Disclaimer: This review contains spoilers regarding the structure of the original Resident Evil 4, but no specific surprises from the remake are revealed.

The word "remake" has meant many different things over the last couple of decades, from HD collections that enhance resolution and little else, to more robust offerings that tweak dated gameplay mechanics and add quality of life improvements. Ever since the 2002 update to the original Resident Evil, Capcom has been the standard-bearer when it comes to re-examining a classic. It featured more than enough new content for series veterans, but also stood as an excellent modern entry point for newcomers. Almost 20 years later, Capcom would repeat this formula with the stellar Resident Evil 2 remake and the more forgettable remake of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis.

It’s natural to wonder when Capcom would put the brakes on this lucrative remake train. Do they go all the way up to the maligned Resident Evil 6 with its bloated campaigns and uneven action? Or do they even bother with Resident Evil 5, with its heavily criticized setting and somewhat disappointing campaign?

I even wondered if they’d bother to remake Resident Evil 4. After all, it’s already one of the most re-released games this side of Skyrim. I loved my time with the GameCube original at launch, as well as the PS2 version with its added Ada Wong content, the Wii version complete with motion controls, re-releases on Switch and several generations of PlayStation, and even in VR. It’s arguably the entry least in need of an upgrade even in terms of gameplay. The campaign may be loaded with hot-at-the-time QTEs and the visuals are a bit dated, but it’s still a blast to play and was never saddled with the clunky tank controls of old.

If you wondered if Resident Evil 4 could benefit from the big-budget Capcom remake machine, the answer is an emphatic “yes.” Like the remakes of 1 and 2, it is fully in line with the white-knuckled spirit of the original release while brilliantly subverting expectations and tightening up every element of the experience. Some remakes are all about making the visuals of the original look more palatable to modern audiences. In Resident Evil 4, the (admittedly stunning) graphical upgrade is the least interesting part of the package.

Let’s start with what’s the same. Resident Evil 4 was always a three-act story – Leon makes his way through a nightmarish village in rural Spain before exploring a sprawling castle and winding up on an island filled with parasite-controlled, assault rifle-toting soldiers. That has not changed. You’ll still be sprinting away from the chainsaw man in the village, escorting Ashley (the President of the United States’ daughter) through the castle, trading barbs with everyone’s favorite Little Lord Boy, and getting into a knife fight with a reject from the cast of Apocalypse Now.

LOOK AT HIS EYES

Some areas are largely unchanged. The opening village is still a mad scramble through barns and houses until the church bell rings. In the castle’s water room you’ll still feel overwhelmed as monks attempt to drag Ashley to her doom. If you disliked the original’s swing towards action in the latter act on the island, you’ll probably still consider it the weakest part of the campaign.

Most of the frustrating aspects of the original have been shortened, changed, or omitted entirely. Even the action-heavy island is improved with the addition of stealth takedowns, either via sneaking up on enemies and stabbing them in the neck or taking them out from afar with the silent bolt thrower. I have annoying memories of stumbling through dark and flooded sewers, flipping stupid switches during late-game boss fights, and getting run over by a boulder because I didn’t anticipate a QTE prompt. These frustrations were drastically minimized or completely absent this time around.

As much as I appreciate the omission of the negative elements of the original, I had even more appreciation for all of the smart changes and additions this remake introduces. Ashley seems to require far less babysitting and now you don’t even need to manage her health. You’ll never have to decide whether Leon or Ashley gets that coveted yellow herb – Leon can scarf down (or whatever he does) every one of them guilt-free now. When Ashley takes too much damage, she’ll go into a state where you have to help her up before she gets attacked again. That’s it. When I played the original, I was haunted by her screaming out for Leon and me having to repeatedly restart checkpoints. During this playthrough, I think she caused me to restart twice.

That’s not to say this experience is easier. It’s every bit a scramble to survive during sections like the village, the attack at the house, the castle’s water room, and large chunks of the island. My first playthrough saw Leon die 29 times despite my long history with the game. If you think you know the original too well to be surprised or challenged, know that you can look forward to numerous moments that will catch you entirely off guard. I don’t want to spoil any of these in particular, but there were several times where I yelled “OH MY GOD” at my television in the middle of the night. This game is going to fucking kill people when that VR mode gets released.

Capcom took out a bunch of the frustrating elements, added a ton of excellent and surprising new stuff, and I still don’t have enough words to go over all of the little tweaks and additions that I appreciated. Parrying feels incredible every time, whether you’re swatting an axe out of mid-air or stopping a chainsaw blade from lopping your head off. The shooting gallery is expanded upon and offers useful charms for those with good aim. Spinels are no longer random shiny objects in the environment, as they’re now rewards for merchant quests that can be spent on exclusive upgrades and items. Journal entries expand upon memorable boss fights like El Gigante and The Garrador. Even something as simple as slotting gems into treasures has added a fun color-based multiplier system to maximize your sell value.

On top of it all, it manages to maintain the perfect amount of cornball and ridiculous moments. Leon hasn’t grown out of his one-liners and he’s still throwing German suplexes like he’s the Brock Lesnar of rural Spain.

I don’t know what more you could ask for in this stunning remake of Resident Evil 4. It’s obvious to say that a great remake should satisfy both returning fans and total newcomers, but this goes so far beyond that. The original game is one of my favorites of all time and now the only reason I’d recommend anyone play it is purely for historical value. And if you’re a complete newcomer to the series, this is bar none one of the most thrilling games ever. It shines as the ultimate Resident Evil experience and the greatest remake of all time.

For the first couple hours of Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, I anticipated a retread of my experience with the original game. “We gave Mario guns and put him in an XCOM” is a novel enough gimmick, but I found the battles and exploration in the first game too rote to keep my attention to the end.

Look at this dumbass.

Sparks of Hope doesn’t make a strong first impression, beginning with generic exposition about an alien force named Cursa that uses some goopy stuff called Darkmess to threaten the peace of this weird Mushroom Kingdom/Rabbid hellhole universe. And it doesn’t take long to introduce Edge, one of the most bafflingly designed characters I’ve seen in a while. This Rabbid is basically a Troll doll with a Joker color scheme, and she appears to be presented wholly unironically despite being named EDGE THE BLADE MASTER.

For the first handful of battles, I told myself I’d handle my misgivings about the Rabbids part of the “Mario + Rabbids” equation by only playing as Mario characters. That was until I realized that the real Peach’s barrier ability was effective, but the heal ability of the dumbass Rabbid Peach was infinitely more useful. Plus her rocket launcher can shoot up and over cover, allowing me to get easy shots on enemies that no other character could. Okay fine, I’ll betray my loyalty to the ‘real’ Mario characters for the sake of improved tactical options. This process happened again and again until I stopped caring about my distaste for the Rabbid stuff and got increasingly invested in each battle.

Oh right, in case you aren’t familiar with Kingdom Battle, I should mention that Sparks of Hope is a tactical strategy game in the vein of XCOM. But unlike its predecessor (and most other games in the genre), it doesn’t confine your characters to a grid. Instead, they have a limited range of free motion during each turn. This can be extended via the use of some fun abilities like team jumps, gliding, or power-ups.

This seemingly small change really added to my enjoyment of every turn. You’re able to quickly swap back and forth between characters without penalty, exploring your movement options before committing to attacks. By default, each character can do one team jump and one dash attack per turn, but this can be increased as you level up.

It’s really rewarding to explore synergies between character abilities in an effort to maximize your damage output each turn. Let’s say I’m in a battle that puts me up against numerous enemies that are weak against shock damage. I can start by throwing Bowser into the fray and using a spark ability (more on that shortly) to draw the enemies towards him. Then I can put Mario into an overwatch mode, which automatically fires upon enemies that are in motion. Enter Rabbid Peach, who I’ve leveled up so she has three dash attacks per turn and equipped her dash with a shock ability. I then slide into several enemies at once, popping them up into the air and activating Mario’s overwatch ability so he snipes them out of the sky like they’re clay pigeons. It felt great every time.

So, the sparks! Imagine the Luma from Mario Galaxy, but they have dumb Rabbid ears. And each one of them has an ability–it could add fire damage to your standard weapon blasts, create a shockwave of goo, reflect incoming damage back at your enemies, regenerate your health, or summon the spirit of Donkey Kong for a devastating radial blast.

Each character can have two sparks equipped at a time, and it’s very simple to slot them in and out at the beginning of battles or during exploration. It’s fun to try to optimize your spark loadout in a way that accentuates each character’s innate abilities. Rabbid Peach was my healer, so I gave her sparks that would reflect damage and revive teammates. Luigi was my sniper, so he got sparks that added fire and shock damage to his bow and arrow. Bowser was a beast with area damage, so he’d usually get sparks that gathered foes together or rained down destruction in a concentrated area. Sometimes you’ll go into a fight and realize that something’s off, whether it’s the characters you selected or the sparks you sent them into battle with. Thankfully, if you fail, it’s super easy to go back to the drawing board and assemble a new team with new abilities based on the challenges you encountered during your failed attempt.

I never grew tired of the many battles in Sparks of Hope and, thankfully, the exploration elements of the game have been improved upon as well. In the original, you just controlled the weird Roomba thing while your team followed along. This time around, you actually control Mario and your team…to an extent.

Here’s the thing. When I’m controlling Mario–the character who defined the platforming genre and who’s so synonymous with jumping that his original name was JUMPMAN–I’m used to a certain level of mobility and platforming ability. There’s something super weird about doing “collect eight red coins” challenges while controlling Mario but being constricted to little more than moving an analog stick. I get it, this isn’t a platforming game. But it still feels weird to be Mario while running around a 3D environment and not even being able to jump.

The puzzles themselves are fine distractions while you move from battle to battle, but aren’t anything that’ll surprise you if you’ve played a video game in the last 25 years. These Resident Evil Lite tasks will have you turning cranks, pushing blocks, and assembling missing pieces of paintings. None of them are particularly bad or frustrating, they’re just kind of things to mildly occupy your brain between the much more engaging battles. Still, it’s better than being a Roomba conga line leader like in Kingdom Battle.

I’ve enjoyed XCOM, Fire Emblem, and Advance Wars in the past but don’t consider myself an expert in tactical games, so I played with everything set to the default options and found the difficulty to be perfectly tuned for me. That said, a variety of accessibility and difficulty options should let you tune Sparks of Hope to your desired level of challenge whether you’re a veteran of the genre or if this is your jumping-on point. Enemy health and damage can be tweaked, as can the level of HP your heroes restore between battles. You can even set your skill tree to be automatically managed as you level up, or turn on full invulnerability if you’re struggling with a particular battle. These options combined with the child-friendly vibes of Mario and the Rabbids should make this an ideal entry point for younger gamers interested in the strategy genre.

Sparks of Hope wasn’t on my radar after my middling experience with Kingdom Battle, but I love it when a game surprises me like this. It takes just a handful of battles for the hooks to get in, and the tactical options only grow as you unlock new heroes and sparks. I’m not sure if any game could be good enough to make me love the Rabbids, but the fun I was having in my 30+ hours with Sparks of Hope did a great job of distracting me from their dumb, dumb faces.

If you grew up reading gaming magazines in the 90s, you might be familiar with full-page advertisements claiming that a game would cause any variety of extreme maladies. Eyelids being ripped off your face, thumbs and palms becoming bloodied, and, in the most severe cases, full cranial explosions. After one of my many late nights with Neon White, I finally felt like that dream of 90s game ads had become a reality. It actually felt like my eyeballs were vibrating enough to potentially pop and dribble down my face in a radical fashion.

Designed by Ben Esposito of Donut County, Neon White takes the bite-sized speedrun approach of Astro’s Playroom and expands on it tenfold. I had to stop playing Astro at times to ice my wrists and forearms; I have to avoid playing Neon White within an hour of sleeping because of a potent mix of adrenaline and a tendency to become preoccupied with pondering the optimal routes through the levels I just played.

Speedrun-focused games aren’t a new concept, but Neon White takes a decidedly novel approach to its 121 stages. It’s part first-person shooter, part resource management, and part puzzle game. Your resources take the form of various cards, each of which features a firing mode and a discard ability. The yellow card, for example, is a pistol that you can fire at range to kill enemies, but when discarded it functions as a double jump. Similarly, the uzi is also a bomb that can take out multiple enemies at once, but its shockwave can propel you up walls or across gaps if you're positioned correctly. A rocket launcher can take out groups of enemies but can also function as a grappling hook.

Each level has a finite amount of cards, and there's a great deal of satisfaction that comes from tinkering with them and figuring out the best way to use them. Maybe you can shoot that group of enemies with your uzi in lieu of bombing them – after all, that bomb could launch you over a wall and shave several seconds off your time if you're able to hold onto it a little longer. Instead of discarding your blue rocket launcher card for its grappling hook ability, try crossing that gap by rocket jumping and saving your grappling hook for a bold shortcut opportunity later in the level. Cards are deliberately laid out in a natural path through each level, but the optimal route is rarely the obvious one.

