NBA 2K’s Best Mode Is Even Better This Year

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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.

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Halloween Cleverly Carves Its Own Path Through Horror Multiplayer

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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.

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The Blood Of Dawnwalker Makes You Want To Do Everything–And Tantalizingly Won’t Let You

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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.

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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.

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Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy Is Good If You Do The Necessary Homework Beforehand

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Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy faces a difficult balancing act. Can it move away from its predecessors' terrifying waves of rats and still deliver a supernatural terror that ties into rewarding environmental puzzles? Can it ditch the series' sibling protagonists and still tell a moving story focused on two people learning to lean on one another? And can it add fierce, frenetic combat to the franchise's formula as a new gameplay pillar without abandoning its core identity as a puzzle game? At times, Resonance succeeds--especially during its stronger first half--but it too often loses its footing. And as the game increasingly misses the mark, it further distances itself from what worked so well in the first two A Plague Tale games without adding anything to make up for the loss.

Set in 1334, about 15 years prior to the first two A Plague Tale games, Resonance follows Sophia instead of series protagonist Amicia de Rune. As a young girl, Sophia was forcibly injected with blood that causes her to have visions of a long-lost civilization. Wanting to cure her of these visions, her father eventually finds and travels to the island that she has seen in her visions, but in his attempts to uncover the island's history, he is killed by a mysterious and terrifying beast. Wanting to discover what her visions mean and learn about what truly happened to her dad, Sophia travels to the island with her best friend, Leni, in tow. 

The story, especially in the first half, is very good. This series has consistently done a fantastic job of quickly building up characters or situations in its introductions to be narrative buy-ins that are solely there to be destroyed or yanked away early on and create emotional stakes: Amicia's happy family life in the first game, the hope that Amicia's life had returned to some degree of normalcy in the second game. Resonance does the same. You actually spend quite a bit of time getting to know Sophia in Europe and the fairly happy life she has with the adopted family of smugglers she grew up with before a tragic event forces Sophia to go to the island. There's a real sense of desperation in her tale, and the stakes of what may happen to her or Leni if she were to return to her allies empty-handed and without answers are abundantly apparent.

Leni and Sophia have an odd dynamic. Narratively, it's pretty good. There's some angst beneath the playful banter of the two friends that implies there could be romantic feelings pushing the two together, and the two play off one another in cutscenes incredibly well with their very different skill sets--Sophia is a fighter who can muscle through problems that require strength, and Leni is a pickpocket who is adept at getting in and out of places she doesn't belong.

But that's never reflected in the gameplay. Leni can hold her own in a fight just as well as Sophia can (she even one-shots whichever enemy she's dealing with as soon as you handle the second-to-last foe) and regularly helps out with pushing open heavy doors and moving partially stuck levers. And at the same time, Sophia can squeeze into any spot Leni can and is usually the lead on how to solve puzzles (because she's you, the player!). The story does a great job of framing that these two are only succeeding because they have one another, but then this framing is repeatedly struck down whenever the cutscene ends and control returns to you. Again, it all feels very odd, like Resonance is holding onto its partnership framing for no other reason than that the first two games used it.

The mysterious, newly discovered island that Sophia and Leni find themselves on is quickly revealed to be Crete, what was once home to Minoan society and, if the myths are to be believed, a minotaur-inhabited labyrinth. The characters don't know that--it's 1334, so all of those stories have yet to be uncovered again.

This is a terrific framing for a puzzle game. As Sophia, you carry a book loaded with drawings from your childhood visions, your dad's early attempts to explore the island, and all the follow-up expeditions that the smuggling gang undertook after his passing. There's no writing--it's all a series of drawings. And using those drawings, you have to figure out how to retrace the steps of those who came before, while also finding your own way forward when unexpected roadblocks pop up. 

To aid in her and Leni's exploration, Sophia possesses an artifact that dates back to the Minoan society that once lived on the island. The sphere can redirect light to reveal hidden symbols left behind with invisible paint, and also open doorways that require lining up beams of light to hit certain points on a wall. These puzzles centered around the use of light are rarely complicated, but contribute to the feeling of Sophia and Leni being intelligent dungeon delvers who are uncovering long-lost history. 

