Not willing to back down from a challenge, Big Ant has decided to move ahead with the series despite its stumbles, resulting in this year’s simply-titled sequel AO Tennis 2. And while it seems eager to rectify some of the original game’s problems, there are a number of inconsistencies and game mechanics that bring down the enjoyment enough to make it difficult to recommend to anyone who isn’t willing to tough out the bad to get to the good.

What makes or break a tennis game, of course, is its very fundamentals. It’s here that AO Tennis 2 both succeeds and fails at different aspects, nailing the sense of momentum and split-second decision-making of the sport while simultaneously convoluting the control scheme to the point of frustration. This is due to the fact that both player movement and aiming your shots are mapped to the left stick. This results in the game using a bit of auto-movement to take some of the micromanagement out of positioning your player, but it doesn’t consistently feel great in action since there really isn’t a clear indication of when your player switches from manual to automatic movement.

The steep learning curve rears its head when you realize that the game requires you to get good positioning, aim the ball, and hold your shot button just long enough to get an accurate return ­– all within the span of about a second or two. On higher difficulties, this leaves rallies feeling needlessly cumbersome, resulting in a never-ending feeling of just clumsily getting by. It might feel a bit like the tension of a real tennis match, but it doesn’t translate to being very fluid for the person playing. All of the tedium can be alleviated by bumping the difficulty down to the lowest setting, almost completely removing the need to prime your shots, but doing so ultimately has the complete opposite effect of making the game feel too easy.

I found Amateur difficulty felt both relaxed enough to enjoy and challenging enough to keep me on my toes in the first couple of hours. But even though moving across the court with fairly generous windows for priming my shots felt more empowering, it still never managed to feel as fluid as it should because the game sometimes just decided not register my movements – a problem I weirdly also encountered in World Tour Tennis a few years back – resulting in my player just kind of standing there like an idiot. This happened frequently enough to dampen my experience, and in a game where every point counts, it’s a completely unacceptable problem.

Despite these irritations, I really like the game’s simplistic assignment of shot types to face buttons that make lining up that a ferocious forehand with beautiful top spin feel satisfying. The game’s solid AI will absolutely run you back and forth with hard hits to the opposite corner of the baseline if you let them, so mastering the different shots is a priority right away. Nailing a perfectly-timed slice to give you some time to reposition can mean the difference between winning and losing a game. It’s quite easy to abuse the AI on the lower difficulties though – a fact that will delight or disappoint you depending on your idea of fun. Before I bumped the difficulty up to the third tier, I commonly won points by just pushing up to the service line after my first return and powering a flat forehand to whichever back corner the AI wasn’t occupying.

I was excited to see some of my favorite players and top seeds like Rafael Nadal and Gael Monfils were playable, but it’s a rather jarring experience to see some high-ranking players and not others. The underwhelming total lineup of 25 real-life tennis pros is missing many extraordinary modern players like Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Novak Djokovic, or Maria Sharapova. As fun as it can be to hit the courts with some of these guys and gals, it’s a real bummer you’re not given the opportunity to pit them against their most exciting matchups.

However, thanks to the game’s incredible player creation tools, someone with enough time on their hands has all they need to design playable characters that look identical to real players. As a matter of fact, the online sharing feature allows you to easily download characters made by someone else, and it’s already stocked up with plenty of lookalikes for popular missing players like Andy Murray and Stan Wawrinka. This immense level of customization for created players is staggering, and it’s certainly nice to be able to revisit the tools at any time to change things up as you’d like.

And you may find that you want to do that from time to time considering that you’re likely to be spending a lot of time with AO Tennis 2’s Career Mode. This mode is a joy to play, offering a diverse collection of tasks to complete, matches to take on, and sponsors to earn. When you’re not showing up to press conferences or running training drills, you’ll be tackling tournaments to earn money that can help you improve your player’s various skills. Maybe you want to be known for your deadly backhand, or maybe you want the kind of serve that makes people nervous; pump your favorite skills full of points and prove yourself to the world.

AO Tennis 2 also features a barebones online mode for those looking to take on other tennis fans. Connection issues seemed abundant during my time playing, and people left mid-game regularly, but I managed to have a handful of pleasant matches with a few friendly people. Sadly, I couldn’t find any custom matches, and the Quick Match option results in precisely that: very quick matches. So, while hopping online for some rallies with real people is a nice diversion, it’s hardly the star of the show.

That’s okay, though, because there are plenty of other modes to delve into, and once you adapt to the game’s somewhat clunky control scheme and figure out the right difficulty for your skill level, AO Tennis 2 begins to evolve into a pretty fun time despite its flaws. It’s not an exceptional game, and the steep learning curve is not going to appeal to casual tennis fans, but it’s probably the best tennis title you’re going to find this generation. I just hope Big Ant Studios manage to finally get everything right with a third entry in this series they’re clearly so passionate about.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.

The Kraken is accessible midway through the campaign, taking place entirely on the V.B.S. Krakow, a beached military vessel taken over by a sentient machine known as CAIN. As you make your way across and inside the ship, you work alongside a woman who guides you to your objectives and assists you in your goal of reaching CAIN to destroy him. Like the base game, there’s little about the story here that intrigues or surprises, but for those who want the full plot, scattered audio logs can expand on the narrative and fill in some blanks if you take the time to find them all.

"Two bosses stand between you in and end of the DLC, one of which is simply a reskin of one of the add-on’s larger foes."

As I first arrived on the ship, I had dreams of charting a path across its vast and eerie surface and delving deep into its interior, but exploring the vessel and unraveling the central mystery of CAIN’s oppressive presence took me about an hour. It doesn’t take long to realize that there are really only two areas in the DLC, both of which include one or two tiny interiors and an open area with a handful of enemies that are virtually indistinguishable from those found in the main game. A few shortcuts lead back to the single med-bay where you can level up and craft new gear, but otherwise, there is very little in the way of hidden paths to find or cleverly-concealed loot to track down.

Two bosses stand between you in and end of the DLC, one of which is simply a reskin of one of the add-on’s larger foes. Neither pose a significant challenge, especially for a late-game character with plenty of healing stocks at their disposal, but I did enjoy the final challenge for its manic attack patterns and general sense of disarray. And though it was during this concluding showdown that I had the most of my fun, it only drove home just how badly I wished that such a clever and compelling finale had been preceded by equally interesting content.

"If you love The Surge 2 and just want the full experience, spending an hour exploring the V.B.S. Krakow will be worth it just for the sake of completion."

