NSO Retro: Fire Emblem (GBA)

As someone who loved the Advance Wars games on the GBA, it’s weird that I never played Fire Emblem which is, more or less, a fantasy version of Advance Wars. Well . . . sort of. Like Advance Wars it’s a turn based tactical strategy game in which you move your units across a map to engage and destroy enemy units. But unlike AW, your units in Fire Emblem are named charterers and if one falls in battle, you don’t get them back.

I didn’t know that going into FE so when I lost two of my characters in an early battle, I just thought they’d re-spawn and be available for the next. But that’s not how it works. Even key story characters can ‘die’ – well, they get ‘wounded’ which means they’re still around for cutscenes, but not for battles. It certainly made things a little tricky for me over the next few missions because I only had a limited number of characters to work with.

You do get access to new characters fairly regularly as you progress so if one does fall, you won’t ever find yourself totally short, not unless you’re really reckless in your play. Fire Emblem encourages a more slow, methodical approach to its battles where retreating to heal or protect is as important as attacking the enemy,

You’ll also want to make use of the terrain and the various defensive bonuses it can provide. Placing a unit in a fort, for example, not only gives it a defence boost but allows it to automatically regenerate health between turns. Like AW, your units perform best when matched against units of an opposing class, although in FE, your weapon type is also a key factor.

Weapons also break after a set number of uses, so it’s also important to ensure you purchase spares or upgraded versions whenever you have the opportunity. By fighting in battles your characters can also level up, and by obtaining certain items you can upgrade their class to a more powerful type.

Every ‘chapter’ in the game which advances the story is another battle on a new map and the game does a good job of mixing up the locations. The first ten or so chapters is a self-contained story that serves as an extended tutorial, although characters that feature throughout this first ‘act’ do reappear later.

So far, so enjoyable. I was having a great time with Fire Emblem because it was, more less, a fantasy Advance Wars. But the deeper I got into the game, the more problems I began to encounter. The first is the weapon / item management system which becomes a little tedious as you need to keep track of all your characters, their weapon types and replacements.

There’s not always vendors available to purchase new gear on a map, so you’ll sometimes be forced to spend several turns on a map where one is available simply purchasing and (slowly) re-equipping your characters. Like I said, FE encourages slow, methodical play – but the further you go and the more challenging things get, it feels like your progression is reduced to a crawl.

It’s easy to lose even your strongest units as the enemy – which always outnumbers you – often sends every unit within range to target one of yours whilst ignoring everyone else. And even the strongest unit can’t necessarily withstand several attacks on the same turn. That means that you’ll often need to ‘bait’ enemy units away and tackle them one at a time. And in the later chapters this does result in the game becoming a bit of a grind to get through.

The worst example is probably the mission where you’re required to kill about 40 enemy units to win, on a map that continually triggers a blizzard which means you can’t move any unit more than one or two spaces per turn. Oh, and if, like me, you didn’t bring a rogue, you’ll discover that the map doesn’t have enough keys to open the doors necessary to progress meaning you’ll have to restart the entire thing and lose more than 50 minutes of tedious grind. F**K

The game is also, frankly, too long. Advance Wars knew when to wrap things up, but Fire Emblem just keeps going. At one point I thought the game was ending, but when it continued on, I discovered I had another 6 or 7 chapters to go. I had to take an extended break from the game and come back to it before slogging my way through the next few missions but at that point, I was so sick of how slow it was and bored by the story that I just watched the last couple of missions on YouTube to see how it ends.

I also wasn’t a fan of how much the game hides things from you. There are so many characters, items and weapons that you only get access to if you ‘visit’ – an action you can perform on the battle map – the right towns or homes, or ‘talk’ to certain characters with certain other characters to get them to join you. I discovered there are even hidden ‘shops’ that look like trees? But why?

Fire Emblem is a game that deliberately tries to makes things difficult for the player, but not in a good way. The challenge should come from figuring out the best strategy to defeat the enemy on each map, not using trial and error to locate important items or characters, or spending ten minutes shuffling your characters around as you trade replacement weapons.

