This was fun. I wrote a bunch of it early, to get ahead of the myself a bit and ensure that I at least got two of these out back to back. Wrote a whole bunch of words about how most modern videogames are bang average at their very worst, with very few actual full-blown stinkers these days. Finished the piece, left it to edit later in the week and then I played Crossfire X and had to rethink everything I had just written. An incredibly bad videogame.

It's a long one this week, folks! Don't expect this every time or I will definitely let you down!

Dying Shite.

The developmental shitshow that is attached to Dying Light 2 was pretty well documented (this article by bald journalist Kirk McKeand will get you up to speed), so it shouldn't be a surprise that the game released at the end of it is messy, disjointed and often irritating. The first game was a bit of an underappreciated gem of the last generation. A slightly botched launch (where they had to recall copies of the game due to some of the zombies wearing a religious headscarf) left a poor first impression but after nearly five years worth of updates, content and support, the Dying Light you can buy right now is a really good time. Despite the fact that the story and setting takes itself quite seriously, there's this brilliant slow burn of power you gain throughout the game. You start off terrified of crowds of zombies and the horrors that come out at night, fending them off with whatever makeshift bludgeoning tool you can get your hands on and by the end of the game you're grappling your way around the place like its Arkham City, dropkicking every zombie you see like you're Jumbo Tsuruta and wielding some kind of electrified katana and a hot pink assault rifle, absolutely fearless. It's heaps of fun.

So with all that in mind I am sure you will agree that it is pretty baffling that someone clearly sat down in a meeting room somewhere a few years ago and went "I know what fans of the original Dying Light want - a greater focus on narrative and branching storyline paths." Someone should've called the fucking police because a crime was being committed.

There's also the strange changes to the main things that gave Dying Light its identity first time around. The once tight, precise free-running now feels strangely floaty and this makes it hard to judge what you can/can't get away with in regards to jumps. You now begin to turn into a zombie in the dark, so you're on a timer in any interior section or when you're out and about at night, which is where the tougher (and more interesting) zombies spawn and thrilling chases can occur. You also start with a really restrictively short stamina bar - clearly designed to help control what you can and can't access as you play through the game - which means that you can't just climb and free run wherever you want and, perhaps more importantly, restricts you from just spending some time outside of the main missions levelling yourself up and getting to that brilliant spot where you're a running, jumping, dropkicking machine. The freedom eventually comes but it is a chore to get there. It reminds me of Horizon Zero Dawn, a game that has some good ideas in the combat but gates it all behind skill trees like it is a game from the mid 00s and by the time you've unlocked the interesting, high level moves you're already massively burned out on the game - plus, you've almost finished it. The skill tree is also much more convoluted, where you receive skill points to allocate to abilities through fighting and free-running but also need to thing three of these hidden collectibles to actually upgrade your stats to the point where you can use the abilities in the first place. Yuck.

It's also riddled with bugs. Patches are coming and yes, Techland did say that there was a substantial day one patch that will address bugs that reviewers may find in their pre-release copies but let me tell you something, folks - I am playing it with the day one patch installed and I am still seeing bandits teleporting onto rooftops, enemies clipping through walls and items resting in mid-air. It's a bit of a mess. A mess that admittedly, looks fantastic in stills, but it falls to bits the second you start moving around.

Honestly, I'm baffled. What were they thinking? What brainrot infiltrated some higher-up at Techland that made them think that this was the clear creative direction for a sequel to Dying fucking Light?! Perhaps it is indicative of the overall direction of AAA videogames in 2022 that this huge focus on things like characters and world-building and backstory and LORE in a game shouldn't actually be a surprise to me. It never excites, never grips you, never makes you care and yet, that's the thing that seems to be pushed front and centre at all times.

You can just see the cracks, how disjointed development must've been. Sure, the pandemic has effected pretty much every game in some way but the issues in the studio are so clearly visible in this "finished" product, be it in the strange design decisions and changes to the formula or the obvious technical deficiencies. A real shame and a huge missed opportunity.

And yet...

The stupid thing about all of this despite doing nothing but complaining about it above, if I have to score Dying Light 2 right now I'd give it a big old 3/5, which is a perfectly fine score. A 6/10. It failed to build on the stuff I enjoyed in the original game but it is still an above average game that has enough in it to be worth playing at the right price. It's certainly a step in the wrong direction and I can't recommend you rush out and drop sixty quid on the thing but is it bad? Is anything bad these days? I HATED The Artful Escape last year but is that honestly a BAD game? When was the last time I played something that was actually bad? What about you?

