You might think, given my history with large, way too long GOTY blogs that I would've already written that by now. You'd be wrong, because instead of that I've been cramming in MORE GAMES, and now I'm writing about them!
Mad Max.
You ever have one of those games that when you start it, you go, "This seems better than I was led to believe," then after a while you really get into it, and think, "Wow this game is great," but then you actually get to the story and think, "Wait, this story is awful, who thought any of this was a good idea?" I'm sure you have, more or less. And, given the context, you can likely assume that's the course my thoughts on Mad Max the game took. In this case, you would be right. I did enjoy quite a bit of what I played of Mad Max (I finished it), but I'm also very glad I waited until it was on sale. I guess we can thank MGSV for releasing on the same day as Mad Max for that.
I say that because, had this game released even a week or two before MGSV, there's a good chance I would have ignored reviews and just gone out and bought it. Why? Well, both because like many summers, there wasn't really much in the way of big video game releases this year, so at a certain point I just wanted SOMETHING to play, and because I really like Mad Max as a franchise. Well, most of it, at least, one of those movies is really terrible. I will not refer to it by name, but it's the one that rhymes with Blunderdome. Or, part of it rhymes with that. You get what I mean.
After Fury Road came out and easily roared its way into my favorite movies of all time, I was really hoping and wishing that Mad Max the game was going to be great. A good Mad Max game is one of those things that I've wanted for a really long time. Used to be on the list with things like a really good western game, you know, things that for years seemed like no one was able to figure out. And while some of the things on this "list" of mine I had to stretch a bit to "check off," like Mass Effect filling in for a really good Star Trek game, Mad Max seemed to be one of the ones that just wasn't going to come to fruition. But then Mad Max the game was announced, and the hope blossomed anew!
And having finished it? It's okay.
The game looks way better than I thought it was going to. Not just in terms of visual fidelity, but in terms of artistic design. Every part of the world looks different, and it's not just Australian deserts like I expected it to be. The first chunk of the game is set in what used to be a seabed, but has long since dried up. Some of these areas end up looking really, for lack of a better word, alien. There's giant rocks jutting up from the earth like fangs, coral reefs, wrecked ships, and even the skeletons of whales. I had to stop and try to figure out what on earth it was the first time I saw one of those. For a few seconds I was actually thinking that something really weird or cool was going on in this game if there were giant skeletons like that. Were they dinosaurs? Was the twist going to be that this was actually in a different Mad Max universe, and on another planet? But then I realized it was a whale and felt dumb for letting my mind go to that many way better ideas and places. Which is not to say that whale skeletons isn't a pretty clever way to get giant skeletons into a game like this, but coming up with ideas that I like better than what is actually in something is a problem I've been running into lately.
Suffice to say, Mad Max is a beautiful game. It gets the "beauty of desolation" better than any other game I've ever played. This game has a photo mode, and it's the only game I've ever played where I've been able to use a photo mode to get screenshots that not only look nice, but look really good. I had several people ask what game they were from after posting them online. I bet they were pretty surprised when I said Mad Max. But, this beauty does come at a cost. The frame rate isn't exactly great. For the most part, it's fine, but there's one area in particular (around Pink Eye's Stronghold) that has a tendency to just TANK the frame rate. Especially when an enemy convoy rolls by, which also has a tendency to hit the frame rate in other parts of the world too.
Which is a shame, because I feel like taking out the convoys is the best part of this game. It's certainly the part of the game that feels the most like the Mad Max movies. The idea of the convoys is that you need to take out a larger vehicle that is being escorted along a never ending loop of road by some other vehicles. Generally speaking, you have to take out most of the other vehicles before being able to destroy the lead vehicle, even late in the game once you've upgraded the Magnum Opus a lot (more on that later). Most games don't really do car chases very well, especially when you're the one doing the chasing.
