2019 has not been a kindly year to gamers. There has been flop after flop, a lack of games being released and a lot of shady moves by developers. The first half of 2019 for us has basically been the final scene between Anakin and Obi in Episode 3. All year long it has been so hard to recommend any games on this page, as I prefer to sing to the skies about awesome games that I'd like you to try, which has resulted in this page being very quiet this year.
A Plague Tale: Innocence is a quaint game. It is a simple game. But it's one that absolutely deserves your attention, your money, and your time.
Set in the 14th century France, you play as a Amicia, a noble lady living a simple life. Her little brother Hugo is sick and she has barely ever seen him. But suddenly, out in the forest, there are signs of something sinister brewing, and the Inquisition come knocking on the De Rune family door asking questions. Tasked with protecting her baby brother, Amicia and Hugo take off into the countryside, looking for help, safety from the Inquisition and to see what has truly been set upon France in all its horror.
I can't talk about this game without mention just how gorgeous it is. It's dark and full of gore, but also light and beauty at times, it truly captures what it's like to walk through a forest during the day and what its like walking into a dark basement, capturing that childlike horror where we have all latched onto something we hear in the dark and are terrified. The atmosphere is utterly stupendous. I cannot sing its praises enough.
The voice acting is fairly well done, a tad melodramatic at times, but still impressive considering the cast of relatively unknown actors to the voice acting world. The relationship between Hugo and Amicia is wonderful; speaking as a little brother with a big sister, I can absolutely vouch that some scenes in particular had emotions running high. Sound effects were greatly done, especially when it comes to the plague in question (which gives a zombie vibe but twists it into their own gruesome sound and feel when it comes to the game.
Lastly I want to mention gameplay; slightly above I mentioned the simplicity, but there's a little more to it. Playing as Amicia, you must take Hugo along with you, sneaking around guards, causing distractions with rocks and pots, knocking out guards with your slingshot, and always making sure your brother remains healthy and comfortable. Leave him alone or get out of his line of sight and he will panic, screaming and calling for you and alerting every single enemy nearby to your location. Amicia isn't covered in armor, her slingshot is her only weapon but it's going to do nothing against armored knights. One hit, one wrong step and you're done for, Hugo is done for. Every choice you make, be it staying crouched or pushing Hugo through a gap first will determine if you live or die.
You can also craft upgrades for Amicia; higher inventory numbers, upgrades to her sling and sneaking ability and so on. This comes within the first quarter of the game and helps with the exploration of a corridor type game.
There's not much more I can say about this game without spoiling key story moments, but the game starts and ends in quite different places with a meaningful overall arc for the characters, world and how it shapes France. Amicia and Hugo are not the same people as they were when they first set out, but I leave their story in your hands. Roughly a 20 hour experience for less than the standard asking price, a great story and great twist on a plague story (with a few vibes of Dishonored here and there, but you can't avoid that with rats), A Plague Tale is yet another excellent example of what a small company can do with a passion project with a talented team behind it.
A Plague Tale: Innocence: 8/10
RAGE was a terrific, but flawed, game. It had a simple but great storyline, fun mechanics and most of all, great gameplay. It was only set back by a bit of glitches, bad audio, tad bad voice acting at time and the now infamously ridiculed ending. There is a veeeeery bad review I wrote for it many years ago, but to put it in context, I gave it an 8/10, and honestly I'd stand by that. Maybe not the line of "It may very well be the Doom of this generation", but hey, it's still a great game. Especially worth it now for a cheap price and a 20-30 hour experience, longer if you do the side missions.
You may be wondering why I'm focusing on the original RAGE instead of its sequel. The reason being, I can bring myself to talk fondly of RAGE. I can't do that of RAGE 2.
