HIGH Ricocheting through the last 20% of “Weave” with sparks flying en route to a record time.

LOW The overly technical and slow “Palm” track.

WTF It is insanely goofy that the sharpest turns are the easiest.

The simplest kind of racing comes in the form of the slot car. There’s no drafting, no steering, no brakes — just a grooved track and a way to go faster. Little Laps leans into this simplicity. There’s no story, no characters, and little customization, just 18 tracks (all accessible immediately) and 15 cars (unlocked by getting achievements) run by two buttons, one to go faster and the other to restart.

Most of those tracks are attractive, if somewhat lacking in background detail. The colors occasionally grate on the eyes, however, especially in the track labeled “Night”. The various cars amount to being just skins, as there are no differences in handling — it’s a slot racer — or acceleration, which is universally sluggish.

The key quirk of Little Laps is that velocity entering the curve doesn’t matter. As my parents know well, a slot car will take off into the air if it hits a hairpin too fast, but in Little Laps any curve can be passed safely as long as the accelerator isn’t touched while the car is turning.

An amusing consequence of this feature is that it inverts expectations about handling. Gentler curves become dangerous places where it’s easy to keep the accelerator down a fraction of a second too long. Hairpins become prime opportunities to gain speed, since they can tolerate the pedal hitting the metal almost up to the last instant.

When this gets going it looks great. Cars throw off sparks as they drift through absurdly sharp corners and weave automatically through wild S-curves with their tires squealing. An available “best time” shadow provided a yardstick against my own performance and global leaderboards let me see my progress against other gamers.

I enjoyed playing Little Laps in small bites, and it’s well-suited to the rhythm of making a few quick attempts at a record time, possibly shaving a few tenths of a second off this lap. In case of a wipeout, I can just hit the reset button and get right back in it.

Or, that’s what one would hope.

The sluggish acceleration rate has another consequence, in that the key to a record lap is entering it with momentum. The first lap, starting from a dead stop, will never produce a record time after the first attempt. As I continued to optimize play, I sometimes found that I needed a second lap to get up enough entry speed to have a chance at a record.

This means that a player isn’t really right back in the action after a wreck. Each restart entails a sluggish first lap before there’s any chance at improving time. Sometimes that lap helped me calm down after a stupid mistake, but mostly it felt like a waste.

Worse, that slow initial run doesn’t offer the opportunity to learn anything about timing acceleration for record-lap tries. As I played, I often noticed myself being more conservative than was reasonable (even when I was trying for a record) simply because I wanted to avoid those wasted laps.

That dead start ends up being a real drag on the whole experience, which is a shame. Little Laps is a charming and zippy single-button racer, but in a stripped-down, minimalist experience everything has to be just right and here a major element isn’t.

Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Conradical Games. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on a home built Windows 11 PC with a single GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card, a Ryzen 7 processor, and 64 GB of RAM. Approximately 6 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There is no multiplayer mode.

Parents: As of press time this game has not been rated by the ESRB. It contains nothing worse than a car flying off a racetrack (with no visible wreck damage) and should logically be rated E.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game has no dialogue or story text. I found that the sound of tire squeals was helpful in judging when to let go of the accelerator, and accordingly found it somewhat more difficult to improve my times when I turned off sound.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable. By default the space bar serves as the accelerator and R resets the race. Menus require the mouse. On an Xbox controller the A button is the accelerator and Y resets. Note: I found that when using a controller to move through the menus the cursor sometimes got “lost” and I had to back out with the B button.

The post Little Laps Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Nuking the dragon with an array of archers before it torched anything.

LOW Wounded swordsmen taking space in my army without ever returning to action.

WTF This is obviously a fantasy world, yet there are no fantasy buildings or units?

The past decade has seen a flood of creative city-builders setting a new standard for the genre. It’s unfair, of course, to expect every indie team to turn out a Frostpunk or The Wandering Village, but the bar has been raised. That means some reasonably competent titles that don’t stand out will be forgotten, and unfortunately, that’s the fate I expect to befall Becastled.

Becastled is a phased-combat city-building game. The player’s forces can only build, recruit units, and gather resources during the day. Every night, “Lunar” enemies attack from a nearby spawn point and follow predictable paths. On each fifth night, a more powerful force attacks. At the edges of the map are a few towers that, when destroyed, provoke a more powerful attack featuring a boss. Destroying all of these towers grants victory.

There’s no campaign to speak of – the closest thing Becastled offers is a series of tutorials – and the meat of the experience is the freeplay mode described above. There’s also a sandbox mode that feels somewhat pointless, as it removes the core resource management aspect of play. A limited map editor is also available. For purposes of this review I tested the sandbox mode, made a few maps, completed the tutorial, and played five full rounds of varying difficulty in freeplay (each of which ran 2-4 hours).

Becastled’s maps are made of irregular polygons of territory, each of which can have a resource and trees, and one curious feature about these resources is that they don’t really deplete. Even on higher difficulties I never had a mineral or food resource run out. Except in the winter season, forests regenerate completely every day. This bounty eliminates the typical progression of city-builders, and among other things, it leads to oddities in city planning like massive stone walls that completely enclose a forest. Another curiosity is that the world of Becastled is clearly one that’s full of magic – the game’s “Lunar” enemies include a golem, a dragon, and a necromancer – but the player can’t create a building or unit that has any obvious magic capability — the closest one can get is an herbalist.

That herbalist building is not initially available, and must be researched on the rudimentary tech tree, which is only about two steps deep on average. Researching new techs is instantaneous and requires only that the player spend resources, primarily wood. This points to a significant resource imbalance in Becastled, as the need for wood is awfully steep since it’s needed to create every early building and also research every tech to get additional resources. Even obtaining the ability to trade other goods for wood requires 2000 units of wood in research, not counting what’s needed to recruit and sustain manpower and gather gold.

The lack of any other resource can be worked around, but if the player spawns in a map with no wood next to the initial position, they might as well restart. Strangely, the bare-bones map editor has no method for adjusting the position or density of forests, so even when creating a specific optimized world, one is utterly dependent on the RNG to get enough wood in the early game to survive.

I also noticed that units sometimes had trouble getting where they needed to go, or that they would make strange movements. This was most notable with the military units — archers would sometimes teleport outside of walls and troops would sometimes get trapped by a cluster of their comrades. Workers would also sometimes get stuck on terrain or be mysteriously unable to reach their work sites, even when nothing had changed from the previous day. Also, walls laid out near lakes would sometimes simply not get built.