If you were to watch a solid run of any Neon White stage, you’d be forgiven for thinking it seems overwhelming. But thanks to its straightforward controls, smart card placement, and drip feed of new weapons and concepts, it makes it easy to recognize and remember the tools at your disposal. If you really want to attack your friends leaderboard, however, you’ll want to use keyboard and mouse controls. Using a controller is great if you want to take your time to learn levels or find hidden collectibles, but there’s a pace to the game’s action that begs for more precise control when climbing the competitive ranks.

Playing on Switch or Steam Deck does offer gyroscope support, which works well and is a major step up from purely analog controls. It’s also way easier to climb the leaderboards on Switch, but I’d only recommend that version if it’s your only option. Its visuals are significantly muddier, though they are high contrast enough that the graphical muddiness won't affect your ability to play the game. The longer load times, however, have more of a pronounced effect on the pace of your experience and how quickly you can repeat attempts. When you’re restarting a level as much as you need to in Neon White, you want a Tony Hawk-style rapid restart option. It may only take a couple of seconds (as opposed to the near instantaneous PC restart), but it’s enough to get annoying when you’re biffing the first jump in a level over and over again.

Neon White is almost always played at a blistering pace, but things frequently come to a screeching halt whenever it’s time for characters to chat. This happens far more often than you might expect, with tons of story-related and optional conversations with your fellow “Neons.” These are presented in the style of a visual novel, with gift-giving and relationship meters straight out of something like Hades. Building your relationship with other characters sometimes leads to a unique sidequest level, but it more frequently involves tons of dialogue featuring humor that will be very hit-or-miss with most players. You can activate a fast forward feature if you’re just looking to get back into the action as soon as possible, but it still disrupts the flow of the level-to-level gameplay.

Neon White gets its hooks in deep and fast. I knew within 10 minutes that I loved it, but I appreciated and enjoyed it more as I spent more time with it. My first playthrough was a blast as I discovered new weapons, explored levels, and experimented with shortcuts. But the “real game” felt like it started after I saw the credits. That’s when I started going back to each level, playing them over and over until I achieved the Ace rank, and then played them more just to shave hundredths of a second off so I could climb my friends leaderboard. It feels amazing to see “New Best!” on your time after dozens of attempts, and failing never gets frustrating considering how short the levels are and how quickly you can restart them. Whether you’re looking to best your own runs, compete with your friends, or attempt to make a splash on the global leaderboard, Neon White presents a welcoming on-ramp to the world of speedrunning, offers compelling challenges to overcome for those that want to pick up the pace, and delivers a satisfying gameplay loop regardless of the speed you want to tackle it at.

What is Halo Infinite?

I mean it, think about it, what is Halo Infinite?

OK, fine, let's step through it together. Is it a traditional, mainline game in the Halo franchise? Sure, yes, in most of the ways you'd quantify that, the complete Halo Infinite package checks many of the boxes you'd expect to see in a Halo game. Campaign co-op, really, is the biggest outlier there, but let's not get hung up on that particular part just yet.

Is it one product? Or is it two? The multiplayer is a free-to-play release that's being called a beta at the moment, though the money they will ask you to spend on a premium battle pass and cosmetics is decidedly final, non-beta money. I've had a fantastic time with the multiplayer and happily put $50 of my own money into it to buy said battle pass, some levels on said battle pass, and an extremely sick-looking armor set for my Halo Man. It's certainly content-light if you're comparing it to an "old," full-fledged, traditional console video game release, but as a seasonal product with all of the ups and downs that entails, it launched reasonably well and it seems at least somewhat likely that the game will see a lot of meaningful additions to its modes and maps lists as time goes on. Obviously, we can't review the future, so what's here right now is what it is: a little thin on its own, but still something I've happily sunk time and money into.

The campaign is probably the part you're interested in hearing about, since it's the part of the game that hasn't been out until right around the time I'm writing this review. That campaign sells for $60, just like a traditional console game. Wonderful, familiar territory, easy to assign a score to and... oh, wait, it's also on Game Pass. OK, let's walk through that a bit.

It is the opinion of this publication that if you own a recent Xbox console you should subscribe to Game Pass and if you also have a reasonably modern PC you should probably subscribe to Game Pass Ultimate. It's been a great collection of games both big and small. Even if Halo Infinite didn't exist, I'd still be typing this part right now to tell you to go play Forza Horizon 5. Or to check out Back 4 Blood for an hour or so before deleting it. The PC end of Game Pass has been a somewhat dicier proposition than its console counterpart, but that side of things has picked up the pace quite a bit over the last year or so, making Game Pass Ultimate a much more interesting tier of service. Oh, also you can play Halo Infinite's campaign via a Game Pass subscription. And there will be some multiplayer skins and stuff that come via the "Game Pass Perks" program.

With all of that said... yes, you should play the Halo campaign, it has some interesting ideas that blow out the traditional Halo campaign concept with some open-world-like designs without falling into the trap of just littering your map with a bunch of bad, repetitive activities. It brings that Halo toolset to a wider arena, letting you take on some of those outdoor challenges in fun, new ways. It also brings you indoors for some extremely Halo-ass Halo levels, which look great and give you that traditional Halo experience.

It also has an extremely satisfying grappling hook that makes you feel like the Master Chief has been playing a bit of Just Cause in his downtime.

So what the heck am I actually reviewing here, anyway? The $60 package, the "pay money for the campaign" package is probably the worst way to play Halo. You'd even be better off buying a month of Game Pass, playing the campaign, and letting that lapse. So thumbs down to that full, retail-style version of the game unless you are somehow locked in a world where you refuse to play anything unless it's on Steam. I don't know why you'd live that way, but you know what? People are weird. Did I say weird? I meant extremely particular. Hey, it's your money.

Video game reviews have meant a lot of things to a lot of people over the years. To me, traditionally, the scored video game review is meant to serve as some sort of helpful advice for players who are on the fence about a particular product. When there was money on the line, I wanted to be there to help. At this point, I've written well over a thousand of these things. Timely reviews of new games couldn't be beat for the first decade or so of my career. They'd sit in the top slot, the traffic would roll in, everyone was... well, maybe not happy, but at least they clicked on a thing and perhaps glanced at the last paragraph of what I had to say about a game. This was the way of the world. The games cost money, I hate to see people waste money on bad games, and me and the people I worked with on the reviews team were the people who held the line in an attempt to keep you from blowing money on bad games. Simple, right?

When the game is free and the subscription service is already something I'd recommend with or without the existence of this particular game, what purpose does that type of review serve? I could sit here and crank out the typical 1,500 words about The Next Halo. Playing the games takes way longer than writing about them does; it always did. In fact, let's just do that now. I'll get back to how I think this style of video game review is deader than dead later.

Halo Infinite's campaign once again puts you in the role of the Master Chief, and, unlike some previous entries, only the Master Chief. In a lot of ways, the game feels very back to basics, focusing most on the enemies and weapons that made the series famous in the first place. Where the last couple of games got bogged down by introducing a new, less exciting faction of enemies known as the Prometheans, Halo Infinite feeds you a steady diet of grunts, brutes, elites, jackals, and hunters. You'll see some fun new tricks and some new enemies along the way, of course, but a lot of this game feels like it's trying to ignore the last couple of games in service of giving you That Halo You Remember while also making everything feel bigger than it's ever been before.

The story, too, takes a big sidestep by quickly introducing you to The Banished, a faction of traditional Halo enemy types that, if the numerous Halo wiki sites I've been scouring for the past few nights are correct, debuted in Halo Wars 2. While something about ditching large parts of the past two games' direction in favor of a group of old-style bad guys that came from an RTS side story might seem a whole lot like grasping at straws to try to make something the lapsed Halo fan might more readily jump at... well, the change paid off because this very much works out in the game's favor.

The story itself does what it can to tie up the loose ends of the previous games, but overall, Halo Infinite doesn't seem too concerned with story at all. It thrusts you into the action, with a cutscene depicting the Master Chief being cast off into space by a large guy named Atriox. The game eventually fills in enough backstory to tell you about Atriox and his faction, the Banished, but overall, the story--particularly the parts focusing on the Banished and why they've taken over Zeta Halo--feels very light. The emotional side of Being the Master Chief and its counterpart, Being Around the Master Chief, are the focuses. Even the big events of the previous games, like Cortana lining up an army of AI allies to fight humanity, aren't really dealt with in major or especially satisfying ways. The game feels like it's waiting to tell you something really important, but once you get to the back third of game and start seeing something that resembles a story dump, it just doesn't have that much information for you. It spends some time talking about what it means to be this weird, armored super soldier and what it's like to be a human (or an AI hologram lady) who has to work alongside the universe's coldest Spartan. The story feels small, in a sense, and that part works decently, but it's hard to get attached to new characters like the Pilot when it feels like there's still unfinished business with a lot of other, longer-running characters.

Many of the game's late story beats unfold in front of you in holographic-style flashbacks and, by the end of the game and its post-credits sequence I was left wondering things like "wait, who was that" and "what did I even accomplish here, anyway?" It feels like a game missing one or two meaningful revelations at the end.

While we're on the subject, the Warthog skin you get for entering a bunch of Rockstar can codes is pretty good.

I'll put it this way: sometimes when we get games in for review, a publisher will ask nicely for us to not spoil specific moments in the game. Most of the time this is absolutely common sense stuff that you'd never really dream of just typing out in a review. In this particular case, one of the things on the Halo Infinite list is something I couldn't spoil if I tried, because despite finishing the game, I have no idea what the thing they're referring to actually is. I suppose I'll need to finish it on Legendary at some point and see if there's an extended post-credit sequence or something? Or maybe it's mentioned in some even more obscure Halo side game? Do I need to buy the books? Is the information scrawled under the pull tab on a can of Rockstar?

Structurally, Halo Infinite looks like an open-world game, with its big map and little icons denoting main and side quests you can (and should) take on. But it works in phases. When you first get outside, you can run around a specific part of the map, taking over bases that serve as fast travel points, taking out high-value targets to unlock neat weapon variants, and so on. Progressing the story eventually takes you to another part of the map, locking you out of your old fast travel points from the first phase, and so on. Eventually you get your hands on a banshee, which is a flying vehicle. So, naturally, I set off in the direction of the dark part of the map that I hadn't been to yet, to see if I could, I don't know, see anything cool or play the last mission out of order or something like that. Instead, the game lets you get a bit outside of your current area, then throws up a YOU ARE LEAVING THE BATTLEFIELD SOLDIER countdown that kills you when it expires. That was a pretty disappointing thing to discover. Halo Infinite is smaller than it initially seems. That said, it's still plenty big and pretty engaging. Also, you are let back out into the world after finishing the campaign, letting you travel around a bit more unfettered to mop up things you might have missed. In a lot of ways, Halo Infinite is the game I wanted after playing Halo 3: ODST, which had a hub world of its own that brought you into a set of somewhat traditional Halo levels. But there's a part of me that can't help but think that it could have been so much more if it had gone further in the open-world direction. It feels restrained both in its structure and in its storytelling. Still an extremely cool game with some terrific visuals and a lot of exciting and meaningful moments, but sometimes it feels like it's just missing something.

And I don't mean campaign co-op, though while we're here, this campaign seems like it could be extremely fun to play through with friends. The open terrain and the mobility (and hijinks) enabled by the presence of a great grappling hook seem like they'd lead to some awesome moments. I'd probably be down to replay this entire campaign once that option is made available. They say it'll happen next year. Forge is also planned to make its way into the game next year.

The multiplayer side of things, then, is confined to its competitive multiplayer, which comes in two basic forms: the 4v4 small map modes and the "big team battle" 24-player big map modes. The big maps are where the vehicles live, and loading up a warthog full of players and getting into trouble on the other side of the map is still extremely fun. The vehicle physics still get a little wild and loose, and again, the presence of a grappling hook only adds to the experience, letting you steal flying vehicles from a distance if you're properly equipped. The trinity of melee strikes, grenades, and guns still works as you'd expect, but the action and control feels a little peppier than it sometimes has in the past. As far as I'm concerned--and I will grant you, I am mostly a Titanfall or Call of Duty kind of guy who didn't even particularly like Halo until Halo 3 came out--this is the best competitive Halo has ever been.

But as I said above, the game launched with less than a full game's worth of maps. The cosmetics are cool, but at some point in our modern, post-Fortnite world "skins" became pretty damned expensive. While I am alarmingly interested in being a clothes horse on the Spartan runway, spending like 20 bucks for a full set of new stuff just seems nuts. That's rapidly becoming the standard price for that sort of makeover, though, so maybe let's set this aside for the larger "the cosmetics are too damn high" conversation we probably need to have.

