2014 was possibly my least favorite year in video games; or, put differently, 2014 was an amazing year for pretty good video games, and a terrible year for excellent video games (the perfection that is Nidhogg aside, that is).
Need to add: Always Sometimes Monsters
Nidhogg is one of the most pure, exhilarating competitive multiplayer experiences in video games. When a match goes way longer than it should, it only skyrockets the tension. The game's sense of style is so evocative of an Atari medieval dystopia, too; the last time I played a few rounds of this with friends we ended up essentially creating fan fiction about Nidhogg's world. Maybe no one can die in this world unless they're fed to the Nidhogg, and they just spawn forever until they're consumed? If that's true, who are the participants in these duels? Are they prisoners - or do they want this?
Is it THE Nidhogg? Or just Nidhogg? Or, maybe, its the more informal 'hogg?
This is a good video game.
Episode 3
Kentucky Route Zero is a fascinating project, and one of the best-written fictional texts about American life in any medium. Each episode is exponentially better than the last: the first episode and it's side-chapter are good, but maybe not all that compelling in and of themselves, until Episode 2 and The Entertainment got released, which are two genuinely wild experiences. Episode 3 clicks into place many of the overarching themes in Kentucky Route Zero's central narratives: it's in this chapter that the concept of debt takes center stage, and in which KRC introduces this gorgeous, bleak visual metaphor for debt, particularly medical debt, in which the parts of the character which are 'owned' by debt and indentured labor appear as glowing bones while the rest of the body is rendered normally. I think episode IV is the apex of Kentucky Route Zero from both a narrative and a design perspective, but episode 3 is a close second.
Here and There Along the Echo
This side-chapter is pure interactive art object. The entire experience consists of a landline which can be used to call an automated number for the Bureau of Secret Tourism. Dozens of phone extensions are revealed through each call. The deeper into the phone tree you explore, the more bizarre the calls get. There's not a lot of 'play' here, sure, but you won't forget experiencing this episode once you play it. Cardboard Computer is one of the only development teams really willing to *do* something with their narrative in an unabashed sense, to extend the themes of their landmark series this far. It's terrific.
Big series like XCOM and Fire Emblem are often heralded for their perma-death design ethos, because they disempower players who start those games expecting power fantasies. That's all well and good, but at the end of the day, those games are about fighting some video game-ass video game monsters with extra complications added in. This War of Mine is brutal in an entirely different, more difficult sense, because it disempowers characters who are normal, likable people who have nothing and who ask for nothing except to survive. I've played a decent chunk of this game, but have never once finished a campaign because losing someone in This War of Mine is devastating, tragic in the way that losing someone in real life is tragic. If nothing else, This War of Mine is one of the most innovative games of the decade in its genre; I can't think of a single other game that uses procedural gameplay to tell a story this bold and realistic.
I bounced off of Dark Souls II a few times but couldn't help myself from coming back to it. It took a while for me to accept that Dark Souls II just isn't the mysterious, compellingly brutal experience of the first game. It actively wants to welcome players. It has a friendlier gameplay loop that doesn't reward your ability as a player to overcome impossible odds so much as it rewards your ability to just be generally persistent; kill an enemy enough times and it will vanish from the map forever, allowing you to empty out the entire world by fighting one enemy at a time. Comparing this tamer design along with the endlessly varied, un-tethered plot of this game against its predecessor and you'll find yourself disappointed, but appreciate the game for its merits as its own experience and you'll be rewarded with some occasionally magnificent instances of artistic design. There were more than a few times playing through this game and all of its DLC where I had to let myself stop and just stare dumbfounded at the cryptic, beautiful space I was inhabiting. I don't think the game works as a "Dark Souls II," exactly, but it definitely feels complete as its own experience. Maybe if they had filled in the blank with another D word and called it ____ Souls instead I would've jumped on board more quickly.
(P.T.) I have never played P.T., but I sure have watched a lot of it. Many of the greatest horror stories of all time shroud themselves with mystery. It's scarier to believe there's something more hidden beneath the story, something lurking in the shadows that may reveal itself at any given moments. It's why people were so shocked at the apparent realism of the original Blair Witch Project, and why communities like creepypasta flourish. It's a travesty that Konami shuttered Silent Hills, but because we'll never get a resolution to this unsettling piece of gaming history and, more to the point, the fact that Konami outright deleted this game from existence has shrouded P.T.'s already unsolvable Pandora's box with an even greater density of theorizing and misinformation. This game is a myth.
