Recent reviews by Antrikshy

There are NO SPOILERS in this review!

Guardians of the Galaxy is an unusually dichotomous title. It feels like a game made by two teams. I don't mean to imply that it was mashed together, or that the teams were competing. Just that many aspects of this game are VERY commendable, but the rest lack polish. And I mean, severely lack polish, like animations from pre-release footage from other games.

EXCELLENT aspects of this game:

1. Graphics and art direction. The look of alien worlds, creatures and other locations in this game is phenomenal. The use of varied, bright, yet geographically consistent color palettes tell me a lot of care went into this. The game looks fantastic overall, including the use of ray-tracing in some areas.
2. Fun characters with mostly engaging backstories.
3. Banter between characters, especially during exploration. It's nice and varied, and there's good humor to it.

Not out of this world, but COMMENDABLE aspects of this game:

1. Lore. There's some amount of lore you can gather from exploration, but most of it comes from dialogue. The writers put in a solid amount of work into the cosmic backstory of their new spin on the Marvel universe, with a healthy amount of references to familiar names and locations from the comics and other media that many players will be familiar with. However, exploration lore felt very half baked, and some of the lore interactions with other characters fell flat for me. Sometimes it would just feel too rambly and wouldn't grab my attention.
2. Gameplay. I get the mixed reviews on the combat in this game. It's mostly comprised of waves of enemies fighting the Guardians. However, I had a lot of fun with it. Even though Star-Lord is the only playable character, he's VERY much the leader of the Guardians, and the game really lets you play that out. There's some depth to the other Guardians' abilities (which you use by calling out what you want them to do). The skill progression is well paced and allows you to learn everything without being overwhelmed.

Some ROUGH aspects of this game:

1. Character animation. Oof. A lot of it felt like it had a beta quality to it. Animations are not fluid, and feel very video-gamey. A few years ago, it would have been acceptable, but it's missing the polish I would expect from a big brand game like this. This extends to some other aspects of the game. The camera work in some sequences is really good and cinematic. In some others, like cutscenes in the middle of battle, they're too video-gamey once again.
2. Puzzles during traversal. On foot travel in this game is only fun because of the characters' banter and combat. Otherwise, this game has unimaginative puzzles and extremely basic level design in scenes where the characters need to get from one place to another.
3. Space battles. There are occasional space battle sequences. They were fairly fun, but there were too many issues. However, I played on an Xbox controller, and didn't find the controls and UI intuitive whatsoever. If the controls were better, I'd have wished for a lot more of them!
4. Occasional hard lockups that required force quits. A couple of times, the game completely froze for me when I went to open the outfits menu. One of those times, it was reproducible, meaning it would happen at specific locations or levels...? Once or twice, the HUD disappeared or UI controls failed to work, requiring a force quit. Fortunately stuff like this wasn't common and didn't impede my experience much.

Another year of development could have made this game one for the ages. Regardless, it's a fun ride that I'd recommend, especially to fans of other Marvel media and maybe people who enjoy space opera fantasies.

For context, I've played the new Wolfenstein series - The New Order, The Old Blood, and most recently, The New Colossus.

The first two were nice. Fairly enjoyable action gameplay, well thought level design. The characters have been interesting so far, but the story around them wasn't something to write home about. The alternate history *setting* and lore, however, are really interesting. Yes, I liked The Man in the High Castle. How did you know? Yet, the first two games didn't draw me in all that much. The graphics were fine, and something about the visual design felt noisy and cluttered. They didn't come close to being my favorite games of the last few years.

All this made me hesitate to start The New Colossus.

Wow am I glad I did. This game is a *massive* glow up for the new Wolfenstein series.

It not only addresses my complaint about visual clarity; it's a hands down handsome looking game!

The story remains just as interesting. Characters, old and new, are more fun than ever. Something about the cinematography and music in the cutscenes elevates them, and their performances pack a punch in this one. Grace Walker, a new addition to the squad, was solid all around. Another thing I enjoy about this game's narrative is the tone. It seems like a totally serious action-thriller on the surface. Yet, it's not afraid to delve into the weird and ridiculous from time to time. I think this was true for the previous iterations as well, but The New Colossus dials it up a notch. While I enjoyed it, I don't know if everyone would.

