Recent reviews by Jocosity

I really like Helldivers 2, as a concept. Not just because it's Starship Troopers in video game form, but because it's one of the few games that have resisted the urge to overcomplicate themselves or reinvent the wheel in a time where that's hard to come by from the AAA sector. It's a classic four player wave shooter with simple objectives and solid mechanics that allow for a lot of varied playstyles, and the combination of those two elements is what makes it so much more replayable than a lot of other modern multiplayer games. On paper, this should be an easy slam dunk for $40. In practice I only come back to it when my friends are playing, and frankly, sometimes I wish they'd go back to Left 4 Dead instead.

To be clear up front, since whenever people complain about this game they're met with a barrage of cope responses like a natural reflex, I like how hard the game is. I like that the premise of the game is all about a crowd of mass-produced fodder soldiers going straight from the freezer into a blender, and I like barely scraping through missions on the harder difficulties covered in more of my blood than any alien's. I like fighting for my life at the extraction point counting the seconds until we get one more respawn, and yes, I like getting trampled by a herd of migrating bile titans. I don't mind that the warbonds cost money, I don't need infinite ammo, and I don't think every gun should have heavy penetration.

What I DO want is for Arrowhead to just pick a lane and stick to it. It feels like every month, every warbond release, or just every time someone expresses too much excitement about the game, Arrowhead comes in and rebalances half the game for no reason. I used to say they balanced Helldivers 2 like an esports title instead of a 4 player co-op game, but these days they probably rebalance it far more often than any competitive pvp game. As a casual player, it feels like every time I come back to the game something in my loadout has changed, usually significantly, and the act of just figuring out which weapons are even good at dealing damage to each faction at a baseline level usually sends me to google at the start of each session. If they want vehicles to suck, fine, go for it. If they want them to be tanky, that's great! If they want the enemies to feel strong, or have distinct weakpoints, or be strong or weak to fire or whatever else, I really couldn't care less. But all of these things feel like they're just dials being turned randomly every now and then, and it's so much worse than if the game just had any idea what it wants the Helldivers 2 experience to feel like. I have to wonder if the game having 10 difficulty settings is just too much for them, or if they're just deathly afraid of a game with no pvp mode whatsoever (ignoring that the entire game is a pvpve game in practice just by nature) might be unbalanced, or that something someone paid for might actually be kind of useful in a game that already prides itself on letting players find super credits in-game for free anyways.

The other thorn in my side is how they handle the warbonds. Again, I don't mind paying up for these; it's a live service game that in terms of content is doing far better than most, and they're putting out more than enough maps, enemies, and more to keep the game feeling fresh. I do not mind paying $10 every now and then in an era where most games are charging $20 for one skin. But the way they handle the medals to unlock what you've paid for is just arbitrary, and ever since they went back to releasing new warbonds fairly often it's only gotten worse. I know somebody in the comments is going to come in and call me a baby who doesn't want to play the game I paid for, but no, I do not enjoy logging in every day to spend 30 minutes to an hour grinding daily objectives by myself just for some pittance of medals that can unlock one fourth of a single piece of armor. And even if I did, it doesn't even matter, because they cap you out at 250 medals at any given time, which is almost never enough to make a dent in any new warbond. Would it ruin the game for me to be able to realistically achieve any real progress in the content I paid for without having to slowly chip away at it over the course of ten nights with my friends? Are people so starved for "progression" that they couldn't possibly enjoy playing the game if they didn't have to treat it like a 9 to 5? There are so many things in the warbonds like vehicle skins that I have never claimed across the ten or so warbonds I own and probably never will because I already struggle to even unlock the headliners from each one before the next warbond is on the horizon. At this point I'm so sick of the medal system that if they started charging $20 for a warbond that actually just gives you the items I would gladly pay for that.

There's nothing I could really say about Helldivers 2 that is individually damning enough to justify a negative review, not even the things I've been ranting about here. It's the result of a thousand little cuts that add up, and over the years this game has been racking those up. I could talk about how it crashes more than any other I've played (which seems to be a weirdly common thing with Sony's ports), how sometimes entire mechanics like hellpod steering just seem to break with no explanation why unless you go digging through patch notes, how obnoxious it is when they add new Illuminate enemies that literally spawn in through the floor underneath you, how nothing they've added to the game has made the hunt for so-called "common" samples any less of a grind, or even just how nearly every armor they add to the game is a slightly different shade from the rest so that nothing ever really matches. But if the game just had any one or two or even half of these problems, I could forgive it, and to some degree I still do anyways. But at this point the Arrowhead Cycle of patching things, apologizing for patching them, and then doing it again a few months later has been running like clockwork for so long that it feels like they are actively trying to make sure that their fanbase is never completely happy with them at any given time. And I really just wish they would take a step back from the warbonds again and think about what they actually want to do with this game instead of trying to overcomplicate things.

