Leaderboard

Metroid Zero Mission A nice, short, Metroid game. Great pace to it too, you're constantly finding upgrades. The section where you play as Samus without her armour and weapons is pretty cool, I wish they had expanded on it. Anyways, onwards to Samus Returns! Grade: A

Metroid Dread So I started playing this game at launch, got maybe half way through and just sort of... forgot about it. But after playing (and mostly liking) Prime, and wanting a game I could play portably without a huge focus on story so my wife and I can watch TV at night, I thought I'd give Dread another take. I started a new save and dived back in. This game fucking slaps. It's everything I want out of a Metroid. Samus' movement is great and gets better throughout the game, through both unlocking new abilities, and you the player mastering those new abilities. There's a lot of quality of life enhancements too that the Prime Remaster was lacking, like auto save outside boss rooms that make retrying the bosses much less frustrating. Which is good because the bosses are tough in this game. But honestly, it's kind of fun learning their patterns and retrying, progressing a bit further each time. I think I prefer the exploration in Prime. The secrets were harder to find. The environments were more engrossing due to being 3D. Both styles of Metroid games have their advantages. Bring on Prime 4 this year. Grade: A+

Assassin's Creed Nexus I've been playing this off and on for the past couple months. It only takes about 15 hours to beat if you don't worry about the side stuff but I've just been busy/distracted by other games. If anything, this game manages to prove that the formula can work in VR. You can do pretty much everything you'd expect to be able to do in an Assassin's Creed game, and most of it works pretty well. Unsheathing your hidden blade by flicking your wrist is always a fun bit of immersion, and being able to throw your melee weapon directly into the face of a charging guard always feels badass. Obviously, the game is of a smaller scale than a traditional AC title, but the maps are still decently sized in each chapter and you have plenty of tools at your disposal to approach a situation in a multitude of ways. I only have two gripes to speak of. Firstly, the climbing can be a little finicky. The climbing part itself is fine, but pulling yourself up onto a ledge or jumping to a distant handhold doesn't always register the way it should, which can mean falling back down if you don't catch yourself in time. It mostly works, but the climbing in Asgard's Wrath 2 still felt a lot more responsive and tight. Speaking of Asgard's Wrath 2, the swordfighting in this game can't even begin to compare. It works fine, nothing is broken, but it's pretty slow paced like most VR swordfighting games are, giving you pretty wide windows to block and parry for the sake of not overwhelming the player. It may help to mitigate frustration, but it feels more like a rhythm game than a true sword battle. If anything, it feels a little too easy for a game that is supposed to be emphasizing stealth over brute force. The actual assassination mechanics are a lot more fun and feel more natural, though. As VR games go, I'd say this is still one of the better ones, maybe on the lower end of a top 10 list or just barely outside of it.