Recent reviews by Ezekiel

Hi-Fi Rush is every other modern combat system. For so many years, developers have believed that the only way to defend should be to time an action, whether dodge or parry, both the same thing, in essence. Hard automatic turning of the character towards enemies is built in because their position doesn't really matter when the attack has to be dodged or parried anyway, in turn making the developers feel free to make enemies more numerous and wilder in terms of where they move in the arena (with the cameras, the stick that you have to leave the action buttons for, often inadequate). I like to go back to Streets of Rage 2 as I complain about these systems because of how much it achieved without a dodge button and with only a special attack that made you invulnerable while sacrificing some health. These newer games aren't about foot movement and finding good positions in the way the old were, even though fighting in real life and in the movies they try to emulate is so much about foot movement and positions. It's often simpler for the player to stand still and wait for the counters.

Hi-Fi Rush also has the Devil May Cry 4 problem, where switching weapons (characters who appear to deliver special attacks, with a cooldown) with L2 is no longer a toggle after a certain point, but a cycle, requiring more mental energy and attention paid to the HUD.

The environmental traversal of Hi-Fi Rush is so automated and simplistic that there is only the monotonous fighting to feel engaged in, and it's only mediocre. I could pull a better fighting system out of my butt.

The bosses are full of checkpoints that, upon death, revive you with full health that you did not enter the checkpoint with, because the developers KNEW the scenarios were too weird and would set players up for failure. "This will be cool. It'll be cinematic and cool. They'll like that!" Lives or tickets had to be removed from games because of how long they became, but it has made developers lazy. They no longer look at battles as progressive challenges and balance their games that way. With the checkpoints, each little part of the fight or the level as a whole becomes a separate thing, a new challenge. There's no continuity.

I sighed and kind of thew my hands when I got to the upgrade screen. These games are all the same, always the same. I did not purchase any attacks because I couldn't be bothered to read explanations of unlocks yet again. I'd say that health upgrades should just be in the world, but I wouldn't upgrade the player's health at all if I made a game. I'd give them all abilities from the start, or I'd only give abilities through story progression, not currency and tedious screens.

The story is stupid anime BS with lame characters and a lame voice for the pathetic, bumbling protagonist. The two women on your team are dressed too similarly.

For a game about music, the music was bland, with a curious lack of songs. The final two levels did have songs, and they sucked and didn't fit the action. No one would snap their finger and walk in such a swagger to these lame beats.

Hellblade has puzzles, but they are of the "Where's Waldo?" variety. Runes start appearing once you are in the general vicinity of the pattern you have to focus on. Easy. I know that the game is supposed to be about the mind (Hah!) and that some people pay more attention to patterns in their world (I used to obsess over that stuff when I was a kid.), but it shows a lack of thought. What I mean is that they designed the level, then put the patterns in after. They could have been placed anywhere. Why would you give them high scores for skipping the work, which would be designing the level as a puzzle? Remember that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indy takes the leap of faith and then the camera turns to reveal he is walking on a kind of optical illusion? There is some of that in here too. You have to look at the illusion from the right angle for bridges to solidify. It's a little cleverer than the "Where's Waldo?" stuff.

