This article’s going to be a little different, folks. I’ve long believed that a review should only be written by a critic who has experienced the work in its entirety; how else can the audience trust that they truly understand it? Obviously this means that I don’t review a game I haven’t beaten, but it also means that I haven’t reviewed games which are still in early access or other comparable, pre-release states.

However, my two most recent single-player gaming experiences have been July 28th’s Halo: Campaign Evolved, whose technical and artistic issues frustrated me into making my first ever Steam refund request, and Fallen Aces, an early-access immersive simulator which released the second of its three planned episodes just two days before Halo. My experiences with these games have led me to reconsider the value of critical work that exists somewhere between a formal review and casual commentary. For the former, there is something significant to be found in my reasons for abandoning the experience. For the latter, I find that criticism for a work in progress takes a different shape but is especially crucial. More importantly, I find that these two experiences have a lot to say about each other.

Were It So Easy

If there’s a phrase that sums up Halo Studios (formerly 343 Industries) in a nutshell, it’s “half in the bag.” Ever since they were created to handle the Halo franchise in the wake of Bungie’s departure, their Halo titles have been uneven, to say the least. Halo 4’s effective narrative direction was held back by trend-chasing gameplay additions which marred its multiplayer. Conversely, Halo 5: Guardians’ different but genuinely entertaining multiplayer was grossly overshadowed by the campaign’s awful story and subpar co-op mechanics. Finally, Halo Infinite managed to design gameplay that felt like a true step forward for the classic Halo formula, but placed it into an obviously unfinished, uneven campaign that ends right when it feels like it’s getting started. With their track record leaving Halo fans disgruntled, their decision to remake the first game came across as an easy way to regain some trust. All they were doing was adding some of the fun new toys the later games had, bringing the visuals up to modern standards, and smoothing out some of the worst moments from the original game. “Even Halo Studios can’t possibly mess this up,” I said to myself at least once a week in the months leading up to Halo: Campaign Evolved. Unfortunately, I should have known better.

I’ve played games that didn’t run so great on my computer before, but Campaign Evolved’s hardware issues are truly baffling. AAA gaming’s overreliance on DLSS frame generation is on full display with this title; it was the only way for me to get a consistently decent framerate with settings ranging from medium to low on my two-year-old machine. However, the game’s prerendered, 30fps-locked cutscenes don’t handle DLSS properly. DLSS is normally fine because it doesn’t noticeably detract from the quality of the image, but during this game’s cutscenes, it introduces serious ghosting that smears the image and desyncs the sound effects. If that wasn’t sloppy enough, frame generation introduces a small but ever-present amount of input lag which makes the game feel a little heavy and unresponsive, especially when aiming. Last but not least, many post-processing effects like some ugly film grain can’t be disabled, which adds unnecessary performance tax. I can deal with lower framerates or less pretty graphics, but Halo: Campaign Evolved’s performance issues genuinely made it worse to play.

When I really want to experience something, I can deal with performance issues. I didn’t even mention my struggles to get Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to reach 60fps in my review. However, Campaign Evolved never motivated me to tough it out. The game includes a brand new three-level story; having already experienced the original, I started there. The new story is about Master Chief and Sergeant Johnson storming a Covenant ship in search of the location of High Charity, the Covenant homeworld. As an intentionally-superfluous prequel, this story is seriously bottlenecked, contributing to a fanfiction-esque feeling. Johnson seems almost self-aware about reappearing for the first time since his death in Halo 3, toting a ridiculous custom gun the player can never acquire. “Woo, Chief and Johnson, just like old times, huh?” the game seems to say to me. This stuff would bother me less if the dialogue was anything but cliches and clumsy exposition; characters pretty much just tell you everything about themselves and how they’re feeling with no tact or realism. Halo’s stories have never been groundbreaking, but they’ve always been carried by snappy, solid dialogue. None of that was present in what I saw.

The gameplay was, thankfully, where things felt the most Halo. Returning weapons like the legendary Magnum felt just like they should, and I’m not the type to complain about some old favorite weapons like the Battle Rifle and Sentinel Beam making a return. It’s great to be able to wield the iconic Energy Sword which was previously exclusive to the enemy in Combat Evolved, although its lunging range is pitifully small. Gameplay features from later games such as sprinting and vehicle hijacking fit in seamlessly. Campaign Evolved also introduces the Brutes first seen in Halo 2, making them significantly bulkier than in previous games. This lends them a niche beyond what Elites already fill as a tough and smart infantry foe. Halo Studios has had a lot of missteps over the years, but their games do at least consistently manage to have gameplay that feels good at a basic level.

This brings me to the real problem at the core of Halo: Campaign Evolved, though. Halo Studios might have viewed this as an easy win, but I think remaking a timeless classic which has aged gracefully is pretty dangerous territory. Many remakes exist to uplift a game from an era where the technology behind it actually held it back in some way. Even this year’s Star Fox, a remake of an N64 classic whose gameplay hasn’t aged a day, had room for significant visual and narrative upgrades that made it feel worth the effort. Halo: Combat Evolved, by contrast, looks a bit dated but has otherwise ageless presentation concerning its performances and music. Its gameplay remains the foundation for modern shooters, and everything that’s a little weird about it like the weapon balance just gives it character. Remakes have to work hard to justify themselves to players, especially when the original game is so easily accessible in the excellent Master Chief Collection on most platforms.

Campaign Evolved’s additions don’t give it a real chance of overshadowing the original. A wider arsenal is nice, but it’s not something which Combat Evolved ever needed to feel fun or complete. Three new levels would be a better selling point if the story weren’t so trite and the gameplay so standard. Script rewrites are roundly downgrades and some of the new quality of life features are utterly patronizing. Watching the game put objective markers over camouflaged Stealth Elites seemed almost like a parody of itself. Apparently the original game’s infamous worst level, The Library, has been redone, but I didn’t make it far enough to evaluate that myself. The original game may not look as smooth and detailed as games today, but at least there’s no pointless film grain and the cutscenes never smear around on themselves. In an era of pop culture that increasingly looks backwards, Halo: Campaign Evolved fails to do so with any finesse or reverence. The game unwittingly forced Halo Studios into exactly what they were trying to escape; unfavorable comparisons with Bungie’s work. If it were an original title, I might have powered through and finished it, mediocre or not. As it stands now, this isn’t worth the fifty bucks from someone who already has - and cherishes - the original game.

Deal Me In

The perfect palate cleanser for a disappointing sci-fi shooter was an immersive dip into Fallen Aces’ gritty world of pulp fiction. Caught in the crosshairs of a gang and stuck in the middle of a conspiracy against the long-disbanded superhero group The A.C.E.S., Detective Mike Thane has to sneak, sleuth and scrap his way from one lead to the next. First released into early access in 2024 from dependable publisher of niche ‘90s PC game genres New Blood Interactive, Fallen Aces is the first commercial work from indie developer duo Trey Powell and Jason Bond. You wouldn’t be able to tell these guys are amateurs just by playing the game, though; Fallen Aces is an immersive sim, and nobody who actually cares to make one of those ever half-asses it. Carrying on the legacy of games like Thief and Bioshock, Powell and Bond have clearly worked hard to create a lived-in world down to the last interactive detail - no matter how long it takes them. With two years between the early access release and Episode Two, they’re taking their time on this labor of love, and it’s looking all the better for it.

Immersive sims are a delicate balance. Their strength lies in two aspects of games which are quite difficult to execute properly: an open-ended approach to problem solving and highly interactive, detailed environments. Even though all immersive sims have these characteristics, some of them prioritize certain aspects more or less. System Shock is a combat-heavy game, whereas Thief emphasizes stealth so much that killing enemies is typically not allowed on harder difficulties. What makes Fallen Aces so special is that it’s one of the only immersive sims I’ve played where all of your possible approaches feel like they have a real seat at the table. Sneaking is more than just crouch-walking and smacking goons in the back of the head, with the ability to hide in shadowed areas and throw objects to distract foes. When it’s time to put up your dukes, brawling feels good as you duck and weave around mooks, kick palookas away or off of ledges, and wind up big punches to send foes to Mr. Sandman. Some situations call for subtlety and guile, while others call for a more direct approach; it feels good to try out lots of different strategies with the help of the quicksave feature.

As with any immersive sim, the levels are doing the majority of the legwork in Fallen Aces’ deeply varied gameplay. Each level has a few main and side objectives, all of which accommodate at least two or three different ways to clear them. Levels greatly range in size and scope, and each is structured with a different balance of stealth and combat in mind. Far from straightforward marches from point A to B, you’re encouraged to investigate everything you see - and quite often rewarded for it. The second level, “Water Under the Bridge,” is a great example. Thane must cross to the other side of the docks and lower a drawbridge to make his escape. Skulk through shipping containers and warehouses to take a cable car across, where keen-eyed players can follow hints about a secret shipment with a tommy gun and more. Sneak over to a shack by the dockside and grab a speargun to ward off sharks - or mooks - as you swim across. Spy a propane tank through a crack in the wall and blow it open to reveal a path to the rooftops and across the drawbridge’s own scaffolding, taking a rifle off of one of the snipers perched there. Most levels in this game match this impressively layered, deeply replayable standard. Design like this takes a lot of time, of course; thankfully, it also makes the levels that we have for now significantly more replayable.

The best part about these levels isn’t just how much there is to do, though; it’s all the awesome ways you can do it. There’s a host of weapons to pick up, from your conventional firearms and lead pipes to whatever’s lying around like trash cans and baseballs. A resourceful player can throw everything and the kitchen sink at their foes or use their environment in even more creative ways. A bar filled with gangsters might be tough to shoot through, but there’s nothing they can do about lighting up the alcohol stock right under them and blowing out the floor! A trashcan lid isn’t the best weapon, but it makes a solid shield from knives and pipes. Find the right transmission code to call in a police raid on a local mob front, then inspect the aftermath. Unlike some games where you play as a detective, some investigation definitely factors into the gameplay; the plot and puzzles are largely unraveled via diegetic clues like notes, signs, and mobster chatter. Everything you can do feels rewarding - except perhaps for sticking your finger into electrical outlets, which you can do if taking 2 damage is something you’re into. With a limited inventory of just three slots (plus one extra slot each for food and ammo which can be purchased later on), you’ll be thinking carefully about everything at your disposal.

All of these aspects were present in the first episode of Fallen Aces, but the second episode dials them up to eleven. The rival Glassheart and Benedetto gangs are joined by the corrupt police, a third faction that won’t get in your way unless you act too suspicious around them. The exceptional first level of Episode Two, “Friends in High Places” sees Thane outmaneuvering all three groups in a sprawling slum. “Bare Threads” allows you to drive around a huge country road, stopping at points of interest and facing down mobsters in some fresh locales like the forest and an abandoned mine. Most of the stages in Episode 2 also feature companion characters who can help you in combat. They carry both lethal and silent, nonlethal weaponry to match your approach, and you can tell them to wait in one spot if you don’t want them getting in the way. I had a couple issues with the levels in Episode Two, namely some texturing and modeling errors and difficulties with the flow and clarity of certain objectives, but a patch came out shortly after I finished it which fixes everything I noticed and then some. They were merely the kinds of problems I expect from early access games, and they’re already fixed! Gotta love it.

Last, but certainly not least, is the story. Immersive sims are known for strong worldbuilding and narrative, and Fallen Aces is no different. It’s the sort of hard-boiled crime thriller which wears its influences on its sleeve, with an effective visual blend of 3D environments and 2D objects and characters evocative of old pulp comics. This classic aesthetic is baked deep into Fallen Aces, complimented not only by the stylistic visuals but also by the flavorful performances and excellent soundtrack. Josh Barron’s score is dripping with noir-style smooth jazz and dramatic atmosphere, and the vocal theme introduced in Episode Two, “Heart of Glass,” feels like something straight out of a Bond movie. The game doesn’t just talk the talk, too; the conspiracy against the former A.C.E.S. is a juicy one filled with interesting characters and secrets.

Fallen Aces does a good job balancing a tongue-in-cheek reverence for the crime classics and its own strong characters and story, carried effectively by the performances. Mike Thane (River Kanoff) is the archetype of the cynical P.I., a consummate wise-ass and functional alcoholic with just the right amount of guile to make it in a dirty city like Umburgh. Delia Price (Marissa Lenti) contrasts nicely with him as someone who’s plenty tough but not quite so beaten down by it all, and former A.C.E.S. member Nightwave (Kamran Nikhad) keeps a tight grip on the glory days while the world tries to leave him behind. Even the common thugs you face are entertaining thanks to Gianni Matragrano, an up-and-coming voice actor who made a name for himself dubbing boomer shooter memes. His Italian mobster accent is perfect, and there’s countless hilarious lines for every situation the goons can find themselves in. I’d throw in some examples, but this article’s got to end at some point.

Heads or Tails

So, why talk about these games at the same time? As I mentioned before, neither of these really constitute a normal “review,” but they also strike me as a particularly evocative example of the divide in the video game industry today. Released within a few days of each other, Halo: Campaign Evolved and the second episode of Fallen Aces represent complete opposite ends of the spectrum. Campaign Evolved is a franchise remake made by one of the richest companies in the world, and Fallen Aces is an indie passion project carried by the tireless efforts of a couple guys and a publishing company whose Steam page can be reached via the URL wehate.money. With significantly more resources, more manpower, and the template of an existing classic to work off of, Halo Studios was only able to create something that felt lazy, unrefined, and redundant. All Trey Powell and Jason Bond really have is a publisher, patience, and each other, yet the only things I’m left wanting from their game are bug fixes and, well, more of it.

I’m sure it’s no news to the vast majority of my readership that the people who deserve the most are rarely the ones who have it. What I want to emphasize, as always, is that games are art, and art thrives when the artists come first. When Bungie made Halo: Combat Evolved, it had been years since Jason Jones and Alex Seropian first founded the studio. Their staff knew each other well and shared a common goal. Halo Studios’ goal was merely to try and keep their established franchise popular, cycling contractors through a revolving door and rushing development in the process. Games aren’t as closely associated with their authors as books or even movies, but if it’s anything I’ve learned from the classics and modern games which inspire me like Fallen Aces, it’s that the authors are no less important here. A good game can come from big studios, one person programming in their spare time, and everywhere in between, but they’ve all got one thing in common; they’re made by people with genuine inspiration who were given the space to make it a reality.

CW: Screenshots and gameplay contains blood, gore, and flashing lights. I mean, it’s Doom.

Though I didn’t end up liking Doom: The Dark Ages as much as its predecessor Doom: Eternal, I still praised it for challenging itself to take things in a different direction. Even though Dark Ages’ commitment to distancing itself from Eternal and upping the scale made it a less refined experience, id knew it wouldn’t succeed without an identity of its own. Their dedication to innovation remains alive and well a year later with Revelations, the first - and possibly only - DLC expansion for Dark Ages. This DLC has some lofty ambitions; narratively and mechanically, everything that defined the Doom Slayer in Dark Ages is getting torn down and built back up. Did they have the chops to pull it all off?

Symbolic of everything Revelations tries to do is the destruction of the Shield Saw early on. Everything in Dark Ages relied on this thing, from parrying countless attacks to stunning tough foes to slamming into enemies headlong across the entire battlefield. Shortly after the Slayer is defeated and plunged into Purgatory, though, does he find the Chain Spear. Where Dark Ages previously focused on heavy, grounded combat, the Chain Spear clears you for takeoff. Doom: Eternal’s beloved quick dashes and meat hook return, and the fact that the meat hook is no longer glued to the super shotgun gives it even more potential. Of course, it takes more than mobility for the Chain Spear to function as a new key for all of Dark Ages’ old locks; parry attacks and clear crowds with a slash, punish tough enemies with a stab, stop enemies in their tracks with a well-aimed spear throw, and slam down from above to stagger whole crowds of demons.

Where the Shield Saw was deliberately simple, it’s evident that the Chain Spear is built for fans who loved the speed and layers of Doom: Eternal’s legendary combat system. Dashing through parryable green attacks at the right time now rewards a perfect dodge, refreshing the dash cooldown and granting half a bar of Empowerment to spend on your powerful stab, throw, or slam maneuvers. Upgrades give you more ways to get Empowerment and other great benefits like temporary speed boosts or health/armor drops. It’s a fairly complicated tool which was challenging not only to learn but also to comfortably bind across my keyboard and mouse, but once I got the hang of it, it was like nothing else I’ve played. Combining the mobility of Eternal with the raw power of Dark Ages created a whole new, beautiful engine of adrenaline. Whipping myself around a tough enemy, reeling in to finish it off, slamming right down into crowds and nailing spear throw headshots made me feel like an utterly unstoppable beast. Words don’t really do it justice; just watch.

It’s a good thing this is just a DLC, or who knows when I would have been able to pull myself away from it and actually write this?

Revelations is easily the best Dark Ages has ever felt, but if there’s any shortcomings to be mentioned, they come from its attachment to Dark Ages. The fact that Dark Ages has sprinting for some reason means I had to put my quick dashes somewhere other than shift, which took some adjustment and was never quite as comfortable. The Chain Spear also has many of its coolest features gated behind upgrades, making it seem less appealing at first and leaving me wishing I’d explored a lot more thoroughly by the last couple levels. The expansion also adds only one new gun - a postgame superweapon - leaving many of my issues with the arsenal from Dark Ages unchanged. Every gun is satisfying and powerful in a vacuum, but they don’t really work together - I’m rarely incentivized to switch from the Accelerator with its absurd damage output and full-auto consistency. The Chain Spear’s versatility makes your guns feel less important than ever, though being able to fill the gaps with slow-firing weapons like the Super Shotgun using Spear functions does make those more fun.

The fact that Revelations is being built around a system made for the Shield Saw - which you later reacquire and can use in conjunction with the Spear - adds an undeniable level of clutter to a game which was already a bit bloated. The only time I ever bothered switching back to the Shield Saw outside of puzzle-solving was during a postgame superboss; for every other fight, the Chain Spear has an answer for all of the Shield Saw’s functions. Conversely, a lot of players are going to struggle to figure out everything the Spear has to offer and stick with the Shield Saw as soon as they can, even though the Spear is honestly a lot stronger. Dark Ages has always been more committed to player freedom, but having so many strong options climbing over one another is tough to manage, both mentally and physically. I can hardly imagine how it feels to use the Spear on controller; the beautiful bastard practically swallowed up my whole keyboard. These nitpicks don’t stop Revelations from being a ton of fun if you prioritize your favorite stuff and put in the practice, but it’s hard not to think a fresh start with these mechanics in mind could have provided some nice breathing room.

Of course, the Chain Spear isn’t all Revelations has to offer; with new demon-slaying tools come new demons to slay. Between Doom II, Doom: Eternal, and now Revelations, the Archvile is always finding new ways to be a pain in the ass. They live up to their reputation as a top-priority demon, filling the screen with summoned demons and teleporting around the battlefield to make shutting them down even harder. There’s also the Cosmic Elemental, this game’s version of the Pain Elemental which is a worthy target for all of the Chain Spear’s air movement and anti-air utility. Warlocks teleport around and cover the arena in fog, which certainly can be frustrating. Existing demons get some new forms as well, including the incredibly irritating invisible variants of the Whiplash and Revenant. There’s nothing more satisfying to spear throw through the skull than those things. Most of Revelations’ additions to the demon lineup are great fun to fight, especially since the Chain Spear’s upgrades give you a lot of specialized solutions to things like teleporting or the enemies’ shot-blocking fence projectiles. I still have some gripes with this game’s difficulty - high player strength leads to some moments where the game tries too hard to keep things difficult - but, of course, everything about the difficulty can still be individually tweaked.

Revelations’ level design is also a big step up. Though there’s only five stages, one of which is more of a mini stage designed to bridge Dark Ages and Revelations, it makes the most of everything it has. Each level is visited twice; once for the main story, and once as part of “End Game,” which is really more of a postgame. The main story path includes collectibles and currency for basic upgrades, while End Game paths add currency for more powerful capstone upgrades alongside some other secrets. As for what’s actually in the levels, the combat arenas are a lot more interesting than they were in Dark Ages proper. The added mobility of the Chain Spear is complemented by an increase in level props like jump pads and meat hook points that give combat much more of a vertical dimension. Puzzles benefit the most from having both the Spear and the Saw, making these downtime sections more engaging. It all culminates in the four Master Arenas unlocked at the very end of the DLC, excellent fights designed around a fully-upgraded Slayer which let you flex every muscle you’ve built on your journey. Environments also remain as detailed and cool as ever, from the snowy mountains of Hell’s Core to the chalky, bone-dry wastes of the Osseus.

Effectively complementing the world design this time around is a story which actually manages to be a bit interesting. I criticized Dark Ages for touting a “cinematic narrative” which lacked substance, oddly dodging around the interesting narrative potential from the Slayer’s past which we’d read about in other games. I can happily say that Revelations’ story manages to be exactly what so many of us wanted Dark Ages’ story to be, not only fleshing out some pivotal moments we’d read about before but presenting some compelling new events. I was happily surprised to see the story begin with a problem the Slayer couldn’t kill, having the trauma of his soul used against him by Hell’s Council to trap him in Purgatory. It’s kind of hard to tell an interesting story about a man too strong to lose and too angry to die, so this was a welcome obstacle.

The Slayer’s journey to master his own soul coincides with political unrest in Argent D’Nur as the Maykrs’ grip on the Sentinel people tightens to a breaking point. Of course, the Slayer’s mental journey takes the shape of killing an absolute shit-ton of demons, but we know what kind of game we’re playing; the storytelling is still a definite improvement that hones in on the fundamental tragedy of the Sentinels placing their faith in manipulative, controlling beings. We also get to experience the Slayer’s time as a soldier before he ever encountered the demons firsthand, consisting of short gameplay sections depicting a counter-insurgent operation gone wrong. Revelations makes it more obvious than ever that the Slayer’s anger is fundamentally righteous, a reasonable reaction not only to the barbarism Hell represents but also the casual callousness he sees from the Maykrs and even his fellow man. These flashback sections also feature a classic Doom-style shotgun, giving id a great excuse to port in four classic levels from Doom II as End Game encounters.

Of course, punctuating everything that is great about Revelations - the adrenaline-drenched combat, the evocative world, and the heavy story - is Finishing Move Inc.’s outstanding soundtrack. I was so wrong to give them only one sentence’s worth of praise in my Dark Ages review that I wrote a whole article to compensate; I will not be making the same mistake here, as they have truly outdone themselves. There is not a single dud or low point across five stages’ worth of absolutely pulse-pounding background music, easily meeting the peak of a series with a legacy of excellent music. There’s just an insane level of energy in every fight thanks to these tracks, which combine great original work with effective compositional references to nearly every previous Doom soundtrack. Ambient tunes between battles are also very effective, with the theme for the Purgatory hub in particular providing quite a distinctive, melancholy sensation. I find the classic references in the soundtrack very appropriate for the DLC’s dedication to Bobby Prince, the original composer for Doom, Doom II, and so many more classic PC games who tragically passed last month. I can hardly think of a better way to honor his memory than to reinterpret his work in a way that shreds this hard.

