By Robert Purchese
Copyright eurogamer
27th September
Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing. This week, Tom reminds everyone that three stars is a good review score; Jim thinks he’s found the next Balatro; Connor returns to work and to Hades 2; Bertie struggles to climb a train; and Marie outs herself as a Lego Jurassic World lover.
What have you been playing?
Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We’ve Been Playing archive.
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, PS5 Pro
My review of Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is live, but I thought I’d sneak in a little inside baseball knowledge about reviews here, just for those of you who are keen enough to actually read this and not head straight to the comments to paste-in what you wrote on Friday morning while you were meant to be working.
We’ve seen you ask for more reviews on Eurogamer and this week we delivered a lot. But this won’t happen every week. Reviews take a lot of time and resources. Even if I decided every member of Eurogamer staff should dedicate their time to reviews and only reviews, we still wouldn’t be able to publish all the reviews we’d like to and that you want to see on the site. We’d also then have a site that was only reviews, which might be nice for a week, until we go out of business.
Finally, a note on review scores. I’ve written this before I’ve seen the aftermath of my three-star score for CrossWorlds, but I expect it was a mixture of “I knew it was going to be rubbish” and “why does Eurogamer hate games?” The reality is I very much enjoyed Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds. It’s a good game. But four stars on Eurogamer is a strong statement that means something is better than “good”. I don’t hate video games. I’ve made my love of video games into a career. Sometimes things are just good, and that’s OK.
Kill the Brickman, Steam Deck
Kill the Brickman is an eccentric cross between Balatro and Arkanoid, which, like all the best video games, is about shooting bullets into dudes. Some of these bullets explode, or clone themselves, or inflict poison damage, and the dudes in question, all of whom deserve to die for reasons, are bricks. It is my most gripping obsession of the year.
It runs beautifully on portables and it’s a solid bedtime or bus game, with big, chunky 16-bit graphics that read easily on small screens. You aim and shoot rather like you would in the old Amiga classic Arcade Pool, with a little line tracing your bullet’s trajectory. This looks and feels so much like an old Amiga game you could probably get it running on one and convince people it came out in 1994. And that’s not a diss.
It’s one of those simple ideas that’s breathtakingly executed and gorgeously presented, like the aforementioned Balatro, or like Vampire Survivors – games that genuinely cause flipped tables during a Game of the Year discussions at popular websites near Christmas time. That studios can spend 500 times this game’s budget and produce something which doesn’t feel half as good to play is frankly unconscionable.
Hades 2, PC
I am back from a two-week stint off work due to my ear falling off like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, and having only recently been able to put headphones on, without my jaw also falling off, the 1.0 release of Hades 2 has been a sweet succor to both my physical and mental woes.
There are like a thousand opinionated paragraphs on why a game everyone played months ago is great, and most of them are likely correct so I won’t bore you with how widely getting a Zeus lightning attack-build to work makes me smile. But I will write with great adoration about how much I loved deleting an early access save file with over 40 hours on it.
It’s shedding you’ve got to do, really. I don’t remember half of what happened in Hades 2, and plenty has surely changed in the time since I first hit its farthest reaches. The result is a weird, but not unpleasant, experience, where you’re possessed with the spirit of yourself from weekends past. It’s nice to feel lurch in surprise at how you’re able to get so far so quick; it’s nice to feel talented at something.
Baby Steps, PC
That fucking train, man. Can I swear here? I’ll probably get told off. But this little outburst is so indicative of how Baby Steps makes me feel that I want to keep it in. I’m not the most cool-headed person. I get agitated. I literally twist myself around my chair and grip it like a constrictor snake when agitation flares inside me – it’s a wonder it’s still in one piece. And agitation flares a lot playing Baby Steps.
Case in point: a train moment, which I don’t want to detail too greatly for fear of spoiling it, but you’ll know it when you get there. (It has to be a nod to another video game, surely.) I fell so much during it. I spent hours there. Falling, climbing back up, falling again. And as much as I want to tell you that I coolly and methodically worked through it, I absolutely didn’t. I expleted. I bitterly persevered. It’s a great game.
Lego Jurassic World, Switch 2
Strange fact: I can’t play Lego games on TV because they make me motion sick, but if they’re on the Switch screen I’m fine. I’m not sure why. But that’s my not-so-smooth transition into talking about Lego Jurassic World!
As a long-time lover of the movies, or at least some of them, and the books, and Lego itself, this was always going to be a no-brainer for me. As such, I’ve completed the entire game twice, though never reached 100 percent completion. But it doesn’t bother me. Just racing through the familiar stories with familiar characters, all told with trademark Lego humour, is more than enough to make a cold night warm.