During my time with Becastled, I noticed it being patched almost daily, yet each patch seemed to make pathfinding worse. The last time I played, military units would regularly fail to move at all when I clicked on a destination, and numerous workers failed to reach their work sites every day. This leaves me with some doubt that the pathfinding problems will be addressed.

While those are serious shortcomings, the fundamental problem with Becastled doesn’t really lie in its systems — the key issue is that there’s just no hook here. There’s no unique resource, no unusual mechanics, and no unexpected interplay between units or buildings. There’s not even anything approaching a graphical twist. Becastled is simplistic and straightforward to the point of being generic, and the magic that’s missing from the player’s build menu is also absent from the experience as a whole.

Becastled is certainly a game a person could spend hours playing, but in a genre crowded with unique and fascinating takes on the concept, I can’t think of a reason why one should put time into a title with so many annoyances and so little to recommend it.

Rating: 4 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Mana Potion Studios and published by Mana Potion Studios and Pingle Studios. It is currently available on PC, PS4/5, Switch, and XBO/X/S. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on a home-built Windows 11 PC equipped with a single GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card (driver 581.80), a Ryzen 7 processor, and 64 GB of RAM. Approximately 15 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed (as described above). There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E10 and contains Fantasy Violence. The violence is totally bloodless, just little guys falling over. If it can hold their interest, this is an all-ages joint.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: During main play there is no dialogue. In tutorials, dialogue is accompanied by text boxes (not true subtitles, example of text below) that cannot be resized. There is narration in the opening movie but no subtitles. During play there are no essential audio cues. This game is not fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: On PC, this game offers partially remappable controls. Keyboard and mouse bindings can be changed, but it is not clear whether controller mapping can be changed (indeed I couldn’t find a page that even had the mapping on it). In KBM mode panning and rotating the map is primarily on the keyboard while the mouse is primarily for zooming. While hotkeys to perform a few functions on selected buildings are available, most selection and other functions uses clicking and dragging of the mouse. I found the game awkward to play with a controller. The left stick controls cursor movement (sluggishly) and the right stick adjusts the view. Buttons are used to select but once a building is selected the D-pad must be used to enter its menu and assign workers (using the face buttons).

The post Becastled Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Stomping the Dungeon boss as the Order.

LOW Basically every time I fought the frustrating Keep boss.

WTF Why is the river such a weak terrain?

Given the opportunity, a random number generator will screw a player over. Games that lean heavily on randomization, such as roguelikes, fundamentally must balance the inevitable frustration of busted runs with a compelling experience of play. Many games meet that standard, but unfortunately Drop Duchy falls just short.

Like most roguelikes, Drop Duchy is built around performing repeated runs — in this case through a lightly-randomized series of combat rounds and resource pickups, and three fixed bosses. The setup for combat will be instantly familiar to anyone who has played Tetris – tetrominoes appear at the top of a field of play and can be rotated before dropping them to the bottom to build complete rows.

The tiles consist of various kinds of terrain and the buildings that interact with them. For instance, a Farm transforms surrounding Plains tiles into Fields, giving a bonus to a Watchtower that gains more units from the latter terrain type. As enemy buildings drop too, arranging tetrominoes so that the terrain benefits the player and not the enemy is a key strategic goal.

In Drop Duchy, completing a row harvests the resources of the terrain (such as grain coming from Fields or Plains) rather than making it disappear. An empty tile prevents harvest, and there’s no way to “uncover” a mistake. Once the tiles reach the top of the play area, the round ends and the player can send military units from his buildings to take on those in enemy buildings (with a classic rock-paper-scissors vulnerability system). The reward for victory is a selection of new buildings or technologies that give passive boosts.

The individual rounds can vary greatly depending on the array of terrain available, but are generally unlikely to end a run and feel too relaxed. The bosses have unusually-shaped fields of play and mostly depend on penalizing the player for putting tiles in forbidden zones. I enjoyed two of the bosses, but I felt that the second boss was poorly tuned, with too much excluded space and penalties that were too stiff for violating it. Many of my runs ended there.

That nonetheless meant that most of my runs exceeded 30 minutes – almost as long as the longest game of Tetris ever played. It’s to its considerable advantage that most games of Tetris are considerably shorter than that: the low stakes make it easier to laugh off the brutal unfairness of the RNG. The time investment of a failed run of Drop Duchy makes it feel inordinately bad to receive, say, an unlucky run of S, Z, and O-shaped tetrominoes in a boss level.

The salve for a failed run is intended to be advancement along Drop Duchy’s progression tree, which is unlocked by fulfilling its many Challenges, which range from gathering certain amounts of a resource to performing particular tricks with certain buildings.

Unfortunately, unlocking new elements didn’t always feel like progress. Gaining the river terrain complicates the earlier parts of the run with few benefits. Most cards interacting with this terrain are not strong and are entirely ineffective if there are less than 15 contiguous river tiles, making them high-risk, mid-reward selections.

New mechanics like Faith have few benefits until the player puts large numbers of the associated buildings into his limited set of tiles. If they don’t turn up, the result is a busted run. Outside of runs with their associated faction, these tiles mostly feel like they’re taking up space.

Even the sheer number of new buildings and techs gets in the way, pushing the encounter frequency of the most useful buildings down significantly. As I got further and further along the progression tree, busted runs where I simply never got offered useful military buildings became too common. When I did get a strategy going, I often found myself in a trap where I couldn’t get the additional buildings I needed to strengthen it. This became another reason to dislike the river — after a while I simply stopped regularly pulling buildings that could make use of it at all.

The unlockable factions are a mixed bag as well. From the start, one can choose the Duchy faction, which relies on small, agrarian buildings that accrue resources easily and are easy to place in the boss fights. The late-unlocking Order synergizes neatly with the otherwise-troubled Faith system and also features a number of interesting upgrade and harvest abilities.

The Republic faction, on the other hand, relies heavily on large buildings and on transforming terrain into “town”, making it unusable for many other buildings. This faction was especially difficult to use against the second boss.

Sometimes a roguelike can pull a player back in with aesthetic components, but Drop Duchy doesn’t really offer anything compelling. The terrain is largely dull, though at least the mountain tiles vary entertainingly. The buildings are nicely drawn but not especially memorable and they don’t do anything interesting like change based on faction or upgrade level. The music is fine, but there’s just not enough character in the graphical design to make that next run feel necessary, and no story to speak of.

