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When I think back on my time with plucky cyberpunk beat-em-up Anno: Mutationem, the first thing I think of is that I wish they'd included a pronunciation guide for that mouthful of a faux Latin title. But the second thing that comes to mind is attitude. From the colorful, retro chic art style to the endearing, ass-kicking protagonist, this is a world with a strong sense of identity that knows from the first minute how it wants to make you feel – even though the story told there sometimes seems a bit more lost.
The streets of futuristic Skopp City are where most of the action takes place: it’s a delightful chrome and concrete sprawl packed with influences from the likes of Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell. Its various districts each use color, sound, and small environmental details to create a textured world that manages to feel bright and homey in spite of its bleak backstory. I had a lot of fun exploring its bars, shops, and alleyways, listening to random conversations and discovering out-of-the-way secrets. It's not exactly a groundbreaking setting – though some Stranger Things-esque weirdness brings a dash of spice to it – but it's one I would happily spend a lot more time in.
When trouble comes to these streets, the capable and daring Ann Flores is ready to shoot, slash, and smash her way through hordes of thugs, robots, and mutants. Combat is responsive, well-paced, and in its best moments the enemy design and flow of battle reminded me of old-school Mega Man. There are plenty of interesting and challenging bosses and lieutenants to pound to a pulp, and the fact that you need to wear down their shields with slower heavy attacks to unlock powerful finishers, while dealing damage with quicker light attacks, makes each scrap more tactically interesting than button mashing away at a health bar. The one kind of annoying thing is that there are a few too many encounters that rely on infinitely respawning minions for my taste. There are lots of ways to make a boss fight harder, and I'm just not fond of that one.
Training Arc
Ann's progression as a professional ass kicker comes from two skill trees, where beating story bosses gives you currency to improve your base stats and beating normal enemies lets you unlock new moves. This ends up working out really well, because you can't really grind to become way too powerful for any given area, but earning yourself a new heavy slash or improving the effectiveness of your parry provides you with more tools to experiment with and put together the the right fighting style for tougher encounters.
A lot of the main story takes place off the grid in lengthy, varied dungeon crawls that create a sense of isolation and are a nice contrast to running around town doing odd jobs. There's always a hint that they're part of a slowly unraveling mystery, but this didn't save me from feeling like I was kind of being led by my nose with too thin of a connecting motivation. The places you get to explore along the way, from a secret lab full of mutant plants to a hidden civilization of cyborgs, are genuinely interesting and weave into a richly detailed world. It's just missing a smoother flow between them to save it from turning into a whirlwind tour that sometimes seems much less interested in why you're discovering these places than it is in the places themselves.
The huge, colorful cast of characters represents both one of Anno's most visible strengths and weaknesses. There's limited voice acting, but where it pops up, it's really well done. Especially Ann herself, voiced in English by the fantastic Suzie Yeung, who comes across as a confident and driven young woman trying to make sense of a mysterious and traumatic past. The dialogue writing itself, though, isn't quite as impressive. There are a lot of times where what's being spoken doesn't match up with the written captions on screen, and far too many conversations felt like rushed exposition that wasn't presented in a very naturalistic way.
BFFs
Sometimes Anno simply throws too many new characters at you, often in one-off cutscenes that won't make any sense until much later in the 20-hour story. While some of the reveals are definitely cool and I like how they've put a weird, metaphysical spin on the cyberpunk genre, it felt like maybe the plot was a bit too intricate for its own good. It is trying to do too much, with too many cast members who don't get enough time to develop or make an impact. What little I saw of characters like Ann's snarky sister Nakamura or the moody cowboy Raymond made me want to get to know them better, but they're simply shuffled on and off the stage too quickly.
The one person you do get to spend plenty of time with is Ann's best friend Ayane. And, well, I love you girl, but you're just a bit much sometimes. The bubbly, manic, aggressively gay sidekick who follows you around in the form of a hologram is an effective foil to Ann's straightforward stoicism, but also reminds me of some of the overcaffeinated anime addicts I hung out with in college, and I often just wished I could tell her to tone it down a couple notches. In her defense, she does sometimes break out of being a living stereotype with moments of emotional depth.
