HIGH An exceptional narrative. 

LOW Technical issues.

WTF Learning new curse words in Italian!

It’s impossible to deny that Hangar 13’s Mafia series has strong, cinematic aspirations. While many narrative-focused titles pull from popular films, there’s a distinct feeling that in the case of Mafia, the clichéd sentiment of “it feels like I’m playing through a movie” really makes sense. 

The strength of each iteration in this long-running franchise (spanning two decades and four console generations) has always been the writing, presentation, and immersive worlds. As a fan of crime films, I’ve enjoyed playing through each successive release, pointing out obvious parallels between the games and movies that inspired them. From the clear callbacks to Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas in Mafia II to the ’60s/’70s motifs in Mafia III, the series is a pastiche of the best mob movie tropes wrapped around some of the best writing videogames has to offer. 

The latest entry, Mafia: The Old Country, continues the pedigree by taking players back to the origins of the Sicilian Mafia. Set in the early 1900s, this third-person action-adventure has players controlling Enzo Favara on his rise from indentured sulfur mine worker to a bona fide member of Don Bernardo Torrisi’s crime family. His journey is one marred by bloodshed and the pursuit of vengeance, with loyalty to both the family and his closest friends tested throughout the roughly 12-hour campaign. 

Narratively, it’s almost unsurprising how well-written The Old Country is. It’s a gripping and mature tale that echoes the best mob films, especially the opening to The Godfather Part II. It hits all the major points that most crime films seem to hit, but it’s acted and told so well that I was engaged the whole time. 

Enzo himself is a fascinating character, echoing the likes of Robert De Niro’s character in Once Upon a Time in America or other notable tragic figures like Michael Corleone. There’s complexity in his journey, and the performance is strong. Other characters like Don Torrisi or his underboss, Luca, add to an already-rich story. 

This narrative is helped by excellent presentation throughout, ranging from exceptional character models to cutscene cinematography that furthers the idea that this is interactive crime drama. Cutscenes are presented with black bars above and below the screen to give a more cinematic feel. 

Those who have played earlier Mafia titles will feel right at home with the gameplay loop of the Old Country. Seen from a third-person perspective, The Old Country is a mostly linear and script-driven experience. Rather than focusing on a large, interactive open world that can be explored, the story is confined to a mission-based structure, which works. The change in structure allows for a more focused experience, with little filler slowing it down. 

The world itself is gorgeously rendered, with an amazing-looking Italian countryside. While focused on scripted sequences, there are some free-roaming areas that players can drive between or ride through on horseback. The world feels lived-in and real, and despite no gameplay incentives to explore aside from a few collectibles and bits of lore.

The snappy and responsive third-person shooting returns, with every shot feeling heavy and impactful. Snapping to cover and popping my head out to land a few hits on enemies was satisfying, and each gun has the expected pros and cons, like shotguns packing a bigger punch but being effective only at short range, while distance rifles feel unwieldy up close.

The biggest change to combat, however, is Enzo’s knife. Many missions require Enzo to use stealth, with players given the option to choke enemies out or quickly stab them to avoid detection. Knives can lose sharpness after use after silencing enemies or opening locked doors, so I appreciated this light resource management forcing me to choose when a knife was necessary.

Missions offer much variety, with some focusing on stealth and some that go loud and culminating in car chases throughout Sicily. One early highlight had me go on a collection run, picking up money that tenants across the map owed. One of the interactions tasked me with holding an unloaded gun on someone to force them to pay up, while another offered a firefight against bandits who were stealing from a farmer who’d already paid his protection money. There are plenty of great situations throughout the campaign, many mirroring iconic moments in mob films. 

My one major caveat about this otherwise-excellent experience is the presence of glitches. There was nothing game-breaking, but I noticed weird inconsistencies like enemies sliding through environments, audio cutting out abruptly in cutscenes, and NPCs clipping through objects. It’s a little immersion-breaking, but it didn’t ruin the experience.

Like the best crime films, Mafia: The Old Country succeeds thanks to a complex and dark tale of revenge and familial ties. It’s a short, yet satisfying ride, and Enzo’s tale is easily one of the best of the year. While some may lament the lack of an open world, the narrative and solid gameplay delivered by the developers makes this an offer no one should refuse. 

Rating: 8.5 out of 10

Buy Mafia: The Old Country — PC — PS — XB 

Disclosures: This game is published by 2K and developed by Hangar 13. It is available on PC, XBX/S, and PS5. This copy was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PS5. Approximately 12 hours were spent in single-player, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M for Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Suggestive Themes and Use of Alcohol . According to the site: This is an action-adventure game in which players follow the story of Enzo Favara’s ascension through a Mafia family in 1905 Sicily. Players engage in various criminal activities (e.g., extortion, theft, murder) at the behest of the Mafia. Some missions can involve using knives, pistols, rifles, shotguns, and explosives to kill enemy rivals and bandits. Combat is accompanied by realistic gunfire and cries of pain. Blood-splatter effects occur as enemies are killed; blood pools are depicted under bodies. Players can also employ stealth takedowns (e.g., throat slitting, stabbing from behind) to kill enemies discreetly. A handful of story sequences require players to execute characters at close range in order to progress. Cutscenes also depict intense acts of violence and/or gore: characters shot in the head; a man’s throat slit at close range; a bound man in a chair beaten to death; a character’s finger sliced off. The game contains some suggestive material: women escorting men inside a brothel; a man tied to a bed by two women inside the brothel; dialogue such as “I found them still in the whorehouse an hour ago” and “Give me…more vino and all the lovely boobies.” During the course of the game, players’ character can consume alcohol and drive while under the influence. The word “f**k” is heard in the game.

Colorblind Modes: Colorblind modes are not present in the options menu.

Deaf and Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are plenty of visual cues during gameplay, like indicators to let players know where enemies are around them, as well as when they are shooting. HUD elements can be adjusted in the menu. Subtitles are present and can be resized. As no audio cues are needed for gameplay, I’d say this is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The controls cannot be remapped, but there is a diagram.

The post Mafia: The Old Country Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

This is a transcript excerpt covering the score awarded to Promise Mascot Agency on the So Videogames podcast, Episode 436. For the original coverage of the game, please listen to Episode 435.

BRAD: Okay, only one circle back this week, but it’s kind of a big one. This is for Promise Mascot Agency. I went into all of the details in the last episode. I’m not going to repeat all of that, but just in case anybody missed it, this is a third person open world game, although the map is kind of small, and I say that as a good thing. You play a disgraced yakuza who got set up to take the fall for a deal gone bad. You’ve got to go out to this town, out in the hinterlands to kind of make good. You’ve got to run this mascot business in order to make money and support your yakuza family back home. So you’re out in the sticks. And this mascot business is just in the dumps. It’s not making any money. It’s the building they’re in is converted to a, quote unquote love hotel. You can figure that one out for yourselves. And this whole game takes place in a world where mascots are actually what they look like.

So, for example, you know, if you go to a sports game, you might see, like, you know, those guys who are like doing the cheerleading down on the field and they’ve got like a big furry suit on with a giant head. You know, maybe it’s the bear if you’re a Chicago Bears fan or it’s a a Seahawk, if you’re a Seahawks fan or something like that. In this world, whatever mascot is, that is exactly what it actually is. It’s not a guy in a suit or a girl in a suit. It is an actual thing that it looks like. The very first mascot you get is a giant block of tofu. And that’s what he is. He is literally a giant block of tofu. You get one that’s like, um, uh, like an eel, which is like, uh, like the kind of eel you put on sushi, but is his chest is cut open and flayed out to be like the pieces that you put on sushi. It’s horrifying. But that’s what he is. Um, there’s like a cat who is covered in jizz like he is. He’s got. I don’t know what his name is, but I called him bukkake Cat because that is exactly what he looks like. And his pastime is watching adult films and doing adult content videos and stuff like that. So, like, you get these weird mascots, and they are those creatures because this world is, like, tinged with the supernatural or whatever.

