And yet, despite how weird it is to be playing Halo on a PlayStation 5, it's still Halo. And so it's really fun.

Not to be confused with Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo: Campaign Evolved (because why would they make the title acronyms different and make things easier for me?) is a remake of the very first Halo, and it's also the first Halo game to be playable on one of Sony's consoles. Unlike the 2011 remaster Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary--which provided a graphical upgrade and added co-op gameplay and brand-new collectibles like lore-filled terminals and gameplay-modifying skulls--Campaign Evolved is a much more drastic transformation.

In the first Halo game, protagonist John-117, aka the Master Chief, awakens aboard a starship after it's been attacked by an alien alliance known as the Covenant. As a super-soldier called a Spartan, Master Chief is tasked with escaping the doomed ship with its artificial intelligence, Cortana, to a nearby moon-sized ring that humanity has never seen before. Cortana quickly learns that this ring, referred to as Halo, is important to the Covenant, and Master Chief sets out to learn what it is and why the Covenant want it, while also helping the various human survivors who made it to the ring's surface and are contending with Covenant forces.

Developed in Unreal Engine 5, Campaign Evolved's visuals are a huge jump from 2001's Combat Evolved. And as the name suggests, the actual story campaign has changed too. There are three brand-new missions that take place one year prior to the events of the main story, the levels in the main story have been redesigned in certain sections in terms of both layout and mission objective, and brand-new cutscenes further flesh out the characters and stories with references that longtime fans will recognize are now early teasers for Halo 2. 

The gameplay has been overhauled too, implementing changes to make the first Halo play more like Master Chief's later adventures. Some of these changes radically alter how it feels to play the first Halo--like the ability to sprint, or aim down sights on all weapons--while others feel much smaller. A mechanic like vehicle hijacking was not added to Halo until the second game in the series, so its addition in Campaign Evolved is technically new, for example. But vehicle hijacking doesn't feel like an extraordinary game-changer because the number of times you have the opportunity to use it are few and far between.

While the much larger (and visually gorgeous) environments, grander firefight arenas, and newly added "hold-the-line" encounters make for an altogether longer game to both explore and fight through, playing Campaign Evolved feels like the memory I have of playing Combat Evolved. The changes to the story and gameplay are noticeable to anyone who has familiarity with the first Halo, but the remake's adjustments don't feel like a complete departure from its source material. 

If anything, Campaign Evolved makes the story of Combat Evolved feel more in line with the lore and overall story developed in the games, books, and animated series that were released after the first Halo. Everything is just better connected--bringing the Brutes into Halo 1 erases the confusion as to why they're in Halo Reach and Halo 2, but not the game that canonically takes place in between them, for instance. And Captain Keyes' daughter, Miranda, is also now mentioned multiple times, setting up her in-game introduction in Halo 2. The original Combat Evolved doesn't acknowledge her existence because she didn't exist when that game was made. But she's now a major part of Halo 2 and Halo 3 (as well as several books) so it makes sense that her dad would at least talk about her in Halo 1.

Are any of these details crucial to the story told in the first Halo? No. Do these changes make the overall story of Master Chief's first game better flow into the second? Yes.

The changes are so much better that Campaign Evolved feels like the new gold standard for playing through the first Halo--I'd recommend this over Combat Evolved Anniversary. Every change feels like an improvement on what came before.

While the three new prequel missions don't rise to the same dramatic highs that make the main story of Combat Evolved so memorable, their inclusion does improve the overall experience and I recommend anyone who picks up Campaign Evolved play these new missions first (the game counts them as a separate story that you can choose to play at any point). 

These new missions see Master Chief and fan-favorite Sergeant Johnson infiltrate a Covenant ship in an effort to find intel on the alien threat's main base of operations. The duo have fantastic back-and-forth that builds up their relationship in a way that Combat Evolved's story simply doesn't have time for because they're split up almost immediately, and even when they do reunite, they then both go off on their separate missions. Combat Evolved's story is a largely solo affair of Chief doing his best to help his human allies as he moves from place to place across the Halo ring, and Campaign Evolved remains faithful to that lonely-feeling journey despite supporting co-op. 

So having a chance to see Chief interact with a friend does a lot of the heavy lifting in characterizing him as an actual person. You see that he has a sense of humor and is fiercely loyal to others (aspects that aren't really explored until Halo 2). And seeing just how, daresay, shy he is with marines he doesn't really know brings the whole psychological toll of being a Spartan to the forefront of his character. That's something you don't really get at all unless you read the books, watch the intro or closing cinematics of Halo 4, or play Halo Infinite. 

These three prequel missions also just have a very Halo Reach feel (there's even a mission in space that isn't all that great in comparison to other sci-fi space battle games, but plays well enough to be a good time). The horrifying threat of the Flood, the mystique of the Forerunners, and the drama of AI rampancy feel so far away. In these missions, it's all about the ongoing galactic war between humanity's scrappiness and an alien threat's technological superiority. As Chief and Johnson do their best to keep each other motivated, navigate a Covenant nature preserve in which the aliens hunt human prisoners for sport, and gaze down upon a planet that has been transformed into glass after undergoing an orbital plasma cannon bombardment, you can just feel it: Humanity is losing. And unless they get a miracle, they'll go extinct. 

These missions lead so well into the main story of Campaign Evolved, establishing that humanity is on the backfoot. My one major qualm with these new prequel missions is that they introduce two new characters: a new Covenant prophet and a new human fireteam leader. Neither are very fleshed out, beyond "evil scientist is evil" and "rough and tough marine," and that feels like such a missed opportunity. Chief meets several prophets across the Halo games, and fights alongside tons of humanity's soldiers. Given how well these prequel missions flesh out Chief and Johnson's relationship, they could have done the same for Chief and an existing prophet or human ally. Instead they introduce new characters but don't have the time to give either one enough time to breath and evolve into nuanced individuals. 

These two characters are not so bad that they ruin the story of these prequel missions, but they both feel like sci-fi tropes. Admittedly, Halo is filled with sci-fi tropes, but it also has some fantastic characters. So whenever a couple of duds pop up, they really stick out for how poorly characterized they are.

Additionally, Campaign Evolved doesn't quite figure out checkpoints. The game's automatic checkpoints seem to trigger for a variety of reasons: reaching a specific spot in a level, killing a certain number of enemies in an area, leaving combat entirely, or some combination of the three. The logic for what counts and what doesn't isn't super consistent and seems to shift parameters moment-to-moment, leading to irritating setbacks--when it's not abundantly clear why getting defeated in one lengthy fight sends you all the way back to the beginning of it, while a defeat in the fight that had just occurred prior only sent you back a few seconds, it can feel like the checkpoint system is finicky at best and unfair at worst. This is a problem in both the main story and the new prequel missions, though I noticed it a lot more in the latter than the former. It's not so bad that I ever wanted to put the game down in frustration, but it's certainly annoying whenever it happens to pop up, especially if you're playing on one of the more challenging difficulties, like Heroic or Legendary.

These issues aside, however, Halo: Campaign Evolved is awesome. And that's not surprising, simply because Halo: Combat Evolved is a fantastic game. There's a reason this story is a classic. Its explosive opening chapter plunges immediately into a series of desperate, high-action firefights that repeatedly reward your precise aim and strategic battle awareness with the sensation of being a heroic super-soldier. Humanity's weapons punch through flesh, while the Covenant's alien firearms and explosives satisfyingly melt enemy shields and paint the walls and floors with purple-blue plasma. For lack of a better word, the orchestral score is perfect, and I envy you if this will be your first time hearing it. And the main story's abrupt shift from a straightforward war between two civilizations into a desperate race by both sides to escape and contain a terrifying new threat that neither can handle is still as tense as it was back in 2001.

It's still an odd sensation to be playing a Halo game on a PlayStation console. If you had asked teenage Jordan--the one who spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours laughing alongside their friends in Halo 3 and Halo Reach online multiplayer--whether Halo would ever make its way to a Sony console, they'd have told you it was impossible. Yet, here we are. And 25 years later, Halo: Combat Evolved's story is still really, really good.

And yet, despite how weird it is to be playing Halo on a PlayStation 5, it's still Halo. And so it's really fun.

Not to be confused with Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo: Campaign Evolved (because why would they make the title acronyms different and make things easier for me?) is a remake of the very first Halo, and it's also the first Halo game to be playable on one of Sony's consoles. Unlike the 2011 remaster Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary--which provided a graphical upgrade and added co-op gameplay and brand-new collectibles like lore-filled terminals and gameplay-modifying skulls--Campaign Evolved is a much more drastic transformation.

In the first Halo game, protagonist John-117, aka the Master Chief, awakens aboard a starship after it's been attacked by an alien alliance known as the Covenant. As a super-soldier called a Spartan, Master Chief is tasked with escaping the doomed ship with its artificial intelligence, Cortana, to a nearby moon-sized ring that humanity has never seen before. Cortana quickly learns that this ring, referred to as Halo, is important to the Covenant, and Master Chief sets out to learn what it is and why the Covenant want it, while also helping the various human survivors who made it to the ring's surface and are contending with Covenant forces.

