Sine Mora EX (PS4)

Sine Mora EX is a shoot ‘em up game that was originally released in the generation prior. This release included some touch ups to the graphics, English voiceovers and additional content. Given the genre, it is not for everyone, but there’s just something simply satisfying with shooting everything up on the screen. It’s a sidescrolling shoot ‘em up, where enemies come in from the sides, and your ship can generally move in any direction while the level is automatically scrolling.

You control an airplane, and your primary weapon shoots bullets with unlimited ammo. You can either mash the button or hold it down for rapid fire (for advanced players, mashing it is faster). Perhaps a unique part of this is that it is rendered in 3D, so it gives it a unique look. There is a secondary weapon that differs depending on the plane / character you’re playing as, and it is usually much stronger and useful to clear out enemies or wipe out a section of the boss’s health. You’ll have limited ammo for this.

As you are destroying enemies, they might drop pickups. These include time extensions, weapon upgrades, ammo for the secondary weapon, shields, or the ability to slow down time. Yes, you can slow down time which can help beginners dodge the crazy bullet hell scenarios. The plane doesn’t really have a health bar, rather it is tied to the timer. Each level has the timer counting down which you primarily extend via defeating enemies and sometimes getting a pickup. Taking damage will decrease the timer.

The game looks and feels great, and the controls feel natural. Each of the stages are structured in a similar way where you defeat normal enemies, before facing against a boss. The bosses have fantastic designs and are a highlight of the game. The difficulty in Normal mode is manageable for beginners but there are some cheap sections. Instant kill sections are extremely frustrating, and you don’t know it is instant death until you hit it. Sometimes there are so many things happening onscreen that you don’t even know what happened. Each section has a checkpoint, and depending on the difficulty you selected, you can retry the checkpoint several times before you must restart the level. Dying during a boss battle will send you right back at the beginning though.

On Normal, the timer isn’t too bad, and you get to carry your weapon upgrades, which will either increase the rate of fire or the spread of the bullets, from stage to stage… until you run out of continues. Then you’re out of luck and must start the stage from the lowest weapon level, which can be a challenge to manage both the timer and to level up the weapons again; this can depend on your luck. At the end of each stage, you’ll get a score based on your performance.

Most of the bosses are cool to play against, although definitely a few where they are designed with frustration and deaths in mind. You’ll have to retry those a lot, and it’s annoying when they fire away a ton of weapons and you’ll have to rely on trial and error. That said, when you try and practice enough times, and get through it, there is a sense of satisfaction there. That’s the thing, this game is designed for repeated plays, so while there’s not that much content, you can still get a lot out of it.

The unique thing is that this is a shoot ‘em up with a story. The story is told via a combination of text, and some light visuals. It sets up the scene with a father trying to take revenge on the one who killed his son in the war, and an alternate viewpoint taking place at the same time where the last survivors of the Enkie race is fighting to destroy the Empire. It’s serves more as an excuse to connect the stages together, but it can be quite interesting… if it was told in a better and more coherent way. There are a lot of good concepts but ultimately can be confusing to digest. The story isn’t long, since it’s comprised of seven stages, and on Normal difficulty, it will take around two to three hours to complete.

That’s only the start though since the game has a few other modes for you to explore. The first is playing through the story again in Challenge difficulty will unlock an alternate ending. Then there are Arcade, Score and Boss modes, which are all self-explanatory. There are achievements within the game itself, where completing them will raise your rank, although the only benefit from that is unlocking a Trophy.

Overall, Sine Mora EX is a good shoot ‘em up and is not a bad entry to the genre for beginnings. Its presentation is beautiful, and it plays well. The stages are fun, although the content is low if you’re looking for some meatier, as the game is designed more for repeated playthroughs to improve your skills, rather than present something new all the time. For its low price though, that’s fine.

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Fahrenheit (PS4)

Fahrenheit, known as Indigo Prophecy in North America, is a game by Quantic Dream. It is one of their first games in the style that they are later well known for. Despite the fact that it is remastered for modern systems, there are a lot of rough edges, and it is still very clearly a game from the 2000s. Booting up the game and you can immediately see this, with the PlayStation 2 logo popping up, muddy blurry textures, and giant text sizes that are all reminiscent of games from that era.  It's basically an upscale of the PS2 version with very little being done to improve it.

