"Once again the nebulous negative force we’re up against is "the darkness", which has no agenda beyond making all the nice people sad and the local boss monsters bastards, requiring that we help out through therapeutic beating the glowing snot out of them. Look, I know this isn't Tinker Tailor Soldier Cat Rabbit Thing and I shouldn't expect complex plotting from my fantasy animal platformers, but the mythic tone and sweeping soundtrack makes me think that it thinks its story is epic and profound, when it's actually kinda shallow. Drive out the darkness and restore the light? Ooh, good idea, maybe I wouldn't bump into things so much. The game's backed by Microsoft and there's a vibe of corporate committee thinking around it. It reminds me of how Hollywood pumps its most crassly gigantic budgets into movies with no more profound message than "it's bad to murder everyone with explosions" because any more controversial statement would offend the Chinese government."

"Our protagonist, Ethan Winters, drives to a scary place in the middle of nowhere because his wife, who's been gone for three years, sends him a message, asking him to— Hey, wait a minute! That's just Silent Hill 2! Fortunately, RE7 swiftly differentiates itself because, while James Sunderland gets drawn into a masterfully crafted atmosphere of dreadful symbolism, Ethan Winters gets a hand chainsawed off. Well, that's much more expedient! He finds himself at the mercy of a family of psychotic, super-powered Republicans who wants to make Ethan's bodily integrity great again, by sawing more bits off of it. Whoops! Bit political, that; better insult the other side to retain balance! In contrast to previous Resident Evil protagonists, Ethan is a normal dude with all the fighting skill of a Democratic Party election campaign. Although, having said that, he bounces back from traumatic injuries remarkably quick. Stuff gets shoved through his hand so often, he should start using the hole to store his biros and business cards."

"Doom Eternal is the sequel to Doom 2016, in which we step back into the chunky, elephantine boots of THE DOOM SLAYER, and the plot picks up where Doom 2016 left off, give or take an explanation for how we escaped from Mars, and where we got a fucking spaceship from, or how demons have conquered most of Planet Earth. Okay, so maybe it doesn't start where Doom 2016 left off, although the "demons invading Earth" bit, we could probably have safely assumed. Ooh, what has humanity learned from the previous disaster? The usual amount: somewhere in the region between "bugger" and "all". How timely. But as for how THE DOOM SLAYER got here, maybe that was explained in the DLC or a comic book somewhere; and incidentally, I do appreciate how it's now canon that THE DOOM SLAYER does actually talk like he did in the Doom comic book: like an abattoir worker on enough coke to floor an elephant seal."

"Black Mesas Xen is three or four times longer than the original, which I'm not sure is the solution I'd have gone for. "Oh, you don't want your broccoli? Well here’s three times as much, bitch, and if you don't learn to like it I'm going to start pushing it up your nose." I suppose having worked on it for years they wanted to prove they weren't Duke Nukem Forever-ing that whole time, and that is most certainly proved. The cosmic vistas are spectacular, every inch of effort is on display, and while it is overlong and the quality has its dips, some bits are pretty forgettable and some chug along like the early morning hangover shits, there’s enough of a sense of wonder about it that I wasn’t unengaged. Trouble is, I don't think it addresses the actual issue with Xen – we just spent umpteen hours tactically combatting our way through an ever-evolving narrative about a research facility disaster and military cover-up and this Metroid meets American McGee's Alice bad acid trip at a children's ball pit full of tricky platforming and bullet spongey bosses doesn’t feel like a payoff for what was set up."

"Ah, the time-honoured playground game of "Who-Would-Win-in-a-Fight-Between..." So many youthful friendships abandoned to hair-pulling dirt wrestles over whether or not the Enterprise-D could take the Death Star in a straight fight. And then those same kids grow up nursing resentments, become video game developers, and create things like Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, in which we learn that, yes, Sub-Zero could beat up Superman, if they're in an incredibly-contrived situation that makes things remotely fair and if Superman is being controlled by your mum. Or they create those pseudo-science TV shows like Deadliest Warrior, in which we learn that, yes, obviously a ninja would win against a pirate, because a ninja is a trained assassin and a pirate is a drunk sailor with an at-best slightly intimidating beard."