So you go around collecting mascots, you recruit them to your agency, and then you send them out on these jobs to make money. So every time a store opens or there’s a big sale, use cars going on sale or something, you send one of your mascots out there to kind of be like the attention getter, and I do like the opening ceremonies and stuff like that. So you’re doing that to earn some money. But the open world is also there. In this game, you are always in your truck. It’s like a little, little one of those little cutie cutie pie, tiny Mitsubishi pickup trucks that I think are just adorable. I would love to have one of those. Um, and you drive around, you never get out of your car, so you’re not doing any running, jumping, fighting or anything like that. You’re just simply navigating from place to place. And I think it works really well in the beginning. You can only drive, but then you can like get some adaptations where your car can go in the water, which is fun. You get turbo boost so you can get from place to place faster and faster. And the favorite one might like the best thing. And this is one of the best things I’ve done all year, is you get a pair of glider wings and with the glider wings combined with the boost, you can basically take off anywhere as long as you’ve got about five feet of flat road in front of you, and that you always do, you can always pull it off.

You can just like land and take off and land and take off and fly across the map. And something about that. Oh my god. So fucking just, like, therapeutic and just so fun. Like half, half the enjoyment. Okay, maybe not half. 25% of the enjoyment of this game was me flying in that fucking Mitsubishi with the wings on it. And just, like, taking off, just like going places and seeing the clouds go by, being over town and then like you come in for a landing, you look for a nice piece, straight, straight piece of road and you just come in and then you pull the wings in and the car kind of plops down on its tires. Good. Safe landing. Fuck. It’s the best. And it’s I don’t know what makes it so good. It’s just like incredibly satisfying. I just I loved the flying. So getting around town in the car is, is quite good. I think it’s very fun. You drive around, you meet people, talk to people. There’s lots of crazy characters in this game. You get lots of wacky stories and weird things happening. You do a bunch of fetch quests for people that kind of force you to cover the map, which is fine. Um, lots of tangible rewards for doing it. Like very often you’ll get something that really means something.

There’s a couple of things that are just kind of fluff, but overall you’ll get things that really help you out, mostly in the mini games that pop up with your mascot. So while you’re driving around town, you will often get a call from one of your mascots who you have dispatched, and they’re like, yo, boss, I’m having some problems. Uh, for example, maybe their suit is or not their suit. Their body is too wide and they can’t get through a door. Or maybe they’re doing a cash register demonstration and they push the wrong button, and money is exploding out of the cash machine. Or maybe, uh, there’s a scary dog who is barking at the mascot, and they need to get away. Like, all these problems are small scale and hilarious. Uh, but what happens is there’s this card system. I’m not gonna get into the weeds here, but there’s a card system where you do quests for villagers. They give you their cards. These cards can assist your mascots when they’re having problems. And it becomes like a little very simplistic, straightforward kind of numbers game where the mascots difficulty will be like, I have a problem that’s 20 big, and then you need to flip through your cards and try to see if you’ve got 20 worth of solution for them. I’m very, very, very drastically simplifying this, but just know that the card game I think is really fun.

I always enjoy doing it. I never skipped one the entire game and once you do that, it gets you some rewards. If you help a mascot out, you get more money, blah blah blah. So the story just kind of goes and goes and goes. I think it’s just really fun. Open world is small and compact. Lots of interesting things to see. I think the mascots are fun. The story is like super wacky and crazy and overall it’s just a really good time. I think my only complaints for the game is I think the fast travel comes a little bit too late in the campaign, although I will say, to be fair to the game, I think it depends on what order you can do things. I found myself doing things in an order that was perhaps not what everybody else did, just for whatever reason. I guess my brain works that way. And so I got fast travel pretty late in the game. Not a big problem because I really just loved flying around in the truck. But every once in a while I would be like, okay, I just want to fast travel here really quickly. Um, and you have to activate each fast travel point. And because I had gotten it so late in the game, I, you know, I didn’t naturally activate these. As I progressed progress through the campaign, I kind of had to go back to the spots that I thought I would need the most and activate those manually, a little bit of a drag that kind of sucked.

The only other complaint I have about this game is kind of a it’s kind of a minor one, I guess. So the writing in this game is really good. I like the characters. I think it’s very funny, but I think there is just too much of it. Um, there’s a bunch of Yakuza info that I found very hard to keep track of and hard to keep straight. Sometimes you’ll talk to somebody and you think you’re going to have this, like short conversation. It ends up being like nine pages of like, nine, nine speech bubbles worth of text or something. And there’s a few times when I was like, okay, this is just like too much info. It’s good, it’s good. The writing is all uniformly good. I think the characters are fun and everything. I don’t have a complaint about that. It’s just like too much sometimes. It’s kind of like, you know, you have a piece of like New York cheesecake. You’re like, damn, this is a shit, I love this, I love New York cheesecake. It’s so good. But you don’t want to eat 15 pieces of it. You want to have like, one, maybe two if you’re having a good day. Uh, but, like, you know, 15 pieces is too many.

It’s still delicious, but it’s too much. Kind of the same thing here where I think the writing is really good, but I think less is more. So that was really my only complaint, because by the end of the game I was like, okay, I get it. I don’t really want to hear more about the Yakuza. I don’t really care that much about, like, who’s screwing what over and which family and the curse on the town and stuff. I mean, I think it was all good. I just needed less. So keep that in mind. It’s not a big deal. You can skip through the text. It’s fine. Fine, fine. But like, overall, I think Promise Mascot Agency has been one of the surprise hits for me this year. I think, um, I don’t know if it’s going to be in my top ten right now. It is, but there’s still like quite a bit of year left to go. I mean, I can imagine a scenario where it might get bumped out of the top ten, but the fact that I’m even considering it for the top ten really kind of tells you how good it is. It’s just really fucking fun to play. And when I would play this game, I had a very hard time stopping playing the game. I would want to do just one more thing. I’m just going to get this one more marker. I’m going to go talk to this one more person.

I’m going to go do this one more mini game. Oh I got to do this. One more mascot drop off. I’m going to do this. One more thing. I just want to fly, you know, like it just kept going and going and going. I found it very, very hard to turn that game off. And when I was playing it, I found it very hard to just, like, stop doing it. So it’s got that special sauce that I think works really well and overall I had a great time with it. This is absolutely a surprise hit for me. I had a wonderful time. I would definitely recommend it to anybody who wants something really quirky, super Japanese, super weird, a little bit of open world stuff in there. I think it really fits a great niche for me. And also, again, big shout out to John over at gaming in the wild. He is the one who convinced me to play this game. I saw the PR for this game and I did not play it because I knew it was coming from the people who made Paradise Killer, and that game did not click with me on any level except for the aesthetic. I love the visuals, didn’t like anything else in that game, and so I skipped it. Uh, speaking of Promise Mascot, I’m like, yeah, I’m not, you know, probably not gonna play this. I didn’t like their last one.

I’m not gonna worry about it. But John, uh, John really convinced me, and I’m glad that he did. So shout out to you, John. Thank you very much for for turning me on to this. I absolutely would not have played it without your influence, and this has been definitely a treat for the year. So overall, finish the game. I did almost everything in the game. I didn’t do every everything because there’s a bunch of little pickups that are just like, whatever. Um, there’s a couple little doodads I kind of skipped. But like all, like all the important stuff I did finished all the side quests that, like, had characters attached to them. I mean, I did like everything major in the game, and plus I rolled credits. Oh, and special shout out. Not going to spoil it here, but the ending of Promise Mascot Agency was fucking awesome. Like, you get a choice of what you want to do at the end. And again, not spoiling it, but like the choice I wanted was there. They let me do it. I wasn’t sure they’re going to let me do it, but they did. And then it resolved in exactly the way that I wanted it to. And I was like, fuck yeah, that’s fucking amazing. I love that you could do this thing, which I’m not going to spoil, but let me just say, it really was the cherry on the cake, so good call, Promise Mascot agency I was very happy with that ending.

