Tag Archives: Star Wars Outlaws

Game of the Year 2024 – Most Disappointing

Honorable Mention – Dragon’s Dogma II

I knew there was a strong possibility that Dragon’s Dogma II and I wouldn’t get along as swimmingly as I had hoped before it released, but I wanted to give it a fair shake anyway. I really tried to like this game, but it’s just too hardcore of an experience for me. That isn’t to say that it’s a bad game. Plenty of people love their video games to be both punishing and obtuse, and Dragon’s Dogma II is the epitome of both. I was disappointed with Dragon’s Dogma II, but it was a long shot to begin with.

The Plucky Squire

I wrote a whole thing about The Plucky Squire back in September about how utterly infuriating this whole game was. It was glitchy mess that constantly interrupted your progression to slowly pan around the map towards your obvious objectives or force you to listen as characters exposited at you for a while. As a game, it genuinely had no faith in the person playing it as evidenced by its over-tutorialization and hand holding.

Despite all of my issues with the game, I still powered through and made it to the final boss fight. It was there that The Plucky Squire fell apart in the middle of said final boss fight and crashed. Since then, I have not been able to load my game back up and finish it. I could simply restart the entire chapter of the game and be done with it, but my experience so far has left a terrible taste in my mouth. I don’t think I’ll be returning to this one.

Star Wars: Outlaws

Star Wars: Outlaws isn’t a bad game — it’s just a boring one. In my 8 or so hours playing it, I had already begun to feel like I had identified the game’s loop and decided I already had my fill. It didn’t help that the game itself just didn’t play great. There were multiple instances of my character mantling something or using a ladder when I didn’t want them to, which isn’t great for when you’re trying to avoid being seen by the only Storm Troopers in the galaxy who can actually hit a target. Mechanically, Star Wars: Outlaws is uninspired and repetitive even when it’s working well.

But even if it was more mechanically interesting, the story (from what I experienced) was just this boilerplate Star Wars narrative that wasn’t engaging at all. I didn’t hate the main character, but I didn’t feel any affinity for them either. The main story line is a real confusing one too, focusing on your character building up a team to execute a big heist. That on its own is whatever, but when every mission feels like an underwhelming heist as is, you eventually lose confidence in the game’s ability to make that big finale compelling.

While the game has been patched a lot since I last played it, I think there are core issues with it that can’t simply be patched out. From the jump Star Wars: Outlaws feels like its doing its best Star Wars impression while offering nothing particularly new or interesting. Maybe it gets better after fifteen hours or something, but I just don’t care enough to return to it. Star Wars: Outlaws is underwhelming but fine.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard

I felt so strongly about this wet fart of a game that I wrote a damn article about it — that’s how much of an impression it left. To summarize my feelings about Dragon Age: The Veilguard, I first need to contextualize some things: First, I am not, nor have I ever been a fan of Dragon Age as a series. I’ve never hated it or anything, I’ve just never felt anything about this franchise. Secondly, I’ve played the Mass Effect series, and for the most part am a fan of it. I consider those games to (mostly) be pretty well written and compelling.

While Dragon Age: The Veilguard has some decent story lines and a couple of compelling characters, I think from top-to-bottom, that game is devoid of any soul. It is the paint-by-numbers version of an RPG. Nothing you do or say matters because you will be the hero, and nothing is going to derail that inevitability. Dialogue options feel less like making choices, and more like picking the tone of a predetermined line. The combat is flashy but gets incredibly repetitive after you fight the same recycled enemies throughout duration of the game, and even the few boss fights you encounter don’t do much to keep things fresh.

I didn’t even have particularly high hopes for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. I knew these weren’t games I had ever enjoyed, but the combat looked fun enough for me to try getting onboard. For the first few hours I was really enjoying my time with the game. I liked the characters I had met and was curious about their lives. The world seemed cool even if the lore was a little dense and hard to follow as someone without any background with the franchise. But I was really ready to engage with this game as a whole, but it just consistently showed me how paper-thin of an experience it was.

There were rarely gray areas in the narrative. Dragon Age made it very clear that it wasn’t interested in challenging anyone with divisive storytelling, ensuring that just about every conflict would eventually be wrapped up nicely and neatly with a little bow on top. There are moments when the writing is genuinely compelling, but rarely does The Veilguard have the confidence in both itself and the player to let these moments breathe. By and large, most stories seem to wrap up a bit too nicely, usually allowing everyone to get the closure they desired.

