Ruined King: A League of Legends Story Review

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Airship Syndicate’s work on Ruined King: A League of Legends Story weaves a wonderful tale that is primed to capture League of legends fans new and old. Blending the design ideas of its previous turn-based RPG, Battle Chasers: Nightwar, with LoL’s lore, it brings together a handful of favorite characters and gives them room to grow over the course of a lengthy and well-paced campaign. While some bugs slowed me down, a compelling story, gorgeous graphic novel-style art, modest character development, and versatile combat kept me entertained as I finally got to experience the world of Runeterra from a different perspective.

Riot has spent the last decade creating diverse, unique, and memorable characters for its MOBA, but until recently they’ve been showcased mainly through video shorts. All that changed in November 2021, first with Netflix’s brilliant animated series Arcane, and now Ruined King and its vast amount of dialogue and backstory, fans like myself can dive far deeper into what makes at least a small portion of the 157-character roster so special. Coming away from this adventure, I found myself more invested in characters I previously knew but had sidelined.

Ruined King’s plot centers around the impending awakening of King Viego at the hands – and hook – of Thresh, who plots to take over the world of Runeterra with the next Harrowing (a corrupting force that wreaks havoc on the world, claiming the souls of all who perish within for eternity) and harvest more souls to torment. The heroes and villains play the roles they need to move the average “stop the villain from destroying the world” story along, and while I found it predictable, the execution is still enjoyable thanks to the strong voice work of industry staples like Matt Mercer, Laura Bailey, Liam O’Brien, and others who reprise their respective roles from League of Legends. It added yet another level of authenticity and charm that pulled me in from the very beginning.

Strong voice acting added yet another level of authenticity and charm that pulled me in.

Ahri, Braum, Illaoi, Miss Fortune, Pyke, and Yasuo are each on journeys that resourcefully intertwine and unfold, depicted in a gorgeous graphic novel art style across my roughly 30-hour main campaign playthrough (and an extra five to 10 hours to finish side quests like bounties or fishing to obtain components to craft legendary weapons). Characters in my party were challenged by their own relatable yet all-too-familiar trials of vengeance, acceptance, and self-discovery that foster growth within them. It was neat to see more of them, but I would have loved to see them dive deeper into certain people; Yasuo’s arc is concluded with a singular battle that heals his trauma and sets him on a more purposeful path and it’s hardly mentioned afterward, making it feel a bit rushed.

The main story keeps everyone focused on the main objective and did a great job of keeping me invested. Most of my favorite moments came from conversations over a meal in cutscenes that accompany the scarcely placed rest points and give breathing room between a dungeon of enemies and the boss at the end. However, it was sometimes too much of a good thing; I wished there had been more rest points to split up the conversations instead of packing as many as four into one, plus I wouldn’t have minded more frequent auto-saves.

It was sometimes too much of a good thing.

While the main story is enjoyable without any prior knowledge of the LoL universe, many of the side conversations involve characters telling stories grounded in their world by previously established lore. Anyone who has read Yasuo’s biography or watched the Kin of the Stained Blade will know his past and what haunts him and causes his hesitation in forging bonds with others, but it was the emotional evolution of him engaging with other characters, like the ever-jovial Braum, that became the driving force in captivating me in nearly every conversation.

The prologue starts things off with an enjoyable series of fast-paced in-battle tutorials as the Swashbuckling Miss Fortune fights off a mysterious black mist that harkens back to the previous Harrowings while teaching you just a fraction of the strategic turn-based combat mechanics. What makes Ruined King’s battle system interesting and versatile is how its Speed, Balanced, and Power attack types play out on the initiative bar timeline, and the counters to each. Casting Miss Fortunes’ “Guns Blazing” ability in the Power lane slows her down as she prepares to launch a heavy attack but pushes her allies forward in the turn order, giving them another chance to attack or defend before the enemies get to move while increasing her own evasion stat. Meanwhile, Speed casting Ahri’s Spirit Mend will heal and cleanse two debuffs from an ally or revive them if they are already KO’d.

Another layer is added with wildcards, boons, and hazards, that help or hinder via healing, poison, or temporary stat boosts. These mechanics continue to evolve with new ideas introduced at an unhurried pace until roughly the midway point of the main story, which is around the time you complete your party. From that point on it’s more about demonstrating your level of mastery of the systems, such as finishing an enemy off in 10 hits or less to prevent them from self-destructing and dealing massive damage or using a Power-based attack to knock an enemy out of their defensive stance, creating a window to defeat them before they regain their footing. I would’ve preferred to get to that point a little sooner, though, because in the early hours I felt ready to move on to the next concept before Ruined King was ready to teach it to me.

I felt ready to move on to the next concept before Ruined King was ready to teach it to me.

My other issue with combat is the default battle speed: sure, it gives you more time to enjoy cute animations like Braum’s Poro Snack and vicious ones like Pyke's ultimate, Reaper – but their novelty wore off quickly. After watching each character's arsenal of 12 unique moves (many of which originate from League of Legends) half a dozen times, I was extremely grateful for the ability to double the battle speed for the rest of the campaign and immediately found myself enjoying combat more.

Living Forge

Across the journey, you acquire tons of materials like gunpowder, leather straps, and essence that enable you to enchant your items with valuable upgrades like life steal, reduced casting time for abilities, or pure stat increases. Using this system isn’t necessary on the lower difficulty levels, but becomes extremely valuable as you progress on the higher ones. This, coupled with the mix-and-match ability and rune upgrade system, gives you an extreme amount of control over how your characters’ stats shake out and what role they perform in battle, such as giving Illaoi a secondary role as a healer or building Miss Fortune as a support to simultaneously buff allies and debuff enemies. Using that setup enabled me to have Yasuo deal the damage with a near 100% critical ratio. There is a finite amount of skill points available by the time you max out at level 30, but what’s great is you can reallocate them for free, and overwrite upgrades on a weapon or armor for a reasonable cost of materials. This let me experiment with all the recipes, such as adding a shield to my tank whenever they got hit, or adding health regeneration after combat, which greatly reduced the number of consumable potions I needed to use between battles.

What We Said About Arcane

Against all odds, Arcane delivers a killing blow to the idea that video games cannot be masterfully adapted into other mediums, with compelling characters, an endearing story, and fascinating lore and worldbuilding, as well as striking visuals that break new ground for what is possible in TV animation. Like Into the Spider-Verse, we’ll be talking about Arcane as a classic and a standard-setter for years to come. – Rafael Motamayor November 20, 2021

Score: 10

Read the full Arcane Season 1 review

Ruined King isn’t going to ruin a lot of experienced RPG players with its difficulty, though. My playthrough on Heroic (the hardest difficulty) only slowed me down marginally compared to my time spent on the lower difficulty options, since upgrading and enchanting abilities and characters are efficient and effortless ways to gain the upper hand. Most notably, late-game enemies like the Guardian Prototype’s HP scaled from 16K on Story mode up to 36K on Heroic. Despite having more HP to deplete, itemizing and upgrading Illaoi to simultaneously tank and heal, Ahri to heal while dealing damage, and Pyke to add absurd amounts of debuffs with his damage ended most battles by the enemies second or third turn. In the rarest occasions where I did lose a battle, it was at the hands of a new enemy specifically made to test my mastery of a new concept that had been recently introduced, such as Wisp Mothers who could one-shot any party member with their Nightmare ability if you don’t take them down quickly, or bosses with ultimate abilities that could blast away 80% of my HP if specific debuffs weren’t removed in time.

Ruined King isn’t going to ruin a lot of experienced RPG players with its difficulty.

However, if you’re new to RPGs and just want to enjoy the story without beating your head against a tougher fight, Story Mode allows you to skip any battle, including bosses, while still reaping the benefits in crafting materials and XP.

Ruined King hits its stride in the latter half, especially as party dynamics are challenged regularly to teach the value of synergy when fighting certain enemies. During a trip to The Shadow Isles, I encountered the extremely deadly Mistwalker Executioners that would use their Guillotine attack to one-shot lower HP allies if I failed to use a tank character like Braum to taunt and absorb the hit with his shields. Meanwhile, corrupted assassins like “Pain Harvesters” used Harvest Pain to remove all debuffs on its allies and grant itself a 10% damage buff per stack; this encouraged me to either kill him first or avoid using attacks that cause debuffs if I had other options, like Wisp Mothers.

Ruined King hits its stride in the latter half.