On top of that, the game launched with an absolutely absurd progression system that only rewards you battle pass XP for completing. So playing the game properly--you know, heady concepts like trying to win or playing the objective modes as if they are objective modes instead of just yet another team deathmatch--aren't really rewarded. There's no listed player level or other progression, either. It's just your battle pass. The challenge setup inspires people to play the game poorly because instead of trying to win, they're trying to get five kills with a disruptor pistol... and then they might just quit after getting those kills since there's no reason for them to stick it out. The developers have already made changes to this system and promise more changes are on the way, but it's still in a pretty poor state as of this writing.

It's been interesting seeing some players decry Halo Infinite's split approach and instead pine for that traditional $60 package. I can't think of anything more boring than a Halo that didn't take any of these chances. While I don't think 343 hit every single target they aimed for here, they hit a lot more often than they miss, and Halo Infinite is a great time whether you're fighting it out with the Banished on the big ring or getting into the multiplayer.

Just don't ask me if I think it's worth $60 or not.

While I'm glad Halo went for it and trying a ton of different stuff in its gameplay, structure, and business model, there's a part of me that pines for the old days. Remember when midnight launches meant something? Absolute lunatics, waiting out all night to pick up a game and go home to play until the sun came up? Now we're pissed if a game doesn't hit at 9PM here on the west coast and anything that decides to hold until 10AM the next day means we're slapping together VPNs or changing our console region to get stuff to unlock early. Or, more accurately, we're pre-ordering games to get in the Friday before the "real" launch date or something insane like that. Halo Infinite doesn't have a Legendary Edition physical release, and something about that makes me sad. I have two of those stupid Halo 3 helmets in my garage and, honestly, the last thing I want is more physical stuff in my life, but... that helmet meant something, it stood out in a way that very, very few of those overpriced collector's editions ever did. It was... well, legendary, I suppose.

Did that review serve its main purpose? I'm going to go ahead and say that you already knew if you were going to play Halo Infinite or not before you even clicked on this page. That's fine, and it gets into the Other Reason people read a lot of these reviews over the years. Some people just want to get in some weird online argument about something. People go out and wait for Metacritic averages and then, instead of using them to help determine if a game is for them or not, they instead try to assign some kind of big meaning to the number. It's just Ford versus Chevy, Sega versus Nintendo, Sony versus Microsoft, Apple versus Android. These divides now run all the way to the top, and I'm sure it won't be long now before some console fanboy is waiting for JFK Jr. to return and tell us which machine is better.

When the games are free, we're not reviewing to help save you money. We're curating to help save you time. And this sort of information is often best conveyed in other forms. Like our podcast, for example, or Quick Looks. As games get bigger and bigger, as the medium spreads further and further, the game-specific publication is only for the diehards, even if some of the largest sites are still cruising off of SEO advantages and spending more time working on Black Friday gift guides stuffed with affiliate links than actual coverage of video games. Those diehards--you diehards--don't need your hands held the same way people did 25 years ago. You don't need me to sit here and put together my best game picks for "dads and grads" for some suck-ass gift guide. Those people all play games now, too. You've already consumed enough information about an upcoming game to know most of what you need to know before it's out. All you really want to know is... does it live up to the hype? Again, you don't need a score or a review to actually answer that question.

So it's well past time for us to leave the "product review" behind. Duh, right? I realize that, as I'm typing this, we haven't reviewed a game in over a year. And that plenty of other publications have made this same move. Also, I don't want you to get it twisted--I'm not talking about critical writing. I'm not talking about actual criticism and the act of putting these games through their paces in search of some cultural context. That sort of writing is only getting more interesting, even if some meatheads like to get very salty the minute an author starts talking about a game's place in the larger world we all inhabit. But that sort of writing isn't necessarily the old "timely reviews that tell you if you should buy it or not" formula that I'm talking about here.

I've been meandering down this road since 2019, when Microsoft put out Crackdown 3, of all things. A bad game, but when it's part of a good subscription service, you might as well at least check it out, right? At the time, the idea that a bad, two-stars-at-best game like Crackdown 3 was still something that I could shrug off and say "I mean hey, give it a shot, you might as well, right?" felt like shoe #1. Halo Infinite is shoe #2. One of the biggest franchises from gaming's modern era now shows up in two spots, one free-to-play, the other via a subscription. You don't need me to do this anymore. There are better avenues for me to talk to you about the relative quality of new video games than this one. Whether it's in an existing format or in an all-new one, this whole thing needs to change to better serve you, the modern video game enthusiast.

Overall, Halo Infinite is great but something of a mixed bag. Fans of the genre will certainly enjoy the additional mobility granted by the grappling hook while the rest of the gameplay delivers that well-polished Halo experience that shooter-heads have come to know and love over the decades. It's a bit of a shame that the story doesn't quite stick the landing, but add in the fantastic (and free) multiplayer and you've got a really solid foundation for whatever comes next, be that a story expansion or an eventual full-on sequel.

Rez, originally released in 2001, was an immediate masterpiece, an astounding aesthetic achievement that was at least as much experience as it was game. It would also serve as one of the games that would send off the Dreamcast and help usher in Sega's still-new role as a third-party publisher by appearing on the PlayStation 2. It's something of an understatement to call this a tumultuous time for Sega, but at the same time the Sega of this era was having something of a creative peak, with inventive, if not outright amazing games landing in arcades or consoles on a somewhat regular basis. Everyone's got their favorites, but to me, Rez (with Cosmic Smash coming in second, which probably tells you a thing or two about the sort of looks I like in a damn video game) has always been the main representative of that era. It's a game that you'll probably finish in a sitting, five levels, in and out. But the look and sound of Rez lingers to this very day.

Its reinvention as a virtual reality showpiece seems like a natural, if not obvious turn. Originally landing on the PlayStation 4 with PSVR support, the game would later come to PC storefronts and, now, it's available alongside the launch of the Oculus Quest 2. Rez Infinite, this VR update of Rez that dares (dares!) to tease players with a brand new level and gameplay style that only serves to make you want that grand, full sequel, feels great and right on a portable VR-only device. The notion that we're here, nearly 20 years later, with a version of this game that both makes good on the original promise of Rez and can be taken wherever you want to go with relative ease is... wild. Technology is nuts.

OK, let's step off the pulpit for a second. In case you don't know, Rez is a rail shooter with lock-on targeting. You know, the type that Sega got really good at making over the years, right? Games like After Burner, Panzer Dragoon, and Planet Harriers all paved the way for Rez's gameplay. You more or less move a cursor around the screen and hold down the fire button to lock onto up to eight targets. When you let off the trigger, you launch your shots and eliminate the targets. You can certainly shoot them one at a time, but taking out a whole screen full of foes with the flick of a wrist is significantly more satisfying. If things get hot you have a limited number of smart bombs that take out targets automatically for a brief period. Lingering enemies will eventually shoot back, and if you're hit, you devolve and eventually lose your connection to the system, requiring you to replay the level.

The first level of Rez begins with a cold, digital look that becomes brighter and more organic as you move through the five levels, getting closer to Eden, the AI you're trying to save by jacking into this ridiculous computer system and, you know, locking onto targets and shooting them. There is a story here, and the fifth level lays it on a lot thicker than the previous four, but really it's about watching the levels twist and evolve as you fly through them. Meanwhile, the soundtrack layers on more and more parts as you progress. Completing the game and meeting various challenges gives you access to a couple of bonus levels and a boss rush, if that's your thing. Personally, I think the track in the lost area--F6 G5 by Ebz--makes the whole thing worth the trip.

The way Rez evolves and builds and layers new audio on top of itself as you move through the levels gives each section its own set of crescendos and all but forces you to get into the zone. Firing shots and locking onto targets add small percussive hits into the mix as you do so. There's no real bonus for playing the game in time to the music other than it makes you very, very cool. While the game definitely wants you to master it by shooting down 100% of the enemies in each level while also collecting 100% of the power-ups, just taking the ride is worthwhile on its own, to the point where the game contains a "traveling" mode that makes you invincible and just lets you vibe out.

Rez Infinite also adds an entirely new experience called Area X. It's somewhat longer than the average Rez level--at least your first time through it--and it changes some fundamental things about Rez. For starters, you have more control of your movement, letting you slow down, speed up, and even stop to take it all in. You can turn and fly around the area as you see fit, turning what was once a rail shooter into something more like a cyberspace-themed digital dogfight. Area X was built with newer technology and has a sharper look to its edges. The particles explode onto the screen, forming shapes and structures that align into existence only to scatter all over again into nothingness. It's brief, but incredibly potent. If this is all we see of "new Rez" then it will all have been worth it anyway, but boy, Area X makes a strong case for a full-fledged sequel that builds on some of these ideas.

The Quest 2 is fully capable of running Rez Infinite and it looks great and sharp, the way it should. I found the game to be totally fine on the PlayStation VR, but as the years have worn on, the screen resolutions on that thing aren't getting any higher. Between running the game about as effectively as a regular PC does and being able to play it unbothered by any cables, this is a really great way to experience Rez Infinite in VR. The only reason to look elsewhere would be if you occasionally wanted to play the game on a regular monitor or TV, which is still a totally valid way to play.

But Rez in VR feels like the way it was always meant to be experienced. While it was mindblowing back on an old 4:3 TV, people weren't quite ready to go pay full price for something this short. Getting it widened out to 16:9 and selling it at a lower price on Xbox Live Arcade for the 360 felt like a real sweet spot, by comparison. But Rez Infinite is the thing we've been waiting for since before we knew this was a thing we could even reasonably expect to wait for. Strapping Rez to your face and living inside it is the ultimate realization of this story, setting, and gameplay. As someone who has returned to Rez nearly annually for damn near 20 years, Rez Infinite is the version I'll play. Unless I find my Trance Vibrator. Hey, can I just add a line here at the bottom of this review and say that it'd be cool if I could dig up some adapters, plug a Trance Vibrator into the USB-C port on the side of the Quest, and have it work?

Get ready to shoot this guy's arms off, a lot.

There are a few reasons it took me three weeks to finish Doom Eternal, and not all of them are related to Doom Eternal, but then some of them are. This followup to id Software’s no-nonsense 2016 revamp of that most seminal first-person shooter franchise takes a more-is-more approach to building on the brutal elegance of its predecessor. That means more mobility, more demons, more weapon mods and upgrades, more resource management… The list could go on and on, and frankly it's hard to think of a single aspect of Doom 2016 that hasn't been absolutely red-lined in this sequel.

That kind of escalation is arguably appropriate for a franchise as over-the-top and self-awarely absurd as Doom, but there are just so many pistons and gears whirring away under the hood here that you sometimes start to feel them grinding against each other a little when the action heats up. But then, when all the machinery is humming along just right and everything works in harmony, Doom Eternal offers some of the most frantic and overwhelming shooter action in history.

The 2016 Doom reboot, or reimagining, or whatever you want to call it, left such a profound impression on me that I can't help filtering my thoughts about Eternal through a direct comparison. The sequel picks back up with the same template--shoot demons to kill them, chainsaw them when you need ammo, rip them in half when you need health, double-jump and mantle away from them when you need breathing room--and then builds outward in every conceivable direction. There's now a flamethrower that works for armor the way the chainsaw does for ammo. You get not one but two types of grenades, concussive and freeze, that you can rapidly toggle between. Your basic melee turns into an area-of-effect "blood punch" when you charge it up with enough of the health-yielding glory kills. All of these have meters and cooldowns to keep an eye on in the corners of the UI.

In addition, the two new elements that have the biggest impact on the flow of the combat are the double dash and the addition of weak points on heavier enemies that let you suppress their deadlier attacks. Much like the double jump, the dash lets you pop off two quick horizontal movements in any direction, on the ground or in the air, which has obvious implications for getting around the combat space quickly. And dealing with the weak points is crucial for threat management. Blowing off the mancubus' arm cannons or the back-mounted gun on the arachnotron, or shoving a sticky bomb down the gullet of a cacodemon, is an immediate priority whenever those enemies come on the scene, purely because of how dangerous those attacks are and how urgent it is to disable them as a result. Both of these are great ideas on paper that add to the variety of the action early on in the campaign (although the game does have a penchant for utilizing the air dash in occasional jumping puzzles that aren't really its strong suit).

The sheer range of interesting locales you'll visit far exceeds the last game.

This full loadout of new and old abilities offers you an amazing range of tactical options in a heavy firefight, and in an ideal setting, such as the Slayer Gate challenge arenas that constitute the purest and most intense combat sequences in the game, they lead to a level of intensity that's above and beyond possibly any other first-person shooter I've played. I honestly found myself short of breath at the end of a couple of the Slayer Gates, after 10 frantic minutes of feeling like I was just barely hanging on before finally eking out a victory. But at the speed Doom Eternal runs at, it can be easy to forget you have some of those abilities at your disposal, or lose track of which ones are off cooldown, when the game is forcing you to make one split-second decision after another. The dash is fantastic for getting you around an arena quickly, but you can also find yourself dashing back into a corner without meaning to and getting boxed in by enemies, or dashing into one of the many monkey bars scattered around the levels, accidentally diverting yourself midair. And quickly popping off those weak point shots becomes a matter of survival the more enemies the game throws at you, which can cause things to spin out of control rapidly when you miss more than a couple of times.