The actual tactical strategy part of the game is fun, but it’s all the convoluted systems around that which kind of spoil it over time. Overall though, despite losing patience with it, I still had a good time playing Fire Emblem and it’s made me interested in checking out a more recent entry in the series, so you can expect a review of Fire Emblem: Three Houses on the Switch sometime in the near future.

Now Playing: Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection

Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection is fantastic. It includes every title you’d want as part of what you might call the ‘golden age’ of Marvel / Capcom crossover fighting games. It also includes The Punisher (?) . . . which I’ll talk about later.

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 was one of my favourite games on the Dreamcast, so when I saw it included as part of this collection, I was happy to pick it up for MvC2 alone. But the collection also includes X-Men: Children of the Atom and Marvel Super Heroes – two games I loved playing on the Sega Saturn back in the day.

And then we have X-Men vs. Street Fighter which I’d always wanted to play, but it never received an EU release on the Saturn. And to round things off we have Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter & Marvel vs. Capcom 1, neither of which I’d played.

Knowing that if I started with MvC2 I might never get around to playing the others, I sensibly decided to leave that one until last to give every other game a fair shake in release order. And whilst MvC2 with its ridiculously comprehensive roster (56 characters!) does make the other games feel a tad redundant, I’m pleased to say that each and every one still holds up well on their own and are all worth playing.

I recall X-Men: Children of the Atom being tough back in the day and I still find it tough now. Maybe it’s just me, but COTA feels a lot tougher to get through than any of the other games in this collection – and the final Magneto fight still gives me no end of trouble. It’s got the most limited roster and mechanics, but there’s a pure simplicity about it that still makes it enjoyable to play.

Marvel Super Heroes also suffers a little with its limited roster, but it makes up for it with its unique ‘Infinity Stone’ system that lets you collect and utilise the various infinity stones throughout your fights – each stone can trigger a different boost, and you can even steal stones from your opponent. The final fight against Thanos is also very fun.

X-Men vs. Street Fighter is just as good as I’d always hoped. It has a great roster and introduces the ‘team’ system for the first time. It feels great to play, looks gorgeous and features some of the best stages and pre/post battle scenes in the collection – although the final fight against Apocalypse can be a tad annoying.

As someone who was always more of an X-Men fan than a fan of Marvel in general, Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter doesn’t excite me as much as its predecessor. It’s still fun to play because mechanically speaking, it’s basically the same game, I just think it has the weakest available roster – or rather, the least interesting roster to me.

So what about Marvel vs. Capcom 1? Is there any reason at all to play this over its sequel? Well, certainly not in terms of roster but then no game here can compete with MvC2 with regard to that. But it does do a couple of unique things that I think makes it still worth playing today.

The first is the ‘support partner’ system. You only pick two fighters for your team, and the third is randomly selected every round so you never know who you’re going to get. You can’t control them directly – they only serve in a support role. It’s a neat little twist that’s unique to MvC1. I also really like the final fight against Onslaught.

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is a fantastic game with a fantastic roster of just about everyone you could possibly want, and you can now pick three characters per team that allows you to put together a crazy number of combinations. I do have some gripes, however. The first is that the 3D effect stages don’t hold up as well now as they did back in the day.

It also feels that in order to accommodate three characters per team, they streamlined certain actions (there’s no light attacks, for example) and cut back on the animations / effects. I also think the final boss fight is a little weak. Abyss isn’t very interesting in terms of visual design, or fun to actually fight.

And finally we have The Punisher . . . I don’t really know why this is here as it’s not a fighting game but a kind of bad Streets of Rage style side scrolling beat ‘em up. It’s not terrible, it’s just rather mediocre. I blasted through it for the achievements and I know I’ll never bother with it again.

Overall this Fighting Collection is pretty great. The Punisher inclusion is weird – but whatever. Everything is worth playing, even if MvC2 somewhat overshadows everything else thanks to its massive roster. I like the visual options to tweak each game, but I do wish there was a little more bonus material for the collection. You get the music and some artwork but it’s pretty basic stuff. The training mode is a very nice (and surprising) addition though.

