Too Long; Didn't Review

This game is transcendent. On the surface it trades as a tongue-in-cheek revival of low-budget 90s FPS smashed through a membrane of the Geocities-era DIY aesthetic that Hypnospace Outlaw was built upon. It's an alright shooter as they go - functional and fun enough on a mechanical level, at least as far as the committment to making the ugliest, most visually cluttered game will allow it to go. But deep down, Slayers X is about a middle-aged guy who used to imagine himself a tech-god teenage edgelord, unable to voice his disappointment at the mundane drudgery of adulthood, revisiting a piece of very personal art that his younger self was never able to make real. It draws you back to your adolescence when the potential of the world seemed to be somewhat limitless and no-one ever imagined that their most likely destination was to become one of millions of faces in a crowd of boring white-collar nobodies.

We see all versions of Zane: the outwardly obnoxious, juvenile child, and the lonely teenager grieving the death of his mother. We see the tired, disillusioned single parent who hasn't matured much, but dedicates a special corner of this game to his infant son. We see a man who cannot forget the greatest years of his life, even if the greatness of those years existed only in his head and on the internet. But, importantly, we see a man who hasn't entirely lost the energy and passion of his youth, and is willing to put the time and effort into finishing a work of art that captured a snapshot of the entirety of his person at a specific and definitive point in his existence.

I think of all the ideas I had in my teens and early 20s that never went anywhere - the half finished scripts, books, songs - that I scrapped because I thought they weren't good enough. The pieces of self-expression lost forever because I got a new computer or deleted a file I didn't think I needed. If I had them all here in front of me now I would have an album of media cataloguing who I was at those moments in a way no photo could ever do justice. A collection of things that would be worse than I remember and better than I remember, that would show me how far I've come, and how far I've strayed. I have memories of those times, of the excitement and confusion and chaos and joy, but nothing material to connect me to those memories. If Zane had finished and published this game at the time, would it have garnered attention? Would he have met a community of designers? Would he have worked on another, applied for training as a designer, worked at a development studio, created something more definitive? Could he have been at the forefront of a creative revolution alongside 90s legends such as John Romero and Tim Cain? This game suggests to me that he thinks he could have. It suggests to me that as he got older made bad choices, or safe choices, or just different choices.

And therein lies the most devastating part of Slayers X - the part that I think most adult humans can relate to. You'll always remember the moments when you felt on top of the world, and the moments of potential lost because of feelings you didn't chase, or feelings you did that didn't work out. Things passed you by, sometimes because you didn't realise they were there, and sometimes because you didn't think they were important. But as you get older you forget the pain and the fear and the emotional instability, and some part of you that you cannot ever be aware of at the time becomes clear. There was a spark there. A spark that drove you to go out and see people and watch bands and movies that you didn't know where going to be great or suck, to talk to strangers and become friends or enemies with people you'll never see again, to walk an hour home along dark streets at 3am because you couldn't afford a taxi from the bar. A spark that made some people love you and some people hate you. Time and the demands of life have worn down its edges and homogenised you; it has sapped your energy and diminished your ambitions. You are still capable of new, exciting ideas, but you talk yourself out of them without even considering them because you don't have time, or you value different things now. But that spark...that uncertainty...the terrifying exhiliration of a future unknown. It was there once, so raw and firey and flawed and desperate to be unleashed.

Years ago I wrote a fond review of an infant Elite: Dangerous - a game that captured my imagination even while it bored me. But it could only have been a matter of weeks after I wrote it that I stopped playing for the first time. Since then I've returned again and again - five or six separate times - started a new game, and saw what the galaxy had to offer. I bought both DLCs looking for that spark of magic to reignite, but it never did. My returning playtimes got shorter and shorter as I got older, my existential dread increased, and my thoughts more wholly turned to the feeling of a clock ticking down the remaining hours of my time on this planet. Since that first review the myth of 'endlessly evolving' live service games proved itself beyond argument to be a pathetic low-effort grift designed to minimise the cost of effort and creativity in exchange for a self-perpetuating trickle of money from victims of the sunk-cost fallacy. Frontier abandoned development on consoles a few years ago, and one day they'll turn off the servers for good and all the thousands and millions of dollars poured by players into cosmetics will be rendered meaningless in a nanosecond. ED as it exists now is in many ways identical to the game it was back then. And yet, while the DLCs feel bird-boned hollow I honestly can't recommend getting the base game on its own. It was bare then, and it's bare now. The wonder of touching down on planets in the DLC is a dim spark in the infinite emptiness of space, and while I can't justify their price for the content the DLCs provide, I don't believe the game retains its value without them. I understand if that seems like a raw deal.

Adding a launcher to the game that adds played time while the game is downloading extra content is pure villainy. It effectively means you shouldn't buy the game if you can't part with the money you're spending, because you're not likely to get it back.

In terms of the game's theorietical scope and mission, I think it's unsurpassed. You simply won't find another piece of media like this. No Man's Sky does the '400 billion planets' thing too, but it doesn't aim to make them scientifically cohesive with our actual real-life galaxy. It doesn't aim to recreate the feeling of travelling in our real universe. If you're looking for an emulation of the feeling of exploring the true-to-life vast and haunting strangeness of space, then you won't find a more immersive game than this. That said, immersion by design often refuses to concede to choices that would make a game more conventionally 'fun'. This is true with Elite Dangerous. Space is big, and space is empty. Space travel, even at impossible speeds, is long and tedious. You'll find plenty of philosophical debates about the value of changing the travel mechanic and its overall effect on the game, but at the end of the day this is what it is.

The biggest issue is that the larger you make your gameworld, the harder it is to fill it. And if your gameworld is intended to be a persistent space for everyone, it becomes impossible to make it meaningfully persistent for *anyone*. Players affect the galaxy in the same way a single janitor affects a multinational company. The story is an abstraction happening everywhere and nowhere. You'll read a lot about political struggles but never encounter anyone of note first-hand. Your attempts to extend the influence of a faction ultimately amount to a bit more in the bank and a line going up in a small region. The main impact of the Thargoid conflict is that you might accidentally stumble into a Thargoid controlled system and lose your ship in seconds to a single enemy. Shooting pirates, mining rocks, trading, and 'travelling' vast distances while you do something else on your phone for a few minutes is really, honestly, all this game has to offer in any concrete way, outside of the times you walk the surface of a moonbase. You won't be making any significant differences to your corner of the galaxy. Your ability to suspend your own sense of disbelief and play in the sandbox for a while is all you're going to have to carry you through. I find that easier to do on some replays given how life-like and immersive the game looks and feels. But the harder you're made to work for small gains, the more it hurts to lose them, and having your bank account halved because you didn't have the right gun attached when you zipped into an alien system because the obtuse map is hard to read has a far more devastating effect on a player here than in a game in which concessions to fun have been made.

I think it's very important to keep in mind the scope and limitations of Elite Dangerous before you pay for it. It really is the most intensely immersive space sim on the market. There's nothing like it from that perspective. It's quite a profound experience in some ways. But it's a win and a loss. This, like all games similar to it released in the last 10 years, is an experiment that has in some ways succeeded, and in other ways cratered. Making this game a 'live service' was a huge mistake - continued upkeep means the need for a constant revenue source, while the player-base diminishes because they've failed to imbue the game with an inherent motivating factor. There aren't any dedicated hubs of human activity, so you'll rarely see anyone. And if you come across a station with other players there, the biggest impact they're likely to have is that they take up a parking spot and you have to wait until they leave. I just play on Solo now. If you play alone anyway the experience is the same.

Postal 2 was released right in the middle of what should have been my prime teenage-edgelord years, but while it’s had a resurgence in popularity due to nostalgia, returning to it, the game strikes me now exactly as it did then - a forgettable and borderline broken, amateurish piece of software that was crowded out of all but the most fringe playerbases by other, better, more interesting games.

Postal 2 is Hatred, if Hatred mistakenly thought it was funny - it was a try-hard attempt at outrunning South Park in a race no-one was watching. The irony is that in hindsight South Park turned out to be tedious fence-sitting ‘all sides are equally stupid’ takes from a pair of moron Gen Xers who thought that not having a strong opinion about anything was cool and were also responsible for mass-marketing anti-semitism to an entire generation. It was seen as edgy and provocative in the 2000s, and now it’s laughed at for its rigid, pointed adherence to committing nothing of value to any issue. And in trying to out-do Parker and Stone the developers of Postal 2 shackled themselves to the exact same sinking ship.

The game is…not great. It’s ugly, and poorly put-together. There are constant issues with controls and soundtrack - you can hear the audio clicking repeatedly in the opening minutes of the game because whoever did the sound design stitched together a bunch of stock sound effects and didn’t crossfade the adjoining tracks. The same 3 second soundbite of a bird repeats endlessly - noticeable because it is the only sound playing as you tour through the town. And while there is something to be said for the effort put into programming all the systems that go towards simulating the mundanity of everyday life (and towards your disruption of that mundanity with a can of gasoline and a box of matches), this was an indie game with a certain amount of ambition developed before crowdfunding could turn these games into something worth playing. It’s tedious, but not in the way the developers intended - it’s tedious mechanically, like playing in a small, ugly, sadistic sandbox. The most interesting thing you discover about it is that doing everyday tasks like shopping for milk, and burning everyone in the town alive, are actions that get boring at exactly the same rate as one another.

That said, I think there’s a certain amount of accidental Tom Green-esque avant-garde nihilism in the absurdity of this game. It’s kind of funny to watch the 'Parents For Decency’ whip out pistols and try to murder every member of the Running With Scissors development team because they don’t like their violent games. That’s genuine satire - it actually says something real, and, because the 'think of the children’ groups are usual comprised of wealthy conservatives trying to avoid caring about actual tangible suffering in the world, the commentary kicks upwards at a group that will otherwise avoid any punishment for their hypocrisy. The icing on the cake is that you can then choose to kill them in self-defence, proving that you’re exactly the thing they were protesting. Postal 2 has something to say occasionally. Very occasionally. But then give it a few hours and you’re murdering dozens of shrieking racist stereotypes of Afghanis that all look like Osama Bin Laden.

If you kill 30 people from every type of skin colour you get an achievement called 'Sheriff Arpaio would be proud’. I had to google his name because I thought he he was a mass murderer with some kind of pointedly indiscriminate political agenda. Nope - he was a white Sheriff in Arizona who specifically profile non-white people in one of the most widespread examples of open racism in American law enforcement since segregation was made ‘illegal’. And given recent history, that’s saying something. He alone cost the taxpayers of his one county $140 million dollars via lawsuits brought against him. The fucking U.S. Justice Department sued him. If I hadn’t researched that I wouldn’t have realised he was actually a massive racist asshole who specifically targeted Hispanics and black people, because Running With Scissors made a false equivalence in their throwaway gag that just happens to mislead the player about the racist crimes of the person they’re referencing. 'Sheriff Arpaio would be proud’…because it was a numbers game? Yes, that’s what he liked. Persecuting *everyone* - as many people as possible, and not one very specific demographic of people.

I’m not saying that this stupid joke intentionally whitewashes the racism of its namesake, and I’m not saying that this, coupled with the developers’ portrayal of Middle Eastern people as homogenous terrorists screaming gibberish through the singular face of a mass murderer is in any way an explicit demonstration of their edgelord racist worldview. I’m not saying that, in the same that I’m not saying that a crack-smoking, dog-kicking, wife-abusing, spree-killer living in a trailer in any way reflects their perspective towards the poor, and that this entire game is one big middle-finger to everything the developers personally dislike. I’m saying that there’s a marked difference between forcing players to kill brown people because they’re all terrorists and forcing players to kill white people because they’re vegetarians. Or have red hair. Jesus that was such a 2003 joke wasn’t it?

At the very least, the panel of people who mindmapped the ideas that came together to form the foundational commentary of Postal 2 are dumb as dogshit, and the end result of that is 'whoopsie we’re slaughtering dozens of Muslims ho ho ho the Indian food store has Afghani suicide bombers in it all these people are the same skin colour Sheriff Arpaio did a bad thing to *lots of different people!*’

Isn’t it interesting that a game touted as a free-for-all and remembered for it’s 'all sides are bad’ South Park-esque 'sick of the system’ worldview actually depicts its town exactly from the perspective of one very specific demographic of people - the single most represented demographic in the American population: middle-class straight white male Gen Xers who feel disenfranchised but are also ardently pro-America, hate the poor despite not being wealthy themselves, hate the rich for being richer than them, hate 'rednecks’ for being too uncivilised, hate 'conservatives’ for being too stuck-up, and hate liberals for not fitting into a stuck-up conservative worldview. When you think of yourself as the lone, correct singularity trapped in the centre of a world filled with people who are wrong because they care too much about things you don’t like to think about, literally every other person on the planet becomes a potential threat. Your life is given meaning by the feeling of persecution this constant target on your back brings. And it’s a lot easier to take your anger out on a toothless social group than to comprehend your own lack of identity - to make fun of 'gingers’ and vegetarians like you were born yesterday rather than do anything legitimately rebellious or anti-establishment. Particularly if your specific demographic is the one nearly all media is catered towards. Movies are telling you that you’re the hero, but your miserable job tells you that you’re just a rube. Who’s to blame? Don’t bother thinking about it, because you might end up on a crusade, and you don’t want to be like those losers who keep going on about their problems. Make a game in which you kill all those people instead. That’ll teach em.