So overall I think it’s time for a full so videogames review and for Promise Mascot Agency I’m going to give it a solid 8.0. You can take that to the bank. This is one of the good ones this year.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Buy Promise Mascot Agency – PC – PS – XB – SW

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Kaizen Game Works. It is currently available on PC, PS4/5, XBS/X and Switch. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 25 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, Drug Reference, Language, Suggestive Themes, and Violence. Older teens only, I think. Despite the cheery cartoon appearance, there are loads of sexual innuendoes and violent references. It’s not very graphic except for a few isolated scenes, but the sentiments are thick and there is some salty language.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options, but there are “color correction” options.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All dialogue is subtitled, but text cannot be altered or resized. No audio cues are needed for successful gameplay. This title is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable, though some functions can be altered. There is no control scheme. Menus are navigated with the sticks and face buttons, and when driving in the world, the left stick controls the truck while the right stick controls camera. Acceleration is R2, Brake is L2. The D-pad is used for various options, such as pulling up the map.

The post SVG REVIEW: Promise Mascot Agency appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Exploring an open world that was made with passion and densely packed with content.

LOW Some bugs, old and new, rear their ugly heads.

WTF Why are the atronachs so hot?

I was born 30 years ago, and for four of those years, I have reviewed titles here at GameCritics — but during all that time, I have never played the original Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

That admission is perhaps a bit surprising, since I’ve played every singleplayer Elder Scrolls RPG that has come out after 2006, which is… just Skyrim, but also every Bethesda Fallout, and these are essentially post-apocalyptic versions Elder Scrolls, for better or worse.

In any case, I enjoy open-world games greatly when done right, and what better excuse is there to check off a game from my backlog than a fresh remaster? I’ll begin with items specific to the remastered version.

The most obvious changes are visual. An incredible level of detail has been added to textures and lighting throughout, which can look impressive on hardware capable of rendering the higher-level settings. Even at low settings, many details from the 2006 version have been modernized, from the rigging of facial models to the (seemingly obligatory) desaturation of colors from the original.

As for performance, I played on two different setups.

On the Steam Deck, it held an average framerate of ~40fps on low settings and struggled to hit 30fps consistently on medium settings, with heavily forested areas hitting the system especially hard. On my PC, running with a 2080, it managed a steady 60 in most situations with a mix of medium/high settings. I only experienced one crash during nearly 30 hours of play — one freeze on a loading screen.

Bugs were not too common, but they were… present. Most of the ones I encountered were visual, but one did affect a main quest and effectively froze progress until I looked up what I was supposed to do next –this specific bug was apparently present in the original. Besides these few bumps, I had a fairly smooth experience that let me become engrossed in the world, easily losing track of time.

For those who want more than the lowdown on the performance bump, Oblivion opens with the player trapped in a prison cell, being goaded by a fellow inmate. The player then gets to make their avatar, who is fully customizable thanks to a fairly robust character creator with many choices, both visual and with those that pertain to gameplay, such as various racial options, each offering different boons and drawbacks.

The introduction plays out with an escape through the sewers as the player fights everything from rats to elite mage-assassins. At the end of this tutorial, the player is released into the world and told very explicitly that they can pursue the main quest or whatever else they want, and the adventure’s design embraces and supports this player freedom.

For example, dungeons and ruins are almost never linear paths, but instead winding labyrinths that can be completed via multiple routes. The experience system encourages players to find their playstyle by rewarding them based on the skills they use. If one uses bladed weapons, then the Blade skill will level up, and so forth. Many skills not tied directly to moment-to-moment action-oriented gameplay, such as lockpicking or speech, offer engaging interfaces that ‘gamify’ the experience.

I did discover some oddities during my time with Oblivion. Shopkeepers have a listed supply of gold (much like in Bethesda’s other RPGs) but the number does not change no matter how much I buy/sell, and I am under the impression their gold supplies are infinite. Followers have limited behavior options and sometimes choose odd pathfinding or will arbitrarily decide to wait at a location and need to be found and told to follow again. I am unsure if these are instances of bugs or perhaps idiosyncratic NPC behavior, but things like this did not substantially impact my experience.

In fact, that sort of oddness found in these characters and the larger world around them are incredibly charming. The world is densely packed with things to do and places to explore, unique quests were easy to come by, and if I ever saw a place and thought “that looks interesting,” I could go there and find out that it usually was.

This fresh version of a beloved adventure from the 2000’s is as good as it ever was, and those (like me) who have yet to make the journey will find it well worth the time, even all these years later.

Rating: 8.5 out of 10

Buy ES IV Oblivion Remastered – PC – PS – XB

Disclosures: This game was developed Virtuos and Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. It is currently available on PS5, XBO/X/S, and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on PC and Steam Deck. Approximately 27 hours were devoted to the game, and it was not completed. This is a single-player-only title.

Parents: This game has received an M rating from the ESRB and contains Blood and Gore, Sexual Themes, and Violence. From the ESRB: “This is a role-playing game in which players assume the role of an escaped prisoner navigating the world of Tamriel. As players explore open-world environments, they can perform various quests that guide and impact their character’s storyline. Players use swords, arrows, and magic attacks (e.g., fireballs, blasts of ice) to kill various enemies (e.g., rats, monsters, human soldiers and bandits). Combat is highlighted by cries of pain and frequent blood-splatter effects. One sequence depicts a room with assorted limbs, torsos, organs, and heads among blood-splattered walls/floors. Dialogue and game text contain some sexual material (e.g., “It was no secret that they were all prostitutes, and after the March and the Flower Festival that evening, they would be available for more intimate business;” “She…raped their men as cruelly as [he] had ravished her;” “Remember when you thought [he]…was hiding being every tree with lewd intent, intent on making you…into his personal sex slave?”).”

Colorblind modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Subtitles are available for all dialogue and the text can be resized. There are some sound cues during a few puzzles and combat that have no other tells, visual or otherwise. This means that this game is not fully accessible.

Controls: Controls are fully remappable.

The post The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The atmosphere is off the charts.

LOW Having hitchhiker penalties without hitchhiker bonuses.

WTF Chain smoking cigarettes to combat a child peeing.

Hi everyone, Eugene Sax here with another review from GameCritics.com.

A new ride, a tank of gas, an invite to a music festival, and an entire summer ahead of me. What new adventures await? I have all summer to find out. Keep Driving aims to capture that sense of freedom and adventure by placing players behind the wheel of a new car with endless opportunity ahead of them.

In this resource management RPG, players will travel across procedurally generated roads with the ultimate goal of meeting up with friends at a music festival. Players will collect resources and items, obtain skill cards, pick up hitchhikers and upgrade their car in order to keep driving. As players obtain different items like food, extra gas cans, a spare tire and so on, they have to organize the items inside their trunk to make it all fit — imagine the inventory system of something like Resident Evil 4 and you’re on the right track. If there’s not enough space in the trunk for an item, players will have to either throw something away to make room or put the back seats down to create a bit more space.

Both items and skills come into play in Keep Driving’s version of combat. As players drive around the world, there will be random events that players must deal with — muddy roads, being stuck in a traffic jam, cameras looking for speeding drivers, and more. These events will threaten the player’s four attributes, gas, car durability, money, and energy, so preparing for the unexpected is a key part of play.

If players can’t deal with road events with the items they have on hand, they might incur a more serious situation, like the car running out of gas or breaking down. Things like this will stop the trip and force the player to take more drastic action, like walking to a gas station if they have the money and the energy to do so. If all else fails, players can take a chance and call their parents which may give them the resources they need to keep going, or it will end the game if their parents don’t pick up. 

One other resource, and a unique one, are the hitchhikers.

