One of the last Metroidvanias on Game Pass I hadn't beaten yet, I stayed away from Ori until now because I tried it on PC last year and bounced off of it hard. I decided to give it another chance, in a year of several second chances in my games beaten list, and I'm kinda glad I did. A lot of the problems that turned me away from Ori when I first tried it are absolutely still there, but I was able to push past them and find a sorta happy medium. I 100%'d the game on normal mode and it took me about 7 hours.
Ori and the Blind Forest is about a small sprite named Ori. He gets separated from his home in the great tree in a storm, and the tree tries to emit a massive surge of mystical light to find him, but is fatally wounded in the process. A creature called Naru finds Ori and raises him as a friend up until the decay caused by the great tree's death reaches their grove. Ori mourns the loss of his adopted mother and then sets out on a quest to find what destroyed the great tree and if anything can be done to fix it. The story is very simple but sweet, but it isn't trying to be anything more than that. The real focus of this game is its presentation, and it absolutely nails its look. A soooorta 2.5D look (although more often 2D-looking), Ori and the Blind Forest is an absolutely beautiful game packed with color, detailed animations, and painting-like environments. Ori seems like a game that was made specifically to seem like a work of art come to life, and it absolutely achieves that. No loading screens means everything flows together visually as well as in pacing as you explore. Lots of ballad-y music brings the sort of somber yet hopeful tone of the visuals to life in a way that works well (although it certainly isn't my kind of music). Unfortunatley, Ori's biggest strength is also one of its biggest flaws. The environments are SO detailed in the foreground, background, and everything in between, and packed with so much color that it can often be hard to tell what you can actually interact with. There were many times that I was super cautious when I didn't need to be because I thought something in the background was in a plane that I could interact with, and just as many times where I was suddenly killed or heavily damaged out of nowhere because something I thought was in the background was in fact something I could interact with. The game's visual design is very loud, too loud, and that really brings down the game's platforming often enough to be a consistant nuisance. The other biggest design bugbear about that is that there are a ton of one-hit deaths and quite tricky jumps in the game, so not being confident in what you can even interact with can get you killed a LOT. The game's main saving grace in this respect is its save system, which is almost save-anywhere. Hold B and you make a save point where you're at where you can also assign skillpoints from. It makes what could be an infuriating time a much more forgiving one (but also kinda hilarious given that the game DOES have a hardcore "only one life" mode). Ori's gameplay is a Metroidvania, but one that takes things a little bit differently from most others I've played. The closest thing I can think of would be Yoku's Island Express, as not only is Ori also about a small creature trying to save a beautiful, colorful wooded world, but the main mechanic is movement. Combat is handled almost entirely by mashing X to launch homing projectiles at nearby enemies. There is almost no aiming other than an optional, not that great grenade projectiles, that's more for hitting switches than fighting. The main mechanic of Ori is its platforming and world exploration, and it doesn't exactly come off on the best foot there either. A lot of early game stuff is weirdly hard, and I'd say many of the game's hardest platforming is in its first hour or two before you get things like the wall jump or double-jump. Later platforming is hard by virtue of lots of instant-death traps, but early platforming has a lot of jumps very easy to miss if you aren't really trying (heck one of the first jumps in the game is one of those). The maps feel like they were designed with Ori's mid-game or end-game moveset in mind instead of the moveset you'd have when you first reach that area, and as a result the game's best content and flow is after the first hour or two. The game has a skill point system that you can use after you've killed enough enemies to level up or found an instant level up item hidden in the world. There's an achievement for beating the game with no skill points used, so these level ups are entirely for making the game easier to play for the player. That on top of some optional yet very useful unlockable traversal skills (like the dash and aforementioned grenade) go towards making the game more or less as tricky as the player wants it to be (to a point). Much more powerful homing projectiles, the ability to see hidden walls far easier, and even a second double jump lie in wait if you just get enough skill points. This is a really neat idea as a way to allow the player to grind to make the game easier despite the lack of a combat focus, and is definitely one of the more ingenious elements of Ori's design. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Part of my lower recommendation for this is certainly due to me preferring different Metroidvanias. The focus on platforming rather than combat isn't quite my cup of tea. But the bigger part of it is how the game stumbles so significantly on the one thing it's supposed to be the best at mechanically. A cluttered visual design hindering the platforming was the recurring mistake that kept me irritated with the game over and over, just as I had started to enjoy it again. Between that and the weirdly omnipresent yet indirect combat, the game struggles with an identity crisis from start to finish that isn't deal breaking but is also quite hard to ignore. That probably won't be a problem for a lot of people, but if your time for Metroidvanias is limited, I think a lot of people can find games (especially on Game Pass) that will better suit their time than Ori.
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Recore was a game that seemed cool but I knew basically nothing about outside of the very basic premise from the E3 reveal so many years ago. I'd heard it was plagued with terrible technical issues and loading times back at launch, and the game was quite clearly badly optimized and not even content-complete. I'd also heard that the definitive edition had fixed that up really well, and my experience playing it fits that hearsay well. I never played original Recore, but I really enjoyed my time with the definitive edition. It took me around 22 hours to get all but a couple collectibles and I also left a couple dungeons un-100%'d.
Recore is the story of a girl named Joule, a girl all alone on an alien world known as Far Eden save for her robot dog named Mack. It turns out though that Mack isn't actually the dog, but the core powering the K9 frame, and over the course of the game you'll get more corebots as well as a total of 5 frames to plonk them in as you unravel the mystery of why this planet is so desolate, why you're all alone on it, and why it's covered in horrible killer corebots. The story isn't anything super special to write home about, but it's done well enough. What's especially great are the corebots themselves. Their designs are good, but the animations on your companions just bring SO much life to them. Especially the way the dog frame will bounce around happily wagging its tail, run forward to where you're gonna go to try and lead you there. I found it very endearing, and it brought some well-needed levity to a story that can be pretty bleak and dark at times. Recore is a really weird kinda game to describe that isn't really like anything else I've played. I imagine it might be somewhat like Metroid Prime, but not having played much of that, I can't say for sure. Either way, this product from Keiji Inafune and the Metroid Prime team plays like something between Metroid Prime, Breath of the Wild, and Mario Odyssey (the latter two not having been released yet when this game came out in 2016, for what it's worth). And it all kinda works in the end? At least it did for me. XD There are 5 large, sub-open worlds with things scattered about them. You can just follow the story, or you can explore around looking for prismatic cores. The world isn't quite as tightly designed as Breath of the Wild, but how much you can just wander around these big areas looking for dungeons (which have a very BotW shrine-like feel to them) or misc activities to do for prismatic cores, health powerups, or crafting materials really scratched the same itch for me that BotW did. Prismatic cores are very much like Mario Odssey's moons in how you go around and hunt for them, and you need a certain amount of them to open up certain gates to let the story progress. Then the Metroid Prime bit comes from how you unlock new traversal abilities to go back to earlier areas to get goodies you couldn't access before as well as how this is a shooter with a lock-on mechanism. Unpacking all of that a little at a time, the exploration and platforming feel great. The game controls fantastically, and Joule moves really tightly with her two jumps and an air dash. The dungeons are either combat trials, platforming trials, or mini-adventure (like proper little dungeons) ones. Each have a secret key to collect, 8 floating switches to find and shoot, and a time limit to do it all in, with each of those getting you a treasure for doing it. Do all three in one go and you get an extra bonus treasure. Interesting areas on the overworld where goodies may lie are signposted very well with bright glowy material collectibles that function like coins in Mario: they're a sign to where the action is. The platforming SHOULD feel a lot more fiddly than it does, but it doesn't. Good camera control, a generous ledge-climbing feature, and a bright yellow circle indicating directly underneath you all help contribute to this. Even when I was just searching the world with a fine-toothed comb for prismatic cores, I was having fun because of how fluid and easy it is to move the character through the environment. Another thing