The word that stayed in my mind the most while playing through Pragmata was "old-fashioned", in a good way. It's already been a while since it was announced in 2020, but more than that, if it weren't for the graphics I could easily slot it in with the other 360-era shooters from Japanese publishers like Lost Planet, Vanquish, and Binary Domain. It feels rooted in an earlier time when the popular game mechanics were less carved in stone, and big name studios were brave enough to make a game that was all about one central mechanic that turned a regular shooter into an instant classic.

In this case, that central mechanic is a hacking minigame. On paper, it reads like something that should be inherently unintuitive and clunky, but once you find your rhythm with it becomes impossible to imagine the game without it. Whenever you aim at an enemy you can hold an additional button to switch to a grid-based minigame to the side of the cursor, navigating through nodes without overlapping yourself and ending at a designated terminal node. If you've played Yakuza 0, think the disco minigame. If you haven't, think playing Snake on your phone in the middle of a firefight. At the beginning of the game the two mechanics feel a little bit incongruous, matching up with Hugh and Diana being relative strangers, but throughout the game you find various types of equipment that can change the function of your hacks, add various nodes with different effects, and give you different passive abilities and conditional stat boosts, and once you start putting together a loadout that feels right the process of weaving between hacking and shooting becomes complementary and second nature. The nodes you can equip were my favorite part of the equation, because of the trade-off they present; hacking nodes can do basic things like increase weapon damage or more specific features like freezing them, spreading the hack across nearby enemies, or turning them against their allies, but each of them comes in the form of a limited-use consumable item. But instead of staying put until you use them, they always populate the grid, so the more you equip, the more you have to intentionally avoid them as you weave through the regular nodes, since using them early might mean not having them for a larger battle. It's as chaotic as it sounds constantly managing two different skillsets, but that's half the fun.

Narratively the game sometimes feels similarly old-fashioned, and while the overall storyline is strong, I wouldn't say it feels like anything particularly brilliant. But that doesn't really matter, because what elevates it instead is Hugh's fatherly relationship with Diana. Pragmata pulls out all the stops to make you love your little robot daughter, and everything from their small talk to the silly antics she gets up to in the safe room are genuinely adorable. It often reminded me of how Ashley was presented in the RE4 remake, with plenty of dialogue to make sure you truly want to get her through it safely. You can even unlock a lot of cute little costumes for her (and Hugh as well), which was refreshing to see since some of Capcom's other recent games have opted to make most of those DLC instead. She does tend to do that "modern game sidekick" thing where she vocalizes things that are already written in-game for the sake of the sadly large audience of people who refuse to read, but at the risk of being a little hypocritical, I do think it feels less egregious when it's coming from a child just trying to help.

The only real hanging point I can think of is that compared to games like Resident Evil, I don't know exactly how replayable this game would be. By the end of my playthrough I did still have a lot of weapons far from fully upgraded, and near the end of the game you unlock some new toys that I was eager to get more use out of, but past the first replay I don't think it's going to be as inherently addicting of a NG+ cycle as usual. There is a Lunacy mode that mentions adding new functionality to the weapons that I'm pretty interested in seeing, but it requires you to start a new save (which is fine; frankly I don't think any increased difficulty would matter if you could bring in the things you get at the end) so I will probably take a break before trying it. But I do think it's worth acknowledging that this is a $60 game, rather than the $70 that modern RE games cost at launch, and I still got plenty of high-quality game time out of just one playthrough.

On that subject of difficulty, I should mention that this game is overall fairly easy, barring certain optional challenges like the final VR training stages. For a while I thought it felt abnormally so, and when I watched a few playthroughs of PS5 players I realized that it seems to be balanced with the gamepad controls in mind. If you're using a gamepad, the hacking grid is navigated using the face buttons, making it slightly easier to adjust your camera view mid-hack but also forcing to you navigate the grid one block at a time. When using a mouse, you can basically navigate it as quickly as you can move your cursor. To put this difference into perspective, I accidentally killed the final boss in about 8 seconds or so in one big barrage of chain hacks because I didn't realize they only had the one health bar. But I can't even fault them for that, really, because the rush you feel when you slam through ten grids in 8 seconds and make a boss instantly explode is something I've never felt in another game, and boy does it feel nice. And that's what it's all about, really: Pragmata is a game that feels nice, and will make you wonder why they ever stopped making games like these.