I could forgive the brevity of this detour from the game’s main path if it offered something of significance that made it worth getting sidetracked, but a few new weapons, armor sets to craft, and a smattering of drone modules hardly seem worth the effort for anyone besides the most hardcore of collectors. A couple of short side-quests offer fleeting diversions, such as when a humorous robot asks you to watch films with him so he can learn more about how to be human. But the payoff is never worth the time investment – nothing found on the V.B.S. Krakow has any meaningful impact on The Surge 2’s core gameplay, leading to me leaving the DLC with absolutely no interest in revisiting any of the main game’s areas to try out my new findings.

The Surge 2 still suffers from the horrible screen tearing and performance problems that have plagued the game since launch, and it’s a damn shame that Deck13 couldn’t have improved on these issues rather than focusing their attention on producing the middling additional content provided in The Kraken. That said, if you love The Surge 2 and just want the full experience, spending an hour exploring the V.B.S. Krakow will be worth it just for the sake of completion. For everyone else, there really isn’t anything in this half-baked DLC to make it worth a return to Jericho City.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.

Indivisible casts players as an audacious young girl named Ajna who sees every obstacles as a solution best solved with a few swift punches. Her journey begins with a familiar opening that sees the destruction of a village and death of her father, and upon learning about the evil warlord responsible, our young hero eagerly sets out on a journey to defeat him. The story eventually expands into the cliche “ancient evil” plot we’ve all come to know and love in JRPGs, but smart writing and story sequences that don’t overstay their welcome help keep Indivisible from becoming a bore.

Ajna is joined by an ever-expanding cast of likable characters along the way, all of whom she absorbs into her mind with a newly-awakened power that allows her to trap them inside and subsequently use them for combat. I was always excited to meet and recruit the many quirky tag-a-longs since the writing itself typically made good use of them through funny and colorful dialogue. It’s just a shame that developer Lab Zero Games made some poor casting choices for the voice work – some characters (Ajna included) gain and drop accents throughout the game, and the overall quality of the voice acting ranges from emotionless to cringe-inducing. Because of this, I usually opted to just read the conversations and skip over the sometimes grating voices.

The combat in Indivisible may remind genre fans of the beloved Valkyrie Profile series, adopting a similar battle layout that maps each of your playable characters’ attacks and blocks to one of the four face buttons. There’s a high learning curve involved if you want to get the most out of the combat mechanics, and the game’s tutorials don’t do the greatest job of properly explaining everything, leaving you to test things out with some trial and error. This can be frustrating when you’re thrown into earlier fights with so many inputs to remember in a short window of time. Considering the fact that each of the over 20 playable characters possess a collection of additional direction-based moves, Indivisible quickly turns into a game of rapid button combo memorization that takes time to get used to but eventually feels rewarding to master.

Frantically pressing all of the face buttons to get everyone to use a normal attack is easy enough, but trying to juggle multiple characters’ directional inputs to set up combos while also consistently blocking on time can be tricky. You can opt to use L1 to have your entire party block and take out some of the micromanagement of using face buttons to have an individual character shield themselves, but this can drain your special attack meter. This system of tradeoffs makes Indivisible feel fair and balanced for both casual button mashers and more experienced gamers who may be seeking to get the most out of each encounter.

To make fights even easier, you can fill up a special meter and use R1 to unleash special moves that range from a flurry of attacks to helpful party-wide healing spells depending on which character you choose for it. Additionally, holding the trigger allows you to slow combat down drastically to give you ample time to form strategies or just glance over your characters’ health and attack stores. If you find that the game moves a little quickly for you in general, save points are plentifully scattered around the levels to make the occasional defeat feel less disappointing.

When you’re not whaling away on Indivisible’s enemies, you’ll be platforming through its gorgeous 2D world full of captivating locales and charismatic characters, and it’s all brought to life with meticulously hand-drawn animation that just begs to be admired. In a time where so many RPGs have moved towards realism, Indivisible embraces the visual style of a bygone era while bringing the fidelity up to modern standards – from its expressive character models to its lush, vivid backdrops, there’s an attention to detail here that has to be seen to be believed.

You’ll spend most of your time with the game exploring these resplendent environments, and how much you enjoy them depends entirely on your patience with Metroidvania games in general. As one would expect, there’s copious amounts of backtracking required as you find new items to open pathways you passed earlier in the game. And despite the best of efforts of the map, there’s always the chance you’ll get turned around a bit as you try to navigate to and from the various areas. That said, while backtracking through the same spots over and over can get tiresome, I appreciated that the items found throughout your journey serve multiple purposes and therefore usually grant fun new gameplay elements to use.

This multi-purpose item system was apparent early on when I found an axe that allowed me to cut through wooden blockades and scale tall walls. This opened up access to new areas in two totally unique ways, getting a lot more utility out of a single item and giving me a more substantial feeling of progression. Throughout the 25 hour journey, these types of helpful items lend much-needed freshness to the otherwise standard navigation elements of Indivisible. Genre typical movements like wall jumping and air dashing can be cool, but pole vaulting with a spear is cooler.

But as fun as it might be to string together all of these unique moves and items, navigating the treacherous levels can also sometimes feel cumbersome when Indivisible decides it just doesn’t want to work with you. From time to time the game wouldn’t register my inputs, and I periodically ran across irritating bugs that had me falling through the map or getting stuck in the game’s environments. These were rare occasions, but they still forced me to restart and lose progress, and I’m hopeful to see them ironed out with future updates.

Despite its faults, Indivisible is a one-of-a-kind game. I would’ve loved to see some better voice work and a bit less backtracking, but mastering the initially chaotic combat and finding new navigational items was a rewarding experience and well worth the time spent exploring the game’s utterly stunning world. It’s a fascinating experiment to behold, and if you’re willing to overlook its flaws, you may find that this genre-bender rewards you with a bounty of engaging gameplay.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.

Young teen artist, Ash, is the perpetual mark of a troop of bullies in the desolate seaside town of Denska. Our journey starts on a bleak day when the group runs across our hero quietly minding his business and subsequently steal the sketchbook he uses for drawing. Things quickly get out of control, leaving the book’s pages scattered about the town and prompting Ash to set out in an attempt to retrieve them. But in an interesting turn of events, he’s introduced to Luna, one of his paintings that has mysteriously become sentient and seems desperate to solve the case of why a purple substance is overtaking the town, and his quest expands well beyond his wildest dreams.

"Grass, trees, suns, rainbows – there are dozens of unique paintings to be found, and each of them have a use at some point in the game’s story."