Developed in Unreal Engine 5, Campaign Evolved's visuals are a huge jump from 2001's Combat Evolved. And as the name suggests, the actual story campaign has changed too. There are three brand-new missions that take place one year prior to the events of the main story, the levels in the main story have been redesigned in certain sections in terms of both layout and mission objective, and brand-new cutscenes further flesh out the characters and stories with references that longtime fans will recognize are now early teasers for Halo 2. 

The gameplay has been overhauled too, implementing changes to make the first Halo play more like Master Chief's later adventures. Some of these changes radically alter how it feels to play the first Halo--like the ability to sprint, or aim down sights on all weapons--while others feel much smaller. A mechanic like vehicle hijacking was not added to Halo until the second game in the series, so its addition in Campaign Evolved is technically new, for example. But vehicle hijacking doesn't feel like an extraordinary game-changer because the number of times you have the opportunity to use it are few and far between.

While the much larger (and visually gorgeous) environments, grander firefight arenas, and newly added "hold-the-line" encounters make for an altogether longer game to both explore and fight through, playing Campaign Evolved feels like the memory I have of playing Combat Evolved. The changes to the story and gameplay are noticeable to anyone who has familiarity with the first Halo, but the remake's adjustments don't feel like a complete departure from its source material. 

If anything, Campaign Evolved makes the story of Combat Evolved feel more in line with the lore and overall story developed in the games, books, and animated series that were released after the first Halo. Everything is just better connected--bringing the Brutes into Halo 1 erases the confusion as to why they're in Halo Reach and Halo 2, but not the game that canonically takes place in between them, for instance. And Captain Keyes' daughter, Miranda, is also now mentioned multiple times, setting up her in-game introduction in Halo 2. The original Combat Evolved doesn't acknowledge her existence because she didn't exist when that game was made. But she's now a major part of Halo 2 and Halo 3 (as well as several books) so it makes sense that her dad would at least talk about her in Halo 1.

Are any of these details crucial to the story told in the first Halo? No. Do these changes make the overall story of Master Chief's first game better flow into the second? Yes.

The changes are so much better that Campaign Evolved feels like the new gold standard for playing through the first Halo--I'd recommend this over Combat Evolved Anniversary. Every change feels like an improvement on what came before.

While the three new prequel missions don't rise to the same dramatic highs that make the main story of Combat Evolved so memorable, their inclusion does improve the overall experience and I recommend anyone who picks up Campaign Evolved play these new missions first (the game counts them as a separate story that you can choose to play at any point). 

These new missions see Master Chief and fan-favorite Sergeant Johnson infiltrate a Covenant ship in an effort to find intel on the alien threat's main base of operations. The duo have fantastic back-and-forth that builds up their relationship in a way that Combat Evolved's story simply doesn't have time for because they're split up almost immediately, and even when they do reunite, they then both go off on their separate missions. Combat Evolved's story is a largely solo affair of Chief doing his best to help his human allies as he moves from place to place across the Halo ring, and Campaign Evolved remains faithful to that lonely-feeling journey despite supporting co-op. 

So having a chance to see Chief interact with a friend does a lot of the heavy lifting in characterizing him as an actual person. You see that he has a sense of humor and is fiercely loyal to others (aspects that aren't really explored until Halo 2). And seeing just how, daresay, shy he is with marines he doesn't really know brings the whole psychological toll of being a Spartan to the forefront of his character. That's something you don't really get at all unless you read the books, watch the intro or closing cinematics of Halo 4, or play Halo Infinite. 

These three prequel missions also just have a very Halo Reach feel (there's even a mission in space that isn't all that great in comparison to other sci-fi space battle games, but plays well enough to be a good time). The horrifying threat of the Flood, the mystique of the Forerunners, and the drama of AI rampancy feel so far away. In these missions, it's all about the ongoing galactic war between humanity's scrappiness and an alien threat's technological superiority. As Chief and Johnson do their best to keep each other motivated, navigate a Covenant nature preserve in which the aliens hunt human prisoners for sport, and gaze down upon a planet that has been transformed into glass after undergoing an orbital plasma cannon bombardment, you can just feel it: Humanity is losing. And unless they get a miracle, they'll go extinct. 

These missions lead so well into the main story of Campaign Evolved, establishing that humanity is on the backfoot. My one major qualm with these new prequel missions is that they introduce two new characters: a new Covenant prophet and a new human fireteam leader. Neither are very fleshed out, beyond "evil scientist is evil" and "rough and tough marine," and that feels like such a missed opportunity. Chief meets several prophets across the Halo games, and fights alongside tons of humanity's soldiers. Given how well these prequel missions flesh out Chief and Johnson's relationship, they could have done the same for Chief and an existing prophet or human ally. Instead they introduce new characters but don't have the time to give either one enough time to breath and evolve into nuanced individuals. 

These two characters are not so bad that they ruin the story of these prequel missions, but they both feel like sci-fi tropes. Admittedly, Halo is filled with sci-fi tropes, but it also has some fantastic characters. So whenever a couple of duds pop up, they really stick out for how poorly characterized they are.

Additionally, Campaign Evolved doesn't quite figure out checkpoints. The game's automatic checkpoints seem to trigger for a variety of reasons: reaching a specific spot in a level, killing a certain number of enemies in an area, leaving combat entirely, or some combination of the three. The logic for what counts and what doesn't isn't super consistent and seems to shift parameters moment-to-moment, leading to irritating setbacks--when it's not abundantly clear why getting defeated in one lengthy fight sends you all the way back to the beginning of it, while a defeat in the fight that had just occurred prior only sent you back a few seconds, it can feel like the checkpoint system is finicky at best and unfair at worst. This is a problem in both the main story and the new prequel missions, though I noticed it a lot more in the latter than the former. It's not so bad that I ever wanted to put the game down in frustration, but it's certainly annoying whenever it happens to pop up, especially if you're playing on one of the more challenging difficulties, like Heroic or Legendary.

These issues aside, however, Halo: Campaign Evolved is awesome. And that's not surprising, simply because Halo: Combat Evolved is a fantastic game. There's a reason this story is a classic. Its explosive opening chapter plunges immediately into a series of desperate, high-action firefights that repeatedly reward your precise aim and strategic battle awareness with the sensation of being a heroic super-soldier. Humanity's weapons punch through flesh, while the Covenant's alien firearms and explosives satisfyingly melt enemy shields and paint the walls and floors with purple-blue plasma. For lack of a better word, the orchestral score is perfect, and I envy you if this will be your first time hearing it. And the main story's abrupt shift from a straightforward war between two civilizations into a desperate race by both sides to escape and contain a terrifying new threat that neither can handle is still as tense as it was back in 2001.

It's still an odd sensation to be playing a Halo game on a PlayStation console. If you had asked teenage Jordan--the one who spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours laughing alongside their friends in Halo 3 and Halo Reach online multiplayer--whether Halo would ever make its way to a Sony console, they'd have told you it was impossible. Yet, here we are. And 25 years later, Halo: Combat Evolved's story is still really, really good.

In a lot of ways, it's easy to imagine how Splatoon Raiders came together. It uses a lot of the basic structure of a regular Splatoon game, like varied weapon types and Salmonid enemies. Even its main heroes, the members of the band Deep Cut, hail from Splatoon 3. Yet Splatoon Raiders rearranges all these familiar parts into a new shape that is best summarized by a quote found near the beginning of the game:  "All that matters now is the loot!" 

Instead of splatting your fellow squid kids and competing to get the most ink coverage, you're taking on a series of PvE challenges. Some of these involve quickly gathering Power Eggs on a timer while others have you roaming a map gathering crystals to power your drilling machine, but the core goal remains the same: defeat Salmonids and get loot. It's simple but it works. Instead of competing to cover the ground with ink, your own ink color (and custom character accents) changes from stage to stage, while your Salmonid enemies are consistently spewing a sickly yellow-green goo.

Returning Splatoon fans will find a lot of familiarity here. Your core weapons, like shooters, splatanas, and dualies, are all here, as well as some weapons that make less sense in this format. The roller was my mainstay in traditional competitive Splatoon games, when I would try to help my team with maximum ink coverage, but it's much less useful while fighting off hordes of superpowered fish. I mostly stuck with rapid-fire weapons like shooters and dualies, but occasionally changed it up with a shotgun-like slosher. The weapons you find have numbered levels that generally match your current experience level, so sometimes Raiders will gently push you to try something new. If you haven't found a new version of your preferred weapon type for a while, of course you'll try out a stronger but less familiar weapon. 

