Tag Archives: Xbox One

Buried in Sand, Hand in Hand

Another long overdue update!

Having burnt myself out on PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and still yearning for a relatively tactical FPS on PC that I might be able to recruit some of my friends into playing, I had caught wind of Insurgency: Sandstorm. I played the original version of Insurgency a fair bit when it was still a Source mod and really enjoyed the combination of tactical squad combat and its brutally (if not totally unrealistic) pin-point accurate ballistics model. Insurgency turned into a standalone retail product at some point but I never got around to trying that version, though it was fairly well received. Insurgency: Sandstorm is its long awaited sequel. Watching a trailer and some preview coverage on YouTube it really looked like it was shaping up to be something amazing; the type of shooter that the grognards who still cherish a return to the days of the original Ghost Recon might go all in on, and as such it’s been on my watch list for quite a while now.

“Sloppily bounding towards our objective.”

This, unfortunately, might be one of those cases of something looking notably better when viewed from afar. Entering its final early access beta, I eagerly bought Sandstorm and jumped in to play some bot matches and was immediately shocked by how janky it’s previously slick looking gameplay actually felt and, if I’m totally honest, how ugly it looked in action (mostly the character models and animations) relative to the beautiful preview footage I had seen. After playing a few matches I started to enjoy the weighty feeling movement and the deadliness of the combat, being quite a departure from any of the other FPSes I’d been playing recently and something I’d dearly missed since the good old days of America’s Army 3. Still, knowing that there was no damn way I could successfully convince any of my friends that this didn’t, in fact, totally suck, I ended up quickly uninstalling the game and considering pursuing a refund.

This was just before launch, back in December, so to give it a fairer shake (to ease my regret for not getting that refund if nothing else) I’ll probably check it out in the future after its had a little bit longer to mature. In fact, installing it to grab a few screenshots has already left me with a better impression than I had last time around, and viewing update notes leaves me believing that it’s still being improved and supported quite well. For now though, the game mostly serves to remind me that I’m still quite capable for falling victim to my own hype. I should really know better by now.

“Sandstorm’s damage model is quite brutal – a single direct hit pretty much takes care of things.”

Speaking of which, at around the same time I was randomly drawn to Conan Exiles. I honestly can’t tell you what it was that suddenly caused my interest to perk up, but I’ve always been a fan of Conan and I really liked the art style and overall conceit of the game. Seeing no real interest in playing this sort of game from any of my online crew, I generated a single player world and hopped in solo. For several intense days, including a couple of days during which I was stuck at home miserably sick, I was completely enthralled (*rim shot!*) but once I got the basic gameplay loop worked out, with a small but stable base of operations, and had seen a little bit of the world and what the game generally had to offer, I’d pretty much had my fill of what was increasingly becoming overly repetitive.

Despite abandoning the game pretty quickly, I actually really liked what I played. The graphics and overall design of the world were awesome, and the construction and tech trees were really cool. I admit, the world felt a little lonely when playing solo, but that’s on me more than the developers since it’s clearly designed to be played online. Honestly, I can easily imagine this being a game I’d have totally fallen in love with if I had played it online with a group of friends on an active, highly competitive server, not unlike the experiences I’d described in the past about my brief but memorable time with Rust (though with perhaps even more nudity!) Really, in so many ways, Conan Exiles is basically just a version of Rust with more polish and a setting that caters to my personal tastes a bit more, which is much more of a compliment than it probably sounds like it is.

“Religion and slaves, check. Game over?”

Likely, I’ll install Conan Exiles again at some point, though probably with some mods installed to make the grind of playing solo a little more tolerable, and if any of my friends ever show any interest in playing I’d jump at the opportunity to hop back in and reinstall it in a heartbeat.

Shifting over to console, I’d been tempted to look at Xbox Game Pass since I first heard about it. The original allure was unlimited access to all of Microsoft’s first party Xbox One titles, which is fairly compelling in and of itself, but they’ve continued to add more and more great content to the subscription. Of course, they cycle it in AND back out from time to time, and they don’t really announce how often things get removed, so it’s a little hard to judge exactly what else you’re getting access to at any point in the future. Even still, as long as there’s at least a couple of games you intend on playing in the future, it feels like a no-brainer. I finally signed up and jumped into my first game not too long after, though I’m still working on that one so I’ll wait to talk more about it in my next one of these updates.

