Regrettably, the Borderlands movie is real

 

Some part of me just filed away the Borderlands movie into 'cancelled' territory without a lick of evidence to back up that assumption. I just subconsciously breathed a sigh of relief that such a bizarre and seemingly doomed concept was never going to seriously make it to film and went about my day a free-er feeling man. And a fool of a man. (Fool of a Took!) Because the game obviously hadn't been canned in the days since Randy Pitchford invaded the set with a handcam and giddy schoolboy's temperament. That wasn't even really part of the marketing cycle, just Randy being a wierdo, so I can't even be upset we've had to wait this long to hear anything and feel vindicated in my writing it off. I just straight gaslighted myself and the unpleasant grimace of realising that impending asteroid I thought we dodged is actually still headed in a collision course has been plastered across my face since watching the trailer.

It started with seeing the poster for the movie doing the rounds online getting a straight flashbang about the aesthetic the movie is going for. So it's official- no post processing whatsoever- what we see it what we get. Which is kind of a bummer if I'm being honest. Without a doubt one of the most memorable aspects of the Borderlands franchise is it's visual identity hinged on the heavy-line cell shaded dynamic, perhaps one of the two only examples wherein such a processing trick has been sought-out not just to mimic an 80's pulp comic aesthetic. I did wonder for a while how such a technique would work running in an ostensibly live action movie, but judging from that poster look of the cast posing like a crew of high budget cosplayers- they're playing it straight with this one.

I'm not personally sure whether or not this alone has deprived the project of something, or if that would have just been a crutch in lieu of a popping visual eye if they had kept in the cell-shaded approach. Because either way, the movie does not seem to capture the same primary starkness of Borderlands, in matching tone and environment. Upon realising that the trailer had released at the same time as the poster, I subjected myself to the full thing to see if the team had made it work without and... I'm not blown away. I'm not entirely repulsed either- but sometimes being caught between the middle of two extremes is the worse way to feel. I mean it's great for the movie makers, who can use this as a chance to either blow me away or let me down horrendously- but I feel absolutely no innate confidence that makes me trust in the project. 

Borderlands over the past few years has been undergoing something of an identity crisis as the games lost that spark of wittiness that populated the franchises' most celebrated age. That perception of Borderlands as 'the funny shooter' game doesn't seem to have survived through Borderlands 3's life cycle of products as fans have been treated to the core game itself- which often mistook 'annoying' for 'quirky' and 'sex reference' for 'wit'- Tiny Tina's Wonderlands which felt undersupplied with content for many out there and is often overlook consequentially, and 'New Tales from the Borderlands' which inherited the legacy of Telltale's funniest game and perhaps Borderland's as a whole's funniest outing, and missed the mark completely. They missed out on the character writing, the emotional heart of the themes, the knowledge of what makes a joke and situation funny and just the general layout of what would be an interesting and engaging narrative. It feels like a lame sitcom about crazy weed-fuelled lunatics written by a team that have never touched a bong in their lives. The 'hello fellow losers' energy is wild.

All this has left a certain vibe off the Borderlands franchise, the stale waft of faded glories clogging up the franchise like salary men who still show up at their fraternity house warming parties expecting not to get tackled to the dirt by campus security. (Was that appropriately American enough of an analogy for you?) And to be completely honest with you- I don't actually detect an abhorrent amount of that on this trailer. Don't get me wrong, it looks like a rough facsimile of what the games represent, and the 'humour' hasn't even coaxed so much as a wry smile out of me from the trailer highlights, but I wouldn't call it terrible- which is a shock and a half to me!

Oh, and please don't misconstrue my lack of disregard as positivity- I am certain this movie is going to suck. It presents absolutely nothing interesting in a world defined by interesting characters doing interesting things. If Borderlands was just about shooting and blowing things up all day, the games would not have lasted as long as they have, Borderlands is about the way you shoot things up- the crazy creatures you're fighting, the creative guns your shooting, the flashy powers you're popping- of which this trailer bizarrely displayed none. I mean, we didn't even get to Roland drop a turret, let alone see Lilith use any of those Siren powers she's supposed to have! Speaking of- I didn't happen to see any of Lilith's siren tattoo's... are we... are we not doing a reimagination? Or have they reimagined the game so much as to reconstruct what Siren's even are? Lilith is already a bit of a boring character, she'll be especially dull without her defining powers.

And aside from that, there are the little things that don't quite line-up tonally. For one, I think the trailer is being narrated by Patricia Tanis, but it's hard to tell considering their choice of actress of Lilith, Cate Blanchet, sounds a lot like Jamie Lee Curtis in her delivery. But assuming it is Tanis, there's very little character in the lines she's been fed. Tanis from the games is a once promising scientist driven past her breaking point to a state of airy apathy after being exposed to the rigors of Pandora and it's unhinged residents. The narration sounded just like an older woman reading a trailer script- it was uninspired. And another little thing- their 'funny' line of "We have something they don't, baby girl- major issues." Irks me in a couple ways. Firstly- you're on Pandora- a planet defined by a population of 100% psycho lunatics. Everyone has issues in that scenario, the line is incorrect. Secondly, and I know this is being mean, her delivery of 'Baby girl' is so damned weak. I know it's unfair comparing the acting prowess of an actual actor like Ashley Burch with a... wait, no this girl is an actor too... would it kill her to try and act like Tina? Just a bit?

I know there are going to be people who love this film when it launches. It has that campy vibe which will resonate with the kind of fans of Borderlands who still find the tired joke format and delivery of 'loud guy is loud', 'corrupt guy is corrupt' etc- funny. But personally, I smell a movie that is going to be totally lacking in value behind it's referential content. Deprive this movie of it's Borderlands connection and it'd be called another boring shooting movie with a few cool design decisions but an ultimately uninspired delivery. And yes, that was me pre-reviewing the film before it's even made it to cinemas- and we'll get to see how well that sentiment ages when it drops! (I'm pretty foresightful on these kinds of 'adaptation' films. I think I've got a decent shot!) 

Shadow of the Erdtree finally got revealed!

 

After approximately several thousand years of waiting, we can finally look upon the face of that product which was promised in our previous lifetimes. Thawed out of the iceberg after a hundred years of hibernation just when the world needed it most- we can finally put our hats together and celebrate the coming of Hollow Knight Sil- huh? Oh wait, this is the other thing that we've waited all our adult lives to release. My bad. No, this was actually the trailer for the DLC of Elden Ring which was so belated I assumed that FromSoftware simply forgot they ever announced it and had moved onto their next game. But no, we have one last adventure to go on in The Land Between, on that journey to drive a wedge into the powers vying for the throne of Elden Lord in gaming's own answer to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Right away from the very first screenshot that released for the DLC upon it's announcement about a year ago, we pretty much had a decent idea where the DLC would be heading. Well- "under the Erdtree" was a decent guess with the name 'Shadow of the Erdtree' to work off, but I mean even further than that-slueths could deduce who's rune we were going for. The golden haired figure riding saddle on a white horse? Yeah, that was going to be Miquella, the missing demi-god of the Elden Ring line-up best known for being kidnapped by the twisted Mohg (from whom we actually take Miquella's rune given his absence) and for being name dropped by his big sis Malenia every time she skewers you from four different angles through her iconic waterfall dance. A plague upon that whole family for hosting two of the most annoyingly painful boss fights in FromSoftware history; I can only imagine Miquella will prove just as frustrating.

And yes, to the surprise of no one Miquella is indeed present in this trailer in some form, proving that the grossly disproportionate limb sticking out of Mohg's cocoon is both accurate to the disfigured form of the ungrowing child, and that the limb does not actually belong to the boy. God, I'm always so excited to peel back some of the ever reclusive FromSoftware lore and peek on the goodies within! What I was quite surprised about, however, was the fact we actually get to see Miquella in this trailer, with his bizarre snake-balancing body- and even spy a glimpse of what appears to be his boss fight! I can only interpret this as either some sort of bait and switch or the team are holding back one of those crazy second-stage transformations that Elden Ring seems to love so much- because otherwise that would be a spoiler for one of the coolest parts of any FromSoftware game- the memorable bosses!

As expected considering the artists we're working with here the trailer is resplendent with unnerving imagery, monsters pulling swords out of their eyes and being generally disfigured in appropriately creative and thoughtful ways; although to be absolutely honest- I think the team are holding back majorly. Nothing I've seen thusfar pertains to any kind of absolute showstopper monster that I simply have to fight. Even Miquella looked a little lowkey in what little of his battle we witnessed. The most crazy looking creature here is the giant candelabra that spews fire out of it's head- but that's a Torrent fight and those tend to be less exciting and challenging in practice than they seem like they'll be initially. Probably because Torrent isn't that agile so FromSoftware can't get too crazy with their attack cycles. Then again the Fire Giant is a stand-out whilst also being a Torrent fight, so there's definitely potential there somewhere!

'The Shadow' portion of the title does not, surprisingly, seem to refer to a location underneath the famous tree of life around which every single JRPG that isn't Final Fantasy is based. (I wonder what sort of devil sacrament Final Fantasy had to perform in order to publish a game where the 'world tree' trope was replaced with a 'world Crystal' instead.) Instead we are literally going under the canopy of the Erdtree (or is it behind the Haling Tree?)- in view of the gnarled and twisted roots of the primordial deity but unable to bask in it's sun-like light. What we experience instead are these drapes of light that, as people are already starting to notice on Twitter, hang like the curtains of Queen Marika's bedchambers- fitting given this is said to be where Marika first stepped when she came to The Lands Between.

