Acer Predator Triton 300 SE Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out With every new generation of hardware, the high-end graphics cards lead the way, with more affordable midrange options trickling in a few months later. That time has finally arrived, and our first foray into 3060-equipped gaming laptops is Acer's latest Predator Triton 300 SE. The successor to last year's Triton aims to provide a well-built, affordable gaming experience in a stylish-but-grown-up package you can use for work or school. It may not be breaking down barriers of innovation, but it's a solid workhorse that'll serve the average user well. I reviewed a model with the following specs:

• Model: Acer Predator Triton 300 SE PT314-51s-71UU
• Display: 14-inch IPS 144Hz at 1920x1080
• Processor: Intel Core i7-11375H Special Edition quad-core processor (12 MB Smart Cache, up to 5.0 GHz)
• Graphics: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 6GB with Max-Q
• Memory: 16GB DDR4 (user-upgradeable to 24GB)
• OS: Windows 10 Home
• Storage: 512 NVMe SSD
• Webcam: 720p
• Ports: 1x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C with Power Delivery and Thunderbolt, 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2 TYpe-A, 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x 3.5mm combo audio jack, 1x A/C power
• Connectivity: Killer Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax), Bluetooth 5.1
• Battery: 60Wh
• Dimensions: 12.7" x 8.97" x 0.7"
• Weight: 3.75 lbs.
• Price (as tested): $1,399.99

At the time of this writing, there are no other models of the Predator Triton 300 SE – though with user-upgradeable RAM and storage, you at least have some options for configuring it to your needs. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=acer-predator-triton-300-se-review&captions=true"]

Design and Features

If you like the idea of a laptop that stands out from the pack but don't love the overly-gaudy designs popular among gaming products, you'll probably like the Triton 300 SE's design. Its relatively thin metal body is sleek and durable, while the subtle cross hatching pattern on the lid is, in my opinion, the perfect amount of flair. The Predator logo, while distinctly "gamer," isn't lit up in RGB or stamped in a high-contrast color – it's subtle with just a touch of holographic reflectiveness. The vents and keyboard legends are a bit more of a giveaway that this is a gaming laptop, but again, it isn't over the top, and I'd feel perfectly comfortable using this in a more professional setting. The build quality is similarly up to the task of your daily work. The keyboard is incredibly comfortable to type on, even for long periods of time, and the layout isn't overly cramped like on some compact notebooks. You get a full row of function keys including Print Screen, Insert, and Delete, along with full-size arrow keys and a row of media keys along the right. (There's even a dedicated key to launch the PredatorSense software, which I'll discuss below.) The right Shift key is on the smaller side, but still wider than a standard 1u key, so it shouldn't invoke any accidental keystrokes. The glass trackpad is similarly fantastic, allowing your finger to glide smoothly over the surface without any errant cursor jumps, incorrect clicks, or other difficulties like poor thumb detection. It's a decent size as well, though for some reason, the laptop's fingerprint sensor – while a welcome addition – is inside the trackpad's borders, which means it can get in the way occasionally. I would have rather seen the sensor placed to the left or right of the trackpad like most laptops, where it's still easily accessible without being a nuisance. I'm a stickler for external build quality, but internal hardware is just as important, particularly on a gaming laptop where every bit of performance counts. The Triton sports the latest Intel 11th generation processors, pairing a four-core Core i7 with an Nvidia RTX 3060 with Max-Q design. That may not be top-of-the-line (and there's a lot we could say about Intel's downgrade to four core i7s this year), but it should be enough to handle gaming on the 1080p IPS display, which is capable of 144Hz of smooth motion. If you need a bit of extra power, the Triton even has a Turbo button above the keyboard that cranks the fans all the way up to provide the most possible boost headroom on the GPU. If you game with headphones, the whirring noise probably won't bother you too much, and it's a fun throwback to the days of Turbo buttons on desktop PCs. Frankly, you'll probably want to game with headphones on anyway, since the speakers – while plenty serviceable for a laptop – aren't going to give you a mind-blowing experience. Listening to music on the internal speakers, for example, sounded less than stellar, with a muddy midrange that felt like it was struggling to make itself heard over the more shrill treble. The built-in DTS:X presets do make a huge difference, though, so I recommend leaving them turned on (even though I usually recommend against such things). The addition of DTS Headphone:X is also welcome, if you're a fan of virtual surround – DTS' implementation is probably better than whatever is built in to your gaming headset, so give it a try. Port selection is decent, offering two USB 3.2 Type-A ports and one USB Type-C port. That's a bit slim for a laptop of this size, but I'll let it slide for the inclusion of HDMI 2.1, which is welcome if you want to game on an external monitor or new TV with variable refresh rate. What I can't let slide, though, is the terrible placement of the power port – maybe it's just because I've become accustomed to having this available at the back of the bottom chassis, but its placement in the center of the keyboard (near the left Shift key) is so wonky that it drives me a little crazy every time I plug it in. Finally, as I mentioned above, the Predator Triton 300 SE is user-serviceable, provided you have a Torx driver to get into the bottom case. The RAM is upgradeable through a single stick of DDR4, the SSD is a standard M.2 drive, and the battery and Wi-Fi card can be easily replaced if need be. This is always good to see, especially in an age where more and more thin-and-light notebooks have their RAM and storage soldered to the motherboard.

Software

I'm rarely a fan of bundled software on laptops, but I have to say Acer's PredatorSense software is actually a welcome inclusion. The home window shows your CPU, GPU, and system temperatures front and center, with quick shortcuts to change your lighting and overclocking profiles. You can further configure both of these from the Lighting and Mode tabs – the lighting offers a few different effects as well as the capability to set the keyboard backlight to any color you want, while the Mode tab lets you set the PC to Quiet mode for lower fan noise, and Extreme or Turbo mode for overclocked performance. The Mode tab also shows you your CPU and GPU usage, while the Fan Control tab shows you the current speed of your fans. If you want to see all this information at once, you can open the Monitoring tab, which shows more detailed graphs for your CPU and GPU usage, temperature, and fan speed. (If you game on an external monitor, having this open on the laptop display is a handy way to keep an eye on your hardware). You can even set custom lighting, overclocking, and fan modes for certain games using the Game Sync feature. I have to give credit to Acer – the company bundled some software I could actually see myself using. The built-in Norton trial, on the other hand, I could do without. This isn't some $500 budget machine, and I grit my teeth every time I see something like this on a laptop. At least you can uninstall it.

Performance and Gaming

While the Predator Triton 300 SE boasts the latest chips from Intel and Nvidia, it isn't exactly a powerhouse, aiming for more midrange-to-high-midrange specs. It is, however, still rather capable. The Max-Q designed RTX 3060 has a quoted boost clock of 1282-1382MHz and a maximum power draw of 75W – so while it's not the lowest-power 3060 we'll probably see in a notebook, it isn't top of the pack either. Still, this machine can handle just about anything you'd throw at it at 1080p, often at higher-than-60fps framerates.

Benchmarks	MSI GP66 Leopard	ASUS Zephyrus M15	Acer Predator Triton 300 SE
Price as tested	$1,799	$1,279	$1,399
CPU	Intel Core i7-10870H	Intel Core i7-10750H	Intel Core i7-11375H
GPU	Nvidia RTX 3070 Laptop	Nvidia GTX 1660 TI	Nvidia RTX 3060
3DMark Time Spy	10266	5807	6377
3DMark Fire Strike	21626	13168	14416
3DMark Night Raid	47377	36383	30238
Total War: Three Kingdoms	128	44	54
Borderlands 3	87	49	60
Metro Exodus	69	23	48
Hitman 3	158		93
Unigine Heaven 4.0	126	71	85
PCMark 10	6499	5240	5892
PCMark 10 Battery Test	2:20	8:31	6:30

Remember, the values above are worst-case scenarios – Ultra settings in benchmarks designed to stress the system to the max. In actual gameplay, I found Medium settings to be more than adequate in Battlefield V for 80-100 frames per second or higher in the single-player campaign, and I'm sure some extra fiddling could have optimized things further. Like most laptop displays, the response time isn't super fast, so you may see some ghosting here and there, but it does the job well enough. I achieved similar results in Borderlands 3 firefights with High settings as well. The Turbo button, while a quaint reminder of days gone by, didn't boost things too much, but if you're using headphones and playing a noisy shooter, it can't hurt to turn it on – I gained a few frames at most during higher-framerate scenes in Battlefield V, while my benchmarks in Borderlands 3 and Total War: Three Kingdoms only jumped by about 1 and 2 frames per second, respectively. This could vary from game to game, especially in cases where Intel's four-core-eight-thread processor might bottleneck the graphics card – which could become more and more common as games are designed to use more CPU threads. On the more subjective side of things, the Predator Triton 300 SE hits all the same marks it does with desktop work. The keyboard is plenty comfortable for strafing between enemy bunkers, with well-spaced keys and deep travel (for a laptop). The trackpad is smooth, and useful enough with the sensitivity cranked up in Windows – though as always, you'll get a much, much better experience with a gaming mouse. The speakers will do you fine in a pinch, but even a cheap pair of earbuds is going to sound better, so factor a few peripherals into your budget for best results. Finally, the laptop does get warm during gaming, just as any other compact machine would – and like most of today's modern laptops, it will get hot enough to thermal throttle during intense tasks like gaming (two of my four CPU cores got into the 90s during the above benchmarks, and in a toastier room, I easily throttled on all four). This is unfortunate as always, but it's also par for the course in 2021, even with the scaled-back 11th gen chips.

