racketboy.com

Having played all of the other Battlefield campaigns released this console generation, I felt it was only fair to give this one a play as well (especially considering that it was only 100 yen). I had it on good authority that this game was, much like Battlefield 3, hardly anything to write home about, but I had also heard that it was at least better than that game, so I went into this with some slight optimism (if you can even call it that). It took me around 6.5 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game (in English) on real hardware on (mostly) easy difficulty (for reasons we’ll get to momentarily).

Battlefield 4 is narratively another modern military shooter living DEEP in the shadow of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare much like the past several BF games had been. You play a member of a special ops force in the American military, and the story focuses around your efforts to save the crew of the aircraft carrier you’re stationed on during the escalating conflict between world powers that kicked off at the end of the previous game (which this has some tenuous ties to, but nothing terribly important). This is certainly the best written of the CoD-wannabee Battlefield games released up to this point, but that’s damning with faint praise. The story is nowhere near as jingoistic or racist as Battlefield 3’s could be at times, but again, we’re not dealing with very highly set standards here.

The story *attempts* to be about something or have characters via the members of your squad Irish and Hannah, but it falls very short of actually doing anything with those characters. Sure, we get some nice developments and character moments between Irish and Hannah, some of which are very sweet or funny. They managed to be characters I cared about somewhat. But for all these character moments, they fail to ever actually build to anything. There are no greater themes being explored and no larger character arcs to delve into, so while this is certainly a more entertaining story than the past several thanks to its stronger character writing, the bar is about as low as it could possibly be. DICE have continued their very perfunctory campaign designs that are in no way a meaningful reason to show up even compared to the relatively low standards of the genre in 2013.

That very “we had to make a campaign, so here it is!” vibe absolutely carries over to the level design and gameplay too. It’s nice that it’s better than BF3 was in that we have less utterly miserable vehicle sections, but that’s hardly something to brag about (you may be noticing a theme with the nature of my praise towards this game XD). Gunplay is still fine, but not quite my cup of tea, and level design is decidedly okay but not particularly great in any way either. If I had to name one thing I really didn’t like in particular, I find it baffling that a game with dedicated stealth sections lacks any kind of “silent kill” popup in the UI to tell you definitively that you’re going to take out a guy silently. Even then, however, it’s an inconsequential enough aspect of the gameplay that it’s hard to get *that* mad about.

This is the first cross-generational Battlefield game, and while Hardline would look remarkably good on the PS3 a couple years later, this game does not look particularly nice in any regard. The music is hardly anything to care about either, but it’s okay I guess. At least the excellent gun sounds DICE are known for are here as grand as ever. The only thing to really complain about is the Japanese dub, which is middling at best in just how hurried the delivery is in order to fit all the lines into the small gaps of audio the English script used. That stuff is quite hard to care about in the face of just how unacceptable the game runs on PS3 though.

I’ll admit that I’ve really buried the lead here. The biggest and most damning aspect of the game is the performance. I’d hope that by now, well after it’s gotten the last of its patches, that the game runs better on other major platforms, and EA had always been known for giving less than a high priority to the quality of their PS3 ports too. Be that as it may, this is an utterly unforgiveable degree of bugginess to release a game in.

The reason I bumped down the game to easy in the first place is that I had to replay an early mission 3 different times because a checkpoint near the end of the level was bugged. The black loading screen would never go away even though I could hear the gameplay having loaded successfully behind it, and no amount of respawning or restarting that checkpoint would fix it. I got so sick of redoing the level from the start (and concerned that I’d run into more of these later on) that I just stuck the game on easy mode so I’d have to risk as few future checkpoints as possible. The issues don’t stop there either. Melee seemed to work extremely selectively, and there were two separate points where the game just hard crashed on me and I had to reset the console to get out of it (one time I have no idea what caused it, but the second was because I was looking for collectibles in a part of the map that despawned while I was in it =w=).

Verdict: Not Recommended. This is a kinda decent campaign that I had a mostly okay time with, but the performance problems really kill any possibility I had of giving the game a remotely positive recommendation. There is absolutely no justification for releasing a game in this state, let alone keeping it in this state so long after it had already come out. While there’s not a ton of reason to look back at a mid at best FPS campaign like this in the first place, there’s absolutely zero reason to give the PS3 port even the slightest glance no matter how deep a discount you find it at XP.

Finally having acquired the last of the mid-era Call of Duty games that had escaped my grasp up until this point, I decided to start at the oldest one and work my way forward. I’ve heard nothing but great things about Modern Warfare 2 basically since it came out, but I’d also more recently heard some very interesting (and negative) criticism of its story in some places, so I was super curious to finally get some firsthand experience with this one. It took me around 5.5 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on normal difficulty on real hardware.

Continuing on from the state of the world where Modern Warfare 1 left off, peace was attained, but the state of the world meanwhile is incredibly fraught. Predictably, some rogue elements somehow given a ton of power after the events of the last game throw the world into chaos, and the United States and Russia find themselves at war. There are some returning characters like Soap (who has speaking lines now!) and Price, but we once again follow a scattershot of perspectives to guide our way through this increasingly heated conflict.

The writing is, in a word, a mess. Now, to lay all my cards down on the table, the Japanese version *only* has a Japanese dub with Japanese subtitles. I’m not going to claim to have understood every bit of dialogue perfectly during all those awful firefights, but it was more than simple enough to grasp that this is an incredibly frantic story that’s very meandering in its pacing. The set pieces you’re going through are conceptually arresting enough, I suppose, but compared to MW1, the way they’re woven together is incredibly confused and unclear, and the game ends up abruptly stumbling into its conclusion.

