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Player Unkown’s Battlegrounds: Xbox One Edition Review

For a long time Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds never really interested me. From a distance, it’s always felt to me like a game mode rather than a fully fledged game. To some extent that’s still the case, but now that I’ve actually given it a crack I understand the feverish excitement surrounding PUBG. The one on Xbox.

My first game of PUBG was short and great. Having no knowledge of the controls or the intricacies of the gameplay I jumped straight for the Quarry. After a few minutes of looking around I found absolutely nothing but a cool leather trench coat, and soon realised I was on the opposite side of the map to where the safe zone had sprung up. I headed off on my way to safety, only to come across the only other player in the area. And they had a mother fucking handgun.

Fists ready, I jumped into action. Managing to dive and duck around this dude’s shots and landing a few punches, we began a majestic dance. Almost like a mating ritual. Eventually he ran out of rounds and resorted to fists also, and we fought like our primitive ancestors before us.

They knocked me out cold in about 15 seconds but it was pretty great. Looking back at the capture I wasn’t actually that far from the safe zone and had all the time in the world to get there, plus there were a thousand places at the Quarry that I didn’t check. But none of that matters because in PUBG you get to do things how you want, and own the consequences no matter how good or bad they may be.

Anthony Gallegos, a past guest on the Kinda Funny podcast and host of the Rebel FM podcast, called PUBG the antithetical shooter, meaning it’s a shooter that does the exact opposite of all other shooters, which is so accurate. In Call Of Duty there is a strict gameplay loop of running, killing and dying over and over again as fast as possible in a twitchy, muscle memory-based experience. Meanwhile PUBG forces you to think for yourself, asking you how you would personally react in a Battle Royal scenario.

I’ve dabbled in playing with friends but have found I play best, or at least have the most fun, on my own. Excluding the performance issues that come into play around other players, I like being on my own because every win is my own and every loss is my own. I hate the feeling of being a dead weight with other players who are certainly better than me, something I experience in most multiplayer games, but on my own I’m my own dead weight. So if I’m weighing myself down, then there’s no dead weight. Right?

Thinking that way validates my actions in the majority of my games, which in any other shooter would be deemed disgraceful and cheap. I’m a bit of a scaredy cat when it comes to confrontation, so I have taken to staying in the air for as long as possible until the safe zone pops in, landing on the tallest building right in the centre of the safe zone and literally laying prone for 20 minutes with no pickups, praying I don’t get rained on by those big red boy mortar strikez. Inevitably I get red zoned every time and have to abandon my plan of playing dead all round, but boy is it fun up until that point.

It’s kind of liberating to play a game where being a little bitch is a viable tactic. I also regularly pull the “loot a house and close all the doors behind you but hide in a bathtub with your gun trained on the door waiting for someone to come in” manoeuvre, which has landed me nearly all of my kills and a DM from one of my victims applauding my tactics.

I honestly couldn’t tell if it was sarcasm or not. Doesn’t really matter either way, I guess.

But yeah, freedom of choice and shit.

It’s a great feeling, being rewarded by watching that player count slowly dropping for doing what you want. I applaud the brave souls in Pochinki who live for the fight, but my hands are sweaty enough as it is, partner. I’m good in this bath.

This brings me to mine and the generally accepted downside of PUBG for Xbox. The controls are some obscure butt shit, like if you want to aim in 3rd person you hold the left bumper, because holding the left trigger puts you into first person. If I wanted to shoot in first person I would, but hitting right bumper and changing perspectives. That part I like. That’s good for cramming my body in those tight roof spaces so ground people don’t see my sneakers.

The whole inventory is a mess, also. It takes a really long time to cycle through your things, select what you want or drop something or equip or whatever, and working out the four different possible interactions for each item as a new player was downright befuddling. The inventory comes down to wearables, health items, weapons, weapon attachments and ammo. That’s six areas that could be really nicely streamlined into something pretty and functional, like maybe a GTA-style weapon wheel. Who knows? Again, I’m no game designer.

I really don’t want to shit on PUBG. I really like playing it, I can see what it’s doing and I know that with Microsoft’s backing it’s bound to get a whooooole lot better. It’s also still in game preview, so it isn’t really out yet. We’re still in the days of Minecraft beta at high school lunch time making big dicks and blowing them up because it’s hacked and modded to shit. I can excuse its performance issues, the pop-in and various graphical shortcomings, the inventory and gameplay issues in firefights, because it’s constantly being reworked and improved upon. I was lucky to buy the game right after a bunch of huge improvements since its Xbox debut.

