Also available on PlayStation 5 and Windows

Released by French studio Sandfall Interactive, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a turn-based RPG that is best described the way my friend, Pat, described it to me - "very sad and very French."  It is definitely very French with names like Gustave and Renoir, and even before you know what's going on in this world, the deep sadness that consumes every facet of the game's world feels ever pervasive.  The "Expedition 33" part of the title becomes apparent almost immediately as the intro unfolds, but the "Clair Obscur" part of the title took me a long time and a Google search to figure out of which I'm sure my college art history professors would be ashamed.  Clair obscur is the French term for the Italian art term "chiaroscuro" which refers to an art style that creates drama through the use of strong contrast between dark and light.  It's obvious from the start of the game that "artistic expression" was the core development philosophy, but as you progress through the story, you begin to see that art itself is at the heart of the narrative.

The game follows the survivors of "Expedition 33," a team sent from the island city of Lumiere to "the continent" (representative of the French mainland) with the mission of reaching and eliminating The Paintress, a giant sad-looking lady who spends her entire life sitting at the base of a monolithic rock and paints a number on that rock every year, originally counting down from 100.  Anyone who is the age painted on the monolith or older - 33, in this case - will "gommage" or disappear, the word translating from French to "to rub" or "to erase" in English.  Basically, if you're 33 on the day the Paintress painted the 33 on the monolith, you're going to disappear into a cloud of rose petals.  The exact mechanism by which this works or that causes this is unknown.  At least until the end of the game.  The game's world is shrouded in a palpable sense of misery, but it's done so with exceptional beauty thanks to the use of Unreal Engine 5 and well executed ray tracing effects.

Expedition 33 is one of those games, like Bioshock or SOMA, that I would describe as "cerebral," forcing the player to think and reflect on the experience as much as just play and enjoy the game.  A lot of the game, especially the last few hours of the game, is deeply philosophical and not nearly as straightforward or black-and-white as "kill the big evil to save the world," something that you slowly piece together as you make your way towards the Paintress.  This is, in my opinion, what should immediately come to mind when you hear the phrase "adult game" - not some garbage sex nonsense but a game that makes you ponder the very nature of existence in a way that children and even most teenagers wouldn't be able to appreciate fully.  One of the most effective tools the game uses to create this outcome is stellar voice acting.  The voice acting is some of the best I've heard in recent games, and the writing is absolutely top tier.  The lines of dialogue, nine times out of ten, feel very intentionally and carefully written.  Very, very few lines feel extraneous or like filler.  The game's dialogue skillfully builds the sense that the continent isn't what you were led to expect and that there are major machinations going on behind the scenes to which your character isn't privy.  These secrets and hidden plans are very slowly and very deliberately hinted at throughout the game but rarely revealed until the last quarter or so.

The combat follows the common turn-order setup that many JRPGs use but with a QTE feature reminiscent of Super Mario RPG.  When a character's turn comes up, they have a few options.  Obviously, you can skip your turn, but that's rarely wise.  You can use an item - a healing potion, an AP (action point) potion, or a revival potion.  You can also use a basic melee attack which generates one AP or a basic ranged attack which costs 1 AP and can be used as many times as your AP can afford per turn.  Then you've got skills which will be your bread-and-butter damage dealers.  These might be healing abilities, buffs, debuffs, or attacks.  There are numerous kinds of damage - physical, fire, ice, electric, earth, dark, light, and void - and skills can either be single target or hit all enemies at once.  They can also inflict status ailments like burn, slow, stun, etc.  Each skill costs AP with the weaker ones' costing one or two and the strongest ones costing a full 9 AP, the maximum you can have at one time.  Lastly, you have your gradient attacks.  These are special very powerful skills that use gradient points to use.  You generate gradient charge for each AP that your skills burn to fill the meter, and you can store up to three gradient charges at once with each gradient skill using one, two, or all three charges.  Like your skills, some of these are powerful moves, like an attack that hits a target ten or twelve times, and some are powerful healing skills, like one that revives all downed allies and buffs them.  Unlike skills, which you unlock using skill points gained upon level up, gradient skills are unlocked by progressing through the game and building relationship levels between characters.

I mentioned that the game features a QTE element a la Super Mario RPG.  This comes in with the skills, both regular and gradient.  When you use a skill, you will have to make between one and three QTE button presses with success granting a better effect and failure granting either a lesser effect or, in some cases, causing damage to you instead of your enemies.  This QTE timing also comes into play with defense.  When you're attacked, there's a tiny window of time where you can press the correct button to do a parry.  If you parry every hit in an enemy's attack, you'll automatically trigger a counterattack.  You can also choose to dodge these attacks which requires pressing a different button at the right time.  Some attacks require you to jump to avoid them which is a different timed button press followed by another button press to perform a counterattack.  It sounds super complicated, and it can definitely take a bit of practice to get used to pressing the right buttons at the right time for the right attacks, but the game introduces these various QTE elements to you slowly over time.  You've got pictos, items of which you can have up to three equipped at a time, that give passive combat abilities.  You can "learn" these after using them in battle enough and use your lumina points to keep them activated even when the picto is unequipped.  There's a lot of depth of the combat beneath the turn-based surface, and you'll probably be halfway through the game before you truly get fully comfortable with all aspects of it.

The game's soundtrack is best described as "haunting" with an orchestral and operatic style that sets it apart from anything I've played recently.  Even Final Fantasy VII's One Winged Angel track with its operatic vocals doesn't achieve the depth of emotion that Clair Obscur's soundtrack creates.  The soundtrack's somber vibe is the perfect support for the game's pervasive themes of mortality and loss.  It's not just the sound design that I consider to be virtually perfect; the game is also what I would call a perfect length, clocking in at between 30 and 40 hours for most players depending on how much you go out of your way for side content.  There are some definite problems with the game - there are occasional clipping and lip sync issues, exploration is a pain with no minimap, some of the relationship building dialogue does feel a bit ancillary and forced, and there are definitely some difficulty spikes that can frustrate players who aren't adequately levelled and comfortable with the combat system.  That said, the emotionally gripping storytelling, captivating soundtrack, beautiful world, and replayability via New Game+ all far outweigh those negatives.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't literally a perfect game, but it's damn close, especially considering it's the debut game of a studio with fewer than three dozen team members.  If this is their first game, imagine what they could do with more experience and a bigger budget.  This is one of those instantly classic games, like Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the 5th gen, Persona 4 for the 6th gen, and Xenoblade Chronicles for the 7th gen that will continue to be revered and discussed for years and decades to come.  There are few games I consider true must-plays for literally every gamer, but this is definitely one of them.  The story will grip you, the characters will enchant you, the soundtrack will captivate you, and the tragedy of it all will move you.  It's only available for modern platforms minus Switch 2 - something I actually approve of since it would need serious cuts for the hardware, and this game deserves to be experienced as envisioned by the artists - so you'll need to have an Xbox Series S or X, a PS5, or a gaming PC to play it, but if you have one of those platforms, you seriously owe it to yourself to play Expedition 33.

Also available on NES, NES Classic, MSX2, PlayStation, Wii, Wii U, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Wonderswan Color, Game Boy Advance, PlayStation Portable, 3DS, Java, Windows Phone, iOS, Android, and PC

The original Final Fantasy, releasing on the Famicom in 1987, revolutionized the RPG genre.  Arguably the most influential JRPG of all time and definitely the most influential JRPG on the NES, Final Fantasy launched a series that spans well over 100 games and has earned Square approximately ten gajillion dollars.  I actually have pretty limited experience with Final Fantasy having only played Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy III, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core, Final Fantasy XVI, and Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.  Of those, my first was this game, the original release of Final Fantasy on NES.  Having played the original release of the game and now the most recent release of the game, it definitely follows the trend of "older games are harder" because the Pixel Remaster on Switch, PS4, Xbox Series, and Steam definitely take off a ton of the BS and bugs that made the original release a bit of a slog in parts.

The version I most recently played and will be focusing on here is the recent Pixel Remaster, and while it's a faithful remake of the original game, it makes some stylistic changes that may not appeal to purists.  There are sharper visuals, updated (and much more detailed) sprites, an updated UI that actually allows for full words and a much more readable font, and a plethora of quality-of-life changes.  The visual changes are mainly to keep a relatively consistent visual presentation across the six games included in the Pixel Remaster collection, so this game looks more akin to its Super Nintendo descendants and the original NES release.  The nostalgic part of me mourns the loss of those clunky sprites, but I would be lying if I said the overall feel and tone of the game didn't benefit from more detailed pixel sprites.  To the remaster's credit, the sprites weren't just redone by random interns; they were redone from the ground up by the original artist, Kazuko Shibuya, so they very much feel authentic even if they're new and more detailed.  The remaster has also been designed for wide screen, although there are some minor frame pacing issues, so folks sensitive to frame rate dips might notice some mild jitter.  I, personally, didn't notice anything, but I'm not terribly sensitive to jitter, and I know it's a common complaint online.  

The biggest change here - and one that I personally adore - is that the soundtrack has been completely redone.  You can still set it to use the iconic original chiptune soundtrack if you want that nostalgia trip, but the new arrangement is a beautiful orchestral recreation that feels more like a realization of what the original soundtrack was meant to be if not for the limitations of 8-bit hardware than an attempt to "change" things, per se.  Don't get me wrong, I love a good chiptune soundtrack, but having been a trumpet player from 5th through 12 grade, I have a real soft spot for orchestral soundtracks, so the arrangement made for the pixel remaster really blew me away.  I definitely recommend using the new soundtrack for those playing on Switch, PS4, Xbox Series, or Steam.

The QoL features are really what make the most difference here with this new remaster.  The biggest aspects of that are the ability to toggle run as your default movement speed in towns and dungeons, the ability to toggle random encounters on or off (super useful if you're out grinding and overextend yourself a bit and need to get back to town safely), and the boosts.  These boosts allow you to adjust the rate of xp, ability points, and gold gain from 4x the normal rate for an easier, less grindy experience all the way down to 0.5x if you not only want the original grind but want to Dark Souls the original grind and overall difficulty.  Additionally, you have the ability to quick save anywhere you want - even in dungeons right before a boss - and these quick saves can be accessed even if you close the game and turn off the system.  That alone makes bosses a lot more manageable, although I personally didn't find any of the bosses to be particularly difficult save for the final boss.  You also have a bestiary that catalogues things like stats and drops for the monsters you defeat, making it easy to reference the strengths and weaknesses of the foes you'll face in any given dungeon.