I was apprehensive at the start of this game because I'd seen bad reviews about how janky and hard it is, but I feel like a lot of that has to be from people who are either trying to play it solo or are too young to know how things like winches and manual transmission work. The physics in this game are as goofy as you'd expect from a game about chain smoking dwarfs booze cruising through the worst detour of all time, but they're also reasonably predictable, and there weren't very many times when a winch accident totaled our RV and at least one person in our group didn't verbalize their doubts about the plan beforehand. It's also pretty forgiving with checkpoints, especially once it gets into the harder areas. As long as you're careful and work together as a team it isn't nearly as brutal as some people make it out to be, and there was never a part in the first map where my group didn't either figure it out within two retries or find a safer alternate route. Use your tools, pack things that are actually useful (and the dart board), and explore the map for parts and gear when you're not driving or helping to navigate. Just like a real road trip, it goes a lot smoother if you alternate drivers whenever the RV explodes.

Beyond that, the game is very much what it looks like. Obviously it isn't a peaceful RV vacation sim, but it isn't overwhelming enough to be stressful either, and there's always time to grill up some burgers and crush a few beers with your friends. I had two friends along for the ride, which seemed like the ideal amount to have all three of us busy with something at any given time, but I think any amount would work as long as you're not going alone. Most of the later levels expect whoever isn't driving to help navigate dodgy cliffside turns, set up planks or winches to help maneuver the RV, or just act as bait to draw bears away, and between all the finangling it does kind of expect you to be competent with a few real world driving concepts that it doesn't otherwise explain. But much like the real world, a lot of the things I see people complaining about are just driver error; I've seen several reviews since playing it where people say it's "just one person driving while the others sit around, and it was really boring and then suddenly got way too hard". You can do the math yourself.

One other thing I do think is important to keep in mind is the replay value. Unlike a lot of these types of games, the maps here are static instead of randomly generated, almost more like a co-op campaign, but as a result they're also fairly large (the whole game's base content is just one giant map, with a second being added later on, and the first map alone took us 10 hours with pretty smooth progress) and have a lot of hand-designed personality to them. It sacrifices some of the "infinite replay value" you'd get from something like Peak or Lethal Company, but with two maps currently in the game and a third on the way I couldn't possibly complain about the value per hour here, and I do think the premise of this game is better suited to this style of map design. It means you get several good sessions of playtime per map where each night you're doing something distinctly different, and it gives the overall game the feeling of a journey instead of just a brief trial, which fits the road trip theme. You even get a little map tucked into your passenger door that fills out with a red line showing your group's path over time, letting you see how far you've come.

There are a few weird quirks and occasional enemies that aren't immediately intuitive on how to deal with them, and every now and then it has some weird bugs, most notably one that causes the positional voice chat to break and turn into global chat whenever you die and reload a checkpoint. But once you get used to its speed bumps and really get going, I had enough fun with this that I'd easily put it among the other giants of the genre.

Early on, there's a scene where Deadman is catching Sam up on the news that paved the way for his journey to Mexico. Sam still has conflicted feelings about the plan and the groups in charge of it, but Deadman demonstrates his story using a bunch of toys and silly little special effects, and it only takes a few minutes for him to get Sam smiling like a kid again. That moment sums up a lot of my experiences with DS2; I had a lot of gripes about it throughout my time with it, but any time I thought too much about comparing it to its predecessor Kojima would pull a rabbit out of a hat and put a smile on my face, reminding me why I was here. Unfortunately, also like that scene, there's bad news to go with it.

To preface with the things the game does well, the graphics are incredible, and while the port has a few weird technical issues like some crashes and the anisotropic filtering setting seemingly not working, it runs great too. Kojima's ports have always been a shining example of how a PC game can look and run when it isn't a hastily cobbled together UE5 port, and despite this one not being a direct KojiPro job it continues this. Both the original soundtrack and the licensed music picks are great. The combat continues to build on the bones of MGSV and DS1 in lots of fun ways, and the bosses and setpieces are mostly pretty awesome. As far as the main missions go, the gameplay is fantastic.