While about 90% of games in League of Legends take place in a single location, I hoped Ruined King would take us on a more expansive tour of the world. Based on trailers and the opening sequence, I knew I would visit the Shadow Isles – home to Thresh, Hecarim, Viego, and others – and that got my hopes up for the chance of seeing places like Ionia, Piltover, or Noxus. But even after spending the first half dozen hours in Bilgewater and gaining access to my ship, that dream never came to fruition. The majority of the story splits its time between Bilgewater and The Shadow Isles, and while there are dungeons like the Purification Temple and Windrake Isle that break up the visual monotony, even they are limited in diversity. Windrake Isle starts out full of vibrant emerald greens, oranges, and reds while on the surface but upon entering the three-room dungeon it immediately reverts back to the muted blue and green color palette seen in the Purification Temple and Bhuru Temple.

Most locations do have plenty to explore, at least, and are inhabited with standard NPCs, enemies, optional quests, fishing spots, bounties to hunt, and puzzles to solve. Though exploration is hobbled by a map system that leaves a lot to be desired – such as typical functions like zoom or the ability to mark locations to come back to later.

It wasn’t all Poros and sunshine in Runeterra: Ruined King suffers from some game-crashing bugs that I encountered routinely playing on PS5 (sometimes at important story moments), and other issues that can slow down progress, like when character models become invisible and unable to interact with objects, and two separate instances where I came back to a corrupted save file or a load screen freezing at 95%. The good news is that things like this happened noticeably less frequently as I played, which may have been thanks to quick patches and hotfixes.

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Alien: Fate of the Nostromo Board Game Review

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Alien is such an iconic franchise that there’s no shortage of great games that have taken inspiration from it down the years. Some, like Lifeform, Space Hulk and Nemesis, weren’t licensed. Others, like Legendary Encounters: Alien and Aliens: Another Day in the Corps, were. But they all had one thing in common: they were aimed at the hobby end of the market.

Alien: Fate of the Nostromo looks to cross that boundary. It’s published by Ravensburger, which has a good track record in making franchised board games with wide appeal. It also has the commercial clout to ensure a competitive price and space on mass-market shelves. And it’s a cooperative game, meaning you all win or lose together, and it can also be played solo.

What’s In The Box

Like other Ravensburger games, the box opens to an image printed on the reverse of the board: in this instance it’s Jones the cat, hissing at you in fear. It’s a nice touch that ups the anticipation of delving through the contents.

On the business side of the board, there’s a slightly confusing split-level map of the Nostromo, the spaceship from the film. Beneath there’s a couple of punchboards of tokens, some decks of cards and a bag of soft plastic figures. Kane, the Alien’s first victim in the film, isn’t available as the action starts after his unfortunate demise.

This being a licensed game, the player boards and their matching figures all look like the relevant characters from the film. Rather than film stills, the cards and boards use specially commissioned art, but it looks great and helps set the scene.

Rules and How to Play

If you’ve played one of Ravensburger’s cooperative before you’ll be familiar with the rough structure of Alien: Fate of the Nostromo. Your character has a pool of actions that they can use to move, pick and drop items, or activate a special power such as Ripley’s ability to move another crew member on her turn. Then you take an encounter card which may cause items to appear on the board, or move the alien.

One thing that’s new to the formula is that you can collect scrap from around the ship and use it to craft items like flashlights and flamethrowers. At the start, you’ll reveal a number of objectives based on the player count. Most of these involve creating an item and taking it somewhere on the ship and are based on a scene from the film, like taking a flashlight to the med bay. You need to complete these objectives to progress the game.

The titular Alien, however, is hunting you. You can encounter it in one of two ways. It has a figure on the board that moves a number of spaces towards the closest target depending on the encounter card. But these cards often also instruct you to place a face down a Concealed token on a space which, when revealed, could send the Alien to that room to simulate an ambush.

This is a good, simple system that creates a lot of suspense and cinematic moments. You can take risks based on a crew member’s distance from the alien figure and how likely a Concealed token is to result in an attack. But the variables involved mean there’s always scope for a nasty surprise. If you do get attacked you have to flee, which can mean flipping more tokens leading to more attacks. This doesn’t happen often, but it feels like the Alien is chasing the crew member through the ship.

None of the crew has individual health to track. Instead, alien attacks run down an overall morale counter, leading to an instant loss if it reaches zero. While this prevents player elimination, it feels like an odd way to handle the danger of a rampant xenomorph. In the movies, people die with gruesome frequency. Keeping everyone alive despite repeated savagings feels like a soft cludge to keep everyone together at the table.

This is a good, simple system that creates a lot of suspense and cinematic moments.

There’s another, more serious problem with the game, though. The simple framework coupled with the Alien’s position on the map can sometimes mean your turn is best spent doing nothing. If there are no resources or goals nearby and the Alien is in a central area, you’re best off staying away from it. Some parts of the board often get cut off by the Alien which, while tactically interesting, also exacerbates this problem as you don’t want to move into an area likely to become a dead end. It’s hardly game-breaking but it’s boring for an affected player.

Against that, the game gives you a fun range of tools to deploy against this extraterrestrial threat. The Grapple Gun lets you move the Alien, for example, while the Motion Detector lets you peek at nearby Concealed tokens. Between them and the crew’s special abilities, your group has a lot of options to get creative in minimizing the threat while you try and count down those objectives.

That threat level, however, is variable. As you add players, it’s harder to stay away from the Alien in the cramped confines of the ship. You start with more morale to compensate, but the game still feels tougher overall. Indeed, with smaller character counts it almost feels too easy. In both cases, your focus is on creating the items needed to satisfy objectives, which means you often won’t craft the more tactically interesting ones. Either way, you rarely need to step up to the creative possibilities they offer in order to win.

As a means of increasing the difficulty the game lets you add Ash, the rogue science officer from the movie. He’s also moved by encounter cards and steals scrap from unguarded locations. Like the lack of character death, this also seems a poor way to mirror his sinister role in the film. It also doesn’t tend to make things that much harder, as players can often snaffle up spare scrap before Ash has the chance to get to it.

Both Ash and the Alien’s thematic roles are boosted by the encounter deck. Many of the cards are “Quiet,” which add scrap and shuffle the alien one space. Others cause Ash or the Alien to behave more aggressively and these can be a real threat. There are also cards that cause Ash and Alien cards to be reshuffled, while Quiet cards are not, meaning the deck becomes more dangerous as the game goes on. Lost the Signal, which puts the Alien back in its nest and a Concealed token in every empty room, is particularly effective.

If you clear your objectives you’ll enter a randomly drawn end game mission. These also mimic scenes from the film and are well designed to create a tense conclusion. You might have to pile up coolant canisters while a self-destruct timer counts down, or find Jones the cat and get to the docking bay, all while the Alien continues its murderous rampage through the ship. While there’s lots of variety and excitement on offer, they begin to fall flat once you appreciate the lightweight nature of the game.

Where to Buy

Alien: Fate of the Nostromo is currently available for a suggested retail price of $29.99.

• See it at Amazon
• See it at Target

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The Humans Review

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The Humans is available now on Showtime.

The Humans was birthed by writer Stephen Karam in 2015 as a much-heralded Off-Broadway play that was then transferred to Broadway in 2016 and won the Tony. Five years later, Karam has reimagined that same story as a thoughtful and brilliantly acted film, bringing Tony Award-winning actress Jayne Houdyshell along with him to reprise her role as Blake family matriarch, Deirdre.

Set on Thanksgiving day, The Humans is now an overtly existential haunted house story, set entirely within the newly rented but decrepit duplex apartment of Brigid (Beanie Feldstein) and Richard (Steven Yeun) in downtown Manhattan. The couple has invited her parents, Erik (Richard Jenkins) and Deirdre, and grandmother, Momo (June Squibb), from Scranton, PA, along with Aimee (Amy Schumer), Brigid’s sister who is a lawyer in the city. Only a week into the creaky, wi-fi-impared abode, the two floors are sparse and cold, which sets the stage for one heck of a holiday hootenanny!

To be clear, The Humans is horror adjacent in that Kramer most effectively uses the language of the genre, from its asymmetrical, claustrophobic framing to the washed-out color palette and jump-scare-inducing sound design, to tell his story. It’s a metaphorical “monster” movie that brilliantly deconstructs the unrealistic expectations we, as humans, bring into the Thanksgiving celebration. It channels our cumulative anxiety about the holiday to commune with our families while often sagging under the heavy weight of achieving pinnacle happiness and perfection while crammed around a table for a few hours. All of that literally oozes out of the apartment, with its peeling plaster, leaking pipes and paper-thin walls, revealing the dysfunction, passive aggressiveness, and secrets that families often drag into the room and eventually can’t ignore.

