Street Fighter 6

(available for PlayStation 4 & 5, Xbox Series X & S, and PC. Playstation 5 version used for the review)

Street Fighter 6 is the latest in the world-renowned fighting game franchise, a staple that all other franchises in the same genre have been building off of. Street Fighter 6 has to set a precedent considering that it now has a lot of big competition, most notably the reboot of Mortal Kombat that will release later this year as well as Tekken 8 which is coming sometime next year. The game itself also has come in with a more sceptical crowd. Street Fighter 5, put bluntly, launched in a pitiful state. There wasn’t an arcade or story mode and the character selection was minimal.

That being said, Street Fighter 5 also had to meet some strict deadlines, something that 6 didn’t have an issue with. Though it is coming out a few months before Evo and will be part of that event. Incidentally, Evo being created by Playstation was the reason that I chose to play this game on the PS5, which brings me to the fact of Framerate- the game has a very good Framerate on consoles and there isn’t much of an issue. You may experience issues with the PC version due to the fact that Denuvo has been added after launch, though this will eventually be removed once CAPCOM believes it has reached maximum sales potential. Once again, I’ll state that Denuvo denies that their program affects the framerate of games, though I personally don’t think that that is the case.

Street Fighter 6 comes with much more content than the previous game. As soon as you boot up the game, you have 3 modes to choose from: Battle Hub, which acts as sort of an arcade centre, which comes with a customisable avatar and a few things to interact within the area. While you can play a bunch of cabinet matches with people, which basically you wander over to arcades and wait for a person to challenge people or vice versa, it’s a basic fight. The game does give you an indication if the person you are battling is at a similar level to yourself. The Battle Hub is a basic main menu for all of the single-player and couch multiplayer modes.

You get arcade mode, the special battles, which I found enjoyable but I wonder how interesting they would be if I managed to get some multiplayer rounds with them, but it also links to doing online matches. You can also select ranked and casual matches from the battle hub, but the fighting ground also has that option as well. This, of course, also leads to the practice room, which you’ll want to use if you want to master a character.

Finally, there’s the World Tour mode, which acts as this game’s story mode. It involves your created avatar training with the Street Fighter cast and getting into scraps on the street. It’s essentially an RPG mixed with a fighting game.

All of these modes are enjoyable but I preferred casual matches since they didn’t feel as bad when you lost, and they also had unlimited rematches. The game also supports crossplay between all platforms, using Capcom’s ID system, though I do not believe it’s required to have a Capcom ID, I didn’t have to enter any login details when I started up, but I may have entered them into my Playstation previously without realising..

PROS

• Modern Controls

This has caused a bit of controversy within the fighting game crowd; the game offers two controls: classic controls, which play like any classic Street Fighter. You have to memorise combos to pull off special moves, the buttons are assigned with different punches and kicks, etc. Modern controls, however, are designed to be more friendly for newcomers. With modern controls, buttons are assigned to heavy attack, light attack, medium attack, and special moves, and you can press these buttons while holding R2 to perform a combo.

These come at a sacrifice. For one thing, modern controls which are made to make things fairer, actually weakened the move. Anyone who performed the same moves with classic controls actually does more damage than if you were to use the modern controls. The auto combos also come at the risk of the new stamina meter, which is used to perform moves to get out of combinations and make your opponent unable to block. The stamina moves were very enjoyable since they add an extra level of strategy to a fight.

But to be honest, I love the modern controls. I’ve never felt like I’ve been able to integrate myself into a Street Fighter game until I had this option, If you’re like me and have Dyspraxia, this is one way to finally get the full Street Fighter experience. I never could have pulled off these combos of special moves and I finally have the ability to do so. It’s a great way of making the game more approachable and it’s given me the Street Fighter experience I’ve always wanted to have. I seriously hope all fighting games implement something like this in the future.

Obviously, there have been complaints about this, but I feel like the fact that modern players have weaker moves and more risk with overperforming combos does address the balance. You can see by the other person’s health bar if they’re playing with modern or classic controls, so you’ll know ahead of time what you’re getting into.

If you want to know what character to go with, when you’re playing offline the character select screen will tell you how easy or hard they are to play with and if they’re a close or long-range fighter. I tended to pick the close-range fighters, hence why I was maining Cammy for most of my playtime. I recommend Lily for newcomers, as she’s one of the easiest to learn. The character you’re definitely going to find most online is Ken, he definitely seems like he’s the most popular character so far, probably because he’s top of the tier list.

• Online Multiplayer

I was genuinely worried about what the net coding would be like for Street Fighter 6, especially since it has to deal with the crossplay of several platforms and the net coding with Street Fighter 5 when it came out wasn’t good. Thankfully, the net coding is fantastic. It rarely ever had framerate drops, and I barely had any matches that I lost because of someone’s connection. I’ve tested out the game with both wifi and ethernet on my PS5, and they both ran excellently. I’ve also played against people on every platform and never had an issue. I can confirm that Playstation vs PC was very good since I faced ff against my colleague Ren to test the framerate in rooms. Our match was very easy to pull off and we had no real issues with framerate or connection using tow different systems. We played seven rounds and he won 6-1, in case anyone is curious.

I didn’t get a chance to test out couch multiplayer, but I suspect that that is the same deal.

I do have a slight complaint about the rankings, while I can’t use ranks in ranked mode but I can use stars, which is really deflating. The only time I had issues with the system itself, though, was when people decide to go offline. Before anyone asks, yes I did check that it wasn’t my internet that was the issue- I would always go straight into another match afterwards with no issue.

• Character Design

I think that the character design this time around is a massive step up from Street Fighter 5’s initial redesign roster. This obviously refers to the cast coming from their entries in Street Fighter 2, in which there’s a decent selection. I particularly liked DJ’s design and particularly Cammy’s redesign, which despite causing a rather sexist backlash, I think is still a really good design. Zangief’s one actually kind of makes sense considering the martial arts he specialises in. There’s not really a bad design in the bunch! Lily’s design is excellent, for a start, and I particularly liked Marisa, and Jamie also has a good design.

I did quite like JP’s design, but his character wasn’t that interesting.

If I had to choose a major issue with designs, I would pick the cover fighter, Luke. He’s a rather generic-looking character and doesn’t really stand out amongst the other characters and that will only become more prevalent when more characters come in.