Concrete Genie is a dark game both figuratively and literally. Its story deals maturely with the concepts of mental and physical bullying, coping mechanisms, and the looming threat of alienation from one’s peers. Meanwhile, Denska is an abandoned, dreary town full of fog and rain, lending a very real sense of dread to the game’s atmosphere. This gloomy aesthetic is far from unattractive though, leaning heavily on an art style reminiscent of games like Life is Strange and Tearaway to bolster its visual uniqueness. And though I never grew particularly attached to any of the cast besides Ash, their distinctive personalities are captured elegantly through the use of interesting facial animations that draw clear inspiration from stop-motion films.

Despite his ever-present feelings of estrangement, Ash is determined to bring Denska back to life with his colorful paint and the help of the titular painted genies that wander about the walls of the levels with you. Using a magical brush and the DualShock 4’s motion controls, you’ll paint a variety of items on the walls of the town in an attempt to turn on lights that hang along the rooftops. Grass, trees, suns, rainbows – there are dozens of unique paintings to be found, and each of them have a use at some point in the game’s story.

Painting vivid auroras and thunderous skies sounds enthralling in theory, but Concrete Genie ultimately presents a half-baked sense of creativity. You’ll collect loads of new things to paint and be given a plethora of blank canvases on which to paint them, but it doesn’t really mean much when you’re asked to repeatedly draw identical items dozens of times. And the game gives no incentive to paint the items with any feeling of creative vision since you can just slap it on a wall any old way and be successful. At least painting is a leisurely exercise since there’s never imposing danger that demands rapid completion, so you’ve got plenty of time to cover Denska with your lustrous paintings at your own pace.

The genies act as companions who require you to paint specific items to stay happy, and you’re given a bit of freedom to design them yourself using some of the pages you’ve found on your journey. More importantly, they possess the ability to perform tasks to aid you in your quest based on their color – red genies can burn red tarps, yellow genies use electricity to power switches, and blue genies blow wind to move objects for you. These unique characteristics give each of them tangible benefits, and some of the game’s environmental puzzles require the use of more than one type to solve. Plus, since a genie remains in your world well after they’re initially needed, your ranks grow exponentially over time to allow for plenty of playful interactivity and simple puzzle-solving.

When you’re not painting bright and colorful vistas on the town’s dilapidated buildings, you’ll spend a lot of your time climbing and navigating them. A lot of Concrete Genie takes place on rooftops as you track down a copious amount of scattered pages, newspapers, and collectible memories throughout Denska. Climbing is responsive and functions similar to games like Uncharted, acting as a compliment to the otherwise conventional platforming. An extremely basic stealth system allows you to make your way to a rooftop and call out to the wandering bullies to relocate them and provide you an opportunity to reach new spots. All of these gameplay elements are very rudimentary, but when combined, they keep the moment-to-moment gameplay feeling more involved than I initially expected.

Completionists will appreciate that Concrete Genie features a bevy of collection notes and trackers and an adequate map for finding its many optional collectibles. But even with that assistance, the game does a great job of hiding certain pages in trash cans or other inconspicuous places that require you to do some additional exploring to track them all down. Thankfully, each of the town’s districts feel distinctive, and most of them are interconnected in ways that allow for easy backtracking, so I never felt like I was wasting time wandering around the streets and rooftops in my pursuit of extras.

"A duo of included VR-only modes give Concrete Genie a bit of extra replay value for those seeking to get even more mileage out of the game."

A surprisingly violent turn in the back end of Concrete Genie comes out of nowhere to set up the endgame while also introducing an underwhelming and clunky combat mechanic that is otherwise absent from the first few acts of the game. During this final act, Ash also gains the ability to skate on paint, and while it’s fun to glide around the town quickly, it unfortunately doesn’t create any additional exploration opportunities. These new mechanics feel like an attempt to offer something more traditional to balance out the game’s creation-based aspects, but I couldn’t help but feel like they could’ve benefitted from being integrated into the game earlier with a more fleshed-out design.

A duo of included VR-only modes give Concrete Genie a bit of extra replay value for those seeking to get even more mileage out of the game. These modes take place in a first-person perspective with one offering objectives and another serving as an open-ended free paint mode. But regardless of your choice, you’re still not granted the freedom to paint anything you wish, relying solely on premade items that chosen from Ash’s sketchbook. Considering these modes require two PS Move controllers, it’s disappointing that we’re not given the option to create things from our own imaginations.

Concrete Genie never quite measures up to its own aspirations, and I would’ve loved to see what Pixelopus could’ve done with a bigger budget and some expanded mechanics. But after wrapping the game up in about 5 hours, I left Ash and his genies having experienced a pleasant afternoon of enchanted entertainment. In an age where so many games try to take themselves too seriously and value narrative over gameplay, Concrete Genie manages to successfully blend its dark undertones with lighthearted playfulness all while still remembering it’s a video game first and foremost. For that, it’s worth every penny.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.

Before you even step a foot into its dark and oppressive world, you’re greeted by a robust character creator that surpasses any I can personally recall. It’s a true joy crafting your ideal anime hero with all the hair, face, and body sliders, but the real star here is the detailed accessory collection. Outfitting your character with an impressive array of glasses, hats, chains, bags, gloves, and more means you can make them as hardcore or as playful as you’d like. Code Vein makes a wise decision to not take itself too seriously in this aspect, and that makes creating your protagonist all the more rewarding. 

"It’s difficult to grow an attachment to characters when you’re bored learning about them. "

This is all in stark contrast to the fact that Code Vein takes place in a post-apocalyptic world and tells a quite serious tale. A calamity has led to the uprising of immortal vampires known as Revenants. The game casts you as one of these creatures in a quest to recover your memories and find out the specifics of humanity’s downfall. It’s a much more story-heavy game than your average Souls-like, opting for a lot of substance and dialogue rather than relying solely on the ambiguous underpinnings the genre is so known for. Sadly, it comes across as little more than maudlin nonsense, only rarely touching on any meaningful points that I found compelling or worth caring about.

Some characters have additional story content told through sequences that see you sluggishly walking and viewing static images while listening to audio exposition. These moments are a chore, which is a shame when a handful of these characters are actually intriguing and deserving of something far more engrossing than this tedious storytelling device. It’s difficult to grow an attachment to characters when you’re bored learning about them.