Led by the masterful Jenkins and Houdyshell, they bring their simmering angst with them as they roll the now dementia-stricken Momo into the awkwardly small halls of the apartment. Erik starts the day distracted while Deirdre clearly tries to be overly pleasant to balance out her cranky husband. Brigid is the sunny, optimist of the Blake family, while Aimee is the sharp-witted problem solver hiding her own issues. Rounding out the collection is Richard, the new(ish) boyfriend still trying to navigate the slippery family dynamics, while softly finding a path to revealing a bit more of himself to Brigid’s family.

The entire ensemble is stellar. Jenkins is the king of naturalistic performance, able to add just the right edge to even the most seemingly benign moments. Schumer is maybe the best she’s ever been in a role, using her comedic chops with natural precision as Aimee uses her wit to diffuse her prickly family. Yet she also serves up heartbreaking emotion with aching realism as Aimee’s personal issues are slowly revealed. Feldstein is brilliant at going from chirpy to restrained in the blink of an eye, and Yeun stands his ground as the most emotionally honest and available human inside the house. The only actor who gets short-shrifted is Squibb, who, because of Momo’s affliction, doesn’t get to do much, outside of one potent scene.

Kramer does a masterful job of finding the most interesting and dread-filled vantage points within the tight confines of the apartment. The camera makes the space claustrophobic and voyeuristic at the same time, as we find ourselves leaning into any given frame seeking what’s just out of shot. We’re so immersed within the confines of cinematographer Lol Crawley’s lens, that we feel like we’re at the proverbial table too. The intimacy of the space is immersive, and creepy and all encompassing. The film tells us to ignore the external and believe that everything the house is trying to tell us resides within the people sitting inside it.

The Humans is a fascinating and often unsettling examination of our flaws.

With a slow build that rewards us with a cathartic escalation of what lies beneath the exteriors of every character, The Humans is a fascinating and often unsettling examination of our cumulative flaws. Through the patina of a Thanksgiving day, it’s a thoughtful meditation on how we project our disappointments upon one another, how casually callous we can be, and also how we endure because of these messy bonds too.

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Dexter: New Blood Episode 4 Review - "H is For Hero"

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The following contains spoilers for Dexter: New Blood's fourth episode, "H is for Hero," which aired on Showtime on Nov. 28.

Dexter: New Blood slid into a slight decline after its premiere, having dipped its toe back into familiar territory. The frosty landscape and new characters helped carry a textbook "Dexter scrambles to hide a murder" scenario (plus a borderline intolerable teen), but only so much. Last week's "Smoke Signals" ticked things upward by leaning more into Harrison's darkness and nicely unspooling a potentially violent character with an all-but unknown past.

"H is for Hero" showed us Harrison as a truly damaged young man, someone who definitely had more reasons to worry about himself than just what Dexter wrote in his letter to Hannah (and do we even believe the Hannah "cancer" story now?). Harrison is feeling some very dark things and it goes far beyond not liking bullies because this week Harrison tried to kill Ethan, the boy who was being picked on. Harrison sliced the boy's leg artery and then staged an attack on himself, playing both sides of the bully equation by painting Ethan out as a school shooter.

Now, was Harrison wrong about that? Probably not. Ethan, by this show's design, was going to do something someday. Was Harrison dabbling in Pre-Crime a bit, by targeting someone he knew would hurt others? Or did he actually just use Ethan's easily built-in narrative so that he could play Trinity Killer? If it's the former, then you also have to wonder what Harrison knows about his dad. Does he actually know about the Bay Harbor Butcher? Once we see him listening to Molly's podcast about Trinity killing his mom, one can assume he's already done his research. So what does he remember about Miami (besides falling off that treadmill)? What did Hannah already tell him? What did he find out, or figure out, on his own? And was this the first time he tried to kill someone? The questions this episode raised are great, so let's hope they get addressed in a timely way, nd the right way.

"H is for Hero" turned Harrison into a much more layered character. At this point we don't know which way the wind will blow with him and that's a fun element for New Blood since, for years, Dexter kind of ran on a lather/rinse/repeat model. Harrison's M.O. had shades of his dad, since he sort of stumbled into taking out someone who could have been a threat to others, but when you look at what the end result was it's more fascinating. Harrison's a glory hound. He seeks "attaboys" and adulation. He shrugs off praise with false modesty. This takes a really good "performer," which is something Dexter was only ever half-good at.

Dexter having to use his old forensic expertise to figure out what Harrison had done was an excellent use of old paint. It gave Ghost Deb something new to do this week too, as she became his partner in snooping. Plus, we got a cool callback to the end of Season 1 and how Dexter always wanted to be a hero (remember the dream parade?) Now we just have to wait for Dexter to recognize the significance of the wound itself so that he can glean what Harrison might know about him and his serial killer past. Was that the first episode of Molly's podcast Harrison listened too? If not, then what did he think of Merry F***ing Kill's take on the Bay Harbor Butcher?

Dexter, as a series, is never not on-the-nose in some regard, and this new season is really hammering home the idea of Dexter deciding to be a dad and what that means and how he might screw up -- and Kurt, thus far, is sort of a funhouse mirror for Dexter in that way (like most Dexter adversaries are) while also being the lead suspect for the Sniper Killer. Seriously, New Blood is either really bad at hiding it or the writers are just being too obvious with Kurt as the Red Herring.

This week, they even gave him a situation where he tried to help a runaway but -- and this is odd -- if he is the killer, he doesn't offer his victims his basement until he gives them money and/or offers them a job first. We didn't get to hear what Kurt's final offer to the girl was and feels like a trick. Because assume bad things are happening when we're not shown them, right? For example, we knew Harrison was lying because his "confrontation" with Ethan happened off-screen. That signals instant guilt. But it would be weird for them to do that with Kurt in the same episode, right?

Anyhow, billionaire Edward Olsen is still in the running. And he even comes with a built-in potential victim, in Angela's daughter, Audrey. Speaking of potential victims, Jamie Chung's Molly seems like a top prize too, since this week she shuffled her investigation over to Angela's missing girls board. But, even given all that, we still don't really know why Kurt lied about Matt FaceTiming him. Kurt may have a dangerous role to play still, even if it's not as the Sniper Killer.

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Harry Potter: Hogwarts Tournament of Houses Review

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Harry Potter: Hogwarts Tournament of Houses is a four-part special that premieres Sunday, Nov. 28 at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT.

With this month marking the 20th anniversary of the theatrical release of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, the TBS/Cartoon Network special quiz event series, Harry Potter: Hogwarts Tournament of Houses, celebrates the whole universe and its fandom. Airing over four weeks, the high-end game show sets up the four Houses of Hogwarts — Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin — to battle against each other until the House winning the most rounds wins the Tournament of Houses cup. Altogether, it’s an entertaining celebration that’s challenging for even the biggest of Potterheads.

The Mistress of Ceremonies is Dame Helen Mirren, perhaps one of the last British thespians to not appear in any of the Potter films. In the first episode, Mirren has the vibe of someone just learning this world and terminology as she reads the questions and trivia to the teams. She relaxes more, though, when she’s talking to the individual team players.

The three contestants representing each House are selected, Price Is Right style, at the top of the game by a flurry of letters that fly out of a fireplace and are randomly collected by a bewildered Mirren. Delightfully, the contestants represent a wide swath of ages and backgrounds, from a new Potter fan in her 20s to a longtime fan in his 70s. The three participants in each house are allowed to commiserate on the right answers and the variety of people makes that inherently more interesting to watch.

In Episode 1, the two Houses battling are Gryffindor and Hufflepuff. They play three rounds of trivia generated from a Jeopardy-esque video board that presents film clips, quotes from the films, books or other media, and even some Potter celebs asking questions. All the questions have multiple-choice options for the right answers. That format allows for playing at home, but it would have been fun to allow the contestants a lightning round or standalone round to highlight their solo knowledge. It’s a small quibble, but the multiple-choice format ultimately doesn’t allow for a lot of point disparity between teams if one pulls ahead, which makes the last rounds less dynamic.

Overall, the rounds have a variety of unexpected elements that make for interesting challenges for even the smartest players on the teams. There’s some team strategy to make it interesting and even a few unexpected cameos, including one where I’ll just tease “Pop Pop!” and let you discover what that means for yourself. In the end, the winning House will move to the Finals, with the losing House going into a Wild Card round, which means wherever you’re personally sorted, you can continue to watch with some hope for where they end up.

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Super Crooks: Season 1 Review

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Super Crooks Season 1 is now streaming on Netflix.

There are surprisingly few anime series inspired by superhero comics. Super Crooks is one of the most recent, an adaptation of the four-issue series by writer Mark Millar and artist Leinil Francis Yu. It's an intriguing, action-packed prequel to the Super Crooks comic that takes a firecracker of a script from Dai Sato (Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo) and runs it through the lens of director Motonobu Hori (Cowboy Bebop, Paranoia Agent) to create an anime Ocean's 11 with, well, supervillains.