MIXED

• Arcade Mode

Arcade Mode is fine but it doesn’t tell that much of a story. There are definitely some good moments, Zangief’s was particularly good with the conclusion. I also liked where some of the stories were going, I think that Cammy’s one hints at more of her backstory, given what she has been going through throughout most of the series.

The issue is that it feels like it’s over before it gets a chance to get started, granted, you can improve that by upping the usual 5-match arcade to 12 matches, but even then, it kind of felt like arcade mode was a bit of an afterthought- though I do think that it will improve when they bring more fighters into the game.

• Character Selection at Launch

I praised the character designs but I think the selection is a bit of a mixed bag. There are some good ones here, a lot of the Street Fighter 2 cast is back including Zangief, Chun-LI, DJ, etc., and we have a good selection of new fighters also. It seemed like they went half and half on legacy fighters and new fighters. However, the character selection still feels a little bit shorter than I would have liked. Maybe four or five more fighters in the mix would have been cool. I do feel like I’m repeating myself a little bit when I’m online, but this might be due to the tier list system.

This criticism will be addressed since there will be 4 fighters coming in the first year alone, and since Street Fighter is an evolving e-sport there will be more as time goes on. They’ve already confirmed two new fighters and two legacy fighters, Rashid and Akuma.

There will be a lot of speculation about who will follow, but this also brings up an issue for me. I may sound a bit ungrateful, but I think 4 fighters in the first year is a little small… I think that when we go into year 2 I would like them to up the new fighters to either 6 or 8. Not only will we get new fighters, but there will be a lot of legacy fighters that people want like Sakura or Crimson Viper just to name a couple. It’s rather telling that we will go a full 12 months without M. Bison- you know, one of the most famous video game villains ever! If someone is going to come up with a storyline reason as to why he can’t be here, well, that guy has come back from the dead more than the Doctor!

CONS

• World Tour Mode

Let me stress that I didn’t dislike World Tour mode. I just found it rather bland overall. Let’s start with a basic rundown. You’re essentially playing a basic RPG where you’re managing health, moves, and equipment to build your fighter and you’re interacting with a storyline around the fighters. Start out in the first location, Metro City, and you go to other locations (they usually aren’t very big maps, and that’s one issue). It’s a rather lifeless story and it doesn’t feel like it’s giving us information about what’s going on in the Street Fighter canon at this point in time. Your interactions with the cast aren’t that interesting, either. My character being trained with Chun-Li should feel like a bigger deal than it is. Unless you make your character a complete clone of one of the masters, the avatar never quite feels that well thought out or balanced. Granted, that might be my ability in the game, which might explain why I lost a bunch of avatar fights, but I did alright enough in the single-player aspects of the story.

The whole thing just felt lifeless! This might get better as time goes on but at this point, I can’t really recommend World Tour. I know my colleague Ren had a similar thought about this part of the game as well, and I think it’s rather telling that I felt like I was forcing myself to play this part of the game because I was having way more fun playing a bunch of online matches.

I will revisit World Tour if it improves down the line, but for now, I just wish they included a story mode similar to Mortal Kombat and the Injustice games.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Street Fighter 6 is a fantastic game. The new controls make it feel very accessible whilst not alienating long-time fans, the game feels very balanced, and I didn’t feel like there were too many characters that needed much of a change to their stats (though I did find Manon’s grip move a bit annoying), and in all honesty, while I do think that the character selection is smaller than I would have liked, it’s a good set of characters so far.

I think that I’m going to be sticking with Street Fighter 6 for quite a while, it’s really an excellent fighting game. This has been one of my favourite fighting games in years and it’s really got me back into the series- but that opinion might change further down the line if some of the additions down the line don’t improve much, especially considering it’s in competitions with two other big fighting games being release in the next year.

FINAL SCORE: 9.2/10

Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp Switch Review

Advance Wars Re-Boot Camp is a 2023 remake of the first 2 Advance Wars games that were released on the Gameboy Advance in 2001 and 2003 respectively.

I completed the game on the Switch OLED so my experience may not reflect those of players on older versions of the Switch model.

Pro.

Game value.

Since this game has both Advance Wars games it offers the player 2 large campaigns to clear completely and offer a lot of replayability to increase your rank for each level since the player is graded based on their performance.

The gameplay has also been lovingly recreated by WayForward and is completely on point for a remake, so both games play the same as the originals with nothing really being cut out compared to the originals and will supply the player with hundreds of hours of content easily making the game worth it for old and newcomers.

Accessibility.

The game has a new lower difficulty mode for the remake to make a newcomers first time with the game much easier since Advance Wars is a difficult strategy game for those who haven’t played before or played many strategy games before.

It also now removes the obtuse requirements in the original games to unlock new COs, as there you had to beat certain missions in certain orders and using specific COs. Whereas now just beating all the missions for each campaign will unlock all COs for purchase in Hachi’s shop with the currency you earn for completing missions.

Cutscenes.

New to the remake are select cutscenes that play when starting the game and then for each campaign’s ending with these being made by WayForward really capture the spirit and energy of the cast.

As the new voice cast sound great in these cutscenes and the small amount of lines they say in battle and the dialogue boxes, with my favourites being Andy’s VA Veronica Taylor who all Anime fans will recognise as the voice as Ash Ketchum from Pokémon as she sounds perfect in the role and the other being Sturm’s VA Craig Lee Thomas as Harvey from Octopath Traveler 2. 

I wish there were more of these since they all look great and are much better than just having a text crawl to convey the same information in a more entertaining means.

Music.

All the music has been remixed for this since the Gameboy Advance didn’t have the best speakers and soundboard, but now they all sound like they are made with actual instruments instead of the old chiptune.

All of the music now has more variations with the base theme for each CO but for when the player is in the menus, in combat or when their unique CO power is used. This adds great variety so the player isn’t hearing the same version of each song all the time.

Multiplayer.

For the first time for these games players can battle their friends locally or online without being forced to have a Link Cable like back when these games first released.

Players also have multiple ways to play multiplayer with players able to share a Switch console or use multiple Switch consoles so each play has their own. This second option I would recommend when playing with Fog of War maps to stop other players cheating.

Now you can play with your friends at any time which is good since matches can go on for hours at a time, so now you don’t have to worry about battery levels since you can have the Switch docked and charging and still playing.

