Recent reviews by Jarscar

Grand Theft Auto V is not only a preposterously enjoyable video game, but also an intelligent and sharp-tongued satire of contemporary America. It represents a refinement of everything that GTA IV brought to the table five years ago. It’s technically more accomplished in every conceivable way, but it’s also tremendously ambitious in its own right. No other world in video games comes close to this in size or scope, and there is sharp intelligence behind its sense of humour and gift for mayhem. It tells a compelling, unpredictable, and provocative story without ever letting it get in the way of your own self-directed adventures through San Andreas.

It's no coincidence that Super Meat Boy shares its initials with Super Mario Bros. This is a pure platformer that boils gameplay down to nothing but running and jumping. Meat Boy's goal is always the same: he must reach Bandage Girl, who is ever in another castle. Doing so is never an easy task thanks to the numerous dastardly traps in the way. One prick from a buzzsaw, spike, or monster's jaws will splatter Meat Boy's bloody pixels (which remain as a grisly reminder of your failure during your next attempt). Even though you only have two maneuvers at your disposal, the developers never run out of clever ways of obstructing your path.

In a game like this where you need to be able to make precision jumps and turns, the controls have to feel just right. The developers understand this and, just like Super Mario Bros., it feels good to control Super Meat Boy. He has a nice weight to him and a beginner player will get the hang of it almost immediately even on advanced stages.

Super Meat Boy is an extremely difficult game. Make the slightest mistake and you'll have to restart the stage over from the beginning -- there are no checkpoints. You might die a hundred times before you are finally reunited with Bandage Girl and the game gleefully keeps track of every death in the Statistics menu. It's such a tense experience my hands hurt after a while and I couldn't get a good grip on the controller any longer because of the sweat. But you have unlimited tries and most stages take less than a minute to complete once you know what you're doing. When you are triumphant you are rewarded with a replay of all your attempts running at once -- dozens of Meat Boys flying across the stage and being eviscerated by traps.

Super Meat Boy is one of the best modern platformers. It's infuriating, exasperating, and arduous, but it's also delightful, thrilling, and hilarious. The NES games of yore were simultaneously simpler and more challenging than today's games, a quality perfectly emulated here. Invite some friends over and pass the controller around -- you're gonna need all the help you can get.

For a game built upon the concept of slipping by unnoticed, Hitman: Absolution is certainly doing the opposite. It’s standing conspicuously amongst today’s fad-driven modern shooters and me-too multiplayer hopefuls, middle fingers extended. A slow-paced, single-player focused sneak ’em up, Absolution looms in stark opposition to many of the most pervading trends in gaming today. It cares not for the overly delicate, their minds rendered dull and flabby after years of being prodded through corridors blasting anything that breathes. Absolution delights in letting players skulk through it expending few bullets at all. It’s a game that wants to let you think for yourself.

A game that wants to remind you that trial and error done right equals satisfaction, not frustration.

Above everything, Absolution is a game that wants you to experiment with it. It refuses to be rushed through, rewarding brains over brawn. It wants you to spend time inside it, methodically picking your way around and discovering morbid new ways to snuff out your unfortunate marks. Like Blood Money before it, your targets here can be executed in a host of ever-so-slightly sickeningly different ways. Returning Hitman fans won’t settle for a simple bullet to the back of the head; they’ll immediately be on the lookout for the tell-tale signs of a classic Hitman kill opportunity. Some of them are more subtle than others but, like Blood Money, they’re all there, waiting to be discovered. A couple of the game’s kills are more tightly choreographed for dramatic effect, complete with a brief cutscene of your deserved victim sucking in their last breaths, but most of the game’s kills – two dozen of them at least – are traditional Hitman fare. How you take them out is in your hands. This is a slow-paced, measured experience. This is not Medal of Duty: Modern Warfighter Ops. Impatient action junkies need not apply.

Like Dishonored before it, it’s a true pleasure to play a game that lets you tackle it from multiple angles. After several years of increasingly totalitarian games where you’re very much following a pre-determined path, it’s nice to have a game that doesn’t just encourage improvisation; it requires it.

