Did you miss your old pals Brachydios and Tigrex? Well, they're back in Monster Hunter World's first and final expansion, Monster Hunter World: Iceborne. Yeah, Capcom already said they won't be doing another one. This expansion is basically the Ultimate version of MHW, except you don't have to restart from the beginning. It picks up right where the first game left off. Iceborne features a new story campaign, 2 new hunting areas, a new hub village, a handful of new monsters, a bunch of returning monsters from previous games, and of course, tons of new weapons and armor sets.
In order to unlock all the new quests and monsters, you're going to have to play through Iceborne's campaign. Now, don't get me wrong, MHW's gameplay is still solid as ever, and the new and returning monsters are a welcome addition, but Iceborne's campaign is pretty underwhelming. The structure and pacing just feel too restrictive, grindy, and slow after basically being able to do whatever I wanted for months in the base game.
It starts off well enough with a quest that takes you to the new snowy area, Hoarfrost Reach. That sounds exactly how you think it does. But it quickly goes downhill from there. By the fourth quest of the campaign, you're already back in Astera. I hadn't even checked everything out in the new village. Then you're sent right back into the Wildspire Wastes to fight a recolored Paolumu, as if everyone wasn't sick of the Wildspire Wastes by now. Way to deflate that hype balloon, Capcom. It feels like the game is stalling already. The Master Rank 1 Optional quests available at this time actually send you to the Ancient Forest to kill Great Jagras and Pukei-Pukei. I was fighting Deviljhos and Elder Dragons before Iceborne, and you send me to Ancient Forest to kill a Jagras? Capcom, please.
The pacing of the campaign is horrible. One of the biggest issues with it is that you can’t just play the Assigned Quests. You have to play the Optional Quests, too. You’re not forced to, but monsters in the campaign go up in rank at such a rapid pace, and each rank is such an upgrade for them, you’ll have to upgrade your gear if you don’t want to die in 2 hits. As the game progressed, I would have to spend more and more time making sets to take on each one because they all have different types of elemental attacks and blights you have to counter. Monster Hunter is 50% about preparing for a fight, I get that, but I didn’t buy Iceborne to make yet another Rathalos set. I was very disappointed seeing so many old MHW monsters in the Optional Quests.
Then, as if the time spent making and upgrading gear wasn’t enough, the campaign starts stalling by making you do filler quests, like going on expeditions to explore areas you’ve already been to, and going back into old areas to collect monster tracks, just like they did for the Tempered monsters in the base game. This is padding. The whole thing feels like something that should have been about 10 quests, but was spread out into 20. I would’ve liked to have seen more new monsters used in the campaign, and then have been able to repeat those quests in Optional to finish the armor sets. I would also have liked to have had more quests in Hoarfrost Reach and less in the old areas.
Your endgame reward for playing all the way through the campaign is the new hunting grounds, The Guiding Lands. This zone combines 4 of the major environment types into one huge zone. They say it’s the biggest zone, but I think Hoarfrost Reach is actually bigger. The Guiding Lands has Ancient Forest, Wilspire Wastes, Rotten Vale, and Coral Highlands themed zones. These are not reused zones, they just look like the old zones. The Guiding Lands also has a leveling component to it. Each zone can be leveled up by killing monsters and collecting monster tracks in them. The higher level the zone is, the higher the level of the monsters that spawn in it will be. That means that level 1 zones will have Great Jagras and Barroths in them. The Guiding Lands is the Iceborne campaign in a nutshell. It makes you collect footprints and fight monsters you have no interest in fighting for the 500th time to get to what you want. I kind of hate it. The leveling of the zones is also not permanent. There’s a balancing effect that levels down zones as you level others up. I think a zone that can have all these monsters in it is cool, but the execution is terrible. I don’t want to level these zones by killing more Rathalos, and I don’t want to collect more monster tracks, either.
Perhaps the most annoying thing about The Guiding Lands is that you still can't change decorations at the camp. So if a monster spawns and you don't already have a set to fight it, you have to go back to town to put one together. And since the monsters leave this zone more quickly, they might leave before you get back. You also lose all your buffs once you go back to town.
Even though the campaign sucks, I stuck with the game because MHW’s gameplay is still great. I’d even say that this is the best MH has ever played. I didn’t think Monster Hunter needed any more mechanics because, frankly, the game is still kind of bloated, but the changes they’ve made are actually really good. Every weapon has gotten new moves, there’s a new clutch claw mechanic, and there’s even mounts/taxis.
