Recent reviews by Austen™ Colossus™√

Very promising, looking forward to the full release. The gameplay is smooth and feels great in action. The main character, One, has a lot of personality and the writing seems strong. I quite enjoy the style of puzzles employed and look forward to seeing the expansion of how these will play out in the full release. The demo mostly has pretty simple puzzling mechanics, with some of the hidden items taking a bit more brain power on how to get to. Luckily, Fading Echo provides a lot of creative options on how to solve these, and while some may have *a way* they intend, due to the flexibility of the various elements, there are definitely other ways you could do them outside of the intention. This is a good thing because at least as of right now, it means that they understand players will be players, and are not locking you into ony how they thought you should do something.

The visuals are great, and the story seems interesting. Here's hoping the full release is as good as the demo is looking!

Dune: Awakening is a game that, when I initially saw it announced, had me go from “Ooh, a Dune game? This could be pretty cool!” to “Oh, no… it’s an always online MMO survival crafting game?”. I have to be honest and say that the initial advertisement I saw left me uncertain. As time went on, however, more details and footage were coming out and it seemed like maybe they could do this right. I still wasn’t sure, but based on early feedback I read from people who got to beta test, things were looking pretty good. I saw some early gameplay and went from uncertain to sold: this seemed promising. I got my review code in my inbox and hopped in, fully ready to go.
First impressions were good. I like the way the story is presented, and the visuals are gorgeous. The beginning introduces you to your character and tasks you with choosing from various backgrounds and “classes”. I, having seen a bit of the game before, decided that from the various choices of starting classes, the one with the grappling hook seemed like the smartest move. A little extra movement speed across flat ground to traverse areas patrolled by Shai-Hulud (The sand worms) if nothing else. My friend who played alongside me proved this to be true because he had taken a class without a movement skill at the beginning and found his demise to a Shai-Hulud’s maw.
Which gets me into the main topic, the part you’ll of course be interacting with in Dune: Awakening the most- the open world. Dune: Awakening’s open world is pretty populated with exploration potential, but it does throw some unique mechanics in your way to make it more complicated than most other survival games. First and foremost: the sun. The sun in Dune: Awakening is an active danger that threatens to kill you if you are exposed for too long. You are made to stick within the shadows as often as possible during the day, while the night time frees you up to make more distant and open movement. I think it’s really interesting that they’ve managed to flip the usual survival game expectation by instead making the night time feel more safe. That isn’t to say that exploring is truly any safer overall, though, as your secondary biggest danger will always be the Shai-Hulud lurking beneath. When you leave the safety of an outcropping of rocky terrain and into the open sands, you’re constantly making noise that WILL alert the worm eventually. Run too far, too often and you’ll be running for your life hoping to make it to the other side of the gap while a mouthful of teeth follow mere feet behind you. Get caught by the worm and you lose your entire backpack… permanently.
Death within Dune: Awakening is one of the… simultaneously most frustrating and sometimes too forgiving things in the game. If you dare to set foot on open sand and alert Shai-Hulud, you will be punished if you don’t escape by permanently losing everything you’re carrying. This sucks. The mechanic itself is kind of interesting, but… ugh, losing everything you’ve got with no option of recovery is a major bummer and I could easily see it causing people to rage quit. Luckily I had my handy grappling hook so I never really had to contend with the Shai-Hulud, but my friend was not so lucky: losing his bag multiple times in our earlier points while trying to just traverse. If you die while out and about, you can respawn at either your base, a respawn beacon you set, or at your vehicle. Dying by any means other than the worm only takes away a small part of your items in inventory and damages your gear. This end of the spectrum almost feels like I get off too light while the other end (worm death) feels really punishing.
Regarding vehicles in all of the above mentioned survival mechanics, I found it oddly… strange that once you get your first vehicle (I got mine maybe 3 hours of game time in), you immediately stop having to care about the sun. For some reason, being on a vehicle makes your character entirely immune to the effects of the sun and you’re now completely free to explore without a second thought on what time of day it is. I found this a little disappointing in my opinion, as the very unique mechanic of the sun could have spent a much longer time being something you had to fight with and being interesting. As it is, it mostly served as a cool early game function that I stopped thinking about entirely aside from the odd moment after a few hours. At this point, I only think about it if I’m deciding to climb really high, but even that at some point gets negated once you unlock the Ornithopter, so…
Dune: Awakening is a fun experience though, and I appreciate that it’s pretty well guided along while also maintaining the need to solve some of it yourself. I never really felt lost in my ~20 hours of playing, and always had something to work toward. The exploration is fun because the environments are pretty while maintaining unique landmasses. I enjoyed just riding around between areas to find what’s new in each, and climbing around to find the little hidden nooks and crannies. The map is HUGE, mostly thanks to the fact that they can get away with large swaths of empty desert that still manages to stay interesting thanks to the Shai-Hulud being ever present within them. It’s a lot of technically empty, but it doesn’t really feel like it in motion. I guess you can attribute that to good design. There’s always something new to find, even within one patch of rocks, since there’s pretty good overlap and verticality to all of it. Caves cross sideways under raider camps that patch up the area.
One thing that admittedly takes away from this beauty,in my opinion, is the simple existence of other players. The multiplayer I feel like is added at the cost of everything being brought down about one notch from where it could be otherwise. For example, the world: there are so many just… empty square boxes all over the map that players slapped down to get a simple base for themselves. In the busy server I was in, just about every rock outcropping had a player base slapped on it, sometimes being extravagant and elegant in a way that complimented the world, but usually just being a rectangle slammed into the middle of a walkway. Dune: Awakening does offer a way to avoid this by having a private server, but… those are rented and cost $11.49/month for the cheapest option. I really just think it’d be much better with a single player option or private world where you and friends can just connect into together, and it spawns your relative bases in. They have a system within the private servers that exist to still connect you with other people in the social hubs and PVE areas, so I’d love to see some addition for a more open existence of that. Funcom made such a beautiful world! I’d love to get to explore it without player builds (Without paying $11/month).
Also, the story is supposed to be about you personally. You’re the metaphorical “chosen one” in this alternate universe telling of Dune’s world. Yet… somehow, everywhere you go, there are fifteen other people who look just like you doing the same objectives you’re doing, hanging out in the secret caves meant for you, inhaling the incense and getting visions just like you. Their existence pulls you out of the “one” part of “chosen one”. It makes a lot of the world feel too overtaken by others equally powerful and effective on the environment as you. It also caused my experience with several of the lengthier underground areas full of enemies to be completely wrong and devoid of all life. In at least two separate circumstances, there was someone else exploring an extensive area who had already killed everything on my walk through for an objective and so I just sort of… walk through empty hallways collecting loot to get to my objective at the end. No tension, no anything, just empty space and free stuff. This also lead to, in one moment, me getting trapped inside an area because a person with the keycard unlocked a door that I didn’t realize was ope

