Recent reviews by ANeM

A Picross game in all but name. Logiart Grimoire is made by Jupiter, the same studio that makes Picross for Nintendo and probably would be called Picross if it wasn't Nintendo's trademark. They make some of the best Nonogram/Picross titles around and LG is no exception.

Their experience with consoles means the controls work well enough on the Steam Deck or with a controller, but mouse/touchscreen is still going to be faster.

While shorter than most Yakuza / Like a Dragon titles and smaller, taking place almost entirely in Sotenbori, Gaiden still holds up. It's more Kiryu, it's more of the tried and tested Dragon Engine combat. While it doesn't do a whole lot to move the plot forward, mostly just expanding on points from Yakuza: Like a Dragon, it's a nice little adventure.

A Short Hike is what you'd get if you made BOTW-style exploration game set in the Animal Crossing universe. At it's core it is exactly what it says on the box; a short hike. It's a couple hours long, filled with beautiful, lo-fi scenery and a lot of little secrets to find and explore. Throw in a cast of charming characters sprinkled across the mountain and you have a perfect game to just chill out and relax with.

Sunset Overdrive on PC was the best Insomniac release of 2018. Spiderman was great, as a Spiderman game, but Sunset Overdrive is the true hidden gem. It doesn't need the qualifier as "a great spiderman game" it's just "a great game." It's just such an unbelievable joy to play. By the time I had 100% Spiderman much of the luster had worn off. Swinging circles around a Manhattan neighborhood just waiting for a crime to happen to check off that last box was tiring. The world outside of those random events was effectively lifeless. I had fun with the game but it wore thin.

That is not the case for Sunset Overdrive, which I've admittedly not gotten 100% completion on yet, but for good reason. I keep getting distracted by other ♥♥♥♥. I'll start playing with the intent of checking stuff off the list, and then get engrossed in the moment to moment gameplay that nothing else really matters. Whether you're swinging from poles, grinding, bouncing or wall running; it's just fun to move through the city. More importantly, movement is integrated directly into combat, if you're not moving you're dying. I can, and have spent hours just messing around in SO without a thought given to my objectives. I've not felt that desire that comes near the end of every open world game where I feel like I'm so close to finishing all the checklists I might as well just push through. It's just a good game to sit down with and play, and it doesn't need to be anything else.

Stealth is a genre I've always loved in concept but mostly hated in execution. The idea of skulking through an area completely undetected is often a lot more engaging than the tedious waiting for guard patrols. My favorite Splinter Cell is Conviction, if that says anything about my tastes. Games like Conviction or Dishonored get around this by essentially making the protagonist a superhero, but Hitman is a bit different.

Agent 47 is for most parts an average person. He can sense people through walls with his "instinct mode" and has some pretty amazing aim when it comes to throwing cans of expired pasta sauce, but beyond that he is a pretty average human being. He doesn't crawl through ventilation shafts like Sam Fisher or Snake, he can't teleport like Corvo or his outsider-infused ilk. He mostly just walks around and wears clothes.

Yet this relative averageness is a strength, not a weakness. Combined with the inclusion of opportunities and instinct 47s "normal human" abilities makes Hitman far more accessible and ways less daunting than other stealth games. The "hidden path" to places generally doesn't require memorizing guard patrols or knowing to split jump up a narrow corridor to find that one ventilation shaft you can crawl through. Instead it requires careful consideration of your surroundings and the NPCs that inhabit them. Finding a way to get someone away from their post long enough to steal their outfit and then simply walking through the previously impassible areas. You can of course always turn off instinct and opportunities, do a Suit only run or a run in Professional mode if you enjoy memorizing patrol patterns and sneaking past absolutely everyone rather than hiding in plain sight, but the game doesn't look down on you for using opportunities.

The episodic nature may have worked against the game, and the elusive targets leave something to be desired, but at the end of the day Hitman is a deeply engaging systems driven stealth game that has somehow managed to make me a fan despite a long history of bouncing off these types of games.

