Review

As you may know if you’ve been listening to the podcast or following me on Twitter, 2021 has been the year that I have gotten back into PC gaming in a big way. I picked up a Razer Blade Stealth in the summer and have been having a blast picking up old games, trying out new stuff like Inscryption and just generally being back in the PC ecosystem again. So as you might imagine I was really excited when Lenovo reached out to send us a Legion 5  laptop for review. I’ve been using the Legion 5  for about a month now, so I thought it was high time I shared my thoughts with you.

One quick note – I’m primarily a console gamer and that’s how I apach games so almost everything here I played using a controller and I used both the built in screen and plugged the Legion 5  into a monitor and a TV. I’m not going to go deep into specs here, because I’m not really plugged in enough to talk about them and the differences between them, if you want that there’s a ton of reviews out there that cover those details.

First off let’s talk games. For this review I tried out Control, Destiny 2, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Batman Arkham Origins on the Legion 5  (and quite a few other games afterwards too). The first three because I was able to compare with console versions of those games I have played on a PS5 and Batman Arkham Origins because I listened to the Arkham Retrospective episode of the Back Page Podcast and just really wanted to see what it looked like at max settings. The Legion 5  easily matched and even exceeded the PS5 in some cases, though I did have a few crashes in Control that I didn’t experience in the PS5 version. 

Pretty much any PS4/XBO generation game ran flawlessly, current gen games were usually very good but sometimes it would struggle and hitch in more challenging environments. I had the aforementioned crashes in Control and a few very short hitches in Valhalla and Destiny 2. I would describe the experience as almost as reliable as a current gen console. Also there were some occasions where games failed to launch or I had to do weird tech support to fix issues, though I wouldn’t mark the Legion 5  down for this as that’s just an unavoidable element of PC gaming. I remember when Gaming Fyx host Andre Cole could only run Forza Horizon 4 if he set his CPU priority to high, something I have no idea how to do.

Hardware wise I would say the Legion 5  is strong, but overall a mixed bag. I didn’t really love the design of it and coming from Apple and Razer laptops it felt a little plasticky for my taste. It’s really sturdily built and I wouldn’t expect to see any issues with durability from the hinge or any other parts. The keyboard is really excellent, an import from the ThinkPad line I expect as it feels very similar. I have typed bably hundreds of thousands of words in articles, reviews and freelance assignments on it and it is a truly excellent experience. bably the best laptop keyboard I have used in 2021.

The biggest downside to the Legion 5 is the size and weight of the laptop. It’s big, thick and heavy. If you want a desktop PC replacement that will occasionally come with you outside of the home then the Legion 5 is an excellent choice. One other thing that bothered me was fan noise, in most cases with the Legion 5 I had to use headphones when playing games to be able to hear music and dialogue, something I don’t always want to do.

Earlier I compared the design and build quality with Razer and Apple laptops and said it comes away unfavourably, but there’s a big difference here between the Legion 5  and the Razer Blade Stealth I use as my daily driver – cost. If you went out to buy a Razer laptop with similar spec to this Legion 5 you’d be paying almost £3,000. The Legion 5 is under £1,000. I think that tells you everything you need to know about whether you should buy a Legion 5 or a Razer laptop!

All in all as I said earlier the Legion 5 is an excellent laptop. While it doesn’t really fit my life as well as a small and portable laptop, I would imagine for most PC gamers who are already set up with a gaming desk and using a high quality headset you’d be hard pressed to find a better option for the money. But what about console gamers? Well that’s where this gets a bit murky. Should you buy the Legion 5 over a PS5? Unfortunately because of capitalism if you want to play Spider-Man: Miles Morales you need a PS5. But if you do a bit of travelling, or you are looking for more than just gaming or you want to play games older than the last generation then PC gaming with the Legion 5 might be a better option for you!

Summary

When I got my review unit for the Legion Phone Duel 2 in the post I was really excited. I’m a big gadget fan, and this phone is almost the definition of a gadget, it’s such an enthusiast device. Even better, it’s targeted towards gamers.

The Duel 2 is basically everything a gamer and phone enthusiast could want, it has a giant uninterrupted screen, basically the best specs you can get in a phone and even RGB lighting. I was really surprised by the Duel 2’s lack of compromises, especially for a price that’s a lot lower than you’d pay for flagship phones from Samsung and Apple.

Speaking of Apple, I’m coming to this device as an iPhone user. While I have used Android phones in the past, I tend to gravitate towards iOS due to a few factors. I’ve often found iPhones to be more stable and have a better variety of apps than Android, although in many cases I didn’t have these issues with the Duel 2 but let’s get into the review proper.

Design & Build

I want to get something out of the way up front – this phone is big, heavy and thick. If you’re struggling to get an iPhone into your skinny jeans then you’ll want to take a look at this phone in person before buying it. If you’re the kind of enthusiast who is in the market for a device like this then I think it’ll ultimately end up being worth it – though your mileage may vary.

The Duel 2 has a gigantic 6.92” AMOLED screen that extends edge to edge with no interruptions due to the hidden pop-up selfie camera. This is an incredible screen, and the standout feature of the phone for me. Many of the special features of the phone you would only take advantage of while gaming, but the screen is stunning for every single task I put it through from watching TV and movies to YouTube videos and even just scrolling social media. You can select multiple refresh rates up to 144hz which, for those that can see the difference in frame rates and such, will make the device seem blazing fast and buttery smooth. I’m unfortunately one of the lesser humans who struggle to see the difference in frame rates in games and on screens and didn’t see much difference between the 144hz Duel 2 and my 60hz iPhone 12, but it was a noticeably smoother experience using the Duel 2 to the last Android device I used which had a 60hz screen.

The build quality of the Duel 2 is great, as expected from Lenovo having used a few of their other devices. It feels very sturdy in the hand (probably due to the weight) and while the review unit I was sent did have some micro-scratches on the screen you couldn’t see them at all unless you were looking. The back of the device is very slippery and a fingerprint magnet, so I would recommend using a case for it. Luckily the Duel 2 comes with a case in the box, although I can’t speak to that as our review unit didn’t have one.