There are plenty of first party games I’m excited to play though: I want to get caught up on the Gears of War games, having enjoyed the first couple. I need to play Halo 5 finally, and also at least the first Halo Wars. State of Decay 2 is still looming large in my backlog too, and I’m sure there are many more. Being more than a little bit of a “patient gamer” I do find it disappointing to see some of the 3rd party games that originally convinced me to subscribe to Game Pass already leaving before I’d had a chance to play them, but I guess that’s just a part of the package.

“Insert corporate tagline here!”

Oh, and shortly after signing up Microsoft announced Xbox Game Pass Ultimate which is more or less just a combination of Xbox Live Gold and Xbox Game Pass. Even more of a no-brainer! Plus they’ve cleverly tried to tempt us to switch our accounts over by combining remaining Xbox Gold and Xbox Game Pass time for Ultimate credit. This lead to a lot of people scheming to buy up as much Xbox Gold and Xbox Game Pass time as they could before switching over to take full advantage of the generous conversion policy. A huge win for Microsoft, as they’re surely looking to lock more people into their ecosystem in advance of the release of the next Xbox console (currently dubbed Project Scarlett) in 2020.

“Traversing the ruins of our childhoods…”

One game I did complete thanks to Game Pass is The Gardens Between. I hadn’t heard of this little indie gem at all until it appeared on The Computer Game Show podcast, where it unexpectedly ended up stealing their 2018 game of the year spot. I was already intrigued by the discussion and the fact that it was supposedly a relatively quick play, but then to find out I already had it on Game Pass? Sold!

The game’s first impression, with its vibrant, whimsical, and slightly cartoony art style, is definitely very positive, but indie games with brilliant graphics are (awesomely) becoming less and less of a standout quality these days. More unique, The Gardens Between’s gameplay is something else entirely. First, despite how it might appear from screenshots and videos, this game is a puzzle game first and foremost. Your two characters automatically traverse a series of small, surrealistic stages somewhat akin to an “auto-runner”. They’ll run into obstacles of various types while trying to reach the end of the stage and your role is to try to figure out how to get them around those obstacles – to solve the puzzle, in other words.

“Trickier than it looks, I promise!”

You don’t control your characters’ movements directly, rather your control comes from forwarding and rewinding time. I once heard someone describe this as being something like Braid minus the platforming which feels pretty apt. Even though your characters will follow the same path forward as long as possible, the obstacles in the world survive your time related antics which allows you to manipulate the environment around them. For example, one of your characters runs into a raised drawbridge where they get stuck but your other character ends up near a lever that lowers the bridge a little later. You then rewind time so that the first character can then cross the now lowered bridge. As you might imagine, these scenarios can get much, much more complicated, with you needing to carefully line up objects and movements typically quite a few times per stage, often taking some real lateral thinking. It can be a bit trial and error oriented too but given the ability to rewind time those “errors” are never really all that punitive.

There is also a narrative here. Involving childhood friendship, it clearly attempts to play on some fairly universal emotions. From some reviews and impressions I’ve heard from other people the game is plenty capable of really affecting you though beyond being overall fairly charming it didn’t quite pull my heartstrings in any major way. It did leave me wondering where it was going the entire time though which was interesting in a different way though. Still, all said and done, it was a great little game that I’d recommend if you need a palate cleanser between longer games or if you just love these sorts of odd puzzle games.

More soon!

The Gardens Between shots were stolen from Google Images.

Not So Isolated

When Alien: Isolation came out I was happy to see that Creative Assembly’s promises of delivering a game that recreated the look of the first Alien movie were actually kept. Still, I’ve never been a huge survival horror fan, and once reviews started coming in, talking about its long length and pacing issues, my interest waned. As time went on, however, it seemed like there were a lot of pockets of love and support for the game out there. People on podcasts I listened to and in articles I’d read talked about it being their game of the year, sometimes even on their short lists of favorite games ever. Eventually I couldn’t ignore the hype and vowed to play the game after all. Mentioning this to my partner, she soon began a campaign of peer pressuring me to play it so that she could watch and bask in my misery. Honestly, I was far more intimidated by its length than the scares, but eventually it felt like the time was right to commit to the 20+ hours, and dove in.