But at the end of the day, I still beat the damn thing because it was fun to play. The gameplay loop was decent, the set-pieces were nice, and the environments were cool to wander in, even if there was rarely a reason to poke around for secrets. I feel like some people will really enjoy their time with this game, while others, like myself, will just be completely underwhelmed by it.

That’s day three of Game of the Year behind us. Come back tomorrow for the final top ten list of games. Consider subscribing to The Bonus World so you can get an email updating you whenever we publish something new.

The Spotlight – 08

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The Spotlight is a monthly summary that encapsulates some of the more notable media experiences I’ve had over the past thirty days. From insights on games played, to articles worth checking out, and even cool stories from tabletop role-playing games, it all has a place in the Spotlight.

Fair word of warning: this month has been very hectic and most of my time has been spent coordinating and executing a move to a different apartment. So this may not be the most comprehensive Spotlight we’ve had.

For the month of September, 2024, here’s what I’m shining the spotlight on.

Games

Astro Bot

An absolute delight from top to bottom. Looks amazing, feels great to move around and use all of the powers. Soundtrack is great. Excellent fan service. Not terribly challenging. Pretty forgiving checkpoints. No real penalty or lose state.

I’ve never really considered myself overly attached to the legacy of the PlayStation brand for a number of reasons, but I’ve grown up alongside of this brand and its characters and can absolutely appreciate aspects of its history. Astro Bot isn’t just one of the best 3D platformers I’ve played, but it’s also a love letter to (and possibly the greatest advertising vehicle for) the PlayStation, its games, hardware, and the many characters associated with its consoles.

I don’t want to belabor the point here, but Astro Bot is an absolute delight to play even if you’re not necessarily nostalgic for the PlayStation brand itself. The platforming is excellent, the soundtrack is great, it’s beautiful to look at, and the levels and boss fights are all fantastic.

It all gets even better if you have an affinity for the PlayStation brand itself. The story of Astro Bot is that you and hundreds of other bots decked out in popular PlayStation character outfits, are flying through space in their spaceship, which is a PS5, when they are attacked by a real nasty alien who knocks them out of the sky and scatters the characters and PS5 components throughout the galaxy. You are literally tasked with saving PlayStation characters and rebuilding a PlayStation 5 in Astro Bot, and while you could look at that as a shameless and gross advertisement you’re paying to experience, I would urge you to look at it like I see it, which is a wonderful celebration of the PlayStation brand.

Star Wars Outlaws

I really want to like Star Wars Outlaws, and I feel like in a few months I’ll be able to do that. As it is right now though, the game is far too buggy for me to want to spend anymore time with. While I’m curious about the story and enjoy the simplistic, if at times uninspired, gameplay loop, the entire experience feels rocky at best.

I’ve encountered a lot of bugs and weird glitches that have hampered my progress, but I also think the stealth system in general is just kind of busted at the moment. You get spotted through walls and cover elements too often to feel confident in the moves you have to make, and more frustratingly, even when you do manage to be completely stealthy about something, you’re still liable to be punished for it as if you were caught.

Star Wars Outlaws is big on its faction system, but it doesn’t feel great when you manage to stealthily double cross a gang without ever being detected, only to still lose reputation with them when you complete the mission. If no one saw me during that whole mission, then why am I still suffering the consequences? As it is, the system de-incentivizes being stealthy, and pushes you to be more willing to blast your way through everything cause it doesn’t matter.

It’s unfortunate, but hopefully Ubisoft will do what they do and fix their busted games further down the line. That’s when I’ll check back in.

NBA 2K25

There is a dark secret to The Bonus World that I think you should know now: Every single one of these articles should include whatever the newest version of the NBA 2K series is out, in them. This series, and now NBA 2K25, are by and large my most played games. They are my comfort food. They’re the thing I do when I’m watching a TV show in another monitor or listening to a podcast. NBA 2K25 is no different.

This is a basketball game like every one of them that came before. It feels really good to play and looks great. It’s also chock full of modes that are filled with some of the most predatory micro-transactions I’ve ever seen. The game throws pop-up ads for in-game currency up on its main screen, and uses the same button for selecting a game mode to buy whatever is on the pop-up. It’s so slimy and evil. I don’t play those modes and I don’t give this game more money than I need to. But I play hundreds of hours of the franchise modes, which more than justifies the base purchase price for me.

The Plucky Squire

The Plucky Squire is a visually stunning game with some truly cool ideas that’s unfortunately marred by tons of technical issues and downright baffling game design. You play as the titular squire as they run through an adventure they’ve completed many times in the past, because The Plucky Squire is actually a children’s book. As things come to a crescendo in the expected adventure, the main villain reveals his disdain with always failing and being defeated, and then launching your ass straight out of the book and into the physical world.