Postal 2 is the kind of stand-up comic that gets heckled for telling an offensive joke and then threatens to shoot-up the audience if they won’t stop booing him. It was made - poorly even for the time - by a bunch of clowns playing to the easiest possible audience: white edgelords. It’s a power fantasy for people who don’t have anything meaningful to fight for, so they fight gingers. Y'know, because South Park did it. Nazis are funny, gingers are bad. Everyone is wrong, stick to the middle. The middle of a spectrum. The middle of the road. The middle of a river as it sweeps you out to sea. It’s all the same.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA .

I've found it really hard to find a customer review from someone who hasn't welded their self-worth to the review score of this product, so I'm here to try and fill that gap and rupture the spleens of a few deeply unhealthy people who really need to log off. 

First, let's be clear - as a product, Cyberpunk 2077 is in no way mechanically 'ground-breaking'. From top-to-bottom, the systems, setting, and gameplay are all well-worn within the RPG and FPS genres. Driving, shooting, stealth, crafting, weapon upgrading...it's all been done before, and in many cases it's been done better. The game doesn't even adapt its source material particularly well - the original Cyberpunk was a critique of capitalism, oppression, racism, and corporate domination; Cyberpunk 2077 is translated by a company that has openly placed itself on the wrong side of several of those issues in its recent history. It shouldn't be a surprise that their interpretation of such a property eliminates its subtext, nuance, and meaningfulness in favour of simple and staid mechanical tropes in an edgy neon slum world.

What I'm saying is that Cyberpunk 2077 is not a ‘next-gen’ experience, nor is it even the best example of what this generation of video games has to offer. Ironically, it’s surpassed in that aspect (in my mind, at least) by the game that inspired much of this game’s pre-release hype: The Witcher 3. The Witcher 3 was an example of existing trends polished to their apex. It is a high water mark of its genre. But even putting the bugs, glitches, and outright broken versions aside, Cyberpunk 2077 is not a paragon of anything. Its features are, in many instances, a lesser copy of long established features in other releases.

It looks good, in certain instances. But the most impressive visual moments will tank the performance of hardware even one year old, and you simply will not be able to run it at acceptable framerates without some kind of resolution downscaling on most systems. In many other instances, the lighting and shadowing is buggy, the textures are blurry at various distances from the aforementioned downscaling, and the character animations are often janky, making an expensive and meticulously designed world that largely cannot be interacted with feel that bit more fake. And, as always, it's on these small details that the immersion rests. So it's almost funny that CDPR spent so much money and went to so much effort trying to make the game melt your PC when that effort is frequently undone by a character whose neck bends the wrong way while he's talking to you.

The world is big and pretty, but it's filled with bullet-sponge enemies that just stand there and trade fire, vendors you can't talk to, shopfronts you can't buy from, objects you can't interact with, and NPCs that flee screaming in terror when you knock over a garbage bin. The story is almost incomprehensible, and the dialogue is edgy, performative technobabble that far too frequently loses the point of what its trying to say as the weight of all the characters' manufactured quirks pile down on top of it. The HUD is overcrowded and will hurl text and video at you that are hard to concentrate on amongst the busy and bustling visual environment. And this is kind of the way the whole game goes. There isn't really a system, visual, or gameplay element that isn't either flawed, derivative, or just not as game-changing as you were expecting.

And obviously those expectations were absurd in the first place, but sadly the poisonous community of people who have inexplicably tied their own sense of self and well-being to the critical opinion of an entertainment product made by a company they're in no-way associated with have made it near impossible to find a reaction that isn't saturated with some kind of anger at either the developers for swindling them, or the audience for daring to speak about their experience.

At the end of the day, it's just a video game. A bombastic, costly piece of entertainment software, who's reach exceeds its grasp. Maybe, one day, it might be greater than the sum of its parts, but given the rushed state it released in, the fact that the company spokespeople lied about the game's quality and embargoed reviews so consumers wouldn't find out, crunched its employees for a release date the game wasn't even ready for, and generally conducted themselves duplicitously and arrogantly, will they ever really deserve to be congratulated? Not for this product. Once again, Cyberpunk is trumped by games that released in a worse state and will likely end up in a better one than this, and I wonder if it will be simply be remembered as another example of the industry’s hubris - a product with lofty ambitions but little innovation produced under duress by a company with too much power and not enough sense.

While perusing Metacritic for reviews on the new Assassin’s Creed clone, it struck me as interesting that the 7/10 reviews have dozens of downvotes and are buried, while myriad one-line 10/10 reviews have several dozen upvotes pushing them to the top of the default display. And given that the reviews labeled 'unhelpful' by the corporate shills were uniformly the ones that matched my own experience with the game, I decided to rise from the grave and write a substantive review that those treating the game like the second coming of Christ can band together and cry about to their heart's content. Because, to a discerning buyer, raising the ire of fanboys seems to be a rather clear mark of reliability.

But let’s not fuck around - in brief: if you liked Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, then you'll likely enjoy the skeleton of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. Despite what you might have thought if you, like me, were influenced by the marketing, Valhalla is indeed another Unisoft game (that was a fortunate typo that I’m going to leave, as the company literally makes one game over and over again) that feeds from exactly the same trough as the one before it, and essentailly makes some small, less significant tweaks to the previous release that change the feeling of the game slightly, but not enough to make it feel fresh.

Mind you, this is coming from a person who, to my great and crippling shame, has had a long and pervaisive secret enjoyment of the company’s safe and often-mindless gameplay loops. Ubisoft games have been, I’m sad to say, my go-to pick up and play experiences. I hate it, and I hate the company, and I hate myself, but that’s the way it’s been for a the largest part of my life. And that’s how you know that I’m *RIGHT* when I say this game isn’t worth your time.

If you carry with you a sense of fatigue at the expansive and often-repetitive nature of Odyssey's content, then you might find yourself starting this game with that fatigue hanging over you as I did. To be clear - I loved Odyssey. It was the only AC game since 2013 that didn't categorically bore me long before the end. But it was huge and tiring, there can be no skirting around that fact. So the understanding that you're not playing a fundamentally different game sets in very quickly, and so does the exhaustion that Odyssey eventually gave way to, despite how fun it was. The feeling is mimicked here - Valhalla is fun as well, and it *is* a tweaked version of its predecessor. But it never, ever diverges enough to feel like much other than the exact same formula, and while I find that formula less worn-out than that of, say, the formula of the later 'old-style' AC games like Syndicate or Unity, it's still worn-out nonetheless.

Ubisoft is up to their old tricks, of course, and like so many releases in the series so far, Valhalla feels like a step slightly too far down the same road. This feeling is exactly what famously tanked Syndicate’s sales and forced the company to revamp for Origins. But we're 20-something games deep in the series now, so no matter what minor changes Ubisoft make to their releases, each new games holds a far-more-quickly diminishing set of returns for long-time players.

Which is to say that, while I managed to feel excited (for once) in anticipation of an experience I thought might honestly be different, Valhalla has ultimately been the game to convince me that the series has reached its natural end. It simply cannot be iterated anymore. Each new release needs to be wildly revamped or give up, because there's just not enough 'new' game here for a 90 dollar release. It's one of two dozen other games that all kind of feel the same, and one of three RPG-style games that already feel like they're being spat out of the Ubisoft-open-world-Build-O-Matic 2000 pipeline.

Which, y'know, if you're not tired of the other games, might be appealing. I 've already admitted that I like the mindlessness of the gameplay loop, and Valhalla offers a beautiful new setting with some fairly engaging story and gory combat. New additions like combat stamina remedy the juvenile button-mashing of Odyssey, but then, what little they try to change only works half as well as you’d hope it would. Combat controls themselves are rather clunky and lack the finesse needed to maintain a nice gameplay flow. You'll often find yourself getting struck by enemies simply because you hit a button one-too-many times. On lesser difficulties this is not so much a problem, but when you suffer a one-hit death because you press the attack button one single time too many it can be enraging. You can dodge to cancel actions, which gives the combat a welcome learning curve - you can get better in-game by improving as a player - but it isn't enough for the fighting to feel substantially less shallow, and in most ways, the aged game engine struggles to meet the demands of the system they've designed. And honestly, it's very likely that this is because the developers suffered horribly at the hands of company management during production.

It's devastating to know that you're playing a game that *feels* like it was made by overworked people. The reported crunch and abusive work conditions that people like Jim Sterling have been trying hard to draw awareness to is worn on Valhalla's sleeve more clearly than ever in the bugs, the glitches, the slapdash animations, the lack of innovation, and the clunky mechanics. This game was forced out before Christmas and could easily have benefitted from, among other things, months of extra development time. But that suggested solution ignores the fact that there's no saving a game created just to make money, by a company infamously cruel to its employees, with the tightest possible development schedule and the slimmest allowable window for innovation. It's a deep scar seen clear as day, but importantly given context by a knowledge of how the game was produced.

If you’ve ever dreamt of killing yourself by hurling your body into a tree at fifty miles an hour, then Steep is here to satisfy that desire. Developed by Ubisoft’s Annecy studio, the game is their first lead-developer credit after a career of working on the multiplayer portions of some of their parent’s most notable single-player franchises - Splinter Cell and Assassin’s Creed. And it shows. Because while the passion for X-Games, and for the beautiful French Alps is evident, the developer’s skill at realising their intentions is not. 

When you think of X-Games, you think of a thrill, right? Hurtling down picturesque yet treacherous terrain in the world’s most remote and unspoiled wilderness. Skin-of-your-teeth weaving through trees and over cliffs. Mastery over mind and body, as a peak physical form is pushed to its limits. You don’t think about people fighting with their own feet to get themselves to go where they want, and slamming head-first into fences and houses again and again because their body isn’t doing what you’re telling it to. Well...bad news. Because the latter is the experience you’re going to primarily indulge in Steep as you wrestle with the unintuitive and uncustomisable control system that Annecy have forced down your throat. 

Somehow both twitchy and unresponsive at the same time, the controls are the game’s biggest flaw, if, for nothing else, than the fact that this is a god-damn sports game. On the ground you’ll try to steer away from obstacles and the character either won’t move fast enough, or simply won’t move at all, and in the air a mosquito’s fart on your joystick will cause you to initiate a spinning or flipping trick for which there is no clear indicator as to when it will stop, sending you crashing into the ground, or slowing you down and knocking you off balance and leaving you vulnerable to being knocked off your feet at even the slightest jostle thereon. There is a certain learning curve that can make you ‘better', but there’s no way to make you good, because the game’s course and mission design prevent you from being able to finish the majority of the courses the first time round. This is often due to the lack of direct camera control - a nightmare if you’re heading over a steep drop in which unknown peril awaits. And if you move into the first-person view, brace yourself for the motion sickness. Your head whips hard into the direction you’re intending to steer your character, which is problematic given the fact that your character often won’t travel in the direction you point them. That, combined with the incessant bumping and jostling, makes you wonder why they implemented it in the first place. It’s not like I go for a jog in real life and have to stop and retch because the head-bobbing has made me sick. Your brain corrects for the movements of your body - so why would anyone think that a go-pro-eye view is the right kind of ‘realism’ for their game? Outside of the core design, the courses are severely wanting in quality as well, and this is almost entirely due to the fact that at least half the runs require you to hit extremely specific markers in order to finish them. You can ski through this little mountain town if you want, but to *win* you’ll need to follow this exact path to the letter, because if you miss a single checkpoint, you gotta start again. Yes, instead of just hitting you with a time penalty or something equivalent, Steep instead opts simply to fail you outright for not hitting each check point on the money. And if it’s not doing that, it’s telling you to complete one single trick worth a certain amount of points. And if it’s not doing that it’s telling you to knock down some snowmen which, for some reason, don’t lie on a single path to be linked together, but are scattered around all sides of the mountain and can’t ever be toppled in less than 4-5 separate runs. Because that’s why people go snowboarding. To do a single trick, or to take round-trips down a mountain and back to collect all the snowmen. I can see that it’s an attempt to give some sense of narrative to an otherwise borderless, open gaming experience, but the point of X-Games is to slide down a mountain. Give me a decent path to slide down and I’ll slide down it happily and thank you for the privilege. There’s no need for this to be an open world. There’s no need for narrative. Give me a proper career mode if you’re so desperate for a story. There is no functional benefit to the XP system. There is no functional benefit to the ability to walk the map - the drop-zones are kilometres away from one-another and you trudge through the snow at a crawl, so it’s never a practical feature worth using. I admire the fact that they’ve tried to make a ‘modern’ X-Games experience, but the word ‘modern’ as it exists in Ubisoft’s lexicon is far-removed from anything one can define positively. Ubisoft’s ‘modern’ is shorthand for ‘trope’. And the trope here is the open world - a genre in which Ubisoft has consistently demonstrated they lack the chops to fill.  And for all its faults, I think it’s the lack of room for spontaneity that really sucks the soul out of the experience. While limiting the breadth of activities might have rustled some feathers, replacing all the boring ‘follow this NPC’ missions and all the checkpoint garbage with free-style time trials would have been far more fun and far more replayable than a course that requires you to restart again and again in order to learn the exact path you need to follow to hit certain markers - a course you don’t want or need to repeat once you’ve done it already. For a game that is trying to buy into the whole ‘open world’ deal, it rarely lets you simply go and see what lies ahead and tackle it as it comes - you have to tackle everything as the game wants you to, and if you don’t, restart, restart, restart. You’ll clip the top of a tree and have to restart. You’ll fall too hard and have to restart. There’s no option to adjust your footing mid-air, so you’ll drift off your axis and have to restart. Errors at speed send you plummeting down the mountain for 15-20 seconds before you grind to a halt and your character slowly, slooooowly, climbs to his feet, and you may as well have restarted when you took the first hit. You’ll try, fail, and either figure out a way to cheat the system, or give up annoyed and move onto more open-ended and enjoyable activities. 

