Tom Berck

We’re big fans of crafting games in this household, and DQB2 is a really excellent addition to the genre. Having just beaten Subnautica below zero, a much more “serious” survival game, I was skeptical about a cube-based builder in the Minecraft style — but DQB2 (despite finicky controls) removes all the little inconveniences one typically associates with that style: your inventory will never get full; your water bucket never runs out; you have an AI companion who takes care of combat. All this while offering a wonderfully varued selection of items/blocks, a shockingly robust building system, and a huge cast of charming npc’s. I love the inclusion of these jrpg-style npc’s. If you build a kitchen or a bathroom or a shower, these characters will cheer and applaud for you, as well as *actually use the rooms*. Phenomenal. It’s like multiplayer Minecraft, but the other players focus on farming or cooking so you can do the exploring and building, as should always be the case. It’s really gratifying. The world is enormous and brimming over with storylines and secrets and unique sights and sounds.

Starfield was a huge disappointment. I’ve been a fan of the Bethesda games since Morrowind, played and beat all the Fallout games. I put this one down after 29 eyeroll inducing hours. Now, listen: I knew we were off to a rocky start during character creation — you can choose your pronouns, including using they/them pronouns (Awesome! We love to see it!), but every single one of the traits you can choose at creation are *absolutely terrible.* A couple of them are good for a laugh. Their gameplay value? Mixed at best. The main story is nonsense, but the game doesn’t even really try to sell me the nonsense. The game knows its story is nonsense, and so doesn’t even bother to make the nonsense interesting. I thought we were supposed to be flying around colonized space and alien worlds? Why am I spending 75% of my time murdering human cultists, pirates, and ‘spacers’ (a pejorative term for space homeless people) in abandoned outposts, deserted mines, and trashed space stations? Why is this just fallout 4 but with vastly less variety in opponents? Notice how I didn’t call this “fallout 4 in space”? It’s because space is lame in Starfield. You fly around in space, sure — you can upgrade your ship, customize it, all that. But you don’t *go* anywhere, in space. The “space” portion of Starfield amounts to a star fox-ish mini game where you may get a random encounter, that takes place between fast-travel actions. You see that planet below you? You cannot fly to it yourself. You do not land on it yourself. These actions are all short cinematics that play when you press X in a menu. This all crystallized for me the moment I completed a not-bad little quest, was rewarded with a totally dope new ship, and then realized I had nothing cool to do with that dope ship. I could kill pirates with it better than my last one. Whoopee. The inclusive character creation options are really cool — but why is it that only Americans seemed to make it out to space? There aren’t languages other than English? The only aliens are brown alien bugs? All the planets are gray and brown? All the alien plants are scrubby bushes or gnarled roots? The Starfield setting was not a seriously thought-out thing. Why did so many people have to slave so hard over this poorly conceived idea? The facial animations are beautiful. The music is pitch-perfect, truly exquisite. Every single cup and pencil and doorway and switch has been lovingly, perfectly designed. The environments are loaded up with props supporting the stories told mostly via email. The ship designer is extensive. It’s sad.