The 13-episode anime series follows supervillain Johnny Bolt (Jonah Scott) as he works to pull off the ultimate heist: robbing a private casino belonging to the world's most powerful supervillain, Christopher Matts, also known as "The Bastard" (Jason Marnocha). Johnny’s ragtag bunch of supervillains includes his psychic girlfriend Kasey (Abby Trott), retired elderly villain Carmine (Doug Stone), weather-changing savant Forecast (Zeno Robinson), twin healers Roddy and Sammy Diesel (Bruno Oliver and Ben Pronsky), telepathic thief TK McCabe (Bill Rogers), translucent thief The Ghost (Bill Butts), and Gladiator (Beau Billingslea), blackmailed into joining Johnny.

Set within the world of Jupiter's Legacy, which explores an uncharted island in the Atlantic Ocean where a group of people received superpowers, Super Crooks is actually a spinoff involving the "first" people who received their special abilities. We learn how Bolt gets his electrical-based powers from an early age, introducing young Johnny, living in a troubled household and getting through each day with the help of his favorite superhero comics. He can control electricity at will, from a simple "on" and "off" at first to snapping and generating electricity.

As every young hero and villain does, we see him experimenting with his newfound powers, bragging about it to his friends, and then ruining a few bullies' days (and personal belongings) with his uncanny ability. Over time, young Johnny deduces that he must be part of the "first" superheroes' bloodline with the help of a friend, indicating one of his parents must have had powers too. After Bolt's powers are more firmly established and he creates a superpower name for himself, as well as an attempt at an alter ego, we realize his powers spiral out of control -- as does he -- and he turns to a life of crime after a particularly gruesome incident involving the neighborhood pool.

From there, Super Crooks introduces us to Johnny’s villainous friends and the seedy underworld of individuals with superpowers. Of course, the Crooks are going to need to put their heads together if they want to get to The Bastard and his fortune. Watching this ragtag bunch come together is a delight, especially when you realize it's for a "good" cause -- helping out a friend, not to be evildoers. Watching the Crooks work to pull this heist off, however, is the real treat.

It’s a colorful, debauched world, much like you’d expect from a Millarworld property, and it’s every bit as fun as you’d expect, too. Getting to know the Crooks is an incredible ride, especially since the events that actually happened in the comic books do take place in this series, but not when you expect them to. Instead, we get plenty of room to let the central characters grow and evolve while we learn about their powers, their motivations, and what makes them tick.

Studio Bones' animation is crisp, clean, and colorful.

Plus, Studio Bones' (My Hero Academia, Fullmetal Alchemist) animation is crisp, clean, and colorful. It adopts a more realistic tone that mimics a Western series more than its Japanese brethren, which works well for its comic source material. It also doesn’t shy away from mature themes (which are plentiful in Millar’s works, obviously), parading around humans with half their heads blown off, sensual moments between Johnny and Kasey, and plenty of foul language peppered throughout the excellent script. While the story may veer off into predictable territory here and there, however, it's still an enjoyable ride through and through. There aren't enough recent series that follow Super Crooks' lead, and it proves that, like recent show Invincible, animation is the optimal medium in which to tell these kinds of tales.

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The Wheel of Time Episode 4 Review: "The Dragon Reborn"

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Spoilers follow for The Wheel of Time’s fourth episode, “The Dragon Reborn,” which premiered Friday, Nov. 26 on Amazon.

The Wheel of Time focused on worldbuilding in “The Dragon Reborn,” explaining significantly more about how channeling works with some ominous implications for the protagonists. It’s an uneven episode, with the plot surrounding the Aes Sedai largely eclipsing the segments where Mat and Rand continue to be dogged by agents of the Dark One while Egwene and Perrin hang out with the pacifist Tinkers.

Robert Jordan filled his books with powerful women, but he wasn’t particularly good at writing them with complexity — most tended to be domineering and shrewish, which made it hard to like even the women you were supposed to be rooting for. The writers of the Amazon adaptation are doing much better in this respect, particularly with Nynaeve. They’ve captured her ferocious stubbornness and mistrust of the Aes Sedai without making her utterly infuriating. The chemistry growing between her and Lan is charming and she provides a good audience stand-in for an explainer on the deep bond between Aes Sedai and their warrior guardian Warders.

What We Said About The Wheel of Time's First 3 Episodes

Samantha Nelson gave the three-episode premiere of The Wheel of Time a 9/10: "The Wheel of Time is gorgeous, well acted, and strongly written, a show that understands the characters and plot of Robert Jordan’s books without being slavishly loyal to the source material. The first three episodes use a mix of gripping action and personal dramas to bring the pages to life while also providing an accessible introduction to series newcomers. The groundwork showrunner Rafe Judkins is laying shows he has a plan for the future. Hopefully he will be given the time and money to see it through."

In Jordan’s books, a Green Ajah who has one Warder is typically married to him. But they’re also the only faction of Aes Sedai that can have multiple Warders. “The Dragon Reborn” makes the polyamorous implications of that explicit with the relationship between Alanna and her two warders, Maksim and Ihvon. But it’s the bond between Kerene Nagashi and her Warder Stepin that provides the true emotional core of the episode. Peter Franzen sells his love for Kerene and the agony of feeling his bond severed, making his fooling attempt to kill Logain Ablar feel honest. Kerene is a minor character in The Wheel of Time prequel novel New Spring placed into entirely different circumstances, showing that the showrunners are sometimes content to just borrow bits of Jordan’s work and rework them to suit their condensed timeline. Some hardcore fans might find that jarring, but it’s a necessary concession if this series isn’t going to run for decades.

The way Moiraine and Lan divide up into their separate spheres once they join the Aes Sedai camp provides for some strong parallel storytelling as they get reports on the current state of affairs in the White Tower. Along with Liandrin Guirale’s acidic contempt, these interactions sell what a minefield the organization is even if everyone’s supposed to be working together to keep the world from falling apart. The fact that Nynaeve’s ability to “listen to the wind” is a use of the One Power was hinted at when Egwene first channeled with Moiraine, but her manifestation at the end of the episode shows she’s capable of much more. She’s also clearly not excited about how much time this assuredly means she’ll be spending with the Aes Sedai.

The episode does a great job of building up Logain even if he starts the episode captive and ends it without power. He truly believes he is destined to save the world, even as shadowy figures urge him to paranoia, a conflict that Alvaro Morte sells in his mad-eyed zeal. The battle that ensues when his army tries to free him has the feel of a war film thanks to the living artillery of the Aes Sedai. Seeing how fiercely the Warders fight compared to how many Red Ajah fall alone really makes that group’s misandrist practices of not bonding with men seem foolish.

The side plots lay the emotion on thick but don’t do much else to move the story along. Barney Harris is doing such a good job portraying Mat’s declining mental health that it’s a shame that he’s already been replaced for Season 2. Tom’s story about what happens to men who touch the One Power is chilling, and works to drive home the seriousness of what the Aes Sedai have done to Logain. The fate of the family that helps Rand and Mat drives home that this show isn’t going to pull punches when it comes to depicting the brutality that the agents of the Dark One are capable of.

Egwene and Perrin’s adventures with the Tinkers is the weakest section. While the scenes of the radical pacifist group’s caravans are lovely, the segment just becomes a therapy session for Perrin to work through his feelings about accidentally murdering his wife, which is definitely the worst section of the show’s plot so far.

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Halo Infinite Multiplayer Review

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First impressions are key, and since six years have passed since Halo 5: Guardians, for a lot of people (like myself) Halo Infinite will be the first Halo multiplayer experience they’ve played at launch – especially since Infinite’s multiplayer is free to play and accessible to everyone with an Xbox or PC. And what a launch it’s been! With its tight 4v4 matches and more chaotic 12v12 Big Team Battle on expertly designed maps, Infinite revives and reinvigorates the glorious sci-fi action that once made Halo king among multiplayer FPS games. Riding high on that thrill, Halo Infinite’s multiplayer has dash-slid into the first-person shooter scene and meleed the competition off the map.

While Halo Infinite's multiplayer is technically still in beta until the single-player campaign comes out on December 8, developer 343 Industries has declared that we’re officially in Season 1, and Infinite comes complete with purchasable cosmetics and a battlepass. In other words, it is for all intents and purposes fully launched.

