Earlier this year, I played most Armored Core bar the PS3 games in anticipation for this game, though not really out of pure hype, but because I was curious what bedrock of design From Software was working with. I didn’t expect to like them much, as I'm not a big mecha fan and I rarely hear high praise for its gameplay, but I was pleasantly surprised. Armored Core had a great niche in which fast movement did not mean great flexibility. You can boost around at high speeds, but your ability to turn and aim is limited by your mech’s legs and your FCS Lockbox. It was an incredibly compelling way to design a console shooter in which traditional aiming was not the main skill, but instead the usage of movement and positioning to supplement your limited tank controls was heavily emphasized. It tickled a very different part of the brain than most games usually do, and this is not without getting into how deep and detailed the mech-building was and the way in which it very directly affected how you control and move with your AC.

To me, the heart and soul of Resident Evil 4 is the combat, and that's what this review is about. Everything else about the remake is something I can take or leave, but I have many issues with the gameplay and its design, and I’d like to talk about why because it feels like everything that the original did right has been forgotten by both the devs and the fans. 

When From Software announced Armored Core 6, I got interested in exploring the older games in the series in order to find out what kind of bedrock of design that the developer was working with for their next big title.

To expand on that...
I have somewhat complicated feelings on FromSoft, as their games are what made me understand a new to enjoy the medium and started my appreciation for deep, challenging gameplay, and I enjoyed them greatly when I first played them. Unfortunately, I ended up growing a bit frustrated with how their design has settled into a kind of mediocrity where they make their games simpler in terms of the skills they demand out of you, while trying to maintain the difficulty by adjusting the games in IMO uninteresting ways. The Souls games had always had a bit of an issue with how lenient the dodge roll timing is, but their earlier games had expensive stamina costs on them to balance this out, however, as they wanted to make the games more action focused, this started to get in the way. Instead of adjusting it so rolls have less i-frames in order to allow them to design enemies with more flexible attack patterns that emphasize positioning just as much as they could emphasize timing, they instead doubled down.

Ever since Bloodborne, they've been narrowing down their games into timing and reaction challenges as much as they can, with Dark Souls 3 giving you lots of stamina and easy fast roll, and designing bosses to have long strings of attacks to test your ability to roll through all of them as the new main challenge of the game.
Elden Ring headed further in this direction, with longer, weirder strings that meant to throw off the timing of even the most veteran players. their prior game, Sekiro, felt like a mission statement setting in stone their modern design: Extremely simple, static solutions to simple problems. Parry regular Attacks, Mikiri Counter the Thrusts, Jump the Sweeps, Dodge Grabs, and mash your attacks in-between. While its a little uncharitable, I would almost call it a game of Simon Says, at least that's how I felt about it given how reliant the game was on standing in front of the enemy and simply pressing the right button that completely counters that the enemy does. I wasn't very challenged and I didn't think the core design they had going on would even be fun if it was hard. Everything was boiled down into timing and reaction while positioning, difficult decisions, and compelling risk-reward seemed to have faded away from their design.

This review was originally published on my BackLoggd account on October 9, 2021

It feels pretty rough to dislike this game cuz on paper its more interesting to me than any fighting game to come out in the last 5 years. It goes against the trend of recent fighters by keeping the movement options of Melty, speeding up the pace even further, and emphasizing a new host of defensive mechanics, a development that I would normally think is really sick if not for the fact that in practice, I dislike just about every change they made from MBAACC.

This review was originally published on my BackLoggd account on July 3, 2021

I finished Omori thinking it was an alright 3 hour game that stretched itself into 12 hours, but the more I thought about the game and its story, the more those 3 hours lost their value and the weakness of its execution came to the forefront of my mind. It's a game that I wish was less afraid of showing its unique aspects, but it plays it safe and refuses to dig deeper into all the touchy subject matter that it brings up. The game is spends most of its time indulging in the escapist fantasy while leaving the meat of the story feel undeveloped, held back by the game's desire to fit into the mold of Earthbound-inspired RPGs.

This review was originally published on my BackLoggd account on Sept 2, 2021

I find it kinda hard to put my own opinion on Strive in an interesting way. I’d say “it's an alright but janky not-anime-fighter” with some wack mechanics and occasionally cool kits. I see it as the kind of game that won’t be many people’s favorite due to how many compromises it makes in the attempt to be accessible and expansive at the same time, pulling mechanics from all across fighting game sub-genres to do a little bit of everything. It’s far more interesting for me to think about what it represents culturally and what the game is trying to do with the FGC.

This review was originally published on my BackLoggd account on August 19, 2021

This game is fucked. What’s more fucked is that I really like it.

A lot of what this game does appeals to my ideal idea of a comfy game: A crazy amount of mechanical depth and variety comes paired with a behemoth amount of content that gives you adequate space to explore all that depth while also ticking off progression. You will get into a loop where you’re always being introduced to new encounters and new tools to play them with and once you’re in there this game is something special. Issue is uhhh….you won’t get there, not for 10 hours and not without the help of a dozen online resources.

This review was originally published on my BackLoggd account on August 18, 2021

If I gotta use one word to describe World, it's that it’s bloated - not in content, but with goals and concepts that come in conflict with each other. An always-online game with unskippable cutscenes and terrible story progression that makes the co-op experience near unplayable for anyone going through the game. Attempts at QoL and tutorialization all over the game to make it more newbie friendly, yet confuses them with distended menus that are much more difficult to navigate and and a variety of unintuitive tertiary mechanics in the form of clutch claw and slinger that badly attempt to solve MH pain points (that were never really a problem) yet only serve to overwhelm new players and hurt the core combat for veterans. And on a more personal note, the more realistic aesthetic takes away a significant amount of the series’ charm to me. It's easy to see now why this game pushed me away from Monster Hunter.

This review was originally published on my BackLoggd account on July 22, 2021

As a disclaimer, I didn’t finish the game. I got to the 5th region with about 40 hours clocked (felt longer) and the last boss I beat was Ryomen.

I enjoyed the concept of Nioh 1, but Nioh 2 actually hooked me in for a while. The good qualities of the combat stood out a lot more, the weapons were more complex, the enemies felt better balanced, and the yokai form was far more exciting than the living weapon. It helped that the game had a really nice character creator to boot, and a decent bit of QoL.

This review was originally published on my BackLoggd account on July 3, 2021

Before playing this game, I tried to get into MHWorld and failed despite nearly finishing the base game, so I wasn’t expecting to get much out of MHRise when I played it at the request of a friend who definitely wasn’t going to follow up on playing with me, but I was motivated primarily by a dearth of things to occupy me in the time between semesters. Turns out, this game is pretty nice.