Battery Life

Battery life is one of Intel's selling points for its 11th-gen processors, and the Predator Triton 300 SE fares...fine in this regard. At six hours and 30 minutes in PCMark 10's Modern Office battery test at 50% brightness, the machine lasted long enough to get you through most of the workday, which is better than a lot of gaming laptops out there. Still, compared to others we've tested, I'd call it middle-of-the-road, or at least high-middle-of-the-road. It's not going to win any battery life awards, but it'll get the job done nicely as a standard day-to-day laptop. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=best-gaming-laptops&captions=true"]

Purchasing Guide

The Acer Predator Triton 300 SE is currently available in only one configuration with a Intel Core i7-11375H Special Edition processor, Nvidia RTX 3060 Max-Q graphics, 16GB of RAM and 512GB NVMe SSD for $1,399 at Best Buy.

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Supergirl: Final Season Premiere Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out Warning: this review contains full spoilers for the Season 6 premiere of Supergirl, which kicks off the final season of the Arrowverse series. [poilib element="accentDivider"] The pandemic continues to do a real number on the Arrowverse in 2021. Not only was Supergirl among the many shows forced to end its 2020 season early, now Season 6 is premiering earlier than planned because of Superman & Lois' own COVID-19 production woes. "Rebirth" has the unfortunate burden of both wrapping up Season 5's loose ends and kicking off the show's final year. It's just as well the focus is mostly on the former. Season premiere or not, "Rebirth" definitely plays like the definitive Season 5 finale we were meant to get in 2020. In fact, some of the episode was filmed last year, making it a mostly cohesive fusion of old and new scenes. Lex Luthor has reached the endgame of his plan to make the world love him and become a literal god in the process. Billions of lives hang in the balance, and the odds are badly stacked against Team Supergirl. Not a bad setup for a final good vs. evil showdown. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=supergirl-rebirth-gallery&captions=true"] Few would argue that Jon Cryer's Lex isn't one of the best additions to the series in its entire run. The Arrowverse has never had the greatest track record with nuanced villains in the first place, and that's always been a particular weak point with Supergirl. Season 5's Leviathan storyline was no exception, sadly. It's hard to say what it is about Supergirl specifically that encourages such campy, pointlessly over-the-top performances from the actors in these villain roles. That's why it's a relief to see Leviathan and characters like Gamemnae take a back-seat in favor of Lex in his grand moment of triumph. Not that Cryer doesn't chew some scenery himself in this episode. That silly montage showing Lex reveling in his apparent victory definitely ranks as the most enjoyable moment in the premiere. But with Lex, that silliness is balanced out by a real sense of menace and downright malice. In many ways, this is the most comic book-faithful take on Lex we've ever seen in live-action. He's a larger than life evil genius, but he has just enough humanity that you understand why he does what he does and why he ultimately fails. Lex's Achilles heel is the fact that he assumes he's too smart to be outwitted or outflanked. That's something this episode plays with nicely. It also delivers a firm cap to Lex's entire Season 5 arc. He may have helped save the multiverse in Crisis, but purely out of self-interest. And here at the end, we see him come perilously close to making himself into a new Anti-Monitor. This episode also successfully ties up a number of other loose ends from 2020. Alex is finally given a proper superhero name to go along with her power and costume. CatCo is back to being a respected journalistic outlet rather than a cog in a corporate conglomerate. And Brainy, despite that very Wrath of Khan quality to that opening scene, is saved from death and given the chance to repair his relationship with Nia. That latter subplot dovetails nicely with the long-awaited Kara/Lena reconciliation and the idea that secrets are necessary, but so are honesty and transparency. It'll be interesting to see how the all-important Kara/Lena dynamic plays out in Season 6 now that Kara will no longer have to play the flighty reporter to her best friend. Are they still friends at this point? As neatly as everything is tied up in this episode, there is a nagging sense that it's all resolved a little too quickly and too easily. With Leviathan defeated and Lex back to being public enemy number one, there is a certain feeling of "back to the status quo" with the ending. It would have been nice to see Lex's master plan play out for more than one episode before the series veered into true Season 6 territory, with one episode focusing on the race to destroy his satellites and the next expanding on the final confrontation between Lex and Kara. For one thing, with Lex so fixated on remaking the world into one where he's beloved by all, it's a real missed opportunity to not turn the tables and have him see firsthand how the world views him now. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/every-cancelled-and-ending-tv-show-announced-in-2020"] It's hard not to wonder if the decision to shorten Season 5's scope by two episodes (which happened pre-COVID, mind you) might have played a role in making the finale feel more rushed than it might have been otherwise. There's also the question of whether Cryer participated in the second round of filming for this episode, or if director Jesse Warn was forced to make do with existing Lex footage from last year. That may be another hurdle working against "Rebirth." Still, as much this episode seems geared toward resetting the status quo and shuffling Lex off the stage, it does give us one significant plot twist heading into Season 6 proper. Kara is now trapped with the other lost souls inside the Phantom Zone, leaving only some incomplete recording of herself behind. An intriguing development, and one that could theoretically play out for a while. Whatever is coming up in the weeks ahead, the series is going to face an uphill battle topping the past two seasons' worth of Lex Luthor stories.

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Balan Wonderworld Review

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It’s sad to say, but I’ve gotten used to disappointment when it comes to spiritual successors of iconic games made by their original creators. For every return as impressive as Bloodstained, there seems to be a far less successful attempt like Mighty No. 9. So, I’m disappointed but not surprised to see that Balan Wonderworld, the latest 3D platformer from Sonic the Hedgehog co-creators Yuji Naka and Naoto Ohshima, is a fundamentally flawed shadow of its predecessors. Its character designs, cutscenes, and music are certainly charming, but charm alone isn’t enough to make this half-baked platformer any less boring to actually play.

When you’re hopping around Balan Wonderworld’s simultaneously imaginative yet bland stages, it doesn’t necessarily feel like a total trainwreck. Some of its barebones obstacle courses can occasionally produce hints of what I might call fun, and it’s not much more than a total bore the rest of the time. But when you take Balan Wonderworld as a whole, it sinks lower than the rudimentary platforming that barely props it up. From its misguided one-button control scheme, to its haphazard transforming costume mechanic and the levels that use them, to the half-hearted Chao Garden-like hub world between them, it gets a lot wrong – and very little of what it gets right helps to balance the scales.

[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/balan-wonderworld-opening-movie"]

This is usually the part where I’d break down Balan Wonderworld’s story for you, but there’s not much to tell about the unexplained nonsense it calls a plot. You play as either a boy who goes from happily breakdancing to being super bummed out in record time, or a girl whose housemaids whisper about her behind her back for no apparent reason. Your choice means very little, though, because either way you are quickly abducted by a magical tophat man named Balan and dropped into a dream land full of weird birds and crystals or something? It’s unclear, but that’s all the setup you’ll get before it starts parading you through 12 different worlds (each with just two levels, a boss, and an extra level once you beat the story) that are each structured around another sad person, all of whom seem completely unrelated to anything that’s going on.

I’ve enjoyed plenty of games with incomprehensible stories, but Balan Wonderworld’s inanity is particularly disappointing when its animated cutscenes are so well made. They’re full of life and energy, and can even tell a few genuinely entertaining bite-sized stories about each world’s subject. Cutscenes primarily play right before a boss to quickly introduce the person for that world and a problem they are facing – be it a boy trying to build a flying machine or a scuba diving girl whose dolphin friend maimed her and left her to die – but a second cutscene right after the boss then immediately resolves it (don’t worry, she and the dolphin are cool now). That pacing not only makes each character’s story feel disjointed from everything else, including your protagonist, it means the levels you play before meeting them are devoid of context. If the first cutscene had played at the start of the world, then maybe I would have connected with those characters as I played through their reference-filled levels, like a chess player’s world being littered with chess pieces. But by holding their whole story to the end, Balan Wonderworld becomes little more than a jumble of endearing but incoherent ideas.

Control Chaos 

Regardless of its story, the festering rot at the heart of Balan Wonderworld is the inexplicable decision to make it a one-button game. Apart from using the joystick to move and the shoulder buttons to swap between ability-altering costumes, nearly every other button on the controller does the same thing. That concept is taken laughably too far by making them the same in the menus too, forcing you to scroll to specific “back” buttons rather than just being able to hit B/Circle, which would be hilarious if it weren’t so stupid. When you’re not wearing a costume (which is extremely rare), your lone button is a simple and underwhelming jump, but each of Balan Wonderworld’s more than 80 different outfits change that function to something else. A jack-o-lantern costume makes your sole action a punch attack, while a sheep suit lets you hover jump, and there are a needlessly large number of other options to stumble across.