The process feels as I imagine archaeology to be--I don't believe Sophia's journey is in any way accurate to uncovering forgotten ruins and unraveling ancient mysteries, but the idealized fantasy of it is well represented here.

Crete is also a beautiful place to explore. The island is brightly lit and full of vibrant greens, reds, and blues, while the faded bronze of statues, broken weapons, and simple machinery mark Minoan society. Resonance also has the best soundtrack of the series, sticking to strings to frame most of Sophia's journey as a grand adventure or odyssey, and crucially plucking at the tension once the supernatural terror begins to rear its head.

It takes Resonance longer than any other A Plague Tale game to reveal its monster, but once it does, any semblance that this will be a fun couples adventure for Sophia and Leni is gone. The beast is creepy, slinking through the darkness of the island's underbelly in search of any and all life. In these darkened areas, Sophia becomes covered in softly glowing blue lights, and she leaves a trail of luminescent tracks whenever she's not crouch-walking. The beast can use these trails to track her, but it also will pause to take a hauntingly raspy sniff of the air--if Sophia is not behind cover when this happens, the beast will sniff out the blue lights on her and pursue her. The beast's only weakness is light. It burns away upon touching any light source, and so encounters with the beast are a series of tense stealth sections as you bravely venture into the dark to reach the next source of light.

These sections are terrifying, especially the first one as the beast is introduced and you finally get to see what killed Sophia's father. These moments stay pretty consistently creepy too, with the sound design of the beast's methodical movements and desperate breathing creating a tense and frantic atmosphere whenever it shows up. And Resonance continues to raise the bar with each encounter, adding new types of obstacles to consider (like how to find safety in areas where the beast can dim the light, or there's no light whatsoever) and more types of enemy terrors for Sophia to encounter in the dark. It's certainly the most memorable take I've ever seen of Crete's infamous minotaur.

Figuring out what the beast is and its motivations becomes the biggest driving mystery of Resonance. As Sophia ventures closer to the minotaur's lair, she encounters more and more that is unfamiliar to her but very much understood for us as the player, but the game's reframing of these long-familiar myths is an enticing draw. Sophia soon starts having visions of being Theseus, the Greek hero who we know slayed the minotaur, but their story feels quite different from the tale we know. They don't seem to be a divine adventurer, but are instead a gladiator who rose to fame by participating in some sort of competition; and they have a secret agreement with Daedalus, the famed inventor of the labyrinth. 

These visions are beautiful, reimagining what Minoan society might have looked like at the height of the Bronze Age. They're also wonderful power fantasies as Theseus is a far stronger warrior than Sophia.

Combat is merely fine in Resonance. Sophia can strike, block, dodge, and parry, and also has a grappling hook to grab and yank enemies toward her. The soldiers that followed Sophia and Leni to the island come in your typical variety of standard, nimble, shield-bearing, spear-wielding, and heavy enemy types, each of which has a singular tried-and-true method of taking them down. The challenge of combat comes down to crowd management, ducking and weaving and parrying long enough for an opening to present itself. Sophia (and Theseus) can take two hits before the third kills them, and health is only regained by executing an enemy, encouraging you to fight aggressively and end conflicts swiftly or to keep a weaker enemy alive for an easy stab-and-heal while whittling away at a much stronger foe. 

These brief and violent dances are a fun break from the puzzle-solving in the first half of the game, but in the latter half--especially the final few hours--Resonance starts throwing huge groups of enemies at you, and that's when the combat system falls apart. Resonance doesn't have a lock-on feature, so dealing with especially large groups of enemies clumped together is a pain, and I found myself frustratingly dying often because I was trying to attack a specific enemy I had just stunned, only for Sophia to wail against the impenetrable shield of a healthy target instead. 

