Welcome back to the Pokemon love/hate series! We’re covering the newest mainline entry in the franchise today, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. There’s been plenty said about these games already and they’ve quickly become some of the most polarizing entries in the entire franchise, representing a bright future for the series while also being mired in technical issues which would be enough to sink any other game. I’ve got plenty of thoughts on these latest games in the Pokemon franchise so let’s dive in and find out what I love and what I hate…
Love
Great Pokemon Designs – I’m not one of those “new Pokemon look so bad!” people that come out every time there’s a new generation, but I’ve been really pleasantly surprised by how good this generation has been. During preview season I was unimpressed by a lot of the new Pokemon that were being shown off, but getting to see Pokemon like Grafaiai, Gimmighoul and Fidough up close in battle and in the overworld, I have really warmed up to them. There are also an unusually high number of top-tier Pokemon for me this generation, which run the gamut from cool basic Pokemon like Flittle, flawless evolutionary lines for Fuecoco and Sprigatito, awesome paradox Pokemon and really interesting legendaries. As usual, I’ll have my list of best and worst Pokemon of the generation at the end of this post.
Lively Open World – My expectations for an open world Pokemon game were very much tempered by Sword and Shield (not to mention Game Freak’s never ending capacity to under-deliver at every opportunity), but I was shocked by just how lively the Paldea region can be and how much personality its Pokemon inhabitants exude. Everywhere you go, Pokemon will react to your presence in interesting ways. Pokemon like Hoppip or Gogoat may walk up to you with curiosity, while Deerling or Stantler may be skittish and flee, Dugtrio and Orthworm will hide from you underground, Cyclizar can often be seen bounding around without a care in the world, and aggressive Pokemon like Tauros or Veluza will actively come after you to initiate battle. It also helps that battles now seamlessly occur on the overworld map instead of in themed arenas as in previous Pokemon games, meaning you can actually see Pokemon continuing to go about their business even then. It’s really cool, immersive to see in action and far more fleshed out than I had expected.
Overworld Shinies – Shiny hunting is one of my favourite parts of the Pokemon experience, even if my patience for long, full-odds hunts is lacking. This is a big reason why I love exploring in Violet, because I know that at any moment I could come across a shiny Pokemon. This is a pretty simple way to make world traversal much more engaging because I am constantly watching for shinies to appear. As of the time of writing this entry I’m currently up to 3 shinies found at full odds, but I will the shiny charm soon, making this vigilance even more rewarding and will eventually start using herba mystica to up my odds even further.
Freedom to Choose How to Advance the Story – Pokemon games run on a pretty standard formula, but Scarlet and Violet make the inspired decision to split the now standard “gym battles”, “evil team” and “raids” storylines and make them be able to be tackled at your own pace and discretion. While there is a “recommended” and “incentivized” path, you’ll still be weaving in and out of these plots at will. It also helps that these three main plots all improve as you go, especially the titan plot with Arven. By the second battle I was all-in on his story and it only gets better as you go along and the three plots become unified in the climax of the game. I am not exaggerating when I say that Scarlet and Violet have possibly the best story in Pokemon, up there with Black and White and I’d argue that it definitely eclipses Sun and Moon.
It’s also worth mentioning that there are also several completely optional side-plots and characters in the academy who you can get to know and help out. Your teachers are a colourful cast and it actually helps the sense that you’re off learning at school in these games (completely with mid-term and final exams!).
First Pokemon Game to Feel Like a AAA Experience – Pokemon was very much designed as a handheld, social experience and really excelled at establishing this formula for itself for a long time. However, one of my issues with Sword and Shield was that it felt like it was a half-measure, attempting to take the Pokemon series into a console-based future but with the mindset of a game that was still rooted in 25 years of handheld traditions. For Scarlet and Violet it feels like Game Freak finally stepped back and thought “Okay, how can we leverage the technology we have to make a Pokemon game with a modern, open-world structure?” The result is a game which is leaps and bounds removed from the traditional structure of how you interact with the Pokemon world, while retaining the core RPG mechanics that make the game work. It’s a huge step forward for a franchise which has been accused for decades now of creative stagnation.
Mixed
Customization – Character customization has been a big factor of Pokemon games since X and Y and I’m sorry to say that Scarlet and Violet take some baffling steps backwards in this regard. While you can still change your look, hairstyle and most of your clothing, for some reason your main outfit is set between one of four seasonal styles. I have no idea why the hell they would do this, other than “you’re at an academy and therefore need a unified dress code”, even though this is a fantasy game and they could do whatever they wanted to. This game’s player card is also far less interesting and far more limited than Sword and Shield‘s customizable trading card system, to the point where I stopped bothering trying to perfect it early on.
Graphics – Look, I didn’t care about the stupid N64 trees in Sword and Shield because of the scope of that game and the fact that it looked much better elsewhere. However, the graphics in Scarlet and Violet are notably bad given the game’s much wider scope. You’re meant to get to the top of high vistas, look down and go “Oh wow!”, but instead all I can think is “Wow, those textures sure are muddy” and “Man, this world sure is lacking in foliage and detail”. This would be one thing if the game ran really well, but it does not (which we’ll get to later) which just makes the graphical issues even more pronounced. Now, I certainly think that the graphics are functional and don’t actually impact my enjoyment of the game, hence why I put it in the Mixed section rather than Hate, but it’s worth mentioning since we’ve already seen better looking open-world Switch games for years now.
Tera Raids – Raids were by far my favourite addition in Gen 8, despite some frustrating network issues that tempered that enjoyment somewhat. While I’m happy that they’re back in Gen 9, their implementation here feels like one step forward and two steps back.
On the one hand, these move way faster than they did previously. In Dynamax raids it wasn’t uncommon to wait 45 seconds each turn for people to pick their moves, then actually have to watch them all play out before going to the next turn again. Tera Raids, in contrast, occur in real-time and moves all take no more than a second or two to resolve, meaning that the whole process goes far faster. However, it also means that you and your allies need to be focused and acting deliberately, otherwise you may miss your turn or use a heal too early.
Tera Raids have also improve the cheer system to no longer give random chances of bonuses, instead allowing you to boost attack, defense, or provide a heal up to 3 times per battle. This is incredibly useful and really helps strategizing during these raids.
On the other hand, raids basically are the endgame, especially 6 star raids. These raids are legitimately hard, especially because the Pokemon will create an energy shield halfway through the battle which reduces damage significantly. Sure, you can terastalize to break this shield easier, but 6 star Pokemon will drain your tera orb during the battle, making it take several turns of attacking fruitlessly and trying not to die to make it work. Meanwhile, if a 6 star Pokemon can buff itself, or has a super-effective move against you, it will spam it every turn and just wipe you out. The result of this is that raids have basically devolved into an extremely limited meta of viable Pokemon who can buff themselves massively, heal themselves/take several hit, and/or provide massive team support, all of which need to be max level and ideally using competitive EVs and IVs. On the one hand, it’s exciting to overcome this, but on the other hand it’s frustrating because even a single weak teammate can make a 6 star raid team worthless. Making all this worse is that if you do manage to win a 6 star raid, you aren’t even guaranteed to get a rare item drop, which is what the entire endgame of Scarlet and Violet revolve around (these rare items are needed to easily get competitive boosts and shinies). Now, to be fair, 5 star raids have a chance of dropping these rare items as well and are significantly easier, but it just increases the grind required to access endgame items even more.
Add onto this that, somehow, the online infrastructure of Scarlet and Violet for raids may actually be worse than Sword and Shield (which was worse than Gen 7, which was worse than Gen 6…). At least in Gen 8 I could do a surprise trade or player card swap to cause the raid list to refresh regularly, but in Gen 9 you only get a grand total of 8 random raids at a time that everyone in the world can get into at the same time and these can only be refreshed every ~30 seconds, meaning that you have like a second to try to get into a raid before none are going to be available. There’s also a random raid option, but that’s a band-aid on a bullet wound when you want to get into specific raids. Why they couldn’t just implement a server browser with some basic filters is beyond me.
Hate
Performance is Shit – Without a doubt, the main talking point about Scarlet and Violet at launch has been the game’s notoriously awful performance, innumerable bugs and poor programming. Fun story: literally the first thing I did in this game was move the right analog stick to get a better look at my character’s room, which caused the camera to clip into a black void. I wasn’t even trying to break the game either, but it set the tone for the experience to follow. Your camera will constantly clip out of the world, I’ve had characters go invisible, Pokemon disappear or slide out of frame during a battle, menu screens and icons that freeze in place and refuse to go away, etc. The performance woes are the real problem though, with the frame rate regularly dipping below 20fps in and around city areas. It’s real bad and can make the game headache-inducing, although saving and resetting your game will often alleviate some of the performance issues. Still, it’s an unacceptable state to launch a game in and clearly was due to The Pokemon Company’s mandated game release schedule.
No Level Scaling – The biggest issue with Scarlet and Violet‘s ambitions of being open world and letting you chart your own path is that Pokemon and trainers’ levels are all set from the start. That means that you can go into an area, be massively under-levelled and grind to beat that area, but if you do then several other areas of the game will be a boring chore because they will all be hopelessly under-levelled. You can somewhat counter this by following recommended progression guides, but if you spend any time exploring and filling your Pokedex off of the main path then you’re pretty easily going to find yourself over-levelled in no time at all.
The Map is Pretty Empty – While the Pokemon make the world interesting and alive, the actual design of the Paldea region is really unengaging. In previous, more tightly-designed Pokemon games there were all sorts of secrets and cool things to find hidden away in the world, but in Scarlet and Violet you will mainly find basic items, or TMs if you’re lucky. The main reward for exploration are stakes which can be used to free legendary beasts, which is admittedly pretty cool. However, the cities are where the game really falls flat. Previous Pokemon games would always have hidden shops, people who wanted to trade, people who could tell you things about your Pokemon, or even just flavourful lore dumps. In Scarlet and Violet, towns are basically worthless. Towns will basically just have food shops which are arbitrarily spread out over a half dozen locations through the town with different menus, item shops (which get spread out between two locations, plus Pokemon Centers themselves) and, if you’re lucky, clothing shops (which are also spread out between 1-2 types of clothing per shop). Very rarely will you come across people wanting to trade or do anything interesting, so you’ll basically just enter to do the gym challenge and then leave quickly (again, the shit performance in cities doesn’t help either). It’s a real shame, considering that places like Goldenrod, Celadon and Lumiose City had so much going on in them and are so memorable to this day, I can’t imagine Paldea’s cities doing the same.
Still No Voice Acting – This would probably be my big caveat to the point about Gen 9 feeling like AAA Pokemon, because these games still, somehow don’t have any kind of voice acting. I get that it’s probably a localization issue, compounded with the time and money that it would take that TPC are too cheap to invest in, but goddamn, voice acting would add so much to this game’s story and characters. It’s just one more embarrassing mark against this series that takes some major steps forward but then shoots itself in the foot with moves that feel super goddamn lazy.
Missions Can Be Dull – While I do like the storylines in this game, some of the actions that you have to do to complete them can be really dull. The worst offender in this regard is Team Star bases. There are five Team Star bases spread across the world map, they all play out the same way and they’re all easy and boring. All you have to do is use the auto-battle mechanic to make 3 of your Pokemon beat the crap out of 3 opposing Pokemon. Rinse and repeat until you defeat 30 Pokemon and then you’ll have to fight a boss. And if this doesn’t sound easy enough, you get an extremely generous 10 minutes to complete this and unlimited opportunities to heal. I don’t know how you could struggle to complete these missions unless you’re massively under-levelled and using a full team with poor type matchups. Gym challenges can also be pretty boring. Most of these involve doing some sort of chore before you’re allowed to fight the boss and they make me yearn for the days when I just had to fight 2-5 trainers before the leader which would act like a mini-tutorial for that gym’s theme.
Slow Battle Pacing – If there’s one major caveat to Pokemon battles occurring in the overworld now, it’s that it has slowed the pace of battles to a crawl not seen since Gen 4. Battles often have long delays between actions, especially if a Pokemon gets swapped out of faints, where you may wait like 5+ seconds before you’re able to make a decision on how to proceed. Thankfully most move animations have been sped up to compensate for this somewhat, but this is definitely the most sluggish battles have felt in several generations.
Let’s Go Feature – Pokemon following you on the overworld has always been a fan-favourite feature in these games, so the idea of having your companions come out whenever you want and even battling for fetching items for you automatically seems enticing. Well… as with most things in this game, the implementation really lets it down. This all comes down to the fact that the tether for this ability is extremely short and is based on your Pokemon’s actual movement speed. This means that if you try to navigate the world at a normal pace on the back of your riding Pokemon, you will almost immediately get too far away from your companion and cause them to head back into their pokeball. This is especially frustrating for the Pokemon who evolve by following you around for a certain number of steps, forcing you to either travel the world at a regular pace, or slow your movement to a crawl so you can have a Pokemon follow you. Suffice to say, I barely use this feature now, which is a damn shame.
Scarlet and Violet have been a bit of a mixed bag for me. I love seeing Pokemon living in the open world, constantly keeping an eye out for shinies and struggling through competitive and raid battles, but the performance and design issues are undeniable and unforgiveable and I’m often finding myself yearning for the tighter, focused design of Gens 2, 4 and 5. I hope that Game Freak will actually do something to improve this game and win back some community trust, but given the history of this franchise I’m not holding my breath.
Best Pokemon of Gen 9: Ceruledge, the entire Sprigatito line, Iron Valiant, Miraidon, Koraidon, Roaring Moon, Klawf, Flittle Shittiest Pokemon of Gen 9: Frigibax, Palafin (the base form is super lazy and the Hero form is an abomination), Sandy Shocks, Dudunsparce (25 years for this… Dunsparce is already the joke, you don’t say the same joke again and expect it to be funny), Gholdengo
I wasn’t sure quite what to expect out of Worm Shepherd, but the album cover and title had me intrigued and, honestly, the opening of the title track really had me intrigued and primed for some epic metal. However, Ritual Hymns quickly establishes itself as a very heavy death metal album, which isn’t a bad thing by any means, but it’s less interesting than the epic, moody, atmospheric metal that the title track hinted at. If you’re into death metal then there are some decent tracks here but it’s very heavy and punishing and I lost most of my interest as the album dragged on.
The Halo Effect are made up of ex-members of In Flames, which is not a band I’m really familiar with, but you can feel their collective experience here on their debut album Days of the Lost. There’s a level of polish and confidence on display here, with an epic, melodic death metal sound that reminded me a lot of Dethklok. It’s very well-made and makes for a good listen, with no tracks really standing out as poor, but on the other hand the whole package lacked that extra bit of “special something” which pushes it from good to great. I could very well end up liking this album a lot more in future if it grows on me with repeat listens, but at this juncture Days of the Lost feels like a good starting point in need of a bit more distinct flavour.
23) Rashomon, Ibaraki
Going into Rashomon I had absolutely no idea what to expect. All I knew was that this album had a really badass cover and it was a metal album, that’s it. Turns out that Ibaraki are basically a rebranded version of Trivium where Matt Heafy leans into his Japanese heritage. Despite the Japanese influences, Rashomon still basically sounds like a North American heavy metal album, which is fine but I was hoping for something a bit more interesting. Highlights for me would be “Ibaraki-Doji”, “Jigoku Dayu” and “Ronin”.
22) Dawn of an Eyeless Realm, Xenotheory (Bandcamp)
I’m a simple man, you put a xenomorph on your album and I’m going to check that shit out. Dawn of an Eyeless Realm is only really going to appeal to you if you’re looking for some extremely heavy death metal with a few samples from Alien and, for some reason, The Fellowship of the Ring thrown in, but I really dug it. I may be being a bit generous putting this album so high up the list considering that none of the tracks stick out to me individually, but as an album I could just put on to vibe for ~40 minutes this is a great listen.
21) Zeit, Rammstein
One of my friends was really into Rammstein in high school so naturally I got into a lot of their stuff as well. That said, I haven’t really kept up with their music since then so I’m around 15 years behind on their music, so I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to get out of Zeit. For better or worse, Zeit is very much the Rammstein I was familiar with, the exact same industrial metal sound and Till Lindemann’s velvet vocals. There’s some stuff here that holds up amongst the best of Rammstein, my favourites would be “Giftig” and “Angst”. Zeit is happy to remind me though that a lot of Rammstein’s songs are cool because they’re in German and I can’t understand them, but if they were translated and sung by someone else they’d be extremely silly. This is best demonstrated by “OK” (abbreviation of a German term for “Without a Condom”) which is about getting fucked, and “Dicke Titten”… which is literally “Fat Tits” and is about a loser whose only wish is for a wife with big tits. All-in-all, it’s Rammstein and it’s solid although the fact that they sound basically the same as they did 15 years ago makes me somewhat concerned that they haven’t evolved at all.
20) Requiem, Korn
Korn have really turned their fortunes around in the last half decade. Even in their hey-day they didn’t get a lot of respect, but the one-two punch of The Serenity of Suffering and The Nothing have established Korn has one of the best mainstream rock/metal bands in the industry. In particular, The Nothing silenced a lot of critics as it came off of the very public suicide of lead singer Jonathan Davis’ ex-wife, causing a lot of people to re-evaluate that, yeah, maybe there’s a reason why Korn have always been so depressed. Requiem is an appropriate follow-up to The Nothing, it feels like Korn are grappling with the emotions that come after a period of suffering. This makes Requiem, weirdly, one of the most hopeful albums Korn has ever released. Several tracks, such as “Let the Dark Do the Rest”, look forward to a better time while going through a period of depression rather than just wallowing in sorrow (“On and on, this lucid darkness is filling up my soul / And how can I be all alone here? / Constant ridicule / And I just wanna go / And I just want to see what the future holds / Had a hell of a time, I’m suffering in / God my life was a mess / And I will never forget it haunting it / Let the dark do the rest“). However, the closer “Worst Is on Its Way” puts a bit of a damper on that hopefulness, as Jonathan Davis remembers that a period of peace is eventually going to be shattered with more suffering (which is pretty familiar to someone who struggles with cycles of depression).
Requiem has much of Korn’s sound, but most of their signatures, such as their heavy guitars and scatting are almost entirely absent. In fact, when they do show up on “Worst Is on Its Way” it made me realize that I had really missed these elements throughout the album. Tracks like “Lost in the Grandeur”, “Disconnect” and “My Confession” are certainly not bad, they just don’t stand out and they lack the bite that Korn had in The Serenity of Suffering and The Nothing, aiming more for a commercial-friendly rock sound that loses a lot of what makes Korn unique. It also doesn’t help that Requiem is barely over 30 minutes long, it comes and goes very quickly. All that said, Requiem is still a solid album, it just pales in comparison to Korn’s best work. It’s got the same sort of issue that Iron Maiden’s Senjutsu had for me last year: it’s not the first, or second, or third, or fourth, or fifth Korn album I’m going to want to listen to, but I expect that in the future I’ll give it a listen every year or two and enjoy it every time.
19) Atlas Ruinica, The Wise Man’s Fear (Bandcamp… they did not post any of the songs from this new album there though, much to my annoyance)
The Wise Man’s Fear have put out some of my favourite metalcore of the last decade and with the conclusion of their Codex Trilogy in 2020 I was looking forward to see where they would take their musical talents next. The answer to that was Atlas Ruinica, a new fantasy metalcore journey which would be released as a series of singles over the course of the year. It was an interesting distribution method for the modern era, but in practice this has been really annoying because they only released them to streaming sites and didn’t release a compilation version of the album. This means you have to track everything down individually, which is more effort than it really should be just to listen to new music from one of my favourite bands.
Anyway, all that out of the way, Atlas Ruinica is… basically just more The Wise Man’s Fear. That probably shouldn’t be too surprising, but after The Valley of Kings ended, I was hoping that their follow-up would be just a bit more different and interesting. Instead, we get more of the same, but lesser because it doesn’t have the same sort of weight and scale as the Codex Trilogy did. It’s still The Wise Man’s Fear, meaning that you’re still getting some solid metalcore/deathcore with a fantasy sheen, but I can’t help but feel a bit disappointed.
Frayle are one of those bands that seem custom-built for me, being a witch-themed doom metal outfit. Going in I was definitely hoping for good things and Frayle left me very intrigued to explore more of their work in future. Unlike most doom metal bands I’m used to, Frayle is a female-fronted band and that lends an entirely different experience to their music. Gwyn Strang’s vocals are haunting and ethereal, reminding me a lot of Maria Brink’s “witchy” vocals on the last couple In This Moment albums. Musically, this is definitely doom metal, although Frayle aren’t afraid to get heavy and more energetic at times than most doom metal bands I’m used to listening to do. This is especially clear on “Treacle & Revenge” and “Sacrifant”, which are probably my two favourite tracks on the album too. That said, the title track is a good example of how Frayle will take a more standard doom metal sound and lend it a haunting energy through their vocals.
On the more negative side of things, the mixing on the album leaves the vocals lost at times and really difficult to understand, although this is probably an intentional, artistic choice so your mileage may vary on that. Some of the tracks can also feel a bit “samey”, but all-in-all I really liked Skin & Sorrow and will be undoubtedly checking out more of Frayle in future.
17) Hell Is Where The Heart Is Pt. I: Love, Pt. II: Longing & Pt. III: Clarity, OCEANS (Bandcamp)
OCEANS were probably my favourite new band of 2020 and, despite not making the top 5 of that year, I am confident that I listened to The Sun and the Cold more than any other album that year. Suffice to say that I’ve been eagerly awaiting a follow-up to see where the band would go… and, I have to admit, I goofed last year. Early in 2021 they released a handful of singles and I assumed these were ramping up for a full album, so I didn’t include them in the 2021 album rankings. However, by my own rules, I could have, because they ended up releasing them all in one collected EP, We Are Nøt Okay, before moving on to their next project. I feel particularly bad about this because that EP was great, the natural follow-up I’d been dreaming about and it would have easily cracked the top 10 on my 2021 ranking.
Anyway, that brings us to their 2022 project, Hell Is Where The Heart Is, which has been split into three different parts released over the course of the entire year (and which I have chosen to include here as one entry for simplicity’s sake). Each part represents a different stage in heartbreak and the songs and sound correlate to these themes. Hell Is Where The Heart Is is a whole other beast for OCEANS compared to what they have given us before, as they clearly are trying to experiment with their sound, for better or worse.
Pt. I: Love is, appropriately, very raw, heavy, emotional and, at times, straight-up vicious. The highlight here is definitely “Sulfur”, which sees OCEANS sounding very much like Iowa-era Slipknot (to the point where I had to look up if it was a cover; I know Slipknot has a song with the same name on one of their albums I don’t really like/am not very familiar with). OCEANS are brutal on this track, the energy they put out here is infectious.
Pt. II: Longing is a slower burn in comparison, more mournful and contemplative, although no less emotional. The highlight for me would be “Living=Dying”, which sounds uncannily like OCEANS meets early-era Korn and provides a shot in the arm at the end of the EP. Viewed on its own, Longing is a bit of an unremarkable release, but viewed as part of a whole it works well as the middle point between Love and Clarity.
Pt. III: Clarity is easily the strongest of the three EPs and gives this collection a really solid (if depressing) ending. “If There’s a God She Has Abandoned Us” starts out as a sombre piano track but builds up and gets heavier as it goes along. Easily my favourite track on the album alongside “Sulfur”. “I Sing Alone” and the title track don’t disappoint either, both being delightfully-heavy tracks which close out this collection on a strong note.
That said, easily my least-favourite parts of these releases are the spoken word interludes, which are so angsty that they wouldn’t be out of place on a 13 year old’s Tumblr page. They’re fine as mood-setters, but I’ve gotten in the habit of skipping them entirely whenever I listen to the EP because they just make me cringe.
It took a while to see the whole picture, but Hell Is Where The Heart Is is an interesting evolution for OCEANS. While I’m glad the band’s trying something different, I’m not sure if the results are better than what we’re familiar with from them yet. Hell Is Where The Heart Is is messier than previous OCEANS albums/EPs and the staggered releases has made experiencing each part feel lesser than if we had gotten to experience them all together (in particular this made Love feel slight and Longing feel a bit mediocre and disappointing). Now that we’ve gotten all three I feel much better about them as a whole but it has affected how I view them as a whole.
