Recent reviews by Snoob

Great couple's game. Lots of fun little details, can be challenging at times but not outright "hard".

While I feel that It Takes Two was slightly better in terms of gameplay, I enjoyed almost all of the 14 hours we spent getting through it. The best thing I have to say is that they almost perfectly time every mechanic to switch up when it starts to outstay its welcome.

The story will probably either hit you strongly or bounce off; If it's the latter, you can use the old "it's a co-op game" excuse. Some areas feel a little lopsided, with one character getting more responsibility or complexity than the other, but it's not a dealbreaker.

It's really CPU-intensive right now (my 3060 Ti isn't even being half-utilized and the framerate shows it).
There's a sneaky little Epic Online Services add-on that, at least when the game "went live", wasn't mentioned.
If this is your first Warhammer 40K media, you're gonna be a little confused, because the plot doesn't help you much.

But the attention to detail is insane. You start to appreciate just how bad it really is for humanity. There's so many things they didn't have to do, but did anyway. It just FEELS GOOD to play. This is the big breakout game that 40K fans wanted from Darktide.

Come for the art style and gameplay (although "motorvania" is a little generous).

Stay for the soundtrack, introspection, and scenes that will bum you out so much that they stick in your head for days afterwards.

Some people think it's a bit hard, but only one boss really gave me trouble, so take that feedback with a grain of salt if you know your video games already.

The Halo franchise has a checkered history, to be sure. Some view it as the revitalization of the first person shooter, while others point to it as the final blow to "classic" FPS even before 343i got their hands on it. Whatever the case, its influence is undeniable: The two-weapon system, regenerating health, and online console multiplayer can all point to this series as common ground, and it ended up being an anchor for Microsoft's XBOX series moving forward. But you didn't come here for a history lesson, you came for a review. Do these old games live up to the legend nowadays?

For the most part, yes. Every single one of these games is more than serviceable as a shooter, and each of them has had its original image maintained (although Gearbox's slight bungling of CE's PC port has been preserved instead of the original XBOX, frustratingly). If you've been living under a rock, the premise of Halo is pretty simple: Aliens exist, they're jerks, and you play as a green guy called Halo on a mission to stop them from nuking the whole galaxy because they're jerks.

The graphics on the originals are mostly what you would expect (4 still has some slight issues with the lighting), but where the MCC shines compared to the classic PC ports is the addition of the "Anniversary" modes, where you can spruce up the graphics on Halo 1 and 2 at the tap of a button. For 1, this doesn't do all that much, and it honestly feels a little phoned in, but Halo 2 Anniversary is rather nice to look at and does seem slightly more like what the "developers intended". The PC version has a few graphical options, but do not expect the opportunity to do much tweaking if you're not sure if your computer meets specs. The framerate can be unlocked, though this sometimes causes some minor cosmetic issues in my experience, and some of CE's mocapped animations were clearly not meant to be viewed past 30.

What appeals to me most about the PC version of the Master Chief Collection is how seamlessly the mouse and keyboard operate. Outside of a little menu difficulty, there's none of that "I can tell this was designed for a joystick first" weirdness that sometimes hounds games like GTA. It just, for lack of a more descriptive phrase, "feels good". You can plug in a controller and play them just like you would on an XBOX if that's more your speed, but it felt amazing to track heads before popping them without having to deal with a clunky aim assist.

Where the aim assist is less desirable is the multiplayer component, where you'll probably end up having to play mixed inputs if you want to find matches reasonably often. It is more or less empirical evidence that it's "easier" to kill people on a controller in Halo, but that did not stop me from throwing down some absolutely disgusting stomps in old favorites. Unfortunately, despite the nearly-unanimous love I have for Halo 1 and 2, most people seem to only play Reach and 3 online, and I could never find a match in 2A or 4 without waiting for a while with only them on (or in 2A's case, never). Around launch, the multiplayer progression system encouraged players to idle and be dead weight in games, but this seems to have been cleaned up by 343 following launch.

