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Summer Heat: A Steamy Romance Collection
Caitlyn Lynch, Christina Rose Andrews, Ariel Bishop, Líadáin Douglas, Annika Steele, Gwen Marshall, Abbigail Clark, Livvy Ward, T.D. Crawls, Ava Bari, Avery J. Heath, Tally Bane, Sera Taíno, Moxie Rivers, Siobhan Kearney, Cynthia Miller and Tricia Ramey
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A collection of 17 steamy short stories (5,000 - 10,000 words) by new and established romance...
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Call Recorder - Automatic Call Recorder Phone ACR (Automatic Call Recorder) is an easy and smart...
Bob Mann (459 KP) rated Free Fire (2017) in Movies
Sep 29, 2021
A movie with more than a whiff of cordite about it
As I write this, I’m really struggling to evaluate whether the latest film of Ben Wheatley (“High Rise”) is a masterpiece or just pulp trash. It’s certainly a brave and highly distinctive venture, with that you can’t argue.
Set in Boston in 1978, an arms deal is going down in a deserted warehouse. Brokered by Justine (Brie Larson, “Room”) an IRA team headed by Frank (Michael Smiley, “The World’s End“) with his business guy Chris (Cillian Murphy, “Inception”, “Batman Begins”) are on the buying side. As ‘roadies’ they’ve brought with them a couple of crack-head friends Stevo (Sam Riley, “Brighton Rock”, “Maleficent“) and Bernie (Enzo Cilenti, “The Martian“) who are far from stable.
On the selling side is South African dealer and “international asshole” Vern (Sharlto Copley, “Elysium“), his suave and wisecracking protector Ord (Armie Hammer, “The Man From Uncle”) and Vern’s right hand man Martin (Babou Ceesay, “Eye in the Sky“). What connects all of these individuals is that no-one likes or trusts anyone else.
Unfortunately, one of Vern’s van drivers is John Denver-lover Harry (the excellent Jack Treynor, “Sing Street”) who has very recent personal history with Stevo. The fuse is lit, and when the two meet chaos ensues: in the words of Anchorman’s Ron Burgundy, “That escalated quickly”!
And, for a 90 minute film, that’s basically it. If you think after viewing the trailer “there must be more to the film than this”…. you’re wrong!
However, what there is of it is enormously entertaining. Played ostensibly for laughs, with very very black humour and an F-word and a gunshot in every other sentence, some of the characters – notably those played by Sharlto Copley, Arnie Hammer and Brie Larson – have some hilarious dialogue. The star turn for me though was Jack Treynor who was just so impressive as the ‘lost at sea’ brother in the delightful “Sing Street” and here delivers a stand-out performance as another brother on a mission… this time a mission of vengeance. You are waiting throughout the film for the inevitable showdown between Harry and Stevo – – and when it comes it is both bloody and memorable.
A cracking 70’ soundtrack, put together by the Portishead duo of Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, involves 70’s classics by Credence Clearwater Revival, John Denver and The Real Kids and it’s hammered out at top volume over the action. The downside of this effect is that – for my old ears at least – it sometimes make some of the dialogue hard to follow.
As a policing exercise, the film clearly has merit. In the same manner as Schwarzenegger’s “Running Man” put criminals in an arena to cull them, so this must have reduced the crime rates in both Boston and Belfast no end! While some may not approve of the levels of violence on show, it is all done in a highly cartoonish way: like a “Tom and Jerry” cartoon, or “Home Alone”, everyone seems to get shot multiple times and yet (in the main) is still active and mobile. All of this makes criticism of the performances something of a waste of time, but I would comment that some of the acting is of the “over the top” variety: surprisingly, I found some of Oscar winner Brie Larson’s scenes falling into this category and snapping me out of the narrative at times.
But overall, my evaluation is now done and I am rooting on the side of it being a brash and exhilarating minor masterpiece. Yes, it’s one-dimensional. Yes, it is virtually impossible to feel any empathy with any of the characters, as they are all universally loathsome. But it’s a movie whose flaws are forgivable based on the characterisation and the cracking good script by long-term collaborators Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump.
Tight as it is within its 90 minute running time, I very much doubt you will be bored.
Set in Boston in 1978, an arms deal is going down in a deserted warehouse. Brokered by Justine (Brie Larson, “Room”) an IRA team headed by Frank (Michael Smiley, “The World’s End“) with his business guy Chris (Cillian Murphy, “Inception”, “Batman Begins”) are on the buying side. As ‘roadies’ they’ve brought with them a couple of crack-head friends Stevo (Sam Riley, “Brighton Rock”, “Maleficent“) and Bernie (Enzo Cilenti, “The Martian“) who are far from stable.
On the selling side is South African dealer and “international asshole” Vern (Sharlto Copley, “Elysium“), his suave and wisecracking protector Ord (Armie Hammer, “The Man From Uncle”) and Vern’s right hand man Martin (Babou Ceesay, “Eye in the Sky“). What connects all of these individuals is that no-one likes or trusts anyone else.
Unfortunately, one of Vern’s van drivers is John Denver-lover Harry (the excellent Jack Treynor, “Sing Street”) who has very recent personal history with Stevo. The fuse is lit, and when the two meet chaos ensues: in the words of Anchorman’s Ron Burgundy, “That escalated quickly”!
And, for a 90 minute film, that’s basically it. If you think after viewing the trailer “there must be more to the film than this”…. you’re wrong!
However, what there is of it is enormously entertaining. Played ostensibly for laughs, with very very black humour and an F-word and a gunshot in every other sentence, some of the characters – notably those played by Sharlto Copley, Arnie Hammer and Brie Larson – have some hilarious dialogue. The star turn for me though was Jack Treynor who was just so impressive as the ‘lost at sea’ brother in the delightful “Sing Street” and here delivers a stand-out performance as another brother on a mission… this time a mission of vengeance. You are waiting throughout the film for the inevitable showdown between Harry and Stevo – – and when it comes it is both bloody and memorable.
A cracking 70’ soundtrack, put together by the Portishead duo of Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, involves 70’s classics by Credence Clearwater Revival, John Denver and The Real Kids and it’s hammered out at top volume over the action. The downside of this effect is that – for my old ears at least – it sometimes make some of the dialogue hard to follow.
As a policing exercise, the film clearly has merit. In the same manner as Schwarzenegger’s “Running Man” put criminals in an arena to cull them, so this must have reduced the crime rates in both Boston and Belfast no end! While some may not approve of the levels of violence on show, it is all done in a highly cartoonish way: like a “Tom and Jerry” cartoon, or “Home Alone”, everyone seems to get shot multiple times and yet (in the main) is still active and mobile. All of this makes criticism of the performances something of a waste of time, but I would comment that some of the acting is of the “over the top” variety: surprisingly, I found some of Oscar winner Brie Larson’s scenes falling into this category and snapping me out of the narrative at times.
But overall, my evaluation is now done and I am rooting on the side of it being a brash and exhilarating minor masterpiece. Yes, it’s one-dimensional. Yes, it is virtually impossible to feel any empathy with any of the characters, as they are all universally loathsome. But it’s a movie whose flaws are forgivable based on the characterisation and the cracking good script by long-term collaborators Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump.
Tight as it is within its 90 minute running time, I very much doubt you will be bored.
Mothergamer (1546 KP) rated Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age in Video Games
Apr 3, 2019
I have loved the Dragon Quest games since I was a kid and have played many of them. I was quite thrilled that a new Dragon Quest game was coming out so as soon as I got my hands on Dragon Quest XI: Echoes Of An Elusive Age, I started playing immediately. Right from the start the game starts off with a fantastic introduction with music played by the Tokyo Symphonic Orchestra and beautiful scenes from the game. The story starts with an interesting beginning showing the hero who is known as the Luminary a hero of light who is the only one that can fight the powers of darkness and a villain known as Mordegon.
Once the initial introduction is done, this is where Dragon Quest really gets going. You have a few side quests that give you a tutorial on how the battle system works and there is a small bit of exploration in the hero's home village.
The hero exploring a cave in his village.
Exploration is very much encouraged in Dragon Quest without being overwhelming. Dungeons are fairly linear so there's no confusion about where to go. The battle system has been revamped a bit with the ability to have the AI on your party members set to specific things such as focusing on healing or fighting wisely. The way I had mine set up was that I had control of the hero with the follow orders setting and had the party members set to certain AI controls like having designated healers and melee fighters.
Another part of fighting in these turn based battles is something called pep powers. Basically after party members take a certain amount of damage from enemies they gain the power of pep. Each pep power is different and you unlock more for your hero and party members as you level up. These pep powers allow the hero and his friends to team up during battles to unleash epic attacks or heal everyone depending on what the situation calls for. Pep powers do not last forever however and if you don't use them right away they can wear off. A trick around this is to have the party member who is pepped up swap places with a party member who isn't. This is where the tactics and line up option in the battle menu comes in handy. It allows you to swap members in and out as needed until everyone has their pep powers ready to go.
Use the pep powers to defeat enemies in battle.
