For this reason, if you hated Origins, you'll probably hate this one too. If you loved Origins, you might enjoy this title, but enough tweaks have been made to the core mechanics that you might not love it. The ability trees have been exploded, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, except that a lot of the special attacks you unlock are mapped (for those using controllers) to the four face buttons--and there are only four face buttons. You can unlock a "second ability wheel" later, but, while using the first wheel is relatively-intuitive and smooth in the flow of combat, using a button to "switch wheels" is just awkward. It could be the whole old-man thing coming back to bite me in the ass, but I found that, in practical terms, it was far better to just stick to only using at most four melee and four ranged combat abilities. This means that you'll end up not using many of the abilities that you unlock--which makes them sort-of pointless. Other parts of the game are similarly over-engineered. Liked having different weapons with different abilities that could be upgraded to your level in Origins? How about weapons and armor pieces that can be upgraded, that have slots to add new unique abilities, and can be engraved to add still more bonuses. Also, you have a magic spear that upgrades and enhances all of your abilities and damage if you collect enough doodads from bad guys.

The basic story here is that you are the male or female progeny of a Spartan warrior and his wife, who happens to be the granddaughter of King Leonidas of Sparta--except that you're actually the spawn of said Spartan woman and a <famous historical figure> because Assassins Creed. You are on a quest to reunite with the male or female sibling who was adopted and corrupted by a--you guessed it--cult planning to take over the world! (You have to read that last bit in your best The Brain voice.) Along the way, you'll possibly kill your foster father and find your mother, who's been doing some piracy and running a small island nation, because, hey, it's a nice gig if you can get it.

Speaking of piracy, I hope you liked the naval combat in Origins. What? You didn't? Well, too bad, because you're in for a crap-ton of it here. But, hey, you get your own ship. And, guess what? It's super-upgradeable. Want fire arrows? How about fire-spears? How about stronger dudes or ladies rowing your boat gently down the stream? You can get all of this and more if you have the appropriate amounts of the six (who am I kidding? I lost count of the actual number of resources long ago) different resources (apart from moolah) in the game world.

The base game content will EASILY allow you to level your avatar to 50+. Moreover, if you have the season pass DLC, you're also getting oodles (I counted) of side missions and that's not counting the "story DLCs." The first of these finds you being hunted by a brand-new cult hailing from the land of Persia. This story was interesting at least, but it makes a peculiar choice, given how quick Ubisoft is to slap a disclaimer on the front of all of these game saying how inclusive it is--the game forces you into a heterosexual relationship with an NPC--and you end up marrying that person. Now, being the sad deviant that I am, I was playing my Kassandra as a love-'em-and-leave-'em lesbian, and she suddenly went straight. That was odd.

I put well over a hundred hours in the game plus the Legacy of the First Blade content. Then I started the Fate of Atlantis pack, which has you going to the Underworld and had a hauntingly-familiar vibe (many hours spent in the "afterlife" portion of Origins). There are new travel mechanics that are . . . actually even more tedious than the usual methods of getting around, and I discovered at this point that I was just tired of playing Odyssey. It had outlived its welcome.

It's not a bad game. It's not a bad AC game. But it was a bit much.

Wales Interactive has created something of a niche for itself in a similar way to Telltale Games. Telltale started out doing conventional adventures, poker games, and other things before taking a hard right into interactive storytelling adventure games with a few QTEs thrown in to ensure that you hadn't fallen asleep at the keyboard. At a certain point in its history, when you were looking at a Telltale game, you had a pretty good idea what to expect from it, and you knew that it was either the sort of thing you like or it wasn't. Wales Interactive is in a fairly similar position now, having cut its teeth on a variety of shooter or survival horror-type games, and making a bigger splash (from my humble analysis) with a series of full-motion video games with branching storylines reacting to the choices the "player" makes. Many people complained in Telltale's heyday that its games weren't really games, because, QTEs aside, the player spent most of his time watching the story unfold while occasionally selecting a character's action or bit of dialogue. My feeling has always been that I was playing the games for the stories and characters anyway, so it never bothered me.

Well, WI games are even less game-y than Telltale's. They're pretty much just movies in which you select occasional character choices of action or speech. Sometimes that's exactly what I want from a game--something that requires me to focus my attention on it, but doesn't really require any physical investment on my part. Usually it means I'm feeling like a particularly lazy SOB at that time.