It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that reviewing bad movies is an endeavor built on a foundation of diminishing returns. While it might seem like a fun thing to do to begin with, it only takes one or two really lazy films for you to realise that there are only so many ways that you can reiterate that a film is lazy without eventually resorting to outright describing the ways the laziness manifests itself - which, while occasionally fun, is regurgitation, not a review. Oftentimes I’m not content to simply tell you what a film ‘is’, or where its value lies - in certain special cases, I try to communicate what it feels like to actually pay for and sit through it. The ‘in the seat’ experience is important, because it’s one thing to say a film is a piece of shit - I could talk all day about the failings of The Nun, or Ralph Breaks The Internet - but for some people this kind of excessive flagellation only makes the idea of seeing the film more attractive. My desire with this website is to help you make an informed decision as to whether it’s worth spending your hard-earned money on a piece of media, and not all bad movies are fun movies. 

NOT ALL BAD MOVIES ARE FUN MOVIES.

So how many different ways can I communicate that about movies like Holmes & Watson, without resorting to a blow-by-blow? It is the movie equivalent of a below-average bowel movement, but if I were to tell you in detail about the terrible script, the terrible directing, the terrible editing, the terrible green-screen, the terrible jokes, or the terrible ADR which covers an overwhelming proportion of Will Ferrell’s first ten minutes of dialogue...would those things make you keen to see it out of curiosity? The stakes here are clear - the film ends on a note that leaves it open for sequel. If I pique some kind of morbid interest in you, and you pay money to watch this movie, they just might make another, and that would be a very bad thing. I don’t want that. So how do I accurately describe just how tedious and disappointing an experience it was to watch it without encouraging you to do the same? Well, I suppose I’d start by telling you that, despite the new-worthy negativity of its Rotten Tomatoes rating, there isn’t a single thing about this film that sets it apart from other terrible Hollywood comedies I’ve seen. Among Will Ferrell’s oeuvre, it isn’t saying much to say that this is among his worst films. But among all the bad movies I’ve watched, Holmes & Watson is utterly middling. There aren’t any tales to be told about the actors drinking on set a la Super Mario Bros, or of some tyrannical imbecile auteur at the helm a la The Room. The only thing that stands out about its production is how glaringly it indicates that  every single person involved in the making of this film was utterly ambivalent. It feels almost certain that there wasn’t a single person involved that was excited about it. Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly give the most tedious performances of their careers: they simply stand in frame and affect the least taxing impression of an English accent that they can muster. Ferrell’s juvenile zaniness is here muted to a tired, old facsimile of other boring characters in other boring films of his, and John C. Reilly, in attempting to be the straight-man to an actor who can’t even pretend to try, nearly ceases to exist at all. If nothing else, Holmes & Watson is evidence that Reilly and Ferrell are not an instinctively good duo. 

Their lack of chemistry, artistry, or integrity is exacerbated by the fact that the film’s director clearly couldn’t wrap his head around the script’s terrible jokes - a fact made all the more galling given that the scriptwriter and the director are the same person. Given how blantant a cheap grift this film is, I’m tempted to believe that ‘Etan Cohen’ is hoping to profit off the inevitable mistaken identity bestowed upon him by his name, but there’s no mistaking him here; if Paul Feig is the poor man’s Judd Apatow, then Etan Cohen is the rank, oily water in Paul Feig’s backyard outhouse. He is shit. His script is shit, and his skills as a director are shit. But this hyperbole undermines the central point I wish to make - Holmes & Watson isn’t fun. It isn’t funny. It isn’t entertaining to watch with mates. It’s badly made. It’s a cheap film made by inept people. The amount of money they had at their disposal and the amount of genuinely talented performers they had on hand make this film an insult to everyone who had to work three hours in some shit job just to afford a ticket to see it. If you think this looks like a good date film, you deserve to be alone. If your kids tell you they want to see this, you need to send them to counselling. This is an obviously idiotic film made to take advantage of people who don’t think and who don’t care about anything, and I took one for the team (and made three friends who now like me a little less take it as well) so you don’t have to. I have nothing else to say about it. The more of these I watch, the more I realise that Hollywood is a giant fucking scam factory, and corporations are literally responsible for the death of art. In paying for this garbage we vindicate them as they scorch the earth and watch it burn, and we have no-one else to blame but ourselves. 

1/10

Ralph Breaks The Internet is memes, guys. It’s memes and product placement, and cheap fan-service to a dozen different series, none of which are the Wreck-It Ralph series. The sequel to Wreck-It Ralph despises its own history so much that you wouldn’t even know it was a sequel to Wreck-It Ralph until you researched what the fuck it was supposed to be because it has the most white-bread, vanilla ice cream, run of the mill, direct-to-Netflix title you’ve ever heard in your life.

Yeah, it’s got the scene with the Disney princesses all together, complete with Belle’s original 62-year-old voice actor giving the impression that she’s months away from dying of emphysema. And there’s the musical number you probably saw in a trailer, or on Youtube somewhere, that is the one objectively good moment in the film. But then you’ve also got the scene where Ralph and Vanellope enter ‘the internet’ in this strange, ageless time period in which people seem to love poorly-kept video game arcades, but online gaming is also simultaneously massive, and you spend the first five minutes sitting there agape as brand names scroll by you one after the other, because the idea of a ‘pop culture reference’ is dead, and ‘recognising things’ is the new joke. And in the ultimate insult, Anthony Daniels is dragged out of his home by Disney’s secret police force and coerced at gunpoint to suck Walt Disney’s cryogenically frozen dick and then record a single, pointless line for this artistically bankrupt mess. Wreck-It Ralph was the story of a man bored with his lot in life, tired of being misunderstood as ‘the bad guy’, ready and willing to give something more, and set in a world filled with familiar characters that are all there to help him out in his quest to save the day and be the hero. Ralph Breaks The Internet is about a neurotic, one-dimensional dickhead who whinges all the time for no good reason, set in a world populated entirely by whichever brands said ‘yes’ to a Disney paycheck, and as many free Disney properties as they could cram in to replace actual creative content. It’s a hack-job - the worst possible sequel they could have thought of. It’s lazy, insulting, uninspired, poorly-written, boring, overlong, and inconsistent in itself and as a sequel to an established film. More than one child in the audience preferred to run up and down the stairs rather than watch the last thirty minutes of the session I went to. The parents didn’t give a fuck, and were just calling out to their kids at full volume, because the film didn’t warrant any more respect than that, and frankly, I didn’t care. When I wasn’t laughing incredulously or talking about the two or three moments that were genuinely inventive and entertaining, I was bitching openly about how fucking weird it was that Ralph - a grown adult male - was strangely, insistently clinging to a child as his only friend. It was weird. I whispered the word ‘pedophile’ to my friend at some point in the first ten minutes. That was a joke, but then after a while it wasn’t, and it’s all because Ralph Breaks The Internet (I still can’t believe that’s the final title) suffers from a severe scripting issue I colloquially refer to as ‘royally fucking up perfectly good characters’. 

Barely thirty seconds after leaving the theatre my mate had lain out a more natural arc for Ralph that took the radical tact of using the established events of the first film as a launchpad for new developments and opportunities for growth, and as we drowned our sorrows afterwards with a palate-cleansing screening of Neil Breen’s vastly more entertaining film ‘I Am Here...Now’, he literally bounced out of his seat in rage at the fact that people are getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to script film-school dreck like this. The opening ten minutes were separately and unanimously nominated by each of us as some of the worst introduction dialogue we’d ever heard in a major motion picture. The forced, stilted exposition signaled that this was not going to be of the same calibre as its predecessor. And while the film isn’t total, complete shit, if I’d paid more than a tenner for it, I’d have been fucking livid. 

Ralph Breaks The Internet is a lazy, cynical cash-grab, plain and simple. Every single person in charge of its development knew that the series wasn’t beloved so they could get away with cramming it full of a bunch of pointless shit and paying off known brands for the use of their name for five seconds. And, because Disney now owns every intellectual property, instead of having to try and give life to characters from a nostalgic video game past, they could just jam a whole bunch of Disney film characters into the fold. That’s the same as being creative, right? I don’t usually critique other people’s opinions, but there are a glut of critics that praised this film, and I can say without a shadow of a doubt that they’re a bunch of fucking idiots. Ralph Breaks The Internet is the name of a low-budget feature film made to cash-in on the fleeting fame of a terrible Youtube ‘star’ from 2008. Its content is largely of a similar calibre. If you enjoyed the first Wreck-It Ralph, this is not in the same league. If you’re just looking to distract your kids, they’re going to get bored. If you like to watch the colours on the screen and hear the things go ‘zoom’ and ‘bang’ and ‘pow’, then shit, I guess you’ll get your money’s worth. But for everyone else, watch Neil Breen instead. 

Click here for my formal review of the game:

https://casualarsonist.tumblr.com/post/179824865660/red-dead-redemption-2-review-ps4

Full disclosure, I haven’t finished RDR2 yet. I’ve put close to eighy hours into the thing, at a guess, and I still haven’t finished it. There was a time I was hoping to 100% it, and while that’s not an impossible task, it is exceedingly time consuming, and not something that I’m ever likely going to care enough to do. The last few hours of my time were spent just begging for it to end, and failing that, I simply reached the point where I finally stopped caring about finding everything, put down the control, and left. Late into my run, once everything in the game finally opened up, I did feel a gentle nudge that gave me the energy where there was none before to keep pursuing the side-activities and challenges. But everything in the game only opens up in the epilogue - the last eight of nearly one hundred hours, once the main story has been completed. It’s unprecedented, in my experience. And it’s impressive, if frustrating. But it’s also incredibly draining to waste so much time trying to figure out ways to do things that you don’t realise can’t be done until after the main part of the game is effectively finished. And by the time the game comes round to letting you have free-reign, it’s been going on far too long for you to care anymore. 

My final impressions of Red Dead Redemption 2 are...mixed. The main issue being that the problems I identified much earlier in my playthrough never resolved themselves, and only became more frustrating as I was exposed to them again and again. My horse never stopped veering into trees, or into rocks, or into people in towns and giving me a wanted level. I never really managed to completely master the temperamental, complicated, and unresponsive controls. The game never stopped feeling like it was a bloated copycat of its predecessor, enslaved by the tropes its towering forerunner established. One of the biggest issues I experienced was during one of the multi-stage side missions that exist in the world to be stumbled upon by unsuspecting travellers. These missions are one of the most valuable parts of the game’s design, filling the world with organic moments that advance themselves with the passing of time, but are unmarked for the player, meaning that your thirst for exploration is the only thing that can help you find and unlock these stories. One of these ambient side-missions involves helping a railway foreman with the construction of part of the line. You have to track down an employee stealing from him, and later chase off some aggressive competitors, and after a time the construction of the railway is supposed to progress along its intended route until it’s finished. Mine did not. Instead, after I had cleared the land for the company’s advance, my railway just up and disappeared. I first discovered this when I unwittingly rode into a sky-coloured chasm in the ground, tumbling for a good 30 seconds before reloading the game. Once, maybe twice, a blank, featureless ridge of flattened gravel would load in, but nine times out of ten, it would simply be a void - a massive hole in the ground that let you see through into other parts of the map. If your horse fell in, anything it was carrying would be lost, which caused me to nearly break my controller after I lost the first perfect raccoon skin I’d found in dozens of hours. This void cordoned off an enormous section of the eastern part of the world, meaning that if ever I wanted to travel from west to east I’d have to divert my journey by three or four minutes to skirt around it, and if ever I forgot that it was there, well, too bad. This enormous glitch was never fixed in the weeks I played this game, and was a thorn in my side for dozens of hours, and had the game not been quite so long, perhaps this issue wouldn’t have progressed into such frustrating territory, but with the amount of time I spent in its company it became a real burden, which is analagous to much of my experience with RDR2. 

After those eighty hours I felt that the game failed to rise above its flaws. It’s often a breathtaking experience, but it’s a tiresome and frustrating one too. Which isn’t to say that it’s not worth the price - I honestly don’t think I’ve ever gotten more of ‘my money’s worth’ out of a game than when playing RDR2; I mean, how can one complain when there’s so much to do? Make no mistake, it’s not that Red Dead lacks value in any kind of tangible sense, but my overall satisfaction in the experience was noticeably waning for something that was seven years in the making and with all that money thrown at it; for something that should have been a generation-defining experience. No, sadly, what RDR2 represents is a triumph of efforts and budgets beyond anything else. It’s a testament to what a massive team of developers and artists can do with infinite money, as much as it is a testament to the bloated product of such a lengthy and ambitious project. For all its virtues, RDR2 is not a particularly well-made game. In fact, all the apocryphal tales of its creation simply serve to render more starkly how lacking it is in terms of its core design. It is by far the most cumbersome of Rockstar’s games, easily the least fun to actually play, to control, and while I was initially happy to credit this as a commitment to recreating the slow, methodical pacing of life in the time in which it is set, at this point I’m far more certain that it’s actually just shitty design. Picking up God of War after putting RDR2 down was a breath of fresh air, and as Kratos smashed his fist through the lid of chests in order to wholly retrieve whatever spoils lay within, I came to realise that having to watch Arthur crouch down, creak open a lid, and one-by-one take out each individual item again and again and again had left me somewhat traumatised. God of War is an engaging experience, but rarely forces the player into inconvenience for the sake of immersion; it only ever asks you to do things that it plans on rewarding you for doing. Every chest has a useful item in it, every corner of the game has something worth seeing. Collectibles are hidden, but not obscured, and in following your instincts you can find treasures that are both practical enhancements to your character, and small emotional rewards that positively reinforce your behaviour. There is plenty of exploration to be done, but there are no true dead-ends. There is a point to everything. And while the hack-and-slash genre is, in my opinion, mechanically crude and difficult to innovate, God of War is a superbly refined product. RDR2 is not. 

