Holiday gaming

‘Tis the season. The holiday season is in full swing and that means lots of game releases. There’s actually so many this time around that I can barely keep up with all the things launching. This year has just been outstanding for video games. God of War, Into the Breach, Farcry 5, Marvel’s Spider-Man, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Dead Cells, Hitman 2, Return of the Obra Dinn, Prey: Mooncrash, Red Dead Redemption II, Octopath Traveler, Pokémon Let’s Go, Super Smash Bros Ultimate, and so many more. I wanna talk about three in particular that I’ve been playing a ton of in particular these days, because I have a lot of stuff to say about them.

Let’s start with Pokémon Let’s Go Pikachu & Eevee. If you haven’t heard, I’m a bit of pokémon nut. I’ve played every single mainline core series pokémon game that has ever released and used to be a competitive player. So naturally, I bought this game despite having reservations about the casual nature of it and the Pokémon Go mechanics. I’ve clocked in about 20 hours so far, halfway done. My thoughts? I actually like it. Yep. The catching mechanic is not ideal, but I don’t hate it as much as I thought I would. There’s just enough variation and interesting tweaks to it that I don’t completely hate it. It actually makes the game move much faster and makes catching feel like less of a grind.

Beyond that, there’s lots of fantastic welcome additions in the series’ first entry on the Switch. Pokémon moving around in the overworld is excellent and makes the world feel very lifelike. It’s quite easy to avoid running into ones that you don’t want to fight, so there’s really no need to stock up on Repels (unlike previous games). There’s a lot of great cutscenes and NPC interactions which add some much needed character development to the series. And some of previous games’ functionality like mega-evolutions and Alolan forms carry over, which I certainly appreciated.

But overall, it very much screams “HD Kanto remake”. Seeing the region in all its high resolution 3D glory is great, but leaves me wanting a lot more. So much was possible on the Switch and literally nothing has changed with how the battle mechanics and animations work. I’m not asking for a drastic change, but just something to use the Switch’s more powerful processor to make the turn-based mechanics feel like less of a grind and more of a strategic engagement. Despite all its faults, the game is very charming and you can tell that the developers put a lot of care into it. I’m loving it and it’s a very fun game to play in bed right before falling asleep due to its alluring and relaxing pace. If anything, this has made me even more excited for the Gen VIII pokémon game coming out in 2019.

Next up: Hitman 2. What an absolute blast. I enjoyed the 2016 Hitman a lot. It mixed stealth-sandbox gameplay with really creative puzzles and level design to deliver a stellar playground in which you toss around coins to distract people. I’m mostly kidding, but seriously, coins are more useful in Hitman than any weapon you could carry. Hitman 2 ups the ante with bigger levels and even more creative ways to eliminate targets. I love following the mission stories that have you disguise as someone that your target will be interacting with and taking them out through a special method. I love creeping on targets and watching their loops to spot opportunities for assassination. I love stealthily stalking my way through the levels to learn how they work.

Speaking of the levels, my goodness, what an achievement from IOI. This is some of the best level design I’ve ever seen, right up there with Dishonored and Deus Ex. Every level consists of multiple large areas interconnected in different ways. There’s underground areas, areas with restricted access, and areas where you can acquire special items. It’s incredible how vastly different your first and tenth playthrough across the same level will be in Hitman. The first time, you’re simply walking around and observing how the level is built. What’s happening where, what disguises are useful, what your targets do, etc. By the tenth time you play it, you’re masterfully blending in to the level by silently subduing unaware NPCs, acquiring disguises and items without anyone noticing, eliminating your targets without alerting anyone, and leaving no evidence behind. The true silent assassin. Hitman’s levels are intentionally designed around replayability, and they get better every time you play them. You learn new infiltration paths, gain new information, and figure out new ways of doing things. It’s bloody brilliant.

The game also has an absurd sense of humor that works in its favor. Your targets are typically high profile criminals who tend who have the most ridiculous proclivities. For instance, a most-wanted drug smuggler has a sweet tooth for blueberry muffins, so he’ll always go out to the muffin vendor outside his house who shows up every now and then. An iconic fashionista is constantly stormed by paparazzi all the time, but loves to get a massage from a very specific masseuse who likes to tell ghost stories. A prolific gang member wants to get a tattoo of his spirit animal, so you disguise as a tattoo artist and get a small window of time to stab him with the tattooing needle. Hitman puts Agent 47 in completely hilarious situations and it’s an absolute treat to play through them while listening to the voice actor deliver all of the lines in a completely deadpan monotonous voice. It’s always a blast.