Another year, another band I checked out simply because they had a cool album cover. Apparently Cave In have been making music since 1998 and this is their seventh studio album, but I don’t recall ever coming across them before now. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s a level of maturity and professional craft on display in Heavy Pendulum, as Cave In show off solid hard rock/metal track after track. “Blood Spiller” is probably my favourite of the bunch, but there really isn’t a weak song on the entire album. Musically, this reminds me a lot of Mastodon’s output during the mid-2010s, it’s uncanny just how similar the two sound. It can start to feel like it’s dragging a bit towards the end, but Heavy Pendulum is a solid album nevertheless and if you like Mastodon then I think you can’t go wrong giving Cave In a look.
15) Eulogy, Wolves at the Gate
Eulogy is fairly typical by metalcore standards, but it’s well-written enough that it manages to stand out. I think the biggest asset is how Wolves at the Gate balance the heaviness with the lighter moments, drawing out stronger emotional resonance in the process than if they went hard one way or the other. It also gives Wolves at the Gate a sound that feels more approachable and “commercial”, kind of like Bad Omens. Eulogy is, perhaps paradoxically, not nearly depressing or aggressive enough to be something I’ll listen to over and over again, but I’d be a fool to deny the quality of tracks like “Peace That Stars the War”, “Euglogies”, “Weight of Glory” and “Silent Anthem”.
14) Darker Still, Parkway Drive
Parkway Drive combine heavy metal reminiscent of Iron Maiden together with nu metal reminiscent of Linkin Park and Slipknot to produce Darker Still, a polished and surprisingly radio-friendly album which had me headbanging on plenty of occasions through its runtime. Parkway Drive’s lyrics can skew towards typical nu metal angst, but their songwriting often eschews standard song structures and typically will leave tracks getting heavier and catchier, rather than running out of steam as they go. The tracks here are also distinct from one another, often willing to play with genre for a diverse track roster. That said, your mileage will likely vary as a result, and I found myself less than enthused with tracks that leaned more into half-baked country and rap styles like on the title track, “If a God Can Bleed” and “From the Heart of the Darkness”. Still, there are lots of quality tracks here, my favourites being “The Greatest Fear”, “Imperial Heretic”, “Land of the Lost” and “Glitch”, all of which I’d definitely recommend checking out!
My God, that is a beautiful cover art. Apparently I’m on a cyberpunk kick this year as I’m finding myself drawn to this sort of aesthetic more and more lately. The actual music of Lotus is a near-even blend of electronica and death metal (sometimes leaning closer to nu metal or deathcore at times), with very heavy and energetic music which will leave you in a constant state of head-banging. The tracks here are infectious and aggressive, with particular highlights for me being the title track, “Toxic”, “Dehumanized” and “Neo-Yakuza”. Within Destruction have put together a rather unlikely blend which works well and which is well worth a listen!
After the moody lead-in to “Awakening”, Draconian Reign assault you with some truly heavy death metal. It’s a great way to open things and primes you for the rest of the EP to come. Every track stands out in its own way and while it isn’t particularly unique or transformative, it is very enjoyable. It’s a pretty short package, coming in at just over 20 minutes, but if you’re into death metal then this is well worth a listen and gets a hearty recommendation from me.
9) The Path of Destruction, Overthrone (they have a Bandcamp, but this album isn’t on there for whatever reason)
The Path of Destruction has all the hallmarks that you’d expect from a metalcore band (shouted vocals, aggressive, energetic music, the occasional melodic section to balance out the heaviness, angst). Overthrone aren’t doing anything unique, but they still manage to succeed because the music they’ve crafted is really solid. They’re really at their best when balancing the heavy and the lighter sections in a song, best demonstrated by emotional and sincere tracks like “Watch the World Burn” and “A Better Man”. They also tease a heavier side with “Suffer”, which goes full-on deathcore, but it’s only a two minute track so feels more like a teaser than a proper exploration. Still, The Path of Destruction is good enough that it’s quickly become one of my most-listened to albums of the year. I’m curious to see where Overthrone goes next, although I hope they can carve a more distinct sound for themselves in future.
I decided to check out Mechina on a whim because of the cool cover for Venator and I am so glad that I did. Musically, they’re very similar to Words of Farewell (particularly their 2016 album, A Quiet World), with a sound that I’d describe as epic, energetic, industrial/electronic metal. Musically they aren’t too far from melodic death metal, but the big thing that differentiates them from other death metal bands is that the vocals are mostly clean and soaring, more akin to glam or power metal. Taken all together, Venator is a really interesting album, feeling like a sci-fi epic and more than once I found myself thinking that it could be a great backing soundtrack for an anime series. There are several great tracks on here, including “Suffer”, “Praise Hydrus” and the title track, which had me headbanging along with a smile on my face. Definitely give Venator a glance, I’ve linked Mechina’s bandcamp above and would heartily give them a recommendation. I know I’ll be checking out more of their stuff in the future.
7) Silverline, Anberlin
Anberlin are one of my favourite bands of all time, which shouldn’t be surprising if you saw my list of best albums from the 2010s. It’s been eight years since their last album, so there has been no release this year that I’ve been more excited for than Silverline. The EP doesn’t disappoint, giving us five rock-solid tracks of Anberlin’s signature alt-rock flavour. A particular highlight is “Two Graves”, which kicks the EP off with a bang. This song is heavy by Anberlin’s standards, announcing that the band is back together and haven’t missed a beat since we last heard them. My favourite track though is “Body Language”, a piece which is just oozing with sex appeal and is going to find itself a place on a very particular playlist of mine… Anyway, Silverline is a solid return for Anberlin, whose only real problem is that it leaves me wanting more. Given that we haven’t heard any new music from Anberlin in eight years, that’s just me being dangerously greedy, but I hope that the band finds plenty of inspiration on this new chapter they find themselves in!
6) Immutable, Meshuggah
Meshuggah are one of those bands that all the big metalheads love, so I figured it was past time for me to check them out. Gotta say, the hype is real with Meshuggah, because Immutable was really solid, energetic, wall-to-wall heavy metal that had me headbanging on several occasions. Highlights for me include “Broken Cog”, “Phantoms” and the extended instrumental track “They Move Below”, but it’s hard to go wrong with any track on Immutable (other than the disappointingly limp closer, “Past Tense”). Definitely a band I’ll be checking out more of in the future.
I’ve really gotten back into Draconian this year (and grown much more of an appreciation for Under a Godless Veil), which made me really come to appreciate how much I love Heike Langhans’ voice; it’s so good that she single-handedly elevated Draconian from “decent” to one of my favourite bands since she joined them in 2012. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that I was saddened earlier this year when the news that she was leaving the band came out. However, the one silver lining was that she was going to be using this opportunity to pursue her own passion projects with her partner Mike Lamb and be able to spend more time with her family as a result. I’m happy that she’s getting to live her dream as an artist and that this creativity is bearing fruit with a number of projects, including this year’s STRATA. Billed as a cosmic metal album, STRATA doesn’t stray too far from Langhans and Lambs’ roots, being very atmospheric doom metal, although the lack of any harsh vocals gives it a different sort of feel. The resulting music encapsulates what I love best about doom metal, it’s beautiful melancholy captured in song. Despite only having seven tracks, this is a surprisingly lengthy album, with each track typically starting chill and sombre and then reaching a heavier, emotional climax towards the end, and it all works simply because Langhans’ voice is incredible. It’s one of those albums that’s best as a complete work, but if you need a single song to sample REMINA, I’d recommend “Icarus Signal”.
4) Deceivers, Arch Enemy
I was so impressed by Alissa White-Gluz’s vocals on last year’s Powerwolf bonus album, Missa Cantorem, that I knew I had to give Arch Enemy a look. I have to say that Deceivers left me impressed. As expected, Alissa’s vocals are great, both harsh and clean, to the point where you’d swear that Arch Enemy had multiple vocalists. The songwriting here is also really solid, there isn’t a weak track on the entire album. Arch Enemy’s music is melodic, high tempo and epic, best described as being somewhere between power metal and death metal. Just a great album from start to finish, definitely recommend checking this out!
3) Voyeurist, Underoath
I wanted to like Underoath’s Erase Mea lot more than I did back in 2018. The turn from evangelical metalcore darlings to losing their faith was a compelling story so it was unfortunate that the album didn’t resonate with me. With Voyeurist, it’s clear that the last four years have been a struggle for the band, and much of that is from dealing with the fallout of their crisis of faith, along with the band’s struggles with mental health and addiction. This clearly has provided the band with fertile ground not often tread by an act of this calibre and it makes Voyeurist a decidedly raw and compelling listen. You can feel their pain and anger towards evangelicals in tracks like “Damn Excuses” (“You never gave me anything I wanted but I’m stuck in the cycle with you / Fuck your revelation and fuck your weak conviction / I am finally exposing the truth“), “(No Oasis)” (“In the dark and overused / Left alone with the abused / I’ll never know if I matter to you / Hey, I was talking down to you / You objectify the truth / Every thing you thought you were is all wrapped up inside a lie / The kind that makes you blind / Falling over every line you believed so hard you hollowed out / Hollowed out your mind“) and “We’re All Gonna Die” (“Hey, we’re all gonna die, what difference does it make? / Don’t pray for me and my friends / I think you’re fucking fake“).
Emotion is one thing though, but thankfully Underoath back that up with some really strong songwriting throughout the entire album. “Hallelujah” is fantastic, the kind of song you’d want to shout along to live, “Take a Breath” makes you want to headbang, “Numb” is nice and heavy and “Pneumonia” is a really interesting and moody closer. Really, Voyeurist just keeps getting better as it goes, which is part of the reason why it’s one of my most replayed albums of the year.
2) Impera, Ghost
So I listened to Impera because I’d heard that it was really good, but I was not ready for what I was walking into. Ghost are straight-up a modern glam metal outfit in 2022! That is very much not what I look for in my aggressive/depressing taste in metal, but Impera is so well-written that it won me over. There are so many great tracks here: “Kaisarion” is a really energetic and catchy rock track, “Call Me Little Sunshine” is like a chill Andrew WK song, and “Watcher in the Sky” feels like the sort of 80s anthem you’d expect to hear Kiss or Styx signing in front of a crowded arena. By far the most impressive track though is “Twenties”, which I shit you not feels like a Disney villain song. It has the most swagger that I’ve ever heard in a metal track. Just listening to it makes me picture the choreography I’d use for it in a stage musical, it’s legitimately one of the coolest songs I’ve heard in years. Being glam metal also means that, unlike the majority of the music I listen to, it’s super accessible to a wide audience. It’s really no wonder that this album is getting as much accolades as it is, it’s truly fantastic and I would implore you not to pass it up.
1) The Death of Peace of Mind, Bad Omens
Finding God Before God Finds Me was one of my favourite albums of the last couple years, enough for me to consider Bad Omens one of my favourite new bands. Their radio-friendly metalcore style was surprisingly compelling, so naturally I was excited to see what Bad Omens would bring us next. The Death of Peace of Mind is an unexpected turn from the band, downplaying the metalcore (which was already downplayed on Finding God Before God Finds Me compared to their debut album) and leaning heavily into electronic and pop influences. While this change in style leaves me torn and alienated, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that Bad Omens put full effort into this album and still deliver some absolute bangers. “CONCRETE JUNGLE” and “THE DEATH OF PEACE OF MIND” alternate between electronic music and heavy metalcore on a dime, making the most out of both styles and developing a sound that’s as compelling as nearly anything from their previous albums. Perhaps the most exciting tracks are “What do you want from me?” and “ARTIFICIAL SUICIDE”, which take traditional electronic sounds (feeling almost cyberpunk-esque at times) and then mix them like a metal track, creating a really energetic beat which is infectious.
The Death of Peace of Mind scares me. It’s a good album overall, but it also represents a fundamental change for a band I loved. If they continue on this electronic/pop journey and ditch their metal influences altogether then I’m afraid that I won’t still be on board with Bad Omens, which would be sad. That also makes it hard to judge this album fairly, but there’s too many great songs on here for me to be too harsh.
Welcome back to my annual music countdown… and this year, I really overdid it. Back when I started I’d have to write up entries for like fifteen albums and it was nice and easy. That number has ballooned every year, to the point where I’ve written entries for more than fifty new albums released in 2022! As a result, I’m not belabouring every review – if I have lots to say about an album I’ll say what I want, but if I don’t have a lot to say then don’t expect more than a few sentences. I’ve been literally working on this article for the entire year and honestly if fifty albums in a year holds true (or even continues trending upward) then I might just start restricting this year-end list to the twenty-five best; we’ll see how things shake out next year.
In any case, there are so many entries this year that I’ve split this into two parts. Naturally, we’ll start with the lower half and then I’ll post the rest tomorrow. With all that out of the way, let’s look into my 2022 in music!
55) Faith is Gone, Arsenic
Faith is Gone starts on a bad note when “Intro” declares that Arsenic don’t give a shit about what’s mainstream or popular, they just play what they want. I literally rolled my eyes – people who feel the need to brand themselves as rebels usually are covering for the fact that someone one time said that their music sucks, so they pass it off as “they don’t understand us, man!” Then Faith is Gone begins in earnest and, my God, I was not ready for this. Imagine an 80s punk/metal fusion, like the Ramones crossed with Black Album-era Metallica, and then add a thick Quebecois accent to the mix. Round out the package with high-school-garage-band-quality production and songwriting and you might have a good idea what Arsenic are like. Nearly every song sounds identical and most are so slight that they feel incomplete – seriously, this album has 9 full tracks (that’s not even including the intro) and it’s barely over the 28 minute mark. That said, there is one glowing highlight, “Jack the Ripper”, which is a pretty fun track about the eponymous serial killer. It’s a legitimately good song and it closes out Faith is Gone on a pinnacle, since I can guarantee you it’s the only track on this album that I’m ever going to listen to again.
54) Season of the Wolf, With A Heavy Heart (Bandcamp)
I listen to quite a lot of metalcore so I hope it means something when I say that Season of the Wolf is one of the most baffling metalcore albums I’ve ever listened to. The production is clean and professional, but the music itself feels really amateur, like a bunch of kids throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. Nearly every song will have multiple instances of the music going from light to heavy (or vice versa), incongruent and sudden shifts in chords before almost immediately switching back, stopping the track entirely for a random sample… all these things I’m describing are some of my favourite parts of a song when done well, but here they feel completely wrong and it’s such a weird thing to realize. It really hammers home how much craftsmanship we take for granted in the music we love. Even when With A Heavy Heart are finding some degree of cohesion in a track, it’s not enough for me to find their music any better than mediocre. I don’t really mean (or want) to shit on With A Heavy Heart, as far as I’m aware they don’t really deserve it, but Season of the Wolf did not work for me at all.
53) Oecumenical Rites for the Antichrist, Law of Contagion (Bandcamp)
Oecumental Rites for the Antichrist is blackened death metal… I’m not sure what else there is to say really. Incomprehensible, growled vocals? Never-ending blast beats? Every song sounds the exact same? Poor production quality? You guessed it. At least I enjoy this kind of music on a baseline level, so I don’t think this album is bad per se; I could throw it on just to get through a foul mood. But that said, it doesn’t stand out to me in the slightest and there isn’t a single song on here that I’m ever going to listen to again, let alone want to.
This is one of those albums that I checked out purely because of the cool artwork. Bajoxtierra are a self-described alt metal band, although I’d say they’re not too far off from metalcore with the interplay between soft and aggressive music (complete with dueling clean and screamed vocals). Normally that’s the kind of thing I like in a metalcore band, but Bajoxtierra feel very mediocre to me. I think the issue is that the quiet sections of their songs just go on for too long and sap all the energy out by the time the faster, more aggressive parts start. There feels like there’s some potential here, but REPENTANCE is very unrefined.
51) Over Opiated in a Forest of Whispering Speakers, Seven Nines & Tens (Bandcamp)
Having started taking edibles over a year ago I’ve gotten more interested in stoner media, so just hearing the title of this album got me interested in checking out Seven Nines & Tens. The album has a grunge-metal sound, like Alice in Chains meets Lateralus-era Tool. The music combines with the vocals to create a palpably dreamy, “far out” atmosphere. It’s really cool at first, but after getting through a couple tracks of the same drawn out sound it starts to drag and blend together, to the point where halfway through I was just wanting it to end. I dunno, maybe I wasn’t high enough to appreciate it, but Over Opiated in a Forest of Whispering Speakers was very dull for me.
Surprise, surprise, I legitimately only checked out this album because the band has the word “fox” in their name, because as we all know foxes are the best. Unfortunately Babylon didn’t really leave me with much of a lasting impression. It’s a pretty slight package, with 6 tracks barely hitting the 20 minute mark (and of those 6, only 4 are full-length tracks). For most of the EP, Next Time Mr. Fox put out some very heavy metal/deathcore. The one big exception is “Under the Moon”, which is a dreamy acoustic track which doesn’t really jive well surrounded by all the heavy metalcore tracks surrounding it. Of all the tracks I think “Bestias” resonated the most to me, it was very aggressive and I found myself headbanging along with it at the start. However, most of Babylon is just painfully mediocre – not bad but just not interesting or something I can see myself ever revisiting. Sorry, Mr. Fox, but I don’t think that there’s going to be a next time.
The Great Dying is, for the most part, fairly typical deathcore. However, I can’t say that I’m a big fan of the vocals on the album, at a certain point enthusiastic, incomprehensible grunts and screams just sound like caveman music. That’s not to say that there aren’t some tracks where this works, I did quite enjoy “The Heartless” and “H.O.M.E.”, but most of this just didn’t catch my interest. Add in the very short playtime at barely over 30 minutes and The Great Dying just didn’t do it for me.
48) AfterLife, Five Finger Death Punch
My thoughts on Five Finger Death Punch are well documented at this point, although I will admit that their last album, F8, was one that I had some positive things to say about. I was curious if AfterLife would continue that turn around, but… well, I can’t even say I’m disappointed. I was momentarily excited when “Welcome to the Circus” started, but then the second the singing kicked in my excitement instantly deflated because it became clear that this was going to be the same old story: really solid musicianship, but abysmal songwriting full of impotent macho posturing. To be fair, the songwriting isn’t as bad as it was on some of their previous albums, but it’s still FFDP and at this point I’ve accepted that I’m just never going to like this band’s songs. If you like FFDP then this will probably be a moot point – like I said, if you can get past the lyrics, the band are undeniably talented musicians. Unfortunately, I just can’t stand the songs they write and clearly never will.
Ahh, black metal. If you’re familiar with these annual countdowns, you’ll know that I check out new bands in this genre all the time, but so many of them fail to make any sort of impression. This genre seems to have a way of making every song bleed together into a loud, congealed soup. Some, like Wolves in the Throne Room and Firelink manage to stand out, but then there’s stuff like Vorga, whose album Striving Toward Oblivion immediately failed to get my interest and every song sounded like the one that came before it. Is it actually bad? No. Will I ever listen to it again? No. There isn’t really much else I have to say other than that.
46) Towards the Dying Lands, Horizon Ignited
Towards the Dying Lands is basically power metal, but with death metal vocals. If you can imagine that, then you’ve got a good idea what Horizon Ignited sound like here and there isn’t a whole lot else I can say about it. I found the album a bit meh, not actively bad but not doing anything that interested me.
45) Exile, Demon Hunter
Demon Hunter used to be one of those bands you could rely on to put out good music on every new album, but they’ve been in something of a tailspin for a while now. Coming off of an uninspired double album and an unnecessary acoustic album, fans of the band have been clamoring for a return to their metalcore roots, but every new release has felt watered down since at least 2012 (even if a couple of those albums have been pretty good anyway). That brings us to Exile, an album I’ve been dreading since it was announced because of the language that was being used to promote it: “Exile is the first-ever concept album by the 20-year metal veterans. Set in the aftermath of civilized society’s collapse, the 12 songs examine modern life through the lens of a nonconformist, contemplating a life untethered. […] Exile is an immersive interrogation of cultural norms and a call to true rebellion.” This was punctuated by the lead single, “Freedom is Dead”… so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that I had some really bad “Don’t tread on me vibes” from the start. It’d be one thing if this was just a fantasy story that Demon Hunter were exploring, but they’re a Christian band and this sort of story setup is rife in evangelical circles, not to mention the anti-mask/vaccine crowd most of us are exhausted of, so suffice to say that there was a good chance that this wasn’t “just a fantasy”.
For a moment there, Exile looked like it might buck my fears. “Defense Mechanism” opens with a roar. It’s pure thrash, a very heavy song, easily the highlight of the album and the sort of track we haven’t gotten out of Demon Hunter in decades. However, the album comes back down to earth pretty much immediately from there. Exile is an album of two selves – on the one hand, it’s musically the most varied Demon Hunter release in a very long time, featuring a handful of heavy, thrash-inspired tracks but still skewing mainly towards lighter ballads and rock tunes. In this regard, it’s better than their last couple lacklustre releases. However, Exile‘s Achilles heel, as I feared, comes down to the songwriting. I can’t take such a self-serious album about non-conformity and fighting for freedom seriously when I know the context it’s coming from. “Master” gets this across early, with lyrics that boil down to “Elites are telling you what to believe and dividing us, but I’m too cool for that, I make my own way! Freedom!” That sort of message is pretty consistent across the album and I just couldn’t take it seriously. In fact, it’s kind of insulting with the inclusion of “Revolutions”, which downplays the importance of efforts to change society, saying that these efforts are cyclical and kind of pointless as a result. If you can get over the lyrics then you’ll probably like Exile more than I did, but it’s not the only issue here. Ryan Clark’s vocals are also noticeably strained throughout the album, especially on all of the heavier tracks. In fact, he sounds downright terrible at several moments on the album, such as the end of “Freedom is Dead”, which might explain why Demon Hunter have been pivoting away from their signature sound for so long. Exile‘s a step in the right direction compared to War and Peace, but even with my obvious biases set aside, it’s still easily in the bottom half of the band’s discography.
Another band I checked out because of a cool album cover, And Hell Followed With are a fairly typical deathcore/death metal band and Quietus gives you about what you’d expect: growled/shouted/screamed vocals, endless blast beats and heavy music galore. It’s just that most of it doesn’t stand out. I was getting excited when I got back-to-back, legitimately good tracks “Infinite Sequential Visions of a Sphere of Hate” and “Sacrificial Human Destiny” came on and hoped that the rest of the album would get more interesting, but unfortunately And Hell Followed With are content to just coast by with a death metal sound that doesn’t stand out. I’d recommend checking out the two tracks noted above and maybe “The Well”, but otherwise Quietus isn’t particularly interesting.
Of My Vice reminds me that nu metal is kind of a stupid umbrella term. I listen to a fair bit of nu metal, but when “The Apparition” started I was instantly reminded that, oh yeah, people think that Slipknot and Linkin Park are part of the same genre. This can be a bit of a tonal whiplash for me because most of the nu metal I listen to has barely any rap in it so I often forget that it’s considered a signature of nu metal bands. Of My Vice lean more in the direction of Linkin Park, with a lot of rap-rock mixed with harsh, metalcore-like vocals. It’s very much a rap-rock album in the first two-thirds, although it does get heavier and I would say goes full-on metalcore by the final track. I wasn’t crazy about Of My Vice, but I did enjoy “The Quandary”, “The Puppeteer” and “The Juxtaposition” (if only because those tracks leaned more into genres of metal that I traditionally find more enjoyable).
42) Dominion, Skillet
I’ve aired my grievances about Skillet in the past. Growing up in an evangelical household, I always found them to be overrated considering the amount of fame they had. As they get further and further away from the breakout album, Comatose, I feel my skepticism become more and more justified. Dominion may be one of their better albums in the past decade, but it is still very much not my thing. It’s decent radio rock written for teenagers by a bunch of rockstars who are nearly 50 years old now, and that insincerity has always really turned me off of Skillet’s music. “Refuge” is the only track that felt like it had any sort of sincerity to it, feeling like a “youth group anthem” and is probably my favourite track on the album. I’m clearly far from the target demographic of this album so take my opinion here with a massive grain of salt, but I’m sure there’s some evangelical kid out there who’s going to hear this and love it (if not, might I recommend Oecumenical Rites for the Antichrist?).
41) Divisive, Disturbed
Like Exile, I’ve been dreading Divisive since it was announced. Disturbed were one of my favourite bands when I was in high school but they have not been the same since their extended hiatus. It got so bad that when 2018’s Evolution came out I was so sick of them that I declared that I’d evolved beyond Disturbed. That was all bad enough, but Disturbed’s politics have been frustrating me for years – it was one thing when the band complained about the media and elites during the 2000s and early 2010s, but when they continue “both sides”-ing through 2016 and the 2020s it feels like they’re either disingenuous or out of touch. Which brings us to Divisive, which promised to be their answer to the divide in society, which they wanted to heal through the power of music… bleh. Suffice to say that I was expecting this album to be one of the worst of the year, but colour me pleasantly surprised that Disturbed managed to exceed my expectations… by being disappointing once again.