I fired up The Complex a few days ago, as I was in that sort of mood and I'd actually pre-ordered it last weekend on XBONE. It's also available on PS4 and Steam (and probably that Nintendo doo-dad too). I completed one playthrough that took about 90 minutes, and I enjoyed it. I often debate whether I want to replay games of this sort, because they lose a bit of their luster once you know the gist of the story. However, it was roughly the cost of a movie ticket (depending on your market--less than $12) to purchase the game, so I figured even if I only got one playthrough out of it, it was probably worthwhile. And it was. The story revolves around biomedical researcher Dr. Amy Tenant and her erstwhile partner Dr. Rees Wakefield getting stuck in a secret underground laboratory at (wait for it) The Complex, her partner's biotech firm, while terrorists are trying to break in and steal the new nanocell treatment that she has created with an eye toward curing many diseases. The acting is good and the story is compelling. Also, the effects, music, and sound design are all well-done for what is essentially an indie film. With the exception of the rare bits of actual biology in the movie, it's all quite well-done. When your game is complete, the game will score you on your relationships with other characters and rate your protagonist's personality based on your actions and dialog choices.

(If there's one thing that bothered me about the game, it was the writer's choice to name one of the main characters "Wakefield," a name I have come to associate with a special kind of British dirtbag named Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who is a large part of the reason that the world is having to deal with anti-vaxxer nonsense. It's probably just me, but it bugged me.)

The Complex represents neither a serious investment of time nor money, but I enjoyed it for what it was. If it is your kind of thing, it's worth the ride. If you don't enjoy this sort of "interactive-movie" malarkey, and you know who you are, you should obviously pass on it.

The story, based on actual historical events, gives a player a real sense of what it was like to live in medieval Europe. Unfortunately, that's one of its strengths and greatest issues. While I actually liked the part where the game force-fed you information about historical personages of significance in Bohemia and the Holy Roman Empire, I was much less enamored with having to find a bed to sleep in every 12 hours for at least eight hours and having to eat and keep track of both how well-nourished and well-rested I am, lest I suffer the accompanying stat penalties that result from being tired or malnourished. There are two kinds of people who play cRPGs in my book--people who played the old Gold Box games and enjoyed the stories and characters and people who played the Ultima games and were enamored with RIchard Garriott's attention to details like ensuring that you eat, sleep and defecate on a schedule as regular as Sheldon Cooper's. I fall squarely in the former camp, and no amount of convincing will ever cause me to buy into the idea that it's enjoyable to have to worry about starving or dying of exhaustion in your fake life in the same way it isn't any fun to worry about in your real life.

I have enough additional grievances to fill an entire Festivus. I didn't really enjoy having to follow lords around on foot when going places because I'm a peasant and I don't deserve a horse (yes, I know he gets a horse later in the game). The quest marker is . . . vague, at best. Without employing any cheats or mods, the game's combat system is brutally difficult too. It's painfully easy to get killed before the game properly starts, which seems to be about two hours in, by various bandits or enemy soldiers.

Only 12 hours in, I encountered numerous bugs as well. Main quests go awry when major NPCs vanish and are nowhere to be found. Checking forums reveals that they only appear at certain times of the day and that you sometimes just have to hope you stumble across them. Other NPCs conveniently disappear during quests that require you to locate them. Sometimes it's just the quest mechanics themselves that are problematic--WAI. Several quests require you to follow NPCs around at a snail's pace, listening to them ramble on about something or other for what feels like hours. It's a bit like the tram ride at the beginning of Half-Life, except in this case you have to manually control the tram's movement and speed or it just sits there and does nothing. I mean, I'm sure the devs weren't actively trying to suck the fun out of it, but it certainly feels that way at times.

So I didn't finish. I probably barely scratched the surface of KC:D. It's a shame, too. A lot of thought went into the combat system, skill system, and story. The music is quite nice and the graphics are well-rendered (characters a bit less so, even with the high-resolution pack). But my rule is always--if you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong, and it wasn't enough fun to justify the large swaths of tedium.

The first and, arguably, most important thing that a Spider-Man game has to get right, and many have done a commendable job with this in the past, is character movement. Jumping from rooftops and swinging through the city has to feel easy and smooth, and it does in this game. Holding down R2 and occasionally tapping your X will cover a lot of territory in the game's detailed, living rendition of New York City. That's a very good thing because you have to go through quite a bit of the game before you unlock "fast travel" to key locations (mostly police precincts) by hopping a ride on a subway car (sometimes literally when you get to the part of the story where the Webhead is a fugitive); this means you will be web-swinging and wall-climbing A LOT. The game has what looks to a person whose never been to New York like a faithful recreation of Manhattan and you cover a lot of territory during the course of the narrative, challenges and side missions.