Playing on Hard combat difficulty (the highest available), I only died once against regular enemies, very early on when I was still figuring out the system, and maybe three times against one later boss. It's a really basic and forgiving system. Her hit points regenerate in combat. She is an averaged-sized woman, maybe five feet four inches, fighting men four times as big as her. I'm supposed to believe that she could stun lock these hulking giants (almost nine feet tall) by throwing straight forward kicks? That she could break through their solid parries or parry the attacks they deliver with arms thick as logs head on? For a game this grim and visually realistic, the fighting is absurd. It doesn't matter if they are phantoms and figments of her mind. The problem with that excuse is that before she came to this place she was taught to fight like men, against enemies who would be bigger and stronger than her. Viking warriors with much more mass, powered by testosterone. She learned to fight, at least initially, by watching her love. If he cared for her, he would have helped her to realize how limited she physically was and taught her to make up for her smaller size and weaker power by using her wits and building her other attributes up more, perhaps making her more of a sneaky, resourceful runner. Or at least put her in a place where she might figure those things out for herself. If these demonic warriors are her fears corporealized, then think about how comically delusional she must be to imagine herself beating them down like little boys, wiping the floor with them, even when it's three or four giants against her. That is what I did through almost the entire game: I wiped the floor with almost everything this hell threw at me, dodging most attacks (dodging physically THROUGH their attacks), my enemies constantly staggered by her unlimited stamina before they could deliver a blow. The voices always told me when the enemies who were not in the overly cramped field of view fixed on her back were about to strike. Once you get the mirror ability that slows them in time, forget about it! THIS is supposed to be her hell? Owning all? It's difficult to think of how she would take them on with any credibility. If we make her taller and significantly more muscular than the vast majority of women, then that just concedes the real problem: men and women aren't the same; a man will almost always win in physical combat. But that makes you wonder why every cinematic story-driven game has to be about defeating hordes, waves, armies of enemies anyway, and it brings me back to the alternative I proposed before. Why can't she instead hide, flee, defend, and only take on the enemy directly when an opportunity that disadvantages one presents itself? The player could have activated events and interacted with objects in the environment that gradually disadvantaged him. For the sake of the intended story, she would still have been a warrior, with agility, stamina and strength, but one who understood and heeded her physical limitations and used the tools available to her. When the enemy did take her on directly while at his best, she would have suffered and might have only gotten away by stabbing/jabbing repeatedly or biting or kicking while in his grasp. I would have increased the field of view and not fixed the camera behind her back for this mix of mechanics. Again, the overwhelming focus on shooting and hitting in nearly all of these types of action-adventure games is tiresome anyway.

The storytelling reminds me of Gone Home, that walking game from a few years ago that for some reason received all those rave reviews, in that without other people anywhere, with only memories of things that already happened, or in the case of Hellblade, spirits and voices in the head to speak to, you don't feel that invested in what is actually going on. None of the characters are tangible. I'm supposed to care because the voices tell me to as I have to watch Senua scream and suffer, on and on. (Why did the creators think that was an entertaining idea for a story? If it was nightmarish horror, then maybe, but this developer only makes action games with a high emphasis on melee combat. They don't know fear.) As if nightmares don't have people in them and the road to hell shouldn't have characters. It's a lot of audio-only exposition for a story-driven game this long. I don't really care about how inaccurate the psychological aspect is, but it's pretty embarrassing that the developers gave that medical notice in the opening when all their research amounted to finding patterns, being belittled and discouraged by the voices, and swordfighting.

The promise of 3D audio felt like false advertising. I put on my headphones, but it only ever sounded like stereo, the left and right. "Binaural recording," they called it, the same technology used for that impressive barbershop demo on YouTube, where the scissors appear to go all around you. Trying the game out with speakers, I found that the internal voices never or barely appeared in the surround speakers and the environment didn't use multichannel audio well. The game is best with headphones, but not what was promised in that configuration. I turned off the chromatic abberation with the files. Tried increasing the field of view as well with those files, but it looked weird. It created a fish eye effect because of where the camera was fixed. Did not find a way to turn off the dumb permanent screen dirt/moisture.

For all the creators' attempts at making these games cinematic, they don't actually understand movies at all. Do they think a good film director doesn't want the viewer to feel a sense of danger for the character as they walk along a ledge or whatever? The kind of automation, magnetic walking and invisible walls protecting the player nowadays are completely antithetical to what a movie scene with that same scenario tries to convey. Canned animations of the character squeezing between two walls again and again just make the thing feel more artificial and make you feel less like the adventurer in that movie you like, because of how the control is taken away from you.