Let me explain.
For better or worse, Divisive ditches the experimentation that was present on Immortalized and Evolution and goes back to the heavier fundamentals of their first couple albums. This album sounds more like Disturbed’s nu metal roots than they have in decades. For all their bluster about this being a political album, Divisive only really makes a statement on “Bad Man” and “Divisive”, and I am using “statement” here very broadly. Like Evolution, these tracks are extremely simplistic, wishy-washy and non-committal, to the point where literally anyone could look at these songs and think that Disturbed are supporting their side. Suffice to say, this makes for very limp, uncompelling content. Most of the album from there is just typical Disturbed – “Hey You” is your big, pump-up anthem, “Unstoppable” and “Won’t Back Down” are your macho tracks, etc. Unfortunately, because this is just Disturbed being Disturbed, they’re treading over very well-trodden ground, so you can’t help but look at “Unstoppable” and see it as a weak rehash of their far-better executed “Indestructible”. Similarly, “Hey You” is supposed to be the big single to get people excited, but it’s going to be filler at best if it was played live. The only track with any sort of staying power is “Don’t Tell Me”, which makes the most of David Draiman and guest Ann Wilson’s soaring vocals to put out an emotional song dealing with the pain of divorce. None of the other tracks on the album feel anywhere near as inspired and it’s far and away the best track on the album (hell, it’s the best track Disturbed have put out since 2015).
I’m probably making it sound like Divisive isn’t that great and that’s because it isn’t. It’s kind of mediocre, like Disturbed are just going through the motions and falling back on what worked for them in the past once again… and that’s honestly still better than what I expected of them at this point in their career. So… good job, I guess?
Heilung are one of the weirder bands that I’ve gotten into in the last couple years, putting out experimental, neolithic, ritualistic folk music which is somehow super metal despite having basically no elements you’d traditionally associate with metal music. Drif is, in many ways, more of the same, but feels like Heilung’s least-interesting album in some crucial aspects. First of all, the entire album is much more chill and low tempo than other Heilung albums, feeling more like what you’d expect of a “traditional” soundscape rather than a series of songs which could run the gamut from atmospheric, to energetic, to experimental gibberish. Heilung albums tend to have at a lot of tracks which are more about the experience: ten minute spoken word rituals, growled rants, repetitive chants, etc – tracks that you’ll listen to once in a blue moon, but more often than not will just get skipped over to get to the good music. Drif, unfortunately, has the weakest tracklist of any Heilung album in my opinion. The only substantial tracks are the first three, “Asja”, “Anoana” and “Tenet”, with the rest being either extended interludes or suffer from noticeably less interesting songwriting. Overall it just makes for an album which is decent and worth a listen, but if you’re familiar with Heilung you can’t help but feel that it’s a missed opportunity. If you’re intrigued by Heilung I would personally recommend seeking out Lifa and watch their live performance if you get the chance – it’s easily their best curated selection of songs and really shows off the band at their best.
Back in December of 2021, one of my friends finally managed to get me into Magic: The Gathering, and I’ve never forgiven him for it (and, for that matter, neither has my wallet). I don’t really understand the lore that much, but I’ve at least got enough of a knowledge that when I saw a band called “Planeswalker” I realized it was probably MTG-related and decided to check them out. What Planeswalker give us here is some decent power metal, with soaring vocals that are operatic in more ways than one. Many of the songs are full-on narratives, with the band’s dual vocalists often having entire conversations with each other in-character. That said, the MTG-gimmick is the only thing about Tales of Magic which makes it stand out at all – fantasy metal isn’t all that uncommon anyway and there’s nothing special here to make Planeswalker stand out. I guess that’s the issue with basing your music on a card game, there’s no existing sound-scape for you to riff off of unlike, say, all the bands based on video games or movies. Tales of Magic is fine but I lost interest very quickly, if only because I don’t gravitate towards power metal.
38) Inglorious Darkness, Crematory
Crematory are one of those bands with a long career, stretching over thirty years, but I have never checked them out until now. On Inglorious Darkness they bring a distinctly-German flavour of metal, mixing death, power and industrial metal together into their own synthesis. The songwriting is a bit meh and I’m not really a fan of Gerhard Stass’ vocals, but the music is so well-done that I have a hard time holding this against Crematory. I’d recommend checking out the title track and “The Sound of My Life” and see if Inglorious Darkness clicks for you.
37) Blood 1983, In This Moment
Of all the musical projects announced this year, Blood 1983 was probably the biggest surprise for me. Celebrating the tenth anniversary of In This Moment’s landmark album Blood, this EP reimagines some of the biggest tracks from that album in 80s synth-pop style. It’s an intriguing concept to say the least and I appreciate that In This Moment aren’t just looking to make a quick and easy buck off their fans, they’re trying to deliver a transformative, creative venture here.
…unfortunately, the execution on Blood 1983 doesn’t really work. The synth sound on “Adrenalize 1983” really nails the tone this EP’s going for, but the vocals and songwriting don’t really work for the synth pop sound they’re going for; the chorus in particular just sounds like a cacophony. “Blood 1983” really cements the issue here – these songs were written as empowering, high-energy metal tracks, not chill 80s pop tunes, and really don’t work when you try to shove them into that mold. The two tracks that work better are “Burn 1983” and “Whore 1983”. “Burn” is a slower-paced track so it’s better suited to the dreamy soundscape that it’s given here, while “Whore” has been completely reimagined as slowed down, melancholic and reflective track. It’s a really interesting way to transform that track and in-line with the original message, providing a new perspective on it and is easily the highlight of the collection.
Blood 1983 is a real mixed bag. I feel like it’s mostly a failed experiment and hope that it isn’t indicative of In This Moment’s future ventures. Still, as a celebration of the band’s successes, I can’t be too harsh on it and there’s enough good stuff here that fans of the band should definitely give it a listen.
36) The Great Heathen Army, Amon Amarth
Viking metal! I’ve been listening to scattered tracks from Amon Amarth for close to fifteen years now, but I’ve never sat down and listened to a full album from them. The Great Heathen Army is about what I expected from them, providing their brand of power metal/death metal fusion which sounds the exact same as the music they’ve been putting out since 2008. The title track and “Oden Owns You All” got me headbanging, but most of this album is just kind of mediocre and uninspired. It’s far from bad and I can see myself happily putting this on again in future, but it’s clearly a case of one of those metal band that’s long in the tooth churning out yet another album that sounds the same as their last ten.
35) Omens, Lamb of God
Ahh, another major metal band that I’ve never actually listened to until now. I’ve always had some interest in checking them out, if only because my dad saw one of Lamb of God’s shirts in a store one time and got all mistakenly happy because he thought it was a Christian shirt. Omens is relentlessly heavy and aggressive from start to finish, feeling like a mixture of groove metal and death metal. I’ll be honest though, I don’t have a ton to say about it. It’s fine, but it wasn’t really resonating with me. I’d say check out “To the Grave” if you want to get a sample of the album, but otherwise I don’t have a lot of thoughts about it.
34) Color Decay, The Devil Wears Prada
The Devil Wears Prada are another one of those bands that I’ve known about for years but didn’t check out til now… and it kind of feels like I did so about 10 years too late. Color Decay is full of polished, commercial/radio-friendly metalcore and all the angst one would expect to go along with that. Tracks like “Broken” and “Trapped” feel like they’d really resonate with teens, but I’m in my 30s now so it doesn’t really appeal all that much to me. I can appreciate the quality of this album but it just makes me feel old and jaded. That said, I want to give a special shout-out to “Cancer” – that track has a tragic reality to it that gut-punched me. It’s a great way to close out the album and definitely my favourite track of the lot.
33) Key to a Vanishing Future, Falls of Rauros (Bandcamp)
Falls of Rauros make their second appearance on the annual countdown and unfortunately I can’t say that they made much more of an impression on me. It’s still black metal and all that entails (including mediocre-at-best production) although the band’s atmospheric elements help give it a bit more flavour than Vorga at least. Still not enough to make this an album I’m going to remember or want to come back to, but if you’re really into black metal then I’m sure you’re going to love this.
32) Seventh Rum of a Seventh Rum, Alestorm (Bandcamp)
2020’s Curse of the Crystal Coconutsingle-handedly shook my trust in Alestorm’s ability to thread the line between epic and silly pirate metal, so naturally I approached Seventh Rum of a Seventh Rum with a lot of trepidation. I’d say that Seventh Rum is a slight improvement over the last album, managing to give us some good, fun pirate metal tracks (such as “Magellan’s Expedition” and “Under Blackened Banners”). The album also has two really big surprise successes. The first is “Return to Tortuga”, which chilled my blood at first because “Tortuga” was one of my least favourite tracks on Curse of the Crystal Coconut, so I figured it would be more of the same. Imagine my surprise when it turned out that this was a subversion, because “Return to Tortuga” is essentially the “serious” version of the previous track, even bringing back guest vocalist Captain Yarrface and calling back to that song’s lyrics. It might be my favourite track on the album and shows that Alestorm don’t have to be stupid, they just choose to be… which, honestly, I kind of have to respect. The other big surprise is “Wooden Leg (Part III)”, which had me wondering where the hell Alestorm were going to go given the rather definitive ending in “Part II” on the last album. Turns out that the answer is “not really anywhere”, with “Part III” acting as a final denouement, but it’s the legitimately sombre tone that is the real shocker here and cements the “Wooden Leg” trilogy as an unexpected career highlight for Alestorm.
Unfortunately, Seventh Rum of a Seventh Rum is brought down by some real stinkers. Most odious would be “Canonball”, the obligatory “Fucked With an Anchor” rip-off which had a chorus that literally made me go wide-eyed when I first heard it. “P.A.R.T.Y.” and “Come to Brazil” also suffer for being the five-hundredth juvenile pirate party metal tracks Alestorm have put out and don’t bring anything new to that concept. I also can’t help but be kind of disappointed at how “meh” the title track is, given that the album’s referencing my favourite Iron Maiden album and song.
All-in-all, Seventh Rum of a Seventh Rum keeps a bit more gas in the Alestorm engine and I appreciate that it’s taking a step back towards a more “serious” take on the concept of pirate metal. However, having listened to their first couple albums again recently, it’s shocking just how much the band has turned themselves into a joke. Then again, they joked about scraping the barrel four albums ago and with every new album it feels less like a joke and more like a threat.
31) The End, So Far, Slipknot
Last time we saw Slipknot they were putting out possibly my favourite album of 2019. We Are Not Your Kind saw Slipknot striking a remarkable balance between pleasing fans and charting a path of musical evolution and experimentation for the band. In a lot of ways, The End, So Far seems to be taking a similar course, making even bigger evolutions to Slipknot’s sound while also feeling very similar to Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses), often considered the band’s foray into more mainstream appeal. I spend a lot of time complaining on these countdowns when bands make the same songs over and over and I always give some credit when they branch out to do something different… but man, different does not always mean good, because I just cannot get on board with The End, So Far.
“Adderall” is an interesting opening which sets the tone for what you’re going to be getting – a chill track that I can’t really put my finger on genre-wise. Pop? Jazz? I honestly don’t know, but you end up waiting more than five minutes before you get any sort of metal. Tracks like “The Dying Song (Time to Sing)”, “The Chapeltown Rag”, “Hivemind” and “Medicine for the Dead” should satisfy Slipknot fans, but I feel like they’re still B-tier Slipknot tracks at best. This might be because the whole thing feels sanitized to me in the same sort of way that Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses) does. When Slipknot shave off their darker aspects they lose a lot of their energy and bite.
The End, So Far is a mixed bag for me. I’m still deciding if that’s because it’s so different than what Slipknot usually gives me, or if it’s because the songs here really aren’t that great. When I take a step back and think about these songs though, I ask myself “How would people react if these tracks were played live?” For most of them, I think it would be a really muted response compared to Slipknot’s classic tracks. Hell, for a lot of these songs, I can’t even imagine them played live to begin with, they’d feel so out of place. With that in mind, I’m leaning towards The End, So Far being a mediocre release, but it’s one that is going to take some time before I can solidify my feelings on it.
Empyrean is an atmospheric death metal album which skews towards fast tempos, high energy, heavy sound and screamed and illegible vocals. While tracks can feel a bit same-y at times, when Fallujah let their atmospheric elements loose it can make for some truly epic death metal, particularly on the last two tracks, “Celestial Resonance” and “Artifacts”, which round out the album on a very high note. I’d definitely recommend checking out those two tracks and “Embrace Oblivion” to see if Fallujah are something you’d be interested in.
Sabaton are one of those bands where you know exactly what you’re going to get out of one of their albums, considering that their sound hasn’t really changed at all since 2008’s The Art of War. Luckily for them, they also put out consistently solid music, so this familiarity hasn’t hurt them too much. The War to End All Wars pushes that familiarity to its limits, because not only is it the same sort of Sabaton that we’re used to, it’s also their second World War I album in three years (plus the three “Echoes of the Great War” EPs that the band will be putting out over the next year, which are basically just over-glorified singles with a bunch of re-released songs; by my own rules I won’t be covering them here, but they’re only adding to the WWI fatigue Sabaton are putting themselves into). The band is clearly passionate about WWI, choosing to put this album out because they had so many stories they still wanted to tell after The Great War, but it can’t help but feel like more of the same. That said, there are some legitimately great tracks on here. “The Unkillable Soldier” is probably the best, “classic” Sabaton track here, nailing that mixture of energetic power metal and the band’s enthusiasm for its heroic subject. “Versailles” is also interesting in how it outwardly has a celebratory tone to mirror the feelings of the Allies at the end of the war, but weaves in a dark, ironic layer because we all know that this victory is going to be fleeting at best. The clear highlight has to be “Christmas Truce” though, the first truly unique Sabaton track in several album cycles, which is like if you took Trans Siberian Orchestra’s “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24” and mashed it with a traditional Sabaton track. It’s epic, tragic and sombre all at once, and will easily be finding a place on my metal Christmas playlists going forward.
All-in-all, The War to End All Wars is fine enough on its own but it feels like a companion piece and is easily among Sabaton’s least-essential albums. Honestly though, the best way to listen to it would probably be to mash together The Great War, The War to End All Wars, and any other WWI tracks and EPs the band has put out, rearrange the tracks in chronological order and listen to them as one big, epic tale of the beginning and end of the First World War.
28) Return to the Void, Shape of Despair (Bandcamp)
Given the name of the album and the band, it should not be surprising that Return to the Void is a funeral doom album. While doom metal has probably become my favourite metal subgenre of the past few years, the funeral doom sub-subgenre is something I’ve only just begun to dabble in, so I was curious to see how Return to the Void would be. It’s about what I expected of this style of music – slow, mournful music with more emphasis on being depressing and atmospheric than on being heavy or energetic, growled vocals and dirge-like backing vocals. Return to the Void doesn’t really do much to deviate from its contemporaries, and being in such a niche genre it is definitely not going to resonate with most people. I found it pretty enjoyable though, especially “Reflection In Slow Time”, the only track to start off properly heavy before transitioning to a very sad duet between the main vocalist death growling while a female vocalist plays off him. It’s easily the best song on the album and if you’re interested in checking out funeral doom it’s a great entry point.
I always get leery when a band’s website or Bandcamp page really goes hard into hyping them up: it always says something along the lines of “One of the hottest new bands in the metal scene right now!” and will inevitably describe their music as the second coming of Christ. I get that this is how promotion and marketing works in the indie music scene, but so often I’ll see this, then listen to the music and think “It’s a bit shit, actually”. Luckily for As The World Dies, they manage to live up to the lofty hype they hold themselves up to, providing plenty of talented, interesting, and thought-out death metal across Agonist‘s ten tracks. I was enjoying myself throughout Agonist, but it finds itself on the wrong side of that borderline of “this is good” and “I would actually listen to this on a regular basis”. I definitely think that there is an audience who are going to love Agonist and I’m certain I’ll give this more listens in the future, but at this point in time I’m not in love with the album either.
26) Neither Moth nor Rust, Hanging Garden (Bandcamp)
Between Agalloch, Swallow the Sun and Draconian, doom metal may just be my favourite metal sub-genre these days so I’m always on the look-out for interesting new music in the genre. Neither Moss nor Rust by Hanging Garden is pretty low-key by doom metal standards, with mostly-clean vocals (including a second, vastly under-utilized female vocalist) and music that is more moody than heavy. While the EP kind of left me wanting, I did enjoy a couple tracks. “The Last Dance” and “On the Shore of Eternity” are easily the two heaviest songs on the EP and feel like they’re drawing directly from Swallow the Sun’s sound. Weirdly enough, I think my favourite track was “Field of Reeds”, this weird bonus remix which breaks from the rest of the album by being a chill, apocalyptic EDM song. I was shocked how much I liked it, let alone how much better it was than the rest of the album. All-in-all, Neither Moth nor Rust didn’t really inspire me to check out Hanging Garden’s other work but it’s got enough interesting tracks that I’d say it’s worth a listen.
And that’s it for today, be sure to tune back in tomorrow for the second half of this list!
Welcome back to the mostly-annual year-end countdown of the best movie posters of the year! In case you’re unfamiliar with how this works, I spend the year trolling through impawards and collecting all the really cool, interesting and striking poster designs for 2022 movies and then narrow them down into a shortlist. As always, any poster released during the year is eligible to make the list, but special consideration is given to posters which are intended for mass distribution rather than posters which are intended to be limited-release, alternative, “artistic” posters. As usual, you can see the full-sized poster in all its glory if you click on the images. Anyway, with those considerations out of the way, let’s get onto the list, starting with some dishonourable mentions!
Dishonourable Mention: Me!
Well… this was embarrassing. Last year’s big winner, Jackass Forever, ended up slipping to 2022, meaning it shouldn’t have even been on the list and should probably be winning this year’s award instead… To be fair, when I wrote the article it hadn’t been delayed into 2022 yet and I didn’t realize the issue until much later, but that was certainly embarrassing when I clued in.
Ok, I don’t want to take up this preamble with a half dozen Dishonourable Mentions, but good God were there an unusually high number of notably-shitty posters this year. On the one hand you’ve got bootlicking shit like Bezos, which makes me retroactively hate the cult of personality that Steve Jobs cultivated even more than I already did. Then there’s cringe shit like the poster for Gamestop: Rise of the Players, which is a fascinating story but one which this poster memes to the point where I’d be embarrassed to even see their documentary. And then there’s stuff like Dakota, which despite featuring a good boy Malinois, has some of the worst graphic design I’ve seen on one of these lists before. The blue background against that garish red font literally hurts my eyes to look at.
Anyway, with that out of the way, let’s get on to this year’s best posters!
X was one of my favourite movies of the last year and these posters were actually part of the reason I checked it out in the first place. The graphic designers have outdone themselves in all of their designs for this film, capturing the 70s aesthetic and lurid subject matter through the imagery they’ve used (the crossed legs making an “X” is particularly clever). These posters don’t really spoil anything, but they prime you for the tone and feel of the movie in an abstract way and for that I think that the designers deserve some accolades.
Netflix’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the stupidest horror movies of the year, but goddamn if the posters for it weren’t some of the year’s most interesting and evocative. The sun-drenched poster is beautiful and disturbing, hiding Leatherface’s visage despite him being in full daylight. Meanwhile, I really like the abstract painting of Leatherface’s mask, which shows very little but aptly promises the “face of madness”. There’s even a little homage of the last shot from the original film beneath Leatherface’s mouth on this poster. Just great posters overall, which is especially surprising considering that the film’s Netflix release meant that they theoretically could have gotten away with marketing the film without producing any.
http://www.impawards.com/2022/good_egg_xlg.html
13) Good Egg
Here’s one of those little movies that wouldn’t get a lot of attention if not for the very striking poster design. Despite knowing nothing about this movie before seeing its poster, it’s impressive how much about the movie you can glean from this poster (it’s about a woman who has been having no luck with invitro fertilization so she turns to criminal methods to help out; hijinks ensure). In fact this poster’s so good that I legitimately want to see this movie now, so you know they did something right!
Much ink has been spilled about how Jurassic World: Dominion wastes its “dinosaurs on the mainland” setup, but for a moment there in the marketing it looked like we’d get to see cool scenes like this where a t-rex interrupts a drive-in movie showing. Depending on what you were looking to get out of Dominion, you could also argue that this makes this particular poster better than the movie we actually got. It’s also kind of wild because this is technically a poster for a teaser trailer, which feels like the pinnacle of big budget franchise marketing excess. If you want to get nitpicky, some of the photoshop compositing isn’t the best, but I really like the premise here and think that it effectively gets across the terror and wonder of dinosaurs unleashed in the real world.
It would take a lot to get me to give a shit about a Pinocchio movie (a fact evidenced by Disney’s own attempt this year coming and going without me even noticing), but apparently that limit for me is a poster with the name “Guillmero del Toro” on it. Del Toro’s creature designs are always fascinating and this poster puts that on full display, promising an unsettling take on Pinocchio which is more than a little reminiscent of Pan’s Labyrinth. Add on that this is not just childhood nostalgia pandering and this is a Pinocchio project that I actually have some interest in checking out when it releases on Netflix.
Marvel movies tend to have pretty boring poster designs, but this one for Wakanda Forever struck me as being visually interesting the first time I saw it. It checks off all the standard “character poster” designs on the top half, but the way it places Namor and his forces upside down on the poster is interesting. It’s a clear visual metaphor, showing that the two sides are mirrored opposites, but it works really well and with more creativity than I’ve come to expect from Marvel these days.
I was thinking of giving the award for “movie poster that looks most like a dime-store novel” to The Black Phone, but Spin Me Round executes on that premise so much better in my opinion. It captures the harlequin romance cover aesthetic perfectly, with just a wink and a nod that everything may not be as straightforward as it may seem with Alison Brie’s backward glance towards the audience. Given that this is by the director of The Little Hours, which was basically the plot of a nun porn without the porn, this definitely is an intentional hint at all sorts of comedic chaos.
The Northman makes this list mainly because… well, just look at it, it’s a gorgeous shot. Robert Eggers knows how to wring every bit of potential out of his historical films and give us some really striking visual design. Whoever decided that Bjork would make a great viking deserves all the praise. Muted colour schemes don’t always work, but here combined with the off-focus it grants The Seeress an ethereal glow which is hard to look away from.
This poster makes the list for the sheer excess of it. It looks like an I Spy or Where’s Waldo illustration – everywhere you look there’s something interesting going on and the poster rewards careful study of it. There’s lots of little hidden details throughout, including the names of the director and the stars, plus various little gags and hints about the movie’s plot. You could argue that the poster is just too much, but considering how much this makes me want to study every little detail, I think it succeeds with aplomb.
6) Nope
For my money, Nope has the most iconic poster design of the year and it doesn’t even come close. This is one of those posters like for Jaws or Star Wars that people are still going to remember years from now. It doesn’t reveal anything about the movie really, just hinting at the alien abduction aspects, but it’s such a striking image and the title is so blunt that it sticks in your head immediately.
Fire of Love‘s poster asks a simple question: do you want to watch a documentary about a volcanologist couple who stand in front of giant walls of lava like it ain’t no thing? It’s such a simple poster, selling you on the film itself with some of the striking, unbelievable imagery which has been captured for it and allowing that to speak for itself.
I don’t know anything about Deep Water, but the graphic designers went hard on it this year, putting out a ton of bomb-ass posters (to the point where I haven’t even posted all the posters I liked for this one film here). They’re all abstract, with vivid colours and imagery that hints at a movie full of sex, mystery, drama and murder. Again, this is for a Hulu film so it’s not like they needed to go this hard with their marketing, but the fact that they did really has helped make this movie’s posters stand out.
I usually hate multiverse stories, but Everything Everywhere All At Once makes the most of the premise with some really fun and striking “alternate universe” posters. Raccacoonie in particular looks hilarious and nails the quirky Disney animation poster design perfectly, while the googly eye poster is weirdly unsettling. Even the standard poster is colourful and visually interesting, showing off the various alternate universes in a more efficient (if less fun) fashion. Everything Everywhere All At Once has had easily the funnest posters of the year, which is actually an accomplishment considering how much I enjoyed that one for White Noise.
