Crycass

The more I play Astro Bot, the more I think to myself how much I’ve missed playing classic 3D platformers, and how much I crave to jump right back into all the better, more mechanically complex games that inspired this title in the first place. In all seriousness, everything “creative” here has straight up taken every possible page from Mario Sunshine’s, Mario Galaxy’s, and Mario Odyssey’s books. Nothing about it is technically original in the grand scheme of things, and it’s almost as if the developers are only just now catching up to the magic of 2000s and early 2010s first party Nintendo games, and are still somehow unable to match those games in visuals and aesthetics. Another thing that’s unintentionally depressing about it is how every time I rescue a bot, I get reminded of the graveyard that is now sadly known as PlayStation. It’s like the game is secretly telling me: "Hey, remember all these wonderful IPs that were once upon a time under Sony’s belt for over two decades? Remember how much more enjoyable, remarkable, and lovable those older games used to be? Well, it’s all gone now, and we’ll never make games like those ever again, but by all means, feel free to reminisce about them all you want." To cut it short: I’m grateful this game was made, and I hope to see more like it. It’s just such a shame that so much of its mascot’s identity however is either tied to glorifying and advertising Sony products or reminding the player of how much more fun gaming used to be in the past.

This is the closest thing to a spiritual Elder Scrolls successor, and it honestly excels at being one seeing as modern-day Bethesda is undoubtedly going to butcher the inevitable sequel. I get burned out super quickly with ARPGs (or any game with an open world for that matter) yet I can’t remember the last time I sat down and found myself getting lost, settling in, and having a genuinely fun time with a game of this caliber. Usually I disparage them within an hour, but this one gripped me in a fashion very few games manage to do. It’s a weird, underappreciated mishmash of games I already know and love (Skyrim, Shadow of the Colossus, Breath of the Wild) with its own unique flavor layered on top. In more ways than one, it reminds me of that increasingly rare sense of discovery in N64’s Ocarina of Time. Hoping for the future QoL updates and the expansion to add in more content and iron out the performance issues.

Luxurious is how I would describe the feeling of playing FFVII Rebirth. It’s borderline elitist to experience it in its entirety. It’s a carnival of fun, fresh ideas that are oftentimes a little too shy to take center stage owing to outdated open world mechanics and mundane, Ubisoft-style checklists. Everything good about it is when it embraces the Japanese philosophy of game design (in other words: capturing the original FFVII’s spirit), and everything bad about it is when it complies with western tropes and gimmicks, and practically bows down to market-tested AAA trends. It’s an overall great title with sadly too much filler content in the end, and I would’ve enjoyed it more had it been a fully linear game instead. The story takes some steep turns here and there, but it’s all a moot point.

Leon’s sections are excellent. Grace’s sections are a little less excellent. I honestly have nothing else to say about this game other than that I’m extremely thankful to announce it’s not a bad game.

A staple in the JRPG genre. The music is fabulous, the writing is amusing though not particularly groundbreaking, the combat is simple yet fun, and the characters may just be the most charming I’ve seen in a long while. The game exudes passion at every turn so much so you can just tell the creators had an absolute blast during development. It’s a labor of love through and through. Bless you, Horii-san.

Perfect level design. Perfect pacing. Perfect controls. Perfect gameplay. Perfect soundtrack. Perfect visuals. Perfect ass. 10/10

The single, most inexorable annoyance of Skyward Sword is its over-reliance on motion controls. It may have been innovating at first, but when it’s constantly demanding the player to swing around his Wii remote in 12 different directions each time for the most basic tasks that could’ve easily been streamlined or substituted by analog controls, it no longer remains a novel concept, but rather a serious inconvenience, never mind the fact that it made every mini-game way more frustrating than it should’ve been. Everything else about it is enjoyable to a fault. World-class in creative ideas and interesting set pieces, in typical Zelda fashion. It’s a game with which you may have a bone or two to pick (fighting The Imprisoned three separate times), but when you finally finish it, you can’t help but appreciate it for its goodness. Suffice it to say, it’s up there as one of my all time favorite games.

