Topic: User Impressions/Reviews Thread

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My review of Banishers.

My TL;DR here is: Banishers is another title on my ever growing list of open or semi open world titles where I feel like if you shaved like 20 hours off of the running time and made it linear, it would be instantly a better game, even if you changed nothing else. Banishers makes this argument harder than ever too, as navigating its semi open world and completing its various world activities are by far the worst parts about this and bloat the package unnecessarily.

And if you wanna strap in cause we going long, here is my full review:

Set in the late 1600s/early 1700s a group of mostly British settlers have been trying to set up communities in a New England area called New Eden. However, a schoolteacher named Deborah ends up murdered in a sham of a witch trial and not long after, the land of New Eden becomes cursed. The locals may not want to see the connection, because they were all in on it in some shape or form. You are the Banishers who are called in to sort out this curse, however, events quickly alter what your ultimate goal ends up being. A Banisher, for the record, being a sort of private detective who investigates any case involving a haunting should the silver be on offer to do so, and is also expected to fight and defeat the ghost if it comes to that.

As such, much of the game will see you travelling around New Eden, going from settlement to settlement, discovering personal stories which involve a haunting of some kind (literal, and more abstract). You will investigate the people involved to try and find the truth, and in turn what the source of the haunting is. Increasingly a big part of these stories becomes finding out what role these people had in Deborah's death, which means that none of these can really be skipped, even though eventually you will wish you could.

This works fantastically for about a dozen hours. So good in fact, I was ready to call this my front runner for GOTY. However, after a while, a reality starts to become clear here that this game was never particularly well thought out. Your overarching story in Banishers is one long haunting case. Then all your side content is also just other haunting cases. Can we see the problem here? All the budget, all the spectacle, has gone into that main haunting case that makes up the main narrative thread - as it should be. But then it just means all the side content you are doing in turn is just a lesser version of what you are doing in the main quest, and as a result, it becomes increasingly harder to really care about completing these other than for the little nuggets of knowledge you gain about Deborah.

And like, don’t get it twisted, it is made by DontNod, and their unique talents are really on full display here. Side content here has better writing than many games offer in their core threads, and they do an absolutely incredible job in offering the player choices which don’t just feel like you are picking between an obviously good, evil or neutral option. And even when a choice may be obvious, the more you learn about Deborah and depending on the pact you made with your partner, sometimes it is hard to use impartial logic in these cases, and so easy to indulge in flashes of raw emotion.

I do love how much this game made me think and reflect. So much of the prejudice and cowardice that has rotten New Eden from the inside out, is sadly still so relevant today, despite it being hundreds of years later. Deborah functions much in the same way Rachel did in the Life is Strange games, and so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised how masterfully DontNod made me hate everyone involved in her murder, despite only brief interactions with her throughout the game. And I loved that even the most contrived haunting quest would have me making a decision which would have tangible cause and effect that I would have to deal with the repercussions of sometimes hours later.

I guess what I am trying to say in all this, is I just think it all a shame. I think Banishers has a great story to tell, and up until the ending - I got literally the worst ending, so I got basically no closure at all - it tells its story well. It is anchored by two incredible characters in Red mac Raith and Antea Duarte, and I would happily go on more adventures with them. But it is hard not to feel like the way in which this game is built, and structured, means it is just constantly diluting itself.

Honestly, this problem creeps into the encounter design as well. They, by the very design of their world, limit the kind of enemies you face. In general moment to moment encounters in the world you are going to be facing the same four or five enemy types (which in themselves are more like 2 or 3 enemy types with variants). There is a bit more variety in boss encounters, and the cinematic presentation for a lot of the build up to bosses is appreciated. However, even though there are not a lot of these, the bosses still somehow in reality are really just bigger variants of other enemies you fight in the game.

They are also never particularly interesting to actually fight, either, which is a problem. They often have very basic mechanics which are more nuisances than anything that offers any real challenge. Two of the boss encounters were also bugged for me, where they just seemed to get stuck somehow and wouldn’t progress, so I had to reload my save and do the boss encounter right from the start again, which kinda makes it hard to feel positive about these.

