Last week’s Beastcast forced me to again consider console capability going into the future. I’ll talk about this more when we get to Firewatch, but: what’s in store for us console folk in the coming months? Or the coming years, if the PS4 and XB1 indeed last as long as they were purported to? Great performance on console is possible, definitely. MGS V immediately comes to mind as one of the best looking games this gen, and it ran at a solid 60 frames on PS4. But of course, not every developer is afforded the same time, money and personnel as a place like the former Kojima Productions.

Sometimes it bums me out to think about this holiday, or the 2017 holiday, and just how shaky the performance may be by then. It's cool, at least, that some developers are including graphics options in console versions of their games so that players can prioritize frame rate if they want. The Division is one such game, and after playing a little of that open beta this weekend I’m convinced we’ll dig deeper into that one in a future blogbox.

In the last week or so:

I spent a Saturday morning hiking through Firewatch.

I felt the need to keep myself away from Giant Bomb’s What It Is video for Firewatch, because I had come this far without knowing much more than I needed to play it. Now I’ve played it. So, Firewatch is: mostly what I expected! A walking simulator / Gone Home style experience that places you in the action of a mystery as opposed to the aftermath of one. I want to keep things spoiler free, so I'll say upfront that the opening felt a little forced and rushed to me, the ending jarring but pleasurably so, and leave it mostly at that.

Firewatch is a game about getting around. There is a hefty amount of navigation and backtracking in this game; you spend most of the game’s runtime trotting around the forest with your compass, occasionally pulling up your map to double-check your bearings. It's a great way to absorb the game’s many pretty sights, sure, but it also feels a lot like busywork. Often there's an engaging dialogue exchange to keep things from simply being a slog, but there's enough times where nothing happens for Firewatch to strike me as a little sluggish, even boring at times. As the game goes on, you increasingly have to hike the world corner-to-corner, back-to-back. It's not particularly arduous, but again: largely uneventful.

Performance on PS4 was rough. The game doesn't require any split-second input from you, so there's no worries there. But the pervasive chunkiness was enough to detract from the pleasant scenery and character building this game is all-in on. I also encountered a rare bug that causes the game to crash when loading. A quick reboot of the app fixed the problem, but it didn't exactly improve my perception of the game's performance. A patch recently hit that improves console performance, but it’s a bummer these optimizations come now, long after the launch audience has finished the game.

It's a shame pacing and performance issues plagued my playthrough, because the middle stretch of Firewatch is a tense and thoroughly enjoyable story about the rigours of isolation, physical and psychological. The ending, while rushed, ends with a quiet and unsure catharsis that felt appropriate in ways the intro fell flat on. It took my fiancee and I under four hours to play through Firewatch in a single sitting. While that says something for how compelling the overarching story really was, we were also kind of rushing it. I think we both would have felt more compelled to stop and really drink things in if the game wasn’t such a jog across the map for so much of its runtime. It’s no Gone Home as far as I’m concerned, but If you’re into these types of story-driven games I’d say it’s worth pursuing, despite the many nicks in its design and execution. I imagine playing on a capable PC would be best.

I snooped around the App Store for the first time in ages and found Swapperoo.

I haven’t kept up with iOS games in years. Swapperoo was a nice reminder that clever and captivating games are hitting iOS often, that I was wrong to ignore the App Store so long. It’s tough to sell a match-3 game in 2016, but Swapperoo does an admirable job of mixing things up in its own way from the start. Often you’re not swapping pieces directly like in Bejeweled, and you don’t have free movement of your pieces like in, say, Puzzle & Dragons. Instead, tiles are largely directional and move in the direction they’re facing when tapped. Directional drill pieces do the same, but destroy its target tile instead of swapping with it. Eye pieces move a space of their own volition each turn, causing you to think ahead and "trap" them into matches.

The game starts relatively simple…

...but before long, you start running into stuff like this:

And that’s well before you get to the Hard tier of levels, or dig deep into the game’s challenge levels.

It manages to make a unique stamp on match-3 gameplay, and If you're looking for something to squeeze in on bus rides or commercial breaks, you could do far worse than Swapperoo. It’s not mindblowing or essential, but it’s proof-positive that free-to-play nonsense hasn’t completely sullied the waters; a dollar or two can buy you an accomplished, polished and ad-free game on the App Store in 2016.

Next Sunday:

It’s an all-3DS bonanza on blogbox! I detail my sexy travels in Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright thus far; Final Fantasy Explorers provides a colourful but somewhat trite monster hunting experience; and I bid an informal farewell to Animal Crossing: New Leaf, one of my favourite games of all-time.