It filled my dark soul with light, a light that seldom draws near. A demon grew inside me, I never had human fear. Temperance and avowance, let me be, a night dying young, a knife lying sharp, a long sigh, heart gouged. I was too fond of my own ecstasy.

Masterclass in atmosphere and level design. Fantastic art direction and amazing sound quality. Great puzzles and excellent boss battles. One of the best remakes and most memorable gaming experiences out there with very few others that could replicate its magnificence.

I guess the best compliment I can give DMC 5 is that its foundation is rooted in an “outdated” PS2 game, meaning: there are no excessive cutscenes, no obnoxious forced walking sections, no pedantic tutorials despite its deep learning curve, no condescending storytelling, and no other modern gaming shenanigans and gimmicks; just pure, nonstop action fun. The one and only complain I have about it is V as a playable character who felt royally unsatisfying in gameplay, though it still served as a nice change of pace and a well needed break from Nero’s and Dante’s high-octane, up close and personal gameplays, I suppose. All things considered, this was the most enjoyment I’ve gotten out of an 8th gen game in a long time.

The biggest sin of R&C 2016 is being a movie tie-in game for a franchise that’s been exceptionally original and creative since its inception. It’s almost heartbreaking, honestly. The story of this “reboot” has no soul. It has no cohesion, no pacing. It almost has no concrete plot, and it ends on an incredibly abrupt, unfinished, unsatisfying note. The original focused on the relationship between the duo, and how it develops into an unbreakable bond; the reboot on the other hand throws all of that out of the window by assassinating Ratchet’s character in favor of some completely irrelevant side characters that are shallowly put on the spotlight. It depicts Ratchet as some sort of nerd, obsessed with celebrity culture, thirsting to be seen and worshipped by everyone. The original Ratchet would never care about any of this. The first game was T rated and as a result, it had plenty of crude jokes and puns that made dialogue super entertaining, whereas this one, being the E rated game that it is, treats the audience like children with its incredibly safe, borderline hipster, Reddit-tier humor. Onto some of the good stuff: the visuals are outstanding, the controls are fluid, the voice acting is decent, the music lacks the funky punch that the original packed, but it’s not exactly awful either, the combat is fine, though it’s far less methodical than the original; it feels more like a generic, take out everything in your vicinity type of third person shooter than what the original offered: a more modest gameplay. It’s not a bad game at all, and I had a blast playing through it twice, it’s just super disappointing when contrasting it with the original which is the more memorable, defining experience that will no doubt continue to age gracefully.

Gorgeous, hellish, stylish and visceral. God of War III carries on being the pinnacle of the series and conceptually one of the most fun, creative hack and slashes I’ve played, right up there with my beloved DMC. It’s much more fun, thematically consistent and interesting than the new direction the series has opted for with the 2018 game, and it is truly a shame we’ll never get another game like this from western developers. I can’t believe how much I’ve missed this pre-Dark Souls era when not every action game was obsessed with catering to masochists and was content with making the player feel like a badass for once. Would’ve given it a 10/10 had it not been for the unskippable cutscenes diminishing the enjoyment of consecutive playthroughs. Some sections felt a bit unpolished as well. Excellent game nevertheless.

It fails to capture the lightning in a bottle magic of the original, and it magnificently lacks the charm and overall campiness of the original as well. It pales in comparison considering how much more hollow so much of it feels. The music is less ambitious, the voice acting is somehow much worse, the UI has less personality, the environments are less handcrafted and aesthetically special, some locations have been completely removed, and even the aiming feels slightly wonkier and more stiff than the original. The original found more consistent ways to reward the player for their risk taking and creative approaches; the remake however attempts to subvert key decisions by constantly throwing curve balls at the player, making obstacles feel more cheap and trollish as though they were supposed to cater to the streamer crowd. An easy example would be how an enemy headshot meant guaranteed stagger in the original vs. the remake where there are now diminishing returns and RNG involvement depending on the difficulty you’re playing on. With all that said, the remake is still an amazingly fun experience when treated as a standalone game thanks to its satisfying combat and the tried and true Resident Evil formula for engaging gameplay. Some of the changes that were made to the pacing are in my opinion excellent for how they help keep things fresh, counteracting the sense of familiarity for returning players. It’s not everyday I play a good modern game, and this one is honestly quite alright in my book, flaws and all.