The ending of Resonance is also just far weaker than the first half. Sofia either travels alone or with a far less interesting NPC. The decision to have her travel solo I can understand--it ups the tension during moments when the beast is hunting Sophia, and also ensures that those tense moments aren't ruined by the companion messing up and breaking stealth. That would have probably sucked. But Sophia's other companion is a poor tradeoff for moments when Leni isn't there--the game does such a good job of villainizing this other character up to that point in the story, that for Sophia to then be forced to work with them for several chapters feels off-putting. 

The decision to make Sophia travel with a companion at all, again, feels like the lingering ghost of the older games dictating what the formula needs to be. The moments where Sophia is traveling solo clearly showcase that she can carry a game on her own, but if we had to have her talk out loud to someone else to progress the story, I'm baffled that the dev team didn't go for the far more intriguing choice of somehow making the ghost of Theseus work.  

Resonance also starts going a little too far into the physical trauma porn in the end, even giving Lara Croft from the rebooted Tomb Raider trilogy a run for her money. There comes a point where seeing a character survive getting tossed around, beaten, and bloodied makes you start to wonder if the character is superhuman. When that occurs, the fantasy of this being a story of an ordinary woman grappling with the ramifications of discovering a supernatural power begins to crack, and you stop worrying about a protagonist once you've seen them survive a near-death experience half a dozen times.

Perhaps worst of all, the final moments of Resonance have a lore problem. If you've played these games, you'll be able to start piecing together what's going on in the latter half of the story, and the final big reveal will ultimately hit you like a freight train. If you know the ramifications of Resonance's mystery and absolutely awesome conclusion, it might be the best finale in the series. But if you have no idea what, as an example, the Prima Macula is, the last five hours of this game's story will make very little sense to you and the finale will probably be a confusing dud. You'll still get the emotional payoff of Sophia having acquired the answers she was seeking, but the game doesn't provide the necessary context to fully understand what those answers mean.

So, as strange as it is to say, if you want to play Resonance and you haven't played both of the previous A Plague Tale games, you have homework. This is not a prequel that tells a story that can stand on its own, nor is it an ideal on-ramp for the series.

Overall, I liked Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy. I think it adds a valuable chapter to the overall mythos of the series, and manages to carve out its own identity in several places without continuing to rely on fan-favorite Amicia or the terror of contending with waves of rats. But you have to be such a fan of the series already to enjoy it to the same extent as I did, and even then, shortcomings in combat and the companion system hold the game back, especially in a latter half that seems to drag as you get closer to the conclusion. I want people to play Resonance, but I can't ignore that any game that requires doing homework beforehand to enjoy is a bit lacking. If you do that homework though, Resonance easily stands besides the other A Plague Tale games as a great AA, story-driven experience.

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Zero Company Is The Rare Star Wars Game To Meaningfully Push A Genre Forward

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Star Wars has been inspiring video games practically since video games have existed, but unlike the trailblazing film series, it has mostly been content to follow the leader. As a result, we've gotten all sorts of Star Wars video games molded after familiar templates, from first-person shooters to racing games. Those have been enjoyable enough, but they're very much defined as: "genre, but Star Wars." It's rare, but not unheard of, for a Star Wars game to push a genre forward with a combination of new ideas and great execution. Star Wars Zero Company is one such case.

At first glance, it's easy to underestimate Zero Company, though. By all appearances this is simply XCOM, set in the world of Star Wars. You have a similar overhead perspective, commanding a small squad of commandos in turn-based combat as they take cover, flank and maneuver, and work together to take down formidable armies. And while that isn't inaccurate as shorthand, it would also sell the game short. Partly by capitalizing on the rich world of Star Wars itself, Zero Company finds ways to iterate further on XCOM, rather than merely imitate it.

Burn, baby, burn

First, some table-setting. Zero Company is set during the Clone Wars era of Star Wars, the tumultuous time seen in the prequel trilogy when the Republic was just on the verge of collapse into the Galactic Empire. Your player character, Hawks, is a down-and-out former Republic commander who started their own mercenary outfit after a disastrous mission gone wrong ruined their military career. The mercenaries, called Zero Company, are having money problems and struggling to find work, when a young Republic officer named Bennic offers steady, not-technically-Republic wet work in exchange for settling your debts. 