Halo Infinite looks absolutely gorgeous. The environments within each map are so detailed and pretty that I’m now looking forward to the campaign even more. The lighting, settings, and overall look of Infinite bring the futuristic world of Halo to modern-day glory. On PC, it can run at 144Hz easily (and there’s a 120Hz mode on Xbox Series X), and the most severe technical issue I’ve seen has been some server desync and stutters every so often. It wasn’t enough to really mess things up but it was noticeable and made some fights slightly harder than they should have been. I’ve only experienced one crash in my 20 hours of playtime, so my experience has been pretty steady.

Ahead of the beta “test flights” in September, one of my biggest concerns was how Halo Infinite would be able to court new players in addition to pleasing Halo veterans who have a lot of set-in-stone ideas of how Halo should play. But to my surprise, Infinite does a stand-up job of bringing novices up to speed with its Academy mode, in which you can try out different weapon drills or jump into a Training session against bots with customizable match settings. Training mode allows you to try out different power items (such as active camouflage and the grappling hook) that you may not have been able to get hold of much in PvP matches, and it also helps you learn the maps as you explore at your own pace. You can also join matches against bots if you want to test your skills before facing other players – and these are some of the most human-like bots I’ve ever seen.

While the modes aren’t revolutionary, they are undoubtedly fun and infinitely replayable.

When I did go up against real opponents, the intimate 4v4 Arena playlist’s fast-paced matches gripped me immediately and had me queuing again and again, for hours on end. The only complaint I have about the playlists is not being able to choose which mode you want to play – you can’t just check a box to pick Slayer or Strongholds, you have to queue for all five game modes: One Flag Capture The Flag, Capture The Flag, Strongholds, Oddball, and Slayer. While they aren’t revolutionary, they are undoubtedly fun and infinitely replayable, and have formed the basis of some of the most enjoyable multiplayer arena shooters of all time. As they say: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Slayer is the traditional team deathmatch, Strongholds has teams fighting to control three capture points on the map, and in Oddball you’re battling over control of a skull. But among the 4v4 modes, my favorite remains plain-old Capture the Flag, which stays fun and competitive no matter how many times I’ve played it. Coordinating with my team and making mad dashes for the enemy’s flag while also chasing down the jerk who stole ours fuels my spirit, and scoring a capture is incredibly rewarding. Playing either defensively around my flag or offensively in trying to steal the enemy’s feels good, and due to the small team sizes no one is unimportant in a match.

The only unconventional mode in that list, One Flag CTF, sounded a little odd to me at first because each round has one team defending a flag and the other team has to capture that flag. But it’s actually a lot of fun – there’s only one map for it, Launch Site, but it has vehicle spawns and easily makes for chaotic and fun gameplay with vehicular Spartan-slaughter as one team attempts to raid the other’s base. All of these game modes are excellent – and much more so when you’re communicating with your teammates.

Making mad dashes for the enemy’s flag while also chasing down the jerk who stole ours fuels my spirit.

I do have a few gripes, of course. For one, barely being able to hear a seven-foot-tall, heavily armored Spartan run up behind you for a one-hit melee kill is incredibly frustrating. It’s an odd misstep (see what I did there?) given that the weapons and effects all sound great. I don’t want heavy footstep sounds like in CS:GO, where you can tell where people are from pretty much all the way across the map, but the number of times I’ve been run up on – not even crouch stealthed – and killed is kind of ridiculous. Also, cloaked enemies being silent makes sense since the Active Camo powerup requires you to walk or crouch to stay invisible.

A big part of the reason Infinite’s matches work so well is that each of the seven maps for arena matches are incredibly well designed to allow for you and your team to fluidly rotate through them, grabbing key weapons and items as they spawn and sweeping out enemies. My favorite map from that playlist has to be Streets, thanks to its flashy neon signs, dynamic lighting, and freshly rained-upon pavement. It’s a perfect example of readability being key when it comes to map design, favoring bold, angular architecture instead of over-detailed environments that come at the cost of instantly spotting enemies and objective markers.

It's Strongholds mode that really shows off Infinite’s superior map designs, however, since in this capture-point mode you really need to be able to rotate from point to point with a specific flow to keep an eye on the locations you already control. While the maps in Infinite are smaller than those in most FPS games, the distance between points is just enough that you can easily get from one spot to another. At the same time, you can also get caught out by yourself and eliminated, which encourages you to move as a team. This is where the flow of maps really comes into play.

It's Strongholds mode that really shows off Infinite’s superior map designs.

In general, you can run from one side of a map to the other quickly enough that they don’t feel all that large for 4v4 matches, but they’re big enough that you don’t get there too fast or feel like they’re too cramped of a space, either. There are lots of platforms and objects stacked on top of each other that you can use to perfect your rotations, so you aren’t restricted to going down one hallway just to get to a specific area – we actually have a lot of options in these spaces thanks to the ability to vault up to ledges and the absence of fall damage. I’m impressed with how the map designs take all of this into consideration, especially on this smaller scale.

Even with Big Team Battle, the three maps are evenly balanced for 12v12 matches. BTB showcases expansive arenas with enough space for close-range mayhem, long-range sniper plays, rumbling Scorpion tanks, and flying Banshee fighters. I like how, unlike Call of Duty’s breakneck-paced 12v12 matches, BTB allows for you to catch a few moments of breathing time before you engage in a heated fight. The weapon spawns are spaced out enough to give everyone a chance to run for them and the vehicle spawns are mirrored on each team’s side, making for awesome vehicle runs. Power weapons and items are always a risk to play for since they’re placed in the middle of maps, and that makes balancing feel just right.

Big Team Battle has space for close-range mayhem, long-range sniper plays, rumbling Scorpion tanks, and flying Banshee fighters.

All three BTB maps feature multiple terrain types that give their layouts variety in height and sightlines. In Behemoth, there are a lot of platforms that let you get higher positioning at the risk of getting sniped from across the way, since the higher levels are more exposed. However, if you’re lower on the ground you may not spot the enemies above your head. The flow in BTB maps feels great – it never takes too long to get into a fight but there’s also enough space that I’ve had no trouble with spawn camping at all. After yet another year of Call of Duty’s notoriously bad spawn system, that’s been a breath of fresh air.

You can play all of that casually, but Infinite also includes a Ranked playlist, available off the drop, which is a great competitive mode for those who want to surround themselves with equally skilled players. You knock out 10 placement matches before you’re given your initial rank, then you can grind out some matches in that Ranked playlist to move up. The tiers are reasonable (going from Bronze to Onyx with six levels within each tier) but the one thing I’d want more clarification on is how you’re graded on performance to move up or down tiers. Right now that’s a bit mysterious.

In terms of gunplay, the weapons feel decently balanced, with some distinctive quirks to them. The Time to Kill (TTK) is certainly longer than in most other games and took me a bit of time to adjust to, maybe a few matches at most, before I was no longer surprised that a target was still standing after I’d unloaded most of an assault rifle’s magazine into them. It probably takes a couple of shots more than I’d like to down an enemy, and that does make it a little harder to win 1v2s here than in faster games like Apex Legends or Call of Duty. But Halo is very much a game about team play, so if you’re smart you won’t be trying to take on multiple adversaries too often since that usually means you’re overextending by yourself.

I have to say, it’s very weird that the MK50 Sidekick pistol is stronger than the MA40 Assault Rifle. While I understand that Halo games have had this balance as the meta going all the way back to the original and the AR is the strongest it’s been in any game in the series, it just seems weird to have a pistol outgun a big, chunky AR. Meanwhile, a few of the weapons you pick up out of dispensers on the walls feel a bit weak in their damage per second (DPS), especially with guns like the VK Commando which sounds and looks like a beefy gun that should knock a target flat but actually takes quite a few extra shots to kill an enemy, even with headshots.

It's a little harder to win 1v2s here than in faster games like Apex Legends or CoD.

That said, the weapon variety is pretty generous, allowing you to pick your choice of pistols, burst rifles, and shotguns. The Mangler, a precision-based revolver, is one of my favorite pistols to use since it rewards you for careful shots and can be used at close or long range (once you learn to compensate for the projectile drop). The CQS48 Bulldog is my favorite shotgun (much better than the fancier-sounding Heatwave) because of its tight spread that can take down a target quickly with accurate body shots. Also, the fan-favorite Needler feels especially rewarding when you’re able to stick a full stack of heat-seeking needles into an enemy and watch them explode after a short delay. Overall, the weapons feel satisfying to use and nothing is wildly overpowered – not including Power Weapons, of course. However, there are a few weapons that I find myself avoiding, like the Plasma Pistol and the Pulse Carbine – I just don’t like the rate of fire of either of them and they don’t output the amount of DPS needed in a close-range fight.

