The Vault-Tec Workshop DLC is structurally simple: it adds an incomplete vault, which you can build out like any other workshop/settlement.

If you loved Fallout 4's base-building, then this is a big, open opportunity to flex your creative muscles. As for me, I kinda hated the workshop's janky UI and laborious inventory management already -- so a bigger sandbox does nothing for me. I was done building my Vault 88 pretty quickly, since I didn't use any floors, or walls, or doors; and I'm not at all ashamed about it being the shittiest vault in the Commonwealth.

I did, at least, glean some satisfaction from the small amount of questing accompanying the vault. At first, you have to clean out its rodent and ghoul and radscorpion problems; and the workshop creates some fun opportunities to fight monsters with defensive sentry guns. I enjoyed those moments more than I probably should have.

Then, when the vault is ready for settlers, your overseer will direct you to run behavioral experiments on them. These experiments are small, and completely scripted, but do show off a bit of Fallout's sense for dark humor.

Barring whatever you build in it, there really isn't much to this DLC. At least it's not as much of a pain in the ass as the Mechanist was.

Better than: Fallout 4: Automatron
Not as good as: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Hearthfire
I guess some people get really into the workshop thing: I'm just not one of them.

Rating: Meh

Automatron is about robots. You fight robots, you get a new companion who's a robot, and you build an upgrade station for robots! Robots, robots, robots.

Unfortunately that upgrade station represents a geometric progression of the inventory-management-hell problem I lamented in Fallout 4. There are so many damn upgrades, requiring such a crazy variety of salvaged parts and pieces -- the menu is bewildering to look at. I did like two upgrades and never bothered with it again.

(It doesn't help that I'd already picked my favorite companion by this point in the game, and it wasn't a robot. The robot upgrade station is effectively pointless if you don't have a robotic companion.)

This DLC also adds a quest-line to hunt down the Mechanist, whose robots have been roaming the Commonwealth and slaughtering its hapless settlers. You've got the handful of go-here-collect-that-kill-everyone quests that you'd expect, nothing I'd really call special or memorable, up until the final quest that takes you to the Mechanist's Lair -- a gruelingly-long dungeon that I was tired of before the halfway point, capped off with an exhausting wave-based gauntlet of robot fights.

Automatron's content isn't nearly compelling enough to justify how much work is required to enjoy it.

Better than: Borderlands 2: Mad Moxxi and the Wedding Day Massacre
Not as good as: Borderlands 2: Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt
And the ending, where the Mechanist is unmasked: what a disappointingly hackneyed twist.

Rating: Bad
Playing A Game Fallout 4 PC

After a month, and 100+ hours, of Fallout 4 ... well, it's okay, I guess.

I kid. Fallout 4 continues Bethesda's traditions of loading a ton of content into a robust open world, and of propping it up with a rich set of progression and customization mechanics. But it also continues their traditions of shoddy technical workmanship, and of investing in sometimes-baffling design ambitions while neglecting core game systems.

Although I've overall enjoyed my time with the game, the majority of this post will be a scathing critique of its flaws (as is tradition).

The game's opening hours are pretty "meh" -- not just because the introductory sequence is boring and slow, but - largely - because it prioritizes showing-off the new base-building features. And these features are ... rough. The interface feels like something a modder might have slapped together, or like a placeholder that's still waiting for a UI design pass.

The input bindings for "workshop mode" are a to-don't list of user experience gaffes. Holding the "V" key enters the mode, while pressing it changes the camera perspective instead; except when you're too far away from a workshop, in which case holding the key does the same thing as pressing it. Once in workshop mode, some keys like Tab and Escape get re-bound to navigate building menus (replacing their typical uses of Pip-boy and Pause menus, respectively) - oh, and there are fuckloads of building options, making it impossible to find anything specific without an online guide - but, when you're looking at an already-placed structure, then the Tab key is overloaded to send it into storage.

That's right -- you can't use Tab to go backward in the workshop menu until you move the camera such that you're no longer looking at a placed structure or item. If it were me, I'd call that a bug.

This is but one example of the over-overloaded base-building interface mess, and the payoff at the end of this learning curve isn't really worthwhile. Placing structures "neatly" is a fiddly exercise in frustration, so making anything aesthetically-satisfying is an inordinate amount of work. The overwhelming majority of building options have no gameplay effect whatsoever; I never placed any furniture except beds, and storage containers. Managing raw material inventory between multiple settlements is a ridiculous chore, even with the Supply Lines skill, which is locked behind an optional perk! And if you do decide to care about your settlers and their depressing living conditions, you'd better be prepared to frequently drop what you're doing and fast-travel to a settlement that's come "under attack."

