Master_Kill

MOSAIC REVIEW GAME STORY You wake up. You grab your phone to switch off the alarm, then stare blearily at it until you're already late for work. You brush your teeth, making eye contact in the bathroom mirror with the hollowed-out thing you've become. As game loops go, it's not exactly shoot, reposition, reload, is it? But then, this is pretty much Mosaic's sales pitch: forget the straightforward thrills of action and/or adventure, here's a game that simulates the tedious grind of everyday life. Using point-and-click controls, you drag your character—an anonymous office worker with a wonky tie, a smartphone and not much else in the way of a discernible personality—through this loop five times, a full working week of low-level misery. Which raises the question: why would you want a second life that's just as rubbish as the first? If Mosaic was able to answer for itself, I suspect it'd be a mumble about art and mirrors and reflecting reality. And there are some sharply observed moments here, like the daily elevator ride you share with two strangers. The only control you have over your character is which way he looks, and if you so much as glance in a stranger's direction, they'll do everything in their power to avoid meeting your eyes. At which point, you realise there is actually a second thing you can do: whip your phone out, and stare at that instead. At which point, maybe you'll open up BlipBlop, probably the single most barbed bit of satire in the entire game. BlipBlop is one of the apps preloaded on your in-game phone, a clicker game with all of the theming ripped clean out to expose its inner workings: flashing lights and pleasing bloops and numbers that keep getting bigger. It is, without any pretence, a hole to pour your time into, a button to hurt your fingers on. And yet it still completely works. I wince at how much of the four hours I spent with Mosaic was dicking around about on my phone instead of getting on with the day. There you go. That's the big message Mosaic has to impart. Modern life, eh? We're all scared of one another and we're always looking at our screens. Bitcoin! It's not wrong, exactly, but I'm not sure it ever cuts any deeper than Daniel Ortberg's withering Black Mirror synopsis, "what if phones but too much". Being fair for a moment, this does mean Mosaic has something to say. But it feels thin here because the entire game is just a housing for this message. Mosaic is a point-and-click adventure, but I use that last word under advisement. There are no real puzzles to speak of, or gags and insights to be accessed by clicking on background details. For the most part, you move from left to right as the story happens, like scrubbing through a YouTube video. There are exceptions, mind. Every day, when you arrive at work, Mosaic switches from its 2.5D world to a flat hex-based grid. Your character's office job is apparently playing a very simple strategy game, where you build outwards and upwards until you reach a given milestone and clock off. It's a decent evocation of the daily grind without actually forcing you to type numbers into a spreadsheet, even if it's ill-explained and undeveloped as a game in its own right. Which might be a stroke of genius, the game standing in for your job being just slightly less compelling than the blatant dopamine feeder that is BlipBlop. And then there are the occasional bright spots you find along your commute. I mean bright literally—sudden bursts of colour and rounded shapes that disrupt the game's tightly-controlled visuals, as you watch a butterfly or listen to a street musician or just sink into your own imagination. These moments are presented as off the beaten path, and some of them even are, toying with those well-trained gamer instincts that, if you're supposed to go right, you should try heading left first. Your efforts will be rewarded with a flash of striking imagery: yer man floating in a sunset, a thousand miles away from the grey tones of real life, or fantasising about a distant office complex crumbling like the end of Fight Club. If I had to make a case for the monotonous second life of Mosaic, these moments would be my Exhibit A. Because this is an undeniably eye-catching game. Mosaic's house style is minimalist: limited palette, deliberately low-poly models, a smooth blank where everyone except your character's face should be. This is pretty much the modern indie-game school uniform, a sampling of visual ideas you might've seen in Ashen and Absolver and Inside, but it works. And then, vitally, Mosaic breaks those rules, messing with the shape of your character or casting dusty sunbeams more textured than the surfaces they land on or just introducing some damned colour to proceedings. The overall effect is of a particularly well-made Radiohead fan video. As someone who spent most of their teens on long meaningful walks with Kid A in the headphones, I don't even necessarily mean that as a bad thing. But it might grate on you. There's an eagerness, in Mosaic's presentation and its experiments with repetition, to constantly remind you that this is art, actually. And yet its grand thematic underpinnings, you could fit into a tweet—one with the old 140 character limit, even. So you might consider that question, why you'd want to live someone else's tedious life and conclude that, frankly, you don't. And you wouldn't be wrong, exactly. But Mosaic is at least an occasionally fascinating way of boring yourself.