My love for Tomodachi life is true and unabashed. One of the most bizarre Nintendo titles ever released. I guess I should say I wish there was a little more of it, but honestly I don't care that much. I admire that Nintendo built a social machine that encouraged Barack Obama get married to Bart Simpson without any input from me whatsoever. It's beautiful, and that's all there is to it.
There isn't much for the player to do in Glitchhikers other than drive, look, and then think about what you're looking at while you drive. It's a surreal experience that perfectly captures that specific kind of isolation that comes with being on the road way too late at night with only your thoughts to keep you company.
While nowhere near as fucked up or prescient as its insane sequel, The New Order is satisfyingly pulp.
There's a tonal imbalance to this game that feels like unsteady storytelling - you're waxing philosophic about a life lost one minute, then you're sunk in the existential hell of an Orwellian dystopia the next, and then you're doing acid with Jimmy Hendrix in his bedroom. It never reads as cohesive, unlike The New Colossus, which abandons the pretense of staid blockbuster movie tropes to skip straight to the batshit satire at the heart of this series (re: The Good Stuff). As a singular story it's therefore uneven, but it works more than it doesn't.
The one area where The New Order excels over its successor is in the difficulty ramp up. The solutions to The New Order's combat arenas are (mostly) legible, and I rarely found myself manically firing in all directions hoping to God I reach the next checkpoint in one piece.
The Evil Within is the worst best game of all time. The general consensus at the time of its release was that it was a miserable slog through rusty video game corridors filled with punishing PS2-era boss fights. That's not *exactly* incorrect, as it certainly ticks all those boxes, but The Evil Within is also one of the only games bold enough to construct sequences that actually mirror the hazy, subliminal, associative nature of a nightmare. The plot requires quite a bit of decoding to make any sense of - probably too much - but it's also a genuinely new flavor of horror story which re-contextualizes a lot of ancient tropes to great effect, and the imagery is inspired. The Evil Within is flawed, definitely enough so that I would hesitate to recommend it to someone who isn't already into horror, but if you do try it you'll find that beneath the repetition and unfriendly enemy encounters lies a wholly new horror narrative that lives up to the hype.
I played every episode of this as they released. It is a cinematic Edgar Allen Poe story, the length of a short novel, portrayed as a cursed Atari game. It is translated rather poorly but crafted with real heart. It's also genuinely scary in spite of its familiar aesthetic.
My feelings about Alien: Isolation can be divided into two categories that fit aptly with the game's title. I love Isolation's picture-perfect replica of the original 70's film; I love how it recreates the cold, unforgiving atmosphere of gleaming corporate safety and vicious organic brutality. I gotta be honest: I hate the Alien. The idea of having just one enemy stalk you through an entire game and unshackle his AI from obvious patrol patterns, but why then does he need to always be within 15 square feet of me? There's no sound way to progress if the Alien always kind of knows where you are. You're left with dozens of trial and error puzzle boxes in which the solution is random and arbitrary. The Alien has no identifiable tactics or personality; he's arbitrarily placed within reach of you and then wanders around till his vision cone hits the right spot or whatever. Cranking the game down to easy doesn't work either because it makes the Alien a blind fucking idiot. Alien: Isolation is host to an immersive world and story that I literally cannot figure out how to engage with. At least it looks and feels stellar.
Left Behind has the distinction of being gaming's first AAA gay romance. And y'know what? It's really good at being that, actually. The Last of Us' extraordinary violence is a lot less believable when playing as a likable precocious 14 year old, but that doesn't stop Left Behind's best moments from soaring. Kind of weird to think how charged the hubub around a proper Last of Us 2 being released was when everyone seemed to eat up this mini-story.
The Master Chief Collection was lambasted at the time of its release for its broken multiplayer, but at the time of this writing nearly a decade later it's almost certainly longest and the most widely played version of Halo ever released. Historically this game was a pretty big mess, but contemporaneously, it's easily one of the best video game anthologies ever released.
