REDFALL

Redfall always looked like it was going to be very different from Arkane’s traditional offerings, but the general expectation was that, given the studio’s innate talent and impeccable track record, it would at least be a good, well put together game. In the end, it definitely wasn’t. Not only does Redfall almost completely lack the strengths one usually associates an Arkane game with, it’s not even good at the new things it tries, with everything from its open world and its co-op gameplay to its loot mechanis coming with major issues. Add to all of that some significan technical hiccups, and what you have is a game that woefully falls short of expectations for an Arkane joint.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: GOLLUM

Let’s be fair here, no one really expected The Lord of the Rings: Gollum to be anything more than middling or passably enjoyable at best- but we also didn’t expect it to be literally one of the worst games in recent memory. Daedalic Entertainment’s stealth action-adventure game took its sweet time to finally release, and when it did, it stumbled with its first step and fell flat on its face. Nothing about The Lord of the Rings: Gollum works. It has boring quest design, little to no exploration, broken combat and traversal mechanics, and a deluge of technical and performance problems that make it nigh on impossible to get through. You don’t play The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. You endure it.

LAYERS OF FEAR

For a while, Bloober Team has been pumping out psychological horror games that range from middling to genuinely good, and this year, the studio went back to the very beginning to bring back Layers of Fear. Combining, connecting, and reimagining the first two games while adding its own new content on top, the new Layers of Fear looks excellent and has a fascinating premise- but as is often the case with Bloober, it doesn’t do justice to that premise. It ends up being a fairly dull, repetetive, and rote game that relies on its visual prowess to the exclusion of almost everything else. We can only hope the Silent Hill 2 remake fares significantly better.

TCHIA

We’d had our eye on Tchia for a while before it launched, with Awaceb’s tropical action-adventure game looking increasingly promising with each of its pre-launch showings, and though the final product is certainly not without its merits, it didn’t quite live up to our expectations. Yes, it has a gorgeous setting, and making your way around the island is fun, for the most part. But the game’s mechanics and systems never quite manage to get their hooks in, leaving us with a pretty but fairly unremarkable experience.

CRIME BOSS: ROCKAY CITY

Over the years, many have tried their hand at the co-op first person shooter heist genre, and very few have managed to enjoy the kind of success that the Payday series has seen. Crime Boss: Rockay City was certainly eyeing that throne, and with its star-studded cast of actors, it looked like it might actually take a big swing. The actual game itself, however, was not only disappointing, it was just downright terrible. Whether you’re playing its single player roguelike campaign or diving into its co-op offerings, the game’s aggressive mediocrity taints every second you spend with it, with its awful voice acting, bland design, repetitive loop, and boring core gameplay dragging down the experience into the doldrums.

RAVENBOUND

Ravenbound has a promising premise on paper as an open world roguelite set in a world inspired by Scandinavian folklore, but when you actually get down to playing the game, you realize that it’s woefully underbaked in almost every way that matters. Its world is a vast one, but given how empty, bland, and vapid it generally feels, exploration ends up being significantly de-emphasized. Combat can get repetitive instead of decent enemy variety, while the game also does itself no favours with its poorly balanced difficulty curve. Add to that an unfortunately healthy dose of technical issues, and you get a pretty underwhelming game.

FORSPOKEN

A big new AAA open world IP from Square Enix? To say that people were curious to see how Forspoken would fare would be an understatement, even back when it was called Project Athia, though unfortunately, it didn’t even come close to matching expectations. A premise that’s interesting on paper is let down by annoying characters and poor writing. An open world that should have been begging to be explored ended up being empty and uninteresting. The combat system, while flashy and enjoyable, failed to make up for deficiencies in boring quest design. The fact that Forspoken failed to meet Square Enix’s commercial expectations was, ultimately, not surprising in the slightest.

