Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Developer:Frictional GamesPublisher:Frictional GamesWhere can I buy it?Steam,GOG
Alice Bee:The pitch: you’ve woken up in a weird castle somewhere in Europe and you can’t remember who you are, or how you got there. The castle is full of lumbering monsters. You have to stay in or near light as much as possible, or your “I’m freaking out!!!” meter starts filling up. Figure out what’s going on, survive the monsters, and ultimately decide the fate of the big weirdo who owns the place.
As the icing on the cake, BioShock 2 invites you to muse on all this while letting you dual wield your weapons and plasmids; something neither of the other BioShock games did, despite it being perhaps the most satisfying gameplay in the entire franchise. Hahaha, now who’s being corrupted by power?! Wait… this is what you’ve been trying to teach me all along isn’t it, BioShock?
Developer:BioWarePublisher:EAWhere can I buy it?Steam,EA Play,Origin
Ollie:When I loaded up Mass Effect 2 for the first time in the better part of a decade, the first thing I was greeted with was a little loading window that depicted all the major characters together. It was a small thing, but it instantly put paid to any concerns I had that the game might be showing its age a little too much to enjoy. Seeing that loading window was surprisingly like looking at an old school photo. Look! There’s Garrus, and Tali, and Thane, and Legion. There was Mordin in the background, taking up as little space as possible; and right next to him was Grunt, doing precisely the opposite. And, because no one gets along with everyone in school, there’s Jacob. They all actually felt like people that I had once had connections with, and I couldn’t wait to revisit and reforge those links. It was a reunion.
But those things aren’t why you should play Mass Effect 2 today. You should play it because it’s still the best space opera in gaming, thanks to its awe-inspiring soundtrack, its surprising and ambitious plot, and of course its brilliantly designed, written, and voice-acted characters. Combined, these three things represent the nucleus of the entire trilogy, bulging with enough protons to cancel out the negativity from the occasional electrons that surround it. And Mass Effect 2 is the peak of the series, a thrilling, powerful, nuanced tale about assembling a band of elite soldiers, earning their trust, and embarking on a suicide mission to save the galaxy. I think everyone should play it at least once.
Developer:Terry CavanaghPublisher:Terry CavanaghWhere can I buy it?Steam,GOG,Itch
It’s also an important lesson in the art of checkpointing. Many games have benefitted from its wise decision to include almost room-by-room save points and instantaneous respawns over the years, and this is important knowledge that simply cannot be lost to the annuls of history. Neither should its toe-tapping soundtrack for that matter. Or its Sad Elephant. Every game needs its own Sad Elephant.
Developer:Obsidian EntertainmentPublisher:Bethesda SoftworksWhere can I buy it?Steam
James:Anyone who’s visited a museum and noticed all the statues’ missing hands, noses and todgers will know two things. One, something can be a work of art even if it’s a bit broken, and two, preserving such delicate works can take some effort. Fallout: New Vegas is another example – running it on PC without constant crashes, or a high FPS sending the physics engine into overdrive, demands a veritablearmoury of modsand DIY bug fixes. People of the future, I hope you still have Nexus Mods.
Credit also goes to the four main expansions – Dead Money, Honest Hearts, Old World Blues and Lonesome Road. Not just being tonally and mechanically distinct adventures in their own right, but for their masterful building of an overarching story that begins with mere lore-crumbs in the base game and ends with the highest of high-stakes showdowns. That you can, this being New Vegas, win by talking smart.
Developer:DICEPublisher:EAWhere can I buy it?Steam,Origin
Ed:Battlefield games are all about scale nowadays. How many players can smush into a lobby? At first it was 64, now it’s 128. And even if they’re not cranking up the dial with each release, you get the feeling that this is the ultimate aim. A Battlefield 2077 set in Night City – no, a cyberpunkuniverse. It has 256 player lobbies; cyborgs with laser eyes; Levolution Plus! Sunken volcanoes can erupt at any time, which causes an earthquake, which causes a tsunami, which floods maps. Tremors can be felt in other players’ lobbies. They exist simultaneously, you see.
Battlefield Bad Company 2 keeps things simple. Not that previous entries hadn’t, it’s just that BC2 gets it so right. Planes were ditched and maps were made smaller, but it made up for its downsizing with excellent map design. The dark forests of Nelson Bay funnel you into desperate pushes over mounds of snow. Valparaiso sees you snake across the coast, tearing through towns and dipping back into jungle. Harvest Day has you chew through quaint homes with RPGs.
Bad Company 2 deserves its place in the RPS cryochamber because it’s a relic of a Battlefield that we may never see again. One that was intimate and funny, with destruction that actually felt destructive. Those smaller maps made smashing through brick all the more intense. Not to mention that it had a decent single-player campaign. I hope that one day DICE pries open this cold casket and sees BC2 as their next step forwards.
Developer:Io InteractivePublisher:Square EnixWhere can I buy it?Steam
Alice0:Kane & Lynch 2 is an ugly and unpleasant third-person cover shooter with a story about two fuck-up murderers who keep fucking up and whose only plan to escape the clusterfuck is to aggressively fuck up in a forwards direction. It’s great. Some highlights: the guns are bad, it looks ugly, and its anti-heroes are just arseholes.
The starting weapons suck. Oh sure, loads of shooters give fancier weapons towards the end, but the guns you’ll find at the start of K&L2 are truly terrible. You’ll often struggle to kill someone ten metres away, spraying bullets everywhere but their flesh, and need to charge forwards to hit them. Even when you do get a semi-decent gun, ammunition is limited enough that you’ll soon need to ditch it and grab a new gun from a fallen foe. Early levels are full of dangerously pushing forwards to get into range of your enemies while desperately seeking a new gun, any gun, just a gun off the floor with any bullets in it. Wonderful, though sadly undercut by getting good guns towards the end.
The look holds up strong. Kane & Lynch 2 is presented like video filmed on a phone or cheap camera then uploaded to an streaming video site. Colours are over-exposed, lines from a scratched lens spread across lights, surfaces are murky patchworks of blocky compression artifacts, nudity is obscured with pixellation, phone calls cause that beepity-beep-bip noise, and even the loading bar is a buffering dial. Camera angles are usually wonky, get all sorts of shaky when you sprint, then in cutscenes sometimes go still as if someone has temporarily set the camera down. It sets out to be aggressively ugly and nails it.
Developer:TreyarchPublisher:ActivisionWhere can I buy it?Steam
Hayden:If I could see some big chart of my zombies playtime across each Call Of Duty game, I imagine it’d be rather frontloaded. World At War kicked it off, but Black Ops 1 is where the mode really took shape. It had simple maps that were fun to play while chasing high rounds and multi-stage easter eggs that were both exciting and accessible, even for nine-year-old me. Black Ops 2 tried its best to retain that formula, and then things got messy.
In recent years, poorly designed maps, endless gimmicks, and increasingly-convoluted puzzles have plagued COD zombies. I think it was around the release of Black Ops 3’s Zetsubou No Shima DLC map that I dropped off almost entirely, and I’ve barely played the new stuff since. I always give them a go and very promptly announce “I just wish they’d go back to Black Ops 1-style zombies”. So, here I am saying it again. Black Ops 1 was the peak of zombies, and I miss it dearly.