When the dust settles, Revelations feels like a sendoff to much more than Bobby Prince. It’s like a culmination of everything Doom has been before, firing on all cylinders and somehow jammed into the best 20 dollars I’ve spent all year. For all its life and energy, though, Revelations tells a story of pain and betrayal which we know ends in the collapse of Sentinel civilization. It’s an odd mirror to Microsoft’s recent gutting of id software, a bitter reward for the studio which redefined single-player shooter campaigns three times in ten years. Just as the Sentinels were wrong to place their faith in the controlling, self-serving Maykrs, id’s exceptional work with idTech and the Doom franchise feels wasted on a company as short-sighted and callous as Microsoft. I shouldn’t be coming away from Revelations with anything but excitement and hope for the future of Doom, but as always, corporate greed doesn’t let anything good stay that way for long. I want to see more and I want it to be great, but if Revelations is where Doom the way we know it ends for a while, it’s a damn good thing it’s this awesome. Play it if you can to show your appreciation for the good people who poured their hearts into it and so many other great games, and always remember that games, like all art, are nothing without the artists who make them.

The Nintendo 64 is something of a blind spot in my gaming history. Sure, I’ve played Super Mario 64 and the 3DS version of Ocarina of Time, but lots of classic N64 games have been sitting on my proverbial list for a little too long. 1997’s Star Fox 64 was one of those games until Nintendo surprised everyone with a full announcement direct for Star Fox (2026) back in May. I fully expected to like the game, but I was caught off-guard by just how much I liked it. Classics though they may be, many of the N64 games I’ve played felt like rougher and more primitive test drives for later iterations I prefer. Star Fox 64’s infinitely replayable levels and exciting piloting gameplay, however, are nothing short of timeless. It’s not the sort of game that needs a remake at first glance, especially since it already retold the original 1993 Star Fox’s story and has been remade as 2011’s Star Fox 64 3D before.

In truth, it’s not Star Fox 64 that needed the remake; it was the Star Fox franchise as a whole. Where Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda have many classic titles, Star Fox 64 is the only game in the series that ever reached that status. Between bizarre genre shifts and control gimmicks, Nintendo just seemed incapable of locking on to what made Star Fox fun in the first place. Now, with the help of third-party Velan Studios, they just might fix that. Star Fox (2026) isn’t here because Star Fox 64 needs a facelift; it’s here to remind everyone that it hasn’t aged a day, and hopefully even to be a north star for the future of the series to follow.

To that end, we’ll start with what was always the best about Star Fox 64: the gameplay. Star Fox (2026) doesn’t try to fix what isn’t broken, remaining staunchly faithful to the original game’s tight controls and exceptional level design. The Arwing is a dream to pilot. Techniques like boosting, braking, somersaulting, and even just banking into turns make the Arwing live up to its reputation as the nimblest fighter craft around. The tension between knocking down shots, lining up locked-on charged shots for extra points against groups, and carefully maneuvering between every obstacle is the core of Star Fox. Despite how much of the game is on rails, you feel a great sense of control over how you fly through each level. On occasion, you’ll even shift into all-range mode. These levels feature dogfighting on wide-open maps with a full range of control, making Star Fox feel even more like a piloting game than just a rail shooter. If it’s anything I’d like for a new Star Fox game to do, it’s expand on all-range mode with larger and more varied areas and objectives.

Just about my only gripe with the controls is the lack of button rebinding. It would be nice to put boost and brake on the bumpers and leave the triggers for tilting and rolling, but the only way to do that is through the Switch 2’s controller profile options, which are a hassle. There’s also a new mouse aiming control scheme with the Joy-Con 2s, but this is unfortunately restricted to first-person piloting, which I don’t prefer. New first-person settings that make it so barrel-rolling doesn’t literally spin the entire screen certainly help, at least. Luckily, there’s really nothing wrong with the original controls, so you don’t have to feel like you’re falling behind the curve without mouse aiming.

Star Fox (2026) effortlessly darts from one awesome setpiece to the next across each of its sixteen levels, keeping the gameplay just as fresh with unique enemies and objectives. Though you can blast through the Lylat System and take down the evil Dr. Andross in an hour or two, your first playthrough of Star Fox is just the beginning. Each playthrough consists of seven of the sixteen levels in one of 25 possible routes. Sharp piloting lets you chase down unique side objectives and chart a course for tougher levels. You’ll really want to play over and over, too, because these levels have that timeless Nintendo polish. Highlights include the hectic battle over Katina, skimming above the rough seas of Zoness as you destroy searchlights to evade detection, and flying over the surface of a star as you struggle to keep your shields intact. Corneria may be the start of every playthrough, but it’s such a flawless introduction that I never get tired of it. Of course, nothing beats the bombastic Area 6, a daring charge through Andross’ armada that throws everything and then some at you.

It’s easy to top an N64 game, but I still think it’s worth noting just how much of a facelift these stages have received in Star Fox (2026). N64 visuals were a huge leap at the time, but many of the finer details are still muddled under layers of abstraction. Velan has done a very faithful job pulling detail out of simple designs, and every level feels so much more alive for the effort. It’s no surprise that levels like Corneria or Zoness look great, but more visually-sparse levels like Katina and Sector X received such huge makeovers that even the exact same layouts might be hard to recognize at first glance. It really feels like Velan has landed on a definitive look for the series going forward. I know the characters’ more realistic designs rubbed some people the wrong way, but I think they call back to the series’ roots quite effectively. There’s also some great new details, like the bird wings painted on the wings of Falco’s Arwing. Of course, gameplay matters more than graphics, but you already know they didn’t drop the ball there.

Though Star Fox (2026)’s stages are loosely sorted into easy, medium, and hard paths, each of these routes has unique appeal. They all have at least one level with a different vehicle, namely the Landmaster tank and the Blue Marine submarine. The remake’s gameplay changes are largely subtle, but there are some noticeable differences with these vehicles. The Landmaster feels much heavier to control than it did in Star Fox 64, and its aiming radius also feels more restrictive (though this may be a byproduct of the remake being in widescreen rather than 4:3). It took some adjusting to meet my old performance on the new Landmaster levels, but I think the changes ultimately make it feel less like it’s just an Arwing with its wings clipped. Although you only use the Blue Marine on Aquas, it’s definitely improved. The aiming reticle no longer arbitrarily disappears when you have a torpedo lock, and barrel rolling now results in quick turns that help the sub feel a lot more maneuverable.

Of course, different routes will also change Star Fox (2026)’s story in interesting ways. This is where we start to get into things you really can’t find in Star Fox 64; Velan has greatly fleshed out the narrative content in the game with new cutscenes and a vastly revamped script. Fox has a lot more to say in this remake, giving us a clearer picture of someone who has a chip on his shoulder about his father’s legacy and is eager to prove himself as a leader. Slippy’s charming enthusiasm comes across so much better in this version, and Peppy fills the role of the team’s veteran mentor more convincingly. Falco is the standout of the main crew this time around, coming across not only as the cocky ace pilot but as someone who uses his too-cool-for-school act to obfuscate how much he really cares about his friends. Hearing their chatter as you flew alongside them through the levels always breathed a lot of life into Star Fox 64, and giving that dynamic more time to shine in new cutscenes was a no-brainer. Sometimes the performances could use a little more energy, but on the whole, it’s an improvement.

Star Fox (2026) also injects a well-defined narrative thread to the proceedings regardless of whether you get the good or bad ending. We understand from early on that Fox is trying to make a name for himself now that he’s inherited the Star Fox team from his late father. Your ability to clear tougher stages now informs his ability to grow into his role, fully earning the respect of his whole team - even that competitive Falco. Extra scenes provide more of a dramatic arc, and that heartwarming moment from the true ending (which I won’t spoil here for the new players) feels so much better at the end of a real arc. This moment also benefits from one of Stephen Barton’s additions to the score. Barton is extremely experienced in mimicking John Williams’ style with games like Jedi: Fallen Order and Titanfall 2, and Williams was definitely an inspiration for Star Fox 64’s score. He was the perfect choice to bring this soundtrack to fully-orchestrated life and contribute some excellent new tunes in key places. All of these changes hone in on and enhance the simple and satisfying themes of the original story, even if it’s nothing groundbreaking.

These improvements make landing on the bad ending, either out of inexperience or in search of high score medals, even less satisfying. Thankfully, the story has great moments no matter where you go. One of the best moments even locks you into the bad ending; after Slippy gets stranded on Titania, Fox, Falco, and Peppy all blow off General Pepper’s orders to save him. Without Slippy around, Falco drops his usual tough guy act and desperately urges Fox to find the poor toad. On other routes, Slippy gets to prove his worth with the vehicles he invented; he definitely ends up coming across as the heart of the group.

Other routes also include neat encounters with new allies or enemies. Katt, a member of Falco’s old gang and the game’s sole female character (it was the ‘90s), is much improved in Star Fox (2026). Her whole personality in her few appearances in Star Fox 64 basically boiled down to being a girl, but here she’s much more of a wild card who gives Falco a hard time like old friends do. Fox and Slippy’s old flight school friend Bill is a reliable, loyal guy. Encountering either of them is a great addition to any run, especially since they show up to give you a hand in the level after you first encounter them as well. There’s also three different points to encounter the rival Star Wolf mercenary group, a dastardly bunch consisting of the amoral ace pilot Wolf, the bloodthirsty Leon, the traitorous Pigma, and Andross’ privileged, talentless nephew Andrew. Dogfights with Star Wolf are always fun, and they act as an effective foil to the noble mercenary band that is Star Fox. These encounters flesh the world out as a place beyond what’s right in front of you, providing even more reasons to experiment with all kinds of routes.

Alright, so Velan nailed the original Star Fox 64 experience; that was the easy part. Star Fox (2026) needs to bring more than nice graphics and cutscenes to the table for a $50 remake of a 29-year-old game on expensive new hardware. Fortunately, we have challenge mode and the holoviewer. Challenge mode not only offers an easy way to play any stage you want anytime, but it includes a number of challenges for both normal and expert difficulty that encourage you to experience everything a level has to offer. Challenges range from approaching objectives with new limitations to interacting with some minor details and easter eggs straight from the original game. Did you know you can fly into the Great Fox’s repair bay to fix your wings and refill your shields on Sector Z? Challenge mode tells you that you can! Clearing stages, getting medals, and doing challenges unlocks holoviewer entries that give you tons of backstory about the characters and this world. The holoviewer includes a lot of longstanding lore that previously only existed in obscure supplementary material plus some new details to fill in the gaps; it’s a fun way to cool down after playing and get a better sense for this setting.

Most new of all, though, is Star Fox (2026)’s battle mode multiplayer. Teams of four sorted between Star Fox and Star Wolf can compete locally or online on three maps, each with their own side objectives. Anyone looking for the next e-sport probably won’t be satisfied, with a variety of random power-ups and a generally chaotic battlefield to manage, but dogfighting with other players can certainly be fun. Little adjustments like tighter u-turns, a more zoomed-out field of view, and a less generous lock-on system fine-tune the multiplayer experience. Objectives provide good reasons to get into the fight and there’s some decent room for fun teamwork in the mix. The only problem, really, is that this game is on Switch 2. This game uses dated peer-to-peer matchmaking and, as much as I might like to try flying alongside my friends, it’s hard to ask them to give it a try for $50 on a $500 (or more) console. Luckily, local gameshare works even with the original Switch, so getting friends together in person for customizable private matches actually seems feasible.

Star Fox (2026) may be the fifth time we’ve told this story and the third time we’ve done it through these levels, but it’s more than just a fresh coat of paint. Nothing’s ever going to make Star Fox 64 any less of a classic, but if you can get your hands on this remake, it is absolutely the definitive version of the Lylat Wars. It looks beautiful with no asterisks, it plays smoother than butter, and the story feels more complete than ever. More to the point, it feels like the perfect jumping-off point for a true sequel. The updated narrative is filled with potential for a follow-up that expands on the team dynamics, and this game proves that classic Star Fox gameplay certainly stands the test of time. It feels like it’s time for Star Fox to truly take off like it always deserved to, and as much as I enjoy this polished classic, I’m really hoping Nintendo and Velan can capture this spirit in something new.

When MOUSE: P.I. For Hire released back on April 16th, I was excited for what had looked like a boomer shooter with some serious production value. After getting my hands on it, I wasn’t sure if I would still call it that. Sure, you move fast and gun down crowds of enemies, but why do I need to reload my guns? Why do my weapons have recoil and spread? Why are my movement and melees tied to a stamina bar? Why are levels so linear? It got me thinking about just how specific and niche the boomer shooter subgenre’s defining characteristics are. Most have no problem calling MOUSE: P.I. a boomer shooter, but the aforementioned qualities disqualify it in my eyes. In the same way, aspects like skill/weapon upgrades and the emphasis on aerial movement cause other people to disqualify games I would include, like Doom Eternal. If these games aren’t boomer shooters, then what exactly are they? Are they arena shooters? Is that even a real genre, or did we just need something to call Halo that doesn’t make it sound like a boomer shooter? Is any genre a real genre?

The more I think about it, the more I wonder just how we define genres in video games and, more importantly, why we try so hard to fit it all in. I suppose it’s human nature to seek patterns, but at a certain point, the pattern becomes so complicated that it isn’t broadly applicable or helpful. Sure, games aren’t the only medium where genre definitions are vague (where’s the line between a thriller and a horror movie, after all?), but they are the medium where genres seem the least intuitive. What’s a novice supposed to think when somebody describes something as a “soulslike” or a “metroidvania”? How many different things will an experienced player think of if you call something an action game? Do genre pigeonholes get in the way of our ability to take something on its own terms? To understand what genres contribute to our critical understanding, I’m going to examine the history of video game genres and how studios and fans have come to use them today.

Sell Me On It

In the simplest possible terms, genres can be understood as shorthand categories for what one might expect in a given work. As such, they’re an important way for companies to quickly and intuitively market something to their audience. When video games emerged as a marketable medium in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the companies selling them were the first to make much of a documented effort with genres. What they considered important to communicate in this way and how they did it says a lot about how our understanding of video games began.

Above is a scan from a 1981 catalogue of Atari 2600 games sorted into eight genres. Aside from the silly, theme park area-esque names which reflect the common understanding from the time of video games as simple toys, what first stands out to me is the lack of consistency in which aspects of the game define the genre. “Space” is an aesthetic aspect of the game, not a mechanical one. The games listed under that category are all pretty different, from Space Invaders to Missile Command to Defender. “Adventure Territory” is introduced with a large fantasy illustration, but the three games included are again completely different. Of course there’s Adventure, but there’s also Haunted House and… Superman? “Adventure” is one of the few terms here which remains a genre today, but there’s basically no mechanical connection between these games. “Skill Gallery” and “Combat Zone” are in a similar boat, the former containing score attack games that didn’t fit anywhere else and the latter containing a variety of games that involve combat. Both aspects which define these genres are extremely common to most of the other ones.

Though it’s hardly a surprise that Atari didn’t have an expert understanding of video games, this is indicative of a broader issue in early gaming genres; the blending of aesthetic and experiential markers. These are two different categories of genre that function largely independently of one another. This is true of other mediums as well, where aesthetic genres like “fantasy” or “sci-fi” need not conflict with experiential ones like “action” or “drama,” but one finds that the experiential side of things carries much more weight in the world of video games. “Genre and game studies: Toward a critical approach to video game genres,” a 2006 paper by Dr. Thomas Apperley, attributes academic difficulties with video game classification of the time to the fact that they “rely overmuch on games^[sic] representational characteristics.” Where a film viewer in search of fantasy may not be as picky about the plot structure, the crucial interactive aspect of games vastly increases the importance of its experiential characteristics. The differences between platformers, action games, rpgs, and more can amount to requiring entirely different physical skillsets and a massive difference in playtime from two hours to 200.

Evidenced by the fact that scholars were still mulling it over in 2006, it took a while for this understanding to arrive in the mainstream. Nintendo’s early genres on the NES consisted of adventure, action, light gun, sports, arcade, programmable, robot, and educational. Qualities of the gameplay aren’t identified with much precision and they’re given the same importance as things like required peripherals or where else you might recognize the game from. Tom Hirschfeld’s 1981 book, How to Master the Video Games, categorizes everything into the alternately hyperspecific and vague genres of “Space Invaders-type,” “Asteroids-type,” “maze,” “reflex,” and - get this - “miscellaneous.” To his credit, games really weren’t much more complicated than that back then, and he consistently defines his genres by gameplay and nothing else. Nintendo would come to adapt to that later on, replacing unhelpful or deprecated genres like arcade and light gun with RPG, simulation, and puzzle. RPG is a curiously mature term compared to many of those other genres Nintendo was using, which brings us to our next section…

Tell Me About It

Genres aren’t just how marketers talk to audiences; they’re also how audiences talk to each other. If you’re trying to tell a friend of yours about a game that you’ve played, it’s a lot quicker to say it’s a “platformer” than it is to say it’s “like Super Mario Bros., except if you were slower and didn’t jump as high and there were no mushrooms and you were in Dracula’s Castle and so forth.” Of course, that’s the kind of train of thought that leads to many great games, but it seems to shortchange the genuine inspiration that makes them great. Experienced players saw the through-lines between formative games and their many successors quite easily, and fans developed that sort of internally-intuitive shorthand that would become our established genre terms today. It only makes sense that the people actually playing the games would do a better job defining them.

Of course, these types of people weren’t exactly art scholars interested in genre studies. The whole reason they came up with the terms in the first place was to simplify discussion amongst each other, which works great in some cases but kind of flops elsewhere. One thing players definitely understood better than companies is the idea that gameplay was the most important factor. When one looks at Super Mario Bros., Castlevania, Ninja Gaiden, and Mega Man, there’s no shortage of differences, but it was easy enough to hone in on the one thing they have in common; jumping across platforms to reach the end of the stage. Subgenres like action platformer and run-and-gun helped capture the nuance, too. Technically, nearly every game has you playing a role, but when certain games have you reading lots of dialogue and investing in the long-term growth of your characters, the moniker of the role-playing game does seem quite suitable. Then again, you have cases like first-person shooters being dubbed Doom clones for the better part of a decade because everyone was still broadly referring to games like Gradius and TwinBee as shooters. Nowadays we have subgenres for both, but it took some time to shake out.

Players’ definitions were worked up on the fly and frequently challenged as the medium evolved, and we still see that in action today. These days, we’re really not that far off of Doom clone with terms like metroidvania and roguelike. Interestingly, these terms emerged many years after the games they call back to; Super Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night were 1994 and 1997, and Rogue was 1980. These genres also have the common distinction of being hyperspecific, representing a fairly niche convergence of gameplay aspects which can all be found in other genres. It’s notably easier in these cases to make an iconic comparison than it is to come up with a catchy term that actually captures their nuance. Some attempts at that for other genres are pretty weak. Who decided that Devil May Cry-style action games with lots of expressive moves and an emphasis on combos should be called character action? Stylish action is right there! All the same, metroidvanias and roguelikes aren’t really subgenres of anything else, making their complexity even stranger. Here, we begin to arrive at the unavoidable issue with genre classifications.

Who Do Genres Help?

I’ve often wanted to take some time to nail down the complex relationship of genres, genre types, and subgenres, and recently I did try to actually do it. Ultimately, I gave up before long because it became immediately apparent that there were barely any strict definitions without some kind of significant exception. Comparing my own efforts to Wikipedia’s list of video game genres does a good job illustrating this issue. Platformers and rhythm games are listed under action games, but I wouldn’t call action a central tenet of either. Then again, their definition of action is centered around physical execution requirements rather than the aesthetic qualities of action. Metroidvanias are also described as a platformer subgenre, which is mostly true except for all the metroidvanias that are in other genres like Metroid’s own first-person shooter subseries Metroid Prime. Light gun remains one of the shooter subgenres on this list, despite the fact that most light gun games fall under other subgenres like rail shooters already.

There’s no real authority dictating what’s an important enough factor to be its own genre, what subgenres should exist, or which genres should contain those subgenres. It is, like all else in the world of art, subjective, but subjectivity isn’t a very scientific quality for a system of classification. In fact, trying to squish the infinitely subjective into the finite objective is harmfully reductive. Take a niche genre I’ve come to enjoy recently: the immersive simulator. It’s a mostly first-person genre which emphasizes a high level of interactivity with the world and multifaceted problem solving. It also happens to involve shooting stuff fairly often, and it’s much more prolific on PC than other platforms. A difficulty I had with immersive sims when I first started to play them is that I treated them a lot more like shooters, but I appreciated them a lot more once I began thinking outside the box and approaching problems differently. All the same, the immersive sim’s unique foibles are largely obscured by their surface-level resemblance to shooters. People tend to come into immersive sims with some kind of preconceived notion about a genre which they aren’t supposed to be and bounce off, which is one reason the genre has remained niche since it began in the nineties.

This particular trouble with genres lies in the intersection of genres’ purposes. They can be used to track the stylistic evolution of an art form and to boil something down so that audiences can make quick comparisons and find more things they like. Artists are often pushing the boundaries on purpose to make something innovative or at least unique. So many excellent games can be pitched as “It’s like [X] but if it was a little [Y],” and so the genre threads that inspired them are woven together into some whole new thing that doesn’t sort very neatly. Take our old friend, the metroidvania. Super Metroid was originally just a platformer with adventure elements and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was inspired by The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, but now those games have inspired countless other titles. Fans responded by giving those games a unique, if lazily-construed, genre term that has outgrown its parents.

The end result of all of this is that new subgenres appear every few years, it gets harder and harder to make comparisons, and I see a lot of weird stuff when I look at the “boomer shooter” tag on Steam. This whole article, I’ve been wondering why we bother with genres if they can quickly become obsolete or barely contain any meaning in the first place. Just as I type this paragraph, I realize that the tension between our desire to grasp the art and the artist’s goal to create something that can’t simply be contained is perhaps exactly what makes genres meaningful. Genres are how we come to understand where we’ve arrived in the world of the art, and every new game we play incorporates that understanding somewhere. Is it a deliberate callback to a classic, a unique blend of ideas explored in other ways, or something entirely new? As long as we let the container expand the art rather than constrain, genres can help us along as we understand and evolve the medium.