helping that was the combat. Joule has a rifle that can swap between white, red, blue, and yellow. Enemies also come in these colors (or combinations of them), and shooting them with the matching color does WAY more damage. You also have up to two corebots at a time in one of five frames. Each of the three colors of corebot has a special attack that corresponds to each frame (blue more quick & damaging, yellow more defensive, and red is damage & damage over time), and both your corebots and enemy corebots function this way. You unlock more corebot frames to use as you progress through the story, giving you more combat options as well as more traversal abilities to go back and nab more goodies with. You can find blueprints and materials to upgrade your corebots (basically better weapons & armor), as well as rare silly-looking ones with special abilities. There's also a neat mechanic where killing an enemy outright will drop materials for crafting armor, but extracting its core when its weak gives you more energy that you'll need to use to boost your corebots stats (they're SUPER weak if you don't boost their stats, and they're killing machines if you keep up on boosting them). Tie that all in with a combo system that gives you more damage output as you keep dealing damage and avoiding taking it, and you have a combat system that I never got bored with. I know a common complaint for this game is that the combat gets repetitive, but I never found that a problem. There's a decent amount of enemy variety, and the level scaling is really viscous (it's pretty uncommon to fight stuff below your level unless you're REALLY backtracking), so there's always an element of danger especially to overworld-wandering enemies. The combat's biggest fault is that it doesn't give the player enough information. You can die SO fast (for basically the entire game, even the first corebots you meet hit really hard) that if you're caught off-guard by something, that can be a death right there (although luckily death respawns are nearly instant). This game really could've used something like Dad of War's ring around the player that points towards incoming attacks, because sometimes you're SO overwhelmed with enemies there's just nothing you could've done to not die. It can sometimes feel like you just had no control over whether or not you lived or died and you just didn't get lucky enough. Part of this is certainly down to how the game handles its combat. You have a lock-on for your gun as well as air-dashes and a double jump. A big part of combat is avoidance and constantly moving, and once you get the hang of that and also start using your corebots special abilities as much as possible, you'll start dying a LOT less. That said, you can still stagger from stuff like fire REALLY hard, and the screen is often so busy that no matter where you are in the game, you're never entirely safe from a death that will feel like it was unfair. It's certainly not how the bulk of the combat feels, but it's a frequent enough problem that it alone is more or less what keeps me from recommending this game as highly as I WANT to recommend it. Presentation is a mixed bag. The graphics are pretty for an earlier Xbone game, but nothing super outstanding. The previously mentioned corebot personality is definitely the strongest part of the game's presentation. The environments don't have a toooon of variety, as most are just the craggy desert that makes up the surface of Far Eden. Either that, or underground caverns or tech facilities. It's not allll the same, but it feels pretty samey. The music is also nothing to write home about, and sometimes the VA is pretty bad too. Especially for the tank-related new content they added for the definitive edition, Joule's VA sounds like she's really phoning it in for some bits of dialogue where her tone will be weirdly detached from the emotional content it seems the words she's saying should have. Performance on my base-model Xbone was mostly fine. If you're looking over a huge vista with tons of stuff on-screen, you're gonna get some framerate dips, but the game never stuttered in a way that affected how I was playing it in a meaningful way. Loading times are generally pretty quick if not instant (for things like respawns after death or fast-travel within the same region), so that's nice. The only really noticeable problems are things like texture maps REALLY freaking out some times in the Shifting Sands area, or texture/model pop-in being pretty noticeable as well. Not stuff that bothered me at all, but if you're someone who would be bothered by that, you're probably better off getting Recore on PC or on an Xbone X. Verdict: Recommended. The combat issues keep me from giving this the highly recommended I really wanna give it, but it's still a game I enjoyed a ton. I really had no idea what I was going in for, and I was very pleasantly surprised by the end of it. This game is easily worth its $20 digital price tag or going through if you happen to have Game Pass if you like action/adventure games and platformers. It's not Dad of War and it's not Breath of the Wild, but it's honestly close