2022's First Triple-Threat (Halo Infinite, Pokemon Legends: Arceus, and OlliOlli World)

Howdy Folks, it's been a hot minute since I last reviewed something, huh? What with the last thing I put out being the best of 2021? Well, I've actually been spending most of this year moving from an apartment to a house, so that has preoccupied a lot of my free time that I might have otherwise spent getting caught up on my writing, so I'm very behind! Now that I've gotten settled in my new dwelling, I've decided to get caught up as soon as possible by reviewing the three games currently in my backlog before I finish Elden Ring and have to tackle that monster. So, these are gonna be short ones, probably the shortest reviews I've done in a long time, but I'd like to get them all done so I can be more on top of things from here on out. With this article, I'm going to order the topics by the order in which I played them, meaning we're obviously starting off with Halo: Infinite.

Available for: Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows

Reviewed for: Microsoft Windows

I, like many Halo fans, have played all the mainline games except for the fifth one. I think it's safe to say that ever since the keys to the kingdom were given to 343, the franchise has largely suffered from a clear lack of vision. Halo 4's enemies and levels were boring as all get-out, Halo 5 infamously had most of the runtime dedicated to a new spartan that nobody asked for, and with Halo Infinite, it seemed like the grand vision 343 were going for this time was...an open world. Despite the recent Ubisoft-initiated decline in the quality of open world games, Halo has always excelled in vehicular combat, so the switch to an open world wasn't quite as worrying, since in my mind, the vehicular combat could easily be adapted to this format in a satisfying way. But still, there were doubts just because 343 was involved. So, how did the underdog who never wins do this time? Well, it's their best work to-date, but it's still lacking in some crucial ways. 

I forget which youtuber said it, but I'll paraphrase it here: 343 just doesn't know how to write a Halo story. It seems like they always miss the point, which is evident in the near-romantic treatment of Cortana by Master Chief in their first project, Halo 4. In the original trilogy, they had a close-knit relationship based on trust, but I never got the sense that Master Chief was actually in love with her or vice-versa. But beyond often missing the point in their stories, their villains are constantly taken out of Marvel's worst films. Take the Didact from Halo 4 and Escheram from this game, then compare them to the prophet of Truth from Halo 2. You'll likely see the difference instantly. Basically, the story in Halo: Infinite is bad. It's all build-up and no payoff. The entire runtime, there's this sinister force hinted at that's way worse than even the flood, and the bad guys are trying to bring that force back...but they don't, so there are basically no stakes. With that in mind, the ending is such clear sequel-bait that it renders the entire plot up until this point meaningless. So, if you go into Halo games for both the story and gameplay like a lot of folks do, this isn't going to be satisfying.

On the other hand, Halo Infinite nails it where it truly matters: the gameplay. The gameplay on display here is phenomenally good. It's largely the gameplay you're used to: pick up the gun, point the gun at the alien, shoot the alien, rinse and repeat, but this time with the added addition of one of the best grappling hooks ever implemented into a game. This grappling hook opens up so many possibilities for fast-paced moment-to-moment gameplay. Is your gun out of ammo? No problem, just use the grappling hook to pick up a new weapon off the ground and instantly equip it. Need to get behind cover FAST? No problem, just aim behind the cover with the hook and get instantly swept there. Just want to do something badass? No problem, just grapple an explosive container to you and throw it, or better yet, shoot an enemy with the hook, ready a punch, and land on them with explosive force. It's the already excellent combat formula that set a new standard back in the day, and this one addition makes it shine even brighter. Because this is an open world game, you often find yourself coming across enemy patrols, and unlike in other games, I would always take the opportunity to get into a fight just because of how fun the gameplay was! Unfortunately, while the bosses here are certainly exciting to fight, they're all, with only a couple exceptions, markedly unfair. The artificial difficulty slider is set so high on these guys that it becomes legitimately nonsensical and infuriating. Brute bosses all have jump attacks that lock onto your movements and have a hit radius that defies reason. Elite bosses will act like an asshole pvp player and just charge you with an energy sword the whole time. I played this game on normal, heroic, and legendary difficulty. Yes, I somehow managed to git gud enough to beat most of these bosses on the hardest difficulty where the unfairness is at an all time high. I even got through the final level. But the final boss, who summons waves of enemies and has unpredictable heat seeking attacks, was simply too random and too unfair for me to beat, even having come that far. Every boss marks a significant difficulty spike, and not because they're tests of your skill.

Unfortunately, the negatives continue into the game's level design....well, not the design of the open world, because that works, but rather the design of basically every story mission in the game. I'd say a good 90% of the game's plot takes place in forerunner ruins. Forerunner ruins have always been the worst part of any Halo game, and that's the majority of what you'll be looking at if all you do is the main story. What's worse, a lot of it is legitimately copy-pasted. Whatever work 343 were doing to warrant a delay when this game was supposed to be selling the Xbox Series X/S, it wasn't to touch up the level design for sure. 

