Arrow: Series Finale - "Fadeout" Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out Warning: this review contains full spoilers for the series finale of Arrow! If you need a refresher on where we left off, here's our review for Season 8, Episode 9 and our full review of the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover. [poilib element="accentDivider"] It's a strange experience writing the final review for a series that's been a part of my personal and professional life for eight years. Before Arrow existed, Smallville was the closest thing to a fully realized, live-action superhero universe on TV. Now we have a whole Arrowverse, one that keeps getting bigger and crazier and comic book-ier with each passing year. Oliver Queen changed a lot over the course of eight years, as did world around him. It's fitting that the series takes its final bow not by putting Ollie in the spotlight, but by examining how his crusade affected the lives of everyone around him. To be frank, Arrow didn't even necessarily need a series finale in the wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Ollie already made his grand, heroic sacrifice and finally achieved his goal of saving Star City. What more even needs to be said at this point? But in a way, that works to the benefit of "Fadeout." The hardest part is already over. There's really no way to unstick the landing, so the finale is less an epic climax to the series than it is a quiet epilogue and an opportunity to spend one last hour with old friends. Quite a few old friends, as it turns out. "Fadeout" shows us Lex Luthor wasn't the only one to manipulate reality and create a new Earth more to his liking. Ollie apparently tweaked Earth-Prime so that doppelgangers of nearly all the loved ones who died over the course of the series are now living in the reborn Star City. It's a clever twist that allows the series to end on a very upbeat and hopeful note despite, you know, everyone grieving for the dead main character. It says a lot about Ollie that he went through the trouble of giving all these people - his mother, Tommy, even poor, twisted Emiko - a second chance without trying to reclaim his own life. And perhaps most importantly, the method behind these "resurrections" dances around any concerns about cheapening their original deaths. Those deaths still happened, just in a universe that no longer exists. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=arrow-fadeout-photos&captions=true"] It's great seeing so many familiar cast members back, including Susanna Thompson's Moira Queen, Colin Donnell's Tommy Merlyn, Katrina Law's Nyssa al Ghul and even Joe Dinicol's Rory Regan. The complaint with nearly all these returning characters is that we didn't get to see enough of them, but there's really only so much that can be expected of one episode. And certainly, writers Marc Guggenheim and Beth Schwartz knew their biggest priority had to be Emily Bett Rickards' Felicity. Season 8 has been able to coast by without Felicity up to now, but it would have been unthinkable to wrap up without bringing her back. Rickards delivers an emotionally charged performance to cap off her Arrowverse tenure, with Felicity juggling her grief over Ollie, her fear at losing William too and the profoundly strange sensation of meeting an adult version of her infant daughter. And fittingly, it all culminates in a sequence that finally reveals what became of 2040's Felicity at the end of Season 7. This episode is somewhat vague (intentionally, no doubt) as to whether Ollie still exists in Spectre form or is truly and completely dead, but all that really matters is he and Felicity finally get that happy ending they failed to achieve at the end of Seasons 3 and 7. If "Fadeout" does anything right, it's in passing the torch from Ollie to Diggle. David Ramsey really shines here as a man mourning his brother and struggling to decide what his purpose is in a world that no longer needs Team Arrow. The flashbacks help highlight that brotherly dynamic and show just how far the two have come since 2012. And happily, this episode implies we'll be seeing a lot more of the Diggle family beyond Ramsey's guest role in next week's The Flash. Their move to Metropolis suggests John and/or Lyla might be part of the supporting cast on Superman & Lois. And it sure seems like that John Diggle: Green Lantern fan theory has well and truly come to pass. The actual conflict in the finale is nothing terribly remarkable. Post-Prometheus, the idea of an old enemy from Season 1 returning to strike at Oliver Queen where he's most vulnerable seems a little redundant. But that subplot and the flashback scenes get the job done in terms of adding a little variety to the mix. You don't want to devote an entire hour to people crying in front of tombstones and statues, especially when James Bamford is directing. And there's something highly amusing about the very last villain in Arrow being named after the influential and infamously cantankerous comic creator John Byrne. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/01/18/crisis-on-infinite-earths-crossover-review"] While emotionally stirring in all the right ways, "Fadeout" does fall short in a few key ways. Anyone who's followed my Arrow reviews over the years probably knows what I'm going to say next. It's hugely disappointing that Manu Bennett's Slade Wilson never made a significant return appearance in Season 8. Slade is easily the best villain Arrow ever produced, and he only Reverse-Flash rivals him as the best Arrowverse villain of them all. The series will always feel irritatingly incomplete in that regard. We do get that early rehash of the pivotal Slade/Moira scene from Season 2 early on, but one has to assume Bamford and his team fudged the end result using archival footage rather than actually flying Bennett out to film a couple quick shots of being punched in the face. Otherwise, why not give Slade a meatier role and actually provide the character with the closure Season 6 never quite achieved? There are several possible reasons why Bennett never returned for Season 8 when nearly every other fan-favorite actor did. Maybe the scheduling never worked out. Maybe, as with Michael Rosenbaum's refusal to take part in Crisis, The CW was never able to provide Bennett with the compensation he felt he deserved. Or maybe Slade is just another casualty of WB's strange dislike of having multiple simultaneous versions of the same character. With Deathstroke playing such a huge role in Titans: Season 2, it could be that Bennett's return was never going to be an option. Whatever the explanation, the almost complete lack of Slade Wilson in the finale causes the series to end on a needlessly sour note. It's also strange how much the events of "Fadeout" seem to clash with last week's "Green Arrow and the Canaries." That episode revealed Dinah fled to the year 2040 after discovering no trace of her existence remains in 2020. How exactly does that gel with what we see here? There's also little sense of how and why Laurel comes to be in 2040. These glaring inconsistencies stand out all the more because this episode does reference William's kidnapping in "Green Arrow and the Canaries," so it's not as if the two hands aren't talking to each other. For these and other reasons, Arrow's final episode does stumble a bit as it crosses the finish line. There are a few too many loose ends that will probably have to be wrapped up in other Arrowverse series. But at least the core trinity of Ollie, Felicity and Diggle are given the sendoffs they deserve. Much as it has throughout its tumultuous existence, Arrow succeeds where it matters most. [poilib element="poll" parameters="id=240f520d-32b1-4811-b0d7-7dd17217cf83"]