Keep in mind, I'm saying that as someone whose way more interested in the Halo campaigns than The Master Chief Collection's Halo mashup multiplayer modes. Besides the fact that this game is a comprehensive collection of every single Halo FPS ever released before the Xbox One - which is actually quite rare, if you think about the way Nintendo and Sony anthologize their legacy games (see: the full-price Super Mario All Stars collection or the half-measure God of War PS3 collection) - The Master Chief Collection also contains the Halo 2 remaster, which is easily one of the most comprehensive visual re-designs of an older title ever made. There's also the achievement challenges, which add a pretty enormous amount of replayability to each game; every level now features a Par Score, Par Time, and a host of level-specific challenges that can be completed either in co-op or in single player. Even more, new collectibles have been added to Halo and Halo 2, which unlock new cutscenes that reveal tasty little Halo lore morsels.
All in all, it's quite the package!
Jazzpunk is not good at being hilarious. It is, however, relentlessly committed to insanity. It's a ton of fun to poke at this thing and see what dumb shit pops out. I'll also add that the '60s spy film meets Saturday morning cartoon pastiche is...*mwah*. Please make more of this.
Look: I like Captain Toad a lot. The character, and the mini-game he spawned from, are the best additions to the Mario canon since Mario went to space. That being said, his debut game is sorely lacking in features. The core puzzle gameplay in Treasure Tracker is some good, clean, simple fun, but for a near-full price release on a console which was desperately in need of new exclusives, it's *crazy* how limited this game is in scope.
I don't even just mean in terms of time-to-completion rate, but in terms of *mechanical* scope. Unlike other, similar Nintendo games, Treasure Tracker functions exactly the same way throughout its entire runtime. It never once expands the possibility space in its puzzle-box mechanics or meaningfully subverts the expectations it sets for the player; it's simply a collection of Captain Toad puzzles which function identically to the puzzles which made up the side content of Super Mario 3D World. It's about 400% as long as those mini-games - that is to say, it lasts about 4-5 hours instead of 1-2 - but it's the same experience otherwise.
Treasure Tracker is fun, but it's also the epitome of mid-'10s Nintendo missing out on yet another opportunity to try something new.
The Sherlock Holmes series is secretly pretty good, actually. This one in particular has some good ideas - granted, these good ideas are often buried under lengthy non-plot related puzzles and excruciatingly slow tasks that require the player sloth their way around a non-descript environment - but more of the cases work here than don't.
Having played this with my partner, there's a unique tension to trying to suss out the whodunnit right at the end. Did character A commit the murder? REALLY? You're crazy, it had to be character B. The fact that the game allows you to proceed with an incorrect decision, even after giving you the solution - and the fact that it might sometimes be morally advantageous to jail a wrongly accused party! - make Crimes and Punishments a uniquely captivating mystery game.
That said, there's no ignoring the clunk. Crimes and Punishments is riddled with questionable busywork, and the overall narrative connecting each disparate case is paper thin. There are real flaws in this series, but its got sheer personality, and I'll definitely be returning to older titles to see if they hold up.
Ground Zeroes' primary quality was that it was shocking. Who was this new version of Snake? How could the cheery-eyed cast of Peace Walker be so violently torn apart at the seams? I don't know if I was so eager to play this game's goofy side content, but the hour and a half I spent sneaking through the campaign was utterly compelling. An amazing teaser for an unbelievable game.
Hitman Go is the philosophy of game design in the Hitman franchise distilled to its core traits. JK, it's not really, but somehow Hitman Go convinces you it is thanks to its unassailable minimalist presentation and puzzlebox tension. The fact that its so quick and addictive, and that its aesthetic is so damn shiny make it its own brand of stealth thriller. One of the smartest and best mobile titles I've yet to play.
Assassin's Creed: Rogue could be titled Black Flag: More Edition, but I guess that would've been selling it a bit short. Ignoring the far more obvious and plentiful technical flaws of Unity at launch, Rogue is by far the most presentationally clunky Assassin's Creed game ever released; at no point in my playthrough was I anything but painfully aware of this game's 'I've been stapled on top of a totally different game' nature. The mechanics between Rogue and Black Flag are obviously the same, which is fine, but the real world Abstergo office sections are straight up identical to Black Flag - I think the primary difference is you're given someone else's desk - save for the fact that the game takes place in winter this time, not summer. So there's a technically poor snow effect outside. You even return to Assassin's Creed: 3's New York City, yet, somehow...it looks worse than that much older game? Maybe it's because I played Black Flag on Xbox One, and this is a 360 game. I don't know.