The real game-changer is the array of Gadgets. You have three Tank types--Speed, Power, and Tactical--which mostly define your Gadget selection. The Speed tank gives you access to the Booyarang, a spinning weapon that squirts some ink in a small radius, while the Power tank gives you Splatellites that circle around you, and the Tactical tank gives you the Shot Pot auto-turret. Each of the gadgets feel very different from each other, and you're able to develop new Gadgets as you progress through the game. I stuck mostly to the Power Tank and my favorite Gadget, the Splatellite, all throughout.

The game again encourages experimentation with Sampler Dungeons, short trial dungeons that let you test out with a Gadget you may not have tried, and rewards your curiosity with a bonus Skill Point. They're always worth doing because of the bonus, and the curated nature of the stages allows the game to walk you through a lot of the clever applications of the Gadgets.

To get even more creative, each Gadget can also be modified by equipping parts. This is one of the aspects you can upgrade with your Skill Points and it's almost always worth it to do, as enhancing your Gadgets is a major part of finding your own strategy to take on the increasingly tough waves of Salmonids. The Gadget parts offer fairly simple upgrades initially, like enhancing their power or area of effect. But as you find and create more, you can add special effects like scorch damage for the Splatellites, or increased damage the further you fall for your ground-striking Meteor Mitt. 

The array of options leads to creative applications that I was still discovering late in the game. The Splatellites are primarily a defensive weapon, but eventually I had reduced their cooldown so much they could be used almost indefinitely, and they created such a large area of effect that they essentially laid down a track of swimmable ink in front of me while I was in squid form. That made it much easier to quickly traverse the battlefield without having to pause to shoot a swimming path. If I saw, say, a turret tower in the distance, I could just activate my Gadget and swim straight over to make quick work of it. That's just one application, and it feels like I could find many more for each piece of gear. 

For emergencies, you also get to equip one Showstopper ability that is paired to which member of Deep Cut you bring along on your voyages. Those power up as well, but recharge much more slowly than your Gadgets, and fill with eggs from defeated enemies instead of a cooldown. However, these Showstoppers make up for their lengthier wait period by packing a serious punch and the ability to completely change the way a match is going. Shiver's ability, which spawns a massive shark to cut across the battlefield, bailed me out more than a few times. 

In both the case of the Power Tank and Showstopper, though, I eventually hit max level and plateaued. It's clear that Splatoon Raiders wants you to swap between them to power them up, but the stages kept ramping up in difficulty and I would feel underpowered when I tried switching to another. So rather than gain valuable experience for the Speed or Tactical Tank, or for the other two Showstoppers, I was just gaining useless experience points toward skills I had already mastered. It would have been nice if I could have applied this spillover experience to my lesser-used Tanks and Showstoppers to speed up their leveling, but instead I was forced to gain functionally nothing unless I wanted to feel underpowered. 

Keeping up with the level requirements of the stages was a must, because the array of Salmonids gets pretty tough. Like the weapons, these are mostly recognizable from past Splatoon games, but they're given new life here. Many of them are given overpowered "Seasoned" forms, identifiable by a thick layer of salt covering them that makes them extra-tough. Raiders gets a shocking amount of mileage out of rearranging the enemies across different compositions and battlefields, and near the end it starts to get incredibly hectic. Managing the battlefield and prioritizing threats is a harried thrill that never gets old, especially with the promise of sweet loot. 

The stages are usually around 10 minutes, which feels like the ideal length for a casual looter shooter like this. It's just enough time to hop in, take down some enemies, then go back to base to check out your new gear and ready-up to go again. But in the stages that required some level of crystal completion, I would often just hang around and keep taking down Salmonids even after fulfilling the requirement, simply because I was enjoying the satisfaction of taking down enemies. That feels like the mark of a great gameplay loop.

Splatoon Raiders isn't entirely absent of multiplayer. You can group up and take part in co-op raids with enemies that scale up in difficulty, and you'll still get loot and experience from your co-op raids. It's a nice-to-have feature that worked well in my limited pre-release experience, but it's really not the focus here. You could play through the entirety of Splatoon Raiders as a single-player shooter, and it's better for it.

I would be surprised if Splatoon Raiders supplants the main Splatoon titles. The series is a big success for Nintendo, so clearly the competitive ink-splattering multiplayer has found an audience. But Splatoon Raiders shows a new degree of flexibility for the franchise, with a single-player campaign that's much more satisfying than its past attempts to inject a story campaign into the main games. I hope this new looter shooter sub-series gets to live alongside the main series, because it's loads of fun already, and the concept could be pushed even further.

In a lot of ways, it's easy to imagine how Splatoon Raiders came together. It uses a lot of the basic structure of a regular Splatoon game, like varied weapon types and Salmonid enemies. Even its main heroes, the members of the band Deep Cut, hail from Splatoon 3. Yet Splatoon Raiders rearranges all these familiar parts into a new shape that is best summarized by a quote found near the beginning of the game:  "All that matters now is the loot!" 

Instead of splatting your fellow squid kids and competing to get the most ink coverage, you're taking on a series of PvE challenges. Some of these involve quickly gathering Power Eggs on a timer while others have you roaming a map gathering crystals to power your drilling machine, but the core goal remains the same: defeat Salmonids and get loot. It's simple but it works. Instead of competing to cover the ground with ink, your own ink color (and custom character accents) changes from stage to stage, while your Salmonid enemies are consistently spewing a sickly yellow-green goo.

Returning Splatoon fans will find a lot of familiarity here. Your core weapons, like shooters, splatanas, and dualies, are all here, as well as some weapons that make less sense in this format. The roller was my mainstay in traditional competitive Splatoon games, when I would try to help my team with maximum ink coverage, but it's much less useful while fighting off hordes of superpowered fish. I mostly stuck with rapid-fire weapons like shooters and dualies, but occasionally changed it up with a shotgun-like slosher. The weapons you find have numbered levels that generally match your current experience level, so sometimes Raiders will gently push you to try something new. If you haven't found a new version of your preferred weapon type for a while, of course you'll try out a stronger but less familiar weapon. 

The real game-changer is the array of Gadgets. You have three Tank types--Speed, Power, and Tactical--which mostly define your Gadget selection. The Speed tank gives you access to the Booyarang, a spinning weapon that squirts some ink in a small radius, while the Power tank gives you Splatellites that circle around you, and the Tactical tank gives you the Shot Pot auto-turret. Each of the gadgets feel very different from each other, and you're able to develop new Gadgets as you progress through the game. I stuck mostly to the Power Tank and my favorite Gadget, the Splatellite, all throughout.

The game again encourages experimentation with Sampler Dungeons, short trial dungeons that let you test out with a Gadget you may not have tried, and rewards your curiosity with a bonus Skill Point. They're always worth doing because of the bonus, and the curated nature of the stages allows the game to walk you through a lot of the clever applications of the Gadgets.

To get even more creative, each Gadget can also be modified by equipping parts. This is one of the aspects you can upgrade with your Skill Points and it's almost always worth it to do, as enhancing your Gadgets is a major part of finding your own strategy to take on the increasingly tough waves of Salmonids. The Gadget parts offer fairly simple upgrades initially, like enhancing their power or area of effect. But as you find and create more, you can add special effects like scorch damage for the Splatellites, or increased damage the further you fall for your ground-striking Meteor Mitt. 

The array of options leads to creative applications that I was still discovering late in the game. The Splatellites are primarily a defensive weapon, but eventually I had reduced their cooldown so much they could be used almost indefinitely, and they created such a large area of effect that they essentially laid down a track of swimmable ink in front of me while I was in squid form. That made it much easier to quickly traverse the battlefield without having to pause to shoot a swimming path. If I saw, say, a turret tower in the distance, I could just activate my Gadget and swim straight over to make quick work of it. That's just one application, and it feels like I could find many more for each piece of gear. 

For emergencies, you also get to equip one Showstopper ability that is paired to which member of Deep Cut you bring along on your voyages. Those power up as well, but recharge much more slowly than your Gadgets, and fill with eggs from defeated enemies instead of a cooldown. However, these Showstoppers make up for their lengthier wait period by packing a serious punch and the ability to completely change the way a match is going. Shiver's ability, which spawns a massive shark to cut across the battlefield, bailed me out more than a few times. 

In both the case of the Power Tank and Showstopper, though, I eventually hit max level and plateaued. It's clear that Splatoon Raiders wants you to swap between them to power them up, but the stages kept ramping up in difficulty and I would feel underpowered when I tried switching to another. So rather than gain valuable experience for the Speed or Tactical Tank, or for the other two Showstoppers, I was just gaining useless experience points toward skills I had already mastered. It would have been nice if I could have applied this spillover experience to my lesser-used Tanks and Showstoppers to speed up their leveling, but instead I was forced to gain functionally nothing unless I wanted to feel underpowered. 