RAGE 2 kicks off the action immediately; you choose your protagonist, and immediately set off to fight the Authority that's attacking your home, reducing it to rubble and twenty people left. You are the last Ranger, a bloodline of people from the Ark (that your OG protag opened) and can don special armor that gives your character abilities, such as extra jumps, groundpound, focus, etc. The world is massive and open for you to explore with your goal quite simply; kill the baddie, save the local communities.
And then it's over. The sequel for a 30 hour long game is barely 8 hours long, 6 if you discount the amount of grind. And yes, you will need to grind in order to continue playing story missions (much like how Saints Row required you to get Respect by doing certain tasks or in world activities). But taking that out, and just focusing on the story, for a full priced game...that's horrible.
Don't get me wrong; the voice acting is pretty good, the graphics and sound effects look great, the gameplay is good too, but there's simply not enough or nothing innovative or new to keep me playing this long term. I barely managed to get through it because, in full honesty, the game is a generic shooter. I've been writing reviews for almost nine years, I've been playing a lot of games long since then, and this is as generic of a shooter as you'd find. The gameplay is DOOM (naturally speaking since Id made this game) mixed with a few others such as Saints Row, Infamous and a splash of Halo 5. I personally didn't find any bugs or problems with the game, so that's a small bonus to be had,
It's fun, but it's nothing I haven't seen before. The story is lackluster, the open world is dead and repetitive (the extra tasks you need to do are mostly fetch quests or destruction based). If you're more of a casual gamer, barely played any shooters or mostly stick to one genre, you won't find many problems with this. Same if you're a giant DOOM fan or just don't care about stories or intricate details and rather blow/slam/explode/shoot things up. You'll have a blast.
But for the rest of us...wait until there's a price drop at the very least. If you have little curiosity, give it a pass all together. Nothing new to the genre is added, nothing of note can be said, and selling an 8 hour empty experience at full price is why I am dropping a point.
The original game is a TENTH of the original cost and almost four times longer. Spend your money there.
RAGE 2: 3/10
Zombie games. Most definitely bulldozed into the public eye by the success of the Nazi Zombies mode in Call of Duty World At War. Ever since, zombie modes and zombie games have capitalised on this for the better half of a decade. In the last few years, the genre has seen better days, as the public has mostly moved on, while the core zombie fanatics remain, myself included. In full honesty however, the genre has grown stale, with too few games released capturing my attention for long. So many copy the same formula, the same concept, the same methods.
Days Gone is not one of them.
Set in a modern day world in the American state of Oregon, you play as Deacon St. John, an Enforcer NOMAD of the Mongrels Club. All hell is set loose as the Freaks, the zombie-like plague, has hundreds of thousands of infected people bearing down on him, his biker brother Boozer (AKA Boozeman) and your wife, Sarah. Sustaining an injury, Sarah is placed on a helicoper by a Nero scientist inter O'Brien, while Deacon stays behind to protect his injured brother.
Fast forward over 700 days, Deacon and Boozer are Drifters, people who travel from camp to camp running errands, saving enough credits to buy upgrades for their bikes and finally travel north for a fresh start and escape their ghosts...until everything starts going right, and wrong, for Deacon.
The story here is incredibly deep and satisfying, on par with The Last of Us; never focusing on unnecessary exposition, but drip-feeding information at the right time. Stories and characters branch out and expand as time goes on, feeling organic with the time frame and how Deacon's position in teh world changes around him. After almost 40 hours of gameplay later, I was extremely happy with the conclusion, with the characters arcs being neatly wrapped up, and the appropriate questions being answered (and so many more being added with the secret ending, wink wink). The sound effects and musical score were also genius and fitted perfectly into the world, although I do wish there was more of a score to be had. The world was so open and large that it felt empty and dead; don't get me wrong, that's great for a zombie game, but not so great for players sitting on over 24 hours of gameplay and listening to the same dialogue lines, the same engine noise and same screams over and over. Graphics wise was nothing short of beautiful; so many times I stopped to just admire the view, especially when it began to snow or exploring snowy regions. As a man who has never seen snow, it was breathtaking to see it and experience it in such detail. It's scary when it wants to be scary, and jawdropping when it wants to be jawdropping.
