Nightreign takes that whole philosophy and tosses it in the fire.

Released back on May 30th, 2025, this thing is a different animal. It’s a roguelite, which already feels like the developer loosening its collar a little. You drop into a place called Limveld as a Nightfarer, you got about forty five minutes, and the map is shrinking around you like a slow motion battle royale while some end of days darkness creeps in from the edges. Three days, three nights, and waiting for you at the finish line is a Nightlord, one of these towering horrors that exists purely to humble you and everybody standing next to you. Quick, brutal, replayable. You lose, you reset, you run it back.

Here’s the part that matters, though. You are not meant to do any of this on your own.

From the ground up, the game was engineered for a squad of three. Not two. Not a brave solo flex. Three. Director Junya Ishizaki and the crew balanced damn near everything around that number, and you feel it the second you load in. Each Nightfarer carries their own kit, their own personality, their own flavor of chaos. The Wylder swings heavy and pulls aggro. Your Recluse hangs back bending magic to her will. A Guardian eats damage so nobody else has to. Alone, any of them can hold a fight. Put them shoulder to shoulder, though, and suddenly somebody’s tanking while somebody’s healing while somebody’s raining hell from the back line, and the whole thing locks into a rhythm no single warrior could ever pull off solo. Right there is the heart of it. Folks at From finally designed a world where you genuinely need other people, and need is not a word that studio throws around lightly.

Then there’s the revive system, which is honestly one of the funniest and most beautiful ideas they’ve ever cooked up. Your homie goes down. In most games you’d jog over, hold a button, watch a little progress bar fill. Not here. Here you bring them back by hitting them. Smacking your fallen teammate with your own weapon chips away at this Near Death meter until they pop back up swinging. Sounds disrespectful. Sounds like betrayal. It’s actually genius, because a ranged Nightfarer can revive somebody from clear across the arena without stepping into the fire, so positioning and trust start to carry real weight. You don’t babysit each other every second. You explore at your own pace, do your own thing, but the moment it hits the fan you’d better know exactly where your people are.

And the stakes run shared all the way down. Every enemy your trio drops feeds runes to all three of you, so nobody’s hoarding, nobody’s getting left behind on levels. You rise as a unit. You also fall as one. The whole group gets wiped at the same moment? Game over, straight back to day one, everybody scraped down to level one again. There is no individual glory hiding in that math. No carrying dead weight to the credits while they watch you cook. Either the squad makes it or the squad starts over, and that one little design choice quietly rewires how you treat the strangers and the friends fighting beside you.

Here’s the thing folks are falling in love with. The shared W.

I’ve felt it myself. Picture it. A Nightlord sitting at a sliver of health, two of your people are down, you’re the last one standing on fumes, and you somehow thread the needle and drop the thing. If you got mics, the chat erupts. If you’re rolling with randoms and nobody’s talking, somebody throws up a celebration gesture and you throw one right back, and for one second three strangers who never met just shared something true. Hits different than soloing a giant by yourself. A solo kill is a flex, a private trophy you tuck away in your pocket. This is a memory you made with other human beings. Those stick around in a way bragging rights never do.

Now let me zoom out, because Nightreign isn’t happening in a vacuum. Whole industry’s been drifting this way for a minute. Helldivers had grown men screaming about democracy with their boys at two in the morning. Lethal Company turned scared people whispering in the dark into pure comedy gold. Hunger for stuff you live through with other people instead of merely beside them has been building and building. And now the company most famous for isolation just planted its flag squarely in cooperative ground. When From of all developers decides community is worth building an entire game around, that tells you the floor has shifted under all our feet.

What makes it land is that they refused to dull the bite to get there. This is still their world. Those Nightlords still hit like a freight train. The dark still wants you in the dirt. They just decided the path through it now runs straight through other people, and then they trusted us to find the harmony ourselves with almost no tools to talk it out. No text chat at all. A ping here, a gesture there, voice only if you bring your own crew. That’s the whole toolbox. And somehow it works, because the design forces a kind of wordless understanding, the same way a good pickup run at the court does. Nobody’s calling plays out loud. Everybody just knows.

Communal feeling like that is something a lot of us already chase anyway. Half the joy of being a Blerd is the group chat blowing up at midnight, the Discord call running for hours, the three of us hopping on after work to get bodied by the same boss eight times and laughing the entire way through. Nightreign reaches right into that energy and makes it the actual gameplay loop. It rewards the late session, the inside jokes, the “go left, no my left” confusion that turns into a rescue at the last possible second. For folks who grew up gaming as a way to stay close to people, that recognition feels personal.

It’s not flawless, and the community was loud about it. At launch there was no way to roll as a pair, just you by your lonesome or a full three stack, which left a whole lot of best friends standing out in the cold. FromSoftware eventually answered that complaint with Patch 1.02, adding Duo Expeditions and adjusting the game’s balance around the current number of players. The funny thing is that the loudest gripe was basically “let me bring exactly one more friend.” Kind of proves the entire point, doesn’t it. People weren’t begging to be left alone anymore. They were begging for more company.

And here’s the real headline buried in all of this. We crossed a line. The company that made loneliness an art form spent a decade convincing us that suffering tastes best quiet and personal, then turned around and made something that only sings when there’s a chorus. Audience didn’t push back on it either. Folks sprinted toward it. We’re out here forming squads, reviving each other with our own swords, splitting runes down the middle, throwing up goofy little gestures over a corpse, and restarting all the way from day one without a single complaint because the people make the loss worth swallowing.

