This game’s story, world building, and characters are phenomenal. The theme of what wouldn’t you be willing to sacrifice to save someone you love is a powerful theme. The game has good combat combined with scavenging and combining mechanics that make for fun gameplay. I would have given this game a 10 if it wasn’t for the fact that 2/3 of the way through the game I was ready for it to be over. This isn’t because of story pacing, it’s because combat encounters began to feel like I was doing the same thing over and over and felt like they were taking too long. I think it felt like that because it was pretty difficult to do something other than stealth and not use up most of your resources while doing it. So even though I was combining resources to make items that could change my combat gameplay loop, I was having to save them for boss fights and scripted moments where I would get attacked by large groups of enemies. That is the only dark spot that tarnishes my memory an otherwise nearly perfect game.
I could easily argue that this is one of the greatest games ever made. The combat feels as if you took turn based combat and transformed it into an action adventure game. There are no actual turns in combat, but it’s all about learning your opponents move set then utilizing timing and patience to exploit their attacks for an opening. The map layout is incredible, it’s full of shortcuts and secrets to explore. The bosses are so well-designed that nearly every action adventure game following Dark Souls has attempted to emulate their boss design in some fashion.
I played the patched version of this expansion, but it’s easily one of the best expansions I have ever played for a game. The scadu tree fragments encourage exploration in a really cool way, by giving you increased power with every one you find it really incentivizes exploration, which is one of the pillars of Souls games. The final boss of this game was pretty difficult but I had a lot of fun learning his move set.
A masterclass in exploration and combat with some of the best boss encounters FromSoftware has ever made peppered throughout. A much more accessible game to the casual gamer than any of their previous entries, so it’s no wonder that it saw massive success. My only minor nitpick with it is that they perhaps crammed a little too much content in the game since they ended up reusing more than a handful of bosses in different dungeons.
This is the first Metroid game I have ever played and I absolutely loved it. The art style does such a great job making this game that I played on ancient tech look beautiful. Mechanically it felt good to play also, which is nice since original is pretty old at this point. The quality of this game felt like it is probably more a remake than a remaster, but I never played the original so I can’t say. The story itself was just okay, but I thought all the lore and world building they did was great. This definitely got me interested in the Metroid series though.
The combat for this game was fun, kind of reminded me of XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Everything else outside of combat was pretty boring and unremarkable, but I find most of Nintendo’s products to be boring and unremarkable, so I’m not the target audience. I still recommend playing it for the combat though.
I bought this game on Steam and PS4 and 100%’d it on both several years apart. The game is that good, it’s absolutely worth playing, especially if you like trying to beat high scores and unlocking apparel that changes the way you approach a run. Successfully stringing together combos in this game feels exhilarating.
This game has some cool ideas with the 2D to 3D transitions, the puzzle words, and the story book theme. The combat was simple but not bad, and the boss fights had uniquely fun mechanics. I thought the combat and puzzles both could have been a bit more challenging, especially as you progressed through the game. The art style is cool and the writing is funny, but the game felt like it went on for too long, by the last few hours I was over it and ready for it to be done. If you have extra time, check it out, or if you have a subscription that includes it then give it a look.
I played the GameCube version of this game using backwards compatibility on my Wii. This game and Twilight Princess made having a Wii worth it. I played hundreds of hours of both games. The campaign was awesome to play through, unlocking all the collectibles was fun, using the weapon unlocks/mods made multiple play throughs worth it, but what made this game truly special was Mercenary mode. Mercenary Mode was just pure fun to replay over and over to S rank everything.
This is the best hunting game I have ever played. I spent most of my time hunting and stealing wagons to sell for money, I regret none of it. The story was amazing as well on top of it all. There are some Rockstar moments though, like missions that aren’t particularly fun to play and scenes where you just have to walk next to someone listening to them talk while you are bored out of your mind. Those are my least favorite parts of Rockstar games and one of the only reasons I can’t give it a 10. Another thing that is annoying is getting certain animals to spawn so that you could record them in your book or farm them was next to impossible sometimes. Everything else about the game though was incredible.