Unfortunately, it's simply been too long since I last played this game to remember much about the technical side of things. The graphics aren't incredible, but I'm a Dragon Age fan, so I can't throw stones unless it's really bad. In addition, sometimes npc soldiers will spaz out when you're placing an order for a vehicle and dodge right under it and die, but that's hardly a dealbreaker. Other than those things, I simply can't remember if I experienced any framerate drops or what not. I believe I would remember a hard crash, so maybe this game is just a little buggy...but take my word with a grain of salt.

Folks, at this point, if you were going to buy Halo: Infinite, chances are good you've already done so. But I always like to not be lazy and put my stuff out there just in case you're someone waiting to get an Xbox X/S who doesn't have a PC. This game is 100% worth your money for the gameplay alone, just realize that it isn't going to burn the world down and rebirth it from the ashes or anything like that. 

Let us review:

Bad story, insulting ending - 1.0

Artificial boss difficulty - 1.0

The final score for Halo Infinite is...

8.0/10 - Good

Decent work, 343, decent work

Available for: Nintendo Switch

Reviewed for: Nintendo Switch

As as longtime Pokemon fan, I'm not against the tried-and-true formula that GameFreak have been relying on for years. I was even a fan of Sword/Shield, though it was far from perfect (besides, it made up for that fact by finally trashing the national dex). That being said, whether a given fan is on the side of "needs" or "would like," everyone can agree that Pokemon was well-overdue for a breath of fresh air. Thankfully, we now have Pokemon Legends: Arceus, and it's that aforementioned breath we've all been waiting for, though it too is far from perfect.

Let's start off with easily the worst part of the game: the story and characters. Let me just say this is the worst story in all of Pokemon history. GameFreak really tries to make it seem like there are stakes, but every time they try, they almost immediately sweep it under the rug. There comes a point where there's an important betrayal, and after one battle, this person takes back their betrayal and says they were totally wrong. It's always been a bit of a plothole in these games that if you beat an evil team in battles, they give up their criminal activities, but this is a whole new level! Like the story, the characters aren't that interesting. There's some degree of charm in seeing the designs and seeing the differences and similarities between these characters and the Diamond/Pearl/Platinum characters that they're the ancestors of, but that's pretty much it. 

The gameplay, however, is where Arceus shines. Battles are still the same turn-based affairs we're all familiar with, but with a crucial tweak in the balancing that makes battles far more tense than they ever have been. As Dunkey said in his review, a Pokemon 10 levels below yours can still deal serious damage, and every battle is over quickly. What this means in practice is that you'll spend maybe a minute at most in any given trainer battle, less than a minute in a given wild encounter, and as a result, the vast majority of the time is spent prowling the overworld, where the biggest (and most beneficial) change to the formula comes into play. For a longtime fan like myself, Arceus is exactly the kind of thing I've been wanting from a Pokemon game all my life. Not only do the creatures move around in the overworld, but they can be caught without entering a battle just like in the anime! Beyond simply fulfilling the dream of every child who grew up with Pokemon, GameFreak managed to make the act of the catching satisfying in its own right. You select the Pokeball you want to use from a miniature menu at the bottom right of your screen, ready the ball with the left bumper button, then throw it at the Pokemon you want to catch with the right bumper. The process is smooth, simple, and comes with just the right sound effects and the correct amount of rumble to make the catching process come to life. Catching Pokemon has never been more satisfying than it is here, but it does have a bit of a caveat to it. Because the catching process is so satisfying, I began to resent having to resort to battles with wild Pokemon. See, certain kinds of Pokemon become agitated if you fail to catch them or if they see you, and in these cases, you can only catch them by entering into a battle. I began to feel actively annoyed by this every time it happened because I'd become so spoiled by the ability to just throw Pokeballs around willy-nilly. It's not a deal-breaker by any stretch of the imagination, but I did find it irritating. 

From a technical standpoint, there's not really a lot to talk about. There's some amount of texture pop-in, larger Pokemon in the distance tend to move at choppier framerates, and the game is just kinda ugly to look at, but as with all presentation-based technical issues, I have to fall back on my status as a fan of Dragon Age: Origins and say that I can't complain unless it's distractingly bad, which this isn't.

Like Halo Infinite, I believe that if you were going to pick up Arceus, you would've done so already. But again, on the off chance that you're still waiting to get your hands on a Switch, I'll say this: If you're a longtime fan of this franchise, I believe you'll enjoy yourself, and if you're totally new, then maybe this title will help you see what all the fuss is about!

Let us review:

Subpar story and characters - 0.5

Resentment of wild battles - 0.5

Small technical concerns - 0.3

The final score for Pokemon Legends: Arceus is...

8.7/10 - Fantastic

Great work, GameFreak, great work!

Available for: Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Windows, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S

Reviewed for: Microsoft Windows

Not once in my life have I seen a skater on the street land a trick. They always try to flip the board or something, and without fail, they always fail....and I always laugh at them. Despite having an emo phase in high school, I was never a skater kid, so naturally, I've never had any interest in the sport on any level. But then along came OlliOlli World, a skating game that had promising gameplay trailers. These days I try to broaden my horizons wherever I can, so because this game looked fun, I figured I'd give it a shot. The result? I can safely say that OlliOlli World is one of the most fun games I've played this year!

