Part Man, Part Machine

Review

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Eidos Montreal (PS4)

Abstract: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is a worthy sequel to 2011’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution, but not one without notable faults. A gripping near-future setting and deft handling of modern social issues stands in contrast with an overly convoluted narrative that ends abruptly. Technical problems plague Mankind Divided, from frame drops to wonky animations. Gameplay is at a franchise best, however, with new skills, challenges, and sandboxes that are better than ever and unapologetically fun. Fans of Deus Ex will get what they want out of Mankind Divided, but it is not a game I would recommend without a caveat or two.

Sirens sound in the distance and the heavy steps of mechanized soldiers reverberate across the cold concrete ground. Drones fly over a world buzzing with technology. Adam Jensen’s task is simple: get from point A to point B. One quick glance at the dilapidated building lets you know your path is anything but straightforward. You have the direct, bloody route in which Jensen will shoot, heal, frag and punch his way through. But what about the serendipitously placed ventilation shaft or the door with a hackable entryway? Do you camouflage and take out enemies silently? Adam Jensen is more than a character, he is you and defined by your actions. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided transforms you into an augmented super spy and the feeling is fantastic.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is the sequel to 2011’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution, itself a spiritual successor (and prequel) to the hugely influential Deus Ex games of the early 2000’s. Human Revolution received widespread critical and fan acclaim, transforming it from an off-my-radar title to a must play. At first I approached the game with hesitance—I’m no huge fan of the stealth genre and had no attachment to the IP. A brutally punishing first couple hours all but caused me to completely drop Human Revolution. But then the game shifted, or rather, it finally clicked. My confidence soared as I dropped soldiers left and right, skillfully made my way through the environment, and completed side quests. Human Revolution is a game I would not have expected to like as much as I did.

Would Mankind Divided improve on an already strong foundation? 

Despite my adoration for Human Revolution, I couldn’t bring myself to purchase Mankind Divided proximal to its release. Maybe it was my fear of another challenging stealth sandbox; maybe it was the tone-deaf marketing campaign. After finding myself in the Upside Down and a friend’s strong recommendation I finally picked up Mankind Divided. Does the game live up it the high bar set by its predecessor? Yes and no.

Once again you take control of the cop turned mechanically augmented super spy Adam Jensen, in a direct continuation of the previous game’s plot. The most resonant event from Human Revolution is the aug incident, in which augmented individuals (augs) across the globe were hacked, causing them to enter into a murderous frenzy. This has spawned the world of Mankind Divided, where augs are marginalized citizens, often viewed as less than human. Groups like the Augmented Rights Coalition (ARC) advocate for equal rights, but many view their actions as terroristic. This acts as a backdrop for the adventures of globe trotting ubermensch Adam Jensen. When a mission in Dubai goes awry, Jensen is forced to question his loyalties, fight against unknown enemies, and try to drag into the light those who would do harm from the shadows.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is a spy thriller in which you never know who to trust.
Probably not that machine gun robot, though. That's a safe bet.

If it sounds like I didn’t really detail the plot of Mankind Divided, you would be right. I didn’t. And not because I didn’t want to, it is because the mainline story isn’t told with a whole lot of finesse. You're given a jargon-filled world of double agents and hacking. It's nothing new, nor is its attempt at making a narrative feel more mature by making it overly complex. I pieced together enough while playing to enjoy the story, broadly speaking, but it was forgettable. Even worse, the game ends at what feels like the second of three acts. You take out some big threats and gain a relatively clear understanding of all the moving pieces, but Jensen doesn’t address the main threat. The game ends not on a cliffhanger, but on a “to be continued.” Mankind Divided’s plot was more functional than important or engaging.