It is striking. Already Shadow of the Erdtree delivers something to us not yet present in the vast and varied world of the base game, teasing at darker and deeper conjurations yet to be dreamed of. Who would find themselves in The Land of Shadows, untouched by the grace of the tree around which the world's order is meant to reside? I mean beyond the ever-young Miquella who famously turned to the Haling Tree in an attempt to age himself and establish an alternative world power strong enough to cure Malenia's Scarlet Rot where the Golden Order could not. And I wonder what our purpose could be seeking out there, if his Rune has already been discarded and recovered from Mohg? Oh... and I guess this means killing Mohg is necessary for accessing the DLC, doesn't it? Bugger. (I can here the 'Nihil's now...)

What I'm curious of most of all is actually whether or not this will count among the very few FromSoftware DLCs that present a new ending to the game, as there have been surprisingly few. Dark Souls 2's Scholar of the First Sin presented the ability to turn away from the throne, and in doing so provided any alternate ending to a game which previously only had one. And aside from that... I don't they've ever actually presented a ending changing DLC. But this would be such a great opportunity for one! Elden Ring's core narrative is all about weighing up the interests of the various duelling factions that all wish to seize the god-like powers of the Elden Ring in order to shape The Lands Between for themselves- but aside from literally becoming the embodiment of a vengeful god of ultimate destruction, there's no way to break the land free from control of the order. (Unless you side with best-doll Ranni but let's be honest- that girl's got her whole own dictatorship in mind!) Creating the ability to side with Miquella, a royal consort who rejected the Golden Order whole heartedly, might just present such an opportunity! (And I love an alternate ending path. Particularly one like 'Phantom Liberty' which reminded us why a risky life with everything to live for is better than a safer one with nothing to ground you.)

Shadow of the Erdtree has a lot of expectations to meet given the pedigree of the game it is coming to compliment, but at the very least it is really coming to fruition. Unlike another long beleaguered product which haunts our every waking moment- I might actually get to play this DLC someday! (I know that Silksong is no longer DLC but an actual standalone now, but the comparison still stands up, I think.) As the final underlying chapter of the epic that is Elden Ring, I expect to be wowed to some significant degree- and of course to be met with an boss so brutal it'll scare me back into fighting Malenia just to try a fight I have a chance of winning. That's all I want out of my FromSoftware games- a total diminishment of my ego until I feel as ugly and detestable as I truly am. So humble me once more, Elden Ring, I'm literally asking for it!

Things aren't looking good for Silent Hill, huh?

 

Silent Hill is a franchise about trauma manifesting in ugly and tormenting ways, and whether or not we can redeem ourselves or ultimately succumb to the demons of our own creation. Which I guess in many ways sums up Konami's surprise return to game development after the absolute sin of killing off the Metal Gear Franchise in favour of a zombie survival game trainwreck. It has been Silent Hill that the company announced their return from the land of Pachinko's with, and though I can't imagine in a thousand years why they want to step away from the sure-fire world of exploiting people with gambling addictions to eek back into the high risk world of expensive video game development- this is the world we're in and the Silent Hill revival is the litmus test for how that process is going. And for that case- how exactly is the Silent Hill revival going?

Well, there was the Silent Hill 2 remake by Bloober team- an absolute sure-fire way to announce the franchise is back given the cult classic status of that original thriller which shocked the entire horror space and changed that genre of games forever. That remake looks a little ropey, but how bad can going back to your roots really end up? I mean Resident Evil has turned it into a fine art over the past few years, EA shut me the hell up with all the side-eye I was giving Dead Space, and Square have pretty much turned their remake of Final Fantasy 7 into the next phase of that franchise for the foreseeable future. And with all that strategically placed on the table by me- allow me to kick out the legs by announcing that people are seriously reconsidering what slight praise Bloober earned out of them for taking on the project and it's looking like another mess.

A recent combat-centric trailer released for the game showcasing one of the weakest aspects of the Silent Hill franchise- monster fighting. Which makes sense given the fact that the player isn't really supposed to kill their way through Silent Hill- but this was a combat trailer so I guess this remake had some interesting work to show. And you know what- had this released a decade and a half ago it would be mightily impressive. Right now, it looks clumsy, messy, boring and uninspired. Resident Evil 4 Remake fans practically weep at the sight of James wrestling in a mad grapple against a monster- with no arms. But the big problem is that... well... Silent Hill isn't really a franchise where a 'combat trailer' would make sense at all. It's about atmosphere and mystery puzzle solving- so advertising material like this kind of makes it seem like the franchise owners don't really understand the property they're working with. The Bloober team insist the trailer was put together by Konami, not them- but that just heightens my unease and supports my grim theory.

Of course, I didn't really need that combat trailer to form doubts about Konami's viability as 'the parent who stepped up for Silent Hill'. Not when Silent Hill Ascension already exists! An attempt to turn Silent Hill into a multiple choice watch-along TV show with audience participation- Ascension practically had 'disaster' written across it's face from the very day it was announced. And now it's out? Yeah, it was as bad as we thought. The microtransaction ridden watching experience was regularly marred by bad cameos from audience member characters haphazardly shoved into scenes, ungodly unnatural lines read by actors who sound starved for an in-booth vocal coach and a reportedly lacklustre narrative that does a disservice to the integrity of the franchise. Oh, but to it's credit the game did give birth the hilariously out-of-touch official rainbow emote joyously announcing 'it's Trauma!'- and that is objectively the funniest thing to come out of this franchise.

But at least there's the small free game Silent Hill: The Short Message to keep everyone's spirits up, right? (Good god, how many Silent Hill projects did Konami greenlight?) This one actually jumped up out of nowhere whilst I was busy with other things and so I didn't even realise it was out- of course I had no reason to keep up with the game's release now finding out that's it's a Playstation exclusive for some insane reason. (The game is free! Why buy it's exclusivity?) There are actually some quite distinct opinions on this game, with some thinking it's actually pretty good- although those more familiar with the franchise, and coincidentally more jaded, seem to think that 'goodness' is only apparent in relation to everything else that the franchise has been spitting out of late.

The Short Message appears to be an attempt to capitalise on the kind of fan which was brought into the franchise back when 'Silent Hills' was first teased through PT; but doing so in a manner that lacks the revolutionary appeal of that frank classic. It's a bit generic, but not bad. Which for modern Silent Hill might as well be calling it the next Metal Gear Solid 3. But most importantly, Silent Hill: The Message is not a full game. It's more akin to an experience, and therefore it is not enough to reinforce the public against the current trajectory of the franchise. That lies in the hands of the two major projects currently in development which are becoming more and more worrisome as everything around them peels and rots in fast motion.

Right now the only thing we have on the horizon for the Silent Hill franchise totally lacking in the shade thrown at the rest of the franchise is 'Silent Hill F' which from the gameplay-free reveal trailer looks to be unnerving and original in way this franchise hasn't enjoyed for over a decade. I know that the writer of the project has quite some renown for his work- so we have a bit of talent attached to the project- but with everything around the game either in flames or showing signs of smoke- what are the chances that F is really going to be the one exception? I'm going for low marks- but I really hope I'm wrong. I would love a brand new kick-ass Japanese horror game to slap me around so hard that I never finish it because I don't actually like being scared too much.

So there is Konami's grand return to the Video Market by the Piliferous Pachinko Purveyors themselves, and considering all that time they spent developing solely for that market- no wonder they've lost their touch! As part of polishing off Yakuza 7 I've finally had a chance to try out a virtual simulation of those machines for myself and I have to say- they're bloody boring! Konami have forgotten how quality control works in the game market and though their projects appear to headed in an upwards trajectory to the point that Silent Hill F might be worth the time to actually load into a console- it's going to be a long time before they're treated in anyway seriously within this market again. Maybe it's best they just cut their losses. And sell their franchises! I cannot stress that last part enough! Please be sure to flog off Metal Gear before the next time you go out for milk, Papa Konami!

Kotaku and Single player games: a balanced review

 

So Kotaku recently uploaded a article going over the recent comments made by Ascendant Studios alumni, people behind the studio-gutting failure 'Immorals of Northampton' or whatever it's called. I read this article at the time and in fact they was one of the sources that alerted me to this topic to begin with when I offered my own insight on the matter. To the point I feel like the team have a skewered perspective on their game based on their closeness to the project and the bizarrely average general reviews. Actual standard people seemed to really not like the game and that did not foster positive word of mouth through any of the more reliable tracts of hype generation. But that isn't what people were talking about in the days to come. In fact, I suspect that the Internet doesn't even remember what 'Inconsequentials' even was- because all anyone could talk about was Kotaku's reductive take on the single player market.

Now I was actually a bit confused by this, because I had actually read the article and didn't come away remembering any particularly unhinged jabs at the single player market whatsoever. I had to actually re-find the article in order to figure out where all the backlash was coming from- and upon reading the headline I get it. "'Irritables of Canterbury' proves it's a grim time for single player games." Having actually read the article, I can confirm this is a case of click-bait article syndrome. There's only a single paragraph connecting this inflammatory headline with the actual situation and thus my mind totally blocked it out- but looking back- yeah, they did actually have something to say about the state of Single Player games- a popular topic in modern gaming discourse.