So yeah, PUBG’s good and it’s super clear that it’s going to get wildly better. If you have an Xbox One or a computer that can play it I highly advise you jump in, especially since buying it for the lower Game Preview price guarantees you access to the eventual full release.

Go get it.

SCORE

Rank 20/100. Meaning good, because a lower number is better in this situation. Think of it as 80%.

What are your thoughts on Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds? How many chickens have you received? Can I have a chicken? Can you send me a chicken in my DMs? If so, do that. I can’t cook.

You’ll like this if you like:

Rust

Day Z

Second-Life with guns

Murdering strangers

Fearing for your life

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Let’s Talk About Hitman

Hitman is a relatively recent love of mine. I discovered Absolution in 2013 or 2014, sat on the series for a while and exploded into it with full force when that most recent one came out. The one with the episodic levels.

I’ve played that a lot.

Before I really get into this, I get that literally all of my branding includes the words “game reviews” and I also get that I’ve only posted two reviews and one kinda review about GTA, and it’s now been two weeks since that, but you can rest assured I’ll be getting onto that more in the future. A lot of what I’m going to be reviewing won’t be the newest and freshest games, both from where my interests lie and my current financial situation, but I promise more reviews will come. I plan to do some new Nintendo stuff, if anything. Maybe some Xbox stuff if I get a Game Pass subscription.

So, with that said, let’s get back to Hitman.

Since my aforementioned honeymoon period I’ve gone back and played through every major release in the series bar OG Hitman: Codename 47 for the Windows 2000 operating system. So I think I have a good grasp on old bald boy.

About a year ago Mark Brown put a video essay up on his YouTube channel about Hitman 2016 and the art of repetition, focusing on its ability to make the player feel like a total badass through repeated play of each of its finely crafted and intricate levels. I love Hitman for a bunch of reasons; its slick stealth mechanics, its fun and self aware levels and characters and, yeah, the sense of empowerment it lends you.

Mark Brown is 100% correct. Hitman Absolution (2012) took a linear approach to the Hitman formula, focussing on narrative and specific pathways over sandbox action. Mechanically, the game is well made. Hitman 2016 actually borrows a lot of these mechanics, which are a massive contributor to its quality. But the issue comes in — you guessed it — its linearity. The point of Hitman 2016 is that by playing each level over and over, completing challenges and taking different approaches to each contract, you learn the level and the movements of the characters within it. You train your instincts to those of Agent 47 himself, knowing exactly when and how to strike for optimal results. But if the gameplay is linear, forcing you from level to level and through those levels as quickly as possible there’s no time to learn your surroundings. You can go back and replay these levels, but being tied so heavily to a constantly moving narrative removes a lot of the possibility space.

This focus is something IO Interactive have attributed to the critical success and community fondness for Hitman: Blood Money (2006). Like Hitman 2016 it focusses on big sandboxes and little to no instruction. One level that I particularly love is House Of Cards, in which 47 is dropped into a huge Las Vegan casino complete with slot machines, secret back rooms and hotel rooms with funny and useful guests, and plenty of perfect sniping opportunities. 47 even has his own hotel room booking, decked out with smuggled weapons and vantage points, lending the level with a great sense of personalisation and sense of place. Even without killing the targets and completing your mission, you still have a place in this world.

You might be reading this right now and asking, “But Mr. Easy Win Game Reviews, what’s your point? What’s your thesis?” Well, I’m glad you asked.

IO Interactive are at a crucial point. They have a wealth of history and experience experimenting with different styles and forms, and have landed on something pretty special with Hitman 2016. But it’s not perfect. Critically, the game has done incredibly well from when the first episode was released right up until now with its continued support. But the game suffered commercially because of its episodic nature, asking consumers to either pay a premium for a seemingly small piece of content or to put in extra for the whole season in the hopes that what would eventually be released months later would be worth it.

To me, I didn’t mind this. I had enough faith in IO to support them and buy the full season at its initial launch. Contributing to Mark Brown’s points on the game I believe its episodic nature only heightened its strengths by forcing you to go back into the older levels as you wait for the new ones, as well as the incentive to continually jump back in with every substantial update.

