Dragon Ball FighterZ (PS4): It's FighterZ, Not Fighter-Zee. Also, Holy SHIT.

If I can get all anime hipster for a second? Dragon Ball Z fans can go SCREW. I had to wake up at 5am on a sunday mornings so I could watch the original Dragon Ball series and Dragon Ball Z. I WAS COMMITTED YOU LAZY PRICKS. Unfortunately for me I started to lose steam on the series not long after it got its big push on Toonami in the late 90's when the series really started to build a head of steam. Sorry, when the Namek saga ran like 400 episodes, I decided that was enough time I could devote to it. I pretty much lived devoid of Dragon Ball since.

But you know what I love? Fighting games created by Arc Systems. Specifically the Guilty Gear, BlazBlue, and the Persona Arena series. I know people live and die by Street Fighter but the speed and intensity of Arc Systems just always feel so much better to me. So when one E3 showed off an over the top Arc Systems variant to Marvel vs Capcom I literally started salivating at the pairing with this anime series. It was a natural fit, and so started months upon months of chomping at the bit for.....

DRAGON BALL FIGTHERZ (PS4)

So I am super out of date on my Dragon Ball timeline so I'll explain the story as best I can. Sometime after/during the events of Dragon Ball Super the world has basically become overrun with with clones of the Z warriors and some of their notable villains. The problem is most of the Z warriors have gone missing, so Bulma goes to find Goku to try to take the fight to the clones and stop this invasion.

The problem is, Goku isn't actually Goku. Oh sure, he's still him but he has been severely depowered. There are a series of waves being pulsed out that are weakening everyone, and the only way to counteract it is link with a separate soul. A separate soul that happens to be currently controlling Goku. The soul is actually you as the player, so the characters are talking directly to you. While its not ideal, it does allow Goku to fight back against the clones. So first things first: Go find the other Z warriors, then once assembled go find the source of the waves and put a stop to this attack.

This story glosses over a lot, because they actually do something pretty interesting with the story. There are essentially 3 story mode arcs for you to play through: A heroes arc, a villains arc, and an Androids arc. The story basically functions the same way among all three modes: you get placed on a map with set enemies to fight. As you play through, you unlock story events depending on the team you are using. You also have set story events based on the boss of that set map, or characters you rescue. On top of this the more you use characters, the more they will interact with you to give them more of their inner monologue about the situation.

Although they use the term Arc, that isn't actually accurate because each Arc doesn't continue off of the last one. The levels you've earned remain, but instead of the story continuing you actually are playing an alternate timeline situation. Basically how things would have happened if you controlled the different set of characters and how that might have changed things.

It's only after you complete all three Arcs you receive the final true ending of the game and unlock FighterZ only original character: Android 21. She is basically a combination of one of the android characters and a Buu style character. And SHE, IS, DELIGHTFUL. Something about her voice and the almost innocent evil she exudes when threatening characters. She's tricky to use but an absolute joy and god do I hope she becomes canon to the series.

I. LOVE. HER.

God I haven't even talked about the gameplay yet. So as I mentioned before, FighterZ comes from the minds over at Arc Systems. When I saw the initial trailer of the game, it really looked like Arc was trying to doing their own take on the Marvel Vs. Capcom 3-vs-3 series using Dragon Ball as the setting, and I will be damned if that's pretty much exactly what I got. But what they really wanted to emphasize was a much less complicated barrier to entry, which has been a long standing complaint to those new to the Guilty Gear or BlazBlue franchise.

It operates on a pretty standard fighting game control scheme with light, medium, heavy attack, and a ki blast mapped to the 4 buttons. Your right shoulder buttons allow for two forms of rush called your Hyper dash (which allows you to fly across the screen to start or pursue a combo) and your Meteor rush (which is essentially a guard breaking combo launcher). Lastly your left shoulder buttons are mapped to your tag partners for quick assists to extend combos, or tagging them to take your current fighters place.

Whole lotta Goku Black in high level FighterZ play.

There are lots of little mechanics that blend these various games together as well. Like Marvel vs Capcom, characters that are tagged out will slowly recover some of their lost health. They appeared to fuse the Guilty Gear Burst effect with MVC's X-factor called the Sparking Blast, which will knock back your enemies and give you a temporary increase to power and health recovery for one last ditch effort to keep fighting,which increases the fewer teammates you have left. You are able to use your meteor rush to break a guard and force opponents to tag out and so forth.

There are also a lot of little mechanics in this game to make it easier to play. For example, in using just the light attack button you can automatically string together a short combo that will launch, follow, and complete with a slam back down. Persona 4 Arena (another Arc fighter) did something similar to this. If using the medium attack button you will string a stronger combo that ends with a flashy special move. Every character has a universal anti-air by hitting down and heavy. And generally, all of the special moves are pretty simplified as well as the majority of every character's move set can be done with the standard Hadoken motion (quarter circle, 2-3-6/2-1-4, d-dr-r or whatever scheme you subscribe to).

Then you have a bunch of little mechanics unique to the game. On top of the Sparking Blast, you can tap two buttons to instantly teleport behind an enemy for a heavy kick to close the gap quickly, or use to keep a combo airborne. When completing auto-combos or combos over 10 hits, you basically earn dragon balls. If you collect all 7, the player that hits an autocombo with a fully charged gauge can be granted a wish such as revive teammate, recover health, more power, etc.

In the story mode, there is also an additional stat boosting mechanic where you can give your characters various attribute changes to accommodate for the increasing difficulty of the enemies, but it won't be until your second playthrough or so where the enemy levels will force you to be very strategic about what attributes you need to give yourself. I basically would ride with increased experience and post match recovery to hang with teams I wanted to level longer.

Now, despite what the fighting game community and game developers would have me to believe, having just an online VS mode does not push me to buy a game. Street Fighter V tried to get away with this garbage, and that's why that game eats shit. So I will be holding it up on its single player experience because other people suck and I am not good enough to have an enjoyable match with the frothing, quick twitch, rage quitting jerks who pollute online fighters.

In crazier moments, it really does just become an episode of DBZ

So as I stated before the game has a Story mode, which is fine but after you complete it there is little reason to keep playing it other than increasing difficulty and stat customization. It has an arcade mode which has an interesting scaling mechanic for the difficulty, so if you are blowing the the first matches too easily you will be scaled upwards to increasingly more difficult matches. If you lose or have a hard time, you keep level or move back down. It makes getting an S-rank run in arcade a bit more tougher than it appears. There is also an 2nd tier of difficulty which increases all of the matches.  This is the mode I most frequently play.

There is a pretty comprehensive tutorial on how to play the game, and the first run of the story mode is going to basically be vomiting tutorial at you for a significant portion of the story. It got to the point where I realized like some 4 hours into the game I was still getting tutorial, but the story was actually really good so it wasn't bothering me like it normally would have. The training mode also has a combo trainer, which was not actually as difficult to go through as some of these combo trainers usually are in these games. Usually with like Street Fighter or Tekken I would get about halfway through and be like "fuck it, I can't get this frame perfect timing."

FighterZ also as a recording replay feature that I have never used, mainly because I am not impressive with this game. This is mainly used to supplement the multitude of online modes the game features. Once you are placed in a lobby for multiplayer, you can open a ring to fight other people present in the lobby (up to 8 people), or wait in line for your turn to go at someone. You have have two matches going at a time but for some strange reason, people waiting don't get to spectate the match. I have no idea why they would do this since being able to watch would keep people in the ring.