The idea of a one-button control scheme isn’t an inherently bad one, but Balan Wonderworld doesn’t provide a single good reason for why it restricts itself this way. What it does do, however, is provide innumerable examples for why it shouldn’t have – most critically, it prevents certain costumes from performing that most basic of platforming tasks: jump. Some suits work fine with one button, particularly the jumping-focused ones (who would have guessed?), but others range from perplexing to downright awful as a result. Things like a clown that can only jump by slowly charging up an annoyingly small explosion, or a flower that can stretch up a uselessly short distance. If a costume uses its button to attack then odds are you can’t jump at all while wearing it, while others might still let you jump but at the cost of making their ability activate only when you’re standing still – or worse, entirely at random. Why in Wonderworld is that the better option?

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Player control is sacrificed for unnecessary simplicity again and again: a robot costume can shoot lasers only if you don’t move at all while a mantis suit can throw blades but not make it up a one-foot ledge, and neither of them make the frequently ignorable enemies any less dull to fight. And then there’s the truly baffling Box Fox, which Balan Wonderworld’s own tooltip explains will turn you into a plain cube “when it feels like it.” That’s genuinely unbelievable when the alternative would have just been to enable even a single extra button, and can make already bland costume abilities annoying or flatout unusable. And while you can carry three costumes at once and simply run around in a more maneuverable one most of the time, swapping between them is accompanied by an aggravatingly slow animation that makes doing so in a pinch a frantic affair.

Because getting hit means you lose that costume entirely, I even found myself in a few situations where taking damage sometimes meant not having the one ability I needed to progress, or potentially not being able to jump at all. That leaves you with no option but to tediously backtrack and grab another copy of the outfit you need. Costumes are contained in purple gems that require a key to unlock, but that’s yet another mechanic that’s so pointless it’s silly. Keys are almost always just a few steps away from the gems themselves, occasionally tucked around a nearby corner or behind a box to provide all the challenge and excitement of playing hide and seek with a four-year-old. Collecting them is always just added friction in a game full of it.

The visual variety of costumes is, at least, decently impressive, with a particular favorite of mine being a giant rolling BB-8 style panda. But mechanically, there’s an immense amount of overlap that can cause new obstacles to be monotonously similar to old ones – there are a half dozen different ways to hover in the air, multiple fighters that fill the same role, and countless options to destroy breakable blocks. While “over 80 different costumes!” might be a catchy bullet point for the back of its $60 box, the reality is Balan Wonderworld would have been a significantly better platformer if it only had 10 that it actually took proper advantage of.

[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=Player%20control%20is%20sacrificed%20for%20unnecessary%20simplicity%20over%20and%20over%20again."]

As is, each world has about five costumes it introduces, makes use of for some extremely basic platforming, and then throws away just as fast. Balan Wonderworld’s levels are mostly linear, but they ignore all the platforming fundamentals of introducing the basics of a mechanic and then building more interesting or challenging sections on top of it as you progress. Each stage seems like a mock-up of how a costume could be used in some better thought-out game we don’t get to play. Maybe the most glaring example of this is a costume that lets you summon a ladder on specific ladder spots (exciting, right?). It’s used to very simply get over some walls right after you get it and then basically never again, so why does it exist at all? Not all of them are quite that dry, with mildly more entertaining suits sending you bouncing between balloons or floating along air currents. But they never evolve past the lack of complexity found in the first few levels, leaving me bored and unengaged for the roughly nine hours it took to reach the credits.

Most levels have small extra bits that can only be accessed with specific costumes from other worlds too, like a recurring bandstand platform that needs a musical costume to trigger – but that means “solving” these obstacles is purely a matter of having the right costume or not. If you spot blue webbing on a wall, you can go back to the closest checkpoint and swap into the spider costume to climb it (if you have an extra of that suit, otherwise you’ve got to go back to its home world first). But that’s not an interesting challenge, a fun discovery, or even a very well rewarded task as it’s very frequently just hiding some borderline useless crystals rather than the Statues that act as Balan Wonderworld’s Super Star equivalent to unlock more worlds.

Those collectibles (and a hat with eyes) aren’t where the similarities to Super Mario Odyssey stop either. Balan Wonderworld clearly seems to take some inspiration from Mario’s latest major outing, but it doesn’t recapture any of the magic that made it so special. Mario’s capture forms are similarly limited in their capabilities, sure, but the vast majority of Odyssey is spent as Mario himself, whose controls are far more nuanced than a single jump button. Each level of that game is designed around Mario and his available captures with explicit intent, ramping up simple concepts into more complex ideas as you go. In contrast, Balan Wonderworld just throws a bunch of random ideas and costumes at you, let’s you swap to any of them any time you like, and never really offers a more interesting use than the ones it introduces the first moment after you put one on.

[ignvideo url="https://ift.tt/3w8B261]

The worlds can stretch through some neat visual styles, from jungle treetops to an M.C. Escher-style artistic maze, but even the nicest of them are undercut by repetitive terrain and peculiar dancing NPCs that disappear every time you get close (and a small handful have a downright nauseating screen warp effect that makes it actively hard to play). But all that color and some pretty great music don’t do much to differentiate their rudimentary level design. Every single one is still overburdened with a needless amount of costumes and held back by its restrictive control scheme, the combination of which prevents Balan Wonderworld’s platforming from ever forming a coherent voice of its own.

The one place this trend is ever so slightly bucked is in its bosses, which do manage to flaunt Balan Wonderworld’s knack for character design. Bosses follow the cookie cutter three-hit formula to beat, but a neat little twist is that there are actually three different ways to deal damage that you have to figure out mid-fight. Each one you manage to use earns you a Statue, which makes them more like an action puzzle. That doesn’t really make them much fun to actually fight, as dodging their attacks and hitting back is still incredibly basic and often annoyingly unintuitive, but it is a place where Balan Wonderworld’s creativity feels better expressed.

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It’s certainly a preferable way to earn Statues than the “Balan’s Bout” bonus stages hidden throughout every level. These transport you to a timing-based minigame where Balan himself flies through a generic void inexplicably punching rocks for no discernible reason, with you trying to time button presses to annoyingly vague indicators to earn multipliers on the crystals you’ve collected. Every single Balan’s Bout reuses the same small pool of animations, takes far too long, and is incredibly harsh in its judgement – getting every button press perfect will earn you a gold medal and a Statue of its own, while even a single slightly mistimed one will drop you to a silver and deny you that reward. By the latter half of the campaign there are two or three of these in every single level, and you have to completely reload a level to take another crack at them, making the prospect of 100%ing any of Balan Wonderworld’s stages an absolute nightmare to consider.

Completionists will get more bad news once the credits roll, as a third level opens up in each of the 12 worlds. These endgame stages ramp up the challenge a little bit, but probably in one of the more frustrating ways possible. The platforming puzzles are only marginally more complex, but now there are no purple costume gems scattered around except for some hidden special ones (like a somewhat familiar chargeable rocket roller skater). That means you have to rely on the supply of costumes you’ve collected elsewhere, and losing a specific one you need could not only halt your progress in that level but also potentially force you back to a different world to laboriously farm up on what you need. That crosses a threshold Balan Wonderworld mercifully doesn’t often reach: the point where my boredom transforms into frustration.

Garden of Eatin'

Between each level, you return to your pointless garden hub world full of pointless birds that spin a wheel to rack up pointless points. For anyone hoping this green, hilled zone is comparable to the Sonic Adventure series’ adorable Chao Garden, I regret to inform you that pretty much the only thing they have in common is the ability to force feed its cute critters crystals and then unceremoniously throw them through the air for a cruel laugh. There's very little interaction with these bird blobs otherwise, making the almost idle game-like nature of giving them crystals to make a generic counter go up perplexingly dull.

The process of feeding them is a tedious one too, requiring you to walk to one of four colored flower patches to throw out the matching crystals you collect during a level – the catch here is that you throw them 10 at a time and there can seemingly only be 20 spawned in at once. Since the old ones will despawn if too many new ones arrive, you have to throw some out and then wait for your fluffy workers to slowly eat before throwing out more. That will then cause them to spin a wheel that builds superfluous structures in your hub, be it a “trampoline” for them to bounce on, part of a tower for them to adorably roll down, another trampoline, or even a third trampoline. Because you’re given zero motivation or explanation for any of this (what do the different color crystals do? Why am I building them so many trampolines? Where did one get a tiny hat from?), throwing out crystals becomes little more than a chore between levels, completely unlike the nuanced care I could give my Chao.

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What’s worse, because crystals are the primary item you’re meant to pick up besides Statues, their lack of value in the hub (the only place they are at all relevant) undermines the very act of collecting them. Backtracking to equip that music costume I mentioned earlier seems relatively fruitless when using its special bandstand only gets you four crystals to add to the hundreds your birds will greedily devour. By the end of the campaign I barely even cared about picking them up anymore – and when the main collectible of your 3D platformer starts to feel like more trouble than its worth, that’s a pretty catastrophic breaking point.

