All the recent news about Assassin's Creed installments got me a bit antsy for some open-world throat-slitting, and the Freedom Cry expansion/vignette for Black Flag happened to be on sale for a few bucks. Unfortunately, a few hours later, I'm still left wanting and unsatisfied.

Freedom Cry is a precise subset of Black Flag: less missions, less weapons, less ship upgrades, less sailing destinations, less keynote features. Almost everything is unlocked using the "freed slaves" count, obviating other features like harpooning and hunting/skinning. There are no scattered bits of lore to collect, only some treasure chests filled with money (which is all but meaningless). There are no naval forts to fight. There's only one "town" island, Port-au-Prince, and it's tiny compared to even the smallest town from AC4; other islands are either one-off plantations, or empty destinations with a single treasure chest. Black Flag's optional extras like Assassin missions, rune puzzles, legendary ship battles -- all of those are missing. There are no sea shanties!

The story of Adewale covered in Freedom Cry is ... not really interesting. It begins after his engagement with Edward, so Ade's potentially-fascinating origins are only mentioned in the Animus database, never shown or explored. He engages with two other characters of note, but not long enough for any of them to build anything meaningful. And the ending is pretty flat. Just, dull.

As in AC3's King Washington DLC, there is no real-world/modern-day content in Freedom Cry. I guess that's sort of a wash.

Freedom Cry isn't "bad," being well-served by the solid sailing and assassinating foundations of Black Flag. But it is simply anemic with content. There isn't enough depth or breadth in Freedom Cry for it to engage on the same level as Eddie Kenway's maritime adventures.

Better than: "The Infamy" opening chapter of Assassin's Creed III: The Tyranny of King Washington
Not as good as: "The Redemption" closing chapter of Assassin's Creed III: The Tyranny of King Washington
At least: it has a much shorter name.

Progress: Finished the story, 92% synchronization.

Other than the Blizzard RTS custom maps that inspired the genre, I hadn't actually played a "MOBA" until just recently. So what surprised me about League of Legends is how much it still feels like those strategy games -- with a focus on hero units, coins instead of raw resources, and character upgrades instead of base-building.

It's not necessarily a bad thing, since the gameplay is utterly familiar and easily accessible as a result; one of the more advanced tutorial topics is "fog of war." It seems like the steepest part of the learning curve will just be accumulating an internal encyclopedia (brainpedia?) of the game's many heroes' talents and abilities. At the same time, I can't help but feel a little bit disappointed. If this is all I've been missing - which is really indistinguishable from what you could make in, for instance, a StarCraft II map - then the current MOBA craze just seems dumb.

But, the game is pretty fun just the same, just as the original DOTA/etc maps were. And I do admire the League of Legends business model, which charges for access to most characters, but is still perfectly playable without spending anything. It's not all that different from having a free demo, then inviting enthusiastic players to purchase more content if they're into it.

Progress: Level 3.

I want to like Killer Is Dead. But it isn't making this easy.

From the start, the game is inscrutable in pretty much every way. The introductory scene is a total non-sequitor. The dialog and interactions don't explain anything, and it isn't even clear if this is due to awkward translation, or some kind of haiku-like storytelling technique, or what. The graphics are so over-oversaturated that it's sometimes legitimately hard to tell where on-screen elements begin and end. And then when the scene is over, wait, that was the first episode? There's a world-map menu? But I can't navigate anywhere except the next mission? What's going on?

At least that last mystery has started to clear up a bit -- after the third episode/mission, there's finally more than one map choice (some bonus missions start to unlock), and a between-missions management menu becomes available. But the plot and the overall world logic are still baffling. This is narrative obfuscation on the level of Killer7 and Flower, Sun, and Rain. Yeah. It's weird.

Finally, there's the actual gameplay. I've been in a handful of basic combat encounters, which seem to just be button-mashing sessions that don't require all that much mashing. And I've also done one boss fight, which was much more mechanically interesting, but showed how awkward the blocking and dodging controls can be. Some combat moves require not only having two buttons pressed at the same time, but pressing them simultaneously, which is ... irritating, so far. I wonder if I'll be able to develop this skill set over time, or if it will really remain this frustrating.

I'll admit that at this point, I'm only really playing Killer Is Dead because of Goichi Suda's track record. But my waning opinion of Grasshopper's post-NMH games, Shadows of the Damned and Lollipop Chainsaw, is not looking anxious to reverse itself.

Progress: Finished Episode 3.