There are tons of side quests in Dragon Quest where you help villagers find items, defeat monsters for them, or just wear the right outfit and you get rewarded with not just experience but items for crafting, healing items, or gear for your party members. There are also some mini games like horse racing and a casino where you can exchange tokens for things like costumes and crafting recipes.
Horse racing is just one of the mini games you can play in the game.
Crafting is a big part of Dragon Quest XI. When you are at campfires, you can use the fun sized forge to craft weapons, armor, and accessories for your hero and his friends. I enjoyed this part of the game a lot because there are a variety of items you can make and if you make them well you get some pretty good stats on them. As you level up, you unlock abilities that can enhance your forging skills and increase your chances of successfully crafting items. If you screw up a crafting session you can always go back and rework the item if you have the right number of perfectionist's pearls. Some of the side quests require you to craft specific items so this is where the fun sized forge comes in handy. It's a nice break from level grinding and adventuring and you can save your game progress at the campfire as well.
Craft a variety of items with the fun sized forge.
Another fun aspect of the game is the variety of costumes you can get for your hero and party members. Some do offer pretty great defense stats and some are just for fun like Jade's bunny costume. There are a few side quests that offer costumes as rewards and some of the costumes you can craft with the forge. Running around getting all the costumes is a lot of fun and each one looks great and goes well with the party member it's for.
Just one of the many costumes you can get in the game.
Does Dragon Quest XI have flaws? In a word, yes. While I loved running around exploring everywhere, enjoyed the story, and didn't mind the level grinding there are serious issues with many of the boss battles in the game. My biggest one is that the old fashioned way of not being able to see a boss battle's HP bar does not work. There are times where a battle will drag on a little too long and there is no way to tell if you are even doing any damage at all or if the boss is close to being defeated. Fighting and hoping for the best just does not work.
Another factor is just how much level grinding is needed in order to win against certain bosses. I love Dragon Quest and while I don't mind challenging having to run around for long periods of time to level grind just to win a boss fight is incredibly tedious which brings me to the next major issue with the game. Towards the end of the game there is a final boss that is the biggest pain in the ass to fight. To add to the frustration in this final area there is only one save point and it's at the beginning of the dungeon. There is no warning about the final boss coming up, no save point before it, and it just throws you into the fray. I did not win the first time or even the second because the boss fight was in two parts and the second part had an outrageous difficulty spike to the point of being so frustrating that I had to take a break from the game.
I did finish the game eventually, but that part of the game alone and the odd spikes in difficulty in various boss fights shows that Dragon Quest needs to modernize a bit and get with the times. It does not need to do anything drastic, but it at least needs to make some changes that are more friendly to the people playing their game such as showing an enemy's HP gauge and not have such a steep learning curve for important boss battles.
Other than those things, I enjoyed Dragon Quest XI a lot. It has an interesting story, wonderful characters, and is a great adventure overall. There is a lot to see and do, the mini games are fun, and the voice acting in the game is very well done. The artwork in the game is terrific and you definitely notice Akira Toriyama's unique art style. The music for the game is great also. When you finish the game, there are things you can do afterwards such as collecting all the crafting recipes and finishing some level 60 side quests. If you are a fan of the series, it is one that you will enjoy playing because it is a great addition to the Dragon Quest universe.
Once the initial introduction is done, this is where Dragon Quest really gets going. You have a few side quests that give you a tutorial on how the battle system works and there is a small bit of exploration in the hero's home village.
The hero exploring a cave in his village.
Exploration is very much encouraged in Dragon Quest without being overwhelming. Dungeons are fairly linear so there's no confusion about where to go. The battle system has been revamped a bit with the ability to have the AI on your party members set to specific things such as focusing on healing or fighting wisely. The way I had mine set up was that I had control of the hero with the follow orders setting and had the party members set to certain AI controls like having designated healers and melee fighters.
Another part of fighting in these turn based battles is something called pep powers. Basically after party members take a certain amount of damage from enemies they gain the power of pep. Each pep power is different and you unlock more for your hero and party members as you level up. These pep powers allow the hero and his friends to team up during battles to unleash epic attacks or heal everyone depending on what the situation calls for. Pep powers do not last forever however and if you don't use them right away they can wear off. A trick around this is to have the party member who is pepped up swap places with a party member who isn't. This is where the tactics and line up option in the battle menu comes in handy. It allows you to swap members in and out as needed until everyone has their pep powers ready to go.
Use the pep powers to defeat enemies in battle.
There are tons of side quests in Dragon Quest where you help villagers find items, defeat monsters for them, or just wear the right outfit and you get rewarded with not just experience but items for crafting, healing items, or gear for your party members. There are also some mini games like horse racing and a casino where you can exchange tokens for things like costumes and crafting recipes.
Horse racing is just one of the mini games you can play in the game.
Crafting is a big part of Dragon Quest XI. When you are at campfires, you can use the fun sized forge to craft weapons, armor, and accessories for your hero and his friends. I enjoyed this part of the game a lot because there are a variety of items you can make and if you make them well you get some pretty good stats on them. As you level up, you unlock abilities that can enhance your forging skills and increase your chances of successfully crafting items. If you screw up a crafting session you can always go back and rework the item if you have the right number of perfectionist's pearls. Some of the side quests require you to craft specific items so this is where the fun sized forge comes in handy. It's a nice break from level grinding and adventuring and you can save your game progress at the campfire as well.
Craft a variety of items with the fun sized forge.
Another fun aspect of the game is the variety of costumes you can get for your hero and party members. Some do offer pretty great defense stats and some are just for fun like Jade's bunny costume. There are a few side quests that offer costumes as rewards and some of the costumes you can craft with the forge. Running around getting all the costumes is a lot of fun and each one looks great and goes well with the party member it's for.
Just one of the many costumes you can get in the game.
Does Dragon Quest XI have flaws? In a word, yes. While I loved running around exploring everywhere, enjoyed the story, and didn't mind the level grinding there are serious issues with many of the boss battles in the game. My biggest one is that the old fashioned way of not being able to see a boss battle's HP bar does not work. There are times where a battle will drag on a little too long and there is no way to tell if you are even doing any damage at all or if the boss is close to being defeated. Fighting and hoping for the best just does not work.
Another factor is just how much level grinding is needed in order to win against certain bosses. I love Dragon Quest and while I don't mind challenging having to run around for long periods of time to level grind just to win a boss fight is incredibly tedious which brings me to the next major issue with the game. Towards the end of the game there is a final boss that is the biggest pain in the ass to fight. To add to the frustration in this final area there is only one save point and it's at the beginning of the dungeon. There is no warning about the final boss coming up, no save point before it, and it just throws you into the fray. I did not win the first time or even the second because the boss fight was in two parts and the second part had an outrageous difficulty spike to the point of being so frustrating that I had to take a break from the game.
I did finish the game eventually, but that part of the game alone and the odd spikes in difficulty in various boss fights shows that Dragon Quest needs to modernize a bit and get with the times. It does not need to do anything drastic, but it at least needs to make some changes that are more friendly to the people playing their game such as showing an enemy's HP gauge and not have such a steep learning curve for important boss battles.
Other than those things, I enjoyed Dragon Quest XI a lot. It has an interesting story, wonderful characters, and is a great adventure overall. There is a lot to see and do, the mini games are fun, and the voice acting in the game is very well done. The artwork in the game is terrific and you definitely notice Akira Toriyama's unique art style. The music for the game is great also. When you finish the game, there are things you can do afterwards such as collecting all the crafting recipes and finishing some level 60 side quests. If you are a fan of the series, it is one that you will enjoy playing because it is a great addition to the Dragon Quest universe.
Purple Phoenix Games (2266 KP) rated Mystic Vale in Tabletop Games
Jun 12, 2019
The Land needs you, Druid! It is plagued, barren, in need of revitalization and only your Circle can cure it and bring vivacity back to our home. Earn as many VP crystal shards as you can to defeat the other Druids and re-beautify us!
DISCLAIMER: This review focuses on vanilla Mystic Vale. We have most of the expansions in our collections, and we may do reviews on them and how they change the experience. If we do, we will either update this review or link to the expansion reviews here. -T
Okay, so the last part of my intro doesn’t quite make thematic sense, but this is a competitive game. A really good competitive game where there really isn’t a ton of direct player interaction, so if you enjoy merely messing with your opponents’ plans and just seeming like an annoying bee sting, read on.
I will also get this out of the way early: this is my first Card Crafting Game and the first of its type (that I know of, anyway). The concept is explained in the next paragraph. There are now others, but this is the grand-daddy. I was skeptical at first and was late to hop on the bandwagon here, but when I did I was really blown away. You have your own deck of cards that is exactly the same as your opponents’ decks, with a different colored back. Throw those cards into the provided clear sleeves, set up the other decks from which you will be purchasing upgrade cards, and you are setup.
The game mechanics are familiar, where you are pushing your luck to flip over cards from your deck to create a hand of cards… or bust and do nothing. Using the symbols on these cards allows you purchase cards from the current offering grid. Once you have purchased your new card(s) you must put them in the sleeves along with your starting cards to improve those starting cards! How can we do this, you ask? THE CARDS ARE SEE-THROUGH PLASTIC CARDS. Some starting cards are completely blank, and so adding to them drastically increases their value. This is a twist on the old deck building mechanic where you are no longer adding cards to make your deck more plentiful, but you are improving the sleeved cards you already have.