You’ll probably have noticed that the Duel 2 has a huge hump on the back where the cameras, RGB Legion logo and the fan sits. This is a really smart design move from Lenovo, essentially they have put all the parts of the phone that will get warm while gaming into this section, which has the fan and really great airflow. This enables you to keep gaming way longer than you might with a normal device, as the parts of the phone you hold to play don’t get hot at all. This hump is a bit unsightly, and stops the Duel 2 from being able to sit flat on a table which I know annoys some people. I felt the sacrifice of the odd shape was worth it for the cooling and gaming experience.

Gaming Experience

The Duel 2 is hands down the best way I have ever played games on a phone without a controller. I used the Duel 2 to play Call of Duty Mobile, Genshin Impact, Epic 7 and a ton of games on Xbox Cloud Streaming and Stadia. The Duel 2 never once struggled, skipped frames or froze. Honestly this is what I was expecting from a phone with the best processor on the market, the Snapdragon 888, and a lot of RAM, fast storage and active cooling. I only had the fan spin up a few times on longer sessions, but it definitely helped keep me gaming longer than I would have been able to with my iPhone. 

Normally with mobile games I will connect either my Xbox Series S controller or Razer Kishi, but with the Duel 2 I often didn’t need to as it has four built-in haptic touch buttons on one side of the device and two touch sensitive surfaces on the back (long live the PS Vita). The fact that you got feedback when you pressed each button made gaming with them much more comfortable than when using on-screen buttons. These haptic buttons made gaming with them even on games designed for controllers like Genshin Impact and Yakuza 0 (via Xcloud) really playable in a way they wouldn’t be on a touch screen.

The Duel 2 has a special interface you can access when gaming which allows you to overclock the phone, mute messages, control the fans and much more. It’s a really smart software interface that gives you very quick access to system controls, but it replaces the standard Android pull-down menu making it harder to check notifications or change quick settings that aren’t gaming related. In one slight negative for this it did enable itself a few times on apps that weren’t games, but it wasn’t a huge issue.

Cameras

I was really impressed with the Duel 2 overall in almost all areas but this one – the cameras. As a parent my phone is my primary camera to take photos of my family and unfortunately the Duel 2 was not high enough quality that I would be comfortable switching to it permanently as my primary device. The photos are absolutely serviceable if you want to share something you saw with a friend, or if you want to post a selfie to social media. But they’re just not at the level of quality I get from my iPhone 12, which is the same RRP as the Duel 2. It’s not exactly fair to compare the cameras of these two as one is invested in cameras and the other has gaming features you just cannot get from an iPhone, but they’re the two devices I have to compare right now.

Here are some samples from the rear facing cameras:

The pop-up selfie camera is a lot of fun. When I first showed it to anyone they always thought it was really cool and the quality of the camera is actually not that bad. It’s on the side of the phone and the lock button sits on top of it. I had a few annoying times when it would pop out after accidentally tapping the camera button in apps like Instagram or Tiktok but for the most part it was more fun than annoying. I also really liked just having a whole uninterrupted screen for watching content on.

Here is a sample from the front facing camera: 

Issues with Android as an iPhone user

If you’re a happy Android user you can probably skip this short section, but I just wanted to talk about this quickly for iPhone users who might be considering the jump due to the gaming capabilities on offer here. I had a few small issues during my time with the Duel 2 that annoyed me that I thought I’d relay here.

Firstly I was unable to change the wallpaper. There was some bug which caused it to error out every time I tried, which was very annoying. If this had been my phone and not a borrowed review unit I would have probably tried to resolve this a bit more, but a quick Google search didn’t help. The biggest thing I found with Android that I haven’t experienced with iOS is that you should be prepared to have to triage your device issues every now and then. Apple devices are so locked down that they very rarely present issues, but the more open nature of Android means that apps can interact poorly with one another or you can make mistakes that will take time to resolve.

Gesture navigation (swipe up to go home etc) was added to Android a while ago, and I really like the added gesture of swiping in from the left or right edge of the screen to go back. I wish that iOS had this as it would make a bigger screen device much easier to operate one handed. I almost never noticed any issues with this navigation format, but the one problem I had was the pre-installed keyboard. It hugged the bottom of the phone screen and as a result when swiping up to leave an app with the keyboard open it would often type a bunch of letters onto the screen. iOS and some Android devices get around this by putting a gap between the bottom of the screen and the bottom of the keyboard, but this wasn’t possible to enable in the Gboard on the Duel 2. I was however able to install an alternative keyboard that I could move up a few millimetres and escape this annoyance. 

Conclusion

All in all I think that if you’re deep into mobile action games like Genshin Impact or Call of Duty Mobile and you’re willing to sacrifice a little in the camera and size/weight departments the Duel 2 is probably for you. It’s an exceptionally well-priced device in my opinion at only £699 direct from Lenovo and the gigantic screen really blows a lot of my other minor criticisms out of the water.

While personally I will be sticking with my iPhone 12 as my daily driver I am sad I have to return our review unit to Lenovo as I had so much fun testing this device. I think possibly a middle ground between the gaming monster phone that is the Duel 2 and a smaller more general audience focused device would probably end up being a fantastic device for me.

Embrace Yourself With All Your Flaws

It’s beyond impressive when a creative endeavour can take clear influence and inspiration from many sources, and leverage them with care and respect to forge their own wholly unique, distinct voice. Developers Sigono proudly pin many different inspirations—including such greats as FTL, Mass Effect, Star Trek, and far more—on their proverbial sleeves with OPUS: Echo of Starsong; and they do so all while weaving a tale, universe, and game which is entirely their own. While each individual component which makes up OPUS: Echo of Starsong is good-to-great in its own respect, they all coalesce into an end product which is exponentially greater than the sum of its parts. A hopeful yet melancholic tale of a future not yet written, occupying a world—nay, a galaxy—which feels significantly larger than it initially lets on will serenade you with a grand, beautifully composed soundtrack as you breathe in its stunning art. All of this is in service of propelling the central core of OPUS: Echo of Starsong—its fantastic space opera story.