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Kingdom Hearts 3 Re Mind DLC Review

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Kingdom Hearts 3’s Re Mind DLC is oddly jumbled. It’s a pack of weirdly separated content that is simultaneously far less interesting than it could have been story-wise and frustratingly difficult at times combat-wise unless you’ve essentially maxed out Sora’s abilities. And even when you have, the Grand Canyon-sized valley between the challenge of its bosses and everything else that comes before them is so wide that they feel entirely out of place. As a result, this shoehorned side adventure, while offering some bright spots, lands as an odd and underwhelming coda to Sora’s latest adventure.

The Re Mind DLC is largely divided into two portions – the first being an underwhelming retread of Kingdom Hearts 3’s climax with miniscule bits of added lore, while the second is a brutal boss gauntlet presented with a disappointing set of Final Fantasy cameos paired with an incredibly in-depth photo mode. That first section, which must be completed before you can tackle the latter, is perhaps Re Mind’s biggest misfire.

Screenshots from Kingdom Hearts 3 Re Mind DLC

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Lasting about four to five hours, most of it cutscenes, Re Mind revisits the end of Kingdom Hearts 3’s campaign, offering some further insight into character moments and motivations as it fills in the blanks of some of Sora’s journey. While the DLC starts on a far more interesting note, seemingly set to investigate the tantalizing and lingering mystery of the black box several characters are searching for all throughout KH3’s main story, it instead pivots to offering essentially a director’s cut of Kingdom Hearts 3’s final hours.