THE LAST OF US PART 1 PC

Frankly, we’re still baffled that this was allowed to exist. Naughty Dog, more than almost any other studio in the entire industry, is associated with an obsessive level of attention to detail and quality assurance. Polish and Naughty Dog go hand-in-hand- which is why it’s so surprising that The Last of Us Part 1’s PC port might be one of the worst PC ports in recent memory. Even looking at brief clips and individual screenshots, it was hard to believe that something this broken had been allowed to release. When you actually played it, it quickly became apparent that the state of the game was somehow even worse. It’s a real shame, too, because this will forever be remembered as the manner in which this legendary franchise made its PC debut.

LEGO 2K DRIVE

Unlike many other games on this list, LEGO 2K Drive is not without its merits. Its world is vibrant and colourful, it has an impressive suite of customization options for building any kind of car you want, and, as you’d expect from a LEGO game, it’s very kid-friendly and easy to get into. It is, however, also quite vapid. What you see is very much what you get, and with that lack of depth, LEGO 2K Drive ends up like a shallow experience that runs out of steam too quickly, whether that’s because of its how uninteresting open world exploration is, or its lackluster optional content, or any number of other issues.

LEAP

LEAP isn’t exactly a game that’s grabbed a whole lot of headlines, so to say that expectations were high wouldn’t exactly be fair. But this is still very much a game that doesn’t do justice to its interesting premise. The sci-fi competitive FPS boasts slick visuals and cool traversal options, but all of that gets bogged down in its tedious gameplay loop and how unsatisfying its moment-to-moment gameplay largely feels. Especially in a genre that’s this competitive, LEAP fails to make a mark in any meaningful way.

STRAYED LIGHTS

We don’t want to be unfair on Strayed Lights here, because for a game developed by a small team with a unique vision, it does actually get some things right. The story, the music, and the aesthetic, for instance, are legitimately solid and worthy of praise. There’s plenty else in the game, however, that drags the experience down, from its frustrating combat to the lackluster platform to its technical issues. The fact that there are parts of the game that are genuinelty good makes the parts that aren’t feel that much more frustrating.

STRAY BLADE

You’ll never see us turning down the chance to play a new Soulslike, especially one that’s trying to shake up the genre’s formula the way Stray Blade was promising it would. But though there’s something to be said about the idea of viewing the genre through a less gloomy lens, the actual execution of many of the game’s core pillars leaves a lot to be desired. The clunky controls, uninspired level design, and technical issues combine to make Stray Blade quite a frustrating experience, even if it isn’t one that’s totally without its merits.

CRASH TEAM RUMBLE

Again, in the name of fairness, it’s worth pointing out that Crash Team Rumble is definitely a game that you can have plenty of fun with- especially for fans of the series, given how well it translates that Crash feel into a MOBA experience. As it stands right now though, it’s also pretty barebones, with its launch offerings, especially in terms of the modes on offer, being quite limited. Of course, we’re hoping that Crash Team Rumble will be supported so well that including it on this list in retrospect feels like a mistake- but with live service games, you can never tell how long of a lifespan to expect.

GREYHILL INCIDENT

A small production in every way possible, criticising Greyhill Incident would almost feel unfair under most circumstances- but unfortunately, there’s plenty to criticize in this game. The core premise of a survival horror game where your main enemies are aliens is certainly an interesting one, but from its awful dialogue to its painfully shallow mechanics to the mind-numbing level design, Greyhill Incident messes up (to say the very least) in too many ways to be anything more than a disappointment. And even that might be a generous description.

RISEN (PS4)

In the many, many years since its launch, the original Risen has amassed a reputation as one of the RPG genre’s proper diamonds in the rough, though with its 2023 port, there was way more of the rough than there was of the diamond. Janky animations, disappointing and minimal updates to the gameplay and visuals, clunky combat, and technical problems combined to paint the ageing experience in what wasn’t exactly the most flattering light. Maybe this is one flawed gem that should have been left in the past.

This sci-fi competitive FPS is brought to us by Blue Isle Studios, a name that probably scratches somewhere at the back of your memory and conjures up a certain feeling of uneasiness. That would probably be because Blue Isle’s first game was Slender: The Arrival. Not a AAA experience by any means, but a mostly effective indie horror game that used its limited resources effectively.