It is time to grab your face shields, space suits, and rubber boots! PowerWash Simulator 2 is releasing, October 23, 2025. You took that dirty old van and made your start-up business run from your garage a success! Not only did you wash away all the grime of the county, but you also saved the town from natural disasters and unwanted visitors. Now is the time to expand your business and open a store front. Calls from all over the county are once again coming in and it is time to get down to some power washing. Go out and explore the map of Caldera County with your three new feline friends, Ulysses, Bubbles, and Squeak. Also, yes, you can pet them all!
The central homebase is your brand-new sprawling empty storefront. Here you can show off your creativity and decorate the space to your liking. As you finish jobs, more furniture will be unlocked to use amongst the space. However, these items were found during the jobs so they will need to be cleaned up before use. The patterns range in styles inspired by modern, art deco, luxury, and many more. You can also use this area to act as a meeting space for you and up to three of your friends in multiplayer mode.
Overall, PowerWash Simulator 2 was a good graphical improvement. The effects of the water are much more fleshed out than the original game, giving a rinsing effect on most surfaces. The textures themselves are vastly improved in PowerWash Simulator 2, showcasing less blurry details. Additionally, the environments have taken on a much more alive feeling than the previous game. Gentle effects of falling leaves, butterflies, and all kinds of small details have been added for immersion. The jobs this time around are less static, some having sections of grime to wash away, only being revealed after completing a certain number of tasks. My only complaint graphics wise was the artefacts left on the job completion replay, I hope to see an update to improve the quality upon launch.
The sound design in PowerWash Simulator 2 did leave me wanting something…else? Using the default settings, I felt the sounds of the water were just too harsh. Of course, this can be easily fixed and fine-tuned in the audio settings menu. It did take me a while to tweak it to my liking as I needed to pause and resume to listen to the difference. If you play like I do though, and have a YouTube video or something else to relax with, this is a minor issue.
A few improvements have been made to the existing game mechanics, and few new interesting ones have been added. Soap is now longer lasting with a sticking effect that will help you find those hard to see grime spots. The formulation has also undergone an upgrade and is now bubblier and more noticeable than previously. New shiny attachments also make their debut, a spinning attachment which twirls in a circle and is seemingly focused on the floor jobs.
In the store you can sell and buy guns and attachments, this can also be utilized to get stronger guns quickly if you are not aiming at collecting them all. Personalization has expanded. Not only do guns and suits have skins, now your van does as well! I am excited to spread my creativeness into these new spaces and hope to see some future additions to these categories with the future DLC themes.
Personally, with PowerWash Simulator 2, I am excited about the future of the PowerWash franchise. If you look at their freshly released 2025/2026 roadmap you can be excited to see 3 paid IP DLC, 3 free Caldera Chronicle Jobs, and what they claim will be a bucket full of other planned additions coming. They are really giving us more of the game we all fell in love with, and I hope they continue to listen to their community. I highly recommend purchasing this installment if you enjoyed the first game, it will be well worth the investment. Go on, let’s go gnome hunting in PowerWash Simulator 2. If you like cozy, comforting games, it’s one of the best.