The narrative we do have, outside of the confusion and rough storytelling philosophy, isn’t terribly great either. The main antagonist (if you can even call him that) has an *interesting* motive, but it’s pretty hard to say the whole game is based around that or anything. It’s more of a last minute twist for the sake of being shocking, if anything (which you can say about most twists in this game). Of all of the Infinity Ward games that I’ve now played, this one is easily the most cringe-inducingly pro-America out of all of them. The levels detailing the Russian assault on the U.S. Capital are embarrassing in their sheer gratuity.

It’s difficult not to start rolling your eyes at just how contrived things end up being, and that’s outside of smaller factors like how the conflict is *shown* playing out over the course of a week. What does the defense of America look like? It’s not defending civilians, no, it’s going through a wealthy neighborhood in D.C. looking for the all-important VIP we need for some reason! Admittedly, following up the novelty and powerfully brisk execution of Modern Warfare 1’s campaign was never going to be an easy feat for anyone including Infinity Ward themselves. In that effort, I believe they utterly failed to not only on-up their previous work, but in even making something decent. Frankly, this game is aggressively living in the shadow of CoD4 so badly that it might think it was a Battlefield game if not for the gunplay being so good.

The gunplay is, thankfully, damn good as we’d come to expect in a CoD game, but the mechanics are also really disappointing in a lot of ways compared to how Modern Warfare 1 handled things. For starters, a lot of level design is just so clumsy and inelegant that it makes for some really tedious slogs. Constantly getting ganked from places I didn’t realize were there in South American slums sucked almost as much as the confusing back and forth across the street defending some fast food restaurants as we try to rescue the VIP near Washington, but it all amounted to a game that has more levels that were struggling to find a fun factor when I can barely say that about a single level in Modern Warfare 1. It at least manages to end on a strong set of a couple levels, but I still couldn’t help think “where were all of these good levels in the previous few hours of video game!?” XD

The other main thing that made this such a pain to actually play was how the UI has been changed. Well, I say that. While the obsession with minimalism at the expense of function *is* a big problem during this generation, Call of Duty honestly doesn’t offer suffer from it. What Modern Warfare 2 in particular suffers from VERY badly is the long memed on “jam” effect when you get hit. Now, I want to first make clear that I’m a big fan of regenerating health. What I’m far less of a fan of is *just* how thick that “jam” effect is when you’re being hit. If you’re taking even the smallest bit of damage, your visibility goes from 100% to 30% in an instant, and it actively inhibits gameplay to the point that I could rarely even see the reticule indicating the direction I was being fired upon from in the first place. They mercifully walked this back in later games, but holy crap did it ever make this game a chore to play on top of the cruddy level design from moment one and never let up.

Aesthetically, the game is pretty good. Modern Warfare 1 has a stronger soundtrack overall, but the sound and music is still perfectly serviceable here. The graphics are similarly very serviceable, and it looks quite good for the time even if not terribly impressive by today’s standards. The voicework is also rather nice, and after how awful some of the subtitles have been in Squenix’s published Black Ops games and how poor the dubs often are in EA’s Battlefield games, it was really nice to experience something that was clearly so well cared about (even if I missed out on all the fun English language voicework). One last note is that this game runs *incredibly* well on this hardware. The framerate runs so high on a PS3 that it looks downright uncanny, and Infinity Ward absolutely deserve props for getting this to run like such a beast when so many other titles comfortably settled for far less.

Verdict: Not Recommended. While there are some neat bells and whistles here and there (and I’m sure the multiplayer was great fun back in the day), this is just not a very well put together single-player campaign. Even outside of the poorly assembled narrative, the play experience of the jam on your screen alongside usually cruddy level design makes this game really hard to enjoy in the way it counts most. Given the quality this series usually did and would go on to have, and particularly from Infinity Ward, it was a real disappointment to have something that was such a frustrating slog. If you’re really hankering for some old modern military FPS campaign goodness, your time is absolutely better spent on any of the other piles of CoD games on this platform.

Next up after finishing Modern Warfare 2 was, logically, Modern Warfare 3. With all the praise I’d heard over the years for MW2, the opposite was largely true for MW3. From what little I had heard about this game years back, it seemed folks were largely quite unhappy with it, though not as unhappy as they’d go on to be with Infinity Ward’s games released after this like Ghosts and such. Even still, my time with MW2’s campaign was so unpleasant and my time with Ghosts’s campaign so fun that I was very curious as to just what the stepping stone between them would have in store for me. It took me about 5.5 hours to play through the Japanese version (with the English dub) of the game on normal mode on real hardware.

This game is a straight continuation of MW2’s story, more or less. Sure, you beat the main American bad guy at the end of the previous game, but the big Russian bad guy who started this whole thing is still out there, and the conflict between the US and Russia is only heating up further and further. Once again swapping between various perspectives, you follow these soldiers (along with Soap, Price, and others) as they fight to get Russia off of American shores, stop this war, and bring the guy responsible for it all to justice.