ESPIRE 1: VR OPERATIVE Game Story If Espire 1 has taught me anything, it's that crouching is really hard work. Sam Fisher must have thighs made of concrete the way he scuttles around for hours on end. If Ubisoft had wanted to make a truly realistic stealth experience, they'd include a post-mission sequence in which Fisher has to rub Ibuprofen gel into his groin. In fairness, Espire 1 doesn't simulate the chronic inner-thigh pain that must come with being a professional sneaky bastard either. This just happens to be a by-product of its concept. Finally, there's a VR game that lets you avoid detection by physically crawling through an oversized vent. By all rights, this should make Espire 1 the most immersive immersive-sim ever made. Sadly, the reality doesn't quite live up to the dream. Don't get me wrong, Espire 1 has some neat ideas, and there are moments when its VR stealth simulation (quietly) sings. But it also lacks the level of mechanical finesse good stealth games need, resulting in an experience that frequently veers closer to Keystone Cops than Metal Gear Solid. This slightly roundabout premise is necessary to explain Espire 1's unique approach to combating VR-induced nausea. In the game, your character is stood in a Minority-Report-like glass box, via which you control the drone telepathically. When you move the drone around (using standard FPS controls), the static box becomes visible in the periphery of your vision, while only the very centre of the screen maintains what the drone is seeing as it moves around. These unique "comfort settings" do seem to succeed in reducing nausea by minimising the amount of movement in your peripheral vision. That said, I found the game to be relatively comfortable even with these settings switched off. As Espire 1 is a stealth game, you're frequently stopping to hide, assess guard patrols, and wait for the right moment to move, which helps reduce motion sickness anyway. The core of Espire 1 will be familiar to anyone who's played Thief, Splinter Cell, Metal Gear, etc. As you explore the underground R&D facility, you'll need to avoid, distract, or eliminate patrolling guards. If they spot you, they'll raise the alarm, and you'll have to either run and hide until the alerts die down or stand and fight until there's nobody left to respond. The potential for VR stealth gaming is immediately apparent. Being able to physically lean around corners to check they're clear is very satisfying, as is physically crouching when moving to reduce the amount of noise you make (although there is an optional crouch button if you want to avoid the risk of thigh-cramp). Espire 1 also takes advantage of verticality. Your robot's magnetic hands let you clamber onto any metal surface, enabling you to shimmy up the drainpipe of a warehouse and evade guards by sneaking along the rafters. Espire 1 is at its best when you're in full evasion mode like this, clambering hand-over-hand on the underside of a metal gantry to avoid the sights of an automated turret. My favourite mechanic is how you activate your infra-red sensors by raising your virtual hand to the side of your head and pressing the trigger of your touch controllers. This instantly gives you a Predator-like view of patrolling guards. It's very cool. This isn't where Espire 1's neat ideas end either. You can use voice commands to sneak behind guards and shout "Freeze!" holding them up MGS 2 style. Weapons are also fun to mani[CENSORED]te. The bolt-action tranquiliser pistol is cocked by physically retracting the bolt on the back, while conventional weapons can be quickly reloaded by holding the gun over the magazine holster on your off-hand side (Espire 1 lets you specify your dominant hand, which is another neat touch). You can even pull magazines out of enemy weapons for extra ammo, or throw them around the environment to distract enemies. Espire 1 has all the right components. It just doesn't always fit them together especially well. The biggest problem is AI. Guard perception is highly inconsistent. You can be stood next to them and they might not see you, but they'll spot you up on a gantry on the far side of the room. The game needs a clear, MGS-style indicator of what enemies can see. Placement of enemies can also be problematic. Several times I opened a door to a new area and was immediately spotted. Elsewhere, I've been funnelled into corridors where there's no alternate route to help avoid detection. Compared to the best stealth games—Chaos Theory, Thief II and so on—the levels are not especially well-thought out, with too many open lines of sight and too few hiding places. Combat, meanwhile, is the weakest part of the game. Your physical inventory is great in theory, but fiddly to use in practice. The pistol holsters are too far back, meaning I'd frequently go to grab my gun and miss, or grab my rifle from the chest holster by mistake. Also, nothing has any sense of weight to it. Guns feel like they're made of Styrofoam, while enemies crumple like wet cardboard when shot. The result is that combat is more absurd than it is thrilling, with you pole-axing a guard because you were trying to grab your pistol and accidentally chucked your assault-rifle at their head. With more polished combat and more precision in the level design, Espire 1 would be a decent chunk of VR stealth. It's campaign lasts about six hours, with around twenty short challenge missions on top of that. As it stands, however, it's just a little too fiddly in execution for me to sneakily slip it a wholehearted recommendation. And A Video Game For Who Wannt To Wach Regards @Master_Kill

