Batman: Return to Arkham- Arkham City XBox One, 1/16- This plays great, looks great, has so many things to do, and is well acted but ye gods, the story is WRETCHED. I think it suffers from a classic case of too much ambition- it tries to fit in so many Batman concepts that weren't part of
Arkham Asylum. Every villain you missed in the last one is here in this one, whether they're needed or not. And I'm gonna get into hardcore spoilers here but:
- Spoiler: show
- Protocol Ten, as far as I can understand it, is rounding up all the criminals in Gotham, and for some reason all the people who worked on it, even though that's MANY innocent citizens whose disappearances would likely be reported, and since Arkham City was legally approved by, as far as I can tell, an overwhelming majority of the citizenry, why are they dong this?- and then blowing them all away with helicopter gunships while they're all trapped in Arkham City.
And THIS, somehow, is meant to FINALLY provoke Batman into finally going to work for Ra's Al Ghul. I... think? That's the idea, right? Why else would Ra's be backing Hugo Strange?
Oh and what the Joker's doing is totally unrelated, he just wants to poison the Gotham reservoir with Joker toxin.
My head hurts.
But the game is wonderful to play, just like the last one. and addicting, just like the last one. I do wish there had been more time to spend with Catwoman- Grey Griffin is so delightful in the role.
Mass Effect Legendary Edition- XBox One, 2/5 Thanks, XBox GamePass! Playing this game again after so many years- my first play through (I think?) as a male Shepard, believe it or not, and once I heard Mark Meer's voice again I remembered why I was FemShep 4 Life. He's not TERRIBLE, but he's weirdly detached in a way that Jennifer Hale is not. This game, I'm gonna say it, is the best of the original trilogy.
It's not just that the writing is much more coherent, it's the shock of the new, the idea of this world and its hundreds of years of history and places, people, and things that are only hinted at that capture the imagination. Yes, some of the mechanics feel slightly complicated (Compared to the following games at least) and some of the design looks dated, but It continues to be the game my mind returns to the most when thinking of the trilogy. And the other two games contain some truly great moments.
I also think the pacing is solid- we have three big missions to take care of, then have a bunch of little missions, and slowly but surely it all comes together. And the final reveal before the finale- that
the Citadel itself is a relay-- still ranks to me as one of the top ten video game twists of all time. Maybe top five. It's seeded all throughout the game, too. This wonderful place, that just so happens to be the center of galactic trade and diplomacy- isn't it funny how no one knows who built it? Or where the Keepers came from?
And the finale, the zero gravity march on the Citadel itself... what a game.
Telling Lies- XBox One, 2/6 Thanks, XBox GamePass!
The game puts us in the shoes of a mysterious woman who returns to her apartment late one night to play with a bunch of video clips, trying to piece together what happened to the people on the clips.
It's a remarkably bleak story of a man, David Smith (Logan Marshall-Green) who... has a interesting job, somewhat secure marriage (to
Halt and Catch Fire's Kerry Bishe), and he's also taking up environmental activism as a "hobby", along with his fellow activist (Alexandra Shipp from
Tick Tick Boom). It turns out the man has somewhat ulterior motives for taking up such a "Hobby" and that his marriage isn't quite as rosy as it seems. There's also another woman (
Westworld host Angela Sarafayan) with a connection to David that he probably doesn't want the other women to know about. The mysterious woman plays clips made by these four until the full picture becomes clear.
I've not played
Her Story, the previous game from this developer, but I suspect that game was more challenging- if you're attentive you can piece together a rough timeline of what happened and why long, looooong before the game actually wants to move you ahead in its story.
The problem is, the man at its center is an utterly unsympathetic human being. He's a narcissistic monster, and the game seems truly incurious as to why that is, which wouldn't be so much of a problem if we weren't forced to spend so much time with him. Even his gesture toward redemption makes things so much worse. The game doesn't want to interrogate the motivations of the man or the man's... associates, which may be good for your confirmation bias but doesn't make for compelling drama.