What really concerned me coming into Mankind Divided, however, was how it would handle its weighty themes. A large part of the game’s marketing was focused on how Mankind Divided will act as a lens through which we can view modern issues. A noble endeavor, sure, but one I quickly soured on after I started seeing “Aug Lives Matter” ads pop up. At best the campaign came across as naïve, and at worst willfully ignorant and trying to monetize a hot-button issue. It came as a huge surprise while playing that Mankind Divided actually handled its serious, real-world parallels with tact. Played out through ambient dialogue, side quests, environmental interactions and more, Mankind Divided portrayed a number of pervasive social issues we face today, like police brutality and institutionalized discrimination, well. I felt something when I was forced to take the augs only part of a train or watch as a serial killer of augs was ignored by a militarized police force.

Heavy handed, sure, but Mankind Divided does a pretty good job with
representing serious issues.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided clearly focused on refining its gameplay, and I’m happy to write that it is better than ever. The series famous 3^rd person action stealth gameplay makes its triumphant return, replete with new abilities, a streamlining of the more clunky elements from past entries, and delightfully fun sandboxes. Each discrete part of Mankind Divided’s robust gameplay suite feels great. The game not only gives players the tools, it encourages them to play however they want. You can go from guns blazing kick in the front door to crawling around in vents while invisible to anything in-between. Jensen’s best augmentations return in Mankind Divided, like smart vision and high jumps, on top of some spectacular new ones, like Titan armor that temporarily makes you invulnerable and remote hacking to disable distant security cameras. Mercifully, Mankind Divided starts with several essential augmentations already activated, removing that brick wall problem myself and others faced coming into Human Revolution.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is an elaborate playground. The moment-to-moment gameplay experience is consistently engaging. You always, always can approach a problem from multiple angles. The sheer number of weapons, items, and power-ups at your disposal is staggering, made all the more impressive when you consider the game’s developers had to keep all of this in mind while designing Mankind Divided’s world. The hub world and missions alike are impeccably designed. In any given moment you could hack, stealth, shoot, run, jump, block, or boost your way around the same problem. Scouring the world for items and paths never stopped being fun. The design felt far more organic this time around. I never felt as if I was abruptly plopped into a ‘stealth’ section. Enemy A.I. is better too, making moving around environments both more challenging and more rewarding.

Difficult gameplay decisions are built into the foundation of Mankind Divided. You’ll die early and often if you’re not thinking while playing. Resources, though relatively plentiful, need to be thoughtfully allocated. Limited inventory space means you need to be decisive about what weapons, ammo, and healing items you have equipped at any given moment. Praxis points, used to power up Jensen’s augmentations, cannot cover the full range of Jensen’s abilities without serious grinding. This means that you have to make tough decisions about what you boost and when—should I get the high jump aug to explore better now or it is more important I increase my body’s battery recharge rate so I can do more in combat? Every augmented action requires energy. Consume it, and you’re unable to use abilities again until it recharges. This includes melee takedowns, a vital element of any mission. I enjoyed having to always think about my actions, whether it was in quiet moments or as a half dozen armed goons charged me with guns blazing.

Decisions, decisions. You should always think before you act,
 inside or outside of combat.

On the PlayStation 4 Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is riddled with some serious performance problems. I’m not a particularly technically minded person, nor am I a guy who gets up in arms about frame rates, resolution, or graphics. But Mankind Divided’s technical issues were hard to overlook. Stuttering and dropped frames occurred with relative frequency, resulting in gameplay than fell below 30 FPS. Textures and geography would pop in abruptly. The combination of the two seriously impacted my gameplay at times. It felt particularly bad perfectly planning an encounter only to be hit with frame stuttering that caused me to mess up, get detected, and then lit up by gunfire. Character model animations were bad, too. Everyone felt stiff. Mouth animations often didn’t line up to the dialogue. Characters in Mankind Divided felt like puppets. They came across mostly like real human beings, but were off just enough that it broke my immersion. For a game that came out 5 years after its predecessor, Mankind Divided felt shockingly rushed. These issues didn’t ruin my experience, but they need to be addressed should another Deus Ex from Eidos Montreal be released.