It would be easy to make Bennic sinister or conniving, dangling cash to desperate mercs, but this is one area where Zero Company excels. The characters are well-rounded and feel alive with humanity. Bennic is actually an honest broker for the Republic--a true believer who quickly folds himself into Zero Company and acts as the Republic's emissary. At first he seems like an assigned babysitter, but the friendship between Bennic and Hawks grows and changes in believable ways. The same could be said for the other members of Zero Company, like the decommissioned clone Trick or the grizzled old boxer Kabb Uppercut. 

The one slight exception is Cly, a Mandalorian bounty hunter who presents herself out of the blue to Zero Company as an asset they can't afford to refuse. Her story is the thinnest of all the named characters, and while it ultimately gets mildly more interesting, her inclusion felt perfunctory. Mandalorians are a popular piece of the Star Wars franchise, and her power set makes her a great inclusion to the tactical combat, so it makes sense to represent the Mando clan. I just wish her individual story and characterization were as strong as the rest.

You might say this is a Trick shot

As the adventure progresses, Zero Company finds itself facing a crisis flying just below the Republic's radar--a strange cult called the Coil that inducts new members with superhuman abilities, all rallied under the banner of a leader named Fathom. Bennic helps the team prioritize this threat, which feels appropriately sized for this story. In this era of Star Wars, the threat needs to be small enough that it doesn't attract much attention from the Jedi or the Grand Army of the Republic, but frightening enough that it could snowball if it isn't contained. Zero Company is punching above its weight taking on a galactic threat like this, and that gives the story real stakes while still retaining a sense of belonging in the Star Wars universe.

For me, the named characters were the stars of Zero Company, and I used them almost exclusively. Like an XCOM game, though, you can also recruit randomized soldiers to your army and develop them on their own, modeling them after your friends or your favorite Star Wars OCs. And as the story develops, you slowly open new options for the types of operators you can recruit, eventually gaining the ability to recruit droids and clones, which have their own specializations. Those specializations, and especially the ones for the named Zero Company characters, are really the secret sauce that makes Zero Company stand out from other tactics games.

As it happens, Star Wars is an especially fertile ground to have lots of differentiated power sets, so you aren't just limited to the usual archetypes like soldiers, heavies, and medics. By the time you finish Zero Company, you'll have access to clones, droids, a Mandalorian, a Jedi, an Umbaran, and whatever the heck a Kabb is. Each of them has their own attributes and most have abilities that are specially tailored to their unique identity in Star Wars lore. 

The diverse cast of Star Wars Zero Company

Take Cly, for example. She has the Mando's signature jet pack, making her an especially nimble operator who can cross great distances easily and ignore many height restrictions. If she lands in the middle of a set of enemies, she'll even knock them back and inflict burn damage, and by default her weapon is a pistol with three shots. It just feels so perfectly Mandalorian to rocket-drop into a scrum of weakened enemies and pick them all off with three quick blaster bolts. 

Your Jedi, meanwhile, excels at up-close melee combat, dealing heavy damage with her lightsaber, pushing and pulling enemies with the Force, and then dropping into a defensive stance that blocks many blaster bolts. And true to their Star Wars identity, droids are an incredibly useful support tool, able to grant your teammates extra moves and carry more equipment than anyone else. They're all so fun to play with. I often wished the squads were bigger so I could bring more of them along on missions, and picking and choosing which ones to make my core crew was difficult. 

Most of these abilities cost Action Points--three per character, per turn--which are well-tuned to balance your movement and attack abilities. My Hawks was a sniper, for instance, so I quickly had to internalize that since her main attack cost 2 AP, her movement was severely limited compared to the rest. She had just enough to reposition slightly, but couldn't move across the map like the others. And if I were already in an advantageous position, I could fire off a shot and then use her extra-long Overwatch ability to restrict enemy movement. Jae or Cly, meanwhile, could move much more effectively, but were much less accurate and powerful. Successful actions also build up a shared pool of Advantage (ADV), which enables extra-powerful moves like Trick's Rocket Strike, which does a ton of explosive damage in a concentrated location. I got in the habit of saving that little beauty for when enemy reinforcements showed up and crowded around an entry point. But ADV also has a lot of utility for giving you occasional access to moves with specialized use-cases, like Cly's aforementioned jetpack.

