#DEXTER

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Like any good racer, the Need for Speed franchise never stops moving. They've come a long way since the early '90s, though the last few years' releases have been more about refinement of the formula than anything else, moving more towards an open world structure. The latest in the franchise, Need for Speed: Rivals, takes a big step by going all-in on one mode that combines a single-player campaign with online multiplayer. The rest -- including the cops, the cars, and the crashing -- stay the same. In a sense, they've made it so players can jump in and go fast without having to worry about the details. Need for Speed: Rivals (PS4 , PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC) Developer: Ghost Games Publisher: Electronic Arts Release: November 15, 2013 for PS4, November 19 for Xbox 360, PS3 Need for Speed: Rivals is an open-world racing sandbox that you're free to do whatever you'd like in. Sure, there's a single-player progression and a light story to follow, but that stuff really doesn't matter in the long run. It's all about going fast and doing what you want as either a racer or a cop, speeding around in a big, crazy racing world. When you boil this game's structure down, it's a series of checklists to complete. While that might not sound exciting, it works pretty well as a way to keep players engaged. Since Rivals lets you play as either a cop or a racer, there are branching paths to follow to work your way up through the progression. Along the way you're free to take on any of the branches, called Speed Lists, picking the objectives you'd prefer to tackle, or the ones that suit your racing style best. Completing items from these Speed Lists will earn you Speed Points, which can be used to buy and upgrade your cars, while completing the Speed Lists themselves will unlock more cars. Rivals goes light on the customization. Beyond the basic paint job and trim customization, progressions that add to a car's speed, acceleration, control, and durability are also available. The only true customization comes from Rivals' Pursuit Tech, which lets you add offensive abilities to your cars. Shockwaves, EMP blasts, jammers and more can be equipped in the two available slots of each car. Each of the Pursuit Tech types also has an upgrade progression. For the racer side of the game, the Speed Lists focus on either racing, driving, or messing with the cops. For the most part, by picking carefully, I found that I could avoid the challenges I didn't care for -- like the interceptor cop chases -- sticking to the fun ones that had me jumping off ramps for distance, or bashing other cars off the road. There are points where the progression forces one objective on all of the paths, though these cases are rare. For the most part, the constantly evolving stream of challenges keeps things fresh, though I found that after I had tried most of the challenge types, it started to feel more like a grind. It works the same way on the cop side, giving the choice to patrol or enforce with challenge types that are more in line with what a cop with a super-fast sports car might do to uphold traffic laws. While taking down racers with sirens screaming is always fun, some of the challenges, like the "go-fast-but-don't-mess-up" Rapid Response mission are somewhat boring in comparison. Between the story progression, the speed lists, and AllDrive, you're never at a loss for what to do next. You can keep your head down and keep to yourself if you'd like, but I found that openly engaging other racers makes for a much better time. As nicely done as Rivals' open world is, it wouldn't be nearly as exciting without real racers zipping around you as you try to run from the cops. For the most part, it gets rid of its predecessors' scripted races and messy multiplayer, giving you action that feels more real. AllDrive is the real deal, and it makes for some pretty lively gameplay. As great as the open world and its always-online connectivity are, there are a few speed bumps in Rivals' game balance. While the cop campaign is mostly problem free, racers' patience will be tried with some supremely frustrating design choices. While both cops and racers earn Speed Points for completing challenges, racers are always at risk of losing their earnings at any time. Cop busts or full wrecks will drain all of a racer's earnings; the only way to ensure keeping these points is to race to a hideout to 'bank' earnings before being busted. Need for Speed: Rivals' AllDrive mode has you playing your races alongside the rest of the world, effectively mixing single-player and multiplayer experiences together. Every time the game is loaded, you're logged into EA's servers. Other players will show up in your game, and you're free to challenge them in races. Through Autolog, friends' race times and other records are also tracked and compared as you race, adding another competitive layer. There are multiple issues here. First off, the more Speed Points a racer earns, the higher their point multiplier goes, letting them increase earnings exponentially if they're daring enough. But, with this multiplier increase comes a heat level increase, which means that the cops are more likely to attack. And, with faster cars, the heat level starts out higher. By the middle of the racer campaign, you're certain to have cops on you at all times, and there is no break or breathing room. Even if you're flying at over 200 miles per hour with nitrous flaming out the back of your car, the cops are on you, coming from all directions, plowing at you at any given opportunity. Chances are you will be busted, and you will lose all of your Speed Points. Since Speed Points earnings are tied directly to the acquisition of new cars and their upgrades, you're essentially losing your progress with each bust. There were sessions of play where I was being busted six times an hour, which means that aside from Speed List challenge checkmarks, I was literally spinning my wheels, going nowhere. In the later levels cops are so aggressive that the game's open-world sense of freedom is completely drained. Cars can be pulled over for not moving at all, first off -- that's ridiculous. I had points where I had pulled my car near hideout after barely breaking free from multiple attacks, mashing L1 to make sure I'd be able to bank my Speed Points, only to find the cops flying at me from every angle, coming out of nowhere to bust me before the game even registered my button presses. I streamed a couple of these sessions via PS4 last week, and my viewers got a kick out of me losing my mind over Speed Point losses. I didn't think it was funny at all. There are a couple of other design holdouts from Most Wanted that they still need to fix. When you need to set a waypoint most -- during a pursuit where you're in danger of losing all of your Speed Points -- Rivals' conveniences no longer feel convenient. You can use either the EasyDrive mini menu by tapping the d-pad, or the overworld map, by pushing the Option button. Either has you taking your eyes off the road when you should be going full speed. With no way to stop and look, you're going to either crash or get busted. There's nothing even close to a pause button. The mini-map is pathetically small, poorly placed, and barely usable. Just like with Most Wanted, it's too far away from the action in the bottom left corner to look at, which means you'll have to take your eyes off the road to know where to go. Doing so at 200 miles per hour never ends well -- and with that kind of speed you're actually out-driving the map! The colored path lines are slow to appear anyway, but at that speed they appear far too late. Worst of all, the range the map displays is too restricted, leaving you unsure of what's ahead until its too late. Ghost Games have added street-level graphical indicators to help guide you in the right direction, but they're hard to see, and they still don't give enough of a clear view of where you need to be going. That all said, I want to thank Ghost Games for dialing back the crash animations. In Most Wanted, they lasted so long that it felt like the game was making fun of you for losing, and were sometimes so disorienting that I had to look away. In Rivals, they're big and flashy, but not drawn out. Need for Speed: Rivals looks great on the PS4, though there's nothing inherently next-gen about it. It looks like a souped up current-gen title with added areas of polish. All of the cars are shiny and highly detailed, and the day-night cycles and weather changes are impressive. Ghost Games' California-inspired world, Redvies, is particularly lovely in its desert areas. Again, no complaints, but I can't wait to see what a ground-up built, next-gen Need for Speed will look like. My only gripes on Rivals' presentation are the story elements and their narration. The tutorial narrator sounds bored or annoyed, which does little to get you excited about the race. The story itself is nonsensical, and the cutscenes are so silly that you'll likely end up skipping them. But the voice bits assigned to each level's Speed List are so bad that you might get some enjoyment out of them in that unintentionally funny kind of way. It sounds like some dope with a nose cold trying to mock designer cologne commercial one-liners. "Fate is out there. Somewhere," one says. Rivals crashed on me a few times, with one crash so bad that the PS4 asked me to send a crash report. Twice, when trying to use the PS4's Share button to upload clips, the game crashed and closed out on its own, losing my progress. Another time, in checking the map during a race, I was kicked out of the game. A few graphical glitches also popped up in the distance, though they were nothing major. Even with the balance issues and design missteps, Need for Speed: Rivals is a blast. Literally. Plowing into cops to watch them explode off the side of the road as you zip by is never not fun. So is blasting them with EMP to watch them flip in the air. And through AllDrive's connectivity, I loved being able to race up alongside someone and mash L1 to instantly challenge them to a head-to-head showdown. Ramping jumps, drift contests, dodging speed traps -- it's all a blast. There's simply too much fun to be had here to get hung up on the gripes. Just be sure to take breaks when playing the racer campaign, as the grind, and the suicidal cops can wear on you.

