HIGH An extremely satisfying gameplay loop.

LOW It’s not very obvious on how to “win” a run.

WTF Body horror… in my roguelite?

We’ve done it, folks. We’ve made a slot-machine roguelite. I think we can pack it up for the rest of time because we’ve made the single most addicting videogame known to man.

In all honesty, CloverPit somehow works as a videogame on a level that I didn’t know was possible. Instead of sticking to a source material’s roots and then adding endless customization like poker in Balatro, or weaving in story to build a larger world as seen in Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers, CloverPit takes slot machines in a more horrifying direction.

Here, the player is trapped in the “CloverPit,” a 5×5 box of a room with a slot machine, a coin depository, an item shop, and not much else. It’s here where the player must play a slot machine and deposit enough coins by each deadline, or else risk the floor opening up and falling to their death. There are ways to rig the machine and items to save the player in times of distress, but ultimately, they’re at the mercy of Lady Luck.

So much of what makes a videogame great is atmosphere, but atmosphere isn’t limited to just music or the art direction. It’s ultimately a collection of small choices that make the experience enjoyable or memorable — sound effects, lighting, and small programming quirks. 

CloverPit has all of these and more. It’s filled with a kind of alchemy that I can barely explain in words, but it has that special sauce where every mechanic is designed to to keep people playing for as long as they can. Each set of spins sounds off with a garbled, electronic announcer saying “Let’s go gambling!” followed by satisfying sounds whenever the machine scores a pattern, and dissatisfying ones whenever they come up short. 

…But the horror is where CloverPit starts to get interesting.

See, the player is “promised” a way out of the pit if they score enough points on the slot machine – but that’s only one piece of the puzzle. Each time they pass a scoring threshold, they’re forced to play again but just reach a higher point total. Eventually, they’re asked to get enough points to unlock a key that seems like a way out, but…

These evil undertones are even more exaggerated by CloverPit‘s dark, hard polygonal art style – which actually did make me feel like I was trapped in a pit with no escape. I felt compelled to play the slots, not just to beat the game, but to get the hell out of the pit. 

Unlike similar roguelites such as Balatro, it’s not obvious how to build a winning run in CloverPit. A slot machine seems like the most luck-of-the-draw machine out there, but CloverPit teaches the player how to win through various trials by fire. Since each round is a gamble, the player had better capitalize on every opportunity by knowing what they want to get out of it.

Each round starts with a choice — spin three times and get two tickets to buy items, or spin seven times and only get one ticket. Rounds pass with more and more choices, where players need to balance keeping enough coins to pass a deadline against buying items that will ultimately increase that coin total. Sometimes a spin will produce enough coins to pass a deadline early, granting the player an extra bonus of coins and tickets to splurge in the item shop. Yet maybe passing that deadline early isn’t the best idea – maybe they want to keep spinning in order to to bank coins for future rounds if they find their winning strategy is petering out. 

This decision-making in CloverPit feels also more weighty than other roguelikes because of the chances that I would be stopped in my tracks due to bad luck. Many runs become dead-on-arrival if the player doesn’t get items that either increase the score from each successful spin, or items that rig the slot machine to make certain symbols appear more often — and don’t forget about the chance to spin a 666, which causes the player to lose all money earned in that round! 

…But when I put things together correctly, avoided the 666 and I did win – ooh boy, that was the best feeling ever.

I haven’t even scratched the surface of what the slot machine has to offer in terms of winning strategies or clever tricks, as there are countless items to unlock, game modifiers to equip, and just more to play. In a decade where certain titles toe the line between gambling and games, CloverPit performs that dance beautifully and produces an unforgettable roguelite experience as a result — it’s a delight, and one of the most delightfully frustrating things I’ve played this year. 

Score: 8 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Panik Arcade and published by Future Friends Games. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PC. Approximately 6 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is rated T for Teen on the ESRB. The game does have a small amount of gore and blood. Players must equip bloody human bones to get past certain portions of the game and there is blood lining the shelves within the cell the main character is trapped in.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game’s story is text-only but the subtitles cannot be resized. The game is not fully accessible. There are no audio cues needed for successful play.\

Remappable Controls: CloverPit is mouse and keyboard only, and there are a few different layouts for keyboards included beyond QWERTY. There are no remap options besides those.

The post CloverPit Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

This is a transcript excerpt covering the score awarded to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 on the So Videogames podcast, Episode 438. For the original coverage of the game, please listen to Episode 436 and Episode 437.

Final circle back is for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I talked about it last episode. Really liked it a lot. I ended up finishing the campaign between then and now. Took me ultimately about between 25 to 28 hours. And full disclosure, I just mainlined once I kind of got the grasp of the game. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is really a very interesting game on many levels, and I’m kind of toying with the idea of giving it a full review here, but I’m not sure.

Let me talk about it for a minute. We’ll see how I feel, I guess. But I mean overall. Okay. So let me just kind of nutshell, like I covered it pretty in depth last episode, I believe, or the one before, but recently. And anyway, now that I’ve kind of gotten into it, like I think there’s so many really cool things about it, I think the art design is great. I love the character designs, I love the vibe like their suits and the way they look like real people. And I think that a lot of the graphics are just really, really nice. The art style is definitely its own thing and it has its own style, and one of the things I was most impressed with in the campaign was how much they got across with just a look, a raised eyebrow when Gustav looks over and raises an eyebrow when he’s talking to someone. Or sometimes at camp, like two characters will kind of like look at each other and, you know, maybe a couple words will pass between them. But really, like, it’s just like a tilt of a head or the corner of a mouth raising up a little bit. I think they do a lot of really, really notable, um, expression work in this game that I think a lot of other games could take some notes from. So I think that’s pretty outstanding.

The music. I mean, probably the best soundtrack that we’re going to hear this year. And I really don’t think that I’m overstating the case there. I don’t think that’s hyperbole at all. I feel like every track is phenomenal. The overall composition for the entire piece as a game is phenomenal. I very rarely notice music, but this music, like, jumped up and slapped me in the face and said, you will pay attention to me. And I’m like, yes, yes, I absolutely will. Uh, all the different like themes and and moments that were supported and underscored by the song. The soundtrack is just like, you know, very rarely. If you listen to this show for any length of time, you know that I very rarely talk about music because I just, I don’t know, it just doesn’t factor in that much for me very often. But in this game, I think the music is an absolute triumph. Like just just off the hook. Amazing. In terms of the story not going to spoil anything here. This is not a spoiler cast and I okay, so I’ve got issues with some parts of it. I don’t think that it was 100% executed flawlessly as it could have been. I felt like there was a couple for me anyway, a couple beats where I felt like, okay, maybe that was a misstep, or maybe they could have sped something up over here, or they could have taken time over here.

