Lies of P

Available on: PC, Mac, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Played it on: PC
Played it for: 35 hours

RATING: 6/10

This game is an enigma. A flawed, frustrating, beautiful, deep, janky piece of art. Where to even begin...

Let's start with the positives. Lies of P is absolutely stellar when it comes to the realization of its main setting, the fictional city of Krat. Based on a visual motif of industrial revolution Paris and London, Krat is a dirty, fog-choked, messy city. Many Souls-likes fall flat in creating a hub that you could imagine as a populated, bustling town. It's common to traverse empty, body-laden streets in these sorts of titles, but few actually achieve something that is believably livable. Elden Ring's capital city of Leyndell comes to mind, which is striking and awe-inspiring at first glance, but traversing its streets still feels like a video game level that only exists as a playground for the combat. Krat goes far beyond that. Some districts offer dense apartments, others detailed shop windows still filled with glitzy goods that are now meaningless in the post-apocalypse, while still others boast theater venues that could support actual stage plays. This is Bloodborne's Victorian Yharnam, but given a homely splash of Yakuza's Kamurocho, and it is excellent. I have never played in another Souls-like setting that has felt this complete.

The characters, too, are nothing short of perfect. The entire cast is dynamic, emotional, flawed, and so very human. Some of our misfits live exclusively at your base of Hotel Krat for the entire game. Others are collected from the streets, given a home and safe respite from the dangers of the city. One of the critical mistakes that FromSoftware continues to make in its titles is to give you an interesting and often awesome supporting cast, and then kill off 97% of them over the course of their questlines. For me, this makes it very hard to care about the outcome of anything. Not so in Lies of P. The biggest thing that kept me going in this game was the cast. I actively wanted to keep them safe, see them be happy, and end the plight of the city so they'd be ok. Even characters I didn't like all that much, like the eccentric inventor Venigni, ended up quite thoroughly endearing themselves to me by the end of the game.

This also lends itself nicely to the main themes of the game. The familiar tale of Pinocchio is about how lying is harmful, and you have to be brave and tell the truth. But Lies of P takes that familiar framework and flips it, making the compelling case that lying is actually what makes us human. The game is laden with messages about it. When P dies, instead of the classic Souls-like, "You Died," screen, you get the message, "Lie or Die." When fast traveling to a new area, the loading bar is labeled, "Now Lying," with a graphic of P's nose growing as the bar fills up to 100%. Characters constantly remind you that the thing that separates puppets from humans is their prime directive, the Grand Covenant. The Fourth Law is that puppets cannot tell a lie. But P is special. He can.

The first lie you tell in the game is a necessary one, it gets you past Hotel Krat's security system so that you can progress the game. After that, the lies are up to you. You can be entirely truthful to all the people you encounter around the city, but... maybe you shouldn't be. White lies can help people feel better, in their final moments as they're plagued by debilitating illness. You might lie to be polite, because you're always expected to tell a lady she looks beautiful. You might lie to protect a friend's feelings when you know the truth isn't really worth telling them. Later in the game, you might hear something that nobody else can, and it reveals a truth so dark that it's simply not worth spreading. And the more you lie, the more human P becomes. He begins to look more human, his hair begins to grow, he starts playing music and experiencing true life. It's powerful, and it's complicated, and the game adds tremendous weight to your conscience as it progresses. But the ability to wrestle with the truth at all, that's human.

The soundtrack, too, is amazing. It is tense when it needs to be, it is quiet when it needs to be, and it excels in crafting a multi-faceted atmosphere. The records you collect from NPC questlines are somber, pining, hopeful, and full of soul. I loved listening to them every time I came back to Hotel Krat to resupply, level up, and upgrade gear. It is difficult to describe how much they add to the game, and, like lying, listening to these records will also make P more human, blending them into the game as something you are rewarded for listening to.

So, from the artistic side, this game is a marvel. It has weighty themes, fantastic art, marvelous attention to detail, and presents a cast of characters that is easily the best of any Souls-like I've ever played, even including FromSoftware's titles. So why on earth am I giving it a 6?

Unfortunately, the game only has so many positives, and this is where the experience will sharply differ between players. The meat and potatoes of any video game is not its set dressing. It is the moment-to-moment gameplay. The level design, the combat, the challenges. And these elements are where Lies of P sharply falls short.