"The usual indie arty platformer theme of small innocent child in big scary world is like the missionary position. There's nothing inherently wrong with it, some interesting things have been done with it, but when it's all you fucking do you'll swiftly be desperately hankering to break the monotony with just one suck job or nipple clamp. The thing about small child scary world though is that it rarely does sequels, because the underlying theme of small child scary world is coming of age and/or loss of innocence, and you can’t lose your innocence twice. Well, I suppose you could lose it in stages. Say, lose half when you find out that Santa isn’t real, lose the other half the first time you take it up the arse."

"THE DOOM SLAYER is an unfettered, chaotic id who only wants to kill demons and find collectible Happy Meal toys; in other words, he's the player of a mindless shooter game. But the central gag of the character is that all the other characters in the plot are looking for meaning and cosmic/religious significance in his actions where none truly exists; he just doesn't give a shit. That's the joke; very funny, ha ha ha. But in Doom Eternal, when there are entire levels devoted to traipsing through empty hallways learning the history of THE DOOM SLAYER and the origin story for how he came to not give a shit, and we're beset by cutscenes and dialogue and codex entries filling us in on the Maykrs of Urdak and their history with the Sentinels of Argent D'Nur and their long tradition of shit and the not-giving thereof, then suddenly, the game itself is the one projecting unnecessary meaning onto the dude who doesn't actually give a shit, and the joke is at the expense of the story-writers!"

"The first area in which The Walking Dead: Baits & Switches exceeds Boneworks is story, because it actually fucking has one. The city of New Orleans has been classically zombie-apocalypsed, and catastrophically flooded as well -- although apparently that was unrelated. That was just, y'know, Tuesday."

"If I'm serious about VR being good and the way forward for immersive gaming -- and I should stress I do genuinely think that; people tell me they often can't tell if I'm being sarcastic because I have what's medically known as Resting Bitch Voice -- then, like the coronavirus, we'd all better get used to hearing about it."

"But somehow they [the weapons] don't have the same satisfying feel. It's the little things. It's the sound; it's the slides being a bit more finicky. It's the way ammunition doesn't go in to the gun so much as disappear the moment it's vaguely near it: "GUN-TOR ACCEPTS YOUR SACRIFICE! (*om-nom-nom-nom-nom!*) YOU ARE GRANTED A BOON OF SIX MORE DEAD CUNTS!""

"I knew [Ghost Recon Wildlands] was yet another Ubisoft Sandbox Game, and therefore another round of blandly visiting icons on maps like an overworked Uber driver, but I didn't expect it to be the Ubisoft Sandbox Game; the ultimate archetype at long last."

"And it's the spirit of Deadliest Warrior that brings us Ubisoft's latest multiplayer-focused Skinner box, Foreigner, so called because it's about how people of different races and creeds will never ever get along under any circumstances. Specifically, it concerns a permanent three-way conflict between medieval knights, medieval Vikings, and, uh... Japanese samurai, which, from a geographical perspective, is kind of like King Leonidas and the 300 Spartans showing up to join in the Falklands Conflict; whatever, it's a fantasy. Three communities of knights, Vikings, and samurai all live within five minutes' drive of each other, and they smack the shit out of their neighbours all day because it's easier than learning the Norwegian for "Stop kicking your ball over my fence!""

"Wattam's blurb states that it's a game about friendship, but I don't agree that it is. What this game is really saying is that the only way to be accepted by society and your peers is to blindly follow instructions, and that if someone chews you up and shits you out you should just be grateful for the attention. So apparently it’s a metaphor for your first job after leaving college."