There’s also only one save slot for the entire collection. One! It’s not a major issue, just kind of stupid. It does feel like this collection was knocked out a little on the cheap, but I guess that’s to be expected. What really matters though are the games and that’s exactly what this collection delivers. If you’re an old fan like me or even if you’ve never tried these games before then be sure to check it out.

8/10

Avowed: First Impressions

I was wary of picking up Avowed at release for a couple of reasons. The first is that I’ve not played the Pillars of Eternity games so I was totally unfamiliar with the world I’d be stepping into. The second and more important reason was that I really wasn’t a fan of The Outer Worlds which, despite liking the setting, I found the general plot and quests dreadfully boring, the characters dull and/or insufferable and the gameplay to be serviceable at best.

But after seeing some footage of Avowed during its ‘early access’ release I decided to take a chance and pick it up and after putting about 10 or so hours into the game, I’m really glad I did. First of all, the game does look gorgeous. It’s bright and colourful and there’s a nice attention to detail all throughout the environment.

The game also does a decent job of easing you into its world – there’s a helpful pop-up glossary you can access during conversations if any words, phrases or names elude you. It’s not perfect because stopping mid-conversation to read additional text does interrupt the flow of things – but the game carefully front loads all of the important stuff early on, so it’s something you just have to get out of the way.

It’s still too early for me to talk about the general plot, but I’m intrigued by what I’ve seen and I’m enjoying my interactions with the characters I’ve met and the writing for the small number of quests I’ve completed thus far. I only have one companion at the moment – Kai – voiced by the same actor as Garrus from Mass Effect. And everyone loved Garrus, so it’s not a surprise he’s one of the first characters you’ll meet.

But I think I’d like Kai even without that voice. If anything, I’d say the voice (initially) detracts a little from the character – at least for me – because it’s hard to disassociate it from Garrus and see Kai as their own, unique character. But you do get there, after some time and some more conversations.

What’s really surprised me about Avowed though is how good it feels to play. Some of the early footage made the combat look a little rough, but I’m pleased to say the final game has some of the best first person combat I’ve played. The game does a good job of dropping all the various weapon types into your hands early on so you can get a feel for what you like.

There’s no ‘classes’ as such, just stats and skill trees relating to melee weapons, ranged weapons and magic, but you can mix and match as you please. And everything feels fun to use. There’s a nice sense of impact and feedback to attacks whatever you pick. It actually makes it hard deciding what to stick with and upgrade.

I’m mostly sticking to magic because that feels really good and I like how the spell system works, but I also have an alternative weapon set I like to switch to with a 2 handed rifle – I’m a mage who also likes to shoot and it’s great that the game gives me the freedom and flexibility within its skills and stats to let me do that. This is one of the those games where I’m actively seeking out enemies because it’s just so fun to fight.

I also really like the exploration aspect. The ‘zone’ I’m currently in isn’t massive, but there’s a lot of places to see and explore and every time I’ve seen something that looked interesting no matter how small, I’ve always found some treasure tucked away. I also love how there’s no stamina for sprinting, very generous fall damage (because there’s a fair amount of verticality to environments so you’ll be doing quite a bit of climbing as you explore) nicely spaced fast travel points, and the ability to send items directly to your camp stash.

I’ve still got a long way to go with Avowed but I like what I’ve seen so far. Hopefully I’ll have a review up next month.

Now Playing: Command & Conquer Remastered

This Command & Conquer Remastered Collection features Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert, both of which I reviewed back in 2016 as part of the C&C Ultimate Collection, so if you’re interested in my thoughts on each title you can check them out here. That’s why this review isn’t so much about the individual games, but the overall package.

And as a package, this Remastered Collection is excellent. Not only do you get both original campaigns, you get a complete campaign list with all branching missions available. You also get all expansion missions, previously console exclusive missions and the fun, not so serious ‘themed’ mini-campaigns. In other words, you get every official mission ever available on any platform for both games. You also get a handy Map Editor and mod support.

In terms of bonus content you get a customisable jukebox so you can play I AM A MECHANICAL MAN on a loop until you go insane, and an extensive collection of behind the scenes videos from when they were recording the live-action mission briefings.