enough that I really hope Microsoft lets this team revist Recore someday. With some tightening up mechanically, this yet-to-be-a-series could be something really really special. Bloodstained is the last of the Metroidvanias on Game Pass I have to play, and I was saving it for last at least in part due to trepidation on my part. The product of a crowdfunding campaign started by "Iga", the guy famous for Konami's Metroid-style Casltevania games and really helping bring that style of game outside of just Nintendo's wheelhouse (especially once Nintendo stopped doing it so much), Bloodstained had quite a legacy to live up to. I knew it was a big deal, but I also didn't wanna be disappointed by letting my hopes for its quality get too high, as I really love a lot of Igarashi's previous games. Bloodstained is a fine game, but far from my favorite Metroidvania of the past few years. It took me 21 hours to beat the game and do all the extra things I felt like doing in it (which was a LOT, I'll admit, but not even close to the full extent of things, which I'll get to later).
For anyone who has played any of the "Igavanias" (those being any of the Metroid-style Casltevania games other than Circle of the Moon), especially the Aira games or Order of Ecclesia, Bloodstained will immediately feel pretty familiar. You're a woman with mysterious powers to absorb the souls of demons and use their powers to fight more demons in a castle that definitely has nothing to do with Dracula. The story is very textbook Igarashi, although it's not the best of stuff he's done. I won't get super into it here as to not spoil anything (for all that's worth), but even for an Igavania story, large elements of it felt a bit contrived to me. I'll admit it takes some moves with its story that I applaud it for, as I didn't see them coming, but it's otherwise just another Igarashi story. For many that is likely a total non-issue, but when games like Hollow Knight, Iconoclasts, and Timespinner are challenging the notion that Metroidvanias are just action games with who-cares stories, I can't let Bloodstained's unimpressive narrative slide in good conscience. The combat of the game I have mixed feelings about. On one hand, I think a lot of the bosses are pretty darn good. The player has a ton of tools at their disposal, as you have your normal weapons, you have activatable spells, you have aimed spells with the right stick and right trigger, AND you have channeled spells by holding right bumper. That's all on top of passive spells you can have equipped as well (and passives who are upgraded to max have their base-level ability active permanently). As you fight enemies in the game, you be able to collect their souls, and each soul falls into one of the above spell categories. You also start out with your back dash and ground slide, so a ton of mobility is available to you right from the start. You can craft new equipment with tons of materials that monsters will drop, as well as upgrade your spells to higher levels to increase their range/effects. Put a normal "kill stuff to get EXP to level up and increase base stats" system on top of that, and you will always be able to grind your way to victory if a boss is giving you trouble. On that note, I want to take this time to mention the game's cooking system, as I think it's on of the most ingenious elements of its design. I don't know if it's original or not, but I have come to really appreciate it. Like you can find materials for crafting, you can also find them for cooking, and eating a meal will restore health when you're damaged just like a potion will. What cooking ALSO does, however, is give you a specific stat boost each time you eat each meal. This means you can go and farm specific enemies for their item drops to then go and make a food you know will help you in the specific stat area you want. You can do targeted, specific grinding instead of just general stuff, and it's also totally optional. It's a really clever twist on level grinding that the game encourages you to do really well through an NPC you meet really early on who requests all sorts of rare foods, so you're always on the lookout for crafting (and you can buy any meal/item you've crafted from the shop once you've done it once, so you never need to choose whether to do the quest or to boost your stats). ALL THAT said, on the other hand is how the game plays. I'm probably just used to more quick-paced Metroidvanias, but I always felt it was really awkward just how hard you stop in your tracks whenever you initiate a weapon swing animation or a spell casting animation. You can break that animation by back-stepping or jumping to quickly do your attack again, but because you can do that, the whole massive pause after the weapon swing never really felt like it made sense to me. I found one special weapon off of a monster like 6 or so hours in that let you both swing very quickly at short range but you didn't have to stop to move, and the DPS on it made it an alright option the entire rest of the game. Similarly, I found a directional spell I loved just a few hours in, and it's the only one I used for the rest