There is also an Arena battle mode, which also features the lobby you play in but I don't think there is a player restriction on this one. I actually haven't played an arena battle. There is also the World Stage mode, which is where you can queue up to Ranked and Unranked matches worldwide. Whats nice about this is your queue can hold if you are playing the arcade, training, or story modes. There is an offline vs mode as well for local play.

This is seriously some GO1 (go-ichi) level defense.

Everything about this game is pretty fuckin' great because its basically aping off of the incredibly solid Guilty Gear Xrd iterations in the unreal engine: using 3d models shaped in a way to give it a 2d look which allows for interesting camera tricks and dramatic angles. Animations are high intensity, fast, and fluid as every good fighting game should be. It translates well to the story mode cut-scenes as well and is simply gorgeous.

Surprisingly to me, Guilty Gear luminary Daisuke Ishiwatari outside of a little casual advice thrown in, had practically nothing to do with the production of the game despite it using a similar engine. And like many of the other Arc System fighting games, I would have thought he did the soundtrack because it has that same high energy rock his games are known for. Hell the FighterZ is basically a copy of what they did in Guilty Gear Xrd.

It even shows a lot of appreciation to the source material, as every characters moves and specials are faithfully recreated in the game so they look like they fight the same way they did in your favorite episodes. Even more so, if you use the right characters in the right stage settings, you can trigger cinematics that re-create some of the more famous moments of the show (such as beating Frieza with Goku on Destroyed Namek).

Yamcha is one of the few who got an original Dramatic Finish. Finishing
his fight with Nappa LIKE IT SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED.

But if I did have to criticize some things, I would say the online play is a chore to set up and there is not a lot of punishment for rage quitters. I feel the game has some serious balancing issues because the casual players basically spam the hyperdash relentlessly because there is little way to punish it after it connects. Usually everyone universal anti-air will counter it but you still have to time it right and that's not exactly easy to do. So unless you get that trick down, expect to have that dash in your face a lot.

And since this is in that MvC kinda vein, combos can get long and stretched out. This game rewards offense more than defense (despite the best in the world right now being a primarily defensive player). So once you are tagged with a combo you are basically relegated to stay in it until the opponent drops it or finishes it. I don't know why the Sparking Blast in this game couldn't count as one free combo break like Guilty Gear's Burst does. That'd be a small concession to give a player one free fighting chance. So any time you think are you are ready to tackle some online play, please be warned that you are probably not.

One of the easiest jokes in the series.

Lastly my ongoing crusade against the DLC. I've clearly lost this battle. There is a 35 dollar "Fighter Pass" that was released with the game with a schedule of no less than 8 DLC characters to come out by the end of the summer. And at this point I just said "Fuck it, fine. Here." and paid for the thing when the first 2 additional characters came out. I've lost. Retail games aren't 60 dollars anymore. They are 90 going on infinity because we as gamers needed to say as a whole "We aren't going to let you nickle and dime every aspect of the game." and we didn't. We let the EA, Biowares, and Capcoms of the world win and get away with this, and now its just something that is accepted. This blows. Fuck DLC.

But complaints not withstanding, Dragon Ball: FighterZ after a somewhat rocky beta basically fucking nailed it on this one.  I don't know if this has supplanted Guilty Gear as my favorite fighting game series but I really feel it is making a hell of a case for it. I play this game constantly and have been practicing to play it in my first EVO championship trip. It's hands down one of the best fighting games in the market right now and its easy to see why its already so immensely popular. It's fast paced and frenetic, easy to pick up but skillful. And if that's what you look for in a fighter you can't go wrong with Dragon Ball: FighterZ.

The first nerfs came out, too
Arc dared to disappoint Vegeta.

Mass Effect: Andromeda (PS4): What's New is Old.

July review of a game I played in March. Good pacing, Chris.

As we all know, I generally have a pretty hate/hate relationship with the majority of science fiction. There are a handful of shining examples through various media that will grab and in some cases even hold my attention, but they tend to be pretty few and far between. With games that is just as relevant. If it has star or space in its title I'd say 70% of the time I don't even bother giving it a second glance. I don't care what color Spock's beamsaber is in Battlestar.

Which is what made it so surprising that this series managed to actually engross me to the point of being a fan of it. Because to be totally honest I don't think I actually even really liked the first one, I didn't think it was a great game. I had just bought a XB360 at the time and was told this was a game worth getting. But once I actually got into it I'll be damned if I didn't fall for this universe. I still feel the second one was the best in this series and it sure felt like the book was closed on the third one, but here we are with a new game in this franchise. After the lukewarm ending of the third, I'm ready to see how Bioware writes themselves out of this one.

MASS EFFECT: ANDROMEDA(PS4)

In between the events of Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, in a joint initiative between the Quarians and 4 races of the Milky Way galaxy have collaborated on an expansion initiative to the Andromeda galaxy. Over 20,000 of the collected races partook in a 600 year journey across space in search of "golden worlds" on massive ships called Arcs. Each race's Arc is lead by a Soldier with an embedded AI unit called a SAM, and they are tasked to find suitable planets for colonization. In this case, the human pathfinder, Alec Ryder.

You control either one of Alec's children, Scott or Sara Ryder (Sara in my case), and unfortunately after being awakened from cryo-sleep to find out that their targeted golden world isn't quite golden.... or even habitable, as it surrounded by this harmful dark energy being called the scourge. The scourge knocks out the ships power, and renders one Ryder sibling comatose. A scout team goes down planet-side to confirm if they planet is habitable or not, and they are met with resistance from a hostile alien race called the Kett.

While investigating the remains of a previous alien race, Ryder and Alec find an alien monolith and activate it. The explosion from it sends them reeling, smashing Ryder's helmet. Alec sacrifices himself to save his child, and makes them the new pathfinder by transferring the SAM AI to them. With the pathfinder lost, all that's left is to return to the centralized space station for the Andromeda Operation called the Nexus and continue the mission. But the Nexus is in shambles, none of the other arcs made it, and it's barely functional. So it's up to Ryder's team to figure out what happened, and get the Andromeda initiative underway.

So as you can tell from the plot synopsis here, we are getting no resolution on the events of the previous Mass Effect Trilogy. It's essentially so far down the timeline that the majority of the characters from original series would have died from conflict or age. They essentially wipe the slate clean sans from a handful of messages from Liara T'soni warning about the impending purge of the Reapers.

Anyways, Andromeda. I'm going to be a little hard pressed to review this one because I'm months behind writing this, they've already patched a bunch, and honestly I can't really think of a lot that has changed in this one in comparisons to the rest of the series.

First off, let's talk character models. Bioware, I'm willing to give you a pass because the majority of the cast are aliens, but some how a significant portion of them seem to look more humans than the actual humans. It was a pretty significant issue with how poor an number of the characters looked that they had to patch in design upgrades to make the humans (specifically women) look less tired and more detailed. Every character with a humanoid form still looks like their eyes are trying to pop from their heads.

