Review: Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

So I’m closing in on 60 hours of playtime in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and while I’m still not finished with the main story (not for lacking of trying, mind you) I’ve reached a sufficient point where I think I can give a good review of the game. It’s pretty much the only game that’s had my attention over the last month (although there were a few others that I will go over in my monthly recap as well). I was a little wary going into the game because the last big game I played was Spider-Man and I was possibly risking burnout by jumping into another action-oriented open world game. Especially since Odyssey’s map is much larger than Spider-Man’s NYC.

I talked a little bit about my specific problem with Odyssey’s map design and traversal aspects in an earlier blog post, and they continued to persist as I got further into the game. I abuse fast travel like nobody’s business and often have my horse or ship auto-take me to the next place I want to go while I turn my attention to Twitter or Facebook for a few minutes. That is probably the game’s biggest flaw in terms of design – you do a lot of traveling from place to place in the game but the journey is never interesting.

But as the famous saying goes, it’s not about the journey – it’s about the destination. Wait, that’s not right. Well, regardless of how the saying goes, I’m going to take a deeper dive into my experiences with Odyssey and how it stacks up against other massive open-world games.

(Some main story and sidequest spoilers for Assassin’s Creed Odyssey will follow.)

Continue reading “Review: Assassin’s Creed Odyssey” →

Review: Marvel’s Spider-Man

Earlier in April of this year I posted this article – and on September 7th, I was finally able to get my hands on Spider-Man to play it. I got the Collector’s Edition and also upgraded my PS4 to the limited edition Spider-Man PS4 Pro. It is an understatement to say that I was excited to play the game. And a little over a week later I’ve completed the game – I earned the Platinum trophy (only one of five that I’ve earned, the others being Horizon: Zero Dawn, Day of the Tentacle Remastered, and two Telltale games which basically only require you to play the entire game to get them).

Spider-Man was an amazing game that I loved almost every minute of – it will almost assuredly be between it and God of War for what I consider my personal game of the year, unless something coming in the next three months manage to impress me more (here’s looking at you Super Smash Bros). It wasn’t a perfect game, though – in fact it actually had a few glaring problems. But considering how Insomniac absolutely nailed everything else, the highs totally outweighed the lows.

So as someone who’s pretty much done everything the base game has to offer, it’s time for my review. There will be mild spoilers for certain parts of the game, but nothing regarding the major plot points that Insomniac wanted to keep secret.

Continue reading “Review: Marvel’s Spider-Man” →

Review: Octopath Traveler

Octopath Traveler is a very interesting game. I was originally only going to talk a little bit about it in a more general sense instead of giving a full review but after playing it off and on for the last few weeks I suddenly realized I’d accumulated 50 or so hours of playtime in the game. At that point I felt the game deserved an actual review instead and so here we are.

Octopath Traveler is a game that tries to hearken back to the old-school SNES days of JRPGs where sprites and beautiful enemy artwork were abundant. Despite the older games it tries to emulate, Octopath has its own unique graphical style that isn’t just “trying to be retro.” It’s one of the more perfect blends of retro and modern designs, unlike say Undertale that was fully pixel art. Not to say Undertale’s graphics are bad, but Octopath’s blend of 2D and 3D makes its landscapes pop and the beautiful art stand out.

Before I go any further in my review, I’m going to go ahead and give a mild spoiler warning for what follows – I’ll talk about a few plot details and the endgame and postgame content while giving a thorough overview of the whole game. So if you want to be surprised by gameplay secrets and what-not be warned I will go in-depth on them. I will try to keep any story spoilers as vague as possible, though.

Now let’s continue.

Continue reading “Review: Octopath Traveler” →

Review: God of War

I finished God of War about a week and a half ago. I started trying to write a review for it but ended up with an immense case of writer’s block, which struck me as weird because I really, really liked the game. So I shelved the review and stepped back to think about why I was having issues writing it out. And the writer’s block basically creeped into all writing as I just sat and stared at the computer screen any time I attempted to write for the last week.

What I finally realized was that I was trying to contextualize my review and base it off of my pre-God of War post – which you can read here – and trying to discuss all the things I brought up in that post and that was not only overwhelming me but it was causing me blockage (heh heh) because I didn’t know where to begin or how to approach all the issues. So instead I’m just going to review the game like I would normally and maybe touch on a few things here or there related to my initial musings on the game before I actually got my hands on it.

There will be some mild spoilers on early game story beats in the review, so if you aren’t a few hours into the game and care about those sorts of things this is your last chance to abandon ship. For the rest of you, let’s begin!

Continue reading “Review: God of War” →

Review: Celeste

Celeste is an interesting game that I’ve been both hot and cold on. It released on January 25, a little less than a month ago, on pretty much every current platform – PS4, Switch, XBox One, PC, etc. It’s a single-player platformer from the maker of Towerfall: Ascension, a very fun multiplayer game that my friends and I enjoyed. I even made a few videos of it for my YouTube channel a while ago. As Towerfall was only multiplayer, it seems fitting that the creator designed an only single-player game using similar platforming mechanics.

The object of Celeste is simple: you are a young girl named Madeline who is climbing the mountain Celeste for…some reason. Through sheer will and determination (along with the ability to dash-jump) you help her navigate the treacherous pitfalls of Celeste. You meet a few interesting characters along the way, but the story is a very light backdrop for the real meat of the game – precision platforming fun.

Continue reading “Review: Celeste” →

Review: Xenoblade Chronicles 2

So as of writing this, the in-game counter for Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has me at about 50 hours of playtime. I haven’t finished it – in actuality I just finished Chapter 5 and it supposedly can take close to 100 hours to finish entirely – but I figure 50 hours is a solid enough amount of time to spend with a video game for a good review. And while I can’t say Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a bad game since I’ve spent over two days playing it, it definitely has issues that detract from the overall experience.

Continue reading “Review: Xenoblade Chronicles 2” →

Review: Strong Female Adventurers x3

I’ve recently been playing through a few different single player games on my PS4, and I realized that all of them coincidentally had a running theme: all of them are third-person adventure games that star a female protagonist as the main playable character. And since they’re all similar I decided to throw all three together into a comparison/review blender. So here we go. The three games are:

Rise of the Tomb Raider
Uncharted: The Lost Legacy
Horizon: Zero Dawn – The Frozen Wilds

Continue reading “Review: Strong Female Adventurers x3” →

Review: Hidden Agenda

In 2015, Supermassive Games released a fun game called Until Dawn. It is a horror game where you control 8 different people and make choices that determine whether all 8 survive the night, or if they all end up dead. When it was released I thought it would be fun to get all my friends together and play it – when it came to important choices we’d all yell and scream and it was like watching and being a part of an interactive horror movie. It ended up being an event where we stayed up literally until dawn and finished the game in one sitting. And all of us had a lot of fun doing it.

Now as it turns out, apparently I wasn’t the only one to have this idea as Supermassive got a lot of feedback from friends about how much fun it was to play the game as an event with a bunch of people watching. So that spawned their latest game – Hidden Agenda – a game similar to Until Dawn where you have two protagonists and have to make choices to see if they survive the entire plot. Except they specifically designed this game to be multiplayer so everyone playing can put in their votes to determine the outcome. And not only that, but it was only $20 – and since my friends and I had such a great time with Until Dawn, I figured I’d get them together again and we’d play through it. Everyone was down for the idea and so this past weekend we all played through Hidden Agenda from start to finish.

Continue reading “Review: Hidden Agenda” →