Also available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Windows 2023’s Modern Warfare III is a somewhat controversial entry in the series among fans. It concludes the Modern Warfare reboot trilogy (assuming they don’t make it a tetralogy), but a lot of us felt there was a lot left to be desired. It’s not so much that it does a lot wrong, per se, but there also isn’t a great deal that it does particularly right. It’s probably the most okay Call of Duty in recent years. Activision initially announced that 2023 wouldn’t be getting a new Call of Duty game. Honestly, they should have stuck with that as Modern Warfare III just feels rushed all around. The campaign, my main focus, saw a steep drop in writing quality. Again, it’s not bad, but it’s definitely not good. It’s just meh. This is the most disappointed I’ve been in a main series Call of Duty campaign since Ghosts. Truthfully, it’s probably my third least second least favorite campaign of the massive series behind only Ghosts and Call of Duty 3. That’s not to say the campaign does nothing right. There are a few “Open Combat” missions that give you a set of objectives in a large non-linear map, and those are a lot of fun. I definitely hope those come back in future entries. That’s honestly all the campaign does especially right, though, and those are only like a third of the campaign; the rest of the missions are traditional linear missions. As for the multiplayer, it’s Call of Duty multiplayer. It hardly ever changes in any meaningful way. This one, though, does have some disappointing aspects that point to lazy development (or, more likely, a horrendously rushed deadline from Activision executives). There are no original maps; the only maps you have to play on are remastered maps with most being from the 2009 Modern Warfare 2. All of this starts to make sense when you consider that Sledgehammer only had a year and a half to make this game - half the normal Call of Duty development time. According to some reports I’ve seen floating around, part of the reason that it feels more like an expansion to Modern Warfare 2 is because that’s exactly what it was supposed to be; apparently even the development team thought they were working on a MW2 expansion until pretty far into development when they were told it was going to be a full release. Modern Warfare 3 is, all around, a bit of a shit show. It’s not a bad game, but it’s a bad sequel, and it’s a rip off to the consumer to charge $70 for what should have been a $30 or $40 expansion. The game is fun, but it’s just not what fans deserved and not what would justify the price it commands. Hopefully Microsoft will bring to Activision the kind of quality control they’ve brought to Bethesda (although you can’t take the bugs out of Bugthesda) because this is Activision bullshit at its most egregious. I had high hopes with how impressed I was with the past few Call of Duty entries, but Modern Warfare 3 fails to live up to any of my expectations. My Rating - CMy first introduction to Insomniac’s Spiderman games wasn’t until I got the version of Miles Morales on PS5 that included the PS5 remaster of the PS4 game. I’m not a fan of Marvel or superhero stuff in general, so it was always a “eh, I’ll play it eventually” on PS4. When I did finally play it, though, I was immediately sucked in and felt compelled to 100% both Spiderman and Miles Morales. When Spiderman 2 was announced, I knew it would be an immediate pre-order; with how good the two previous games were, I knew I’d have to play this one at or near launch. One of the coolest parts about this sequel is that you’ve got two protagonists; you switch between playing as Peter Parker and Miles Morales over the course of the game’s main story. They each have their own unique powers and skill trees in addition to a shared skill tree. There are also side quests that are unique to each character, although most side objectives can be completed by either. As someone who’s never read a single Marvel comic, cares absolutely nothing for the MCU, and had no experience with Spiderman since the Toby McGuire movies until these games, I absolutely loved the story of the game. I don’t know how much was common to the source material and how much was creative liberty, but it was enthralling regardless. The combat feels very familiar but with the changes you’d expect from a sequel; there’s not as much emphasis on stealth this time outside of a couple missions, and you get an opportunity to parry enemy attacks and throw them off balance in addition to simply dodging out of the way. There are also new abilities and gadgets to make beating up bad guys more entertaining. The boss battles, too, felt more dramatic and in a couple of instances more challenging than in the previous games. You still have the option of stealth in a lot of cases, and with some enemies - which appear in a greater variety here than in the first game - that’s the smarter way to approach some fights. There are also a few missions where you play as MJ with a stun gun instead of superpowers. A lot of folks online seem to despise the MJ missions, but I, personally, loved them. They broke up the flow of the missions in a way that added variety but didn’t break the feel of the game. There are two visual modes to choose from here - Fidelity and Performance. Fidelity keeps the traditional 30 fps cap in favor of dynamic resolution that sticks pretty close to 2160p as well as