Onto to the meat of the game - gameplay. The only way I can explain it is to compare it to a good mix of Dying Light and The Last of Us; players can explore a massive, maaaaasive open world, slaying Freaks, Horde of hundreds of Swarmers, Screamers, Breakers and more, traveling from place to place on their trusty motorbike. Being in a broken world, you're gonna need supplies, which can mostly be found in camps, but to make items, you'll need to find what you need (or wait for Boozer to do it). Finding most of what you need is easy enough, it's tracking down that last thing (looking at you Kerosene, WHY CAN'T I JUST USE PETROL?!) that completes the craft. But it doesn't stop there. Your bike breaks, you need scrap to fix it. Bike run dry? Better find a gas can. Out of bullets? Best hope you refilled your satchel, or your melee weapon isn't near breaking.
Then comes the world itself; it can be slightly empty in certain areas during the day, but at night it when they shine...with the dozens or hundreds of Freak bodies scrambling to come and consume you since you accidentally fired a shot nearby instead of using your bow. NERO injector sites to increase your health/stamina/focus, Horde locations, Ambush sites, marauder camps, camp objectives, there's plenty to keep you busy long after you've finished the game (or like me, in between missions). The one mistake to note is that doing all of this, you may sense a theme; your tactics never really change.
Go to a location, track/follow your target, take them/their group out, return for credit, repeat. This also follows for most of the main story. In short, there is a lot, a LOT, of simple gameplay.
BUT, simple doesn't mean bad. Repetitive is a bad thing, that is for sure, but repetitive isn't bad as long as the gameplay is fun, exhilarating or keeps your attention, which I'm glad to say Days Gone did for me in spades.
By far the biggest pull for this game was its voice acting. Sam Witwer takes the reigns of Deacon and once more, he steals the show. He truly creates Deacon as a living, breathing man; the additional effort in his vocal work to make Deacon sound paranoid, scared, angry, even exhausted after finishing a firefight is nothing short of phenomenal. The supporting cast was also fantastic in creating such a living world, feeding off the world around them; character emotions felt raw and electric when conflict came into play.
Naturally, I do have to mention bugs and problems, sadly which this game does have in spades. Respawning after dying can put you in insta-kill areas, scenes will often keep motion blur at bizarre moments. Screen tearing and frame rate issues are incredibly frequent when Freak numbers are larger, world loading can also have problems after upgrading your bike to faster speeds, with camps never fully loading and being a hollow, empty mess of sinkholes. Graphics can also take a dip during these moments, with assets partially disappearing in areas or completely reverting to their Normals mapping (with a strong T pose quickly following after the load).
In full honesty, I've been struggling to grade this game. When it comes to reviewing, I try to be as clear as I possibly can, showing what parts I believe most gamers will enjoy, while explaining others that most will dislike. This game has changed my opinion somewhat on buggy releases; there is a genuine mistake or things outside the creators control that occur, and then there's pushing a half baked game out the door to earn a quick buck. This is Bend Studio's first game release on the PS4 and their first main console release in almost 12 years. This studio poured their heart and soul into this game. There are parts that do hold this game back, but what's been released at launch is more than enough to deserve your attention, with hopefully more coming in the near future.
Days Gone is a love letter to the zombie genre, and while it is flawed, any gamer who enjoys the genre and is in need of a new good story heavy game in 2019 should look no further.
Days Gone: 8/10
2019 has not been a kindly year to gamers. There has been flop after flop, a lack of games being released and a lot of shady moves by developers. The first half of 2019 for us has basically been the final scene between Anakin and Obi in Episode 3. All year long it has been so hard to recommend any games on this page, as I prefer to sing to the skies about awesome games that I'd like you to try, which has resulted in this page being very quiet this year.
