Did you know that people are actually still playing Titanfall? There are at least a few of us still out there, still making do with what we have, lack of baseball slide and all – seriously, how do you center your game around this crazy parkour jetpack-assisted movement and not have a baseball slide? Fucking Wolfenstein has a baseball slide! Baseball slides are fucking IMPORTANT. Wait, where was I?

Oh, right. Titanfall.

Titanfall made a whole lot of noise leading up to its release. It was going to be a system seller, revitalize the Xbox One’s sales, and somehow postpone the inevitable de-bundling of the Kinect 2.0 from the console proper. There was even a Titanfall bundle, the first (I think) official Microsoft bundle to hit the market. Now you can’t move without tripping over a different bundle and different pack-ins; I’m pretty sure there’s one now that gets you Black Flag, Unity, and one other game that I don’t remember for $349, and I’ve lost my point again.

Okay. Titanfall.

I have to say, I was initially skeptical that a purely multiplayer FPS releasing on a console would do well or have any sort of staying power at all, especially one where the game story is more or less a radio drama that happens in little talking boxes in the corners of the screen. That said, Metal Gear Solid has 5 official sequels at this point, so what do I know? As it turns out, though, I ended up having a lot of fun with Titanfall, enough fun that when the season pass went on sale, I bought it and got a bunch of new maps that I almost immediately didn’t play at all. I think Destiny released, and that was that for a while.

But I recently went back to Titanfall, and found that I had been missing its team deathmatch with gigantic robot sensibilities. I also found that I was doing suspiciously well in matches, even managing to finish in the top spot on more than one occasion. It was almost disturbing in a way, because I had fully expected to just get wrecked a few times and give up. Instead, I was actually competitive and wanted to keep playing. I even finally got to play on those map packs (that I discovered I hadn’t even installed after purchasing access to them, lord almighty what is wrong with me) and they are pretty great! But it still nagged at the back of my mind that I was performing far above my expected level, until I finally figured it out.

All the good players went to play Call of Duty.

This Week’s Game: Resident Evil (Xbox One)

I have never managed to beat Resident Evil. I don’t know if it is the restrictive inventory management (8 slots: not enough slots! 6 slots: who the fuck are you kidding?) or the tank controls (an M1 Abrams could maneuver better) or the fact that I am completely incapable of playing those games without someone else in the room to make the somewhat dull-as-shit gameplay loop (find key, find door, kill monster using sub-par combat controls, repeat) fun.

Wow, I never knew how much of that game bothered me until I wrote it out up there. I think, honestly, the real reason I never beat Resident Evil was the fact that I did not have a PSOne growing up. By the time I got around to playing RE, the gameplay mechanics were outdated and annoying. Perhaps if I had played the game when it first hit, I would have adapted to the controls and enjoyed the experience for what it was.

As it is, I am amazed at how many of the idiosyncrasies of Resident Evil I am willing to deal with when only the tank controls are removed. The removal of the tank controls were, in fact, the only reason that I bought this new release of an older game at all. For a few days after buying the game, I wasn’t sure that I had made the right decision anyway, but after putting a couple of hours into it, I can say that I made a good call in picking this latest release of Resident Evil up, because I really enjoy it!

It’s not a very scary game, as it turns out, nor is it very tense. I think that after the first-person experiences of PT and Alien: Isolation, a 3^rd person camera just doesn’t pack the same sort of punch as it may have before. Sure, there’s a few jump scares here and there – a surprise zombie hiding behind an obtuse camera angle, dogs jumping through the windows – but the game lacks the tension that I remember it having back in the GameCube days.

What it is, however, is a pretty fun game to play with friends, especially when neither of you quite remembers where to go next and you end up just running around waiting to trigger the next encounter with Barry “The Sandwich Artist” Burton. Sometimes, you get frustrated. Sometimes, you realize how absurd the whole game is. And sometimes, magic happens.

The whole game’s got a base price of $20, which to my mind means that it is ripe for becoming a free Xbox Gold/PlayStation Plus deal in the next six months or so. For me, it was entirely worth dropping a twomp, even though I have a copy of the GameCube remake floating around the house… somewhere. I can rationalize the hell out of a $20 purchase.

One final thought: I am a big fan of the shotgun in this game, as it is one of the most satisfying shotguns in a game since… Doom, I’d say. BLAP BLAP BLAP.