The new clutch claw move allows you to use your claw shot to cling to a monster and attack it. You can hit it with your weapon, or shoot it in the face if you have some slinger ammo equipped. This might sound like the mounting mechanic, but it’s actually a totally different thing. If you shoot a monster in the face with some strong ammo, you can knock them down, stagger them and make them run into walls, and even make them fall off cliffs for massive damage. The clutch claw also gives melee weapon users something to do to flying monsters besides shooting them with flash bombs.
My favorite new feature is the mounts, which are more like taxis. If you befriend a zone’s Felyne tribe by doing a quest, your Palico will learn how to talk to some of the monsters in that zone and it will get a new item that calls a mount for you. You can’t control this mount directly, but you can have it take you wherever you want in the zone by setting a destination for it on the map. These taxis are much faster than running, and you can use items while mounted.
Iceborne had a rocky start in regards to performance, but some of that has been ironed out with patches by now. Apparently, some of it had to do with the new anti-cheat program attached to the game, which was using a lot of CPU power. The game itself has gotten a pretty big performance boost, though. I can now run the game with higher settings and at a higher framerate on the same PC. I actually used the volumetric rendering for the fog this time around because I think it looks really good in the snowy environments. Besides the performance boost, the snow area has a new snow deformation effect to go along with all the snow everywhere. You and the monsters make trails in the snow as you run through it. I haven’t tried writing my name in it, but it looks pretty cool.
There is a new soundtrack to go along with Iceborne, but the way the game uses music dynamically doesn’t really let you listen to all of it as much as I’d like. The new songs are really good, though. They're all orchestrated, just like on the first game's soundtrack. The OST is on Spotify, if you want to hear the entire songs.
Wow, this review sounds really negative. Well, I’m not very happy with the campaign, and I think the Guiding Lands is a cool idea with a bad execution. Iceborne does add a bunch of monsters to the game, though. That’s what I really wanted out of Iceborne. The game badly needed more monsters. I really like the new moves and mounts, too. I guess this should be obvious, but this expansion is strictly for the hardcore Monster Hunter fans.
After the success of Super Mario 64, everyone wanted to make their own 3D platformer. It was kind of a trend for a while. Unsurprisingly, one of the best at making 3D platformers in the Mario 64 mold was Nintendo’s own Rareware. They made 2 Banjo-Kazooie games, Donkey Kong 64, and Conker’s Bad Fur Day. They even started their own trend among 3D platformers, the collectathon. Banjo-Kazooie was my jam back in the day, but I don’t particularly miss those games with hundreds of collectables of six different kinds in every level. There is definitely an audience looking for this kind of game, though. In 2015, 73,206 backers pledged over 2.7 million dollars to a Kickstarter campaign for the development of Yooka-Laylee, a Rare style 3D platformer made by Playtonic Games, a development studio founded by former Rare developers who worked the Donkey Kong Country and Banjo-Kazooie series. Frankly, I haven’t heard great things about Yooka-Laylee, but I played it and collected around 115 Pagies, and I was pleasantly surprised. It definitely does the thing it sets out to do, give us another one of those Mario 64 clones in that cheeky Rare style.
The main draw of this game for me is how Rare-like it is. N64 kids should feel right at home here. Yooka-Laylee is more than Rare enough. It’s comically Rare. Everything about Yooka-Laylee is heavily leaning on the googly eyed characters that talk like “Hwa hwa hwa hwa hwa” thing, there are toilet jokes everywhere, and constant 4th wall breaking. Mostly by Laylee. There’s even an enemy that’s just a pair of bouncing googly eyes that possesses many different objects throughout the game. Anything can be a character with a pair of googly eyes! Yooka and Laylee themselves look like they could have been one of those other non-DK characters in Diddy Kong Racing. This is what the people wanted, right?
Playtonic has definitely made that game, but I think the thing that draws people to Yooka-Laylee is also the reason why it's not a great game. Yooka-Laylee totally looks and plays like a sequel to all those Rare 3D platformers on N64, but not like a sequel made this gen. It feels more like a GameCube era game remade for the current generation. Yooka-Laylee feels very old-school compared to how 3D Mario games have evolved since Mario Sunshine. Yooka-Laylee is full of gimmicky minigames, huge levels that are huge for the sake of being huge, and a pretty bad camera no matter which option you use.
My biggest issue with Yooka-Laylee is how gimmicky it is. It feels like half of the things you do to get Pagies (the Stars of YL) aren't even platforming. There's races, minecart levels, quizzes, shooting galleries, fake arcade games, and a bunch of transformations, like a snowplow and helicopter. Most of these aren't even fun to begin with, and yet they're repeated over and over throughout the game. Every level has the 5 ghosts, a minecart level, an arcade game, and something to do with a transformation. None of these are actual platforming, and they all end up feeling like filler. They’re just something to put in these huge levels to meet the 25 Pagie requirement for each one.
