Will Borger
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Before Crimson Desert, I’d never played a game I’d describe as maximalist. Crimson Desert is a maximalist video game, defined by its excess, straining against the confines of an open world video game and perhaps the medium itself. It is stunningly ambitious, and often worse for it. It invites you to explore every aspect of its world and hates you for doing so. It is bogged down by design choices that baffle as much as they intrigue. It believes that more is always better, always necessary, that aims to create a living, breathing world, but one that only extends to the major characters. It does not view NPCs as people, and hopes you will not notice. It chases grandeur and gets there perhaps – generously – half the time. The rest of it made me wish I was doing literally anything else. I cannot deny its ambition; I did not enjoy my time with it. It is a game that wastes your time.
The dichotomy of the Metroidvania as a genre is an interesting one. Its world is always ruined, cruel, hostile, perhaps once beautiful, now broken, but the genre asks you to imagine that it wasn’t always that way. That it was beautiful, once, worthwhile, and that no matter how hostile it is now, it might be something you can survive, something you can conquer. You must hold both of these ideas in your head simultaneously if the genre is to make sense. The Metroidvania is a genre of imitation, of something that reminds of something else. You must be able to imagine that the world of the Metroidvania could be a happy one for the trick to work.
The stages and enemies aren’t going to blow you away, but Marvel Cosmic Invasion’s tag team action still has the juice.
Namako explodes into a fountain of blood for what feels like the eighth time, and I open the menu and select Restart Battle. I’m fighting a giant skull and a pair of hands that looks like what I imagine Ocarina of Time’s Bongo Bongo would be if he were a skeleton. Every few turns, his skull splits open and his brain politely drops to the floor of the arena so one of my students can whale on it. It is the only way I can hurt him, and he decides when and how it happens. Our war is one of attrition. That isn’t what’s killing Namako. It’s easy to dodge, as are the bony fingers he stabs into the stone floor of the dank, dusty crypt in which we battle. No, what’s killing her are the little crawly demons his hands place on the floor between turns. He always puts them in random places, so there is no way to prepare for where they’ll be, and Namako, who is particularly susceptible to their attacks, dies in two hits. One bad turn, and she’s little more than a pool of blood traveling the gaps between the stones beneath our feet.
Painkiller is a game about nothing for no one, a mediocre resurrection of a classic trying to put a new cover on an old book and hoping it still has some relevance 21 years later.
Painkiller is a game about nothing for no one, a mediocre resurrection of a classic trying to put a new cover on an old book and hoping it still has some relevance 21 years later.
Bounty Star’s combination of mech combat and farming is equal parts compelling and tranquil, and Clem’s story is riveting. Sometimes, you have to get back in the robot and hope there’s a life on the other side.
Absolum is an excellent beat ‘em up let down by a roguelite structure that doesn’t serve it.
Joining a co-op crew in Jump Space's space and on-foot action is full of sci-fi thrills and chill sessions with friends, but the early access caveat is that its objectives get repetitive pretty much from the jump.
There’s always room for improvement, but it’s hard to overstate what a leap Madden NFL 26 feels like both on and off the field.