There are some quality of life improvements to the UI and controls – being able to queue unit builds is a very welcome change. And everything is fully customisable so you can pick and choose between legacy and modern options as you please. They also added a skirmish mode for both games.

In terms of the visual upgrades, both games now look fantastic. I didn’t fully appreciate just what a great job they’d done until I flipped back and forth between the original and remastered visuals – which is a toggle I’ll always love in remastered editions. The new visuals capture the spirit of the originals perfectly. Buildings, units and terrain all look great and you can even zoom right in to scrutinise the extra details.

The only real criticism I have of this collection is how they upscaled the live-action or CGI videos. Some of them look kind of terrible. It’s a shame when every other aspect of this remaster from a visual point of view is so perfectly done. But it seems like they really did the best they could with what they had.

Overall, this Remastered Collection is simply the best way to experience these two classic games. Its a comprehensive collection in terms of content, it provides all the modern control customisation you’d want and delivers fantastic in-game visuals. If you’re an old fan or even if you’ve never touched this series before, then be sure to check it out.

8/10

Suburban Killbot: Steam Replay 2024

In 2024 I played 21 games on Steam unlocking 486 achievements. 38% of these games were new releases, 62% were released in the last 1-7 years and 0% were released 8 or more years ago. This is a slight change to last year – 35 games, 747 achievements, 31% new, 66% recent, and 3% old.

Only 4% of my total playtime was spent in VR games in 2024 compared to 2% last year, but with a new Quest 3 and several VR games I’m interested in playing releasing towards the end of 2024, I expect this percentage to increase by next year.

32% of my time was spent playing games with a controller. The top 3 were Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Forza Horizon 5 and Hellblade 2. This was an increase from 15% last year.

My longest daily streak in 2024 was 42 days from Sun, April 28th to Sun, June 9th in which I played 9 different games. In 2023 it was a ridiculous 107 days and 16 different games.

My overall top 3 most played games by % of playtime were Starfield (21%) Dragon Age: The Veilguard (15%) and Horizon: Forbidden West (13%).

November was the busiest month with 14% of my total playtime, and December was the slowest with only 2%.

Now Playing: Balatro

Balatro is a rogue-like deck building game and if you follow this blog you’ll know that’s not the kind of thing I usually play. But after seeing so much praise for the game online in ‘Best of 2024’ lists and GOTY nominations, I guess I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

Even so, I probably wouldn’t have picked it up if it also wasn’t themed around another game I know and like to play – poker. So Balatro may not be my typical type of game – I’m not usually interested in either rogue-likes or deck builders – but the poker angle intrigued me.

You begin by choosing a deck of cards and are tasked with building poker hands to score chips. There are three ‘blinds’ (Small, Big & Boss) to each ‘ante’ of difficulty and each requires an increasing number of chips to progress. You can only play a set number of hands per blind, so the goal is to put together hands that offer the most chips per play.

Individual cards offer a base chip score, and the poker hands offer a base multiplication effect determined by the rarity of the hand. So far, so simple – and after a few failed attempts to progress beyond the third or fourth ante I must admit I was wondering if it just wasn’t a game for me . . . but then things began to click into place.

Because Balatro is all about multipliers (mults) and modifiers that allow you to massively and sometimes ridiculously increase your chip score per hand. You do this by purchasing items at a shop between blinds. Items that let you increase the base mult of specific poker hands, for example, or the mult of a specific card. You can also find and stack ‘Joker’ cards that offer a wide variety of chip boosting effects.

And everything stacks. It just keeps stacking! And you want to find ways to make it stack even higher so you can earn even more ridiculous multipliers. And this is where I went from feeling Balatro might not be for me, to playing Balatro for hours at a time.

There’s something very satisfying about embarking on a run and seeing a strategy pay off. About seeing all those mults align. Once you hit ante 8 you win the run, but you can continue on in an ‘endless’ mode if you choose. And once you do start a new run, everything resets.