Your Jedi companion is great at controlling the space

Each combat encounter also has a rotating backup ability, which alternates between the members of your squad randomly each turn. Selecting your backup before starting your attack action will let another member of the squad take a shot too, doubling your effectiveness. But that also means you need to carefully position your squadmates and consider which ones have a clear line of sight before you choose a backup partner, adding another tactical wrinkle to combat. And it awards Bond XP between operators as well--more on that in a bit.

You use these abilities on a wide range of enemies, from regular humanoids to Clone Wars-era battle droids, including deadly droidekas, to the cultist Coil. The Coil is not quite a hivemind, since it doesn't have one shared consciousness. Instead, its fanatical followers all work individually but collaboratively toward a goal in perfect unison. (If you've seen the Apple TV show Pluribus, you'll have the general idea.) It's unnerving from a story standpoint and has neat applications in gameplay. Since the Coil are all linked, defeating one will often empower the next-closest Coil member with some special ability like extra defense or even cloaking. That adds yet another dynamic element, forcing you to carefully plan which ones to pick off and in which order to maximize your advantage over the rest, knowing that they'll be steadily ramping up in difficulty as you do.

And those Coil advantages are partially influenced by the mission briefs, where you'll sometimes be given a choice of which Coil upgrade to stop. There's no way to prevent both--the Coil abilities will get stronger in some way no matter what--but these decisions let you shape the types of challenges you'll face in the tactical missions. Your home base is where you'll spend mission cash on upgrades that apply to your whole team and black-market gear for your individual units. You'll also be able to upgrade your team's bonds, which start to unlock powerful upgrades across both operators when they reach the highest levels, manage their ability loadouts with unlimited free refunds to toy with different builds, adjust equipment and weapon mods, and more.

Well that's going to hurt

If that description hasn't made it clear, there are choices upon choices upon choices in Zero Company, but it never feels overwhelming or obtuse. Everything is digestible and clear, which is quite a feat for such a dense tactical game with so many options. I always felt fully in control of my decisions and knew exactly what I was doing.

While there was a great variety of abilities, enemies, and satisfying tactical choices, though, some of the missions did start to feel very familiar over my 30-hour playtime. I attribute this to similar objectives, which made many missions play very similarly. You often have to wipe the battlefield of all enemies, of course, but missions would often then end with getting to an extraction point, usually after a dose of reinforcements. The tactical combat itself is very fun, so it didn't bother me too much, but the lack of variety in mission objectives stood out as a weak spot.

While Zero Company uses cameos sparingly, the ones it does include are effective. Anakin Skywalker shows up briefly, so you can be completely overpowered for a handful of missions, and in the context of the Clone Wars cartoon, this is believably just another mission he was tangentially attached to for a little while before jetting off to other Jedi missions. I wasn't too sorry to see him go, because by that point I was developing such affection for my squad that I wanted to spend more time with them anyway. That's what makes the story so effective. The story of the Coil cult is a somewhat typical sci-fi threat, but I wanted to overcome it with my squad, as I had shaped and gotten to know them. We built bonds as a game mechanic, but I built bonds with them myself too. 

Star Wars Zero Company is like XCOM, but it is more than just an XCOM-like. Developer Bit Reactor set higher ambitions than simply slapping a Star Wars skin on a template. Star Wars is a rich playground for games, with loads of differentiated hero and enemy types and powers baked in, and Zero Company takes full advantage of that to make an excellent tactics game in its own right. In doing so, it has made the next great evolution of the genre.