It wouldn’t be a review of mine if we didn’t talk about difficulty and this is also majorly problematic too. Set on normal, after the first few hours, the game becomes cartoonishly and mindlessly easy. I like a relatively frictionless experience, but even I just found this all rather boring. I put the game onto Hard for most of my playthrough, something I never usually do, but I wouldn’t say Hard is any more fun, either. Especially with the enemy slate you fight in the final third of the game, it is just wave after wave of tedious, spongey, enemies that can all kill you in like two hits with no warning. Just a miserable slog.

Honestly, if I am being honest... I hated this combat by the end. Every time you fast travel the world respawns all the enemies, and I just grew so tired of having to fast travel from one end of the map to the other, and every time knowing I had to beat the same four waves of identical spongey boring enemies over and over and over that kept respawning between me and my objective. I turned it down from Hard to Story mode in the last couple of hours because I just couldn’t bear it anymore and wanted to just be done with this at that point.

Difficulty is also somewhat shaped by Banishers’ gear game. Although don’t worry, it isn’t a looter. After about 25ish hours I had enough gear to make three builds, but it wasn’t really anything crazy. Just basically more damage if I focused on melee, more damage if I focused on range or more damage if I focused on the special move called Banish. There are survivability and utility items as well which don’t have as much of a defined build focus, but even on Hard, I almost feel like you don't need these. Especially as sacrificing damage when the enemies are this spongey is not the way.

There is also this mountain of stats in the right hand side of the menu, but I honestly couldn’t tell you if this was just for show. When I had 67 Strength versus 98 strength (which apparently affects my melee damage) I noticed absolutely no difference at all. If you want to just absolutely break the experience and ruin the combat for yourself even further, just fully spec into the rifle, as this thing is absurdly overtuned and poorly balanced, it felt like cheating.

Finally I guess let us talk about exploration / the fast travel system. If you remember in GOW 2018, while it gave the illusion of being an open world, it was more a collection of linear corridors where you had to solve puzzles to progress forwards, or progress far enough in the story to unlock abilities which would then open the way for you, often requiring a ton of backtracking. Banishers works identically to this, and even borrows heavily from a lot of the environments and puzzles from that game.

This was the thing that I thought sucked the most in GOW 2018, I thought it slaughtered the pacing of that game and if I was to make my own GOW 2018 riff game like this, that would be the first thing I’d cut. Instead, Banishers embraces this part of GOW, makes it a core part of the experience and does absolutely nothing to solve all the problems it creates. In fact, Banishers somehow makes this worse because of its fast travel system.

Basically, along your journey you will find fixed shelter points you can rest at, they work a little like Souls bonfires, as you can upgrade equipment here, mess around with your skill tree (although this can be done any time) and top up your potions. These also become your fast travel points on the map. However, even though you have now unlocked the fast travel point, this system can only be used directly, so from one shelter to another. You can’t just pull up your map and access the fast travel system from anywhere.

Much like with combat, it is mostly due to the sheer unnecessary length of this that this system goes from kind of annoying, to ripping your hair out and screaming into your empty apartment maddening. Much like GOW 2018, they don’t want to give the game away as to how small the map truly is, so rather than making you walk 50 metres in a straight line to the objective you need to go hundreds of metres in the wrong direction and solve an environmental puzzle or two -

Just a quick aside. ***** the environmental puzzles. May they all burn in hell. The most unintuitive, infuriating, collection of puzzles ever designed. The amount of my game time that must have been me just wasting 20 minutes at a time running around in a circle like a *****. Giving up. Going on YouTube and seeing a solution that just makes you throw your hands up in maddening frustration as to how they ever suspected anyone to figure that out to begin with.

• Anyway, you suffer all that misery to end up basically five metres ahead of where you started. And even though the puzzles may be cleared the next time you need to go through there to access a fast travel point for example, a direct path is never opened, so you still need to do that 400 metre loop in the wrong direction every time you want to access that fast travel point. Eventually you will unlock side content all over the map, that often requires you to go from one end of the map to the other, so they know you’d be spending a not insignificant amount of your game time backtracking in loops around this map, so the fact they never make the map more convenient to cross is just baffling to me.