The overall experience is preserved very well from its NES roots.  The six classes - Fighter, Thief, Black Belt, White Mage, Black Mage, Red Mage - are still your class options, and the quest to restore the four crystals and defeat Garland is unchanged.  At default xp, ability point, and gil drop settings, which is how I played, the game is a challenge but very manageable if you're willing to grind a little bit, and the overall improvement to the flow and speed of the game makes it less time consuming to grind than the NES original, especially the ability to toggle auto battle.  Being an early 8-bit JRPG, Final Fantasy doesn't hold your hand as far as where you go and what to do.  It definitely tells you what you need to do next, and it usually tells you the general direction of where you need to go, but you need to make sure you talk to every NPC because that direction is not always given by the "important" NPCs exclusively.  It also requires a fair amount of good ol' fashioned exploration.  Fortunately, the pixel remaster lets you pull up a world map that shows you where each location you've visited is and even how many chests you've opened and how many chests there are total, so that definitely makes it more user-friendly than the NES original since it can be hard to remember the name of each town and village and where in the game's world each one is.

In general, I consider the pixel remaster to be the definitive way to experience the original Final Fantasy.  This is especially true of the Switch version; it boasts slightly faster load times than the PS4 or PC versions, and it gives the option of portability (I played the entire time while lounging in bed with my girlfriend over the course a week).  There is, however, a definite downside that needs to be noted.  While the visuals, orchestral soundtrack, and QoL changes are amazing, the pixel remaster does lack the extra content found in the GBA and PSP versions of Final Fantasy.  If you're going for the most content possible and are willing to sacrifice the modern improvements and conveniences found in the pixel remaster, one of those versions might be a better fit for you.

The original Final Fantasy, while arguably the progenitor of the JRPG as we know it alongside Enix's Dragon Quest, hasn't aged terribly well despite being a solid game.  The pixel remaster definitely gives it a nice face lift and addresses some of the things that aged poorly such as the lack of full backgrounds in battles and the absolute slog that grinding can be, but because it's a faithful remake, it retains some things that just don't stand up today such as a thin story, non-existent character development, and often obtuse objectives.  That said, the pixel remaster does make the game much more approachable for younger gamers, and it's faithful enough to keep older gamers like me happy with this modern take on the experience.  If you're into retro-style indie RPGs released in recent years, give the original Final Fantasy a shot in the pixel remaster collection; you'll probably find that a lot of what you like in modern indie JRPGs is borrowed from a nearly-40-year-old juggernaut.

Also available on PlayStation 2 (original), PlayStation 3 (original), PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Switch, and Windows

I am a huge fan of the Shin Megami Tensei series, and I have most of the Devil Summoner games (this game's original title was Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army), but I've never actually gotten around to playing them.  When I saw that the remaster of the first of the Raidou Devil Summoner games was a Switch 2 launch window title, I figured now was a good time to jump on it.  I'm not thrilled that it's one of the stupid game-key cards on Switch 2, but whatever.

The game revolves around the player character - named whatever you want to name him - who is training to become a devil summoner, someone who can summon and control demons.  Upon completing his training, he is given the new name Raidou Kuzunoha XIV and tasked with defending "the Capital" (Tokyo) from demons and protecting the citizenry from the shadows.  To this end, he assumes the role of a private detective with the Narumi Detective Agency.  Quickly, however, a plot is discovered that threatens not only to destroy the capital city but threatens the fabric of time itself.

I've often described Shin Megami Tensei as Pokmeon crossed with mythology since the games involve capturing demons and gods from all religions and mythologies and using them in battle.  This game still does that, but rather than the typical turn based combat familiar to those who've played the core Shin Megami Tensei series or the Persona sub-series, Raidou is an action RPG.  You can have two demons at a time fighting alongside you, although you're able to switch these in and out at will from your total supply that starts at eight and eventually grows to 24.  These demons also play a role outside of combat, as well; each demon has skills that can be used on people or objects in the environment - Use Force, Inspect, Cool Down, etc. - so you'll want to make sure that you have demons with you with a wide array of those skills even if, like me, you tend to stick to two or three for combat.  In addition to your main mission, you'll be given side quests - "Case Files" as they're called in this game - that, while totally option, can give some pretty awesome rewards ranging from money to unlocking new demon fusions.  That's the other cool element that should be familiar to long-time fans of Shin Megami Tensei - you can fuse two demons into a new demon.  Sometimes it's a stronger demon, sometimes it's a weaker demon, but what makes it worthwhile is the ability to pass down the skills of the two demons that went into the fusion, allowing you to make demons that know attacks they might otherwise be unable to learn.

One thing that's important to keep in mind is that this is a remaster, not a remake.  While the character models and world have been cleaned up beautifully and render at 1080p for Switch, Switch 2, and PS4 and 2160p for PS5 and Series X, it is still a 19 year old game, and that is going to show in certain situations.  While it may not look like a modern day game, it also definitely doesn't look like a game on the PlayStation 2 from 2006, either.  The frame rate is, thankfully, a solid 60 fps on current consoles.  PlayStation 4 and Switch see a variable frame rate between 30 and 60 fps.  All in all, a solid performance level.  I was a bit disappointed to see Switch 2 capped at the Switch resolution of 1080p instead of matching the Series S resolution of 1440p, but I played most of the game on Switch 2 docked on a 4K TV, and it looked fantastic.  Truthfully, on modern consoles, even 1080p looks better than the 1080p of the 8th and especially 7th gen consoles.

Overall, I had a fantastic experience with Raidou Remastered.  The story was intriguing and the characters were interesting, although I did find the ending a little bit lackluster.  I guess I got spoiled with the main series Shin Megami Tensei games' endings usually being some variation of "Go kill God."  It wasn't bad, by any mean, but it was an okay ending to a great game.  That said, it was a great game but not an amazing game.  I haven't played the other Devil Summoner games, but it fell well below my enjoyment of the main series Shin Megami Tensei games or of the Persona games.  I did thoroughly enjoy my time with Raidou Remastered, though, and I had a lot of fun trying to fuse every demon, complete every side quest, and steamroll the last dungeon.  While the ending may have been so-so in my book, I still hope they do the same quality remaster for Devil Summoner 2: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon.  This is a pretty readily available game between the PS2 original release, the PS3 digital re-release, and the remaster's release on PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X, Switch, Switch 2, and Windows.  Unless you're a never-Sony-and-only-retro gamer, you've probably got a system that some version of this game is on.  I definitely do recommend it to all RPG fans, but know that it's going to stand up to Shin Megami Tensei IV or Persona 4.

The Legend of Zelda is one of Nintendo's flagship series and probably my favorite adventure series.  It's been around for almost 40 years since the original Legend of Zelda on the NES, and this newest game does something that no Zelda game (on a Nintendo console, anyway; CD-i doesn't count) has done before - have Zelda, not Link, as the playable protagonist.  Echoes of Wisdom flips the normal Legend of Zelda script on its head and sees Link kidnapped and Zelda embarking on a quest to defeat the evil threatening Hyrule and rescue the hero.

The general premise is that dark rifts are opening up across Hyrule, pulling people in and disrupting villages and roadways.  The other, more sinister, aspect to these rifts is that in some instances, dark clones of the people swallowed emerge and replace them.  This eventually gets Zelda mistakenly identified as the cause of the rifts and thus arrested and locked in the castle's dungeon.  It's only through the help of a wisp-like entity named Tri, who teaches her to use their magic to create echoes (magical duplicates of items and monsters), that she is able to escape and begin to unravel the mystery and identify the real culprit.  As she travels across Hyrule, she learns to create echoes of new monsters to fight for her, helps the various peoples of the land, and learns the truth of the rifts.  

Visually, the game follows the recent Link's Awakening remake's style, and that's a very good thing in my book.  The game's colors pop, the character models are smooth and made with a beautiful simplicity, and it truly captures the overall vibe of early 90s Zelda while offering a very modern presentation and gameplay feel.  Performance tends to suffer a bit as far as frame rate goes on Switch, but playing on my Switch 2, it was a smooth 60 fps as opposed to the wild wavering between 30 and 60 on the original Switch.  It would be nice if there were a patch that capped it at 30 fps and a Switch 2 specific patch that kept it uncapped so that players on the OG Switch could have a smooth experience even if at a slightly lower frame rate.  Even on original Switch, though, the game's excellence still outweighs the performance shortcomings.

Breath of the Wild, as I'm sure all Zelda fans have experienced for themselves, marked a dramatic departure from the traditional Zelda formula, trading the typical dungeons for open world exploration.  Echoes of Wisdom returns to the dungeon format, but it's also a pretty big departure from the typical Zelda experience due to Zelda's role as the main character.  Unlike Link, Zelda does not engage in combat directly.  She can sort of channel Link's power through his dropped sword for a short period of time to fight directly, but nine times out of ten, she "fights" through creating echoes of monsters to fight for her.  This forces the player to take a more strategic approach to fights as the echoes can be stunned during an attack preparation easily.  Picking the right echo for the right opponent is key, and that can take a little bit of experimentation.  Traversing the environment's obstacles also takes some experimentation with echoes.  My go-to methods for traversing gaps or reaching higher elevations were building a bridge of beds and stacking blocks of water to swim up, respectively.  This seems like the sort of game where there's no one correct answer most of the time, though, and I imagine players have devised a plethora of creative solutions to dungeon obstacles.

Echoes of Wisdom is definitely a different take on the core Legend of Zelda experience, but blending a return to traditional dungeons with a radical change in gameplay style managed to give the game a familiar feel while also feeling novel and fresh at the same time, something that's not always easy to do with a series as old and revered as The Legend of Zelda.  Breath of the Wild definitely managed to feel novel and fresh, but not much felt particularly familiar about it.  That's not a bad thing, but I do think Echoes of Wisdom is a more interesting way to refresh the series by striking that balance with nostalgic familiarity.  I've love to see a Switch 2 edition that adds in and expands the dungeon building from the Link's Awakening remake (it really should have been called Link's ReAwakening), but just the performance boost that the Switch 2's more robust hardware gives it is a stark improvement.  Even if you only have the original Switch, though, it's absolutely worth playing.  It's a unique and memorable Zelda experience that definitely deserves more attention that it seems to have gotten.

Mario Kart World is both the latest entry in Nintendo's wildly popular system-selling party racing franchise as well as the flagship title for the launch of their new Switch 2 console.  I think a lot of us were wondering what they could do with Mario Kart after the near-perfect Mario Kart 8 on Wii U and its expanded port to Switch, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.  With World, they didn't try to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, but they did go back to the fundamentals of Mario Kart and try something completely new for the series - an explorable open world.

Let me get this out there right up front - I do not like Mario Kart World as much as Mario Kart 8.  That said, Mario Kart World blew me away in a lot of ways.  The first thing that really impressed me was the character roster.  Mario Kart 8 had a huge character roster, and it was made interesting by the inclusion of non-Mario Nintendo character like Link and the Inkling with its DLC packs (included in the base game for 8 Deluxe).  World, however, opted to omit the non-Mario characters (with which I'm fine despite my love of the Inkling character) and instead include a plethora of more minor Mario characters.  World includes a roster with a whopping 50 characters - 24 "main" characters - the ones whom we've come to expect in Mario sports games - and 26 "creature" characters, like Goomba, Cheep-Cheep, the dolphin, and the weird things from Mario Sunshine.  In addition to the 50 unique characters, the main characters all have alternate costumes.  Some, like Paulina and Donkey Kong, only have their default costume and one more, while others, like Mario, have a total of ten unlockable costumes.  The creature characters and costumes are unlocked by random chance occurrences, too, so there's a lot of incentive to keep playing.