To address the level design first, it is linear. Incredibly linear. This isn't the end of the world, I'm a bigger fan of linear games than open world games, but this game is a straight hallway from beginning to end. There are a few areas that are a bit more dungeon-esque with extra hallways and shortcuts back to the checkpoints, but for the most part you are never going to explore a hidden pathway for more than one extra room here and there. And in a setting with as much detail as Krat, this was a bit of a letdown. But it pales in comparison to my experience with the combat.

The combat is a bizarre mix of elements from other Souls titles like Sekiro, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, and even the first Dark Souls that have difficulty melding together. It has Sekiro's parry mechanic, where perfectly timed blocks will damage the enemy's poise meter until their health bar starts blinking white. Then you can hit them with a charged heavy attack to actually stagger them, like you would have to do for Bloodborne's visceral attacks, in order to get a, "fatal attack." But despite the name, these attacks are far from fatal. They deal a decent amount of damage, but it's not nearly as rewarding as Sekiro where it could wipe out a full health bar. The timing window for these perfect blocks is also extremely tight, far tighter than Sekiro, and the vast majority of enemies employ frustrating attack delays in their movesets that will be followed by a blindingly fast attack that both launches and hits in 3-5 frames. I felt as though I had no choice but to trudge through fully memorizing each boss's individual attack patterns and delays in order to parry them, since the delays are deeply unintuitive and the actual attack launch is too fast to allow a reactive button press.

Speaking of delayed attacks, this was, in my opinion, one of Elden Ring's greatest weaknesses, and it was violently frustrating to see it replicated here to an even greater degree. Some bosses would lift up their arm to attack and hold it for a full second or two before swinging. Some enemies would raise their weapon, take three, four, or five staggering steps forward, and then swing. Some enemies would jump in the air, hang there for what feels like an eternity, and then slam down with the force and speed of a meteor. For that last one, they also have full tracking while in the air, I've watched enemies jump up and then rotate 90-180 degrees to perfectly track me before suddenly rocketing down. It not only looks wrong, it also feels wrong. The telegraphing in this game is in very dire need of a full rework, and it's compounded by enemy health values.

This doesn't become so apparent until later in the game, but elite enemies are absolute damage sponges. They also hit brutally hard, often able to kill you in 2-3 attacks, which happened to me quite often. I struggled to avoid moves where they would hold an attack while walking forward and perfectly tracking every movement I made, giving me no ability to avoid their sudden supersonic blow. But rather than being glass cannons, they also exhaustively dominate encounters with huge health pools and unbelievable defenses. In some rare elite encounters, I would be beating on them relentlessly, proc'ing status effects, finally staggering them for a fatal attack, and then still they would still have a quarter of their health bar left. Combat made most areas feel like a slog as I doggedly pushed through encounter after encounter of these mechanics.

And speaking of slog, this game has a veneer of speed thanks to how fast attacks come at you when they do finally launch, but the rate at which attacks come out is even slower than Dark Souls 1, which itself is the slowest of FromSoft's lineup. One boss that comes to mind is a big swamp creature that you fight a little over halfway through the game. One of its signature patterns is three huge slamming attacks. There is a full five seconds between each of these swings. It's long enough to get in a hit or two with a speedy weapon, but not really enough to safely commit with a big weapon, and adds to the bizarre pacing of combat overall. These sorts of unintuitive patterns were very common, and lead me to the conclusion that speedy weapons were the objectively correct choice for engaging with the game. Every time I tried using bigger weapons, I felt like the game punished me very harshly because I couldn't snag good hits in the time between enemy attacks, and even when I did they weren't doing nearly enough damage or poise damage.

This leads into my final issue with the game. Most Souls-likes have some kind of special mechanic that separates them from the pack. Mortal Shell has the titular shells, bodies you inhabit that take the place of your usual gear and stat upgrades. Lords of the Fallen (2024) has the umbral world mechanic, a scary place you enter upon death that gives you an extra shot at survival, but sometimes must be entered on purpose for progression or challenge areas. Blasphemous has its Metroid-vania exploration mechanics woven into its questlines and combat powers. So what does Lies of P bring? Weapon building.