Batman movies have been trying to one-up themselves for a decade an a half now with how grim-dark they can get, and these posters for The Batman easily take the cake for how moody and dark they are. The red and black contrast is eye-catching and sets the oppressive, noir tone efficiently. The poster with the Riddler looks more akin to a serial killer film than it does a traditional Batman poster and the poster that frames Batman with the question mark hints at the Riddler’s involvement in iconic fashion. All-in-all, the posters for this incarnation of the bat are thematically united, hinting at a take on the character which will be darker, more serious and more disturbing than any we have seen before.
NOPE. These posters are weird and disturbing enough without context, but if you know David Cronenberg and his penchant for twisted sci-fi and body horror, then these posters should be making your skin crawl. These posters only hint at the sorts of sick depravity you’re in store for if you watch this movie and for that they are easily the most effective posters I’ve seen all year.
Hey, I just wanted to put out a quick update on the blog since there has been an extended period of radio silence. I know that I long ago committed to writing and updating the blog in my own time, but I do feel bad when I go long periods between posts, so I feel like some sort of excuse is in order. Probably most importantly, at the end of July I had my second child, so I’ve had much less leisure time where I could just sit down and write.
I have had Retrospective series and other posts that I’ve wanted to write for a couple years now, but just have no had the time to dedicate to these. Retrospectives in particular are big undertakings, often taking several hours each in addition to the time needed to actually watch all the media involved, and I just have not been able to justify the time commitment that would require. Love/Hate articles, in contrast, take a fraction of the time and have been much more realistic, plus I enjoy the format so expect to see more of those until I have more time for deeper dives.
For that matter, the Resident Evil Love/Hate series is still underway, I have a couple posts completed already for the next batch of articles, but it will likely be a long time before those are completed. It’s new Pokemon season, so I’ll be dedicating most of my playing time to that before diving into any more Resident Evil games. I do plan on doing the Resident Evil Village DLC in the near future though, so when that’s completed I’ll likely edit the existing article, or I’ll do a new one if the DLC is substantial enough.
All this said, I do still have my usual year-end music and movie poster rankings coming on schedule. I work on these throughout the year in bits and pieces so they should be ready at their usual times in December. I also have put work into a big, only slightly masturbatory writing project through the year and that might see release in the new year. I have no idea if anyone will care about it, but whatever, this is my blog and I like to experiment with what I do here. Anyway, that’s where I’m at for now, hopefully I’m able to dedicate more time to writing in 2023 if life becomes a bit more stable.
Welcome back to the Resident Evil love/hate series! In this entry we’re looking at Resident Evil Village, the most recent entry in the franchise thus far. After the successful resurrection of the franchise with Resident Evil 7 and then the blockbuster hits that were the Resident Evil 2 and 3 remakes, everyone was excited to see what direction Capcom were going to go next. Their answer was Resident Evil Village, a game which (thankfully) looked to push the bounds of the franchise with vampires, werewolves and a gothic aesthetic that looked more than a little inspired by Resident Evil 4. Could Capcom keep the series’ revival going? Read on to find out…
Also, just before we get into the meat of this article, I played this game on a base PS4. The game still looks and runs fantastically on old hardware, I didn’t really notice any issues in my playthrough. I’m sure it looks absolutely stunning on current-gen systems, but don’t feel like you have to wait to get the full experience.
Love
Great Characters – Most Resident Evil games have one or two really compelling leads and maybe a good villain, but Resident Evil Village has one of the most compelling casts in the whole franchise. There’s at least three top-tier villains, two solid heroes, a top-tier side-character and nearly every other major player has a ton of personality that makes them memorable. The four lords in particular are all fantastic, having more in common with a Metal Gear rogues gallery than they do Resident Evil, which works in their favour. Alcina Dimitrescu makes for a very compelling, haughty antagonist as she stalks you through her castle with her daughters and toys with you, believing you to be below her attention. Donna Beneviento is just creepy, the way she messes with your mind during her level tells you more about her than any exposition could. Salvatore Moreau is a pathetic momma’s boy, you feel a lot of pity for him as you put him out of his misery. Karl Heisenberg is really interesting, a truly chaotic force within the plot whose performance nails the “Nicholas Cage” energy it was going for. Mother Miranda has less personality than any of the four lords, but the game builds up an appropriately intimidating atmosphere around her character which keeps her from falling flat. As for the leads, Ethan Winters has so much more personality here than he did in Resident Evil 7, reacting appropriately as he tears his way through the village to save his daughter. As for Chris Redfield, this was honestly the first time a Resident Evil game has made me interested in him. His heel-turn is definitely contrived, but the portrayal of Chris here is one who is supremely confident and weathered, actually feeling like a proper soldier for once. Perhaps the biggest surprise has to be The Duke though. I was expecting him to be a second-rate Merchant, but he manages to be interesting, mysterious and strange all at once, allowing him to stand on his own merits.
Variety – Going into Resident Evil Village I expected this game to just be a ripoff of Resident Evil 4. While it is clearly drawing some inspiration from Resident Evil 4, Village is very much its own game. Perhaps the most interesting way that Village differentiates itself is in how wildly it shifts tones and gameplay in each section. The village is reminiscent of the early hours of Resident Evil 4, then Castle Dimitrescu feels like the original Resident Evil with a gothic coat of paint, House Beneviento goes full-on P.T. with its psychological horror/escape room vibe, Moreau Reservoir has lots of puzzle/environmental hazard gameplay in a Lovecraftian fishing village, the factory plays like a slow-paced Doom game and then the last stretch of the game goes from tank-battle, to full-bore shooter and then to an almost Souls-like final boss. It’s a lot of different styles and tones across a 8-12 hour playthrough and while some work more than others, there should be some levels that catch your interest.
Some Great Level Design – Compared to Resident Evil 7, Village is a more linear and expansive game. However, it still does work in some looping areas as it goes along. The most obvious example of this is the main village area, which you can nearly fully-explore in your initial visit, but as the game progresses you will be able to return to areas you couldn’t open at the time, and after nearly every major event some new enemy type or secret area will open up, encouraging you to explore the world as much as you can. Castle Dimitrescu also feels like classic Resident Evil level design as you trek out from the one safe room to find keys, solve puzzles and dodge the pursuer enemies looking to drain your blood. House Beneviento, as I’ve stated, feels like the fulfilled promise of P.T., utilizing frequent backtracking and escape room-like gameplay to mess with the player and build tension until unleashing it all in truly terrifying fashion.
Secrets Everywhere! – While I’m mildly disappointed that Village doesn’t have deviously well-hidden items like Resident Evil 7 did, it makes up for it with all the hidden secrets it backs into its levels. Whether its the hidden areas full of rewarding gear, tough bosses off the beaten path, or the iron balls you can use to unlock the rewarding (and fun) labyrinth puzzles, there’s always something new to do in the village after you complete each level. In fact, I know for a fact I missed a few of these secrets in my playthrough and it almost makes me want to go back to find them again.
Mixed
Story Goes Off the Rails in the Last Hour – Surprise, surprise, another Resident Evil game has a narrative I can’t fully get on board with. In some ways, Village may just have the deepest narrative in the franchise, if only because it actually has a theme that it weaves throughout the entire narrative. Specifically, the story is very much about parenthood, the lengths that parents and children will go to for each other. Many of the game’s strongest and most horrific moments revolve around this very theme. However, the story really falls off the rails in the last hour. Much of this has to do with the game’s opening, where Chris kills Ethan’s wife, Mia, and kidnaps their daughter, Rose, who then gets intercepted by Mother Miranda and brought to the titular village. While this makes for a really intriguing narrative hook, the game undermines it in the last hour when it reveals that “Mia” was actually Miranda in disguise and that Chris was actually trying to save Rose… but didn’t bother to tell Ethan for absolutely no reason. It’s stupid, transparently so, and is the one thing that makes me second-guess whether this is the best Chris Redfield portrayal or not. It also doesn’t help that after all the hyping up, Mother Miranda doesn’t get a lot of opportunity to shine and live up to the hype. She very much suffers from a “tell, not show” approach. If she had some more opportunity to get fleshed out she could have been one of the most memorable Resident Evil villains.
Hints of What’s to Come – The closing minutes of Village are perhaps some of the most interesting to talk about. It is revealed that the BSAA, the heroic anti-bio-terror organization which has been a fixture in the series since Resident Evil 5, have become corrupt and are now deploying B.O.W.s to combat bio-terror. Obviously, this is hinting at a future where we may have to take down the BSAA, which sounds interesting to say the least. The other big reveal is that Rose grows up infected with the mold, which has given her powers that the government are monitoring closely (kind of like Sherry Birkin in Resident Evil 6). On the one hand, my gut tells me that these plot threads are going to lead us back down an action-heavy direction for the series like Resident Evil 5 and 6 did. If followed to their natural conclusion, you’d need either a soldier-type like Chris or Jill leading the fight against the BSAA and all their B.O.W. soldiers, or you’d need a super-powered Rose Winters leading the fight. Either way, it’s far away from the intimate, tense, horror-focused gameplay of the best Resident Evil games and I’d hate to see the series leave that behind again right after finding its footing. That said, I really don’t want Resident Evil to have yet another major plot hook meet a dead-end. Jake Muller (who was poised to take over the franchise) hasn’t been seen in 10 years, nothing has been done about Alex Wesker’s personality taking control of Natalia and we still know basically nothing about Blue Umbrella or what Mia was up to in Resident Evil 7. Oh, speaking of which…
Hate
Mia Gets Totally Shafted – If there’s one character who truly gets done dirty in this game, it’s Mia Winters. In a rather shocking twist, Resident Evil 7 reveals that Mia is secretly a part of a freaking bio-terror organization, a fact which comes to light over the course of the game. It was kind of expected that this would be explored more in Village, maybe even be why Chris shoots her in the opening sequence… but no, it is never brought up at all. In fact, Mia is relegated to the role of damsel and crying wife. She’s literally just locked up in a cage throughout the entire events of the game, gets rescued by Chris about 30 minutes before the game ends and then cries and freaks out asking where Ethan is. It’s borderline insulting that Mia gets treated this way, she was (and is) a far more compelling character than Ethan is and could have made for a great hero (or antagonist!) in this game if they’d just stuck with the narrative threads they’d established for her. Honestly, I want her to come back for Resident Evil 9. I think the villainous route could work really well for her. Maybe she had Rose with Ethan in order to continue her research, it is implied she knew Miranda and maybe she was working with her as well. This could lead to a F.E.A.R.-like situation if Mia turns Rose evil, which could be an interesting direction that could keep the games from getting too action-heavy.
Two Back-to-Back Awful Levels – The second half of this game really soured the experience for me. I know some people don’t like either Moreau’s Reservoir or they don’t like the factory, but I had the unpleasant experience of hating both.
Moreau’s area was unfocused and mediocre enough in the mines, but when you have to make your way to drain the sunken village it became an incredibly frustrating game of trial and error. Basically, you have to maneuver across planks before they go in the water, but if you fail, or if you happen to try at a moment when Moreau jumps past you, then you fall in the water and instantly get killed. I must have died here more times than in the rest of the game combined, and nearly every death was total bullshit. You can tell that there were some major cuts made here, a fact which was only recently confirmed. The original concept for the area sounds way more intriguing than what we got and I’m sad that the developers didn’t get more time to make it work.
Meanwhile, Heisenberg’s factory is just a slog. You have a fight tons of cyborg-zombies which become stronger and more well-armoured as the level progresses to keep things interesting. While I appreciate the attempts to keep the fights from getting too routine and I like some of the level design, the factory just goes on way too goddamn long and outstays its welcome. The game is also a lot more action-heavy during this time and every enemy feels like it takes too many shots to down them… everything is just “too much” and really should have been scaled back. Cut 20-30 minutes off this level and the game itself would be vastly improved.
Exploration Just Suddenly Ends Without Warning – As I headed off to Heisenberg’s factory, I had no idea that, once I went through those doors, the freeform exploration that the game had allowed up to that point was done. I had some puzzles and areas to explore still, but I figured I’d get a chance to clean all that up after the factory and before moving on to whatever area Miranda was in… haha, nope. As soon as the factory’s done the end-game gauntlet begins and goes on for nearly an hour. There’s also no merchant or weapon upgrades during this time either, so I sure hope you made use of The Duke’s services before you fought Heisenberg. Honestly, this is kind of baffling to me, I can’t help but wonder if they had to rush the ending or cut out some more areas, but it really annoyed me that you couldn’t get one last chance to explore the village before the final showdown.
Resident Evil Village was a big of a mixed bag for me. The first half was fantastic all-round, but by the time I hit the mid-point the game really nose-dived in quality and it left me feeling disappointed at how things went. I appreciate Capcom’s willingness to experiment with the franchise, but I definitely preferred the more focused and small-scale stakes of Resident Evil 7 and hope that the series will try to emulate that experience going forward.
Yeah that’s right, this one doesn’t even have the Resident Evil moniker, Capcom literally just called it Umbrella Corps. I’m not even going to mince words, this game fucking sucks. It is far and away the worst Resident Evil game I’ve played and I have a hard time imagining how a AAA studio could make a game shittier than this in future. How they managed to make a worse shooter than Resident Evil: Survivor in an era when shooters had been long figured out is beyond me. Oh and as for why I’m covering this game now instead of later with the Resident Evil spin-off titles? Despite being a multiplayer shooter, it is somehow, inexplicably canon.
Love
No Microtransactions – I shouldn’t even have to give a game any sort of kudos for not being predatory, but Umbrella Corps seems so ripe for microtransactions that it is shocking to see them absent. Especially for a hollow game like this, you’d expect it to be nothing but a vector to shove microtransactions at gamers, but no, somehow Capcom had some pride in this game. Hooray?
Fan Service – Okay, I’ve got to admit that seeing the Resident Evil 4 village in full HD is pretty damn cool. The game even adopts some of the movement mechanics of that game into the map design, encouraging more verticality. Similarly, the Kijuju village map features much more aggressive enemies, similar to how Resident Evil 5 plays, making the game almost feel like a bite-sized remake at times.
Mixed
Customization – Like I mentioned on Resident Evil 6, I love when a game lets you customize trivial things to your liking. Wanna pick the colour of your uniform, your helmet emblems, your gun sights and reticule? Umbrella Corps has you covered. However, you get the sense that they may have put the horse before the cart because you’re telling me that you only start out with two shotguns, two SMGs and 2 pistols? Seriously? I mean, you could theoretically unlock more, but… well…
Movement Speed – Holy crap you move FAST in this game, which feels at odds with the tiny maps you’re running around in. Even with just your base movement speed you can cross a room in a couple seconds at most, which I can only imagine was to copy the blistering mobility of games of the time like Titanfall and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. I don’t really like the speed of the game, it feels “wrong” to me, but that’s more of a subjective annoyance rather than an actual flaw so your mileage may vary.
Hate
An Online Shooter With No Online – The big issue with online-focused games is that they are inevitably going to be worthless and most of the content inaccessible once the online part of the game comes to an end. It’s one thing to hold that against a game like MAG or Warhawk where they provided years of online play to people who were buying the game. However, I have absolutely no reservations about Umbrella Corps, because it was dead on arrival. Within a month it was basically unplayable, with less than 50 people playing at any one time. In its release year it spent more time in an unplayable state than it did playable, which mean that this is the game’s content as far as I’m concerned. And Capcom’s still selling the “Deluxe Edition” for $33.50 on PSN! For a completely dead game!!!
The Experiment – Full-stop, the single player content in this game is miserable. This would be bad enough if it was just a bonus mode you could ignore, but this especially hurts because it’s the only part of the game that’s actually playable. It plays like Black Ops Declassified, the bargain-basement PS Vita Call of Duty game Activision shit out. You do spec ops missions with such engaging objectives as “kill a bunch of enemies” and “hold some points for 10 seconds”, bored to tears the whole time, stuck with the default weapon loadouts and each mission may take like 2 minutes at most to complete. To compensate for this, the game makes all enemies kill you in 1 or 2 hits, so if you make any kind of mistake then you’re punished severely. If you want to make the game even more boring you can cheese this by standing in front of the meat piles that zombies spawn from and just shoot them before they can even react, but… like, the game is boring enough as is. I’m not ashamed to admit that I quit about halfway through The Experiment, it was that joyless. The game had me doing a tedious “kill 20 enemies” mission and then round 2 was “hold point 10 seconds 5 times”. I died in the 2nd round and had to replay the entire first round again. I wanted to see Raccoon City, but fuck this, I’m not playing this game ever again.
Basic Design Decisions Are Flawed – Umbrella Corps just feels “off” when you’re playing it. The aforementioned movement speed doesn’t help too much but on it’s own it’s not an insurmountable problem. The problems arise from how awkward the basic shooting gameplay is. The game’s in a third person perspective, but suddenly switches to first person when you aim down sights. This is disorienting enough, but for a bonus it doesn’t do this if you’re in cover, in that context it just zooms the third person camera when you ADS. It got to the point where I was just hip-firing at all times rather than deal with the camera zooming in and out all the time.
Repeated Voice Lines – Get ready to tear your ears off if you hop into The Experiment. Every time you pick up a DNA sample you’re going to hear “This one’s mine!” and “There is is!” over and over and over and over and over and over and over. I swear to God that no one in charge tested this game, no one would greenlight a game this annoying and “yeah, that’s acceptable”.
Information Overload – Umbrella Corps‘ UI is buck-wild. In addition to standard shooter UI, the game shows you exactly where you can climb, take cover and the exact range of your melee weapons… which, combined with the small maps means that at any one time your view is going to be filled with obtrusive, over-animated bullshit, whether you wanted to or not.
Umbrella Corps is fucking garbage. I spent $6.50 on this game and I kind of knew what I was getting into, but even that felt like I was getting ripped off. I really want to know how Capcom fucked this up so badly, because there are Steam Greenlight games with better all-round design than this piece of shit.
Welcome back to the Resident Evil love/hate series! In this entry we’re looking at Resident Evil: Revelations2, a game which, in hindsight, feels like Capcom testing the waters between Resident Evil 6 and 7. Like its predecessor, Revelations 2 experiments with the franchise’s usual formula in plenty of interesting ways. Does it work out for the better? Read on to find out…
Love
Horror Is Back, Baby! – The first Resident Evil: Revelations was clearly trying to harken back to the survival horror gameplay of the franchise’s classic entries, but Revelations 2 decides to lean full-tilt into being a horror game. It wears its influences on its sleeves – the Claire/Moira sections are very intense, like Saw II mashed with a creature feature (there’s even a chapter with its own Saw traps!), whereas Barry/Natalia’s sections are much slower-paced and have a post-apocalyptic feel, like The Last of Us. It’s a much more small-scale and intimate return to form for the franchise, which had been going off the rails for years by this point.
Lots of Great Characters – Revelations 2 scales down the cast compared to its predecessor, but in doing so it crafts a far more focused and impactful journey for most of them. By far the best of the bunch are Barry Burton and his daughter Moira. It’s really nice to see Barry again after so long and the fact that we like him so much makes us want to find his missing daughter all the more. Speaking of which, Moira has a great debut here. Like most modern-day Resident Evil heroines, she has a serious potty mouth, which goes along with her off-the-charts sass, but it makes her endearing. Learning what caused the rift between her and Barry and helping her overcome her fears makes for a surprisingly poignant journey. Natalia is also a surprisingly decent character, I was worried that a little girl character could get annoyingly precocious or just be used as a vector for limp scares, but she manages to hold her own. I also found the game’s villain to be very creepy, I wish that they had gotten a bit more to do but they really made an impact here.
Some Interesting New Enemies – Most of Revelations 2‘s enemies are the usual variety of fast/slow zombies, heavy weapon zombies, etc, but Barry’s campaign has a couple of really interesting new enemy types.
First of all are the glasps, which are basically big, invisible bugs. As they close in on you, the camera begins to lose focus in their direction, giving you a hint about where they are. In addition, Natalia can see them, so you can either switch to her to see where they are, or aim and listen to her call-outs to know where to shoot. They’re usually not much of a threat, but they are spooky, so they fit the game’s horror ambitions well.
My favourite enemy though are the Revenants, big, creepy zombies with armour all over their bodies which move erratically as you blow the plates off. The really interesting part though is that every Revenant has a randomized parasite in one of its extremities, kind of like the Regeneradors from Resident Evil 4. If you know where their weak points are, you can kill them in as little as two shots, but if you don’t you can waste a lot of ammo guessing. This incentivizes strategic play any time you encounter a Revenant. Natalia can see the parasites, so you can switch to her to know where to shoot, or you can use stealth to get close and one-shot them with a knife takedown. All-in-all, they’re a nice shake-up from the usual sorts of enemies we encounter in these games and the fact that they require some strategizing to kill effectively is appreciated.
Partner Switching Returns! – Thirteen years after being introduced in Resident Evil 0, seamless character switching makes its triumphant return in Revelations 2! With a press of a button you can instantly switch characters. While there aren’t quite as many puzzles requiring your characters to separate, in some ways this feature felt more necessary in Revelations 2, because your characters are far more specialized. Claire/Barry are the only characters who can shoot guns at enemies, meaning they’re going to be doing most of the combat, whereas Moira and Natalia can be used to stun enemies and find hidden items in the environment. Because of this, I got into a rhythm of playing as the item-finding characters 60% of the time and then switching to my fighter when combat gets triggered. Of course, if you don’t want to partner switch, then you could always use…
Split-screen Co-op! – I was legitimately surprised when I found out that Revelations 2 had a split-screen mode. Considering that Resident Evil 5 and 6 both had split-screen, I probably shouldn’t have been, but it’s a welcome surprise. It may not be as fun of an experience as those games since one player is going to be severely underpowered at all times, but having to adapt to being a support character could make Revelations 2 a unique co-op experience.
An Actual Dodge Button – Capcom must have heard my complaints about the dodge in the original Revelations, because the dodge here solves every single problem I had with that game’s system. All you have to do is press a button and it will play an animation, oh my God! Honestly, this probably shouldn’t even warrant an entry on the list, but the fact that I loathed the original game’s dodge so much made this such a joyous addition.
Mixed
Nerfed Weapon Upgrade System – Considering how much I loved the weapon upgrade system in the original Revelations, I was really excited to see it back in Revelations 2. However, the devs have made some tweaks to this system which make it so much less satisfying. First of all, the upgrade screen now shows you far less information – you can’t even see what effect applying an upgrade will have to your stats until you have applied it… why would they do this? Secondly, parts kits are significantly rarer than they were in the first game. You could reliably find 1-2 parts kits every time you passed a weapons bench in the first game, but here it’s not unusual for me to go a whole chapter and only find a couple upgrades the whole time. The devs seem to have made the decision to have parts kits be hidden much better in the environment, meaning that you really have to go looking to find them now. You can argue that it’s more rewarding, but I just find it leaves your weapons feeling far less personalized over the course of the playthrough.
Oh Hey, Skills Are Back… – Skills return from Resident Evil 6… and they’re about as useless as ever. As you play through the game you can find gems which will earn you BP which you can use at the end of a chapter to purchase skills, but most of these skills are very underwhelming. I can increase my fire rate when I crouch by 10%? Wow. I can heal my partner from a downed state faster (a state that I had my partner get into once in the entire game)? What a steal… But hey, at least BP is pretty easy to come by and they combined Skills with an actual weapon upgrade system, so it’s at best unobtrusive. It is, however, pretty underwhelming considering that they included a medal system to try to incentivize getting lots of bonus BP.
Hate
Linear Level Design – Probably the biggest change in Revelations 2 is that it drops the looping level design in favour of a far more linear progression, which feels pretty disappointing in comparison. Some of this could be chalked up to the game’s episodic release structure, which could make it difficult to design the game with hub areas, looping levels and gradual exploration of a larger area. Making matters worse, Barry’s segments recycle areas from Claire’s campaign. In fact, Barry doesn’t get any substantial new areas until Chapter 3 (of 4, for the record), meaning that nearly a quarter of the game feels like an asset flip. Thankfully, like I’ve said, the tone and pacing in Barry’s version of these areas is completely different so it doesn’t feel too egregious.