Sequence [later renamed "Before the Echo"] is probably the most complicated game I've seen that also isn't interesting at all.

It's a rhythm/RPG hybrid, in the same way that Puzzle Quest is a matching/RPG hybrid: actions, like attacking, are performed by matching notes as they drop down. (Well, not "notes," but Dance Dance Revolution step-arrows, for some reason.) Okay, that's only two types of gameplay, not that hard to manage-- well, except that there are three different "lanes" to watch, which must be switched and focused on one at a time. One of them builds up spellcasting mana; one of them casts spells (and failure means a loss of mana with no effect); and one of them prevents damage, as in, not switching to and succeeding in this lane causes damage. All of these are potentially going at the same time. It's like The World Ends with You, but with three screens instead of two.

So I was already a little confounded by the time I finished the tutorial. Well, I thought I had finished the tutorial. Then the game started belting out all this stuff about items. And crafting! And keys, and, yeah. No thank you.

The kicker is that the game's production values, which might have compelled me to at least tolerate it a little longer, are really no good. The art is bland, including the in-combat art, which actually makes the gameplay appear more dull. And scenes inbetween combat are filled with poorly-written, poorly-acted dialog that's often painful to listen to. If these characters were real people, I would make up an excuse to get away from them.

Progress: Got to the "safe room."

Well, this is a disappointment. SteamWorld Dig comes out swinging with an enchanting art style and simple platforming mechanics, and some exploratory digging mixed in for good measure; the stage is set, here, for some kind of Metroid/Red Faction hybrid, set in a bizarre steampunk wild west. It seems like an insanely creative idea on all sides.

But that font of creativity slows to a trickle after only a few minutes. Your first pickaxe upgrade allows you to mine denser material; the second merely allows you to mine faster. So does the third, and the fourth, and (I think?) the fifth, or whatever the last one I got was. You find new abilities, very slowly, that make little to no difference in the moment-to-moment gameplay. You gather minerals, worth money, that you can slowly accumulate for minor upgrades. And you get those upgrades (and replenish your light source) by regularly returning to the surface -- meaning that you'll have to frequently interrupt your dig to climb all* the way back up to the surface.

* Or, at least some of the way. There appear to be teleport-checkpoints that limit how much you have to climb. But this limit is still way too much.

Digging is the primary focus of the game. You have to dig down, to find plot-relevant caves with upgrade-things in them, and to find better minerals for more money for new upgrades. In theory it's a fine progression mechanism, but the amount of digging you have to do to get anywhere is just too much. And the tedium around the digging - climbing back up, turning in minerals, descending back down, over, and over, and over again - is dull.

It may well be that later parts of the game are more exciting. But that's my whole problem with SteamWorld Dig: it seems utterly ignorant of how boring the general gameplay surrounding its key features is. Repeatedly digging holes and jumping out of them, is not, in itself, a fun time.

Better than: Blocks That Matter
Not as good as: Minecraft: Java Edition
Probably not as good as: Terraria, unless you don't have any friends, in which case it might be pretty close.

Progress: Didn't quite get to the third "cave."

One of my fondest memories of childhood gaming was from X-Wing, taking down a Star Destroyer with my scrappy little fighter. (For whatever reason, my memory of the same in Rogue Squadron is not as clear. Maybe because of how infrequent it was in those games? Hard to say.) If the archetypal video game is about empowerment, and hence about overcoming an imbalance of power, then this kind of small-craft-vs-capital-ship combat is the epitome of spaceflight games.

I bring this up because Strike Suit Zero, separate from its great dogfighting mechanics and enthralling mission scenarios, completely nails this concept. In the beginning, my allies and I trembled in fear at the sight of enemy Frigates; by the end, with polished tactics and upgraded space-torpedoes, I was eating them for breakfast -- and salivating at the Cruisers and Carriers behind them. Late campaign missions gradually ramp up the challenge with more and bigger and crazier capital ships, bristling with offensive batteries, swarming with protective fighters, and I was all too happy to blow all of them up with my plucky little (highly-upgraded) flying space robot.

This meta-narrative, of reversing the balance of power, is probably just as significant a part of the campaign as the written story. And it's a good thing, because the written story by itself is not exceptionally strong. It's premised in some really good hard sci-fi, and in general, the performances of the game's characters are convincing and interesting; but there are enough situations where the story falters - by going off on an unnecessary tangent, or awkwardly pausing the pacing a bit too long - that the story overall falls just short of "captivating." To its credit, though, SSZ rarely makes the mistake of thinking that its static storytelling is more important than the gameplay; it excels at mid-mission narration, and at nudging the plot along with mid-mission chatter and events.