The game’s story is one with an absolutely phenomenal amount of thoughtfully crafted, creative lore which makes the scope of the universe feel enormous—far bigger than what’s present in the game itself. The entirety of the game takes place in space, with your characters piloting a ship to various space stations, asteroids, and other celestial bodies as you chart a course through the stars to solve a bevy of mysteries. Each of which has its own history, and is possibly occupied by members of one of several factions (each with their own history with other factions, mythos, beliefs, and customs). It is a universe full of adventurers, swindlers, refugees displaced by wars and religious persecution, honest people trying to make ends meet, and far more. So what is your role in all of this?

You and your crew are adventurers; however, you have an advantage over most. You have the ability to interact with the “starsong.” What is the starsong? How does it manifest? What are the implications? Well, while I could explain it here, it’s far better to experience it for yourself. One of the most impressive aspects of OPUS: Echo of Starsong’s storytelling is that it introduces many concepts similarly unique as the starsongs themselves, and explains each of them in an intuitive, plausible way which is internally consistent with the enormous world they’ve built. Beyond the scope of this world being thoroughly impressive, the most important part of its story is the smaller-scope, more intimate tale it weaves about our intrepid adventurers. 

At its core, OPUS: Echo of Starsong is a story about life—the value of a life, the impact another person can have on your own life, the far-reaching effects your life and decisions have on others, as well as what it means to truly and deeply care for someone. The story primarily follows two characters, Jun & Eda, both of whom come from disparate backgrounds, and whose paths cross coincidentally. Their arc together is multi-layered and complicated, balancing and celebrating their differences while they both deal with very real, very human problems. They deal with their own instances of loss and longing, they both struggle and hesitate to say what they mean, and sometimes they make decisions which they know will be right in the end, but hurt in the moment. They have their own goals, and sometimes these goals mean making sacrifices which affect one another. Sometimes they make sacrifices they previously never would have expected in order to help each other, even if it means setting back their own plans and goals. There’s a lot to talk about, but to truly do it justice would require diving into deep spoilers—perhaps we will have a spoilercast in the future to touch on these intricate details.

All of this has been said, and we haven’t even yet touched on the act of playing the game. Or the beautiful, colourful, vividly imaginative visuals. Or the wonderful marriage between gameplay and audio, which routinely weaves its soundtrack into the world itself. There’s a ton to unpack, but for the sake of not writing a 10 000 word review, I’ll summarize most of it. The gameplay itself is often varied—alternating between a fixed-camera, side-scrolling adventure/puzzle game; a space-faring, resource-managing and decision-making strategy game; and a visual novel with a blend between 3D models interacting in a 3D world, and painterly 2D art which often manifests as gorgeous CGs at major plot points. While none of these gameplay systems are show-stoppingly excellent on their own, they’re all fun for different reasons and do a wonderful job of ensuring there’s enough variety in your playthrough to keep forward momentum which consistently moves the plot forward. There’s also a ton of side content to do, all of which is entirely missable and failable! This aspect is a bold choice which I thoroughly appreciate.

For a game which includes the term “song” directly in the title, that may conjure some expectations for the soundtrack to have significance, and to be well-crafted. Thankfully it delivers on all fronts, and the game is made exponentially better by a beautiful soundtrack. In fact, I’ve had it playing in the background throughout writing this review (it is available on Steam and comes highly recommended). It is certainly excellent as a standalone listening experience, but is all-powerful when contextualized amongst intense, emotionally charged scenes. Or giving a gentle moment a pitch-perfect atmosphere which punctuates character moments with appropriate bravado. All-in-all, the music (and sound design) tie an already impressive experience together in a way which elevates it far beyond any potential I could have anticipated. 

OPUS: Echo of Starsong is a triumph in all regards. It frequently punches above its weight, ambitiously growing the scale of its storytelling with each passing hour, and rarely (if ever) missing the mark. While there are certainly things which could be critiqued—occasional framerate dips, awkward animations at times, a few obtuse puzzles—they all pale in comparison to everything the game excels at. The layered story, the thorough lore, the carefully and thoughtfully constructed universe, the refreshing gameplay loops, the excellent characters, the gorgeous visuals, and the music which will stick with you hours beyond closing the game. It is a fantastic experience through-and-through, culminating in an astounding ending worthy of the journey. Thank you to the whole team at Sigono, you’ve crafted a fantastic experience and one of the best games of the year.

This game is presented in a 4:3 format to preserve the integrity of Zack Snyder’s creative vision.

As a world, we will look back on 2020 as a pivotal moment in society. A global pandemic, protests for racial and social justice, political turmoil, and the list go on. Where that pivot takes us remains to be seen. One thing we can see, however, is how artists and creators are responding to these events in real near real-time through social media and the internet. Hidden Track, an interactive theater company in the U.K., found themselves unable to perform because of Covid-19 lockdown restrictions. Their response was to shift their focus to creating a game while maintaining their interactive flare. The result is How To Win, a game that probably has terrible SEO.

Booting up How To Win is like being transported back to 2002, with Newgrounds open on your desktop. It looks and plays exactly how you remember a flash game playing. Made over the course of a couple of months, it’s not a mechanically complex game, it’s mostly a visual novel with a few branching paths and a handful of minigames. You start episode one in an idle clicker/idle game situation, while later in the game you find yourself playing a whack-a-mole type game. Simple activities to break up the story are all they are. You’re here for the writing.

The way Hidden Track created the game is what makes How To Win unique. Being an established theater company before their foray into making games, they utilized their existing audience to help them develop content for the game. Fans would submit their suggestions; Hidden Track would then comb through the suggestions, put their favorites up for a vote, and create content based on the winning votes. The main example of this would be the win condition objective of each episode. By audience vote, the first episode’s win condition is to “make the most money.” After each episode, the audience was again solicited for ideas and suggestions, which were then voted on after the developers chose their favorite options.