"I made sure to leave a like on the small number of games that I felt got into the right spirit of things, offering nice straightforward gameplay loops, occasionally even original ones, and as I looked around at the colourful menus and the careful curation algorithms at work, I found myself thinking "Y'know, it'll be a real shame when this all gets taken over by perverts." These things always are, Media Molecule. The Sonic the Hedgehog fans are the warning sign. Now Sonic fans aren't necessarily perverts, basketball players aren't necessarily tall but it fucking helps. Sooner or later they bring in that one character who's a bat with tits and the furries have got a foot in your door. Remember Second Life? Once a lovely wholesome attempt at a community-created online world of pure imagination, now just zebra dicks and yiff piles as far as the eye can see. The earnest creators will all return or graduate to more efficient systems once the novelty wears off and then all your fancy 3D art tools are so much fantasy penis shaping equipment. What're you gonna do, screen all incoming content for the rest of your fucking life? Smarter and more dedicated people than you have tried to hold back the masturbators, and the masturbators always win, probably because they've got all the stamina."

"It's odd to play a Half-Life game where the main character speaks and can tell the people around them to stop being such prannies, but it's still unmistakably Half-Life, with its trademark monsters, linear narrative gameplay, and weird emotional tone. I mean, humanity has essentially been enslaved by the Borg, who systematically subject them to gory, nightmarish body horror, but everyone's really cheerful and yucking it up with their pet headcrabs. Yes, I know humans strive to be upbeat during a crisis, but there's this one very Resident Evil-y chapter in Alyx where we have to sneak around an indestructible monster who's this hideously mutated human who will tear us apart if he finds us and looks to be in immense suffering, and then we're told that their name is Jeff, and everyone talks about him like he's the one asshole in the friend group who keeps hitting on waitresses. "Oh, that Jeff; Jeff sucks." "Hey, I trapped Jeff in a garbage compactor." "Sucks to be Jeff!" Sometimes, Half-Lifes storytelling feels like what happens when an entire game has Asperger syndrome."

"Here's the plot: protagonist of last game gets murdered by group seeking revenge for thing protagonist did in last game; adopted daughter of protagonist goes to group's home base to get double-backsy revenge, which happens to be in a really shitty holiday destination, and no, it didn't escape me that this is the same plot as Silent Hill 3. Now, Joel in the last game was a basically relatable gruff hairy dad learning to love again who made one very questionable decision at the end, but Ellie in Last of Us II seems to be of a mind that the best way to commemorate Gruff Hairy Dad would be to beat his "questionable decision" speed record as many times as possible. And already, I hear the same people who gave me shit about not liking the last game slithering out from behind the fridge to make the same argument: "You're not supposed to like or agree with the characters! It's complex and challenging drama!" Yeah, thanks, Professor; I got we weren't supposed to be entirely on Ellie's side around the Dr. Sniffybum incident. But the message is muddled by everyone in Ellie's conventionally attractive mumblecore support group assuring her that revenge is the tops and totally justified, and the villains' equivalent act of revenge against Joel for doing something a lot worse was totally not justified because they hadn't had nearly enough screen time. Which is presumably why, just as the plot is starting to look like it's wrapping up, the game suddenly flashes back and makes us play as the main villain for way, way too fucking long: to show that, ooh, they have redemptive qualities as well and, from their perspective, Ellie is basically a less eloquent Jason Voorhees."

"...Oh yeah, I've got tons of things to say about Borderlands 3. Wait here, and I'll go get them. *walks off screen followed by the sound of a car pulling away as Borderlands 3 awkwardly stands around in silence*"

"The game also assigns more than one command to some buttons like it's passive-aggressively trying to get them married. You throw your current inventory item by touching the trackpad, and eat it by touching the trackpad in a subtly different way. And I'm sure you can imagine there is very little overlap between "Things you want to throw at people" and "Things you want to eat;" the list starts and ends with, "custard pies," and there aren't a whole lot of custard pies in the Tower of Barbs. You also cycle your inventory by touching the trackpad in a third subtly different way. Blimey! This is like trying to seduce your lady friend in a darkened cinema, and discovering that all along you were fingering her bacon sandwich."