And it feels… superfluous. Without spoiling any of the original story (which I quite enjoyed as I mentioned in my original Kingdom Hearts 3 review) or how this new version shifts it, a few new fan service-y moments are introduced into a stretch that already felt like fan service personified. While I liked that originally, these new portions add very little to my enjoyment of sequences I’d essentially seen before. I kept waiting for something big to happen that would deepen my understanding of them, but it ultimately lead nowhere revelatory – even worse, sometimes actually raising more questions than it answers.

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Mechanically, this first half frustratingly reuses boss fights as well – and while they now offer the option to play as characters other than Sora, those characters are one-offs that are just not as fun to play as. They’re not nearly as powerful as my leveled-up Sora at that point in the adventure, and their move sets aren’t varied enough to substantively change combat in an interesting way. I played as these alternate characters because I felt obligated to, not because they were fun.

Re Mind does add one small quest that let me fully explore one of Kingdom Hearts 3’s coolest original areas, a late-game sprawling citadel that I was left wanting more of in the base game. But the quest here is over and done in about 20 to 30 minutes, and while the level is definitely pretty, its emptiness feels like a missed opportunity to imbue something intriguing and unexpected into this world.

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By the time Re Mind’s more story focused endeavors ended, I was left questioning why I needed to see that retread at all. Hoping the second portion, the “Limit Cut” episode as it’s labeled, would offer some concrete and fresh character and story moments to satisfy a hunger the year-long wait for this DLC had caused, I was initially thrilled by the inclusion of forgotten Final Fantasy characters. Leon, Yuffie, and Aerith have been important parts of past Kingdom Hearts adventures but were absent in 3, so seeing them felt like a sign of great things to come.

Unfortunately,  they’re relegated to a single cutscene and some additional dialogue options that set up the true meat of this DLC: 13 boss battles based on digitized information of characters Sora has already fought in his quest to acquire information I won’t spoil here. Don’t even try these battles if you’re not at or near the upper limit of Sora’s strength. These are some of if not the hardest boss battles in the entire franchise, very clearly intentionally so, and I didn’t even have a hope of fighting them on normal difficulty below level 90. I did (at level 75), and found the battles so unrelentingly oppressive that I leveled Sora up to the max of 99 in order to feel like I had a fighting chance.

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Even still, I’ve only managed to best four of those bosses so far and gotten my butt kicked by each of the others multiple times over. They are, quite simply, abnormally tough, and it’s felt pretty rewarding to knock out the ones I have. But they are not for the faint of heart – short of having the Ultima Weapon and/or maxing out Sora’s level, it’s not even worth entertaining the idea of these battles, which is never properly communicated in the lead up to them.

While I’ve enjoyed the fights now that grinding levels has made them somewhat achievable, they also feel very out of place. Every Kingdom Hearts has included a tough optional boss or two, and that’s totally fine, but including over a dozen new battles that are orders of magnitude more difficult than anything else in the relatively easy Kingdom Hearts 3 makes them a disorienting challenge to tackle. It’s a bit of a monkey’s paw wish being granted – I’m glad there’s something truly challenging in this game now, but I’d rather it felt like a more natural part of the story.

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They can’t be trained for other than losing to them over and over again either, and I’ve wrestled with whether the ultimate satisfaction of beating them is worth the asking price – especially given the fairly lackluster reward for doing so, a brief tease of a starkly different future for Kingdom Hearts than what’s come before. And while its revelations definitely shocked me at first, the more I think about it, the less it means to me as a fan of this franchise.

Re Mind does, however, throw in a ridiculously deep photo mode that puts most others to shame – essentially allowing the player to pick a location and choose from a deep series of characters, poses, items, and effects to set whatever fan fiction scene you can imagine. Want Sora to strike down Donald for all those times he yelled out about ingredients? This photo mode can grant that and many other wishes. It’s a treat to play around with, though its inclusion only adds to the scattershot compilation that is Re Mind.

