Borderlands 3 (PS4) Review

Borderlands 3 (PS4) Review

Release Date: 13 September 2019

Date Played: 7 May 2021

I think I've just outgrown Borderlands.  I remember 100% completing the first game including all of its DLC.  A few years later, I played the sequel and just didn't have the drive to continue much beyond finishing the story.   This time around, it was a real drag just getting through the campaign.  What happened?  

Firstly, I played the entire game in Co-op.  I'm absolutely sure that this made the game a lot more fun.  If it hadn't been for having a partner on the couch with me, I probably would have given up long before the final credits rolled.   Borderlands has never been much for story and instead relied on its zany characters and outrageous situations to carry you through.   Throw in a bunch of awesome guns to loot while playing with friends, and you have a winning combination.  This time around, Gearbox really dropped the ball.  You chose 1 of 4 classes of character and once again set out on the planet Pandora to gather riches and fame.  You quickly learn that all the psychotic inhabitants of the planet have joined a cult that follows these post-apocalyptic internet influencers called the Calypso Twins.  They are Sirens (magical beings found in all of the Borderlands games) and they are gathering all the energy they can by sucking it out of everyone they come across.  They want to get into the vaults hidden around the galaxy and absorb the energy of the vault guardians so they can ascend into godhood.  You have to group up with the resistance group, the Crimson Raiders, to try to foil their plans.  Returning are most of the characters from the previous games.  There's Lilith,  Claptrap, Tannis, Maya, Tine, Mad Moxxi, and others.  Actually, I think every old character from the series makes a cameo, but it feels very fan-servicy without actually having any real impact since most only have a couple of lines of dialog and then disappear.  You travel around to different planets that are all post apocalyptic wastelands to gather key fragments to open vaults.  As with the other games, you kill aliens, bugs, and psychos all along the way.  There's tons of guns to collect, side missions, places to explore.   It’s a tried and true method, but you’d be hard pressed to be able to differentiate this game from its prequels if you didn’t know it was #3.

The issues with this game that make it so mediocre and forgettable are obvious. Firstly, the Calypso twins are not good villains.  They are annoying, not funny, their character models are lame, and I think they are pretty much universally despised. I feel like the societal zeitgeist is to have an aversion to influencers, and choosing them as the game’s antagonists was a double edged sword.  Immediately, you have foes that the public will hate, so that’s mission accomplished.  On the other side, you have unrelatable, superficial, and vapid characters that the audience is more repulsed by than fearful of. Also, All of the locations in the game feel and look just like all the locations in the previous games.  It feels like you've already been here before... because you have. The exception to this is when you go through the Jakob's estate.  It's like a haunted house murder mystery in a characture of a Louisianna plantation.  It was a really fun and unique part of the game and was by far my favorite part.  It stands in stark contrast to the arid and bug infested Borderlands universe. 

The guns are fun, but they don't really add any new effects from the hundreds of other guns you've gotten before and often feel super weak.  Finally, the humor... is just off.  It's the same old jokes you've heard a million times in the other games... but they just fall so flat.  I read a review online, and someone said something to the degree that, "the dialog and jokes are extremely childish and are written poorly but you can just tell that the writers thought it was the funniest thing ever."  I don't remember what member of the public wrote this review, but he absolutely summed it all up with that statement.  There is a whole mission where some woman wants a cup of coffee.  So, she sends you on a bunch of boring fetch quests (a theme of this game) to gather the resources to make her a cup of coffee.  The whole time she's on the com's system saying things like, "OMG... COFFEE!! I Need my coffee!!! I can't do anything without my coffee!!!! Yummy, yummy, yummy!"  It feels like the way a 10 year old would write the dialog of an adult.  It's so terrible and actually caused me to wince at several points because the humor was so off point. There's only so many times someone will laugh at a fart joke or at a character running around in his tighty-whiteys while wearing a cape.  