All this means that playing Doom Eternal felt like a series of highs and lows rather than the 20-plus-hour nonstop high I expected. At its best, the game is a breakneck, exhilarating, barely controllable dance of damage output, maneuvering, crowd control, and leapfrogging resource management, and it's so much fun when everything is working sublimely that it's all the more jarring when one aspect of it or another feels like it gets in the way. I suspect that some of this, especially the issue with weak points, comes down to the way I played Doom Eternal, which was on a PlayStation 4 Pro on Ultra-Violence (i.e. hard). That's also how I played through Doom 2016, and I emerged from that experience confidently declaring it one of the best shooters ever made. So I felt I had to apply the same benchmark to Eternal, which in the last handful of hours felt tougher to play well on a controller than its predecessor. Analog sticks aren't as well suited as a mouse to nailing the small moving targets (including literal headshots in a late-game boss fight) that you need to hit reliably to survive, and there are so many abilities and toggles mapped to face buttons that taking your thumbs off the sticks at the wrong time, and thus losing the ability to move or aim or both for even a split second, can be flat out deadly late in the game. That's hardly to say Eternal is unplayable on consoles, but I just felt more at ease with the game's specific mechanics and requirements in the hours I spent playing it on PC, even on Nightmare. Frankly I can admire the audacity of making a shooter so demanding that it almost feels like it requires a mouse at higher difficulties, and in hindsight that's how I wish I'd played it, but at any rate it's something to be aware of depending on your choice of platform.

As gnarly body damage on demons goes, this game is pretty much best-in-class.

That's a lot of words about the pure combat experience of Doom Eternal, but there's a ton of other stuff built around that core action. There's now a hub area, which is a literal gothic-sci-fi castle floating in space, that you return to in between levels. This home base helps act as a wrapper for the game's numerous upgrade systems, which initially look like a lot to take in but are really no more complex or unmanageable than those in Doom 2016. Weapon mods (which there are more of) can still be upgraded and then put through mastery challenges to unlock their ultimate forms. Passive upgrades, which fall into two categories, enhance your movement, various damage resistances, grenade attributes, and so forth. And the runes from the previous game also return as a sort of perk system, letting you equip three really meaningful bonuses at any one time from a pool of things like a last-stand chance to regain some health when you "die," increased range on glory kills, and slowing down time when you use a weapon mod in the air. To the game's credit, as punishing and sometimes irksome as I found some of the later levels, it did force me to reexamine the rune loadout I had settled into using for most of the game, and changing things up there made a big difference in how I got through a couple of the rougher spots.

It still seems improbable even now, but somehow Doom 2016 had a hilariously self-aware story--about the corporate exploitation of Hell and the Doom guy's ferocious dispensation of divine justice--that felt like it walked a fine line between being extremely serious and not remotely serious. The key to that balance was the overt disdain the player character himself displayed for everything going on around him, but here, the Doom guy is a more willing and eager participant in a much wider ranging story that features demon priests, spectral warrior kings, a fallen interdimensional empire, and an array of other elements that feels like it's attempting to build up a quantity of elaborate, faux-Biblical lore. I did enjoy the game's take on the clash between Heaven and Hell and its unusual conception of a celestial host pulling strings behind the scenes, but what felt like a wry commentary on man's arrogance and greed in the first game has taken a backseat to straight up backstory here, an attempt to create something akin to a Doom cinematic universe which fills in some blanks from the previous game that I would have rather remained unfilled.

One way that Eternal certainly brings it just as strongly as the 2016 game did is in the sights and sounds. Where the previous game's setting was pretty much limited to a generic sci-fi facility, the red sands of Mars, and a couple of expeditions into Hell, Doom Eternal sends you all over the place to multiple hotspots on the demon-occupied Earth, several locations in the interdimensional outworld, and deep into the bowels of Hell's most insidious strongholds. Eternal's art design feels like it recognizes and embraces its adolescent roots, and some of the late-game levels in particular offer some really gnarly, fire-and-brimstone depictions of infernal human suffering that land somewhere between Milton and Iron Maiden. The graphical fidelity is still top notch and the game still runs smooth as butter, even on consoles, and I have to give special credit to the location-specific damage tech in this game. Having enemies take damage exactly where you shoot them might seem like old hat these days, but Doom Eternal takes it to such an absurd degree that it really stands out when you peel big, meaty chunks of flesh off the bigger enemies with every blast of the super shotgun, and by the time you're almost done with bruisers like the hell knight, they can half look like a bloody skeleton still chasing you around. Focusing on that kind of tech feels like another fun throwback to the days of shooter engine one-upmanship, when games like Soldier of Fortune II put that kind of thing right on the back of the box.

Mars probably had it coming anyway.

The previous Doom's multiplayer options were perfunctory at best, and here Eternal improves significantly with the new Battlemode, a round-based, asymmetric two-on-one versus mode with two players taking control of a demon, including the mancubus, revenant, and arch-vile, and the third playing as the Doom marine with his full bag of tricks from the campaign. Each demon type has a range of unique special abilities (some of which let you spawn other heavy demons in), and the arena is also populated with plenty of AI fodder enemies, which means the Doom guy player can really have their hands full. And both sides get to choose from a handful of perks as the rounds progress that enhance certain abilities or change the flow of combat. I found Battlemode more engaging playing as the Doom marine, though it seems like the more time you spent with the demons the more you'd get a feel for using their abilities to really muck things up for the third player. Throwing a couple of human players into the enemy mix is a clever way to further intensify the game's already complex and varied combat model, and I actually wouldn't mind going back to Battlemode now and then, which is more than I could say for Doom 2016's multiplayer.

One thing I can say without reservation about Doom Eternal is that it's ambitious as hell. The devs at id weren't content to just pop out a new set of levels with one new weapon and a couple of enemies (which, ironically, is how the original Doom II came about). Instead they included an enormous roster of new ideas both obvious and unexpected, and took these additions and enhancements to over-the-top extremes. Eternal may not have quite the same purity of focus as its predecessor, but it's so relentless about throwing everything in its toolbox at you at a thousand miles an hour that it's often hard to stop and notice.

Cere has an axe to grind with the Empire, and for good reason.

Respawn's named-by-marketing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is a game that impresses and frustrates in almost equal measure. Here's an ambitious third-person action game that tells an engaging and at times moving story set five years after the events of Revenge of the Sith, when the Jedi Order was purged and the Republic gave way to the Empire. Rather than merely emulating the linear cinematic action of an Uncharted but with droids and lightsabers, Fallen Order makes an earnest effort to blend the usual ledge-climbing and flashy set pieces with simplified versions of the combat and progression from Dark Souls and the ability-based exploration of a Metroid. On paper, these elements add up to one of the most elaborate and original Star Wars games in a very long time, but poor performance, a multitude of minor bugs, and a pervasive sense that swaths of the game are just lacking in refinement all undermine what would otherwise be an easy game to recommend.

Unsurprisingly, Fallen Order assumes a familiarity with all six of the original Star Wars films and situates itself squarely between the two trilogies, drawing far more influence from the prequels than any of the movies produced under Disney's imprimatur so far. Cal Kestis was but a wee padawan when Order 66 directed the Republic's clone troopers to slaughter their Jedi commanders, and since that time he's grown into a young man while working as a lowly scrapper on a junk planet and doing his best to evade the Empire's attention. When a life-or-death accident forces him to use his latent Jedi powers, Cal invites the wrath of the Imperial inquisitors tasked with hunting down the remaining Jedi "traitors," and before long he finds himself on the run with Cere, a lapsed Jedi herself with a vague past and a burning desire to restore the vanquished order, and her pilot Greez, a gruff four-armed alien that comes off sort of like a neurotic New York cabbie. The spry little droid BD-1, who hitches a ride on Cal's shoulder and acts like a skeleton key for any technical obstacles you run into, also becomes a pretty endearing character in its own right.

The ensuing quest sends you in pursuit of a MacGuffin-ish object and involves stock video game tropes like a trio of ancient tombs and the lost knowledge of a vanished civilization, but that generic setup is merely a backdrop to the real story, which is largely about revealing and attempting to heal the lingering wounds inflicted on the game's characters by the devastation of the Clone Wars and the Republic's collapse. Cal and Cere get the bulk of the screentime here, but there's depth to nearly all the supporting characters, even the primary antagonist; the oppressive reign of the Empire has been cruel to all of them, and each is desperately searching for purpose, redemption, vengeance or power in a harsh and chaotic galaxy. The game has a good grasp of the larger-than-life, mythical themes that underpin Star Wars, and for my money touches on a couple of The Last Jedi's ideas in particular with more coherence and subtlety than that movie did. In particular, Fallen Order specializes in flashbacks and dream sequences, so often the tedious bane of good video game storytelling. Here, Respawn uses the game's technology to play around with shifting environments and a blend of past, present, and future in clever and evocative ways that feel unique and help sell the story's themes and personal drama. It's refreshing just to get a glimpse of this little-seen era of Star Wars in the first place, let alone with such great writing, acting, and narrative technique.

Cal and friends end up in some far-flung locales in their fight against the Empire.

Fallen Order gives you command of Greez's humble ship the Mantis, which you use to navigate at will between roughly half a dozen planets as the story introduces them. While Cal's friends repeatedly signal in a slightly rote fashion that you're free to go wherever, whenever, there's really only ever one plot-relevant destination at a time, so you're better off simply following the objective indicator for the first few hours. The game's non-linear element comes into play once you start earning the standard Force powers like push and pull, which in addition to helping in combat will also give you access to new territory on the planets you've already visited. This is where the Metroid influence comes in, though it's as if Metroid slapped a big flashing neon sign on all of its hidden secrets. The game's elaborate 3D maps plaster glowing colored signposts on every point in the environment where exploration is or will become possible; if you see red, it means "Hey, you can't access this yet. Come back when it turns green." Even unexplored routes without any ability gating are marked with big flashing yellow indicators, so there's rarely any mystery about where you have or haven't been, although the larger multi-level maps are a little too busy to be easily parsed, and getting around the bigger locations before you've unlocked all the traversal abilities and with no fast travel can occasionally feel like a cumbersome chore.

In a game where I just wanted to move the story along and see what there is to see, I actually appreciated how blatant the map makes progression for the most part, though the value of the side content you're going back to find will largely be subjective, since the bulk of it consists of small areas containing minor collectibles like costume variations and snippets of lore. The game did make use of backtracking in a couple of more interesting ways that I encountered, though. In one case, I went back to explore an early planet on a lark and stumbled onto an extremely valuable combat upgrade-slash-piece of fan service with no real fanfare. Information from Respawn suggests all players will get that upgrade later on in the story in a different location, but finding it early and on my own initiative was frankly one of the more delightful moments I had playing the game. In another case, one seemingly minor pathway led to an entire crashed Star Destroyer that I spent an hour poking around in, solving puzzles and picking up little bits of contextual story and a couple of upgrades. The game tends to hide healing upgrades and Force and health meter extensions in these larger side areas, so there's at least some mechanical incentive to go back and look around. Fallen Order isn't a short game even if you blaze through the critical path, but poking around all these side areas was a big part of the appeal for me and led me to spend what felt like at least 30 hours with the game. All games should really start including hour counters though.

In true Star Wars fashion, there's more going on behind the mask than you might think.

Some fuss has been made prior to release about Fallen Order's resemblance to Dark Souls, though the comparison turns out to be somewhat superficial. The loop upon arriving on a new planet is straightforward: explore the ancient tombs or jungle or Imperial dig site along a mostly linear path, unlock a few shortcuts that will let you skip a lot of that traversal the second time around, and press on to the next story beat. The game's bonfire stand-in is the meditation point, where you rest to cash in experience points on lightsaber moves, Force powers, and survivability, and also have the option of restoring your health and stim packs (the Estus flask equivalent) while respawning all the enemies you've killed. Reappearing enemies make contextual sense in Dark Souls and Bloodborne, which take place in lonely, dead worlds that exist somewhat out of time, where fighting the same fights over and over lends itself to the purgatorial feeling those games try to evoke. I found it a little odd to run into the same combat encounters over and over in a more traditional linear, narrative-driven game like Fallen Order, and the game itself seems to agree to an extent, since it plays fast and loose with which enemies do respawn and which ones don't as dictated by the events of the story. Still, Respawn deserves credit for drawing on multiple influences in this game and coming up with a welcome change of pace from the typical by-the-numbers licensed action game.