“Welcome to Sevastopol…”

First in foremost, as touted, the game is absolutely beautiful. The style and feel of the original 1979 Alien movie were lovingly recreated and, without direct side by side comparisons, seems quite faithful. I especially love the bizarrely retro-future feel of the computers, with their monochrome displays and multitude of lights, knobs, and bizarre noises. Sevastopol station, where you’ll be spending the majority of the game, reminds me a weird combination of the UAC facilities of Doom 3 and BioShock’s Rapture. Maybe that says more about the Aliens franchise’s influence on those games than anything, but I’d call that high praise regardless. The design is meticulously detailed, oh so eerie, and at times oddly claustrophobic. Helping with this immensely, the environmental lighting is great, with enough darkness to produce an intimidating mood without completely impeding the player’s ability to navigate. It all really works.

Alien: Isolation also nails it in the sound department. The sound effects are good all around, but the ambient noise is freakily eerie with the occasional suspicious noise thrown in just to keep you on your toes. Of course, if an enemy (particularly the alien itself) is stalking you, noise plays a big part in trying to track its location and activity. Hearing the alien clunking around as it moves through the vents above you never gets any less terrifying. The soundtrack is similarly well executed, incorporating some of the original movie soundtrack with more modern, electronic elements. It’s perfectly atmospheric, while at times dynamically shifting into a faster pace, crescendoing when the action peaks. Whether purposely or accidentally, sometimes these music changes seemed to be misleading which had me turning the tides on my girlfriend – on several occasions I looked over at her to see her nervously shielding her face in anticipation simply because the music had picked up which she thought meant I was about to be attacked. Hilarious!

“Scary. Change my mind!”

The game starts out quite slowly, and the pacing just feels off to me for the first few hours. It takes quite a while before the alien even shows up, in fact. This actually lead to a little bit of unexpected tension, as I was constantly waiting for it to make its first appearance and needlessly psyching myself out. The game even seems to have a little fun with this at the player’s expense in places. That’s not to say there aren’t enemies, though. While the station is largely deserted, you’ll run into the occasional band of unfriendly humans and, much more infamously, androids. I heard a lot of people talk about the “Working Joe” androids, shrugging them off as boring and definitely not at all scary. Well, they’re wrong! Sure, the androids are MUCH more predictable than the more complicated AI tied to the alien, but with their glowing eyes, movements shifting from slow and freakily deliberate to fast and deadly, and their creepy speech, I thought they were plenty menacing.

Anyway, I digress. Let me backup and (vaguely) talk about the story. Amanda Ripley, the daughter of Ellen Ripley, the main protagonist of the original movies, learns that the flight recorder of the ship her mother was on in Alien, the Nostromo, has been recovered. She’s invited to travel to a distant mining station where it’s being held to learn more about her mother’s disappearance. When she gets there, well, let’s just say things aren’t going so great there. Shit gets crazy and Amanda learns more about what’s going on aboard Sevastopol station as well as more about the fate of the Nostromo along the way. The nice thing about the story is that it wedges itself between well known plot points in the first two movies without doing too much retconning, keeping it inoffensive to most franchise purists. The biggest complaints I can muster about it is that it feels a little extraneous and, perhaps, because of the length of the game, some of the plot twists and turns feel a little tedious.

“Hack the planet! Hack the planet!”

The length and the pacing are (again) common complaints. I actually didn’t find the pacing to be nearly as bad as people made it out to be, after that initial slog I mentioned at least. It may just be that how intensely, nerve-wrackingly stressful the gameplay is to a lot of us also makes it feel a lot worse than it actually is, especially given the save system. Saving is done by static, manually activated save points scattered throughout the environment. For the most part they’re spaced just about perfectly to break the game down into relatively small, digestible sections. That said, given that you spend large portions of the game being actively hunted, and being caught usually results in death, the save system feels incredibly unforgiving and, at times, fucking infuriating. I’m 100% sure they went with this style of save system to up the tension, and it is slightly more flexible than hard checkpoints, I admit, but it definitely feels a bit of a dated design. Regardless of the pacing, I definitely agree with the common criticism that the game feels a lot longer than it should. There’s a fair degree of backtracking too. I get the impression that they were going for a sort of “metrovania” approach to gating content and it largely works, though that style of level design pairs badly with a game that already feels a little too long.