However, the REAL problem with this game is on the technical front.  It's actually a technical mess.  Firstly, and most annoyingly, the font is way, way, way, too small.  In the normal game, you can just barely read the text on the screen.  This goes for items names, descriptions, stats, prompts to interact with the environment, etc.  When you go into split-screen, the font size is cut in half.  EVERYONE on the internet has been complaining about this for years, and Gearbox has just ignored them.  I'm not even joking, you have to stand like 2 feet away from the screen and lean forward to where you're about a foot from the screen to be able to read anything in the game.  This is unacceptable.   In addition to this, the game has some of the longest load times I've ever seen.   It's around 3-4 minutes just to boot up the game.  Going from area to area or fast traveling takes a minute or two.  Finally, the game runs like total garbage.  There's slow texture loading, screen tearing, bad animations, desynced dialog, items falling through the world, and other bugs all over the place. Not only that, but navigating through the game is a  nightmare.  The areas are very convoluted and overlapping.  This is especially true of the home base, which is one of the most complicated areas I've ever experienced in a game.  Even after spending more than 20 hours in this game, I couldn't find my way to the most basic areas of the base like the weapon vendor, or the command post.  The maps are 3D nightmares and it's not clear how to get from one location to another.  It's almost like the developers TRIED to make it bad.  It doesn't help that it takes several seconds to open the map to see where you are because of loading times.   The final nail in the coffin is the biggest technical problem of all.  The game's framerate is terrible.  After playing more than an hour or so, the framerate drops down to the single digits.  The game becomes so choppy you can barely play it and the dialog sounds like it's in slow motion with clipping in the audio and the voices cutting in and out.  What a mess.  

The truth is that 2K published this game before it was finished and then decided to focus on the COPIOUS amounts of DLC packs instead of fixing the problems with this game.  What a shame.  I probably will never buy another Borderlands game after this.  If I didn't already own the Pre-Sequel (which I haven't played at the time of this review) I wouldn't even play another Borderlands game.  This was a mediocre game to begin with and the glaring technical issues, poor writing, banal missions, and generic areas make Borderlands 3 feel like a total cash grab.  There's no heart in this game.

Final Status: Beaten

Final Score: 5/10 (Mediocre)

Strafe (PS4) Review

Strafe (PS4) Review

Release Date: 9 May 2018

Date Played: 18 June 2022

Strafe has a cool premise: Blend the fast and tight gameplay of old school shooters like Quake and Doom with the popular rogue-like stylings that are worming their way into every game these days. It was a good enough concept, but it totally failed in almost every conceivable way. It was developed by Pixel Titans and published by Devolver Digital. It was met with a less than lukewarm reception on consoles, but fared slightly better on PC.

Gameplay:

Strafe is an absolute mess of a game.  There's no other way to put it.  Not only is it poorly designed and relatively unfun, but it's also a buggy mess that is barely playable much of the time. 

You're a scrapper who's sent out into a hostile environment to collect... scrap. You start off the game by selecting from either the shotgun, railgun, or machine gun and then teleport into the first level.  In rogue-like fashion, you'll soon discover that all of the levels are procedurally generated and have a randomized layout. This seems good in theory, but falls very flat because these fast-twitch shooters rely on precise and well thought out level design that can be memorized.  The ability to fly through the levels while blasting away all the baddies is the main draw to these games and gives that sense of momentum that is so exhilarating. Obviously, that's what the developers had intended.  But, unfortunately, you can't do that here.   You have to hang back and play more conservatively than you want to because there's no way to know what's coming up ahead. You'll find yourself funneling the mindless and frustrating enemies into choke points just to mow them down. 

However, just because you're killing tons of enemies, don't think the game is easy. Strafe is unfairly brutal in a bad way.  Most of the early enemies just run directly towards you no matter where you are. This can be a huge issue since there is an overwhelming amount of them.  They will pop out of previously cleared areas and make no sound, so you have no idea they are behind you until you take damage. You have to pop around corners to try to observe the upcoming rooms and find a course of action.  Of course, there are enemies that hang onto the walls and ceilings just out of sight that love to drop down on you once you pass by.  Of course, they are silent and you won't know they're there until you've already taken damage. It's an annoying gameplay loop, and there are so, so many instances of unavoidable damage.  That's a real issue since you only have one life and health refills are rare.