Balan Wonderworld reminds me of some of the other platformers I played as a child, but not in a good way. It feels like a small subset of games that I enjoyed in the ‘90s, like Gex: Enter the Gecko or Bubsy, only to realize they were actually pretty bad once I grew out of my young naivete and looked back with more informed eyes. But both our options and our standards have increased dramatically since the days of the Nintendo 64. So even viewed with nostalgic eyes, Balan Wonderworld is less a throwback to a bygone era and more a derivative reminder of memories best left forgotten.

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Disco Elysium - The Final Cut Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out [Editors Note: Our original 2019 review of Disco Elysium has been updated to reflect the changes and improvements in Disco Elysium - The Final Cut.]

Like all good detective stories, what appears simple at first becomes so much more than that in Disco Elysium – and here it gets so, so much weirder, too. It takes the age-old mechanics of tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons and twists them in strange ways around a macabre tale of violence, poverty, and a society on the brink of collapse. Through sharply written dialogue and an expertly crafted world, it uses some unique game mechanics - such as debating against 24 different sections of your own brain - to create a story that will stay with me for a long time. And, somehow, it manages to make all of this fun and, surprisingly often, funny. Now with the addition of a fully voiced cast and even more side quests to embark on, The Final Cut makes an amazing game even better.

The premise of Disco Elysium is straightforward: A body has been discovered, hanged from a looming tree in the backyard of a hostel, and it’s up to you to work out how it got there over the course of the 30-hour story. Everything that surrounds this core mystery is far from simple, however, not least being that you kick things off with an almighty dose of hangover-induced amnesia. You can’t even remember your name, let alone that you are a cop on a murder case. A part of your consciousness described as your ancient reptilian brain – which you literally engage in conversation with – attempts to persuade you to give up your quest even as your snivelling limbic system battles against it. As you stumble around your wrecked bedroom searching for remnants of your former self, it quickly becomes clear that this isn’t simply a whodunnit, but a journey that will challenge you to solve crises on both profoundly personal and societal levels. It’s a gorgeously designed isometric RPG that makes you think at every turn of its painterly streets. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=disco-elysium-18-screenshots&captions=true"]

Learn, Baby Learn

The first decision you have to make when booting up Disco Elysium is what kind of detective you wish to be: Intelligent (think Sherlock Holmes), Sensitive (think Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks), or Bruiser (think Marv from Sin City). Each determines the base stats for your nameless gumshoe and influences the decisions offered to you from the get-go, but they all offer an interesting way to play. For example, opening with the Intelligent build allows you to instantly decipher that you have woken in the city of Revachol as your high Encyclopedia skill level feeds you that knowledge. Begin with the Sensitive option, however, and you’ll have no idea where you are and will have to piece together that same information. The beauty of Disco Elysium’s skill system is that there’s always a reward for the choices you have made – a Sensitive might not know where he is, but he can start interrogating his necktie for clues. Yes, really. [poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=The%20beauty%20of%20Disco%20Elysium%E2%80%99s%20skill%20system%20is%20that%20there%E2%80%99s%20always%20a%20reward%20for%20the%20choices%20you%20have%20made."] If that isn’t varied enough for you, you can build your own detective from the ground up instead. Your character sheet is made up of four distinct pillars: Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics. Each of these consists of six wonderfully strange skills (like Intellect’s Encyclopedia), which bring their own bonuses. Want to command respect from a member of the public? Spend points on Authority. How about intimidate a witness? Beef up your Physical Instrument total. Want to talk to that necktie? Start messing with the David Lynch-inspired Inland Empire measurement.

Final Cut - Hearing Yourself Think

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut expands its original cast to include fully voiced performances for every character, but none make more of an impact than the 24 different sections of your brain that accompany you throughout your journey. To emphasize just how important they are, roughly half of the more than one million words spoken in this sprawling RPG belong to your character’s innermost thoughts. Voicing all two dozen of these cerebral incarnations is jazz musician Lenval Brown, who masterfully breaths new life into ZA/UM’s tome of a script. His bass-heavy, calming yet authoritative voice guides you as much as it does educate you on the world of Revachol. The casting for this role was always going to be crucial to the success of The Final Cut, but after hearing the gravitas and depth Brown brings to it, it’s hard to imagine Disco Elysium any other way.

These skills aren’t just passive ways of sending you down different paths; each one is a distinct voice in your detective’s head, represented in the dialogue window during conversations. With high Empathy you might get a voice telling you not to push too hard in a victim interrogation, but with high Half Light (a skill that allows your to interrogate suspects with more force) your brain might tell you to just punch them in the face. They’re as much in-game tips as they are a way to gate your progress. You earn another skill point for every 100 XP you gain, collected by checking off tasks from your quest list or by simply having conversations with people and uncovering new information. Leveling up does come fairly infrequently though, so you’ll have to really think about how you want to use them, but it never feels like you’re waiting too long for the next skill point however and feels just about right. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/disco-elysium-the-final-cut-release-date-trailer"] The upshot of all this skill management is that Disco Elysium plays like no other video game I’ve ever seen. Its closest analogue is perhaps the outstanding Divinity: Original Sin 2, if you replaced all of its turn-based combat with early-era LucasArts point-and-click scenarios. Puzzle-solving comes hand-in-hand with skill checks, which are interactions based on a combination of a dice roll and your stats. The higher your number for the requisite skill, the higher the percentage you have of rolling successfully. This mechanic is used to resolve everything from conversation options to jumps across ledges, and even violence. [poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=The%20upshot%20of%20all%20this%20skill%20management%20is%20that%20Disco%20Elysium%20plays%20like%20no%20other%20video%20game%20I%E2%80%99ve%20ever%20seen."] Hold on though: there is no combat in Disco Elysium, not in the traditional sense anyway. Throwing a punch is a matter of willing your detective to do so, and the consequences are usually verbal rather than physical. For the most part, you’re armed with your (sometimes) silver tongue and a roll of the dice. Your choice of dialogue is often crucial to solving problems, not only when interacting with others, but with the many voices occupying your mind. It’s a truly fun way of dealing with exciting sequences and a welcome breath of fresh air compared to more action-oriented RPGs. I actually found talking my way through situations and building out my character sheet in Disco Elysium much more stimulating than the monotony of slicing down enemies with yet another +2 blade. Clothing positively and negatively affects your skills as well, which will be familiar to those acquainted with Bethesda RPGs. By putting on a replica hat worn by fictional detective Dick Mullen you can boost your Encyclopedia score by 1. Quick costume changes can come in handy when faced with a dice roll that looks too difficult at first glance. I once found myself confronted by a mural in an especially seedy part of town which required a substantial amount of Shivers – a skill that lets you “raise the hair on your neck” and “tune into the city” to decipher your environment. My character naturally had a low Shivers stat, but by putting on a pair of fancy shades and changing my jacket I soon had enough to make the percentage likelihood of my roll a tempting 72%. I went for it, got lucky, and swiftly changed back into my preferred getup. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2019/10/15/disco-elysium-the-first-26-minutes"] These are the moments when a little lateral thought is needed, each one serving as a mini-puzzle where you try to build up your stats with what resides in your inventory. You can also boost yourself by consuming alcohol or taking drugs, such as speed. These temporarily boost a whole pillar of your character sheet for an in-game hour, but come at the expense of your health or morale. I never really felt that this came at much of a risk, however, so I ended up consuming narcotics with regularity in order to gain that welcome boost up over the fence. In truth, I never had to play around with my inventory very often and wished I had more reason to do so. I found myself sticking with the same outfit for large portions of the adventure and yearned at times for a bit more challenge. Luckily, Disco Elysium has such a strong central story driving it along that I ultimately didn’t miss the lack of difficulty. [poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=Luckily%2C%20Disco%20Elysium%20has%20such%20a%20strong%20central%20story%20driving%20it%20along%20that%20I%20ultimately%20didn%E2%80%99t%20miss%20the%20lack%20of%20difficulty."] Other than increasing your skills, you can also spend points in your Thought Cabinet, a unique mechanic that turns abstract concepts like Communism, memories of favourite flavours, or just mistakenly thinking you’re a rockstar into a kind of mental inventory. It plays beautifully into the theme that half of the battle in Disco Elysium takes place in your mind. By internalizing a thought unlocked along your travels you can earn a variety of rewards attached to it. These vary from stat boosts to XP boosts and unique traits. They can also come with some major downsides, but part of the fun is not knowing what benefits you might get from ruminating on something like the “Volumetric Shit Compactor” for a while. For example, after seven hours gestating one thought called “The Wompty-Dompty Dom Centre”, I received a perk that gave me 10 XP every time I successfully used my Encyclopedia stat in conversation, but also lowered my Suggestion stat by two points because I’m a “pretentious wanker,” according to my own brain. It’s a wonderfully odd system, not least because each time you complete a thought a new and stunningly grotesque illustrative painting fills your screen, echoing Francisco Goya’s “Black Paintings” period – which is to say, they are laden with disturbing imagery reflecting a bleak outlook on humanity.