A video game's first responsibility -- arguably its only responsibility -- is to show the player a good time. To say that Saints Row: The Third is a good time would be a severe understatement. Running naked around the fictional city of Steelport wiping out rival gangs with mind-controlling octopi delivered some of the most fun I've had this year. There may be a tendency to dismiss Saints Row as a Grand Theft Auto clone (it isn't) or as juvenile antics (it is) but when you just want to indulge in some mindless violence and sexual depravity, this will more than suffice.

Saints Row the Third takes you out of Stilwater, the setting for the first two games, and drops you into the new city of Steelport. Three local gangs are well-entrenched, but the Third Street Saints aren't going to settle for fourth place. Your job throughout Saints Row the Third is to take over this new city and crush the competition.

After an intro mission sets up your exit from Stilwater you'll get the chance to customize your character. Customization plays a big part in the entire game, from your body to your dress to your vehicles. I love that, at a glance, no two players' games will look alike -- one will star a voluptuous vixen in a cocktail dress while the next may feature a blue sumo wrestler with cat eyes that speaks in zombie gibberish.

While definitely not up to the standards of recent games like Uncharted 3 or Rage, Saints Row 3's visuals go easy enough on the eyes. I love the neon-lit towering skyscrapers of Steelport, but down in the streets things can seem quiet and lifeless. This is an open world but I wouldn't say it's a living world. Mayhem activities ask you to destroy as much as you can before time runs out, but you may be at a loss for stuff to blow up. As you tear around town the traffic magically appears in front of your car. Granted, I only noticed that pop-up while driving.

Saints Row: The Third allows you to play the entire campaign cooperatively online or via system link. Inviting a friend or joining a game couldn't be simpler, but playing cooperatively yields mixed results. While the nature of two players running around with rocket launchers and tanks can create comical chaos, not all of these missions seem designed for cooperative play -- visiting players may sometimes feel like a third wheel. But, happily, all progress carries over to your single-player game.

News flash: people find sex and violence entertaining. Saints Row: The Third gives the people what they want and drops us into an open world adult theme park where we can treat ourselves to delightful acts of bloodshed and perversion. It doesn't take itself too seriously and only asks that you don't, either.

Whether or not Left 4 Dead 2 is for you really depends on your level of exposure and affinity for the style of hardcore team-focused gameplay Valve is offering here. If you're still interested in the gameplay, then you're going to enjoy every aspect of the sequel since it's improved in all areas, from available game modes to strength of character and personality to replayability and its visual style. After playing, you'll find it impossible to go back to the first game. Though plenty of other games offer co-operative gameplay against mobs of computer-controlled foes, no other game emphasizes teamwork as strongly as this, and few other games are as satisfying when you're able to pull through successfully, particularly when competing in Versus mode against four human-controlled boss zombies. If you saw the original and were always curious to try it out, then by all means get the sequel. It is, without a doubt, the better game. Yet despite all the advancements and additions, it's still very familiar, and something meant to appeal to those who are already sold on the concept. If you're someone who never cared for the game, Left 4 Dead 2 isn't going to change your mind. Even so, it remains one of the most distinctive co-operative titles out there, and allows for some of the most nerve-searing team-based multiplayer gaming on the market.

BeamNG.drive is a soft-body physics simulation game developed by the BeamNG company and first released in 2013. As someone who’s a fan of simulation games, particularly physics simulations, I got my hands on BeamNG.drive as soon as I heard about it. Upon playing the game, I was immediately impressed with the accuracy and detail of the crashes as the game boasts a real-time, soft-body dynamic physics structure using algorithms for physics calculations in real-time. The result is stunning car crashes upon interactions with various objects and other landscape obstacles.

One of the first things that I want to point out with BeamNG.drive is that, as of writing, this game is still considered “early access” which means it is still technically in development. As of right now, there are two modes available – Freeroam and Scenarios. For the most part, most people find themselves playing in freeroam as this is where you have the freedom to customize and experiment with the game, its maps and vehicles.

One of the most impressive aspects of this game aside from the realistic real-time physics and crashes is the graphical elements and beauty of the maps and vehicle designs. It’s apparent that great care and detail has gone into the design of all included vehicles and maps. Every element of the maps can interact with the vehicles allowing you to take your vehicle anywhere on the map and crash it. Even as parts fly and vehicles tumble, you’ll be impressed with the way they interact with objects on the map, oftentimes pleasantly unexpectedly.