Overall, this is a very serious improvement from Modern Warfare 2’s campaign, even if that’s admittedly not terribly high praise ^^;. While our narrative still doesn’t have anything that can be described as a single proper three-dimensional character, and we’re not exactly exploring any themes with our story either, we’ve at least succeeded in making a big dumb action movie that’s cohesive to follow (much like MW1 had been and Ghosts would be) even if we’ve elevated characters like Price to Goku-levels of invincibility for no good reason in the process <w>. There isn’t *no* racism or jingoism, of course, and we’re still certainly glorifying the US and British armed services, but it’s back at a much more tolerable level. It’s a big, action-packed romp that doesn’t outstay its welcome, and I enjoyed it. It really felt like playing through a 007 Bond film with how they handle their primary antagonist, and while I wouldn’t always consider that a good thing, it’s a compliment in this case XD

Mechanically we’ve taken a big step forward from MW2 as well, thankfully. Gunplay is still great as ever, and level design has been repolished up significantly. Levels are much snappier and quicker to play through, and it complements the arcade gunplay very well. There aren’t any that are anything close to as bad a slog as MW2’s levels so often were. Set pieces are big and memorable, albeit not as silly as Ghosts would get, with a personal favorite being the submarine infiltration x3. It succeeds much more often (though not always) in also taking real world locations and building set pieces around them that feel less gratuitous in just how Hell Yeah America! they are. We’ve even mercifully fixed the awful visibility problem with the “jam on your screen” taking damage effect that plagued MW2 *so* badly, so the moment-to-moment gameplay is way less rough as well. Infinity Ward have done a great job bringing their campaign design back to the standards of quality that their older titles set, and as someone who only plays these for the single-player campaigns, I’m very thankful for it.

Aesthetically, the game still looks and sounds very good just like you’d hope it would. It’s quite a nice looking game, being such a late-era PS3 title, and the sound and music and such are as good as ever too (even if there’s nothing super stand-out cool in the soundtrack). Also, I once again need to give big props to Infinity Ward for making this game run SO well on the PS3. It’s not quite the “woah” that MW2’s performance was on this platform, but just how stable and high a framerate they’ve managed on the hardware is something I just can’t ignore with how aggressively it leapt out at me. It’s not going to compare to a high-spec PC build of the time, sure, but it’s nice to see that they nonetheless prioritized the performance on console so highly (especially when companies like EA were out there releasing barely functional PS3 ports of Battlefield games).

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. It doesn’t have quite the silliness factor or straight up bombastic set pieces of Ghosts, but it’s still got that great gunplay to hold it up. If you’re in the mood for old-ish single player FPS content and don’t mind hopping into the end part of a larger story, then MW3’s campaign still holds up pretty darn well, and it’s a fine choice to spend a weekend on among a sea of other Also Fun CoD campaigns of the time.

Having finished up all of the PS3-era Call of Duty games I could get for super cheap around here, I continued on to the PS4-era ones I could get for similarly super cheap x3. Much like with Modern Warfare 3, I had heard a ton of praise for Black Ops 2 but a lot of scorn for its sequel growing up. These were never my kind of game to play either single-player or multiplayer, but the general vibe that I always got was that people really didn’t care for the CoD games from any company in this era, and that this one in particular was a very disappointing ending to the original Black Ops trilogy’s story. As someone who is hardly a fan of either of the previous two Black Ops games, I hardly went into this expecting anything good, but I was still surprised in unexpected ways nonetheless. It took me around 8 hours to complete the Japanese version (with the English dub) of the campaign on normal mode on real hardware.

Much like between the original Black Ops and its sequel, we’ve got another 40-ish year time gap between the previous game’s narrative and this one. You play an unnamed player character (they’re even referred to in the subtitles as “player”) who can be either male or female. You pick at the start and can, in a very cool choice, change whenever you like between missions with no consequence. After receiving a near death blow in a special ops mission, they receive life-saving surgery along with life-altering bodily augmentations as they’re inducted into a special black ops force for the Winslow Accord (basically the NATO/USA stand-in) military. You follow them on their mission across the world and into the human mind itself as they take on a mystery that threatens to tear the world’s delicate balance of power apart (and much much more).

Both Black Ops 1 and 2 are both games with sloppily written stories and very firmly right wing-leaning stories that are very much products of their neo liberal eras, and Black Ops 3 is really no different. While Black Ops 2’s story was still very right wing like the first game’s was, the actual pacing and plotting of the story were a solid enough upgrade from the first game that I had *some* hope for this game to continue that upwards trend, but my hope was decidedly misplaced. This is the most straightforwardly right wing as well of the original Black Ops trilogy on top of being a both less ambitious yet similarly clumsily constructed narrative than Black Ops 2 had done.

While the game *does* have characters, we are once again in a story devoid of either character arcs or larger narrative themes. There are twists and turns in the story, of course, but a lot of it seems to just be trying to outsmart your expectations or just broadly seem more clever than they actually are. The only really consistent theme (and something that is continued from Black Ops 2) is that any criticism of the western hegemony or neo imperial sphere just isn’t real. It’s all some combination of insincere and, in reality, motivated by either an entirely personal, selfish motive or just arbitrary hatred of all things “good”. Many times, bad guy characters criticize crimes against humanity conducted by the Winslow Accord and/or the CIA, and our good guys’ only response is to call them crazy. These quite straightforward statements of the WA’s cruelty or injustice are met with the same kind of concerned incredulity that you’d give someone who was adamantly claiming that the moon was not only made of cheese, but that all of the world’s governments should be working to retrieve it.