The local experience is also smooth and not producing much lag in comparison to the online which can hit the player with lag at times. 

Con.

Graphics.

The only major downside I had with this remake is the move to the Unity engine and the use of poor looking 3D models that lack the detailing of the original 2D pixel art.

The game would of been even better if they stuck to the 2D pixel art aesthetic or collaborated with Square Enix & Acquire who created Octopath Traveler and the HD 2D engine. As that would of greatly helped the art style for the units instead of them looking like they are made of cheap shiny plastic.

Performance.

While the game aims for 30fps during the map screen sections during gameplay I found that when I have a lot of units on screen that if I tried to scroll the map around the battlefield that I would encounter framerate drops.

This is more substantial in direct combat screens where the game cuts away to these side on mini battles and unlocks the framerate to ideally 60fps but frequently bounces between 50ish down to just over 30fps in my experience leading to combat appearing to have slowdown at random moments as the Switch struggles to render it. 

These framerate drops don’t detract that much from the experience since the game is turn based the player doesn’t need to have high framerate to enjoy the gameplay as the game isn’t a fighting game or 1^st person shooter where reflexes are very important.

Lack of voice acting.

Since all the characters have new voice actors it’s a real shame that there isn’t more voice acting in the game as most of the dialogue is just in text boxes without being voiced.

So most of the new voice actors go to waste as even when they have voiced lines it is normally only the opening line in the text box as all the rest is silent and there aren’t enough cutscenes to show off the new voice cast.

Difficulty fluctuation.

The difficulty in the remake seems very random at times where the enemy A.I is actually easier on the higher levels (Classic and above) compared to the new Casual difficulty level.

As the enemy is more aggressive and builds more units where this should be the opposite of how the enemy A.I works, as doing this can be off-putting for new players who didn’t play the original as they would see that the game is too difficult to play.

Turn rewind feels redundant.

While this feature is a good idea in theory it turns out to be pretty redundant since you never really need to rewind your turn until you see how the enemy reacts to your turn.

So if they wanted this option to help newcomers then I would suggest letting it rewind to your previous turn on that just the current one, as this would help newcomers learn better positioning and ranges.

Conclusion.

A fantastic remake that keeps the core gameplay and themes of the original games while remaking them and making them more accessible for a modern audience.

If you are a fan of the original two games then these are an essential pickup and serve as a great remake for a great price for the amount of content given to the player with all features present at launch.

Score: 9.0

Redfall

(available for XBox Series X and S, and PC. Xbox Series X version used for this review)

Redfall is a first-person co-op shooter developed by Arkane, developers of games like Prey, Dishonoured, and Death Loop. This game was specifically developed by the Austin, Texas division responsible for Prey.

Redfall is a project that has become an Xbox first-party title after Microsoft’s acquisition of ZeniMax, the parent company of Bethesda. Ever since E3 2021, the game has been quite heavily marketed by Xbox during their showcases. This also marks a turning point as this is the first £70 game on Xbox’s first party, though it is also available as part of your Game Pass subscription.

Redfall seemed like it had some good buzz around it, despite early trailers inviting some comparison to the Left 4 Dead games, Arkane were very persistent that the game was more similar to Far Cry.

Despite some good showings leading up to the release, the game had received some bad press. For starters, the game was revealed that it would be always online, though the team planned to have this at launch, they were planning to take it out later down the line. It was then also revealed that the game has host-only progression meaning that if you play with your friends, you wouldn’t keep any progress like weapons and power-ups during those sessions. You would have to do those story missions over again on your own save file. The game would also be launching with no Performance Mode, only Quality Mode, meaning that while the game does give out 4K resolution, it’s locked on Xbox at 30 frames per second.

Personally, I thought that all of these were weak choices but it became clear that the game wouldn’t be delayed any further since Microsoft made a promise that one of the three games that were delayed in 2021 would be released in 2022. Since Starfield currently has a release date of September 26th, Redfall had to come out. But if the gameplay was there, I think that you could have gotten around these issues.

Full disclosure, this review should be taken with a pinch of salt. I have multiple hours within the game, but there are major sections in this game that I haven’t tried out, and one of them is co-op. I love a good co-op experience, the problem is that I couldn’t get anyone to play this game with me! Anyone who I wanted to play with had to be on my friends list and I couldn’t convince anyone! In fact, one of my colleagues downloaded this game on release and gave up on the first day. I heard from several people that have played it in co-op that the game does improve in multiplayer, but I haven’t personally experienced it. Based on my single-player and other accounts online, this game must be so easy in co-op! There’s no real challenge when you’re playing the game in single-player even with the difficulty spikes.

As I mentioned before, this is a co-op first-person shooter, but the best way to describe it is it’s more of a loot shooter. The team might be aiming for FarCry, but I would compare it to Borderlands. Unlike Borderlands, however, the gameplay loop is really dull. It’s set in the fictional New England town of Redfall which has been recently invaded by vampires and cut off from the rest of America, leading a team of 4 vigilantes with powers to take down the vampires. That’s it, that’s all the story you need, there’s really not much more to it.

PROS

• Not Really Anything

I’m really struggling here. I tried for an hour in the process of coming up with notes for this review to put anything down in this section but it’s not happening. I suppose I can say that the shooting mechanics are fine and the game functions for the most part. But on the whole, that’s all I’ve really got. There’s not much I can put in here.

MIXED

• Performance

I mentioned that the game functions fine at 30FPS, but this game is begging for 60FPS. Again, 30FPS is fine and it functions well enough and the framerate doesn’t dip too much. But man, it does feel off that the game has launched in this state without that better performance. That’s just on consoles. For the record- the Series S version doesn’t have a 4K resolution, it plays at 1440p with 30FPS.

The PC version does have a higher framerate, but it comes with its own issues, mainly that it has severe framerate drops. This is mainly because it comes with something that will enrage PC players everywhere: Denuvo. Denuvo is an Austrian tech company that has developed a digital rights media program with the same name. A lot of PC games, particularly ones on Steam, get it as an anti-piracy tool when a game launches. It usually gets removed later down the line when sales slow down. Many games with it have consistent framerate issues at launch. Denuvo has denied that their program is causing framerate issues on these games, but in my personal opinion, when there are so many examples of it including this game and the only common denominator is that program, those denials are getting harder to believe. Redfall on PC is no exception.