Returning to Overwatch recently has hit me with a surprising rush of nostalgia not just for the game, but for everything surrounding it. Having played it when it first came out ten years ago before going on a long hiatus, listening to my favorite characters interact and playing matches on classic maps felt like coming back home even in the face of everything that’s changed about the game. In particular, I was reminded of the amazing animated shorts Blizzard used to market the game. Marketing an original world and characters to a large multiplayer audience is tough, and Blizzard solved that problem by pouring all their World of Warcraft money into exceptional short films with beautiful animation. These shorts and other supplementary storytelling established Overwatch’s speculative future and touched on all corners of its wide world with playable characters and locations exactly as they appear in the game. Overwatch was always a fun experience, but I chalk up the lion’s share of its success to the creative team. After many of them left due to controversy within Blizzard, fans have noted the game just doesn’t quite feel the same.

This has gotten me thinking about just where story finds its place in the world of multiplayer gaming. Cooperative experiences are often defined by cutscene skipping or excluding story entirely so you don’t have to worry about talking over something. Many players in competitive games play with no regard for wider worldbuilding or characters, choosing what’s strongest or best suited to their playstyle. All the same, nobody plays games that are just polygons interacting in blank voids, no matter how fun they are. Players care about characters and worlds in multiplayer games, but “story” simply doesn’t look the same in that context as it does elsewhere. I’m here to dive into how storytelling impacts the multiplayer experience, and how playing with and against others changes the way we want to interact with story.

Is the Game Telling the Story?

You might have noticed that my first example here with Overwatch concerns storytelling that happens mostly outside of the game itself. When concrete plot events happen in Overwatch’s world, they occur in the animated shorts, webcomics, and more. Characters may talk about what’s happening in the spawn room while you wait for the match to start, or certain details on a map may change in response to a story development, but the development itself happens in supplementary material. This is a very common approach to storytelling in multiplayer games. Even when backstory is contained within the game, as with Guilty Gear -STRIVE-’s movie-style story, reading or watching the plot play out in a separate menu has no tangible connection to the gameplay itself. No matter how many times you win your fight, push a payload, or capture a zone, the story is unaffected by your actions and you are not shown a real narrative development.

The reason for this is quite simple; competitive environments are not conducive to storytelling. These games are at their most fun when your focus is entirely on the match, as the depth of interaction inherent to the competition is more than enough to carry the moment-to-moment experience. Moreover, multiplayer matches are meant to be infinitely repeatable regardless of their outcome. Your victory in a match can’t really lead to the next event the way levels or quests in a single-player game can. While video games are more than capable of interesting and mature storytelling, it makes sense for games so focused on the gameplay to offload their narrative efforts to more traditional narrative mediums like text and film. Both have room to breathe that way, and it has the somewhat meta effect of making the world seem bigger by virtue of how many different ways the audience has to engage with it.

Of course, games used to do the split between story and competition within themselves. The Halo franchise was famous not only for popularizing online deathmatches on console, but for its professional and polished stories that could be played alone or with some friends on the same system. This was the standard going back even before Halo. Though Quake doesn’t exactly tell much of a story, fighting through the unsettling gothic atmosphere as an out-of-place soldier still immerses the player in an interesting world. Before that, fighting games always had their lineup of arcade battles against the computer leading to little plot anecdotes for each character, minimal as that is. However, as the free-to-play, live-service format grew in popularity and fiscal success, most studios couldn’t justify putting effort into a single-player campaign to support the multiplayer world. The multimedia approach is our modern compromise, though some multiplayer games still try to bridge the gap internally. Marvel Rivals tells its story through a mix of written gallery cards and physical comics, but the maps where matches take place are all meant to fit into a certain narrative moment throughout its unfolding story. Bungie’s new Marathon title is attempting to use the looter-shooter genre’s tropes to tie into the original Marathon series’ surprisingly cerebral, postmodern themes. Ideas like death, rebirth, and transcendence remain intact; while I don’t really enjoy looter shooters, the execution in Marathon’s case is interesting.

So, that’s how our competitive games go about telling stories these days. As the emphasis flipped from stories with multiplayer components over to multiplayer formats with supplementary story, the question of just why these games actually bother with the story remains. It’s certainly not as easy to communicate it to your audience as it used to be, and yet it matters all the same. The reason for this is simple:

We Stand By Our People

Recently, Street Fighter III’s poster boy Alex made his way into Street Fighter 6 as Season 3’s third DLC character. Capcom created a ton of hype for him before release, collaborating with J-Pop group JAM Project for his theme and bringing on professional wrestler Kenny Omega to motion-capture some of Alex’s classic wrestling moves. Alex has always had a lot of personality, and I was excited to see Street Fighter 6 take him to the next level. Unfortunately, players like myself found only that his new story was oddly focused around his marriage to Patricia, his adoptive sister and - a new detail in Street Fighter 6 - apparently his second cousin. YIKES. It was so bad that the game was updated with some wide-reaching retcons to Alex’s history that make the situation mostly less weird, but he’s never living it down all the same.

While this drama was fresh, I was listening to fighting game content creator Brian_F’s podcast, Extra Trashy, as he discussed it with pro Street Fighter player iDom. “The whole thing’s a joke to me,” says Brian; “I never realized how many people actually care about Street Fighter writing.” He’s got a point - Street Fighter has never had much of a good story, and the majority of players are just here for the fighting - but I couldn’t agree with him wholeheartedly. Street Fighter players don’t much care about the plot, but they do care about the characters. After all, Street Fighter 6 tricked players into playing the tutorial by turning it into an hours-long RPG where your custom character can hang out with the whole cast and learn their moves.

My point is that people - myself included - like these characters for more than their strength or their playstyle. Ken may fit my playstyle well, but I also play him because I like who he is. I’ve always enjoyed his friendly rivalry with Ryu, acting the foil to Ryu’s self-serious dedication to martial arts as a more laid-back fighter with a life and a family outside of the match. When he got embroiled in a global conspiracy in Street Fighter 6 and went on the run, I was excited to see where the story might take him. This is just as true for Overwatch. Genji is one of the game’s hardest characters, but I like him too much not to put the time in. He’s lived a whole life before the time the game takes place, touching on nearly all corners of Overwatch’s fleshed-out world in his long journey towards inner peace. Plus, he’s a cyborg ninja, and that’s damn cool. I’ve spent many hours as weak characters just because I liked them - Kirby and Richter in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Iron Man in Marvel Rivals, and more - and I know I’m not the only one.

In the best cases, gameplay reinforces personality in perfect synergy. Ken’s style is a little less well-rounded than Ryu’s, but the flashy flaming uppercuts and aggressive offense reflect his confident, free-flowing attitude. That’s why, when Fortnite throws in a skin of Ryu for you to shoot people in, it’s disjointed and meaningless. When Ryu fights with his fists to stay disciplined and appreciate the art of fighting in Street Fighter, it means something beyond the match. Characters are the lens a player experiences these simulated worlds through, and that’s true even when a player’s engagement with the world happens in structured, competitive formats. Who you choose is part of how you express your style in these games, both mechanically and aesthetically. As interesting as the dynamic interplay between players is, our motivation to engage with that system comes when we identify with our characters. Winning feels better when you’re doing it your way, and there’s few better feelings than finding the character you want at your side.

Collaborative Storytelling

The dynamic between story and gameplay changes quite a bit in cooperative multiplayer environments. Many of those aforementioned single-player modes in competitive games have co-op, but it doesn’t connect to the story; most Halo games just drop your buddies in as additional Master Chiefs with no context. Levels are still linear and cutscenes play when they’re supposed to, as your whole voice chat party just kind of sits and watches. Personally, I don’t mind taking breaks to watch the story play out even with my friends, but it’s not the most ideal context within which to take that story seriously. There are certain movies that you just can’t watch with too many people in the same room, as the desire to interact with your friends inevitably overtakes the ability to focus on the screen and really take it all in. Because many games still must put the gameplay on hold to deliver their stories, they can easily be subject to the same problems.

Co-op focused games have learned to direct their storytelling emphasis elsewhere. Instead of focusing on traditional narratives with characters and a chronological sequence of events, these games let players design their own characters and give them a repeatable gameplay framework to enjoy together. Games like Peak, Lethal Company, and Deep Rock Galactic are among the more popular examples of this format. These games all have simple, occasionally even barebones narrative frameworks, but this doesn’t mean story is absent. Rather, the game provides a context for fun moments to emerge with your friends as you play. Though all games possess the emergent stories of personal experience, co-op games place singular focus on letting those moments flourish. The story is not of Peak, but of that time your friend threw dynamite into a pit to cook a scorpion only for your other friend to fall into the pit moments before. Not unlike the collaborative storytelling found in tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, there is some real value to allowing people to create their own emergent stories in fictionalized contexts.

I would also be remiss not to mention MMOs. I’ve never really participated in MMOs, unless you count Club Penguin back in the day, but they are easily the most narrative-focused multiplayer games. Games like World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, and Destiny 2 allow huge populations of players to create their own characters and participate in a world whose events unfold in front of them. Some suspension of narrative is, as always, required - canonically, a given dungeon raid surely only succeeds once instead of the many, many times it is intended to be attempted in the game - but the story still connects much more to the players’ involvement in the world. Participating in a world like this can be quite complex though, and the games themselves are designed around time-consuming RPG mechanics like grinding. It’s no surprise most games can’t commit to fleshing out their world and multiplayer mechanics on this level, as most players only have time to participate in one or none of these games at once.

If there was a short answer to this question, I’d say it’s that multiplayer games have stories because video games are art, through and through. Video games have always represented an unusual confluence of activity and art. Many people consider the aspects of one to disqualify the medium as the other, but the ways multiplayer games have told their stories shows me that games don’t have to pick a side. Even when competition is the focus, the people who make these games can’t resist the opportunity to create interesting worlds and characters. The activity motivates our engagement with the art, and the art enhances our investment in the activity, both in ways we rarely consider consciously. So, as much as story can feel like a secondary priority for these games, I’ll always be interested in what they have to say - and many others will too, even a little more than they know.

As nostalgia for ‘90s shooters reaches its zenith, one publisher has been at the forefront of the boomer shooter resurgence: New Blood Interactive. Three of their published games, bundled together on Steam as the New Blood FPS Trilogy, represent some of the most iconic faces of the modern boomer shooter. 2018’s Dusk, which I’ve already covered, reinvigorates the classic Quake structure with ingenious creativity to remind the world what was so great about boomer shooters in the first place. Ultrakill, which I plan to cover once it’s finally out of early access, innovates beyond the boomer shooter so effectively that it’s already inspiring lots of new releases before it’s even really done. Finally, 2019’s Amid Evil nods back to Heretic and Hexen as a medieval boomer shooter with magical weapons and worlds.

On the surface, Amid Evil isn’t quite as impressive as the genre titans it gets lumped in with. Whereas Dusk and Ultrakill show how much untapped potential remains in this subgenre, Amid Evil seems content to stay in its comfort zone. Boomer shooter fans will find it familiar, and new players will get a good sense for what to expect from the genre with this game. The game even opens by saying you’ve been recruited to destroy “the Evil,” which is about as boomer-shooter-simple as it gets. I’ve always enjoyed Amid Evil just fine, but I couldn’t match the enthusiasm some fans have for it. However, upon recently revisiting the game and trying its 2023 expansion, The Black Labyrinth for the first time, I’ve gained a certain respect for just how solid this game is at its core.

Amid Evil’s strong fundamentals are never more obvious than with its weapons. On the surface, the arsenal consists of magical-themed proxies for the standard Doom II-style weapons, but in practice, there’s a good bit more nuance to how you use them. Even your starting melee weapon, the Axe of the Black Labyrinth, proves useful throughout the game, evoking Hexen’s melee emphasis. Though the lightning-launching Voltride seems to fill your standard full-auto niche, its ability to cast chain lightning between crowds of weak foes by “overkilling” an enemy makes it feel unique and satisfying. Where most shotgun-type weapons exist to get eclipsed by super shotgun-type weapons, the Whisper’s Edge’s ability to pierce groups of enemies with the edges of its sword beams give it a niche even compared to the Star of Torment’s devastating hail of shards. The enemies, unique to each of the game’s seven worlds, play into this even further. Some enemies are weak to certain weapons or vice versa, and others have unique interactions with your weapons like reflecting your projectiles with a shield or turning into stronger enemies if they’re set on fire. The worst boomer shooters find themselves getting stale, and Amid Evil wards this off quite well.

Much of the arsenal’s satisfaction comes from the presentation, as well. “Overkilling” enemies results in especially gory deaths like pinning foes to the walls with the Star of Torment’s shards. Even though the Celestial Claw is essentially just a rocket launcher in function - which is good, because the boomer shooter rocket launcher is a sacred tenet which should not be infringed upon - the fact that it fires entire planets at enemies sure makes it feel unique. I kind of feel bad about doing that, especially since there’s a small chance that the planet you pull with it is Earth. All of this gets cranked up to eleven when you collect enough souls to activate Soul Mode, a state which boosts your weapons akin to Heretic’s Tome of Power. If you thought firing planets at enemies was excessive, how about firing SUNS? The Voltride fires a continuous lightning beam in soul mode, carrying on the Quake Lightning Gun’s legacy in admirable fashion and making it even easier to overload foes. Finally, the Aeternum, your mystical equivalent to the screen-clearing BFG, will switch from casting energy at crowds to firing a black hole, sucking in even the toughest foes you face. It’s important for weapons to feel good to shoot in these games, and Amid Evil certainly clears that bar.

Amid Evil’s sense of style thoroughly extends to its world design. It has an artstyle which I can’t quite say I’ve seen anywhere else. Its levels have Quake-style low-poly environments and low-res textures, but the lighting system is extremely sophisticated. The game even supports raytracing! Your weapons also animate like 2D images, very much in the style of classic Doom or Heretic, but I’m pretty sure they’re all 3D models since they’re affected by the environmental lighting. It’s sort of like combining the way you remember classic games with certain modern trappings. Like Dusk, the atmosphere is complemented by a solid soundtrack from boomer shooter darling Andrew Hulshult. His work on this game is more ambient than usual, evoking much of his music for Quake Champions, but it ramps up and excites when it needs to.

Amid Evil tours seven different realms, each with their own unique architecture and enemies. Worlds range from mountain castles and citadels to monolithic forges to trippy voids in space, all vaguely united under a medieval aesthetic sensibility. Messages on the wall and a lore codex accessible through the pause menu flesh the areas out, showing how the Evil wormed its way into these ancient realms. Though the Evil is largely depicted as a sort of corrupting influence, the context of each world makes it clear that these worlds fell only to themselves. The Lunar and Solar Solstices were corrupted by tribalism against each other, the Sentinels’ obsession with perfection rotted them from the inside, and the Mages of the Arcland Expanse broke the world apart with overzealous magical experiments, for instance. It’s not particularly fleshed-out, but I appreciated the attempt at something more subtle and metaphorical.

The visual variety is nice, and that extends to the way you play through these levels as well. The map design has good momentum and is rarely confusing, but there’s still plenty of secrets to hunt down to give yourself the edge. Since the game is broken up into so many different worlds, you frequently have your arsenal reset, which gives the whole loadout some more value. Boomer shooter vets will also enjoy the “Champion Mode” where you begin each level with only your axe. Overall, barring some late-game exceptions, the level design is where the game feels the most like standard boomer shooter fare. The first world in particular is a little too easy, and the whole game provides you with a lot more mana and health than you really need even on the hidden Evil difficulty. Evil is really not that evil, and it’s probably only hidden as a reference to how Quake hid its nightmare difficulty. Movement is pretty basic, too; you have your obligatory rocket jumping (planet jumping?), but there’s no strafe-jumping, sliding, or the like.

In short, Amid Evil plays the boomer shooter straight with smart execution and satisfying weapons, even if its approach is a little too safe. Its presentation helps it stand out, but it doesn’t really have the spice and cleverness that something like Dusk has and it’s certainly not as creative as Ultrakill. Should I ask for more? I’d quite like to; the game is right on the edge of being something genuinely impressive. Well, in 2023, The Black Labyrinth DLC arrived to give Amid Evil a little push and show off the best that it has to offer.

A prequel to Amid Evil, The Black Labyrinth depicts the Champion’s quest through the titular labyrinth to earn its coveted Axe. Of course, this means you’ll need a different melee weapon; ironically, the Gauntlets of the Platinum Star are not only cooler than the Axe, but integrated into the level design significantly more. There are a ton of surfaces and switches that can only be activated with a firm punch, launching huge blocks or yourself across the level. The Black Labyrinth’s levels aren’t nearly as generous with mana as the main game, too. There’s also these annoying shield-bearing enemies that show up about halfway through who can reflect your shots, but can’t do much about getting punched in the gut. All of this already means you’ll want to throw hands with enemies more often, but the Gauntlets just look cooler even in a vacuum. Observe:

Using Soul Mode even lets you rapidly punch like it’s Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, but I won’t include a video here since it’s honestly pretty disorienting.

As you beat your foes to death with your own two fists, you’ll likely notice that The Black Labyrinth feels more brutal than the base game. Throughout nine levels with eleven new foes and two new bosses, the titular Black Labyrinth earns its reputation as a challenge which has stood uncleared for generations. War horns blare in a new collection of epic anthems from Hulshult as you descend from challenge to challenge; his final boss theme for this DLC is so good, he made it the first track on the soundtrack album. A strange spirit watches over your progress every now and again, voiced by Stephan Weyte of Blood fame. The levels are all visually standout, fun, and just that little bit sharper than before. The Black Labyrinth is about twice as long as Amid Evil’s original brief worlds, which is great because this is definitely Amid Evil at its best.

Aside from the Gauntlets, The Black Labyrinth only includes one new weapon. Amid Evil’s arsenal was always its strongest point, so I don’t really mind this. The Voidsplitter is a space-rending scythe which can reap even the largest groups of enemies in a brutal slice, replacing the Aeternum. Activate Soul Mode to straight-up wipe your foes out of existence. I think it says something that you can replace the base game’s weapons with their Black Labyrinth equivalents when you play it, but not vice-versa. Black Labyrinth’s unique enemies fill the base game’s familiar archetypes, but this episode’s increased enemy variety makes it much more consistently challenging throughout. You’ll be giving everything at your disposal a workout, and the aforementioned decrease in mana pickups forces you to think more about how you shoot in a good way. It’s all so intense and solid that, when you beat the expansion and it loads right into the base game, it feels like crazy buildup for that easy first world.

Simply put, The Black Labyrinth is Amid Evil with that extra edge I wanted it to have. The base game was already solid, but this DLC highlights all of the game’s best elements and makes it clear why this game sits at the same table as Dusk. It’s not groundbreaking or genre-defining, but it’s just damn solid. I’ve played lots of games that were fine, but didn’t come together in one way or another. Hell, I just reviewed one. To say nothing of all the games I’ve played that were simply bad, you do gain an appreciation for something that nails the basics when you’ve waded through so much of the middle ground. Amid Evil gets props for simply feeling the way a game like this should, even hitting occasional highs where it stands out as uniquely worthwhile. If you like boomer shooters, you’ll like Amid Evil, and if you think you might like boomer shooters, Amid Evil’s not a bad place to find out.

Last Fall, I wrote an article outlining my most anticipated games of the season which included MOUSE: P.I. For Hire. Just in time for Fall 2025, MOUSE: P.I. finally released on April 16th, 2026. I first learned about it from its Summer Games Fest trailer, where the combination of rubber hose animation, noir tropes, and what looked to be boomer shooter gameplay really stood out to me. It didn’t hurt that it was flaunting Troy Baker’s performance as the jaded, streetwise Jack Pepper, our titular mouse P.I. That trailer painted what looked like a complete picture of a game combining boomer shooter action with crime-solving mechanics and a real story, but looking back at trailers and screenshots from the years this game spent in development reveals a lot of little revisions. I think MOUSE: P.I. might have been trying to put too many pieces together, and what we got wasn’t quite as hard-boiled as I’d hoped.

Largely beyond reproach, at any rate, is MOUSE: P.I.’s art style. Combining 3D environments and 2D characters, the city of Mouseburg and its surrounding areas are brought to life effectively. There’s a lighthearted approach to the combination of largely innocent rubber hose styling and the gritty noir aesthetic, such that it feels just as silly to blow off a mouse’s head as it does to explode them into a pile of dust with eyes. Small touches give every animation a lot of life, and characters are full of visual personality. Despite the game’s monochromatic style, it effectively highlights interactive level props and important info doesn’t blend together. You get the sense that the artists just had a good time drawing as much as they could, especially with the largely-superfluous world map that draws out the Mouseburg region in detail. The soundtrack’s retro jazz tones and orchestral tension, both in its original music and a variety of licensed tracks ranging from Dizzy Gillespie to Vivaldi, set the mood well as Jack tours city streets, movie sets, hidden laboratories, and more.

The art works well in concert with MOUSE: P.I.’s story, certainly much more of a priority than it usually is for boomer shooters. Set in a mouse-inhabited proxy for Prohibition-era America, the story revolves around a ridiculously tangled conspiracy involving the fascist Big Mouse Party, a dead actress, disappearing shrews, and foreign scientists. Jack Pepper is brought onto the case when his Mouseburg Herald contact, Wanda Fuller, lets him in on the case of a missing magician: his old war buddy Steve Bandel. Every lead he chases pulls him in a different direction - and right into the crosshairs of the mob, the BMP, corrupt cops, a bizarre cult, cheeseleggers (cheese is like drugs, you see, because they’re mice) and more. In typical noir fashion, the mean streets of Mouseburg are rife with dirty dealings and shady characters, and the oppression of the diminuitive shrews by the BMP effectively mirrors the pre-WWII setting which defines noir as a genre. Like the animation, the story approaches the serious situations its cartoons are going through with an appropriate amount of self-aware humor. Turns out cartoon logic is a great way to explain a lot of the less-sensible video game tropes which exist for fun, too!

A highlight of MOUSE: P.I.’s story is the characters, who have a surprising amount of depth. Jack Pepper, portrayed by Troy Baker, is a highlight. Though he fits the noir detective bill closely, small details like his past as a soldier with Steve and current mayoral candidate Cornelius Stilton flesh him and the world out well. He has something of a fatherly relationship with Tammy Tumbler, a young tinkerer whose real father Jack locked up when he was still a cop. Characters generally feel like they have whole lives under their belts, and the performances are lively across the board. I enjoyed Florian Clare’s performance as the dry, witty Wanda, and Frank Todaro impressed in combining Stilton’s practiced, dignified delivery with a natural stutter. My only real gripe with the script is an absolutely ridiculous number of references. It’s no harm when they nod towards clear inspirations like Blood and Steamboat Willie (hey, it’s kind of weird for this game to be inspired by both of those things, huh?), but there were so many references to all kinds of random things that it was genuinely distracting at times.