Um, but talking about the main story itself, I know other people have described it like this, but wow, what a wild swing for the fences. And to be perfectly frank, I think it succeeds. I wasn’t sure where it was going. I was very curious to find out. And, and and the overall experience, I do want to say that the story is what carried me forward. I absolutely wanted to see how this was going to turn out. I was so curious to see what the writers had come up with. And they, they they surprised me, man. They really surprised me. It was nuanced. I think it was delicate. I think it was surprising. I think it was a really, really fine piece of writing. Overall. It showed restraint in some areas. It showed boldness in other areas. Again, not going to spoil anything, but I will say it is absolutely worth seeing to the end. And I don’t think that’s true of all RPG games. It wasn’t just a matter of what quests got finished and did the good guys win the end? It was absolutely about what is even happening and what is going on with these characters. And I was just so, so curious. And I do feel like ultimately the payoff was there. I do feel like it succeeded in that way. And it was really, really something else. Um, so yes, I think the story is a win. Absolutely not perfect. I think there’s a couple things I would change, but but a win.

And I think it’s also notable. Kind of like what they did with the facial expressions. I think there’s a lot of lessons to be taken from this story. I think it shows that we can reach for higher heights than perhaps writers have recently. I think that players are on board to be a little bit more challenged in some ways. I think that the writing really goes above and beyond, and I do want to celebrate it for that. So I think that’s incredible. Um, okay. As for the rest of it, I think that in terms of production and the gameplay, I think that’s where the game kind of, I hesitate to say it like it falls down for me, but I think perhaps, maybe that’s where I don’t click with it as strongly as I did with the other aspects. Um, I think that, I mean, number one UI is not great. The UI could be better. I think the tutorials are not great. Tutorials could be a lot better, especially for some of the systems, which I think are pretty intricate. Uh, some of the characters especially like CL like I just never fully understood her powers. And there’s a couple other aspects that I felt like really could have been tightened up a little bit. Um, I do think that the lack of a map genuinely hurts the game. I think the mini maps in each level are.

The lack of mini map is a big detriment, because I got confused and turned around all the time, constantly got lost. I can’t even count the number of times I thought I was moving forward, only to find myself back at the entry point of the map to realize I had simply retraced my steps and didn’t even know it until I got there. And I’m like, okay, that happened way too many times. And so these maps, I think are a problem. I think they need a mini map. I think also you need a quest list. I don’t think a quest list would be wrong. I think, um, being able, being able to put markers or just being able to like organize the world a little bit more, I think would have really helped. I know the team seems like they were kind of going for something outside the norm, and I think they did that in all the ways that really count. But I think taking away these kind of concessions to the player and quality of life things, that is not someplace that you need to push the boundaries. I think I think making the game easier to play for people who are busy, who have kids, who have spouses, who have jobs, who may have to be away from the game a couple days before they come back. I mean, those things are there for a reason. We’ve developed those things over time for reasons, and I don’t think it was great for them to, like, take that stuff away.

I will also say that. So I guess I’m of two minds when it comes to the main campaign. You can mainline the campaign, which is what I did. If you just go from hotspot to hotspot, boom, boom, boom all the way through. The difficulty is pretty easy and pretty straightforward, and I think I appreciated that. And I liked the ability to just go do the main story and be done, which is what I did. But that said, I would have liked more of an off ramp into some of the side activities. There’s actually quite a bit of side content which I did not engage in for a couple of reasons. Number one, I could never remember where it was after I decided I wasn’t going to do it at the time, I couldn’t come back to it. I just I didn’t have a notebook and a pen with me. I didn’t remember where things were and so I very often just forgot and I didn’t want to waste my time looking around. I don’t think that it’s easy to get around from place to place. I think fast travel at a certain point would have been fine. You do eventually get a flight ability, which helps, but it’s not the same thing as fast travel, especially when you’re trying to remember. Where was that one thing that I saw six hours ago? Was it here or was it here? Was it here I can’t remember, and being able to fast travel would have sped that up a little bit, just for practicality’s sake.

You know, I think also there weren’t very many pointers towards the side content. I know that there are companion quests, but I didn’t see any during my playthrough. I don’t know whether I just didn’t talk to people enough or whatever, but like a little more flagging, like I think would have helped. I know that they are kind of leaning into the exploration, but between the lack of a map and the lack of, um, the larger overworld map and the lack of fast travel and the lack of a quest list, I wasn’t really incentivized to do a lot of that searching for things. It felt like kind of a waste of time to just blindly go after things, and I just didn’t care for that. And I will also say that a lot of the side content was much, much, much, much, much harder than the main content, which I guess is fine, but I think having some of it be just easier and more approachable would be great. I felt like every time I tried to go off the beaten track, I got kicked in the face and that was a big problem. It really discouraged me from doing the other stuff. Um, so I think that was an issue.

I will also say that this game to me feels like it’s two halves on the one half. You have the story of the expeditioners and the cool narrative and the events of what happened. And then the other half is the combat system, and I feel like the game really hinges very heavily on the combat system, where I think anybody can probably make their way through it without too much trouble, as long as you’ve, you know, played a video game before. Um, but I think it, it is very specifically designed to appeal to people who like to tweak with the, um, the little bits and bobs, like the pick toes and the luminas and the, um, the different statuses and stuff like that. So like when I, when I beat the game, I think the highest damage I was ever doing at one time was probably something like 22 or 23,000, like for one hit, right? But I was talking to people, uh, some people over in the, uh, gaming the discord, and I’ve seen some people on YouTube and other people, I mean, I’ve seen some people like, hit like in the millions and it’s like, okay, that’s a cool thing that is optional and you don’t need to do it. But I feel like you have to kind of like to fiddle with those things a little bit. And if you don’t like to fiddle with equipping this, pick toe with this other thing that causes a status and then, you know, like you’ve got to really kind of like fiddle with all these little tiny settings.

And if you like it, I think it’s probably a, a tweakers Paradise. But if you don’t like it, I think the rest of the game is very harsh to you and does not make it easy to engage with the rest of the content. If you don’t get on board with what the developers want you to do. I think there’s a kind of rigidity there that I found a little bit off putting in terms of the mechanics. So so I felt like I really did lean into half of the game, but not the other half. I did kind of the bare minimum. I just wasn’t really that interested in trying to do all the tweaks and the Lumina tweaks and the weapon tweaks and stuff, like it just wasn’t that fun to me. Um, although I will. I mean, I can’t argue with the results. I mean, I’ve seen people do absolutely like crushing attacks that I thought were very cool, but I just didn’t get there. It didn’t click with me. Um, naturally, it just wasn’t something that that dragged me in. So I felt like I didn’t see as much as a game as I would have liked to, just because I didn’t feel very welcome, and I didn’t feel like the game was very open towards people who might be of a different persuasion, people who might be interested in other things.

