TITANFALL 2 (PS4)

I wasn´t excited enough to buy Titanfall 2 when it was released, and I think I was right to. But when given out for free in Playstation plus, I thought it was time to give it a try

Overall it´s a good game, done by an experienced team. A satisfying shooter, you clearly see that team had done others before (most team members used to be at Infinity Ward when the CoD modern warfares were done). It also has a fairly good level design, and a couple of relatively fresh unique selling points (mechs and parkour). I particularly liked the collectibles design - visible from the main path but you need to solve a little environmental puzzle to get them

On the minus side it´s not memorable. There is nothing absolutely new about it. If you are a hardcore shooter gamer you should like it. Otherwise if you only have time for “revolutionary” games (as opposed to “evolutionary”) you´ll probably experience it as falling a bit short. I actually stopped playing 2 years ago, and only thanks to the pandemic lockdown managed to finish it

Still, it´s a very competent shooter and easy to enjoy - particularly for that genre´s lovers

THE HEX (PC)

I currently use Steam mostly for indie games. Quite often you won´t find them in any other platform. I believe The Hex is one of them. I knew about it from a long time, but the game premise wasn´t totally enticing to me: A group of videogame characters had to solve a mysterious murder. Still, I kept it on the wishlist hoping to give it a chance it the price dropped substantially

And it did. Then I discovered the game was way more than its marketing. The Hex is basically a metagame: A game about games. The murder is a mere excuse to put together 6 different mini-games, all tied up by a fictional game developer who went through different troubles while making all those games, the feedback he got on each case (often displayed on-screen as game elements) and how that affected the lives of the main characters

A bit confusing, isn´t it? Yes, that might be the case. Sometimes it´s a bit like those pretentious "auteur" 70s movies with references within references. Kinda like a videogame adaptation of "Six characters in search of an author". Still you won´t see many games - or entertainment products in general - willing to go that route, and for the most part makes you think about what it means to create games, how you relate to the character you control, and the creator of the game in general

Each of the mini-games are not great individually. Graphically speaking is ugly, and it´s clear they didn´t have a great budget for animation / art. But the main proposal works very well, and you can get a good 10 hours of varied gameplay that makes you think a little. You can´t ask for more

HORIZON ZERO DAWN (PS4)

For a while Horizon was in my "to-do" list, but I had a good bunch of unfinished open world games in process. I eventually found a gap to give a try, and my intention was to play 4-5h to get a sense of what the game was about... and I ended up getting the platinum trophy

I remember reading about the story setting, and feeling skeptical about it: Robots vs cavemen? How are they going to pull that off? After a couple hours of playtime, the story was enticing and mysterious enough to keep me engaged as to decide to keep playing, and see where that´d take me. Admittedly, there was a huge section in the second act - the one about tribal frictions and lore - that made me question if it was worth it. But focusing on the main story, and thanks to the low difficulty of most secondary challenges, I found it satisfying to play, and kept moving forward

The game is not perfect, though. To start with, it succeeds and fails in the same areas than other similar open worlds: The main character falls constantly into what I call "the good samaritan syndrome" (you go around the world helping people you don´t know and don´t care for, often doing menial tasks for them that make no sense for an epic world-savior), there are many "template-based" gameplay elements copy-pasted across all regions, and traversing can be often frustrating. On top of that, the visual design of most characters is too Tenerife carnival queen to my taste. The UI is functional, but a bit too crude in my opinion. Some 2D artists could spend some time to spike up its appeal

On the other hand, for a company who´d been known for linear shooters the change of genre is always a big challenge, and they completely succeeded at it. The game has an innovative unique selling point (Beast-like robots), a good combat system taking advantage of the specifics of those enemies, and a good story that keeps enough hidden elements as to keep you interested until the end. And as I said, the game difficulty is not layered like many other games nowadays (meaning you have different challenges, each more daunting that the previous, to please all sorts of players, from casuals to hardcores) and seems to be happy to offer easy content just to keep you playing

Overall a good game, great way to start a new IP and if they can build upon this foundation we can have a great franchise for many years. Good work, Guerrilla