On the Beat

Society seems a concept long since forgotten in the city of Revachol, the once-proud capital of the world you wake up in. Martinaise, the district where you’ll spend most of your time, is an impoverished hub of anger and discontent, but it’s a captivating place to be. On the surface, no one appears happy here, perhaps apart from the few who grasp tightly onto power with a greedy fist. It’s a beautifully realised depiction of a firmly ugly place – you instantly get a sense of the world you’ll spend upwards of 30 hours trawling through; snow falls softly onto abandoned vehicles, crumbling, neglected architecture haunts the streets, and broken statues commemorating a long-fabled war serve as a reminder of what happened here.

Final Cut - Vision Quest

One of the most impactful additions in The Final Cut are the Political Vision Quests. These four optional objectives are mutually exclusive, meaning you’ll only get to see one of them per playthrough. They are tied to the political leanings you’ve shown during the story and add roughly 20-30 minutes of enjoyable new detective work. While not directly affecting the outcome of the main storyline, they do a great job of teaching you more about the world and quirky characters of Revachol, one of the main draws of Disco Elysium already. The original release included a lot of political theory and many of the dialogue choices you made influenced your characters leanings, from fascist to liberal and everything in between. However, there never felt like there was any sort of payoff or closure to whichever path you took. The Final Cut provides exactly what was missing by adding these quest lines late in the story, allowing you to fully commit to a branch of ideological thinking. In my playthrough of The Final Cut I chose to embrace Communism, which culminated in a bizarre, bewildering, and ultimately enriching conversation with two new characters I wouldn’t have met otherwise. Revachol and its socio-political history were always one of the key strengths of Disco Elysium, so naturally I was more than happy to delve deeper into that while simultaneously being given more opportunities to build out my protagonist and find his place in the world.

To deduce the stories the city has to tell (and there’s quite a few) you’ll have to be thorough, using all of your character’s faded detecting abilities as they slowly come back to him. Small, coloured information orbs are littered across the environment, inviting you to click on them all to squeeze every drop of knowledge out of the deeply layered world. Not everything will be relevant to your cause, but it will always be interesting. This is testament to the world that developer ZA/UM has created in Disco Elysium – rarely has a place sucked me in quite like the city of Revachol did. It ranks up there with the likes of The Witcher 3’s colourful Continent or Red Dead Redemption 2’s rugged West, despite taking place over a much smaller area. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=disco-elysium-19-pieces-of-concept-art&captions=true"] The density of a game’s world can sometimes feel overwhelming, with maps dominated by icons and large areas of land beckoning to be explored. This is never the case with Disco Elysium; there’s lots to do, but it encourages you to take your time and absorb all the information you are being fed at your own pace. Whether you choose to take what you find at face value is for you to decide; You’re a detective, after all. You’ll probably want to click every prompt as well, and it’s hard to miss any due to the extremely useful ability to highlight any clickable item on the screen by holding Tab (something not uncommon to veterans of the adventure genre). Although sometimes deliberately obtuse in its dialogue and the way certain things are worded, crucially Disco Elysium never clouds what you’re meant to be doing. Tasks are clearly listed in the menu with a generous amount of hinting as to what you’re aiming to achieve; it’s an incredibly dense experience with my list of tasks quickly growing, but one I never felt bogged down in. [poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=Each%20new%20face%20is%20accompanied%20by%20a%20gorgeously%20painted%20portrait%20that%20looks%20as%20if%20it%E2%80%99s%20been%20stroked%20onto%20a%20canvas%20by%20a%20hopped-up%20Francis%20Bacon."] Core to this is Disco Elysium’s varied cast of characters and the way their stories intertwine with both your own and that of the world they inhabit. Each new face is accompanied by a gorgeously painted portrait that looks as if it’s been stroked onto a canvas by a hopped-up Francis Bacon. Every one feels fully formed and it’s clear to see from a quick look at their face or a few sentences in their company what their background is. They range from Cuno, a foul-mouthed boy who finds pleasure in throwing rocks at your subject’s suspended corpse (he is, frankly, a little shit) to Evrart Claire, a slimy union boss who looks cut from the same cloth as Jabba the Hutt. It’s rare to meet a kind face in Revachol, which makes it all the more special when you actually find yourself connecting to someone and having a conversation that actually borders on the polite... [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2019/10/17/disco-elysium-review"] Chief among these connections is the one you’ll forge with your partner in crime-fighting, Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, a policeman brought in from another precinct to help with the case. You are strangers at first, and he can come across as cold and suspicious of your methods. But I enjoyed watching your bond form as the stakes continue to heighten. Kitsuragi’s dry humour and analytic mind is brought to life brilliantly in his voice acting and provides a reassuring tone during tense moments.

Final Cut - Finding a Voice

Every person you meet in Martinaise is now fully voiced, and it can’t be overstated how much of an improvement this is over the original. The 2019 release did feature limited voicing of some characters, and the inconsistent quality of these performances was one of my few criticisms of Disco Elysium when I reviewed it then – but I couldn’t be happier with the results this time around. A couple of cast members remain, most notably those playing larger roles like Kim Kitsuragi and Evrat Claire, while others that had only partially voiced roles have been changed. These include Cuno, who’s new performance still carries the obnoxious essence of the character, but is nowhere near as grating on the ears as it once was. Practically all of the newly added cast members hit the mark as well, breathing new life into the world of Disco Elysium and further reinforcing the diversity that can be found in the city with a globe-full of accents and languages. The biggest compliment I can pay to the vocal additions is that all of the characters sounded exactly how I imagined they would when I first played. It mirrored the joy I get from first hearing an audiobook or film adaptation of one of my favourite novels, with the voices I once solely heard in my head finally played back to me.

The dialogue itself is meticulously written. It’s bitingly funny at times, leaning into the darkness of your situation while also not being afraid to let you know when you’ve made a stupid mistake. It’s willing to be a cynical step into much darker, serious themes as many people in Revachol hold racist and fascist beliefs and are not afraid to let you know. Characters will swing from revolutionary prose calling for the fall of the bourgeoisie into Kafka-esque psychoanalytic ramblings. They are topics that expand and enrich the mind, giving you cause to question your character’s place in the world as well as your own. Disco Elysium is as much an exercise in detective fantasy as it an evaluation of your own socio-political leanings. [poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=Disco%20Elysium%20is%20as%20much%20an%20exercise%20in%20detective%20fantasy%20as%20an%20evaluation%20of%20your%20own%20socio-political%20leanings."] There are two main plotlines to the story of Disco Elysium: the murder case you have been sent to Revachol to solve, and a more personal journey as you attempt to piece together your past and find out who you really are. These are both woven in and out like a poisonous vine by the societal issues at play in the city. There’s little else I can say about the plot without spoiling too much of the mystery – I urge you to discover the tale for yourself. With the sheer number of twists and branches it’s likely you’ll end up with a different end result than I did, anyhow. There are still a couple of key dice rolls that didn’t land in my favour that I can’t wait to go back and retry, just to see how differently it all could have gone. Ultimately, I was satisfied with the ending I got, even if I did leave a bit more of a mess behind me than I desired. It’s always difficult to put a bow on a story that promises so much, but Disco Elysium achieves its goal, even if I was left waiting for that one more twist, that one more revelation. Over the course of its 30 hours I couldn’t stop reading everything I picked up, learning more about the world I was in and the people that were suffering in it. If this seems all a bit much for you though, there is always the option to just give up. 15 minutes in I received my first game over screen after having a meltdown and giving into the murmurings of my ancient reptilian brain. Yes, Disco Elysium is definitely weird, and by no means a feel-good experience, but it's a highly smart one that I can’t wait to relive.  

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Alienware AW2721D Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out A 27-inch, 1440p, 144Hz gaming monitor is the standard infantry rifle for PC gamers. It’s effective, reasonably priced, and works well no matter the game you throw at it. First-person shooters? Yep! Real-time strategy? Not a problem. Simulation? It’s going to look great. Alienware’s AW2721D challenges that standard by raising the bar on motion performance. This is a 27-inch, 1440p monitor, but ups the refresh rate to 240Hz and tacks on Nvidia G-Sync Ultimate certification to drive the point home. These upgrades set the AW2721D apart from the crowd. AOC’s AG274QG is the only competing 27-inch, 1440p, 240Hz, G-Sync Ultimate monitor certified by Nvidia, but it’s not yet for sale in North America. Asus and Acer both also have 1440p 240Hz G-Sync (not Ultimate) panels on the way, but they’re not expected until this summer.  Samsung’s 27-inch Odyssey G7 also offers 1440p and 240Hz, though it’s only G-Sync compatible. Unique features often mean a high price, so sit down. Ready? The Alienware AW2721D has an MSRP of $1,099, though it frequently sells for $824.99. Surprisingly, the 240hz gaming monitor’s image quality supports the burden set by its price. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=alienware-aw2721d-review&captions=true"]