Much like with previous Black Ops games, there is no shortage of depictions of western powers, our “good guys” doing very bad things, but there is never any sincere or nuanced/direct criticism of those things by either side. This is not a conversation about these topics that the game is trying to have with itself or its audience. They’re simple plot conveniences used to tell an action movie story because the lads at Treyarch really like sci-fi and action movies but don’t understand the messages those movies are telling well enough to actually tell their own kind of nuanced societal critique with them. This didn’t make me quite as viscerally uncomfortable as the racism in Black Ops 1 did, but this is still such a disgustingly pro-imperialism, right wing story that I can give it no real respect. While I can’t say for sure if the writing team at Treyarch are just that right wing or if they’re just this incompetent at writing good stories, I’m frankly unsure which of those readings is the kinder one at this point.

In terms of our gameplay, that’s also taken a step both sideways and backwards from Black Ops 2’s designs. Level design is still not quite up to snuff to how the teams at Infinity Ward or Sledgehammer tend to do things. It’s definitely not as bad as Black Ops 1, thank goodness, but there’s a real problem with visibility in environments that makes getting into firefights much more of a pain than it is in pretty much any of the rest of these games. The sci-fi augments to your character’s vision allow you to do infrared pings or see little markers above enemies, which admittedly does help a lot, but I also can’t help but feel that particularly the latter UI innovation is more of a crutch to make the poor environmental/level design less of a problem than a proper feature in and of itself.

The gunplay is pretty good as it usually is, thankfully, but its coupled with enemy design and new tertiary features that seem decidedly not fully realized. On the more straightforward and obvious end, the game really likes pitting you against big guys in power armor and big robots, and both kinds of enemy are massive pains in the butt to fight. They’re seriously overused in the story, and they’re never particularly fun to fight either with how tough and relentless their firepower is. Aside from just your guns, you’ve got some special hacker sci-fi powers to help you against these baddies, but I found rarely actually worth using.

In a step similar to Black Ops 2’s light RPG elements, Black Ops 3 has customizable loadouts as well as perks that can be tuned and unlocked by playing more and better through the story. You’ve even got more of those sci-fi powers to unlock this way if you’re so keen to. None of the powers I unlocked ever seemed all that useful, however. I quickly found some guns I liked using (a rifle and the rocket launcher, because those giant robots can only be fought with heavy ordinance and bringing your own makes it just that much easier), and because guns levels up as you use them, I saw little purpose in switching to a different main gun because the assault rifle I had already had the scopes and other side-grades unlocked for it. Sure, you can swap your loadouts at stations scattered throughout levels, but a “one size fits all” approach was just never disproven to not be the best path forward, at least for a first playthrough.

The sci-fi powers were also very underwhelming. While they show off some pretty slick ones in the tutorial mission at the start, once out in actual missions, I found it difficult to actually find much obvious use for any of the powers outside of the most straightforward ones (with my general standby being the one that explodes robots by looking at them). Perhaps someone with more of an eye towards experimentation could find more use for the enemy confusion or robot hacking powers, but they just never seemed all that useful when compared to blowing up stuff that my guns had a hard time taking down. There’s even a whole tree dedicated to movement tech skills like wall running, but that in itself is a massive problem. If you can only do movement tech by picking one particular loadout, then the levels can’t ever utilize that movement tech in interesting ways because they need to account for the player not using it.

The gameplay on the whole is *fine*, but compared to all of the varied side missions and alternate endings (not to mention just generally more solid level design) found in Black Ops 2, this game can’t help but feel like a hell of a backslide in design when compared to Treyarch’s previous work, let alone the (in my view) superior previous two Call of Duty games by Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer. To be honest, a lot of the future tech stuff in this just felt like poorer implementations of Sledgehammer’s exosuit stuff implemented in the previous year’s Advanced Warfare, and that vibe of “damn, that earlier game just did this better” was something that Black Ops 3 just never managed to make me stop feeling.

Aesthetically, the game does look quite nice at least. We’re flexing the power of the PS4 quite nicely, and environments, weapons, robots, and all the funky mind warping stuff that Treyarch love so much have all held up very nice in the 10-some years since this game came out. Granted, we’re still dealing with the crappy environmental design on a level design level, but it at least looks (and sounds) nice ^^;. The music is also perfectly fine. Nothing super daring or interesting, but it’s not bad at least. On the topic of sound, while I never had a chance to see what the Japanese audio dub was like, I sadly once again found the subtitles to be pretty terrible, which is doubly disappointing given that Square Enix wasn’t even publishing for Activision in Japan anymore, so now it’s entirely Activision’s own fault that their subtitles are so terrible.

Verdict: Not Recommended. Treyarch are generally some of the weaker written and designed Call of Duty campaigns, and Black Ops 3 does not escape that curse. Problems and criticisms I had with Black Ops 2 are largely both unaddressed and added to in ways I’ll admit, I really never expected to be the case. If you’re looking for a well-constructed single-player FPS experience on PS4, while I’m sure you could find worse, you can absolutely do a *hell* of a lot better, even for games out by 2015.

On to Infinity Ward’s first non-cross-generational title, I’ll admit I was a bit excited for this one. The whole concept of “Earth vs. Mars” presented an opportunity to escape a lot of the baggage that drawing from real-world places/conflicts often brings to Call of Duty’s storytelling, and I’d broadly heard a fair bit of praise for this game’s campaign (from what little I’d admittedly heard about it). Beyond all that, I just generally quite enjoy Infinity Ward’s campaign output, so if nothing else, I knew I was at least up for a fun time XD. It took me around 9.5 hours to play through the Japanese (with English dub) version of the game on real hardware on normal mode doing as much side content as I could.