These passengers to be picked up run a wide gamut — you might find a musician who requires room for his guitar, a convict on the run from the law, a “free spirit” party girl, and more. If you decide to give one a ride, they come with additional skill cards players can use for road events. However, they can also have some drawbacks as well. For example, The Convict makes the player drive faster, which results in fewer road events between destinations and a higher chance to get pulled over by cops. The longer hitchhikers stay in the car with the player, the additional skills will be unlocked for use. 

The hitchhikers aren’t just resources, though — I’d say they’re the soul of the game.

As players drive between destinations, there will occasionally be bits of dialogue that come up between the player and any passengers they’ve picked up. Bit by bit, they start revealing their past and their stories, fleshing things out in simple, but effective ways. They don’t become friends for life, though. Hitchhikers eventually ask the player to help them accomplish their own goals, and completing them may mean they leave the car, and there were many times when I was sad to see one go. 

Another aspect that solidifies the experience of Keep Driving is the goal of getting to the music festival. Actually getting there is just one of a handful of final outcomes, but it doesn’t matter which one the player ultimately wants to pursue on their playthrough. One time in the middle of a run I got a letter from my grandmother asking me to come visit her at the hospital. I detoured, and when I got there, she told me that there was a plot of land she wanted me to have as an inheritance, triggering a new destination to open up on my map. Quests like these are clearly marked to let the player know if following them will end a run, so my choice boiled down to getting my inheritance or continuing to the music festival with friends. That freeform feeling of choosing your own adventure is really the spirit that Keep Driving is trying to capture, I think. 

The gripes I have about Keep Driving are minor. There are a few minor bugs here and there, like one time when I tried to change tires on the car and the spare tire was displayed outside of the inventory space. Another glitch was when I got penalties for having hitchhikers, even though they weren’t in the car. Otherwise, the randomness can sometimes make a run last much longer than it needs to. At one point I had to spend nearly an hour driving between two cities in an effort to make the game spawn a car upgrade I needed for a specific ending. Minor issues all, really.

Overall, I was hooked by the atmosphere and easy-to-learn management of this summer road trip. In a time where games can be a wonderful escape from current world events, Keep Driving brought me back to a younger time when a car meant freedom and opportunity, and a reminder of those good times was more than welcome. As such, Keep Driving is an easy recommendation for sure!

For me: Keep Driving gets 8.5 liters of gas out of 10

Buy Keep Driving on Steam

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by YCJY Games. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 10 hours of play were spent playing the game, and multiple endings were completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game is not rated through the ESRB. There are numerous references to drugs and alcohol. There are some sex references in one of the endings, and there is significant cursing in some of the music tracks and some of the character dialogue. Not recommended for young children.

Colorblind Modes: Colorblind Modes are not present.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles, but subtitles can not be altered and/or resized. There are no relevant audio cues needed for gameplay. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable controls: Controls are not remappable, and there is no control scheme. Currently the game only supports keyboard and mouse, with the mouse controlling everything. The developer has said that controller support will be coming in a future update.

The post Keep Driving VIDEO Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Goodbye “Quests”, hello “Leads”!

LOW Shallow gameplay mechanics.

WTF They “say less is more” but isn’t it too little!?

Atomfall is Rebellion’s timely break from the Sniper Elite franchise.

Officially called a first-person survival actioner, this work of historical science fiction is a reasonably-sized double-A project that does not want all of a player’s time and attention, instead offering a short, mysterious adventure filled with conspiracies and moral dilemmas.

Atomfall‘s story is set five years after the UK’s (real life) Windscale Fire nuclear incident of 1957. In this alternate take, a military quarantine protocol is enacted and players control of someone who’s had an accident that left him unconscious for five years. Upon waking up, the protagonist discovers that he’s lost his memory and now must find the truth behind the incident and a way out of the quarantine that’s been in effect for all this time.

Atomfall is played from a first-person perspective, and employs stealth and shooting elements. In the early stages, firearms and bullets are rare and combat is mostly focused on melee. Later on, different types of firearms such as revolvers, marksman rifles, and bows can be acquired through looting, exploration, or trading. The world consists of four areas that are connected through a hub-like facility called The Interchange. Different factions reside in each part of the world, and as one might expect, the factions can consider the player either friend or foe based on their choices.

Atomfall can largely be seen as two halves — the gameplay and the narrative.

Though there is a barebones skill tree that improves combat, stealth, and survival capabilities of the player, it doesn’t provide any active special abilities. As such, Atomfall largely plays the same at the end as it does at the beginning, resulting in the combat and stealth feeling shallow, especially since the mechanics (in general) are on par with something from the early 2000s.

For example, players can crouch or hide in bushes to prevent being detected and to take out enemies silently from behind but that’s all there is to it. The awareness of enemies is also incredibly high, which makes it nearly impossible to stealth without it eventually turning into a shootout. The same goes for combat. Melee is tanky and slow because there’s no dodge or deflect, and shootouts are all about hiding behind a rock and returning fire. There are no cover systems or special abilities to add depth or strategy to any of the action. In fact, the only good thing about combat is the weapon variety and the ability to upgrade later in the campaign, increasing a weapon’s stats and their looks.

With such straightforward action, Atomfall‘s narrative and story are certainly its strongest suits, and to be fair, its opening is a good one — imagine leaving an underground bunker, suffering from amnesia and the very first thing in view is an atomic powerplant on the horizon surrounded by strange cyan auroras. Before that sight can be properly digested, a nearby payphone rings and a monstrous voice on the other side requests the death of someone called Oberon! Just five minutes into the experience we’re already faced with so many questions — what happened to that powerplant? Who is Oberon? Who are these people living in this mess? And what is my role in it? Mystery is a classic way to kick off an adventure, and the team at Rebellion have nailed it.

Atomfall also tries to redefine the notion of quests and rebrands them as “leads” — and they don’t start and end in a traditonal linear way. Some of the leads players find at the beginning of the story will continue to get updated until the very end. Sometimes finding an object updates the log for multiple leads and adds entries about them. Every lead might be as important as the next, and players will find themselves in a web of interconnected leads whose value and importance are sometimes revealed only after their conclusion.

Further, Atomfall doesn’t believe in handholding when it comes to exploration and lead design. Players must follow visual clues such as a bloody set of footprints that lead to a waterfall to find a hidden cave behind it. Such do-it-yourself encounters are the basis of exploration which might result in finding rare resources, weapons, quest items, or more leads.

While Atomfall‘s ending isn’t a top-notch example in the genre, it is highly reflective of the choices players make and their interactions with NPCs. Supporting characters met along the way are well written and each have characteristics that make them feel like unique human beings with agendas and aspirations, and very often they’re in contrast with what someone else wants — for example, one might be focused on accepting what’s happening in the zone, another NPC asks you to fight against the odds, while yet another might suggest jumping ship and leaving everyone else to their fate. Credits will roll accordingly.

Atomfall is ultimately what I call a “chimera” game — it incorporates elements from different genres, but keeps their influence on a surface level. It has resource management and crafting mechanics of classic survival titles, multiple endings and choice-related story and gameplay outcomes akin to classic RPGs, and an emphasis on exploration usually seen in action-adventure counterparts. These are all good things at first glance, but the lack of depth in most regards makes it hard to recommend to dedicated genre fans while also making it relevant to any discussion on traditional boundaries of defining genre.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Buy Atomfall: PC – PS – XB

Disclosures: This game is published and developed by Rebellion. It is available on PC, PS4/5, and XBO/X/S. This copy was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PC. Approximately 14 hours were spent in single-player and the game was completed. There is no multiplayer.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M for Blood, Language and Violence. The site reads: Battles are highlighted by gunfire, cries of pain, and blood-splatter effects. Players have the ability to attack/kill bystanders and civilians, snapping their necks and/or slashing them repeatedly, with large blood-splatter effects. During the course of the game, players can encounter bloodstained corpses and/or blood on the ground. The words “sht” and “prck” appear in the game.

Colorblind Modes: Colorblind modes are not present in the options menu.

Deaf and Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are subtitles and visual options available in the game, all of which can be adjusted. There were no audio cues of note. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: The controls can be remapped.

