Recent reviews by Cookington

People are not kidding about the blur issue on these Enhanced Editions, and it has something to do with a botched implementation of FSR upscaling and new anti-aliasing options. I don't get why FSR (plus framegen) was needed for nearly two decade old games that run at well over 100+ FPS without it on any hardware from the last 6+ years, but even besides that they only implemented FXAA and MLAA for anti-aliasing while any decent FSR support needs TAA to upscale properly. As it currently is as of patch 1.0.1, the game looks blurry because it's clearly not rendering at your native resolution no matter what settings you pick. It only looks decent if you're playing at 4K, not great at 1440p, and outright terrible at 1080p and lower.

The removed assets are another can of worms, but one that I'm personally less miffed by because of the developer's recent history regarding the Russian-Ukrainian war. The majority of the core game is still intact, and I do think this would be otherwise the best way to play these games out of the box vanilla without modding if it wasn't for the baffling technical issues that I'm shocked were somehow missed (or worse, straight up ignored) for launch.

I deeply respect Wanderstop because it had every chance to be something mean-spirited and cynical working within the confines of the "cozy game" genre, and try to rip safety and expectations out the window for some kind of "twist" to subvert expectations. It's all too common for media that people tend to call "deconstructive" of whatever genre or trope that something tries to toy with and flip on their heads, which usually ends up being a 50/50 coin toss of feeling disingenuous instead.

Wanderstop never did this, and maybe that's the most important thing of all. It truly treats its gameplay mechanics with respect, as simple as they are. It genuinely looks the player and its lead protagonist in the eye and asks to softly and slowly follow this journey through to whatever path it may follow. It is not kidding when it tells you to pace yourself and find enjoyment in doing "nothing" which while can (and probably will) rub some people the wrong way and create friction, I think it's one of those rare cases in a video game where that friction feels intentional and adds further to its message and themes.

Wanderstop is a cozy game. It also very much is not. It's very deeply rooted in exploring personal traumas and burnout. It's also about trying to heal and recover, not from some magic solution that resolves everything but trying to come to terms with your issues and taking soft steady steps in that process. This is a (not) cozy game that can be heavily spoiled, not because of game mechanics or secrets you can look up in a Wiki like many other proper titles in the genre, but because the experience itself is one you should go in knowing very little about. So many of Wanderstop's most effective moments for me came from the unknown and how it intertwines gameplay with the narrative in a manner that puts you closer to Alta's headspace, as deeply flawed as she may be. It reminds me a lot of The Beginner's Guide, Davey Wreden's previous title, except where that game retains a cynical narcissistic outlook and how intentionally misleading and controlling a person could be, Wanderstop cares so much more about actually growing from your flaws and traumas. There's a space for both titles, and I'm glad to have Wanderstop fill the opposite end of that space.

The backpack can't fit everything.

What started as just another 2024 release that I was curious about and wanting to clear more off my backlog quickly turned into an experience that I finished in the span of like two days playing all the way into 2am by the end because it was a game that I could not stop thinking about. It is so clearly a wildly ambitious passion project from a new small studio, made up of voices with their own unique perspective to tackle such a broad range of themes and ideas around authoritarism, rebellion, generational trauma, motherhood, religion and history. The way 1000xRESIST's narrative unfolds, twists and turns, and zig zags around left me with a plot that always kept me guessing about where it could possibly go next, that there was no way they just pulled off that into this already expansive story and yet it continually did at every chapter. It's not very often that you get games made with a distinctly Asian immigrant viewpoint and history; it's even rarer for one to so tightly integrate that history, that specific kind of trauma and memory into a story like this. It isn't just a science fiction post-apocalyptic story about unraveling the truth about your beliefs and way of life, it's a story that asks you how do you look back on the mistakes and regrets you have made? How do you enact change and build a better future? Is that change worth fighting for at the cost of everything else? How will history look back on your actions and the consequences of them? Will that history even be remembered truthfully?