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Ambulance will debut in U.S. theaters on April 8, 2022.
Action movies don’t have to be big, bold, brash displays of guns, violence, and car chases. Some take an altogether more measured approach, layering plot and dialogue to underpin a thrilling story, using action sequences to punctuate a gripping story.
Michael Bay has directed possibly the most Michael Bay film of all time as Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II stomp around Los Angeles in a stolen ambulance, evading the police after a heist gone wrong.
It’s a neat setup that borrows a lot from the likes of Speed and the Grand Theft Auto games, with frenzied editing that makes scenes whizz by faster than a getaway ambulance. There’s nothing subtle or understated here – Ambulance is a bold movie from a director renowned for his over-the-top antics. And boy, Bay does not disappoint here.
Danny (Gyllenhaal) and Will (Abdul-Mateen) are crooks pulling one last big bank job – the one to top them all. But while Danny is keen to follow in his criminal father’s footsteps, Will is a more reluctant bank robber, dragged kicking and screaming into his brother’s scheme.
The heist scenes are a bit rough around the edges, but that’s kind of the point. It all goes sideways very quickly, leaving Danny and Will hot-footing it out of there with bags stuffed full of cash and assault rifles at the ready. Not exactly inconspicuous, and with the cops on their tail, time is running out. If only they could find a way out…
Of course, the real star of the show is Jake Gyllenhaal.
Enter the Ambulance, home to notorious EMT Cam Thompson (Eiza González), who can keep anyone alive for 20 minutes as long as you don’t dare to strike up any kind of personal conversation. She’s essentially a caricature of a grizzled veteran health care worker, but González manages to wrestle with the stereotype to pull out an impressive performance.
Of course, the real star of the show is Gyllenhaal, who spends 136 minutes chewing the scenery so hard, he needs a new set of dentures by the end of it. Expect crazed monologues, hyped-up displays of aggression, and bucketloads of those trademark Gyllenhaal crazed expressions. Abdul-Mateen brings a more measured performance as the humble U.S. veteran who just happens to be related to a serial bank robber. Although he’s underutilized at first, Abdul-Mateen really comes into his own by the third act, building a solid rapport with Gyllenhaal that eventually bursts out of the screen.
But Cam gets plenty of opportunity to shine too. Although the high-speed hijinks of a bank robbery gone wrong provide most of the action, it’s punctuated by excruciating medical scenes which see Cam go beyond the call of duty.
In fact, there’s a lot more to this than meets the eye.
Shot during lockdown in 2021, Ambulance feels like a salute to the frontline healthcare workers who put their lives on the line to keep us safe. Positioning Cam as the trustworthy face of a brutal healthcare system shows us the humanity and sacrifice of the noble EMT, highlighting the bravery of the ordinary nurse or hospital porter.
That being said, it’s not particularly realistic.
After all, one scene sees the EMT perform impromptu surgery using a hair clip while being walked through the procedure by a surgeon friend over Zoom. But González’s no-nonsense heroine is unwavering in the face of danger. She’s not particularly complex – neither are Gyllenhaal and Abdul Mateen’s characters. But there’s joy to be found in the simple plot, executed amid a hail of gunfire, in the back of a speeding ambulance, with Bay’s signature explosions wreaking havoc around them.
It's an audacious film in more ways than one. Only Bay can get away with directly referencing his own movies throughout the film’s already cheesy dialogue. The tongue-in-cheek nature of a cop talking about Bad Boys is more than a little reminiscent of Hot Fuzz.
It's a fast-paced thrill ride all round with breakneck cuts and a frantic energy.
Pop quiz, hotshot – how exactly does Michael Bay do it?
That’s all down to his signature style. It's a fast-paced thrill ride all round with breakneck cuts and a frantic energy you won’t find anywhere else. Sure, it’s a bit exhausting to sit through over two hours of edge-of-your-seat action and not-quite-whip-smart quips from Gyllenhaal’s cash-obsessed hustler. But you’re rewarded with an action-packed finale that will leave you feeling positively energized.