In fact, I have no shame in telling you, this might be the first game I ever played where I literally got so lost I just had no choice but to reload my save because I just couldn’t work out how to get out of where I was to make it back to a fast travel point.

It is funny too, because there are open world activities to complete, but I just dreaded doing them. I hated combat, I hated navigating this world, I just wanted to get to the next story beat. Every design decision made every extra activity such an easy skip. I am usually really OCD about map marker games, to the point where I kinda spoil those games for myself and burn myself out at the end trying to clear everything. But even I got less than 40 percent map completion by the time I finished the story I believe, because I just so strongly disliked the act of engaging with this world for anything beyond the story. It wasn’t like the completion rewards for these were worth it. Plus 1 to all stats? What do these stats even do? A bunch of materials I could just find out in the world anyway? Thanks so much.

Wow. Okay. This ended up being very negative overall. It is a shame, as there is so much to like about Banishers, but it is about 30 hours too long and everything bad about this game is directly because of that reason. The mission design would have been fine for a game under 20 hours, the combat would have been fine for a game less than 20 hours and so on and so forth. Although nothing was saving those environmental puzzles, even 20 minutes of doing those puzzles must count as some kind of war crime somewhere. Then for all of my trouble I got the worst ending for reasons as obtuse and intuitive as those awful environmental puzzles, like giving me one last f u on the way out.

I absolutely recommend you try and find some way to experience this story, even if it is through someone else's playthrough on YouTube or something. I also think if you like your Sony style third person, narrative focused, semi open world action games, you may be able to stomach this longer than some others can.

But I am sorry, to the general person, the length of this just makes it an impossible recommendation for me.

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Just Cause 4

Now I never write reviews… well I say never, the only review I ever wrote previously was for Just Cause 3 back in 2021, so why then and why now? Why did Just Cause 3 (and now its successor) of all things engender (or give cause for) me to put down the controller and hammer away at the keyboard for a couple of hours, when no other game (and I’ve played some bangers to be fair) did? Well… it was just damn good fun! So in that vein… it’s time for @colonelkilgore’s triennial Just Cause Review-mega fest! Well… a review for Just Cause 4 at the very least.

So… am I writing this thing simply for the giggles or did this fourth entry actually give me a good reason to put finger-tips to keys? Well I’m pleased to say the latter… and most definitely so.

Pre-play
Even though I enjoyed the heck out of Just Cause 3 back three year ago, I wasn’t overly enthused to begin the next instalment. I think I’d probably forgotten quite how much I enjoyed the trilogy-capper… or just assumed it was a right time, right game kinda thing. So there was that… but also the fact that I’d heard what a step-down Rico Rodriguez’s fourth adventure was when compared to 2 and 3. As a result of this, it’s fair to say I loaded it up with some trepidation that it could potentially sully the franchise for me.

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure
I needn’t have worried though. There is just something about the Just Cause series which provides the perfect blend of serenity and chaos that soothes my gaming id. I’m not saying that they’re for everybody… and that’s pretty obvious from the small and ever-decreasing audience that the series ends up reaching but it hits for me that’s for sure. For one, I’ve always liked open-world military games harking all the way back to Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction and right the way through to Ghost Recon: Breakpoint… hell my favourite Metal Gear Solid is V (don’t hate me). For two, it’s the gameplay… more specifically the traversal.

It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey
So I waxed lyrical about the wing suit-grapple hook combination used to traverse the open world during my first review three year ago and nothing has changed. Well I say nothing, if anything Avalanche have actually refined the experience of covering ground in this manner. And it is the wing suit/grappling hook combination for traversal that provides the serenity to which I referred previously. Soaring over mountains and swooping down valleys and through into the crevices of the landscape is an absolute joy and to quote my 2021 self: “… is the best traversal system in all of gaming!” Hefty claim that but I still stand by it. There is just no other game that manages to make the simple art of map navigation this much fun. To further my point, I do find that after 30 or so hours in an open-world game that I start to resort to using fast travel. I actually hate to do this as I do find that it breaks my immersion… but to put it simply “ain’t nobody got time for that!” Well with the Just Cause games I would never even consider fast travelling and actually become enthused by a cross-map journey to begin the next mission or task… as that is the games main strength. The use of the wing suit in conjunction with the grapple is somewhat tricky to master but once perfected, the player just has absolute control over Rico’s speed and direction and this produces some truly majestic moment-to-moment gaming.