This Week’s Game: Sword Coast Legends

Here’s something new for this space: I’m going to talk about a game that hasn’t released yet, isn’t in early access, and I only just stumbled across yesterday. A game that totally caught me off guard, and one that I might venture to say will owe a great debt to Pillars of Eternity and Torment: Tides of Numenera if it succeeds. Why is that, you say? Well, I would submit that the aforementioned wildly successful Kickstarted games demonstrated that there is a healthy demand for what people seem to like calling “old school RPGs,” by which they mean Western RPGs, by which they mean “games that remind me of Baldur’s Gate.”

I’m talking, of course, about Sword Coast Legends. You all obviously know what I’m talking about, because the wiki page was created last Friday, so clearly we’ve all been in the know about this game and its development from its inception. Me, I know exactly as much information as is posted on their website, because I’ve not read a scrap of press about the game anywhere else. Even the forums have barely 1,000 messages – not topics, mind you, but topics and replies combined.

Apparently, a few well-seasoned industry veterans got together and made themselves an isometric-view RPG using the 5^th Edition ruleset and based along the Sword Coast, a.k.a. that place that Baldur’s Gate expansion was set in. Have they pushed all your nostalgia buttons yet? The director of Dragon Age: Origins is attached, for what that’s worth. I don’t know what that’s worth, because my grasp of how much power a director has over the development of a game as monolithic as DA:O is tenuous at best. It seems pretty cool, though. There’s just not a whole lot of details in the wild about this game, which I usually interpret as “this game is going to be a budget title trainwreck that they’ll charge full price for.” On the other hand, I did enjoy the little time I spent farting around in the F2P MMO Neverwinter, so I could be convinced to hold out some hope for this game as well.

So this is the part where I mention the Dungeon Master Mode and how that intrigues me more than the rest of the game. It looks like – and please, remember that I’m guessing wildly here because there isn’t much to go on – a party of four can team up with a party of one who can edit the campaign on the fly by adding elements or changing around dungeons or… something? If it is a hyper-easy-to-use version of the Neverwinter Nights campaign building tools that can be edited in real-time, then I am pretty intrigued. I am also only too aware of my disastrous history with campaign editors (I’m really bad at them and I never take the time to learn the tools).

Anyway, I’ll be interested to see how this game fares, and if it continues to fly under the radar after release. It’d be nice to see someone give it a shot, maybe post some impressions or – dare I hope for such a thing? – a Quick Look of it.

Hey, you’ve been a great audience, did I mention I do a podcast? Well, I do, and you can listen to it every week (mostly). Shameless plug’s out of the way, so uh… hopefully I’ll write something for next week, maybe even about a game that I know stuff about!

This Week’s Game: Far Cry 4

Can I tell you a secret? Shh shh shh, lean in close.

I had no interest in Far Cry 3. That game, in fact, looked real fuckin’ dumb to me. I avoided it entirely, in fact, and instead picked up Far Cry 2 on sale and played a good amount of that, but I already wrote about that game. I am pretty sure that I still don’t have much interest at all in playing FC3, but I definitely have an interest in Far Cry 4.

I blame Giantbomb for this entirely.

I bought Far Cry 4 about a week ago, shortly before the game went on sale on XBL, so perfect timing there, I guess. Still, the game was totally worth the full cost based on how much fun I have had playing the co-op. Any game that just unleashes you and a buddy on an unsuspecting world with a lot of C4 is worth playing, I think. I have said “Xbox, record that” more times playing this game than any other – which is to say that I’ve said it at all.

There were some surprisingly great open world games that came out last year, so much so that I actually bought and played some. I tend to stay away from open world games because I never end up finishing them, but I think the truth is that I just need to stay away from GTA, because those are the ones that I never finish. I’ve had a blast with Sunset Overdrive and Shadow of Mordor. What Far Cry 4 has that those game doesn’t, of course, is co-op.

And C4. Can’t forget about that.

I have only actually played through the prologue and Act 1 (Chapter 1? I think it’s divided up by chapters) of the main story, and have spent the rest of my time climbing towers, freeing outposts, and assassinating soldiers. I did make a point of watching the quick ending, and one of the issues I have with the game is the fact that I had to sit through the introduction again after I unlocked that first ending. Aside from that and a few connectivity issues, though, I’m pretty happy with the game overall. Stuff blows up really nice, the detonators on the C4 have a surprisingly long range, and I have yet to run out of fun ways to create chaos in my little corner of Kyrat.