It's a shame that this game is so full of gimmicks because it plays really well. There’s some very good traditional platforming here. The Yooka and Laylee combo makes for a really fun character to play as in a 3D platformer. Aside from some iffy first person aiming, the game has great controls. Running and jumping around feels smooth and precise, combining your abilities feels intuitive, and you get a good mix of familiar and new moves throughout the game. You get a roll, double jump, glide, Sonic spin dash, a Crash/Jak-like spin attack, and also some weirder moves, like a Predator-like stealth mode (‘cause Yooka is a chameleon) and a sonar shot (‘cause Laylee is a bat) that reveals secret totems. I feel like the weirder, non-platforming abilities aren’t used very well, though. You barely use the tongue grappling hook outside of the swamp area, for example, and that only adds to the disjointed and gimmicky vibe of the game.
The levels in Yooka-Laylee are just too big for their own good. There really isn't that much to do in all this space. That’s probably why there’s 200 Quills in them. A lot of the Pagie challenges have you talk to an NPC that throws you into a minigame, or take place in a cave or dungeon separate from the main part of the world, so large chunks of the levels end up feeling like space that's only there to connect areas or like they’re only there to make the world bigger. These huge worlds also work against you because the game only creates checkpoints at doors. That means that long obstacle courses have to be retried from the start every time, and if you die while exploring deep into a level, you might have to run back there from the entrance.
The camera in Yooka-Laylee is problematic, but honestly, I got used to it. I used manual throughout the whole game. That's a lot of camera babysitting, but it's better than constantly fighting the regular camera.
Progression through the game is done pretty well. There are jokes about collectathons in the game, but I was not overwhelmed by collectables in YL, like in Banjo-Tooie and DK64. Each level has 200 Quills, 5 ghosts, an arcade token you use to play Rextro’s games, an HP upgrade, an energy upgrade, and a Mollycool to use the transformation machine. It's a lot of stuff, but you don't have to get all of it to progress. You get a Pagie after catching all the ghosts, one from collecting 200 Quills, 2 Pagies from the arcade game you play with the token, and a few with the level’s transformation, so you're not just collecting for the sake of it. You use Quills to buy moves and you open and expand levels with Pagies, so you always feel like you’re working towards a goal. It’s also worth noting that there’s 145 Pagies in the game, but you only need 100 to fight the last boss, so you can definitely skip some mine cart levels if you want.
I think Yooka-Laylee looks pretty nice. If they were going for a Rare box art CG look, then they pretty much nailed it. You could probably use a Yooka-Laylee screenshot for the cover of a YL SNES game. The environments have cliche themes like ice, jungle, and swamp, but they’re very lively, colorful, full of cartoony details, and totally remind me of Donkey Kong Country and Banjo-Kazooie. I played the PC version, and it ran at 60fps with max settings at 1080p, but I did notice that there were some ugly graphical glitches, like flat black textures on some objects, like the ice cubes in the Icymetric Palace and one of the pillars in the casino level.
Yooka-Laylee's soundtrack definitely sounds like a Rare game. It's like part DKC and part BK, with tracks by both Grant Kirkhope and David Wise. It fits the game really well, but it’s not really my style. I’m just not into the horn-heavy, orchestral Grant Kirkhope stuff. It reminds me too much of old cartoons or something. I like the David Wise tracks much better. They’re usually the faster more electronic, DKC-sounding tracks.
I had fun with Yooka-Laylee, but there’s definitely a lot of crap to wade through. If this game had cut out half of those minigames and transformations and focused more on platforming obstacle courses, it would have probably been a much better game. Still, if you were a fan of Rare’s games back when they worked for Nintendo, you’ll probably have a good time with Yooka-Laylee. I’d be interested in another 3D Yooka-Laylee platformer, and I’ll definitely have to check out Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair soon.
13. Tetris 99 - This literally came out of nowhere. Tetris spinoffs don’t usually turn out well, but Arika and Nintendo nailed it with this one. It’s such a simple idea. It’s Tetris battle royale. You vs 98 other players online. There’s some real killers online, and I’ve still never won a game, but this is a ton of fun regardless. It has single player Marathon and offline multiplayer DLC, too.
12. Shovel Knight: King of Cards - The final Shovel Knight expansion. And what a great sendoff for the game. It doesn’t seem to have gotten a lot of attention, but it’s a legitimately great platformer. Don’t let the card game scare you off. You don’t have to play it if you don’t want. King Knight is a really fun character to play as and the levels are some of the most challenging in the series. This is a must play for fans of 2D platformers.