Probably the only truly “mature” game I’ve got around playing as far as video game maturity goes at least. I enjoyed it very much at times, though the anthological aspect and the pacing of the game can definitely take its toll on the player. It can get direly repetitive/exhausting the closer you get to the endgame especially considering how disjoined the plot really is; most of it basically happens towards the end and they tried to compensate for it with the newspaper collectibles. I remember vehemently disliking the game when it first launched so I’m happy to see it’s grown on me with time. The lie detection/interrogation system becomes less frustrating if you pay more attention to the logic and the validity behind every suspect’s answer instead of solely focusing on their inconsistent, often exaggerated facial expressions, but it’s still a heavily flawed system nonetheless; it feels as though every actor sort of rolled with whatever they thought was indicative of “lying” instead of following a unified rule the developers had intended for them. The setting of the game is wonderfully crafted, the music is excellent, and the characters are interesting enough to keep you going. I think where the game shines the brightest is really in the delivery and atmosphere. I’d have wished for more engaging gameplay elements, but the crime solving, mystery unraveling aspect of the game is still super fun and addicting on its own.

Played it for this year’s Halloween, and it’s a bizarrely lackluster and forgettable experience. Unlike the games it’s being compared to, namely Alien: Isolation or Soma, this game doesn’t really have a whole lot of surprising elements up its sleeve. Once you encounter the one and only stalker enemy for the first time, you’ve pretty much seen everything the game has to offer. The sound design is nothing short of exceptional from the development team, but the real meat and potatoes of the game being its puzzles and gameplay elements are an exhaustive set of chores. A serious flaw in game design that reeks of a lack of proper playtesting by people who were NOT developers (i.e., people who didn’t exactly know the ins and outs of the game) is the limited storage space (or item box or whatever you wanna call it). What’s the point of this? The player could just simply and safely drop any item in the safe zone and pick it back up again. Why not just let them store it in the item box anyway? The developers NEVER asked themselves this question, because they had already designed and played the game to death so they barely even had to use the item box to begin with. You have to have NON-developers play your game before you go gold and you should listen to their feedback/criticism. You can see similar signs of amateur playtesting in other areas as well. Lastly I should add, the game is terribly optimized on PlayStation. It stutters on environmental loads, and my save file got corrupted as a result of constant crashes but thankfully I’d backed it up beforehand, causing me to lose only an hour of progress which is still super annoying in a game like this. The ending is anticlimactic, and the length doesn’t fully justify the price tag. Nothing out of the ordinary for yet another generic indie horror game (as if the world doesn’t already suffer from those).

My only criticism is that the game is criminally short for a Mario game, though it’s still of decent length for a 3DS game, maybe even the best one at that. I did everything the game has to offer in about 10 hours or so and it was blissful. Really good game despite the fact that it may lack some of the more shiny polish of Galaxy, 3D World, or Odyssey.

Boring combat, boring story, boring characters, boring puzzles, boring, dull, lifeless graphics & environments, genuinely one of the worst games I’ve seen in recent history and I’m not exaggerating. The fact that I haven’t got the chance to play a good Silent Hill game since Silent Hill 4 is the only terrifying thing about Silent Hill as a franchise.