The character creator is still a plate of hot garbage. I spent hours try make Velfir Ryder appealing for me to look at only to have it look like she has neon face paint the moment she left the creator, because shit looks differently in different lighting engine. Despite the incredible amount of customization to this game, you really only get one crack to make your characters so you better be confident in them when you finish up. Or, you can do what a significant number of people did and just try to make the shittiest looking characters they can come up with.

Kotaku had people send in their bad character screens, and some of them are horrifying.

Thankfully, when it comes to abilities you don't really get locked into what kind of character you have this time around. Andromeda lets you play around with all the aspects of your characters pretty fast and loose, and it makes incredibly cheap to reboot and make adjustments. So if you are playing the game as silent stealthy sniper and decide mid-way through the game you'd like to be a heavy wielding thicky with biotic powers? A quick trip to you ship and a couple of credits and you can respec however you like. I ended up liking what I was rolling with and didn't end up doing this.

Andromeda has kept the somewhat cover-based 3rd person shooter engine it laid down in Mass Effect 2 pretty much intact. If you've ever played a Mass Effect game before or even any modern 3rd person shooter, the controls should feel natural at this point its been around for well over a decade. The combat really on changes up depending on what traits you've taken and will dictate what kind of attack you will use.

Andromeda gives you lots of freedom with your specs, so play around.

In my case, I was a technician with effective sniping ability, so I would basically rain down headshot fire target after target from hundreds of yards away, and if they were foolish enough to get closer they would be burned with a incinerate fireball, then exploded with an electric overcharge. If they were dumb enough to push closer, they were ripped down with a laser assault rifle. I could clear out entire bases without ever needed to step foot in them till it was totally safe. I've seen some pretty interesting high damage builds, but I never really needed to explore them.

The only real thing different about the combat that I can think of is now there is an addition of a rocket jump and a dodge. The dodge I found useful for whipping around a cover for tense firefights. The jump is really only about as useful as the games platforming segments require them. Sure you can jump and then dodge to dash, and it helps with exploration a little bit but otherwise the game could have not had it and it probably wouldn't have affected things much.

Paw Rifle: unlimited ammo, perfect accuracy, shreds shields.  Yes please.

The cast? Ehh, cast is alright I guess. As is with most Mass Effect games there are characters I really liked like Peebee and Drack (the Asari and Krogan, go figure), and ones that I didn't like Cora. But because of your ability to overhaul your skills team composition never really felt like it was a real determining factor. From my build, it seemed like I wouldn't have needed a character like Ja'al because of the same skill set, but I rarely noticed any impact if he was on my team or not.

It feels like Andromeda tried to mix various elements of the previous games that worked in the hope of a vastly improved experience. It's better for it but I don't know how much. Maps for example are big and explorable again. It feels like they have taken a page out of the build of Dragon Age: Inquisition and set up the maps for individual questing areas. As much as I hate to say it, Skyrim really set a precedent for open world questing that's probably going to continue to be a staple for years to come. Thankfully, In addition to the return of being able to drive around the maps, it also implements a fast travel for landmarks you have already hit to save time. But it's still viable to drive since you are able to mine resources from the car as well.

Dem Duke boys is crazy

Which makes me wonder why the hell we still have to scan every single planet still. Either for meager resources or map completion there very rarely is any functional reason to do it. There are handful of areas where you scan that adds areas of interest to the map. These should be the only things we need to scan for, the rest is just pointless fluff.

It was especially bad before the initial patch where every time you wanted to transition from planet to planet or from galaxy to galaxy you had to watch this extended interspace travel sequence. Prior to the patch, there was no way to skip these sequences that basically slowed down planet exploration to a crawl. I'm sure this had to do something with load times but there are only so many planets you actually set foot on. Thankfully, this got quickly adjusted and once you are in a new galaxy, you are able to skip most of these flight sequences.

The transitions are so long that 15 seconds of gif isn't enough to show a whole one.

Speaking of patches, I found this one to be especially bad when it came to glitching in general. I would have tons of problems of animations bugging out, interactions messing up, falling through floors mid fight, things bugging out that wouldn't allow me to finish off the quests, and one situation where backing my PS4 to a new drive almost ruined my progress. Thankfully the majority of these were able to be fixed by simply restarting the game, but it gave the entire game a very unpolished feeling to me.

There really isn't much to add about the multiplayer. If you played it on Mass Effect 2 or 3, it's basically more of the same. There is a new companion app for you phone that you can use to earn more research points to unlock more weapons or equipment, more characters of the online mode, but I only really dabbled with it a few times and it destroyed me on the easiest setting, so I didn't really bother with it.

I'll give Bioware this, they always manage to leave me totally confused at the start of a Mass Effect game as they drown me in terminology, backstory, and massive opening map locations, but by the time I get rolling in the game I am completely dialed in. The story in this one is pretty straight forward for the most part, and while there aren't a terribly bountiful amount of boss fights (a handful of architect fights really), it does still get pretty exciting by the end of it.

But the one thing they got very right is that they finally did away with the stupid Paragon/Renegade system. Typically when you play this series you pretty much make the decision in your head at the onset if you are going to play this game good or evil, since there is generally no real benefit to play things neutral. You generally needed to be all good or all bad to make certain decisions, and the game suffered for it.

I liked Peebee a lot. Lived in an escape pod in the event the other shoe dropped.
Kept everyone at arm length. Behaviors I could certainly relate to.

Now instead of those options, you have conversational choices of formal, logical, emotional, or casual. I like these options better because while they aren't exactly clear what that logical response could be, it allows me to better play to the character I am talking to. Most of the time I just went with casual because I tend to be a bit of a smart ass, but in more harrowing moments I could shift to emotional and it made sense. Or meeting a new race of aliens, formal made more sense to me. Conversational trees felt better in this one, more natural.

But the biggest thing I applaud them on this front is not the conversation trees, but the decisions. Again in older Mass Effects it was: Do you want to save the box of adorable kittens? or do you want to light the box on fire. I always hated that there was no middle ground or if there was it was not worth picking. Not so in this one. In a large number of critical moments during the game you are presented with two opposing, but equally viable options. No good or evil, paragon or renegade. Just two varied grey possible options. And they fucking killed me to the point where I would sit and agonize over what selection I was going to make. It made it truly feel like my decisions mattered, and would leave me with consequences of those decisions. It really was the best aspect of this game.

So did I like the game? Yeah I guess so. When the narrative got going I was able to see it through to the finish.  There were certainly enough characters I liked to want to see their story through, and even the ones that I didn't care for I cared enough about the story to do their missions as well. But ultimately, when the final credits rolled I was with the distinct feeling of "Whelp, this certainly was a Mass Effect game." It's certainly not a game I felt I needed to keep playing the moment I had finished it.

Mass Effect: Andromeda feels like a cash in to try to draw back a fan base that felt scorned by the ending of Mass Effect 3.  I enjoyed that it took the story back in a new direction and honestly I didn't mind a return visit to this universe. It was met with somewhat lack luster reviews and similar sales. It's certainly not the greatest one in its series, but it's certainly playable.  It pushes no boundaries and breaks no molds. It simply was just a another game of the series.  If you are a fan of the franchise you certainly will find yourself enjoying your time with it. I don't think it's a must have or can't miss, not sure if it's a hard sell for new fans, but I wasn't unhappy with it.

Seriously, how long does it take to set up a goddamn movie night?

Attack on Titan (PS4): Simple but Effective.