"And so ends the year Two Thousand Nineteen / What a cascade of failure and pain it has been / Out came the games to not that much cheer / But lots of hostility, and yawning, and sneers / That made all the publishers recoil in fear / And push back the games that looked good to next year / But no amount of pushback would have been enough / To lift our poor industry out of the trough / Of artless, 'sploitational, grind-a-thon guff / Of loot-box live service, and all of that stuff / But anyway, to close out Two Thousand Nineteen / The best, and the worst, and the blandest I've seen."

"[Code Vein] is another Souls-like with combat that's generally FINE and boring level design, but it has one thing that makes it notable: it's the most game I've ever played. This is a game where the character customizer has 90 billion hairdos and two noses; a game where one of the facilities in your home base is a , and if you get in it, female characters will show up in skimpy towels. This is a thing that happens. It built a hot springs episode into its fucking mechanics! And after the second main boss in a row was a giant demonic stripper with their , I made the decision to stop playing before my recommendations became too embarrassing."

"After my best character died and I had no continues, I needed to pay in-game money to resurrect him instead, for you see, permadeath is only a thing that poor people have to worry about. But to make that money, I had to grind with my second best avatar. But his stats were lower and I got him killed as well. So I had to grind up with my third best to bring him back so I could continue grinding up to bring my best one back. And that's when I knew I had to get out before I got caught in an inescapable vortex of failure. I learned that lesson from the Hillary Clinton campaign."

"[Outer Wilds]'s nice when you're roaming the skies with a song in your heart. It's less nice you're lost in an underground labyrinth trying to find a fucking outpost you found two loops ago, but couldn't finish exploring because you misfired your jetpack, fell, broke both your legs and then the sun exploded. It's a game that can simultaneously be very chilled out and very demoralizing. Like going bankrupt because you blew all your money on BBC nature documentaries."

"I was hesitant to reward Bloodstained just for being Castlevania: Symphony of The Night, but it isn't that, really. What it is is exactly what I wanted: For Castlevania to stop pissing about and pack all the good ideas it's had into one game that we can finally call good without qualification. "Okay, but I can I make the protagonist wear a silly hat?" Yes, Koji Igarashi, have all the silly hats you want. "I will!""

"The plot concerns the infuriatingly awkwardly-spelled Ajna, a spunky teenage girl in a Ni no Kuni-esque dog's breakfast fantasy world where forest villages and steampunk cities rub shoulders like slightly-acquainted colleagues in an undersized lift, who has been trained as a fighter from birth by her stern dad, and has only just established her protagonist credentials when she returns to her forest village to find it being forest pillaged by an imperialist army of baddies, and her stern dad has been made stone dead. Yeah, I'm guessing you weren't shooting for the "Creative Writing" prize, were you, Lab Zero? Shall I put us down for "Standard RPG Fantasy Package A-12", then? Please direct me to the first of the several teenagers we will be enlisting to aid us in murdering God. Still, we're thrown a bit of a curveball early on when, while fighting the Imperial soldier who stone-deaded our stern dad, said soldier inexplicably turns into a spirit and is absorbed by Ajna's consciousness, 'cause it turns out Ajna has a secret god power that lets her draw people into herself and then get them to fight for her; sort of like Pokémon, but with human beings, and therefore, somehow even more ethically questionable."

"...Let's not forget, you can buy what's termed "timesavers"; so first we buy your game, Ubisoft, and then you charge us more money to not have to play it? If I paid double price up front, would you just not give it to me at all? Take a step back, people, because this has all gotten way too fucking normalized. When you charge money for something you can produce infinitely at zero cost, like in-game currency, that's not a service; that is the fucking death of economics as a concept. How the fuck did we get here from basic principles of trade?! It's like walking up to a dude in the stocks in the village square and saying, "If you give me three turnips, I'll spit in your face.""