The second thing that's most important about most games for me is the story. Is it any good? In this case, the story, which has a smattering of both of the first two Tobey Maguire films (much more of the second one) as well as numerous comics. There is a villain with whom I was not previously familiar who is ostensibly the main villain, but who is later overshadowed by another emerging villain. I'm trying to avoid spoilers here, but I will include one that probably isn't a shock to anyone who watched and liked Into the Spider-Verse (here's my three-word review: it was okay) or anyone who is familiar with the comics. This isn't a Peter Parker Spider-Man origin story. Unlike several of the movie series, which start with Peter Parker in high school, this Peter Parker is, I'd say, in his mid- to late-20s and he's done the whole dirtbag-murdered-my-Uncle-Ben and Mary-Jane-knows-my-secret-identity song-and-dance. However, it does represent a kind of Miles Morales origin story. That's pretty much all I'll say about that, other than that it will be interesting to see what they do with this in the sequel.

The characterizations of the characters with which I am familiar (most of them) are spot-on and the voice-acting is uniformly great. Also, this is a very beautiful game. Everything looks great, the city is full of average people wandering around doing people things, and there is a pretty remarkable attention to detail. Spider-Man can even wade through rooftop swimming pools on buildings that have them (but there's no option to swim laps).

This is, at its core, an open-world game, so there are main story missions, that can be played straight through to the end, if you choose--although the game gives you little breaks between them where it unsubtly encourages you to do other things. There are side missions, which you'll uncover as the plot advances, challenges, crimes, research missions, and enemy bases. If you're looking for things to do, you will find them. Your protagonist earns experience points for every activity, and he can level up to 50 (well, you can level past that, but the rewards at that level are trivial). With each level, S-M gains a boost to damage or health and an ability point. He has three separate skill trees from which to unlock abilities related to movement, offense, and defense. If you level your Spidey up tp 50 (which I was able to do within the base game), you earn enough skill points to unlock every skill in every tree. Peter also creates gadgets to help him in combat, which you unlock and enhance using the game's (six) types of "currency" (research points, base points, challenge points, crime points, backpack points, and landmark points). There are enough of all of these to fully upgrade every apect of your Spider-Man too, but only if you're skilled enough to score well on most of the challenges. The final "collectible" is suits. It wouldn't be a Spider-Man game without alternate costumes and this game has 38 of the suckers (if you include the DLC--note that the silver trophy for unlocking all costumes only requires the suits available in the base game). Some look cool, some look . . . like Spider-Man suits, and some are just silly (Bag-Man and Undies come to mind). Your inner nerd will undoubtedly settle on three or four favorites.

I should say something about the music too. It's some of the best superhero game music out there. Like some of the best game soundtracks, it's the kind of music you could easily play while walking around or working out (if you're into that sort of thing), doing tedious paperwork, or riding around in your car.

So what about the DLC? Either my PS4 doesn't keep track of this or I'm not clever enough to figure out how to persuade it to share the information, so I don't have a good sense of how much time I spent on the base game. It's probably safe to say it's 50+ hours. The three-part DLC probably has around 20-30 hours of extra gameplay. It tells a story of Hammerhead's (okay, I'm just going to say it--of all of the Spider-Man villains in this game, Hammerhead is just the dumbest and most stereotypical--a psychopathic mobster with a plate in his head--even Tombstone is more interesting) attempt to take control of the city's underworld using the wiles of Black Cat and the advanced arms and armor of Silver Sable. While I just found Hammerhead a bit irritating, the overarching narrative is quite fun. It picks up almost immediately after the crisis of the base game and runs with a few of the story threads that were intentionally left hanging afterwards.

Do I have any criticisms? Well, Screwball is REALLY annoying, and her last mission in the Silver Sable DLC was beyond my abilities (or maybe my patience threshold) to complete. The game also has carried on the Marvel movie tradition that was novel and fun at first but has now come to represent the height of tedium--yes, I'm talking about BOTH mid-credit and post-credit scenes, truly the best of both horrible worlds. And. . . that's about it. This is damn good game. If you have a PS4, you're doing yourself a terrible injustice if you don't play it.

You play as one of a few hundred thousand colonists on a huge colony ship bound for the Earth colony of Halcyon, consisting of a few space stations and several inhabited worlds. Something goes wrong with your voyage, you drop out of, let's say for the sake of argument, hyperspace (the game does not delve into this sort of thing in any detail beyond simply stating that FTL drives in this fiction are referred to as "skip" drives because the vessel "skips" c) far off course and your ship is adrift for 70 years. The skeleton crew maintaining the vessel has long since perished when a rogue mad scientist revives you from your cryosleep after several failed attempts with other unfortunate passengers. He needs you to find a way to procure more of the same kinds of chemicals he used to revive you so that he can start waking up other colonists in hopes of averting a systemwide crisis, seemingly of mismanagement and tyranny, although you later learn something far less pleasant is going on as well (naturally).

