GG: Three 90-plus rated games for £10 each
Monster Hunter Rise, Resident Evil 2 remake, and Into the Breach: Advanced Edition.
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Howdy, all. This week — my first proper week back after a long hiatus — I wanted to talk about three games: Resident Evil 2 (the 2019 remake of the original), Monster Hunter Rise (the latest and one of the best games in the critter-slaying Monster Hunter series), and Into the Breach: Advanced Edition, last year’s (free) update to one of the best puzzle-tactics games ever made.
All three are must-plays, and all three are pretty cheap right now.
In Into the Breach, you control three mechs on a grid trying to kill invading aliens before they stomp on nearby buildings.
It’s often compared to chess: each mech has a unique set of moves, and winning is a combination of attacking your invaders and manipulating the board, pushing an alien back a space so they attack one of their friends instead of your building, for example.
Why it’s worth playing right this second is because of last year’s Advanced Edition update, which adds new mechs, pilot abilities, enemy types, mission objectives and more (PC Gamer’s Evan Lahti had a good write-up here). If you’ve played it before, there’s enough here to justify a replay, and if you haven’t, there’s no better time.
It’s on PC and Switch, where you can expect to pay around $10/£10, but it’s also free if you’re a Netflix subscriber — you can play it on your phone, and the phone port is apparently really good. Just search Into the Breach in your app store.
Worth reading is Alex Wiltshere’s piece for Rock Paper Shotgun on the genius of the game’s design:
I’m in less familiar territory with the next two games, because I’ve only just started playing them, after wanting to for a long time. Let’s start with Resident Evil 2, the 2019 remake of — you guessed it — Resident Evil 2, the 1998 horror game. It’s on sale for one its lowest-ever prices on multiple platforms.
It’s a model for remaking old games: shinier visuals, smoother animations, streamlined controls, some brand new ideas that change how you play, and entire areas rebuilt — but it maintains the spirit of the original.
You’d never guess from playing it that its foundations were laid decades ago. It feels like a slick, modern, scary horror game, one in which you’re scrambling for resources and constantly finding new hidden corners of the world to explore, all the while dodging a giant, stalking super zombie and his trademark black fedora.
It’s replayable, too — its two main characters have separate campaigns that shade in different parts of the game’s canvas.
Best of all, it’s cheap. You can pick it up for roughly £9/$10 on PC or from the PS5 store. Well worth it. If you don’t believe me, check out a review from Eurogamer’s Aoife Wilson at the link below, and then watch a video from IGN — narrated by Joe Skrebels, now of Xbox Wire — on why Resident Evil 2’s police station is the perfect survival horror setting.
Last, lets look at Monster Hunter Rise. I’ve always wanted to get into Monster Hunter, but never had the patience for it — it’s a big, lumbering beast with a long list of weapon classes, each with their own move sets, and an encyclopedia of armour, craftable items, and companions who aid you in battle.
A few years ago I hopped into Monster Hunter: World, the biggest-budget game in the series, and hopped straight back out after realising my giant hammer had a scrolling menu of possible attacks that looked like a move set from Street Fighter or Tekken.
But Rise is supposed to be pretty accessible. It’s smaller than Monster Hunter: World (it’s on Switch as well as other consoles, which helps limits its ambitions), and it’s supposed to be easier to learn, too. I’ve briefly dipped in can confirm that it is, at least, not immediately overwhelming. I’ll stick with it and report back — by all accounts it’s the Monster Hunter to play if you’re new to the series. Here’s Dom Peppiatt in his Guardian review:
It makes sense that the branching weapon techniques of World have been dialled back a little, and everything feels more arcade-y. Special attacks can be swapped out on a whim to make movesets more flexible and comfortable to play. Fourteen weapons, interchangeable skills, ludicrous anime-inspired special attacks that have you leaping around like a particularly flamboyant Power Ranger … it all compresses into a fun, easy-going action game
The reason I’ve dipped in is because it’s just arrived on that chest of boundless treasure, Xbox Game Pass. It’s a full priced game elsewhere, but if you have an Xbox or PC (or phone or Steam Deck for the cloud version), it’s part of your monthly subscription. If you’re not a subscriber, then TechRadar’s James Pickard has a piece explaining the best sign-up deal (you can get your first month for £1/$1). It works out roughly a tenner a month over the full year.
(Other notable new arrivals on Game Pass include the JRPGs Persona 4 Golden and Persona 3 Portable, joining Persona 5 Golden, considered one of the best role-playing games of all time.)
The one caveat with Monster Hunter Rise is that it’s better in co-op than solo. So if you can buddy up, do — although you can still enjoy it singleplayer.
That’s all for this week — I haven’t had a chance to revive the GG Discord server yet, but that’s coming next month.
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You can also leave a comment — I’m keen to hear your thoughts on these three games
Take care!
Sam