I spoke to my colleague Elliot, who gave the game up very quickly, and he said that he was experiencing a very poor framerate.

CONS

• Single-player Experience

This game is really, really dull in single-player. I tried, I really, really tried to get into this game. But there are a lot of dull fetch-quests against a very uninteresting world map, and occasionally you’ll do a side-mission to create more fast-travel points as well as unlock some more content. The only thing that you’re getting is a few extra missions which get very repetitive, you create these safe houses by killing a boss vampire. That’s assuming that you are going to fight a vampire because large portions of the game have you fighting Cultists, who look and act like they’re out of the Last of Us.

The vampires themselves have a cool design, but unless they’re in packs, they’re not too threatening. Once I got a stake gun they went down really quickly.

The game gives various characters powers, I completely forgot they were a thing. The character I chose for most of my playthrough gave me a Raven which would locate enemies on the map, which never worked when I tried it so I stopped using it. In fact, I fired it directly where I knew there were enemies and still no luck. The cloaking method that makes you invisible is game-breaking! I could literally walk around the back of the vampires and get an easy headshot and extend the timer.

• Dumb AI

I thought that the AI in Deathloop was bad, but I’m begging to go back to that after playing this. There were several moments where I screwed up being stealthy and I wasn’t punished for it. These enemies are so dumb that you can easily take advantage of them to get a ton of kills. Not helped by the fact that the game is full of bugs. I got to a state where a couple of vampires just stayed in place and I was able to shoot them all without trouble. What’s more, they don’t even fire their guns or attack you intelligently. Unless you enrage a bunch of them at once, you’re not in danger of dying.

• Story

Two points to this one: it’s non-existent in the sense that it doesn’t provide much lore or motivation, and the game has pretty much no cutscenes. The game is told through a lot of still images which look like a bunch of concept art spliced together- it’s something that you would show to people to illustrate how the game will look later on.

• Graphics

I’ll say one good thing, and that is that the vampire designs are good. But nothing about this game feels like it should be of this current generation of consoles. It also makes me wonder why this game was such a large download size- where are all of those gigabytes going?

What’s more, the game does suffer with a lot of resolution issues and the bugs showed up in a lot of places. I noticed a hilarious one in a YouTube video from DigitalFoundry where water was falling out of a sink so it went through the sink instead of out of it.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Redfall is a boring looter shooter and Xbox needs to do better. They had a great start to the year with Hi-fi Rush, but this has really put their future in disarray. Whatever mock reviewers they were hiring need to be fired because they clearly don’t have Xbox’s best interests at heart. The guns all feel the same, the enemies are bugged out, and it’s currently in a state on the console where it can’t reach a decent framerate and has major issues on PC as well. It’s just boring!

It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever played, it functions just fine, but as a whole, I really got bored of this one really quickly and I’m not interested in any future content updates that Arkane have planned. If this has come about because Microsoft has management issues within their studios, something needs to change immediately.

FINAL SCORE: 5.1/10

Tchia

(available for PlayStation 4 & 5, and PC. PlayStation 5 version used for this review)

Tchia has been a game showing up in PlayStation showcases for quite some time, it has been shown off with various trailers and developer diaries. The team at PlayStation has teamed up with indie studio Awaceb to get this game to be exclusive. Now it’s finally out, with PlayStation going as far as to place this game on the PlayStation Plus service for Extra and Premium subscribers, which is how I got it.

Tchia is an open-world adventure game with minimal combat. The more blunt way to describe it is a Zelda clone with Super Mario Odyssey thrown into the mix. Nonetheless, I was tempted to try it out. For the most part, the open world is genuinely very interesting! The team itself originates from French Caledonia, a small island between Australia and New Zealand, but the world itself is fictional, and the team stresses both aspects, the game even opens with a text crawl explaining this.

The storyline revolves around a small girl, Tchia, trying to rescue her father after he is kidnapped by someone using magic powers to control both of the islands that you can explore. There are smaller islands in the game, the two larger islands are the only ones part of this open world. The game revolves around doing various missions for people to gain certain things that progress the story. For example, early on you have to convince the heads of two villages to give you items as tribute. The tasks mainly include getting used to traversing this world, you’ll be looking for various items like Stamina Fruit, making traditional masks to unlock challenge temples which give you fruit to extend the time of the possession mechanic (which is where the Mario Odyssey elements come in which I’ll go into later), gaining trinkets and pearls which act as currency, picking up various items for customisation for Tchia and her boat, and there’s also a few other challenges around the island like diving and races.

It’s genuinely a very well-thought-out world and there’s plenty to do. Though if you like a good map marker, you might have a few troubles with this game since the map never actually states where you are. The team wanted you to use the map to recognise landmarks and give a sense of adventure- which sounds like a cop-out, but you will very rarely get lost. If you can read a compass, you’ll get used to this very quickly.

The game clearly takes on influences, like Legend of Zelda Windwaker and Breath of the Wild as well as Super Mario Odyssey and I felt all three of those influences very strongly throughout the game.

The delays that this game faced probably didn’t help it to stand out, especially considering that this is coming out just two months before Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

PROS

• Soundtrack

The soundtrack in this game is phenomenal, probably one of the best I’ve heard all year so far. You get several musical sequences in the game, which on the PlayStation version involves you pressing a direction with the analogue stick and A to hit a chord. You use a couple of different instruments, but mostly it’s the ukulele. You don’t have to worry about these sequences though since if you don’t want to take part in the game you can select Autoplay, and even if you do screw up, the game doesn’t punish you.

The game also mixes in other songs at critical moments, which emphasised the change in the storyline and the progression of character arcs. It’s a really good use of how to use a soundtrack to tell a story.

• World Design

The open world looks really well designed in this game, it’s not like Breath of the Wild where there’s something to do in every corner, but there are a lot of collectables and it’s very clear that a ton of care was taken to recreate the aesthetic of French Caledonia. There are a lot of different biomes that are relevant to that island and the team does a great job of making sure that the culture is front and centre, to such an extent that there is no English language dub to the game, so it comes with subtitles. Most of the game has voiceovers from residents of the island that inspired the game, so all of the characters speak in either French or Drehu.