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The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners Review

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Imagine what would happen if you took a half-season of The Walking Dead TV show, mashed it together with a Deus Ex or System Shock style of exploration and decision-making, and then drizzled it with the best aspects of a modern VR game. What you might end up with is a survival horror game that’s oppressively tense and brutal, but also tugs on you relentlessly to explore every corner of its post-apocalyptic world for hidden loot and nuggets of lore. The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is exactly that, and it absolutely nails the mix, delivering it with a level of detail and a depth of interactivity that feels like a genuine step forward for virtual reality.

You play as the Tourist, a storied survivor and living urban legend who seems to be immune to the fictional virus that makes everybody else a little bitier in The Walking Dead universe. You’ve rolled into the sunken remains of New Orleans following a rumor about a buried hotbed of limitless supplies called the Reserve, and the rest is up to you. It’s a simple setup, but one that's perfect for the size and scope of Saints & Sinners because it doesn’t immediately saddle you with any presumptions about your character’s morality.

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You’re introduced to New Orleans by your old buddy Henri, but the moral choices you’ll make while navigating its several open-ended zones are yours alone. As an Obsidian fan, I was pleased to find that there were several major factions fighting for control of the Reserve, each with their own perspective on the bleak situation around you. One such moral choice involves a mission where a faction member will send you to rescue their brother in exchange for an important item, and it’s fantastic that you can then choose to upend the original mission and kill the brother, earning his captors as allies and instead taking the item by force – if that’s the path you prefer, of course. Saints & Sinners’ ending depends entirely on the decisions you make throughout the campaign too, few of which are decidedly ‘good’ or ‘evil’.

All that choice makes the Tourist primarily a shell for you to insert your own personality into, with decent voice acting that gives life to each dialogue option, much like Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect series. By comparison, Telltale’s The Walking Dead accomplished some truly great feats of cinematic storytelling and meaningful decision-making in its hostile and zombie-riddled world, but it never gave me free rein to do whatever I wanted. That’s something I had craved for years when I was a regular watcher of The Walking Dead TV series, and while Telltale’s take on The Walking Dead certainly made me care about Clementine, it never made me feel like I was in that world.

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Saints & Sinners scratches that itch with the grace and confidence of a well-lubricated bowie knife. The portrayal of killing zombies – or walkers – has never been as satisfying as it is here, and the abject terror of an unexpected walker swarm has never been as palpable. Zombie guts and brains are rendered with great detail, but what really grounds you in this world is the fact that weapons have appropriate weight and heft. Heavy weapons like axes and rifles require you to grip them with both hands for stability, while small weapons like shivs are much lighter and easier to land precise blows with. It’s not as nuanced as a game like Boneworks; you can’t wield just any item as a weapon, but this combat system is far more tactile and exciting than if you were doing it remotely with a gamepad or a keyboard.

Diseased walkers explode and unleash poisonous gases that lower your health pool when killed up close, meanwhile helmeted walkers are far tougher to kill, requiring a complete decapitation or extremely precise blows to exposed parts of their heads. This increased challenge only adds to the intensity of fighting an entire pack of walkers at once, a common occurrence later on, as you need to quickly pick and choose which walkers need to be killed in which way and in which order to preserve the durability of your best weapons. Rapidly juggling my inventory in real-time to acclimate to each fight forced me to be smarter and, as a result, Saints & Sinners never fell into that Action-RPG trap of becoming repetitive. I spent a little over 18 hours in the campaign – the story itself is a few hours shorter than that, but it was just loads of fun to complete scavenging runs and hunt for secret recipes on my own.

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The walkers and human NPCs themselves have their own agendas too, often interacting with one another in interesting and useful ways. While the AI isn’t always the most bright, causing enemies to sometimes get stuck in hilarious and vulnerable positions, an impressive amount of the unfurling drama that makes Saints & Sinners exciting is simulated in real-time rather than deliberately scripted. To my satisfaction, I found that many of the quests allowed me to choose my own path to a solution, and it was a delight to discover alternate routes and secrets, even if the map can feel a little nondescript or claustrophobic at times. Even when I was presented with straightforward options for moving through a group of wary human NPCs or solving a quest with diplomacy – or simply by attacking an NPC directly – I could just as easily avoid interacting with certain characters altogether, either by attracting a herd of walkers and sneaking past the ensuing carnage, or by climbing over the side of a wall or up the side of a house. That freedom to tackle a situation so many different ways is fantastic.

