Few movies can truly say they hit the ground running, but Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil is among them. And that’s a good thing, because after so many Resident Evil movies, every new one needs a running start to have a chance of making it.
We can’t talk about a Resident Evil movie without doing a little bit of table-setting first, though. Resident Evil debuted on PlayStation in 1996 and coined the name for an emerging game genre: Survival Horror. Since then, Paul W.S. Anderson has directed six live-action Resident Evil movies starring his photogenic and acrobatic wife Milla Jovovich. 2021 brought us the Robbie Amell-led Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. That’s not counting the half-dozen CGI Resident Evil movies that more or less act as canonical extensions of the game series. Generally speaking, the Resident Evil movies have been on a downward trend since early into Anderson’s tenure. Now, in 2026, the unkillable movie franchise rises again, this time with Zach Cregger, director of Barbarian and Weapons, acting as the head of the monster.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNd1gb19A-c
Resident Evil follows medical courier Bryan (Austin Abrams) as he drops off a package and argues with his girlfriend over the phone. Instead of going home to talk to her about it, though, Bryan jumps at the chance to take a high-priority delivery to Raccoon City. It needs to get there intact, and without any detours. A perfect way to not talk about any personal problems Bryan might have. Bryan starts questioning his decision when he hits a woman in a nightgown while driving in the dark down a slick road in heavy snow.
That moment marks the point in which Bryan is in over his head and finds himself in a race to survive.
Bryan is not a hero. He is perhaps the least heroic character to lead a Resident Evil movie. And that’s a huge factor in why this disgusting, hilarious, and often frightening movie works. Bryan doesn’t have special forces training, and like so many of us, he’s only ever wielded a gun using a video game controller.
As he curses and fumbles his way through this horrifying night, he’s easy to sympathize with. He’s a sort of self-insert character for the audience, but not in the usual way we think of. What if you sat down to play Resident Evil for the first time but woke up in that world? The vast majority of us would be stuck in a stumbling run, trying to load the last rounds we have with shaking hands. That’s Bryan–always breathless and on the edge of a panic attack.
But Bryan never stops, and the movie doesn’t, either. Resident Evil runs at a breakneck pace through the film's entire 95-minute runtime. There are no quiet moments to breathe and reflect: It’s a horrible night where one disaster pushes Bryan into the next one. Each time he’s found something resembling safety, he’s yanked right back into the endless nightmare. It’s a marathon movie in the vein of movies like Mad Max: Fury Road and Run Lola Run.
As such, Resident Evil is more of a tense movie than a scary one. There are a handful of great jump scares, of course, and tons of viscera just everywhere. It’s also a very funny movie. Cregger cut his teeth on the sketch comedy show Whitest Kids U Know (he’s in good company with Jordan Peele and Curry Barker as sketch comedy alums making some of the best horror flicks around), and he’s said in interviews that he had to cut tons of jokes. Our protagonist copes with his nightmarish surroundings with humor. The jokes land, but they don’t destroy the tension and terror by any means. In fact, some of the best laughs come when we know something very bad is about to happen, and I still found myself backing into my seat when the bad thing came to pass.
Resident Evil fans will find plenty to enjoy here. There are no cameos from any Raccoon Police Department officers or members of STARS, but there are references all over the place. These are things that the average moviegoer might notice, but that only fans will understand. And even the monsters feel like they were created by and for Resident Evil fans.
There aren’t actually that many zombies in this movie, though they certainly do help propel it along. Instead of relying on classic Resident Evil monsters, Cregger treats us to mostly original monsters, but ones that feel like they’re in the lineage of the T-Virus. Masses of arms and legs, tentacles that end in teeth, you name it. I felt right at home watching the movie, but it still surprised me with awesome, gnarly, and nauseating monsters around every corner.
By backing away from the stories and characters of the video games, Cregger dodges the giant bullet of “that’s not my Leon Kennedy” and instead lets us finally experience Resident Evil ourselves, through our own eyes. The artifice of a campy action movie is gone, and we’re left with a terrified guy who runs from one set of problems, only to encounter something far worse.
Even for a series known for its sprawling scope, Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave is ambitious. Nintendo and developer Intelligent Systems clearly approached this latest entry in the series having learned from its success in Three Houses, its missteps in Engage, and even some of the series' historical oddities. Fortune's Weave rewards those craving both deep interconnected stories and intricate, interlocking RPG systems in equal measure, creating a new high-water mark for the series.
The structure of Fortune's Weave often feels like a series of concentric circles, constantly broadening and deepening your understanding of its systems and its characters. It's so massive it's hard to even know where to start, so I'll begin where the game does: in the future.
Or at least, in a futuristic, science-fiction setting that is strikingly different from the series' norm. Right from the beginning of Fortune's Weave, your created character, Eshmel, is literally created, birthed by sci-fi-coded magic as the last hope for humanity against the army of the Demon Lord, who is already on the verge of total victory. Fortuna, the Goddess of Fate, is cooperating with the last bastions of humanity and sees an opportunity to turn the tide in your favor. Four instrumental heroes, the legendary Flame Lords, can be recruited to help in the coming fight, so Fortuna sends Eshmel back in time to a key moment in the Flame Lords' lives to guide them. That moment is their participation in the Heroic Games, a sort of gladiatorial and tactical version of the ancient Greek Olympics.
Right away, this imbues the story, and the Flame Lords' individual stories, with propulsive force. You know from the very beginning that your ultimate destiny is leading toward a major escalation, but you also know these four characters are special, destined for greatness in ways that make them inflection points in history. In many stories like this, you see individual protagonists and slowly come to learn of a mysterious visitor who reveals a greater destiny. In Fortune's Weave, you are the mysterious visitor, and you have hidden knowledge that they don't, creating an interesting dynamic as you watch the events of their lives unfold.
This premise also creates a setting that confidently blends tropes from the Age of Antiquity, smooth futuristic science-fiction, and high fantasy. Regardless of the particular details in your character creation, Eshmel has an otherworldly quality to them that seems distinctly out of place in the nation of Dagda, which is obviously inspired by ancient empires, and both Eshmel and the Flame Lords themselves all regularly interact with actual gods and goddesses. It's a compelling blend of storytelling motifs that feels fresh and new for this series.
Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave
Fortuna emphasizes the importance of recruiting the Flame Lords to have any real hope of defeating the Demon King, but you can actually proceed to the endgame at any time. After finishing the prologue you could, technically, proceed to the final battles alone. I wasn't brave enough to attempt this, but I'm sure some impressive Fire Emblem experts will pull it off. For me, simply having the option emphasized a central theme of the game. You constantly have choices about how to approach almost every aspect, even down to the core structure of it. You can play and pivot in whatever manner you choose.
The four Flame Lords can be played in any order, and each has their own motivation for competing in the Heroic Games, in which the winner is promised to be granted a single wish. Cai is a young boy hoping to save his father from a false imprisonment; Dietrich is an expert swordsman looking to prove himself by taking on the toughest opponents; Theodora is a newly crowned warrior queen who wants to clear a historical injustice for her people; and Leda is a dancer and refugee who sees the games as an opportunity to get close enough to her father's killer that she can exact revenge. Each of the stories is a compelling premise, though I only played through Leda and Theodora's stories so far. Each of them is driven to a fault, obsessed and single-minded, even when their motivations are ostensibly just or even noble.
You spend a lot of time with each hero you choose, gaining insights about their motivations and desires as they navigate the twists of their individual stories. And that's one of the most impressive tricks in Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave--these stories are satisfying on their own as individual narratives, but grow even richer in conversation with each other, and with the larger story of the war against the Demon King. It's a layered narrative that builds upon itself and becomes more compelling the more you explore it.