Claire Gets Shafted – Going into this game I thought that Claire Redfield was the main character, but holy shit does she ever feel like an afterthought. She basically adds nothing to the plot. Like, the ingredients for her to actually matter are there – Moira needs to overcome her fears in order to save the day, why can’t we make it clear that Claire is the one to inspire her? Hell, the game’s T-virus strain is triggered by fear and the villain wants Natalia specifically because she’s fearless… yet she casts aside Claire without a second thought. You’re telling me that Natalia’s more fearless than Claire is at this point? Hell, even at the end when Claire comes back to finish the fight, Barry’s just like “fuck off, this is my fight”. Sure, Claire gets the final hit in, but again it all feels like an afterthought… And oh my God don’t even get me started on her “relationship” with Neil that comes out of nowhere. It’s so badly done that it undermines and sort of emotional heft that could have been mined from it. All-in-all, this is the Burtons’ game and Claire is one again relegated to supporting character which is very disappointing.
On a related note, Kaya Scodelario who plays Claire in Welcome to Raccoon City got dragged by Resident Evil fans for saying that Claire gets screwed over after Resident Evil 2… but, like, she undeniably did. After 2 she gets Code: Veronica, which puts her in the back seat for Chris halfway through, and then… this. Claire got shafted hardcore by Capcom and anyone who argued otherwise needs to take a step back and look at just how under-represented Claire is.
Bleed/Healing System – One of Revelations 2‘s experiments with the series’ survival horror formula involves adding a bleed status and I’ve got to say that I’m not a fan of this system at all. If you get hit by a strong attack from an enemy, this will cause the edges of the screen to turn a sharp red and your health will drain over time. The only way to stop this is for you or your partner to either apply a tourniquet or use a green herb. It’s fine in concept, but in execution it doesn’t work. First of all, there’s no hotkey to use a tourniquet, so you have to dive into your menu to do it… but if you got hit by an enemy then you’re still in combat and you won’t have time to do that (opening the inventory doesn’t pause the game in Revelations 2). Secondly, you never know if your partner is going to use a tourniquet on you or not, it’s a crapshoot really. Thirdly, I don’t like the way this game indicates damage – you can’t really tell how damaged you are, and even a couple small hits turn a third of your screen red so for all I know I was healing all game while still over half health. Oh and the game also has ANOTHER system where your vision can be obscured by gunk so you can apply disinfectant to clear your screen, but again… why? With no hotkey I’m not digging through my inventory for this.
HOLD ONTO THE FUCKING BRICK, NATALIA – Holy fucking shit this annoyed the hell out of me. Natalia’s only offensive option is to pick up bricks in the environment and throw them at enemies or bash them up close. You’d think she could just carry them around easily, but no, if you do anything she will drop it automatically. Went up a ladder? Brick’s gone? Slide down a hill? Bye-bye brick. Open a door? No bricks allowed. It’s so stupid, it makes it so that you can’t even reliably plan to have a brick for any upcoming combats and I honestly can’t wrap my head around why the devs would program the game like this.
Doesn’t Take Advantage of A/B Scenario – Revelations 2 makes some attempts for actions taken in Claire’s scenario to affect Barry’s scenario, but these feel token at best. There are a handful of enemies in each chapter with glowing heads whose survival or death affects Barry’s campaign, plus interacting with a couple objects may open up different paths, but that’s it. It could have been cool if there was more ways to “leave a mark” on Barry’s campaign, but unfortunately the execution here is so limited that it is effectively non-existent.
Bugs – There are bugs everywhere in this game, and not just of the invisible-variety. Animation bugs are by far the most common and egregious – you will see objects and characters clip through the environment all the time. Even the mandatory sliding animations to load into new areas will blatantly show Barry and Natalia halfway up to their knees in the environment which is really immersion-breaking.
The Story Crumbles By the End – By the end of the first half, Revelations 2 had one of the best stories in any Resident Evil game going. The character drama is strong and Chapter 2 ends with a hell of a cliff-hanger, but after this point the plot quickly starts to fall apart. Chapter 3 really puts Claire’s “relationship” with Neil center stage and it goes off like a wet fart, whereas Barry’s Chapter 3 is basically just busywork, feeling like padding. However, by the time you reach the story revelations in Chapter 4 the plot crumbles with any level of scrutiny (spoilers ahead). For example, if Neil was secretly supporting bioterrorism, why did he kidnap his own employees as test subjects? And, for that matter, why kidnap Claire goddamn Redfield!? All that said, Revelations 2 ends on a cliffhanger that must be addressed in a future Resident Evil game, it’s far too big to just leave it as a loose end forever.
I enjoyed Resident Evil: Revelations 2 quite a bit, but it is a far different game than its predecessor. I like some things they did here more than the original, but for every improvement there’s a step back which hinders the experience somewhat. If they had ironed out a handful of the annoyances (eg, drop the bleed system, keep weapon upgrades how they were in the original, tighten the story, etc) then it’d probably be a clear head and shoulders above the first Revelations, but as-is I appreciate both for their unique takes on survival horror.
Welcome back to the Resident Evil love/hate series! In this entry we’re going to start arguably the most prominent and popular spin-off series in the franchise, Resident Evil: Revelations. Conceived as an interquel set between Resident Evil 4 and 5 and initially designed as a handheld experience, Revelations has since made its way to TV screen and computer monitors. This game also came out at a time when Resident Evil was at its most troubled – the horror elements of the franchise had been forgotten and Resident Evil 6 and Operation Racoon City were just on the horizon to make things even worse. With all this in mind, how does Revelations hold up today compared to its full-fledged console brethren? Read on to find out…
Love
Really Impressive For a 3DS Game – While it’s not quite on the same level as Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, Revelations makes the jump from handheld to console surprisingly well. You can definitely tell that the game was designed for less-powerful hardware – the graphics range from near PS3-quality for some of the character models to sub-PS1 for parts of the environment, the animations (especially for enemies) can be very stiff and limited and the whole experience feels like Resident Evil 5-lite. However, this ultimately makes the game all the more impressive because throughout the entire playthrough I found myself saying holy shit this was running on a 3DS?!
Great Pacing – Resident Evil games, especially after 4, had a bad habit of trying to stretch out their levels as much as possible, making each one take around an hour to get through. Revelations, on the other hand, is designed for handhelds and so most levels top out between 30-45 minutes, which are often divided up between 5-30 minute chunks of gameplay, and each chapter ends with some sort of cliffhanger which makes you want to find out what will happen next. Honestly, I enjoyed this “TV drama” approach more than I expected to.
Some Great New Characters – Resident Evil can struggle at times to introduce interesting new characters (or, hell, can be adverse to introducing any), but Revelations has a bunch of fun, delightful additions that I really want to see come back to the franchise someday. The most notable is Parker, a super charming guy who is as memorable as fan-favourite Barry Burton. BSAA director O’Brian is also a solid character, literally a Colonel Campbell type (they even got Paul Eiding for the English dub to play him). Despite being one-note, I also found Jessica to be quite endearing, especially because she plays off of Chris and Parker well. I would be sad if none of these characters ever return to the series – don’t make me sad, Capcom!
Return to Classic Level Design – Resident Evil 4 moved the franchise towards a more linear level design, but a good chunk of Revelations harkens back to a more classic-style in line with the original Resident Evil. Over the course of the game, Jill will explore every area of the Queen Zenobia at least twice over, coming back to get to previously-inaccessible rooms and items as you go, which keeps the environments from feeling overly-repetitive. Like I’ve said, it’s pretty stripped-down compared to the classic Resident Evil games, so don’t expect to find an item and then have to trek to the other side of the ship to use it, the game is pretty good at funneling you where you need to go (which is good because the in-game map is not very helpful and the Queen Zenobia isn’t anywhere near as memorable as the Spencer Mansion or Raccoon Police Department).
Genesis – I was initially annoyed by the introduction of the Genesis scanning system; it felt like an unnecessary barrier to item discovery, when you should be able to just pick items up in the environment. However, soon enough I found it to be a fun, optional bonus you could use. Low on ammo? Pop out the Genesis and you’re sure to find some. It’s also very handy that when you walk into a room the scanner will tell you if there’s an item there, so you don’t have to waste time searching every corner of every room. It also has the bonus function of producing green herbs when you scan enough enemies… but it’s most effective when they’re still alive (some enemies can’t even be scanned when they die because their bodies dissolve immediately), so you have a strategic decision to make when using it. I’m not sure I’d like this to be added to any other Resident Evil game, but it works surprisingly well here.
Weapon Upgrades System – Revelations may have my favourite weapon upgrade system in the entire franchise. Hell, Revelations may have my favourite kind of weapon upgrade system in any game. Put simply, you’ll find parts kits in the environment as you play, the most valuable of which are in hard-to-reach places and/or hidden with the Genesis. If you’re actually looking for them, you should find one or two kits every time you set off to complete an objective. These kits allow you to equip perks onto your guns at workbenches. Each gun comes with a certain number of perk slots, perks can be swapped in and out at will and some perks are exclusive to each weapon. Furthermore, each perk has multiple levels of effectiveness which dramatically improve their quality (eg, Damage 1 boosts your gun by 10%… whereas Damage 5 boosts it 50%). All-in-all, it’s a great system that gives you a ton of flexibility and customization, encourages exploration to get the most out of your weapons and are doled out at a good pace to feel rewarding.
Mixed
The Shooting Gameplay – Revelations plays a lot like Resident Evil 5, which I was pretty meh on. Thankfully, the enemies in this game aren’t quite as bullet-spongey, but some of the endless shooting galleries (especially any time Hunters are on-screen) get to the point of being tedious and mind-numbing. Unlike, say, the Resident Evil 2 remake where you are encouraged to avoid/ignore enemies when you can, Revelations seems to expect you to kill everyone you come across, which clashes somewhat with the more classic survival horror elements of the game. It can be especially problematic during the handful of sequences where you get absolutely swarmed by enemies, where your success or failure will likely come down to whether you happen to have enough ammo stockpiled.
Hate
…And Some Awful New Characters – As much as I like the new cast in Revelations, there were some utter stinkers added to the roster which I would be remiss to ignore. Worst of all has to be Quint, an annoying dork who refuses to just shut the hell up for five seconds. He’s joined by his comedy side-kick, Grinder, who isn’t anywhere near as bad but ever time Quint said his nickname (which is all the time) all I can hear is “Grindr”… Anyway, this game is also saddled with Raymond, an even bigger dork with an awful, out-of-place anime character design, complete with huge red haircut and gigantic chad chin. Raymond himself isn’t that bad, but his design is so off-putting that I hated every moment he was on-screen and it definitely undermined the “cool guy” energy they were clearly aiming for.
Dodging – Okay, I will acknowledge that there is a good chance that this may be 100% on me, but holy fuck I could not dodge to save my life. There’s a whole dodging tutorial section in the early parts of the game where it tells you “move your analog stick and press X to dodge” and if you do it at the right time your character will dodge. Simple enough, but Jesus Christ it doesn’t work. First of all, there is no associated animation for a failed dodge, so you either do it perfectly or don’t do anything, making it difficult to know if I’m even performing it right. Secondly, I would constantly perform dodges at random in this game without even intending to and I can tell you for a fact that all I was doing at the time was moving the stick, I was definitely not pressing X too. Worst of all, dodging is crucial for your survival, because several enemies and attacks are clearly designed to be dodged and your health reserves will barely get you through on Normal if you can’t. Anyway, suffice to say I got extremely frustrated during the dodge “tutorial”.
Story Goes Off the Rails – I’ll be honest, for the first half of this game I was enjoying the story here way more than most Resident Evil games. The TV drama format means you’re getting new twists and turns every 30 minutes or so, but at a certain point it just collapses in on itself. Probably the dumbest moment in the whole game is when you play as Chris and Jessica fighting your way through a ship to rescue Jill and Parker… only to get to the end of the level and discover “oh no, the princess is in another cruise ship!” Seriously, someone decided that it was a good idea to have two identical cruise ships with monsters in them and the only reason I can think for that is to pad the runtime and reuse some areas for a dumb twist. As if that wasn’t dumb enough though, it turns out that there’s also a third ship after all this. Oh, and the whole plot is a false flag operation orchestrated by O’Brian to prove that his boss is a terrorist-sympathizer… which he does by unleashing a deadly virus on two (retired) cruise ships and then throws his best agents into them because he can’t risk having the truth leak out! Throw in a couple non-sensical betrayals and it’s pretty clear that twists took precedence over a coherent and satisfying narrative.
Enemy Design – The design of the T-Abyss monsters really doesn’t do it for me in this game. On the one hand, blob-like enemies hadn’t been done in the franchise at this point, I can appreciate their deep-sea creature inspirations and they’re differentiated well enough that you can always know exactly what variant you’re fighting. However, blob monsters seem so uninspired to me. Their jerky motions remind me of the necromorphs in Dead Space, but their design as a bunch of flesh blobs make them far less interesting and disturbing as far as I’m concerned. On the other side of the coin, the Hunters and infected wolves clearly got the short end of the stick here, as each are clearly given far less attention with their animations and attacks, preferring to just swarm you and hope you don’t notice.
Partner AI – I’m not even sure why Revelations has a partner with you at all times, because they are basically useless. I can only assume that “everyone liked it in Resident Evil 5” so it’s an expectation that it will be there? Anyway, your partner will never do anything useful in combat, can’t hold items for you, can’t heal you and will rarely draw any sort of aggro for you… Honestly, the only good part about having an AI partner with you for the whole game is that at least it helps flesh out their character, which is a big reason why I liked Parker and Jessica so much.
Jill’s Redesign – This is a pretty minor issue all-told, but I couldn’t get it out of my head throughout the entire game. Capcom changed Jill’s face model for this game and it just feels… wrong. The new model isn’t that far off from the one they had been using from Resident Evil remake through to 5, but (weirdly enough) that just makes it feel worse, like they subtly screwed up how she’s supposed to look.
Horny Devs – Resident Evil 6 was in development at the same time as Revelations and you can definitely see that both games had the same level of horniness in the dev teams (for better or worse). First of all, Jill has a dump truck ass in this game and is always showing some cleavage. This is super minor and I wouldn’t have minded at all if that was the end of it, but there are two particularly egregious offenders. First of all is Jessica, whose special ops wetsuit design apparently doesn’t need to cover an entire leg or ass-cheek. It’s just so transparently horny that even the guy who designed her thinks it looks stupid. The worst offender is, without a doubt, Rachel Foley, an agent who goes into combat on the Queen Zenoba with her two gigantic knockers exposed. You come across her getting fucking murdered right in front of you and you’re probably going to come away from all that thinking “man she had big tits”. Oh, but then she gets infected with T-Abyss and takes it to a whole other level as she suddenly becomes the only ooze monster to retain enough of a human shape to be constantly thrusting her bulbous boobies at you. I’ve heard justifications that they were trying to mix horror and eroticism together in this design, but it just looks like some weirdo’s fetish unleashed. Naturally, Rachel has become one of the most popular Revelations characters, fancy that.
While it may look like my opinions on Revelations are polarized, I honestly feel like most of the “Hates” are relatively minor. Overall, I really enjoyed this game, the mixture of classic Resident Evil level design and Resident Evil 4 and 5‘s gameplay works really well and its characters and unique eccentricities really grew on me the more I played. It just goes to show what you can do with a strong design team, even on an underpowered system like the 3DS.
Welcome back to the Resident Evil love/hate series! In this entry we’re going to be looking at Resident Evil 0, the oft-overlooked Game Cube prequel to the original game. Having come out at a time when classic survival horror fatigue was at an all-time high, does this game hold up 20 years later? Read on to find out…
Love
Partner Switch Mechanic – By far the most notable addition in Resident Evil 0 is the ability to switch characters with the press of a button. Not because it opens up new gameplay possibilities (which it does, but it’s arguably under-utilized), but because the technology of it is so cool. Seriously, in a game series where opening every door results in a loading screen, the ability to press a button and then a second later be on an entirely different part of the map with another character is mind-blowing. Seriously, this is the kind of thing that modern games struggled with until the most recent generation where SSDs became standardized, but seeing it on a Game Cube game is wild.
Graphics – Resident Evil 0 was easily the best-looking Resident Evil game until the series made the jump to PS4. The pre-rendered backgrounds look great and, uncharacteristically, Capcom managed to not lose their hi-res masters so the HD remaster actually looks fantastic in action (although, like the Resident Evil remake, the cinematics are still in stretched 480p). I feel like the art direction in Resident Evil remake is a bit more distinctive overall, but Resident Evil 0 is definitely the prettiest of the “classic” era of the franchise.
Train Opening – Resident Evil 0 makes a big impression in its opening hour, which sees you having to deal with zombies on a train. It’s easily the most memorable and unique area in the game and… well, honestly, it was pretty frustrating to play this section but the art direction and level design are so distinctive that it left a positive impression on me overall. It’s too bad that the rest of the game feels like it’s recycling series tropes with its locations, but at least the train at the start of the game gives 0 its own legitimately iconic identity.
Billy and Rebecca – Like Sherry and Jake in Resident Evil 6, Rebecca Chambers and Billy Coen make for a great odd-couple pairing (albeit without the romantic tension). At the game’s outset, Billy is straight-up a convicted murderer whereas Rebecca is the straight-laced soldier, which makes their forced cooperation and eventual warming up to one another great to see play out. The voice acting is also better-than-average for a Resident Evil game, especially from Billy’s actor, James Kee, who gives his character a confident, menacing, sarcastic edge.
Innovations – It’s not unusual for a prequel to be used as an excuse to repeat familiar beats one more time, but Resident Evil 0 actually makes the brave decision to shake up the gameplay of the franchise. For better or for worse this gives the game its own unique identity. First of all, as I’ve mentioned, it introduces an AI partner for the first time in the franchise who you can switch to control on the fly. The game also allows you to drop items and they will stay on the map later, alleviating some stress about item management. Both of these changes fundamentally switch up the way you play the game and make Resident Evil 0 an interesting entry even now, whether you like the changes or not.
HD Remaster Costumes – Okay, I’ve gotta say that the plethora of costumes available in the HD remaster right off the bat is a great touch. Most Resident Evil games will have unlockable costume sets that only become available for subsequent playthroughs, but I don’t tend to replay games all that regularly so I never really get to use them. However, right from the outset you get a bunch of choices to customize Rebecca and Billy and can swap them on the fly. It’s a small touch but I personally loved the option!
Wesker Mode – THIS is how you convince someone to replay a game that they just beat. The HD remaster of Resident Evil 0 adds the ability to have Billy swapped out for Albert freaking Wesker, complete with his own unique moveset and abilities which fundamentally shakes up the gameplay. It’s such a cool idea and I don’t understand why more games don’t have cool bonus modes like this to reward players for completion.
Mixed
Partner AI – Your partner’s AI can be reeeeeeally stupid at times, often being more of a liability than an asset. You get a few toggles you can set to make them passive or aggressive, or to stay put or follow you, but even if you put them on attack mode they will often stand around doing nothing half the time. Worse, they will usually have to be micro-managed to avoid taking any damage and in certain areas of the game you’re best off leaving your partner behind so you can weave through enemies alone so your partner won’t waste your resources, which you’re only going to know through either pre-existing knowledge or trial-and-error.
Hate
The Load Times – Here’s a caveat: I played this game on Switch so maybe this is just down to the platform I played on, but oh my God the load times kill me in this game. Every time you go through a door it can easily take ten seconds or more before you get back in control, which adds up big time over the course of a playthrough. Hell, it’s not unusual for me to spend more time waiting for an area to load than actually playing in an area before getting to the next loading screen. This is especially baffling when the player switch is so seamless and quick, despite you potentially being on the other side of the game world at the time… is it not loading in the same resources either way? Why does that take only a second whereas entering some rooms takes upwards of fifteen seconds…? Hell, the Resident Evil remake didn’t take nearly this long either and its definitely comparable technology. In any case, this is a major frustration which makes Resident Evil 0 a slog to playthrough in the moment-to-moment gameplay.
No Item Box – While being able to drop items where ever you want is handy, the way it is implemented turns it into more of an exercise in frustration than the Godsend that it sounds like. This is mainly because the game decides to show off this feature by doing away with the traditional item box, which leads to two big issues:
First of all, while it sounds more realistic and immersive, managing your big stockpile of items is not intuitive when they’re in a big pile on the floor. There are a couple rooms in the game which were clearly designed as your “item drop” areas and you’ll find yourself annoyed as you try to maneuver just right to be able to pick up the one item you want to get, and not the item beside it. Remember, this is a fixed-camera game and you’re trying to reach the exact point you want to get to in 3D space, it’s not as easy as it sounds and I often found myself grabbing the wrong items. Making matters worse, all areas have a cap on the number of items you can drop there and you will eventually run out of space, forcing you to find another safe area to be your backup item drop room, meaning you now have to remember where you put which items.
The second, bigger issue is that eventually you are going to have to move all those items. There are three points in this game where you are going to have to move all your shit around, which is a long, annoying process of dropping all your items, heading back to get more, dropping those off and then backtracking again to get whatever stuff you weren’t able to bring the first time. It’s not fun and all that they would have needed to do to solve it is give you an item box that you can put your stuff into in addition to being able to drop stuff on the floor if needed.
The Worst Enemies in the Franchise – Resident Evil 0 has some of the most frustrating enemies in the whole series to have to face, to the point where it makes the thought of replaying the game less enticing. The leech zombies are everywhere in this game and I hate them. They are vulnerable to fire, but if you don’t have a couple molotov cocktails or a grenade launcher then you will literally waste all your pistol and shotgun ammo trying to kill them if you don’t just take the damage and run past. Again, like I said earlier, if you already know how to deal with them or learn through trial-and-error then you can mitigate the frustration, but if you go in blind then it’s just straight-up unfair. The leech zombies aren’t even the worst enemies, that would probably be the Eliminator monkeys since you can’t just run past them. These little bastards can stunlock you, deal huge amounts of damage, attack in groups and take several shotgun rounds to take down. Oh, and I’d be remiss to not mention the Lurkers, which can show up if you cross one particular bridge. If you happened to not bring your partner with you at the time, you die instantly and without warning… how fun!
The Leech Controller is Super Lame – So, the main villain of Resident Evil 0 looks like… this. I don’t find myself hating him because of his actions or for being threatening, I want him dead because he’s such a stupid looking villain. That’s it, I just hate this character. When I get through the series I want to do a character tier list and this loser is going to be in the bottom tier, no question.
Just a Really Frustrating Experience – I would argue that Resident Evil 0 is probably the hardest game in the franchise. Even playing on normal mode, the game is designed to keep you on the absolute bare minimum of health and ammo, while also throwing you into situations where you have to fight, have to take damage, or get put up against enemies like the leech zombies which you can’t possibly deal with without losing all your resources. Sure, maybe you’ll figure out a way to deal with these problems through trial and error, but you’re going to want to throw your controller across the room because of it. I died maybe a couple times playing through Resident Evil remake on normal and was able to stockpile a lot of resources, whereas I must have died more than a dozen times in Resident Evil 0, and each death just pissed me off. Resident Evil remake feels like it’s more interested in being fun than difficult, but Resident Evil 0 is definitely trying to be difficult.
The first half of the game especially is so frustratingly designed, putting you in very narrow corridors where dodging enemies is not a realistic expectation, while also not giving you nearly enough ammunition to kill all the enemies the game throws at you. Even then, it’s not unusual for the game to respawn enemies in areas where you’ve already cleared them out (the train is especially bad for this). This can lead to unwinnable situations where you’ve already used all your ammo or health and can’t deal with one of the big enemies that show up in the early game.
You can also get screwed over out of the blue when the game decides to throw a boss fight at you, as these are mostly one-character-only battles. What’s that, you were using Billy as Rebecca’s inventory monkey and all he has is a pistol? Too bad, he’s gotta fight this giant centipede now, good luck!
Special mention has to go towards one of the big “fuck you’s” the developers put in this game. See, these bastards knew that their no item box system meant that you were going to have to drop items and backtrack to get more, so they spawn a group of fucking Eliminators in this path after you’ve dropped all your items to free up inventory space. Thankfully I happened to have a shotgun with me, but holy shit that is a clear as day example of the developers knowing their shitty design decisions and then just trying to fuck over the player. It’s either pre-existing knowledge, pure luck, or frustration.
Speaking of backtracking, there are chemicals that you have to find and add to Rebecca’s mixing set throughout the game. I just added these by habit during the game, but you need specific chemicals for two or three puzzles at various points in the game, so it was pure dumb luck that I happened to have the right ones when needed. If I didn’t I wouldn’t even begin to know where to go for what chemical, or even know that I needed a specific one. Again… pre-existing knowledge, pure luck, or frustration.