Speaking of the progression system... This will either make or break your opinion on the collection if you're a Halo veteran. 343 Industries has torn out how you used to earn armor parts in Reach, instead putting them on a 100-level-long pseudo-battle-pass that rations out which pieces you get based on arbitrary restrictions. In later "seasons", they added more of these which provide new cosmetic skins to weapons and vehicles in Halo CE and 3. Now, as I write this, their plan is to mess with Halo 3's multiplayer systems a little more-- again, entirely in cosmetic ways-- that some people are very irate about. You can opt out of this embellishing content through a menu if you wish, but between the changes to Reach and other content (ODST Firefight characters being noteworthy) being unlocked through these progression treadmills, things might be frustrating for you if you're more used to how the old systems worked.

So what's my overall opinion? Well, here's a tl;dr: If you've never played Halo, the Master Chief Collection is a steal to see what set up the "modern" shooter genre. It is probably one of the best values I have ever seen, and a powerful tool for nostalgia on top of that. I'm currently a little iffy on whether the multiplayer will stick around for years, but you get so much that solo and cooperative offerings would probably placate you even if if doesn't.

When it comes to looter-shooters, Borderlands is probably the first word out of anybody's mouth. A cast of zany characters with crazy skills and exotic enemies that spew out more guns than you can shake a Vercuvian back-ham at are trademarks of the series, and you can bet that Borderlands 3 delivers on this entirely-too-long sentence in spades. But let's break it down a little more.

The main draw of this game, to me, is the power rush. Depending on which character you pick, you can atomize your enemies with a mecha suit, sic your pets on them, devastate them with an array of psionic powers, or feel like you're playing fourth-dimensional chess as you utilize all the gadgets available to a special agent. That's not even covering the guns! For the first time in the series, it feels like you're shooting weapons instead of, I don't know, playing laser tag with a janky model superimposed on the screen. Combat is fast, frenetic, and controlled by your decisions as you play Build-A-Badass with three skill trees per character (with an extra tied to DLC). Want to print ammo faster than you can shoot it while making people's heads literally explode? There's a build for that. In the mood to be a sniper ninja shooting once and killing multiple enemies due to ricochets? There's a build for that. Like causing so much chaos that not even your friends will know who to shoot? Got you covered.

Another serious improvement to the formula is that, for the first time, it doesn't all take place on one planet. You can go from fighting in concrete jungles where verticality plays a little more importance to a miserable swampland whose waters are prime for a little area electrocution, have shootouts in low gravity where you feel like a caricature of Max Payne, and even more. It helps shake things up and improve the scenery diversity, but it's clear that a few were more rushed than others (you can experience everything that a specific place has to offer in a little under an hour, only returning to it once to do so). Still, it breaks up the crushing monotony of Gray-And-Brown Area #41 that anybody who played the original game is all too familiar with. Other changes include an option to switch to instanced loot (if you know you play with a bunch of That Guys), a system to auto-loot good stuff later if you miss it, and an "easy" mode which... presumably, makes the game easier. I haven't touched that one, since the difficulty curve feels more than agreeable.

Leave your hopes for a compelling narrative at the door, though; 3 doesn't even manage to touch the relatively low bar set by earlier entries in the series. There are more plot holes than a graph made out of Swiss cheese, and events feel more like a series of "I figured out how we get the plot moving again!" announcements than a cohesive storyline. With that being said, there are still some okay stories to be found. I was especially fond of the DLC storylines, which felt more planned out and focus on a few specific characters instead of rushing to cram in series favorites left and right (though plenty of them make appearances, and they did my boys Axton and Salvador dirty).

Everything else isn't all painbows and sunspines, either. A recurring issue that I have with the game is performance. It's usually playable enough, dropping to about 40 FPS maxxed out, and I will admit that my setup is starting to show its age, but when there's a lot of stuff going on (especially in co-op, when multiple action skills can fire off at once), it does lag somewhat tangibly. It is possible to reduce your settings to compensate for this, but sometimes it feels like what's on the screen isn't justifying the framerate drops it's causing. You may also run into a few quest-related issues (across 4 playthroughs, I've had a few times where missions either skip crucial dialogue or lock up until restarting the game), but I haven't encountered any "this is a giant, super-obvious glitch that broke everything" stuff within 130 hours.