The open "world" in Mario Kart World manifests itself in two ways.  You've got your typical game grand prix, battle, etc. game modes, but there are two new ways to play.  The first and most obvious way the "World" title is incorporated is in the ability to explore freely the game's interconnected open world.  All of the tracks and areas are connected in Mario Kart World, and while your average race feels as contained as any Mario Kart track, the open world exploration lets you go off-road and see how the world is interconnected.  I, personally, find the open world to feel rather empty and boring, but a few of my friends really enjoy it, and it's definitely a neat inclusion even if it's a little bare bones at the moment.  The other way the game incorporates an interconnected world is with the Knockout Tours.  Instead of racing in a circuit on four tracks with three laps each, you do a single long race of six "laps," but these laps aren't what you'd think; each "lap" is really a section of the race, and this race will take you across the game's world and through different areas in a single uninterrupted drive.  I may not be a fan of the game's free roam mode, but this Knockout Tour is hands-down my favorite game mode.  Knockout Tour online with some friends is absolutely the best way to play.  See below the screenshot immortalizing my victory over my buddy, Flake.

Regarding performance, Mario Kart is a series known for its impressive visuals and solid performance, and Mario Kart World is no different.  In handheld, the game runs at 1080p, and docked, it runs at a resolution of 1440p.  In both modes, handheld and docked, the game hits a solid 60 fps.  I saw rumors that an update to add 120 fps support at lower resolutions is in the works, but you know how the Nintendo rumor mill is - less accurate than a tabloid horoscope.  To be sure, I would absolutely love a 120 fps option to be added and would have no problem sacrificing some pixels for it, but I'm perfectly content with 60 fps.  My eyes haven't worked right since I was eight, and even aside from the bad eyesight, I'm getting old; old folks' eyes aren't as quick as the younguns'.

Overall, Mario Kart World is an excellent entry in an excellent series, and it was a brilliant game to have as a day-one launch title for the Switch 2.  I may not personally like it as much as Mario Kart 8, but that's like being second or third place at the Olympics; being the second or third best Mario Kart game (I still can't decide if I put World or Double Dash in 2nd place) still ranks it as one of the best racing games of all time in my book.  Unfortunately for those not ready, not financially able, or not logistically able (with regards to stock availability) to make the jump to Switch 2, this game isn't available on the original Switch.  It actually started development on the Switch, but the scope of the game is just more than the 2017 console's aging hardware could do justice.  If you have a Switch 2 and don't have Mario Kart World...what are you even doing?  If you don't have a Switch 2 yet, don't distress; this game is going to remain popular the entire generation, mark my words, and you've got one heck of a great racer to look forward to whenever you are able to make the jump to Switch 2.

Also available on Xbox Series X and Windows

Sniper Elite is a series that, on paper, I probably shouldn't like, but in reality, adore.  I'm normally not one for stealth games or sniping.  I have the patience for neither.  Sniper Elite, however, doesn't actually force either on you.  Obviously, the game is intended to be played as a stealthy sniper, and it's definitely the easiest way to play, but if you want to, you could run in guns blazing with a submachine gun.  Or, like I do, turn the sniping physics down to Very Easy so there's no wind or bullet drop and start shooting with no regard for whether you're detected or not.  As long as you're having fun with the game you paid 5 hours' worth of labor for, there's not really a wrong way to do it, and that's what sets Sniper Elite apart for me.

Sniper Elite: Resistance, like the other games in the series, has you fighting Nazis during World War II (as opposed to during January, 2021), but what sets Resistance apart is that you don't play as the German-born American-British sniper, Karl Fairburne, but rather as British sniper, Harry Hawker.  Hawker has previously appeared in Sniper Elite 3, 4, and 5 as a multiplayer character, but he had no major story relevance until Resistance.  Worth noting, though, is that Karl Fairburne was later released as a playable character via free DLC.  It feels a bit odd to me not to hear Fairburne's voice after having gotten so used to it, but Harry grew on me quickly.  As is tradition for Sniper Elite, paid DLC missions are available including the traditional "assassinate Hitler" mission that seems to come to every game.  I, personally, love getting to put a bullet between Hitler's eyes, but the wholesale massacre of Nazi grunts is really why I play.

As the subtitle suggests, being Sniper Elite: Resistance and not Sniper Elite 6, you're not a lone wolf working as part of the American or British armies but rather a British operative embedded in the French Resistance and helping them to foil Nazi plots in France and liberate the occupied country.  In particular, you're foiling a plot being carried out behind Hitler's back by a rogue Nazi faction to use some new superweapon against the force that will carry out the impending Allied invasion of Europe.  As you snipe (or violently machine gun) your way through Nazi camps and facilities, you learn more about the mysterious "Kleine Blume" and the specific threat it poses to the upcoming D-Day landings as you try to stop the weapon before it can be deployed and save the Allies' hail Mary invasion strategy.

Visually, Resistance is stunning.  Because I refuse to pay $700 for a digital-only system and nearly $100 for a separate disc drive, I don't have a PS5 Pro, but even on base PS5, the game looked and ran beautifully.  The game runs at a dynamic 2160p, and the only real improvement PS5 Pro seems to offer according to Digital Foundry is that it spends more time at or near true native 4K than base PS5 or Series X.  On all three platforms (I don't acknowledge Series S, so I don't care about its performance), the 60 fps target is virtually unbroken, leading to a smooth gameplay experience, something that's pretty important for lining up long shots (my longest headshot, for example, was 721 meters).  Sound design is fantastic.  The sniper rifles have a meaty BOOM when they fire, and the sound of suppressed weapons brings all of my "pew pew" spy fantasies to life.  My only very slight gripe with the game - and this is something that Digital Foundry briefly noted as well in their analysis - is that the x-ray shots don't feel quite as visceral as in Sniper Elite 5.  You still see skulls break, brains compress, blood spurt, and testicles pop, but it seemed just a little toned down.  Granted, the x-ray shots have always been EXCESSIVELY gory and over-the-top, but that's what I loved about them.  These are Nazis; they don't deserve respect or dignity in their digital deaths.

Resistance, like most of the series, is fairly short, clocking in at about 9 hours according to HLTB, although my playtime was around 17 hours since I made a point to hunt down each and every single Nazi soldier, officer, and scientist in every single level plus all of the DLC levels.  Sniper Elite is a matter of quality, not quantity, though, and if you're a completionist, going for every collectible and completing all of the optional kill challenges will definitely add some serious length to the game, especially if you're not using an online guide.  While there are multiplayer aspects of the game to enjoy, Sniper Elite is first and foremost a single player game, and it proves that there is still a lot to enjoy in single player shooters rather than purely multiplayer live service garbage.

Sniper Elite: Resistance may not have impressed me quite as much as Sniper Elite 5 did, but it's still an excellent offering from Rebellion and a fantastic time for any gamers who love killing virtual Nazis (and if you don't, I immediately distrust you).  Fingers crossed for a port to Switch 2 along with Sniper Elite 5 because this is totally a game I would double dip on.  Regardless of whether you're a PlayStation gamer, Xbox gamer, or annoyingly arrogant PC gamer, give Sniper Elite: Resistance a shot (pun absolutely intended).

Fast Fusion is the fourth (or third, depending on how you look at it) game in Shin'en Multimedia's F-Zero/Wipeout hybrid racing series.  Debuting on the Wii's WiiWare service with Fast Racing League, then moving to HD on the Wii U with Fast Racing Neo (which was then ported and expanded on Switch with Fast RMX since only twelve people bought a Wii U), the series has now made the jump to UHD with Fast Fusion on Switch 2.  It's a little content light compared to its predecessor, but quality over quantity seems to be the name of the game here.

Fast Fusion embraces the Switch 2's capabilities with a number of visual profiles, although I honestly don't know what the point of some are.  The "Ultra Quality" setting is the peak of visuals here with 4K visuals, maximum detail textures, and even ray tracing.  The tradeoff, though, is that the game only runs at 30 fps on that setting, but it is at least a stable 30 fps.  Still, though, not the ideal way to play.  Below that, you have the Quality setting which is what I use.  No ray tracing here, but it still runs at 4K with a solid 60 fps frame rate.  Below that, you have a balanced setting that offers 1440p and 60 fps, and there's also a Performance setting for 1080p and...60 fps.  It's really disappointing that even dropping the resolution all the way down to 1080p doesn't offer support for the Switch 2's 120 fps capability, although Shin'en has said that they're exploring adding 120 fps support in a future update.  I think there's a fifth setting that I'm forgetting, but with 4K, 1440p, and 1080p all running at 60 fps, I don't really know what the point is.  Still, though, the game looks great, and while Digital Foundry's analysis went into some detail about some blurring that occurs due to the way Shin'en used DLSS here, I honestly didn't notice any visual issues whatsoever while I was playing given how fast the game's pace is.  That really seems like more of an issue for people watching others play rather than the player themselves.

Fast Fusion features numerous game modes.  The traditional Championship mode is your typical grand prix.  You race a set of three tracks for each championship, and there are four championships in each of the game's three difficulty settings, although I'm pretty sure the tracks are the same and in the same order in all three difficulties.  Subsonic is pretty easy and is definitely akin to Mario Kart's 50cc.  Supersonic is basically Mario Kart's 100cc and for experienced players who haven't really mastered the game yet.  Hypersonic is the game's 150cc equivalent, and it definitely gets hard.  I fought hard for some second and third place finishes in Hypersonic.  In addition to Championship, you've also some Time Attacks where you try to beat the developers' best times on the game's tracks.  Lastly, you have Superhero, the game's hardcore mode.  You have to finish the race without crashing a single time and without running out of energy, and your energy is used by both your shields as well as your boost, so you have to be very careful with how you use it.  I...have never finished a race on this mode, though not for lack of trying.  It's difficult, and I suck at the game.  The last gameplay feature which is really the star of the show is the vehicle fusion.  As you earn in-game money in the races and buy vehicles, you have the option of fusing them together.  Sometimes these fusions are nothing special, but other times, they'll yield an immensely powerful vehicle.  I ended up using a fusion that maxed out top speed, almost maxed out acceleration, and had about 2/3 of the way to max for boost.  You'll definitely want to use a good fused vehicle for Hypersonic and the Time Attacks.

The only real letdown with Fast Fusion is the amount of content.  There aren't a lot of tracks, so you'll probably get bored with the track variety pretty quickly.  To Shin'en's credit, they have promised that free updates are coming in the future to add more tracks (and potentially that 120 fps support), but at launch, it's a bit content dry.  As I said earlier, though, what content is here is excellent.  Quality, not quantity, folks.  Fast Fusion is an excellent racing launch title for the Switch 2 for gamers who want something a little more intense than Mario Kart.  It sadly doesn't support online play like its predecessor did, and that genuinely is a bummer, but I'm hopeful that that, too, can be added in an update down the line.  Other than the limited track selection and the lack of online play, though, Fast Fusion is probably the best game in the series.  At the very least, it's a tie with Fast RMX.  If you have a Switch 2, I definitely consider this to be a must have.  It's digital only (for now), but it's only $15, and that's more than fair as an asking price.