Allll that said, Rogue frequently feels like a reward for Assassin's Creed diehards. Contained within its plot, collectibles and main story are dozens of mini-revelations that fill in little timeline gaps between all of the games. We learn how Edward Kenway the assassin from 4, somehow raised the master templar for the American colonies, the primary antagonist from 3. We see the end of Adwele's story, and learn key details leading up to the beginning of 3 AND Unity.
I am an absolute sucker for timeline-filling, AND Black Flag is my favorite Assassin's Creed game. So, despite the somehwhat haphazard feel of Rogue, I still ended up quite liking it. Definitely worth a shot if you've played the other games but missed out on this one.
Splitting the latest (and the last?) Smash title into two 75% complete games will forever hamper the single player's experience with it, but mechanically Smash 4 is the most refined game in the series yet. Gone is the 'fuck you' tripping mechanic, but all the fun Nintendo in-jokes remain. The stage design is terrific (mostly) and the new characters are a great fit. The series, however, is getting long in the tooth; a new Smash game that is this bare bones would be considered a big misstep in today's market. All that said, Sakurai (rightly) knows that most every Smash player will spend the vast majority of their time in local multiplayer, and has predicated the entire experience on that. Is there a better party-style local multiplayer experience to be had that matches the lunacy of an 8 player Smash game?
Mario Kart 8 is the greatest Mario Kart title every developed. Nintendo finally (finally!) figured out the balance between skill and accessibility.
Nothing about the first episode of Dark Dreams Don't Die proves to me that it would have been a complete success as a full season, but Swery 65's wordy, unpredictable insanity was fun to revisit. A little more exploration, or - well, honestly, a little more in terms of levels, this thing feels like it'd last an hour if you mainlined it - and D4 would be an easy recommendation for the B-Movie Weird aficionado.
A QWOP-style physics based comedy about a very smart Octopus who has fooled a small family into thinking that he is a human man. This one's lacking in content and starts losing its charm once the plot gets going; the stuff I love in Octodad is playing this lanky, rubbery animal who is pretending to know how to make coffee or buy cereal or whatever, and I don't necessarily need to dive into his existential fear of marine biologists. There's a bunch of side content unrelated to the plot to mitigate the game's short length, which admittedly helps, and the charm will stay with you long after you forget about the awful sneaking parts.
Sunset Overdrive's pretend 'haha, we're punks let's rock out and break the fourth wall' aesthetic sucks. It just does. I love how the game feels, I love its combat, I love navigating its roller blade-driven landscapes, but I could not keep up with the constant 'haha check out our attitude, that guy cut all his limbs off and ate it to survive cuz he's a boy scout, that's nuts, right?? haha.' Keep the gameplay design, add a greater variety in combat scenarios and then hire a new writer and come back to me with this stuff.
So, Bedlam is a little cheesy and its occasionally slipshod mechanics can be off-putting. But hey: the fantasy fulfillment RedBedlam achieved by allowing players to sprint through quite literally every decade of first person shooter gameplay is so much fun. You literally warp from Oblivion to Medal of Honor to Halo while playing as an NPC from Quake. There's a moment early on in which you're warped into a Quake online multiplayer session replete with sexist 12 year old boys who get pissy when you kill them, and it is easily one of my moments of the year.
One of the last true B games. Doesn't go far enough with its ghost detective concept, but the simple joy of running up to objects, looking at them, then solving mysteries with your precocious teenage spirit ward make it a wholly likable - if unfinished-feeling - experience.
There is a compelling story in Three Fourths Home, but this game occasionally presses the pen too deeply into its nostalgic, monotone script. The less visually adept prequel that would release with Three Fourths Home, while less singular, is actually the more compelling experience.
I wanted to role play Dragon Age: Inquisition as a populist elf politician, but the character model's arms constantly glitch through his body and the game demanded I spend way more time walking around a lot of flat, dead combat areas completing meaningless side quests. I love the way the game ratchets up tension in the war room, though - a Bioware RPG in which you have to consider cultural and tactical ramifications to your alliances is a great idea.