of the game. While this is kind of a good thing, in that weapons and spells do scale really well with upgrades and stat boosts, so you don't need to move onto new stuff if you don't really want to, it also highlights one of my biggest problems with the game's design: bloat. A lot of Bloodstained feels there because it can be. The game has 127 monsters and about as many spells (total across all types), but so many of them feel redundant or simply not worth upgrading because you'd need to farm for SO long to get the upgrade stuff for them, when very similarly good spells can be found and upgraded much earlier. It makes the start of the game have this overwhelming element of choice that masks a system that is mostly just huge because it can be. A lot of the weapons fall into that category too of "it's another one of these", which is normal for a game like this, but that is also very true for spells. I spent more than half of this game not even trying out new spells I got because what I had already worked so well. That's a problem both Aria games had as well, don't get me wrong, but it's one that Order of Ecclesia more or less solved by only a few of its many enemies being able to drop a soul. Iga had already made a fantastic game in this style following a "less is more" mentality, and I can't help but ponder if the crowdfunding origins of Bloodstained helped contribute to how this game seems to have so much stuff for no real purpose. The same goes for the tons of side quests in the game. Now I call them side quests, but they're largely just bounties for items or monsters with the exception of one actual sorta sidequest helping a guy get home after he got lost. They help push you into stuff like item crafting and exploring the world, so they definitely have a point, but most of the time I spent with them is because of the game's REALLY uneven difficulty curve. I wanted something to occupy my time and give me that "you did a thing!" dopamine hit to help boost my levels to get past this most recent boss who was giving me so much trouble. Bloostained has a lot to do, but a lot of it isn't exactly the most satisfying of content to engage with. The voice acting is good (or at least the Japanese I listened to is), but for the parts where characters weren't talking, I usually had a podcast on because I was trying to find the one ingredient I needed to fulfill the next quest. I spent 21 hours in Bloodstained, but if you were just doing the story, you could beat it way faster and I'd honestly recommend you do that. The presentation of the game is fine. It doesn't look amazing, but it's a pretty 2.5D game with some funny ragdoll physics at times when you kill enemies. Miriam, the main character, has a character design that is kind of like if someone saw Shanoa from Order of Ecclesia and thought she wasn't sexualized nearly enough (it's almost like a parody of that, to be totally honest). But despite having a named main character, once you meet a certain NPC you can change her hair, skin color, primary and secondary colors on her costume, and the accessories and hats you wear as armor even appear on your model. I really wish you had an option to hide those to see the fun hairstyles, but that's just me. I only had podcasts on when I was grinding for stuff, but none of the music was particularly memorable for me. Lastly, I'm gonna hit upon the biggest problem with this game for me: the performance. I played this on a base-model Xbox One, and the performance was absolutely unacceptable for a game with these graphics. I'd heard the Switch version has some pretty serious issues, but the Xbone's issues cannot go unmentioned. One of the main ones I don't actually think is a hardware thing is hit detection. Especially on certain bosses, it is at times very unclear where your hitbox actually is. This is compounded by the sometimes quite cluttered visual design of the background or boss enemy attacks, and there was more than one boss I had trouble keeping track of where I was during the battle for, especially since some hits make you FLY back into a wall when they hit. The most damning thing is the loading stutters though. As you play, the game will hiccup for like half a second at times. This often isn't a problem, but if you're in the middle of some tricky jumping to avoid some very nasty boss attacks, those will cancel your current jump and send you falling down to take a big pile of damage. I don't mind the soft crashes the game does ever 3 or 4 hours, but those loading stutters were so bad I cannot let the game get away with them, especially when it's been out for almost six months. Verdict: Recommended. As much as I talk bad about the game, I DID mostly enjoy my time with it. Exploring the castle and finding new loot is fun, but that's the main the game really has going for it and not much else. Numerous people, including myself, pondered prior to the game's release if Bloodstained would feel a bit redundant by the time it came out considering how many other great Metroidvanias have come onto the scene since Bloodstained's Kickstarter campaign, and that worry has come to pass. You should really watch the hardware you play it on, but Bloodstained isn't a bad option if you choose to play it. There's just a lot else out there you'll probably enjoy just as much, if not more so, on more platforms, so it's not super easy to recommend for someone whose gaming time is limited. This has been so fun to think about! I didn't do a very good job of keeping track of what I played before I started on RacketBoy in 2016, and I also didn't play very many games as they were new this decade, so I'm just gonna use my Games Beaten lists to scope out my favorites that I've played that came out this decade. I'm gonna keep it narrowed down to a list of 10 favorites in a simply chronological order, because otherwise this list would be far far too long XD
