It's dangerously elite near the homeworld, wing commander.

My time with the original Void Destroyer ended when I got hard-stuck on a mission. Finding no solutions, I eventually gave up. Even so, I really, really liked what Iteration 11 had come up with.

The same thing happened with Void Destroyer 2, but much later, and after much, much, MUCH more fun.

Starting off, I was pretty intimidated by this title. Or rather, I didn't start off because of that intimidation. It sat in my Steam wishlist for a long while, passed over for other offerings. I just sat there, looking at it, going, "Am I truly ready for a simulation game and all that entails? Am I?"

Finally, I swallowed my fears of not enjoying myself and installed the software. And I had fun! Immediately. Void Destroyer 2 does not demand that you know every system and hotkey in the game in order to get started, although you will need to swiftly become familiar with a few to fly your ship effectively. Further, you will need to gain some grasp of every travel and combat-related modality available if you want to feel like you're seeing most of what's on offer. Being able to enter into and functionally interact with the tactical view, for instance, is critical for managing encounters when you have a fleet.

With all that on the table, though, I want to be clear that - if you actually like space sims - buying this title is buying something approachable. I'm quite confident that you'll "get it" as you encounter new features, because the campaign does a decent job of introducing them to you in manageable chunks. You'll be tossed into new experiences, but the experience itself can largely teach you how to navigate within it.

There are some quality-of-life quibbles that wound up nagging me a little. Certain things that should be automated aren't. For instance, if you switch away from your main ship in order to pilot another craft for a while, you can't invoke your gravity drive. All fine and good, but you're neither presented with a quick option to change back to your main ship, nor is there a fast way to switch the current ship to the main ship. You can only do that in the Fleet interface (as far as I can tell), which is only accessible in the "Overworld." You can't save during missions, and there are no mission checkpoints, so a multi-stage, difficult encounter has to be fought successfully in one go or the whole shebang has to be run again. Also - Overworld time-compression (which speeds up travel, shipbuilding, and such) does have a range of selectable multipliers...but for an unknown reason, access to that feature is hidden behind an upgrade that has to be bought for your player character. Why?

All of the preceding issues are forgivable, though, as Void Destroyer 2 has too much charm for those foibles to prove lethal. What we have here is a classic space-sandbox-sim that tries to use the resources that it has with tremendous efficiency. Because it does this winsomely, it can get its hooks into you for a whole mass of hours. Even if you're like me, and get yourself into a situation where you can't crack the difficulty curve, you'll probably land in that position after getting some very fun ships, amassing at least one fleet, and acquiring a base or three. I am a little miffed at being denied by game completion (I do play games to "win" them), but I don't feel deprived.

Dungeons and Dragons: XCOM Edition

Hear ye, brave adventurers! I didst obtain this treasure from Epic Games for free!

...and I'm very glad I did.

First, as the above witticism should lead you to believe, this is definitely an XCOM-esque game. If you (like me) have played the second entry in that series, Fort Triumph's basic mechanics will be strongly familiar to you. The metagame will likely resonate.

Of course, the narrative feel is profoundly different. Fort Triumph is a lighthearted and satirical journey, with plenty of silliness to cleanse your palate from all the notes of nihilism and acidity that swish about in the gaming wine-glass of late. This is DnD as a Saturday-morning cartoon, and while I understand if some folks dislike that notion, but I enjoyed it.

CookieByte also decided to vary their experience beyond setting and theme. My time with XCOM 2 certainly featured environmental interactions, but this game basically requires them. That is, THE way to win is pretty much through the synergies that you can exploit by de-emphasizing your regular attacks and focusing on, say, kicking objects into enemies. Sure, smacking an opponent with something loose in the level so as to bounce them into a wall for stacking damage (or getting them to collide with another hostile) is less injurious than a simple attack. However, that physics-interaction is rather prone to stun the evil creature that you're treating like a billiard ball, and that means you'll be safer from them as you're structuring your follow-up during the next turn.

Be aware, that the baddies you encounter can do the same thing to you. Positioning and planning matters a lot, and it can be easier than you might think to jam yourself in a lethal fix.