Oh man, I was going to talk about Puyo Puyo Tetris, wasn’t I? Oh well, next time maybe.

I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: Wolfenstein: The New Order

Oh good lord, really? Am I really going to do one of these on a game that came out last year? No. NO. We’re done. I’m not going do this anymore. New plan: write about whatever game interested me in a given week, regardless of age.

This week’s game is still Wolfenstein: The New Order. I’m just dispensing with that Backlog nonsense.

So, Wolfenstein. I have a fondness for Wolfenstein as a franchise, with Wolfenstein 3D being my first introduction to the wild world of First Person Shooters. Kind of apropos, given that it was also pretty much one of the first FPS games made. It was also my introduction to Shareware, because I never actually obtained the full Wolfenstein 3D license, so all I had was that glorious Shareware game to keep me company (see also: Doom, Quake). Return to Castle Wolfenstein was a great game that I could only play at a friend’s house because I didn’t have a computer capable of running it, and the 2009 Wolfenstein I missed out on, which I regret. It seemed cool. I totally read the plot summary on Wikipedia, though, so I feel like I have a pretty good handle on what’s been done with the series to this point and I also know who that wheelchair lady and Death’s Head are, and what they mean to newly made-into-a-real-boy B.J. Blaskowitz.

Can we talk for a moment about how amazing it is that the guy who was once basically an animated .gif at the bottom of the screen now suddenly has character motivations and inner monologue and observations on man’s inhumanity to man and, of course, a ladyfriend with whom he has what is definitely the most tastefully done sex scene ever put into a game. In a word, he has depth, which is generally not something that one finds in FPS protagonists. Really, from what I’ve played so far the story itself is a bit more than one finds in the average FPS, and certainly vastly more intricate than I expected a Wolfenstein game to have.

But it’s not all about the story. It’s about ethics in games journalism gameplay as well. The New Order touts a mixture of action and stealth gameplay that, quite frankly, I didn’t at all believe would work. Imagine my surprise when the promised stealth gameplay not only existed, but was surprisingly well-done and satisfying to play. Add it to the pile of “I wasn’t expecting to find that in a Wolfenstein game” features that The New Order has. The gunplay is predictably satisfying, which I mean, if you’re going to make a Wolfenstein game, please make sure the guns feel good. The auto shotgun, in particular, is the most fun I’ve had with a shotgun since Halo. Enemies are tough (but not too tough), and encounters know juuuust when they’re about to overstay their welcome (I also wasn’t expecting a Wolfenstein game with quiet moments).

This is a game that shouldn’t be good. The fact that it shipped without multiplayer means it shouldn’t be successful. I think that the ability of the developer to focus on just the campaign is what gave it the ability to be so great. I hope that the success of The New Order (It was successful, right? Of course it was) means that the single-player FPS will be a more viable option for developers in the future. I think I could get used to more games like The New Order in my life. I’m gonna go play it some more right now!

Stay tuned, because next on my list of things to talk about is Puyo Puyo Tetris. Not here, though. Somewhere else. Next week? Let’s say next week.

Hey, did you miss me while I was gone? I missed me while I was gone. I also recorded a few more podcasts. If you ever wanted to know what it sounds like when you are shouting into the void and nobody gives a fuck, give it a listen! It’ll make you never want to try podcasting yourself, and that is a service I am happy to keep providing.

I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: The World Ends With You

I went on a crusade this week to find my Nintendo DS, because I desperately am trying to avoid buying a PS Vita and a copy of Persona 4: Golden, because come on that’s a hefty chunk of change for a shitty version of Borderlands 2 and what will mostly be a Persona playing machine. Luckily, I have a secret stash of esoteric JRPGs, and once I remembered where I had hidden the thing from my 3 year old son, I was able to boot up the oft overlooked Shibuya Fashion Simulator, The World Ends With You. Great job on a ridiculously convoluted name, by the way. I’m impressed by a game that can have such a clunky title while not using any extraneous punctuation.

Anyway, TWEWY (a more-or-less unpronounceable acronym, too! This title’s got legs) is all about your grumpy teenage fashonista who wears too many belts, but is also dead, and his self-hating partner, who is also dead. Did I mention you’re playing a weird game with Reapers to try and not have died? I’m not sure how it all works out, because I obviously haven’t beaten the game yet, but man it sounds fascinating. Or super dumb. Probably a little bit of both.