Leda is going through a lot right now
Once you enter the story of a Flame Lord, you can play it to completion or jump out to dabble in others. Again, you always have choices. But the individual Flame Lord stories themselves have a smooth difficulty ramp, scaling up the challenge as you continuously recruit more forces to your side, upgrade your skills and equipment, and unlock new classes.
That does mean you have to repeat some easier missions when you begin a new Flame Lord's quest, but the strength of the narrative pulled me through those easier missions. And a series of Notable Deeds grants you currency to spend on things like universal XP boosts, which create a glide path to maintain momentum as you go back to visit other Flame Lords from the beginning.
The structure of the Heroic Games is simple. You climb a bracket of competitors, starting with lower-level recruitable characters and building your way up to more serious opponents, sometimes including the other Flame Lords. The matches are set for specific days on the calendar, giving you downtime between story quests to partake in side quests and paralogues, recruit new units, etc.
While the Heroic Games take place inside the capital city of Dagsion, there's a massive world map outside of its walls to explore. I found the map movement a little clunky, as you have to select an action (move, wait, search, etc) on map nodes before selecting a direction to move a limited number of spaces, similar to a board game. The idea, though, is that every action you do outside of Dagsion's walls--and some that you do inside--makes time pass. You can't simply farm random encounters to get overpowered for the main quests. You have to manage your time and make use of it wisely to balance the various demands of side quests, leveling up, and making progress on recruiting new team members. It sounds daunting, but I found the system was flexible enough to absorb some time wasted without feeling too punishing. For those who want to take on the toughest challenges with permadeath turned on, however, I expect this system to be a satisfying challenge for meticulous min-maxxers.
Strategy combat in Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave
Similarly, some activities in Dagsion can only be performed weekly. Those include giving gifts or attending a play--sorry, you can't simply love-bomb a character you want to recruit--or training at the Arena. It also includes performing acts of service at the temples of the gods. Some characters are naturally more pious than others, granting bigger bonuses to your acts of worship. And each god grants you a special benefit that can be used in battle. Fortuna is unlocked from the start, letting you rewind turns, but there are others to be discovered with important passive benefits that can turn the tide of battle.
Exploring the map outside of Dagsion is a must, because it's vital for completing your Flame Lord's individual quests and gaining Renown. Each Flame Lord has their own specialized quests, and those give you much bigger bonuses to Renown points than any other side quests. Theodora, for example, has to scour the world searching for supplies to send back to her nation, while Leda gets tips about taverns in distant cities where she can perform. Those grant you regular rewards like any other side quest, including even unlocking some specialized classes early, but the real reward is Renown.
Renown is an important resource because it's one of two factors that determine who you can recruit. The other is Support, which you gain by improving your Flame Lord's bond with another character via giving gifts or sharing meals. I found progressing this stat fairly slow, so it can take time to win someone over to your side--even as the ticking clock of the game means you may not manage to recruit everyone you had your eye on. Fortunately, there's a good variety of recruitable characters with different level requirements, so as long as you're making a little progress with several at a time, you'll get a decent flow of additional allies.
Sun's out, guns out
Randomized battles also populate the world map, along with dungeons that can be explored in third-person a la Fire Emblem: Shadows of Valentia. Those provide a nice change of pace and a different way to engage with the world, granting you a little experience boost by taking part in more traditional turn-based RPG combat. Once you're sufficiently overleveled for a dungeon, you can farm experience by simply striking an enemy without triggering the combat, making this an even more streamlined way to quickly gain treasures and experience. I never found them very challenging, but they seemed more intended to break up the pace, and they worked well for that purpose.
The best missions, of course, are those involving traditional tactical combat. Fire Emblem is second to none in this regard, and Fortune's Weave manages to improve on it further. The main quests always find ways to add new wrinkles to combat scenarios, forcing you to think differently and staving off the complacency that can come from having a powerful team.
In one memorable battle, I was being targeted by a long-range attack, requiring careful movement and creative blocking while I slowly advanced. In another, I would lose if any enemy units reached a certain goal line, but their forces were so overwhelming, and reinforcements so frequent, that I quickly realized I had to prioritize cutting my way through to the one enemy unit whose defeat served as a victory condition. Sometimes I needed to keep my forces tightly packed together to take out tougher enemies, while, in others, I had to spread them terrifyingly thin to address dispersed threats. What's so satisfying about these challenges is that the game never explicitly explains how to resolve the puzzle; it just presents you with a scenario and presses you to figure out the solution. My own conclusions certainly aren't the only ones possible.
Dietrich considers his exam options
Aiding you in combat are two types of special abilities: Combat Arts and Blaze Arts. Combat Arts are available to all units as they level up and specialize in skills, letting you perform special actions at the cost of weapon durability, which can then be repaired at a Blacksmith. Blaze Arts are reserved for special characters, letting you sacrifice HP for powerful effects. Theodora, who is imbued with a magical, superpowered prosthetic arm, can grab a hunk of stone from the earth and chuck it great distances, for example, while Dietrich can teleport forward to strike down an enemy before they even see him coming, and Leda has a series of special dances that buff her allies. New Blaze Arts are offered as you take part in the quests to improve Renown, so all of the systems feed into each other nicely.
However, all this complexity does come at a price. While the battles themselves are snappy and intuitive enough for newcomers to understand, the menu user interface is overstuffed, and at first it was hard to find certain elements. I got accustomed to it well enough after several hours, but there's just a lot going on, and I wished the UI had been easier to navigate.
With four heroes all existing concurrently, sometimes you see the same story beats repeated, but I rarely found this tiring or repetitive. Instead, it was delightful to see a similar scene recontextualized through the lens of the current character's story, adding more color and texture to their own tale by how they've interacted with others. Each of the characters also has their own entourage of close companions, and Fortune's Weave excels at making each of them likable in their own ways. It's a strong ensemble cast, even before you start recruiting a variety of distinct warriors with their own odd designs.
Your warriors enjoy a Feast
And since this is all happening concurrently, the narratives intertwine in ways that make the whole story richer the more you engage with it. Seeing the events only from Theodora's perspective was interesting enough, but then seeing the same and other contemporaneous events from Leda's perspective filled in a fuller picture. Plus, since each story interacts with the other Flame Lords, you get a sense for the other heroes' stories even if you haven't started their actual quest. This is a narrative with criss-crossing interests and characters, so you're really meant to play through all four Flame Lords to see how all of the puzzle pieces fit together.
Naturally, after your Flame Lord's individual story resolves, events in the world take a turn for the more dramatic on a global scale. This is very similar to the arc of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, where your chosen House then became instrumental in a massive war. This time, though, you aren't forced to pick favorites. You can play through all four Flame Lords' stories, the more the better, and each of them have a part to play in this second arc as you proceed towards the endgame against the Demon King.
All of this is complemented by an incredible orchestral score, as evidenced by finding myself idly humming the main theme for days at a time, and the voice acting is well-performed. I made a point of playing Fortune's Weave in quiet environments where I could hear everything, because I just didn't want to miss an audio moment. And while Dagsion itself can look a little plain in places, the character designs themselves are universally gorgeous, with incredible detail and flourishes, and class designs that look great and fitting no matter how you spec your characters. The cutscenes, as well, are remarkably cinematic and help accentuate the epic scope of this story about war in an age of antiquity. Fortune's Weave is the best-looking and best-sounding Fire Emblem to date, on top of all of its other excellent traits.
Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave is a sprawling masterpiece of a strategy RPG, building upon the successes of past Fire Emblem games with new interconnected elements, expertly designed combat puzzles, and an emphasis on flexibility and choice. Nintendo and Intelligent Systems have topped themselves, making this the new high point to beat for future entries.