Upon starting up the story, it immediately captures your attention with its plot. Lucas Kane is in the toilet at a diner, and we see something disturbing. He seems to be possessed, against his will, and murders a fellow patron. What follows is him trying to cover up and escape. Once the body is found, two detectives, Carla and Tyler, come to investigate this murder and try to track Lucas down. Being able to play as both Lucas, the murderer, and the two policeman Carla and Tyler, who are trying to track down the murderer, gives the story an interesting perspective. Playing both sides, you’d want both sides to succeed and achieve in what they want to do.

Despite the hook, and the story has huge potential, there are some odd writing moments, even early in the game. Lucas keeps getting these weird visions, and the story hints at something supernatural. Although this can be explained away (at first) because of Lucas’ failing mental state, and in fact, that would have been a great direction for the game to go into. The story is broken up into chapters, where it moves from setting to setting, scene to scene, and you control the different characters as the murder investigation unravels.

As it is basically an interactive movie, you wouldn’t expect the gameplay to be amazing. It’s effectively filled with quick time events (QTE), and unfortunately even those are not implemented well, and the controls are frustratingly horrid. The camera controls are terrible and unintuitive, like an early 3D game from the 1990s. It’s basically fixed camera angles that you can cycle through and move it around a little bit. The worst part is that when you’re moving a character, the camera angle will shift, and you lose all sense of direction. Often, you feel like the character isn’t going in the direction you don’t want them to go in and you’re wrestling with the controls.

Next are the QTEs, which make up the bulk of the “action scenes”. Interacting with anything, such as talking to people, opening doors, picking up objects etc requires a short QTE, basically a flick of the analogue stick. The decision to map all the QTEs to the analogue sticks rather than the face button is horrible, as there are times when it doesn’t properly register the direction, you’re flicking the analogue stick in. And when some of them have such tight time limits, then it is very awkward to do it quickly.

The game also doesn’t like to give you much direction in what to do and where to go. You will easily miss things. It wants you to spend time methodically going through everything but that significantly slows down the pace and makes it very boring. Not helped that it loves to drag scenes out longer than they should. On top of that, adding time limits to certain scenes to give you pressure, while not giving you any direction, is an unfair move by the developers. You can retry scenes, but in others, you are limited by lives. The QTEs may be novel and fun at first, but when each one of those keeps dragging on and on and on to extend the length of the game, they quickly outstay their welcome.

The game has annoying gimmicks such as a character being claustrophobic, so you need to mash some buttons to keep her breathing and panic under control. The problem with this is that you are constantly doing this while trying to figure out what you must do in that scene to progress. It’s not fun juggling the two together. The QTEs also don’t feel like they connect properly to what’s happening on screen, they are there just so you aren’t watching a movie. Representing the QTEs as two colored circles is not a great idea either as they aren’t especially intuitive, especially when sometimes they flash by so quickly.

And then there are the forced stealth sections, complete with the universally loved instant fail requirements. The game was not designed for any type of gameplay, let alone stealth. It gives you a poor map and very little ability, so you must blindly use trial and error to get through. It’s frustrating and annoying, and frankly, an extremely poor design. Being forced to repeat sections again and again is horrendous.

The graphics are not great. They are clearly still early PS2 levels with barely any effort made to improve them. Basically, the game just got its resolution increased so that it doesn’t look like a blurry mess in HD, but nothing was done to improve the textures or character models. This, combined with the clunky controls (as that hasn’t changed either), and you have this time relic of a game that will put a lot of people off.

Despite the serious and grounded beginning, the story will take a turn for the fantastic from the midway point. It had so much potential but then the writers just threw whatever could stick. As a result, there are jumps in the story that cause inconsistencies and plot holes. Lucas does impossible things and basically the game uses the same weak excuse to explain all these impossible things, where it feels like a giant coincidence. It is a disappointing direction that the plot eventually goes for, and the reveal the villains felt like it was out of nowhere. It was as if it was too hard to write the ending, so the writers gave up and gave us some fan fiction quality material.

Further denting the quality of the game is how slowly it dragged the beginning out, which wasn’t bad even though there was some pointless filler material. By comparison, the second half felt very rushed as it went from place to place. A few drawn out battles which end up making the final battle, which was extremely short by comparison, severely underwhelming. Despite the many apparent choices and variations, you could take, the different endings are only determined by how well do you in the final battle. The story takes around eight hours to complete, longer if you are lost. You can replay using chapter select to try out different things but there really isn’t much to pull you back.

