Pixelated Sausage - Attack the Backlog

The third and final part of my Attack the Backlog playthrough of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a game that wasn't what I expected. I thought the game was going to be more open, where you create your own character and find your own story within its world. I was wrong. While you can shape the character you play to an extent, you are playing a specific character--Henry in this case--who has his own stor...

Part two of my Attack the Backlog playthrough of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a game that wasn't what I expected. I thought the game was going to be more open, where you create your own character and find your own story within its world. I was wrong. While you can shape the character you play to an extent, you are playing a specific character--Henry in this case--who has his own story and there's li...

Part one of my Attack the Backlog playthrough of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a game that wasn't what I expected. I thought the game was going to be more open, where you create your own character and find your own story within its world. I was wrong. While you can shape the character you play to an extent, you are playing a specific character--Henry in this case--who has his own story and there's li...

I needed something chill and relaxing after the nightmare that was Kingdom Come Deliverance--expect those episodes after this one. I thought about many games, but ultimately landed on DREDGE, a relatively simple game about boating and fishing, wrapped in a mysterious Lovecraftian bow. It was exactly what the doctor ordered. If the idea of boating around and fishing doesn't sound like a bore to you...

This was a frustrating experience. My first thought after booting up Evil Dead: The Game was, "Wow, this is prettier than I was expecting," followed immediately by, "Damn, I wish this was just a normal-ass single-player game. As I played the tutorials and eventually a handful of games, my disappointment and sadness only grew as the tutorial did a poor job of preparing me for a real match. Even onc...

I've played many a Need for Speed game, but not one has frustrated me as much as Need for Speed Unbound. It may have a great sense of style and take place in a fictionalized version of my hometown--a not-so-great take on Chicago--but that's not enough to make up for its annoying structure, frustrating race design, and cheap AI. It also shouldn't come as a surprise that the story is shit, but I dou...

" Use Duality to control two bodies in real-time, letting you defend two sites at once, cover your own cross, or even trade yourself." Sounds pretty cool, right? Sadly, as cool as Spectre Divide sounded in concept, it never quite reached those levels in practice. Part of that comes down to the shooting--which was just okay--but the whole "Duality" system never felt like more than in gimmick in wha...

Behold the second and final episode of my Attack the Backlog review of Grounded. While I really liked the game overall, one mission almost made me rage quit the game. I managed to get through it in the end, but it did leave a sour taste in my mouth and somewhat tarnished what is a mostly great game.

It doesn't matter if you're first to an idea, if you don't execute it well enough, someone else can swoop in and steal your thunder before you even manage to throw your lightning. That's the case with Stampede: Racing, a battle royale kart racer where you start with 60 players and gradually whittle it down to one after reaching select checkpoints during a race. Sound familiar? It should, beca...

Behold the first part of my review of Grounded. It's been a long time coming. I tried playing and streaming the game once before, but got so annoyed with the chat that I rage quit both the game and streaming for years. Fast-forward to now and things are very different, not only did chat never bother me when I streamed the game--you can check out the archive for my entire playthrough if you want--I...

I had a taste for more Star Wars after playing through both Star Wars Jedi games and rewatching most of the movies and shows. I could have played something new, something I never played before, but opted for something I remembered fondly: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. My memory of the game was that it wasn't amazing, but achieved what it set out to do: deliver a satisfying Jedi power fantasy; ho...

Broforce is a lot of fun...until it isn't. What do I mean by this? I don't mean what you probably think--that it's fun for a while and eventually stops being fun--but that it's best enjoyed in small doses instead of large ones. I played Broforce two nights in a row for roughly four hours each night and the same thing happened both nights: after about hour two, I started to get annoyed and frustrat...

I've always been a naysayer about Fortnite's move to the battle royale space--I am one of the weirdos who liked Fortnite when it was just Save the World--so take everything I say with a grain of salt, but I always found Realm Royale more fun that Fortnite. It wasn't good enough to pull me away from Apex Legends when I was deep in the battle royale space, but if there was any runner-up for me among...