Team Ninja is back with a third installation of Nioh, and they prove that they remain strong. Nioh as a series has long been a series that, in my opinion, does a lot to take the formula enough from a souls-like game to reasonably be called one, but at the same time does everything to be entirely different. A souls-like in a technicality only, by way of the fact that when you die, you drop your XP that you need to bank at shrines to level up, which respawns enemies when interacted with. But quick-swapping class-based twists on combat, a beautiful open world with interesting exploration, and a sprawling set of skills to choose from do everything to differentiate Nioh 3 not only from its Dark Souls inspirations, but also from the previous two releases.

So, as mentioned, if you’re familiar with the Soulslike format, you’ll know what to expect to some extent here. Hard bosses separated by the world full of enemies to kill and nooks and crannies to explore to get stronger to fight harder bosses. Skill-heavy combat ensuring you can’t just cheese your way through every fight. Respawning enemies when you go to level up or die making you have to pick and choose when to actually bank your points if you don’t want to have to fight through everything again. All the usual suspects of the genre are here, and a Soulslike fan will find themselves at home in this environment. However, there’s so much unique handling Team Ninja puts into Nioh 3 that, even fervent souls fans might come out finding themselves enjoying Nioh 3 more than even some of the actual greats from Fromsoft, themselves. I can certainly say as a big fan of the Souls games that Nioh 3 is definitely competing for a place high on the rankings against Dark Souls 3 or Bloodborne in my head. But this article isn’t about Dark Souls, it’s about Nioh, so let’s get into the meat on what makes Nioh stand out in its own light.

The biggest, most interesting thing has to be the class system. Nioh 3 introduces for the first time in the series the ability to fluidly swap between two “classes”: the Ninja/Shinobi and the Samurai. As you can probably infer, the Ninja is faster and squishier, while the Samurai is slower, stronger, and tankier. The way this is handled within Nioh 3 though makes it so you are always playing as both. Sure, you can choose to primarily play as one or the other, but, rather than only progressing whatever you’re using, Nioh 3 gives you skill points for both constantly to ensure that you’re never leaving one behind out of preference. With a one-button swap, you’re able to seamlessly swap between the two classes in the middle of combat so you can get up close and hit em hard with the samurai, then change to Ninja and make an escape. Each class has entirely unique weapon sets and skill sets, so you will always want to be doing your best to keep yourself familiar with both while exploring and fighting the overworld enemies.

Samurai is setup such that, when played efficiently, you will always stay up close and personal with your opponent. With the unique “Ki pulse” mechanic, you’re able to rapidly refill your stamina (referred to within Nioh 3 as “Ki”) between swings. Jumping between attacking and blocking, you should find yourself always face-to-face with your opponent. Movement is slow, so you will not want to be having to get around in the fight very much. Samurai is very much the “Strength” build class of the game, bullying enemies to keep them in place and not allowing them to return fire. Mirroring Samurai, the Ninja class keeps you light on your feet with Ki recovery bonuses from timing your dodges. Staying distant and jumping in for attacks of opportunity while an opponent is recovering is the name of the game here. Ninja does more Ki damage to your opponents, so they’re much better for staggering, so long as you’re good at dodging. Ninja is, of course, the “Dexterity” build class. Managing a healthy balance between the two classes in any given fight is the key to success, but one or the other is sometimes necessary in greater screentime for different bosses. Both feel really good, and neither stands out as being more favored by the devs in my experience.

Both classes have a large assortment of gear to equip, and almost in the vein of a Diablo level overload, there is a lot of loot to be had and decide on. Gear rarities and levels dropping from various enemies give you reason beyond simple level ups to continue grinding areas if you desire. Endless possibilities for stats on each piece makes it either a logistical nightmare or a statistical heaven depending on the type of person you are, but luckily an “auto-equip” system is also present to save people like me who just want to not have to think about it. Just click the thumbstick, tell it what level of encumbrance you want, and it’ll use whatever integrated algorithm exists to slap on what seems best for your desires. Thank you so much for this function, Team Ninja. Also, there is luckily no limit to the amount of individual items you can carry, so you are always okay to push off going through everything as long as you want until you find yourself buried under a mountain of swords and armor you have to wade through (or just be like me and auto-equip things then sell everything else blindly when you realize you have several hundred pieces of gear to sort through…)

Also new this time around with Nioh 3 is their semi-open world map. Reminiscent in some ways to Elden Ring here, but with some Quality of Life differences that I think are really nice. Your map always shows you the recommended level for each area, so you shouldn’t find yourself accidentally stumbling into a Caelid-type accidental self destruction. Each map section also functions to get more detailed the more you do within the cell. There are 4 “exploration levels” available per map cell and doing more reveals more. First revealing the roadmap itself up to revealing the location of any remaining collectables and activities within each when maxed out. This system feels very rewarding in action, and it serves very well as a way to encourage you to blindly explore new areas at first while giving you some forgiveness as you spend more time to save you some time from mindless exploration of areas you’ve already covered.