Blur (2010): My favorite kart racer I've ever played. Any one I've played since I've just thought to myself "damn, I could be playing Blur right now" XD. The game has SUCH a great sense of speed along with the bright cars and dark racing tracks, it really brings the feeling of a blur to how you play. The power-ups all having 2 uses makes none of them ever feel useless, and ones like the mine can really be essential to later tracks in getting good at throwing it in front of you. I'm not sure I've ever had this much fun with a kart racer, and I don't think I ever will again. Even just typing about it here makes me want to rush out and go buy it so I can play it again XD Crusader Kings II (2012): I've technically played more Civ 5 (like 350 hours more of civ 5), but 820-ish hours in CK2 is still a lot! XD. Along with the tons of time I've sunk into watching my kingdoms grow and trying to secure the best heirs, this game really helped nurture my love for world history. It helped me learn so much geography and has helped me connect a lot better with people around the world because of it. It's also given me tons of incredible stories of my favorite rulers to share (like my insane pirate king of Ireland who died on a doomed quest for immortality). If I had to pick just one big strategy game with maps I played a ton of this decade, it'd have to be CK2. Octodad (2014): One of my favorite multiplayer games ever, easily. The number of times I've used Octodad to bond with family and friends who don't even play video games very much (if at all) because of its wacky humor, simple premise, and awkward controls is too many for me to even count. Even with so many other brilliant, casual local co-op games released this decade (like Super Mario Party and Overcooked), Octodad takes the top spot for me. LISA: The Painful (2014): One of the most brilliant RPGs I've ever played. Not just the story it tells, but how it tells it, weaving together narrative with mechanics, is a high bar that other games should strive to reach. It's a game with a weird sense of humor, despite its heavy subject matter, and it's not something I can recommend to everyone. That said, I can think of very few RPGs that I've engaged with so thoroughly that I've played them back-to-back 3 times. Magicka 2: Learn to Spell... AGAIN! (2015): Where Octodad was the game I played with more casual friends, Magicka 2 was what I played with friends more used to playing video games. The controls take some time to get used to, but once you have them down this game is such a blast to play. We played through this game, must've been 4 or 5 times this decade, and I was so incredibly excited when we actually managed to beat it on very hard mode. This game has a lot of wonderful memories for me, and I'd be very remiss to omit it from a list like this. Paper Mario: Color Splash (2016): Let's not forget the BEST Paper Mario game came out this decade! X3. Taking all the good ideas from Sticker Star and making it into a game with combat that mattered and some of the best, silliest writing a Nintendo game has ever had, this game blew me away when I played it earlier this year. Easily one of my favoritest RPGs, and it easily made this list among some very stiff RPG competition. Yokai Watch 3: Sukiyaki (2016): Speaking of amazing RPGs that blew me away, Yokai Watch 3! I was already a fan of Yokai Watch before I played this one, but clocking in at 214 hours, I played 3 more than the other 4 games in the series combined. For once we had an actually good narrative (or at least a cohesive one) full of fun pop culture references and characters that had me constantly grinning ear to ear. It introduced a totally revamped battle system that took the confusing yet still too simple system of the first two games and combined with with the 3 Kingdoms tactics game to make something actually engaging and meaningful. And to top it all off, it added the Yokai Treasure Busters mode, a Diablo-style side game with an absurd amount of detail and content that by all means could've been its own stand-alone game (and eventually was). Pokemon wishes it could ever have a game as good as Yokai Watch 3, and I'm not even sure the Yokai Watch series will ever have a game this good again. Hollow Knight (2017): A long series of excellent indie Metroidvanias (that still continue to come out) has a masterpiece above all others, and that game is Hollow