A few hours into Wolverine I found myself asking, “Why did Insomniac Games make this?” There are obvious answers, of course: It has three excellent Spider-Man games under its belt; it's an opportunity to expand its Marvel Universe; and Wolverine presents ample opportunities for a brutal and bloody action game. But none of that explains why Insomniac Games,specifically,made Wolverine.
Spider-Man is an ideal fit for the studio: an energetic and dynamic hero in the hands of a team known for open-worlds that are sprawling jungle gyms, where it can let players loose with thrilling traversal mechanics and varied combat systems for crime fighting fun. Insomniac also excels at crafting narratives that are as earnest as they are dramatic--perfect for the tumultuous lives of Peter Parker and Miles Morales.
Wolverine is much less ideal of a pairing, as was evident throughout my time with the game. Insomniac doesn't make bad games and Wolverine certainly isn't one. It's a solid, cinematic, and occasionally thrilling experience that ticks all the necessary boxes for a decent action game. But it does so in a workman-like fashion and never aspires to much more than the essentials. Wolverine is an action game that serves the character well enough, but it doesn't lean into Insomniac's strengths or leverage its creativity, and the game feels unremarkable because of it.
Straying too far from who Wolverine is and how he operates would no doubt create questions around the authenticity of the adaptation, but only coloring inside the well-defined lines means never offering anything new or exciting. It turns out that the most authentic version of Wolverine, in this case, is also the embodiment of the character action genre at its plainest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7Nz-WyUq7o
In a world where pretty much every superhero game subscribes to the Batman: Arkham template of combat design, describing how you fight would belabor how familiar it all is. Suffice it to say: light attack, heavy attack, dodge, parry, a few special abilities, and some attribute modifiers.
There are very few distinguishing elements of Wolverine's combat system that make it stand out. The closest it comes is a leaping attack, which allows players to launch him across distances to close the gap and begin an assault on unsuspecting enemies. It's an undeniably satisfying tool to keep up the intensity of each skirmish and ensure you're always applying pressure, but loses its luster after a couple of hours when it becomes clear that it can be employed pretty mindlessly.
The other unique element, a mechanic that represents an escalation of power and brutality as Wolverine's rage boils over, has more longevity in how drastically it shifts the dynamic of combat and amps up the satisfaction of it. As players dispatch enemies, an on-screen rage meter builds until the point where Wolverine goes berserk, putting him in a state where you can chain together executions to tear enemies apart in quick succession. In just a few seconds, Wolverine can create piles of brutally mauled bad guys, and there's a feral savagery to the whole thing that is very effective.
It's a consistently exhilarating moment because, as well as shifting to desaturated visuals to emphasize how unstable and blinded by rage Logan is, these sequences are strong instances of synchronicity between the character and the player. As Wolverine's rage builds, the player needs to be more efficient in dispatching enemies to keep the meter climbing, and when Wolverine finally hits breaking point, the input demands on the player simplify to just pressing two buttons together to eviscerate anything in your path. It is catharsis that comes from Wolverine giving into the monster within and the player embracing that monster in tandem.
If the appeal of Wolverine for you lies in how visceral its violence is, your virtual bloodlust will be well and truly satiated. Insomniac has spared no expense in lavishing Wolverine's finishes with copious amounts of blood and guts--his executions are exactly that in every sense of the word. The violence never strives for shock value by being grotesque in the way something like Mortal Kombat does, so it never feels gratuitous. Even when he erupts into a berserker rage, the coldness of his violence reinforces the idea that he is an efficient killing machine. Wolverine never revels in it; he just gets it done and moves on.
The main issues with Wolverine's combat are that it often feels like it lacks weight, is missing lethality up until he goes berserk, and never finds rhythm. As a result, I often felt frustrated that the game was undermining the sense of power and ferocity that I wanted to feel as Wolverine. And at the same time, the individual components of the combat doesn't have the connective tissue to create a natural flow that made me feel like I developed a mastery of Wolverine's skills.
The adamantium claws that serve as Wolverine's dealers of death and destruction often felt more like needles than blades. The feedback on each attack always felt just a little lacking, and enemies never responded to being struck in a way that made me feel empowered. Quite the opposite, in fact. I can't count the number of times that I would be mid-combo, clawing away at an enemy, and they'd suddenly ignore incoming damage to clobber me over the head with a rifle or slice me with their own blade. It came off as the game deciding it was the enemy's turn to attack because it needed to put an end to my barrage. It made me feel like an angry cat being bonked on the head to calm down.
Fortunately, the various abilities Wolverine has at his disposal feel like they pack more punch and can swing momentum in your favor. These range from a spinning claw attack that can control space and a leaping knee that interrupts enemies, to a grapple that slams enemies down so that Wolverine can mount and pummel them. There's also a spinning Psycho Crusher-like maneuver that can be chained multiple times, an all-out barrage of powerful strikes, and a recovery ability that focuses Wolverine's rage and uses it to heal, among others. All of these introduce new considerations into the combat, making it feel a little more involved and dynamic. However, since there's no real depth or connectivity to the combo system, their execution feels very rigid and disjointed.
Everything is on a cooldown, which suggests that timing and strategy is important in how they're used, but in practice, they can be employed thoughtlessly without much consequence. Many of Spider-Man's abilities served as ways to bridge one attack sequence into another; after smacking an enemy around, he could launch them into the air, chase up, smash them back down, zip to another enemy, swing them around to hit others in the vicinity, launch them into the distance, use a web to close that distance, and continue to string physical abilities together or use gadgets to manipulate enemies to his advantage. The point being, there was an if-this-then-that flow to it that, admittedly, is made possible by the character's agility and dynamism.
Wolverine, meanwhile, feels awkward and brutish by comparison--and not in a good, character-appropriate way. Instead, using his various skills is akin to how you'd approach battles in an MMO, where you just let basic attacks fill the time in between cooldowns and then sequentially work through everything on the ability bar. Sure, you can use those abilities in a way that complements each other, but there's no real requirement or incentive to do so beyond your own initiative.
Defensively, Wolverine suffers similar issues. Tapping the L1 button at the right moment will parry an attack, but the window--even before you use an adaptation to make it more forgiving--is pretty lenient, so it doesn't really take much skill to parry. In fact, I had a few occasions where I was surrounded by enemies all attacking me, sometimes overlapping, and I was able to survive their onslaught and take no damage by spamming the parry button with my eyes closed. That's not hyperbolic--I tested it. Parrying is another part of Wolverine's combat that is functional but unrewarding.
It may be hard to believe but all of that doesn't mean the combat is bad. It is perfectly functional, and I suspect that many people won't think too hard about how it all fits together. The cinematic brutality of it provides enough of a spectacle that everything else may not even register or matter. But as someone who wants to feel engaged and challenged, the vast majority of my time playing Wolverine felt rote. In a couple of stretches, I opted to reduce enemy health to make them easier to kill. Not because they provided any sort of challenge, but because I wasn't engaged enough to care and wanted to hit the next story beat. Being a fan of the character, experienced with intricate combat systems, and knowing how good Insomniac can do combat, this was disappointing.
However, through it all, the care and attention given to visual presentation remained one of the game's strengths. Unlike its open-world Spider-Man games, Wolverine is linear, corralling players from one combat arena to the next by way of streets, up and down elevators, through buildings, onto rooftops, and into the thick of a remote forest or two. Any deviations off the main path are slight and usually to pick up resources used for unlocking new outfits or bottles of whiskey that expand how many adaptations you can equip.
The most evident benefit of this narrowing in scope is in the fidelity of the visuals. Wolverine is a beautiful game, both artistically and technically. I really appreciate how Insomniac is able to bring together the vibrancy of comic books and a grittier aesthetic that allows the game to feature superheroes wearing bright costumes, while also giving the game a grounded, more realistic vibe befitting of Wolverine. There's an impressive amount of detail in the character models, with Wolverine's stout and muscular physique giving him an imposing presence. When the camera gets up close, you can really see just how hairy he is (can relate), but also the gradation in his skin color, his pores, and the grime that builds up during brawls.