Outside of gameplay, there’s not a lot to speak on a ton for Nioh 3. It’s a game that is very much trying to give you a fun gameplay experience first and story is very, very clearly not the focus. Similarly to the previous two entries, the story of Nioh 3 is, in my opinion, very weak. It definitely feels like it’s there more as an excuse to reason you through the gameplay elements and areas than it is anything else. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad for the overall health of the game, but it is definitely worth noting. Likewise, oh god, the English voice cast for Nioh has always been, and remains, wildly inconsistent. Each character sounds like they’re recorded without hearing the other person’s delivery they’re supposed to be responding to, and overall it’s very reminiscent of a cheesy english dub from the late 80s or 90s. As a person who is dubs or die typically, even I had to give up on this one and change to having the original Japanese voices.
Nioh 3 is an excellent game with very few rough edges in the moment to moment gameplay. It’s a ton of fun, well made, beautiful looking, and full of content. Another excellent addition to the series, there’s little to desire short of hoping they put some more effort into the storyline. But… that’s not what anyone is here for anyway, so you can essentially just write it off as a con. Boss fights are unique, stylish, and flow well. Chaff enemies even require you to get used to their patterns and offer a bit of challenge on their own. Everything is here to make for a stellar experience for any Nioh fan or soulslike enjoyer looking for something new to explore. Obviously considering my notes on the lacking storyline,

Marathon is finally out after much discussion and broad concern from the gaming community. It’s been the subject of a lot of conversation since it’s initial announcement, and even already had its share of controversy before it was ever even released. Marathon has been gearing up to drop something that nobody had any certainty if they were going to love or hate. It’s from Bungie, for god’s sake: creator of multiple long-beloved game franchises at this point. Ebbs and flows in opinions on handling a live service with Destiny withheld, this is a developer that knows what they’re doing and carries a lot of anticipation for anything new they’re going to throw out there. So when they come out and tell us they’re making an extraction shooter of all things; one of the most contentious game genres there is; it’s cause for conflicted feelings before ever even seeing anything. Players that prefer PVE will tell you that it is a genre that is too hostile for them to enjoy. But… Arc Raiders recently proved it can appeal to the casual audience half a year ago. Strict PVP FPS players will tell you that the extraction shooter genre is too slow or that losing a fight making you lose everything is painfully annoying to feel like coming back in at a disadvantage. Now that’s where Marathon comes in.

Marathon, as I would call it, is the Yin to Arc Raiders’ Yang. If Arc Raiders was the one to prove that a AAA quality extraction shooter could appeal to casual players that enjoy PVE and slightly spicy co-operation with the thrill of the odd betrayal, Marathon is the one to prove that a AAA quality extraction shooter can appeal to the PVP crowd. This is the hostile extraction shooter. In Marathon, there is little incentive to ever let your fellow players live. You should shoot them on sight. There are quest objectives focused on killing others, and the game shows you kill numbers as the first stat every time you exit a world (whether that be willingly or not). If you don’t want to have PVP at the forefront of any interaction, then Marathon is not the right choice for you.

Likewise, in continued offering of how Marathon really shows the other side of extraction shooters: in my experience, there is just not much need to worry about the loot you’re finding. You want to have ammo, healing items, and guns first and foremost. Upgrade items like shields, attachments, throwables, cores, and implants take the second priority, and last up in importance is anything else you can carry in order of highest value. Chaff items seemingly exist in Marathon solely to get you money on exfil for no reason other than to be able to buy upgrades and more gear for when you inevitably die in the future. Not that the loss of your items matters much anyway; Marathon is all too willing to fill you out with a free kit when you are eliminated, consisting of just enough to have no problems getting more. Sure, the guns are basic and the healing items included are weak, but with such a fast TTK (Time to kill), there’s little reason to be bothered by these things. There’s even incentives to not bring your own stuff by way of gaining reputation with the various factions by taking their sponsored kits into battle.

The guns all feel really good and unique between eachother, perhaps to an extent that I can only credit Bungie in the past for having done with the Halo games. There are several categories of weapons and while you can stick with the familiarity of ballistic weapons, don’t miss out on the interesting variety offered by the volt weapons in Marathon. The game’s aesthetics lend itself well to creating wildly off-the-wall concepts and put them into practice. With Marathon taking place in a far futuristic dystopian future at the point where people are consciously running in robot bodies, there are few lengths that would be a stretch of imagination, and Marathon takes full liberty with that in weapon designs. Every gun feels like it has its own pros and cons, and nothing in my time thus far has felt exceptionally better or worse than the other in a general sense. The free kits also give you pretty good weapons, so you’re rarely running with anything weak.