Unfortunately, MOUSE: P.I.’s gameplay isn’t executed with much of the same confidence. I’ve been describing it as a boomer shooter and, while it certainly has the speed and slaughter to be one, there’s a lot of ways where it doesn’t play the genre tropes straight. Guns generally need to reload and have things like bullet spread and recoil. Kicking enemies, double-jumping, and dashing all drain stamina. Running out of stamina always felt very punishing, especially since so many of your most important actions all drain it significantly. The variety of enemies you face is also quite low; you’ve seen most of the foes you’ll be facing in every level by the halfway point or even a little earlier. Encounters across the whole game start to blend together as it struggles to up the ante, which was fairly noticeable during my 15-hour playthrough. There’s plenty of boss fights, though, nearly all of which were much more interesting and fun than the standard combat. Bosses had a way of waking me up, forcing me to engage with the game’s mechanics a lot more seriously than normal fights ever prepared me for.

Though MOUSE: P.I.’s weapons are lovingly-rendered and often creative, like the ink-melting Devarnisher and the brain-blasting Jarhead, getting new ones typically didn’t excite. Most of the weapons feel weak before you give them some upgrades, and first impressions are everything. The aforementioned Jarhead’s primary fire is a generally slow and terrible projectile that stuns and does low damage, but its alternate fire - which you have to unlock - melts enemies if you aim at the head. It’s like they were trying to hide the good part of the weapon until after most would write it off. The game’s combat is so focused on crowds of weak enemies as well that the more complicated weapons seemed kind of pointless in the face of staples like the tommy gun - sorry, the James Gun in this game - and the boomstick. The Devarnisher and the Kiss Kiss both apply damage over time to enemies, but with how little health most enemies have, there’s not much use for either. The Loose Cannon, a literal cannon which acts as the game’s rocket launcher, has pretty low damage for how little ammo it can store. In general, the combat felt like it was missing something to bring it all together.

Prerelease screenshots also hinted that MOUSE: P.I. might involve some investigation in its gameplay, but in the final product, this is largely absent. Level design is largely linear, consisting of sequences of fights broken up by conversations with key figures and maybe a notional moment where you’re prompted to take out a camera and take a picture of something. Secrets litter the levels for the curious, ranging from old newspapers with worldbuilding details to baseball cards for use in a minigame. I think some of the clues were secrets, but I’m not really sure. Between levels, the game has you pin your clues to a board so you can resolve leads when you have enough of them. By the end of a game, I had as many as three levels available at once because of leads I’d resolved. With how the game pushed me along its main path, I’m not sure how much I missed - or where I’d look for it. A game about a mouse detective wasn’t the type of game I expected to have a button to press to give you a trail to your next objective. Even some simple puzzle solving could’ve added some appropriate flavor to the gameplay.

MOUSE: P.I. For Hire has a lot of style, but not as much substance as I’d hoped. Its heart is in the right place with a good sense of humor, but the gameplay doesn’t measure up too well in a genre which has had so many hits in recent years. I feel like it went through a lot of structural changes that resulted in a compromised, but nonetheless complete and playable final product. Still, for something with this kind of advertising budget and as many names in the credits as I saw, a little more polish could have gone a long way. All in all, at 30 dollars and fifteen hours, you could do worse things with your money and your time. MOUSE: P.I. does succeed where many games fail in feeling charming and getting a laugh out of me, even if I can point to better shooting experiences.

I’m sure we all have a few games that have been sitting around unplayed in our Steam libraries for years. I think I bought En Garde! around the time of its release in 2023; it was on sale, and I figured I’d get around to it eventually. Now, in April 2026, I was finally between games after spending an unreasonably long time beating everything in Heretic + Hexen. This adorable title, a student project with vibrant art and a unique take on the action genre, looked up at me with puppy dog eyes like I’d left it out in the rain overnight. I’m glad I let it inside when I did, though; it turns out it’s exactly the kind of game I like to stumble upon, warts and all.

Those experienced with the action genre know that the toughest moments aren’t fights against towering bosses and tough enemies, but dealing with crowds of low to mid level foes. Though it’s actually a lot of fun to learn different strategies and use moves you would otherwise ignore to deal with crowds, many players prefer simple duels with no distractions. Unlike other action games, En Garde! thrives in the crowded scuffle by design. Adalia de Volador, the lovable rogue fighting against Spanish oppression in Mexico, won’t be able to brush armies aside with ease or juggle an enemy in midair for a full minute like Dante or Bayonetta. In spite of what you expect from a fencing-themed game, En Garde! sets itself apart by encouraging you to play dirty.

En Garde!’s combat is fundamentally quite simple. You have basic attacks, a parry for quick ripostes, and a dodge for attacks which can’t be parried. Enemies have only a couple hit points, but you have to break down their guard to hit them. There’s no standing and waiting in En Garde!; it’s always best to keep attacking enemies, as it’ll drain their guard and force them to attack so that you can counter it. It’s simple and effective, but you’ll find it lacking as tougher enemies start to appear and your foes come in larger numbers. Captains have shields and heavy armor which normal attacks won’t break, and certain tougher enemies get all of their guard back when you don’t dodge or parry their attacks correctly. Unlike some other action games, the action can always reach a point where even the sharpest players won’t be able to parry or dodge through everything.

How do you deal with groups of sharper, tougher foes when your moveset is so simple? It’s easy; just improvise! One attack I haven’t mentioned yet is the kick, and it’s the move that opens up a world of possibilities. Kick your enemies into walls, down stairs, or right off of cliffs when you open them up! Better yet, kick props into enemies or vice versa. Knock down a crowd by kicking a stack of crates into them or kick enemies right into a weapon rack to drop it on their heads. You have to catch an enemy off guard, either by avoiding their attacks or disorienting them with props, before you can kick them directly. This means you can’t just kick everyone around all the time, making it more satisfying to kick an enemy in just the right spot.

Of course, there’s also a button to quickly interact with even more props in every arena. You can throw stuff at enemies to stun them, cut down ropes to drop cages and chandeliers on your enemies, or toss a bucket over an enemy’s head to keep them out of the fight for a while. When simply fencing your enemies doesn’t work, unorthodox tactics sweep them off their feet and embarrass them enough to make their guard easier to break. The varied arenas and props make your approach to every single fight different, and the variety of enemies is enough to further change up your approach. My only gripe here is the lack of a real manual lock-on system; the less strict targeting makes sense with how aware you must be of your surroundings, but it didn’t always agree with who I wanted to hit.

Last but not least is panache, the mechanic which really ties the theatrical theme together. Many action games put an emphasis on stylish play, but En Garde! is once again unique it how it defines style. Panache fuels a set of three powerful attacks which restore a point of health; a strike which depletes a lot of guard, a spinning slash to disperse crowds, and an unblockable kick that makes it easy to put your enemies in bad spots. You won’t earn much panache from your usual fighting maneuvers; instead, you earn it with bold and otherwise impractical flourishes. Swing over a crowd on a rope or a bar, landing on the other side as they can’t help but stare in shock! Slide over a table towards enemies, stunning them with your bravery! All of this has the perfect flair for a musketeering game like this, but it does feel a little like the game is bluntly looking for ways to get you to move like it wants you to. The special moves are nice to have with how busy and chaotic the game can get - especially on hard mode, where your health is halved - but earning panache is one part of the game that doesn’t quite flow as well as the rest.

Fortunately, even En Garde!’s hard mode feels quite fair, despite the game claiming that normal mode is the intended experience. Of course, it’s not as hard to design a solid difficulty curve when the game only has four levels. Yeah, I was able to finish the game on hard and its bonus arena mode in about four and a half hours, which is probably the most disappointing thing about the game. The arena mode’s random aspects do help to give it some replay value, at least. This game’s status as a cleaned-up student project explains all of its best and worst aspects. That’s why it doesn’t have a lot of content and seems a bit rough around the edges sometimes, but that’s also why it was made with so much creativity and heart.

Matching the appeal of its roguish gameplay is its wholly charming aesthetic. Your adventures as Adalia de Volador consist of four largely self-contained episodes exploring her escapades against the establishment. The entire first episode sees her fighting through the city guard in an elaborate test orchestrated by her bumbling brother Alejandro, who unconvincingly disguises himself as “El Vigilante” with a domino mask. The third episode introduces Zaida, a fellow rogue who isn’t above using Adalia’s crush on her to her advantage; the almost childlike admiration Adalia has for Zaida is adorable. The overarching villain is the Count Duke - both count and duke - who taxes the city dry and responds to caricatures of himself by burning them all in a huge bonfire in the city. The simple setup of a people’s hero fighting to keep the occupying government in check plays well into a lighthearted and quite funny tone, employing all the classic genre tropes with a self-aware touch. The colorful Mexican cityscapes and flavorful music give the game a vibrant feeling.

A lot of credit has to go to the performances here. Clara Cantos’ performance on Adalia is nothing short of spirited from start to finish; you can tell she’s having a ton of fun taunting her enemies and delivering witty retorts in the heat of battle, and her intonation fits the character perfectly. Angela LeBlanc and Julien Masdoua are also doing well as Zaida and Alejandro respectively, selling me on Zaida’s cool cynicism and Alejandro’s klutzy theatrics effectively. Although Mathieu Lagarrigue’s performance as the Count Duke is arguably a little flat, his intonation suited the image of the cruel, narcissistic noble well enough.

Quite a lot of the fun really comes from the various enemies’ lines in combat. The back-and-forth between Adalia and her foes is very charming, as they complain about her unorthodox tactics being unfair or taunt her for running away only to end up with a bucket on their head moments later. Their reactions to getting kicked down the stairs, watching Adalia leap over them in awe, and the like are fittingly cheesy. The tougher enemies like Captains and Duelists have more distinct personalities; it’s always fun to hear Captains complain about the lacking quality of their soldiers and to stuff Duelists’ self-important dignity right in their faces. It’s the perfect tone for a game about performing slapstick comedy against your enemies to come out on top.

Overall, En Garde! isn’t exactly some kind of groundbreaking masterpiece, but it is a fun, charming little romp. I don’t have much of anything bad to say about it, and just about anyone looking for a good time can enjoy what this game has to offer. I’m always so happy to stumble upon something like this because it just feels like something made by people who really cared about bringing their idea to life. Though its creators may not have had a ton of experience, they were still able to pour their creativity and talent into something that put a smile on my face. When stupid people who do nothing but play Call of Duty and Fortnite all of the time complain about games no longer being fun, I can’t help but think of things like En Garde! There’s always someone out there making the kind of game you want to see; sometimes you just have to look outside the mainstream.

If anyone’s ever told you that success is all about connections, there’s perhaps no better example of such a thing than Raven Software’s rapport with id software in the ‘90s. John Romero had taken a shine to their work on the otherwise-unsuccessful Black Crypt in 1992, and id would agree to publish many of their later endeavors. The one that would put Raven on the map was 1994’s Heretic, an early step towards creating a Dungeons and Dragons-inspired game that pushed the engine from id’s revolutionary 1993 title Doom in new ways. They’d later get even more ambitious with 1995’s Hexen: Beyond Heretic, one of the most advanced Doom engine titles of the time. Though Doom’s imitators were so numerous that the first-person shooter genre spent nearly a decade being referred to simply as “Doom clones,” Raven’s unique fantasy titles always stood out for bringing their own take to an established formula; this approach would define the company until Activision essentially just banished them to the endless Call of Duty grindstone around 2013.

Nightdive Studios, ever crusading to revive the old classics for modern audiences, turned their attention to Raven’s iconic pair of medieval shooters last summer. The remaster is not only an excellent opportunity for me to experience these titles for the first time, but it also introduces a number of changes that raise interesting ideas on what sorts of liberties remasters can take. These games, emblematic of attempts at innovation in the age before Quake added a real third dimension, occupy an interesting middle ground between adventure and shooter design that lends them a unique feel. How do they hold up today, and how did they affect the games of today?

At D’Sparil’s Gate

If either of these games was to deserve the archaic “Doom clone” moniker, it would be Heretic. Originally consisting of three episodes with nine levels each, one of which was secret, it fits Doom’s structure exactly. Almost all of its weapons are medieval-style analogues to Doom’s; wand equals pistol, Hellstaff equals plasma rifle, etc. The levels are wide labyrinths where navigation usually depends on collecting keys and hitting switches, killing the hordes of enemies along the way. The simple story of fighting demons is replaced by the slightly-less-simple story of fighting back against D’Sparil, the tyrannical Serpent Rider who swayed the world of Parthoris into worshiping him. See, that’s why it’s called Heretic! You can look up and down now, for what it’s worth, but it leads to weird texture warping and you’ll need the vertical auto-aim anyways.

However, simply calling it “Doom but medieval” feels reductive. While Heretic maintains all the Doom fundamentals, it finds much of its value in the ways that it builds additional mechanics on top of them. Heretic includes an inventory, allowing you to store useful items and power-ups for on-demand use. Most unique among these is the Tome of Power, which provides a unique boost to each weapon when used. This can be as simple as raising the number of projectiles and the fire rate of the shotgun-esque Ethereal Crossbow or as weird as turning your Hellstaff into a weapon that summons damaging rainstorms above enemies. One item turns enemies into much less deadly chickens. Though power-ups like invincibility and flight are also quite potent, the simple ability to carry health potions with you is perhaps most impactful of all. Heretic smartly prevents players from carrying more than one of each item between maps, encouraging you to use them instead of letting them collect dust while you wait for that hypothetical perfect moment when you absolutely need it.

Heretic’s enemies are also a good deal more creative than Doom’s. The original Doom’s enemies are really quite simple, and even Doom II’s new monsters are largely riffs on the existing ones. Heretic’s monsters use a wider range of attacks, perhaps most evident in its bosses. Iron liches fire exploding ice shots, walls of fireballs, and even really disorienting homing tornadoes which screw with your aim. Maulotaurs (no, I didn’t misspell “minotaurs”) use fireball spreads, grounded waves of fire, and a charging attack which can stun you briefly. Even basic enemies like the extremely common Gargoyles and the Disciples of D’Sparil add a lot more unique flavor. Enemies have a way of feeling quite bulky, though, especially for the numbers in which they appear. This is also partly due to a weirdly large degree of damage randomization on all the weapons which makes them feel inconsistent. It doesn’t help that the Firemace, easily the least derivative weapon in the game, is basically useless, either.

The good folks at Raven effectively leverage the medieval aesthetic in Heretic’s maps. The maps resemble fortresses and dungeons better than the maps in Doom ever resembled much of anything, and there’s a ton of great texture work for basic surfaces and a variety of wall decorations. Like the inventory, the maps also take inspiration from adventure games in their puzzles. The sorts of things you need to do to progress in some Heretic levels could easily have passed for secrets in Doom. The sum of these changes is a game that feels like an effective adventure-themed next step for the Doom formula. While it’s not as tight and lean as Doom in the action department, the breadth of tools at your disposal and the new foes makes it all feel pretty fresh - even when it makes things a lot easier.

Heretic + Hexen includes the original two Shadow of the Serpent Riders expansion episodes as well as the all-new Faith Renewed, and Nightdive has once more proven their deep understanding of these classics with their new episode. Faith Renewed’s maps ramp up the challenge in a good way and lay themselves out such as to never be as confusing as Heretic’s worst maps. I played the five classic episodes in their original states (you can disable the remaster’s changes in the “difficulty modifiers” sub-menu when starting a new game) and switched to Nightdive’s new mechanics for Faith Renewed, as I assumed they’d built their own expansion around them. Both were fun, though I can certainly see why Nightdive felt the need to change some things about the old episodes. I won’t complain about making the Firemace actually useful, and the original first map of Serpent Riders is an ungodly affair with too many enemies and too little ammo. That said, I think Nightdive’s map changes and new mechanics are a little too wide-reaching in some cases, especially for a game that wasn’t exactly begging for a fix. If you’re curious, I recommend playing the game in its original state first and switching to the enhancements if something is really bothering you.

It’s Like Playing D&D Alone But if That Wasn’t Super Depressing

Now, here’s where things really get interesting. Where Heretic applied a medieval twist on the fundamental Doom structure, Hexen: Beyond Heretic went… well, beyond. Though still a boomer shooter at its core, Hexen blends much more of the fantasy adventure genre into the mix. To this end, Raven pushed the Doom engine’s performance farther than ever. Vertical aiming returns and is now complimented by jumping, lending a much better sense of verticality to the not-quite-3D engine. Hexen’s environmental detail and lighting are also very sophisticated for the time, featuring destructible props like pots and trees and a ton of decorative wall textures. Your quest through Cronos to take down the next Serpent Rider, Korrax, ends up feeling much grander and more immersive.

Primary to the game’s fantasy feeling is the roster of three playable characters, each with unique weapons and stats. Baratus the fighter is the fastest and toughest character with an emphasis on melee; only two of his four weapons can attack at range. Daedolon the mage is the slowest and frailest, but he’s the only character who starts with a ranged attack and he generally fights better from afar. Parias the cleric strikes a middle ground with speed and durability, starting with a melee weapon and finding reliable ranged options later on. Each character has four weapons: the starting weapon which uses no mana, one weapon for either blue or green mana, and a fourth superweapon which must be assembled from three pieces and uses a hefty amount of both mana colors. Each class also uses the collectible fléchettes differently, which is kind of like a fifth weapon. Taken on the whole, you have more weapons and ways to play, but completing a Hexen campaign from start to finish as one character will leave you wanting some more variety - especially since the Tome of Power doesn’t return.

Hexen’s map design is also a big departure, and it’s a major reason the game feels so much more like a fantasy adventure. The linear episodes have been replaced with sprawling hubs, collections of interconnected maps featuring puzzles that require traveling through the entire hub to solve. Hunting down the proper switches and keys is a much more involved affair, for better or for worse. The first hub, The Seven Portals, is notorious for its confusing multi-network of various switch puzzles, and this does comprise much of how you navigate Hexen. I will admit that, when I pulled a switch in a later hub and saw the message “One ninth of the puzzle has been solved,” I couldn’t help but sigh. Watch out for crushing ceilings and floors and bottomless pits, too. While the feeling of navigating between each area lends a fun sense of scale and purpose to the world, it does grow tedious at times, especially because essential switches and keys are sometimes hidden in obscure, easy-to-miss corners. I’m used to investigating wall textures and checking weird corners from other boomer shooters, and even I got stumped a few times. Hexen is at its worst when it stalls out like that.

The map design is indicative of the unevenness which pervades all aspects of Hexen. While the weapons are generally more creative than Heretic’s, some of them are duds, which stands out more in light of how few alternatives each character has. The new hub system also means the game doesn’t stop you from stocking up on items anymore, which can really trivialize things. You’ll be playing the majority of the game with your fléchettes and healing potions maxed out at 25, with replacements found quickly after use. Despite the scale of the game, enemy variety is quite scant, which once again makes the more annoying enemies stand out. Centaurs and their more powerful but visually identical Slaughtaur variants use their shields to reflect attacks, often forcing time-consuming approaches to killing them. Swamp areas are filled to the gills with Stalkers, mermen who can only be killed while they’re popping up from underwater to smack you. The Heresiarch is a dreadfully annoying boss fought twice in the regular game with an absurd amount of health who occasionally activates a projectile-reflecting barrier - killing him is a chore. Hexen ends up being more ambitious and interesting than Heretic, but not as consistent and rougher around the edges.

Fortunately, this is where Nightdive’s remastering touch comes into play. Like Heretic, this game’s original expansion, Deathkings of the Dark Citadel, and the brand-new Vestiges of Grandeur are also included in Heretic + Hexen. Oddly enough, the remaster settings change less about Hexen, but the changes they do make are all great. Many of the game’s worst weapons feel a lot better now. Most noticeable is the addition of a shield to Parias’ originally-pathetic mace; melee attacks can now be parried to open enemies up to a brutal counterstrike, transforming Parias’ gameplay completely. If you want to mix things up, there are various pedestals in the hubs which let you switch your character without starting a new game. Maps have new visual touches that make it easier to track your progress on switch hunts, and the automap now marks keys and the many hub teleporters to provide a fairer sense of direction. Enemy counts in single-player have been reduced a fair bit to cut down on tedium, which is especially helpful for Deathkings.

Vestiges of Grandeur is also an excellent demonstration of Hexen at its best. A lot of care was put into the environmental design of the maps, and while the game still consists of a sprawling puzzle across a huge hub, the main objectives and even secrets feel much more intuitive to follow. Vestiges’ only hub uses nearly every progression item from the original Hexen, but it’s all laid out with such a good flow that I barely ever stalled out. It’s an expansion which zeroes in on Hexen’s best moments; exploring sprawling medieval worlds as you fight your way forwards through intense encounters. It’s this expansion which is the clearest proof to any modern audience that Hexen’s unique genre blend has merit, even though the original game stumbled in places.

At the end of the day, neither Heretic nor Hexen broke the most ground or felt the best to play, but they are excellent examples of fun takes on existing design space. The flood of Doom Clones in the ‘90s and our current oversaturation of live-service shooters are quite similar, and these games are a good example of the difference between a truly derivative clone and an inspired new experience. Heretic combined the fundamentals with new flavor and meaningful differences that changed your approach, and Hexen’s sweeping changes to the world and gameplay demonstrated just how much potential the genre still had. Though neither game stands as a real historical landmark, they’re emblematic of all the different people putting their own spin on the current thing - and just how many of those people can end up making something worth playing. Next time you get bored of what you’ve seen before, step outside of the mainstream a little bit - or look back to the retro classics.

Even as fighting games have managed to widen the net more than ever in recent years, the long-standing stigma that these games are too “hard” remains. The approach to this for the past decade or so has been to try and remove perceived entry barriers. Some changes like input buffer windows are good, while others like simplified characters and combos have their ups and downs. Experienced players complain that fighting games are losing their spirit in an effort to boost sales, and to make matters worse, these changes haven’t done much to fix their reputation as overly hardcore, unwelcoming games. What exactly does difficulty mean in the context of a game where the goal is to defeat another player? Why are other competitive genres widely perceived as more accessible? Finally, why have many new players jumped in, and what keeps them around?