The Power Weapons, such as the M41 SPNKR rocket launcher and the Gravity Hammer, are limited to a few shots to keep things from getting out of control when you snag one. However, the Energy Sword definitely seems to have three to four charges too many – that could be toned down a bit, since right now the only thing keeping it in check is the fact that you have to close in to melee range to score a kill with it.

While the weapons feel as great and handle as we’ve come to expect from Halo, one thing that feels disappointingly inconsistent is the melee. Standard Spartan melees are a two-hit kill, which feels fine, but the range and damage rarely seems to work the way I expect. It doesn’t help that Infinite uses soft collision, meaning you can pass through another player, instead of hard collision, where you bounce off of each other. While soft collision keeps people from griefing each other by blocking doorways, a side effect is that the way people can phase through each other means melee strikes don’t feel right. Sometimes you’re able to get a “backsmack” instant kill while facing your opponent and other times you completely miss by phasing through their body and they get the opportunity to kill you. Also, I’ve seen what appear to be direct melee hits to the face do no damage, even when the enemy is a sneeze’s worth of health away from dying.

In Halo, grenades are an art form.

Something you can always count on, though, is the classic Halo grenade plays. Calculating the timing on a grenade throw and counting the bounces before it goes off and kills an enemy is one of the most rewarding experiences in Infinite’s multiplayer. Being able to throw a ‘nade behind enemy cover and then push them backwards into the explosion is so satisfying, and sticking someone with a plasma grenade is always a hilarious way to earn a kill. In this game, grenades are an art form.

Infinite also makes smart use of its gadgetry. The Grappleshot is my favorite, and I use it to reposition myself around enemies in active fights. It’s also great for a quick disengage from close-range fights to heal up before grappling back in to finish the fight. I also really enjoy the fact that you can grapple enemies and catch them off guard, and even throw in an elbow punch to the back of their heads when you get right up to them. I’ve even come to love the Thruster – it took a while to grow on me, but now I’ve found ways to get creative and dash past enemies, then turn and backslap them during heated fights where they were trying to keep their distance.

Microsoft couldn’t have chosen a better moment for Master Chief’s comeback.

The Drop Wall still isn’t my favorite equipment item, but that’s purely based off of my aggressive playstyle – hunkering down behind a deployable shield just makes me feel like grenade bait. Active Camo is much more my style, since its invisibility allows me to get multiple stealth kills in a row literally before they know what hit them. I also love the Repulsor, which reflects projectiles back at enemies while also pushing them back from you. Using it to throw enemies off the map was probably not what it was intended for, but it’s a ton of fun to mess around with equipment and weapon combos like that. Having that creative freedom is important, and Infinite does a great job of allowing you to have fun while slaying.

And all of that comes at just the right time. In fact, Microsoft couldn’t have chosen a better moment for Master Chief’s comeback, with Call of Duty: Vanguard's multiplayer feeling like more of the same and Battlefield 2042’s main modes leaving much to be desired. Infinite’s long-absent style of team-based multiplayer is the shot in the arm the shooter community needed right now.

Microtransaction Reaction

Halo Infinite’s store is open for business and the bundles and options for its purely cosmetic wares are varied. The pricing feels fair and evenly set relative to other free-to-play games, with daily Rare bundles costing $5 (500 credits) and weekly Legendary bundles going for $20 (2,000 credits). The Season 1 Battlepass costs 1,000 credits, so about $10, and the Premium Pass Bundle costs 2,800 credits, around $28.

Since Infinite’s multiplayer is free to play it makes sense that it’d have a battlepass, but what’s awkward is that the rewards within it are pretty lackluster. Outside of a couple of neat fire effects that can be applied to your character, all you get are things like plain armor coatings and uninspired helmet attachments. Nothing in it has interested me more than what you can earn without paying.

Also, the challenge system doesn't provide much XP, so the free cosmetic options take a long time to unlock. With the inability to choose the game modes you want to play, completing some of these challenges are difficult because you might just get half an hour of Slayer on two rotating maps and be unable to complete a challenge that requires a specific vehicle that spawns on a different map. Daily and weekly challenges should be engaging and make you feel a sense of accomplishment after completing one, but these are just small drops in a very large bucket. It’s too much of a grind to feel worth spending money on the battlepass for some meager customization unlocks as the progression rewards.

Even after an update that doles out a flat 50 XP after every match and tweaks to the challenge deck it still feels like a slog, and I don’t feel rewarded for a good performance. However, I do love that 343 Industries is showing esports teams some love with armored skin sets themed after partnered Halo Championship Series esports organizations, such as Cloud9 and Faze, so you can show support for your favorite teams.

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Hellbound: Season 1 Review

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Hellbound is now streaming on Netflix.

What would you do if you knew the exact moment you were destined to die? For a nameless man in the opening scene of Netflix's latest Korean drama, Hellbound, that question is all too real. He sits at a table in a busy cafe, staring at the phone on his clock, sweat dripping from his panicked face. As the clock hits 1:20 p.m., there is silence. A moment of relief flashes on the man's face. And then a rumble rips through the streets, and he meets his preordained fate. A trio of demon-like beasts barge through the city to grab him, beat him senseless, then burn him into a shell of ash and bones. It’s a shocking opening to a series that doesn’t let up the tension for six whole episodes, diving into a world where the threat of damnation turns us all into monsters of a different breed.

Yeon Sang-ho, the director of Train to Busan, adapts his own webtoon for a six-part series that has quickly become a social media talking point. It’s hard not to be immediately intrigued by the premise: people begin receiving prophecies from strange creatures that they will soon be dragged to hell for their sins, causing the world to fall into a state of panic and condemnation. That opening scene is a brutal wake-up call of the utmost seriousness of this conceit. There are no winks, nods, or sly jokes to break the tension, no meme-ready moments for Netflix to post on Twitter. Hellbound is 100% serious about its bleak new world. For Yeon, however, the focus is less on the creatures themselves, as foreboding as they may be, than the all-too-human reactions they elicit.

The first half of the series focuses on a disparate group of people tied together by the chaos of these creatures. Detective Jin Kyeong-hoon (Yang Ik-june) is called upon to investigate the deaths, a task that seems utterly pointless given that human justice seems utterly irrelevant to this case. Min Hye-jin (Kim Hyun-joo) is an attorney hired to represent a terrified woman who is doomed to damnation. And then there is Jeong Jin-soo, a quietly charismatic figure who heads the New Truth Society, a cult that sees the emergence of these creatures as a sign that humanity has strayed from God's path and must change before it's too late. As played by Yoo Ah-in, probably best known to Westerners for his startling performance in Lee Chang-dong's Burning, Jeong is unnervingly normal, bereft of the fire and brimstone preaching one might expect from a cult leader. Handsome, almost cute, and wholly in control of every moment, he makes it seem completely understandable as to why anyone would be taken by his call for a return to Old Testament-style justice. It's in those moments where his calm facade falls and we see the real toxicity of his gospel that we, the audience, feel his wrath.

The wrath of God is one thing, but the judgment of man is revealed to be far more insidious. It seemingly takes no time at all for Seoul society to fall into a trap of hysteria, scorn, and religious propaganda. There's no room for nuance in this new world. You're either a sinner or you're not, and regardless of the seriousness of your supposed crimes, you deserve to suffer. This is most tragically conveyed through the fate of one damned sinner, a terrified single mother named Park Jeong-ja, played by Kim Shin-rok in a heart-wrenching performance that’s a series standout.

Yeon spends three episodes achingly developing the roots of this new world, and then there’s a time jump for the second half of the show that reveals the consequences. It’s a nervy move by a series that has several twists that will make you slack-jawed. If Hellbound had ended after Episode 3, it still would have been one of the TV highlights of 2021. Episodes 4-6 show how humanity has changed thanks to the threat of damnation. The sense of despair is still palpable, particularly after we’re introduced to Bae Young-jae (Park Jeong-min), a detective facing the most horrific of news: his newborn baby is bound for hell.

Even with this fantastical setup, Hellbound retains a grounded approach in depicting humanity’s eerily familiar response to the unlikely. Even the loudest and most mouth-frothing of reactions feel rooted in our own all-too-human ways. It doesn’t seem all that outlandish to imagine that society’s wealthy elite would pay top dollar to watch a sobbing woman be murdered by monsters, or that lawyers would negotiate an appropriate price tag for what amounts to a human life. Hellbound doesn’t have a particularly hopeful view of people or our societal coping mechanisms. As you watch these “sinners” be pummelled to ashes while crowds watch on, smartphones in hand and not a single one of them willing to help, the series’ message on the agony of human complicity becomes all too clear. Do people truly fear hell, or do they just crave blood?

Hellbound's gutsy focus is one well worth investing in.