Nintendo wouldn't be Nintendo if they didn't do whatever they want and to hell with anyone who has a problem with it.  Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour is exactly the free pack-in game that we would expect the Switch 2 to launch with.  Unfortunately, this game was neither free nor a pack-in, and that made the internet keyboard warriors angry.  We'll get to that in a bit.  Despite the controversy surrounding the game's price (and whether it even counts as a game), I had a very pleasant time with Welcome Tour and quite enjoyed what it had to offer.

Welcome Tour introduces players to a highly polished and visually impressive showcase of the new Switch 2 hardware in the form of an exhibit sort of event.  You use your avatar to explore freely a massive recreation of the Switch 2, the Joycon 2s, the Joycon 2 straps the Switch 2 Pro Controller, the camera, and the Joycon 2 wheels.  While the visuals may not impress folks who are used to high end PCs or a PS5 or Series X, this exhibit area rendered in crisp 3D is unlike anything we've seen on a Nintendo platform before. It’s really more like a virtual museum than a traditional game, but its main purpose is to teach customers about the Switch 2 hardware - and it goes into a LOT of detail about the hardware and the design philosophy - and showcase the system's capabilities and highlight the ways in which it's separate and distinct from the Switch.

The game impressed me the most in its tech demonstrations.  These aren't "games" per se but, as the name suggests, ways to see the new hardware's capabilities and features highlighted.  Players move the Joycon 2s in “mouse mode,” experience detailed HD‑rumble effects, and test the 120Hz screen refresh rate. These demos also showcase the Joycon 2’s magnetic attachment, gyroscope and accelerometer features, tactile feedback, and 3D audio features.  One especially cool demo even uses the Joycon 2's vibration to replicate classic Mario sounds, highlighting just how advanced the HD Rumble 2 effect is.  With around 20 minigames and 14 demos, Welcome Tour mixes increasingly challenging minigames like mini‑golf, maze navigation, and frame‑rate guessing with interactive informational boards to teach you about the system's features and design and quizzes that follow.  Though critics tend to say that the minigames don’t offer much replay value, I really enjoyed them as bite‑sized tech showcases and liked being able to learn the hardware design quirks in a relatively fun and interesting way.

More than providing a gameplay experience to showcase the new system, the experience is educational and offers insights (that's literally what they call it) into the console's engineering and hardware philosophy.  It explains features like the Joycon 2's magnetics connection to the system, airflow design in the dock, screen tech, and accessory integration.  For Nintendo enthusiasts like me and folks interested in technology design, it’s a fascinating glimpse into the platform's inner workings and upgrades over its predecessor.  It may look extremely similar to the Switch, but it's a completely different beast under the hood.

I, personally, had a great time with Welcome Tour.  I downloaded it - actually, I preordered it on Nintendo's website - because I'm a Nintendo shill and will buy almost anything with their logo on it, but I ended up liking it a lot more than I expected.  There are a few minigame medals that I can't get because some of them get INSANELY difficult, but I probably finished 97% of all of the content in the game.  To me for the enjoyment I got out of it, it's worth the $10 asking price, although that does seem to be a minority opinion.  To be clear, I absolutely think this should have been a free pack-in like Wii Sports was.  That said, I don't think $10 is an unreasonable asking price.  That's pretty darn cheap for a game, and while it's totally fine if a tech demo crossed with an edutainment game doesn't appeal to you, don't pretend that the amount of content doesn't justify the price just because it's content you don't care for.  It's definitely not a game for everyone, but if you are interested in how the Switch 2 works and why it was made that way - and want to see the mouse controls and other features in action - definitely consider checking this out.  That said, though, there's no real replay value here, and a lot of the minigames are just different uses of the same features, and those things are important to note.  If you're not willing to shell out the $10 for it, at least find a friend who bought it and hijack their Switch 2 for a few hours to give it a try.  It's definitely worth that.

Also available on Xbox Series X and Windows

Call of Duty is one of the most prolific game series around with 21 main series entries - that will be 22 later this year - and numerous spin-offs.  The series has spawned two major sub-series - Modern Warfare and Black Ops - and it seems that Black Ops is currently center stage with 2024's Black Ops 6 as the most recent Call of Duty game and Black Ops 7 scheduled to release later this year.  As an entry in a series most known for its multiplayer, does the campaign in Black Ops 6 offer anything of substance, or is this effectively another useless Black Ops 4 (stupidly stylized "IIII" instead of "IV") situation?

Black Ops 6 takes place during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, a UN Security Council sanctioned campaign led by a coalition of allied nations (following the United States's lead, of course) to push Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army out of neighboring Kuwait following his illegal invasion of the small Arab nation.  The game's storyline follows a handful of rogue CIA operatives as they investigate as mysterious paramilitary group called Pantheon and end up unraveling a decades old conspiracy that goes straight to the heart of the CIA. The game takes the usual cinematic approach for which Call of Duty campaigns are known, but what really makes Black Ops 6 stand out is the variety of missions in its campaign from stealthy missions where the characters are undercover to gain access to a restricted area to a small-team assault on an enemy base to full blown combat operations in the deserts of Iraq.  What stuck out to me was that the game even had a couple of levels that left the action genre behind and went full blown horror.  Who got Resident Evil in my pew pew murder simulator?  Between missions, you return to a hub “safe house” that offers non-essential dialogue to build character development and allows you to spend money you find during missions to upgrade weapons, upgrade gear, or upgrade your own combat prowess.

Visually, Black Ops 6 is - as one would expect for the most recent release - the most impressive of the series yet.  The character models look fantastic and super realistic, the weapon textures are razor sharp, and the campaign's environments range from scorching deserts to casinos and abandoned top-secret military bases that housed unspeakably horrific experiments.  Everything about the game's visual presentation is quite good if not outstanding.  The game's audio design, including gunfire, environmental sound effects, and voicework is equally impressive and really reinforce the cinematic vibe throughout the campaign.  The voice acting especially is top notch and really drove the immersion for me.  Overall, the high production value of Black Ops 6 really elevates the narrative set‑pieces and makes you interested in the story and its effects on the characters.

As for the multiplayer, it's largely your typical Call of Duty experience with no truly ground-breaking innovations or changes.  They did add "omnidirectional movement" which lets you sprint in any direction and aim in a full 360 degrees while prone which, honestly, is helpful but also looks goofy when you turn around 180 degrees and your legs are just awkwardly sticking out in front of you.  That's the only change to the core formula of note, though.  There are around a dozen and a half maps for your traditional multiplayer modes, the expected Zombies mode that continues the story familiar to those who keep up with the series, and the balance between weapons is solid with no weapon feeling useless underpowered or like an outright noob tube.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 isn't shooting to the top of my "Favorite Call of Duty Games" list, but it's definitely a very good entry and absolutely worth playing for fans of FPS campaigns.  Multiplayer feels great to play and offers a good braindead distraction from the never-ending existential dread of adult life.  It is, of course, available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Windows - with Game Pass as an option for the latter two - but it's also still available on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One for the peasants out there.  As a Nintendo shill, I was hoping for a Switch 2 port when the console launched earlier this month, but I definitely wasn't surprised that it never materialized.  Fingers crossed (without any real optimism) for Black Ops 7!

Also available on PlayStation 5 and Windows

Doom is, on paper, a series I should not enjoy nearly as much as I do.  I am typically a very narrative-focused gamer, and while Doom has some interesting lore, it's not exactly a series that most players would describe as "lore-heavy."  On the contrary, the lore is basically a coat of paint put on an exterior of gratuitous violence and gore.  I definitely want a good story with most of my games, but sometimes, I just want to rip and tear.  Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal pretty much perfected that, though, so where was id to go from here?  Backwards.  Technically.  Dark Ages is a prequel to the recent Doom games.  It takes place after Doom, Doom II, and Doom 64 (Doom 3 is a non-canon reimagining of Doom) but before Doom 2016, Doom Eternal, and Eternal's The Ancient Gods DLC.  Doomguy (nowadays referred to as Doom Slayer) voluntarily stayed in Hell fighting demons at the end of Doom 64, and he's found by UAC trapped in a sarcophagus at the start of Doom 2016; Dark Ages depicts the war between Hell and Argent D'Nur that took place between those two events.

Dark Ages seems to be a rather divisive game amongst fans of the series.  Some praise it as the best Doom experience yet while others pan it as the worst game since Doom 3.  I fall somewhere in the middle; I enjoyed it more than Doom Eternal, but it definitely fell short of Doom 2016 in my opinion.  The split in opinion, it seems to be, comes down largely to the flow of the game.  It is an undeniably slower gameplay style than Doom 2016.  That said, though, it's a consistent flow whereas Doom Eternal would flow like 2016 for 45 minutes and then grind to a halt when you encountered one of the god-awful marauders (the shield guys).  Dark Ages does have a couple of enemies that can shield themselves from all attacks temporarily, but you either need to kill enough smaller demons to "break morale" or parry its attacks back at it to drop its shield, depending on what the specific enemy is.  Either way, it doesn't break the feel of the game the way Eternal's marauders did, and that alone puts it above Eternal in my book.

As far as performance goes, it seemed to run at a flawless 60 frame per second, and according to Digital Foundry, it seems to run at a dynamic 1440p with the occasional drop down to 1080p for especially busy fights.  Resolution isn't everything anymore when it comes to visual quality, though; the power of the Series X is leveraged to deliver that rock solid frame rate and respectable resolution alongside ray tracing, some impressively detailed textures, and fantastic lighting effects that perfectly set the dark pseudo-gothic tone that creates a sort of medieval version of a cyberpunk aesthetic.  I admittedly have not played on PC with my 4090 GPU or on PS5 yet (let alone PS5 Pro which I don't even own #broketeacherproblems), but I can't imagine PS5 looks or runs much worse than Series X, and PC...well, PC always runs better than console these days unless it's a port from Playstation.  If nothing else, Doom: The Dark Ages's art design is pretty unique, at least of games that I've played.

As I mentioned before, the gameplay flow of Dark Ages is a lot slower than that of 2016.  Doom 2016 was a very acrobatic-feeling game wherein you practically flew through the environment raining death and carnage down on your enemies.  Dark Ages, on the other hand, has you act more akin to a modern main battle tank; you can move fast when you need to, but you're mainly a steadily progressing wall of carnage, standing your ground and killing all that lies before you rather than zipping around like Peter Parker did a pound of meth.  I, personally, prefer 2016's faster paced combat, but that is absolutely a personal preference and not a statement on quality; I felt Dark Ages's slower pace to be every bit as masterfully executed as 2016's frantic pace.  Dark Ages did add in some awesome new combat segments.  The dragon mounted combat from The Ancient Gods is back and refined to a smoothness that made it feel almost like Star Wars: Squadrons.  Better than that, though, is the introduction of a giant robot.  You can pilot a huge mech and either punch demons to death or explode them with enormous shoulder mounted cannons.  I may prefer the general combat feel of 2016, but the mech combat in Dark Ages is peak.  It's also supremely approachable with an array of deeply customizable difficulty options so you can tailor the game's difficulty (and the reason for that difficulty) exactly to your wishes.

