Blind 4

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: It’s not super amazing but it does its job well. Forest, basement, magical school, you get it
2. Animation: I want to circle back to this later but even as I type this, only about 7 hours into the game, I’m blown away by the animation. This is very FFIV animation, and I mean that as a severe compliment. Taking relatively simple sprites with relatively few frames and doing so much with it
3. Storyboarding: Excellent usage of framing and positioning of the scene as well
4. Dialogue: I’m reasonably impressed by the dialogue too. Most characters are distinct and you can actually hear their verbal tics as they present them
5. Atmosphere: There’s an interesting vibe to the entire work. It’s all so… ordinary. Sometimes when you see this type of story (ordinary person enters fantastical world for the first time) there’s this usual thing with it being super amazing and wonderment and gasps and then oh my gosh it’s actually terrifying. Instead here it starts OFF threatening but then evens out into… ordinary. And it works REALLY well as an exposition tool in addition to just adding to the tone
6. Writing: Speaking of, good exposition on how the world works. The very fact that a fire mage or a lightning mage are completely unheard of, by itself, speaks volumes
7. Intro: The game starts REALLY strong. Quick and efficient exposition (we’re ordinary, we’re going through the forest looking for our missing sister, horrifying ghosts, just kidding they’re cool, by the way you’re also a mage). This immediately invests the audience while getting us right into the action
8. MSQ: The entire first major story arc (entering the school) is good stuff too. We get introduced to several concepts, several recurring characters, and that atmosphere vibe I mentioned earlier
9. Atmosphere: Every time we zip through the in-between realm it is brilliantly presented. It’s almost completely silent… until we start walking, and then even our tiny footsteps reverberate until it’s a cacophony. It’s great
10. Moment: Pertisia’s panic attack. I’ve seen SLIGHTLY better in a couple of other works (Arcane and Celeste come to mind) but this is very well done, and serves as a great character point for her and Maritte
11. Doodads: Again, general, but some good stuff. Especially in the dungeons
12. MSQ: The revelation of the Summerstone and the plot seemingly twisting on this point is a good scene (more on this down in the Negatives)
13. Moment: The Raven is wonderfully alien. The way it speaks, the way it moves, the sounds, great stuff
14. Music Direction: I have to give special mention to the usage of songs done from the perspective of the people we’re either playing as or fighting against, or… as is in the next scene, from the person we’re seeing the memories of
15. MSQ: The entire sequence revealing the truth of Aeldra’s defeat of the Dark Fold is exactly as powerful as it should be
16. Brickwork: A second generalized one. The gardens, the library, the dens. It’s good stuff
17. Character: Gilda is just amusing. They don’t do much with her but what they do I like, especially the part where she has to come to accept herself for who she is
18. Character: Petronella. Some solid Bernadetta vibes here, the uncertain person who nevertheless puts themselves out there at every opportunity to try and do what they can
19. Character: I wasn’t going to give it to Maritte at first, but honestly her vulnerabilities, decisions, and moments sell it
20. Character: Pertisia is the other one I’m surprised by. Typical rich kid exterior, actual human being interior. Very sympathetic too, lots of relatability here
21. Character: And a general bonus plus for the rest of the supporting cast
22. Outro: I’ll give you this game. Having Ibn descend into worse and worse versions of himself until all he’s doing is standing there, crying, while his latent pain is doing damage to us
23. Outro: The actual epilogue is sweet, wholesome, and a much better ‘and here’s where they are now’ than the scenes prior
24. World Building: Quiet and in the background but consistent. The nature of magic, the Coven, how limited these people are in terms of their world and their history, understanding how magic shifts, the Seasons, it’s all interesting stuff

Story Negatives:

1. Pacing: So there’s this very strange sequence. For a huge portion of the game there’s this massive development and build up to the mystery of what’s going on, whereupon we find out The Truth (™) and then… literally two dungeons later, which is like 20 minutes, we learn that was all false and there’s The Real Truth (™) this time. It’s very strange
2. Padding: The game is too empty and devoid of substantial story for fairly large swaths of said story. Some of this is Empty Text and some of this is just spinning wheels…
3. Padding: …but the ENTIRE game is just generally padded
4. Padding: Two bonus points here. First, when we do an entire dungeon solely to decide not to do the very thing we went there to do…
5. Padding: …and second, for there being a ticking clock we’re desperately moving against without any sense of urgency attached
6. Outro: Why is Ibn the last boss. This is classic Space Flea Out Of Nowhere problem. Yes he’s been in the game so far… as a comic relief who didn’t matter at all to the narrative. This is such a strange choice, specially since Aeldra was a far more substantial final boss narratively
7. Outro: The ending just kind of stumbled. They suddenly decided to rez Bax (okay), they talk down the final boss, but also the entire sequence acts like something the rest of the game did which really bothered me (more on that in a second). Then we have an ending which doesn’t really resolve anything and just kind of happily ever afters
8. Segregation: But I said I’d mention one other thing. And that is that almost every single boss fight in the game goes the same way. We talk to them, do a boss fight, then the scene proceeds as if we hadn’t fought at all. I don’t mean even the usual ‘boss ignores our victory’ crap a lot of games do, I mean in some cases it acts as though the fight LITERALLY didn’t happen. This makes it feel like a fight is just tacked on to a story, and it’s a constant irritation…
9. Segregation: …and deserves its own double

Gameplay Positives:

1. Options: Quite a few, plus some nice stuff like content warnings and other similar accessibility features
2. Core Combat: It’s decent enough to qualify. Almost every ability has different ranges, meaning positioning matters a lot, but past that it’s all about setting up and staggering. Reminds me of a board game, in a good way
3. Interface: Solid. Decent cross referencing, decent shortcutting, a few good controls options
4. HUD: Again, solid. Turn order is good and readable, as well as the grid and effects upon said grid
5. Difficulty Options: Okay so there’s a few. First you have an option to set it up as whether or not you want to have fully manual timing, partially successful timing automatic, or perfect timing automatic. This is already a great gradient and remember it also can be toggled at will out of combat
6. Difficulty Options: By the way it can be toggled on the fly out of combat
7. Fast Travel: Simple but solid waypoint system
8. QoL: So this is a tough one because this is debatably a difficulty option AND a quality of life thing. You can enable the option to, in combat, at any time during your turn just… win. This is an amazing feature, particularly because of how granular it is. The specific thing it does is kill all enemies currently on the field. So for example let’s say you came extremely close to defeating a boss, so you hit retry (more on that in a sec) and then hit the Win button rather than having to redo the entire fight. Or maybe you just don’t feel like dealing with the trash fights right now. Maybe you just want to enjoy the story. Maybe you reached phase 2 of a boss and died and don’t want to redo phase 1. All of these are possible with this option. What I’VE been doing is fighting every battle at least once (with trash) to judge them properly, and fighting every boss without, and let me tell you, this has been great
9. QoL: Restart battle upon death, pretty much the same way Final Fantasy Mystic Quest did it (it snapshots your setup at the beginning of battle and that’s what it restarts to)
10. Guidance: The menu has a brief snippet that gives a bit of a guidance on what to do next
11. Save: Surprisingly solid auto save system
12. Save: Save point placement is also really solid which (combined with them being full heals) makes for a smooth saving experience
13. Kit: General. I was torn on this for a while because the spread of moves you get is decent, it’s also… weird. Almost every person is designed to be a bit of a catch all who can support (both buff and debuff) and attack. And there’s no elemental damage to speak of. What this means is you just kind of pick your favorites because functionally they’re not really that different from each other. So the ONE character is good, and still deserving of a positive, but there’s not enough to justify positives per character
14. Music: Solid music throughout. Good variety, good tones for the common songs like battle and boss…
15. Music: …solid double
16. QoL: There’s an accessibility feature where there’s content warnings in advance of cutscenes. This dovetails into how the cutscenes are skippable, which means you can easily step over any scenes you don’t want to deal with
17. Intro: Excellent Intro on the gameplay axis as well. Here’s combat, here’s itemization, here’s your basic kit, and a nice tutorial level. All of this gets you everything you need to play the entire rest of the game, though it’s a shame it falls apart right after the Intro up until you get Rook in the party
18. Intro: Boss: The candelabra boss. 20 health and we can do 2 damage an attack (so we don’t HAVE to stagger… er, use the gimmick) but you can blow up its own adds next to it to do 7 damage. Already some neat mechanics and positioning
19. Level: The dorms. Nothing super fancy but still some good puzzle design and looping as you progress through
20. Boss: Gilda 1. Lots of moves and varying them up rather than spamming her strongest attacks. Good maneuverability. Lots of health but not unfair in patterning. Good song (a bit too short but still). Overall solid stuff
21. Boss: The Cauldron. It summons adds (which can be used against it) and has manageable attacks, and three distinct phases (phase 1 is just endure, phase 2 is push it down, phase 3 is the burn phase). Another solid fight
22. Boss: Fleur. Adds with fun support options while she doesn’t have too much health but a ton of mobility, supporting either your own movement or splitting up the party to accommodate
23. Boss: Snatcher. Probably the best example of proper difficulty so far. Lots of mobility, reach, and several weaknesses to attacks you have access to at this point, alongside absolutely spamming you with adds you can ignore to take tons of damage or try to focus fire down
24. Level: Spirit Oval. Sliding panes, teleporters, and switches. Probably one of the more complex dungeons so far but with some solid branch puzzle design (as in, do all four branches to progress)…
25. Level: …solid double
26. Minigame: Gwenora’s picture games. These are actually pretty fun, well designed in giving you just enough of a snippet to figure out where’s what, and rewarding too
27. Level: The Forest Ruins. A fairly standard illusory forest, but well laid out, decent puzzles. It’s right about here that I started to realize what this game reminds me of; Golden Sun. And I mean that as a good thing
28. Boss: Eoc 2. This is a great development of the earlier tutorial fight. Same basic concepts, plus a few great additions, including a final phase where the boss gains more mobility and range…
29. Boss: …probably my favorite boss in the game so far
30. Song: Aeldra’s Lament is a shockingly good song, especially for how it’s used (see the Story Positives above)
31. Level: The garden and the rolling ball puzzles. I love how much these dungeons layer into each other, often with objectives making you backtrack through the same area where things are different (in other words, good backtracking)
32. Boss: The Gardener. Summons that can be mitigated (lot of add bosses in this game…), big attacks of course but mostly single target, and spiking up the terrain for some area denial
33. Level: The Stacks. A variety of pseudo minigames (with actual checkpoints even!) makes for a nice change of pace
34. Outro: Level: The Sorcerer’s Tower has some solid puzzles, as… honestly almost every level has so far. A weirdly good aspect of the game, go figure

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Seconds In Minutes: Combat’s neat but every action and animation add up over time
2. Early Game: Lack of party size and reduced action economy plus large groups of enemies. It takes several hours to get Rook, our third party member, and most of the combat kind of sucks up until then. If you were here during the Run you know I was theorizing that the whole game was balanced improperly and was prepared to score it accordingly but, again, the second we got a third party member it smoothed out immediately. That does still mean the Early Game sucks, and I’ll be paying attention as we go to see if it dips again elsewise
3. Itemization: The game bobs up and down with its in game economy. You pretty regularly have a decent supply of gold but only occasionally have anything worth purchasing. As you progress more stuff unlocks in the shop but most of that is consumables which, to put it nicely, suck to use in combat. So outside of the biggest heals or the phoenix downs they’re barely worth the investment. This is combined with another issue I’ve been chewing on (at about hour 10 as I write this) which is…
4. Power Progression Curve: …the game barely feels like I’ve been increasing in output at all. I still do about 5 or 6 damage per turn on enemies with dozens of health or bosses which have hit triple digits. The only way to keep up is to buff and debuff, but buffs and debuffs last a hilariously short period of time. Meaning if you screw up on the timing of these at all you don’t get full benefit from them and the raw math lines up such that it’s actually better to just do the weaker attacks all 3 or so turns instead of trying to buff. There are some accessories which help mitigate this but you don’t gain access to these until reasonably far in and there’s only so many of them
5. Kit: Buff items. These… suck, to put it nicely. They’re limited in actual range (the person using them has to be horizontally adjacent to the person receiving for example). They’re limited in use (most buff for 3 turns which is a VERY short period of time in this game). And the buffs themselves suck (+3 attack power? When I have NINETY? This is a microscopic increase). All of this is pretty easy to fix (we actually came up with several methods on camera) but as is the buff items just feel pointless. Better to focus on the rez items or the AOE heals
6. Boss: Adds. Every single freaking boss fight from a certain point onwards summons adds. They always have too much health to really just wipe away AND the bosses love to resummon them if they die, making going after them a waste. They also eat up valuable time (contributing to the Seconds In Minutes problem) and basically just serve a a health tax
7. Factory Worker Syndrome: The entire game. The trash design in this game is honestly pretty bad. Boss design is solid, few complaints there, but trash? Trash is entirely overtuned, has way too high of speed, way too much health, and hits way too hard. This is true for the entire game too so if you ever fall behind a bit you can just find yourself getting bodied out of nowhere. This contributes to…
8. Difficulty Curve: …the incredibly wonky curve. Some areas are drastically easier than others, while some are just difficulty spikes out of nowhere, and there’s no real pattern to it…
9. Difficulty Curve: …which leads neatly into…
10. Outro: Trash: …the final dungeon. The trash in here is bonkers, literally harder than the final series of bosses. An entire enemy round can go before you have a chance to move, and they can kill someone from full health if you miss your inputs. This is insane…
11. Outro: Trash: …deserving its own negative
12. Outro: Boss: The first four phases of the final boss are just miserable. An extremely mobile boss who does a ton of damage (while summoning adds, OBVIOUSLY) and if I didn’t make it clear it’s a FIVE PHASE FIGHT. Christ this got dull
13. Segregation: But I said I’d mention one other thing. And that is that almost every single boss fight in the game goes the same way. We talk to them, do a boss fight, then the scene proceeds as if we hadn’t fought at all. I don’t mean even the usual ‘boss ignores our victory’ crap a lot of games do, I mean in some cases it acts as though the fight LITERALLY didn’t happen. This makes it feel like a fight is just tacked on to a story, and it’s a constant irritation…
14. Segregation: …and deserves its own double

Story Positives:

1. Storytelling Mechanic: Newspapers, which not only contain relevant story info for the times but amusing little side anecdotes
2. Brickwork: General, but solid. Amusingly this is a bit more of a gameplay thing than usual (since costs of rails depends on terrain) but it still helps set the scene
3. Music Direction: Very period appropriate. In fact near as I can tell the specific songs even change depending on what era you’re in
4. Storytelling Mechanic: I’m honestly not sure what category to put this under but I LOVE that you can just attach to the train and watch it go. There’s no mechanical benefit to this (in fact it slows the game down substantially AND removes your interface) but what it really does is just lets you enjoy the ride, and the (surprisingly good) graphics as you rail across the plains…
5. Storytelling Mechanic: …a totally unnecessary, and yet sublime, option
6. Spritework: Consider this a positive just for the trains. There is a lot of lovingly crafted detail that makes the engines themselves pop
7. Humor: Satire. Mean, cutting, and brutal satire
8. Sound: Great soundscape. The towns, the wind, the trains, the businesses

Story Negatives:

1. Dialogue: A lot of the dialogue is actively bad. Like, it’s hard to explain it but it feels more generated than written (keep in mind this was before the LLM boom… oh and also games with LLM trash in them are vetoed, so that’s not it)
2. Voice Direction: There’s also some WEIRD voice acting. Cadence, pitch, and tone are all off in over half the lines

Gameplay Positives:

1. Mod Accessibility: You can literally fire up the map and scenario editor from in game…
2. Mod Accessibility: …though there’s a few issues with third party software
3. Mod Tools: The tools themselves are pretty solid. They look like straight up dev tools…
4. Mod Tools: …so that’s an easy double
5. Minigame: Free mode and just jump into individual maps and scenarios you want to play on the spot
6. Minigame: Sandbox mode and just do whatever modes. More on Starting Options in a bit
7. Minigame: Challenge mode and the four scenarios. There’s not a lot of variety here but these are properly mean challenges with interesting time limits and requirements
8. Starting Options: Okay so you have a few options when firing up a new map. These are limited on Campaign maps but more open depending and can substantially change things in ways you wouldn’t really think (for example, just the fact that you can abstract trains so they don’t have collision totally changes how you use signals and lay out rails)
9. Secondary: Optional objectives and bonuses. Fun ways to boost your score and add nice mutators to the levels
10. Saves: Good general, quick, and efficient saving and loading
11. Saves: Autosaves and…
12. Saves: …multiple autosave slots
13. Core Mechanics: Okay let’s talk what we got. First there’s setting up your lines and leveling towns, which are as fundamental as the game gets. Laying trains is neat and intuitive, and you have to take into account clearing, tunneling, bridges, curves, and height difference. All of these are relevant and change the cost of the line and the relative speed trains can go on it. Then…
14. Core Mechanics: …there’s leveling towns. This took me a moment to really process because the tutorial isn’t great (see the negatives for more on this) but the idea is that you supply needs (easy enough) but then also have to keep the town moving. This means passenger trains primarily. More people means more demands and towns can also shrink, but larger towns also pull in way more money for you and so form a key backbone to any map
15. Core Mechanics: Research tree is neat and useful. The Rivals can form some interesting pressure mechanics and a way to bypass standard progression (wish they’d shut up though… thankfully there IS a toggle for the rival volume)
16. Kit: I mentioned this briefly earlier but the trains themselves are legit (I mean, I would hope they are). Obviously they’re all cool looking (see Spriteworks positive up top) but they have a variety of stats and aren’t just straight upgrades of each other. Some have better resistance to pulling uphill, some are smoother rides for passengers, some are way faster, etc. Planning out your trains and having a good fleet is probably the third and final main cornerstone of the game
17. Economy: I’ve been debating the in game economy for a bit. It is, perhaps amusingly, very easy to make net profit in this game. What I find most interesting is how that’s not a problem. Rather, most of the difficulty isn’t avoiding bankruptcy, but rather trying to focus on making money fast enough. Since every major objective in the game comes with a time limit you’re always on the clock, and so it’s all about pushing further and faster
18. Early Game: Early game is simple and solid. Set up lines, set up towns, set up trains, think about your next few moves
19. Mid Game: As per usual, a solid early game leads to a solid mid game. By this point you’re really thinking about what to connect where and how, as well as planning several steps ahead
20. MSQ: Chapter 3 is far more interesting than Chapter 2. Forcing the player to supply a town to be able to access past the Mississippi, and also limiting the player to a single bridge is interesting
21. MSQ: Chapter 4 does a few more interesting things. Managing very specific freight lines (gun running) and dumping passengers from place to place (delivering soldiers) and all while the map itself has pre-baked infrastructure to help keep you focused on objectives rather than getting bogged down in details. In fact I would say this is the best map so far…
22. MSQ: …for a solid double
23. MSQ: Chapter 5 plays with terrain and objectives while still giving you tons of resources to grow with and lots of options with the California coast
24. Prime Opt: The Britain scenario starts to really play with terrain being relevant, and does some cool stuff with a slowly unlocking map as you complete objectives, which neatly follows your resource requirements
25. Prime Opt: The Australia scenario might be my favorite overall. It’s a long haul, in fact it’s basically a whole new mode (I saw mentions of a ‘century game’) where you play from 1830 to 1930 while slowly taming all of the Australian east. That’s already reasonably cool, but what made this pop is the new settlement mechanic. You can decide where new settlements go as a reward for raising the population in a territory (territories are bought with unlocks and cash) and you can decide which ones you place in what order, and then set up lines to feed resources to them to get them started. So a well designed sandbox map with objectives and more depth to town placement and development? That…
26. Prime Opt: …is…
27. Prime Opt: …awesome
28. Replayability: Of course! Between scenarios and options and general fun we get the first positive…
29. Replayability: …and the second, as is normal for these types of games
30. Terrain: Actually really solid terrain usage on quite a few maps. Hills, mountains, and water are major obstacles and hugely expensive to deal with

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Controls: Backing out and going forwards in the menus. So first, escape to back out doesn’t always work, so that’s already irritating. But then whether it works or not varies per screen. In fact some screens let you right click to back out by right clicking but don’t in others but do in quite a few. It’s very frustrating
2. Controls: Hotkeying. Several core functionality things do not have a hotkey. By the way there’s also no guide on what hotkeys are AND no rebinding options
3. Options: I should ding that separately because in a modern PC strategy management game there’s no friggin’ rebinding
4. Interface: Fairly unintuitive and takes a while to figure out how to do specific types of things. Also a general lack of cross referencing (as of typing this I still don’t know how to at-a-glance what cities need to develop, instead I have to select each city individually and take mental note). To put this into perspective, it took me the better part of an hour to figure out how to do something fairly basic (set up a train route to pick up specific amounts of each item and drop them off at a town to boost its growth). Once you figure out where all the buttons are and how they connect it takes literally like a minute to do, but that interface barrier is brutal…
5. Interface: …and sadly…
6. Interface: …pretty typical for the genre
7. Intro: Tutorialization: A bit too hand holdy and, worse, doesn’t cover pretty critical stuff. I actually lost the tutorial because of running into deadlines and not recognizing how to kickstart capital (in other words, the unlock bonuses). Hell several entire mechanics are completely locked out until it hits them
8. MSQ: Chapter 2’s final two requirements are literally just wait around for money to pool up
9. Core Mechanic: Certain aspects of logistics are a bit borked. It’s very boardgamey (in good ways) but also in ways that makes it frustrating to do something. For example, if you buy out a competitor? Well now you have unconnected rails because theirs don’t connect with your home base. Trying to set up a rail line and made a mistake? Now there’s an empty line just taking up space which you have to go out of your way to find. Trying to connect two rails? Hope you clicked very precisely cuz it’s extremely easy to LOOK like they connect but don’t actually. But there’s a few things that feel worse than that
10. Core Mechanic: Like Warehouses. I did a bit of a dive into how these work and they… suck. They add an additional loading/unloading stop for goods and store them there but there’s no real benefit to doing so since if goods can’t move they don’t need to anyways (for example, no demand). This means it just costs money and time. Heaven help you if you set up a warehouse IN your network where it will just bog it down and provide no benefit
11. Core Mechanic: Speaking of… I HIGHLY recommend just letting trains pass through each other on any given scenario or map. And I know that sounds strange because it does remove a layer of complexity to the game (namely, designing your rail lines to accommodate multiple trains). Thing is the aforementioned accommodation sucks. I spent quite a while brute forcing my way through one of the maps attempting to wrap my head around how the system works because it’s not a ‘smart’ system. If you set up two lines between two towns the trains will always use the same line and get clogged immediately. There’s also seemingly no way to adjust priority for trains so who got to go and who got to wait was seemingly random. After quite a bit of work I found that if you set up manual waypoints you could FORCE a train to take an alternate line on a round trip, but only if you set it up right and obviously it then always has to take THAT line. This could be worse, and it’s completely optional thanks to the toggle, but it still sucks
12. Late Game: As with almost every large strategy game ever made, the late game falls off pretty hard. There’s no new mechanics or things to deal with, it’s just the mid game again. And after a while that just gets old

Story Positives:

1. Spritework: This is a weird one. So the in combat sprites are solid, but the in map sprites are very, very basic ASCII style art circa the 70s. Good animations and good portraits help quite a bit though
2. Plot: Core premise. The world is gone, has been for an uncertain amount of time, and we’re putting it back together. It’s a very fantasy plot in a high concept way I don’t see very often but actually uses its concept and emphasizes its alien nature
3. Background Lore: Lore tidbits (that you pay for, sigh) are nice additional bits of background info on the world that was
4. Brickwork: I chewed on this for a bit. But I do actually like the somewhat gloomy but distinct styling of the tiles as you place them
5. Brickwork: Further I want to give a side bonus to the interface. The stone slab, flecked with bits of sand and blood, the carvings and grooves, the little side stylings. It’s not super often I get to praise the graphics of an interface itself but here we are
6. Atmosphere: Horrifying. This is a truly terrifying setting in so many ways. The mimics, the zealot’s resurrections, the ghosts inside of ghosts

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Core Mechanic: Tile placement is as core as it gets to the game. Everything about this is shockingly well designed, laid out, and though out. The level of depth involved with tiles giving benefits that don’t benefit everyone equally, change depending on specific placement in the world, and adjust your relative power level per loop is hard to properly summarize. So for the cards themselves…
2. Core Mechanic: …we’ll call it…
3. Core Mechanic: …a solid triple
4. Core Mechanic: So most of the cards you can use carry benefits. Most of them also spawn enemies. Yet the enemies themselves are part of the benefits… if you’re set up to deal with them. It’s a great dynamic and puts a ton of control into the player’s hands for how any given loop goes…
5. Core Mechanic: …and deserves a positive just for how well thought out it is, nevermind how much it adds to the experience
6. Core Combat: Loop plus strategy on placement plus potions plus equipment. See, this is what we call hands-off strategy, where you do things that affect the combat but don’t actually do the combat itself (see: Pikmin for a popular example of this). This is still quite well designed, as what you place where (see positives 1 through 5) has a direct impact on combat, as well as things like potions, your Supply from camp, and swapping equipment you get on the fly to adjust
7. Kit: Cards in general. There’s just so many cards with so many different uses and so many different combos for synergies (meaning positioning matters a lot and honestly forms a huge portion of the tactics of the game)…
8. Kit: …so consider that…
9. Kit: …another triple
10. Build: How you set up your build is another huge aspect of gameplay. Obviously there’s the classes (more on that in a moment) but also which Supply you bring with you and which cards you bring. The deck setup is more complex than it looks too because you’re not bringing a set amount of any given card, merely adding the chance for a card to spawn when one is drawn. That means any new card added functionally reduces the chance of getting any other card. You also can only bring so many of any given type (and HAVE to bring a minimum amount, both of type and in general). Further, each card has a weight attached to how likely it will spawn. This allows a ton of Build options…
11. Build: …for another…
12. Build: …triple
13. QoL: Loadouts. The ability to set up loadouts for different Builds is fantastic
14. Kit: Rogue. Relatively simple; You get a huge bump of equipment right at the end and they have issues with group damage, but they will absolutely DESTROY individual targets and of course you can build around that
15. Kit: Necromancer is even cooler. So you do damage sure, but most of your output is on your pets which you summon. So you care about summon level, but also quantity of summons. Further, because health doesn’t matter as much to you (thanks to your magic shield mechanic) you can change your focus on items and cards. In fact it’s hilarious that while Warriors love things like forests and mountains, necromancers just want deserts. Either way…
16. Kit: …great class
17. Core Mechanic: Also, as mentioned above, there’s some great class synergies in cards, equipment, and Supply
18. Itemization: Drops. Which enemies drop which types of items is a whole thing (Skeletons, for example, drop higher level equipment than Slimes, and Spiders are a great source of cards) and that…
19. Encounter Design: …dovetails into how much the player wants to line up their encounters thusly
20. Music: Great music. I’m honestly shocked that music that plays for a game this long doesn’t get old but they do some good variance and have a lot of different tracks…
21. Music: …and the tunes are great besides
22. Interface: Nothing super awesome but weirdly smooth for what it is
23. HUD: Once you figure out what each thing is and indicates there’s a ton of at-a-glance info on display at all times
24. Sound: Almost every single action has its own distinct sound and you get a good vibe for it all after a while
25. Info In Game: Quite a bit. There’s an encyclopedia with some specifics, plus if you mouse over things the game pauses for a sec to let you read
26. Strategic Layer: Base building and tile placement, crafting for microscopic bonuses, end game prep, resource exchange
27. Boss: Second and third bosses are neat. The second boss has these angels you can’t target and these mirrors that sort of reflect damage but otherwise you’re just trying to deal with her. The third boss buffs whoever’s left alive once you defeat one of the three enemies in question. It’s not a lot but it does require some setup and strategy
28. Replayability: The second positive, definitely, as all rogue games should get
29. Enemy Design: Solid design throughout. Each enemy has its own bit of kit and reward baked into it
30. Enemy Variety: Great variety too. There’s hardly two enemies that are dealt with in the same way, especially…
31. Enemy Variety: …once you consider how they gain new abilities as they push forward into new levels
32. Postgame: Considerable, of course. There’s more stuff to unlock, optional fights, and new dialogues

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Info In Game: For all it does right, it’s worth noting there’s a weirdly large amount of info the game just does not tell you. Ever. I had to use a wiki and several guides to understand certain mechanics and cards
2. Grind: Okay so I talked about this on camera, and intend to type this up in my summary, but this game is about triple the length that it should be for the main campaign. If you, like I did, cheat in resources to speed up progress to the point where the game takes roughly 10 hours the game is fine. Smooth progression curve, smooth experience, good pacing, no padding. But that’s not the way the game actually is. Instead what you find is you have to…
3. Grind: …grind your face off…
4. Grind: …doing loops over and over and over to get basic resources to progress. Because see…
5. Power Progression Curve: …the progression curve is wonky as hell. Some of the very FIRST buildings you gain access to cost exorbitant amounts of resources and give hardly any real benefit. In fact one of the first buildings you gain in the town is the ability to craft… once you unlock another building, much further down the line. That’s ignoring the obvious fact that the quantity of resources it takes to then craft Supplies to give yourself bonuses, and those bonuses are microscopic and thus require TONS of them to be worthwhile…
6. Power Progression Curve: …it’s just awful, especially since…
7. Padding: …all of this means even more padding. Because you also need to grind up resources to get more buildings to upgrade your inventory cap so you can then grind to craft items and by the way the items you make are RANDOM so good luck getting the right ones
8. Pacing: And all of this means the full game’s pacing is awful
9. Seconds In Minutes: Gear and stat randomness. So at a certain point in the game I stopped paying as much attention to specific stats on gear unless I was going for a specific build (like Evasion focused or whatever) because you get SO MUCH GEAR and it takes just a little bit too much time to glance and figure out what’s what. It’s only a second or two per item, but think about just how many items you spend those seconds on across so many loops

Story Positives:

1. Writing: Generally solid across the board. There’s some real effort put into the style and type of the notes and descriptions of areas as we progress
2. Sound: Great soundscape, top to bottom. Varies from area to area too
3. Music Direction: Variable, but good enough to get the nod. Sometimes the music just really crushes it in how it adds to the scene
4. Background Lore: Taxonomy entries and scientificish research on the various flora we find
5. Atmosphere: The Bloom. Our first taste of horror, though small, is still a great sign of things to come. Speaking of which…
6. Atmosphere: The Dusk Slopes. Dark, empty, and deep. That soundscape really starts to do its job here
7. Moment: Suddenly finding Minae. It’s so understated; As you’re scanning the info starts showing up normally, but quickly turns into ‘oh my god’ as she realizes who it is
8. Plot: This is the official moment where the plot kicks off (as mentioned in the negatives this is AFTER the Intro) and the mystery hook is actually quite strong. To wit; A person is found over a kilometer down, resting on the ocean floor, without a suit. Just… hanging out there. What in the world
9. World Building: A lot, mostly in the background. Casual references to just how bad things are on the ‘grey world’ (Earth), and how bad the corporations have gotten where someone willingly kills himself and his entire crew because it was ordered
10. Atmosphere: The Anomaly. Deep, creaking metal, logs detailing their final days, descriptions of how badly the place is crushed. Oh speaking of…
11. Storytelling Mechanic: The Anomaly’s log entries. These are really well written and we see exactly as much of these as we need to get a pretty clear picture
12. Outro: The final run through the Oceanic Mind and the mounds of corpses over 3 clicks down is properly horrifying

Story Negatives:

1. Intro: For basically the exact same reason as in the gameplay axis, the Intro doesn’t… do anything good really. The fact that the first real moment of interest happens firmly AFTER the Intro says all it needs to
2. Outro: The ending itself is… not particularly good. Okay so we found everything, cool, and life still sucks, and we have no idea what’s going to happen next, and we have an uncertain amount of time stuck here, but hey at least we found the last Artificer! Who fled the instant it saw us! Great

Gameplay Positives:

1. Tutorialization: All diegetic, weirdly enough. In fact there’s exactly one thing I had to have explained to me (the oxygen and power icons), otherwise everything is sort of self apparent thanks to color usage and highlighting
2. Interface: The interface itself is solid. Which is good because it’s all we got
3. Overworld: Reasonably good overworld design. There’s no such thing as getting yourself unable to proceed, there’s natural flow of progression, and there’s clearly thought out paths of exploration
4. Message Log: A full on log that, when it works correctly, shows you EVERYthing that’s been said to date and in order
5. Difficulty Curve: Easing. So when you enter your first oxygen deprivation area the first two nodes are oxygen nodes, meaning you’re eased in nicely. The entire Bloom is actually this as well for the later areas which are much harsher about these things
6. Secondary: Optional objectives to go scan specific things to unlock more scientific logs
7. Level: The Bloom is very well designed in general, gameplay wise. The oxygen safe zones are properly spaced (more early on, but later you start to go fairly long stretches without) and the addition of the item to create your own safe zone wherever is a great item
8. Level: Dusk Slopes. One of the very first things that happens here is you’re given an obvious path to cross one of the veil lines, which naturally hurts you. Immediately after this are nodes that let you go AROUND said lines, clearly indicating how this area works. This kind of doubles for the Brine area which pulls the same trick (one of the first nodes in the Brine mandates going through it, but only a little bit)
9. Level: The Anomaly. The game flat out tells you to bring supplies, and it means it. This is one long stretch with no resupply whatsoever, multiple routes, and tons to do. It’s also multiple layers with multiple ways to swap layers, and having to burn resources to open doors adds to the tension

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Seconds In Minutes: As of typing this I’m still torn if this is one negative or two, but it sucks either way. Moving around just takes too damned long, especially when moving into an area the first time. The process means scanning, selecting, switching to jet, then jetting over. Rinse and and repeat dozens and dozens of times
2. Intro: For similar reasons to the story axis, the Intro is pretty weak. You don’t have much in the way of interesting interactions or kit yet, and while the game has a solid tutorial right out the gate, it also just doesn’t… do anything until you reach the Bloom. And a weak Intro on both axis means early Quit Points for players

Story Positives:

1. Tone: There’s actually two tones here, which gel well with each other. The first is the horrifyingly corporate dystopia, to such an insane degree that this is right up there with Weyland Yutani, and it is emphasized and presented exceptionally well…
2. Tone: …so that’s a double
3. Tone: Then there’s the blue collar worker tone. Part of this is the music direction but just the hard, difficult work vibe in the trenches is great stuff…
4. Tone: …and worthy of another positive
5. Voice Acting: Great voice acting pretty much across the board
6. Brickwork: Space, the Moon, the yard…
7. Visual Storytelling: …and Earth. Barren, broken, partially sunk Earth
8. World Building: There’s a lot of background world building about exactly how things have developed and how things are the way they are. Side note; I love how the union busting video we’re forced to watch is actually not as bad as real life union busting videos
9. Intro: Terms of Service. Just… the Terms of Service. WOW this is insane. Also the Intro includes us having part of our spine ripped out and then us dying while we listen to it happening
10. Character: Weaver. Weaver is such a perfect character for this type of story, and easily the best character in said story. He’s affable, friendly, helpful, genuinely cares… and completely empowers the horrible corporation that takes advantage of everyone by his desire to compromise and ‘make everyone happy’ when one of those sides is so clearly in the wrong…
11. Character: …great stuff
12. Character: I also have to give credit to Hal, who is honestly just the perfect slice of horrible. Even more than just being another petty middle manager, they manage to do a ton of little details about his character perfectly (so much so that I would believe it’s based on real life experience). My favorite individual detail is later on when the crew stops talking back to him he clearly has no idea how to deal with that, and just fumbles a bit before moving on…
13. Character: …and a second positive
14. Banter: Generally good banter between the team
15. MSQ: Industrial Action. Fun, well written, well acted, and nicely cathartic
16. Moment: Hal, when he thinks he’s killed Kaito, legitimately loses it. Rants, misdirects, blames, but at the end of the day his dialogue and voice actor makes it clear; he is NOT a killer. And good lord
17. Storytelling Mechanic: The little portraits and their little animations are neat

Story Negatives:

1. Segregation: So this is a weird one but hear me out. The game wants this horrible doom tone of being an oppressed worker slave… and yet reality does not conform to that. We have honestly a pretty interesting, rewarding, and challenging job that pays extremely well that, if we stuck with it (in lore) for maybe half a year we’d have our debt paid off and be on our way to earning our retirement. The problem, at its core, is that the team wanted to make a good game (which they did) and then wrote a story that doesn’t quite… fit that
2. Pacing: The story takes way, way too long to go anywhere. In fact this is a recursive problem, because the story takes too long in general, and the gaps in between story beats are too long. The big Act 3 starter should’ve probably happened within 4-6 shifts of Hal showing up, not forever later. In fact to put numbers to this, the point at which the plot actually starts moving (the aforementioned Act 3) is over 25 hours into the game. I talked about this same problem over in Loop Hero; The campaign needs to be properly paced to set up ideas, mechanics, complexities, and encounters and then conclude when it’s done, at which point if the player wants more you have alternate modes and endless/arcade mode to go keep having fun. Instead both games take entirely too long to get to the end of campaign point. So this sucks twice…
3. Pacing: …for the gaps, but also…
4. Pacing: …for the entire…
5. Pacing: …length and positioning problem
6. Tone: So this is related to point 1 but the game does not know what tone it wants to strike. Sometimes it’s down to earth blue collar work, sometimes it’s nifty sci fi, sometimes it’s corporate dystopia, and it does not know how to gel these together well
7. Moment: Backing off of Kaito’s death robs the scene of so much of its dramatic potential. And it’s a damned good scene otherwise too
8. Outro: Pacing: The entire story is way too stretched, and then it resolves inside of just three shifts. Whole thing races
9. Outro: Tone: The ending is… VERY weird in tone. It’s portrayed in this super positive tone, which is weird, but also doesn’t coincide with what is literally being shown in said ending (which if you think about it is actually pretty bad)

Gameplay Positives:

1. Controls: I’m going to be honest, it took me a while to get into the groove of it, but a lot of good thought is put into how to interact with what and where. And it has good rebindings…
2. Controls: …so that’s a solid double
3. Kit: I’ve been chewing on this for a bit. Each bit of kit is very well designed and so we’re going to go down the list in order. First obviously is the Grappler. The physics of it, the increased strength and range, how you can push or pull depending on weight, the shove, and the charge shove. This is bread and butter territory and you can tell a lot of thought and effort put into this sucker…
4. Kit: …so that’ s a solid double
5. Kit: Then we have the cutter. This isn’t SUPER fancy compared to the Grappler but it’s still a very solid bit of tech, and they clearly put some thought into this one too. Different materials take different amounts of time to burn through, anywhere on an object burns the whole object, and the beam cutter (mode 2) will hit what you’re aiming at not what the beams hit (despite what the graphics say). So overall…
6. Kit: …another very well designed piece of kit
7. Kit: Then there’s the tethers. These are wild. As long as they don’t break they have seemingly infinite pull (if not the same strength of pull you can get elsewise), so they’re how you can move super heavy stuff. They can also be used to just fire and forget pieces. And you can chain items together (they’ll always pull towards the heaviest object). Then there’s the TONS of them they give you, the relative cheapness of procuring more, the intuitive interface, and the insane mechanics you can pull off with them…
8. Kit: …so I think…
9. Kit: …tethers win
10. Core Mechanic: Good time to talk about physics. Normally I don’t give much credit to ‘using a physics engine’ unless it’s particularly interesting or they do cool stuff with it. In this case it’s both. First the physics are by themselves well designed and, of course, form the core mechanic of the entire game…
11. Core Mechanic: …but what really impressed me is how much they cheat with them. I mentioned this earlier when talking about the Brakes but it’s still true. There’s actually several cases of the physics being ‘close enough’ without actually being realistic which makes the game much smoother and funner to play. But even if you would prefer truly realistic physics for a more simulation concept, which is fine it’s worth noting, there’s still a lot of obvious design put into this which deserves to be mentioned
12. Encounter Design: So let’s talk ship types. Each ship type forms a different style of design for the ship. While the particulars can and do vary, you can generally tell what you’re looking at and what you’re looking for based on the make. So! We start with Mackerals. These are tutorialy but really well designed for what they are; Satisfying to peel apart and fun to figure out efficient ways to deal with
13. Encounter Design: Then there’s Atlas ships. These tend to be big thick chonkers with horrible, horrible thruster and fuel setups designed to make it VERY easy to ignite a fire while processing
14. Encounter Design: Javelins. These are basically ‘bring bombs’ with tons of moving pieces, so a lot of splicing up, but tons of valuable salvage as you go
15. Encounter Design: Geckos are my personal favorite. They’re almost always a giant outer hull surrounding a tight inner hull with lots of connection points, meaning once you get it and get it decompressed it’s all about cracking the shell and peeling it out, which is immensely satisfying (and gradient, as you can decide how large or small you want most of the chunks to be)…
16. Encounter Design: …easily the best designed ships so far
17. Encounter Design: I should mention ghost ships. You tend to walk in more blind with these, and of course they have AI nodes. And AI nodes can do… random things. Closing or opening doors, forcing explosive decompression, starting electrical surges, stuff like that. It’s actually a bit of a mutator on top of an existing ship but I put it here because the main focus is the AI nodes which like to hide around the ship and, once dealt with, reduce it to a regular shift
18. Enemy Design: So this is probably a weird thing to log under ‘enemy’ but I think it fits. Let’s start with fuel. We have fuel pipes and fuel tanks. The tanks are obviously very flammable and have to be carefully extricated or else kablooey, but the pipes can be vented properly if you find the switch which can make them safe to cut or otherwise remove. The game also LOVES to put fuel stuff immediately behind a cutting point, which encourages the player to be careful about their cutting angles
19. Enemy Design: Electrical is a bit different. It’s not a direct threat like fuel, more like an obstacle to overcome. Turning off the power negates it entirely, but any power source anywhere connected to where you’re at in the ship provides power. You CAN just eat the electric shock, but electricity can also arc between things if you’re not careful (eg; pulling out an item that touches something electrified makes the item electrified as well). Also turning off all the electricity means no doors or switches or atmosphere condensers anymore, so you have to think about that
20. Enemy Design: Then there’s reactors. These are the upgraded threats, usually in a very cramped and hard to reach position. This is relevant because once you pull them they start going critical and you have a limited amount of time to barge them. So there’s a lot of prep work involved, but as mentioned in the Chaos positive down below, sometimes one gets pulled early and you just have to carve a path out in a hurry and deal with it
21. Enemy Design: I’m giving special mention to Reactor 2’s. So these have a process to give you maximum safe time to deal with; Disconnect the thrusters, disconnect the cryo, then barge the reactor. The timer starts the moment the cryo gets disconnected, but it’s a nice long timer. This is a good risk/reward thing because you don’t HAVE to do that, you CAN just pull it and barge it if you’re quick. It’s also gradient; You can disconnect the thrusters then just pull the reactor
22. Core Mechanic: Chaos. Because of the nature of the game it can be very dynamic and rewards on the fly thinking, both in success and in spectacular failure…
23. Core Mechanic: …and most of my favorite moments of gameplay were when things went off the rails like this. I honestly wish the game had an events system to capitalize on this
24. MSQ: Increasing complexity. There’s actually two layers to this which I like. The first is the obvious; Periodically you get introduced to a new mechanic and have to learn how to deal with it. This is some good progression and makes you feel like you’re going through a… y’know a campaign rather than just random missions
25. MSQ: The second is interesting though. As you level up and get higher hazard levels the rules change in subtle ways. Ships start having no way to NOT explosively decompress, or they start using mark 2 stuff alongside things you don’t want to blow up. Little mutators that add to the difficulty and complexity without really adding any new mechanics
26. MSQ: Ship doctor is a fun little side thing that encourages you to be on the look out for stuff you can use for your ship, not just increasing your level
27. Tutorialization: I love how the game tutorializes. There’s the obvious stuff when you do a Training Day but also they give you (usually) infinite time and sometimes infinite supplies to do the Training Day
28. HUD: Color coding feedback (yellow, red, blue). This is such a great system and near omnipresent and helps with solid at a glance
29. QoL: So there’s this mechanic in place where the base ship doesn’t rotate itself into oblivion because it’s technically ignoring physics until it’s broken apart sufficiently. This is really good because if it wasn’t for this the ship would quickly rotate itself either apart or out of the bay and it’d just be irritating
30. Kit: Brakes. I know this is a weird one to call out but it’s true. The brakes essentially break physics and just straight up anchor you in place so you don’t move anymore, and you can upgrade the brakes to resist further speeds, and this changes the game from what would be massively frustrating to control to super smooth and fun. If you doubt this, play a few shifts without using the brakes at all and you’ll see the difference right quick
31. Music: Solid country worker music
32. Yoshi Drums: The music adjusts intensity and volume based on vents (reactor, low on resources)
33. Guidance: The design of the dockyard itself is nothing short of brilliant. There is SO much done to make this easier to navigate at a glance and to very quickly reorient yourself as you navigate 3D space. The fact that ‘up’ and ‘down’ are different looking, same with ‘forwards’ and ‘back’, lots of obstacles to break sight lines to prevent you from losing relative cohesion, the Earth covering half the skybox, it’s all great stuff…
34. Guidance: …easy double territory
35. MSQ: Industrial Action. Fun mission, and a good showcasing of how they could have taken the game conceits and ran with them (both the ‘inverse’ salvage as well as the periodic shutdowns
36. Replayability: The second positive, easily. This whole game is designed around replayability
37. Visual Distinction: Actually really, really good. Outlines, color usage, great angles, usage of light… just tons of great design here…
38. Visual Distinction: …easy double

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Options: There’s a reasonable amount of options, but you have to be in the game to even access them. As in fire up the game, do the intro, make a character, pass tons of cutscenes, and literally be in gameplay before you can access the menu. This is one of the most egregious examples of this I’ve seen in recent memory
2. Bug: So the game is a little bit hardware intensive, which can lead to blips. Thing is those blips usually happen when calculating physics, such as pulling something to you or pushing something away. And the game continues to calculate while the blip is happening, which leads to odd situations where stuff kind of glitches around. I actually died on camera to this thanks to me yanking on something (lightly, mind) and there was a blip and then it SLAMMED into my face and killed me because it kept calculating the physics during the blip
3. Segregation: So this is a weird one but hear me out. The game wants this horrible doom tone of being an oppressed worker slave… and yet reality does not conform to that. We have honestly a pretty interesting, rewarding, and challenging job that pays extremely well that, if we stuck with it (in lore) for maybe half a year we’d have our debt paid off and be on our way to earning our retirement. The problem, at its core, is that the team wanted to make a good game (which they did) and then wrote a story that doesn’t quite… fit that
4. Penalty For Failure: There is none. And that’s… sort of the problem. The entire game’s focus is killing off that debt, but the rate of pay off doesn’t really increase, and there’s no real detriment to buying resources or supplies to keep going or do better. Also the ‘cost’ of tossing stuff in the wrong bin is extraordinarily small. All of this is fine since doing it right is its own reward, but especially for the campaign mode the total lack of penalty just makes you stop caring after a certain point. And a lot of this dovetails into…
5. Economy: …the lack of an economy. Oh there’s levels, and monopoly bucks, which you can spend on new unlocks, and that’s fine. No I mean there’s no ECONOMY. There is no real benefit or point in being careful with your refills, or trying to stretch out your O2 supply, or hell just calling a shift and coming back to do the same ship over and over again across 5 or 15 shifts if you want to. This total lack of investment contributes to the lack of penalty for failure mentioned earlier and is a gaping flaw in the game design…
6. Economy: …easily a double negative
7. Padding: Industrial Action takes just a little bit too long to really qualify for the Hyperbeam Moment it probably should have been. Wish they’d designed a ship just for this. Maybe with multiple reactors or tons of fuel tanks or just lots of stuff you can haul off in bunches

Story Positives:

1. Character: Solas. Go figure that one of the better characters from Inquisition is still good here. Probably at least in part because the actor himself got involved
2. Character: Devrin. Solid, conflicted, loyal, angry, and hurt
3. Character: Emmrich. Emmrich is consistently better written than most of the other characters and I think at least part of that is because his dialogue has actual work done on his vocabulary. Plus there’s something fascinating about a kindly helpful necromancer who has a fear of death…
4. Character: …solid double
5. Character: Ghilain’nain. I don’t want to over-praise but I actually rather like the mad scientist vibe and how she’s presented*
6. Character: Assan and Manfred
7. Voice Acting: Varric is, as usual, well acted. Water continues to be wet
8. Voice Acting: I’ve been listening to the PC actors and all four of them are pretty legit… so we’ll consider this a positive for…
9. Voice Acting: …each…
10. Voice Acting: …of…
11. Voice Acting: …them. But I want to double down on the one we used because I’ve heard a lot of his lines versus other actors’ lines and he’s even better than the rest
12. Voice Acting: Of course Solas is well acted as well. Might be the only person who has direction too… oh not from a director, but based on interviews, from HIMSELF
13. Banter: So it honestly took a while to get there but once you’re out of the initial stuff (the Intro and the chapter right after that) the banter between party members gets a lot better. It’s exactly what banter should be; Mostly fluff flavor but good ways to show the characters dynamics with each other…
14. Banter: …good stuff
15. Brickwork: Minrathous is, credit where it’s due, very well designed. Very gothic, lots of sharp angles and floating impossible magic architecture
16. Architecture: Speaking of Minrathous, the architecture here is shockingly good. The playable area is quite large, there’s tons of usage of blocking sight lines and interiors to make it feel larger, as well as some varying ‘biomes’ (like the docks or the market), and finally you can see the rest of the city in the background at most points…
17. Architecture: …for a strong double
18. Storytelling Mechanic: Of course the codex is back. Has several entries from previous games too
19. Brickwork: The woods and wilds. I’ve seen better, but this is still a decent ruined elven forest
20. Cutscene: Our first legitimately good scene in the game, and of course it’s with friggin’ Solas. He’s well written (also the first well written dialogue in the game), well acted, and is properly in character. Concern for Varric, can’t help but snark despite the seriousness of the situation, and drops some truth bombs. It even had a legitimately funny joke
21. Moment: Solas’ first memory, when he first uncovers that Bobette is experimenting with Blight and immediately and unhesitatingly burns the entire facility to the ground to avoid the Blight escaping. Including his loyal follower
22. Brickwork: Treviso is probably the first legitimately good looking place in the game. Actual work done on sightlines, color usage, and otherwise making it look like a real place
23. Visual Storytelling: Treviso under occupation. The bullying, the people presenting papers, little details
24. Doodads: Treviso, while we’re at it, has pretty solid doodading
25. NPC Set Dressing: Especially around the marketplace which has tons of people hocking and talking and adding to the scenery
26. Brickwork: The Ossuary. This whole place is fascinating looking, being an underwater prison that’s partially leaking and partially falling apart
27. MSQ: The jailbreak of the Ossuary. The experiments, the internecine politics, the uniqueness of the person we rescue, even the way they showcase Spite (and make it clear that we cannot see Spite in character)
28. Moment: Bellara has a pretty nice moment at the end of her Echoes Of The Past quest where she opens up about her brother who was lost because, in her mind, she failed him. And it’s a really solid scene out of absolutely nowhere, up to and including a mature and nuanced take on grief, coping, and how to reach out to someone like that…
29. Moment: …double positive territory
30. Prime Opt: Solas’ second memory is another nice sequence. Solas leads a feint attack and willingly sacrifices quite a few people (and feels no remorse for doing so, always willing to defend himself) to have one of his agents slip in and steal the actual target. Nice bit of characterization and continuing the trend of playable flashbacks being a good thing
31. MSQ: Recruiting Devrin. There’s some… REALLY bad dialogue in this quest (mentioned below in the negatives) but the core meat of the quest is actually legit. The entire thrust of some Wardens having a brain, followed by us naturally ending up at the Griffon roost, and easing us into the idea of the griffons coming back (yes I know this was set up in the books) is already pretty good. What I like best is the little details. The griffons wigging out in the cages while some kind of dark magic flows over it, the little snippet about how the griffons have been gone for so long that they don’t even know how to deal with them anymore so they’re starting from scratch, and Devrin’s very obvious and righteous anger at how much this all gets to him given that they are his charge. Good stuff
32. Doodads: Minrathous markets and docks
33. NPC Set Dressing: And, again, Minrathous market area
34. MSQ: The recruitment quest for Emmrich is pretty legit. Good introduction to Emmrich of course, but also a good showcasing of how differently the Rivain look at things like the dead (the entire Necropolis works like this) and it’s just generally well done. It’s also nice to see an entire faction dedicated to caring for the dead
35. Sound: Generally good soundscape. Nice ambient sounds, nice sound design in combat
36. Cutscene: Solas, as usual, tends to be some of the better scenes. Also some good background establishment (Bob being someone who killed off an entire emotion), as well as the dynamic between the two (the amoral scientist and the tyrant)
37. Moment: Well, I tried. WHAM. Seriously, best moment in the game
38. MSQ: In addition to the aforementioned best scene in the game, the entire Weisshaupt segment is probably the best sequence in the game. Arriving to find the place under siege, the gigantic presentation mask, the frenzied fight that we’re slowly losing, the desperate charge through the literally crumbling fortress, all leading up to some actual showcasing of Ghilan’nain (and some great animations accompanying her)…
39. MSQ: …very solid sequence…
40. MSQ: …and worthy of a triple
41. Cutscene: Taash’s first major companion scene where they try to talk out who and what they are is pretty solid. It’s also probably the first scene where they’re allowed to be a character instead of an irritant which helps
42. Prime Opt: Emmrich’s tour amongst the grave gardens. This is legit for a number of reasons. It’s a fantastic insight into Navarra culture. It’s a positively inclined look at necromancy. It’s a good insight into Emmrich’s personality. And the dialogue as he discusses his thanatophobia is shockingly well written
43. Prime Opt: So we go with Bellara to save some of her people and end up seeing Anaris and Cyrian and that’s a nice moment, but what really sells this is Bellara’s reaction to all this. She’s freaking out of course and trying to cope by essentially pushing him out of her mind. Even after the quest she is desperate for any explanation that detaches him from responsibility and means she doesn’t have to deal with it
44. Brickwork: I’ve been sitting on this for a bit. I’m not what I I’d call super impressed with it but there is a decent amount of scene and mood setting with the deserts and ruins and tombs. It’s… interesting because it’s completely smothered by tons of blight gunk (the SAME blight gunk in fact) which I think is part of what diminishes it… but it still deserves the single positive
45. External Continuity: We’ll call this the Gygapudding Positive, in honor of its donor. But no for real it has been fairly argued that there ARE individual elements scattered throughout the game that utilize previous canon well. The reveal of the elves is a big one, the fact that the Inquisitor is still influential down south and still active, stuff like that
46. Cutscene: So this isn’t a positive I give very often but there’s this concept in boss fights called spectacle. Spectacle goes up here in Story, not Gameplay, because it’s more about feel and vibe of the fight rather than the mechanics of it. Also good spectacle fights aren’t always good actual fights. Anyways! This is an aggregate but I still agree that there’s some good spectacle to a lot of the bigger boss battles, especially including the various dragons
47. Secondary: I’ve been chewing on this one for a while because most of the side quests in this game are flat neutral. To be clear that’s a good thing (MOST games have bad side quests) but I do agree that there’s some decent flavor lore across them. The demon of desperation, the Echo in the well (which we can find later in the Fade), stuff like that
48. Storytelling Mechanic: Follow-up letters. I liked it in ME2, I liked it in TOR, and I like it here. It’s always nice to see some kind of results for some of our questing
49. Writing: So I spent some time off camera looking at the other romance options and they’re… fine. I don’t have any to complain about but I feel like most of them suffer from, y’know, the limitations of the game (limited time, inconsistent editing passes, no voice direction). I’ve seen worse, but I’ve seen better too
50. Prime Opt: The sequence between Lucanis and Spite as we see a bit of a refraction of his mental prison (naturally using the Ossuary tileset) is really good stuff. I love how frustrating it is for Lucanis and Spite for totally different reasons, and how badly they want to leave (both of them!) but can’t for different reasons
51. Prime Opt: So this is going to sound like I’m repeating myself but the core meat of Harding’s quest is neat. The Titanic anger, the world building, the lore significance
52. Prime Opt: Our first loyalty mission (today) that doesn’t have an asterisk! I’ve seen better but I still enjoyed Davrin’s jaunt to help the Halla with Assan better than most of these
53. MSQ: For all the problems it had, I did actually like Solas and Bob arguing back and forth (in our heads) during the filler Arlathan quest
54. Moment: I’ll talk about how bad it is later but there’s a legit moment with Taash’s mother where she encourages her child and, critically, calls them ‘them’ for the first time
55. Character: Harding and Taash are adorable if they hook up. It’s weird because both act like teenagers, but it’s well written and well acted
56. Character: In a similar vein I’m rather fond of Neve and Lucanis. You can see how he has no idea how to handle something like this but he clearly wants to
57. Prime Opt: Davrin’s final quest does some nice acknowledgement of choices, lines up with the griffons and the Wardens in general, and is legitimately sweet when we (don’t) say goodbye to Assan
58. Prime Opt: Jesus Christ Emmrich’s final companion quests comes out of absolutely nowhere and just kind of nails it. Great build up, great usage of Manfred, great pacing to the big fight, great custom animations with Emmrich (there’s a great moment where Manfred says his first word, ‘hello’, and Emmrich stalls a bit in his casting before suddenly realizing he needs to keep casting and goes back to it), great localized threat that’s still substantial, great thematic ties to Emmrich himself…
59. Prime Opt: …absolutely…
60. Prime Opt: …fantastic stuff
61. Prime Opt: I also have to give credence for the fact that, for arguably the first time in the entire game, we have a truly momentous and well crafted choice. Do you bring back Manfred? Or do you accept lichdom for Emmrich? And it even makes SENSE that it’s a choice (a lich must be willing to accept the deaths and loss of those close to them, for if they make too many exceptions they will simply rule tyrannical over the living)
62. Writing: There is one romance I feel deserves an actual positive, and of course it’s Emmrich. It is weirdly well constructed and acknowledged
63. Cutscene: When you decide to bring Manfred back the whole thing is just fantastic. It’s uplifting, Manfred starting to talk and learning how to is amazing, Emmrich refusing to feel bad for his choice, the possibility of ‘our child’ if you’re romancing him, it’s just so good
64. Cutscene: So the Butcher’s, uh, ‘introduction’ scene (which happens SIXTY HOURS INTO THE GAME) is crazy good for its placement and purpose. He’s so wonderfully internally contradictory. He hates and loves the gifts he’s given, he adores the city that he has no desire to see ruined but could in a moment, he wants to make us prove we deserve it, and he respects us for the fact that we’re worth a damn rather than just another greedy jackass
65. Outro: The general vibe and tone of the, uh, ‘final’ charge up to Ghilan’nain is legit. It has all the atmosphere it needs and is one of the first times in the game I’ve actually felt the gravity of the situation
66. Outro: Moment: Davrin’s final sacrifice. Goes down like a boss and gives us the shot we needed to kill Ghilan’nain. Assan couldn’t even stop himself from diving down after him as he went
67. Outro: Cutscene: The statues of whoever you chose (Bellara or Neve) and their poses as you climb through your fade prison, followed by the statues of the lost (Davrin or Harding)… this is shockingly powerful for what it is, and very well constructed. For in a prison of regret…
68. Outro: Cutscene: …we are shackled only by ourselves. Good moments with everyone… yes, even Varric. Or rather ourselves since, y’know
69. Babylon 5 Effect: I want you to know I’m giving this positive through gritted teeth. But for the interactions with Solas and how that ends up with him (inevitably) betraying us and then swapping positions with us is legit B5 Effect
70. Outro: Cutscene: I love that as we make decisions we see them implemented (in the future) WHILE we’re still in the planning phase
71. Outro: Also credit where credit is due. The entire battle cutscene is extensive, well animated, has great music, and directly changes based on choices…
72. Outro: …earning that solid double
73. Outro: Solas is pretty legit in the Outro. He’s exactly as insincere, duplicative, and truthful as he should be
74. Outro: Convincing Solas to finally (finally) change his mind is… well okay it kind of cheats because of the Mythal mandate BUT I do like the animation, the voice acting, and the moment itself. The way he is so thoroughly broken is legitimately powerful
75. Outro: I also have to give credit for the ‘out-think him’ ending. “You are a mortal, and I… am a fool”. Hah

Story Negatives:

1. Spritework: People look… bad. This might be an engine issue, might be a lighting issue, but people just look bad. I’ll decide as we go throughout the game exactly how bad this is. Okay so this third sentence I am now typing as of about the 18 hour mark… and they’re not getting any better. I HAVE seen worse, but I’m just going to go ahead…
2. Spritework: …and give a double negative and move on
3. Spritework: Qunari in particular look… awful. Just awful. What is this nonsense. They look like plastic dolls with skin horns
4. External Continuity: DAI and character creator… or lack thereof. During character creation you get to decide three, count ‘em, THREE things that carry forward from all three previous games. One of which barely matters
5. Animation: I don’t like to punch down on animations but these are… not great. It’s telling that the best animation I’ve seen in the game as of typing (about 18 hours in) is Lucanis sipping a cup of coffee. Their motions are wrong, their movements are weird, their rigging is just off, the random motions in cutscenes look randomized… it’s not good. I won’t be TOO mean but it’s a consistent problem. Ultimately I think it just has to do with what I already mentioned…
6. Spritework: …the models are just terrible. I actually have the theory that (thanks to the behind the scenes mess) they decided to make ONE model of rigging and animation and then just kind of morphed it around to make the other playable races. This would explain why ENEMIES (which use different design philosophies) look fine and why the only single individual with a full animation kit is us, the actual PC
7. Voice Direction: So this is another problem that’s pretty universal. Near as I can tell there’s no voice direction at all. How noticeable this is depends on the individual actor in question and how well they can interpret the lines on the page, but it’s pretty clear to a trained ear that none of these people received any worthwhile direction and probably didn’t even get retakes. This causes issues everywhere, from wrong line reads to bad intonation to not responding correctly to the previous line…
8. Voice Direction: …it’s not the worst I’ve ever seen, but it’s pretty bad
9. Voice Acting: Neve is the only actor so far I think is legitimately bad. Everyone else can be chalked up to direction but this woman cannot act
10. Intro: It’s telling that I paused for 20 minutes on stream to dissect how bad this Intro is. Let’s start with the obvious; the opening narration immediately spoils things that we weren’t even 100% sure of until that moment and slams us right into the action. I said this on camera but I strongly suspect that (in one of the 3+ previous iterations of this game) this was supposed to be the end of Act 1 or later, not the Intro, and things like this add to that. For example right AFTER that Varric narrates a whole adventure of chasing down Solas for his big ritual
11. Intro: Tone: By the way, the tone of this entire Intro is very… extra. It reminds me of Modern Warfare 3 (and if you know me, you know that’s a pretty big insult). It’s trying entirely too hard to be BIG and FLASHY without much substance to it
12. Intro: Pacing: It’s also all over the place. It takes too long and is entirely too rushed at the same time
13. Intro: Moment: Varric is like ‘we just need to sell him a better option!’ and then just says ‘man you should stop’ without… actually doing what he just said he’d do. In fact all he attempts in his endeavor to convince Solas is literally point his weapon at him. His second attempt is to… repeat himself by focusing on the one thing he knows Solas does not care about
14. Intro: Cutscene: So then we have a get-together immediately after the previous events. We spend this cutscene immediately repeating everything we just saw and did as all three of our principle cast repeat everything to each other repeatably
15. Intro: MSQ: So our first major quest is to a town overrun by Blight. This probably could have been atmospheric and was definitely going for it, but instead people will not shut up (and the dialogue is terribly edited, as usual) and the gross is generic and everywhere to the point where it just dulls a bit
16. Intro: Cutscene: Morrigan’s entrance. The nicest thing I can say about this is that everything about it is wrong. Morrigan’s appearance is whatever, but her voice is… wrong. She also totally ignores any consequences or choices of the previous games, including one thing that really should matter first (her SON). She also apparently has no real relevance here? Literally right after this we have to go repair an eluvian and we just sort of… ignore the expert on it who’s right there who just offered to help us do so who’s also in the conversation in question
17. Intro: Cutscene: Rook, Neve, and Harding have a… I mean good lord it’s a friggin’ FFXIII cutscene (it even includes Ali Hillis!)
18. Intro: Dialogue: So I’m going to talk more about this later but the dialogue in the Intro is particularly bad. Like, noteworthy to deserve its own negative bad. Like the writers forgot what the characters said two sentences ago bad. It’s hard to even summarize
19. Intro: Story Sequencing: To be expected from a game like this, but let’s start off with the obvious one; the Intro barely fits the rest of the game. I don’t just mean in quality, I mean in terms of events. The only thing here of significance is removing Solas from the board and replacing him with Bob and Ghilan’nain. Aside from this the Intro continues to be a poison on the rest of the game
20. Empty Text: A lot. It’s telling that this isn’t the worst I’ve ever seen (Tales of Arise and Persona 5 say hello) but it’s still pretty bad how much vacuous non dialogue is in this game…
21. Empty Text: …so we’re going to double down on that
22. Dialogue: This might be some of the worst dialogue I’ve heard in recent memory. In an effort to be nice I’m going to go ahead and triple negative it and then only mention it later when it’s particularly noticeable. But there’s at least three major issues going on here. First is the Netflix Writing which has become such a plague in fiction over the last ten years. This is when characters state the obvious out loud because they presume the person is not paying attention (literally the idea sprang from the presumption that people were on their phones and not watching). Thing is this is ALWAYS bad writing, but it’s even worse in a video game where there’s absolutely no real way the player, who is playing the game, isn’t seeing the thing they’re narrating immediately after
23. Dialogue: The second problem is the lack of editing. This one’s easiest to showcase because there’s a TON of dialogue which is clearly placeholder dialogue, which is actually quite normal to write when doing a first pass of a particular work. For example, you want to showcase someone’s reaction to something. There’s a lot you can do with that, and you want to be right in their headspace to do it. So you jot down something pointless or repetitive there as a placeholder to go back and fix later. Problem is it requires that editing pass, and this game very clearly did not get that pass
24. Cutscene Incompetence: Only a few instances but it still crops up several times, usually because it’s not time to resolve a quest line yet
25. Foreshadowing: NEXT TIME on Dragonball Z! (Varric’s narration tidbits are consistently irritating. He just pops up to narrate something we’ve just done, which is… fine, but then he has to leave the ‘but then THIS spoilery thing happens’ at the end)
26. External Continuity: The Qunari just do a run around on Antiva off camera. I could probably type up an essay of what’s wrong with the Antaam being this rogue military expansionist power or how this would galvanize the other nearby states or the resultant disruption of trade or the Divine getting involved but let’s just call this what it is; It’s because plot. This is doubly weird because the Antaam even IN this game (as mentioned in the codex) lack… anything aside from soldiers. Which in addition to being incredibly inefficient also means they’d fall apart the moment they hit anything real, be it an opponent or an obstacle such as terrain they get bogged down in or can’t forage or pillage
27. External Continuity: Everything to do with the red lyrium idol being the dagger is silly at best. It’s an unnecessary plot twist / retcon and the fact that Varric can recognize it on SIGHT is just weird
28. Moment: “The fire’s still going” REALLY. Okay so I said I’d note any particularly bad aspects of dialogue later and the entire recruit Davrin mission is this. Neve’s dialogue takes the cake (she’s literally staring at a fire and says it’s still going as it’s obviously still going) but the entire quest had this issue. Notably immediately before this WE stared at the fire and mentioned something equally stupid
29. Writing: The game acts like we’re a Chosen One. I’ve been chewing on this one since the Intro, and I think I’ll only give it a single negative because it’s not as bad as I’ve seen in other works, but I’m really not a fan of how we’re just the Chosen One right out of the gate. At every step of the way the game acts like… well like we’re the PC. And I get that but better stories (both game and otherwise) will showcase the arc leading INTO that. Notably all THREE previous Dragon Age games do a much better job of conveying why we’re the PC and us becoming a big deal across the game
30. Internal Continuity: Blight inconsistencies. I’m going to keep an eye on this one but even ignoring gameplay and story segregation (Blight is literally a status effect now, plus there’s Blight Armor) most of the game treats Blight as something that isn’t incredibly toxic or damaging except when it is
31. MSQ: Okay so we have to choose between saving Treviso and Minrathous. There are several things wrong with this. First it’s a really strange place to put a choice like this. Keep in mind that even doing side quests I’ve only had a grand total of 2 quests in Minrathous and 3 in Treviso as of this point in time, barely enough time to form any real attachment or understanding of either location. Secondly the game acts like it’s a completely binary choice, no possible in between. This is doubly aggravating because thirdly and most importantly we actually CAN help both cities… and DO. Literally we sent people to both cities to help. But of course the one WE don’t go to is the one that falls (see Chosen One issues earlier). All of this is its own issue but I have to mention one other thing…
32. MSQ: …and shaming the player for making a choice. No matter what that choice is. So apparently it varies a bit (I bothered to Youtube a few other versions) and amusingly we got one of the worst versions (we were a Shadow Dragon who didn’t go to Minrathous) but again no matter what there’s shaming. Don’t… do this game. Even if it makes sense for the characters to be lashing out or hurting don’t present it in a way that pulls a Spec Ops The Line where you’re shaming the player for the choice they were forced to make
33. External Continuity: I was trying to keep track and at some point I decided to give up. This game just… does not give a damn about existing world building and or concepts. I don’t necessarily blame the game’s INTENT for this, and in some cases attempts are made to explain some of what’s going on but good lord. So rather than getting persnickety let’s just give it a blanket triple and if we see anything particularly bad we’ll note that later…
34. External Continuity: …so…
35. External Continuity: …enjoy that triple
36. MSQ: Taash’s recruitment quest… is an awful first showcasing of the character and is a pretty disinteresting quest to begin with. Taash themselves are just irritating, the sequence of events is bizarre to the point of nonsensical, and the patented Badly Edited Dialogue spikes (or is that tanks?) in quality for the whole quest
37. External Continuity: The game likes to slide previous characters in periodically. Sometimes these work (Isabella), sometimes they’re off (Dorian), and sometimes they’re awful (The Inquisitor). The problem is none of these are bad in concept just bad in execution. The Inquisitor showing up to tell us how awesome we are just feels cheap
38. Tone: So hey. There’s no… gravity to anything. I’m being exaggerative (there’s a few individual quests that nail the tone) but the entire rest of the game is very MCU in how they approach everything. People are dying by the thousands, Blight is everywhere the ancient evil elven gods are bad, the veil is weak, demons are everywhere, and most of the characters act like this is a light adventure’y romp
39. Cutscene: The weird ‘book club’ cutscenes after the Solas mural flashbacks are… weird. I think I get what they were going for but they come across as just repeating the exposition we just got and it falls flat. And of course the tone is just all over the place
40. Consequence Storytelling: I’ve been chewing on this one for a bit. I’m not going to punch down over much on this but honestly there’s a lot of things that just happen, or happened off camera, and there’s no real… consequence for half of it. For example sometimes there’s some real impact
41. Cutscene: I’m reminded of Final Fantasy 13… again. There’s this really weird thing, it’s not constant but it does show up periodically, where they clearly don’t know how to end a scene. So they don’t, it just kind of stops
42. Cutscene: This dovetails into another issue I’ve noticed; They don’t know how to START conversations either. Again this isn’t a constant issue but there’s several times where conversations either just start randomly or, worse, has this weird segway leading into it that doesn’t feel natural or real it’s just… there
43. MSQ: Neve’s quest to go rescue the Threads leader (the Cobbled Swan Case) is… weird. We once again have a lot of the story just feeling like it’s skipping beats, odd dialogue choices, lots of stating the obvious, and just… it feels like someone jammed multiple bits into it. Like right at the end there’s this bit where we say ‘there’s no one else here’ and it’s like… yeah? And we KNOW there’s a blood mage controlling the dude at ranged but then comment that she’s ‘gone’ when she leaves?? What?!
44. MSQ: So then there’s Lucanis’ mission to go after Zara which is… wonky. First Illario shows up and is so overtly and amazingly suspicious that I’m a little shocked the characters don’t even acknowledge something is weird. Then we just bulldoze through all of Zara’s people, then her, pretty effortlessly… and then Illario shows up in the most suspicious way possible, kills her, uses blood magic on Lucanis, and aside from a quick ‘that’s weird’ we just kind of shrug it off and the quest ends. It makes me think this was actually multiple quests artificially divided up into different quests (a problem Dragon Age 2 had as well if you’ll remember)
45. External Continuity: This is something I’ve talked about many times but this is one of those truly rare cases where the game retains external continuity and the story is worse for it. We don’t cover this concept very often but here we are. So, the previous games set up the big reveals of this game. This makes sense; We know that most of this was written back when they codified the lore, after Dragon Age Origins came out (which amusing means DAO is the one game that doesn’t fit… which is actually pretty common in gaming, but moving on). So this is continuity being maintained across the three games. Cool. That doesn’t make it GOOD though. In fact it might have been better to either retcon it because the problem is they don’t DO anything with it. We thought of many ways this could have worked on camera (noteworthy one; We explain what the Blight is so we can understand how to end it) but the game itself just pulls the big reveals and that’s… it
46. Cutscene: And that’s the other big sin here. The presentation is legitimately terrible. Major lore reveals we’ve debated for literal years casually tossed out in Varric narrations or one of the magic meeting room scenes and with hardly any… presentation. It’s just there. Here’s the answers okay byyyeee
47. Dialogue: So this is another aggregate but I want to notate this here, not just because the dialogue continues to be bad but a specific way in which it’s bad, and I want to talk about this somewhere. So a phrase I use semi often is ‘first pass dialogue’. This refers to when you deliberately write dialogue to be placeholder dialogue so you can go touch it up later and make it better. Adjust lines and words, change the tone by usage of punctuation, polishing stuff like that. By definition then good placeholder dialogue should (like all placeholders) very obvious. This then leads to a lot of the dialogue in THIS game, which is so overtly bad that it’s clearly placeholder dialogue that they never got the chance to go back and edit up
48. External Continuity: Morrigan. In general, honestly, but most especially for how violently this goes against her character arc from Origins, from Inquisition, and from the entire franchise
49. External Continuity: So this is a weird one I was chewing on. I think this is another case where execution is what ruins it but we hear quite a bit about how things are going down south in the lands of the previous games and… it’s not going great. The intent was obviously to showcase how our previous characters (most notably the Inquisitor) were busy holding off the armies while we try to chop off the head, but as is it just feels like the rest of the world is going directly to hell while we faff about doing side quests
50. Prime Opt: The very odd and abrupt placement of the Spite and Lucanis cutscene is very strange
51. Prime Opt: So yeah not to repeat myself but Harding’s companion quest has the same basic problem as Lucanis’. It’s just… here, out of nowhere, but also ends very abruptly. In fact I’m going to make a note here to double this negative if they don’t follow through on it later
52. Tone: Rook and choices… or lack thereof. There are exceptions (which I mentioned up in the positives) but the overwhelming majority of time the Choices you get are fake. There’s no flavor here to speak of and instead you’re always just… Rook. And that would be FINE if the game didn’t lie to us about it and constantly give us dialogue choices that… y’know, aren’t. So instead the tone and flavor…
53. Tone: …aren’t
54. Cutscene: I hate to give this scene a negative because people will get weird about it but… it’s a bad scene, that’s what a negative means. So Taash tries to come out to their mother. The problem is this scene needed another polishing pass or two. The mother has been a cantankerous dick the entire game but in this sequence she admits she’s a bad mother and someone who has a very logical, scholarly approach that she was trained to do. This is also revealed IMMEDIATELY before this, framing her for the player as more reasonable than this might otherwise come across. So Taash comes out and the mother’s immediate reaction is to try and understand it, opening with a comment about the in universe Qun definition of trans people, which Taash immediately and violently rejects. The problem here aside from, y’know, the usual (lack of editing) is that this frames Taash as a bratty and entitled child when the scene needed more nuance than that. And like it or not it makes Taash slide into a real life stereotype (considering who wrote Taash’s story arc this has to be an accident). And the bottom line is the whole scene can’t seem to decide how it wants to be or what it’s trying to do
55. Prime Opt: So Lucanis’ story arc is… very strange. Illario is a bizarre rival / antagonist character for Lucanis who isn’t well developed and is portrayed inconsistently depending on the scene he’s in. We go from totally believing his innocence to immediately knowing he’s the traitor with no gap in between. The final quest line itself is excessively rushed, completely sidesteps Catarina being an abusive caretaker, continues to treat the mafia assassins like one big happy family, has a fake choice, refuses to resolve the Illario thing, and then has him jump into a Venatori alliance (which everyone is completely fine with by the way) and it’s just…
56. Prime Opt: …bad
57. Pacing: Something brought up in chat (thanks Dr. Winter) really stuck with me. The companion quests are entirely too stretched out, taking one note or occasionally two notes and stretching it across literal dozens of hours of side quests… but that’s not the worst part…
58. Pacing: …the worst part is how they all frontload their backstories, motivations, and characterizations. The first major cutscene with every character starts with them dumping this on us and then we just kind of deal with it across the next fifteen
59. Writing: So our first major villain group is the Venatori. They are… boring. Boring evil cultists and they don’t do anything with them
60. Writing: And while I’m at it, the Antaam are actually worse. They’re literally the military with no backup and… again… they don’t do anything with this. Both groups could have been interesting. Neither are
61. MSQ: I… what was the point of the ‘infiltrate the Venatori’ quest? We do a whole song and dance about infiltrating them then once we succeed (which takes NO time, literally one cutscene) and then we get mind controlled, immediately break the mind control, and then flee. The Solas stuff is decent but otherwise the whole sequence is just boring filler
62. Prime Opt: So despite the good stuff on display, the Taash companion quest where we go after the Dragon King. The Dragon King himself is pathetic, the cutscene construction and camera usage are actively bad, the cutscene incompetence isn’t great, and the finale just falls apart
63. Writing: In general every single faction has been flattened. This is a problem for both sides; Good guys are just plain good, bad guys are just plain bad, and that’s it. I mentioned some specific issues with this prior to now but the entire game has this overall problem
64. Prime Opt: You know something I really didn’t like in Dragon Age 2? How Act 3 had a bunch of final mostly-cutscene and generally badly done wrap ups of the various companion arcs. Not all of them were that bad but several were just… what? And yeah several of the final wrap ups here aren’t great either for basically the same reason
65. Writing: Dialect. I’ve been sitting on this for a while now because this is yet another consequence of the lack of editing problem buuut… There’s this issue most writers run into where they use modern (for whenever they are) word choice and terminology for whatever it is they’re trying to say. They then go back in the editing pass to polish the dialogue up to match the setting, time, region, and person. Obviously none of this is in the game (except when it is!) and that causes two issues. First is the lack of any real dialect. Every single person uses the same ‘voice’ when talking, as if they were all the same character, which obviously pushes me a bit out of things and doesn’t contribute to the general lack of interest in the characters, but there’s another issue…
66. Writing: …which is that everyone uses modern terminology. It’s worth noting a lot of the concepts, ideas, and world building in this game has been in previous games but it feels and sounds off specifically because they’re just using 2020s word choices to describe them. So this makes it contradictory versus the previous games and it pushes the player out of the narrative…
67. Writing: …and this might be the worst example of this I’ve seen in recent memory
68. MSQ: For all I loved the Butcher’s ONE cutscene (gave it its own positive even) the fact is the rest of this quest sucked. Noticeably bad dialogue (even by Inquisition’s standards), the dumbest traitor reveal so far, a weird and dumb confrontation scene, an extended ‘here let’s repeat everything’ scene after
69. Story Sequencing: It’s hard to even properly explain the sequencing issues this game has. Some story threads are spread out across dozens of hours. Some are concentrated right at the beginning, or end. Sometimes something that was clearly supposed to be an introduction is the last time we see a given character. Sometimes an entire regional chain is clomped together in one sequence except this one tidbit which is way over here instead. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a game that was at least four different games at various points in its very troubled production
70. Prime Opt: The Treviso regional finale is… flat. The obvious traitor (revealed just one quest ago by the way) is fought, effortlessly defeated, the Crows are now in charge (yaaay) and there’s another non choice and then it’s over. We also follow through with Jacobus who I won’t blame you for forgetting he even exists since he hasn’t been in the game for about 30 hours
71. Internal Continuity: Fereldan. So here’s the thing, there’s these missives you get from what’s happening down south the whole time. Cool idea but it’s clearly and obviously tacked on at some point in the narrative (which is why this is under ‘internal continuity’) because it absolutely does not fit. Each time the Inquisitor comes to chat it’s about low tier stuff or to reminisce on nostalgia. And at one point Harding and Emmrich go camping in a place so lost to the Blight that starvation is a legitimate concern. There’s obvious issues with how spiteful this feels but the issue here is how much it contrasts and doesn’t acknowledge the rest of the game
72. Writing: So Bob can just move a moon to cause an eclipse. I don’t even know where to start with how insane this is. This would have massive consequences on the world, and even if it’s costly or time consuming it’s an absolutely bonkers display of power. Anybody who can move a moon is just going to win
73. Storyboarding: Narrative cheating with Varric. The game does so much to make it so obvious that Varric isn’t there across the entire game. I could go into individual instances because I was paying attention the ENTIRE time and it wasn’t… done well. As with so many other things in this game it’s ultimately down to execution, and the execution of the ‘foreshadowing’ is honestly pretty crap. So as usual this boils down to execution
74. Writing: Now let’s talk about why Varric dying sucked. This is the same basic negative I would’ve given back at the Intro because at the end of the day this is just turning Varric into a red shirt. He dies to establish Solas (unnecessary) and to provide the prison swap for Rook (incredibly easy to write around) and that’s… it. This is the exact same negative I would give any Trek episode for killing off some random crewmember and for the exact same reason
75. Outro: The ending epilogue is weak, at best. One line saying nothing from each character and that’s kind of… it
76. Outro: It turns out the secret evil council of evil was behind THE ENTIRE FRANCHISE to date! Gahahahaha