Environments also have a high degree of destructability, so while I may not have always felt powerful as Wolverine when attacking enemies, watching the world around me crack, crumble, and collapse picked up some of that slack. This high level of visual fidelity pays dividends most in the larger-scale set-pieces, of which there are only a handful, but they're a lot of fun. There are battles against towering enemies (surprise, there are Sentinels) or knockdown-dragout battles against other superpowered characters.
Wolverine serves the character well enough, but doesn’t lean into Insomniac’s strengths or leverage its creativity
There are other parts of the gameplay experience that never outright excel. Everything in between the combat fits into the Uncharted-esque guided platforming mold, so you'll spend a lot of time jumping from handhold to handhold, swinging from branches and poles, or hopping across rooftops. But because Wolverine has very limited mobility and no interesting traversal mechanic to speak of beyond a big jump, the running, jumping, and climbing portions of the game often feel equally uneventful. Similarly, stealth feels like more of an afterthought than a key pillar of gameplay. Again, I know that's not Wolverine's thing. He doesn't swing from buildings like Spidey or barrel across skylines like Hulk, or sneak like Mystique, but the truth of the matter is I didn't find much to get excited about when moving around the world. The only real exceptions come in the rare high-octane escape or desperate climb for survival, in which the circumstances bring the thrills instead of anything I'm actually doing.
Ultimately, it is what it is because it's all Wolverine really has. And that point is driven home in the numerous times that Jean Grey, the ultra-powerful mutant with telepathic and telekinetic abilities, offers to simply fly herself and Logan to the top of a building or across a city, and Wolverine declines repeatedly. Even when the fate of his friends or of the world is on the line, he opts to take the long and arduous way because, I don't know, it makes his tummy hurt, or he doesn't like how it feels or some other contrived excuse. But I know that taking the quick and direct route would trivialize massive portions of the game, so instead we go through the uninteresting but inoffensive motions.
The strongest aspect of Wolverine is its narrative and character development, but even that isn't without its fair share of oddities and pacing issues. Insomniac has done a commendable job of taking touchstones from the history of Marvel and building something a little more original around them, while also trying to explore Logan from a more emotional, human perspective. Logan's story is intertwined with the increasingly threatened existence of mutants, which have fairly recently emerged.
Although Bolivar Trask is presented as the main threat to mutantkind, the game doesn't waste any time in hinting that a bigger threat may be a little closer to home. The game takes place at a time when the X-Men haven't yet formed and, instead, Wolverine is a member of Team X, a crew also featuring Sabertooth and Mystique. Crucially, Team X was assembled by Nathaniel Essex, better known as the villain Mister Sinister in other Marvel stories.
What begins as a mission to rescue Essex eventually leads to a battle for mutant survival against Trask and his Sentinels, and then a hunt for a mysterious artifact that could change the future of mutant and humankind forever. Along the way, relationships become strained, hidden motivations emerge, and the state of Insomniac's fledgling X-Men universe rapidly develops in some unexpected directions. There are stellar performances all around, with Liam McIntyre's take on Logan bringing more heart and charm to the character than expected thanks to writing that allows the character to be vulnerable and, on occasion, goofy.
Krizia Bajos's Jean Grey also has an emotional depth to her that makes the time she spends with Logan meaningful for both characters. She has been finding and rescuing mutants, and has a worn-down, sometimes defeated vibe to her, but is uplifted by the community of mutants she has built around her. The game is very comfortable letting Logan and Jean have their moments of flirtation and bonding, and although it can occasionally feel rushed, the performances make the deepening connection between them believable nevertheless.
The standout performance, however, is undoubtedly Troy Baker as Nathaniel Essex. Anyone with a bit of X-Men knowledge knows exactly where Essex's story will take him, but the journey is still compelling thanks to the performance. Baker is able to present Essex with the same kind of warmth and conviction that makes him a believable surrogate for Charles Xavier in Insomniac's version of the X-Men universe. But every scene he's in has a line delivered just manipulatively enough to keep the player on edge, waiting for the inevitable turn. The impact Essex has on those around him, especially Mystique and Sabertooth, is also part of the brilliance of his character and Baker's performance. He's able to prey on everyone's vulnerabilities and exploit their nature to his advantage. And Logan is the victim of some of the worst of it.
The story takes its time getting the pieces in the right place, and there are certainly some pacing issues during this process. The early parts of the game are perhaps a bit too introspective and focused on Wolverine and Jean's relationship, while also including some lengthy sections chasing a macguffin around for a bit too long. But the final third of the game essentially switches from being a Wolverine story to a straight-up X-Men story. That's not a spoiler--you won't suddenly see Cyclops and Gambit appear--but the stakes will become crystal clear and the groundwork is laid for something momentous. As a longtime X-Men fan, I'm a sucker for that kind of stuff and it worked on me.
Wolverine is a difficult game to come to terms with. As I've emphasized repeatedly, there's nothing outright wrong or bad about it. It delivers an authentic, highly playable Wolverine experience. I don't regret my time with it and, in fact, I left hoping there's a sequel that makes good on what the game sets up. But at the same time, that inoffensiveness comes from the fact that it's a barebones third-person action game executed in a no-frills way, with no real surprises.
At best, it's a fun but forgettable experience that'll entertain you for a few hours. At worst, it shows that just because you can make really good superhero games with one character, that doesn't mean you can make really good super hero games with any character. Insomniac is an incredibly talented developer, but it shines with characters that allow it to flex its well-trained design muscles. Wolverine might be the best at what he does, but what he does hasn't let Insomniac's developers be the best at what they do.
NBA 2K has long been the standard-bearer for high-quality sports games. It's the pinnacle that other series like Madden, FC, and even the oft-beloved MLB The Show aspire to emulate in whatever ways their respective sports allow. That's not to say it gets everything right, but it often feels like the team at Visual Concepts is competing against itself. It creates trends; it doesn't chase them.
That's always been most obvious in The City, the series' social PvPvE hub and the lifeblood of the game's community. Though some other parts of the game are more uneven with this year's entry, The City proves that if you only plan to play one sports game this year, NBA 2K27 is the way to go.
The City is where players can meet up for basketball games of varying sweat levels, buy cosmetics, and complete live-service challenges--it is the center of NBA 2K27's solar system. This hub is thoughtfully attached to the single-player MyCareer mode at the proverbial hip, and this pairing offers more enjoyable and immersive things to do as a tandem than most other sports games taken in their totality.
This year, The City makes several smart changes. At the core of it all is the long-awaited ability to import custom women characters into the mode. Aesthetically, this is a nice change that lets the hub world better reflect real-life streetball communities--it's always been true that women have existed in these spaces in real life, so they should be included in NBA 2K, too.
However, this positive change does come with a frustrating caveat: The MyCareer mode doesn't account for them, thereby siloing these women avatars into The City exclusively. Plus, this requires anyone who wants to run around in The City as a woman to create a second avatar as a man if they want to go into MyCareer's story mode. So as awesome as this all is to see, it also feels like a frustrating half-step forward.
Finally bringing women avatars into The City makes for a more diverse and dynamic social space.
New landmarks in The City, Casual Corner and Crew HQ, build out the virtual world to be much more inviting and social. In Casual Corner, beginner-friendly pick-up games, including some that are co-op PvE against rather lowly bots, are happening whenever you want to queue for them. Meanwhile, NBA 2K's clan-like "Crews" system gets a big upgrade in Crew HQ, a space for you and your crew to meet up, practice, play crew-only games, and socialize.
