PS4

It’s a 2D side-scrolling action RPG about a brave Valkyrie and her overbearing father, Odin.

Everyone says that this game has no story and all the characters are the same and once you’ve played the first few levels, you’ve seen all the game can offer. But, everyone is wrong. I’ve played for 50 hours and not seen all there is to see. I’ve gotten most of the trophies (I played on the PS5), but not all of them. The end A man spent his life caring for his sickly brother. When his brother passed on, the man went to the Academy to find new meaning to his life. As he approached the Academy, he saw a dog waiting for him. When he looked into the dog’s eyes, he saw his brother looking back at him. Together, they entered the labyrinth. ...

DM: You see an encounter before you Party: I don’t recognize this one. Hmmm. Okay, everyone, brace up, we’re heading in! DM: It is a black hole. It immediately begins to suck you in. Party: Run! RUN! DM: You can’t get away. You are sucked in, everyone dies. Roll up a new party. After my original party was sucked in by a black hole, and I’d taken a new character with no experience or equipment down through the labyrinth to do a CR, I got to thinking how I would defeat the Black Hole next time I encountered one. Use the stopwatch we got to keep resetting its Action Time Bar (ATB)? Try and petrify it? ...

Needle drop some , and you could pretend this post-apocalyptic arcade shooter is the iconic Taarna segment from the Heavy Metal movie. It’s all the otherworldly rails shooter action you could want in a game. Panzer Dragoon Remake cases, PS4 and Sega Saturn A long, long time ago, there was a little game called Starfox, for the Super Nintendo. It was a rails-based shooter that took Star Fox, Fox McCloud and his three friends, Slippy Toad, Peppy Hare, and Falco Lombardi, on an adventure that stretched from the land into space. ...

DC Universe Online has had a problem. It’s the most popular of Daybreak’s MMOs, but its spandex tights flies under the radar of most MMO players. Recent content dumps (called “episodes”) are still very crowded. Recent changes to show exactly how many players are in each zone (and across how many instances) shows that the most recent hub areas support hundreds of players at any time of the day – and this isn’t counting the Nintendo Switch players, who have their own sets of servers. ...

Square Enix’s new co-op third person shooter RPG, “Outriders”, doesn’t have anything to do with the Marvel heroes. Just, the last demo I played of this sort was Marvel’s Avengers, and I didn’t have a great experience with the co-op features, and this title was just there, for some reason. So, what is “Outriders” if not Marvel’s Avengers? I hadn’t even heard of this game before a couple days ago, when it exploded all over my Twitter timeline. I (being at work at the time) demanded someone patiently explain to me what kind of game it was so that I could join in the fun. ...

When you REALLY want to play DCUO, but all you have is the Switch…

A “Fallout”-branded worker placement mobile game in the vein of Ellison’s “A Boy and His Dog”

I looked at all the RPGs I’ve played this year, trying to pick the one of them all that would be the best of the year. Several stood out, but I couldn’t pick just one. I guess if there were a game that I felt worth spending hours of my life playing, that proved its quality, maybe? Outer Wilds (PS4; finished January 26) This indie game about a hapless astronaut who is trying to stop their sun from exploding in (looks at watch) 24 minutes made a huge splash when it came out last year for all the right reasons. The clockwork solar system our astronaut lives in is full of puzzles everywhere you look. The lore is amazing. The physics are on point. And every 24 minutes, the sun explodes and you start from the beginning again, but you still have retained all you learned. ...

One really nice thing about playing a long, involved game like Assassins Creed Valhalla is that I don’t have to think about what game I want to play when I’m done work and chores in the evening. For the past month, it’s been off to Valhalla for a few hours. It’s the same feeling I get when I’m seriously into an MMO and logging in and saying hello to the guild is just a great start to an evening. ...