Fallen Order's combat is also a sort of Dark Souls-lite thing where you can lock onto enemies by clicking the right stick, and you and most melee enemies each have a block meter that needs to be whittled down with repeated strikes or well timed counters before you can get in and do some actual damage. Then the block meter refills on the stronger enemies and you do the whole thing once or twice more. (Any attempt at making your lightsaber as instantly deadly as it appears in the films goes right out the window in an attempt to provide the player an actual challenge.) There are plenty of Stormtroopers shooting straight up guns at you as well, though they're much more easily dealt with since the game is generous about letting you reflect projectiles right back at whoever shot them. Fallen Order certainly doesn't rise to a FromSoftware-like level of challenge, but it's tough enough that you'll need to get at least a basic grasp on dodging, parrying, and using Force powers to control groups of enemies, many of whom are protected by block meters and also have unblockable attacks themselves (which are thankfully signaled well in advance). The combat is usually at least serviceable and often even satisfying, though it doesn't have quite the elegant feel of a Souls game, where controls and character animations and visual feedback all harmonize to give you a sublime, instinctual connection to the challenge you're facing. The combat here also tends to collapse under its own weight and become a little annoying to manage when it throws you into encounters of six or eight enemies up close with even more shooting at you from off to the side.

There are of course climbing sequences and sliding sequences and scripted boss fights and the other sort of fluff you expect in a game with cinematic inspirations, and Fallen Order also provides the occasional reasonably clever puzzle-solving in some of the more dungeon spelunking-style areas. While none of these component parts quite rise to the level of the more focused games that inspire them, they mix well enough to be fun and engaging for the entirety of the lengthy run time, especially while propelled by the impressive quality of the storytelling. Where Fallen Order tragically falters is in that classically nebulous category, polish. Perhaps most glaringly, all versions of the game have a form of fairly severe stuttering that seems to happen when you move from area to area--presumably when the game is trying to load in new level assets--that causes the performance to slow to a crawl for a few seconds every time you run more than a couple of minutes in any direction. In a few places it also suffers badly, worse than I've seen in a while, from the Unreal Engine tendency to load in scenery and textures too slowly to keep up with the camera, and I actually saw textures unload and then load back in briefly in one scene.

Get ready to do a lot of parrying before you can take down enemies like this.

Moreover, I ran into a multitude of minor bugs and unrefined elements too numerous to list here, but among them were a particular enemy type that I repeatedly caught in what looked like the quadrupedal-alien version of a T-pose, enemies disengaging and running away from me in the middle of a fight or "seeing" me and activating through a closed door (including, in the latter case, the game's last boss), a few unreliable interactions between Cal and traversal elements like zip lines and balance beams, a glitchy camera angle on respawn in the middle of a hectic action sequence, a number of erratic animations and some missing environmental sound effects, and a glaring bug where I was unable to wall run on the very first wall in the wall running tutorial. That last one happened on both PS4 and Xbox. To be clear, any one or two or even half a dozen of these quibbles wouldn't even be worth mentioning here, but they were pervasive enough to start chipping away at the experience I was having with what's otherwise a really enjoyable game, and they're particularly hard to ignore coming from companies as big as EA and Disney, and in a franchise as hallowed as Star Wars. As neither a game developer nor a member of Respawn I certainly can't pretend to know what led to the game shipping in this state, though the impending release of The Rise of Skywalker and the peak of the holiday shopping season are hard to ignore. My layman's impression is simply that the game would have benefited from a few more months in production. These problems can't be a surprise to anyone who made and tested this game, but of course time is what's required to actually fix them.

That's what frustrates me about Jedi: Fallen Order: It's good enough that its host of technical problems feels like an affront to what the game could have been, and to the hard work and talent--and there's a considerable amount of talent here--of the people who made it. Actually, looking back at the long history of Star Wars video games, the last time someone attempted a character-driven game in this franchise was The Force Unleashed II, and that was almost a decade ago. And I can't find another Star Wars game in the decades before that which brings together so many different elements and tells a unique story with as much gravity as this one. Now it's up to EA to give Respawn the chance to hammer out as many of these annoying imperfections as it can via post-release updates, and allow Jedi: Fallen Order to take its rightful place in the pantheon of all-time great Star Wars games.

What the hell is Death Stranding?

This is all anyone has wanted to know since Hideo Kojima unveiled the project three years ago. In that unveiling, all we knew was that it starred a naked Norman Reedus, that there were babies, dead sea creatures, and weird floating people. Not a lot to go on, but given Kojima's long, weird history with the long, weird Metal Gear franchise, it was enough to get people talking excitedly about all the things it could possibly be.

Sam and his BB are a regular Lone Wolf and Cub...if the ronin was replaced with a post-apocalyptic Amazon delivery man, and the baby lived in a jar and detected angry ghosts.

As time has gone on, and even as Kojima has said he himself does not fully understand the game, a clearer picture began to take shape, and now that it is here, we can say definitively what Death Stranding is. It is a third-person action game, with a heavier-than-usual de-emphasis on the "action." It is a game about exploration in which there isn't that much to discover. It is a game about America that takes place in a world that bears only minimal resemblance whatsoever to the country it's portraying. It is a game that takes, at minimum, 10-15 hours to actually become "fun," and even then the definition of fun is one likely to vary wildly for its players. It is a Hideo Kojima game in which the story is the least appealing aspect of the whole endeavor. Ultimately, Death Stranding is a game that is unlike much else I've played before, and I'm not entirely sure if I want to play anything like it ever again.

In Death Stranding, you play Sam Porter Bridges. He is named that because he is a porter, tasked with delivering things to the citizens of a fractured, post-apocalyptic America, and because he is a member of Bridges, an organization dedicated to, well, building bridges--both literal and metaphorical--to those people in order to reconnect the country. Sam is a reluctant hero in the grand Kojima tradition. He's on his own, wandering the country and avoiding human contact because of past trauma, until the last President, Bridget Strand, pleads with him in her dying moments to help bring the "chiral network" back online, and reunite the country.

This network is powered by chiralium, the game's primary McGuffin. It's a magical element that all of the game's technology is based around, and also is related to the game's apocalypse. You see, there was the titular Death Stranding. The barrier between the world of the living and the world of the dead was breached. The dead, represented here as sludgy ghosts attached to umbilical cords, roam chunks of the world and consume human bodies, creating "voidouts," which are basically ghost magic nuclear explosions. Also it rains time now, and if it touches you, it ages you and wrecks your equipment, which is bad.

Anyway, the chiral network. It's the super internet, and in order to reconnect America, you need to hook up the remaining cities and stations to it. Equipped with your trusty BB--a literal baby in a jar (😲) that helps you detect sludge ghosts through its link to its stillmother (😐) and the world of the dead--you do this by delivering packages to all those places. Rhythmically, this game has more in common with something like the Truck Simulator games than your standard third-person action game. As a porter, you schlep boxes of medicine and video games and semen to and from all these different stations throughout the world. Initially, all you've got are your backpack and your feet. The more jobs you take on, the more ludicrous the stack of packages on your back gets, and if you surpass Sam's weight limit, balancing and moving him becomes far more challenging.

Here's a gif we found on the internet that pretty well encapsulates what the early goings of Death Stranding are like.

Early on, this is a pain in the ass. You're constantly trying to navigate over rough terrain and through heavy patches of time rain and all you can do is hug the R2/L2 buttons to try to balance yourself. Eventually, you are given a variety of tools to make Sam's journeys more manageable. You start out with basic things like ladders and climbing ropes before graduating to portable, floating cargo trays and full-on trucks. Crafting all these tools takes small amounts of the various resources you'll find littered around the world, but even if you aren't looking to spend a lot of time building and placing things yourself, you may find that other players have been more than happy to do the work for you. Death Stranding includes an asynchronous online system that allows things built in other players' worlds to surface in yours. There are also straight up public works projects multiple players can contribute to, including whole highway builders that greatly mitigate the frustration of trying to navigate the world.

See, without those highways, vehicles aren't very useful. Death Stranding's vision of America looks like a combination of the Norwegian fjords and the surface of Mars. Rocks and cliffs are everywhere, and it's on you to build bridges (of course), highways, and whatever else is necessary to traverse these spaces. And even when you do invest heavily into the game's version of Infrastructure Week, the time rain will degrade any structure in the world, and if you don't add resources to repair them, they'll disappear.

In the opening hours, this doesn't matter as much because you're just on foot and hoofing it from place to place. When you finally get vehicles, using them mostly sucks because you're constantly driving into rocks. When you finally get highways you can build, it starts to feel a little like American Truck Simulator...if you had to craft the truck and the roads yourself. And then the game just kind of gives up on that infrastructure stuff and sends you off to the mountains to criss-cross huge, snow-deluged peaks that take a very long time to get around. And then it asks you to do that a bunch more until the game is essentially over.

I have several issues with Death Stranding, and one of them is pacing. This is a very lumpy game. The opening hours are a slog of endless, precarious walking and a near-constant deluge of new systems being presented to you. Then it just kind of settles into a rhythm of deliveries and discovering new places to deliver to, mostly putting the story on the back-burner until you finish the extremely long third chapter. After that, the A Hideo Kojima Production part of the game suddenly wakes up and you find yourself inundated with more cutscenes and character exposition than you'll ever know what to do with. The early hours have the feel of a child excitedly explaining to you the elaborate fantasy world they just came up with, and then the middle feels like the deep breath they take before launching into all the reasons why things are the way they are in that world. The last hour and change of the game is basically one long run-on sentence that tries to tie up every remaining loose end where you don't really do anything at all except listen to it ramble on.

There are moments of genuine, contemplative beauty in Death Stranding. It's just a shame the game wasn't confident enough to not break them up with extremely bland action and stealth sequences.

Look, it's not like previous Kojima games haven't had pacing issues, but Death Stranding is the most egregious example of it. It's not nearly confident enough to just rely on the delivery aspect of the game as its main thrust, so it changes things up with combat and stealth sequences that never feel all that great. Early on, combat is something you mostly want to avoid. Human enemies consist of MULES, a group of ex-porters who have been driven insane by the chemical boost they get for receiving "likes" from making deliveries (helloooooooo social media commentary!). They are a nuisance who will come after your cargo, but thankfully you can mostly just beat them senseless with a few quick mashes of the square button. By the time they give you bola guns and stun bombs, they become comically easy to dispatch. BTs, the aforementioned sludge ghosts, need to be avoided until you learn how to make bullets and grenades from your own blood. If you do bump into one, you have to trudge your way through a pool of moaning tar bodies while mashing square to escape. If you fail, you get whisked away to a space some distance away and fight a giant tar animal, for reasons.

To be absolutely clear: these parts of the game are never all that fun. They are not broken or really even difficult; they're merely an oft-tedious distraction. They're the thing you do that's most analogous to Kojima's previous works, but the fights are never very memorable. Whenever a BT section or boss fight cropped up, I often found myself annoyed that my delivery missions were being sidelined, and that is not something I expected to say about a game like this. If I enjoyed anything about playing Death Stranding, it was the moments of solitude I experienced as I wandered from place to place, the moments of quiet beauty as I crested some big hill to see a new city on the horizon. Death Stranding is a game that shines brightest when it's willing to get out of its own way and just let the player exist free of the constraints of its own narrative and need to intersperse its mundanity with middling action.

About that narrative. This being a Kojima game, there is of course a cast of strange characters that exist alongside Sam, helping his mission or standing directly in his way. Each of these characters has some kind of ludicrous backstory that they will eventually explain to you in excruciating detail, even though most of them are literally named after the primary thing that defines their existence in the game. And there are significant sections of the game where everything grinds to a halt so that Kojima (by way of one of these supporting characters) can either explain at length what's going on with any of the myriad bizarre concepts built into the game's narrative, or delve into the latest Wikipedia article he somehow found a way to graft onto the game's plot. None of these inclusions should be surprising, because this is the way Kojima directs his games.

What is surprising is just how flat the vast majority of it all falls. In the Metal Gear series, Kojima's goofy tangents and batshit character monologues felt, to me at least, like amusing digressions set against the series' action cinema bravado. That stuff doesn't come off as well in what is essentially his version of an Andrei Tarkovsky movie. Nothing is allowed to be all that mysterious, and the game constantly tips its hand regarding things that might be considered twists or surprises. Whether it's through monologues, in-game emails and interviews, or someone just flatly stating the premise of what's going on out loud as obviously as possible, very little in Death Stranding is allowed to exist without overwhelming explanation.

As weird and amusing as it is to see Kojima drop a bunch of his famous friends into his game, it would have been nice if he'd written more memorable characters for them.