This game certainly doesn't do it perfectly, but I still feel like these best capture the spirit of the Mad Max movies, even if the controls for using weapons in the car are a bit wonky. Well, not wonky so much as that there is so much aim assist in the aiming that it can sometimes be hard to aim at the thing you actually want to hit if the game thinks you wanted to hit something else. Like targeting a door with the grappling hook when I wanted to hit the tire. It does go into slow motion when aiming, but even then, I still ended up crashing more than once when I wasn't paying close enough attention. But I think that's more on me than it is on the game.
I still really liked the car combat in the game. Slamming into other vehicles, and yanking off pieces of them with the grappling hook was really fun throughout. I know I've seen more than a few people online say they didn't like this stuff in the game, and I don't really have an argument to combat what they have to say, but hey! I had fun, and that's what really matters, right?
Speaking of cars, one of the central focuses of this game is the Magnum Opus, the car designed by a strange fellow named Chumbucket. Chum is apparently a master mechanic, and believes Max to be some sort of chosen one. Chosen by the angel of speed, or cars, or something. Maybe it was intentional, or maybe it was because I played with subtitles off and missed a fair amount of dialog because of the roar of engines, but I never really got a clear idea of what Chum was actually going on about with this religious allusions to that car and Max.
But that's not important, because what is important is that the car is built to be customized, and customized a lot. You can change the car body (which doesn't seem to affect stats, unless I missed something), tires, suspension, exhaust, weaponry, armor, spikes, grill (for ramming), paint, add nitrous, weaponry, and most importantly: the engine. Most of these things affect the car in ways that make sense. Equip better tires to get better handling, equip heavier armor to increase defense, but lower acceleration, etc. Some of it makes a little less sense, though, I admit I know very little about cars. Even so, tying top speed to the exhaust seems weird to me. It also seems weird that once you finally get a V8 engine (Max's sole goal in the story for what felt like more than half of the game), it boosts acceleration, but lowers the handling of the car.
Maybe the idea is that as it accelerates faster, it becomes harder to steer, but when the story is literally solely focused on getting that V8 engine, and when the V8 engine is literally worshiped in other entries in the Mad Max universe (and this one), it feels weird that it has trade offs. I sort of get it from a game design perspective, but what person playing this game is going to, after spending so much of the game trying to get that V8, decide to go back to a V6 because it handles better? When so much of the game was about finding that engine, actually getting it and realizing it has these trade offs was a bummer. Getting a V8 in a Mad Max game shouldn't be a moment of wondering if better acceleration is worth losing some handling (it is, just so you know), it should be a rad moment.
And that, I think is maybe Mad Max's biggest issue, outside of the story and writing being awful. It's that while this game gets a lot of the surface level things right about Mad Max (specifically Fury Road, at least aesthetically), it also fails to grasp what it is that makes those movies fun. It's that beneath the post apocalypse, beneath the cars, beneath the war boys screaming about being witnessed so they can ride eternal on the highways of Valhalla, shiny and chrome, the movies are just plain fun. There's a manic glee to Fury Road that Mad Max the game never even attempts to match. Yes, it's still a movie about women fleeing from a warlord that was sexually abusing them, amongst other things, but it's also a movie that revels in cars slamming into each other, things exploding, and just generally having a good time watching violence unfurl before your eyes.
And speaking of the women of Fury Road, that brings me to the story of Mad Max the game. I know expecting a complex story out of a Mad Max game was asking for too much, especially when the game is being made by the people that brought us Just Cause 2, but this didn't even meet my low expectations. Like I said, the first half of the game is about finding a V8 engine, and then the second half (I'm more or less guessing when I say half, by the way) is about rescuing damsels in distress. The game assumes that you feel the slightest bit of sympathy for them simply because they are a woman and young girl and you are the big strong man who is the only one that can save them. The woman, naturally, is named Hope and also known as, "The Concubine." Finally, SPOILERS, (not that you should actually care) the game kills off those two because apparently they needed a reason for Max to go after the villain (the awfully named Scrotus). You know, because losing twice to the guy, and losing his car (the last of the Interceptors) wasn't reason enough for Max to want revenge, I guess. Revenge so strong that he MORE SPOILERS ends up destroying both his car and Chumbucket in a (failed) attempt to defeat Scrotus, which is so stupid because there are ways that could've played out without that happening, and just makes Max seem like a complete asshole. And then both the Magnum Opus and Chumbucket are magically back after the credits roll anyway, because while you do get the Last of the Interceptors back, it doesn't have a grappling hook, so there's not much reason to use it.