These two additions will better onboard new players and, by being tied to the Learn 2K suite added in recent years, speak to the team's commitment to not feel so dizzying to new players. They also become two more diverse ways to play in a hub world already full of so many different offerings, from ultra-sweaty Proving Grounds games that ditch the shot meter to The Rec's full-length 5v5 games.
There's always The Park too, where some players spend the entire year building out their in-game legend and dominating on a particular court as though they actually live in the neighborhood. In more than one corner of the game's social world, these various modes feel big enough to allow you to commit to any of them exclusively and still find a lot to love.
My favorite of The City's modes, Street Kings, is akin to Mortal Kombat's Towers: PvE games against boss-type ballers that escalate in challenge with every match, and where a hype man and an energetic crowd of NPCs cheer you on like a classic And 1 game. Since it first appeared in the series two years ago, it's become my favorite way to play multiplayer in NBA 2K because it allows me and my brother to make lots of progress in The City's various progress bars, like player and season XP, without bumping into players who disrupt the more casual vibe we're aiming for.
Of course, every year I'm compelled to shine a spotlight once more on the over-monetized aspects of The City. Visual Concepts is extremely adept at partnering with authentic-feeling brands that create aspirational cosmetics to purchase and unlock in The City, and that's fine with me, even in its abundance. Personally, I loved getting to walk around in a Portland Fire jersey for the first time, as my home city recently rejoined the WNBA.
It's past time for returning players to keep their in-game cosmetics year to year.
But I will forever hate that players can spend money to improve their players right away. Paying past the grind that begins with players rated 60 overall (OVR) has long been an additional surcharge on players in the game's marquee mode.
It's also true that avatar intricacies like skill badges, takeover abilities, and cap breakers all mean that initial pay-to-win buff is less effective than it may sound. Paying to bring my 60 OVR player to 79 OVR as soon as he steps into The City isn't as big a leap as grinding him to 99 OVR with multiple cap breakers and gold badges.
Still, it essentially means NBA 2K is not a $70 game, but closer to a $100 game for anyone planning to play online with their friends. Attributes shouldn't be available with the same universal currency that also buys me my Rose City hat and a pair of virtual Jordans. I'll say it every year, even as it seems this is very much a feature for parent company Take-Two, not a bug.
This year's game accidentally shines a light on a related topic, too. With The City taking on the same look (albeit with some added landmarks) as last year's, it serves as a more overt reminder that your purchases don't carry over, even if the virtual world's layout does. I really liked my avatar's Celtics hoodie last year, but seeing it in the shop again for a price, rather than just being available to me for free, felt especially annoying this year. The scenery is nearly identical, but the hoodie was apparently just a rental. There's so much for sale and new things are added frequently; it feels like it's time for NBA 2K to go the way of Fortnite and just let me keep my in-game purchases forever.
The City is normally the social aspect of the custom avatar you'll build in the game, with MyCareer being the solo portion, but this year's game has built co-op into the MyCareer experience. However, it's a half-measure for now, and not as exciting as I once hoped when it was revealed. The narrative of MyCareer is much longer than usual this year, and the co-op portion of play only becomes available after several hours. At that time, the G League team you've landed with in the game's branching saga introduces a new teammate of yours in Trace Miller, a fake player invented for the story and meant to be the Player 2 of the story mode.
This leaves your co-op friend feeling side-saddled. You can create your own avatar with your own intricately designed player build, even using your own face, but Miller is who he is, for the most part. Though you can choose his starting size and position, the build design tools are much simpler from there. The best version of co-op MyCareer would let both players fully customize their athletes, rather than leaving one feeling like merely the sidekick unlocked after many hours, as this first iteration does.
Building your custom player is a richly detailed experience that many in the community treat like a science.
The good thing is NBA 2K has long been great at taking an idea and building on it over time, rather than scrapping it if the first year or two don't satisfy players. It's an attribute that has separated this series from some other sports games, and I expect that North Star may affect this mode soon, hopefully for the better.
There's a third way to live out the life of your avatar this year: MyCareer Eras. Borrowing the same remarkably deep Eras feature from the team-based MyNBA mode, MyCareer Eras lets you drop your fake player into any decade from the 1980s Bird vs. Magic era onward, thereby time-traveling to the NBA of yesteryear. In any era, you'll see period-specific presentation elements, rules, uniforms, rosters, and even audience attire.
Eras were introduced in NBA 2K a few years ago, and they remain the coolest way to play Franchise-style. Though you could drop your avatar into MyNBA Eras last year, that was the extent of it. You were just a player on a team like any other. This year's version is a bespoke narrative experience that puts the spotlight on your player in a bygone era, full of challenges and emergent stories.
Taking my avatar to the early 1990s and seeking to paint over the Jordan dynasty is an incredibly fun thing to do, and just like The City--or MyNBA, which, admittedly, takes a backseat in terms of sweeping changes of its own this year--MyCareer Eras is a mode I could enjoy for hundreds of hours.
Though MyNBA doesn't get much of a look this year, it at least has received major overhauls in recent years. That's more than I can say for the game's suite of WNBA modes. Over the past three seasons and 2K sequels, my emotional investment in the WNBA has grown a lot, and with a local team making its grand reopening this year, I've been so excited to play as them in 2K. But having grown more attached to the league has led me to see some of 2K's shortcomings when it comes to the WNBA.
Even with several deep modes on offer, I hope the WNBA modes get more attention soon.
For one, The W, its solo avatar analog to MyCareer, doesn't allow you to import your woman avatar from The City, which, like the lack of a truly customizable Player 2 in MyCareer, feels like a half-measure. But in MyWNBA mode, where you take on seasons of a single team, there's a lack of the same care the men's league gets.
I'm sure the WNBA modes are played less, but I've always found it commendable how NBA 2K is a hub for all things basketball; only now I'm better able to see some of what's missing, like a robust halftime show and arena-specific ceremonies, the likes of which do exist in the real WNBA but only exist in the 2K version of the NBA.
I'm hopeful that, as the league continues to grow, 2K's WNBA modes can grow with it. It's great to see women in the game more, like in The City or in MyTeam, where they first arrived last year, but in their own bespoke game modes, some of the details this studio is otherwise so great at building into the experience are lacking.
I've spent a lot of words on not talking about gameplay, which might seem weird, but it's because this year's game feels the most year-over-year familiar to me of any game of recent memory. That's not exactly a bad thing. NBA 2K is a lot of fun on the court. It has been, so it is again. And it's not that the game adds nothing. In particular, I really like the new step-through finishing moves, used to finish a shot after you've lost your dribble. Like other aspects of on-court animations, lots of these are modeled after real players' go-to moves.
Visual Concepts has been using ProPlay, its in-house tech that transposes real NBA footage into gameplay animations, in ways that are hard to specifically attribute from outside the confines of the studio, but if ProPlay is why the game looks and feels so good, I'll take it. Combined with the game's continuing efforts to teach newcomers how to play 2K, as well as changes in The City, it feels like the series has never been more approachable.
While playing online can bring out any number of cheesy players who seek to break the game in their favor, this is true of all sports games and is usually improved upon if you stick to specific modes, like Rec games, where the crowded court of 5v5 gameplay minimizes any cheesehead's worst intentions. In games against the computer, I continue to be amazed by how different players and teams--even those spanning different eras--have their own playstyles.
Playing the Celtics, you'll get a heavy dose of Mazzulla Ball, while the Spurs rightly center everything around the unique size and talents of Wemby. This is a fun basketball game not just because of the depth and breadth of its modes, but also because its foundational gameplay is easy to enjoy and closely resembles watching the real thing.
Taking on different eras of the league and the legends who made them memorable remains the coolest mode in sports games.