I’m kind of scared, however, that this is a dangerous strategy for IO to continue. Especially now that they are fully independent, The community conversation around Hitman 2016 is almost silent, and I constantly see steelbook editions of it in preowned game sections all over the city. For the broader consumer base the episodic release structure obviously didn’t work.

IO have all the ammunition they need to make the perfect Hitman game in terms of gameplay, writing, everything on the actual game side. They’ve learnt a lot from their successes and failures alike. But they need to find an alternative to the episodic structure that retains its strengths with repeated play and heavy duty mental combat training, that is as accessible as a full standard release. But not a full standard release.

I’m not really sure.

The closest thing I can think of is GTA V, releasing a big full game with a consistent stream of hefty added content for the tail end that flips the oridgy-didge game on its head. Or even something like Destiny, where a big game is released and followed by a handful of just as big add-ons. But, again, IO is a small studio now and would have to take out some serious loans to pull of a project of this scope.

Or maybe they can do it.

Who am I? I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Do you like Hitman? What are your thoughts on the series? What are your thoughts on me? What are your thoughts on me as a hitman? What are your thoughts in general? Hit me up here or on Twitter @easywingamereviews or on my Facebook Easy Win Game Reviews. - Feature & illustration brewed in-house -

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SAINT’S ROW – WHERE TO GO?

So, I’ve been playing a lot of Grand Theft Auto lately (namely GTA 3 for my last post) and it’s got me wondering: what’s happening with the Saint’s Row series?

As a die hard GTA fan I have a weird relationship with Saint’s; I inherently see them as mechanically inferior knock-offs of a staple of the medium, but at the same time I appreciate them and enjoy them as a way to tide myself over until the next GTA, which is where they evidently thrive. They’re undoubtedly fun and do a great job at emphasising player agency, creativity and fulfilling power fantasies as opposed to attempting to mirror real life with 1:1 physics and photorealistic graphics.

If you’re not super familiar with the Saint’s Row series, it’s basically the best Grand Theft Auto-like out there, with the major difference being that you get to create your own protagonist. Developed by Volition and published by THQ, the first two games took concepts directly from GTA (largely in a good way) with a focus on cartoony gags and violence; a way for Volition to make the most of their game engine, which has always been decidedly less graphically and mechanically impressive as Rockstar’s in-house engine. From Saint’s Row: The Third the series doubled-down on its whacky aesthetics, meta humour and ridiculous sexual innuendo, adding more layers of fucked with each release.

It’s important to note that the Saint’s Row series has always prospered in the absence of Grand Theft Auto, with each game coming out either just before the release of a brand-spanking-new GTA or in the middle of a GTA drought. Critically, it’s had a great run. From Saint’s 1 in 2006 to 4 in 2013, the series was a consistent critical and commercial hits, likely as a result of the release window of each game. The fifth game in the series, however — Saint’s Row: Gat Out Of Hell (2015) — slumped big time in comparison to its peers, largely for its continued re-use of old assets and mechanics and its disinteresting yet over-the-top narrative.

But that’s it for the Saint’s series so far. Agents Of Mayhem — a futuristic MOBA set in Seoul, South Korea with stringent narrative ties to the Saint’s Row series — released last year to critical meh-ness. But other than that there’s been no word on the Saint’s series itself since 2015. It seems strange to me that a series which has largely been a success would go away for so long without any word on its prospective future. I can safely imagine the Saint’s will make a return at some point in the future, but you would think that as Grand Theft Auto V’s decline has finally begun and GTA 6 is likely to be three to five years away right now would be the perfect time to release another fun stop-gap.

Even with an open-world behemoth like Red Dead Redemption 2 on the way, something in this vein definitely stands a chance at success. Saint’s has its own very unique flavour and dedicated fanbase.

It’s tricky, though. It makes sense to release a new Saint’s Row game, but how would you do it? Saint’s Row IV was fun, but with Gat Out Of Hell not doing so well I would argue that it to be risky to commit once again to far-fetched superhero fantasies. I also think doing this for a third time would paint Saint’s Row into a corner.

I also don’t think they could go completely serious, because that just wouldn’t be Saint’s Row, but to portray realistic street gangs in a silly and cartoonish way might border on being straight-up offensive.

So, where to?