The art on the cards you are purchasing from the offer are printed in a way where information is split into three areas – top, middle, and bottom. So, you may have a starting card that gives you one icon worth of purchasing power with art on the top section. You grab a card to add to that another purchasing icon, with art on the bottom section. Now the next time this card comes up in your hand it is worth two icons to spend on further cards. Simple, right? Well, there are several types of purchasing icons (stars, leaves, paws, etc), not just one general icon. Some cards will furnish you with the other icons that you can use to purchase Vale cards (see photo below). These are powerful cards that can provide VPs and other actions to propel you to victory.
There’s so much in this game, even with just the vanilla base cards, that I just cannot explain everything here. So I won’t. If you have questions, do let me know. Speaking of the base game, here’s what you get.
A box. The box is decent size and will accommodate an expansion. I believe it is supposed to handle more than one, but in my experience, I wasn’t able to fit a whole lot in there with the provided insert. So I made my own. The VP tokens are great. The plastic cards are really great, but they have a strange (or familiar if you have played games like Gloom) smell to them that takes a bit to get used to smelling. Also, the cards come with a protective cling-film layer that will eventually start peeling off. These are used to facilitate printing on the plastic, and can be kept on or taken off – your preference. I’ll tell you what though. The art on this game is absolutely stellar. I really haven’t seen much better on a game, so I definitely am keeping my protective film on mine. The sleeves are decent, but I have had a few blowouts from usage. The game comes with more sleeves than is necessary, so I am hoping I never run out.
This review is long enough, but I wanted the reader to know that I hold this game in VERY high regard. It is well entrenched in my Top 10 list, and I don’t see it moving downward any time soon. The expansions definitely add a ton of replayability to it, but even as is, Purple Phoenix Games gives this one a revivified 21 / 24.
https://purplephoenixgames.wordpress.com/2019/03/15/mystic-vale-review/
DISCLAIMER: This review focuses on vanilla Mystic Vale. We have most of the expansions in our collections, and we may do reviews on them and how they change the experience. If we do, we will either update this review or link to the expansion reviews here. -T
Okay, so the last part of my intro doesn’t quite make thematic sense, but this is a competitive game. A really good competitive game where there really isn’t a ton of direct player interaction, so if you enjoy merely messing with your opponents’ plans and just seeming like an annoying bee sting, read on.
I will also get this out of the way early: this is my first Card Crafting Game and the first of its type (that I know of, anyway). The concept is explained in the next paragraph. There are now others, but this is the grand-daddy. I was skeptical at first and was late to hop on the bandwagon here, but when I did I was really blown away. You have your own deck of cards that is exactly the same as your opponents’ decks, with a different colored back. Throw those cards into the provided clear sleeves, set up the other decks from which you will be purchasing upgrade cards, and you are setup.
The game mechanics are familiar, where you are pushing your luck to flip over cards from your deck to create a hand of cards… or bust and do nothing. Using the symbols on these cards allows you purchase cards from the current offering grid. Once you have purchased your new card(s) you must put them in the sleeves along with your starting cards to improve those starting cards! How can we do this, you ask? THE CARDS ARE SEE-THROUGH PLASTIC CARDS. Some starting cards are completely blank, and so adding to them drastically increases their value. This is a twist on the old deck building mechanic where you are no longer adding cards to make your deck more plentiful, but you are improving the sleeved cards you already have.
The art on the cards you are purchasing from the offer are printed in a way where information is split into three areas – top, middle, and bottom. So, you may have a starting card that gives you one icon worth of purchasing power with art on the top section. You grab a card to add to that another purchasing icon, with art on the bottom section. Now the next time this card comes up in your hand it is worth two icons to spend on further cards. Simple, right? Well, there are several types of purchasing icons (stars, leaves, paws, etc), not just one general icon. Some cards will furnish you with the other icons that you can use to purchase Vale cards (see photo below). These are powerful cards that can provide VPs and other actions to propel you to victory.
There’s so much in this game, even with just the vanilla base cards, that I just cannot explain everything here. So I won’t. If you have questions, do let me know. Speaking of the base game, here’s what you get.
A box. The box is decent size and will accommodate an expansion. I believe it is supposed to handle more than one, but in my experience, I wasn’t able to fit a whole lot in there with the provided insert. So I made my own. The VP tokens are great. The plastic cards are really great, but they have a strange (or familiar if you have played games like Gloom) smell to them that takes a bit to get used to smelling. Also, the cards come with a protective cling-film layer that will eventually start peeling off. These are used to facilitate printing on the plastic, and can be kept on or taken off – your preference. I’ll tell you what though. The art on this game is absolutely stellar. I really haven’t seen much better on a game, so I definitely am keeping my protective film on mine. The sleeves are decent, but I have had a few blowouts from usage. The game comes with more sleeves than is necessary, so I am hoping I never run out.
This review is long enough, but I wanted the reader to know that I hold this game in VERY high regard. It is well entrenched in my Top 10 list, and I don’t see it moving downward any time soon. The expansions definitely add a ton of replayability to it, but even as is, Purple Phoenix Games gives this one a revivified 21 / 24.
https://purplephoenixgames.wordpress.com/2019/03/15/mystic-vale-review/
Daniel Boyd (1066 KP) rated Tomb Raider (2018) in Movies
Mar 22, 2018 (Updated Mar 22, 2018)
An Uninspired Take On the Iconic Character
This is the greatest video game movie ever made.
Now, I know what you are thinking, "Dan, you scored this thing a 6, you can't open your review with a statement like that!" Well the thing is, every other video game movie is so shit, that this mediocre action adventure flick is the gold standard in comparison.
If you played the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot game, then you will see a lot of similarities here, except most of it isn't done as well as it was done in the game. First of all, they spend far too much time following Lara in London before she goes on her adventure. For some reason she lives a poor life as a delivery girl that can't even afford to pay her gym membership, even though she has a massive fortune of inheritance money sitting there, that is hers once she signs off on her father's death certificate. Her dad is played by Dominic West, who is one of my favourite actors, but unfortunately he is kind of wasted here. He went missing seven years ago and is the catalyst for Lara's adventure to begin.
So she goes to Thailand to look for the guy that her dad bought the boat from to go to the remote island with the treasure on it. The guy she finds from Into The Badlands, turns out to be his son and he agrees to help her for some cash. He is actually pretty enjoyable in the movie and probably does a better job selling his character than his Oscar winning co-star, but we will get back to that later. So the two of them go to this remote island and a storm hits the boat, forcing the two of them overboard. Lara wakes up with Walton Goggins' character Mathias holding her at gun point. Mathias is nothing like he was in the game, where he was a mad priest type character, here he is a tired faithless mercenary that just wants to get the job done and go home. Walton Goggins, who again is one of my favourite actors, does his best with the material that he is giving, the issue being that the material is pretty garbage, which is the case for this movie's script in general. From here, Lara goes through the motions of becoming more of a badass survivor. This leads us into some exciting action set pieces that call back to the original game and are probably the best parts of the movie, so I won't spoil them here.
Let's talk about Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft. I have liked Alicia Vikander in every other role that I have seen her in and I was looking forward to seeing her performance as this iconic character. However, she just doesn't sell the character for me. I'm not sure if it's the material that the filmmakers gave her to work with, but she is totally underwhelming and never defines the character in any major way or makes it her own. You could have cast any young actress in this role and you would have gotten the same result. The other rumoured names before Vikander was officially cast were Emelia Clarke and Daisey Ridley. Any one of those would yielded the exact same results meaning that while Vikander was perfectly serviceable, she brought nothing special or original to the role.
Next I want to cover some of the movie's technical elements. The special effects were actually pretty impressive overall. The CGI backdrops all looked pretty convincing and even the character animation that was sprinkled in here and there looked pretty good and didn't distract or take me out of the movie too much. However, everything else was totally unremarkable. From the direction, to the lighting, to the cinematography, to the score, it was all just passable and nothing more.
Before I conclude this review, I want to briefly touch on something that this movie does that I hate seeing in movies. For some reason this movie repeatedly shows us flashbacks of something that happened just minutes beforehand. It is so frustrating and totally breaks the pace of the movie. It also feels as if the filmmakers are treating their audience like complete idiots that can't piece their predictable plot together without explicitly spelling it out by showing us the same flashback for the fourth time. Hollywood please stop doing this, it totally breaks any flow that your movie almost had and is so painfully unnecessary it hurts, give us some credit as moviegoers.
Overall, this is a decent action adventure romp that works okay if you don't think about it too much. It isn't anything special in any way and doesn't do anything that hasn't been done better by another franchise before. You will have a decent time with this as long as you don't expect something that is going to bring the video game movie into legendary status.
Now, I know what you are thinking, "Dan, you scored this thing a 6, you can't open your review with a statement like that!" Well the thing is, every other video game movie is so shit, that this mediocre action adventure flick is the gold standard in comparison.
