Recent reviews by Aerothorn

As far as I can tell, the Yakuza series was always intended by Sega to be a reliable, mainstay budget series; made for the domestic market, it was never going to be a runaway international hit, but if they could pump them out at a good clip, it could consistently make a profit. This informed the series development timeline, in which a few years were spent making the first game on a given console, with code and asset reuse allowing mostly annual installments (either main-series or spinoff) thereafter. Yakuza 2 came out in 2006, a year after the first, and was basically More Yakuza; Yakuza 3 took all the way to 2009, presumably due to having to learn a new console and remake all the assets from scratch (though the first Yakuza spin-off, the still unreleased-outside-Japan Ryū ga Gotoku Kenzan!, served as something of a dry run in 2008). It was thus reasonable to expect that Yakuza 4, released a mere 13 months after Yakuza 3, would be essentially a stand-alone expansion.

It’s not, and this is all down to a single change: the decision to divide the game into four acts, each with a different protagonist. The entire Yakuza series has, to this point, been built around Kiryu, his naive heroism and superhuman martial arts ability. It’s not a given that other characters could carry the series.

So how does Yakuza 4 acquit itself? Good, but not perfectly. Each character offers an interesting twist: loan agent Shin Akuyami is a more intellectual and playful character than the stoic Kiryu, with an unusual backstory (with a particularly satisfying connection to the original Yakuza), and a speed/combo based fighting style that’s a blast to play. Taiga Saejima is his opposite, a brooding, cynical thug of few words who has done terrible things in the name of the yakuza, and accepted his impending execution at the hands of the state. He basically fights like The Incredible Hulk, and if it’s a little one-note it’s at least substantially different from the other characters. And Masayoshi Tanimura is a polyglot police officer, simultaneously playing police detective and corruptly shaking down shady sorts rather than arresting them. He has a evasion/dodge fighting style that was too finicky for my tastes.

These different acts add a lot of variety to the series, at the cost of some inconsistency. Akuyami’s story feels like one of the best Yakuza sidequests stretched out for 10 hours, which is mostly a good thing; Saejima’s story weaves a dramatic prison break with some genuine character development for, of all people, Goro Majima (up to this point he’s just a comic-relief antagonist with no cogent backstory; Yakuza 4 decides to change that in dramatic fashion, laying the groundwork for his star turn in Yakuza 0). Past its opening acts, Saekima's story runs out of steam and sort of putters along, painless but not fully realizing its potential.

Tanimura’s story, bluntly, doesn’t work. We finally have the opportunity to view the yakuza from the outside, to enter the world of Japanese police, and instead we get a rogue detective who operates entirely on his own, flagrantly breaks the law, and generally just plays like a particularly humorless yakuza. The worst part is that he is, in many ways, the lynchpin to the overarching plot; it’s only in his act that the disparate threads start to come together. The attempt to connect all the stories is admirable, but ultimately results in an absurd, over-complicated conspiracy even by the standards of Yakuza games.

Kiryu is Kiryu, and Yakuza 4’s greatest trick is to make his return feel like a real treat, rather than a tired rehash. For most of the game, we get to see the heroic Kiryu from the outside, as an almost mythic figure; when we play him, it’s like the game has given us control over the final boss.

The finale goes all-in on the premise, having four separate final showdowns for each of the protagonists, and if some of the pairings make very little sense, it’s at least suitably epic.

Yakuza 4 shows that there’s life left in the series, but also that the fundamentals are as important as ever, and that interweaving the stories of multiple protagonists presents its own challenges. It also demonstrated (to me) that I really, really need to not play more than one Yakuza game a year, lest I suffer burnout. Yakuza 4 is in most ways a better, more interesting game than Yakuza 3, but I found myself liking the former more at least in part because I took a real break from Kiwami 2 before leaping into it.