Setting aside the anachronistically brilliant Far Cry 2, Far Cry 4 is probably the best Far Cry game Ubisoft ever developed. Far Cry 3 was a hinge point for the massive publisher, who took that game's runaway critical and commercial success and basically replicated it, ad nauseum, for the next decade. Additionally, Ubisoft's games start to position themselves as more and more politically conservative, often transparently so, leading to titles like the mobile Tom Clancy game in which the player quells fictional analogs of Black Lives Matter protestors, and Far Cry 5, in which the player assassinates vaguely millennial cultists, at one point literally in a conspiracy to help president Donald Trump. Perhaps this hard swing towards reactionary conservatism is correlated with the studio's abuse allegations towards certain employees or the stories that broke about the Assassin's Creed team's desire to make a female protagonist being silenced for the better part of a decade? Who could say.
In any case, Far Cry 4 still fits very neatly within this lineage of reactionary Ubisoft games - Far Cry 4's plot climaxes in a sequence in which it urges you to empathize with its totalitarian dictator against and side against the populist rebellion you cultivate, after all - but, as far as reactionary Ubisoft titles go, this is definitely the least bad result. If nothing else, it's fictional Himalayan country makes for a genuinely gorgeous space to explore, and it's so chock-full of loose Far Cry open world madness that you may well forget about the plot in the first place. It's still ultimately a content mill and I have serious reservations about...well, just about every single move the narrative makes during the final act, but as far as AAA time wasters go, you could do a lot worse than Far Cry 4.
The premise of this game is that you are a limo driver who can only drive by making donuts on the road. This is a stupidly hyper-specific premise to a game, and I love Roundabout for it. It gets a little less charming once the game gets hard, but I always enjoy a game that willingly falls off the rails when it feels like. Great FMV stuff in here, too.
(ACT 1)
There's plenty of Double Fine charm in Broken Age, but at a certain point I don't think it quite lives up to the hype as an adventure game. While I understand that the first act exists to introduce conflicts resolved in the second, there aren't enough interesting incidental characters, stories, or puzzles in Broken Age Act 1 to set it apart from its historic forebears. I like the protagonists, however, and the central conflict for both of them is actually really clever. I just wish there was a little more to care about along the way.
(Episodes 2-5) I was never convinced I was being given much to do in TellTale's first attempt at the mystery drama, but the writers do an awesome job of playing with expectation. The characters are all fan-fiction schlock, but in the best way possible. When the world is so neon pink and the score is Cliff Martinez by way of Grimm's Fairy Tales, I found this series fun to return to, even if it never built towards anything.
Costume Quest 2 is one of those "I want to love you" games. Double Fine's Halloween RPG has everything on paper, but the combat is laboriously slow and there is a LOT of it. The script is cute if unfulfilling; I've always wondered if voice acting and a more memorable score would've made it stand out as more than a middling RPG with some terrific visual design.
Spider-Man Unlimited is a bigger-budgeted version of Temple Run with a Spider-Man skin. There are timed events in which you can unlock obscure versions of the character. That's pretty much all I needed to sink a zillion hours into this game. I used to sneak runs in between tasks at my college job. The game is no achievement by any stretch, but in a genre like this sometimes all you need is the right paint job for it to sit well with you.
A serviceable multiplayer 2D shoot 'em up in a Smash Bros. mode. It's got *just enough* features to play through a couple times with friends, but nowhere near enough to justify spending any significant amount of time with.
(Episodes 2-5) Season Two of the Walking Dead was a slow, sad realization that TellTale will likely never recapture the magic of that first season; the knowledge that my agency in the story was minimal at best put me off quick, and the writing did little to salvage the experience. The characters more obviously align as good/evil archetypes, Clementine has little distinguishable character and is surrounded by a supporting cast of anonymous survivors I can barely remember. Kenny's transformation into an un-killable behemoth is fun in a pulpy way, I suppose, but without a more evidently human cast the moral choices in this one end up feeling anything but insightful.
After developing No One Lives Forever and Condemned: Criminal Origins, Monolith became important to me as a studio. Conversely, my exposure to The Lord of the Rings consists almost entirely of the animated version of The Hobbit and the first of Peter Jackson's Hobbit adaptations. Fantasy is not for me, particularly Tolkein's fantasy.
I thought the LOTR ties wouldn't matter, but because Shadow of Mordor's (probably!) innovative Nemesis system is so easy to miss if you play the game a certain way I couldn't for the life of me place why this game won so many GOTY awards. I appreciate that the mechanics are so accessible, but I couldn't shake the feeling like I was playing this fantasy edgelord Arkham game. It wasn't enough to get me through, especially when the plot is as imaginative as a DC superhero film.