MECHWARRIOR 5: MERCENARIES REVIEW GAME STORY MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries honors the 30-year MechWarrior legacy very closely: in mechanics, in controls, and even in soundtrack. Bombastic guitar riffs thunder over every combat encounter, lasers sizzle, PPCs crackle, and Gauss Rifles make that weird pew noise. Mechs stomp and break and explode spectacularly, leveling buildings around them. In short: MechWarrior is extremely back. Not everything about the MW5 is a throwback. The overall aesthetic fits into the contemporary look of the BattleTech universe. The UI is clean, inspired by and of a piece with Harebrained Schemes' interface for 2018's BattleTech. Piranha's modern 'Mech designs are memorable updates to the dated '80s designs. They stomp menacingly at each other across a pretty diverse set of battlefields that sits starkly opposed to the near-featureless plains of the MechWarrior past. It also brings in your friends in a co-op mode, both for campaign and one-off skirmishes, that is both stable and tactically rich. It runs pretty well—a first for me in the MechWarrior series—aside from one glitchy randomly-generated mission and some occasional chug on mission starts. The game is an interstellar sandbox about running a company of mercenary mech pilots and pursuing some casual revenge. It's a campaign mode that really plays into the themes of the setting, ones of scarcity and technological regression, the so-called LosTech. It often forces you to make hard choices about how to re-arm a mech when you can't find a replacement part—or simply sell the whole thing when it'll be too time-consuming and expensive to repair. Budgeting decisions can leave you strapped for cash, choosing between new mechs or top-tier guns for the mechs you have. The big space campaign map is really just a vehicle for a simple, tight, and effective loop: travel to a new conflict zone, pick a mission and ruin your mechs in combat, find a sidequest to accept, head to some industrial worlds to rearm and repair, then head back out to your new mission. The feeling of dropping into those missions is superb. Your lance of mechs—yourself and up to three others, controlled by friends online or AI pilots—rotates into position, red lights strobing in the cavernous maintenance bay of your mercenary company's Leopard DropShip. Your pilot's hands move across the console to punch a boot-up sequence and grip controls. The doors in front of you crack open as the startup sequence completes and the iconic lines sound: REACTORS, ONLINE. SENSORS, ONLINE. WEAPONS, ONLINE. ALL Your mech strides onto the battlefield—sometimes to a calm forest morning, others into raging streams of laser fire. The missions are chosen from only a few types, but they're always different because each battlefield is procedurally generated and then sprinkled with objectives. Navigating cramped canyons on a Mars-like world is a very different feel from being utterly exposed on a rolling plain of wheat. There are also bespoke campaign missions of varying quality, from clumsy and linear to interestingly open-ended. The mechs are a pleasure to handle, and the core experience of combat really takes advantage of the map as a centerpiece. Mechs stomp around, faster or slower as you throttle up and down—throttle and orientation control are a key part of the simulator-style play here. Twisting your torso to strafe targets and show strong armor to the enemy is key, as is knowing the layout of weapons on your mech—lasers situated high might shoot over a wall, while those slung on low arms will just explode the cover you were using. Fights in MechWarrior 5 feel intensely physical as your mech slows to scale inclines or ploughs through a row of parked cars. Lasers rake across woods to follow a target and leave a trail of falling, burning trees in their wake. (A pleasure I spent a good five minutes repeating over and over when I discovered it.) Watching mechs smash into destructible terrain is great, for instance when a dodging mech shoulder checks a building and obliterates the facade. Of course, the smashing isn't always on purpose. The AI of both your enemies and teammates is relatively functional but often comically inept at understanding the terrain. Allies will casually smash whatever you're supposed to defend or launch missiles into cliffsides. Or, my personal favorite, be reduced to only long-range weapons and stubbornly continue