Snoob の最近のレビュー

Ever since I picked up a copy of Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate for the Wii U in a desperate attempt to get a game for the system that didn't suck, I've been hooked on the series. This is a franchise that, historically, will take you on an adventure, obfuscate a ton of things that are probably vital information, and, most importantly, ask you to take down giant monsters with comically-oversized weapons so you can make armor and more weapons from their corpses. It turns out that the name is a bit on the nose, you could say. And then comes World, the black sheep of the family and the most polarizing member of the whole shebang. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

In Monster Hunter, the player's job is to... hunt monsters. Big surprise there. Choosing from an arsenal of 14 different weapons, each with their own crafting trees to explore, the job has a few core tenants. First, scouting the area is important, both to find your quarry and see what parts of the environment you can use to your advantage later. On top of that, natural resources are important for your continued progression, and should be harvested when possible. Next comes the actual hunting part, as you go toe to toe with a motley assortment of beasts ranging from "somewhat oversized iguana" to "a veritable mountain that threatens to eradicate all life in the world". Yeah. Power creep's pretty high, but the game starts you out small and makes you scale up slowly (sometimes a bit too slowly, honestly). Rarely will you feel out of your depth, even if you might have to look for some guidance every now and then.

The biggest selling point of World, in my opinion, is the improved combat system. Monster Hunter has always felt a bit... clunky. And while that was its signature style, going to World just feels like such a breath of fresh air. There's a freedom of movement that feels so liberating, like you're an actual person and not an entity locked into place while performing a variety of actions. The addition of the Slinger and grappling capability have made delivering payloads like incapacitating Flash Bombs more streamlined, but now the monsters are a bit smarter about things and eventually learn to close their eyes (or something) at higher tiers. Damage numbers are a nice quality of life feature, even if I turned them off once I got more comfortable with the weapons' rebalancing, and so many tactics that you used to just have to know ("Hit Rathian in the face") feel less like hidden stratagems and more like things you can learn through natural experimentation. Most importantly, though, with a mouse and keyboard, using a ranged weapon no longer feels like hot garbage (although it's still a little clunky).

Capcom's MonHun team have also been hard at work adding more value to this game ever since it launched. Much like on the console versions, it feels like every single month adds something new, whether it's a monster, new sets of armor, a limited-time festival, or all of the above. This all comes completely free of cost to all owners, allowing everybody to stay on the same playing field, and makes it sting a little less when it was announced that the "G rank" equivalent (effectively a ton more content, and traditionally a seperate game entirely for this series) would be a paid DLC this time around not too far back. This has given it a lot of additional mileage in my book, and I keep coming back to World to check out the new content despite being technically "done" with it in record time for a game in the series.

No game is without flaw, however, and World has one or two, especially if you're a returning fan. It's incredibly obvious that the series moving to an entirely new engine meant that all work had to be thrown out and done from scratch, and so a lot of fan-favorite monsters didn't make it back, at least not yet (but despite this, we have enough room for 4 variants on the same skeleton in the form of Rathian, Rathalos, and their variants...). Each of World's existing monsters stands out on their own decently, but without classics like Nargacuga, Tigrex, or Zinogre, the game feels like it's missing some important icons that would look amazing in "true" HD. Furthermore, there are several points where the game is clearly just throwing busy work at you to pad it out, whether it be needing to grind Hunter Rank to get the "real" end-game quests unlocked (more egregiously than the series usually resorts to, at least), a multitude of quests which seem to exist just to show off a monster you'll have to fight on the next one, or (and this one is the most egregious) a point where you have to goof around doing other quests for a while while marking tracks for unknown monsters in order to unlock the last few you'll need to complete the game by fighting the ultimate big bad.

If this giant wall of text has scared you, here's my summary: Monster Hunter World is the perfect way to get into Monster Hunter as a series, especially if you've been turned off in the past by how esoteric it is. While it makes me somewhat anxious that Capcom may simplify the formula down more further down the line, World effectively acts like a much-needed booster shot of modernization, a teaspoon of bitter medicine that many fans may just need to swallow. It's become one of my go-to "Do you have this yet?" games to suggest for co-op, and the only reason I don't have more hours is because the back half of the year had so many excellent releases I needed to play as well.

