Author Archives: Dan Stapleton

Following in the footsteps of Ubisoft’s The Crew series before it, Rider’s Republic aims to cram the engine of a high-octane arcade racer under the hood of a sprawling online open world – except this time the engine is your legs and the hood is a bunch of extreme sports events so over the top it would make the late ‘90s blush. It’s a somewhat familiar formula, but what’s really impressive is that (with the notable and occasional game crash aside) it overwhelmingly succeeds at providing the ultimate downhill sports fantasy. Whether I was blasting into the sky in my rocket-powered wingsuit or sweating bullets as I completed obstacle courses on my bike, Riders Republic awoke the extreme sports fanatic inside me and kept me hooked for over 60 hours and counting.

Riders Republic uses a structure that will be very recognizable if you’ve played any of The Crew or Forza Horizon games: you explore a beautiful open-world, participate in exciting races and trick contests, search for collectibles, and unlock better gear and more difficult activities as you go – only instead of driving vehicles cross-country, you’ll be swapping between a bicycle, wingsuit, snowboard, and pair of skis to scream down mountains. Riders Republic sticks very closely to the existing open-world racing game formula we’ve seen many times before, but having an extreme sports version of those racers is hardly a bad thing.

Whether you’re catching air in a snowboard trick competition or flying through said air in a wingsuit race, every one of Riders Republic’s sports is an absolute blast to take on. Riding bikes is all about precision and managing your peddling stamina meter, which becomes more challenging depending on your terrain. Riding a bike in the snow, for example, is a recipe for disaster that’s best avoided. Using your skis or a snowboard, on the other hand, is all about controlling your speed and momentum as you slide across more slippery locales. And in contrast to bike riding, skis and snowboards perform pretty terribly on harder terrain like dirt and pavement. Meanwhile, the wingsuit requires you to embrace your inner daredevil and glide or rocket dangerously close to hard objects at a terminal velocity. Mastering each machine of gnarliness Riders Republic offers is challenging, diverse, and guaranteed to result in a few hilarious but nasty spills.

The events you’ll be using them in can be just as varied, throwing you down dozens of mountainsides with plenty of different goals to shake things up. Races make speed the name of the game, and they can be some seriously tense competitions that put your reflexes and guts to the test as you shred downhill, fly over gaps, and dodge obstacles. But you’ll also need to master your showoff skills in stunt contests where the key to success is pulling off tricks and grinding on rails to rack up points in the style of other arcade sports games like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.

Mastering each course as I earned better gear, leveled up each of my extreme sport careers, and unlocked even more contests was consistently satisfying, and the incredible amount of things to do meant that loop never got stale. For example, after beating my head against a wall in a particularly challenging rocket wingsuit race, I took a break to play some snowboard trick contests and felt like I’d jumped into an entirely different game. With so much to do, I never felt burnt out with enough of Riders Republic to put it down for very long, and that’s an impressive feat considering how easy it usually is to bore me.

The map is also downright loaded with other things to do as well, whether it’s collectibles to hunt for, lovely sights to see, or organic events to discover like hidden stunt activities – some of which ask you to complete insane task like clearing an impossibly large gap or riding a tiny steel beam across a canyon. Interestingly, the map takes seven real-world national parks and 45 actual landmarks and smashes them all together into one massive location, where the snowy Grand Teton Summit can sit comfortably next to the rocky Angel Arch. This bizarre mishmashing of real-world locations and impossibly diverse biomes all welded together is not only an awesome sight to behold, it makes one map feel like several, each with their own notable features, colorful landscapes, and wildly different paths to bomb down.

Eventually you’ll level up enough to gain access to more difficult activities, including Big Events and Boss Events. Unfortunately, these don’t particularly live up to their name, in that they basically just feel like slightly longer versions of the standard events. Instead of doing something crazy like Forza Horizon’s Showcases, Riders Republic uses these activities as a sort of skill check to confirm you’ve gained enough loot and improved your skill enough to advance to the next bracket of challenges. That’s fine, but not as exciting as I’d hoped from a game that’s constantly shoving its over-the-top qualities in your face.