Alienware AW2721D Review – Design and Features

Alienware’s Legend design language, announced in 2019, does the AW2721D many favors. It combines expanses of sleek, curved, monochromatic materials with bursts of RGB color. The result looks tailor-made for Commander Shepard’s personal gaming rig. I prefer this monitor’s cohesive, bold look to the “add ALL the things” design of recent monitors from Acer’s Predator and Asus’ Strix line. Looks are subjective, of course; your opinion might differ. The AW2721D’s build quality, however, isn’t up for debate. This monitor has a massive, hefty, ergonomic stand with built-in RGB lighting. It keeps the monitor planted and offers excellent, easy-to-use adjustments for height, tilt, swivel, and pivot. The display panel feels just as sturdy and lacks the worrying creaks and cracks common to less expensive options. Not even Samsung’s Odyssey curved gaming monitors, which look and feel great, measure up. [poilib element="poll" parameters="id=d922e71f-d83c-4b85-b928-4796a8c1b2fb"] While the stand looks great and feels solid, it’s not perfect. It’s much deeper than a typical monitor, measuring about nine inches from the rear of the stand to the front of the screen. That places the monitor a bit too close on many desks. It’s not a problem if you play non-competitive game, but you could miss a sniper lurking at the edge of your field of view. Dell, which owns Alienware, backs the monitor with a three-year warranty that has two perks. Premium Panel Exchange promises a free panel replacement during the warranty period “even if only one bright pixel is found.” Advanced Exchange Service promises a replacement, if deemed necessary after a call to Dell technical support, will be shipped on the next business day. This warranty is a plus. Most expensive gaming monitors have just a single year of warranty coverage; Samsung and LG are bad about this, offering just one year even on monitors that sell for more than $1,000.

Alienware AW2721D Review – Features and OSD Menu

The Alienware AW2721D has a long list of features, including a 240Hz refresh rate, G-Sync Ultimate certification, VESA DisplayHDR 600, an IPS Nano Color panel, a “true one millisecond” response time, local backlight dimming, a customizable dark stabilizer, and RGB lighting that can be controlled through AlienFX software. Features are great, but they can make a monitor confusing to use. I complained about this with the otherwise excellent Acer Predator XB253Q GW. Luckily, the AW2721D’s menu does its best to keep settings under control. There’s fewer if-then, then-that gotchas, and the menu puts game options front and center. Navigating the menus is easy, as well, thanks to the joystick-based controls. Annoyingly, the AW2721D offers limited image customization. RGB color can be adjusted slightly in Custom Color mode, but that’s about it. There’s no precisely mapped gamma or color temperature presets. This makes the monitor less suitable for professional work despite its impressive specifications. It’s odd given that Dell advertises the monitor’s “professional color gamut” on its website. One of the AW2721D’s best features is Smart HDR. The AW2721D will automatically detect an HDR signal and turn on HDR without opening the monitor’s settings. This is an advantage over many HDR monitors, as HDR often must be activated manually, or is detected unreliably. The AW2721D’s display features are paired with a wide range of connectivity. This includes two HDMI 2.0 ports, one DisplayPort 1.4, and four USB-A 3.2 ports driven by a USB-B 3.2 Upstream port that connects to your PC. This lets the AW2721D serve as a USB hub, though it does lack USB-C ports. There’s also an audio jack for audio pass-through in case you use wired headphones with a short cord.

Alienware AW2721D Review – Everyday Performance

Alienware’s AW2721D is a great display for day-to-day use. The monitor’s color accuracy falls short of true professional displays, like BenQ’s PD2720U, but is strong overall. This monitor is a fine choice for professionals who don’t work in print or film, such as streamers, YouTubers, or game developers. This is the brightest monitor I’ve ever tested, beating the Alienware AW3821DW, which just claimed that title a month ago. The AW2721D is 15 to 25 percent brighter than other HDR gaming monitors I’ve reviewed like Acer’s Predator XB253Q GW and Samsung’s Odyssey G9. That’s good news if your gaming den is on the sunward side of Mercury. The AW2721D is advertised as having an anti-glare coating, but I think it’s better described as semi-gloss, as the silhouettes of reflected objects are easy to make out. I measured a contrast ratio at 1050:1, which is typical for a monitor with a premium IPS panel. The monitor does a good job of avoiding the worst of the “IPS glow” common to monitors of this type, but it can’t come close to displaying a deep, inky black. This can be a problem if you use the AW2721D in a dark room or frequently view dark images, such as photos taken at night. It’s worth recognizing the fundamental strength of a 27-inch, 1440p display. It’s a popular option for good reason. The 2,560 x 1,440 resolution hits a pixel density of 109 pixels per inch, nearly 35 percent better than a 1080p display. It’s a big, sharp display that works as well in Excel as it does in Hitman 3.

Alienware AW2721D Review – Gaming Performance

Of course, you don’t buy a monitor this expensive for Excel. Game performance is where this monitor should stand out and, given the price, it has a lot to prove. The Alienware AW2721D’s good color performance, high pixel density, and stunning brightness become its greatest assets in games. This is an extraordinarily bright and punchy monitor. Colorful games like Rocket League and Dyson Sphere Program leap off the screen. The monitor’s wide color gamut prevents color banding in most situations, a problem that can be noticeable on monitors that don’t cover the entire sRGB gamut, like Acer’s Predator XB253Q GW. These highlights mesh well with the 27-inch, 1440p display panel. While a 4K panel would certainly provide an even sharper look, 1440p looks outstanding on a monitor of this size. Images are sharp and aliasing is only an issue in games with many sharp angles and high-contrast borders that also have lackluster anti-aliasing. Also, because 1440p is much less demanding than 4K, you may be able to turn on higher detail settings without cratering the framerate. Dark, shadowy scenes can challenge the AW2721D, however. The monitor’s contrast ratio is above average for an IPS display, but that’s influenced more by its brightness than remarkably deep black levels. Horror games suffer most from this, as will any game that takes place primarily at night. I noticed it most while making a few long-haul overnight deliveries in American Truck Simulator. The corners of my truck’s cabin reached a hazy hue of gray instead of a realistically deep black. Samsung’s Odyssey G7, which uses a VA panel and has a maximum contrast ratio roughly double the AW2721D, will perform better in dark games. On the plus side, the AW2721D has great luminance uniformity and showed only small patches of brightness near the corners of its screen. Again using American Truck Simulator as an example, I’ve tested monitors that show obvious, distracting bright spots inside the truck’s cabin during midnight runs. It’s a common flaw that spoils your sense of immersion. Fortunately, the AW2721D significantly outperforms in this area. The AW2721D is VESA DisplayHDR 600 certified, which means it claims a maximum luminance of 600 cd/m2 and has local backlight dimming. The local dimming feature is of limited use. The AW2721D is an edge-lit monitor with just a handful of dimming zones, so bright objects on dark scenes show significant blooming when backlight dimming is on. In fact, the local dimming feature is often more distracting than beneficial in games, which is likely why it’s turned off by default. Still, I was pleased by the AW2721D’s HDR performance. Most HDR monitors are rather terrible at HDR, so Alienware has an edge here. The AW2721D is bright enough, and colorful enough, to make a noticeable difference in bright scenes. I noticed this most in Hitman 3, where the Alienware’s HDR performance leads to a more atmospheric look. It’s still no better than a budget HDR television, however.

Alienware AW2721D Review – Motion Clarity

Refresh rate is the Alienware AW2721D’s defining feature. There’s a lot of 27-inch 1440p monitors available, including many that can rival the AW2721D’s color performance. Very few, however, have both 1440p resolution and a 240Hz refresh rate. The 240Hz refresh rate is only available over the monitor’s DisplayPort connection. Its two HDMI connections are limited to 144Hz. Unsurprisingly, the AW2721D’s high refresh rate and responsive IPS panel led to great results. Viewing the UFO test, which scrolls a cartoon UFO across the monitor at a high rate of speed, I saw great motion clarity at 240Hz, as well as at lower refresh rates. I appreciated the monitor’s clarity in Diablo 3, a fast and fluid game that hugely benefits from an improved refresh rate. The AW2721D suffers no noticeable overshoot at default settings. Overshoot is a problem that occurs when a monitor’s pixels response too drastically to changes in an image, creating bright highlights around moving objects. Overshoot is tame at the Super Fast response time setting, too. Extreme, the highest setting, introduces noticeable overshoot around high-contrast objects. Given how fast this monitor responds at any setting, I don’t think there’s a reason to change from the default Fast setting. [poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=I%20saw%20great%20motion%20clarity%20at%20240Hz%2C%20as%20well%20as%20at%20lower%20refresh%20rates"] While the AW2721D is a smooth, crisp display, I was a bit underwhelmed after testing the 24-inch Acer Predator XB253Q GW. This can be blamed on the AW2721D’s resolution. The Acer XB253Q is a 1080p monitor, so my Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti pumped out more frames. The AW2721D’s 1440p panel increases pixel count by about 50 percent relative to 1080p, so games ran at lower framerates. The lower the framerate, the less benefit received from the 240Hz panel. Even powerful video cards sold at inflated prices on eBay, like Nvidia’s RTX 3080 and AMD’s RX 6800XT, can’t make full use of the AW2721D’s refresh rate at native resolution. This isn’t a flaw in the monitor, but it’s a problem given the high price Alienware charges for a cutting-edge refresh rate. If maximum motion clarity and responsiveness is your goal, you’d be better off with a 24.5-inch 360Hz display like the Asus ROG Swift PG259QN or Alienware AW2521H. Alternatively, you can save hundreds of dollars and still have better motion clarity by choosing a 24-inch monitor like the 280Hz Acer Predator XB253Q GW.