Almost every weapon in the game can be disassembled into a blade and handle, and you can swap these around to create a weapon unique to you. The handle governs the moveset, the blade governs the damage, status effects, and how fast it can swing. In theory, this sounds great. In practice, this means that no blade can deal a ton more damage than others because you could just unscrew the greatsword blade and put it on a dagger handle and break the game. So as I experimented with weapons, I found that big things were swinging slower... and that was it. It was still taking 3 hits to kill rank and file enemies, but speedy weapons could do it three times faster, and the damage values simply weren't different enough on bosses to make big weapons worthwhile. By the halfway point, I found no value in anything bigger than a one-handed sword because I could deal damage (and apply status effects) so much faster simply by hitting more often and being able to capitalize on openings.

Bigger weapons also didn't deal nearly enough poise damage to be worthwhile either. I found that I was still getting fatal attacks just as fast, or sometimes even faster by using small weapons because they could hit so often. The weapon crafting is a neat idea, but it seems to have added an unnecessary burden on the development team that they ultimately couldn't solve. If they have the time in a DLC or sequel, a great fix to this would be to limit what blades can be attached to what handles, allowing big weapons much more breathing room to shine and allowing Neowiz to appropriately crank up the damage and poise damage to compensate for their slow movesets.

Ultimately what this all created is a game that feels like it was overdesigned. It can't have full Sekiro parry-and-kill mechanics because we want it to feel like Bloodborne, which is largely where we're borrowing our visual aesthetics. It can't have Bloodborne's parry-and-visceral-attack mechanics because we want players to work for their staggers with the Sekiro parry. No blade can be that much stronger than any other blade because we want this weapon combo system and we can't let players get too wild with what they make. It can't feel too easy because it's a Souls-like, so we have to include extremely delayed attacks so that the game feels much harder than it actually is. It is a game that was pulled in too many directions, and fails to commit to any of them.

These are the novice steps of a development team who are just breaking into the Souls-like genre, so I don't want to be too harsh. Especially when other teams have made games like Thymesia and Mortal Shell, which are maybe a tenth the size of what Neowiz has created here. A good portion of their achievement is tremendous, and I think they should feel proud of the majority of this game. The aesthetics, the story, the music, the themes, all of these are beacons that other games would do well to aspire to. But the combat is the biggest issue here. As I was reading through negative reviews, players who struggled with the game almost universally cited the unrewarding and tedious combat as their biggest sticking point, which was certainly my experience too. I did leave this game being happy that I played it, but it was a test of will to stick through to the end, and I did so only because everything else was done so exquisitely well. My biggest hope is that Neowiz can use this as a jumping off point for what could be a hugely successful career, provided they can take some appropriate lessons, iterate their designs, and double down on what makes this game shine. And I absolutely think that they can do that.

Dying Light

Available on: PS4, Xbox One, and PC

Played it on: PS4

Approximate Playtime: 30 hours

RATING: 6/10

Dying Light is supposed to be good. It's supposed to be great, in fact. Techland's last two attempts at a commercial title were both zombie games. Both operated on the same mechanics as Dying Light. Both involved weapon crafting. Both were decent role playing games. And, most importantly, both were actually extremely fun despite being buggy and unbalanced. So, with a game like Dying Light, one expects it to be flawless, to take in all the criticism from previous titles, and to use them as fuel for the creation of a masterpiece.

So what the hell happened?

To begin with, Dying Light does boast itself as an Action RPG. Now, this puts it a category with titanic titles such as The Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, Dark Souls, and Borderlands. With that said, it's also the same category that the previous two Dead Island games fell into, and the main problem with this fact is that, while both Dead Island games managed to make a niche for themselves rather well, Dying Light does nothing of the sort. In reality, the extremely minimal, pseudo-RPG elements in the game exist solely to mask what Dying Light is really trying to be: a first-person action-adventure title. And while there is nothing inherently wrong with that genre, it puts a massive damper on the game's premise as a whole. Techland touted the game as being almost something of a survival game, with players free running around the environments, wielding the classic, jerry-rigged weapons fans have come to love from Dead Island while competing for limited resources like airdrops of food. The free running aspect of the game especially was massively hyped up in all the trailers and press releases, which was just the right thing to entice lovers of Mirror's Edge like myself. And the last, beautiful spice on the top was the fact that at night, players would be subject to invasions from other players who could embody special infected and hunt the living to their deaths. In reality, none of that came true.