I've seen people kicking off about Balan Wonderworld but the few hours I spent with it I found it to be totally fine. Sure it was a little clumsy and sure, there's a few design decisions in there from a style of platform game that isn't really fashionable to make any more but is it SHIT? Is it worthy of such derision, declarations that it is one of the worst games ever made? I can only assume that the people who think that fall into one of three categories...

1. Outrage merchants fishing for engagement so everything is either "the best/worst thing ever".

2. Genuinely clueless about videogames and their history and I really hope you didn't see this on a website who paid for those words.

3. A child. Or, at the very least, someone born after the PS1.

None of these can be trusted.

The thing about games in 2022, you see, is we've kind of got things figured out. Now, this has pros and one hell of a lot of cons (but we'll save those for another time) but, if we focus on the upside, the baseline standard for most retail games is pretty high. Even with bugs and day one patches, there's still a level of quality that is higher than what we had in the early 00s and exponentially higher than anything that came before that.

Have you played Bebe's Kids on the SNES? Have you played the videogame adaptation of Wayne's World. Have you played RISE OF THE ROBOTS? You can play Rise of the Robots right now, in your web browser, if you click here. Go on, give it a go, see what you think and come back to me. I'll wait, it's fine.

Pretty rough, isn't it?

The controls are extremely unresponsive and when they do work, they're awkward. Visually, everyone was duped by pre-release renders but it is ugly as hell and technically bettered by other games using similar technology in the Donkey Kong Country series, Killer Instinct and Super Mario RPG. It has some confusing decisions, like player one only being able to play as the protagonist Cyborg but player two being able to choose from any of the other robots available in the game. There's almost no content - a run through the arcade mode ladder with the one character and you've seen everything. THAT is a bad game, a game that is below average and yet I've seen people saying that Dying Light 2 is a crime against humanity because it runs at 30fps. Seriously, please, for the improvement of your ability to critique a game - play some old games and don't just play good ones.

There's this trend that if something isn't an important, AAA, genre defining or elite level title then it is basically worthless. There's an expectation that everything has to be the next biggest and best thing ever. You see it with the Marvel films - there's no room for something to just be deemed as "alright" - everything is hyped up to be some life-changing experience by fans. Reviews are essentially meaningless because the consumer decides they're going to ride and die for something based on the first sniff of marketing for it and, due to social media, they can make a lot of noise about their opinion too. When a game comes out like Dying Light 2 or Balan Wonderworld or Terminator Resistance, all games that are far from being landmark titles, then they're basically trash, regardless of the elements they have within them that are well worth checking out, be it for the right price or whether or not you like a specific genre.

Explaining why you don't like something everyone else loves is just as important as the opposite but it is always worth keeping in mind that most stuff, at its very worst, is fine and it is probably just not your cup of tea and a truly, truly terrible game will be quite the sight to behold in 2022. Bad games do exist but that one you're playing right now, it probably isn't one of them.

HOWEVER...

STOP THE PRESS! As if the gaming gods themselves willed it to be, I've just played a bunch of Crossfire X! It is atrocious! Just when you think we're past the point of truly terrible videogames and that a lot of the discourse it people pissing about whether they love or hate something that is actually just an average game, along comes this absolute disaster.

First of all, it is a mess of glitches and bugs. There's a list of various different issues including the free single player campaign being locked behind a paywall. With this sort of game, you'd expect issues to be ironed out by multiple patches throughout its life but this one is particularly messy out of the gate.

The campaign is made by none other than Remedy, those behind Alan Wake and Control. Regardless of what I think of their games, you can't say they're dull. Well, guess what? Crossfire X's campaign is one of the most generic military shooter campaigns in, well, ever. Remedy definitely half-arsed this one, presumably the money from Smilegate was too good to turn down. This probably funded Alan Wake 2 and that's about the best thing I can say about it.

You know there was that chat about the Alien A.I. in Aliens: Colonial Marines being bust because someone didn't close a bracket or some shit in the code? Someone at Remedy might want to take a look at their stuff here. Enemies stand around, barely aware of your presence, firing blindly at walls. There appears to be a sort-of radius that, once you get inside, it triggers them to be aware of you and start shooting. I know nothing of game design and this might be a standard way of making enemy A.I. work but I'd like to think this radius wouldn't be like two metres around the bloody enemy.