And speaking of women, this game kills off three of the four named female characters in the game, one of which is a boss fight that exists for literally no reason other than to work in a reference to Blunderdome. It's extra dumb because seconds before that fight starts, this woman was working with Max in a car combat race (she was using the weapons in the Magnum Opus, because the developers needed an excuse to get Chum out of there so you couldn't repair mid race), but I guess they didn't want to let a woman with something resembling agency keep going? You do encounter unnamed women in the wasteland that occasionally have things like intel for getting into enemy bases (just look for the hole with yellow paint around it, usually), but the only noteworthy thing about them is that they (and the unnamed wasteland dudes) are about the only people in the game that actually have Australian accents. Them, and Max.
But that's beside the point, the point is that while Fury Road was a great example of an action film with a cast of primarily women, this game is about as bad with women as you'll find in a game this season. No, it might not be super pervy like, say, MGSV, but outside of that, this is maybe the worst example I can think of in recent history. And that's disappointing, because even without Fury Road, they should be able to write a story that doesn't depend on these sorts of tired, sexist tropes. Though, even with the pervy stuff in MGSV, I'm still going to say this game is worse in terms of how it treats women, because at least you could play as a lady in MGSV, and the game being pervy about Quiet is not the central focus of the story, unlike Mad Max and its damsels. But, it's a losing argument either way, because both are pretty bad in this regard, just for different reasons.
And speaking of things this game does worse than MGSV, this game has the most disappointing dog I've ever seen in a game. At least that I can remember. I had been thinking this was a pretty good year for dogs in games. MGSV had DD, and Fallout 4 had Dogmeat. I didn't use Dogmeat nearly as much as I used DD, but at least Dogmeat was a functional dog that followed you around and did dog things in the grand tradition of Fable II (never mind that Fallout 3 had a Dogmeat too, and was released the same year). But instead of having a dog buddy that follows you around, the dog in Mad Max is relegated to mine sweeping. What does that mean? Well, let me explain.
See, Mad Max, like many open world games these days, has a whole bunch of things you can do in the open world to reduce the control that the main villain has. Some of these things can be fun and engaging, like defeating enemy convoys, or clearing enemy bases. Some of them are just busy work, like tearing down big metal scarecrows around the world, or floating up in a balloon to scout out the area around you. But the absolute worst are the minefields. These are areas that Chumbucket warns against, but, so far as I can tell, you can never actually hit a mine unless you are explicitly trying to clear them (and then there's only three or four per minefield). And you do this by driving around with the dog as it barks in the direction of the nearest mine until you get close enough for an icon to appear over the mine. Then you get out, and carefully walk toward it, because now it suddenly is capable of exploding. This is bad enough, and boring enough on its own, but the real problem?
You only have the dog with you if you take the one vehicle that has the dog. This one vehicle is not the Magnum Opus. Instead, it's Chumbucket's old buggy, and the only way to access it (once you've done the mission to get the dog and buggy) is by driving it out of an allied Stronghold (there's only a handful of those in the game). Now, even this level of annoyance could've been "okay" if there were only a couple of minefields in the game. But I think there's like thirty or forty in the game. It's literally ten per zone, and the mines are in three of the zones, I think, so I guess probably thirty. Outside of the story, this is the most baffling part of the game. The idea that people thought this mine clearing was engaging enough to do that many times, and that you shouldn't be able to do it unless you have the one specific vehicle is absurd. I should also explain that there's no other reason to ever use that buggy, because it's not a good vehicle to drive.