Gameplay Positives:

1. Music: I’ve been chewing on the music for a while now. There’s some solid ambient music, several really cool songs, and some good companion pieces…
2. Music: …for a solid double
3. Options: Actually really solid options menu. All the right toggles and details, and presets to go along with them if you’re not sure of specifics
4. Cosmetic: Character creation options. I’m not going to lie, I think the character models are legitimately ugly, but the options for making YOUR character are legit. Lots of morphs and mutators…
5. Cosmetic: …pretty solid double positive
6. Cosmetic: You can also kit up your comrades in their own unique outfits instead of the same generic mage robe, and there’s some solid stuff here too
7. Difficulty Option: Good difficulty options in general, adjusting enemy attack rates and specific values, all on individual sliders
8. Difficulty Option: Good presets and custom setup for if you want a generic ‘easy / medium / hard’ or if you want a customized experience
9. Difficulty Option: You can adjust difficulty on the fly too. It won’t effect currently spawned enemies (and says so) but you can do it
10. Respec: On the fly, and can do individual points or the entire tree at a button push…
11. Respec: …for a double positive
12. Fast Travel: Honestly excellent fast travel system. Good spread, easy to access, doable from multiple maps…
13. Fast Travel: …solid…
14. Fast Travel: …triple
15. QoL: Quite a few actually. Looting is quick, selling all is a single button press, there’s plenty of leeway on platforming, you don’t need party members to access their exploration abilities, little stuff like that
16. Map: Shockingly good map, speaking of which. Easy to navigate, plenty of useful information, some undiscovered stuff is off known territory so you have an idea where to go, great legend that shows all kinds of info…
17. Map: …call this…
18. Map: …another triple
19. Guidance: Completion per zone and indicators on if you’ve solved or opened certain chests already
20. Kit: So as with the previous ones, there’s not really a ‘mage’ so much as the mage specs, and each one plays differently. So we’ll start with Death Caller. Death Caller has nice big long animations (which means long invulns), combined with lots of leeching and siphon stacks. Tons of synergies with getting secondary effects when you have debuffs on the enemy too…
21. Kit: …very solid spec
22. Viscerality: So let’s start by mentioning Death Caller. The visuals are legit, of course, with good audio design
23. Kit: Then we have Mage Spellblade. It’s a bit harder to use but even more satisfying, being capable of layering tons of Shocking debuffs on the enemies and tons of benefits from that. My personal favorite tidbit is how Shocking feeds into itself giving you the chance to stagger Arcane Bombs with heavy attacks (also heavy attacks are almost always boosted), plus some nice mobility and counterattack play…
24. Kit: …another solid double
25. Viscerality: Then we shift over to Spellblade. The visuals here are absolutely insane. There’s a lot of good design into how the lightning arcs over the targets, on the ground, and in the air…
26. Viscerality: …this is really good stuff
27. Viscerality: Impact of Spellblade is weird. It doesn’t do nearly as much damage but what it DOES do is an insane amount of Stagger (meaning tons of knockdown attacks) and tons of chaining
28. Kit: Then we have Mage Evoker. This is absolutely bonkers. It’s technically a CC class but the amount of damage it can do in a burst is absolutely bonkers. It also has great capacity to yank, freeze, chill, and combo into shattering…
29. Kit: …for another great class
30. Viscerality: Evoker doesn’t have quite the same visuals or audio as the other two but it’s still quite solid
31. Viscerality: Now the impact… good lord. Freezing, chilling, grabbing, holding in place, and hitting like a truck the entire time…
32. Viscerality: …incredible…
33. Viscerality: …impact
34. Kit: Champion. This is another favorite spec of mine. Absolutely love the interplay of defense and offense, the insane protection possibilities, the ability to block basically everything…
35. Kit: …another double
36. Viscerality: The visuals are… fine but the audio, whoof. The audio of Champion is SO good. The shield sounds alone are incredibly well constructed, with great build up and critical point as well as a wonderfully reverberating metallic sound…
37. Viscerality: …great audio
38. Viscerality: Excellent impact as well, of course
39. Kit: Reaper is a bit more berserkery than the other two Warrior builds, but has some really nice abilities for closing or maneuvering, and plenty of lifestealing sustain…
40. Kit: …for another double
41. Kit: Slayer. A personal favorite, this is all about big honkin’ hits and tons of stagger damage, and I love whirlwind which is basically an elongated invuln while giving you the ability to move (and do tons of stagger damage). Mechanically it’s a class more focused on pulling down enemies than just doing raw damage which can work out really well, especially on bosses…
42. Kit: …so that’s another solid double
43. Viscerality: The audio and visuals of Slayer are legit… but it’s the Impact that absolutely nails it, good lord you feel like the big swinging hammer here…
44. Viscerality: …solid double
45. Kit: Duelist. This is probably the most skill based of the classes, heavily focused on avoidance and rewarding the player if they avoid getting hit with more and more damage. This is on top of this being a more timing based attacker (mashing changes your combos, but you’re rewarded for good timing) and having plenty of moves centered around movement and area control…
46. Kit: …for a solid…
47. Kit: …triple
48. Viscerality: The Visuals of Duelist are nice but the Audio is where it really shines. This is some of the best audio design of the classes (only surpassed by the Champion)
49. Kit: Saboteur. This is the machine gun rogue (though there’s other ways to go with it), as well as plenty of middle range rapid fire death doom. Plenty of layering buffs too, or an option to layer debuffs…
50. Kit: …either way, a solid double
51. Kit: Party members. I’ve been chewing on this for a bit but I’m ultimately not SUPER impressed with the party members gameplay wise. They’re basically another bit of kit for the player, like cooldowns or power ups, more than anything else. Which is fine it’s just there’s only two things that really matter here; Which combos you want access to and whom you want to listen to
52. Power Progression Curve: The Caretaker is a fascinating and thankfully intuitive method of progression. Upgrading the Caretaker changes what grade of equipment will drop, gives you access to upgrading existing gear, and then…
53. Alternate Leveling: …gives access to enchanting. Enchanting is fascinating in how well designed it is. You unlock enchants based on Caretaker level, enchanting (and removing enchanting) is free, and you can only have one enchant out at a time. But you can swap it on the fly by just enchanting a new item, and it keeps track of what types of stuff you have enchanted, and you can enchant party member gear too. This whole system is a great bit of boost and also ties into the Build stuff we’ll talk about later…
54. Alternate Leveling: …but is an easy double as is
55. Enemy Design: I’m honestly shocked at how good the enemy design is in this game. Nice range, nice buffs, nice abilities, nice moves, nice comboing…
56. Enemy Design: …solid stuff
57. Enemy Variety: Good variety too. Lobbers, chargers, shield guys, ranged jackasses, big heavies, et cetera
58. Build: I’ve been chewing on this for a bit. There’s a lot of Build potential in this game. First we have the obvious, our skills, which can be adjusted more or less on the fly. There’s also a lot of synergies in said skills and you obviously can’t get all of them which helps. Also we have our three specs per class which each play pretty differently. There’s also the items which I’ll mention in a second…
59. Build: …but for just the builds…
60. Build: …this is excellent Build gameplay
61. Itemization: So, I mentioned items. Items are part of the aforementioned Builds because they can fundamentally change how you play, acting as mutators to existing abilities. This by itself makes for some great item design…
62. Itemization: …so that gets a double
63. Itemization: Also the items, y’know, themselves are quite well designed (in addition to the above and below)
64. Itemization: Now we talk about the item acquisition thing. So I wasn’t sure about this for quite a while but after consideration I actually really like this system. There’s a relatively small pool of items but each of them have gradients. But unlike most live service crap (for that is surely where this came from) in this case the upgrades don’t just improve the stats, they add additional suffixes, and those serve as the primary mutators. This in turn encourages you to explore and buy (and check the wisp vendor for the stuff you missed) in order to keep getting new versions of items to keep upgrading them…
65. Itemization: …so in addition to the obvious Build implications, this is just good itemization in general
66. HUD: Color usage, buffs/debuffs, types of bars. There’s some really solid stuff here, and a great amount of at-a-glance so you can tell what’s going on almost instantly. Useful stuff for a live service game…
67. HUD: …but still very welcome here
68. Interface: Skill trees. There’s some solid design here in color usage, keywords, and interaction
69. Mid Mission Checkpointing: The pseudo auto save. There’s multiple slots…
70. Mid Mission Checkpointing: …and it autosaves reasonably frequently
71. Mid Mission Checkpointing: Even in between boss phase transitions!
72. QoL: Map indicators of who you can interact with and what that leads to. Some other decent legend stuff too
73. Core Combat: Combos. This is the same basic system as back in Mass Effect 2 and it’s still good for the same reason
74. Core Combat: I’ve seen better core combat… but usually in games far more focused on that (Devil May Cry 5 says hello) but this is still shockingly good for what it is
75. Level: Consider this something of an aggregate level positive for most of the levels I’ve encountered to date. There’s good spread of items, it rewards exploration, and they’re generally smooth to navigate
76. Viscerality: Catharsis! Okay sorry I should explain that. So in some games you can absolutely smash debris (usually pots). Sometimes it’s for loot, sometimes it isn’t, but it’s always cathartic. This game is right up there with Dark Souls in terms of how much you can smash and how satisfying it is…
77. Viscerality: …earning a double for the quantity and quality
78. Overly Skippable Cutscenes: Or lack thereof! If interrupted (once) banter will actually resume after the interruption. This is such a great feature more games need
79. Cosmetics: Transmog system. Relatively easy to use back in town, and lots of options…
80. Cosmetics: …for a double
81. Cosmetics: Appearance changing barber style back in town if you decide you don’t care for it or change your mind or whatever
82. Tutorialization: Cutscenes for new moves. Taking a page out of Devil May Cry (or live service games, hah!) there’s a small video snippet that plays to help you see what the moves you’re taking are
83. Boss: Consider this an aggregate for most of the bosses I don’t individually mention. Although speaking of which…
84. Boss: Calivan. I was pleasantly surprised that there was some actual design to this boss. He summons clones which have essentially 1 HP but can still damage you, basic ranged attacks, telegraph attacks, and an intermission phase against a Pride demon
85. Encounter: Puzzles. Similar to earlier points, this is an aggregate for several of the repeat puzzles in the game, most notably the elven power crystals and the blight veins. I am rather fond of how the veins have a… well a vein you can follow to deduce where exactly the blister is you need to pop
86. Encounter: Speaking of noteworthy individual encounters. There’s a bridge / energy puzzle in the Arlathan woods which I was honestly impressed by. Several routes around it to get to the critical path, nice usage of the item to unlock the path to get the item to relock the path stuff
87. Prime Opt: Solas memories. At the moment consider this an aggregate but so far I’m impressed with these, and I love actually playing the flashbacks rather than having them narrated or otherwise. Special praise to the second flashback we did (the charge on the citadel as a distraction effort) where they went out of their way to showcase how most of the outer troops were level 1 nobodies, meaning we were just tearing through them
88. Boss: So basically all of the Champion fights are the same format (see the Dragon fights back in Inquisition… similar style, a few different abilities and damage types) but they’re solid fights. Nice recovery phases, big punishing attacks, nice patterns of attacks, and honestly some of the funner fights in the game
89. Boss: Good time to mention said Dragon fights. A couple of them are noteworthy individually (more on that later) but ‘the’ dragon fight is still fun and enjoyable for what it is. And there’s not fifty billion of them this time!
90. Overworld: Arlathan. I’ll be honest, I’m not super impressed with most of the explorable areas, but Arlathan is a good exception to that. Good layout, sightlines, some of the better puzzles and encounters, and honestly rewarding to explore
91. Overworld: After some back and forth hemming and hawing I’ve decided to give another aggregate overworld positive. Treviso, Docktown, and the Crossroads itself have some decent item placement, peaking, and exploration throughlines to warrant it
92. Boss: Slaughter of the Pillars (and the other revenants). Big ol’ shield, not a lot of mobility but great range, and a dps check in between phase which rewards you with a vuln phase if you succeed and punishes you with (avoidable) damage if you don’t
93. MSQ: Weisshaupt is also a great sequence gameplay wise. Nice set pieces, nice quick puzzles, nice enemy placement, and of course that leads up to a great boss fight…
94. Boss: Archdemon Razikale. A THREE phase fight with big vuln phases, nice obvious weak spots, methods to diminish add spawning, nice escalation, and great spectacle…
95. Boss: …easy double
96. Boss: The Formless One is a fantastic fight. It’s only really get one phase but that phase is excellent. Gigantic sweeping attacks, multi lightning strikes, spell barriers that when broken generate a vuln phase, regular weakspots you can exploit, a proper stagger, and all on top of an enemy that does an insane amount of damage and plenty of health to make it last…
97. Boss: …fantastic fight
98. Level: Kal Sharok. Call me a weirdo but this is one of the better levels in the game thusfar. Nice dovetailing of the layout and puzzles and how the path unlocks into itself, with good shortcutting, and even decent platforming…
99. Level: …solid stuff
100. Boss: Okay so I was torn on it for a bit but the dual dragon fight was frickin’ legit. The first phase is more or less the same fight as earlier just the full fight instead of a preview, so that’s always awesome…
101. Boss: …and it would be VERY easy for it to fall apart, especially in the second phase. Fighting two dragons at once by itself would honestly probably be a negative, buuut…
102. Boss: …they give us the ballista. It’s about a 20 second cooldown, can miss (so it’s not an ‘I win’ button), can be aimed just like any other party spell, and acts as an immediate stun (which provokes a vuln phase) when it lands. This shifts the second phase into a very frenetic, fast paced, and player skill focused fight. Easily the best boss in the game so far
103. Boss: Oh my God it’s an actual dialogue boss in this game. I’m legitimately shocked. But Mythal counts, and the ‘fight’ is suitably tense
104. Boss: Holy crap. I honestly really do like the Anaris fight. It’s like one step away from being crap but instead he has enough in-between time to make it interesting, and as you push him through phase transitions what’s required to navigate and get to the crystals to destroy them escalates
105. Boss: Another solid fight, good lord. So we fight Aelia… or rather don’t fight her at all, instead we fight trash while dealing with the old venatori crystal bubbles puzzle at the same time
106. Guidance: A good point of no return warning. Sometimes these are natural, this one is not (which is exactly why it’s good that it’s there)
107. Outro: Level: The charge up the beach to Ghilan’nain is pretty solid. It’s the same basic design of most of the good levels in the game but it’s well executed and I like the layering of the puzzles and enemies, alternating and making good pacing
108. Outro: Choices: There’s only two, but both choices have actual impact and consequence
109. Outro: Boss: Ghilan’nain. Consider me surprised by a trash fight being a good fight but here we are. Boils to be knocked over in order, and each one you get escalates the quantity and quality of adds she summons but also gives you another person to help you fight them. It’s properly chaotic and hectic and challenging…
110. Outro: Boss: …easy double positive worthy
111. Outro: Boss: And yes, the Bob fight is legit. Lots of telegraphing, lots of movement, lots of great alternate timing attacks. Very solid fight

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Choices: You get to choose your Inquisition background in character creator. All… three choices. One of which barely matters. This is the total sum of choices from across the previous three games that carries forward. Yes I get it (I even approve of how Inquisition spent time ‘trimming branches’) but it’s still painful
2. Save: I’ve been debating this. So there’s no… real saves. There’s just checkpoints. This is ‘fine’ except for the fact that the game outright lies about it. It keeps saves and autosaves and lets you SAVE and it’s all a lie. I don’t think I will give this more negatives but it really sucks
3. Choice: I’m also only going to ding this once I think but there’s a general absence of Choices Gameplay in this game. I would let this go if it didn’t pretend to have choices (hey, that sounds familiar) but here we are
4. Interface: There’s this… REALLY weird decision where there’s no logic to the order of the numbers for answering choices with the keyboard. As in if you want to hit 1 or 3 or 5 to pick an option where the 1 or 3 are is friggin’ random
5. Controls: The tab screen sucks. It’s hard to parse at a glance and it requires opening up the menu, selecting something, then closing it instead of… anything more intuitive or something that doesn’t kill the pacing
6. Interface: Lack of navigation and search in skill trees. I think this says all it needs to. There’s no zoom out, it’s irritating to navigate, and you can’t search or filter
7. Bug: Graphics optimization problems. Game is hilariously unoptimized and causes issues on machines that aren’t reasonably set up
8. Audio Spam: I’ve been chewing on this one for a while. It’s not the worst I’ve seen (in fact all told this might be the least bad I’ve seen of this phenomenon) but there’s this thing called ‘They won’t shut up’ in gaming, it’s been a bit of a plague for the last decade or so. It’s when party members just… say stuff in combat. Not useful stuff or even character stuff just… pointless filler. Like they’re afraid for their characters to stay quiet. Harding telling me that I’m fighting ranged enemies while fighting an enemy at range is not helpful. And every cry of ‘watch out for that!’ for a telegraph is just… irritating. In the interests of accuracy I should mention that Harding is MUCH worse about this than everyone else
9. Intro: Guidance: So this problem goes away after the Intro (thank God) but they… REALLY over tutorialize the (fairly basic) puzzles in the Intro. For those familiar with the issues over in God of War 5 Ragnarok it’s the same problem. You can’t sit there for longer than 5 seconds before someone shouts the answer at you
10. Intro: Consider this an aggregate but it’s mostly for the bad tutorialization. The entire Intro is just not fun or interesting gameplay wise. A lot of the dungeons in this game are narrow corridors but as MANY games have proven (even THIS one) that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the Intro is just dull to play
11. MSQ: The ‘big choice’ between Minrathous and Treviso. Now obviously this is a problem for several narrative reasons but it commits a grave sin in gameplay as well. It locks you out of the town in question and cancels existing quests there…. Without any form of ‘point of no return’ warning. It’s distressingly easy to just be pursuing the MSQ, stumble into this, and permanently miss out on content as a consequence
12. Lighting: Treviso is just too dark in several areas. This is doubly strange because if you turn up the brightness it’s fine so it’s obviously rendered properly, and the lighting is perfectly good elsewhere. Now I know what you’re thinking. “But lore, just turn on the Bloom to fix it!” And you’re right, turning the Bloom on does fix the visibility issues in Treviso… by making it look worse (as Bloom always does) as well as making the entire REST of the game look terrible too
13. Overworld: Rivain. As mentioned earlier I’m not super impressed with most of the explorable areas but Rivain is the worst thus far. Irritating to navigate, frustrating puzzles, and enemies that respawn WAY too fast for how tiny of an area it is (meaning you’ll end up going just a few rooms away before things start respawning)
14. Overly Skippable Cutscenes: So this is kind of a hypothetical but we’ve run into this issue. The issue is that every time you go to the Lighthouse it pulls from a queue and then makes that thing interactable, usually a dialogue or even a quest starter. Thing is it only pulls from the top of the queue, which means if there’s any conflict stuff gets shoved back into the queue. The solution here is to just hit the lighthouse over and over again every time you get a chance to get them all which is exactly as frustrating as it sounds, especially since some of these can be cut off and never happen if you advance too far without triggering them
15. Pacing: So there’s this weird issue the game has. First, quests can go away and once they do never come back. That means the player is naturally inclined to do all of them immediately. It’s also relatively easy to miss quests if you don’t MANUALLY check both the local and overworld maps EVERY single time you finish a quest. This creates this awful pacing problem where you do a quest then immediately and slowly scan things and then possibly go do side quests and then check AGAIN and so on
16. Guidance: The game spends a minimum of four times that I counted telling you ‘hey, go do Loyalty Missions and faction side quests’ and I’m like… yeah okay cool. The first time sure, the second time ehh, the third time started to irritate me, but by the fourth time it was really pissing me off
17. Choice: Or lack thereof. There’s a consistent problem with choices being presented as roleplaying… y’know, Choices Gameplay… but it’s just a lie. It’s not always, but it does happen more often than not…
18. Choice: …sufficiently often to deserve a double
19. Encounter: So during Bellara’s quest chain there’s a puzzle where you have to aim beams at nodes on the wall. But while this is decently designed to get the shortcuts unlocked, everything else about it is awful. First it requires specific combinations, not just any. There’s also no indicators of what ‘right’ is. That means you have to trial and error it. This is already bad…
20. Encounter: …but it also takes bloody forever to walk around and get in between the spots, making the time to solution entirely too long
21. Interface: After several hours of this game and having respecced several times I can safely say that this interface kinda sucks for it. There’s some weird minor issues with it of course (like jankiness in controlling it or the lack of zoom other than ‘the whole screen’ or ‘super zoomed in’) but what really drags this down is how much of a pain it is to constantly cross reference anything while making said build. By the way there’s no presets either which means if you respec to try something, there’s no respeccing BACK without reloading. This dovetails into another issue…
22. Seconds In Minutes: …the time investment. I had to set up 7 specs total and it took an arduous amount of time to do. I also both used a guide and didn’t, and honestly the time difference between the two was negligible because it just takes so many additional seconds to do every single individual node and to check every piece of armor and to swap enchants and the whole thing just…
23. Seconds In Minutes: …drags
24. Kit: Veil Ranger. This is probably the single worst holdover from the Morrison live service version of the game. The class is entirely focused on charging up your attacks and manually aiming which is cool… if they’re not focused on YOU the entire time. Fun fact, they are. Yes I know there’s a few companions that have temporary taunts but that’s really not what I mean. The idea of an entire class centered around holding back and being unharried in a game where the enemies constantly charge and harry you just does not fit

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: Green foliage, cliffsides, and forests. It looks nice in general but it also does a good job of conveying the idyllic setting
2. Spritework: Characters I’m more impressed than I thought I would be. Similar to Dragon Quest, the stylized cell shading works pretty well here…
3. Spritework: …easily garnering a double
4. Voice Acting: Nothing super amazing but I do still like a decent amount of it. Lord knows Sabat is pulling his weight here
5. World Building: It gets a little silly pretty fast but I do rather enjoy the way they portray Earth. The idyllic landscape, the insanely advanced technology, the way people can carry entire houses worth of material in the capsules, all sorts of cool stuff
6. Visual Storytelling: I wasn’t sure it was on purpose at first but after a bit more exploring the Earth zones I think it is deliberate. The giant windmills providing power to the cities, the total lack of smog or pollution (clean water, green fields), the near total lack of industrial infrastructure
7. Secondary: A decent amount of little flavor in the side quests across the Saiyan arc
8. Character: Piccolo. Even in just the first arc Piccolo honestly worked for me pretty well. Gruff, not exactly smart but not really stupid, cares but doesn’t… I dunno. I don’t want to over-emphasize but I think he’s at least a two dimensional character and his actor doesn’t hurt anything
9. Animation: So let’s get this out of the way; the animation is REALLY solid. The standardized animations are already good, but you can tell a lot of effort was put into the cutscenes and making them really pop…
10. Animation: …easily deserving…
11. Animation: …a triple
12. Storyboarding: They also do some really good stuff with some of the fights. It’s only occasionally I’ll admit, but when it’s there it’s really good
13. Humor: This game makes me laugh entirely too much, mostly because of it’s…
14. Tone: …ridiculous, humorous, and adventurous tone
15. Cutscene: Spectacle. Consider this the usual boss spectacle positive…
16. Cutscene: …for each…
17. Cutscene: …of the major fights
18. Voice Acting: Frieza’s voice actor is legit in general, but I’m especially fond of how he changes how he voices Frieza each form
19. MSQ: Establishing Frieza. They do this in two smart ways. First Frieza never does anything himself, letting his minions handle it for him. Then we play as Vegeta who goes very far out of his way to not confront Frieza personally. Vegeta, Mr. tiny dick himself who challenges everyone he can see just to prove he’s just that good, is avoiding this guy. It’s a nice way to establish
20. Moment: I also have to give credit to the Namekian’s decision to destroy the Scouters to help hide their fellows (and, later, when Vegeta crushes his own just to deny them the tool)
21. Humor: Ginyu Force, against my better judgment. Especially Recoome, holy crap. In fact, no…
22. Cutscene: …I’m giving Recoome his own positive. We’ll consider this for his animations, his humor, his over the top antics, and generally being the best fight of the bundle
23. MSQ: Okay I have to admit, the Frieza encounter itself is pretty solid. Goku managing a hit, summoning the Spirit Bomb and seeing it land from outer space (complete with muted audio), but what really caught me is the very first time Goku gets angry. In the ENTIRE game, in fact. Nothing’s phased him this entire time but Frieza finally pisses him off, and that finally pushes Goku into blonde–er, Super Sayin’ mode
24. Plot: I also want to give a side positive to the Frieza arc in general. It’s just generally a solid arc, far more so than I was expecting, with good escalation (for once), good presentation, good stakes, good tension, and good moments
25. Character: Frieza. I guess I agree with the crowd because Frieza is the best character in the game to date. Polite, horrifying, very professional… and lazy. Someone who clearly just coasts by on their insane power and lets everyone else do the real work. Add on top of this a dash of patheticness, ego, and presentation…
26. Character: …and you have a hell of a villain
27. Humor: Okay, you got me game. In an entire sea of slog, boring drivel, Piccolo and Goku getting into it racing each other as part of their car training was grin inducing
28. Character: Krillin. I was torn on him for a while but man he’s just kind of consistently a bro isn’t he?
29. Character: Supporting cast (Eighter is weirdly legit, one of the better parts of the side quests. And of course Buu is weirdly engaging as the evil Kirby)
30. External Continuity: The way the game (especially the early game) uses the setting is actually pretty legit
31. Moment: I’ll give you this. Goku teleporting the One Winged Angel Cell to King Kai’s realm to blow up was hysterical
32. Moment: I also like Piccolo, of all people, yelling at Goku for how stupid he was being about his son. More than anything else it shows Piccolo’s character growth, as well as how monumentally badly Goku had misjudged the situation. (Oh and for perspective Goku didn’t give a bean to Cell before the fight in the game. Still stupid though)
33. Moment: Okay. Gohan being a total dorkus in his outfit for the bandits is legit
34. MSQ: Perhaps it’s partially the total lack of stakes, maybe it’s partially because of the lack of the awful awful combat, but the initial tournament sequence is actually pretty solid. It’s silly fluff. A romp, for lack of a better word, and it works pretty well. There’s even a nice ‘world tour’ sequence where we catch up with a lot of people post time skip and (gasp) they actually treat it like it’s been a while
35. Cutscene: So, Vegeta’s big sacrifice. This is well animated, well acted, well portrayed. You can tell a lot of effort and time was spent on this scene. And this SHOULD be a multiple positive scene if it had been built up properly, making this a payoff. But instead it’s a great scene in a vacuum, thus only a solitary positive
36. MSQ: I cannot believe it but I actually really like Hercule befriending Majin Buu. It’s exactly as innocent and simple as it probably should be
37. Outro: Cutscene: I’ll give you this. The money shot of Vegito absolutely bodying Super Buu is exceptionally well animated and some fantastic spectacle
38. Outro: Cutscene: And somehow they one-up this later. Okay, call me a weirdo but I honestly think this is THE best ‘fight scene’ in the game thusfar; Kid Buu fighting Goku. The uniqueness and cleverness of Kid Buu’s fighting style, the usual great spectacle, all while Vegeta is narrating…
39. Outro: Cutscene: …this fight is honestly amazing
40. Outro: Moment: Okay, I’ll admit it. I DO like the moment where Hercule stands up and gets the people of Earth to help, I’ll admit it. He even eats a little humble pie while he’s at it

Story Negatives:

1. Intro: Spoilery cutscenes as per usual
2. Intro: Complete non-sequitor intro that barely sets up anything with text narration that goes away before you can read it and absolutely no idea what’s going on
3. Voice Acting: Inconsistent voice acting, that old chestnut
4. Moment: Goku insisting that Krillin let Vegeta go because he wants to fight him when he comes back stronger is… not great at this point in the game. This dude is a mass murdering genocidal planet destroyer who has killed his own just cuz, was barely brought down by multiple last minute miracles, and Vegeta has outright stated that he’s going to come back and kill them all, and Goku KNOWS this and then says PLEASE let him go SO THAT HE CAN DO THIS
5. MSQ: The first filler arc is, try to be shocked, padded filler and completely kills the pacing
6. Cutscene Incompetence: This is actually a gameplay problem too but there’s far too many fights we win only to lose in the cutscene immediately after
7. Writing: Staircase power escalation. It has been requested I call this the Shonen Anime Negative. So even before we start the Cell Saga we already see this in spades. The game introduces a new villain, they’re so much stronger than anything we’ve seen before and are established as such, and then we somehow barely barely barely take them down. Then there’s another even stronger villain after them. Rinse and repeat ad infinitum. I was already tired of this by Vegeta…
8. Writing: …but then the entire Ginyu force thing just dialed this up to eleven. You’ll notice I do NOT mention Frieza here, as one of the only villains whose escalation feels earned. Which is a shame because this is going to show up again later
9. Plot: So the Dragon Balls are straight up macguffins. Nothing pretends otherwise and… I mean honestly I’ve seen worse, but it’s pretty clear they do whatever the plot needs whenever the plot needs it
10. Character: Okay I’m sure they’ll make this worth it later (lord knows everyone constantly tells me they do) but the way they completely whitewash Vegeta after, y’know, being Vegeta in the entire first arc (and most of the second arc!) is just silly
11. Writing: I gave this a negative in Veilguard and I’m giving it here. At the end of each arc there’s a ‘next time’ which blatantly and overtly spoils the next story arc, even for someone like me who doesn’t know what’s coming
12. MSQ: So then Frieza… ‘scuse me, Mecha Frieza… just comes back. No fanfare he’s just back. After all that, ALL that to get rid of him, he’s back. Oh and brought his dad too. Oh and then NewKid (??) shows up and just bodies both instantly and effortlessly and the entire time everyone’s acting entirely too chill about everything
13. MSQ: This is immediately followed by some especially impressively boring filler. I’m not even going to recite it, this is just dull
14. MSQ: Then we go do boring filler again (yes, again) and then three years pass in a single transition (yes, really) and nothing’s changed of course
15. Voice Acting: Androids… and honestly everyone who isn’t Sabat or Mills
16. Writing: STOP SPOILING YOURSELF GAME, gawd!
17. Writing: So hey, more Staircase Power Escalation (er, sorry, Shonen Anime). So the androids are stupidly ridiculously powerful, even more so than Frieza. Sigh
18. Segregation: Joke fights vs. real fights. So periodically there’s a fight that’s either a supposed to lose (mentioned above) or is clearly not a real fight. Then there’s fights that are… y’know, real fights, that actually matter. This is fine of course (good, even) BUT the problem here is the gameplay difficulty of these fights doesn’t follow any internal logic at all. Some of the joke or supposed to lose fights are balls hard, and some of the actually real fights are a joke
19. MSQ: Okay I’ve been… entirely too nice to the Android Arc. This is stupid. The first two Androids are stupid, the second two Androids are badly presented, Cell is just eating cities OFF CAMERA and then everyone bounces the Idiot Ball between them as fast and hard as they can. Then some of the story beats are referenced but don’t happen, some entire segments are narrated over still frames, and it’s just…
20. MSQ: …REALLY badly done. I’m honestly being too kind even now because the pacing is awful too
21. Cutscene: So let’s just slather a negative over this entire sequence shall we? Vegeta lets Imperfect go on to become Perfect because he’s an egotistical prick, Krillin destroys the remote because 18 kissed his cheek once, and Trunks fails at interfering, and this whole sequence is just Because Plot. Even if it makes sense (similar to Goku earlier when sparing Vegeta) it’s still happening just to get from Point A to Point B as quickly and stupidly as possible
22. External Continuity: So this is something I have difficulty gauging, but by the time we hit the Android and Cell Saga the sheer quantity of story beats the game starts skipping is starting to add up. Because it’s starting to detract from sequencing and scenes…
23. External Continuity: …and added up to a double per chat request
24. Story Sequencing: Speaking of which the entire android saga has been some absolutely bizarre sequencing. Stuff has just been… happening. Even by the loose continuity this game practices this is something else
25. MSQ: So Cell comes back as even Perfecter Cell. This is already the same dull ‘fights never end’ crap the whole game has been doing but what makes it worse is the GAME didn’t do ANYthing to build up to this at all. He’s just… back. And he can regenerate from anything and he gets stronger each time he ‘dies’. This is straight up playground writing where that one kid insists he has the dinosaur that eats force shields
26. Character: Vegeta. I’ve been chewing on this for a long time but as presented in the game Vegeta is just a one note nobody. He doesn’t have the presentation he needs to be enjoyable, and he only has one character trait (obsessive rivalry) which is a difficult trait to pull off. And the game just doesn’t do anything with it other than constantly have him wanting to fight Goku, end statement
27. Storyboarding: So… there’s a thing in most games. Honestly I’d say 98% of games ever. And it’s when you reach a point where the game just starts noticeably dipping in quality. And this game has been doing that steadily for a while now but it’s getting much, much worse in the Buu stuff. They’ve started replacing entire fights and major plot beats with stills (which have narration) or boring talky sections with no animation or action. It’s… bad. Like, really bad…
28. Cutscene: …up to and including several major moments (aforementioned) which are just kind of… there
29. Music Direction: So hey. Y’know how some games have only like 5 songs they play over and over and over and over, for several stretches of different types of cutscenes that have nothing to do with each other, to the point where the music turns into this background drone? Yeah I love it when that happens…
30. Music Direction: …especially across…
31. Music Direction: …a thirty hour game
32. Cutscene: So you see, 80% of all life has been wiped out. You can tell because of this incredibly cheap still we threw together in an hour with some stock guns and repeated models while the narrator talked over it. I also have to give special mention to how incredibly horrifying the thought is of Buu turning people into clay to make his house yet they don’t… do anything with this wonderfully horrifying thing
33. Cutscene: So then Gotenks fakes being out of energy, leading to Piccolo destroying the exit, leading to Super Buu just breaking out on his own. This could have been ominous or funny or … anything really. But it isn’t
34. MSQ: So Buu goes from being interesting and dynamic to bratty to We Have Cell At Home and it’s amazingly de-investing
35. Cutscene Incompetence: So they have the ultimate solution, just (permanently) fuse Goku with Gohan (which is going to make a few conversations with Chi Chi and Videl a bit awkward later) and then Gohan……… drops the earring. GOHAN, the dude who’s super precise and super fast and has amazing situational awareness…. Drops the earring. Then he spends entirely too long fumbling around looking for it, asks what to do with it, and gets eaten by Buu. Cool. Y’know, if you wanted Vegeta and Goku to fuse you could’ve just gone with that rather than this nonsense
36. Writing: By the way Buu… JUST Buu, mind you… is already a stupid staircase escalation problem. Buu starts OFF insanely ridiculously stupidly overpowered, and then goes up from there by splitting with himself, then absorbing people, then absorbing MORE people, then distilling back to his true form, and Christ you have completely lost me. I’m not even all that mad about how nonsensically stupid all of this is because at least it’s maintaining a tone of insanity consistently but this has just drifted into nonsense land. It has one other problem too…
37. Padding: …it’s too vacuous. The amount of time they spend spinning their wheels here is silly, especially given that they’ve ALREADY done the big money shot super powered Vegito shot
38. Internal Continuity: I actually had this issue earlier but goddammit they just power up the dragon balls so they can be even more of macguffins than they already were because… I mean at this point no one cares
39. Outro: I have to ding the ‘people of Earth’ sequence. First of all, they mention they’re connected to every person in the UNIVERSE, but for some reason it takes this stupid Earth population to really make a difference. Second of all these people, who live in a wild and fantastical world, which has semi recently dealt with all kinds of crazy stuff from Vegeta to Cell being this jaded and disbelieving about everything is honestly just aggravating after all this nonsense. It leads to a nice moment but there were better ways to accomplish the same concept (right off the top of my head, maybe Vegeta was too injured to make the plea so Hercule makes the plea himself)

Gameplay Positives:

1. Saves: Decent and frequent autosave (though only one slot)
2. Guidance: Dialogue bubbles indicating regular dialogue, side quest, or main quest. These are a consistent bit of quality of life and I really appreciate it being there
3. Music: When the music kicks it kicks. Noteworthy that most of the combat songs are legit
4. Fast Travel: I’ve seen better, but it’s still there and it’s still good. Mostly between zones from the world map
5. Core Mechanic: Communities might be some of the only… this feels mean to say… gameplay the game has. The basic ass kit of the moves are low tier and the exploration and fishing both suck. But Communities is interesting. You give gifts to the right person to raise their level with specific Communities, and then put them on those boards to give passive effects to the entire team regardless of whom you’re playing. There’s also some interesting interplay here because lots of people have multiple boards they’re good at and there’s lots of different combos you can do which boost levels even more. It is, dare I say it, the only interesting gameplay decisions the game has
6. Viscerality: Being honest, if the game failed at this it’d fail hard. Thing is the combat viscerality is merely ‘fine’. Having said that the visuals are solid, especially as you’re zooming around and destroying terrain
7. Viscerality: This ties into Impact as well where some of your combat impact is fine but most of it is just there, and the rest (as in out of combat) stuff feels nicely impactful
8. Difficulty Options: For how lazy the diff is, being able to swap it on the fly is good
9. Boss: Raditz. Multi-phase with good tells, great escalation (eg. his fireball attack switches from one to two to three as the fight progresses), a side ‘just dodge’ phase, big vuln phases, and is generally solid
10. Boss: Guldo and Recoome were both actual boss fights holy crap. (Yes I realize it’s been since Raditz since we had a real boss fight) Guldo had the dodge phases with a vuln phase following, and Recoome had MULTIPLE cool moves and mechanics

Gameplay Negatives:

1. MTX: Honestly this is the Bandai Namco norm. Lots of them and pay to win…
2. MTX: …so enjoy that double
3. Bug: So… there’s this bug where if anything goes wrong with the game closing (like crashing or closing improperly) the game has issues loading your save. Now as of this moment in time your saves are still there. Now if you go backup your saves right then and there you’re fine, but if you decide to start a new game thinking it will help those saves will be actually wiped. The solution is to turn off cloud saves, which the player may or may not know how to do (and good luck doing this on console). For how awful and easy to replicate this bug is AND for how permanently it can damage your playthrough…
4. Bug: …this is…
5. Bug: …a triple bug
6. Raspberry Jam: It’s pretty bad, shows up as soon as you hit your final health bar, and constantly pulses… even over things like menus
7. Difficulty Options: Lazy difficulty (enemies hit TEN times harder in hard mode, yeesh)
8. Intro: The very first fight just throws you into a fight with a brief ‘hey here’s your buttons have fuuun’ which is a hell of a way to start things
9. Intro: Forced escort quest (twice!) First you have to walk (WALK) with your son, then you have to pick him up and carry him and (once again) walk
10. Intro: Tutorialization: Then it does that wonderful thing where you can ONLY do the thing it mandates you do in the order it mandates and any attempt to do anything else is met with an EHH wrong move, try again thing. This is never good tutorialization and feels awkward and stiff especially since….
11. Intro: …the intro is absolutely shotgunning us with mechanics and features
12. Audio Spam: I’ve seen worse but this isn’t exactly great
13. Music: And then when the music doesn’t kick it’s just awful. Too short of loops and too meandering of a tune
14. Song: Meandering sad strings. It feels like it’s the same four notes over and over and over and it gets old inside of a minute… and it plays for much, much longer than that
15. Song: Jazz villainous song that plays CONSTANTLY AAGH
16. Controls: The game has this weird input delay… thing. Sometimes you can menu and sometimes you can’t. This isn’t just in combat, in fact it’s only mildly irritating in combat, but it’s AWFUL while menuing
17. Secondary: Side quests, at absolute best, are a neutral. And then there are the other much more aggravating ones like ‘go gather X ingredients’ quests, some of which have LAYERED ‘go gather X’ quests. I should mention this negative only applies to the first arc’s filler stuff
18. Encounter: A semi common problem is you’ll fight a boss, win, and then immediately lose in the cutscene right after. This is a semi common problem in a lot of games but it’s especially aggravating here for two reasons. First, it happens CONSTANTLY, and second… if you lose the fight you lose the game and have to start over. Even though you lose in the cutscene. Why not just… let us lose?
19. Secondary: So then there’s the side quests on Namek. Which are actually WORSE than the ones on Earth if you can believe it
20. Secondary: Then there’s the filler saga. Check this out. In order to do all the side quests here and gain the medals you have to gather the Dragonballs (randomly spread out all over the place), resurrect someone, fight them, wait 20 real life minutes, find the dragonballs again, power them up, fight them AGAIN, and then repeat this for like 10 characters. This is some of the most bland grind in the game…
21. Secondary: …and I will be NICE and only give it a double negative
22. MSQ: Which is immediately followed by several mandatory quests which are… just side quests. I mean they’re not secondary content but you know what I mean. They’re the exact same format as half the other side quests in the game. These are back to back too
23. Core Combat: Let’s talk Problems. This game has a Problem that I can best describe as ‘the entire gameplay axis except for the Community Board’. So let’s push through these in order because they ALL dovetail into each other. First and foremost is the core combat itself which is, at absolute best, incredibly boring. You have basic attacks, Ki attacks, and can end a series of basic attacks with a Ki attack. This is the most vanilla definition of ‘combos’ you could possibly have. You also have three super moves which cost Ki and come in about four flavors (vuln, big hit, combo hit, energy beam). And that’s… it. That’s the entirety of combat. There’s NOTHING here, and so every fight has you doing the same basic moves over and over in the same ways. This by itself…
24. Core Combat: …is some of the worst core combat…
25. Core Combat: …I have ever seen. This is already kind of dull…
26. Kit: …but it’s worth mentioning how limited your kit is this entire time. There’s hardly anything you can actually DO. I say without hyperbole that River City Ransom on the NES has more engaging kit and combat than this game, and it’s pathetic. And I haven’t even started on the next major issue…
27. Enemy Variety: I checked. Not counting the repeating bosses there are exactly six enemy types for trash in the ENTIRE game. I should also mention those six enemies is pulling a hell of a technically because really there’s only about two types of enemies stretched across six models. This is already awful…
28. Enemy Variety: …and deserving of its own double…
29. Enemy Variety: …but then there’s the bosses! As of typing this I’m into the Cell Saga and so far I’ve encountered exactly 4 unique bosses in the ENTIRE game. That’s amongst DOZENS of bosses (including tons of boss refights!)…
30. Enemy Variety: …considering how much of the game is spent fighting the SAME GODDAMNED BOSS OVER AND OVER I think…
31. Enemy Variety: …this deserves a triple. By the way remember the boss refights thing, I’ll come back to it later. Oh…
32. Enemy Design: …did I mention that the bosses barely have any design to them at all? They have some kind of projectile attack, the stun attack everyone has (more on that in a sec), the big hit, and usually a counter knockback thing. And that’s… it that’s 99% of the bosses in the game. This is awful…
33. Enemy Design: …and boring…
34. Enemy Design: …but then there’s the trash! Did I mention there’s functionally TWO enemy types in trash encounters? And they come in flavors of ‘fights you’ or ‘buffs others’ and that’s… that’s it…
35. Encounter Rate: …thank goodness they don’t have like a bajillion encounters on the overworld as you’re exploring though, right?!? RIGHT?!?
36. Encounter Rate: No of course they don’t SCREW YOU they love to spam you as you’re just exploring or even trying to engage in the open world trash oh and speaking of that…
37. Audio Spam: …did I mention that your characters will NOT shut up about anything? I’m tempted to give this MORE than triple negative because it’s the same damned lines over and over and for the same triggers. So you will hear them constantly yammering the same lines…
38. Audio Spam: …and this is both in combat and in the overworld sequences…
39. Audio Spam: …so take that triple and get out of my sight
40. Overworld: Just kidding we need to talk about the Overworld design. Or lack thereof. There’s just… stuff scattered all over the place, and it takes entirely too long to get around for how little there is to do in it. Which I suppose is a good time to drift into…
41. Alternate Leveling: …okay so I know what you’re thinking. Why isn’t this under ‘minigame?’ Patience, I’ll get to it. So, as you roam the overworld you can hunt animals (hit A while behind them), gather fruit (run into trees), mine things (hit A on a node), fly into orbs (self explanatory), fish (waggle the control stick then hit the right button at the right time), and fight optional fights (to unlock more nodes on the leveling grid, more on that in a minute). Here’s the thing. These are obviously really boring and dumb filler but what really grinds my gears is that they’re part of… leveling. All this CRAP you get lets you level up on the grid and do the cooking and unlock nodes. And all of THAT is your leveling. That’s how you gain stat ups and the like, thanks to Feasts and … y’know, leveling. And so that’s a lot of boring sloggy grind just to gain stat ups. And all of that is already bad…
42. Minigame: …but I really should mention how all this crap is REALLY boring. Like there’s almost an absence of gameplay here. It’s usually a single button press, and takes entirely too long to do on top of that
43. Padding: Did I mention that all of this is on top of needing to fight optional fights just to be able to unlock the ability to spend points on the grid to get slightly upgraded versions of your abilities?
44. Padding: Did I mention there are MANY of these fights and they are per character…
45. Padding: …which means, hey, you know those incredibly dull samey bosses I mentioned earlier? Enjoy fighting them over and over and over
46. Grind: I should mention that this is INCREDIBLY grindy. It’s absolutely insane how grindy this gets in fact, based on everything I mentioned already (and will mention again) so…
47. Grind: …earning that…
48. Grind: …triple
49. Power Progression Curve: Did I mention that every thing you do to increase your power has no noticeable impact whatsoever? I’m sure it’s having SOME impact somewhere but you don’t feel different at all. Combine not feeling stronger with not getting new moves (remember they’re just the same moves but better) and a limited kit and the same fight over and over and you have, as I said at the beginning, a Problem
50. Info In Game: S ranking lies. It’s stupid easy to get S ranking, and it just feels cheap at a certain point
51. Segregation: Joke fights vs. real fights. So periodically there’s a fight that’s either a supposed to lose (mentioned above) or is clearly not a real fight. Then there’s fights that are… y’know, real fights, that actually matter. This is fine of course (good, even) BUT the problem here is the gameplay difficulty of these fights doesn’t follow any internal logic at all. Some of the joke or supposed to lose fights are balls hard, and some of the actually real fights are a joke
52. Difficulty Curve: And that’s a good time to bring up how stupid the difficulty curve is. Because as with many other games that clearly didn’t design a difficulty curve at all there’s no… curve here. It’s just a yo-yo up and down…
53. Difficulty Curve: …and this is consistent…
54. Difficulty Curve: …across the whole game
55. Tutorialization: So here we are, I’m about 20 hours in, and by COMPLETE accident I stumbled into the fact that you have to equip passive upgrades. First, that’s stupid. Second, the passives are microscopic increases in power. And third and most importantly NOTHING TELLS YOU THIS
56. Boss: I’m just going to give another negative for yet another series of repetitive fights. Did I mention each Cell fight up to Perfect is the same bog standard boss we’ve been fighting since the beginning of the game? And to be clear about that, even the Perfect Cell fight is the same bog standard fight. I want to be clear about this. As of this point in time (the Perfect Cell fight) we’ve had 5 semi unique boss fights. Raditz (and his beam dodge 2D section), Nappa (also had a few camera-shifting attacks), Guldo (unique side attack), Recoome (best fight in the game with multiple unique abilities), and friggin’ Dr. Gero (who had the ‘grab you’ attack). That’s… it
57. MSQ: So in the MIDDLE of the Cell arc we get several mandatory side quests shoved in. These are the usual bad side quest material but some of the items in question aren’t even guaranteed spawns, so it involves a random amount of respawning and grinding. This is immediately followed by the first mandatory dragon ball gathering sequence which… could be a lot worse, admittedly, but it’s still dull filler
58. Secondary: Okay so after the Cell Saga I finally quit doing side quests. I ran into yet another one which was yet another ‘go find the randomly spawning items on the map’ quest (this is like the FOURTH of these by the way, just today) and I was like y’know what? No. So screw ‘em and screw these side quests…
59. Secondary: …so here’s a final presumptive aggregate…
60. Secondary: …for the remainder I’m skipping
61. Boss: I’m going to mention once again how these boss fights are just the same crap over and over again. There’s even times where they TRICK you into thinking there’s a variance, like with Majin Buu, but actually no it’s just a fancy stun attack with a different graphic. By the way this is as good of a time to mention something I’ve been noticing this whole time but is VERY noticeable here. The bosses all have the same attack combos. As in LITERALLY the same combos. Same moves, same rigging, regardless of who they are or their individual models and meshes. The most jarring example of this is Sabura (giant muscular guy) and Majin Buu (smaller puff ball) who use, again, the exact same combo animations
62. Boss: I just realized I’ve only given two negatives prior to now to the ‘same boss’ problem. So as of typing this now I’ve fought Super Buu several times and he has ONE slightly different move (basically his AOE pushback is larger than usual) but once again we’re just fighting the same fight over and over again

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: There’s not much here (by design) but they do good work with it. The drawn field and cabin (or tower or whatever it is today) shifting about and drifting into the Quiet works quite nicely
2. Spritework: Similarly the various variants of the Princess are distinct from each other but also immediately convey their particular temperament and tone
3. Voice Acting: For only having two voice actors there’s a lot of good stuff here but really…
4. Voice Acting: …I have to give special mention to Nichole Goodnight and her portrayal of the various Princesses and, y’know, the Ocean…
5. Voice Acting: …so she gets a solid double
6. Voice Direction: It’s harder than it sounds to sound distinct when voicing multiple people who are talking to each other. Some great direction here
7. Dialogue: Exceptionally smartly written dialogue. A lot is conveyed in very few words and one can tell immediately who’s talking based solely on their word choice and dialogue construction. Furthermore the game manages to avoid falling into the nonsense trope so many ‘big meaning’ fictions fail at, as all the seemingly nonsensical stuff actually makes perfect sense even the first time through, nevermind on subsequent playthroughs…
8. Dialogue: …easily earning a double
9. Sound: Great usage of sound throughout. The animation is excellent of course but the audio design really adds to the scenes
10. Animation: Right, speaking of, they have some great usage of animation as well. It’s smart usage too, usually very simple but well utilized
11. Writing: There’s also a great deal to keep track of across the various possible permutations and layers of everything
12. Character: The Ocean. Anything more I type here will be spoilery and I try to avoid overt spoilers this early in a review document so all I’ll say is they do some really fascinating stuff with this creature and how much she adjusts based entirely on you
13. Character: The shards of the Narrators. It’s subtle, but there’s differences between each of them depending on which version we’re interacting with. And of course there’s the ‘original’ Narrator, the one in the mirror, and his… shall we say interesting motivations
14. Character: The various Princesses. They are all a reaction to what you did, how you did it, and what you do
15. Character: The Voices. There’s some clearly better than others (Smitten and Opportunist and Hunted are all kinda bleh, whereas Skeptic and Paranoid are pretty consistently well written) but regardless they’re all well written enough to deserve their own positive
16. Storytelling Mechanic: Mouse cursor changes based on choices and place in the story
17. Visual Storytelling: Changes in the cabin and the forest depending on routes and choices
18. Visual Storytelling: Changes in the art style of the Princess… I mean yes obviously there’s the different princesses but several of them have minute and minor changes based on smaller decisions
19. Music Direction: The (good) music does a good job of setting the various scenes quite well
20. Plot: The entire plot and hook is immediately engaging. Building up the Ocean and trying to figure out what in the world (ha) is going on
21. Intro: The entire initial lead up is fantastic. The obvious comparison to Stanley Parable is obvious but the game does a lot, between the Narrator, visuals, and choices, to get across what kind of situation we’re in and how things can go immediately
22. MSQ: The innocent Princess. This is apparently the Damsel route, and if I’m honest this (the very first route we got) is one of my favorites. The initial is properly horrifying (we can barely resist trying to kill her) and her sobbing and telling us she’s sorry as she stabs us over and over, and when we come back she’s devolved into a caricature of a person who, each time we insist she can be her own person, she devolves even more…
23. MSQ: …horrifying stuff
24. MSQ: The bestial monster that kills us in self defense. This is apparently the Beast route. This one is… well done, though I’ll admit a bit much for me and the only reason I like it is because it lead to us becoming a concept (known as the Wild) which was properly well done and branched again
25. MSQ: The vengeful banshee who paralyzes us to death. This is the Nightmare route. This hit just the right slice of horrible as she clearly isn’t what you’d call good, but she also doesn’t quite care… very fey, if I had to use a word. Also the voice keeping our organs running whilst we free her is a nice touch
26. MSQ: The prisoner, with the same dialogue as the innocent but a completely different tone, who is far more confident and controlled. This is, appropriately, called the Prisoner route
27. MSQ: The fractured reality (which makes sense if the Princess is a mirror, since if you don’t look into the mirror…). Bonus points…
28. MSQ: …for being incredibly well written as the layers of options cascade into each other Oh and this is the Stranger route
29. MSQ: The Happily Ever After route… is incredibly creepy. Probably the most horrifying route so far. The examination of surface level wants vs. more complex wants, the absolutely horrifying parallels to abusive relationships, and the startlingly well written interactions with the Princess. Also Smitten as the shadow is inspired. But…
30. MSQ: …while all of that is enough for a double…
31. MSQ: …what pushes this up to triple territory is the Narrator himself, who absolutely HATES this. The echo/program who, I remind you, has the primary objective of trapping us here forever, is absolutely horrified by all of this. It is the only route I’ve seen as of typing this where the Narrator actually wants you to NOT kill her and instead free her because he is repulsed by the very nature of it. It’s a wonderful insight into the Narrator as well as how messed up this is
32. MSQ: The Moment of Clarity. This is one of the rare times when we see every Voice simultaneously and that alone deserves this positive, as all of them cascade in and over each other
33. MSQ: The Tower. I was torn on this one at first but there’s some interesting stuff with the Narrator, and of course it leads into Apotheosis…
34. MSQ: …speaking of which, Apotheosis. This one was very well presented, but what really pushes this into positive territory is how Apotheosis was almost capable of escaping the prison, and how we stopped her by embracing our nature as the nothing
35. MSQ: The Spectre is, by itself, pretty interesting and the different tones the Princess can take add good flavor, on top of the ultimate decision to either die or let her possess us… and then stab ourselves. And if we go through this very, very strange route we get…
36. MSQ: The Princess And The Dragon. This is my personal favorite route thusfar. We start off from her perspective for the first time, no Narrator, no internal Voices… we do however get to talk to her. And that’s already fascinating before we get into how Opportunist and Cold are running things in our absence, our first real look at ourself, and the option to getting this poor Perspective out of here. It’s very well written, a great twist, and they do some great stuff with it…
37. MSQ: …earning…
38. MSQ: …that triple
39. MSQ: Thorn. This is such a fascinating one. You can be… extremely evil in this route (in two separate ways, no less) but what makes it most interesting is the only way to get here is to betray her, then let her betray you. So the Perspective at the end just doesn’t know what to make of you. But if you open up to her she does legitimately work with you and accepts the end of the cycle of violence. Or you can be a dick
40. MSQ: Razor. This is the other path where we have all the other Voices, and as with before that’s what really sells this one. The Razor Perspective herself is fairly vanilla (though wonderfully horrifying, as each time she kills you she grows new blades and new blade teeth), as each of the Voices all (once again) cascade over each other as they all freak out about how powerless they are… Until you quiet them all, then the Narrator, then everything, and embrace our nature as nothing…
41. MSQ: …leaving her nothing but a heart
42. MSQ: The Cage. As usual it’s incredibly horrific, but what’s most interesting is how this can branch pretty far. Either she severs your head and the two of you submit to helpless powerlessness, or empower her to free both of you from the chains
43. MSQ: Consider this an aggregate for the (well done) horror of both the Grey and the Wraith routes. There’s not much depth to these routes, but they are well done horror
44. Outro: Acknowledging which Perspectives we chose, and literally seeing the alternate perspective, that is to say the viewpoint OF the Perspectives
45. Outro: The first ending we got was wonderfully sweet. As the Ocean tries to convince us to leave with her, speaking with the divine confidence of being a god, we just reach out to her as a person. And this leads to us meeting a singular Princess at the core of everything, accepting each other as just people, and leaving back into the world as ourselves. I should mention there’s two other major endings but they’re startlingly similar to this one except for a few scenes (one we leave with her, one we destroy her) so we’ll bake all of this into one
46. Outro: The, uh, ‘good ending’. Even when it hurt to laugh it still made me laugh

Story Negatives:

1. Writing: There are multiple ways to completely avoid getting critical information due to no fault of the player, while still being more than capable of dealing with the consequences of things you do not understand
2. Tone: Gross. There’s a few examples but I think there’s enough genuinely horrifying, gluck-ridden scenes that it qualifies. Special mention to the first person vore section. Could’ve done without that
3. MSQ: The Fury. Unnecessarily gross, sure, but what really earns this its own negative is how ancillary it is. It’s entirely too long and nothing… really happens

Gameplay Positives:

1. Choices: Obviously since it’s the primary point and purpose of the game there’s a ton of Choices here, but let’s break this down a bit. First and foremost we have actual branching choices which substantially change how things go
2. Choices: Then there’s the flavor choices. This is almost entirely about flavor, but as discussed a few dozen times at this point in my career roleplaying Choices are an aspect of gameplay, and there’s an inordinate amount of flavor here which…
3. Choices: …easily deserves a double
4. Log: Built in log to help catch anything you miss
5. Save: Decent save system
6. Music: Good, varied, and enjoyable
7. Outro: Boss: The final encounter is a fascinating example of a dialogue boss. Near as I can tell there’s no ‘losing’ this, but there are a lot of ways it can go

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Save: The built in save system screen looks ALMOST identical to the load screen and is, honestly, weirdly awkward to navigate
2. Choice: So… this is one I’ve been sitting on this one for a minute. A lot of choices unlock other choices… no I don’t mean down the line (though that’s true too) I mean within individual scenes, routes, and even conversations. This means it’s distressingly easy to lock yourself out of options, especially since you usually don’t get infinite choices within a given conversation. This also runs into another issue I’ve been having…
3. Interface: …the choices themselves are, how do I describe this… not very clear. There’s an Explore tag on some but it’s not always true, and in fact more often than not is an actual choice not an ‘explore’ choice. Further, you crudely scroll through what is often a very large list of options and where it places new or unlocked options is not linear, meaning the only real way to tell if options have changed or if there are new options is to manually scroll each time and keep mental track. What’s worse is this isn’t always true, in fact I would say that it’s true less often than it is. Which means it’s easy to get into the habit of not manually checking every single option every single dialogue… which means missing stuff

Story Positives:

1. MSQ: I’m… gobsmacked but I think there’s enough decent stuff overall in Munitions Forge to qualify. The objective to free people giving us something tangible to do, more than one person to interact with who AREN’T dicks for once, and visuals and brickwork that’s actually worth a damn

Story Negatives:

1. Voice Acting: Spyro. I know it’s Elijah Wood and I do NOT care. He never emotes, at all, and sounds like he’s sleepwalking all his lines…
2. Voice Acting: …double negative
3. Voice Acting: David Spade as Sparx is actually worse if you can believe it. Mumbles his lines, no pacing at all, no tone, no inflection, it’s even worse than ‘line reading’ acting, it’s more like ‘rushing through it as fast as he can’ reading…
4. Voice Acting: …and it’s…
5. Voice Acting: …atrocious
6. Voice Acting: Gary Oldman sounds like he’s literally asleep as he reads his lines
7. Voice Direction: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, you can always tell when actors don’t receive direction. And I’m pretty sure no one received any in this entire game. Industry vets like Cree Summer putting in this slop almost guarantees a lack of direction…
8. Voice Direction: …and lemme tell you…
9. Voice Direction: …it’s pretty bad
10. Character: Spyro is an awful character. Bounces between trying to be irreverent, wise, and heroic and never succeeds at any
11. Character: Sparx can go directly to hell. He adds NOTHING to the game. He is just there to do his one-line anti-jokes and complain about absolutely everything, while also commenting on the bleedingly obvious…
12. Character: …screw him…
13. Character: …and screw his stupid face
14. Pacing: The pacing of the entire game is bizarre. Cutscenes just end and begin with no rhyme or reason to them, and events blorp forwards like sludge before suddenly racing
15. Banter: Every line of dialogue between Spyro and Sparx makes me want to mute the game. This isn’t banter, this is just two aliens who once watched a documentary about human interaction and think they’re experts on it trying to talk up each other. Except they watched different documentaries. In different languages…
16. Banter: …I cannot restress this, I am not exaggerating…
17. Banter: …I HATE this
18. Animations: Words don’t do this justice. A lot of games of this era didn’t have stellar animation because a lot of studios were still figuring out what was possible now, with much more complex rigging and models meshed on top of that. This isn’t that. This is just straight up cheap low effort crap. Just watch Sparx’s creepy frowning smile bounce back and forth between slightly less of a smile and more of a smile, or how horrific Spyro’s eyelids ooze over his eyes, or how every walk animation looks like it’s being done with an amateur’s stop motion studio. It’s ALL bad…???
19. Spritework: Spyro looks hideous. Just flat up hideous
20. Spritework: Sparx somehow looks worse. His awful, awful non smile and his bulging eyes… hideous
21. Brickwork: I don’t like to punch down on PS2 brickwork because it’s in that awful confluence of the beginnings of the Brown Era as well as when people started leaning on textured backgrounds a lot more without being able to make them look good, but even by these standards this is bad. Blurry, muddied colors and dull repeating biomes. You know how a lot of games build up a set of textures and doodads and meshes per biome and then design said biome with those? Yeah imagine that except there’s no variety. At all. At one point I was going through one section of the swamp area (the first ‘stage’) and it looked SO similar to a previous stretch I actually thought I’d gotten turned around. So consider this a negative for the swamp gluck
22. Humor: The game is constantly trying to be funny and it is constantly failing. I know humor is subjective but I can point to two definitive ways in which it’s failing. First is obvious; Delivery. David Spade can be hilarious but not here, and Elijah Wood is sleep-walking everything. Second is tone and tempo. Jokes to break up a serious story makes for a common formula, but that’s not what this is. This is ‘serious beat / offhand joke / serious beat / offhand joke’. Oh I suppose there’s also a third way too; Every single ‘joke’ is just a stupid one liner. So…
23. Humor: …I think we know where that’s going
24. Intro: Opening cutscene. PROPHECY! For we are the CHOOOSEN ONE! Thank goodness we were born to the right person or we might have to actually earn something. Sorry I’ll rant more about this later, this opening CGI is BAD
25. Intro: Stupid chase sequence! We have to chase our best buddie in the whole world and let me tell you this small section here did SO much to make me absolutely despise Sparx that I wished him physical pain inside of 2 minutes
26. Intro: Stupid cutscene construction and pacing and everything around us ‘discovering’ we can breathe fire, then revealing it to our parents, and then going on a journey (to a war torn and hellish landscape mind you)…
27. Intro: …for a double. Seriously the way they cut these scenes, it’s as if they don’t know what scene construction is. By the way they treat this like it’s this big dramatic beginning of the journey arc AND it’s a huge reveal that we can breathe fire. I remind you this is about 5 minutes into the game
28. Intro: So then we meet Ignitus and he is SO hilariously over the top in how seriously he conveys this super dark, deep, dorky as hell war of endless death and doom By the way this dude, who didn’t even know we were alive so it’s not an Obi Wan Watching Luke situation, is like half a block thataway from where Spyro was living for years. How did… how did they never run into each other? How… oh nevermind
29. Cutscene: I’m just going to say ‘everything’ in this segment around the tutorial. The panning shot of ‘the devastation’ which.. honestly if not for the narration I couldn’t tell was supposed to be devastated. Oh I changed my mind because I want to give a separate negative for something in a minute
30. Music Direction: Is it weird that the trying-too-hard dramatic music actually makes the scenes worse? I feel like that’s weird. It’s okay…
31. Music Direction: …because it’s true the entire game, so at least it’s consistent
32. Moment: So then we leeeearn the aaancient pooower of the draagooons and can now fly. I feel like any description I try to put here will not do this moment justice. But hey, big swelling moment
33. Brickwork: And another one for the endless ice fields of icy fields endlessly icing the field’s ice
34. Cutscene: More attempts at humor with electric boy
35. Character: Kane. Unsanctimonious asshole who never gets better
36. Brickwork: Y’know, these jungley ruins ALMOST looked good. I almost tricked myself into thinking it looked good. Until about the fifth time I felt like I was in the exact same area because of how samey and tiled it is
37. Visual Continuity: This is as good of a time as any to mention this Where is… anything? How does it connect to each other? To itself? I have SO little idea of anything and what’s worse is they had a perfect chance to connect the metaphorical dots earlier with the moment where Ignitus gave us the view of ‘the islands’ and ‘how devastated they were’ and that would’ve been a great time to show each of these zones. But no
38. Dialogue: …why does Spyro spend all of the Tall Plains level spouting random idioms?
39. Cutscene: So we beat the next boss and everyone starts to worship us. If this was serious it could work in a horrifying or enlightening way. If it was silly it could be amusing. It’s neither so it’s… neither. By the way Kane ‘learning a lesson about teamwork’ is incredibly forced too
40. Cutscene: I hate everything about listening to these dragons talk to each other
41. Cutscene: The CGI is so… so bad. My favorite detail is that Spyro doesn’t even look like himself
42. Cutscene: There’s a scene where Spyro and Sparx find a bell. Sparx then, for absolutely no reason whatsoever, bullies Spyro into ringing the bell. This leads to Spyro getting crushed by the bell, Sparx then giving THE actual worst performance in the game, and then Spyro now has earth powers. This… dry recitation of events does not properly convey everything wrong with this scene. It’s actually the single worst scene in the entire game. Literally everything is wrong with it. The storyboarding, the blocking, the camera usage, the animation on the characters, the voice acting, the pacing of the scene, the internal logic of it, the intro and outro (or lack thereof) so…
43. Cutscene: …let’s just…
44. Cutscene: …triple that up
45. Outro: Brickwork: What is this nonsense? Generic black tower with morphing crystal surroundings
46. Outro: Visual Continuity: Seriously we approach the front of the tower, go in, then go.. Out, then approach another tower, and we do this like four times. WHERE are we exactly? What is… anything?
47. Outro: By the way we’re… the same??… as Cynder. This is treated like a ‘she’s your mother’ reveal but they don’t actually say what the connection is or how it matters. This is also the first time we find out what’s beyond the portal (the Dark Master) and… why does any of this exist?
48. Outro: So then we go into nonsense land for the big epic battle with the dragon lady who’s actually our friend so we must rescue her. The problem is, of course, that we spend all the time we could have spent rescuing her arguing that WE MUST RESCUE HER in big dramatic poses, WHILE she’s getting sucked into the vortex of unknowable doom. Time and place people
49. Outro: Then the ending has Sparx complain about how maligned he is. For several minutes. It is exactly as awkward, unfunny, and padded as it sounds…
50. Outro: …and I hate…
51. Outro: …every moment of it
52. Outro: Then there’s a post credits where they warn that they have a bad feeling. That’s it. Play the next game!
53. Character: Cynder. The big super doomy doom dragon that everyone’s terrified of is someone we see glimpses of like three times and then she shows up right at the end, has 11 lines of dialogue, and we done
54. Theme: The game wants very much to be about coming of age and the hero’s journey. It SUPER is not