Character animations in scenes like this are bad. The real Illuminati conspiracy
is that the whole world is filled with awkward marionette people.

So did Deus Ex: Mankind Divided live up to Human Revolution’s legacy? Yes and no. While gameplay was a substantial step forward for the franchise, narrative and performance problems held Mankind Divided back from greatness. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is more than worth your time if you’re a fan of the franchise or action stealth games, but it isn’t a game I would recommend without reservations.  I’m happy to have played, though. There’s nothing quite like being part man, part machine, and 100% badass super spy. Jensen didn’t choose this, but I sure did.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

3/5

Beautiful Spectrum

Review

Hyper Light Drifter, Heart Machine (PS4)

Abstract: Hyper Light Drifter is a new classic. The game’s stunning art direction and soundtrack compliment an immensely satisfying gameplay experience. Combat is a perfect balance of simplicity with depth and fluidity with strategy. Hyper Light Drifter creates a world that is easy to get lost in and is filled with hidden secrets. The game does so much with so little and respects the player’s intelligence and perseverance throughout. Hyper Light Drifter should not be missed. It is easily one of 2016’s best.

Hyper Light Drifter makes me jealous. Not as a game designer, not as a critic, but as a scientist. In many ways, Hyper Light Drifter resembles the perfect kind of research manuscript. The game sets itself a goal and accomplishes it with resounding success. And, with what feels little effort. More than that, though, Hyper Light Drifter does so much with so little – it is the perfect combination of small parts that delivers an extraordinary experience. Hyper Light Drifter is simple, but underneath that simplicity (as any good research scientist knows) there almost certainly was an excruciating struggle and peerless work. Hyper Light Drifter is everything I want my own thesis project to be: intrigue, complexity refined into perfect simplicity, and something that immediately grips its audience and doesn’t let go.

A fluorescent-steeped and moody prologue begins your adventure into Hyper Light Drifter. The textless exposition sets the stage of a world destroyed by giant monsters, a deadly disease, a sealed off power, and a people forced to rebuild. The quasi-medieval setting quickly unfolds into something much deeper, with echoes of a lost technological age. Your protagonist is a silent wanderer, donning a flowing cape, glowing sword, and small pistol. He finds himself in a small town with adventure waiting on all sides. The drifter seeks to explore the ruined world and uncover its truths. Along your journey you’ll fight monsters of all shapes and sizes, tyrannical bosses and treacherous terrain. Hyper Light Drifter’s narrative leaves a lot up to the player for interpretation, but by so confidently establishing both mood and lore I was immediately sucked in.

The world calls to me.

The game’s zoomed out isometric perspective gives a great view of its gorgeous world. Usually I wait until later in the review, but I can’t help myself. Hyper Light Drifter is an astoundingly beautiful game. From its animations to its highly detailed pixel art, the game’s aesthetic shines through. Snowy mountains, verdant forests, barren deserts are all wonderfully realized through Hyper Light Drifter’s unique perspective. The world has a certain indefinable charm that exists as a combination of art, music (by the amazing Disasterpiece) and enemy design. In all honesty, the art is what drew me from the start – as early as the game’s embryonic (i.e. Kickstarter) stages. I was so relieved to see the full realization of the designers’ vision in the game’s final release.

Hyper Light Drifter is a 2D action RPG. Gameplay divides nicely into a couple key areas: combat, upgrading your character, and exploration. Hyper Light Drifter’s combat is superb. Fights occur naturally when exploring, in set combat arenas, and against bosses. The drifter has a number of tools to deal with the monsters that flood the world. Your primary weapon is the sword. Enemies can be hit with quick single blows or, if you’ve read their patterns correctly, can be punished with a three-hit combo. Firing your sidearm can damage enemies at a distance. The damage is minimal, unless charged up for a big shot, and ammunition is limited (it refills slowly upon attacking foes with your sword). Your opposition is aggressive, so Hyper Light Drifter also provides the player fantastic tools for escape. You have access to a lightning fast dash move, which can be used offensively or defensively depending on your situation. The player is invulnerable for a short time while dashing, increasing the skill threshold as whole attacks can be mitigated by a well-timed dodge.