Plus, you know, there's still Generations Ultimate on the Switch if you like the old formula more.

By now, the Hitman series probably (hopefully?) needs no introduction. A franchise of old blood that's managed to survive to the modern gaming landscape through a series of fortunate (and not-so-fortunate) events, it's seen its share of ups and downs. Right now, though, I think the biggest problem with the series is a lack of advertising, because this game's great but supposedly hasn't sold very well.

HITMAN 2 (Not be to confused with the old Hitman 2: Silent Assassin) continues the story of the previous title, rather plainly called "HITMAN" (and referred to by the community as "Hitman 2016"). Following Agent 47, the baldest man in the universe, players are tasked with assassinating specific targets by any means neccessary as they hop the globe, trying to get to the bottom of a giant conspiracy theory. Sounds pretty simple, right? It's just killing people, after all.

Well, sure, any brute can go in, shoot the place up, and leave a massive body count in their wake. But that's not the point of this game. Sure, you can play it like that, leaving a ton of collateral damage, but the ideal way to pull off any of HITMAN 2's missions is to leave absolutely no trace, getting the coveted Silent Assassin rating. This is where the game's challenge lies, as each mission area feels like its own little world, full of life and stories to be found and exploited for your own purposes. There are forces beyond your own at work in each of these levels, and while I was a little disappointed to find that it's exceedingly rare to be able to "miss" a schedule, it's very easy to get lost in these microcosms and explore them to the fullest in order to get a leg up on your next run (and believe me, these are missions that, ideally, you'll play over and over again to see every little thing you can do, as there's only so much that can be done in a specific attempt at the level). As an added bonus, if you bought the previous game, you can play those levels in the improved engine, taking advantage of enhanced concealment and the new rulesets (this is available if you didn't as well, but as a DLC pack).

One of the things that stands out in this game to me is that the developers thought of a lot of things and iterated on their previous work. People lampshaded how you were able to sneak up behind people who were checking themselves out in the mirrors, and now they're factored into line of sight. Sniper rifles were too easy to walk around with, so now no disguise is authorized to use them, forcing the player to use the readded briefcase mechanics. Getting caught trespassing no longer invalidates your SA attempts, and if you comply with the guard's request to follow him out of the zone, you can continue along your merry little murdering way. There's secrets and easter egg interactions everywhere, and even a point where the game says, "hey, please don't kill this guy", and if you do it anyway, you complete a challenge lampooning you for being too curious for your own good before the mission fails.

While this is probably my second-favorite game of 2018 (and a strong contender for the overall game of the year, if I'm being candid), it's not without its flaws. The always-online system from Hitman 2016 makes a return, and still feels rather tacked on and like it's just forced DRM. Elusive Targets, which have a lot of work put into them, have been improved somewhat but are still limited-time content, which is sure to sour some grapes. I've noticed a few bugs, such as actors walking straight through level geometry, into the sky, and so on, which has made some things very problematic or impossible to do without restarting the level, but I think most of these have been ironed out by now.

To put it simply, this game is amazing. The way IO Interactive has managed to make the franchise recover after the threat of a nosedive at the hands of Absolution to the cautiously-optimistic 2016 to this entry has left me confident that this is a series that deserves to survive. There's not really another game like Hitman, and calling this one of the best stealth games of the decade is not an understatement. With a slew of content, a nearly-infinite amount of ways to tackle your missions, and tons of things to unlock, this is a game for completionists, perfectionists, and people who just want to have fun alike.

Across a vast sector of space known as the Inner Sphere, it is the 29th century, and war rages. Great Houses wage battles of intrigue and bloodshed alike, using giant robots known as BattleMechs ('Mechs) piloted by elite fighters called MechWarriors to do the latter. But in their haste to seize power, humans have destroyed more than a few things that were taken for granted in the past, and blood is now far cheaper than metal. Mercenaries are cheaper still, and this is the concept that BATTLETECH focuses on.