Fights are generally over pretty quickly, as mentioned above, thanks to the fast TTK offered in Marathon. Generally, it feels like the combat is fun when it’s happening, and getting into gunfights is definitely one of the primary things you’re expected and will likely want to do while playing. NPCs litter each map, which are all generally pretty populated. Map sizes are tightly designed, with little dead space, so there’s almost always someone likely nearby. NPCs seem to serve primarily as obstacles, whose purpose is to waste your ammo and expose your position. Gunshots are audible from quite far, and getting third-partied is a constant in Marathon. That is, if you start firing shots, you can assume pretty reliably that someone heard those shots and is coming your way. In a way, this fact almost feels a bit oppressive, dis-incentivizing you from engaging NPCs at all for fear of being shot in the back by surprise, but as long as you’re operating with that knowledge, I’ve found the tension keeps up well in operation. Just watch out for the random claymores that seem to be scattered about the map with little expectation.

I do want to lobby one complaint on the NPCs in Marathon: the way that the humanoid enemies move and fight just… feels wrong in the setting. You can tell this is a Bungie game, because just like in Halo or Destiny before, all enemies casually side strafe and hip fire at you constantly. I think this style of AI works to feel right when there are more enemies on the screen like in the two previously mentioned games, but feels oddly out of place when you’re only fighting 1-3 enemies at a time. This is a minor complaint overall, since the NPCs are kind of secondary to the players, but I did notice this immediately and thought it felt odd.

The aesthetic is where Marathon really puts itself out there. The visuals are honestly nothing short of shocking. That can be a good or a bad thing, depending on your view, but you’d be hard-pressed to not call it stylish and unique. Almost offensively bright and vibrant colors splash the palette of Marathon at every turn. Every menu, every structure, every gun and character, there is not much that isn’t coated in the most strikingly vibrant paint possible, and it works for Marathon to create something you don’t see often. This visual slap in the face offered even extends past just the color palette, as I just have to say, these loading screens.. what is happening here? The loading screens are all uncomforting, hyper-defined shots of moths doing… something. By something I mean: I have no idea what they’re doing, but it’s creepy and weird looking as they’re crawling about a facial-looking mask of some sort. It’s hard to describe and you’d just have to see it, but believe me, it’s really weird every single time and it definitely catches the attention. If not that, then you’re shown the moths eating oddly wet and juicy looking (synthetic?) worms. Yes, it’s just as gross as it sounds. I honestly am not sure what these add to the game, and kind of wish it weren’t so oddly intimate with the shots on these moths, but, it is definitely worth noting.

Super Battle Golf is the kind of crazy fun that you get from a good Nintendo party game like Mario Party or Mario Kart, but condensed into a fast-paced asynchronous golfing game. There’s a lot right about Super Battle Golf, and the developers have clearly put in a lot of work on making everything feel good, look nice, and feel balanced. The abilities from pickups are all unique and feel good, everything feels polished, and overall it’s just a damn fun game with some friends. My group has vowed to, at least for the foreseeable future, play a few rounds of Super Battle Golf on the weekends coming up. It’s a bunch of fun, even if only in bursts; but such is the life of any party game.

Super Battle Golf is, at it’s core, a very simple premise. Up to eight players all tee off at the same time on a full size golf course and race to complete the hole the fastest. Yes, the fastest, not the least strokes. Super Battle Golf will give you bonus points for making it under par, but it’s hardly the goal. As you race down each golf course, a plethora of power ups lie on the trail for you to pick up and either boost yourself ahead or force your friends backwards. Rocket launchers, rifles, landmines, airhorns, or just running away or your friends over with a golf cart, every pickup supplies you with the ammunition to keep the pace of the game going breakneck. A form of assurance exists as each player makes their ball in the hole by dropping them out of participation, so as more players complete, the remaining players have less to worry about.

The visuals are very reminiscent of PEAK, but it’s more just a modern art style that’s started to catch on. Which is no wonder, it makes for a style that looks artistically pleasing while being easy on both the eyes and the graphics card. The effects surrounding the game are more of where it shines through though, as explosions and other particles often fill the air in every round. All of these animations and effects feel well crafted and I never really encountered anything worth complaining about.