Beyond gating related items (the Maintenance Jack, the Plasma Torch, etc.) there are also a number of weapons and other items, most of which can be crafted from certain components found in the station. I personally found very few of these items useful enough to keep using. The Medkit, of course, ended up being pretty essential, particular in certain areas, and the Stun Baton is a godsend against rampaging androids, but otherwise? Eh. I know this is going to vary greatly by person, but this honestly didn’t feel like a playstyle thing – those items just didn’t feel all that useful to me, period. Normally when I play a game with a lot of options and I don’t use them all, I can at least see the potential in them. The whole thing is just… odd.

It’s especially odd in the case of weapons. It takes you awhile to find one, and when you finally pick up your first revolver it feels damn empowering. Then you go to use it the first time and discover that it’s probably a good thing you’ve had up until then to get used to playing without them. The shotgun is a lot better, but by the time you get it you’ll probably find yourself reluctant to use your trigger finger for a host of other reasons.

“The Torrens and Sevastopol Station.”

The biggest exception to this is the aforementioned creepy androids which, when they turn on you, take quite a beating until you nail them with a Stun Baton or catch them with an EMP blast. Of course, right around the time I felt like I mastered facing off with them you’re introduced to the Hazardous Environment Joes which are pretty much invulnerable to all of that stuff. I found myself in at least a couple of situations where I was stuck with a room full of these bastards and no great way to defeat them. This lead to some very creative (and very tense) trial and error situations that I somehow eventually myself through. It’s worth noting that you will eventually get the Bolt Gun which takes down either sort of android with a single clean headshot, though landing that shot under the kind of intense situations you’ll most want to use it in isn’t always easy, and the gun comes with a punishing reload time.

Dealing with the Working Joes is a walk in the park compared to dealing with our titular alien friend, however. Nothing is all that effective against the alien save for the flamethrower which you get in the last half of the game. It’s often mentioned that the flamethrower makes the game instantly easy, though I didn’t find that to be the case at all. Fuel (ammo) for the flamethrower is limited enough that you’ll want to use it sparingly, and you’ll run into the alien enough, even when playing extremely cautiously, that you’ll burn through it quite quickly if you start to rely on it. That, and it usually only scares the alien off for a short amount of time. While it does undeniably change the game a bit, it still remains tense, and if you do run out of fuel you’ll be faced with a whole new feeling of helplessness.

“The motion scanner is extremely useful at times. This isn’t one of them.”

The topic of the alien itself really deserves a lot of attention. As mentioned, it takes awhile for it to become a factor, but when it does… oof! The game uses some interesting AI scripting for the alien that makes it behave in some pretty unique ways. It’s utterly ridiculous – mostly ridiculously cool, but sometimes ridiculously cheap and unforgiving. I quickly learned a few tricks to allow me to adapt to being stalked by it, or really, just existing in a world where it also happens to be, which is scary enough, but it never really failed to feel like an existential threat, keeping me on the edge of my seat. I did get a little desensitized by the end of the game, but that had a lot less to do with the game’s tricks wearing thin on me, and more to do with having to constantly force myself to resist my cautious nature and adopt a “let’s do it!” attitude to accomplishing my goals that Leeroy Jenkins would be proud of. It’s far too tempting to sit around waiting until you feel safe, but those moments rarely come, and even when they do they’re usually a bit of an illusion. In short, waiting around is rarely beneficial to you – you just need to keeping pushing ahead onto the next area, that next objective, and the next story beat.

Like I said, as amazingly cool as the alien’s behavior could be at times, it could also really suck. There were plenty of quirks in its scripting resulting in kills that felt amazingly cheap and unfair and some generally annoying patterns of behavior, such as the realization that you’re on this massive space station but no matter where you are, the alien always seems to be coming after you and you alone. It doesn’t matter where you are, where you’ve gone, or what else is around, it’s like its tethered to you, which definitely ruined a lot of the immersion for me. As such, I also wish there were more moments of the alien interacting with other humans and, despite some plot points against it, the androids. There are some other minor issues with the game too, like how the auto-map largely feels like it was an afterthought and how some other elements of the UI don’t feel like they spent enough time in the hands of the UX team.

“The majority of xenomorph encounters go more like this…”

Despite all of this, there’s no doubt in my mind that Creative Assembly managed to make a compellingly terrifying experience. Before playing Alien: Isolation, I think the scariest game I ever played was Doom 3. That game was all about tension though – never knowing when the next monster would pop out of a deviously placed “monster closet” to achieve a cheap jump scare. This game, on the other hand, had all of that and more – an incredible atmosphere and an almost palpable feeling of dread at times – I mean, it had me literally yelling out loud multiple times throughout my playthrough. Sure, some of this was me just getting into the spirit of it, which was even funner with my girlfriend just as freaked out by watching me play as I was playing, but this was genuinely a first for me.