If you played the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot game, then you will see a lot of similarities here, except most of it isn't done as well as it was done in the game. First of all, they spend far too much time following Lara in London before she goes on her adventure. For some reason she lives a poor life as a delivery girl that can't even afford to pay her gym membership, even though she has a massive fortune of inheritance money sitting there, that is hers once she signs off on her father's death certificate. Her dad is played by Dominic West, who is one of my favourite actors, but unfortunately he is kind of wasted here. He went missing seven years ago and is the catalyst for Lara's adventure to begin.
So she goes to Thailand to look for the guy that her dad bought the boat from to go to the remote island with the treasure on it. The guy she finds from Into The Badlands, turns out to be his son and he agrees to help her for some cash. He is actually pretty enjoyable in the movie and probably does a better job selling his character than his Oscar winning co-star, but we will get back to that later. So the two of them go to this remote island and a storm hits the boat, forcing the two of them overboard. Lara wakes up with Walton Goggins' character Mathias holding her at gun point. Mathias is nothing like he was in the game, where he was a mad priest type character, here he is a tired faithless mercenary that just wants to get the job done and go home. Walton Goggins, who again is one of my favourite actors, does his best with the material that he is giving, the issue being that the material is pretty garbage, which is the case for this movie's script in general. From here, Lara goes through the motions of becoming more of a badass survivor. This leads us into some exciting action set pieces that call back to the original game and are probably the best parts of the movie, so I won't spoil them here.
Let's talk about Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft. I have liked Alicia Vikander in every other role that I have seen her in and I was looking forward to seeing her performance as this iconic character. However, she just doesn't sell the character for me. I'm not sure if it's the material that the filmmakers gave her to work with, but she is totally underwhelming and never defines the character in any major way or makes it her own. You could have cast any young actress in this role and you would have gotten the same result. The other rumoured names before Vikander was officially cast were Emelia Clarke and Daisey Ridley. Any one of those would yielded the exact same results meaning that while Vikander was perfectly serviceable, she brought nothing special or original to the role.
Next I want to cover some of the movie's technical elements. The special effects were actually pretty impressive overall. The CGI backdrops all looked pretty convincing and even the character animation that was sprinkled in here and there looked pretty good and didn't distract or take me out of the movie too much. However, everything else was totally unremarkable. From the direction, to the lighting, to the cinematography, to the score, it was all just passable and nothing more.
Before I conclude this review, I want to briefly touch on something that this movie does that I hate seeing in movies. For some reason this movie repeatedly shows us flashbacks of something that happened just minutes beforehand. It is so frustrating and totally breaks the pace of the movie. It also feels as if the filmmakers are treating their audience like complete idiots that can't piece their predictable plot together without explicitly spelling it out by showing us the same flashback for the fourth time. Hollywood please stop doing this, it totally breaks any flow that your movie almost had and is so painfully unnecessary it hurts, give us some credit as moviegoers.
Overall, this is a decent action adventure romp that works okay if you don't think about it too much. It isn't anything special in any way and doesn't do anything that hasn't been done better by another franchise before. You will have a decent time with this as long as you don't expect something that is going to bring the video game movie into legendary status.
Bob Mann (459 KP) rated First Man (2018) in Movies
Sep 28, 2021
He captured a feeling. Sky with no ceiling.
A memorable event
I am a child of the 60’s, born in 1961. The “Space Race” for me was not some historical concept but a pervasive backdrop to my childhood. I still recall, at the age of 8, being marched into my junior school’s assembly hall. We all peered at the grainy black-and-white pictures of Neil Armstrong as he spoke his famously fluffed line before stepping onto the lunar surface. The event happened at 3:54am UK time, so clearly my recollection of “seeing it live” is bogus. (I read that the BBC stayed on air until 10:30 in the morning, so it was probably a ‘final review’ of the night’s events I saw). It is probably lodged in my memory less for the historical event and more due to the fact that there was TELEVISION ON IN THE MORNING! (Kids, ask your grandparents!)
A very personal connection. My personal copy of Waddington’s “Blast Off” board game, briefly shown in the film.
The plot
But back to Damien Chazelle‘s film. We start early in the 60’s with America getting well and truly kicked up the proberbial by the Russians in the space race: they fail to get the first man in space; they fail to carry out the first spacewalk. So the Americans, following the famous JFK speech, set their sights on the moon. It’s the equivalent of making a mess of cutting your toenails but then deciding to have a go at brain surgery. NASA develop the Gemini programme to practice the essential docking manoevers required as a precursor for the seemingly impossible (‘two blackboard’) mission that is Apollo.
But the price paid for such ambition is high.
Ryan Gosling plays Neil Armstrong as a dedicated, prickly, professional; altogether not a terribly likeable individual. Claire Foy plays his long-suffering wife Janet, putting her support for her husband’s dangerous profession ahead of her natural fears of becoming a single mother.
Review
There is obviously little tension to be mined from a film that has such a well-known historical context. Those with even a subliminal knowledge of the subject will be aware of the key triumphs and tragedies along the way. The script (by Josh Singer, “The Post“; “Spotlight“) is very well done in developing a creeping dread of knowing what is shortly to come.
Even with these inherent spoilers, Chazelle still manages to evoke armrest-squeezing tension into the space flight sequences. A lot of this is achieved through disorientating camera movements and flashing images that may irritate some but I found to be highly effective. (Did anyone else flash back to that excellent “Mission Space” ride at Epcot during the launch sequences?) This hand-held cinematography by Linus Sandgren (Chazelle’s “La La Land” collaborator) is matched by some utterly drop-dead gorgeous shots – beautifully framed; beautifully lit – that would be worthy of a Kaminski/Spielberg collaboration.
Those expecting a rollercoaster thrill-ride of the likes of “Apollo 13” will be disappointed. The film has more of the slow-and-long-burn feeling of “The Right Stuff” in mood and, at 141 minutes, some might even find it quite boring. There is significant time, for example, spent within the family home. These scenes include turbulent events of which I wasn’t previously aware: events that form the cornerstone of the film’s drama. For me, the balance of the personal and the historical background was perfectly done. I found it curious though that with such a family-oriented drama Chazelle chose to ditch completely any cuts away to the earthbound onlookers during the tense lunar landing sequence. (Compare and contrast with Ron Howard‘s masterly inter-cutting in the re-entry scene of “Apollo 13”). With the outcome foretold, perhaps such tension building was considered unnecessary? I’m not suggesting it was wrong to ‘stay in the moment’ with the astronauts, but it’s a bold directorial move.
Overall, the foolhardiness of NASA trying to do what they did with the 60’s technology at their disposal is well-portrayed. If you’ve been lucky enough, as I have, to view the Apollo 11 capsule in the National Air and Space museum in Washington you can’t help but be impressed by the bravery of Armstong, Aldrin and Collins in getting in that bucket of bolts and putting their lives on the line. True American heroes.
On that topic, the “flag issue” has generated much self-righteous heat within the US media; that is regarding Chazelle not showing the American flag being planted. This seems fatuous to me. Not only is the flag shown on the moon, but the film ably demonstrates the American know-how and bravery behind the mission. If Clint Eastwood had been directing he would have probably gone there: but for me it certainly didn’t need any further patriotism rubbed in the viewer’s face.
The turns
Are Oscar nominations on the cards for Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy? For me, it would be staggering if they are not: this film has “Oscar nomination” written all over it. I’d also certainly not bet against Foy winning for Best Actress: her portrayal of a wife on the edge is nothing short of brilliant. And perhaps, just perhaps, this might be Gosling’s year too.
Elsewhere there are strong supporting performances from Kyle Chandler (as Deke Slayton), Corey Stoll (as the ‘tell it how it is’ Buzz Aldrin) and Jason Clarke (as Ed White). It’s also great to see Belfast-born Ciarán Hinds in another mainstream Hollywood release.
For me, another dead cert Oscar nomination will be Justin Hurwitz for the score which is breathtakingly brilliant, not just in its compelling themes but also in its orchestration: the use of the eerie theremin and melodic harp are just brilliant together. I haven’t heard a score this year that’s more fitting to the visuals: although it’s early in the Oscar season to be calling it, I’d be very surprised if this didn’t walk away with the statuette.
Summary
Loved this. Damien Chazelle – with “Whiplash“, “La La Land” and now “First Man” – has hit all of three out of the park in my book. It’s not really a film for thrill-seekers, who might get bored, but anyone, like me, with an interest in the history of space exploration will I think lap it up: for this was surely the most memorable decade in space history… so far.
On leaving the cinema I looked up at the rising moon and marvelled once more at the audacity of man. My eyes then drifted across to the red dot that was Mars. How long I wonder? And how many dramatic film biographies still to come?
I am a child of the 60’s, born in 1961. The “Space Race” for me was not some historical concept but a pervasive backdrop to my childhood. I still recall, at the age of 8, being marched into my junior school’s assembly hall. We all peered at the grainy black-and-white pictures of Neil Armstrong as he spoke his famously fluffed line before stepping onto the lunar surface. The event happened at 3:54am UK time, so clearly my recollection of “seeing it live” is bogus. (I read that the BBC stayed on air until 10:30 in the morning, so it was probably a ‘final review’ of the night’s events I saw). It is probably lodged in my memory less for the historical event and more due to the fact that there was TELEVISION ON IN THE MORNING! (Kids, ask your grandparents!)