Super Battle Golf encourages you to torture your friends, and pulls every stop to give you as many opportunities to do so as you could think up with the tools provided by the game. Sure, there are the obvious ones like simply shooting a rocket at them, but… have you considered the alternative uses of the land mines? Why not throw one down and tee it off at someone’s face before it arms? Have you even considered, instead of spawning the golf cart and running them down, simply… dropping it on the ground and slamming the item straight at their noggin? If not, where’s your creativity? Super Battle Golf considered these options and made sure to give you the chance to miss out. You might even just take that golf club and trip your friend straight into the hole themselves, forget about the ball. It’s all possible, and I’m sure there’s more little things like this that I couldn’t even come up with myself in my time playing. I kept having moments like “will it let me do this?”, which was always followed by the game going “of course, why not”. If it seems like you can do it, Super Battle Golf seems willing to provide.

The only thing I have to note is that right now there are only three sets of nine holes each, so there’s not a huge number, but honestly… it’s fine. They’re all unique enough and offer a lot of variety, so it hardly feels repetitive. Especially considering how much of the actual meat of the game comes from the ongoing battle you have with your friends, the courses themselves almost serve as secondary to what you’re doing. But have no fear, developing studio Brimstone has already announced that they have at least one more full course of nine holes on the near horizon, and they’ve gotten quite a lot of sales, so I’m hopeful that we’ll see a lot of new content coming out as time goes on. Also a prospective mention of adding workshop support means that, if all goes well, Super Battle Golf could go on to an endless replayability loop as a fun time with friends.

Super Battle Golf is an excellent, fun game, and there’s so much good to be found here, so much fun to be had, and so many friends to be lost. I can’t help but love Super Battle Golf. I’m hoping it continues a series of content drops in the near future that keeps it alive and continues catching people’s attention. It’s the kind of party game fun you don’t often see on games outside of the Nintendo garden. Give it a play, don’t miss out. It’s cheap and a ton of fun. Just make sure you bring at least 2-3 friends to get the best experience.

Embark Studios is a relatively new name in the industry, but backed by big players who are passionate about making incredible games with a small team. Their first release two years ago, The Finals, was released to boundless praise for how fun and unique it was. The Finals was Embark’s foray into the genre of arena class shooters a la Team Fortress. With Arc Raiders, they’re dipping their toes into the ever-temultuous extraction shooter genre. Extraction shooters haven’t exactly been known up to this point for their ease of dropping in for casual players, so a large, high quality, colorful, and casual friendly game was not really something I think many expected to get from the genre in general. Embark Studios has come in strong with Arc Raiders though, delivering thoughtful design and flow decisions that not only make it good for people who have never enjoyed the hardcore nature of extraction shooters, but also making it just plain fun.

Arc Raider’s “Extraction shooter” genre itself is a bit occluded behind some knowledge, considering it’s not exactly been one we’ve seen much representation for in the AAA sphere, so let me take a paragraph at the beginning here to catch those unaware up to speed. What is an extraction shooter? An extraction shooter is typically a PvPvE game where you and many other players deploy onto a large map similar to that of a battle royale. The difference typically being that you spawn randomly on the map rather than choosing a drop point and players do not always spawn at the same time. You are allowed to bring any equipment along with you that you’d like… the only limitation being that everything you bring must be brought back with you if you’d like to keep it. The goal of every session you play will be to deploy into the overworld and loot to find materials for you to take back to home base and craft better gear. It’s essentially the ultimate form of a gear treadmill, but with the tension permadeath provides. If you die on the field, you drop everything, save for a “safe pocket” item that allows you to protect a single item.

Arc Raiders launched a week ago as of the writing of this, and I’ve gotten time to play a healthy number of rounds and I have to say I’ve been having a great time with it! This truly feels like proof that the extraction shooter genre doesn’t have to be a hardcore game that only the sweatiest gamers can get into. So far when playing solo at least, it almost feels like the game provides so little incentive for killing other players that you would have to actively go out of your way to be malicious to be doing so. With a few barriers Arc Raiders provides to ensure fights don’t end in seconds, I’ve found that asking to work together with any random player through proximity chat actually has a pretty good chance of success. I’ve experienced numerous opportunities to join whole groups of players who all deployed solo and run together to fight off the enemies and loot buildings together. Strength in numbers is huge in Arc Raiders, and being able to get assistance as enemies swarm is major in being able to get higher quality loot. It’s possible to do it alone, but taking a friend or 5 along for the ride will benefit everyone, so why not stick together?

Arc Raiders overall is extremely well polished, looks glorious, and plays great. It’s finally proof that Unreal Engine 5 doesn’t have to mean relying on DLSS. The graphics are good but the set and world design really sells it visually. The gun play is smooth and feels good in third person. It’s done a marvel to come out in such a state while the industry has gotten notoriously worse and worse with unpolished, buggy day one releases. Arc Raiders does a lot right, but if I had to pick one thing out to complain about, it has to be the prices for the included cosmetic microtransactions.