Final verdict? This is probably the best looter-shooter I've played to date. Build decisions are impactful with lots of long-term ramifications, combat feels rewarding enough to seek out for fun over and over again (or to grind out that last legendary you need to nail your build), and a mediocre plot can be easily overlooked by it being addicting enough to go through it repeatedly to level up different characters. Just be careful of the DLC prices, as they do add a fair amount of content, including a fourth skill tree for each character.

The galaxy is in shambles. OMNIs, ubiquitous constructs that humanity took for granted, shut down, and nobody knows why. In their absence, civilization devolves, and a once-proud Galactic Empire has been brought low. As a clone of Admiral Ellys Idaho, the best and brightest commander the galaxy has ever seen, it is up to you to get to the bottom of all this and reactivate the OMNIs... If such a thing is even possible.

The most obvious comparison for Crying Suns is FTL, another space-based "rogue-lite" that saw rather substantial success, but this isn't a simple click-drag copy-paste. It is true that both games involve navigating a sector one node at a time, interacting with dialogue and making decisions, but while the ships in FTL were cruisers, your flagship in Crying Suns is a monolithic carrier capable of not only bringing weapons to bear, but also small armadas of strike craft and smaller vessels. The hex-based combat is a mix of resource management, rock-paper-scissors, and real time strategy (though it can be paused as needed to make sense of what's going on). Throughout your journey, ships may suffer battle damage (rendering them weaker in future engagements) or find themselves replaced by superior models that can do something differently, so unlike in FTL, it can be risky to invest in a single approach to your problems at the expense of everything else; Oftentimes, it's one misplay from being surprisingly less effective.

What caught my eye almost immediately was the game's visual style. At a glance on the store page, it looks like a typical indie "2D majority with 3D elements", right? Well, look closer. Almost every entity in the game is actually a 3D model that's been designed explicitly to look two-dimensional, but interacts with light and shadow in a way very reminiscent of Dungeon of the Endless. The UI is also on point, giving a clean "sci-fi" look that is easily read while still providing a unifying theme (the Empire was all about its rounded rectangles, it would seem). There's something else that, to my knowledge, is unique to the genre: A Star-Trek-esque "Away Team" mechanic that lets you beam crews down to a planet in search of death and treasure.

While the visuals draw you in, and the combat is novel, what's really engrossing here is the narrative. Crying Suns goes a long way towards making you think that something's going to be stereotypical of the genre only to have it subverted on more than one occasion, and as your perspective is that of a clone who has been out of the loop for the last few centuries, it feels slightly more natural when another character gives you a bit of an exposition dump. The best part about this is that you keep your "memories" when you die, which means that you're not going to be mashing through the same explanations and preambles again (after the first time you reach a particular boss, you can actually tell them something like "shut up, I've heard this before, let's get this over with"). This is a game where you might find yourself asking if keeping the moral high ground is worth it in a galaxy that's clearly fallen apart, but it's not exactly a Spec-Ops level "you're the bad guy now, tee-hee" affair insomuch as "shades of gray".

Okay, now what might put you off of this purchase? Well, first of all, it can be pretty brutal, difficulty-wise. Compounding this problem further is that while Normal feels like a battle against the grain, Easy goes to the extremes implied by its name, to the point where the challenge went almost entirely out the airlock. Second, there are some "known quantities", and while you're pursuing the storyline, they will make themselves apparent. At first, this sounds like a solution to the previous issue: You know who's going to be at the end of Chapter 1 every time, right? Well, the intervening business is by no means guaranteed to be the same, obviously. You either build your way up to snowballing whichever gimmick awaits you at the end of the sector, or it's an uphill battle where you struggle to get what you need. To the game's credit, you're forced to reset your progress at the end of each chapter (with an appropriate difficulty curve reset), which helps alleviate some of this by letting you come into a new challenge with a predictable power level, but I know some people I've mentioned this to didn't like that, so I felt it was worth mentioning here.

Overall, if you liked FTL and strategy in general, you'll probably get a kick out of this. I'm not sure that it's as inherently replayable as FTL (though the developers are working on that as time goes on), and it will certainly be harder to see the credits roll (at least, in my opinion), but it trades some of that "infinite replayability" for more depth of story. While FTL basically said "you're running from the rebels, now go", Crying Suns tries to make the journey as engaging as the destination, something which compelled me to keep going through a relatively slow release schedule for the time of year it came out in. I'd say that if your only objective is to hit the end, you'll probably be working on it for at least 8 to 10 hours, with that number ballooning if you're seeking to accomplish everything it has to offer now.