Played this after the release of Night in the Woods proper. I enjoyed the meta-narrative between Mae and her grandfather (which plays nicely into the main story), but wasn't enamored with this game's generally slow pace. The snappy dialogue just isn't as fun and engaging when broken up by a bunch of traditionally adventure game-y puzzles.
I'm not sure I get the appeal with this one. I've played through part of it solo and part of it with a friend, and in both instances found the mechanics fun enough, and that's about it. There are just a lot of generic puzzles to get through, and the generic world design does the game no favors.
I've been desparate for a new skateboarding game for a while, and I thought Olli Olli could fill the void. It's colorful at the outset, has a touch of personality and is focused on fluid motion in a way that I enjoy. But it's stages are hyper-straightforward. It gets its longevity out of asking the player to repeat objectives, much like the Tony Hawk games, but UNlike the Tony Hawk games, each objective is touchy and demands pitch perfect precision. Whereas Tony Hawk would have you return to a level to, say, jump over a particularly cinematic gap between rooftops or try to grind an entire subway rail, OlliOlli demands that you jump over three flight of stairs as accurately as possible. Or it demands that you never slow down in a level. Which is...fine, I guess, but maybe not for me.
Burial at Sea: Episode 2
BioShock Infinite was a huge inflection point in games criticism, a Big Boy Narrative packed to the gills with metaphoric imagery, unironic social commentary, meta-literary references and AAA scale. It was intended to be the Urr-game, the game which would encompass all video games before and after it, the game which would act as a reference point for video game narratives from that point forward, a zenith of the medium - and it was an abysmal failure, to the extent that all of its extreme acclaim has subsequently given way to trite dismissals and 'well, it was a different time' apologia.
The thing is, BioShock Infinite achieved what it set out to achieve, in a sense. It really was a game emblematic of AAA video game narratives, though only in the worst sense of the word. BioShock Infinite is a game about oppression and racism from the powerful American ruling class that understands these things to be bad, but considers a violent defense against these acts to be even worse, all the while staging the player as a Morally Righteous Centrist Mass Murderer. It's a *mess*, a grotesque bit of satire that ultimately comes back around as propaganda for its own wretched status quo.
Burial at Sea Episode 2 attempts to soften the blow of the main game's story by re-casting a black liberationist as a *sympathetic* child-killer and not an *unsympathetic* child-killer. You might be surprised to learn that this doesn't make much difference in the grand scheme of BioShock Infinite's character writing or its politics.
From a game design perspective, Burial at Sea Episode 2 also attempts to shift its mechanics closer to its immersive sim progenitor, the Thief series. This is another abysmal failure - save for the addition of a crossbow and an emphasis on stealth, Burial at Sea Episode 2 might gesture towards a greater depth of systems, but ultimately you're doing the exact same chaotic mass murder from the regular game - you're just wearing a cloak this time.
Maybe one of the most disappointing games I've played. After bouncing off of it twice, I ended up playing through the entirety of Watch Dogs in the summer of 2017. The game's attempt at social commentary are hampered instantly some ugly racial profiling, a protagonist more rote and predictable than whoever the dude in Dead to Rights was, obvious cultural stereotypes, a plot so erratically paced that it raises questions about the game's development cycle and some flat out shit level design. This game has so much promise, and its 'hack the world' premise still shines through in a few triumphant moments. I am totally down to be tech Batman and shoot corporate murderers; I just need that experience to feel at least a little human.
(Episode 1) A comedy that, thanks to TellTale's haggard adventure game engine, is without comedic timing.
Five Nights at Freddy's is quite the phenomenon, and there's no denying this game had a greater cultural impact than almost any other game on this list. But I have to be honest: I just don't think the FNAF games are very good. The 'cursed Chuck E. Cheese' concept always struck me as kind of obvious territory for B-movie horror, and Five Nights at Freddy's never really rises above its premise. Despite the fact that a whole lot of people quite obviously disagreed, I don't think Five Nights at Freddy's cultivates a fertile ground for further titles in either a gameplay sense or a narrative sense. I don't mean to sound dismissive, but I really do think you can reduce the entire experience in this game to 'creepypasta but with jump scares' without leaving out anything that it does. This game is exactly as simple as it appears to be. I can't bring myself to care one way or the other about it.
I like the idea of a big dumb sandbox to goof around in, but this is a big dumb sandbox built for YouTubers to scream at; the jokes are already baked in, and they're all adolescent 'so random!' bullshit.