“Difficult” has always seemed to me like the wrong word to describe any competitive game. When single-player games are described as such, it’s to say that players will need a certain level of skill just to make progress and see the entire game. If difficulty is defined by the benchmarks you have to reach to succeed, then the difficulty in a fighting game (or any other player-versus-player genre) changes every round. When people say these games are difficult, they’re usually referring to complicated inputs and combos or the nuanced interactions that happen in the neutral, advantage, and disadvantage states during the match. However, your understanding of these things only has to be as good as or better than your opponent’s; I can say from experience that many players even today don’t really grasp these things. Sure, some people are out there putting hundreds of hours into Street Fighter 6 to compete for millions of dollars on the world stage, but their prowess doesn’t make it any more complicated for two friends to chill on the couch and mash buttons. It also doesn’t make that casual experience any less legitimate; if you’re having fun, you’re playing the game “for real.”

This isn’t any different for other competitive genres. A beginner shooter player will probably be more concerned with learning how to move and aim at the same time than they are with concepts like proper positioning or skill shots. Racing game casuals care more about staying on the track than they do about shaving milliseconds off of their lap times. Though the difference between a beginner and a pro isn’t any smaller than it is in fighting games, beginners don’t feel like they’re not playing “the real game” or complain that it’s too hard simply to play at all in the same way. Why aren’t these games “hard”?

The reason is in how these games accommodate casual experiences. Shooters have been a single-player genre since their inception. Extremely popular shooters of the past decades like Halo and Call of Duty always packed in campaign experiences which let players get a hold of the mechanics outside of a competitive environment, not to mention their various extra cooperative modes like Firefight and Zombies and the ability to team up with friends against other players. Many shooters are designed just for single-player or co-op modes even today, but the basic genre fundamentals are largely the same as they are in multiplayer games. Racing games always have a ton of engaging ways to play alone, and they can be fun even without any other cars on the track. Even MOBAs, a genre with a similarly “hardcore” reputation as fighting games, let you play on a team with five of your buddies.

Fighting games, by contrast, usually feel stiff or boring in single-player form. Single-player often amounts to the game lining up a bunch of computer opponents for you to beat with an unfair boss at the end, a format which is fundamentally unchanged from the arcade days. More than dull, this format fails at teaching the ins and outs of the game in a fun, intuitive way. Teaming up with your friends is impossible too, save for certain tag games with modes where different players can play as a team’s various characters. Getting together with your friends usually means running king-of-the-hill rotations and a bunch of parallel one-versus-one matches. This can be plenty of fun, but it’s not as forgiving as getting to team up against random players with your friends. Instead of your more skilled friends helping you win, they’re the reason you’re losing even if they are trying to help you get better. Without good casual modes or a smooth learning pipeline, a lot of players only see fighting games through the almost unreachable expertise of high-level tournament clips and then wonder why it doesn’t look like that when they play.

It also doesn’t help that fighting games still tend to be full-price games with a lot of paid DLC. It is quite literally harder for some people to afford even trying the game, and the genre might have some progress to make in terms of simply marketing itself. I’m going to focus on the gameplay reasons these games are hard to approach, though; I just felt that was worth mentioning.

This probably makes fighting games sound archaic at best or needlessly cruel at worst, but that’s not really true. The dilemma here is that what makes fighting games struggle with casual modes is the same as what makes them really fun: they are deeply fine-tuned around the experience of fighting another person. Characters automatically face each other, with inputs checking your direction relative to your opponent. The classic balance between attacking, blocking, and grabbing is predicated on conditioning opponents into making mistakes and making predictions based on how your opponent plays. There’s honestly something intimate about the fighting game experience. With layered character designs and nuanced systems, players have a lot of room to express themselves through their play. Even those pesky motion inputs which so many players decry as archaic become satisfying to perform and help each character literally feel different in your hands. As you hone your skills and develop your own playstyle, the experience only gets more fulfilling. Hitting that “rematch” button over and over with a friend, always ready to see how the dance plays out again, is just about the peak of video games.

That depth is what makes fighting games awesome, but as I mentioned before, it’s also why the usual tricks to make onboarding easier don’t work very well. Many fighting games have opted to simplify many of the more difficult aspects of the game. Mashing a single button may result in an autocombo, classic inputs will get replaced with simple ones, or the combo system will be designed such that many characters have very similar combo routes and offensive approaches. While this has resulted in some good changes that have made modern fighting games feel less stiff, going too far in this direction is bad for the opposite reasons; it flattens the game out and leaves players without as much room to experiment or play their own way. Moreover, the things which actually stump new players, like the tempo of a match and frame data, remain the real difference-makers.

In some way, developers want to solve the “issue” of skill gaps. However, the potential for those skill gaps is what actually gives the game its substance. The problem is that beginners won’t understand what it is they’re losing to and what they need to learn. These are not impossible problems to solve, though, and the past half-decade’s fighting game renaissance is proof positive of that. You might be surprised to learn after what you’ve read here that fighting games are arguably in the best place they’ve ever been right now, and it’s all because of a few games that managed to understand what new or more casual players actually care about.

The Super Smash Bros. series is often excluded from discussions of fighting games as its own thing in spite of its immense popularity, but I believe this disqualification is part of why fighting games have stubbornly struggled as long as they have. It’s true that Smash’s open-ended “platform fighter” style is very different and outwardly simpler than traditional fighters, but it is a franchise which has long understood what casual appeal means for fighting games better than most. The platform fighter style can accommodate many more players in a match along with zany stages and items that make the game into a renowned casual experience. The casual side of Smash also allows single player to be fun, since the computer opponents don’t have to engage players on their own. Even the simple input style doesn’t stop Smash games from being quite technical at high level, with Super Smash Bros. Melee especially being famous for its depth and complexity. While it’s true that the series has often shied away from competitive play, as was certainly the case in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the best games in the series show that there’s room for all kinds of players in the genre. Just about anyone who likes playing Smash seriously these days started by messing around in free-for-all matches with their friends, and that’s really important.

If there is any proof that fighting games won’t succeed by dumbing themselves down, we need only look to Street Fighter. 2016’s Street Fighter V attempted to draw in new players with a simpler gameplay system, but failed hard at launch because there was almost nothing to do besides play ranked matches online with bad delay-based netcode. Without casual modes, new players didn’t see much value in the purchase, leaving experienced players to complain about the lack of depth compared to Street Fighter IV. Only with years of updates containing new modes, characters, and moves did Street Fighter V come to feel like a complete experience. The game also added much better “rollback” netcode later on, which became the industry standard after Guilty Gear -STRIVE- launched with it to great success.

For 2023’s Street Fighter 6, Capcom learned their lesson from their previous failure better than I’ve ever seen in the industry. Instead of boiling characters down, every returning character was expanded out with new moves and lots of room for engaging, expressive decision-making. Traditional “classic” controls and simplified “modern” controls coexist effectively, letting players run with the input style they like best. The new Drive Gauge system and its associated mechanics are extremely fine-tuned, layering the game with an exciting sense of risk vs. reward at a base level. An elegant mix of simple fundamentals and complex optimizations make the game’s flow more intuitive without compromising the satisfaction of mastery at all. Naturally, online play is done with rollback netcode, preserving the game’s smooth and precise feel.

If that wasn’t enough, the game’s World Tour is perhaps the most effective single-player mode in any fighting game. Framed as an RPG with a custom main character, players can experiment with all kinds of moves from every character while growing stronger as they face opponents who test the player on relevant fighting-game skills like anti-airing and blocking. Though more of a tutorial than anything, it succeeds where fighting games have failed for decades by introducing new players to the genre’s mechanics in an intuitive, entertaining way. Combine all of this with an extremely robust suite of quality-of-life and accessibility settings, and Street Fighter 6 is among the most bang for your buck in the entire genre. There are minor gripes to be had with the balance and such, but this is easily one of the best fighting games for players of all types.

So, fighting games will always be “hard” because the challenge and room for growth are what make the experience worth your time. What fighting games don’t have to be is hard to try. The real challenge of fighting games isn’t in the techniques; it’s in the ways that fighting games have obfuscated the transition from casual to competitor for decades. The fundamentals of fighting games really are strong, and they’re the only reason the genre is still going strong today. If we want it to grow and thrive, though, we need fighting games to work harder at showing players of all kinds the value of the experience. The only way to get more serious players is to give casual observers a window into why fighting games are awesome, and besides, don’t we want casual friends and solo players to have fun, too? In short, the way to make fighting games better is to make them better not just as fighting games, but as games on the whole.

I’ve always believed that “perfection” is a sort of unattainable thing in our imperfect world, but most video games do not agree with me. They present a set of problems which players are challenged to solve, and the most fun comes when you’re still solving those problems. Thus, many games keep the fun of improvement going by asking you not only to beat those challenges, but to beat them better - do it faster, take less damage, or just be cooler. Stick the landing in all of a game’s given categories, and you end up with a “perfect” grade, or an S-rank for “super,” or something to that effect. Sure, literal perfection may not be practical, but games are good at making us feel like we got there. I’m interested in what different games call perfection, how they balance challenge and fairness in pursuit of it, and why they care to do it at all.

Do Everything

Likely the most basic and approachable form of perfection in games is the simple 100% completion. Every single task in the game is already designed to be beatable, so this automatically comes across as an achievable goal. Just about any game under the sun is happy to pat its players on the back for sticking around through the whole thing. Many games even have one last section unlocked after you’ve completed everything else to make sure you end on a high note. The challenge and time demand of 100% completion vary from game to game, especially if those games have other, more specific perfection tests. Longer games with more to find tend to place the most emphasis on completion, especially if exploring is central to the experience. Shorter, linear games are usually less satisfying in this regard; the difference between beating and completing the game is shrunk down, and many linear games don’t have enough bells and whistles to make completion tracking worthwhile.

That said, there’s still room for interpretation in how the 100% experience plays out from game to game. Games sometimes leave certain things out of their built-in completion tracking, such as their achievement systems. A game might give you an achievement for doing some silly trick or finding an easter egg, but such minor things usually don’t matter for the wider completion rating. That doesn’t stop people from adding them to their own personal completion challenges, though. Many games with single-player and multiplayer components track completion separately between the two; multiplayer achievements can depend on your opponents’ actions to a frustrating degree and may become nearly impossible once player counts dwindle years after launch. Sometimes different in-game metrics have their own completion tracking. I’ve found every shrine in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but I didn’t bother hunting down each of the thousand niche Korok Seeds. I got a reward for the shrines that had nothing to do with my Korok Seed completion, and it’s clear the game doesn’t really expect the average player to literally turn over every rock in pursuit of them. Once again, it doesn’t stop people from trying. Some people just really want to do EVERYTHING.

Do It Faster

Being the fastest to finish a stage or even an entire game has become one of the most iconic signs of perfection in gaming. It dates back to the early days, when we were finally transitioning from endless score-attack arcade games into structured experiences that began and ended. Now that games could be finished, it followed that those who once chased high scores on arcade cabinets might now try to show their mastery by finishing the game the fastest.

Developers caught on to the “speedrunning” bug pretty early on. 1986’s Metroid was one of the first games to reward speed clears. Once you were done exploring the labyrinthine depths of Planet Zebes (without a map, even!), the game would display your time; do it fast enough, and Samus removes her bulky power suit to reveal that she’s a woman! That was kind of a big deal in the ‘80s. Sonic the Hedgehog was all about going fast from the start, further establishing platformers as one of the most prolific speedrunning genres. Quake’s smooth movement and replay-saving capabilities inspired a collaborative speedrun called “Quake Done Quick” which eventually grew into the speedrunning charity convention Games Done Quick.

One thing that has been thoroughly proven in this long history of speedrunning is how punishing it can feel. Even the slightest mistakes can cost just enough time to shut you out of whatever threshold you’re trying to reach. Players have to focus constantly until the timer stops and they can put the controller down. Anything from a single level to every bit of content in a game, depending on the type of speedrun being done, needs to be memorized with a route planned in advance. Anybody who’s familiar with the speedrunning community, where players dedicate an ungodly amount of time to running a game over and over in the hopes of nailing every single precise trick they can, knows that it is a true test of both skill and patience. Developers know that the majority of their players aren’t going to hunker down for hours of practice and failure to try and set world records, so when they do implement speedrunning challenges, they have to be careful to set reasonable goalposts.

Most games that implement speedrunning challenges are the shorter kind, as everything from routing to execution to simple endurance becomes harder the longer the speedrun is. Games often have ways to break their speedruns up into smaller chunks or various challenge sections as well. Sonic games which rank your performance do it on a stage-by-stage basis, for instance. There’s also some generosity going on under the hood with some games to make the act of speedrunning a little more forgiving. Metroid Dread locks certain rewards behind completing the game in under four hours. That sounds hard, since Dread is a decently long game, but it doesn’t count time spent in loading screens and loading a save sets the time back to when the save was made. One often finds that the game is willing to award its highest honors in these regards with much lower standards than the wider speedrunning community will. Even though the run could be more “perfect,” the game’s standards are usually more than demanding enough to put your average player through their paces. They get the speedrunning experience to the extent that the designers want them to have it, which usually means cutting it off before it gets really frustrating.

Don’t Mess Up

Now this particular metric is an interesting one. Players have been inclined to show off in all kinds of ways for all of gaming’s long history, and different games acknowledge that in their own way. In the early arcade days, you could show your mastery by racking up a high score and staying on the cabinet as long as possible to put your three-letter initials (or “ASS”) on the leaderboard. Later on, you could take on bosses, stages, or even the whole game without taking damage. Come Devil May Cry and the ensuing era of action games, and the game might actually tell you how cool you were playing, encouraging you to get better and better just to see that score go up. Competitive genres like fighting games and shooters let players show off various skills against other players, presenting ways to not only defeat your opponents but to toy with and humiliate them. Though “cooler” or more “stylish” gameplay can be subjective, there is one thing in common with all of these judgments: taking damage and/or dying are not cool.

Representing mastery like this can come in the form of optional requirements for accolades or increasing the punishment for existing failure states. Devil May Cry 3’s prestigious SS rating for a level can only be accomplished by collecting tons of orbs, fighting stylishly, moving quickly, AND avoiding all damage, but simply progressing through the game doesn’t force you to do any of that. In fighting games, defeating your opponent without taking any damage - even the chip damage you sustain while blocking - results in a perfect round, the ultimate show of mastery over your foe. Shooter games like Quake and Halo give you fun medals during a match to recognize impressive feats. Recent Halo games in particular have added the “Perfect” medal for using one of the game’s various precision weapons to kill a full-health player in the minimum number of shots - just enough to break their shields followed by the fatal headshot. On the other end of the spectrum are modes where damage or death end your progress outright. Some games like Hollow Knight and Doom Eternal add optional modes where dying means losing all of your progress, defining perfection as having mastered all kinds of aspects of the game enough to avoid a failure state which is otherwise an expected, minor setback. Other games like Dusk or Devil May Cry 4 and 5 have modes that turn one hit into fatal damage, incurring the more severe penalty of death for smaller mistakes. Either through encouragement or force, these techniques get players to tighten up their play more than they normally would.

Bring it All Together

These are the most popular methods by which games judge your performance, and by now, you might be thinking that this doesn’t sound much like “perfection” at all. In a way, that’s true - it’s usually more like “good enough for you to take a break now” - but the reason I bring up that word is because of the hours I’ve put into games which use it to define their toughest challenges. Pizza Tower and Ultrakill have a lot in common despite belonging to two completely different genres; they’re both creative indie titles with distinct aesthetics, high-speed gameplay, and a prestigious “P” ranking for every stage which demands mastery on every front. In Pizza Tower, you need to maintain a combo from start to finish by defeating enemies and picking up items, all the while raising your score to the S rank par score and completing the second lap. For boss fights, you just have to clear them without taking any damage. In Ultrakill, you must clear the stage under the par time, kill every enemy, and play well enough to rack up a high amount of style score without loading any checkpoints - if you die, you need to fully restart the level.

I’ve put days worth of effort into getting P-ranks in these games. In both titles, it can be such a precise and uncompromising challenge that I’m sometimes unsure whether I can (or want to) do it again. In the worst cases, day after day would stack up filled with attempts where I took a hit at the wrong time, died when I shouldn’t have, or just barely didn’t clear the level fast enough for that perfect rank. Every failure has the exhausting effect of simultaneously making you want it even more and sowing doubt that you ever can do it, with the balance shifting towards the latter the longer it takes. In the best cases, finally seeing the P-rank cross my screen came with a feeling of triumph; I had enjoyed getting faster and sharper and had a fun final run to earn the rank. In the worst cases, tiresome memories of near-wins and days of toil made the eventual success come only with the relief that I could move on forever. Keep in mind that even these high benchmarks set by the game are far from perfect, if the gameplay you can find from these titles’ greatest players is any indication.

For a game designer, the last thing you want your players to think is “glad I never have to do that again.” At the same time, challenge - even challenge beyond what the majority of your players are looking for - is a core part of what makes games so satisfying to play, learn, and triumph within for the long term. With that in mind, we see why so many developers ride the knife’s edge of including extreme challenges that must nonetheless feel at least mostly fair. For as exhausting and intense as Pizza Tower and Ultrakill’s P-ranks can be, leniency still exists; a combo can still be recovered after taking damage in Pizza Tower’s main levels, and Ultrakill doesn’t punish non-lethal damage very strictly. Other games like Sonic Generations and Devil May Cry 5 have less demanding chases to their max ranks, never quite reaching the same tension that the prior games do but still providing a fun incentive to engage with the game’s proverbial next level.

Difficulty in general is about stoking investment in the sweet spot between boredom and frustration. These ultimate challenges need to scrape as close to frustration as they can; they can’t always stay on the right side of it, but by doing a good enough job, the effort will prove worthwhile. The chase for the perfect rank has made up many of the highest and lowest moments I can remember from games. In a way, the risk needs to be greater for the reward to feel good. I’ll never forget the way my stomach churned as I shotgunned Doom Eternal’s last five levels on Ultra Nightmare, especially when I nearly lost it all on the final boss. My run may not have literally been perfect - plenty of folks out there have done it faster, or cleaner, or et cetera - but what was really perfect about that was the challenge the game had set for me. There are yet higher peaks to reach, but the perfection in these challenges come when the designers know exactly how hard-won the victory must feel to satisfy. Games uniquely must sometimes risk the lowest lows for the highest highs, and I respect the games I’ve played which knew just how hard to push me to that edge.

I replayed Doom: The Dark Ages recently, and there was one song that stuck out to me this time: “Steel Beyond the Grave.” In a game filled with loud, fast music, what stands out about this song are the parts where it is slow and quiet. The track is backed by a modest, step-like tempo that feels heavy. Though no less intense than the rest of this metal soundtrack, there are times where the guitar quiets down behind the beat, seeming to loom just over the horizon of the thing. At the climax we hear perhaps the most intimidating use of a theremin (that instrument which makes those wobbly sounds you probably associate with UFOs in old movies) I can recall; mimicking the guitar’s own earlier crescendos quietly behind a renewed melody, it caps off the sense of fearsome approach that the whole song has communicated. This song is for a level where you have fought your way out of Hell after literally dying, now unleashed again with the sole gameplay objective of “Punish the guilty.” I am struck by how effectively it conveys the feeling of some ferocious beast stalking its prey, then pouncing for a vicious kill. This excerpt is a good example:

After listening to this song obsessively for a few days, I realized I wrote exactly one pathetic sentence about the music in my review for Dark Ages.

For a franchise which some people jokingly call soundtracks which come with a free game, one sentence is really not enough. Music is absolutely crucial to the mood of Dark Ages and so much else that I’ve written about on this site, but I can never seem to make the space to talk about it. Why is that? For one, I’m just not as qualified when it comes to music. The literacy I have for video games, film, and literature, honed both in my free time and the grand majority of my higher education, is simply not matched for music. I don’t really listen to “real” music, though video game soundtracks tend to back me up while I’m writing, drawing, or working. For another, gameplay is a major focus in my understanding of games, so it tends to occupy the majority of my writing space. After that, it’s onto the story and mood, largely informed by writing and aesthetics. As a visually-minded person, music tends to land last in my priorities, though it is truly no less important or effective in defining how a game feels. This article is my attempt to make up for this blind spot and highlight just how many amazing ways video games use music.

One of the few times I’ve done right by the music was in my article on Quake. In that article, I hone in on the transformative effect Trent Reznor’s masterclass in unsettling ambience has on the feel of the game compared to its predecessors. Quake’s action is no less exciting than Doom’s, but the change from metal to ambient mood music converts the atmosphere completely from one of power to one of tension. This helpful example demonstrates the power that the soundtrack alone holds over the feeling of any given video game scenario. While visual style and effective character writing can set a scene, music is often what brings you into that scene and tells you how to feel about it.

Music has been pulling that weight since some of gaming’s earliest days. Castlevania’s haunted halls wouldn’t be half as memorable without its excellent musical complements like Vampire Killer and Heart of Fire. The eight stages in your typical Mega Man game each have a distinct identity, and you can be sure that the music is working just as hard as the level design gimmicks and visuals are to round out those themes. The Kirby series’ tone shifts from colorful forests to intense battles in dimensional rifts are all mediated by a musical identity which effortlessly manages to nail every kind of style all the way from bubbly background music to speed metal. The music’s not really doing anything complicated here - you just stick it behind the gameplay and let it do its thing - but that’s often enough.

One of my favorite simple applications of music like this is Pizza Tower. The game is defined by its deliberate effort towards being as zany and discordant as possible, and the music plays a big part in this. Just as the whole game jumps from theme to theme with crudely-styled art, the music combines retro-style midi instruments with bizarre samples like random quotes from old movies or cheesy yelling and laughing sound effects. Much like the rest of the game, it sounds like it should suck, but it’s clearly made by people who understand the fundamentals well enough to make it really good. I laugh along to the music as much as I laugh along to the rest of the game because it all seems like it’s in on its own joke. Listen to a clip from “Hot Spaghetti”:

This all goes to show that music is best when it complements the rest of the aesthetic. It’s relatively easy to do this in film, as you have full control over when and how the music appears. In games, where the player exerts some control over what happens, matching the mood can be more difficult. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention; this particular obstacle led to the creation of dynamic music, one of the most artistically unique applications of music in video games.

Its implementation was simple at first. In Super Mario World, hopping on Yoshi’s back would add a catchy percussion section to the existing background music, complementing the benefits of teaming up. Modern multiplayer games sometimes apply this depending on how well you’re doing; Mario Kart 8’s music adds percussion when you’re in first, and Quake Champions’ tracks fully transition to more intense, exciting versions when you or your team have the lead. Turn-based RPGs would have separate music for combat and exploration, and this trope would come to be used in games with more seamless distinctions between the two such as Devil May Cry. Simple music triggers like this help the audio match your actions better, but dynamic music can go even further.