Yakuza 3 is a difficult game to evaluate. The mainline Yakuza series is now up to eight entries; ask people to rank all the titles, and most will put Yakuza 3 at the bottom (while noting that the worst Yakuza game is still a solid game on its own terms). I think this is fair, and yet simultaneously, I think this is one of the most important and visionary Yakuza titles, and will only get shortchanged by modern audiences because of the Kiwami remakes. Let me explain.

The first two Yakuza games were an ambitious attempt to combine a Shenmue-style dense, simulated world with low-brow brawling and a serious, melodramatic Yakuza story ripped straight from Japanese cinema. The fact that they were obviously stitched together from these disparate parts was part of their charm, but the underlying technology couldn’t fully support the vision; Shenmue was able to make its detailed world on the Dreamcast only through a truly stupendous outlay of time and money and clever use of the Dreamcast hardware.� Yakuza had a budget the fraction of the size and was forced to work with the difficult-to-program PS2. The end result is more of a zoomed-out brawler playground that a richly detailed slice of Tokyo.

Yakuza 3 changes this. It returns to the exact same location—the semi-fictional red light district of Kamurocho—but renders it in lush detail (as well as the new secondary location of Okinawa—more on that in a sec). A first-person camera is implemented, and used in a few game modes, but is really there just to show off the detail. The pacing is tremendously improved by allowing battles and exploration to seamlessly blend, without the traditional black loading screen; a wider array of minigames are implemented, bringing the total up to 20. These changes would carry through to every subsequent game in the series, and ultimately be “backported” to its predecessors via the full remakes of Yakuza Kiwami 1 and 2.

This means that someone who started the Yakuza series today, playing the games in chronological order starting with Yakuza 0 and working their way through the Kiwamis before hitting Yakuza 3, would find Yakuza 3 a substantial step backwards; the “remasterings” of Yakuza 3–5 are simply HD ports with redone localization, and so are a substantial graphical downgrade 0/Kiwami. Without the freshness and awe of its advances, Yakuza 3 can feel like a filler Yakuza game, a final spin of the wheels before the series realizes it needs to start changing to avoid becoming stale.

But I have a fondness for Yakuza 3 even coming off Kiwami, and that’s almost solely due to the brave, divisive turn it takes with its story. One of the most common tropes of the “honorable criminal” is the criminal who leaves the life of crime behind to Do Good, but then gets Pulled Back In because somebody wants to make a sequel. Yakuza 2 already pulled this trick, and at the end of that protagonist Kiryu went “okay, for real this time, I’m running an orphanage on Okinawa and not beating up any more dudes.” You’d expect Yakuza 3 to find some flimsy excuse to reverse this off the bat once again, but it doesn't; the game spends an extended period of time with Kiryu fully in Orphanage Dad mode, helping take care of kids and dealing with the occasional financial or local crime issue.

I love this; Kiryu’s always at his best when his natural warmth is allowed to shine, and I bluntly didn’t take enough of a break between this and previous Yakuza titles, so the variety was welcome. A lot of players felt that this isn’t what they signed up for, that the Okinawa segment was a series of pointless sidequests and character moments divorced from the larger stakes of the series. And yeah, if you’re here solely to see more Elaborate Yakuza Opera, you’re going to be disappointed with the game’s first half.

I felt the opposite; eventually, Kiryu is pulled back in and goes to Kamarucho, and while I appreciate that the game took the time to ‘earn’ this and it felt consistent with Kiryu’s character, the actual story and gameplay is a forgettable retread; I can barely remember the plot writing this, and what I do remember is mostly just a variation on things we’ve seen in the first two. The villain in particular, while a notable attempt at making a more intellectual antagonist for Kiryu, is at the end of the day a thinly-written finance criminal.

The developers clearly realized that they were getting into a rut; Yakuza 4 substantially shook up the series and it never looked back. But I wouldn’t skip Yakuza 3; some of the best character moments in the entire series are found with the children of the Sunflower Orphanage.