I stupidly assumed Ultimate NES Remix was a WarioWare style microgames fest but with NES titles. It's not. Instead, it's a series of seconds-long challenges in NES games which vary from brain-dead (Beat level 1-1 in Super Mario Bros. in less than a minute) to worth-a-try-once (get through a few screens in Metroid without firing a shot). The concept is fine, I guess, but without the snappiness and high-energy of a WarioWare, Ultimate NES Remix is achingly dull to play. Not to mention it was expensive! Truly, who wants to play a grand total of 3 minutes and 15 seconds of, like, Balloon Fight, and all in completely arbitrary sequences in the game?
Five Nights at Freddy's 2 is identical to the first game, except this time, it's got more. This proves to make for a worse experience than the original, as the entire gameplay structure of this series is formulated around spinning plates. 'Check the vent, check the camera, put on the mask, flash the flashlight, check the vent again.' Frankly, it's fucking annoying. The only way in which this sequel expands upon the original is by adding more plates to spin. The sheer lack of imagination of this sequel, alongside the fact that it's rather transparently churned out as quickly as possible to capitalize on the original's viral success, was enough to put me off of the series forever.
There's a lot of marketing buzz around this game, to the point where I've become frustrated at even seeing it anymore. Contest of Champion's obvious pay-to-play incentives and basic button-mashy fighting make it a complete waste of time.
I have been patiently awaiting a competent followup to Spider-Man 2/Ultimate Spider-Man for like a decade. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 reminded me of going to a friend from school's house in elementary school and playing some anonymous PC game their mom bought from Staples or something. Holds the distinction of portraying the least convincing approximation of New York City in a video game possibly ever.
I'm going to say something that will sound like hyperbole, so I want to make it super, super clear that this isn't at all an exaggeration on my part but something I've thought pretty carefully about: Assassin's Creed Unity is one of the worst games ever developed by a major video game developer, one of the very worst games I've ever played, and one of the just straight-ahead dumbest portrayals of a major historical event I've ever seen in any medium, video games or otherwise. If Ubisoft's reactionary The Division series didn't exist, it would very easily be the worst Ubisoft game of all time.
Assassin's Creed Unity primarily takes place in Paris during the French Revolution, and its setting is lavishly produced, teeming with regular people navigating the chaos of a nation in turmoil. It's great! Except, every other part of the experience, every single action available to the player, every narrative conceit intertwined with the setting, is - just- the worst shit on the planet.
First, the easiest and most obvious problem to discuss: the parkour problem. Assassin's Creed mostly automated free running mechanics often make for some sloppy, imprecise gameplay, and it's a consistent problem in the series that players will accidentally clamber over walls when they mean to simply walk into a building or dive spinal-column first into a bale of hay when they mean to leap from rooftop to rooftop (always with the fucking bales of hay in this series).
In Unity, the free running mechanics have been *greatly* automated, even more so than in past titles. It used to be that the player could use the right trigger to switch between the binary of 'quiet' actions (walking, blending with crowds, slow-climbing) and 'loud' actions (sprinting, shoving people out of the way, leaping into those goddamned bales of hay). In Unity, the player holds the 'loud' actions trigger and then holds either the 'ascend' button or the 'descend' button, at which point the player character will randomly choose whatever path is easiest to take that will either 'ascend' or 'descend' the player. In practice, this means that there is very little time at all in which the player gets to make any fine-grain decisions about navigation *whatsoever,* and that the A.I. gets free reign to, say, leap directly into a well when the player is literally trying to *go to the store*, or that the A.I. might leap, as driven by a spur of the moment suicide, from a fifth floor balcony to the city streets rather than, say, climb into a window from the outside. It's a fucking *nightmare* to play Unity if you care at all about tackling a level with stealth, because you're never 100% certain of where your body will be at any given moment. The snap-to-cover system, even, makes the occasional leap-of-logic; 'oh, you meant, take cover behind the wall directly adjacent to you? I thought you meant you wanted me to fling you smack into the path of the guy you're hiding from!'