A very personal connection. My personal copy of Waddington’s “Blast Off” board game, briefly shown in the film.
The plot
But back to Damien Chazelle‘s film. We start early in the 60’s with America getting well and truly kicked up the proberbial by the Russians in the space race: they fail to get the first man in space; they fail to carry out the first spacewalk. So the Americans, following the famous JFK speech, set their sights on the moon. It’s the equivalent of making a mess of cutting your toenails but then deciding to have a go at brain surgery. NASA develop the Gemini programme to practice the essential docking manoevers required as a precursor for the seemingly impossible (‘two blackboard’) mission that is Apollo.
But the price paid for such ambition is high.
Ryan Gosling plays Neil Armstrong as a dedicated, prickly, professional; altogether not a terribly likeable individual. Claire Foy plays his long-suffering wife Janet, putting her support for her husband’s dangerous profession ahead of her natural fears of becoming a single mother.
Review
There is obviously little tension to be mined from a film that has such a well-known historical context. Those with even a subliminal knowledge of the subject will be aware of the key triumphs and tragedies along the way. The script (by Josh Singer, “The Post“; “Spotlight“) is very well done in developing a creeping dread of knowing what is shortly to come.
Even with these inherent spoilers, Chazelle still manages to evoke armrest-squeezing tension into the space flight sequences. A lot of this is achieved through disorientating camera movements and flashing images that may irritate some but I found to be highly effective. (Did anyone else flash back to that excellent “Mission Space” ride at Epcot during the launch sequences?) This hand-held cinematography by Linus Sandgren (Chazelle’s “La La Land” collaborator) is matched by some utterly drop-dead gorgeous shots – beautifully framed; beautifully lit – that would be worthy of a Kaminski/Spielberg collaboration.
Those expecting a rollercoaster thrill-ride of the likes of “Apollo 13” will be disappointed. The film has more of the slow-and-long-burn feeling of “The Right Stuff” in mood and, at 141 minutes, some might even find it quite boring. There is significant time, for example, spent within the family home. These scenes include turbulent events of which I wasn’t previously aware: events that form the cornerstone of the film’s drama. For me, the balance of the personal and the historical background was perfectly done. I found it curious though that with such a family-oriented drama Chazelle chose to ditch completely any cuts away to the earthbound onlookers during the tense lunar landing sequence. (Compare and contrast with Ron Howard‘s masterly inter-cutting in the re-entry scene of “Apollo 13”). With the outcome foretold, perhaps such tension building was considered unnecessary? I’m not suggesting it was wrong to ‘stay in the moment’ with the astronauts, but it’s a bold directorial move.
Overall, the foolhardiness of NASA trying to do what they did with the 60’s technology at their disposal is well-portrayed. If you’ve been lucky enough, as I have, to view the Apollo 11 capsule in the National Air and Space museum in Washington you can’t help but be impressed by the bravery of Armstong, Aldrin and Collins in getting in that bucket of bolts and putting their lives on the line. True American heroes.
On that topic, the “flag issue” has generated much self-righteous heat within the US media; that is regarding Chazelle not showing the American flag being planted. This seems fatuous to me. Not only is the flag shown on the moon, but the film ably demonstrates the American know-how and bravery behind the mission. If Clint Eastwood had been directing he would have probably gone there: but for me it certainly didn’t need any further patriotism rubbed in the viewer’s face.
The turns
Are Oscar nominations on the cards for Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy? For me, it would be staggering if they are not: this film has “Oscar nomination” written all over it. I’d also certainly not bet against Foy winning for Best Actress: her portrayal of a wife on the edge is nothing short of brilliant. And perhaps, just perhaps, this might be Gosling’s year too.
Elsewhere there are strong supporting performances from Kyle Chandler (as Deke Slayton), Corey Stoll (as the ‘tell it how it is’ Buzz Aldrin) and Jason Clarke (as Ed White). It’s also great to see Belfast-born Ciarán Hinds in another mainstream Hollywood release.
For me, another dead cert Oscar nomination will be Justin Hurwitz for the score which is breathtakingly brilliant, not just in its compelling themes but also in its orchestration: the use of the eerie theremin and melodic harp are just brilliant together. I haven’t heard a score this year that’s more fitting to the visuals: although it’s early in the Oscar season to be calling it, I’d be very surprised if this didn’t walk away with the statuette.
Summary
Loved this. Damien Chazelle – with “Whiplash“, “La La Land” and now “First Man” – has hit all of three out of the park in my book. It’s not really a film for thrill-seekers, who might get bored, but anyone, like me, with an interest in the history of space exploration will I think lap it up: for this was surely the most memorable decade in space history… so far.
On leaving the cinema I looked up at the rising moon and marvelled once more at the audacity of man. My eyes then drifted across to the red dot that was Mars. How long I wonder? And how many dramatic film biographies still to come?
Emma @ The Movies (1786 KP) rated My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising (2020) in Movies
Mar 12, 2020
It was very exciting to finally get an anime screening at my local Cineworld. We don't seem to get considered for these different screenings very often so it made a nice change to see something a little unusual.
A class of superheroes-in-training are sent to an island where the resident hero has retired. Getting experience is the best way to learn and getting to know the people around them will help them learn what they're fighting for.
The day to day hero life is hum-drum but fulfilling and most of the trainees are settling in well. Things are about to change, a spate of superpower robberies take place and it seems the culprits are heading for the island.
I've read manga in the past and have seen snippets of anime from time to time but I don't think I've ever sat down to a whole film of it apart from Pokemon. Possibly I shouldn't have started with something fairly deep in an existing franchise but I wasn't aware of it beforehand, and actually, I would have said it could have been a standalone after watching it.
It was really nice to see so many people there for it, there were about 30 others which felt like quite a lot for our cinema, more than I was expecting... and by the look of it there were all young enough to be my kids, so that was a fun experience.
I'm not going to lie, I was very confused at the beginning. It opens on a chase sequence and with no idea who these characters were or what was happening, I was lost. It doesn't take too long to get the gist of everything after this but it really threw me for a while.
On the advice of Twitter peeps I went and saw the subtitled release rather than the dubbed, this would have been my personal choice too as I find dubbing a rather hit and miss format. I'm not sure what might be lost in translation but some of the dialogue didn't seem natural, it might be an interesting experience to see it again with a dubbed track over it for the comparison.
You know when you're driving and looking for a turning so you can see where you're going better? During that first chase scene in particular the music is quite loud and the voices were hardly audible... I know I didn't need to head the audio as I wouldn't have understood it anyway but reading the subtitles without hearing the pacing was quite tricky and felt like it was partly why the scene was confusing to me. (This brings up all sorts of questions about subtitles when people HAVE to use them that I'd never even considered before.) The sound issue did get a little better as it progressed, but there was still a discrepancy through the film.
One good guy has to be virtuous and self-sacrificing, one has to be overly aggressive with a hidden soft side, another has to be adorably cute. Is that how they all work or just this one? Oh, and for the most part, everyone has to have great hair. I found either end of the scale of characters to be frustrating, Mahoro and Bakugo (I hope I'm getting these character names right) were on the aggressive side and the outbursts of screaming didn't make a lot of sense. There are several of the heroes that have a rather saccharine demeanour that also grated at me. Within the ensemble though there were characters like Deku and Katsuma who felt much more balanced, and Katsuma was so adorable to boot.
The story for the film seemed simple enough, bad guys want something, good guys have to protect it and stop them. Classic. But the back story to it seemed very complicated with a whole section of the film verging on unnecessary. This could be something that makes more sense with it combined with the series, but it's not something I'm going to know for now.
That may or may not have contributed to me struggling through the first 40 minutes of the film. I'm sure a little advanced knowledge might have helped, for example, I don't know whether Nine's motivations were established in the series. As it was it took me a while to work out.
Once we hit the confrontation of the film everything really picks up and I was a lot more engaged. As it progresses there's quite a strong moral compass that becomes evident and a lot of teachable moments are thrown at us, by the end I was really moved by some of the characters and their actions. Emotions were surprisingly well handled and the sense of right and wrong with them come across well.
I did have fun watching the film but there were things that held me back. The fact that the villain is well matched by a group of unattended school kids with only a partial grasp on their powers being one. Essentially the heroes come back for round two with nothing more than determination, but I get the sense that that all just helps with the sense that anyone can triumph over evil. I could rant on about this until the cows come home.
The biggest thing that held this back is not really a negative to the film, it's more that I'm a newbie to it. Anime is made up of several different styles, realistic, cartoonish, fantastical, that's a lot to deal with when you're not familiar with something. In a bad comparison for you it's like watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit? without knowing half the characters, you don't know why they look the way they do and you don't know what their function is. The only way that's going to make more sense to me is by watching more of it.
My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising is probably a good place for me to pick up some anime knowledge, once the film got going it was an enjoyable ride. As a nice surprise this also attracted the best audience I've had in quite a while.
Originally posted on: https://emmaatthemovies.blogspot.com/2020/03/my-hero-academia-heroes-rising-movie.html
A class of superheroes-in-training are sent to an island where the resident hero has retired. Getting experience is the best way to learn and getting to know the people around them will help them learn what they're fighting for.