How do you choose what to leave behind, and what to take with you?

1000xRESIST isn't going to break new ground in the gameplay department, and those who scoff at these narrative focused games will do so. Initially during those early few hours with the game I thought my one complaint was going to be the exploration of the game's hub area, a location overly large and confusingly laid out even after eventually figuring out that it's more or less a circle with two floors and some bridges going between them. It's what the game eventually did with that layout knowledge over the course of its runtime, how it uses your memory of the way you navigate these locations and where everything is that made me change my mind. So many brilliant moments happen toward the second half of the game with how it smartly reuses assets and locations to further recontextualized and built upon. If anything, it at least helped me narrow down that maybe the one single minor complaint I have with the game is the map/waypoint system just not being good enough for the optional side quest and achievements for talking to everybody in each chapter; it's annoyingly inconsistent in what characters it gives waypoints for, and whether those waypoints actually clear or not after you're done talking to them. Maybe someday I'll go for the full achievement completion, but the problem is less a dealbreaker and more just an annoyance that I eventually got over (especially when the later chapters make it less of a concern).

1000xRESIST is incredible as a work of art in the video game medium because it uses the elements it has in such a beautiful manner. The game's small team and budget may be clearer on closer inspection, but it never takes away from how often and regularly the game carefully frames and presents every single shot throughout its run. The camera perspective changes always felt seamless and made way for more variety in how the game's Communion sequences played out. Locations get reused as mentioned earlier, but they never feel cheap thanks to smart changes and framing that makes their use feel carefully considered and multifaceted in how they were crafted. Characters are designed with clear distinction and make great use of simple color choices, and just in general the way the game uses color and lighting are so incredibly effective even if I knowingly sat there early on giggling at how clearly stock Unity shader looking it initially felt. 1000xRESIST does more with simple smart use of its tools and craft than big AAA budget games I have seen in years have.

This is one of the most impactful and meaningful games I have played in recent memory, and frankly an easy contender for becoming one of my favorite games of all time. It's a game that after starting it and realizing I was hooked, I just could not stop thinking about and even now after finishing it I already know that I'm still going to need so much more time to really unpack all of what it had to show and say. It's a game so jampacked with ideas, emotions, themes, feelings that there is simply no way that I could ever fully describe how much 1000xRESIST will mean to me after going through it, and it's an experience that I implore everyone else to go try and discover for themselves.

Incredibly funny to be blaming Linux and Steam Deck players for your server and cheating problems, less funny that this game is why Respawn won’t move onto other properties of theirs

There's not very many Metroidvania games I've played that truly give a sense of unparalleled freedom to explore like Pseudoregalia offers. The initially simple looking set of movement tools the game gives you pave the way to that sense of freedom as you look at each wall and platform less as obstacles and more as destinations that you quickly route in your mind with the ways you can creatively use the slide and wall kicks, and eventually the extra abilities that stack on top of those basics. The true success in Pseudoregalia's freedom is unlike other games in its Metroidvania genre that claim freedom in their maps, I genuinely cannot figure out what is a developer intended "route" for progression.

There's so many little shortcuts and pathways that lead to places all across the game's world ranging in difficulty of how willing you are to push the game's mechanics to their limits, that for every few minutes that I might have been frustrated wandering around in a dark area that I probably clearly wasn't supposed to be in, there were countless others where I was grinning like an idiot thinking that I pulled off something to reach a ledge that clearly I wasn't supposed to reach yet... right? Every time I stopped to take a break from playing, 10 minutes later I would be sitting there thinking "hold up a second" remembering a location I hadn't retreaded yet with a new ability I had gotten, or a way I could have reached a certain spot that I hadn't tried yet. Pseudoregalia may not be a very long game by any means ranging anywhere from 4 to 6 hours on a first run, and I could definitely nitpick things like the combat being kinda whatever and a few ability locations that I think could have had a little more signposting for their significance, but it's only fitting that a game set in a dream would look, sound and feel this good to play and run around in.