The first major problem is the story. You play as Kyle Crane, a man hired by the GRE, a sort of totally not blatantly evil humanitarian group with a hidden agenda, to hunt down a fellow operative and get back a file that contains information that could kill thousands. A boring, over-used, cliche'd hook to be sure. Upon arriving at his destination in the fictional city of Harran, he is ambushed by generic villains, which attracts a horde and gets him bitten. This introduces a fascinating narrative concept that could have been the perfect hook in the extremely bloated zombie genre, the fact that Crane needs a drug called Antizin or he will seize up and eventually turn. After the first seizure Crane has, I expected this to be a major gameplay mechanic: keep up on your Antizin or risk a seizure in combat, which could be fatal. 

Instead, Crane goes through an arbitrary cutscene where he receives a shot, and that's it. In-game, Antizin is never dropped by the GRE airdrops. It is never mentioned unless it's part of a main quest. And Crane could spend months simply killing zombies without ever getting a booster shot, a concept that the main questline tries to scream at you isn't true. The concept of needing Antizin does become important again for a single sixty second interval when the main questline deems it necessary to shove the "you're infected" concept down players' throats as hard as possible while Crane has repeated seizures as he tries to escape the main villain, but that's the extent of it. No urgency, no consequence. 

Crane himself is one of the most inconsistent protagonists to date, which removes any feeling of legitimacy to his character and destroys the actual role playing aspect of this supposed RPG. Call me a bit tainted by playing too many BioWare and Telltale titles, and I probably am, but I was under the impression that a "role playing game" was supposed to involve, you know, playing a role. Becoming somebody else for a while and making decisions that concretely affect a fictional universe, that's what playing a role means. It's something that was first introduced by the god of tabletop, Gary Gygax (praise be unto him), back in 1974, and it's something that has continued to be the icing on the cake of role playing as the games shifted from being played on a table to being played on a computer. But, while tabletop is still alive and kicking harder than ever, Dying Light seems content to make all of the important decisions for you and force you to watch Crane bungle around like a roided out moron as he generally insults the entire populace, and still has the disrespectful nerve to call itself and RPG. Even the skill tree elements seem rather token and tacky, and could just as easily have not existed at all. As they are, they simply pad down a game that's desperately trying to be an 8 hour campaign experience. One of the most unfortunately memorable parts of the game is when Kyle makes his daring escape from the main villain, but the game wrestles control from you, shows you turning into a ninja and killing several armed guards and single handedly slicing off a hand, and then lets you watch as Crane deftly dodges bullets fired from guards with the worst aim since Return of the Jedi, before handing the game back to you with the very heavy feeling of, "See, look at our set piece action, aren't you enjoying yourself?!?!?!"

Even worse than that, what players got instead of the promised, beautiful mechanics was a watered down, useless upgrade system with three separate experience bars: one for overall level, one for combat level, and one for defensive/mobility level. While this idea may have been great at its core, allowing players to focus on crafting instead of health, or on mobility instead of combat, none of it matters. There are 24 levels of each tree, and exactly 24 abilities in each tree, meaning that all players will be identical at the end of the game. The only difference is the order in which abilities are acquired. Even then, the majority of the abilities, regardless of category, are utterly useless. A few, such as tackling zombies or leaping off zombie heads, are useful in just about every situation, and are actually quite game-changing. But most of the abilities are ones such as getting better sale prices (which is absolutely useless by the mid game, as Crane only ever needs five or six weapons at a time, which means that emptying one's backpack is a frequent and lucrative affair that nets tens of thousands of dollars regardless of perks) or increasing the duration of temporary booster potions, which are unnecessary fluff in the first place. In fact, I quite easily finished the game without ever once crafting a booster, as the ingredients were excruciating to fetch while avoiding hordes of infected, and I didn't need them anyway.

The survival, too, is completely forgotten about in the actual game. Sure, there are airdrops that the game asks you to fetch before the opposing side gets to them, but they don't make even a lick of difference in the actual narrative. Crane could lose every single airdrop ever sent, and none of it would matter. The only difference is that he would level up slower, as he wouldn't receive the ludicrous XP boosts that the packages give. And that leads to another blatant problem with this game: no balance whatsoever.