There’s probably a lot more I could say, but in the spirit of avoiding too many spoilers and encouraging people to try it themselves, I’ll just wrap up by saying that Alien: Isolation is a great game that more people should play. Should you play it? It’s hard for me to recommend this kind of game in any sort of universal way, given how subjective the enjoyment of these types of games can be. For me, it’s a bit of a love and hate situation, with love undeniably winning out at the end of the day. It’s certainly my new favorite survival horror game, but with the length and odd annoyances added to how nerve wracking the whole thing was for me, I have no plans to check out the DLC any time soon and I highly doubt I’ll ever play through the main campaign again despite how much I ultimately enjoyed the experience.

In the future I will be shoved out of an airlock for my stealing the above screenshots from random sites around the web. Please, just make it quick.

Out of the Fire

I’ve been intrigued by Firewatch since it was first announced. Not only have I been a longtime fan of many of the the Idle Thumbs podcasts, of which three members are key Campo Santo employees, but I loved The Walking Dead, and two of those three employees were its project leads and writers. I’ve also enjoyed my few forays into the “walking simulator” genre thus far, and the previews of the game made the basic themes look appealing as well. Despite buying it on PC the first time it ever went on sale on Steam, I only finally got around to playing it last month, buying the Xbox One version so I could more easily share the experience with my girlfriend from the comfort of our living room couch.

“Home sweet home.”

Right off the bat Firewatch hits you with a bizarre “choose your own adventure” like interactive story about your character Henry’s backstory. A bit jarring, it feels a little low budget and isn’t anything like the experience I was gearing myself up for. Still, it has an interesting function – you immediately start the game with a good idea of who your character is, what he’s gone through, and having customized his backstory a little in the process, even a bit of a connection to him.

Once in the game proper, you find Henry in the beautiful Wyoming wilderness where he’ll be manning a fire tower for the season. We have fire lookout towers not too dissimilar to the ones featured in Firewatch out here in and around the southern Appalachian Mountains and, having had the opportunity to climb several of them over the years, I’ve always been fascinated by what manning one of them must have been like back when they were in full-use. The Campo Santo team did a fabulous job bringing those towers and the surrounding wilderness to life. The stylized art and the engine’s lighting system steal the show, but it all comes together just perfectly, producing beautiful vistas filled with swaying trees and grass among rolling hills and rocky peaks. Combined with the forced first-person perspective and minimalist, mostly in-game-world UI, I quickly found myself totally immersed in the setting.

“The lighting really brings the whole presentation together.”

Firewatch’s world is fairly open, and while there is some gating and the occasional invisible wall, I never found them to take me too far out of the experience. This is likely because I was always too busy either checking out the amazing views, looking for the next interesting detail, or looking at my map and compass to try to figure out where in the hell I was. On top of that, I often felt a sense of urgency to try to complete my objectives before the sun went down and I’d be forced to wander my way back to my tower in near pitch-black darkness. Those objectives felt important to me most of the time too, so going off and exploring far beyond where I needed to be never made a lot of sense to me.

A lot of the user reviews I glanced at while writing this seemed to mention bugs and performance issues but for me the fact that the game ran so smoothly with such a degree of polish was absolutely a part of why I was able to really get into the experience. Maybe the Xbox One port is better than some of the others or perhaps I’m benefiting from being a late adopter here, but in any case, I think it bears mentioning that I didn’t have any such issues.

“I hope you like looking at maps!”

Anyway, so far, I’ve just described a game about a guy wandering around in the woods. Obviously, I’m leaving out a massive part of the game here: Delilah. Your character has a nearly-constant companion over the radio, something along the lines of Atlas helping you out in Bioshock, though a little less manipulative. The conversations between Henry and Delilah, both in terms of writing and voice acting, are what really push Firewatch into excellence. These chats are unusually funny, heartwarming, realistically written, and full of character. The dialog system has both the urgency of a Telltale adventure game, in which you might have a limited time to respond and your lack of a response is, in and of itself, interpreted as a response, and unlike most modern games with dialog systems, isn’t tied to story decisions or moral choices but mostly just serves to further develop your own personalization of the characterization of Henry. I can only guess that how well this all came together must have surprised even the developers themselves.