Overall though, if NBA 2K is truly competing against itself, this year's game is a slight step back. While the addition of co-op to MyCareer and women to The City are great first drafts of ideas, they each come with caveats for now that keep them from being as fun as they could've been--and reasonably should've been. On the court itself, NBA 2K is still a lot of fun, but it has seemingly settled into a groove for now, iterating in smaller ways after previous years' bigger leaps. There's room to grow in the WNBA side of the game, though with The City, MyCareer, and Eras modes, it's not short on deeply immersive experiences already.
I have enough fun with NBA 2K each year that I tend to delete it from my console after the new year; otherwise, I risk never playing anything else. It can be that good. But just as I was ready to commit to the game for the full year, with my heightened fandom in tow, it's given me an installment I feel more comfortable walking away from--right after I delete the Jordan dynasty and beat all the Street Kings.
Among horror royalty, there is perhaps no greater icon than Michael Myers. First appearing in 1978, the slasher helped ignite a trend of similar movie monsters that defined the next decade and beyond of the horror landscape.
Halloween: The Game displays a keen understanding of his special place in that lineage, and IllFonic has brought his unique sense of unrelenting menace to video games in a way I can't get enough of.
Halloween: The Game is a 4v1 asymmetrical horror game from a team that has established its brand on similar projects. From Friday the 13th and Predator: Hunting Grounds to Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed and Killer Klowns From Outer Space, IllFonic has spent the last decade becoming synonymous with this genre, and yet it's never made the same game twice. That's true again here, as one of Halloween's best attributes is that it plays quite unlike any other, be it from this team or the others also making games in this realm. The studio didn't reskin something we've seen before in a blue jumpsuit. This is the real deal.
Though games of this sort have used a 4v1 setup before, most famously in the genre's king of the hill, Dead by Daylight, Halloween adds a unique wrinkle in the form of NPCs. Across the various maps of Haddonfield, Illinois, residents go about their day-to-day lives, and it's up to the team of four player-controlled survivors to warn them of the threat Myers poses, protect them, and eventually escort them off the map or hide them until the round's timer expires.
I love this new approach to the genre for two big reasons. For one, it dims the spotlight on the human survivors. In a game of Dead by Daylight, for example, one or two people dying early will likely doom the entire round. But in Halloween, your group of four is joined by a handful of other potential survivors, and the game's scoring system, like Killer Klowns' before it, is not built on a binary pass/fail. You could die in a round, but if your team helps a handful of residents flee to safety, you may have won the round anyway. It feels like less pressure is on your shoulders.
Fundamentally, this gives the entire game a feel unlike anything that's come before it. You're not just trying to escape or wait out the timer to win, as you did in Friday the 13th. You actively need to outrun and outsmart Michael Myers, creatively using the limited time you have before he appears in stabbing range. Staying stealthy, locking doors behind you, and pre-planning an exit strategy--like jumping out a window when he's swarmed the house you're in--are vital.
But there's another big reason this novel setup works so well: It authentically captures the spirit of the movies, particularly that timeless first one from 1978. This is especially true when you're playing as Michael himself. His key ability, the Shape Jump, allows him to quickly and invisibly float around the map, reappearing anywhere so long as it's dark and no survivor is too near, mimicking his way of almost supernaturally being where you least expect him.
But simply spawning on survivors to quickly gut them only awards the killer a measly score for his gory efforts. Instead, you're encouraged by the scoring system to stalk your prey, watching from a distance, building up your stalking meter, before ultimately moving in for the kill. The higher your stalking meter, the more environmental kills you can unlock, too, which don't just add even more score, but also sell the horror-movie vibe--Michael isn't merely slashing everyone with his butcher knife. He's throwing them through TVs, into fireplaces, or leaving them propped up on fences like twisted lawn decorations.
Halloween is certainly Illfonic's best-looking game yet.
After a kill, you're also encouraged to admire your work, staring at it in the same first-person view you use to stalk people in order to build up a Bloodthirst meter that makes Michael more powerful for subsequent kills.
This loop of stalking and killing residents, both user-controlled and NPCs, gives Halloween its special ingredient. I found myself role-playing as Michael in ways I didn't see coming, peeking out from bushes just enough to stealthily build my stalking meter on unsuspecting victims, practically recreating some of the film's most memorable imagery. Staring into people's living rooms as they gabbed on the phone or leisurely watched TV was so immersive, I'd even creep myself out at times. It felt like I was playing a home-invasion simulator. It was unsettling, but true to the film.
With a lot of games in this space, the community is often obsessed with playing as the killer, and that'll likely happen here, too. But playing Halloween as a survivor has been my most enjoyable experience on that side of the asymmetry since Friday the 13th. The objective of getting people out alive is fresh, but even when it's your neck Michael is breathing down, it's well-balanced. After a few matches as Michael, I thought he was overpowered, but as I played more and people came to understand how to operate as survivors, it became clearer that those survivors have a lot of strength in numbers.
Banding together to arm NPCs, escorting them to escape routes, and disrupting Michael's restless pursuit with flashlights, firecrackers, guns, and melee weapons are best done with your friends nearby. If you're grabbed, you can pry yourself free rather easily with a pocket knife, or with more effort using a quick-time event that lets you escape his clutches if you're fast enough. When Michael closes the distance, it's possible and could even be likely that you down him with a gang attack. Though he can't seemingly be killed like Jason once could, when he's downed, his Bloodthirst meter takes a major hit, before he sits up like The Undertaker (okay, to be fair, The Undertaker stole that move from him), and continues his pursuit.
Little moments like that will be rarer, but in between, the period-specific cars, kitchens, garages, and TV shows soak you in the time and place of the film, while the front porches lined with jack-o'-lanterns, as vibes-rich as they already are, feel destined to be even more appreciated every October. I love the fall season, and that's partly because I love horror so much. It feels so good to live in the world of the film, faithfully brought to life in every would-be-quaint home turned into a crime scene, aglow in the lights of both pumpkins and police cars.
Yes, Laurie Strode is playable and sometimes even an NPC--and, as an added plot twist, she might even die first.
It's not only the NPCs that make Halloween stand out from the pack of asymmetrical horror multiplayer games. There's also a single-player campaign, though it's not the draw here. Across six missions and only about two hours total for a single playthrough, you'll play entirely as Michael Myers, re-enacting some of the movie's scenes while also adding to the canon. The premise is that you're playing as him, starting with his escape from Smith's Grove Sanitarium and up through Halloween Eve, essentially filling a gap in time when we otherwise don't see what he's up to.
It functions more than anything as a tutorial. With various icons on the screen, cooldown abilities, and lots of mechanics to manage, from killing the electricity, phone lines, or, of course, the many people around town, the campaign does its job at teaching you the basics, though it should be noted there's no survivor equivalent. For that side of the game, you really just learn by doing. I didn't mind that since it meant things like repairing getaway cars, calling the cops, or unlocking the emergency bunker weren't so clearly understood, heightening the horror of my earliest rounds.
The campaign also has more to do than just see each mission once, as it includes a set of challenges to complete that award items such as player banners, clothing, and other cosmetics for its several survivor characters and Michael himself. I had more fun with the campaign when chasing these rewards than I did on the first pass when I was playing it simply for its own sake. The solo mode isn't much to get excited about on its own.
Each map envelops you in the place and time of the original film.
Halloween also continues a long trend for IllFonic games, and it's one I wish all other games of this sort would copy: You lose nothing for playing in private matches. You enjoy the same XP rates; you can unlock all the same rewards; there's nothing gated behind matchmaking versus playing in a private lobby. Though it's easy to load into a multiplayer game with your friends anyway, I know firsthand that sometimes you want to keep it more casual or private in a game for just you and your buddies. I can see why other games, particularly the ultra-competitive Dead by Daylight, aren't as willing to tear down that barrier, but IllFonic has never punished players for playing in private matches, even if they choose to never step foot into a public lobby, and I love that.