Completing a quest usually nets about two to three thousand experience depending on the job. Main quests are worth more, but most fall into that range. Establishing a safehouse is worth even less, only about a thousand experience points out of the tens of thousands required to level up. Simply fetching a few airdrops and turning them in all at once? I once received more than sixty thousand experience from turning in about ten or so airdrops, and they're plopped into the map two or three times per day cycle. Of course, this is probably meant to mask the insane amount of experience the game steals from the player upon death. Dying results in a relatively small loss at the start, but by the end it costs thousands of experience points to die, which is made even more infuriating by the fact that the majority of deaths are the results of unfair shenanigans, like falling too far due to extremely sticky, clunky controls, or because the player was grabbed one too many times while fighting a horde, something that the game actually encourages players to do by giving them crazy weapons and combat perks that often amount to diddly in practice. The grab, too, is extraordinarily broken, as the zombie's grab has a huge, magnetic tracking that often means dodging is useless as the zombie will just spin around and bite anyway. The bite, too, seems to be prioritized over every single other action, as Crane will quite literally stop in the middle of a swing and stand awkwardly, staring into the zombie's eyes just so the biting animation can happen and Crane can get screwed. This entire endeavor makes the game feel like it's still in early beta before the playtesting and balancing have happened, which cheapens the experience as a whole.

That being said, there are still some marginally decent parts of the game that prevent it from being a complete and utter flop like Brink or RAGE. To begin with, Harran is an actually beautiful and often grabbingly realistic world to play in. It feels like a completion of the world that Dead Island and Riptide were trying to create. In the parts where parkour actually works, it works extremely well, and I loved the mechanic that allowed players to jump onto a roof that would collapse underneath them, summoning zombies and knocking the wind out of Crane as he hits the floor below. Even though it became obvious later on as to which roofs were unstable, I thought the element was a nice touch. The night sections of the game were also a great trial, as running around at night was significantly more fun and scary than doing so in the day, and I felt like it added suspense to the otherwise generic title. If Crane is spotted by the mutated freaks that roam the night, he can use a UV flare or UV flashlight to stun them momentarily before continuing his escape, which is a mechanic that is difficult but rewarding to master. A final, if small, touch that I thought was at least interesting was the concept of a zombie that hasn't fully turned. Rarely, a zombie will be encountered that still retains part of its humanity, and will respond with human cries of pain and pleas to have mercy when Crane hits them over the head. For a ruthless apocalyptian like myself, I frankly didn't care, as it wanted to eat my face and I knew objectively that it was a zombie that the devs were trying to make me feel bad about killing... in a game who's entire premise is killing. But it gives small moments of pause to the otherwise action filled world, and it makes players actually think about their actions for a brief moment. Even if it didn't change anything, at least it felt as though thought was given to the game. And the co-op mode is both broken and hilariously fun, which genuinely helps revitalize the game and give it a bit more play time.

Unfortunately, overall the game is pretty lackluster. It's frustratingly unbalanced, it didn't deliver what the developers directly promised their fans, and it feels like something that barely squeaked out of the launch title section so that it might be considered for the big boys club. The replay value is less than zero, considering that there aren't even other characters and abilities to explore and the story is staggeringly linear, and even the first playthrough isn't exactly a joy as players are forced to watch Crane be an ass to everyone he meets and follow orders like a trained monkey for the first half of the game before he experiences his first emotion (it's sadness by the way, before you guess). And the entire experience is padded out with abhorrent fetch quests and worthless escort missions, which are the only other two missions in existence. In the end, it feels like a game that's trying way too hard to be noticed, when Dead Island knew exactly what it wanted to be and executed that to the letter. And for a game that was delayed so unbelievably far that I thought it might open a time portal and actually become Bioshock Infinite, I expected it to be Bioshock Infinite: a game with such quality and fidelity that it blew my mind so hard that I'm still cleaning my apartment and finding brain matter all these months later. That's what delaying a game is supposed to do, allow developers to make the game all nice and shiny and bug-free before launch. Instead, all we got was Techland's shoddy attempt at squeezing out a first person Assassin's Creed with zombies. And to be honest, that's more depressing than anything else.

Dead Space

Available on: Xbox 360, PS3, and PC
Played it on: Xbox 360
Played it for: 13 hours

RATING: 9/10

Summary: Earth is breaking. The world has sent out hundreds of ships to mine the other known planets dry, and use those resources to fuel the dying planet. One such ship, the USG Ishimura, picked up a strange artifact with it's mining materials called The Marker. It's existence was sacred to the Church of Unitology, so it was kept on board until the ship could reach Earth.