For the longest time this genre treated playing with others as a feature you flip on when you got bored. Nightreign treats it as the whole reason you showed up tonight. Not some small tweak in a patch note either. It’s a statement about where this hobby is headed, and From just said it louder than anybody else in the room.

So go grab two of your people, or roll the dice with two strangers, and march out to take down a Nightlord. Lose a few. You will, trust me. Then win one, all three of you, by the absolute skin of your teeth, and try to tell me you don’t feel something move in your chest. What you’re feeling right there is the future knocking. Might as well answer the door.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Folks my age came up on a meaner version of this franchise. Early on it was all World War II. Mud, bolt rifles, brothers hollering over artillery while you crawled toward some bombed out farmhouse. Then 2007 arrived and busted the whole thing wide open. Modern Warfare dropped you into a present that felt uncomfortably close to the evening news. Two years later, Modern Warfare 2 gave us that one mission, the airport, the one plenty of us won’t bring up at the function. You walk through, the room goes silent, and grown folks argued about it for a decade. Love it or despise it, you cannot call it lazy. Somebody sat in a chair and decided that moment should turn your stomach on purpose.

That was the magic, if I’m being real with you. Not the guns. The seriousness.

Black Ops carried that same torch. Reznov whispering in your ear, the numbers, the cold paranoia of men who’d done terrible things for flags that never loved them back. Woods and Mason felt like characters, not inventory. You finished those campaigns a little hushed, sitting in the dark thinking. A shooter made you think. Wild, right? My cousins and me would stay up after, dissecting endings like we’d just walked out of a Spike Lee joint.

And then the model flipped on us.

Online play turned the whole thing into a nation of its own. The lobbies became a culture. Prestige grind, sweaty headset wars, somebody’s little brother screaming, beef getting settled across the map at two in the morning. For a lot of us, that was the hangout when there was nowhere else to be. The franchise didn’t just sell campaigns anymore. It sold a place to live.

Warzone landed in 2020 and the business changed shape again. Free to download, always running, a battle pass ticking away in the corner, a shop that refreshed on a schedule. Season after season now, each one a fresh page of stuff to buy, grind, or miss. Activision figured out that the story wasn’t the engine anymore. The engine was the wardrobe.

And that wardrobe got loud.

Somewhere along the line the battlefield turned into a costume party. Nicki Minaj rolled through in full pink as Red Ruby Da Sleeze, with a matching whip you could drive across the map. Snoop slid back in. 21 Savage too. They stamped it as a hip hop celebration, fifty years deep, and honestly the Doggfather I’ll allow, since the man’s been gaming royalty forever. But the floodgates were already gone by then. Shredder from the Turtles. Messi in his cleats. Cheech and Chong. Seth Rogen, so you could finally hotbox a Humvee in the middle of a firefight. Beavis and Butt Head. A giant porcelain murder doll from Squid Game stomping around the map like it pays rent. Lucy and The Ghoul from Fallout turning the classic Nuketown into a radioactive vault.

There’s a strange double feeling watching the culture show up like that. Part of me lit up seeing hip hop finally treated like it belonged in the biggest shooter on the planet. Another part of me clocked that it arrived wearing a price tag. The art that raised me, packaged and rotated through a store window beside cartoon ghosts and movie monsters.

You want the deluxe version of the season, that’s BlackCell, extra operators and shinier blueprints stacked on top of the normal pass. A bundle runs you around twenty dollars. An event pass, ten. Multiply that by a roster of celebrity guests cycling in and out forever and you start to see what this whole apparatus really is now. Not a beloved series of titles. A storefront with a shooter bolted onto the front.

And the rotation is the hook. The shop doesn’t sit there politely waiting on you. It blinks, it counts down, it whispers that the outfit you been eyeing leaves in three days and might never return. That pressure rewires how you play. You quit logging in to enjoy yourself and start logging in to keep pace. Chase the tier. Catch the limited bundle before the clock empties. Grind a challenge so your sixty dollar purchase doesn’t sit there gathering dust. I caught myself one night doing busywork in a mode I didn’t even like, just to nudge a progress bar forward, and I had to set the controller down and ask exactly who I was working for. Couch era, I played because it was fun. Now the fun arrives with a quota.

Now here’s where I gotta play fair, because the old head in me wants to holler at clouds and the gamer in me knows better than that.

Some of these mashups absolutely slap. The Squid Game collab came with a real mode, that Red Light Green Light tension where you freeze and pray nobody clocks your movement. Wasn’t a lazy reskin. That was somebody having fun with the medium. And there’s an argument, a decent one, that the absurdity is the entire point. A war sim was always a fantasy anyway. Watching Nicki posted up next to a dude in a John McClane tank top on some Cold War rooftop is so stupid it loops back around to joyful. The dissonance becomes its own flavor of fun.

Plenty of younger players came up after the grounded years and don’t mourn them at all. To them this was always a playground, bright and chaotic and theirs. That’s fair. The thing was never built for me alone. Kids deserve their goofy. I’m not trying to gatekeep somebody’s good time.

But something did get traded, and I won’t pretend otherwise.