But the worst part is that you HAVE to clear these minefields if you want all of the car upgrades. A lot of the upgrades are locked behind getting specific zones to specific threat levels, and you do that by completing the open world activities. And there are some that require dropping the threat to ZERO in some areas, and that requires clearing all of those minefields. I know because I really wanted the level 6 grappling hook, but gave up when I did everything in Jeet's territory except the minefields, but didn't have zero threat. And that made me very disgruntled.
I guess the last thing worth mentioning about the game is that it does at least pay lip service to the idea that there is a scarcity of resources in this world. Cars do have a limited amount of gasoline (you can carry an extra can in the back of the car), and Max carries a canteen of water that can be used to restore health, though he can't die of dehydration, or anything like that. The only other ways to restore health are by finding cans of dog food or maggot infested corpses (because the only sources of food in the post apocalypse are cans of dog food and maggots), or by killing enemies whilst in Fury Mode, which regenerates a bit of health. Speaking of, I haven't mentioned the melee combat at all, but it's just Batman combat except you can charge attacks and time the parries for "perfect parries." The shotgun can instantly kill most enemies in combat, but the ammo is pretty limited, as are the shanks. And scrap is the generic resource used to craft upgrades for the car, and for Max's gear.
As you might suspect, while the game has stuff like a fuel gauge for the car, it's not actually anything that you ever need to worry about. The car goes through fuel at a rate low enough that I never ran below half in the Magnum Opus, and you can upgrade the fuel efficiency even more (though weirdly enough, it's an upgrade for Max himself, and not the car, which makes sense if you spend a lot of time driving other cars). And the same goes for water and everything else. There's an infinite supply of everything you could possibly need in the game, especially if you upgrade the strongholds. If you do that, they can completely fill the gas tank, Max's canteen, his health, and all of his ammo.
But I don't really mind that these aren't things you need to worry about. One reason is that I'm not really a fan of survival games in general, so actually worrying about them in a game designed the way this game is in terms of distance traveled, and number of enemies fought is not something I would enjoy. And the other reason is that, when you think about it, Fury Road isn't actually set in a world where there is a scarcity of resources. Instead, it's a world where there's more than enough water, gasoline, etc, it's just all being horded by a few people. Mad Max the game doesn't really get into that, but if Fury Road is the movie this game is aping, I see no problem in this game going a similar route and making resources not actually a thing to worry about.
That said, if this game was actually built from the ground up as being focused on survival, and had way fewer enemy encounters, but made those more meaningful because of the lack of resources? A game where you had literally no ammo most of the time, and just had to use the gun to trick people into thinking you have ammo (something Max has done multiple times in the movies, and can't do here)? A game where you have to set traps on your car to prevent someone from stealing it whilst you scour a wrecked building in the hopes of some supplies? That sounds interesting. But it also sounds like a game that would have to be built from the ground up with that in mind, and not something that could be easily modded into the existing Mad Max game.
I've written way more about this game than I was intending to. Oops. I'll wrap this up by saying that I think the core game of this game is fun to play, but the story and missions (few that they are, because a large portion of the game just requires you do side stuff to build up the car) built around that game is bad. I would say it's a solid foundation that could really be improved upon in a sequel, but I have no idea if this game sold well enough for WB to decide there should be a sequel, and I don't really have faith in Avalanche to improve on the stuff I didn't like about this game. You know, the part where the story is awful and treats its women like things, and not people. But not in a way that is them trying to make a statement or anything, just a poor writing thing. Okay, I'll stop now.
Galak-Z.
Galak-Z, if you're not aware, is a game where you fly a transforming spaceship around randomly generated levels as you defeat enemies, scour for upgrades and scrap (used for buying things), and complete objectives. That's a really bland way of describing a game that I actually really enjoy playing, but there isn't really anything new or interesting about random levels at this point, so it's just sort of a thing that needs to be gotten out of the way when writing about it. You know what I mean?