Don’t come to Hellbound hoping for comforting answers to the questions it poses, or the ones you’ll have about its ideas. This is a show as merciless as its monsters. Even in its faint moments of hope, the series understands that there’s no guarantee that humans, who seem to default to their worst in such moments of crisis, will actually listen. This kind of ceaseless nihilism may prove too much for some viewers, especially as a viewing choice for dark winter nights in the midst of a pandemic, but Hellbound's gutsy focus is one well worth investing in. If Netflix chooses to commission a second season (which seems likely given the show’s popularity), then the possibilities for further darkness seem shockingly limitless.

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Bruised Review

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Bruised premieres on Wednesday, Nov. 24 on Netflix.

Oscar winner Halle Berry makes her feature film directorial debut with Bruised, a decently spun redemption tale about an MMA fighter's journey back to the Octagon years after suffering a brutal loss in a wickedly one-sided fight. Bruised doesn't exactly steer clear of genre clichés or sappy sports story elements, but Berry's directing, and performance as the lead, helps it hit a little bit harder.

Training montages, demons to overcome, a young kid worth fighting for -- Bruised spares no expense in the tropes department when it comes to the underdog story of one Jackie Justice, a hardscrabble former UFC grappler whose life is left a mess after her boyfriend/manager ruins her 10-and-0 record by putting her in a fight she's not prepared for. Years later, Jackie's an alcoholic mess and working as a housekeeper, still under the thumb of her sh***y boyfriend.

Despite some of the paint-by-numbers elements, Berry works hard to bring an authenticity to Bruised, getting down and dirty in the cage and physically digging in as a performer to present us with character to root for, one who we want to see succeed as a fighter and a mother.

Perhaps a more traditional way this story could have gone would be for Berry to play someone who mentors and trains a new fighter, but Bruised wonderfully takes Berry's Jackie, an aging warrior who some might say blew her shot, and pushes her as a marvel who still has toxicity to expel from her life and, in doing so, has a worthy story to tell.

One of the more surprising parts of Bruised -- which is even more pleasing when one considers how these moments usually play out in movies that build up to a final battle -- is Jackie's third-act return to the cage and her big showdown with dominant lightweight champion Lady Killer (played by MMA fighter Valentina Shevchenko). The film slowly loads itself up with new people in Jackie's life who you might expect to see cheer her on, or be there for her as motivation during a crisis of faith, but she goes it alone. And it's here that Bruised's message sticks its landing the best. This is Jackie's crucible. Win or lose, she'll be in that ring by herself.

The arrival of Jackie's 6-year-old son, Manny (Danny Boyd Jr.), and a spark of interest from a local promoter, simultaneously forces, and compels, Jackie to set her life straight. Dispelling the darkness that presently pummels her while also confronting her painful past, Berry's Jackie is a gritty survivor whose obstacles, at times, feel insurmountable. There was definitely more to mine here with Manny, since the child re-enters Jackie's life as a character who doesn't speak, leaving him feeling like a bit of a blank slate/plot device at times, but Berry knows how to play off it, often having Jackie see Manny as a reflection of her own traumas.

Bruised isn't flashy, per se, but it still exudes glamour as a notably unglamorous project. Berry gives a riveting performance at times, unleashing blood, sweat, and tears as part of Jackie's courageous comeback. Story-wise though, there's nothing enticingly fresh here. The performances are strong -- particularly Berry and Sheila Atim, who plays Jackie's trainer, Buddhakan -- and the film is a promising start for Berry's budding directing career, but Jackie's battle back from the brink only ever reaches medium levels of drama.

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Licorice Pizza Review

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Licorice Pizza debuts in theaters on Nov. 26, 2021.

Licorice Pizza kind of warns you in the title that, depending on your taste, there’s a good chance some of what’s being served isn’t going to go down easily. Despite the sunny one-sheets and the era’s authentic, up-tempo needle drops, the film is in alignment with Paul Thomas Anderson’s oeuvre of telling the stories of deeply troubled people. Some of it works, but other parts will likely leave you with a strange aftertaste.

Many aren’t going to agree with me, but the very premise of the “romance” at the heart of this film between 15-year-old Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) and 25-year-old Alana Kane (Alana Haim) isn’t cute, sweet, or charming. It’s one, wrong and two, extremely dysfunctional for this pair living in the Hollywood-adjacent San Fernando Valley. They meet at Gary’s high school on picture day, when he’s in line and she’s assisting the handsy photog. They’re immediately curious about one another as they banter and flirt, and then Gary pursues. Yet through it all, Anderson lays the groundwork for how these two connect on a maturity level that hasn’t graduated from basic recess yard impulses.

Gary, as played by the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son Cooper Hoffman, is a successful child actor, who has wielded his limited “fame” with confidence far beyond his years. He’s got a lot of alpha energy for such a sprite, which we see is from having to navigate the egos of aging Hollywood stars and a revolving door of casting agents. It’s in this space that he declares to his younger brother, on the same day as meeting her, that he’s going to marry Alana someday. Again, what might be romantic to some is more than creepy to another.

Alana is the youngest daughter of a restrictive ex-Israeli soldier, spinning her wheels personally and professionally. There’s a seething anger just below the surface of all her interactions, impatient with her lot in life and the straight paths she’s uninterested in taking to achieve her goals of wealth and attention. Gary is the road not taken, the one that she knows she shouldn’t pursue. It’s one she flagrantly does, but puts her toe in, and then takes out, like an unending game of hokey pokey for the entire length of the movie.

As the two aggressively flirt and make one another jealous, Gary envelops Alana into his scattershot existence, first as his adult chaperone on his press tour trip to New York City, and then in a series of opportunistic business ventures in the Valley. Be it ahead of the trend — waterbeds, acting gigs, pinball houses, you name it — when Gary puts his eye on it, he’s immediately successful at it. Their seemingly random ventures (which are all based on the real exploits of former child actor Gary ​​Goetzman) carry Gary, Alana, and a small posse of young enablers across a summer in the Valley running breathlessly from one scheme to the next.

In all the crisscrossing, Anderson does capture the time, 1973, with incredible accuracy. Anderson and co-DP Michael Bauman create a landscape that subsumes the cast and location into that time with almost documentarian precision. Faces are shot au natural and close up so every imperfection is captured, bringing a sense of realism to the fore. All of that helps with the almost fever dream escapades that are presented along the way. From Sean Penn and Tom Waits’ aging Hollywood alpha males setting up impromptu motorcycle jumps on a golf course to a surreal evening with Bradley Cooper’s over-sexed Jon Peter’s buying a waterbed, there’s nothing mundane about what Gary and Alana experience together.

What Anderson doesn’t give us is the inner lives of anyone in the film.

But it all gets to be too much about halfway through. What Anderson doesn’t give us is the inner lives of anyone in the film. Gary and Alana are entirely front-facing people, ruled by their mercurial natures and strange, almost magnetic attraction to one another. They tease and bait one another, hurt and then almost ferally defend one another. While Alana does, at a couple points, vocally question the weirdness of her spending so much time with a boy like Gary, the movie isn’t interested in seeing either of them grow. In fact, Anderson seems most interested in just watching them attract and repel one another ad nauseum as they navigate themselves amongst a never-ending lineup of awful men and agency-less women.

Regardless of where Gary and Alana end up in the movie, the biggest barrier to entry in Licorice Pizza is the inherent wrongness of these two being together because of their ages. You can love the performances of Hoffman and Haim, who are both very good, and enjoy their escapades, even if they go on about 40 minutes too long. But you can also reject the extremely bent moral compass the movie mostly ignores. If the genders were turned, there would be no question of how problematic this premise is. But maybe Anderson, in the end, is really provoking our morals. Maybe the broken, cynical playground that serves as the backdrop to their adventures is the canary in the coalmine for this whole seemingly “romantic” venture. I’d like to believe that’s Anderson's true intention, getting us to really think about how easily we’re persuaded to root for a messed-up dynamic because it’s so skillfully framed like a Hollywood ending. And if he’s not, there’s not enough “no thank you’s” in the world to be given to this slice of life.

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Chucky Episode 7 Review: "Twice the Grieving, Double the Loss"

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Spoilers for Chucky episode 7, titled “Twice The Grieving, Double the Loss,” ahead. For more, check out our review of last week’s episode.

Two murdered moms mark quite the place to start an episode of TV, but this is Chucky, and we deal with dead parents on a regular basis here. Last week’s frantically paced “Cape Queer” had a lot of paradigms to shift, so “Twice the Grieving, Double the Loss” slows things down to build some tension for the finale. But aside from pushing one character past their point of no return, “Twice the Grieving, Double the Loss” feels like Chucky stalling.