Outside of its heavy focus on plot, Code Vein’s inspiration is abundantly clear, channeling games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne to build its combat fundamentals. You play a game of stamina roulette as you balance light and heavy attacks, parrying, blocking, and dodging. The experience you earn from killing enemies is lost upon death and must be recovered before dying again lest it disappear forever. You rest at mistles (see: bonfires) to refill your health restoration items, and it subsequently respawns all enemies in the area. If all of this sounds wonderfully familiar to you, there’s at least a really good chance that Code Vein will scratch your Souls-like itch.

"Whether you want to deal damage up close with a light or heavy weapon or deal magic damage from various different elements, you’ll find a blood code that fits you."

Code Vein manages to inject some interesting ideas of its own to set itself apart and keep things interesting. For example, dozens of blood codes act as the game’s class system, and you’re allowed to swap freely between them as you see fit. Each has a style of weapon that is best suited to it and a collection of passive and active gifts (abilities) to learn. But Code Vein never makes you feel as though your choices are black and white, largely due to the fact that you can learn gifts from one blood code and use them in another. This allows for a surprisingly deep experience of mixing and matching gifts to find your perfect loadout.

Whether you want to deal damage up close with a light or heavy weapon or deal magic damage from various different elements, you’ll find a blood code that fits you. But swapping between them frequently is often the key to success. Though you may be able to eek your way through the game only using your favorite, there’s a lot of power in experimentation. Taking down certain bosses is made exponentially easier when using a ranged option that can help you avoid AOE damage, whereas you may find it much quicker to fell average enemies using a simple sword for rapid, calculated attacks. Thanks to the ease of switching over, you never have much to lose by trying a new combination, and doing so during my playthrough often led to me discovering I enjoyed a specific blood code more than the one before it.

The sheer variety of blood codes means you’re likely to end up with a vast amount of gifts to use, but the game’s ichor system isn’t a straightforward affair. Using abilities eats through this resource quickly, and replenishing it is mainly achieved through repeatedly landing blows on enemies and using drain attacks that shed some much-needed spotlight on the vampire backdrop. This keeps you from abusing gifts with no consequence while also giving you incentive to play aggressively to earn more ichor.

"As with Dark Souls, you can summon a real person too, but unless you and a friend use the password system, you’ll generally sync up with a random player."

You can swap between AI companions that tag along for your journey, and finding the right one that compliments your playstyle is a fun puzzle in itself. But having this friend along creates a crazy level of imbalance in the game’s difficulty. You’ll often face hordes of enemies at a time, and your AI-controlled friend is adept at pummeling them relentlessly to the point that you may find regular encounters too easy. But enter one of the game’s epic boss battles, and their lack of regard for their own safety often leads to quick deaths, leaving you to fight an extremely powerful foe on your own. Facing down difficult bosses isn’t new to Souls-like fans, but Code Vein’s bosses typically feel tuned for two players, so having a dead companion less than a minute in can be exceptionally irksome.

As with Dark Souls, you can summon a real person too, but unless you and a friend use the password system, you’ll generally sync up with a random player. It’s a crapshoot as to whether their assistance will live up to your expectations, so I preferred just bringing along the AI pals so I could pick exactly what type of companion I wanted to match with whatever blood code I was currently experimenting with. Additionally, I appreciated their likable personalities and tendency to offer observational input on nearby points of interest. I just wish they were as observant during boss battles.

Though beautiful, Code Vein’s locations all share similar visuals, consisting mostly of some variation of streets, rubble, or buildings. This can make some locations feel too familiar, but it’s nevertheless enjoyable to explore them to find hidden areas and loot, and their tendency to loop back together with shortcuts makes for easy access to mistles for healing and spending experience. I’m a big fan of the map system that charts your progress through the game’s levels, giving you a clearer picture of where you’ve explored and where you may have missed. It often cuts down on backtracking and keeps things chugging along during longer dungeons, many of which take you through maze-like interiors that would be otherwise easy to get lost in.

"Not only can I recommend Code Vein, but I’d go so far as to call it a must-play for fans of the series it so wonderfully imitates."

I’m also very thankful that Code Vein offers a fully-customizable button layout because its default settings are likely to frustrate Souls-like veterans by mapping attacks to face buttons rather than triggers. Some may find this easier to adapt to than others, but cemented muscle memory forced me to reorganize my layout to the genre standard. This created a few hiccups for me when trying to string together some of the game’s more complicated inputs, but at least moment-to-moment gameplay felt more comfortable.

Tackling all of Code Vein’s available side-content alongside the main story took me around 30 hours, and with the calling of NG+ and additional endings, I’m happy to know there’s still plenty to keep me busy grinding away at the game for months to come. If you can overlook a handful of quirks, it might just suck you in too with its nearly endless combat customization and appreciated enhancements to the genre’s established formula — and no one will judge you if you decide to skip the cutscenes.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.

"New dribbling animations give life to individual players, and changes to core gameplay mechanics have impacted the moment-to-moment gameplay in interesting ways."

This year makes good on a few of these expectations with some small, but lovely updates. New dribbling animations give life to individual players, and changes to core gameplay mechanics have impacted the moment-to-moment gameplay in interesting ways. For instance, the new size-up mechanic allows you to use the right stick to chain standing dribble moves, something that is likely to require veteran players to practice a lot to get a feel for how things have changed.

Relearning proper timing and discovering the best way to chain your animations together is key to success, I found myself fumbling about for quite a while as I tried to adjust to all of the freedom that comes with mixing and matching animations. Once things click, however, these changes feel great, and there’s plenty of room for both newcomers and veterans to make use of these new mechanics in ways that match their skill level.

Meanwhile, sprinting is a more limited resource now, requiring you to make use of it sparingly in order to properly manage your stamina. This makes for a far more engaging experience that asks you to learn to strategize rather than simply hold down a trigger for the entire game. Much like the new dribbling mechanics, it’s really a matter of timing, and knowing the best moment to initiate a burst of speed is a learned skill that takes patience and dedication.

"The usual modes all return, but it’s usually the series’ MyCareer mode that tends to grow the most, and 2K20 aims to take things further than ever with some of the biggest star power we’ve seen yet."

The usual modes all return, but it’s usually the series’ MyCareer mode that tends to grow the most, and 2K20 aims to take things further than ever with some of the biggest star power we’ve seen yet. Idris Elba, Mark Cuban, Thomas Middleditch, and Rosario Dawson all show up here alongside plenty of NBA stars like LeBron James and Anthony Davis, and they’re all excellent additions to the story-focused campaign mode titled “When the Lights Are the Brightest”. This expanded mode feels more cinematic than ever thanks to these celebrity additions and a new focus on less trivial decision-based segments and more core gameplay.