I enjoyed the gameplay loop in this one a bit more. If I remember right, the first two games "chained" their set pieces, with the character moving from scene to scene. I didn't complain about that, but I prefer how The New Colossus lays everything out. The game has been restructured to follow a home base and missions model (after the first mission or so). This gives an in-universe excuse for the game to take you to familiar locations, reusing maps with slight modifications for special assassination missions and collectible hunting. The New Colossus remains a gameplay-first game, offering a good amount of replay value and bonus "levels" to players who value those things.

Finally, one of the most standout aspects of this title for me was the FEEL of everything. I don't have a single word to distill this into. Everything from the menus, to the sound effects in the menus, to how the weapons looked and felt, movement controls, and overall UX is remarkably crisp. It's not easy to balance the fluidity of first-person character animations with how responsive the controls feel while managing to not look janky. I think it was mainly the UI respecting the player over unnecessary animations, delays, fade-ins for aesthetics. During gameplay, almost every voluntarily triggered animation (such as reload) can immediately be cancelled with reasonable consequences. I never found myself waiting for a menu to fade or slide into place, or for my character to finish reloading or switching weapons as an enemy guns me down. I'd love to see other games learn from The New Colossus how to make an experience that *feels* fun while looking nice.

All in all, I recommend this game. It's great. Please play The New Order first. Knowing all the characters was a big part of my enjoyment. Skip the prequel unless you're a huge fan of the first one. It's non-essential. It's very much a gameplay-first game with good replay value, bonus objectives, fantastic level design, fun collectibles, good humor, all packaged in UX that respects the player.

As a bonus, The New Colossus has a satisfying ending that could spark a sequel, but it won't be necessary. Netflix original series writers should learn from this franchise.

I'm into story driven games. I tend to prefer linear design, although some of my favorite single player games of all time happen to be open world.

Control is one of the best games I have ever played. It sits somewhere among Spider-Man (2018), Grand Theft Auto V, Grand Theft Auto IV, Half-Life: Alyx, and the 2010s Tomb Raider trilogy. I consider (almost) all these games platinum standards in different aspects of game design.

THE GOOD

What Control excels at is lore and world building. I don't enjoy fantasy settings much. However, I love stories that sit in richly designed worlds. I feel there aren't too many games set in realities close enough to ours, while also embellishing it with creative layers of fiction. Control sets such a high bar in this area, I really hope that their planned sequel is able to live up to it. This isn't surprising coming from the folks behind Alan Wake. Control is miles better. I can also confirm Control is significantly better than Quantum Break, which *was* fun and creative in its own way. I digress.

I may be coming across as a lore hound who hunts down every scrap of paper in games. This is not true. I'm a skimmer. And I really appreciated how Control catered to me. This game is chock full of documents and collectibles. I'd even say they're half the fun of the game. What I really like is how easy each collectible is to comprehend. Since the game is set in more-or-less-the-real-world, people don't write (or talk) like Vikings, so the collectibles tend to be straighforwardly written, requiring just enough brain power to comprehend to not get tiring. On top of that, most of them are short pieces of text. If they were any longer, I'd have lost interest. Instead, I found myself scavenging every corner of the game's setting to connect the various collectibles stories together like Mail Room Charlie. The writing is immensely clever and more engaging than many bestselling thriller novels I've read.

The world that Control creates reminds me of Men in Black, but less funny. They're similar in that both stories add layers upon layers to the reality we know while coming up with satisfying explanations for why these layers are hidden away from us in our day-to-day. Think: Neuralyzers in MiB.