Believe it or not, but this forgotten game was one of the games that inspired Attack the Backlog. I still remember thinking it looked so cool on PlayStation 4, but never getting around to it because I was all-in on Xbox One to start that generation. By the time I got a PlayStation 4, it felt like the moment had passed and I might as well wait for a hopeful Xbox One port. Fast-forward four years an...

A combination of uninspired gameplay and a completely bonkers handling of its release are just two of the factors that led to MultiVersus wasting a treasure trove of IP; add a poor microtransaction structure and spotty server connectivity on top of that and you've got a recipe for disaster, and a disaster is exactly what MultiVersus was. It's a shame, too, because with better gameplay and a better...

Gameplay woes and character issues aside, the team over at Naughty Dog pulled off the impossible: they not only made me not hate Abby, they made me like her so much I think she may just be the new best character in the series. Unlike Ellie, Abby actually shows growth and an ability to make her own decisions, whereas Ellie becomes a less interesting character the longer the game goes on, eventually...

Unlike some of the games I've recently played for The Last Call, Dauntless had a good run, launching in beta in May 2018 and lasting until May 2025. That's seven good years. Well, as someone who didn't regularly play it, I can't say they were good years with any kind of authority, but as someone who played it near launch and near death, it was a fine time. Ultimately, I think it never found a way...

This was a long time coming. I've talked about wanting to play The Last of Us Part II for years now, but the mood was never quite right. After luckily stumbling into a 30th Anniversary PlayStation 5 Pro, I said The Last of Us Part II would be the game to break my new console's cherry. Fast-forward six months later and that time has finally come (insert eyebrow raising here). This episode covers a...

Star Wars Episode I: Jedi Power Battles is one of the few games I've not completed for Attack the Backlog. The reason is twofold. First, it's structured in such a way that you can just play whatever level you want in whatever order you want and actually "beating" the game feels inconsequential. Second, and more importantly, it's just an incredibly frustrating game. That said, however, there's so m...

Or it could just be that LEGO games are no longer for me. (It's probably a little bit of both.) What I thought was going to be a nice chill time and a return to a game formula I remembered loving, quickly turned into a sad realization: maybe I've grown out of LEGO games. The constant need to change characters in order to interact with this and that, and having to randomly smash bricks until you fi...

If Road Redemption was a pleasant surprise, Road Rage was a crashing disappointment. It didn't help that I played Road Rage immediately after playing Road Redemption, but where Road Redemption found a few elements to focus on and refine, Road Rage went the other route and tried doing too much. I can see a version of Road Rage that's good, but the Road Rage we have fails on all fronts and only mana...

For a game with drift in the title, the drifting in KartRider: Drift felt terrible. That could be excused if everything else was good to great, but that wasn't the case. Sure, there's a lot of content there, from a large cast of drivers to a decent selection of tracks, but none of that mattered when the game wasn't fun to play, and when you're in a crowded genre full of some very big hitters, you...

This was a surprise. Early this year I wasn't sure what to play and wasn't quite ready for anything too big, so I perused my various libraries and picked out a few games that caught my eye. Road Redemption was one of those games. As someone who grew up with Road Rash and loved every iteration of it up to and including Road Rash 3D, any game that looks like Road Rash is going to get my attention. T...

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League isn't a bad game, it's just a bad Arkham game. If you asked anyone what they wanted out of a sequel to Batman: Arkham Knight, I doubt a single person would say, "I want a co-op, live service Suicide Squad game," but that's what we got: a perfectly fine cooperative shooter with enough cutscenes to rival the runtime of The Return of the King: Extended Edition a...

It's unoriginal to blame negativity towards Batman: Arkham Knight on the batmobile, but hear me out. While most (all?) complained about the batmobile from a direct gameplay standpoint--how it felt and the repetitive missions--my complaint is an indirect one: I think the batmobile ruined Arkham Knight by forcing Rocksteady to change the way other aspects of the game controlled in order to accommoda...