Combat and destruction
As with the previous entries in the series, the combat is pretty mediocre. The gunplay seems quite floaty, as Rico just doesn’t seem to have the weight of… let’s say a Rockstar protagonist. It also has some snap-to aiming which I’m not a massive fan of but I guess the developers thought it necessary what with the movement speed and verticality available to the player. All in all, the combat is nothing to write home about but is at the very least serviceable. The destruction on the other hand is as fun as ever, with the huge map dotted with military basis and installations ready to be purged. It’s bubble-wrap gameplay for sure and that’s no bad thing when sandwiched between the more serious military fare I’ve been playing of late. That is no sleight on Spec Ops: The Line nor Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist as I enjoyed both immensely… but this seemed to come at just the right time if you catch my drift.

Physics 101
So there has been numerous videos and text reviews referring to what was lost from the Just Cause games with this fourth entry but I was very pleasantly surprised by what was added. Namely new tools that can be applied to your grapple tether that can have hilarious effect within the games sandbox. The Just Cause engine always had pretty impressive physics, what with slingshotting unsuspecting enemies 100’s of feet into the air before falling to their death… or concocting an elaborate system of tethers to draw large red-tipped constructions together in explosive conflagration. And all that is still present but Rico now has the ability to tether helium balloons and nitro-boosters to various npc’s and artefacts too. I found that I hardly used these during my campaign playthrough and just thought the devs had added them for the sake of adding them. I eventually found the reason for the additions when mopping up the platinum though. There are around 150 vehicle stunts that you can attempt across the map and the vast majority will require a mastery of one, two or all three of the tether-tools at Rico’s disposal. One stunt in particular will live long in the memory, which involved me having to be sat in the driver seat of a monster truck as it passed through a checkpoint three-quarters of the way up the tallest skyscraper in the game. Needless to say, the solution… or my solution involved tethers, balloons and boosters. All of which had to be activated and deactivated at just the right time for the desired result. In fairness, not all of the vehicle stunts are as thrilling or tricky… but there were some highly satisfying physic’s puzzles there that actually reminded me of Breath of the Wild’s shrine puzzles (don’t hate me #2).

What was lost
So Avalanche Studios did try to shake up the base-clearing formula and this seemed to be the main thing that gave series-veterans cause for concern. I read the reviews prior to playing it and I have to admit I felt concerned too. I always took great pleasure when playing Just Cause 2 and Just Cause 3 from fastidiously taking out each and every military base and installation I come across. Blowing up each and every red-tipped military construction and component until the location is 100%’d. Well this is no longer a thing… you can still blow up every red-tipped enemy artefact if you like but there is no need… and they’ll simply respawn anyway. Instead, there are now specific actions and requirements to complete for a base/location to be brought into the fold. Once done, Rico acquires points which can be used to advance the front line rebel force into new areas still held by the occupying military force. I’m not gonna lie, I definitely think that I preferred the way it was handled during the previous games but in fairness to the game, it didn’t really impact my time with the game as much as I originally thought it would.

You can take the weather with you
The devs added freak weather conditions for some reason. Lightning, thunder, dust-storms and tornadoes. You know where I mentioned earlier, that I initially thought that the new tether tools may have been added simply for the sake of adding them. Well this really seems the case here… pretty ridiculous if you ask me and adds very little to the game if anything at all. The less said about this the better in my opinion so…

Frame rate, loading and servers
So having re-read my previous review of Just Cause 3 prior to the writing of this, I had forgotten about the issues that I experienced in this regard. I had completely forgotten that my initial venture into Just Cause 3 had given me a headache due to the stuttering 30fps frame rate. Now I very rarely suffer with headaches so the fact that this rang an undeniable bell with my recent foray into Just Cause 4 is fairly profound. I actually had my first ever migraine when starting Just Cause 4 recently. It only happened during that first session but is indicative of the game itself in my opinion. The movement is just so fast and multi-directional, that when your eyes are trying to process this at a still somewhat inconsistent 30fps it is unceremoniously jarring, so beware!