While the lore is what made Control really memorable to me, it packs many more punches. Gameplay is stellar. Control is a metroidvania-style open world game. I didn't know this when I hit play on day 1, and was taken aback by this. I didn't think I would end up enjoying it as much as other people seemed to. As I said, I'm all about linear games. However, the raw gameplay mechanics Remedy have constructed are laid out perfectly throughout the map. Control fosters intrinsic motivation for random exploration and re-treading the same locations. Unlocking new areas is well paced. Going back to the same locations spawns random new waves of enemies each time, keeping exploration somewhat fresh, even after you've collected all collectibles. Traversing the map outside of missions never got frustrating or tiring either. There is *no* ammo management (love it!), there's a pretty good fast travel system, and it's generally easy to disengage from combat, regen health and book it if you prefer.

Oh and the art direction. Control looks unique. The architecture, symbolism, BOLD color choices throughout, are superb. I can't praise it enough. When I first saw footage of this game, I didn't take it to be a graphically demanding or *pretty* title. Boy, was I wrong. If you're a fidelity-hungry player, you won't be disappointed. The game's beautiful, and even more so with raytracing on. For the amount of eye-candy RT adds to this game (I played nearly maxed out, and tried turning it off to compare), I was surprised with how well it performed at 1440p on my RTX 2070 + Ryzen 2600X combo. DLSS helped a ton. Environment destruction is some of the best I've ever seen. I also enjoy returning to the same locations to see them destroyed in all new simulations in the course of new firefights. To cap it off, there's a reasonable in-universe headcanon explanation for this.

Ultimate Edition includes both DLC chapters (as a patient gamer, very appreciated!), and they meet the rest of the game's high quality bar. The two chapters are set in their own map expansions, like earlier chapters in the game. They become available as the story progresses, and are astonishingly well-integrated into the narrative. I recommend playing AWE first, Foundation second. I also recommend playing Alan Wake before AWE. Thank me later.

THE BAD (but not really)

There aren't many things about this game that I can critique. It's close to being an all-rounder.

Actually there's one thing, and it's really a nitpick. The acting felt a bit distant at times. I couldn't tell if there was a disconnect between the actors' performances and the in-game characters, if it was in the timing of line delivery, or just the writing. There's also an uncanniness to facial expressions throughout this game.

Jesse also has this habit of speaking to herself, which has some bearing on the story. Near the start of the game, I was confused about her personality. It almost felt like the main character was being the comic relief in an otherwise grim and sinister game. Perhaps it was that first impression that threw me off on the acting in this game overall. It grew on me eventually, and I realized that Control wasn't intended to be a 100% *serious* game. It makes some room for levity, and it does so pretty well.

OH there's another thing, and this one's really bad. There's a late-game boss fight in a large room that contains a huge boulder in the center. When you get to that location, know that you'll be facing the full wrath of whatever Remedy employees decided to include this fight in the game. I died in that boss fight more times than the entire rest of the game combined. I'm 90% sure of this.

So there.

THE CONCLUSION

Control gets a big thumbs up from me to anyone who enjoys immersive story-driven games.

VERY important note: This game is not very scary. It may look all dark and horror-y but for the most part, it really isn't. The AWE DLC chapter is a bit darker, with some areas that feel stressful if you're prone to it. I don't remember any jump scares really *getting* me. I don't think the game attempted more than 1 or 2 of them in my entire ~50-ish hour completionist play through. Helpfully, Control also includes some trainer-like settings to tune the difficulty to your liking if you really want to.

So please don't be discouraged by the game's genre. You will miss out on a masterpiece of the 2010s.

This game is magical. Short, at around 2-3 hours of playtime, but magical. The sound design, art style, and acting are lovely. The main character is incredibly well designed, and there is something truly unique about watching this diorama-like, puppet-show-esque story unfold for the first time. All these things do an amazing job creating a sense of childish wonder.

While the initial feeling of magic did eventually pass (when I went back to painstakingly find every collectible, AND resorted to looking up the locations of the last 4 or 5), my first play session was memorable. I found myself lost in the game close to an hour before realizing it.

At the time of writing, Half-Life: Alyx remains my favorite game of all time, but Down The Rabbit Hole is another gold standard of what I want other studios to do with the VR medium.