And that kind of leads me to the other aspect of where this game can sometimes feel empty. If you don’t like the tweaking of the combat, like you’re going to be doing mostly combat, there weren’t a lot of side activities that you could engage in that would that would kind of expect in other RPGs of the type, like there was no village building. I mean, I guess there were character side quests, but I didn’t find those. I guess they were later, or maybe I just didn’t find them or I didn’t know where they were. Um, you know, there weren’t, like, all these other kind of, like, different types of activities for people who may want to engage in, like a broader, more well-rounded experience. Um, which isn’t to say that all RPGs need to be the same, but it kind of felt like it kind of felt like a lot of the stuff was gated out if you weren’t exactly in line with the developers, which it’s kind of frustrating. It’s kind of frustrating. I feel like this is such great content that it could have been opened up. It could have been rounded off a little bit. You could still have your incredibly difficult challenges, but I think more people could have been welcomed into the fold. And ultimately, you know, a more balanced experience could have been had. I mean, clearly that’s not what the developers are after.

And people are free to make whatever game they want to make, blah, blah, blah, I get it. For my taste, the game, overall, was a little bit too bifurcated for me — there was a big division between story and gameplay. But with that said, I did have a good time and have a lot of respect for what the story was going for. Nothing about it is perfect, but the developer is trying new things and bringing a lot of fresh blood and new energy new to the table, and I have the greatest respect for that.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is absolutely, without doubt, a notable title, and probably going to be one of the ten best of the year, even though I do have some issues with it. Overall, it’s something to be studied and learned from, and it’s got a lot to teach the rest of the industry. So fuck, I just talked for a million years. I should give it a review. Okay. So what? What score am I going to give it? I’m thinking I’m thinking, oh boy, I’m really I’m really divided here. I really am leaning towards 8.5 because I feel like the places where it’s strong, it’s extremely strong. But I will say that some of the drawbacks to me were pretty serious drawbacks, and they did hamper my enjoyment of the title overall. And they kind of reflected, um, maybe like some, some choices. I think that could have been a little bit more. Well considered.

Fuck it. Fuck. Okay, I’m gonna go with an official. Okay. 8.0. I got to do it 8.0. It’s really great. I think it’s notable. I think it’s going to be a landmark. Touchstone title for years to come. But I just have too many reservations about it to, like, embrace it fully. Wholeheartedly. Uh, yes. Eight.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Buy Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 – PC – XB – PS

Disclosures: This game is developed by Sandfall Interactive and published by Kepler Interactive. It is currently available on PC, PS5 and XBX. This copy of the game was obtained via Game Pass and reviewed on the XBX. Approximately 28 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M and contains Blood and Gore, Strong Language, Suggestive Themes, and Violence. The official description reads: This is an action role-playing game in which players assume the roles of expeditioners attempting to break a cycle of death. From a third-person perspective, players explore an open-world environment, interact with characters, and battle human and fantastical enemies in turn-based combat. Players select physical attacks (e.g., swords, guns), elemental attacks (e.g., lightning, fire), and skills from a menu to defeat enemies. Bloodstains can be seen on the ground in several environments. Cutscenes also depict instances of violence and blood/gore: characters stabbed; a character decapitated, with their headless body depicted in the background; characters shot; characters with large amounts of blood on their faces/clothes. In one area, players can stop in front of a brothel and hear sexual moaning sounds. Players are also able to advance character relationships, with innuendo in text (e.g., “Away from the others…[They] became a bit more than friends”; “They spend one final night together. It is truly passionate. [They] live something unforgettable”). The word “f**k” appears in the game.

Colorblind Modes: There are colorblind modes available in the options.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Almost all dialogue is subtitled. (I found a very few minor instances of dialogue in the world that were not subtitled.) Text can be resized. Names and colors can be added to the text. While parrying often relies on visual cues, some of the animations are quite tricky and some are easier to perform by listening for the audio cues, rather than relying on the visuals.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable.

The post SVG REVIEW Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Those wirebugs are a phenomenal addition to the formula.

LOW The Rampage quests are really half-assed.

WTF Walking through someone’s front door in the middle of the day is considered ‘stealthy’?

Monster Hunter veterans will know the score by now.

With the release of Monster Hunter Rise on consoles, it’s time to create a new character in a new locale and defend humanity from the threat of vicious creatures. Rise introduces a feudal Japanese-themed ninja village named Kamura tucked away in the mountains as our new base of operations, filled with cheerful villagers and handy hunter amenities aplenty. It also features two hot twins who think that walking into the player’s house while they’re asleep isn’t weird in the slightest, and that’s just how things work there.

Well, whatever.  

It’s not all cookies, milk and twin home invaders, though — there’s a flood of monsters threatening to overwhelm the village due to a rare event they call the Rampage. Everyone in Kamura yearns to be free of this threat, a feeling I suspect many players of Monster Hunter Rise will also share by the game’s end. More on that later though.

For those unfamiliar with the series, Monster Hunter is a third-person hunting game in which players choose from a variety of melee and ranged weapons, such as a massive oversized hammer or a heavy bowgun, then accept quests at a nearby hub before heading out into the field to capture or kill the monster that’s been causing all the ruckus. There are variations on this (such as heading out to collect fruits and berries instead) but players will generally be facing something the size of a small building with a lot of pointy teeth trying to rip their face off.

Victory brings rewards, and upon returning to the village hub it’s possible to use the money and materials earned on the hunt to upgrade their equipment and buy new gear, such as traps and healing items. The village offers everything a hunter could possibly need, including a restaurant with potent food that buffs up stats before each hunt, a multiplayer hub to group up with others online, various training and trading grounds, and a blacksmith to create or upgrade weapons and armor from the parts collected from each monster.

This is all classic Monster Hunter, but Rise also introduces a bunch of new mechanics.

The addition of ninja-style wall-running and grappling hook inspired Wirebugs to the formula allows for vastly increased mobility while on the hunt. Riding the hunter’s freshly-introduced and ride-able Palamutes (basically, huge dogs) to speed across the hunting ground in search of prey is simple and effective. Between these two timesaving creations and many new shortcuts that offer fast paths between hunting areas, the additional freedom is very welcome indeed.