The major pioneer in dynamic music was Doom (2016), a classic which was groundbreaking in more ways than one. Mick Gordon made his name as a composer with this game. Doom (2016) was founded on its fast-paced and varied combat, and the soundtrack was designed to intimately match every moment of it. It does the trick well enough to just have action music playing during the action, but what if that music had its own ebbs and flows which suited the changes in intensity? Factors like the number and strength of your enemies, the weapons you’re holding, and more play into a delicate system which moves each action track along different points to fit what you’re doing down to the detail. This has inspired similar systems in other games like Devil May Cry 5, where the series’ classic style rating influences which section of the combat music you hear. The better you play, the better the music!

Rather than designing the music to respond to the gameplay, some games force the gameplay to respond to music. The obvious example is rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution, but games have recently begun to implement rhythm mechanics into other genres. Metal: Hellsinger is a shooting game where your shots and other abilities improve if you do them in sync with the beat, featuring an original soundtrack complete with vocals from famous metal singers like Serj Tankian. Hi-Fi Rush similarly combines rhythm mechanics with the action genre. Timing systems like held and delayed inputs - common to both rhythm and action games - combine to give combat a fresh and fun cadence. The emergent “rhythm” of stringing your own combos together meshes effortlessly with the fun of following the beat. Hi-Fi Rush’s biggest moments are punctuated by licensed music from such artists as Quake’s own Nine Inch Nails to Wolfgang Gartner, somehow. To prevent streamers from getting copyright strikes by playing the game (pretty stupid problem, of course), streamer mode replaces the licensed music with original compositions that match the relevant rhythm for gameplay purposes. All the original music is so good anyways that it’s really no loss to turn streamer mode on, which I find very impressive.

By now, the reason I needed to make up for my prior negligence on the music is surely clear; I actually think video game music is extremely cool, even if I’m not the number-one guy to talk about it. I’m constantly impressed by everything from basic platformer stage music to crazy boss themes to an amazing transition that matches my onscreen actions perfectly. There are so many moments in almost every game I play that just wouldn’t hit right without their soundtracks. Games are one of the most unique and innovative musical contexts out there right now. I’m more inclined - and better-equipped - to speak on other aspects of games, but I don’t want that to diminish the importance of music to these experiences. I’ll make an effort to give it more attention in my future articles (something my readers may have already noticed a little bit in my latest works), but if it slips the mind again, I guess I’ll just have to dedicate another article to it. I can get behind that.

The indie gaming scene has no shortage of “boomer shooter” revivals - games inspired by Doom, Quake, and the like emphasizing high action, quick movement, and quicker reflexes. It’s not hard to understand why; for a while in the 2000s, boomer shooters fell by the wayside as developers and audiences were more interested in narratives like Half-Life or more realistic multiplayer shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield. Eventually, enough folks with programming knowledge decided they missed the old way of doing things and were going to bring it back themselves, spurred on by the groundbreaking 2016 reboot of Doom. As with any deluge of retro genre throwbacks (cough, Metroidvanias, cough), real success takes more than just imitating what made the classics great. There is perhaps no game that understood this better than David Szymanski’s Dusk, a game which masterfully weaves the genre’s classic look and feel together with wholly unique atmosphere and creative execution.

Like the classics, Dusk tosses players right into the action. No backstory, no cutscenes - just you, your sickles, and your wits against an evil cult in rural Pennsylvania. Quake-style strafe jumping and a snappy slide mechanic make movement fast and buttery-smooth. Szymanski’s clever level designs have a clear sense of momentum and direction while also hiding tons of useful secrets to fit every player’s approach. Dusk’s weapons include well-executed staples like the super shotgun and the machine gun and creative additions like the crossbow which can shoot straight through enemies and walls. The graphics match Quake’s early-3D vibe perfectly, leaning into other visual influences from the time like Blood and Redneck Rampage. With an impressive variety of enemies, punchy and satisfying shooting across a well-balanced arsenal, and quick and precise movement, everything about the gameplay meets the mark and then some. Boomer shooter fans will settle into the rhythm effortlessly, and new players can hardly ask for a better introduction to the genre’s classic tempo.

Dusk’s gameplay hits all the right notes, but that’s only a part of what makes this game special. Though boomer shooters have a reputation for paper-thin story, Dusk takes some lessons from the modern age of environmental storytelling to let the levels do the narrative work without distracting from the action. There’s clear continuity from one level to the next, and Szymanski leverages the traditional episodic structure of the classics to further establish thematic progression. The game’s first episode in the rural outskirts pits you against such enemies as hooded cultists, chainsaw-wielding leathernecks, and shotgun-toting scarecrows. Levels resemble real places like farms and lumber yards more than they did in games like Quake, and you can see evidence of how the cult’s influence has affected this place everywhere. There’s some clear slasher inspiration here but, like most boomer shooters, the horror influences don’t manifest in particularly scary moments. Everything seems cut and dry, especially to fans of the genre, but that’s exactly what Dusk wants you to think.

Eventually, you take a trip through a dark, claustrophobic mine where tricks and traps abound. You realize there might be a reason this game, like so many horror games, gives you a flashlight to narrowly light pitch-dark spaces. As you begin your journey into the factory in episode two, you descend to a suspiciously-empty dig site littered with corpses. The music has cut out entirely in favor of foreboding ambience. Descend a little further towards the red key, and your flashlight flickers as you hear heavy, bestial breathing slowly getting closer. The wall, scrawled in blood, reads “Don’t trust your eyes.” After your panicked shots reveal the invisible wendigo and you’ve managed to take it down, you’ll have realized that one of this game’s major innovations in the boomer shooter space is that it is actually trying to be scary sometimes - and it works.

Among the most impressive aspects of Dusk is its ability to switch in moments from ridiculously fast and bombastic action to skin-crawling tension. All of it is attributable to the continuity and pacing I mentioned earlier. The whole first episode gets you comfortable with the boomer shooter essentials before it’s ready to give you a scare. Each episode uses every aspect, from the aesthetics to the enemies to the order you find your weapons, as a chance to distinguish itself from the last. An action-packed level will cap itself off with the reveal of a horrible meat-grinding machine, leading straight into a mission where your flashlight breaks as you navigate the dark insides of the contraption surrounded by an unimaginable amount of emulsified flesh. A laboratory’s rooms flip and turn upon themselves when you backtrack, and a teleporter takes you inside of some horrible ribcage with a droning hiss that masks the sound of two wendigos within. A lot of credit has to go to Andrew Hulshult here, too. Nailing his characteristic action music with most tracks and demonstrating some excellent understanding of ambience with others, Dusk’s soundtrack and sound effect design are among the best of Hulshult’s entire career. Szymanski’s levels find their perfect complement in his work, and it’s hard to imagine Dusk without it.

Dusk’s action and its familiar sights are gradually encroached upon by horror moments and mind-bending landscapes as you go further and further. The continuity the game has established so strongly - even including a back door near the start of every level which displays “No turning back now” when interacted with - enhances the disjointed feeling as your quest to uncover the cult’s machinations becomes more and more incomprehensible. It all comes to a head spectacularly in episode three, easily the highlight of the game which I don’t want to spoil much. I’ve already said too much about episode two, honestly, but I didn’t think I could paint a picture of how precise and effective this game’s level design and pacing are without it. It feels like you’re being toyed with in the best way possible. Although I don’t have the stomach for horror - I even chickened out of this game for a little while from one level in episode three - I think Dusk nails its action and its horror in equal parts. After all, the shooting was so good that I toughed out the scares, and it makes the game so much more unique on the whole.

If anything about this review has sounded cool to you, just go ahead and play Dusk. It’s cheap, it runs on anything, and it’s a bona-fide modern classic. It’s right near the top of the pile of indie games that inspire me, these massive accomplishments that show how creativity and steady design can crop up from anyone, anywhere. With a strong command of the fundamentals, David Szymanski created this masterfully-paced, artistic adventure that still feels right in line with the classics that inspired it. Simple as boomer shooters are on the surface, there’s nothing about this game that really came easy. Though it doesn’t make as much noise as some other new-age boomer shooters like Ultrakill, I and many others appreciate the subtle touches that put Dusk at the front of the pack.

I do my best to approach criticism with deliberation and care for the art form. Unlike many other critics, I never review a game I haven’t finished or, in the case of multiplayer-only experiences, played thoroughly. I tend to be a little behind the curve when I release my reviews because of this, but I’m confident that it makes my work more informative and trustworthy for you, dear reader. All of this is to say that the fact that I was only able to tolerate three matches of Highguard for this article is, in some ways, a review all its own. I’m not just here to write about Highguard; I’m also here to discuss what it says about our gaming landscape and what players really want to see.

Highguard, the newest game from some of the people who made Titanfall and Apex Legends, is blatantly unfinished. Shipping with a paltry eight characters, fourteen weapons, and one play mode with ranked matches “coming soon,” there is simply not enough substance to support the gameplay loop. What’s included generally lacks personality anyways, hovering in this uncertain hodge-podge of medieval and sci-fi aesthetics that never feels like an effective blend. Nothing sells me on this world or its characters, and the lack of meaningful variety amongst them means lots of players won’t find a good fit. Moreover, the game has absolutely terrible optimization. I can’t get it to look as good on Medium as last year’s Doom: The Dark Ages looks on low even with DLSS and my 8GB Nvidia 4060, which really shouldn’t be feeling that weak in 2026. The few times where things actually happened during a match were all marred by the game dropping frames due to particle effects and the like. Dark Ages is also vastly more fun while nailing the blend of fantasy and sci-fi elements… it honestly embarrasses Highguard on every front, but I digress.

Matches take place on huge maps with chests to loot and resources to mine like some weird combination of battle royale shooters and MOBAs, but both teams only have three players. The vast majority of a Highguard match is spent wandering around looking for arbitrarily-improved varieties of your gear and wondering when the hell you’re going to shoot something. The map is easily large enough to support Battlefield-style team sizes and squads and I’m left scratching my head as to why it simply doesn’t. After running around to gear up for a while, teams are encouraged to fight for the Shieldbreaker and use it to open up their enemy’s base, which does force at least some confrontations. Once a base is open, the fighting shifts rapidly to close quarters as the attackers attempt to plant bombs in the base’s small rooms. Efforts at reinforcing base walls largely felt pointless as everyone ran inside to scrap, and this isn’t the type of game where scrapping in close range feels good.

When encounters do start, the shooting feels sort of clunky and weak. Highguard tended to feel best in mid to long range encounters where there was room to use character abilities and take aim, but the disappointingly slow movement and the reliance on semi-random gear upgrades made the majority of fights feel mediocre. I’ll admit that this game takes after the kinds of shooters I’ve never enjoyed or been good at, but even outside of that bias, I struggled to find a moment where I wouldn’t have rather been playing something faster or less restrictive. Even my friends who are more accustomed to mainstream shooters didn’t find much fun in it. There’s really just nothing about the guns or character abilities that feels inspired. Even though the phases of a match are structurally unique, nothing around it really works in service of what it’s trying to do.

Ultimately, whatever inspiration lies within Highguard - and there is something in there somewhere - is buried under its half-baked design and visual malaise. As the title of this article indicates, my conclusion is that this should simply not have released like this. Given another year or two, the designers may have been able to tease out a lot more potential from this game. More characters and guns, larger player counts, more interesting base features like defensive weapons, and removing pointless weapon tiers in favor of more interesting map objectives could have turned Highguard into something genuinely unique and fun. That’s way too much to wait for in post-launch updates; the game needs to come out feeling complete to have that chance. The best thing I can really say about Highguard’s current state is that it didn’t cost me any money to be disappointed by it.

The fact that Highguard is a free-to-play, live service model is truly the root of its problems. If this was a beta test, players would be much more willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and let the devs have time to refine it. As it is now, it feels like something we see all too often these days - an utterly shameless cash grab rushed out of the door to make money off of whatever rubes they can convince to spend real money on cosmetics. Sure, there’s some clot of gamers that spends an absurd amount of money on copy-pasted Call of Duty games every year and Fortnite is still going strong as some kind of consumerist frankenstein of a game, but players at large are losing their patience for games which so blatantly feel like trend-chasers made to addict and capitalize rather than entertain or inspire. If Highguard were finished, it may have escaped such damning categorization, but the studio made the choice to release it like this and they will pay the price for it. As indie designers make more impressive games and gamers become more aware of them, this kind of focus-tested approach just isn’t going to work anymore.

If anything about Highguard gives me hope, it’s that gamers might be getting a little wise to what they’re being fed. The reaction to this game has been widely negative since its Game Awards reveal, and the best you can say about its release response has been that it’s “mixed.” The Steam user base’s capacity for drowning any game with poor PC optimization in negative reviews is as strong as ever with Highguard, and this is a case where it is exceptionally well-deserved. Gamers’ widespread rejection of such obvious bait and their acceptance of less competitive co-op experiences like Helldivers II and Peak gives me hope that players are finally starting to look outside of their comfort zones and appreciate games that aren’t just formulaic profit engines. More diversity in our popular landscape can only benefit the players, and I hope for the industry’s sake that the players really are going to start spending their time and money on more genuine experiences.

When I wrote my review for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, I didn’t know what an “immersive sim” was. This is regrettable because Great Circle IS an immersive sim, but also understandable because immersive sims are quite niche. Looking Glass Studios is credited with creating the genre in the early ‘90s with series like System Shock and Thief, now widely regarded as cult classics which inspired their own celebrated successors like Deus Ex and Bioshock. Despite the acclaim of these games, the ‘90s - early ‘00s heyday of immersive sims is long past; aside from some exceptions like the aforementioned Great Circle and the in-development early access title Fallen Aces, you don’t see them much anymore. Why is that? Well, maybe this screenshot from the original version of System Shock can shed some light on that.

Yeah, the controls and interface for System Shock were extremely obtuse. Later immersive sims would smooth that out, but all of the impressive programming, worldbuilding, and interactivity inherent to the genre do inevitably complicate the experience. With a long history as PC-based games, these titles are typically for enthusiasts. Like many things for enthusiasts, their lack of widespread appeal is counterbalanced by a thoroughly dedicated fanbase. These are the types of people who make up Nightdive Studios, a company largely dedicated to remastering and re-releasing ‘90s and early ‘00s games with modern hardware and console compatibility. Their remasters of everything from niche titles whose original source code had been lost like Strife to iconic classics like Quake are always made with care for the original experience, and the same could doubtless be said for their 2015 remaster of the original System Shock. For that game, though, it was obvious that the core experience could use more of a facelift than a remaster could provide. Thus Nightdive stepped out of their comfort zone and actually developed a game from the ground up, even if it was a remake of an existing one. Curious about the origin of this niche genre and a fan of its cyberpunk aesthetic, I thought it would be interesting to see how they updated this important title for the modern day.

Unsurprisingly, System Shock (2023) takes a lot of cues from the much more popular and influential System Shock 2. It uses a more traditional first-person aiming interface, obliterating much of the obnoxious or outright useless screen clutter as seen in the original interface. System Shock 2’s inventory system is also directly implemented, elegantly reducing the ridiculous amount of things you could carry in the original game and introducing an element of strategy as larger items detract potential space for smaller ones. The number of weapons in the game has also been cut down, making them easier to manage in the face of the new inventory system. It’s not like anyone’s really going to miss the tranquilizer dart gun anyways. Various consumables like snack bars have been added alongside the original game’s medipatches, providing the setting with a more lived-in texture.

The most notable change is in the aesthetic. Although System Shock 2 was quite gritty and realistic for its time, System Shock (2023) elects for a more impressionistic style that calls back to its roots in the early days of cyberpunk. Dark settings contrast well with bright LEDs and computers, and the graphics have an intentional pixelated edge to them that lends a ‘90s roughness to otherwise-modern visuals. The original title’s bright and simple textures are brought forward surprisingly well; things such as the orange walls of the maintenance level don’t come across as ridiculous the way one might expect. Much of the game’s look - especially in the cyberspace sections - feel close to a visualization of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, a seminal work in the early history of cyberpunk. In true Nightdive fashion, it’s like a remarkably respectful modernization of everything that had merit about the original System Shock’s aesthetic.

It was important for Nightdive to nail that aesthetic, as it’s crucial to the sense of immersion in this immersive sim. You play as a hacker captured by Edward Diego, a corrupt TriOptimum Corporation executive, and promised a military-grade implant in return for disabling the security protocols for SHODAN, the AI which helps run the Citadel space station. Awakening on Citadel Station months after the procedure, you emerge from the medical bay to find that SHODAN has (unsurprisingly) taken over the station with an army of robots, cyborgs, and even mutants and is now running a variety of schemes to destroy humanity from the station. Thus begins Space Die Hard as you crawl through every nook and cranny of Citadel Station to foil SHODAN’s plans. The odds are against you, hacker… That’s just the way you like it.

SHODAN, already a highlight of the 1994 original, steals the show once again as the centerpiece of the game’s tense atmosphere. Terri Brosius reprises her role from the previous System Shock games and remains a standout, thanks in no small part to the chilling distortion effects put on her voice by the audio designers. Referring to herself as a god with her cyborgs and mutants as her “children” and Citadel Station itself as her “body,” you understand that she sees herself as master over a new kind of life, however twisted it may seem to a human. You also come to understand why she calls you an “insect” as you crawl through the veins of the station, her robots and cyborgs referring to their “mother” with religious reverence as they act as her immune system. You really do feel like a cockroach running through the inner workings of one of those room-sized NASA computers from the sixties, except every possible aspect of that computer is also trying to kill you. The carnage left around the station and the chilling musings of the cyborgs - some of whom even broadcast the terrified thoughts of the dead humans whose brains they’ve hijacked - make the world feel suitably horrifying and hostile.

Truly, every inch of Citadel Station feels deliberate. Items, enemies, and corpses often wordlessly tell a story of the station disaster. The game approaches it all with a slick, sardonic sense of dark humor typical to the cyberpunk genre. Bubbly elevator music contrasts with a crowd of mutant zombies as the door opens into the research level, and you might hear a vending machine say “You’ve encountered Snacktron! How fortunate for your hunger and/or thirst!” right after violently fighting for your life. Various logs tell the story of an investigation into Edward Diego’s corruption, the questionable ethics of TriOptimum designing the research station like a maze to do psychological studies, and a social stratification existing between the workers and the executives who literally lived on different tiers of the station. As you play, you naturally come to the conclusion that all of this suffering was really the result of the greed encouraged by this hyper-capitalist environment. Any question you could have about the setting is answered, and all of it adds relevant, engaging texture to the narrative.

The level of care in System Shock (2023)’s worldbuilding extends to your gameplay interactions with the station. Elements like switches, keypads, and circuit puzzles are all used seamlessly by looking at the thing and hitting the “use” key; no extra menus or breaks from real-time gameplay required. Codes to unlock doors and the steps needed to properly foil SHODAN’s schemes simply exist either as part of the level or in the many audio logs left behind by the late TriOptimum employees and SHODAN’s minions. It’s a naturalistic style of puzzle solving that feels better and, yes, more immersive than the type of rigid segmentation between modes of play that often exists in AAA games. To this end, the game really expects you to be paying attention to everything; you can even trigger a game over by hitting the switch to activate the mining laser SHODAN aimed at Earth before doing the steps to destroy it. Fortunately, the world is designed with such deliberate care that you’ll always be rewarded no matter where you look. Everything from the experiments that allowed SHODAN to mutate or cyborg-ify the whole station to the reason a space station workplace is so labyrinthine in the first place is explained. This is a great example of how immersion isn’t about realistic gameplay mechanics so much as it is about a world with thorough internal consistency.

Dealing with combat in System Shock (2023) is as varied as all the other problem solving the game presents you with. A wide variety of melee weapons, guns, and explosives give players a lot of different toys to play around with. Inventory space, ammunition types, and enemy variety mean combat always comes with a lot to think about. Some weapons use your energy, which is also used by various helpful items like boots that increase speed and let you hover or a radiation shield. Health stations are rare, and consumable items to restore health can be too. Early on, ammo is scarce and the decision to use it at all feels important. Later on, as you find a wider variety of powerful guns and face down bigger enemies, it becomes about knowing when to best use your arsenal.

Though the original System Shock was Doom’s contemporary, this is not the type of game where you can just outrun and outshoot your problems. All the same, the shooting isn’t so bogged down in realism that it doesn’t feel good. Weapons all the way from your staple minipistol to the devastating railgun are satisfying to use, and big fights against a lot of enemies can be exciting and challenging. Quicksaving and the restoration bays on most floors make it easy to try new approaches to your problems. It’s a nice middle ground where the tension between the pressure enemies place on you and your need to manage your resources work together, at least on the normal difficulty settings. High difficulty should probably be reserved for players who are familiar enough with the game to manage their resources with foresight.

Finally, to really make you feel like a hacker, System Shock (2023) sees you jacking into cyberspace to help open the way in realspace. If there was any part of the original System Shock which needed a facelift, it was this one. You fly through cyberspace freely in all directions, able to roll your view while moving around like some kind of weightless drone as you shoot an endless stream of slow projectiles towards security countermeasures. In the original game, cyberspace’s boundaries and enemies were defined only by empty wireframes in a largely-black environment. It was extremely disorienting. Nightdive has solidified the environments in cyberspace by filling in the simple geometry, allowing the bright colors to be a more effective guide. Some level of otherworldly, simulation-like confusion is maintained by having the surfaces fade out past a certain distance from the player, preserving the intended strangeness of cyberspace. Though it’s not as involved or fun as realspace, Nightdive’s updates have made cyberspace feel like a more valuable and interesting inclusion for the overall experience. Plus, if you still find it confusing, its difficulty can be adjusted separately from the puzzle complexity, mission difficulty, and combat difficulty. For such a multifaceted genre as the immersive sim, adding this many tuning knobs to the difficulty feels appropriate.

For all of its scale, detail, and interactivity, System Shock (2023) is the kind of game that you can lose yourself inside of for a while. Nightdive has done an exceptional job bringing forward all the most timeless aspects of the original while cutting out its most dated systems, resulting in an experience with enough complexity to engage you long term that is nonetheless intuitive to learn and experiment within. Even when I stalled out in search of a puzzle’s solution, I never tired of the tense, heavy atmosphere and the careful decisions I needed to make to survive it. Every step of the way, SHODAN’s threatening presence and chilling, hateful messages to the player motivate you to be one insect she just can’t swat. It’s one of those games that I almost wanted to jump right back into after my first finish, as it always gave back what I put into it. It’ll probably be a little complex for some people, but if you’re willing to take it on its terms, System Shock (2023) is a lovingly-made cyberpunk staple that I recommend to any fan of single-player adventures, cyberpunk, or - of course - immersive sims.