"The problem is, there's a moment in the game - and it's remarkable how finely I can pinpoint it - where an invisible lever gets thrown and the bottom drops out, and it stops being fun. It's about the point when you meet the pirate lesbian, and the world opens up, and you know we're in trouble when a pirate lesbian marks anything but an upturn in events. The problem is in the numbers; I don't know if they were originally making another fighting game and just got bored, but that might explain the ridiculous number of party members you get. This is some Chrono Cross-level shit; the primest real estate in the world is a teenage girl's noggin, apparently, and Ajna's beating the tenants off with a stick. But the combat isn't very deep, and all that really matters is doing the most damage as fast as you can, so you might as well just find four guys you like and stick with them. And post-pirate lesbian, something goes horribly wrong with the enemy's stats; I went into battle with a small, unassuming frog, bum-bounced them between my four lads for twenty minutes, then in that awkward post-coital cigarette-break while I wait for everyone's bars to refill, I realized that the frog still had nine-tenths of their health bar left. I hit that frog 400 times! In a sane world, they would no longer have more than one dimension, let alone health points! And they couldn't do much damage to me, either, so now I'm just disinterestedly doing my super-combo six times to kill one fucking frog! I feel like Rachmaninoff playing for pocket change in a dive bar, and the crowd won't stop requesting "Free Bird"."

"The first thing you need to know is that Dead Rising 4 doesn't have a fixed time limit or mission deadlines. You remember, that thing that every Dead Rising has and what makes them interesting, and is as much a part of Dead Rising as the sense of betrayal is part of getting kicked in the balls by your beloved horse! What it does have is a linear sequence of missions that will still be waiting for you, even if you sit down in the mud outside and make daisy-chains for eleven hours. You remember, the way every bloody sandbox game works. Dead Rising has taken the part of innovation that entails doing the shit that everyone else does; which is innovative in the same sense that the grey goo scenario is innovative. "Oh, wow! My legs have been harvested by a ravenous, unstoppable nano-swarm! This will add an intriguing new twist to the upcoming line-dancing tournament!" I shouldn't have to explain that the time limits were there to add a unique challenge! Yes, it could occasionally get in the way of trying on hilarious barbecue aprons and tricycling down the escalator, but isn't that cathartic fun all the more satisfying when we know we've parceled our time to allow for a quick barbecue apron session in between making progress and not just cocking about?"

"The Witness is a new game by Jonathan Blow. Ironically, it sucks! Mneh-eh-eh-eh-obnoxious-laugh!"

"Between missions, we go back to home base and have to deal with the "looty" half of "looty-shooty" by laboriously sorting through our latest crop of equips and weapon add-ons that apply completely mystifying upgrades. "+5% defence against generic damage"? What the fuck is "generic" damage? Damage that basically does the job but isn't focused on innovating at this time?"

"The Obsidian-brand depth of player choice is here; you can even side with the corporations if you want, but they are both evil and failing horribly, so it's like betting on the Nazis to win World War II even as Magda Goebbels is biting down on her suicide pill."

"Anthem is mind-numbing live service tosh with fewer original ideas than a BBC daytime television commissioner, but that's not why it's topping my "blandest" list. The real reason? Because while I was writing down the obvious candidates -- Days Gone, Ghost Recon -- I suddenly noticed Anthem on the list of 2019 releases, and thought, "Huh. I completely forgot about that." And that, viewers, is what gives you the edge in a mediocrity contest."

"Remnant (huurk) From the Ashes is a third-person action-adventure with a grim tone set in a dying world- it's a Dark Souls clone, isn't it? "Yes, Yahtzee, that's why we thought you would like it, since you feel about Dark Souls the way a starving tiger feels about something tigers particularly enjoy eating!" Yeah, but it feels like half the original IPs these days are Dark Souls clones. You're like grandparents, you are; I show up to your house in orange trousers one fucking time and now you get me a new pair of orange trousers every fucking Christmas. So come on then, what's this one's gimmick? "Well, it's Dark Souls, but with guns!" So, Bloodborne, then? "NO, SHUT UP! It's Dark Souls with a full-on third-person shooter: over-the-shoulder, iron sights, the whole steaming cow pat." So, it's Dark Souls but combined with the other 50% of every game that comes out these days?"

