#we would have more Kaine content but if it’s at the price of the level of character warping they’ve been doing with Ben???

[scarletspider2the2ndpower]

Variant cover for Avengers: Forever (Vol. 2/2022), #15 by Daniel Hainsworth.

Zoom-in under the cut:

[a-alhazred]

KILL BOSS

I was only going to screencap one thing in this but while I was looking for it so much stupid kept jumping out at me that I just kept hitting print screen. For the record, yes, I am currently playing this game, and enjoying it, and this was a heavy factor in this pissing me off so much. It’s not like IGN being ridiculous is anything new so I probably wouldn’t have felt a need to make this post if it wasn’t both head-deskingly absurd and about something I’m playing.

So the tl:dr is that IGN’s review of Ruiner is bizarre. The actual review can be found here.

LET’S START.

This dude has not played Enter the Gungeon for more than twenty minutes. “Elegantly simple” and “Enter the Gungeon” are not two phrases that go together. Gungeon has a metric fuck-ton of weapons and passives and the coming update is even going to add more bonuses for holding certain combinations. The difference between them is that Ruiner has a skill tree instead of enormous pickup variety. The skill tree isn’t overly simple but this comparison is nonsense.

What the fuck does this even mean, they’re enemies they are all trying to kill you. BUT WAIT THIS IS DUMBER THAN IT SOUNDS because this game also has its camera pushed way closer than is normal for twinstick shooters (compare gameplay videos or even screenshots of this to Helldivers or Livelock and you’ll instantly see the difference) so the notion that you can’t tell you’re being attacked or by which enemy or that you’re taking damage is here more than any other game in this genre a whole lot of what? You also have a degree of camera control and bullets leave huge bright tracers so it’s not like something can shoot you from off-camera out of nowhere.

I’ll give that it can feel exhausting, it’s a really intense, fast-paced game, but a game feeling exhausting is not in and of itself a criticism, it’s just down to your tastes whether or not you enjoy that level of intensity. If you’re thinking this is foreshadowing yet another game journo bagging on a game for being Too Hard for his delicate walking simulator expertise, you’re right. Lowering the difficulty does not seem to be an option. For the reviewer, I mean. The game has difficulty settings. He even says flat-out the game only became fun for him when he could repeat earlier portions with later unlocks.

It’s a $20 game.

I actually have to explain why this matters, don’t I? It should be obvious but reviewers tend to forget us us mere mortals don’t get free review code and that what we have to pay for the game is an extremely important bit of context. It plays a very large role in determining whether the amount and type of content in a game is worthwhile. If Ruiner was $60 the fact that it has faux-sidequests and a teeny tiny hub that doesn’t measure up would be really, really important. It’s not a $60 game and what it offers is easily acceptable for its price range.

To be clear, I don’t have a problem with reviewers getting free review code. I have a problem with the really pervasive habit they have of not acknowledging that games cost money for everyone else and utterly failing to ever address the value of a game’s content compared to its cost.

We’re going to go back to the first paragraph I screengrabbed now because it also contains the part I was originally looking for before I got sidetracked by the rest of this idiocy:

The barrier is one of the first skills.

The tutorial gives it to you.

You don’t have to die at all before you get it.

Oh and this also implies that dying is actually a prerequisite to unlocking skills. I haven’t thoroughly examined the skill tree but I saw nothing of the sort after looking through it.

So yeah, same old IGN.

I remember back in the late 90s I was super hyped for Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver and waiting for the intro cutscene to download on my dialup while anxiously awaiting the release and finding every bit of information I could. IGN had a screenshot of Raziel with the Soul Reaver captioned “This sword of light is coming right out of Kain’s hand!”

I remember thinking “wow it’s a good thing gaming news isn’t always that silly!” but alas, now my innocence is lost.