The post Atomfall Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

This is a transcript excerpt covering the score awarded to Monster Hunter Wilds on the So Videogames podcast, Episode 433. For the original, expanded coverage, please listen to episode 431.

BRAD: One more game and then we’re gonna wrap the show here. Monster Hunter Wilds, Carlos. Now, I talked about this earlier. I’m happy to circle back. And in fact, this is good timing for you because I have now played enough to where I feel comfortable giving it an official score, which I will do here on the show.

CARLOS: I will too.

B: Alright, but since I already covered a little bit, we will talk about your experience first and then we’ll circle back to my stuff. I think folks kind of know that I’m like the monster hunter guy, which is all fine, well and good. But, Carlos, tell us a little bit about your background. I have you, in my mind, pegged as being not the monster hunter guy, so tell us about your relationship with the series. Where are you coming from on this?

C: Well, I’ve talked about on the show, if you remember, over the course of many years, but it’s been a while. But I generally don’t like it. I don’t like the, uh, sharpening of swords, which they still have, which is still really dumb. A sword is still sharp. Doesn’t need to be sharpened. But they make it easier, as you probably obviously know, that you can sharpen it on your horse or your mount. so that makes it easier.

B: I do call it a horse, by the way, despite the fact it looks like a dinosaur. I call it my horse.

C: And so, in general, you know, I played Monster Hunter Worlds, liked it because it was a little more accessible. And I think I didn’t beat that, but I did like it a little more. But I still was annoyed because I just don’t ever want to like, you know, collect all that shit and do all the things. There’s like lots of things to do and collect and plan. I don’t want to do any of that strategy. You know, I just want to fight things. So I’m generally not that monster person. This is probably my favorite one because it’s just a no brainer. I think the devs were like, okay, let’s bring everybody in and make and like streamline the campaign. And that’s what they did. They made it “easier”. It is. And I mean, the main dragon I was fighting — spoiler –Their main bad monster thing. At the end of the campaign, I was like, oh, I got this. You know, like there was like no thought in my mind. I was like, oh, I don’t know, you know? I was like, yeah, I, I’m fine, you know. And so when I beat it, it’s like when the game starts that bullshit and, you know, you can go four more or three more chapters of stuff. So I might go back with my friends, you know, maybe even you and like and do some multiplayer stuff because I like my character. I had a pretty good time with it. It’s not my favorite game still, but I liked it. I thought the campaign story was just garbage. Uh, I so didn’t care about that kid. Just get him out of here, man. Get him out of here. I don’t care what he thinks and what he’s feeling. I just never cared about that kid. and the fact that we were doing everything for him. And I don’t love the idea of the ending. You know, I’m not going to spoil it, but that, you know, hidden message of what the story is about. No care. No care.

B: What? I don’t remember what the what secret is.

C: Guardians or whatever. The things that are in the little eggs.

B: What was the message?

C: Minor spoiler. Right now, for one minute. Yeah, they created those monsters. And that’s like a big reveal. They created monsters to protect them, and they’re in, like, eggs. Like clones. But who cares? Who cares? No one cares.

No, I didn’t care anything about the story. Had a good time. Beat it. Which I’ve never done. So that’s something, right?

B: Yes, that’s definitely something.

C: One big con, and you’ve probably already talked about it. But you beat the game. You beat this massive monster. You feeling badass? They make you do your first mission after you beat the game. And I died like, a million times to the bird guy because you gotta capture it. And it’s like, oh yeah, you can capture things. Did you know that? Here’s how you do it. Well, they don’t really tell you very well. And then the bird just pecks me to death, and I just die over and over, and I go, oh, cool. Great thing for an end game thing, buddy. Capture this thing that’s gonna peck. I hated that.

B: I think you’ve kind of hit on one of my big, big complaints of this game. So, like, I have ups and downs with this game, right? Like, I think it’s better than Monster Hunter World.

C: Yeah, I do too.

B: But also, Monster Hunter World is one of my least favorite Monster Hunters, like in the entire series. So it was kind of a low bar. I talked about it before. I’m not going to get super into the weeds here, but like so to give you context of where I’m at, I rolled the the initial credits. I want to say it was about 15 or 16 hours. So you can like get to the end. The first part of the the main campaign where you can just put the game down and be like, you know what, I had a good experience. This was fun and I’m gonna bounce. So that’s about 15 hours in. I’m now I’m like at 55 hours in. And so after you roll the credits the first time, there’s like like I mean, yeah, not to not to belittle anybody or anything, but like that’s really like the tutorial. The campaign is 15 hours of a miserable tutorial, but once you get past that, the real Monster Hunter begins with more options, more missions, more systems and different weapon upgrades. You get all sorts of like systems that open up that weren’t there before. So I think that’s kind of my big gripe about this game is like, they put this really, really boring — I hate the fucking story. I hate the story. I hate that the story, like, makes you watch so much walking and talking. I don’t care about the characters. It actually interferes with gameplay because there’s several times I wanted to go do a mission, and I couldn’t do a mission because I had to go through the story mission first, or I’ve got a quest to turn in and the guy to give it to isn’t there, because you got to watch the cutscene first, and it’s like it’s a problem.

I find it very irritating, but they also don’t prepare you for the real game, like the trapping thing like you just mentioned. You’re exactly correct. The very first mission after your credits is go capture something and they don’t tell you anything about capturing that. It barely even exists in the game until that point. It’s like, why did you, like, make me play 15 hours and you haven’t covered it at any point up until this point? So that part was a problem. Um, yeah, I have issues with this. But now. But I will say, to be fair, on the other side of the coin here, um, once you get past the first “ending” at 15 hours and get into the main portion of the game when the story takes a backseat, this is the experience that most Monster Hunter players are looking for. They give you, like, more armor types, more, um, upgrades, like more different systems, like you unlock like a whole other, like 2 or 3 other systems that you’ve never even seen in the game up until that point. And you have a bunch of side quests open up like it’s all like side quests all the time. Like, I don’t know if you noticed, but in the main campaign you get exactly. And I counted. You get exactly one side quest in the first 15 hours. All the rest of it is all main story quests, and then once you get past that, you’ve got like 50 side quests you can do, which is like more variety, gives you more choice.

You can go after different monsters you want to go after. So I think that makes the game better once you get into the what I see anyway as a long time Monster Hunter guy, what I kind of wanted from the game doesn’t appear until like 15 20 hours in. At that point, I started really enjoying myself where I’m like, okay, here’s the stuff that I wanted. Here’s the meatier stuff. The deeper stuff, it does get a lot harder. I’ll say that for sure. It gets way harder. Um, and that’s fine too. I’m not a difficulty whore, but I, you know, I, I do want to have like, a reason to strategize. I do want to tweak my armor a little bit. I want to use some gems and, and do some powers and attributes and stuff that you don’t really ever have to engage with in the first 15 hours or so. So there’s a lot of stuff here. I think it is a legit monster hunter at some point, but getting through 15 hours is kind of a big ask. It’s like you said, boring story, boring campaign, but the gameplay is okay. But still, for me anyway. It didn’t didn’t really open up for quite a while. So I guess Carlos, besides the capturing thing, you think you’re going to go back? Do you think you’re going to like, engage with the other systems, or what do you think you want from Monster Hunter at this point, now that you’ve kind of rolled credits?

C: The only thing is, I know that there’s three more chapters that I haven’t done. So, like, I like story bits, like we just said in the beginning. So I might want to do those right. And I might want to play with my friends. Like I have a couple friends who are playing it and I’m like, okay, maybe I’ll do that because I never do multiplayer, but in general, I got it, you know, like if that’s what they wanted me to do is to understand it and then be done. Well, success, you know, because I’m like, I might not have to go back.

B: Yeah, but you feel like you got a pretty good experience just from going through the story campaign and rolling credits. Yeah. Like you feel satisfied?

C: Yeah. I think it was worth the purchase or whatever.