Knight. It brought to the table an incredibly huge map paired with an enemy variety that makes for an experience rivaling the decadence of Symphony of the Night. It has a really tight combat system and lots of awesome bosses, and overall just feels great to play. A great, fluid art style helps bring to life a dreary world with a somber narrative. Its difficulty definitely keeps it from being the most accessible game in the world, but damn if it isn't a great 2D action/adventure game. God of War (2018): I never would've guessed that it'd be Sony who'd make the best 3D Zelda-style game to date. A complete re-imagining of a classic series, Dad of War came out and changed the face of the franchise in a way I don't think anyone could've predicted. A sincere reflective story on what the series has been gives a really wonderful narrative on two people growing to love each other despite their differences with some really unprecedented pacing for a video game story. Combat is so visceral and fun to play, I was sad when I was out of optional extra bosses to fight. The game looks gorgeous and sounds great on top of that. Definitely a game you'd expect to come out at the end of a generation and stand atop its console's library in quality. La-Mulana 2 (2018): This is another fairly personal one for me. I don't think that La-Mulana 2 is a better Metroidvania than Hollow Knight, although it is definitely one of the better ones out there. A Let's Play of La-Mulana is one of the first things that got me into gaming outside of just AVGN videos on Youtube. It's, effectively, one of the reasons I'm part of so many of the communities online I am today. I played through the first game's remake eventually and adored it, but was a little sad that I'd never get to try and solve La-Mulana's many cryptic puzzles on my own. I was absolutely shocked when, on one of the last times I went on Kickstarter, a game I never thought would or could exist was on it: La-Mulana 2. I waited patiently for years for it to come out, and jumped right in the day it finally did. A whole new ruin, a whole new story, better controls, and so many new bosses: It was better than I ever really could've hoped for. I wasn't able to figure out ALL puzzles myself, but being able to try was what I really wanted most, and that's what I got. La-Mulana 2 is the culmination of a lot of feelings about video games and my time with them online, and it will always hold a very special place in my heart because of that <3 I remember really liking the first of the Deus Ex reboots when I played it a few years back, so I was excited to see the sequel that I never got around to available to play Game Pass. I figured I'd like this too but didn't know how much, and it ended up being one of my favorite games I've played this year. I did a stealth (no alarms) non-lethal run on normal difficulty doing all the side missions and lots of exploring, and it took me around 43 hours.
A continuation of the first game, Human Revolution, this game follows Adam Jensen as he continues to try and uncover and stop the conspiracy against augmented humans and the rest of the world by the shadowy Illuminati. He's a member of Task Force 29, a UN task force that's a counter-terrorism agency with global jurisdiction. Working out of Prague, a hotbed of anit-augmented and pro-augmented divisiveness, it's your mission to try and stop the bloodshed while also uncovering who's really orchestrating it in the first place. The game has a 12 minute recap of the events of the first game you can choose to watch if you want. I chose to and was promptly reminded just how little of the first game I remembered, so I'm glad it was there XD. Regardless, the plot of the first game doesn't impact this one THAT much. You'll be able to follow this game just fine without having played the first one, even without watching the recap, but having that context will definitely help the world and events in it (not to mention several side characters who are returning cast from the first game) make more sense. The foundation of Mankind Divided's plot is the unjust discrimination facing mechanically augmented people after an Illuminati plot caused their neuro-circuitry to malfunction and send them into violent frenzies two years before the plot of this game. It does this using a lot of cues from real-world prejudice and institutions, and I think it pulls it off fairly well. The Illuminati being framed as the cause of the division from the very start of the game (it even opens on an Illuminati meeting only the audience is privy to) does a nice job of framing these divisions as institutional and not simply the fault of certain individuals. It has plenty of bad actors on both sides (both those who hate the augmented and want to see them suffer as well as augmented retaliating for how shitty they're treated but in irredeemable ways), but the constant context of Jensen's mission is that they are victims of a system designed to act against all of their interests. It's certainly not perfect (it basically ignores any connotations of things like race and being augmented or not is the sole source of prejudice in this