The Video Games You Should Play This Weekend – March 6

Mega Crit’s Slay the Spire didn’t invent the roguelite genre, but it quickly became a banner-bearer for the genre. With years of people climbing the Spire, you might wonder, how would Mega Crit follow it up with a sequel? Slay the Spire 2 has only been out for a little while now, but already seems to have found several ways to build upon the solid framework of its predecessor.

Between new cards and old cards, relics familiar and strange, and a structure that feels just like the original, Mega Crit hasn’t fixed what isn’t broken. Instead, the studio’s turned towards interesting new avenues of progression. Quests reward commitment to short-term risks for long-term boons. Floor rewards offer interesting choices, with some clever run-shifting mechanics. New bosses throw both big numbers and surprising puzzles at the player. And the two new characters add some great variety to the roster; I already love playing as the skeletal Necrobinder and her handy pal Osty. I put dozens upon dozens of hours into the first Slay the Spire, and I feel the same pull here in the sequel.

I’m what you would call a lapsed Pokémon fan. I was 10 when Pokémon Red and Blue first hit the U.S., and I was absolutely obsessed with the franchise during that magical first generation as a kid who also wanted to be the very best. However, I fell off the franchise hard during Gen 2 (partially because my GBA with my in-progress copy of Gold was stolen) and never fully got back into it, save for sporadic check-ins like the 2016 Pokémon Go craze. Still, I’ve retained a soft spot for the franchise despite watching it grow from afar and have waited for it to offer something more interesting and, frankly, weirder than the standard RPGs to draw me back in.

When I first laid eyes on Pokémon Pokopia and its derpy-faced Ditto protagonist, I was charmed from the get-go. I enjoyed what I played of the Dragon Quest Builders games and had fun with Animal Crossing: New Horizons, so a Pokémon-themed amalgamation of those experiences sounded super appealing. Plus, again, the premise of a Ditto masquerading as a barely passable human is delightfully stupid. I’m still very early in the game, but I’m drawn to its low-key post-apocalyptic world (humanity is dead missing!), and I can already feel its cozy hooks digging into me as my to-do list starts to populate. Plus, with the real world seemingly falling apart in various ways, it feels good to put a different one back together. The lesson: be the Ditto that copies the person you want to see in this world.

For more on Pokémon Pokopia, you can read Brian Shea’s full review right here or watch the video review below.

My first drop on Tau Ceti IV was tense. We crept through cobbled-together stations and outposts, scavenging and scurrying like rats trying to fill our packs before we made off in the night with our hard-earned goods. A few robots tried to stop us, but it was easy enough to clear them out and move on. The second run, though, got a little more tense; an eerily quiet trek for faction quests and collectibles erupted into chaos when human players tried to pick us off in a moment of calm. My trio fled down a chasm, stopping and shooting all the way like the infamous heist scene from Heat, until we realized that we’d managed to force the other team into a funnel. When they tried to chase us out of the chasm’s opening into the open air, the runners in the chasm were like fish in a barrel.

I’m unsure what the long-term health of Marathon is, or whether an extraction shooter can really sustain constant interest for that long. It’s a genre with a goldfish’s attention span, always looking for the next big thing. But Bungie’s graphic maximalism, what my friend and Restart.run associate editor Jesse Vitelli has dubbed “techno-sludge”, beautifully underpins the pitch-perfect shooting and chaos. Marathon is already far from the tenuous truces of Arc Raiders – everything on Tau Ceti IV feels designed to send you back to the main menu with a lot less loot. It’s a good time.

This week saw the release of Scott Pilgrim EX, the third in developer Tribute’s unofficial trilogy of well-executed, nostalgic beat ’em ups after Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge and Marvel Cosmic Invasion. Unlike those previous two games which were primarily inspired by arcade classics (like the TMNT and Marvel beat ’em ups of the past, unsurprisingly), Scott Pilgrim EX is more closely modeled after River City Ransom. That means it has a sort of open world that you can walk around in and explore while getting into fights and collecting coins. It makes it stand apart from Tribute’s previous games and pretty handily makes it, mechanically, my favorite of those three. It also has great Scott Pilgrim vibes thanks to the participation of Scott Pilgrim’s creator, Bryan Lee O’Malley (read our interview with O’Malley about the game right here), and an excellent new Anamanguchi soundtrack (they did the music for the first Scott Pilgrim game and the recent Scott Pilgrim Netflix anime). If you are looking to participate in some classic co-op beat ’em up action with up to three other friends, you really can’t go wrong with Scott Pilgrim EX.

For more on Scott Pilgrim EX, you can read Kyle Hilliard’s full review right here, or watch the video review below.