For those of you like me who enjoy a good physics sandbox game and realistic car crashes, BeamNG is the game for you! The beauty and level of detail put into this game combined with the incredible real-time physics engine will leave you impressed and with hours and hours of entertainment. Look for this game to continue to evolve as it has been over the past few years with the developer providing full support and many updates. It is well worth the $20 for Early Access and can be purchased direct from the developer or through Steam.

Vulgarity doesn't make Postal a particularly bad game. Postal makes Postal a bad game. Flawed from the start, being crude for the sake of being crude makes it lame, but playing it makes it a pain.

Paradise is bland. Vaunted interaction is, in reality, largely limited to shoot or don't shoot situations. Missions are tedious for they involve far too much the way of wandering and far too little the way of excitement. Nicely, it is possible to approach some situations without sitting on your hands or whipping out the pistol, but they too are broken. Inevitably, dying or being arrested is pretty much what the game is all about. While you're playing Postal you're either shooting people at random or just walking around like a tool.

Look! The bathroom has turds on the floor! Oh God, this is the greatest horrible game ever.

I was stacking books on a shelf in my house in Whiterun, one of Skyrim's major cities, when I noticed a weapon rack right beside it. I set a sacrificial dagger in one slot, an Orcish mace in the other. They were on display for nobody but me and my computer-controlled housecarl, Lydia, who sat at a table patiently waiting for me to ask her to go questing. The chest upstairs was reserved for excess weapons and armor, the bedside table for smithing ingots and ores, the one next to the Alchemy table for ingredients. I'd meticulously organized my owned virtual property not because I had to, but because tending to the minutia of domestic life is a comforting break from dealing with screaming frost trolls, dragons, a civil war, and job assignments that never seem to go as planned. It's even a sensible thing to do; a seemingly natural component of every day existence in Skyrim, one of the most fully-realized, easily enjoyable, and utterly engrossing role-playing games ever made.

It's difficult to ever feel completely satisfied with a play session of Skyrim. There's always one more pressing quest, one more unexplored tract of land, one more skill to increase, one more butterfly to catch. It's a mesmerizing game that draws you into an finely crafted fictional space packed with content that consistently surprises. The changes made since Oblivion are many, and result in a more focused and sensible style of play, where the effects of every decision are easily seen. Featuring the same kind of thrilling freedom of choice The Elder Scrolls series is known for along with beautiful visuals and a stirring soundtrack, playing Skyrim is a rare kind of intensely personal, deeply rewarding experience, and one of the best role-playing games yet produced.

Since its original release, Team Fortress 2 has benefited from numerous updates and made the jump to a free-to-play business model. So how well is Team Fortress 2 faring in 2018 among the current crop of competitors for your time?

The short answer is, it's holding up very well. The core action pits two teams of players against each other in a battle to capture points, move a cart, or steal a briefcase. The objective is always very straightforward; it's the interplay between the nine playable classes that makes things so varied and interesting. The speedy scout, the militant heavy, the diligent engineer, the conniving medic, the pesky sniper, the sneaky spy, the feisty pyro, the explosive soldier, and the even-more-explosive demoman all have unique weapons, attributes, and abilities that complement each other and clash in myriad ways. Encounters can vary widely depending on the match type and the makeup of each team, and this unpredictability is crucial to TF2's long-standing appeal.

Staying relevant even a year after release is rare for a competitive shooter, and yet, here's Team Fortress 2, still lively after ten years in the business. At times it feels like the same game you could have played back then, and at other times it feels like no one will ever quite nail class-based shooter competition the way TF2 does. The experience has evolved over the years without compromising what made it so great in the first place, so though your free-to-play options may have increased considerably in the past few years, there are few that do it as well as Team Fortress 2.

Global Offensive is definitely a Counter-Strike sequel -- it looks and feels familiar, with minor tweaks here and there to help balance old issues and surprise longtime players. This is a demanding, skill-based multiplayer game that's as satisfying now as it ever was, but it's for a specific kind of player. If you're not willing to learn to play different than you're used to, look elsewhere. Otherwise, this is a top-tier tactics game that will probably share the long-tailed legacy of its predecessors.