I've been a huge fan of Rayman's revival period. After the Rabbids spun off into their own universe (which even got big enough to crossover with Mario recently), and Rayman fell into relative obscurity, I was extremely delighted to play through Rayman Origins and its even better follow-up, Rayman Legends. After only playing it on the Wii U, I was curious as to how well Legends' GamePad-centric mechanic translated to its ports and even how it played on the go. Luckily for me, a "definitive" version of the title collected all of the content spread across multiple ports and sought to deliver the best of both home and portable worlds. Rayman Legends Definitive Edition (Switch) Developer: Ubisoft Montepellier Publisher: Ubisoft Released: September 12, 2017 MSRP: $39.99 Taking place sometime after Rayman Origins, Rayman and his buddies have been sleeping while gross monsters and the like have wreaked havoc across the land. At the behest of a long bearded hookah smoker, Rayman and some compatriots have to save little blue fairy things called "Teensies." Saving these Teensies across Definitive Edition's many, many, many available levels and collecting Lums (little yellow fairies only factoring into a final level score and an unlockable toward the game's end) is how you progress. You'll unlock new stages and worlds almost constantly, so at least there's a good sense of progression throughout. It's even more pronounced in the Definitive Edition, as now there are many more characters and character skins (like a Rayman wearing a Mario hat or a Rayman with a suit of armor). So early on, it feels like there are a ton of collectables and fun to be had. But unfortunately, these massive piles of collectables devolve into white noise before too long. At least the gameplay is still as tight as ever. Running and jumping feels precise, and there are plenty of creative twists on platforming to keep the stages innovative for the majority of the time. Standouts are still, of course, the rhythm stages such as the famous "Black Betty" scored stage. These stages are platform design at its finest, and Definitive Edition definitely gave me an urge to replay some of the better designed stages. The worst aspect of this, however, is whenever the flying green friend Murfy is involved. In the Wii U version, another player could use the GamePad's touchscreen and move Murfy around to interact with the level and help Rayman along. But in this version (and the older ports, apparently), Murfy is relegated to a button press as he automatically positions himself where needed. It's a bit cumbersome when trying to press a button to activate Murfy while jumping to platforms at the same time, or needing to quickly switch between the two in mid-air. It's such a strangely non-cohesive design choice for an otherwise tight game. And for such a well designed platformer, this "definitive" port has far too many technical issues to ignore. While this still has the smooth animation and visual design of Legends, it doesn't look the greatest. Rather than feel like an updated version of a title initially released four years ago, it, uh, looks like a title released four years ago with even more compressed images. Compounding on this are the entirely too lengthy load times. To be honest the loading time wasn't a huge issue for me at first, but the more levels I played, the more I realized how much time in all I had spent waiting to play them. The waiting can be so egregious at times, it diminishes the easy and breezy vibe of Legends overall. As for the Switch's handheld mode, this works out better but I did notice a bit of slowdown in some levels. On one hand, I want as many people to play Rayman Legends as possible since it manages to reinvent itself and stay fresh with so many of its levels. The fact it's now available to a new audience with a slightly discounted price greases those wheels a bit too. On the other, there just isn't enough here to justify warranting a purchase of Definitive Edition. It's slightly worse than its prior counterparts (even forgoing the Wii U's gameplay twist with Murfy and not letting another Switch user connect and play in that particular way), and the only truly new feature is the ability to play a tournament mode in the Kung Foot soccer minigame. Maybe I nitpicked Definitive Edition into oblivion, but there isn't a justification for such a wonky product that's the latest in a long line of ports.

If there are still games to ask, please reply with the game along with your sincere opinion about the hottest action game on 2019.

One Piece: World Seeker (PS4 , PC, Xbox One) Developer: Ganbarion Publisher: Bandai Namco Released: March 15, 2019 MSRP: $59.99 One Piece is one of the longest-running franchises I still find myself watching and reading week to week. With over 900 chapters of the manga and over 800 anime episodes, something about the world and its characters keeps pulling me back in. At this point the last thing I expect from One Piece is a phenomenal video game, but you never know when that Dragon Ball FighterZ moment will hit. One Piece: World Seeker isn't a particularly groundbreaking open world title. It does tell a pretty solid story for Luffy and the rest of the Straw Hat crew, but only if you're willing to struggle through its repetitive and boring gameplay. The best part of One Piece: World Seeker is its surprisingly strong narrative. While the pacing is slowed considerably by the insane amount of unremarkable sidequests, the original story, written by Eiichiro Oda himself, delivers two new characters and a decent through line for Luffy and his crew. Things start out with you dropping onto Prison Island. Luffy and the rest of the Straw Hats are here in search of a legendary treasure, said to be held within the island's flying fortress. Things go wrong fast - as they often have a habit of doing for the Straw Hat crew - and the treasure turns out to be a bust. The whole setup was a trap orchestrated by the prison's warden, Isaac. During their escape, our heroes find themselves separated, getting tangled up in a plot involving recognizable pirates and navy officers from Luffy's past, all with Isaac pulling the strings. Luffy ends up allying with the leader of a local anti-navy group named Jeanne. The struggle between the pro and anti-navy islanders - and that between Jeanne and Isaac - is the focal point of World Seeker's story. The big beats could amount to a few solid filler episodes of the anime, though I'd hope those episodes would feature a lot less of Luffy wandering around and picking shiny objects up off the ground. The open world of Prison Island is mostly sprawling countryside and small villages, aside from one major metropolitan city. You'll spend a whole lot of time running back and forth across this map. The gameplay loop consists of two types of mission: fetch a character specified items, or beat up a bunch of random navy or pirate goons. Sometimes you'll even have to beat the crap out of some dudes on your way to retrieve aforementioned items. How you beat the crap out these dudes isn't particularly entertaining either. Luffy can swap between two combat stances. Observational Haki has a focus on dodging and fast strikes, while Armament Haki is all about slow, powerful hits. Later on, you also gain access to Luffy's Gear Fourth transformation. Whatever mode you use the most in combat doesn't really matter, because enemies don't present that much of a challenge. With the exception of armored or flying enemies that might force you to use some ranged attacks, you can basically just spam the punch button until everything is dead. The skill tree offers up a few new abilities like Gum Gum Bazooka, but it doesn't do much to shake up the way you fight. It's more important that you fully upgrade your Rocket and UFO abilities as soon as possible, or else getting around the island can be something of a headache. On the subject of traversing the island, it can be pretty entertaining once you've fully upgraded your Rocket ability, but it still lacks the precision and flow of games like Spider-Man. You can launch yourself pretty far, but it's hard to land exactly where you want to be or keep yourself in the air for very long. Most of the time Steele City, the area that looks the most fun to swing around in, is riddled with Navy snipers that will gun you out of the air without much effort. The lackluster gameplay and bogged-down pacing of the story might have seen some improvements had the full cast of characters been more fully utilized. Monkey D. Luffy is a great character, but One Piece has never been just about him. World Seeker could've benefited from exploring gameplay elements from multiple Straw Hat members. Having every one of them playable might be asking too much, but at the very least having the group's three heavy hitters, Luffy, Zoro, and Sanji as playable characters seems within scope. This variety could have made for some more entertaining story beats. Simply running into the crew members doesn't give them a lot of time to shine. There are a few sidequests centered around the locals mistaking Brook for a ghost and one that plays off the running gag that Zoro has no sense of direction. Aside from these notable moments the other Straw Hats only pop up to ask random tasks of you, except for Sanji who can dispatch other crew members to gather crafting resources, and Franky and Usopp who act as living, breathing crafting stations. One Piece: World Seeker tells a surprisingly well-realized story that fans of the series are sure to enjoy, but only if they can make it through repetitive and frustrating gameplay. The talented voice cast and bright, popping visuals are a treat, but it does little to revolutionize the open-world adventure genre. If you aren't a fan of the source material, World Seeker is hard to recommend, but lovers of the Straw Hat pirates will find an enjoyable story buried under a lot of mundane gameplay.