GTA V's movement feels bad. It's too sluggish as a shooter, and you spend a lot of time shooting. The default speed is a walk, and it takes a slow moment for the character to accelerate to a run. Even when you hold the run button, your character doesn't move that fast. There is no shoulder swap, which makes going around right corners inconvenient. The car handling feels so arcady and shallow. I was one of the people who actually enjoyed the more realistic physics of GTA IV. It wasn't just about going really fast all the time.

I played this game two years ago and have still not felt like replaying it. Maybe it's because I got tired of the GTA formula. But I blame Rockstar for not making significant enough improvements and sticking so close to what they've been doing for years and years. I barely remember the story and I didn't like any of the characters. There's no sincerity in the writing. Everyone is an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, a loudmouthed caricature or a dullard.

GTA Online is a time sink with little reward. It took a long, long time of playing the same missions over and over to afford an apartment with a garage and cars, the American dream, as the achievement calls it. I guess now that I have those, I'm done? There are too many loading screens and lobbies in the multiplayer. Even trying to play simple deathmatch takes too long to bother, and it's not much fun anyway, since the versus maps are mostly flat and open and a lot of people use soft-lock (auto-aim).

The Dead Men Walking coop mode included with this DLC crashes as soon as it's started. The only way to play it is to launch it through "Private Match." The Tiete River Docks map works, but the Hoboken map crashes, You can't unlock the achievement "Breaking and Entering" in Private Match. The game also crashes immediately after the match is over, so your score isn't saved.

I can't recommend this now broken DLC.

Update: I was surprised to see today that, after the DLC crashed the game again, my score was saved. It took me two and a half hours to reach 386,025 points. I was pretty bored by that point and was relieved when a grenade finally killed me.

I forgot that this DLC also includes Arcade mode, which I did have some fun with. So, it might be worth buying, but keep in mind that part of the DLC is bugged.

NieR: Automata is a good game. I like how it tells its lore and existentialist story with different point of view characters and relevant side quests, how much there is to discover in the ruined world, the quirky inhabitants, the music and art direction. The controls are responsive and the animations fluid. The game kept me interested through almost its whole length. It embraces its medium as few modern games do. But I don’t find it amazing or even great, like most players seem to.

I didn’t have any issue with the flying sections. This isn’t one of the better scrolling shoot ’em ups I’ve played, but it’s fine. The hack and slash combat, while polished and totally serviceable, is simplistic and shallow. The balance is poor and the character you play as more than any other, 9S, has a mediocre hacking mechanic haphazardly replacing the Y attack.

The hacking that comprises so much of 9S’s combat is just more shoot ’em up gameplay, which the game already has in abundance. The only big difference is that the mini-games are set on a little square map instead of a long scrolling level. There are a select number of hacking mini-games that are replayed over and over, not including the small number present during unique bosses and areas. The hacking makes 9S too powerful. His wins are usually instant. I hacked in such rapid successions that the characters didn’t even have time to speak whole sentences. It would be nice if hacking were something you did after finding some kind of opening.

I also find it weird that 2B is supposed to be the one in charge and 9S the support, yet in Route B, which is largely a repeat of Route A but with you playing as 9S instead of 2B, he is always running ahead and doing everything.

By the time the story has ended and you get to play as 2B again, you’re overpowered. I think this game would have been better without leveling, with only the interchangeable, combinable chips serving as upgrades. It’s implied that the playable characters have been performing their combat and scanning roles for a while, so the leveling system serves little narrative purpose, and it unbalances the game later on. Alternatively, give me a Bloody Palace mode or a challenge mode or something in which I can continue to play as the different characters while being challenged.

It would be nice if you at least had to dodge in the correct direction and were not invincible while dodging, which would require reworking the enemy attacks. You can spam the dodge through every attack.

The hovering pods that accompany you have offensive and defensive programs, ranging from protective barriers to a giant hammer. You eventually get a wave attack that can instantly take out every lower tier enemy in your vicinity. It takes less than a minute for the pod to recharge, at which point you can do it again.