Ambulance is a high-octane delight for anyone who loves the complete and utter mayhem of an over-the-top action thriller. It’s not particularly clever, or original. But Ambulance does deliver the kind of thrilling, fast-paced action that’s been missing in cinemas for the last few years. It’s perfect popcorn fodder with a healthy dose of explosions, chase scenes, and that signature fast-cutting, frenzied style that made Bay a household name.
Don’t expect too much and Ambulance will give you a healthy shot of adrenaline long before you risk flatlining.
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Asus just made the Surface Pro of gaming. The Asus ROG Flow Z13 is a 2-in-1 gaming laptop, and much like Microsoft’s Surface line, it has a main tablet body and a detachable keyboard. Of course, to be a gaming laptop, there needs to be some considerable power inside, and Asus has packed in a good deal. But the ROG Flow Z13 also works with Asus’s external GPU system, the ROG XG Mobile, which can squeeze in an RTX 3080 GPU. Such a unique system doesn’t come cheap though, and it has more than a few hurdles to leap through to justify its existence in the face of so many great gaming laptops that can cost less by not trying to break any molds. So, let’s look at just how the Asus ROG Flow Z13 does.
Asus ROG Flow Z13 – Design and Features
If the Surface Pro and ROG Flow Z13 were twins, the Surface Pro would be the one who put on a suit and headed off to business school while the ROG Flow Z13 went full cyberpunk and hit the gym seven days a week. For a tablet, this thing is swole. Asus tries to call it a lightweight device at 2.6 pounds, but that’s for just the tablet. Once the keyboard is snapped on, the whole unit weighs 3.31 pounds. I’ll give it some credit, though – that’s still a good deal lighter than most gaming laptops. Of course, few gaming laptops are using a 13.3-inch touchscreen.
The tablet has a robust, aluminum frame that’s thoroughly stylized with cut-outs, etching, and logos. By far the slickest choice by Asus is the transparent window on the back that shows off some PCB on the inside of the device illuminated by RGB lights.
Aside from the aesthetics, the ROG Flow Z13 is remarkably similar to the Surface Pro where form and function meet. The keyboard attaches to the tablet via pins and magnets, and it has a fold near the top to give it an angle and hide the bottom bezel of the display area. The magnets are very powerful, almost making it hard to move around on a metal table. The keyboard has RGB lighting, but just one zone. The palm rest area of the keyboard is a comfortable soft-touch material, but the back is a felt-like fabric that loves to wipe up lint, dust, and hairs. The keys themselves are nice and poppy with a great typing feel.
Around back, the tablet has a beefy kickstand with a wide range of motion and a little rubbery tab on one side that helps open it up. That kickstand hides a microSD card slot and a removable cover for the SSD, which is sadly an M.2 2230 size, so it’ll be harder to find a quality upgrade. The lowest angle of the kickstand may not make much sense for gaming, but the ROG Flow Z13 display supports stylus input, so it could be useful for artwork or note-taking.
There’s decent I/O on the tablet. The right edge houses a basic USB port and a headphone jack. There’s also a volume rocker and the power button (which doubles as a fingerprint scanner) over there. The left side is where the action is. This houses a Thunderbolt 4 port that’s handy for hubs, peripherals, displays, or power input. During testing, I ran into an intermittent issue with power running through this port, seeing the device stop charging and remain that way for a while even after unplugging and re-plugging the power (and trying a different 65W GaN charger). Underneath the Thunderbolt 4 port is a special combo that pairs a USB-C 3.2 port next to a proprietary PCIe 3.0 x8 link. This pair of ports is what connects to Asus’s XG Mobile eGPU.
The XG Mobile connector is chunky and locks in place, but the length of the connector is a concern, as it presents an opportunity to apply a lot of leverage on the connection, which could make for an easily broken link. When docked the connector handles power delivery, leaving the Thunderbolt 4 port free for whatever else you might want. The dock also provides the ROG Flow Z13 with a bunch of extra ports. There are four USB ports as well as HDMI, DisplayPort, and Ethernet connectors. There’s even a full-size SD card reader. The XG Mobile is kind of like a double-wide power brick. Most gaming laptops have pretty substantial power bricks, and this is just a little extra. The graphics processor is inside alongside cooling hardware. The XG Mobile also includes a kickstand to stand it up and ensure good airflow, though intake vents on two sides should make it hard to accidentally choke the device. The XG Mobile can come with an RTX 3080, though in reviewer materials Asus has mentioned RTX 3080 Ti and AMD Radeon RX 6850M XT as options. Portability takes a hit once the XG Mobile is factored in, which brings the total package weight up to 5.78 pounds.