While I felt like the story itself was a bit of a mixed bag since it wasn’t too brilliant but wasn’t that bad either, the attention to detail is good, which is why I’m not putting the story in the Mixed section, since it didn’t inspire much feeling for me. Most of my time enjoying the game was down to the exploration.

MIXED

• Graphics

For a small studio, this game looks fine, particularly the water effects look great. With Windwaker playing a part in the influences of this game, it plays brilliantly when you sail from one area to another, so it’s good that the game looks great in those moments. I will also say that the island and character designs look good as well with the restrictions in place. It’s clear that the team was going with the sort of claymation effect- not literally, but you can certainly see that a lot of stop-motion animation features have given some inspiration to the designers.

However, you can feel that some cuts have been made due to the limited budget. Tchia doesn’t look amazing even with the graphical power of the PlayStation 5. I don’t believe that it’s because a PS4 version was in the works before they had to make it for both consoles, there are plenty of games that had to be made for both and look great! Tchia doesn’t quite look amazing in several departments. It does have a rather unique art style that I quite like, just not enough to praise the game for it.

• Traversal

You will be doing a lot of sailing but after a while, the islands are going to involve you doing a lot of slow travel on foot. The game gives you a hand glider, almost exactly like Breath of the Wild, but without much stamina fruit, it’s not an ideal way of getting around.

After a while, traversal feels a lot slower than I would like, especially because the world isn’t that big, so on-foot travel grates quite a bit.

What’s more, after a while, the movement speeds feel too slow so as a result, it will make travelling from certain parts a bit more tedious than you would like. I also don’t think that it would help that there are a lot of collectables so there’s a lot to do if you want to get 100%, so you’re going to need to do a lot of mini-stops along the way. Unlike other open-world games, there isn’t a big difference between most environments. There is a city and also a very strange island you unlock, but as a whole, it’s a lot of tropical jungles and swamp land and beaches.

• Combat

You won’t be doing a lot of combat, you’ll only be fighting these fabric enemies that are weak to fire, but these things provide so little threat that you won’t struggle against them. You are providing a slingshot, but it’s mostly useless- I only used it when it was required. You’ll mostly be throwing things like gasoline tanks or possessing lanterns that litter the environment to throw back at them. There are only a few environments that have a large number of enemies which makes the game kind of turn into Assassin’s Creed, but you can get away from them rather easily, I only got captured like three times.

The game is remarkably not difficult in terms of the combat, which suits the tranquil vibe of the game, but it does often feel very repetitive especially when you get stuck in some of the larger combat areas.

• Possession Mechanic

This is the part that is incredibly similar to Super Mario Odyssey. You’ll be possessing several animals, rocks, and objects around the island. Some come with extra mechanics.

The gameplay is fine, and none of them are difficult to control. The issue comes from the fact that there are barely any of them around! There were so many times were I wanted to skip an island by possessing a bird but there weren’t any around! The most issues I had were when I wanted to find some pearls and wanted to possess a fish, whale, or shark to get closer without losing my breath.

It also has a time limit, something which you can increase by doing the various challenge dungeons that I mentioned. There aren’t too many of them, and you don’t have to do them, but I would recommend it since the reward for it is incredibly beneficial.

I also find myself unpossessing almost as soon as I’d started because I’d get to the location that I was aiming for too quickly. Obviously, there are some exceptions like some of the snakes and insects don’t provide much benefit in travel, you’re only using them to complete your creature diary.

While this mechanic doesn’t have much wrong with it, it was mostly just disappointing how uninclined I felt to use it outside of combat.

CONS

• Limited Fast Travel

This is my biggest problem with the game. It’s not that there’s no fast travel, it does have some but it’s very limited. The limit comes from the various docks that you have for putting your boat in. You can travel between all of the various docks over the two largest islands- but the problem is that there are only 10 docks in the game, and there are large parts of each island that the fast travel won’t take you to. There are various campfires that you can access as autosave areas which also act as a way to eat food to replenish your possession meter and sleep to change the time of day if you don’t feel like playing the chords on your ukulele to do it. I assumed that they would have fast travel considering that there’s plenty of them across the island- but they aren’t! The lack of docks on two of the islands means that there is no fast travel to them either.

I understand why this was done, the developers made it clear that they intended to make this game feel like a childhood adventure, but the lack of fast travel made it feel like a bit more of a chore than I would have liked. There were so many moments where I wished I could have fast-travelled to a campfire.

• Short Run Time

For an open-world game, Tchia is remarkably shorter than I would have hoped. Because of the plot points going so quickly, I found that I had won the game very quickly even after doing a lot of extra missions. I finished the game in about 10 hours, but if you just want to go through the main story you can finish it in about 7 hours. If you want to be a completionist about it, you can beat the game really quickly. It’s not as if this game is full price so it’s not as if you’re getting ripped off, and if you have a PlayStation Plus subscription the price is even more reduced, but I felt like the game needed a little bit longer.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Tchia is a good game on the whole, but it’s also one that I felt was more unremarkable than I would have liked. The lack of fast travel and the unintuitive combat did bother me, but I’m not going to mark the game down for other games because we really should potentially be emulating our heroes to get some good ideas of our own. This feels like a unique game in many regards in terms of how it brought the team’s culture to the forefront. It’s very clearly a passion project brought to life, but I feel like I have to echo something from a conversation between me and my friends: it’s very minimalist in places where it shouldn’t be. That being said, I’ll be very interested to see what the team does next. They had some good ideas but they needed to work on them a little bit more. The possession mechanic, for example, doesn’t feel as intuitive as Mario Odyssey. The time limit makes it feel less enjoyable to use.

If you have a PlayStation Premium subscription, I would say it’s worth your time. But as a whole, I would describe this game as pretty okay but I’m not sure I’ll go back to it anytime soon- especially with Tears of a Kingdom coming out in a month’s time.

FINAL SCORE: 7.7/10

Octopath Traveler 2

(available for PlayStation 4 & 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC with SteamDeck compatibility. Nintendo Switch version used for this review)

Octopath Traveler 2 is the latest Square Enix game from Team Asano, who has been knocking it out of the park recently. They had excellent entries with games like Triangle Strategy and the Live a Live remake, both of which I reviewed last year, with the latter of which coming to Playstation and PC shortly after this review comes out (unless you’re reading this after April 2023 in which case it’s already out, so go out and buy it! It’s one of the best RPGs released in recent memory).