11. Untitled Goose Game - The goose that laid the golden egg. Not only was it an instant hit when it came out on Switch, but it just surpassed 1 million in sales after its PS4 and XBO release. And well deserved. Untitled Goose game is hilarious and a lot of fun to play. I was legitimately surprised at how good the actual gameplay was. I thought it was just about funny goose memes, but I had a great time solving puzzles around the neighborhood.
10. Contra Anniversary Collection - This and the Castlevania collection had a few issues, like the Pixel Perfect mode on SNES and NES games actually being in Genesis Pixel Perfect aspect ratio instead of 8:7, but they’re both full of great games and well worth the price. Sure, you’ll get better options by playing these on your NES, SNES, or Genesis Classic, but this is probably going to be the only way to get these games on PS4, XBO, or Switch.
9. Blazing Chrome - Blazing Chrome is not actually a new Contra game, but it is a much better Contra game than the new Contra game, Contra: Rogue Corps. Blazing Chrome takes the sidescrolling run ‘n gun action that made Contra III and Contra: Hard Corps so great on SNES and Genesis and does something a little more modern with it. There is no 30 lives code here, but you do have infinite continues and can do some of the levels out of order, so this game is much more about memorizing levels and improving your skills. If Contra Anniversary Collection left you wanting a new Contra, you should check out Blazing Chrome.
8. Castlevania: Anniversary Collection - Yeah, this is missing all those great Metroidvanias, like SOTN and Aria of Sorrow, and it doesn’t even have all the Classicvanias, since it’s missing Rondo of Blood and The Adventure ReBirth, but there's a lot of great Classicvanias in this thing, and it’s only $20. This also has the only English release of Kid Dracula for NES, which is not great, but is interesting if you’re into retro game oddities.
7. Luigi’s Mansion 3 - Even though the Luigi’s Mansion series goes all the way back to the GameCube days, it’s never been one of Nintendo’s big series. Luigi’s Mansion 3 feels like the game that’s going to change that. This feels like a AAA Luigi’s Mansion. This is by far the biggest game in the series and one of the best looking games on Switch. I thought the controls were a little awkward and felt like the game was asking a bit too much of Luigi near the end, but it was otherwise a great game.
6. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night - I was one of the backers that got burned by the pathetic Switch version, but after playing this on PC, I can’t bring myself to hate it. It’s just too good. There are a lot of indies games trying to be Symphony of the Night 2 out there, but none of them do it as well as Bloodstained RotN. Iga delivered and I can’t wait to see what’s next for the series.
5. Devil May Cry 5 - The Devil May Cry series has been flirting with Resident Evil and Zelda style puzzles since the very first one, but I don’t think they ever really clicked. The series needed to pick a style, and it went with pure action. Devil May Cry 5 drops nearly all the puzzles and exploration, and is much closer to a Bayonetta in structure than a DMC4. I think it worked out well. This game is non-stop action, both Nero and Dante are a lot of fun to play, and even though the story doesn’t make sense sometimes (to say the least), it’s fun in a dumb action movie kind of way. This party’s crazier than ever!
4. River City Girls - I love WayForward and River City Ransom is one of my favorite NES beat ‘em ups, so this is a match made in heaven for me. The combat system is nearly as deep as a fighting game’s and the presentation is bursting with style. It has beautiful 2D graphics, one of the best soundtracks of the year, and the story is hilarious and full of colorful characters and clever dialogue. I hope to see more of Misako and Kyoko in the future.
3. The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening - It’s Link’s Awakening with more buttons. That automatically makes it the best version of Link’s Awakening. This remake lets the amazing game that was always held back by the limitations of the GB shine through. It’s a shame that they never fixed the uneven framerate on the overworld, but the game is fantastic otherwise. It has some of the best graphics on the Switch and the soundtrack is by far the best Zelda music in a game outside of Smash Bros.
2. Super Mario Maker 2 - Even after Pokemon, this is still my most played game of the year It was basically an expansion to the Wii U game but with a worse UI, but I got totally into making levels again. Nobody plays my levels, but that’s another story. I just have fun making them. It’s a creative outlet for me. The single player was also pretty good. Still waiting on Swoops, Nintendo!
1. Pokemon Sword and Shield - This game was the most fun I had all year. I was totally addicted to it for about a month and I still play it every day. I loved how the story focused on trainers and the spirit of competition, and I'm still having a lot of fun raiding, shiny hunting, and breeding competitive Pokemon. This series was heading in a bad direction with Sun and Moon and its handholdy campaign and terrible characters, like Hao and Lillie, and while Sword and Shield are not the Breath of the Wild of Pokemon, they’re a step in the right direction. This is by far the best Pokemon game to come out in a very long time.