Centuries in the future, humanity has colonized much of the solar system in one way or another. In particular, Mars has seen a very serious buildup of human colonies, but sadly to the point of seeing itself completely separate from Earth. The Settlement Defense Force, Mars’s military, is something of a military with a state rather than the other way around, and the uneasy stalemate between themselves and Earth’s forces is about to break. In a giant Pearl Harbor-style attack on Earth’s forces, you play Captain Reyes, the newly appointed captain of Earth’s last surviving carrier after every superior officer to him is taken out in the SDF’s surprise attack. It’s up to you and your rag tag crew to turn the tide of the war and make sure that Earth survives what’s to become the most tumultuous and eventful day in the history of humanity.

In something I had come to think I’d never be saying about a Call of Duty game, the writing in this game is genuinely great! It’s not even just in a Call of Duty: Ghosts-kind of way, where it’s a big dumb romp and you can enjoy it like a big stupid action movie relatively safely either! Reyes is a flawed character who actually changes over the course of the story. Our main villain not only isn’t the sole arbiter of Mars’s military might, but he’s also a very purposeful parallel to our protagonist because this is a story with broad narrative themes that we actually successfully execute on! And it’s even in a way that’s basically never horribly right wing! (though of course there is glorification of the armed forces. This *is* a war story, after all).

The character writing and banter is fun, and there are some memorable set pieces and characters for sure, but this, for once in the series’ history, actually succeeds in just having a conventionally well written story, and I’m frankly shocked but certainly happy that we ever made it this far! XD. There are a few little side stories (if you can call them that) that are a bit rushed like Ethan’s acceptance by the crew, and the SDF are basically the Space Russo-Nazis, but it’s all used so well for the main thematic drive that these are really minor complaints at the end of the day. Reyes’s journey to being a better leader, the one his troops need, is a genuinely touching tale of sacrifice that’s stocked with a diverse cast and good pacing to boot (we even have the series’ first canon gay character in a way that doesn’t feel like trying to just score brownie points with the LGBT+ crowd! Genuinely unbelievable! XD). I never thought I’d be able to sit here and recommend a Call of Duty game on the strength of its narrative themes just as much as its gameplay, but here we are! XD

The gameplay is, true to reliable Infinity Ward form, some of the best designed stuff that the series has seen. You’ve got two general modes of gameplay, both boots on the ground normal gunplay as well as flying around in your space fighter jet taking on other spaceships. There’s a decidedly Star Wars-y kind of vibe to it all, but they honestly pull it off really well. The spaceflight stuff is (mercifully) very arcadey and easy to pick up, so it might be a bit of a chore to those who prefer more hardcore flight simulation games, but for someone who really doesn’t care for that kind of thing, it was exactly what the doctor ordered. The guns feel great and have a really satisfying punch to them. The devs clearly had a lot of fun making big, punchy laser guns for the player to mess around with, and combined with the great level design and big, fun set pieces, this game was as much of a joy to play as it was to experience the story in. We even have a handful of big robot fights that are both not overused *and* actually fun in the first place! Take that, Black Ops 3! XD

Aesthetically, the game looks and sounds really nice, just as you’d expect from Activision’s flagship franchise. The sounds of the laser guns and space combat are very satisfyingly sci-fi, and the graphics, from the way the robots move to how the spaceships look, is all very nice too. While I never got a chance to listen to the Japanese dub for this game, the subtitles are actually pretty decent. They certainly don’t quite capture the vibe of all of the different accents all the different nationalities of your crew have or the spirit of the humor, but there are a few little touches here and there (even a few subtitle-only jokes) I noticed that made me come away with a positive opinion on them vs. how cruddy Black Ops 3’s were.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. Having now played just about half of the Call of Duty campaigns that exist, I can very comfortably say that this is one of if not *the* best one they’ve ever made, at the very least in the writing department. The credits are the usual Infinity Ward way of just one gigantic alphabetical list of names, no specific credit per person, for each company, but one of the few exceptions for that is for the game’s writer, and damn if he doesn’t deserve it. A genuinely well written game with some great space sci-fi gameplay, and it even looks gorgeous too! If you’re a fan of FPS single-player content at all, you are absolutely doing yourself a disservice if you (understandably) slept on this game and brushed it off as just another forgettable CoD campaign. Infinity Ward really put together something special with this one, and it’s truly something worthy of praise even outside of the sheer fact that it’s a CoD game with a well written story XD

1. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
Cynically, in the modern chapters, this game even admits that it's a commercially pedestrian blockbuster. It depicts history wrongly all the time, so there's little value in that. Purely as a game, it's mostly the same as the previous games, which means gameplay is automatic and shallow, while you hoover up symbols on your map. The only thing going for it would be the ship battles, which while sluggish and imprecise, are still somewhat novel and explosive. In about forty hours of play time, I think I had about an hour of fun being a pirate.
4/10