Team Asano’s first entry with the HD2D engine was the first Octopath Traveler, a project that was worked on with Nintendo Switch in mind to recapture classic Super Nintendo-era RPGs like the old Final Fantasy games, Chrono Trigger, and Secret of Mana. They did a good job with the battle system that they had in place which made it stand out from the rest. It felt like a classic RPG brought to the modern age, not just visually but mechanically. I also felt that Octopath Traveler had a lot of issues that should have been fixed- don’t get me wrong, I really liked it, but it was incredibly grind-heavy, even by RPG standards. It’s also a game that really benefits from a guide for learning enemy weaknesses.

Octopath Traveler 2, however, was announced in a September Nintendo Direct, with the promise that it would be the original game expanded. To cut a long story short, it has achieved that.

Octopath Traveler 2 is a very good game, but you’ll be noticing that this game came out in February and I’m getting this review out in April. That is because this is a LONG game! You’re looking at a bare minimum of 70 hours if you’re good. My playtime was 100 hours by the time of the final boss. I only did a few side quests for the purposes of the review! The game is full of content. I think that this is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, I think that they managed the content well, but on the other hand, I think that this game is a massive time sink. If you’re buying it as a way to tide yourself over until Tears of the Kingdom comes out, you won’t finish it before then.

As for my thoughts, well, I would say it has improved on the first in pretty much every way, to such an extent that I’m not sure I will be able to go back to the original. The most confusing aspect of the game is the fact that this game is getting a PlayStation version despite the fact the first one didn’t have a version, and the sequel doesn’t have an Xbox version despite the fact that original did appear on that one!

Square Enix’s questionable marketing aside, it’s clear that they see a future in the HD2D engine with this franchise. I wouldn’t put it past them to reveal a new game with this engine in the next Nintendo Direct outside of the upcoming Dragon Quest 3 remake which I keep forgetting is a thing.

PROS

• Storylines

Like the original game, you’ll be choosing one of 8 characters to be your main character. You’ll start off by performing their first chapter, or if you chose Osvald as your main character you get the first two chapters since his first two chapters are so interconnected. Don’t worry if you feel like his story is sped along, since he gets an extra chapter compared to the other characters to make up for it.

The eight choices this time are:

• The Warrior Hikari
• The Dancer Agnea
• The Merchant Partitio
• The Cleric Temenos
• The Scholar Osvald
• The Thief Throné
• The Hunter Ochette
• The Apothecary Castti

Like before, they each come with their own individual storylines, Hikari is trying to regain control of his home nation following a coup from his brother, Ochette is searching the world for mythical monsters to defend her home island, and Osvald trying to get revenge from a tragedy involving his tragedy. The great thing about this game is that they all have much better story structures. The problem with the first game was that there wasn’t an ongoing storyline for each of the characters, they were a lot more episodic in nature. Octopath 2 has much better storylines, they feel a lot more satisfying no matter who you pick as your character. You want to be careful about choosing your main character, because, unlike the last game, they will be stuck as your main party character until you finish their story.

Outside of the bantering dialogue, the characters don’t really interact in each of their stories, they’re rather solitary. Given the fact that they have dialogue amongst each other in battle, they feel more like a party in this game compared to the last.

I picked Hikari as my starting character, and if you want brute force, then he’s your best bet. But if you want a good healer in your party then I would recommend Castti or Temenos. While Hikari can gain a bunch of new abilities, Ochette also performs that well by capturing beats to use throughout the battle. Your main character will inevitably be overpowered, so pick one that suits your playstyle. Hikari was incredibly overpowered by the time I got to the final boss.

If you’re worried about the team make up, don’t worry since you have access to the team guild early on in the game. This gives you the ability to add a secondary job to each character. In my case, I made Hikari a warrior cleric, so I guaranteed that there was someone who could perform a full party heal at all times. I probably made my biggest mistake of the playthrough by making Osvald a scholar dancer- his special abilities didn’t blend very well in that department, but it was worth it to give him a dagger which was sorely needed a lot of times.

Despite the fact that the characters don’t really interact with each other, they make up for it by having crossed-path storylines. This involves the characters having their own individual story, you’ll gain access to a lot of them early on but you won’t be able to finish these storylines until you’ve finished each character’s final chapter. Think of them as nice epilogues to each of the stories.

Of course, the game comes together with a final story towards the end. I won’t dare spoil it, but I think it did a better job tying all of the stories together than the first game did.

• Battle System

The battle system is a bit more interesting this time, it’s virtually the same as before, you’re trying to target certain weaknesses and you can only learn so many through trial and error. I’d actually recommend trying to have a scholar in your party for most of the time, be it Osvald or whoever you give that secondary job to. Word of advice, when Osvald isn’t in the party, have your second scholar in the party as well. Having the ability of Analyse to reveal one weakness at a time doesn’t cost much SP (this game’s equivalent of what would normally be called NP) and it revealing a weakness is always a good thing to do ahead of time.

As before, there is also BP or Battle Points. They build up over time and you can cash them in to gain extra attacks, reaching a maximum charge of 4. This either revolves around you attacking multiple times with the same weapon, so you can cash in for four sword attacks or you can make an ability even stronger.

It’s not very different from the previous game, you’re trying to knock down enemies’ weaknesses so you break them and they, therefore, skip a turn and receive more damage from attacks. The big difference to this battle system this time is the special abilities that have been added, each character comes with a different one. Hikari gets special attacks, Temenos can attack and break enemy shield points each turn, Agnea can target multiple enemies, and you get the gist. They build up by either breaking enemies over time or by taking damage. You can also power them by using the new item the Empowering Lychee.

Everything about this game feels like it takes the good battle system from the last game and refines it. There are a few issues I have with specific battles, but as a whole, I think this is the best turn-based battle system that we’ve seen in a game in years. It’s still fantastic and I think that it has improved greatly in this game.

I would also recommend checking out some of the optional classes that you can get, like the Inventor and the Master of Arms. The Inventor in particular is a great one to get, though you won’t be able to power it up through job points which you earn with experience points in battles which assign you the extra abilities.