alternate history of the world), but I think it deals with the themes well from the perspective it takes on things. I honestly got fairly similar feelings to it that I did from The Outer Worlds, in that the people at the top are the only really "evil" ones pitting the rest of society against itself. The other aspects of the writing, characters and world building, I really enjoyed. The game has a lot of great minor and major characters (some I wish were in the game more than they were, to be honest) that really add a lot of color to 2029 Prague. The books you find lying around and TV reports you can watch (and even many conversations you can overhear) are also fun to peek into for glimpses at the wider world outside of Jensen's mission. There are little references to things from the original Deus Ex games here and there, from characters to organization names, but nothing really major. It does a good job of standing on its own divorced from the original games, and telling a story whose stakes feel engaging even though things like knowledge of a conspiracy are a constant known factor (and therefore can't be used for a twist). The gameplay parts of Deus Ex are very similar to the previous Deus Ex: Human Revolution, but more specifically the Director's Cut of Human Revolution. It's a first person action game not unlike Dishonored, where the option to do things lethally or non-lethally is always present. Unlike the original Human Revolution, any "boss" encounters can be dealt with non-lethally, and there is always an option forward for whatever kind of playthrough you're going for (stealth, guns blazing, non-lethal, etc). There's only one real boss in the game, as opposed to the three of Human Revolution, and it's not a forced combat scenario that screws over people who opted to go entirely into hacking/stealth like the original Human Revolution did. Weaved into their place are debates that Jensen can have (he was captain of the debate team in high school XD) with important NPCs, like he could in the first game. The main difference here is that he can also have them with important enemy NPCs, and can deescalate a problem before it even becomes violent if you say the right things (and this is made even easier with an augmentation). Where I found a lot of the debates in the first game super easy, they were much more difficult in this game, and the "correct" option was far more difficult to pinpoint. This being a sequel to Human Revolution, there are of course tons of augmentations you can give Adam Jensen to boost his capabilities in everything from hacking to stealthing to shooting. Leveling up from fighting enemies, completing quests, or even just exploring gives you Praxis points which are skill points that can be fed into these. Praxis cards can also be found around the world if you explore enough, allowing for free level ups if you hunt around. You start out the game fairly tooled up, and quickly gain access to a whole new series of augmentations. These new augmentations, as was the case in the last game, mostly lend themselves to a guns blazing-style playthrough, but far from all, and I never really had the problem as I did in the first game of having way too many skill points and basically nothing useful to spend them on because they were useless for stealth. I did a stealth playthrough, so I can't really comment on the action elements, but the stealth elements work great. They're great at communicating information clearly to the player about when they're being noticed and from where, and cover is always advantageous in the player's favor. Whenever you're noticed, it's 100% your fault. As a big fan of stealth games with action options, I found this game scratched that itch perfectly for me. Performance and presentation wise, this game definitely shows its age. It's a game from 2016, but it clearly reuses a lot of animations and models from Human Revolution. NPC's dialogue often doesn't match up with how their lips say it (although it does sometimes, mostly on important characters), and the NPCs have a very video gamey style to their body language in conversations. The game stutters a little bit from time to time on my base-model Xbox One, but it otherwise ran fine and the loading time are pretty quick too (at least compared to Dishonored 2, which came out the same year). It's a fairly pretty game, but it's hardly The Witcher 3. The music does a good job of setting the atmosphere and tone, but it's nothing you'll wanna put on your MP3 player, I'd imagine. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Easily the new #2 spot in my favorite games I've played this year. This is a stellar stealth/action game with great writing and it's a damn shame we'll never get any more of it (unless Squenix suddenly decides to revive it, I suppose). Regardless, the story feels satisfying even with the tiny cliffhangers at the end, and if you like stealth/action games, this is a great choice to pick up, especially if you have the option to dip into it for free with Game Pass like I did~ |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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