Drop Duchy attempts to ease the hard feelings of a busted run with its progression-unlocking Challenges, but the proliferation of new features feels like it dilutes rather than strengthens subsequent runs. As a consequence, Drop Duchy falls too far into the frustrating regime of RNG-dominated games. There’s an interesting concept here, but Drop Duchy lacks the kind of snappy gameplay or compelling aesthetic that would sustain it through the unfairness of waiting in vain for that dang line piece that just won’t drop.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Buy Drop Duchy – PC

Disclosures: This game is developed by Sleepy Mill Studio and published by The Arcade Crew. It is currently available on PC via Steam. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on a home-built Windows 11 PC equipped with a Ryzen 7 processor, 64 GB RAM, and a single GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics card (with various 576.x drivers). Approximately 20 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed (all factions and game modes were played and ~80% of the progression tree was unlocked). There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: As of press time this game has not been rated by the ESRB. Beyond simply acknowledging the existence of armed conflict and religious heresy, there’s nothing here to object to.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game has no dialogue nor are there any significant sound cues. Therefore, it is fully accessible.

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

The post Drop Duchy Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Simply chilling in high places and taking in the view of the world.

LOW The ending, which is poorly designed and written, and riddled with bugs.

WTF Oh, so that’s not a frog statue.

The planet Cigalo is dying. Its ecosystem has been shattered, its swamps drained, and its surface strip-mined in order to build a spaceborne array of solar panels that will eventually block out its sun. An environmental catastrophe interrupted the project and forced the exploiters to depart, leaving behind abandoned facilities and mountains of scrap.

As Caravan SandWitch begins, players step into the role of a teenage pilot trainee and Cigalo native named Sauge. She’s just received a distress signal from her sister, who was assumed dead after disappearing on on this half-ruined planet six years ago. Although that premise sounds grim, Caravan SandWitch itself is anything but. The desiccated world of Cigalo is rendered in attractive, saturated, cel-shaded graphics. There’s no combat whatsoever, and most of its play loops are built around exploring, collecting items, and driving folks around in a big, bright yellow van.

Sauge progresses the story mostly by reaching new sites in the world. Initially this is gated by a need to disable “jammers” that block communications and blot out the map, but as the plot unspools, it becomes necessary to reach specific locations to empower transmitters and link disparate decrepit industrial locations through a kind of teleportation network.

As is standard for third-person open-world games, these tasks are presented with a minimum of time pressure. A few character-related quests get locked out when Sauge gets a new tool, but more time is always available to finish these before moving on. The passage of days is noted, but nothing moves forward until Sauge collects enough scrap parts to build the next sensor or grapple gun and the player chooses to advance to the next chunk of the adventure.

Although driving the van is generally smooth, one could complain a bit about the platforming. Sauge will frequently clip through a ledge while mantling, particularly if the shape is odd. On tight ledges, Sauge will sometimes rotate in a random direction while jumping, though they will still grab and mantle to the next ledge correctly. Even when the animations got dodgy, the result was generally what I intended, and the small number of unexpected failures didn’t result in any permanent harm since Caravan SandWitch has no fall damage.

The total harmlessness of falling even from enormous heights might support a chill experience, but it also plays a part in rendering events curiously inert. It’s fine for a story not to have combat, but Caravan SandWitch feels like it goes beyond this to evict any kind of conflict entirely. Despite the desperation of the scenario players are presented with on Cigalo, Sauge gets to drift through it without truly confronting the planet’s exploiters, the elements, or even her parents.

For all her ominous looming, the eponymous Sand Witch does almost nothing directly injurious to any of the characters. The planet’s native sentient species, who suffered cultural and physical genocide, hold no apparent animosity towards the lingering humans on the planet. Only one character evinces even the slightest negativity towards Sauge and he’s quickly won over. Caravan SandWitch even shies away from confronting the damage the loss of Sauge’s sister’s caused the family.

The poorly-translated dialogue contributes to this problem. Almost every line in Caravan SandWitch is intelligible, but they’re often abrupt and unmusical, as if important nuances from the original French were elided by the translation. The conversations are functional, but any emotion comes across as perfunctory and shallow. It’s particularly bad towards the end of the campaign as the subpar dialogue interfered with the intelligibility of the action, sapping what little power there was in SandWitch’s contrived, half-baked endgame choice.

Despite its numerous charms, Caravan SandWitch just didn’t sit right with me. There is perhaps something to be said for a chill attitude in the midst of apocalypse, but this experience gets there by avoiding all of its tragedies, save one. The looming death of this world and seeming indifference from everyone inhabiting it left me too uneasy to fully accept the atmosphere Caravan SandWitch seemed to be after. While Cigalo was beautiful to see and relaxing to visit, even as the planet crept ever closer to collapse, I kept wishing that someone would rage against the dying of its light.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Studio Plane Toast and published by Dear Villagers. It is currently available on PC, PS5 and Switch. This copy of the game was obtained via retail purchase and reviewed on a home-built Windows X PC equipped with a AMD Ryzen 2700X processor, an ASRock X470 motherboard, 32 GB RAM, and a single GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card. Approximately 10 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 Language and Violent References. This is a terrible classification. The mentioned violence is no worse than your typical 6PM newscast and I can’t recall Sauge ever going harder than “drat”. My main reservation is that in one of its endings a character commits suicide by choosing to remain behind (offscreen) in an exploding building. Even with that, I would not put this above E10. The world’s most tedious and unlikable people (perhaps the ESRB raters are among them) will also be annoyed that Sauge has two dads and many individuals are referred to with they/them pronouns.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game is fully accessible. All dialogue is in text, but text cannot be resized or modified. There are no essential sound cues in gameplay.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls on PC. MK controls are as shown in the attached images. Controller defaults to X for interaction, Y for exiting / returning to van, A for jumping or acceleration boost (in van), B for exiting dialogues. Left and right sticks default to move and look, respectively, left and right triggers default to decelerate (in the van) and accelerate (on foot and in the van).

The post Caravan SandWitch Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Bloody Mary and her sweetheart.

LOW The third chapter, boringly premised and absurdly presented.

WTF I defeated a spider by knocking it into a shallow hole? You know they crawl up walls, right?