That's the "original" campaign, from Strike Suit Zero proper. It needs to be distinguished from the Heroes of the Fleet "campaign" added in the Director's Cut, because the two are very different beasts. In fact, I would hesitate to call Heroes a campaign at all -- it's more of a collection of bonus missions. The missions themselves are exciting and exhilirating, continuing to ramp up the difficulty past the main campaign's end. But they don't add anything of value to the established narrative, and the collection only tells the barest story of its own, practically unrelated to the main space-opera setting.

I've brought up the game's difficulty a couple times, and while I would overall call it a well-tuned balance of encouraging mastery and allowing mistakes, there are a few caveats that bear mentioning. For one, on a few occasions I did essentially "cheat" mission objectives by failing and restarting at a checkpoint, with refilled health and weapons. A number of the game's missions are relatively-lengthy multi-phase affairs, and it's not uncommon to narrowly squeak out a victory only to be confronted by an even greater challenge immediately afterward. It's also pretty evident that, without offensive and defensive upgrades - which are earned by completing extra objectives in each mission - some of the late game's challenges would be much, much more difficult. I went out of my way to collect all the upgrades, so as a result I'm not sure that I experienced the game's "intended" level of challenge.

But it's a moot point, because I felt challenged enough to get really into the game, and I was also having enough fun that I never got too burned-out to keep playing. I even had a blast replaying missions to unlock upgrades, and to try different approaches to the same combat scenarios. Each ship has its own unique combat style, and each equippable weapon adds yet another dimension to the fight, switching up advantages and disadvantages like range, speed, and pure firepower. There is a wealth of possibility in playing and replaying Strike Suit Zero's diverse, well-designed mission encounters with these different permutations.

SSZ is a triumph of an indie production, and - while not perfect - a standout genre entry as well. This is a franchise I'd love to see more from. (Excepting the likes of Strike Suit Infinity, which as a pure dogfight simulator, without any campaign whatsoever, comes across more like an Oculus Rift tech demo.)

Better than: any other similar title I'm able to remember
Not as good as: it would be with a more serious campaign storyline (but it's pretty damn close)
And the soundtrack: is basically perfect. Oh, this guy composed the Homeworld soundtrack, too? Badass.

Progress: Finished the original campaign and the Heroes of the Fleet missions on Normal.

When was the last time I played a spaceflight/dogfighting game? According to Glog records, it's been like, eight or ten years. Wow. I can't really say with authority if good games in this genre still get made often; I really haven't been paying attention, since this game type was never at the top of my list. But I'm definitely glad that I gave Strike Suit Zero a shot, because it reminds me of all the things I loved in those past games.

The titular mechanic of SSZ is a transforming ship a'la Robotech: Battlecry, but I wouldn't really call this combat modality the focus of the game. Rather, transformation is more of an intermittent flavoring on top of an X-Wing- and TIE Fighter-styled combat sim. There are fighters and interceptors to chase, capital ships to strategically target, enemy objectives to destroy, and friendly objectives to protect; the comm-channel banter with allies even has all the right space-military trappings ("Copy that!"). The HUD is informative without being overcomplicated, easily indicating relevant targets and current status, and the controls (with a twin-stick controller, anyway) are joyously intuitive -- with the slight exception of some occasionally-frustrating auto-targeting. All the fundamentals are here, and they're all done very well.

Strike Suit Zero also has a pretty impressive space-opera setting, showing inspiration from both western and anime tropes. But the narrative is sort of a mixed bag, with a balance of skilled and awkward writing, and good and bad voice acting to go with it. And some story bits, especially the introductory exposition, are more long-winded than they need to be. The overall atmosphere of the game feels best when you ignore the characters and words that make it up, which is a bit unfortunate.

The graphical presentation, too, has its highs and lows. Lighting and special effects, i.e. space explosions, are a spectacle to behold. But whenever there are breaks in the action, the low-polygon models and low-detail textures are a bit too obvious. It's a shame, because aside from these kinds of cracks in the veneer, Strike Suit Zero looks much better than you'd expect from a self-publishing indie.

Ignoring those imperfections, I'm having quite a bit of fun with Strike Suit Zero so far. Space, robots, lasers, missiles, explosions -- I mean, it ticks all the necessary boxes, without even breaking a sweat.