When everything is for sale, nothing carries weight. That airport mission worked because the series respected silence. It understood when to stop entertaining you. Compare that to a present where the loudest detail about a new release is which star is dropping into the shop next, what neon outfit glows when you rack up a kill streak, how many tiers you gotta climb before the pass pays itself off. The campaign, the part that used to leave me quiet on the couch, is basically a garnish now. A little appetizer before the real meal, which is the spending.

Even the competition is throwing shade. When the Battlefield people went around saying their soldiers would stay grounded, that they didn’t need a Nicki Minaj situation, everybody on earth knew exactly who they were subtweeting. The market itself started treating restraint like a selling point again. That alone tells you how far the pendulum swung.

So did the franchise forget what made it great? I been chewing on this for a minute, and I don’t think forgot is the honest word. Forgetting is an accident. This was a decision. Activision remembers precisely what it had. It looked at a grim, weighty, story driven war series on one side and a glittering machine that prints cash four seasons a year on the other, and it reached for the machine. The receipts proved the math out. Hard to call a billion dollar choice dumb.

Great and profitable were never the same word though.

What made it special, for those of us who came up whisper yelling on a couch, was that it took itself seriously enough to make a shooter feel like it mattered. It treated us like we could handle something heavy. That version still flickers in there, buried in a mission here, a quiet beat there. You can feel the ghost of it moving through. Then a mascot in a green tracksuit sprints past swinging a minigun and the spell shatters in your hands.

I’m not even mad, not fully. I’m just an aging gamer who remembers when the wardrobe was empty and the story did the talking. My favorite thing grew up into a shopping mall. Loud, busy, lucrative, packed with people having an absolute ball. I’ll still load in. I’ll run with the homies and talk my noise. But every now and then I sit in that menu, scroll past the newest face for sale, and I quietly miss the one that knew how to make a grown man go still.

That version didn’t need a costume. It just had something to say.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller… He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Now peep where we landed. What turned a generation into builders and sweats grew into a shopping plaza with a battle bus parked out front. Hop on and you can play a Guitar Hero clone. Grind a Lego survival map. Race cars. Run a horror level where Darth Vader hunts you through a busted Star Destroyer. Or sink a whole afternoon into a factory sim whose entire reason for living is making little droids labor so your money counter ticks higher. Buried under all that noise, the original is still breathing. The question nobody at Epic wants to sit with too long is whether anybody can still hear it.

Let me be clear about one thing first. I love this game. Have loved it since the husk days, before the world even knew battle royale was about to become the genre that ate the decade. So this isn’t some old head hollering at the bus to slow down. This is love with its eyes open.

Here’s the tension. By every number that matters to a boardroom, the company is cooking. Concurrent players, revenue, cultural reach, the way one skin drop trends across every timeline for a day straight. Travis brought a planet to a virtual stage. Marvel turned the island into a crossover bigger than half the movies. Kids who’ve never touched a controller for anything else log in every single night. That’s a win. Loud, undeniable, money in the bank.

But thriving and staying yourself are two different prayers.

Watch what went down this spring and tell me the studio doesn’t feel the strain. Epic let go of around a thousand people. Right after, they removed Ballistic and the competitive stage of the music mode, while putting Rocket Racing on the chopping block for October. Years of work, whole teams, gone from the menu. For a place that spent the back half of the decade preaching the metaverse gospel, promising the island would become a platform where every genre lives forever, that retreat says plenty. The dream of being all things got expensive. It got messy. And a chunk of it simply wasn’t fun.

Then came the part that stopped me cold. Save the World, the original co op grind, the corner abandoned in early access for what felt like a geological age, finally went free. And it detonated. Player-tracked reports showed it crossing six figures almost overnight, with folks rushing back into a husk fight everybody supposedly forgot about. Read that twice. Strip the price tag off a piece that was actually a real one, with bones and a story, and people came running like it was a family reunion.

That ought to tell somebody at Epic something. Maybe it already has.

Because the trouble with becoming all things is that all things has no center. Walk a brand new player through what the island offers in 2026 and you can feel the vertigo set in. A rhythm game. A survival crafter. A tactical shooter that just died on the table. A racing playlist sitting on death row. A whole wave of Star Wars maps, a few genuinely impressive, one of them basically a Battlefront knockoff with capture points and a lightsaber if you earn it. Then the tycoons. Lord, the tycoons. Entire districts of the experience built around the same brain itch that powers Roblox, where children push a number higher while they hang out and talk, the actual playing almost beside the point. There’s a popular one floating around literally named Steal the Brainrot, and that title might be the most honest thing on the whole platform.

None of that is the heart. The heart was the build fight. The heart was that specific panic when the circle catches you in the open and you ramp rush a third party with eleven mats and a prayer. It was a thing you could describe to your cousin in a single breath and he’d get it instantly. Drop in, last one standing wins, build to survive. That clarity was the magic, and clarity is the first casualty when you bolt forty different worlds onto one launcher and call the result a universe.

I’m not mad at experimentation. A platform that never shifts goes stale and dies slow, and the studio understood that earlier and better than almost anybody in the business. The chapter resets, the live events, the absurd collabs, that engine of constant reinvention is half the reason this juggernaut outlived every copycat that came for the crown. PUBG, Apex, Warzone, all real, all good, not one of them turned itself into a stage where a stadium of people watched a concert together. Reinvention kept the lights blazing.