This game might as well have been called Metal Gear Solid V: Fulton Extraction, because that is pretty much what I spent the entirety of my time playing this game doing. The Fulton Extraction experience alone is enough for my score, I had so much fun doing it. It was so addictive to get max rank on all my soldiers, so I used tranquilizer guns for the whole game so I could extract everyone and everything on the map that I could manage to strap a parachute to. I don’t remember anything from the story or any of the boss fights other than the skull things that chase you, but I do remember what the map looked like and even specific base camps really well.
Bear in mind that the score I’m giving this game is heavily influenced by nostalgia, so I’m not sure what an objective player with fresh eyes will think of the game. This is my favorite game of all time, it was the first game I ever played that had a real story and the game that introduced me to JRPG’s. I love the characters, the writing, the combat, and the chocobos (S rank). This game changed what I thought was possible in video games, at least as far as I knew anyway.
When I was a teenager whose whole world revolved around skateboarding, video games and soccer these were some of my favorite games to play on N64. Then Skate and Session came out and changed skateboarding games for me, so now when I play an arcade skating game like this it just doesn’t feel fun anymore. It **** because I have a lot of fond memories playing these games with my friends, so I was excited to play them again. I just can’t find the fun in doing these ridiculous lines to get a higher score anymore, now I want skateboarding games that feel like actual skateboarding, where just landing a single trick feels really hard, let alone completing an entire line. If you’re looking to play a skateboarding game that gives you that feel of actually skating then give session a try and let THPS live as cherished memories from your childhood.
Skate changed skateboarding games forever for me. Skate ruined the THPS series for me, those are no longer skateboarding games to me, they’re just skateboarding themed score-attack platformers to me now. It’s been difficult to find anything to fill the Skate-void since the Xbox 360, but this game does the trick. First things first, this game has a lot of rough edges: graphics aren’t great, off board stuff is super janky, there is some onboard jank here and there as well, trophy progression is broken for quite a few trophies, and the animations aren’t always the greatest looking. Admittedly, that seems like a lot of stuff, but the game is so much fun to play if you are looking for a game that feels like skateboarding. There is so much more required from the player mechanically in this game to pull off tricks, and it feels so satisfying when you’re able to do it after trying over and over. To give you an example, in Skate, to do a kick flip you would flick your right stick down then diagonally up and to the left (regular footed), and your avatar will do a perfect kick flip that they will catch and land all on their own. In Session, each joystick controls a foot so in order to do a kick flip you have to flick the right joystick down and then flick the left joystick diagonally up and left after your tail hits the ground, but you’re not done there, you also have to time it and flick the right stick again to catch the board before you land. This gives even simple tricks like kick flips some real depth and difficulty in Session, because the timing is based on how fast you flick the left stick, faster flicks will make the board flip faster so you can do double, triple, and quadruple kick flips and a slower flick can make a nice stylishly slow kick flip. This trick system combined with a physics system where angle, speed, and timing are all integral to being able to connect with a rail or ledge make Session’s gameplay feel incredibly deep. The game also has a large number of settings that you can tweak to make the gameplay more like a sim or more like an arcade (essentially easier or harder) based on your preferences. It can sometimes take 30 min - an hour just to do a flip trick into a grind on a rail/ledge, completing a line can take well over an hour to perfect and it feels so damn satisfying when you do it. This game makes you feel like you actually achieved something through persistence and practice. I’m 39 years old and have been working a manual labor job since I was 18, so skating is a lot harder on my body than it used to be and it’s risky for my career to try certain things; this video game is the closest thing I have found to giving me that feeling that skateboarding does.
The original Silent Hill and Silent Hill 2 hold a special place in my memory, my friend and I used to pass the controller in 10th grade playing those games in a dark room at night. I remember that was the first time I ever felt dread playing through a video game and I thought it was amazing that a game could make us feel just as scared as if we were really walking through those buildings. This remake did exactly what I hoped it would do, it felt like I was playing the game I had such fond memories from all those years ago. Obviously, this remake built from the ground up with new assets, engine, and animations but through lens of nostalgia, this is how I remember the game. I absolutely loved playing through this game. If you are into stories where you feel like you are unsure of what’s happening but feel compelled to find out more, then this game is definitely one to try. There is possibly a bit too much combat, only because the game is possible a bit too long to the point where combat can start to feel a bit repetitive, but I enjoyed the combat so this didn’t affect my enjoyment of the game really. The graphics look great even in Performance mode and it runs great as well. The sound design and music stand out as well, they do a great job engrossing you in the atmosphere of this game.