I usually don’t use the term spectacle fighter, but it describes the combat pretty well. It’s about looking cool and feeling powerful rather than having depth and being challenging. The harder modes don’t fix it either. I tried Very Hard because I wanted to replay some chapters and was overpowered at level 80-something. I died from one hit in the prologue, by one of the little trashcan enemies. Same thing happens if you start the game on Hard mode at level 0: Instant deaths in the prologue. Normal is far too easy and hard is far too punishing. I’m not fond of difficulty levels. I like how Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls have just one difficulty. It forces the developers to find a good balance with their game.

The lack of checkpoints makes the prologues sometimes feel like annoying wastes of time. I had to do all of the Route B prologue again because I died during the last part. Even though there were do-over checkpoints before that point! It’s not a difficult part, but I had practically no hit points left (and didn’t yet know that I could heal during the flying sections) when I started the sequence, and mistakes happen. Forcing me to sit through the same story sequences again is excessive and hurts the pacing. I failed the sequence again the second time because I wasn’t aware that I was supposed to prevent the machines from passing my pod. I’ve experienced some crashes. They don’t occur regularly, but I’ve had them often enough that they made long sequences without save points slightly more worrying.

It’s always disappointing when cutscenes that are created with a game’s engine in production are played as compressed videos. It wastes a lot of space and doesn’t look as good as a live render. NieR: Automata’s cutscenes take up 24.5 GB, half the size of the game. If Kojima Productions can render all their in-engine cutscenes in real time, Platinum Games should be able to.

I thought the relationship between 2B and 9S could have been handled better. We learn more about them late in the game, but for most of the story they seem distant. So it’s a little weird when 9S has an emotional breaking point because of 2B in Route C and goes on a self-destructive quest for her. I would have liked to see the two of them grow closer instead of just having the significance of their relationship justified by complicated exposition so late in the story. The final ending is alright. It makes prior events feel a bit pointless, though.

It’s because of how absorbing the world and the story are and how proud NieR: Automata is of being a video game that I’d still recommend it. You can tell that it was created with passion.

The game runs generally okay on my GTX 780 and i5-4670k, after lowering the resolution to 1920×1080 and turning off anti-aliasing, blur and ambient occlusion. I find AA overrated anyway, because of how it softens details in many games, and motion blur always looks bad, in my opinion. It makes sense in 30 fps console games, like Shadow of the Colossus, but at 60 fps it becomes distracting. I have Effects set on high, Shadows on low and Texture Filter at 8x. The framerate does drop into the forties and sometimes thirties, but not often enough that it significantly detracted from my experience. Installing the FAR fix has also helped. Some of the cutscenes, however, are currently choppy, no matter what specifications you have, and the subtitles are delayed by about a second at times.

Metal Gear Rising's combat is too automated for my taste. You press the attack button and Raiden turns and rushes the guy behind him. You tap, tap, tap, as Raiden does his stupid, flashy moves, and before you realize the guy is dead, Raiden automatically turns or rolls towards the next opponent and begins slashing him. Imagine taking the wonderful Streets of Rage 2 and no longer requiring the player to turn towards the opponents and focus on positions. You press attack at least two meters from the nearest opponent and Axel/Blaze turns around and lunges at his/her enemy. The enemies in Metal Gear Rising mostly just stand there, taking their turns, letting you hit them with your dumb combos, until it comes time to use blade mode.

The parry is so similar to the attack that you barely have to put any effort into parrying. The parry animation only activates when you're being attacked, so you can just spam the attack while pushing the stick towards the opponent. I'm usually pushing towards the opponent anyway. The timing is so simple most of the time. I would have rather just had a parry/block button. You do so much parrying in this game.

Being able to replenish the whole health bar with the numerous energy cells makes the combat too simplistic. I guess they expect you to play it for the high scores, but I couldn't care less.

Blade mode, the freestyle cutting ability brought over from the original stealth-action concept, Metal Gear Solid: Rising, doesn't work that well in an action game. I had trouble cutting certain things the way the game wanted me to. Your opponents are frozen (even in mid air) so that you can perform your crummy cutting and harvesting.