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I’ve Played (Almost) Every Zombie Game, And This New One Still Feels Excitingly Fresh

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For as long as I can remember, I've enjoyed zombie fiction. I've always figured it's because I saw Romero's classics at way too young an age, but I've never wavered in my enthusiasm for the undead, be they in movies, TV shows, books, or video games. By now, I feel like I've seen, read, and played nearly all of them.

It's that familiarity with the genre that has had me so excited for No More Room in Hell 2 over the past few years, even through some early-access growing pains, and why I'm glad to see the 1.0 release stick the landing.

It's been a long journey to this 1.0 build for Torn Banner, the team behind the PvP medieval combat series Chivalry. I've been playing No More Room in Hell 2 for about two years now in early access and have watched as its studio tried to strike a chord with the community, which at times seemed fed up with the sequel and preferred its under-the-radar original. Balancing issues, bugs, and overall design issues got in the way at times, but I feel as though most have been washed away in its current form.

No More Room in Hell 2 is a first-person zombie-survival game designed for teams of eight. Right away, that's a pretty cool feature, as zombie games tend to be made for massive lobbies of dozens, like DayZ; smaller co-op teams, like Left 4 Dead; or solo experiences, like Days Gone. The novelty of eight players is a boon to the game, but it wouldn't mean much if, ultimately, that's all it had going for it. Thankfully, it has a lot else that works well in its favor. 

In its purposely slower-paced story missions, you'll move through campaigns set on large maps in Pennsylvania with a lot of lateral space to explore, taking you from the woods to residential neighborhoods to downtown areas and more, completing objectives as a group and hopefully escaping with the same number of beating hearts you arrived with.

No More Room in Hell 2 clearly draws on timeless zombie-fiction imagery, with the undead springing from caskets, banging on doors and windows until they break their seals, and shambling through graveyards like someone should warn Barbara. While the new console version naturally doesn't look as nice as the PC edition I've been playing for the past two years, the game has a strong sense of atmosphere no matter where you're playing it.

No More Room In Hell 2 takes players to a wide range of locations that feel like classic zombie-fiction set dressing.

In some campaigns, you'll start alone and must find each other through exploration. These missions are my favorites, as they feel especially desolate and dangerous, and that's always been what I look for in zombie games. Throughout early access, this was always meant to be a slow-burning, Romero-esque walk through hell, and it excels by achieving that vision.

Though nearly all zombies in the game are of the classic slow-moving type, even just one of them can spell trouble. They're relentless. In fact, on higher difficulties, there may even be too many, offering not enough breathing room for the highs to feel as high as they should. But on normal difficulty, the game finds a sweet spot. 

Killing just one of them often takes four or more swipes with a melee weapon, and that's if you're diligently hitting them in the head, chipping away at their skulls as their brains flop out like someone's stepped on a tube of toothpaste. Body blows will only serve to tire you faster than it will take out the restless ghouls--unless you happen to have a sharp weapon and cut off enough of their limbs to halt them. Letting them into your personal space is a tense affair, as it's important to let them get just close enough for you to hit them, but not close enough that they slash or bite at you. Learning to measure them up correctly is an early hurdle that will decide who lives or dies.

Managing stamina is a thoughtful and near-constant exercise in survival. A powerful kick ability allows you to gain some vital breathing space when you're being surrounded, but it also eats away a big chunk of your stamina. The same is true of running. Very early on, I learned to stay aware of my surroundings, because while running from the horde behind you may seem absolutely crucial, you may be heading straight toward another and won't stand to survive if you're exhausted when you get there.

Further demonstrating how seriously this game takes its zombie fiction, you can get infected mid-mission, and if you're not careful, you'll not only turn into one of them, but you'll become a speedier variant, losing control of your character as you're left to torment your fellow survivors from beyond the grave.

You can help your infected teammates, or you can wait for them to turn and then lop off their limbs.

This element is No More Room in Hell 2's coolest, because it allows for some really fascinating social dynamics. Pills will temporarily keep the infection at bay, and anyone infected will give away their illness by coughing every once in a while. But what if you don't have pills, or what if no one is willing to share theirs? They're not abundant enough to go around, so I've seen some people choose not to share, opting to take their chances with the fast ghoul who will soon come charging toward whoever is nearby. 