Since that debut, Blue Isle have released a couple of games that would probably be described by most as “average”, but at least they had some kind of spark or creativity behind them. So, why the history lesson?

LEAP is their latest game, and somehow their least inspired one as well.

"From the moment you start LEAP, it feels pretty barebones."

From the moment you start LEAP, it feels pretty barebones. The Overwatch-like start screen presents players with LEAP’s handful of features, including its class customization, daily challenges, and the marketplace where you can purchase things like keychains for your guns, taunts, and other cosmetics with in-game currency. It appears that this currency is earned only from gameplay, as I didn’t see any options to purchase it and the PlayStation Store doesn’t have the game marked for microtransactions. This is a point in LEAP’s favor since it’s commonplace for paid games to have microtransactions on top of the cost of entry.

Another cool feature LEAP offers is crossplay between PC and PlayStation gamers, which opens up the competition pool considerably. If you prefer to not be decimated by keyboard and mouse users though, crossplay can be turned off from the start screen.

As for actual game modes, selecting the play option on the start screen brings up a few options: Special Operations, PVP, Server Browser, and Practice. LEAP doesn’t appear to force the tutorial on you, but I would recommend checking it out anyways before getting into the real game modes. There’s a little bit of nuance to the controls that I had some trouble with initially.

Now for the three main game modes. Special Operations is the mission-based co-op option, PVP offers up to forty-person battles (although I never saw a battle of that size), and Server Browser which allows players to find an open server with a specific set of parameters that can be set with filters. All the game modes you would expect are represented, with equivalents for capture the flag, team deathmatch, control point, etcetera.

"Functionally, LEAP is fine. It has everything you would want in a competitive FPS, and it’s not bad looking either. Just a little bland."

Functionally, LEAP is fine. It has everything you would want in a competitive FPS, and it’s not bad looking either. Just a little bland. The graphics are simple and the designs of the character models are forgettable. It’s definitely not pushing the PS5 hardware in any way, but there’s enough detail and visual interest to keep players engaged. Where LEAP doesn’t manage to stick the landing, is unfortunately where it matters most: its gameplay.

I played a round of Special Operations first, which didn’t really set high expectations for the rest of the experience. These missions are supposed to be co-op with online partners, and this first round did say that it had found a match for me, but I was still dropped into the mission by myself. This ended up not being too much of an issue as it seems that difficulty is balanced depending on how many players are in a match, because I was essentially a one-man army, taking shots from all sides but only sustaining minimal damage.

In another game, this might have been fun or empowering. But in LEAP, it really just felt like a shooting gallery. Enemy drop pods crash into the ground at a rate that should be overwhelming, but the enemies that exit that wreckage seem to just walk toward you or stand still and fire. There are no interesting tactics or much enemy variety at all to speak of. They’ll either have machine guns, sniper rifles, or rocket launchers, and that’s it.

Taking down wave after wave of mindless enemies was particularly easy in Special Operations thanks to the egregious aim assist. If you’re aiming at one enemy and decide to set your sites on another without destroying the first one, getting your reticule to move off of that first target feels bad. The aim assist is too sticky and unyielding. There’s no way to lessen the effect of the auto-aim, but you can turn it off. I didn’t notice this issue in PVP, which is a good thing. PVP matches were moderately fun if only because they bypassed the monotonous wave-based nonsense Special Operations devolve into.

"What’s not fun are technical issues, and I experienced a few of those in my time with LEAP. Connection issues are something you used to have to just accept with a game of this type, but other games have made great improvements in this area that LEAP doesn’t seem to take advantage of."

Both Special Operations and PVP matches take place in large open maps that were clearly designed for the larger matches LEAP advertises. I didn’t see matches of more than eight to ten players though, so the maps felt needlessly vast. But at least LEAP includes a few interesting ways to get around: mounts called PVs, and Attack on Titan-style grappling lines. I only used a hoverboard, but I saw some wild vehicles like a robo-moose, a rocket-powered innertube, and a very cool glider to name a few. So at least there’s a solid amount of variety in this area, even if they all control the same.