Well, 2025 is finally behind us. Good riddance. One of the bright spots in a year like that, though, ended up being the many exciting new releases in gaming. Metroid Prime and Hollow Knight fans got their new games, which some doubted would ever release, within four months of each other. Nintendo killed two birds with one Donkey Kong Bananza by releasing the first original standalone Donkey Kong title since 2014 and raising the bar for 3D platformers again. Everybody lost their collective minds over Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for a while, but that was so early in this ridiculously long year that I often forget it happened… especially since I didn’t play it. Sorry, RPG fans! It’s just not for me.

So, now the time has come, of course, to decide what was the best of the bunch. The end of the year brings along with it a sense of finality, and this manifests in art criticism as award season. No matter how many subcategories you make - and there’s never a shortage of them - there must always be the game of the year. A game that was simply better than all the rest. Of course, it’s not a competition; it’s an honor even just to be nominated for such a lofty title. One of them still has to win, though. How else would we know what was really THE best? Without that knowledge, we would surely be rudderless. Well then, it’s time I made my contribution. Without further ado, here are my best games of 2025, conveniently sorted into categories of varying precision and implied value.

Best Action: Doom: The Dark Ages

Read my full review of Doom: The Dark Ages here.

I remember my first time watching the reveal trailer for this game with the kind of crisp precision with which most people seem to only remember weddings or the births of their children. Just when it was starting to feel like a while since Doom Eternal came out, in comes id software with a preliminary dose of their brand-new theater of violence. Their commitment to the guts of a game - the stuff that really matters - shone through in the amount of honest-to-goodness gameplay on display right from the first trailer. I immediately wanted the game in my hands yesterday, and every visceral bit of destruction and power from that trailer survived to the final product and then some. You effortlessly occupy the heavy boots of the Doom Slayer, mowing down hordes and mercilessly chopping up the big guys with the brutal Shield Saw. No gun is too small to blow chunks of gore off of every demon, and the demons are strong enough to make every moment spent eviscerating them cathartic. It’s not as focused and slick as Eternal, sure, but Dark Ages compensates with pure scale and impact. id not only proved that they could stay at the front of the pack, but do it in an original way that nonetheless provided the familiar comforts Doom has been known for since ‘93.

In terms of action, Dark Ages just couldn’t be beat this year. Sure, it had an uninteresting story, and the sections spent riding dragons or boxing in a mech suit weren’t the game’s most inspired moments, but nothing else could provide an adrenaline rush on the same level as Dark Ages’ core brutality. Oddly, Dark Ages repeated the trend of Eternal by releasing the same year as a Hades game and losing the title of “Best Action Game” from The Game Awards to that game. I regrettably haven’t gotten around to Hades or its sequel, but the repeated snubs do make me wonder just what decides the title of best action game.

Does either Hades have better action than their respective Doom counterparts? I wouldn’t be surprised if they have better stories and characters - that’s not really what Doom has ever been about. If we’re choosing the best action game, how much are we looking at those qualities? Where do we even draw the line for action games when so many games include action? Is single-player, or at least player-versus-enemy, assumed in a world where the majority of multiplayer games have action? Is it about some kind of raw quantity of combat and explosions, or is it about the game’s attitude towards the action within? Monster Hunter Wilds was another “nominee” of sorts for this category, but that game puts a wider emphasis on multiplayer and exploration. Perhaps it would be better-suited for an action-adventure category… but then, what defines adventure? How much of a blend between action and adventure is expected? That’s why I decided to call this category “Best Action” for my review. I can say without a doubt that the action in Dark Ages was better than the action in any other new release I played this year; now I am no longer challenged to define an “action game” on the whole before I can proceed.

Best Racing Game: Kirby Air Riders

Read my full review of Kirby Air Riders here.

2025 was an oddly-busy year in the world of kart racers, from the first new Mario Kart in eleven years to the Earth-shattering release of the avant-garde, postmodern masterpiece that was Garfield Kart 2 - All You Can Drift. Ok, maybe it wasn’t that good. Anyways, Mario, Sonic, and - for the first time since 2003 - Kirby all decided to hit the track this year, and there’s someone out there who thinks all three of those outings was the best one. Regardless of who “loses” this proverbial competition, it’s fair to say racing fans won. Anyways, time to choose the winner; somebody’s gotta do it.

It was Kirby Air Riders which truly took the lead for me this year. Sure, I’m a sucker for Kirby, but I think it’s hard to deny that this was a game with the kind of careful craftsmanship we just don’t see as often anymore. Mario Kart World made some great additions to the racing experience, but it also never really made the most of its open-world emphasis. Sonic Racing Crossworlds was, frankly, one $70 purchase too many for me this year and, in true Sonic fashion, may have been more about style than substance. Kirby Air Riders harkened back to the old days of AAA gaming as a full-price release that felt like it really had a full price’s worth of content. The racing is effortlessly simple and fine-tuned. Courses are packed with detail and engaging routes. Top Ride and City Trial offer so many different ways to experience the same fundamental gameplay that I doubt the lack of planned DLC is going to bother anyone. God, I wish more games just did it like this these days. I’m so tired of live service.

Thankfully, there’s not much need for me to go into the weeds of what defines a racing game. Racing has to be a primary aspect, and that’s not the sort of thing you can say about any game. That said, racing is so specific that one might wonder why it’s actually its own category. A “big year” for racing games, by my count, was defined by three (maybe four if you actually want to count Garfield Kart) games. Would it simply be difficult for me to give Air Riders its just desserts if it didn’t have its own category to win? Most years, I don’t even play a new racing game. I played two this year, though, and I sure liked ‘em both. Is that a good enough reason to give something a category?

Best Family Game: Donkey Kong Bananza

Read my full review of Donkey Kong Bananza here.

Nintendo’s long-awaited return to Donkey Kong was also their latest reminder that they will always rule the 3D platformer scene. Donkey Kong Bananza crafts whimsical worlds for DK to smash his way through, somehow feeling both laser-focused and highly malleable in their design. The innovative destruction mechanics come as naturally as instinct, and it’s easy for anyone to start carving their own trail. Like all of the best collect-a-thons, the pure fun of moving around pushes you from collectible to collectible with an irresistible momentum. It’s the kind of game anyone can enjoy, assuming they like having fun or that sort of thing.

Of course, it’s a great game for the family thanks to its extremely superfluous co-op mechanics where a second player can shoot some extra rocks around while player one does all the important stuff on DK. Fun for the whole family! Wait, that doesn’t make sense. What exactly makes this a family game? Is it because it’s rated E10+ (or PEGI 7 for my European readers)? Is it because it’s colorful and cartoonish? Do those qualities relegate this game, an extremely well-made single-player adventure, into a diminished all-ages categorization that is implicitly less artistically relevant than more mature games? Or, get this, is it just because this game - amazing as it was - wasn’t game of the year, or even the best platformer of the year, and I still just wanted to highlight it anyways? Perhaps one day, we’ll know the answer.

Anyways, that’s the last of the consolation categories. Now, it’s finally time for the moment you’ve all been waiting for: the best one. The one that wins. Without further ado…

Game of the Year: Hollow Knight: Silksong

Read my review of Hollow Knight: Silksong here.

As someone with well-honed tastes and a penchant for games that won’t always appeal to the masses, some part of me kind of wanted to be a contrarian and give Game of the Year to something else just to make a statement. I even said that Silksong “may not have quite been my favorite thing this year” in my original review, but this is a game that grew on me in every sense. I think the original Hollow Knight, while solid, was a little overrated, and I was one of the few to jump into Silksong after the long wait without sky-high expectations. When the dust settled, I just couldn’t deny the artistry of what Team Cherry had accomplished with this game. The gameplay had been expanded upon and honed. The world was beautifully rendered with every area coalescing into a deeply textured setting. Encounters of all kinds were memorable from start to finish even as the game continued far beyond the usual bounds of metroidvanias, thanks in no small part to the beautiful soundtrack. There are parts of the other games I’ve highlighted here which I may have liked more in a vacuum, but Silksong is special for how thoroughly it succeeds on every front and how unrelentingly memorable it is. There are simply so many moments in this game that I will never forget, and that’s how it defines the year for me.

Now it might become clear to some of you why I did not include categories such as “best platformer,” “best adventure game,” or “best indie game.” Silksong was great, but there’s no reason for me to pat it on the back over and over again. Besides, doesn’t giving indie games their own category seem pointless if they’ve proved time and again that they can hang with the best work of AAA studios? Although, I guess that highlights why we really have all these increasingly niche and subjective categories to hand out awards for. On some level, we just want to acknowledge as many of the year’s highlights as possible. It’s especially good to have awards for production roles like sound design and art direction to highlight the many individual talents that go into our favorite games. Unfortunately, I’m not as well-equipped as a whole committee is to dole out accolades on an individual level like that. I also don’t have the clout to put a bunch of brand-new game reveals in my awards show; why even read it? Hey, who else is excited for Mega Man: Dual Override?

Anyways, if the question is “why do we always need to give out awards?”, then the answer may be different for everyone. I’m giving out my awards for the same reason I write anything on this blog: I believe games are a sophisticated and unique art form, and I want to celebrate the games that prove that thesis in all kinds of different ways. The awards format seems to lend a lot of people to an impression of criticism as a competition, though, and I can’t really blame them. We are giving someone a trophy and sending four or five other groups home without one. What does that really say about why we create games? Is art about “winning?” Everything has to have a number score so people online can say their game has a bigger number than yours. When people are panicking over a six out of ten, one has to wonder what a truly bad score even is! Every time someone calls a game “objectively” better or worse than another one, an angel loses their wings.

So, what do I want you to take away from my awards? It’s about the same thing you should be taking away from any review: here’s what the critic thinks and why. Critique is about new perspectives and discussion, not correct answers. I’m just here to share what made these games special to me. Maybe you’ll enjoy an expression that captures your own thoughts about these games, a new perspective on something you were interested in, or an example of what works about these games which you might carry into your own work. To me, critique’s about working together to always raise the bar for the art we love, not strict, black-and-white judgment. These are just four of the past year’s many great games that made me excited to keep playing - and writing - in the new year. Feel free to join me for the ride.

For some reason, I have a very clear memory of the first time I heard that Metroid Prime 4 had been delayed. During my high school art class, I was watching the Nintendo Direct while I worked. Nintendo announced that they weren’t getting anywhere with the game in-house and had returned the project to Retro Studios, where they would be starting again from the ground up. That was two years after the game was announced with no other news in between. In the time since that announcement, I graduated high school, graduated college, had three different jobs, started this blog, and actually played through the previous Metroid Prime games. Metroid Prime Remastered came out while we were waiting for Prime 4, later revealed to be practice for much of Retro’s new staff. To say that Metroid fans have had a lot of time to get their hopes up about this project is an understatement.

I’m always partial to devs taking their time to make sure something is good, even if it means I have to wait the better part of a decade to get my hands on it. Waiting is temporary; art is forever. However, lengthy developments can put a ton of stress on a project. This year’s Hollow Knight: Silksong was another long-awaited release where the delays mostly came from the small dev team’s own passion for the project. For most studios, the causes of such delays are much worse; creative blocks, technical issues, poor or inconsistent direction, etc. The point is that Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, as it changed studio hands and started from scratch again at least once, could have easily been a horror story. Luckily, it seems that Retro’s steady hand has molded Prime 4 into a release that feels like it picks up right where Metroid Prime 3: Corruption left off, but is that enough? Is that what a fanbase relishing their memories of the original Gamecube classic for eighteen years really wanted? Let’s find out.

Playing through Metroid Prime 4’s first moments immediately felt right. As I blasted through Space Pirates in a raid on a Galactic Federation facility, scanned all kinds of environmental details, and morph-balled my way through tunnels, I was struck by how much I really was playing a bona-fide, brand-new Metroid Prime game. After getting teleported to the alien world of Viewros and being sent on a quest to preserve the Lamorn people’s legacy as the “chosen one,” it only felt more like I’d settled right back in. Fury Green, the game’s first real area, is absolutely beautiful. It effortlessly maintains Retro’s penchant for designing alien worlds that feel at once strange and sublime, punctuated by a massive tree which stores the psychic energy of the Lamorn. Prime 4 makes a strong case not only for being the best-looking game on the Switch, but also the Switch 2. I normally feel like I’m not taking enough screenshots for my reviews, but here, I couldn’t help but take too many.

Later areas like the stormy, industrial Volt Forge and the frigid, unforgiving peaks of Ice Belt don’t miss a beat. Volt Forge guides you along an entire manufacturing line, seeing every step of the process in building the Vi-O-La motorcycle. If Metroid Prime’s Phendrana Drifts emphasized the calm of snow-covered landscapes, Prime 4’s Ice Belt embodies the brutal experience of extreme cold both inside and out of its abandoned medical complex. Once again, you can scan everything to learn what to do next, how to fight enemies, or just how the ecosystem of Viewros works. The music returns in full force as well to maintain an ambient, mysterious atmosphere. The sound uses electric guitars and warbly synth to great effect, conveying that alien tone perfectly in a way entirely distinct from the previous Prime outings.

If there’s one critique to have about the world design, it’s more in the layout than the visuals. It bears repeating that Prime 4 is very much a sequel to Prime 3, despite how much time has passed; like that game, areas feel somewhat more linear and condensed than they should. Backtracking is still necessary, and there’s no real shortage of upgrades to scrounge for in old areas, but your first trip through an area is always quite straightforward. It’s noticeable right from the start, but my disappointment with this structure came when the game largely failed to open up as it progressed.

The Prime series’ level design has come to more closely resemble The Legend of Zelda than Metroid ever since Prime 2, insofar as new items allow you to clear a current area and then move to the next rather than constantly revisiting existing areas. It doesn’t feel entirely out of line for Prime 4 to be structured like this, especially since you do need to dip back into previous areas more than a few times to progress, but I miss the fully-interconnected world of the original Prime. Retro proved they could build an intricate and holistic world in full 3D all those years ago; why have they been so insistent on simplifying a core part of the Metroid series?

Also like Prime 3 is a separate connecting structure between the main areas. In Prime 3, it was interplanetary travel with your gunship. In Prime 4, it’s the massive desert of Sol Valley that stands squarely in the middle of each area. Crossing the desert is best done on Vi-O-La, which I’m convinced exists solely because someone on Retro’s design team thought it looked too cool to leave out. The desert contains a heaping of Green Energy crystals to collect for upgrades among other finds, but gameplay here largely feels like padding. The bike controls pretty well, but there’s no part of riding it which is genuinely engaging. It’s solely used to cross a massive desert that feels like it was included just to make you use the bike. It gets pretty tedious near the end if you’re going for completion, as you need to seek out and run over every crystal on the massive desert with no real tension or intrigue. Fans were concerned that this would be all the bike was when it was revealed, but I trusted Retro to do more with it. Unfortunately, they really didn’t. It’s a head-scratcher, but it’s also not the kind of thing that ruins the whole experience.

Fortunately, the bike isn’t the only thing about Prime 4 that controls well. I can say with confidence that this game has the single best controls and moment-to-moment gameplay of the whole series. As with the visuals, it feels like Retro has actually made full use of the time between releases here. Basic dual-stick controls and the Wii-style pointer controls both exist, with options for lock-on free aim and gyro controls. Want the reticle to stick to the center? Prefer to move it around the screen a bit? This game will meet your preferences, combining the best of the previous games’ control schemes and doing away with the horrible classic scheme completely. Good riddance. Switch 2 users are also treated to the first Prime game with official mouse control support. Holding the Joycon as a mouse isn’t very ergonomic (it helps to hold it a little diagonally), but it still feels great to play a Prime game with the control scheme shooters were made for. Mouse controls are equally supported between dual-stick and pointer control modes. Switching to mouse even adds a more precise reticle!

Beyond aiming, other aspects of Prime 4’s control have been touched up. Switching to and from the Morph Ball is smoother than ever. You actually have full control of Samus’ movements as soon as you unfurl now; no need to wait for the camera to get back behind her helmet. Though there wasn’t room to put dodging on its own button, it’s been changed to a double-tap of jump. This not only prevents most of my accidental dodges when trying to jump and vice-versa, but also enables new forward and backward dodges that make movement during fights a lot more flexible. Because no Prime game can use the same beam upgrade system twice, this game also changes beams to replace your missiles instead of your standard fire when you switch to them. It makes it easy to combine the various elemental beams with your standard shots, and ammo for your beams is in more than enough supply to experiment with them. Beams could stand to be more powerful - there’s a feeling that your attacks stay about the same strength for the whole game - but they definitely have their uses. The super charge shot for the Thunder Shot is especially satisfying, pumping lightning into a single target and watching it bounce between all surrounding enemies.

The result of all these control changes is the absolute best action in the Prime series. Previous games felt a little slow and clunky in this regard; Prime 4 is no Doom, but the action is a lot quicker and smoother here than usual. Though enemy variety is a little scant, they are consistently fun to fight with a decent mix of attacks and weaknesses. Bosses especially are a new highlight, combining the puzzle-style structure of weak points and item usage with a generally higher tempo. Sylux makes his long-awaited return from Metroid Prime Hunters here; while his inclusion in the story is a little uneven, his fights are consistently great. He makes a much more interesting rival than Dark Samus ever was while providing similar battles. The improved combat helps soften the blow of the stripped-down exploration, and your first run through an area will often consist of a lot of unique combat encounters.

There’s only one last thing about Prime 4 to mention here, and it’s the story. Normally, Metroid games don’t have a ton of story: there’s a problem, Samus shows up, she solves the problem, a planet probably explodes, see you next mission. Metroid has always thrived instead on its atmosphere, which I’ve already established that Prime 4 still nails. However, the Prime series’ obsession with the Galactic Federation simply must continue in Prime 4; I say again that this truly is a sequel to Prime 3. Throughout Samus’ mission, she’ll meet a variety of Federation stragglers caught in the event that teleported her to Viewros. The first of these, Myles MacKenzie, is a Federation engineer who sets up a base camp and communicates with Samus via radio for much of the game.

The response to these characters has been largely negative, and it’s not entirely unwarranted. I actually think that there’s a lot to talk about with them, though. If the goal is to flesh the Federation out and give Samus some contrast, then I would say it works a hell of a lot better than it ever did in Prime 3. There wasn’t a single Federation character in that game that felt like anything but a droll exposition dump. Though these characters occasionally fall into action movie stereotypes - indeed, Retro’s Western sensibilities in this Eastern franchise are most obvious here - they are at least occasionally interesting and endearing. Young recruit Nora Armstrong falls over herself to meet her idol, Samus, and is pushed to better herself by her example. Myles, though often dominated by annoying nerd tropes, does have some enjoyable quirks. The best of the bunch was Reger Tokabi, a black-ops sniper with a spiritual side. Retro must’ve known they’d found something good with him, since he has about four unique encounters in Sol Valley explaining his upbringing in a tribe of hunters and his conflict between his faith and the work he now does to support his family.

Though I think the internet was way too quick to throw Prime 4 under the bus after a few minutes of Myles, there are definitely some valid problems with how these characters are executed. For one, Samus never speaks a word herself. I get she’s a woman of few words, but it’s not like she’s mute. She spent pretty much all of Metroid Fusion talking to ADAM, and seeing her respond to a Chozo in their language in Metroid Dread was a really cool moment. Watching her interact with all these characters solely through nods and head shakes undercuts anything Retro wants us to feel for her. She could’ve still spoken every now and then in concise, purposeful ways without uncharacteristically coming off as a chatterbox.

I digress, though. The larger problems reside in how the characters affect gameplay. Multiple areas are bogged down at least slightly by the need to wait for these guys to open up obstacles for you, and much of what they have to say boils down to patronizing hints and pats on the back for solving basic puzzles. Myles is absolutely the worst offender here. Even if you just take a brief detour to collect items - a Metroid series staple - he will call in to give you blatant directions to the next thing you need to do. Not only was the next step never confusing, but the massive growth of the metroidvania genre has proven that players enjoy having to look around and open the world up on their own. It was really quite frustrating that Prime 4 treated me like an idiot just because I was actually bothering to take my damn time. Of course, every Prime game has had a hint system, but this and Prime 3 (big surprise) are the only ones where you can’t turn it off. There is literally a button to call Myles whenever you want, and the game still feels the need for him to butt in unprompted so he can hold my hand.

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond was the return of everything that was great about Retro’s Prime series, but also much of what was frustrating about it. Its setting and visuals are impressive even amongst the series’ proud history. Its gameplay is so far improved that I’m begging them to update Metroid Prime Remastered with those mouse controls. All the same, it feels shackled by utterly pointless inclusions and the kind of dated hand-holding that feels like some kind of soulless producer mandate. Everything good it does with its characters is held back by their need to patronize. I’m willing to give the game some grace and look beyond its annoyances - I stress that it is, on the whole, a fun and largely faithful Metroid Prime experience - but gamers are profoundly exhausted with the exact mistakes this game makes. It’s the frustrating kind of game where you can just see how much better it would have been with certain parts entirely removed, a problem that becomes all the more disappointing in light of how long this game took to make.

Regardless, it’s important that we don’t cry doom and gloom or sweep our problems under the rug. We all want another Prime game that can make us feel the way the first one did, and the only way that’s going to happen is if we approach Prime 4 holistically. It is beyond clear to me that Retro still has what it takes to make compelling worlds and exploration that feels good. The conclusion to draw from this game is that we want to explore more and be told how and where to explore less. This game may not have been everything everyone wanted it to be, but it’s far from irredeemable or even bad. If you’re a Metroid Prime fan, I definitely still recommend Prime 4, though it’s not quite as good as the first two Prime games. With the right takeaways from this game, I think Retro could be in the right position to make a truly excellent Prime 5. For now, I’ve had my fun with this game, and I’m happy it made it out of development hell in the shape it did. Not all games are so lucky.

Though best-known for their comics and movies, it’s no overstatement to say that Marvel has had a profound impact on every medium of pop culture. While Marvel vs. Capcom is a key pillar of fighting game history, video games are perhaps the area where their influence has been least significant. In recent years, Marvel has been doing everything in their power to change that with the Marvel Games label. Insomniac’s successful slate of Spider-Man narrative action games has inspired successors with other characters such as Insomniac’s own take on Wolverine, Motive’s Iron Man (if it still exists…), and Skydance’s Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra. NetEase’s Marvel Rivals has made its mark on the online shooter landscape, and Arc System Works’ Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls is looking to bring the franchise back into fighting games.