I mentioned the metagame earlier. Much as that OTHER game with the aliens, you get a world map to move around on, and a base (or a handful thereof) where you can upgrade various aspects of your party and recruit additional party members. It's an engaging way to progress things in general, but I didn't enjoy how moving from world map to world map applied a reset to certain upgrades. Why did we lose the party expansion upgrade and our special items when we entered the underworld? Could we not carry them? It didn't make sense to me, especially since I can't see how that progression couldn't be reconciled via balance changes in the later areas.

That was the only true gripe I had, though. Fort Triumph was such fun, overall, and I heartily recommend it.

Nostalgia isn't as fun as I remember.

I wanted to like Black Mesa. I love Half Life in general, and I enjoyed playing the original when I finally got the opportunity.

...and there's a lot to appreciate about this remake, which was obviously built with great affection. Crowbar Collective clearly and obviously wanted to put the software they loved into a new engine, polish the graphics, and give a sense of scale that the original wasn't able to achieve due to technical limitations. With that being the case, I simply didn't enjoy myself as much as I expected to. The magic wasn't there - and I have to be careful to say that perhaps the magic wasn't even there in the original. That is, I don't know if it's entirely the remake's fault that certain aspects (like the pacing) don't live up to what I've come to expect from a Valve offering. Valve themselves didn't emerge with a fully-formed philosophy of design. I imagine that they had to work up to what we've all become accustomed to from Half Life 2 and its episodes, and that the original Half Life was pretty "rough and ready" in comparison. Of course, a major bugaboo here is that I don't have a fresh memory of exactly how the original piece of software played.

As such, any review of mine has to be read with the understanding that maybe, just maybe, some of my gripes are really about faithful recreations of the experience that people had in the late 1990s.

The main thing that simply failed to land for me was the pacing. I constantly felt like the fun of discovering a new area or getting into a scrap was brought to a screeching halt by hitting one more puzzle. Not far into my playthrough, I was audibly groaning when, moments after things got interesting or intense, I had to pick my way through Yet Another Contrived Hindrance.™ The groaning continued throughout, getting louder as the experience progressed.

Again - it's possible that's how the thing always was, and I don't remember due to the ravages of time upon the memory.

An additional issue with not having the Valve-standard rhythm was that you frequently get dumped into a situation where you have to figure out something (relatively) complicated while under pressure, but without a preceding "tutorial" that takes place without pressure. This is frustrating because of the fail and reload cycle that occurs, often several times, further impeding your progress.

A more "macro scale" issue of game tempo came from the Xen section. Xen is a triumph of visual artistry on the part of the dev team. They've truly created an environment inspired by the original that's a feast of alien colors and vistas. Which is great! But, dog-GONE-IT is Xen looooooong, with one Yet Another Contrived Hindrance™ after another, after another, after another. By the time I got to the end, I was very, very, VERY ready to be done. I mean, geeze, I just didn't care about connecting that many energy beams over and over by navigating frustrating terrain.

...and, about that frustrating terrain: Outside of the pacing issues, I felt that the movement and shooting were achingly clumsy. There seems to be a lot of carried momentum, especially when running and jumping, and that made the many jumping puzzles a chore. Beyond that, just getting around was a process. After coming from games that handle mantling onto ledges, the janky and persnickety jumping onto elevated areas gave me some extra grey hairs. As to the shooting, I was surprised at how often I missed, most notably while taking pistol shots at headcrabs. The imprecision had me grinding my teeth, because what I remember from previous experience is the headcrabs being pretty easy as target practice. Here, though, they were a genuine annoyance - even a threat - because they seemed oddly difficult to hit.

One thing that the developers absolutely could have changed was the murkiness of the graphics. Black Mesa is dim, dark, and muddy, with the flashlight doing very little to aid in those matters. I had the flashlight on for something like 99% of the game, because I simply didn't notice it being activated in more brightly-lit sections, and in dark areas it was fully necessary even to barely see. I was regularly missing passages, ladders, and other exits, as I just could not make out what the heck was going on.