The first We Were Here was a charming and innovative co-op game, and I was more than willing to forgive its scattered and amateurish storytelling for the experience it delivered. I enjoyed this sequel less; it doesn’t change the formula one slightest, so all you get is more puzzles (which are mostly solid, but sometimes finicky and frustrating, with at least one puzzle being outright bugged and requiring multiple restarts) using mostly the same techniques, and a genuinely terrible attempt at gothic storytelling (an earnest attempt, to be fair, but writing is just not the dev’s strong suits). On top of all that, it employs the classic “the defaulte ending is a bad ending” structure, with the good ending essentially impossible to discover without a guide.

If you loved We Were Here and you want more, this will give you that, but with less consisten quality; I’d still play another game, but only if I had reason to believe the developers were really trying to iterate and not just content to put out More Puzzles in an increasingly nonsensical setting (just how many Arctic explorers are getting themselves trapped in gothic castles with nothing but walkie-talkies?).

In the last decade, Games Workshop has gone from being fairly precious with the Warhammer license to giving it to anyone with an idea and a bag of cash. [ref]This leads to a lot of Warhammer (mostly Warhammer 40k) games of varying quality, but I’m a fan; in my dream world, copyright terms would be relatively short, and after that anyone who wanted to take a shot could. A great diversity of ideas and takes is a good thing, and I much prefer Games Workshop’s approach to, say, Disney’s highly-controlling approach to the Star Wars license.[/ref] Word on the street was that Mechanicus, a tactical combat game in the vein of the modern XCOMs,�  was one of the better attempts, and I can confirm that it’s a real treat. it’s clearly a game built on a budget, and it’s not the next coming of tactical strategy, but it’s also far more than a reskin.

At first glance, it is very XCOMy: there’s a overarching campaign on a strategic map, that gives you more potential missions than you have time for. There are skill trees (though this is a classless system and characters can mix and match to their mechanical heart’s content), there’s turn-based combat with cover components, enemies that take their turn when revealed, etc.

But rather than just wearing the Grim Darkness of the Far Future as an aesthetic skin, Mechanicus uses it to inform every aspect of its design; this is a game positively dripping with flavor, to the point that I (someone with no nostalgia, or particular fondness for, Warhammer 40k) became genuinely invested in each decision point.

This is embodied in how each mission giver representes a competing ideology within the Mechanicus. One argues that all Xeno technology must be captured and understood in order to better fight the enemy; another declares this blasphemy, and has a dogmatic quote to justify every argument. One just cares about keeping the soldiers alive and not unnecessary wasting their lives in pursuit of abstract ideologies. The missions themselves riff on these ideas further. There's a stron “game book” vibe to the dungeon crawling, with most rooms having an illustrated scenario and a multiple-choice decision tree. It’s easy to choose wrong, but the result always feels flavorful and plausible, and helps convey the danger of the Necron tombs you explore.

Another differnece with XCOM is that your “hero” characters are only part of your team; you can also bring an increasing number of ordinary soldiers with you on missions, from basic Servitors to more advanced Rangers. Relative to your main units, these guys are squishy and disposable, but they can easily make the difference between victory and defeat. Their presence - and how you're encourage to use them - underscores just how expendable the tech-priests view everyone else.

If there’s one place where Mechanicus falters, it’s the actual mission design; the combat scenarios are largely repetitive, and outside of some set-pieces you’ll mostly fight in samey arenas against only a single race of enemies (Necrons), and towards the end of the campaign I was definitely ready to pack it in. But the developer seems to realize this, and it's an unusually short game for the genre (I clocked in about 18 hours) and for almost all of the runtime the enemy variety is satisfying, with the campaign introducing new foes at a regular clip. Combined with solid AI, a wide variety of abilities, a novel mana system, and an unusual emphasis on intelligence-gathering, Mechanicus has plenty to distinguish itself, and is sure to satisfy anyone looking for a solid tactical strategy game, doubly so if they want to soak in some grimdark sci-fi.

Tentative recommendation.