I had a ton of fun with Halloween, so much, in fact, that I was willing to forgive what was a messy experience during many rounds. Bugs in the game ranged from cosmetic blemishes, like misaligned kill animations and floating police cars appearing on the map, to more serious issues, like players losing the ability to move or frame-rate slowdowns.
Lots of these issues were cleaned up over time; I've been playing the game for a few weeks now and have seen several patches come through. Still, with more planned patches on the way, my expectation is early adopters will experience some janky aspects of their own, even if they may be less common or different than the ones I named here. If there's one consistent mark against this studio, it's a lack of polish out of the gate.
Though the launch-day patch may provide a cleaner experience than I had, I'd be surprised if Halloween is entirely free of the issues I ran into.
These issues slightly tempered my enjoyment of Halloween, though I'm generally not easily frustrated by bugs if the core experience is good enough. If you tend to be more bothered by them, you may want to see how the broader community reacts in the early days after launch. For me, though, I had so much fun and only didn't play more than my 20+ hours because it's hard to coordinate multiplayer sessions when only a few people in the world are playing before launch.
People often like to stack up every asymmetrical horror game to Dead by Daylight. I've never felt that makes sense. Games like Halloween aren't trying to replace that genre titan; they're seeking to live alongside it. To do that, they need a distinct and exciting gameplay loop and to capture the tone of their source material. Halloween achieves both of these things, giving players a vibes-heavy experience befitting the timeless film while also offering a unique hook that keeps the game from feeling like a rehash of the many horror multiplayer games that came before it. Games like Halloween don't make me think the landscape is oversaturated. It makes me excited to see what teams that love horror the way IllFonic does will do next, because here, with Halloween, they nailed it.
Very few of the many stories you'll encounter in The Blood of Dawnwalker end happily. It seems foolish to expect anything else from a dark, medieval action-RPG about a secluded valley ruled over by vampires who demand blood and subservience from its human populace. While hoping for anyone to get out unscathed is perhaps naive, it's impressive that developer Rebel Wolves manages to give just about every story enough depth and nuance to keep all that death and tragedy compelling all the way through.
Dawnwalker is composed of what feels like a ridiculous number of quests. Due to its structure, they seem haphazardly constructed at first, with no dedicated throughline; only a story you construct by taking on whatever tasks you think are worth your limited time. What's shocking is that these quests, from the intricate stories of rebels fighting to free the valley and vampires following shadowy agendas, to the momentary tidbits of setup from a group of soldiers by the side of the road before you start hacking them apart with your sword, are so well-written. To the game's credit, there's a good chance you'll want to do everything in Dawnwalker. The fact that you can't is part of what makes it so compelling.
https://youtu.be/947maH4t22E
Dawnwalker's story is built on a ticking clock, and that feature is among the game's best ideas. You play as Coen, a human who loses his family to Brencis, the valley's vampire sovereign. Coen quickly comes to realize that Brencis is set to host a feast in 30 in-game days, so you have that long to make preparations and storm the castle to free the captured humans, doing whatever you can to strengthen yourself, gather allies, and figure out a plan before time runs out.
Time advances when you take on or complete quests and activities. Each of these takes an allotted amount of time, so you're always weighing whether you want to dedicate time to one quest over another. Dilly dallying with other activities while a quest is active can change the situation or even cause it to end in failure, so stacking up 50 things to do is a bad idea. While you have enough time on your hands that you're not forced to consider every single hour you spend along the way, the sense that the clock is against you gives everything you do in Dawnwalker the feeling of weight and importance. It also might make you think twice about stopping to lend a hand to a minor character you meet, or choosing a merciful but time-consuming option over a more expedient but harmful one.
Time also dictates the way that you address quests. At the end of the tutorial section, Coen is forcibly turned into a vampire, but thanks to this world's supernatural rules, he unexpectedly becomes a Dawnwalker--he transforms into a vampire when night falls but reverts to a human under the sun. During the day, the human Coen can do things like interact with shopkeepers or make his way into occupied settlements, looking like any other person; if he gets into a fight with Brencis's soldiers, he does it with a sword. At night, Coen is more deadly in a fight, but often more noticeable, and enemies tend to attack on sight. An area might be public during the day and off limits at night, so when you decide to solve a problem can change how you do so. And of course, some events only take place during the day, while others only happen at night.
The smartest way time is deployed against you is in Dawnwalker's progression system. Leveling happens passively as you gain experience points for completing quests and defeating enemies, kicking up your overall stats, but to unlock new abilities in combat or enhance elements like your life total and stamina bar, you need to do more. To add skills for the human Coen, you'll need to find and read books and manuals; for the vampire Coen, your skills unlock as you consume the blood of humans, animals, and other vampires. And unlocking perks costs points you'll earn from leveling, as well as time.
This means that making yourself stronger forces tradeoffs. Do you want to power yourself up at the risk of failing or delaying a quest? I found that I was always sitting on perk points in Dawnwalker, waiting for when I was sure they wouldn't cost me key opportunities. As a result, sometimes I undertook quests without maximizing my capabilities. That push and pull makes leveling up a deliberate and important decision about how it might impact Coen's overall goal.
Where this leveling system falls down is in what it actually offers. Coen has three different skill trees from which you can purchase perks, each keyed to a different part of his character. Coen's a gifted swordsman and can use his claws as a vampire, while he gets access to witchcraft powers when he's human.
The system presents you with a lot of options, many of which can be upgraded several times, and it feels purposely designed to create choice paralysis. Since you probably aren't investing in everything due to the time it'll cost, you're forced to think about what upgrades are going to matter most to you, and whether you're leaning too hard on one set of perks over the others, which might leave you vulnerable during certain times of day.
The trouble is that the trees are filled with upgrades that don't always feel meaningful. Part of the weakness is that abilities are equipped into slots in your menu, and in order to equip more of them, you have to also unlock new slots by spending perk points and time. The limitation can incentivize you to equip a couple of active and passive abilities and never change them, effectively making the ones you don't equip dead spots on the tree. And since, for most abilities, you need to first find books to unlock them, you might be barred from a perk forever, or long enough that it doesn't matter enough to pursue it.
Requiring so much thought about how you build Coen makes it easy to disregard a lot of your options, not out of purposefully constructing a character, but because of the quests you might choose arbitrarily throughout the game. I never did much with his witchcraft abilities, for instance, since they required me to spend health it often felt like Human Coen couldn't spare, and because their books weren't as easily available. I spent perk points on witchcraft abilities I never actually used much, and in the end wound up ignoring a lot of that skill tree in favor of the more practical sword skills.
And while you'll unlock some fun combat abilities, the fact that you might only use a couple of them for huge swathes of the game weakens Dawnwalker somewhat, because you'll be doing a ton of fighting. Brencis's soldiers dominate the valley, and while you'll talk your way through a lot of situations, combat is the main thrust of Dawnwalker's gameplay, so the rhythm of using the same few abilities can get stale.
Dawnwalker's combat is pretty good nevertheless, bolstered by its focus on being directional. Coen swings his attacks in a particular direction, depending on where you hold the left analog stick, and the idea is that you want to beat an enemy's guard by swinging to avoid their blocks. In practice, directional swings are more haphazard and tough to use well, but also don't really matter. Where the directional combat really shines is in your defense--if you push the analog stick in the direction your opponent is swinging from and hit the block button at the right time, you can parry their blow and counterattack.