Overall, Fahrenheit had a lot of potential. It started off so strongly, presenting an engaging mystery that sucks you in. Playing from both the perspective of the murderer as well as the investigator, provided some interesting conflicts of interests whenever you played their section, as you want them both to do well and not do so well. Unfortunately, the plot soon degrades into something that isn’t nearly so thoughtful, with a rushed development and ending that leaves a bitter taste in your mouth.

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The physical release comes with a cardboard sleeve, a message from the developers, and a small artbook.

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Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled (PS4)

After the fantastic remake of the original Crash Bandicoot trilogy from the PS1, the developers returned to not only give us a remake of the equally fun Crash Team Racing, but also its sequel from the PS2, Nitro Kart. It’s a remake similar in the vein of N. Sane Trilogy, where it gives the game a massive graphics upgrade, but retains everything else to be quite faithful to the originals.

One of the best things about the original game was that despite being a kart racer, it had a story mode. It’s not an amazing story mode but it did it well enough that it is something that all other kart racers should aspire to. This remake contains the story mode of the original game, but unfortunately not the one for Nitro Kart. Called the Adventure Mode, upon starting this, you have to select a difficulty setting from either Easy, Medium or Hard. The bad thing is that you cannot change this once you start it. It’s not bad except that Easy is too easy, while Medium can be just right, until you get constantly hit by attacks and losing first place just as you’re about to cross the finish line due to a missile or bomb someone fired at you.

In terms of controls, this is a typical kart racer and if you have played the original, the steering may feel a bit off at first, but after a few laps, you will adjust. Each track’s goal is of course to come first, and on the tracks are boxes that you hit to get a power up. These can either be offensive or defensive items, to help you knock down other racers and get ahead. These range from explosive boxes left on the track, to tracking missiles, to an item that slows everyone down.

The main aspect that this game differs from something like Mario Kart is the power sliding mechanic. As you drift, you can press a button at the right moment to get a boost in speed. Do this successfully three times in a row in one drift and you get a bigger burst of sustain speed. Similarly, if you hop / jump from high enough and stay long enough in the air, you’ll get a speed boost when you land. It is like Mario Kart but puts enough of its own twist into it so that it feels unique. All the tracks are designed around the power sliding mechanic.

The story within Adventure Mode is simple. Alien Nitros Oxide has come to Crash’s planet with the intention of taking over. However, he is kind enough to give the planet a fighting chance. Find the speediest racer and they’ll race each other. If Oxide wins, he gets the planet, otherwise he’ll leave. It is a short and simple story, but it gives a good enough reason for what you are doing. You select a character, and you can either use the same character throughout the whole mode or swap it as you wish.

The structure of Adventure Mode is very simple too. There are four hub worlds of four tracks each, and you need to get first in each one. Every hub world has a boss, and this remake adds in cutscenes when you face the bosses, and they themselves have dialogue. So, it’s both interesting and weird when you hear them speaking for the first time. Boss levels take place in the same tracks, but they have special power up abilities which can become difficult. Perhaps it is how the game is structured, being focused on levels, but you are constantly loading a track which takes thirty seconds each time. That feels long in a time where a lot of games use various techniques to mask load times.

Given that there are only sixteen story tracks and five bosses, you reach the ending very soon at only around two hours (depending on how good you are). However, whenever you finish a track, it unlocks two other objectives in that track. The first are Time Relics, which you lap the track three times and get the lowest time but with the twist that there are boxes scattered on the track that freezes the clock. The other is CTR challenge, where you still need to get first, but in the process, you need to find and collect the three letters “C”, “T” and “R”, as well. This can be a challenge on higher difficulty. Each hub world also has a level where it is set in the battle mode maps (basically a wide-open area) and you need to collect twenty crystals scattered in the level in a set time, one of which is particularly tough.

Completing enough of the CTR challenges will unlock the Grand Prixes, where you do four tracks back-to-back and aim to get the highest score at the end of it. This further unlocks two bonus tracks, and then a final showdown against Oxide for the true ending. All in all, yes, there is a decent amount of content, even if it doesn’t take too many more hours to complete it, and it can get repetitive because you will need to play each track a minimum of four times, with some requiring five or six times. This isn’t counting if you need to replay tracks if you didn’t succeed the first time.

Like with the N. Sane Trilogy, you’ll be impressed with how much the graphics are improved at first glance. It blows you away with how much of a massive upgrade this is over the original. The nice colorful graphics really make the game pop. The only negative is that with all the added details, some of the tracks are a bit busy which can distract you and when you first play a track, you might not be able to immediately identify corners properly.

As mentioned, while they managed to include the story mode of the original Crash Team Racing, they didn’t for Nitro Kart. We do get the next best thing though, which is every single track from that game remade. Coupled with quite a few free DLC tracks which are completely new and original, and this is a meaty game with something like forty tracks to choose from. That said, while the Nitro Kart tracks are nice, they do feel different to the originals in that they trend towards being gimmicky at times. The tracks have even more distracting things in the background, designs can be iffy, and they have a lot of obstacles that end up being annoying rather than engaging.

After you’re done with Adventure Mode, there are a lot more modes to choose from that you can either play locally or online. For example, Battle Mode has you pitting against each other in a wide-open map in modes like death match and capture the flag. Time Trials has you aiming to get the fastest speed in a track, and then there’s the already mentioned CTR challenges and Relic races. These modes are available on even the Nitro Kart tracks. There is also a new mode called Ring Rally, where you go through rings that boosts your speed and adds to the clock that’s ticking down, so you aim to survive as long as possible.

And finally, the game has a ton of customization options for your racers and karts. Not much is available from the beginning but via playing the game, you will earn in-game currency. This currency can be used in the in-game shop to purchase customization options such as new playable characters, kart designs, stickers and decals. To be honest, it’s fairly tame as far as monetization goes.

Overall, Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled is a fantastic update and remake of the original two games. It is on par if not better than N. Sane Trilogy’s efforts. The fact that they included all the tracks from Nitro Kart is a plus and something that the developers didn’t really have to do. If they could have included the story mode from Nitro Kart as well that would have been perfect, but the game is already very good as is.

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Red Dead Redemption II (PS4)

Red Dead Redemption II is a Rockstar open world western game, and so you know that it is going to be high quality, brimming with details.  It has a huge single player campaign, which is a prequel to Red Read Redemption.  It follows Arthur Morgan, as part of the outlaw group led by Dutch.  If that sounds familiar, that’s because the previous game’s protagonist, John Marston, was part of this group.  You will see John, and other familiar characters, show up from time to time, but it is still very much Arthur’s story.

The game starts off setting up the scene where the group botched a job, and they are now on the run.  Dutch had screwed up and this sets off some doubts within the group.  Not much, but you can see the seeds there, and as Dutch becomes more unstable throughout the game, you see his downfall coming.  Nevertheless, Arthur is part of this gang, and they eventually move to near Valentine, setting up camp.  The story is then kind of one where Arthur lives the life of an outlaw, robbing from the rich, hunting to survive, and just general day to day stuff.

Despite the slice of life aspect, and the whole jack of all trades thing with Arthur helping out everyone with a bit of everything, the story does intrigue you and suck you in.  This is because while life can be good, it can also be bad.  They are outlaws and are on the run, hunted down by bounty hunters, lawmen, and other outlaws, it is not a completely rosy life.  There is a lot of hardship, and they have to be constantly on the move.

The gameplay is also one where the game excels at.  It introduces new elements that makes the game more realistic, which is kind of annoying at first, but it doesn’t impact the enjoyment too much.  That is, Arthur now has various “cores” (health, stamina and “dead eye”), and you need to regularly eat in order to keep them up.  Same with his horse, which has cores you need to keep up that will improve over time so that you can gallop for longer without tiring etc.  Riding a horse continues to require you to tap X, and these things become second nature.

In terms of gameplay mechanics, Arthur can run and climb, as well as ride a horse.  He carries with him a multitude of weapons, although annoying, they are often left on the horse and you need to reequip them each time.  Gunplay is solid, with the aim assist and just general aiming to be very good.  Arthur has the “dead eye” ability, which uses a meter to slow down time so you can fire multiple shots in quick succession.  Like everything else in the game, shooting is also a deliberate affair.  You cannot run and gun easily, as it takes time for the gun to reload, or to take another shot after the previous one.

The open world is where the game shines the brightest.  After the first chapter, you’re then let loose on the whole open world and it is massive, filled with things to do.  There are various bigger towns, as well as smaller buildings.  There are strangers out there that you can help, and hunting is a big part of the experience.  Sneaking up to the wildlife and then shooting it down carefully to get the best quality skin is addictive.  There is a day night cycle, and it feels like a world where it is lived in.  Random events can also happen such as wolves attacking you at night, or other outlaws asking for a toll to cross a bridge.

There is a lot of choice in how Arthur approaches things.  He can have honorable actions, or not so much. This affects the honor meter and will affect how others will treat Arthur (such as raising and lowering prices in the shops accordingly).  All this may sound like the game has a ton of systems, but it somehow all manages to not be overwhelming and are synergistic with each other.  The game is cohesive, and that is what makes it so engaging and immersive.

Mission structure and progressing through the story is probably the most standard part of the game.  There are mission icons on the map, and as you approach the character, you’ll get some story cutscenes and then the mission objectives.  There is mission variety, from robbing a train, to shootouts, to herding sheep, those sections aren’t too boring.  What can be boring is being forced to slow walk or slowly ride your horse next to the character, as they speak.  Wrestling control away from you is never great, especially when there is a large distance to traverse, but the game does it well enough that it isn’t too much of an annoyance.  Given that the game is so long, it ends up repeating a lot of the mission structure, so that eventually it does get boring when the vast majority of each missions is either riding your horse or shooting people.

If you beeline for the story missions alone, this is still a massive game and takes hours upon hours to finish.  But then include all the optional stuff and it can feel like a game that is never-ending.  There are tons of sidequests to do, as well as minigames like poker and dominoes.  You can find wildlife to hunt or do some fishing.  Even just general galloping around exploring the amazing environment isn’t boring at all.  Each story mission also has optional objectives to do if that is your jam.

The graphics are phenomenal and coupled with the attention to detail, it is a visual spectacle.  The beginning of the game really shows off what it can do, with how Arthur trudges through the snow.  Then while walking or riding, you can see the footprints left behind on certain terrain, it is crazy.  Unfortunately though, you will eventually get burn out with how slow and methodical the game likes to be.  Missions can start to become repetitive as they usually involve a lot of riding, some shooting, and maybe some sneaking.  Repeat for 50 hours for over 100 missions and it’s a tad bit too much.

The more and more you play the game, the more and more the forced slow walking will start to annoy you.  It just feels like the developers is forcing a slow pacing onto the player, instead of letting them decide how quickly or slowly they would like to proceed.  The story elements feel repetitive too, and while yes, it is supposed to show Dutch descending into madness, the fact that they gang walks into so many traps, and constantly screws up so much, you’d think that they would learn.  It’s frustrating when the characters are idiots like that.  You feel that Rockstar could have taken out big chunks of the story to streamline the game more.

This is a game where everyone takes a wildly different time to finish.  Although if you rush through everything, then the main story will take around 35 to 40 hours, but then it’ll open up the Epilogue section.  The final few missions can really feel like they are dragging things out bit by bit, even more so than normal.  The amount of horse riding, the number of enemies you have to kill etc, it feels overly bloated.  Rockstar has gone for “realism” too far, and yet in other aspects, it doesn’t.  How does Arthur survive killing literally hundreds of enemies?  Anyway, as this is a prequel, some characters are immune, and that’s a shame.  You can see what the ending was going to be like, and it’s sad.  It doesn’t help that effectively all the good characters die, and you’re left with the extremely unlikeable ones as you progress towards the end of the game.

The Epilogue sounds like a good concept, a slower and relaxing way to wind down the game while setting up for the original Red Dead Redemption.  Unfortunately, like the rest of the game, the developers have clearly self-indulged, and the Epilogues goes for far too long.  It takes around ten hours to complete, and it wouldn’t be so bad if the missions were so repetitive, so overly long, and feeling so pointless.  All it needed to do was to wrap up any loose ends and set up the first game, but no, it continues on and on and on, where each mission you’d wish would be the last but it isn’t.  Where each mission you’d hope for something interesting but isn’t.  Or that it would be short but isn’t.  Rather it’s a bunch of menial tasks, quicktime events, even more horse riding and even more shootouts, something you’ve been doing for 40 to 60 hours already.  It makes the game feel bloated and thematically completely different to the ending of the game.

Overall, Red Dead Redemption II is an amazing game.  However, the developers clearly had a vision and while it gave the game so much character and atmosphere, this is a game first and foremost and it isn’t the most player friendly decisions.  In their quest for realism, and attention to detail, sometimes where 99% of players won’t notice, you have to wonder if they could have put those resources into streamlining the story, streamlining the controls, and giving more variety in how the story is told beyond just talking while horse riding.  Again, it’s still an amazing game with a great story, but the conscious decisions to make everything so slow and tedious will not gel with everyone.

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