Set during the Third Succession War of the Battletech setting, BATTLETECH (I'm going to stop writing it like that from now on) starts out simple, focusing on your character doing a "milk run" mission for royalty that goes south. Soon enough, you end up heading a company of MechWarrior mercenaries out in the Periphery, sort of the "Wild West" of the setting. Taking missions, crushing enemies, and punching out names, your company must go from barely scraping by to thriving, primarily by excelling on the battlefield.

If you've played games like the XCOM reboot, Battletech is going to look familiar on the surface. But this superficial similarity belies an interesting implementation of a tabletop system that's over 30 years old at this point. Fighting with 'Mechs is a grind in the best possible meaning of the word, starting out with combatants firing on all cylinders only to have damage gradually wear them down. By the end of a drop, units on both sides may be struggling to stay alive, desperately attempting to avoid blows that may prove fatal. Combat is too complicated to go into at length in this review, but through effective usage of flanks, tactics, range, and pilot skills, your four-man lance of MechWarriors can take on far larger forces and emerge victorious. Each of your 'Mechs can be customized between missions, allowing you to choose what you want each of your units to prioritize and focus on to make the ultimate fighting machines.

Success or failure transfers back to the overall campaign in a lot of important ways. Taking more damage will put your 'Mechs in the repair bay longer if you want to get them back in fighting shape before the next mission, not to mention cost more money and potentially drain your stocks of weaponry. "Legging" an enemy or attempting to knock out its pilot without forcing their mech to go critical will let you grab more of its gear and even its parts, while "coring out" a hostile by firing at center mass until its reactor explodes can be an easier way to remove them from the field, but will lower the salvage you get as much of its arsenal is devastated or destroyed in the resulting detonation.

While there is a "main story", and it is, in my opinion, compelling and well-written, Battletech allows you to ignore it and go about the Periphery doing your own thing (a mode was even added alongside the first DLC that lets you do exactly that, turning the game into a lengthy score attack). Following the story will help set a more natural progression (several missions offering you the ability to outright buy chasses to up-gun yourself after their completion so you can stay competitive, for instance), but if you try to do every mission the moment it opens up, they can be incredibly challenging bordering on impossible, especially if you're going into them blind. Due to its placement in the timeline and the studio's previous work on titles like Shadowrun Dragonfall, this game can serve as an excellent introduction to the Battletech universe, allowing you to learn as much or as little as you want during conversations.

With all those positives and cool aspects come a few issues, however. The first is that you will need to get good or enjoy restarting the campaign. Battletech is a game about risk vs reward, and while it won't remind you that sometimes the best option is to not fight at all, it's something that always needs to be kept in mind. This isn't an XCOM-style "clear the map and win the mission" game, at least not all the time, and making a few sizable mistakes in one or two drops in a row can lead to a slippery slope that kills the whole campaign for one reason or another. The other flaw is that while I think HBS's free, incremental updates to the game have been very welcome in keeping the game interesting, their current hand of DLC offerings is not encouraging and makes me ask whether it's truly worthwhile. The base game stands on its own decently well, but Paradox's close involvement with the project is revealing itself piece by $19.99 piece.

Overall, Battletech is, in a word, great. You feel the fear of failure, the rush of success, and the wonder of a plan well-executed. Whether it's following the structured storyline or forging out on your own, it's an excellent example of emergent narrative, how no two missions go the same, and how taking the rails off and letting players break and tinker with things have allowed for one of the most engaging tactics-based games not just for this year, but much of the decade.

Imagine a world where having fun borders on being an illegal activity. Where a simple ball game has to be done underground and out of the limelight, just because sometimes people happen to get killed by it. This is the setting of Lethal League Blaze, a sequel to, you guessed it, Lethal League.

Sort of like Super Smash Bros or DiveKick, Lethal League is a fighting game, but it has some... odd ideas about the genre. Players smack a ball around in leiu of throwing traditional attacks, using several techniques to control angle, velocity, and timing in order to try and knock out their opponents. This sounds really simple, right? It isn't. The ball starts out slow and speeds up based on how intense the forces acting upon it are, ever faster until the burst ends. Fast enough to distort the stage... Fast enough to break the sound barrier and make things go negative... Fast enough to make reality itself disappear, in a strangely peaceful zen where there is only the ball and the ball-players.