But there’s a version of reinvention that strengthens the core, and a version that just buries it under merchandise. Lately it leans toward the second one. When a curious newcomer loads up for the very first time and can’t even find the battle royale without scrolling past a droid factory and a karaoke stage, something has slipped loose. The front door turned into a flea market.

And here’s the quieter cost nobody puts in the earnings call. A whole generation is growing up thinking the island is mainly a place to hang out and grind numbers with friends, the way some of us grew up on a basketball court that happened to have a hoop on it. Cool. Beautiful, even. But ask one of those kids to describe the build fight that started all of this and you might get a blank stare. The thing that made the magic real for the rest of us is becoming a side quest in its own house.

Now the hopeful read, and I want to be fair here, is that the spring retreat looks a lot like the company finally clocking the same problem the rest of us clocked. Cut the playlists that flopped. Pour attention back into the core, into Zero Build, into Blitz and Reload and OG, the stuff that actually feels like what people fell for. Make the real one free and watch the crowd come home. If that’s the plan now, it’s the right plan. Stability over sprawl. Substance over a storefront with a hundred doors and nothing waiting behind most of them.

Whether they hold that line is the whole ballgame. Because the pull toward more is strong, and it pays. Tycoon maps print engagement. Brand deals print money. The metaverse pitch makes investors lean forward in a way a clean build fight never will. The temptation to keep stacking genres on the foundation until it cracks will be there every single quarter, dressed up as innovation, whispering that bigger is always better.

So my honest hope is this. That somebody in that building still remembers a title this old does not run on skins and crossovers and number go up loops. It runs on a feeling. That clutch when you’re the last one breathing and your hands won’t quit shaking. That sensation is the asset. The rest is decoration, and decoration is only worth something when there’s a real house standing underneath it.

So can Fortnite keep winning without losing itself? Maybe. The husk mode comeback and the nerve to cut dead weight tell me the people steering this still know where the pulse is. But knowing where it lives and actually protecting it are two separate jobs. You can top every chart on earth and still wake up one morning as a mall that used to be a game. The bus is still flying. I just hope whoever’s driving remembers what made all of us climb aboard in the first place.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller… He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Here’s what gets me though. Going home is supposed to feel like one emotion. Comfort, maybe. A warm blanket of stuff you already recognize. But this announcement hit me with two feelings at the exact same time, and they didn’t cancel each other out. One half of me felt that deep nostalgia pull, the kind that smells like a cracked PS2 disc and a summer with no responsibilities. The other half felt something newer and sharper, like I was standing at the start of a road I’d never driven. Both at once. That’s a hard trick to pull off, and I don’t think they lucked into it.

Let me rewind for the youngbloods who didn’t live through the original. Vice City came out in the fall of 2002, and it was basically a love letter to 1980s Miami filtered through Scarface and cocaine money and pastel suits. You played Tommy Vercetti, a man fresh out of prison trying to build an empire while pop ballads and synth tracks bled out your radio. That world was loud, gaudy, sun drunk, and absolutely iconic. For a lot of us it was the first open map that felt like a real place instead of a level. You could just exist in it. Ride a scooter at night with the lights smearing past and feel like it all belonged to you.

So when folks heard we were heading there, the assumption was simple. Cash in on the memories. Slap a fresh coat of paint on the same beach and let grown men cry about their childhood. And listen, that would have sold a hundred million copies anyway. Nobody would have blamed them for running it lazy. But that is not what they did.

This joint is set in the state of Leonida, which is their version of all Florida, not just the one glamorous strip. The old beach is in there, sure, dressed up prettier than anything we’ve ever seen on a console. Underneath all that polish though, the bones are different. We are not in 1986 anymore. The setting is dragged into the present, full of phone cameras and viral clout chasers and the kind of swampy, alligator filled backcountry that the original never even hinted at. They kept the soul of the place and swapped out the year, and that single decision is why the trip feels brand new instead of recycled.

Then there’s the people you ride with, which is honestly the part that flipped my whole perspective. For once the series hands you a duo. Lucia Caminos and Jason Duval, a couple deep in the kind of trouble that doesn’t come with an exit. The trailer shows Jason rolling up to collect Lucia the day she gets out of lockup, and right away you understand these two are not playing tourist in paradise. Rockstar straight up said the deck has always been stacked against them. They want a fresh start somewhere that mostly chews up regular folks and spits them out broke.

That framing matters to me more than the graphics ever could. Because Lucia is the first fully realized female lead in the modern GTA era, and they didn’t make her some side trophy or a damsel waiting on rescue. She is a lead. She is in the driver seat of her own mess. As somebody who grew up watching this series treat women like furniture and worse, seeing a Latina come home from a cell and immediately become the engine of the story does something for me. It signals that the studio knows the world changed under their feet, and they are at least trying to change with it.

You see what I mean about the two feelings now. The shell is pure nostalgia. The water, the palms, the heat shimmer, the way the radio is gonna scratch some forgotten itch the second a certain song plays. But everything living inside that shell is a clean break. New leads, a modern era, a bigger and stranger map, and a story about two broke people trying to claw out of a hole rather than a kingpin building a tower of yes men. They are using the familiar wrapping to sneak you somewhere you have not been.

I keep circling how rare that balance actually is in this business. Most sequels pick a lane. They either chase the past so hard they suffocate, terrified to change a single beloved detail, or they burn the whole house down and alienate the people who showed up out of love. Hardly anybody threads it. You either get the safe rerun or the reckless reboot. What Rockstar seems to be doing is using the memory as a doorway, not a destination, and that is a much braver swing than the marketing lets on.