Angie Weathers is dying of cancer and there is little mystery as to why, since she smokes every chance she gets. Too late to fight it by conventional means, she takes one last job in hopes of fulfilling her dead husband’s travel dreams. Instead, she finds herself in Burnhouse Lane, a purgatory for the dying that offers her a slim hope of living on.

Burnhouse Lane primarily plays like a 2D anthology-style adventure game, albeit one bedecked with horror themes and tons of gore. In order to save herself, Angie must complete tasks that lead her into horrific experiences in the real world, while simultaneously dodging the terrors residing in the purgatorial dream world of Burnhouse Lane.

It must be said that both spheres of action are intensely gory, to such an extent that I don’t think anyone would enjoy Burnhouse Lane other than gore enthusiasts, or those like myself who are generally unbothered by blood and guts.

The chapters are mostly atomistic, with new villains and scenarios in each one, mainly threaded together by Angie herself. Unfortunately, this has the effect of denying the game a throughline. Rather than juxtaposing some horrific force with Angie’s illness, Burnhouse Lane casts about, trying different things without really making them connect with what’s gone wrong in Angie’s life.

The horror elements of Burnhouse Lane lean heavily on combat and fatal outcomes that result from missteps in solving its often-brittle puzzles. If a save point is missed or passed up, an unexpected death (or glitch) can lead to a long slog of repeated gameplay. In a nice touch, the save points are ashtrays – so like Angie, the player will often be dying for a cigarette.

Burnhouse Lane’s only consistently-repeated motif is the imprisonment of women, which is either implicitly or explicitly part of almost every one of its seven chapters. Of course, cancer is the world’s most extensively analogized disease and doubtless someone has compared it to a prison. To me, though, this doesn’t seem intended as a metaphor for her disease or her personal problems, and would be an inapt one if it were.

Some of the individual chapters do hit the mark, though. In “The Valley of Many Noises”, Angie’s body betrays her and she must make use of outwardly-perfect wax bodies that mask rotting, putrid flesh. This plays nicely against another character’s accusation that Angie is faking her cancer (as she has opted not to do chemotherapy).

Another standout chapter is “Bloody Mary”, about a reclusive old woman who spoils her pet pig terribly. Its premise feels original, and pushes the line of absurdity without toppling over it into full camp. The violence of the chapter surfaces in ways that at least obliquely recall Angie’s malady, and the villain, despite the brevity of her appearance, is intensely memorable.

Unfortunately, the lack of a continuous narrative thread costs the game in the end. Some chapters feel like they lean too much on lazy horror tropes like serial killers and demonizing fatness, ideas that likely would have fallen by the wayside had things been built around a more centralized horror concept. Worse, the finale arrives with a whimper and the ‘climactic’ boss feels like an afterthought, although there are some satisfying callbacks for players who manage to preserve their friendships (and friends).

Narrative aside, Burnhouse Lane has little to recommend it mechanically. Its inventory system is surprisingly awkward for an adventure title, and movement through the world frequently feels sluggish. Combat with guns feels perfunctory, lacking any real aiming system, while the primary melee weapon (an axe) had wonky and frustrating attack timing. The thankfully rare platforming is unpleasantly floaty.

Having the freedom of an anthology format allows Burnhouse Lane to play with multiple horror ideas, with some notable successes. While I wish it had more of a throughline and fewer overdone horror tropes, Burnhouse Lane does contain a few fresh ideas for lovers of gore. For everyone else? I doubt it’s worth the struggle.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Harvester Games. It is currently available on PC, PS4/5, XBO/X/S and Switch. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 10 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, Intense Violence, Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, and Use of Drugs. A particular warning: the first scene of the game is of a woman attempting suicide. Aside from that, multiple characters are murdered or mutilated on screen, characters are shown in various states of dismemberment, partially nude women are tortured and killed, and a woman literally suffocates in a mound of excrement. Kids do not belong here.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. They can be repositioned (to either float above characters’ heads or stay at the bottom of the screen) but otherwise cannot be altered. There is at least one essential sound cue in the game’s third chapter. While the segment where the sound cue appears is potentially survivable without using it, the difficulty is enormously increased. As such, this game is not fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, on PS5 this game’s controls are not remappable. No controller diagram is available in-game. In general the left stick is used for movement and the face buttons are used for action or opening the inventory. The left trigger readies a weapon and the right trigger attacks with it. Certain movements (jumps, dodges) require simultaneously holding a face button and using the right bumper.

The post Burnhouse Lane Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Petting the dog! Players must pet the dog.

LOW Spending too much time getting Chaz to the sax in “Crouching Bassline, Hidden Saxophone”.

WTF Why do these people take their instruments everywhere?

Music, like games, is an individual taste. Some people love metal, some love jazz. Backbeat,
a game about a woman who finds her muse in funk, comes with its own unique gameplay
concept. I wanted to join in on the jam, but for me this mashup of puzzler and stealth-strategy
struck a discordant note.

Having lived through the mid-’90s and experienced the mainstream ascendance of R&B and
rap during that time myself, I was somewhat nonplussed by the focus on funk, and even
moreso in the context here. Funk music is intricate, but it’s not a natural stylistic fit for a
cerebral puzzle (better suited to baroque, perhaps) and its in-your-face attitude seems poorly
suited to a stealth title.

The story of Backbeat — a “Battle of the Bands” tale that wouldn’t be out of place in a late-
century teen comedy — doesn’t seem to connect to anything it asks the player to do, either.
And, with few exceptions, the “stealth” requirements of the levels don’t even make sense in
the context of the immediate plot.

That’s typical story/game conflict, though, and easily forgiven if the gameplay offers
something compelling. Backbeat’s levels ask the player to route different characters (who
mostly have different stride lengths and special abilities) around ‘alert’ zones within a certain
number of moves. The characters travel different numbers of tiles per move and use up
different amounts of a timeline in doing so, producing a puzzle of geometry and time.

The player also has to manage resources, most of which go up or down based on when the
characters mark the timeline by changing directions or taking actions. There’s “stagger”,
which depletes when multiple characters mark the timeline simultaneously, and “align”, which
requires the characters to mark the timeline at certain points. Obviously these are in tension.
This is even more so with “solo”, which requires that only one character at a time use an interaction point in the level, and “assist”, which needs certain pairs of characters to use interaction points simultaneously.