That's it, I'm getting me guillotine Unlike any other medium outside of visiting a historical recreation, games afford us the unique ability to not only see but feel what it would be like to live during a pivotal moment in history. Most historical games would put you in the shoes of a higher-ranking official, but that doesn't give you an experience other than pure power. To get the right feel for a tumultuous time period you must be someone whose death would not be monumental. We. The Revolution understands this and puts you in the seat of a revolutionary tribunal judge after the fall of the French Monarchy in the late 18th century. By overwhelming you and never letting you rest on your laurels, it makes you feel like any day could be your last. As an emulation of the French Revolution, it works splendidly, but as a game, it has some faults. We. The Revolution has a lot going on in it, so much so that I'm having a hard time determining its genre because the game doesn't stop throwing new mechanics at you. It has shades of adventure and role-playing, as well as some strategy thrown in. Gameplay starts out as a courtroom procedural where you go over evidence, question the accused, render a verdict based on what you think should happen to the defendant, as well as filling out reports based on your findings. Every verdict you render affects your rating among the various classes living in Paris, and you also have to take into account the jury's opinion. As orders came down from above about less moral ambiguity and more heads on the chopping block, I began to stop thinking about the cases at hand and more about managing my reputation. At first, I got annoyed with this, but the more I played and got involved in the world, it felt appropriate. It really puts you in the shoes of a person in a lesser position of power that had superiors they had to follow. On top of cases, you also have to manage your home life where your family is as fractured as could be. Each of your family members is a member of a different faction and your wife holds a grudge against you from your years of being an alcoholic. You manage their opinions of you by choosing each night to take part in an activity with them. Each activity has an effect on their reputation which then transfers over to the faction they represent. If this seems like glorified resource management, then you're on the right track because that's what it is. Ordinarily, I would find this to be lazy game design (I'm looking at you Gods Will Be Watching) and throw it in the trash. But in a paranoid society such as the young French Republic, where everyone suspects everyone else so they aren't the next being led to the gallows, this juggling of enemies and allies really drives that feeling home. Unfortunately, they continue to pile the mechanics on and bring in a tactical recreation of Paris where you must deploy agents to gain support and quell those who would want you dead. Doubling down on the strategy element, they introduce battles later on in the game where you decide how to attack in a rock, paper, scissors like mechanic. Those who know me know I'll gobble up anything with even a whiff of strategy to it, but these just seem like things that were tacked on to break up the resource management. They didn't really work for me and their absence wouldn't be missed. The persuasion mechanics, on the other hand, work amazingly well. At various times through the game, you will have to mani[CENSORED]te a crowd or person by giving a speech. You are given a set number of topics you will have to cover, and four approaches you can take regarding the subject. You can approach with carelessness, humility, aggression, or mani[CENSORED]tion. Before you initiate the conversation you are allowed to test your approaches and you can see how it would fare then adjust accordingly when actually doing the speech. Depending on how well you rouse your target they will either support you or turn against you. It's a nice take on the branching conversation mechanic and in a political game such as We. The Revolution, something like this is sorely needed. Make no mistake about it, We. The Revolution is a political game. It doesn't pull punches when it comes to the corruption of those in power, nor with its subject matter. I feel it necessary to warn that there are some cases in here that deal with sensitive subjects that some may find disturbing such as but not limited to rape, the position of women in society, and pedophilia. For the most part, from what I experienced, it is all handled maturely. There is one instance where a same-sex relationship can be used as leverage, but owing to the time period it feels historically accurate, as crappy as it may be by today's standards. As far as historical accuracy, some liberties have been taken with exact events to aide the branching narrative mechanic but the structure is still there. The overarching story is up and down and while there are moments that are somewhat boring, there are a few moments where the game yanks you right back into the world and doesn't let you forget that it is in charge. There is an expected knowledge of the revolution to fully grasp the story as there is little to no lead-in to the world. While I am a student of history, and have a particular interest in historical uprisings and regime changes, my knowledge of the French Revolution is somewhat lacking. So when I was having trouble finding my footing in the opening hours, I wondered how those who didn't share my predilection for history would fare. Aesthetically it's a beautiful piece of art. The entire world is bathed in polygonal art that give off at once a hollow as well as fiery feel. There are times where I wish they had put some bedding music into the trials but the silence in some of the more mundane cases helps drive home the feel of the day-to-day of being a judge. There is an issue with the fact that the dialogue is spoken in English with bits of French words and accents thrown in for flavor. This is a huge sticking point for me and it's not like the dialogue is so overwhelming that to use French audio with English subtitles would be a bad thing. For as engrossing as the rest of the game is at bringing you into the world, the English audio tears you right out of it. Thankfully voiced cutscenes are on the lesser side but it still stuck in my side like a dagger. We. The Revolution is clearly not for everyone. It's undoubtedly slow with the most thrilling aspect being the persuasion speeches, and even then that's just dialogue. But if you're in the mood for something that really transports you to the tumultuous time of the French Revolution then I don't think you will find a better way there. We. The Revolution (PC) Developer: Polyslash Publisher: Klabater Released: March 21, 2019 MSRP: $19.99

In Their Own Words THE SIMS 4 STRANGERVILLE WALKTHROUGH Unravel the mystery of the Secret Laboratory The Sims 4 Associate Producer, Antonio Romeo, walks you through The Sims 4: StrangerVille, and provides a few gameplay tips that may help your Sims unravel the mystery of the Secret Laboratory. When players move into StrangerVille from February 26th on PC and Mac, they’re going to be greeted by some very peculiar looking Sims acting super creepy and weird. They’ll also notice strange purple glowing pod plants sprouting up around town, Federal Agents on the streets and suspicious looking vans. Apparently, all is not what it seems… In fact, some of these weird townies are ‘actively possessed’ Sims, which explains their odd behavior as they bumble around planting Bizarre Fruit and Bizarre Plants in random places—like your fridge! If this happens, Secret Agents will show up to remove them and eradicate any source of infection. This will fuel players curiosity as they question what's going on around them. If players are looking for a more guided experience, I recommend using our brand new Aspiration 'StrangerVille Mystery'. This will ensure your Sims stay on track in solving what mysteries could be hiding in this strange town. Their first step with this aspiration is to visit the StrangerVille Plaza and seek out the town's Military Personnel at the Local Bar, Scientists at the Library and Conspiracy Theorists walking around town. These factions may be able to offer your Sims essential clues if you ‘Ask About StrangerVille’. After you gain some information from the townsfolk, be sure to visit the Curio Shop outside the trailer park in the StrangerVille Plaza. They are bound to have some helpful information. Once you talk a bit with them and browse some Curio, it’s time to finally check out that Secret Lab. When they reach the Secret Lab, two things are apparent. One, it’s completely abandoned and, two there’s a large sealed door. Players should have their sims 'Examine' the door to see if there is a way to open it, and start their investigation. There’s also a notable amount of items scattered around, which could be useful evidence. Make sure to photograph these, the Lab Door, and those Bizarre plants—which could prove fruitful. Once your Sim has gathered enough evidence at the Lab, it’s time to head back into town. Once there, seek out those specific factions again by visiting their favorite venues like the Local Bar (for Military Personnel) or the Library (for Scientists). Establishing a