I wasn't too late to the party when this anime started making some waves. I made the foolish mistake of watching the first episode of it right before bed, so that wasn't a smart move. But like so many people I loved the series and have been ravenously destroying the mangas as they have been released. I am very clearly a fan.

I had kept my eye on this one since its release last year. I saw a number of youtuber's stream their own let's plays of it throughout the year and it seemed fairly simple in its concept and really needed to execute on two major fronts. I had it on my xmas list this year but didn't get it, but I did have a good amount of Amazon credit after the holidays, so with a little extra spending money to burn I got myself a copy of....

ATTACK ON TITAN:(PS4)

The campaign mode of this game is generally condensed telling of season one of Attack on Titan but for those of you who do not know: over a century prior to the start of our story, humanity was attack by this species of gigantic humanoid monsters called Titans. They devoured humans on site maliciously and without mercy. Humanity was pushed near the edge of extinction forcing the remaining populous into a city protected by 3 massive walls, With royalty and the wealthy class in the center, and the poorer and downtrodden in the outer ring. For over 100 years, these walls protected humanity.

We take the perspective of Eren Yeager, his adoptive sister Mikasa Ackerman, and their friend Armin Arlert. Eren has a long standing desire to see the world beyond the walls, and quickly gets his wish as a massive 100 meter Titan looms over the walls and smashes through it, allowing smaller titans to invade the city. Thousands of lives are lost, and Eren loses his mother as she is eaten by a titan. Eren swears vengeance to kill all titans and joins the ranks of the military, with Mikasa and Armin in tow.

Five years pass and they work their way to cadets before deciding what sect of the military they are going to station to, with working omni-directional gear that is used to combat titans when the walls are attacked again by the colossal titan. With another opportunity to fight, Eren submits to his bloodlust and takes the fight to the titans.

Armin, Eren, and Mikasa

Now this is somewhat of a simplified summary of the basic events that get the game in motion, but I glossed over quite a bit. The game, in all honesty, kind of does as well as the cut-scenes between missions give us rather brief expositions of the story to transition us to the scenes that take us to the next mission. It's not a bad telling and if you have never seen Attack on Titan it will at least keep you up to speed, but if you are looking for the plot line, you really should watch the show.

Thankfully in my case, I didn't give a shit about the story development because I have seen it before. What I needed from this game was to be successful at two things and only two things. One: is it fun and fluid to fly around the city using the omni directional gear? And Two: is to fun to use said ability to fly around to kill big dumb derpy Titans? If this game succeeded on these two points, I would consider this a worthwhile purchase.

So lets start with moving around. There is a standard run and jump which you will use pretty much never. For some areas like open fields you can ride horseback, but 90% of the game will involve you using the Omni-direction mobility gear (or vertical maneuvering equipment, whatever). It works fairly simply enough, you tap the square/X to fire off an anchor for your gear, It doesn't need to aim so long as you are in high terrain, and it will immediately yank you up into the air. As long as have a visible anchor symbol, you can continue to press the anchor button and you will swing continually as long as the environment allows.

I should stress holding it is all you need to do, I was trying to time my presses and it was slowing me down. You can also use the jump button to fire a burst of gas from your tanks to increase you speed or keep you airborne if you are trying to jump a wide gap or something. For the most part it works pretty easily, and the only real problem comes in sometimes when you smack into the side of a building. It doesn't work exceptionally great for going straight up in the air.

Flying around the map is a joy to do. 

When approaching Titans to fight you will be able to switch from mobility mode to combat mode. Its more or less a lock on, and when you lock in on a target you are able to fire off anchors into them. This allows you to swing around your target, and more importantly allow you to get above them. Titans will usually have 5 targets on their knees, elbows, and nap of the neck. As we know, you can only KILL a titan by attacking the neck, but occasionally there material drops in the arms and legs, so its wise to try to farm that when you have the chance.

Battle is somewhat straightforward as well. Once you are anchored onto your target, you can flip between the targets and re-anchor at will. As long as you are moving the analogs you will continue to shift your position and it will let you know about how far away from the titan you are. If you let go of the analog your ODG will start to reel your in towards the titan. Upon getting in range you can tag the triangle/Y to make an attack. You need to speed to really deal damage so you want to start from far enough away that you can build speed before the strike. Otherwise you'll need to use a burst of gas or you'll fudge the attack.

Flying with the anchors in combat can be finicky when doing it in close quarters or when fighting multiple titans. A titan will never trip up themselves or you on an anchor attacked to them, but if you swing and cross through a tree, building, or another titan the line will snap and you'll need to re-anchor. And these pricks will trip up your line and try to grab you a lot, so be ready for it.

Every single kill you make in the game is immensely satisfying.

Generally, when going through the game either in the story mode or online mode, you will enter a location with a main objective. You could dash right to the objective and take it down, but you will usually get a pretty shitty ranking for that. While traveling the map you will that other characters will be on the map and they may be in trouble. There are various side objectives that these characters are doing (like killing titans, defending a point, escorting someone to saftey) and you can go to help them to keep them alive. If you do, chances are you will gain better materials and they will assist you in the fights for the rest of the level.

Yes, you aren't fighting alone. There are a number of varied survey corps members around as well as main characters. Each of these have a rank of effectiveness so naturally you'll want to help your teammates to get better support. For characters like Armin and Hange, who have the ability to control their teammates attacks, its almost crucial because it basically gives you a series of homing shots. 

Characters have abilities that develop as you level them. I mentioned strategists like Armin and Hange who have abilities that keep them safer in battle from a distance, but then you have heavies like Mikasa or Levi who can pretty much yo-yo themselves for multiple attacks, which allows them to bring down titans faster than other characters, There are also characters who are better at resource collecting. The story mode lets you run through a majority of these characters so you can get a feel for who you like when you go into online mode.

As you might have guessed, Levi is the most busted character in the game.

And for those who watched the show or read the manga before hand? Yes you will have segments where using a titan will be in play. But I'll be 100% honest with you? This is probably the most boring aspect of the game. You can run at speeds and slug it out and throw other titans, but it just feels like it turns into a regular brawler. A regular old brawler is not why I am here.

Lastly, as I've mentioned there is materials you get during missions. This is what allows you to upgrade your ODG or swords. There isn't a whole world of difference between the main types of gear. For swords do you want range, power, or capacity/durability. For ODG do you want speed, Range, strength, and capacity. Honestly, I found it best to just keep upgrading the standard gear because they were the most balanced, but if you dabble further into the online scout mode, you'll need to tailor your gear for harder missions.

In online, multiple players can use the same character.
So if you wanted 4 titans to play the game in boring mode, you could.

It should also be noted that your gear isn't indefinite. There is degradation to your primary equipment, namely the amount of swords you have to use, how long they last, and how much pressure you have to air dash around. There are scouts littered across the map that you can stop at for a quick re-supply, but with the right equipment I've found that this rarely is an issue. You also have the ability to trigger a decisive battle which will give you increased attack, and small boost to your gear.

The Scout Mode is more or less the online version of the game. You can continue to play increasingly challenging missions for more supplies and experience as well as a mod where you can scout multiple missions in a row. Whats nice about this is you have the freedom to choose what character of the majority of the cast you'd like to use. So when I played online, it was a lot of Eren's, Mikasa's, and Levi's. I was constantly hunting for materials so I often used Christa, which seemed to annoy most of the groups I played with because she is probably the weakest character in the game.