I would compare it to assembling a ten-thousand piece puzzle. There’s a certain respect that such a mammoth undertaking earns, undoubtedly. Whether you enjoy that kind of thing or not, you can’t help but admire it. But it’s an activity of diminishing returns, and after a while you find yourself just looking at the box to see the finished product. In the same way, after a time I wanted to skip out on RDR2 and read the wiki. In lieu of that, I found myself just railroading the story missions towards the end, which isn’t difficult, given that the entire second half of the game is a series of dumb shooting galleries. There’s a very clear turning point, after which literally every single mission follows the same formula, and that formula always revolves around killing everything in sight, which feels even more out of place given that it runs parallel to your character more frequently voicing his doubts about the gang’s brutality. It’s no coincidence that during this latter half of the story is where it becomes abundantly clear that the game’s shooting mechanics are terrible. Lock on, fire, lock on, fire, for five to ten minutes straight. All depth falls out of the bottom of the gameplay, and it feels like the team either ran out of time or inspiration and just phoned in the final ten hours of the main story. When the game finally reaches its climax, the tension in the story is squandered as it forces you into a pointless, repetitive, and overlong fist-fight, and then things finish up with little sense of closure. For those that played RDR1, Marston’s death feels like a fitting, if crushing, end point for that character. But there is little of that sense of satisfying drama here. Instead, the game’s epilogue, rather than wrapping up loose ends, takes the place of the ending of the third act. Again, while I might have initially thought of it as a bold move, that feeling quickly wore away in favour of the opinion that it’s just shit writing. 

It’s not entirely mismanaged, though. The fact that the game forces the player to follow through with the debt collections for a long time before offering a choice, and then eventually forcing them to let the debtors go, is an example of the gameplay smartly imparting the definite shift in Morgan’s personality. It understands your discomfort at having to enforce them, and then slowly changes its own rules to reflect the changing mindset of the character. And the game is superb at retrofitting a backstory to the existing characters carried backwards from RDR1: Dutch’s final speech of RDR1 is repeated almost verbatim here as a ploy to get himself out of a bind, and in that moment completely redefines his end in the first game from a man musing on his own animal nature, to a shyster, full of empty words and devoid of real convictions and values; a pathetic human being. But for the largest part, the moments of genuine pathos are disrupted by the irreverence of the world, or by the repetition of ideas for the sake of drawing out the story, or by the disconnect between the narrative and the gameplay.

I do not own the above image. Please don’t sue me for $1.3 million, 2K. I make no money from this. 

I’m not gonna lie, when I first bought Red Dead Redemption 2 I felt ashamed whenever I had to tell anyone about it. Not just because I’d leapt upon the zeitgeist bandwagon like all the other sheeple, or because it was a day-one purchase and only babies, fanboys, and other idiots (me) buy games on the first day of release anymore, but because Dan Houser’s tone-deaf bragging about ‘100-hour work weeks’ amid a flurry of similar controversy, and the numerous damning reports of Rockstar’s work culture up to and including leaving people who worked on the game uncredited if they weren’t there at the completion of the product made me absolutely rage. Say what you like about the issues, I’m sure you’ve all got your opinions, but it seems there’s not a single developer/publisher that can help themselves but to court controversy by mistreating some human demographic one way or another, even less so if they’re in some way related to 2K (formally known by their extended title ‘2Kunty 2Kare’), and I think that’s absolutely disgracefuul. I feel like I betrayed myself when I handed my money to Rockstar the way I did. I fed this filthy machine in a way could only have been topped had I pre-ordered it, and I have to be honest, this sour feeling has stuck with me for a while. Maybe it’s because the elements of jankiness and strange, inconsistent design are so prevalent that despite the thousands of hours of overwork and the dozens or hundreds of lives that were made measurably worse in its production, the game isn’t even close to being Rockstar’s best release, and despite that, the Houser brothers will pocket nearly half a billion dollars between them and their rabid fanbase will tear apart anyone that doesn’t rate the game a perfect one-zero, and I contributed my money towards this ill-gotten end. 

I think part of the problem is that some fatigue is setting in in a way similar to that of the Assassin’s Creed series. All the tropes of Rockstar open world games are all here, made worse by the fact that this game resembles its predecessor far more than the GTA sequels resembled theirs. There are massive differences between GTA V and IV, and between IV and San Andreas, but in most ways Red Dead Redemption 2 just feels exactly like a bigger, fancier Red Dead Redemption. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing - the original game’s formula was more-or-less watertight - but it does leave you feeling like you’re retreading ground in a way that is leaving me feeling noticeably tired. 

But I’m coming on strong here. I suppose it’s to manage expectations, because the working conditions of any manufacturer are important, and I’m not going to ignore all the game’s flaws just to prove that I am indeed an acolyte of the church of Dan Houser and that nothing he can do will be wrong in my eyes as long as he pours enough time and money and tales of obscene, mythical effort into his latest game. But this doesn’t mean that I think the game isn’t a good, even great game. The ceiling for Rockstar’s efforts is high, and even if it isn’t their best complete experience, it is one of their most detailed worlds, and the glut of things to do in that world, and the depth to which you can do those things does ultimately make this a singular, stand-out experience. So before I go into more detail about the game’s flaws, let’s say a few good things. 

Red Dead Redemption 2 is the numerical sequel and narrative prequel of Red Dead Redemption, set twelve years prior, when John Marston was running with Dutch’s gang instead of trying to kill them. You take on the role of a different member of the gang - Arthur Morgan - they flee from the law after a deal gone wrong. Dutch seems to be losing his edge, having shot and killed a girl in circumstances that no-one can seem to confirm as accidental. The gang’s belief in him is shaken as their situation goes from bad to worse, losing a few members to a lawman’s gun and ending up stranded atop a mountain amidst a horrific snowstorm. But after the thaw, the gang find themselves a place to set camp nearby the small township of Valentine, and set themselves about rebuilding their fortunes in order to continue their journey west with the hope of buying some property and living a truly free life. 

I’ve had quite a few discussions with my girlfriend about the nature of 'Westerns’ since I started playing this game. She claims to hate the genre, either for it’s comically pulpy John Wayne antics, or for its otherwise doom-and-gloom existential stories. I, for one, found my love for it in the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, and his dark, picturesque take on seeking meaning in a life defined by its traumas and a world without compassion or pity; where luck is transient at best, and one’s existence is inescapably confined by one’s flaws. I respect the genre for its commitment to exploring harsh, sometimes nihilistic realities, and for finding a strange sense of beauty in that nihilism - men with nothing finding themselves in touch with the natural world in a way the rest of us invariably miss out on. And this is a world that we forget existed barely over a hundred years ago - a world in which, if you didn’t kill your own food, you didn’t eat; a world in which giving a stranger the benefit of the doubt could mean the end of your life. Industrialisation changed this for a lot of people as steam engines brought mass transit to previously isolated places and the invention of the telegraph meant that your past could outpace you, but on the borders of civilisation existed the last hope of the lawless. 

This boundary is where Dutch’s gang find themselves trapped, out of money, low on provisions, and chased by the laws of a society that is steadily taming the last remaining wildlands of the US territory. Where RDR1 followed a man trying to move beyond the grip of his past, RDR2 looks upon a man who instead struggles with the walls of past and future closing in upon him, for time remaining static is the only way his lifestyle, and by extension he himself, can exist. The outlaw way is out of date and no-longer spoken about with any tone of reverence of legend. Whereas before he and his gang existed from day-to-day with nothing to tie them down, they’re now increasingly bothered by a past full of infractions that they can’t leave behind, heading into a future that doesn’t want them. This is the first Rockstar game that works as a reverse-power fantasy: the more missions you complete, the more you find yourself detested by the inhabitants of the country, and the more isolated you become. Arthur knows that the best of his years are long behind him, and amongst his friends he sees those with their wits about them withering away, and those without wits lying stinking in a haze of booze. Some of the most interesting parts of the game’s ambient narrative involve seeing the way characters like John and Abigail Marston used to be - emotional, immature, and having not yet acquired the world-weariness that grips Arthur Morgan here, and will grip Marston in the future. In those two characters trailing behind him, and in others ahead of him, Arthur can see his past and his future laid out already, and so his thoughts, when extending beyond his tendency towards knee-jerk aggression, are tinged with a sadness and a sense of yearning for some kind of small meaning left ahead. One gets the feeling very early on that he never really expects to live another day, and when the next day comes, it’s simply one more in between him and something of a release in death. The horrors of a life of violence wear a man down, no matter how accustomed to it he may become. 

From this frame of reference we get to view a landscape that is, like Arthur Morgan, seemingly at odds with itself. From rocky escarpments you can sit and contemplate the stunning beauty of Rockstar’s most lifelike and vibrant gameworld ever, right up until the crowing of a steam train interrupts your thoughts as it comes chugging past throwing gouts of black smoke into the trees. The dirt tracks that wind through the forests are well-traveled by others, and it’s easier than ever to be spotted committing a crime by the frequent passers-by that make their way past. Attempts at stalking animals are frequently interrupted by strangers wandering past, and the mark of humankind is starting to be indelibly imprinted on nature as lumberyards, quarries, and townships cut into the otherwise pristine wilderness. The attention to detail is exquisite, and it is in the details that the game presents its greatest gift to the medium. Skinned animals leave bloodstains over the player’s shoulder or the back of your horse, which are washed off down the river if you submerge yourself. Your horse gets spooked by large predators or snakes or dead animals, and must be calmed down lest it tosses you and flees. Newer horses will become agitated at gunshots, whereas older, more experienced horses don’t. Hawks swoop down and attack rabbits. Opossums play dead when frightened. Every ambient sound, as far as I can tell, comes from some kind of source - be it plant, animal, or machine. There is one single location in the game in which you stand under a natural rock archway, and the wind sounds different within it. NPCs comment on almost every player-state including whether it’s morning, noon, or night, whether you’re dirty or bloodied, whether you’re carrying game with you, and will treat you differently depending on how much trouble you’ve historically caused in a given camp, town, or region - you can pat away your bounty, but you can’t buy people’s forgiveness. You can interact with near everyone, and the things you say to them and the things they say to you are always related to one-another. Shooting weapons in populated areas will either spook people or outright turn them against you. Shooting lanterns can set a whole campsite afire, and the fire will destroy any items it engulfs. A bout of rain will douse the fire, freeze you if the temperature drops, or bring heavy, impenetrable mists upon the local area. The time of day, and geographic location affects the temperature, which will in turn affect your health if you aren’t dressed for the climate. And the list goes on and on. The interactivity, the visuals, the sound design, the weather effects, the size and scope are all phenomenal. From a technical standpoint, Red Dead Redemption is something of a masterpiece, and for the amount of systems interacting with one another here, the polish is astounding. THIS is where money should be going for AAA releases - into QA - because anything less than this level of polish in such an expensive game is near inexcusable for companies with budgets this high. I suppose that’s one thing about console exclusives - less variation in the system means the developers have an easier time accounting for bugs, but picking up and playing Red Dead took me back to the good ol’ days of the first two Playstations, when games HAD to work on release, otherwise the developers were fucked. 

It’s one of those games where you have to readjust your expectations when playing it, as you’ll come in expecting to be able to cheat the system in certain ways - to set enemies on fire and still be able to loot them, for instance, or to piss a character off, and be able to come back after a period of time and have them reset - but in RDR2, this is not the case. Your actions often have permanent repercussions, teaching harsh, and sometimes frustrating lessons to those that break the rules, and reinforcing a focus in the design on recreating the slow and cumbersome way of life in a time and place largely untouched by modern conveniences. Every time you skin an animal it takes time, and once you’ve finished you have to travel to your horse and put the skin atop it. If your horse should fall at any point, the carcasses and furs it carries will fall off and you’ll have to put them back on. This makes something as simple as navigating the world an experience in which you must learn to pace yourself, as trying to belt through a forest will more often than not end with you slamming headlong into a tree, damaging both you and your steed, and you having to collect all your things again. It’s an interesting direction for the game to take, given the fact that typical Rockstar audiences are going to be used to blazing heedlessly from one end of the world to the other, but it’s one that forces the player into adopting, at least in part, an appreciation for the measured way of life in which these people live. 

But it is here, in these specifics, and in this encouraged slow-pacing that the game finds its biggest flaw. The controls are, at their worst, utterly, incomprehensibly terrible. Sometimes you just want to turn and face the other direction, but your character has a turning circle, so if you’re on a precipice any attempt to backtrack will send him walking off the edge and into oblivion. Your horse is not you, and it will often move in a direction contrary to that which you intend it to, sometimes because you’ve told it to do something it doesn’t want to, but sometimes because the contextual controls have simply wigged out on you. So when you’re trying to turn your horse around so you can follow a carriage only to have it go mental and leap headlong into the side of the carriage, and forcing the carriage to race screaming off into the distance as the occupants shoot at you, it feels like the game is out to fuck with you. This is made even worse given the staggering over-complication of the inputs that often map two very different functions to the same button, where the only variable is a context that the game decides for you. For example, the button for reloading is the same as the button for melee combat, and the only difference between these two actions is how close to someone you’re standing. So when I was about to win $20 from a man challenging me to a shooting contest and I pressed the button to reload, I smacked him in the face with the butt of my rifle instead, and he pulled his gun on me. This forced me into reloading an old save frantically before the game autosaved over my mistake, and given that the event in question was a random encounter, I couldn’t do it again until the game decided it was ready to let me, which was hours later. Another time I had saved a woman from death at the hands of some degenerate bandits who had murdered her husband. As I was looting the bandit corpses she asked me to give her a ride to safety, except as she was saying that sentence, I was standing over a bandit but looking at her dead husband, and although I cancelled the action before I managed to loot him, the game already registered its own incorrect interpretation of my intentions, the woman cursed at me, and she fled. 