Keeping up with the level requirements of the stages was a must, because the array of Salmonids gets pretty tough. Like the weapons, these are mostly recognizable from past Splatoon games, but they're given new life here. Many of them are given overpowered "Seasoned" forms, identifiable by a thick layer of salt covering them that makes them extra-tough. Raiders gets a shocking amount of mileage out of rearranging the enemies across different compositions and battlefields, and near the end it starts to get incredibly hectic. Managing the battlefield and prioritizing threats is a harried thrill that never gets old, especially with the promise of sweet loot. 

The stages are usually around 10 minutes, which feels like the ideal length for a casual looter shooter like this. It's just enough time to hop in, take down some enemies, then go back to base to check out your new gear and ready-up to go again. But in the stages that required some level of crystal completion, I would often just hang around and keep taking down Salmonids even after fulfilling the requirement, simply because I was enjoying the satisfaction of taking down enemies. That feels like the mark of a great gameplay loop.

Splatoon Raiders isn't entirely absent of multiplayer. You can group up and take part in co-op raids with enemies that scale up in difficulty, and you'll still get loot and experience from your co-op raids. It's a nice-to-have feature that worked well in my limited pre-release experience, but it's really not the focus here. You could play through the entirety of Splatoon Raiders as a single-player shooter, and it's better for it.

I would be surprised if Splatoon Raiders supplants the main Splatoon titles. The series is a big success for Nintendo, so clearly the competitive ink-splattering multiplayer has found an audience. But Splatoon Raiders shows a new degree of flexibility for the franchise, with a single-player campaign that's much more satisfying than its past attempts to inject a story campaign into the main games. I hope this new looter shooter sub-series gets to live alongside the main series, because it's loads of fun already, and the concept could be pushed even further.

Having now played Resynced, I don't think it is better. That still means Resynced is pretty good. Black Flag is one of the best games in the Assassin's Creed series, and Resynced doesn't change so much that that's no longer the case. The issue is that for every positive change that Resynced makes to Black Flag, it stumbles into creating a new problem.

If you asked me what Black Flag is, I'd tell you it was a treasure hunt. You play as a normal employee of an entertainment company in the 21st century who is scrubbing through the memories of Edward Kenway, a Welsh privateer-turned-pirate trying to make his fortune in the 18th century, via a machine called an Animus. Your mission is initially just to capture footage of Edward's life to make a new media project. However, your research into Edward's memories draws the attention of your bosses. Turns out, Edward stumbled across someone who knew of a site called the Observatory during this period of his life, and your bosses want to know whether Edward ever found it himself. They task you with spending more and more time reliving Edward's life in hopes of finding where it's hidden in the past, so that they can rediscover it for themselves in the modern day. 

You don't know what the Observatory really is or why you're looking for it, and your efforts slowly pull you into a shadow war between freedom-protecting Assassins and order-oriented Templars--and at the same time, you see Edward similarly get pulled into that same conflict 300 years earlier. Mirroring your character's life to Edward's is straightforward but effective narrative framing, and it adds this incredible science-fiction flavoring to what's an already terrific historical fantasy adventure. To date, it's one of the best intertwined present-and-past stories in the series--only the first two Assassin's Creed games do it better.

Resynced gets rid of pretty much all of that. The intro does establish that you're experiencing a simulation of Edward's life via the Animus but doesn't provide any reasoning up front as to why you're doing it. The original game's modern-day missions have been completely stripped away, reframing the entire adventure. It no longer feels like a sci-fi treasure hunt.

Instead, Resynced is a sci-fi rebellion. But you won't get this framing if you just play Resynced's story, as the modern-day missions that provide this framing are all optional.

Resynced is actually a sequel to Assassin's Creed Shadows, not Assassin's Creed III like the original Black Flag. It continues the story of Animus users who have awakened as Travelers to fight against Ego, an artificial intelligence created by the Templars that is now training itself to become the perfect overlord of the human race. If you go out of your way to find them (like really out of your way--the game does not make it easy for you), you can find rifts that allow you to temporarily enter what I can only surmise is the Black Room, where Ego shows you how it would use details of Edward, Blackbeard, and Mary Read's lives to generate what it thinks is a better version of historical events. 

Ego theorizes that if these three pirates' stories were that of a man who returned to his wife, a pirate captain who took the king's pardon, and an Assassin who left the Brotherhood, and all three were ultimately rewarded with wealth and happiness for choosing to live as good little sheep, then perhaps more Animus users like you would be inspired to fall in line rather than embrace a chaotic life and seek out personal fame, fortune, and freedom. In Ego's eyes, the best way to guide humanity into a better future is if the ugliness of the past is erased and replaced with something that is safe and sober, but robbed of all reason and sapped of all spirit.

This. Is. Fascinating! However, this weird-as-hell (in a cool way) sci-fi story is frustratingly tucked away in optional side content that's not easy to find because it's not even marked on the in-game map. You just have to know where to look for these four rifts or spend hours scouring every corner of the Caribbean. And hopefully you've also done all the rifts in Shadows so that you have the context for who Ego is, why the Guide and Eagle are fighting Ego, who the Guide and Eagle even are (it is a whole thing, let me tell you), and what it means for you to be one of the Travelers. 

This bizarre mishandling of the framing device for Resynced's story encapsulates the remake's failings. It does a lot of cool stuff, but it also doesn't use that cool stuff very effectively. It's so bewildering to play this game and see moments of brilliance continuously mishandled. 

I adore what Resynced does for Anne Bonny, for example, a character who takes on an important role in the final chapters of Black Flag but is largely absent for most of the story. Resynced has Anne introduced as soon as Edward returns to Nassau at the very beginning of the game, and she regularly pops up in the story after that in reimagined cutscenes and brand-new missions that further flesh out her importance to Edward. It makes all of the already-great scenes involving her in the later chapters hit even harder. The same is true for Ed Thatch and Stede Bonnet, both of whom also get more screen time and brand-new missions that continue their storylines after their departure from Black Flag's story and give them a more fulfilling end.

So why then does Resynced bother to add brand-new characters who have very little screentime and unrewarding finales to their arcs that leaves them feeling separated from Edward's tale? The remake is fixing the problem of Black Flag's old characters and then adding new characters who have the flaws that were just fixed in the original characters, preserving one of the original problems of Black Flag.

Resynced's other issues aren't nearly as severe, but they all add up and needle at you throughout the experience. Most are a result of trying to fit Black Flag into a new game engine. What the various teams across Ubisoft have been able to accomplish with Ubisoft Anvil is to be commended (Mirage and Resynced feel so much better to play than Origins), but it's still clearly an engine designed for an action-RPG, not a stealth-driven action-adventure. Edward's freerunning is better than the likes of Origins' Bayek or Odyssey's Kassandra, but both the mechanical depth and the feeling of his freerunning still fall behind Unity's Arno and the protagonists who preceded him. 

And while combat does at times feel like a modern take on the counter-heavy combat of Black Flag, the use of pistols, the rope dart, the sweeping kick, and the forward kick is clearly just a cleverly hidden version of the battle abilities from the RPG-style Assassin's Creed games--there's a bit more strategy to using these equipment and skills in Resynced, but not enough to keep combat exciting across a 30-hour story given the poor enemy variety. 

The new animations and voicelines are hit-or-miss too. Many of Edward's new lines add excellent insight to his character during scenes where there previously was none, while some of the new lines--especially his extremely pro-Assassin, anti-Templar one-liners that he spouts with every Assassin Contract--feel like a mischaracterization that makes him oddly heroic during a portion of the game where he has to be a scumbag for the story to work. Brand-new cutscenes add more story, but at the cost of poor facial animations that look like wooden puppets talking to each other. Some of the cutscenes that were in the original game are also somehow worse, with strange facial hiccups (at least on Xbox Series X) distorting the longing glances, winks, smirks, scowls, and contemplative sighs that carried so much narrative weight in the original Black Flag.

Resynced also gives Edward the ability to quietly crouch walk and slink behind cover anywhere, not just stalker zones, and incorporates some of Shadows' uses of weather and darkness to add new considerations to stealth, but the remake's outright removal of all tailing missions (which, admittedly were a pain point in the original game) means these improvements don't have much use. Social stealth is also back in Resynced (great!) but almost every mission that relied on those mechanics has been removed or changed, meaning there's little chance to engage with it (bad!). 

In fact, when it comes to the mass deletion of all mandatory tailing missions and changing almost every social stealth mission so that they no longer rely on stealth mechanics, Resynced feels like too big of a swing in the other direction, recreating Black Flag into a game like the action-packed adventures of Kassandra or Eivor. And that makes sense--all of these games are made in the same engine.

The issue is that, unlike those games, Resynced isn't an RPG--there are no ways for Edward to talk his way through problems, disguise himself, or create clever opportunities. He can only engage through the action part of the action-RPG formula. So instead of having missions with a wide variety and breadth of structure, you're still mostly doing the same thing over and over. Resynced might have been a stronger experience if only half of the social stealth-driven tailing missions were removed, as changing pretty much all of them and moving Edward's story in a more action-oriented direction simply shifts one problem into another. 