A weird thing about the online mode of the game is I was under the assumption that the party/room leader was who got to selection missions. I had this one asshole invade one of my games, My room was set that I was clearly focusing on missions at this level of difficulty, and after doing one of them this prick would go into the mission NPC, change my mission to a different mode entirely and then ready immediately, thus locking the mission in place and not allowing it to be changed. It was fucking annoying and I had to kick him because it was my room.

Because you are a chump, Armin. Grow a pair and fight like everyone else is.

I find the soundtrack to this game to be simultaneously great and generic at the same time. This is something the Tales Of series tends to struggle with. They managed to produce this epic sounding score that feels great when you are battling titans or flying around, but if you asked me to hum a few notes of my favorites, I couldn't do it because its all utterly forgettable. I honestly don't know how this is possible but its surprisingly common it feels like.

Graphically I guess you could say its got kind of a washed out cell shading to it? I don't know how to describe it but its something about the grittiness of how the characters are animated makes them contrast sharply to the backdrop and environment around them it works to make the characters pop in their otherwise grimy surroundings.

Using your decisive flare can get you out of pinch or give that last push on a hard titan 

The game honestly could have tooled with the upgrade and progression system somewhat. It feels like hunting for supplies is always a chore and if you are playing online good luck trying to get people to help you do it. You have to clear as many as you can as fast as you can to really get A and S ranks on your missions and most people just dash to the finish and kill the boss. You'll get C's for that. It causes you to miss out on a lot of bonus supplies for equipment that honestly is only marginally better than what you are using. Expect to be checking back a lot.

And one can argue that the game is incredibly repetitive. The real meat and potatoes of the game will be you flying around on the ODG in massive open environments around swarms of titans. The only things that break the pace are the few missions where you actually get to control a titan, but as I've said earlier, doing so takes away from what I feel is the fun part of the game. So yeah, not a whole lot of real variance to the game from the start to the finish. The biggest challenge really is learning its somewhat awkward controls. Even once you beat the story, the online missions are basically variants of story missions with slightly changing difficulty.

Not unless you are playing with friends, Hange.

But you know what? I played this game for HOURS. Went completely through the story mode, hopped online and did a bunch of missions with some random strangers, and I almost never got tired of flying around and hacking away at titans. The increasing difficulty of the missions some how did just enough to really keep me engaged with this game for a lot longer than it should of. Leveled up a bunch of characters and pretty much kept playing it till something new came out.

So I consider this worth the purchase I paid for it. It goes on sale often and will probably be looking a price drop sooner than later, so for what its worth I enjoyed Attack on Titan. While it might not be the most developed and fleshed out game to ever come out, I said at the onset that it had to do two things right and on that front it most certainly succeeds. If you are a fan of the series Attack on Titan will provide you with a fun experience, just don't expect to probably come back to it after you've moved on to something else.

I seriously don't get why the show is deviating from the manga for season 2.
That story is so friggen good.

Overwatch (PS4): A Competent Confusion.

Sometimes hype gets so big that you can't ignore it. Even I heard the words Call of Duty so much that even I had to break down and try one of them to see what all the fuss was about. Now, I've never been a huge follower of Blizzard properties, so I only heard so much about this title during its coming release. Heard the name mentioned a few times, heard it was shooter. Didn't grab me.

But closer to release, Blizzard started putting out these amazing Pixar-esq cinematics to promote the game and I watched one of them. And holy shit, from that point I slowly started to become obsessed with this game. Learning about the characters, the lore. It had me genuinely interested, but as a game I worried because it's not the usual type of game I play. But the hype machine was so strong I had to ask a friend to borrow it just so I can see what the fuss was all about...

OVERWATCH:(PS4)

The story to Overwatch is both plentiful and nonexistent. The main crux of the story is that it takes place in a fictionalized future version of earth. Human society has evolved technologically and produced a golden age of advanced robotics with artificial intelligence. But as all robotic AI stories go, the machines begin to question their creators and robot uprising begins to battle humans. Enter the Overwatch team, a unit of people with specialized abilities who were able to quell the robot uprising.

But there was a schism between the Overwatch's frontline and black op teams. Reports of wrong doings started getting placed on Overwatch and an explosion leveled the Overwatch HQ allegedly killing the two leading members of the squad. Ultimately this caused the world governments to investigate the situation and eventually passed an act that basically made the actions of the team illegal forcing the team to disband to spare themselves of any criminal repercussion. 

But years after this act has been placed corporations have taken control, acts of terrorism are happening throughout the world, and the possibility of another robotic uprising is starting to stir. Unable to continue to sit back and watch this happen one of  Overwatch's members, Winston, initiates the call to reassemble the team despite the ban to try to do something to stem this wave of terror sweeping the world.

I seriously love these trailers. If they made this an animated series or movie I would totally watch it.

Honestly though, the game doesn't even tell you that much when you first fire it up. They released a a couple of cinematics that feature a number of the characters that give a little bit of the story surrounding the world its creating, but as far as the game play goes you only will get little snippets of conversation between characters that fill in the blanks a little bit. Which is surprising considering how deep and interested the lore of this game actually goes. I will touch on this more later in the review.

Overwatch as a game can best be akin to a team based objective style first person shooter that borrows heavily from MOBA elements. When someone asks what kind of game Overwatch is, the first thing almost everybody says in response is: "It's kind of like Team Fortress 2". I personally didn't play a lot of TF2 but I feel that is probably the most fair comparison to make when discussing this game.

Essentially at its core, Overwatch is a 6v6 FPS. How your game typically starts is you press a button to start where you immediately have to wait to connect to Blizzard server (because god forbid having any offline capability). Then once you are into the game decide if you want to jump into quick play or training. When you select, the game offers you a tiny little counter with how long you have waited and how long they think it will take for you to be connected to a game. If the wait is too long it will drop you into a tiny skirmish where you can run around a shoot while you wait. It's a nice little distraction.

Once you are in a room, you are taken back to your character selection screen. Characters are broken up into four major archetypes. Your offensive characters who are meant to push the pace, your defensive characters who are meant to create choke points to slow the opposing team, the Tanks who are meant to soak up damage for your offensive users, and your supports who are meant to die immediately (or if you are good at the game buff your team and weaken the opposing, I guess.).

One of Overwatch's biggest selling points is that the boasts a diverse set 21 different playable characters. Each character is unique in their design and have their own specific skill sets about them. For example there are 4 or 5 different support characters, but none of them play the same way: Mercy is a full blown healer, but she is nimble, fast, can buff strength on top of heal, and has a suprisingly damaging pistol. Symmetra however is also a support, but she doesn't heal. She is able to create turrets to shoot enemies that you can hide on walls and in cover, and make shields to keep people alive.

Because of the diverse nature of all the of the characters even within their roles, team composition will be an important factor when assembling your team. Depending on the game type, your go to player might not be available or necessary for the mission at hand. So if you are the 3rd fucking Hanzo on your team, it might be wise to try somebody else because a bad composition will doom your team from the start. Seriously, a team should never have 3 fucking snipers.

It's easy to see why Tracer is the unofficial mascot of the game. She's so cheery and cute
that it's just impossible not to love her. I don't even play Tracer and I love the character.