In short, RDR2′s controls are so imprecise, confusing, and inconsistent that they can, and will, ruin entire missions for you. They can make whole areas completely inaccessible simply because you forgot that ‘accelerate’ in this game isn’t ‘R2′ like in the GTA games. So you hop on a horse, press R2, and accidentally hipfire your pistol, sending the entire encampment hostile, and charging you with trespassing every single time you take a step inside its boundaries. This happened to me, and because the game autosaved immediately following this action, I had to retread two hours of playtime just to get myself back to that point so I could finish the given mission, and I don’t recall a time in which I’ve been more frustrated with a Rockstar game. I can take it if it’s something I’m responsible for. If I've chosen to loot a person in a crowded place without considering that I was going to be charged with a crime, I’ll take that hit. But with RDR2, the mistakes are far more often the fault of the game itself, or of its convoluted control system, and that is indescribably aggravating. In most cases, L2 aims your weapon and R2 shoots. But when you’re in a shop, that button combination is required to merely raise your weapon, so in certain contexts even the simple act of unholstering becomes a nightmarish mix of anxiety and confusion in which you’re not sure if you’re about to the thing you want to do, or if you’re about to shoot someone in the face and have to reload. It’s at the point now where every time I want to commit an action I have to stare at the contextual controls in the corner of the screen and think deeply about what I’m about to do, and it shouldn’t be that damn hard. The button to skin an animal shouldn’t be the same as the button to get on your horse, meaning that if your prize is too close to your ride, you have to either spend thirty seconds trying to figure out how to get it to identify that you’re trying to skin the animal, or get on the horse and ride it away, get off, return, skin the animal, then walk all the way back over to your horse to put the skin on it. Sometimes you have to be pointing the camera at an item to pick it up, other times you have to point your character at it, and other times you just have to be in the general vicinity. There’s no consistency, and the game seems to demand the most pedantic input requirements of the situations in which you’re dealing with the most finicky, small items. In trying to craft a control system that compliments the game’s immersive qualities, they’ve created a control system that is directly responsible for pulling you out of the experience, and one that is behind almost every single one of the game’s most frustrating moments. It’s a staggering oversight, or perhaps a crippling error of judgement, that they let this remain the way it is. And while I thought it sounded like a petty concern in reviews I’d read before I bought the game, it single-handedly dropped my opinion of the game down a few notches. Because controls shouldn’t be a thing you need to continually think about when you play, but here, they are a constant thorn in the player’s side.

But it’s not just in terms of the controls in which the game's internal rules are deeply inconsistent; across the board, the rules of play are tweaked and manipulated in a way that can’t always be predicted. You can take part in a train robbery in which you enforce theft and kill guards without effect, and yet joining your gang in actively taking items from people somehow nets you an honour penalty. You can shoot a dozen lawman in a mission without a problem, but shoot one otherwise and you get an honour penalty. Looting aggressors is okay, until it isn’t. Kidnapping is not okay until it is. This unequal treatment of its systems extends to game mechanics. Your horse can carry every one of the three dozen weapons you’ve bought, yet it will only travel to you in real time if you walk away from it. You can sprint through the streets of almost any location in the game, other than your gang’s camp, where you spend a lot of time, and must walk at a crawl no matter what you’re doing. You will freeze if you don’t wear enough clothes in cold areas, but you can swim in frozen lakes forever if you like. Minigames allow you to skip certain meaningless segments, but not other, longer, equally meaningless segments, and the ability to skip at all differs depending on the game. Some things you have to endure, and others you don’t, and for every two things that happen that make sense, there is one thing that doesn’t. I don’t mean to criticise the game for not getting every conceivable thing right, but this is where the game crosses the invisible line between immersive design and clumsy design. And perhaps it’s because this is the first time they’ve really gone all-in on something like this that it leaves RDR2 feeling like a lesser game in a lot of ways than anything the company has released in a decade. GTA IV is awkward, at times, but it’s rarely inconvenient. The vehicle physics are slidey, but the car doesn’t unpredictably flip itself because you accidentally hit the brake button which is also the ‘flip car’ button if you’re not holding L2. There’s almost never a time in GTA V when something happens that makes you feel like the game has just screwed you, or in which you find yourself thrust into an unexpected situation you can’t get out of. In contrast, RDR2 will often drop you into encounters in which you’ve ruined the experience long before you even realise what you were supposed to be doing, or you’ve been charged with a bounty because you pressed the right button in the wrong context. This is not good game design. And it pains me to say, because there are so many ways in which Rockstar have gone above and beyond in terms of what they’ve delivered here, and yet in some of the most basic, entry-level aspects, the game is starkly lacking. 

Yes, this is a strongly negative perspective to take on what is, for the largest part, an enjoyable experience, but in my playthrough I found that the relatively frequent high points never reached the extremes of the more-than-occasional low points, and an enjoyable experience marked by some truly rage inducing flaws that almost always occurred because of the game’s frequently clumsy design is not an experience I’m prepared to rave about. I play this game every day, almost impulsively. I am desperate to explore its world more. But I am not looking forward to the next time its gameplay makes me want to put my fist through the TV screen, and Red Dead Redemption 2 makes me want to do that at least once every time I pick the controller up. So while the game could be viewed through a certain lens as a superb addition to the genre, I don’t think that there will be many fanboys left singing it unequivocal praise after their initial ‘an attack against this game is an attack against me’ phase wears off. Most of the hype came from the nostalgia - Rockstar didn’t do a lot of ‘promising’ (2K just sued an outlet for $1.3 million for leaking spoilers in February in a tasteless strong-arm move against games journalists), and I think that is in part because this game is an experiment. It’s an experiment to create the closest approximation to a real world that has likely ever been attempted, a world that responds realistically and sometimes unpredictably to the player. It’s an experiment to try and craft a game that is both threatening and accessible, thrusting the player, often against their will, into dangerous situations, thereby imitating an agency in their non-player characters that has not been managed before. But at the end of the day, I do wonder whether or not they will conclude that the result was worth the effort. The sheer amount of time and money invested into predicting, scripting, recording, and programming all the little instances of variation and life into the game render the moments when the curtain is lifted all the more glaring. It’s like the uncanny valley of programming. No matter how many times Siri gives you a lifelike and helpful answer, you’re always going to remember the times she said she didn’t understand a simple question you asked her. It is the same here. 

In short, yes, I recommend the game. Maybe not for full price, although that’s largely for ethical reasons. Perhaps if the controls were more elegant, and there was more consistency to the mechanics and some more quality-of-life tweaks I’d rave about it. The potential is there for it to have been their best release. But when you get your hands on it, you’ll see what I mean almost immediately - Red Dead Redemption 2 is a very impressive effort, detailed to an almost unprecedented extent, and beautiful, but it is not a cultural touchstone. It’s a sequel to a cultural touchstone, and one that was crafted under dubious circumstances, and with some dubious design choices.

8/10 

Take one part Arkham City, one part Watch Dogs 2, one part Grand Theft Auto IV. Blend well. Bake for roughly two years, and you’ve got Spiderman for PS4. Is it a good game? Yes. Is it a great game? Possibly. Does it do a single thing that hasn’t been done before? Not a damn one. But if you consider Marvel’s habit of releasing reasonably consistent, enjoyable films that lack a single original bone in their body, you can quite clearly see the cloth from which Spider-Man has been cut. For what it’s worth I enjoyed this game far more than I enjoy any of their movies, but that doesn’t change the fact that the game itself is hugely derivative. There’s not going to be a lot to this experience that you won’t have indulged elsewhere, and perhaps enjoyed more, but I don’t think that should overshadow all the things Spider-Man gets right.

The Webbed One is one of the biggest comic book characters that I’ve never had a particular interest in, and despite being one of Marvel’s most well-known superheroes, he seems to be one of the only main-line Marvel icons that hasn’t been treated particularly well by media outside the comics. His movies are largely tat, the TV shows largely forgettable, and his games range from fairly good to outright poor. I’m not sure what it is - the difficult balance of tone, or his rather inconsistent and sometimes goofy skills, but the man in the bright red leotard has always come off more a figure of ridicule than a lot of his contemporaries. What Spider-Man the 2018 game shows us is that, when given a decent writer, and the technology to properly bring to life his abilities, Peter Parker becomes quite a thrilling character to watch. Yeah, he’s a goofball whose jokes are a little too in-your-face, and yeah most of his emotional turmoil is wrought upon himself by his own juvenile emotionality, but he’s so...different...from so many of the others. He’s the antithesis of Batman with his youth and his eternal light-heartedness. He’s brilliant like Tony Stark, but completely lacks the means to finance his pursuits, and regularly suffers from the fact that saving the city is pro-bono work. He LOVES his hometown, and unlike many superheroes who protect primarily out of a sense of duty, he does it out of a genuine adoration for the city he lives in, and the people in it. And this is all translated so well by the game - through the writing, through the acting, and through the mechanics. Swooping around New York City is an absolute joy - I think I only fast traveled a handful of times, and only because you get an achievement for doing so. NYC is large, but not so large that webslinging becomes cumbersome, and the act itself is so fun, especially as you get a hang of his skills, that the act of *traveling* becomes one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game. That’s unheard of in an open world game.

On top of that, Peter and his family and colleagues are, for the largest part, a well-rounded and likable group of people. Even the villains - well-known or otherwise - are entertaining to witness, despite only having a handful of scenes cumulatively. Taking place eight years after taking on the Spider-Mantle (ayyyy), Peter works in a lab with his mentor Otto Octavius. In this incarnation, Otto is a brilliant scientist, but stricken by a degenerative motor neuron disorder. This inspires his tireless and dedicated efforts to develop dextrous artificial limbs that can be controlled by thought - not ‘as good’ as real limbs, but better. When Otto’s former friend and now-rival Norman Osborn confiscates some of Otto’s work and sets him back at square one, Otto is struck by a frustrated vengeance that precipitates his downfall. It’s a compelling story, and a superbly acted and animated one to boot. The characters look photorealistic a times, and together with some excellent performances from skilled voice actors, including that of prolific Spider-Man voice actor Yuri Lowenthal, the stories of the characters are brought to life in as true a fashion as any of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films. You might not notice as you fly around the world, but many of the lines delivered by Lowenthal have been recorded twice - once for when you’re standing around while he delivers them, and once for when Spider-Man is exerting himself. Yeah, they recorded the dialogue twice, so that it would sound different if Spider-Man is in transit. It’s something they didn’t need to do, but once you notice it, you realise that you couldn’t live without it. Details like this indicate a serious dedication on the part of the creative team to make a game that is greater than the sum of its parts, which is really one of the main reasons Spider-Man lives to be a success story rather than a disappointing footnote. 

It cannot be understated how derivative it is - Horizon: Zero Dawn caught flack for failing to reinvent the wheel, and yet Spider-Man has garnered nothing but praise despite being a far-greater offender when it comes to regurgitating cliche mechanics. Offsetting this, however, is the fact that it makes an effort to scatter its content - releasing it upon the player piecemeal, rather than vomiting markers all over the map from the get-go like the Assassin’s Creed series. It takes a break every couple of story missions in order to let the player indulge the side content, and when all that side content is done, it won’t give you more until you complete the next few missions. This simple factor makes the environment of Spider-Man feel as if it’s responding to the story, rather than the story simply occurring within the environment, and this ties the entire experience - gameplay and mechanics - together as one long reciprocal arc as opposed to leaving it feeling like the static sandbox that it could otherwise have easily turned into. But the same ol’ fatigue did set in once or twice during my 20-odd hours of play. The game is riddled with tired open-world sandbox tropes that might have killed it, had they not just been ever-so-slightly tweaked in the way that they have been. 

And I suppose that this goes to show just how little effort it can take to separate a tired release from a lauded one. Spider-Man does have a lot more going for it than this one thing - the writing, visuals, and mechanics, as mentioned, are all top-notch for the most part - but had the rest of the game more closely mirrored some of the more lackluster open-world games, then it would almost certainly have taken the entire product down a few notches on everyone’s list. In short, Spider-Man for PS4 is no game-changer, and if you’re even the slightest bit over the typical open-world formula, then you’ll feel the familiar pangs of weariness at certain times, but these feelings appear only as a shadow of what they might otherwise have been. The game’s strengths far outweigh its weaknesses, and while the best of the Arkham series still trumps this game in terms of overall quality and relevance in pushing forwards the superhero genre, you’ll certainly get your money’s worth here. 

My first interaction with the Monster Hunter series was way back in 2000-and-something as I watched a mate of mine play Monster Hunter Tri briefly on his Nintendo Wii. I’m not going to lie - I wasn’t that impressed. Not that I watched for long enough to get more than the most brief impression about the game, as his girlfriend turned it off on him before he managed to save because there were ‘guests’, and the entire room uttered a collective gasp of disgust. In any case, while I didn’t feel motivated to buy, I was intrigued by the series’ rather unique premise, and was always tangentially aware of its existence and the zeitgeist surrounding it. So along came Monster Hunter World this year, and along with it came lashings of praise from every angle. Having no experience with the series, I had no context for the compliments it was getting, but I knew more or less immediately that at some point I was going to play this entry, and given the post-release hype, I had no doubt in my mind that I was going to enjoy it. And then I bought it on PS4...