circle-strafing an opponent inside their minimum range. Enemies can and will get stuck on terrain features, requiring you to pick through a whole city for one last, tiny tank before a mission can progress. Raids quickly became my favorite missions. They're lightning-fast battles that require you to destroy a handful of specific targets scattered across a map. Things like radar stations or warehouses, usually. The catch is that you're only there to destroy those, then get out, and you're there to do it against a huge number of defenders. Standing for a straight-up fight is likely to get you blown up, so I took delight in crafting specialty formations of fast, tough mechs geared to weave through cover and smash objectives before disappearing to other parts of the map. The strategy worked especially well in night fights where enemies' long-range shots were hampered by night vision mode, or during weather events when banks of swirling dust storm could shield my movement. Customizing mechs is superbly fun, and a variety of weird techs and mech variants show up, with more being added as the in-universe timeline advances. Hunting down Rare Mech or Weapon icons on the campaign map is more fun than pursuing the main storyline. The end of a mission is significantly less climactic. You don't desperately return to your DropShip under the cover of its guns, you just fade to black at the exfiltration point. Actually, DropShips don't shoot at all, aside from once during a cinematic in the tutorial. That's a weird thing to miss since MechWarrior 4 so prominently and memorably featured the weapons on landed DropShips and Piranha's own MechWarrior Online had them as well. There's also just the one kind of DropShip—the Leopard—and the iconic spherical DropShips don't make an appearance. The DropShips aren't the only bit of missing BattleTech lore that would make Mechwarrior 5 feel more complete. Infantry and aerospace fighter attacks are also absent—infantry conspicuously so since foot soldiers featured in a MW5 trailer. With melee combat featuring so gloriously—and so prominently—in the recent BattleTech tactics game, it's sorely missing from MechWarrior 5. Mechs collide with a crash of screeching metal and… awkwardly grind against each other. You start with a Centurion, a mech with a prominent claw-and-shield arm for grabbing and slashing—but that arm just hangs limply. It's a notable absence when every FPS for 15 years has included a token melee attack. (You can still run over smaller tanks and Death From Above attack by landing on others with jump jets. Both have suitably satisfying results.) Of course, none of those relatively small problems are so bad that they ruined MechWarrior 5 as a mech combat simulator. What could have is the writing. I cannot remember the last time I encountered a professional game with worse writing, dialogue, and narrative design than MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries. The characters are shallow and forgettable caricatures and the plot a paint-by-numbers revenge story. The few talented voice actors struggle with the barren dialogue they're given. The stories of prior MechWarrior games may have been FMV ham festivals, but at least they had some heart, and BattleTech's long history is rife with tales of star-crossed lovers and honorable space knights. You can't watch the MechWarrior 2 betrayal cinematic, or the MechWarrior 4 intro, and not feel at least laughter. MechWarrior 5 made me feel absolutely nothing. This is honestly kind of amazing, as the missions have you commit casual war crimes quite often. Sure, the civilian colony administrator is begging you to stop because there are women and children in the buildings you're leveling, but at the end of the mission your coworkers just say something like, "haha wow that was a rough one we just did with the fusion flamethrowers on those schools and farms, let us collect our paychecks and never speak of this again." None of that is to even mention the bits of narrative that are entirely nonsensical. A mission chain will first task you with covering a VIP's escape from one location, and then ask you to fight a desperate rearguard as the VIP's ship is fueled to depart… except that supposedly immediate followup will be on a planet a month of travel away. This sort of mismatch between description and events is the rule, not the exception. Perhaps most glaringly, the text of item and mission descriptions is riddled with errors, misspellings, and grammatical mistakes. But MechWarrior 5 is a game that will get a pass on its narrative woes because, I must concede, the narrative is so thin the gameplay completely trumps it. MW5 is unmistakably a game about being a sandbox mech jockey, and the stories are just a low-quality veneer over some superb robot combat. If you're here for a mech smashing simulator, this is the best new mech smashing simulator around. Here's hoping for more and better from a MechWarrior 6. Regards @Master_Kill

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