Military shooters aren't the most artful bunch but this one is particularly uninspiring. It's grey. Very, very grey. There's no memorable characters, no memorable moments, no interesting weapons. On a technical level, it's crap too - it doesn't hit any mad visual heights (which can sometimes absolve a game of many sins), its full of gimmicky effects like sparks, debris blowing and and drops of water on the camera and in fact, looks like a game from a couple of generations ago. Proper 'bloom and lens flare' style stuff. It really reminds me of Rebellion's dreadful Rogue Warrior - completely devoid of anything interesting to look at, an utterly joyless experience. It also has texture pop-in on almost every camera transition, like it's the fucking original Mass Effect. It just has this horrible look, like a high-end mobile game that is largely made out of generic Unreal Engine assets blown up to 4K.

Honestly, the list of shite things in this game is endless. The aiming feels floaty and the sense of impact when shooting at enemies is unsatisfying at best and non-existent the rest of the time. The 'time-to-kill' is quite long, giving the impression of bullet sponge enemies and causing some weird interactions in online matches. The sound effects will occasionally disappear completely. The game is full of PC keyboard input prompts, despite being played on the Xbox Series S. There's ONE MAP per game mode. Enemy models move at a fraction of the framerate if they're any further away than the middle distance. It has not one but TWO aggressive microtransaction storefronts. The game balance appears to be all over the shop but I'm not going to play it enough to really talk on that in detail. They might be able to patch out a lot of the bugs but I highly doubt they're going to be able to patch "GOOD GAME" into this one.

Absolutely stinking. Reset the clock. I can now remember the last truly bad videogame I played.

Recommended: Ys I + II Chronicles +

I've been on an inexplicable JRPG tip recently, so I played and finished the first Ys game in the last month. It's the first time I've played anything in the series and I ended up absolutely loving it. One of the things about JRPGs is that they're always trying to put their own unique spin on the basic formula that underpins the genre and your mileage is going to vary depending on whether or not you click with the stuff that makes that particular game unique. For instance, I really like Final Fantasy VIII's 'draw' system and the way you can manipulate that to your advantage and even break the game in a way that completely negates the difficulty but many people hate how it works and how it essentially rewards you for NOT engaging with it in the way the developers intended.

Enter, the BUMP COMBAT system.

BUMP COMBAT sounds ridiculous when you explain it and looks even more ridiculous when you see it in action. You literally bump into enemies who walk around the map and based on a few factors (level, gear equipped and - most importantly - where you bumped them) the game decides who damaged who. You end up running around the map, crashing into enemies like some kind of mad car, trying to stay off centre when you collide to evade taking damage yourself. There's a slight skill to ensuring that you don't hit the enemy straight on that makes this all feel strangely satisfying - a sensation that is amplified tenfold when you run through an area that you're over-levelled for and just watch every enemy explode as you touch them, especially when you remember having to bump them four, five times on your first encounter.

It does a few unexpected things to the JRPG formula. First of all, for a genre that is notoriously stop/start, BUMP COMBAT adds a constant feeling of momentum, speed and violence. Grinding is simply a case of finding a couple of enemies you can dispatch with one bump and just running between them, killing them as soon as they respawn and watching the number go up. There's no pausing as it transitions into a battle sequence, you're always moving - fighting and exploring at the same time.

It also turns the boss encounters into weird puzzles. Some of Ys's (???) bosses chuck a 'shmups' amount of projectiles onto the screen and you have to work out how to avoid these and crash into the boss, which is almost the exact opposite of most action game encounters. They're all dead easy once you've worked out the patterns and how to move around them but there's something wonderfully unique about trying to make contact with a boss, rather than get the hell out of their way.

Ys is also a very short game. It's an entire JRPG experience, from waking up with amnesia to finding the sacred relics to beating the big bad boss at the end of his lengthy final dungeon in about three hours flat. It gave me a similar vibe to Half-Minute Hero on the PSP, in that all of the JRPG tropes have been refined to their most basic form. There's only a handful of weapons, armour and shields, the map isn't that big and there's only a few dungeons to explore but this bitesize JRPG works really well in tandem with a combat system that has you sprinting around everywhere. I had a really good time with this and I'm going to check out more - although apparently the BUMP COMBAT doesn't stick around. Bring it back!

OTHER STUFF WORTH A LOOK THIS WEEK IN ONE SENTENCE.

Donkey Kong '94 - The best Game Boy game.

Kirby's Dream Land - The second best Game Boy game.

Windjammers 2 - A game that adds new mechanics to a game that was already mechanically perfect, making a game that is Perfect +.