The wait has been its own kind of comedy too. This game got announced, leaked, delayed, leaked again, delayed again, until the running joke was that everything in your life would happen before it actually came out. Babies born. Relationships ended. Entire console generations aged. And now it finally has a real date sitting on the calendar, November 19, 2026, dropping on the current boxes while the rest of us on PC wait in the cut like we always do. After all that buildup, the easy move would have been to give the crowd a comfortable hit of pure throwback. Instead they’re asking us to fall in love with something that only looks like the past from across the room.

There’s a deeper reason the formula works on me, and I think it’s about how memory actually functions. You can’t ever really go back. What you remember is gone, polished by time into something that never quite existed. So a true return is impossible. What you can do is revisit the feeling while letting the details move forward, which is exactly what this is. The version of that coast I loved as a kid lives in my head, untouchable. This one isn’t pretending to replace it. It’s a grown up echo, the same vibe wearing different clothes, talking about different problems, run by people who weren’t even in the picture last go.

I won’t front like I have zero worries. A studio with this much money and this much hype can fumble. The price tag is steep, the special editions are doing the most, and history has shown these companies will squeeze a dollar out of nostalgia until it begs for mercy. There’s every chance the online side becomes another grindy storefront. I’m holding my excitement with both eyes open. But the core idea, the bones of what they’re building, has me believing.

Because at its best, that is what a return is supposed to be. Not a copy of a thing you loved, frozen and dusty. A reunion with a place that grew up while you were gone, that has fresh stories and new faces and the same heartbeat thumping underneath. That coast made me fall for open worlds twenty years ago. Now it’s pulling me forward into a story I’ve never heard, told through eyes I’ve never looked through. Old enough to feel like home. New enough to feel like opening day. I don’t know how they did it, but I’m already in the car with the top down, waiting for the sun to come up.

So let me turn it over to you. You ready for this one, or did the long wait wear the hype down to a nub? Does that November date actually hold? Is eighty dollars and up fair pay for a decade of work, or a stickup in broad daylight? And could a game this hyped still land flat and bomb? I’ve got my hunches. Pull up in the comments and tell me where you stand.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller… He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

The question falls apart once Kengo is mentioned. Depending on you ask, Kengo is either truly amazing in how realistic it is or really boring in how overly realistic it is. I’m in the first camp but we’re talking about the most samurai game that would be fun to roughly anyone. Not the most Dark Souls of samurai games.

A Tale of Two Clans

That’s where we get to Way of the Samurai on the Playstation 2. It came out in 2003 and had you take the role of a ronin who arrives in a small town facing change as the new, foreign-influenced government rolls in. Yes, we’re out of the Tokugawa Era and now we’re in the Meiji Era. It’s 1878 and Japan has been opened.

There are two main factions fighting for power in the area, the Kurou Clan, lead by Tesshin Kurou, has had power for years and wants to hold on against the new government. The problem is that the new government, heavily influenced by western innovation and culture, have the advantage in weaponry.

To prevent loses, the Kurou opt to sell the iron foundry in the area but have to deal with the villagers who won’t leave. Mind you, it looks like everyone already bounced outside a few villagers and the rival clans. The village is bare, just about devoid of life and its just weird how the Kurou assaults the few folks still left.

The other clan is the Akadama Clan was formed by the illegitimate son of Kurou’s leader. Young and hotted, Kitcho wants to defeat the Kurou whom he can feels are traitors and smash the Meiji government. Tall orders right? Especially when your base of operations is a near ghost town where the population is mainly split between your two clans!

Where It Shines

There are two areas where Way of the Samurai shines. The first is the gameplay, it’s a straight up slash ‘em up action game. In some ways its similar to Samurai Warriors or Dynasty Warriors only you’re not mashing square over and over until its time to pop a Musou attack and clear the room. Instead, it’s a not-as-flashy version of the Warriors approach and it works since you’re not fighting on wide battlefields.

It’s also cool that you collect swords from fallen foes and can have them improved. Of course, since you only have a handful time to make money to do this. Also, you can only have two or three swords at a time. Swords gained can dull and break, losing their effectiveness.

The other area where Way of the Samurai shines is the story. Depending on your actions the game can take several different paths for six endings. You can avoid conflict and just leave Rokkotsu Pass without becoming involved or removing your sword. You’re also able to pick one of the clans or side with the villagers–all four of them.

From there, depending on how you carry out certain missions for the faction or what time of day that you run into main characters, the story can branch off. Character deaths also play a role in how the story unfolds. Way of the Samurai was pretty much ahead of other games in this respect.

Verdict

The glaring flaw with Way of the Samurai is that you only have two days of story. This changes with the sequels but this game gives you a little time to do quite a bit of story. On one hand, there’s not really much going on in Rokkotsu Pass because there’s no villagers. On the other, there’s a lot going on, you just showed up at the tail end of everything.

The bright side to this limitation is that it cuts down on the whole “I’m just gonna run around aimlessly!” style of plan. Some love that, I’m not a fan of it and it’s boring to watch and do. Doing that in Samurai and the game is over before you know it.

That aside, the actual combat is very solid, allowing for heated duels and intense melees. It’s a combat mechanic that totally works. Definitely pick up Way of the Samurai if you can. It’s available on PSP and you’ll have to hunt for it Amazon or eBay–where it’s most likely worth more than it was at launch.