Nothing should be underestimated. Hyper Light Drifter
keeps you on your toes.

Combat starts slow as you learn the language of the game. Fluency comes rapidly, though, as your fights become a flashy choreography of dashes and sword strikes and weapon swaps. Mastery feels always just out of reach, perfect for a skill intensive game like Hyper Light Drifter. There’s always more to learn. Your skills are put to the test in boss fights. Bosses run the gamut of shapes and sizes but they always force fluency in some aspect of combat, whether it be pattern recognition, short punishes, or chain dashes. Hyper Light Drifter’s combat also quickly opens up to player customization. You’ll unlock new guns to bolster long distance or close range engagements and new abilities that make battles even more fluid. Combat is a perfect combination of simplicity and depth, risk and reward, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

 

Time to show what you've learned.

Speaking of unlocks, Hyper Light Drifter lives up to its RPG name by featuring a nice suite of methods to power up your hero. Gearbits can be found throughout the world and used as currency to unlock new abilities. Your sword can gain a charge strike to deal massive damage, or a dash strike to attack after a dash. Your dash can gain the ability to chain into itself infinitely and the ability to reflect enemy projectiles. While there are no stats to manage, Hyper Light Drifter does allow for the hero himself to be powered up. You can unlock the ability to carry more health packs, which is essential, as health never regenerates. As you progress through the game, you’ll also come across new outfits for the drifter. These are often more than just an aesthetic change as they can grant bonus abilities like faster ammo recovery or an extra point of health. Hyper Light Drifter is a great RPG while making your RPG-experience as streamlined as possible.

Streamlined or not, I enjoyed Hyper Light Drifter's RPG elements.

Exploration is where Hyper Light Drifter truly shines. Hyper Light Drifter has a world you want to get lost in. Tranquility belies a setting rife with intrigue. Tucked into every nook and cranny of the world is something interesting to see or some new item for your playthrough. The nonverbal communication of the game to the player is fantastic. You’re never told where to go or what path to take—everything is discovered through playing. You’re never told to look for secrets, nor are you told what to do with those secrets. There is a system in place that indicates where a secret hides, but Hyper Light Drifter relies on a player’s intelligence and perseverance to find the pattern. I hate comparing one game I’m reviewing to another, but I can think of no better way to put it here: playing Hyper Light Drifter evokes the same feeling I got playing the original The Legend of Zelda on the NES. The game is a puzzle box that can be solved as rudimentarily, or as meticulously, as you desire. The joy I felt moving from screen to screen scouring for paths is unparalleled in modern gaming. Exploring Hyper Light Drifter is part epic poem and part learning a new language, and the two combine to create something spectacular. There are a precious few games I wish I could erase from my memory so I could experience them again for the first time – Hyper Light Drifter is one of them.

In the spirit of the mostly wordless Hyper Light Drifter I attempted to keep this review brief. I could go on for another thousand words about the satisfying gameplay loop, the hidden bonus challenges, or how the real world around me dissolved while playing. Hyper Light Drifter is one of the most supremely well-designed games I’ve played all year. Hyper Light Drifter not only lived up to expectations, it created a new classic. Hyper Light Drifter is a wide spectrum of excellence not to be missed.

Hyper Light Drifter

5/5

Feel The Fury

Review

Furi, The Game Bakers (PS4)

Abstract: Furi is a neon-soaked, electronic flurry of blades and bullets. A unique visual, aural and gameplay package, Furi confidently establishes itself as something you’ve never quite played before. As a boss-focused action combat game, Furi succeeds in a number of ways. The hyper fast combat, replete with skill intensive dashing, parrying, and attacking mechanics, plays wonderfully. Furi demands a lot of players and brutally punishes mistakes. Unfortunately, not everything in this diverse package works well. Bullet hell sections suffer from unclear projectile and player hitboxes that frustrate to the point of feeling unfair. Painfully slow and barren walks between boss fights leave the player bored. Taken together, however, Furi’s successes outweigh its failures to create a game well-worth playing for action fans.