The game started production shortly after the time that national lockdowns started happening, specifically the lockdown of the U.K., where Hidden Track is based. In this remastered version of the original release, they explicitly point to the events that were happening at the time that shaped their storytelling. The group is not shy about their push for social justice, which has been present in their stage shows and made its way into How To Win. Subtlety is certainly not their goal, though. The game very openly addresses issues like income inequality, education, and racial justice. Often in ways that feel jarring.

That’s not to say the issues shouldn’t be handled. Many of the topics are introduced in a way that borders on parody and leans into the frustrations that many people can feel when these topics are broached. Not everyone has the mental capacity to constantly think about and unpack social issues in their free time. Some folks want to disengage their critical part of their brain and just have fun without being reminded of the world’s problems. It intends to address that we are constantly bombarded with entertainment and fun to make us ignore social and political issues. The approach they take to tackling this fact is heavy-handed on both sides of the message, which ends up diluting the point.

How To Win is a surprisingly nostalgic experience for those that spent time playing flash games in the early 2000s. It’s rife with a brand of British humor that may or may not land for people outside of the U.K., and even then, it’s hard to praise the writing. Fans of improv comedy will probably enjoy it quite a bit for its humor. This game-making approach is novel and has potential going forward as Hidden Track works on their sequel. As a piece of 2020 history, there are worse media experiences to have.

Summary

I often struggle with starting to write a review. Do you explain the concept of the game, what it’s about, how it feels to play? For this one I’ve opted to get a few sentences under my feet before I really start. You might wonder why a JRPG that (unless we’re buds) you may have never even heard of is so important to me, well let me explain:

The Trails series is a long-running JRPG franchise developed by Nihon Falcom, a company you have also probably never heard of. The thing that makes the Trails series special in a way no other JRPG series I’ve played is it’s story – a complicated and interwoven narrative across nine games. Trails of Cold Steel IV is the 9th game in this series, billed as “End of Saga” in Japan, and is the final game in the first half of this planned story. This game is a continuation of 8 others, with very few references, hints or tips to help you catch up on what you’ve missed. There are excellent YouTube recaps and the game itself comes with a bunch of background info you can read – but you probably shouldn’t.

I started playing the first Trails of Cold Steel in late 2019. Around 350 hours later in early 2021 I completed Cold Steel IV. In that time period I’ve become a father and there’s been a global pandemic. All through 2020 in the background I was plugging away at this series, playing a few hours a week when parenting would allow.

This review is focused on Cold Steel IV and I’ll keep it spoiler free for the whole of the Cold Steel arc.

In the Cold Steel series you play as Rean Schwarzer, a new student at a world famous military academy. You’re inducted into a new experimental class made up of misfits from all walks of life, from major nobility to new money, the son of a general and a few with mysterious backgrounds that take a while to be revealed. The first game is essentially an act of incredible world and tension building, introducing you to the country of Erebonia where the game is set and carefully placing dominoes ready to knock over in future games.

I can’t say much about where we find Rean in Cold Steel IV without heavily spoiling the endings of the first three games, so I’m not going to. But suffice to say that Rean and his pals are up against it, with insurmountable odds opposing them and and many of their friends missing or dead. 

Cold Steel III ends with a bang, but like every Trails game I’ve played Cold Steel IV opens with a whimper. I have found the opening of II-IV to be a little too slow, and too preoccupied with smaller stories when you really just want to know what’s happening in the main story. However, if you didn’t marathon the entire series back to back this chapter of the game would be perfect to set you up and get you back into the groove. 

The Trails of Cold Steel games have a fairly simple structure, not unlike a Persona game. The chapter will open with some story, then you’ll get a free day off to hang out with people and do bonding activities or side quests. Then you’ll ship out somewhere to investigate something, end up in a dungeon and fight a boss. The secret weapon Trails has though is it’s worldbuilding and the history you have with the characters on your team, in the world and that you fight against.

Yes you might be going through a linear dungeon with a few puzzles, but when you get to the end you might fight a boss who was a former ally. Or an almost mythical character you’ve fought multiple times but never been able to defeat or maybe even a family member of one of the characters. The emotional weight on what in many JRPGs might be a dragon that’s slightly bigger than the ones you’ve fought in the dungeon, or a haunted treasure chest is unmatched in the genre from my personal experience.

Let’s talk about the world for a sec. So the Cold Steel series are set in a country called Erebonia, which has been portrayed almost as the villain for the previous games. To begin with your party are essentially child soldiers, training at a military school and going out in the world for field experience before they graduate. But everywhere they go they make connections, they meet people and you explore a world that feels real. You go to a city that’s recently been conquered and subjugated by the empire and you can really feel the tension from it.

This incredibly well realised and deep world is bigger than ever before in Cold Steel IV. With more places to visit, new people and stories in places you’ve previously visited and more links to the previous two arcs in the series than ever before. I’d wager I only saw half of what was on offer in this game and I played for over 80 hours.

I could talk for hours about the worlds in these games, and I have done so on the podcast a few times, but what about how they play?

The game plays a lot like a Persona or Final Fantasy title – there’s towns and cities to explore, meet people and get quests and there are zones with roaming monsters in the overworld you can either fight or avoid. Another trademark of Falcom games is that you’ll only get all the quests and activities by speaking to everyone. And this isn’t the drag it might sound like, as every NPC has something interesting to say whether it be adding context to a previous big story moment, pointing you towards something interesting or just a small and more personal story to tell.

Once you’re out of the town and on the road you can enter combat with monsters, enemy humans and other such things. The battle system has evolved and balanced over time throughout the series, but is essentially a turn-based system however instead of the fights being a line of your characters VS a line of enemies there’s a 3D battlefield and your characters can move around it. Characters have crafts which are sort of like special physical attacks, arts which are magic spells and also move around to get in range or out of range. There’s also Battle Orders, which cost battle points but can be used on any turn and don’t take up a turn.

This combat system might be starting to sound complex, I know. But it’s been built and iterated on for 9 games, perfecting it like sharpening a samurai sword. I think it’s the best traditional JRPG battle system I’ve ever played. There are so many options and ways to play and they all come together to create something really fun to play as well.

So I’ve talked around the story and discussed the gameplay a little, but I think you’re probably all wondering by this point – was it worth it? Was the ending a pay off for the 350 hours of JRPG I played leading up to it? Did the end justify spending over a year of my life playing it?