From there, you’ll split your time between the “real” world, and the newly written version of the book where the villain wins, spanning the world and helping its inhabitants. Between slashing goblins with your sword, you’ll occasionally come across larger areas that can’t be traversed in their current state. Written on the ground are passages from the very book you’re inside of, that you can remove words from and swap them with other words from other passages.

For instance, an early puzzle had a large boulder blocking the exit and a passage beside it that more or less said the same thing. Elsewhere on the map, there was a passage about a small frog that I could remove the “small” descriptor from, and replace the “large” in the boulder description with to instantly shrink the size of the boulder, allowing me passage to the next screen.

Unfortunately, The Plucky Squire has zero faith in you as a player to figure out any puzzle solution on your own, let alone even remember the plot of the game from screen to screen. The Plucky Squire frequently over-explains itself to the point of being pandering. Just as any gameplay momentum is built up, you are quite literally frozen in place to listen to some dialogue from the narrator, or your traveling companions, or some random NPC, or just to be shown a sweeping shot of the entire map so you can really appreciate it. I wouldn’t even call it excessive hand-holding, rather, it’s more like The Plucky Squire jammed its fingers in my nose and is pulling me through every aspect of the game so I don’t have to think about anything for too long.

Oh, and the cherry on top of it all is that the game is so buggy and broken that I’ve repeatedly lost progress from having to reload saves because a puzzle suddenly just stopped working. I’ve also encountered several crashes, each of which cost me more time, and one that, as of writing this, still prohibits me from finishing the game. Without spoiling anything, I died in the final boss battle which caused the game to crash, and whenever I open the game and try to continue, the game crashes instead.

The Plucky Squire is such a bummer and I really wish it was better. But it is an inherently flawed game that even bug fixes and patches can’t truly repair. There is no real reason to play this game, and I hate that I’m saying that.

UFO 50

I have been waiting for UFO 50 to come out for what feels like an eternity. It’s a collection of 50 games made by a fictional game company in the mid to late 80s, that was actually made by a handful of indie developers over the course of nearly a decade. I still haven’t played all of the games yet, but what I can say is that old games were infuriatingly obtuse and I’m not as good as I once was at them. That being said, I absolutely adore this game and everything it’s doing, and I hope I find at least one game that truly hooks me.

I’ll have more to say about UFO 50 next month… hopefully.

Watch List

The Good Place

Wonderful show that manages to hit both comedic and dramatic highs. I was severely skeptical of the end of season 1, and I’m still kind of angry about it. Kind of made the first season feel like a waste of time, even though they make good on it in the later seasons. It’s a very good show from top to bottom, despite the few issues I had with how they were telling their story.

New Girl

I’ve never watched New Girl before, and if it weren’t for the prodding from my partner, I probably would have bailed after the first 3 episodes. I found the characters to all be generally unlikable and I did not care about any of them.

By the end of the first season, however, I get what everyone sees in this show. Now in the third season, I still have some serious concerns about the writing and the character’s motivations, but I’m hopeful that things turn around soon.

Listening Party

Sastanàqqàm – Tinariwen (+IO:I)

Just – Radiohead

Money for Nothing – Dire Straits

The Rest

Moving

Seriously, fuck moving. I’m so exhausted and worn down.

News

Concord Gets Pruned

Days Gone Director is a Baby

“Pull Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps” Says ex-Sony President

Sony Reveals a Console for Rich People

An Entire Game Studio Quits

Baldur’s Gate 3 Modder Shows Off Custom Maps, and Surprisingly No Sex Mods

“Not Enough Ads Yet” – Says Sony, as Ads are Dynamically Inserted Into PS5 Home Screen

Thanks for checking out The Spotlight. We’ll be back at the end of October with another installment. Consider subscribing to The Bonus World so you can get an email updating you whenever we publish something new.

The Best of the Summer Game Fest

UFO 50

“The story of UFO 50 is that the games were all created in the 80’s by a fictional company that was obscure but ahead of its time.” That’s the official pitch for UFO 50 and it sounds absolutely amazing. While it may have barely missed its initial launch window of 2018, I’m absolutely thrilled to see a sign of life from this game, let alone a release date for September 18th of this year.

