Joe Bariso
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MonsterVineLatest Reviews
The Final Word Nothing it does truly elevates itself to the greatness of the Southern Gothic look it’s going for, and in a lot of ways, gets in the way of truly enjoying the beautiful locales that are shown. There are only so many times you can enter a circular combat chamber and fight the same enemies over and over with subpar abilities before it gets droll. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the area outside of that arena is.
This is emblematic of the game as a whole, solid choices, mixed with overambition that never quite realizes what it’s reaching for. But what’s strange is that the game still mainly works despite its flaws. At its core, it’s a strong well made game, and you want to keep playing it. Experimentation isn’t always perfect, not every game can flawlessly reinvent itself, sometimes there are misfires, and sometimes they nail it, and sometimes both can happen. Sure there are criticisms of the format of this game, but Assassin’s Creed Shadows succeeds in the one area it needed to: making you feel like a ninja.
Despite it all, Metaphor: ReFantazio is a game about hope. The hope of a brighter day. It makes no qualms about the hardship that comes with that hope. The battles that must be fought, the pain that must be endured, but also the friends you make along the way, the power of kindness. The power of belief.
At its core, The Plucky Squire is a pretty traditional old-school Zelda game. It hits all the notes, even down to the traditional hero’s story, albeit with a meta aspect. But the game also functions as a celebration of the stories that stick with us. The small silly things we love from our youth, the stories that inspire our want to create art ourselves. You can feel that love in almost every aspect of the game. Sure there’s a lot of borrowed ideas and concepts, things that might seem formulaic or cliche, but it knows this, it embraces them. The Plucky Squire is here to remind us why we love these tropes. Why every story, no matter how small, is important.
All this said the core combat and the pawn system are great. It’s a joy to mess around with different classes on you and your pawns. Especially when rolling with some particularly weird ones. Like my beloved Frog Nasty. The game really wants you to experiment, and it never feels like you’re being punished for trying something new and it’s always easy to swap stuff if it doesn’t feel like it’s working out.
In a lot of ways Starfield feels like Bethesda Game Studios magnum opus, it’s a collection of almost every design idea and concept they worked on since Daggerfall nearly 30 years ago. A lot of these design choices can be seen as them pushing exploration past simple silhouettes on the horizon but into the joy of discovering mechanics themselves. It’s a weird sometimes messy game, but one that will have a stranglehold on your life. Every moment feels like you could find something new. Feel something new. Be something new.
You also occasionally run up against the edges of what you can do, which again isn’t much and inevitable really. Sometimes a dialog prompt won’t have anything you would want to say. Or a questline will go into a direction you don’t really feel your character would, but this is still a video game and it still has a story to tell, and compared to an actual table top game anything can feel limited at times.
None of this is bad, the game runs fine, and nothing is broken, but it isn’t fun and to quote one Monkey D. Luffy: “I don’t want to go on an adventure that isn’t fun.” What’s the point of a massive world if nothing is interesting? What’s the point of exploring if you know exactly what you’re going to get? One could argue that the journey is the reward, playing with the combat system and seeing the world, but at a point, that isn’t enough. A good adventure is its own reward, but you have to have something worth adventuring for.
On top of that most of the story is locked behind a system called Criminal Ventures, locations that you buy to increase your hourly income. The more you have unlocked and completed the further into the story you can go. All of these ventures are really just minigames, one of which is the series staple Insurance Fraud, which is still fun, but the rest range from mediocre to insufferable. It’s a grind to finish them and it’s a grind to get the money to buy them, and unlocking them only unlocks another chapter in a loosely connected story that you have little connection with.
All that said, if you’re looking for a game with an incredible art style that you can easily drop in and out of whenever Cult of the Lamb is phenomenal for that. The game has a problem with diminishing returns, but the visuals and overall vibe of the game make up for most of that. Sometimes style does win out over substance, and Cult of the Lamb has style to spare.