I found the process to summon your PV to be a little fiddly, and it just explodes when you begin firing which makes it unavailable until you respawn. Thankfully the grapple lines are always there for you, and they’re a ton of fun to use. It’s not as smooth as the Attack on Titan games and it’s definitely not as good as Spider-Man’s web-swinging, but being able to point in a direction, latch on, and zip forward was fun every time. Taking potshots at enemies as you zip by them is also very fun.

What’s not fun are technical issues, and I experienced a few of those in my time with LEAP. Connection issues are something you used to have to just accept with a game of this type, but other games have made great improvements in this area that LEAP doesn’t seem to take advantage of. I had several matches that were plagued with lag to the point that I left and tried to join a new one. When your entire game hinges on its online experience, the amount of trouble I experienced is game-ruining.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 5.

NOTE: This interview was conducted prior to the game’s early access launch.

"From day one, movement was a core design pillar. We want you to be able to navigate in truly unique and fun ways."

What can you tell us about the playable classes in LEAP and the different play styles they will enable?

We’ve got four playable classes, which we call exosuits. Each one is quite different in how you play them. We wanted to make players feel like superheroes, but with machineguns, so we mixed in some familiar weapons with a lot of really unconventional stuff. Each class also comes equipped with an array of movement types and unique abilities which supports a lot of different plastyles. For example, our Pathfinder class will likely appeal to someone who plays a traditional shooter, but something like the Titan with its jetpack and ability to hover in the air like a gunship, or a Tech Ops who uses a combination of support and unique weapons. There really should be something for everyone to enjoy.

Movement seems like it’s going to be an important part of the core gameplay. How much of an emphasis does the game put on that, and how does something like that change how you approach map design?

From day one, movement was a core design pillar. We want you to be able to navigate in truly unique and fun ways. It makes a gunfight feel totally different since both players are often airborne. As such, everything we build has to be designed with this in mind and fortunately we had a lot of experience building environments for something like this from our previous game, Valley. We decided to focus mostly on large outdoor environments, give players a lot of room to roam around. In a traditional shooter, for example, something like a crate is an obstacle to hide behind or navigate around. In our game, our version of a crate is a full two-story house. You can hide behind it, run around it or soar right overtop by using your grappling hook or a quick double jump. It really forces you to rethink how you design and navigate a world like this.

What can you tell us about LEAP’s maps? What should players expect in terms of size and variety of the environments?

In terms of theming, most things are relatively grounded but set some time in the future. We wanted players to see an everyday object, but treat it in a completely different way that you normally would. It sort of enhances the feeling of power you get as a player. With that said, there is a lot of variety, we tried to pick really cool locations from around the world. In terms of size, our maps are quite large but are designed to scale in size depending on player count. Our map boundaries adjust and we’ve tried to design everything to be satisfying for both small and large groups of players. In our largest game modes, everything is quite wide open and free flowing.

"Our map boundaries adjust and we’ve tried to design everything to be satisfying for both small and large groups of players. In our largest game modes, everything is quite wide open and free flowing."

With each map in LEAP having different variants for different modes, was the process of designing around those requirements a challenging one? 

It is definitely a challenge, for example, designing a Capture the Core (our version of CTF) is totally different than a Control style map (capture points). With that said, the core of the game is how you move around the world and that means our maps need to be quite large. Because they are so large, we were actually able to pick different locations on the same map for different game modes. So if you played Capture the Core on our Haze map for example, that battle takes place in a totally different part compared to a Team Annihilation match (team deathmatch).

Can you tell us how the game’s overarching progression system will function?

Most in game actions you perform have an XP value associated with them. XP that you accumulate during a match helps you progress your main player rank and also levels up your individual exosuits. Leveling up your exosuits is important, because you unlock more gear, weapons and abilities for your loadouts. Additionally, there are thousands of unique cosmetic items you can unlock. Lastly, progression and XP leveling carries over across all game modes, whether you are playing a Special Operations PvE match, or one of our game modes within Competitive PvP play.