Rise isn’t just about adding elements, though. If previous instalment and worldwide hit Monster Hunter World was responsible for pulling the series into the present with an assortment of  modern functions that a general audience takes for granted, Rise takes another hard look and cuts away even more of the series’ legacy busywork. For instance, players have a cute pet owl that they automatically dispatch to highlight every monster on the map, meaning there’s no need to track or mark them now. Various hostile climates no longer need the use of items such as hot or cold drinks to operate effectively within them. Cutscenes can be skipped upon a first viewing, and there’s none of World’s absurdly tedious clues needed to track down threats before finally unlocking the matching quest.

It all equals a friendlier, faster approach to getting in there and walloping enemies, and it absolutely works in Rise’s favor. It’s dangerous to make so many things more approachable, though — at the rate Capcom’s dishing out these quality-of-life improvements, the next installment might automatically refresh the player’s loadout at the end of a hunt without having to go to the item box every time. Imagine such decadence!

Everything isn’t simply handed to players on a platter, though. Hunters will still have to down certain monsters numerous times while praying for a 3% drop rate to get the bits they need to make a spectacularly useful piece of armor. I had to hunt one monster about twenty times to get my hands on a Purple Magna Orb for a sweet pair of bracers, so it’s a good thing being out in the field hunting feels great.

The monsters themselves are a great mix of old favourites and fresh faces, and all have their own strengths, weaknesses and battlefield behaviors. During any given fight, these beasts will go into a fury status where they become more dangerous and hit harder, before eventually tiring out and tottering around the place at half their previous speed. Following this rhythm is important, so as not to get lasered by an enemy’s ultimate attack at inopportune moments. Players always have backup, though, with the possibility of either two AI helper pets while playing alone, or up to three human players online.

So far, so good… until we get to the part of Rise that absolutely sucks, the Rampage quests.

Rampage quests are essentially a Tower Defense minigame where players are tasked with protecting the  gate leading into Kamura from a stream of rampaging monsters led by an Apex predator. Predetermined spots around the map allow for installations such as autocannons, traps or manual gun emplacements to be set up to defend from the onslaught, and occasionally super-powerful ‘hero’ units will become available to assist hunters with massive damage and support buffs for brief periods.

Sound interesting? Perhaps, but the implementation leaves much to be desired. They’re stressful in the worst possible way, with villagers constantly screaming about how everything’s going to hell as the hunter gets pingponged across the battlefield by a barrage of monsters, fireballs and screen-filling lightning blasts they’ve almost no chance of seeing coming. These sequences aren’t even that difficult once players figure out a worthwhile strategy, but they’re very, very irritating in solo play and downright boring in multiplayer.

Thankfully, only a few of these quests are required in order to progress through the story, though players aiming for the best endgame gear will have to suffer for their gains.

The other mild annoyance is that the online functionality isn’t very user-friendly, making it tough to join groups battling specific monsters without getting granular on specific quests. Most players trying to join a hunt won’t care about the quest so much as the monster holding the parts they need, so it’s just a bit more fiddly than it should be to get matched with an appropriate hunt. Oh, and there’s no crossplay either. Bleh.

In short, Rise is a great iteration on the classic Monster Hunter formula, making things more approachable and getting rid of some of the series’ less desirable elements. They may have made sense in the past, but the removal of much busywork is a net positive in my eyes. It’s a shame that Capcom didn’t include the massive Sunbreak expansion with this release given that it’s already out on Switch and PC, but it’s not like this package is lacking in content or value. For hunters of any experience level, Rise is a great entry in a storied series.

Rating: 8.0 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Capcom. It is currently available on XBO/X/S, PS4/5, Switch and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the XBX. Approximately 55 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed, including every postgame monster and completing my optimal armor set and build. 7 hours of play were spent in multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Alcohol Reference, Blood and Violence. Their official description from the Switch version reads as follows: This is an action adventure game in which players assume the role of a hunter who must save a village from a monster invasion. Players traverse a fantasy world and hunt down and kill various dragons, wyverns, and giant spiders. Players use swords, hammers, bows, and axes to kill creatures in frenetic melee-style combat. Spurts of blood are often depicted when players and creatures are injured during combat. A handful of missions allow players to operate mounted turrets and cannons to shoot rampaging creatures. The game contains several references to alcohol in the dialogue (e.g., “Enjoy the occasional drink and you’ll never need a docto–*hic*”; “I had a couple of sips of alcohol…”; “Drinking alone ain’t the worst thing, but booze tastes better with company”; “Pops tells the story whenever he gets boozed up.”).

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. Some in-game battle callouts aren’t translated. They’re usually of minor value, though characters will yell when an enemy is about to unleash their strongest attacks, giving D/HH players a minor disadvantage. Still, these callouts weren’t in previous titles at all and watching the enemy’s movements carefully should reveal the same information. Despite the lack of bark captioning, I’d still class it as fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Certain functions are remappable. There are a lot of contextual controls and every button is not only used, but also used in combination with others. The left stick moves the player, the right stick controls the camera, the face buttons interact with the environment, accept or cancel menu options or unleash attacks, and the shoulder buttons can sprint, charge up attacks, use projectiles or unleash other types of attacks. Holding down the left bumper can also access item shortcuts or scrolling windows. It’s complicated and can be a little fiddly, but it works.

The post Monster Hunter Rise (Xbox X) Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

High The unique and entrancing tone

Low Superfluous RPG elements

WTF Kamizake killer robots. I can still hear the clattering noises in my nightmares……

I was fairly unsurprised when I discovered after finishing that Ghost Song was first announced on Kickstarter in 2013. It has the hallmarks of a typical Kickstarter of that era – a more innocent time in crowdfunding history. It’s a 2D, retro-inspired metroidvania, it has an immediately striking art style and overall aesthetic, and it clearly takes a great deal of influence from Dark Souls, whose earthshaking influence on the gaming landscape was only just beginning to be felt nine years ago.

All this stuff immediately made sense to me because Ghost Song was just so eager to please. It was stuffed with story and gameplay ideas that would likely entice someone browsing a crowdfunding page, but might not actually gel together in a practical sense. Let’s start with what works, though.

In terms of general gameplay rhythm, Ghost Song is quite content to exist as the most orthodox Metroidvania in the universe—the player explores segmented rooms, defeats grunts and bosses, and grabs powerups or shoot walls to gain access to new areas of the map. However, the moment-to-moment combat, specifically the relationship between ranged and melee attacks, contains a tiny gem of an idea that’s novel enough to raise anyone’s eyebrows.

In Ghost Song, the player is asked to inhabit the Deadsuit, a mysterious robotic humanoid of unknown origin who abruptly wakes up from a long slumber on the desolated moon of Lorian. Out of curiosity (and the kindness of her metallic heart) the Deadsuit chooses to help the crew of a crashed ship she encounters and find the components they require to repair their ship.