Further complicating things are a roster of playable characters, each of which has their own swing arcs, mobility options, and special moves that open up new options. They feel different enough that there is a fighting-game-like allure in "maining" someone, but none are so alien from one another that they can't be picked up and played with relative ease while maintaining almost all of your previous skill (one noteworthy exception to this being that some characters are "heavier" than others, which may throw off jump timings and arcs if you're jumping around the roster quickly). The story can help new players get acclimated to the special moves and quirks of each character before hopping into local or online play, if desired.

This doesn't really fit into the remainder of my review, but I would be doing a serious disservice if I didn't mention how great of a soundtrack this game has. From Frank Klepacki to returning favorite Bignic and even the same composer who did Jet Set Radio's music, there is a large volume of number one jams on offer, all of which fit in with the stage they're played on and help pump up the action even further. If I can impress just one thing upon you from this factoid, it's that there ain't nothin' like a funky beat.

My biggest issue with Lethal League Blaze so far is probably the netcode. I willingly play a lot of transoceanic matches, and it seems about 50-50 whether a specific match has tangible lag or not, even against the same opponent. Admittedly, this is something of an outlier, and if I were to come up with a real issue, I'd probably supplement that with the game having a definite dearth of content if you're not comfortable diving into multiplayer lobbies or getting friends who also have it. While the main storyline is acceptable, it's over in about 2-3 hours and reminded me a lot of Smash Bros. Melee: "Cool, I unlocked the things for doing this, now what... Oh, I have to do a lot more?!"

When it comes to cheap, fast-paced, and simple party games for either real-life gatherings or online game nights, the original Lethal League was a title I turned to very often, often to fill space while people got ready or filed in. Blaze continues to live up to that mantle, serving as a great way to say "Just one more, one more" for at least an hour in more than one instance. If it sounds like something you'd like, I'd definitely suggest picking it up, because you'll find out very quickly whether or not it's your cup of tea. Or, as the game says: "No weak s*it."

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war-- Wait, wrong script.

Continuing the plot from the original (and equally-cumbersomely-named original) Vermintide 2, as I'll call it, is a team-based action game set in the Warhammer End Times canon. Choosing from an unlikely band of uneasy allies, you must make it through a selection of areas, accomplishing objectives, killing bosses, and playing Library Simulator. Opposing this are everybody's favorite (or least favorite) walking memes, the rat-like Skaven, joined by their new allies, the Warriors of Chaos. And boy, did they bring some big guys.

For the most part, Fatshark has taken what they learned from the first Vermintide and improved upon it, as there's just more of everything. More weapons, more enemies on screen, more variety, a new "career" system that lets you play your hero more like you'd like them to be, a more sensible and overhauled loot system, and more memorable maps (even if they're memorable for the wrong reasons sometimes) make this feel like a clear upgrade over the original. Choosing to stay with the original cast has allowed each of them to receive more characterization, both due to seeing how they talk about the past and how they handle the present together, and it just feels good to cut a rat-man clear in twain with a greatsword.

Featuring music by Jesper Kyd of Hitman fame, the tone is quickly set as moody and atmospheric, even if you will often not be concerned about that as you're busy coordinating with your teammates. There's a fair bit of quoteworthy dialogue (my favorite probably being "The crime is your foul existence! The sentence is DEATH!", or "Oiii! We're the bloody Ubersreik five!"), conversations are steeped in the lore of Warhammer Fantasy in general (there's at least one debate on why Karl Franz has so many fancy hats), and it is my strong conviction that if somebody wanted to get into the setting, this would be where you'd send them first as a jumping-off point. This game will let you feel firsthand why the Empire had such a struggle taking on Chaos in those final hours, as you hack and shoot at a warrior of Nurgle asking "Why won't you die?!".

Now for the not-so-fun parts. My issues with this game can mostly be lumped into two camps, and I want to talk about the community first. I've had good times with randoms, where we're all laughing it up or focused on the task at hand, but far too often people leave immediately after they die, make poor value judgements, and so on. It's weird, because when I've interacted with the community outside of the game, they aren't nearly that bad, which makes me think it might be a few "bad eggs". The other issue is that this game has been stuck in patch limbo more than once, with Fatshark going absolutely silent for several months at a time before saying "we're still listening, we promise", oftentimes tweaking a few things people wanted tweaked, a few things nobody asked for, and then repeating the process outside of a few bug fixes. Despite that, the game has come a long way from where it was when it launched in early March, and I hope it only gets better.