Rating: 7 out 10 (Recommended)

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

Like Destiny 2, WF is very much a live service game meaning it’s meant to stay active via constant seasonal content and updates as well as regular expansions. These games make their bread either by selling the expansion while the game itself is free, having stuff that can be purchased in the premium shop, seasonal passes—or all three. Oftentimes, all three are utilized since the seasonal pass and seasonal content keeps things alive.

Live Service is a Hard Road to Travel

Most of the time when a game is developed it’s either meant as a one-off story, a potential series-starter, or a sequel but it’s often a contained story that might get DLC before the studio moves on. They’re rarely meant to be live like the multiplayer modes of Call of Duty. Live service is more the realm of MOBAs and MMORPGs which come in as massively online experiences as soon as they’re installed.

As it would go, live services exist within MMO’s metropolitan area without having a residence in the city proper. But the studio has to be able to support it consistently. That means regular seasons every two to six months that have a theme and keep players involved and engage in the game world followed by an expansion.

The expansion serves as a mini-sequel or soft sequel without being a full-on sequel with a number and subtitle. Mind you, Bungie sells expansions for the price of a full game but those come around every year or two but they have the fanbase and the players tend to be enthusiastic even if there are elements they don’t care for much.

That’s ultimately what a developer takes this road wants: a dedicated fanbase for the title. You only get that with rewarding missions and gameplay and an engaging, constantly evolving story. The mix of this concoction varies from game to game and developer to developer but those who apparently hit that perfect mix for them tend to stick around for a long time. Sprinkle in free-to-play and boom!

Much like Warframe.

Warframe is Hanging in There

Again, released in 2013, WF is a sci-fi third-person shooter where you as a recently unfrozen Tenno—humanoid warriors who are one with their bio battle suits—to combat a variety of alien lifeforms. Tennos utilize different kinds of weaponry as they take on galaxy-spanning missions to deal damage and defeat these hostile lifeforms.

Typical sci-fi stuff, really. Like other live service games, a premium store where things and currency can purchased that can be used with any particular in-game mechanic. There’s always a special currency with these types of games—such as platinum in Diablo IV.

The story is just enough that a developer can keep going with the game while throwing in storyline stuff and pushing the main story along every few years. What keeps players engaging with WF is some fun gameplay, decent gameplay, cosmetics and better gear to snag, and a leveling system players can work on.

The goal is to make it challenging and rewarding for the dedicated players and accessible enough for new and returning players. It’s a real tightrope act because if you make things too easy, your diehards are going to be annoyed since their effort for years prior might come off as pointless. However, if things are too difficult or convoluted, that’s a good way to not see return players or retain them.

You simply end up with your diehards who—while loyal—you can never truly satisfy. There will be something they didn’t enjoy and those players are regulars and might be familiar to the team. The loudest and rowdiest tend to have a voice in the core community.

Of course, that all only matters if you’re really involved with the community. If you’re not in the official Discord or on their forums, it doesn’t matter. You’re here to play the game. With that said, Warframe has a dedicated community that keeps the game alive and keeps the devs busy.

There are a few games that should be watched to see how this is done. While WF doesn’t have the live population of Diablo IV or Destiny 2, it has stayed alive for over a decade with a population often in the lower five figures.

Do you play Warframe, Diablo IV, or Destiny 2? What keeps you playing and what would make you take a break from the grind and the loop? As always let us know!

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

For those who never experienced it or played the game when it ended on storefronts, Kingdoms of Amalur was an open-world action RPG taking place in fantasy world brimming with magical and ancient dangers, well-crafted lore, and a good amount of quests and side quests to keep you busy.

Following a decent character creation process, the main character’s story begins after challenging Fate and reviving after certain death. There is a brutal conflict going on but the Gnomes are busy conducting research into resurrection and getting their Well of Souls working.

The MC proves to be a success and of great interest to one researcher who accompanies the MC in escaping hostile forces and puts them on the path to finding out more about their new existence. Along the way, the main character experiences many adventures while also lending their power to the difficult forces combating the Tuatha and more regional dangers and threats.

Kingdoms of Amalur Had a Lot Going for It

Honestly, that’s as brief an explanation of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning (or Re-Reckoning, the remaster). There’s a lot of stuff going on here. It featured everything that would’ve been standard for an open-world game at this time.

You have your farming of materials, crafting, a decent-sized skill tree with flexibility for some flexible build crafting, rewarding side quests and encounters that allow you to test and stress your progress and build.

The developer, Big Huge Games had a boatload of ideas and managed to put the majority together and craft their mechanics around them. And it works! Whenever I installed this game, I ended up sinking hours into the quests, building up my Fateless One (the main character who exists beyond Fate which governs the world), and crafting gear and weapons to better utilize those skills.

It’s all stock open-world RPG fare but it’s all put together in a way that works and is actually fun. In addition, you had two creative powerhouses in fantasy and comics with novelist R.A Salvatore and writer/artist Todd McFarlane fleshing out the setting of the Faelands, its lore and inhabitants.

What I found interesting about all of this is that at the time of its release, visually Kingdoms of Amalur looked like nothing too special. There were definitely that looked better crafted graphically but Amalur was far from a horrible-looking game. In some ways it existed between slightly dated and of its time but didn’t come off as a game that would push the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, or gaming PCs of the early 2010s.