The first thing that struck me as odd when I started the game was the ad for PSN membership that popped up when it tried to log me in online. After having subscribed for a month in order to play Titanfall 2, and then being robbed by sneaky recurring payments that I wasn’t being notified about for another 6 months after that, I refused to buy a PSN subscription ever again. So loading up a brand new game, and having it immediately stop itself to advertise Playstation subscriptions to me felt grotesque. Next came the first cutscene, which I enjoyed right up until the characters started talking and I realised that the lipsyncing hadn’t been localised, meaning that the game looked like a poorly-dubbed Japanese film. Then came the loading screens, and as I sat in front of my console for two minutes and thirty seconds waiting for the first level to load, the incredulity in me rose. And then I entered the opening hub level. And the game ran somewhere around 25 frames per second. And at that point I tried to get a refund, but it turns out that you can’t refund PS4 games after you’ve downloaded them, meaning they could be broken as shit and you’re stuck with the product anyway because fuck you. And I genuinely thought Monster Hunter World on the PS4 was broken, because it ran almost as bad as Mass Effect Andromeda - one of the worst game I’ve ever played. So, barely 10 minutes into my first time playing, I turned off the console in disgust and walked away. So after I researched Sony’s refund policy and discovered that it was utter dogshit, I realised that I was stuck with the game and I sat back down and gave it another go. And...well, it’s okay. Just okay. 

I fully accept that this is my first foray into an established series with established mechanics. I hate it when games I enjoy dumb themselves down for a mainstream audience (*cough* Fallout *cough*), so I don’t criticise the game for taking some time to get used to. However, there are some real quality of life issues here that simply shouldn’t exist in this day and age.

First of all - it looks like shit. Not it terms of its design, but in terms of the quality of the visuals. Poor frame-rate aside, the graphics are heavily washed-out, which is a big disappointment given the lush forests and crystal clear waters of the first area. I don’t know whether the colour palette could be balanced better on PC, but there’s a flatness to everything on the PS4 that leaves the beautiful, evocative locales feeling drab and lifeless. This is purely a stylistic choice, and I cannot understand why they would go the trouble of crafting such a vivid landscape, only to broadcast it through what feels like a white filter. Turning the brightness all the way down helps, but there’s no reason why this should be a problem in the first place.

Secondly, Dark Souls and Bloodborn exist, and a number of copycat games like Nioh have proven that there’s no excuse for a game to be clunky in order to be difficult. Difficulty should exist in the gameplay balance, not in dated control systems, and this is a big stumbling block for Monster Hunter World. The larger monsters all have certain weak points that can be broken or severed in order to weaken them. The problem is that attacking these weakpoints is easier said than done when the lock-on system barely works, and the directional controls feel like the nine-point directional system of a PS1 game. Attacks cannot be stopped once they’ve started, meaning that you need to master your timing in order to be an effective combatant, but they also cannot be rotated once you’ve initiated them in a particular direction, so if pointing your character in the right direction is a chore, your attacks will often fall slightly to the left or right of where you intend for them to go. Coupled with the fact that the creatures move at speed, this means that finesse goes out the window and much of your initial combat experiences will involve getting as close to the target as possible simply so you can’t miss. Now don’t get me wrong - there is a sense of skill-building and personal improvement once you start to get used to this system, but it does feel extremely dated in a way that doesn’t inspire nostalgia. If a retro first-person-shooter had no mouse look, you’d be up in arms. So too does this feel like less of a design choice and more of a glaring failure to adapt to modern conveniences.

The last big issue is that the game isn’t marketed as a multiplayer game, instead being sold as a single player drop-in-drop-out experience. Which is true, to a point, yet every time you load it up it freezes to connect to the Playstation Network, and then advertises a PSN membership to you if you don’t already have one. Once you’re playing, the game will constantly remind you that other people are playing online, even going so far as to tell you who is joining your ‘session’ - a session that you aren’t in if you don’t have a PSN subscription. And to top it all off, you can’t simply select a mission and then expect it to start straight away: instead you have to wait while the game ‘prepares’ the mission as if you were in multiplayer lobby, even if you’re playing offline. This can take up to a minute or more, and makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. So even if the game detects that you have no PSN account it will still connect to the internet, then force you into either hosting or loading an online game, then tell you all of the people who are joining a session that you’re not playing in, and then put you in a mission lobby when you’re not waiting for anyone to join. It’s the cherry atop a cake baked ten years ago and marketed as a 2018 release. It's absurd. It’s as if the game was created by people who couldn’t fathom a world in which players wouldn’t play alone, and yet the game is, largely, played and sold as a single-player experience - just like all its predecessors. The greatest effect of having other people join in is that your experience bonus is split between you all instead of going solely to you, and that’s not a bonus, but a deficit. 

These issues make me wonder how the game has come to be critically acclaimed at all, at least in terms of this particular version. I hear the PS4 Pro version can run at 1080p60, and I assume the PC version can as well, although I’ve heard there are some connectivity issues with the PC servers, but my immediate impressions of the standard PS4 version are near appalling. Spiderman runs flawlessly as you swing across the entire city of New York - I didn’t see a single frame drop in my entire playthrough, and yet the detailed but limited-scope environs of Monster Hunter World bring the console to its knees. This, more than anything, speaks to the decline of the console’s relevance as modern graphics capabilities increase. One of the important selling points of the consoles was the fact that you could count on them to run stably, even if their games were technologically inferior to their PC counterparts. If they look worse AND play worse, then what’s the point of owning a console at all? If you have to upgrade to a mid-generation PS Pro now every few years just to be able to ensure your games are going to work, then why not just buy a new graphics card for your PC for the same price, not have to subscribe to the fucking scam that is the Playstation Network, AND have a better quality experience while you do it? Aside from the exclusives, the Playstation 4 is redundant, in my opinion. I can’t think of a single reason to invest in the next console generation, because you know that whatever machine you buy is just going to be obsolete in a few years’ time anyway. 

I’m sure that, all the gameplay quibbles aside, Monster Hunter World is perfectly fine to play on a more powerful machine, but I still cannot see why it has garnered such praise. It’s still a niche game, and it’s okay for what it is, but it’s not at all the force to be reckoned with the reviews make it sound like. It’s stuck in the past mechanically, and has the bare minimum of localisation, and while it is fun after you pass a certain teething point, I find that the ultimate experience is defined not what it is, but what it is not. My rating here is for the PS4 version, so take that as you will, but as it is, the PS Store really needs a proper refund policy.

The Dillinger Escape Plan have always held a rather strange place in my musical upbringing. At the time I started listening to them, they were far and away the most extreme band I had in my catalogue. I’d been listening to Strapping Young Lad for years, for example, but for all the rage in the lyrics and the cacophonous wall-of-sound production, Devin Townsend can’t help but be a funny guy and there’s a core of melody and cohesion that colours all of the band’s music. It took me a long time to discover the melody and cohesion in DEP’s tracks, and I remember clearly the exact time and place in which I first heard the jazzy breakdown in the middle of Miss Machine’s Highway Robbery, and how, after listening to that track and that track alone for many months, I slowly started to unpeel the onion and find the layers that lay behind many of the other songs on the album. 

And if that jazzy breakdown was a pipeline into DEP’s world, their next full-length album, Ire Works, was the floodgates opened wide. It’s still, in my opinion, their most consistent album (quality-wise) by a mile, and not because it explores the melodic possibilities of their music more than any other release - it’s still mental, a record that can barely sit still for more than ten seconds before it pulls an about-face on the listener and races off in a completely different direction. But when it does this, you can always, always see the benefit of it doing so. It’s not about the music being digestible, it’s about the choices making sense for the song, and I understand that if I try to categorise the quality of a ‘mathcore’ release by how sensible it is I’ll be buried under a pile of internet manure, but I think that you can make an excellent mathcore album that is also fun and engaging. DEP did this, more than once, and it’s why they were one of the biggest bands in the genre. The intensity, the melody, the electronic experimentation, it all fit together within Ire Works as one great, unstoppable wave that flowed perfectly from start to finish. Even though it was rarely the same from one moment to the next, the band’s instincts as to when to hold onto an idea and when to let go were impeccable. It was a natural evolution from their previous effort, and a refinement of everything therein, and while the follow-up to Ire Works - Option Paralysis - is also a fantastic album, the band didn’t really manage to capture their own capabilities in such a pure and balanced form again. 

Which brings me to Dissociation - the final record the band will ever release after choosing to quit while they were ahead and avoid jumping the shark. I honestly can’t find the words to praise their decision enough, because it’s a rare occasion in which an incredibly talented group of people look at what they’re doing and what they’ve done, feel happy with their work, and say ‘y’know what? I don’t ever want to release a bad piece of art. We’ve had an excellent run, let’s end it here.’ As a creative, knowing when to stop is a hard thing to do because it’s almost impossible to judge the worth of your work when you’re inside it, and it’s impossible to know whether you’re capable of topping the things you’ve produced until you’ve tried. And it’s so typical of these guys to have the intelligence, dignity, talent, and class to know when to begin and when to end. They’ve not released a single bad song. They’ve released songs I don’t particularly like, but I can’t ever accuse them of releasing a single piece that can’t be accurately described as art. But in reading reviews about Dissociation, I’ve seen it said more than once that the album is a ‘culmination’ of their entire career, and on this point I completely disagree. Dissociation is, in my mind, more of a return to the beginning - the snake latching on to its own tail. With their last couple of releases in mind, their career reads less like an ascending line and more like a bell curve, which is something that I’ll admit disappointed me, but there’s caveats all over the place, so let me start at the start. 

It took me a long time to buy this album. I wasn’t particularly moved by its predecessor, One Of Us Is The Killer, and found myself returning only every to listen to the title song - a modern classic, to be sure - and I found the relentless, unfocused aggression to be something I struggled to connect with; the band’s abrasive anger has always been something I’ve had to fight to enjoy for the same reason that I don’t listen to a lot of hardcore punk, for example. But it was clear after OOUITK that there was a change in the air as they shed a lot of the musical influences that Mike Patton introduced to them way back when they were in-between singers after their first album, and recorded a fantastic and bizarre EP with him. They were returning, at least in my mind, to the place from whence they came - to the complex and brutal hardcore punk roots that had defined their debut studio album Calculating Infinity back in 1999. The difference between Calculating Infinity and Dissocation, however, is that Calculating Infinity had a sense of humour. Dissocation is a dark album. It’s a reeling, unrelenting, blast of white noise. The few experimental electronic touches that remain create an aura of despair, like the sound of a stalker following you down a subterranean tunnel. Melody has all but been wiped out, and the hooks that offered us plebs a peek through the door of the secret club have been more-or-less tossed away here - those few that remain just aren’t that great. Even the now-requisite last-track ‘melodic’ song is an alienating experience - a mournful dirge left right at the very end of the album, through a forest of dark rage that one must traverse in order to find the light, and it rings like a funeral hymn to mark the band’s end. 

This doesn’t make the album bad. But it does set it as far apart from the rest of their work as the gestational ideas of Calculating Infinity do. In other words, if you come to Dissociation looking for the DEP album to end all DEP albums, you’re not likely to find what you’re expecting. Instead, you’re going to find a conscious choice to make an album that stands apart as something other than another Ire Works, or OOUITK, and being a choice, there are consequences to accompany it - one of those being that it’s just not that fun to listen to. It takes the furious energy of their debut album, and the finesse and flawless production of their modern releases, and leaves most of the entertainment factor out of the equation. Even if I wanted to do it (which I don’t, because I fucking hate them), a song-by-song appraisal is hard to do here for the simple fact that tracks one-through-nine are, for all intents and purposes, kind of the same. ‘Song begins with raucous, frenetic riffing and screaming’, ‘song ends with raucous, frenetic riffing and screaming four or five minutes later’. You know exactly the type of DEP song I’m talking about, except take away a lot of the nuance, and what you’ve got left it is Dissociation. And I know for a fact that those last few sentences will drive purists up the wall, but I own every piece of music the band has released for commercial sale and I listen to them on a weekly basis, and I simply cannot penetrate Dissociation’s ironclad aural barrier. 

Perhaps, like all their releases, it is as I said - an onion to unpeel. But I’ve always found one of the most intriguing and endearing aspects of Dillinger to be the fact that no matter what they’re doing, no matter how extreme, or mainstream their sound, one can always immediately see the uniqueness and worth from song to song. 'Miss Machine’ has been compared in reviews to the type of music one would use to force a dictator out of his barricaded palace, but it’s actually a really eclectic and dynamic album - every song is clearly distinct from the last. So whether it’s different riffing, or syncopation, or melody, or tempo, there’s always something that defines even their most blistering tracks as an individual piece with individual inspirations behind the music. And while I feel like this waned a bit in recent releases, Dissociation is the first of their albums that I feel lacks that uniqueness for the largest part. And perhaps it’s a matter of changing internal influences - ex-drummer Chris Pennie once described guitarist and songwriter Ben Weinman as his ‘musical soulmate’, and was largely responsible for much of the electronic influence (among other things) up to and including Ire Works. Both he and his replacement, Gil Sharone, left the band to pursue more diverse musical endeavours. And as much as I revere the work of current drummer Billy Rymer, perhaps he simply didn’t have the same kind of say in the creation of the last three albums? Although none of these three albums can rightly be called bad, they each get progressively less memorable than the last, and say what you will about the band’s fluctuating accessibility, but it’s simply not as easy to discern between nine songs that all largely follow the same formula. 