This is a good game that very frustratingly verges on being great solely because of how many layers of polish are seemingly missing at launch. The performance on a technical level is simply not at the level it needs to be, and I'm frankly baffled at how Saber is promising Steam Deck support by the end of the year because I have no idea how much more performance they can squeeze out of whatever spaghetti code this thing is barely functioning from. The implementation of FSR 2 is not as good as it should be for being essentially a hard requirement for performance, and even more annoying that Intel XeSS and FSR 3 Frame Generation aren't here. The graphics presets barely seem to make any dent in performance especially by the last several chapters of the campaign, and while you can try to cap the framerate at 30, it feels ridiculous that it feels essential for a consistent experience on PC on most mid-range hardware.

I've also had the game crash several times, one time so badly that I had to fully restart my PC during a cutscene near the end of the game making me redo a boss fight. It's ridiculous that there's no private lobby option at launch, especially when friends can join you without needing an invite in what would otherwise be a singleplayer campaign (as much as I love my friends and have had a blast playing co-op). Servers in general seem to be somewhat finicky with a random chance to get stuck on a loading screen and having to force quit the game when joining friends. Load times in general are incredibly long even on a fast NVMe solid state drive.

There is a fun game here, but unless you are a 40K diehard you really should wait for more patches before jumping in. For as much of a spectacle as the campaign is, I feel like I was soured of playing it looking and running at its best and being able to fully immerse myself in its world without worrying about the technical issues and stability.

Whatever goodwill Aspyr might have gotten for the Tomb Raider remasters, they have completely and utterly obliterated it with the release of this collection. Restoring some of the missing/broken specular effects and reflections alongside console DLC does not excuse how much of a blatantly lazy unfinished effort this is.

The game's install folder is literally named "Battle." Half the options disappear when you are in-game. They used the original console interface for BF2 but took no effort to resize or scale it for modern monitors or TVs. The videos are all lazily AI upscaled. The multiplayer servers have massive connection issues and there is no way to properly host dedicated servers of our own. The sound for Battlefront 1's load screen is wrong. How do you even go out of your way to mess that up?

Even if Aspyr actually does fix this, which considering how long it took for the Tomb Raider collection to even get a patch that fixed some glaring problems (as good as that collection otherwise was) my expectations are incredibly low, their reputation has been ruined by this and for good reason. This should have been the biggest hit possible and they completely fumbled the ball.

Sony may have walked back their announcement, but I still stand by how much of a critical hit to their PR this whole debacle was. This is staying a negative review until it's proven otherwise for the long-term that whoever's head was wound up tight there that they've heard loud and clear that they can't pull this stunt again. It's a victory for now, and I hate that I even have to be worried about the potential of something like this ever happening again knowing who's actually holding the strings on Arrowhead as a developer despite our initial beliefs.

Fundamentally broken PC port that will never be properly fixed thanks to Volition being shut down. You have a very slim chance of actually getting this properly working and stable, and in my case even with a current RX 6700 XT/Ryzen 7 5800X3D I cannot get this game to actually run consistently. Cutscenes will regularly run below 30FPS, traversing the world constantly jitters and hitches, and in general there's weird bugs and inconsistencies that don't line up with how the original 360 release played. Gentlemen of the Row and DXVK cannot do enough to fix a port that is broken at its core.

If you have decent hardware and have to play on PC, you genuinely have a better chance of running the game through an emulator like Xenia over this PC port. Xenia runs better, is more stable, and is more feature complete thanks to DLC that was also never ported over to PC.

This should be like the poster child for what is actually meant by I want shorter games with worse graphics because this incredibly silly goofy little 40 minute shooter is so cozy and charming and yet still shows the hallmarks of what made Dusk's level design and gun play so satisfying and special, just in a smaller funnier package for 5 bucks. The soundtrack slaps too!