Arc Raiders is a $40 game at release. This is a great value for what it is, and some sort of in-game monetization is to be expected these days. But what we got is… well the cosmetics reek a bit of free-to-play monetization. Arc Raiders offers outfits for $20 a pop in game for some of them and while they all look good, it’s just… not great value for the customers. If Arc Raiders were free to play, these would be a bit pricy, but justifiable considering the rest of the game is delivered completely free. In this case, paying half the price of a game for a skin while also running a battle-passesque system does admittedly feel out of place and not quite right. I hope to see this get cut down on a bit in future updates, but at least it’s purely cosmetic.

Where Arc Raiders really excels though, as mentioned above, is the visual aesthetic of both the game at large stylistically and the level design. Arc Raiders looks majestic. There are a total of 4 playable maps at launch, each lovingly designed to ensure at every turn you’re given a view that gives you a wallpaper worthy view on your screen. The game is made with cinematic flair at the forefront and it’s clear in everything it does. From the “Cassette Futurism” stylization of everything to the clear and open landscapes, saying it wows me consistently sounds like an overexaggeration, but once you’re in it, you’ll understand. Every area is completely different fundamentally from the other 3 and even within each of those 4, you’ll easily find 5-8 zones that are visually distinct from one another. This not only helps keep runs fresh, but it also keeps you looking forward to finding out what you’ll run into next nigh indefinitely. The mentioned cassette futurism style runs through the veins of every nook of Arc Raiders. This style isn’t used very often (think the technology used within the Alien franchise), and I think this serves well to keep things interesting within the game. Set pieces feel unique but pulling from real life analog visuals, almost familiar. It’s a surrealistic style that injects a lot of personality into Arc Raiders.

The visual spectacle is all the more impressive when you zoom out a bit and analyze recent industry trends with the engine used in Arc Raiders. Unreal Engine 5 is the hot new thing carrying us into the next generation of graphical fidelity, and with it, a whole slew of games sporting performance issues. If any of the countless examples prior to Arc Raiders are to be believed, you’d be hard pressed to find a game looking as good as Unreal Engine 5 can produce that doesn’t need to rely on DLSS to keep your frames up. But leave it to Embark Studios to prove the AAA industry wrong as Arc Raiders comes in punching hard in this regard as well. With excellent performance across the board for even lower-mid level hardware, Arc Raiders is ready for anyone with a gaming capable PC to join.

The handling of Arc Raiders feels equally good, as whatever they did to capture the animations has been noteworthy itself. There are little nuances in the way the player character moves that has made me let out an interested “huh, never seen that before” on multiple occasions. From the little hop into sprint the character does to the spectacular ragdoll rolls when you’re downed, the smoothness and general quality of every animation is unrivaled. It’s not even just for player characters. The way the NPC enemies (which are entirely robots) move about is notable as well, as they adapt in motion to the damage they sustain in battle. Many of the Arc enemies you will run into utilize multiple thrusters to stay in flight. Shooting at any of these thrusters will eventually cause it to explode and I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but just the way you can watch the entire handling of the flight change as you pop one or two off is so uncanny in how well done it is. That’s not even to mention the terror of the leapers, which, if you’ve seen any video footage of Arc Raiders gameplay online, you’ve undoubtedly seen one of these sail through the air directly at a player’s face. It all comes together in a symphony of motion that ma

Finally, a real gamer's game

This year’s entry to the Battlefield series is coming to us seemingly hotly sought after by the FPS gaming community at large. Pretty much any gaming space anywhere on the internet you happen to peruse, you’ll see people singing its praises. Doing nothing short of seemingly holding it on a pedestal as the savior: coming in to save gaming from the dark ages of so-called “Fornite-ification”. Fawning over the gunplay, or the fact that you have to work as a team, that… “Battlefield is back”. That’s what they say if you went online before release. The Battlefield 6 beta was hugely successful, drawing record numbers on the Steam charts, people were in it to win it. So now that the day finally dawns on us and we get to play the game? Yeah… it’s great. Battlefield really is (at least mostly) back.

Battlefield has long been a series that sort of finds the middle ground between the mil-sim military games like Arma or Squad and the arcade shooters like Call of Duty. Not really “realistic”, but not really ungrounded from reality. Call it the… cinematic action movie experience. Large teams clashing against each other in a symphony of tank shells and gunfire, explosions lighting up the field and tearing it down at the same time. This is what Battlefield does best. But at the same time, it’s always been important that any one squad on a team can affect the battle to a greater extent. Despite Battlefield 6’s teams of 32, you and your squad can make all the difference. Never you alone, and this is what makes the Battlefield series really shine. It encourages bringing your friends online in a way that most other competitive shooters don’t really do, in my opinion (Battle Royale’s not withstanding). Battlefield’s previous entry, Battlefield 2042 was an example of how that formula can be made wrong. In 2042, Dice played with the idea of much larger scale teams at 64 v 64, and it just… broke everything, in my opinion. A battle to that scale can be cinematic chaos for sure, but with 32 players on every objective… how does a squad of 4 begin to help? The answer was you didn’t and that was exactly what went so wrong for me with 2042.