That said, despite the charming narrative surrounding your character’s rise to stardom, this year’s offering somehow manages to feel less exciting that previous versions. Clocking in at only around 5 hours, the credits roll abruptly after reaching first rookie game, and much of the gameplay leading up to it is mundane busywork. Scrimmages can be a good time, but the awful minigames are a nightmare to control and serve as a reminder that sometimes a basketball game should really just focus on what it does best – letting you play basketball. I was invested in seeing things through to the end, but I never really felt like any of it mattered as much as it wanted me to believe.

2K20’s implementation of the WNBA is a weak addition as well, giving very little for the female players to do and making their presence seem more like an obligatory answer to direct competitor NBA Live’s addition of the league last year. Without the game’s full suite of modes available to the WNBA, there’s really not much to do besides a simple season mode that lacks many of the bells and whistles found in the NBA’s modes.

"Far less rewarding is the series’ ever-growing focus on in-game monetization in nearly every mode (including MyCareer, a mode they have no right to be in). 2K20 is so riddled with microtransactions, so bogged down by their presence, that it’s virtually impossible to be competitive in some modes without gambling real money for a chance at something useful."

Online action varies from thrilling to downright infuriating depending on whether or not the game’s servers want to work with you at the time. I crashed out of matches frequently, and even when I didn’t, lag spikes and glitches were constant blemishes on my experience. When things are working, however, 2K20 can be a blast against competitive opponents that learn and adapt to your playstyle as you do the same to theirs’, resulting in victories that feel earned and rewarding.

Far less rewarding is the series’ ever-growing focus on in-game monetization in nearly every mode (including MyCareer, a mode they have no right to be in). 2K20 is so riddled with microtransactions, so bogged down by their presence, that it’s virtually impossible to be competitive in some modes without gambling real money for a chance at something useful. Buying packs is nothing new in sports games’ online fantasy modes, but providing enjoyable gameplay should be paramount, and yet the game seems specifically designed to bore you into spending money. Trying to entice me to spend $10 in MyTeam because the in-game challenges are so monotonous and awful isn’t gratifying – it’s exploitative.

The predatory nature of these microtransactions aren’t exactly thinly veiled either. MyTeam’s UI is quite literally designed like a casino filled with slot machines and roulette wheels. In an age where loot boxes and other forms of microtransactions are so frowned upon, it almost feels as though 2K is taunting and prodding at gamers, knowing good and well that their sales numbers won’t be meaningfully affected by these tone-deaf presentation choices. Sure, opening packs is how you obtain players, so you don’t directly engage with these gambling visuals to unlock content, but their use as a means of delivery is nevertheless insulting. Each spin of the wheel feels like it should come with a laugh track and a sign saying, “Sucker!”

"When you factor in that 2K20 plasters ridiculously excessive advertisements everywhere, the game begins to feel like a free-to-play game that just so happens to have stolen sixty bucks from your wallet. And ultimately, that’s exactly how the game made me feel."

When you factor in that 2K20 plasters ridiculously excessive advertisements everywhere, the game begins to feel like a free-to-play game that just so happens to have stolen sixty bucks from your wallet. And ultimately, that’s exactly how the game made me feel. The wonderful improvements to gameplay are constantly overshadowed by long load times and in-your-face monetization. It’s fun to play basketball in the game, but whether it’s a basketball sim or a virtual casino disguised as one, I really couldn’t tell you.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox One.

As expected, EA Vancouver has promised some much-needed additions in this year’s iteration, but the end result remains the usual mixed bag of fun new ways to play alongside a collection of continued oversights that prove that hockey just isn’t where EA is doing its best work.

I’ve always appreciated NHL’s mostly fluid controls and general accessibility, but perhaps the worst aspect of EA’s annual hockey franchise is that it rarely feels like it makes substantial changes where it’s needed most. This year, the addition of contextual shooting makes animations a lot more natural and assists you in shot selection, and you’ll notice goalies also share a considerably wider range of animations and actions.

But these basic quality of life fixes don’t change the fact that we’ve needed a true overhaul of AI for years. NHL 20 is filled to the brim with legacy issues like defenders making consistently stupid choices with positioning and players timing passes poorly for no good reason. On more than one occasion, my AI teammates would skate over to the puck and then decide it just wasn’t worth snagging, leaving it to the opposing team to come along for an easy possession. Problems like this have plagued the series for far longer than they should, and the workarounds EA keeps trying to employ just aren’t cutting it anymore.

"Choosing your casual and professional wear is much deeper than I initially expected, going so far as to have you pick mouthguard materials and colors or decide how much of your jersey is tucked in."

On the plus side, the game’s broadcasting receives an overhaul this year, removing long-time commentator duo, Eddie Olzyck and Doc Emrick in favor of some new voices. Replacing them is Vancouver radio personality James Cyulski as the play-by-play announcer and Ray Ferraro moving from third commentator to color commentator.

Thanks to the fact that these two are local to EA’s Vancouver studio, we’ve been promised consistent updates to the commentary throughout the year. There’s good chemistry between them, and this year’s commentary tracks definitely feel a little less serious than usual. This is something EA has purposefully brought attention to as they aim to bring things in line with commentary styles from other popular sports for the sake of accessibility, and I’m all for it. Additionally, while I won’t spoil the guest commentators for you, rest assured there are a handful of fun ones that show up.

Creating a player is as easier and more fun than ever too, and choosing from a wide variety of preset faces and hairstyles is just the beginning – NHL 20 boasts an impressively layered style system.

Choosing your casual and professional wear is much deeper than I initially expected, going so far as to have you pick mouthguard materials and colors or decide how much of your jersey is tucked in. Intro animations and celebratory actions are often hilarious, and watching them play out in-game is a delight. Unlocking new clothing, accessories, and emotes gives you a solid secondary reason for keeping an eye on the game’s huge number of challenges.

"Speaking of World of Chel, there’s a bevy of new challenges and content to unlock this year, but more exciting is what’s buried in its menus: an exciting new mode, Eliminator."

Trying to find which mode you’d like to dive into leads to suffering through NHL 20’s cluttered mess of a menu system. While I appreciate the sheer volume of content the game has available, there’s got to be a better way to present it to players.

Like last year, you can pin a handful of your favorite modes to your main menu, but if you’re a mode-hopper like me, you’ll have to navigate your way through the sea of boxes and sub-menus to get to the meat of the game. This is made even more tedious by the game’s long loading between menus, and I couldn’t ever quite pin down what could possibly be going on behind the scenes to require such extensive loading between such simple navigational pages.