Final Fantasy VII Remake is sadly infested and saturated with a boatload of modern AAA gimmicks and shenanigans (the entire crane section with Aerith being a prime example) but what makes this differ in form from its contemporaries and the average modern game experience is that it has the heart and soul of a 1997 PlayStation 1 title. There’s just so much love put into the music, the characters, their distinct design, the performance, the artstyle, the combat system, the melancholically bleak story, that it makes it impossible for me to not love the game. While it does have a serious undertone, very much like the original game, I do appreciate that it doesn’t take itself super seriously. It’s refreshing to play a big budget title that knows how and when to break the ice, and frankly I don’t see western developers being able to recapture this specific kind of charm. It’s not a game without its flaws: too much padding during side quests, the boss fights get interrupted way too many times by cutscenes which can get quite annoying, the enemies aggro in on you the second you switch characters which is unrealistic and immersion-breaking, and some story beats that may feel unfaithful in the eyes of the purists. I still think the original FFVII is head and shoulders above this trilogy, and it’s kind of dishonest of the marketing team to sell this as a Remake when it is in fact a reboot/sequel kind of deal, but hey, I have played this game for well over hundred hours now, and every time I pick up the controller, I find myself having fun again. Can’t argue with results.

Such a magical game. I have incredible memories playing this when it was recently released. If you grew up playing Sonic, this will feel like a love letter. It is in my eyes the best Sonic game, and honestly one of the best platformers I’ve played. It’s got great music, great levels, great visuals, and by far the most responsive controls of any modern Sonic game. The remaster is done excellently too, though some of the changes that have been made to the characters and their interactions are just silly, and the Shadow stages, while spectacular in design and riveting in gameplay, don’t feel quite as memorably ambitious or iconic. The only issue I have with it is the length which is noticeably short; you can 100% everything in about 10hrs on your first playthrough. The final boss is also horrendously designed.

The combat and music are done well, but the writing is significantly worse than its predecessor. The Stick of Truth felt more in tandem with South Park’s dark and offensive humor. Not a bad game at all, though. Still worth a playthrough.

Diamond in the rough. My biggest gripe with it is its terrible performance on base consoles. The frame rates dip below 15 at the later stages of the game which is appalling and I’m honestly shocked they shipped it in this state. I did like the puzzles, and I thought Trico was fine. The story is just okay. Save yourself a headache and play it on a PS5.

Play it on hard, play it on normal, play it with a controller, play it on mouse and keyboard, play it with mods, play it however you want, but whatever you do, do not play it without headphones. Seriously.

"Let me get this straight, you think Skyrim is a good game?" — "I do, and I’m tired of pretending it’s not."

Easily one of the best puzzle games I’ve played, right up there with Portal 2. Absolutely love this game. The puzzles are brilliantly laid out and the pacing in general is immaculate. Great soundtrack too. If only a fraction of indie games were as unprecedented and original as this instead of being low poly carbon copies of one another.

I’ve always had a love and hate relationship with this game. It’s got a wonderful setting, phenomenal soundtrack, and great voice acting, but it also suffers from a genuinely awful level design, a monotonous core gameplay loop, and a story that is, due to its prequel nature, predictable and honestly somewhat boring towards the end with chapters 4 and 5. The game rarely ever encourages creativity in its gameplay, every mission can be summed up to: ride to the target location > something goes wrong there > start shooting enemies > mission ends, now do this for a 100 hours to come. Rockstar specializes in making games for possibly the lowest common denominator. Seriously, my 90 year old grandfather could probably beat this game, that is how simplified the mechanics are. Because their games cost so much time and money to produce, they make games primarily for EVERYone to beat hence their monumental success in sales and popularity, but when you try to please everyone with a video game, what you’ll end up with is Red Dead Redemption 2: incredible fidelity, awesome graphics, and wonderful production quality but with a safe, uninspired, dull combat system and generic, risk-averse gameplay elements. It’s not a bad game by any means, just not an entirely amazing one. The average person who tells you “this is the best game ever made” has only played a total of ten games in their lifetime.