There is one major factor that keeps Dark Ages from getting a near perfect score from me, though, and that's the soundtrack.  Since the very first game, Doom's epic metal soundtrack has been a staple, and Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal were absolute masterpiece examples of video game soundtrack design.  The soundtrack in Dark Ages isn't bad, per se, but it's...bland.  It's like seeing Slipknot live, then seeing Ice Nine Kills live, and then seeing your uncle's admittedly talented Metallica cover band live.  They may be a great cover band, but they'll never hold a candle to legit metal superstar bands.  That's how Dark Ages's soundtrack is.  It's a perfectly fine metal soundtrack, but it's just fine, and fine isn't good enough when you're coming off the heels of two consecutive perfect soundtracks.  At least as far as my personal friends go, that seems to be the single biggest complaint about Dark Ages; the soundtrack is just such a disappointment after the standard set by 2016 and Eternal.

Doom: The Dark Ages is a fantastic game.  Hell (no pun intended), it's an amazing game.  The soundtrack it honestly the only thing holding it back from a perfect rating from me.  Normally that alone wouldn't be enough to knock a game with otherwise incredible gameplay down from an S to an A, but this is Doom we're talking about.  There are three things that people think of when they think of Doom - a shotgun, a chainsaw, and a badass metal soundtrack.  Okay, so Dark Ages also replaced the chainsaw with a flail, but the ultra-violence is still there.  The soundtrack, though, is just painfully mid for a game in the Doom franchise.  Still, though, I consider this an absolute must play for fans of first-person shooters.  You've got options with it available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X or (eww) Series S, so hopefully you've got one of those platforms lying around.  I'm also crossing my fingers for a Switch 2 port down the line given how well Panic Button got Doom Eternal running on the original Switch.

Attack on Toys, another game clearly directly inspired by the Army Men series, was almost a game perfectly suited to be a natural modern progression from the late 90s Army Men overhead tactical games.  Like those games, you play from an overhead perspective.  Like those games, you choose what to do with the plastic resources you have at your disposal before the game starts - lots of small units, a few strong units, base defenses, etc.  Like those games, you can either directly command your troops or take more an omniscient view as a battlefield general.  Unfortunately, while Attack on Toys does a good job of paying homage to the classic Army Men games, and there is some fun to be had here, it definitely falls short of living up to the legacy of Army Men II and Army Men: Toys in Space.

The biggest letdown with Attack on Toys and the biggest reason I think it fails to be a truly adequate spiritual successor to Army Men is the lack of single player campaign.  You can absolutely play the game solo against AI opponents, and the menu makes it clear that it's geared towards that, but it's a shame that there isn't a campaign.  It doesn't have to be a great story - the actual Army Men games weren't exactly exemplars of deep narratives - but some kind of goofy story would have been a real plus.  As it stands, you've got a few different game modes, my favorite of which are Skirmish and Invasion.  In Invasion, you have to survive wave after wave of enemy attacks.  Build up your base defenses, stay vigilant, and intercept enemy incursions before they can destroy your base.  In Skirmish, it's very similar to the random skirmish modes of the older PC Army Men games.  You start with a set amount of plastic to build either units or base structures, and once the game begins, you try to destroy the enemies' bases while preventing the destruction of your base.  One thing that separates it from the older Army Men games and is a nice addition is the ability to accumulate more plastic during the game and build additional buildings or units mid-game.  I tended to build a plastic factory as part of my initial set up with some anti-air, anti-tank, and anti-infantry defenses around it, and then accrue plastic during the game and expand my base with facilities that automatically produce troops and vehicles.  That one feature adds a lot of different strategy options to the game.

Another feature that's truthfully pretty insignificant but super cool to me is the color options.  Obviously, being so heavily inspired by Army Men, you'd expect to be able to select Green, Tan, Blue, or Grey as your team color, but you can also select the Orange, Red, Purple, or Black armies.  Red, Orange, and Black all either appear in very minor roles or are mentioned in the Army Men games, and with those seven color nations, it's logical to assume there'd be a Purple nation somewhere.  Not only does it allow for the possibility of huge eight player battles, but it just adds a bit of flair.  The difficulty is easy to adjust over a range of settings, and while lower difficulties are definitely a lot easier to survive on, it can still be very difficult to destroy your enemies' bases even on lower difficulties until you really get a feel for the game.

My primary complaint with the game aside from the lack of real campaign or worldbuilding is that it very much feels like an early access game.  Aiming feels mostly good but a little...floaty, I guess, would be the best description.  Driving the vehicles and flying the planes and helicopters also feel like they could use some refinement and just have too sluggish a feel to them.  That said, it's an indie game in early access that was created by one person that originally started off as a school project.  For something to go from school project to commercial game by the hands of one person and actually be fun is a pretty big accomplishment in and of itself, one I've previously only seen from Sungrand.  In that context, while the game has a lot of room to grow and improve, it's definitely impressive for what it is and a pretty fun time to play.

Attack on Toys isn't perfect, far from it.  It is, however, very competent and a fun tribute to 3DO's classic Army Men games.  It's a shame that there's no story campaign for some cheesy plastic combat goodness, but the game modes that do exist are definitely enough to keep most entertained with lots of different ways to go about fighting your battles.  It's often on sale on Steam but normally sells for $7, and that's an extremely fair price, I think, for what it is if you remember Army Men fondly.  Your mileage may vary if you aren't a nostalgic Army Men fan, but take a look at the gameplay on YouTube, and I think you'll find there's enough charming and quirky fun here to justify the price of a fast food burger without fries or a drink.

Also available on Vita, Atari VCS, and Windows

I am a huge fan and supporter of Sungrand Studios, the one-man developer of the Silver Falls series, so when Jerrel said he was working on what he called an "action puzzle" game called Clasherball, I was excited.  I was extra excited when he started saying "Get ready to clash your balls" shortly before the game's Switch release.  While these versions are not out yet as of the time of writing, the game is also coming to Steam and, surprisingly, Atari VCS.  No, not the glorious 2600, the sadly failure of an Android-based console that I foolishly backed on Kickstarter way back when.  There's also a free version available to download (although you can and should opt to pay something for the man's hard work) for PlayStation Vita if you have a hacked Vita or PS TV.  That can be downloaded here.

Clasherball plays kind of like if you threw Zuma, Tempest, and Puyo Puyo into a blender.  Like Tempest, you move your launcher around the edge of a circular play field.  Like Zuma, you're launching balls of various colors that you have to aim well and match up in groups, and like Puyo Puyo, these have to be groups of four balls to eliminate them.  The challenge mechanic here, though, is that when you connect four balls of the same color, they erupt in colored flames and fly off in different directions based on the configuration in which they were connected and the place and angle at which the fourth ball hit based on the game's physics design.  What makes that challenging is that they'll knock any unattached ball of a different color around the arena if they make contact, they'll set any other ball of the same color on fire if they make contact, and most importantly, you'll take damage if any flaming ball makes contact with your launcher, although fortunately, balls that aren't on fire are harmless.  This can be super chaotic if you end up with a lot of flaming balls flying around at once, but it can get surprisingly difficult once you get introduced to some of the gimmicks in later levels.

There are two modes, "arcade" and "infinite."  In the "infinite" mode, there are two AI controlled launchers that just keep launching balls periodically while you get to clash your balls into their balls.  This gets increasingly chaotic as balls are eventually flying all over the place, some flaming and some not.  Or at least it does the way I play which involves just continuously moving in as circle and smashing the A button like I'm playing old school Gradius.  The game's "arcade" mode is divided into seven worlds with 15 stages each.  You start off with the first five stages unlocked and all 15 levels in each open - Beach, Snow, Jungle, Synthwave (my personal favorite), and Space.  After you've cleared all 15 levels in all five of those worlds, you unlock the Retro world which is a forest that looks similar to the Jungle world but is pixelated like an impressive 16-bit or relatively crude 32-bit game.  I adore that aesthetic.  If you beat all fifteen levels in the Retro world, you unlock the Pixel world and its 15 levels.  This world is super 8-bit style and looks like a "what if" Game Boy version of the game.  It's important to note, though, that there seems to be a bug (or maybe this is intentional, I'm not sure) where exiting to the level select screen makes the Pixel world inaccessible until you go back to level 15 of the Retro world and beat it again.  Still, though, that's over 100 levels in total with pretty varied difficulties, layouts, and gimmick hazards.  You've got some circular saw blades that get knocked around that you need to avoid, some asteroids orbiting stages, some ramps you have to launch balls up at the correct angle, etc.  My least favorite hazard are the bombs.  Normally, you have to take three hits before you lose, but if anything so much as grazes those bombs, they explode and give you an instant game over.

Clasherball is a simple and inexpensive puzzle game that will keep you busy for a surprisingly long time.  It's also surprisingly addicting.  When I first played it, I thought "I can see myself getting bored in about twenty minutes," but at no point did I ever get bored.  I got frustrated and rage quit a couple of times, but I never stopped playing because I was bored.  That's the thing about puzzle games - they don't have to have deep gameplay mechanics or flashy visuals to be gloriously addictive.  Just look at Candy Crush Saga, Tetris, and Zuma.  All of those games are very simple, but they're all wildly fun and hard to put down once you get into it.  Clasherball is an easy decision to pick up for Switch, and the upcoming Steam release will make it even more widely available, but it's cool to have a homebrew Vita option.  The definitive version, however, will be the Atari VCS releasing that's upcoming because it's going to be designed to use the paddle controller to control your launcher.  As I mentioned earlier, I backed the VCS on Kickstarter way back when, so I have one, but I don't have a paddle controller.  Yes, I am very seriously considering buying one solely for that version of Clasherball.

Also available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows

​There have been a few games over the years either somewhat or directly inspired by Army Men, but none have been so open about it as The Mean Greens: Plastic Warfare.  The title is dumb - the Greens are the good guys, so what’s “mean” about them? - but the game itself is pretty reminiscent of what Army Men might be if the series were still around today.  Well, it is in some ways, anyway.

​The Mean Greens is a multiplayer only third person shooter.  The original release featured no real tutorial or offline play with bots, but that has thankfully since been added in updates.  There’s still no true single player mode, though; it just has the exact same game modes as online but with bots.  I know that I’m in a minority of gamers in that I expect a true single player offering with games, but that’s especially true with Army Men games (and those directly inspired by it).  They’re toys, and it’s not technically an Army Men game; other than “Green good, Tan bad,” you don’t have an established canon to worry about sticking to, and the fact that they’re toys in the real world gives you a ton of creative flexibility.  I can’t help but see the decision not to include any kind of a single player mode as anything but lazy.