This clutter showcases one reason that the franchise desperately needs to overhaul its modes in general. Sure, variety is nice, but there are now so many modes buried inside of other modes that a few of them have begun to feel redundant. For instance, Be A Pro continues to be one of the franchise’s weakest offerings, and at this point, it would seem more feasible to just merge it with the online-focused World of Chel.

The developers have obviously shifted the bulk of their attention to this newer mode, and it encompasses the best part of Be A Pro while expanding upon it exponentially in all the ways that matter most to the average player.

Speaking of World of Chel, there’s a bevy of new challenges and content to unlock this year, but more exciting is what’s buried in its menus: an exciting new mode, Eliminator. It takes a page from the popular battle royale genre and pits 81 players against each other in tournament brackets to see who reigns supreme. It’s playable solo or with a squad of three, and I had a good time competing in the solo version’s high-stakes showdowns against two other players at a time. Eliminator forces you to improve your skill in order to stand a chance to progress, and I can see it being the kind of mode that grabs long-time fans seeking new and interesting ways to showcase their proficiency.

"I came down hard on last year’s severely overpriced microtransactions in Ultimate Team, and while I’m still not a fan of spending money to buy in-game content when I’ve already spent $60 on the game, I’m nevertheless happy to report that the prices have evened out some."

Ultimate Team’s new squad battles offer more to do for people who aren’t interested in engaging in NHL 20’s online fantasy mode, allowing them the option to play offline against HUT teams created by the community. Each week brings a new season and the ability to climb the ranks and earn cool rewards, and increasing the difficulty of your opponents’ teams also increases your earned points, giving you a meaningful reason to take chances.

I came down hard on last year’s severely overpriced microtransactions in Ultimate Team, and while I’m still not a fan of spending money to buy in-game content when I’ve already spent $60 on the game, I’m nevertheless happy to report that the prices have evened out some. With lower prices around the board, there’s more incentive to buy packs, which could potentially lead to more players for the mode and more variety among teams.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.

"While it doesn’t hit every note just right, it’s a considerable improvement with more highs than lows."

Let’s get something out of the way up front: I’m embarrassingly bad at simulation racing games. Though I enjoy the tense, unrelenting challenge that comes from gameplay where every move made can make or break your performance, I’ve never quite mastered the art of gentle trigger pressure and making minute steering movements. I can comfortably make my way through more beginner-friendly games like Forza Horizon with its vast open-world design and fewer barriers to laughably crash into, but WRC’s endless tight corners demand rapid decision-making, and its ever-changing conditions require skilled hands behind the controller.

So, luckily, WRC 8 didn’t shut me out. A helpful training mode gave me plenty of opportunity to practice up and relearn its mechanics, and while I was never able to ramp the difficulty past medium to hang with the pros, I never felt like I was being punished for not being a master rally racer. The game’s improved responsiveness forces you to relearn even your most basic skills, like how best to apply the handbrake in hairpins, so even someone with a long history with the franchise is almost guaranteed to benefit from some time in the test mode.

WRC 8 differentiates itself from previous iterations by adopting a full-blown career mode that focuses heavily on team management. Managing both your calendar and your team means a lot of extra work, but thankfully, it’s all pretty straightforward even for less experienced players. Each new team member adds something useful to your crew, such as a mechanic who repairs your car over time or a meteorologist who predicts weather conditions with fluctuating degrees of accuracy so you can have a better idea of what type of tires to use. But like in real life, predictions don’t always end up being correct, so you may find that, despite your crew’s best efforts, things don’t always go as planned. Still, having these different team members working together unison gives you significantly better chances at success.

"WRC 8 differentiates itself from previous iterations by adopting a full-blown career mode that focuses heavily on team management. Managing both your calendar and your team means a lot of extra work, but thankfully, it’s all pretty straightforward even for less experienced players."

Managing your team is multifaceted. Doing well in rallies and earning additional money through completing objectives (such as not using hard tires for a few rallies) is vital to keep a steady flow of cash to pay them all, and you’ll need to rest them individually to ensure they maintain the quality upkeep you need to succeed. Meanwhile, heading over to the R&D area grants you the ability to apply points to an impressively-detailed skill tree. It’s here where you unlock new types of team members or improve their craft, optimize and reinforce your car, and gain access to new abilities and features for yourself and your team. Navigating the game’s menus can be cumbersome and even periodically laggy, but the vast array of options at your disposal is welcomed.

As you manage your career’s calendar, additional events keep things interesting and supplement the official rallies, such as an Extreme Conditions event that places you in a severely damaged car in extreme conditions and tasks you with making it as far as you possibly can. A bevy of training events allow you a bit of freedom by letting you continue on for as long as you’d like in an attempt to earn medals for beating best times. Having this collection of thing to do in between longer rally stages keeps things from growing stale quickly, and I appreciated the diversity between them.

On the casual end of the spectrum, you can opt to skip the team management of the career mode in WRC 8’s season mode and take part in rallies without getting buried in the details, or if you’re just looking for unfettered access to the game’s 100 stages, quick play can get you behind the wheel driving somewhere beautiful. If you’re a highly skilled player looking to test your mettle, eSports events give competitive you the ability to compete against the best of the best.

"A bevy of training events allow you a bit of freedom by letting you continue on for as long as you’d like in an attempt to earn medals for beating best times. Having this collection of thing to do in between longer rally stages keeps things from growing stale quickly, and I appreciated the diversity between them."

Due to being given an early review code for the game, I was unable to find any online matches. Even so, the normal options apply here – finding or creating a lobby comes with a suite of difficulty and category options to help narrow things down, and a “quick game” option gets the ball rolling without being tasked with deciding between those pesky options. Meanwhile, a split screen option keeps thing old-school for anyone wanting to have some friendly couch competition.

Since each rally comes with its own set of unique weather conditions and road types, WRC 8 demands you adapt each time you get behind the wheel. One rally may see you racing on snowy mountain roads that require you to be skilled at managing your speeds and manoeuvres, and another’s gravel roads may suffer from poor conditions and potholes, demanding that you adapt to the consistently bumpy ride. Considering my low to medium skill level, I’m always a fan of faster rallies that allow me to reach high speeds and take on heart-stopping jumps, but I quickly found that conditions and expectations can change like the wind, so staying focused is mandatory to succeed.