Sometimes, you get grabbed and have to shake the analog stick really fast to free yourself. The only way I can shake the stick fast enough is by using my right hand. Why would you require rapidly moving left and right the clumsy digit of your non-dominant hand? It requires considerable dexterity and is bad for the analog stick.

I don't want Dance Dance Revolution in my action games. QTEs don't coincide with a game's controls. They don't feel like an extension of the gameplay; they feel arbitrary. They're just kind of strange. You think you beat a boss, but then you ruin your score because you're not ready for the on-screen prompts. When I saw the first QTE after not playing MGR for a while, I thought for a second, "What is this?" And then I remembered. By that point, I was already dead. I would rather just have non-interactive cutscenes, like in the older Metal Gear games, so I can pay attention to what's going on instead of focusing on the button prompts.

The bosses have some of the most bloated HP I've ever seen in a game.

Hack and slashers like this are monotonous, always fast fast fast fast, room after empty room, the same enemies over and over. MGR makes my arms ache. It has like a hundred different moves, but you only ever need to use a few them to win. There's no purpose or depth to it, beyond trying to look cool. The weak stealth bits didn't help with the monotony.

I never liked Cyborg Raiden. I preferred him as he was in MGS2. His ending was one of positivity, so it was a letdown to see him become such a mess in MGS4, all because fans didn't like him and didn't find him "badass." As if we needed ANOTHER cyborg ninja in MGS. He was much more of a character in MGS2 than in 4.

The political rock fails to excite or immerse me, though I like the progression of it during bosses.

I can't think of anything else the game does particularly well. I dislike the characters, the ridiculous and often cheesy cutscenes, the bare environments, the annoying camera... But this review was mainly meant to be about the combat, because I know not to expect much else from a stylish hack and slash game. Devil May Cry 3 is the only one I ever had much respect for.

Tomb Raider exemplifies much of what I dislike about games nowadays. I believe this series has amazing potential, which was never realized with the older games and, because of recent trends, likely never will be.

There are too many “cinematic” interruptions and little things that take control away from the player, like forced walking and times when Lara refuses to light and put out torches, saying, “I can’t do that now.” In the first hour of the game, there are few moments in which you’re fully in control. New games replace player agency with presentation.

The game features ridiculously fragile and predictable roller coaster environments. Lara’s luck is amusing. You know that linear path will crumble and explode perfectly around you as you jump from platform to platform or tumble and slide down, you know you’ll swing against that conspicuous climbable wall after that rope you’ll climb across is cut and you know there’s gonna be an “exciting” river ride if you try to cross those raging waters. The quick time events are worse. Setpieces and QTEs usually feel like scenes for actors, that have to be repeated until they’re performed just right, so that they look good to the viewer. I'd have had more fun if they had removed most of the predictable cinematic setpieces and integrated the fights more naturally into the exploration.

The transparency of action movie games like Tomb Raider: http://i.imgur.com/G9BKmv0.jpg

In nearly every fight, you’re crouched on one side of an arena and you have to kill waves of enemies on the other. The fights are too contained. In the bigger areas the enemies always wait in little, widely dispersed groups, conveniently having conversations for you to listen to. I like the fight near the end of the game, where you have to advance through enemies, but there is almost none of that in the game.

I don’t want to hold a button to aim my ranged weapon (zooming the picture in) in a game that’s mainly about shooting. You already know where you want to shoot with the orientation of the camera. It’s an unnecessary strain (Why is there not a toggle option for aiming?) and I find the camera zoom slightly disorienting. Just keep the dot on the center of the screen until I put my gun away. I prefer the gunplay of Max Payne 3, where you can shoot at any time and the camera is pulled back so that you can see more.

The automatic cover system is alright, but I'd rather control Lara myself. She doesn't always lean out of cover how I want her to. Manual cover systems let you lean in any direction. I want to be able to stand during gunfights so that I can move faster between cover. It's nice, however, that she doesn't foolishly press her back to the wall, like other action heroes.

