Weekend Hot Topic, part 2: The best game of 2018 so far | Gaming News

Haven’t had much chance to play many new games this year. Have played Celeste and deem it to be wonderful. If God Of War is better than that, that will be quite something. I don’t know yet, the excessive machismo along with what I perceive to be a lack of humour and drabness of the visuals has made me reluctant to rush out and buy it. But… we’ll see.

Tried Monster Hunter: World. On my own. The character creator is good but I just don’t think the combat has enough bite for my liking. The visual and tactile feedback for just simply swing a weapon into the flesh of my enemies just isn’t there for me. And that wouldn’t be improved with other people, so I’m probably going to sell it on.

Then we come to Dragon Ball FighterZ. I was so looking forward to that after having played the open beta. Those controls are so nice and smooth, best in genre. Easily. But, like I said a while back in that feature I penned it doesn’t do anything interesting with them.

I don’t know what you guys were smoking when you said that the single-player was fun, because boy could I not disagree with you more. It’s more boring than the story in Street Fighter V and only slightly better than SoulCalibur V. Yeah, the cut scenes are charming. I even laughed a few times – despite being a complete noob to the series. But, you can’t just play for the cut scenes. Story mode is as bloated as a beached whale full to bursting with plastic. There is no variation to the gameplay. There is no rewards to strive for except characters that you’ll have to wait forever for.

And the characters are too similar to each other, having access to all the major skills. Not identical clones, I must stress – but variants on the same archetype. For example, Majin Buu did not play all that differently to Krillin. There was never as dramatic a difference as there was between Chun-Li and Zangief or Ivy and Astaroth. It’s like Street Fighter with their Shotokan characters or Mortal Kombat and their obsession with ninjas. Goku is Ryu, Vegeta would be angry Ken. Majin Buu is fat Ryu. Krillin is tiny Ryu. Android 18 is Sakura. Android 21 is evil Sakura and so on.

I know why they did that. Well, I think I do. I presume it was to ensure that fans of the anime would be well served by whatever character they chose – making the choice almost cosmetic only. Which makes it a great party game but I have over 20 other fighting games spread out over five formats and it isn’t more fun than Power Stone 2, SoulCalibur II, or even NetherRealm’s latest offerings. Sorry.

God. Capcom will now do an evil Sakura now, won’t they? She’s too young to be portrayed as a dominatrix so she’d probably be the tearaway, punk biker chick. I called it. Watch it happen.
DMR