And that’s what Dissociation is. A collection of songs that largely follow the same formula, with one reasonably interesting penultimate track, and then a funeral dirge. Of the band’s work, it is amongst the least inspiring, and it’s a depressing album, not for its lack of Dillinger’s typical idiosyncratic qualities, but for its utter lack of levity. Dissociation is a lasting reminder of the kind of ravenous energy the band had right until the end, but it’s probably not the kind of thing you put down and feel glad you listened to. 

*SPOILERS*, but who cares at this point?

I’ve placed a lot of expectation on myself for this review. It’s been through three incarnations already, and I still can’t get it right. It’s muddled, it says too little about too many things, it’s all over the place emotionally, and it needs a good edit. 

...Hey then, I suppose in that case it’s perfect, because it’s exactly like Star Wars: The Last Jedi *badoom tish*.

For those that don’t know, I’m a massive Star Wars fan with all the usual caveats applying - not the prequels, not the garbage games, not the Christmas Special. And yet The ‘Last Jedi’ was the first Star Wars film ever released that I straight-up refused to watch. It started with me simply failing to care, and then it became an antagonistic joke to some people who asked me to review it, until finally it turned into a matter of earnest protest - I was not going to pay to see this film, because that way Disney wins. It was only after I realised it was released on a streaming service that my girlfriend had a subscription for that I decided to bite the bullet. I’ve asked myself many times before and since how the hell things could possibly have gotten to this point - to the point that I, the second biggest fan I know, for whom the series was and is a deep and integral part of my life, would simply stop giving a shit?

In the case of The Last Jedi, it began with the mundanity of Disney’s output. Who would have guessed that, after all the prophecies of hope and dread following the corporation’s acquisition of the Star Wars licence, the actual end-result would be that they would simply bore us to death with aggressively average releases? That fact, coupled with the unfathomable laziness of The Force Awakens’ rehashing of A New Hope’s story, and the cavalcade of negative press, reviews, and anecdotes I read and heard in the wake of The Last Jedi’s release hammered the last nail in the coffin with such force, it might as well have been fired directly from the Death Star. For what it’s worth now, it’s immediately clear that even though the prequel trilogy are, by most metrics, terrible films, at least they still very much fit into the Star Wars universe. There’s something about George Lucas’ touch, something that I can’t explain, in that while it stands for nothing in terms of guaranteeing quality, it can at least be counted on to sprinkle originality and imagination over an otherwise well-worn, classic story. George Lucas’ Episode VII sure as hell wouldn’t have been a blatant reboot of A New Hope. And whatever your thoughts on the man, the fact is that without him, we’re stuck in a real worst-case scenario: a bunch of isolated  ‘enthusiasts’ writing disconnected fan-fiction screenplays for the corporate zombies on Disney’s board to mutilate in accordance with their latest focus-group data. Mediocre scripts rendered ever-more tedious by a studio intent on watering down anything and everything that might turn someone away, and in doing so, they end up turning away everyone that was looking for something new. For the series that I so adore, this is a fate worse than death. So it is that we end up with Rian Johnson’s crack at the franchise, and so it is that I found myself completely and utterly ambivalent. 

I wish I had enough passion in me to savage this film - to create a real spectacle piece, a cathartic script to read for anyone else feeling angry and disappointed. I wish that, after all the waiting and the bemused anticipation, The Last Jedi had made me mad enough to rip it to pieces...but, honestly, I don’t know if it did. I think the overwhelming sensation that filled me when it was all said and done was that it met my expectations exactly. And don’t get me wrong - by most metrics, The Last Jedi is an utter clusterfuck. By most metrics, it’s a terrible Star Wars film. But it’s not like Johnson scorched the earth of the franchise - Disney had more to do with that than he. Johnson’s script simply built itself a weird, amateurish hovel atop a pre-existing ruin. And while I’m not saying that no-one could ever possibly release a good Star Wars film again (even though I don’t think they will), for me - and judging by the extremely lackluster numbers of ‘Solo’, a great deal of others - Disney simply cannot recapture the strange, flawed, wizard-magic of George Lucas and Lucasfilm, and I don’t know if I’m ever going to care about another Star Wars film again. 

Yes, it’s that famous nerd-fan hyperbole at play here - I won’t deny that I care more than I should - but I want to reiterate that I’m not so much in histrionics over this particular instalment, but about what the film and its collective flaws represent. The feeling George Lucas got during the test screening of The Phantom Menace - that dreadful understanding that your multi-million-dollar creation is a dog’s breakfast - is a feeling that should have echoed throughout the entirety of Disney HQ when The Last Jedi was first screened. Disney’s fractured, unfocused, haphazard production process is directly mirrored in The Last Jedi’s fractured, unfocused, haphazard final product. Its plot is a mess and filled with holes and unfinished ideas. It’s tone-deaf. Every single attempt at humour is groan-inducing. It’s so fixated on concluding the stories of old, core characters, and yet unceremoniously shovels beloved side-characters into a mass grave; and every single time it tries to introduce someone or something new, they either don’t fit properly into the universe, or the film drops it like a pot of Kevin Malone’s chili into the middle of a confusing series of events, glossing over character’s histories to such an extent that it’s impossible to care about them. Admiral Ackbar is in this film, apparently. I didn’t know that until one of the characters mentions that he’d been killed. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention, or maybe they said his name while I was yelling at the TV in incredulous rage, but one of the most revered characters in the series is eliminated with such little fanfare, I didn’t even know he was onscreen when it happened. He’s then supplanted by a commander that was apparently trained by Leia, but has never been mentioned in 40 years of canon. She’s killed an hour later. That’s cool. That was a good decision.  

It’s going to be really hard to detail all the missteps in The Last Jedi’s lumbering progression towards its underwhelming end, but I’ll try to relate some of the most impactful. Through an absurd web of barely-connected story threads, we follow Luke Skywalker as he drinks raw milk from an alien’s tit. We see General Hux turned into some slapstick comedy ragdoll existing only to scream incomprehensibly and be dragged around the set by the dark jedi. We see Luke toss his old lightsaber away as if the last time he had it, it didn’t disappear down a bottomless pit. We’re still not given an explanation as to where and how it was found, and we probably never will. We see every side character from the previous film either written-out or killed. We see Leia somehow master the Force to overcome certain death, and it’s never explained how. We see an X-Wing ‘drift’ in the vacuum of space. We see Captain Phasma return as if she’s some kind of nemesis to Finn, only to have her ass kicked by the ex-stormtrooper grunt in a 30-second fight before falling to her presumed death. Leia chastises Poe for being reckless, then immediately sanctions his recklessness. Finn decides that the only way to stop a First Order weapon is to fly into it and kill himself. This does not happen, and there are no consequences. Yoda’s force ghost somehow burns down the site of old Jedi texts, and then the texts turn up unscathed in a throwaway shot later on. A joke prop from A New Hope is given a role of sentimental importance, even though most people won’t even know it ever existed, and won’t therefore have any emotional connection with it - I didn’t, and I’ve watched the film about 30 times. And perhaps most importantly, we see the ‘Resistance’ on the run from an evil entity that somehow crawled out of the ashes of a decimated Empire with enough manpower and capital to finance and build a weapon the size of a literal planet, lost that planet along with all the men and materiel remaining on it, and STILL remains far more powerful than the fighting force and governing power that defeated its every incarnation throughout history. Apparently, eradicating the Empire’s dictatorial command structure and freeing the most influential planets in the galaxy does absolutely nothing to weaken it, and yet the entirety of the armed forces of the new Galactic Republic exists aboard a dozen underpowered ships. 

Nothing makes sense. Nothing is sacred. The weakness of J.J. Abrams conceit for Episode VII is revealed here as Johnson intentionally erases every mystery he established and tosses away all the minor characters that glimmered with the faint hope of being something more interesting this time around. He’s stated in interviews that he was trying to ‘subvert audience expectations’, and if your expectation was that the second film in the trilogy would build on the first, he certainly succeeded in that goal. But what story is The Last Jedi trying to tell? Like The Force Awakens, it’s so trapped by the prestige of its past and the burden of creating a future that, in accordance with Disney, must please every single human being alive, that it achieves nothing. When Mark Hamill tells you to your face that he completely disagrees with every single decision you’ve made about a character he’s known and lived for forty years, your decisions probably need a rethink. But Johnson didn’t rethink his decisions, and Mark Hamill is such a boss that he gave it his all regardless. No, The Last Jedi doesn’t scorch the earth. It simply salts the already desolate landscape so that nothing more may grow again, at least from this story-cycle.

So with all this frustration, you might assume that I despised the film...but I didn’t. It has the worst script of any Star Wars film, no doubt - worse in its inept storytelling and its awful, atonal jokes than almost anything Lucas ever wrote – and yet I'd still watch it again sooner than Episode 2. I’d watch it sooner than The Force Awakens. It's stupid, and overlong, and a directionless, muddled mess, but it still has some good moments. I liked seeing Luke, despite the potential of his character being wasted. I liked the idea of a union between Kylo and Rey, even if that too was squandered. I still like Kylo Ren, even if that’s not a popular opinion. As much as Admiral Holdo's character was ineptly shoehorned into the plot, I liked her final scene. Leia carries herself with strength and dignity, and actually gives orders and counsel, as she should. These moments are a drop in a bucket when it comes to tallying the bad vs the good, but they're there, and they’re okay. 

But this film cannot be fixed. Rian Johnson has said that J.J. Abrams shared no long-term plans for the trilogy. No shit. For every three films planned, George Lucas had a three-film arc; that’s what tied together even the worst of the Lucasfilm releases. Disney has no such plan. They’re trying to cobble together a trilogy of films without retaining any creative staff, and giving the new people they bring in through a revolving door free-reign to do whatever they want right up until it clashes with the company’s monetisation plan. There’s no consistency. There’s no permanence. There’s no balance or flow between instalments because there’s no unified oversight, and the end result is that every incoming writer has to spend a large portion of their time guessing the answers to questions that the previous writer posed. And Rian Johnson, for his part, has no idea what he’s doing or where he’s going. His contribution to the Star Wars legacy is to undo everything Abrams left for him, retroactively destroying any worth The Force Awakens might have had, and establish nothing for himself. Every film in this new cycle has been a patchwork mess led by an ever-changing roster of freelance writers and directors looking for a million-dollar paycheck. It’s an utter disaster, and Disney can call it ‘canon’ all it likes, but this is not a real Star Wars film. 

So I’m trying this thing now called ‘socialising’, where I meet people I know and go and do things with them. It’s new and weird, and sometimes you have to see trash films because someone suggests it and you’re part of the hive mind now so you can’t resist, but I think I like it. At least it gives me something new to write about, so I’m not always like ‘this is a film I watched because I heard good things about it and it was, as they said, good, 8/10′.

That’s how I ended up in the Peckhamplex with a five pound ticket and a bag full of pick and mix, watching ‘The Nun’. Well, I say ‘watching’, but what I mean is ‘trying not to punch the person across the aisle in the face for eating nachos in the cinema like she’s in an advert and the crunch has been digitally edited in for maximum effect’. Well, I say that, but what I really mean is ‘trying not to get distracted by the groups of people who keep turning up 45 mins into a 90 min film’. Well, I say that, but what I really mean is ‘trying to figure out whether that’s an usher pointing their phone flashlight at the screen, or a patron who has turned up 45 mins into a 90 mins film.’

...I hate cinemas.

But in this case, the cinema turned out to be the only place worth watching a movie like this because the audience reactions to it were far more entertaining than the movie itself - I’m not sure what it means if the jump scares elicit more laughter than they do fright, but I’m not sure it’s a good sign. In any case, James Wan has once again backed a garbage truck up to the doorstep of mainstream cinema and dumped a giant load of refuse everywhere, because The Nun is fucking shit. 

A lazy, unplanned spinoff to a studio-mandated sequel, The Nun fails to tell the origin story of the titular villain, a manifestation of the demon ‘Valak’, who stalks the halls of an old Romanian castle converted into a cloistered convent after the castle’s owner was beheaded by the Knights Templar for his unholy activities. The bombs of World War 2 have disturbed a portal to Hell, allowing Valak to escape, and one-by-one she eliminates the inhabitants of the convent. Then the movie starts, and instead of that other awesome horror film we could have been watching, we have to watch a bunch of clueless people chase shadows for ninety minutes until they figure out that everyone was dead all along and they can finally get to the expected showdown. 

Spoilers, yes, but fuck you, the film is trash. If you were so looking forward to The Nun that you’re upset I spoiled it for you, then you’re a gullible idiot, and I don’t respect your opinion. I’m sorry, but the one good thing about the blatant laziness of mainstream Hollywood films is that they’ve so utterly poisoned the well that they don’t need to pander when there’s nothing better to see. Therefore, they’re pretty transparent - at no point have the makers of this film tried to convince anyone that it’s not a predictable, lazy cash-grab. It’s called ‘The Nun’, for god’s sake, because it’s about the nun in that other film. There are a thousand titles they could have gone with, and they chose ‘The Nun’. Why has there never been a film called ‘The Nun’ before now? Because it’s a garbage title and no movie-maker with any self-respect would choose it. My point is that you’ve been warned well in advance of what you’re going to see, and if you’re still excited then your standards are objectively low. Before we’d even exited the cinema my friends and I thought up at least three different conceits that were better than the one they chose to go with, including turning it into a tongue-in-cheek spooky action film like Brendan Fraser’s ‘The Mummy’, or focusing on showing everything that happened before the film rather than the aftermath of a more interesting story, or actually making a proper haunted house movie rather than forcing the audience to sit there as characters repeatedly see a thing, plod towards it at a snail’s pace, activate a jump scare, and then the thing disappears, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, thanks for your cash, idiots. There is one death in the whole film, and it occurs less than five minutes in. Every other second involves just waiting for the speakers to go ‘bang’ and wondering why the cast are servicing such a dogshit script with such committed performances. 