So...maybe. If you've not yet played Half Life then this is probably the place to start. If you have, though, I'm not sure you should feel obligated to jump into Black Mesa. There are some really amazing moments, but the slogging you have to do to get there is too much for me to enjoy myself. Your mileage may vary.

Deus Ex 4051: System Shock

Prey, in my way of thinking, is absolutely a love-letter to (and to fans of) both the classic, immersive-sim games and their offshoots. Multiple routes to objectives? Check. More pathways that open once you unlock more skills? Check. Limited inventory that keeps you VERY vulnerable at first, and still vulnerable in the late game? Check. An obligatory 0451 door code? Check. A sort of art-deco aesthetic and alternate history that feels very Bioshock? Check. I also feel like the gradually deteriorating condition of the station as events progress is a nod to Rapture's ongoing collapse in Bioshock.

And a computer system called Looking Glass, named after the very company that made the System Shock titles? CHECK.

All of that brought a smile to my face.

What didn't bring a smile to my face, but I still appreciated, was the atmosphere. People have talked about how, say, Metroid games create a sense of dread, and boy HOWDY does Prey know how to create dread and tension. It even allows you to create more of that dread and tension for yourself if you're a thorough player.

What I mean is, the game is very good at making you feel alone and threatened. There's a feeling of solitude that I can only describe as being gnawingly oppressive, and it's delivered in large doses across the whole of the experience. You spend a lot of time seeing the aftermath of the events sweeping through Talos I; The bodies, the damage, the ominous warnings of hull breaches beyond a barrier, that sort of thing. This gets amplified if you do what you might be apt to do if you've played immersive sims before - poking around in every nook and cranny, and ignoring your main objectives in favor of exploration and secondaries. You know, because you want the golden ending and all the goodies.

If that's how you play, not only will you have invoked a self-imposed "harder" difficulty (because of getting into encounters without the benefits of certain equipment), but you will endure a lot of silence. You'll find Transcribes (audio logs), but those folks aren't talking TO you. You're just hearing the echoes of ghosts. Plus, you'll be waiting to run into threats, the tension winding farther and farther when nothing happens for a while. More and more, you begin to think, "What in blazes am I going to unleash upon myself when I finally find the thing in the map that triggers it?" This can sometimes lead to getting exhausted with Prey, because that kind of vigilance is very hard to maintain, but I can't see that as a failing. The game is true to its mood and honors your choices, even if they make your life uncomfortable.

Oh, and let me tell you about going outside. First of all, it's very impressive throughout the game, because the outside of the station is convincingly to-scale and just as explorable as anything else. It's also even more oppressive in terms of mood, because there's even deeper silence and shadow. Your own breath is loud in your ears, but there's nothing outside you to hear. It makes you keenly aware of how a thoroughly lethal environment is waiting just a few millimeters away, outside your helmet. The darkness outside is especially dark, because there aren't a lot of surfaces outside the station to bounce light into areas not directly struck by the sun. There's that sense of dread again!

Anyway, If your playstyle is my playstyle, Prey pretty much lets go of your hand as soon as you arrive in the Talos I lobby for the first time. It's perfectly happy to explicitly explain or tutorialize pretty much nothing, expecting you to do the work of discovery yourself. (You'll be shown things, but you have to be observant.) This can lead to some costly mistakes, as games like this make combat dangerous and resource-intensive. So too is wanton futzing around with things like repairs, which cost spare parts. Across the entire station, there's enough inventory of everything to get you through the game with a good bit of margin, but you can run dry of something critical at any point if you get careless. Plus, you might not have a recycler or fabricator handy when you want it. Even when I was well-supplied, I never quite got over the feeling of needing to be careful with ammunition. I never had as much as I wanted.

As an interlocking-systems game, problem solving at the macro and micro levels is always logical. This can both help and hurt you. I was quick to see the utility of the climbable "gloo balls" that the GLOO gun can stick to a great many surfaces, as well as to understand it as a fire-fighting tool and barrier-builder. Things work as you expect! This is also true for the crew-locator database that you can find at security stations. It's very useful, though clunky in that you can't sort the database in a way that makes it highly convenient. On the "hurt" side, though, is what happens when you forget a mechanic or gloss over it because you're feeling lazy. I once wasted a bunch of time backtracking to various areas and flying around the station's exterior, because I didn't bother to set a crewmember tracking location via a security terminal. Similarly, near the end of the game I got completely schmuck-baited by failing to look up a crew member - though the mistake wasn't fatal.