Managing these meters along with the awkward movement of the characters and the alert
zones and the finite timeline provides Backbeat‘s challenge, which ramps up very fast and
stays high until to the end. The difficulty is amplified by the almost pathological resistance to
providing the explicit numbers behind what it’s asking the player to manage. Everything is
displayed as bars and radar graphs, leading to a lot of trial and error due to the lack of clarity.
It also seems like (though because of the above, I can’t be sure) the various resources max
out, so for example, one can’t stock up stagger at the start of the level to balance out
simultaneous marks at the end.

Unfortunately, the result is that each level is a grind. The player has to figure the routes right,
then adjust the timing so the resources don’t get depleted, then readjust the routes for the
timing of other characters. The reward is that one can then, finally exhausted, look at a
disappointing level score before entering an overlong dialogue scene. There’s no moment of
delight to reward a good solve, and almost never any moment of excitement in the course of
it.

What I want out of a puzzler is the moment of revelation when a solution becomes clear. What
the characters are getting out of their adventure here is the joy of playing music together, but
the sloggy grind of actually playing Backbeat doesn’t provide the first and can’t mirror the
second. Although the game makes a respectable effort to connect the resources it’s asking
the player to manage to the mechanics of a successful funk session, it never finds the joy
inherent to the music. This is the right game for someone, surely, but not for me.

Rating: 4 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Ichigoichie.It is currently available on Linux, Mac, PC, PS4/5, Switch and XBO/X/S. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on a home-built Windows X PC equipped with a AMD Ryzen 2700X processor, an ASRock X470 motherboard, 32 GB RAM , and a single GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card using driver 531.68. Approximately 12 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 E. No content warnings are noted. There are references to violence and alcohol but otherwise I noticed nothing objectionable.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available. Interaction points are linked to their outputs by colored symbols (unfortunately, often green, red, and yellow) and some required interaction points are designated solely by colored symbols and outlines (and not mentioned in the level’s starting information). The timelines are color-coded as well.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All dialogue in the game is in the form of text, although the text cannot be resized. The background of the text can be altered but examples are not shown while choosing. Despite its theme, the game has no essential sound cues, although the level-ending musical overview cannot be skipped.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable. On PC, movement and interaction in Backbeat are primarily controlled with the mouse, although sometimes the shift key must be pressed at the same time as a mouse click, and certain hotkeys (space, q, e, c) control actions in the levels. Sometimes button presses are mandatory in the menus as well.

The post Backbeat Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The first sight of the colony’s oxygen engine.

LOW Trying to figure out how to back eject from an ice climb on a sharp time limit.

WTF The ships still have fuel enough to launch?

The modern media landscape being what it is, I’m never surprised to see a sequel. Often, though, I ask myself whether a particular one is necessary.

Deliver Us the Moon, a perfectly good game about a lonely effort to revive a lunar power station, didn’t seem to be crying out for one, even though the villains’ departure on an obviously-doomed planetary colonization mission was a clear hook. As it happens, the developers took the bait, and the story continues now in Deliver Us Mars.

Much has changed this time around. I felt that Moon suffered from the silence and general disembodiment of its main character, as well as the absence of other individuals to interact with. In  Mars the protagonist is vocal and numerous characters are frequently on screen, albeit somewhat stiff-faced. If anything, the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, as Mars has a bit too much chatter and far too many flashbacks.

Unfortunately, the expanded dialogue mainly reveals that many of Deliver Us Mars’ characters are completely insufferable, including those clearly intended to be sympathetic. The protagonist, Kat, is perhaps not the worst, but she’s introduced to us as a child willfully destroying a toy just given to her by her father, and this foolhardy self-centeredness ends up driving much of the plot.

Of course in a game in which the Earth is suffering a climate catastrophe, there’s plenty of willful destruction to go around. Deliver Us Mars is a depressing experience, devoid of optimism for either the potential for colonizing space, or our chances of rescuing the Earth.

As the title suggests, the fleeing scientists of the first game decided to make their new home on Mars, a location not clearly superior to the Moon as a potential home. Their efforts have gone both better and worse than expected. The terms of the story and of Kat’s connection to one of the colonists require that the scientists have, without support from Earth, developed functional industry on an alien planet at a pace that beggars belief, which is just one of the plot’s many striking implausibilities.

A game of this kind tends to fill those holes by dotting its levels with bits of lore, and Kat can find holograms and snippets of text. Yet, it feels like there’s frustratingly little to glean even from surroundings that should be data-rich. This leaves gaps in the story, like how anyone came to think that sending four people to bring back three giant, possibly unfueled spaceships was going to work.

As it happens, the task involves a lot of walking. Much time is spent in plodding traversal, occasionally spiced up by floaty drives in a rover that handles like the second coming of Mass Effect’s Mako. Outdoors, Kat has a time limit on her oxygen, although thankfully the devs eschew Moon’s habit of strewing areas with canisters containing ridiculously tiny quantities of oxygen to extend the timer. The limit rarely matters except when Deliver us Mars asks her to do a bit of rock (or ice) climbing.

The climbing approach is fairly standard. Kat has a pick in each hand controlled by a mouse button or trigger. Holding down that control slams the pick in, releasing it allows her to reposition it. It’s all right as far as it goes, but rock-climbing feels like a mechanic in search of a purpose. The developers gamely keep trying to supply one, but however many platforming challenges Kat encounters, each scenario seems modified to suit the climbing, rather than the climbing being a natural solution to any problems the story poses.

There are also puzzles to solve in the form of routing power beams (generally for opening doors) and positional tasks that are used to unlock holograms. I did not find these to be interesting but at least they, unlike the climbing, felt like they belong.

The sense of story being divorced from events is further accentuated in sequences where Kat is asked to perform tasks related to spacecraft launch. As a highly trained astronaut, Kat should know exactly what to do, but as a player I was forced to scan around until I found an active control panel, figure out how to use it, then carry out a request. None of this was particularly difficult (and at least it fit the context) but it accentuated the divide between the character and me, not least when I was asked to slide forward a throttle and did this while Kat’s immobile hand was visible elsewhere onscreen.