Gameplay Positives:

1. Mid Mission Checkpointing: There’s… functionally no Penalty For Failure here, but the game does at least have good checkpoint placement. Plus it has smart mid boss phase checkpoints!
2. Mid Mission Checkpointing: In fact it’s so consistently good I’m willing to toss it a double

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Graphics: LoD bulbous morphing grossness. You thought it was just the mushrooms, but little did you know! It’s in every stage except the ice one
2. Controls: I’ve played worse. Floating and sluggish at the same time, with tons of input delay which makes every other control interaction (like the minigames or puzzles) even worse…
3. Controls: …so that’s a solid double
4. Camera: Typical PS2 camera. Slow, has collision, and terrain not designed around it
5. Core Combat: Basic combos are boring and janky, related to controls above. It’s immensely boring…
6. Core Combat: …for another double
7. Kit: Not helped by an atrocious kit. So let’s go down the list. You have a flamethrower ability which stuns the enemy (the only good thing about it) but enemies being on fire, paradoxically, does NO damage. Instead you have to maintain the flamethrower by holding the button down on an enemy, which in addition to draining your mana super fast is also bad on feedback because you can only do so for a second or two at a time and while surrounded by flaming enemies it’s hard to tell if you’re still blowing fire or not unless you look at their health bars
8. Kit: Then we have lightning which is arguably worse since it’s hard to chain or AOE with so it’s basically single target, but otherwise seems identical to flamethrower
9. Kit: Then we get ice which is consistently garbage. As in it’s a narrow stream which wibbles around and barely hits enemies and takes a LONG time to stun someone (and once stunned a single hit breaks them out of it) making it objectively worse than fire and lightning
10. Viscerality: I hate the viscerality in this game. Attacks look and sound bad…
11. Viscerality: …and have NO damned impact. Or worse, inconsistent impact. My personal favorite thing? Using my gigantic, takes-forever-to-charge ultimate attack to do a tiny sliver of damage to a boss. As in less than a regular melee hit…
12. Viscerality: …this is…
13. Viscerality: …pathetic
14. Audio Spam: Entirely too many repeated calls of the same damned lines
15. Bug: Sound just disabling periodically
16. Sound Design: Good God fix your audio balancing please. Everyone’s mumbling, the sound effects are muted, the music is almost silent
17. Sound: Also the damned monkey sounds are aggravating and constant
18. Enemy Design: There is no design to these yahoos…
19. Enemy Design: …except for the enemies with absolutely aggravating and bullcrap design
20. Animation: Quite a few enemy attacks have either no real windup or no tell whatsoever they just happen
21. Intro: Encounter: So our first major encounters are a room filled with basic enemies, and then another room with basic enemies. There are no objects to use, no terrain, no enemy design to speak of. Just a boring encounter
22. Intro: Encounter: Then we do another one. And another one. And… you’re starting to get the point. By about the hour mark we’ve only fought basic enemies in basic empty rooms. I’m going to just say the Intro ends when we finally meet Ignitus which means…
23. Intro: …screw…
24. Intro: …this boring ass stretch of the same puzzle and the same enemies 20 times in a row. Oh and I’ll get to the spawn problem in a minute cuz it gets SO much worse later
25. Encounter: By the way the ‘puzzles’ involves shoving something onto something else. This is already basic to the point of nonsense but the awful controls make it aggravating too
26. Tutorialization: This is the worst tutorial I have ever seen. No, seriously, it commits every sin a tutorial can. It’s tutorializing basic ass combat (and we’re talking things like ‘attacking’ or ‘comboing’). It requires you to repeat each tutorial multiple times. It then requires you to do multiple VARIANTS of the same basic concept but in slight, and I do mean slight, variances… which you also have to do repeatedly. It also tutorializes moves that aren’t useful in natural combat. Those moves also don’t work very well. Did I mention it’s on a timer? AND if you do anything but the one specific thing that’s mandated it won’t count? AND that it’s completely mandatory? AND that even if done perfectly it’s literally longer than the entire first stage? I want you to know, deep in my blackened and dead heart, how awful this tutorial was. Let’s start off by just giving this section, as a tutorial…
27. Tutorialization: …a full…
28. Tutorialization: …triple
29. Tutorialization: Padding: Then let’s talk about how needlessly redundant, time consuming, and easy to screw up this all is (through no fault of your own!)…
30. Tutorialization: Padding: …so that’s another double
31. Tutorialization: Difficulty Curve: Then there’s the fact that the timers on several of these are absolutely bonkers. This is unironically the hardest thing in the game at this point (and, spoilers, harder than the entire next segment) and when I finally managed it it was down to pure luck and no actual skill or even effort
32. Tutorialization: Controls: And final bonus points for how terribly this by itself controls. It’s not just that it’s bad controls, it’s actively incorrect controls. As in if you try to line up a shot and jump to do it Spyro will move WITHOUT INPUT to make sure he aims AWAY from what you were aiming at
33. Tutorialization: By the way the game doesn’t tutorialize leveling at all even though it’s incredibly helpful (almost mandatory, I’d say) to completing the game
34. Level: We Have Gummi Ship At Home. There’s only two of these (one much later) but they’re both really… really boring
35. Level: So then we hit the snow level, Dante’s Freezer. Gosh where do I begin. Let’s start with the INCREDIBLY wonky physics on the snowballs which, I should point out, are mandatory. You also have to do them multiple times per catapult. And often there’s enemies around them too
36. Level: Then I want to give a negative for just how boring this entire level is. Just the whole thing. I’m terrified that this is the format of the rest of the game right here; Enter a new room, brief cutscene, then a non puzzle or a brief encounter, rinse and repeat
37. Gotcha: There’s Gotcha traps too. There’s actually a few further on but y’know
38. Level: Encounter: And y’know that might have worked if the combat were good or the enemies were good or the terrain was good or the kit was good. I like a good Beat ‘Em Up (really) but this… is not it. So instead we have dull, frustrating spats of enemies in areas seemingly designed to screw with you in the jankiest ways possible. Like putting the thing you need to bash have spikes on it so if you hit it slightly off you’re damaged. Or enemies can just walk off cliff edges to stay out of reach. Or enemies charging while doing the snowball thing
39. Enemy Design: I want to give special mention to these goddamned undead enemies. There’s the basic ones which have a counter attack with NO tell at all, can only be hit from certain angles, hit like a truck, and have too much health. That’s before we get into the BIG undead who have a second form who’s juuust enough in the air that you need to do aerial combos and good luck doing those while he’s doing his hard-to-see-coming hits
40. Level: Encounter Rate: And this is the last thing I have to say about this level. SCREW this. So there are multiple parts of the level where you have to just stand in place and kill respawning enemies to progress. Typical Red Room concept, straight out of Double Dragon (except, y’know, not good). That’s fine. What is not fine is how absolutely insanely many of these spawns happen. It’s bad in general but what really tips this over is this one encounter later…
41. Level: Encounter Rate: …where chat (and myself) were wondering if it was an actual infinite respawn point and I was supposed to move past it rather than just stand there killing seemingly endless waves of drek
42. Encounter Rate: I’m going to mention the ENTIRE GAME has this problem by the way…
43. Encounter Rate: …and just…
44. Encounter Rate: …triple this issue as an aggregate, not counting any outstanding issues
45. Interface: Leveling (also not tutorialized at all)
46. Boss: Ice King. Ice physics, unclear hurtboxes, and ultimately a fairly boring fight. This could actually be worse so it’s just one negative
47. Tutorialization: The electric tutorial is no where near as bad as the nightmarefest that was before but it’s still a boring forced action tutorial
48. Level: So hey, Tall Plains. This is the same usual boring doldrums as the previous stage
49. Level: Guidance: But wait, there’s more! This is MUCH worse signposting than the previous stage. Like, at one point Gyga (thanks Gyga) suggested a path forwards and I was like ‘there’s no way’ and it was in fact the way. And it made SO little sense. The whole stage is like this
50. Level: Padding: Did I mention how boringly LONG this stage is too? Not normally long. Boringly long
51. Level: Encounter: The ship. Okay so the ship is functionally a red room but wait! It’s even worse! Because unlike most other red rooms in this game if you die (and it’s VERY easy to die, especially late on) then you start ALL OVER AGAIN. There’s NO bypassing this. It’s also a tiny enclosed area with no terrain or tools because of course it is…
52. Level: Encounter: …God I hate this game
53. Boss: So the Stone Sentinel fight is… I mean it’s only the second boss in the game but it’s pretty bad. Let’s really talk this one out. Small arena with close walls and camera collision means it’s very frustrating to stay at range from the boss and still see him to dodge his ranged attack (which absolutely can hit you, there’s no out-ranging it). He also hits like a truck and has far too many health bars. He also has static health and mana drops in the arena and once those are gone, that’s it (note the Ice King at least summoned icicles you could recover with). All of this is already terrible but we’re not done yet because remember I mentioned how hard it is to stay at range? If you’re NOT at range he has two attacks which he can spam that have almost no wind-up time, meaning they’re almost impossible to dodge. This makes for a frustrating, boring, lengthy boss fight which has only one really viable method to success…
54. Boss: …and overall…
55. Boss: …sucks
56. Tutorialization: The ice tutorial is probably the least bad one so far. It’s still boring forced mandatory and repetition
57. Level: Munitions Forge. This is easily the best stage in the game. That’s… still bad but honestly it could be worse. Frustrating enemies that hit too hard, weird platforming relying on the ‘climb up’ ledge thing which is janky and slow, and a bizarre focus on explosives that flashbang you
58. Boss: I was going to give the Steam boss (the train) a flat neutral (or even a positive!) until the only good thing about the fight (you can hit him with lightning to stun him when he charges, causing him to run into the wall) he just decides to ignore. Also by the last phase he is ABSOLUTELY bombarding you nonstop with attacks and it’s obnoxious
59. Outro: Encounter Rate: Concurrent Skies. God okay so we START with one of those terrible seemingly-infinite-spawning enemies Red Rooms. And let me tell you this goes on for a WHILE. It’s okay though it is immediately followed by two more. That’s not a joke…
60. Outro: Encounter Rate: …this is ALREADY terrible. And it never stops…
61. Outro: Encounter Rate: …it just keeps being a thing… endlessly
62. Outro: Padding: I’m just going to triple this and walk away from trying to come up with creative ways to convey what fighting 3 enemies endlessly in small contained rooms is like…
63. Outro: Padding: …so enjoy…
64. Outro: Padding: …that triple
65. Outro: Encounter: And of course I should probably mention that every encounter in this God forsaken dungeon is the same four enemies. Lightning orbs, basic monkeys, medium monkeys, large monkeys. That’s IT. There’s no variety. There’s no design. There is only endless waves of death
66. Outro: Oh right I should probably mention the multiple elevator segments. They’re somehow some of the worst elevator fights I’ve ever seen, combining everything wrong with the concept and doing NOTHING new or interesting with it
67. Outro: Seconds In Minutes: Making us wait every single step of the elevator to do another red room wave of enemies to break the crystals to progress the elevator to do it again (and again) is just such a dick move
68. Outro: Boss: The final Cynder fight is pretty bad. Her attacks have gigantic stun phases, there’s very little recovery in the arena, and she has entirely too much health
69. Replayability: Because of the consistently mandated tutorials this game has negative replayability
70. Enemy Variety: If it’s not obvious there’s not really… enemy variety in this game. I mean there is SOME (which is why this isn’t a triple) but you will get so, SO tired of fighting the same three monkeys for 8 hours, let me tell you…
71. Enemy Variety: …and by the way the final dungeon also includes those three damned monkeys
72. Pacing: The game… attempts pacing. You do a room, then there’s an establishing cutscene (often with a quip), then you do another room. Thing is that’s… it, that’s the game…
73. Pacing: …the entire…
74. Pacing: …game
75. Power Progression Curve: I swear I just slowly got WEAKER as the game got on. In fact the only reason this is merely one negative is because almost in the finale we finally get the Earth Breath and we were suddenly handed a metaphorical shotgun

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: The training domain (I looked it up, it’s literally just called Dream, lawl). It’s pretty nice looking though, and gets across that mystical vibe pretty well
2. Brickwork: The fleet is… actually pretty legit looking for what they’re going for. Very poiratey, lots of airship with sailing ship vibes, weirdly good color usage
3. Cutscenes: The animated pseudo still cutscenes are… weirdly good. Which is hysterical because I guarantee you they did this to save money and accidentally made better cutscenes as a result

Story Negatives:

1. Voice Acting: Spyro continues to be badly acted. Wake up Frodo
2. Voice Acting: Billy West is still Billy West but lord he is NOT putting in a good showing here
3. Voice Direction: So y’know how I mentioned, via analysis, that there was no voice direction in the last game? I can now confirm with certainty thanks to behind the scenes research that, yes, there was no voice direction…
4. Voice Direction: …and it still shows
5. Character: Sparx is still the worst character in the game. Consistently an asshole, bully, snarker, and coward…
6. Character: …with no redeeming traits
7. Animation: The animation is still terrible
8. Spritework: Sparx and Spyro still look hideous
9. Humor: This game is NOT funny. It tries very hard, and it is not funny
10. Intro: Awkwardly quiet, immediate lack of establishment or stakes, terrible storyboarding… yep, it’s a Legend of Spyro game
11. Intro: Cutscene: Okay so even our very, very first scene sucks. Despite having LITERALLY just rescued her (and even if we didn’t play the previous game, the opening cinematic shows us saving her) she’s bailed. Then we pass out out of no where (hard to even tell that’s what happened… LOVE this animation, lemme tell ya). And the whole time Sparx is still the worst
12. Intro: Cutscene: Then there’s an even worse cutscene. I really am struggling to come up with new and creative ways to convey how bad these are. I could just be boring. I could tell you how the camera is bad, the music is bad, Gary Oldman using the exact same voice clip for his attacks every time is bad. But really I just want you to know how plodding, badly constructed, and dull these scenes are, visually, audibly, and in terms of content. So…
13. Intro: Cutscene: …take that for what it is
14. Cutscene: One more cutscene (yaay) where Sparx pretends to be funny (gotta earn those character negatives) while we learn about our dreams and a prophecy and an even ancientier dragon than the ancient dragons with us and Jesus Christ what is this regurgitated McDonald’s (thanks Pyjama Day!) being left out in the sun…
15. Cutscene: …another double negative
16. Cutscene: So then they’re roaming the second stage and Sparx decides to start munching on butterflies. These give him SUCH bad indigestion that he can’t stop burping. I’m serious he belches three times in a row, and then keeps belching afterwards. THEN the hyenas show up (they’re fine actually) and Spyro gets hit with the mandatory coma of powering up which NATURALLY leads to Sparx having to belch SO loudly it echoes in the distance. This dry retelling of this garbage does not do this justice. This is as bad of a scene as the Earth Bell scene in the first game…
17. Cutscene: …and so earns the same…
18. Cutscene: …reward
19. Visual Continuity: This is negative continuity. Which… I guess yeah, that’s why it’s in the negatives, but you get what I mean. We pass out in the grass, wake up in the cave, head up to a flying airship fleet for some reason.. Y’know how the original Spyro had portals between islands and worlds? THAT had more continuity than this nonsense-fest
20. Cutscene: So then Sparx shows up again reminding us of why he’s just the worst friggin’ character. I should mention that I’m already tired of typing up specifics so forgive me I’m going to start being a bit more general about this. So… this cutscene sucks! But…
21. Cutscene: …I have to give a special negative for the audio balance in this scene being SO BAD that I literally could not hear the people talking. Thank goodness for subtitles
22. Story Sequencing: Stuff just… happens in this game. As of typing this we’ve spent like an hour fighting in an arena because…. I have no idea why
23. Plot: So here’s something interesting. We start off focusing on the Big Evil Forces Of Evil. We fight them in the first stage, which comprises areas 1 through 4. Cool. Then we end up doing a few dream sequences and now we’re dealing with the pirates. Why are we dealing with the pirates? I need you to understand that over a third of the game is spent dealing with the pirates, and closer to three fourths of the STORY is spent dealing with the pirates. Why? Why do we spend such a ginormous portion of the game dealing with this irrelevant sidequest?
24. Cutscene: Hey, Cynder’s here! To immediately be kidnapped and become a damsel! And now the ship is on fire. What IS going on in this game?
25. Cutscene: Another badly animated badly storyboarded bad scene of bad with the end of the pirates
26. Cutscene: Oh hey so now we’re underwater or… whatever and now we’re in the dream land and okay now to get ALL the story dumped on us. The exposition dump is pretty badly positioned but what really gets to me about this stupid scene is Sparx
27. Outro: A wet deflated fart. This is just pathetic
28. Banter: It’s no where near as bad (or as constant) as the first game but it’s still there
29. Brickwork: Everywhere else still looks murky and bad. Notably the first and last dungeons
30. Dialogue: All of the dialogue sucks. All of it

Gameplay Positives:

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Graphics: You remember that awful pop in jittery weirdness from the first game? It’s baaack
2. Bug: Several wonky physics bugs which usually kill you
3. Controls: The game controls almost identically to the first one so same basic issues. Too floaty and too sloggy at the exact same time. It’s like swimming in marmalade on the moon…
4. Controls: …and it’s terrible
5. Controls: Double jump is worse though. It’s hard to describe exactly why it’s worse but the timing window on getting in the double jump is SO unforgiving now, and keep in mind most major jumps flat require a double jump in this game
6. Camera: Camera still sucks. Still has collision and still swerves lazily (or doesn’t respond to you at all)
7. Sound Design: Audio balancing is somehow even worse in this one than the first game. There are so many examples of when you can barely hear what’s going on because it’s too loud or completely buried in other noise…
8. Sound Design: …thank goodness for subtitles
9. Enemy Design: Spiders. They have crazy accurate stunning ranged attacks, tons of health, and when knocked down the first time they heal
10. Enemy Design: Three Hitters. These are a common type of ‘big’ enemy that can kill you in three hits. And they suck
11. Enemy Design: Scorpion Riders. These guys are awful. They’re fast, attack from ranged, block in melee, and can stunlock you. They REQUIRE you to do a charged attack to break their block (which requires standing still) and almost always attack in packs…
12. Enemy Design: …and they are the worst enemy in the game
13. Kit: Flamethrower. Weak, low damage, low range, and the same issues with using it as the first game
14. Kit: The charged ice shot is stupid, takes too long to charge, and stuns for too little time
15. Kit: The electric orb of stupid does almost no damage, is irritating to use in combat, and removes enemies from your reach
16. Kit: But it all pales compared to the Earth Flail. What in God’s name were they smoking when they designed this stupid thing? This replaced the Earth Breath from the first game (aka the friggin’ shotgun) and is cumbersome, does almost no damage, pushes enemies AWAY from you, can only be used at range, and looks stupid…
17. Kit: …easy double
18. Intro: Level: So one of the first things we do is have a dream sequence where we’re stuck in ‘time slow’ mode. I’ve already said my piece about time slow but suffice it to say that these jumps are actively terribly designed. You have to do shockingly precise jumps with bad controls onto very small, rounded platforms which are easy to fall off of. And you have to do this while facing TOWARDS them. This is the second worst jumping camera angle that exists (slightly being beaten out by isometric) due to difficulties in depth perception and the fact that the objects are just growing and shrinking (from the viewer’s perspective). This is instantly and immediately bad
19. Intro: Level: Okay so the first real stage is the swamp again (cool). The game’s a lot more platform heavy now which… sucks actually because the controls are worse and the engine is trash, and we get an early glimpse of this here
20. Intro: Encounter: Enemies here come in just the most perfect combos to screw you over. Snail guys who require jumps alongside spiders who spit and freeze alongside monkeys to freeze
21. Intro: Level: Encounter: Then there’s this recurring puzzle to light stuff on fire to progress. It’s boring. And they do it constantly
22. Intro: Level: Encounter: Then there’s this other jumping puzzle. This is so bad. So you have to jump across roots that wilt once you step on them. This is a basic ass donut block puzzle from Mario 3 but everything about it makes it worse. The physics are so wonky and fluid that it’s easy to be in a fall state while technically standing ON the platforms, and you can’t jump while falling. Also thanks to the new double jump problem you have to predict where you’ll need your jumps in advance. Finally the checkpoints are worse so any screw up means redoing the entire section
23. Intro: Boss: Then there’s our first, uh ‘boss’. You can only strafe and have very minimal room to move, meaning it’s really easy to get hit. As usual getting hit means tons of delay animations as you recover. He hits very hard. And you have to hold down a button to even be able to hit him at all
24. Intro: Graphics: There’s this recurring pink flashbang that is SO awful and so obnoxious and so epilepsy-warning I honestly thought it was an emulation bug but no, it’s just the entire first stage. It’s BAD. It’s CONSTANT. And it doesn’t go away even in the cutscenes…
25. Intro: Graphics: …so this is… really bad
26. Level: Encounter: So there’s this giant poison pool. In the pool are enemies with sniper like precision and attacks that, when they hit you, blur your camera. It’s also unclear where to go to progress
27. Level: Encounter: Immediately, and I mean IMMEDIATELY, after this is the encounter I actually had to pause and put the game down for a second to start typing up some notes because there were so many issues cascading into each other. Let me start by saying this encounter deserves its own negative. It’s three fast moving knockback/stun enemies alongside a big honker who’s attacks are hard to dodge and who hits you for half your health in a narrow corridor. But let’s talk about what’s really wrong here…
28. Kit: …because we have a Problem. I’ll start with some speculation, because a lot of this is ported forward from the previous game, but it feels like they made several changes here and there and I’d like to believe these were an attempt to make the game.. Better, not worse. They did not succeed. So things that were merely irritating before have become giant progression blockers. For example, remember that flamethrower attack? It’s functionally the same now, and that’s still problematic, but now it’s even worse because…
29. Leveling: …leveling does almost nothing. There’s plenty of examples of this but to use a specific one, if you upgrade flamethrower once it gets bigger (cool) but still does almost no damage Next upgrade also does almost no damage increase (real talk, I’m not 100% sure if the damage went up at ALL, it’s that hard to tell). So experience is next to worthless…
30. Level: …and now you have removed one of the potential rewards from your game (additional gems to empower your breaths more). This means all those little bonus side encounters or puzzles or just going out of your way to explore to get more stuff is now pointless. This is also relevant because…
31. Difficulty Curve: …our health pool is pathetic and doesn’t, y’know, grow. And that’s a problem when, on stage TWO, enemies can two shot us. This is also a problem…
32. Power Progression Curve: …because it means our damage output doesn’t rise commensurately to the enemies and difficulty as we progress through the game. Now add onto this…
33. Encounter Rate: …just how many enemies we fight. As of typing this (remember, we’re only on stage 2) it hasn’t been as bad as the absolute nonsense of the first game, but it’s already pretty bad. As mentioned above a pack of 3 enemies plus 1 big one is already a gigantic obstacle. This is at least in part because…
34. Kit: …they want us to be using our time power. CONSTANTLY. It refills very quickly and combat goes from being insurmountable to a joke when you do. And you gain access to new moves while in time mode. I realized this during the tutorial stage actually (died there too, by the way) and it’s… it’s bad, because not only is this ‘one solution to each combat’…
35. Seconds In Minutes: …it’s SLOW. It… literally slows time, that’s what it does. So every encounter now has this extra period of padding baked in
36. Interface: This is when I admit I’m an idiot and misread the interface. I thought it was capping my experience gain, but it was just telling me how far I could expand it based on my current experience, not total. Even going back and re-reading said interface it’s super not clear what the hell is going on. Christ the first game did a better job of this nonsense
37. Core Combat: So! All of this makes combat suck. A lot. We’ve gone from combat merely being boring back in the first game…
38. Core Combat: …to being actively and repeatedly…
39. Core Combat: …bad
40. Core Combat: I need to talk about the knockback problem. In this game any attack that’s considered ‘heavy’ sends Spyro into this ball animation as you recoil from it. This can send you flying a considerable distance, and you have no control or ability to do anything while recoiling. Well over 80% of the attacks in this game are ‘heavy’ attacks. And these can chain. Oh and the stun lasts several seconds. This one thing makes every combat encounter in the ENTIRE game worse than it needs to be…
41. Core Combat: …and so this one thing…
42. Core Combat: …deserves its own triple
43. Kit: Ice breath and platforms. Using these sucks. It sucks because it’s blinding, it sucks because it’s hard to aim, and it sucks because they last hardly any time
44. Level: Encounter: So hey, speaking of that awfulness. Use the ice breath to make platforms across a poison pit while enemies shoot at you. Also you’re essentially timed. And any fall means starting over. Also the shots blur your vision and so do the explosions which will happen without you wanting them to. The only saving grace here is the mana crystals at the restart points…
45. Level: Encounter: …but this is still horrible
46. Level: There’s this swath of section where you have to deal with perched enemies with ranged attacks while doing bad platforming and have difficulty telling where to go next and it’s just so wonderful
47. Level: Encounter: Oh THEN we bring back the big honkin’ ‘kill you in three hits’ mobs. Then we make you fight multiple at once. Did I mention these guys have an AOE attack?
48. Level: Encounter: Then we have a Red Room where you have to stand there dealing with the big honkin Three Hitters in a closed room with one heal and one mana restore. By the way there’s like 6 of them (only 2 at a time but still). Then a bigger one…
49. Level: Encounter: …SCREW this encounter in particular
50. Level: Did I mention the health upgrades are locked behind an absolutely insane platforming section?
51. Level: Encounter: This is immediately followed by a section where you once again have lots of enemies with knockbacks and a nearby ledge to be knocked into and the Three Hitter and… I’m getting tired of giving every encounter a negative but dammit
52. Level: Boss: And then there’s Arborick. His first phase involves hitting each body part enough times to ignite it before he resets his health, forcing you to start over. This is done with the 2D ‘hold down to change angle of attack’ mechanic fight they love so much in this one and it’s exactly as frustrating as it sounds…
53. Level: Boss: …but what makes it worse is your shots drain your mana to use. Mana that slowly comes back, meaning there’s a delay in shooting. In a fight that’s timed
54. Level: Boss: Then in his second phase he just hits like a truck and is very difficult to dodge (by the way that’s true for the ENTIRE fight)
55. Encounter: So hey, twin scorpions. This is intended to be the anti-block tutorial but good lord. These things hit like an absolute truck, come at you offset, stunlock you (by the way the ARENA can also stunlock you), and you have to beat both of them multiple times
56. Boss: The Ravage Rider fight is such a dick fight. He has ONE weak spot (took me forever to even notice it, egg on my face) and otherwise he’s virtually immune to everything. Also this fight has no recovery options whatsoever
57. Level: Encounter: So now we’re on the ship. First thing is of course a massive fight against assholes let’s just get that out of the way…
58. Level: Encounter: …then you have to do this dumb jumping button puzzle which I’m only dinging because it’s guidance and signposting are in the negatives…
59. Level: …but then… but THEN… there’s this jumping section. Jesus Christ this jumping section might be the single worst platforming segment in the game so far and that is impressive. First you have to jump across tiny platforms while there’s flame jets shooting at you and the timing on them is shall we say… not very well telegraphed. Both of these things suck…
60. Level: …but what pushes this into its own double is you have to do it at a mandatory isometric angle and GOOD lord. I mentioned earlier that the second worst jumping angle is head on? THE worst is isometric. It has none of the benefits of top down, side, or behind, and all of the detriments of all three
61. Level: Encounter: The timing lever jumping puzzle. So you enter a room, hit a lever, and scurry over to an elevator. It’s designed to require the slow time thing to make it, but thanks to what at this point I am convinced is literally zero QA time the timer on this is entirely too tight. This is unreasonably short a period of time for this, especially considering it’s a tutorial for…
62. Level: Encounter: …its immediate follow up. First let me describe this puzzle. You have to hit a switch, run around a platform, do a jump, and go through a door before it closes. Simple enough, and again clearly designed around the slow time mechanic. Thing is this is… absolutely ludicrously overtuned. I’m not even sure a single playtester played this level because a braindead monkey would see how badly timed this is. I’m going to now neutrally describe to you the process I used to make this jump…
63. Level: Encounter: Run in one direction (not the other) towards a lever, smack it while activating the time slow on the same frame to get a slight boost by not killing momentum, run forwards for about a fourth of a second while prepping for a curve right, curve right and do a blind jump because you do not have time to aim it, while the camera is adjusting presume you have the right angle and use a flaming dash while holding forward to get extra distance, take off again the frame you land on the platform but also let go of forwards or you’ll run into the wall (or worse, grab the ledge), do a very quick neutral double jump straight up, quickly push forwards again, and make it past the timed gate with milliseconds to spare
64. Level: Encounter: I want you to understand how unreasonable that is. I want you to realize the level of speedrunner bullcrap that whole paragraph indicates. I want you to realize that this was just to get past some random door in the game, nothing fancy or special. And then I want you to realize…
65. Difficulty Curve: …why this is already four negatives and still growing…
66. Difficulty Curve: …because this single jump…
67. Difficulty Curve: …is the worst jump I have seen in this franchise
68. Level: Encounter Rate: On the ship there’s yet another seemingly endless wave of endlessly spawning endless death endless
69. Level: Encounter: And then those GOD DAMN SCORPIONS AGAIN. I should mention that I got straight stunlocked here SO badly that without cheats I never would have broken out
70. Boss: Skabb 1. Dodge then hit briefly during vuln phase. Dodge then get in 3 hits during vuln phase. Try to do anything else and he has a near-instant knockback attack. That’s it. That’s the entire fight
71. Level: Lemme just gloss over the next like 20 minutes of boring platforming here. It’s not as bad as previous stages (really), it’s mostly just dodging enemies or occasionally having to kill them and hopping between life boats. But good lord this level is way too long for what it is
72. Animation: I was thinking about this earlier. So many enemies have either very little or NO wind up to some of their attacks (and in a lot of cases no follow through animation either!) which means it’s hard to tell when they’re going to attack and when they’re ready to attack again
73. Level: Okay so kill these enemies. No kill them in the right spot because see when they die their heads become a puzzle item that explodes after literal seconds
74. Level: By the way the light here for the ‘water’ you have to make ice platforms on is blinding. By the way your ice shot is also blinding. Blinding on blinding action
75. Mid Mission Checkpointing: I’ve been chewing on this the entire game but I honestly think this game gets a negative where the previous game got a positive. The checkpoints are spread out in such a specific manner as to force you to redo irritating and frustrating sections if ANYthing goes wrong across weirdly large swaths of gameplay and it sucks
76. Level: Then there’s this… puzzle. There’s a tiny dude with a switch looking thing on his head. He runs AWAY from you. He’s immune to all breath weapons and attacks. What do you do? I had to look this nonsense up because the ONLY thing you can do with him is the ground stomp and given how fast he moves AND he’s running away from you, you NEED to use time slow to make this at all
77. Level: Encounter: These golem Three Hitters are such a nonstop hassle in this stage. And keep in mind any deaths to these guys means redoing substantial swaths of gameplay
78. Level: Encounter: Another Three Hitter encounter
79. Boss: This is a good time to mention that we have to fight the same boss…
80. Boss: …four…
81. Boss: …times…
82. Boss: …in a row. And he sucks exactly the same each and every single time. He has a shield which you can break with the element he is (for some reason), he pushbacks you if you melee him, and he laughs at you. That’s it
83. Level: I sort of lost track of how awful each of these stupid elemental levels are because they’re all awful…
84. Level: …so…
85. Level: …let’s just move on
86. Boss: Then you fight Cynder. Seriously it’s just Cynder again except now you’re supposed to cycle between attacks based on her color and stay at range
87. Outro: Level: There’s a jumping sequence which requires overly tight timing even with the time slow
88. Outro: Level: Followed immediately by an ice breath section and enemies who knockback you into a pit forcing you to start over
89. Outro: Encounter: Followed by enemies in entirely too small of areas which hit too hard, have two phases, and can knock you off forcing you to start over
90. Outro: Encounter: So there’s one of those ‘endless waves of enemies’ encounters in the final dungeon. This is already bad but it’s worse because of lack of resources, enemies doing constant knockbacks, sheer quantity, and my personal favorite…
91. Outro: Encounter: …it’s on a platform with no safety railing. Meaning if you get knocked off you die and start over…
92. Outro: Encounter: …so that’s wonderful
93. Outro: Graphics: Hey look, the flashbang lightning is back
94. Outro: Anyways then there’s a jumping puzzle against moving platforms which ‘requires’ time slow while you can barely see what’s going on between flashing, snow, and darkness
95. Outro: Boss: This fight is stupid. The first phase is another of those seemingly frustrating fights that’s, in fact, just incredibly boring. Jump over his waves, attack while he’s stuck. Rinse and repeat
96. Outro: Boss: But the SECOND fight, oh my God screw this second phase. His attacks have STUPID range, he has a whirlwind attack which is near impossible to dodge and delays you, there’s plenty of janky physics that can fling you over the edge…
97. Outro: Mid Mission Checkpoint: …there’s no mid boss checkpoint if you get flung over…
98. Outro: Hyperfail Moment: …but the worst part is we get super powered as Dark Spyro and it… sucks. We get a ranged pea shooter with such bad visuals I couldn’t even tell I was attacking (or how to, for that matter), and a combo attack which only works at severe melee range AND only works if you do NO inputs (bizarrely), and it just… sucks
99. Viscerality: It’s not as bad as the first game but moves just feel bad. And the flashbang issue returns
100. Visual Distinction: It is SO damned hard to tell what you’re looking at in this game. At any given moment you could fail and fall and have to redo because you were doing blind jumps in glaring white lights or inky black darkness all while crap is just everywhere covering your visible screen…
101. Visual Distinction: …some of the worst visual distinction I’ve ever, uh, seen…
102. Visual Distinction: …enjoy that triple

Story Positives:

1. Voice Acting: General. For the first time in the trilogy we have actual voice acting. I’m shocked
2. Brickwork: Underground ruins. Nicely detailed, very cavernous, definitely gets across the vibe
3. Brickwork: Green grasslands of Avalar. Probably the best looking area in the game, for what it’s worth (though obviously MUCH worse on the PS2)
4. Brickwork: Okay I’ll give you this, the final areas (especially the floating islands) have some legitimate visuals. I’m especially fond of seeing the previous levels down in the distance