Star Wars Outlaws

There are a lot of valid criticisms you could levy at Ubisoft, particularly in how formulaic their open-world games seem to be. But even so, I’m genuinely excited to get my hands on Star Wars Outlaws and engage with its inevitable open-world bloat, dressed up in a Star Wars costume. The vibe of Star Wars is strong in this gameplay demo, but whether the story and gameplay manage to land the metaphorical ship is something I’ll have to find out when it releases on August 30th, this year.

Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind

Releasing later this year, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind looks absolutely phenomenal. Admittedly, I haven’t been a Power Rangers fan since I was a wee-lad, but everything about this trailer is igniting nostalgic synapses that had been laying dormant for over 30 years. I’m a sucker for a good beat-em-up and Rita’s Rewind seems to be going above and beyond genre expectations with some cool mode-7 inspired gameplay twists.

Cairn

Cairn might be the first game to ever have a mountain kick your ass, but it certainly looks like one of the toughest. Knowing nothing about mountain climbing aside from it’s done by people with an allergic reaction to safety, I can confidently say that Cairn looks to be a realistic depiction of both the act of climbing and the emotional toll it can take. The resource management aspect of the game is giving me some pause, but I’m still very interested in playing Cairn, regardless.

Wanderstop

Wanderstop looks very cool for what it is, but I’m left wondering how you make a game out it. Sure, you’ve got the tea house management angle that’s obviously there to lull you into a false sense of routine, but once the self-doubt starts kicking in, what does the game actually look like? I’m suspecting there might be a massive genre twist in this one, but I could be wrong. Either way, I’m excited to check it out whenever it releases.

Unknown 9: Awakening

It’s been a while since a game reminded me of Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy, a ridiculously fun game with a hilariously stupid name, but here’ comes’s a new stupidly named game that might scratch that itch — it’s Unknown 9: Awakening! Dumb names aside, this game looks pretty cool. The main mechanic seems to be about possessing enemies and having them take each other out, which is always my preferred “stealth” option when playing games, so a whole game about that has to be good, right? It comes out this year, so I’ll find out more then.

Eternal Strands

Someone described Eternal Strands to me as Shadow of the Colossus and Breath of the Wild smashed into one game. While that’s a super lofty claim to make, should Eternal Strands even be marginally as good as either of those games, it’ll be an overwhelming success to me. I’m skeptical, but I really do want this to be good.

In Sink

I don’t know why I put games like In Sink on any sort of list, whether it be article or wish, because I never have anyone to play the dang things with. But I’m imagining a world where I do have a good co-op partner, and we are both loving this game and its asymmetrical puzzle solving. Also in this imagined world I have huge muscles and like, a million dollars. There’s a demo out now, but a full release is expected later this year.

Skate

I just want to play a new Skate game already. Imitators like Session and Skater XL tried to fill the void in its absence, but fumbled the execution so hard with their overly complicated control schemes. While I’m genuinely terrified of the EA-controlled free-to-play model this entry is adopting, I know it was probably the only way a new Skate game would get green-lit. Regardless, I want to play this very badly, and I can’t believe there still isn’t a release window.

South of Midnight

If nothing else, South of Midnight looks very cool. Aside from aesthetic appeal, I truly have no idea how this one is going to shake out, but I’m more than willing to give it a spin when it launches on Game Pass.

Perfect Dark

I really hope this trailer isn’t all smoke and mirrors because the new Perfect Dark looks absolutely incredible. An immersive-sim with all the Perfect Dark gadgets and future tech seems like a perfect pair, but I’ll reserve my boundless praise for whenever I actually do get to play it.

Mixtape

I have no idea how Mixtape will play or what it’ll be about, but it’s trailer is giving off all the right vibes. I think I might be a few years removed from the prime demographic for this game, but I’m still going to play it anyway because it looks cool and has a pretty dope soundtrack.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

From Uncharted to Tomb Raider, games have been chomping Indiana Jones’s flavor for years to mostly positive results. So maybe it’s finally time for the progenitor of archaeologic adventures to come out with a game that’ll live up to and make good on the mystique of Indiana Jones. I really hope that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is good, because this trailer looks like a lot of fun. And if nothing else, at least I’ll get to punch a Nazi in the face.

Fable

Please be good.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Okay, so this particular trailer isn’t particularly good, but the gameplay demo that came out a day later was much better. I don’t have any love for the Dragon Age series, but I’m willing to take the plunge with The Veilguard after pouring a full week’s worth of time in Baldur’s Gate 3. Maybe I’m an RPG guy now. Or maybe I’m excited because this game looks like it’ll cater more to my action-oriented gameplay sensibilities way more than its predecessors did. Either way, I want to try this video game.