The Asus ROG Flow Z13 comes with a good but unremarkable display. It gets plenty bright, which is a plus. The model Asus sent for review includes a 1920x1200 display with a 120Hz refresh rate, though there’s also a 3840x2200 60Hz option. The extra smoothness of a 120Hz refresh rate is useful for gaming, but the panel’s slow pixel response time can show plenty of ghosting.
Despite Asus boasting Dolby Vision support on the display, Windows 11 hasn’t always recognized the device as HDR compatible, and only says it supports streaming video in HDR when it does recognize it. Asus also advertises Adaptive Sync support for the display, but Nvidia Control Panel won’t expose the usual settings to enable it.
Asus ROG Flow Z13 – Software
The Asus ROG Flow Z13 comes with Windows 11 and just a bit of extra stuff running on it. Most notably, it has Asus’s Armoury Crate pre-installed. This software offers some fairly in-depth detail on system vitals like CPU and GPU usage, wattage, temperature, and clock speeds, It also provides access to game profiles, quick settings. Asus also pre-installed a Pantone-validate color profile, which should make the display extra useful for creators who need a higher degree of color accuracy. Beyond this, the Asus ROG Flow Z13 is relatively free of bloatware.
Asus ROG Flow Z13 – Gaming and performance
Performance is where things get bizarre for the Asus ROG Flow Z13 as there are effectively two wildly different configurations for one machine. On its own, the tablet Asus sent runs an Intel Core i9-12900H processor with six performance cores and eight efficiency cores alongside 16GB (standard across all models) of LPDDR5 memory and an Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti graphics processor. This makes it a fairly robust little tablet, and its performance lines up with that.
The CPU performance is very solid, making a great showing of the high-end Alder Lake chip. In the PC Mark 10 benchmark, which lets the CPU shine a bit more than some gaming tests, it stacks up just behind the AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS we’ve benchmarked in a lot of different machines. But that’s only when running the tablet alone. If the XG Mobile is attached, the CPU can get more power, and this scenario sees it leap right out ahead of the Ryzen 9 5900HS with an average PCMark 10 score of 8003. This translates into smooth operation in daily use as well. The only time I notice the device stumble is when it’s switching graphics processing between its internal or external options.
Despite the sacrifices Asus made to get all of the key hardware into a tablet form factor, the ROG Flow Z13 still has decent battery life, hitting 5:44 in our battery test. It falls shy of some of its competitors and even last year’s Asus ROG Flow X13 (a standard clamshell laptop take on this system). Popping down to the cafe for a few hours of work doesn’t have me worrying if I left the charger behind.
The RTX 3050 Ti in the system I tested has enough might to hold up to some gaming on the go. It can handle a number of games at 1080p and max settings while maintaining averages above 30fps, including Metro Exodus with RTX enabled. Of course, for $1,899, you can get a much faster gaming laptop (albeit a heavier one). The Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition costs less and easily muscles out the ROG Flow Z13 with double to triple the benchmark scores and more battery life to boot – of course, it weighs almost twice as much, too. The 4.2-pound Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 stacks up better at $1799 for a model with a Ryzen 9 5900HS and RTX 3070, and I’d absolutely recommend it instead.
Once the ROG Flow Z13 is plugged into the XG Mobile, the tides turn. The tablet gets a huge boost in performance from both the RTX 3080 subbing in for the RTX 3050 Ti, and from the extra power budget allocated to the CPU. This setup sees the system trade blows with a lot of lighter high-end gaming laptops, like the Razer Blade 15 Advanced Edition and MSI GS66 Stealth. The RTX 3080 inside the XG Mobile readily handles our benchmark titles at 1080p max settings with over 60fps on average in all of them. In many cases, this setup sees the benchmark scores doubled over the ROG Flow Z13 on its own.