2. Minecraft
I was extremely pleasantly surprised at how much respect the game had for the player's ingenuity. The tutorial is merely some pages you can find in the options menu. You have minutes to set up a safe haven, preferably with a bed and torches, with little to no instructions. Dying halves your experience points and leaves all your gear scattered about. Although randomly generated, there's always a feeling you might find something unique. The final boss is a treat, being open ended and seemingly insurmountable at first. There's a lot of random stuff that can set you back a couple of hours back, which keeps the challenge honest and respectful. However, it is still a game about crafting, meaning half the time you'll be doing busywork and clicking around in menus.
8/10

3. Street Fighter 6
Link combos now have a three frame buffer, while the super meter(s) allow many alterations to your moves. Competitively, this means you'll spend less time practicing the same combos over and over, and instead practicing reading different situations. With less neutral and much more creativity, this makes Street Fighter more like the other anime fighters. Which while a good thing, makes me wonder why this should be played at all. The answer is the masses: the single player mode is a poor man's Yakuza, but nevertheless will feed the tournament scene with plenty of folks confident enough they'll want to compete.
8/10

The last of the Call of Duty games I could find locally for super cheap, I was a bit excited for this one because I quite enjoyed the previous Sledgehammer-developed CoD game I played. I figured it was a pretty safe bet that it wouldn’t top the excellent experience I had with Infinite Warfare’s campaign, but if Advanced Warfare was anything to go by, it seemed a pretty safe bet that I’d at the very least enjoy this one okay. It took me about 8.5 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game (English dub, Japanese text) on normal mode.

As the name flatly states, Call of Duty: WWII takes place in the titular conflict. A throwback to a bygone era of first-person shooters of a decade or so earlier, we follow Private Daniels, an American soldier, in his platoon’s mission to liberate Europe from the Nazis. We follow him from a total greenhorn storming the beaches at Normandy (because where else would a WWII story start?) through the liberation of Paris and even storming the Rhine River to make a way for the final invasion into Germany. It may not be the most original story, and I’ll admit I haven’t even seen Saving Private Ryan to know how much of that they use as inspiration for this, but it’s still a competently told story that I enjoyed.

While it certainly isn’t the quality of Infinite Warfare, the narrative in WWII is definitely a step up from Advanced Warfare. We don’t really have overarching themes or character arcs we’re exploring, but we do have colorful and entertaining characters to take us through our story, at the very least. Daniels and his platoon mates have really great chemistry, and their banter is always entertaining to listen to. Over the course of the story there are some light themes of brotherhood and sacrifice, but the story isn’t particularly doing anything with them in terms of forming some larger commentary. The story does end up begging the question with a few characters by the end (especially Pearson), and I can’t help but feel that, while the story didn’t *have* to be something more, with a bit more pushing, it really could’ve been.

That said, I still really enjoyed my time with WWII’s story. They use the themes they do have for some really good narrative setup and payoff, and even if it’s not a story that’ll change your life, it’s still a very enjoyable ride with not much to get too fussed about. I’ll admit, *just* how conventionally attractive everyone is started to feel a bit comical at times (there were many jokes made referencing the old Hark a Vagrant “Hunk Draft” comic), and they go a *little* bit gratuitous with how they handle the Holocaust, but it was nothing overtly distasteful. If you’re a fan of war movies and don’t need them to be particularly challenging to the status quo or delve particularly deeply into the human experience, then there’s a lot to enjoy here.

The gunplay is also as good as you’d hope it’d be even without all the fancy future tech that the previous decade or so of Call of Duty games had been playing around with. We’re back to good ol’ World War II-era guns like the M-1 Garand, and while I doubt it’ll be anything anyone who’s played an old Medal of Honor game hasn’t seen before, it’s still very cool to be able to see guns like this with the polish of a game from 2017. The mission design is pretty darn good too, with some good variety with stealth, infiltration, and vehicle missions (even if the vehicle stuff kinda sucks, especially the plane stuff).

While we’ve abandoned the future stuff, the big innovation here is actually a big reach into the past in terms of game mechanics in the form of health packs. The very first Call of Duty did also have these as well, but while it’s not technically a “series first”, it may as darn well be. How these are used is more of a mixed bag, I’d say. After playing so many games with regenerating health, it was quite a process in getting used to having to be so careful with my health again. Overall, I wouldn’t really say that I love their inclusion. They feel like something more of a gimmick made to give the game something to stand out rather than a really carefully considered design choice. I can’t say there’s any particularly novel or interesting way that health packs are used, and it really does feel like an old Medal of Honor game but with better checkpoints, to a degree. Still, Medal of Honor with better checkpoints isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and I eventually started to enjoy the mechanic alright even if it could be a bit grating. If nothing else, it’s certainly a lot easier to deal with it here where you have such nice checkpoints than it was in the old Medal of Honor games where a death meant you had to start the WHOLE level over again XP

Aesthetically, the game looks REALLY nice. Even on my 2010 TV, the game looks incredible on my PS4 from the guns to the environments to the people. The voice acting is really well done, and the faces and such look so nice that my friends (who watch much more TV than I do) could actually place names to the actors who played some characters XD. The music fits the action just fine, and the whole thing does a lot to justify the game’s massive 80+GB install size. The only real negative I have is that, as usual, the Japanese subtitle and dubbing job is very subpar. They once again fail to really capture a lot of the flair of the dialogue in English, and the whole implementation feels very perfunctory.