Why does nearly every modern game need upgrade systems and other RPG elements? They made the guns much less effective than they should be to validate the XP system. Enemies can take a lot of bullets to kill, and the combat becomes too easy if you explore, collect and upgrade. With temporary weapon pickups, it's easier to keep the game balanced. Temporary pickups and lower ammo capacities also require the player to move more during gunfights, keeping them from being shooting galleries (in which you're always crouched on one side). The permanent carry system in Tomb Raider kind of contradicts the gritty realism the game is going for. How does Lara carry a shotgun and a rifle on her back without them getting entangled with the bow and quiver? The bow disappears whenever another weapon is used. Even if it’s just the pistol, which, unlike the shotgun, bow and machine gun, you can always see anyway.

Another thing that bothers me about the bow is that enemies can neither see nor hear arrows whizzing by, which dulls the stealth. They can only hear the impact of it, if it’s nearby.

They tried to mix the fights up with big fighters, but their sizes made those moments pretty silly and weird. One guy is like 9 feet tall for some odd reason. In an older Tomb Raider, he would have been a monster instead of a human. Some ancient protector.

The wildlife is an illusion. Only the wolves in the beginning and at one point in the middle are threatening and only at one part in the beginning does Lara need to feed herself. After that, hunting just adds to your XP, which increases in a multitude of other ways. Tomb Raider pretends to be a survival game, but those aspects are pretty bare and quickly forgotten.

The mechanics are made so that anyone can play the game and that makes exploration bland. A special sense reveals all the secrets in the world and all the jumps are simple. There isn’t even a lot of jumping and climbing, which was the best thing about Tomb Raider: Anniversary. That game combined challenging platforms with puzzles in a way that made surmounting them satisfying. I wish they'd bring back some of the acrobatics (like wall running with a rope and jumping off walls while running on them) and timing of the older games instead of inserting so much slow climbing. Tombs have taken a backseat to the action and are too short and few. Lara is an archaeologist, an explorer, but in this game she spends almost the whole adventure killing.

Why does Lara always touch rock walls when she is walking? I think this started with Uncharted. It looks weird there too.

The journals feel arbitrary. Like the characters wouldn’t actually write them and put them in such convenient locations. Especially the ones written by Lara’s friends.

If you wanna tell an origin story, do it convincingly. I didn't believe this inexperienced girl wearing nothing but a tank top could survive the harsh conditions, completely dominate an island of armed men and make such a change by the end of the game. From the beginning, she is an amazing killer. They only explain her abilities briefly briefly through one of her monologues, in which she says that she did some treks and target practice with Roth, but it's unfortunate that we never see it, considering how powerful she is and the fact that she has never been in a life or death situation or killed anyone. Her moans, cries and anguish continue through more than half the game. Should all the men she kills in the first hour not harden her? She has this meek expression and a voice that breathes exasperatedly through almost every line, making her look even less imposing. I don’t like her outfit. A simple shirt worked in the old games because she was supposed to be cool and sexy, but in this grittier game she looks too bare. Why doesn’t she grab a coat off a dead body if she shivers and sniffs? Everybody else on the island is smart enough to wear a jacket. And you would think she’d take off those three earrings with all that tumbling, falling and skidding about. The game takes itself too seriously, showing Lara as sensitive and inexperienced in the cutscenes and then letting us dominate groups of armed men. All the abuse and her gory, screaming death scenes (one featuring a branch impaling her throat) together come off as trashy and sadistic. I like strong protagonists in my action movies.

The other characters are worse.

The music is cheap. I turn it off sometimes. The music often distracts from immersive sound. That’s something the game does well.

I like the Japanese history of the island and the idea of these people being unable to leave because of an ancient curse, although the effect is lessened by how many of these people there are. How many you kill.

Some of the open areas also look pretty and I liked collecting items, even though it was mostly meaningless and Lara seemed more concerned with her predicament than her profession. She hates tombs. But I guess when you make a game about surviving, it’s hard to emphasize discovery. I hope in the sequel she’s there because she wants to be there.