On the flipside, the infected person could distance themselves and try to hide their illness, just like the selfish guy in any zombie movie's group of survivors. This may buy them time to find a cure, or just escape with infected status while keeping their character alive. If they're more altruistic, they can instead sacrifice themselves just before they turn--provided they have any ammo--sparing their fellow survivors from dealing with the mess.

It's a hard decision to make in either case when you're playing on difficulties higher than beginner, because permadeath is a part of the experience. Characters are re-rolled randomly, applying some basic stats and a backstory, and you can customize their clothing if you'd like. From there, you'll level them with each successful campaign, unlocking skills of your choosing at regular intervals that help you lean into particular builds. Knowing I had no plans to use guns all that much, I often grabbed skills that buffed my stamina and melee damage, and it's really satisfying to see a character come together over many hours. 

But should they die, they're lost for good. 

The stakes feel so high. Taking my level 20+ character into a round that quickly went into the gutter was nerve-racking. Thankfully, these lengthy campaign missions that typically take anywhere from 30-60 minutes offer a few early exits on your travels. If you're determined to just get out alive, you can extract early, even as an individual, at the cost of any character XP gains. But hey, at least you'll be leaving with your life.

While heavy, weighted melee combat helps sell this immersive experience even more, gunplay on controller leaves something to be desired. The aim assist isn't reliable enough, as it's quite sticky but then doesn't track zombie heads well, meaning you'll often waste ammo hitting them in the chest, while trying to correct for it feels hard to pinpoint, too. It's serviceable at closer range, but only barely, and partly because the zombies are attracted to noise, and you ought not be firing loud weapons unless it's the only thing keeping you alive in any given moment. 

This means you can, and probably will, get through some missions without ever using guns. I do wish my co-op partners understood that better so we could keep the hordes off our backs more often, but even these teammate frustrations feel authentic to what living in a zombie world might feel like. 

While you should stick to beginner difficulty for a few early rounds, the game is at its best when permadeath is in play on higher difficulties.

The teamwork required in this game is intense, and some would-be-selfish players must find themselves banding together at times, because the deeper you get into a mission, the harder it becomes, and you don't want to fight off that final horde with a deficit in your team size. There are plenty of times where you or a teammate could be totally gassed and about to be swarmed, only for an ally to save the day. But in this world, there's little time to celebrate, as the next horde likely isn't far off.

Another issue the game's newly implemented controller support suffers from is strangely janky menus. Exploring options screens or even different overlays in the main menu, like moving from character upgrades to the in-game store to the challenge system, often feels clunky; my cursor would disappear, and I'd need to guess where I'm clicking. 

It's merely an annoyance in the main menu but can become a bigger issue on missions, like if you have a teammate playing music that his headset is picking up and you can't easily get to the mute button. No More Room in Hell 2 doesn't let you stop and breathe very often, so when this happened to me, I didn't have time to fumble around in the social menu. Instead, I found myself wishing that guy would just get bitten. I'm not proud of it. It's sad what these apocalyptic times make of us.

Outside of the main campaign-style "Objective" mode, there's also a wave-based survival mode. I've never been nearly as interested in wave-based zombie modes--it's why I don't even bother playing Call of Duty Zombies these days--but I like No More Room in Hell 2's survival mode just fine as a shorter alternative to the lengthy missions. They're good for farming weekly challenges and leveling characters faster than the real attraction allows, but I'd sooner just decide to play when I have the time for the game's best version of itself.

Though No More Room in Hell 2 clearly leans into decades of zombie history, it feels, most of all, like a great mash-up of two of my favorite zombie games: It has the dread-inducing, life-or-death stakes of State of Decay wrapped in a tight co-op experience reminiscent of Left 4 Dead. Though some subpar shooting mechanics keep it from being as enjoyable as either of those, that's also a very high bar in my mind, and No More Room in Hell 2 still accomplishes a hell of a lot.

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