Deliver Us Mars demands a sequel, in the sense that it artlessly uses a couple of post-credits scenes to set one up, but there’s nothing here that left me wanting more. Its puzzles are rather dull and the most notable gameplay activity, rock-climbing, feels like it belongs in an entirely different game. I don’t care for most of the characters that survived Deliver Us Mars’ sloppy, facile plot, and its scenario is hopeless and depressing. A third installment may be inevitable, but I’m not eager for that package to arrive.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by KeokeN Interactive and published by Frontier Foundry.It is currently available on Windows PC, PS4/5, and XBO/X/S. This copy of the game was obtained via the publisher and reviewed on a home-built Windows X PC equipped with a AMD Ryzen 2700X processor, an ASRock X470 motherboard, 32 GB RAM , and a single GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card using driver 531.29. Approximately 10 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 Mild Blood and Violence. Per the ESRB: “This is an action-adventure game in which players assume the roles of astronauts investigating a lost colony on Mars. From first- and third-person perspectives, players explore spacecrafts and colonies, solve puzzles, and avoid hazards (e.g., electrical bursts). As players progress, they can unlock journal entries depicting holographic images of violence/peril: colonists suffocating to death; characters sucked into space as a result of a terrorist attack. One sequence depicts an exploding space craft, with a woman left on board. Some scenes depict human corpses scattered across facilities, including a man with blood on his face.”

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. However, they cannot be altered or resized. During the course of play, there are several noises that are important, for instance a chirp indicating that another quarter of the oxygen tank has been used or an alert from the that a collectible has been identified. Although there are visual counterparts for these noises I noticed that the sounds were more accurate about status and directed me to search areas I had otherwise ignored. I believe the game will be more difficult without the assistance of sound.

Remappable Controls: On PC, this game offers fully remappable controls, but I have seen complaints that this is not true on other platforms. Players on console might want to investgate before a purchase.

The post Deliver Us Mars Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH You can pet the dog AND the cat!

LOW Having to pause constantly for loading screens.

WTF Was that carrot laced with arsenic?

The little village of Sainte-Monique-Des-Monts, like all little villages, has a huge and terrible secret. A sin was committed here, and in 1896 the town’s efforts to cover it up result in summoning an evil creature that whispers to its folk in the darkness, recounting their crimes. Those it has not driven away seem to be going mad and on the verge of suicide. As the town’s doom approaches, the parish priest from a nearby village comes to The Whispering Valley to investigate.

The priest poses the first of The Whispering Valley‘s many problems, because while most of the characters are voiced, the protagonist is silent. Although he finds multiple dead bodies and witnesses several suicides, he does not audibly pray, nor does he even apparently cross himself. At the sight of his friend’s torment he callously says… nothing. This is not because he’s supposed to be some every-man — the whisperer torments the main character with visions of his past, so he is supposed to have a stained history. The decision to go with a silent, invisible cipher seems at odds with the specificity of his character and is of no apparent benefit.

The gameplay is standard point-and-click adventure fare, albeit inflected with a touch of horror atmosphere thanks to some effective sound design. Although The Whispering Valley’s spaces are three-dimensional, the protagonist cannot move freely. Instead, the player selects the next place to go. The movement hotspots are small and are sometimes not well-differentiated from the surroundings, especially outdoors. As a consequence, even figuring out how to move has the feel of a pixel hunt.

Ironically, this is good training for the puzzle gameplay, which is more of the same. A great deal of The Whispering Valley involves finding keys to open up houses or rooms within houses. Even in the few well-lit areas, these and other items are frequently hard to spot against the background. At one juncture I needed a knife and had to resort to meticulously scanning every inch of every screen to find it, a task only lengthened by the considerable spatial padding and numerous (and substantial) loading screens.

This is a long-solved problem in the genre — indeed, by virtue of “Look” this problem was solved before adventure games even progressed as far as using a mouse. A hotspot-highlight key is the modern version of this affordance, and The Whispering Valley desperately needs one.

Once an item is in hand, The Whispering Valley becomes rather straightforward. While it has several avenues of action in the beginning, around the halfway point it basically boils down to having only one thing at a time for the player to do, which is of a piece with the lack of interactivity. There is no “Inspect” action, and on most screens the only thing the protagonist can do is move. In some areas — most notably a large meadow in the second half of the game — there’s nothing to really look at.

The Whispering Valley at least avoids the worst kind of “adventure-game logic” as even the lengthier chains of action at least make sense internally. There are only a few true puzzles, and while I thought most of them were fine, I would be remiss not to mention that two of them critically rely on sounds that are not replicated in the subtitles. Players who can’t hear the sounds will not be able to move further.

I genuinely hate giving an earnest indie a bad review, but The Whispering Valley just gets too much wrong. There are positive points in its lovely environments and solidly effective sound design. The game also has a great atmosphere. Unfortunately, its padding, linearity, inaccessibility, lack of a main character, and pixel-hunt gameplay result in an experience that is dull and retrograde, even by the standards of the industry’s oldest genre.

Rating: 4 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Studio Chien d’Or. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on a home-built Windows X PC equipped with a AMD Ryzen 2700X processor, an ASRock X470 motherboard, 32 GB RAM , and a single GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card using driver 526.86. Approximately 3 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: As of press time this game has not been rated by the ESRB. Considering its content and themes I would rate it T. Numerous characters commit suicide in various fashions during the course of the game, some of them bloody. In addition, some already-dead bodies are discovered that are gory. Depression, suicide, and murder are discussed throughout. There are also a few jump scares.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers:  All dialogue in the game is subtitled, though the subtitles cannot be altered or resized. However, this game has two puzzles that absolutely rely on sound cues and in my opinion it cannot be completed by players who may have hearing issues. This game is not fully accessible.

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

The post The Whispering Valley Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Taking down the maximum number of enemies with card plays left.

LOW Redrawing an entire hand of unusable heroics… only to get new unusable heroics.

WTF Why are there so many kinds of currency you can’t buy?

At least once a year the “big two” comics publishers have an “event.” They’re all different, but also all the same – a startling new threat arises, or an old one reappears. Multiple superhero teams fight each other, or team up, or first one and then the other. A safe haven is breached or destroyed, and a major character dies (for now). Along the way, almost every ongoing book has its plotline disrupted for a tie-in issue. Marvel’s Midnight Suns aims to capture this feel, although it lacks the tight pacing of a six-issue summer special.

In this case the new threat is Lilith, the servant of a dark god that wishes to take over the universe (natch). Along with her demonic army (comprised mainly, it seems, of bad dogs) she joins forces with perennial Marvel villains like HYDRA, Sabretooth, and Venom in order to open a portal for her master.