With Battlefield 6, they’ve done a lot right to get back into the good graces of the FPS community. We’ve got a large assortment of weapons, great graphics, and pretty good maps to boot. Some don’t agree on the maps front, but in action, I’ve had a lot of fun with them personally. The weapon variety is great, and they’ve done good at making them all feel unique. The visuals look sleek, modern, and run surprisingly well on older hardware. The maps have some contest with the Battlefield community not feeling like they’re all quite large enough, but… I haven’t felt much to complain about with them myself. I’m hoping that with this entry, EA/DICE keep on the right track, because they’ve got a promising opportunity in front of them, holding a huge chunk of the gaming community’s attention.

For the weapon variety, I’ve found the assortment to be quite nice. It’s nothing incredibly new to Battlefield as a series; they’ve always been rather consistent with their games taking place in modern times about what you can expect to show up. But what I find nice is the way that, in Battlefield 6, I feel like the guns have much more unique personalities than I remember experiencing with games past. Sporting eight assault rifles, seven carbines (arguably making for 15 ARs if it were any other game), eight SMGs, eight LMGs, four DMRs, three snipers, three shotguns, and four pistols, that puts us at a huge 45 guns available at launch. This is a huge number compared to a lot of games, and it’s impressive to me that each of them feel so different within their relative categories. Gunplay feels great, like it always does even in the worst of times for Battlefield. One thing to note, however, is the current contention within the community at large surrounding the spread that occurs with continuous fully automatic fire. The game doesn’t really explain this to you, and they changed it between beta time and release: holding down the trigger will increasingly spread where your next shot lands. This encourages “tap firing”, or shooting in bursts, but… with players being so used to recoil affected aim rather than this method, it’s causing a ruckus among a lot of people. It’s something you have to get used to, but… if the game never tells you about it, how do most players learn?

Personally I’ve found the experience in active play to be a ton of fun, and working together with my friends has been an extraordinary time. Short of the dedicated attention to not messing up you get from a game like Squad, but not to the level of never caring about what your teammates are actually doing that you get from a game like Call of Duty (yes, that’s projection and I know it’s how I play COD). What you get is a casual experience where dying is fine because they’ll jolt you back to life in a pinch, but focused enough that running in blindly is punished by having to spawn all the way back at your base instead of with your squad. Play carefully, but accept that dying is inevitable yet not super punishing. Speaking of, Battlefield 6 has officially changed how reviving works! Forget the old school way of all the medics trampling your corpse and ignoring you: now you can also get trampled and ignored by all of your squadmates!

As is the tradition for Battlefield, the Medic class (now Support) comes equipped with a set of defibrillator paddles that can be used to bring back allies who were slain in combat by any means. Inside a tank that exploded? Defib shock; get back in there, soldier. Shot in the head? Defibs. Fell off a 10 story building? Defibs do the job. This time around, Battlefield 6 has changed things around a bit, though. Instead of the previous way the defibrillators have worked, you no longer are required to charge them up. Now you can just click and instantly hit a downed ally to bring them back up. The cost of doing this is that they’re only brought back at half health, but you’re still able to charge and hit for the full HP revive. Also, as I mentioned before, squadmates can freely revive each other this time around. Seemingly co-opting Battlebit’s drag feature, Battlefield 6 now allows squadmates to drag eachother into safety and revive at will. You do not need to be any specific class for this. It’s slow, but it’s helpful in a pinch. It also helps to keep from pigeonholing one friend into always playing medic so you stop dying and losing the team tickets.

Battlefield 6 also looks great. The visuals are very nice, likely helped by the fact that the game has chosen to actually leave behind the last generation of consoles. What impresses me the most has been seeing reports of how well Battlefield 6 runs even on lower end or older PCs. I’m personally pretty up to date, but it’s rare for me to see a game that lets my 4090 run it at max graphics settings and native 4K without upscaling while getting over 100FPS. Reports I’ve seen online documenting performance has the game running great, even on hardware as old as a GTX 1070. AAA games as of the last several years have seen themselves becoming increasingly reliant on tools like frame generation and DLSS as a substitute for having to bother optimizing their game. It’s almost a sad note to feel that it’s notable to see a major game studio that cared to optimize, but that’s what you get with Battlefield 6. It feels like they really cared to put it all together to make everything great.

Which brings me to my last point: the maps. Discussions around Battlefield 6 have people at odds over how they feel about the maps available at launch. Admittedly, all of the maps available in the beta as a means to get people interested were rather on the smaller side. Luckily there are some larger maps available immediately and… matchmaking allows you to select what maps you’d like to join into. Don’t like a map? Just don’t choose it when yo

A beautiful game