The problem is that beyond the main path, the game is frankly just too easy, no matter what difficulty you pick; I played on To The Wilder, which is advertised as an extra hard challenge mode where every decision you make counts, but pretty much its entire paragraph description is just a lie. The terrain navigation has been streamlined to the point that you rarely trip or stumble anymore, the vehicles have been improved so much that nothing else can keep up, and timefall matters even less than it did in the first game. You're never allowed to feel like you're actually venturing out deep into unknown territory, and you spend most of the game being tailed by your mobile base, the DHV Magellan, which pops up beside you like an overbearing babysitter almost every time you add any area to the network to force you to come inside for a nap. The old fast travel system is still in, but even with it getting buffed by letting you freely build cheap fast travel waypoints it still ends up being relegated to fringe case usage because the Magellan unlocks earlier and can carry cars, equipment, and materials to nearly any facility. Even if you decide to challenge yourself by avoiding all of the early unlocks that trivialize the majority of the game, it just doesn't help much because the map is too fundamentally built to make it easy to drive a truck all over the place without issue. It's very flat, full of smooth, wide paths, and frankly just not super exciting to pass through outside of the obligatory mountaineering segment.

I'm not saying the game needs to be brutally hard, because it doesn't. But the whole point is that the game is supposed to at least be challenging, so that it feels good when another player's structure helps you out and vice versa, and that just isn't the case here. But that's honestly a whole topic in its own right, because the strand system in this game doesn't hit the same. Unlike DS1, DS2's PC server is shared with the PS5 one, so even hours after the game released, as soon as you activated the chiral network in any region it would instantly explode with fully upgraded structures from people who beat the game a year ago. The first game showed players' avatars beside their names and packages, giving it a personal touch, but despite having slots for them every player just shows up as a faceless ghost in this -- which may admittedly be a bug, considering you can see the avatars if you make strand contracts with steam friends. The friends list in itself didn't work for the full first week (lol), so it is entirely possible that there are still things that are broken. But one of my fondest memories of DS1 was finding a stray package from someone who wasn't even on my friends list, but was someone I recognized as a friend of a friend in a "small world" sort of way, whereas in 2 even adding my friends as contracts couldn't help me find any trace of half of them over dozens of hours. I know it's petty, but it does feel grating when all you ever see are PS5 players with billions of likes that haven't played the game in a week.

But the other thing is that the tools the game gives you early on are so strong that there's just not a lot of reason to even bother with some of my favorite things in it. There's a third fast travel option that's the most charming of any of them by far, but it's also easily the worst and almost useless aside from the style points of it. There's a funny outfit whose only gameplay benefit is that if you carry the shoes with you you can rest at any facility you visit, but it barely matters because of the Magellan. And while I got a lot of use out of the various silly equipment items you unlock throughout the game anyways, a lot of them were things that I wished the game chose to design its early game around instead of just giving you a bunch of guns, sort of like how DS1's early game emphasized the bolas instead of traditional weapons. For that matter, virtually all of the guns in DS2 are now "multipurpose", meaning aside from them all being nonlethal to humans they're also all effective against BTs, removing a lot of the specialization of the tools.

In the end, there's just not that much sauce left on anything except the combat; the idea of there being noteworthy "hard" areas like the wind farms or the MULE ravines from DS1 are long gone, and I remember the moments in DS2 that gave me that same feeling well because there were only two of them. The challenging terrain and weather was what made making deliveries in DS1 fun, and it was what made the brief moments of rest and relief feel cozy and satisfying. The only challenge DS2 ever gives you for a delivery is how much time you're willing to waste driving back and forth (as you can see in my case, "a lot"), and in the end it tends to feel like the "walking sim" DS1's haters think it was. I imagine there's a type of person who will find this sort of thing cozy in a different way, like people who play those city bus sims or other 9-to-5 job games, and I have no disrespect for them, but I just thought this part of it was boring. I spent over 100 hours in DS1 and adored it, but if I could go back a week I would tell myself to spend half the time I spent doing deliveries in 2. I've heard recently that the game was intentionally balanced around wanting most of the people who play it to be able to finish the game, and I can respect that, but the effects of that seeped way too much into the higher difficulties.

