I mean, I’d agree with you, but Horizon Zero Dawn - or something like Shadow of the Colossus, to go even further in that direction - required specific mechanics to take down larger enemies, a sense of tactics or puzzle-solving rather than just ‘pour bullets into them, over and over’. I’d definitely put what Outriders…

That’s fair, and some of it may be the fact that I wasn’t really upgrading the gear at all; I was just using whatever was highest, which I tend to do in games like this, because it gives me an excuse to play with pretty much everything. (Then, by the time I get to the endgame, I know what I like and what I don’t,…

See, as someone who did more or less that - playing on the highest world tier I had unlocked until I hit a wall, then knocking it down for a fight or two until I felt capable of climbing up again - I kind of wonder if I wouldn’t have had more fun just... staying at tier 3. Maybe it was just my build, but the…

Ha! Fair enough; to each their own. I’d honestly say that the guns and the mods have almost opposite issues - the mods all feel very distinct, in that ash, say, feels distinct from freeze, and ‘bone explosion on a kill’ feels different from ‘anomaly explosion on a kill’. But at the end of the day, mechanically, they’re…

Well thought out! I’d agree with most of your points, for sure; I generally consider ‘more enemies’ to be more fun than ‘fewer enemies with higher health’, so that one wouldn’t necessarily be on my list. Same for spawns - I think what you’re saying is accurate, I just don’t consider needing your ‘head on swivel’ to be…

I think that’s definitely what they’re going for, but it just feels so scattershot that none of the different approaches they’re taking to that basic premise really take root - especially since so few of those narrative ‘arcs’ actually wrap up. Instead, it just comes off like basic knee-jerk cynicism to me -…

Solid review; I mostly agree on all points, though I think I come down a little more harshly on the divide between ‘the powers are fun’ and ‘the guns less so’. The guns definitely feel almost like an afterthought to me, something to use whilst I wait for my powers to recharge. That changes somewhat with higher-tier…

I honestly wish they’d just leaned into it more; gone full-on ‘Bulletstorm’ ridiculousness. Instead, they’re biting off... a lot *STORY SPOILERS* (if you’re going to make me walk my off-brand space marine through a concentration camp, game, you’d better earn that shit) *END SPOILERS*, and it’s really more than they…

To be fair, my take on the endgame difficulty may be a little skewed because I came into it with better equipment than the game expected me to: by the time I got the endgame unlocked, I was at World Tier 12 and my gear was at 39, whereas the endgame enemies started at around level 34 or so. (It also... abandons the…

I don’t pretend to understand most of the endgame patch stuff - I only just got to the endgame myself - but man, I gotta say ( in relation to the earlier ‘can’t choose between classes’ article), what I’d really like to see is some form of resource sharing between all four classes. Make me level them independently,…

As I recall, they haven’t necessarily ruled out DLC, but they’ve put a lot of promotional focus on the ‘this is a complete game, the whole thing is here right out of the box, you finish it and it’s over’ kind of approach. Which to me is trying to harken back to an even earlier era - an era of, basically, ‘if it’s…

I just said this in a post on another article, but yeah: about the only way it doesn’t at this point is if Sony’s PSNow deal had some sort of ‘exclusivity’ clause. (And, to echo someone else’s comment above: coming to GamePass is about the only way you’ll get me to play it, really, after the... let’s say ‘mixed’…

That would make a certain amount of sense, for sure. Plus, ~6-8 months seems to be about the right amount of time for a game that size to hit these sorts of services - I wouldn’t be surprised to see it hit GamePass relatively soon, either, given that Square’s put a fair amount of stuff on GamePass in the past,…

I find the interplay between Avengers and Outriders approaches to ‘post-game content’ kind of fascinating, in that (from what I understand) part of what’s held Avengers back is that there’s so little to do in the endgame, and they’ve been so slow to add new content. In contrast, Outriders is... riding... (sorry) the…

It sounds more like you’re objection is with the concept of an adaptation, then, rather than with a superhero game specifically; the notion that we have certain expectations coming into the universe. Out of curiosity, how do you feel about the Shadow of Mordor/War games? I quite enjoyed them, but I’ve never been a…

Same. Definitely one of those I really intended to play - installed it and everything (though I don’t know it made the jump between Xbox One and Series X) - but it never quite rose to the top of my list. Now, faced with the choice of ‘putting down what I’m currently playing and get to it’ or... not, I’m apparently goin…

You’re absolutely right; I probably shouldn’t have said ‘grow your user base’ so much as ‘retain your user base’ - Sony doesn’t necessarily need to sell consoles to people who’ve never owned a console before, they need to sell them to people who already owned the previous generation of consoles (whether that was a…

My experience with Outriders has been ‘a lot of fun - with some caveats’. First and foremost, the server issues they’re having: my experience (on an XSX) has basically just been ‘ it takes me ten tries to connect’, but I know other people have had ‘random disconnects in the middle of gameplay’, too. So you might want…

Not exactly a killer list for me, but my GamePass dance card is still full to the brim (mixed metaphors, I know) between Octopath Traveler and Outriders, so I don’t mind a weak list over the next few weeks. (Both Traveler and Outriders have their frustrations, but Outriders is really, really fun when it works - by…