impressive shadow effects and ray tracing. Performance - my preferred way to play - ups the cap to 60 fps with very few dips below that and even then, only a few frames. To maintain this, the resolution drops from 2160p to 1440p, but ray tracing is still present in Performance albeit reduced from Fidelity. I consider Spiderman 2 to be a perfect sequel. The story is better than the first game and on par with Miles Morales in my opinion, and the improvements to the Performance visual mode are fantastic. Combat is improved and diversified, and having two and a half protagonists to play as (I’m counting MJ as a half because of how small a percentage of the game you play as her) ensures that you never get stuck in a rut. A massive variety to suits keeps cosmetics interesting, and the array of side missions and mini-game sequences give players a lot to do aside from the main missions. My Rating - SAlso available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Windows Devil in Me is the most recent of the Dark Pictures Anthology games and the end of their “season one” games. It actually introduces some minor gameplay changes over the previous three Dark Pictures Anthology games, but it’s still pretty much the same general gameplay as the others. That’s not necessarily a bad thing - “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” after all - but playing them back to back to back does start to feel a bit stale despite having totally different stories, settings, and characters. Still, though, Devil in Me offers an interesting story with some really compelling choices the player has to make. It’s the story I found least interesting of the Dark Pictures Anthology games, but it’s got the choices that left me second guessing myself the most. You play as the film crew for a small production studio that’s making a TV series documentary episode about H. H. Holmes, often considered to be America’s first major serial killer. During a meeting to watch a cut of the episode, Charles, the owner of the studio, gets a phone call from a mysterious man who claims to have inherited from his uncle a recreation of Holmes’s infamous “murder castle” and a lot of original Holmes artifacts. Charles convinces the other four members of his team to spend the weekend at the man’s island hotel and shoot new footage to really improve the episode. When they get there, though, things go from odd to weird to downright suspicious when a figure dressed as Holmes starts appearing. The big gameplay change here is that each character has an equipment ability that only that character can use. Charles can use a card to unlock drawers, Jamie can fix electrical equipment, Erin has a gizmo to hear distant sounds and conversations, etc. If a character dies too early, you may not be able to use the equipment needed to perform some task later on which could put other characters in peril. It’s a fantastic element that wasn’t present in the other games, but it unfortunately isn’t enough to keep the game itself feeling fresh. I can’t even put my finger on what specifically is holding it back. It looks great. Voice acting is fine. The story itself is interesting, and the premise’s roots in the 1893 World’s Fair is fascinating to an American history teacher like me. I guess the kicker for me is that there’s nothing supernatural about this story unlike the others, and the characters are less interesting to me than in the other three games. On paper, this should be a smash hit, but in execution, it just feels so-so. Devil in Me wasn’t exactly a high note to end the first season of the Dark Pictures Anthology on, but by no means does that make it a bad game; it’s just the least good of the four. If it were the first Dark Pictures Anthology game you played, you’d probably leave with a much better opinion of it than I have. I’m glad I played it, I’m glad it’s on my PS5 shelf, and I can readily recommend it to those who enjoy choice-driven horror games and haven’t played this one before, but I’ll definitely not be going back to this for another playthrough any time soon if at all. My Rating - BAlso available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Windows House of Ashes is the third game in Supermassive’s Dark Pictures Anthology series. It plays almost exactly like Until Dawn, Man in Medan, and Little Hope before it. It does make a couple of changes to the gameplay that makes it feel distinct from the previous two games, but it’s still solidly Dark Pictures Anthology. House of Ashes takes place in 2003 in US occupied Iraq. After the fall of Baghdad and the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s army, the United States Marine Corps is combing the country in search of Saddam’s mythical chemical weapons that President Bush SWORE to the American people and to the world existed. Thinking that his fancy satellite system found an underground silo, Colonel Cucksworth or whatever his name is orders a Marine battle group to attack the village above the suspected silo and secure the weapons. After a firefight with the remnants of Saddam’s Republican Guard, it turns out that it wasn’t a silo but a massive subterranean ruin that the satellite detected, and now two US Marines, two CIA agents, and an Iraqi soldier are trapped there. I’m rather torn on House of Ashes. On the one hand, the game is steeped in ancient Sumerian mythology, and as a history teacher, I absolutely love that. I also love the references to the