Everything about TOW feels a bit scaled-down compared to the conventional RPG-epics that Obsidian is known for: the scope of the game and the threat that is your ultimate nemesis, the depth of the companion NPCs, and the world-building. At least to all appearances, the greatest threat in the game is one that affects only the system you're inhabiting presently, so there's no universal or even galaxy-wide menace here. While there are a fair number of recruitable companions, not all of them have companion quests and there are no romance options among them; the closest you come to that is potentially setting up one of your earliest recruits with a life-partner. (Whether a lack of romance in an RPG is good or bad is undoubtedly a subjective assessment and a debate for a different forum.) The world-building that is there is fun but a bit shallow. For example, there appear to be two main metaphysical viewpoints (which seems like a small number) in this fiction, philosophism and scientism, and one of your companions is a strong proponent of the latter. Neither of these philosophies or religions is explained very well, and the companion in question goes on a sort of vision quest and receives some fairly meaningless gobbledy-gook that is supposed to enlighten him. The whole thing seems like it wasn't terribly well-thought-out.

The game has several things in common with Fallout and Wasteland. This isn't a post-apocalyptic setting, and it's not Earth, but the artwork and tech all has a vaguely steampunky look to it, and there are mega-corporations that control huge swaths of territory as well as industries and have their own unique technologies (well, by "unique," I mean slightly different). The game's humor tends to largely be derived from a satirical approach to how corporations actually running worlds would do things. For example, Sanjar Nandi, head of MSI on Monarch, asks you to retrieve a powerful weapon, the BOLT-52. This turns out to be a (minor spoiler) requisition form. While you're retrieving that, he also asks you to erase any files you find on nearby computer systems, files which happen to include an unflattering personnel review of one Mr. Nandi.

Combat in TOW is a real-time affair with what the game calls tactical time dilation (TTD). This not-quite-VATS allows you to target vulnerable points on enemies and slows them down while your meter is charged. The game explains this as a side effect of your extended cryosleep and unorthodox awakening--which is to say that it doesn't really bother to explain it at all. In any case, combat is curiously easy on the default difficulty level, rendering this game one of the rare instances of an RPG in recent memory where it's not necessarily advantageous to dump a lot of points into combat skills. In fact, I played as a really smart colonist with a focus on engineering, science, and dialog skills. This is a very viable build, but you miss out on a LOT of stuff in this game if you don't boost your hack and lockpick skills. Your primary stats, strength, intelligence, perception, et cetera, rarely seem to matter all that much, relative to secondary skills like persuade and hack. In The Outer Worlds, you pick your primary stats and put points into secondary skill groups at the beginning. In a somewhat novel approach, individual skills are placed into groups and you can boost as many as three skills at a time with a single point allocation until one of those skills hits 50 (out of a possible 100), at which time, you have to increase each skill within that group individually. Each level grants you 10 skill points to allocate and every third level you get a "perk," which provide bonuses to things like your weight limit, accuracy while moving, armor, et cetera. You can also gain extra perks by taking flaws, which the game will offer you at various points. For example, if you get killed by raptidons on Monarch a lot, the game may ask you if you want to take a "herpetophobia" flaw, which causes you to have a negative reaction (in the form of stat debuffs) in the presence of certain animals; if you choose to accept it, you can pick a perk from the tiers that are currently unlocked. It's an interesting system, and you do have the ability to respec on the ship you acquire early in the game, the Unreliable.

The game's ending does leave open a few possibilities for sequels, although it seems unlikely that any will be forthcoming. I wouldn't mind a deeper exploration of this world, but I'll probably just have to settle for Wasteland 3, whenever that is finished. As much fun as I had with the game, I still keep circling back to its brevity. The game's MSRP is $60, which is what you'd pay for something like Dragon Age: Inquisition, The Witcher 3, or Mass Effect 3 (yes, I know people hated that one, and that's not the point). While the game feels polished and well-done for what it is, it lacks the epic scope of something I'd expect at this pricepoint. Naturally many people will be playing it as part of Game Pass either on XBONEs or PCs, but in some ways, I'd rather see this priced $10 or maybe $15 cheaper at MSRP and not be part of a Game Pass than see it released at this price either because Microsoft was hoping to offset development costs and the cost of having it available for "free" to many users or just because someone has the mindset that all new games have to be $60. I don't think that's a thing, but--and I've already belabored this point to what is probably an absurd degree, this is just not a $60 game. I realize this is something of a backhanded endorsement, but it is a good game in general and a fun RPG experience, despite my reservations about its size and scope. If you enjoy RPGs and you have Game Pass, it's absolutely worth your time. If you don't have Game Pass, wait for a sale (you're a CAG if you're reading this, so you were going to anyway).