Mafia III is the most uninspired pile of garbage I've played in a long time. Somehow 2K has managed to top Ubisoft at making an archetypical Ubigame. Feeling like a mix of all the worst parts of the first entires in Watch_Dogs and Assassin's Creed series, Mafia 3 is a monotonous, repetitive slog held down by poor writing, poor coding, poor mission design, poor sound design and poor art direction.

Some of these problems are apparent from the very beginning. As soon as you get into the game you'll find something that looks like someone has smeared vasoline across your screen. For some reason the developers have decided to force a terrible implementation of post-processing anti-aliasing on at all times, and even at its lowest setting it feels like it has been cranked up to 11. To make things worse, the highest texture filtering setting is woefully low, further enforcing the blurry feeling. Mafia 3 on average looks the way other games look when I take off my glasses. Then there are the visual problems that will take a bit more time to see. Reflections, lighting and shadows all feel like they were placeholder assets, often freaking out and just making everything look worse in general. Taking down shopkeepers often results in them exploding into a mess of polygons.

In terms of mission design it borrows heavily from the first Assassin's Creed, at least in structure. Tasked with taking out a district boss, you need to go through a variety of paint by number open world activities that all conform to one of maybe 4 templates before you can actually take on.. the bosses lieutennant. Then you get to do it all over again for their other lieutennant. Repetition is the name of the game, and even once you've won over the distriction you have the option to waste even more time on filler, driving out to the middle of nowhere to steal a truck and bring it back to your new rackets, and then repeating this same pointless 10 minute drive multiple times until they've been maxed out. Even the fights against Lieutennants don't feel unique because 90% of the time you'll have to wreck their base once first before they show their faces.

and maybe these long pointless drives the game is so enamored to put you through wouldn't be so bad if driving didn't feel terrible, and if the world didn't feel lifeless and empty. Despite the fact you're waging a gang war, there really are no enemies on the streets outside of the police. A district that you own feels indistinguishable from one you don't. There are traintracks and trolley rails across the city, but there are no trains or trolleys. Of course, the lack of those things make sense when you realize that the NPCs are so dumb that they can't even path around cars you've parked * completely on the sidewalk.* They have trouble getting around vehicles that aren't even on the roads so stopping for trolleys and trains would be a nightmare.

The sound design isn't too bad, but it fails in a few key ways. First of all it makes the fastest car practically unusable once you've fully upgraded it, they decided that a good sound for the supercharger would be the same sound a dentist drill makes as it drives into your teeth. Considering there are only 8 cars you can summon and upgrade this is a bit of a problem. Beyond that there are obvious issues, music playing during scripted sequences that don't actually last long enough for you to finish the task and characters getting cut off in scripted, unskippable conversations, sometimes even being cut off by themselves. Sound is probably the only part of Mafia III that is passable but still manages to fail in some important places.

The characters are largely one dimensional trope machines. The writers try to make them have some big revelation near the end of their arcs but it always falls flat. There are a good number of plot threads just left hanging, especially involving your underbosses lieutennants, for whom you do two jobs and then just get repeatable missions and never actually talk to them again, usually before getting any sort of resolution. The underbosses themselves aren't much better. Though it is nice to see Vito from Mafia 2 return, it would have been nicer if it were in a better game.

Some of the antagonists are so poorly written that it feels as though the writers sometimes completely forgot the entire purpose of the character. For example, one character is introduced as the legitimate business partner for a mob boss. His entire role in the story is that he isn't a criminal, there is no purpose for him if he were a criminal, but.. they decided to use the Racist Talkshow Host as this legitimate business partner, and took him to cartoonish levels of villiany where he is arguably the worst criminal in the entire game, and that is completely independent of the mob.