The Story – Oh hey, another Resident Evil game, another underwhelming story. Resident Evil 0 has some unique issues though that make it particularly frustrating. First of all, its status as a prequel creates issues, the most glaring being that Rebecca’s characterization in this game and in Resident Evil remake is completely off. Here she’s a capable badass, but in Resident Evil, which occurs literally a day later, she’s a scared little girl who can’t do anything without Chris’ help. The presence of Albert Wesker and William Birkin also irks me, since they don’t really do anything and it spoils their roles in Resident Evil 1 and 2, meaning that new players shouldn’t experience the games in chronological order. It also just isn’t a very good prequel. The idea of finding out what happened to S.T.A.R.S. Bravo Team sounds cool, but the premise is almost immediately dropped as the team splits up in the woods and gets lost on their own side quests. We encounter Enrico about three quarters of the way through and then, after blowing up another Umbrella lab, Rebecca decides to wander into the mansion at the end of the game, but that’s not really a great connective story now is it? Honestly, Resident Evil 0 would have been better without trying to tie it directly into the original game.
Overall, I did enjoy Resident Evil 0 and I appreciate its attempts to shake-up the series’ formula which was growing stale at the time. However, there are so many intentionally-frustrating design decisions that the idea of replaying it anytime soon is totally soured for me. I’d recommend checking it out, but unless you’re a masochist then glancing at a walkthrough to know what to expect would probably be wise if you want to avoid some rage-inducing moments.
Welcome back to the Resident Evil love/hate series! Previously we went through the series from the remake of the original to Resident Evil 7. At the time I said I’d pickup the franchise’s several spin-offs and other media at a later date, and that time has finally come. We’re going to start with Resident Evil Survivor, the franchise’s first spin-off video game. While oft-forgotten and overlooked, it is still a canonical entry thanks to the shoutout it gets at the start of Resident Evil 0. At a time when Resident Evil games used pre-rendered backgrounds, fixed camera angles and auto-aiming, Survivor differentiated itself by being a first-person shooter with fully 3D environments. How does it hold-up playing it today? Read on to find out…
Love
The Writing and Voice Acting – Early Resident Evil games are known for having bad voice acting, but Survivor‘s bad voice acting combined with its atrocious writing come together to make every bit of dialogue and every file you come across into an unintentional comedy sketch. The main character is often reacting incredulously to the things going on around him but their voice actor sounds like he’s holding back his performance, as if he’s recording his lines while hiding in an attic as the police are searching the house for him. The writing makes it all worse though – the writers want you to know that, get this, VINCENT IS A MURDERER, so every file and line about him hammers home what an over-the-top monster he is, how everyone hates him and is afraid of him, and they’ve got to write all this down to record it because people need to know how much of a murderer Vincent is. There’s even a part where the main character comes across a recording of Vincent’s mother calling to tell him to stop being a murderer, it’s fucking hilarious. Every line feels so unnatural and inhuman, even innocuous stuff like when a character says “At the request of my friend, Leon S. Kennedy, I came here to investigate!”… because we wouldn’t know which Leon they were referring to without throwing in their middle initial. It’s so bad, I legitimately adored this part of the game.
Branching Pathways – So the one legitimately good thing that Survivor does is that at a few points in the game you will get a one-use only key item which can be used to open a couple different side-routes of your choice. For a game that is expecting replays this helps keep the game from feeling the same every thing time and there can be some extra rewards for going through some of the more off-the-beaten-path routes.
It’s Short – After spending like 20+ hours of my life on Resident Evil 6, I appreciate that Survivor only wasted a couple of my evenings. That said, the fact that it’s short also gives you some excuse to check it out – it’s not going to waste a ton of your life so if you’re curious then maybe give it a shot.
Mixed
It’s Still Survival Horror, For Better or Worse – Survivor plays very much like a first-person version of the classic Resident Evil games, including tank controls, item management and even much of the button layout. One big difference though is that pistol ammunition is unlimited, so you’ll always have at least one gun available for any situation. However, ammo for other weapons and healing items are very limited, which is nice for keeping the game from getting too easy. That said, the game gets real stingy about doling out healing items in the latter section of the game… which is the part where you are actually going to need your healing and special ammo the most. Seriously, health was pretty abundant early on but I don’t even think the game gave me more than one herb during the entire last area of the game, not even before boss fights, which is a major problem because I reached the final boss with literally 1 HP left and low on special ammo types, so I had to either git gud or replay the whole game knowing that you’re not actually supposed to use the resources the game gives you because it will stop giving you them later. I went with option three and just Youtubed the final cutscene.
Hate
Bad Controls – Resident Evil Survivor is in the unfortunate position of being a console FPS before the control schemes for these kinds of games were figured out and standardized. As a result, Survivor literally lifts its controls from the main Resident Evil games, including tank controls, having to hold R1 to draw your weapon and then press X to actually fire it. Classic Resident Evil manages to get by on this control scheme, but for a first person shooter it does not make for a good time. Probably the worst part of this is that there is no way to move the camera vertically, which is a major problem for two reasons. First of all, you have to just walk over some items and hope you bump into them because you have to get too close to see them in order to pick them up. Secondly, dogs and lickers will get under your line of sight and be untargetable as a result, which is a major issue in a game where 99% of the enemies are trying to melee you. The game’s solution is to lock the camera onto enemies when you shoot them, but this can cause the whole camera to flail wildly as it tracks their erratic movements. Oh, and this also makes follow-up shots ridiculously easy to chain, which leads into the next problem…
Bad Game Design – Survivor has a litany of badly designed elements which can make playing it feel dull. One of the worst elements compared to mainline Resident Evil games is its brain-dead use of key items. Classic games in the franchise will have you collecting multiple key items and carrying them all over the map to find their use. In Survivor once you pick up a key item you’re rarely more than one or two rooms away from the place where it’s needed, meaning that you’re barely going to be holding them for more than thirty seconds. Also not helping matters is what I call this game’s “dummy button”, L1. Tapping L1 will lock-on to the closest door, item or enemy, which turns into a crutch to make you have to think even less while playing this game. Also, having played the game like a shooter and fighting all the enemies as I went, in retrospect this game is unintentionally encouraging you to not fight unless you’re going to take damage otherwise. Any area rarely has more than 2-4 enemies in it, there’s plenty of room to maneuver (even when you’re up against tougher foes like Lickers or Tyrants), and ammo for your stronger weapons is too rare to waste on every Tyrant and Hunter you come across because the game does not reward you for fighting them. Running through every room to avoid combat isn’t going to do this already short game any favours. Which leads into the next issue…
Bad Checkpointing – What do you do to make your two hour game feel longer? Why, make it so when the player dies they have to replay like a half hour of content to get back to where they were! Brilliant! Seriously, I died on the final boss and the game plopped me back in somewhere before the ruined mansion area, which was easily 30+ minutes of gameplay (and unskippable cutscenes!). Thankfully I was on an emulator so I could just reload a save state, but to make matters even more infuriating, there are no save rooms in Survivor. Anyone who bought this game for PS1 was expected to complete it in one sitting and only got three lives before they just straight-up lose. If I was playing this game back in the day, I would fling my disc across the room if that happened.
Bad UX – Item management is a real pain in Survivor. Any time you need to heal or switch weapons, the process is laborious. First, you have to pause, open the inventory, scroll through all your items to find the one you want, select it, press equip/use and then unpause the game. Oh and button inputs are delayed so everything just feels like it takes longer than it needs to, on top of the whole process taking several more steps than it needs to.
Bad QA – So, Resident Evil Survivor is so slapdash that it may not have even had a quality assurance team involved in its creation. I can’t verify the veracity of this claim, but it really wouldn’t surprise me because I came across a few bugs in my short playtime. Perhaps the most annoying one was that I had to go into the sewers in order to progress, which involved picking up a manhole opener and then walking over the manhole. I did so, but it wouldn’t trigger, making me think that I had to manually press “Use” on the item. This did not work. It wasn’t until I walked in a straight line from the place where I got the manhole opener to the manhole itself that it finally triggered, which is just ridiculous. How could they not anticipate players maybe approaching the manhole from a slightly different angle…? Perhaps the most common bugs though will be with the enemy AI. I’ve had spiders run headlong at me but not be able to do any damage, enemies getting caught helplessly on scenery and each other, and enemies just running around in circles while you shoot them.
Bad Sound Effects – How bad does your game have to be when I’m even ragging on the sound effects??? The pool of sound effects in this game are incredibly limited, meaning that every time you shoot your gun you’re getting assaulted with the exact same gunshot over and over again, and enemies just keep making the same stock sound effects every time they’re hit and die. The worst offenders for this are the Undertakers, bio-weapon soldiers who make this bizarre, ungodly screech like a jungle cat when they die (I guarantee that you have heard the awful sound effect they use for this before).
Bad Story – Look, the writing in Survivor is at least ironically funny, but the actual story here is even worse than I was expecting. Like, to set the stage for you, the whole plot revolves around amnesia and a bunch of ridiculously contrived misunderstandings and blatant lying from the writers to make you believe that you are Vincent (who is a MURDERER). It’s bad enough that any sort of story they could have told about what Umbrella was up to on Sheena Island gets lost in the shuffle.
My God Resident Evil Survivor was bad, easily the worst Resident Evil game I’d played up to this point and probably up there amongst the worst games I’ve played through, period. That said, at least it’s short so if you want to check it out you’re not going to suffer for long. And with all that said, Umbrella Corps can’t be worse than this though… right? Right?
In October 2020 I released an article about all the different RPG characters I’ve played over the years. I doubt anyone cared about it, but I had fun writing it. Well, I’ve continued playing games since then and have new tales and new characters I wanted to share. The past three months in particular have been some of the most active for me in terms of RPGs… which is actually a pretty big contributor for why I haven’t posted anything on the blog lately, I’ve been really struggling to find time between RPG nights, playing Magic: The Gathering or working my way through more Resident Evil games for future Love/Hate articles. However, let’s take a moment to look into the adventures of my RPG characters, new and old alike!
Orome Arrick (FFG Star Wars)
Orome was very much a new character of mine when I wrote the last article, but we’re now more than 40 sessions deep into this story and he’s really had a chance to develop, find some glory and wallow in his failings. This campaign has been grueling, with the party constantly drowning in debt, wanted across the galaxy and struggling to eke out any meaningful victories. However, Orome’s crowning achievement has to be when the party had a mission on Bespin to pull off a massive heist (we were running The Jewel of Yavin source book at the time). As the party’s pilot, I ended up competing in a race to get us entry to an exclusive party where we could influence the bidders in a secret auction (and then fleece them all and steal the titular jewel). The race was incredibly intense, but my expert piloting got us an early lead before half the competition got themselves destroyed. It ended up being neck-and-neck at the end, with the end result coming down to literally the final die roll where our opponent’s engine blew right before the finish line, giving us a victory by the thinnest of margins. The mission ultimately ended with Orome, in pure scoundrel style, stealing a crimelord’s money and wife and then flying off into the galaxy to find his next fortune.
On the other side of things though, Orome’s life has been a total mess. He’s extremely self-destructive, turning to drugs or alcohol rather than facing any problem in his life directly. It has been a legitimate problem on more than one occasion – I can recall at least two instances where the party needed Orome to pilot their ship but he was too high to do it. Hopefully an opportunity comes when Orome can find the motivation to get clean, he has a good heart and I want to see him succeed someday.
G’Dorah Hirose (DND 5E)
Back when I wrote that first article, G’Dorah was still a theoretical character, one that I was waiting to get a chance to play. Well, I was soon thereafter invited to join a campaign playing through Descent Into Avernus, and G’Dorah finally got the chance to come to life. I made a few changes from my original concept in order to make the character work here (she’s a paladin of Bahamut instead of Eldath, which honestly makes way more sense), but she has been everything I was hoping for. She’s a platinum dragonborn paladin of redemption, marching through hell seeking those who can be redeemed and smiting down those for whom forgiveness is beyond reach. Our party in this game consists of a tiefling monk, a human war cleric and a half-giant barbarian and G’Dorah has slotted into a group as a support/damage character. She can put out a ton of damage in a hit – I’ve had her do over 60 damage with just one attack! Her utility abilities are what makes her most interesting though, she can heal allies, buff everyone with +5 to their saving throws or provide support through her warding spells and religious devotion.
Perhaps the most interesting interactions have been between her and the tiefling. She saw that the tiefling had lost several fingers and assumed that he was a thief and treated him coldly as a result. However, over the course of the campaign she’s come to realize that these fingers were lost because the tiefling was making bargains with hags to protect the group and other innocents. G’Dorah has learned that she is perhaps too quick to judge others and has gained considerable respect for her half-devil companion, to the point where she was willing to trust his judgement. The tiefling had discovered that the barbarian had been overcome by evil influences and G’Dorah trusted him enough to side with him to try to save their companion. This ultimately forced the whole party to beatdown the barbarian until G’Dorah could break the chains which bound his mind. At the time of this writing, there are only one or two sessions left in this game and soon G’Dorah will be tied with Ellri as my highest-level character. I’ve really grown to love her, she’s a lot of fun to play and I really hope she can make it out of Avernus alive. I have an ending in mind that I want to get the chance to play out (I’ll edit it in here after the game is over if it all plays out)!
Valdyr Lenya (DND 5E)
A couple months ago, our regular DM decided they wanted to run a Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign, alternating between that and Star Wars every second week in order to get some more variety. By this point I had decided that my next character would be a druid as I was very keen to try out that class, and so Valdyr was born. Like most of my characters, he’s an edgelord with a tragic backstory (which is funny because there are eight other players in this campaign and somehow the druid is the only goddamn edgelord). Valdyr is a young man who has made some major mistakes and is now at a crossroads in life. He’s spent the last half decade with a band of highway robbers alongside his childhood friend and lover, Arianne. However, a few months prior to the start of the campaign, everything blew up in their faces as a heist turned sour and most of Valdyr’s companions were killed in the process, including his love. He’s now very solemn, trying to avoid attention from the authorities while rebuilding his life and figuring out what comes next. We’re still pretty early into this campaign so things are still evolving, but I view the awakening and expanding of his druid powers and developing the skill to wild shape as a sort of visual metaphor – he’s in the process of becoming someone new.
Maria (DND 5E)
Another returning character! Back in the original article I said that I hoped that the campaign Maria originally appeared in would continue. Alas, it never did! However, I was invited to join a campaign for Curse of Strahd and decided that it was time to dust off one of my favourite characters whose journey hadn’t reached its end. Given that this game starts me off at a higher level, I’ve even incorporated the events of the first campaign into her backstory, with her shriveled arm still being there as a reminder of how far she will go to see her task through. This game is also pretty early on so there hasn’t been much development of her character yet, but I look forward to future sessions. That said, I’ve come to realize that Maria’s flaw is a deep-rooted sense of fanatical self-loathing. She sees the evil wrought by vampires on those weaker than them and internalizes it as a failing of her kind, something that she can’t separate from herself. This leads to her being very cold and distant. Perhaps one day she can learn to let someone close to her, but I fear she will destroy herself before that day comes.
Lucatiel (DND 5E)
My newest character may draw their name from my favourite Dark Souls character, but it is more tribute than inspiration. I was invited to join an in-progress game of Out of the Abyss and was told that a rogue would fit the party well. Having never played a rogue, I was on-board and formulated a character from there. Lucatiel is a kenku, DND’s diminutive and untrustworthy crow-like species. He’s getting old by kenku standards, with greying feathers and an unimposing frame. However, his mind is his real weapon and I mean that quite literally – he’s a soulknife rogue, who creates psychic blades he can hurl at enemies at range, meaning that even if he appears to be unarmed he can put a knife in your gut at a moment’s notice. Lucatiel is easily the most skilled character I’ve ever played, with several ridiculously high skill proficiencies which, combined with his sub-class, make it nearly impossible to fail key skill checks. Again, I haven’t had a lot of chance to play Lucatiel yet, but he’s a very interesting and different sort of character for me, plus his class sounds straight-up badass.
Surprise, surprise, the first half of 2021 was much like 2020 with lockdowns and social restrictions making listening to music at home an escape from the hell of anti-vaxxers screaming incoherently outside our doors. The second half of 2021 has been more lively, but somehow infinitely more depressing due to the people obsessed with their freedumbs making this pandemic draw out longer and more deadlier than it needs to be. Through it all there has been music and thank God for that, because I know I needed the escape and emotional release. As is tradition now, let’s look back at the good and the bad new music that I listened to in 2021…
Dishonourable Mention: Volume IV, September Mourning
In early 2021 September Mourning announced that Volume IV would be coming out this year, much to my excitement. However, we’re rapidly approaching year-end with no release date in sight. It happens, especially in a wild year like 2021, but that brings us to why this is getting a dishonourable mention: frontwoman Emily Lazar is a crypto nut and has spent the year going all-in on NFT bullshit. September Mourning has always been a multimedia project, but she’s riding the NFT grift hard, selling bargain-basement animated gifs and her own line of incredibly ugly generative artwork. Considering that earlier in the year she said Volume IV would be out this year, it sounds like the only reason we don’t have Volume IV yet is because she’s tying it into her NFT metaverse bullshit, which is incredibly disappointing and his basically torpedoed any interest I had in supporting this band going forward.
28) Soft Songs for the Quarantined Mind, Smile Empty Soul
Every time I think that I’m done with Smile Empty Soul forever, they find a way to pull me back in through sheer morbid curiosity. 2020 was one of the most unpleasant releases I put myself through last year (only surpassed by the unprecedented awfulness of Trapt) and I did not intend to listen to any new music from this band ever again… but when they released their newest EP on the 12th of January my jaw dropped, knowing that I was looking at a front-runner for “Shittiest Album of 2021” already. That EP’s title? Soft Songs for the Quarantined Mind. Sounds innocent enough, but remember, this is a grunge band who looked at all the political turmoil in America in 2020 and decided that the most important statement they could make is that Instagram and Facebook are making “kids these days” self-absorbed. Also consider that I had serious concerns that Smile Empty Soul were pushing an anti-vax message in 2020, but was giving them the benefit of the doubt due to ambiguity. Well wonder no more because Smile Empty Soul have gone mask-off (literally) with Soft Songs for the Quarantined Mind.
I initially thought that the “Soft Songs” part of the title was going to be a sarcastic dig at people who apparently are too fearful to deal with “real” music, but it’s actually pretty apt – this is a soft, toned-down, mostly-acoustic EP. Even more to my surprise, it starts out fairly well with “Follow”, a strong grunge song which is easily one of the best tracks I’ve heard from the band. The rest of the album feels like a step down in comparison, going a bit too far on the “soft songs” idea and sapping so much energy that they feel downright lethargic. That said, this format does show off frontman Sean Danielsen’s strong vocals, so even though I found the rest of the album to be dull at best, his singing was at least a treat.
All that said, Soft Songs for the Quarantined Mind is absolutely torpedoed by the inclusion of “The Good Boy”. Right off the bat, the song is abrasively anti-mask:
Close those eyes, so scared again/Take the fear and drink it in/Put that mask over your face/You worthless piece of shit/Looking down and giving in/Cover up that ugly skin/Be the slave that everybody/Knows you’ve always been
Fuck you too, Sean. The fucking idiot says “You can’t look in my eyes/Pretend you don’t hear these lies”, because he thinks that no one can believe what public health officials across the world are saying. In Sean’s mind, this is all just an attempt to take away our freedoms so he’s gonna be a big man and not wear a mask, stick a Gadsden Flag and cop Punisher logo on his guitar, post a picture of Bill Gates using Anthony Fauci as a dancing monkey to promote conspiracy theories and go on tour in the middle of a pandemic. For context, this EP and tour announcement are coming out in January of 2021, right as America surpasses 400,000 deaths from COVID-19, where so many people are dying that the air in Los Angeles is being polluted due to the number of cremations that are being performed, and where even in Canada cities are running out of space in their morgues and having to use cold storage instead… and this chuckle-fuck thinks that the real problem here is that the government might step in to keep assholes from killing people in the name of “muh freedumbs”!? I said it last year, you’re supposed to be a punk Sean, but you’re just a fucking tool. Politics-aside, Soft Songs for the Quarantined Mind is a meh EP, but factor in the COVIDIOT political bent and this is total shit. Seriously, fuck this band, I’m not even going to bother covering the other album they put out this year, Black Pilled, even though its title is potentially an alt-right dogwhistle and therefore ripe for the IC2S treatment. No, fuck that, you’re not even worth my time, Sean. Go hang out in IC2S music hell with Trapt.
27) Exile, The Raven Age
The Raven Age intrigued me for two reasons. One, they were one of those bands which I checked out because they had a cool album cover on Spotify. Two, their lead guitarist is the son of Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a big fan of their sophomore effort, Conspiracy, but I decided to give them a second chance with Exile. Little did I realize that this was a terrible idea because Exile isn’t a proper, new studio album, it’s actually an acoustic/compilation album. In other words, as someone who was unimpressed by The Raven Age, I was diving into an album explicitly made for existing fans. I am keenly aware that I am not the target audience for this album, but I’m still rather underwhelmed by what the stripped-down songs they deliver here. Sure, there are some highlights, such as the guitar solo towards the end of “Fireflies” and the four live tracks which have been randomly bolted onto the end of the album, but overall this is a forgettable soft rock album that may have torpedoed any lingering interest I had in The Raven Age.
26) Songs of Death and Resurrection, Demon Hunter
Long-time Demon Hunter fans have been accusing the band of softening their sound since at least 2012’s True Defiance, but it has become blatantly obvious in the last few years that the band just doesn’t want to put out more of their signature brand of energetic, aggressive metal. If Outlive didn’t make that obvious then Peace sure did, ditching their sound entirely for stripped-back ballads. That brings us to this year’s Songs of Death and Resurrection, which once again sees Demon Hunter delving into their softer side, this time with an acoustic cover album. Scott Fryberger at Jesus Freak Hideout may have put it best: “It’s the same issue I had with 2019’s Peace, which is just that I don’t listen to Demon Hunter for the ballads. […] Their best work isn’t found in their rock songs, but in their loud, abrasive, pummeling metal.” Look, I tend to enjoy it when a rock/metal band puts out an acoustic album, because it offers a new spin on their usual sound. However, when your band which is traditionally known for their aggressive metalcore puts out three stripped-back albums in a row, an acoustic cover album isn’t a nice diversion, it’s reinforcing the new status quo. Even worse, the tracks chosen for the album were already the band’s stripped back ballads, some of which were already acoustic, such as “Dead Flowers”. So how do they choose to adapt these songs here? Why, by slowing the tempo down to a lethargic crawl, naturally! Granted, on “Dead Flowers” they do do some interesting stuff to change the feel of the track, making it sound like a military funeral song. Most of the other tracks don’t get the same sort of transformative treatment – tracks like “My Throat is an Open Grave” and “Heart of a Graveyard” feel like their original renditions, but with no electronic elements and less energy. The sole new track, “Praise the Void”, is one of the few highlights, perhaps because it was built from the ground-up to be an acoustic track. All-in-all, Songs of Death and Resurrection is another disappointing release from Demon Hunter. If they want to keep putting out these soft rock tracks in their twilight years then more power to them, but I really miss the days of The Triptych when they could make me headbang through the whole album.
25) MÓ•re, Harakiri for the Sky
Surprise, surprise, we’ve got one of those “I saw a badass cover on Spotify and listened to it” picks that happens every year. MÓ•re‘s cover reminded me of The Company of Wolves, which has the gnarliest werewolf transformation scene ever put to film, wherein a guy tears his own skin off piece by piece. As for Harakiri for the Sky? Never heard of them before this, so it made for a fresh experience. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel like MÓ•re particularly stands out. Their music is quick and heavy, with very harsh, shouted, incomprehensible vocals. Overall they’re very reminiscent of black metal, but a bit less heavy and gloomy… so, like, dark grey metal…? Harakiri in the Sky aren’t doing anything bad, but their music just didn’t stick with me. It also doesn’t help that MÓ•re is nearly an hour and a half long with only ten tracks! Holy crap! Every song is anywhere from 7 to 11 minutes long, so even though the tracks are all well-written and performed, the overall package begins to fatigue as it goes along. Like I said, this is certainly not a bad album, but it wasn’t really doing it for me. That said, if you’re curious, I’d recommend checking out “Sing for the Damage We’ve Done” and then decide if you want to go further from there.