And though the bigger story about breaking into the Reserve can sometimes feel pretty thin between long periods of exploring, looting, killing, and crafting my way through the streets of New Orleans, it was refreshing for a VR game to let me define my character through my own decisions in a setting as meticulously detailed and open-ended as this. While Saints & Sinners isn’t exactly the first of its kind, this caliber of storytelling reaches a height that VR had otherwise yet to achieve.

Zombalaya

Central to the tension of Saints & Sinners is that you only get so much time each day to do things before the city’s bells are rung and the streets flood with ravenous corpses. Once you head back to safety you can go to sleep and skip to the next morning, but the number of undead you encounter the following day increases. This creates a compelling risk-reward choice between pushing your luck past dark or playing it safe at the cost of worse odds tomorrow, driving the tension of the entire game.

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That dilemma would be perfectly manageable if not for the fact that you only have a limited amount of inventory space, pushing you to think more carefully about what you grab. You also have to continue crafting or finding new weapons as your old ones tend to fall apart at a distressingly high rate. That forces you to make each attack count, which is easier said than done since you actually have to swing and aim with your real-world appendages. With a ticking clock looming behind all that, Saints & Sinners quickly becomes the perfect storm for adrenaline junkies.

Luckily, the inventory management is intuitive and feels great. Picking up items and placing them into your backpack is as simple as throwing them over your shoulder, and to access them again you simply grab the pack off of your back and pull items out of their neatly arranged slots. Meanwhile, weapons can be holstered in convenient slots on your waist and back while your journal and flashlight fit snugly on your chest. This style of physical inventory management has existed in VR games like Rec Room and Township Tale for some time, and it’s far more interactive and interesting than simply tapping on a menu screen with your fingers or pointing at some text with a laser pointer.

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Limited stamina is also a worry. Running out of stamina makes you slow and unable to swing, aim, or run away, meaning it’s all the more critical to land each and every blow with finesse. Likewise, having a strong weapon or beefed up stamina pool makes you feel satisfyingly powerful, but never so much that you can let your guard down, keeping combat engaging even as you get stronger.

If you do die to the shambling hordes, you’re forced to respawn at the start of the map while the day’s clock is still ticking, and you only get one chance to reclaim your inventory before it’s gone forever. As time wears on, high-quality supplies and weapons can become so difficult to find that scrounging up a broken bottleneck or screwdriver in the nick of time is sometimes the difference between life and death. This, mixed with the fact that your health and stamina pools are temporarily decreased when you die, is a perfect formula for some of the most terrifying moments I’ve had in a VR headset – but that terror was met with an equal amount of satisfaction if I could make it back to my loot and come out alive after.

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It is disappointing that character progression is fairly linear, with only a few tech trees to branch into – Gear, Guns, and Survival – and no mutual exclusivity between them. There’s nothing stopping you from unlocking every possible upgrade at the crafting stations in short order, just as long as you can find the right components from scrapping items you find in the world, similar to Fallout 4. It’s plenty of fun to use newfound upgrades like the Nail Bomb and the Grass Cutter, and there are some recipes that you first have to uncover the hidden nooks and crannies of New Orleans to find, but it’s too bad that there’s no real way to personalize your Tourist beyond the story choices you make.

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DualShock 4 Back Button Attachment Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out From robotic dogs to pocketable PCs – Sony’s never been afraid to get weird. But for the most part, the PlayStation has played it pretty vanilla. That’s why it’s exciting to see something as strange as the DualShock 4 Back Button Attachment. As the name implies, this strange, clip-on attachment adds back buttons to your PlayStation controller. It’s a peripheral that’s overdue. It’s been more than four years since Microsoft released the Xbox Elite controller to critical acclaim, and just under a year before the inevitable PS5. Sony didn’t even make the holiday season. So why now is a valid question – though we can speculate that it points to the forthcoming PS5 controller possibly having similar back paddles, thus the attachment exists for compatibility reasons. Either way, Sony undercuts its importance by offering it at a bargain-basement $30 price point.