Mafia III is a trainwreck, and a great example of why you shouldn't offload an established franchise on a freshly minted studio. It is buggy, ugly, performs poorly, has piss poor gameplay: be it stealth, shooting, driving or mission design, and can't even redeem itself with a half decent story.

Shadow Complex is greater than the sum of its parts. The graphics and sound a bit lacking, a result of being an early XBLA title. The voice acting and writing leave a lot to be desired, characters are flat an uninteresting. The few things it does to innovate in the Metroidvania genre fall flat, any additional contol gained by the ability to aim your weapon freely is negated by the added depth of 3D environments making it frustratingly difficult to actually hit what you think you're aiming at.

But none of that matters. Even years later it is still a delight to play. The upgrades feel solid, the combat works, the world is is fun to explore. At ~5 hours to completion it is decently long for a game in its genre, but it never feels like it is dragging its heels just to pad out game time, there is no endgame sequence that forces you to find 20 hidden macguffins to get to the final boss .

That isn't to say there aren't any macguffins of course. There are plenty of macguffins. Plus it isn't afraid to let completionists just be overpowered killing machines. Get all the rocket packs and it'll give you unlimited rockets. Get all the key cards and you become more or less invincible while standing still. It might be nice if the game had a secret ending with an extra challenging bossfight for 100% completion to actually provide a challenge for this excessive power, but as it is the game is still just plain fun.

Shadow Complex is essentially Metal Gear by way of Metroid, and it executes in such a way that isn't perfect, but doesn't feel dishonest to associate it with those other games.

I don't know how a game that is only 2 hours long can manage to so thoroughly overstay its welcome, but Evoland achieves it with such ease that even half way through I could barely stand it anymore. The game jumps often from mechanic to mechanic, each time executing its new mechanics even worse than it did the previous ones.

Starting as a clunky, imprecise Zelda clone it swiftly shifts gears into a dull and grindy Final Fantasy Clone, switching back and fourth between the two for a couple dungeons before introducing the worst possible Diablo clone ever conceived. Finishing off, it moves to a side scrolling action sequence for the last boss. The boss itself is dull and predictable, but due to unresponsive controls, tiny hitboxes, and him having more health than god, the fight with only two phases, each only having a single attack pattern can draw out for 20 minutes.

The game wouldn't even be so bad if it were at least moderately consistant between mechanics, but it basically throws everything away when you move to a new section. The bombs and arrows you get in the zelda sequence can't be used in the Final Fantasy section, so you end up just mashing attack and waiting for everything to die. The potions, healing spells and phoenix downs you get in the Final Fantasy section can't be used in the Zelda, Diablo or Final boss sections, something that even contradicts the "plot" of the game. All the "power" you obtain before the final boss, a power which is supposed to help you defeat him, goes completely unused because none of those abilities are available outside of the Final Fantasy sections.

Evoland is a novel idea executed in the worst possible way.

An awful game that really just deserves to be forgotten. Despite playing as an elite military operative, you are completely unable to reliably hit targets at 10 feet with any weapon. This incredible inaccuracy makes Dark Sector one of the most annoyingly dull games I've ever played, a problem that is only compounded by the fact that the enemies become more bullet-spongier as the game progresses.

The story makes no sense and the promise of turning into a resident evil style bio-weapon Ninja is cut short by the fact that, rather than undergoing a full body mutation as the game makes you believe, the ninja shown in the trailers is just the protagonist in a weird ninja suit. Furthermore, this ninja suit doesn't actually do anything. You can't take more damage, you don't do more damage, you don't move faster, the invisibility skill is obtained on route to pick up the suit..

The only thing it really changes is that you're able to pick up miniguns dropped mech-suit enemies. Considering the reason you go to get the suit in the first place is to defeat another weird ninja suit guy and that fight doesn't involve a minigun the whole thing just feels ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pointless and dumb; which more or less sums up the whole game.

You'd be better off playing Warframe, the spiritual successor to Dark Sector, and is actually half decent if incredibly grindy.