To help you pass some of Riders Republic’s more challenging undertakings, you’ll unlock new gear as you progress that’ll make the going much easier. A rocket wingsuit with higher stats will make it easier for you to turn and use your rocket boost for longer, while a better snowboard might make you faster in deep snow that would normally slow you down. Getting new gear is essential to be competitive in the most contentious activities and while it’s certainly possible to compete with subpar gear, those who have grinded (literally and figuratively) for better gear have an incredible advantage. Therefore, leveling up and gaining new gear becomes a high priority and an addictive part of a sandbox that already gives you dozens of reasons to keep racing.

While you’ll be buying most of those upgrades with in-game currecny, you can also spend it on cosmetic stuff to make your character match your particular style – which in my case meant dressing up in the most ridiculous costumes I could find, like an elephant in a suit, a giraffe in a tuxedo, or a dumb-looking, purple unicorn. They really go all-out with some of the options so you can make your rider as ridiculous as you want, and seeing other players in all their freakish glory is definitely part of the fun.

There’s a whole host of compelling competitive multiplayer modes as well, including ranked Free for All races that test your skills against a small group of live players, Arena matches that pit two teams of six against each other as you fight for control of a skate park, and most notably: Mass Races. Free for All and 6v6 Arena matches are a good way to pass the time and play competitively if you grow bored of racing against player ghosts, but they’re also run of the mill modes I’ve seen in other games before. Mass Races are a whole new beast entirely.

Mass Races start with a server-wide announcement calling all players to stop what they’re doing and participate. If you answer the call, you’re thrown into a lengthy racing tournament with 64 players and loads of XP and accolades at stake for those who manage to score a podium finish. As you might expect, racing against 63 other players is utter chaos, but the kind of chaos that works perfectly in Riders Republic, which seems to welcome and thrive in it. The absolute horror show of dozens of people all pushing one another out of the way, flying off cliff edges, and smashing into obstacles at terminal velocity is a sight to behold even if you find yourself putting on a tragic showing. And if you actually manage to earn yourself a podium finish, the payoff and bragging rights are immense.

The only drawback from these ambitious events is that, as you might imagine, technical issues sometimes muck things up. Apparently something about cramming 64 players in the same event all at once isn’t an easy task to accomplish, because about 10% of the time I participated in one it would crash to the main menu – though admittedly it seemed to get better over time as the launch server issues resolved themselves. Even so, crashes and goofy glitches are a pretty regular occurrence in Riders Republic, at least on the Xbox Series X where I played. Once I fell through the world map and met an inglorious demise, and another time I crashed into a tree trunk so hard I got stuck inside of it with no way out. But more often than not encountering a bug just meant crashing to the dashboard with only some inscrutable error code to keep me company. Seeing these sorts of things in a large online game like this isn’t exactly surprising, especially close to launch, but they’re still just frequent enough here that it can start to frustrate.

When Darkest Dungeon was first released in early access in 2015, it was a minor miracle. The tension-filled roguelike-ish design, the stress system on top of a Lovecraftian horror setting, and especially the sound, amazingly atmospheric narrator, and music combined to create an instant classic of a tactical role-playing game that was then refined into an outstanding and distinctive final version a year later. It’s a tough act to follow, but Red Hook Games has given it a worthy shot with the early access launch of Darkest Dungeon 2. The good news is that this sequel has a different enough structure and technical improvements that it more than justifies its existence, taking the original formula into surprisingly new directions instead of simple additions we often see in follow ups. The less good news is that there are some pretty significant tweaks that seem necessary before it can really hold a torch to the original.

Aside from the switch to animated 3D graphics that closely match the gritty style of the original’s 2D paper doll characters, there are two massive changes to Darkest Dungeon 2: the campaign is significantly smaller in scope, and character relationships are now the center of the stress system instead of individual mentality. Both take the experience in fascinating, if not always good, new directions.