Purchasing Guide

The Alienware AW2721D retails for $825 on Amazon and direct from Dell.

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Concrete Cowboy Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out Concrete Cowboy debuts exclusively on Netflix on April 2. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Netflix’s Concrete Cowboy is intriguing on paper. It’s based on the G. Neri novel “Ghetto Cowboy,” it features the on-screen talents of Caleb McLaughlin (Stranger Things), Jharrel Jerome (Moonlight), and Idris Elba, and it centers on a seldom talked-about subculture in the United States: Black cowboys in inner-city Philadelphia. However, the film, by first-time feature director and Philly native Ricky Staub, suffers from visual and thematic tunnel vision. Despite occasional moments of deft filmmaking, it rarely captures what its characters or their surroundings are about, and it coasts entirely on the innate charisma of its cast. McLaughlin plays Cole, a troubled, directionless Detroit high schooler whose fed-up mother Amahle (Liz Priestley) ships him off to live with his estranged father Harp (Elba) for the summer. Cole brings nothing but two trash bags full of clothes. Harp, a horseman by trade, owns even less than that. His scant kitchen is stocked only with a handful of beers, and the couch he eventually lets Cole sleep on is adjacent to his permanent houseguest: a horse named Chuck. Cole’s only two options, at this squalid summer getaway, are either shoveling horse dung at the stables around the corner — the real-life Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club, of which Harp is part owner — or riding around the city with his lively childhood buddy, Smush (Jerome). Cole opts for the latter, but Harp takes issue with this, forcing Cole to choose between hanging out with Smush, or living under his roof, though the aloof wrangler provides little incentive for Cole to actually stick around. The foremost questions surrounding this premise, which are vital to understanding the film’s drama, are as follows: What does Cole want, deep down? Why does Harp seem so uncaring? And why does Harp take issue with Cole spending time with Smush? The film doesn’t answer these questions in any narratively interesting way. It only hints at the first two, in a clunky, graceless exposition scene led by a conflicted cop character (played by Clifford “Method Man” Smith), nearly an hour and a half into its 111-minute runtime. As for the third question, one can perhaps infer that Smush is dealing drugs — he’s indebted to someone up the food chain, and he keeps mentioning encroaching on people’s territory — but despite the amount of time we see Cole spend with him, we never actually get a glimpse at what Smush does or how he does it, and in the process, what kind of life Cole is actually choosing in lieu of working at Fletcher Street. [ignvideo width=610 height=374 url=https://ift.tt/39tseOi] Similarly, the film’s father-son dynamic requires a whole lot of presumption by the audience and a fair amount of heavy lifting by McLaughlin and Elba. They both deliver measured performances that require them to dig deep (McLaughlin as an angsty teen on the verge of exploding, and Elba as distant father weighed down by regret), but their exchanges go from zero to sixty without much discernible build or backdrop to their disagreements. Cole, Harp and Smush are on screen for most of the film, but they seem to pop into existence at the beginning of a given scene, disintegrate when the film cuts away, and re-materialize elsewhere, as mere ideas, rather than moving from place to place as real people with evolving emotional responses. Although, the fact that they feel like silhouettes is somewhat fitting. Despite its lack of emotional through-line, the film features numerous striking shots that help deliver at least some semblance of internal story — among them, a gorgeous moment of Cole donning a cowboy hat at dusk as he sits atop a horse, awash in shadow as if evoking the very idea of an urban cowboy, or stepping into his father’s shoes. In moments like these, the film pulls away from its larger plot and presents incredible abstract portraits of each character, like Smush’s isolated hideout beneath a bridge, which features beams of light piercing through the darkness as he dreams of a hopeful escape from his life. However, these moments are few and far between. For the most part, the film follows a linear, granular plot, which often feels as directionless as Cole himself, albeit unintentionally. For every impressionistic use of shadow, there’s an equally amateurish use of traditional dramatic coverage, where close-ups in conversation scenes have mismatched eyelines and the characters are framed awkwardly from shot to shot, resulting in a lack of clarity regarding their physical and emotional relationships to one another, and to the space around them. (Where someone is looking during a conversation is pretty vital to understanding their mindset). The film’s misuse of visual space is where many of its problems lie. In fact, these issues are best illuminated by comparing Concrete Cowboy to the 2017 Atlantic photo series “The Equestrians of North Philly” by Ann Sophie Lindström. The series not only captures the very same people — like real lifelong rider Jamil Prattis, who appears in the film as Cole’s disabled mentor — but the very same streets and stables. A brief glimpse at each photograph offers a window into the relationships between the people, the streets, the buildings, and the horses, something the film fails to contextualize in its nearly two-hour runtime. Lindström’s pictures capture all these elements in the same frame, and while the film certainly isn’t beholden to this or any other aesthetic, it rarely frames people and places together in the same shot, or moves between them, or establishes their relationships in successive shots. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=netflix-spotlight-april-2021&captions=true"] Staub and cinematographer Minka Farthing-Kohl rightly love their leads and are constantly fixated on their emotions. But the edit (by Luke Ciarrocchi) seldom breaks away from the characters to capture their world or the way they move through space, or the perspective they have on their surroundings. The filmmakers love their cowboys, but they present them in fragments and forget about the concrete in the process. This wouldn’t be as big an issue if the major external conflict weren’t about concrete itself, and the way the cityscape is constantly shifting around the cowboys. On its surface, the film is about gentrification. Characters mention it from time to time, and they discuss how close it’s getting to the stables — the film’s climax is even built around it — but there’s no physical sense of its encroachment. The camera never turns far enough away from the stables to capture the inevitable injustice on the horizon. For a film so deeply entrenched in the imagery of the Western, one would think the odd landscape shot might carry over. The film does, in theory, find itself at odds with the traditional Hollywood cowboy and American mythology. The characters, at one point, talk about the ways cinema has whitewashed American history — one in four cowboys were Black, though comparatively few have been depicted in movies — but this conflict between American self-image and racial reality crops up only in spurts, in the broadest, most scattered elements of the plot. Of course, the very image of Harp, a Black man, riding on horseback through narrow city streets, rather than through open plains, runs intrinsically counter to Hollywood’s usual depiction of the cowboy. But the film, rather than dramatizing these themes, seems satisfied with having its characters comment on them and point in their direction. It doesn’t engage with the core aesthetic idea represented by Harp, one connecting historical indignities against African Americans to their modern displacement, except for a few brief lines of dialogue. Cole, for his part, has a nice little subplot about learning to stand atop a horse — which seems to have its roots in a 2005 Life Magazine article on Fletcher Street, the basis for Neri’s book — but he feels most like a passenger in the stories of Smush and Harp. At one point, Cole bonds with a supposedly untrainable horse who other riders have given up on. But despite this reflection of himself, as someone who feels discarded and unloved, this dynamic, too, feels like a brief suggestion rather than emotional baggage. Add to that Cole’s sudden, half-baked romance with minor character Esha (played by real-life rider Ivannah-Mercedes), and poor McLaughlin becomes stuck in a never-ending series of unconnected dramatic sketches, which work in isolation, but rarely feel connected. Concrete Cowboy is rife with great ideas and shorts bursts of poetic filmmaking — among them, a lively celebration and horse race midway through, which feels both propulsive and immersive — but for the most part, it fails to treat Fletcher Street as much more than a disposable matte painting. Its cast performs admirably, but the unfortunate irony is that the characters played by seasoned actors are eventually outshone by real Fletcher riders like Prattis and Ivannah-Mercedes, not during the film, but in interview segments that play over the closing credits. Despite their brevity, these glimpses act as portraits of real struggle and wistfulness, which feel fuller and more alive than the rest of the fictional story. It’s never a good sign when a film’s parting message is “this should’ve been a documentary instead.” [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=worst-reviewed-movies-of-2021&captions=true"]

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Can’t Drive This Review

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The tangled result of taking Tetris and Trackmania Turbo and tossing them into a tumble dryer, Can’t Drive This is a clever and compulsive co-op puzzle racer. With one player literally building a road out of random tiles as the other navigates the chaotic, impromptu track that results, Can’t Drive This is one of the most inventive driving games I’ve played in recent years, although its modest selection of modes makes it a multiplayer experience best enjoyed in short bursts rather than an all-night party classic-in-the-making.

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Replace Tetris’ iconic tetronimoes with assorted chunks of stunt racing track and you’re most of the way to understanding how Can’t Drive This delivers its own brand of puzzle-like track pieces. Every new slab will be something random – one might be a simple square of asphalt while the next has a devilish swinging hammer designed to hamper your progress. However, some may not be square at all – they’ll be 90-degree bends or banked corners that need to be rotated before they’re placed – and others won’t even be asphalt – they’ll be a deep mud pit to mess with your grip or a giant yellow dome to throw you off-course. The variety of tiles and obstacles is decent, although the hydraulic press is a nightmare. While it appears as if you just need to skirt around it, as it slams down it seems to send out a powerful shockwave that knocks trucks from the track without touching them. It was funny at first to watch my teammates struggle to survive it, but ultimately it became regularly irritating.