I loved playing this game even more than my score would suggest, but I gave it an 8 because I think it might be a bit polarizing as far as players are concerned. I think there will be quite a few people who might be turned off a bit by the difficulty and the steep learning curve that this game has in the first biome. For example, I played about 45-50 hours to beat the game and it took me about 18 of those hours just to beat the first biome, which is about 1/6th of the game. Once you figure out what you should be doing and unlock certain weapons, then the game becomes quite a bit easier, so everything goes a bit faster. The one annoyance I had at times with the game is actually the fact that I felt almost reliant on getting certain weapons in a run to be able to have a run where I felt like it could be successful. Sometimes you would just keep getting same underperforming weapons over and over in a run and feel like it was a waste of your time. I think this game is so much fun, and I loved playing, but it might not be for everyone.
Another beautiful game by Nomada where they manage to captivate you in a 2D world reminiscent of Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke. Unlike Gris, this game has combat in it, and the combat is pretty good but not really what makes this game great. The art direction and story are really what shine in the game, everything else around it is good enough to keep you playing so that you can experience the game. It’s a short experience, so you don’t have to worry about the gameplay getting too monotonous and overstaying its welcome. Definitely worth a try if the art style interests you at all, I had a great time playing it.
This game feels like interactive art. The art style, gameplay, and sound design feel like a cohesive experience guiding you through various emotions. There were multiple times when I stopped just to admire the beauty of this game because of how gorgeous the art style is. It’s a shorter game, which is perfect for someone like me who has limited gaming time and a gigantic backlog of games to play. The puzzles felt fun to solve for me, they weren’t overly difficult but they also weren’t so easy that you immediately knew what to do every time. If you are looking for challenging puzzles though, this might not be the game for you. This 4-5 hour experience was completely worth playing though, especially if you are looking for something unique in a time when a lot of games can feel a bit similar.
This game was brutally difficulty for me to beat, but I eventually managed to do it. I had quite the emotional journey with this game, I came into asa FromSoft Fan having played all the Souls and Bloodborne. Bloodborne was my least favorite of the FromSoftware games because of its departure from the more tactical style of combat that the Souls games had. I went into this game expecting to play a mix of Dark Souls combined with Tenchu (one of my favorite series from when I was a teenager). I always preferred dodging over parrying in all the Souls games, so the first few hours of Sekiro were a real slog for me. I tried to play it like a Souls game and kept getting the **** kicked out of me. I wasn’t really enjoying the game, and I just couldn’t figure out why since I wanted to love this game from one of my favorite developers. I did some searches on Reddit and came across some posts that expressed feelings similar to mine, and there was one commenter that mentioned you can’t play this game like you would Dark Souls otherwise you will never experience what makes the combat so special in this game. They described it like a rhythm game where you have to learn enemy attack patterns and time your parries/counters and attacks while keeping up almost constant aggression. When they described the rhythm fighting mechanic, that was finally when everything started to click and I began enjoying the game. When I got to the Genichiro fight is when I really started to fall in love with this game. The final boss fight is what cemented this game as the best action combat game I have ever played. The combat in this game is so much fun once you engage with it the way you were intended to. It’s not a perfect game, I wish the stealth was slightly more viable for various encounters, but I understand why it isn’t. The story is whatever, but it has some good moments. What makes this game so good though is the combat and the boss fights/mini-bosses, as long as you meet it on its terms then you’ll have such an amazing combat experience.
I played this game a year after it released so I didn’t ever experience any of the performance issues the people had around launch like the large frame rate drops near towns. In its current state, this game is so much fun to play. I maxed every vocation just because it was so much fun to have different play styles and party compositions. I 100%’d this game, which I only do for games that I love, and I never got tired of playing it. A big complaint about this game was the fast travel, but I thought the emerging gameplay moments and all the loot/experience you got from traveling on foot completely justified the limitations on fast travel. I was initially worried about that point, because I generally don’t like when games don’t give me quality of life upgrades like fast travel right from the start of the game, but I ended up having no problem with it for the most part in this one. The story is pretty terrible, so if that matters to you then that will be a problem, but for me gameplay comes first and this game is fun to play. There are a lot of cool moments that occur because of the physics in combat, sometimes these moments can end up in frustration as well so make sure you save often. If you care about character customization, this game has a lot options. The world feels somewhat alive at times with NPCs reacting to events and decisions you are making regularly. If you like RPGs with a deep combat system/build variety and don’t mind exploration on foot then you should definitely check this game out, it’s an amazing game.