Hearthfire's purely dialog-selection-based construction options were more satisfying than this under-baked, underwhelming feature set. And while I appreciate the premise of "rebuilding" the wasteland, Fallout 4's workshops are a poor execution of that idea; it doesn't feel like I'm restoring the Commonwealth as much as it feels like I'm playing a shitty hacked-together version of The Sims.

Base-building also highlights how underdeveloped this game's inventory-management tools are. And I mean ... trying to organize your stuff in Skyrim was already pretty goddamn awful, but some of that felt like "my fault" for my pack-rat, virtual-hoarder playstyle. Bafflingly, Fallout 4 introduces no mechanical or design changes to solve this problem; instead, it incentivizes hoarding by making settlement upgrades cost "junk." Oh, and not just settlement upgrades -- weapon and armor crafting also requires junk, including a few resources that are consistently hard-to-find (looking at you, adhesive).

So to invest in the game's crafting systems, you'll need to meticulously explore and loot dungeons for crafting materials, consume a significant amount of your precious carrying capacity with literal junk, and make frequent pit-stops back to base for unloading said junk. This routine makes the Strong Back level 4 perk the most valuable character upgrade in the game.

It also emphasizes how bad Fallout 4's loading times are. And no, I don't mean that you need a fast install disk; I mean that you need a fast install disk and a fan-made mod to fix the game. It would appear that Fallout 4 ties various engine systems to its frame rate, and assumes that only a certain portion of each "tick" can be used for asset loading; hence, when it locks the frame rate at 60 fps, the game unintentionally hobbles itself during loading screens. The non-loading portions of each "tick" take zero time, but it still needs to wait for the next frame before more assets can be loaded.

A thorough engine fix would be job-ifying asset loading and other systemic tasks (like physics and AI), so that the whole frame could be filled with asset-loading work when other systems aren't needed. An "okay" fix would merely disable load-time restrictions during loading transitions. The quick, hacky fix would be to just turn off V-Sync during loading; that's what the fan-made mod does, and it's something that I'd estimate a halfway-decent systems developer should be able to do in the real engine in like... ten minutes.

More than four years after its release, Fallout 4 still hasn't fixed this, and its loading times are an order of magnitude higher on solid state disks than they should be because of the frame rate. It's astonishing.

The game's tech isn't exactly bulletproof in other areas, either. I might generously offer that the number of crashes-to-desktop I encountered in Fallout 4 was at least not more than the number of crashes I remember hitting in Skyrim.

So the UI is dogshit and the engine is held together with wet tape. "It's a Bethesda game, what'd you expect?" I can hear you asking in a spiteful Boston accent. (Oh yeah, and despite the voice actors' accents, I can still identify many of them from their previous characters in Whiterun and Windhelm -- again, classic Bethesda.) Well, as baffled as I am by the UI, and as incensed as I am by the engine tech, it's Fallout 4's lackluster narrative quests that disappointed me the most.

When I remember my Skyrim playthroughs, I fondly recall helping defend the College of Winterhold from magic sprites; being targeted by, infiltrating, and effectively cleansing the Dark Brotherhood; turning the Theives' Guild into a first-world power; and fighting the Stormcloaks' war for them by slaughtering those jackass Imperials. The strong personalities of each faction made their sidequests compelling, and it was especially satisfying to lead (or conquer) as many of them as possible, more so than following the comparatively-simple path of the main dragon-yelling story quests.

It's not surprising that Bethesda saw this reaction to the main quests, and asked itself: how can side-factions become more involved in the central story? But the answer they've proposed in Fallout 4 doesn't seem right. Much of each faction's identity is rooted in hating the other factions -- and while it's cool that endgame missions have you destroying a faction's rivals, this necessarily excludes you from experiencing the other factions' endgame missions and content.

These mutually-exclusive quests can also make for a confusing, and highly error-prone, path to the endgame. Each group plots against the others, but sometimes you can slyly play multiple sides, while at other times simply acceping a quest causes another faction to instantly cut ties with you. Faction relations were especially arcane in my allegiance with the Railroad, which requires that you maintain deep cover within the Institute; so betraying the Institute at the "wrong" moment fails the questlines from both factions.

And even when focusing on anyone one faction, it's like... they don't have very much character to them.