Unlike previous games in the series, the weather in WRC 8 is randomized and dynamic. A massive thunderstorm is unlikely to hit you in the midst of a beautiful, sunny drive through Finland’s countryside. Instead, you’ll notice a slow onset of turbulent weather alongside slowly degrading driving conditions, meaning you’re forced to continuously adjust your braking distances as puddles fill up and mud begins to replace dry, dusty roads. And with cool new features like realistic tire deformation – an addition that sees your tires scrub off throughout the rally and can eventually lead to blow outs – weather can take a true toll on your driving experience and leave you in one hell of a predicament. Visual cues and slowly changing conditions mean that you’re just as reliant on your staff’s predictions as you are on your own driving skills, creating a genuine sense of synergy that drives home WRC 8’s focus on team mechanics in its career mode.

"Visual cues and slowly changing conditions mean that you’re just as reliant on your staff’s predictions as you are on your own driving skills, creating a genuine sense of synergy that drives home WRC 8’s focus on team mechanics in its career mode."

Even on the PS4 Pro, the game’s occasionally excessive screen tearing and pop-in can be distracting, and the sound regularly lags behind what is happening on-screen. Visually, WRC 8 falls largely short of contemporaries like Codemasters’ attractive DiRT Rally 2.0, but it’s not an ugly game. Most of the cars in the game are immaculately detailed, and though much of the architecture is blocky and severely lacking in detail, overall texture quality and lighting brings life to each stage admirably. Unfortunately, damage modeling on the cars themselves is fairly unimpressive from a visual standpoint – no matter how many times I tested it by ramming my front bumper into something, it created the same static damage visuals. None of this is offensively bad when focusing on the ever-intensive driving, but stopping to look around is guaranteed to occasionally result in disappointing results.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.

Astral Chain takes place in 2078, and Earth has become uninhabitable, forcing what is left of the human species to migrate to an advanced city known as The Ark. You’re placed in the shoes of a male or female twin enlisted in a special task force known as Neuron during their fight against an encroaching threat of the Chimera, an interdimensional alien species. There’s nothing new here at first glance, but the twist is apparent quickly: Humanity has found a way to capture and convert these creatures into allies. Now known as Legions, these subservient Chimera connect to you via a chain and fight alongside you as you push back the alien invasion.

"With each new game, PlatinumGames aims to push boundaries and entice gamers to lose themselves in strange and compelling worlds where physics seem like an afterthought and characters are as zany as they are relatable. Their newest game, Astral Chain, is a progression of this design mantra while somehow feeling like a more mature and refined experience despite its wacky premise."

If it all sounds kind of insane, that’s because it is. But even so, Astral Chain never falls victim to feeling hokey thanks to its absolutely stellar production quality and devotion to making its premise feel grounded in the world you’re inhabiting. Set-piece moments are executed with finesse and exceptional camera work, and the believable voice acting is miles beyond any I’ve heard from other anime-style games. The developers frame scenes so perfectly even during simple moments of dialogue, giving Astral Chain a film-esque tone that begs for a movie or show adaptation. This is all helped by the fact that Astral Chain is probably the best-looking game currently available on the Switch. Its striking cel-shaded visuals are reminiscent of something like A Scanner Darkly, making its anime art style pop off the screen with vibrant use of colors and lighting as you venture across its neon-drenched cyberpunk city.

While I hate to add to the list of people who compare games to Dark Souls, bear with me as I irritate you with the comparison for a moment. Make no mistake – Astral Chain’s combat isn’t deliberate like Dark Souls; it’s an entrancing symphony of beautiful chaos and visual spectacle. But much like the newer Assassin’s Creed games revamped their combat by borrowing certain combat mechanics from games like Dark Souls (minus the oppressive challenge), Astral Chain does the same. You click the right stick to lock on to enemies, use ZR to attack them, and use B to dodge – and it all initially feels very similar to anyone familiar with the Souls-like genre or the games that have adopted its mechanics, something my muscle memory appreciated. But the familiarity stops when you factor in the chained Legions that serve as a direct extension of your character.

The Legions do plenty of attacking by themselves during the intense, exciting combat encounters while you dodge and maneuver about the battlefield getting in hits as you can and setting up cool combo possibilities. As you both whittle away at enemies’ health, you’ll often time your attacks together perfectly and result in synchronized attacks that give you the opportunity to do some extra damage. Meanwhile, if you’re adept at dodging, you can slow down time momentarily and get some shots in on an enemy’s back for even more damage. If you’re not adept at it, you’ll need to practice because much of the game’s combat boils down to you out-manoeuvring your opponents – you can tank a handful of hits, but you won’t last long blatantly ignoring the B button.

"The developers frame scenes so perfectly even during simple moments of dialogue, giving Astral Chain a film-esque tone that begs for a movie or show adaptation. This is all helped by the fact that Astral Chain is probably the best-looking game currently available on the Switch."

In typical PlatinumGames fashion, it wouldn’t feel right without some eccentric abilities, and the ones in Astral Chain don’t disappoint. You can directly control your Legion and use the chain binding them to you to wrap up enemies and pin them down, an especially invaluable asset against bosses and larger enemies. Additionally, a chain jump gives you the ability to propel yourself to your Legion, giving you a much needed boon to your mobility that really comes in handy both for getting to enemies or getting away from them as necessary. Your Legion has a time limit before it needs to recharge, and it’s not until you don’t have these extra abilities for controlling the battlefield that you realize just how significant of an impact they have on fights.

Astral Chain boasts five total Legion types that unlock as you progress the game’s story. Each one is an equally important asset to have – one aggressively melees with a sword, one shoots arrows to knock down flying enemies, one can be used like a suit of armor to grant you heavy attacks, another can be used as a mount, and a late-game Legion offers helpful defensive capabilities. Each of them possess skill trees, but they all basically mirror one another with only a handful of interesting extra abilities setting them apart. I would’ve definitely preferred more engaging upgrades, but with such an impressive variety of playstyles already available across the five different Legions, I’m just being greedy at this point.

Fighting is only part of the meaty content offered in Astral Chain. When you’re not bashing in Chimera faces, you’ll be partaking in task force investigations and dialogue-heavy quests, both of which sound agonizing on paper and yet somehow manage to be a pleasing break from all the chaos thanks to the game’s phenomenal writing and sense of place. There’s no dearth of enjoyable side-content either, with copious amounts of NPCs to get additional quests from and plenty of extra pathways just begging to be explored. It’s during this side-content that Astral Chain showcases a bounty of heart, and even when my tasks boiled down to something essentially pointless like finding cats hidden in every chapter, I welcomed the levity.