This game is one of my favorite games that I have ever played. It’s just pure fun to tackle all of this world’s obstacles with the variety of power-ups that you get. Playing it with the dual sense just elevates the entire experience because you feel all the different textures on the ground and even the mechanics of the game are enhanced by the controller. It’s one of those games that you want to live in and do everything you possibly can do. The game is gorgeous and it runs flawlessly. My son constantly asks me to play it again just because it’s his favorite game to watch me play. There are a few minor nitpicks: enemy diversity feels somewhat lacking at times, the story levels are on the easier side of the difficulty spectrum, and the boss art designs feel a bit lackluster. None of these things personally affected my experience, but I could see them bothering some other people. There are challenge levels once you beat the game that are quite difficult and are a lot of fun if you are seeking something that isn’t as easy. Collecting the different bots and secrets is one of the best parts of the game and adds so much fun. They all have funny animations in the hub world that really make collecting them feel worthwhile. I cannot recommend this game enough, it’s so amazing.
This is a great game that is fun to play. It’s a polished game that looks good, thanks to the great art direction, and runs smoothly with no issues. The levels are designed well and have quite a bit of diversity with the various mechanics you can use to interact with them. The thing I heard most about this game was how great the movement is, and I agree that there are a lot of movement options that have good feeling animations, but I rarely used them because they seemed mostly unnecessary to beat the game. I am not a Nintendo fan and I haven’t played a Mario game since Super Mario Bros 3, so I am not the target audience for this game. I think all the praise that this game gets for its movement is only applicable if you plan on no-lifing this game and trying to get every collectible. I did not love the game enough to want to do anything more than just beat it, so all of the movement mechanics were not things that felt useful to me. You can easily beat the game without having to do anything beyond jumping, throwing Cappy, and using Cappy abilities. The platforming felt imprecise and difficult to judge where I was going to land sometimes, but I am new to 3D Platformers so that easily be a skill issue. Astro’s Playroom is the game that got me into 3D Platformers, so then I played Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart. Astro Bot, and now this game. I can easily say that this was my least favorite of the four, I 100%’d the other three games because I absolutely fell in love with them. While playing this game I never even considered 100% it, I just wanted to beat it and be done with it, which is a shame because all I have heard coming into it is that it’s the best 3D platformer ever made. Like I said, I think it’s a great game and it’s worth playing, but greatest 3D Platformer has to go to Astro Bot over this.
The story and writing in this game isn’t good, after the Baron arc I just skipped all the cutscenes and dialogue but a game doesn’t need either of those things to be a fun ass video game. I had so much fun playing this game; the quests are fun to do, the combat is fun and there are lots of viable builds that make you feel like a bad ass monster slayer. The Blood and Wine expansion does such a great job adding skills that make it possible to create all these cool builds. It’s a large world, but fast travel is done well with lots of travel points that encourage exploration. Finding all the fast travel points gave me a similar feeling that I get when completing a Pokédex in Pokémon, it was addictive. I was also completely obsessed with Gwent and collecting all the cards, I spent so much time playing that game and don’t regret any of it. The worst part of this game were the parts where you are forced to play as a character that isn’t your main character, I wish there had been a way to skip that stuff. Overall, thought this was an amazing game though.