There’s a consistent gap between how much I respect Dave Gilbert's and how much I actually enjoy his output; I was hoping Unavowed would close it (in the way that� The Shivah and Blackwell Unbound did), but it doesn’t, despite its admirable ambitions to be more than “just” a point-and-click adventure with lovely pixel art.

Writing this a year after I finished it, my memory is already so hazy that I can’t offer a detailed review or critique; the fact is that Wadjet Eyes’ stories and characters are consistently tropey, and while they’re elevated by competent writing and voice acting, I always find them a little dull; there is a flatness to them, a sense that the character could be reduced to an index card of their Likes and Dislikes and Strengths and Flaws. They have intelligence, but no insight; wit, but no spark.

This matters more in Unavowed than most, because it’s shtick is having Bioware-style companions, complete with regular dialog check-ins and personal sidequests. For each mission you can choose two of the four to take with you, and the narrative—and potential puzzle solutions—change as a result of who you take. This is remarkably well implemented, and I never felt unduly restricted by who I took, while the game simultaneously convinced me that it wasn’t faking its reactivity (though I haven’t done a replay to confirm this).

The plot is by-the-numbers urban fantasy; it displays a deep love for and familiarity with New York City, like all of Dave Gilbert’s games, but is otherwise not particularly notable, and I struggle to recall specifics, other than that it hews very closely to the plot of a specific Bioware game.

Part of the problem is that I’m not a big Bioware fan, and this game emulates Bioware’s ticks (the chosen protagonist with a dark past, the fat middle with locations you can visit in any order, the protagonist serving as a therapist for all of their traveling companions) without really trying to improve on them or twist them. It's content enough to do the work to shift them into a point-and-click framework, and this is probably an improvement (Dragon Age: Origins is probably the only Bioware game with particularly good combat).

All that said: the puzzle design is fantastic, I never got stuck but still felt like I had at at least to think things through a little bit. Gilbert knows what he is doing here, and it’s readily apparently that the game was thoroughly playtested.

If you like post-Baldur’s Gate Bioware games, or if you loved Gilbert’s previous output, then I highly recommend Unavowed. But if, like me, you have issues with either, Unavowed isn’t going to change your mind, and in some ways is less interesting than either of its major influences.

One of the odder aspects of indie games going (semi) mainstream and being sold alongside AAA games has been the increased marketing of “indie” as a brand, a shared aesthetic and idea. By and large, it’s not, and insofar as there’s a shared indie sensibility, it’s only shared by more conservative indies, which use the language and structure of traditional, publisher-made video games by iterating on established genres.

But there’s a bigger, weirder sphere of games that largely exists outside of commercial games, on Itch, or Gamejolt, or even more obscure places on the internet. 99.99% of these games will only be played by a small insider audience, and maybe a few kids exploring what’s available for free, but every once in a while one escapes. Umurangi Generation is such a game; it’s absolutely inspired by known commercial titles, most notably Jet Set Radio [7] (with whom it shares an audiovisual aesthetic and an appreciation of graffiti culture) and Pokemon Snap (because it’s a photography game and, for some bizarre reason, Pokemon Snap remains the only traditionally published photography game, at least until 2020’s Bugsnax).

But while Jet Set Radio borrowed the iconography of punk, Umurangi Generation straight-up *is* punk, albeit a 21st century sort that embraces rather than rejects national identities.

What is Umurangi Generation about? If I’m being honest, I’m not entirely sure; there’s no dialog, just artful dioramas you explore and photograph. In this case, they’re of future New Zealand, occupied by UN forces as NGE-style mechs battle alien kaiju. It’s an image-and-tone driven piece, and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a great visual thinker, and surely missed a lot. There’s an atmosphere of antipathy and frustration (towards globalism and foreign governments, towards a world seemingly on an irreversible course towards destruction) but also quiet resignation, and an appreciate of the beauty of life’s small joys: making art, hanging with friends.