You may be wondering why, after all this, this is still considered a positive review. As I said in the beginning, this is still a Hideo Kojima game to its core. I could go on and on about my feelings about the story, how messy and unnecessary it is, but I won't -- both because I can appreciate that KojiPro is a solo studio now and has to keep the lights on, and because as stupid as the plot is, it has more than enough exciting moments and sick vibes to entertain you. It's flashy, over the top, and full of the usual eccentricities, and that extends to the rest of the game's world too. You're never allowed to feel too bothered by the things the game does poorly before you turn over a rock and find some hilarious little secret buried somewhere fun, and these moments just never seem to end. DS2 is absolutely stuffed with Kojima's charming attention to detail and goofball antics, and no matter how much I might dislike certain directions the game took I couldn't possibly call it a bad game as a whole.

In a lot of ways, this feels like a final exam of sorts for the series up to this point. Throughout the game it piles on all kinds of mechanics that can be traced back to just about every game in the series, and it feels equal parts "greatest hits" and a refinement of everything that came before it. The contrast between Grace's gameplay borrowing elements from the classic RE games and Leon's being RE4 put into a blender with the good parts of RE6 is a hilarious disparity, with Grace struggling to take down one enemy that Leon can bulldoze entire crowds of, but it works really well despite the two vastly different playstyles. Leon's sections are placed in ways that make them feel like a safety blanket after hours of stress, but instead of fully relieving the tension it only serves to make it sink in that much more when they snatch him away and put you back in Grace's shoes.

Grace's sections are the obvious highlight, though, and anyone who loved RE7 the way I did will feel right at home here. What I love about her gameplay is the way it makes you appreciate the standard zombies more than any other game in the series has; even one of them is a reasonable threat, and if you're playing on a difficulty that has ink ribbons enabled the tension starts to ramp up fast. It gives you an up close and personal look at what it must feel like to be a regular civilian during one of these incidents, even more than the Outbreak games already did. I don't think the RE games have ever been all that scary, but I would describe them as tense, with a lot of thought being put into how it makes you think about ammo conservation and resource expenses. With 9, though, I think "dread" is a better word; this game knows exactly how to get you swearing under your breath every time you learn about yet another new mechanic being piled onto an already bad situation, and I absolutely loved it.

Leon's sections are great for their own reasons, with his later segments even drawing from side modes like The Mercenaries in really fun ways, but I think it lacks the tight sense of mechanical focus that Grace's sections had. Leon gets his RE4 attache case back, but it only gets one upgrade, and the starting size is already so big that it never really feels like the grid organization really matters because you have plenty of space for every weapon you'd want. The upgrade system itself feels kind of haphazard, and most of what you can buy is available at the start so it doesn't have the same feeling of going to the merchant in 4 or Village and seeing something all new available. But these are minor nitpicks in the grand scheme of it, because that isn't what you come to the Leon segments to do; they're all about ridiculous action sequences and a rollercoaster of clever setpieces, and they bring both in spades.

I know there's not really a point in discussing the story, because anyone expecting a particularly cohesive narrative out of Resident Evil has had over a decade to realize they're in the wrong place. Requiem starts out seeming like something that could be the finale of the franchise, but by the end of it you just kind of realize you've been bamboozled again, and we now arguably know less about the Connections that we did before. What I will say is that the story is still very entertaining, Leon and Grace's arcs are both satisfying, and I'm glad they left room to keep going because I want to keep going, too. In the end I would say Requiem feels like it could be part 1 of a multi-part finale, with a lot of questions answered and a lot more raised, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how it all plays out. For now, I'm already ready to dive back in for another playthrough.

I only learned about this game because of its sequel, which suggested that I play this first when I launched it. I'm glad it did, because whether the "one surprise" mentioned in Mermaid's Curse ends up being substantial or not, this is a fantastic VN and I'm glad I played it anyways. The fact that it's only on PC and Switch just feels right, because in a lot of ways It feels like a modern evolution of all those Nintendo DS-era visual novels that constantly used every trick they had available to try to surprise you. It's clever in a lot of fun ways, and even when you see it coming it still has the charm of someone performing a magic trick for you so earnestly that you can't help but smile for it. The art and overall production values are also pretty nice, but what really surprised me is how consistently good every part of the soundtrack is.