Opposing her is her own semi-immortal child (player-designed) called only “the Hunter” because apparently nobody could be bothered to pick a gender-neutral name. They team up with Marvel heroes ranging from the globally popular (Spider-Man, Wolverine, the Avengers) to the obscure (Magik, Nico Minoru) and those in between — Blade gets his most prominent appearance since Wesley Snipes wore the fangs.

The confrontations play out as round-based strategic battles. Lilith’s fighters get one or two attacks apiece, but the heroes’ actions are based on a hand of cards. Each of these holds an attack or a support skill. Playing them generates a stock of “heroism” that can be spent to perform special abilities from “heroic” cards or the environment.

Movement for attacks is automatic and costs nothing, so with the exception of a few specific abilities, range is not a significant factor. However, the angle of attacks is frequently important, because it controls how enemies will react when a hit will knock them back and what trajectories can leverage the environment.

In most fights, a small number of weak enemies stream into the arena every turn, offering opportunities to build heroism in order to use more powerful abilities against heavies or supervillains. The preponderance of knockback skills means these mooks often end up being used as ammunition, hurled into larger enemies or flung into explosive hazards to damage their compatriots. In this sense the combat accurately replicates the ways superhero combat action is typically drawn on the page.

Unfortunately, the combat otherwise falls short. Having one side go and then the other makes the pace feel overly stately, if not glacial, and like all systems of this type, it leaves the player totally disengaged for half the action. The heavy reliance on angle and the limited ability to control hero position feels overly constraining, particularly early on. Also, since a single hand of cards controls the whole team of (typically three) heroes and only three cards can be played per turn by default, it’s depressingly common to have one or two heroes standing around doing nothing for multiple turns on end.

Worse, I found that the combat phases frequently led to situations where I had a hand full of heroic cards but no heroism to spend, and no attack cards to build it up. Typically only two cards can be redrawn in a turn, and some characters have heroic cards that stay in the hand when redrawn. It’s rare to be totally stuck for multiple turns, but most mission objectives and the game’s grading system reward constant offense. Having actions available to the player to build heroism during the defense phase would have addressed many of the combat’s deficiencies.

Between fights, the Hunter and company return to their home base, an Abbey, which frankly feels like it was borrowed from another game. Part of this is due to a change in perspective from an objective view to one that’s over the Hunter’s shoulder. The other is that it imposes a daily cycle (not unlike Stardew Valley or some other farming game) in that time is split up into “days” and every morning is taken up with performing chores.

Although these chores are technically optional, the player is clearly expected to explore the vast grounds of the Abbey and investigate numerous locations therein. The player’s daily chores involve converting battle loot into new or upgraded cards, designing decks, purchasing combat items, launching side missions, training and healing comrades, and gathering mushrooms to brew potions (no, seriously).

Downtime also affords an opportunity for bonding with teammates, which is an aspect that feels overplayed. Although the whole course of the story takes place in less than three months, the Hunter can easily become BFFs with everyone on the somewhat overstuffed roster. This feels like a bit too much, a bit too fast, especially since the Hunter has no built-in personality. This nigh-comical friendship system is accentuated by various “clubs” the Hunter can participate in, as if the Abbey is a high school where offering its heroes extracurricular activities.

The Abbey’s activities bring the player into contact with Midnight Suns’ dizzying array of currencies. There are three different kinds of “essence” that enable card upgrades or modifications. In addition to that there is “intel” that must be spent to send idle characters on side missions. “Credits” are required in order to expand facilities or participate in training battles. “Gloss” is needed in order to expand the cosmetic options for the Hunter and the heroes.

Incredibly, none of these currencies can be purchased in the online store. That exclusively sells a sixth kind of currency, “Eclipse Credits”, which are the sole means of obtaining certain additional skins. The absence of an obvious, venal profit motive is frankly somewhat refreshing, though it does suggest the terrifying possibility that somebody thinks this rainbow of currencies is good game design. Really, the absurd proliferation of resources to manage is of a piece with the imbalance of Midnight Suns as a whole.

The Abbey takes up far too much of the player’s time and imposes a brutally slow pace on play. The need to perform repetitive tasks in the Abbey slows down every day, and the need to gather resources and develop the home base nudges the player to put off story missions and instead spend time on low-calorie filler activities, particularly at the beginning and end of the arc.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns has many of the elements that would make it a great special event story — it carries off its pulpy narrative pretty well despite the bland protagonist, and the combat is a competent adaptation of superhero action into a strategy format. However, the slow pacing of the narrative and battles, not to mention the wrong-headed approach to the home base and team building make Midnight Suns feel disjointed and torpid. This is one special event that won’t become a collectible.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Firaxis and published by 2K Games. It is currently available on PC, PS4/5, Switch, and XBO/X/S. This copy of the game was obtained via retail purchase and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 40 hours of play were devoted to 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 Language, Mild Blood, and Violence. Per the ESRB: This is an action/role-playing game in which players assume the role a supernatural hero working with Marvel universe characters to battle a powerful villain. As players progress through the storyline, they engage in turn-based battles against HYDRA soldiers, possessed mutants/heroes, and demonic figures/animals. Players move around battlefields and take turns performing attacks, sometimes with slow-motion effects. Characters use magic, firearms, and various melee weapons (e.g., swords, shields, whips) to attack enemies; combat is highlighted by cries of pain, explosions, gunfire, and screen-shaking effects. One cutscene depicts a mutant being slashed with a sword, leaving red slash marks that quickly heal. The word “sh*t” and “a*shole” appear in the dialogue.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available. Red-green coloring is sometimes used to distinguish between valid and invalid moves in combat; however, a message will usually pop up explaining why the move is invalid. Green highlights are sometimes used to designate cards that have been modified by other abilities. As such, colorblind players may be inconvenienced.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be altered or resized. Some lines of dialogue were not subtitled in battle although they are barks and contain no story information. No critical sound cues are present.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable. In the Abbey standard third-person controls are used, with motion on left stick and camera on right. A face button (X on PS5) is used to control most interactions. Use of special abilities on Abbey grounds requires the player to hold a trigger and select the ability with a stick. Combat controls are shown in the diagram below.

The post Marvel’s Midnight Suns Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Dealing 5 million damage and completely healing my party on the verge of defeat.

LOW Nuking a boss before a cutscene where the same boss was wrecking my party.

WTF Can we not have a colony full of preteens in skintight suits please?

