Been playing too much things to give justice to them all fully, so I’m going to lay out my recent plays (and faves). This doesn’t mean we won’t revisit these later on, but in an effort to break the ice…without further adieu:

Far Cry 4 — “You Have Failed This Island” 

the newest addition of this Ubisoft shooter series just hit the shelves, but 4 was the one I’ve spent the most time with (by about twice over) of any FC game other than the spin-off “Blood Dragon.” To be sure, the game still houses some of the quirks that I find off-putting, and the storyline really eventually did feel like it was getting my way, but I really enjoyed doing my Green Arrow impression as I stealthily took base after base from the fascist ruler of a rather beautiful island. While I could list a bunch of complaints–skinning the bizarrely-hostile wild animals as an upgrade system rubs me the wrong way, the guy on the radio of the vehicles is just freaking annoying, and the storyline seems like on overly long, unwieldly US foreign policy analogy–the fact is that I enjoyed the vast majority of the 35 hours I spent on the game.

The driving mechanics felt right to me, successfully giving vehicles a good amount of “weight” and avoiding the GTA-feeling of driving a car on skates. The combat was fun, and FC4 implements stealth well in a game where you don’t need to use stealth; for those unfamiliar with the adventures other games have had trying to do this, it’s kind of rare. I wish I could tell you more about how shooting the baddies feels, but about 90% of my combat experience was using the bow. And it was wonderful. And you can fire exploding arrows.

As with most non-mind-blowing-but-perfectly-playable-open-worlders, I’d recommend waiting for a sale, but this is the first Far Cry game since the spinoff where there was something magnetic about it to me. Better writing/story missions would’ve made this game a lot better, but it was a lot of fun. Oops! Almost forgot: this is becoming more and more redundant these days, and it’s sort par for the course for the series, but wow does the island ever look and feel great. It’s purdy. Ubisoft Montreal gets a thumbs up for this one, on balance.

And yes, UPlay still sucks.

Rocket League — “About As Much Fun As You Can Have With Your Pants On”

I mean, except…you don’t need to wear pants to play Rocket League. N

Ahem, anyway, RL is the type of game that, once you play, if it’s remotely your cup of tea, you’re very likely to wonder why it didn’t exist before now. “What if we combined boost-centric racing with indoor soccer?” Doesn’t seem like it should click as well as Rocket League does, but it turns out to be a multiplayer match made in Game Heaven.

The typical mode is 3-on-3, where you and two internet buddies (or friends you queue’d with) face off against three other players. They’re five different maps. The ball is bigger than your car. You can put lots of silly things on your car. The games last five minutes, and the goal is to–stop me if you’ve heard this!–score more goals than the other team. If the game is tied after five minutes, it goes into Sudden Death OT (first one to score wins).

The ability to flip, jump, twist, double-jump, boost, fall with style, etc.–coupled with a pretty good matchmaking system that usually pairs pretty evenly matched teams–makes this game one where both newcomers and crazy-serious-pro-gamers can enjoy (as well as those of us in-between). There are other modes as well, though it’s definitely optimized at 3-on-3, and you can try 4v4 or playing with a giant puck as well.

Rocket League is so much fun that it’s one of the few games I’ve played recently where I’d just say “buy it now.” It’s $20 at full price, so that helps too. If FC4 surprised me with how much fun I had with a FC game, RL blew me away with how such a silly “what if we…” formula makes for such a polished, fun experience. And that polish really is evident down to fun little details like the scoring system or the ball exploding your team’s color when it crosses the goal line. It’s hard to believe that the developer, Psyonix, hadn’t done anything more notable before. That said, it’s a helluva breakout game!

That is, if my teammates don’t eventually find out where I live and murder me for my awful defense.

 

Black Ops 3 — “I’m Bouncing Off The Walls Again”

Yes, I guess I’m reaching back a bit with this one, but I never did post my–mostly positive–review draft of the latest entry in the non-bad half of the Call of Duty franchise. If you can get over the typical CoD crap–yes, of course there was a patch that broke the game for a significant number of people, and of course one of the shotguns was hilariously brokenly good on release, and of course the anti-hacking “system” isn’t great–there’s actually plenty of fun to be had.

While the single-player narrative sort of trails off into something esoteric enough that it’s kind of one part incomprehensible and two parts “okay, but I really couldn’t care less,” most of the levels in the campaign were fun to play and I do admire the attempt at making the campaign center around high-tech and cyborgy stuff…even if it’s more of an attempt than a success. That said, the level design is generally pretty darn great, and someone at the studios finally realized it shouldn’t matter if you play as a guy or a gal! The latter would be a bigger step forward if so many of the character models weren’t varying shades of white, but at least they made it past step one (hint: if your main character being a specific type of person isn’t really central to the plot at all, this “why not be ______?” approach should be taken by more people).

Multiplayer is where it’s at with this title, though, and while there are a lot of differing opinions on this one, I grew to really like that BlOps 3 made movement abilities–utilizing a handy sort-of-jet-pack–a thing that becomes a key part of the gameplay. Rather than just target recognition and aim, having this as a more fully formed third dimension of gameplay makes BlOps 3 both a bit sillier and more fun to me than certain “realistic” versions of the game (such as the ones on the other side of the BlOps-Modern Warfare Divide). It’s still, at its heart, a personshoot. But Treyarch’s latest entry is a personshoot with the ability to wall-walk, use the occasional power-up, and slide under someone’s aim around a corner to hit them in the face with something. While it’s not the only way people should be making multiplayer shooters, it’s a fun way and actually a neat little departure from the typical formula.

~

We’ll be updating more often now, so there’ll be more of these to come (and again, they aren’t in place of full reviews). Happy driving-shooting-sneaking!