Heck yeah it did.

There were moments I stood up and cheered. There were times I stayed up into the wee hours, fighting sleep to finish a section of story I just couldn’t put down. There were character moments that got me truly emotional, beyond almost anything else in gaming. There have been moments like this across the series, but Cold Steel IV is the culmination in the best way possible.

I can’t wait to see where the Trails series goes next and Nihon Falcom has me hooked for life now. I couldn’t give a stronger recommendation than the one I give for this series. It might not be the best story in gaming, but it’s very very good and I think the worldbuilding in these titles is absolutely the best in gaming, even for games based on existing properties.

So if you’re still reading this, go out and get Trails of Cold Steel and jump on at the beginning of this arc or get Trails in the Sky and jump in at the start. I honestly think you won’t regret it.

It's On the Rare Side

Horror is a genre that is exceptionally hard to do well in games. Balancing suspense and danger to create an enjoyable gameplay experience is not easy. It’s also something that, until relatively recently, games have had trouble balancing. Bloober Team’s newest horror game, The Medium, performs this balancing before collapsing for no good reason in the final moments.

Set in Bloober Team’s native Poland in the 1990s, The Medium is a story about Marianne and her attempt to discover the mystery behind her mysterious power to exist in both the world of the living and sort of spirit realm where lost souls linger before being sent on. Marianne has lived with this power for as long as she can remember. One day, when returning home to finish preparations for her adopted father’s funeral, she receives a phone call, calling her to Niwa, a defunct worker’s resort. It’s a set-up reminiscent of Silent Hill, which is welcome as it’s been so long since we’ve had one of those games, which is appropriate since Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka handled the music for the game.

Further drifting into Silent Hill territory, The Medium employs the use of multiple worlds within the game. Unlike the world of Silent Hill, which often drifts and changes between its real-world and hellish counterparts, The Medium creates two distinct worlds that you can play in Tandem. The worlds share general geometry but use unique art. It’s an impressive implementation, requiring the game to render two different versions of the world at once. At times you can separate your spirit self from your corporeal form and investigate the spirit world separately for a brief time, which is when this dualworld begins to impress rather than feel like a simple gimmick.

Put simply; The Medium is a walking simulator with light puzzle elements eighty percent of the time. You spend most of your time exploring spooky areas, finding objects with echoes of the past ingrained in them, which fleshes out the story of Niwa and the people there before the infamous Niwa massacre that left it abandoned in disrepair. In fact, it would probably be better if it stuck to being a walking simulator. The controls are not well suited for the forced stealth sections. While you may not die in most situations, things are just fiddly enough that the risk is there. Luckily the game has a decent checkpoint system, so you aren’t left in the cold. The stealth sections mostly just feel superfluous and arbitrary at times, especially later in the game. It’s one of the biggest problems for horror games—the need to create tension while balancing it with enjoyable gameplay that isn’t too punishing. The moment you need to replay a section because of a death, it begins to lose its appeal. Unskippable (albeit short) cutscenes in certain moments make random deaths even more frustrating. The stealth and tension end up getting in the way of the rest of the experience.

There are several interweaving narratives which you’ll uncover during your time exploring Niwa, and they all end up drawing an uncomfortable conclusion. The Medium is a game with relatively little danger, so when you encounter one of the few monstrous creatures throughout the game, they take the time to flesh them out and attempt to explain them. Unfortunately, the game leaves us with this idea; trauma turns us into Monsters. We may not like it, or we may embrace it. Either way, Monsters we become, personally unaccountable for our actions and unable to recover of our own volition.

Marianne uses her powers to help lost souls move on to the afterlife, using that same power to dispel the Monsters holding dominion over Niwa and the surrounding area. Not only does trauma give birth to Monsters, but those same Monsters also outlive us.

It is unquestionably a story about the impact of World War II and the Nazi and Soviet occupation of Poland in the 20^th century. Much of the story and lore of Niwa and Marianne are deeply entrenched in this history. Still, without being better versed in Poland’s socio-economic history, it’s not one that I can adequately unpack. Marianne, for her part, represents a new generation of Poles raised by people traumatized by World War II and the political turmoil of the 1970s but not experiencing it themselves. She is left to navigate the lives and trauma of those that came before her. All this with the hope of understanding who she is.

But the game doesn’t posit that this new generation “has it easy” or anything of the sort. They, too, can be traumatized and create Monsters. This becomes distressing because the game says that the ONLY way to move past the trauma is death. There’s no magic wand to wave; of course, nothing is that easy. But according to The Medium, attempting to move on or recover from your trauma is impossible. Forgiveness can dramatically affect recovering from traumatic incidents, but the game refuses even to entertain the idea. One character has managed to harness their trauma and live with it but ultimately cannot keep it from harming others.

The Medium is a technical showpiece that shows some of the possibilities of gaming with new consoles with faster storage solutions available. Unfortunately, the PC’s performance is riddled with glitches, and it sounds like even the Xbox Series X plays the game at sub 1080p resolution and sub 720p on Xbox Series S. Despite these issues, the environments are beautiful in a haunting way. The performances by the voice actors and the music are all exceptional.

The game is let down by its insistence on inserting stealth sequences and a pace that is just too slow to be that enjoyable during less tense gameplay. Paired with a story with a less than stellar outlook on personal trauma and how it impacts us, The Medium is hard to recommend.

A Donut's Hole in a Donut's Hole

IO Interactive is back with the latest in their globe-trotting Hitman franchise, finishing the trilogy started with their 2016 Hitman: World of Assassination. A lot has changed for IO in the past five years, but despite tumultuous times for the company – not to mention the rest of the world – Hitman has become a remarkably consistent game that has evolved with each new iteration.  

This latest game in the series wraps up the story of Agent 47, Diana Burnwood, and Providence (a secret cabal of people ruling the world). But you could be forgiven for not realizing that the story was taking place. It’s always been delivered in short vignettes between missions and served as more of a loose justification for why Agent 47 is jetting around the world to take out wealthy shitheads. This time around, traditional cutscenes are back, leaving behind the second game’s motion comic style. More than the previous games, they are trying to make players care about Agent 47 and Burnwood. But because the sequences are so short and usually lack connection to the locations you’re visiting, it’s hard to care about them.  