Released for free as part of PlayStation’s July PS+ line-up, Furi is a new game from The Game Bakers that has its toe dipped deeply into Blade Runner, Tron and shonen (boys) anime. Furi is a wild ride, a breathless series of fights that test the true mettle of the player. Prepare yourself – it’s about to get furious.

The game starts with a prisoner shackled in a cell as a masked jailer is torturing him. Your protagonist, The Stranger, is silent. He neither knows where he is or why he’s there. As the jailer leaves you are greeted by a mysterious companion, a rabbit mask toting specter known as The Voice. The Voice frees The Stranger and informs him of the brutal journey ahead. The Stranger must fight through the most intricate, and deadly, prison ever built as he makes his way to the planet floating below. This is no easy task, as terrifying characters guard each floor: the guardians of the prison and bosses he must vanquish. As you move from floor to floor, The Voice slowly sheds more light on his motivation, who The Stranger might be, and who are the people trying to stop you.

Admittedly, the story is quite light. Motivations and the truth of your situation are revealed quite slowly. Questions are answered with more questions and much is left up to the player to interpret. The narrative framework for the game at hand, however, works well. Games don’t often need much to propel players through a serious of huge boss fights, and the same is true for Furi. What works best about Furi’s story is its establishment of a wholly unique world. The game’s credits cite game designers like Hideo Kojima and Goichi Suda as inspiration for creating Furi. It’s abundantly clear throughout. Furi’s world is like no other I’ve seen in a video game. The mixture of space with samurai with cyberpunk is perfect. From start to finish I was engrossed in Furi’s world. I only wish there was more to explore.

 

The Voice, The Stranger, and one impossible goal.

As you might have guessed, Furi is all about its combat. Furi is a “boss rush” game, meaning that the large bulk of the gameplay is spent fighting Furi’s 10 bosses. You move from one boss to the next with very little in-between. Furi would suffer if its bosses were bland, repetitive, or uninteresting, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Each fight is different, testing the player in a variety of ways so they can prove their mastery of the game’s various systems. Each fight takes place in an arena, but no two arenas are alike. Bosses are visually striking and impressively memorable. You experience a fantastic sense of dread as you walk into the arena for a new boss. What new challenge are you about to face? Fights can take anywhere between 5 and 45 minutes, depending on player skill and the boss being fought. My completion time was about six and a half hours, though looking at leaderboards some have completed Furi in as little as 45 minutes. As I’ll explain in great detail, Furi is all about player skill.

Each boss fight is a unique combination of Furi’s three central mechanics: third person isometric arena fights, 3D fighting-game styled close combat, and bullet hell. Let’s talk about the first. The arena-based isometric fighting is superb. Bosses hurl attack after attack at the player: projectiles, area of effect moves, and close combat. Furi follows along with the recent trend we’ve seen in games like Hyper Light Drifter and Stories: The Path of Destinies in which movement speed and dodging are the key focus. The Stranger moves fast. Incredibly fast. Furi emphasizes use of your dash move, a quick teleport with invincibility that serves as both your primary way to avoid being damaged as well your method for getting close enough to the boss to attack. Like all combat mechanics in Furi, the skill ceiling for this dash move is quite high. The dash button can be held down. The longer it’s held down, the further your dash goes. Timing your dash and knowing how far to dash make all the difference. When dashing isn’t an option, you can parry. Parries only work on certain attacks, like projectiles and melee strikes (as indicated by a visual flash and a distinct sound) and need to be timed perfectly to prevent damage. A well-timed parry blocks the enemy’s attack and restores health to your character. A perfectly timed parry leaves the boss open for a huge counter-attack. Learning to use your parry is challenging but immensely rewarding (and essential for the game’s later bosses). Similar to the dash, it too has a high skill ceiling. Furi is all about mastery.