The final boss of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is a giant screaming head. I want to emphasize that it is a head without a body, that it is many times the size of any playable character, and that it screams about both hating the world and also not wanting the world to change. That this gibberish concludes the many dozens of hours it takes to play Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is entirely fitting.

The giant screaming head is sat at the edge of a circular arena floating in midair. Although Xenoblade Chronicles 3’s snappy, enjoyable combat system is heavily reliant on positioning (and indeed there are entire attack classes built on primarily attacking from the side or back) it is impossible to get around or behind the giant screaming head. The giant screaming head is also largely immune to key status effects, so strategies built around these effects are largely useless despite being instrumental to success throughout the game.

The giant screaming head’s arena is an iridescent stage of pulsing light, which makes it even more of a visual jumble than the real-time battles typically are. All six members of the party, plus at least one guest, are always present on the battlefield, which can easily feature an equal number of enemies. With each enemy displaying a targeting line, particle effects from special attacks going off, plus various circles on the ground displaying buff and debuff zones, the battles frequently become a chaotic mess where the action becomes almost impossible to follow.

The giant screaming head doesn’t start off as a giant screaming head. Instead, he begins the boss sequence as a man who must be defeated several times in sequence, with the six main members of the party chaining attacks together both in their regular human bodies and in the “Ouroboros” forms (basically, biological mechs) that pairs of them can fuse into. Each time he is defeated, the boss seems to become more powerful, until he reaches his apotheosis as the aforementioned giant screaming head.

This is de rigeur for Xenoblade Chronicles 3, a game that loves nothing more than to follow up the player’s rousing combat victory with a cutscene where the same enemy is beating the absolute tar out of the party, delivering a lengthy speech while the kids listen passively, or simply peace-ing out instantly, as if the entire preceding battle had not happened. Sometimes all three!

Many of these enemies (and the giant screaming head) belong to Moebius, an organization of cackling psychopaths that has created a world of endless, stalemated war between the states of Keves and Agnus, waged by soldiers that live a maximum of ten years before being recycled. The Moebius crew seem to sustain themselves on the lives lost in battle and derive more sustenance from those that experienced epic highs and lows, thus explaining why everyone has a 15-minute cutscene’s worth of tragic backstory, always delivered as a flashback infodump, despite being only 8 years old.

Our heroes appear to be teenagers (thanks to accelerated aging) equally drawn from both sides of this ginned-up conflict, and once they gain special powers, they set about liberating military units (colonies) from the tyrannical rule of the Flame Clocks that force them to kill in order to survive.

Each colony comes with its own hero who adds another option to the class-based character system, and a story. A few of these tales are compelling, but the volume is prodigious and it’s easy to lose sight of the quality storytelling amidst the cascade of stories that are mundane or simply rehashing eroded JRPG tropes. Even the best of these struggle with pacing, and the lesser ones are often done in by it. One colony whips back and forth between killing to live and quietly awaiting death and then looking forward to a bright future over the course of five minutes, ultimately accepting salvation after the heroes kill a squad of angry goats.

This slapdash approach permeates the story.

Massive and expansive as it is, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 never seems to come to grips with its world, its themes, or even the main characters. Although 2/3 of the party have the murder of a beloved friend by enemy forces as their single most formative experience, they almost instantly suppress their lifetime of conditioning and grief, and never really struggle with those feelings again – nor do most other characters. Instead, their challenges are banalities like not being true to themselves or lacking conviction, as if the whole script was cribbed from a sports anime. That’s how a story about constant worldwide war ends with disjointed pablum about “walking together [and] choosing who you really are”. Although most of them are well-drawn and likable characters, few of the main cast get anything like a real arc. Although the love between two characters is central to the plot and critical to the themes, the romance itself is so anodyne as to be nonexistent. The melodrama occasionally lands some hits, its emotional heft enhanced by a well-written score, but the story is ultimately flimsy and weightless.

The overall construction suffers from a similar lack of care. While the core combat systems work well, the class system is unbalanced, with a particular lack of options and variety for tanks. The system is also hobbled by the fact that the experience levels are badly tuned, so that even modest attention to sidequests will produce a badly overleveled party that advances class capability at a glacial pace. The world’s merchants don’t sell any materials necessary for crafting and only offer the lowest-ranked equipment, rendering the entire economy moot. Even the world, though it is beautiful, expansive and full of life (as is usual for the series), feels unimaginative and rather empty compared to earlier entries. And then, of course, there is the giant screaming head.

What really bothers me about all of this is that it’s so far beneath Monolith.

This is a studio that has created characters with moving arcs and developed stories that grapple with revenge, forgiveness, and even the nature of being. Here, it feels like all that ambition has died and been replaced with Gundam for Complete Illiterates. It’s a tragic regression, all the more so because here and there compelling stories and characters poke through. Alas, they end up buried beneath a mountain of anime tropes and JRPG platitudes. Monolith is better than Xenoblade Chronicles 3, and so are we.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Monolith Soft and published by Nintendo. It is currently available exclusively on the Switch.This copy of the game was obtained via retail purchase and reviewed on the Switch. The console was of launch vintage. The game was primarily played with the Pro Controller on a television but handheld mode was also used. Approximately 90 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 Language, Mild Blood, Suggestive Themes, and Violence. From a third-person perspective, players complete quests and engage in melee battle against enemies (e.g., animals, creatures, human boss characters). Combat is highlighted by impact sounds, explosions, and cries of pain. Cutscenes depict further instances of violence: characters impaled by sword; a character shooting herself off screen; a man stabbing himself off screen. In principle, almost all the characters who die are children; additionally, on several occasions characters with the appearance of children are killed. A handful of scenes depict blood (e.g., droplets falling from a wounded character; drips of blood on a character’s face). Some fantasy characters/creatures are designed with revealing armor and/or anatomy (e.g., deep cleavage, partially exposed breasts). The words “sh*t,” “ar*ehole,” and “b*tch” appear in the dialogue.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles and most dialogue is displayed in dialogue boxes. Subtitles cannot be altered or resized. Unfortunately, a large quantity of dialogue, particularly at the initiation of, during, and after combat, is not subtitled. Additionally, many contextual statements (characters reacting to the environment) are not subtitled. No sound cues are essential in gameplay, however character callouts and ambient sounds during battle (that do not receive subtitles) are used to reinforce visual messaging about timers and the charging of special skills.

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

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