relationship with them will help your Sim gather more evidence to ‘Compile a Secret Dossier’, which they’ll need to obtain a ‘Keycard’ and open lab doors. Obtaining a Keycard can be achieved in different ways. Once you have the Secret Dossier in your Sims Inventory, click on any of the Faction NPC’s that you’ve built relationships with, your Sim can request one directly from them. Or you can take it to the Curios Shop Request a Keycard from its owner, who’ll let you know that they have one in their 'Secret Inventory'. Opening that will let your Sims purchase a Keycard directly from them. As soon as your Sim has the Keycard, they will be instructed through The StrangerVille Mystery Aspiration, to go back to the lab and open the Sealed Door. Once the first door of the Secret Lab opens you’ll notice the world start to change, and not necessarily for the better... Once your Sim goes deeper into the Secret Lab, they will be confronted by a hazardous roadblock of foggy mist and spores. Some players may walk into it for investigation purposes, and others may avoid it, but where’s the fun in that? The choice is yours, but your goal here is to find a way past the Spore Hallway in order to go deeper into the Secret Lab. As you begin poking around on the second floor of the lab, players will notice a red pulsating Chemical Analyzer. Clicking the item will display an interaction that’s blocked until you get 15 Spore Clusters. These Clusters can be found by using an Infection Scanner, something which is issued to every Military Personnel in StrangerVille. So players should head to the Local Bar and start questioning them about Spores in the Secret Lab. Players can obtain a scanner from any of the Military Personnel, in a few different ways. Fighting them to win a scanner is one approach, seducing them is another, bribing them or impressing them by demonstrating your Sims physical prowess. Whichever method players choose, your goal should be to obtain the Infection Scanner at any cost. With the Infection Scanner in your Sims Inventory, you will now have a new interaction, to Scan by clicking on the ground. Sims can scan areas for potential spore clusters and collect them, but note that the scanner only has 3 charges on it, and will need time to cool down and recharge. It works best near high concentrations of Spores, and the best place for that is most likely the Secret Lab. Once players have gathered 15 Spore Clusters, they will be able to use the Chemical Analyzer on the second floor of the secret lab, to construct the Infection Profile Data. This infection Profile Data will be very useful to any Scientist around StrangerVille. It may even help them find a way to filter those hazardous Spores. With the Profile Data in your Sims Inventory, head to the local Library and talk with a Scientist. Build enough relationship with them and they might be able to construct a Spore Filter for you. With the Spore Filter to hand, it’s time to combine it with a Hazmat Suit. Doing so, will fully protect your Sims from the Spore Hallway. So have your Sim revisit the Curio Shop owner to talk to them about the Spores in the Lab. You never know, they might have something useful in their Secret Inventory. Once you obtain the Incomplete Hazmat Suit and the Spore Filter, players will be able to combine them both by clicking the items in their Sims inventory. With the Modified Hazmat Suit fully constructed, your Sim can wear it by clicking the item once more on your Sims Inventory. This will surely protect them from those toxic Spores in the lab, as your Sims wade deeper into the Secret Lab and uses the Keycard to open that second door. And as you explore further, players will find one final door. But what's behind it? You’ll have to find that out for yourself in The Sims 4: StrangerVille!

Pls respect model ur last request get rejected cuz of this. For now i will accept it. Next time pls put this title "Request Change Tag" T/C

Report Accepted Suspended for 2days T/C

In this topic I will post weekly my favorite songs :).

Rock the dragon, and the Gum-Gum Fruit, and... There's so much raw potential for games based around anime. Most of it is squandered in favor of style over substance, but every so often a developer will surprise us. Jump Force isn't one of those projects that elevates itself above the framework of a brawler, but it isn't just pure pageantry either. Here's the gist: you, a player character and innocent bystander in an attack against a major city by Dragon Ball big bad Frieza, have been granted superpowers to help stave off the assault. After customizing your character you subsequently join up with "Jump Force," an organization comprised of po[CENSORED]r Shonen Jump characters (42 playable in all) and original creations from Akira Toriyama. Your avatar is based around three schools of fighting: Dragon Ball (martial arts), One Piece (pirate style) and Naruto (swift ninja movements). Those all play into the three story teams led by Goku, Luffy, and Naruto. That's basically it as you fly through the tame, low-energy storyline. If you're expecting an English dub, you're out of luck. I can't imagine the nightmare involved with wrangling up voices for this, but there you go. So yeah, it's a predictable and alright setup for what essentially amounts to a framework for a slugfest of a brawler. You'll take mission after mission, level-up your character in menial and significant ways, and occasionally view a cutscene that moves the plot along. It's not as mind-blowing or as high-stakes as, say, the anime-flavored Asura's Wrath, and while a lot of the interactions are fun enough, Jump Force's real strength lies in wait in its combat system. Spike Chunsoft isn't as well-known as studios like Arc System Works when it comes to tactical fighting mechanics, but they've been putting in work for years crafting flashy brawlers. The "rush system," which is basically code for "auto-combo," facilitates that. You can rapidly press a button to hit some cool-looking attacks, with the power to hold up or down on the analog stick to smash enemies into the air or onto the floor. Holding down the attack button initiates a charged smash, and the exact same thing goes for the heavy attack button alongside a dedicated throw key. Guarding and sidestepping work in tandem with the same button (with movement input). Standard fighter fare, yes, and while it seems like a surface-level button masher, playing online for just a few matches against capable opponents will straighten you out: there's finesse involved, no doubt about it. You can guard at the right moment to execute a "high-speed dodge" to avoid getting pummeled, then punish with a counter-attack. There's also a chase mechanic with a super dash that runs on a cooldown that you can use to get out of a combo (like a combo breaker, if you will). Supers, which are always given such a huge emphasis in anime games, help differentiate the cast and add extra layers. Some of them are instantaneous, many are ranged, and a few have significant amounts of charging time before they go off. Learning each of them is key to survival and makes nearly every matchup fun to play. Saving that instant-pop ultimate for a key punish (and being aware that your opponent has one available) is a reality you'll have to deal with. You can also "awaken" (read: go Super Saiyan and power up your stats, which is a literal transformation for some characters) in addition to your ultimate. Where it all comes together is the sheer number of different styles. Watching the gun-toting Ryo Saeba, who is basically a detective from the City Hunter manga, go up against Yugi Mutou, who summons card companions, is hilarious. Abilities that put up guard walls and force enemies to change positioning on the fly are also key to ensuring that Jump Force isn't just a run-of-the-mill mash-fest. There's a lot of room to find a "main" that suits your personal playstyle. Your core modes on top of the campaign are offline and online (ranked and non-ranked) brawls. Here, characters that aren't acquired yet from story mode are unlocked so you can battle with whomever (nice). Online was available for testing and seems stable (even pre-launch matchmaking only took 10 seconds or less), but that may change. If it does, we'll let you know. While the actual gameplay is deep enough, the setup for each battle is going to be polarizing depending on personal preference. Everyone has some idea of what fighting games should be, whether that's the tag-team Marvel vs. Capcom style, all-in insane bouts with multiple characters on-screen like Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style (there's a reference for you), or strict heads-up 1v1s. Jump Force kind of takes a little of column A and column C and, as a result, has a slight identity crisis. I view Jump Force as a chill brawler, so I want to see everyone in the mix at once similar to how the previous all-stars fighter J-Stars Victory Vs did it. This is a crossover game with myriad colorful characters; let me watch them interact. But Jump Force, while technically a 3v3 affair, only allows you to fight with one character at a time. That isn't inherently bad, mind, as I'm game for fighters of every variety, but all those roster members share the same health bar. It makes some brawls feel smaller in stature than they really