Story Negatives:

1. Moment: Oh no! We can’t possibly fly (or climb or WALK) over the slight impediment to our progress! We’d better split up and go another way!
2. MSQ: Why are the armies of Mordor marching on the Dragon City? Why are the Mole People the last bastion of decency and good in the world? What, as in literally WHAT, are we fighting? We may never know
3. Tone: So y’know when something’s trying way, way too hard to be epic? And it just kind of feels awkward as a result? Yeah, that
4. Cutscene: General. Seriously the cutscenes aren’t awful but they’re not great
5. Consequence Storytelling: Unearned. Every major late game story beat is completely unearned. It’s hard to feel anything when this stuff comes out, happens, and then we move on
6. Voice Acting: Mark Hamill’s voice modulation. I want you to imagine you get the amazing Mark Hamill and then smother his voice acting in so much modulation you can’t tell what he’s even saying
7. Outro: Cutscene: Absolutely wastes the final boss on a big Fake Drama scene that’s undone inside of about 20 seconds of Spyro admitting he has no hope left. No you heard that right, his DESPAIR breaks her out of the mind control
8. Outro: The actual ending is pretty stupid. Spyro and Cynder sacrifice themselves to restore the entire planet, oh and Cynder declares her love out of absolutely nowhere
9. Outro: And the actual final scene. The Chronicler spends his final moments talking about Spyro before dying out of nowhere, Ignitus turns blue and looks for Spyro, Spyro and Cynder fly together, fin
10. Character: Good time to mention that Spyro and Cynder have absolutely no chemistry. Honestly no one does with anyone it’s just particularly noticeable with them

Gameplay Positives:

1. Co-Op: Full co-op gameplay and…
2. Co-Op: …full campaign co-op, even. Wow
3. Music: Some of this is the same music as the first two games but there’s enough decent stuff here that’s new to qualify
4. Kit: Spyro. The Earth is whatever but the Lightning disarms, Ice slows, and Fire does tons of damage
5. Kit: Cynder has far more interesting Kit. She has your basic hit (Shadow), something to find enemies around (Wind), something that can fling basically any enemy (also Shadow), and Fear which is just insane. Oh and Poison…
6. Kit: …surprisingly solid stuff
7. Mid Mission Checkpoints: My God, the good checkpoints are back. Mid boss checkpoints even…
8. Mid Mission Checkpoints: …so we’re back to a solid double
9. Intro: I cannot friggin’ believe this but the opening section is actually kind of legit. It’s a slow escalation tutorial which shows off combat, platforming, two player puzzles, has one optional fight, and each new mechanic just involves some basic navigation and puzzle design
10. Viscerality: Decent Visual Viscerality. Lots of reasonably cool looking attacks, especially from Cynder

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Controls: Climbing, swinging, wall running. It’s all very… very janky
2. Sound: Sound balancing continues to be a problem
3. Graphics: BLOOOOM. And not the Orlandu variety
4. Graphics: I was originally going to just give the bloom and blur and overbright and flashing lights one negative but it just will not stop being an issue
5. Visual Distinction: It’s hard to really put into perspective just how hard it is to tell WHAT the hell is going on at every individual second of this game. Textures that blur into each other, bloom all over the lens, tiny and indistinct enemies which blend into the background…
6. Visual Distinction: …it’s bad
7. Animations: So enemy animations are practically non existent. This means the player has very little warning or indeed even awareness of when an enemy is attacking. This means combat tends to devolve into blind punching at the air or spamming abilities (when the game lets you). This…
8. Animations: …sucks
9. Enemy Design: Not super impressed with the enemy design so far. We have little guys with too much health, ranged guys with near perfect aim with too much health, barragers who near as I can tell are straight up invincible, and big dudes who hit like a truck. This is… this is some fun stuff here
10. Padding: Every enemy, EVERY enemy, has I’d say 10 times the health they should. Yes you heard me, TEN times…
11. Padding: …and it makes the entire game drag
12. Encounter Rate: Especially since they just cannot stop doing the ‘endless spawns of enemies’ thing the first game loved so much
13. Core Combat: It’s… better than the previous games, but I can’t bring myself to call this good. In a lot of games like this much of the core combat is threading between your various moves, creating your own combos. You either can’t or I can’t tell the difference if you can here, meaning you’re stuck with ‘light attack spam’ or ‘heavy attack hit’ and that’s kind of it
14. Level: Guidance: Climbable terrain in level 2 (Valley of Avalar). There’s green vines on green and brown cliffsides and sometimes you can see it and sometimes you can’t but good luck finding it either way. Doubly irritating since it’s required to progress
15. MSQ: Also this entire sequence is just kind of miserable jank which required me to look up a walkthrough THREE times
16. Level: So the Dragon City’s very first sequence is an unclear, needlessly convoluted puzzle involving element involving getting a bucket to put out a fire. No of course you don’t use the bucket on the water don’t be silly, first you have to go around and unlock the water which is already there THEN you can use the bucket on it
17. Level: Encounter: Jesus Christ. We’ve sidegraded from zero effort shovelware trash to whatever this nonsense is. We have to escort the catapult (thank GOD we can repair or this would be even more miserable), while reloading it, and then going to knock over enemy towers, while dealing with seemingly invincible attack spamming enemies, and then we have to do it four more times in a row. This is pure misery…
18. Level: Encounter: …and easily deserves…
19. Level: Encounter: …a triple
20. Level: Encounter: Then there’s the gate sequence. There’s this wonderful lack of feedback issue here so it’s super unclear what’s even going on, nevermind what you’re supposed to do, but let’s just line this up. Kill all the enemies, close the door, light the flames, close the door again, rinse and repeat any time you screw up. This takes too long, it’s boring, and it’s aggravating…
21. Level: Encounter: …so that’s, y’know, fun
22. Boss: The Golem starts off being badly signposted (just like everything else in this miserable game)
23. Boss: Then rinse and repeat that like three times
24. Boss: But then we get to the REAL fight. And SCREW the real fight. So he attacks and then his hand sits there a few moments, letting you hit him. His hitbox is weirdly small and you get physics’d back a bit while he’s moving. There’s recovery spots but they’re in like the most perfectly designed spot to be aggravating to reach (also he can counter attack in that area). And then he attacks, probably hurts you, you hit him like twice, then you do this for 20 minutes so you can do a quick QTE and then do it again but this time he sends homing fireballs at you perfectly offset to interrupt his vuln phase. Screw this stupid fight…
25. Boss: …for a full…
26. Boss: …triple
27. Level: Awakening the four dragon statues. Every single one of these is a miserable, boring slog through walkthroughitis ‘puzzle’ design while fighting off waves of frustrating enemies. So here’s one for the lower right
28. Level: One for upper right
29. Level: One for lower left
30. Level: And one for upper left
31. Walkthroughitis: By the way in this section, alone, had two mechanics that NOTHING ever tutorialized in the entire game, and one that was mentioned once prior to not
32. Level: So hey, the Dam. The initial puzzle is some Grade A Eurojank but ultimately just whatever
33. Level: The SECOND puzzle though, woah ho ho. So whichever way you go first locks in that as the only source of the weighted ball thing which you have to carry in order to weight down a switch. Except now you have to carry it across the dam to the other side and by the way NOTHING indicates you can do this, you just have to do it and then bomb jump your way up what is effectively a sheer cliff edge to finish the puzzle
34. Level: Then it’s back to Jank City, Population “you”, because you have to do ANOTHER of these sections and thanks to the angles and distances of several of these jumps it’s almost impossible to avoid there being excessive physicsing which cause all kinds of wonderful issues. Oh and by the way you need two of these stupid things
35. Level: So the Destroyer is just a boring slogfest. Some of the nodes have SO much health I legitimately thought I wasn’t doing damage to them
36. Level: Also navigating the Destroyer is some terrible janky awfulness
37. Level: I’ll be nice and just give the rest of the stage an aggregate. For the enemies with too much health and damage, for the dull heart fight, for the boring chase sequence
38. Level: Guidance: So the way forward in the Burned Lands is to go into a dead end and then turn in the direction the camera refuses to let you see to progress
39. Level: Encounter: So hey, we have a lengthy encounter with awful enemies that do too much damage and have too much health
40. Enemy Design: By the way these purple enemies absolutely suck. They have a boatload of health, hit like a truck, and can teleport around
41. Level: Encounter: Another forced redroom encounter
42. Outro: Level: Extended exploration section requiring finding torches with no indicators in order to progress which also requires mana to ignite them? Of course we have this
43. Outro: Encounter: Aaaand one last lengthy stupid padded fight of dumb
44. Outro: Boss: Simple (usually only having two attacks) and hits like a truck hitting you with another truck. This is not great…
45. Outro: Boss: …and it takes entirely too long
46. Enemy Variety: Not much to speak of, and even what’s there barely changes how you deal with them
47. Power Progression Curve: Pretty bad overall. Too little experience combined with barely noticeable improvements in power…
48. Power Progression Curve: …makes a pretty bad curve
49. Viscerality: This game has negative Impact Viscerality. You do giant doomy attacks that do an absolute pittance of damage…
50. Viscerality: …and even fully upgraded you barely feel like you’re accomplishing anything

Story Positives:

1. Animation: Decent. No, that’s as high as the praise is getting. There’s some issues with uncanny valley and they over-reach into visual fidelity which hurts it. But the overall motion capture is… decent
2. Intro: Moment: The grieving widow is probably one of the only good moments in the game as of typing this. We invade a house as part of the first mission, find a woman sobbing over the corpse of her husband. She quickly grabs a gun and shoots at us. It’s surprisingly powerful and the only scene in the first HALF of the game that does anything thematically
3. Doodads: Let’s call this a blanket triple. The whole game does doodading really well, but it also kind of blends into itself so nothing really sticks out. Still…
4. Doodads: …I’ll give them…
5. Doodads: …credit
6. Brickwork: Amsterdam. It’s just one room but it’s CRAZY detailed. Like, too detailed, I wonder how much of the time and money budgets were blown on this. It’s insane
7. Cutscene: The drive through Los Almas. Visual storytelling of what the area’s like, world building for what the world is like, it’s all properly grim and awful
8. MSQ: For what it’s worth they did SOME decent stuff with the atmosphere, sound design, and visuals of Close Air and Hardpoint. The muffled noises, hearing the explosions through the comms as they’re talking to you, dulled reloading and firing as you rain death, it’s decent stuff
9. Brickwork: Mexico. Just, in general. Woods, trees, grass, it’s all very pretty
10. Atmosphere: Credit where it’s due, the quiet rain and lack of music during the tense pseudo stealth mission in Alone is pretty legit
11. MSQ: The entire prison break sequence is suddenly great. We see competency, cooperation, camaraderie, and good tension
12. Cutscene: Shepard defending himself to Price, Price shutting him down, and then recruiting the team with the ghost masks… great moment
13. Voice Acting: Generally good

Story Negatives:

1. Dialogue: Bad. No, I’m not going to go into more detail. It’s bad the entire game…
2. Dialogue: …it’s exceptionally Hollywood, but without any of the quality or charm that requires
3. Architecture: Amsterdam is pretty detailed and well fleshed out and all that and yet… and yet it really does look like a single room. And that’s the BEST visuals in the game. Most of the towns and areas and hotels and whatnot all fail to feel like they’re actual places or larger than they are (special mention to the big open grassy area which just feels empty and pointless)
4. Tone: Failure to be serious or silly. It can’t nail either tone and so just comes across as bad
5. Writing: Hollywoodisms. On the off chance you don’t know what that means, it’s when the writing is deliberately written to be stupid nonsense to trick you into turning off your brain to enjoy it. Now, hold on, that’s not NECESSARILY a bad thing. There’s such a thing as good writing for any concept, even this one. But this is not an example of that. This is a stupid action movie being played as if it’s a super gritty edgy realistic movie and it’s… not
6. Pacing: Okay so hey, hi, you remember Modern Warfare 1 and 2? They both knew how to do this insane thing called narrative pacing, where the tempo of the story would follow patterns and rise or fall or shift sideways to keep things interesting. Then Modern Warfare 3 (the original) came out and had AWFUL pacing because it was nonstop ‘high’ tension, either big action or big stakes or big whatever. Like a stereo blaring the same song over and over it got old. So here we are, Modern Warfare 2 R, and… yeah. Hey, me from the future here, the pacing actually DOES get better in the latter half of the game! Early part still sucks though
7. Intro: Kill Or Capture. Spinning our wheels AND we suck at our jobs. I’m being serious, nothing really… happens in the first mission. Worse, this starts off our main plot (more on that in a bit) where we suck at our jobs continuously. Point in fact we lose CONSTANTLY until the evil PMC comes to bail us out and even then we lose (more on THAT later too)
8. Cutscene: Shepard and Kate. What is this nonsense? Why is he yelling at her to do two contradictory things? Why is she taking this so seriously, like it’s the end of the world? Why did they hype up her ‘being in the field’ when she will only do so once, do nothing while she’s there, and then basically vanish from the narrative?
9. MSQ: Okay so the ENTIRE first act sucks. It’s a good half the game, by the way, and we spend the ENTIRE time trying to capture Hassan. And failing at it. Over and over and over we stumble and fail and are just shown to be about as competent as Mystery Inc. Actually that’s unkind, the Scooby Gang at least figured things out here and again. As we talked about on camera you can make a ‘constantly losing’ story work (in fact a LOT of good games pull this exact trick off). This is not one of those games. This just feels like we’re first year cadets. Not just us, our entire teams. Yes teamS, plural, because we work with SAS, the mexican anti cartel task force, and whatever Price is right now…
10. MSQ: …this entire act sucks
11. Character: Hassan is such a pointless character. I’ve seen this kind of character before; Their one and only character trait is their zealotry. This, again, CAN work but… does not here. It doesn’t help that he’s just kind of better than us in every single scene he’s in. Seriously, he’s this super hyper competent ultra terrorist… except when he has to be an idiot so we can keep chasing him
12. Atmosphere: Okay so I have to bang on this point one more time. Just the once, I swear. It… doesn’t FEEL good to be losing constantly to someone who’s just… a dude. We barely know this dude or his motivations past ‘grrr terrorism’ and we keep getting shreked by everything under the sun, and like… why?
13. Consequence Storytelling: Or lack thereof. Stuff just happens and NO one cares. People dying left and right? Barely acknowledged. Blow up an entire town? Nobody even mentions it. Having a big deal about violating jurisdictions? Completely thrown out the window
14. Writing: Speaking of. Why is there seven billion Mexican Military officials after us? Yes I know, they’re paid off by the cartel. How much did they blow on this exactly? You realize that at some point the entire friggin’ army is corrupt right? We kill HUNDREDS of these guys
15. Writing: Speaking of, the cartel are all fanatically loyal and devoted despite ALSO being gunned down by the hundreds cuz… they’re bad guys. That’s really why, that’s the problem with both of these negatives. They’re just slightly different coats of paint for the same thing; a bad guy to shoot at. No thought put into it
16. MSQ: So the game has us do many… very, very illegal acts (the ENTIRE game actually) but then when we finally, FINALLY capture the dude we’re after… we have to let him go because it’s illegal to hold him and killing him starts a war. Because, y’know, blowing up the RUSSIAN and iranian detachment earlier wasn’t a declaration of war. Or obliterating two mexican towns. Or anything else we’ve done. This is… nonsensical….
17. Internal Continuity: …stupid…
18. Writing: …and poorly thought out
19. Cutscene: Then Hassan just… walks all over us in the cutscene where we ‘interrogate’ him. Like seriously, no one here acts like they have the tiniest shred of competency except Hassan. And he’s actually RIGHT in most of his counter points. So naturally with all his hyper competency…
20. Writing: …we track his phone (since we have to let him go, remember, because Dumb) and he… KEEPS USING THAT PHONE. I’ve used burners in real life. Me, normal ass nobody nothing clueless dipwad. How does this super terrorist not know what a burner is?!
21. Writing: Literally just thought of another one. They say they have no cause to hold Hassan. BULLcrap. Probable cause is a ludicrously low bar on purpose, and we have MANY eye witnesses stating he’s done MANY things that we have probable cause to believe he is guilty of
22. Story Sequencing: Oh by the way we make a big deal of chasing Hassan into Texas and then the next two missions, having LOST him in the States, are… back in Mexico. Chasing Hassan
23. Integration: I will talk about this more in Gameplay but this game resists being a game and just wants to be a movie. And the result is an experience that works both for both
24. MSQ: So while Recon By Fire is actually a decent mission gameplay wise my God is it stupid narratively. So we knock over an ENTIRE cartel base, keep saying really (really) dumb dialogue, and Kate tells us (repeatedly) she’s fine… then she gets captured. And once again the game just does not want us to friggin’ win
25. Character: Shepard. This lame-o cannot stop sucking in even a single cutscene and he’s TRYING to come across as this big hardass military general (played by Glenn Morshower who absolutely CAN do this kind of role) but, like everything else, he falls flat. So instead he’s just kind of… a doofus
26. Character: I’m also going to ding the, uh, entire cast. So far, well over halfway through the game, I’ve encountered a grand total of two characters who don’t suck. It’s Farah and Nikolai, aka the cameos from the first game. They ALL suck, every one of them…
27. Character: …and I’m not going to be super mean because a lot of that is on the dialogue, but yeesh
28. MSQ: The entire ‘I’m evil’ establishing scene for the twitface (I don’t even remember her name) fails at every level. This comes across as some amateur teenager’s idea of what edgy and hard look like. If done correctly this could’ve established how in over her head she is, as we effortlessly outmaneuver her and then capture her. But the game doesn’t go that route. Instead this is portrayed straight; That this is supposed to be super intimidating and she’s supposed to be taken super seriously. So the GAME is the amateur teenager. And I could go into detail about this, how she cusses too much or gets right in our face to emphasize… every… word… or how she kills a perfectly good and loyal minion to prove how evil she is. But at the end of the day this sequence just sucks…
29. MSQ: …so we’re just going to call that…
30. MSQ: …a triple awful sequence
31. Cutscene: Alejandro and Valeria yelling at each other, her being unabashedly evil and a bonafide drug lord, and… Christ. Scenes like this make my job difficult. I’m not joking. The best possible way to really show you how this scene sucks is to just replay it for you, which I… did on stream I guess but I obviously cannot do here in the document. She and Alejandro just… yell at each other for a minute. Several entire sentences which are, literally, just cusses. And then it comes out that she betrayed the military by becoming a drug lord which… yeah? At one point he needs to be physically restrained to not attack her. And the rest of the team doesn’t help ANYthing here. And it’s all so……. Soap opera. Pun intended (for once). It’s cheap, at best, badly written, and horribly edited…
32. Cutscene: …just… awful
33. MSQ: The twist… doesn’t land. And the PMC going super psycho evil on a switch because it’s okay to be evil now doesn’t work either
34. Fake Drama: Shepard has ZERO reason for what he’s doing here and ZERO reason to go after us like he does
35. Outro: Somehow Makarov, Space Wizard, has returned! (Seriously they play this moment up WAY too much) Also they do the nonsense musical cue and everything, it’s pathetic…
36. Outro: …and deflates its own point
37. Foreshadowing: Or lack thereof. The big twist on Shepard AND on Graves is only spoiled by the fact that the game won’t stop referencing Modern Warfare 2, and the fact that he’s a general and they’re a PMC. Other than that there’s nothing
38. Plot: The entire plot is stupid. We spend the ENTIRE game with this big over-riding imperative of hunting down Hassan and getting the missiles back, except it takes about twice as long as it should and he keeps Scooby Doo’ing away right in front of us. Further, the most interesting aspect of the game narratively is when we’re betrayed and have to go deal with that, and all of the sudden it’s like we’re competent and decent again. This…
39. Plot: …is…
40. Plot: …bad

Gameplay Positives:

1. Music: Not… bad. I know that sounds like faint praise but I’ve enjoyed listening for what it’s worth
2. Mid Mission Checkpoints: Probably one of the unabashedly good aspects of the game, there are checkpoints EVERYwhere so if you screw up or, y’know, go the wrong way (more on that in the negatives) you only lose like 20 seconds
3. Mid Mission Checkpoints: This goes for encounters and bosses too
4. Level: Wetwork, our first good stage (and last for a while, hrm) is solid. It’s very open ended (you’re just given a docks and water to maneuver through), the water forms a natural stealth barrier, and you’re encouraged to stealth but it’s not mandatory (if you go loud they just attack you, and in some areas they spawn more enemies)
5. Level: Close Air and Hardpoint. I’ll give you this, this is not a bad recreation of Death From Above in Modern Warfare 1. It’s not as good, not gonna lie, but at least there’s actual design to avoiding civilians, switching between the guns, and dealing with the situations as they arise
6. Level: Recon By Fire is, gasp, a good mission (I’m shocked, we haven’t had a lot of those). Multiple approaches to the base, non-mandatory stealth, multiple options to deal with the buildings, dynamic enemies based on where you hit first. It’s only real flaw is it’s a wee bit too long for what it is
7. Level: El Sin Nombre is another level which does… kind of the same thing all the good levels have done (go figure, I suppose). Go quiet, go loud, multiple objectives, if you screw up you can recover. No respawning enemies so you can lay traps and hunker up too
8. Level: Dark Water. So hey, we’re heading out into an oil rig and it’s… fine, and then we have a shootout in a ship interior and it’s… fine. But what’s funny is both of these are decent set pieces…
9. Level: …but what really works well is ON the ship. There’s tons of unsecured cargo containers sloshing about and they will absolutely crush you (or the enemy) so the entire battlefield suddenly becomes very dynamic. Great fun
10. Level: Alone. I was torn on this at first because the game was cheating me in a few ways, but once I got into the swing of using traps and bypassing terrain it started clicking. There’s multiple routes everywhere so avoiding or encircling enemies is possible, lots of chokepoints to take advantage of, stealth is optional (though encouraged), and it escalates nicely throughout. Overall a very solid stage…
11. Level: …one of the best in the game…
12. Level: …for a solid triple
13. Level: Encounter: Prison Break, camera sequence. This is brilliant. It’d be easy to screw this up, making it too linear or too boring, but there’s multiple paths at each ‘encounter’ and plenty of ways to dynamically deal with enemies (or avoid them entirely), and lots of good scripts you can work with and around…
14. Level: Encounter: …one of the more fun sections of the game
15. Level: Prison Break, the actual prison. Tight terrain usage and good encounter design
16. Level: Prison Break, the evacuation and giving you tools to play with. Seriously they give you the bombs you placed earlier (which you can detonate at your leisure, or not at all) and a friggin’ grenade launcher and arguably the best sniper rifle in the game (I believe it’s a 50 cal)
17. Level: Ghost Team is another excellent stage (what’s with all the good stages in the latter half of the game?). You have to deal with trip wire lasers, good encounter design in and around the buildings WHILE having access to a friggin’ gunship that can be used (or ignored) however you like, and overall just great fun…
18. Level: …easy double
19. Outro: Level: Countdown initial. Fun times heading down the building, heading THROUGH the building, and fighting alongside allies worth a damn
20. Outro: Level: Countdown final. I wanted to like this more than I did, but it’s still a good sequence. The very last encounter is you versus a handful of armored soldiers and you have lost all your kit so, similar to Alone, you have to scavenge a way to deal with them. Good level design with good options makes for a fun finale

Gameplay Negatives:

1. MTX: I mean, yeah
2. Raspberry Jam: Not as bad as the norm, believe it or not. Still bad
3. Bug: Absolutely no access to the options in game..
4. Bug: …which is a new one for me, not gonna lie
5. Bug: Also if you access options while IN the game the game instantly crashes
6. Crash: Several. We’re up to 7 as of typing this
7. Graphics: Frame tearing in the middle of the screen. The way I fixed this, by the way, was using an external program to force vsync on AND uncapping the framerate
8. Graphics: Stuttering, lack of optimization, weird artifacts, the whole game looks kinda crappy
9. Intro: Kill Or Capture. Dull and badly paced, featuring a tiny house to barely navigate (basically a linear corridor), a hold the line mission, and then ANOTHER linear corridor. That’s it that’s the whole mission
10. Level: By the fourth mission (Borderline) I realized the major issue with this game so far, and it’s not the first time I’ve seen it in a Call of Duty game. It’s aggressively linear, to the point where it detracts from the game. You want to take out those snipers to advance? Nope, gotta wait for the chopper. Want to navigate around the house to surprise the person you’re tailing? Nope, have to go through the one path. Want to check side rooms in the house? Nope, those side doors are just there for decoration. It’s one step away from being a rail shooter and not in a good way because while that CAN work (see rail shooters… or hell, Star Fox) it doesn’t here because there’s no GAMEPLAY to it. There’s no decision making or choices or tactics or anything, you’re just following The Adventure Line when and how it tells you to. Even being taken down by a dude you absolutely could have seen coming and reacted to isn’t an option you’re given because what the game wants…
11. Integration: …is to be a movie. The game actively resists being a game with a good story, instead it’s trying to be a movie you click on periodically. And this CAN work (I’ve seen several ‘movie games’ that work pretty well) but this is NOT one of them. And that’s ignoring the fact that it’s a bloody shooter
12. Level: Anyways, triple negative…
13. Level: …for the doldrum levels
14. MSQ: I know this is kind of a story thing but it really needs to be emphasized how much we spend the entire first act sucking and losing and it just FEELS bad. As we, the player, are gunning down enemies by the HUNDREDS and yet we keep failing. This is Supposed To Lose boss fights all over again, done really badly and constantly
15. Enemy AI: Very… very stupid. Like, run up into melee range to shoot at you stupid. This wasn’t an isolated incident either
16. Enemy Design: Or lack thereof. There’s dudes, some of them have armor, and that is it
17. Enemy Variety: Again, no real variety in what we fight. They don’t change tactics or composition they’re just the same dudes over and over

Story Positives:

1. Animation: The animations on Sybil herself. I’m sorry she looks VERY cool, and a lot of clear effort was put into these

Story Negatives:

1. Brickwork: The low poly thing doesn’t bother me, not really. The low rez thing though? The blur is just unnecessary. Doesn’t help that most of the game is just browns and greys
2. Outro: …what?! (Okay to be more verbose about this… after the final boss we find out that we’ve been in a dream helping someone wake up. But this is TERRIBLY presented. It’s literally a text box, and once it closes you’re just back at the title again. I repeat; What?!

Gameplay Positives:

1. Music: Decent for what it is. Just one song per ‘region’ but that works
2. Map: Functional. It’s better than nothing
3. Core Mechanic: So there’s a neat loop to the weapon. As you hit enemies you generate energy. Higher energy pips means better attack (more range, then more damage). But you can also spend energy to heal. So there’s this constant balancing of using and gaining the energy
4. Controls: There’s some issues (more on that in the negatives) but the base controls are legit for the most part and of course this is in part due to some of the silly kit you get
5. Kit: The kit, in general, works very well in conjunction with itself. Reverse hops, wall runs, ground pounds, spring jumps, reverse mid air jumps, all of it combined…
6. Kit: …makes for some great…
7. Traversal: …traversal, as there’s plenty of fun and interesting ways to zoom and zip around
8. Kit: Bonus points for the wall kick itself, which is weird, kind of janky, and absolutely flings the game wide open. Even when you accidentally wall kick and plummet to your death
9. Intro: Level: Dilapidated Dungeon. A simple but solid introduction to what the game is about and some basics of platforming
10. Level: Castle Sansa, general. There’s some individual really good stuff here but for the most part you find a slowly escalating series of challenges, mostly centered around climbing (quickly, no doubt) and bouncing around and learning about angled jumps and death pits
11. Level: Sansa Keep. Again, solid level design but also starting to vary up some of the challenges and with some interesting connective tissue between the other major zones
12. Level: Listless Library. I hit this place pretty early and managed some fun stuff here. Nice usage of verticality, good escalation of requiring the wall jumps, and great platforming to reward really going for it
13. Level: Underbelly. This is probably the simplest overall section of the game (weirdly) but still well designed for what it is. The tower segment (where you have to solve mini puzzles on each floor to hit a switch), the wall run segments deep underground, the fling puzzles
14. Level: Tower ascent. This was really fun, one of the major key challenges, though not nearly as good as…
15. Level: …the path in the Keep to opening the big door. This is just a very tight, fantastic series of jumping puzzles back to back and I love it
16. Level: Over in the Theater there’s a trio of challenges you have to do to open the way to the major key. Each of these is a full challenging section in and of itself (though they vary in quality) and between the exterior from hell, the weird interior segments, and the tight platforming (and good checkpointing) this is PROBABLY the most difficult segment of the whole game…
17. Level: …and an easy double
18. Replayability: The second positive. This game is so crazy open ended that there’s just so many different ways you can push through it

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Bug: Spelling errors and other minor polishing issues
2. Bug: Control rebinding issues. Every single time I launched the game my control bindings changed without me doing anything to them
3. Interface: Feedback… or lack thereof. There’s a WEIRD lack of feedback. It’s existent but so faint that it’s easy to miss, and in some cases there’s no real change in if you’re doing something right or wrong (especially in audio design) so…
4. Interface: …that kind of gets in the way of puzzle solving
5. Controls: There’s some general jank to the controls but I can zoom in on one thing that makes the more advanced platforming feel worse. So for the most part the controls are relative to the camera, which makes sense and helps you navigate. However in some specific situations like when you’ve interacted with a wall or you’re on a pole the controls are relative to the character. This ALSO makes sense. The problem is the two can flip between each other immediately and without much warning and that can REALLY screw with you when you’re bouncing between things and make some of the harder wall jumps much worse than they should be
6. Core Combat: It’s… not great. Like, it’s there… it’s vague and faint and feels tacked on at best
7. Enemy Design: Not great. Some enemies ignore you, some attack you with like a spread fire, some are turrets. Turrets suck. They are very well positioned to interrupt platforming and try to add pressure to it while just irritating you
8. Guidance: So this game has one problem more than anything else, and that is a lack of Guidance. I know that open endedness is the point but as I have been saying since about 2002 too much open endedness is not a good thing. You can go basically anywhere in basically any order and that can cause some pretty serious flow and exploration issues. It’s no wonder they patched in a map later on but for now…
9. Guidance: …this is…
10. Guidance: …really bad
11. Visual Navigation: There’s also not a lot to center yourself other than just memorizing rooms and trying to center yourself based on that. No compass, the map is… there, and not even an in game ‘north’ indicator or landmark or something similar
12. Boss: The first boss is… weird. Combat in this game in general has issues so fighting something that has collision damage while having a huge swinging weapon and way too much health is just a frustrating speed bump
13. Level: Frustration, general. There’s just a lot of weird frustration issues here and there
14. Level: Samey corridors problem. This is tied into the above visual navigation issue but almost every area inside of a given stage has pretty much the same visuals and that leads to it being shockingly easy to get turned around
15. Outro: Boss: If it had less health I think I could’ve liked this fight, but it dragged entirely too long

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: It feels weird giving a game that looks like this a Brickwork positive but I stand by it firmly. Clear thought was put into the rusted buildings, the dilapidated town, the military base, the research facility, the… weird. It’s all shockingly well done and contributes to the general visual storytelling the whole game is doing
2. Spritework: Similarly they do some good things with the front layer. In a game like this that’s almost entirely enemies, though there are some nice details here and there. But the cultists look appropriately evil and bloody, the military troops are detached and faceless, and then there’s the much, much more horrifying enemies
3. Atmosphere: So we’re going to call this an atmosphere positive for the game as a whole. The whole game is very nightmare-esque. Things just barely fit and connect to each other enough that you don’t REALLY think it’s out of bounds but the whole game feels uncanny valley. It’s telling that one of the last levels, deep beneath the depths of the earth, opens up into… just the back alleys of a city
4. Music Direction: Obviously the music’s a banger (Andrew Hulshult says hello) but I wasn’t expecting the sheer amount to which it’d add to the aforementioned atmosphere. I should probably add that this really came into its own in Episodes 2 and 3 where entire sequences have wonderful tension just because of the ambient music
5. Visual Storytelling: So I’ll be mentioning individual elements as we go but it really needs to be remarked upon that the ENTIRE game is telling a story with the visuals. It’s all really little stuff, like the snow filtering in through the cracks in the cathedral, the bloodied kitchen with body bags in the basement, the clinically clean facility which has eldritch abominations in tanks, or the reactor in the middle of the city…
6. Visual Storytelling: …all worthy of…
7. Visual Storytelling: …a triple aggregate
8. Architecture: The game does a shockingly good job of making you feel like the (very small) maps are much larger than they are, most notably in Episode 2
9. Sound: Some really horrifying stuff here. My personal favorite is the screams of the bone balls, but the glorping of the flesh levels qualifies too
10. Storytelling Mechanic: Internal thoughts on events and interactions as you play through the game. Like when a boss spawns, or when you deal with an encounter, or just looking at paintings or other decor
11. Intro: Simple but strong. They’ve come for you, and so you kill them. And this immediately leads to you being in a typical swampy outdoors wild creepy place with tons of cultists coming for you. It’s a great tone setter
12. Moment: “Don’t trust your eyes” is a fantastic beat. It’s also a great introduction to probably the best enemy in the game (the wendigo)
13. MSQ: E2M4, The Infernal Machine, is a noticeable uptick in the sheer density of storytelling per stage (something that will be a trend for the remainder of the game). We have made our way into some kind of what I can only call a meat processor which is filled with mulchers, smelters, and burners. We navigate across seas of mulched flesh as we progress, and we start to learn more about why these people have been capturing folks from the city en masse
14. MSQ: E2M5 the Escher Labs. This one almost speaks for itself, a very Half Life level, but here we start to see just how much the military has been experimenting with the demons. Even the very existence of the scientist enemies (who love to jab you with syringes) and they’ve been messing with… SOMEthing (we’ll see more of this later) which is screwing with gravity and reality. This is also where we start to see some of their augment resultants (such as the boss, Mama)
15. MSQ: E2M6, the Erebus Reactor, is a giant reactor using the pulp energy of sacrificed souls (so that’s neat) in the dead center of the city. Which is just its own variety of horrifying
16. MSQ: E2M8, Blood and Bone is… well. I would argue the whole game has horror tones up until now, but honestly in the same vein that like Half Life does. By this stage we start to see just how messed up things really are. The empowering green energy, the descent from some kind of sky palace into pits, the pitch black segment where your flashlight isn’t working (a trick they pull several times actually), the areas absent physicality… it’s all messed up.
17. MSQ: Episode 3 in general, as mentioned above, really leaps off the deep end into everything being uncanny valley and messed up
18. Brickwork: E3M3 City of Shadows. This is another one that kind of speaks for itself. You open up into a small but complex underground city carved of stone and lit with red stained glass
19. Brickwork: E3M4, Crypt of the Flesh. I’m not into gore but I mean, it’s well done. This entire place is made of stone and gore, including my personal favorite the interior of a ribcage. Also this isn’t Brickwork per say but I HAVE to mention how absolutely horrifying the Horror enemies are. You will hear them rasping for air long before you see them. As an aside I like to think that the floaters (Bone Monks) are the cultists who have ascended, and the Horrors are the ones who failed to ascend. And the Bone Balls are what’s left of the sacrificed
20. Moment: The Tornado. This is a proper moment, with text prompting its arrival, the gigantic tornado slowly approaching from the fog, and the sound… which rises to an absolute crescendo, and then slips back down into near total silence
21. MSQ: E3M6, Brimstone Ghetto. I mentioned this one up above. We’re so far ‘down’ (though down is getting relative at this point) so when you open out into a full city it’s like wait what? But this entire area is also starting to fall apart completely and the ‘seams’ of whatever this really is are showing. As you go further down you end up back in previous areas, culminating in being back at a haunted portal in the woods, which leads you to…
22. MSQ: E3M7, Homecoming. This is a messed up level. Bits and pieces of what is slowly revealed to be YOUR home, with painful reminders of the past and a broken, shattered motif which is sadly quite indicative of your mindset at this point
23. Voice Acting: Everyone does a decent job but I really have to give praise to Stephan Weyte who is brought in for the final boss, who has a few great and memorable speeches, including…
24. Moment: “There’s just… me”. I have a few issues with the Outro, this is not one of them