N.B.: Evidently, Strike Suit Zero and its Director's Cut are fairly different games: the Director's Cut includes additional content, but is also at feature-parity with the console ports, missing some of the original PC version's graphical polish. At least, that's what I've read on the interweb; past its rocky launch period, it's hard to get a straight story about this. Point being, SSZ and the Director's Cut are different in ways that may, or may not, be significant. I think. Maybe.

Progress: Finished Mission 5 of the original campaign.

It's high time - wow, almost three years after the pre-release demo - I accept that I won't be finishing Trine 2.

My inability to focus on making headway in the game can largely be attributed to the controls. Back in the first Trine, the floaty platforming and shoddy hit-detection were grudgingly acceptable -- the cost of doing business with the game's super-cool physics-based puzzles. Now? They're just anachronistically unpolished. Not even Trine 2's gorgeous environments are distracting enough when I keep failing to land a jump, or when I hit obstacles that I absolutely shouldn't have hit.

But even more than the controls and physics, I just can't stay interested in Trine 2. Sure it looks "good," but it isn't very ... visually engaging. Plants, stone arches, orcs, some tunnels; it's all very stereotypical and trite. There's an utter lack of stand-out moments, and even the puzzle elements feel repetitive, with frequent re-use of move-this-thing-to-this-place non-challenges. The skill trees and level-ups are pretty neat, but otherwise the whole experience is just dull.

I think this would be more fun with more people, in a party-style situation, with alcohol and random wizard attacks. Barring that, I can't see myself mustering up to yet another attempt on Trine 2.

Progress: About midway through the swamp, this time.

In case it wasn't obvious from the past few weeks of rapid-fire glogging, I'm presently trying to burn through my backlog. No mercy; no remorse. I've been making it a point to target smaller games, and/or ones I expect to get fed up with quickly. In that respect, BattleBlock Theater is ... something of an anomaly.

I made the purchase based on interweb recommendation, but other than hilarious narration, I really had no idea what to expect going in. It looks like a multi-agent battle arena? Or some kind of platform-puzzle game, ala Blocks That Matter? In fact, BattleBlock Theater is a platformer -- and the reason that this isn't visually clear, is because it's a non-traditional platformer, in many ways. You'll drown in water blocks, but lava blocks aren't fatal, and in fact propel you to new heights. There are enemies, but jumping on them doesn't tend to hurt you, or them; in fact, you can ride them like platforms. There is a context-specific control for paddling your hand in the water, in order to draw a boat toward you. Yeah, it's, bizarre.

But it works! Actually playing the game, it's clear that this is a movement-oriented platformer with fresh and creative mobility challenges. Collecting gems and navigating to the end of a level is a unique and fun exercise in exploring the game's varied, wacky movement mechanics. And while early levels are simple, it isn't long before they get pretty challenging, between mazes of deadly obstacles (with thankfully-forgiving checkpoints) and time limits that turn some levels into hectic races against the clock.

So, BattleBlock turned out to surprise and impress me with its clever design. And, it is fairly fun, in general. But the catch is that - not unlike Behemoth's previous games, Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers - it's just a bit too repetitive. New mechanics aren't introduced quite fast enough, and variations on existing mechanics iterate a tad too slowly. The number of levels in a chapter seems high, and the differences between them seem low, given they block progress through the game's story. (And for what it's worth, the story cutscenes, while very funny, also feel like they drag on.)

And there is a glut of content in this game, evidently, somewhere on the order of 100-150 levels over eight chapters. Unfortunately, that's the punchline for me. I'm already getting a little bored with the level design, only one chapter in; so I know that I'll get tired and resentful of the game long before reaching the end.

BattleBlock Theater is a very cool idea, and I'm glad I played of it what I did. But, I'm also perfectly content to stop at this fairly early point, rather than trying harder and harder to squeeze enjoyment out of it as the story proceeds.

That said, the prospect of multiplayer co-op here sounds pretty appealing, as well -- so maybe I'll be back, with a friend, later on.

Progress: Finished Chapter 1, started Chapter 2.

Granted, I played it out of its release-date sequence -- but New Super Mario Bros. 2 just feels indefensibly not-new. The "New" SMB formula has run its course. And this installment's unique feature - excessive coin-collecting - just isn't that interesting. The moment-to-moment gameplay feels stale and sterile.

Also, I don't seem to be able to tolerate the 3DS's physical buttons as much as I used to. At least not in a realtime platforming context. Not sure why it's different now, but, holding 'Y' and pressing 'B' intermittently feels strangely uncomfortable.

Progress: Finished the first world mid-boss, collected 893 coins.