So yes, it’s possible to ‘beat’ Balatro fairly easily if you go on a good run, but the game offers multiple decks with their own modifiers as well as harder difficulty options (stakes). And, being a rogue-like, there’s a heavy dose of randomisation to every run so you never know exactly what kind of cards, jokers or modifiers you might get access to as you progress. It’s very much a game of making the best of what you’ve got and what you’ve got changes every run.

Of course, the flip side to this is that some runs just suck balls. I’ve had some runs where I’ve struggled to get through the first couple of antes or even failed them because I’d had such a terrible initial selection of modifiers or jokers to work with. Other times I’ve had runs going super smooth, only to hit a randomised Boss blind that’s the complete antithesis of the strategy I’m relying on.

Because you do kind of have to find and stick to a single strategy each run to maximise your score. Runs aren’t really long enough to give you time to adjust your strategy or spread your mults too thin, especially not when you’re deep into the run. That – and the unavoidable repetition – is the frustrating side of Balatro, but I guess that’s the frustrating side of most rogue-likes.

Overall, I’ve really enjoyed my time with Balatro. I can’t say I’ve found it as addictive as people online like to suggest, but considering it’s not the kind of game I typically play, I’d say it did a pretty great job of hooking me in. It’s fairly cheap too, so there’s no reason not to give it a spin.

8/10

X-Box Developer Direct 2025

Like last year, this Developer Direct was a nice way to showcase not only the games, but the studios and people responsible for creating them. So what got me excited? DOOM: The Dark Ages looks fantastic. As highly as I rated Eternal, I didn’t want TDA to play the same way so I’m glad they’ve taken the series in a new direction.

Or rather, an old direction, I suppose, as TDA is more reminiscent of the original DOOM games than Eternal was. It’s slower, more measured and appears to offer a more open hub-like map design – at least in certain areas. This is a game I’d like to pick up at release if I can find the time.

South of Midnight looks lovely from a visual point of view. I like the style and the animation. I also love the setting. In terms of gameplay, I’m not seeing anything here I can get very excited about. It reminds me a little of Kena: Bridge of Spirits which I reviewed back in March 2023.

That was also a charming and fun little adventure, but nothing particularly special in terms of gameplay. There’s also similarities when it comes to structure as in both Kena and Midnight you’re cleansing ‘corruption’ from the local environment in order to progress.

I don’t typically like turn-based combat systems, and if I’m going to like one it either has to be a really good one, or offer a fresh twist on an old formula. I’m hoping Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 will do both because I really like the concept and the visual style. I feel this one has a lot of potential but we’ll see how it all comes together.

And finally we have Ninja Gaiden 4. I have no real history with the Ninja Gaiden series – I think I might have played one on the original X-Box back in the day but I’m not totally sure. So I wasn’t super excited about this announcement until I saw the Platinum Games logo pop up and then I was very, very interested.

It’s weird seeing people talk online about PG like they’re in some kind of creative ‘decline’ when they released Bayonetta 3 in 2022 and Bayonetta Origins in 2023 – two absolute bangers that followed on from those other absolute bangers NieR: Automata in 2017 and Astral Chain in 2019. In the time it takes a AAA Sony studio to produce a single game, PG knocked out four of the best games you’ll ever play.

And Ninja Gaiden 4 looks f**king great. I’m all in on this one. I might even give the Ninja Gaiden 2 Black remake a spin if they fix up some of those bugs and performance issues I’ve seen reported, but it’s the Platinum spin on the series that I really want to see.

Overall, this was another great show and it’s kind of nuts that all these games are releasing on Game Pass. The value is pretty insane and I really don’t know why I’m not yet subscribed. I guess I’m just an old man who still likes to ‘own’ my games, even though technically speaking, I kind of don’t anyway. But, whatever, Microsoft don’t care – they’re getting my money either way.

Now Playing: Indiana Jones & The Great Circle

So you’re making an Indiana Jones game? What do you do? What kind of game should it be? The obvious choice and what many – myself included – expected was a linear, third person, action-adventure game in the style of Uncharted or the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy. But, thankfully, that’s not what we got. Indiana Jones & The Great Circle delivers something entirely different and unique – a first person adventure/puzzle/action game that successfully combines linear levels with open-world hubs.