I think the Saint’s have to go international. For three games the series has been stuck in the American city of Steelport, but imagine a fish-out-of-water scenario set in London, Paris or Tokyo. The humour comes from the balls-out swagger of the Third Street Saints, or just you (the Boss) clashing with a straight-laced and wholly different culture. Picture Dead Rising meets Sleeping Dogs, with a dash of Sunset Overdrive.

The elements of the Saint’s series that have never really agreed with me are the side-characters, who are often one-note cartoons with a gimmick and no true personality. In Saint’s 3 there’s a pimp who only talks in auto-tune. Real funny… I say do away with this shit and take a British approach to humour: make your protagonist the butt of the joke instead of the protagonist making everyone else look dumb. In a city like Tokyo you can indulge those sexual elements of Saint’s Row in a more subdued way, while also making a statement on America, its influence over the world and how it is seen by other countries.

Get fucked, Shaundi, you pot-smoking hippie stereotype.

Go away, Pierce, you absolute nothing of a man.

Hit the bricks… whoever else is left.

Japan’s rich cultural identity would make for an insane playground, with crazy shit like Godzilla, Samurai, the Yakuza, anime and the representation of more meta pop cultural phenomena in video games, like Pokemon, Mario and Metal Gear Solid.

“Boss! We’ve got to destroy the ‘Hard Cog’ before it launches its payload all over Downtown Tokyo!”

I would personally play the shit out of a good GTA-like set in Tokyo (since Rockstar have declared their disinterest in using the city as a setting, citing its street layout and infrastructure) with a funny narrative, cool combat and high level of personalisation.

Hell, expand upon the personalisation. Make it a fully formed street crime RPG instead of just a character creator. Game development is that easy, right?

If I stop to think about it though… I guess a lot of this stuff has already kind of been done by the Yakuza series…

Nah, fuck that. Crank it up to 69 and blaze up some sushi rolls, it’s time to get culturally insensitive up in this GTA-clone. I know I started by suggesting that it be set in London or Paris as well, but is just too perfect to pass up!

Either way, I think you understand what I’m getting at. Saint’s Row is a good franchise. A successful franchise. I think it’s high time for another instalment, along with a breath of fresh air for the franchise as a whole.

This series can go anywhere and do anything. I think it’s time they embraced that.

What do you think? Are you a fan of the Saint’s Row franchise? And if so, where do you reckon it should go? Hit me up in the DM’s, or through Twitter or Facebook and let me know where your head’s at.

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STILL GOOD? — GRAND THEFT AUTO III

This is ‘Still Good?’, an editorial series in which I look back at both favourites games of mine and classics that I somehow missed, working out how these titles stack up today and whether or not they’re worth going back to.

tl;dr — has <insert game> aged well?

That said, let’s dig into Grand Theft Auto III.

Originally released in 2001 for the PS2 GTA 3 was hailed by critics and fans as a landmark in video game design. Its core gameplay mechanics — driving, shooting and navigating an open world — had all been seen before, but this marked the first instance of these mechanics being put together in a seamless and (for lack of a better word) good way. Mix this with elements of The Sopranos and the popular gangster movies of the time and you’ve got one spicy meat-a-ball.

Upon its release it received fantastic reviews across the board, sitting on an aggregate score of 97% (Metacritic) for the PS2 version. It was called, "a luscious, sprawling epic,” a, "technological marvel ... that captures the essence of gritty city life in amazing detail,” and "on a scale that's truly epic” (quotes lifted from Wikipedia). From here on out, aided by various other releases of the time, the gaming landscape was irreversibly shifted towards a focus on cinematic storytelling and open-world settings. It’s become difficult to not find traces of GTA 3’s DNA floating around a most modern releases.

It’s also very easy to get ahold of today. A mobile version was released for its 10th anniversary, but if you prefer something more solid it’s also available on the desktop App Store for Mac, Steam and on Xbox 360 through backwards compatibility if you can find a hard copy.

This sure is a celebrated classic, but it really hasn’t aged well.

If you’ve gone ahead and put in the work by reading my About page you’ll know I go hardcore with the GTA series. GTA 3 especially introduced me to mature video games in a way that I’ll never forget, but unlike other classics of the medium like the 2D Mario games it’s really tough to go back. I finished the game in high school on a MacBook using a trackpad, and recently bought it and Vice City on eBay for Xbox (these versions received various graphical improvements over the PS2 version) and have played maybe half of 3 so far since then.