are, even with the occasional assist power popping in. I'm also torn on the ultra-realistic style. I do have a soft spot for cel-shaded visuals that make something look like a playable version of the anime. FighterZ is the perfect example of this, implementing tech from Guilty Gear Xrd to get the job done. But with so many different properties spanning multiple decades here, this keen focus on current-generation character models makes sense, even if they do look a little off for certain cast members (Luffy looks like he's one bad day from going insane). On the flipside of the engine, Gaara, master of sand, has some really neat-looking abilities. The particle details, the bruises when getting roughed-up, and the ripped clothes also make for much more heightened and emotional battles. The other annoyance is the forced hub, which also functions as your menu. Once you get past the first 30 minutes or so you'll see other players appear and it won't be so lonely, but having to run to a counter to select a mode when a simple pause option would do is trying. It's sort of interesting to witness player creations running about and clearly the great "social" push of all late 2010 games plays a part. The idea is obvious: you'll see someone riding on a cloud or frog mount, go "cool I want that!," and keep playing. I get it. But the long load times also play a part in the vexing presentation. Like the Dissidia series, Jump Force is something I'm going to be coming back to for random bits of fun throughout the years. The core is good, it's just let down by some odd design choices and an average campaign. This is an older brawler in an HD skin: if you want something more than that, look elsewhere. Jump Force (PC, PS4 , Xbox One) Developer: Spike Chunsoft Publisher: Bandai Namco Released: February 15, 2019 MSRP: $59.99

L.A. Noire has been in development for at least seven years. Not everything's worth waiting for. Some things are. L.A. Noire (PlayStation 3 [reviewed], Xbox 360) Developer: Team Bondi / Rockstar Games Publisher: Rockstar Games To be released: May 17, 2011 MSRP: $59.99 L.A. Noire is a game that will take many players by surprise. With its arcade driving controls and open world, not to mention the backing of Rockstar, your average gamer could be forgiven for thinking that this 1947 detective game might merely be Grand Theft Auto played from the other side of the law. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. L.A. Noire has more in common with point-and-click adventure games than open-world crime simulators, and it's better in practice than it may look on paper. This isn't just a game where you drive around shooting drug dealers and chasing fiends in the name of rough justice. While there are plenty of shootouts and car chases to go around, the main spine of the game is in good old-fashioned detective work. Each case from the game's four main desks -- Traffic, Homicide, Vice and Arson -- starts with a crime scene, and as detective Cole Phelps, players will need to investigate for clues. The collection of clues is an integral part of any case, as players will need to not only harvest them, but know when to bring them out during an interrogation. Some clues require mani[CENSORED]tion, which is easily handled by the movement stick. Moving the analog stick causes Phelps' hand to rotate, allowing the player to spot vital information. Some items can also be opened up or unfolded, revealing evidence hidden within. L.A. Noire is good about player feedback, with vibrations and musical cues letting you know when you're near an item, or when all clues have been discovered. If a player feels this is too much like hand-holding, the cues can be turned off to make things more tricky. L.A. Noire's many cases are split evenly between clue-hunting and interrogating. At various points during the course of the game, players will need to interview witnesses and suspects, and here's where L.A. Noire's utterly astounding facial animations come into play. L.A. Noire relies on a player's own ability to read body language and facial expressions, as they attempt to determine if a witness/suspect is being truthful, telling a lie, or omitting a vital piece of information. Giveaways, such as averting eye contact, false smiles, and awkward scratching, all come into play, and some characters are better liars than others. I cannot express enough how impressed I am with the facial animation, and how it's been used not only as eye candy, but as an invaluable part of the gameplay itself. It's a joy to interview suspects and watch them talk in such a realistic fashion, using their movements to inform your own decisions. Without the animation, the game simply would not work, but I'm thrilled to report that it works beautifully. Phelps can deal with a suspect's statements in one of three ways. He can take them as truth, call certain facts into doubt, or accuse them of telling an outright lie. If he makes an accusation, it needs to be backed up with evidence recovered from the locations explored previously. If the player suspects a lie but lacks the proof, a statement can be called into doubt. Naturally, characters aren't always hiding something, and in that case, their words can be taken as fact. Should Cole read a suspect correctly and select the right answer, he may get a new lead. If he fails, he could miss out on vital information. For the most part, the interviews work to a fabulous degree, but they don't always make sense. Some of the logic seems a little arbitrary, especially when it comes to using contrary evidence against a suspect's statement. One also doesn't always know exactly how Phelps will call a statement into doubt or phrase an accusation, with his more unpredictable statements occasionally ruining a line of inquiry for you. While these moments do occur, and can be rather frustrating, I must stress how satisfying it is when it does work and you successfully interrogate a person. Getting a suspect on the ropes and making him divulge something crucial is particularly elating, and will make any player feel instantly more intelligent. Conversely, in those times when you screw up a question and it's definitely due to your own lack of perception, it can really sting. It can also affect the way a case plays out, too. It's the fact that L.A. Noire's interrogations rely so heavily on natural intuition that really makes the whole thing work. As humans, we know how to read faces, and that's what L.A. Noire exploits. To be able to have a player think, "Okay, I can tell this guy is lying, but do I have proof?" is what this game is all about, and the fact that it works so well is truly, truly jaw-dropping. There's nothing about the game's internal algorithms that determines your success in this arena. It's all about how good you are, as a human being, at knowing when someone's being straight with you and when they're trying to be sneaky. I can think of no other game that has exploited a player's innate mental faculties so deftly. L.A Noire isn't just about finding clues and asking questions. Action sequences are peppered throughout the game to keep things frisky, and Cole will have to pursue various suspects on foot and in cars, get into brawls, or engage in violent shootouts. There's certainly a greater GTA flavor in these sequences, but they feel a lot tighter, with some impressive scripting and pacing, especially in the game's multitude of car chases. Avoiding screeching cars, having your partner shoot out tires, and stopping just as your suspect's vehicle gets hit by a bus and skids out of control all add up to create some of the game's most memorable moments. The action sequences are held back somewhat by a few dodgy control issues. Sprinting and shooting in cover are both handled by one button, and needing to manually back out of cover to chase somebody is a little fiddly. Phelp's movement controls could also be better; he takes wild swings to turn, and sometimes moves in stutters due to confused animations. These are minor grievances, however, and once players get used to the way Phelps handles, there shouldn't be too much aggravation. Much of the action is found in various "Street Crime" missions. These purely optional missions are activated over the police radio. Activating a Street Crime opens up a brief objective that does away with the investigative process and focuses purely on combat or pursuit. Street Crimes are unique to each of the four Desks, and you'll have to return to a previous Desk to clean up any ones you may have missed. Successful interrogations and Street Crime completions award experience points, which contribute to Rank increases. Ranks bring special bonuses, such as unlockable vehicles, extra costumes and, most importantly, Intuition Points. Intuition can be used during the course of an investigation and can be invaluable to a player who's stuck in a rut. Using an Intuition Point during a crime scene will locate all clues on the mini-map, while using it during an interview can either remove one of the possible answers (for instance, confirming that a suspect isn't lying) or activate the "Ask The Community" option, which will take the game online to find out which answer is most po[CENSORED]r among players. When added together, the various elements of L.A. Noire combine to form one of the slickest, most