Speaking of sounds, this soundtrack is fanstastic. The little DS speakers don’t really do it justice, so I plugged a pair of nice headphones in and was rewarded by some startlingly clear music. Sometimes I forget how much data can be packed onto one of those little SD cards. The songs themselves are squarely in the JPop/JRap (is JRap a thing? If it isn’t I’m making it one) spectrum, and the overall sound reminds me of the Persona 4 soundtrack in a lot of ways.

Gameplay-wise, TWEWY makes heavy use of the touchpad, which is neat because, I mean, that’s what it’s there for in the first place. Combat takes place on both screens, and challenges you to operate both protagonists at the same time, using the stylus to move the fellow on the bottom screen and the D-Pad or face buttons to move the fellow on the top screen. If you time your attacks correctly, you’ll pass a green energy puck back and forth, which builds your attack power the more you pass it. It’s really hard to master, but also really innovative. I like it, even though a lot of the time I let the AI handle the top screen.

The standard RPG equipment is replaced by Pins, which allow you to cast spells and attack the Noise or whatever. The Noise are the moment-to-moment enemy in the game, and you fight ‘em by scanning an area and dragging them to you with the stylus. This means that you can chain together fights, which makes things more difficult but also gives you bonuses and such for doing so. The more you chain, the better the bonus.

Your armor is instead clothing, and different brands of clothing give different bonuses. Also, depending on what area of Shibuya you’re in, different brands are popular. Popular brands give you bonuses, while unpopular brands penalize you. It’s a pretty deep system, as it turns out, and I don’t know that I ever really got that far into the whole brand synergy game. I did, however, get far enough into the story for a couple of twists and turns to happen, and I was surprised at how much of it I remembered when I booted it up again this week.

If you have a DS, (or a 3DS, I guess… are those backwards-compatible? I’ve no idea) then it is probably worth your time to track down a used copy of this game and just go to town. It’s a real fun game, and it takes advantage of the DS hardware in a way that I wish more games had done (and, I think, are doing with the 3DS). I doubt we’ll ever see a TWEWY2, but if we did, I would probably have to get whatever system it was on. Shame that Square-Enix seems to be a pretty risk-averse company these days, though.

I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: Persona 4

It is only fair that I admit at the start that this is one of the newest of my backlogged games. I didn’t pick up Persona 4 until I started watching the legendary Endurance Run hosted on this very site. Something about the weird low-stakes (for a JRPG) story and high school shenanigans appealed to me in a way that nothing has in a long while – well, I guess I got pretty deep into The World Ends With You at some point, but I have absolutely no idea where my DS is at the moment.

Anyway, Persona 4! I bought it over the summer and downloaded it onto my PS3 and it has been providing me joy every time that I remember to boot it up. My wife thinks it is one of the dumbest things she’s ever seen in her life, so I generally don’t play it when she’s around. When I finally played it again this weekend, it had been a couple of months since I had last visited Inaba. I missed it!

Look, I’ll be honest: there isn’t anything I can say about this game that hasn’t already been said before. The writing is excellent and manages to capture all the weird social shit that defined my time in high school while also mixing in a murder mystery – a murder mystery! That is the extent of the stakes presented! No world-ending apocalypse or anything like that, just a rash of murders in a sleepy suburban town. It’s refreshing, after playing so many games where the world, universe, galaxy, or fabric of reality is being threatened. I’m still fairly early on (just rescued Yukiko way ahead of schedule, so there’s a lot of puttering around and social linking going on at the moment), but I am excited to get further in.

It’s strange that in spite of the fact that I have seen so much of this game played by Vinny and Jeff (how great was it for them to do the Persona Q quick look together?) I haven’t skipped any cutscenes or buttoned through any of the dialogue or anything like that. The game feels fresh, and for a game that came out two console generations ago, the visuals hold up surprisingly well – an advantage of its stylized look, I’m sure.

What it comes down to is that this game is a well-crafted masterpiece; you can take as much or as little time as you want to dig into its systems and still enjoy your time with it. I am sure I’ve barely scratched the surface, but I’m having a blast. Maybe in another month, I’ll play it again!

Note: Yeah, it's really short this week, but I was short on time and spent too much time playing Destiny again. Fucking Destiny.

