I spent 20 hours with The Finals over the last week and my dominant thought by the conclusion of the beta was this: could I reasonably fit a game’s pre-release playtest onto my game of the year list? That would be crazy, wouldn’t it? The Finals is competitive first-person shooter from Embark Studios , a Swedish game development outfit founded by former DICE developers. It is not a battle royale...
The home base, in an earlier time Nuclear power is finally in my sights in Satisfactory , but it's still so far away . Between myself and what I can only assume is the be-all and end-all of power generation: more milestones of increasing complexity and the realization that my facilities are absolutely going to need significant expansion to pull it all off. And I couldn't be more excited. My ste...
One of the side effects of discussions about Half-Life Alyx this year has been a forced reexamining of the series on my part. That’s a long-winded way of saying that I had never played the first Half-Life game until now, and I felt I needed to correct that. It’s one of those gaps in my video game history that I always knew I’d address someday, especially considering that the first-person shoote...
The Six Invitational 2020 wraps up today, and Ubisoft held its annual panel detailing the year ahead for Rainbow Six Siege. This time, they revealed roadmaps for Years 5 and 6 and detailed a load of new features coming to the game over the next 12 months. I came out of the Six Invitational last year thinking that 2019 would be Siege's best year, but it ended up being fairly standard. The additi...
"I came to this place to build the impossible. You came to rob what you could never build. A Hun, gaping at the gates of Rome. Even the air you breathe is sponged from my account. Well, breathe deep ... so later you might remember the taste.” Often I think that exploring the mysteries of a piece of fiction, be it a video game, a film, or novel, is only an excellent experience the first time thr...
Busy! Over the last few weeks I have installed games, uninstalled games, finished games, and written about games. Most of them were excellent. Here are some words about them. Finished and Written Void Bastards What an amazing surprise this was . I knew nothing of Void Bastards' existence until a recent Beastcast, and thanks to its availability on Game Pass I was able to easily give it a shot. I...
March is apparently FPS month for me this year. Let's chat real quick. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered It is so good to be back here Playing this thing feels like visiting an old friend who has aged wonderfully. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is probably my favorite game of all time, but until this month I had never played this remastered version. And boy, what a truly phenomenal game t...
Each week I tell myself a lie about finally chipping away at a backlog. What happens instead is I fall back into my rotation of multiplayer games, currently dominated by Apex Legends but with frequent interludes into Rainbow Six Siege . In the last few months I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the state of multiplayer games, and I’ve largely come away disappointed. Every generation brings...