There's also a surprising dearth of memorable characters. Norman Reedus' Sam is especially bland. In a way, he's the perfect video game protagonist, because nearly all he does is grunt and sigh. There's just not much personality to him, which is a bummer given how much time you spend with him throughout the game. The only actor who feels like they're truly on board with the weirdness of the whole thing is Mads Mikkelsen, who plays an otherworldly soldier wraith that pops up just often enough to remind you that Hideo Kojima used to make some games about war. He seems like he's relishing the role, which I can't quite say for most of the other actors involved. Actresses Lea Seydoux and Margaret Qualley do their best with some truly leaden dialogue, and Troy Baker at least tries to chew (or, more accurately, lick) some scenery as the deeply disappointing terrorist villain Higgs, who is named that because he thinks he's like the God particle, and frequently references video games because I guess someone in this game probably had to do that.

Frustratingly, I kept waiting for Death Stranding to offer something to say, something to justify the amount of breath spent explaining its most obvious metaphors and motivations. Unfortunately, it never gets there. Its early game musings on human connectedness and the need to bring people together never evolves over the 50 hours you'll spend playing it. The things it says at the beginning are pretty much the same things it's saying at the end, and none of those things are all that deep.

Even more frustratingly, there were multiple times during the course of my time spent playing Death Stranding that I could see the strands of a game I'd really like. There are individual pieces of the game that I think work well. It's gorgeous, for one thing, offering up a well-realized world with wonderfully unusual looking technology and terrific animation work. And there were times when I found myself genuinely lost in the experience of wandering that world, lugging gear from place to place, building roads and liking ladders and just drinking in the loneliness of it all. Even the massive pile of different systems all feel like they mostly work together in a way that's harmonious.

We get it, dude. You read Wikipedia.

But the whole of the game never achieves that balance. There's a deep thread of insecurity that runs through it, one that manifests in its unwillingness to commit all the way to the arduousness of its main character's task, that's too willing to break that quietness with mediocre action, and that never trusts the player to understand even its most basic ideas without hitting them over the head with them. There is a weirdo, avant spirit to Death Stranding that I do admire, but that spirit fails to carry the game anywhere worthwhile.

At least now we know what the hell Death Stranding is: a disappointment.

Qualitatively, the Call of Duty franchise has been on a bit of a roll lately. WWII felt like that first attempt at hitting the panic button with its back-to-basics approach. Black Ops 4 seemed like a different type of panic might have plagued its development, but the franchise's first foray into the battle royale genre was pretty good and the competitive multiplayer made good on the whole operators/abilities angle Treyarch started trying back in Black Ops 3. So where does that leave Call of Duty: Modern Warfare? Is it... back-to-back-to-basics, perhaps? Yes and no.

Sure, yeah, it's a game that attempts to recapture the magic of that first really massive Call of Duty game by taking its name and a few of its characters and integrating them into an all-new campaign. If you were looking for some kind of analogy here, it kind of reminds me of that Star Trek reboot. It's going to occasionally reference events that came from Modern Warfare's past, but it's a different universe and, assuming they continue down the line to make a sequel, it'll maybe even retell some of the stories from those old games. The campaign is pretty solid, gameplay-wise, with plenty of the standard move-and-shoot gameplay that you’d expect along with a handful of fun little diversions and tools to play around with. Yes, you’ll rain down shots from above on helpless enemies below, but you’ll also use RC planes strapped to C4 to knock down helicopters. The game even manages to make its obligatory sniper mission feel pretty fun while still forcing you to account for wind and distance when lining up your shots.

Modern Warfare takes an action movie approach to its story, which occasionally comes off as reckless when paired with the game’s often-grim subject matter. Also, the game’s length (probably around six-to-eight hours for most players, though you could certainly shoot through it faster than that) means that every facet of the story feels abbreviated. Two characters develop something of a personal attachment to each other, but before any of that goes anywhere, the game ends. The game does still find time for some flashbacks, though, which have you doing “fun” things like playing as a small girl who survives a Russian invasion and subsequent gas attack and grows up in captivity only to be featured in a waterboarding minigame. The game doesn’t necessarily play things up for shock value, but at the same time it doesn’t really linger on any of its heavier moments to give them much weight. As such, I found it hard to get too worked up one way or the other. It’s a fun video game, but its hook of “how bad will the good guys have to become in order to catch the actual bad guys” doesn’t especially hold up to critical scrutiny.

The competitive multiplayer feels bigger and better than its predecessors, though this is mostly achieved via a bunch of smart tweaks that don’t initially sound like a big deal. You can now mount to corners and low walls, giving you a way to keep most of your body behind a wall and peek out, letting you enter rooms a little more tactically. The modes have been given a bit of an overhaul, with Headquarters returning to the fold. Most of the game’s modes are now placed into a centralized hopper that you can filter down if you, for example, don’t ever way to play Search & Destroy but are fine with any Team Deathmatch, Cyber War, or Domination match that might be available. This is pretty similar to Titanfall 2’s mode selection interface, which also worked well. Some modes also get broken out of that main quick play list, so you can easily line up a Ground War match. Ground War has even more of a Battlefield-esque feel this time out, with 64-player matches on larger maps that hold five control points. You can parachute off of high buildings here, there are a few vehicles, and all of the killstreaks that players keep calling in make things feel ridiculously chaotic. It’s a weird, fun experience, seeing Call of Duty at this larger scale. Realism mode is also cool as it sort of splits the difference between regular matches and the traditional hardcore match. Realism more or less eliminates the HUD, forcing you to focus more on what’s in front of you and only giving you tactical information when your team has a UAV up in the air. There are also night versions of some multiplayer maps, which is a fun twist, but I haven’t seen these pop up in the game’s public matchmaking yet.

Unlocking items and options in multiplayer often feels like it changes for change’s sake from year to year, but Modern Warfare’s take on perks and attachments both feels new and better than what’s come before. Instead of a big, crazy pick 10 system, you can pick your three perks--these are things that might make you run faster, or perhaps become invisible to enemy radar—and level up as normal. But you’ll also select a field upgrade, which is a new ability that charges on a meter. These might be something as simple as throwing down an ammo box or you might opt for Dead Silence, which appears in this year’s game as an active ability rather than as a perk. This silences your footsteps, which seems more useful this year since enemy footsteps are weirdly loud… making them more tactically important in the process.

Gun attachments move to a sort of “pick 5” system, where guns have multiple attachment spots and you can put, say, a scope on there for one point, an extended magazine on there for more bullets, stocks, grips, and so on. Guns also have a perk slot on them, so a lot of gun-specific perks that would have previously existed in the traditional perk slots show up here, along with some new ones. So you could take one that increases your melee speed, or full metal jacket bullets that do extra damage to vehicles and killstreaks, and so on. Most attachments have trade-offs to them, like fitting a scope on a weapon might make aiming down sights take slightly longer, and so on, which makes gun customization feel like a more thoughtful process than it has in years past. Overall it feels like you have more control over how your particular version of a gun will handle, which is nice.

There's also a new two-on-two mode called gunfight. It's designed to be a quick, round-based experience that takes place on its own small maps. The premise is simple--eliminate the other team or, should a game go to overtime, try to capture a flag in the center of the map. Loadouts of guns and items are predetermined and rotate multiple times through a match, giving it some variety as you go. It's a neat idea that evokes both fighting games and the old, great Rocket Arena mod for Quake.

The third main mode in Modern Warfare is a co-op mode, and it’s bad. This was billed as something that would potentially resemble the Spec Ops mode found in Modern Warfare 2, but the main mode is just a mess. These are four-player operations set in large, wide-open levels. Objectives will pop up on your HUD and you’ll have to make your way over there and place some scramblers on a server rack or shoot some guys or whatever. Since people seem to be into quitting this mode mid-mission, most of the time I’d spawn into a mission already in progress, but I’d spawn way back at the beginning, requiring me to waste a ton of time just running over to where the action is. The action itself is awful, too. The maps are open, but enemies just keep magically appearing behind pillars when you turn around, and more or less popping out of thin air, just out of view of the camera. So you’re taking fire from all sides and the whole thing just feels phony. It’s also intensely buggy as of this writing, so at times we’ve fallen through the world, spawned into a broken map that refused to list any objectives or spawn any enemies, and so on. Even if it worked as intended, it doesn’t seem like it’d be much fun.

The co-op mode also offers a seemingly endless take on the campaign’s sniper mission, where four players fight off waves of enemies until they get bored and quit. The PS4 version also gets an exclusive survival mode where you shoot down waves of enemies on the multiplayer maps. This mode is actually functional, but not much fun, either. It’s a shame to see the Spec Ops name--which was a legendary mode back in the original Modern Warfare--get squandered so thoroughly here.

While Modern Warfare certainly has its issues, I’m having a really terrific time with it. The audiovisual aspects of the game have received significant upgrades. It’s a great-looking game with really strong sound design. That stuff helped make the campaign worth seeing, and it’s part of why I keep coming back to the competitive multiplayer, too. The meaningful tweaks to the leveling process matched up with some solid map design and great modes certainly don’t hurt, either. It’s a real shame that the co-op is pretty much dead on arrival, but the rest of the game is still absolutely worth looking at.

OK, let's talk about this up front: Gears 5 is on Microsoft's Game Pass service for both Xbox One and PC. That means you could potentially be playing this game for a fraction of the $60 you might expect to spend on a new, high-budget video game. Our general recommendation these days is that it'll depend on which games you specifically like to play, but the typical selection on Game Pass for Xbox One is worth the price of admission. Under that guidance, Gears 5 would cost you zero additional dollars to play, so... you should play it.

Gears is good. It's always been good. Actually, scratch that. Gears Judgment was a pretty mediocre story that came too soon after Gears 3 to feel like it needed to exist. It felt, you know, contractually obligated. After that, I think I would've been fine if the franchise sailed off into the sunset. Marcus took the do-rag off, Gears is done. Right? Then I ended up really enjoying the action, style, and characters of Gears 4. That opening of a new trilogy was a little short on story, but it pushed all the right buttons and waited long enough to make you forget that you played a metric ton of cover shooters on the Xbox 360. These days, I don't know, the cover shooter feels like it's about as out-of-style as it gets. But between Gears 4 ending on a cliffhanger and all those also-rans falling off the face of the earth, Gears 5 still somehow feels like a warm handshake from an old friend where it counts. It also takes some stabs in new directions that, for the most part, don't work all that well, meaning it works best when it's being more of a pure nostalgia play.

The campaign continues the story of Gears 4, where we discovered in the closing moments that Kait Diaz, a new character, was related to the Locust Queen, thought dead at the end of Gears 3. That moment felt tacked onto the end of the previous game, but Gears 5 more or less makes that fact the entirety of its business. Kait becomes the main playable character here and most of the game is spent getting to the bottom of Kait's lineage and essentially saving her from herself. You do this with another Gears 4 return, Del, by your side. Del, as you might expect, can be controlled by another player, if co-op is your thing. The end brings it all back together and sets you up for the explosive conclusion where you... well, you know, finish the fight or whatever it is you do at the end of Microsoft's trilogies.

While it opens like a traditional Gears game, once you get past the first act the whole thing opens up a bit. the second and third acts are set in wide-open spaces and you traverse them at will on a sand-sailor of sorts. The catch is that these large spaces don't really have much in them. There are a few secondary objectives to find out there, but those are short sequences that usually aren't worth your time. The rest of the items highlighted on your world map are just spots where you kind of just walk into a traditional feeling Gears of War level for awhile, then finish an objective and loop back around to your vehicle to keep moving on. It's like Halo: ODST but with a dryer, more pointless-feeling space to explore. That said, the long stretches of nothing look really nice and give you time to hear Kait and Del talk, which manages to make both characters feel more human and likable than nearly anyone that's appeared in a Gears game up to this point.

The campaign also gives you a new set of secondary abilities that are equipped onto Jack, your invisible, door-ripping robot friend. Interestingly, a human can also control Jack in co-op, if you want, which serves as a "here's a character for your friends who don't play video games ever" sort of thing. Regardless of who's calling the shots, Jack gains abilities that give you a variety of effects, like a cloak or additional armor. They're mostly situational, though having Jack mark every target in the area makes wiping up after a long encounter a little easier to deal with. All in all, the campaign is pretty good. It takes some chances, which is nice, but it's unfortunate that those chances end up being the least interesting parts of the game. Gears 5 is at its best when it's sticking to the pacing and procedures of a traditional Gears game. I never thought I'd come at you and tell you that I'm a Gears Traditionalist, but hey, here we are.

Actually, let me take that back. The competitive multiplayer in Gears 5 isn't terribly different than what came before it. I suppose that makes sense, as it's become pretty popular, but I get less and less out of it every time out. This time around they've added a killstreak-like system that lets you give yourself a heavy weapon after accruing a certain number of points and there seems to be a real attempt to push people into the "arcade" playlist, which gives players more than just the standard team deathmatch mode. While more variety is nice, it's all still built around that same core experience, which I'm just not interested in anymore. Enough people still like it, which probably prevents it from changing too much, so that's probably just the way it's going to stay. But yeah, no interest in competitive Gears at all over here.