Darkest Dungeon 2 takes place in a single wagon as it travels through a handful of hostile territories before landing at the occasional inn to regroup. Instead of hundreds of hours spent building up a town and juggling dozens of heroes as in Darkest Dungeon 1, a campaign takes place over the course of five or six hours, with five total campaigns promised in the interface (only one is available in the initial Early Access release).

The wagon proceeds through three settings that you choose, and moves to different nodes within each, functioning fairly similarly to rooms within a dungeon. Upgrades to characters come either at the inn every so often or by choosing to take the wagon to hospitals or shops in the traveling sections. Permanent upgrades don’t come from building infrastructure, but unlocking items and characters on a progress bar at the end of each run.

There are several side effects of this. The biggest is that it shrinks the story, both of the campaign directly and the one that you can tell yourself over the course of a run. Instead of being a larger strategic management challenge, it’s only about the four people who happen to be in the wagon at a given time. This makes it a lot easier to jump in and out of a run, but I personally miss the feeling of managing a large team of characters in a tactics game, like the original Darkest Dungeon, XCOM, Battletech, or even something like Football Manager. There’s no longer-term emergent storytelling happening in Darkest Dungeon 2, and this makes it overall less exciting, even if it is more manageable.

On the other hand, a major knock-on effect of the smaller campaign focus is that Darkest Dungeon 2’s characters feel like distinct individuals instead of classes. In the first Darkest Dungeon, Dismas was a name given to one of several members of the Highwayman class you’d be likely to recruit. In Darkest Dungeon 2, Dismas is the name of the singular Highwayman you use in every run and that you’ll develop over every campaign by unlocking skills; at the same time you’ll see each character’s backstory in flashbacks that occasionally have little combat puzzles in them. It all makes characters feel like people instead of merely cogs in a machine; for example, poisoning Audrey the Grave Robber’s rich abusive husband is surprisingly satisfying, as is customizing her new skills to make her into a stealth character.

Another way that Darkest Dungeon 2 diverges from its predecessor is by having its characters become friends or enemies across the course of a run. Since Fire Emblem: Awakening, tactical RPGs with character relationships have become common, and it’s almost always either amazing or at least fun background color, like in XCOM 2: War of the Chosen… except for here, where it threatens to derail everything.

In Darkest Dungeon 2, health and sanity meters – the big innovation from Darkest Dungeon 1 – still exist, but each character also has a relationship bar with everyone else in the party. When those meters fill up with either positive or negative emotion, that triggers a friendship or a rivalry of a certain kind, like Hopeful or Hateful, that can trigger buffs or debuffs or even give certain extra combat actions. (There’s also “Amorous,” for those of us who are excited to know that their Darkest Dungeon characters are smooching.)

Stress also works a bit differently in that, instead of causing an individual to develop a negative reaction, a full stress bar causes a meltdown which damage the relationships in a group. The net effect is that you’re managing your party’s overall happiness with one another, and if that starts falling apart with one person, there’s a cascading effect of negative feelings. On paper, this seems like a good idea: what Darkest Dungeon 1 did for the individual effects of stress turning people paranoid or cowardly, Darkest Dungeon 2 does for small group dynamics. Unfortunately, there are a couple major issues with it.

The first issue is conceptual. One of the strengths of Darkest Dungeon 1 was the simplicity of its system: there’s a single stress bar and having it fill in probably makes that character useless. In Darkest Dungeon 2, a four-person party means four individual stress and health bars, and a total of six different relationships within the party. Fracturing that central mechanic across several different meters makes it feel harder to track and less important when it does break down.