"It’s during this side-content that Astral Chain showcases a bounty of heart, and even when my tasks boiled down to something essentially pointless like finding cats hidden in every chapter, I welcomed the levity."

Even when the game gives you room to breathe, you can rest assured there’s some heart-stopping action on the way soon enough. Much like Nier: Automata before it, Astral Chain deviates from traditional gameplay frequently enough to always keep you on your toes, often throwing entirely new one-off gameplay segments at you that range from simple things like platforming and puzzle-solving to balls-to-the-wall set pieces like riding a motorcycle while shooting enemies or dodging falling vehicles on a collapsing bridge. This endless variety in gameplay means that even if you aren’t particularly fond of one element of the game, you’re sure to find something else that quickly recaptures your attention.

It’s worth noting that playing in docked mode is definitely the best way to enjoy Astral Chain. While the game still looks great in handheld mode, there’s simply so much going on during combat that it can be difficult to keep up with it all when viewing everything so small. I was occasionally unable to see small projectiles and such during more intense battles, but the game isn’t so unforgiving that it made for a poor experience – it’s just a game best enjoyed in all its glory on the biggest screen you can find.

This game was reviewed on the Nintendo Switch.

"Decay of Logos doesn’t just miss the mark. It fails on the most fundamental levels with aggressive mishandling of combat, structure, and balance, and it’s often a downright insufferable experience as a result."

It fancies itself somewhere between Breath of the Wild and Dark Souls with its fairy tale-esque aesthetic, challenging one-on-one lock-on combat, and cryptic narrative. Of these things, its colorful visual style is probably its most appealing quality, yet further examination reveals that the texture quality, slowdown, pop-in, and iffy frame rate would all be at home on the PS2. And I wish that wasn’t just the beginning of the problems.

Let’s just pretend Decay of Logos didn’t crash three times in my first 20 minutes, and let’s pretend it didn’t get stuck on infinite load screens over and over. Alas, even if those game-breaking problems didn’t mar my experience already, they may have still been preferable to actually playing the game.

Decay of Logos initially appeared to nicely check off some of the most basic of the genre’s boxes. Tutorial stones scattered about the world answered basic questions like what buttons attack and how to dodge. As someone with over 2,000 hours invested in Souls-like games, muscle memory was kicking in right away, and I felt briefly hopeful.

I quickly found out that learning how to do these things don’t matter when the very act of executing them is a complete disaster. No matter how much the game attempts to replicate the Souls-like combat experience, it can’t be successful when it just doesn’t work.

"No matter how much the game attempts to replicate the Souls-like combat experience, it can’t be successful when it just doesn’t work."

There’s a general sense of stiffness and sluggishness to everything you do in Decay of Logos. The game often just decides not to register your inputs because of the needlessly long animation locks that occur between actions. Where better games in the genre find the perfect balance of weight and responsiveness, combat in Decay of Logos feels less like a game of calculated risks and more like cumbersome guesswork.

This is compounded by inconsistent hitboxes that cause attacks from the exact same spot to whiff right through enemies sometimes and connect just fine other times, making strategic positioning feel pointless at times. You can stand directly on an enemy and still have your attack periodically just miss for seemingly no reason and get pummeled because of the aforementioned long recovery times.

And things are even worse with enemy attack hitboxes. This is perhaps most notable with the game’s first boss, a giant goblin with an axe. The majority of his attacks are simple forward-facing foot pounds, and even when if you stand fully behind him and keep your distance, the attack will often still register as a hit on you and send you falling to the ground with half of your health lost. I tested it multiple times and found that the hitbox for the attack was basically anywhere within a mile of his foot.

There doesn’t appear to be any refillable Estus Flask-style consumable either. I found scattered health potions during my playtime, but once I had used them, the only means for healing came from sleeping at camps that serve as the game’s version of a bonfire from Dark Souls.

"Where better games in the genre find the perfect balance of weight and responsiveness, combat in Decay of Logos feels less like a game of calculated risks and more like cumbersome guesswork."

Considering every enemy I encountered took off 3/4 of my health in a single hit during the early portion of the game, the lack of healing options meant that each attempt I made to explore the world granted me around two hits. Coupled with the game’s broken combat, this resulted in me stumbling about the open world frustrated and just barely skimming by with the game’s janky, inconsistent combat.

That was, of course, until the automated leveling system started leveling me up. I couldn’t find an experience meter of any sort, so gaining levels felt like random events rather than earned payoffs. But at least I started doing substantially more damage to enemies each time, and that was welcomed, even if it didn’t really change the fact that the combat itself was too unwieldy to ever leave me feeling confident in encounters.

I gained around 4 levels over the course of the next hour and was suddenly killing enemies in a single hit. With this nice boon to my attack power, I continued forward in hopes of overcoming the fundamental flaws in the combat design, if only to see if the game’s other features were at least mildly interesting enough to earn it a bit of praise.

Instead, what little of the world I managed to explore was full of barren open spaces and dull architecture with tedious ladder-climbing sections basically everywhere I turned. Enemy variety primarily ranged from walking trees to walking trees with shields. As with any Souls-like, I at least somewhat enjoyed exploring nooks and crannies to uncover secrets, but even those typically didn’t yield worthwhile rewards.

"As with any Souls-like, I at least somewhat enjoyed exploring nooks and crannies to uncover secrets, but even those typically didn’t yield worthwhile rewards."

When I did find something, it was usually some type of armor or weapon I had already seen drop a dozen times. Since the game uses a degradation system, finding and replacing armor with the same type seems to be part of the game design. That never really bothered me, and finding a cool new weapon was always a highlight; I never felt like I had to use the same one too long before discovering something with better stats. If the combat wasn’t so atrocious, I would’ve thoroughly enjoyed using them and learning their unique timing windows.

There’s a rideable elk that follows you in your journey and even periodically comes in handy for solving puzzles. Riding it required me to obtain berries (used to calm the beast) scattered about the world, but they were plentiful. Despite my constant pounding of the X button to make it go, it just slowly meandered about as if it didn’t even notice my character’s feet relentlessly beating its sides. The extreme sensitivity of the stick caused it to just walk into the walls and structures as I tried to direct it where to go. Thanks, but no thanks.

All of my Souls-like experience and unwavering dedication didn’t prepare me for this travesty, and by the end of my time with Decay of Logos, I didn’t walk away feeling hopeful for its future. Even if Decay of Logos receives future patches to improve its slowdown, wacky hitboxes, and constant bugs, the stiff and frustrating combat and general lack of soul would still ensure it was never worthy of your time.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.