But it’s hard, man. I love GTA but I’m honestly struggling to continue. It’s a weird case because I can look past its dated graphics and the driving is fine, but nearly everything else is just frustrating. My major gripe with playing this game now is that the controls are absolutely shitted. Locking on to enemies is vague, both in the sense that it only sometimes works with certain weapons and that the lock on rectangle is very transparent. Combat lacks any kind of possible finesse and relies upon a lot of dumb luck and blind button mashing, and moving Claude around feels like I’m controlling a marionette puppet.

And the camera…

There’s a strange feature I’ve found both in GTA 3 and Vice City on Xbox, and I’m not exactly sure if it was apparent on PC or PS2 (but I’m probably wrong). The option to rotate the camera around your player, whether you want to focus on enemies or check out the scenery, is gone. Completely. Instead, when you move the right stick, the camera jumps into a first-person perspective from which you can’t actually do anything. No walking, no combat. Its only really purpose is to change what direction you’re looking (duh), which is just slow and painful. Especially in combat because you have to stop, change the camera, and then move or perform some kind of action to go back out to third-person.

Imagine, if you will…

A mission tells you to go into Chinatown.

Easy, you get there.

But uh oh, you’ve been ambushed by gun and baseball bat-wielding Triads!

You pull out your Uzi and pump a clip into one guy at your 12 o’clock, but three more guys on your 6 you have opened fire!

You act fast, and duck into first person mode.

Five seconds later you’ve turned to face your foes, and have lost half of your health in that time. Now, to lock on.

In a daring move, you lock onto Triad #1 on your right, shoot two rounds and wait for another three seconds while you automatically reload (something that can’t be done manually).

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

You got him! Well done! You’ve also got next to no health.

Time to aim at the next pistol-packing Triad.

But uh oh again, you’ve locked onto someone with a baseball bat instead. You can’t switch your target on the fly, silly, and now you have six guys in total all around you shooting and beating you to death.

You’re dead, good luck next time.

As 2K18 gamer bro, this is frustrating as hell. And this happens constantly. A lot of combat scenarios, in my case at least, came down to me trying over and over again and succeeding only by shepherding the AI into a tight pack and using up the five molotov cocktails I’d scrounged to burn them all alive like a pack of zombies.

I was too young to be involved in the original hype of this game, but I imagine there was a big emphasis on strategy and player freedom in the marketing leading up to the game’s release. I get that, and GTA 3 sure is revolutionary on that front, but by today’s standards it just isn’t good. When the game at hand has a focus on combat and action it’s not a good thing when success comes from manipulating the infrastructure of the game itself. I don’t feel like I’m playing it the way it was meant to be played, but I don’t see any other option.

To make my point clearer, take the example of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. There are a lot of points in this game where you’re surrounded by enemies, who mostly all have guns. There’s no cover-based shooting or anything of that sort in San Andreas, but the fluidity and freedom of the movement with the ability to crouch, walk while crouched, jump and vault over obstacles, strafe, free aim and lock onto and attack enemies without having them in your immediate line of sight really make the difference. Just the ability to freely rotate the camera around CJ and switch lock-on targets make combat scenarios infinitely more strategic and playable than GTA 3.

Sure, San Andreas only exists because of 3’s legacy, but in three short years so much of the Grand Theft Auto formula was refined by intuitive but glaringly obvious improvements for San Andreas, making it now so much easier to go back to than 3. I would put San Andreas, a now 14 year old game, in front of any gamer in 2018, tell them to play it and be confident they would have fun and play with a full sense of control.

The other area where GTA 3 really lacks is in its narrative elements.

In the game you play as Claude, a mute blank slate of a man who wasn’t actually given a name until a one-off skippable phone call in San Andreas. At the beginning of the game we find Claude robbing a bank with his girlfriend, Catalina, who betrays him as they make their getaway with the line, "Sorry babe. I'm an ambitious girl, and you're just small time.”

Immediately, there’s confusion. Stylistically, it’s cool for sure. There’s shotguns and convertibles and action, but who is this lady? Why do her ambitions stop her from robbing banks with her lover (something they have been doing together for around nine years)? She must just be psycho or something, because she jumps in a sports car with some other guy, so to her it’s more beneficial to share the money with the getaway driver than with your long-term boyfriend. What’s more, Claude can’t explain any of this because he can’t talk, so these questions linger for the whole game and never get answered.