"Back before Mass Effect finished itself off with all the grace and elegance of the last season of Game of Thrones wanking into a bin, whenever I played one of those games, it always struck me how you only ever saw that universe from the top of the social heap; from the perspective of a universally famous and respected galactic saviour who could swan about on the best ship ever, decking journalists with impunity and being extremely flighty about what his favourite store on the Citadel is. I always wondered what the Mass Effect universe was like to the average fuck, just about qualified to reverse their space van out of their own space driveway and deliver crates of flavourless nutrient paste to the worker cubes; how did they feel about Commander Shepard? Were they happy with the flavour of ice cream they got at the end of Mass Effect 3? Well, I guess we'll never know now, since after Mass Effect: Andromeda, more Mass Effect is about as hotly demanded as the Jeffrey Epstein Bumper Fun Activity Book for Kids."

"Well, anyway, the war against the Locust, I mean the Lambent, I mean the Swarm, I mean actually I think it's the Locust again now, continues, and is showing no sign of clearing up because this game ends on an unsatisfying cliffhanger. I guess Microsoft are still paying off the death-ray satellite."

"It started in 2002 when, in the run-up to the release of horror-themed action-adventure Shadow Man 2, Acclaim announced that they would pay the funeral costs of anyone willing to put a Shadow Man 2 advert on the headstone of a deceased relative, prompting public outcry and the Church of England basically telling them to piss off. Yes, Church of "Tea and Crumpets with the Vicar" England! Takes a lot to upset those lads; they don't even hate gays that much. Now, in my research, the name "Steve Perry" came up a lot; apparently, he was the executive coming up with these ideas, but I find it hard to believe that one person could be entirely to blame. Sure, I can see one executive descending from a cocaine-induced trance to announce, "Hey, I know what demographic we should target: the recently bereaved!"; what I have trouble picturing is the roomful of colleagues that then replied, "Yes, we agree! What a good idea; let's action it!" without subsequently making hasty, sarcastic eye-rolls at whoever was keeping the minutes. Later the same year, Acclaim promoted the resoundingly mediocre Turok: Evolution by offering a sack of cash to anyone who was willing to christen their newborn baby "Turok", apparently shifting their demographic focus to the other end of the scale."

"Sea of Solitude is one of those games that's either going to really speak to you, or completely leave you cold. It'll all depend on whether you personally relate to Kay or not, and the more I played, the more I disliked her. Not because she was an inattentive sister or any of the other reasons the game gives for why she's tormenting herself like this. It's because she's such a fucking self-absorbed drama queen, she'll craft a grand operatic scenario out of her interpersonal relationship issues. "Oh no! I didn't give my depressed boyfriend enough space! Verily must I be clothed in the rainments of the traitor and banish myself to the wine-dark seas of nothingness to dwell forevermore." JUST STOP TEXTING HIM SO MUCH, YA DIPPY MOO!"

"Now, one might reasonably say at this point, "Surely, it wasn't a serious offer to let new parents cash in on their future bullying victims! Surely, these were just shock tactics to grab headlines, the way a graffiti artist just wants attention and doesn't literally want to fuck the police! I mean, to be serious, there aren't enough hours in the day." Well, Acclaim would always insist these were genuine offers when pressed, and therefore, they must've been by the Universal Law of No Take-Backsies, but they also claim that the baby name idea was taken from a marketing expert named Simeon Cantrell who, it turned out, didn't exist; who wrote a book whose ISBN number, in truth, belonged to a book of children's knock-knock jokes. All of which indicates that at least one person at Acclaim was treating this as a big, ironic gag that would send them laughing all the way to the bank, but Acclaim was still losing money, so it was more like a forced chuckle all the way to the dole office."

"Want to know how to do a Gears of War witticism? Step One: Say something relevant but completely obvious, to stir the players from the latest trance the combat put them into. Step Two: Continue talking uselessly until I hate you: "We need to go over there, and by 'over there,' I mean towards that big scary building full of enemies." "Oh, great. So what's the good news?" "Well, the good news is that I'm very handsome and glib and..." SHUT THE FUCK UUuuUUuuUP!! "...Okay, but by "shut the fuck up," do you mean...?" OH, MY GOD!! Why can't you just accept that Joss Whedon will never hire you?"

