Welcome to a regular Video Game Round-Up! You know how this works now, but this may seem either late (which it technically is because I had to make space for the two Specials) or very early (because you read those two Specials, and it was less than a week since the last one came out), but that’s okay. It’s here, and it’s chock full of games!
If you read my second Special, Video Games I’m Most Excited About in 2020, you will have seen that two of the games on that list were Final Fantasy VII Remake and Marvel’s Avengers, which I said were coming on 3 March and 15 May respectively. Not two days after that went live, Square Enix announced both those games had been delayed, to 10 April and 4 September (!) respectively. And then, three days later, my Cyberpunk 2077 was delayed 5 months, from 16 April to 17 September.
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!
*koff*
Before we get to the games, a quick word about Apple Arcade: I played four games available through this service, and I’ll likely play even more in the coming months (years?), so I figured I should quickly explain it. It’s basically a monthly subscription service that allows you to download/play as many games available on the service as you want. Even better, none of these games have any microtransactions. Most of them are complete games with beginnings, middles, and ends (but not all, alas). It’s a fairly inexpensive service, and you can include up to three other “family members” on one subscription.
Now, on to the games!
LEGO Dimensions (PS4) - We’ve had a bunch of unopen Dimensions sets that we bought a long time ago from various places around the world, and we finally sat down to build them. None of them come with instructions except in-game (I guess I could have found them online, but where’s the fun in that?), so we finally built six sets from the Teen Titans Go, Powerpuff Girls, Adventure Time, and Beetlejuice universes... and then didn’t actually play the game. The building took so much time, that by the time we were ready to play... we were tired already. And yes, this was the only LEGO game we “played” this month, even though we had grand plans to play many more, mostly because another game ended up taking all our couch co-op time.
Guacamelee (Switch) - I 100%-ed the game, baby! And I’m super happy I did, because the best ending was hidden behind that 100%. Getting that 100% meant finding every chest, completing every side mission, gold medaling every Infierno challenge (so hard!), and finding all six Orbs. Some of these things are really quite hard (there’s an Orb at the top of the Tule Tree which nearly made me murder the Switch), but it felt really good when I did them all. Go play this!
Overcooked (Switch) - WHO IN THE SEVEN HELLS DESIGNED THESE KITCHENS?!?!
This was the game that took up all our couch co-op time, and I hates it. Well, that’s not true; I actually like it quite a lot. BUT I HATES IT.
It is hilarious to play this game, especially as the kitchens become more and more ridiculous. You and your friends will laugh uproariously at the new and exciting ways you now have to mess up. And you will mess up. I had to re-jigger my gaming brain for this game. My gaming brain is usually in “I must defeat this to progress” mode, and while that statement is still true for this game (you need a certain number of stars to unlock new levels, and you can only get more stars by completing more orders and not mess up as much in each level), it is no longer true to enjoy myself. I originally found myself getting angry and frustrated when we messed up and didn’t immediately get the three stars our first time out in a level. But then I realized the fun in this game is in the repetition, and in getting better, and yes, even in the hilarious ways we mess up. So now, my gaming brain is in “just play it and have fun” mode... for this game, at least.
Star Wars Battlefront II (PS4) - After finishing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, I went back to the other Star Wars game I had started. I had been stuck on the same section for weeks, so I dropped the difficulty level down, and finished the single-player mode and Iden Versio’s story, including the Resurrection DLC (that DLC answered some questions I’d had since I first watched The Force Awakens, so yay for the game, boo for the movie)! I also bought the LEGO set with Iden Versio and Inferno Squad because why not.
I liked the story quite a bit, even if it wasn’t what was promised on the tin. The marketing materials told us we were finally going to play as an Imperial trooper through the war of the original trilogy, which, yes, is where this game started. But not three or four missions in, Iden Versio switches sides and joins the rebels. That didn’t make the story not good, it just made it not as original. I also read that some people had problems with the levels in which you don’t play as Iden (there are four levels where you play as Luke, Leia, Han, and Lando, respectively), but I enjoyed them quite a bit, especially as I got play around with different loadouts and special skills.