Your starting weapons are puny and don't feel good to fire. There's no impact to them or sense of weightiness. Not only that, but the upgrades and other weapons you find throughout your run of the game don't improve matters much.  These upgrades  are scattered around the levels that increase your fire rate, health, armor, etc.  But they don't really seem to make you feel any more powerful and the awesome synergies that can be found in most rogue-likes are absent here.  Also absent is a perpetual progressions system.  There is really nothing to unlock other than difficulty modifiers and teleporters to let you skip the first few levels of the game. So, you're not going to be able to improve or alter the way the game plays on subsequent runs. The game will play exactly the same as the first time you played it.  It's a real oversight on the developer's part.  These meta-progression systems are an essential staple of rogue-likes, and without them, any failed run feels like wasted time.

In addition to this, the game has real framerate issues on PS4.  Aiming can be difficult because of the choppiness of your movement, and hitting enemies can be a challenge. This is even the case when the enemies are right up in your face and it feels like you can't hit the broad side of a barn. When rooms fill up with enemies, the framerate drops into the single digits and makes the game neigh unplayable.  Since you only have 1 life, this usually spells the end of your run.  Even if the game performed well, the aiming feels very slippery and you can tell it's more suited to a keyboard and mouse setup.  It's obvious that this port was an afterthought and PC was the main focus during development.

There are 4 levels in the game that are each broken up into 3 sections.  Sadly, because of the randomized nature of everything and the necessity to play so conservatively most of the time, things begin to all blur together and get pretty boring rather quickly. Although, I can't say I was ever able to make it to the latter levels because of the buggy nature of the game.

I also encountered bugs that included key items falling through the floor, shops taking money for ammo and not dispensing it, and numerous crashes between the levels. On my best run, I got stuck on some terrain and wasn't able to progress.  I had to start over.  The game has a pretty substantial patch that seems to fix some of these issues.  Personally, I played the game with the patch, and still encountered all of these issues.  I can't even imagine how bad it would be without the patch. 

Presentation:

The game is supposed to look like a game from 1996, and I guess it does.  It has those clunky graphics like Quake and does a good job of evoking the look of games from the period.  Sadly, even though it looks the part, the game has no artistic style and is boring to look at.  Almost everything is the same gunmetal gray corridors and rooms.  As you progress further into the game things never really change much and remains underwhelming.  The enemies are also really boring and uninspired. You can blow off parts of their bodies, which I guess is novel.  But it really messes with the kill animations of the game and sometimes it's difficult to tell if an enemy is actually dead, or if parts of them are just falling off.  The peashooter feel of most of the guns don't really help to remedy this.

The music is also extremely underwhelming and has no memorable points whatsoever.  It's kind of a synth-guitar sound that tries to rip off better games from the 90s, but totally fails. There are no cool hooks or riffs to latch on to and just seems to meander around while you play.

On a very positive note, this game has the best tutorial I've ever seen.  It features a live action training presentation with a fantastic VHS filter on it that stars a sexy lab tech who is training you on how to be a metal scrapper.  Hillary Vetter, the actress, does a phenomenal job in this role and is the best part of the game. It's full of fantastic humor, great sets, memorable one-liners, and enough charm to almost justify purchasing the game.  Her delivery of, "There's more to scrapping than just collecting scrap and scrapping it" is one of the hardest I've ever laughed playing any video game and if the rest of the game lived up to the caliber of its tutorial, it would be one of the best games of all time.

Conclusion:

Strafe is not worth playing.  Even if the game worked (which it doesn't), it is a boring and tedious mess of bad gameplay design and failure to capture what makes the games it's trying to emulate fun. Literally every part of the game, excluding the tutorial, is a waste of your time if you decide to play it on PS4.  Perhaps you can have some fun with the PC version, but the version I attempted to play just doesn't function.  I feel like the developers had a simple concept of blending Quake with a rogue-like and just had no idea how to achieve anything they wanted to do.  

This is one of only a couple of games I've played in the last several years that was so buggy and poorly performing that I literally couldn't finish it.  