Sadly, for anyone expecting desktop-class performance from the RTX 3080, that’s not on offer here. This is a mobile variant of the GPU, which sees performance constrained compared to the full-fat model – severely constrained. Asus’s proprietary connector gives the XG Mobile an advantage over other Thunderbolt-based eGPU enclosures in that it doesn’t seem to struggle with sending the video feed back to the tablet. Where eGPUs would normally see a large performance loss if the gameplay is sent back to the internal display instead of an external monitor, the ROG Flow Z13 has more bandwidth to send data back and forth (though it still performs better with an external display)
To put things in perspective, I loaded up a GPU heavy benchmark on my desktop and the ROG Flow Z13 with XG Mobile. I ran Metro Exodus’s RT benchmark at 3440 x 1440 on an external display. My desktop is running an RTX 3070 and Ryzen 5 3600X – not exactly baller like a Core i9 and RTX 3080. So, bad news for Asus when the system only hit 44.19fps average while my mid-range rig averaged 57.25fps. The fans in Asus’s setup also kick up a lot more racket than desktop fans. Asus has a Turbo mode available in Armoury Crate that scores some extra performance by upping the clock speeds and wattage, but it comes with extra heat and noise.
At least the ROG Flow Z13 can run Elden Ring with no problem at 1080p on the internal display, but that’s a small consolation for a setup that costs over $3,000. That compares poorly to a desktop setup that one could likely build for around $1,000 (assuming none of the absurd graphics card markups we’ve all been dealing with the past two years)
Now normally I wouldn’t go comparing a laptop to a desktop, but the ROG Flow Z13 practically begs for the comparison when it claims “uncompromised graphics performance” from the XG Mobile. It aims to be portable when you need it to be and perform like a desktop when you’re at a desk docked. But the reality is you can grab a competent laptop that nearly matches the ROG Flow Z13+XG Mobile combo at almost half the price with the ROG Zephyrus G15 and then get a solid gaming desktop on the side for when you want even more performance.
The ROG Flow Z13 is simply too niche an offering to make sense for just about anyone. The one possible benefit is that a ROG Flow Z13 owner could theoretically upgrade GPUs down the line by swapping to a future XG Mobile, but we’ll have to wait and see with tightly crossed fingers whether Asus continues to produce the proprietary external GPUs. And the second-hand market for XG Mobile is likely to be tiny, whereas a full-sized graphics card used in a desktop or eGPU enclosure is likely going to be easy to sell when upgrading.
It comes down to the XG Mobile. The ROG Flow Z13 is a wonder in its own right as a high-performance tablet. When the keyboard isn’t needed, it really could serve as a portable gaming machine paired with a controller. The speakers pack enough punch for it, even if they start to grate on me after a couple of hours. But the rest of the package adds enough bulk, weight, and cost that it just makes no sense to choose over a similarly powerful laptop unless you absolutely, positively must have a single device (that can sometimes weigh under three pounds) instead of two separate ones.
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Our Flag Means Death Season 1 is now available on HBO Max.
Everything about the basic description of HBO Max’s comedy series Our Flag Means Death warns potential viewers, like a Jolly Roger whipping in the wind, that it's not going to be for everyone. But for those who appreciate comedy that sails away from mainstream, this is a wild ride meant with plenty to enjoy.
Loosely based on the life of Stede Bonnet (aka "The Gentleman Pirate”), an actual wealthy, 18th Century landowner from Barbados who left his wife and kids to pillage in Blackbeard’s territory, the series presents its own take on Bonnet’s origin story, warts and all. Season 1 paints him as the most unlikely pirate to ever claim the title, but also an eccentric optimist who, over time, begrudgingly earns some respect from his crew, his peers, and even his family. Smartly, creator David Jenkins (People of Earth), assisted by executive producer/director Taika Waititi, uses Bonnet’s odd footnote in history not as a punchline, but as an aspirational underdog story worthy of celebrating as he punches holes in the pirate genre’s most outdated and worn-thin tropes.