The day to day hero life is hum-drum but fulfilling and most of the trainees are settling in well. Things are about to change, a spate of superpower robberies take place and it seems the culprits are heading for the island.
I've read manga in the past and have seen snippets of anime from time to time but I don't think I've ever sat down to a whole film of it apart from Pokemon. Possibly I shouldn't have started with something fairly deep in an existing franchise but I wasn't aware of it beforehand, and actually, I would have said it could have been a standalone after watching it.
It was really nice to see so many people there for it, there were about 30 others which felt like quite a lot for our cinema, more than I was expecting... and by the look of it there were all young enough to be my kids, so that was a fun experience.
I'm not going to lie, I was very confused at the beginning. It opens on a chase sequence and with no idea who these characters were or what was happening, I was lost. It doesn't take too long to get the gist of everything after this but it really threw me for a while.
On the advice of Twitter peeps I went and saw the subtitled release rather than the dubbed, this would have been my personal choice too as I find dubbing a rather hit and miss format. I'm not sure what might be lost in translation but some of the dialogue didn't seem natural, it might be an interesting experience to see it again with a dubbed track over it for the comparison.
You know when you're driving and looking for a turning so you can see where you're going better? During that first chase scene in particular the music is quite loud and the voices were hardly audible... I know I didn't need to head the audio as I wouldn't have understood it anyway but reading the subtitles without hearing the pacing was quite tricky and felt like it was partly why the scene was confusing to me. (This brings up all sorts of questions about subtitles when people HAVE to use them that I'd never even considered before.) The sound issue did get a little better as it progressed, but there was still a discrepancy through the film.
One good guy has to be virtuous and self-sacrificing, one has to be overly aggressive with a hidden soft side, another has to be adorably cute. Is that how they all work or just this one? Oh, and for the most part, everyone has to have great hair. I found either end of the scale of characters to be frustrating, Mahoro and Bakugo (I hope I'm getting these character names right) were on the aggressive side and the outbursts of screaming didn't make a lot of sense. There are several of the heroes that have a rather saccharine demeanour that also grated at me. Within the ensemble though there were characters like Deku and Katsuma who felt much more balanced, and Katsuma was so adorable to boot.
The story for the film seemed simple enough, bad guys want something, good guys have to protect it and stop them. Classic. But the back story to it seemed very complicated with a whole section of the film verging on unnecessary. This could be something that makes more sense with it combined with the series, but it's not something I'm going to know for now.
That may or may not have contributed to me struggling through the first 40 minutes of the film. I'm sure a little advanced knowledge might have helped, for example, I don't know whether Nine's motivations were established in the series. As it was it took me a while to work out.
Once we hit the confrontation of the film everything really picks up and I was a lot more engaged. As it progresses there's quite a strong moral compass that becomes evident and a lot of teachable moments are thrown at us, by the end I was really moved by some of the characters and their actions. Emotions were surprisingly well handled and the sense of right and wrong with them come across well.
I did have fun watching the film but there were things that held me back. The fact that the villain is well matched by a group of unattended school kids with only a partial grasp on their powers being one. Essentially the heroes come back for round two with nothing more than determination, but I get the sense that that all just helps with the sense that anyone can triumph over evil. I could rant on about this until the cows come home.
The biggest thing that held this back is not really a negative to the film, it's more that I'm a newbie to it. Anime is made up of several different styles, realistic, cartoonish, fantastical, that's a lot to deal with when you're not familiar with something. In a bad comparison for you it's like watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit? without knowing half the characters, you don't know why they look the way they do and you don't know what their function is. The only way that's going to make more sense to me is by watching more of it.
My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising is probably a good place for me to pick up some anime knowledge, once the film got going it was an enjoyable ride. As a nice surprise this also attracted the best audience I've had in quite a while.
Originally posted on: https://emmaatthemovies.blogspot.com/2020/03/my-hero-academia-heroes-rising-movie.html
Daniel Boyd (1066 KP) rated the PlayStation 4 version of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order in Video Games
Mar 1, 2020 (Updated Mar 1, 2020)
Wasted Potential
So I just finished Jedi: Fallen Order and it's left me feeling confused. Not because of some complex twist or story revelation, but because on paper I should have loved every minute of this game. You take the parkour movement and sense of adventure from a game like Uncharted and you give it to a Jedi, who we follow during some of the darkest days in the Star Wars lore and what do you get?
Apparently you get something that doesn't feel like Star Wars.
I have a fair number of problems with this game, so I'm going to go ahead and list them and explain why they bothered me so much during my experience playing through Fallen Order.
First of all, when this game dropped and did pretty well commercially and critically, EA were commended in the games media for having the guts to release a single-player, story based Star Wars game with no online play. When the reviews dropped just before the game's release, this news got me really hyped as I have never been much for online gaming and much prefer story based games over anything else. Now whilst EA did give us a single-player, offline Star Wars story, they did so in such a sloppy, janky, half-finished fashion.
I lost count of the amount of times that I had to restart my game because of loading errors or game breaking bugs. Almost every time I would enter a new area the characters would initially appear in a T-pose position and remain that way for a good few seconds until I approached them. Onscreen prompts would often fail to appear making the game's already confusing exploration methods even more unclear. I have not seen this much pop-in in a videogame since the first version of No Man's Sky. Almost every area was covered in murky textures upon initially entering them, with some entire structures and areas failing to render. During a few boss fights, the AI character would fail to attack me and just stand still and no matter how many blows I would land on them, their health bar would not budge until I fully reloaded the level. This sort of thing was present during every one of my play sessions and at a few points the game became almost unplayable due to it's glaring technical glitches. Also, I got this game as a Christmas gift, so it has been out for a decent amount of time. A game of this calibre, that has been out for months at this point, from a major studio like Respawn and a publisher like EA, not to mention being from a major franchise like Star Wars, - the fact that it is in the current broken state that it's in is frankly unacceptable.
The next issue I had was the story and characters in the game. The game's protagonist Cal, is an unsympathetic, whiny bitch of a character that got on my nerves every time he opened his mouth. The rest of the crew were also pretty bland, unendearing and lacking in much personality. I grew up loving the Star Wars universe, yet I found myself trying in vain to skip almost every cutscene and really not giving a crap what happens to any one of the characters. The villains were unengaging and the other side characters like Cal's master and the old dude that left holograms for Cal to find got increasingly annoying every time they appeared. The only character I found engaging throughout the whole game was Sister Merrin.
I always thought Jedi Knights were supposed to be extremely capable, powerful warriors, yet at no point in this game do you ever feel powerful in any significant way. The whole time, you feel on par with the non descript enemies that you are fighting. While I agree that the last major AAA single-player Star Wars game, The Force Unleashed was too easy, at least you felt powerful while playing as that character. The combat never feels as satisfying as it should due to the lack of dismemberment. The decision not to allow the player to chop off limbs makes it feels more like you are hitting enemy shaped piñatas with a big stick, rather than welding a laser sword of pure, raw energy. I also felt that there was a lack of variation in the combos and moves-set and found myself watching the same animations over and again no matter what combination of buttons I was mashing. Every fight in this game is hard and not in a fun,challenging way, but instead in a grinding, irritating way. The ridiculously long loading times also made dying even more frustrating. If you are going to design a game where the player is going to die frequently, you HAVE TO have a snappy respawn system in place à la Super Meat Boy or Hotline Miami. (Especially when your fucking studio is called RESPAWN, but I digress.) They were clearly going for a more defensive, methodical approach to the combat system, which is fine, but they should have given you a choice between that and a more aggressive, offensive skill tree, meaning that more play styles could be catered to. Another majorly annoying thing was the way that the game justified unlocking new skills for Cal, with him having out-of-the-blue flashbacks at seemingly random points in the story where he would suddenly remember that he could wall-run or double-jump. I hate when games do this, it feels extremely lazy and unjustified within the context of the story that is being presented. Another thing that bothered me gameplay-wise was the checkpoint system. The whole refilling your health = respawning the enemies thing felt really arcady and often broke immersion.
Something else that I hate in games is when the game tries to pretend that it is an open world game rather than a linear experience, which this game does. I don't understand why you would want to masquerade as an open world game when that mechanic has been so oversaturated for this entire generation. After you play through the game's intro and get access to the ship, you are given the impression that you can choose what order to visit each planet and progress though the game. However this is not the case. When I was first given the choice to pick a planet, I chose Dathomir as I am a big Darth Maul fan and thought it would be cool to explore his home turf. I got there and was making my way through the clear-as-mud holomap when I got to a section where I could not progress. There was a jump that I just could not make no matter how many times I tried. After eventually getting fed up I had to look up a walkthrough to find out how to progress whereupon I learned that you actually need to go to the other planet first and gain an ability to make this jump. Now even if I did design my game so poorly that I let the player go to the wrong planet on their first travel, I would have at least had the decency to put in a prompt at the un-passable jump to let the player know that they don't have the skills to progress here yet and to go to the other planet and return here later. It could have been a voiceover from a crew member or even an immersion-breaking piece of text, but something would have been nice to prevent me having to look up a walkthrough to learn this fact. Witnessing this ineptitude in game design from such a major studio was shocking. So yeah, from that point on, - lesson learned, - I just followed the checkpoints to decide what my next planet would be to travel to, but then why even give players the illusion of choice in this? Why not just usher the player automatically to the next planet they need to visit after they return to the ship?