While the story is mostly the same thing we’ve been experiencing for the past few games, Hitman 3 does make some bold choices regarding level design and new gameplay options. Dubai is a relatively straight forward Hitman level in terms of your objectives, but it plays with verticality and complex interconnecting spaces more than other levels in the series. Persistent short cuts play a large part in that as well. These shortcuts are a new mechanic; whereby unlocking particular doors or ladders, you can create a shortcut that will be forever opened on subsequent playthroughs, gaining you faster access to hard-to-reach areas. Taking time to explore and learn a space is now even more rewarding, and your pathways through levels become more direct and intricate. 

The first level does, however, do away with a bit of the magic and hilarity the first two games explored. Agent 47 is a chameleon, fit to blend into any circumstance, as long as no one notices. The Paris level of Hitman (2016) encapsulates this perfectly with Helmut Kruger. Agent 47 is the man’s spitting image, and you can use that to your advantage. The second game had Agent 47 able to assume a celebrity tattoo artist’s identity, despite lacking the tattoos to inhabit the role fully. Agent 47’s ability to blend in among his clueless targets makes for great gags. But there’s nothing like that in the third game. You can find your way into multiple stories where you assume the identity of people who look nothing like Agent 47, but people pay no mind to the sudden change in appearance of the men they were speaking to, not 30 seconds ago. The men in question aren’t even bald! It’s not an issue that Agent 47 takes on these people’s identities, yet it feels like a step backward to not even attempt to waive it away.  

The second level is where we begin to see new and unexpected mechanics. If you choose to follow one of the Story Missions, you’ll find yourself in the role of a detective enlisted to solve the murder of your target’s brother. Typically, in Hitman’s story missions, the game will direct you to each step with a waypoint and instructions. Here, the game gives you free rein to explore and investigate while you look for clues. There are plenty of ancillary characters for you to interact with and learn about, which makes the mansion feel that much more like a real place. Of course, there are plenty of other more traditional ways to go about your assignment, but the twists and turns of the investigation make this a standout on a first play.

I’d like to avoid breaking down every single level in the game, but I would lastly like to touch on the Berlin level. It’s a creative mechanical twist on what we’ve come to expect from the series. Agent 47 is now the one being hunted, and you’ll need to be on your toes if you want to make it out alive. This level is like jazz. It’s about the assassinations you don’t make. There are hundreds of bodies packed into this underground club, and while the game has done crowds before, things have never felt this dense. The dense groups of ravers also manage to up the intensity and stress of the situation. Finding a way or opportunity to take on your mark is that much trickier here. 

At first blush, these new levels appear to have less content within them, as there are fewer story missions compared to stages in the previous games. Instead of removing that content from the game, finding intel scattered across the map now has greater emphasis. Intel isn’t new, but the renewed focus on it means you’ll want to pay a bit more attention as you’re exploring so you can find every opportunity on your subsequent playthroughs. While it may not be as curated, it encourages the player to be even more creative with their plots.

It’s just a shame that the PC release of the game was marred by the promised inclusion of Hitman 2 levels (for owners of the previous game), which was then reneged on, stating players would need to purchase the levels as DLC since the game is an Epic Store exclusive this year.  They once again changed their stance days before release, notifying PC players that they would be able to access Hitman 2 levels sometime in the future. Still not available yet, which is a shame as there are some incredible levels in Hitman 2. Then there’s the always-online requirement. You could play offline, but you would be giving up the ability to earn mastery points and make progress. These server woes tend only to be an issue in the first few weeks of the game being out, but getting frequent disconnection messages, which pause the game, is quite annoying.  

After 2020, It’s nice to have a game that takes you to exotic and luxurious locations, where you can take out the absolute worst kinds of people in the most absurd or sneaky ways. The biggest thing standing in the game’s way is its insistence on trying to make the characters people players should care about. There are a few missteps within the Mission Story narratives, but overall, the level design is top-notch this time around, and there are plenty of creative twists on the mechanics that it doesn’t merely feel like “more Hitman.” IOI has done incredible work at supporting the Hitman games in this trilogy, with things like Elusive Targets, escalations, alternate versions of maps, and DLC, so I have high hopes for the future of Hitman 3 as the last game in the trilogy. However, it remains to be seen what will come to the game in the future. As it stands, Hitman 3 is a fantastic addition to the two previous games in the series when bundled together, but it stumbles as a standalone release at launch.

I don't got friends, I got family.

The Yakuza franchise has been slowly building a world and mythos over the last twenty years. The story of Kiryu, the Tojo Clan, and Kamurocho spans decades. As such, the developers of Yakuza: Like a Dragon (Yakuza 7 in Japan), had quite a challenge in front of themselves. Not only did they leave the lovable protagonist of the series behind with this new entry, they also left the familiar setting of Kamurocho, and transitioned from the beat ‘em up/brawler gameplay of the series to replace it with turn-based combat, a four-person party, and a job system that works.

While Yakuza: Like a Dragon does leave behind many aspects, it still maintains some relation to the previous games in the series. Our new protagonist, Ichiban Kasuga, is an orphan and member of The Tojo Clan and starts his journey in Kamurocho. He’s also quite capable of holding his own in a fight and has a knack for finding himself in absurd situations, much like Kiryu. While the two share a wealth of similarities, Ichiban is not a simple replacement or recreation of Kiryu. While Kiryu is a Yakuza legend for his skills and exploits over the course of the series, Ichiban wears his emotions on his sleeve and is almost completely unknown. This is in large part to an early event that leaves Ichiban in prison for 18 years, while the world and the entirety of the Yakuza series (save for Zero) pass him by.

