Wordsmith's Anvil

  Image credit: Jump Over the Age Ah. That refreshing Amos Roddy music again.     Some games can really nail down a feeling and a tone that you're looking for as a gamer. Not everything has to be shooting and carving people up . Not everything has to be incredibly crafted dramas fit for television . Some stuff can just be simply great writing with an atmospheric  tune ushering you along through the narrative.     Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector puts us in the shoes of a sleeper again. For those not in the know, a sleeper is an individual who has leased out their consciousness to a megacorp in order to get their ticket off-world in some shape or fashion. The sleeper themselves might be actually in a bunker several lightyears away, but the body their consciousness is operating looks and functions in a nearly-human way on different space stations, ships, or even asteroids in the belt of the Helion System. They need to eat, walk, sleep, and endure the strugg...

Image credit: Jump Over the Age "'More Human than Human' is our motto," Tyrell says with a mixture of matter-of-fact clarification and barely contained pride.     Deckard scoffs at the very idea that one of these replicants could be anything like a human.       Let alone more.     Blade Runner is, and probably always will be, my all-time favorite movie. It combines the raw human emotion I love in films alongside great sci-fi action. I could go on for hours, but we're not here to talk about Ridley Scott's masterpiece. We're here to talk about the one created by Jump Over the Age.     You read that right.     In Citizen Sleeper , you play as a "sleeper" on an almost-forgotten space station in a remote corner of the galaxy. To figure out just what the hell I'm talking about, let me clarify a few things. First off, in this distant future AI has been outlawed entirely. Perhaps not such a bad thing... Either way, it is illegal for an...

Image Credit: Reikon Games It's amazing what a game can do to your willingness to dive in with something as simple as a gun and a set of sci-fi powers. Now add a few more guns and a soundtrack that bangs with every track... and you've got Metal Eden .     You play as Aska, a "hyper unit" Android tasked with releasing the uploaded minds of millions of citizens that have been held hostage in what amounts to a sort of brain-storage-facility. This all takes place on a planet that has been designated as mankind's best new setting as Earth has been rendered uninhabitable. Unfortunately for Aska, but fortunately for us, there are obstacles in the way of her mission in the form of thousands of enemies that are tasked with guarding the "cores" needed to advance further.     Sound confusing?     Just wait 'til you play it. The Good First and foremost, the gameplay takes a front seat here. It's not just the combat, although that alone is truly special. The ...

  Image credit: Reikon Games It's been a hot minute since my last gaming review! Just kidding it's been like a literal minute. That's because Ruiner is one of those bite-size games that can be blown through in a single weekend without even having your wife grab the butcher knife and threaten your livelihood if you don't go to bed.     Ruiner is a 5-hour romp through the gritty undercity of a cyberpunk hellscape. You're a nameless, faceless, action hero armed with nothing but a busted pipe and an easily-modded gun called a "Ruiner." It starts you off with the goal being to assassinate the boss of a megacorporation called Heaven. After taking down some thugs on your way to do this task-a task that you have no real reason to do besides it just being the current assignment and flashes of someone telling you what to do-your brain is hacked by Her. "Her" is intent on getting you to safety for the time being so you can find out what's really going o...

  Images courtesy of Harebrained Schemes I think most trilogies try to improve upon their formula with each iteration. This can be seen with film classics like the original Star Wars trilogy, and also with gaming epics like Mass Effect . It's a tried and true method of getting your audience to continue returning. The stakes have been amped up from piece to piece, and we all want to find out what happens next.     The same can definitely be said for Shadowrun .     I never had the privilege of playing the original Shadowrun on SNES, but I was pretty excited to find out that some of the original creators of the work landed themselves in Harebrained Schemes to set up the Kickstarter campaigns needed to flesh out a new series for the title. Now, granted, this trilogy came out quite a few years ago and then was ported to current consoles several years later (still a couple years back, by now), but it was a new foray for me into a cyberpunk world the likes I'd never...

Image courtesy of Neon Giant Blade Runner, Cyberpunk 2077 , and to some extent... The Outer Worlds 1 and 2 . These would all be works that could be found in the vein of cyberpunk, or at least possess some elements of the genre. The typical pieces are all there. Major distances between rich and poor, corporations in charge of various entities normally controlled by governments, and rain. You have to have rain.     The Ascent tackles every one of these components in spades.     In this newcomer to the cyberpunk scene, we play as an "indent" in the underbelly of Veles, a planet headed by several corporations vying for power over one another. An indent is short for an indentured servant. Similar to the origins of the term from colonial America's earliest days, indentured servants take on terrible contracts in order to get a one-way trip to a burgeoning community promising more. This is the story of Veles, and in order to claw our way out of the underground we have to w...

  Images courtesy of Obsidian Entertainment I've honed in on quite a few reviews in recent days. The truth is, my review backlog fills up just like everyone's gaming backlog does. Sometimes a game will dominate hours on end of my time and then a block of weeks will go by without a single word written about it, then a string of short games will come along and I have to do a half-dozen in a row. In spite of what everyone's complaints were about the original Outer Worlds being too short, the Spacer's Choice Edition  does not fall anywhere near that category now.     The Outer Worlds clocked in at just over sixty hours from start to finish for me with all the DLC included. As a game, it blends the perfect amount of science fiction, fantasy, adventure, and comedy into a package that tells a compelling tale without ever taking itself too seriously. We start as a solo colonist plucked from the Hope, a colony ship carrying tens of thousands meant to populate the far-flung sy...

  Images courtesy of CD Projekt Red There are few examples of games in recent years that have had a more contentious start than Cyberpunk 2077. When it originally released, CP dropped with a slew of issues ranging from empty streets to recurrences of broken loading. Even PSN pulled the title from its online selling due to the issues that ran so rampant across nearly every player's experience. As time went on, patches and fixes helped to bring it to playability for Next Gen consoles and PC while still rendering it next to useless for the Playstation 4 and XBox One generations. I was one of those people who had been so looking forward to the amazingness CD Projekt promised with Cyberpunk , especially after being so wowed by The Witcher 3 , only to have my heart broken when I tried to get into the game on my PS4. It just wasn't happening, and so I put my hopes for a true Blade Runner- esque game to the wayside for a bit. Now in 2025, one of my close friends highly recommended CP w...