24) Visions of Another Hell, Blood Youth
There’s a dude on Allmusic called Simone Appollini who is notorious among metalheads who frequent the site. The guy listens to like 30 albums a day and leaves ratings and reviews for every single one, so his name shows up on nearly any metal album you can think of on the site. What really makes the guy notorious though is that the vast majority of his reviews are a one (or, if he’s feeling generous, two) stars out of five and his reviews are almost always “this album is a carbon-copy of the band/another band’s previous work”. I’ve actually been mulling over doing a whole article on the guy, because he’s clearly well-versed in music but to a point where he can’t even enjoy it anymore because it’s all so familiar-sounding, like he’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of acquiring too much knowledge. Anyway, the reason I bring him up is because, on occasion, there really are bands whose music does feel like a carbon copy of another band’s… which brings me to Blood Youth and Visions of Another Hell. From the moment this album started it was obvious that Blood Youth’s sound is heavily-indebted to Slipknot, with their heavy, aggressive music, angsty lyrics and screamed vocals sounding just like Iowa or .5: The Gray Chapter-era Slipknot. I am, clearly, a Slipknot fan so this makes Visions of Another Hell at least an enjoyable listen, but as it keeps going it becomes distressingly clear that Blood Youth are only interested in ripping off Slipknot wholesale rather than bringing their own twist to this style. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but it’s ultimately to Blood Youth’s detriment that they don’t deviate more – Slipknot is a nine-piece band, so Blood Youth’s sound is small in comparison and their refusal to break their own ground makes their songs feel insincere, like they’re just trying to fit the formula. To be fair, Blood Youth do very occasionally show glimmers of mixing some metalcore into this sound which would have been enough to make them feel like they were doing their own thing (such as on “Open Window” or “Human Blur”), but these are few and far between. It’s too bad, I do think this is an enjoyable-enough album but the lack of originality really soured me on Visions of Another Hell.
23) Vicissitude, Monochromatic Black
If you know anything about my taste in music (and artwork) then you know why I gave Vicissitude a shot. That album cover is badass. Other than knowing that Monochromatic Black were a deathcore band, I went in blind. What did I think? Well, Vicissitude feels like a scattershot album. Most of the album is punishing deathcore, verging on noise at times, although the band also has a female secondary vocalist who, when she’s allowed to shine, will suddenly turn songs into melodic metal out of nowhere. This is most clear on “Cerulean” and “Disillusioned”, which sound really out of place among the relentless screams and death metal that permeates the rest of the album. All-in-all, Vicissitude just didn’t gel with me, it was an okay experience but if I’m being honest I don’t think I’ll ever listen to it again. That said, you may enjoy it more than I did – you can pick the album up on Bandcamp for $10 if you’re interested.
22) The Fire Itself, Phinehas
The Fire Itself made me nostalgic for the days when Weathered Steel was still in operation and I could get a curated look at the Christian metal scene (coupled with a good rage-laugh at every buck-wild fundamentalist advertisement that would play between songs). Phinehas were a staple on the station back then, so I was already somewhat familiar with their aggressive metalcore style and sound before going into The Fire Itself. If you’re into metalcore then The Fire Itself is certainly enjoyable – Phinehas are full of energy and aggression here which is exactly what you’d expect from this kind of music. That said, the album reminds me why, when I listened to Weathered Steel, I gravitated to bands like A Feast for Kings and Impending Doom rather than Phinehas: they just don’t feel all that distinct. That’s not really meant to be a knock against Phinehas, I think they’re talented and this is a fairly good album, but the Christian metalcore subgenre is quite expansive and this album exemplifies what I would think of if I was to picture typical Christian metalcore. It’s not like I dislike this kind of sound either, but metalcore bands like Bleed From Within, Bad Omens or The Wise Man’s Fear resonate with me far more because they feel far more distinct. I feel like The Fire Itself is worth giving a shot if you are into aggressive metalcore, but if your tastes are like mind then you may find that it fails to carve a place for itself in a crowded subgenre.
Oh, fun bonus fact, Phinehas have had so many lineup changes over the years that there are zero founding members still with the band to this day!
21) Haeretica Ecclesia, Apostolica
As I’ve said in the past, religious fanatics are one of my favourite types of characters, so when I saw Apostolica and Haeretica Ecclesia I knew that I had to give them a shot. That said, I’m also a big Powerwolf fan, who already have made a considerable name for themselves the “dark, religious aesthetic” metal market, so I was curious to see how they would stand out. The answer to that is… they don’t really. Right off the bat Apostolica gives off Powerwolf-wannabe vibes with their latin chants, choirs, use of organs… hell, even their riffs sound the same at times and the fact that both bands are using the same themes of being dark, religious heretics makes Apostolica feel like even more of an imitation. It also doesn’t help that Powerwolf is fronted by Attila Dorn’s soaring, operatic vocal style, and Ezekiel* struggles to live up to that. The main ways that Apostolica try to differentiate themselves are by cutting out the “creatures of the night” and the tongue-in-cheek humour of Powerwolf in favour of playing the heretical religious themes straight. What we get as a result is basically just standard power metal with some Catholic flavour thrown in. Haeretica Ecclesia is an inconsistent mess in many ways. “Sanctus Spiritus” feels like discount Powerwolf off the bat, but then we get strong efforts like “The Sword of Sorrow” and “Thanatos” which stand out on their own merits. Unfortunately, the entire back half of the album feels half-assed and mediocre. That said, “The Sword of Sorrow” and “Thanatos” were great enough that I have some optimism that the band may be able to pull off a great, more-distinct sophomore effort, but as it stands Haeretica Ecclesia is a rough debut for the band.
*Playing up the theatricality of the band, its members are all unknown, going by single-name aliases (Jonas, Malachia, Isaia and Ezekiel) and wearing masks at all times. Their label claims that they are “some of the finest musicians of the international heavy metal scene”, whatever that actually means.
20) School of Thought, DED
DED’s debut album, Mis•an•thrope, was basically a modern-day version of early 2000s nu metal with its heavy, aggressive sound and overflowing with blistering, uncontrolled rage. The band’s long-awaited sophomore effort, School of Thought, consciously dials back some of that angst towards the world and aims to be more introspective at times. Blind rage is replaced with sullen brooding, such as on the opening track “Ghost”, which feels like a Breaking Benjamin track and is clearly aiming to be a radio-friendly hard rock song, while “Kill Beautiful Things” feels like a sequel to Mis•an•thrope‘s one introspective track, “Beautiful”. That’s not to say that DED don’t cut loose and bring the aggression though, far from it. “A Mannequin Idol” is a blistering track and feels like old-school Korn at times, while the anger in “Parasite” feels totally justified and “Persona”‘s plea to “Stop making stupid people famous” is sobering. That said, DED’s cover of “Love Song” featuring Maria Brink (who is dating DED frontman Joe Cotela) doesn’t work for me at all. It’s got an industrial sound to it that gives it this eerie vibe, but the lyrics don’t make a lot of sense when put to this music in my opinion and comes across more like trying to be creepy than actually creepy. Overall, School of Thought is a fine evolution for DED. It doesn’t hit nearly as hard as Mis•an•thrope, but there’s some clear growth going on here which make me curious to see where DED are going to go in the future.
19) Dear Monsters, Bad Wolves
Bad Wolves have been one of my favourite bands of the last few years, with their first two albums being in perennial rotation for me. However, my interest in the band was soured in 2020 when it came out that lead singer Tommy Vext was a die-hard, Trump-loving Republican, which only became worse and worse as he spoke out against Black Lives Matter (in case you’re unaware, this is made all the worse by the fact that he is a black celebrity) and started spouting Qanon conspiracy theories. It all came to a head when Vext quit the band (or possibly was pressured to do so) and was replaced by Daniel “DL” Laskiewicz. Vext alleged that this was due to him being censored for being a conservative, whereas the band tastefully kept quiet until Vext’s loud mouth caused them to reveal that he was kicked out for being verbally and physically abusive. Vext didn’t help matters by becoming more and more deranged, to the point where he went on tour as “Tommy Vext and The B@d W8lv3s”. Suffice to say, there has been some serious drama surrounding the release of Dear Monsters and given the circumstances I was really hoping that the transition from Vext to Laskiewicz would go smoothly – after all, Vext is clearly the asshole in this situation and I’d hate to see the guy getting more ammunition to disparage the band with.
…unfortunately, while Dear Monsters is definitely still Bad Wolves, it feels like the band is at a crossroads. Laskiewicz sounds quite similar to Vext, but brings his own distinct style. It doesn’t feel like he’s just aping the previous vocalist. Meanwhile, the rest of the band sounds as solid as ever, so I don’t think that it’s an issue where Vext was the key creative spark. However, the music here is just less interesting and feels less inspired than the best tracks on the band’s last two albums. Whereas Disobey felt like it was throwing every musical style at the wall to see what would stick, Dear Monsters is very focused on radio-ready rock, with just a dash of metal remaining. We do get some heavy-hitters such as the delightfully energetic “On the Case”, but the heavy stuff is outnumbered by softer rock tracks such as the clearly-designed-to-be-the-hit-single “Lifeline”. For the most part, these tracks are decent enough (except for “Comatose”, whose opening lines/chorus lead-in make me cringe every time), but they lack the energy and bite of their previous work. On the other hand, there’s only a single break-up song on this album, whereas there were like 5 on N.A.T.I.O.N., so at least the band is spreading their wings even if the results don’t resonate with me that much. Hopefully this is just a transition period for Bad Wolves, because if their next album underwhelms as well I think it would deflate any interest I have left in the band.
18) Bullet for My Valentine, Bullet for My Valentine
Bullet For My Valentine are one of those bands that I’m familiar with because they were in every game soundtrack in the mid-2000s to the early-2010s. However, I didn’t really get into them til the last couple years where I found their brand of angsty and energetic metalcore infectious. The band really hit a peak in 2010 with Fever and then immediately plummeted off a cliff with Temper Temper. Since then, every subsequent album has been a bit better than the last but they’re still nowhere near the quality of their heyday… which brings us to their 2021 self-titled album (and, just to be extra confusing, their debut EP was also self-titled). Bullet for My Valentine continues the band’s trajectory of putting out solid metalcore, but it’s still a shadow of the band’s best efforts. The main differentiators here are that Matt Tuck’s vocals have gotten harsher with a lot more growling and yelling than in previous albums. There are a couple really good tracks here, particularly “Knives”, “Can’t Escape the Waves” and “Shatter”, if you’re interested then I’d recommend checking these ones out and deciding if you want to give the rest of the album a shot. For what it’s worth, Bullet for My Valentine is fine but I don’t expect that I’ll be an album I come back to much (if ever) in the future.
17) The Bitter Truth, Evanescence
Considering how huge Evanescence were back in the early 2000s, it’s wild to me that they don’t have more albums – The Bitter Truth is only their fourth original studio album and their first new album in 10 years. For my own part, I had a very brief Evanescence phase in the early 2010s, but fell out of them pretty quickly. There’s a reason this band has become a meme – their lyrics tend to get so angsty that’s hard to take them seriously. That said, they do have some catchy songs and Amy Lee’s soaring, operatic vocals have carved the band their own place within the hard rock/alt metal landscape. I had no idea what to expect from The Bitter Truth, only that I felt like I had to give it a fair shake.
Ultimately, I’m kind of torn on The Bitter Truth. On the one hand, fans are going to love it – I can see tracks like “Broken Pieces Shine”, “Wasted on You” and “Use My Voice” slotting into the band’s live setlists seamlessly and becoming new staples going forward. Then there’s tracks that tread totally new ground for the band, particularly “Yeah Right” which sees Evanescence drawing on jazz and swing influences. I was even rather impressed that Evanescence are still dedicated to their nu-metal influences, as The Bitter Truth is no less heavy than their previous albums. All that said, The Bitter Truth isn’t going to convert any skeptics – I went into the album pretty meh about Evanescence and I came out able to acknowledge that it’s a decent rock album, but not really one that I cared all that much about. I’m probably being a bit hard on it to be honest, as it did review fairly well, but I’m sorry, it just didn’t resonate with me. I’m sure there’s an audience out there that’s going to love this thing, but unfortunately I’m just not among that number.
16) Kindred: Act II, Red Cain
True to its name, Kindred: Act II picks up right where last year’s Act I left off, providing us with more epic fantasy power metal to enjoy. Also appropriately, Act II feels like the darker middle chapter compared to its predecessor and sees Red Cain being a bit more experimental with their sound. Sure, tracks like “Kindred” and “Baltic Fleet” are straight out of their usual playbook, but then there’s “Precipice of Man” which is slowed down and almost ballad-like for the first minute before becoming one of the heaviest tracks in the band’s catalogue. Then there’s “Varyag and the Shrike”, which feels like an evolution of Red Cain’s “Snakebouquet” and is the highlight of the album in my opinion. As I more-or-less expected, it’s more Kindred, and considering that it was one of my favourite albums of last year that’s not a bad thing.
15) Inner Universe II, Words of Farewell
I got an email alert that Words of Farewell had put out a new EP and almost immediately jumped at it. Funnily enough, I was actually the first person on Bandcamp to get Inner Universe II. As the title would imply, this is basically more of the same from Words of Farewell (which shouldn’t be surprising because they’ve been mining the same soundscapes for nearly a decade now). However, I quite enjoy their music so that’s not really an issue for me. If you’re into fast, aggressive melodic death metal (or progressive metalcore, which I still feel is a more apt descriptor for Words of Farewell’s sound), then you’ll probably enjoy Inner Universe II… and every other song Words of Farewell have put out for that matter.
14) LIVE, Bad Omens
The problem with these annual countdowns is that I always, without fail, discover a band who released some of my favourite music of the year after I’ve already published my list. Bad Omens are one of those bands. 2019’s Finding God Before God Finds Me would have easily taken a top 3 spot on that list. Its polished and surprisingly-commercial metalcore sound really resonated with me and its themes of religious rebellion and soul-searching have kept me hooked on it through the very end of 2020 and into 2021. LIVE is their first album that’s come out since then and, as its name implies, it is a live performance of some of the band’s bigger tracks. Right off the bat, the band came swinging with “Glass Houses” which, while not as polished as the studio release, still works well due to the band’s energy. Unfortunately, Bad Omens then spend most of the album on softer, quieter rock songs. While I like songs like “The Worst in Me” or “Never Know”, by the time they got to their third soft song in a row I was itching for some actual metalcore. It also doesn’t help that frontman Noah Sebastian’s vocals can sound really strained at times on these tracks. However, Bad Omens entirely redeem themselves with the finishing one-two punch of “Dethrone” and “Mercy”. “Dethrone” is a brutal track, which builds in tension and then just explodes with a death growled “YEAHHHH!” The song is just as good, if not better, live and brings back the energy which was sorely missed all this time. The album then ends on “Mercy”, my favourite Bad Omens song, and easily their best fusion of their quieter and heavy sides. It’s a fantastic close to the album, but you’re definitely left wanting more after these two tracks. The album itself is only about half an hour long, which I can only imagine is because Bad Omens aren’t really headlining any live shows yet, so they’re going to have very limited setlists. LIVE makes for an interesting sampler for fans and newcomers, but honestly I feel like the best way to experience this band would be to listen to their two studio albums. Maybe consider checking out the last two tracks here though to get yourself hyped up.
13) 20 Years of Gloom, Beauty and Despair – Live in Helsinki, Swallow the Sun
Remember how I said Bad Omens’ Finding God Before God Finds Me would have been a top 3 pick for 2019 albums? Well, if I had listened to it in 2019 then Swallow the Sun’s When a Shadow is Forced into the Light would likely have taken my #1 spot. I am enthralled by that album’s melancholic beauty, it’s one of those albums that needs to be experienced from start to finish in one sitting. Like Bad Omens, Swallow the Sun have also put out a live album, this one in celebration of their twenty year anniversary as a band, where they put on a mammoth, two-hour show. The first half of the show was a full performance of “Beauty”, the acoustic, second disc from their 2015 triple-album Songs From the North I, II & III, whereas the setlist for the second half of the show was voted by fans.
“Beauty” kicks off the live album in a low-key, sombre and atmospheric fashion. Given that the songs in this half of the show were already very stripped-back, they translate very well to a live setting, although Mikko Kotamäki’s clean vocals aren’t quite up to task at times (they get particularly strained on “Away” and “Autumn Fire”). It makes this half of the show a bit of a mixed bag, and it also doesn’t help that “Beauty” worked as well as it did in Songs From the North because it was interspersed between the melodic doom metal of part one and the brutal, funeral doom metal of part three; when it has to hold everything up on its own it can start to drag. Certainly not bad, but not what I’m looking for from a Swallow the Sun live album.
However, when the fan-voted setlist starts, that’s when 20 Years of Gloom, Beauty and Despair really kicks off. “Lost & Catatonic” sets the mood right away, with the transition to harsher vocals happening seamlessly, with no vocal straining to be heard and with the heavier tone bringing far more energy. From there it goes into “Empires of Loneliness” which was one of the most intriguing tracks for me in this live album. As one of the funeral doom tracks on Songs From the North III I didn’t really care for it before, but hearing it live gives it a whole different perspective that I appreciated far more. In a live setting it feels far more epic and brutal, while bringing that haunting and melancholic feel which the best Swallow the Sun songs embody. “Empires of Loneliness” was an unexpected pick, but this fan-voted set has some truly esoteric choices which really surprised me (usually when you hear a “fan-voted” setlist for any other band you’d expect to hear a bunch of fan-wank tracks). Most surprising to me was freaking “Plague of Butterflies, Pt. II” from their 2008 EP of the same name which was written for an extreme metal ballet that never got off the ground. There’s some great variety here across Swallow the Sun’s entire career and running the gamut from epic, moody, quieter tracks to the brutal and depressing. This disc fires on all cylinders and it really makes me wish that Swallow the Sun had struck a little more tonal balance in the first half of the show. Ahh well, regardless 20 Years of Gloom, Beauty and Despair is well-worth a listen for fans of Swallow the Sun, people who are curious about their music and fans of extreme metal and is a worthy celebration of the band’s career thus far.
12) Hellbent, Impending Doom
As much as I love their brand of crushingly-heavy and energetic deathcore, Impending Doom have become something of a problematic favourite of mine. In case you’re unaware, they are unabashedly Christian, and I’d put them up there as one of the best Christian metal bands. However, considering how many of their songs complain about the evil in culture and their at times ugly worldview, I can’t help but feel like any day they could come out with an awful song or statement which could tank all my interest in the band. Thankfully that day hasn’t come yet, because Hellbent is another really solid and catchy release.
The one somewhat problematic track here is the opener, “Satanic Panic” (which, apparently, is also the name on the album art…?). Given that the Satanic Panic was a moral panic caused by hysterical Christians which ruined several innocent lives, it seems like a pretty tone-deaf move for a Christian band to go around slinging that term but meaning it in full sincerity. Again, I’d half expect Impending Doom to start slinging Qanon talking points, but thankfully I didn’t get any of that here. Thankfully the rest of the album didn’t get my hackles up as much and every track on here is Impending Doom’s signature brand of brutal metal. The band has always been really good at making their tracks catchy and make you want to scream along and Hellbent is no exception. “New World Horror” and the title track in particular are highlights. The band isn’t doing anything particularly new, but they’re doing it well which is what’s most important.
11) …and the Triumph of Justice, Countless Thousands
Countless Thousands have been cooking up a triumphant, anti-fascist punk rock opera for years now and it’s a stroke of luck that it came out when it did. In the wake of the fascist riot at Capitol Hill and the Biden inauguration, not to mention after four turbulent years of Trump, we were starved for something triumphant and that’s just what Countless Thousands deliver with …and the Triumph of Justice. Countless Thousands take their signature brand of enthusiastic, nerdy punk rock and infuse it with a timely political message which makes the album feel relevant. The political aspirations of the album are clear right from the outset as the opening title track is anthemic and clearly pays homage to “The Star Spangled Banner” before launching into “Game Change”, which opines about how little meaningful difference there is in Americans’ political choices, “The Rat”, which is blatantly about Michael Cohen, and “Fat Cat”, which is about how the rich will fuck over everyone for another dollar. For all the complaining I do about bands being wishy-washy with their political messages, it’s refreshing to see a band making an unapologetic stand. That said, Countless Thousands aren’t above using politics as a springboard for a joke, such as the hilarious “Space Nazis Must Die!” which recounts the tale of Countless Thousands travelling to the moon to kill Astro-Hitler or “Lazar Wolf” which, as far as I can tell, is about a goddamn LAZAAAAAAAR WOOOOLF! There’s also an adorable running storyline about frontman Danger van Gorder’s daughter and how she will one day inherit the world, giving the album a surprisingly poignant justification for its political leanings.
Of course, politics can only take an album so far, but luckily Countless Thousands have put together some real bangers on …and the Triumph of Justice. Every track feels unique: the aforementioned “Space Nazis Must Die!” is an epic, humourous treat, “Solidarity Forever” is a fantastic, surprisingly-patriotic socialist gospel track that pays homage to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, “Fat Cat” sounds like a swingin’ Disney villain song, and “Can’t Quit (An Orchestra on the March)” slowly builds up into a triumphant anthem for our generation – life sucks but we have to keep working away to make it better for those who come after. The whole album works really well and even on some of the weirder tracks (like “Murder Assassins from the Future”), Countless Thousands’ humour and energy is infectious. I’m also happy to say that the production quality on this album is great, which I wasn’t really expecting after the lackluster quality on Pretzel Champions and the fact that this album was recorded in the bandmembers’ kitchens! All-in-all, …and the Triumph of Justice is another winner for Countless Thousands.
10) Senjutsu, Iron Maiden
Iron Maiden are, without a doubt, one of the biggest names in metal and every new release of theirs is an event worth paying attention to. Even if they undoubtedly peaked in the 80s, they’ve still had moments where they’ve recaptured their glory days, such as Brave New World, have continued putting out solid albums throughout the 2000s and 2010s, and even their most forgettable works tend to have a few gems that stand out. With that said, Senjutsu fits into the trail Iron Maiden have been blazing for the past two decades – good metal, more of the same we’ve been getting for the past forty years, but not as good as their classic albums, so it feels a bit unmemorable as a result. Don’t misunderstand me, there’s nothing really wrong with Senjutsu – I found myself enjoying tracks like “Stratego”, “Lost in a Lost World” and the title track, but I just wasn’t excited by it. You can tell this is an album made by professionals who are extremely comfortable with their craft and know what they’re doing, but after the novelty wears off Senjutsu is going to be like The Book of Souls or Dance of Death – a Maiden album that’s going to constantly get passed up in favour of another spin of Seventh Son of a Seventh Son or Powerslave. Again, that shouldn’t take away from how well-made Senjutsu really is but it’s hard for me to even talk about this album without deflating my enthusiasm about it. Even listening to it in one sitting can be a slog because this is another double album clocking in at nearly an hour and a half. Hell, at this point, I’m not even sure that this album has a track like “Empire of the Clouds” or “Fear of the Dark” that I’ll happily come back to even if I don’t want to listen to their respective albums in their entirety. Look, I definitely think you should give this album a fair shake, maybe you’ll enjoy it with less caveats than I did.
For any sin you confide we take a cloth off your breast […] From the lord she will get her kicks / Dressed to hide the dark and obsessed to ride him hard on the crucifix […] Reveal yourself to the pastor, brings forgiveness at best / For any fabric on skin corrupts your mind like the pest […] Naked skies see her go down at night, when on the cross she licks
All-in-all, Call of the Wild is more Powerwolf. It’s more of the really solid power metal we’ve come to expect from them and while they do take a few steps towards breaking the formula, the band is still clearly well within their comfort zone.
Like The Sacrament of Sin and Blessed and Possessed, one of the most exciting aspects of Call of the Wild is its deluxe edition. This features a whole bonus disc called Missa Cantorem, featuring vocal covers of Powerwolf songs. While I wasn’t too keen on the offering in The Sacrament of Sin, Blessed and Possessed‘s bonus disc was so good that I liked it more than the actual main album so I was interested to see what Missa Cantorem would be like. It was… about what I expected to be honest. Calling this a vocal cover isn’t an exaggeration, the band got a bunch of guest artists in to sing over Powerwolf’s own master recordings of hits that weren’t covered on the last bonus disc. It almost feels like a karaoke album in that regard and while it makes it feel kind of cheap, I can’t help but think that the pandemic made anything more than this too difficult to coordinate. That said, Missa Cantorem actually does have two really good vocal covers on it. First is Alissa White-Gluz’s gender-bent take on “Demons Are a Girl’s Best Friend” and I honestly like this version even more than the already-stellar original. Alissa’s gutteral vocals are extremely impressive and work surprisingly well with this song, lending it an entirely different feel to the original. Similarly, Johan Hegg (of Amon Amarth) brings his death metal vocals to “Nightside of Siberia” and it sounds awesome, once again working because it brings an entirely different feel to the song. Other songs don’t do quite as well, such as Doro Pesch’s admirable attempt at “Where the Wild Wolves Have Gone” or the inspired decision to have Christopher Bowes’ (of Alestorm) take on “Resurrection By Erection” – neither live up to the originals. Still, it’s worthwhile enough to upgrade to the deluxe edition if only for the two great tracks we get here.