As a mysterious and malleable robotic being, the Deadsuit is able to wield a large variety of weaponry, all of which feed into the core combat loop that I find so deliciously successful — using the basic ranged weapon causes it to heat up, eventually losing effectiveness if it’s continuously fired it without a break. However, the hotter the gun gets, the more damage the melee weapon does!

The melee weapons, meanwhile, cost stamina to use. This means that to be most effective in combat, players will constantly switch between melee and ranged attacks, strategically building and reducing the gun’s heat value as needed. At its best, the combat becomes a fluid and strategic dance, and pummelling dudes into submission with a fully boosted metal fist becomes an addictive high.

Unfortunately, to appreciate these moments requires ignoring the pesky RPG elements that keep trying to rain on this parade!

Besides some standard Metroidvania upgrades that provide different bonuses and effects, Ghost Song contains an RPG level-up system. In true soulsborne fashion, the character levels up by spending “nano-gel” at a save point, a material which can usually be found by defeating enemies, and can be recovered from the site of their corpse after a death. Bizarrely, there are only three stats to level up – gun damage, melee damage/max health, and a general stat called ‘Resolve’ that increases life, energy, and stamina gauges, among other bonuses. Given this limited choice of stats and the core rhythm of play, I can’t think of a reason why these RPG elements exist in Ghost Song at all!

One could argue that they promote specialization and replayability – a player could focus on either melee or ranged weapons, a philosophy I dabbled in when I dumped most of my points into the Gun stat during the mid-game. However, as the core combat loop makes clear, switching up attack types is the key to a quick victory. Players will want to dump a suitable amount of levels into both gun and melee, especially towards the end of the campaign. Those who neglect to level up equally might find themselves running into opposition that’s tougher than it should be.

No, the real, valuable progression in Ghost Song comes in the form of the weapons and powerups themselves. I was frustrated with a minor boss, only to come back with an alternate weapon that shot out little slime buddies to attack the boss from range, chewing away its health bar while I cowered behind a ledge, cackling with glee.

In terms of narrative, It helps that on the page, the Deadsuit’s quest is full of grace and heart despite being so minimalist. I loved her inquisitiveness and friendliness, and her simple desire to do right by the crew of the ship. By the same token, I adored how helpful and trusting all the crewmates were, treating her like a new family member instead of a traditional videogame errand lady.

These supporting characters all have their own cute little stories, a few of which parallel the Deadsuit’s desire for change and renewal. They all scanned as archetypes for me when I first met them, but they contained just enough individuality that I was quite won over by the end, and especially invested in the side story of bumbling wannabe-inventor Molly.

In Ghost Song, the Deadsuit don’t accumulate power for its own sake — everything it does is for the sake of the ragtag crew, and kindness is its own reward in a way that feels genuine and heartfelt, rather than cloyingly sentimental. Ghost Song is filled with genuine human beings who fight fiercely for each other’s happiness, and it’s a tonal balance I almost always find lovely. It’s just a shame that it doesn’t seem to realize that decent action alone would have been a sufficient accompaniment to it.

Regardless of the superfluous RPG trappings, Ghost Song offers beautiful sights to be found within its mysterious halls.

— Breton Campbell

Disclaimers: This game is developed by Old Moon and published by Humble Games. It is currently available on PS4, PS5, PC, XB0, XBS/X, Switch. Approximately 19 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

ESRB Rating: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Blood, Violence, and Partial Mudity. Though there are violent scenes involving humanoid characters, the vast majority of violence is highly stylized encounters with insects, monsters, etc. The partial nudity, from what I can tell, is chiefly related to an android character.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard at Hearing  Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be altered or resized. The majority of the game could be completed without sound, given that there are subtitles for all dialogue, and most of the player and enemy actions have an accompanying visual cue. However, attacks can come at the player from offscreen (especially during one of the final boss fights) making it more difficult to dodge these attacks without the appropriate sound cue.

Remappable Controls: The game’s controls are not remappable.

The post Ghost Song Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The most beautiful platformer I’ve seen in a long time.

LOW Character dialogue is surprisingly flat.

WTF RIP to the bone powder I spent an hour and a half farming for.

Developed by Black Mermaid and published by Humble Games, Moonscars is a dark, moody tale about (im)mortality, power, and, death… lots and lots of death. While I’m usually all for a creepy tale that encapsulates all of these components, Moonscars’s clunky mechanics, flat dialogue, and unyielding adherence to its ‘difficulty for difficulty’s sake’ framework ultimately robs it of its potential luster.

This is quite a shame given that the aesthetics are lustrous! The painterly landscapes in each map belie Moonscars’s gloomy atmosphere. When contrasted with the pixelated characters, cutscenes, and area maps, the result is truly lovely.

Moonscars follows the plight of Gray Irma, the sullen protagonist, and her journey to unearth the nature of her existence. Players must help Gray Irma recover her memories and locate the sculptor who created her. Her narrative arc is gradually unveiled by the characters she encounters. However, I found the conversations between Gray Irma and the characters she meets to be a bit flat, which impacted my engagement with the story from time to time. 

Best described as a 2D soulslike, Moonscars offers many effective mechanics. Gray Irma can jump, scale walls (something I discovered during a happy accident), and ground pound. There’s even a dash feature that allows her to escape enemies in a pinch and also discover areas on the map that can’t be reached by jumping alone. There were moments of clunkiness when I was unable to dismount a ladder and the lack of camera mobility was a bit of a pain, but these hiccups weren’t annoying enough to deter me from continuing.

Moonscars’s straightforward controls are a lifesaver, especially given the difficult, perhaps even unforgiving, battle structure.

Although it’s marketed as an action-adventure, it takes cues from the soulslike genre. One of the most prominent (and frustrating!) examples of this linkage is apparent in Moonscars’s buffing system. Gray Irma must use two main sources of currency, glands and bone powder, to buff her weapons and develop her attacks. Glands are a bit more difficult to locate than bone powder, but the player doesn’t lose them upon death. Bone powder, on the other hand, disappears upon death — if the player dies before collecting the bone powder they’ve lost, the powder is lost for good, which is devastating. 

Moonscars’s battle mechanics are relatively straightforward. There’s a dash feature, a standard attack, a power-up attack, and… parrying. I’m not going to lie, parrying can be tough. The enemies are merciless from the get-go, and there’s a learning curve associated with mastering parrying. It’s a frustrating reality where a successful parry often means the difference between life and death.

There are also special attacks that Gray Irma can perform called “witchery” used to give players an upper hand in battle. Players must first unlock the spell by spending bone powder, and once it’s in Gray Irma’s arsenal, players must draw from a limited power source to perform the spell. One of my personal favorites allows Gray Irma to hurl a parasite that emits a poisonous cloud that damages all enemies in her vicinity.