OlliOlli World takes place in the skate-centric land of Radlandia, a domain watched over by the Skate Godz (not a typo). Every once in a while, the Skate Godz seek out a skater to take the position of a Skate Wizard: a brand of skater that, as the introductory cutscene puts it, is both rad and gnar! You are the most recent candidate to try and take on this position, so your goal is to nail all the important skate locations/festivals/forests/etc across Radlandia, impress each of the Skate Godz, and go down in history! So there isn't much moment-to-moment plot, but the overall concept is more than charming enough to make up for that. Accompanying this story is a small cast of 1-dimensional (but still imminently likable) characters who serve to pepper in a little bit more life into the world. However, if you just want to Skate, you can choose to skip all the world building and just have fun.

And have fun, you will, even if you're like me and you have no interest in this sport. Gameplay is more-or-less a sidescrolling affair in which your character flies swiftly along rails and paintings and the like, and the ultimate goal of each course (aside from completing it) is to rack up as high a score as you can. Your score is dependent on pulling off as many tricks as possible without just landing on the ground with your board, all the while avoiding obstacles that'll send you back to your last checkpoint. There are countless tricks you can pull off that you'll likely be pressing every button on your controller in some of the harder courses. Each course has a couple of extra tidbits: besides the basic requirement of completing the level, you also can earn cosmetic items by completing the level in one try (in other words, without using checkpoints), beating the scores of three local heroes, and completing three specific challenges (such as "cross three gaps in one combo"). In addition, certain levels offer access to side quests, which are extra challenging courses with unique rewards such as brand new board styles. As I already implied, this gameplay is fast, and as such, it takes some getting used to. This clearly isn't a game meant for people who are new to skating, so a lot of the jargon will likely go over your head at first. Like most skill-based games, practice makes perfect, so if you're going to pick this game up, understand that you're going to be failing a lot at the starts of each progressively-harder corner of Radlandia. But as you get better and better at the game, you'll find yourself able to pull off sicker and sicker combos, so as the game becomes more challenging, it also becomes infinitely more satisfying to challenge yourself to fit as many tricks as possible into what little airtime you can squeeze out of a course. And with this in mind, when you go back to prior courses to try and improve your scores, you find new, cooler ways to handle certain jumps that you wouldn't have thought to do before learning how to do one of the new tricks you learned recently. I've found myself going back to levels that initially had me beet red from frustration and reveling in the progressively higher and higher scores I've been able to rack up on more than one occasion. That's how rewarding the simple act of playing and getting better at this game is, to say nothing of the cosmetic rewards you get. I never used any of the cosmetics I got, so for me it was all about watching that score go up, but if you're the kind of person who enjoys those kinds of things, this game will be all the more rewarding for you! If I had to list some negatives, they'd be pretty small, but noteworthy nonetheless. For starters, there's the learning gap in terms of the jargon. I'd see challenges that might as well have said "do three pip-plops and five doodly-doos and then biff-baff on the flip-flop without ding-a-darying all in one combo" for all I could understand. In addition, there are some times when the game can feel a little random. I'd fail a jump 50 times and then nail it after jumping off seemingly from the same point where I'd tried jumping off the past 50 times, and this is a common occurrence in some of the harder levels. Eventually muscle memory starts to kick in, but I cannot for the life of me tell you how I continue to beat some of these levels. On that same subject, the randomness seems to extend to some of the challenges. I would think I had successfully landed an advanced trick in front of the specified crowd, for instance, and I wouldn't get credit for it, or I would think I'd successfully ridden the whole painting that a challenge demanded, only to get to the end and once again not get credit. So, there are times when the game feels like it has a little screw loose. Not a large screw, but a little one that makes things just a tad bit flimsier than I would've liked.

What doesn't feel flimsy, on the other hand, is the technical side of things. The graphical style is very indie, so it doesn't offend or impress, but what does impress is the smooth technical performance. For the speed of the levels and the amount of stuff you could be doing at any given moment, a lesser game's framerate might crumble under the weight. But in OlliOlli World, every single second of the gameplay runs at a consistently good framerate and never once buckles. Furthermore, restarts after failing are instantaneous, meaning that failure in no way halts the momentum of this game. For some of the harder courses, this consistent restart speed is a godsend that prevents any further frustration from happening.

This is the one game in this article that I believe you might not have heard of, so I get to end this review off without saying you've probably already gotten it if you were going to get it! Speaking as someone who still has no interest in skating, I can say that if you enjoy good, fast-paced gameplay where you get to see continuous results from improvement, you'll have a good time. You'll have to feel like Steve Buscemi in his infamous meme where he's holding a skateboard for a little while, but it'll be worth it. I simply can't remember the last sport-centric game I played that I enjoyed this much. In fact, I doubt I've played one that was this fun in the first place! As you can already guess, every game in this article comes with a recommendation from me, but of all of them, I think OlliOlli World would be the one I recommend the most.

Let us review:

Gameplay nitpicks + jargon: - 0.3

The final score for OlliOlli World is...

9.7/10 - Nearly Perfect

Excellent work, Roll7, excellent work!

Well, that was the first triple-threat of the year! See you next time for Elden Ring!