Server-wise, I encountered none of the issues which meant that I had to delete well over 100 friends from my PlayStation profile when attempting to load into Just Cause 3. I was concerned when initially loading the game up and was ready for another cull (don’t hate me #3) but fortunately the game and its servers seemed far more up to the task of accepting over 99 friends in this instance.

Verdict
Loved it to be honest… much more than I thought I would too. I know the game is not to be taken seriously, that the narrative is full of cheese, that the characters are chewing the scenery when ever they get a monologue and that the games performance is somewhat questionable at best but… it’s fun. I think we sometimes lose sight of why we started gaming… and that’s easy to do what with how modern gaming has evolved into serious works of artistic expression in some cases but the main reason I originally picked up a controller back in the early 80’s was to have fun… and that’s what this series invariably delivers.

PS. It’s better than Just Cause 2 (okay, you can hate me now)

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My review of Rise of the Ronin.

As I mentioned in the main thread, I kinda feel like something must have happened to this game in production. The more I played Rise of the Ronin, the more unfinished it felt. I don't know whether they ran out of time, or there were clashing visions on the production side (or just a general lack of vision) or their budget was slashed, or what. But whatever it was, I can't remember the last time I played a game that felt unfinished in quite the weird way this does.

Like, for example, they've created this really detailed slice of history, teaming with life and authenticity. This game isn't exactly a beauty, but the art direction is absolutely excellent and the choice to go for a collection of smaller open worlds rather than just one massive one allows them to pack each one with detail and landmarks. Yet... there is almost no way to meaningfully interact with any of it. It may as well be one massive film set.

You'll visit sprawling urban centres, bustling markets, farming or fishing villages, famous landmarks and other such things, and there is rarely even a single NPC to even talk to in these spaces, let alone any sort of gameplay to engage in, either. It is like the world is finished, but is still waiting for most of the game to actually be added into it.

It is most striking in the core narrative, where by Act 3 the game was just utterly incomprehensible for me. It starts as a game about the player making choices - what factions to side with, what views to align with, who gets to live or die. This basically vanishes from Act 2 entirely until the end, then Act 3 asks you to lock in your faction choice and yet you immediately go back to playing both sides. I just ended up so disconnected and cold towards this story, because it felt like nothing I did mattered.

Yet, the way the game is playing out feels like there were meant to be choices and branching paths here, but they were either removed or never finished. Characters will wander into the narrative and just vanish, and there is clearly something missing here that would have made this made sense. You will ally to one faction, only to be killing them in the next mission, yet these actions will have no consequences and no one in the story recognises any of this playing out. You are positioned to be the core of this story, yet every development is written like you don’t exist in this story at all.

In fact, part of what makes Act 3 so impossible to follow is the way characters will be introduced as an ally, but then be a boss in the next mission, and then an ally again in the mission after that. And it is just never referenced, it is like every mission takes place in a vacuum and as soon as the mission is over it never happened. There are entire quest chains which make absolutely zero sense if you make certain choices. And this isn’t just for you, either, one of your companions can also be getting attacked by a faction in one mission and then in the next teaming with them and it is never referenced again. Just a complete and utter mess.

Like to me it seems clear the faction system was planned to be both far vaster, and far deeper, than the version we get in the released game. That each mission would give the player hard choices to make, which would be opening and closing missions off to you and sealing the fates of characters so they couldn’t show back up again. This is evidenced by the fact that the game includes an entire mechanic here which allows you to replay missions and make different decisions, but the mechanic has been added and the decisions haven’t been. However, the faction system we get in the actual game doesn’t actually do anything, so you are basically playing every branch of this story simultaneously on top of each other even though it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I just cannot believe for a second this was how the game was ever meant to be experienced when it was in production. You are just whatever faction the mission you are doing is at that time, but it is in a vacuum with no cause and effect or repercussions - despite the game constantly telling you there are.