It's hard to describe in text, but Galak-Z is one of those games that just has a really good "feel" to it. In a lot of ways, it's a game about physics. This isn't a game where you push in a direction on the stick, you fly that way, and when you left off the stick you stop. Instead, all the stick does is aim you, you have to use thrusters to move. These thrusters come in four varieties (one for each shoulder button): forward, reverse, boost (which drains a meter that refills quickly, and can be used in conjunction with the others), and drift. Drift is weird because it depends on which direction you already have momentum in, but it's really useful for strafing targets. Like I previously said, you don't just stop when you left off on the thrusters, you keep going. It's not super realistic, because you do slow down after letting off the booster, whereas in real space I'm pretty sure the lack of air resistance would mean you would maintain that speed until you used a reverse thruster or hit something. But, it's a game, and game design should usually triumph over realism, unless realism is the explicit goal.
On top of all that, the ship can transform into a mech. A mech with an energy sword, an energy shield (a directed one to the front, unlike the regular shield), and a non-energy grappling arm. You don't get the mech mode at first, but once you do, the game really opens up. At least in terms of the options you have in combat, because the level design feels pretty same-y throughout. Some situations call for sticking to the ship, and using blasters and missiles at range. But others call for charging in head first with the shield up and a fully charged swing of the sword. Others call for starting by grappling and throwing an explosive into a group of enemies, and then changing to the ship and blasting. Or switching back and forth through a fight, so long as you keep track of which form you're in, and make sure to back off once your shields go down (or before they go down if you have a temporary shield buff upgrade).
And the important thing is that, like I said, all of that just feels really good. There's just enough weight to the ship that you can feel it, but not enough that it ever feels sluggish. It took me a while to really get used to it, and I do still run into cases where I drift in the wrong direction, but that stuff never really feels like it's the game's fault. It feels like it's my fault for panicking because I was surrounded by imperials and raiders, and then accidentally flew into an electric sparking thing, which drained all my shields and whoops I died.
Galak-Z is a hard game. It doesn't start hard, and I think it's pretty good about ramping up the difficulty at the right pace. But by the end of Season 3 (of 5), it gets pretty tough, and Season 4 is even tougher. The thing that really makes it hard is the rogue-like system built around death in the game. If you die, you have to restart the Season you're on, unless you have enough Crash Coins (5) to restart on that mission. Problem is that if you do that, you start that mission without ANY of the upgrades you've acquired that Season, and that includes being able to transform into the mech. There is a box with all of the upgrades somewhere in the level, and if you can find it, you get all of it back. However, if you don't feel confident about your ability to get that stuff back and finish the level, you can instead start that Season over (or replay another one) and use those Crash Coins to get bonus scrap at the start. And it's enough scrap per coin that I think that's the much smarter route, especially because once you finish that Season, you lose all the upgrades anyway, and carry over the Crash Coins to buy stuff in the next Season.
But this is also my biggest issue with the game. Once you get to Season 4 it's hard enough that having to restart the whole season every time you die is just too much, especially when that probably means starting with fewer Crash Coins, and thus fewer upgrades. In fact, to get through Seasons 3 and 4, I ended up having to manipulate cloud saves to keep retrying missions to get through. I felt bad about this at first, because I was subverting the game design to make it easier for myself. I get why they built the game the way they did, and I respect that, but I'm also bad at games and patient enough to download and upload my saves after every mission.
Then I learned that the PC version has an "Arcade Mode" that lets you just retry missions after you die. I no longer felt bad about manipulating saves, because I was just doing what they added to the PC version, it was just more cumbersome. I really hope they add that to the PS4 version. I don't really have any idea why they haven't yet, but making and supporting games is hard, so I'm going to assume that whatever the reasons are, it's justified.
That said, it's a fun game, and I've quite enjoyed my time with it. I haven't played Season 5 yet, but I did get all the Trophies (sadly no Platinum), because apparently Season 5 was added in an update after the launch of the game. I will be attempting that Season eventually, and I look forward to it! I also look forward to when they inevitably add Arcade Mode to PS4 days after I finish Season 5. Just wait and see.