It’s telling that I’ve taken this long to write about the actual gameplay; the photography is actually quite good, easy to use and slowly giving you more filters and lenses to keep things interesting and give you reason to return to previous levels. But for me, it was a means to end, a lens (no pun intended) to explore this strange world. There’s many bonus objectives, and to “max out” a level you have to race against time to accomplish everything in a certain window. If you try to achive this, it will greatly extend the game’s playtime, forcing you to memorize every nook and cranny, the fastest pathways through, the quickest-to-reach angles necessary for certain photographs. It’s a particuarly novel speedrunning game, and I admire it, while simultaneously having absolutely no desire to race the clock. I find timers anxiety-inducing, and thus stay far away from speedrunning.

Did I enjoy Umurangi Generation? Yes, but I probably appreciated it more than I enjoyed it, in part because it felt like a game intended for someone else: someone younger and more in tune with its ideas about the world, who found empowerment rather than disillusion in its politics, and who took a lot more pleasure from getting the perfect photograph, even if there was nobody else around to appreciate it.

Trine is an always competent, occasionally brilliant puzzle platformer that’s elevated by being explicitly designed for three-player co-op. It is simultaneously tightly designed and a sandbox for goofiness, mostly due to the Wizard.

Let me back up: in Trine, each player controls one of three characters. The knight is straightforward, hacking, slashing, and using his shield to block and redirect missiles. The thief has a higher skill ceiling, using a grappling hook to swing and climb and archery to hit distant targets, but is still what you’d expect. But does the Wizard throw fireballs, shoot lightning, or summon monsters? No. He’s able to materialize crates and planks, and drag objects around with the mouse, and that’s it. While the Knight plays Golden Axe and the Thief plays Prince of Persia, the Wizard is playing some weird point-and-click game, full of enemies that he is unable to directly attack or defend against.

I played the wizard, and had a particularly absurd Trine experience; I was the only player in my party particularly good at platforming or combat games, playing the one character who didn’t have any inherent mobility or combat skills. The result: I was frequently forced to kill skeletons, spiders, and other monsters by awkwardly materializing crates on top of their heads or using planks to lightly shove them off ledges. I’m not going to tell you it was elegant, tight game design, but it was novel as heck and constantly comic.

The game’s finale is a desperate, time-limited climb up a tower teeming with traps and infinitely spawning monsters. My teammates quickly died, and I had to make it through the entire gauntlet with a single hitpoint, simultaneously platforming, creating objects, making bridges, and desperately blocking attacks from creatures with the awkward mouse-and-keyboard controls. I somehow managed to do it, and I have rarely felt so proud of my accomplishments. Wish I had a video.

Terraria is widely considered the first “post-Minecraft” game, releasing six months before the already-popular Minecraft had exited beta. And it does a wonderful job of fitting Minecraft‘s block-based exploration, mining, and crafting into a 2D sidescroller with combat and exploration similar to Spelunky. If that change in perspective, and an increased focus on combat, makes Terraria a ‘narrower’ game than Minecraft, it’s still excellent on its own terms, particularly in co-op.

In retrospect, Terraria was also one of the first of a new breed of commercial single-player games: ones that sold in such absurd quantities that the developer was able to deliver free updates for years following. Terraria takes the cake here; it’s had ten years of free updates and expansions, and the game is now bursting with content.

Terraria has satisfying progression, and the core loop of mining, crafting, and creatively decorating bases is compelling for quite a long time. It has more discrete bottlenecks than Minecraft; a lot of objects, items, and missions are locked behind NPCs you have to attract to your base or find & rescue, but there’s no way to know how to do that without consulting a wiki. And while (unlike early Minecraft) it’s possible to get direction on crafting recipes within the game, you can only do so by talking to a specific NPC in one location in the world, which is inconvenient enough that you’ll probably end up hitting a wiki anyway. I’ve never been a huge fan of relying on outside-the-game resources for guidance, but it’s at least not too egregious here. I spent most of my time natively discovering things, and only really hit the wikis once I started running out of obvious things to do.

