Tomb Raider 2013(Nintendo Switch) Review

This might've been the first Tomb Raider game I ever finished. Before I would eventually play the earlier games later on, this was more or less my introduction to the franchise. I've beaten it 3 times now. This being my 3rd playthrough and even with TR being the long running franchise that it is after playing the prior games, I'd still consider this to be one of the better games in the franchise. There's been a fair share of duds this series has produced with the prior one being Underworld and because of that, it had to be rebooted...again. This time however it borrows from different games and media of the time. The tone and idea being similar to Batman Begins. The premise being like Lost and Far Cry 3 while borrowing gameplay ideas and mechanics from Uncharted and Batman Arkham Asylum.

Story of the game is interesting in that this might be the most interesting Lara Croft ever was a character as far as the TR games are concerned. Her arc is one of the more acclaimed aspects of the story where she starts off as scared and helpless but slowly throughout the game she starts to become more confident and more sure of herself after being tested by the hardships the island puts her through. Lara said she wanted to make her mark at the start of the game and she pretty much did. Her arc can surprisingly feel gradual and over the half way mark, she's inspiring fear into her enemies. Lara up before this point was just a generic action movie hero that never really did much of anything to stand out other than being an early popular female game character. She was never the reason why I enjoyed some of the early Core Design games.

The side characters can feel on the underdeveloped side. Roth and Grim being the best. The latter I wished had more scenes due to how cool he was taking out the soldiers before dying. Mathias is more of a weird foil for Lara in that he's how Lara would've ended up if went crazy insane by the island. There are some contrived moments here and there like her not using guns during some story cutscenes. Still the story was surprisingly decent.

The visuals are an interesting point of note because in many ways, this game was the earliest example of visual fidelity in games reaching the point where they won't be outdated in 2-3 years but can still hold up even now. The environments and textures can look sharp even now and the opening shot of Lara getting out of the cave can still be poignant even now.

This now leads to the next point and this can be an issue for many that persists even now that due to TR 2013 being high in visual fiedlity that it is you now have to create ways for the player to know where to go. One way was through the Detective Vision Batman Arkham had and another way was through painting everything interactive in white. This can be very on the nose and also a downgrade from the original game considering in that game, Lara can climb on anything due to it's consistency with the grid based design. Now, it's "it's not white or not a climbable rocky surface, you can't touch it". I don't mind it too much in the moment but it does go to show how much this whole thing persists even now due to the issues high visual fidelity can create.

The exploration borrows from Batman Arkham Asylum with the Island of Yamati being like the Asylum where in points of the story, the setting will loop back inself where you can get different gadgets and upgrades to unlock new parts of the map to get more scrap.

Scrap currency is where this game surpasses the Uncharted series since now, you have a reason to look around every knook and cranny to buy weapon upgrades and get skill points instead of just mindless walking around until the next platforming section.

The action is also an improvement. You can hold all your weapons, there are alt fire modes on each gun, the cover system isn't sticky and is seemless, damage animations feel a lot better and there are more variety in enemies. You got enemies who melee, use shields, throw molotovs, armored enemies and they actively get you out of cover where you have to deal with close and mid range enemies.

You could argue this emphasis on shooting and fighting hitscanners isn't "true" to Tomb Raider but TR2 already did this and was handled worse in that game.

Stealth is in the game and a rather infamous aspect about it is that it's a red herring. You can sneak around but due to the lack of awareness indicators and enemies seemingly able to see you from out of nowhere, stealth becomes a game of slowly picking off enemies until you inevitably get the alert.

The set pieces are a carry over from Uncharted and I just sort of tolerate here even if I always found this sort of thing obnoxious due to how limited interactivity here is. They do have a little more going when you have to time shotgun blasts or climb axe latches.

Overall, TR 2013 was is a very good game in a series I just tolerate to varying degrees. It's one of the franchise's better made games.

Spyro the Dragon Review

When I played Spyro the Dragon 11 years ago, a large part of me felt completely underwhelmed. I always recall this particular game being remembered so fondly and I couldn't help but be like, "that's it?" Upon playing it now, I do like game more mainly due to the short length and being so light on difficulty that I consider it relaxing to play. Ultimately, Spyro the Dragon is designed to be someone's first game. It did come out in 1998 back when gaming isn't as mainstream and big as it is now. It's target demographic was children and it was the go to 3D platformer series alongside Crash Bandicot especially when that series was about to close out it's trio of platformers. This is a big reason why I had that inital lukewarm reaction I did when I originally played. If you are new to gaming, Spyro could be mind blowing but as someone who's played so many games, it can be rather vanilla. Still for what it is, Sypro is charming.