B: All right. That’s that’s pretty fair. So for me,I was going to come back and give this game my official review because like I said, I’m like 50, 55 hours or something. I’m literally like, I think two fights away from the actual end of the campaign. And there’s more, of course, there’s more game, there’s optional battles, there’s new stuff updating all the time. They just added a brand new monster into the campaign, So forth and so on. so I think with everything I said in this show, everything I said in last show and what I know is still in the game to come, I think I feel pretty comfortable giving this game like an eight… an eight out of ten, but that’s with the caveat that you have to get past the first 15 hours of it. And that’s a huge ask. Like, I don’t say that lightly, and I never want to be the “it just gets good later” kind of guy, but in this case it really is true — for a good monster hunting experience, it doesn’t heat up until 15 hours in, which sucks. But I’m here now and I’ve been having fun, so I think an eight is the right way to go.

C: I agree.

B: I’m gonna give it an official 8.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Buy Monster Hunter Wilds: PC – PS – XB

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Capcom. It is currently available on PC, PS and XB. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 65 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the full campaign was completed. All 65 hours were spent in either offline multi (with bots) or online multi (with real players.)

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Blood, Crude Humor, and Violence. The official description reads: This is an adventure role-playing game in which players assume the role of a monster hunter attempting to save the people and ecosystem of forbidden lands. From a third-person perspective, players explore a fantasy world, complete quests, interact with characters, and battle fantastical creatures (e.g., dragons, dinosaurs, giant insects). Players use swords, hammers, axes, and bows to defeat enemies in fast-paced, melee-style combat. Battles are accompanied by impact sounds, explosions, and blood-splatter effects. One cutscene depicts a large monster using a flatulence attack, causing a brown cloud to knock back characters; some monsters are depicted urinating and defecating in the environment.

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

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All dialogue is subtitled and the game comes with closed captions (and various display options) for supporting information. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Certain functions are remappable. The controls in Wilds are extremely complicated. There’s no one control diagram that shows everything, and most controls are context-sensitive, with many buttons having multiple functions based not only on the situation, but also on which weapon is being used. Players can toggle and switch many functions, but I would not say that the controls are fully remappable. In general, the left stick moves, the right stick handles camera, and the face/shoulder buttons handle a variety of other actions. Again, everything has multiple functions, so there’s no easy way of explaining it all — just assume every button and stick is used multiple times in multiple ways.

The post SVG REVIEW: Monster Hunter Wilds appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Goro Majima finally gets his very own game!

LOW The sailing and piracy aspects fall short of expectations.

WTF Sorry, no WTF moment here. Everything in this game is completely normal.

Some time after the events of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, series favorite Goro Majima washes up shirtless and dehydrated on a small island and is promptly saved by an innocent little tyke named Noah who warily hands the tattooed weirdo a cup of water. This random act of kindness results in Majima dedicating his life to protecting the little guy from assorted bastards on the island and making sure Noah’s wish of seeing the world is granted… by becoming an actual pirate sailing around the high seas at the helm of his own pirate ship.

Typically, if a sixty-year-old man loses his memory, begins dressing up as a pirate and promises to take a random ten year old boy away from his family on an extensive adventure… well, it wouldn’t end well for them. However, the story told in Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii isn’t terrifying — it’s heartwarming! Swoon as our lovable amnesiac ex-yakuza scamp rolls around Hawaii sinking enemy ships for plunder and stabbing the living hell out of anybody who gets in his way.

Of course, pirates have enemies and Majima will have to frequently defend himself from people who think a one-eyed maniac carrying a pair of razor sharp swords will make for an easy target. This entry opts for real-time third-person combat, and while Majima might be over the hill, he’s still a nippy little bugger in combat, scooting around the battlefield faster than a greased ferret shooting down a drainpipe.

Majima has access to two battle styles — his classic ‘Mad Dog’ where he brandishes a knife and can split into doppelgangers, and the new ‘Sea Dog’ pirate-themed stance where he dual wields a pair of cutlasses, can haul people around with a grappling hook or blast them in the face with a flintlock pistol. There are often tons of enemies on the screen, but fret not — Captain Majima is more than capable of ripping through anyone.

So, realism may have left the building, but joyful antics and salty shenanigans are in plentiful supply when it comes to Pirate Yakuza.

Unsurprising to anyone familiar with the character, Majima makes for an fantastic protagonist. He’s fearless and borderline demented, but also surprisingly sharp and empathetic in story scenes — at least when he’s not summoning cursed monkey Gods to punch people in the face.

The Hawaii map from the previous game makes a return, and there’s a few islands peppered nearby that can be visited for various reasons, from Noah’s home on Rich Island to the insane pirate lair known as Madlantis, where cannon-blasting seadogs drop anchor for well-deserved R&R. There may be shark tanks.

Naturally for a Yakuza game, there are tons of side activities, substories and minigames to indulge in. I’m not going to spoil them, but the revamped baseball minigame Bang Bang Batting deserves a special shout out, transforming one of the least interesting tasks in the series into a seriously addictive spectacle. It’s great.

Customization options aren’t too shabby either. Majima’s ship can be decked out as the player prefers, from the ominous black and gold setup I went with, to something that looks like it’s been dragged straight out of a magical girl anime with laser cannons melting everything in sight. Clothing options are also incredibly extensive, from basic t-shirts and hoodies to the apocalyptic Fist of the North Star-adjacent spiked shoulder pads I rolled with.

Given that this all of this madness sounds like it’s leading up to being the best game ever made, what’s the catch? Well, the catch is that as a side entry in the series, it doesn’t feel as fully-fleshed-out as it could have been.

Take the sailing, for example. The shipborne side of things isn’t bad, exactly, but it is disappointingly safe. There’s no truly open world sailing, with various maps being chopped up into sections and accessed via quick travel. Most battles on the high sea end in the blink of an eye, and its arcadey feel robs it of authenticity.

The fact is that despite the theming it’s not a pirate simulator in any way, and things such as weather changes are minor. Anyone who’s played Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag or Sea of Thieves will know how a sudden squall and churning waves can enhance the experience, but Pirate Yakuza doesn’t even attempt to compete on that level. For such a focal point of the story, being on the ship feels much like any other bolted on minigame in the series — decent, but somewhat throwaway.

I also have to say that despite liking the story overall, corners have been cut here, too. The whimsical and generally carefree nature of the plot is great, but there’s too much filler in the midgame. It doesn’t feel offensively padded out, but expect to fight human chew toy and supposed pirate boss “Keith” far more often than is desired, or to slam the brakes on storyline progression until the player levels up Majima’s ship or progresses through the ranks of the Pirate Coliseum before being allowed to continue to the superb finale. They’re unnecessary detours.

Despite all that, Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii is still pretty great overall, but this was one case where the devs should have pulled out all the stops to offer something truly different and unique within the series, and it didn’t quite get there.

Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Buy Like a Dragon: Yakuza Pirate in Hawaii: PC – PS – XB

Disclosures: This game is developed by Ryu ga Gotoku Studio and published by Sega. It is currently available on XBO/X/S, PS4/5 and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 30 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, Strong Language, Suggestive Themes, and Violence. The official description reads as follows: This is an action-adventure game in which players control an ex-yakuza (Goro Majima) stranded on an island in the Pacific. As players seek to regain Majima’s memories, they explore the island and battle enemies to become captain of a pirate ship. Players engage in melee combat, using punches, kicks, blades, and pistols to kill enemies. Fighting is highlighted by impact sounds, cries of pain, and frequent blood-splatter effects. Finishing moves can involve brief slow-motion effects and/or dramatic stabbings. Cutscenes depict further instances of violence: a character shot repeatedly; a bound man punched and kicked; a child kicked on the ground. Some female characters wear revealing outfits (e.g., low-cut tops, deep cleavage); in one background area, a man is depicted groping a woman’s chest. The word “f**k” appears in the game.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available, though elements such as the subtitles can be recolored to suit.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles can be altered and/ or resized. There are no significant auditory cues. I’d also say that the game is also fully playable without audio.