So let’s start with all the good stuff – Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is a fantastic Indiana Jones game. It really is like playing through an Indiana Jones film – one of the good ones, I mean. Troy Baker pulls off a near perfect (young) Harrison Ford, but the real credit should go to the writers because they absolutely nailed the character of Indiana Jones through both his dialogue and mannerisms.

They also nailed the tone of the (good) films – knowing when to keep things light, when to get a little more serious, and when to indulge in just a dash of slapstick comedy, even in the middle of a fight scene. They also nailed the supporting cast and most importantly – the villain – all of whom fit perfectly into this Indiana Jones adventure.

The story is also pretty good. There’s a nice sense of pace to the mystery as you and Indy put the pieces of the puzzle together but I do feel the ending is, sadly, a little rushed, and one major aspect of it isn’t as set-up to the degree that I would have liked. It’s a bit of a shame because I was fully invested in the mystery up until the very end, but the climax didn’t quite manage to stick the landing in the way that I’d hoped. I know I’m being annoyingly vague, but that’s because I don’t want to spoil anything – just trust me when I say the plot is better than any Indy film post Crusade.

The game opens with a recreation of the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark that also serves as a short tutorial. It’s a clever way to immediately set the tone and establish that The Great Circle is very much influenced by and imitating the style of the original films. From here we travel to Marshall College and set up an adventure that will take Indy to several locations across the globe.

In addition to some smaller, linear levels, there are also three fairly large open-world hubs – locations full of side quests (Fieldwork) small mysteries to solve and collectibles to find. You can ignore all of the additional content if you wish and blast through the core story in (I would estimate) around 10-15 hours depending upon your style of play, but if you do everything – like I did – you’re looking at around 30-35 hours.

There’s a fantastic variety to the locations in terms of setting, visuals and design and they all reward your exploration with some genuinely engaging and fun side content. If you really want to skip it you can – but I’d recommend at least doing the Fieldwork as it ties more directly into the main quest.

How you approach this content is really up to you as the game gives you a lot of different tools at your disposal. You can try to brute force things by shooting and punching your way through. You can play sneaky and use stealth to slip in unseen. You can find disguises that let you blend in with your local surroundings. Or you can do all three.

And you probably will, because just like the action in a good Indiana Jones film, The Great Circle builds its gameplay all around Indy’s ability to improvise. No disguise is infallible, Indy can’t tank a dozen bullets or beatings, and stealth will usually only get you so far – just like in the (good) films you need to adapt, improvise and switch tack on the fly. You also need to know when, if things get out of hand, to make a daring escape.

It’s quite amazing how well the gameplay of The Great Circle captures the chaotic, improvisational nature of Indiana Jones film action. This is a very melee focused game, one in which nearly every item within reach can be turned into a weapon and because these weapons all break after a certain number of hits, you’re often using not what you’d want, but whatever you have at hand – just like Indiana Jones.

The first person perspective – with occasional perspective shifts to third-person when climbing or swinging – really does put you into Indy’s shoes. You feel the weight of every punch and the crack of your whip as you disarm an enemy. You feel more involved in every puzzle as you scrutinise the clues before you. The puzzles are neither too hard nor too easy and there’s a nice variety between locations. I do wish the game wasn’t as reliant on the ‘find the code for this lock box’ type of puzzles for its smaller mysteries though.

Disguises, whilst a welcome addition – particularly if you want to find every collectible – do make traversing some areas a little too easy. Avoiding the officers that can rumble you isn’t too hard – and you can always lure them away and knock them out. Even if you are rumbled, it’s easy to just run off for a bit and within minutes everyone forgets you were there. I don’t think the risk/reward balance of using a disguise is quite right here.

And I guess this is where I start to get into the few more negative aspects of The Great Circle. Whilst the first two open-world areas are incredibly polished, the third feels a little rough. There’s a noticeable number of lighting bugs, frequent pop-in, false map markers and some weird audio de-syncs.