8) Hushed and Grim, Mastodon
When Emperor of Sand came out back in 2017, I said it felt like it was a throwback to Mastodon’s greatest hits. As much as I liked it, I had hoped that Mastodon would continue to evolve going forward instead of giving us something safe, comfortable and familiar. Well, I’m happy to say that Hushed and Grim is a brand new chapter for Mastodon, unlike any previous album they’ve released. Their closest analog would have to be the Cold Dark Place EP, but even that doesn’t paint a proper picture of what to expect of Hushed and Grim. Coming off of the death of the band’s long-time manager Nick John and Brann Dailor’s divorce, Mastodon are clearly dealing with some serious grief on this album which gives Hushed and Grim a palpable air of melancholy. Lyrically, this could be a doom metal album, but musically it’s clearly Mastodon’s sound, reminding me of their Blood Mountain and The Hunter albums. And, true to their name, Hushed and Grim is a mammoth double album at nearly an hour and a half in length. The result is a sprawling album with tons to chew over. While I definitely do like Hushed and Grim, it does have a couple issues for me. The first is that it’s so long that, to date, I haven’t managed to get through it all in one sitting. Secondly, the length causes the album to feel like it drags at times; I feel like Mastodon could have trimmed this album down quite a bit without losing its impact in the process. That said, this is an album that has so much going on with it that it is going to take me a very long time to fully appreciate, but I’m already starting to get drawn into the rawness of tracks like “Dagger” and the epic sludge metal in “Gobblers of Dregs” stands amongst Mastodon’s best work. I definitely recommend experiencing this album, I know that it’s getting a somewhat mixed reception among fans, but I do think it will be looked back upon as another classic in time.
7) Infernum in Terra, A Pale Horse Named Death
While I wasn’t a huge fan of 2019’s When the World Becomes Undone, A Pale Horse Named Death managed to make a big impression on me due to their grunge-like sound and hopeless lyrics which really do wonders when you’re going through a depressive episode. Well, Sal Abruscato is back with another round of despair and I have to say it is quite welcome. Infernum in Terra doesn’t do much to change my perceptions of A Pale Horse Named Death, but there is some very incremental evolution here: the production is a bit better, the music is a bit more heavy and interesting and the songwriting is definitely stronger which makes for an infectious listen. Also worth noting is that, unlike their previous albums, Sal Abruscato’s singing doesn’t feel lethargic here, the album doesn’t feel like it drags on (I mean, it’s still slowly-paced due to the whole dour tone, but it feels more deliberately curated this time). Particular highlights include “Shards of Glass”, “Lucifier’s Sun”, “Slave to the Master” and “Reflections of the Dead”, all of which I’ll find myself singing at random times, which just makes me want to listen to the album all over again. If you’re like me and like to channel your emotions into music then Infernum in Terra is a great album and is going to do wonders for your depression.
6) Servant of the Mind, Volbeat
Silly me, I was ready to hit publish on this article when suddenly I was caught completely unawares by a brand new album by one of my favourite bands of the last decade. I knew there was no way I was going to let a new Volbeat album pass me by on the year’s best-of list, even if their last effort, Rewind, Replay, Rebound was easily one of their weakest albums.
Thankfully, Servant of the Mind is a return to form and evolution in one, a fact which is clear as soon as the opening track, “Temple of Ekur” starts up. Volbeat are often considered a metal band, which is a label I’ve never really agreed with, but they really are heavy on this album. This is easily the heaviest they’ve been since their first two albums, if not heavier, which is a really refreshing twist after their last couple albums made the shift towards commercial arena-ready rock. That’s not to say that this album isn’t familiar (it certainly is) or that it doesn’t have commercial appeal – tracks like “Wait a Minute My Girl” and “Dagen Før” are made for radio and are both incredibly catchy in their own right, standing tall beside the heavier tracks like “Shotgun Blues” and “The Sacred Stones”. In addition to their usual rockabilly influences, Volbeat also brings some surf rock guitar onto this album, most obviously on “The Devil Rages On” and “Step Into Light”. I’m glad to see that Volbeat are still delivering surprises and aren’t content to put out the same album over and over again. While I’m going to look forward to their next album, in the meantime I can tell you that I will be listening to Servant of the Mind on repeat for quite a while.
Oh, also worth noting, Volbeat love their deluxe editions and Servant of the Mind is no different in this regard. Whereas Rewind, Replay, Rebound‘s offerings were very slim (basically just some demos that were barely different from the released track), Servant of the Mind‘s deluxe edition is worth the extra couple bucks in my opinion. Bonus tracks “Return to None” and “Domino” stand out quite a bit from the rest of the album’s offerings and the alternate versions of “Shotgun Blues” and ” Dagen Før” are transformative enough to be worth a look.
5) Shaman, Orbit Culture
I’m a simple man – I see a metal album with a badass cover and I listen to it. By that measure, Shaman is one of the most darkly evocative covers I’ve seen all year, thanks to the incredible work by Bahrull Marta, whose art style is best described as the stuff of nightmares. A cool cover is all well and good, but what about the music? Orbit Culture are described as a combination of groove metal and melodic death metal, which is a pretty accurate categorization – their music is heavy and aggressive, but more focused on the rhythm rather than speed like you might expect from a death metal band. Their vocals are not so much screamed, growled or yelled as they are roared, akin to Impending Doom, while the backing vocalist (who features in every track) sounds like James Hetfield of all people.
While I found “Mast of the World” and “Flight of the Fireflies” interesting and enjoyable, I initially was thinking that Shaman would probably be in the middle of the pack for 2021 until “Carvings” started and made me sit up and take notice for real. “Carvings” is where Orbit Culture’s brand of groove/melodic death metal really started to stand out and had me literally headbanging along to the beat. This continued into “Strangler” but it was “A Sailor’s Tale” that truly blew the lid off of this album for me. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the title, this track is pirate death metal and holy shit is it amazing. It builds up in momentum until it gets to the incredibly heavy end section where I literally just want to headbang and put my devil horns in the sky, it’s easily one of my favourite tracks of the year. It was so good that I played it the first time and then immediately played it a second time (and would have done a third time if I didn’t have to be elsewhere right then). All this for two freaking dollars on Bandcamp!!! Suffice to say, I was quite happily surprised by Shaman and will definitely be checking out all of Orbit Culture’s music as a result!
4) Perfectly Preserved, Love and Death
Holy crap has it really been eight years since Between Here & Lost? To be fair, at the time Love and Death was Brian “Head” Welch’s side-project and he went back to Korn around the same time so he was a bit too busy to get the band back together. As a result, half the band has been replaced for Perfectly Preserved, but it seems to be for the best because Love and Death are forging their own identity with this release. No longer are they just “Head’s side project”, Love and Death actually feels like it’s the product of a full band’s collaboration. The most obvious evidence of this is that band co-founder JR Bareis shares equal vocal duties with Head on this album, lending a more melodic and soft tone in contrast to Head’s harsh, aggressive, shouted singing. When the two work together on a track it adds new layers to what’s possible for Love and Death. That alone would lend Perfectly Preserved a new feel for the band, but then there’s the addition of Jasen Rauch on bass – that may not sound like it would make much of a difference, but his influence is all over this album. Rauch is perhaps better known as the former lead guitarist for Red and current lead guitarist for Breaking Benjamin, and has also produced albums by Breaking Benjamin and Love and Death. You can feel all these influences colliding because Perfectly Preserved very much feels like Korn meets Breaking Benjamin and it’s a mix I really dig.
The album kicks off strong with “Tragedy” before moving to “Down”, a moody and introspective track which is up there among the best tracks of Head’s solo career. Then Love and Death pull off a coup with perhaps the most surprising track of the year. What, you thought Head’s Devo cover on Between Here & Lost was cute? Well pull over because “Let Me Love You”, a goddamn DJ Snake and Justin Bieber cover, is fucking fantastic. Lacey Sturm is on guest vocals here and everyone gives this 110% to knock it out of the park, easily one of my favourite tracks of the whole year. This album came out in February and I’m still shocked that this Bieber track is as good as it turned out to be. Perfectly Preserved would already be up there among the best of the year for me at this point, but the band keeps the strong tracks coming, from the duelling vocals of “Slow Fire”, to the melancholy of “Lo Lamento”, to the raw “Affliction” and closing on the aggressive and energetic breakdowns of “White Flag”. Perfectly Preserved is fantastic and a very welcome return for Love and Death. I just hope that we don’t have to wait too long for their next evolution, because Perfectly Preserved shows that Love and Death are every bit as good as their members’ main acts. Let this be a reflection of just how good 2021 has been for music – Perfectly Preserved was, for a while, my favourite album of the year and a top contender for the year-end accolade.
3) Primordial Arcana, Wolves in the Throne Room
I’ve mentioned in the past that I had been searching for a band to fill the void Agalloch left with their disbandment and Wolves in the Throne Room seemed to be the band most often recommended. At the time I wasn’t really a big fan of what I heard, but in 2021 I’ve found myself coming back to their 2017 album Thrice Woven with fondness for its take on atmospheric black metal. As I was getting back into that album, Primordial Arcana dropped and I was curious to listen to their newest LP. All I’ll say is holy crap did I ever pick a good time to get back into Wolves in the Throne Room because Primordial Arcana has got to be by far the best black metal album I’ve ever listened to (again, this is coming from someone who has complained several times in the past that most black metal bleeds into an undifferentiated mass for me).
Primordial Arcana takes you on a musical journey, each song capturing a different tone and conjuring a new mental landscape, from the ethereal and sinister “Mountain Magick”, to the East-Asian strings of “Spirit of Lightning”, to the marching beat that unites “Primal Chasm (Gift of Fire)”, “Underworld Aurora” and “Masters of Rain and Storm”, to the atmospheric and spooky feel of “Skyclad Passage”. “Masters of Rain and Storm” bears special mention, as it can be best described as the black metal “Jesus of Suburbia”. Seriously, this song goes places, seamlessly transitioning from one style to another, almost like a full album crammed into one incredible eleven-minute song.
It’s also quite clear that Wolves in the Throne Room brought a ton of craft and talent to this album – it doesn’t feel like a bunch of 30 year olds jamming for fifteen minutes with no plan, every minute has been laid out to produce a specific feel. In addition, the production quality is fantastic – again, some black metal bands think that they have to record on a potato to get a “raw” feel, but Wolves in the Throne Room prove here that good music speaks for itself. Primordial Arcana is best experienced as a journey from start to finish (which, at only 50 minutes if you include the bonus track, isn’t bad), but if you’re going to experience a single track from this album, make it “Masters of Rain and Storm”. This album is fantastic from start to finish and at only $10 USD on Bandcamp it’s an absolute steal.
2) Moonflowers, Swallow the Sun
What a year for Swallow the Sun. For most bands, a massive live album like 20 Years of Gloom, Beauty and Despair would have been enough, but then Swallow the Sun had to surprise us with a whole new studio album to boot. Like I said earlier, Swallow the Sun have a way of making misery beautiful and Moonflowers may be the best example of this in action. Coming off of the death of songwriter Juha Raivio’s partner, Aleah Stanbridge, to cancer in 2016, When a Shadow is Forced Into the Light felt like a monument to grief. Moonflowers, in contrast, feels like an extended lament at the lingering feelings of loss. While this could be oppressive in its dourness (see: A Pale Horse Named Death’s discography), Moonflowers is finds the beauty in the sorrow which makes it very easy to listen to. Swallow the Sun hit a strong balance between softer and heavier tracks, all in their signature doom metal sound. Moonflowers doesn’t reinvent Swallow the Sun’s sound – the only real musical evolution is the inclusion of more backing strings, which give songs such as “Enemy” and “Woven Into Sorrow” a bigger, more epic feel and which make the album’s strong emotions hit harder. My favourite track may have to be “All Hallows’ Grieve” though, which features the delicate guest vocals of Cammie Gilbert and best exemplifies the beautiful melancholy that Swallow the Sun strives for. However, the album does start to drag a bit in the latter-half with “The Void” and “The Fight of Your Life”, which ditch the backing strings and losing some of the energy of the first half of the album. That’s basically the only reason why Moonflowers isn’t my album of the year, I had to debate long and hard between this and my #1 pick, but a couple of weaker tracks here were ultimately the difference-maker.
Moonflowers also features a bonus disc where every single song on the album has been redone as classical string music. It’s an interesting take on the material, but one that I quickly grew bored of. For my tastes, I’d much rather experience this album the way it was intended, especially because these string versions lack the vocals of the main album. It doesn’t really hurt anything, but I would have liked if this disc was something I’d find myself going back to.
1) God is Partying, Andrew W.K.
As I’ve saidmany times in the past, Andrew W.K. was introduced to me as “life metal” (as opposed to death metal), best exemplified by his wall of sound style and enthusiastic lyrics that are obsessed with having a good time. His first two albums, I Get Wet and The Wolf are classics and nothing else he’s put out has come close to matching that quality. 2018’s You’re Not Alone was a return to form, but it felt very safe, like a conscious effort to recapture Andrew W.K.’s glory days rather than doing anything different. So, with all this in mind, if you’d told me that God is Partying was going to be a departure from Andrew W.K.‘s classic mold (including his harsh, shouted vocals I like so much) and his darkest album ever, I would have likely expected this to flop since it goes against everything I know that I love about this artist. Thankfully, this is why artists shouldn’t give fans what they want, because God is Partying is every bit as good as Andrew W.K.’s two classic albums, if not better.
One element from You’re Not Alone which carries over to God is Partying is the spiritual, pseudo-religious themes, but they’ve taken on a more ominous and dark turn here. “Everybody Sins” demonstrates this with epic grandiosity, at times feeling like a gospel track while also being one of the heaviest songs in Andrew W.K.’s entire discography. In fact, there’s two other tracks on here which are easily among Andrew W.K.’s heaviest songs, including “Babalon” and “I’m in Heaven”. Pretty much every track has some sort of experimentation going on, from “Everybody Sins”‘ backing organs, to “Babalon” incorporating electronics and synthesizers, to the sinister tone and incoherent screams backing “I’m in Heaven”, to “Remember Your Oath”‘s ballad-like feel, to “I Made It”‘s energetic, piano-led melody which makes it feel like a Michael W. Smith worship track.
Oh and it’s also worth noting that Andrew W.K. has dropped his signature harsh vocals on this album that I like so much. I hated his mid-2000s albums because they did this, but man does the new, soaring vocal style ever work here, especially on the epic, eye-watering “No One to Know”. Meanwhile, Andrew W.K. is mining much more personal and dark territory than ever before (I’m pretty sure he doesn’t even say “party” once in this whole album), most clearly evidenced with the nasty breakup song “My Tower”, which is downright vicious for an Andrew W.K. song.
God is Partying is Andrew W.K. at his most diverse, mature and assured. I figured I’d enjoy this album, but it was way better than I was expecting. It’s impressive enough as it is, but when you factor in just how off-brand Andrew W.K. is on this album it makes it even more impressive that I’m this blown away by it. If that’s not album of the year material, I don’t know what is.
Welcome back to the mostly-annual year-end countdown of the best movie posters of the year! Obviously since we basically got no movies in 2020 I had to take the last year off, but we’re back for 2021 with a very solid selection of eye-catching posters that I had a seriously difficult time narrowing down into just a top 15. As before, I’m using impawards as the source for 2021 posters. Any poster released during the year is eligible, but special consideration is given to posters which are intended for mass distribution rather than posters which are intended to be limited-release, alternative, “artistic” posters. As usual, you can see the full-sized poster in all its glory if you click on the images. Anyway, with those considerations out of the way, let’s get onto the list!
Dishonourable Mention: Cosmic Sin
Okay, the idea of Bruce Willis and Frank Grillo as a couple of space marines sounds fucking awesome, but the cheap, obvious, awful headswap Photoshop job on this poster makes this whole movie seem cheap and laughable. Not that Cosmic Sin needsmuch help, this movie is apparently so bad and forgettable that no one has even fixed the numerous grammatical errors in its Wikipedia page as of October 21, 2021. Ouch.
15) The French Dispatch
This one mostly makes the list because you take one look at it and go “Oh hey, it’s a Wes Anderson movie in poster form”. It’s quirky, detailed and has tons of stuff to look at, each cell is practically a miniature character poster of its own and the Fibonacci sequence-like layout directs your eyes in an unusual and interesting way. The pulpy, 30s/40s serial art style also helps this standout amongst the other posters of 2021 and no-doubt reflects Anderson’s distinct visual style and aesthetics. All-in-all, a unique and fun poster which undoubtedly reflects the film’s aesthetic as well.
14) Spencer
This poster is very striking. Between the massive, elaborate outfit, the contrast between the dark and the light of the dress and Kristen Stewart’s flawless transformation into Princess Diana, there’s plenty to draw you in. What helps make this more than just a visually-appealing piece is that the design also belies the story’s darker elements, with Diana seemingly stifled, like she’s trapped in the opulence. It’s a true art piece in its own right and I’m curious if Spencer can live up to it.
I’m not really a fan of pop music (shocker), so unsurprisingly I don’t give a shit about Billie Eilish and could care even less for an Apple TV exclusive documentary about her. However, it’s hard to deny that she doesn’t have her own distinct style, best highlighted in these posters for The World’s a Little Blurry. I like the first one mostly, it has a moody tone to it, Eilish’s signature green hair gives it a strong hue and it (obviously) lives up to the “blurry” part of the title. It reminds me of the Joker poster from 2019 that I liked so much. Like most good posters, the use of colour is very intentional, bringing its own tone, mood, style and even symbology to these posters which I can’t help but appreciate.
12) Prisoners of the Ghostland
While I find this poster very visually-arresting, promising me the trippiest samurai movie you’ve ever seen, there’s one small element that really makes me love this poster. I love how this poster draws your eyeline downward – first you see a samurai badass with his back to you, then the spooky mask, then the title and then “This wildest movie I’ve ever made”. Wow, who’s saying that? Nicholas goddamn Cage and for himthat is afreaking declaration. The poster itself is cool but that strategically-placed quote gets my imagination racing, just going to show that every aspect of poster design can be crucial to its success. For that, Prisoners of the Ghostland deserves special commendation!
11) A Classic Horror Story
This one succeeds for a couple reasons. First of all, it’s called A Classic Horror Story and the poster design makes this look like… a classic 70s horror story. Secondly, if I saw that horned devil lady in my doorway, I’d be legitimately unsettled. The fact that it seems to be happening in full daylight just makes the whole thing even more unsettling to me, while the red and black colours give the whole thing a sinister vibe. Like I said, colour is very important in good poster design (a trend which you will likely notice going forward) and the use of it here helps contribute to the horrifying atmosphere that A Classic Horror Story is giving off.
10) Honeydew
There are several horror posters this year that get by with their disturbing and unnerving imagery, including choices that just missed the list such as Malignant and We Need to Do Something. However, this poster for Honeydew is the most unsettling for me. I’m not entirely sure what is happening here, but it sure looks uncomfortable and you can see the fear in this guy’s eyes at whatever’s going on. It conjures images in my mind of some Saw-like trap and all the nastiness associated with that. The sickly, yellow hue over the entire poster just makes it feel even more disconcerting.
9) Old
This one is pretty simple but effective. While other posters for Old get across the idea that it takes place on a beach more, this one is far more interesting. In my opinion, it captures the concept of the inevitable, uncontrollable and even frightening passage of time and death very well, all wrapped up in a minimalist, black and white style that makes it striking to view.
8) The Sleeping Negro
Oh and speaking of minimalist styles, while the poster for Old mostly just looks cool, this poster for The Sleeping Negro uses it to get across some pretty clever racial imagery. This poster deftly gets across the theme of alienation and isolation in this film in a very simple manner that makes it even more effective than if they had gone for something more complicated or less stylized. Hell, they could honestly go even more minimalist if they wanted to, cutting out the title completely, and the message would still be conveyed just as strongly, as even the black character’s afro highlights that he’s singled out because of his race. When you can afford to strip down your poster even more then you know the designers hit on something right.
7) Bulletproof
This is another one of those posters where the imagery captures the ideas of the film in a really striking manner. Bulletproof is about the American response to school shootings and seeing children pointing finger guns at each other here is an eerie encapsulation of the topics this film will be exploring. Once again, the eyeline works perfectly – you see the finger guns, then you’re drawn down to the title and know what this movie is saying in chilling fashion.
The Suicide Squad has a huge cast of extremely colourful and varied characters and this first poster captures that aspect of the film and its off-kilter tone in glorious fashion. It also doesn’t give any of the characters more prominence than the others, which makes the characters’ fates in the film even more ambiguous (which is pretty important for a movie where, like, 80% of these characters get annihilated in gory fashion). The second poster captures the feel of a pulpy, 60s-era action movie, which isn’t nearly as interesting but it it’s worth highlighting and contrasting it to the first poster. These are very different styles but they both work to capture the fun of this very enjoyable romp of a film.
I love the use of bright red and gold and the subjects facing away from the camera across The Green Knight‘s posters, it gives them all a unifying, sombre tone. While the main theatrical poster would have made this list regardless due to its strong aesthetic, what really pushed this into the top five for me was the presence of that brilliantly huggable foxy boi. When I first saw that poster I squealed with glee. For the record, graphic designers, throw a fox on your poster and you’re pretty much guaranteed to make my top 15 if your poster is any good.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the Monsterverse consistently have some of the best posters of all Hollywood blockbusters. We get posters like Spiral which are pretty and posters like Bring Your Own Brigade and The River Runner which give you massive scale, but Godzilla vs. Kong gives you pretty colours and massive scale! The fact that they have so many cool posters and so many of these were actually used in the general marketing of the film make this even more impressive to me. Even if Godzilla vs. Kong was kinda disappointing, there’s no denying that the marketing was, once again, on point.
I didn’t really care for Army of the Dead – I thought it was bloated, poorly written and squandered what should have been an over-the-top action romp. While the film itself fell short, the marketing department for Army of the Dead clearly understood what this movie should have been. We get gorgeous poster after gorgeous poster of colourful, macabre excess, all of which make the film look way cooler than it actually is. This is just a handful of the great posters Army of the Dead got this year, so even if the quality wasn’t there (which it is) then due to pure variety this would have ranked highly. For my own part, I especially like the neon-hued skull in a river of paint and the pile of corpses in the shape of a skull. Man, seeing these posters is making me think about how I wish the movie lived up to them all over again…
We’ve had a slew of spooky and disturbing horror movie posters in 2021, but for my money The Night House has the best of them. What makes it more impressive is that there isn’t much horror imagery to speak of – there’s a blood-red moon, a scared expression from Rebecca Hall and, in one poster, a ghostly hand cutout, representing a spectral figure or perhaps someone who’s been lost? Then there’s the strong use of red and black to give everything an eerie atmosphere. In any case, it works, I really want to see this movie and figure out what sort of thrills The Night House has in store for me, which makes it more than worthy of this spot. However, there can only be one #1 pick…
1) Jackass Forever
There’s something about this poster where I looked at it and said “this is perfect” and instantly put it as a frontrunner for the year’s posters. Like, just look at it, it’s the perfect encapsulation of what Jackass is. You’ve got the rainbow hang glider and obese man to draw your attention and then the eyeline goes down to the cactus plants and then down to the film’s title. Just by looking at it, it creates a story in your head that is equal parts funny, painful and so incredibly stupid that I can’t help but applaud it. It’s so simple, but so striking that I still can’t quite believe that it’s this good, especially because the other Jackass Forever posters don’t hitme the sameway at all. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise though, this right here: this is art.
POST-SCRIPT: Well, shit. I usually have a rule here – only posters for movies released in the year in question are considered and here I have completely flubbed as Jackass Forever is going to be released in 2022 instead. To be fair, when I started this list it actually would have been a 2021 film, but it was delayed and I missed that in the time it took to make selections, write and release the list. This isn’t the first time I’ve had this issue due to unexpected delays, but it should probably go without saying that I’ll not take Jackass Forever into account for 2022’s list (because it would probably win again).