This was a fun campaign, but quite short. This and Fallen Order have made me want more Star Wars single-player games as soon as possible. I have Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast waiting for me on PS4, which I’m looking forward to, but I also want Star Wars single-player games that have nothing to do with Jedis (or Sith). I want bounty hunters and on-the-ground soldiers who never even meet a Force-user. Basically, I want Star Wars 1313 and Ragtag. Get on that, EA!
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch) - Remember this game? I beat this like two years ago, so why am I playing it again? Because when I visited my family in November/December, my nephew showed me how to use the Amiibos properly in this game (yes, I am an old). So I spent about a week trying to get all of the special weapons, armor, and costumes that various Amiibos unlock. And that’s it. I didn’t do anything else, like trying to tame the Lord of the Mountain or finding more Korok seeds. I just unlocked a bunch of armor that looks nice, but I don’t need.
Return of the Obra Dinn (Switch) - Cast your minds back to the beginning of the year, when I first started playing this game on PC. I did not finish it then (though I got about a third of the way through), so I did the very clever thing of buying the game again (you’re welcome, Lucas Pope), but on Switch this time, so I can take it with me and play it on the go. And hey, guess what? I totally finished it! This is a really, really good game, and you should all play it. The gameplay is pure detective. You have to pay attention to what people say, to the tableaus presented, and use your deductive reasoning to figure everything out. I wish I could delete the game from my brain so I could play it again from scratch.
Outer Wilds (PS4) - My fifth best game of 2019, Outer Wilds is a bittersweet puzzle/detective game in which the solar system ends every 22 minutes. It’s an open-world (open-star system, actually), Myst-like game that has zero combat. The hardest thing you have to do is learn how to fly the dang spaceship (which I admit I am terrible at). Like Return of the Obra Dinn, this game will tax your deductive and reasoning skills more than anything else (though your hand-eye coordination will also have to be top-notch to get the spaceship going the way you want it to) as you discover the history of your star system, what happened to the astronauts before you, and why your star keeps going supernova right before time resets and you find yourself back on your planet with all your memories intact.
What the Golf? (iPhone) - The first Apple Arcade game I played, and my favorite of the bunch. I talked about it in my Best of 2019, where I said it was maybe the second best golf game of all time after Golf Story (Switch). Basically, you have to get various items (golf balls, clubs, golfers, cars, footballs, spiders, etc.) to flags at the end of the level. They’re quick and fun levels, and have multiple difficulty levels, and I like being able to just play it on the go.
Sayonara Wild Hearts (iPhone) - Another Apple Arcade game, this one is available on various other platforms as well, including PC and Switch. It’s an endless runner/rhythm game with an excellent soundtrack and an amazing art style, and a pretty interesting story. It’s a very short game, though, and the replayability comes from trying to beat your records on every level.
Pinball Wizard (iPhone) - The third Apple Arcade game I played, I’m actually not a big fan of this one. As I said in my Best of 2019, the progression system feels broken, and way too grindy for a game you want people to play for sessions of a minute or two at a time. I eventually made it to a section so I didn’t have to keep starting at the beginning, which was great (playing the same six or so levels over and over wasn’t very fun), but now I’m starting to think I’m maybe just bad at pinball... Nah, it’s totally because the touch controls aren’t super great. Those special powers buttons have got to move higher on the screen.
Crash Bandicoot (PS4) - I got the N. Sane Trilogy on the cheap before Christmas, and played a couple of levels of the first game, and they are dang hard! Like, I literally only did six or so levels, and I am having a hard time! Old-school platformers have either gotten way harder since I was a kid, or I was just much better when I was a kid.
I will probably play this on and off for the rest of my life :P
Assemble (iPhone) - The final Apple Arcade game on this list, I think I described this quite well in my Best of 2019 write-up, so let me just copy pasta that here: this is a short, sweet game about a repairwoman in a new town fixing people’s stuff, but also their lives. I like it, but I am also a sap. Also, I like the puzzle-y bits involving taking things apart and then putting them back together. My only complaint is that it is far too short.