Weird camera cuts and dramatic perspective shifts during assassination takedowns and chain kills also make it irritatingly tricky to keep track of enemies in enclosed spaces, like caves or the decks of smaller ships--it's totally fine to have this in the wide-open locales of Origins' Egypt or Odyssey's Greece, but it clashes with Black Flag's structure. The game hasn't changed enough to fit the new game engine, which leads me to wonder why this wasn't just a brand-new pirate adventure during this time period that followed a new protagonist. Edward meets so many other Assassins! We didn't need to stick to the rigidity of his story again if it doesn't really fit the mechanics of this new game engine.

I could go on but the point remains: There are plenty of great changes in Resynced, but equally a ton of pain points in trying to force the Black Flag structure to fit into an engine designed for a very different type of Assassin's Creed. This makes Resynced less of a new gold standard for Edward's adventure, and more of a bizzaro-world variation of the original Black Flag. If you haven't played Black Flag (or at least don't revisit it often), you should play Resynced, because even though it doesn't feel like a faithful remake to me, it is still remaking a game that's already critically acclaimed. But if you have played Black Flag, I'm not sure if Resynced will hit you as hard emotionally as you're hoping for.

All said, I regard Resynced with the exact same sentiments as Mass Effect Legendary Edition. Resynced goes beyond the scope of a traditional remaster and adjusts the content of Black Flag to make improvements to the experience (what you'd expect for a remake). But the downside to these fixes is that it highlights problems that weren't fixed or, even worse, new problems that didn't even exist in the original game. Resynced is a half-step toward something truly fantastic. If you play it, you will see the strengths of Black Flag. You will see why the original game was the de facto pirate video game for years. But you will also find a remake that doesn't manage to take the crown from the very game that it's remaking.

Having now played Resynced, I don't think it is better. That still means Resynced is pretty good. Black Flag is one of the best games in the Assassin's Creed series, and Resynced doesn't change so much that that's no longer the case. The issue is that for every positive change that Resynced makes to Black Flag, it stumbles into creating a new problem.

If you asked me what Black Flag is, I'd tell you it was a treasure hunt. You play as a normal employee of an entertainment company in the 21st century who is scrubbing through the memories of Edward Kenway, a Welsh privateer-turned-pirate trying to make his fortune in the 18th century, via a machine called an Animus. Your mission is initially just to capture footage of Edward's life to make a new media project. However, your research into Edward's memories draws the attention of your bosses. Turns out, Edward stumbled across someone who knew of a site called the Observatory during this period of his life, and your bosses want to know whether Edward ever found it himself. They task you with spending more and more time reliving Edward's life in hopes of finding where it's hidden in the past, so that they can rediscover it for themselves in the modern day. 

You don't know what the Observatory really is or why you're looking for it, and your efforts slowly pull you into a shadow war between freedom-protecting Assassins and order-oriented Templars--and at the same time, you see Edward similarly get pulled into that same conflict 300 years earlier. Mirroring your character's life to Edward's is straightforward but effective narrative framing, and it adds this incredible science-fiction flavoring to what's an already terrific historical fantasy adventure. To date, it's one of the best intertwined present-and-past stories in the series--only the first two Assassin's Creed games do it better.

Resynced gets rid of pretty much all of that. The intro does establish that you're experiencing a simulation of Edward's life via the Animus but doesn't provide any reasoning up front as to why you're doing it. The original game's modern-day missions have been completely stripped away, reframing the entire adventure. It no longer feels like a sci-fi treasure hunt.

Instead, Resynced is a sci-fi rebellion. But you won't get this framing if you just play Resynced's story, as the modern-day missions that provide this framing are all optional.

Resynced is actually a sequel to Assassin's Creed Shadows, not Assassin's Creed III like the original Black Flag. It continues the story of Animus users who have awakened as Travelers to fight against Ego, an artificial intelligence created by the Templars that is now training itself to become the perfect overlord of the human race. If you go out of your way to find them (like really out of your way--the game does not make it easy for you), you can find rifts that allow you to temporarily enter what I can only surmise is the Black Room, where Ego shows you how it would use details of Edward, Blackbeard, and Mary Read's lives to generate what it thinks is a better version of historical events. 

Ego theorizes that if these three pirates' stories were that of a man who returned to his wife, a pirate captain who took the king's pardon, and an Assassin who left the Brotherhood, and all three were ultimately rewarded with wealth and happiness for choosing to live as good little sheep, then perhaps more Animus users like you would be inspired to fall in line rather than embrace a chaotic life and seek out personal fame, fortune, and freedom. In Ego's eyes, the best way to guide humanity into a better future is if the ugliness of the past is erased and replaced with something that is safe and sober, but robbed of all reason and sapped of all spirit.

This. Is. Fascinating! However, this weird-as-hell (in a cool way) sci-fi story is frustratingly tucked away in optional side content that's not easy to find because it's not even marked on the in-game map. You just have to know where to look for these four rifts or spend hours scouring every corner of the Caribbean. And hopefully you've also done all the rifts in Shadows so that you have the context for who Ego is, why the Guide and Eagle are fighting Ego, who the Guide and Eagle even are (it is a whole thing, let me tell you), and what it means for you to be one of the Travelers. 

This bizarre mishandling of the framing device for Resynced's story encapsulates the remake's failings. It does a lot of cool stuff, but it also doesn't use that cool stuff very effectively. It's so bewildering to play this game and see moments of brilliance continuously mishandled. 

I adore what Resynced does for Anne Bonny, for example, a character who takes on an important role in the final chapters of Black Flag but is largely absent for most of the story. Resynced has Anne introduced as soon as Edward returns to Nassau at the very beginning of the game, and she regularly pops up in the story after that in reimagined cutscenes and brand-new missions that further flesh out her importance to Edward. It makes all of the already-great scenes involving her in the later chapters hit even harder. The same is true for Ed Thatch and Stede Bonnet, both of whom also get more screen time and brand-new missions that continue their storylines after their departure from Black Flag's story and give them a more fulfilling end.

So why then does Resynced bother to add brand-new characters who have very little screentime and unrewarding finales to their arcs that leaves them feeling separated from Edward's tale? The remake is fixing the problem of Black Flag's old characters and then adding new characters who have the flaws that were just fixed in the original characters, preserving one of the original problems of Black Flag.

Resynced's other issues aren't nearly as severe, but they all add up and needle at you throughout the experience. Most are a result of trying to fit Black Flag into a new game engine. What the various teams across Ubisoft have been able to accomplish with Ubisoft Anvil is to be commended (Mirage and Resynced feel so much better to play than Origins), but it's still clearly an engine designed for an action-RPG, not a stealth-driven action-adventure. Edward's freerunning is better than the likes of Origins' Bayek or Odyssey's Kassandra, but both the mechanical depth and the feeling of his freerunning still fall behind Unity's Arno and the protagonists who preceded him. 

And while combat does at times feel like a modern take on the counter-heavy combat of Black Flag, the use of pistols, the rope dart, the sweeping kick, and the forward kick is clearly just a cleverly hidden version of the battle abilities from the RPG-style Assassin's Creed games--there's a bit more strategy to using these equipment and skills in Resynced, but not enough to keep combat exciting across a 30-hour story given the poor enemy variety. 

The new animations and voicelines are hit-or-miss too. Many of Edward's new lines add excellent insight to his character during scenes where there previously was none, while some of the new lines--especially his extremely pro-Assassin, anti-Templar one-liners that he spouts with every Assassin Contract--feel like a mischaracterization that makes him oddly heroic during a portion of the game where he has to be a scumbag for the story to work. Brand-new cutscenes add more story, but at the cost of poor facial animations that look like wooden puppets talking to each other. Some of the cutscenes that were in the original game are also somehow worse, with strange facial hiccups (at least on Xbox Series X) distorting the longing glances, winks, smirks, scowls, and contemplative sighs that carried so much narrative weight in the original Black Flag.

Resynced also gives Edward the ability to quietly crouch walk and slink behind cover anywhere, not just stalker zones, and incorporates some of Shadows' uses of weather and darkness to add new considerations to stealth, but the remake's outright removal of all tailing missions (which, admittedly were a pain point in the original game) means these improvements don't have much use. Social stealth is also back in Resynced (great!) but almost every mission that relied on those mechanics has been removed or changed, meaning there's little chance to engage with it (bad!). 

In fact, when it comes to the mass deletion of all mandatory tailing missions and changing almost every social stealth mission so that they no longer rely on stealth mechanics, Resynced feels like too big of a swing in the other direction, recreating Black Flag into a game like the action-packed adventures of Kassandra or Eivor. And that makes sense--all of these games are made in the same engine.