Looking at the big picture, Vermintide 2 might be this year's "it's fun with friends" game; Admittedly, I almost never play it solo any more, but I still get good mileage out of it regardless. A few niggling issues do little to detract from a solid experience, a rare game that has managed to hold my attention almost all year in one form or another. Then again, it does help that I love Warhammer...

The stress in the staccato crack of bullets hitting nearby, not quite hitting you but getting closer. The surge of adrenaline you get as an RPG whooshes by, slamming into a back wall and killing several teammates but leaving you alive... alone, to suffer. The palpable fear upon hearing the distinctive ring of a cell phone and not knowing where the bomb, or the bomber, could be. These are just a few things racing through your head in the middle of Insurgency: Sandstorm, a game that I only half-jokingly call a "PTSD simulator" for the experience it offers.

Set in the Middle East in either the modern era or a few years before it, Sandstorm pits local "Security Forces" (SecFor, or "SEC") against insurgents, managing to ground things in reality without making an overt political statement. Players must choose from a slew of classes offering a vast arsenal, kitting themselves out using a "point buy" system before hitting the field and putting the work in. One thing that's immediately tangible is how gameplay is both fast and deadly; A single bullet can often put you down, but the mobility of all but the most gear-laden soldiers enables quick and decisive assaults where one can take the foe by surprise and eliminate them. New to Sandstorm is fire support: Using the chain of command, a Commander can relay a fire support request to an Observer, allowing them to activate faction-specific support such as gun runs, suicide drones, chemical attacks, or the dreaded "Gunship on station!".

Not only is Sandstorm intense and fast, but due to audio design and other choices, it's incredibly immersive. Listening to things unfold honestly makes you feel the chaos of a live fire zone better than any game I've ever played. People shouting as gunfire rips through their cover, trying to keep things together if they've been hit or under duress (the infamous "triple F bomb"), and having back-and-forth banter does wonders to keep the player immersed. From the gameplay side of things, your gun "free aims" without a crosshair, and has laughable accuracy unless you take time to use your sights and control your bursts. There's a choice between "tactical" reloads (keeping the remainder of the magazine for later use) or faster "dry" ones, the amount of gun accessories borders on pornographic, and there is often an interesting dichotomy between agility and armor at work (though I would argue agility wins out slightly in many cases).

The major elephant in the room with this game is the optimization. I've played it from the tail end of the pre-order beta to a week or two back, and it still has problems running on specific maps, no matter my settings, despite me far exceeding the listed specs. To clarify: I do not mean "doesn't hit 60", I mean "the game turns into a PowerPoint slideshow". Things are a work in progress on that front, and I'm still hoping that it improves. Speaking of maps, the selection is somewhat scant at the moment, but this is also something that the developers have said they will work on adding. Rounding things out are a selection of bugs which sometimes make things annoying (I've had unwinnable rounds due to a supply cache deciding it wouldn't blow up no matter how much punishment it took, in addition to cosmetic issues like hand glitching), but overall, if you meet spec, and the optimization gets ironed out, the issues are not major.

Overall, this game reminds me a lot of the Rising Storm series, but obviously set in a more modern era. The focus is on smaller squad tactics, sure, but choosing to go all in on gameplay-friendly realism and catering to what Insurgency has always done well has only worked out in their favor, and has helped create what is probably the only non-horror game I can't play right before I go to sleep. And that's great.

I've always had a mild fear of large, dark voids. Space. Big empty rooms at night. Deep water. That last one's important when talking about Subnautica, a game where dry land is as rare as diamonds in oldschool Minecraft. From the word "go", things are quite literally sink or swim, as the player character is forced to evacuate their vessel after it's shot down during a flyby of an alien world. Who did it and why are part of the story that won't be touched on, but everything has its reasons... Anyway, let's move on.