Shortly after my tenth death at the hands of the first boss I learned that grinding is a necessary aspect of Moonscars. While I’m not grind-averse, I found the process to be a bit grueling, especially given that bone powder is such a precarious commodity. That’s not to say that the grinding process wasn’t addicting. “Dammit! Just one more time” was a mantra I found myself repeating throughout the entire game, but after a while, one more time became way too many times. 

Had it not been for my stubborn ego and innate curiosity I probably would have abandoned Moonscars. It’s really a shame, because the world that Gray Irma inhabits is so compelling! I wanted to love the characters and truly delve into their stories, but I had to stop myself from rushing through the dialogue at times. Beating Moonscars felt really satisfying, but this was mostly due to the fact that I had found a way to withstand its brutality until the very end.  

Moonscars has so much potential, but its ruthless battle format and flat character dialogue left much to be desired. There’s no denying that it’s beautiful and the customization of weapons and attacks makes the character-building process exciting, but I was still left wanting more bang for my buck, and less doom for my gloom.

— Taylor Pryor

Disclosures: This game is developed by Black Mermaid and published by Humble Games. It is currently available on XBO/S/PS4/PS5/Switch/PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 15 hours of play went into this game, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Blood, Partial Nudity, and Violence. Because combat is essential to progress in Moonscars, bloodshed and violence are inescapable. Therefore, parents should proceed with caution if this is an issue. Some of the women in the game wear revealing clothing, but there is no full-frontal nudity.  

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available. 

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Moonscars offers subtitles, but they cannot be resized. Audio cues do not hinder game progression and controller vibrations can be modified to make navigating the landscape more seamless. Therefore, the game is fully accessible. 

Remappable Controls: This game’s controls are not remappable. 

The post Moonscars Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH It’s got that ‘just one more go’ quality.

LOW The slow-burn first boss.

WTF The soundtrack sounds like synth System of a Down.

Lately it seems like we’re getting a new roguelike almost daily and genre burnout is real, but hear me out — Undermine, developed by Thorium, is one of the cracking ones.

The premise is that evil demons have appeared and it’s down to the player as a nameless, disposable peasant (alongside their trusty familiar) to help a wizard quell them. Each time the peasant dies they’re replaced by another, much to the amusement of the cast of permanent characters.

Gameplay-wise, Undermine is an action-adventure roguelike seen from a top-down 2D view featuring 16-bit aesthetics. The dungeons are split into biomes, with between 3-5 floors per biome and a boss section.

Dungeon floors consist of rooms that are roughly the size of one screen. The player must use their trusty pickaxe to hack their way through while fighting procedurally generated enemies. They’ll also be picking up keys, bombs, gold, potions, blessings (offering various positive effects) and sometimes curses with assorted negative effects.

The player will also pick up relics which introduce abilities such as making bombs generate gold on explosion, or making the pickaxe electrocute enemies.

Upon a peasant’s death, a percentage of their accumulated gold is lost, but the remaining amount can be spent on permanently extending certain statistics — damage, health, potion duration, etc. — to increase the chances of success on future runs.

Engaging in combat and exploration on a run is gratifying in and of itself, but learning what things to focus on and cultivating a build gives Undermine a good set of long-term of goals on each run. For example, one boss demands ranged attacks, but instead of chucking my pickaxe I had some fortuitous drops that gave me a bomb relic with massive range which gave me an edge by allowing me to approach the fight in a different manner.

Of special note are nuances in Undermine‘s systems, and also the way risk is rewarded. A good example of the first is that enemies will occasionally drop food that regenerates health. However, if fire happens to touch the food, it will cook it and the item will heal more health. The chances of this happening organically are rare, but when it does, it shows the care taken in creating the world’s potential interactions.

In a second example showcasing risk, it can be seen with keys and bombs. Too many roguelikes get disposable items wrong, since using one in a random circumstance feels wasteful, and only worth it when there’s an absolute guarantee of reward. Undermine wants the player to explore these items and has an uncanny knack of giving the player back at least one bomb or key when one has just been used. This encouraged me to take risks, and the result is that I was often rewarded, seldom punished.

My only criticism has to do with the first boss — it’s a bit of a chore. It took me many runs to get past it, and each time I reached it, I was doing chip damage to this fast-moving enemy who has large portions of its body immune to damage. However, once past it, the flow of Undermine picks up and joy comes from powering up a peasant to the point where they’re destroying traps by stepping on them, walking on air and killing enemies with hardly any effort.

Despite so many good roguelikes already out or due soon, Undermine is still one that’s worth spending time with — this is a stellar debut from its developers.

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Thorium Entertainment. It’s currently available on XBO, PC, Switch, Linux, and Mac. This copy of the game was obtained via Game Pass and reviewed on the XBO-X. Approximately 33 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E10 and contains Fantasy Violence, Alcohol Reference. The game is very lighthearted — there are a couple of scary monsters and spooky dungeons, but overall, it is acceptable even for pre-teens.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: The game is playable without sound. However, leveling-up cues might be missed as the text is only onscreen for a split second. Text size cannot be altered, nor can the color be changed.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

The post Undermine Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Blasting through gods like they’re nothing.

LOW The game has more content than playtime.

WTF Nothing for something is too often an outcome.

The roguelike genre has become a go-to in the indie scene, and one that’s been met with acceptance. Although the forerunner and namesake are from the US, during the dark days when that style fell out of fashion, it was Japanese developer Chunsoft tirelessly iterating on Shiren the Wanderer that kept the ‘Mystery Dungeon’ genre alive.

There are other luminaries in the genre such as Spelunky and Faster Than Light, but I can already see my editor massaging his brow and sighing ‘AJ, please just get on with the review and stop this rambling intro to roguelikes, and no you can’t call them “Mystery Dungeons” for the rest of the review’.

[correct – ed.]

With pan-global genre credentials established, it is now Chinese developer Veewo Games’ turn to put their spin on roguelikes with Neon Abyss.

The plot seems to be that the player is tasked by Greek goddess Athena with killing other gods while set against an evocative 16-bit neon theme, but I am not entirely clear on this, and I’m not sure it matters.

Neon Abyss is a 2D platformer/exploration game with rooms split up in metroidvania fashion offering shops, combat encounters, platforming sections, and more. Each map is procedural, and after 5 to 7 maps, a run ends with a God-themed boss.

Along the way to a boss fight, the player will collect gold, bombs, keys, crystals, items (passive buffs) and eggs that hatch into pets that help (or hinder). Gold is used for buying stuff from the store, bombs blow up walls, stone chests and revealing hidden rooms, and keys are for opening locked doors and treasure chests.