I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: The Elder Scolls V: Skyrim

You don’t know how close I came to tossing the Backlog to one side so I could talk about Dragon Age: Inquisition instead, because that game does some shit and I got super excited by it. Instead of talking about it, though, I recorded a podcast instead, so if you’re curious, give that a listen. This week, though, I am going to talk about Skyrim, a game that shares some DNA with Inquisition but is entirely its own beast, and what a marvelously strange and wonderful beast it is.

I have been playing Skyrim on and off for roughly 2 years now, and every time I fire it back up I am immediately enamored of its presentation. The landscapes, the music, and the weird characters that inhabit the mountainous Nordic world of Skyrim are designed in a manner that takes my breath away. There was a month where I listened to nothing but the soundtrack at work. In fact, it was largely the soundtrack (and the Randy Savage mod) that led me to finally buy the game.

Macho Man's a-comin'. You were warned.

There is a sense of scale in Skyrim that I have found is unmatched by other open-world games that I’ve played, even those created by Bethesda. I’m sure that the mountainous terrain has something to do with this perception, as does the incredibly detailed night sky. There is an entire world in Skyrim that is going on while you’re not around, which gets incredibly silly once dragons start showing up randomly around the game world. It is entirely possible to come across, say, the house of a necromancer, only the necromancer is dead on account of having picked a fight with a dragon who is flying around the area.

Then the dragon kills you. That’s been my experience, anyway.

Loading into my save, I discovered that I had apparently been following a dog around, so that’s what I kept on doing, and man, let me tell you, I discovered that the dog does some SERIOUS DIRT if you get into a fight. This shaggy dude tore through an entire cave full of Draculas, leaving destruction and free loot in his wake. Turns out I was apparently going to run some errands for a god of chaos or something like that, so the dog was leading me to a shrine to said god so I could have a chat with him, and when I write that out I kinda realize how totally fucking insane that sounds.

I also found a gem that wanted to talk to me, and that’s how I ended up hundreds of feet in the air having a chat with another god, only this one was a goddess and she was more or less just a ball of light. I had to take out another necromancer, and unfortunately he was in a temple so I couldn’t just wait for a dragon to show up and take him out. I did, however, have a psychotic dog. Turns out he is pretty good at killing wraiths and ghosts as well.

At this point, I had to stop playing. This all happened in one game session, mind you. I didn’t end up going back to the game this week – too much Destiny and Dragon Age to play. I think that one of Skyrim’s greatest strengths is the fact that you can play the game for a couple hours and have a totally unique experience that sounds like utter craziness when you look back on it. While I was charging around, I was having a blast not only because the gameplay is solid and engaging, but also because everything I was doing was so outlandish. Yet to the denizens of Skyrim, this is just sort of a normal day.

I will go back and play more Skyrim. I always go back and play more Skyrim. The game is too much fun to leave for any real length of time. And, if you’re the father of a young child (I am), it helps to have a game that you can both save and put down at any moment, and a game that you can go for hours without having to kill anything.

I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: Far Cry 2

So last week I was going to attempt to write one of these about Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, only I (one) already beat that game with a bootleg copy on my PC back in college and (two) spent the majority of the past two weeks in a Dragon Age shaped hole from where there can be no escape, save to delve as deeply as possible and hope to find the exit up – that’s a Legacy deep cut for you. So instead, I didn’t write anything, vowing to do my best to make up for it this week. I’m a dude who takes his made-up responsibilities seriously.

This week, I decided to take a different approach and try to actually play a game that I hadn’t beaten, and one that I had been meaning to get back to (and one, by chance, that is sort of relevant to the previous week’s releases). So I picked Far Cry 2, because that’s a game that I remember enjoying, even though that I also remember that game being one that actively hates me. Far Cry 2 is the game that starts off by giving you malaria and a jammed gun, then kicking you out the door into a warzone. It’s the game where your car will break down with frightening regularity, but you can fix it by ratcheting one bolt under the hood. So far as I know, it started the whole “healing yourself ain’t look pretty” trend in the series, which means that at a certain point you’re snapping your arm back in place and going about your business. Don’t sprint too long, because you’ll probably have another malaria attack, and pills are hard to come by. Don’t have any pills? Guess you’re fucked!