You can see here by making Claude the blank slate that he is that it’s likely the intention from Rockstar was to let the player use the mute as a vessel through which they could project themselves, personifying the game with their own personal flavour. Only, there are numerous and very definitive displays of Claude’s character throughout the game that the player might not agree with.

Character defining moments for a character who isn’t meant to have character.

For Christ’s sake, it’s implied he shoots a woman point blank at the end of the game because she talks too much.

It’s a weird half measure. It feels like Rockstar were trying to toe the line between an open world RPG packed with player personalisation and a fully scripted cinematic experience like Goodfellas. They’ve learned since, and their campaigns have been largely compelling ever since, but this feels like a big misstep.

Also, a minor issue I have; the cutscenes and cinematic moments of this game look like dog shit. The direction, cinematography and pacing of nearly every cutscene is awful. Claude will walk to someone’s door and knock, only to be answered an instant later by immediate talk as if this other character intuitively knew he was there. The shots will cut out parts of character’s faces, sometimes ending at their forehead or mouth, and as the cutscenes conclude it isn’t uncommon for Claude to start heading for the exit as the mission boss is still mid-sentence, as if he also intuitively knows the conversation is about to end. Even if the mission parameters haven’t been outlined yet. It’s almost as if the residents of Liberty City have been endowed with psychic abilities (but only in 2001 because Liberty City Stories is much more aligned with the rest of the series in this regard [maybe it’s something in the water]).

Coming from later GTA games, this just doesn’t feel like GTA.

The story overall is also just bland. It’s the most generic revenge plot you could imagine, with some out-of-nowhere betrayals such as that of Salvatore Leone — the local Mob boss.

After completing a number of tasks, both extremely dangerous and tedious, the Don congratulates you on your achievements and your loyalty to the Leone family. This feels pretty good, especially since the missions immediately preceding this moment are a hellish cluster fuck full of shoddy AI and stupid mission design. And you know what? He’s right. You have been loyal to him. You’ve done literally everything he’s told you to do and more. As this happens, he asks you to collect a car parked somewhere Downtown. So, like the good little Mafia errand boy you are, you skip down the hill to get it, only to be sent a page from Salvatore’s girlfriend of all people that the car is a trap and that you’re about to be murdered. Surely enough, the car is rigged with explosives, so your only option is to actually betray Salvatore and flee the first island with his girlfriend as you plot your (second) revenge.

It’s simply not good writing. There’s no cause and effect, no setting up of any kind. You are blank man. You work for blank Mafia man. But blank Mafia man turns on you, because he is bad Mafia man after all. You get blank revenge. It’s high school shit.

Just like Catalina. Take that blank man example, but substitute ‘black Mafia man’ with ‘blank girl’. It’s bad writing.

When it comes to games and movies it becomes hard to define what is good, especially in cases where legacy and nostalgia are involved. Super Mario Bros. 3 or World or whatever might be a better game than OG Super Mario Bros., but you might see OG Super Mario Bros. as the better game because it gave birth to what came after it. In my opinion that’s a really weird viewpoint to have, especially since gaming culture is so focussed on iteration and improvement. Some see it as sacrilege to say an old classic just doesn’t play well, but that’s the case because games as a medium inherently get better as we improve the craft and polish the development process.

With this in mind, and everything else I’ve already said, Grand Theft Auto III is not a good game in 2018. It’s not fun and it doesn’t control well. The story is bad and the moment-to-moment writing is no better. From a historical stance, I think it’s definitely worth playing, but if GTA V was your first introduction to the series and you want to explore its past GTA 3 is not the place to start.

STILL GOOD?

Not really, no

Am I completely wrong? Is my subjective opinion too subjective? Did I forget to mention how much San Andreas fleshes out both Salvatore Leone and Catalina and their character arcs in this game? Shoot (pew) me a message up top through the Ask Me Anything link OR hit me up on Twitter @easy_win_games.

Illustration left-to-right: Catalina, Maria, Asuka, Kenji, Donald Love, Toni, Luigi, 8-Ball, Salvatore Leone. Claude in the foreground.