This is all pretty standard, but then Neon Abyss adds spice — crystals are collected for unlocking nodes and some shop doors, and they also add to the Wisdom meter whenever they’re used. This leads to secret rooms holding more powerful items, but there is a opposite to wisdom — Violence.

Violence can be done by shooting nodes and doors, and then throwing the character at them. Similarly, there are items to be found that add Violence, and balancing Wisdom with Violence is important. All Wisdom buffs are focused on defense, while Violence buffs are primarily focused on attack, and a player needs both to be able to succeed.

The final spin Neon Abyss offers is a staple of the best roguelikes — items can be combined and layered in an often gamebreaking fashion.

Early on I found myself stumped by bosses and some levels — I could see what I was supposed to do, but not how. Luckily, failed runs award meta-currency that unlocks new passives (players can try before they buy) and new rooms, and this is when I started finding builds that felt incredibly powerful.

For example, in one run I had an item that boosted my firepower when I had a low crystal count, and another that boosted it when my crystal count was high. Then, I had a third item that gave me an extra jump for every egg I had hatched. At that point I was firing beams of light that reflected off surfaces and wiped whole rooms of enemies in seconds. In another run, I could straight up fly.

A good run often requires being able to see what will synergize well and then guiding the character down that path. Unfortunately, Neon Abyss makes this hard by requiring a passive item to see descriptions of things before buying them. There are a lot of items and I ended up creating a spreadsheet to track everything — not a great look, but it didn’t stop me playing.

This obtuseness is also in the procedural generation of Neon Abyss. It sometimes feels like it puts something potentially interesting behind a locked door or in a chest, and then offers nothing that’s readily available. This means that progress can be stopped early in a run, or and there were moments where my progress slowed to a crawl due to the procedural generation failing to generate anything I could use effectively.

My final complaint is that while Neon Abyss is delightful when I’m unleashing screen-filling destruction, I actually found myself completing the game on Normal before I had even unlocked the first three (of eight) skill trees. I’m not sure what tweaks I want to resolve this, because making it ‘harder’ isn’t what I enjoy, but all of that content being locked behind a grind means I’m never going to see it.

The empowerment and novelty of toppling gods made me look past the fact that Neon Abyss might be a bit too easy for vets familiar with this style of play. On the other hand, this makes it a great starting point for those craving a more forgiving difficulty curve, or newcomers wanting to begin their exploration of the Mystery Dungeon-like Roguelike genre.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Veewo and published by Team 17. It is currently available on Switch, PS4, XBO, and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via Game Pass and reviewed on the XBO-X. Approximately 15 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Blood and Gore, Crude Humor, and Violence. The game is cartoonish in its violence, although there are a couple of creatures that might scare younger kids with their macabre expressions. Otherwise this game is quite tame.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: The game is fully playable without sound. The text cannot be resized nor can the colors be changed. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls. The Y axis cannot be changed, but this is not relevant to this game.

The post Neon Abyss Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The art style.

LOW When I don’t get the “Traitor” revolver.

WTF That economy.

West of Dead continues publisher Raw Fury’s eye for titles with good visual style and tight mechanical design. Unfortunately, West of Dead also continues a trend of indies that would be perfect if not for bugs and design issues that are sure to be ironed out in six months’ time.

The game is a roguelike, procedurally generated twin-stick shooter played from a cinematic isometric view. The art style is evocative of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comics — all heavy blacks with splashes of color — and it even has Hellboy himself, actor Ron Perlman, voicing the main character.

The story follows a mysterious gunman with a flaming skull who wakes up to find himself dead and possibly in purgatory. He’s told that good souls head East and bad ones go West, but there’s a preacher blocking travel in both directions. The gunman must try and track down the preacher and piece together his own past while doing so.

The dungeons are broken up into dark rooms and hallways, and in each room there are a number of cover spots behind tombs or boxes, etc, that the player can flit between while taking pot-shots at the enemy. There are also unlit lanterns in most rooms, and turning them on will stun enemies. Using the cover and lanterns is important because health items are random and sparse until a life-giving canteen is unlocked, and even then, it’s not much.

How the player approaches each area depends on their loadout. Guns are randomly found or bought from a shop with randomized merchandise from an initially-small pool, and the player can carry two firearms at a time. 

Guns have infinite ammo that reloads over time. Shotguns pack a punch, but have short range and small capacity. Rifles shoot much further, but require lining up shots to do good damage. Pistols and revolvers are mid-range and reliable, but deal low damage compared to the others. In addition, the gunman has two ability slots that can equip random active effects with cooldowns such as grenades, quicker reload times, or damage shielding. There are also passive support effects, as well.

West of Dead is divided up into chapters, each containing three procedural maps and a boss fight. There are also extra levels that contain monsters and secrets. The player levels up on each run by finding upgrade spots that grant a choice between more health, stronger abilities, or upped weapon damage. When a character dies, all of their upgrades, guns and support items are removed, but some persistence comes from finding ‘fragments’ of new weapons and abilities that can be unlocked with in-game currency. Once purchased, those items will appear in the randomized rotation.

The devs go to lengths to force the player to change their strategy like a good roguelike should — some enemies charge the player, some monsters are invulnerable from the front, some foes warp behind the player, and so on. I found myself butting heads with problematic enemies in the second map, but once I understood how they worked, I was able to push further into the game until faced with the next challenge. Every death made me want to go back and try again, and it was all smoothed out by the sound of a great cinematic Western soundtrack and Ron Perlman’s tones.

When the action in West of Dead is flowing, it feels great – vaulting over cover to trigger a lantern that stuns enemies, and then shooting them with a revolver while they’re paralyzed for a moment is fantastic. Unfortunately, West of Dead is also host to lots of little problems that rubbed me the wrong way.

First were the small things like the auto-aim occasionally encouraging me to shoot at a harmless barricade instead of the enemy in front of me, and sometimes not even aiming at things in the same room. Sometimes the fiery cowboy might slide through cover instead of over it. There are chat prompts encouraging the player to converse with the NPCs, only to find that there’s no relevant dialogue there.

However, the worst offender is the economy.

The first map generates about 12 units of meta-currency for unlocks. The issue? After the first few that cost 10-20 each, most of the weapons and upgrades cost at least 75, with some going all the way up to 500. Earning that much buying power requires a grind that doesn’t feel rewarding and undermines the good work done elsewhere in West of Dead.