Verdict: Recommended. While it’s not the best game in the series, it’s a really great Call of Duty campaign. The story is very entertaining and well put together, and the gameplay is as well constructed as you’d expect from the veterans at Sledgehammer. Even if for no other reason than the sheer novelty of seeing a WWII-era FPS game at this level of graphical fidelity, this is a great Call of Duty campaign to check out if you’re itching for a well put together FPS campaign but want something that still plays in a well-polished and familiar fashion.

A few months back, Resistance 1 was the first FPS game I played in what would go on to become this massive process of playing through over two dozen old-ish FPS games. With this as the last one I owned physically to play, it felt only appropriate to leave the last Resistance game for the end cap of the big FPS marathon. I really didn’t care for the first Resistance, but Resistance 2 had been quite fun (if far less novel than the original Resistance had been). I’d heard over and over that Resistance 3 was the best of the bunch, so I was eager to finally see just what all of the excitement was about. It took me about 10-ish hours to play through the English version of the campaign on normal mode doing as many trophies as it took to unlock the bonus videos at the end of the campaign x3

Resistance 3 follows Joseph Capelli, Nathan Hale’s surviving squadmate (and killer) from the previous game. After Hale fell to the Chimera virus and had to be put down, Capelli did his best to run away from the whole conflict, finding a wife, having a kid, and settling down in the central United States with his new family. However, the Chimeran conflict is not one so easily run from. When a Chimeran patrol comes around and wipes out the town, and an old ally comes looking for him, Joe is forced to face the imminent danger of the remaining Chimera forces. If he doesn’t get to New York City and shut down the giant Chimeran tower generating a giant wormhole in the sky, Earth will continue to freeze until there’s nothing left. With scientist friend in tow, Joe sets off for New York before it’s too late.

I’d love to talk more about R3’s story, but that’s honestly pretty much it. I had really hoped that we’d progress further from what R2 attempted to do and have some kind of character story, but this is, if anything, a step back from even how light a story that game had attempted. R3 goes for a nitty gritty story of surviving against all odds in both its story and its gameplay, but the story is all just too light to do anything more but generate an occasional “Huh, how about that” from the player. While it’s certainly amusing just how much inspiration we’re taking from zombie fiction of the time (even down to having a former prison run by arbitrarily extremely evil former convicts that now run it), it’s not like we’re actually trying to communicate any greater message through that (we’re just villainizing people convicted of crimes :/ ).

Resistance 3 is yet another game in the series that pushes gratuitous worldbuilding first and foremost without the support of a larger plot, let alone characters to care about, and once again we have a game with a very difficult to care about narrative. FPS games had absolutely begun to step up to the plate time and time again by 2011, so while it does seem like a very deliberate choice to have the game’s writing this way, I find it harder and harder to excuse Insomniac’s design choices by simply shrugging and going “well that was the style of the time,” because that’s just increasingly not the case. The story here is just meant to be an excuse for the action to happen, which is hardly an invalid design choice, of course, but when your game isn’t even clearing the bar of “cool action movie” the way a lot of Call of Duty or even older Medal of Honor titles had been, it’s a lot harder for me to not just call it boring ^^;

Resistance 3 has a very retro-feeling FPS story for 2011, and while I may consider that a bad thing personally, it’s a much cooler and novel design choice when that retro feel extends to the gameplay as well. A lot of the design of Resistance 3 feels like a deliberate redo and polishing up of ideas explored in Resistance 1 five years earlier. In a very unconventional move for the time, there is no regenerating health *at all*, and you’ve gotta find health packs if you want to heal up after a fire fight. In a similarly weird move for 2011, you’ve got “Duke Nukem pockets”, so you can carry dozen+ of your guns at once and pick from something whenever instead of only being able to carry two guns at a time like so many other games of the time did (including Resistance 2). With so many guns to choose from, the downside to that is that your maximum amount of ammo for guns is (relatively speaking) *very* small, usually having only enough for another 2 or 3 reloads per gun at most. This means the feeling of having to survive by the skin of your teeth against impossible odds may struggle to be communicated through the story, but it’s absolutely ringing loud and clear through the gameplay.

However, while all of that may be very novel, I wish I could say it was all that fun ^^;. To a certain degree, this is just down to personal taste. If I’m playing a more modern shooter, I prefer something with the arcadey pacing and narrative bombast of a Call of Duty game, and if I’m playing a retro shooter, I prefer something with more exploratory elements like Turok. Resistance 3 doesn’t really have the strengths of either of these styles, and so the overall gameplay loop suffers significantly as a result. We lack the bombast or the pacing of a Call of Duty or Battlefield game, so the game can feel quite slow and plodding at times (especially with the weak and superficial narrative). We also lack the more open, secret-filled level design of a Doom or a Turok, so the design choices like a lack of regenerating health and very limited ammo for your guns also don’t really get flexed to the extent that they could.

The gameplay is still pretty fun with some good new enemy variety and far better overall game feel compared to an overly difficult mess like Resistance 1 was. Levels may be linear, but the set pieces are still quite well designed even if they lack the flair that most of Resistance 2’s had. Resistance 3 feels like a game out of time in many ways, and the novelty of playing a game with things like ammo limitations and health packs on your PS3 does pitch a compelling contrast to the competition if nothing else. That said, while it may be offering an interesting counterpoint to most other FPS campaign design of the time, I would struggle to say that it’s making a very compelling case for it. At least for me, this middle-of-the-road design philosophy ends up making the whole experience come with a pretty consistent feeling of wishing you were playing something a bit better realized.