You see, we're all responsible for making sweeping generalisations about the state of the industry based on our own personal biases this way or that- it's just the basic way of game critiques. Most annoying of all are those who make the blanket statement that every single AAA game is a lie and how they're all merciless scams that release as unfinished messes- who then just quietly sulk in a corner when a Game of the Year candidate comes out, only to leap back out and start up with their crap for the next mistake. Yeah, some games don't come out in their best possible state- that doesn't make them the entirety of the industry and pretending they do is a reductive statement just as stupid as whatever it is that Yves Guillemot last said. Not just his public statements, but anything he has recently said this entire morning/afternoon/last night/in the bathroom where no-one could hear him. He's just that special level of stupid.

As for the actual Kotaku comment? In a nutshell the author was addressing the fact that Ascendant's debut game had a lot of things going for it- particularly for the fact that it was everything people who critique games have been screaming for. Namely it wasn't a life-sucking, money hungry live service disaster piece. But uhh... that's only what the game isn't- it was also a total mess of bad narrative, cringe predictable character work and an unengaging core combat conceit. (I know some people liked the combat, but I look at them the same way I look at enjoyers of Forspoken's combat- we just aren't the same species, I guess.) But beyond that- a shot was fired across the bough of single player games as an institution.

"Without better sales or in-game purchases to bring in money, it seems the single player model is only sustainable on games with smaller budgets" croaks the Kotaku article. Basically they propose that AAA Single player games are too often subject to overstuffing which balloons development costs to such an extent that only a massive hit can recoup costs which is... actually a super basic conclusion to draw. But here's the thing- that is the case with the entire AAA market. The multiplayer games out there that don't sell well but monetise out the ass? They also don't make enough to cover their costs because there's not enough people playing to buy the microtransactions. Just ask Avengers. Where Kotaku went wrong is narrowing their scope.

See, the entire video game world is fraught with never-ending rising budgets that write cheques very few of them can cash- it's not evidence that the single player scene is falling out of vogue- it's a condemnation of bad management choices that push for spectacle above purpose and vision. When every game begs to be a super high fidelity, open world extravaganza, but most games don't really have a purpose to being, then you're going to have an 100 hour game wherein only 10 or so hours are worth playing. (Think of every Asssassin's Creed game from the past 7 years.) This is exactly the point that the Kotaku article was making and it's a concise one- but the headline sensationalises an absolute nothing statement which is found nowhere in the actual words themselves.

It's actually quite easy for the author to turn around and sigh at the state of an audience that don't bother read an article before responding with a hit-piece- but I would honestly blame whoever thought rage clicks would be profitable than representing the actual article itself. That doesn't happen by accident, someone wanted to ruffle feathers specifically to draw the people out the woodworks who come specifically to drop the name of 'Baldur's Gate 3', 'Alan Wake' and 'Yakuza 8' in triumphant furore. Because Kotaku is one of those article generators with that negative level of integrity to their name- wherein you have to second guess ever other word out of their mouths to see if an actual point is being made or mirthless controversy is being spurred for nobody's gain. (Just check the Persona 4 article declaring it as being 'sexist' for evidence.)

So I'm going to fold up my hands and say that both sides are kind of in the wrong for this. Kotaku for fanning the flames and the people for falling for them. Oh, and the former developers for trying so very hard to wear blindfolds and not see the genuine problems that their game had on a fundamental level. (I know they received that feedback from actual players- so they have to be trying to blot it out for whatever reason.) Of all the genuine dogs-puke articles I've studied, this perhaps marks the only one I've read in a while that's not as bad as people said. That being said, still clumsy in the wording. Because afterall, it is still Kotaku.

Madame Web: it was a movie

 When you accept responsibility, great power will come.

I don't often find myself stepping outside the realms of the game's industry when it comes to this blog, but when I do it tends to be for a damned good reason. For the times when there is a topic of such seismic significance that the way we live our lives could very well be changed. One such turning point dawned upon me the moment I watched the Madame Web movie and transcended from my being. We all knew we were looking at something special when we saw the trailer, but it was only upon being in the theatre, cramped in shoulder to shoulder with the other six participants, that I truly looked upon the bare face of god on high and knew in that one brilliant, shattering moment, that he must have abandoned us to let something like this happen. I don't know if he's ever coming back from getting those smokes, but 'Madame Web' would imply not.

Sony's latest attempt to capitalise off the hard work that Disney put in making the Marvel brand profitable, Madame Web feels like the final stop on a long trip to disregard every single lesson that modern superhero filmmaking has learnt across the past two decades. Watching this movie transported me back to my childhood where all cinema was just loud noise and all I wanted to do was curl up into a ball and watch my cartoons- worlds where things made sense. And yeah, I pretty much wish I went for a cheeky Rugrats binge rather than attend that screening. (Would have been a hell of a lot cheaper too!) But before I get into it there is an elephant that needs addressing. I need to make it absolutely clear that no- there is not a single piece of merit worth praising about this movie, and that alone is what makes it so incredible. Just so we're on the same page here.

Madame Web tells us the origin story of a Spider-Man side character in a way that attempts to frame it as a mystery thriller movie, which I suspect might have been the original concept when they signed everyone's name to the project. That potential exists only in concept today, however, because the bogging down of references to the Spider-Man mythos, a horrendously bad Spider-Suit for the villain, dull setpieces and the over-arching aura of the one true god-king Pepsi standing over the entire production- Web feels like an aggressive waste of time in it's every scene. Kudos for the team for managing to depict a 'reliving the same moment' story in the most bare basic way possible- by replaying footage again and again and pretending that is anyway trippy even by the fifteenth time we've seen it. But these are the higher conceptuals of the filmmaking process I'm critiquing, and let me be clear that the problems do not start there.

Right from the very first scene, itself a redundant flashback of setting that is already going to be explained later on in the movie, every character is speaking in pure exposition mode. Not an ounce of character or situational context survived to the page, these actors might as well have been AI chatbots reading out the Wikipedia summary of the Madame Web movie page. And one of them very well might have been for the way that Ezekiel Sims botches every spoken word in the entire film. He is the villain, by the way, so we get to hear a lot of his ear screeching terribleness. Now the man is clearly not a native English speaker, but that doesn't explain why every line he speaks, even lines spoken in scenes with a clearly visible mouth, are terribly and nearly incoherently voiced over in a faux-gruff tone that sounds like the sort of voice you grumble over Xbox live at 12 o'clock at night when you don't want you parents to here you trash talking. (Having English be your second language and being actually incapable of acting in English are two vastly different degrees of language competency!)

Dakota Johnson's Cassie Webb is perhaps the most inline with the vibe of the film in that she is prickly and as uncooperative as the script will allow her to be, which seems to match the vibe the actress had accepting this role given her general disinterest regarding the role during all of her press tours. There's a mean spiritedness about the character that I found relatable, if not really in line with the role she is supposed to coming into as the 'mentor' of the attacked children, and were this a better film I might critique her performance as a detriment to the film. As it sits her casual snark almost comes across as a knowing wink to the audience that she is aware just how trash this all is and is equally as annoyed about being here. She was the one island in this production that seemed self aware.

Her co-stars on the other hand? They were just fine. Various Spider-themed side characters from across the canon that had not yet been swooped up by either Spider-Verse or Insomniac. The movie treats them like the rejects it sees them as, affixing surfaces level character traits and familiar names to high school teenagers in the hopes that the complex narratives that comic authors have spent decades crafting will just magically ooze in them making the cast inexplicably 'interesting'. It is a vain hope. The cast really don't deserve to be in this movie and moreover don't deserve to steal the name of genuine comic book characters. And the unambitious nature of the movie means they don't even get to dress up like them in anything other than desperate flash forward dream sequences in an attempt to secure a franchise that will never come.

To it's slight credit however, I will admit that Madame Web does save it's most memorably unhinged lunacy for the final act. From some of the most moronic leaps of logic imaginable, such as leading Sims into a fireworks factory and setting off the payload so that one of the fireworks can fire at a solid brick wall- totally destroying it in order to open up an escape. Oh, and then there's the firework that blows up a helicopter. And we couldn't forget the editing nightmares such as the dramatic zoom in on Webb's glacial comebacks, or the way that a giant 'S' from a Pepsi sign is what saves the day by squashing Ezekiel underneath it's holy girth. Truly we are blessed by the carbonated gods to witness such a sight. And little can match the incredible back-door CW-level series pitch the show tried to make in it's epilogue portion, shipping these aspiring actresses as low-level cosplay superheroes for the rest of their natural careers. Thank god this bombed, saving them from the kinds of contracts that career's never survive!

If 2023 was the year that Superhero movies died, then 2024 was the year that their corpse was defiled in such a blasphemous way to bury any and all hope of resuscitation. I genuinely believe that out of all the hands that went into making that film from production to script writing to cinematography to set design to costume design to acting and to even the casting director- everything was a failure. With the exception of one half decent wide shot of Webb crossing the street once. Land this one at the door of 'evil producers' all you want, the truth of the matter is that at no point has any producer sat down and said "Hey, can we make the movie as bad as we can possible make it?" Something should have gone right, by accident- but aside from the fact that the reel rolled and the film played- Madame Web is a step-by-step showcase of the worst creative efforts that the mainstream film industry has to offer. Maybe this crew would do better working in the adult film circuit- that certainly seems more their speed.

The little Live Service that could

I'm not gonna pull any punches here- I think Live Services are trash and should burn down to nothing alongside with all the failures they've already endured this year. In fact, all my homies hate on Live Services! (>This message is sponsored by the single player gang<) But what if I told you that just like an anime season finale where everybody is at their last post and the antagonist is floating above the scene with a total victory in the grasp of his hands- someone, somewhere, has figured out a way to actually do a Live Service in a way that not only isn't total trash, but is actually starting to take off to a worryingly wide audience. Yes, all of us Live Service haters out there are going to have to start eating our hats pretty darn soon because of all games it was Helldivers 2 that flew down out of the drop ship in order to rain on our parade.