My final and biggest issue with this game is despite it being a Star Wars game, it never really felt like Star Wars. I noticed this during the first third of the game in the some of the character designs. Some of the side characters looked more akin to something from Ratchet & Clank than from the Star Wars universe. Then as I was playing through Kashyyyk and fighting spiders and giant slugs, I'm thinking to myself, I don't ever remember Luke Skywalker doing this and that dude lived and trained in a swamp for like a year. Then the shark was well and truly jumped. Upon revisiting Dathomir and finally being able to make some progress, a character literally raises bodies from the ground for you to fight. That's right, they put zombies in a Star Wars game. I thought since Disney had taken control of Star Wars, that they were way stricter than Lucas ever was about what does and doesn't get into the Star Wars universe, so whoever greenlit this zombie shit over at Disney should really get the boot. I can't quite believe that I'm saying this, but if you want a more authentic and higher quality Star Wars videogame experience, go play Battlefront 2. Sure it may have had an extremely messy launch and been marred with controversy ever since, but at least it feels like Star Wars.
There were a sparse few things that I did enjoy. As I mentioned above, Merrin was a fairly engaging and well acted character. The Lightsaber customisation was also pretty neat. I also enjoyed the music and (SPOILERS,) the brief appearance that Darth Vader makes. However the music is only great because it's the Star Wars score and whilst Vader's appearance as an unstoppable force was cool here, I personally feel like it was done better in Rogue One.
So yeah, I kind of feel like I played a different game to everyone else. I really wanted to fall in love with this game and I kept waiting for it to win me over, but unfortunately it never did. I think that there is potential here for something better, mostly owed to the interesting time period the game is set in on the Star Wars timeline, so I really hope that they take the few good elements that were present in Fallen Order and improve upon everything else for the sequel.
Apparently you get something that doesn't feel like Star Wars.
I have a fair number of problems with this game, so I'm going to go ahead and list them and explain why they bothered me so much during my experience playing through Fallen Order.
First of all, when this game dropped and did pretty well commercially and critically, EA were commended in the games media for having the guts to release a single-player, story based Star Wars game with no online play. When the reviews dropped just before the game's release, this news got me really hyped as I have never been much for online gaming and much prefer story based games over anything else. Now whilst EA did give us a single-player, offline Star Wars story, they did so in such a sloppy, janky, half-finished fashion.
I lost count of the amount of times that I had to restart my game because of loading errors or game breaking bugs. Almost every time I would enter a new area the characters would initially appear in a T-pose position and remain that way for a good few seconds until I approached them. Onscreen prompts would often fail to appear making the game's already confusing exploration methods even more unclear. I have not seen this much pop-in in a videogame since the first version of No Man's Sky. Almost every area was covered in murky textures upon initially entering them, with some entire structures and areas failing to render. During a few boss fights, the AI character would fail to attack me and just stand still and no matter how many blows I would land on them, their health bar would not budge until I fully reloaded the level. This sort of thing was present during every one of my play sessions and at a few points the game became almost unplayable due to it's glaring technical glitches. Also, I got this game as a Christmas gift, so it has been out for a decent amount of time. A game of this calibre, that has been out for months at this point, from a major studio like Respawn and a publisher like EA, not to mention being from a major franchise like Star Wars, - the fact that it is in the current broken state that it's in is frankly unacceptable.
The next issue I had was the story and characters in the game. The game's protagonist Cal, is an unsympathetic, whiny bitch of a character that got on my nerves every time he opened his mouth. The rest of the crew were also pretty bland, unendearing and lacking in much personality. I grew up loving the Star Wars universe, yet I found myself trying in vain to skip almost every cutscene and really not giving a crap what happens to any one of the characters. The villains were unengaging and the other side characters like Cal's master and the old dude that left holograms for Cal to find got increasingly annoying every time they appeared. The only character I found engaging throughout the whole game was Sister Merrin.
I always thought Jedi Knights were supposed to be extremely capable, powerful warriors, yet at no point in this game do you ever feel powerful in any significant way. The whole time, you feel on par with the non descript enemies that you are fighting. While I agree that the last major AAA single-player Star Wars game, The Force Unleashed was too easy, at least you felt powerful while playing as that character. The combat never feels as satisfying as it should due to the lack of dismemberment. The decision not to allow the player to chop off limbs makes it feels more like you are hitting enemy shaped piñatas with a big stick, rather than welding a laser sword of pure, raw energy. I also felt that there was a lack of variation in the combos and moves-set and found myself watching the same animations over and again no matter what combination of buttons I was mashing. Every fight in this game is hard and not in a fun,challenging way, but instead in a grinding, irritating way. The ridiculously long loading times also made dying even more frustrating. If you are going to design a game where the player is going to die frequently, you HAVE TO have a snappy respawn system in place à la Super Meat Boy or Hotline Miami. (Especially when your fucking studio is called RESPAWN, but I digress.) They were clearly going for a more defensive, methodical approach to the combat system, which is fine, but they should have given you a choice between that and a more aggressive, offensive skill tree, meaning that more play styles could be catered to. Another majorly annoying thing was the way that the game justified unlocking new skills for Cal, with him having out-of-the-blue flashbacks at seemingly random points in the story where he would suddenly remember that he could wall-run or double-jump. I hate when games do this, it feels extremely lazy and unjustified within the context of the story that is being presented. Another thing that bothered me gameplay-wise was the checkpoint system. The whole refilling your health = respawning the enemies thing felt really arcady and often broke immersion.
Something else that I hate in games is when the game tries to pretend that it is an open world game rather than a linear experience, which this game does. I don't understand why you would want to masquerade as an open world game when that mechanic has been so oversaturated for this entire generation. After you play through the game's intro and get access to the ship, you are given the impression that you can choose what order to visit each planet and progress though the game. However this is not the case. When I was first given the choice to pick a planet, I chose Dathomir as I am a big Darth Maul fan and thought it would be cool to explore his home turf. I got there and was making my way through the clear-as-mud holomap when I got to a section where I could not progress. There was a jump that I just could not make no matter how many times I tried. After eventually getting fed up I had to look up a walkthrough to find out how to progress whereupon I learned that you actually need to go to the other planet first and gain an ability to make this jump. Now even if I did design my game so poorly that I let the player go to the wrong planet on their first travel, I would have at least had the decency to put in a prompt at the un-passable jump to let the player know that they don't have the skills to progress here yet and to go to the other planet and return here later. It could have been a voiceover from a crew member or even an immersion-breaking piece of text, but something would have been nice to prevent me having to look up a walkthrough to learn this fact. Witnessing this ineptitude in game design from such a major studio was shocking. So yeah, from that point on, - lesson learned, - I just followed the checkpoints to decide what my next planet would be to travel to, but then why even give players the illusion of choice in this? Why not just usher the player automatically to the next planet they need to visit after they return to the ship?
My final and biggest issue with this game is despite it being a Star Wars game, it never really felt like Star Wars. I noticed this during the first third of the game in the some of the character designs. Some of the side characters looked more akin to something from Ratchet & Clank than from the Star Wars universe. Then as I was playing through Kashyyyk and fighting spiders and giant slugs, I'm thinking to myself, I don't ever remember Luke Skywalker doing this and that dude lived and trained in a swamp for like a year. Then the shark was well and truly jumped. Upon revisiting Dathomir and finally being able to make some progress, a character literally raises bodies from the ground for you to fight. That's right, they put zombies in a Star Wars game. I thought since Disney had taken control of Star Wars, that they were way stricter than Lucas ever was about what does and doesn't get into the Star Wars universe, so whoever greenlit this zombie shit over at Disney should really get the boot. I can't quite believe that I'm saying this, but if you want a more authentic and higher quality Star Wars videogame experience, go play Battlefront 2. Sure it may have had an extremely messy launch and been marred with controversy ever since, but at least it feels like Star Wars.
There were a sparse few things that I did enjoy. As I mentioned above, Merrin was a fairly engaging and well acted character. The Lightsaber customisation was also pretty neat. I also enjoyed the music and (SPOILERS,) the brief appearance that Darth Vader makes. However the music is only great because it's the Star Wars score and whilst Vader's appearance as an unstoppable force was cool here, I personally feel like it was done better in Rogue One.
So yeah, I kind of feel like I played a different game to everyone else. I really wanted to fall in love with this game and I kept waiting for it to win me over, but unfortunately it never did. I think that there is potential here for something better, mostly owed to the interesting time period the game is set in on the Star Wars timeline, so I really hope that they take the few good elements that were present in Fallen Order and improve upon everything else for the sequel.
Hadley (567 KP) rated A Luminous Republic in Books
Aug 13, 2020
Well-written (1 more)
Unpredictable
Andres Barba's A Luminous Republic has feral children, senseless murders, and a plot that keeps the story moving enough that the reader won't want to put the book down. This story creatively combines politics, murder, fear and family - - - but the best part is, the book is unpredictable.