On the technical side, there are a couple of minor quibbles. The climbing mechanic seemed a bit weird to me, and not always reliable in how it triggered. I also had some situations where objective markers would lead me to entirely the wrong area, and I'd go hunting high-and low, only to not find what I was after.

Prey is the sort of game that rewards patience and thoughtfulness. It's generally a slow-pace, high tension sort of affair, although there are moments of great urgency when events escalate. I find it to be a highly competent piece of software, that also has a lot of fun with its literary themes of who to trust and how to act if your own memory is a volatile, fungible thing.

The only reason not to give it a try if you haven't is if you just plain hate this kind of game. Even, then...still consider it?

Shiny!

Please note: I got Borderlands 3 for free from the Epic store.

Borderlands 3 doesn't start as well as it possibly could have.

That is, when you get plonked down into it, you get the same sense of "we must do this obligatory thing" that you might have gotten with the last Pink Floyd album. It's Borderlands trying hard to be Borderlands, because there are EXPECTATIONS, people! In such a situation, the result is almost incapable of being as engaging as what made you enjoy the previous installment: The freshness isn't there to grab your attention, because familiarity is the only thing that matters and any risk is a liability.

For instance, in Borderlands 2, you get tutorialized by Claptrap. In the process, there's a surprising amount of character building and general storytelling done. You get a new perspective on Claptrap, and even the world around you. Immediately, the foundation of the previous game gets new structure on top. Then, you go out into the world, and fight some enemies that you haven't seen before. The universe is familiar, but you're seeing a part of it that you haven't experienced yet. That's a very strong opening. With Borderlands 3, that doesn't really happen. Sure, you get the new villains, but they don't seem all that special. They're just bandit agitators, and we've all seen bandits before. Then you fight bandits (and we've all seen bandits before), and then you meet up with Lilith (and we've all met her before), and...anyway, it all seems like it's the same thing as we've done in past installments, with newer paint.

But it gets better if you stick with it!

Which is not to say that Troy and Tyreen grow into being the best baddies of the series. Handsome Jack still holds that title in my view, and 2 still beats 3 in terms of narrative. The Calypso twins get a pretty solid twist near the end of the game, but their motivations are a little too stock and only broadly sketched compared to the much more personal story (and razor-sharp characterization) that Jack received.

It is to say, though, that Borderlands 3 starts telling it's own story after only a couple of hours of being worryingly generic and derivative. All you have to do is hang on.

Let me tell you what this installment is best at, though. When you get to the endgame, it has the BEST player agency in regards to loot when compared to the rest of the series. I was happy enough to finish the main campaign, yet it was the post-campaign where things really bloomed.

There are two factors to giving you this agency. The first is the Eridian Fabricator, which is a weapon generator, and the second is the Mayhem system.

The Fabricator makes eridium far more useful than it used to be, and just as importantly, it's tunable. You can elect to use a good pile of eridium to guarantee that it will spit out a legendary weapon, and let me tell you, it is GLORIOUS. It's not that you get something of apocalyptic power every time, but legendary weapons are nearly always interesting in some way.

The Mayhem system lets you add a general reward tuning to the game, where you get better rewards for higher difficulty. It's a bit like a world-tier system, but more fun because you have more choices. It's especially good for loot if the system rolls up the loot-splosion modifier, where there's a significant chance for any enemy to drop a bunch of guns, cash, and eridium. Get a critical kill and the loot-splosion is guaranteed. Combine that with Fl4k, who has a skill that gives a chance for critical hits on any part of an enemy hitbox, and...*evil laugh.*

Oh, and the thing with higher Mayhem levels is that the loot guns have higher damage output - and, at the time of this writing, that output is NOT reduced if you drop your Mayhem level later. So, with the Fabricator, you can pop out some Mayhem 10 legendaries, find a couple you like, and then easily "import" them into a lower Mayhem level that's more manageable to play.