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

The post Like A Dragon: Yakuza Pirate In Hawaii Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH An exceptional narrative and combat system that builds upon years of experience.

LOW Some slowdown and visual quirks.

WTF I urge all readers to watch Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai before playing this game

For almost two decades, gamers have been well-acquainted with Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series. 

The first nine mainline releases saw players inhabit virtual recreations of historical settings in small-scale, open-ended environments that focused on stealth-based gameplay and stories that involve Dan Brown-esque shadow societies and conspiracies.

In 2017, Ubisoft changed directions and the series has since shifted into an open-world, action role-playing style, rivaling modern juggernauts such as The Witcher III and Red Dead Redemption II. As a longtime fan of the series, the current iteration is one I’ve grown fond of, with my own review of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla praising its deeper focus on exploration and strong combat suite. However, even after putting over 100 hours into Valhalla, I still felt that it (and the series as a whole) needed a little more to push itself into greatness and Shadows is that attempt.

Played from a third-person perspective, Shadows is an action-RPG set in feudal Japan. During this time (the end of the Sengoku period), conflicts have broken out while major advancements in wartime technology (like the introduction of guns) have turned the tide of battle. Players are introduced to the two protagonists, Naoe and Yasuke. The former is a ninja who’s been training her whole life among her people in the Iga Province. The latter, based on the real historical figure of the same name, is an African who was granted the title of Samurai. Without revealing too many narrative details, both characters meet in dire circumstances and form an allyship to liberate Japan from a wave of oppressors. 

The storytelling in Shadows is one of its strongest suits, providing a much darker and deeper narrative the series has seen in years. This era in Japan was known for death and destruction, and the story covers that with a gravity I wasn’t expecting. Themes center around the aftermath of war, the tolls that vengeance takes on people and how race and class affect worldview are all prevalent and handled well. It also helps that the two main characters are charming and fleshed out — Naoe’s brash attitude clashes with Yasuke’s more thoughtful personality, making their dynamic work.  

The grand scope and wonderful character of this piece recalls the likes of Akira Kurosawa’s oeuvre of samurai films (Throne of Blood, Seven Samurai, etc.) while the over-the-top violence reminded me of Kenji Misumi’s classic Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance or Takashi Miike’s excellent remake of 13 Assassins. Those cinematic allusions also play a huge part in the story’s presentation, as every cutscene is well-directed and featuring solid cinematography and the inclusion of black bars above and below the screen to add some flair, giving that “widescreen” look.

With the story being the best the series has seen in ages, I’m also happy to report that the gameplay is exceptional, with innovations and changes made to combat and stealth.

Players control both Naoe and Yasuke in their journey through Japan and are able to switch between them freely after an extended period with Naoe at the beginning. Rather than each character being a simple aesthetic choice, each provides a different style, different skill trees and different approaches to combat, allowing players to build Naoe and Yasuke how they want. 

For example, I decided that Naoe should be an excellent assassin and focused on those skills in her tree. She was able to perform a double assassination with a hidden blade, had an arsenal of tools like kunai (a small blade) that could be thrown to dispose of enemies quickly and quietly, and a smoke bomb to get out of dangerous situations. At one point, I even found armor that allowed me to inflict more damage at night, adding to my plan of sticking to the shadows. Naoe can also go prone and crawl on the floor, sneaking through bushes and under structures to catch enemies off guard.

If I did have to get loud using Naoe, I made sure she was an adept fighter and upgraded her katana skills. Combat as a shinobi is a fast dance of careful dodges, parries and quick sword attacks. The stamina meter from Valhalla is gone, allowing players to attack without the cumbersome feeling of managing a meter. 

Yasuke isn’t so graceful, but he brings a more brutal style of play. A trained samurai, Yasuke mostly uses weapons like katanas or kanabō (spiked clubs) in fights to delivers slower, yet more powerful attacks. His abilities include a kick that can send opponents flying or knocking them down after running into them. Despite not being able to sneak as easily as Naoe, I enjoyed walking into an enemy outpost and taking on a large group of enemies. This boldness pairs excellently with gnarly finisher moves, with plenty of heads and limbs being chopped off. 

Other major upgrades to combat include the importance of lights and sounds, as players are able to extinguish candles to conceal themselves in the dark and being careful when sneaking around to avoid creaky floorboards. After the last few entries in the AC series deemphasizing stealth in exchange for action, being able to play Shadows as a full-blown stealth title is a treat. Supporting this is that quests are dynamic, with many ways to complete them. For example, Naoe had to assassinate someone in a house. I managed to successfully sneak past the guards, find a suitable vantage point and threw a knife from a safe distance before anyone had seen me. I completed the quest and faced no alarms or opposition. 

As mentioned, Shadows does an excellent job in storytelling and presentation to make the experience feel cinematic, and it also helps that the visuals are gorgeous, with character models and facial animations looking good. However, the real star of the show is Japan itself.

Riding through winding hills on horseback is a treat, as mountains on the horizon paint a gorgeous picture. The same goes for standing in a dense forest full of bamboo. Shadows’ Japan is smaller than Valhalla’s England, which in turn makes it more dense with detail. The overall presentation is amazing and during my time, I only encountered minor moments of slowdown and a few weird clipping instances.  

Assassin’s Creed Shadows feels like the culmination of years of reworking the series into a full-fledged RPG. With smart changes to the overall flow of combat and a narrative that rivals some of the best triple-AAA experiences available today, Shadows is not only the best AC in well over a decade, but arguably one of the finest action-RPGs of the decade so far.

Fans and doubters alike owe it to themselves to take this trip to Japan.

Rating: 8.5 out of 10 

Buy Assassin’s Creed Shadows: PS5 – Xbox – PC

Disclosures: This game is published and developed by Ubisoft. It is available on PC, PS5, and XBX/S. This copy was obtained via publisher and was reviewed on PS5. Approximately 30 hours were spent in single-player and the game was not completed (still playing). There is no multiplayer.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M for Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Language. The site reads: This is an action-adventure game in which players follow the stories of a shinobi assassin (Naoe) and a samurai (Yasuke) as they navigate turbulent clan wars during Sengoku-era Japan. Players explore open-world environments while performing missions (e.g., searching for items, infiltrating enemy compounds) and using stealth to kill human targets. Players use swords, throwing/concealed blades, and occasional guns to kill various enemies (e.g., ninja, guards, soldiers, samurai) in melee-style combat. Battles are highlighted by screams of pain and frequent blood-splatter effects. Some finishing moves allow players to decapitate or dismember enemies, with brief slow-motion effects. Cutscenes depict further instances of violence: captives beheaded; characters shot at close range. The words “sh*t” and “a*shole” appear in the game.

Colorblind Modes: Colorblind modes are present in the options menu.

Deaf and Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are subtitles and visual options available in the game, all of which can be adjusted. This game is fully accessible. More on the accessibility can be read here.

Remappable Controls: The controls can be remapped.

The post Assassin’s Creed Shadows Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

Disclosure: This is an article written and released by Ubisoft, and sent to GameCritics via Ubisoft PR. While we don’t usually run PR releases, given its focus on accessibility and our lifelong dedication to same, we’re happy to share this information. The article can be seen in its original format here.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows launches on March 20 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Amazon Luna, Macs with Apple silicon via the Mac App Store, and Windows PC through the Ubisoft Store, Steam, and Epic Games Store. Set during the late Sengoku era in Japan, players will play as both the stealthy shinobi Naoe and the formidable samurai Yasuke. No matter who you’re playing as, the development team wanted to ensure that as many people as possible are able to enjoy everything that Assassin’s Creed Shadows has to offer. To learn more about the team’s approach to accessible design, we spoke with UX Director Jonathan Bedard.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is an evolution for the franchise, with many elements being rebuilt from the ground up. In what ways did that allow you to change your approach to accessibility?