Subnautica, first and foremost, is a survival game, and it makes no attempt to hide it. Every step taken needs to have a purpose behind it, as you need to get off the planet you're stranded on before you succumb to one of the many ways to die (note, however that in most modes, death is either somewhat trivial or annoying at worst, so I mean this from a story point of view). Crafting chains are in full force, with almost everything you pick up being useful in one way or another, and almost Metroid-like in its progression. For instance, on one's first jaunt back into the ship they left before the game started, it's likely that not all the tools needed to explore it thoroughly will be in your possession, forcing you to come back later. This sense of tangible progression works very well, especially if you're like me and started out scared witless when it got dark. By the end of the game, if you haven't gone from paranoid fear to admiring the exotic and natural beauty of your surroundings, there might be something wrong with you.

Don't get me wrong, though. I wasn't kidding when I said there were a lot of ways to die. From annoying little sharks to suicidal clownfish to giant monstrosities that dwarf nuclear subs, there are a lot of things that will make you watch where you're swimming. Being set almost entirely underwater, air is a vital and precious resource, and a key part of the early game is getting ways to extend your exploration range so you can dive deeper, longer, and farther. You can also choose to play with a food and water meter, requiring you to keep supplies on hand to stay hardy. Most creatures will listen to reason and force, with a few even being slayable should you need them gone badly enough, but some... Well, when you see them, it's best to just run. There are ways to counter them, but this is definitely not a game where you will feel like a badass. There will be constant reminders that you're an intruder in a foreign ecosystem, a stranger in an even stranger land.

There are a few flaws with this game, though. For one, while things can look downright beautiful, there is often a thick "fog" around everything higher up in the biomes (not unrealistic, because you're spending the whole game underwater, but a bit annoying) and it's very easy to make the framerate tank in some places. There are also a few hilariously laughable instances of pop-in (watch the islands from above the waves when you're trying to get close to them, for instance), but this isn't really a giant black mark unless it takes you out of your immersion. Another issue I found is that sometimes it's not clear what exactly to do next, and while the game's lack of a map system and potential reliance on player-made deployable waypoint beacons helps add to the atmosphere, it can get very annoying when you're trying to remember, say, where the entrance to Lost River is, or finding it for the first time at all. Despite how open the game is, towards about the middle it becomes a bit clearer that there's a pretty linear path the story is trying to guide you down, and while this helps provide structure and a clear reason for progression, it somewhat robs the game of replayability to me, as there's little incentive to play again due to how things are set up (at least to me).

When I started up Subnautica, I really didn't expect it to grab me like it did. I've never really been one for survival games, but something about the setting, presentation, and story just pulled me in. It was also interesting to me how my own playstyle evolved in tandem with the progression, going from being scared to dive too deep because I might not be able to get back up for air to leaping into crevices with reckless abandon, secure in the knowledge of where I'd end up and finding new things to surprise me all the same. It might just help to face your fears and dive in (okay, last bad pun, I promise).

Oftentimes in turn-based strategy games, we find ourselves asking: "What if I'd done something else instead?". Into the Breach makes that concept into a whole game in its own right. A time-traveler from the future, where a giant insectoid species has brought humanity to ruin, comes back to the past (or maybe the present?) to try and fix things the only way one's supposed to fight giant insects: With giant robots.

Where this gets interesting is that you're able to see exactly what every enemy is going to do, because you've been here before, fought these battles, and so on (metaphorically, at least; the playing field is procedurally generated, so you'll be fighting a new battle every time). At the same time, you have to save the population, and more importantly, the power grid. This creates an interesting game almost akin to chess, wherein using each of your mechs "optimally" to keep people out of harm becomes tantamount. Permadeath and a sometimes harsh difficulty curve add to this, forcing the player to make tough decisions such as deciding who should "soak" damage early in the fight if things come to it. Play well (or even perfectly), and your rewards will increase, making the road ahead less difficult.

Throughout the fight to change the future, you will run into a respectable variety of enemies. Into the Breach is pretty good about easing you in, with enemies being introduced incrementally each run in addition to being added into the overall random "pool" of enemies after you've run into them once or twice (an example being that you won't run into shield bugs randomly until you've seen them by progressing far enough, then they'll come into the pool for earlier island options). You'll also crew a variety of mechs that fit various themes based on their team, often built around a gimmick. One sets absolutely everything on fire. Another takes advantage of the game's "Smoke"/"Dust" terrain and creates more smoke of its own, all of which damages enemies that are in the same tile. Yet another fixates on pushing and tossing enemies like some kind of trio of 30-foot-tall Guts Man clones. And that's only three of them!