EDIT: Turns out that Season 5 isn't actually available yet. Whoops!
Call of Duty: Black Ops III.
This blog is already longer than I had been planning, so I'm going to try to keep my thoughts on this game brief.
As you probably already know, I quite like the Call of Duty series in general, but especially the Black Ops sub-series. It still feels weird saying this, but I liked the stories in those games, and I think III mostly continues the tradition of having an interesting story. I would also say that in terms of the story, it's the weakest of the three Blops games, but it's also the best in terms of...certain things that I really don't want to spoil. Suffice to say that the story goes places I wasn't expecting a Call of Duty game to ever go, especially in terms of visual design. Some of the most visually interesting things I've seen in any game all year were in Blops III, and I feel bad that I can't share any of those screenshots because I don't want to spoil any of it. Just trust me on this. It's weird and I really like that they were willing and able to do this stuff with a Call of Duty game, and I hope that Treyarch goes even farther in this direction with the next game they make.
It's also a fun campaign just in terms of how you play it. This year the thing is that you have different powers that you select through a Mass Effect style power wheel (just without the time stopping thing because you can play in co-op, which I didn't). You're never lifting things into the air like in Mass Effect, but you can send out swarms of fiery robo-bugs, and take over large robots and control them from afar. None of the powers feel overpowered, in a way that's both good and bad. It's good because it doesn't allow you to completely subvert the first person shooter encounters they designed. It's also a bit disappointing because they end up feeling a little tacked on. Most of the ones I used just incapacitate or kill a couple enemies, and none of the other ones are anything crazy or game changing. There is one that lets you turn invisible, but I never used it. Maybe you could use it to sneak through some encounters, but I enjoy the shooting in these games, so sneaking through doesn't really sound that interesting. Being able to control the really large enemy robots is great, but it takes a long time to hack into them, so that ability isn't OP or anything either.
My other issue with the powers is that what ones you have available in mission depends on what power core you equip (you can change mid mission at loadout selection spots). I used the Control one the most, because that was the one with the robot hacking. Sadly, the robot bugs were in the Chaos Core, which I didn't really see much else in there worth using. And I don't remember the name of the third core, but that was the one with the invisibility. It also had one that speeds up movement and reload speed, but the rest didn't seem like I'd want to use them. If you level up enough you can get a multi-core that lets you switch between the three on the fly, but the controls for that (I only used it in the combat simulation, where all the cores and abilities are unlocked from the get go) are a bit unwieldy. Instead of all that, I wish I could just equip the powers I want to use, and have those be the only ones on my power wheel.
This is also the first Call of Duty game to let you play through the campaign as a lady, which I think is great. It doesn't really have as deep of a character "creator" as it should (you only real options are gender, hair, and bandanna, meaning no people of color since the only skin options are pale and slightly tanned), but it's at least a step in the right direction. And unlike some other games (cough, Fallout 4 where the enemies call you a bitch if you play as a lady, cough), so far as I could tell, nothing about the game outside of the look of your character and their voice changes depending on the gender you go with.
For the most part, I think that's the right way to go in something like this, but there is one scene in particular that I think feels like it was written with a dude in mind. In it (mild spoilers, I guess), a character says (I'm paraphrasing), "Oh, I get it, you've fallen for her, and just want to move out to the country, have kids, and have a good life!" The context more or less being that you would abandon the mission to go do that with this lady in the game. And playing as a lady in the game, like I said, it felt like it was a line written with the male character in mind. Or maybe it wasn't, and the lady you play as is gay and this game is just cool with that. Again, unlike Fallout 4, this isn't something that I think breaks the narrative or anything if you play as a lady, but I suspect they wrote that with the dude in mind. Though in my head, the lady was totally gay because why not?