The narrative aspect of Unity - boy, where to even start. I literally don't think I have the energy to dig into the sheer scale of the bullshit, weasely Ubisoft centerism that's interspersed throughout the paint-by-numbers action movie dialogue. I'll try to put this as succinctly as possible: in Assassin's Creed Unity, we learn that the Templars - an illuminati-style group bent on achieving a total and invisible control of humanity - stage the French Revolution by propagandizing the French people (probably not that hard to do, considering we see many of them starving on the street in this game, which - y'know - *maybe that itself explains some of the discord here???) and seeding the movement with violent thugs. Meanwhile, the assassins, whose entire ideology - like, down to the very bones of the movement, it's *literally* in their charter - is that people *must* have the ability to make choices of their own free will - god - anyway, the assassins anachronistically decide to kill French revolutionaries by the hundreds in a series of violent covert operations in order to keep the people who hoard all the resources of the society (y'know, the very inciting incident that disallowed people the freedom to live their lives) in power.
In other words, Unity takes the viciousness of the French Revolution - the bloodthirsty decapitations and the "eat the rich" attitudes of legend - and stupidly dismisses the material context which propelled that movement for narrative purposes, making the entire scenario bewildering and arbitrarily cruel. Worse, it assigns the 'blame' of the populist uprising as the result of (what else?) an evil Templar conspiracy that seeks to prove "the people" (aka everyone who isn't a Templar) don't actually want material power by means of...giving them...all of the power of the state...?
The incoherent plot reflects badly on Unity's creative leads for two reasons. The first is: this is an *extremely* circuitous and nonsensical action for an illuminati-style global cabal that seeks unparalleled control of the entire Earth to make. 'In order to further control the populace, we'll allow them to behead us, the people who control them, whenever they want. That will make them feel so weird they'll cede power back to us." Hey, Assassin's Creed Unity, what the fuck are you talking about?????????????????????????
The second reason Unity's story reflects badly on the creative leads, and this is probably worse, is that, in order for the conceit to make any sense, real figures of history that were (or ended up) on the side of the people's movement are re-contextualized as (I promise I am not putting a slant on this, this is literally, actually how these people are typically presented in this game) bloodthirsty serial killers who get a weird kick out of mass murder. This is an *extremely* transparent rewriting of history with an extremely clear reactionary ideological slant.
I mean, I'm not, like, decoding some hyper-specific subtext from this game, in saying all this. The creative director - and I find knowing this actively unpleasant, like, it hurts to have this rattling around in my brain - the creative director was out there, in 2014, giving interviews in which he explained 'if you go too far to the left or the right you end up right back in the same place, and Assassin's Creed Unity is an expression of that idea.' He also went on to say that, if players are playing through the Assassins Creed series and thinking 'these assassins seem like the good guys and the templars seem like bad guys,' then they've misunderstood the entire series, which is incredible. This framework for understanding political action is called the 'horseshoe theory,' and the horseshoe theory is a stupid ideology for babies. You can disprove it *within the text of these games*, even!!!
What happened in the game *directly preceding* Unity, Assassin's Creed IV? You fought *slaveholders." The templars were buddy-buddy with slaveholders, and you and your assassin buddy killed those slaveholders to free the slaves. In that political conflict - which, slavery and the abolition of slavery are obviously literal, real political movements from history and therefore worthy of consideration in the context of political thought, fictional or otherwise - "slaves should not be allowed to exist as a concept" and "I should be able to own human beings" are the polar ends of this debate. I would love someone to explain to me, in clear terms, how exactly you could go "so far left" of anti-slavery that you end up being the same as the slave-holding Templars. You can't!!! Because these ideas are incompatible!!! Welcome to politics!!
Constantly throughout Assassin's Creed Unity, the protagonist makes these bitchy comments about the revolutionaries and the mobs of average people who siege castles and reclaim territory from the controlling estates of Paris. He calls them "bloodthirsty," he makes comments about the low intellect of the mobs. Historical figures from the revolution who DIDN'T resort to violence, like leading figures in the women's march, are placed on a pedestal above the revolutionaries who DID resort to violence, like Robespierre. The idea seems to be, if you use violence to achieve your political goals, you're inherently an evil person and deserve to fail. But there's a problem with this. Can you guess what it is? It seemed pretty easy to figure out to me because, oh I don't know, in this story you play the role of AN ASSASSIN!!!!!!! IN A SERIES CALLED ASSASSIN'S CREED!!!! MURDER, TO YOU, GOES BEYOND IDEOLOGY AND INTO CULT STUFF!!!
OK, sorry, all done with this. Abysmal.