To its credit, Terraria isn’t just procedurally endless; the world is a finite size, and there’s a final boss that completes an initial run of the game. This subsequently unlocks a New Game+, which unlocks various additional content sure to satisfy those who crave difficult combat and further progression, but for me it was too little content spaced too far apart to justify another runthrough. But this isn’t a complaint; if Terraria just straight-up ended at the final boss, I would have been perfectly happy with the time I spent with it. It’s a beautiful, accessible game with a lovely chiptune soundtrack and a lot of fun things to discover (goofy mounts not least among them) that wholly deserves its success.

While the title suggests a roguelike brawler, Streets of Rogue is in fact a full-on, procedurally-generated immersive sim. This isn’t readilly apparent; almost all immersive sims are first-person, while Streets of Rogue uses a top-down camera, with a pixel art style channeling River City Ransom. In some ways, it’s much closer to the early roguelikes (e.g. Nethack) than modern ones; those games were more about exploring and managing chaos than platforming or tightly-designed combat.

The game’s chief inspiration is made clear during its comedic tutorial, which contains an exact replication of an infamous Deus Ex scene. But rather than customizing a single protagonist, you select a different character at the start of each run. Your mission: proceed from the city slums all the way to it’s highest echelons, and take down the corrupt mayor.

You can play as a soldier, a hacker, a doctor, or any number of other starting characters, each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and special abilities. As you progress, you’ll unlock more, most of them pretty ridiculous; my personal favorites were the Gorilla (can’t talk, hunted by scientists, incredible melee strength) and the Doppelganger (can possess any character and gain their powers/status, but is weak and attacked on sight in its native form).

Each level gives you procedurally-generated missions (selected from a relatively small pool—destroy a generator, steal an item, rescue a specific NPC) and then throws you into a sizeable city level full of NPCs, stores, residences, bars, etc.

The missions themselves are straightforward, and honestly the least interesting part of the game. The combat is functional but simple, and not going to win any awards. But as a story generator, Streets of Rogue is fantastic. Each run will see you employ different skills, encounter different random events (a zombie outbreak! a meteor shower!), and learn a few more tricks to make it through a level without dying.

As with the Hitman games, stealth and subterfuge are the more satisfying paths, even though it’s technically possible to shoot you way through everything. I understand that a run soaked in blood leads to a worse ending, but I can’t speak to this, as I’ve never actually won a game (though I’ve come very close!)

The game is at its most delightful in co-op, where you can team up with up to three other players; this gives you not only a wider range of abilities to work with, it also makes the game somewhat more forgiving, as players can revive eachother as long as they have sufficient cash and one is left alive to do the reviving.

I usually burn out quickly on roguelikes—I’m not one for repeating content—but the sheer variety, and the cheerful chaos, of a Streets of Rogue run will keep it installed.

I could cheekily call this the greatest dodgeball game ever made, but that would be selling Stikbold short; it’s not just a fun arcadey, sports-inspired title, it’s also wholly distinct, different from both traditional sports games and the co-op action games that seem to be its chief inspiration.

In short, Stikbold casts you as two lazy Swedish dodgeball players, whose core skills are atrophying through a lack of practice. Shortly after the tutorial, their rivals get captured, and being Honorable Sorts, they ignore their coach’s advice to leave well enough alone and race after them. An escalating series of increasingly absurd dodgeball battles (with everything from a hippie van to a madman on an oil rig) follow, recalling nothing so much as the PS1 cult classic Incredible Crisis. But rather than a series of minigames, there’s a simple-but-elegant set of dodgeball mechanics; you not only aim and throw the balls but can dodge, intercept, and pass between teammates, as well as straight-up stealing the ball from your opponents.

This is very much in the spirit of stage-based arcade games; think of it as Streets of Rage, but with dodgeball instead of brawling. As a co-op game, it’s a delight, but the AI is remarkably competent for those who want to try it solo.

If I have one criticism, it’s that the later stages can be a bit too difficult for what’s at core a pretty casual game, and as such I still haven’t completed it, but it’s happening in 2022 for sure.