The 2010's are a strange time. Everything old is new again: Paying 6 different services to watch 4 shows, waiting a year for games to come out on PC (despite a beta test existing due to exclusivity deals), and playing games with simple geometry and explosive amounts of color are all in vogue again. Enter the dragon! Spyro the Dragon, to be precise. Re-enter him, I mean. I think this metaphor got away from me somewhere. Let's move on.

You've definitely played Spyro, or at least a game like it, before. This whole genre is what you'd call a "collectathon"; Gather up a large amount of things across a variety of stages, go to the next one, and do it all over again. The general plot motivator is that a villain has stolen a large volume of something of importance, and it's your job to get it back. Boss fights may or may not punctuate the whole affair (they do in this one). The twist here is that, much like the Crash Bandicoot remaster, the whole original trilogy is included! Yep, that's right. All three games, but now they look more like how your nostalgia would remember them instead of the clunky polygonal messes they were originally. (Can you believe the Playstation 1 used affline texture mapping? Kids these days have it so easy...)

There isn't a lot of nuance to this one, honestly. Yes, it's Spyro. Yes, it's a lot like it was back when they originally came out, but now it looks prettier. As the trilogy goes on, there's a bit more depth added; Spyro 2 introduces the concept of additional challenges in order to collect trinkets (like running an obstacle course or playing a game of trimmed-down hockey), while the third installment goes so far as to add more characters to play as for some sections that have their own types of gameplay, but for the most part, you're still gonna be a purple dragon with a bit of an attitude collecting gems and doo-dads. It is a pretty solid gem-and-doo-dad collector, though. Going into it expecting a "children's game", I was pleasantly surprised to see a reasonable range of difficulty, especially in Spyro 2, where it's simple enough to get to the end of a level, but not always a cakewalk to complete a level's checklist.

I didn't really feel like it was fair to judge this remaster too harshly compared to "more modern offerings", since, well, it effectively came out in 2000. With that being said, I didn't play it back on the PS1, so keep that in mind. First, the first game really felt like a slog. It quickly became clear to me that when people are talking about how good Spyro was, they were probably not talking about this one. By the time the end of the year rolled around, "collection fatigue" was also starting to set in, but that is more of a subjective issue. More importantly, there are also a few problems, at least with Spyro 1, relating to the framerate lock making some levels not work properly. This is an incredibly minor nitpick, especially since it only comes up a handful of times if you're only playing through each level once, but any game where it's an issue at all bears a cautionary mention.

So what's the verdict? First, if you were a Spyro fan, you probably already own this, but if you don't, go ahead and get it. It really is just like you remember, for better or for worse. It looks very pretty even if the gameplay is a little dated. At the same time, if you weren't enamored with Spyro, or collectathons in general, before this, I highly doubt this trilogy will change your mind. I'd suggest you look for it to be about twenty dollars, unless you really are dying to play Spyro again.

Do you remember Advance Wars? (Intelligent Systems certainly doesn't.) What if you were to take its gameplay, put your own twists on it, and wrap the whole thing up with a high-fantasy setting? Well, then you'd have Wargroove, and that's pretty swell.

When it comes to the campaign, Wargroove runs down the list of everything you'd expect from an SRPG. There's missions that play much like fair fights, missions that play out more like puzzles as you must use limited units intelligently, and missions that have special conditions or environmental challenges to overcome. It's decent enough, even if the plot is kind of paint-by-numbers. The presentation is nice, almost like a mix of hand-drawn art and spritework that provokes a kind-of-retro feeling without being limited by its art style. As is traditional with the genre, each "faction" has its own unit designs for cosmetic purposes.