This area is also not as well designed in terms of map layout. If you do want to find everything, be prepared for a bit of a slog back and forth throughout this location. It’s the one place in the game where The Great Circle started to feel like a real chore to play. This issue is made worse by the inability to track multiple collectibles at once – even if you’ve unlocked the map for them.

 

I suppose it’s done so you can’t clutter your screen with waypoints, but if I want to track say Notes and Relics in a single location, I don’t see why I can’t have the option to track both at once rather than have to continually go into my journal and set the active quest back and forth.

I’m also not sold on the Skill Book system. The idea is that you earn ‘adventure points’ by completing content and then use these points to unlock skills or upgrades via books you can find or purchase throughout the game. But at some point I just stopped caring about what these books did and unlocked them just because I could. Visually, The Great Circle looks fantastic. I was playing with path tracing enabled and the game makes great use of it – at least until that somewhat rough final open-world hub.

Overall, Indiana Jones & The Great Circle is a great Indiana Jones game and easily one of the best licensed games ever made. It really does capture the spirit of the original films. But I certainly think there’s room for improvement here. It feels like a great foundation to build upon, to refine and then improve in a potential sequel. I don’t know if we’ll get one, but if we do, I think the license is in very good hands.

8/10

Steam Winter Sale: Damage Report

I played and reviewed every Command & Conquer game a few years ago, but when I saw this Remastered Collection on sale for under £2, how could I not pick it up? I also picked up State of Decay 2 for under £2. I enjoyed the first game quite a bit, reviewing it way back in 2013, but it felt like a game that would serve as a strong foundation to a more refined sequel. I guess it’s finally time to find out.

Frostpunk 2 was a game I wanted to get at release, but I just didn’t have the time to play it. I’m a big fan of the original but I was always concerned about how they’d handle a sequel. From what I’ve seen, I think I might like the direction Frostpunk 2 takes because I certainly didn’t want just more of the same.

I was a little on the fence about Ghost of Tsushima because I got rather sick of open world map clutter games years ago, but I’ve heard such positive things about this one and it’s a setting I like so it’s worth giving a go.

And finally we have the Marvel vs Capcom Fighting Collection which I’d have happily bought just for Marvel vs Capcom 2 – one of my favourite fighting games – but it also includes some other games I’ve played and loved in the past like Children of the Atom and Marvel Super Heroes. It also includes X-Men vs Street Fighter which is a game I really wanted to play back in the day but never had the chance to. I’m excited to get stuck into this one.

Other games I picked up though not on Steam were SIFU, Ghostrunner 2 and Dredge which I claimed for free on Epic. I also got Fire Emblem: Three Houses for the Switch – and I’ll be talking about the original Fire Emblem here soon.

Now Playing: The Callisto Protocol

The Callisto Protocol is a sci-fi survival horror that released in 2022. I recall seeing it get somewhat mixed reviews, but when it was recently given away for free on Epic I saw no reason not to give it a spin. You play as Jacob Lee, a space trucker hauling cargo to Callisto on behalf of the United Jupiter Company.

But when your ship is attacked and you crash on the surface, you find yourself tossed without charge into Black Iron Prison. Things quickly go to shit as a virus spreads throughout the prison population, transforming them into monsters. As Jacob, your goal is simple: get the f**k out of the prison and off Callisto alive.

What follows is a very linear, eight or so hour adventure, around half of which I would estimate is spent slowly crawling in vents or squeezing around pipes and through narrow gaps. So much squeezing. So, so much. Your progress through Black Iron is broken down into several chapters and I’m sad to say from a gameplay point of view, the game doesn’t really mix things up as you go.

Every area is just a handful of linear corridors, with several crawls and squeezes to divide sections. Paths may branch on occasion, but they rarely lead to anything more exciting than a few extra supplies and a dead end. Or a fuse and a dead end. So, so many fuses. All throughout the game your progress will be impeded by yet another door with a blown fuse that requires you to backtrack to locate a new one.