Now I'll be honest- I had no clue what Helldivers even was before that sequel was announced to moderate applause during the PlayStation conference last year. Apparently the first entry was a decently entertaining top-down shooter with pretty heavy Starship Troopers vibes emanating off of it. Helldivers 2 looked to lean even further on those laurels to the point where I actually assumed the trailer was meant to be for a new third person Starship Troopers game before the franchise title flared up on screen. (Although in my defence, I was disadvantaged by my ignorance.) But even those in the know couldn't have had any inkling of a clue what exact impact this game was going to have when it landed, for it's moderate price point, just a few days ago.

We live in an age of 'flash in the pan' hits; wherein one week all anybody can talk about is a Pokemon reimagining and the next week we have ourselves an unapologetically Verhoeven-coded military bug shooter championing co-op missions of bug hunting for the service of Super Earth. Helldivers has been the kind of hit that developers can't even bring themselves to dream of, to the point where servers are literally melting because the team had no idea their player numbers could go this high. Originally it's said that the developers were playing to actually hop onto online games and mess with their player base, whom they expected to be cosy and intimate, but now such a proposition seems laughable with the thousands of concurrent sessions they have being started every few minutes or so. Truly, this month is the month of Helldivers 2. And it's a Live Service?

That's right- despite having an actually sensible buy in price point and a satisfying amount of content off the bat- Helldivers 2 is committing itself to all the carnal sins of modern gaming. It's laying out a continuous development plan, (although I hear that constraints of those plans have stretched significantly given the runaway success of the title.) there are microtransactions, battlepasses and gameplay effecting cosmetics. And yet none of that is being looked down upon. In fact, Helldivers 2 is being celebrated as the one game in the entire industry that does the absolute impossible and gets it right- and I am both impressed and lightly horrified to see how that's the case. Helldivers 2 is about to turn the whole table back around on the 'Live Service' debate.

The defining characteristics of every Live Service in the past few years has been an unfinished game shoved out the door with a promise to make it feel somewhat complete over the next year or so of adding new content. Oh, here's a new map and a bunch of new mission types and enemy variants and weapons. "But of course, that means we need to take out the beginning quests from the game because... well... screw you- that's why." That game will then promote unending quests for players to get lost in, disregarding the fact that all those recurring missions are trash focused around the same three objectives. (Defend the point, kill the bullet sponge, escort the vulnerable thing) Helldivers 2, on the otherhand, hyper fixates on it's design. 

Helldivers 2 was designed with the very soul of recurrent play in mind- with the loop of dropping into various hotspots in order to smite the enemies of mankind slipping nicely into the fiction of the world they establish. As does the 'War Bonds' which forms the currency of the in-game Microtransaction store and the provisions of the Battlepass. And just like every game with a Live Service component that isn't quite as hated as others': you can earn currency without spending a dime and buy the pass at your own pace. Also, the Battlepass doesn't expire which forgoes the lamentable 'fomo' aspect that many of the laziest Live Services cling to like it's the only idea of value their company has ever produced. To many, Helldivers is a breath of fresh air.

And to me it's like that first whiff of gas in the canary mine, because I've paid more than enough attention to this industry to know exactly what comes next. Helldivers 2 has every right to be a success, sliding into the goal right as everyone had settled into the very safe assumption that Live Services are dead. Right after Kill the Justice League began it's slow agonising journey to an early death and Pirate ship game (Genuinely can't remember the name, again) face planted on that journey to such an extent I don't even expect it to last the year at this rate. Helldivers is going to be used as the fuel underneath every executive fire for a Live Service future that had just been doused with cold reality- and we're going to be in this exact same position four years from now.

I know what supporters are going to say. "But Helldivers does it right! Surely this game will serve as an example blueprint for these companies!" To which all I can do is sadly chuckle at what naive fools you are. Do you think Helldivers 2 is an easy sort of game to make? No! It takes passion, talent and insight- all the qualities that are whittled down with prejudice by the corporate driven Live Service surge. This game will be used as vindication to keep the Live Service dream alive, and the copycats riding this game's tail will miss the point entirely, crash and burn totally, and further ruin the prospects of the AAA angle of the gaming industry. So thanks Helldivers for proving it can be done, and thanks for nothing for the consequences of that.

What makes a masterpiece different from a success?

 

There's a metric of 'success' and 'failure' that the whole world operates off, a balancing act of extremes, heights and calamitous pits. In some cultures that metric can be a mountain range soaring and diving over the years in an ever-unravelling panoramic tapestry; and down here in England it tends to something more of a one-way plane. You're either going up or you're going down and ain't nothing going to change that trajectory once it's set. But what if I were to tell you there's a tiny bit more nuance within the ranges of the successful and the unfortunate than just 'red' or 'green'. There are degrees, there are distinctions. And a masterpiece may not necessarily be a success, nor is a success automatically a masterpiece. Would you ask me to elaborate? I sure hope so because... that's what I'm going to do. That elaboration thing. Got it? Cool. Please read.

We've all got our games that we love for the success that they are. Playing Fallout 4 during that first year of release was a total blast of genuine decent first person combat, a fresh wasteland wonderland to tear into little pieces and a seemingly endless barrage of side-game content to keep me preoccupied until the star blinked out. There are people currently throwing their weight behind Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League and declaring that their favourite game of the year. And many of the Call of Duty games earn barrels of players in their first few months being alive. Such are the marks of success', to some degree. But what do all of these examples have in common that stops them just short of being true masterpieces? Think on it for a bit, we'll circle around later.

Masterpieces rank among the types of games that must be recognised, regardless of your affinity towards them or not. Fallout New Vegas will forever be called upon as a paragon of it's genre type, Deus Ex is considered one of the best games of all time, Diablo 2 has never gone a year without being mentioned within the game design space, Devil May Cry 3 is a touchstone for action gaming as a whole. These are the sorts of products that almost stand out in their defiance, and though their comparison up against the previous examples could be construed as being 'unfair', you only perceive such under the acknowledgement that the games I'm talking about are in a league of their own. And I suspect these examples might greater illustrate the point I'm angling towards.

Out of every Star Wars game ever released, there is only one that I would consider an actual masterpiece, and breaking it down will unveil the etymology I employ behind that specific designation. The Force Unleashed was a well received title that dropped in the era of Shonen anime becoming popular in the west, which was indeed one of the inspirations behind it's conceptualisation. Nowadays it seems a bit dated and self indulgent, particularly the once-cool, now stupid-looking scene where the protagonist pulls a Star Destroyer out of space with his mastery of the Force alone. The Fallen Order series is a breakdown of the formula and setting that only really works because of the ground work laid by the Souls genre of games and general boredom with the core aspects of the Skywalker narrative- so squeaking out more story from the spaces between still holds some vague interest. (Just check out all of the latest Disney Star Wars shows.) Knights of the Old Republic, on the otherhand, relies largely on itself.

I mean it is a Star Wars game, obviously, and benefits from that brand- but the game is not largely beloved for it's connection to that larger franchise. Indeed, KOTOR does a lot of things to distance itself from Star Wars in all manner except for thematic. It abandons the core story, forsakes all memorable characters and setting and throws itself squarely into the realm of an original cast in a new time period with a thematic resemblance to the universe we know but distinct elements. It tells a new narrative, familiar but with twists far removed from anything core Star Wars could pull off, and it introduces a deceptively approachable but surprisingly complex Dnd style gameplay system backing it all up. It is a masterpiece not because it came at the right time and borrowed the right elements, but because it soared on it's own impressive merits.

What makes a success an increasingly rare and applauded worthy instance in todays age is the near inscrutable fact that they need to be timely. Video games capture the moment's zeitgeist and weaponizes that to their distinct advantage; which means they have to be the right kind of en vogue from the moment that they drop. As games are becoming more bloated and requiring longer development times- that starts to become increasingly rare. Just look at this year alone- two live Services coming out years after that genre-type has been deemed horrendously overstuffed. They might have been timely when production began, but now they're relics. What could have been success two years ago are now remnants of a brushed over past. Failures for their timing alone.

But when a success today could have been a failure yesterday, can that really be put on the same sort of pedestal as something that is timeless and pervasive? Can the industry trend setters, who forged their own path and laid bricks in their respective wake, be as well loved as those that followed alongside the beaten path and found similar plaudits? And does the difference between one and the other even matter in a world where either can be as successful as the other? Afterall incredibly influential games sometimes get brushed into the background despite all that they achieve- just look at Vanquish's slide mechanic that every third/first person game with a half decent moveset either uses or has a worse version of! Where's that game's remaster?

So if we're going to try and put labels where none should probably exist, we can pretty safely give the title of 'Success' to games that are timely and that of 'Masterpiece' to games that are timeless- with the added knowledge that neither is mutually exclusive from the other. There's a reason why my Nintendo Switch is loaded up with a whole bunch of Nintendo only exclusives and Kotor 1&2 and Baldur's Gate 1&2. Some ideas shine beyond the dim of age. They'll still be people discovering those games decades from now and remarking on their role in the shaping of entertainment even in the time when everyone is digitally hooked up to their total-immersion VR pleasure domes that are really just the cucoon milking eggs from prophetic sci-fi case study 'Skynut'- mark my words.

Your move, Pokemon.