And finally, Red Dead Redemption II. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t terribly hyped for this game. I knew it’d be a big release because it’s Rockstar. I hadn’t even fully played the first game either. I just knew this would be good given the studio that’s making it. And so I bought it on release day and got playing. And I hated it. Yes, I completely hated the game for the first six hours. It was slow, it was tedious, the controls were a mess, simply walking around was incredibly frustrating, the gameplay was bland, and I really didn’t care about the world or any of its characters. And I was bewildered that the game was standing at a 97 out of 100 on Metacritic, the highest aggregate rating of any game in this generation. What on earth could possibly be so good about this? I was convinced that the critics were crazy to overlook such obvious flaws in the game and were dishing out 10 out of 10’s based purely on hype alone.

So I kept playing to see if it got any better, and boy am I glad I did. The game is definitely a slow burn. As the narrative progressed, the character development shot up in quality dramatically. It developed bonds between Arthur and his gang in very interesting ways, and presented Arthur in such a likable way that he was starting to really grow on me. Most of the missions still involved riding somewhere on a horse for an obnoxiously long period of time, after which a shootout would take place, which would be followed by you riding back to the camp for an equally obnoxious period of time. I wasn’t too keen on the actual gameplay, but the story was getting so good that I kept going. Everything has a very cinematic quality to it. The writing, narrative, dialogue, and voice acting is spot-on. It’s the best I’ve ever seen in a video game. A huge amount of work was put into even the tiniest of side quests to make everything feel believable and genuine.

About sixty hours into the game, I’m now nearing the end of it. The world design is unbelievable. The lighting, textures, and environment art all contribute to what I see as hands down the best looking game ever made. There are plenty of moments where I’ve just stopped walking to take it all in and stare in awe at the world around me. There is an obsessive level of detail in everything, from the wood patterns on demolished houses to the horse tracks in the mud to the lettering and signage on storefronts. Residents of the world behave in very human ways and everything is animated with an extreme level of care. It honestly is so stunning that I’ve entered brand new areas only to stop and go “how on earth is this possible?” more times than I can count. When a lightning storm comes on at night or when the moonlit sky illuminates the path ahead of you, it’s hard not to be impressed by what a huge technical achievement this game is.

But when it comes to actual gameplay, things don’t look so good. The controls are indeed still extremely clunky, but I’ve gotten used to them. It’s not bad, but also not as quick and efficient as I’d like them to be. The moment-to-moment gameplay is extremely mediocre. The shooting mechanics have auto-aim and boil down to cover based pop-and-shoot gameplay every single time. From the very first mission to the very last one, this is what you’re doing. Taking cover, peeking out, firing a shot, and going back into cover. It’s dumb and has nothing interesting going on. Even the other supplementary gameplay is nothing more than glorified quicktime events turning special in-game actions into simple button presses. There really is nothing novel or unique about the gameplay, and that’s probably my biggest gripe with the game.

Despite all this, Red Dead Redemption II is one of the best games I’ve ever played. It says a lot about the strength of the narrative and world design when I’m able to overlook such huge missteps in control schemes and gameplay mechanics. Gameplay is arguably the thing that matters most in a “video-game”, but Red Dead Redemption II rides this weird line where mediocre gameplay is sort of acceptable and shrugged off in favor of its grander vision and the story it’s trying to tell. The story of Dutch is so well told and I was so invested in the fate of the Van der Linde gang that I just had to keep playing to find out what happens. In short, Red Dead Redemption II is the best longform TV show I’ve played, and I’m having a very good time with it.

So yeah, my holidays have consisted of me playing Pokémon Let’s Go Eevee on my Switch, and alternating between Hitman 2 and Red Dead Redemption II on my PS4. They’re all drastically different games, and it’s a fun change of pace to bounce between the three. Red Dead gets a little too serious for its own good sometimes, so some good old fashioned Pokémon is a welcome change. Hitman 2 serves as a fantastic pick-me-up for when I want to indulge and immerse myself into a sandbox world full of possibilities and emergent gameplay. It’s been a good holiday season and overall a great year for games. I wish I had more time to fully explore titles I haven’t yet played or picked up, but here’s to hoping I get some more time next year to keep playing these marvelous gems that these studios are starting to put out.