impressively written games I've played in a long time. While the game has its low points -- with the Homicide desk surprisingly being the weakest section of the game due to some questionable narrative ideas that I won't spoil here -- L.A. Noire's overall plot is decidedly strong, up there with the best the medium has to offer. By the time it concludes, players will be shocked, satisfied and perhaps even a little angry. The characters are all rather memorable, with some highlights including the overtly religious Irish police captain, the deadbeat Arson detective, and the snake-like Roy Earle of AD Vice. Each case has its own intricately written story, with a unique set of characters and a fitting conclusion. The ability to replay cases is very welcome indeed, as some of them are simply too good to just be played once. I also have to congratulate Team Bondi on tackling a number of disturbing themes in this game in a most classy and tactful way. There are moments in L.A. Noire that truly shock, with utterly horrifying moments and sleazy characters who run the gamut of the worst of humanity. L.A. Noire never plays these instances for aughs, and never shocks just for the sake of it. There is one particular crime scene that disturbed me more than anything else a game has ever produced, but it only served to make the story that much more compelling. Those looking for maturity and adult themes done right in gaming need look no further than Team Bondi and their efforts. If I have to dredge up a consistent negative for the game, it's that the AI could do with a little more fine-tuning. Players are given a partner for each crime desk, and while they generally keep out of the way and are good at defending themselves in a fight, they regularly like to hinder a player's movement during investigations, standing in front of them and trapping them in tight enclosures by refusing to move for a few moments. I've also had partners and civilians actually run in front of me while I'm trying to shoot at a criminal. If you hit an innocent just once, you'll fail the sequence. Aside from facial animation, the motion capture overall is damn fine. Every now and then, you may be able to spot a clear disparity between the animation of the faces and the heads they're attached to, but such occasions are rare and easily ignored. I'm so pleased that the game managed to get characters that moved realistically yet didn't dive into the uncanny valley. These characters look believable, but not to a creepy degree, save for a few female faces that can look a little weird at times. In terms of the environment, a huge deal of L.A is rendered in a highly authentic 1940s style, and there are some impressive draw distances with only the occasional instance of textures or objects popping in. Otherwise, the framerate is smooth and the whole game runs well. I didn't encounter a single glitch, which is rare for an open-world game. The movements and voice-overs were done by the same actors, who also look frighteningly like their digital counterparts (doing a Google Image Search for the actors can make for a fun -- and terrifying -- meta-game). All the voice acting, with the exception of a handful of bit characters, is outstanding. Professional and naturalistic, one of the finest vocal casts you'll find -- and this is coming from someone who is very discerning about voice acting. L.A. Noire is a testament to the possibility of bringing dark, adult, mature games to the mainstream market. When I say mature, I don't just mean that it throws in sex and violence under the pretense of being for grown-ups. It is truly mature, with the kind of narrative you'd only expect to see in a major TV drama series or crime movie. No game released this generation has tackled the subject matter found in L.A. Noire with the same degree of intelligence and respect, and no game has blended gameplay from various genres so seamlessly, in a way that delivers something far more unique in experience than the sum of its parts. Add that sense of uniqueness and intelligence to the fact that L.A. Noire is a terrific bloody videogame, and you have what is guaranteed to be a classic for years to come. True maturity and narrative depth in mainstream gaming begins right here.

I take back every nice thing I ever wrote about this game. Yes, Thomas Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands (an Ubisoft Game) certainly makes a strong first impression. Isn't that, like, the first rule of running a good con? You get the mark to trust you over the first couple hours, to believe that your open-world will be exciting and diverse. That's when you pull the rug out, instead forcing your mark to suffer through dozens upon dozens of hours worth of endlessly repetitive missions, a story so bad that it should be illegal, and a series of irritating glitches and bugs. The fact that I've wasted a portion of my life getting to the end credits of this awful, awful game is bad enough -- if I had paid full price for Ghost Recon Wildlands, I would be furious. I don't even know where to start with this thing. Who is this game even for? It's certainly not for people who want to play co-op with their friends. I gave that mode a shot under practically ideal circumstances; although my microphone was unusable (my fault, the co-op works perfectly on a technical level), I knew everyone else in the party and they had their headsets on. I could only communicate via PSN messages sent from my laptop or Twitter, but that was good enough. I was content to follow orders on this particular mission. The operation in question was an instant-fail stealth tailing mission, of which there are many in Ghost Recon Wildlands. It's curious to see a game released in 2017 implement an objective that is irredeemably terrible and not enjoyed by a single human being on the planet Earth, especially after the collective internet took this exact company to task for stuffing these kinds of missions in the Assassins' Creed franchise. Except these missions are worse than usual, because you're often infiltrating a base right before the tailing starts so you have to remain undetected by everyone, made harder since the AI in Wildlands can often spot you from across the other side of the map. We were supposed to find a cartel assistant and follow his car without being noticed. After getting spotted again and again and again (because you've got four operators in co-op instead of one with three AI partners), we decided to send one person in and have the other three hang back at the spawn point. For a good hour, our elected representative made it to the point with no trouble...only to have the assistant get hung up on something and not even bother getting into his car. Eventually, the whole thing fell into place and our man started following the assistant. Somewhere along the line, the assistant stopped his car in the middle of nowhere and didn't move. The AI broke again. When I tried the mission in single player, the car was just gone. That's obviously a worst-case scenario, but it's not like the game was an absolute blast to play when everything worked just fine. Even when you're playing with other humans, you're still going through these boring-ass missions. Blow up the thing. Kill everybody. Find the guy and then kill him. Find the guy and then extract him. Do this thing, but if you get detected then you fail and have to start from the beginning. It may seem like I'm being reductive, but there really isn't any flavor to anything you're doing. Every mission is practically the same, both in terms of structure and context. Wildlands feels more like an MMO than a co-op shooter -- which is weird because The Division, the other Ubisoft co-op shooter that feels like an MMO, had a far more interesting world and mission structure. I actually wanted to see everything in The Division, but I got sick of Wildlands' repetitive side missions. Ostensibly, Wildlands allows you to handle cartel targets differently, but I never saw that in person. In order to unlock missions where you take out lieutenants, you have to find pieces of intel, which unlock missions located elsewhere. (read: busywork) Then, once you take out enough lieutenants, you can unlock the underbosses. Once you take out the underboss and the rest of the lieutenants, you unlock the head of the respective branch of the Santa Blanca cartel. Since I had to play the opening 10 hours twice due to a PSN cloud save glitch, I handled the preparation missions in a different order, but I got the same results for my targets. Of course, none of that matters, because everything you do in this game is unbelievably mind-numbing. Actually, that's not entirely fair. Sometimes Wildlands is just actively terrible. There was a pretty crappy mission where you have to kill everyone in a base and not let anyone escape, but if you get spotted (and you will get spotted, apparently the Santa Blanca cartel staffs up with owl/Terminator hybrids) two bad guys will hop in cars and drive away in opposite directions. You will then fail the mission. Occasionally, when you have to extract a friendly NPC, they'll run towards gunfire and get killed, and since Wildlands' checkpointing is atrocious, you'll be kicked back to the very beginning of the mission. There was one time where I had to extract a truck without getting seen, and