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Cities: Skylines - Xbox One Edition Review

My gaming patterns are weird. Unless there’s something I’m super passionate about, I don’t often go in on big new games. At the moment I have RDR2 on preorder, and I bought Mario Odyssey right when it came out. But apart from these releases, I tend to either rotate my library of favourites or go in on cheaper things I’ve had my eye on for a while. And sometimes I get absolutely fucking hooked.

This is where Cities: Skylines comes in.

Cities: Skylines is a city building simulator, full of everything you might expect (minus a few features lost in the translation from PC to console). When you start up a new game you pick a region to build in (tropical, temperate, winter, etc.), name your city and specify a few gameplay details before being dropped into a completely blank slate. You build roads, lay out building zones, sort out the financial side of things and place specialised service buildings to make your city thrive.

Gameplay-wise this is definitely a full game, and if you go in on the season pass developer Paradox Plaza have already started doling out great content. The most recent release was the addition of snow and the ‘winter’ areas, bringing new elements to planning your cities including heating and road maintenance. It’s very apparent, however, that a lot is missing when compared to the PC version. I haven’t personally played it, but I can see from YouTube clips and trailers that a lot of content, both launch and post-release, is absent. Something that is in the PC version that I would love to have in the Xbox version is the ability to shape terrain and deeper levels of micromanagement. That said, with the promise of semi-regular updates and expansions I’m confident this game will be much bigger in a year or two.

A minor note, but I would love the option to designate swimming areas for beaches. It feels redundant to pick a tropical beach-lined coast to build along and have no one on the sand or in the water. I’m Australian so this is important to me.

The whole thing is extremely mediative and very rewarding. I am not fully aware of how a city should be properly laid out, road-wise, and constantly get stuck with areas of heavy traffic and carpark-level congestion. But when I’m able to quell these situations, in spite of my naivety in urban planning, the wash of pride and relief I experience is remarkable. There’s just something about seeing hundreds of big-rig trucks slip seamlessly from freeway to industrial district to cargo hub and back to freeway that tickles me all over.

Before picking up this gem the only city building sim I’d played was SimCity Creator released way back for the Nintendo Wii, and I was surprised at how much the two games have in common. While Creator is very much a simplified version of SimCity it’s funny seeing how much it shares with what is by all accounts the best city sim out at the moment. All the core elements are there: building roads in various ways and sizes, placing building zones and service buildings and balancing your city’s books. This isn’t super relevant, but since it’s my only real experience with this type of game other than Cities: Skylines I thought it might be important, just so you know where I’m coming from.

This game is the perfect passive game (see two paragraphs ago). A lot of the games I play (Hitman, Zelda BotW, Red Dead) are games with a lot of down time, or free time if that’s more applicable. Games in which you can do a lot and have a full experience, but not have to pause your podcast every five minutes to take in some exposition. I had been checking out Cities for months before getting it, watching the price go down (because I’m stingy) because I knew it would be ideal for me for this exact reason.

I feel like I’m repeating myself at this point, but I guess the core of what I’m saying is:

If you like your games to be relaxing yet challenging and to not completely consume your life, and you get off on trucks, then Cities: Skylines for Xbox or PS4, or probably even PC, is THE game for you.

SCORE

A debt of only $0.99 — lots of room for improvement.

Have I forgotten anything? Did I neglect the need to connect the residential districts to the power grid? Is there a storm drain pumping raw sewerage all over the elementary school? Leave me a note or give me a beep and let me know your thoughts.

You’ll like this if you liked:

The SimCity franchise

The Sims

Rollercoaster Tycoon

Any kind of management/building sim

- Review & illustration brewed in-house -

[easy-win-games-blog]

SUPER MARIO ODYSSEY REVIEW

I’ve always liked Mario. Like a lot of people I grew up with him and associate him with a special part of my childhood. Super Mario Odyssey took me back to that time with its charming visual style and creativity in the characters that occupy its many worlds.

Spoilers

From the second Odyssey starts the game establishes its core theme as momentum. The story picks up in the midst of yet another battle between Mario and Bowser with a fun fight sequence (the cinematography and exaggerated style of which reminded me of moments from Metal Gear) throwing you overalls first into this world.

From here, depending on how you play, the pace is tight throughout with only a few minor snags. Overall, however, it’s clear that this tight pacing was a focus for Nintendo in a similar way to how freedom was central to The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild.