Origins is the somewhat-confusing tale of Bayek, a medjay (sort of an Egyptian sheriff) whose son was murdered by a cabal of conspirators who sought his assistance in opening a vault with, well, it's never terribly clear what was in it, but they figured that child-murder was a good way to get in it. Bayek didn't know how to get into the vault anyway, as is sometimes the way of these things, but he makes good his escape and begins a quest to hunt down the conspirators and forgive them. Just kidding. He wants to murder them.

My last AC game was Assassins Creed II, which I thought was really fun, but I ended up getting stuck on a story mission involving stealthily killing five or six different guys (yeah, the details are pretty fuzzy after all this time). I enjoyed most of the aspect of the gameplay, although the puzzle rooms were my least favorite. I think I'm too old for them--or maybe I never had the requisite patience to start with.

This entry in the series is purportedly intended to reveal the "origins" of the Assassins, hence the clever name. When you finish the game, you may have a vague idea about this, but there will remain things that are fairly unclear to you--unless it's just me and if you've played every AC game since ACII, you'd suddenly experience total enlightenment on this point. This is a possibility, but I feel confident that it is a remote one.

The game looks and sounds terrific. It's clear that Ubisoft Montreal put a massive amount of work into making period locations, details, and backgrounds as authentic as possible. If you don't believe me, check out the Discovery Tour mode. This mode is one of the things I was particularly excited about regarding the game. In it, you select a topic and an avatar from a range of the PCs and NPCs in the game and walk, ride, or punt your way through an area while hitting points of interest associated with behind-the-scenes information on creating the game world, real archaeological information, or real historical information about the setting, the people, and/or the place. It is a substantial amount of museum-tour-quality information at your fingertips, and Ubi sold it separately from the base game (there is no interactivity to speak of beyond the points of interest, so if you want to explore ancient Egypt without even being attacked by annoyed crocodiles, this is your ticket). It's quite good, but mostly what I've discovered is that, after putting approximately 119 hours into the base game and the DLC content, I don't really have the patience for it.

Bayek starts off with five targets to eliminate, one of which he does in the game's prologue. After finishing off the last target, he discovers that his conspiracy is more wide-ranging than he originally believed and gains a new set of targets. In addition to the main story missions, there are numerous side missions that appear in every region. They're not super-original or complex--they're fairly generic fetch, murder or rescue quests, but what they lack in quality they make up for in quantity. As in many modern open-world games, each region contains so much content that it's not difficult for you to "overlevel" the region. Ubi is aware of this and you have the option to have enemies scale to your level no matter what the default level is in the area; you also have the option to simply not do a lot of side missions that will give you so much experience that you overlevel the area. It really just depends on how you feel about the concept of enemy-scaling and content. I fall squarely in the camp of having more content rarely being a bad thing for a game (unless it's just a terrible game, which this is not).

When Bayek levels up he gains some health and damage and is able to unlock part of his prolific skill tree, with three areas of focus--melee combat, ranged combat, and "mystical abilities" (which include a lot of skills involving poisons, sleep toxins, and animal taming). These mean that you can play Bayek in a few different ways. My Bayek build was essentially a brutal combat machine who dealt serious damage with fast edged weapons. You can also rely on a lot of bow mechanics and sic animals on enemies and poison enemies with toxins that "infect" other enemies, leading to chain reactions of death. The variety of weapons available also makes for myriad tactical options (which you will need for some of the more challenging boss fights). For example, light bows fire a rapid succession of arrows, while predator bows have very low quantities of ammunition, but their charged shots can be devastating. Bayek can wield weapons ranging from daggers to several different types of straight and curved swords as well as large and small blunt weapons. Each of these can range from ordinary to rare to legendary in quality, with each step up granting more powerful bonuses (as one might expect). Weapons have levels, and it's possible to pay money to "level up" a weapon to bring it up to your current level, upgrading its stats. This way, if you have a favorite sword, you can ensure that it keeps up with you. Weapon types are, naturally, heavier and slower or lighter and faster, and these call for different strategies in handling single and multiple enemies in combat. All of this makes AC:O's combat system very rich and rewarding.