Pros:

• The most interesting, funny, and awesome tutorial I've ever seen in a game

Cons:

• The game is a buggy mess and doesn't work

• The framerate is so bad you can't aim

• The randomized levels make the game less fun, not more interesting

• The enemies have annoying A.I. and deal cheap damage

• Boring and uninspired presentation

Final Status: Played

Final Score: 3/10 (Terrible)

 

A Hat In Time (Switch) Review

A Hat In Time (Switch) Review

Release Date: 18 October 2019

Date Played: 21 May 2022

I saw one review online that described A Hat In Time as, "a beautiful mess."  Despite my best efforts, I can't think of a more apt way to describe this game.  It's full of extreme framerate drops into the single digits, sub-par graphics, tons of texture pop-in, wonky and slippery controls, an incredibly frustrating camera, game crashes, and near game-breaking bugs.  But, despite all of that, it has so much variety and charm that it manages to overcome what would normally be a nail in the coffin for most other games to present itself as not only an above average game, but also a must play.  In the last 20 years of gaming, I can only think of one other game that was so broken and janky that it should have been relegated to obscurity but managed to win over the hearts of most of the people that put in the time to appreciate it.  That game was Deadly Premonition.   

Story:

You play has Hat Kid, a little girl who is trying to return to her home world on her spaceship.  After passing over a planet, the Mafia comes to collect a toll and Hat Kid refuses to pay.  In retaliation, the Mafia bust open the spaceship's time vault and all of the hourglasses (the ships fuel) spill out over the world below.  You have to travel around the planet's four areas collecting time pieces by completing various tasks. These different areas are locked behind a minimum number of hourglasses, a la Mario 64's stars. With 25 hourglasses required to finish the game. Along the way, you'll make many friends and enemies.  You'll complete tasks for the Mafia in their beach-front, tropical themed world, help make several movies in a bird themed version of Hollywood, sell your soul to the devil in a haunted forest and mansion, and platform your way over perilous crevasses and tricky puzzles in an alpine themed stage.  Obviously, the game is not only quite zany and silly, it's also quite varied. The characters you meet are fantastic and have some very funny dialog.  There are some campy bits, but it just adds to the abundance of charisma that the game has. Every stage feels very different and unique and is one of the game's best features.  

Gameplay:

A Hat In Time is a 3D platformer.  Which, if you've read any other my other reviews, you'll know is not a genre that I'm very fond of.  So, to say that this buggy and wonky game won me over is a huge complement on its behalf.  As mentioned above, the game's 4 stages all play very differently.  The tropical Mafia world plays like a 3D collectathon style game in a sandbox type environment,  the Hollywood stages are more focused on stealth and investigation,  much of the haunted forest area plays almost like a survival horror game, and the alpine section is straight up white-knuckle platforming. The game can be a bit challenging at times, but dying is never to much of a setback and you're always able to jump back in at the most recent checkpoint. Of course, most of these area's are split up into different levels that will have you performing various tasks and challenges. They all really feel different and the game does a good job of never really letting itself get into a lull where you feel like you're doing the same things over and over again. 

Hat girl can double jump, wall climb, dash, attack, crawl, and all of the other things your would expect to be able to do in a 3D platformer.  While you do finally get the hang of the controls and the camera, a lot of the time, the controls feel slippery.  You'll constantly miss platforms, overshoot your landing, come up short, wall-jump when you don't want to, and fight with the camera that loves to swing around right at the last second and makes you miss your landing.  It can be extremely annoying at times, and I didn't really feel like I had the hang of controlling Hat Kid until about 75% of the way through the game.  Once I did though, the game became much more enjoyable to play.  Luckily, the tougher platforming sections are reserved for the end of the game and are opened to you at the perfect time. If there was some more serious platforming towards the beginning of the game, I'm not sure I would have stuck it out and seen Hat Kid's adventure to the end.