The issue is that, unlike those games, Resynced isn't an RPG--there are no ways for Edward to talk his way through problems, disguise himself, or create clever opportunities. He can only engage through the action part of the action-RPG formula. So instead of having missions with a wide variety and breadth of structure, you're still mostly doing the same thing over and over. Resynced might have been a stronger experience if only half of the social stealth-driven tailing missions were removed, as changing pretty much all of them and moving Edward's story in a more action-oriented direction simply shifts one problem into another. 

Weird camera cuts and dramatic perspective shifts during assassination takedowns and chain kills also make it irritatingly tricky to keep track of enemies in enclosed spaces, like caves or the decks of smaller ships--it's totally fine to have this in the wide-open locales of Origins' Egypt or Odyssey's Greece, but it clashes with Black Flag's structure. The game hasn't changed enough to fit the new game engine, which leads me to wonder why this wasn't just a brand-new pirate adventure during this time period that followed a new protagonist. Edward meets so many other Assassins! We didn't need to stick to the rigidity of his story again if it doesn't really fit the mechanics of this new game engine.

I could go on but the point remains: There are plenty of great changes in Resynced, but equally a ton of pain points in trying to force the Black Flag structure to fit into an engine designed for a very different type of Assassin's Creed. This makes Resynced less of a new gold standard for Edward's adventure, and more of a bizzaro-world variation of the original Black Flag. If you haven't played Black Flag (or at least don't revisit it often), you should play Resynced, because even though it doesn't feel like a faithful remake to me, it is still remaking a game that's already critically acclaimed. But if you have played Black Flag, I'm not sure if Resynced will hit you as hard emotionally as you're hoping for.

All said, I regard Resynced with the exact same sentiments as Mass Effect Legendary Edition. Resynced goes beyond the scope of a traditional remaster and adjusts the content of Black Flag to make improvements to the experience (what you'd expect for a remake). But the downside to these fixes is that it highlights problems that weren't fixed or, even worse, new problems that didn't even exist in the original game. Resynced is a half-step toward something truly fantastic. If you play it, you will see the strengths of Black Flag. You will see why the original game was the de facto pirate video game for years. But you will also find a remake that doesn't manage to take the crown from the very game that it's remaking.

The influences from WarioWare will be obvious to anyone who has played that long-running gonzo microgame series, but unlike those, the individual games in Rhythm Heaven Groove last much longer than a few seconds. After a short practice round to learn the rhythm and button prompts, you go into the actual performance that mixes together commands to the rhythm of a song. Almost all of your commands are mapped to the A button, but more complicated arrangements add one of the D-pad buttons for a different command. In an early game where you're driving a stunt car for a commercial, for example, the A button accelerates while the D-pad Down hits the brakes, so you need to alternate between them on command to stay aligned with the other stunt cars.

The WarioWare spirit shines through in both the art style--an eclectic blend of crude simplicity, chunky cartoonism, and occasional hyper-realism--and also in the gonzo spirit of the games themselves. The stunt car example is one of the more normal ones, but many of the games are downright bizarre. Across the breadth of Rhythm Heaven, you'll have to jump and roll as a cat doll, bounce fruits off your muscles as a bodybuilder, sort delicious pudding from tainted living pudding cups as a factory robot, and jump over windshield wipers during a rainstorm. The game frequently surprises you with new creative applications that all feel different, even if they're mechanically very similar. That sense of surprise meant that even when I didn't like a game as much, I loved seeing the creativity.

In addition to adapting to each game's rhythm, you also often have to contend with distractions in the background. The kitty-hopping game--Hop, Stop, N Roll--transforms the background from a simple wood-paneled design to a kaleidoscopic beach scene, so part of the challenge is keeping your concentration and the beat going while the world changes around you. When you learn to "read" the games, you also start to notice little signs about your performance, like your fellow performer in the umbrella-folding game shooting you a dirty look if your timing was just slightly off. 

While the WarioWare influence is obvious, my time with Rhythm Heaven Groove also reminded me of another long-lost rhythm game: Elite Beat Agents. While no game has quite substituted for EBA's charm, mixing storytelling with pop songs and rhythmic touch screen taps, Rhythm Heaven Groove is similarly focused on nailing your percussive beats. The sound design has excellent feedback with a sharp, snappy snare that punctuates even harder when you nail a beat perfectly. Sometimes I would simply close my eyes to feel my way through the rhythm, and it worked just as well as watching on-screen. Everything has a sound cue, so this is one game you actually can play blindfolded. 

My absolute favorite aspect of Rhythm Heaven Groove, though, were the Remix stages. Each column consists of four stages, and they all feel varied as you're playing them and climbing the tower. When you reach the top, all four get remixed into one game, sometimes set to a real, credited J-pop song. At this point, all those games that seemed so different feel like different parts of the same whole, and you get to see them coming together. Sometimes a game will even fade into another mid-beat, showing you that you're actually keeping the same rhythm across both. It's a very cool magic trick. 

That said, the mapping of commands onto the D-pad would occasionally trip me up, because it wasn't always the same D-pad button across each game. Since the Remix stages start without any warm-up time, I would sometimes finish a set of stages and come back to do the Remix later, only to discover I had completely forgotten which D-pad button to use. Aside from trial and error, the only solution is to quit out and find the individual minigames, and then redo their practice modes as a reminder. It's not terribly intuitive, and there's not any particular reason the D-pad prompt couldn't just be consistent throughout all of the minigames. Yes it's a little more elegant that D-Pad Left triggers a crab claw and D-Pad Down hits the car brakes, but would it really matter if they were the same? On that one point, the game became less about rhythm and more about memorization, which undermined the fun. 

And as much fun as it was in handheld, I struggled with playing Rhythm Heaven Groove on my TV. To its credit, the game recognizes when you've hooked it up to your TV for the first time and conducts a quick calibration game in an effort to reduce the effects of lag. But even after going through that, I struggled to hit my marks across several games playing on my TV with a Pro Controller, even in games I had already mastered in handheld mode. The game does note that some TVs just behave differently than others, so your mileage may vary.  

Those same struggles with TV lag may have impacted my multiplayer experience, but not enough to detract from the fun. I dabbled in all the games with my two kids of varying ages, and after some early struggles, we found a handful of favorites that created the kind of raucous party atmosphere that Rhythm Heaven is obviously going for. There's a great mix of competitive and cooperative game types, and unlike the single-player columns that offer different games as you climb, these offer new twists on the games you've already mastered. We were only playing with two players at a time, but it fills in the extra spots with bots regardless of your player count for a total of four. As long as you have at least one buddy, you can play all of the multiplayer games.

So many of the multiplayer games are strong that it's hard to pick favorites, but a few stand out. A virus-busting game shoots a disease through tubes, so you have to pin them with precise timing as they come, and your position in the four quadrants of protection rotates each turn. A tennis game imitates an RPG as you lob balls to defeat approaching enemies and save a prince. Cake Wait revolves around waiting until exactly 3 o'clock to grab the single slice of cake on the table, testing your ability to count down on-tempo. An Arkanoid-like arrow-shooting game has you break bricks protecting a bomb as you race to be the first to hit and detonate it. There is even a card-flipping memory game, but instead of pictures, you're matching particular drum rhythms as displayed by toe-tapping chickens. All of these are delivered with the same goofball spirit as the rest of the game, which makes it disarmingly funny. 

Still, multiplayer lends itself to the big-screen experience of a TV, and we did occasionally find it hard to master the timing in some minigames. One of the first, in which you pluck hairs from an onion, consistently tripped us up, even after going back to it once we had performed much better on some of the other games. It's hard to say if this was due to TV lag or if that particular game is just surprisingly strict, but it was a noticeable change from the kooky fun of the others to consistently failing out of that one.

Nintendo is one of the biggest and oldest game publishers in the world, so it feels strange to say that something it made carries itself with indie sensibilities. But that's always been true of WarioWare, and by extension, it's true of Rhythm Heaven Groove. It's such a strange, low-fi game that it comes off as if the team is getting away with something while the boss isn't looking. But it's also a genuinely welcome addition to my Switch collection, because it's such an oddity. Whenever I feel the need to tap my toes while feeling the beat of a tadpole march, or invite my friends to compete in a foot race as lucha libre across giant bouncy balls, I'll return to Rhythm Heaven.

The influences from WarioWare will be obvious to anyone who has played that long-running gonzo microgame series, but unlike those, the individual games in Rhythm Heaven Groove last much longer than a few seconds. After a short practice round to learn the rhythm and button prompts, you go into the actual performance that mixes together commands to the rhythm of a song. Almost all of your commands are mapped to the A button, but more complicated arrangements add one of the D-pad buttons for a different command. In an early game where you're driving a stunt car for a commercial, for example, the A button accelerates while the D-pad Down hits the brakes, so you need to alternate between them on command to stay aligned with the other stunt cars.