If You Build It, They’ll Have Fun

Assembling the track in Can’t Drive This is ultimately like trying to piece together a slot car set on the dining table before your little sister drives your favourite car off the end of it. There’s really no time to think it through. The driver can’t simply park and wait for their partner to carefully or artfully string a track together because if the truck stops too long it’ll explode, so reacting to the pieces as they arrive and plonking them down quickly is the only way to succeed as a team.

There are certainly times where it feels like you’re getting shafted with combinations of tiles that are extremely difficult for a driver to deal with – like a series of boost pads into a jump that a driver may find themselves committed to before the builder has even had time to set down a landing area – but with a couch full of players laughing at this predicament it’s generally more funny than aggravating.

However, there were a lot of occasions where I or one of my teammates found ourselves stuck clipping through a guardrail or bogged in a track tile that blinked into existence a fraction too late to let us continue, but a fraction too soon to allow the truck to actually plummet from the sky. It’s an annoying purgatory to be trapped in, particularly when the truck refuses to explode and manually restarting your run from the pause menu is the only solution. This is at its most frustrating with three drivers. Fallen trucks can be resurrected if another player drives through the beacon marking the point on track they perished, but we had a couple of instances where our last surviving driver was fused halfway inside a track tile, unable to revive teammates or proceed.

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Monster Truck Madness

The monster trucks in Can’t Drive This may look toy-like in scale but they handle with a good sense of heft and inertia. The trucks have a decent feeling of mass without being cumbersome, and they’re responsive without feeling overly twitchy or sticky.

There’s also a huge amount of truck customisation on offer but I haven’t really found myself drawn to it. A monster truck with a beard and a cowboy hat is objectively brilliant, I admit, but I can’t help but wonder if Can’t Drive This would’ve been better served with a few more modes or ways to play it than such an extensive range of cosmetics.

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As it stands, there are three different multiplayer modes: Yardage, where up to three drivers and one builder attempt to simply go the furthest distance they can before all trucks either careen off the track or explode; Game of Drones, where two drivers and two builders partner up to collect an increasing number of floating cubes randomly scattered around an initial hub zone; and Capture the Egg, where two teams – each featuring a driver and a builder – square off in a capture the flag scenario.

The frantic and unforgiving Yardage feels like the core Can’t Drive This experience, but I think I actually prefer Game of Drones; tracking down all the cubes requires building in all four compass directions rather than relentlessly trying to power forwards, and there’s slightly more time to rebuild around errors – you just need to avoid the EMP mines dropped by the drone that will disable trucks and potentially send them spearing off the track or into an obstacle to become stuck and blow up.

That’s it, though, and once we’d dabbled in each mode for a while sessions of Can’t Drive This would begin to lose a bit of momentum. There’s a fourth mode purely for solo players where you need to both build the road and drive it yourself as it subsequently assembles in front of you, but if this is the only way you’d be planning to play Can’t Drive This I’d recommend against picking it up. Lone Racer really loses a lot of steam after a dozen or so attempts.

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Narita Boy Review

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Narita Boy left me conflicted like few other games have before. Its jaw-dropping neo-retro 2D aesthetic constantly treats your eyes to beautiful ‘80s themed backdrops, wildly imaginative character designs, and wonderfully fluid animations while a truly excellent synth-wave soundtrack perfectly underscores not only the action, and the emotional moments of its story are surprisingly poignant as well. But as far as actually playing it is concerned, Narita Boy is at best serviceable, with hollow exploration filled with constant backtracking, simple puzzles, and combat that never really evolves in ways that make tougher enemies any more fun to fight. And at its worst moments… well, let’s just say that thankfully it’s only at its worst for a fraction of its six or seven-hour length, because otherwise I’d need a whole lot more aspirin.

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You play as a young boy who suddenly gets dragged into a digital world after its creator, a genius hardware and software developer named Lionel Pearl, gets his memories stolen by a malicious program known as HIM. The boy assumes the role of the titular hero, “Narita Boy,” and sets out on an adventure to restore Lionel’s memories, defeat HIM, and save the digital world. However, that is a huge oversimplification of Narita Boy’s hard-to-follow overarching plot, which is bogged down with technical jargon and boring exposition dumps.

Fortunately though, that setup is not the main attraction of Narita Boy’s story. The real meat of it is communicated as you unlock Lionel’s memories and play through 13 really well-done flashback sequences that chronicle his life all the way from childhood to the present. Each time I unlocked one it felt like a gift I couldn’t wait to unwrap: these bite-sized story sequences are easily the highpoint of Narita Boy as a whole, as Lionel’s story is an emotional one to watch unfold, with wonderful music box-like tunes adeptly setting the tone. What’s especially neat about them is the way they help bring better understanding to the digital world that you’re playing through. They tie together the digital and physical worlds in a way that’s rather clever.

.hack//slash

As far as combat goes, Narita Boy looks more impressive than it actually feels to play. There are some really great animations, hits are impactful, and the way enemies die is super satisfying to look at – but the big problem is that, at the outset, there really isn’t much to your arsenal of moves outside of a basic three-hit sword combo, close-range shotgun blast, and powerful beam attack. That’s an alright base, but none of the abilities that you gain as you progress ever make engaging with combat any more fun.

Rather than changing the way you approach a fight to keep things fresh, the techniques you unlock are more designed around giving you a way to deal with a specific new enemy type. For example, there’s a shoulder bash that’s only really used on one shielded enemy type, and an uppercut that’s primarily just used to hit the few enemies that fly. That makes them feel more like keys than actual techniques, only to be used when you see the right enemy-shaped lock. As a result, combat gets stale early on and stays that way.

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The one exception to this stagnancy is a dashing thrust attack that actually fits nicely into Narita Boy’s repertoire of moves as a way to hit a bunch of enemies in a row, in addition to being able to remove armor from a specific enemy. Of course, it’s one of the last techniques that you get, so I didn’t have much time to really enjoy using it in combat.

And while there are an impressive number of enemy types throughout Narita Boy, they’re almost all disappointingly simple, with a single attack and a single way for you to avoid that attack. Eventually you gain the ability to use a Wildfire power up and can toggle between red, blue, and yellow auras, which makes you deal and take more damage against enemies of the same color. But while it’s great to have an extra layer to think about in combat to break the routine of it all, it fails to make fights any more fun since you pretty much just kill enemies in one hit when you’re matched with their color.

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None of this means that combat in Narita Boy is outright bad, and I wouldn’t even go as far as to say that it’s shallow, because the enemies do require that you learn their patterns, as simple as they are. It just never rises above that baseline level of what combat should be in an action platformer like this, leaving it somewhat amusing but relatively one-note the whole way through when compared to evolving games like Ori or Guacamelee.

Platforming and exploration follow the same trail limped along by Narita Boy’s combat: they never really cross that threshold of being anything better than just “fine” on a fundamental level. The world of Narita Boy may be absolutely gorgeous to look at, with visually spectacular backdrops throughout each of its three major color-coded zones, but I eventually grew numb to them; running back and forth between them over and over again, picking up and delivering keys while trying to keep track of which ones are for which locks without any sort of map drains them of their novelty after a while.

At Its Worst

Each area of Narita Boy is capped off with a big event to transition into the next one, and usually these are among the highpoints of the whole campaign. Surfing on a floppy disc and transitioning from skidding along the water’s surface to jumping back onto solid ground is good fun, as is the power fantasy of transforming into a giant robot and utterly smashing everything in your way. But there’s one transition in Narita Boy that I need to talk about in detail, because it is the closest I’ve ever gotten to rage-quitting a game that I was assigned to review.

Upon clearing the Yellow House area you have to ride on a stag in a very familiar speeder bike-esque section that you’ve probably seen a hundred times in other games – think Bit.Trip Runner’s side-scrolling obstacle dodging, just without the rhythm element. But here you’re moving extremely fast and the obstacles that you need to jump over are just a little too hard to see. Even more frustrating is that in order to avoid taking damage from certain enemies, you have to boost through them. The problem is that when you boost you move so fast, and it pushes you so far to the right side of the screen, that it becomes practically impossible to react to whatever is coming next.

The result is a two-minute-long blurry obstacle course that largely comes down to memorization, much like that infamous Battletoads level pretty much everyone has hated since 1991. But while Battletoads has that hardcore appeal of being a difficult game all the way through, Narita Boy is otherwise a very easy game, and this awful level comes out of absolutely nowhere. It’s made worse by the fact that the mechanic meant for giving you health back, which is boosting through a string of enemies, often doesn’t work and has you still taking damage for seemingly no reason, even during a part that seems explicitly designed to let you heal. It’s headache-inducing, it doesn’t work as intended, and it almost completely ruined Narita Boy as a whole for me – but thankfully this short section is also the only moment like it.

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