Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity had some awfully big shoes to fill. Coming (quite belatedly) on the heels of Nintendo’s uber-mega-smash-hit, the game had to both illuminate some of the backstory that didn’t appear in Breath of the Wild and be a decent game in its own right; not an easy task. Did it succeed, though? Well…you’re going to have to read the article to find out.
As a side note, I’m changing up the format of my Still Worth Playing articles. Instead of covering everything about a game, which leads to me spending a lot of time and space…
See, the Hyrule Warriors games (and the Dynasty Warriors games they spun off from) have always felt a little mindless. Much like in Assassin’s Creed, you can skate by on lower difficulties simply by mashing the basic attack button, slicing and dicing your way through crowds of enemies without worrying much about taking damage or even missing. Walking forward and pressing Y would probably be a quick ticket to victory on Very Easy, and might even get you most of the way through the game on Medium.
That’s a shame, because the game’s systems are more complex than they seem…
Last time, when I reviewed Super Mario 64, I covered a game that everyone loves. This time? Well, it’s not so simple. Super Mario Sunshine is probably the most controversial Mario game ever made. While there are no outright bad Mario games, there are a few that almost no one will really defend — the New Super Mario Bros. series comes to mind, as well as, if we’re willing to go there, Hotel Mario on the CD-i (actually, I take back what I said; that one is a bad Mario game, and it’s why Nintendo doesn’t license its characters anymore)…
When I write these articles — all of them bearing nearly identical titles — the question I ask, whether [insert game title here] is still worth playing, is often rhetorical. The fact is, yes, a certain kind of person can enjoy almost any video game. Yes, for that specific kind of person, even something as awful as Rogue Warrior, the infamously horrible first-person shooter based on the heavily-fictionalized exploits of Navy SEAL Dick Marcinko, can be a fun time and well worth the price of admission. …
Full disclosure: I have already written something that could be considered a review of Total War: Warhammer. That’s available here. But…well, that was never going to be enough. I now have nearly two hundred hours on both games combined. If I had spent that time working out, I would be a monster. If I had spent that time practicing, say, Swedish, jag kunde tala det mycket bra. If I had spent that time writing, I might end up being able to put out a Medium article more than once a month. The waste is incredible, though I have to admit…
Of course, I also love strategy games, as you know, so when Kalypso announced that they were putting out a title (developed by Limbic Entertainment) that combined two of my interests, I was sold! The game seemed to allow for complex management (with each citizen individually simulated), while at the same time including the kind of ridiculous dictator-y stuff that makes any banana republic simulator memorable, like arbitrarily arresting your citizens and stealing the Eiffel Tower.
It’s now been a year and a half since the game released, and since I’ve recently returned to it, I thought I would do…
I did my best. I finished the main quest and a few of the bigger side questlines. I explored a number of dungeons that weren’t required for anything else, and I generally tried to cast a wide net, sampling different kinds of content from all over the map. I even got a couple of skills to level 100. But it was an exercise in futility; I could have spent a hundred more hours with the game and still not done everything there is to do.
I came late to Skyrim, the same way I came late to Grand Theft Auto…
But if there’s one thing that can be said about human culture, it is this: What is popular is not necessarily good. In the early 60s, baby boomers unironically enjoyed music that beseeched them to “boogie.” Modern art — art that sells for millions of dollars — often consists of garbage stuck together with duct tape. And there are still, despite everything, girls with crushes on Justin Bieber. So the question remains to be answered: Is Grand Theft Auto V still worth playing?
I got the game for free on the Epic store a few months back. It was my…
Step one: Find a nation to build
This sounds a lot easier than it is. All of the good nations, such as Norway, already exist, so you will likely have to settle for a second-rate pick. There is very little (but not no, as I’ll outline in a moment) unclaimed land in the world, which means that it will be much easier to carve a chunk out of a country that already exists.
The best place to look is likely going to be Africa. The continent’s borders were drawn in 1952 as a piece of modern art, so they are…
I’ll be the first to confess: I’m not very good at RTS games. Give me more than a few units to manage, and any strategy I devise quickly devolves into chaos. Resources go undeveloped, upgrades go unbought, vulnerable targets are left out in the open, and soon, I lose. It’s the same sad story every single time, no matter what game I play, whether it’s a classic like Company of Heroes or a semi-RTS like Total War or even a game for children like Lego Battles on the DS (anybody else remember that)? …
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