Where I spent most of my time thus far was creating custom maps and playing skirmishes, both against the AI and other people. Downloading new maps is almost painless, and while creating them requires a little more effort, it's simple enough that I was soon banging out old classics with slight tweaks to make them playable under a slightly different system. When it comes to the gameplay itself, you get a decent amount of options (such as whether to use the "commander" system, the classic "HQ" system, or both). There are also a large amounts of units to choose from, more than were included in almost any Advance Wars game (to my knowledge; I didn't play much Days of Ruin). Towns aren't completely defenseless in this adaptation, but they still won't be scoring a lot of kills any time soon. Instead of CO Powers, each commander has a "Wargroove", which does something like healing nearby units, dealing a lot of damage to a single target, or summoning reinforcements. The game does do a decent job at forging its own identity, and despite all its changes, I would be hard-pressed to call out a unit or commander that's "overpowered".

To me, Wargroove vacillates between being a send-up of a popular (if niche) franchise and trying to do its own thing, with both ends of this having their own issues. For one, while there were some pretty glaring balance issues in Advance Wars (the power creep as one got more and more expensive units, for instance, or almost the entirety of the additions of Dual Strike), I honestly don't feel that the solution was to just add more units. Most of the units that Wargroove adds do their own thing, but there are some that exist almost exclusively to counter specific units. The primary way that the game communicates what a unit does is through the mandatory tutorials that are front-loaded at the beginning of the campaign; At first, this is no different than any other game in the genre, but where this becomes a problem is if you want to jump in and play around with all the stuff ahead of time, where some units have weird rules or abilities that are not documented well at a glance until you try to use them (further compounding this is that every unit has a kind of "niche trait", like spearmen are more effective when adjacent to one another, but those are listed pretty well). There's no way to say "I've played games like this before", so a large amount of those early tutorials are also things like showing you how to move units around or capture bases.

The biggest issue with reinventing the wheel, however, is that it's hard to get that "classic experience", if that's what you're looking for. The commanders don't feel like they have quite as much impact as COs despite being mission-critical assets with a special power. Little things like cities being passable in Advance Wars but not in Wargroove introduce nuance that makes one have to adjust a slew of maps to ensure that balance remains reasonable (or, at points, that a route remains traversable at all). Don't get me wrong: It's good that the developers tried something different, I just want to stress that if you're literally looking for Advance Wars, you should go play Advance Wars.

Overall, Wargroove is a solid game for its price point, offering you many hours of somewhat-cartoony strategy (especially if you do online or local multiplayer). The comparisons to classics of the genre can be tiresome, and it might hold your hand too much, but the core gameplay is solid, and if this is your first entry into the genre, that won't matter. It's definitely the best you're going to get if you're looking for a "new" Advance Wars until Fire Emblem stops selling.

(Product was received through owning the original prior to the remaster coming out)

It's the first Borderlands, but again. There's been a few graphical changes, but for the most part, it's the same as it was a decade ago. Since it uses Steamworks out of the box this time, there's a little less hassle connecting to people than there was through GameSpy (RIP), although there were still a few minor issues until we got everything sorted which basically boiled down to "just let me host, it worked fine that way".

A disclaimer: If you've played 2 but not 1, and you don't like how slow the opening to 2 is, 1 is even worse in that regard. Basically the entire first act or so acts like you've never played a shooter and/or looter before. The wart-like archaic concepts are also still in effect (like a low gun variety pool, side-quests being introduced primarily as an excuse to reuse areas, etc.), and sometimes you'll feel underwhelmed by concepts that 2 actually managed to do better.

However, if you're stricken by nostalgia, or want to see how the series began, this is definitely the way to do it. Just... bring friends, or you might get bored.

A serviceable experience of simulating driving a big rig, ATS is a good game that nobody will stop ribbing you for playing. Now featuring every West Coast state (after DLC) and parts of the Midwestern US, a very granular set of options lets you choose how "realistic" you want your experience to be, from whether fuel and fatigue matter to little things like whether the air brake is simulated properly. The traffic AI is rather awful at actually interacting with you (exploitable just as often as it's costing you an absurd amount of money), traffic law itself isn't always coded properly (right-on-red states will still find you penalized for taking such a maneuver, and posted signs like "left turn yield on green" will still leave you with penalties even if you stop and the intersection is deserted), and it would be nice to tell the GPS to prioritize new routes over seeing the same main roads over and over again without personal initiative, but if you want to drive a large truck hauling cargo across the US, this is your game, I reckon.