You will occasionally play as Bayek's semi-estranged wife, Aya, who is on a mission of her own to support Cleopatra's claim to the throne of Egypt against her brother Ptolemy. Her larger goal, of course, mirrors Bayek's, but she sees this as their best option moving forward--to gain powerful friends and ensure their ascendance. Aya's sections were not my favorites because he has a more limited set of abilities relative to her husband--and some of these sequences involve the game's dull and tedious naval combat. Yes, I get that some people like these sequences but I don't; I find them to be a jarring distraction from the elements of gameplay in the rest of the game. Naval combat involves awkwardly maneuvering your trireme to move around enemy vessels, launch fire arrow attacks, block enemy volleys, and avoid pitfalls like being rammed or running over Greek fire. One of these sequences is mandatory as part of the main story, another is part of an optional side mission, and another plays a role in one of the single-player DLCs.

The story DLCs, The Hidden Ones and The Curse of the Pharaohs, add new areas and objectives to the already-expansive map. Of the two, the former is better in my opinion, if somewhat less deep, than the latter, as it ties in directly to the events of the main story and advances that plot to some degree. The latter, set in Thebes, pits Bayek against risen Pharaoh spirits on a quest to restore the dead to their rest in a permanent fashion. Along the way, he must make numerous excursions to the underworld, each of which is its own unique bit of weirdness. The Curse story seems to revolve around a battle between monotheist and polytheist factions, and the details are confusing in the best of circumstances.

There are some issues with the game. While it was remarkably stable in general, I did experience some crashes. Some of the game's quests require Bayek to use an ability called "Dawn & Dusk" that must be unlocked through the "seer" portion of the skill tree; this should have been an inherent ability. There are also a number of weird issues with the framing-device story and certain occurrences in the main narrative. Some of this may be "normal" when dealing with this series, but it's not clear to me as my experience is limited in this regard. The framing story is about a brilliant engineer named Layla Hassan, denied by Abstergo the ability to work on the animus project, who designs her own animus, is tracked down by corporate goons, and eventually flees Egypt in the company of an Assassin. The biggest problem with it is that it's fundamentally unnecessary. I can't see any player being particularly invested in Layla's activities or her fate. Additionally, there are hints in certain rooms that Bayek accesses in the pyramids that suggest that either aliens, time-travellers, or gods are intervening in the history of mankind. All of this was extremely unclear from beginning to end, and I have no idea how any of it is intended to fit into the fiction of this universe.

Having said that, I had a tremendous amount of fun playing this game and Odyssey is already in my backlog.

This one is mixes trading card game elements into the concept. Play cards to generate gold, spend gold on packs of cards, and strategize by placing the cards in the optimum configuration in the playmat's grid.

Note that this is still an early work-in-progress: what you're seeing is a game that I spent maybe 10-15 hours working on last week as a fun little side project. But the response to it has been way bigger than I expected, getting around 5,000 plays/day on just this little preview build. So I'll be adding a bunch of new content to it, more than I originally planned, and aim for a "real" 1.0 release sometime in within the next few weeks.

<<< edit: preview link removed. Full version now at https://www.kongregate.com/games/Fordesoft/creature-card-idle >>>

Zoo Tycoon was a decent first effort. Parts of it are even rather fun. There were several major shortcomings. It sounded terrific--both the music and ambient noise/sound effects were spot-on. It looked . . . well, less-than-stellar. Animal models and environments were only fair, even allowing for the tech of the day. You had serious restrictions on your zoo layouts and certain animals could only be placed in what were essentially pre-built habitats that sucked a lot of the joy out of having them. Want a huge exhibit for your Nile monitors with a pond that has underwater viewing areas and some land spaces to hang out? Well, that's not going to happen. They'll be fine sitting on this little island here.

It could also be rather boring. There were stretches in the game where there was simply nothing to do but wait until you researched an item or had enough money to buy an animal. You had to unlock the sandbox mode, which is a situation I have mixed feelings about. Sometimes I like jumping into things without the hand-holding of a tutorial; while the later games seem to really benefit from the tutorial levels, this iteration in the genre really did not need one.