To help out Hat Kid, you can collect balls of yarn scattered around the various stages.  This will allow her to craft a new hat that comes with a new set of abilities.  One lets you run faster, one lets you explode walls, another reveals hidden platforms, one lets you jump to hidden areas, etc.. You can also unlock badges to put on your hats to give them additional bonuses. These can be mildly beneficial while you play but aren't required to progress. These different mechanics give the game a bit of a metroidvania feel as some areas are inaccessible until you've gained an ability to reach it.  You'll have to come back and revisit old stages once you've unlocked a few hats. Some required storyline chapters require specific hats.  So, you'll have your progress halted a few times where you have to go visit a different area than the one you're currently working on in order to get some yarn to craft the hat you need.  It's not too bad, but I wish the game explained this better.  At one point, I was playing through an area of the game and was given a notification that I couldn't progress anymore.  I had no idea what to do and had to look online to figure out what was going on.  Apparently, you're supposed to go on to the next area of the game to unlock a new hat, then come back later to finish off the previous area. A bit esoteric, but not a grievous sin.

There are also some really awesome platforming challenges that you can unlock by finding hidden warps in the 4 areas of the game.  So, be on the lookout for those.  But, make sure you don't jump into one while you're in the middle of completing another objective during a stage, because once you enter the warp, you'll lose any progress you've made on your current mission.

Presentation:

A Hat In Time looks like a Playstation 2 game.  I'm not sure if this was on purpose and trying to cash in on the retro look, or if the developer just didn't know how to do any better.  It looks pretty bad, to be honest, and I have a pretty strong tolerance for older looking games as I mainly play retro stuff.  Luckily, all of the fantastic art design and little details scattered around the game once again make up for its short comings and allow it to rise above the sum of its parts.  Cute touches like the Roomba that wonders around the spaceship, the fantastic artwork on the title screen of each level, the character's cute mannerisms, and the remarkable humor of the game puts such a big smile on your face that you're more than willing to overlook the shoddy graphics and the insane amount of texture pop-in.  

To top it off, the game has a stellar soundtrack that once again elevates it.  It's catchy and can be either very calm or exhilarating when it needs to be. My daughter and I both found ourselves humming along to the music whenever we were playing. She said that it was her favorite music in a video game ever, and considering she played Mario Odyssey not that long ago, that's a pretty huge complement.

As I mentioned earlier, the game is a mess in terms of its technical presentation.  There are spots where the game drops into a single digit framerate.  This often coincides with some of the more epic, and difficult, set pieces that are thrown your way and will almost guarantee that you die because you can't see what's going on or control your jumps.  At one point in the game, in the haunted mansion at an especially tense point, I had to sneak into a room and solve a puzzle to get a key while being chased.  Every time I walked into the room, my entire screen would glitch out and I would only be able to make out what was going on in the very bottom right corner of the screen.  It was almost game breaking.  I had to watch a playthrough of this section of the game, and then just jump around until I got lucky enough to solve the puzzle.  It was almost like playing the game blindfolded.  What should have taken about a minute ended up taking over an hour.  There were also many times that the camera rotated when I wasn't expecting and caused me to miss my jump.  It was a constant struggle fighting against this camera, and once I decided to play with its settings in the options, it became better, but not good by any means.

Conclusion:

A beautiful mess... That's really the best way to sum up this game.  It's just so charming, fun, varied, cute, interesting, and well thought out that it's impossible not to love.  It's really hamstrung by all of its technical problems and it's substandard controls and if these weren't an issue, this game would be one of the best 3D platform games ever made.  You know all of the beloved games that RARE made on the N64.  Games like Conker's Bad Fur Day, Donkey Kong 64, Banjo Kazooie, etc.?  All those games that everyone loves, right?  Well, not me.  I have never enjoyed playing any of those... and I LOVED A Hat In Time. I'm really taken aback that this game is so good that it not only overcame its shortcomings to be awesome, but it also made ME overlook my aversion to 3D platformers and reconsider my opinions of them. I wish I could say that it would like me appreciate them more, but it's just so good that it might make me be more harshly critical towards them. Yeesh... only time can tell.

You owe it to yourself to try out this one.  Yes, you'll have to work for your enjoyment at times, but it's more than worth it.

Final Status: Beaten

Final Score: 8/10