That level of control and reward kept me playing Borderlands 3 far past the end of the campaign. I even turned on True Vault Hunter mode and ran the main campaign critical-path all the way from start to finish with the same character I started with. I've never done that before.

Borderlands 3 is definitely a piece of software that I recommend getting your hands on, assuming you like Borderlands in general. If you can get it for free, that's ideal, but I would have been happy to buy it on sale as well.

I have to reload.

Honest to goodness, the core skill you need to have for this game is to save at the right moment and then reload.

XCOM2 really is an interesting game of tactics, but whoo DOGGIES will it test your patience. I want to say that the random number generator is unforgiving, but that can't be the case of course. What's really going on is that the percentage chances of succeeding at various actions are a lot lower than what you think they ought to be. There's a special kind of frustration when you watch multiple, high-ranking soldiers take reaction shots and constantly miss.

This is especially tough in the early game, when your armor and weapons are significantly behind what the enemy can put on the field. Every battle you win is hard-fought, especially since (if you're like me) you're constantly having to reload when things go a little bit badly. The reason is that an encounter not going your way a little bit will very likely spiral into that scenario completely beating you to death in a couple of turns.

I should also mention that the XCOM2 I got was offered freely from the Epic Games store, which apparently is the old and buggy version. Weird things would occasionally happen on the tactical map, like actions targeting an enemy I didn't expect, and certain missions would generate in such a way as to be unwinnable. If a VIP had to be rescued or captured from an Advent vehicle, that vehicle would always be placed outside the traversable area of the map. Luckily, I was almost always able to get the game to re-roll that mission, but it was strange that such a blatant error stayed in the software.

In any case, the folks who look down on "save scumming" will probably say something like, "Recovering from your mistakes is part of mastering the tactics."

For my part, though, I don't think the game allows you to recover from your mistakes until you're quite powerful. As I said before, when a mission goes sideways it tends to be devastating. You can't recover from that at the tactical level, and the metagame has very little room for error either. Especially after the Avatar Project starts, you'll feel as though you're barely keeping pace, even if you're banging away at missions to ensure that everything goes along perfectly.

Now then - if XCOM2 is such a grind, why am I giving it a "Recommended" rating? I think it's mostly because of two aspects.

First: You CAN figure out what went wrong, and so finally squeezing a win or three out of the mess feels like a real achievement.

Second: As your soldiers level up and you research better equipment, you do finally manage to gain a sense of empowerment.

The second aspect also figures into the game having some true replayability. After finally completing the campaign with a mixed group of soldiers, I wanted to try a couple of different squads. One would be a squad entirely comprised of Rangers, and the other would be a 100% Psi cohort.

What I discovered was that the Ranger squad was really powerful, but the Psi squad was well-nigh unstoppable. With the ability to mind control even powerful enemies, and the null-lance attack that can reach enemies at great distances, even the Avatars at the end of the game weren't very tough.

By the time I was done, I definitely understood why XCOM games are so appreciated, even if I had to spend a long time being irritated by the experience.

Like "Armored Core," but...

Yeah, I'll take any opportunity to quote Yahtzee Croshaw, because he's the funniest games journalist ever.

Anyway.

In my view, Daemon X Machina is a sort of Armored Core-lite. The Twitter version. But not the 140 character Twitter, no, rather the 280 character version.

I say that because Daemon is significantly easier and more streamlined than I remember any Core game being, but still entirely recognizable as being connected to the pedigree.

That famous, FROM Software difficulty, the difficulty that smashes you to pieces in mere moments, doesn't show up until the very tail end of the campaign (or the co-op missions). The experience crafted by Marvelous and First Studio is downright casual in comparison. I rarely failed a mission, and when I did, it was pretty obvious where I had gone wrong.