Also available on Gamecube, PlayStation 2, and Windows

2003 was a dark year.  That was the year that 3DO filed for bankruptcy and sold off the Army Men IP to Global Star Software.  Global Star then proceeded to say "What if we took Army Men, removed everything that made it a cult classic series, and added in a bunch of gritty dark drama that literally not one singular person on Earth asked for?"  Thus Sarge's War was born.  The box art says it all.  Sargeant Hawk stands atop a pile of melting Tan corpses amidst a destroyed brick wall that, probably because it's made of plastic I guess, is burning with a bandolier around his chest, an M-16 in one hand, and a heavy machine gun in the other.  Yeah...it's as weird as it sounds.

The premise of the game is that, after repelling a vicious Tan surprise attack, the Green Army manages to fight the Tan to the point where General Plastro agrees to a peace treaty.  Right out of the gate, Global Star has the series's primary antagonist acting super out of character.  Also why is Plastro out the Green military prison and back in command of the Tan Army?  Like, did these guys even play the games they're making a sequel to?  Anyway, a rogue faction of the Tan Army led by a "Lord Malice" - super creative and not at all edgelord name - manages to Trojan Horse what looks like a nuclear bomb into the courtyard where the treaty signing is taking place by hiding it inside a statue commemorating the historic peace accord.  When the bomb detonates, Greentown is destroyed.  Plastro is dead.  Grimm is dead.  All of the Bravo Company heroes are dead.  Countless Green and Tan soldiers and civilians are dead.  Sarge, who was racing to warn Grimm when he learned about the bomb after fighting a group of rogue Tan, gets to Greentown just in time to see the mushroom cloud.  As he walks through the carnage, he sees Vikki's half melted form.  She dies in his arms.  Sarge then does the obligatory angst scream, finds two automatic weapons to point in the air, and starts firing at the clouds.  It's cliche, it's horribly out of character and off tone for the series, and it's just...weird.  It's like a shitty version of Spec Ops: The Line eight years before Spec Ops: The Line came out.

Lest you think my only complaint with the game is the bizarre story, think again.  The sound design is horrendous as well.  It took the sound problems of Army Men RTS and made them ten times worse.  You can adjust the sound effect volume, music volume, and in-game voice volume from the settings menu...but you can't adjust the cut scene volume at all.  So at default levels, sound effects are deafening, music is obnoxiously loud, people are shouting in-game, and everyone is whispering in the cut scenes as if you're in church and mom has thwacked you in the head with the bulletin twice already.  I'd go on to criticize the music, but there's hardly any.  There's some music here and there, but by and large, the levels are played in silence except for the gunshots.  Not even footsteps - unless you're on a metal floor or something or climbing up a ladder, you run silently.  That won't stop the Tan from hearing your non-existent footstep sounds, but you definitely won't hear them.  It's just...a weird sound effect omission.  I don't even know if that was intentional or a bug that made it past QA along with the entire garbage story.  Oh, and the worst offense of all is the voice acting.  Instead of having Jim Cummings voice everyone as is tradition for the Sarge's Heroes universe games, they got some Terry Maratos guy to voice Sargeant Hawk.  His filmography suggests he's a decent actor, but he sucked as Sergeant Hawk.  Zero wit or humor.  Just dark and angsty edgelord.  While that's exactly what Global Star was going for, it's absolutely not Sarge.

While I could fill a tome with complaints about the artistic direction of this game, as an actual game, I have to admit that it's really not as a bad to play as it is to experience from a narrative perspective.  It looks good for the series; it's no Halo 2 or Metroid Prime, but the visuals are better than anything we'd seen from the series previously.  As expected, the PS2 version looks just a tad rougher than its two counterparts, but it looks pretty much the same on Gamecube and Xbox.  Controls, oddly enough, are the biggest differences.  I can't put my finger on exactly why, but the controls just feel wrong on PlayStation 2.  The aiming feels stiff and jerky, and the buttons, while the same basic layout as the other two versions, just feel awkward to use.  Gamecube, on the other hand, feels flawless.  Totally comfortable, totally natural, and completely complaint-free from me.  Xbox, the version I played through from start to finish for my review since I wanted to get as many platforms represented in the series as I could, falls in the middle but FAR closer to the Gamecube side of things.  It doesn't feel quite as comfortable to control as it does on Gamecube, but it still feels excellent outside of some minor aiming jank, and it's infinitely more playable than the PlayStation 2 version.

Army Men: Sarge's War is a game that honestly isn't bad but is just...weird.  It shows how utterly tone deaf Global Star was with the series, and honestly, I think this game is the beginning of the end of Army Men considering that Global Star only made one game after this, and, aside from a weird Java mobile phone game in 2010, no Army Men game was made after Take-Two bought the IP in 2007.  Army Men may not have been enough to save 3DO, and it may not have been a mainstream series, but the folks who liked it - like me - REALLY liked it, and if Global Star had taken the time to learn and appreciate what the series was, I genuinely think it could have made them a decent even if not massive profit.  Sarge's War is definitely worth a play if you have a Gamecube or PC able to run 20 year old games, a PlayStation 2 if you're in a PAL territory, or an Xbox if you're in North America.  Just know going into it that while it has the same protagonist as Sarge's Heroes and Sarge's Heroes 2, the tone of the game is diametrically opposed.

Also available on PlayStation 2 and Windows

Real time strategy seems like kind of a natural fit for the Army Men series, but it took until the end of 3DO's life to make that a reality.  3DO didn't even release the Gamecube version two and a half years after the PS2 and PC releases; Global Star handled that port after acquiring the Army Men IP in the wake of 3DO's collapse.  RTS games on console had long been attempted with several seeing releases on Nintendo 64, PlayStation, and Saturn, but Army Men RTS was one of the first that really felt "right."  Starcraft 64 was solid, but it didn't feel quite fluid enough with the controls to be on par with its PC counterpart; Army Men RTS, on the other hand, is the best console RTS in my opinion until the release of Halo Wars three and a half years later.

The game's story follows Sergeant Hawk and his Bravo Company commandos as they push across Tan lines to take out Colonel Blintz, a Green officer who defected to the Tan after being shot in the head.  The game's story makes multiple allusions to the film Apocalypse Now which itself is based on Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella, Heart of Darkness, even to point of Blintz's final line of dialogue in the game being "The horror, the horror," a direct quote from Heart of Darkness antagonist, Kurtz.  I utterly loath Heart of Darkness thanks to the insanely deep analysis of it I had to do when I took AP English IV, but I can't deny its literary value, so referencing a film based on the book definitely pleases the academic in me.

The game features a 15 mission campaign that tells the story in addition to a set of "Great Battles" which are missions designed for building large bases and longer engagements as well as "Special Operations" which are missions with some very specific objectives.  All in all, it's got a good bit of content with 23 missions over those three game modes.  If you're playing on PC, there's also a multiplayer option, although since it relied on GameSpy, you have to jump through some hoops to get that to work.  As you're building up your forces and fighting your way through the missions, you'll naturally have to keep an eye on resource management, a staple of any RTS game.  While games like Age of Empires hit you with numerous resources to manage, Army Men RTS takes a page out of Starcraft's book; your only resources here are plastic and electricity both of which can be harvested from toys strewn about the world.

Army Men RTS actually looks pretty decent for a mid budget game, and unlike most of the series, it actually hit pretty good marks on each part of my checklist.  The story is, while basic, well done to provide a context for the game's campaign.  The visuals, as I just mentioned, look good.  My only complaint there is the explosions; they're sort of a soft explosion like in the Toy Story 2 game on N64 if anyone played that instead of the more visceral explosions we saw in Army Men II and Army Men: Toys in Space.  The sound design is good with some decent even if not stunning music and the solid voice acting that we've come to expect with the Sarge's Heroes universe games.  Jim Cummings continues his performance of literally every single character in the game except for Vikki, and it's his performance, I think, that really elevates the game's sound design; the beneficial effect that just having a good voice actor can have for a game really can't be understated, and Jim Cumming's performance gives the game a light-hearted and humorous feel that fits the "toy soldiers" motif perfectly.

The biggest hurdle that RTS games on consoles always face is with control, and perhaps surprisingly give the mediocrity for which the Army Men series is known, 3DO and Global Star really nailed the controls here.  It would take until Halo Wars three and a half years and a whole console generation later and developed with a significantly larger budget for a console RTS game to surpass Army Men RTS in controls.  Deselecting units can be a little awkward, but selecting and directing your units feels completely natural, and that's the most important element of RTS control.  Rather than having to select a specific building, you just hold the R button and can use up and down on the D pad to cycle through building menus to make the units or structures you want to build.  Barbed wire fences also automatically appear connecting guard towers and fence posts as long as they're positioned properly.  A lot of the things that were either cumbersome or omitted from past console RTS games have been creatively fixed here.  RTS may not do much to shake up the typical RTS formula, but that's not necessarily a bad thing; the phrase "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" has endured for so long for a reason.

Army Men RTS, while sadly 3DO's last Army Men game, is also one of their best Army Men games.  I, personally, still prefer the tactics games on PC and the third person shooters on Nintendo 64, but as far as quality goes, RTS definitely deserves a place right beside Army Men II and Sarge's Heroes 2.  The game's PC version has been updated and made easily playable on modern machines thanks to GOG, and considering that the PlayStation 2 is the best-selling console of all time, I imagine a lot of people still have one of those, making that version an option.  I'm naturally partial to the Gamecube version given that that's the version I played growing up and is on a Nintendo platform, but I've tried all three versions, and there's not a bad choice to be had.  Whether you go PC, PS2, or Gamecube (the real gamer's choice), Army Men RTS is a game that is worth checking out whether you're a fan of the series or not.

Also available on PlayStation and PlayStation 2 as Army Men: Air Attack 2

Army Men: Air Combat - The Elite Missions continues 3DO's weird insistence on giving games different titles on different systems and, in this case, different regions.  On PlayStation, this game is called Army Men: Air Attack 2.  On PlayStation 2, it is also called Army Men: Air Attack 2, but only in North America; in Europe, it's called Army Men: Air Attack - Blade's Revenge.  Here on Gamecube, it's called Army Men: Air Combat - The Elite Missions.  I don't know why they couldn't just pick a damn title and stick with it - at the very least, keep it consistent across regions for PS2 and just call it Air Combat 2 on Gamecube - but alas, here we are with a naming scheme that would put Nintendo's winners to shame.