JWE improved on a lot of the issues with the 2013 game. First, it had dinosaurs, so, WIN! The dinos look and sound great, like the movie creatures, so watching one come out of the gate of the Hammond Research Center just never gets old. You have the freedom to create habitats of most any size and stock them with whatever you want, although most carnivores will not co-exist peacefully. A lot of what sells the game is the atmosphere, with JW actors (including the notorious Mr. Goldblum) providing color commentary. Personally I found that unlocking everything could be quite challenging, given that you often have to juggle conflicting priorities. One of the major flaws is the inability to see whether species are compatible or anything about their habitat requirements before you start hatching new specimens. When dealing with the more volatile critters, this can be a recipe for . . . well, large or sufficiently-aggressive animals can destroy fencing, and you remember what Goldblum said in Jurassic Park about the difference between a malfunction here and a malfunction at the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland? Yeah, that happens--which is both great and screamingly unrealistic. I mean, think about it--six people get eaten at your dinosaur park and the worst consequence you get from that is that your visitor happiness numbers go down for a while? What kinds of flaws carried over or were introduced in JWE? There are still lulls in the action where you wait for things to happen, although there aren't quite as many. Unfortunately, one of the ways that Frontier cut down on that specific type of tedium is by introducing a new one: manually assigning rangers to fill food stations. The presence of "feeders" in the game seems superfluous on its face: predatory dinosaurs should, in theory, be able to hunt down game without this, and an even more absurd scenario is the herbivores who will ignore the lush vegetation all around them and starve to death unless you put a machine near them that spits out plant material at designated times. The islands aren't exactly free-form playgrounds, as you can only construct buildings and exhibits within prescribed areas. The gyrospheres, those cool-looking transparent plastic doodads introduced in the first Jurassic World movie, are terribly finicky; you have to lay track for them to follow (which is a little weird in itself) and if you're introducing them as a feature in a park that is already largely-complete, the pathing can be tricky, if not impossible. Power management can be a real chore in certain scenarios, and you do not want to experience a power loss in a park where a gaggle of electric fences is the only thing between your guests and an angry Indoraptor.

So how does the not-quite-complete version of Planet Zoo look? It looks pretty nice. The animals and environments look nice. The soundtrack is very reminiscent of one of the old Blue Fang games. I don't know exactly what "zoo sim" music is supposed to sound like--vaguely African or Caribbean? Whatever it is, Frontier seems to have nailed it. The tutorial level has the novice player completing the design and troubleshooting problems with the Goodwin House Zoo in Britain. The default control scheme is a bit wonky. Unlike its 2013 predecessor, which practically required a controller (not surprising given its pedigree), this one doesn't even acknowledge their existence. Fair enough, it's a computer game--but the default scroll speeds with both mouse and keyboard controls are a bit ludicrous and not at all conducive to fine control. To be fair about this, I do not have a gaming mouse for my laptop, but that was never a problem in JWE. Here, though, clicking the middle mouse button and moving the mouse to rotate your view is oddly difficult to pull off--and this does not seem to be reconfigurable at this point (I tried). An unfortunate inheritance from the 2013 predecessor is the requirement to stick certain animals like the yellow anaconda into pre-built "exhibits"; so much for my grand plan to create a herps-only zoo. There seems to be a lot of clipping all the way round at this point. The height controls not only allow you to soar into the atmosphere, but they also allow to achieve the kind of subterranean depths only previously seen by the Mole People--this is not a good thing. Likewise, I saw numerous instances of mammals sticking tails into the ground and through brick walls in fits of pique. On the plus side, the toolkit does allow you to get creative with pathbuilding, so if you want to recreate that zoo that you built in Zoo Tycoon 2 10 years ago that was pretty much all habitat with teeny-tiny walkways for the annoying humans, er, guests, you can probably make that happen. Animals have a lot of naturalistic behaviors such as playing, resting, eating, and drinking. I haven't seen how Frontier has handled mating or defecating. I also haven't seen anything suggesting that if I put some zebras in an enclosure with some lions, I'll end up with some fat lions and some ex-zebras, so I don't know whether those kinds of behaviors are modelled here either. We know that the enclosures become damaged over time unless maintained in good repair, so does that mean escaped animals can and will attack guests like the dinos in JWE? I suppose time will tell (but I suspect not). I actually wish that more sims would let you be a dick like The Sims. If i want to build a zoo that's essentially a deathtrap for tourists in sandbox mode, then by gum I say, "Let me do it! Let me commit murder like the mastermind behind that Cube movie! Let my park be a warning to all interlopers never to cross my path! [insert maniacal laughter here]" Well, you take my point.

There are three modes showing in the beta, two of which were available to players: Tutorial/Campaign, and Franchise. Fixing up the Goodwin House is the first campaign mission and it's the only one that was available in the beta. The Franchise mode, I confess, I don't quite understand at this juncture. The premise seems to be that you use the game's two in-game currencies to build zoos in different places and trade animals with other players. Apparently beta players complained about this mode being online-only so Frontier is developing an offline version. The Sandbox mode was locked, which is possibly because it was simply a beta and not all of the pieces are supposed to be available or possibly because, in this game like previous ones, it's gated behind certain milestones in other game modes.

The beta shows a lot of promise as possibly being the best zoo sim to date. I hope this is true, but there isn't a massive amount of competition for the title at this point.