The aesthetics of the game aren’t much better either, but at least they’re not bad. Where Resistance 1 was a game of bright yellows and drab greys, and Resistance 2 was a much more colorful experience of blues, reds, and greens, Resistance 3 sadly goes back to drab colors. The graphics of this game just do not look very nice in a lot of points. While the Chimera look cool and striking as ever, the rest of the world, particularly the human characters, have been designed with a kind of cel-shaded “just off realism” type of vibe that absolutely did not work for me. Combined with the dull color palette, we end up with a very muddy and ugly looking game whose art style really has not stood the test of time outside of its creature designs. The music and sound design are nice as well as the voice acting, but that’s pretty cold comfort along with everything else I’ve complained about here.

Verdict: Not Recommended. This is one I can very nearly almost recommend, but it’s just not solid enough an experience at the end of the day. It’s very novel for 2011, that’s true, but novelty is not quality on its own. If you’re really into that idea of hunting around for ammo constantly but not playing a horror game, you might find something here. If you’re also someone who doesn’t need much more than a neat sci-fi premise for a story to be interesting to you, then you might well find a lot to love in the whole Resistance series. As for my tastes though, I just could not find enough to love in Resistance 3 to sincerely recommend it to anyone. While it may’ve been a strong enough dose of originality back in 2011, that simply isn’t enough of a value proposition in 2025 to go back to this old PS3 game when you could be playing things like The Darkness 2 (from early 2012) instead.

Finally done with the big FPS marathon I’d been undertaking the past few months but also wanting to take advantage of the fact that the PS4 was still hooked up, I decided it was finally time to tackle Tearaway. This is a game I’ve had for so long that it actually came to Japan with me from the States, and I’d originally bought it because I really loved the first two LittleBigPlanet games. It may’ve taken me years to get into the mood to finally play this, but I’m pleased to say that it was worth the wait~. It took me about 10.5 hours or so to beat the English version of the game while looking for as many secrets as I could.

Tearaway is the story of You, literally! You are contacted by mysterious beings from the dimension inside your PS4, inside the world of Tearaway. They’re in search of a good story, so they decide to make their own with your help! They put together a little messenger, and after leading them around with the guiding light from the back of your PS4 controller for a brief while, you’re connected with direct control of them. With a giant scary hole in the sky and evil Scrap monsters pouring out of it, it’s up to you and your Messenger to set things right and bring this story to a happy ending~.

It's a story right out of a children’s movie, and I mean that in the most positive way possible. Much like their earlier LittleBigPlanet titles, MediaMolecule have made a delightfully cute and whimsical adventure for you to go through. The story is packed with quirky little characters to interact with, and the two voiced characters, the big green and big purple gods of this sort of world, all have tons of funny, interesting dialogue to see over the course of your tale. It’s nothing super deep, but it’s also well-paced and interesting enough that it never gets boring or outstays its welcome. That’s generally the least I ask for in a story, but this game clears that bar with flying colors regardless.

And what colors it is! Tearaway is a platformer, and a relatively simple one, but one very focused around creation and interacting with the game’s world. Much like the original version of Tearaway was a game created to show off and play with the various hardware gimmicks of the PSVita, the PS4 remake has done the same thing for the PS4. Your Messenger will get more and more powers over the course of the adventure, and that even includes jumping, which you’re actually without for the first hour or so of your adventure. These powers use the various buttons on the PS4 controller, of course, but they also much more often involve novel ways to use the gyroscope in the controller or the touch pad. You’re thankfully free to engage with the world’s creative side activities as much or as little as you’d like, but looking for more silly things to try out was part of the fun of each world!

The game has a ton of creative activities you can do in regards to decorating not only your Messenger but also the world around you. Drawing with your finger on the touch pad allows you to make all sorts of creations, and the way you can manipulate those 2D shapes is also very intuitive and convenient. While I could certainly see some people finding these things as burdensome and a drag on the pace of the adventure, I’d also say that that kind of attitude is a good sign that a game like Tearaway isn’t for you in the first place ^^;. The platforming itself can get quite tricky if you’re trying to 100% the game or something, but it’s generally quite simple and very forgiving, far more so than something as frequently mean as LittleBigPlanet. If you’ve got a creatively minded kid around 10 or so, then they’re probably going to have an absolute blast with what Tearaway lets them get up to and the worlds it lets them explore, and I can personally confirm that that childlike wonder is still a delight to engage with as an adult too~.

No matter what someone might feel about the rest of the game’s quality, it’s pretty darn difficult to argue that the aesthetics aren’t a total homerun. As the game’s name implies, the world’s aesthetic is paper, and they nail that feeling SO hard. The way everything looks, sounds, and moves makes it feel like a crafting table came to life. Heck, there are even collectible items you can photograph in-game and use them to print out your own paper crafts to do in real life! The music is delightfully complimentary to the rest of the game’s whimsy too, and it fits the colorful platformer aesthetic perfectly.

Verdict; Recommended. While there are plenty of people who are going to find Tearaway too simple and mechanically underwhelming to be very engaging (I was one of those people for years as I waited to be in the mood to play this, after all), if you’re looking for a simple adventure that just screams “fun”, then this is a brilliant place to find it. As a big fan of platformers, I had a blast with this. MediaMolecule have really done the legwork necessary to make a mechanically simple game fun as heck, and if you’re willing to give it a try, I think there’s a pretty darn good chance you’ll walk away from it thinking the same thing~.