With two main characters having a dead mom to cope with, Chucky devotes more time to Junior’s (Teo Briones) grieving process. That process involves sucker-punching Jake (Zackary Arthur) and suspecting his dad of having an affair with Tiffany (Jennifer Tilly) after she shows up to Bree’s funeral and kisses him (classic Tiff). Junior’s descent into madness has been a long time coming, but his heel turn still feels forced. Put under immense pressure by his father, ignored by his girlfriend, convinced Jake has it out for him, Junior’s been a ticking time bomb all season.

Early on, Jake was framed as an outsider that Chucky could exploit, until he connected with other people and insulated himself from the killer doll. Junior was always a foil to that and, after being cast aside like clockwork, has fallen victim to the same way of thinking. But lately, it’s felt like the show has actively worked to keep Junior totally isolated so that we’d buy it when he snapped. Chucky has had a lot of fun exploring the negativities the Good Guy doll can represent to each character; for Junior, it seems it may be something as dull and blunt as a weapon to beat his jerk dad to death with after that last straw breaks. Logan’s death scene is brutal and well-shot. And ending with Junior and Chucky singing “We Got the Beat” just felt right, as the show usually does when leaning hard into the bizarre.

Chucky’s malign influence is raising much more interesting questions across town in his childhood home, which Tiffany is using as a staging ground for some kind of Good Guy doll army. Chucky’s soul-splitting voodoo and to what ends it’s being used for remain one of the more exciting mysteries of the show, and the image of the platoon of Chuckies all turning their heads to the kidnapped Devon (Björgvin Arnarson) allows for some ambitious ideas to be in play. But that’s for next week -- in the here and now, I’m more disappointed in how the loss of Devon’s mother is treated as an afterthought. Not only does focusing so much on Junior’s loss shortchange Devon of good emotional material, it also just feels strange that no one’s talking about Kim, a detective investigating a string of murders, being murdered herself.

Jake and Lexy (Alyvia Alyn Lind) aren’t in a much better place, with both seeming to be finished with their own development as characters. Arthur and Lind’s chemistry and banter is still fun, but there’s no conflict between the two. They’re both on the same page that Chucky’s plan, whatever it may be, has to be stopped at all costs. The relationship is beginning to feel redundant to the incoming Alex and Kyle, whose goals are seemingly the same.

“Twice the Grieving, Double the Loss” fumbles its use of legacy characters in both the present day and flashback. Like last week, Chucky checks in on Andy Barclay (Alex Vincent) and Kyle (Christine Elise)’s journey to Hackensack. While their undercover Chucky assassination mission last week was useful for getting newcomers oriented to what these characters are all about, their scene here felt far more like pure finale setup. Andy abandoning Kyle at this point in their trip is a choice that seems designed to give her a last-second heroic moment when she’s least expected next week, not a natural thing for someone to do to their foster sister.

Extraneous flashbacks feel like a bad investment of screen time. 

The ‘80s flashbacks detailing Charles Lee Ray and Tiffany’s early days are starting to feel less exciting and more obligatory. While they’ve been smartly tied in to what’s going on in present day (Chucky’s first kill), this week’s flashback to Charles and Tiff’s first experience cohabitating felt inessential and distracting. Especially in a week where it felt like a main character was being robbed of time to process a pretty serious trauma, extraneous flashbacks felt like a bad investment of screen time.

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Hawkeye Episodes 1 and 2 Review

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This is a spoiler-free review for the two-part premiere of Marvel’s Hawkeye, streaming from November 24 on Disney+.

Hawkeye stands as perhaps Disney+ and Marvel Studios’ most difficult TV challenge yet: how to get anyone to care about the MCU’s most boring Avenger. Luckily there’s a blueprint; comic creators Matt Fraction and David Aja have been here before when they evolved the character from tired to tremendous across 22 fantastic issues. Unsurprisingly it’s that run from which the Disney+ show draws its inspiration. For those unfamiliar with the comics, you can expect a surprisingly goofy street-level caper that’s big on personality while also letting darker elements gently simmer. These components are clear right from the get go, and while Hawkeye commits some of the same mistakes other MCU shows have, its fun ideas ensures the two-part premiere introduces us to a promising story that knowingly winks at the boring Hawkeye meme and begins to rebuild its titular hero.

In these opening episodes, set in the week leading up to Christmas, Jeremy Renner’s Clint Barton is recognized in the street and theatre stalls by wide-eyed fans. Despite this, it’s clear he’s not the Avenger most people adore. As he walks past a group of superhero cosplayers in Times Square, the archer among them is actually Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games, a great joke that really makes the story’s intent for him clear. This lack of popularity is because Hawkeye doesn’t have a good brand, Barton’s told. How could anyone care about him when he hides anything interesting about himself?

It’s a question posed by someone who has the most likable ‘brand’ of any Marvel character since Phase One: Hailee Steinfeld’s Kate Bishop. Pulled almost entirely from the pages of Fraction and Aja’s comics, she’s a delightfully energetic force who runs before she can walk. Her archery skills are matched only by her ability to arrive in the wrong place at the wrong time. This provides almost all of Hawkeye’s initial fun and intrigue; Kate’s a pint-sized detective, and her underbaked crime fighting instincts ensure she’s always getting herself into some kind of exciting trouble.

Together, Barton and Bishop make a classic double-act. He’s the grumpy surrogate father who’s just trying to live his life, and she’s the untamable wild card who may just bring out the best in her new mentor. It’s a cliché set up that stands a chance of becoming tired but, at least in these initial hours, the dynamic is strong. That’s largely thanks to Steinfeld; based on these two episodes, the Hawkeye the title refers to is almost certainly Kate. It’s unsurprising that she steals the show — Steinfeld has always been a magnetic joy — but her junior hero also fires significantly more arrows over the premiere, both physically and metaphorically. Again, this feels like a recognition that Hawkeye needs spicing up, and that heat was never going to come from Clint himself, at least not initially. By providing the lion’s share of the show to Kate, we’re able to invest in a much more fascinating character who will hopefully over time push Clint into a more interesting position.

While the duo makes for an energetic feel, there are elements at play that keep things human and weighty. Barton is trying his best to be a dad while suffering the side effects of being a superhero; he’s carrying the traumatic burden of a lost best friend, and a hearing aid makes up for the toll a dozen explosive missions have taken on his eardrums. The sudden appearance of Kate in his life pulls him back into a life of trouble he’s trying to put on the backburner for the Holidays, which amps up the excitement and amusement but, doesn’t lose sight of that humanity. A sequence set during a live-action role play game really delivers on this balance; it’s consistently funny while also demonstrating Barton’s reluctance to being pulled into a conflict when he’d rather be wrapping presents.

Barton’s home life is kept largely as a framing device, as is the norm for the ‘getting home in time for Christmas’ trope that Hawkeye enjoyably revels in. Each episode ticks down a day, which steadily builds the pressure. This format means there’s sadly minimal depth to his relationship with his children and wife Laura (Linda Cardellini) so far, though, with their roles being used as symbolism more than characters.

Where Clint’s family life is underdeveloped, Kate’s bumpy relationship with her mom (Vera Farmiga) and new suspicious step-dad figure (Tony Dalton) takes up much more time than it needs. There are moments when it successfully contributes to Kate’s character -- a scene with her mom in which she discusses the privileges of great wealth is worthwhile -- but so far this storyline feels like it’s stealing time away from the double act at the heart of the show, rather than adding anything valuable. It really dents Hawkeye’s zippy tone, and even makes little stretches of the premier close to boring. By dedicating so much time to this plot thread, it means more exciting areas have been denied the chance to develop, and as such Hawkeye fails to hit its full potential in this opening act.

Much like The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, Hawkeye is tackling secondary storylines that it really doesn’t need to, and that makes me fearful that it could suffer from similarly undercooked conclusions further down the line. Kate is a fascinating enough character on her own, and television really isn’t in need of any more stories about the trials of the incredibly rich. Perhaps this will be explored further down the line, but so far it feels like Hawkeye has missed its comic inspiration’s trick of exploring the lives of regular people trying to get by in a crime-plagued neighborhood.

Street-level storytelling is still present, though, fulfilled by Barton and Bishop’s feud with the Tracksuit Mafia; a collective of sweaty Eastern European gangsters dressed exclusively in red athletic wear. Their use of the word ‘bro’ as punctuation in every sentence makes them a consistently funny adversary, which bolsters Hawkeye’s crime caper tones. This does, admittedly, come with the risk of them being a less-than-fearsome foe, but the conclusion of the second episode pulls a trick that will potentially make them much more menacing.

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