political issues surrounding the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. On the other hand, having battle hardened soldiers be the protagonists of a horror game can be tough to pull off. It’s certainly not impossible, but it takes some careful world building and atmosphere maintenance to keep it scary knowing that you’re an elite trained soldier with an automatic assault rifle. That aspect does, however, introduce the mild gameplay change - there are numerous sequences where time slows and you have to aim the crosshair over an enemy to attack. Failing that can, like the regular quick time events, cause characters to die. It’s a nice change to the standard formula, but it doesn’t quite revolutionize the experience. House of Ashes is a low point for Supermassive’s games in my opinion, but don’t take that to mean that it’s a bad game. I still enjoyed it quite a bit, but I must confess that it dragged a bit for me. I wouldn’t say I had to force myself to finish it, but it didn’t grasp me like Man in Medan or Little Hope did. It’s definitely worth a playthrough, but I’m not sure if I’ll do any subsequent playthroughs of this one. My Rating - BAlso available on Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Windows If you’ve played any games by Supermassive, known most for their incredible work on Until Dawn, then you know basically how all of the games in their Dark Pictures Anthology series work. I played Man in Medan last October for Halloween, but I’ve since collected the other three games in the series, so this year, I decided I’d go through the remaining three starting with Little Hope. Little Hope takes place in the northeastern ghost town of Little Hope, long abandoned after the closure of the textile factory that kept the town’s economy afloat. As is hinted at in the beginning and revealed bit by bit over the course of the game, the town has a dark history relating to witchcraft and the occult. You play as a group of five people - a college professor and his four students - as you find yourselves stranded in Little Hope after a bus crash. As you try to survive the night and the pursuit of supernatural creatures, you piece together the mystery of the strange goings on in the abandoned town. Its strongly character driven and choice based approach isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea when it comes to horror, but it perfectly fits what I look for in a horror experience. The game’s atmosphere and general aesthetic is very reminiscent of Silent Hill as both towns are abandoned, haunted by supernatural monsters and bad memories, and blanketed in a thick layer of eerie fog. The character models are absolutely fantastic, and the game’s sound design adds to the creepy ambiance and the overall vibe of the experience. Compared to the previous Dark Pictures Anthology game, Man in Medan, I found the environment of the town to be a bit less ensnaring than the abandoned ship and the characters less interesting, but the overall story and ending was better in my opinion. If you want a thrilling horror experience like Dino Crisis or Resident Evil 4, then Little Hope probably isn’t for you. If you liked TellTale’s games, though, especially their Walking Dead games, then this is definitely going to appeal to you. I adore Supermassive’s games, even the ones that most critics are lukewarm on, and this is one of those lukewarm ones; it’s got a 71 on Metacritic. It’s definitely not a masterpiece, but I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish and have no problem recommending it to others. My Rating - AAlso available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Windows Supermassive Games is a studio of which I'm quite fond. Until Dawn is one of my favorite horror games because of its intensely character and choice driven cinematic focus matched only by TellTale's games. Their Dark Pictures Anthology tetralogy was met with mixed reviews although I enjoyed it, but they broke free from that label with The Quarry in an attempt to recapture the magic of Until Dawn. Did they succeed? Well...yes and no. Critics have been pretty hard on The Quarry, but I quite enjoyed the game. The character models are extremely impressive, and the voice acting and sound design is excellent. I enjoyed the story, although it did feel a lot like "Until Dawn again." On the one hand, that's not necessarily a bad thing if you haven't played Until Dawn, but it can take a bit of the wind out of your sails if you have played Until Dawn. You play as some camp counselors on the night after the deep-in-the-woods camp ends. Sort of Friday 13th vibes minus the serial killer. Being a Supermassive game, the antagonist is obviously something supernatural, not just a serial killer, and as is par for the course for their games, your choices and response to quick time events determines which characters live, which characters die, and how the story ends. The only real negative about the game is that the camera is complete garbage in a few places. Most of the time, it's perfectly fine, but there are a few angles where the camera adamantly refuses to cooperate. The quick time events are also much simpler here than in past games which makes them a little less tense. The story takes its sweet time really picking up after a prologue, but I personally didn't mind the slow build-up of tension. There are a few minor glitches here and there, and the camera can be obnoxious, but overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the game. The models look fantastic, the story is fairly generic but nonetheless enjoyable, and the characters are a fun cast. It's not quite as good as Until Dawn, but it's probably my second favorite Supermassive game. My Rating - AGears of War was, alongside Halo and Forza, part of the holy trinity of Xbox IPs in the mid to late 2000s. It brought a level of visceral violence to which most gamers weren’t accustomed, and it coupled it with solid voice acting and an interesting storyline even if the world was almost completely desaturated. Gears of War started off rad, and Gears of War 2 kicked things into high gear. When Gears of War 3 dropped in 2011, Xbox fans were stoked. Gears of War 3 is a direct sequel picking up after the events of the second game, and Epic really put some real emphasis on character and world development here. The fact that a game about roided up dudebros with chainsaw machine guns can make me cry is all you need to know about the writing and voice performance in Gears 3. The lore is really moved along in a meaningful way here, and while it serves as the end to this particular Gears saga, it thankfully left the door open to future installments, thus Gears 4 and 5. Visually, Gears of War 3 takes the foundation of the previous two games and applies further polish and refinement. It’s not as big a graphical leap as Halo 3 to Halo 4, but it looks impressive nonetheless. As with the previous two games, the sound design is fantastic in terms of music, combat sound effects, and voice acting. No one can mistake the sound of a Lancer’s chainsaw revving up or the sound of a Boomer’s shouting “BOOM!” before firing a grenade at you. The addition of the Retro Lancer’s bayonet is my favorite new weapon in Gears 3. Gears of War 3 was initially expected to be the end of a series, but it thankfully ended up being more of a turning point than an end. The story and character development arguably peaked for the series with Gears of War 3, but whether Gears 3 is your favorite or if you prefer Gears 5, this game is absolutely worth dusting off your Xbox 360 or popping that old disc into your Xbox Series X. It’s an exceptional sci-fi war shooter that reinforces the idea that a war shooter doesn’t have to be first person to be badass. My Rating - AActivision used to have this habit of trying to include Call of Duty releases for weaker hardware. Call of Duty 3 was full on multigen, Call of Duty 4 got releases on Wii and DS (although the latter was a totally different game), and Call of Duty: World at War got the same treatment with a Wii port, a different DS version, and now a PS2 side game called World at War - Final Fronts. This is basically the precursor to the Vita side game, Call of Duty: Black Ops - Declassified. Fortunately, Final Fronts isn’t as bad as Declassified, but it still leaves you feeling like it was a bit of a fumble. Like the main World at War on PC, PS3, 360, and Wii, Final Fronts has you fighting across different theaters of World War II. Unfortunately, it’s not just the visuals that took a big hit being on the PlayStation 2; it already felt like the B team did the writing for World at War, and Final Fronts’s script must have gotten the new hires’ unpaid interns. It’s just bland and uninspired, like eggs fried over hard with no salt or pepper; it’s not actively bad, but it’s definitely not especially good. If anything, the visuals actually are the highlight of the game as they look pretty impressive for the PlayStation 2. The controls are a bit clunky - odd considering that the PS2 controller is basically the PS3 controller plus a wire and minus the gyro controls - but they’re serviceable. World at War - Final Fronts has no multiplayer whatsoever despite the fact that the PS2 was capable of online play as well as LAN plan. That exclusion isn’t terribly surprising as relatively few games outside of Dreamcast and Xbox featured online play that generation, but the absence of any local multiplayer is rather disappointing considering that local multiplayer with AI bots was pretty commonplace on PS2 and its competitors. In fairness, though, by 2008, the world had moved on to favoring online multiplayer, and the AI bot multiplayer features had largely died off. It’s a bummer, but it’s not wholly unexpected. Call of Duty: World at War - Final Fronts is a cool piece of Call of Duty history in that it was an attempt to cater to the PS2 audience two years after its successor came out. Granted, the PS2 had some lingering third party support long into the PS3’s lifespan, but still, most of that was from sports games and shovelware; this was a major staple IP. It’s a shame, then, that it’s such a lackluster game. I definitely wouldn’t call it the worst game in the Call of Duty series - that dubious title goes to Black Ops - Declassified on Vita - but it probably is the second worst game in the series. It’s worth a play if you’re a World War II enthusiast, and it’s worth a purchase if you’re a PlayStation 2 enthusiast, but don’t go in expecting a blockbuster game. My Rating - D |
I'm a teacher.And I like to play video games. I like to collect video games. I like to talk about video games, and I like to write about video games. During the day, I teach high school history; during the night, I spend my spare time gaming. Then I write about it. Archives
April 2024
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