The good is that the visuals especially in the Reignited Trilogy looks great. Everything looks vibrant, cute and colorful. It felt like it was trying to mimick a classic kids cartoon or medival adventure asethetic and it does a solid job. The characters are quite expressive even it's tone is very much appealing to it's target audience. Where some older dragons would go on and on about their life story and Spyro would be like, "eh don't want to hear it".

Music also does a good job at fitting the atmosphere that the game is going for. Feeling very upbeat and energetic but also giving it's own unique vibe by not being 100% traditional fantasy music.

The story while very simplistic if not outright barebones can personifies the game as a whole a simple adventure where you don't have to think way too much on what's going on. Gnasty Gnorc might just be a plot device or an excuse to get the game going but I can't help but love him for he did what he did because he was called "ugly". It's so pure I can't help but love it.

Gameplay is interesting in that in the moment, it's mostly "fine" and due it's easy difficulty can even be relaxing. Platforming is never too demanding nor does the game ever get too hard. Enemies can be beaten by either using flame breath or charging and it only requires to do the action one time to defeat the enemy. Sometimes there might be another step added to defeat the enemy like charge into an armored enemy to have him fall to his death. Other times you make to flame breath an enemy to get on an platform for a limited but it won't go beyond this. Bosses are pretty much just scripted set pieces or chases. You will find Dragons, Eggs and Gems just by causally going through the levels and to get to the credits isn't too demanding. Add that to you can beat the game in 3 hours on your first run through, Spyro never enters into the realm of monotony because of this.

The most interesting aspect is the structure. Out of all the Spyro games even collectathon platformers by extension, Spyro is a game where you have to play a majority of the levels to get anywhere. This is very poorly communicated. For the to get 50 dragons, 5 Dragon Eggs, and 6000 gems to roll credits but the game never tells you this. You think you need to just get the Dragons but you then need to get the gems, but then you get the gems but you need the eggs but then collect dragons and gems again. This should've been told better to the player. Just tell the player to get both Dragons, Gems and Eggs instead of only collecting one for each world than changing the requirement out of nowhere. Towards the end of the game and getting to the final world, you can just jump straight to Gnasty Gnorc.

The game can have some challenge but that is due to awkward controls. The glide not being very intuititve. When you look across to a wide open gap of the level, you don't know that your glide can make it to the other side until after you do it and the furthur it is, the harder it is to tell you will make it. You could make it or die.

Running isn't the most precise due to how slow the camera is when turning Spyro as he moves. This will mainly be a challenge during the parts where you need to get the Dragon Eggs or chasing Gnasty Gnorc at the end of the game.

Challenge does sort of ramp up towards the end when the Gnorc Commandos show up and you have to kill the enemies in a certain order to get anywhere but this all happens towards the very end of the game and it's almost done by the time they show up. It can feel jarring when the rest of the game was straightforward minus the progression roadblock requirements or how the final boss later was nothing more than a scripted chase.

Overall, I get why I was initially lukewarm but I do enjoy Spyro the Dragon even if it is easy for me to criticize it. Sure, it can essentially be a "casual" game before the term was even coined but there is enough charm here to carry me through it's short length.

Neon Inferno Review

For a game I randomly heard about and saw some trailers for. It turned out to be really fun and quite innovating. Thought it was just just going to be a fun Contra and Metal Slug style shooter featuring a male playable character who looks like Jin Kazama from Tekken and it was that plus throwing in it's own cool ideas.

While Neon Inferno is like the above mentioned games. There is also aspects that those games don't do. This is where the game will turn into Wild Guns where it sort of becomes a shooter where enemies are attacking you in the background while also being attacked from the foreground. It can create for a rather dynamic style of gameplay that this style of game hasn't seen that often.

One minute you might have enemies coming at you in the foreground but then you need to switch to aim mode and attack enemies in firing at you in the background while using cover.

You can shoot, duck and cover of course but there is also a melee attack that works double as a parry with green projectiles. You also have a double jump as well as a dedicated dodge roll making combat even more fast paced and dynamic.

Combat can feel very fast paced and intense due to enemies attack from the background and foreground, dealing with hazards, death pits, timing jumps as well melee attacks close by enemies and parrying projectiles.

One disappointing aspect of Neon Inferno is that the main weapon you'll get is the base pistol. No powerups of getting weapons like shotguns, rocket launchers, electricity guns or flamethrowers. It would've been nice if the game got me to wreck havoc with some powerful weapons from time to time and can help widdle away at the health of bosses or get past certain enemy hordes to get to them faster. You do get powerups at the shop inbetween missions but the best on is a shield that doubles HP and they can only be used once per level.