It’s clear that Marvel wants to approach their gaming initiatives from a variety of angles. Marvel Games publishes titles from all manner of studios in all kinds of different genres. Perhaps none of their projects exemplify this quite as well as Marvel Cosmic Invasion. Designed by Dotemu, a studio best known for bringing back Sega’s Streets of Rage series, it is an inside-and-out retro throwback. Everything from the beat-em-up genre to the classic character designs and pixelated visuals makes it seem like it’s trying to trick you into thinking it came out in the ‘90s. Moreover, it’s not some big, AAA event; it’s a smaller game designed for couch co-op in a genre which has always been pretty simple. One might think that Marvel would be looking to do with games what they have done with movies by releasing big-budget projects to modernize their characters, but Marvel Cosmic Invasion shows that they don’t want to leave simpler sensibilities behind. It’s their tribute to a simpler time, acknowledging what made it all fun in a tongue-in-cheek way with some modern refinement.

To this end, Cosmic Invasion’s visual design is quite a deliberate throwback to ‘90s-era Marvel Comics. Most of the character designs and even many of their attacks directly reference the legendary Marvel vs. Capcom 2, which itself immortalized many of the characters’ then-contemporary looks better than their comics did. The heroes, enemies, and environments are all rendered with some of the cleanest and most fluid pixel art animations around. The style is vibrant and simple, evoking classic comic art without strictly mimicking it. Though ingrained in retro sensibilities, the game also does a good job integrating more modern Marvel aspects and making them feel classic. Characters like Phyla-Vell, Cosmic Ghost Rider, and Knull all blend in well with classic staples like Wolverine and Captain America. Classic characters take some modern aspects with them; Iron Man still maintains his identity as Tony Stark’s bodyguard from the classic comics, but he also refers to the Arc Reactor which was not a concept until the 2008 Iron Man film. Overall, the presentation is bound to satisfy all kinds of Marvel fans. I, for one, enjoyed the characters’ palette swaps, frequently switching from Iron Man’s iconic red and gold to looks inspired by his Silver Centurion and Model 42 armors.

Cosmic Invasion’s gameplay is similarly solid and simple. Like any beat-em-up, most problems can be solved with your four-punch mash or the midair dive kick. To keep things from getting repetitive, though, each of the 15 playable characters have their own nuances. Some characters can fly to fight on an extra plane. Attack while running to knock enemies around. Unique actions differ by character and usually function as a way to fight distant foes, ranging from Spider-Man’s web clusters to Rocket Raccoon’s random-effect grenades. Pressing attack and jump together allows for rising attacks or instant dive kicks depending on the character, and holding down attack produces another wholly-unique strike for different characters. Using the same button, some characters block and others dodge; enemies are aggressive enough that you’ll need to pay attention to defense. Of course, everyone has their own special attack, ranging from piercing beams to sweeping attacks in a wide arc.

My favorite hero, Iron Man, has a satisfying suite of attacks. His held attack fires an energy ball that hovers in place, creating fun opportunities to knock enemies into it or set it up where they’ll land. Guarding enemy projectiles at the right time also gives him unlimited energy for repulsor shots for a few moments, letting him fire away in response. Of course, it wouldn’t be Iron Man without his big beam; in true Marvel vs. Capcom fashion, he whips out the Proton Cannon for this one. Every hero I tried had a lot of fun ways to combo enemies and keep things interesting, with Spidey nimbly swinging through foes across the whole screen and Phyla-Vell teleporting to enemies hit by her thrown swords.

More fun still are the ways to combine your heroes; each player picks two characters and can tag between them at any time. Tagging after attacks which knock enemies back brings the second character in with an automatic follow-up, while tagging during basic combos brings the second character in free to act while the first character’s combo finishes automatically. You can even tag in the middle of a special attack to use the second character while the first’s special finishes! I enjoyed launching enemies with Captain America’s special attack and meeting them in the air with Iron Man’s flight.

Beat-em-ups have a reputation for being mindless button-mashers, and I think that reputation wasn’t entirely unwarranted back in the early days of the genre. Dotemu has smartly applied a little more to consider in this game, taking cues from its sister genre of fighting games. Levels have various hazards like bottomless pits or falling debris to consider, and enemies can always smack flying characters right out of the sky if you hover near them too carelessly. The blocking and dodging functions become pretty important, especially against the many bosses who won’t flinch as easily as your standard mooks. Nonetheless, Dotemu understands the simple catharsis of punching away at the hordes, providing enough health and healing items that fighting doesn’t ever feel overly complicated. It’s satisfying to dodge around something or block a projectile just in time instead of getting laid out, but it still generally abides by beat-em-up simplicity.

I guess all that’s left to talk about is the story, huh? Well, there’s not much to say. Annihilus has invaded from the Negative Zone to subjugate the world, somehow with help from A.I.M., Sentinels, Galactus, and more. Heroes band together from New York to Asgard, trouncing the forces of evil across the cosmos until they set things right. It’s a classic-style tour of Marvel friends and foes that’s never trying to be anything but simple fun, much like the rest of the game. Some hammy voice work with comic-style one-liners really sends it all home. In some games, I’d be disappointed with such little effort attached to the plot. For a retro throwback like this with no real investment in narrative innovation, it does all it needs to do.

Marvel Cosmic Invasion delivers as an affordable, short-but-sweet romp through iconic Marvel scenarios. If you like Marvel, beat-em-ups, or both, it’s an easy recommend, especially at its fairly low price. I had my fair share of fun beating down the waves of enemies, and the various modifiers for Arcade Mode give you a lot of different ways to come back and experience the stages all over again. It’s not the sort of game lined up to win an award or a genre-defining masterpiece, but it is solid and it is fun. That’s all it really needs to be. People have developed a penchant for all-or-nothing, grandiose thinking these days; it’s either “peak” or “mid.” There’s still a place for modest, entertaining treats like Cosmic Invasion, though, and I can’t wait to scrounge up some friends for couch co-op one of these days.

I’m kind of a massive Kirby fan, and I have been since I was but a young lad. I had plenty of time to plumb the depths of series history as a kid, looking for all the Kirby I could eat in what was my general introduction to retro games. 2003’s Kirby Air Ride naturally became the main reason I had a GameCube controller and memory card for my Wii growing up. Though I haven’t played that original game in a long time, I have fond memories of hours spent honing my cornering skills and checking off boxes to unlock everything that I could. Mario Kart has always been the standard bearer in kart racing, but I and other dedicated Kirby fans knew there was something special in that one-off spinoff. The driving was so simple, but the vehicles made it so varied. The racing was no slouch, but City Trial delivered a chaotic experience unlike anything else around. Alas, in the age before online multiplayer was commonplace, I had no one to play this game with.

Now, Masahiro Sakurai has returned to his original creation to direct a blockbuster sequel to the cult classic racer. As the years have passed, our standards for game design have changed. Live service has commercialized the online gaming landscape, with whole games orbiting around how many cosmetics they can jam into their monthly battlepasses. “Earning” has been replaced with “buying,” and the growth of e-sports has left most games focusing less on content and more on a repeatable, competitive experience. Sakurai has always been one to put the fun first - and to put his all into anything he works on. Kirby Air Riders is a game made the old-fashioned way, confidently eschewing the trends of modern multiplayer gaming to provide an ultimate smorgasbord of racing fun for players of all stripes.

The mantra of the Kirby series has always been “easy to learn, hard to master.” Air Riders is no different, featuring such effortlessly simple driving controls that anyone can pick up quickly. Acceleration is automatic, and you can press a button to slow down and charge up a boost to bring around the turn with you. Distinct from traditional drifting, there’s a lot of nuance in how and when to charge up that boost and just as much satisfaction in letting it loose at the perfect time for that ideal line through the track. Sliding off a ramp starts a glide, letting you soar over obstacles and get a little boost if you land smoothly. Flicking the stick lets you spin to attack nearby racers, making those neck-and-neck moments decisive. The standard mode, Air Ride, shows all these systems off in the racing style you expect.

The most satisfying addition in this game is the star slide, a speed boost gained by following another player’s trail that intuitively makes taking the lead back engaging. Press the boost button near an enemy to inhale them, spitting them out or copying their ability. Abilities either attack automatically or trigger when you hit boost, with the overlap having interesting implications on how you use them. Some abilities, like Fighter or Needle, specialize in hitting your opponents. Others, like Jet and the brand-new Flash, improve your boost and help you soar ahead.

The major difference from the previous game is in the variety of characters to choose from. Every player in Air Ride used Kirby unless you selected Dedede or Meta Knight, who were essentially vehicles as far as the game was concerned. Now you can combine a range of fun Kirby characters with all of the original vehicles from Air Ride and then some. Every character comes with different stats and their own special that charges up during the races, and most have some other perks as well. Though Sakurai lamented the need to add even one extra button to this impressively lean racing system, the specials give every character satisfying ways to power through and fight. Attacking provides the attacker a boost more than it slows players down, avoiding those awful Mario Kart situations where you get pelted by items helplessly. The only thing about the new characters which I don’t like is that it feels like good ol’ Kirby doesn’t have much to offer compared to their unique traits, especially since every character was given a way to use Kirby’s signature copy abilities.

Of course, the vehicles already provided the bulk of the variety, and that doesn’t change here. Your choice of vehicle can mean as little as statistical differences and as much as comprehensive changes to how the game controls. Some vehicles perform better while gliding, and others ride on wheels and can’t glide at all. The Swerve Star accelerates instantly, but can’t turn unless it comes to a full stop by charging a boost. The Transform Star can shift between a wheelie form and a star form, suiting the needs of the track. The Vampire Star has weak stats, but can attack other racers to power itself up and boost ahead. Vehicles can have such volatile strengths and weaknesses that the result of a race can feel decided ahead of time if the track and vehicles line up a certain way. Luckily, enough generic vehicles like the reliable Warp Star exist that you can round your riding experience out across courses. Just don’t be too disappointed if you end up on a course where one of your rivals’ vehicles is well-suited.

The sum of all these things is a racing experience with a lot of intensity and surprisingly high speed, but one which is nonetheless easy to jump into. The courses provide a lot of variety, both in how their layouts focus on different aspects of the game and in their vibrant settings. Each course feels grand, bringing racers along whole journeys even in their brief length. Cavernous Corners takes you from a jungle into a yawning cave entrance, leading through ancient ruins and a massive underground treasure hoard. Mount Amberfalls starts on a snowy peak, descending through the autumnal forests and waterfalls until the race ends on a beach. These areas are all so distinct that they’re appreciated even as you blast past rivals, snagging every opportunity you can to star slide and attack for a boost. It’s a chaotic kind of action-racer which feels just as unique as it did in 2003, even if it sometimes feels like you’re at the mercy of its craziness. Luckily, limiting the racers on the track to six keeps things a little more focused than they’d be otherwise.

Of course, real Air Ride fans know that it doesn’t stop at the standard racing. Two other modes exist. The second mode is Top Ride, a top-down racing experience built on the same fundamental controls as Air Ride. Courses are much shorter, emphasizing handling as you quickly bounce from hairpin to hairpin. Gliding exists, but it’s quite downplayed. Two control methods allow players to either point their stick in the direction they want to go or always steer left or right relative to the vehicle’s front; I find steer controls make a little more sense to me. This mode lacks specials and instead includes a whole host of items and copy abilities constantly dropping in, making races unpredictable. It ends up being a quicker, more casual mode. A lot of players didn’t expect Top Ride to return from the original game - Sakurai even joked about it being dispensable once - but it’s nice that even a small aside like this got the same kind of face lift as the rest of the game.

Of course, the breakout mode of Air Ride is what most fans are really here for: City Trial. This mode puts all of its players - up to sixteen in Air Riders from the previous four - into the sprawling city of Skyah, tasking them with running around the map for upgrades, new vehicles, and perhaps even the parts to construct one of four legendary air ride machines. Along with searching the map, you can attack your rival riders to steal their upgrades or even destroy their vehicles, forcing them to scramble for a new one while you reap the map’s rewards.

This all culminates in the stadium, where players get to choose between four possible events that lean into certain stats. Events can be as simple as a standard Air Ride race with your upgrades and vehicles, or as specialized as a gliding distance competition or an all-out arena brawl against other players. Without any knowledge of what stadium events will come, players either take a gamble on upgrading into a certain category or try to round themselves out to be decently prepared for whatever comes. You can also try to choose an event you don’t think your rivals will choose to have less competition.

With all of the craziness inherent to City Trial, including periodic map events that can be as catastrophic as falling meteors, it quickly becomes a mad dash for anything you can get your hands on. You can chase down your opponents to steal their legendary machine parts, putting one together for their awesome power. The map will suddenly spawn treasure chests as you quickly make for the key. Somebody will randomly find a crazy laser cannon that shoots a huge beam through the whole map and you might just have to deal with your vehicle exploding. This is easily the most “party game” part of the game. There’s strategy to be had, such as searching for the obscure corners of the map where special upgrades may spawn or gliding for distant, floating islands, but it ultimately feels like there’s so much randomness involved that your chances of winning are totally up in the air. That’s okay, though; games about having crazy, fun times like this are getting increasingly rare, especially in the AAA space. City Trial is nothing if not fun, especially now that I can fill up a game with players online whenever I want.

Every mode keeps you occupied with a huge checklist of unlocks. All kinds of objectives appear here, from simple ones you’ll unlock as you race normally to interesting challenges you can work towards completing. With only a few riders and vehicles by default, you’ll want to work through challenges quickly to try out everything. It’s refreshing these days to be able to get so much just by playing the game. Racing also earns you miles, a currency you can spend for cosmetics. You can put hats on your riders, customize your license card for players online to see, or buy parts for the My Machine customization mode. Using decals, attachments, and more, players can customize every vehicle in the game to their heart’s content. I haven’t managed much more than a simple palette swap myself, but I can guarantee that the machine editor is comprehensive. People have come up with a lot of creative stuff, and you can spend your miles to buy their work and use it yourself if you like it.

All of these aspects come together in the last, single-player focused mode, Road Trip. Telling the game’s story, Road Trip lets players collect upgrades and machines as they choose between a variety of challenges along several stages. The format evokes Classic Mode from the Super Smash Bros. series, being a canned sequence of matches across the game’s many modes. Though it’s fun to use Road Trip as a flight of everything the game has to offer, it does run a bit long for what it is. Running the same variety of stadium challenges and short races invariably gets repetitive, especially when you get enough upgrades that you can start blasting by races without much care for what your CPU opponents are even doing. Boss battles, though also a City Trial stadium option, end up being the coolest thing on offer. The final bosses - including the secret true final boss faced if you collect every machine - are epic, though I wish I didn’t have to play all of Road Trip twice for it.

Kirby Air Riders strikes me as the kind of game they just don’t make anymore. It’s fun, approachable, and engaging without being even remotely concerned with trying to be the next e-sport. The simple modes are supplanted by a huge checklist of things to earn, giving even solo players a ton to do. There’s also just a ridiculous amount of settings for everything from the game’s UI to private online lobbies with friends that help make the game as comfortable and playable as possible for everyone. Kirby has always been the one franchise that I feel successfully designs itself for everyone. Instead of trying to be the game that is all things to all people, it leans into its own identity and just removes as many barriers to that experience as it can. Air Riders is a prime example of this philosophy, with the veteran designer who created that formula at the director’s helm. The goal is to be fun, plain and simple, and Sakurai’s tireless dedication is no less impactful towards that goal than it is towards something major like Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. There’s no Switch 2 owner I can’t recommend Air Riders to, and it makes a strong case for the best racer on the system even in a year with strong competition.

Part of CastleVember 2025!

• Castlevania (1986)

• Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest (1987)

• Castlevania: The Adventure (1989)

Though a flawed entry, Castlevania: The Adventure proved to be the first steps towards a consistent identity for the Castlevania series. It got the ball rolling with concepts like a centuries-long legacy of Belmonts and a return to Castlevania’s original, linear structure, but it couldn’t fully solidify these aspects as a handheld side entry. That honor would go to the next home console sequel, Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse. Made by a separate team from the one that made The Adventure, Dracula’s Curse aimed to be the true Castlevania sequel that Simon’s Quest never was. With a better understanding of the NES’ hardware and of the series’ own strengths, Dracula’s Curse was bigger, better, and - crucially - much more brutal. For the story of the Belmont Clan’s first battle against Dracula, Konami would end up setting the tone for the rest of the entire series.

Raising the Stakes

From the first moments of Dracula’s Curse, you can tell how much grander it wants to be. It opens with a scrolling cutscene with a film-strip effect, leaning into the series’ Hammer horror inspirations. Stages have even richer background detail. Boss battles are much more refined and interesting. If you were playing this game in Japan, the music even got a notable upgrade thanks to Konami’s cartridge addition which Nintendo of America didn’t allow - the VRC6 chip. The compositions are able to make use of more instruments, and they sound richer, too. Sound effects also won’t cut the music out as often thanks to the dedicated audio processing chip. Compare two versions of the classic first level theme, “Beginning.” NES first, Famicom second:

Though it’s worse by comparison, the NES version thankfully still isn’t bad. The point is that Dracula’s Curse leveraged everything its developers had learned about the NES hardware in the years since Castlevania to push its visuals and audio to the fullest. The same can be said of its level design. The game picks up right where Castlevania’s design philosophy left off, quickly reintroducing most of that game’s enemies and hazards before moving on to myriad new ones. Instead of starting right on Dracula’s doorstep, Trevor has to journey all the way across Transylvania to reach him, much to the benefit of the level design. The route to the castle includes trips through haunted forests, sunken cities, and even across the ocean on a ship. Any given playthrough has nine stages - three more than Castlevania - and you can choose different routes as you progress to play different stages. Compared to Castlevania, the level designs maintain that patient, puzzle-like quality, but with so much more variety.

Even more variety comes with the game’s biggest innovation - its three additional characters. The second route split determines which of two characters you can recruit as well as about half of the levels you’ll play through. The upper route gives you Sypha, a witch with powerful spells instead of sub-weapons, but frail constitution. The bottom route gives you Alucard - appearing here eight years before his ever-iconic reintroduction in Symphony of the Night - whose weak combat is balanced out by a handy ability to turn into a bat and fly around obstacles. Before each of them comes Grant, your reward for taking on the optional clock tower level. He can cling to walls, walk faster, jump higher, and even steer his jumps in midair, but he takes extra damage like Sypha. Though you can only have one partner at a time, your choice of route and partner can make every playthrough look a little different even in the structured, linear design of a Castlevania game.

Overall, Dracula’s Curse delivers as a huge next step for that “classic-vania” style. It’s a sharper and smarter game with lots more variety. There is one catch, though. Back in the early days of console gaming, challenge was a huge selling point. Companies goaded their players into taking on the biggest, baddest challenges for bragging rights. If you had a sequel, it couldn’t just be bigger or better - it had to be harder, too. With Simon’s Quest disappointing in this regard, Dracula’s Curse had to pick up the slack, even though Castlevania was already plenty tough. The result?

This Game is Really Damn Hard

With a better understanding of Castlevania’s structure came not only more clever and fun levels, but also a better understanding of how to use all of its mechanics to put players through the meat grinder. The game uses your inability to jump while climbing stairs to bottleneck you against swooping enemies. Crows dive in from just the worst places, sometimes right after you enter a room. Some jumps are so long that you’ll only clear them if you stand as close to the edge as possible. Enemies cover each other’s angles of attack so well in some rooms that you’ll swear you just missed the huddle where they planned it all out. In the grand scheme, it’s all still done in that typical Castlevania way - carefully-placed hazards that give you some time to react and have a clear solution - but the arrangements seriously put your decision-making and planning to the test.

While the more creative levels tend to be a positive too, some of the ideas would have been better off left on the drawing board. While Alucard’s flight is very useful, I rarely ever play on his route because the gimmicks of his levels are just a frustrating waste of time. Multiple levels make you wait for falling acid to melt blocks or for falling blocks to stack up before you can progress. One particularly egregious room forces you to dodge through the same pattern of stacking blocks for over a minute only to change the pattern up on you near the end, potentially knocking you into a pit. The penultimate level - among the hardest of any Castlevania game - finishes with a doppelganger boss that copies the moves of the various characters. Its AI is predictably stupid for this era, so beating it pretty much always requires cheesing it out. Spamming the character switch button lets you get one free hit in per switch, which takes forever since character switching couldn’t be quick in the old days.

Oddly enough, American players also got a significantly harder version of the game in most respects. The Japanese version assigns damage on a per-hazard basis which is consistent throughout the game, but the US version goes back to the system from Castlevania - every hazard’s damage depends on the level. This makes the last few levels of Dracula’s Curse absolutely grueling on the US version by greatly reducing your margin for error. Some bosses also get tougher attack patterns, such as increasing the size of the twin dragons’ fire breath enough that they can potentially be unavoidable if the heads appear in the wrong spots. Some of the changes are good, though. The original twin dragon breath would actually lag the game. Grant gets his knife throw nerfed down to a short-range stab in the US version, but it was kind of ridiculous for him to have the knife throw anyways. The final battle against Dracula is also much improved; the patterns for his movement and flame pillars are better to play around, and his third phase has its angles of attack adjusted so it can properly aim at you anywhere. The Japanese version is my go-to for simply being less stressful, but I’d appreciate a remake that brings the best balance from both together.

A Legacy Established

Castlevania may have laid the groundwork, but Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse set the standard for the franchise going forward. For doubling down on everything about the first game and bringing in so many new ideas that would become series staples, it is truly difficult to imagine how the franchise would look without this game. Koji Igarashi, known for spearheading the franchise’s shift into an easier, more open-ended style, still counts Dracula’s Curse as his favorite Castlevania game. Even as it tries its hardest to break your spirit, there’s just something so undeniably solid about how it’s all put together that it’s hard not to push through to the end. Sometimes it gets so hard that it crosses a line for me - especially in the American version - but it does so much else right that it’s easy to forgive. As I watch Trevor put his arm around Sypha as the sun rises on the crumbling castle, all the resentment pretty much just washes away.

More than just setting the standard for the series, Dracula’s Curse also strikes me as a crucial example of one of the most important things about gaming. As games continue to get easier and more accessible, Dracula’s Curse stands as a constant reminder that the struggle can make the experience more meaningful. It’s not bad that games are less obtuse or that there are more games that newcomers can approach, but the importance of this adversity cannot be understated. Challenge invests us in the world in its own way, aligning the struggles of its characters with a simulated struggle we really face. The modern classics of challenge, like Dark Souls and Hollow Knight, were all looking to games like this in their design. Castlevania taught us that challenge didn’t have to be cheap, using it instead to elevate the experience. Castlevania III is among the greatest examples of this feat in the NES age, and it paved the way for the future of the series to carry on that legacy.