then drive the truck back within about three minutes -- except after I swapped the truck, I had to spend 40 seconds talking to an NPC, and then I had to drive the new truck back to the original spot very slowly because it's filled with explosives. Terrible and boring! Those are just a few examples of the reason why I've started greying around the temples at my young age. Here's a pro-tip for anyone who already bought the game and is playing the singleplayer: throw up your drone, mark every dude in the camp, and then use your AI partners to insta-kill them using the "sync shot." The game doesn't account for this, you can beat whole early-game missions this way! Eventually, you'll have to actually do some combat yourself, but the gunplay is bog-standard so anyone who's played a shooter released in the last 15 years will have no trouble at all. I should start putting "tactical shooter" in quotes, because the sync shot is the one tactic that actually works, apart from taking out an assault rifle and showing the cartel why bullets are not so good for your health. They say travel is good for you, but Wildlands never takes you anywhere interesting -- even the resort and mausoleum areas feel as drab and empty as the rest of the world. The cartel outposts are either tiny hovels with a handful of buildings that take no effort to clear or labyrinthine sprawls with one viable entrance. Everything feels like a cheap movie set, rather than a detailed, lived-in world. Yes, the lighting is great and the vistas look beautiful, but none of that matters if the sandbox is little more than a stretch of land in between objective markers. Wildlands kinda reminds me of Just Cause 2 in a bad way, stapling that game's cardboard world to a grievously uninteresting "tactical" third-person-shooter. At first, I thought Wildlands would have a lot of potential for mayhem and nonsense. I was terribly wrong, in part because the game is so disappointingly stringent about where you can safely drive a car. The game is selling a vision of an explosion-filled playground, so why am I being punished for improvising? The player is constantly being told by the game's visual direction that it's possible to ride around the desert on a motorcycle...but so help me God, if you hit one pebble, you fly 50 horizontal feet and die instantly. What fun. Call a mortar strike if you want, and thrill at the pithy little explosions that lack any kind of impact. Whoopie. I was 100% correct about the story being terrible, so at least I'm one for two in my original assessment. The game only makes a vague stab at the very end towards addressing jingoistic American exceptionalism, but it's literally a single line of dialogue that seems to exist only in service of a dumb twist. None of the characters are interesting, or memorable, or dynamic, and they exist in a bland, mean-spirited, generic world full of dullards exactly like them. I only saw the "bad ending" and not the "true ending," because the latter requires players to complete literally every story mission in Ghost Recon (I refuse to play one more insta-fail stealth mission, so I'll take my lumps rather than spend 40 more hours grinding), but the player character has almost no agency in the finale no matter which ending you get. Even worse, practically everything you did over the past 30 hours was for nothing, as the "good ending" lets the big bad El Sueño make a deal with the Feds and gets off scot-free. In a bleaker game, that could be an effective bit of commentary on the drug war. In Ghost Recon Wildlands, it's a sequel hook that doubles as a slap in the face considering all the busywork you had to suffer through. It's obvious the game thinks it's operating on the same level as The Wire or similar great drug stories, but it's not even close. At best, the gleeful utterances the Ghosts make during the extermination of every cartel member they see is drastically at odds with the "devils avocado" conversations your squadmates have during the incredibly long drives you'll have to undertake in between missions. One moment, your partners will be talking about how the cartel offering a college education isn't that far off from the American military. The next, they'll be threatening cartel members with a prison cell where Neo-Nazis will use them "as pincushions for their dicks" or joking about how they want to steal some coke for themselves. Antiheroes are fine, I have nothing against that particular archetype -- the problem here is the writing. Your actions just don't fit half of the in-game chatter, and when everything does fit, the good guys look like sociopaths. Insta-fail stealth tailing missions, ludonarrative dissonance, a huge open world with nothing interesting to do, it's like we're back in 2009 baby! I don't know if you noticed, but I do not like this game very much. I derived some enjoyment from the beta, where my friends and I poked at a busted-ass open world shooter for $0. That stands in stark contrast to the full release, where I can say -- in all honesty -- I have not had any fun since writing my original review in progress. To see a major $60 Ubisoft release be this unconscionably terrible, especially after The Division and Watch Dogs 2's respective course-corrections, is downright sad. Wildlands is a bad [CENSORED] game -- it completely fails at everything it aspires to be. It's a bad co-op game, it's a bad shooter, it's a bad open-world game, and the writing is terrible. At best, the game is boring. At worst, it's frustrating. I suppose the visuals are worthy of some praise, but you can just look at screenshots for free. I cannot recommend Ghost Recon Wildlands to anyone, unless you're directly related to someone on the development team. If that is the case, by all means, support your family! Everyone else: stay away. Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands (PC, PS4 , Xbox One) Developer: Ubisoft Paris Publisher: Ubisoft Released: March 7, 2017

Watch Dogs 2 (PC, PS4 [reviewed], Xbox One) Developer: Ubisoft Montreal Publisher: Ubisoft Release: November 15, 2016 (PS4, Xbox One), November 29, 2016 (PC) MSRP: $59.99 Since releasing in 2014, Ubisoft's Watch Dogs has meant something different to almost everyone who played it. Though the open-world hack-a-thon is often critiqued for lacking personality and the graphical downgrade debacle, it still sits pretty at an 80 on Metacritic (whether or not this means anything to you is highly subjective). As oft-maligned as it seems to be, reviewers and players clearly saw potential. It certainly didn't re-invent the wheel, and many jokes were made about bland protagonist Aiden Pierce and his "iconic" hat. But most who played came to one overwhelming consensus: Watch Dogs 2 would probably be one hell of a game. For the most part, it is. I came into the review thinking I'd experience thematical whiplash; the first game was revenge tale, and the sequel looked to be a dorky, light-hearted take on hacking culture in San Francisco. After finishing it, I think the change to some much-needed levity was a clever move that led to some surprisingly good character work and political commentary. Watch Dogs 2 stars Marcus Holloway, a young omnipotent hacker that is everything that Aiden Pearce wasn't. He's charming, often hilarious, and plays well with others. The best way to think of him is like a confident, black Scott Pilgrim -- he's basically incredible at everything and you'll never really get any backstory as to why, because it doesn't matter. He's just there for you to have a good time. As a part of DedSec, a hacking collective opposed to technology's increasingly pervasive grasp, you'll accrue followers and bring truth to the people unaware of just how much of their digital footprints are used against them. San Francisco has recently adopted ctOS, an operating system that links the entire city under the guise of simplifying the lives of residents. DedSec opposes Big Data, and Marcus especially has reasons to hate the cold, mechanical tendrils of surveillance programs reaching into his life. The program predicted that he would be a criminal, leaving him with a stained record. By joining DedSec, he has a chance to expose the flaws in both ctOS and the idea of trusting tech with the ones and zeroes that record everyone's lives. How you have Marcus do this is up to you. Using his phone, he can hack every vehicle and camera in the city, providing him with transportation and eyes everywhere. If you just accept his hacking abilities as magic from the get-go, you're gonna have a much better time (why can he see in hackervision doesn't make any goddamn sense). Unlike the first Watch Dogs, hacking doesn't seem like a little bit of extra flavor to spice up an average shooter. Instead, every ability seems like a toy, a challenge to incorporate into your next objective, daring you to be as creative as you can be. Most missions go a little something like this: there's a building that you need to infiltrate, with one or two spots that you need to physically reach and interact with. To do that, you have to sneak by armed guards who are ready to shoot on sight. Whether you want to accomplish this by playing creatively and using every tool at your disposal or by shooting every face you see is up to you. I was happy to find that you can play all the way through