End of Year Catch Up

Hello friends! As you may or may not know, I use December 1st as my cutoff date for the GOTY lists. That means that I stop playing new things and take time to go back and spend some more time with titles I've already played. It's also then that I start making the final decisions for each of the end of year lists. However, this year I find myself yet again more than a little bit behind on my reviewing and I need scores in place to make the final calculations. So, though it pains me to do it, I'm going to once again tackle what's left on my backlog in a completely fanfareless rapid fire style. 

God of War: Ragnarok

This is the one that's the most painful to have to review in this way, given how high it's likely to score on several GOTY lists for me, but it is what it is. This is 2018's God of War reboot but better in almost every way. The gameplay is given even more bells and whistles while not becoming overwhelming. I've heard folks say that the story isn't as tight as the original, and that's true, but at the same time it avoids one of my complaints about the original. That is to say the moment-to-moment plot isn't made up entirely of "oops, path is blocked, let's go somewhere else" moments. Speaking of my complaints about the original, there's far more enemy, boss, and miniboss variety on display here. The writing, cutscene direction, everything that made God of War excellent is back in even fuller force. But here's the thing...even if every aspect of Ragnarok was of the exact same quality as the original, it would still be a better game by sheer virtue of the fact that they removed the Niflheim roguelike section, which was the worst part of the original. There are some small bugs like Kratos' axe becoming invisible when he holds it in the weapons menu and the map button taking multiple presses to register that you want to go to your map and not your weapon menu, but nothing major like crashes or actual glitches in gameplay. 

9.8/10

Valkyrie Elysium

The second of the two games set in Norse Mythology in this article is...not quite at the same level as Ragnarok, but it's a respectable spectacle fighter! In this marketingless release from Square Enix, you play as one of Odin's loyal Valkyries charged with retrieving a handful of McGuffins from Midgard. On your journey, you recruit Einherjar to join your cause and gradually uncover the not at all shocking truth about Odin. So yeah, the story and characters aren't worth writing home about, but gameplay is king in this game. Styled after the original God of War and Devil May Cry games, gameplay in Valkyrie Elysium consists of using a staggering amount of weapons to build combos and pull off incredibly stylish maneuvers. In addition to the weapons, you use spells of various elemental types to hit enemy weaknesses as well as summon your noble Einherjar to fight alongside you. Lets say you're using a spear, as I often did. When things get insane and there are several enemies on screen, you'll be flying across the screen doing things like throwing it in a helicopter rotor pattern or sliding across the floor, pole vaulting off of it, and kicking an enemy in the face. No two weapons operate the same, so there's a lot of room for experimentation! Now, I should mention that I may be overselling the effect. It's definitely a lot of fun, and you definitely do all that cool stuff, but the game overall has this incredibly low-budget feel (probably because it did, in fact, have a low budget). In addition, the game is needlessly old-school with its checkpoint mechanic, limiting you to manual save locations. But if you like some good, mindless action, don't sleep on this sleeper hit from Square!

8.0/10

Pokemon Scarlet

Hoooooooooo boy. Gameplay-wise, this may very well be my favorite Pokemon game of all time. But the technical state is simply unforgivable. 100% unstable framerate, constant pop-in right in front of your face, camera clipping through the world, ugly textures, every problem you can think of is here. What's more, I didn't like hardly any of the new Pokemon...Orthworm and Annihilape are probably the only ones. Everything else is just completely bizzare, and the typings are ambitious in one or two, but most are just lazy. That alongside the new evolution method of walking in the overworld with certain Pokemon (which I hated), and there's just not a lot to recommend here unless you're like me and you just want another Pokemon adventure.

6.0/10