Horde mode got some knocks last time around because parts of it were built around a pretty ugly card system that made it all feel grindy, if not overly focused on microtransactions. While you'll still build loadouts of cards and such here, they unlock as you level a character. Characters also have meters and ultimate abilities, like setting down decoys or buffing damage, which makes character choice matter even more than it has in the past. Horde has often been one of the best co-op experiences around, and it feels improved and pretty solid here in Gears 5.

The other new mode is called Escape and it also uses some character abilities. But the goal here is that you need to get from deep within a hive out to the surface, where you'll be extracted. So it's a point A to point B run, with gas from a bomb you plant at the center of the hive slowly creeping your way and forcing you to keep moving. The game also has a map editor that lets you plop down parts to create your own hives, but the editor feels just as limited as the hives that the game has served up on its own. Ammo is scarce and time is often short, which sounds like it could deliver some nice tension, but the map designs I've seen thus far have been pretty underwhelming and the movement and mechanics of Gears don't really lend themselves well to this kind of "go, go, go" kind of style. It feels like a big miss.

That said, the parts of Gears 5 that I enjoyed? I enjoyed them quite a bit. The game looks really great and has a deliberately brighter and more varied color palette than most of the previous games. While I think the open-world stuff is flat and could have been way better, there are moments out there in the nothingness that just look straight-up incredible, including a late-game weather sequence that, despite not being great gameplay, was worth seeing a couple of times just for the visuals alone. The campaign does some interesting stuff, gives you a tiny bit of player choice that'll have to play out somehow in the next game, and simply splits the difference between comforting classic and new release by giving you classic gameplay with new settings and characters to play with. And Horde is a good time, though I'm not sure it's something I'll keep coming back to again and again, like I certainly did when the mode was brand new.

Furthermore, there's this whole Game Pass thing. At $60, Gears 5 becomes a slightly dicier proposition based on how much you'd enjoy all four of its modes. But as a part of a subscription service that you might already be paying for? Absolutely give it a shot, play the parts you like and skip the rest.

Control is a great game for a lot of reasons, both big and small. It tells an exciting and interesting story in an extremely fascinating setting. It weaves in the episodic framework of a television show without requiring you to put down the controller for long periods of time. The action weaves together traditional shooting and supernatural abilities in a way that feels very natural, letting you flow from one move to the next in a way that feels pretty cool. Control also trusts its players by creating a large, shifting space to explore without feeling the need to paint a ton of UI over the action in an effort to keep you on track. The signs on the walls work in Control, helping to ground it and make the Oldest House feel like a real space. Well... right up until all the astral projection starts happening, anyway.

The story, setting, and world of Control was easily my favorite part of the game. From the opening moments, when Jesse Faden finds her way to the front door of the Federal Bureau of Control's headquarters only to find the front desk completely unmanned, inspiring her to step in and dig deeper, I was hooked. There's something about the game's mix of Twin Peaks, X-Files, and SCP Foundation that just spoke to me from the get-go. From there, you begin exploring the Oldest House on a search for your brother, who's been missing since the men in black showed up and took him when you were kids. The hows and whys of all that are fascinating, and I think the game's main plot is really solid, even if the ending wasn't quite as explicitly revelatory as some might want. But it's all the parts around the edges that do the heavy lifting in Control. Finding a "weird" artifact down a side path or reading some of the game's well-written collectibles ends up feeling rewarding on its own, and chasing down some of those side missions ended up being my favorite stuff in the game. It has a few memorable characters that you'll meet along the way, but for the most part it's Jesse, alone, exploring an amazing space full of intensely weird supernatural objects and blasting possessed humans with a cool-looking gun that morphs into different styles of weapon.

The combat feels fine in Control, and it fleshes out more and more as you progress and unlock new powers. You'll eventually be able to levitate, for example, and this opens up some interesting new concepts for combat. Control isn't necessarily a cover-shooter, though putting some geometry between you and the incoming attacks certainly helps. The action flows pretty well, letting you slide from one move to the next, over to the gun for a bit, and back without feeling like you're plodding or planting your feet after every move, which was something that pushed me away from Quantum Break. There were a couple of tough, if not mildly frustrating boss fights to be found here, but nothing that felt wildly unfair or broken.

Control also nods towards Remedy's long-running interest in tying its games to episodic television or radio. After finishing a main mission, you'll hear about your next task, and then get a quick montage of future events. It isn't explicit, but it sets up a real "next time on Control" vibe that kept me pushing forward to learn all the context behind the moments in the clips. I was rarely disappointed by what I found.

This is an open-world adventure game of sorts, one you could sort of compare to a Metroid-style game. You'll gain traversal moves here and there that open up access to new parts of the facility. But that isn't necessarily a huge part of the game. I found it really interesting that Control trusts players to navigate the facility without the benefit of an on-screen minimap. You can pull up a map of the facility at any time and get a sense of where you're at, but most of your reconnoitering comes from actually looking at your surroundings and reading signs. Like a real person might actually do. This probably isn't the first time a game has done this, and some people will probably come away from Control wishing that the map was more functional and modern, but this is the first time I can say this felt like a benefit to the game instead of just a game with bad mapping options. This helps the Oldest House feel "real," even when its warping, twisting walls reconfigure on the fly, leaving you wondering what just happened and where you might be now.

This is probably a good a time as any to say that this review applies to the PC version of the game. I found Control to run quite well there on a few different configurations, and this was also the first game I've seen that made all the fancy and extremely expensive ray-tracing stuff that Nvidia has been banking on lately feel like a cool, useful feature. The reflections and lighting with all those bells and whistles turned on just look fantastic. But the game still looks solid without the (extremely) expensive graphics card. Much has been said about the graphical fidelity and frame rate issues found in the console versions of the games, especially when running on the old base model boxes. That stuff sounds like a real shame and like a significant knock against Control if you own the original PS4 or Xbox One, but that's beyond the scope of this review.

Great performances, strong action, and a solid sense of design all come together to make Control one of my favorite games so far in 2019. Control feels like Remedy finally making all of its different interests play well together, better than they've ever done it before.

Editor's note: This review was originally conducted in a podcast format, available as a video above or right here as an audio file. A summary of the review follows.

You can make some cool power armor if you put your mind to it.

BioWare nails the feeling of flight in its first attempt at a loot shooter, Anthem. Soaring over a big open landscape in your robot suit (or javelin, as they're known here); nimbly covering ground in combat situations; snapping into and out of flight mode in a split-second burst of fireworks: it all feels great, and it's nice that Anthem's most unique aspect also turns out to be its best. The game also has a robust character customizer, giving you a range of painting tools and letting you swap between materials like cloth, hard rubber, and various metals to create weird and unique looks for your power armor, without locking basic coloration behind a paywall or grind like some other loot games in recent memory.

Those are the good parts. Most of the other elements that make up Anthem, from the storytelling to the loot to the basic gunplay, suffer from a range of problems or just aren't as good or polished as you'd like, and the game as a whole has an oddly rigid, disjointed structure that often makes playing it feel more tedious and frustrating than it should be. Anthem feels like it needs a lot more attention in a lot of areas.

This is BioWare's first brand new from-the-ground-up setting in quite some time, but it's underpinned by the same "ancient, vanished progenitor race and the magical technology they left behind" trope that's such well worn territory in video game stories, particularly in BioWare's own Mass Effect series, where it already appeared in two separate iterations. The vast bulk of the dialogue has an overly performative, irreverent tone to it that made it tough for me to get invested in what was going on. Though, there is some dramatic potential in the friction between the various good-guy factions, including the lighthearted mercenary freelancers, who your nameless character belongs to, the stuffy, militaristic sentinels, and Corvus, the secret spy agency. But the story only starts to scratch the surface there (and mostly does so around the edges of the main plot) by the time it's over, and all of these groups are just up against your standard generic evil empire trying to get its hands on the ancient tech before they do, anyway. Anthem does end with a mildly intriguing post-credits teaser that looks like it will take the game in a distinctly different direction from the story included in the shipping product, and since BioWare is promising "ongoing narrative" content starting a handful of weeks after release, it won't take long to find out if it's any good. Hopefully the writers focus more on the grounded, affecting style of storytelling you get just a few short glimpses of at the end of the main campaign.

These guys can be a huuuuuge pain to fight.

Actually playing Anthem is where the real trouble arises. Much of the third-person gunplay feels imprecise, a problem exacerbated by the fact that even combat fundamentals like shooting guns and enemies registering damage seem to be dependent on your server connection, so in laggy situations the game just doesn't feel good to play. The guns are all generic military fare and don't have much personality for a game where you're supposed to get excited about having new weapons drop from enemies all the time, and the aspirational arc of the loot as you level up through the story feels more contrived than in games where the rarity of loot seems truly random (although to be fair, loot issues appear to be something BioWare is committed to addressing quickly). There are four distinct javelins that all play quite differently, though the game doesn't let you try them out before you're locked into your initial choices for which ones you want to play first. The ability combo system, similar to that of the Mass Effect games, would ideally add some more variety and dynamism to your combat loadout once you've settled on a preferred class, but the game doesn't even try to explain this system in any detail, leaving you to fumble around and guess at the meaning of various icons and item descriptions if you want to grasp how combos work in any more depth than what's obvious at first glance. And you'll realize very quickly there are only a small handful of objectives that you're going to repeat over and over and over across a multitude of missions. In a game with better combat that wouldn't be so bad, but with all the other issues in play, it wears thin.

Other oversights or strange design choices drag down the experience. The game is chock-full of load screens, which are interminably long on consoles, and the various sections of the game are so compartmentalized that you frequently hit load after load just to get anything done. New loot that drops during gameplay just comes in as a generic item, so you can't tell what it is you just got--but that doesn't really matter since you can't change your weapons and abilities without returning to the game's one small town first anyway. So just to try out a new item or experiment with a new set of abilities that might combo well together, you have to load from the game world back into town, walk all the way across town, load into the loot and gear interface, load back into town, then load back into the game world again. It's hard to say if there are technical reasons behind the simple fact that you can't even change your weapons on the fly, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating to play.

There's a fair amount of grind in Anthem that wouldn't be quite so bad if there weren't so many problems in other areas. Gaining crafting recipes for new gear forces you to grind faction reputation, making it feel like it takes forever before you can craft anything worthwhile. The game throws up a couple of arbitrary lists of tedious mechanical challenges that force you to go out and grind a ton of kills, which isn't all that hard, but also look for more situational things like treasure chests that can be an absolute slog depending on your luck (or your willingness to replay missions that guarantee them). Though there's an open world, the collectibles and random events you engage with there quickly get repetitive, and some of the events aren't balanced well for solo play without telegraphing that fact until you've already invested too much time in finishing them and run up against a boss with way too much health.

Maybe Spy Lady will have a more interesting story to tell next month.

Also, the game is buggy. Really buggy. Aside from standard server disconnects and crashes, I found basic game functionality would break on a regular basis. Sometimes it was the interact prompt that let me open doors and revive other players that stopped working. Frequently, it was the meter for my ultimate ability appearing to be ready to go even though the ability was actually unusable. Once, the game loaded me into a mission with one of my two guns unequipped (note that the game doesn't actually let you unequip a gun manually). And twice on PS4, the game crashed so hard that it literally powered down my console, forcing me to repair all my storage devices before I could boot it back up. A game making you worry about damaging your hardware is just inexcusable. I don't remember seeing this many big and small technical issues in a major release since, well, Mass Effect: Andromeda. How that reflects on BioWare's recent track record doesn't really need to be said.

Despite my litany of complaints, I did have some fun zooming around in some of Anthem's grander combat situations--when everything comes together and you're flying to and fro, coordinating your tactics with your friends (which, frankly, makes any game better), you can see how good an Anthem with all of these rough edges sanded down could be. And there are a few ideas here, like creating more combat and traversal mechanics around flight, that deserve more attention than they get in the game that's on shelves right now. But Anthem needs more than just new content. A lot of work needs to be done on a wide variety of the game's fundamental elements before it can join the ranks of other redeemed loot games like Diablo III, Destiny, and The Division. Whether EA will give BioWare the latitude to overhaul the parts of the game that need it--and whether it's even technically feasible for them to do that in the first place--are questions with uncertain answers.

Crackdown 3 was probably announced too early. Microsoft started talking about it in 2014, back when the idea of a sequel to Crackdown--especially one that was significantly better than the underwhelming Crackdown 2--probably seemed like a good idea. Here in 2019, it feels like open-world games have gone out and into favor at least once or twice since that last Crackdown came out. But Crackdown 3 shows very little in the way of learning from the past or learning from the other open-world games that have graced consoles over the last nine years. Instead it feels slight, mindless, and dull. It feels like a gussied-up first-generation Xbox One game. Like the sort of game you might have expected to hear about back in 2014. In the here and now, though, there's... way less room for this sort of game on store shelves.