That’s where the story begins to pick up steam. Ichiban is thrust into a world that is not only unfamiliar to himself but drastically different from what fans of the series have come to know. The status quo has changed, and there’s no room for Ichiban in it. We’re quickly pulled from Kamurocho (a fictionalized part of Tokyo) to Ijincho (a similarly fictionalized part of Yokohama), a first for the series. Ijincho is larger and more sprawling than other areas in previous Yakuza games, and effectively creates a sense of place. Much like other games in the series, Like a Dragon has an open world that actually feels alive, and as if people are really living in it and spending time. The streets are crowded, traffic can be dangerous, and people react when a fight breaks out between your rag-tag group and the local ruffians and gangs of Ijincho.

And boy, do fights break out often. More so than previous games it feels. Part of that may because upon defeating a mob out in the world, another will respawn to take their place somewhere down the street. And if that happens to be in the direction you’re running, it can begin to feel a little tedious to have to fight multiple times on the same street. There is an auto-battle system that you can utilize to let fights play out without your help, but you can’t guarantee that you’ll get the most efficient or quickest victory with that. Now more than ever before in the series is that a concern.

As mentioned earlier, the combat system of the series has been replaced with JRPG turn-based combat. This is justified and explained away by Ichiban’s ferocious love for the Dragon Quest series, which drastically impacts the way he sees the world, and especially how he sees fights. Part of this change is the addition of a party, which allows three additional companions to join Ichiban in combat for the player to control. Each companion has a unique job, which can be changed freely at Hello Work. The real Government Employment Service Center (the Don Quixote license wasn’t renewed, but somehow, they got Hello Work). Changing jobs is helpful for getting new skills and abilities and to create new strategies for fights. This mostly works, but there is little carryover for skills, and it can take a long time to level up each job. Because of that, it’s hard to know when you should bother changing jobs and which ones are important.

Then comes the somewhat frustrating combat. Enemies and allies don’t take static positions in the world, nor does there seem to be any sort of logic to their positioning at all. Characters walk freely about the combat area, breaking furniture, or kicking street signs. It’s a little bizarre. Causing further frustration is the fact that enemy placement can have a significant impact on execution and strategy. Enemies can opportunistically attack out of sequence to stop a character’s attack from being successfully executed if they run past. You could wait until you have a clear shot, but there’s no telling how long that could take, or if an enemy’s pathing could randomly reverse and thwart your attack. It felt frustrating more than it made me carefully consider and plan my attacks.

My final gripe with the combat has to do with the last quarter of the game, which sees a sharp spike in difficulty that the game does a poor job of preparing you for. Autosaves can save you some measure of pain, but fights can drag out for long periods of time, and surprise one-hit kills can sometimes erase up to an hour of progress near the end. The difficulty spike makes sense in the context of who you’re fighting, compared to your previous opponents, but that doesn’t mean it feels good to play.

The time you spend outside of battles is largely the same as it has been in the series since its inception. You wander around an open world, happening across battles and an embarrassment of substories that will leave you moved, amused, and baffled. As usual, the substories give the developers an excuse to insert all manner of weird mini-games into the series. This time, the most prominent is Dragon Kart, a riff on the go-kart tours that bother so many native Japanese (and Nintendo). Through Dragon Kart, you can meet an assortment of strange characters and watch a dramatic story unfold. While the gameplay of Dragon Kart isn’t exceptional, it is totally serviceable as a vehicle for the game to deliver another series of sub-stories. Importantly, no sub-story felt like a let-down and some even reward you with a Poundmate (the game’s name for summons in combat).

Even without that added reward, the writing in the sub-stories is what fans have come to expect from the series. A story that has Ichiban assisting a young girl soliciting donations, doesn’t feel out of place next to a story about Ichiban helping a hapless Circus Ringleader who can’t keep his animals caged.

This deft weaving between the dramatic and the absurd unsurprisingly carries over into the main narrative as well. It’s a compelling crime story that lives and breathes melodrama with every ounce of its being. And it uses much of its story to address multiple social issues like sex work, homelessness, and even political corruption. All complex issues, that the game doesn’t claim to have a solution or even an answer to, but through its narrative humanizes many people that society often looks down on, if it even looks at them at all. It does this all while being genuinely funny, over the top and occasionally fantastical.

One way the game stumbles, however, is the way it characterizes these groups outside of the narrative. Referring to homeless enemies as things like “Hungry-Hungry Homeless.” I can’t say whether that was a localization choice or if that was the intended method of naming, but it’s punching down from a game that usually attempts to raise those same people up and humanize them. But these issues don’t feel malicious, more like attempts to lean into the absurd nature of the game that was somewhat careless.

The game also has one party member that is 100% inconsequential to the story. While the character in question is optional, she may as well not exist outside of combat and the sub-story she is a part of. It would be nice if the game recognized that she had been an important member of my party and gave her even just a handful of lines and presence in the narrative or cutscenes. Instead, she feels like a character added by Gameshark.

On PC, the game looks mostly good if you don’t pay special attention to signage in the game. Textures around the world, on things like street signs, which are a little low res even at the highest settings on PC, but it doesn’t really detract from the experience. My gut reaction is to say that Yakuza 6 looked better, even playing on a PS4, but I didn’t bother to check because, either way, it looks perfectly fine for the experience.

Yakuza: Like A Dragon is a fantastic evolution of the Yakuza franchise, that continues the themes of previous games, while also carving out its own path forward for the franchise. There are some missteps that have come along with the changes that the Ryu Ga Gotoku studio made but they are not enough to detract from the fantastic story being told. And those missteps bring along new ideas that serve to freshen up a series that had maintained a rather steady formula for the past 15 years. Whether you’ve been following Kiryu from his earliest adventures on the Playstation 2, or have never touched a Yakuza game before, you’ll find something to pull you in and keep you moving through the story.

Summary

Godfall has the distinction of being the first ever PlayStation 5 game to be officially announced. The game tells the story of two warring brothers named Orin and Macros, you play as Orin who seems to be a sort of spirit or soul that can inhabit different armours called Valorplates. You fight your way across three distinct and large zones to eventually take on your brother to stop him from completing a ritual to become a god or something. Like the rest of the game, the story of Godfall is a real swing and a miss. But Godfall’s developers are calling it the very first looter slasher, so does the story matter if the loot is good?