"I hope Bloodstained realizes what it has done; all we needed was a few more disappointing fuck-ups, a few more Mighty No. 9s, Yooka-Laylees, Broken Ages, and maybe we could've all been completely soured to the Kickstarted retro callback. "Oh, maybe it isn't healthy to never want to leave our youthful comfort zones," we could've all said. "Maybe we should be open to new thoughts and ideas, for just as the gene pool requires variance, so too does art need a diversity of new concepts to avoid stagnation and producing nothing but the cultural equivalent of harelips and webbed toes." And you fucked that up, Bloodstained, by proving the system can actually work, and now it's going to be Kickstarted remakes of Custer's Revenge as far as the eye can see. If you want a picture of the future, imagine General Custer's lovingly-rendered shiny bell-end slapping a human face - forever."

"Funny, isn't it, how whenever a game talks about being "over-the-top" or "tongue-in-cheek", it always seems to mean the same thing these days: that it's going to look like an irresponsibly violent version of Jet Set Radio? Probably cel-shaded, every character's introduced with a freeze-frame profile and dresses like a Tank Girl cosplayer with colour blindness, and a lot of things will be magenta. Oh, yeah, and there'll be a panda, for some reason."

"I want to emphasize, though, that the core combat is really good. I smash through a window on a skateboard, kick the same skateboard into somebody's eye socket, backflip over his friend shooting two guys at once, kick a frying pan into the air and shoot at it so the bullets ricochet into three other guys who were in cover and apparently left under some mad idea that it was in their power to stop me, and then, for the first time since initially entering the room, I touch the floor."

"Ghost Recon Wildlands is a sandbox-shooter reminiscent of— Oh, blimey, that rabbit hole never ends! It might be quicker to list the games Ghost Recon Wildlands isn't reminiscent of. Well, it's not in the least bit like Jet Set Willy, because at no point do you have to travel down a toilet, except in, you know, the metaphorical sense. The first comparison that comes to mind is The Division, as both are flying the "Tom Clancy" flag and between the two we now have quite an insight into Tom Clancy's view of the world; or rather the view of the world of whatever creative director is currently holding up Tom Clancy's disinterred head on a stick. The message is: "Have another cheeseburger, complacent subjects, for the government has secretly inserted packs of trained killers into all the world's populations, and the moment our way of life is kinda, sorta, indirectly threatened they are ready to step up and start shooting the disenfranchised." Meanwhile, in the real world, the government can barely manage secretly inserting the President's knob into an intern! But I digress."

"Now, doing nothing but comparing Dead Rising 4 to its predecessors would be a stubborn, churlish, and counterproductive thing to do; so let's keep doing it! Hey, remember how the boss-fights with psychos used to be elaborate and interesting with colourful characters and unique attacks? Well, instead of that, now you fight generic dudes in silly outfits with slightly longer health bars. Another wonderful "innovation" to the format! "Oh, look, the grey goo scenario has eaten my arms now as well! What a perfect opportunity to learn how to balance things on my nose!" Alright, fine! Dead Rising 4 introduces a couple of new mechanics. You can equip powered armour in order to continue doing the same zombie-splattering you've been doing all along, except with slightly more defense. And there are stealth mechanics now, and — holy shit — I just thought of another word that doesn't belong anywhere near Dead Rising! Stealth is for characters who aren't carrying around three dynamite crossbows and a giant, acid-spewing hammer, thank you very much! To me, stealth mode was just a "walk obnoxiously slowly" button that I only ever pressed because I forgot that it wasn't the sprint."

"So let me see if I've got this straight, Insomniac Games' Disney's Spider-Man: You're going to interrupt your high-octane big-balls web-swinging free-roam superhero power fantasy for the sake of some mandatory forced stealth sections playing as a mundane fuck going on a chest-high wall inspection tour. And you're doing this so that we don't get bored."

