The Critical Corner

You can make plenty of parallels between developer Bioware’s newest game Anthem and developer Bungie’s Destiny . Both these games are essentially new IP. Both these games are attempts at trying something new while still retaining some of the developers’ signature touch. And ultimately, at least at launch, both these games set a foundation to be built upon for an exciting future more than they do anything exciting in the here and now. The big key difference between these two games is the release timing. Destiny was the game that ushered the always online, “shared-world MMO-like” style of shooter back in 2014, and with that came exciting developments and plenty of missteps. Not to mention another contender in the genre appeared halfway through Destiny ’s lifecycle in the form of Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s The Division , a game that also did as much right as it did wrong as Bungie’s shooter. Releasing five years after  Destiny ’s debut,  Anthem theoretically has the

Titanfall 2 remains to me one of the biggest tragedies of this console generation. Here you had a shooter that was as close to perfect as you could get: incredible mechanics, tight campaign, epic multiplayer. And thanks to publisher Electronic Arts deciding to release the game in the week between their latest Battlefield game and rival Activision's latest Call of Duty game back in 2016, no one played Titanfall 2 . For all intents and purposes, this new franchise from the original Call of Duty creators was potentially dead in the water. When leaks started happening the weekend of the Super Bowl that developer Respawn Entertainment was going to release a Battle Royale game set in the Titanfall universe, my heart sank. I was dismayed at the fact they were chasing what I now consider a fad that's been dominated by Fortnite for so long. With  "Battle Royale" being a genre I've tried to love but never have, I was ready to write off the Titanfall serie