This combines with the other major issue with the relationship system in the early access version: it’s just not especially well-balanced right now. If you want to manage your party’s stress level, you pretty much have to upgrade one of a few skills like the Plague Doctor’s “Ounce of Prevention” skill at the start of a run and use it regularly. Alternately, if you don’t want to worry about stress, you can get by without even bothering to take those characters or upgrades. I found it pretty easy, at least early in a run, to simply fight my way past the debuffs. They’re annoying, certainly, but they’re not run-ending the way a breakdown in Darkest Dungeon 1 could be.

And this is the biggest issue with Darkest Dungeon 2’s new mechanics. They combine in a way that removes the signature tension that Darkest Dungeon 1 created. Because a run is a single, multi-hour progression, there’s no ability to run away and only get partial rewards for the current set of characters – in Darkest Dungeon 2 you’re either going forward or you’re starting over. Darkest Dungeon 1 was filled with the compelling decision of “should I try to guide this barely standing party to a finish line or should I bail now and keep them alive?” In Darkest Dungeon 2, you simply go as far as you can until you have to click “Abandon Run” and then try again. Having a single long dungeon run means there are a bunch of smaller decisions with smaller effects overall. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing! If you were stressed about those difficult decisions in the original, Darkest Dungeon 2 might be much more your speed. It’s much less intense overall, for good and for ill.

Darkest Dungeon 2 is still a very strong moment-to-moment game, despite those systemic issues. Combat is largely the same as it was in its predecessor; it’s a one-dimensional tactics game where face monsters on a line and use appropriate skills to bash, weaken, and zap them before they can do the same to you. What’s dramatically improved, however, are the character models and animations. Instead of being barely animated paper doll-style cutouts, the characters move and sway when idle and prepare to attack when you start clicking on different combat skills. I still get excited just switching between two different skills with the Hellion and watching her raise her halberd above her head versus pulling it behind her body.

The sound and music is also top-notch – again. Narrator Wayne June, whose deep and unsettling voice set precisely the right tone in the first game, has returned for an encore, as has composer Stuart Chadwick. Both seem to be slightly more subdued than they were in the original, but in a way that fits Darkest Dungeon 2’s long road-trip vibe.

The early access version of Darkest Dungeon 2 contains only one of six planned campaigns in the initial menu, although it’s hard to tell what exactly – other than a final boss – would change from one campaign to the next. The early access period also has some quality of life issues and a sparse options menu: a brightness adjuster would be extremely welcome, as would an option to mute the sound when it’s in the background.

It’s also only got nine characters, as opposed to the first game’s 16-plus classes; most of the new cast are holdovers, although the new Runaway character is a welcome addition. I managed to finish that campaign on my fifth or sixth try and unlocked most of the characters after less than a week of play. So there’s certainly some content here, but it’s likely only scratching the surface of what Darkest Dungeon 2 should become in a year or so.

Fracked just wants you to have fun, and so it throws a lot at you. You’ll engage in shootouts, climb rickety structures, solve puzzles, and zip-line from platform to platform. Maybe you’ve seen all the individual parts before in other VR games, but that’s not a big problem. As it funneled me from action scene to action scene, I had little time to dwell on which game did what first.

The setting here is a mining operation run by an evil corporation. Your job is to kill all the workers (don’t worry, they’re purple interdimensional zombies) before confronting the maniacal CEO, a talkative fellow with a foul mouth and a southern drawl. This is a fine setup, but it’s hardly original. How many times have we stopped evil corporations from sapping a planet’s resources? The voice acting is great, though, and the whole thing feels stylish in a way many PSVR games don’t.

At the start, you find yourself skiing high up on a snowy mountain. You hardly have time to soak in the appealing cel-shaded world before an explosion causes an avalanche you have to outrace. Occasionally, beat-driven electronic music kicks in, suiting the style of the world nicely. It’s an exciting start that’s perfectly in line with the action-hero exploits to come.

To play Fracked, you’ll need a pair of Move controllers. In the headset these become your hands, appearing in your vision as meaty, floating gloves you’ll put to good use: you use them to pull yourself behind cover, shoot and reload guns, climb ladders, turn cranks, and operate levers.