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Music: As much as I wish he’d stop copywronging my videos, Andrew Hulshult does some absolutely banger stuff here…
2. Music: …a very easy…
3. Music: …triple
4. Yoshi Drums: In some of the later stages it gets even better, with music drifting in and out of different layers and phases depending on what’s going on at the time
5. Mod Support: Accessibility via Steam Workshop. There’s actually an SDK and a few other resources but those aren’t baked into the game nor available outside of external resources, I just mention them so if anyone wants to mod the game they’re aware of it
6. Save: Quicksaves and quickloads and solid manual saving…
7. Save: …for a solid double
8. Minigame: Endless mode is nice for what it is. Smart enemy placement and respawning resources help to keep you pushing forwards
9. Difficulty Options: Toggleable on the fly. The difficulty itself is a wash but that toggle is great
10. Sound: Excellent sound design for navigation. Enemies have distinct sounds for moving, fighting, and when they first aggro you…
11. Sound: …which can really help with navigation
12. Controls: Aside from some issues I’ll mention in the negatives, the controls are legit. As you’d expect from a run and gun
13. Itemization: Another aggregate, but since the overwhelming majority of enemies do not drop anything you’re reliant upon the drops to be able to progress…
14. Itemization: …so it’s a good thing there’s some smart placement here
15. Guidance: This is one of the better run and guns I’ve played for guidance. Just the layout of areas, item placement, and enemies is well used to this regard (and a few levels will get their own positives for this as well) but also the usual praise for both items and corpses being methods of navigation (items mean you haven’t been there yet, corpses mean you have)…
16. Guidance: …solid stuff
17. Options: Surprisingly in depth options menu
18. Enemy Design: I think only one enemy in the game qualifies as not well designed
19. Enemy Variety: Great variety of enemy types too. And, as you might expect from a run and gun, this leads to…
20. Encounter: …great encounter design. What combinations of enemies you fight and where is something they clearly put a lot of thought into consistently. Again this will be mentioned in individual level positives…
21. Encounter: …but the whole game deserves an aggregate
22. Pacing: Lovely pacing. Good highs, good lows, good exploration, good combat
23. NG+: When you do a level select you have the option of adjusting your starting loadout. This obviously includes weapons, but also specific ammo count too. And there’s a convenient ‘max’ button to just max everything out
24. Kit: The guns are… variable in quality. The hunting rifle, super shotgun, and riveter are probably the best designed of the bunch. The rest are servicable
25. Viscerality: This ties into the game’s weakest point, its viscerality. There’s a few guns that sound good (Super Shotgun, Riveter) and several that feel good (Super Shotgun, Hunting rifle, riveter) but in general the viscerality just isn’t there
26. Kit: Power ups. Fast attack, turbo health, climbing, Super Hot. The fast attack is obvious (and stacks!), the turbo health is nice, the climbing allows for some crazy fun stuff, and the ‘super hot’ power up makes it so the enemies slow to a crawl while you’re static, letting you plan out attacks and movement
27. Intro: Tutorialization: Attacks, enemy types, navigation. Everything is conveyed very quickly and effectively, even if you’re not familiar with the subgenre
28. Level: E3MS, The Ratacombs. Actually consider this a positive for the bonus levels in general but I wanted to mention the Ratacombs because of the pun. Anyways. They’re all… fun. Solid, simple, fun
29. Level: E1M2. Solid enemy placement, good guidance in terrain design, good usage of the hedge maze to mentally divide the two parts of the stage, fantastic encounter layout in the second half with a tree (to give you a second to adjust), good variety of enemies crowded around several carefully placed barrels (if you know you shoot them, if you don’t you’re likely to learn just by fighting the enemies), and a solid return loop…
30. Level: …solid stuff
31. Level: E1M3. Interweaving level design centered around the three main keys, excellent warnings in layout of incoming enemies, good placement of enemies and barrels, great guidance in loot and secrets, culminating in a reasonable and skippable boss battle…
32. Level: …another solid stuff
33. Level: E1M4. Simple but solid. Good enemy spread, nice arena design with several routes and paths through, and good backtracking
34. Level: E1M5. Another simple but solid level. Couple of decent traps, good flow of layout between the upper and lower sections, nice array of boxes to get at secrets, good item placement
35. Level: E1M6, the Cutty Mine. Short but sweet, with a lot of moving back and forth across the same basic area but each time enemies and terrain change slightly. Also probably our first real look at Peeking in level design
36. Level: E1M7, Dead of the Night. Big open brawler map with lots of enemies, great item placement, and some smart tutorialization of your brand new toy (the crossbow)
37. Level: E1M8, Through The Gate. Another fairly big open ended arena brawler at the start but with some good interiors, that all important looping design, some nice corridors designed to take advantage of infighting (and starting to see enough ranged enemies to really benefit from it too), but the start of the level is the lead up to and conclusion at the end with the military facility and how you can take advantage of the cultists fighting the military. Good enemy spread, good encounters, great stuff…
38. Level: …easy double
39. Level: E1M9, Ghost Town. Lots of interior spaces to compliment the nice big open area, smart sightline usage to make enemies spawn out in the open while you’re exploring said interiors, and some very smart looping baked into this interior > exterior route. Special mention to the encounter design of how they’ll place melee enemies in curved hallways so you have a moment to recover and deal with it, whereas ranged enemies tend to be in nice straight hallways so you (and they) have straight shots at each other. Also I believe this is our second usage of the slowly cascading arena, where walls slowly slide away bit by bit to emulate ‘waves’ of enemies
40. Level: E1M10, Creations. It’s basically just a boss fight but the way it’s built up (the military guys staring at a giant container and the obvious ‘do not release’ signs), but what really makes this work is after you beat the first horse there’s obvious switches to progress and… that immediately releases the second horse. Gotcha!
41. Level: E2M2 The Unseen. This level really plays with lack of lighting as a major mechanic, but likes to use objects and glow from said objects as navigation. This is on top of thinking about enemy placement (again lots of angles to work with, especially when dealing with the wendigos and flamethrowers)
42. Level: E2M3 Into The Thresher. MOST of the stage is fine, honestly. Nice exploration around, then up, then backtracking through the same area with the keys. Typical decent looping stage. I’ll talk more about it down in the negatives
43. Level: E2M4 The Infernal Machine. More excellent usage of terrain as obstacles, good visual indication so you’re not lost despite tiny corridors and low lighting, a nice vertical section with the wall grapplers, and of course smart teleporting mobs in nice big corridors
44. Level: E2M5 The Escher Labs. It starts off as a solid but simple level with some quick interweaving back and forth in the initial labs, but as you start to progress and reality gets more warped you start to have to play with some fun platforming and good encounter sequences (two wendigos in the hell dimension, the sideways area leading into the boss battle), oh speaking of which the boss itself which is mostly made interesting by virtue of the level (the level design keeps being the star of the show here)…
45. Level: …either way a solid double
46. Level: E2M6 The Erebus Reactor is probably the one good arena in the game, and it’s entirely due to the level design. The big lava pit below which contains a few secrets and drops as well as a protection suit, the initial level having one door you can open leading to a key leading to another key for some ping pong progression (also each key you get spawns more enemies in the middle), nice upper areas you can reach which also have plenty of enemies on them, and a final boss against someone who is apparently from other games of the same ilk. Either way it’s a solid level mixing up the typical arena design
47. Level: E2M8, Blood and Bone. Interiors with open air spiral staircases, making for good maneuvering, dodging, and using the terrain, all against good encounter designs. This trend continues even in the later, more surrealistic areas where the ‘contained but open’ terrain design continues to compliment the enemy placement (or vice versa, I suppose)
48. Level: E2M9, The Dig. Opens strong with several complex interiors allowing for maneuvering around (or through… or under) the terrain while dodging enemies. Combine this with hole-riddled terrain which allows for avoidance and/or duck and weave combat (or lobbing a grenade or two) and you have a winning level
49. Level: E3M1, the Iron Cathedral. So normally games have Sunshine Syndrome, where the game just slowly gets worse over time. Be prepared for the opposite of that (colloquially referred to as ‘it gets better eventually’) with Episode 3. We’re introduced to a new weapon (the sword) which is one of the better designed weapons in the game (charge to do more damage but only at high health, aim to block but only at high morale) and some pseudo stealth segments. Follow this brief tutorial with an open air segment designed to benefit the sword, giving us the crossbow immediately before fighting in corridors, plenty of madness crystals you can use on the clusters of enemies, a new enemy which greatly benefits from the sword design, and the flowing lava serving as guidance… all of this immediately before a lengthy but narrow turning corridor which then introduces the charging dog enemy. All of this makes for honestly…
50. Level: …one of the best levels…
51. Level: …so far
52. Level: E3M2, Fire and Ice. Color me impressed. We start off with a lava segment and a protective suit, absolutely amazing vertical design (we actually open up into an area connected to the final area of the stage), and a room with three doors each of which loops seamlessly back to the central area at which point we’ve unlocked another door (and usually different enemies). This is on top of terrain designed entirely around which weapons they know we’ll have at any given point in time, a fun climbing segment, and a nice breather pacing segment up on the ice before spawning our latest new enemy (the flier) who are all clustered sufficient to be terrifying but relatively easy to deal with if you’re cautious. In other words, a perfect introduction to the new enemy type. This is another VERY good stage…
53. Level: …and deserving…
54. Level: …of an easy triple
55. Level: E3M3 City of Shadows. I am legitimately shocked these stages keep knocking it out of the park. So this is a dense city level with an absolutely crazy amount of labyrinth-style interiors that open up into each other smoothly. There’s even multiple routes and paths through here (notably the red door area has two entrances, both of which require very different approaches to reach and both are quite valid), and this is on top of some really smart enemy placement and encounter grouping to let you take advantage of the dense terrain at almost every angle. And all of that is BEFORE you flood the city and just fly… er, swim everywhere. A banger of a level…
56. Level: …and an easy…
57. Level: …triple
58. Level: E3M4, Crypt of the Flesh, is mostly a story stage but it still does some solid stuff. Tight corridors which are mostly about navigation and platforming, open ended complex terrain which can be used against ranged enemies, looping unlocks and backtracking as per the Doom standard, and excellent encounter design
59. Level: E3M5, Blasphemy. What a weird stage. We start off with a giant open terrain and switches. Each switch spawns a specific group of enemies, and has a weapon by it to help with that particular configuration of enemies. Then the tornado hits (great moment), and we descent into the tower of hell, at which point we have a quick but very well designed interior looping segment as we grab keys and return to and through the central tower. That’s functionally two well designed levels graphed into one…
60. Level: …and so deserves the double
61. Level: E3M6, Brimstone Ghetto. This stage is all about flow, something most stages do to some extent or another but this one just nails. The initial power ups (literally a few feet from the start) which double boost your speed and give you the slow time and the grapple let you playground your way through the initial city. As you descend into the outskirts and start seeing older enemies you notice the terrain starts favoring THEM instead of you, which makes sense because you have much, much better weapons now to deal with them. Toss some smart terrain design and you have a solid stage
62. Level: E3M7, Homecoming, is probably the premiere example of what this game does best in one stage. This is all about level design. Small islands detached from each other, but jump pads to help navigate. Try to use the planks, but some break… but if you fall you loop, giving you access to areas you wouldn’t otherwise reach. A quick tight interior segment on the one house and then we discover the major gimmick of the stage, using those strange artifacts the military was experimenting with to change gravity. Suddenly the looping design makes more sense and those houses become the platforms you need to use to navigate, and the tightness of the level design shows itself as they accommodated the player accessing these areas at multiple angles to make this work. Add on top of this some solid enemy placement and you’ve got yourself…
63. Level: …one of the best designed stages…
64. Level: …in the game
65. Level: E3M8, As Above, So Below. This is functionally our final stage (the next two are a gauntlet and a boss arena respectively) and it shows. The level is a mish mash of stage design elements leading up to this point, using corridors and sight lines to good effect, some neat segments (the mini room comes to mind), and the usual smart looping through the same areas as you progress and unlock more
66. Outro: Boss: Jakob. He’s an Unreal bot, but he’s good at what he does, and uses most of YOUR arsenal so it’s a nice mirror fight
67. Outro: Boss: Nyarlathotep. Big, obvious hits that are still a bit tricky to dodge while dealing with everything else. Nice obvious vuln phases and weak points. And big viscerality for a nice, satisfying boss fight. Shame we don’t beat him but whatever
68. Replayability: Generally pretty solidly replayable

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Controls: Jumping. Jumping just kind of sucks, I don’t know what else to add to it. It feels wrong and I never really fully got the hang of it. Also as an aside controls in GENERAL require some rejiggering of the options to not suck, but those options do exist so it’s not really a negative, I’m just mentioning it in case anyone else has similar issues
2. Viscerality: So I mentioned the guns kind of suck and… yeah. Most of them sound bad and look worse. And in a run and gun where guns are kind of a principal element that doesn’t feel great
3. Difficulty Curve: There’s a noticeable point at which the game just starts getting meaner without being more interesting, usually in its big arena fights and… this game doesn’t do big arena fights very well. Arena design is a whole thing (Doom 5 says hello) and the designers of DUSK are not very good at it
4. Level: E2M1, the Grainery, sucks. It starts off with a big open field with lots of enemies, including our new friends the flamers, then it has two entirely-too-small segments which are frustrating to navigate. All of this would be fine except the game’s visual language has made you think you shouldn’t go into green glowing fog areas AND even when you do the visuals don’t indicate that it’s a way forward. Indeed the only way to tell is to just keep exploring. Point in fact it looks more like a Secret than the mandatory progression path. I was stuck here entirely too long and even WITH directions it took a while to find this narrow corridor of stupid…
5. Level: …so screw that noise
6. Level: E2M3 Into The Thresher. This level has a nice big open arena section and it sucks. There’s lots of sight blockers but they work more against you than for you, and the enemies are multitudinous and like to swarm you, and that’s on top of there being those homing jackasses. In short you have to go through what is essentially one huge room absolutely glutted with enemies that will be doing TONS of damage to you before you can progress. This was probably the first real difficulty wall I ran into (something I mentioned up in negative 3) and just stopped being fun after several restarts
7. Level: E2M7, Neobabel. I wasn’t impressed with this level storywise either but even gameplay wise it’s mostly a relatively dull series of two big open segments, weird enemy placement, and low itemization… which leads immediately to three brutal arenas back to back. The difficulty isn’t really an issue (it only took me two tries to push through and infighting can help a lot) it’s just… vacuous. There’s an absence of design here
8. Boss: The Guardian can suck a lemon. It’s a giant boss which spams spread-fire grenades, which is already silly… but then add on three other niggles and this is the worst encounter in the game. First, all three areas you fight in are small and narrow corridors (or one small arena), meaning lots of room to get grenade spammed. Second, there’s triggers to make him teleport to you if you go for the switches. And third, he has way… and I mean WAY too much health. If at least one of these wasn’t true I think this could work but all three make for a frustration sandwich…
9. Boss: …with you in the middle
10. Boss: General. Outside of Jakob and Narly at the end bosses are pretty dull ‘enemies with more health’

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: The initial cityscape intro. Whirling fans, glowing lights, wrecked buildings in the distant, and a lovely skybox
2. Brickwork: Ore Mines. Lovely rocks, distant crags, clearly mechanical construction, and lots of supports and in construction tunnels
3. Brickwork: City Center. The obvious cityscape in the distance is nice, but I’m also quite fond of the usage of wires, infrastructure, speakers blasting music, large displays adding to the show, and colorful visuals (like the visualizers in the walls)
4. Brickwork: Mountain. Frozen tundra, coolers baked into the walls, support beams, distant snow, all pretty stuff
5. Brickwork: Junkyard. The obvious junkyard itself, the piles, the dispensers, the processors, the whirling gears in the background, the bits and pieces of the facility showing wear and tear, it’s all lovely stuff…
6. Brickwork: …my favorite so far
7. Brickwork: Steelworks. My goodness. The heat waves, the smelters, the lava waves, the coolant fans, the warning indicators, the distant conveyors and machinery…
8. Brickwork: …another solid double
9. Brickwork: Highway. Reasonably interesting cityscape but we’ve honestly seen it before. The main draw here are the cargo trucks themselves. Warehouse. Honestly the first segment looks better. The actual cyberspace is fine, really, just not as good as some of the others. I do like the binary flickering wallpaper
10. Brickwork: The Ark, general. A lot of these visuals are actually borrowed from other points in the game but there’s enough good stuff here to count, and the depths of the reactor of the Ark have a nice horribleness to them
11. Spritework: Kai in general has tremendous depth to his moves and animations and is very well designed across the board
12. Spritework: Enemies, in general, are pretty solid too
13. Spritework: Bosses are very well done. The lion’s share is for the Circuits of course but there are several others as well, and they’re all shockingly well done…
14. Spritework: …easy double territory
15. Storytelling Mechanic: Portraits, of all things. Quite a few frames of animation to showcase their moods as they talk too
16. Visual Storytelling: Plenty. Little things, but there are several throughout, especially around and inside the Ark
17. Plot: I actually rather enjoy the central plot. Spoilers but… the idea that we’re just terraforming bots sent by some unseen masters bagrillions of years ago still doing our operations at the expense of the bots we build is horrifying, and the idea that the bodies of the robots all die everytime we enter FTL and only the Circuits survive, transferring to new host bodies, meaning we’re just killing ourselves every time we FTL is messed up. We’ll see where they go with this in Gravity Circuit 2

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Music: Ho-lee crap yes. This soundtrack is absolute fire. You can buy it on Bandcamp if you’re wondering, Dominic Ninmark is the composer…
2. Music: …but for now…
3. Music: …take the triple
4. Difficulty Options: Damage and health… but also i-frames, enemy attack rate, which attacks enemies use. Some good stuff here
5. Options: A surprisingly large number of solid options
6. QoL: Exit button once done with a stage, set moves to different slots, auto A for attacking, dashing options (you can set it to hold makes you dash, tap makes you dash, or inverse where you dash except when holding the button), stage replay which also lets you pick a specific checkpoint AND turn on or off cutscenes for replay, also you retain progress when you redo a stage and exit so you can just beeline for something you missed (dovetails nicely into the Guidance interface positive below), and Speedrun Mode (auto skips all cutscenes, gives you a timer, and bypasses some progression blockers)…
7. QoL: …some really solid stuff here
8. Controls: With a couple of noteworthy issues, the controls are exactly what they need to be for a game this precise and brutal…
9. Controls: …so that’s an easy double
10. Enemy Design: Generally good enemy design throughout, mostly as they pertain to level design (so that’ll get its own mentions down in the Levels section)
11. Visual Distinction: I’ve seen better, but the game does a good job of distinguishing interactables, enemies, and background
12. Guidance: Each stage contains 10 secrets. One palette chip, one upgrade, and eight civilians. There’s (almost) always some good guidance in terrain design, indicators, or otherwise something to draw your attention to it. I only had to look up like five or so of these in the entire game
13. Guidance: Also in the interface it says which specific things you’re missing and (in the case of civilians) in which order, giving you an idea of where to look
14. Economy: Weirdly solid. In a fairly normal playthrough I was able to buy ALMOST everything there was to offer. Admittedly I was going for 100% for power ups and civilians, but I also was failing at a lot of end of mission rewards
15. Mid Mission Checkpoint: Well placed AND at each one…
16. Penalty For Failure: …you can pay an increasing amount of money to recover full health AND Burst energy. There’s also always one right before the boss
17. Pacing: I’ll mention a few of these in individual stages but the game as a whole has great pacing. Each stage has breather segments and a good up and down wave in intensity, and the downtime sections back at camp help too
18. Kit: So this is a weird one. There’s a bunch of chips you can buy, and burst moves you can procure, and palette chips which change your playstyle a bit, but it all feels like it barely changes your core playstyle. It’s fun and there’s a few things to play around with but that’s it. This also dovetails into a negative I’ll mention later
19. Viscerality: This is also why this is only getting a single Viscerality positive, mostly for Impact (a lot of these attacks do feel like they do a TON of damage when they land)
20. Core Mechanic: In contrast to the former, the ability to grab and fling stuff is just great. You can use this to damage terrain, defeat enemies, fight back against bosses, or just hit switches, and it contributes to the fact that…
21. Flow: The game has insane flow. The fact that every defeated enemy is a weapon (which does a TON of damage by the way) you can use on other enemies, alongside fantastic level layout and design makes for a game…
22. Flow: …that’s smooth as butter
23. Tutorialization: Good and bad. The text is somewhat needless but it is toggleable, and the level design of the tutorial works for what it is, immediately conveying what’s needed to progress
24. Intro: A pretty simple but solid two-fold stage. First half is just ‘here’s the controls’ (effectively a second tutorial), and the second half is a small escalation of enemy placement (encouraging usage of the fling mechanic) and platforming / swinging
25. Level: Ore Mines starts off with a quick introduction of temporary blocks in the form of donut blocks, followed immediately by breakable blocks that first interrupt, then inform, traversal. In each case you either use the blocks or avoid them to progress, making for a nice initial theme. This escalates throughout the level, dovetailing a bit with a couple of Ride Armor segments which (in addition to being awesome) also add accessibility to spiked sections which in turn lead to civilians and some fun challenges…
26. Level: …overall a very solid stage
27. Boss: Break Circuit. Nice animations indicating when attacks are coming, good stagger if you do enough damage, a fun ultimate attack which flings the level’s theme at you (breakable blocks), and occasional blocks from the ceiling (also a good animation indicator)
28. Level: City Center. A much harder, very fun level. We start off with the obvious theme of the periodic damaging tiles, but this is quickly replaced by a much more interesting theme of the interaction tiles. So you stand on or touch a tile and then a few seconds later something happens. There are several of these here; The bouncepads which launch you after a second, the spike blocks which reveal their spikes, and the large platforms which launch after a few seconds. This theme is consistent throughout the first half of the stage, but quickly escalates as all four encounter types start happening at the same time
29. Boss: Wave Circuit. Excellent variety of attacks which encourage mobility, the inclusion of the bounce pads affecting her, her projectiles, and us adds some nice layers to the fight, and her super being two area denials and two wave attacks at once…
30. Boss: …make for a solid fight
31. Level: Mountain. This is a strange one because it doesn’t have a cohesive theme like most of these stages, but there’s still a lot of great design on display. Most of the enemies are baked into the terrain in some manner (forming platforms, popping out of the walls, adding spikes to the ground, etc.) and then the terrain itself is a lot of pits, spikes, and floating platforms that fall when you stand on them. Add onto this vents that blow against you which means you have to initiate your jumping arcs in just the right way to avoid spikes, or slide around enemies which are blocking progression to hit another vent to land on a floating platform then immediately jump, or just using enemies AS platforms to bypass much of the pits and spikes…
32. Level: …it makes for a very fun segment
33. Boss: Cooler Circuit. Very mobile, lots of area denial attacks, loves to go out where you can’t reach, but nice big vuln windows to compensate. And that’s on top of a fun ultimate (continuing the area denial theme, he just turns into a tornado and zooms around)
34. Level: Junkyard. Probably the best stage so far, with a VERY strong theme; terrain hazards. Spikes, blobs that drag you down, grapplers that drag you into damage, pits, moving platforms, dispensers that fling out junk, the junk piles themselves. It escalates these VERY quickly (one of the first major challenges is weaving a dash jump in between blobs that drag you down to spikes). But it’s exceptionally fair, always gives breather spots or segments, has good pacing in how it uses which hazards, and probably has the best guidance of each of the levels so far…
35. Level: …a very solid…
36. Level: …triple
37. Boss: Patch Circuit. A simple but solid fight. A spread fire attack, blorp spawners which root you, summoning adds out of the junk pile, throwing junk AT you, and an ultimate which results in lots of rapid fire area denial
38. Level: Steelworks. We start off with both lava and explosive barrels, with some quick tutorialization of both before we have to start breaking exploding barrels just to be able to progress. This quickly escalates as both start layering all over each other, but then we start to introduce a great new theme; Lasers. You trip them, they shoot a few seconds later… but these can be channeled into beams (well tutorialized) and then across bouncers (making for angles). In the next few screens this massively escalates until you’re racing through to just barely stay ahead of the beam. This then leads to an amazing series of sections where you have to keep pace or die, which increase in intensity as it progresses… but always with at least one breather segment throughout. This goes up to and including the last stretch to the boss, which is a lengthy extended ‘race the laser’ sequence…
39. Level: …fantastic stuff…
40. Level: …easy triple
41. Boss: Optic Circuit. Big, obvious attacks with lots of dynamic aiming and avoidance to them and a nice big obvious but hard to dodge super attack
42. Level: Highway. Innovative but a bit lacking, still a really solid stage. Constant moving platforms and the incoming terrain damagers combined with lots of instant kill spikes and pits (even ON the trucks) alongside some very smart platforming and great escalation is all great and good. I even like the jump jump jump slide slide segments, especially the last one. The greatest sin the level commits is it’s a bit too spread out and entirely too long for what it is. Still a solid stage though
43. Boss: Shift Circuit. Very fun, mobile, hectic fight. Lots of rapid attacks, plenty of openings, and a great hectic super
44. Level: Warehouse. Probably the hardest level to-date. They have two fantastic themes here; The teleporters and the switches. Teleporters fling you between specific points, requiring fast reflexes to adapt. And switches open and close paths, which can be solid or spiked blocks. In both cases they escalate this continuously throughout the entire stage, until you’re doing mid air distance attacks to fall to another switch to hit a teleporter and warp to a new spot to fall to ANOTHER spot all in one go. It’s really properly mean and very well structured…
45. Level: …call it an easy…
46. Level: …triple
47. Boss: Cipher Circuit. One of my favorite bosses so far. His illusions can be hit too, he summons turrets and does area denial attacks which include layering a platform in spikes, and his super is a massive ‘run to the safe spot quickly’ attack…
48. Boss: …easy double
49. Level: Power Plant. Ending strong here with two absolutely amazing themes. First is the switches which make temporary safety in some form or another, usually removing obstacles or adding a platform. Second is the beams which fire periodically. Oh and I lied there’s a third, the ‘conductive’ material which lights up and becomes damaging when hit by enemies or beams. All of these are played with, escalating (as per usual) until you’re hitting a switch, lunging across an area, zooming through a segment while on a timer and also avoiding the conductive platforms because nearby beams are lighting them up. And all of this is on top of some very smart platform placement and great guidance…
50. Level: …overall…
51. Level: …a great stage
52. Boss: Power Circuit. Simple but solid fight, with several attacks that interact with the conductive floor, a nice area denial super, and some basic platforming. I feel like he was supposed to be the first boss, not the last, but whatever hah
53. Level: Ark 1, the Entrance. Good lord they really fling enemies at you in this one. Mixing and matching themes from several previous stages into one (lightning alongside beams alongside wind) makes for an intense and brutal stage, but still using fair breather segments and pacing to vary up challenges. Forgive me for not going into more detail but good lord…
54. Level: …this is…
55. Level: …a solid triple
56. Boss: Nega is my favorite boss as of this point in the game. It’s a classic mirror match but he has a lot of mobility, switches between moves constantly, and punishes aggressiveness while simultaneously vulning. Then he hits his SECOND phase and just starts going ballistic, using burst attacks frequently (most of the ones you have access to as well)…
57. Boss: …fantastic fight…
58. Boss: …easy triple
59. Level: Ark 2, the Machinery. Holy crap this stage is nuts. Lava pits everywhere, flame jets which interrupt jump arcs requiring you to think about how to progress, lots of recovery ledges to reward reflexes while also being possible to route through smoothly, insane flow, usage of temporary platforms both in the air (moving ledges) and in the lava (heated and dangerous before cooling to be safe). This is a bonkers good stage…
60. Level: …call that another…
61. Level: …solid triple
62. Boss: I was torn on Circuit Crystal for a bit but the addition of checkpoints plus the fact that the boss uses attacks inspired by each refight, and the refights themselves are at half health AND start off with their super helps
63. Outro: Level: Ark 3, Depths. So this stage is ABsolutely bonkers. This initial positive? This is for the connective tissue of the stage, small but solid platforming and switches and… okay so you go down a segment, get an option to go left or right, then go down again. Each vertical segment contains teasers of the horizontal sections
64. Outro: Level: So I did all the left paths first and each one is worthy of at least one positive. So first floor left is a series of absolutely insane switch puzzles. Each switch activates a wall which lets you progress, but there’s also lasers which then close the way. The first stretch is pretty easy, a simple tutorial across platforms that will fall as you land on them. The second stretch adds a laser up top to make it even easier to hit the laser. The THIRD section is much, much worse with a narrow hopping segment immediately before floating platforms over a pit and by the way there’s a vertical laser immediately in your path RIGHT next to an enemy doing diagonal shots which is almost guaranteed to knock you INTO the beam. The enemy here is also set in such a way that he’s guaranteed to respawn each time you make an attempt, no clearing ahead of time. All of this is mean, fun, and brutal
65. Outro: Level: Second floor left is a bunch of spikes, platforms that react to your presence by also protruding spikes, and teleporting orbs. This is all a baby mode tutorial of course because the next segment is just nothing but spike blocks and teleport orbs, no safe zone or ground in sight until you finish the entire sequence. It’s okay because right after this there IS a breather… followed by spike blocks floating over the void while enemies are blocking the path AND you have to hit a switch that lowers the wall in front of you, making for a timer as you’re going through the spike blocks
66. Outro: Level: Third floor, left, is all about explosives. Explosive orbs you can bounce across, explosive barrels in your way, and huge, huge swaths of empty terrain you need to bounce or grapple across. This is followed by ANOTHER grapple section, this time across ceilings that are almost perfectly in your way to make this harder… followed by ANOTHER grapple section which is even harder than the previous one, and THEN a grapple section over a pit WITH a switch WITH a laser in the way you have to time your way across
67. Outro: Level: Fourth floor, left, is a personal favorite. Okay so it’s all junk, but there’s grey blocks that get in the way, but there’s two types; basic blocks and spike blocks. You can damage both of course, but they also go away on standing on them. So the blocks are temporaries and the spikes are obstacles. The first segment is a basic ‘blast through walls of these’ tutorialization segment. Right after this is blocks over bottomless pits AND walls you have to damage through. This is then followed by an extensive segment of walls you have to blast through which are hovering over the abyss, meaning you need to aim precisely to not kill your own terrain. After this is a ‘breather’ of spikes and vanishing blocks OVER spikes, followed by more walls of damagable spikes and platforms which you have to race through in order to make it before running out of time, and at last one more timed button segment…
68. Outro: Level: …easily my favorite of the four stages so far
69. Outro: Level: Okay so we went back to see the right side, and at first I was disappointed that it was the same theme as the left side. It’s a different stage though so that’s nice. This time it’s all about increasingly tight timers on moving across spikes, temporary blocks, and with enemies in the way of progression, some of the later sequences being almost identical but with tighter windows or shorter timers
70. Outro: Level: Second Right is a short but sweet teleport rush with some fun reflex checks. Each port drops you lower than the one you need, and this requires quick movement to not fall immediately to your death, but there’s also multiple stretches of ‘no safe zone’ as you have to wall jump up partially spiked and partially enemied walls. Don’t worry, there’s still good pacing and breather moments too
71. Outro: Level: Third Right is yet another explosive segment, but this time mixed with disappearing grey blocks and a mech instead of explosive pit hopping. This is yet another well designed segment which encourages you to move fast but also gives breather segments, and rotates around a ‘soft’ timer of the blocks instead of the hard switch timer
72. Outro: Level: Fourth Right isn’t as good as Fourth Left but it’s still very solid. It’s all about disappearing blocks and spikes, having to navigate pushing through these that either block your path, provide platforms (meaning a requirement of precision breaking), and NOT destroying certain stretches as they’re all that prevents you from hitting spikes or pits
73. Outro: Boss: For all my issues with it, there’s a lot of good design in the final boss(es). Especially the very last phase of the Commander Circuit, where he spawns enemies you can fling at him but lose the ability to block his attacks so it becomes a soft enrage against your health and/or dodge ability
74. Song: The name of this song is With The World On Your Shoulders and good lord, it just screams ‘final dungeon’
75. Song: Architecti, Audi Nos, the final boss song, is just fantastic for what it’s going for and is appropriately apocalyptic
76. Replayability: I mean yeah. It’s a solid, well designed, mean megaman style game
77. NG+: The usual solid new game plus
78. Difficulty Options: You also can add modifiers to future playthroughs. These include remixed levels, enemies, double damage, forced deathless per stage, forced deathless per an entire run, and ceiling walking (for… some reason)

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Controls: Grapple is… jank. It feels like physics suddenly exists just for this one mechanic and you can pull some nonsense with it, but just for regular play it feels more irritating than anything else. There’s a reason I tried to avoid using it whenever I could (which, to the game’s credit, is most of the time)
2. Kit: So this is a weird one but the severe limitation of burst energy makes boss weapons and the other kit… not as great. It takes entirely too long to build up enough energy and even if you get all the upgrades you only ever have six shots banked at a time. Also if you fire one and miss, sucks to be you, you just wasted it. Worse, some bosses are flat immune to some Bursts so that leads to more wasting of precious and rare energy. It all contributes to how anemic the (admittedly extensive) weapon moves feel
3. Outro: Boss: The final boss is complete bullcrap. First you fight a mirror style boss (with two full health bars) who has the usual iframes, but is also a melee-centric boss so he can grab and fling you in several ways. This is ‘fine’ but then this leads into…
4. Outro: Boss: …Commander Circuit, which has some interesting design to him I’ll admit (see the above positive) but the problem is his attacks are stupid to dodge, do way too much damage, there’s NO recovery of any kind (no E Tanks, no Sub Tanks, no recovery in mid fight) and that’s on top of the fact that he has a hugely damaging AOE if you get too close to his weakpoint. I remind you you are a melee fighter. And then there’s the fact…
5. Outro: Boss: …that Commander Circuit is so FAT. He has more health than anything in the game and this is AFTER a full two healthbar boss I remind you. Turns what should have been an awesome fight into a slog

Story Positives:

1. Cutscene: Jedi Fallen Order recap. Quick, to the point, and very stylized
2. Intro: Brickwork: The lower levels of Coruscant look amazing, try to be shocked. Any words I put here will fail to properly convey how much time and effort was spent on the rooftop apartments, the open air hangouts, the distant wall processors, the meat packaging plant, the massive ceiling of cityscape above us…
3. Intro: Brickwork: …just…
4. Intro: Brickwork: …incredible looking
5. Intro: Doodads: Quite a few little touches too, from the billboards to the cafes to the chairs and hardware and furnishings and windows…
6. Intro: Doodads: …lovely stuff
7. Character: Supporting cast, Coruscant. It’s mostly our crew but there’s some good effort put into making you give a damn, plus the inclusion of the senator (who has some weirdly good lines)
8. Intro: World Building: A lot of little details about what it’s like below the surface of Coruscant. If this is your first exposure there’s a lot conveyed here. My personal favorite is the recurring gag of the turbo dogs… which gets less funny when you see the meat packing plant
9. Intro: Tone: So one thing the Intro nails is tone. It’s a heist, sure, but it’s not our first rodeo. Quite the contrary, Cal acts pretty on top of things the entire time, and it’s only when Ninth shows up that things go even slightly sideways
10. Character: Ninth Sister… what’s left of her. She’s lost even more of herself to her rage, and you can tell she’s spent entirely too much of the last five years laser focused on Cal. She is, in every way, still at the top of that tree in Kashyyyk… whereas Cal has long since moved on. Speaking of which
11. Moment: Cal’s moments. These are all tiny, seconds long moments, but there are quite a few of them peppered across the first couple of worlds. His brief acknowledgement at the loss of his comrades, his dismissive attitude towards Cere, his obvious regret at not being with Merrin, how he so warmly and immediately embraces Greez, it’s all good stuff
12. External Continuity: Cal’s progression. Enemies that were minibosses are now early level one mooks. He’s in charge of his own team. And while he’s clearly having issues, he is far more on top of things than he was in the previous game
13. Brickwork: Koboh. Yeah, SoCal looks pretty, not going to lie. The crags, mountain cliffs, distant mountains, sloping plains, all on rough terrain that looks difficult to forage, farm, and tame…
14. Brickwork: …call that a solid double
15. Doodads: Koboh, mostly for the town, ESPECIALLY the bar. There are SO many tiny details here it’s kind of silly…
16. Doodads: …let’s give that bar its own positive
17. Cutscene: The introduction of ZN-A4 (henceforth referred to as Zee) is essentially perfect. She’s delightful, very well animated (you can almost feel the sand in her gears), and there’s a lot of establishment of who she is and why she’s important. She’s also our first concrete connection to…
18. World Building: …the High Republic, which they do a shockingly large amount of stuff with in this game
19. Moment: The validation of Cal. Zee tells him she’s certain he’s a jedi and he just… pauses, smiles, takes that in a moment. It’s such a powerful moment and you can tell he needed to hear that. From a High Republic jedi droid no less!
20. Brickwork: Jedha. Gorgeous dunes of sand, fantastic architecture in the ancient jedi adjacent ruins, and everything looks properly broken down and worn smooth by the sand
21. MSQ: The extended re-introduction of Merrin is as delightful as it should be. She is fond of him clearly, and happy to see him, but expresses it in her own unique mannerisms. He’s a bit gob smacked to see her again but trying to retain his cool. There’s some solid banter and a bit of snark. It’s good stuff. That poor landspeeder though
22. Cutscene: Merrin and Cal by the fire. It’s just as much about each of them individually as it is about them as a group. Their connection to each other, her need to know who she is, his need to understand. And a wonderful line…
23. Moment: …fire is warm and comforting, but too much will simply consume
24. Brickwork: Shattered Moon skybox. Nothing but praise here, this is properly horrifying looking
25. Brickwork: Shattered Moon interior. Dark, forboding, and mostly abandoned facility that manages to be just pristine enough to offset how broken and shattered it is, surrounded by ruins, molten rods of metal, and tormented droids…
26. Brickwork: …yeah, solid stuff
27. Moment: Merrin and Cal kiss. I’m sorry this is actually a pretty sweet moment, especially since it’s entirely about how much they trust one another. If you’ll forgive me for commenting on the obvious, trust is a huge deal for both of them
28. Cutscene: The extended spectacle of the Trident battle deserves its own mention
29. Brickwork: The Lucrehulk. Nothing fancy here just good showcasings of the ship, and a lot of Clone Wars era tech
30. Moment: Cal worrying about becoming like Dagan and Merrin trying to comfort him is a nice scene, and a good bit of Cal’s characterization. There’s an issue here I’ll mention in the negatives but otherwise this is still a nice scene
31. Character: Supporting cast, Koboh. A weirdly large spread of unique, flavorful characters dotting the town (and especially the cantina, more on that in a minute)…
32. Character: …easy double territory
33. Animation: There’s… actually some pretty BAD animations this time around (seen down in the negatives) but there’s still enough solid stuff, like with Zee, or how Dagan moves, or the precise but calculated movements of Rayviz, that it qualifies for a positive as well
34. NPC Set Dressing: The Saloon. The way this place (can) slowly get more and more people, the music and visuals and animations and all the effort put into making it feel lived in is great. The fact that YOU are the reason it works is even better
35. Moment: Rick the Door Technician. The hardest boss in the entire game
36. MSQ: The slow ascent from the depths of the fog and the Imperial base, up to the floating observatory high above the clouds mirrors the Kashyyyk climb back in the first game and similarly serves as a nice backdrop to our confrontation with Idiotface
37. Theme: Now’s as good of a time as any to talk about the major theme of the work; the path. When the group broke up years ago everyone went on to find their paths in life. Greez set himself up with his bar, Merrin wanted to learn more about the galaxy, Cere wanted to find and retain knowledge. Cal… had nothing. So he went to fight the Empire, but the thing is ‘fighting the Empire’ was IT for him. It’s no wonder he went to Saw (who, as a reminder, ALSO only has one path right now and it happens to be the same one). Tanalorr offers the tantalizing prospect of a path, a goal, something with an actual finish line that he can work towards… and THAT is good stuff. The entire game is about Cal figuring out where he wants to go, and in a way forms a ‘now what’ after Fallen Order…
38. Theme: …great stuff
39. Moment: The team getting together, Cal admitting that the Order is dead and gone and that he wants to be with Merrin, and her tiny little smile
40. Storytelling Mechanic: The framing device of the Cere segment all being a psychometry of Cal’s is exceptionally well done
41. MSQ: The entire Cere fight against Vader is exceptionally well presented. From him playing with her originally (and going at it one handed) to being ON FIRE and using both hands and being relentless in his attacks
42. Cutscene: While I have… substantial issues with the twists themselves, the follow up scene where Cal immediately starts to blame himself and Greez shuts that down immediately works really well
43. Brickwork: The ISB base is very Imperial but very well done too. Angular windows, large open corridors, lots of cold whites and other bright lighting
44. Moment: The extremely messed up nature of Bode so overtly using his daughter as a shield to us
45. Integration: Unlocking the Dark Side magically makes all the combat easier (funny how that works) and really shows how far Cal is losing himself here, AND leads to my favorite scene in the entire game
46. Moment: Merrin and Cal have a moment as Cal goes to murder the ISB director Denvik. This scene is almost perfect because while Cal has had no trouble killing Imperials for some time now this is… different. This is him wanting to murder a man in cold blood because he’ll enjoy it. This is Dark Side to a T, and Merrin knows it. And she’s right there demanding that he does not do this, not for any of the other reasons she could say, but instead because she does not want to lose him too. And that slap shakes Cal out of it. It is perfectly animated, voice acted, camera’d, it fits her, it fits him, it fits THEM, and it fits the setting…
47. Moment: …absolute…
48. Moment: …poetry
49. Cutscene: The traversal through the Abyss. Greez being awesome, Merrin embracing Cal when they manage it, Cal asking if they trust him, Cere giving him that final push…
50. Cutscene: …great stuff
51. Secondary: Several, notably everything to do with the bounty hunter chain…
52. Secondary: …and our favorite dwarven fisherman
53. External Continuity: Star Wars. You know what I mean. Like the first game this is very Star Wars and uses its setting and pieces to good effect
54. Banter: Stormtroopers return and are still amazing to listen to. It’s astonishing the sheer quantity of quality dialogue they put into these guys…
55. Banter: …so that’s the usual…
56. Banter: …triple positives
57. Banter: But now we have droids too! And holy crap they nail these guys so well. Even at their first exposure they’re pure gold…
58. Banter: …so that’s another…
59. Banter: …triple
60. Character: Cal, the man without a path, who has no idea what he’s doing or why he’s doing it
61. Character: BD, who continues to be the amazing supportive droid he is
62. Character: Bode. Yes I have… issues with him later but that doesn’t stop him from being an excellent character throughout MOST of the game
63. Character: Merrin is, unironically, one of the best characters in this game. She really feels like she’s come into her own, and has learned legitimate wisdom… without losing her snark and personality…
64. Character: …solid double character
65. Character: Rayvis. Unlike his boss Rayvis has a lot going on in a short period of time, and we can understand and sympathize with him literally as of his first scene
66. Character: Supporting characters in general, basically everyone who wasn’t enough for their own individual points was still good…
67. Character: …for a solid double
68. Voice Actor: Cal has excellent voice acting, of course
69. Voice Actor: Bode, who brings some fantastic chops to the work
70. Voice Actor: Koboh side cast. There are MANY side characters here…
71. Voice Actor: …and all voiced well
72. Voice Actor: Merrin. Again, there’s some great nuance to her performance and how she portrays herself
73. Voice Actor: Rayvis. As if I’d expect anything less from DC Douglas but he nails it consistently
74. Voice Actor: And again, everyone else who generally puts in a solid performance
75. Outro: Bode being… almost literally insane by the end, completely lost to his own paranoia and grief, completely drowning in the Dark Side. Almost kills his own daughter (twice!) and refuses like four chances to turn back… and he never could. He was, as Anakin was before him, simply too possessive and too unwilling to let go
76. Outro: Kata laying the doll on her father’s pyre is a hell of a moment. Is it her letting go? Is it her offering comfort to her long dead father? Who knows

Story Negatives:

1. Animation: Some of the animations, especially facial rigging, is just… not great for some reason
2. Banter: Cal. He’s okay sometimes but he also, like in the first game, does not know when to shut up
3. Intro: External Continuity: Ninth Sister is back. Yes I know we didn’t see the body, yes it leads to a good moment, it’s still silly
4. Intro: Pacing: The entire first level is just entirely too long. It crescendos into a natural conclusion point more than once and then keeps going
5. Intro: Foreshadowing: The initial team is all worse animated and textured than Bode and Cal are. And I mean… yeah, of course they’re going to die, they’re basically red shirts
6. Intro: Moment: By the way the big despair moment leads to a good scene but… why is the big data they want on imperial military outposts? More to the point though, why is this seen as a big despair moment? Cal VISIBLY reacts to seeing how little impact they’ve made. I mean… yeah? Ultimately I’ll summarize my thoughts by saying that this could have worked with more time and polish but those are two things this game did not receive, which will be coming up again in ALMOST every additional negative you see below
7. Pacing: Okay so I originally gave this negative to plot for a lack of a hook but I changed my mind. There IS no hook for a solid five or so hours and that’s honestly too long, but then you DO get the hook in the form of Zee and things smooth out. Furthermore the hook just being ‘it’s a tuesday’ works pretty well for me (I can name several stories that do this to good effect). No for the second time I must complain about how the game just cannot pace itself properly. Coruscant is simultaneously too long and too short (a lot happens in the hours we’re there after all), and then we can spend a variably large amount of time on Koboh spinning our wheels until we run into anything interesting
8. MSQ: I have to give a negative or two for the introduction of our main villain who’s name I don’t even remember right now. In the space of a grand total of five scenes we see him descend from ‘vaguely villainous’ to ‘muwa ha ha’ (also in the space of a couple of minutes) and then when he reveals himself he bleeds his crystal right in front of us for NO reason other than to proclaim himself as evil (seriously why does he do this?) then he is portrayed as super amazingly on top of things and powerful, way beyond us (he is effortlessly parrying and blocking us one handed while having insane control of the battle) and this is all within a minute or two of being ejected from a bacta tank for literal centuries. Then he ENOUGHs when we beat him and leaves…
9. MSQ: …this is not how you establish your main villain. This is how you establish a bad author insert
10. Storytelling Mechanic: Logs. They’re… vacuous. Honestly I would’ve stopped picking them up except for the fact that they give experience. It’s weird
11. Pacing: Exposition upgrades are… weirdly paced. And weird in general. In some cases it works (us learning a lesson from our teachings and experience) and sometimes it does not (us literally just remembering an ability from memories). I know they need to expand our traversal kit but come on
12. Character: Dagan is such a flat piece of wet cardboard and he never gets better. He has no charisma, isn’t very well acted or presented, his motive is bland, and he doesn’t even get screen time proper to flesh him out more. Both Bode and Rayviz are better fleshed out characters in substantially less screen time…
13. Character: …and that all sucks
14. Theme: Dagan and Cal and obsession. So there’s supposed to be this big theme of Cal being obsessed and how Dagan is a dark mirror to him, like Trilla in the first game. The problem is this is stupid and doesn’t work at all. Dagan is out of his mind over effectively nothing because he doesn’t like being snubbed. Cal is certainly having issues but his obsession with fighting the Empire is more tied in to the actually GOOD theme of him simply not having a path in life
15. Plot: The entire plot has periodic holes which COULD be smoothed over and aren’t. It makes the entire sequence of events feel a bit… well, unpolished. Like we’re playing a second draft instead of a finished product…
16. Plot: …and this never stops being an issue
17. Pacing: After we beat the, uh, ‘final boss’ the game just kind of… keeps going. It’s the latest in a weird series of pacing choices, which runs into some issues immediately after this too because there’s actually shockingly little actual content left but for some reason it takes several hours to go through
18. Plot: So there’s no way to talk about this without spoiling but… the twists around Bode do not work, in my opinion. My initial jokes about Bode turning on us were, honestly, just jokes. There was not enough build up or foreshadowing to make this work, which means him being a betrayer is just a twist for twist’s sakes and that’s never a good thing
19. Plot: Second is the SECOND twist which works much worse for me. Turns out Bode was always a jedi (a jedi spy no less) and… I have two fundamental issues with this. First the idea that he stays hidden while in the presence (regularly) of four different jedi, which includes two Masters and all of which approach the Force in different ways making for many different perspectives to sus him out, is already silly. But the real problem here is that this ultimately doesn’t do anything, mean anything, or change anything. He’s evil and he’s a jedi and he’s the final boss and… the end? Similar to Dagan I just do not buy this guy as being an evil mirror to Cal and it all gets resolved VERY quickly after the reveal (two stages and one boss and that’s it)

Gameplay Positives:

1. Difficulty Options: So good difficulty options in general with aggression and timing windows…
2. Difficulty Options: …but also literally changing AI patterns and attacks depending on difficulty
3. Difficulty Options: Toggleable on the fly, which is always great
4. Controls: Controls like a dream, as it needs to for a game like this. I’ve played quite a few Soulslikes at this point in my life and this probably controls the best of all of them…
5. Controls: …putting that at a solid double
6. Enemy AI: Pretty decent for what it is. It’s… flawed, but once you’re actually in a fight it’s legit
7. Enemy Design: Excellent. We have plenty of enemies with plenty of design to their attacks. How they react to your attacks, the strength of their guards, their weak points, how they counterattack…
8. Enemy Design: …great stuff
9. Enemy Variety: Good variety too. You have melees, ranged, heavy ranged, heavy melee, and then a smattering of monsters
10. Encounter: Very good encounter design. It’s rare there isn’t an encounter which didn’t have thought put into what combinations of enemies and terrain to make the combat pop…
11. Encounter: …definite double territory
12. Guidance: Generally good. There’s only a few times where I’m like ‘uh’ and most of those are later on in the game
13. Visual Distinction: Generally good, again. It varies based on tileset but some are really well designed with regard to features and colors
14. Cosmetic: Pretty solid options this time around. Hair, beard, clothes (with color options), and the usual saber changes (plus plenty of colors unlocked at the start)…
15. Cosmetic: …good stuff
16. Tutorialization: Videos showcasing abilities as you pick them up, so you can get an idea for them in action
17. Kit: So… originally I was developing preferences and a list for how to review these stances. I’m pretty used to doing this kind of thing by this point in my career and usually what happens is some abilities or talents or whatever are just better than others, even if they’re all good. So I fully expected Crossguard and Blaster to just kind of crush… but then I started really doing my homework and researching each ability and really playing around with the stances both on camera and off at varying difficulties and I came to the weird conclusion that all five stances are all very well designed and are EQUALLY well designed. So! Single stance. This is the ‘catch all’, good in literally every scenario. It has solid defensive options, some good reach, good aerial attacks, a couple of good ranged attacks, solid block, and does decent damage…
18. Kit: …so it can handle…
19. Kit: …every scenario
20. Kit: Doublesaber is probably my personal least favorite but still very well designed. Each swing is fully commital, you are animation locked until hit or until you finish. This is pretty vulnerable but it also is doing a LOT of reach in its swings, as you hit basically everything around you as you slowly lunge forwards. It also has a closer, the ability to just straight up AOE a gigantic area, can gain aerial while attacking, can attack FROM the air in another AOE, and is exceptionally good at dealing with ranged enemies. A fantastic crowd control and anti ranged option…
21. Kit: …so that’s…
22. Kit: …a triple
23. Kit: Dual was originally my favorite (until I got the NEXT two which replaced it). It’s a lot of swings which do relatively low stamina and damage, but the barrage lets you keep the pressure on constantly. You also have small range AOE, lots of options for combo chaining in multiple ways (both to hit a single target and several), and a few lightsaber throws for your ranged option. But what really sells the Dual Wield is you can animation cancel. It’s worth noting this is the ONLY stance that allows this. This means you can be exceptionally reactive to enemy attacks (which is good because your attacks barely do any stagger) and just sit there right in their faces parrying at will. You also get auto counter as an ability in exchange for Force. It is probably the weakest against red attacks though…
24. Kit: …but it’s still a very well designed…
25. Kit: …stance
26. Kit: Crossguard became my favorite the moment I got it. It’s essentially big, slow two handed attacks. It has shockingly good reach (almost all of its attacks are also a lunge), longs of wide sweeping attacks (great for crowd control), shockwave flings for range, and nice big hits. The thing that sells this is twofold. First, it rewards predicting enemy attacks because you can hit them WHILE they’re attacking you (even red attacks!) becaause Second, it has insanely high stagger. This means your attacks (especially the heavy ones) tend to stagger with a single hit. So with some patience, timing, and careful ranging, you can completely control an encounter while doing crazy damage…
27. Kit: …a very challenging and fun…
28. Kit: …stance
29. Kit: Blaster stance is so misnamed because it’s actually the FENCER stance. I’m serious, it’s the Dooku stance. It has easily the best parry and block of any of them and can just tank a ton of hits while also doing bonkers stamina damage to enemies if you’re parrying well. This is on top of being able to have crazy reach, as almost all your swings lunge forward (similar to Crossguard but moreso), and of course you do have the blaster itself which is great for chip damage (especially to stamina bars). This is on top of some fun Force abilities and the charged blaster shots and you have a really good dueling stance…
30. Kit: …for a final…
31. Kit: …triple
32. Mid Mission Checkpoint: Surprisingly good and consistently so throughout the more extensive platforming sections…
33. Mid Mission Checkpoint: …so that’s a pretty solid double
34. Map: It’s… serviceable. And MUCH worse than the first game. It’s hard to even put into words why, but it controls worse, isn’t as indicative, and doesn’t help with the open world zone at all. That’s on top of lack of cross referencing and proper labeling
35. Penalty For Failure: The usual approach for Soulslike games; You die, you go back to the last checkpoint/bonfire/etc. and you can re-grab your dropped resources if you recover your corpse, but if you die again they’re gone
36. Music: Of course the music is absolute fire, pretty much just like in the first game…
37. Music: …earning a really solid double
38. Core Combat: Of course the combat is excellent, but HOW excellent is the question I chewed on for most of the game. I do think the Kit has a few issues I’ll mention elsewhere (er, sorry apparently I put those notes above this point) but the combat ITSELF? I’ve decided it’s up there with Sekiro or Bloodborne and I tend to hold those up as the pinnacles. It’s responsive, dynamic, fluid, and enormously in the hands of the player. A no-damage playthrough is absolutely possible and indeed even encouraged. So yeah…
39. Core Combat: …we’ll call this…
40. Core Combat: …a solid triple
41. Animation: Enemy animations for attacks are pretty standard in a Soulsborne but they’re really good here. There’s a few jukes and a few copy paste animations but this is still some great telegraphing…
42. Animation: …and so earns the double
43. Intro: Level: The Coruscant depths are solid on the level design. Plenty of smooth platforming, fun but non challenging designed to get you into the flow of the newer parkour mechanics. This is on top of some solid enemy placement (we start off pretty simple, but quickly escalate into groups, elites, and mixed arms groups)…
44. Intro: Level: …for a solid double
45. Level: The initial segment of Koboh is weirdly good. Plenty of side paths, looping design, several shortcuts, nice gimmicks (the tar, the mines)
46. Fast Travel: Waypoint between save spots. Frickin’ finally. The amount this speeds up backtracking is hard to even put into words
47. Level: Koboh’s advance to the array segment. Some smart tutorialization of concepts, tight platforming, good shortcuts, generally good level design
48. Level: The Array itself is probably one of the better individual stages so far. A clear mechanic and gimmick in the form of the nano death tubes and the lasers, a clear goal (two, actually) right at the start with the bird and the array center, low on enemies but always to accent the platforming, plenty of shortcutting, clear indicators of progression, and some fun jumping and puzzle sequences…
49. Level: …a solid double
50. Level: Jedha initial. Some basic platforming and ‘the floor is lava’ sequences with the desert, a few fun encounters to push through with Merrin’s help, and a couple of side rewarding puzzles
51. Level: Shattered Moon, first visit. This is almost entirely platforming and really helped cohese for me how much this game is doing better when it’s all about the platforming and exploration. Good but not too overt indicators of interactables, rewarding pathing and just challenging enough to be engaging, and slowly escalating new concepts as we go (something we’ll come back to in just a second)…
52. Level: …for a solid double
53. Level: Path to the sanctuary temple. This is your second major section on Jedha, and it is excellent. It starts off with some basic but solid platforming, especially considering the amount of traversal we’ve got at this point. But then they give us access to the mid air dash which completely changes how we can interact with the terrain (and opens up the area we’d just visited… yes this is the second time we’ve seen this shush). This is all already excellent…
54. Level: …especially with the backdrop of the Trident. Speaking of
55. Level: The Trident boss. Yes I put this as a level design thing not a boss because you navigate the terrain to outmaneuver him and eventually defeat him, and it’s very well done (and properly checkpointed)
56. Level: Lucrehulk. Yes this is our THIRD leveling segment where we see a bunch of things before we can interact with them, do some very solid and tight platforming before suddenly gaining access to a new traversal ability which completely opens up the level and allows us to progress. It took me a minute to get into the groove on this one (I blame the HUD indicator) but once I did it was some good stuff after…
57. Level: …as well as before
58. Secondary: Trial puzzles are… fine. There’s 7 or so of these and they’re fine. They feel like a poor-man’s Zelda mini dungeon, but they’re decent for what they are
59. Boss: Dagan 2. A much more interesting fight this time around, with a huge area denial attack which can also be parried (doing a TON of parry damage by the way), substantially reduced parry bar in general, and more variety of attacks
60. Level: Shattered Moon 2. Mostly some basic but good platforming here, the inclusion of FINALLY being able to interact with the balloons is nice
61. Boss: Rayvis. Big swinging hits with good reach AND range (since the flail covers a pretty big area while being long AND wielded by someone with a long arm), nice patterned attacks (big hits that you can parry but followed by a massive red hit), and rewarding vuln periods after he finishes his biggest attacks. You can even (at least with the two hander) interrupt even his red attacks if you time it right. His second phase ups the aggression factor (he can outright juggle you if you’re not careful), and adds new flavor to each attack (the missiles with the blaster, and even wider swings with the flail). This is an absolutely fantastic fight; Mean, fair, and fun…
62. Boss: …best boss…
63. Boss: …in the game so far
64. Encounter: The TIE Hanger on the way up to the Observatory is the best encounter design in the game as of this point. Very smart combinations of enemies which make this whole gauntlet VERY mean. Heavy droids alongside flamers and a jetpack trooper, two heavy troopers with three melees and a shield, et cetera. This is a very fun encounter…
65. Encounter: …and deserving of its own mention
66. Level: The ascent up to the Observatory has some issues with jank and guidance BUT it also has some really fun fight setpieces and some good platforming
67. Boss: Dagan 3 is another solid fight. It retains some of the quality from his second fight, but stumbles a bit compared to that one (he can just freeze his stamina bar and then heal it to full while doing a hard to dodge AOE attack, just to name one issue) but there’s still some solid design here. His clones having VERY low health but able to do damage is great (that alone would’ve ruined this honestly), and the spectacle of the fight is pretty legit
68. Hyperbeam Moment: Playing as Cere is silly and awesome. There’s little details that fiddle with things like enemy stagger, the reach and damage you do, etc. that make her just straight up stronger than Cal and that works very well
69. Boss: Vader. I had to chew on this one a bit cuz I died quite a bit and was honestly pretty bored of redoing his first two phases by then, but with some distance and analysis this is a very good fight. I don’t think it’s mechanically as good as Rayvis but it’s very close. His first phase is mostly big obvious swings you can parry and a grab you cannot. His second phase starts adding different permutations of his attack combos he can do and more ranged attacks. His THIRD phase is INSANE and is where the fight comes into its own. He starts using both hands, his damage spikes WAY up, he actually uses LESS red attacks which is good because you need to be on your parry game or you will just straight up die. He also attacks far more frequently and doesn’t stagger at all anymore…
70. Boss: …he’s also on fire. Literally I mean not just, y’know, metaphorically
71. Integration: The entire extended sequence where Cal gives in to the Dark Side is great in gameplay (all the combat suddenly gets easier… how appropriate) and narrative and leads to my personal favorite scene in the game
72. Hyperbeam Moment: Speaking of which, the Dark Side unlock is a hell of a Hyperbeam Moment. You get it henceforth and it’s an upgraded Slow but for this segment it refills almost instantly and lets you chippershred your way through everything
73. Difficulty Curve: With honestly only two exceptions the whole game has a pretty smooth incline of difficulty…
74. Difficulty Curve: …for a solid double
75. Minigame: Multiple. The battle game, the garden, the little battle arenas and optional bosses…
76. Minigame: …solid stuff
77. NG+: Decent. Carry over skills, stance unlocks, and some new perks which can change the playstyle of the second playthrough
78. Options: Quite a few, and some good accessibility options too
79. Power Progression Curve: Each bit of additional kit you get feels like a noticeable uptick in power, and that’s on top of perks and health/Force ups
80. Replayability: Obviously
81. Viscerality: Visual. The game is still just as ridiculous as JFO in terms of visual viscerality, looking very satisfying as you blast and sweep your way through everything…
82. Viscerality: …for a solid double
83. Viscerality: Audio is, once again, very good. Very Star Wars…
84. Viscerality: …in all the right ways
85. Viscerality: Impact, however, is a new one. Even with the difficulty up you still FEEL like you’re doing some serious damage with several of the stances…
86. Viscerality: …and it feels fantastic

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Launch: Everyone knows this game had a pretty bad launch with a pretty buggy release, and it was even worse on the ports (including the version we’re playing). It’s been patched up a bit…
2. Launch: …but there are still issues
3. Graphics: Several graphical glitches and issues periodically. And by periodically I mean constantly through the entire game. This is the PATCHED version I really need to remind you. Flickering screwing up the entire last planet, clothing and lighting glitches everywhere, just…
4. Graphics: …a nonstop…
5. Graphics: …hassle
6. Bug: Several small but irritating bugs periodically
7. Intro: Pacing: In a similar vein to the story issues with pacing on the first stage, the gameplay ALSO naturally hits several crescendos and then just sort of keeps going. By the end of it I just wanted to move on
8. Overworld: Kodoh’s connective tissue is… not super well designed. In fact I would go so far as to say it’s not very designed at all. Almost every area is guided navigation but in a bad way, making logical methods of progression blocked by impassable walls or non-interactables. There are jank ways around these but even this wouldn’t bother me as much if not for the fact that there’s often no logical route around or through these. I’ll use just one example; At one point I wanted up a tower. It was right nearby. I saw two obvious ways up and both were wrong. The CORRECT thing to do is go completely the other direction for like half an hour, come at it from a totally different angle, and do an entirely unrelated mini dungeon which then unlocked the flier which let me fly to the tower. And the whole valley is like this. Once you get into the ‘branches’ where there’s actual level design it’s fine but this is just bad…
9. Overworld: …even as of typing it’s worthy of a double
10. Boss: Dagan Gera 1. This is not a good boss fight. He hits VERY hard and has a ton of block AND health. This is on top of him having only a few attacks, most of which are slight variances on each other. This is a recipe for a very long, dull boss fight. That’s on top of the fact that he keeps repeating the same tired taunts which, again, wouldn’t be as bad if the fight wasn’t so damned long
11. Kit: Force abilities. No like the actual Force abilities. Because they take Force just like lightsaber attacks do they have to do some heavy lifting (no pun intended) to be worthwhile and while they’re fun they just do not measure up. You have to sink SO many points into making them worthwhile, and even then you know how you regain Force? That’s right, you hit things with your Lightsaber. This makes a nice combat loop for the saber abilities but more of an interruption when trying to ‘cast’. That’s not helped by the fact that you get very FEW actual Force abilities (Confuse, which requires a ton of points to be useful, and variants on CC or yank/push for Telekinesis). All of this would be easier to stomach but…
12. Respec: …the respec in the game is not great. You get one free respec. ONE. Every other one costs you a level, meaning you have to go out and grind to now de-level to respec. The only reason this is just one negative is because the cost doesn’t increase over time
13. Guidance: Periodic but there’s several times, especially in later levels, where it’s not super clear what you can interact with or where you can go to progress
14. Controls: Jank. There’s a bit here and there, especially related to the open world segments, but things like how the auto targeting are just weird and the camera actively fights you
15. Traversal: The kill plane thing. I understand logically that for some of these levels they want a kill plane and that’s fine but it’s WAY too short and, near as I can tell, just checks how far you’ve fallen to see if it should activate. This can range from silly to ridiculous. For a quick and dirty showcase, hop up to the small cliff right by the cantina in the central town in Koboh and hop off. You will die basically as you hit the ground
16. Encounter: Every now and again there’s this weird issue where the enemies are just a big fat screw you. This is ESPECIALLY true on harder difficulties, and they’re almost always in optional areas or as path blockers, and it’s legitimately frustrating especially since they’re usually right BEFORE save points
17. Outro: Boss: Bode’s final boss fight is… overtuned. It’s ‘fine’ but feels much more rushed compared to the other duel bosses we have in this game, and he hits SO hard and leans very heavily into chain red attacks which are frustrating to dodge that it’s just not a fun fight
18. Seconds In Minutes: General. Everything takes a little too long in this game. This feels like a weird negative to give considering they fixed some of the backtracking and related issues but…
19. Seconds In Minutes: …it’s telling that for several stretches of the game we’d spend 30, 45 minutes doing basically nothing

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: A weird pick but I stand by it. The stark visuals contrasted with the rain and inverted world of the boss cubes alongside the slowly growing colors of the trees and central zones makes for some striking visuals
2. Music Direction: The usage of the music and how it flows in and out of itself similarly contributes to the overall…
3. Atmosphere: …vibe of the work. There is no true narrative here, not even in the Mario Bros sense of the word, but there is a vibe

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. Music: Periodic and not very melodic but very enjoyable nonetheless
2. Visual Distinction: Sort of critical in a game like this, but between the highlighting and color usage as well as sharp lines and rendering techniques you can pretty much always see what you need to
3. QoL: Indicators where blocks will fall, and a few other small but critical things (can’t be crushed, grid snapping on blocks, able to change direction in mid air or before you even begin to fall thanks to delay, lots of stairs to help with gravity switching and not getting stuck, etc.)
4. Controls: Controls shockingly well, which is good considering some of the stuff the game expects of you
5. Core Mechanic: So this is kind of a twofer. You have several core mechanics (the way blocks interact with gravity, how seeds grow from trees, how water flows and is redirected and has solidarity when frozen) but the big one…
6. Traversal: …is flipping gravity. And this isn’t just essential for puzzle solving, it’s how you navigate the world, and for this alone it deserves its own positive
7. Visual Navigation: In (most) areas you can look around and orient yourself pretty quickly by just seeing where the other fractals are in relation to you
8. Intro: Tutorialization: We get introduced to everything and the basics of gravity, repeating terrain, and block usage very smoothly helps introduce and escalate these simply by the level design itself
9. Intro: Level: World 1, Blue. I already gave this stage a positive for tutorialization but it should be mentioned that the design and non linear space are good indicators and the puzzles aeeeeeating other objects through terrain, think about setting things up in advance, and execution…
10. Level: …fun stuff
11. Level: World 2, Red, starts to introduce concepts like multi-color blocks and blocks creating fields to help or hinder navigation, on top of a lovely maze aesthetic which encourages you to think in loops
12. Level: World 3, Green, has a simple but very satisfying mechanic of growing trees and redirecting water in ways to navigate the terrain and grow even more trees
13. Level: World 4, Yellow, is kind of crazy. So we have multiple smaller puzzles which each deserve their own positive and mention, and as you solve these micro puzzle rooms…
14. Level: …that unlocks more of the central pillar rooms, each of which gives access to additional cubes which give us paths we can create using the gigantic tetrominos which you can navigate around (and have some built in softlock protection in their positioning)…
15. Level: …and all of it interlocks and lets you progress at your own pace
16. Level: World 5, Purple, is probably my personal favorite so far. It’s seemingly simple but involves a lot of non linear doors which requires thinking in multiple dimensions at once, and the mini puzzles are the best so far by quite a margin. I will zoom in on just one to highlight my point; You have two yellow cubes and have to turn one red and one blue. And that’s it. The thing is they have to rest on each other, meaning getting one into position first then using it to steady the other one. These are the first types of puzzles where the order of operations matters more (as a lot of earlier puzzles could be solved in basically any order)…
17. Level: …and so this whole section…
18. Level: …gets a solid triple
19. Outro: Level: The rainbow level starts off with a great final exam segment. First, figure out how to manipulate blocks to get to a specific spot. Second we have to deal with river direction (I got way too lost on this hah). Third is a laser re-orient, fourth is non liminal space, and fifth is a combination of large tetrominos and water redirection. And the final stage…
20. Outro: Level: …deserves special mention for being a wonderful and flowy sequence which looks massive but patterns onto itself so naturally you can immediately divine what’s needed
21. Replayability: I hedged on this one a bit, but ultimately it’s a fun (and short) enough game that I could see it being the type of game you replay every few years, when you’ve forgotten the solutions

Gameplay Negatives:

1. Camera: A small but constant issue I had was the inability to detach the camera and just look at the puzzle from different angles. This would lead to minor irritations like falling off a platform (which can really upset your progress in some rooms) while trying to get a better look, or flat being unable to see a necessary element (like that frickin’ ramp) in order to progress

Story Positives:

1. Brickwork: Town. There’s a lot of details here, from the little huts to the swaying waves and the lovely beach, and plenty of little doodads across the way (that slowly get better as you improve the island too!)
2. Brickwork: The underwater segments in general. There’s not a HUGE variance between them, but enough color and placement distinction to make each biome feel different. Further, the visuals themselves are just plain pretty, and nicely convey the idea of where you’re diving
3. Spritework: The turtles carry the show of course (including our principal) but there’s still plenty of good sprite design in the various jellyfish, the secondary resource nodes you can gather, and the gathered individuals around the island
4. NPC Set Dressing: Speaking of! As you progress you see more and more of these delightful people just hanging out and enjoying the vibes
5. Sound: Good overall soundscape, especially while diving
6. Atmosphere: For the second time in a row this is a good vibe game. The overall atmosphere of chill (or frenetic, depending) diving and hanging out on the island really adds to the flavor

Story Negatives:

Gameplay Positives:

1. HUD: Simple and informative. Health, ammo, inventory (which is also toggleable), breath (and how much you’re losing), enemy ‘health’, et cetera. All very solid stuff. Speaking of which…
2. Interface: …simple and clean interface too. Very, very short load times between runs and quick and efficient selling and upgrading mean very little padding in the downtime. I also want to give praise really quick to the talent window which features some great icon design (you almost always know what you’re getting at a glance), navigation, and color usage (reds are locked out, greens are available, blues are taken, rainbows are special). Speaking of…
3. Pacing: As with all good Incrementals, there’s good ups and downs in activity. Obviously there’s the dives versus the upgrade island segments, but in addition to that you go through waves of slowly mastering a given level before accessing the new one and functionally resetting progress, before mastering that one too, making for a very smooth experience
4. Music: Surprisingly good soundtrack for what it is. Not for a second did any of the songs get dull, and they added to that all important vibe I mentioned up in the Story segment
5. Core Mechanic: So the central gimmick of any given Incremental is, as the name implies, the incrementing itself. You do something to get something, you spend the something to do more of the something. This is a duh but I’ve played quite a few of these in my time (even before the more recent mobage gutted the genre) and most of them do not manage this simple concept very well. By contrast Shelldiver has a great deal of design in small little details to ensure that, while you DO start off barely accomplishing anything, there is noticeable sense of progression and no grind walls or doldrum periods…
6. Core Mechanic: …excellent stuff
7. Alternate Leveling: Speaking of, the talent tree itself deserves mention for design. The way in which it branches out (eventually into a full star) with little visual language in which types of upgrades are where and how much they cost is very well laid out
8. Power Progression Curve: All of this leads to the game’s biggest benefit; the power progression curve is fantastic. You are essentially always moving forward, progressing in access or oxygen or time or resources or raw output, and the curve does something a huge number of games (of multiple genres, even) forget to do; It has stairs of noticeable improvement in addition to the usual small incremental improvements. For the most part each talent you take is a small increase to your overall ability, but peppered throughout are the really good talents that just spike up what you can do, to the point where the player (and this is important) FEELS like they’ve accomplished something. Too many games (especially RPGs) fail at this simple task and instead make the player slowly get stronger over time with no spikes, meaning the player’s relative power level never really changes as the enemies increase alongside them, meaning (once again) the player does not FEEL more powerful. None of that here. Fantastic design…
9. Power Progression Curve: …easily worth…
10. Power Progression Curve: …a triple
11. Economy: Good thing to mention as well, the costs of everything are very well designed, as is the income rate of both types of resources (shells and the various secondary incomes)
12. QoL: Shell percentage grabbing, auto A, shooting through walls, grabbing range improvements, being able to gather while selling, and a few other little ones I didn’t jot down
13. Info In Game: Quite a bit. There’s no confusion about what does what or what’s worthwhile
14. Early Game: Very solid early game. You start off absolutely pathetic and only able to last a few seconds (17, I believe) while barely getting any shells, but this escalates quickly enough that you get the appreciation for being pathetic and the progression past that point
15. Mid Game: As more options and abilities get added to the player the mid game starts to open up a bit, as puffers and starfish and robots change up how you interact with the world
16. Late Game: Most games fall apart in the late game but this one escalates so much that, even though your kit doesn’t change, it feels fun to just start absolutely blitzing everything. Speaking of…
17. Viscerality: Excellent viscerality for what this is. Visually it’s a treat to fling lightning, burning beams, and pink bubbles everywhere. Audibly it sounds like you’re just this hurricane of destruction. And of course you feel the impact as you’re obliterating everything…
18. Viscerality: …very good stuff
19. Replayability: A solidly simple game and worthy of a fun replayability positive

Gameplay Negatives: