JRM's Pile o' Games Episode 1: Gamefly Games

As far back as I can remember, I have always been big into video games. When I was younger I certainly had room for playing with toys, and as I grew I did things like go on the internet, watch movies, and even sometimes hang out with people! But no matter where I was in life, I still always fell back on playing video games. It's how I mostly hang out with close friends as well, and as I started to be able to buy games myself, I grew a collection much bigger than what Christmas and Birthdays could offer me.

...Too big, I'd almost say, if I didn't also hope of one day playing all of them. My game collection swelled as I bought more and more, and even then I was still playing games owned by family and friends. I did have certain genres I liked, but even when I thought I wouldn't like a certain kind of game, I'd always be proven wrong when I gave it a chance.  For a long time, this intake of video games was purely for my own enjoyment, but such a broad collection from various systems and genres is a sad thing to put to waste. For a while now I've considered making something to share what I've learned and thought about these games and video games as a whole. A blog series was an obvious idea, but for such a massive undertaking, its always hard to find a starting point. However, I found a way to test run the idea. While I would love to talk about the games I own, the games I have played but don't own are often just as interesting, so to possibly kick off this series, first I'm going to discuss which games I've rented through Gamefly!

Sometime last year, as it was becoming feasible for me to buy more games than ever, a thought entered my mind, perhaps one to protect me from myself. Back in the day there were many game rental services like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, and while I rented games from those places, I don't recall beating very many games I rented. The time windows were often small and so was my time available to play, as I had to go to school and having the game console hooked into a shared tv meant it was almost a competition to even get to play. The modern age, however, has given me more time and means to play games as long as I like, and a more convenient means to rent them. Their constant advertising during adult swim paid off as I recalled Gamefly existed, and decided to give it a try.

And I was impressed! You can have multiple games at once, the service has many generous ways to get free months or discounted months, and it has a decent selection of games from the PS2 era onward. The prices are surprisingly reasonable, because even if you did a one month subscription and only played one game the whole time, its still about 1/3 the cost of the same game completely new. Naturally, I didn't want to get any games that I wanted to keep forever, but Gamefly was an excellent service for shorter games that only take a day or so to beat. It leads to a high game turnover, and in about three months I got to complete 22(ish) games, as well as renting Avengers: Age of Ultron as they allow movie rentals as well, and trying to play Lollipop Chainsaw, a game so fun I'd rather buy it, but one also blocked pretty hard by a glitch that seemed impossible to fix even with replacement copies.

I have very little ill to say about Gamefly; they will replace a damaged disc or the like (and I thought Lollipop Chainsaw was damaged until every copy they sent had the same issue) but of course you aren't given any sort of time extension or credit for the time lost on a dud. After cancelling your subscription, even if you put the game in the mail right as you do it, it can be sort of scary as Gamefly emails you saying you'll be charged if it isn't received soon even though you shipped it the day you cancelled. The window is pretty large and I never did get charged, but it took a while for them to confirm they had received the game. I also live in a large city, so shipping was likely faster for me at times than most people but inexplicably slower at others. Once again though, most these are completely brushed aside by the benefits. New games are added to Gamefly the moment they are released. Games with DLC I suppose are hard to recommend for renting, but I used a few websites to help me determine what to rent.

https://howlongtobeat.com/ is an excellent resource in finding out which games are short enough for a one-and-done rental. They have gamer-voted times of completion for both the basic storyline, 100% completion, speed runs, DLC included, and so on. Usually I looked up games that took less than a day to beat so I could play them on my days off from work, and it is what I'd recommend howlongtobeat.com for mostly. For weeding outs games with DLC so you don't rent a game that you can't beat fully, typing the game's name in http://www.giantbomb.com/ and looking at the DLC tab usually told you all you needed to know, and even when a game might have DLC, it might be pointless cosmetics or multiplayer only, so it was worth renting just for the single-player and not fretting about the DLC!

Still, this is only somewhat of an ad for Gamefly, and only because I know many people would like it if they gave it a chance. It impressed me, and it deserves a bit of praise for allowing me to play so many games for so cheap. The start-up deal I received made a two-disc at a time plan 15 bucks a month. 45 bucks for this amount of content, its a total steal. Some of these games still cost more than that! An even more interesting aspect is, after not having a subscription for a while, they offered me better and better deals on renewing my subscription, almost like a girl desperate to do anything to get you back. When they said I could have a subscription for one month for only one dollar, even with my busier work schedule, I would have been dumb to say no. I used that subscription solely to rent movies, which may be its own blogpost, but I've been talking a lot about Gamefly when the intent here was to tell you what I thought of the games I got through it!

(Also at the end of this I'm totally putting a referral code so anyone who wants to try Gamefly can get a free month and I can get a free month too! Even if you don't have time for games, mail-delivered movies is pretty good too.)

Now then, let's begin, in the order which I received them. Each game I will give a simple rating of Buy, Play, or Skip, because the wiiviewr pretty much figured out the perfect rating system. Buy means a game so good its worth owning, Play means you can get all you'd want from just a single runthrough via rental, and Skip means avoid it (although not always a harsh condemnation, some games are okay but don't have enough going for them).

Deadpool (Xbox One)
The Deadpool video game came out when Deadpool was rightly getting the attention and praise he deserved. Deadpool was a delightful and whimsical injection into comic books, bringing humor not often seen elsewhere into the pages of Marvel and growing a sizeable fanbase. Deadpool cosplayers were on the rise and panels were being shared across the internet of his antics, and soon the idea of making a game came along and so this one was made.

Now, Deadpool has suffered a bit from a rise in popularity, as people identify the two or three major components of him and exaggerate them as they do most any character from fiction. Amazingly, the Deadpool movie had a great balance of his aspects and was very faithful in portraying Deadpool at his best. The game? ...It's more a mixed bag. Leaning much too hard on the fourth wall breaking humor, Deadpool spends too much of the time talking directly about the game developer High Moon Studios. Some of it is funny, but most developer related humor is bland and boring and the kind of humor we hear elsewhere even in less self-aware games and tv shows.

Where the Deadpool game shines is when it makes fun of things outside of who created it, tackling video game jokes that are not quite so often tread by other self-aware games. So many of its best jokes have already been shared around like crazy, but when it pokes fun at something besides High Moon Studios, its got some legitimately funny moments! Ones you could still probably enjoy from a compilation on Youtube admittedly, which is where the gameplay comes in. The gameplay itself is a decent brawler, with an expanding set of weapons (both swords and firearms) and attacks as the game continues. It certainly captures the sort of mad carnage Deadpool lives for, but most of the crazy interesting attacks happen in cutscenes outside your control. The combat certainly isn't boring, and is a good way to carry you to the next funny moment, but its best when it gets creative and you aren't really using the core mechanics. Strange minigame-esque moments and parts where Deadpool is put in a ridiculous situation that you do play through are the shining moments. The plot is obviously one to set up Deadpool being silly, and it runs concurrently to a more serious but simple plot you only see from Deadpool's warped point of view, but ultimately what works and what doesn't work mixes together into a decent stew that made the perfect first game to test my thesis on which games to get from Gamefly.

VERDICT: Play. Or Watch. Either works really. I think the humor is great where it works and a lot of its sillier gameplay moments are better for having played them. It also puts a spotlight on some comic book characters who needed some love, D Listers with powers that mix up gameplay or are fine characters in their own right. The more I write this, the more I fondly remember, so even if the core gameplay is only okay, rest assured there is more inside this game, just as long as you like Deadpool's kind of humor cranked a little too high. Did I mention he has two voices in his head who provide commentary? The Juvenile one is almost unbearable with his simplistic jokes, but the Serious one has its moments, and then the banter between all three gives us some good moments, even if this is an angle I would not miss.

Spec Ops: The Line (PS3)
You've probably already heard of this game, and probably already have some vague idea of what happens in it. I certainly did when I went into it, and it was the fact I know such things about it that made me interested in getting it. While Deadpool played around as if the fourth wall didn't exist, Spec Ops: The Line is a deconstruction of the modern first-person shooter, and when it breaks the fourth wall, it is harsh about it.

First and foremost, the gameplay is about what you'd expect from a modern war shooter. Point your gun, shoot, hide if you're shot at, throw grenades sometimes. One thing that made it more interesting was the ability to command your squadmates, and they'd actually complete the tasks asked of them. If an enemy has you pinned down, order your buddy to shoot them down to remove the pressure. More war shooters could use this feature, but this is not what Spec Ops: The Line is about. Spec Ops is a war shooter where you experience the horrors of war. The mental strain, the hard choices, and the loose grip on humanity. The gameplay is so much like Call of Duty and Battlefield on purpose to hide this as it slowly develops, and its probably one of the few war shooters with much to say about its setting. The game doesn't outright condemn you for playing it, although it certainly lays on the guilt at times. I won't spoil anything specific, and while some people would somehow try to get you to play it without even a minor hint about its true message, I feel you won't get anyone to play it then, and those very same people probably played it after getting the minor tonal spoiler.

I've heard some people complain about a few aspects of it though, besides the story (which is the main focus and why its worth getting). I haven't played as many modern shooters as other people, and certainly didn't play the huge glut of them around the time this game was released, but some people condemn the gameplay as being too bland and taking a while to get going. The bland thing is sort of intentional I guess, but... I kind of liked it! With the squad commanding, interesting locations, and competent shooting controls, it does its job more than what others seem to indicate. The other complaint is the presence of a multiplayer mode that undermines the game's serious tone and message, but even the creators admitted it was the only way to make the story they wanted while still keeping the publisher happy. The multiplayer is completely skippable and not worth your time and is probably where you'd find an absolutely basic FPS experience. The single player campaign is what you're here for, and while it inevitably leans into Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now like anything war-related with a message does these days, its still got its own unique message in that its the only war shooter willing to do more than pointing you at the next target to shoot.

VERDICT: Buy. While I haven't bought this game myself and did get the full experience, it's got the quality of a game I wouldn't regret buying. People will pay 12 bucks to see a mediocre movie at the theater and consider it well spent, and Spec Ops: The Line is about that price and much better than a routine trip to the cinema. The tone of the game is the only warning I'd give; it's very much a game done for the art, and usually if you say something has a message, it's not a positive one. And it's a war game. Put a few ones and ones together as your disclaimer, but if you think you can handle it, it has some great moments that earned it the wide respect it gets on the internet for daring to make you think about what's going on in the game you're playing. I won't pretend I was deeply affected or moved emotionally by it, although it apparently does something for quite a few people, and I can at least understand how it hit them "right there".

The Wolf Among Us (Xbox One)
Telltale Games and their modern take on the Adventure genre has gotten a lot of well-deserved praise. Removing most of the obtuse puzzles from the early days, permanently unwinnable games, and pointless deaths, Telltale got down to the essence of these old point-and-clicks. You're going interesting place, doing interesting things there, and having interesting conversations with interesting characters. The games are by no means Visual Novels, as you still have the ability to die, moments that test your reflexes, and the need for problem-solving skills to connect the dots. Having already played their takes on Sam and Max and The Walking Dead, I went into The Wolf Among Us with high hopes...

And they were validated! The Wolf Among Us is a prequel of sorts to the Fable comic series, and manages to completely establish its world quite well even to those who didn't even know it was based on a series. Characters from fairy tales, fables, and urban legends are all actual living things, but they've been forced to live in the human world now, and are encountering the sinful lifestyles we often experience. Dark without being edgy, the game manages to convince you that a talking frog is not so absurd in this game world. This game has the classic Telltale split choices, and while they influence your individual experience and events during it, the plot never completely diverges from the core idea, which is fair enough. There's no real  reason for you to deviate from the central premise: You are the Big Bad Wolf, and you are investigating the murder of a fairy tale character. It's always a joy to see which character they bring in next from cultural fiction, and the game does a good job of injecting them with personality and flair.

VERDICT: Buy. If you are curious about the Telltale brand of Adventure game, Wolf Among Us might be the perfect pick to experience it. It's got grit, and it isn't just reinterpreting fairy tale characters for the sake of making them darker. A riveting ride til the end with very few dips in quality throughout, it made me interested in the Fables comic for sure, and I'm still thinking about this game even now, hoping for a Season 2 or something similar. I'd buy any sequel... well not in an instant because its an episodic game, but without hesitation once its finished. With all episodes of Season 1 available and constantly on sale in a bundle, it would be a good buy for you too.

Journey/Flower/flOw (PS3)
You might notice there are three game titles there, but that's because Journey: Collector's Edition comes with three short games on it! This is where the 22(ish) figure came from, as with Flower and flOw included, its 24 full games rented and finished. My opinions on the three games vary, so we're going to use a few subheaders here.

JOURNEY
Journey is definitely the best of the bunch, appropriately, and for a while it was lavished with so much praise that even my dad heard of it, and he usually only hears about games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders. Sometimes too much love can strangle something great and only make it so-so, but Journey was still a lovely experience despite all the love it was given, an unusual phrase if there ever was one.

Journey has a very simple premise summed up in its title, and the game is very sparse on giving you details. You're some sort of being with a fancy hood and scarf and mostly you platform through a desert to find your way to the top of a mountain, being told a wordless story along the way. This would not make Journey the best of games, maybe artsy like Limbo but not the game that made everyone go gaga. No, what made Journey amazing was that as you journeyed, you'd come across another scarf-hood-person like you. At first I thought they were some in-game character, and I saw them from afar and rushed over to interact. Their initial action still felt a bit like an NPC, but then I began to test them. You can't talk to them at all, but you can make a variety of noises, and basically just doing whimsical nonsense revealed that it was a person who was also playing Journey at the time. I was surprised since it was like 3 am and I was playing the PS3 version years after it came out, but this was an honest to goodness human being playing with me!

And that is what makes it a Journey. You continue onwards with your buddy, and its not even like you need them. They can help you, but it is possible to go alone, and I did read that you can encounter more than one person if your original partner disappears or decides to go things on their own. However, during my playthrough, I stuck with the same person throughout. We'd have moments we'd just chirp and goof around, or moments where we struggled. One very chilling moment I thought I had lost my partner near the end of the game, and I was really heartbroken. I didn't know anything about this guy and yet to come so far and lose him near the end... After trodding along slowly on my own, he popped up again! We were able to make it to the end of the game together after that, and after the credits it tells you who you journeyed with... so naturally we both became PSN friends and thanked each other for the experience. ...And we never really did talk again, but I think that's okay. It truly was an adventure together, and the design decision to leave off names, to make communication wordless, and to just make the appearance of the other player so subtle all made it feel like a journey. Now, with our journey complete, we go our separate ways...

There is some stuff to be earned and found in replaying the game, but that almost seems wrong to do. Especially if you end up being another player's encounter when they first play the game, and you're just kind of trudging through to find the secrets. I've always loved the idea of just coming across another player in a game where its otherwise pretty much single player. It's one reason Destiny was so interesting when I played it. Journey, however, is the embodiment of that idea, rather than Destiny flirting with it (plus it also had required multiplayer sections, so that's not as neat).

Flower
Oh boy. This game is artsy-fartsy as all get out. Journey was certainly artistic, but Flower is definitely an art game. Its got some marvelous visuals, but its the premise and gameplay that make it so artsy. You're a single flower petal, and you fly through environments gathering petals from the flowers until you're this beautiful windstream of petals. The game has some sort of nature vs, technology theme as well as the environments you enter are often darkened due to the presence of like... power lines, but I feel the best imagery in the game is in the first moment, where you open to see a flower pot in your typical urban jungle. Are these the dreams of a flower? Probably, that seems almost straightforwardly suggested.

Still, the game is pretty and all, but its more about visuals than doing anything. This collector's disc has behind the scenes on all the games, and I almost recall Flower being billed like a virtual wallpaper, which doesn't speak highly of its gameplay. I guess its not bad, its got that satisfying feeling similar to making all the... well, according to google, it wasn't a common toy, and I don't even remember its name properly, It was a lot like a Lite Brite, but all the pegs were already in it and you drag your hand across it to change the colors on it. I meant to compare Flower to managing to make those all the same light, but I guess you'll just have to take my word on how it is satisfying, but not really fulfilling. Cleaning your desk can be satisfying, and while Flower is prettier than most desks, its not all that engaging. I suppose its a counterpoint to Journey almost in that Journey is very engaging but Flower is just a relaxing drift through grassy terrain. Not really a bad game, but I feel silly for almost buying it once upon a time.

flOw
Now I can safely say this game is pretty bad. Not the worst game, but in it, you're just a series of different microbes absorbing other microbes and hopping around different layers to get to bigger microbes, or smaller ones if you screw up. The goal with each microbe is get bigger and keep going until you reach the bottom and beat a big microbe, that you usually play as next. It's not really challenging, and again its got some of that "virtual wallpaper" feel to it like Flower where its more about looking at neat microbe designs float around the screen, but its not exactly a full game either. I didn't even really think they were trying to sell it separately until I checked the PSN. It's certainly not a game to buy, but at best a curiosity appended to Journey and Flower.

I didn't even mention the controls. You use the Sixaxis motion control to guide your little microorganisms, but even then I chose "guide" as the word very specifically. The microbes control like cars for some reason, and its very hard to steer them on the right path, especially since motion control is involved. A cursory look at reviews and such, people often say "you get used to them", and that is technically true, but you can get used to the pain of an injury too, and that doesn't suddenly make that pain good. flOw goes from a visually pleasing and sort of mindless experience to one with unnecessary frustration as you have to take giant turns to move around. If the creature design at least indicated that the thing can't turn well maybe we'd have a different story, but this game's does not do motion controls well. You know what does them better? FLOWER! Flower, I totally didn't mention, has controls that I forgot until now that are Sixaxis based. You are the wind moving a petal, so of course you can't take a sharp turn, but even then the turning and control is better than its companion with half its name. I can say I would've been fine with more Flower, but flOw I was hoping near the end that the next microbe I played as would be the last.

VERDICT: Buy. Journey alone is worth the price of the collection, and it comes with behind the scenes stuff on it, Flower, and flOw. I wouldn't recommend Flower or flOw on their own, but in this collection with Journey and a lot of treats as well, they certainly round out a decent disc to add to the collection. Even though I returned this game, it came with a beautiful Flower based theme for the PS3 that I still use! Individually, Journey is certainly at least worth one playthrough and could probably be bought cheap (I got it free later through PS+), but Flower and flOw don't really deserve attention individually. This collection makes it feel like Journey is the meat and Flower and flOw are just nice minigames added... which it comes with actual minigames too. Like, MINI games. The developers included old Game Jam prototypes that are usually multiplayer focused so I didn't really get to experience them, but they are certainly more like extra content since they aren't trying to sell them separately as well.

Murdered: Soul Suspect (Xbox One)
This is another game I heard a lot of praise floating around for, but in the more subtle way sleeper hits and cult classics get praised. I'm not exactly sure what lofty heights these people hold this game at, but while it's certainly not bad, it didn't knock it out of the park or anything.

Murdered: Soul Suspect's strongest point is its premise. You're playing a guy who is investigating a serial killer who gets killed by that very serial killer. So, you're dead, but luckily you're a ghost, and now you're a ghost trying to solver your own murder. There are, of course, a lot of ghost rules, but its usually not too restrictive in that you can pass through walls and all, you just can't interact much with the world. Besides the main mystery there are a lot of mini-mysteries where maybe you find the sight of a car wreck or find the ghost of a lady who doesn't know how she died, and those I think where really interesting when they worked, but a lot of the main mystery solving involved boring things like tailing a cat or leaps in logic that weren't exactly fair. If this game was purely investigating stuff though, even with the guessing and odd detours, it wouldn't be so bad. There's fun to be had there... fun the game doesn't allow you have sometimes because I imagine a higher up at Square Enix said BUT COMBAT?!?!?!

The more recent Sherlock Games do really good with having investigation as its focus, and even when you do combat, it's more like a puzzle: Sherlock is about to get punched but he sees a rickety shelf he can knock down on the guy, things like that. Murdered: Soul Suspect could have done something neat with that idea. Maybe a human is about to be hurt and you posses random objects to foil the aggressor. Instead though, the game decides that it would rather have EEEEEEVIL GHOOOOOOOSTS! Who are really more like guards in any cliche stealth game. You have to sneak around them, because if they notice  you, its gonna take a while to get them to give up on you! It's not particularly interesting or inspired and mostly involves flitting around with ghost teleportation frantically if they find you. It's a shame too, the game takes place in Salem and both educates on what happened back then with witches and comes up with its own interesting fictional approaches to stuff. The game came out in 2014, but I feel if it had come out a year or two later, maybe they would've realized gamers will accept a game without unnecessary stealth/combat. The game even does a good job with its characters but it just drops the ball too much elsewhere!

One fun thing I remember during play it thought is how at one point, your character finds out about a medium who can see the dead and wants to seek her out so he can have more influence on the environment in his investigations. For some reason, I scoffed at this, because mediums aren't really able to communicate with the dead! ...Before remembering I was playing a fictional game where I was playing as an actual ghost. I guess it says something about it doing a good job of suspending my disbelief up until that point at least.

VERDICT: This is a hard one, but I'll ultimately land on the side of Play. The combat/stealth adds nothing good to the game, and some of the investigation stuff is trash, but its got a cool setting, a nice approach to characterization, some fun side mysteries, and ultimately it was an enjoyable experience I think others would enjoy too. Its hard to say just watch it on youtube, because the investigations where you figure things out and the large collection of readable books and files add a lot to the experience and a video online wouldn't allow either of those to work very well. I don't think it deserves some sort of glowing recommendation, but games focused on investigating things, like, ACTUALLY INVESTIGATING things rather than walking in the right room to auto-investigate, are a genre that needs both more games in it, and more creative ones. And ones without tacked on combat/stealth.

Transformers Devastation (Xbox One)
PlatinumGames is a strange developer. On one hand they can deliver high quality action with games like Bayonetta and Metal Gear Rising, and on the other they can push out mediocrity like Legend of Korra and Star Fox Zero. I wasn't really intimately acquainted with their catalog when I opted to get Devastation on the simple recommendation of "PlatinumGames made it", but this game certainly stands above Korra and Star Fox Zero.

You probably know the deal with Transformers, it's not a well kept secret. Those cars you see? Their robots IN DISGUISE! They fight each other a lot. Opting to copy the aesthetic of the franchise's height of popularity in the 80s, Devastation really does create a beautiful simulacrum of an episode of the old TV show, although I'd say its more of a TV Movie kind of plot. The Autobots are fighting Decepticons again, but Megatron's plans are going well enough to put Earth in some real trouble. Nothing groundbreaking here, but it plays right into the kind of thing you'd expect from old Transformers, and I've only been vaguely acquainted with the old show.

PlatinumGames is famous for their intense combat, and Devastation brings a varied and interesting combat system to the table. Each weapon is a new battle style and while some of them aren't as fun as others, they're all fleshed out. The character selection is more about what they can do in their transformed form and a special attack, with Grimlock standing out for being the T-Rex but the game somehow making Optimus and the others still fun or sometimes MORE FUN THAN BEING A T-REX as basic cars. The combat mechanics work very well and the game comes with a slew of enemies to fight. The Legend of Korra's problem was it had pretty much one boss character and then a bunch of enemies, but Transformers Devastation gives you tons of characters from the series to battle, all with unique skills and transformations. The game even has insecticons and the massive combiners. The game can also be pretty hard, as I remember dying. A lot. It's mostly forgiving in that regard, setting you back not too far, but boss fights it pushes you to the beginning of course, and the game has some boss fights that take a while. You do get items that I probably should have used more, but the skill-based gameplay made me stubborn to use health items, and the fact you can buy weapons and all with the in-game currency instead of the healing items made me horde it to save for the new gameplay styles instead of just making it possible to defeat a tough roadblock boss.

VERDICT: Buy. The Wolf Among Us is a good showing of TellTale Games, and I'd say Transformers Devastation is the same for PlatinumGames. Things like Metal Gear Rising are great too, but Devastation has a higher level of approachability. I did end up getting this game myself as well... on PS4. So none of my save data can be transferred, or else I might've decided to try the challenges that I skipped during my rental. It may be a bit goofy to see Optimus Prime dodging around the city during a fight, but it makes it so much more fun to just let loose and punch things as a capable giant robot.

Wolfenstein: The New Order (Xbox One)
Bethesda has a surprisingly good track record when it comes to reviving old PC game franchises.  Although Fallout and Elder Scrolls are the most famous examples, the recent wild success of Doom shows that not only is Bethesda quite capable, but they also get the games their working on. Doom is a modernization of that wild time in FPS history when it was all about blood and guts and big guns. Before they released Doom though, they first treated us to its cousin's revival. Wolfenstein was pretty much the original Doom but killing Nazis instead, with the same visceral feel of blowing apart demons but with history's most famous villains.

Surprisingly though, when it came time to rejuvenate the franchise and give it a coat of modern paint, they took a much different direction than they would with Doom. Wolfenstein: The New Order is an alternate history game where the Nazis won, and it does so much more with that idea than any other media I've seen do it. It doesn't just plop swastikas everywhere, it reinterprets history in a way so unique and well thought out that I tell people who don't even care about video games what it does. Featuring Nazi Party approved reimaginings of art, music, and architecture, as well as a world under the boot of the party, you might think this game might be oppressively bleak. Yet, even though you end up actually going into their modernized death camps at one point, the game is still a strong and enjoyable experience, somehow managing to hit emotional marks even when the gameplay is mostly just still about shooting Nazi.

The New Order does a great job of CONTEXTUALIZING that violence. The game manages to unite the goofier aspects of Nazis from pop culture (right down to having a secret moon base!) while not forgetting the serious aspects (the main villain in particular is like Mengele on overdrive). It keeps the combat interesting as well, mixing old WWII tech as well as future tech, as the premise is the Nazis get a hold of advanced technology which allows them to win the war and take over the world. Naturally, you are in the resistance, and you meet quite a beautiful variety of characters in it. Wolfenstein really didn't have to do much more than making Nazis interesting to shoot again, but it gives a brilliantly imagined world and some actual characters to experience it with. Although I feel I experienced most of what the game offered with my time with it, I still bemoan the fact I missed even one file, newspaper clipping, or record, as seeing our world filtered through the lens of this dystopia was something extremely unique.

VERDICT: Buy. If my gushing wasn't enough, I think even just looking up some of the reimagined music from the game might convince you that this isn't just another entry in what was a flagging shooter series. In games like these, the coat of paint really can change the experience entirely, and Wolfenstein even gives you some quiet moments so its not an endless stream of gunfire. It even has easter eggs where you can play levels from Wolfenstein 3D! While Journey might have been the game most emotionally moving on this list, and Spec Ops: The Line perhaps the one with the best artistic message, Wolfenstein: The New Order was the most impressive game I got from Gamefly. It's certainly got to have one of the best single player FPS experiences of all time.

Ryse: Son of Rome (Xbox One)
You move from one alternate history game onto another, and while I won't fault Ryse: Son of Rome for failing to achieve the exceptional heights of Wolfenstein: The New Order, I will fault it for not really being exceptional in anyway.

Ryse: Son of Rome had potential, I'll admit. It would be cool to play as a roman soldier tearing up the place, and while it does its best to give you interesting locations to do the tearing up in, the act of doing so is repetitive and unengaging. To try and give the combat the kind of flow you'd find in games like Batman: Arkham City and Legend of Kri, Ryse decides to basically turn its combat into a rhythm game, where its about timing your button presses to pull off flashy (and incredibly repetitive) executions. You can technically slash through the entire game instead, if you wish to be punished for the approach, and to be denied the many boosts (including one of the few reliable ways to get health) for refusing to do the same executions over and over on most every enemy. And even if you decided to just hack and slash your way through, that doesn't really bring much to the table at all either, as the combos and executions are both equally about rhythm. I almost think this game would benefit from committing fully to that idea, although I can imagine that would be a hard sell, especially since this was billed as one of the few exclusives meant to entice people to the fledgling Xbox One when it was released.

I do appreciate the game taking us through the Roman conquering of Britain instead of staying in Rome the entire time, but besides the scenery, the story is terribly uninspired. All the characters you aren't supposed to like are an assortment of the most cliche traits you'd give such characters, and the characters you're supposed to like are of course designed so commonly approachable that there's nothing exactly enticing about them. Your character also goes down a rather predictable road of redemption as he realizes his historically appropriate actions are wrong from a modern perspective, and also Gods are guiding things? Its somehow both too simple and too confusing, and the combat doesn't buoy it like most games that get away with an uninteresting plot.

VERDICT: Skip. You've probably noticed up until now, that other than digging my teeth in a bit hard for Flower and flOw, that I've been pretty nice to these games. Most come recommended highly or at least given a thumbs up, and I admit that my broad tastes mean that I'm probably more permissive than most players or reviewers. Most of these reviews should be read with the condition of "you will probably need to like the genre first", and even here, where I'm telling you to skip it, I still enjoyed my time with it, but I also enjoy mediocre and bad games on some level. I certainly don't regret it, it pays to have a breadth of experience instead of wallowing only in the cream of the crop, and it is because I've played the broad spectrum of games that I know this one is unexceptional. It looks nice enough graphically, it has some cool setpieces, and it could probably be refined into a better game if it embraced certain aspects more heartily, but as it stands, there's not much of a reason to invest your time in playing Ryse.

Transformers: War for Cybertron (PS3)
Despite this being the second Transformers game covered here, I don't have any particularly strong attachment to it as a series. I don't dislike it, but I've only dabbled in its media, but even from this outsider perspective, I took special note when people were saying War for Cybertron was a good game. Licensed games have huge hurdles in their path to being great games, and Tranformers, just as a series in general, has often had trouble being adapted. One of the major hurdles it encounters is the involvement of human characters, and oftentimes people say the best Transformers stories focus on the robotic cast rather than any human being they associate with.

If its any clue on what my opinion will be about this game: there isn't a single human being in it.

Transformers: War for Cybertron, I think, is an even better adaptation of the series than even Devastation, despite forgoing the aesthetic of the original cartoon. The robots transforming into cars are given a more realistic look without trying as hard as Michael Bay to sell that idea, and even thought they still transform into vehicles despite this taking place in the past and on a completely different planet than Earth, the game masks this well by making the vehicle forms no real specific model of car or plane. The game gives you a few options of which character to play as, with both a Decepticon portion and Autobot portion of the campaign as the two fight over the fate of their home planet. One thing I like about that aspect is you both get to set up the main conflict and tear it down, but both sides have equally impressive challenges to overcome. The gameplay is primarily a third-person shooter, with plenty of weapons and vehicle forms to swap around and find your favorites.

While the praise I have for this game is simpler, it seems to capture what's good about Transformers better than Devastation. Devastation has a good combat engine it bends to integrate the giant robots, but War for Cybertron properly integrates their vehicle forms both in combat and navigation, as well as giving the Transformers guns as their main attack method, which was the more common option in the show. Almost every picture of those guys always had them holding a weapon or having some missile launching attachment, why would anyone think these giant robots prefer giant katanas and axes? I heard it was supposed to have good multiplayer, but that means little now that the game is basically dead online even if I wanted to try it.

VERDICT: Buy. Did you know High Moon Studios made this game? If only Deadpool had been around to tell me! They seemed to have captured the essence of Transformers better than they did Deadpool at least, and its hard for me to imagine a better adaptation if you strip away artificial influences like Devastation's graphical design. It's a blast to run and gun as these robots in disguise, and all of it is packed in to a decent narrative about the fate of their planet.

God of War: Ghost of Sparta (PSP)
While Ghost of Sparta isn't the first PSP God of War game I played, and I actually owned Chains of Olympus. It's not really worth trying to compare the two, as they mostly differ in their setting, bosses, and a few weapons or skills... which sounds like it would make them very worthy of direct comparison, but that would be something for a more IN-DEPTH analysis instead of a small look at one of them. Ultimately, they're both continuations of the original God of War, although I think Ghost of Sparta turned out to be the one I liked more.

Ghost of Sparta's big point in its favor is a more interesting plot angle than Chains of Olympus. When I completed the original God of War and watched its special features, I saw the sequel tease about Kratos's brother and thought that was an awful angle for the series about fighting the gods and mythical creatures to go with its next installment. Thankfully, God of War II does not go that path... but Ghost of Sparta does, and it works well in a spin-off game! Even though Chains of Olympus would touch on the more expected parts of Kratos's backstory, I did think it was more interesting to dip into this unseen side of him, instead of his wife and daughter that would become his Thomas and Martha Wayne, in that they always would crop up for some easy drama. Not that they shouldn't be acknowledged though, but I doubt the brother comes back into the picture ever.

Either way, God of War: Ghost of Sparta is a continuation of the hack and slash gameplay from the first game, with satisfying combat with some considerable range against foes inspired by Greek myth. All the series's strong points are here as well and it sticks to the formula well... but that's all there really is. If you want more God of War, you're going to find it here, but it doesn't do much to elevate itself above the others. It ironed out a few kinks from the first games and got some new ones from being on the PSP, but in the same way it inoffensively uses the Kratos's brother storyline by being a side game, it also doesn't do much unique as a side game. That's neither a condemnation nor a commendation, but it is tricky to figure out my thoughts on it. It does all it needs to do well... but if you've ever heard the phrase "Mission Pack Sequel", this isn't a far cry from one. It's a God of War game with news bells and whistles, and if you liked the meal before, you'll like the second helping just as much.

VERDICT: Skip. This is a hard rating to give really. I still think its a good game, most people who like God of War would like it too, but its like trying to say "If you like Worlds 1-4 of Super Mario Bros, why not play World 5 and 6 too?" You're either going to do it anyway or already made up your mind on if you care to. Ghost of Sparta, especially now that the PSP is retired, doesn't fill much of a niche. Portable God of War isn't a selling point for buying a game now, although I do believe this game comes bundled with other God of Wars game in a collection pack, which I think is definitely the best way to play it. Ghost of Sparta managed to hit the dartboard with its dart, but if it had missed or gotten a bullseye, at least it would be a bit more interesting. Instead, its in that range where it gets you some points, but not enough to win. Its supplementary material to the God of War series. Despite all this umming and ahhing, and saying to skip it, it's still a good game underneath it all, but about as fulfilling as potato chips.

Lost in Shadow (Wii)
I believe I first heard about this game in a gaming magazine like Nintendo Power, and its concept immediately captivated me. Rather than playing in a traditional physical world, Lost in Shadow is a platform game set entirely in the shadow of that traditional, physical world.

Admittedly, such a concept does take some getting used to. All objects you see on the screen are present only to cast their shadows for you to navigate on, and sometimes the shadows are so short you might as well be running on the platform casting it, leading to some disorientation. You definitely do get used to it, in a good way, unlike flOw. flOw requires you to get used to it because that's how things are, but the game world is entirely within those shadows, and when you can stop ignoring the physical world, you benefit from it rather than growing tolerant of it. You maaaaay still accidentally think that object is a wall blocking you even though it has no shadows on it, but the game is pretty navigable once you've accepted the premise.

The concept, again, is really cool, but despite all I've said, it's almost underutilized. You can move light sources to make shadows taller or smaller, but it never really gets creative with things like shadow puppetry, and late in the game it starts abandoning the shadow ideas for the sake of small 3D environments (most the gameplay is 2D, because shadows are 2D!) and platforming in an area where you just exist rather than working with shadows. The whole goal of the game is, for some reason, perhaps as a form of execution, your shadows is cut from your real body, and your shadow's only goal is to get back to its body to presumably revive itself. There are stories about the shadow world you're in, and you encounter shadow monsters, but they are just that. Monsters as shadows, nothing in the real world is casting them, and soon the real world isn't very interesting since its just inexplicable blocks in a ruined place casting the shadows instead of something interesting.

Lost in Shadow is also too long for its own good, even requiring you to backtrack when it slams an arbitrary roadblock in your face before the final area. The backtracking I guess was done to make you curious about the 3D platforming sections you could see in the real world as you played through the shadows, but none of them are particularly interesting, all of those 3D segments are on a regenerating time limit that requires you to pop in and out of shadows for not much reason but to make it take longer, and then you can continue your game and go to a pretty decent final area... but one that doesn't really connect to the rest of the game. It's 2D platforming again, but without the shadow aesthetic and with 3D rotating platforms. Death's a slap on the wrist in this game too so if you rotate wrong and kill yourself it teleports you back and you just spin it the other way, and even by the time I finished the game I was still not quite used to figuring out how to turn the objects precisely. The game is also way too bright in places and really hurts the eyes!

VERDICT: Skip. I really liked this game's concept, but the delivery on it was half-hearted, and the game is too long even before the backtracking to carry such a small premise. A small indie game could probably do it better in shorter time and more imaginatively, but Lost in Shadow comes up with one or two gameplay aspects and sends you through way too many areas without mixing it up. It also doesn't help that the Wii isn't the best at rendering the shadows at times, not enough to ruin the experience, but enough to be irritating when it happens. Although, again, I enjoyed all the games I played here with my Gamefly subscription, this one was a bit of a disappointment, especially since modern, more imaginative games have done more with less, while this game does less with way too much.

Devil's Third (Wii U)
Nintendo consoles tend to attract the strangest shooting games. Red Steel, Conduit, and Devil's Third were all billed as the shooting games for Nintendo fans, and so far, none of them have really delivered on that promise. The game comes out and gets swept under the rug so quickly that they only exist as shorthand for the failed attempts at appealing to the mainstream audiences found on Xbox and Playstation.

Devil's Third got hurt even harder than the other two I feel, to the point its Wikipedia article still has sections that talk about it like it hasn't been released. I've heard Red Steel 2 is supposed to be good, and Conduit I think was good but not good ENOUGH. Devil's Third is just strange. It's a shooting game, yes, with some decent melee integration as well. The combat and gameplay is competent and enjoyable in the same way any competent system for such things is, but it doesn't reach for any lofty heights. The story, however, is all over the place, trying to spin an insane premise out of disparate pieces of yarn. On some level you might excuse the game's absurdity as an excuse for trying to take you to a bunch of interesting places, but I expect at least some cohesion in the plot, and the plot is mostly "take down the villains" as they scramble all over the globe and go to strange places.

I've heard some amazing stories about this game's multiplayer, however, which could almost redeem the slurry of action setpieces and tropes that is the main plot. The online has a two faction system, as well as the option to be a third party lone wolf mercenary type, and you basically exist as two competing games, performing raids on the enemy holdings, sabotaging them from within... its about as close as I've heard about a game simulating real gang wars. The only problem with that cool online multiplayer? It's locked behind a level up process in its more generic online multiplayer, where you compete for kills on normal maps with no stakes. You have to spend way too much time there to even touch the better mode, likely to make sure only good, committed players get involved in the faction stuff, but instead it just means I'd never invest the time to try that aspect. The game isn't good enough to justify such devotion, and apparently they even are releasing it on PC separately (and hopefully improved and more accessible) to shed the weight of its single player campaign (and, admittedly, the Wii U system. They've already even shut down those servers.)

VERDICT: Skip. While certainly not a bog-standard shooter, its plot reads like the first draft of six different comic series stapled together haphazardly, and the combat doesn't do anything more than it need to. In better hands, with more care, and more coherency, this could've been something worthy of praise and play, and again I must append that I enjoyed the experience for what it was, but I doubt anyone who likes this genre would enjoy this game. It's the kind of game that usually exists in another work of fiction as a parody of genre tropes, but this game does not seem to be a parody in anyway and expects you to accept a giant ancient Japanese village plopped down in Russia and zombies made from super cancer. It's absurd, but not quite delightfully absurd. I almost wish the game was worse so that it could be enjoyed more as a guilty pleasure, or its faults could be made fun of, but for every moment of absurdity with commentary (like pretty much any boss fight or cutscene) there's just a bunch of normal gameplay in between.

Heavenly Sword (PS3)
Knowing my opinion on God of War: Ghost of Sparta, you probably wouldn't be surprised at what I have to say here about Heavenly Sword, a game very much like God of War. Heavenly Sword isn't a direct copy of the God of War formula, because technically it takes place in a more Asian setting. Otherwise, Heavenly Sword has the same hack and slash gameplay of God of War, including the ability to slash at enemies with a chained sword! However, it does do some things God of War doesn't, like making it near impossible to guard! To guard in a fight, you simply do not press any buttons on your controller, which would be okay if you fought one or two guys at a time, but the game will put you in the middle of 30 and then while you're slashing at some guys, one goes in for the attack and the game expects you to just drop your controller I suppose and give that guy the time of day. Instead of, you know, giving you a guard button.

Heavenly Sword also copies the flashy Quick Time Events from God of War, where you need to press a button at the right time during a cutscene... but while God of War will let you see the button you need to press and the cutscene, Heavenly Sword makes you choose. The button prompts are much too small and you won't really get to watch what your character kick butt. At least you get to see PS3 buttons instead, right? It might be somewhat unfair to rail so hard on this game for being similar to God of War, but that's not a sin in itself. Some things it adds are fun. The core gameplay focuses on Nariko and her sword that can switch into three different attack styles, which do the combat well enough, but I think the best part it adds is where you play as Kai. Kai is some sort of feral child adopted by Nariko's village and has a strange British accent, and her dialog is always either charming, cute, or cringey. However, she has a crossbow, and while firing it (and also cannons and other projectile weapons as Nariko) is uninspired normally, if you always use the focus mode after firing, you are able to guide the projectile with a rather fun integration of the Sixaxis motion controls. I think I wouldn't mind an indie game based all around the idea of bending a bullet's path after it fired to push it on course or make trick shots. Kai's segments were always a joy for that reason, as I tried to pick people off from afar in fancy ways.

The story itself is about an emperor named Bohan who really want to conquer just everybody and steal their coolest weapon, and Nariko's village has the Heavenly Sword, a legendary weapon that will kill whoever uses it. Nariko elects to use it to protect the village, and everyone yammers on about how she's unworthy to do so even though this chick is killing herself to save them. Nariko herself is a bit of an unexciting protagonist, but if you thought British feral crossbowgirl was strange, the game's characters really get weird when we look at the bosses. But weird in a GOOD way. They almost feel squandered on this game despite bringing a lot of what makes it good to the table. An insane old bird man, a snake lady that is all over the place, the simple giant Roach... whoever designed these bosses should really team up with Hideo Kojima to make the most quirky and high quality boss squad in history. The fights with the bosses aren't exactly groundbreaking, but they at least are high personality and fun to watch.

VERDICT: This one stings, but I'm going to say Skip. Heavenly Sword's got lovely trimming, but the Christmas Tree itself is too poor to bear them properly. The combat just isn't that great, especially thanks to the necessity and difficulty in guarding. The failure to understand the appeal of QTEs burns as well, and since most the game is actually just the combat and the QTEs, the few moments that do excel aren't worth the price of admission.

Knack (PS4)
Occasionally, people will try to call Super Mario 64 a tech demo, since it was one of the first Nintendo 64 games and it showed off how games, especially platformers, can be made in 3D. Even if it was simply a "tech demo", Super Mario 64 is still a fun game with tons to do in it, and the reason its probably viewed as a tech demo in retrospect is it was pretty much the first game to get 3D platforming right, making it essentially the prototype to any platforming game that came after.

Knack, however, is much more worthy of being called the tech demo that it is. The game's reason for existing is solely because the titular character Knack is a robot made up of tons of individually moving parts, all meant to display how well the PS4 can render such a thing. Knack grows as you play and collect more of these small parts throughout the level, but he only really gets significantly bigger at places where the game bumps up your size on purpose for the next obstacles.

The story is... inexplicable. You are play as Knack, a robot made of ancient artifacts who can integrate more, and you are being used because Goblins are invading the futuristic cities people live in. Somehow, with their tribal weaponry, the Goblins are a major threat. To be fair we find out some bad egg humans are giving them some advanced tech, but they're still mostly using bows and blades besides the bosses. You'd think the humans could do more than throw their hands up and rely on Knack to punch everything really hard. The biggest point in this game's favor is a bit of a mixed bag, and that is the classic cartoon artstyle. It reminds me a lot of things like Astro Boy, but while you'll have the big nose doctor, you then have a very realistic human, and then a lady who looks like she got stuck halfway in the transition between those two extremes. Not to mention that, other than Knack being cutesy, his busy design clashes with that artstyle once he grows, and when he's at his largest, he's the spikiest thing since a group of hedgehogs all curled into a ball in a punji pit. The most fun segments are where you are a giant robot smashing through the place, and the game does wisely give you a few moments to go hog wild with it. Knack can also absorb things like wood and crystals to get different abilities, and being a giant flaming robot as your wood burns was also cool, if much too short.

Still, the game sadly doesn't have much at its core. Knack hops around and fights pretty simply, and the puzzles aren't particularly imaginative, only really having things like the time allotted to do them as obstacles to their completion. More notably, I decided for Knack I'd try to use the PS4's share button, connecting it to my Twitch in the hopes of just saving an archive of me playing a game to perhaps review later. The Twitch streaming unfortunately is not the best, mostly because game can put blocks in to hide certain moments of the game, like late-game cutscenes or where a secret is, and why would anyone want to watch a stream where it keeps cutting out at the good bits? Strangely though, a guy decided to watch my stream, some guy from France who kept trying to tell me how to play. I added him as a PSN friend, only to see he is REALLY into Knack. Like, has all the secrets and yet still plays it. I guess he was just happy to see anyone playing Knack on Twitch, even if I wasn't talking at all.

VERDICT: Skip. Knack is mostly just a tech demo well and truly, and its plot is poorly conceived and stringed together. Just the fact you fight goblins so much in a game about being a robot is strange enough, but it neither pushes a combat focus or a platform focus, leaving it just a way to show off a graphical feature that I can't really imagine got into many other games, save the now inexplicably greenlit Knack 2. Maybe they'll redeem it by fleshing things out and getting more imaginative, but until then, Knack is best served as videogamedunkey's running punchline for how underwhelming and ill conceived it was. Still, I must again say that I did enjoy my own time with it, and apparently some guy over in France REALLY enjoyed his time with it. To each their own.

Deadly Creatures (Wii)
Perhaps moreso even than Lost Shadow, Deadly Creatures was a game with an intriguing concept that I immediately wanted to play, but jut never managed to acquire it before I got Gamefly. In Deadly Creatures you alternate between playing as a Tarantula and a Scorpion, fighting other creatures in the desert like Gila Monsters, Rattlesnakes, and Tarantula Hawks. The animals all behave pretty realistically save the inherent human guidance of the player and the fact that almost every creature picks fight over flight in the game. As cool as it would be to see, the Tarantula never supplexes anyone, the animals moving as closely as possible to their real world counterparts.

You just kind of bug around most the game, bugging it up and such, but as you bug all over the place, a pair of humans keep crossing your path, often not even noticing you as they are out in the desert trying to dig up some old Civil War gold. Your path will occasionally intersect with theirs, and although its hard to hear what they're talking about sometimes, they are a fine addition, and their expedition adds human objects to the environment. a single pick-up truck is an enormous stage when you're a small arachnid. The tarantula is the more fun of the two to play as I believe, simply for having the option of the web, although the scorpion has sort of snappier combat, I suppose, as its draw. Both of them can walk all over walls, ground, and sometimes ceiling, although exactly how well they can do that depends on the material and situation. Sometimes it can be incredibly disorienting, as the game keeps the camera close to make you see the world as the bugs would, and I remember getting lost sometimes simply because being able to walk on any surface meant I kept getting upside down and sideways. It should have indicated the way onward more clearly, I feel.

While it certainly delivers well enough on the concept, it is a Gamefly rental because of how short it is. I appreciate their approach to authenticity (although it kind of stretches that when the bugs intersect the human element of the plot), but it might've been cooler if they had allowed themselves some liberties, or gone completely absurd and had the scorpion fight something as big as a coyote. Its a competent game but low on content, and the desert areas can get kind of drab and uninteresting after a while, despite the game making you take interesting detours.

VERDICT: Skip. If the idea of playing as a tarantula and a scorpion didn't immediately appeal to you, you probably won't like this game. If it did immediately appeal to you, it probably is worth a play. I can't think of many other games that take this approach and try to do so realistically, and it delivers on the promise of its premise ultimately, it just doesn't have much creativity on where to go with it. I'm glad I finally got to play it though.  Its also worth mentioning that the crawling on walls comes with a big issue, in that I kept falling through them and glitching out of the world. The game could have used quite a bit more time in the oven. It also, strangely, has fall damage, so if you pop off the wall, you can die, whereas real bugs fall all the time from high up and scurry off perfectly fine. I guess it can't all be realistic! Or maybe those bugs were just putting on a brave face for me when they fell in real life. Either way, we've again found a game that could be great, is still pretty good, but it has to be your cup of tea or else you won't get into it.

Wolfenstein: The Old Blood (Xbox One)
Wolfenstein: The Old Blood is a standalone DLC experience built off of Wolfenstein: The New Order, and after New Order blew me away, I was more than happy to pick up its DLC. I am very pleased with game companies releasing their bigger DLC expansions separately now, mostly because I don't need to worry about situations like this where I'm renting both the game and its DLC!

The Old Blood got my hopes up for more Wolfenstein goodness... but it fell short. I know its a bit unfair to compare the DLC to the main game, but in this case, Old Blood deviates incredibly from the main game. New Order's interesting post-Nazi victory world, with its crazy tech and alternate history, are completely abandoned by the DLC, which chooses to set itself up as a prequel placed during World War II itself. The game also changes its focus away from portraying the breadth of Nazism in fiction and instead zeroes in on one aspect of them: their interest in the occult. Now, ever since Indiana Jones, most people know that the Nazis liked the occult a lot, but they liked a lot of things, most things except for racial equality of course. I had no real issue with them focusing the narrative on the Nazi's look into the supernatural, but it does it with such laser focus that the game doesn't bring much else along with it. None of the cool alternate history moments, none of the quiet character building moments. It's just a lot of shooting the undead and using the BRAND NEW WEAPON of a pip. I swear, the game designers were gaga for that thing, and wormed it into Old Blood wherever they could.

The gunplay itself, despite the occasional pipe insistence, is as good as ever, and really its not too bad at doing what it tries to do, but it sheds so much of The New Order's charm to give you a pretty basic experience. You shoot some nazis, you shoot some zombies, you shoot some nazi zombies. It almost feels like I might be asking too much from DLC, but then again it is standalone, and if someone only bought this, they'd get a well-structured experience, but nothing with as great world-building as New Order or as unadulterated gleeful carnage like Doom.

VERDICT: Skip. Especially if you aren't going to pick up Wolfenstein: The New Order. If I had to best explain how that game compares to its DLC, just imagine those old days where a game would release on a proper console, but then have a stripped down Game Boy port. Wolfenstein: The Old Blood has enough of the blood of New Order to be a standalone experience, but it loses so much of the personality for the sake of pursuing its premise of addressing the Nazi interest in the occult, which to be fair was the focus of a few of the games in the series and it might exist to placate those who liked that aspect. It might also exist to placate the one guy at Bethesda who has a really troublesome obsession with pipes, and they have to throw him a bone every now and again or he'll tear out all the building's plumbing to get his fix.

Godzilla (PS4)
Sometimes a game comes along that isn't that great, isn't that varied, doesn't even provide a really fulfilling experience... but you love playing it anyway. There is just something about this Godzilla game that ticks a few of my boxes without ticking the ones I thought it would need to. It has a very simple arrangement, where the story mode is you playing as Godzilla, stomping around the map and destroying stuff full of G Energy to increase your size, and every now and again your stomping fun will be interrupted by some kaiju or some man-made weapon. The PS4 version, right off the bat, is supposedly objectively superior to other versions for having more kaiju, and even as a person who has only seen the first few Godzilla movies, it was still a joy seeing all the kaiju on offer. I even recognized most of them just from having looked into kaiju before, and its got all the ones you'd expect, all the ones you'd probably want but might not dare to dream for, and then some you might not expect.

Not all are playable of course, especially the human weapons, but there's a nice variety available. The main gameplay is a story about Godzilla going on a rampage and it has no more depth to it than that really, not that I'd ask for it. There are also modes available where you can basically do an arcade mode run through the levels as the other kaiju, and an evolution mode where Godzilla gradually learns a bunch of new tricks. I didn't fully explore the other modes, although I did beat the story and its many branching paths, which you unlock based on your performance in the levels. The game even comes with a cool encyclopedia of Godzilla kaiju, a nice touch that probably could have been ignored due to wikis these days, but its cool to read them in game too.

The kaiju fighting isn't exactly complicated, and that's surely what drags it down. It does alright, wrecking stuff still looks good and all, but you learn how to cheese a lot of things and not doing so just gets you screwed. Some kaiju control awkwardly and very stiffly, and for ones like Mothra Larva who they let you play as for some reason, that's expected, but even when you pick a more traditionally shaped kaiju, the strange attack methods make an already poor control system feel even worse. I don't want my character doing backflips and flying away from the enemy after an attack! Especially when a few lucky ones get basic claw swipes that all they need to do is get in with and they've basically won.

Still, for some reason... it's mind-numbingly fun. I was putting on podcasts and listening to them as I wrecked cities as Gigan and Rodan. I still have Godzilla installed on my PS4 just in case I ever do buy it, because it seems like a decent time waster, even if it isn't doing much more than just occupying me.

VERDICT: Skip. As much as I enjoy turning my brain off and bashing a few buildings as Jet Jaguar, its still not very good. Its the gaming equivalent of twiddling your thumbs, a way to keep yourself busy just so you aren't doing nothing. I'm not sure what other Godzilla games have been like, and maybe my glee at seeing the kaiju on offer is nothing compared to some older game with a bigger roster, but these kaiju do look great on the PS4. Despite my unexplained love for it, it might be one of the games I'd rate lowest if I was using a number scale, but I'd still say it was simply average rather than outright bad, although it is also definitely not the modern Godzilla game the fans deserve.

The Order: 1886 (PS4)
Once again, we find ourselves visiting a game that goes for the alternate history route, but Wolfenstein: The New Order this ain't.

The Order: 1886 is your basic cover shooter with the trappings of wasted potential. See that number in the title? The game takes place then, in a world where steampunk and fantasy both seem to exist. You play as a member of the Knights of the Round Table, who use steampunk guns instead of swords and all that, which is one of the cooler angles the game takes. Everything else is kind of a grab bag of steampunk tropes: zeppelins in the air, Tesla being around and recognized for his genius, not game-breaking aspects of course but I wish they had embraced the idea of Steampunk Arthurian legend more than just informing the main characters. Over the course of the game, doing your knightly thing, you discover a conspiracy involving werewolves and vampires and then at the end of that game, none of that is resolved and if anything things only are made worse BUT ITS OKAY SEQUEL HOOK! One that might not get made and likely would be spending too much time trying to be cinematic. See, maybe the way the game's plot could've worked as a movie or the early episodes of a tv show, but here, its just getting cut off after learning about the world and threat and not getting to do anything about it.

By now you should also expect me to say the gunplay is serviceable. The weapons do enough and it gives you a few neat ones but nothing to write home about. It does do that annoying thing where during a stealth section, the moment you get caught you instantly die, so that's a mark against it. A lot of the gameplay exists as an excuse to push along the plot, and as I said the plot doesn't go much of anywhere, and even then its not exactly a riveting premise after they took some cool art design and visuals and just decided to do nothing with them. Oh, and widescreen is non-optional, gotta be CINEMATIC at all times!

VERDICT: Skip. And probably one of my more assured skips. Unless you're like me and you can draw enjoyment from most anything, The Order: 1886 just reeks of wasted potential, and potential that was seemingly wasted on purpose since the developers intended it only to be the first in a longer series. You can't sell just your intro for full price and expect us to swallow it happily though, This is like a heavily, HEAVILY stripped down Metal Gear Solid game, but even those, with their hour long cutscenes, at least gave you good gameplay to carry you there. If anything, this game is basically like the first three issues of a meandering comic book series, one that has quite a lot of its arc left and could have conceivably hooked you if it didn't putter about so long. Somewhere out there there's better steampunk alternate history. Go find it.

Remember Me (PS3)
We go from a failure of worldbuilding to OH MY GOD THIS WORLDBUILDING! I think its even better than Wolfenstein The New Order in regards to creating its setting. I guess I shouldn't put the cart before the horse though.

Remember Me is a cyberpunk brawler, and when you heard that, you probably got the wrong idea about the both of them. First of all, although cyberpunk does tend towards the same tropes, Remember Me takes a very creative route and decides to build its entire setting around one breakthrough in technology: the ability to digitize memories. In this future, people are able to access memories electronically, and through this they are able to remove them, rewrite them, and even add new ones. This doesn't inherently lead to a dystopia, surprisingly, although there are of course the usual evil underbelly to it all and the ups and downs to it. Many people, especially the rich, will remove their bad memories and buy experiences curated to make them happy. The poor treat memories like a drug, desperately snatching a hit of happiness from some backroom memory dealer. Some people have had their minds completely fried from the memory tampering, becoming unusual and reckless beings who can't retain any information. People who go to prison have their minds scrubbed of the offending thoughts until they're rehabilitated and can be released.

This game does so much with this concept! Now you might be asking how does this factor into the brawler aspect. Well, while there are moves you can do during combat to screw with a character's mind, you are mostly punching and kicking folks, although the game has a real cool system that injects your typical brawler combos with an all new flair. See, Remember Me has this combo lab thing on its pause menu, where you can create and customize your combos. You gradually unlock and discover new attacks, which all take the form of a single button press, but those buttons can be customized to have different aspects. You can set a single attack in your combo to either heal you, be a power move, increase the effects of the previous attack, or generate a meter for your special moves. Since you got control over how to form these combos too, you could conceivably give yourself one easy to execute healing combo where you do quick weak attacks to build back up your health, or you could have a more intricate combo that is basically your power combo. This combo system on its own is really cool, and I'd love to see it copied in more games, as this experience was certainly not enough for me to exhaust such a neat twist on your typical combat system.

Besides the brawler aspect, the game has portions where you wire yourself into someone's mind and begin tinkering with their memories, either to turn a bad guy good, to undo the tinkering someone else has done to them, or to learn something that you can only get through their eyes. I wish their had been more of these sequences as you were basically puzzling out a mystery each time, and it does make the whole morality of memory tampering really hit you directly instead of just seeing the society it created.

Remember Me has an awesome world, cool combat mechanics... how did this game not get love? I guess some things I can identify are the protagonist not exactly being too interesting (she starts off with her memories drained unsurprisingly) and the boss fights, which are really prone to looping their patterns without bringing too much interesting to the table. The combo lab could've also been a bit more forthcoming with its attack slots and attributes, so I can see a few people giving up while the game hasn't quite got going yet. Its definitely not perfect, and I guess you can lock yourself into doing the same combos repeatedly if all you wanted was POWERPOWERPOWER instead of trying to keep topped up on everything. I feel if this game had a sequel that fleshed out the combo system to give it more options, a lot more people would like it.

VERDICT: Buy. Even for all its faults, Remember Me brings a world committed to its idea and so many fun bits and bobs that it just blew me away. This was definitely the surprise hit of the list, as some of the others I've raved about I knew beforehand were quite good. Remember Me also poorly advertised itself, as I basically had no idea what it was save the protagonist was that girl on the cover. It's a shame it never got much attention besides for its troubles trying to make its protagonist female in that old economic climate, and I feel if it had gotten enough love, we'd probably have a Remember Me 2 that ironed out all the issues so that its imagination could really shine.

Legend of Kay Anniversary (Wii U)
The existence of this game is inexplicable. While I don't want to dismiss the idea of rereleasing and remaking games in order to make them more widely available in the modern age, Legend of Kay was never a game that appeared on my radar, even after I opened my radar open super wide and leaped at every miniscule blip that could be interesting. Legend of Kay was released for the PS2 in 2005, received lukewarm reviews, and this apparently was enough to justify a modern remaster. I thought maybe it was an early PS2 game and thus earned love simply for being available, but this was 5 years into the system's life, so I don't know what made people think it was a beloved classic.

Willing to believe I missed out on a hidden gem though, I decided to snap up its Anniversary edition, waiting to see what the game would deliver... Eh. I can't see it. Whatever it was that justified this remake doesn't convey itself well, and even with the updated graphics and all, the game still looks more like a Gamecube or Wii game with no real identifiable improvements.

Legend of Kay Anniversary is sort of your typical action-adventure platformer form the PS2 era, comparable to a more well-loved game like Jak and Daxter. You run, jump, and fight around various locales, solving puzzles and saving the world in a very generic story that decides to make all its important cutscenes some rather bland comic strips. I do like that the game begins with the lands already conquered by the gorilla emperor and you just finally have enough and begin your rebellion, but otherwise it brings nothing special. The opening area was a strange deviation from what would be the norm too, with many sidequests likely just to give you an easy start to the game before it becomes totally linear from then on. The sidequests were a bit of a mixed bag but it would've been nice to have them later when you're just drudging through enormous areas that often twist and turn around on themselves, leaving you meandering about as you try to find the next step in a mazelike mix of generic scenery.

The combat and platforming aren't worthy of much comment, its that inoffensive PS2 era design I mentioned earlier, but holy crap is Kay the worst protagonist ever. I suppose I should have mentioned it earlier, but everyone in this game is an anthropomorphic animal, and while the Jamaican nudist frogs are awesome and the female pandas are just plain disturbing, you as the player are put in the role of the smuggest, most self-loving cat ever. Kay begins the game brash and overconfident, and ends it brash and overconfident. Every time you encounter a pack of enemies he has some unimaginative quip about how he's going to win, and he's constantly crossing his arms to deliver some witless one-liner. His cockiness never produces anything except the most generic heroism, and I really wish he could've just been a silent protagonist instead.

VERDICT: Skip. I'm not sure what motivated them to pull this game out for its 10th anniversary besides perhaps not having many hits since, but there was clearly a lot of improving they could have done that they decided to skimp on. The game doesn't look too bad or even play all that bad, but its unexceptional and doesn't really create much worth seeing. There are much better games in this style, and I think the only reason you might like this much is if it was your first experience with that style of gameplay. And please, someone give Kay his just desserts. I'd be perfectly fine if you did a 20th anniversary edition where he gets taken down a few hundred pegs.

Dragon Ball Origins (DS)
A delightful romp through the early days of Dragon Ball, this game covers the early parts of the anime, going from the very beginning up until the first tournament. Admittedly a small span of time in the grand scheme of the show, but it is perhaps the most nostalgic point, having all of the Emperor Pilaf stuff and managing not to skimp on very many details. The game manages to cover most everything that happens in that span of time, admittedly omitting some of the raunchier bits but still including some of the ones you might think too raunchy to include! More interestingly, it manages to adapt even the smallest of episodes into full-fledged levels, and whereas a single villain-of-the-day episode isn't that great in a tv show, it works very well in a video game where it gives you an interesting challenge to overcome, not to mention that they can flesh it out a bit more by devoting a whole area to that villain.

Dragon Ball Origins is an action-adventure game with a sort-of topdown perspective, where you play as Goku, to the surprise of no one. Goku's attacks are executed solely with the touch screen, and while this can be annoying in games like The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass, Dragon Ball Origins manages to make it work okay, notably by allowing you to move with the buttons so you aren't running into enemies you are trying to attack. Goku's attacks are simply enough to pull off, and sometimes the touchscreen justifies itself, like when you drag out the power pole to adjust its length or direction. It also has a sort of small challenge for certain abilities that will influence their strength and speed. The faster you do the Kamehameha Wave, the weaker it is, but you can hold down the screen prompts to charge it up and make it stronger. This means you can just as much use it to blast away as pig or deal serious damage to a boss without either hurting the potential to do the other. It's not a deep combat system really, but its punchy enough to do its job.

Somehow, I managed to sample Dragon Ball Origins ages ago, playing a demo of it on the DS. Not sure how I played a demo on the DS in those times, but it interested me enough to make this rental, and while the combat is good enough, the areas fun enough to explore, and the nostalgia turned up high, it squanders a lot of this as the game goes on. You'd think fleshing out the smaller episodes would lead to more variation, but during periods where the show had too few action moments, the game contrives reasons for you to go on adventures with no real direction through areas you've been to before, not to mention its many enigmatic secret levels unlocking late in the game to basically give you retreads of the earlier levels with some small new element. Solving the maze of Pilaf's Castle can be fun once, but it was not something  I wanted to revisit and the game insisted there was still more it could milk out of the location. I feel a bit more self control could have lead to a more well-rounded experience, and sometimes a longer experience isn't necessarily a better one.

VERDICT: Skip, with the condition that if you are a big Dragon Ball fan (or even just one with a bit of nostalgia for it) it is a good Play. Despite recounting the show so closely it is no substitute for it, and when it tries to do its own thing or contrive some new addition to the story, it always fails utterly, especially since they always stick that story in the same few settings that were interesting with the better tales behind them. Perhaps not play it all in one go would make those levels better, but they still have no imagination behind them. You may also notice earlier I said the combat is good ENOUGH and the areas fun ENOUGH, and that's where the lack of recommendation comes from. If I wasn't encountering the stuff I liked about early Dragon Ball, the combat would not be enough to sustain a good game with. Most of your time is spent going around fighting pigs and lizards in those areas too, and with the bosses as the only enemy highlights, it can leave you a bit high and dry as you muck around looking for the way onward. Still, what I found was enough to make me want to try Dragon Ball Origins 2 still, here's hoping they didn't repeat the sins of their predecessor!

Transformers: Fall of Cybertron (PS3)
The final game on this list, and a sequel to a game I recommended highly earlier in this list, Fall of Cybertron continues the unusual glut of Transformers games on this list as well as continuing the gameplay style of its predecessor. Just like War for Cybertron, Fall is a third person shooter where you're those giant robots that transform into cars, but this time they have refined, improved, and developed the gunplay and weapon systems to make it a more interesting and varied experience. For the most part, you're still mostly just shooting bad guys with some cool guns or shoot those same bad guys AS A CAR, but to fulfill its role as a sequel, this game has inserted some incredibly flashy moments and appeals to Transformers nostalgia, pulling out more recognizable robots (the Dinobots especially) and giving some major setpieces to play in, all while keeping its darker tone.

However, while Fall of Cybertron is good, it is sort of more of the same, and while it has some big flashy moments to appeal to you, its story is sort of vapid. In the previous game Cybertron took a major beating and so the Autobots set off to find a new planet to live on... but this game takes place in the teeny tiny window of time between the Autobots preparing to leave and actually leaving Cybertron, thus cramming in a plot that has very little stakes as the previous game kind of included the results in its ending. It does its best, and it throws you in enough interesting places to give you a lot of fun stuff to do, but it can't quite match the scale of the previous game's plot, and it sometimes leans too hard on things like "Destroy this cannon. Destroy the next cannon. Destroy the third cannon."  I do think the Decepticons got the better angle of the story, where this time they're the ones getting shaken up hard and you basically have to reorganize them and regroup so they can sort of execute their plan (which is sadly a foregone conclusion because of the War for Cybertron's ending).

VERDICT: Play. The sad fact of it is that Fall of Cybertron isn't bad, and it improves on a lot of the stuff that War for Cybertron needed to be improved with, but it just doesn't have the same spark as its predecessor. It has a lot of great flashy moments, and ultimately it is more of a good game, so its hard to complain about that, but it feels more like a DLC expansion than a standalone game, especially due to how it awkwardly squeezes itself into a small window of time left by the previous game's plot. I'd almost say they're better to be played back to back, instead of with this massive space in between them like how I played them, but War for Cybertron still feels the superior of the two for being so much more packed with content, and meaningful content at that.

Conclusion
And there you have it! A short look at all the games I got through Gamefly during a 3 month subscription. Although this is somewhat just elaborate shilling, it was also just a chance for me to share some thoughts on some games you might be interested in, and while I gave a lot more skips than I thought I would, this ranking scale is a bit curbed in that I tried to consider things from the perspective of a regular person, instead of someone like me who'll play anything. Keep in mind, even when I say Skip, I'd rate many of these games pretty well, where if I had to assign numbers, I guess a Skip is usually a 4-6, Play would be High 6-7, and Buy would be 8 and above. And that means graded more appropriately, not in a world where every game is an average of 8, but one where 5 is the average.

I suppose I can do a few things to make it more simple to read here at the end, such as: collecting all the games by rating!

Buy: Spec Ops: The Line, The Wolf Among Us, Journey (Flower and flOw really don't get a ranking, but would probably be Skip), Transformers Devastation, Wolfenstein: The New Order, Transformers: War for Cybertron, Remember Me

Play: Deadpool, Murdered: Soul Suspect, Transformers: Fall of Cybertron

Skip: Ryse: Son of Rome, God of War: Ghost of Sparta, Lost in Shadow, Devil's Third, Heavenly Sword, Knack, Deadly Creatures, Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, Godzilla, The Order: 1886, Legend of Kay Anniversary, Dragon Ball Origins

Huh, only 3 in Play, thought there'd be more when I made the rating, but I erred often towards the extremes and often appended Play to the borderline cases of Skip. Buy managed a lovely 7, while Skip got 12 total. I won't rate Lollipop Chainsaw's brief experience until I can truly play it (although it seemed like a buy) and Avengers: Age of Ultron was a move, so ultimately, think of this haul as you will.

I shall also put these games in order of Best to Worst, also for funsies and ease of reading.

1: Wolfenstein: The New Order
2: Journey
3: The Wolf Among us
4: Remember Me
5: Transformers: War for Cybertron
6: Transformers Devastation
7: Spec Ops: The Line
8 (Play Line): Transformers: Fall of Cybertron
9: Murdered: Soul Suspet
10:  Deadpool
11 (Skip Line): Wolfenstein: The Old Blood
12: God of War: Ghost of Sparta
13: Heavenly Sword
14: Deadly Creatures
15: Ryse: Son of Rome
16: Lost in Shadow
17: Legend of Kay Anniversary
18: Dragon Ball Origins
19: Godzilla (once my bias is removed)
20: Devil's Third
21: The Order: 1886
22: Knack

Some of the order is a bit arbitrary, and I'm not too happy with some of the placement, but its roughly accurate and the extremes certainly are right. This is only a comparison within this small almost arbitrary selection as well, but somewhere down the line, probably sporadically, I'd like to do more blogs about this sharing my thoughts on games I've played and making some use of this giant pile of games for something other than my own enjoyment. I'd probably do certain themes similar to this Gamefly one but more focused (a whole series, what I own on a certain console, etc.) Now then, I did promise this, and... I think this is how you do it! But if you want to try a month of Gamefly for free, I believe this is the link you can use to get it: http://gamefly.extole.com/micro/microsite2?channel=other&channel=other&source=site-footer&extole_token=DKXWC79N0J56WAB9PA

I believe that is right, I might have to have an active subscription to share it, but if not, tell me if you get it working, and we can both get a month of free games or movies in the mail! ...Might not apply out of the US, but try if you like!

Either way, I hope you enjoyed me rambling at length about a bunch of games I played. Maybe I offered some insight on them, and maybe I helped you find a great game for you to play, or helped you avoid a major stinker!