The WarioWare spirit shines through in both the art style--an eclectic blend of crude simplicity, chunky cartoonism, and occasional hyper-realism--and also in the gonzo spirit of the games themselves. The stunt car example is one of the more normal ones, but many of the games are downright bizarre. Across the breadth of Rhythm Heaven, you'll have to jump and roll as a cat doll, bounce fruits off your muscles as a bodybuilder, sort delicious pudding from tainted living pudding cups as a factory robot, and jump over windshield wipers during a rainstorm. The game frequently surprises you with new creative applications that all feel different, even if they're mechanically very similar. That sense of surprise meant that even when I didn't like a game as much, I loved seeing the creativity.

In addition to adapting to each game's rhythm, you also often have to contend with distractions in the background. The kitty-hopping game--Hop, Stop, N Roll--transforms the background from a simple wood-paneled design to a kaleidoscopic beach scene, so part of the challenge is keeping your concentration and the beat going while the world changes around you. When you learn to "read" the games, you also start to notice little signs about your performance, like your fellow performer in the umbrella-folding game shooting you a dirty look if your timing was just slightly off. 

While the WarioWare influence is obvious, my time with Rhythm Heaven Groove also reminded me of another long-lost rhythm game: Elite Beat Agents. While no game has quite substituted for EBA's charm, mixing storytelling with pop songs and rhythmic touch screen taps, Rhythm Heaven Groove is similarly focused on nailing your percussive beats. The sound design has excellent feedback with a sharp, snappy snare that punctuates even harder when you nail a beat perfectly. Sometimes I would simply close my eyes to feel my way through the rhythm, and it worked just as well as watching on-screen. Everything has a sound cue, so this is one game you actually can play blindfolded. 

My absolute favorite aspect of Rhythm Heaven Groove, though, were the Remix stages. Each column consists of four stages, and they all feel varied as you're playing them and climbing the tower. When you reach the top, all four get remixed into one game, sometimes set to a real, credited J-pop song. At this point, all those games that seemed so different feel like different parts of the same whole, and you get to see them coming together. Sometimes a game will even fade into another mid-beat, showing you that you're actually keeping the same rhythm across both. It's a very cool magic trick. 

That said, the mapping of commands onto the D-pad would occasionally trip me up, because it wasn't always the same D-pad button across each game. Since the Remix stages start without any warm-up time, I would sometimes finish a set of stages and come back to do the Remix later, only to discover I had completely forgotten which D-pad button to use. Aside from trial and error, the only solution is to quit out and find the individual minigames, and then redo their practice modes as a reminder. It's not terribly intuitive, and there's not any particular reason the D-pad prompt couldn't just be consistent throughout all of the minigames. Yes it's a little more elegant that D-Pad Left triggers a crab claw and D-Pad Down hits the car brakes, but would it really matter if they were the same? On that one point, the game became less about rhythm and more about memorization, which undermined the fun. 

And as much fun as it was in handheld, I struggled with playing Rhythm Heaven Groove on my TV. To its credit, the game recognizes when you've hooked it up to your TV for the first time and conducts a quick calibration game in an effort to reduce the effects of lag. But even after going through that, I struggled to hit my marks across several games playing on my TV with a Pro Controller, even in games I had already mastered in handheld mode. The game does note that some TVs just behave differently than others, so your mileage may vary.  

Those same struggles with TV lag may have impacted my multiplayer experience, but not enough to detract from the fun. I dabbled in all the games with my two kids of varying ages, and after some early struggles, we found a handful of favorites that created the kind of raucous party atmosphere that Rhythm Heaven is obviously going for. There's a great mix of competitive and cooperative game types, and unlike the single-player columns that offer different games as you climb, these offer new twists on the games you've already mastered. We were only playing with two players at a time, but it fills in the extra spots with bots regardless of your player count for a total of four. As long as you have at least one buddy, you can play all of the multiplayer games.

So many of the multiplayer games are strong that it's hard to pick favorites, but a few stand out. A virus-busting game shoots a disease through tubes, so you have to pin them with precise timing as they come, and your position in the four quadrants of protection rotates each turn. A tennis game imitates an RPG as you lob balls to defeat approaching enemies and save a prince. Cake Wait revolves around waiting until exactly 3 o'clock to grab the single slice of cake on the table, testing your ability to count down on-tempo. An Arkanoid-like arrow-shooting game has you break bricks protecting a bomb as you race to be the first to hit and detonate it. There is even a card-flipping memory game, but instead of pictures, you're matching particular drum rhythms as displayed by toe-tapping chickens. All of these are delivered with the same goofball spirit as the rest of the game, which makes it disarmingly funny. 

Still, multiplayer lends itself to the big-screen experience of a TV, and we did occasionally find it hard to master the timing in some minigames. One of the first, in which you pluck hairs from an onion, consistently tripped us up, even after going back to it once we had performed much better on some of the other games. It's hard to say if this was due to TV lag or if that particular game is just surprisingly strict, but it was a noticeable change from the kooky fun of the others to consistently failing out of that one.

Nintendo is one of the biggest and oldest game publishers in the world, so it feels strange to say that something it made carries itself with indie sensibilities. But that's always been true of WarioWare, and by extension, it's true of Rhythm Heaven Groove. It's such a strange, low-fi game that it comes off as if the team is getting away with something while the boss isn't looking. But it's also a genuinely welcome addition to my Switch collection, because it's such an oddity. Whenever I feel the need to tap my toes while feeling the beat of a tadpole march, or invite my friends to compete in a foot race as lucha libre across giant bouncy balls, I'll return to Rhythm Heaven.

For the uninitiated, or perhaps those who just learned about ultra-cool guy Fox McCloud from his spotlight-stealing cameo in the Mario Galaxy movie, Star Fox takes place in a galaxy called the Lylat system, composed of anthropomorphic animals with futuristic space-travel technology. Star Fox is a group of well-funded fighter-jock mercenaries who are regularly called upon by a military general, a dog named Pepper, to assist their space-combat operations. 

As established in an opening cutscene, some years ago Fox's father, James McCloud, was en route to investigate questionable activity on a planet named Venom, when his wingmate Pigma betrayed him to the mad scientist Andross. James was lost, his trusty wingman Peppy escaped, and Andross kept quietly assembling his army for an invasion of the rest of the Lylat system. 

That sequence establishes one of the major new features of this remake: fully animated cutscenes. And to their credit, these are very well-made sequences. The aerial stunts look cool while staying true to the original spirit where needed, and the voice acting has been updated to facilitate the expanded scope. The more realistic character designs were divisive when shown off earlier this year, but I felt fine with them from the beginning, and after spending some time seeing them animated in cutscenes, I've come to really appreciate the look. Their faces are nicely expressive and textures like fur give them a sense of realism, while still staying in the fantastical world of space animals. The vast majority of the cutscenes take place aboard their docking ship, the Great Fox, as they discuss strategy, but the characters are still given lots of characterization in their movements and gestures to express their perspectives and personalities. For example, Falco rolls his eyes a lot, because he is above all kind of a jerk.

A similarly heightened level of visual fidelity is present in the stages themselves, which look recognizable to their N64 counterparts without feeling too beholden to their jagged edges and geometry. While all of the stages look great, the upgraded style is most impressive when it shows off new flourishes that weren't available in the original, like the lighting effects of your lasers reflecting off of surfaces and illuminating dark caves. Star Fox 64 always excelled at stage variety, but this remake accentuates it by making each stage appear vastly different than the rest. I especially loved revisiting the stages that are major departures from the others, like the water world Aquas, the surface of the sun on Solar, or the wacky and kaleidoscopic Meteos wormhole. 

Revisiting all the areas takes at least a few runs because of how the stage layout has worked since the original. One of the coolest aspects of Star Fox 64, and again here, is the ability to carve your way from one side of the galaxy to another in a relatively freeform fashion, completing optional objectives. In broad terms, you can see the three paths as Easy, Medium, and Hard, but you aren't limited to one track. If you know how to find your way, you can easily hop between paths throughout, so you aren't committed to only staying on one difficulty track. Completing a hidden objective that opens the harder path will always let you switch to the easier one, but if you only complete the easier objective, you can't switch to the harder path.

In the original Star Fox 64, this was presented rather plainly, with a blue, yellow, or red line showing where you can go. In this version, it's given a good deal more panache, thanks again to the new extended cutscenes. Rather than simply present you with a choice of locations for your next mission, each mission starts with General Pepper debriefing from the last mission and explaining the strategic importance of both next possible locations. One might have a suspected bioweapon while the other is an outpost under attack. In each case Pepper outlines why Star Fox is the best or perhaps only available force to complete this mission. And since there's some overlap, as you could approach a planet from different directions, it's particularly impressive how these cutscenes stitch different pieces together without feeling noticeably disjointed. 

These all lead to the same outcome, of course. You're ultimately headed toward Venom no matter what, and it doesn't make a difference in the end whether you went to Sector X or Solar, but it does a good job of tying the journey together and giving each mission an appropriate amount of weight. Sometimes I even felt bad abandoning one planet in need for another, even knowing that it doesn't have any impact.