While the game is often very fair, depending on the team selected, it is possible to go into missions that, while you might be able to win, will be an incredible uphill battle that rely on AI manipulation based on learning fundamental concepts about how bugs target both buildings and mechs. Not all teams are created equally, and some are distinctly more challenging than others (especially based on luck of the draw as to which bugs are selected for your run). I found that things would usually either snowball into a victory or defeat, which makes the game's option to "punch out" early and fight the final battle after completing just half of the possible content in a run somewhat odd. This is a game of risk management, which might drive some people off, but it's sometimes easy to get into a bad situation and realize "I shouldn't have done this thing 3 turns ago" which leads to a scenario where the player has to choose between two bad options. This in itself isn't a design flaw, but may turn you off.

Overall, Into the Breach demonstrates that Subset Games took every lesson learned from their previous title, FTL, and put it into practice. It's just as addictive and replayable as FTL was, has a similar (if not superior) layer of tactical complexity, and, most importantly, unlike FTL, the vast majority of the time, it feels like it was your fault when you lost. There are no instances where the game does things like dump surprise punishments on you, every enemy's behavior, damage inflicted, and so on are disclosed immediately, and it's a matter of selecting the right missions for your mechs after learning them.

If you like turn-based PvE, this is one of the best titles to come out this year at this price point, easily.

One of my "guilty pleasures" is games that let me use my pretty sizable library of music for novel purposes, whether it be as backing tracks while I'm grinding or to try and smash high scores based on procedural generation (a genre whose ranks have swelled appreciably in the past few years, I've noticed). Beat Hazard 2 falls firmly in the latter camp, and having played the first a decent amount, I'll compare how it stacks up.

Gameplay's pretty straightforward: Shoot things and don't get hit. Complicating this on your side are power-ups and perks, which either provide access to additional features (such as missile barrages) or enhance your existing ones (make multipliers worth more). In this regard, things are pretty simple, and the name of the game is either setting a high score or surviving as long as possible. If you like top-down shooters, this game has you covered, although it can get a little... pseudo-seizure-inducing, as the screenshots and videos will almost definitely attest.

But how about the music integration? Unlike something like Audiosurf, it's pretty simple: The more loud and bombastic the backing track gets, the more powerful your ship becomes from moment to moment (although if you max out both your Power and Intensity, you get a more consistent weapon which is almost like staying at full health in some top-down Zelda titles). Bosses tend to come in right before heavy drops, calm moments see less intense enemy waves, and there's a variety of difficulty options if you want something more or less hardcore than the baseline (you can also change the intensity of the flashing lights, but unfortunately, to get the maximum score you need to turn them up insanely high). Each song has its own scoreboard, but all difficulties and intensities are lumped together, making things a bit... lopsided.

My main complaint about Beat Hazard 2 is that, for some reason, the game has to "phone home" to a server almost every time you see a menu, and as somebody who likes to play games in offline mode whenever possible, this gets annoying very quickly. Audiosurf only tries to connect to the leaderboards once per song, and quickly gives up if it can't, but Beat Hazard 2 will refuse to proceed until it establishes that connection every time. The "Open Mic" feature that allows the usage of Spotify, while neat, is also best described as "somewhat janky", not allowing any pausing while the Open Mic feature is in use (lest you desync) and having a few other minor nitpicks. Additionally, several features added by the Ultra upgrade to the original have yet to be incorporated (such a multiple player ship types), and local multiplayer is now entirely absent, though I believe some of these things are on the way.

Overall, while I try to avoid reviewing Early Access titles until they come out, this one is already pretty solid, and with the developer's description of features to be added later, promises to surpass the original. I'm hopeful that the complaints I've leveled will be addressed closer to release (the Open Mic thing more than the online connectivity, because I suspect that this won't be fixed, but I can live with that if the rest of the game becomes more polished).