I wish I could tell you everything outside of this is better, but like I say, this problem permeates through every inch of this. The game feels like a bolted together patchwork of borrowed ideas. It is the blandest, most shallow, thing you can imagine when you think of an Ubisoft open world. It is Ghost of Tsushima but with a fraction of the soul that game had.

In terms of the combat, it made a really bad first impression on me, and while it does get better, I am not sure it is ever exactly… good. Like you will absolutely enjoy some challenging fights, which feel super tight and clean, I'm parrying everything I feel I should have, any missed parries feel fair and like it's on me. It all feels like a properly scripted fight you’d see in a cutscene, but you are completely in control and it is awesome.

Sadly though, most of the fights I experienced, especially against bosses in the back half of the game, was like trying to play a fighting game online on a bad internet connection. Your parry will just not connect, or enemies attack in really odd cadences so trying to find a window to parry when the parry is as unforgiving as it is here is next to impossible and they love to ramp up the difficulty by having enemies who cannot be interrupted yet an enemy can sneeze across the room and it’ll interrupt what you doing. I can’t tell you the amount of times I died to enemies just spamming me with extremely long combos, no parry connected, their combo could not be stopped and just attacked through any attacks I made. Like you are defenceless and I genuinely do not know what the game expected me to do here. I am so glad this game has an easy mode, as I am not sure I could have finished this without it.

However, while the combat itself wasn’t great, the one thing I did genuinely enjoy in Rise of the Ronin - and the thing that meant that even 50 hours in I wasn't tired of this in a way I have been with games half as long this year - is everything around the combat. There is a vast range of weapons here, and each weapon has a deep collection of stances which basically give each weapon multiple completely diverse and unique ways to play. And even on the easiest difficulty, the game pushes you to really engage with this side of the game. You can't just pick a weapon and a stance and let it carry you through to the end, especially if you are just spamming abilities and not really learning how they function. Even on the easiest difficulty this approach will get you absolutely wrecked. You really need to play around with everything, and take the time to learn the quirks of both individual weapons, but also the various stances too and honestly this was just always a joy to do. When a weapon you tried earlier didn’t click, but then you get a new stance which really fits your playstyle and it just all comes together, like every few hours I would have one of those moments and it was just so fun, and so rewarding. Like technically what you are doing here is the same thing over and over again, but this level of experimentation meant the experience still had ways to feel fresh right until the credits rolled.

Oh, and the other thing I loved here is character creation and customisation. The character creator is deep and robust, you actually create two characters and there are no restrictions on you whatsoever with making changes throughout your playthrough. Like I literally swapped the genders of my Twins multiple times. You also get access to a transmog system basically immediately and there is a truly vast amount of looks in the game. I have no shame in admitting that a huge chunk of my playtime was probably just tweaking my characters and building and tweaking my outfits. Oh man, as a fashion game, character creation, photo mode addict? I was really feasting here.

So yeah, overall, it is hard to really know how to summarise Rise of the Ronin. I have played games this year with better characters, or stories, or more original ideas or whatever, but God was I burned out on those games by the end. Rise of the Ronin took me around 60ish hours to clear (it could be significantly longer if you wanted to do every bond mission, every side mission and 100 percent each map, which I absolutely did not want to do) and while I was definitely ready to move on when the credits rolled, it is probably the first game I have played this year where I wasn’t spending like the last 20 hours just growing a deep resentment for the game that it didn’t know when the right time was to stop.

In terms of whether I think you - the person reading this - should play it. I dunno, I think it is kind of a hard sell. If you like a lot of what you hear about this and haven’t played Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, play that instead. If you have consumed every piece of Ubisoft media and are gagging for one of their open worlds for some reason, then Rise of the Ronin offers you that, along with a surprising amount of mechanical depth for those who want to explore it, even if it also comes along with a lot of bad as well. So yeah, if that sells it to you, the price of entry right now is steep, but hopefully you can grab this in a sale at some point.