  • The Minutemen want to "help" the Commonwealth rebuild, but doesn't really do anything to accomplish that, and their quests feel more like tutorials than world-building.
  • The Railroad wants to "help" synths by freeing them from the Institute, but until you show up, is practically impotent; after their introductory follow-the-clues quest, nothing they do is all that interesting.
  • The Brotherhood of Steel wants to "help" humans retake the wasteland, but their goals devolve into a flat stereotype of blind racism, albeit a well-armed one.
  • The Institute wants to "help" the future of humanity, and at least feels distinct from the other factions in how aloof and detached they are; but that aloofness also means that they never satisfyingly explore the ethical questions around synths' free will, the plight of surface-dwellers, or even their habit of kidnapping people to use as test subjects.

I came away from each faction's NPCs feeling like their goals were basic, lacking nuance; and their quests gradually morphed those goals into "defeat the other factions." Which may be a fascinating moral-grey-area point about xenophobia and personal freedom, but... it's not very creative.

Alright. Phew! I think that more-or-less covers my airing of grievances toward Fallout 4.

And it's shitty of me to abridge the positive side of this post, I know; but the fact is, most of the things that Fallout 4 got right are things that Skyrim also got right. Building up your character is mostly satisfying, once you've figured out some survival and combat strategies that work. Reading in-game lore is usually a treat, especially when terminal entries build a multi-faceted story around pre-war characters or events.

Like in Skyrim, some of Fallout 4's best moments have subtle and surprising beginnings -- like the treasure hunt at Jamaica Plain, which might be the most memorable quest of my whole playthrough. Environmental, ambient storytelling is one of Bethesda's greatest strengths, and Fallout 4 proves that they haven't lost their knack for it.

It does, though, call into question what I can expect from the next Elder Scrolls game's key narratives. And if they cram this disastrous inventory UI down my throat again... well, maybe someone will fix it in a mod.

Look: Fallout 4 isn't a bad game. I don't regret spending a hundred hours in it, and I definitely got a significant amount of solid entertainment out of those hours. But the next time a Bethesda game makes me choose which milquetoast faction to ally myself with, I might just pick "none."

Better than: Assassin's Creed Revelations
Not as good as: Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, naturally The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
And despite all my whining: I'm still looking forward to discovering new stories in the Far Harbor and Nuka World DLCs.

Progress: Helped the Railroad nuke the Institute.

Rating: Good

I waited too long to try Baldur's Gate.

Even in its slightly-more-current Enhanced Edition, this definitely feels like a 20-year-old game. The character creator is onerous, the tutorials are clunky, the UI is a tad byzantine, and the world just ... doesn't seem interesting. I'd have been willing to tolerate the former problems, but the game's opening minutes weren't compelling enough -- all mechanical dialogs and banal fetch-quests.

I get that the setting and characters might become more engaging later on, but I'm not interested in spending hours slaying rats and twiddling with character pages just to get there. My expectations for immersive-world RPGs have been spoiled by more modern games like Witcher 3 and Skyrim.

Progress: Didn't make it out of the starting town.

The demo of Raji: An Ancient Epic shows off some sloppy story cutscenes, mediocre level design (far too easy to get lost), frustrating combat design (groups of enemies stunlock you to death), and a few abilities that just don't seem to control correctly.

So why am I interested in it? Because it's been ten years since Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, and even that felt like a shadow of the 3D PoP games.

I wouldn't say that Raji "nails" the pillar-climbing, wall-running, and monster-slashing spirit of the 2000s-era Prince of Persias, ... but it could be close enough. Here's hoping they polish this game up some more before release.

I normally shy away from demos for unfinished games - CrossCode left me hanging for years - but who would say no to an online-only festival? Or to a Metroidvania-styled sidescroller, at that?

And after a few minutes with Batbarian, I felt like this could be the game I wanted Chasm to be. Hand-crafted levels with precise platforms and traps, instead of procedurally-generated, boring filler; tight controls that don't make every enemy a struggle; and, while Batbarian's demo didn't show much of a story, it does show personality through humorous dialog.

And, you know, the usual -- experience points and level-ups, key items that enhance your abilities, hidden secrets behind breakable walls. For a pre-release demo, it already shows quite a lot of polish in how its secrets blend into the environment.

I'm still interested in what reviews will be like post-release, but Batbarian certainly has my attention.

Review 1 (paraphrased): Ori and the Will of the Wisps is heavily inspired by ideas and mechanics from Hollow Knight. It has customizable "shard" (pin) slots, it has an upgradeable sword, it has informative NPCs, it has tactical combat against diverse enemies and bosses, it even has an undergound environment infested with bugs.