• HD2D

I’ve gushed enough about how good this engine looks in my reviews of Triangle Strategy and I also talked about it in the Live A Live review, so I won’t go on too much about it- but Octopath Traveler 2 is a visually excellent game. If you liked the look of those other games this one will give you more of that. If I was to comment about a significant improvement, it would be the character designs., They are a lot more distinctive and there’s a better use of colours on display for these designs.

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• Side Quests

The side quests aren’t terrible, but they have a couple of issues. The major one is that they’re all fetch quests, so you won’t gain experience points as a reward. You do get money, though, so I would recommend doing them early on. Since those rewards come in quite handy, you will be able to purchase some of the more expensive items early on.

The other issue though is that they’re incredibly cryptic and you don’t gain a map marker to show you what you’re supposed to be doing. Even in the specialist ones for Partitio. Since he’s a merchant, he gains some commerce-based side quests, which you should do as early as possible since it benefits you in a later chapter. If you forget to do it, the game warns you when it will be beneficial to have those quests completed. There’s no penalty for not having them done, and you can go back to them.

In short, the side quests are good but I wish they were a bit clearer. I had to find a guide to figure out what was required of me.

CONS

• Boss fight Length

One thing I didn’t like about the first game that has not been improved in this game and that is the boss fights. Some of them are incredibly gimmicky. I don’t want to give away many spoilers but some of them were so frustrating. I especially noticed that some of the bosses in Throné’s chapters were especially annoying.

That being said, the biggest offender was the final boss of Agnea’s storyline. Word of advice for that boss fight: Agnea’s secondary job needs to be an Apothecary, make sure she knows to Rehabilitate by the end of her fourth chapter. If she knows that it will make the second phase of that boss fight way less of a hassle. Even then though, it was so gimmicky that I was looking at movie-length playthroughs. I’ll admit that some of my characters were slightly under-levelled, but even so, this fight shouldn’t have taken that long. I timed it with a few of my colleagues during one of my playthroughs and it went on for an hour and thirty-five minutes– and that wasn’t a successful one!

In short, there are no short boss fights in this game, and I think that that’s more annoying than it is enjoyable. At some point, you’re not going to get away with having some of the characters be at the recommended level for that story, which leads to my next point:

• Grinding Heavy

It’s not as bad as the first game, but they haven’t fixed one of my major issues with it and that was the heavy grind aspect. At certain points, I was noticing it way less and that was when I got a better system in place for levelling up characters. However, this game still has large portions of grinding. It doesn’t help that side quests don’t give out experience points as rewards. My advice is to walk everywhere without fast travel for a while, you’re inevitably going to end up against under-levelled enemies. Find areas which are good for grinding, it’s certainly a lot quicker if you had a good system in place. I had an apothecary and a scholar in my party at all times and then alternated characters when they over-levelled each other. One scholar would swap out when they got one level above the other one, same with the apothecaries, etc.

This obviously might be affected if you wanted to use this system if you chose Castti or Osvald as your main characters. The best advice that I can give is to find a way to level up the characters that work for you. When you’re getting into those final chapters (which is usually chapter 4 or 5 depending on the character) you are going to have to make sure that all of your characters are at the recommended level.

Despite the fact that it does give branching pathways for each other chapters, you’ll have to take both of them at some point anyway, so you may as well take the lower-level one first.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Octopath Traveller 2 is a really good RPG, but the boss fights kind of dragged it down for me. It’s a really good RPG, don’t get me wrong, I think it’s one of Square Enix’s best, and it can easily stand up against Triangle Strategy and Live a Live, even up against NEO: The World Ends With You. However, I do have to say that this is a grind-heavy game and some of these boss fights are going to infuriate you. If you’re having trouble, there is no shame in looking up a guide.

Visually, it’s stunning, the soundtrack is amazing and I want Apple Music to give me access to it. I really like the new Day and Night system which gives each character an extra on-map ability. The battle system is as good as ever and the storylines are significantly improved, they actually got me to really care about these characters.

This is a top-level RPG, though if you care about performance, you shroud only be getting the Switch version if it’s the only console you have since the PlayStation and PC versions have much better framerates. As a whole, I really liked it on Switch since the franchise lends itself to Nintendo well.

If you liked the first one, this one is an improvement on it. If you had issues with the first, it doesn’t fix all of them but it does fix a good few.

Final Score: 9.0/10

Bayonetta Origins

(available on Nintendo Switch only)

Bayonetta Origins is a brand new spin-off developed by Platinum Games with the subtitle ‘Cereza and the Lost Demon’. It attempts to tell a short origin story for Bayonetta when she was a child, tying back in briefly to some of the events of other Bayonetta games. We got a small hint of this in Bayonetta 3, at one point during the game you could buy the fairy tale book from Ronan’s shop, and during the time I was playing it, you would have to get 3 keys to unlock the preview to this game. At the time we didn’t know whether it would be a full game or just DLC. If you play Bayonetta 3 now, it has been patched so that you don’t have to get the keys to unlock the book, you just have to get the book itself.

At the game awards, it was revealed that Bayonetta Origins would be a full game that would release in March.

The best way to describe Bayonetta Origins is as a dungeon crawler with light environmental puzzles. The game has you controlling Cereza most of the time, though you will occasionally have to bring out Cheshire to solve certain puzzles. The map is interconnected, but it won’t be until later chapters that you’ll be going back and forth to gain extra items, rather like a traditional Bayonetta game, there are also trials along the way to get extra rewards which are often used to power up Cereza or Cheshire – the big difference is that Cheshire (the demon first introduced in Bayonetta 3)  will be doing all of the combat. Because Cereza is a witch in training she doesn’t have too many combat abilities at this point, but she does have the ability to affect the environment and she can pin enemies in forms which makes combat a bit easier for Cheshire.

That being said, you don’t have to explore the environment too much if you don’t want to; if you’re interested in the story you can just go from start to finish on a more linear path, though the game is still pretty short either way, it comes at around 10-12 hours.

Now I will stress that Cereza and the Lost Demon is pretty ambitious and for the most part it does succeed in its ambition, though it’s not to say that the game is without fault, you won’t start to notice those faults until you’re quite deep into the game.