I finally got around to playing this game for the first time in the January of 2019. Coming in as a huge fan of GTA IV, with some expectations of "dumbed down", arcadey driving mechanics, I still had high hopes for the single player story of GTA V, as I have not once been disappointed by this franchise thus far. As I near the end, I think I can call this the most memorable game I have played so far. I could go on and on about why this is, but here is a list of some of my top reasons as they come to mind.

1. The story, acting, writing is phenomenal.
2. The attention to detail that I have noticed while free roaming is unparalleled (though I tend not to play many open world games).
3. This game does a fantastic job of making me feel like I'm in an action movie. GTA IV did this as well, and this one doesn't let me down either.
4. The replayability is decent, and I'm especially thankful for the mission replay feature with not-too-difficult medal system *in* the game itself.
5. The soundtrack. Oh boy, the cinematographic score that plays during most missions is SO good, I find myself humming them long after exiting the game.

Of course, the game is not perfect. There are a few things I could nitpick - difficulty-wise, I wish it was as relentless as some of the previous titles, I wish it had the GTA IV physics simulation driving and combat mechanics, etc etc. But those are grains of sand in comparison to all the mountains of good stuff in here.

To fans of action movie simulator-style games, I give GTA V a huge thumbs up.

I see where the mixed reviews come from. The story was good in theory, but not all that well executed. It was hard to follow sometimes, but the in-menu summaries helped me catch up. Overall, I thought the game fizzled out about halfway in. I expected it to last a bit longer. The amazing breadth of the game (explorable locations, hackable computers and such) gave me a false expectation of length. It could have done a better job of indicating how much of the plot is left, because I would have been laxer with my Praxis and unlocked more augmentations and used more consumables along the way.

Gameplay was fun, though I was disappointed by the proportion of sequences in which Jensen faces cops as the "enemy". I felt restricted because I couldn't fight through them for moral reasons (I couldn't see Jensen doing it), so I played through much of the game stealthily. When I did fight, I found the combat to be pretty fun.

I still recommend it because it does a superb job of cyberpunk world building, and I like fiction set in futuristic urban settings. If you played Human Revolution and enjoyed it, this one is worth picking up for the plot, especially if a third installment gets developed.

If you plan on playing this, I hope you're up for a challenge. It's one of those single player games that need to be *beat*, not experienced. This game is ruthless, in a very fun way. Not unlike its predecessor, it's a highly open ended RPG with minimal hand-holding along the way. The humor, story, characters are on point.

I played through it with a Steam Controller. That required some tinkering, but not too much. I recommend using the gyro-as-mouse thingy.

I tried really hard to enjoy this, but I am a fan of more linear shooters. I'm still playing through it and will eventually get to Borderlands 2, which I also own. Overall, it's all right. The game feels like a chore. Managing items in your backpack gets old fast and the game keeps generating new weapons as you keep finding loot. The idea is great, but in practice it just requires a lot of work to keep your inventory clean and up-to-date with the new challenges that will inevitably be thrown at you as you progress through the story. It's really challenging and often feels like a tedious repetitive mess. Traveling around the world could be heavily improved upon.

But if you like massive open worlds, level progression and LOTS of inventory management, you may enjoy this.

This is the best stealth game you will ever play in your life. From the moment I started, I couldn't believe how well designed it was. While being a platformer, it is designed such that the player's view is limited to the character's. It's hard to describe everything without going into a ton of detail. Do yourself a favor and get this game. You have to play it to see it.

There is no way to describe the amount of amazing that GTA IV packs in the 12-15 GB download (or whatever). This game is insane fun due to the following, easily digestible list of reasons:

- Good character driven plot
- Super-duper fun combats, car chases and such
- Superb graphics and detailing (car damage, bullet holes etc)
- Possibly the largest map you have seen in a game (Liberty City is very very very close to a real city)
- Extremely long game that you will want to play through again
- Loads of side missions and other stuff to do that will keep you busy
- Insane amount of effort put into the voices (seriously, even pedestrians seem to have hundreds of lines, every time you go out with a friend, they have something new to say etc)
- Funny radio shows, TV cameo by Ricky Gervais and other celebs and again, the insane levels of effort put into making the whole thing so damn realistic