Design and Features

The Back Button Attachment plugs into the headphone jack and the rarely used EXT port – although actually affixing the cradle to the ports is easier said than done. It requires a precise angle and pressure to plug in, and there were multiple times I thought I was about to break it. I even consulted YouTube videos before getting it right. More times than once, I accidentally started the controller and turned on the PS4, which meant I had to turn the controller off, try again, or risk pairing issues. This would usually be the place where I’d give you some practical advice on how to get it right. However, after dozens of attachments, I still haven’t nailed it. It just requires a ton of wiggling it, pushing it, pulling it out, and starting again. Once on, you’re set. The Back Button Attachment adds a bit of a chin to the DualShock 4, but I quickly got used to it. And despite adding a bit of clunk to the rear of the controller, it’s subtle enough to keep adhered to your default controller. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/01/14/ps4s-back-button-attachment-impressions-a-tease-of-ps5"] At .88 ounces, the rear attachment doesn’t weigh much. What’s more noticeable is the ergonomic shift. Depending on how forward your hands sit on the controller, the grip will either feel most comfortable on your ring or middle fingers. You may need to try out new grips. Mapping buttons feels high-tech and low-tech all at the same time. There’s a circular button on the back that, when held down, reveals an OLED screen. Once you hold it down, you can program the buttons by cycling through the options (there are sixteen). Then it’s just a matter of actually stopping at the right spot. Miss the button you want to map it to, and you’ll have to press the button another 16 times, which I had to do three times because I’m an idiot. To understand just how weird this process is, consider other “elite” controllers. The Xbox Elite can do it through Xbox software, and Astro’s C40 controller has a dedicated pairing button. Hold that button until the controller vibrates, then hit the trigger you want to program, followed by whatever button you want to map it to. Three button presses. Versus (literally) 48, in my case. The Back Button Attachment could easily ape this same functionality. It already has a giant button that starts the mapping process. Alas. Fortunately, once you’ve managed to find your perfect mapping, it’s easy enough to save your button combinations into a profile, of which the attachment holds three. These profiles are displayed as P1, P2, and P3. At first, I figured the controller was telling me which Player I was, not which profile was selected. Thankfully, it’s dead simple to flip through these profiles – simply double-tap the OLED button twice. The screen even tells you which buttons are mapped to which.

Performance and Gaming

The Back Button Attachment is made of sturdy plastic, and it feels similar to the back of the DualShock. Unlike the Scuf and Elite, these buttons have almost no travel. That makes them super easy to click, whether you’re using your middle or ring fingers. And while battery drain is minimal, I did notice it – especially on some of my oldest controllers. The effectiveness of back buttons varies drastically from game to game. Ostensibly, they’re intended to help you keep your thumbs on the thumbstick, so are recommended for face buttons. However, in practice, it’s a little more complicated. I found them to be just as useful for lobbing grenades in The Division 2 (D-Pad), bullet jumping in Warframe (L1 and X), and adding a little oomph to my melees in Modern Warfare (R3). For most games, once I got used to the new button configurations, I found the Back Buttons irreplaceable. There’s a real advantage to rear buttons, but you may have to experiment with what works for you. I didn’t have a great use-case for them in every game, however. For instance, in Rocket League, I was thrilled to map Air Roll (a maneuver that has no default binding on the controller) to the triggers. But once I actually got playing, I found it altogether too confusing and just mapped boost and jump to the triggers instead. Even when the back buttons combos aren’t natural, the attachment always is. It feels like a natural extension to the controller and I’ve been delighted to try out old favorites with the new peripheral. If that’s not worth $30, I don’t know what is.

Purchasing Guide

The DualShock 4 Back Button Attachment is available now for $30.

• See it at Amazon 
• See it at Best Buy 
• See it at GameStop 

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