 

So perhaps you've noticed but over the month of January the world was briefly swept by something it almost never gets when we're talking about Nintendo products- Competition. I mean sure, Mario has Sonic to 'contend' with, but those are never actually fair competitions- those are just exhibitions for Mario to showcase how much more market dominance he has over the blue blur at that particular moment of time. They're really rather cruel if you think about it. But Pokemon on the other hand? Oh that right there is the product of a life born with literally no hardships whatsoever. You couldn't dream of a more privileged, silver spoon, space within which to flounder and collapse in on one-self. Every way in which Pokemon has let down it's fans over the years can be traced back to the iron fist that the Pokemon Company has enforced over the world, as spurred on by Nintendo's great wall of lawyer muscle.

Which is why it has been so surprising that Palworld has been allowed to go on as long as it has. Even former Pokemon employees seem flabbergasted by it, which either means the big N are riding up for an apocalyptic lawsuit so destructive it will burn up the entire game's industry- or they simply don't have the legal grounds that they thought they did. And if it is the latter- then that means Pokemon is going to have to face up to something terrifying that they've never had to face before- expectations. When you own the monopoly lion's share of the market for your game type, the onus rarely falls on you to really try when it comes to wooing over your customers. But set up a new stall on the front lawn that offers something more than you do, at a cheaper price? Well then you've just been captialismed on, son!

Of course, what this means for The Pokemon Company is that they actually have to step up their game if they want to wrest fans back from Palworld- because whilst these player counts are current a dent on Pokemon's giant empire- this is the seed from which the great oak grows. Palworld, assuming they aren't nuked in a lawsuit warhead, are going to grow off the back of this game. They're going to get more resources, feedback and staff aboard and they're going to take another shot at this genre in a couple years or so. And that game? That one might be a little bit better, and gain a little bit more traction. And at some point consumers are going to be asking themselves whether or not they want to shell out for Pokemon's latest failure experiment in basic game design principles that somehow managed to fail making open world exploration interesting even with decades of examples to learn from, and just pick up the cheaper option Palworld is providing.

 I suppose what I'm trying to manifest within the world is the possibility that Pokemon is going to need to react and change in order to keep their spot at the top of the roster, and we might be able to take a guess at the way they're going to do it by looking at the company we're dealing with and what they typically do in nervous moments. For example, I think the biggest ability currently residing in the Pokemon tool-kit is that of nostalgia. When weaponised, nostalgia baiting can subsidize a lot of your marketing budget simply by word of mouth that the thing people loved is coming back to them practically unchanged, remade on a slightly worse- but shinier- engine. And we already know this is a tool the Pokemon Company are obsessed with.

It's practically all but confirmed fact that the team are juggling a remake of Pokemon Gold and Silver adorned with mascot Pokemon and borrowing the exact same game design their ancestor teams worked on back in 1999. Yes, the 'Let's go' remakes are presumably going to come with the 'Pokemon Go' redesigns of the originals that 'Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee' enjoyed- and the Unova remakes which have also been leaked and will feature their own set of quality of life improvements- which to be clear are all utterly negligible. Basically the bare minimum to make it feel worthy of being called a new game whilst forgoing the risk of actually trying to make something new. Which at the very least gives GameFreak time to work on their next main entry game which promises so much and delivers so very little. It's easy to forget how little GameFreak actually deliver on until you've gone through their latest entry and reflect on how unfulfilling your experience just was.

But that doesn't mean The Pokemon Company are just going to write off making something new! Oh, they've got to try and win over the conversation somehow, which means they have to try and make their next Pokemon game a contender to Palworld. I think this confirms that the company aren't going to be pulling back on the open world elements like some figured they might following the performance hiccups of Scarlet and Violet, but they may just be spurred to try and make that open world experience more involved as Palworld does. So what does that mean? A return of the 'hideout' mechanic offering basic base building? Possible. Simple survival mechanics? Unlikely. A more comprehensive Pokemon populated worldspace which better champions explorative play? I hope so.

Because you see- that is what is so great about this coming fight! Challenge breeds competition and competition breeds improvements! If they can't cheat their way to market dominance the way that Pokemon have relied on doing all these years, then they have to start getting out of their comfort zones and doing things they would never normally do. Maybe that means being a bit less anal about the way they handle cross-marketing between their products, maybe a bit less regional locking of content- and maybe we can start to see Gamefreak actually grow as a company in a way that a developer who has been making games for over two decades really should have by now. Why don't they have an international office at this point?

Now to be honest with you I don't think that Palworld is the prophesised Pokemon killer of yore. It wears the boots and talks the talk, but it's stride is clumsy and it's vision lazy. But who's to say that someone else can't follow Palworld's initiative with an even better realisation of the Pokemon idea? I've said it before, but I think these Pokemon-style games are currently in an invisible arms race to see who can be the first to create a game which depicts a 'Ryme City' style world as teased in Detective Pikachu. Nail that and you've become the king of the genre, in my humble opinion. And if that winner isn't The Pokemon Company- I ain't gonna be whining.

Why is Yakuza so much better than Assassin's Creed?

 

With the release, and critical success, of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth the disparity between the western content farm franchises and the eastern content farm franchises is reaching a point of frank parody. How can it possibly be that the ludicrously over saturated Like a Dragon games are somehow increasing in quality despite being shot quicker than your average 100 Meter sprinter? In an industry filthy with production hang-ups and bloat, resulting in ever longer slogs between major releases that disappoint more and more often- to such a point where some superstar developers are having to weigh up the time they have left on this planet with what they want to work on next. (I'm pretty sure Kojima's next stealth-game after Death Stranding 2 is probably going to be his last, or penultimate, game. As sad as that is to say.) In this industry, what right does a AAA franchise like 'Like a Dragon' have to go on gallivanting like it's still the 2010's?

Especially when you compare this franchise to likes of the biggest perpetrator of 'diminishing returns' such as (Give me a second to riffle through my catalogue of dead horses real quick...) Ubisoft! Can you believe that Assassin's Creed is actually two years younger than the Yakuza franchise? That's right, the first Yakuza launched back in 2005! And do you know what? I think Assassin's Creed's first outing actually holds up better! It's still dated and clunky, but the core of what the franchise would become is spelled out there, whereas Yakuza was just kind of messy in execution at it's start- there's a reason why Yakuza took so long to get it's footing. But Assassin's Creed is increasingly becoming a symbol of everything wrong with modern game design, whilst Like a Dragon is becoming a paragon of all that can go right- so where's the disconnect?

First off I think the mistake that the production of Assassin's Creed makes is in their desperate search for 'relevancy'. What Assassin's Creed currently has in the modern age that is unique to it can only be it's history-jumping setting that promises to take players on a journey to new locations. I've always praised the Ubisoft asset designers because they've never not delivered the top-most possible content, even when recycling assets they never deliver a low-effort outing. However what else does Assassin's Creed offer as a USP? It's unique blend of visually appealing power-fantasy combat? Stealth based stalking mechanics? Robust metagames? All gone. They used to have a place in this franchise, and were probably brought together at their best in Brotherhood, but since then they've fallen for the Ubisoft plague of trying what everyone else is doing in hopes of leaching off of their success.

Yakuza (or 'Like a Dragon'), on the otherhand, knows exactly what it's niches are. Like a Dragon is a franchise that celebrates Japanese culture, leans on romanticised mobster-movie aesthetics and cliches and provides ever-improving combo-based combat schemes. The difference between knowing your strengths and fruitlessly searching for them is clear- RGG can hone on what they're good at and improve rapidly with each outing, whereas Assassin's Creed is stuck dipping their toes into different fields praying one pops off for them enough to warrant sticking around. Origin's slightly positive reception doomed the next two games (at least) to pathetically undercooked RPG-light gameplay which has bloated each entry worse and worse. They're not sharping their toolset, they're blunting their instruments and perfecting their flaws.

Assassin's Creed also suffers narratively thanks to the conceit of their own concept. Hopping to new time periods and characters with each games makes this something of a anthology franchise with only the modern day story to connect elements. Unfortunately, Ubisoft have absolutely no interest in championing narrative in their core franchise to such a degree that the audience often feels disrespected or ignored. Modern Assassin's Creed narratives consist of a couple of set-pieces that are built up to by comics and books released between games read only by die hard fans. Let me remind you that I used to replay the entire franchise before every release like a madman, and I still am not diehard enough to put up with Ubisoft's slop writing for the most basic amount of context. Which means I don't ever get character motivations or relationships presented appropriately to me, which means I end up either not caring or actively hating the cast. (Layla deservers that hate, to be fair. She's awful.)

And what about the assassin's themselves? Well, despite having 100 hour long games now, remember that Ubisoft have turned these into RPGs which translates to- character writing is too hard now. Seriously, their last two major protagonists after Bayek have a grand total of one motive at the beginning of the story and a couple of character traits that usually add up to variations of 'sarcastic' and 'begrudgingly virtuous'. These traits and motivations so rarely come into play that they don't really feel like building blocks of a character but rather bullet points that the script writers need to keep reminding themselves. Most of the time events just kind of happen around them and these characters react, usually by killing the people in front of them, and then they're shuffled off towards the next task. Sure, RPG options means we get to make a choice every now and then- but consequences for said choices are typically either immediate or ephemeral- essentially making them meaningless choices to being with.

Like a Dragon, on the otherhand, never fails to tell character/action hybrid narratives, introduce vibrant fore and background characters, moves the needle in some significant fashion and wows with substantive growth and spectacle by the end. Who could forget the four way duel at the end of Yakuza 4? And who can remember what the finale of Assassin's Creed Origins was? (It couldn't have just been the Caesar assassination, could it? The one that low-key broke the lore of the franchise because we didn't get to see Brutus in the assassin gear we know he owned from Brotherhood.) It's hard to tell stories with characters iconic and static like Kiryu, and RGG have been doing that for nearly 20 years at this point. They're just better at telling stories, to be honest.