How you fight is dictated by a stamina meter, and you use stamina for attacks, dodges, and Coen's "omniblock," which deflects any incoming blow. Blocking directionally, however, uses no stamina and actually kicks off its recovery, so in order to keep up the speed of a fight you need to be executing skillful blocks, lest you run out of stamina and get overwhelmed. Enemies often come at Coen in groups, too, so you have to watch out for people coming from the sides, who you can deflect away and hit briefly before returning to your main target.
It's a great system that gives fights the rhythm of a duel, with the back-and-forth between you and your opponent requiring quick reactions on your part, and all happening fast enough that you're rarely waiting for an attack to parry. With multiple enemies, you have to pay close attention, and I genuinely felt like a world-class swordsman as I turned away opponent after opponent. Trading blows and parries builds up "activation points" that can be spent on special abilities like stunning enemies or hitting several at a time. And even though you'll play through hundreds of battles, the focus on quick reactions and executing on openings keeps them exciting, even when you're facing groups of soldiers who have been fighting more or less the same way for 40 hours.
What irritations derive from combat come from the fact that you do so much of it, and how it feels is mostly dictated by the kinds of enemies coming for you. The directional combat approach is engaging, but it also means that fighting as Human Coen and Vampire Coen are very similar in function, despite their differences. As a vampire, Coen can fight with his claws, but they deflect blows from soldiers and monsters the same way a sword does. The major differences come from which special abilities you can use, which are often unblockable or interrupt enemy attacks. That fact can downgrade their use from being a tactical deployment at a key moment, to something you hit as soon as an activation point pops up and a move's cooldown runs out. Even though the human and vampire are intended to feel different, one more calculated and the other more aggressive, they wind up playing more or less the same way, especially over a long time.
Another big difference in the two sides of combat comes from how you manage health. Vampire Coen has a bunch of perks that increase his survivability. You start with an ability that lets you briefly chomp on an enemy's neck to suck some of their blood and restore your health, which is a huge boon in the early game. The vampire side also has some extremely powerful perks like passive health regeneration, as well as ones that give health back when you parry and when you attack with your claws. You also get bonuses from weapons and armor that passively boost a bunch of traits, including health. By the end of the game, I felt functionally unkillable as a vampire as my health often regenerated faster than enemies could damage me.
As a human, fights are much more harrowing, since your healing options are limited to eating food between fights and using items equipped to quick slots during combat. You can't refill your quick slots while fighting, so you have to manage them carefully, and food is less effective in combat, pushing you to rely on medicines you can craft. Where you can restore health through combat abilities reliably as a vampire all game, as a human, you have to wait for openings to use a medicine, and make sure you pack enough to stay alive. This makes fighting as a human tough and active in interesting ways, but also incentivizes you to take on whatever battles you can with your safer and more powerful vampire abilities.
Dawnwalker does include a decently granular difficulty system that you can adjust throughout the game, and it's definitely something you should mess with. You can separately adjust combat difficulty, dictating things like parry windows and the damage enemies inflict, and RPG difficulty, which governs elements like Coen's stamina costs and healing. At the default difficulty settings, it felt easy for the balance to get thrown off, so adjusting both was useful to keep Dawnwalker from getting frustratingly difficult or feeling too easy.
While they don't always fire on all cylinders, what's notable about all these systems is how intricate and deliberate they are, how much the game wants you to think about the ways you interact with them, and how many cool swings they take. It's fun to think so deeply about how and when to level up, what armor and weapon bonuses are most important to your build, and what preparations you're going to need for a fight before you undertake it. Those elements give Dawnwalker's RPG systems a lot more depth and thoughtfulness than games in the genre often have.
Holding it all together are the many, many cool stories you'll find along the way. The valley is absolutely littered with quests, and to their credit, they all feel like they're worth doing. What's more, you have a ton of freedom about what you actually get up to as you push toward your goal of saving people, and you won't always know how a quest might provide you with friends who can help you later, or unlock new information and further steps. But the fact that they so often do helps stop most quests from seeming like detours, and instead, weaves them together to tell Coen's story through your very specific path through the game. Everything has an air of being consequential, especially because Coen and others are constantly mentioning important tidbits gleaned from other quests, or the consequences of past actions.
Writing and voice acting is also strong throughout the game, making so much of what might otherwise be mundane open-world content unexpectedly compelling. Brencis has three lieutenants who run his operations in the valley, doing things like recruiting soldiers, gathering the blood of peasants, and keeping the masses entertained and docile. Disrupting those operations can eventually draw them out, triggering quests that give you opportunities to kill them so you won't have to face Brencis at full strength. And even a lot of these activities, which are ostensibly of the base-clearing variety, throw in interesting little stories. You might run into a mother trying to convince her soldier son to desert, and then get the choice to try to talk him into it through reasoning, intimidation, or bribery, lowering the difficulty of the battle against his remaining squad. Or you might find that, after clearing a few camps where peasants are paid to gather leeches to help store blood for the vampires, the commoners you're ostensibly trying to help at the remaining camps have taken up arms to help defend their livelihoods against you.
The quests tied to each of Brencis's lieutenants are some of the best in the game, giving you opportunities to catch each one when they're vulnerable, and giving you a deep look into who they are. They're also full of tough, interesting choices, like when you're approached by a vassal of one lieutenant who wants to help you win a duel against him by poisoning the blood he drinks--which means poisoning an innocent person. How you deal with situations has material consequences and creates some great, small-scale dramas. A lot of the quests in Dawnwalker are still sticking with me days later, and I want to dive back in to follow the many plot threads that I missed or cut short.
Dawnwalker also throws in a very good idea to mess with the formula of giving you all these tough choices to make: the fact that you're a vampire. Often when talking to people, you'll see an option on your list of responses: "Give in to the hunger." As your health gets lower and you get hungrier, that option becomes more prevalent. It might hop around the list to try to trick you into selecting it, and other options might briefly change into the hunger option. If your health is low enough, you might not get the choice at all--the hunger will take over and your murderous nature will take out that character.
It's a great idea that creates interesting and serious consequences. Killing someone, either on purpose or by accident, might wall off a quest you needed that person to complete, or change its circumstances. At the very least, people who would have played a larger part in the story won't be around later if they're dead. It injects a fun, unexpected drama into a game where you're already constantly choosing how you want to deal with people and what you're willing to do to achieve your goals.
What's disappointing about the idea is that it's so easy to circumvent. I experienced Coen losing control during a Dawnwalker preview event, but playing it for review, it never happened again. The game puts up plenty of guard rails to help you avoid being forced into that situation, whether it's animals or other people you can briefly feed on, health bar enhancements that make it tougher to fall so low you can't stop yourself, or passive healing that lessens the risk. So I never got challenged by my vampire nature in a way that was out of my hands. It's a shame, because being forced to balance your health or perform well in a fight because of the risk you might pose to regular people is a great idea, and I wish Dawnwalker leaned into it more.
The game can also be a bit technically shaky, although its issues never reached above minor frustrations for me. Objects and textures pop in frequently, animations can hitch in conversations, some platforming sections see Coen slipping off walls or falling through the ground haphazardly, and hit boxes are occasionally a little finicky in combat. The limitations mostly result in briefly irritating sections, but they happen often enough to be notable, if not dealbreaking. Rebel Wolves has already patched out a lot of issues and plans a Day One update that should help things even more, but it's worth noting that you're going to see some jank that will affect the experience, so save often.
Overall, The Blood of Dawnwalker is an incredibly ambitious, deeply interesting first game from Rebel Wolves. Not every good idea lands and not every envelope is pushed as far as it could be, but the potential of the game is vast, and there's a huge amount to lean into and love. And it's all bolstered by excellent writing that makes for one of the deepest and most interesting game worlds I've run across in some time. The Blood of Dawnwalker is the kind of RPG that feels great to get lost in, that digs into your mind and stays there, and which is worth scouring and savoring.