For an older game, I have to say that the visuals really hold up well on my PC. No dropped frames on ultra settings, 1080p (the ideal number of p to have) resolution, and very few loading screens. Did I say very few? I meant one, when you load the game, but nothing after that. And the vast majority of your screen is just the world around you. HUDs are apparently for suckers, as are maps. Instead, there are road signs and any vehicle you get into will have a tiny GPS screen that will help you navigate your way around. This leads to you trying to stay in your vehicle as long as possible when you’re near an objective, because as soon as you get out of that car, you no longer have any indication as to where your objective is. I thought this would be super annoying, but it turns out to just heighten the sparse feeling that the game is trying to push. You are constantly on the precipice of failure, and Far Cry 2 is just waiting for you to lower your guard so it can give you a big ol’ push. It is less a game about shooting dudes and more a game about surviving the war-torn world you find yourself in.

By far my favorite moment so far came immediately after finishing the tutorial that I didn’t realize I was still doing. A message appears telling you that you can more or less do whatever you want now, mentions a few different people you can track down to get jobs from, and ends with a reminder that somewhere in this vast wilderness is a man named the Jackal, and you need to kill him. Now, I do not know if that means that it is possible to just randomly come across the Jackal by accident and kill him less than an hour into the main game or something, but the way that the game presents it certainly seems to point that way. I am all for antagonists that aren’t any more super-powered than you are, and can be found at any point in the story. Now, maybe this leads to a Morrowind style fail state, with a little note telling you that the threads of Fate had been severed and now you are playing in a doomed timeline or whatever, but honestly that’s one of the things that I missed in Oblivion and Skyrim. If I can stumble across the Jackal and shoot him in the face, regardless of whatever else I have accomplished in the game, Far Cry 2 might become one of my favorite games. Hell, I might even pick up Far Cry 4 if it lets me do that.

I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: Tomb Raider

There’s a lot to be said about Square Enix’s revival of the Tomb Raider, not all of it complementary. But that has more or less been the case for the entire history of that franchise, except for a few games (Angel of Darkness) that are pretty universally thought to have been a bit shit. I don’t have a whole lot of history with the franchise, but I was always casually interested in it. I never could find a good entry point to the series, having grown up without a PSX, but eventually I was given my chance with the release of Tomb Raider: Anniversary. That was an interesting game (and yet another in my backlog), but it didn’t really grab me. This reboot, however, commanded my attention.

So the most obvious change to the franchise is the fact that Lara Croft is no longer a hot-pants wearing, buxom beauty. I would venture to say that this particular Croft is a little more realistically proportioned, but she certainly is one of the most durable and unfortunate. Shit just constantly is going wrong for this poor girl, almost to the point of absurdity. There’s a lot of impaling that goes on in this game, and I have to say it is the sort of subtext that makes me squint a bit and go “hmm…”

The story is interesting in a Lost sort of way, with the centerpiece being the growth of Lara from a frightened, damaged girl into an hurricane of destruction. Er, and a confident woman. That too. The first time that Lara kills someone, the game makes a big deal of it. It even makes a big deal of the next few times she kills someone, with her gruff mentor telling her that it was either her or them. After that, though, Lara just starts wasting fools, and the game kinda shrugs as if to say, “well, this is what you do in games, right?” The combat is satisfying, don’t get me wrong, but after making the first few encounters so nerve-wracking and morally fraught, the fact that she’s soon merrily setting people on fire and shooting arrows through their eyes makes it all ring a bit hollow. Lara’s transformation from hesitant heroine to badass is, from a gameplay standpoint, almost instantaneous. It makes the cutscenes where she is still scrambling to survive a bit incongruous with the rest of the game.

Actually, aside from her status as an ass-kicking savant, a lot of Lara’s animations imply her inexperience, from the way she flails through the air with her climbing axe when jumping for a far cliff-wall to the way that she is constantly wobbling and almost falling when crossing a gap on a branch or narrow pathway, this is a Lara Croft who didn’t exactly train for any of the shit that has gone down around her. She just happens to be an expert shot who kills with a ferocious intensity.

What I’m saying is that I think Lara Croft is a serial killer.

Stepping away from all that, the game plays great and it looks amazing on my computer, in spite of the fact that I cannot activate the fabled TRESSFX. What I can do is pull 60 FPS, which is a sight to behold. This is a great game, and I don’t know why I haven’t spent more time with it. I’m gonna try to buckle down and beat this one before the next one comes out.

That said, if it goes on sale on the XBox One, I might pick it up there. This is a game good enough to get twice.