All that Assassin's Creed has at this point is legacy. No one sticks to those games for their quality, but because they're comfort food. But the problem with comfort food is that it does start to bore after a while, and all it takes it for anything with a bit of flavour to waft across your way and you drop the comfort food in an instant. Yakuza is like a plate of Pasta al Nero di Seppia. Your brain tells you that is a weird dish of inky noodles your going to be spitting out in a couple of hours, but then you've finished 6 plates, stuck into your seventh with another ahead of you and the spin-off plates piled around that. (Think that analogy got away a bit, but you see where I'm going with this.) The moral of the story is- I'm hungry.

The Aveum Annihilation

 

It comes about now and then that a project will drop at the wrong time to the wrong audience and turn out... wrongly. That is to say; not every failure was meant to be so for the pure merit of what it is, and not every success is due solely to the strengths of the pieces involved. Indeed much about the life we lived is based on the peripherals and inconsequentials of the world- who we know, where we are, the events around us. 'Merit' is a lie perpetuated by the fortunate to give the bereft some grim hope to persist in search of a brighter future that doesn't exist. Even the act of giving up is criminalised and blasphemed, because the rich can't stay afloat unless we are kneeling in the gutter for them to stand atop. But I'm sliding a bit away from the point- we're here to talk the Immortals game!

I think there's always a bad sign regarding a game when the name is a headache to say. Sure, there are many games out there with bad and caustic headlines that manage to worm their way onto 'classics' lists- just take 'Dragon Age: Origins' for example- a game with a subtitle that is completely and utterly meaningless outside of the context of referring to this being the start of the franchise. There is no other 'Origin' told throughout the game in any context- it's marketing pure and simple. But we don't ever think of the game's weird name because it's become a household name. But if you don't have a unbridled classic brewing in your little pot, a cleaner title is just better for marketing. Perhaps consider renaming 'Immortals of Aveum' to... well, literally anything else? I still have to look it up and I've done 5 or so articles on the little bugger- that's a problem!

But the name is not what sank Aveum. In a recent candid comment from a former EA developer, a spotlight was shone on the process of what the game was and how in many ways it and the team were set up to fail from the get-go. One of the nearly 50% of Ascendant Studio that were laid off from the team after the game's unfortunate failure called it a "Truly awful idea"; laying the blame of the game on "Trying to make a AAA single-player shooter in today's market." Atop of highlighting the game was a new IP and was filled with the bloat typical of a plus 100 million dollar budget. (including the 40 million for marketing) Again, we come back to the idea of the perhipherals of the situation. Not the talents of the team- but the 'timing' of the game. Let's examine that.

Now I don't need to interview the fellows themselves to figure out what they meant by 'today's market'. As it stands a lot of the top most player games are AAA shooters- but most important they are multiplayer shooters, that all leverage some sort of Live Service functionality. Warzone, Battlefield, Apex, Destiny, Halo. Some have increasingly limited Single Player offerings, but those are just to get players through the door and keep them busy when the servers are down. The multiplayer is the draw that keeps them hooked and buying cosmetics long enough for the investment to hit their return multiplayers that make shareholders salivate. If that is the game that rules the roost, then delivering an experience with no multiplayer portions whatsoever was tantamount to suicide, no?

Yet here's the rub- the cold water- things are never that black and white. If the world really existed in such a state that only things which were already popular could be successful, then innovation wouldn't be a concept; now would it? Do you think Divinity Original Sin dropped into a healthy CRPG market and did gangbusters there? No- it released to a world starved for heavy duty RPGs and thus capitalised on the market gap. Heck, what about DOOM 2016, which released during an equally heavy Multiplayer Shooter trend? (although 'Live Services' were not as industry-standard back then.) Admittedly, that game did have an online component- which died mere seconds after the game launched- but the Single Player portion? Instant classic. Best seller. Earned a sequel. So what is the difference between Aveum and DOOM? Or Wolfenstien? Or any of the other AAA shooters of the modern age that did well?

Honestly, Aveum just wasn't that good. Bloat, is perhaps the right term here as coined by this ex-employee- because the game had nowhere near the amount of content variety to justify the playtime. The whole wrist-based magic concept feels weak too, on a visual scale, which weakens the spectacle of action in a genre that thrives on visual spectacle. The story was over-stuffed, the characters were under-baked, the general art-style looked only a tad less overdesigned than Godfall- but still a total mess. It just felt as though the game lacked a heart, which was attempted to be paved over with style and passionless excess. If Aveum was an excellent game, it would have drawn eyes despite itself. Build it and they will come.

To which I will say that the game was a bad idea from the outset. First-off- it is utterly insane that this game wasn't a VR title. I've scoured the internet searching for some sort of VR release because for the love of god- it seemed made for it. I've even spoken with people who tested the thing, who themselves were baffled that it went to launch in the absolute state it was in! There has to be something said for a product not passing the sniff test from the most important demographic, the makers and the players. If they can't justify the product, then who is going to buy it at the end of the day? Be honest with yourselves! And more than half a year later- what is the game's legacy? It decimated a studio and stained EA's banksheet.

I bring this up to draw a line under what should be an example. Games can never be forced together out of elements that should work. Aveum was constructed by a team of industry vets, given a stupid amount of money, featured a talented cast of stars- but it didn't have a heart. Art will always be the story of people laid out before you- a heart peeled open. Any form of art lacking that heart is going to fail to reach, to impress and to succeed. That's just the basic aspect of creation in a nutshell. That is what is missing from titles like Suicide League. From studios like Ubisoft. And from industries like the music complex. Just have a little heart, will ya?

Digital Only- the oncoming trainwreck

Things look bad and the digital ownership situation seems a mess! 

The whole 'not owning our digital purchases and being at the whim of platform providers' seems goddamned hopeless! 

We're all as potless, begging these companies to reassess. 

The gaming communities spine feels freakin' boneless! 

We've lost the game, we think the system's wrecked,

Well let me just say that's- correct!

We're all losers, baby! No matter what we spin it we've totally and utterly lost the battle for the ownership of the things that we buy now that the digital landscape has taken over reality and made the necessity for the physical all but redundant. The worst thing that ever happened to the upper class was the right of us lessers ever owning anything, which is why those have consistently been the rights attacked generation after generation since the birth of society. Rights to land were taken away, rights to congregate in large crowds, the right to be loud outside of the House of Commons (if you're down here in Blightly with myself) and now the right to own a damned file. Not even a digital copy of a movie or game can belong to the people who spend their money on it because ownership is a concept created by the oppressive to stamp down on us.

I'm in a mood. Can you tell?

Recently there's been some uproar in the space of entertainment regarding the prevalence of streaming services and the horrific imbalance of control it's permitting studios to have over modern movies and TV shows. Back in the day it was totally up to the purview of distributors to get out shows and movies- which often meant that the less popular just got scrapped completely turning most of cinema's origins into lost media. That was supposed to become a thing of the past as we moved into the age of easy to replicate digital files- but the reign of service providers is trying to resuscitate that rank imbalance for some hellish incomprehensible purpose. And nowhere has that been made more horrifically obvious then with Warner Bros. recent antics.

We've heard of two high-coverage cases of movies that were funded by Warner Bros to completion and then canned in some strange attempt to- perhaps construe losses on their tax returns? Who's to say what their end goal is- the results, however, is that the Batgirl film and 'Coyote vs ACME' have been killed in a completed state, wasting the time and talents of everyone involved with both products for no reason whatsoever. And these are just the instances that we're heard about because the creators kicked up a fuss. How many similar projects were snuffed out upon being birthed but managed to be kept hush-hush because the team were afraid of being backlisted by the big producer holding the pillow? And would you believe me if I told you that this same thing was happening to movies and shows that have already been released?

When providers pull shows and nobody picks them up, thanks to the streaming exclusivity and lack of physical release- some just disappear entirely! The Netflix Marvel shows were unwatchable for two years and on the gaming side there are entire Stadia exclusive games that simply cannot exist elsewhere because they were designed specifically to take advantage of streamed tech, and no other streaming platform currently allows streamed game exclusivity. (Although most have managed to get ports which scale down the reliance on streaming) We still can't get our hands on the Nuts and Bolts style spin off to Hello Neighbour which is real and perhaps the only positive casualty of this no-ownership world within which we reside.

Of course we can rely on the likes of piracy when the world of licences fail us, because no pirate site is going to abide by some greedy studios calculated move to drive up scarcity in order to conjure an illusion of value. But we can't place piracy as the solution to all of our problems. I don't want to commit piracy as a solution to owning my software, I want to support the creators so that they can make more cool stuff! Right now I have only ever committed piracy on a single franchise I refuse to pay money for, and that's only to check if their latest updates have made the game worth getting. When I find out inevitably that they haven't after an hour of playing, I uninstall it again. (Good luck figuring out which game I'm talking about.)

This is no idle threat to consumers either. With Crunchy Roll's recent consumption of Funimation, everybody who had redeemed a show on the service through a DVD code, or who had even brought one through some special instances, hold no recourse for retaining that digital data when accounts are moved to Crunchy Roll's servers. The same happened with Sony's breakup with the Discovery Channel and 'owned' shows through their servers. And yes, Sony may have walked that back publicly, but certain territories got no such provisions- Germans just lost their shows. Ownership is becoming a commodity that the commercial world cannot afford.