Despite the small bugs and a skewed economy that diminishes the experience, West of Dead is still something I can’t put down. The developers seem committed to fixes and I expect the experience to improve as time goes on, but it’s already an incredibly solid game that I enjoy and can easily recommend.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Upstream Arcade and published by Raw Fury  It is currently available on PC, Switch, PS4 and XBO. This copy of the game was obtained via Game Pass reviewed on the XBO-X. Approximately 10 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Fantasy Violence. The game is cartoonishly violent and contains a lot of dark themes. Ron Perlman narrates stories of violence against children, abandonment, and drinking. It fully earns the T rating.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: The game is playable without sound but the game plays a tune when a room is cleared and subtly changes the camera angle — there were a couple of times where I didn’t notice the camera angle change, so was not aware that the room was cleared. The text size cannot be altered, nor can the color be changed.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable.

The post West Of Dead Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH It’s more or less free.

LOW Yet it’s still barely worth playing.

WTF The complete under-utilization of Terry Crews.

We may never know the full story behind Crackdown 3’s legendarily troubled development cycle, but I’d think a project that took this much time and effort to materialize would come out looking, I don’t know, a little more ambitious than this?

A last-gen game by every measure except its release date, the only thing preventing me from calling Crackdown 3 a copy-and-paste job is that the previous game in the series already demonstrated just how (and on a critical level, I do not use this word lightly) lazy a sequel can be, recycling the same sandbox environment of its predecessor, tossing in some zombies, and calling it a full-priced follow-up. Crackdown 3, to its credit, is actually set in a new city this time. So, hey, baby steps.

The original Crackdown felt fresh because it was one of our first exposures to the superhero sandbox genre, and possibly the first not to carry the stigma of the movie tie-in. The market has since become so cluttered with open-world collect-a-thons that I’m amazed developer Sumo Digital assumed that the series needed so little tweaking. The obvious recent comparison is Insomniac’s excellent Spider-Man, but I don’t even need to punch that far below the belt. Since Crackdown’s release, franchises like Infamous and Just Cause have improved on the formula and gone out of style themselves. Flinging oneself over rooftops just isn’t as effortlessly cool as it once was.

Our setting is New Providence, an island city that’s been taken over by an assortment of eccentric villains with thinly-defined motivations. Playing as one of thirteen representatives of the Agency (one of whom is Terry Crews, and twelve of whom are not), it’s our job to create chaos within their regime, dissolving their smallest bases of operation first and gradually working our way up to the top.

Although Crackdown 3 looks like an upscaled Xbox 360 game — the buildings are all just boxes with windows on them, and no effort has gone into making New Providence feel thriving and alive — I will grant that the city’s layout is pretty cool. The architecture is nicely futuristic, and I like that the buildings get taller and more intimidating as players venture deeper into the island. In the original Crackdown, I accidentally stumbled upon the endgame after only two-thirds of the campaign due to a lack of direction, but here, it’s easy to tell where the final encounter will be and what needs to be done to reach it.

As always, though, that process takes the form of a checklist — capture X amount of bases, climb Y amount of towers, sabotage Z number of processing plants, and so forth. There’s nothing the player can do in Crackdown 3 that they won’t be doing about a dozen more times, and the climactic encounters against the rogues’ gallery are surprisingly unmemorable — hell, a few of them pilot high-powered versions of the same damn mech suits we’ve been fighting the entire game. Even the final boss is only remarkable for its location and not the trite design of the battle itself.

Sumo has wisely kept the skill system from the previous Crackdown games, wherein the agent’s abilities improve as the player makes active use of them. As always, the best part of Crackdown 3 is collecting agility orbs, which are sprinkled across the rooftops and boost the agent’s speed and jump height. Likewise, fighting with guns, explosives and fists will make the agent more proficient in those categories, and for anyone weird enough to want to use vehicles in a game where one can literally bound over entire buildings, the driving skill is there, too. It’s an organic system that’s held up well.

What hasn’t held up is the combat, which feels flimsy, messy and unsatisfying. It’s borderline impossible to hit anything without the targeting system, which isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but the process of delicately picking off one soldier at a time is at odds with combat scenarios in which the agent is surrounded by dozens of enemies in every direction — even above and below — and many of them firing from outside of the player’s lock-on radius. The compass and damage indicators do a poor job of highlighting threats, and Crackdown 3’s unusually vibrant colors actually make the game difficult to read in busy, stressful situations.

When the game is tough, it’s never tough in clever ways, as the AI is borderline nonexistent. Sumo’s method of ramping up the difficulty is just to add more — more soldiers, more drones, more explosions, more everything. Overcoming intense combat scenarios is often less about monitoring one’s health meter and more about regaining control as the agent is getting bounced around like a pinball. Occasionally one of the gang leaders will temporarily shut the city down and force the player to survive waves of enemy spawns, a tactic that’s particularly annoying when it happens in the middle of a mission.

This weak combat design certainly isn’t enough to support Crackdown 3’s competitive multiplayer mode. Developer Elbow Rocket, to whom the mode was outsourced, pulls some nifty tricks with destructible environments (earning it the title Wrecking Zone) but they don’t elevate the humdrum combat or the mere two unimaginative game types (deathmatch and territories) that players are forced to duke it out in.

Perhaps the most damning thing I can say about Crackdown 3 is that it even manages to make Terry Crews boring. I assume his presence is a holdover from an earlier version of the game with significantly more personality, because I don’t know who would hire one of the world’s most outsized, charismatic actors and then give him this little to do. Even his one good line — “Fuck you, gravity!” — loses its luster quickly because it’s one of maybe five barks his character gets.

With Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft is angling to move the industry in the direction of the subscription-based model that’s overtaken home video. While that’s not a bad idea, Crackdown 3 is the gaming equivalent of the phrase “dumped on Netflix.” This is a mediocre release, and whatever excuse we make for it — that it’s practically free, that we expected no better, or that it’s following one of the worst sequels of all time — doesn’t make it look any less out of date.Rating: 4 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Sumo Digital and published by Xbox Game Studios. It is currently available on Xbox One and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via paid download (through Xbox Game Pass) and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 15 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. One hour of play was spent in multiplayer modes, a separate app titled Wrecking Zone.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated Mature and contains Blood, Drug References, Sexual Themes, Strong Language and Violence. There are some minor, easily-missed references to sex, drugs and alcohol, mostly in street signs and NPC dialog. Though the violence is plentiful, none of it is particularly graphic. The frequent F-bombs are primarily what earn this game its rating. If profanity isn’t a concern, Crackdown 3 is relatively tame.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Subtitles are available for major dialogue. They don’t cover incidental chatter, but none of that affects Crackdown 3’s playability. Collectible orbs emit noises that make locating them easier, so players who can’t hear them will be at a slight disadvantage. On-screen threat indicators are also vague and confusing.

Remappable Controls: This game offers fully remappable controls for keyboard and mouse, but not for controller.

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