non-lethally, using only a stun gun and melee abilities to leave everyone alive (though still rocking a mean concussion). I'm always weary of saying there's a "right" way to play a game, but playing non-lethally makes Watch Dogs 2 much more enjoyable, and seems to suit Marcus' character better. Considering violence is never really mentioned in any of the cutscenes, it didn't seem right to have him joking and generally enjoying his rebellious life and then shotgun off hundreds of faces. When I chose to play as peacefully as possible, I found myself using every trick up my sleeve to avoid the loss of human life. For instance, one mission tasked me with destroying three vans while guards patrolled around them. While it was deeply tempting to use a grenade launcher to light them up, my Marcus wouldn't do that. Instead, I used my remote controlled quadcopter to fly into the skies above and survey the scene and lure the baddies away with stun bombs and distractions. When I felt they were far enough away that I wouldn't accidentally kill them, I hacked into a forklift, picked up the vans, and dropped them into the ocean. Some of my favorite games are the ones that allow you to feel like you're breaking them. Watch Dogs 2 let me at least feel like I was thinking of solutions the developers may have never intended for yet still provided the means and virtual space to achieve. This being a game in 2016, killing your way through every mission is a viable option. There are plenty of weapons to play with, like auto-shotguns and grenade launchers, and the shooting and intuitive cover system are more than adequate if you want to get your jollies via murder. But despite Marcus' seemingly inhuman superpowers, he's human in that a few bullets is enough to end his hacking career/life. Taking cover for a few seconds is enough for him to recover, but his relatively low health is all the more incentive to try and play the game as the stealth puzzler that it's better suited to being. I'd go so far as to say removing guns entirely would benefit the series, but having both options entices a wider playerbase, and Ubisoft wants money, so I get it. Watch Dogs 2 is a generous game in many ways. Fast travel is available from the start, excising the monotonous long-distance drives that are usually associated with open-world games (though driving as a whole is much-improved, having a more arcadey feel behind it). At any time you can call vehicles that you have purchased and have them delivered to your location, so you're really only on-foot when you choose. There's a great wealth of activities to take part in ranging from drone and go-kart races to hacking ATMs and seeing how people react when you give and take away their money. My two favorite activities were going around and finding landmarks to take selfies in front of to gain more followers, and solving security puzzles that unlocked the best abilities on the skill tree. The whole tech/phone angle is used in clever ways as both window dressing and your actual interface with the world. Your pause menu is your phone and you can download apps that allow you to be an Uber driver, change the color filter of the world, or download songs. If you want more songs, you have to hear them in-game and use your SoundHound equivalent to pick it up. It makes sense as the way that Marcus and his friends interact with their surroundings. You can also use the phone to initiate co-op missions. Finding partners this way is simple, but not as interesting as the interconnected world that you can meet other players through. Ubisoft found an issue that disabled the seamless multiplayer for some of the time I was playing through for review, which it's confident it can fix before release. However, I had a couple of days to play with it and am confident in talking about how it works. When starting single-player missions, you will sometimes find yourself being hacked and thrown into a small session of hide-and-seek, in which you have to scan NPCs until you find the actual player who's trying to steal your data. Another mode is Bounty Hunt: when being chased by the police in single-player, another person might be enlisted by the cops to try and track you down. It adds an extra thrill to being hunted, and is fun on both sides. This can be frustrating if you just want to play solo, but you could turn it off. I found it easy enough to ignore when I wanted to play alone and jump in when I wanted to ruin someone's day. You can also earn cosmetic items (of which there are many, and I was dressed in a dapper-as-heck suit the entire time) by performing well, so there's an extra carrot on the stick. I'll probably jump back in after the review for more multiplayer, which is honestly not something I say often. A few technical issues marred the mostly-impressive rendering of San Francisco. There were a few streets I drove down that were barren before people and cars both appeared as if by sorcery. One time I was in a car and rain was cascading down, but a cutscene initiated and rain was falling on my shoulders inside of the closed-top vehicle. Driving in first-person seemed to make my arm detach from my body once in a while. By far the most egregious problem was that three times during my thirty-hour playthrough, the framerate took a huge dive. Suddenly I was viewing the world at fifteen frames per second, with awful screen tearing that made the game nigh-unplayable. I had to quit to the main menu and load back in for it to stop. Again, this didn't happen often, and hopefully a patch is all it takes to fix it. For what it's worth, this happened on both my PS4 and PS4 Pro when I tested it. I initially thought Marcus' friends looked like Ubisoft was trying too hard to replicate a dated take on hacking culture with characters like Wrench who wears studded leather, a mask that has a digital emoticons for eyes, and has the symbol for anarchy tattooed on his neck. And you know what? These characters are a bunch of dorks, but in an entertaining endearing way. Yeah, they dress like what I probably thought was cool when I was ten years old. Sure, they make some forced video game references that don't always stick the landing. Often they have awful lines like "Hella cool. Coolocity." But they also seem self-assured in a way that's nice to see in a game. That Marcus, a cool guy who's presented as very capable and social can also nerd out about a hypothetical Aliens Versus Predator scenario is a positive representation of 'geek culture' (as useless as that terms is nowadays). It's a far cry from the usual binary nerd/jock stereotypes we see in media. Perhaps what surprises me the most about Watch Dogs 2 is that it's unafraid to talk about topical cultural and political issues without batting an eye. If you're the type that wants video games to be an escape (as if games are made in a vacuum, free from the context of the individual developers that work together to create these worlds for us), you might be uncomfortable. Rigged elections, systemic racism being used to predict crimes and lead to gentrification, and a lack of diversity in tech jobs are all subjects tackled here. As I mentioned earlier, Marcus is black, and Ubisoft explores what that means in the very white Silicon Valley tech scene. One mission in particular has Marcus accompany Horatio, another black man in DedSec, to his job at Nudle (Watch Dogs' Google equivalent). The following exchange occurs (exact words might be slightly off): Marcus: "I'm scared, man. No one looks like us." Horatio: "What do you call a black man surrounded by 1000 white people? Mr. President. Marcus: "But with two of us here in the same place, they're gonna think we're plotting. Horatio: "We ARE plotting!" Later, Horatio muses that "If [he] had a nickel for every time [he] was complimented for being well-spoken" he'd be rich. These moments are presented in a humorous fashion, but they cut with razor precision. Whether these references go far enough to make any statement beyond acknowledgement isn't for me to decide. But even acknowledgment feels refreshing in a AAA game. The same goes for characters like a fellow hacker who has Asperger's syndrome, and a transwoman in the San Francisco government who you ally with; these characters seem to have been crafted with respect, like the developer realized there were colors it had never used on its palette when painting them. It doesn't come across as "diversity for diversity's sake," whatever the heck that means. I expected Watch Dogs 2 to be a paint-by-numbers sequel -- more guns, more cars, a bigger playground. Instead, it gives players freedom to play with the world with hackmagic the way they want to, and crafts a memorable, mostly lighthearted story that's just a lot of fun. Considering the heavy subject matter woven in, that's even more of an accomplishment than it seems like. After playing a bit of the first game, I was dreaming of a better second game with a much more compelling main character. Now, after finishing the second? I'm ready for the third game, but can we stick with Marcus for the rest of the series? Oh, and Windows 10 decided to update when I finished this review the first time, deleting everything I did and making it so I had to rewrite this two hours before embargo. DedSec, is that you? 8.5 is a great score, please never touch my computer again.