Well, the loot isn’t very good either.

If you’re here looking for an enthusiastic and mean-spirited takedown of something that a lot of people very likely spent a lot of time on for several years, then I hate to tell you that this ain’t it. The biggest thing I took away from Godfall was honestly frustration, because with a few small tweaks and a little more time in the over this game could have been a great launch title for the PS5.

Godfall is trying to slot in between a casual button mashing slasher game and something more deliberate and slower paced like Monster Hunter, the developer even cited Monster Hunter as an influence in interviews. In combat you have two weapons and a shield, attacking with one weapon allows you to build up a big area of effect attack on the other and unleash it when you switch weapons. You can throw your shield like Captain America and dive at enemies with it to stun them. The combat is a little faster than Monster Hunter and for the first few hours with the game as I made my way through the first area I actually really liked it.

But unfortunately the combat in Godfall has a big problem, one so big I honestly thought my controller was broken or the battery was dying. Godfall doesn’t allow you to press a button while an action is completing, and for that action to take place when the animation for the previous action is complete. You have to know where the animation finishes and then trigger the new action. For example, you’re swinging a big and heavy greatsword, which takes a second or two to run through the animation for. You see an enemy winding up an attack and hold L1 to bring up your shield. Orin will complete his sword swing and then just stand there and get hit. 

It’s definitely a deliberate choice on the part of the combat designer, but it made the combat feel completely broken and took a lot of the enjoyment out of it. Once I noticed it I never looked at the game the same way again. I assumed every death and every failure were due to this mechanic. 

Speaking of death and failure Godfall also makes the interesting choice to preserve the damage done to enemies when you die in most cases. This allowed me to brute force my way through the entire game extremely under-levelled with only a couple of short pauses for bosses that took a few tries. The bosses do have regenerating health, but their health bars are split into segments and they only refill the current segment when you die. The first boss in the game took me a few tries, maybe 10 in all, but all the others less than 3. 

One non-boss enemy in the game took me maybe 3 hours to beat and was more difficult to land hits on than any other enemy in the game including the final boss because it was the only enemy in the game I fought that regenerated its health bar. It was especially egregious because often the damage over time effects would continue to apply to me after reviving at a checkpoint. It was so busted that it felt like a bug, so I don’t know yet if Counterplay Games is going to fix it.

The overall enemy design and AI is pretty good, they telegraph moves well to enable you to get off a parry in a lot of cases (as long as you aren’t attacking) and the different enemies do have different styles of combat. There’s enough variety in each zone that you don’t get bored and the bosses are all pretty cool looking.

It’s the looks front where Godfall really and truly shines. Literally, the whole thing is glowing and reflecting and throwing clouds of glowing particle effects at you all the time. It’s obviously a matter of taste if you like the particular style or not but I really did, and technically I think the game is just a real feat of engineering. Obviously compared to other PS5 games like Miles Morales it’s trying to do a lot less in a smaller area, but I still found it constantly impressive. 

Performance and presentation was good in both graphics modes, though I preferred the 30fps 4K resolution mode personally as I feel like if you’re not throwing on all the bells and whistles why even buy a PS5. Godfall is absolutely a game you show to friends to show off how powerful your PS5 is. I did have a very small number of 1-2 second freezes, but they didn’t really impact gameplay and were often when I had possibly taken on too many enemies at once in a graphically complex zone. It never came up fighting bosses.

I did have one final technical issue – when fighting the last boss Macros I was killed by a damage over time effect at the exact same time he died. This glitched the final cutscene into playing at the same time as the bossfight started over, and completing the mission didn’t cause the trophy for beating the game to pop which was annoying. The story progressed into the post-game but I was annoyed as I actually was unable to watch the final cutscene. Disappointing to see this in a AAA game, but I haven’t seen any other mentions of this online so I assume it was a specific and hard to trigger bug which I wouldn’t mark the game down for.

The one final thing I would mark the game down for is the gameplay loop. When you’ve done the story missions in the first area, the Earth zone, you then have to go around and do other non-story missions to collect 10 Earth tokens to unlock the boss and progress. I thought this was fine and the mini-bosses I fought were interesting enough, and I could even get all 10 without repeating content. But my feelings on this turned when I got to the Water zone and needed 10 Water tokens and 10 Earth tokens, or the Air zone where I needed 10 Earth tokens, 10 Water tokens and 10 Air tokens. This force replaying of old content from previous zones felt like busywork, and I wish they had just front loaded these activities in the zones as part of the campaign. 

The token value for missions also seemed to me to be really off – a mission that takes me 30-45 minutes with multiple objectives and a difficult boss might net me 6 of my 10 tokens, but so will replaying the 2 token mission that takes 5 minutes if I play it 3 times. It was during the token collecting in the Water zone that I realised that I was trying to work out the way I could play as little as possible of the game and still progress, which I feel is fairly damning.

Finally, while this is a loot game the loot itself isn’t particularly well implemented. After a few hours I realised the combination of weapons I liked, got a legendary version of each and maxed out their levels and then didn’t find anything better until right before the final boss. Again this is another missed opportunity as the design

s of the weapons are awesome, but unlike something like Destiny 2 where all the weapon types feel great to use and have different use cases in Godfall most of them feel pretty bad to use. The upgrade system for weapons is great on one hand, because if you like the design of a weapon and how it feels you can keep it for most of the game. But on the other hand the encouragement to push through and try to love other weapons just isn’t there.

The biggest feelings I had playing Godfall were frustration and disappointment by the end of the story. The game looks fantastic and has some really great design, music and even half decent voice acting. But the story is fairly poorly told to you through conversations with two NPCs that stand on opposite sides of a room that you have to jog back and forth between before starting missions. The combat made me feel like my controller battery was dying, the gameplay loop needs work and the loot is just not that interesting.

The frustration I felt playing this game was mostly at the disappointment for what it could have been. Which, honestly, is a real shame as there’s a lot of promise here. I can’t recommend that anyone buy Godfall in its current state, but I do sincerely hope they work on this game and maybe fix some of these issues before they launch the DLC next year.