How extensive will the customization options in LEAP be?

I’d say reasonably extensive to start, with plans to significantly expand as we develop further. Each exosuit has a lot of different armor sets to unlock, all of our weapons have a lot of variety in paint styles. We’ve also got our personal vehicles which are pretty awesome, each of those have a lot of different paint jobs to choose from. Then there’s our player dances/emotes, weapon keychains and lots more coming. In total, we’ve got about one year’s worth of cosmetic content planned, with our ingame store cycling new items every day or week depending on rarity.

How much variety should players expect from the different personal vehicles in the game? Will each control differently?

In our early versions, the personal vehicles all controlled differently. It was fun but also presented a lot of challenges, mostly in terms of gameplay balancing. We ended up simplifying the system and giving the same movement abilities and stats to all of our personal vehicles, so today they are more of a visual expression type of thing instead of a gameplay decision for a player to make. For example, do you want to ride into battle on a robotic moose, do backflips on a hoverboard, or jump around in a bouncy ball? We’ve got lots of options to choose from, some are kind of funny and others are more serious looking.

"In the early days we’ll be doing very frequent updates. Because we are in early access that means bug fixes, rapid balance adjustments and other critical issues. Once that calms down a bit, we’ve got more weapons, abilities, exosuits, new maps and even brand new game modes in the works."

Are you building LEAP as a purely multiplayer experience, or do you have plans for single player or other similar PvE content down the road as well?

We’ve actually got both PvP and PvE in the modes for early access launch. PvP, which we call Competitive, is split into a bunch of different game modes. We also developed PvE Special Operations missions, which allow you to team up with other players and cooperatively fight through hordes of enemies together, this one is actually my favourite. Special Operations are designed to scale difficulty depending on player count, so you can play it solo or with up to three other teammates.

What sort of a content rollout plan do you have for LEAP during its early access period? What should players expect in terms of the frequency and size of updates?

In the early days we’ll be doing very frequent updates. Because we are in early access that means bug fixes, rapid balance adjustments and other critical issues. Once that calms down a bit, we’ve got more weapons, abilities, exosuits, new maps and even brand new game modes in the works. On top of this, we have a full years worth of cosmetic content planned, this will let players keep their characters looking cool and fresh each week. Our update schedule as it stands today, is divided into major and minor updates. A minor update could be something like a new personal vehicle, balance adjustments or other smaller types of content. A major update would be new maps, game modes, more Special Operations scenarios, and lots more. We have an internal schedule today, but I’m sure it will change pretty rapidly once we start getting more feedback on the game.

Once LEAP is out of early access, what are your plans regarding post-launch support for the game?

By the time we exit early access, we should have a very good idea of what kind of content everyone is enjoying the most. Today, we have deliberately left those plans a bit vague because we are going to learn so much during early access. Any plans we make today for post 1.0 are likely going to change a lot. With that said, we love this game, we love working on it and we love playing it. We certainly hope to be working on this game for many years post 1.0 launch.

"By the time we exit early access, we should have a very good idea of what kind of content everyone is enjoying the most. Today, we have deliberately left those plans a bit vague because we are going to learn so much during early access."

How will you approach in-game monetization in LEAP?

Right now there is no in-game monetization. If you purchase the game you have the same access to all of the content as any other player, unless you bought the Founders Edition which has some exclusive cosmetic items. We’ve got an in-game store, but it uses a currently that is entirely in-game and earned through gameplay and player level. If we ever did have in-game monetization, we’d keep it to cosmetic items only. I think we’ve all seen too many bad examples of pay to win and that’s something we have zero interest in.

Do you have plans to eventually bring LEAP to other platforms down the line?

As a developer you really want to see as many players as possible enjoy the game you have worked on for so many years. So in short, definitely. We are confirmed coming to Playstation and Xbox as well, that’ll likely be closer to, or simultaneous with the 1.0 launch. Aside from those, we’ll definitely look at other platforms that make sense.