 

The Chain is the first stop in a long line of brutal bosses.

Attacking bosses is just as skill intensive. You typically have two options for dealing damage while in the isometric arena combat. You can fire a laser pistol with the right analog stick at the boss. For some bosses, this will chip away at their health bar. Others can block or ignore the pistol damage entirely. The bulk of your damage comes from sword attacks. After parrying or otherwise opening up a boss for attack, The Stranger can unleash a four-hit combo. Depending on your window of opportunity, sometimes you can get all four hits and sometimes just two or three. Much like dashing and parrying, Furi allows the player to perfectly titrate how they attack. The pistol can be charged by pressing another button, which unleashes a powerful knock down attack against the boss, but it can be incredibly hard to connect with the shot. You can also hold down the sword slash button, which similarly charges a difficult to connect but powerful knock down attack. Dealing damage is all about finding your enemies’ weak spots and exploiting them. Like many great combat focused games, Furi has a delicate but fantastic balance of risk with reward. Do you try for that extra damage knowing you could be punished? Or go the safe route but risk spending longer in the fight thereby increasing the odds you mess up a dodge and die? Furi is steeped in difficult split second decisions that test dexterity, reflexes, and pattern recognition. I loved it.

Dashes, parries, melee punishes. Combat in Furi is fast and fabulous. 

Typically, by the time you’ve dealt enough damage to the boss’ health bar (they have several) in the isometric arena, they’ll fall. This exposes them to a quick melee hit that cinematically shifts the combat into a 3D fighter styled brawl. Here, it’s no longer about enemy projectile attacks or area of effect moves: it’s all about melee combat. Trapped in a much smaller zone, you have fewer options to escape your enemy’s blows. Quick dodges and parries are critical. This zoomed-in fight is the perfect culmination of that boss phase, and the way the camera dramatically shifts makes the player feel so empowered. One of my favorite fights in the game, The Edge, is entirely fought in this 3D fighter style. It’s so cool. It takes the mechanics you use from the isometric viewpoint and reformat them in a new and compelling way. And typically, after you down a boss in this perspective they shift to their next phase, meaning a new health bar and new attack patterns. Like the isometric viewpoint, this fighting is again all about pattern recognition, risk and reward, and perfect execution.

 

The zoomed-in melee clashes never stop making your feel awesome.

Just in case it isn’t abundantly clear by this point in the review, Furi is not an easy game. Furi is brutal, punishing players for even the smallest of mistakes. Though the game (usually) communicates what the player needs to do to defeat the boss, actually doing so is another thing entirely. The player only has 3 health bars. Get K.O.’d three times and you lose – you need to restart the entire fight. Destroying one of a boss’ health bars restores one of your own, but this only goes so far when the boss’ last few phases can devastate the player. I consider myself fairly skilled at games with combat like Furi’s, and even I typically took 2-3 attempts to beat a boss. This can sometimes be an exercise in frustration. Going back to the very beginning of a 40 minute fight just because you died to attack patterns you had never seen before isn’t super fun. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that Furi offers very small windows for both dashing and parrying. Mess up your parry timing by even a quarter of a second and you could be looking at losing a third of your current health bar. With all that said, I enjoyed Furi’s difficulty as it relates to isometric and 3D fighter combat. I love tough games when they’re fair. Furi, for the most part, nails that fair toughness.

Unfortunately, not all mechanics achieve the same degree of success. Namely, the bullet hell segments. I’m someone who loves a good bullet hell. They aren’t great here. Bullet hell segments take place from the isometric viewpoint, which poses a serious perspective problem. It’s hard to know exactly where the projectiles are or where your character’s hitbox ends. There is a reason most (good) bullet hells are top down or 2D. Getting hit by a projectile you’ve anticipated and dodged feels awful. This problem could have been mitigated in a couple of ways, but the most obvious of which is it make projectile boundaries more clearly defined. Like with a bold, dark outline for instance. Instead, projectiles are bright amorphous blobs of energy with fuzzy boundaries. While some bosses have limited bullet hell sections, like The Chain or The Scale, others rely on this mechanic for their entirety. Because of it, The Line and The Burst fights become painful to complete. Even more egregiously, Furi’s final final-boss is entirely bullet hell making it the worst fight in the game.