The World and Scale

Instead you had regions that were colorful, bold, and at times dark and gloomy. You actually felt that your Fateless One was engaged in this large, lengthy quest where you decided how it progressed. Adding to this was the scale of the world. You could look at the map and see what region your were in and which ones were close but traveling through these areas wasn’t exactly a quick jaunt.

You were going to clash with enemies and beasts, you would be distracted by loot and stories, and enticed by exploration. The size of different areas within a region encouraged exploration and after a few encounters, that curiosity in what else could be gained as far as gear and weapons.

I would say this is what really kept me in Amalur: the scale and crafting. Sure, the combat was fine but the possibilities and tiers of crafting material and what could be made had me trying to create the best possible gear for my adventures. The game encouraged that heavily but made it so that if you were into combat, there was plenty of that but you had to explore to be more effective.

Fate of the Kingdom

Ultimately, Kingdoms of Amalur managed to move a million copies but the developer closed due to financial factors as EA had to be repaid for investing a significant amount into the project. Also, the development itself had some issues that seemed to be am indication of how things would shake out for the end product.

Despite the cash sunk into Amalur, there were unfavorable takes into different elements of the game. It was viewed favorably enough to warrant a remaster by Kaiko roughly eight years later. While there is a potential series or even a franchise there, Amalur hasn’t seen much interest or movement in future entries.

Share your thoughts on Kingdoms of Amalur. With the other RPGs of a similar vein out and thriving at that time, did you have expectations of a sequel? Or did you gather that “Too much was out into this game, it was going to get the axe and thrown in the vault”?

Let us know!

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

The collecting, battling, and evolving monster games pool was a bit crowded and roughly half of those titles made into the 2010s and 2020s. What set Monster Rancher apart from other games in its early entries was the ability to pull monsters physical CDs. Some CDs in your CD binder or shelf could feature a powerful monster that you couldn’t train yet.

That leads us to what really makes this my favorite of the Pokeclones: the life-sim aspect.

Monster Rancher Went Further with Monster Training

There was a lot going on with Monster Rancher mechanics-wise that I love. Most of it would be pretty applicable to Pokémon if the in-game time was treated differently from real time or “Earth time” as Final Fantasy XIV calls it. See, Pokémon always felt like the longest summer ever because you could catch monsters, train them, collect gym badges, and spank the Elite 4 in pretty short order.

You’re not going to spend months going through a Pokémon title doing the core game even if you have other things to do. That isn’t the case in a Rancher game, either. Depending on the game, you could go through the ranks quickly. The main difference is that the monster you’re raising and the way you’re raising it might not get you to the top.

Time Was Everything

That’s because of the life simulation gameplay in the series. Players have to feed their monster, let them get rest, give them treats, encourage them for great results, choose their training regime throughout the month, breed them other monsters, watch their weight, and enroll them in battles and tournaments (some which determine the monster’s ranking).

All of this is managed by a very simple in-game calendar. Matches and tournaments are scheduled and if the monster’s rank is high enough, they’re able to enter that competition. In the games on GameBoy Advance, the calendar featured Official tournaments hosted by the organization in the game that allow for rank promotion to the winner.

Tying all of this together is that each monster has a lifespan. The crushing part in a Monster Rancher title is that sometimes when a player thinks their monster can advance in rank, it can kick the bucket. So, the game gets some longevity and replayability by requiring the player to summon and raise another monster.

Then again, if a player wants to avoid dealing with a dying monster they can retire the monster, get them registered as a trainer, and have them on the ranch training the next potential champion.

What Happened with Monster Rancher?

The franchise is still around and as of 2022, Koei Tecmo has released a game for Nintendo Switch in a crossover with the Ultraman franchise. The method of summoning or generating monsters has even been modernized since CDs aren’t used much now.

On that note, the game’s success is pretty easy to determine since it didn’t get much buzz after being released and the franchise’s peak in the West was between 1999-2000 when the animated series was on broadcast television.

Monster Rancher is the pokeclone that has simply always been around. The games maintained a consistent level of quality but never garnered buzz with the newer releases like Dragon Quest Monsters would with the Joker series and Devil Summoner games on Nintendo DS.

If you played the Monster Rancher games, which were your favorites and monsters? I was never a fan of Suezo and always preferred Tiger of the Wind or Zan. Also, what were your thoughts on the short-lived animated series?

Share your thoughts below!

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

I still have the physical copy and enjoyed it when I played it. Mind you, it was the kind of enjoyment you got from having only a few games and that game being one of the better ones of the bunch. When I played it over ten years later, I had experienced better beat ‘em ups since then and revisited better ones that came out before and during 2002. Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance being a good example.

E.O.E and Its Flaws

One of the issues E.O.E had was the camera which I’d say contributed to the difficulty. Mind you, the game had a manageable difficulty that wouldn’t have you putting the game down and revisiting hours later. You could chunk through this game in a week at the longest and only get mildly frustrated. The cause of that frustration: the camera which had you taking hits that should’ve easily been dodged or blocked.

I say “easily” because the foes in this game weren’t exactly programmed to be proto-Dead Souls or anything. Of course, slash ‘em ups tend to require more patience and timed evasion and blocking. Beat ‘em ups have developed to require that level know-how while playing.