The worlds themselves have been criticised for largely sticking with the tried and true Mario format: Desert World, Ice World, Beach World, Water World and fiery Bowser World. I do agree with this to some extent - I would have preferred more variation - however I also believe some of the twists made on these mainstays and the welcome additions of the Cascade and Metro Kingdoms keep the overall game feeling fresh.

My personal favourite world, the Sand Kingdom, is a huge, sprawling desert populated by Day of the Dead-inspired skeleton people and a fun and very Mario remix of Egyptian aesthetics. Without going in with a ruler, I would guess this world to be the largest in Odyssey and maybe the most spacious world in any Mario game to date.

I sincerely hope the Jaxi makes an appearance in the next Mario Kart.

As a kid I played Super Mario Bros 3 on my Gameboy Advance for years, only making it as far as World 3. Even now I have never finished it. Classic Mario can get seriously hard. Even parts of Super Mario Galaxy kicked my ass before I saw the final credits. But for whatever reason the toughest part of Odyssey comes in collecting bonus Moons - the currency for progression through the game’s story and on to 100%. The levels themselves are fairly straightforward and the punishment for failure is a measly 10 coins, which can be recouped in a matter of seconds. I didn’t mind all that much that the fail state of Odyssey was lax - at no point was I screaming at my Switch to punish me harder - but I did find it lost that edge of Mario games past. There was no sense risk or danger, especially with the liberally placed fast travel points. If you fall from the top of the highest building in New Donk City, you can just throw your hat into the sky and teleport straight back. No fall damage, no loss of progress.

This is nitpicky as hell, and I understand that Nintendo and the Mario franchise generally put family level accessibility first, but it feels strange going from something as demanding as Breath Of The Wild last year to something that could probably be finished in a few hours with minimal deaths. Maybe none if you had played it through once before.

On this point, there were moments in the game where it did feel like I had played it before. At first introduction, Bowser’s malevolent Wedding Planner rabbits feel like a fun addition to the Mario family, acting as a substitute for Bowser’s Koopalings. They quickly fall flat, however, as each of the five rabbits returns over the course of the game. With painfully obvious weaknesses and, in certain cases, attack cycles taken directly from the Koopalings, I honestly do not want to see these characters again. It’s a shame that in a game so focussed on momentum these characters appear only to grind the action to a halt.

Personally, I played Odyssey as a completionist. Before shipping off to New Donk City I went back through each of the previous worlds to find as many moons as possible, and it’s in this type of exploration that Odyssey really shines.

Mario feels good. Plain and simple. And the worlds are designed to make the most of both his standard abilities like triple jumping, wall jumping and ground pounding, as well as the new features now achievable with Cappy. How have I not talked about Cappy yet?

Real quick, Cappy brings a whole lot of fresh jazziness to this game and updates the Mario formula in a way that it’s needed for a long time. The character himself is pretty uninteresting - he’s basically Mario but in ghost hat form and with a fully developed vocabulary - but the design and the powers he brings are maybe the high points of Odyssey as a whole. But back to what I was saying.

I honestly don’t know how much time I’ve spent zipping about the Sand and Metro Kingdoms hunting down all the moons, exploring the weird little secret pockets and helping the loveable characters that populate these areas. Some of the super stereotypically New Yorker dialogue from the sharply dressed gents of New Donk City (“Me head into the city?! Fuggedaboutit!”) actually made me laugh out loud. It’s hard for games to be actually funny, but Odyssey does good. Likewise, many of the callbacks to Mario’s history threw a big fat smile on my face.

If you have a Nintendo Switch I imagine you will have already bought Super Mario Odyssey. If you haven’t, what’s wrong with you? Why do you have a Switch? I’m very confused.

If you don’t have a Switch? It’s tough to call Mario a game worth buying one for, just for the sheer fact that Switch’s are still very expensive. If you have the disposable income, go for it. Honestly, I would say even now that Breath Of The Wild is a more worthy system seller than Odyssey, but if you’re a long time fan of the Mario franchise, have the money and are somewhat interested I advise you go in. Especially now that third parties are ramping up Switch game development.

SCORE

799.2 Moons/999

Did I miss anything important in my review? Did you like Super Mario Odyssey? Leave your thoughts  and any feedback you may have.

You’ll like this if you liked:

Any previous Super Mario Games

The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild

Voodoo Vince

- Review & illustration brewed in-house -