Speaking of the characters, I have to say that I absolutely love the character design and art direction of this game. I keep using the term "Pixar-esq" when describing it and if you've watched any of the animations you know that's an apt comparison. Each of the characters have a unique and interesting design about them, all the characters hail for different nationalities so they all have different quirks and accents. The design of the world around them is bright and colorful in all its different locations which severely goes against the grain of the Grey/Brown shooters we see these days. It is just an incredibly appealing looking game.

A big point of contention in this game for me is somewhat lack of options. When you jump into quick play the games will always be 6v6 but the objective isn't always the same. Sometimes you need to take and hold an area. sometimes it will be a 2 out of 3 king of the hill style game. Sometimes you will need to capture a payload and escort it to the finish. While you can argue that there are multiple game "types" it essentially boils down to the same game in my eyes. Six people shooting at Six other people. Only thing that changes is where you do it.

A feature that I love about this game though is that you are not locked into the character you selected at the start of the game. Let's say for example I start the game by picking D.Va, the mech riding tank character with close range damage, and we have a mission where we are pushing forward. On this mission I am getting blown up and put down one almost every surge, and so are some of our allies.

While respawing I can see that say our team has a lack of support characters, so on the fly as long as I am in the home base or respawning I can switch my character without interrupting the flow of the game. So now I can switch to Mercy to provide healing to another tank or offensive character to keep our pushes sustained. That's one of the games biggest perks that if you are playing a match and this team or your character isn't working then you aren't stuck with it. It forces you to be more versatile for the benefit of your team. (or you can keep taking unnecessary snipers like an asshole.)

Something else that I liked, is that the thing to remember is this is an objective focused game. So this means all you shitdicks who are still overly concerned about your Kill/Death ratio means you are playing the game fucking wrong. Since the main objective of each game is never "Kill as many as you can", it somewhat tries to steer you into playing your role on the team. It doesn't stop everyone from running off and trying to do their own thing, but most of the time the team knows exactly what their job is when the game starts.

Mei is fantastic for blocking paths and is devastating when used properly.
So naturally, I don't use Mei.

Although, there is a new bit of dick waving when a match finishes. It's a small little highlight at the end of a match that is deemed the "Play of the Game." As it sounds, a player is highlighted for having a spectacular play during the game, typically if they landed multiple kills in one move, a very well sustained assault, or if you're Torbjorn standing next to a turret doing fucking nothing {those infuriate me}. In a rare instance, you can do it with a support, but that is incredibly hard to pull off. Since people seem obsessed with getting this, too often actual objectives fall to the wayside.

They do balance it a little bit at the end of the match by nominating up to 4 players for commendations. Basically if a support healed a lot, a tank really stuck with an objective and soaked up a lot of damage, or someone really was just a one man killing machine all match, things like that. The players then basically can like which of the ones they thought deserved it like a facebook post. Typically, this is the best that I hope for and you usually see the other players give credit where its due to the less sexy grunt work characters.

It's hard to do, but not impossible. I was super proud of myself for this performance even though we lost.
Wish I had waited the few more seconds to get all 4 revived on that play though. That would have been clutch.

Once you complete a game you are awarded experience for completing the match and you also receive bonuses for the highest medal you achieved for specific match actions like healing, tanking, or objective, a bonus if you win, and bonus for not quitting the game. Once you gain a level you are awarded a loot crate which gives you up to 4 various unlockables from costumes, colors, sprays, and dialog. This is essentially all you can earn from playing the game (or just micropay for it if you are lazy, which you shouldn't do).

At the time of writing, I returned the game to my friend just as the competitive mode was released. Essentially a mode for level 25 and above where you go through 10 "qualifier" games to determine your skill level. Then you can player longer games for better cosmetic rewards. Personally, I dislike the idea of a competitive mode because it immediately places a divide between the hyper competitive high level player, and the casual player who likes the game just wants to have fun. (See: Any fucking Moba).

There really isn't much else to the game. There is a small little training area with random bots around where you can test out characters and get a feel for their moves, but strangely if you stay in that game mode too long the game will punt you back to the main menu. There is a small little bit of tutorial to learn the game, a VS. AI mode for someone looking to practice without the tense nature of being against other players, and Match of the week kinda thing with goofy rules. It really is all the elements of a Moba.

Here is my biggest beef with the game, and honestly something Blizzard does in general: they have the ability to make these incredibly fantastic looking cinematics for their games and most specifically this one. There are pages upon pages of character backstory and design that go into carefully crafting these unique and interesting characters. And once you fire the game up you get less than .0075% of it. It's a complete and utter travesty.

Look Blizzard, I'm going to level with you here. You are are sitting on a fucking transmedia empire here and doing dick all with it. Inside of one single video you turned a guy who doesn't play Blizzard games, first person shooters, or online multiplayer games into somebody who is completely entranced by the property you've brought to the table. I said right out the gate before I even tried the game that if you didn't make this game and made Overwatch an animated series, graphic novel, or a 2 hour Pixar style movie I would be first in line to consume the shit out of this.

You built this fantastic world filled with interesting characters and backstory. It is practically a travesty that there isn't even some kind of meager campaign to go with it. I'm not asking for a lot since I know this was always intended to be a multiplayer game. But god if you could give me some small 2-6 hour campaign to get even more engrossed in this universe, it would completely justify a 60 dollar price tag.

True Fact: This review took forever to post because I couldn't stop watching these awesome videos.

They are just too fucking cool. Make this a goddamn show or movie already!

Which brings me to my 2nd issue: Full price for this game just is not worth it in my opinion. Yes, I discussed that there are variants to what the match objective is every time you play but ultimately to the unseasoned shooter player such as myself, every single match feels like the match before it. Either run to the location and shoot all the players, follow the location and shoot all the players, or shoot all the players to stop them from getting to your location. Call them whatever you want, but its all essentially one game mode. You just get to decide if you want bots or humans to play against.

Now some people will throw out "Neeehhh! But its only 40 on PC!" This is true, it is 40 if you lose out on some DLC skins and such. Which sadly is still more than I would be willing to pay for a single game mode. Now apparently all updates aren't going to be charged as DLC from what I understand which I appreciate, but then we sort of fall into the Street Fighter V scenario where I feel you basically have put out an incomplete product under the guise of giving it all to you later when you have time to complete it. Eff you, you still charged the full price for an unfinished product.

I would bitch about how I hate playing games with other people online, but I've gone on that rant a billion times and thankfully I have the option to mute all the mics. So I can party up and chat with friends if I want to, but have blissful silence while I play the game with randoms. They have quick emotes in the game to use for basic commands and as a Smite player I appreciate that, and are more than sufficient. Call out a "Need Healing" and I know where to be.

One of these pictures caused a huge problem for some people. One is the picture that replaced it.
Can you guess which? Hint: If you can, get over yourself.

Also, I am not going to comment on the whole "butt controversy" because that was the biggest non-issue I've ever heard in a video game. I don't like using the term Social Justice Warrior because I feel its whole purpose is to invalidate anyone who might have a legitimate complaint or criticism {that's what it does, and if you don't think so you are totally full of shit.}. But people getting mad because Tracer has a pose that showed her butt was literally people getting mad at something for the sake of getting mad at something. Blizzard changed the pose to a new butt showing pose and inside a week nobody fucking cared anymore. Look it up if you want more detail on that.