The only thing I could really say negative about it is something that I personally liked, which is that the game is kind of inconsistent in its premise. It introduces a lot of things in the first half that seem like they're going to be the core of the game but aren't, and if you're only here for ghosts and screamers the second half almost entirely drops them in favor of more genuine investigation. But the mystery story throughout both parts had me totally absorbed in whatever curve ball the game threw at me next, and I can't wait to see what the sequel is like.

I've already played through this on the Switch 2 and just wanted to support the studio again, so don't take my playtime at face value (though I probably will go through it a second time soon). But with that being said, the store page is fairly honest about what you're getting here; this is not a long game, and it's more of an interactive movie than a game at all. But if that's not a deal breaker for you, this is a very sweet experience.

If you had a Nintendo DS through its glory days, the art style might be what immediately stands out to you. This game's art director is Taisuke Kanasaki, the director of various instant classics like Hotel Dusk and Trace Memory/Another Code (as well as the recent Another Code remake), and this game has the same gorgeously rotoscoped animation. Since the story is told entirely without dialogue it relies a lot on the music and art, and they made sure to make them both count; I think the visuals alone are worth the price of entry.

On that note, despite being completely wordless, this game has no trouble at all tugging on your heartstrings within its short runtime. The narrative it tells is as beautiful as the art it uses to tell it, and by the end of it I really appreciated the format it's told in because it can be interpreted in a number of different ways that will resonate with different peoples' perspectives. Is it a story about romance? Is it about following your dreams? Is it about aging, and the circle of life in general? That's kind of up to you, but I think just about anyone can find something meaningful within it, especially adults. If absolutely nothing else, I think most people would have a hard time feeling like they didn't get $8 worth of something out of this game.

And if you won't do it for that, do it for the hypothetical Hotel Dusk duology remake. Please, Kanasaki, I'm begging you.

Green Hell is very similar to The Forest at a glance, but with the mutants and zombies replaced by wild animals and parasites. Instead of just having a food and thirst meter it splits your food intake into four macronutrient categories to manage, and there are all kinds of status effects, diseases, and injuries to die from. In some ways, these might honestly go a little too far to enjoy it in singleplayer; you'll probably spend a lot of time early on just passed out in the dirt, if not dead. But in co-op this game absolutely shines, and the content it's gotten since release has only made that aspect better. The co-op itself was a post-release addition to the game, but the comical difficulty almost feels like it was designed around helping pluck leeches from your friends and forming rescue parties for each other.

The original base building mechanics were already pretty solid, but over the more recent years they've added more and more, letting you build tree houses or floating river bases, piling on more options for storage and transport, and even letting you tame pets. There's a really funny feature where most of the plants you find start out just being called 'Unknown', prompting you to give them an in-game name yourself, which immediately becomes even funnier when you realize everyone in your group has named them different things and nobody knows what each other is asking for until they explain. I would go as far as to say that this is probably my favorite building system out of any survival crafting game (having played a considerable amount of them), and whether you like to build one big mega-fort for all of your friends or set up individual camps nearby to allow different approaches I think it complements the multiplayer really well.

It also needs to be said that the sheer amount of content here is pretty absurd at this point. The original campaign is already really fun, with an interesting story and a more natural progression than a lot of these games tend to have, and one particular step of it close to the end has lived rent-free in my head ever since I played it for how creative of an idea it is on a gameplay level. But by now there's an entire second full-length campaign called Spirits of Amazonia, with a new story and different means of progression. The 74 hours I have in the game isn't from multiple playthroughs; that's one run of both campaigns, even with some of the work being split between three people.

In a lot of ways Green Hell is very rough around the edges, and it's definitely not a game for everyone, but I think its secret sauce is how it owns so much of that roughness as being an intentional design decision instead of a mistake that it blurs the lines around the things that genuinely are just missteps, and it keeps the whole thing afloat. This is about as far from "cozy survival" as it gets, and you'll probably spend a little while scratching your head and wondering why you keep passing out, but if you're a survival crafting veteran and have a group ready this has shaped up to become one of my favorites in the genre.

I bought this game expecting to have a fun time competing with my friends, but the instant I started it my Lovely Planet muscle memory from 2014 kicked in like a sleeper cell agent. Neon White is much more approachable (and less cruel) than Lovely Planet, but the bones of it are the same, being a mix of speed shooting and platforming with a presentation that makes even the most low-bpm heart chase a faster time just for the sake of going faster. Because getting the Ace medal on each stage is easy; the real game is beating all of your friends' times in the friend leaderboard.