Control (PS4) - The Expeditions DLC was made available during the Video Game Awards, and it took me a week or two to finally get around to it, and let me tell you something: it is stupid hard. The way it works is that you have to find jukebox tokens around the regular parts of the game (I say “regular” like any section of this game isn’t weird as hell, but I mean the stuff available in the base game), then use them in the jukebox altered item near the main “camp” in the starting area. You can use 1, 3, or 5 tokens at one time to play through the easy, medium, or hard modes of the Expeditions. You are sent to a different section of the Black Rock Quarry that can’t be otherwise accessed, and you have to complete four different objectives while the Hiss try to kill you in a set time limit. These aren’t particularly difficult objectives, except for the Hiss trying to kill you part. You can die, and that won’t end the session, and any completed objectives will remain completed, but anything you were in the middle of you have to start over. And time continues to tick.
Maybe I’m just out of practice or something, but I couldn’t finish this even in the easy mode. I was only able to do two of the objectives in the time limit. I will eventually try this again, but probably not until the first story DLC drops on 26 March 2020 (hopefully, I’ll be done with the next game by then).
The Witcher III: Wild Hunt (PS4) - Why did I wait so long to play this game? Oh, right, because it’s ENORMOUS.
I finally started playing this game because I enjoyed the Netflix series so much (I still love you, my Duke of Suffolk). I’ve owned it for like three years, but I kept putting it off because I didn’t want to spend 100+ hours on one game (and then played Red Dead Redemption 2, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, and Yakuza 0, all games I spent at least 100 hours in), but after enjoying the show so much, I finally bit the bullet.
The game has six quite large areas (and one fairly small castle), only two of which are actually connected into one map (Velen and Novigrad). And when I say large, I mean LARGE. White Orchard, the opening area, is probably the smallest of the six, and I still spent something like five hours doing everything in that map. I am now fully stuck in Velen, the second region, where I have spent the rest of my 15 or so hours, and I’m not even a quarter done. There are story missions, side quests, witcher contracts, and treasure hunts, and I want to do all of them, but it’s hard because they keep running into each other. Example: I started a side quest and I had to travel to a new area to do it. On the way there, I took care of a couple of question marks on the map since they were on the way, and I stumbled across another smaller side quest. I decided to just finish that up real quick. I got back on track and went to the area I was originally supposed to go to, and as soon as I arrived, another side quest popped, but I didn’t even notice because I thought it was the still the same side quest. I finished that one (which took me to another area entirely), then realized I had to go back and finish the original side quest I had started. So, a small side quest that should have taken me like 15 minutes to finish, instead took me about an hour and a half because of all the extra stuff. That’s amazing.
I love that the gameplay isn’t just hack and slash all the things. I mean, it is, but it’s also investigate all the things. It turns out that being a witcher is half-detective, half-swordmaster, and that’s awesome.
Most of the missions in the game are quite similar in terms of gameplay (go here, do an investigation, kill a thing, occasionally bring a thing, etc.), but the writing is so strong on basically every single mission that they all feel super different, and that’s awesome. I will have to complain about the interminably long dungeon that Keira Metz takes me through, however, because that was too damn long. But every quest story, even the smallest of the small, is wonderfully written, I can see why this game takes ages to complete: you really want to do every mission just to find out where every individual story is going to go. Some of them are funny, some of them are scary, some of them are sweet, some of them are heartbreaking, and some of them are ridiculous as hell, but they’re all amazing.
I am enjoying the hell out of this game, and I think I’ll be playing it until I finish it or Cyberpunk 2077 comes out, whichever comes first (though now that it’s been delayed to September, I have a lot more time than I originally thought; maybe I’ll play Death Stranding, Final Fantasy VII Remake, and/or Yakuza Kiwami after I finish The Witcher III).
PS. The events of the show happen some time before the events of the game, just FYI.
And that’s it! Those are all the games I played this past month. Next month’s column should be back to its original schedule, though I may only talk about one game (The Witcher III is so damn good, you guys!). Until then, play more video games!
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