And the solution? Unfortunately I think it's going to have to be a government decision. We need a big power, preferably from within the EU, to take a revised look at digital rights and amend them- because there isn't a company on the planet with a Shareholder board lenient enough to allow that kind of revision. And what do I propose? I think we need a subsidy backed digital library of content through which legal ownership can be verified and copies can be downloaded if their rights aren't currently in service by a private service provider- so that the greed of corporations is ripped right out of the equation. Digital art is given the safety net it deserves, and audiences don't feel the need to stock up on Hard drives for fear of their favourite platform shutting down everytime they blink. Yeah, it's not fullproof, but honestly what else is going to change our trajectory in this downwards spiral of not owning anything? There's only so far we can keep physical media struggling along before it needs to be put out of it's misery.

Deus Dead

We didn't ask for this

I love Deus Ex. No, not the original classic that is heralded as both one of the most influential and one of the flat best PC games of all time, because I'm not that based. I liked the original, I'd probably play it again someday- but it's Human Revolution that tickles my turnips. That rugged old pointed goateed GOAT cyberninja who Didn't Ask For This(tm) has haunted my lofty expectations for entertainment for years now. How a video game can tell a great multi-layered narrative with explorative story beats, how multi-faceted playstyle design can work at an impeccable level, and how one can style themselves to unreachable levels of rizz through the use of some quality beard oil and sub-dermal indoor shades- Human Revolution taught it all and did it with that subtle over-the-shoulder wink and smile that said "Yeah, I can do this all day. You'd like that, wouldn't you?" But they did not end up doing it all day.

Because you see, Deus Ex is a dead franchise. It is no more. Caput. Donezo. Or at least, the Deus Ex that we were getting to know over the past decade and a bit is. I suppose the very concept of Deus Ex will never and can ever die, probably being cooked up into some sort of ill-fated mobile management game at some point soon- but the Adam Jensen saga- as started by Human Revolutions and royally cocked up in Mankind Divided? The story that was going to give us a direct line into the formation of the Illumanti from the first game: presumably whilst giving us a direct tie to some of the core members to make them all that more interesting come next playthrough? Yeah, he's gone. And we've got confirmation from none other than the man himself.

Elias Toufexis is one of those well beloved actors largely for that one iconic role that is probably now so small a part of his resume that he has to remind himself why people still remind him of it on the street. But we can provide that context for free whenever such a query is raised. It's because of that innate lure that the weathered and beaten crusader who doggedly pursues an unassailable foe with enviable passion and a smooth-as-rocks attitude beneath it all. That an Elias has one of those voices you can just picture. Throw him behind the highly detailed and angularly stylised model of Adam Jensen or the considerable more potato-y face of Cole from Starfield and you can picture their entire person from the moment those characters open their mouth. His has a voice for character, that man does. Which is why when a talent like that is so intrinsically linked to a character, their bad news is the communities bad news. 

Bad news such as the fact that Elias seems to be the sole member of the original team publicly talking about Deus Ex, to such a point that a while back Eidos had to reach out to ask him to stop so that they could perhaps whittle down some of the Deus Ex begging all of their newer products get hounded by. And Elias? Well, he can't live off hope and fan expectation forever. The man himself seems to have thrown in the towel and publicly urged people to put out their candles- their strapping goateed macho man is never coming home and even if there is a future for the Deus Ex brand, it most likely will not continue the story which fascinated me and so many newer Deus Ex fans all those years ago. That timeline is lost to the ethos.

And that has become more apparent from the fact that Eidos is currently owned by the absolute grinder of potential video games known as, wouldn't you know it, the Embracer Group! Oh, what do you know! The company I've been saying for months sound like the proto-religious gated commune accepting all the lost and weary that, in the third act, turns out to be a people-trafficking organ farm run by a governmental shadow cabal in a Dan Brown novel- turns out they're not the safe haven of wayward developers that everyone else was building them up to be all these years! Turns out they're something of a convalescence house within which development studios struggle under an unyielding producer as they slowly stagnate. Turns out- Nominative determinism is a thing!

For Eidos specifically? Embracer has been the foot stamping out the embers of every possible Deus Ex project before it can be born. In fact, Embracer have been reported as cancelling somewhere close to 15 projects before announcement from all over the place- and personally I've yet to see their logo printed in the producer credits of any video game. Looking at a list of their biggest franchises, the only one's I can say I know is Destroy All Humans- for which they produced remakes, not the originals- and Homefront. Which was one of the worst shooter franchises ever made. So not exactly what I'd call a shining beacon of success. But Embracer have been embracing across the industry gobbling up every studio under the sun- almost like a Megacorporation might- wait... has Deus Ex been killed by a company who would look bad under the messaging? (Food for thought.)

Right now let's be honest with one another- you'd have to be an actual moron not to see the market for a Deus Ex game. After Cyberpunk 2077 managed to redeem itself with one final big content update, the genre is wide open for something to fill the gap whilst CDPR fumble about with The Witcher 4 and Project Orion at the same time- and Deus Ex could have ridden that expectation to glory. They could have revived another go around as that 'Deus Ex Universe' thing they wanted to do. They could have dusted off the old angular trench-coat and got us grumbly cyber-daddy back in his airvents. And instead- during the best opportunity window- we have silence. And if Deus Ex isn't in the cards now- they'll never be a better time to make one. So until Eidos can wiggle free from under the amorphous mass of the love-craftian abomination sitting on their back- Deus is Ex-communicado.

The Future of Xbox

 

So the fated date has come and gone and Xbox have revealed their grand plan to slowly destroy any competitive edge they ever had in the industry in a slow wind-down to getting rid of their console altogether. And sure, that isn't how this was presented- but that is merely because saying such out loud would cause a panic. But let's be honest, what else would be the reason for going the direction that they are going in? Remember, out of all the big three that are scared of consoles becoming obsolete, Microsoft are the ones who literally own the majority of the PC market. All they have to do is start working on beefing up their online Microsoft store to not be utterly atrocious. (Treating game files like App files and locking them away in hidden systems folders is so painfully out of touch it isn't even funny.) This is how it happens, this is how the Xbox man dies.

It was already leaked well in advance that Xbox was looking at bringing some of their exclusive games to other consoles in an attempt to double dip their popularity. At the time fears were abound for some of the big platform identity holders making the jump, but whether because the backlash came from a calculated leak and the team decided to pull back, or simply because people ran out of control- such plans were not revealed to the public. Yet. But bare in mind- that is the only direction that this could possibly go. You don't start handing out console exclusives only to start and stop with the four announced today. This is a precedent set by the person in the weakest position to try and manifest a reality that only they see for the future of the industry. One day, Halo is going to at least be on the negotiating table with Sony.

As for the four games? Microsoft were quick to try and downplay their importance whilst softening the field for the next pitch of much more consequential heavy hitters somewhere down the line. The stipulations were piled on top of one another- these are older games from more than a year ago since their launch- they're already reached their 'community potential' in the eyes of Microsoft and can't pick up significant traction on their own anymore. (Maybe give them a promotional boost on GamePass then, I dunno.) Oh, and then there's the headscratching claim that some of these games were 'never meant to be exclusive'- which sounds like crap to me. So what, you forgot to port them to other consoles until just today? Did someone file the port request to the wrong office? Nah, this is just some gaslighting, isn't it?

According to reporting from the Verge the games we are looking at start with Hi-Fi Rush- something of an underground hit which sparked the first serious interest in this new era of Xbox exclusives when it launched the same day as the inaugural Microsoft Bethesda conference. A testament to the long time prospect of that exclusive partnership, now being pimped out to Sony and probably Nintendo for a quick buck. (Great look, guys.) Then there's the very niche 'Pentiment', second game developed by current in-house Microsoft developer 'Obsidian'. Not really sure if this one has a big future on Playstation, felt like a game more directed towards a PC audience to me- but who knows- maybe the lacklustre sells will find a pertinent boost from the novelty of playing a strict Xbox exclusive alone. Sea of Thieves is a big one- a giant ecosystem-game with a healthy community made by an Xbox partner of over a decade- now a pawn in a bigger game. Oh, and Obsidian's other exclusive Xbox title, Grounded- basically making every bit of Xbox value the company had generated since their purchase utterly moot. Good job, team.

Now those of us with delusional syndrome have breathed a sigh of relief at all of this news. Taking solace from the fact that Xbox promised only 'small games' would ever be in consideration of being ported over. But here's the thing- Xbox has no 'big' exclusives aside from Starfield. This year's Indiana Jones is going to be their second big exclusive in half a console generation- they don't have the weight to throw around like they seem eager to pretend that they do. With this new medium an Xbox exclusivity deal is going to become as worthless as an Epic Games exclusivity deal- because nobody third party is going to sell off their big AAA exclusive game and all medium developers simply need to weigh up if the Microsoft payday is enough to cover that first year of minimal sales before it's handed off to the real markets. Xbox will never develop a worthwhile buyer base again.

Now for their defence, Microsoft think that they're stepping ahead of the curve with this decision. In the mind of the Xbox hierarchy they believe that console exclusivity is on the way out and they're simply leading the charge by example- but who's going to tell that to Sony? Sony have the market completely in their grasp, Nintendo maintains their niche- neither platform holds anything to gain from giving their games to the Xbox marketplace. In fact, both would lose everything in an ecosystem where consoles dissolve entirely in the wake of computers. Xbox is betting their weight on a future that only they want- forgetting how outnumbered they are on the board- which essentially sums up to the company pushing themselves out of the market.