Compare this to Armored Core 2: Another Age, which I remember as being very tough. Even tougher when an enemy core showed up. There was a specific music cue (a heavily flanged breakbeat sort of thing) that played to signal the arrival of a "peer" machine, and I had a full-on stress response whenever it played. I knew that I could lose to this new opponent very easily, and death was greatly punishing. Not so with Daemon X Machina. Going up against other Arsenals is more of a challenge than the very nearly cannon-fodder AI baddies, but it rarely struck me as being truly difficult. (Again, put in an exception for the very end of the game.)

But even with reduced difficulty, the basic elements are all there. This is another title that lifts the AC4A Kojima-particle "thing," here referred to as Femto, as a worldbuilding and plot device. The Arms Fort ginormous enemy idea makes an appearance, with one of the first you encounter having the "We're Totally Plagiarizing!" name of "Gun Fort." Of course there are interchangeable parts with flavor text, and loads of different builds that can result from mixing and matching those components. The build system is rather more streamlined and accessible than the AC games I've played, and I'm entirely fine with that development. I sometimes got a bit annoyed with how finicky the Armored Core build rules could become.

There's also the mysterious, slowly unfolding plot that involves multiple corporations and the enigmatic mercenary organization you're part of, a setup that's instantly familiar to anyone who's a fan of this game's spiritual predecessor.

That's all fine and good, yet I was disappointed with the story's presentation. There are loads and LOADS of characters, some of them boringly generic, and others opaquely odd. It takes a long while to figure out why you should care about any of them, and the way the narrative gets handed to you is strangely uneven. Sometimes you get a cutscene, but often you don't. When you don't get something animated, dialogue is delivered through an achingly ponderous comms screen that you have to manually advance after every sentence. What's worse is that these conversations reliably take place right after the (almost always completely unnecessary) mission briefings, when you're spoiling to get into the action. But no! If you want the story you've got to slog on through.

Minor irritations aside, Daemon X Machina is an enjoyable nostalgia trip for Armored Core fans.

Reach out and touch someone.

Sniper Elite 4 was the game I loaded up immediately after Outriders, and it was a welcome palate-cleanser.

True to my memory of other entries in the series, this offering was a pleasantly challenging, thinking-person's shooter. Though you can, to some degree, decide to simply blast away, Sniper Elite really is at its best when you're taking seriously the hit-evade-hit loop. The dopamine drip you get from sneaking to a position and then nailing a shot without being located is steady and satisfying. There's also a slightly wider sense of tension and release that you get from Rebellion's level design, where the developers carefully place opportunities for sound-masking, long shots, and environmental mayhem. You get plenty of chances to rest from the primary rhythm of play and try something a little different for a spell.

For me, the triumph of Sniper Elite is how all the interlocking systems of shooting and stealth intersect in readable and consistent ways. It's all simplified and streamlined to make the game fun, of course, but the whole setup obediently follows its own rules: If you can get the correct angle, you can make that very long shot. If it seems noisy enough to cover a rifle report, it probably is...and you'll get the appropriate indicator on your HUD to confirm that fact. If it's got a gas tank, hitting it with a bullet will make something go boom. If you keep shooting (noisily) from one place, you'll soon be discovered and rushed. (If you're rushed, you can still prevail by being smart and cool-headed.)

In fact, my only real complaints about Sniper Elite 4 come when it seems to step away from the consistency that it otherwise builds up. For instance, I understand the idea of "suppressed ammo" from a gameplay perspective. Quiet shots from anywhere you please do make things a lot easier. However, it's a bit odd in an experience that's otherwise all about a sort of streamlined authenticity. A suppressor is a weapon attachment, not an ammo type, and from my perspective the sudden swerve into an artificial game-mechanic was an odd choice. I also feel that the hit calculation system is a touch too persnickety. There were a few times where I landed a solid hit on what I thought was the target's neck, or even their center of mass, and the enemy registered it as a minor inconvenience. This doesn't jive with how other shots are portrayed as being devastating.

A relatively minor quibble is that I remember Sniper Elite 3 as having a better variety of tactical situations. This game felt a little bit more repetitive and straightforward. It might have had lesser verticality overall.