If there was an option to give this game a 9.5, I would probably choose that but since there isn’t I went with a 10. The story for this game potentially has some pacing issues, but I don’t care because this is one of only four video games that has ever made me have strong emotional feelings in relation to the story (the others being FF7, TLOU Part I and Part II). I love FromSoft games and I love turn-based JRPG’s, and this game felt like the perfect marriage of the two. I think the world-building for this game was done so well, it gave me just something unique and teased just enough about the greater universe that this game is set in to leave me wanting more but content with allowing my imagination to to fill out the rest of it. The combat has set a new standard for JRPG combat for me, enough so that I am a bit worried I will no longer enjoy standard turn-based combat anymore. I love the systems, and the build diversity that they allow for, although if you are not someone who likes living in menus then there are potentially some things you might not enjoy about the combat systems. The game is difficult enough that it encourages you to experiment either builds, which is something I enjoy because otherwise I won’t ever experiment. I generally just find what works and then use that until it no longer works, so I like when games encourage me to go try new things. I even found the somewhat frustrating jank in the mini-games to be charming (don’t worry, they are purely for cosmetic purposes so you don’t have to do them if you hate them). I love to grind when games make it fun, and while you don’t have to grind in this game if you prefer to brute force it with skill, I had so much fun grinding in this game. I love when optional bosses in games are more difficult than the final boss, so you can grind if you want to until you can defeat those optional bosses without having progression halted for you if don’t want to do that and this game has that. Some people will complain about the lack of a map for dungeons, but I personally didn’t have any issues with the navigation/exploration of the game. The game is a masterpiece to me, the story, game design, and art direction are all phenomenal to me. I cannot recommend this game enough, easily one of my top 5 games of all time.
To be fair to this game, I played it nearly 7 years after its release on Nintendo Switch, so keep that in mind while reading this review. The most fun I had playing this game was while doing the dungeons, shrines, and while hunting for Korok seeds/cooking ingredients. The interaction of elements and the physics of this game were the absolute coolest part of the game. It felt so good to try something random to solve a puzzle and have it actually work, that by itself makes the game worth playing. I think scope is probably one of the biggest problems this game has, it has so many ambitious things it does, but on hardware that doesn’t support these grand ideas. The art style is pretty good, but it looks so fuzzy that it really ruins the visuals of the game when you’re playing. Sacrificing visual fidelity wouldn’t be that bad if you got the tradeoff of having good performance (60 fps), but the frame rate isn’t good either, often feeling like you’re lucky if you get 30 fps. Combat is okay, but it isn’t something I enjoyed doing in this game. It mostly felt like I fought the same few enemies in the same way over and over. This isn’t because you don’t have a diversity of combat options, you can actually be quite creative in the way you approach combat, but because of the homogeneity of the enemy design there is no real incentive for you to experiment in combat. You pretty much find what works and stick with that, there are no mechanics that force you to try out different systems. This might be a positive for many players who want the freedom to express themselves in combat, I am not a creative person so if the game doesn’t force me to change how I think about a situation then I generally don’t experiment. My biggest issue with the combat though is weapon durability; I understand why they did it so that you can’t just go grab a strong weapon early and make the game easy mode, but that flies in the face of the rest of the design choices in this game: go anywhere and do whatever you want in whatever order you choose. If I want to get a strong weapon and use that for the entirety of the game, that should be an option. Instead, I have to mark camps on the map where there are weapons that I like and then wait multiple in-game hours for a blood moon to respawn camps so that I can farm multiple instances of the stronger weapons that I want for combat. At the very least, make it so that I can force the camps the respawn rather than having to wait for my game to refresh its memory, it’s anti-fun. Lastly, the story was garbage and basically non-existent, but whatever that isn’t a big deal, you can just skip that stuff. All in all, I had fun and this is a great game, but considering the hype and reverence I have heard for many years about how this is the greatest game ever made, I had much higher expectations and was disappointed in the game when I finished it.
This review is just for story mode, I didn’t play online and I have no desire to play a GTA online. When I was younger I put a lot of time into GTA III, Vice City, and GTA IV; I had been wanting to play some GTA because I always remembered those games fondly and so I bought GTA V for PS5. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much fun playing this game over the span of about 12 hours and ended up deleting it before I could finish story mode. The world that the developers created is big with a lot of detail, the cars look really nice, and the shooting/driving mechanics are pretty fun but the missions in this game are mostly terrible. It’s so boring doing most of the missions that even though the developers were able to create a world that is pretty fun to play around in, there is no motivation for me to actually play the game. After I got bored with stealing cars, driving around, and playing golf/tennis I was left with nothing else to do but delete the game. If you’re bored and have nothing else to play then it’s worth playing this game to kill some time, but if you have a giant backlog of games like I do, thenI would say skip this one and go play something else in your backlog.