If you want ironclad confirmation that this is going to rock the game development world- just look no further than Ubisoft. In an unsolicited comment on the goings-on, a Ubisoft executive offhandedly remarked that if Xbox were to start going multiplatform it wouldn't have a significant effect on the market. Which executive said this? Yves Guillemot. Now, barring for a moment the fact that the guy is a pathological liar- he's also chief of a company renowned for being guided by the least intelligent, unintuitive backwards worms of creation- evolutionary rejects bred in the recesses of the Paris Catacombs since the neolithic age and dragged out into the light to run the most backwards game developer into the ground. If they say that Xbox isn't going to change the balance of the market, you can bet it's going to rock the industry foundation to it's core.

So peering past the pomp and circuses, wiping that Microsoft-branded cake crumbs off your mouth and looking at the whole picture- it's easy to see what is really going on here. Microsoft is battling over how it's wants to monetise itself which is leading to these inane decisions that foster not confidence, but profitability. Who cares about sustainability when I have the chance to effect a boost in revenue in my age? And after that scuffle is wound down, will there be anything left worthy of choosing an Xbox over? Playstation won't surrender it's exclusivities- so all the Xbox will be is a console for beta-testing Microsoft studio games before they get perfected and ported to the Playstation- turning one-time industry players into witless masterless cattle. And as for Sony and Nintendo? With a little bravado, maybe tomorrow they'll strike atop the heap. Nature abhors a power vacuum, the future of Xbox belongs to them.

Mad Max Review

 Black-on-Black.

There's something to be said about the science of release dates. The time of year and week can all greatly influence those ever important day one sales, and so can making sure not to release the game in the same few days as the next big Metal Gear. Yeah, trying to go toe-to-toe with Hideo Kojima tends to be a recipe for disaster. Such was the case for the long-doomed Mad Max game which collapsed spectacularly in the face of staunch competition that absolutely buried this little game and relegated it to the realms of 'lost gem' forever more. I'd put off finally getting around to the game, which actually showed considerable promise during it's marketing stages with impressive set-piece vehicular combat and eye-popping ravenous storms, until finishing Days Gone. Now with that out the way I seem to have smoothly transitioned over to another post-apocalyptic anti-hero led open world game prominently revolving around a central vehicle and fuel management, who'd have thought?

Mad Max marks the debut of one of the most influential post-apocalyptic franchises of all time to the video game space, not counting some Atari mess-of-a-game I'm sure exists out there. (Yep, 1990 release on the 2600.) The visual of desert strewn Australia has become the goto marquee for practically every franchise of this genre, and Fallout still retained it's 'Leather armour' as a nod to the Road Warrior Max all the way up until Fallout 4 which ruined that tradition along with all the others it squandered. (Still bitter I see.) Following the resurgence of interest in the franchise with the release of Fury Road (2015)- this game was conjured up as something of a sequel leveraging the newly realised myth-like take on the story of Max in an open world action adventure game.

Max is thrust into the dunes of a long-dried ocean, deprived of all of his iconic tools from his armour to his shotgun to his car, the legendary black-on-black; as he is left for dead following a brutal battle with the son of Immortan Joe (From Fury Road). Mad Max achieves what very few RPGs can by marrying together the progression of the narrative to the RPG progression of the character, as the game presents the slow building of a replacement car, alongside cobbling together new armour and a makeshift gun- as necessary steps on Max's journey to travel into the 'Plains of Silence' where Max hopes to finally escape the guilt of letting his family die all the way back in the first Mad Max movie that hardly anyone actually remembers.

This means that the core of the gameplay loop, even as it is expressed through the story missions, is based around scavenging either specific new parts or miscellaneous scrap that can be turned into upgrades- and it is the freedom through which the player finds these items that Mad Max settles on it's greatest structural strengths. Pretty much everything you engage with in the open world, from picking through small camps to fighting through enemy strongholds, to taking out convoys, to braving insane dust storms- rewards the player with the universal currency of 'scrap'- meaning you're never really pigeon-holed into a certain type of open world activity in order to advance- with the exception of the rare specific part that needs to be grabbed from one particular part of the map.

The Magnum Opus, Max's replacement car, is constructed from a literal frame on wheels into a powerhouse with an impressive level of internal and external customisation to make this vehicle really feel like the player's own. Whilst at the beginning of the game you're simply happy to have a car that moves faster than walking- with time you'll be able to settle in certain builds that prioritise speed or basing power, and invest in really fantastic upgrades that make the game's genuinely impressive car combat stand out. All whilst not worrying too much about fuel because, thank god, the rate of fuel leakage is sensible. (Take note, Days Gone!)

Given the legacy of the franchise in question: the car really was what Mad Max needed to get right most of all, and with a weighty-powerful handling, wide open spaces to let rip and an impressively cinematic flair to car crashes- Avalanche certainly delivered! Bashing into raider's death karts is satisfying enough, but shooting a hook onto specific parts and then ripping them off with a working physics-enabled cable? That's sick. Ripping a driver out their windscreen or tearing a wheel off it's hinges and watching the car barrel out of control never gets old. But that's just the base gear. By the end of the game you'll be hurling exploding 'lightning rods' and shooting flamethrowers out of your side exhausts- this is the kind of car-combat a Mad Max game demanded to have.

And when you're out of the car? What then? Well, then you actually get to enjoy a decently built Arkham clone fit with a basic move-set and counters. There's nowhere near the level of complexity and flow of a Rocksteady Arkham game; but there's enough to scratch that free-flow itch with genuinely crunchy strikes and satisfyingly painful finisher animations brought to life with some great sound design work. There's even some parrying timed button prompts at later levels, nudging the player's skill-bone; and once you start getting a reliable source of ammo the makeshift sawn-off is a great combo diversifier of it's own. Altogether Max's combat suite is a damn-sight more meaty and put-together than one would expect from a game like this, and I don't hate it one bit at all.

Enemy variety is a bit lacking on the actual 'challenge' level; although visually the team put together an absolutely wacky cast of post-world psychos. Colourful and lanky, crazed and unpredictable- it's a bit of shame that pretty much everyone goes down to the same basic combos because these guys look positively freaky. I think it really does speak to the strength of the combat development team, in style and content, that I still find something satisfying about crushing these guys- even if there are only two or three archetypes that really make me change up my game. If there were literally two more tactically-challenging enemies, I'd consider this suite entirely serviceable for the game as it is. They're that close to satisfying! As it is, outposts can start to feel repetitive after a while once you've started to figure out how combat works and there's far too many of them to clear throughout the whole game- as there is going to always be when we're talking about an open world.

Of course as this is an open world game, it is in the story that Mad Max falters a little, not because the narrative is bad but simply because it's largely static- as is the nature of the character himself. An Iconic character like Max can't really embark on a proper arc, and that is a bit of the charm of him. Always knowing that Max is out for himself, and never quite knowing who he can open up to, is satisfying in it's own way- but it can be frustrating to have the promise of an arc dangled in front of the player before being regressed before our eyes. I accept that as a totally legitimate narrative tool to keep an Iconic character where they are, mind you- but that doesn't mean I don't find it annoying. Max leaves this narrative exactly the same as how he came into it, and it's not through lack of trying to change.

The larger world around Max is memorable in it's own way, crazed and larger than life and populated with more Australian accents than you can shake a didgeridoo at- but there is a ethereal impermanence to it. Perhaps Days Gone has just left a mark on how I see these sorts of 'barren worlds' but I never found myself caring about any of the settlements I worked alongside or the people I met therein, because I never really see the reality in them- although that in itself is part of the style of Mad Max. It's almost supposed to feel like aspects of a fairy tale. Which makes me at odds with my own feelings on the overall characterisation of the world. There's a cartoon-edge which both undercuts and outlines the tragedy around the character of Max making moments when he is clearly confronted- which are pretty much exclusively during the optional conversations with the Level-up merchant- feel both out-of-place and strangely apropos.  

Visually, at least, I really loved the world. The wide open wastes of the drained sea bed littered with the hulks of old ships and towering lighthouses- there's a solid personality dotted about the place which makes the world more than just another 'barren post-apocalyptic desert' setting. Of course, the world is at it's most stark when wrecked by the breathtaking storm walls that swallow up the world, turning the whole world in a whirlwind of chaos. Battling a convoy that gets drowned in a sea of storms is a dynamic shift worth living through for the experience of it all alone, and Avalanche brought that moment to the forefront of it's liveliness. There is certainly a case to be made for 'brown world is brown', but the colour of the various paint-strewn bandits, and the brilliant glare of the sun, offset by the deep blue of night- on a primary spectrum this game can be a stark work of empty art. Then again, I'm a sucker for empty worlds that fill space with their enormous magnificence, aren't I?

Conclusion

Mad Max is a game borne from a dozen influences manned and cared for by a team that really knew how and why those influences worked. When I see all that Mad Max achieved, I can't see a single fault in direction but simply in the resources the team had available to them. Individually I don't think there is a single element that Mad Max pulls off to a fantastic degree beyond the car combat, which I genuinely think should be an example to others, but the bringing together of these elements in a cohesive manner is in itself an above average feat. I have to recommend this game, and probably even go a bit further to knock its score perhaps a grade or so higher than it deserves. In that light, given the entire game on offer, Mad Max probably rightly earns it's spot to a solid B grade on the arbitrary scaling just by being solidly better than average titles; sliding out of the C's for those great vehicular battle moments. I won't call this a must buy, but if you're looking for a little something between your Far Cry's and your Day's Gones- both in length and style- you can't go wrong with Avalanche's Mad Max.