As played by New Zealander Rhys Darby (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle), Bonnet is a distracted, starry-eyed dreamer who longs to break the chains of an arranged marriage to Mary (Claudia O'Doherty) and the land-based life forced upon him by familial, class, and financial expectations. The first and fourth episodes, “Pilot” and "Discomfort in a Married State," reveal the frustrations that come from his mocking father and his loveless marriage, and the circumstances that finally spur him to abandon all he knows to set sail on The Revenge, a custom-built ship with living quarters that arguably surpass any pirate ship featured in the entirety of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Surrounded by his beloved silk frocks, massive library, and creature comforts, Bonnet’s glamping version of pirating is as aspirational as it gets. However, functional, it is not.
Having hired a ratty crew who barely tolerates him, Bonnet sails about looking for adventure with no experience or means to navigate the actualities of pirating without immediately getting killed. If not for the kindness of his more sympathetic hires like Oluwande (Samson Kayo), Lucius (Nathan Foad) the records keeper, and eventually the intrigued Blackbeard (Taika Waititi), it’s an understatement to say Bonnet would be sunk.
Much of the fun of the series is watching Darby, festooned in gorgeous silks or silly nightcaps, roam around the boat or out on occasional side trips still acting like the lord of the manor. It’s pure fish-out-of-water storytelling, but Darby goes for it with a charming zeal, instilling his crusty crew with attitude-adjusting exercises to work through their trauma or approrisms to chant them out of their poor negative thinking. His equally weird crew on The Revenge is composed of a gaggle of international comedians and character actors, like Kristian Nairn (Hodor on Game of Thrones), Nat Faxon (Ben and Kate), Guz Khan (Taskmaster), and Joel Fry (Cruella), who all play extremely well against Darby’s brightness, tempering him so the eccentricities don’t go too extreme.
The writers also build investment-worthy B and C stories around many of the supporting players, which broadens out the scope of the series and gives the diverse cast a chance to shine in very unexpected storylines. Vico Ortiz is particularly captivating as a gender-fluid member of The Revenge pursuing their own revenge. And in keeping with the trope-shattering intentions of Our Flag Means Death, the idea of homosexuality not being a real thing on isolated ships at sea for months is rightfully mocked, and same-sex relationships are instead normalized within several charming instances throughout the season. And while the homophobia expected in the genre has to appear, it’s represented by Blackbeard’s proto-pirate first mate Izzy Hands (Con O'Neill), but treated in a very atypical way. His bigotry and bullying are denounced and stripped of their power over and over again so the characters aren’t diminished for whom they love or how they love.
Our Flag Means Death is a quirky, defiant tale about outsiders for outsiders.
Kudos also to the casting team for landing a murders’ row of big-name comedians from Will Arnett to Kristen Schaal to work within the quirky parameters of the show’s premise. In particular, Our Flag Means Death knew exactly what to do with Leslie Jones’ talent as Spanish Jackie, the frightening, bigamist pirate who has no time for Bonnet’s schtick. She’s perfect in the role and is a worthy adversary for many in the cast.
Another big plus is having Waititi as a main character because it's easy to forget with his more recent heightened character work in JoJo Rabbit and Thor: Ragnarok that the man can act the hell out of those quiet, emotional moments too. Both he and Darby are experts at going big, but reuniting them in this series as polar-opposite pirates with wounded souls allows us to appreciate their beautifully subtle performances, too. Their characters’ relationship gets the slow-burn treatment as they form mutual respect for one another’s pasts and their current approaches to life in episodes like "The Best Revenge Is Dressing Well" and “The Art of Fuckery.” And it's the culmination of that bond that really feeds the emotional climax of the final two episodes, “Act of Grace” and the cliffhanger ending of “Wherever You Go, There You Are.”
Our Flag Means Death isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of grog, but that’s really woven into the DNA of the series as it celebrates the unconventional, the outcasts, and the wanderers looking for their tribes. By the season finale, Bonnet’s folly stitches together a collection of weirdos you can’t help but love and root for with vigor as they show their bravery in embracing their truest selves.
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