This leads to the difficulty and it's rather bizarre. For 4 out of the 6 levels, it feels well balanced and a solid challenge. Not having you do too much content upon death. However, this changes when doing the 4th level Baptism by Fire where there is are long enemy waves, bosses and dogs that will slowly but surely chip away at health and then doing it all again when dying since the checkpoints are so far apart. There is a lengthy phased boss fight that can take a lot of damage. You might've used your power up before fighting her too.

Level 6 is where you don't get access to the shop so no shield power up at the start and it ends with yet another phased boss fight that has double HP on normal.

I lowered to easy on both these levels. It's a shame the game couldn't get the "just right" feeling for the all the levels instead of 4 out of 6. Still, I'm glad they got it for most of the game.

Overall, I had a fun time with Neon Inferno, it brought some interesting innovation to the 2D run and gun style game with good controls and combat with multiple factors to account for. Just wished it had more weapons to use and less difficulty spikes on normal difficulty.

Heretic(Playstation 5) Review

Nightdive recently remastered both this game and Hexen. It was a surprise shadow drop and I'm looking for another excuse to play through Heretic again and this remaster was a great excuse to do it. As a whole it still holds up and in ways differentiates itself from Doom in ways I didn't notice when I played it the first time.

The first big difference of course is that you can look up or down.

Another one is with the weapons. Sure, it's all based on archetypes found in Doom but they have their own little quirks. The Elven Wand is the pistol but it's far more reliable and does more damage than the former. The ammo for it is all over the various maps making a much more reliable fallback weapon. The Etheral Crossbow is the shotgun but it's a projectile weapon with a far wider reach at long range. It can also be almost as deadly as Doom 2's double barrel shotgun at close range. The Hellstafe is like the Plasma Rifle but with a faster fire rate. The Phoenix Rod is a much faster firing rocket launcher. The Gaunlets is the Chainsaw.

There is also quirky weapons unique to Heretic like the Firemace and Dragan Claw. The latter might be the earliest example of having an assault rifle or machine gun in an FPS despite being a magic based weapon.

The death animations are also far superior and satisfying when compared to Doom's. The enemies blow up into chunks upon killing them which makes for far more visercal feedback.

Another way it can feel different in that even on the normal difficulty, it is very easy to be low on ammo especially in the early episodes. Getting overwhelmed here can happen pretty often. With that said because of this I experimented with the various items much more a lot. I used the Tomb of Power on large hordes especially during the boss fight episodes. Morphs Ovums to get some kills when low or too many enemies. Mystic Urns to restore health. Shadow Sphere to occasional sneak by. Ring of Invincibilty can especially be deadly with the Gaunlets. It helped out a lot the River of Fire level when low on ammo.

When high on ammo, I did often run away especially if I knew where the level exit was since it was better to save it all for the next level. Felt oddly surivival horror for an FPS game like this.

Level design is also great especially in Episode 2 onwards. The game always gives you a good sightline on where you are supposed to go or shows you where the different colored key doors are located. You can see them through a window but they are locked off and you need to find them. The levels themselves already have the different colored doors right at the start at the level or somewhere a little latter so there isn't much time spent being lost trying to find them. The levels themselves are pretty large medieval landscapes too fitting the fantasy theme well.

The remastered soundtrack is also well made and fits the game in the moment pretty well.

Some issues are that the game can rely on the fire floors that can damage you way too much. It can be grating when you might try to find the next key or door but you keep taking damage when trying to retrace your steps or trying to find different routes you might've overlooked.

While I did praise the high count of enemies, being low on ammo and picking and choosing fights. At other times it can feel cheap to get randomly attacked from behind or a far away enemy. There are points where you are going through a level can just suddenly get ambushed with no clear or distinct enemy sound cue alerting you to their presence. Sometimes they might even be behind a wall texture.

The Wings of Wrath as far as the first 3 episode are concerned only needed to be used on the final boss of Episode 3. It can feel jarring since they were optional prior to that.

Overall, Heretic still holds up. There's some problems here and there but for a game that could be considered a "Doom clone". There's enough differences here that calling it that can be a disservice.

Tales of Xillia Remastered Review

If there was any game that came close to being a "nostalgic" JRPG for me, Tales of Xillia would be it. I played it around 10 years ago and it's already crazy that it's been that long since I originally beat it. I decided to buy the remaster since it really has been that long and to maybe see if I can get my foot into the door regarding getting into the genre. It was supposed to be that way 10 years ago but it never amounted to much. After playing the game again, I can say the story and writing certainly holds up but the gameplay can be on the iffy side.