It is remarkable how well Twilight Princess has aged. Charming art style, great music, and fantastic puzzles. Nintendo’s level design during this era was bar none close to perfection. It’s a game that forever rekindled my love for video games as a whole, and it’s one that reminds you “it’s not you who’s changed for the worse, it’s the games.”

The gameplay can be atrociously repetitive with very little variety to break ground, and the story starts out incredibly strong, it sets the stage for something glorious to come… except it never comes. For a thrilling, suspenseful game that is supposedly inspired by David Lynch, you’d expect some mind-numbing, brilliant twist at the end that recontextualizes everything and gives answer to all the mysteries, right? Well, not in Alan Wake, you don’t. There is no twist in this game. The whole “Alan actually completely forgot about the week he had written the manuscripts for literally no reason whatsoever” plot point is incredibly, and I mean incredibly lazy. It’s bad writing 101, it essentially uses one of the worst tropes ever. The ending is so unsatisfying, it’s unreal. Absolutely garbage, predictable story with an even more predictable gameplay. There is still SOME morsel of fun left in this, but it’s so indigestible, it’s not even worth bothering.

Gorgeous scenery, incredible combat system, and an excellent set of mechanics all complementing each other to create the best licensed, non-canon LOTR game. The story isn’t memorable by any stretch, but it is serviceable, and it’s only there to push the arcade-like gameplay forward. The voice acting is otherworldly (seriously, both Baker and Duncan did a fantastic job with this and the team behind every uruk’s voice is exceptional). The music however is sadly a bit forgettable, and I feel like it rarely takes the stage. For a game as grandiose as this, there could’ve definitely been a more ambitious OST. The only major criticism I could give it is that it becomes an incredibly grindy/repetitive slog towards the end, and the main missions are nowhere near as imaginatively unique as the IP itself. The open world combined with the nemesis system had so much more potential than to be another generic, bloated, Ubisoft-inspired mess. Play the definitive edition with all the DLCs installed.

Never understood the hype around this game. First off, Geralt runs around like an eternally drunk bolero dancer to the point that the devs even added an “alternative movement” option in one of the patches that barely mitigates the janky animations. **** doesn’t FEEL fun to control/play, my brain will automatically hate it no matter how good everything surrounding that game is. Second, this game suffers from some serious lack of core gameplay variety. The combat system feels sluggish and underdeveloped. It’s got neither style nor substance. Perhaps the issue may not be on the combat itself, but more so on the fact that the main story of this game takes about 60 hours to finish, and you DO NOT want to assign TW3’s combat to a game that takes any longer than 10 hours to finish, because then the cracks will begin to show, then you’ll quickly realize just how bogged down and monotonous the combat is. It lacks depth for a game that has over 100 hours of content. You NEED to make a combat system that lets the player approach obstacles/enemies from more creative and unique angles if you’re going to make a game that’s this long. Storywise, it is also incredibly overrated. Geralt is as insufferable as main characters can get. He is a pretentious, soulless, narcissistic piece of **** that I can never bring myself to care about under any circumstances because he doesn’t care about anyone but himself and his daughter, and what does the game do to make you care about his daughter and help so that the player’s motivations can be in tandem with those of the protagonist exactly? Nothing. Aside from endlessly searching for her, and only hearing about her through mundane dialogue, the only times you get to know her are through flashbacks which amount to less than 3 hours in total. You have to care about her because she’s your daughter, and that’s basically it! Wow, amazing writing, guys! “Tell, don’t show.” Way to go, champs! On a serious note, this is legitimately Fallout 4 levels of storytelling, and it’s beyond awful. Actually, this is worse than FO4, because that one at least had a slightly fun twist at the end. The voice acting is incredibly bland too, but that is to be expected of an Eastern European game with barely any baked animations and a million lines of unnecessary dialogue that neither push the plot forward nor do any character development, so I take it the voice actors probably became bored out of their skulls. Lastly, the amount of Assassin’s Creed-like “follow the trail of blood” or “investigate the area using your Witcher sense” fetch quests in this game is disgusting; those quests are not fun, they are the opposite of fun. On a more positive note: the game’s music is fantastic, and the graphics, while I genuinely never care about them regardless of the game I play, are looking good. Anywho, this game taught me an invaluable lesson, and that is to never trust the opinion of the masses before playing and evaluating a game for myself. This is just garbage.