The fourth or fifth time you get hit by a projectile you were SURE
you dodged can really suck the fun out of the fight.

The problems don’t end with bullet hell segments, however. Outside of fighting bosses there is nothing to do. Normally this wouldn’t be a huge issue. I am more than ok with a game focusing on what works – Furi didn’t need anything more than boss fights. The player, however, needs to walk from one fight to the next. I appreciate what The Game Bakers try to do with these sections. Slowly walking gives The Stranger that badass feel. It also gives The Voice time to build upon the narrative and show off the game’s unique world. But the walking is so slow. With nothing to do other than push the stick in the direction you want to go walking becomes painful. A walk from boss A to boss B can take upwards of 5+ minutes. Slowly moving your character through barren, linear pathways is not fun for 5+ minutes. It’s not fun for 2. To make matters worse, sometimes it isn’t exactly clear which way to walk. This can result in walking several slow minutes in the wrong direction, adding to your snail’s crawl to the next fight. The walking problems are compounded by Furi’s decision to use fixed cameras along your path. Transitioning between one angle and the next messes with your directional controls. Furi tries to keep it consistent, like if you were holding down on one screen and the next you’re moving up holding down will still move you in the same direction, but it gets messy. Each new screen I would stop my character and reset which way I was holding the control stick just so The Stranger wouldn’t awkwardly stutter or walk into invisible walls.

 

I have one fear: having to endure the next overlong walking sequence.

Slow walk and chaotic boss fight alike are accompanied by a stellar electronic soundtrack. Furi has one of the best soundtracks of the year. The game features the works of several artists, like Carpenter Brut and The Toxic Avenger, that synergize with each other to reinforce the mood set by the combat and visuals. The pulsing beats get you pumped up and ready to take on the world. When combined with the cool character designs, great cell shaded look and diverse visuals, Furi is a complete aesthetic package that bolsters the entire experience.

Furi is a game with high highs and some low lows, but one that I can’t help but be enamored by. I want to return to the sci-fi samurai 80’s neon world to inflict havoc on the game’s fantastic bosses. I also feel the urge to better myself, to achieve the elusive A and S Ranks on the fights, or even complete one without taking damage. Furi is, for better and worse, very much its own thing. Furi is one prison I wouldn’t mind being trapped in again.

Furi

3/5

TIF Plays: Week of 3/7-3/11
Gameplay

Welcome to the The Impact Factor's last week of gameplay! Check out below to links of all my gameplay. Be sure to catch me live on Twitch (MegalodonPhD). I stream every Tuesday at 5:30pm PST and Thursday at 6:30pm PST. Plus some special Friday streams, too! You can do me a favor by subscribing to The Impact Factor's YouTube channel, but hey, don't let me tell you what to do! 

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See you all next week!

TIF’s Snuggle & Scream Ep. 02: The Guest
Podcast

Snuggle and Scream as you listen to this podcast about horror films! In this special seasonal spin-off of The Impact Factor, Alex is joined by his co-host, fiancee and fellow (begrudging) horror movie watcher Justine to discuss some scary movies! Each episode we’ll talk about a new horror movie we’ve seen together and give our thoughts.

This week Justine and I discuss 2014’s The Guest.

Send questions & comments to:impactfactorpodcast@gmail.com
Alex is on Twitter @alexsamocha
Follow all things TIF: http://www.theimpactfactor.blogspot.com

Intro: ‘Horror TV’ by FoolBoyMedia, freesound.org. Attribution Noncommercial License.

freesound.org/people/FoolBoyMedia/sounds/246516/