And... that's cool, I guess. But it doesn't resolve my frustrations with the original game's punishing save system.

Review 2: "One element that factored into the original's difficulty, that's no longer present, was the option to manually generate your own save points. Instead, the sequel automatically does this for you. This is a much better solution that allows you to focus on the best parts of the game, rather than worrying about a bothersome mechanic that could potentially result in losing progress."

... you don't say?

This sequel evidently still has the kind of chase sequences I previously described as "bullshit," and maybe even more of the platforming mechanics I decried years ago. But the save-points change is a good one.

Playing A Game Yakuza 0 PC

I never expected to be more critical of a game than both Dunkey and Yahtzee, but, here we are.

Maybe they have a pre-existing attachment to the Yakuza franchise that I don't? At any rate, where they found Yakuza 0 charming in spite of its flaws, all I found was a bunch of slow, dull bullshit.

It's not quite the same situation that I recently lamented regarding Grand Theft Auto IV -- although Yakuza does have more than its fair share of uninteresting bowling-style minigames. Yakuza's dullness is more an artifact of its agonizing dialog pacing and verbosity.

Characters reiterate themselves in dialog, often multiple times, for seemingly no reason. They digress into unrelated tangential backstories way more often than is appropriate. And their speech is melodramatically slow and halting, which just compounds the issue of dialog scenes taking forever.

And the game doesn't use these slow storytelling tactics lightly -- of the game's opening 100 minutes, I would say 90+ of them are non-interactive, or barely-interactive (i.e. press A to continue). The overwhelming majority of Chapter 1 is in underwhelming cutscenes.

The inexplicable transitions that Yakuza 0 will make between low-, mid-, and high-detail cutscene rendering - often in the same scene - are just bizarre icing on this cake. Yeah, I get that the game is trying to tell a hard-boiled Japanese gangland thriller; but it's so slow and so poorly-told that I cannot stay interested in where it might go.

There are other things I could complain about in my relatively-brief time with Yakuza 0, but even the clunky controls or losing 40 minutes of progress (because I assumed there was an auto-save, before the game introduced its save-point phone booths) aren't as big of a deal as how sluggish and boring the storytelling is.

Other reviews seem to forgive Yakuza's extracurricular shortcomings because they dig the story. So for me, when I can't muster interest in that story... this game doesn't really stand a chance.

Progress: Got to Chapter 2

Rating: Meh
Playing A Game Windward PC

Windward is one of those long-since-backlogged titles where I can't even remember when I got it. I can imagine why, though: sailing the open seas, completing sidequests, and trading up for bigger and more powerful pirate ships should scratch the same itches as Rebel Galaxy or Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag did. What could go wrong?

Unfortunately, it seems I neglected to notice the "Procedural Generation" tag on this game -- and thus the implication that it has no cohesive plot or narrative. There are quests, and there are even "factions," but... there isn't an over-arching motive for why I should hoard enough money to buy more cannon portholes. Who am I and what am I doing here? ... just ferrying things from place to place, I guess?

Without a compelling introductory hook, and with no written characters (let alone character development), Windward feels less like a swashbuckling simulator and more like a port-trading simulator. Personally, I can't get engaged in such a world; if I don't have compatriots to impress, or villains to crush, the power fantasy is just too shallow.

Progress: Almost none.

Niko's story starts cinematically and moves very slowly; Luis's doesn't hesitate to throw you into firefights (or off of a building). Niko has difficulty accessing high-powered cars and guns; Luis has no problem picking up a supercar, or explosive shotgun shells. Niko's missions pissed me off with their infrequent and unforgiving checkpoints; Luis's missions have plenty of checkpoints and are a trivial inconvenience to retry.

(I still hate the shit out of losing my weapons when I'm arrested, but, whatevs. Being able to call up a Gun Van helps, too.)

The Ballad of Gay Tony is a bit on the short side, and it doesn't have the gravitas of Niko's personal tale of redemption and vengeance. But it still has some of the best action, storytelling, and sandbox mechanics of the GTA franchise, or really of any game.

I'm sure that graphical expecations will leave it behind eventually... but for its breakneck pacing and generous checkpointing, TBOGT holds up really well, ten years later.

Better than: Grand Theft Auto IV
Not as good as: eh... The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt?
It'd be a real shame: if the upcoming re-launch loses the rights to Vladivostok FM's club music.

Progress: Finished the main missions, none of the side missions.

Rating: Awesome