“I was more than a little disappointed about not having the option to order prints of my pictures in the Xbox One version.”

Through the friendship that grows between Henry and Delilah, the mysteries they unravel and personal baggage they unpack together, we eventually reach a conclusion that is, as with the dialog, rather realistic. I won’t spoil it or go into any in-depth analysis of the ending, despite how desperate I was to discuss it when first finishing the game, but I will say that like so many others I was a bit disappointed in the ending. At the same time, I felt like I understood, at some very deep emotional level, what Campo Santo was aiming to achieve, and I got it. I got it. I didn’t like it, maybe because it was a bit too real, but in some way, it made me respect the entire experience all the more for it. What a fantastic game.

“One player distracts the guard, the other unclogs the toilet.”

At some point while playing Firewatch we stumbled upon A Way Out in the Microsoft Store. From watching trailers and listening to some podcast banter about it, all I really knew was that it was a game about two convicts working together to escape a prison, and that the whole game was based around being a two-person co-op experience. I could also see that the game looked fantastic, with a simplified but realistic art style, and a lot of interesting, very cinematic camera work. Overall the art and presentation is somewhat reminiscent of the last couple of Grand Theft Auto titles, which is a good thing.

Starting the game, we found ourselves quickly engaged, as we had to decide which of the two distinct characters we’d want to play and then, after a brief cutscene, were set off on two different paths. The fact the game starts off with your two characters not even knowing each other was unexpected, and despite the beginning being a little slow, made for some interesting development as the two characters met and the story progressed.

“Wandering the yard.”

Having each player working on separate goals via split-screen, interspersed by the occasional use of clever timing to trigger cutscenes and events involving both characters together is the game’s central novelty, in fact. Sometimes these events are little mini-games meant to allow the players to interact and the characters to bond a bit, and other times they’re simple cooperative puzzles, like needing both players’ input to lift a heavy object or to climb up an otherwise unreachable ledge. Occasionally the players must decide between two different approaches to solving a situation, which was kind of cool. I do wish there was a little more depth to these mechanics, as your interactions with NPCs are short and mostly only serve as fluff, the exploration is very limited, and the cooperative puzzles are almost all exceedingly basic. I suppose the simplicity is in service of being an approachable co-op experience, so I can largely overlook that. Besides, early on, it was mainly the story and the characters that had me hooked.

“You can choose to handle a lot of situation Leo’s way, or Vincent’s way. You’ll figure out what that means quite quickly.”

Unfortunately, the story is really nothing too special. The fact that almost every aspect of it was swiped from genre tropes is a common complaint but I personally didn’t really find that to be distracting or problematic. Instead, my main problem is that while the game does a good job at giving you a sense of who both characters are, in fact watching them interact as the story unfolded really seemed like it was going to be something very special, it ends up squandering the opportunity for some real character development and an impactful story. This is especially true when the plot takes a sharp turn from being about our characters escaping prison and reuniting with their families to being about them seeking revenge on the person who put them there. It just goes a bit off the rails.

Revenge certainly could have been an interesting angle, of course, but when the game suddenly devolved from what felt more like a narrative heavy adventure game, not completely dissimilar to the aforementioned Firewatch, into a mediocre third person shooter, it kind of lost me. By this point in the story we had learned that neither one of our two characters were what you’d call “violent criminals” yet they suddenly engage in the wanton slaughter that makes up this next to last scene of the game without batting an eye. Talk about ludonarrative dissonance! That, and the twist at the end, while mechanically kind of cool, just wasn’t at all where I felt like the story was taking me early on.

“There’s always time for Connect 4!”

Despite the disappointing finale, I liked A Way Out overall. The presentation, the characters, and the co-op centric gameplay really impressed, even if my great early impressions didn’t quite last throughout the game. There aren’t a lot of games out there that rely on cooperative gameplay, especially split-screen cooperative gameplay, and A Way Out even lets a second person play online without owning the game, which is awesome! If the negatives in this little review here don’t sound like they’d outweigh the positives for you then it is probably easily worth your money. At the very least, Hazelight Studios’ next project will have my full attention. I hope it’s not something entirely different as I really do see a lot of potential in A Way Out’s style of gameplay.

As usual, I’ve stolen my Xbox One screenshots from aimlessly scouring the Internet for decent ones. Apologies for not having individual credits for each of them!