Just so, small missteps aren't worth any hand-wringing. A game with a real emphasis on "ballistic puzzle solving" is a huge treat. And, thank heavens, the experience is built on a self-contained campaign that has a real wrap-up, and isn't just an immediate cliffhanger to set up a "play-forever grind." Yes, there is a survival mode, but it's not the point of the whole game. The campaign isn't just an extended training mission, and the DLC is optional weaponry instead of the developers finally giving you the best part of the software. In my opinion, if you want to get into sniping games, Sniper Elite is the way to go - and yes, this sortie is an essential part of that series.

I'm commander Shepard of The Division. This is my Destiny.

As the game opened, I was very hopeful. There was strong characterization being built up over a crop of the dramatis personae, with flavorful hints of deep worldbuilding and player choice. I got the sense that we might have a conversation system like Mass Effect, allowing for those of us behind the keyboard to steer the relationships that our Outrider would have with other actors. And...oh! We've been dropped into the requisite combat tutorial which also starts the main conflict of the story, and oh! A villain has emerged. This guy's clearly all about his own success, everyone else be danged. I wonder how this will unf-

And then, you get put into cryo, almost all of those threads seem to get cut, and a great deal of promise quickly unravels.

Let me take a moment to say that the combat, loot, and upgrade loops are basically fine. The shooting is snappy, with projectiles going where you expect them to, and the guns feel like they hit about as hard as they should (generally, anyhow). You don't find really interesting weaponry all the time, but it is doled out frequently enough to avoid your starving for it. Plus, the crafting system is generous enough to keep you "current" via leveling up your most favorite guns and armor. I also have to acknowledge real appreciation for the deconstruction system, which not only recovers resources but also - crucially - allows you to extract the special features from items that have them. Plus, those special features can be applied to other, sufficiently rare items without a whole lot of friction. (This is a big improvement over the experience I had in The Division 2, which made transferring interesting effects from one weapon to another into a colossal hassle by comparison.)

So, what am I disappointed about?

Outriders, to me, teases tons of potential and then doesn't deliver on it. It's as though a whole bunch of teams had great ideas - ideas you can clearly perceive the seeds of - and then didn't get the freedom to truly flesh them out. For instance, there was that hint of being able to guide the characterization of your Outrider (much like Commander Shepard in Mass Effect), but that immediately drops away after the prologue. It would be more tolerable if you got a pre-written character who was interesting and nuanced, grappling existentially with their new-found power and how it changes them. What you get, though, (if playing a male) is "Generic, somewhat-gruff, kinda laconic, ex military/ law enforcement/ guy, Serial No. 932443." There were times when the game was delivering dialogue, and I thought, "That's all they could come up with? They must have seen and heard this back before it was all shipped, right?"

This unrealized potential also pertains to the story at large, albeit in an uneven way. That interesting setup with a villainous superior at the beginning never has anything worthwhile done with it. It just flares up and dies like a tumbleweed being set aflame. Later on, a decently rich and rather uncomfortable arc does develop, and there's a fine twist to be had within it. Unfortunately, the arc only truly starts cooking in the latter third of the game or so, which means that it's denied the time to be a great, slow burn. It has to resolve itself too quickly to really have maximum impact.

In connection to that, the final enemy of the game feels a bit...wrong? That is, you have huge motivation to end up with a giant climax against "The True Monster" of the story, but that fizzles entirely when the final battle ends up being a contest against "just one of the monsters." I mean, it's a strong monster, but about as generic as your own character when compared with who I saw as the honest-to-goodness Big Bad.

Plus, that final battle is a pain, especially if you've been running at the highest possible World Tier. It takes forever to whittle the main enemy down, and you have to do it twice with no checkpoint in between. Getting within moments of a win and then being set back all the way to the first stage of the contest is unnecessarily punishing, and it gets very old in a huge hurry. I ended up having to dial back my World Tier in order to finally finish.

The unnecessary punishment extends to the forever-grind endgame, too. Get almost all the way through an Expedition and then make a critical mistake? Start all over at the beginning and fight all the same fights again.