Crawling, squeezing and fuses – that’s the holy trinity of progression and exploration in The Callisto Protocol. Yes, it’s about as exciting as it sounds. Which is a shame, because I feel like there’s a potentially really good game buried in here beneath all this tedious and bland game design. The Callisto Protocol is clearly going for that Dead Space vibe – slow, sci-fi horror that’s brutal, relentless and dark.

And I think it does a great job of capturing that spirit – which is why it’s a shame that everything else about the game is so damn flawed. I did like Jacob as a protagonist, but the plot doesn’t really seem to progress for much of the game, not unless you take time out to track down and listen to the obligatory audio logs.

By ‘plot’ I mean the story beyond the simple objective of getting out of the prison alive. I’m talking about where the virus came from, who released it and why. But most of these questions seem totally irrelevant as you progress, at least until towards the very end when the game dumps all the exposition on you at once.

There’s no real ‘antagonist’ as such, but then the game suddenly tries to make one out of a prison officer (Ferris) you met very briefly at the beginning of the game. So . . . he’s my nemesis now? But why? There’s also an odd ‘boss’ monster with two heads that just shows up out of nowhere once and then the game makes you fight it two more times before the end.

It’s not a bad fight, but surely the game could have set it up a little? Teased it a little? Couldn’t it have made Ferris a more constant presence throughout your experience? He disappears near the start of the game, makes a couple of brief appearances as you go and then becomes the final boss fight like you have some kind of history or grudge to settle or . . . I don’t f**king know.

What do you want from me, Callisto Protocol? What do you want me to care about? I did care about getting Jacob out alive, I guess, but beyond that I can’t say the game gave me a reason to care about much else. Everything is so damn predictable. Did the creepy hologram man release the virus? Of course he f**king did. Is the prison experimenting on its inmates? Of course it f**king is. If you’re looking for a story that might surprise you, or take an unexpected twist then you won’t find that here.

The combat has a nice weight and crunch to it. You get a decent selection of weapons, all of which can be upgraded. You also get a limited ‘gravity glove’ type ability that lets you pick up and toss monsters into grinding machinery. So much grinding machinery. So, so much. Black Iron Prison doesn’t seem to have much in the way of Health and Safety regulations given how so many of its rooms have massive grinding machines that can reduce you to a red mist, operating without any kind of safety barrier.

It’s actually kind of ridiculous, even if it is always fun to toss monsters into the machinery and watch them explode. There’s one part where you’re warned that the prison set a trap for prisoners trying to escape a particular way and whilst a simple locked gate would have sufficed, instead they installed a revolving, deadly drill machine that slowly trundles up and down a narrow corridor with very helpful safe alcoves provided at regular intervals.

Wait, what? I guess that’s not as weird as the water slide system that runs for miles beneath the prison and has pillars covered in spikes placed randomly along it to stop anyone from . . . surfing their way to freedom? Who the f**k designed this prison? I guess you could just say ‘video game’ by way of explanation but for me, I like to think the environments of a very serious game like this would make at least some kind of logical sense.

Enemy variety ain’t great. Not terrible, but not great. There’s one part where you encounter a new enemy that hunts by sound. No exactly original, but it’s a nice change of pace to the bum-rush brutes and acid spitters you’ve spent the last 5 hours smashing and blasting. Of course the game then ruins it by making you sneak around these f**ks for way too long. I lost patience and just started shooting my way through.

Enemies nearly always attack you in a repetitive pattern too – left swing, right swing – which you can easily dodge and then counter. Sometimes they mix it up a little, but not much. It means it’s pretty easy to avoid taking any hits even when you’re surrounded.

Visually, The Callisto Protocol looks very nice, but not nice enough to run as poorly as it does. Optimisation isn’t great. I can’t really complain about the cast because they do a good job with what they’ve got but what they’re got isn’t worth much.

Overall, The Callisto Protocol, despite my many gripes, certainly isn’t a bad game. It’s an okay game that if you see it given away for free or on a heavy sale and you like your sci-fi or survival horror then it might just be worth giving a go. But otherwise it’s pretty hard to recommend. It’s like playing a worse version of Dead Space . . . and if that’s all it is, why not just play Dead Space again?

6/10