We first meet our main character, whose name is never given throughout the entire story, when he and his family are moving to San Cristobal because of a job opportunity. He works for the Department of Social Affairs, and has just received a promotion because he has come up with a very successful plan: " I had developed a social integration program for indigenous communities. The idea was simple and the program proved to be an effective model; it consisted of granting the indigenous exclusive rights to farm certain specific product." Our main character believes that this plan will bring the farmers more money. And he is more than happy to go back to the city where he fell in-love with his now wife, Maia - - - a violin teacher who had a daughter before meeting him, who he calls 'girl' throughout the story because she is also named Maia.
While on his way to work one day, our main character comes across one of the unknown children of the jungle, which shakes him up a bit. The unknown jungle children were known to beg at street lights for money and food, but one of the grimy, frizzy-haired boys stared the man down, only to end up giving him a very wide smile. "The boy's smile unsettled me because it confirmed that there had been a connection between us, that something had begun in me ended in him." Pretty soon after, he begins to notice these unknown jungle children running around a lot more, and that sometimes their intentions are not always innocent - - - he and the 'girl' witness an elderly woman get robbed of her groceries by a group of these children in the middle of the street in a subtle but violent way.
The unknown jungle children soon begin to rob several people,and when a police officer is killed while being attacked by them, the Mayor and the police want the children off the streets as soon as possible. Working with our main character, the former and the latter try to figure out the strange language these children use, whom may be the leader among them, and where they disappear to at night. Since the story is being told from our main character's past, the book is written like a True Crime story, with names of professionals and such being cited throughout. Our main character brings up a woman, who was a young girl at the time of the jungle children's invasion on San Cristobal: Teresa Otano, who happened to 'publish' her diary from that time, which gives readers insights into the jungle children: "Often, some of the thirty-two [jungle children], on their nightly journey back to the jungle, congregated next to Teresa's house, on one corner of Antartida Avenue. At first, Teresa, enthralled, simply makes notes, logging the days on which they appeared, whether there were three, four or five of them, what they were wearing, and so forth. She establishes patterns and identifies a few of the kids..." our main character explains to the reader.
But soon, the children cross a line that they can never come back from; being told by our main character from the view of surveillance video tapes, he describes to us that the jungle children entered a supermarket after an incident with a guard that works there, they block the entrance doors and begin to destroy items throughout the store, but the chaos quickly escalates, and two adults are murdered by the children - - - fear now holds the town in its grip, causing search parties to sweep through the dense jungle after the children fled.
But murder wasn't something new to San Cristobal, our main character explains to us that the suburbs of this area usually had a murder a week all year long, and that on the outskirts of the jungle, there were known spots for drug trafficking and assaults. What made the 'Dakota Supermarket' murders scare the town was that the residents' own children began to behave differently afterwards - - - they start to play a 'game' where they put their ears to the ground, believing that they can hear the jungle children talking to them. Our main character even walks in on the 'girl' playing this exact game. "For a second it was as if I were witnessing a ritual invented by a twelve-year-old girl, and I thought of how afraid my daughter must have felt when I found her in the bathroom that day. People often remark on the self-assured quality of the invocation, its instruction-manual tone, but I'd say that its intensity actually stems from what it dispenses: adult logic, a world that no longer serves. How could our children possibly have explained to us what they were doing? We weren't prepared for their world or their logic. Somewhere out there, underground, that dissonant sound was being sent, in code: down below, chaos. "
This phenomenon attracts the attention of money/fame seekers, which includes the Zapata children. Four siblings, ranging from the ages of five to nine, claimed that the jungle children were speaking to them through their dreams. They would make drawings from what they were told by the jungle children, but state that even they didn't know what the drawings meant. The media quickly jumped on them and put them in front of a camera, causing the family's home to be surrounded by civilians at all hours of the day and night. One night, the crowd outside becomes anxious, and breaks into the house, stealing not only the drawings from the Zapata children, but also the life savings of the family. At this point, the Zapatas had had enough, and retreat from the story altogether for reasons I won't disclose here. I can't give away much more of the book without ruining the story.
Barba's attempt at making a different kind of Lord of the Flies was done well, but the lack of emotion is felt throughout the entire story which makes the characters flat, especially our main character, who I didn't find likable in any such way. He calls a grieving woman a 'whore,' and he seems rude towards his family, especially his step-daughter.
A Luminous Republic is redeemed by is unpredictability, which is something that doesn't come along in fiction that often anymore. I enjoyed that the story was written like a True Crime novel, with fictitious documentaries, news reports and books. So, I would recommend this book to people who like True Crime and Mysteries.
We first meet our main character, whose name is never given throughout the entire story, when he and his family are moving to San Cristobal because of a job opportunity. He works for the Department of Social Affairs, and has just received a promotion because he has come up with a very successful plan: " I had developed a social integration program for indigenous communities. The idea was simple and the program proved to be an effective model; it consisted of granting the indigenous exclusive rights to farm certain specific product." Our main character believes that this plan will bring the farmers more money. And he is more than happy to go back to the city where he fell in-love with his now wife, Maia - - - a violin teacher who had a daughter before meeting him, who he calls 'girl' throughout the story because she is also named Maia.
While on his way to work one day, our main character comes across one of the unknown children of the jungle, which shakes him up a bit. The unknown jungle children were known to beg at street lights for money and food, but one of the grimy, frizzy-haired boys stared the man down, only to end up giving him a very wide smile. "The boy's smile unsettled me because it confirmed that there had been a connection between us, that something had begun in me ended in him." Pretty soon after, he begins to notice these unknown jungle children running around a lot more, and that sometimes their intentions are not always innocent - - - he and the 'girl' witness an elderly woman get robbed of her groceries by a group of these children in the middle of the street in a subtle but violent way.
The unknown jungle children soon begin to rob several people,and when a police officer is killed while being attacked by them, the Mayor and the police want the children off the streets as soon as possible. Working with our main character, the former and the latter try to figure out the strange language these children use, whom may be the leader among them, and where they disappear to at night. Since the story is being told from our main character's past, the book is written like a True Crime story, with names of professionals and such being cited throughout. Our main character brings up a woman, who was a young girl at the time of the jungle children's invasion on San Cristobal: Teresa Otano, who happened to 'publish' her diary from that time, which gives readers insights into the jungle children: "Often, some of the thirty-two [jungle children], on their nightly journey back to the jungle, congregated next to Teresa's house, on one corner of Antartida Avenue. At first, Teresa, enthralled, simply makes notes, logging the days on which they appeared, whether there were three, four or five of them, what they were wearing, and so forth. She establishes patterns and identifies a few of the kids..." our main character explains to the reader.
But soon, the children cross a line that they can never come back from; being told by our main character from the view of surveillance video tapes, he describes to us that the jungle children entered a supermarket after an incident with a guard that works there, they block the entrance doors and begin to destroy items throughout the store, but the chaos quickly escalates, and two adults are murdered by the children - - - fear now holds the town in its grip, causing search parties to sweep through the dense jungle after the children fled.
But murder wasn't something new to San Cristobal, our main character explains to us that the suburbs of this area usually had a murder a week all year long, and that on the outskirts of the jungle, there were known spots for drug trafficking and assaults. What made the 'Dakota Supermarket' murders scare the town was that the residents' own children began to behave differently afterwards - - - they start to play a 'game' where they put their ears to the ground, believing that they can hear the jungle children talking to them. Our main character even walks in on the 'girl' playing this exact game. "For a second it was as if I were witnessing a ritual invented by a twelve-year-old girl, and I thought of how afraid my daughter must have felt when I found her in the bathroom that day. People often remark on the self-assured quality of the invocation, its instruction-manual tone, but I'd say that its intensity actually stems from what it dispenses: adult logic, a world that no longer serves. How could our children possibly have explained to us what they were doing? We weren't prepared for their world or their logic. Somewhere out there, underground, that dissonant sound was being sent, in code: down below, chaos. "
This phenomenon attracts the attention of money/fame seekers, which includes the Zapata children. Four siblings, ranging from the ages of five to nine, claimed that the jungle children were speaking to them through their dreams. They would make drawings from what they were told by the jungle children, but state that even they didn't know what the drawings meant. The media quickly jumped on them and put them in front of a camera, causing the family's home to be surrounded by civilians at all hours of the day and night. One night, the crowd outside becomes anxious, and breaks into the house, stealing not only the drawings from the Zapata children, but also the life savings of the family. At this point, the Zapatas had had enough, and retreat from the story altogether for reasons I won't disclose here. I can't give away much more of the book without ruining the story.
Barba's attempt at making a different kind of Lord of the Flies was done well, but the lack of emotion is felt throughout the entire story which makes the characters flat, especially our main character, who I didn't find likable in any such way. He calls a grieving woman a 'whore,' and he seems rude towards his family, especially his step-daughter.
A Luminous Republic is redeemed by is unpredictability, which is something that doesn't come along in fiction that often anymore. I enjoyed that the story was written like a True Crime novel, with fictitious documentaries, news reports and books. So, I would recommend this book to people who like True Crime and Mysteries.