The story and writing is easily and by far the best part of the game. Parts of me was a little skeptical if it would hold up and another part of me knew it would since I beat it 10 years ago. If I didn't like it back then especially for a game that took me over 40 hours to beat, I wouldn't finished it in the first place.

As a whole, it mostly certainly does. I chose to play as Jude Mathis this time and what shocked me about his writing in that while he is naive, he is not an idiot. Characters who have traits of naive idealism can run the risk of being insufferable and obnoxious and thankfully, Jude avoids this. He has his moments of helping out the cast when Presa shows up early game and he notices something wrong in the rock formation and tells Alvin to shoot it. He also starts to slowly mature and grow out of his naivety as well.

The rest of the cast of characters are all equally as well layered and likeable too. Milla's interactions with various cast members can be entertaining due to being an all knowing spirit but she only watched humanity but never truly interacted with them which can lead to some entertaining observations and misunderstandings.

Characters like Alivn and Rowan are also entertaining. The former being a charming and sharp tongued mercenary who has a good heart but can often question who's side he's on. Rowan being a famous war general who was also a deserter but slowly starts becomes proactive and changes the world for the better.

Elise is a child character that manages to avoid being annoying, useless and slowly develops throughout the game. The ending in particular with her felt very touching.

What also greatly helps with all this is the skit system. It's something about this particular series I always liked since even when characters in your party aren't being used during gameplay, they still get speak and interact with the cast and aren't invisible until key story moments.

The story also tends to play with your expectations regarding who the real overarching villain is but when he does show himself, he is the most honorable and noble of the bunch. It's easy to see people do root for him and you almost want him not want to him.

It does get a little hard to follow due to a twist that happens late game but it doesn't get too convoluted.

Issues with the story is that the villains before the one I described can feel a bit underdeveloped. Natichal being chief among them. We learn so much about him and has one cool moment of easily defeating Millia then it's all over and doesn't do much of anything. There is also the fact that due to this, the subplot where fixing Millia's legs can really start to drag due to how long the main cast is seperated.

With all this said, while I'm not big on the gameplay. The sense of being on a journey this game created can feel impeccable. Beating the game felt like I just ended a relationship with a group of buddies I hung around with for a while. That is something I don't think a movie, book, TV show animated or live action can even create.

I'm describing the story so much because it's the main reason to play the game. Combat while fine for a few hours can start to get very, very montonous. With the party of Jude and Millia and using Elise for healing can  With the party of Jude and Millia and using Elise for healing can often consist of beating regular enemies the same way over and over. Flame Sphere is a linked arte that can instantly end regular enemy encounters. Much of the game is this.

Bosses can be more challenging due to having more HP and later arcane artes but due to the monotonous enemy encounters, I lowered to easy because the former are more manageable and the latter is over much quicker.

Level design is also not very good and suffer from Castlevania Curse of Darkness problem where everything looks so similar and if you don't have the map screen at all times, it's easy to get lost. Doubly so if the levels have verticality. Not even the waypoint markers in the remaster alleviates this. It can almost be a guessing game if you are even going the right way. Finding the proper path felt like a game of luck half the time.

The shop system is admittedly kind of interesting in that it gave me something to look forward to after killing so many enemies to get money and materials to upgrade the shop. This aspect did prevent the gameplay from getting overly montonous.

Overall, story holds up but gameplay is on the weaker side.

Chaos Legion Review

The best way of describing Chaos Legion is that it's a complete mess. There's some interesting ideas here. You'd see it's gameplay mechanics pop up in Devil May Cry 5. Astral Chain would use them. The upcoming Tides of Annhilation is seemingly using the ideas brought forth by this game. It being made by Capcom during the 6th gen made finally decide to decide to play it and well to put it simpily, it is such a bizzarely put together title that it could've only have released in that era.

The story, oh man the story. To put it simpily there certainly is a story here, a very badly told and put together story. It starts you off in the middle of the action expecting you to know what's going on. Sieg and Delecriox were once friends but the death of a woman important to them drives the latter to turn heel. There's a girl that appears later that shares a striking resemblance to the dead girl named Arcia.

It doesn't help that most if not all of the character interactions are either non stop exposition dumps or just characters showing the only character trait of constantly showing angst. This goes double for Delecriox which seems to be the only thing he knows how to do or talk about how the death Siela has ruined him.