"It also does the thing where it goes, "Oh, look, a sewer level. How original." (*roll eyes*) And then proceeds to unironically have a sewer level, that goes on way too fucking long. If you know it's bad, why are you doing it? Surely the comedic subversive thing to do would be to pretend we're having a sewer level, and then go, "Oh, bollocks to this hackneyed shit! Let's have a level where you ride an ostrich through a bouncy castle!""

"Set after the alien wars depicted in the retro Contras, Contra: Rogue Corps is concerned with a mysterious alien city that rises from the ruins, which is supposed to be full of treasure that we assuredly want, but doesn't seem to be doing anything besides sitting there and having treasure and monsters, which is a classic example of a "non-plot." A depressingly common setting for live-service multiplayer video games: A plot with no active villain, or ticking clock, or clear solution, just an environment with a sense of permanent, non-specific peril that can never change or develop for fear that XxNobChopsxX might stop his grindy, 8-hour quest to make themselves able to grind 1.8% more efficiently."

"The history of gaming in the 2010s could theoretically be told entirely in open world games. If I were to pick that represents them all, I'd probably go for Far Cry 3, which was pretty good, but it was where an unpleasant trend was being to crystallise - the sandbox game becoming less "open-ended cathartic adventure" than "gigantic, three-dimensional checklist of busywork", its maps splattered with identical, copy-pasted challenges and collectibles designed mainly to torment the obsessive-compulsive, with a primary gameplay loop best summarized as "tidying up". Where the stories gradually devolved into withered strands of linear tutorial missions that don't even have proper endings, 'cos we have to go straight back to the sandbox afterwards to hunt for the remaining five hundred sliver pinecones."

"Can I do a spot of disabusing here? The kind I always have to do whenever they put out a DAVID CAGE game, or anything else presenting a façade of dramatic depth? The following things do not make a character deep or compelling: 1.) Getting hurt a lot (Looking at you, Tomb Raider reboot.); 2.) Being sad; 3.) Doing morally questionable things; and we might as well tack on 4.) Being a member of a minority, just 'cos I've already given up hope for this video's comment section. What does matter is the characters at least be interesting to watch, and these aren't; the banter between Ellie and her girlfriend as they adventure together sizzles like a flask of slightly tepid water because they're too similar in personality, background, and motivation to have good chemistry. But the most important thing is growth. Walker in Spec Ops: The Line slowly becomes a monster as he's twisted by the constant backfiring of his good intentions, and that's why it's compelling; Ellie has no character development. Villain Lady does, a little bit, for stupid reasons, along the lines of suddenly realizing that the enemy faction she's been genociding unquestioned for months are also human beings with families and would rather not be genocided, thanks, but Ellie just sets out to do something shitty and remains a shitty person; in fact, the game keeps droning on for about two hours after you think it's finally ending just to continue establishing Ellie's shittiness!"

"There's a lot about base-designing that feels inefficient. You're supposed to designate areas as specific rooms, but I'm unclear on why my minions need a barracks, and a dining hall, and a break room, and an entirely separate kind of break room for replenishing mental health or something. That's what happens when you let the fuckers unionize, I suppose. Furniture for one kind of room can't go in any other kind of room, which makes no sense; would it really break the interior designer's heart to shove a fucking vending machine in the break room so my dudes don't have to trudge all the way to the dining hall for a Twix? And while we're on the subject, why can I only put fire extinguishers, guard posts, and staircases in rooms officially designated as "corridors"? I just wanted a fucking split-level food court! Also, why did I have to research the concept of a staircase?! Where was my evil genius educated, St. Bungalow's School for the Wheelchair-Bound?"

"The main character is Rubi, a tomboy-ish assassin who's about as likable and sympathetic as a deep-sea angler fish in an SS uniform. She's arrogant, rude, surly, psychotic, selfish, greedy, joyless, and really rather dim; and this may be a cheap shot, but she looks like a fifteen-year-old boy wearing a dirty mop head and a corset. The only way she could appeal is if your name is Russ Meyer and you built an entire film-making career around the same masochistic fantasy in which domineering women bite your knob off. Also, she seems to confuse swearing with wit. That's MY thing!"