Army Men: Air Combat - The Elite Missions is a direct sequel to Army Men: Air Combat.  Before I play a game, I often browse other players' and critics' reviews to see what they liked and disliked so I can pay attention to that and see if I agree.  One of the things I noticed when doing that here is that - unsurprisingly - IGN is an utterly worthless source of reviews because their reviewer clearly didn't even play the damn game.  They talk about how this is "the Gamecube version" of Air Combat "on Nintendo 64."  Uhh, no.  No it's not.  It's a sequel.  Yeah, there are some similarities because 3DO was pumping these games out like Russia pumps out war crimes, but they're absolutely not the same game.  Baron von Beige, the primary antagonist in this game, didn't even appear in Air Combat.  Literally the opening cut scene introduces him.  It's like calling Star Wars: The Phantom Menace an expanded remaster of Star Wars: A New Hope.  It's just objectively wrong in every sense, and I'm honestly surprised even "6/10 too much water" IGN would have such an egregiously lazy reviewer on their payroll.  Anyway, this is why I make a point to play through every game before I review it or at the bare minimum play a good ten or twenty hours at least - it ensures I actually know what the hell I'm talking about.

Having established Green air superiority during the vents of Air Combat and Air Tactics, Tan dictator Plastro hatches a new plan to take the skies from the Green - ace pilot Baron von Beige, an obvious reference to Manfred von Richthofen, a World War I German fighter ace more commonly known as "The Red Baron" who was credited with 80 aerial kills.  Baron von Beige is the only pilot who can match Captain Blade's skill in aerial dogfighting, although Beige flies a World War I style triplane.  He also likely references Darth Vader from Star Wars as both are extremely skilled fighter pilots, both are shot down in the end of the movie/game, and both are (except for Vader's death scene) never seen or heard speaking without their masks.  Regardless of whom he does or does not reference, Baron von Beige begins relentlessly attacking Green Army positions in an attempt to draw out Captain Blade.  Blade, being a cocky Top Gun esque hot head, falls for the bait, and his entire squadron is shot down.  Over the course of the game's 20 missions, you have to rescue your team (two or three times...), attack Tan factories and installations, and eventually confront Baron von Beige in a one-on-one dogfight (minus the infinitely spawning ground units that will attack you throughout the final battle).

Visually, the chips fall about where you'd expect; PS1 looks the worst with Gamecube and PS2 looking pretty on par.  I thought the Gamecube version looked just a hair better, but it felt like the PS2 version ran just a little smoother in some places.  They're so close, though, that both of those could just be in my head.  Props to the PS1 version, though; while it looks pretty rough compared to the two 6th gen versions and doesn't run as smoothly, it looks a lot better than I expected to.  It seems like 3DO finally figured out how to use the PS1's hardware pretty well by this point.  It still doesn't look as good as some of Sony's first party games or some of the major big budget third party games on the system, but for an Army Men game on PS1, I was impressed.  Sound design is also pretty good here.  Music is solid, sound effects are pretty great, and the voice acting is good...in the context of Army Men, anyway.  It's still cheesy as hell, but that's part of the series's soul.  The most important part - the gameplay - is also solid.  I don't know if I had some settings messed up or what, but the controls felt a bit clunkier and more awkward than they should on PS2.  It controlled as fine as you could expect with a D pad on PS1, and it felt amazing to play on Gamecube, but something about the controls on PS2 just felt a little off to me, and I never could quite put my finger on why.  Regardless, though, even with the unexplainable awkwardness of the PS2 version's controls, it doesn't take too long to get used to.  This really is a pretty smooth and comfortable aerial combat game.

Army Men: Air Combat - the Elite Missions on Gamecube (or Army Men: Air Attack 2 if you're playing one of the PlayStation versions) is definitely one of the better games in the series.  I'd personally put it at #4 - below Army Men II, Army Men: Sarge's Heroes, and Army Men: Sarge's Heroes 2; but above Army Men: Air Combat/Air Attack.  I strongly recommend playing the Gamecube version if you can - between the visuals and the controls, it's definitely the best version of the three.  Failing that, go for PS2.  If, somehow, you don't have a PS2, a Gamecube, or a Wii, then PS1 is still a good option.  Despite being the obviously weakest of the three versions both mechanically and visually, it still plays surprisingly well and is absolutely worth playing if you don't have access to one of the two 6th gen versions.  The game had some bugs I noticed towards the end, but nothing that prevent me from progressing or that I found particularly irritating.  It's worth owning this game not only to have on your shelf with your other Army Men games but to play and replay occasionally; it really is a genuinely fun time.  It's one of three Army Men games on Gamecube, one of seven Army Men games on PlayStation 2, and one of ten Army Men games on PlayStation.  If you're collecting for any of those systems or for this series, make sure this one gets a spot on your shelf; it actually deserves one which is more than some of its compatriots can say.

Also available on PlayStation 2

Dragon Glide is the newest game from Australian one-man developer, Sungrand Studios, and it's part of Jerrel's new initiative to develop and release games for mobile phones running KaiOS.  If you're not familiar with KaiOS - I wasn't until Jerrel unveiled Dragon Glide - it's a Linux-based operating system for feature phones, phones that have the form factor of cell phones from the good ol' day (flip phones, slide phones, etc) and some very basic smart features.  You won't find Monopoly Go or Call of Duty Mobile here, but it has basic internet functionality and - most important for us - a quickly growing app store with relatively rudimentary games.  For most Zoomers, there's probably zero appeal here, but for Millennials and maybe some younger nostalgic Gen Xers, it harkens back to the days of Snake and Tetris on Nokia's indestructible phones.  Crucially for Sungrand, though, and the reason Jerrel is developing for KaiOS, is that these inexpensive phones are EXTREMELY popular in the developing world.  Africa and India, especially, have hundreds of millions of potential KaiOS users, and the market in those countries is growing pretty quickly.

Dragon Glide is pretty primitive by the standards of what we in the West are used to playing on phones, but considering the budget hardware KaiOS runs on, it's pretty standard.  Being Sungrand's first game on KaiOS, it's pretty simple; after all, no one's first go at anything is going to be astounding or super in depth.  You play as a dragon at the bottom of the screen, and you have to move left and right to avoid the various enemy dragons constantly flying at you while also collecting the slowly falling dragon eggs.  Collecting the dragon eggs is how you score points.  If you get hit by an enemy dragon, you lose one of your little wingman dragons, signified by "Bonus x3" in the bottom right when you have both of your dragons (this is how you start the game), "Bonus x2" when you've lost one, and "Bonus x1" when it's just your main dragon.  This isn't just a life counter; as the word "bonus" implies, it's also your point multiplier, so if you want to rack up a high score, it's crucial to keep your wingman dragons alive for as long as possible.  The music is a bit bugged on my phone - not sure if that's a bug that needs fixing or if my phone is just a weaker model - but I just turn off the music, and it plays well (that's a bummer, though, as the music is great, as is the norm for Sungrand's soundtracks).

There's no story here, and the game doesn't have an "ending" per se; you just try to chase the best high score you can get.  It's simple, it's basic, it's primitive, but it's relaxing and surprisingly charming.  I was skeptical when Jerrel first unveiled this plan and his idea for this initial game in the Sungrand Discord, but I have to admit, I'm pleasantly surprised with how the game turned out.  You can get a cheap KaiOS phone from Cricket for under $50 (I got mine for $25), and while it's probably not worth it to buy a whole second phone just for primitive KaiOS games, it is cool to see the kind of games that those not privileged with having been born in a wealthy nation play.  We - or at least I - often take for granted the luxuries of living in a disgustingly rich nation like the United States, Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany, etc., so it's good, I think, to humble ourselves by seeing how most of the world lives.  Usually that means seeing and contemplating how people can live in cripplingly dehumanizing poverty, but sometimes it's as simple as playing a primitive game on a phone that costs less than I spend on a date.  Dragon Glide isn't revolutionary, and it's not setting a milestone for mobile gaming - not even KaiOS mobile gaming - but it's pretty cool for Sungrand's first KaiOS release, and seeing how this turned out and hearing what other games he has planned for KaiOS makes me quite interested to see how his future projects turn out,s and I think that he's making a pretty wise business move by branching into KaiOS to get some of the market in the developing world.  Take my rating here for what it is; I make a point to judge games with their hardware in mind, so keep in mind that I'm not going to hold a KaiOS game to the same standards to which I'd hold an Android of iOS game.

Also available on PlayStation

​I went into Portal Runner on the PlayStation 2 with extremely low expectations.  I found the Game Boy Color game to be dreadful, and while I know a PS2 game and GBC game are, by default, a far cry from one another, I figured “If the Game Boy Color game screws up what should be a winning formula for me - platforming - then what will this screw up?”  Fortunately, though, what I got was the opposite of what I expected.  It’s not the best game in the series or anything, but it’s genuinely fun and significantly better than I expected it to be.

Unlike the other Army Men games on PlayStation platforms, this isn’t a strict third person shooter.  You do shoot - Vikki has a bow - but it’s an adventure platformer first and foremost.  Yeah, there was a good bit of platforming in Sarge’s Heroes, but nothing like this.  In those games, it was a feature that livened things up between bouts of combat; here, it’s the focus whereas combat is the feature that livens things up.  Whereas the platforming in Sarge’s Heroes felt pretty clunky, it’s thankfully pretty smooth here.  It’s no Crash Bandicoot or Mario, but it’s good for a series that epitomizes mediocrity.  The shooting is pretty solid too; there’s a very strong auto aim that, while it struggles a little with the Y axis aiming, makes X axis aiming something you barely have to do; shoot anywhere in a 45 degree arc, and you’ll probably hit it.  That’s not to say there’s no manual aiming; there is, and you’ll have to use it now and then both for puzzles and to hit distant enemies.  It’s just not how most of your shooting will be done as was the case in Sarge’s Heroes.  Speaking of the puzzles, they’re not bad.  They’re pretty rudimentary - no Resident Evil puzzles here - but they are, for the most part, interesting enough that I didn’t get bored with them.  ​

Also available on PlayStation and Nintendo 64

Army Men: Sarge's Heroes 2 might well be the best game in the series.  I'm partial to Army Men II, but unless one of the few later releases that I haven't played in years is better than I remember, Sarge's Heroes 2 is probably the best game from an objective standpoint.  Now, if you go on Metacritic or Gamespot or similar sites, you'll see the exact opposite; a lot of those sites say that Sarge's Heroes 2 is worse than the original game.  I firmly disagree with that, and I think that critics are generally wrong about Army Men, at least from an experience standpoint.  The games may be rough visually and have unfair difficulty curves more often than not, but they're dumb fun, and that's an oft underestimated part of the video game experience.

Sarge's Heroes 2 is a direct sequel to the first Sarge's Heroes.  After the events of the first game, General Plastro is trapped in the real world where he was eventually plastered, or frozen in place as an actual toy soldier due to staying in the real world for too long.  After a series of military defeats in Plastro's absences, Colonel Grimm convinces the acting Tan commander, Field Marshal Tannenburg, agrees to an armistice.  Unbeknownst to either Grimm or Tannenburg, Bridget Blue, a spy from the Blue nation, has an anti-plastrification serum developed by Grey scientist Dr. Madd (despite being from a different universe, this is the same - or at least a parallel version of - the "mad Grey scientist" from Army Men II) and revives Plastro.  After rebuilding his forces at a toy store, Plastro bursts through a portal and assaults the peace treaty signing event, thus ensuring that the war between Green and Tan would continue.  Most people - at least fellow Army Men fans I've discussed the game with - seem to like the lighter story here more than the previous game's story with its overt mention of death rays and torture.  I, on the other hand, usually prefer darker stories, so while I prefer this game over the first one, I found the previous game's story to be a little more interesting.  That's just personal preference, though, not a point for or against either game.