Despite the Move controllers’ lack of analog sticks, you have full freedom of movement. The controls work exceptionally well, all things considered, especially if you’re familiar with games like Skyrim VR that use a similar control scheme. Also, when you have to climb, reload your weapon, or use your hands in general, everything feels nicely tactile. It didn’t take me long to get the hang of the controls, and soon I was navigating the mountainside mining operation with ease.

The campaign’s pacing is nicely varied, with environmental puzzles and exciting climbing sections sprinkled between the action-heavy shooting areas. In fact, I preferred the quieter sections over the shootouts, which can feel drawn-out and repetitive after a while. One reason is because the enemy variety is lacking, with only a few different types of foes to go up against. You have some basic gun-toting soldiers who usually just stand in place and shoot at you, and then there’s the exploding variety who run at you and detonate in a one-hit kill if they get close enough. Finally, you’ll encounter heavies who stomp around littering the ground with landmines. There aren’t any bosses to speak of, or other enemies that might make you rethink your combat approach.

The weapons feel satisfying to use, but unfortunately the more powerful ones, like shotguns and grenade launchers, are single-use and they disappear when you run out of ammo. So the only two guns you can always access are a pistol and an Uzi-like automatic weapon that shoots lasers. These are serviceable, but unexciting. It would be nice to have more weapon variety available during any given shootout.

Combat is fine in small doses, but later in the roughly three-hour run time you’ll have to kill a lot of enemies before you can move on. I died quite a bit in these sections, often in ways that felt unfair. For instance, the kamikaze enemies generally make noise as they approach, but sometimes one would appear behind me and explode without warning.

Fortunately, there’s plenty to do aside from combat. At various points you’ll find yourself skiing, climbing, zip-lining between platforms, operating a crane, and a lot more besides. I’ve done most of those things in VR before, but never in the same game. Climbing is particularly fun. From the outside you might look silly flailing with your Move controllers, but in the headset you’re shimmying around collapsing structures like Nathan Drake. The puzzles are also well executed, not too hard or easy.

As I approached the final encounter, though, the combat sections became more frequent, the map flooding with more and more waves of enemies, bogging down the pace before it came to a close. But prior to that, I had a lot of fun.

A tactical RPG adventure, Disciples: Liberation is a fun outing in a fantasy world that puts you in the shoes of a classic RPG protagonist with special powers, a motley crew of companions, and a bone to pick with fate… then just keeps escalating the stakes further than you’d ever expect them to go. In fact, it punches above its weight class in the quality of its combat and content, but lets itself down with a disorganized mess of extra systems and some very prominent bugs.

Blending a turn-based tactics game with a proper RPG, Disciples: Liberation has you wander through isometric environments as you play through a hefty 80-hour RPG story – I did more than a few sidequests and optional fights, ending up at 92 hours played. It’s not an open world, but it’s not linear either; each chapter is divided up into a few regions that can be tackled in any order. Within those regions you fight a lot of turn-based battles, and it’s good that those are fun and (aside from being a bit slow at times) pretty openly designed because there are a lot of them.

It’s a suitably sprawling, cosmic story for Nevandaar, a fantasy world that’s dark and terrible, but still allows for goodness and redemption. Your character, a gutter-born mercenary named Avyanna, has plenty of dialogue choices: Kind ones denoted by halos, aggressive ones denoted by horns, and snarky ones denoted by Avyanna’s own twilight wings symbol. The sidequests have enough diversity, and enough compelling characters, that I couldn’t always easily decide who to side with.

There’s a lot of branching dialogue, most of it pretty good, but some of it’s really cheesy and accompanied by equally cheesy voice acting. That’s honestly a positive thing, because Disciples: Liberation knows what tone it’s going for and sticks to it. Nevandaar is a comfort-food setting; this is a familiar, feel-good, generic fantasy done right.