PROS

• Aesthetics

Graphically, Bayonetta Origins is not going too far in terms of power with the Switch, but it does look amazing. The game goes for a storybook aesthetic and takes a lot of inspiration from story tales – not that you have to do much ever to reimagine that this is part of the Bayonetta universe, but they do a good job transferring the more abstract art style to the older games. For example, Cereza translates into different art styles, and her design mostly resembles her Bayonetta 3 design. The only other character that needed to have the design changed was Jeanne, who gets a small cameo in the game (and in retrospect, this kind of messes with the Bayonetta timeline, but considering how many retcons have been implemented, this is no surprise).

The world itself has a real otherworldly fairy tale aspect to it, which is unsurprising considering pretty much all of the enemies in the games are fairies since the game’s primary plot point is that Cereza wanders into the fairy forest to gain the power to save her mother. The fairy types are kind of interesting, they’re not as distinctive as the angels, demons, or homunculi from the other Bayonetta games but they do have some interesting aspects to them. Mainly in the fact that they do come with various different equipment like shields, sword type, or even underground drills- there is a good enemy variety here.

It also looks stunning, even in handheld mode. If you have a Switch OLED, this game will look amazing on that.

• Gameplay and Controls

I’m not in the camp of people who have said they don’t enjoy the gameplay of Bayonetta Origins. Puzzle solving isn’t really my favourite genre, but I don’t mind it if the game is incredibly focused on it.

Combat, as I mentioned before, is mainly focused around Cheshire. You bring him out in his toy form (which is because Bayonetta screwed up a demon-summoning spell and puts him into her stuffed plushie), but he can take full demon form to perform attacks. You do this by pressing the R trigger to bring him out and using the ZR button to perform a basic attack. There are a few combos that you can do by holding down the ZR button but most of the combat is done using the right side of the controls, the left side is what controls Cereza. You’ll use the ZL trigger to trap the enemies in forms. There isn’t too much strategy involved until you break the elemental cores, which is the main driving point in the storyline. They imbued Cheshire with several different elements which are used for certain puzzles and combat- for example, several enemies can only be defeated when Cheshire is imbued with certain elements or using a certain element which will give you an advantage in battle. For example, shield enemies come with a hook that can be attacked when Cheshire gets the wood element. It’s the first element that you will get, and therefore the easiest to learn.

The way that I’m describing this feels very similar to an indie game I reviewed a few months ago called Blanc, and for that, I said that the controls were clearly designed with co-op in mind and made the single player play experience miserable. This game takes that control scheme and makes it much better, For one thing, the environments are designed to make both characters move at a pace where you can control them simultaneously. Unlike Blanc, where the environments are slightly more open, these are a little more boxed in. The controls have been more thought out for a single player here.

There is no co-op in this game, which is quite good for this purpose, so having a good control scheme works quite well. There were only a few times where I screwed up because I got the controls wrong, I did struggle occasionally pressing the right button to choose which elemental core I wanted, but as a whole, the controls work quite well.

The combat itself is quite enjoyable, I would say don’t go into this game thinking you’ll be getting the typical Bayonetta-style combat- this is much more simplified, which is something that I could say about the whole game in general…

• Story

I actually like the story of this game! It centres around Cereza seeing a boy in her dreams tell her that she can have the power to save her mother if she travels through the deep forest to get a new power, which she will obtain by following a white wolf, which directs her and her new demon Cheshire to four elemental cores. Meanwhile, she is being urged to travel back b her strict teacher Morgana.

The one thing that I like about the game is the excellent story structure. You also don’t indeed to know too much about the Bayonetta games to know what the significance of some of these moments is, and it’s kind of separate in a lot of regards to the other games. Cheshire will be very recognizable to people who have played Bayonetta 3, but as an origin story, it does tell us a lot about Cereza and how she will become Bayonetta. The storybook aesthetic works well in giving a kind of Grimm’s Fairy Tales look to it.

I won’t tell you much about the story since there’s a lot you should discover for yourself, especially considering that the trailers have been rather cryptic about the general storyline. But I will say one thing, if you feel like the story is slowing down, it gets really good towards the end.

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• Skill Tree

At some of the various save points, you gain a skill tree – one for Cereza and one for Cheshire. The skill tree is fine but because combat isn’t very challenging or as in-depth as other Bayonetta games, I didn’t see the point to put much effort into this. It’s fine overall, but it does what a lot of other skill trees do which artificially extends the game’s run time. Especially considering that most of the skills were locked behind late-game items which require extra exploration. If you are just going from start to finish with the story, that skill tree is going to stop being relevant or even useable to you very quickly.

The trials that are used to gain or even find a lot of these items are plentiful. You obviously get a few of them by doing the main story, but the optional ones don’t provide that much of a challenge and aren’t exactly frequent.

CONS

• Repetitive nature

I will say that this game doesn’t really change up the gameplay too much from beginning to end. There are obviously new challenges but after a while, you’ll start to notice a bunch of puzzles repeat themselves – especially in times when Cereza and Cheshire have to be separated because areas are blocked by rosemary (which demons hate) or there will be a challenge that involves getting it from one area to another using an elemental core that you’ve already been using. You start to feel the grind of the game this way after a while.

While the storyline picked up after a while which motivated me to keep playing, gameplay-wise it started to drag. If you’re not captivated by the gameplay, you won’t want to revisit some areas, which you will need to do to get some of the extras- it has some very Metroidvania-like qualities.

On top of that, it does feel like Bayonetta Origins is kind of a bit too simplistic for its core audience. The thing that really drove people to Bayonetta was the flashy combos of the combat, and this feels like it clashes with the audience for this game. The team at Platinum have said that they want to expand upon this idea, and I think that if they do then it will be really interesting, but I’m also looking at this game and wondering how much this can be expanded and if anyone is going to play this and be driven to play the original Bayonetta trilogy.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon is a very ambitious game and I really enjoyed my time with it, but the repetitiveness of the combat, puzzles, and skill tree held back my enjoyment somewhat. The storyline is excellent and the voice actors have done a great job with their performances.

I think that this is a really good game, particularly if you like dungeon crawlers and puzzle-solving. If you’re coming into it for the combat of the Bayonetta games, you’re going to be short-changed because it isn’t here. But if you’re interested in the lore and story of Bayonetta, this is one you should check out.

I will say that Bayonetta Origin’s mileage really depends on the player, and some may not enjoy it as much as I did. I think that this will be a polarising game.

FINAL SCORE: 8.5/10