Installing Crackdown 3 gives you two executables that launch separately from the Xbox One dashboard or your PC's start menu. Crackdown 3: Campaign gets you the traditional Crackdown experience. You can play it alone or with another player via online co-op. It's structurally very similar to the previous games, with a handful of bosses in a set hierarchy. Chipping away at the lesser bosses opens the path to the lieutenants, and so on. All the while, you're earning "skills for kills" to make your super-agent more powerful. Punching out enemies gives you strength orbs, which level up to make your melee abilities stronger. Shooting them earns you firearm skills, driving over them earns you driving skills, and so on. Agility is the thing that made the previous games tick, though. Agility orbs must be collected by jumping around the city and finding them. They still give off a slight hum, letting you know that one is nearby. They led to an orb-collecting obsession in some players, back when the first game was released. But they just don't work that way anymore. Why?

It's probably the layout of the city. The island you're on does have some high buildings, but the orbs feel carelessly strewn about in some zones of the city, placed onto low rooftops that don't even pose a meaningful challenge. In other sections, the orbs seem weirdly scarce. But in the case of all this, the orbs just don't always feel like they've been placed in interesting spots. WIthout that--and, honestly, after all these years, it's hard to imagine simple orb collection as a standout feature at all--the rest of the game manages to feel very generic.

Sure, you jump higher as you level up, but other games have done the "open-world game but with powers" stuff really well in the years since Crackdown 2. This one really feels like it's going through the motions at every turn, with an utterly lifeless story and generic missions that feel like they were clone-stamped into the world for you to do over and over again. Every monorail station takeover mission feels identical. There are roughly two types of industrial/chemical missions. Two types of enforcer missions. And so on. It feels like you're just hopping around the world, never quite as quickly or as nimbly as you feel like you should be, performing the same six tasks over and over again. Eventually you unlock boss fights, but these aren't especially creative and don't stand out much. Most of them felt like they were missing a phase, like something else should have happened but then... nope. You win. Completing the campaign with almost all of the non-race missions completed took me somewhere around six or seven hours. You can go back in, you can take your leveled agent into a reset city, and you can play on multiple difficulties, but I'm not sure why anyone would want to do this stuff a second time. It's not bad, but nothing about it stands out (actually, having the game crash to desktop the first time I beat the final boss and having to replay that entire fight all over again stands out, but you know what I mean).

The multiplayer end of the game is called Wrecking Zone, and this is where the new stuff is supposed to be. This is where all the fancy "cloud-based physics" live. It's a five-on-five team game with two modes, set on small, vertically-focused maps. One mode is a take on the Kill Confirmed mode from Call of Duty--you shoot agents down and collect their shield to score a point. The other mode is about territory control, so agents must stand in zones to capture and hold them, scoring points for controlling spots. Both modes are weird because of the very nature of Crackdown's gameplay. The shooting in Crackdown is all lock-on targeting. You hold the left trigger to lock to a target, then hit the right trigger to fire. You only miss if you're too far away or if you're using a weapon with a wide bullet spread. In campaign, this means you might want to tap out some single shots at long ranges, since that'll be more accurate than just holding the trigger down on a fully-automatic rifle. In multiplayer, that holds true, but that also means that it's a multiplayer shooter when you can lock onto your target at almost any time and hold that lock.

The game attempts to build some trade-offs around the locking. If an enemy locks onto you, you see a line pointing in the direction of that enemy, giving away their position. And the game seems to be about ranges. The longest-range primary weapon will score a lot of hits, but a closer-range weapon should, in theory, take an enemy down more quickly. You also have a melee attack on a cooldown timer, giving you another option when enemies get too close. But they've gone and made a multiplayer shooter where the shooting feels automated. That's fine, the shooting doesn't have to be fun. But the rest of the mode doesn't pick up the slack. It feels like the sort of random multiplayer mode you'd see in some late-model PS2 or early Xbox 360 game and wonder "wow, why does this game have competitive multiplayer?"

To add a little insult to injury, Wrecking Zone is launching without the ability to party up and play with friends, which seems like a bizarre omission. Microsoft has stated it'll be coming in a future update.

The physics stuff--which, ostensibly, is why Crackdown 3 has competitive multiplayer--translates into the ability to shoot or punch through walls and floors, but it doesn't feel like anything terribly special. That's not to say that there isn't some impressive collection of tech in the background, keeping that destruction synced across all ten players, but in the context of these modes, it mostly just means that you can force your way through a building to take out an enemy who might be attempting to hide behind cover. But a mix of the lock-on targeting, quick health recovery, and generally open skies in most maps make chasing down an enemy seem pointless. It's easier to just give up and find a new target. The closeness of the camera and the way it whips around as you're locked onto a target also never gives you any sense of scale or context for the destruction. Instead, all this destruction just translates into occasionally pushing through piles of rubble to get back to a zone or get closer to an enemy. Crackdown 3's multiplayer modes just don't feel like they're built to truly take advantage of large-scale building destruction, and unless you follow gaming closely enough to know that syncing these sorts of physics across a number of multiplayer clients is said to be a difficult feat, this aspect just feels like a bad take on Red Faction: Guerrilla. Wading through rubble doesn't add anything meaningful to the overall experience.

The game lets you play as a number of preset agents, which are different across the two modes. The multiplayer has you select from a number of generic, silent, thick dudes. The single-player gives the agents names and each has an experience bonus to two aspects of the game's progression. The campaign is where Terry Crews appears, but other than an intro cutscene, you don't hear from him very much. You can (and I did) play as Terry Crews' character, Jaxson, but the player character doesn't quip very often, and on every platform and machine I tried it on, the player quips were mixed incredibly low, making them very easy to miss among the enemy radio chatter, your handlers, and, well, just about every other sound in the game. Going and getting a guy like Terry Crews for your game and then making it so you barely hear from him past the first cutscene seems like sort of a waste.

On the performance side, the game's frame rate is mostly stable on an Xbox One X, though I certainly noticed some spots in the multiplayer mode where things would get a little choppy. Nothing major. Load times on console seem acceptable, though as you'd probably expect, a good SSD makes the PC version have a lot less downtime overall.

I don't think I'd call Crackdown 3 an awful game, but I would call it dated. I don't know enough about this specific game's development to know what happened here, but I do know that this specific game feels like something that would have been better received had it been released several years ago. At the same time, Crackdown 3 fits reasonably well on Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass service. Paying $60 for this thing would be downright foolish. It's short and bland on the campaign end and the two multiplayer modes aren't worth your time. But if you're already a subscriber to Microsoft's service and can play this for no additional charge, it's a passable little bit of junk food that might hold your attention for an afternoon or two.

Editor's note: This review was originally conducted in a podcast format, available as a video above or right here as an audio file. A summary of the review follows.

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who already know the glee of 2016's Hitman reboot, and those who have yet to experience IO Interactive's wildly entertaining world of absurdist assassination. Fortunately, Hitman 2 is easy to recommend to both groups, owing to a big list of necessary improvements to the formula, a smart integration with the previous game, and another big pack of great new maps. There's really never been a better time to get into this unique, quirky franchise.

The core of Hitman 2 is exactly the same as in the first game: you roam around massive clockwork levels swarming with hundreds of characters, all interacting with each other and carrying out their own routines, as you plan dozens of ridiculous ways to bump off your targets (quietly or not). But Hitman 2 is chock-full of incremental changes and additions that make it a much better playing game on the whole. Some intelligent interface tweaks help clarify abstract information like compromised disguises, off-limits areas, and scripted murder opportunities and make them much easier to parse. New gameplay features, like tall foliage that lets you hide in plain sight and a briefcase you can use to smuggle conspicuously illegal items around, give you more options to devise creative strategies. And in what must be one of the most generous decisions made by a developer in recent history, owners of the first game can import all of its content into the new package for free and replay it with all the new features--and newcomers can add all that content to the sequel for a measly 20 bucks. Seeing two whole games' worth of Hitman encapsulated in one tidy package is a special kind of satisfying.

Hitman 2's locations cover almost as much exotic ground as those in the first game, from a high-tech Miami speedway to a drug cartel's jungle compound, suburban Anytown USA and a secret island meeting of billionaires who not-so-secretly run the world. At five full-sized maps and one smaller one, there's more than enough content here to get your money's worth. And while this sequel maintains the goofy, totally-serious-but-not-really tone of the series, I have to give Hitman 2 credit for making me genuinely care about the story in a Hitman game. The first game raised a ton of questions about illuminati-type groups and shadowy rogue agents without providing many answers, but the sequel makes good on that residual suspense with a taut international cat-and-mouse thriller that not only develops the characters of Agent 47 and his handler Diana Burnwood, but also provides some closure to the first game's mysteries. In the course of making good on those lingering plot threads, it also raises the stakes to such a degree that seeing the conclusion of the whole thing might be the number one reason I want a Hitman 3. That's not a sentence I ever expected to write.

This is a great package in total, though Hitman 2 feels just slightly rougher around the edges than its predecessor. The production is a little less polished and elaborate, with cutscenes composed of rudimentary still images compared to the full-fat CG treatment the story got in the first game. That's made more noticeable since both games' cinematics are housed side-by-side in the same menu. There's a little less map content to work with overall compared to the previous game's six full-sized locations and two sizable training maps, but the five new maps are gigantic, and Hitman 2 does come up with a handful of new variations on the standard objective of just killing all your targets that help to freshen things up a bit. And while the game offers a couple of supplementary modes with Sniper Assassin, where you attempt to take out targets at a wedding from a lofty perch with a scoped rifle, and Ghost--a head-to-head "beta" multiplayer mode that has players racing to get kills, which doesn't feel like it plays to Hitman's loose, anything-goes strengths--this ancillary content isn't really the reason you come to a Hitman game. Luckily, the first limited-time "elusive target" starring none other than Sean Bean is a great sign for more of the free post-release support that defined the first game, and there are DLC releases planned down the line to provide more of those great locations.

Those complaints don't amount to much when you step back and look at how well the Hitman formula has matured in this sequel and just how much content IO has crammed into this single package. The developer's uncertain future under Square Enix made a fair number of headlines a while back, before IO went independent and became the sole master of Agent 47's destiny. The fact that Hitman 2 turned out as well as it did in spite of that business turmoil is a great sign for the future of the franchise, and we should all be fortunate enough to get to play another one of these games a couple of years from now.

Editor's note: This review was originally conducted in a podcast format, available as a video above or right here as an audio file. A summary of the review follows.

How do you innovate on Tetris? The core game itself is just as playable as it was over 30 years ago. Sure, you can change the rules of how the game plays, create new modes, or mash it up with other games. It feels like many modern versions of Tetris have asked “how do we make Tetris more fun,” but nobody has asked “how do we make Tetris more of an experience?”

Enter Tetsuya Mizuguchi and Enhance Inc. with Tetris Effect, which blends the core mechanics of Tetris with the unique visual and audio stylings of past Mizuguchi games like Rez and Lumines. In the game’s main Journey mode, players are taken on a trip through 27 levels, each with their own unique and interactive skin and music. Clearing a set number of lines will bring players from one stage to the next, transitioning between visual soundscapes that are themed around flying windmills, volcanic hulas, and space whales. Beating Journey from start to finish will only take about two hours or so, and it takes you through levels that are range from relaxing to very technically challenging. There's decent replayability to be found with different difficulties and modes that you unlock after completing it.

Tetris Effect does an incredible job of keeping the player immersed, and one of the best ways it does it is by giving the player control of the music. Moving tetriminos, rotating and dropping them, and clearing lines affects the music in dynamic ways. This is only complimented by playing the game in VR. This, surprisingly, was my favorite way to play the game. The first time I booted up the game in VR and was able to look around me and see myself being showered in falling stars as trance/world music washed over me was my favorite VR experience to date. The interactivity of the music, the intense and sometime overwhelming visuals, and solid core gameplay all blend together to create a cohesive and sometimes emotional experience. The few songs in the game with lyrics all share a common motif--togetherness--and as cheesy as it sounds, you feel like you’re part of something bigger when playing in VR.

In addition to the Journey mode, the game features Effect mode. These are a series of Tetris variants, and feature some models you might be familiar with. There are established modes like Marathon (clear 300 lines as fast as you can) or Sprint (clear 40 lines in a set amount of time), but also new modes such as Purify, where players must kill off infected tetriminos as fast as possible. These offer a good break from the core game, and even act as tutorials to a degree. Take, for example, the mode called All Clear. This mode gives you a partially filled in well with a set number of pieces to drop. I found playing this mode allowed me to spot unique solutions to problems in my regular Tetris play. Tetris Effect will also have weekend challenges, where players must come together and clear a certain number of lines to unlock new avatars for players to use on their profiles, adding a reason to come back to the game frequently.

Tetris Effect, from top to bottom, is my favorite iteration of Tetris yet. The music and visuals work together to create a truly unique Tetris experience, that is only enhanced by VR.