When you settle in for a fight you’ll control Avyanna, a few of her named companions, and a set of generic units you’ve recruited on your travels or produced back home in the ancient magical city of Yllian. There’s a lot of variety to the units, from armored infantry to bone golems, possessed berserkers, and feral elf snipers. There are over 50 units, all told, and units level up as you go, so nothing ever becomes truly irrelevant. (Unfortunately, though your companions are a diverse and weird lot, on the battlefield they’re just reskins of basic units with higher stats.)

In addition to its front line use, each unit can also be placed in one of your three back line slots, where it contributes a unique power from afar by buffing your units or weakening your enemies. Pro tip: Winter Dryads give your entire army permanent regeneration, which I found invaluable.

The combat maps are an ideal size, giving you enough room to maneuver and a sprinkling of terrain to play around. They avoid both the trap of feeling like a tight chessboard and the classic genre mistake of attempting environmental realism at the cost of being tactically interesting. No playstyle feels penalized, nor does any style feel fundamentally overpowered. Both melee-centric and ranged options have their high points, and while mobility is strong, units get bonuses and healing if they choose not to use an action point. Those small bonuses for not acting are brilliant design, allowing defensive strategies to flourish in a genre normally obsessed with aggressive movement. The enemy AI does its best, and does focus fire pretty well, but is very bad at knowing when to time its special abilities and truly terrible at staying put to capitalize on those bonuses.

I liked to build my armies out of combos of Undead (who have staying power), Demons (who hit hard), and Elves (to pick off the stragglers). The human Empire units are all obnoxious god-botherers and I couldn’t stand their voice shouts after a while, so I mostly didn’t use them. One of my favorite army compositions came about mid-game, when my undead Death Knights would inflict the chilled effect on enemies and Elf snipers, who automatically critical on chilled foes, would pick them off. Meanwhile Avyanna – who I’d built into a teleporting battle magician – would wreak havoc with controlling spells in the enemy’s back line.

The spells are a particular joy, with an extensive spellbook of magic to collect that varies from situational buffs and fireballs to weird utility spells like walls or clouds of mist. It really nails the feel of that classic fantasy magic-user with a spell for every situation, even if you’re playing as one of Avyanna’s melee builds.

Other systems, however, seem designed almost at random. Resources for building your base and upgrading your troops are poorly balanced, with some critical and others all but useless – I had a stockpile of over 200,000 wood and iron at the end of the campaign but constantly wanted more gold. They also accumulate in real time while the game runs, but can only be picked up in your base, so if you really wanted unlimited resources you could leave Disciples: Liberation running and visit every hour or so. There’s other stuff that generally feels irrelevant and only comes up as a frustration, like persistent damage between unrelated combats, or the arbitrary limitation on how many buildings you can place in your settlement.

None of that really detracts from the otherwise nice story and combat, though. What does are the interface, which slows down gameplay, and the bugs, which are both frustrating and too numerous to list. The interface itself just has delays built in: It’s riddled with submenus and loves to use three clicks for a task when one would do. It’s also poorly signposted outside of combat, doing things like showing you a total for a number but not what that number means – it’s not fun to reverse-engineer precisely what each point of strength does.

The bugs, on the other hand, are more than mere annoyances. Some were just exploits, like one that let me add infinite units to my army. Others were annoying but survivable, like low-level combats that can’t be autoresolved, or skills that seem to do nothing. Other issues consistently cropped up that required me to reload a recent quicksave or quit out and restart. I can’t be comprehensive, but I’ll give a few examples that required a reboot to fix: A persistent bug made me unable to interact with the world at random. Clicking “Done” too quickly after combat locked me on the summary screen. I’m a veteran of weird bugs and probably have more patience for them than most, but these were bad enough that I’d be sure they’re fixed before you commit to play.

None of them were apocalyptic, of course. My save worked, and I was ultimately able to finish relatively unimpeded, but it left me with the sour taste that combos, skill bonuses, and other key parts of the game either didn’t work. Or, worse, that they didn’t work and I had no way to tell they didn’t work.