When I returned the game, my initial review of it was "I don't know if it I like it or not". But now that I have had a few weeks to stew on it, I am coming to realize that I did enjoy my time with the game and honestly still have to urge to play it a little bit. More than likely, I will end up caving and purchasing the game because it works perfectly well to pop in an out of a game or two real quick without having to devote too much time to it. More importantly, its an FPS game that doesn't require me to actually be a good shot to pick a character and play well.

Which is pretty fucking unprecedented considering who is doing the review here. It is not often that I buy into the hype surrounding a game, especially if its a genre or style that I generally don't play. But in Overwatch's case they pretty much nailed exactly what it was they were trying to do. Many of my gripes are things that are becoming the norm in the gaming industry despite my older video game sensibilities.

Most importantly to this whole review and much to the credit of Blizzard, they thoroughly deconstructed a previous game in production to produce a brand new game. They meticulously took their time to make sure everything was interestingly designed, through out, and built to play well with minimal issue. Yes there were a number of things about the game that I had to complain about, but despite most of them, there isn't a whole lot on a technical or a mechanic standpoint that this game did wrong. Perhaps a little balancing issues on some character but those will be worked in patches no doubt.

So I am left confused. By my usual standards this should be a game I don't care for. But somehow its managed to defy the odds and ended up being a game than I actually kinda liked. If I can get it at more fair price then I think I would absolutely do that. Overwatch has the possibility to really become the new standard for the team based FPS genre and if they continue to develop their baby it could really be something. Overwatch has earned my recommendation.

You "Mei is Bae" folk are idiots. Mercy will always be my love.

Uncharted 4 - A Thief's End (PS4): A Somber Swan Song

Ahhh. The ole Dude Raider. A series I didn't think I would be a fan of ended up being one of my favorite reasons to own my PS3. Hard to believe that its been about 5 years since the last game came out. If you read back to that very very old blog post of mine, I enjoyed Uncharted 3 quite a bit but ultimately felt like it was very much of the same game that came before.

So there has been a significant amount of time that has passed since the last game, and I'm sure there was no way in hell Sony was going let Naughty Dog go without giving them one last installment of this series on their shiny new console (that's already about to be outdated, but that's another issue). So here we are, one last go around with Nathan Drake to get one last treasure.

UNCHARTED 4: A THIEF'S END:(PS4)

The story bounces around for the first few chapters so I'll try to summarize. The game begins in medias res with Nathan on a high speed boat chase with somebody named Sam. They are at high speed and being shot at, and the water conditions are less than ideal. As is with all things related to Nathan Drake, the situation gets out of hand quickly as the boat crashes and they are flung into the sea just off the shore of the island.

We then flash back roughly 18 years, Nathan Drake is slugging it out in a Panamanian prison, be we find out that its a work. He, his contact Rafe, and the man from before on the boat, Sam. We find out that Sam is Nathan's brother, and they have weaseled into this prison because they are on the trail of lost treasure of the notorious pirate Henry Avery. Things however don't go as planned as they try to make their escape from the prison. During the escape a gunfight ensues and Sam is shot. Nathan, unable to save his brother, is dragged to escape but gives up the will to find this treasure.

The story flashes 15 years forward (3 years after the events of the 3rd game). Drake has finally got out of the treasure hunting life and is working a regular salvage job. He also is now happily married to long time Uncharted protagonist Elena Fischer. They are happy with the marriage, but its apparent to both of them that Nathan still longs for adventure. Elena pushes him to do a little more risky job to try to satiate his need, but he affirms that he is committed to this life with her.

However, a curve ball is thrown at him at work as he is visited by his assumed dead brother Sam Drake. Sam informs him that he was patched up and stuck in that prison for the past 15 years since the escape. He often spoke of Avery's treasure to his cellmate and notorious drug lord Hector Alcazar. Hector helps Sam break out, but upon escape tells Sam that if he doesn't find that treasure and give up half, Hector will come back to kill him. Nathan is reluctant and tries to stay out of that life, but wracked with guilt about leaving his brother stranded, he calls and lies to Elena about a job so he help his brother find the treasure they were on the hunt for so long ago to save his life.

There is something really important about the story that I would like to address here. The first thing I want to make note of here is this is probably the first time in the history of Uncharted that I can think of where Nathan Drake as a character actually seems to show a sens of growth and development. In the previous iterations of the game, Nathan basically would go through adventure to adventure gunning down any brown people that get in his way, despite what is friends and colleagues think he should be doing. He often wouldn't listen to reason and would end up in a bad situation because of it.

This time around, I got a real sense that while Nathan still longed to adventure, he finally has a sense of the bigger picture. He's been through so many life and death struggles and walked away with almost no reward for it. Some treasure from Uncharted: Drake's Fortune but ultimately not much else. He has a steady job and happy marriage. Even when his brother comes back he clearly still doesn't want to get involved. But he does only because he feels he owes Sam for leaving him, and wants to help save his life. It is very clear this time around, that Nathan is not motivated by finding the treasure. He wants to save his brother.

For the first time, it seems like Nate has finally taken stock in how good he

actually has it. I mean come on, Elena is the best.

The other thing about the story that I really noticed the entire time is that practically every scene in this game some how gives this sense of sadness and finality to it. Naughty Dog, the title of the game, and every news outlet really let every know that this was the be the last Uncharted game. Everything about this adventure really gives me that sense too. I don't know if its how scenes play out or just some exceptional voice acting. But a whole lot of the game makes it feel like this is intended to be the last go. There is just a real weight to the story.

So, the Uncharted series is a game that has never really broken the mold as far as game play goes. It is still operating on the cookie cutter 3rd person shooter control scheme with cover mechanics and a fading color screen to determine damage that has been so prevalent for the past decade or so. If you have ever played one of the other Uncharted games, Gears of war, the new Tomb Raiders, Resident Evil 6, etc, then this game is going to feel real familiar aside from figuring out which button reloads for you.

The melee combat never seems to stick to the same system in these games though and it kinda changed again here too. You can still wail on the square button to punch the crap out of enemies and if you do a physical attack while blind firing you can do a take down move. But the brutal combos are still gone, you can still stealth kill from behind, and much of the quick time events for the most part are gone. For major portions of the game it seems like melee sequences are meant to be cinematic rather than actually skill based.  They essentially simplified the game play to assist those with physical disability to finish the game.

A gamergater got thrown out of a focus group for swearing at this scene. Girls can be
tough and that's OK. It's actually pretty rad. Grow the fuck up already.

Uncharted games typically are broken up into 3 parts: Beautifully motion captured cut scene, Nathan Drake climbs on stuff that falls apart on him while he does, Over the top action sequence with gunfights and explosions. This is about as formulaic as Uncharted gets and the pattern is alive and well here. It's usually this "Drake climbs stuff" segment where the puzzle sections of the game take place. The majority of the puzzle is just "find which ledge to grab to move forward" but the game does feature a handful of nifty little puzzles to solve. Most of them aren't too difficult to solve, and after if you struggle the game will eventually throw you a hint.

Speaking of hints, I'm not sure if I am thankful or insulted by Uncharted 4's direction assistance. The game features some incredibly beautiful landscapes and locations for you travel in. It easy to sit back and marvel at just how beautiful the game looks. The problem is, sometimes that doesn't exactly provide you a clear path of where you are supposed to be heading. After a while, Nate will talk to himself or the NPC you are with will kinda point out the path to you.