But the thing that makes me question that is that, there is a second campaign in this game, that you can only play as a woman in. Well, "second campaign" is a bit of a stretch. It's more of a remixed campaign with the levels in a different order, different enemy encounters (now with zombies!), and most interestingly, an entirely different story written on top of what is happening in the game. It's presented with your character (the lady, as it doesn't give an option to pick and the internet said it's just the lady) talking about what happened with another character. Like a flashback sort of thing with narration. The weirdest thing about it is that all the old cutscenes play, you just don't hear any of the original dialog.
At first I thought it was pretty cool, and a clever way of telling a different story. And I was thinking that it was going to tie back into the main story somehow, because originally you had to finish the main campaign (or put in a code) to unlock this mode. But, for whatever reason, they patched the game to make that mode unlocked from the start. And, having played through all of this mode (it's called Nightmares, I should have said), I can safely say it's not worth playing all the way through. It's fun for the first couple of missions, but it becomes clear well before the end that it's not going to tie into the main campaign in any way, and that they didn't have the time or resources to actually flesh out this mode in the way it should have been.
In order for it to really work, it should have been unique levels with cutscenes made specifically for that story. And if they didn't have the time or money for that, they should have only done two or three missions, and not the entire campaign. It's pretty clear well before the end that they were stretching to justify going through every single mission, and the final one in particular has a lot of going to great lengths to justify things like why it's showing character talking to you, but they aren't actually saying anything.
But the worst part about it is that it's just not as fun to play as the main campaign. While there are enemies with guns, and big robots to fight, most of the enemies are zombies, and zombies just aren't fun to fight. They're just there to soak up bullets until they die, and they can kill you way faster than is actually fun to deal with. And if they manage to grab you, it restricts how quickly you can turn around and aim at them, meaning I ended up doing a lot of frantic double jumping to get away from them. Which is, I suppose, an interesting way of simulating the struggle of breaking free from a zombie, but not especially fun. I ended up turning the difficulty down to easy because I wasn't having any fun after the first few missions, and wanted to just finish that mode in the event that there was something worth seeing at the end. There wasn't.
And there's weird changes in the Nightmares mode too. You can only carry one weapon at a time (not counting heavy weapons, which you need to take down the larger robots if you can't hack them), and you start most missions with only a pistol. New weapons appear as power-ups, or from boxes that are literally labeled, "Magic Box." And the only way to get powers is from power-ups too, and they run out after a while. That and, like I said, the fact that zombies aren't really fun to fight in this mode, made most of Nightmares a slog. It's still better than the Zombies mode, but that's a low bar to meet.
In good news, Dead Ops Arcade makes its triumphant return, and is better than ever! More levels, more variety in power-ups (including a first person mode!), and a bonus stage where you are literally driving a truck around a little race track add up to make it an even sillier mode than it was in Black Ops I. I was pretty bummed that Blops II didn't have Dead Ops, but I'm glad it's back. I love me some top down twin stick shooting, and it's fun. Still the best zombies related thing in Call of Duty, so far as I'm concerned.
And then there's the multiplayer. I played a couple matches whilst I was waiting for the campaign to finish installing, and my thoughts on it are the same as they were when I played the beta. It's fine, but not as good as last year's. Definitely not good enough to keep me wanting to play more, given that I borrowed this game from my cousin just so I could play through the campaign. I'll have to return it in the near future, and I don't have any desire to play more of that stuff.
That's Blops III. I probably forgot to mention something that I wanted to say, but oh well. I did enjoy my time with the regular campaign quite a bit more than I was expecting. It's fun, and in most ways, I still think Treyarch is the best at making Call of Duty campaigns. If only the online stuff hadn't felt like a step back from Advanced Warfare's, I probably would have bought the game and spent a lot of time playing against other people. Again, oh well!
Anything else?
That's it for games I've played this year. All that's left is....You know.
Stay tuned. The Seventh Annual Moosies Video Game Awards Extravabonanztacular Triple Double Deluxe X-Treme will return!
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