Yeah, it’s not all bad. The main trio are surprisingly engaging for what little they’ve got to work with, and at times early on I even found myself invested in the possibilities of the story, but it quickly becomes clear that their performances cannot elevate the film, and any hope quickly fades, because for all they could have done with the conceit the creatives instead chose to take the lowest possible road. I realise that makes it sound lowbrow, and I kind of wish it was, because at least that'd be interesting. But it's not - it's just torpid, sunk by a complete lack of inspiration or care. I would not be the slightest bit surprised to find out that the script had been written in a day, and the size of the credits was a genuine shock to me as I couldn’t believe it had taken that many people to make this. Look at the screengrab at the top of the review - that’s an actual frame that ended up in a twenty-two million dollar film and it’s fucking shit. A ‘professional’ made that composite. Someone got paid an awful lot of money to do that, and it looks like a teenager made it in Windows Movie Maker. It’s laughable. And it’s not the only thing. The editing is awful, the music is bizarrely inappropriate and tonally inconsistent, every time CGI is used it invariably makes the scene less scary, the story is threadbare, the villain is utterly useless, the script has no respect for logic or internal consistency, there aren’t any rules to the universe, and the direction of the spooky scenes is so piss poor that I genuinely think Corin Hardy should be blacklisted. 

This guy...this fucking guy... As a horror director, Corin Hardy has exactly two tricks up his sleeve: 

1) 

* Camera looks backwards at character and over their shoulder as they turn. 

* Spooky thing appears behind them.

* They turn again and the spooky thing disappears. 

2) 

* Character sees spooky thing. 

* Character approaches spooky thing.

* Soundtrack goes quiet.

* BANG.

* Spooky thing disappears. 

It’s lame and boring the first time it happens. By the literal, not figurative, tenth time I was throwing my hands up in utter disdain. Here’s the trick: you can manage to avoid being spooked by acknowledging to yourself that ‘a loud noise is going to happen’ - an easy guess to make, because it turns into a silent film each and every time a jump scare approaches - and then when the loud noise happens, you're expecting it, like a siren passing down the street, and it doesn’t shock you. Because that’s what a jump scare is: it’s shock, not fright. It’s a reflex action that you can’t control, and it’s as spooky as watching the weather report with your girlfriend and then shrieking for no reason. If that’s the kind of thing you’re into pay me two hundred and twenty eight million US dollars and I’ll do it to you whenever you want. Or you can piss your money into a Hollywood producer’s mouth so they can abuse more cocaine and women. Whatever you prefer.

I just can’t get over the breathtaking lack of effort. As we left the screening room, my friend lamented the lack of the most basic creativity - pinpointing the moment when the characters enter the creature’s lair and wander off from one another for no good reason, he said that the writers could have done literally anything with the conceit given that there was no lore or dogma surrounding the creature. The nun could lure them away, or trick them, or change the surroundings... Instead, they simply split off into three different rooms without a word of explanation, and despite each being endangered on multiple occasions before. In the belly of the beast, they just wordlessly wander away from one another, and as they did it felt like the writer was slowly dragging his balls across my face, daring me to get up and leave. 

Because ‘The Nun’ is a test, you see? They’re testing to see how fucking gullible you are. It’s a cheaply made spin-off that twenty-five years ago would have gone straight-to-VHS, but the obsession with ‘cinematic universes’ has got us clawing over each other to make sure that we don’t miss a single instalment, just in case a background character shows up to spray diarrhea in our faces in the post-credits sequence of ‘The Snake Mouth Kid From The Nun: 7′ fifteen years in the future.  It doesn’t matter if you walk out vowing never to watch another one again, because you already gave them your money. You failed the test when you bought the ticket. And if you think this is scary, wait until you see the scam they try and pull next.

I do play other games, you know. 

I’m mid-way through a bunch of games, and finished others but just haven’t gotten my thoughts together about them. It’s just really easy for me to speak my mind about Ubisoft games, because there’s so damn many of them, I’ve played so damn many of them, and their features are all iterative, rather than innovative, so there’s always an established base for me to speak from. In saying that, my review of the first Watch Dogs was one of impressed incredulity - it’s a really decent game. If it was the only open-world game that Ubisoft had released, it would have been lauded. Its use of the digital hacker trope as a gameplay tool to manipulate the city’s infrastructure in real time, as well as to peer into the private lives of each citizen, and the lengths it went to construct a vast series of interpersonal interactions amongst the NPCs resulted in a believable and interesting gameworld, and some genuinely thrilling cat-and-mouse car chases through the city streets. Unfortunately it was at the tip of spear during an infamous period of graphical downgrading when Ubisoft would naively stir hype with technically unfeasible pre-release gameplay footage, and then inevitably get hit with backlash when the actual released version of the game was necessarily downgraded in terms of its looks in order. 

I say ‘downgraded’ rather than ‘it looked worse’, because Watch Dogs has never looked ‘bad’. It’s not as swanky as the pre-release footage, but it still looks great, and it boggles my fucking mind when I try to consider how enslaved to the shareholders the people making the marketing decisions must be, how out-of-touch they’d have to be to fail to predict the backlash, or how dishonest they are if the backlash is some kind of considered collateral as long as the pre-orders rack up. In any case, the announcement of Watch Dogs 2 received a not-undue amount of skepticism in return. Given how deceitful the marketing of the first game was, I was shocked that there was much interest at all. But Ubisoft smartly chose a bold new style to contrast the drab and morose look of the previous game, and this strange, quirky, fun-looking experience did the trick and sparked interest. Instead of the Windy City, we were treated to sun-kissed San Francisco. Instead of the gruff, grumbly ‘brown-haired white male protagonist #375’ (I can’t recall his name), we had a collective of young, crazy, wise-cracking hackers. The foundation of the original Watch Dogs was solid enough for this to be enough of a change, and so it was that Watch Dogs 2 was released to a reasonable amount of praise. 

For all intents and purposes, it’s much the same game, but it fits an era of Ubisoft releases I’m going to refer to as ‘Newbisoft’: that is, the era in which Ubi seemed to finally get that its output was repetitive shit, and started making the barest effort to disguise it. The collectibles have been scaled down and replaced with places of interest that one can photograph to accrue experience points. The ‘experience points’ have been replaced with ‘followers’ - ostensibly reflecting the rise of your hacker collective as you complete missions and tasks. Other busywork activities such as pointless races are still there, as are Assassin’s Creed’s loot chests in the form of money bags lying in protected areas patrolled by gang members or security forces, but in putting them within an area that one must sneak into, seeking them out feels more like a mission than it does mindless filler. The amount of cash needed to purchase the various weapons and vehicles is generally quite high, and this feeds a desire in the player to want to engage in this cash-grabbing - you’re not getting six useless reales at a time - so it’s less irritating in this way. But if you stop to think about it too long, it’s unmistakably the same old bag of tricks. 

As for the game itself? Well...it’s okay. As an open-world Ubisoft game, it’s fine. It’s far too long, and if you’re anything like me and put off the story missions for fear of finishing the game and missing loads of content, you’ll quickly find out that the side missions aren’t actually side missions, but rather a near-endless series of tasks that you’re required to repeat four or five times before each matter is resolved. This pads out the play time by a dozen hours at least, and by the time you’ve finished the majority of them you might feel rather sick of the experience as a whole. Gameplay-wise it’s again similar to the first, although there seems to be a greater focus on gunplay than on setting and activating traps. This undermines the few unique elements of the series as a whole, as it’s simply more enjoyable to walk into an area and shoot anything that moves than it is to try and knock people out one at a time, only to have them wake up a few minutes later and shoot you in the back. Also, I, for one, didn’t mind the general seriousness of the first game. It gave the narrative a sort of singular focus that I felt impelled me onwards. Was it melodramatic? Yeah. Did I have a clue what was happening? Not really. But it contextualised the player’s exploration of the gritty ghetto areas, and construction sights, and grimy backalleys of Chicago, and resulted in a very evocative experience. Meanwhile, Watch Dogs 2 is all sun-shine and rainbows. Everything is in technicolour. All the characters are upbeat and exaggerated, and while I won’t fault the acting (except for the main character, who, amongst a band colourful of misfits, proves time and time again to be the most annoying and bland member), it feels like there are no stakes and no genuine repercussions for their actions. Their foggy mission-statement of dismantling the establishment and ending the reign of privacy-invading corporations is vague, and directly contradicted by the player’s actions in game as you peek into the secret lives of every single NPC you come across, or steal from their bank accounts, or hijack their cars, or run them down as they chat with friends. The characters are, by and large, as virtuous as can be, but in the course of completing your missions, the collateral damage is enormous. Watch Dogs 2 is a game that has crafted a story and characters that are at odds with the central conceit of the gameplay. This was not a problem with the first game, whose tale of rage-fueled vigilante justice was not opposed by the player’s in-game actions. 

That’s not to say that it doesn’t get anything right, of course. As mentioned, the acting is generally great - the character of Josh, a brilliant hacker with Asperger’s, is particularly charming and well-performed. It also carries on the previous game’s commitment to crafting a believable world with hundreds of nuanced, varied, and entertaining interactions between the NPCs that populate the city. I’m going to go ahead and say that Ubisoft’s efforts with the Watch Dogs series are about on-par with Rockstar in terms of creating a believable world filled with interesting characters. Every single NPC has a story. Every single area of the world is filled with incredibly detailed locations. At one point I came across a group of people who were trying and failing to take a photo of themselves with a self-timing camera. I stood in front of them and aimed a selfie at all of us and they stopped what they were doing and started laughing - the woman who was so desperate to have their photo work threw her hands up and grumbled. These people weren’t planted anywhere particular - they were just standing in an innocuous place by the seaside. The moment stood out to me amongst the thousands of other people you see around, but I could’ve put a hundred hours into the game and missed them. Other people will swear at you for taking photos of them, or play up to the camera, but this one particular group lost in this massive city had this one specific reaction, and I’m still not sure where it was something uniquely programmed, or whether it was just a particularly smooth example of the established systems working together in surprising harmony. 

The ability to interact with the city’s infrastructure only adds to the feeling of immersion. There’s plenty of joy to be found standing on a street corner during a rain shower and triggering the traffic lights, or causing cars to come to sharp stops or careen off the road. I found myself relying far less on the Watch Dogs ways of escaping danger though - blowing steam vents used to fill me with delight, but I found myself just hiding in alleyways far more often this time. The enemy AI is much more intelligent, no doubt, but the low-rise buildings of San Francisco offer less places to hide from helicopters, who quickly become the bane of your existence, and force you into long getaway chases from one end of the map to the other. 

The online aspects of the game are back, and are still entertaining. Drop-in co-op modes are accessible, if a little underwhelming in terms of what they ask of you, and the Bounty Hunter mode that can sometimes trigger automatically if you or another human player has been wanted for long enough will send you fleeing from the law AND trying to outwit other players as they race around trying to blow the shit out of you. It’s an arseload of fun seeing what lengths other players will go to in order to escape - at one point I dove off a bridge after a player, plunging into the water below behind him, and as he slowly swam away I hijacked a fishing trawler and ran him down. The nature of the game’s systems allow for abject chaos, and this is never clearer than when indulging it with other players. However, this too suffers from feeling somewhat less satisfying than that of the previous game, particularly when it comes to the ‘hacking invasion’ mode. As with the car chases, the lack of verticality and relative sparsity of pedestrians mean that there are few places for a person to hide, so in a mode that requires you to blend in with your surroundings, the most effective tactic is often just to put as much space between you and the other player. Standing in groups of people rarely works because there are rarely groups of people to stand with. Finding a spot to crouch and using the cameras to spot the other person rarely works because there often isn’t a spot to crouch that isn’t exposed. Once again, the brighter, happier change of scenery has transformed the game for the worse. 

And I think that cuts to the core of the issues with the Watch Dogs 2 - the changes are predominantly tonal, but the issues with the first game weren’t. Ubisoft fucked up because they pulled a bait-and-switch on the public, and because they milked their formula dry and sold it to an exhausted audience, not because the game wasn’t silly enough. Newbisoft’s Watch Dogs 2 is only new in spirit, and the changes they’ve made are, as always, iterative rather than innovative. It’s also one of the most unnecessarily draining games I’ve ever played in terms of the computing power required to run it to any reasonable standard. I had to rebuild my entire computer just to get it to run higher than 40fps. There’s no need for that, especially not for a game that is, to some extent, a glorified Saints Row. It could be a case of some rose-tinted hindsight, but I'd personally recommend the first game over this one, in terms of raw mood and action. It’s not perfect at all, but it’s darker and grittier and I think that kind of tone is better served by the gameplay. However, that’s not to say that this isn’t worth a play. If you’ve never played a Watch Dogs game before, then maybe this is the better place to start? It’s fun...at least for the first dozen hours, before it gets tedious. But then, can’t you say the same for nearly everything Ubisoft has ever released?