In the first Sarge's Heroes, the four versions were split into two "build" of the game but were relatively identical to one another outside of graphical quality.  That's largely the same here, but not exactly.  The Nintendo 64 version of the game came out first, a few months prior to the PlayStation version's release, but while they have identical stories, the PlayStation version was actually built from the ground up separately from the N64 version.  When the PlayStation 2 version came out a year later, rather than being based on the PS1 version, 3DO took the N64 version and adapted and improved it for the PS2 release.  That's probably a good thing, too, as the PS1 version is by far the worst looking of the three and actually looks worse in my opinion than Sarge's Heroes did on the system.  There are some exclusive features to each version, as well.  The N64 version gets an exclusive level not present in the PS1 or PS2 versions.  The PS2 version gets drastically improved visuals and, in some cases, completely redone models.  The PS1 version gets...disappointment.  That's all it gets.  Jokes aside, though, there are four weapons and six enemies that only appear in the PS1 version as well as one enemy that appears in the N64 and PS2 versions but not in the PS1 version.  Most noteworthy here, to me at least, is that 3DO didn't make the same mistake with the 6th gen release of Sarge's Heroes 2 that did with Sarge's Heroes.  Sarge's Heroes on Dreamcast, like the PS2 version of Sarge's Heroes 2, was based on the Nintendo 64 version.  With the first game, however, that included the lack of FMV cut scenes despite the Dreamcast's GD-ROM format having more than enough space for the FMV scenes.  With Sarge's Heroes 2, however, the PlayStation 2 is a truly definitive version (minus the one N64 exclusive level and a few PS1 exclusive weapons and enemies, but those are minor details); not only have the PS1 cut scenes been included in the PS2 port, but they've been remastered to look much better and run much smoother in addition to running at a higher resolution.  It really makes me wish even more that Sarge's Heroes on Dreamcast had been given the same treatment.

In terms of performance, the versions rank just like you'd expect; PS1 had the most instances of slowdown in my experience, with N64 suffering from some slowdown as well but not quite to the same degree, and the PS2 version winning hands down with very little slowdown and drastically improved visuals.  I do have one grip with the PS2 visuals, and this is completely subjective - the zombies outside of Dr. Madd's castle don't look as cool.  They definitely look more like zombies, but that honestly takes part of it's charm; in the 5th gen versions of the game, they look like they do in Army Men II and Toys in Space - shambling army men with limbs of all different colors.  You can see some color variation on PS2, but they look too much like actual toy zombies and not enough like Army Men zombies for my taste.  As I said, though, that's definitely a personal taste issue, not a knock against the game.  As far as music goes, the Sarge's Heroes sub-series is 2-2; the music is fantastic and even better than it was in the previous game.

I may not have like the story in Sarge's Heroes 2 quite as much as I like that in the previous game, but the missions in Sarge's Heroes 2 win hands down.  You spend a lot of time in the real world in this game whereas it was pretty scarce in the previous one, and that is definitely to the game's benefit.  The most memorable and iconic mission in the whole game in my opinion is the refrigerator level.  You have to climb your way up inside this fridge, fighting Tan soldiers along the way, while you search for and destroy cans of deplastrification spray.  It's a pretty short level, but that's true of most levels in the game; only one level took me more than ten minutes to complete (excluding deaths and restarts), and that only took 12 minutes with most missions averaging around 5 or 6 minutes once I knew what I was doing.  That's not a bad thing, though; one of my biggest complaints with the previous game was that the increasingly long levels added difficulty through an obnoxious method with the lack of checkpoints mid-level.  There are still no checkpoints in the level here, but with levels that take less time to complete fully here than it takes to reach a checkpoint one-third of the way through some of Sarge's Heroes's later levels, that's not too bad; even if you get killed at the very end of the level, you've only lost five or six minutes, not ten or twenty.

For me, there are few games quite as nostalgic as Army Men: Sarge's Heroes 2.  I used to play this for hours on my Nintendo 64 with friends when I was in elementary school.  I even had action figures of Sergeant Hawk and General Plastro when I was a kid.  It may not look or play quite as brilliantly as it does in my childhood memories, but that doesn't mean it's not a genuinely good game.  The auto aim is a little more irritating and less reliable than in the previous game, and at least on PlayStation, it doesn't look quite as good as the previous game, but the visuals saw a bit of an improvement on Nintendo 64, and the PlayStation 2 version truly looks like it's a generation ahead whereas the Dreamcast version of the previous game looked markedly better but only barely a "generational" leap if at all.  Whether its the local deathmatch multiplayer or the cheesy but fun as hell single player, Sarge's Heroes 2 is definitely a game you need to play.  If you collect for Nintendo 64, this one is absolutely mandatory, especially if you can get the green cartridge.  If you collect for PlayStation, you should snag this one just because there are so many Army Men games on the console, and they look great on a shelf next to one another.  If you collect for PlayStation 2, there are still five Army Men games on PS2 - six if you count Portal Runner - but I wouldn't say it's as much of a collection must-have as it is for PS1 or N64, although the PS2 version is definitely the definitive way to play the game.  Whatever retro console you prefer, give this game a play.

Also available on PlayStation and Windows (under the title Air Attack)

Also available on Nintendo 64, PlayStation, and Windows

Army Men: Air Tactics was my first introduction to airborne Army Men growing up.  As a kid, my mom got me this four-pack CD-ROM set from Sam's with Army Men, Army Men II, Army Men: Toys in Space, and Army Men: Air Tactics.  I always spent most of my time playing Army Men II and Army Men: Toys in Space, but I do remember Air Tactics fondly.  Unfortunately, it was a lot easier to play 20 years ago.  I genuinely spent three or four hours finding it online (thank you, www.myabandonware.com), fiddling with the compatibility settings, giving up entirely on getting it to work on Windows 11, teaching myself how to set up a virtual machine, finding an ISO and CD key for Windows 95, installing that, and THEN installing Air Tactics on the virtual machine.  A game designed for Windows 95 just does not like Windows 11.  Was it worth all that effort?  Ehh....maybe?

The Army Men "Air" games have an exceptionally convoluted history as far as naming goes, so to avoid the confusion I had in one of the Army Men Discord servers, I'll try to explain it all here.  The first Air game released which also introduce Captain William Blade as a Green protagonist was Army Men: Air Combat on PlayStation in late 1999.  Then in March, 2000, Army Men: Air Tactics releases on Windows.  In July, 2000, Air Attack is released on Nintendo 64 but under the title of Army Men: Air Combat; a Game Boy Color game with the same title would be released in November of 2000.  Also in November of 2000, Army Men: Air Attack 2 would release on PlayStation.  Then in March, 2001, Air Attack 2 released on PlayStation 2 but would inexplicably have the title changed to Army Men: Air Attack - Blade's Revenge in Europe, but only for the PlayStation 2 version; the PlayStation 1 version is still called Army Men: Air Attack 2 in Europe.  Later that year in June, 2001, Army Men: Air Attack would release on Windows (it did not carry the Air Combat title; for some reason, that was just for Nintendo).  Lastly, in March of 2003, Air Attack 2 released on Gamecube with the title Army Men: Air Combat - The Elite Missions.  So, as you can see, it's a confusing release history.  The tl;dr is that Air Attack/Air Combat came first, and they're the same game; then came Air Tactics; then came Air Attack 2/Blade's Revenge/The Elite Missions which are all the same game.  Why they couldn't just pick one title and stick with it across regions and console manufacturers, I don't know, but it is what it is.

Air Tactics isn't a 3D game like Air Attack; instead, it uses a modified version of the Army Men II engine to produce a 2D overhead view game.  While you normally think of helicopter combat as taking place in a three-dimensional space - and it does, in a way - the 2D perspective works well here.  I guess it's more accurate to call it a sort of pseudo-2.5D because you do move along the Z axis, but only in certain places that have ramp-like environmental features, and only up to a certain height; basically, you maintain a static hover above the ground, so the only way to "ascend" is to go somewhere with a gradually increasing elevation.  Like in Air Combat, you follow Captain William Blade of Alpha Wolf Squadron.  Most of his missions are a support role for Sergeant Hawk, but you do get to take on some pretty fierce Tan opposition as you're ferrying Hawk and his men around or softening up a beachhead for an assault.  The story revolves around the Green Army's attempt to establish and maintain air supremacy and stop the Tan from developing some kind of chemical weapon of mass destruction.

Visually, the game is pretty much identical to Army Men II.  Some elements here and there look a touch improved, but overall, it's basically Army Men II with a helicopter.  The visuals are honestly the highlight of the game; this era of advanced 2D in lieu of primitive 3D graphics is sorely underappreciated in my opinion.  The sound design is...well, I honestly have no idea.  Despite the fact that the sound worked normally on the desktop of my Windows 95 virtual machine, nothing I did made the sound work in game.  From what I can remember from playing it over 20 years ago, it sounded great, but that could be the rose tinted headphones talking.  What I can definitely speak to is the control, and it's not great.  The helicopter feels SUPER floaty and imprecise with its controls.  Granted, I'm using a modern mouse instead of an old school trackball this game would have been designed to use, so the oversensitivity of my mouse could be affected me here as it did in Army Men II and Army Men: Toys in Space, although considering that most reviews I've read also lament the controls - "driving a car on a field of Crisco," I believe, is how IGN's reviewer worded - I'm inclined to believe that the controls really are just bad.  What I know for a fact isn't a problem caused by my modern mouse, though, is the hit detection.  It was seemingly random whether my shots would hit a Tan soldier or harmlessly hit the area beside his feet.  There would be bullets you can clearly see hitting him - bullet pixel on body pixel contact - but no damage, and then sometimes a bullet would clearly miss him, but you'd still see flakes of Tan plastic break off as he takes damage.  No rhyme or reason whatsoever.

Despite the horrific controls, the garbage hit detection, and the inexplicably absent sound during my playthrough, I have to admit that I did enjoy revisiting Air Tactics.  It's definitely not what I'd call a high point for the series, but it's also not Major Malfunction, so it's at least not the worst game in the series.  If you want to give this one a play these days, good luck; you'll either need a computer running Windows XP or earlier - maybe Vista at the absolute newest - or a virtual machine running ideally Windows 95 or Windows 98.  I know that for most tech savvy people, virtual machines or dual boot PCs are no big deal, but it was a pain in the ass to teach myself how to set one up for literally the sole purpose of playing this one game.  Do I regret that massive time investment?  Not even a little; no Army Men game left behind.  Would I recommend anyone else who doesn't already know how to set up a virtual machine go through the hassle just to play this game?  Absolutely not.