The plot mainly consists of Sieg and Arcia wondering around, fight Delecroix and then do some more wandering. There is some world building about an order of some kind but it's all so badly presented through title crawls that it's hard to really get attached. Sieg and Delecroix seem to be the only active members and that's it.

There is a scene later in the game where Arcia dies after being shot in the head but ha not really fake out.

It is fascinating in how bad this story is even for Capcom action game standards.

Gameplay is where things get interesting and where it's ideas get borrowed from. In Chaos Legion, you don't fight alone, you do what the title implies fight with a Legion of familars.

It's about using your familars effectively to get through battles rather than be effecient on your own. Sieg can summon them using his as long as his Soul guage is filled. Legions taking damage drains them but hitting enemies will get it back up and do a little damage to the enemies themselves.

This is sound on paper however the gameplay problems start rushing in quickly. The awkward controls, design and structure reer in their ugly head fast.

Enemies are damage sponges even on easy. The thing that made this tolerable was that larger foes dropped health upon health. In order to lock on you need to hit them with lightning which can be problematic since bigger enemies and bosses can level your health bar very quickly. Since stages are very long, it can be infuriated to get far into a level, spend minutes trying to lower a larger enemies' health bar, get hit by them once or twice and you could be killed even before you can press start to use a healing item. This is worse for bosses because they can level your health super fast, destroy you soul gauge within seconds on top of being damage sponges. The Legion AI will also prioritze enemies around the boss rather than the boss himself. Force attacks are the only way to do major attacks to the bosses.

To add to all this, Sieg has no real dodge command since all he can do is a backflip. I didn't know after beating you had to use lighting to lock on which you can see why this never got adopted since adds needless busywork when you can just hold a button to lock on.

You can equip two Legions at a time but there is a lot of stop and go. In order to activate your equipped Legion, you need to press L1 to switch press L2 to switch to the next one. There is no seemless switching, you need to press L1 to turn on or off, press L2 to switch and then wait again to press L1 to activate the next Legion. Certain Legion being strong against flesh and others against metal. You want to attack a flesh enemy but then a metallic one? You have to do that tedious switching process I described.

On top of this, you get XP and new Legions but never get a chance to practice the new ones until you get into the levels but by that point you want to just stick with the ones since only two can be equipped at a time. Using new Legions are a risk and a waste of time.

There's also a pointless shooting section with Arcia later in the game where it's only one level for that run of the campaign. Her healing items never transfer over to Sieg making it pointless since you could've played that whole level as him and nothing would be lost.

Save states on emulator and the health drops greatly helped me here.

One amazing thing about the game is the music. It is by far the best thing about it. You might be familar with some songs while not knowing the game itself. There's choirs and electric guitars that do a great job at making the player feel empowered during gameplay. The intermission songs are also fantastic.

Overall, messy game but it's worth checking out of curosity.

Pac-Man World 2: Re-PAC Review

This game was quite the surprise considering how much I disliked the first game. They fixed most of the issues I had with it. A new easy difficulty known as "Theory Mode" was added this time around where the lives system was removed, you can't take damage and extra platforms were also added. I like the first change but dislike the latter two. I would've prefered no lives but keeping everything the same.

There is some major improvements this time around like the camera controls being more intuitive and having less of that bizarre inbetween of being 2D and 3D. Now it's completely 3D. The double jump which I found really weirdly implemented in the first game is the same but with "butt bounce" you have to time where when done correctly can get you to jump even higher sort of feeling a precursor to Hulk being able to leap massive distances in Hulk Ultimate Destruction. The regular jump is more along the lines of Mario's jump arc in his 3D outings.

The speed boosters feel better to use here than in the first game due to the better controlling camera and not awkwardly being into 2D and 3D.

Level design is mostly solid with World 2 making great use of the Butt Bounce ability later parts of the game don't do as much.

The most challeging parts even on Theory Mode are the bosses. World 2, 5 and the final boss. World 2 due to camera and how it moves after you land a blow on the boss. World 4 due it to not using the base game's mechanics and being a very dragged out shump section. I'm glad I played on easy here due to how long this boss lasts. Spooky and 3 phases and the hardest part is that now you have to master the Butt Bounce even though you never needed to be good with it after World 2.

There is a challenging Crash Bandicot boulder chase in World 3 but those are generally hard due to not seeing what's in front of you. It is weird how this is the only time a sequence like this pops up.

Story is okay, just a usual platfomer story with an over the top bad guy. I do like Spooky for how over the top he is.

The remake does add a lot of improvements and reduced difficulty as a whole compared to the original which I never played.

Overall, Re Pac 2 is a solid game considering how much I couldn't stand playing the original title. This was a solid improvement.