Mass Effect 2 Legendary Edition 2/20, XBox One- Thanks, XBox GamePass! Well, this is the one everyone loved at the time, including me, but the intervening twelve years have not exactly been kind to
Mass Effect 2. It may be the fault of me reading Shamus Young's blog, but the fact of the matter is, the main story of
Mass Effect does not move at all when you play this game. The Collectors are a side story, and I suppose this is an aftereffect of the series' original writer Drew Karpyshyyn leaving the project midway through. I mean, the Collectors are a FUN side story- I even like that ridiculous boss fight at the end. And the game introduces many characters that are part of the reason the series is still so beloved. The Reapers are still out there at game's end, and we're no closer to defeating them, or figuring out a way to defeat them, than we were before.
But who cares about that when there are so many cool side quests and stories to do? This
Mass Effect, more than the other two, feels like your own little playground, traversing from world to world, mining stuff and hoping a wild little quest appears. All the new characters are well drawn, but Thane Krios especially stands out as brilliantly developed and acted. It's kind of sad how nothing more was done with the Drell in the 3rd game and Andromeda, though in the latter that would have been very difficult.
It still strikes me as odd that Yvonne Strahovski lent her likeness to Miranda, as well as her voice. I hope to god she never googled the character with safe search off.
The game basically becomes a cover shooter this time around, and while it's a good cover shooter, I do miss some of the more complex RPG mechanics of the previous game. Then again, the simplification of the combat accentuates the ticking clock nature of the plot.
Whiskey Mafia: Frank's Story XBox One, 2/28 This bizarre visual novel/slash sort of game is an easy ticket to 1000 points but there's little else to recommend it. A guy named Frank during the 1910s isn't doing to great at his post office job, so he plans to open up a bar with a friend. That proves to be a bit difficult, so he turns... to CRIME.
The game has you delivering letters. Hot mailing action! Very slowly. And doing a drink mixing and bartending section that's no Root Beer Tapper. And then there's some embarrassingly clunky shooting and melee action. But before I could get really annoyed with the game, it ended.
The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes- XBox One, 3/14 this is the third Supermassive game I've played- the other two are
Until Dawn and
Man of Medan- but this is by far my favorite of the three. It feels like the sort of lean, mean chiller-diller feature that would have played in the dog days of August, made a small profit, but would have gotten a more sterling reputation on cable and DVD years later (and shit reboot from Blumhouse) I'll admit That it's a bit hard for me to buy Ashley Tisdale as hardened CIA field analyst, but the woman is definitely making an effort. The rest of the cast is solid even if I didn't recognize them besides Tisdale.
The character writing here is well done- the racist, rah rah Bush era caricature of the American soldiers turns out to have more depth than expected, while the script doesn't let him off the hook for being kind of an ass. The game lets you decide how Rachel, Eric, and Nick's love triangle plays out, and I liked how there was no clear "bad guy" there. The plot gets increasingly ridiculous (How in the world could that epilogue happen?) but I appreciated
- Spoiler: show
- how there actually WAS monsters this time and it was not a fakeout, or a fakeout on top of a fakeout.
I haven't said much about the gameplay because it's the standard point and click interspersed with quick time events, and one problem I had is that sometimes I could go so long without an event that I momentarily had put my controller down and was distracted, then got someone killed. But the events are challenging and there are no easy outs. The final sequence is a serious nail biter, and ranks among the best work Supermassive has done. I was practically losing my mind trying to keep characters alive.
Mass Effect 3 Legendary Edition- XBox One, 3/23- Thanks, XBox GamePass. I'm not sure if there's anything anyone can say anymore about the ending of this game. It's been ten and a half years. A very, very long ten and a half years. I think that ending caused a permanent fracture in gaming. Or rather, helped cause the permanent fracture that came later. But this is probably the wrong place to have that discussion. All I will say is this: It's not good. I still remember the first time I beat Mass Effect 3 I had leigitimately no idea what actually
happened. My form of protest was not screaming at an EA secretary, no sending cupcakes, I just didn't buy any of the DLC.
So it's ten years later, and I finally have gotten to play the DLC. And it's pretty damn good. The Leviathan DLC does alleviate the HOW and the WHY of what the reapers are doing. It was nice that they did that. The Citadel DLC lived up to the hype and was very awesome. You could really feel BioWare's desire to make up for the ending and give all the characters a proper sendoff. I appreciated it.