But if you take too much longer still, it will highlight an arrow and let you press up on the D-pad to lock you in on the direction you should be going. This isn't something you can spam like in Dead Space so basically you have to wait until the game gets impatient with you. I'll be scaling around a wall looking for the proper ledge to climb on, not seeing which way I need to go, and then I'll get that highlighted hint button in the left corner of my screen. Hitting it will show me that there was another series of ledges going to opposite direction, with a fast camera swing as if the game was saying: "Hey stupid, the path is actually this way if you are done doing the wall mambo over there."

Fuck you Uncharted 4. you can't make a game about exploring for treasure and then get impatient with me that I'm not exploring the story driven correct direction. If you wanted me to follow the appropriate path then make it so I have to go that way, or let me figure it out of my own accord until I am ready to ask for help. Don't be a patronizing asshole about it, ya jerks.

That being said, The game somewhat has a sense for when you might be getting bored with exploring environments. Typically in situations when you are out exploring landscape like jungles, forests or cities you will find small patches of soldiers to skirmish with. You can stealth your way through and try to take them out that way, or you can go in guns blazing and try to shoot everyone down.

The stealth mechanics here are pretty good and more often than not it's the preferable solution to the gun fights. There is usually plenty of tall grass to sneak around in or walls to duck behind. You usually have a pretty forgiving amount of time if you start to get noticed to duck back into cover before they start shooting at you. And while it doesn't have The Last of Us's super sonar hearing mechanic, if you happen to see people in stealth, you can mark them with L3 to at least keep of sense of where they are at and where they are moving to. Usually if you can choke out 3 or 4 guards before you start a gunfight, that's a pretty good run.

Naughty Dog should really be given a lot of credit for the stories that they weave. While its not the face to face copy of say Beyond: Two Souls, the motion capture work that they do for their games is nothing short of impeccable. Nolan North and Troy Baker are really on top of the voice acting world it seems as they find their way into everything, so it only made sense to cast Baker as Nathan Drake's brother Sam. They have a similar sounding voice and are both supremely talented. They managed to quickly get me to believe that Nate's brother was a character who technically has been around this whole time even though I'm just seeing him now for the first time.

I have to give special mention to Emily Rose here. She always does an exceptional job as the Elena character, but in this game she too is obviously wrestling with some conflicted emotions. She's been on the white knuckle adventure before, but she is also comfortable with being in a happy home. And despite clearly trying to work with him to give him some sense of thrill back in his life, he lies to her again before going off to another adventure. It's happened in between each of the games in the franchise, but this is the first time we see it and it's heartbreaking since Elena is probably the most human and relateable character in this whole series.

That being said, its because we see it this time that we end up getting the best rendition of Nathan Drake that we get because for once like I said above, we actually see some growth out of the character. We get some sense that he isn't out for the treasure just to get the treasure, and through the majority of the adventure, he very much is wrestling with what he is gambling to save by trying to find Avery's treasure. It's probably one of the few times I actually felt sympathetic for him. He essentially was stuck in a very shitty situation and was forced to choose between the two people he calls family.

Little scenes like this always impress me with mo-cap in games. Poor Elena.

Honestly, I had completely forgotten that this game featured a multiplayer mode. I haven't actually fired it up myself but I'm sure it features some sort of 5 on 5 game where you can play deathmatch, CTF, or some kind of king of the hill game. It was only just recently reminded because Kotaku posted a gif of Nathan Drake doing the musician Drake's doofy hotline bling dance. I am sure if you like multiplayer games this is probably alright but I've cited why I don't play these a billion times already. No need to really dwell on that point.

There really isn't a lot that I didn't like about this game that I haven't already made much mention to. Like I said I find the hint button to be condescending in its current iteration. if you are going to provide the hint button, then that's fine. But make it so I have the option to press it at any time I want to. Or if you are going to wait for me to appear stuck, at least give me a little longer to figure out what it is I need to do. Sometimes I would just be exploring the cool environment and it would pop up to remind me it thinks I'm stupid.

Honestly, I know its part of the Uncharted core gameplay at this point but there were a handful of times while I was playing the game and I felt like I was getting bored scaling stuff. I know, I know. It's a game about exploration. But I can't think of how many times I would approach a new location and would see like a massive clock tower or something and think "Ugh, I'm going to have to get to the top of that, and I bet its going to fall apart as I do and collapse when I reach the top." Only to have that exact thing pretty much happen as I said it would.  It's annoying, but its even more annoying when the characters actually poke fun at it, like the game is totally aware how often it happens.

Totally sure he'll get to the top without anything breaking (-_-)

The story in this game is really good, but there were points in the game where it felt a little predictable. They set up some story line elements fairly early on and they are some pretty common tropes. I've mentioned how Nate is gripping that he feels he needs to do this adventure for his brother, but not because he wants to. So he lies to Elena about it. This is spoiler but I'm sure most of you have already figured out that Elena figures it out too. It doesn't make the scene when it happens any less powerful for sure, but it did leave me with the dumb question of "how the hell did she know where to find him?"

Here is ANOTHER BIG SPOILER, but it bears mentioning because it was something I personally appreciated. So if you don't want to have it ruined for you I give you this opportunity to SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH AND THE NEXT ONE..... Everyone gone? Good. Of the main series of Uncharted games, this is the first one that didn't have a supernatural element play into the story. No Infected people from El Dorado, no magical steroid of Shambala, no mind controlling cistern of the Djinn. It's just people out there fighting for pirate treasure.

I discussed this with a friend was unhappy to see there was no supernatural this time, because its always been a regular part of the series. I personally contest that it was better without it. That was always my biggest complaint from Uncharted: Drake's Fortune: the story and the characters had already gotten me totally wrapped in tale it was weaving. Throwing in the monsters felt like a cheap throwaway to just get them in there. The game was doing perfectly fine without them and seeing them cheapened the whole experience for me. In this new one, the only monster in this game is the greed of the characters.

Here is the thing about Uncharted 4: A Thief's End. If you played any liked any of the other Uncharted games then you know you are probably going to like this one as well. They have been talking and in the story telling that this is going to be the last Uncharted game, but without spoiling things too much, you get one last little epilogue chapter after you beat the game that shows you that at lease this bit of story is really over, it was beautiful and perfect. When it ended, I felt satisfied. I didn't need one more adventure with Nathan Drake. It felt complete.

Lots of other outlets are giving Uncharted 4 perfect scores. I very rarely do that and it holds true here. Things that annoyed me in the previous Uncharted games still annoy me here, but none of them ever did enough to make me think they were bad games. The game is not perfect, but it was complete. It's very rare does a series come to end where I feel the ending gives me a satisfying conclusion. The moment I finished this game, I took to facebook with a simple post that pretty much explained my feelings on it: "The ending of Uncharted 4 was the ending this game deserved". While the game itself doesn't get a perfect score, it's ending does.

I was able to happily close the book on the Uncharted series with this. If they make a new one with a new cast, I'll be along for the ride, but as far as Nathan Drake's escapades are concerned? A very wild wild ride has come to a satisfying conclusion.

Kinda surprised at no appearance of Chole in this one.