It never did.

Engineer Isaac Clarke is sent with his team to fix the ship after it sent its final distress signal, but when they arrive, the team finds the ship crawling with Necromorphs, freakish, mutated, zombie-like beings that barely show any semblance of once being human. The ship's entire crew has been turned by the marker, and it is Isaac's job to find salvation.

Review: Space Zombies!
At some point during your Dead Space escapade, you'll probably, no, you will ask yourself who on Earth would be demented enough to not only create the idea for Dead Space, but was actually crazy enough to make it into a full game with a plot and everything. Not only do you have to fight undead in space, you frequently have to watch the transformation from human to Necromorph, and you are also forced to watch 20+ suicides throughout the 12 missions of the extensive campaign. The Marker has made you insane and given you dementia, and if that wasn't bad enough, you have to face the entire 12 hour campaign alone. To put it in basic terms, this game is not for the feint of heart...

I bought Dead Space half out of curiosity and half out of boredom. I wanted something completely different from my usual Halo FPS or Gears of War TPS or Fallout/Skyrim RPG. Something preferably scary, but not the calibur of Amnesia or SAW (though I've never played SAW, I have heard the stories). Dead Space seemed to fit right into that category, and I was completely right. Those who want a very different experience out of gaming will very much enjoy it, but be prepared for some pretty disturbed visuals. I will say this, where Amnesia is a game that relies of the psychological aspect of horror, Dead Space handles the startling part. Necromorphs can come out of literally anywhere, so you have to be prepared at all times for a battle royal. The higher the difficulty you play, the more scarce ammunition is as well, making it much more difficult to, well, live later on. I suppose you could cheat your way to the finish, as Dead Space is one of the few living titles to employ actual cheat inputs for when you pause and are bored enough to look them up, but I preferred to go the traditional route and just play it how it was meant to be played. Oh how difficult it was...

Dead Space 2 is more popular than the first one, and for good reason. It's newer, looks better, handles better, has newer and better features and the like, so many readers probably don't realize how brutally unforgiving Dead Space is compared to the sequel. It was unbelievably difficult to complete the campaign just on medium, and that was with me just pumping money into ammo at every store, and burning through weapon upgrade nodes at work benches. Even with all of this, the final mission was a tough one, forcing you to fight wave after wave of the strongest Necromorphs in the game to deliver The Marker to the giant hive mind on the planet Aegis 7, which floats gently below the Ishimura for the other 11 chapters. The part that scares me the most is that there's not just one, but two difficulties harder than the already challenging medium, one of which is so difficult it's called Impossible Mode, and is unlocked after playing through the game once on easy, medium, or hard, Gears of War style. Just for kicks, I created a new game on impossible, and it's difficult just beating the first chapter, and that's with already knowing exactly where all the Necromorphs are going to pop out. I can't imagine how ridiculous the next 11 are...

Aside from all that, the gameplay itself is fantastic. While one might think that only having seven guns in the entire game would be pointless and stupid, the weapon upgrades make it impossible to have more anyway, as  more guns means more resources to spread out, which in turn means you'll have a lot of guns, but none of them are nearly damaging enough to actually be effective past chapter 6. Unlike DS2, there are also only 5 suits, simply named level 1 suit, level 2 suit, and so forth, but this I think also makes the game more interesting, as it takes your focus off of how you look and onto how many more Necromorphs you have to kill before the next room. Actually, all of the things you can buy in the store or use in upgrades just add to the tension, as you have to make the decision to either keep your last upgrade node to open up a special locked treasure door later on or to upgrade your machine gun so you can live long enough to see the door in the first place. The game is built to put you in those positions, and it makes the experience that much more effective. In all, it's both new and quite refreshing.

The campaign runs you about twelve hours to beat it once, and I'd say that's fair for a standard shooter. I would have liked the campaign to run closer to thirty, but you begin to wonder at some point when it's all going to end, and therefore the game actually raps itself up quite nicely by the end of chapter 12. It's got descent replay value as well, as long as you play it on a harder difficulty each time, and is something that you can easily go back to and play for a few hours after your first go round. All in all, it's a good and different game that's probably worth your time.