As for the main game itself, I appreciated the pockets of character writing, and all the little stories we find throughout the Citadel. I liked the sense of dread. I didn't like the fact that the side quests are are essentially fetch quests, to get up to an arbitrary number for the war assets so we can get a slightly better cut scene at the end. The cover based shooter gameplay is fine. Nothing new is introduced, but I can't be bothered by that too much, since the game was essentially made in 13 months. I wish I had gotten a chance to play with the Firewalker again.
Overall, the Legendary Edition was a great package and I'm glad I played it again, warts and all. The landscape has changed so much I'm not sure how 4 will shake out, or, based on
Anthem, if it will even be playable. Guess we'll find out.
Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy XBox One, 4/13- Thanks, XBox GamePass! Eidos Montreal and Square Enix try to recover from the train wreck that was
Marvel's Avengers (which I'd argue isn't QUITE the disaster it's been pitched as but it's not great either) with a straightforward riff on the movies. Like the
Avengers it's all slightly to the left of the movies, this time with local Canadian voice talent instead of American veterans. They're all all right, but are stuck trying to emulate the actors, which doesn't serve them well, particularly the actors voicing Gamorra and Rocket.
What I found weird about this is that the whole man-child Star-Lord, the whole wall to wall 80s soundtrack, in the wake of
Peacemaker, it all feels... wrong somehow? Because
Peacemaker plays with the 80s nostalgia to depict someone dealing with serious emotional issues and it's not as funny or as fun as it was in the
Guardians films. That's not Eidos Montreal's fault, of course. It's a weird effect that it has on me, and probably me alone.
The game itself looks great, is well produced, has some strong mechanics, and has a story that makes an effort at emotional resonance and an arc... but in the end, never rose to much more than above average for me. The third person run and gun is fun at first but becomes repetitive and the whole Huddle mechanic, while neat, just makes me wish I had the opportunity to play the other characters and not just Star-Lord (Really, when you see them pull off so many sick moves you wish you could try them). I think I'm being a bit unfair- there are some dynamite sequences in the game, but by the end I was just kind of tired. I also hated that
- Spoiler: show
- Peter doesn't turn out to be Nikki's dad, which makes the whole thing pointless to me. But there's nothing about this version of Peter that we see that made me think that Ko-Rel wouldn't bother telling him he was Nikki's father, he's not as irresponsible as the movie or comics versions. The whole drama fell flat for me Also it's yet another genre story where someone's mom dies, so Nikki can join the team. The cosmetic change to Nikki, which is something someone who only read the original Guardians comics would get, gave me a huge belly laugh though.
Transformers: Battlegrounds Digital Deluxe Edition XBox One, 4/16, Thanks, XBox GameP-WHAAAAA? I already owned this? Yes I do, I bought it on a black friday sale only a few weeks before it hit GamePass. Boy do I feel stupid! But hey, I get all these boss character skins!
This is based on the seemingly little seen
Cyberverse animated series which you can watch on Netflix. It's a pretty entertaining series, at least from a visual standpoint- the writing is strictly kids stuff, starting out initially as a two-hander between Bumblebee and Windblade being hunted by the Decepticons until the rest of the cast eventually joins in.
The gang's all here in
Battlegrounds- the player character isn't an Autobot or Decepticon, but a human who's been tasked with helping out the Autobots in their battle to destroy some evil forces. Really, the game starts and the characters talk to an unseen player character who's riding a Teletraan-1 drone and giving orders. It's so contrived they barely mention it ever again in the story.
What follows is extremely solid, if very familiar, turn based strategy gameplay, over various maps- city, desert, forest, finishing with a big ass fight on Cybertron. All the characters have fun unique moves, especially Grimlock (who spends most of the game in his dino form). The biggest flaw in the gameplay is all the maps have two kinds of goals- either defeat all the Decepticons, or move to the other side of the map. And that's literally it. And yet, the simplicity of the gameplay was appealing to me. Trouble is, the game is about 7 hours long. it's what we oldsters would call a "weekend rental".
(Yes, I have even more games that I've beaten to talk about, but I figure right now that's enough. this took a while!)
--Dan