The only reason I'd hesitated starting this for a while because the cards in the gameplay I saw made me think there was an element of randomization, but instead the cards are basically just a representation of different weapon pickups. Obviously each one shoots differently, but the secondary fire modes are what really matter; each weapon can be discarded, expending all of its uses to do things like give you an extra jump, dash forward, and more, and balancing when to keep a weapon for its regular uses and when to give it up is the core of chasing faster times. It's a creative twist that results in the game calling on a lot of skills that were otherwise left in the counterstrike surf map days, and in that regard I felt right at home going through its levels.

Beyond just time chasing, the game does have a story, and from all the talk of how "embarrassing" it is I figured it would be an exercise in tolerance that dares you to mash the skip button. But I feel like if you've ever watched any anime in your life, you've probably seen worse. The occasional bits of fanservice in the beginning pretty quickly give way to a story that isn't exactly original (it's basically a mix of Cowboy Bebop and Heat) but still kept me entertained to the end, and the characters do a good job of endearing themselves to you in the short amount of time the game is willing to spend on the plot before letting you loose in another race to the finish.

$25 is a lot, but I recently bought it on sale for $10 and it was money well spent. But the rest of this stuff isn't really important; if you've got a friend playing this game right now, the only question is how much the satisfaction of chasing down their high scores is worth to you.

Thief VR is pretty clearly a port of either the PSVR2 or Quest 3 version, and in its current state it has a number of technical issues. There are no graphical settings (though these are reportedly coming soon in a patch), and there are a lot of bugs and quirks that may or may not prevent you from finishing the game in its current state. There are patches on the way, and if you're wanting to ensure a perfectly smooth experience you should probably give it a couple of weeks. But as far as the content is concerned, I really liked this game.

Going in as a long-time Thief fan, I was expecting concessions to be made, and some of them have. The light meter has been changed to a binary two-stage system for the sake of readability, and you don't get as many tools as in the main games. Because the game is built to let you replay missions at any time, the tool store has been removed in favor of each mission having "reward objectives" that offer upgrades and more starting equipment for their completion. But in terms of everything that is there, I was impressed with the amount of things they got right, and the clever ideas they added on top, like letting you use your headset's microphone to blow out candles or taunt the guards for a distraction. They added a second hitbox to guards' knees so that you can stumble them to the ground while crouching and follow through with a bonk on the head once you've stood, which is nice for those of us who like to play without the crouch button, and you can still drag bodies to hide them, which surprised me considering Quest games don't usually offer ragdoll physics. Clotheslining a guard's shins, then clocking him and yanking him into the shadows is everything I dreamed of when I saw Thief was getting a VR game. And in general, a lot of the immersive elements are just them cashing in on a promise Thief 2014 made 11 years ago; the many uses for Garrett's hands in that game are a much more natural fit in VR, and things like investigating painting frames for secret buttons are a lot more natural in VR than they were in that game. This game largely wears the skin of that one, but with a much less bombastic approach, and in turn a lot more reverence for the early games.

There are 7 missions in total, with the last two reusing maps but with different objectives and loot/guard placements (which I didn't mind, because the two maps they reused were both a lot of fun), and in my experience you can easily get around 8-9 hours from it. But given that this is both a VR game and a stealth game, that can vary a lot. Depending on your VR playstyle, whether you engage in open combat or stick to stealth, how thorough you are in looting and exploring, and how many side objectives you do, you can end up going a few hours shorter or longer than that guess. I have no problems with the amount of content being served here -- but I will say that no matter how much time you get out of it, it's hard not to feel like there wasn't supposed to be more. The narrative is where this hits the hardest, amounting to basically nonsense if you haven't played the previous games and still feeling disjointed if you have. A lot of obvious questions don't get answered, Garrett's side of the story feels like it barely matters beyond being a spiritual successor to the mentor story with that girl at the end of Deadly Shadows (because let's be honest, nobody liked Erin), and the 8th "mission" feels like something scraped together at the last minute to give the game literally any degree of conclusion.

If you're looking to this game for a continuation of the franchise's lore, I would not buy this, unless it turns out that there's some secret ending we've all been softlocked out of getting by bugs. If you're looking for 7 missions of taffing around with your good buddy Garrett while reminiscing about old times via various easter eggs and references that nod back to the original games, though, I think there's still a lot to like here. It's a great start from devs that seem to understand what people like about Thief, and I really hope that something more comes from this.