The extended cutscenes also help define the characters' relationships with each other and with General Pepper. Falco has always been portrayed as a cocky hotshot, but here we get to see him slowly warming to Fox's leadership. Peppy is the assured veteran who trusts Fox will come into his own as a leader. We even get some insight about why the team keeps Slippy around, as the cutscenes sell him as a machinist wunderkind who's always two steps ahead in anticipating their equipment needs. And Fox, for his part, is played as the cool Han Solo type--a mercenary needling General Pepper to pay for their valuable services, even if he's obviously going to do the heroic thing regardless. 

Wayfinding to new paths is a little easier this time around too. Dialogue will drop hints about what to do to open new paths, without being overly on the nose or spelling it out for you. If you miss an optional objective, it's easier to restart a stage from the beginning or from your most recent checkpoint, and doing so doesn't even cost you a life or eliminate your laser upgrades or bombs. You can even entirely complete a stage, see where it leads, and then go back and do it again immediately to try for another way. 

That said, I was surprised that each run through the Lylat system is treated as its own distinct game progression, just like the original. That means that once you finish the game, you'll need to start anew on Corneria and cut your path through from the beginning. This is true to the original, and I don't mind the faithfulness, to a point. But for returning fans who already know their way around, it would have been nice to have the option to track which paths you've already opened and let you jump back to planets, eventually creating a fully filled-out star map.

And while the updated visuals are often gorgeous, they do come with some trade-offs that take getting used to. For one thing, your targets are a lot less obvious with much more happening on-screen, visually, so it's easier to miss a flyer who gets away. In boss battles, weak points are less obvious than the glowing vulnerabilities of the original, and they don't flash as brightly when you land a successful hit to let you know that you're doing damage. And with the higher fidelity making everything look much more like it has weight and bulk, it's a little strange when a capital warship in Area 6 explodes like an empty cardboard box.

The other marquee feature of this release is multiplayer, which adds online play, and GameChat camera integration for animalistic avatars. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to try any of the pre-release online multiplayer sessions, so I'll have to reserve my judgments on that aspect until I can try it in a live environment. We'll update this review once we've been able to sufficiently test it out.

Star Fox is a remake, but it also appears to be an attempt at a reset. The franchise has never really found its footing, despite clearly having a lot of love from Nintendo. This story has always felt like a starting point, establishing the characters and hinting at their backstory. So altogether, this remake may be the best possible way to give the series a fresh start. At the same time, the original still holds up very well, and if you have Switch Online with the Expansion Pass, you can already play it. That makes this hard to recommend, which is a shame. If Nintendo means this to be a new beginning for Star Fox, retreading familiar ground undermines the effort.

For the uninitiated, or perhaps those who just learned about ultra-cool guy Fox McCloud from his spotlight-stealing cameo in the Mario Galaxy movie, Star Fox takes place in a galaxy called the Lylat system, composed of anthropomorphic animals with futuristic space-travel technology. Star Fox is a group of well-funded fighter-jock mercenaries who are regularly called upon by a military general, a dog named Pepper, to assist their space-combat operations. 

As established in an opening cutscene, some years ago Fox's father, James McCloud, was en route to investigate questionable activity on a planet named Venom, when his wingmate Pigma betrayed him to the mad scientist Andross. James was lost, his trusty wingman Peppy escaped, and Andross kept quietly assembling his army for an invasion of the rest of the Lylat system. 

That sequence establishes one of the major new features of this remake: fully animated cutscenes. And to their credit, these are very well-made sequences. The aerial stunts look cool while staying true to the original spirit where needed, and the voice acting has been updated to facilitate the expanded scope. The more realistic character designs were divisive when shown off earlier this year, but I felt fine with them from the beginning, and after spending some time seeing them animated in cutscenes, I've come to really appreciate the look. Their faces are nicely expressive and textures like fur give them a sense of realism, while still staying in the fantastical world of space animals. The vast majority of the cutscenes take place aboard their docking ship, the Great Fox, as they discuss strategy, but the characters are still given lots of characterization in their movements and gestures to express their perspectives and personalities. For example, Falco rolls his eyes a lot, because he is above all kind of a jerk.

A similarly heightened level of visual fidelity is present in the stages themselves, which look recognizable to their N64 counterparts without feeling too beholden to their jagged edges and geometry. While all of the stages look great, the upgraded style is most impressive when it shows off new flourishes that weren't available in the original, like the lighting effects of your lasers reflecting off of surfaces and illuminating dark caves. Star Fox 64 always excelled at stage variety, but this remake accentuates it by making each stage appear vastly different than the rest. I especially loved revisiting the stages that are major departures from the others, like the water world Aquas, the surface of the sun on Solar, or the wacky and kaleidoscopic Meteos wormhole. 

Revisiting all the areas takes at least a few runs because of how the stage layout has worked since the original. One of the coolest aspects of Star Fox 64, and again here, is the ability to carve your way from one side of the galaxy to another in a relatively freeform fashion, completing optional objectives. In broad terms, you can see the three paths as Easy, Medium, and Hard, but you aren't limited to one track. If you know how to find your way, you can easily hop between paths throughout, so you aren't committed to only staying on one difficulty track. Completing a hidden objective that opens the harder path will always let you switch to the easier one, but if you only complete the easier objective, you can't switch to the harder path.

In the original Star Fox 64, this was presented rather plainly, with a blue, yellow, or red line showing where you can go. In this version, it's given a good deal more panache, thanks again to the new extended cutscenes. Rather than simply present you with a choice of locations for your next mission, each mission starts with General Pepper debriefing from the last mission and explaining the strategic importance of both next possible locations. One might have a suspected bioweapon while the other is an outpost under attack. In each case Pepper outlines why Star Fox is the best or perhaps only available force to complete this mission. And since there's some overlap, as you could approach a planet from different directions, it's particularly impressive how these cutscenes stitch different pieces together without feeling noticeably disjointed. 

These all lead to the same outcome, of course. You're ultimately headed toward Venom no matter what, and it doesn't make a difference in the end whether you went to Sector X or Solar, but it does a good job of tying the journey together and giving each mission an appropriate amount of weight. Sometimes I even felt bad abandoning one planet in need for another, even knowing that it doesn't have any impact.

The extended cutscenes also help define the characters' relationships with each other and with General Pepper. Falco has always been portrayed as a cocky hotshot, but here we get to see him slowly warming to Fox's leadership. Peppy is the assured veteran who trusts Fox will come into his own as a leader. We even get some insight about why the team keeps Slippy around, as the cutscenes sell him as a machinist wunderkind who's always two steps ahead in anticipating their equipment needs. And Fox, for his part, is played as the cool Han Solo type--a mercenary needling General Pepper to pay for their valuable services, even if he's obviously going to do the heroic thing regardless. 

Wayfinding to new paths is a little easier this time around too. Dialogue will drop hints about what to do to open new paths, without being overly on the nose or spelling it out for you. If you miss an optional objective, it's easier to restart a stage from the beginning or from your most recent checkpoint, and doing so doesn't even cost you a life or eliminate your laser upgrades or bombs. You can even entirely complete a stage, see where it leads, and then go back and do it again immediately to try for another way. 

That said, I was surprised that each run through the Lylat system is treated as its own distinct game progression, just like the original. That means that once you finish the game, you'll need to start anew on Corneria and cut your path through from the beginning. This is true to the original, and I don't mind the faithfulness, to a point. But for returning fans who already know their way around, it would have been nice to have the option to track which paths you've already opened and let you jump back to planets, eventually creating a fully filled-out star map.

And while the updated visuals are often gorgeous, they do come with some trade-offs that take getting used to. For one thing, your targets are a lot less obvious with much more happening on-screen, visually, so it's easier to miss a flyer who gets away. In boss battles, weak points are less obvious than the glowing vulnerabilities of the original, and they don't flash as brightly when you land a successful hit to let you know that you're doing damage. And with the higher fidelity making everything look much more like it has weight and bulk, it's a little strange when a capital warship in Area 6 explodes like an empty cardboard box.

The other marquee feature of this release is multiplayer, which adds online play, and GameChat camera integration for animalistic avatars. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to try any of the pre-release online multiplayer sessions, so I'll have to reserve my judgments on that aspect until I can try it in a live environment. We'll update this review once we've been able to sufficiently test it out.

Star Fox is a remake, but it also appears to be an attempt at a reset. The franchise has never really found its footing, despite clearly having a lot of love from Nintendo. This story has always felt like a starting point, establishing the characters and hinting at their backstory. So altogether, this remake may be the best possible way to give the series a fresh start. At the same time, the original still holds up very well, and if you have Switch Online with the Expansion Pass, you can already play it. That makes this hard to recommend, which is a shame. If Nintendo means this to be a new beginning for Star Fox, retreading familiar ground undermines the effort.