Yep, Ubisoft released another Far Cry game this year. Set in rural Montana, you take on the role of a deputy sheriff for the Hope County Police Department and are asked to ride along to detain Joseph Seed, notorious cult leader. In trademark Far Cry fashion, this doesn't go according to plan, and it's up to you (and you alone, for the most part) to fix the situation that unfolds. What happens next is a slightly paint-by-numbers romp through an Ubisoft open-world... Mostly.

The reason Far Cry 5 caught my interest was threefold. First was the concept of "home-grown terror", that the threat in your video game doesn't have to be a generic foreign entity or big business, but just a "charismatic" (according to the developers) character. Second was being able to form a resistance of your own in order to fight back, retaking the county house by house, one heart and mind at a time. Finally, I heard that Ubisoft had finally decided to start fixing things that had been going on for so long that they were almost tropes of their little sub-genre (radio towers, anybody?). Since it came out on my birth month, I decided to dive in.

Without pulling any punches, it's the antagonists of Far Cry 5 that both carry and anchor the plot simultaneously. Joseph Seed typifies the sort of "holier than thou" types one would see in rural America, but taken to the extreme; Unfortunately, he barely intrudes upon the story save for the beginning and end, leaving him the weakest character. Jacob, Faith, and John are each caricatures in a similar fashion, though your mileage may vary with them, and each toys with a different idea which is never touched upon outside of their convenient, theme-park-esque region (such as the MK ULTRA-style treatment Jacob forces upon the player). Without giving anything away, the plot takes a serious swerve towards the end of the game, and while the logical ending is the canonical one, if I'm being honest, it really pissed me off.

For the sake of brevity, I'll merge my other two points into a single umbrella paragraph, and this pertains to what Far Cry 5 actually did right and what kept me engaged for two full playthroughs. First, I love the feeling that recruitable AI partners add to the game. It goes a long way towards making the playspace feel less desolate and more lived-in, and given the setting (a card-carrying NRA member's wet dream), it makes perfect sense that you could talk to somebody in town and convince them to raise hell with you, even if their AI is middling to awful at times. Some of them are a bit silly (a trained bear???), but the majority of partners make sense and are reasonably grounded, at least in terms of Far Cry's universe. After getting past that, we get into the departures from previous games in the series. No longer does one have to find the mythical emu pelt in order to upgrade their weapon slings, climb radio towers to reveal the map, or "play your way"... as long as it's the way the developers intended. Everything you do will contribute towards progression in a nearly universal way, and those niche objectives you had in previous games will now contribute towards unlocking the next story checkpoint, almost akin to Saint's Row 2. And much like in that game, the story missions intersperse that "busy work", helping to make it feel like you're actually accomplishing something instead of just burning through the main story and only touching side missions when you feel the need to get a little more firepower. These allow for beautiful and emergent gameplay, such as an engagement where friendly forces were mixed in with enemies in the middle of thick forest at midnight, causing a shootout that wouldn't have felt out of place in Battlefield titles.

But this isn't without its own flaws. Most of the time I spent playing Far Cry 5, I felt like there was slightly too much going on; Constantly I'd come across people to save, hostiles that wanted to ram me off the road, and so on. The game seems to have a serious issue giving you time to just breathe and relax until it's in its twilight hours, at least if you want to stick to the roads. No matter how it's sliced, the game is going to feel like a bit of a grind, and surprisingly, some of the side missions are more interesting than the main story missions are. All of this combined with the lack of an interesting end-game arsenal (many weapons are more or less interchangable and there's no reason to use something outside of an "optimal loadout" past a certain point) makes it feel like the game peaks in the middle and turns into a bit of a slog towards the end. The final mission in particular has an amazing concept but quickly peters out for a variety of reasons.

Overall, I think this is not only the best entry in the series since Far Cry 2 (which remains the gold standard by which I compare many open world shooters, honestly), but the best entry in all of Ubisoft's "open world" genre. I didn't touch any of the DLC, having scratched my itch after two playthroughs, so I can't speak there, but the base experience is solid, especially if it's acquired for about 30 US dollars. At the same time, it's got several things holding it back to prevent it from being an experience you'll want to go back to unless you don't play a lot of games and trust in Ubisoft's designs.