That previous bit extends to the rest of the game, in a way. The battles and enemies are VERY "samey" in Outriders. You always know when you're about to up against a "technological" opponent, because there's very obvious cover plonked about. Worse, though, is that all those opponents are essentially the same. Every faction has regular shooters, shotgun dudes, melee rushers, and a couple of different heavies, and they are all very nearly identical except for the model and texture. I counted very few truly differentiable creature types, to continue in the same vein. I simply don't see a palette swap and a change from poison damage to fire damage as being "variety."

I also can't say I was a huge fan of the execution on the semi-open world. There's much to be said for huge, highly explorable, yet ultimately pointless world design as being a problem. However, I think that could have been avoided here. The Division 2 does exploration pretty darn well, for instance, and I think such a setup would have played very well into an experience where you're exploring an alien planet where humanity has only a tenuous foothold. The way it's all set up, though, is to take you to what amount to story and shooter theme parks, where the act of walking from point A to point B stops being part of the fun and acts instead as a bit of tedium. It doesn't help that your area map is pretty poor at helping you navigate, and this is compounded by a lack of any global, directional reference that I was able to perceive.

In the end, I got the impression that Outriders was meant to capitalize on the "forever grind shooter" trend, and was done just well enough to get there at the AAA level. The problem, in my estimation, is that the final product obviously reflects that approach. It's rather like a house where you can see the shortcuts a budget builder took to finish it. It's not that it doesn't function, and it's not that parts of it aren't enjoyable, it's just that you can always see where they shrugged and said, "Eh, it's okay like that."

Something's moving, and it ain't us!

Homeworld Emergence is a great look at the best of what Homeworld used to be. It's also a great platform for evaluating one's own taxonomic framework for "Jank" and "Clunk."

Now, in no way am I saying that Homeworld Remastered or Homeworld 2 suffer from a case of "It's new, now it's awful." Far from it. The streamlined behaviors of the updates are very positive. There's something curiously fun, though, about experiencing a Homeworld game with maximum "clunk" enabled.

The concept of clunk, in my mind is that of a game feature that works correctly, but is clumsy to interact with. The hallmark of this in Emergence is the way that different verbs require you to put the game in different "modes" to use them. For example, I went into the game expecting to select a mothership or carrier, and then to have immediate access to all of its build options in the main game screen. Nope! You have to invoke the Build Manager, a whole separate screen that completely yanks you out of the main game context. Still clunky (but less jarring) is the Movement Manager. It does work in the main view context - it has to in order to make any sense - but it's not like what we're all used to. You don't right-click on a point in space to make your ships go there. Instead, you have to invoke the movement mode and essentially get wrapped up into a whole separate task of directing travel.

If Emergence was "janky," these different systems would collide, fail, or have unexpected results. I never managed to find an instance where that happened, though. The only janky element was the graphics setup, where trying to use Direct 3D resulted in menu and manager behavior that was so slow as to be unusable. Returning to OpenGL fixed that.

But anyway, the clunkiness of the game had the interesting effect of focusing it. I had to be deliberate about everything, rather than just banging away with right and left-click actions. I think that other commentators have noted that Emergence rewards patience, and I would certainly agree. The enforced slowdown of context switching the game plays into that. You have to take a moment to consider things, especially the very-handy "guard" orders (which I never became smooth at invoking, but managed to use successfully nonetheless).

In terms of other aspects, I have to tip my hat to Barking Dog Studios. I'm currently watching the series Star Wars: Visions, and a parallel I see is that of a creative entity getting access to an intellectual property to find their own interpretation of it. Barking Dog had the sense to create a story that had grand stakes in a different framework, the framework of a mining Kith. This handily explains why you start as a scrappy band of finaglers rather than a real military power, and also why the "harsher in hindsight" risk of a big discovery was taken so readily. I also really appreciated how the dialogue supported their worldbuilding, with comm traffic that was rather more panicked than what you would get from the more military Hiigarans. These folks are miners, and when something comes through the hull to eat you, you're going to shout about it over the radio.

I do think that Emergence really is for Homeworld fans, in the sense that knowing about the setting and the story from the first game is necessary to truly appreciate what this offering brings to the table. That's not a slight to Emergence, but rather a modifer; The original game is one I highly recommend, and I also highly recommend this one as a follow-up.