Jonathan Bedard: Having changed the way we built the game, we had to redo many things, and it allowed us to revisit some elements that weren’t working as well as we’d hoped. Certain features benefited from this by being retooled or by simply changing the interface itself – or in some cases, the functionalities – to elevate our offer and our experience to higher standards. One example of that is our input remapping. Not only can you adjust the inputs of any of the buttons, but you can adjust the action of that input, whether you want it to be a hold or a press.

What was the collaboration like with the development team at Ubisoft Quebec?

JB: With every project, we have more and more people interested and invested in the different topics related to accessibility. This was especially true for Shadows; for instance, the audio team was really invested and proposed ways to innovate and push the boundaries of what we do in accessibility.

The unflinching involvement of our dedicated accessibility teams in Ukraine, mixed with the enthusiasm in our different studios, made it so we were able to propose new innovative features like audio descriptions for in-game cinematics, which is something not often seen in games.

Are there any new features you’re particularly proud of? Or that the community has been requesting for a while?

JB: Audio descriptions for cinematics is something that really made me happy to see come to the game.

Fun fact, while in a director meeting, reviewing the game, we ended up encountering that feature, in a scene that was used as a benchmark for this. It was not supposed to be enabled for that meeting, but we ended up really impressed by how many emotions and actions were transposed through it. It helped me project how this could change the perception of many motivational levers for many of our players needing this because of how well it came out, and how good of a job it did to express the events in the game in a way that really conveys the emotions and subtleties of our scenes.

It also made me happy to see an initiative coming from the team’s passion and making its way into the game. This shows how far we’ve come along in the last few years, in terms of people being aware of and caring about accessibility at Ubisoft. I am proud to see this evolution, awareness, and care spreading and making our games more accessible every time.

ACCESSIBILITY FEATURES LIST

Visual

• Colorblind options – Ability to change colors for certain gameplay elements from a list of presets
• Screen Narration – Not only most menu items, but also many HUD modules and time-sensitive elements can be narrated
• HUD Customization – Ability to turn all HUD elements on or off either all at once, or individually, either with shortcut or using presets – increase opacity, resize text, resize Icons or add background to increase readability
• Screen shake on/off toggle

Audio

• Subtitles – Better color modifications, speaker directions and speaker emotions
• Gameplay Captions – Surfacing stimuli and points to their origins
• Audio Description for Cinematics – Cinematic will be audio descripted
• Audio Cues/Audio Glossary – New signs and feedback allowing navigation and path finding with non-visual cues
• Separate, isolated audio sliders

Navigation and Guidance

• FTUE – First time user experience flow is back, offering first-access critical options
• Guided Mode – Offer streamlined systems and remove part of the gameplay to alleviate the requirement for player engagement in exploration and finding content
• Tutorials Section – Tutorials can be found in the Codex section at any time
• Menu Tutorials – Always alerts when there are new menu functions
• Conversation Log – Every line can be perused from the start to the end of a dialogue

Controls

• Control Remapping – Remap gameplay inputs, and their action (hold, press, double-press)
• Many inputs devices – Mouse and keyboard, controllers, combinations
• Lock-On Camera – Lock the camera on an enemy
• X and Y axis inversion – Ability to invert the axis for aiming actions
• Stick inversion – Invert the analog-stick behavior

Gameplay

• Stealth and combat each have four separate difficulty settings
• Guided Mode – Offer streamlined systems and remove part of the gameplay to alleviate the requirement for player engagement in exploration and finding content
• Canon Mode – Enable automatic selection of narrative decisions for the “canon” story to unfold
• Melee Attack Mode – Simplifies the combat by using a single input instead of multiple buttons or complex combinations
• Quick Timed Events – Type of input required to complete Quick Time Events can be simplified, or skipped entirely
• Aim Assistance – Four levels of aim assistance are offered (off, light, moderate, full)

Assassin’s Creed Shadows is available for preorder now and launches on March 20 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Amazon Luna, Macs with Apple silicon via the Mac App Store, and Windows PC through the Ubisoft Store, Steam, and the Epic Games Store. The game will also come to iPad at a later date.

— Youssef Garcia-Maguid

The post Assassin’s Creed Shadows Accessibility Spotlight appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH It’s a fantastic reinterpretation of the metroidvania formula.

LOW Being unexpectedly locked out of the explorer frog’s sidequest.

WTF Hummus is easily available on a world like this??

Sparky has done a great job in covering Caravan SandWitch with his main review, and I don’t disagree on any of his points, other than perhaps the degree to which we enjoyed the experience. For me, it was easily one of the year’s best.

One thing that made it stand out were the vibes. As he correctly indicates, it’s an extremely chill experience, and that laid-back quality was was quite welcome in this tumultuous year of chaos. The lack of fall damage and combat were revelations, and after spending 12 hours with Sauge trying to complete every quest possible, I rolled credits without missing either. SandWitch didn’t need them, I didn’t crave them, and it says a lot about how certain experiences can choose non-traditional paths and thrive.

I also loved how the overall world design dovetailed with this fresh direction. The conceit of a large multi-galaxy conglomerate leaving the planet and abandoning all of their facilities, robots and gear was fascinating — coming across huge warehouses with the goods still in them, secure areas left unguarded, power plants sending electricity to nowhere, and autonomous robots performing tasks that no longer serve a purpose were all excellent world building, and spending time with the people left in capitalism’s wake is perhaps a tiny peek into our own future.

The scope of SandWitch was quite welcome, too. While the map makes the available territory seem much larger than it is, it’s quick and simple to cross from one end of the land to the other in a matter of minutes, and that was just fine! It never felt onerous or tedious to get anywhere, and I never felt like I needed or wanted tons more space. In fact, this cozy area suited me so well that I eventually became familiar enough with the landscape that I knew where I was going, even without the map.

With both the setting and size taken into consideration, it was then a bit of a revelation to see a truly fresh application of the metroidvania formula laid atop SandWitch‘s foundations.

SandWitch takes the traditionally-2D system of finding powerups and opening skill-gated parts of a world and successfully extrapolates it to a fully 3D open world environment. Rather than closing off sections of the world, certain buildings were closed or key facilities were inaccessible, so the freedom of being in an open world was still present. Of course, there were certainly places that the player would have to mentally make note of and return to later once they’d received some of the tools that Sauge eventually adds to her arsenal, but it felt logical and organic, and never artificially constrained. I’m honestly quite tired of the metroidvania formula as it is traditionally interpreted, but something about SandWitch made the proposal feel so new and curious that I was immediately sucked in and wanted to uncover every single secret.

Unfortunately, Sparky is dead correct when it comes to the story and the translation. For a game that clearly displays so much love and attention in so many aspects, it’s a shame that the script, dialogue and individual conversations fall flat.

Throughout the campaign there are tons of examples of phrases that feel slightly off, of someone’s point not quite being made, and a general lack of dramatic buildup to the climax despite of the fact that there are many, many opportunities for poignant moments and unfolding revelations.

I must stress to every developer reading this review — don’t skimp on the translation!! Don’t give it to AI for cleanup, and don’t give it to a friend who kinda-sorta knows English. A script can make or break an entire experience, and while Caravan SandWitch is something I absolutely loved, this could have been an all-time classic if the characters and story were better written. The translation is a huge, avoidable mess for a title that is otherwise precisely on-point, and it pained me to see how uncaring I was about the story in general.

With a script that’s so off, it really says something that not only was I invested enough to play Caravan SandWitch to completion, but that it ended up being one of my favorite experiences of the year in spite of the poor dialogue. Exploring this extremely chill, open world while digging around amongst the ruins of corporate greed held my attention from start to finish, and even by the time I had solved all the mysteries and had done all the things, I was still quite ready to spend more time in this world. It’s not without its flaws, but Caravan SandWitch remains one of my favorite experiences of 2024, and I would strongly encourage the developers to continue their work — I look forward to being delighted with something new.

Rating: 8.5

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 PS5. Approximately 12 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).

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