However, in the early 2000s they were still pretty straightforward with the main change being the setting of a 3D arena. If early the PSX  and Nintendo 64 showed us anything: 3D needs a camera that isn’t cheeks. It really helps to be able to see around your character fluidly. This was an issue with Eve of Extinction.

Another issue that was more tolerable was a basic, mostly uninteresting storyline. The main character Josh has a weapon containing his girlfriend Eliel that can change during gameplay. Basically, it can be whatever you might need for the combat situation you’re in. That would be great if E.O.E wasn’t in that weird space of fun combat but having bricks for enemies.

Again, it was 2002, so no one was really expecting Ghosts of Tsushima or Metal Gear enemies. Instead, it was more like Spider-Man: Maximum Carnage or early Dynasty Warriors scrub soldiers just marching in to get spanked. The enemies were so uninteresting, that it’d be hard to go into the bosses in the game outside of their AI being better than the rank and file scrubs.

That’s expected but nowadays you have situations where field bosses, sub bosses, and even a few scrubs that prove to be more of a problem than the bosses. The Borderlands series tend to have a number of them across multiple games.

Was There Any Hope for a Sequel?

With any older game or series, I like to dive into sequel or reboot potential. Often you hear from gamers that there are few original concepts or games being put out by the larger studios or that franchises are getting run into the ground. The magic solution to fixing that is to come up with something new that isn’t a sequel to something we’ve played for the past decade.

I’ve always felt that an easier solution would be to revive or reboot a title that is collecting dust in a developer’s vault. If we haven’t seen the game in a long while, see what can be changed or built upon. There are more mechanics and storytelling is better now than 20 years ago in games.

E.O.E: Eve of Extinction is one of those games that would need to be rebooted before moving it into a sequel. The original wasn’t that good or memorable from start to finish. I remember more about R.A.D: Robot Alchemic Drive than E.O.E and that was another mid-at-best title from the PS2 era.

At the time, there was no hope for a sequel in part because the solo game ended in a way that one game was enough. It was a standalone story and as it was, no one was really clamoring for another trip into Josh’s world to deal with a revived Wisdom Company.

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

Two strengths for Saints Row included always having fun locations and its turf war approach. We’re going to look at both.

Location, Location, Location

Open-world crime games typically run with a fictional location inspired by a real world city. GTA has Vice City (Miami), Liberty City (New York), and San Andreas (Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas) while Mafia has Lost Haven (Chicago), Empire Bay (mostly New York), and New Bordeaux (New Orleans).

Saints Row has its own fictional areas with Steelport and Stillwater being the two main focuses. The 2022 reboot introduced Santo Ileso which is based on Las Vegas. It’s another strong location but there were a few things that didn’t make this a contender for replayability for me. It wasn’t a dismal game but it wasn’t as fun of an adventure as the previous four were.

That’s for another time.

Stilwater in Saints Row 2 and Steelport in SR: The Third were my favorite locations in the franchise. The player spent the first SR game assisting in taking a small gang to the top of the city only to wake up from a coma and find the gang in shambles. Not only that but they’ve lost a lot of turf and parts of the city are changing.

Mind you, between the first and second game—canonically five years apart—the city grew in size. That just meant more room to groove, more space for chaos, and more activities! You could even go on the stroll in SR2. That was very new when you’re used to just picking up sex workers in GTA games and having them drain your money while the car rocks.

In SR: The Third, the gang has gone from a recovered street gang to gangsta celebrities. They’re in a different city away from their power base of Stilwater and the Ultor Corporation isn’t the threat here. Steelport is run by The Syndicate which is made up of three gangs. There’s also the threat of the government’s anti-aging task force which has shown up to drop the hammer.

At the time, there were grumblings about the new location but there will be grumblings about any particular feature or element of a game. I did find the city to be not as active as Stilwater while appearing to be larger—which is always a problem.

That aside, what you were able to do in the city and missions that had you out and about in Steelport were very fun. It also helps that the team you put together in SR2 are better rounded out which is something that would continue in SR4 with the characters having matured while remaining immature and bringing in some new faces.

Turf Wars in Saints Row

Turf wars or gang wars made their debut in open-world crime gangs with GTA: San Andreas. Saints Row, The Godfather, and to a degree Mafia improved on that mechanic. Of the three, Saints Row did the most with it because it was tied closely to the gameplay and story.

Volition got away from that element somewhat in SR4. Sure, there’s still turf to fight for but your main character The Boss is trapped in a simulation and the main opposition comes from an alien controlling things.

No, the first three Saints Row games and to a lesser degree the reboot got turf wars right. Rival gangs were introduced, they were prominent in areas they controlled, and the main missions focused on taking them down and taking over their spots. Success resulted in some perks for the gang, being able to go through a piece of turf without enemies lighting you up, and seeing Saints purple on the map indicating your territory.

Sometimes the battles were pretty spicy, especially if the law showed up or were just passing by. Most of the times, it was your usual slam all the enemies in this mission until you wipe the waves or achieved some objective. In some ways, it was very straight forward but it wasn’t purely “clap the ops to sleep.”

That was the San Andreas approach and sometimes it didn’t work when a stray Balla gang member was stuck somewhere or at the border of the block or turf you were fighting over and you couldn’t find them. It was always that one guy.

If you’ve played the Saints Row franchise, what was your favorite and least favorite title? Also, it was mentioned in passing but have you played The Godfather?

As always, let us know down below!

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.