Release Date: 15/11/19

Pokemon Silver was the first game that I ever owned and ever since then I have loved every installment that has been released. After the success of the recent Let’s Go Pikachu/Eevee I am very much looking forward to playing a brand new adventure in Pokemon Sword and Shield. A new generation of Pokemon will be introduced and they have already started to reveal some of these on their Youtube channel. Alongside new Pokemon there is also a new region called Galar, and this will be great fun to explore. This will be the first new core game to be released on the Nintendo Switch so it will be very interesting to see where they take it with all the new features that are available to them.

Overwatch

Release Date: 15/10/19

Overwatch has been one of my favourite PC games for a while now and the prospect of being able to play it portable sounds great to me. Whilst I know it will not provide the full experience of what you get on a PC or console I am only a casual player so it will be fun to pick up and play on the go every now and then. The dev team have also implemented a new motion controls which allows you to use the joy cons much like the old Wii-mote, using one of them as an aiming tracker. I’m not entirely sure how this will work for people who have the Switch Lite however, as it may prove to be a big handicap for them not having access to the detachable Joy-Cons.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Release Date: 15/10/19

I don’t want to admit how many hours I have put into this game on my pc but it is safe to say that I am very excited for the release of this game in October. It will be great fun to start a new game and with all the dlc being included from the start it is likely that I will be playing this for a large amount of time. One thing I am looking forward to seeing is if they implement some new mechanics specifically for the switch. The combat is one of the stand out features of The Witcher and I would love it if there was some form of motion control introduced to it.

Luigi’s Mansion 3

Release Date: 31/10/19

Luigi travels to a luxurious hotel with his friends but all is not what it seems as King Boo had set a trap to capture Mario. The latest installment of Luigi’s mansion looks like it will be one of the most fun games to play this year and it looks absolutely fantastic on the Nintendo Switch. Luigi now wields the ‘Poltergust G-00’ to tackle his enemies and it can even summon his counterpart ‘Gooigi’. This is what excites me most about the game as Gooigi can be played by a second player, meaning that it will be a great game to play if you have a friend over. There is also a multiplayer mode where up to 8 players can clear objective based challenges.

If you would like to play any of these games then I would highly recommend getting a Nintendo Switch if you haven’t got one already. I would however purchase the original console over the Switch Lite as a lot of upcoming games seem to include motion controls. Motion control can only be used if you have detachable Joy-Cons and the Switch Lite does not have these so you would have to purchase separate Joy-Cons.. If you would like to know more about the differences between consoles then just have a look at this comparison.

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NOTE: This post will contain some substantial spoilers for the story of AC:O, so if you haven't played it, and you intend to, please do yourself a favor and stop here. You have been warned.

We learn Bayek's tragedy pretty early on, and, as befits this series, it involves a Conspiracy. This particular conspiracy has designs on control of Egypt, and they need Bayek for this purpose. To convince him to cooperate, they murder his son. Probably not the smartest way to go about this, in retrospect. Nonetheless, this is the beginning of Bayek's quest for revenge. He is presented with a group of five initial targets, leaders of this plot. He kills the first one at the start of the game. After the other four are slain, he believes that he has exacted his vengeance and ensured his son may rest in the afterlife. Then he discovers that there are more conspirators (of course).

In contrast to the first targets on his list, who seem only interested in power, the next ones are somewhat more complex figures.

If he tackles these in the order of difficulty, as the game intends, you start with the Scarab, later revealed to be a man called Taharqa. Taharqa is working to recruit settlers to the once-lost city of Letopolis. He intends to resurrect this fallen city and bring it prosperity and peace. The game intimates that his methods are brutal, and outright states that he has his henchmen torture and remove the tongue of his father-in-law for the crime of investigating his identity. Yet the game also introduces us (and Bayek) to his doting son and loving wife and has the player fight alongside Taharqa to defeat a plague of bandits in the area. Were it not for the pretty in-your-face example of the Scarab's vicious methods, he would seem like a noble figure.

Next, there is the Hyena, who Bayek discovers is a grieving mother. The game definitely takes a turn for the weird here, and I'm curious to see whether some of the ideas that are touched on here actually go anywhere; if it turns out that this is just some sort of bog-standard, "oh, look, there were ancient aliens in Egypt," I'll be pretty bummed. In any case, she is attempting a ritual to resurrect her dead daughter. It does involve some murder, but, uh, so does doing what Bayek does, and, even though he berates her for trying to do something that is "not for them," I couldn't help but wonder whether a man in his position might not consider doing exactly what she is doing if he harbored any suspicion that it might actually work.

Well, that's as far as I've gotten, but I'm curious to see what lies ahead.