Lemmiwink's journey is distant, far and vast; to find his way out of a 9ay man's ass.

I’m slightly conflicted on FFXV. It has so much heart and soul, it’s hard for me to dislike it on any level. On the one hand, it’s got an absolutely gorgeous open word that doesn’t exactly excel at rewarding the player for exploration, a pacing that may not feel ideal for many players, and a few plot points that are left unexplained in typical Final Fantasy fashion, but on the other, it’s got a decently fun and flashy combat system, a magnificent soundtrack, and a surprisingly interesting, memorable, and emotionally resonant cast of characters. Contrary to what a lot of people might think of him, I thought Noctis was a brilliant protagonist. Early on, you’ll get to see how he’s got a strong sense of innocence in his demeanor and you get to attach to and grow with him along the way; it also helps that despite being the heir to the throne, he’s less about bravado and being the cliched “chosen one” in a traditional RPG sense and more about internal growth and responsibility. The heart of Final Fantasy is still beating here in the sense that the game’s characters (and the way they are written) essentially imply “hey, we’re going to save the world together, so let’s make sure we have fun along the way.” Several of the game’s elements resemble those of Xenoblade Chronicles: the open world design, side quest structure, a positioning-based combat system involving a lot of the same mechanics such as hitting enemies from behind for bonus damage, and real time party presence and banter. As someone who loves Xenoblade Chronicles, I felt right at home playing this. I think that game’s success definitely inspired Square Enix during development. I still can’t help but notice how many of the story-related faults and pacing issues would’ve been fixed had the entire game fully committed to linearity as opposed to the first half being open world, the other half being more linear in structure. It’s a shame since they probably went with that direction after being scolded by the more hardcore fans for making FFXIII an entirely linear game so they wanted to shake things up a bit and simultaneously satisfy both sides of the fanbase. This is also more of an aesthetic preference, but I really like the color palette they went for with this game. It’s got a great balance of not being gritty, but also not too cartoonish/childish either. We have so many modern games and RPGs coming out nowadays with that nasty, dark brown filter (e.g., FFXVI, Baldur’s Gate 3, Expedition 33, Oblivion Remaster, etc.) that‘s supposed to render games more mature or “realistic” (two things I don’t ever want to think of when playing a video game) as if we can no longer afford to have artistic integrity and as if games looking dark and depressing as hell is basically supposed to be the gold standard moving forward, but FFXV manages to stay visually unique and artistically beautiful. It’s not a flawless game, but in the end, the good bits outshine the bad.

The Mona Lisa of gaming. Somber and melancholic. One in a lifetime kind of deal. Work of art, really.

Mikami’s love letter to fans of the original Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil (2002). Despite being heavily action-oriented, the game had its quiet moments of introspection (the sunflower field being one of them). It’s bizarrely unique in its gothic atmosphere. The enemy design was grotesquely beautiful, and much like its sequel, it had some of the most memorable boss fights of any horror game. A lot of people struggle with the difficulty and my suggestion to them is to take things slow. The game will punish you for your lack of patience. It is sadly a bit janky, and the performance is awful on consoles, but it’s also ridiculously fun once you approach it from an angle that fits your playstyle. The DLCs were a let down.

It’s a glorified walking simulator at its core with roughly 3 or 4 enemy encounters but the story makes up for all the shortcomings. The world building was superb, and the ending was beautifully depressing. The sound design was honestly one of the best I’ve ever heard come out of a video game. It’s a great example of just how vital good sound design is in horror games. A lot of really good, memorable moments in this game.

Amazingly immersive. Fantastic lighting effects. The reactor section was stellar. Storywise, it didn’t have much to offer, and the ending felt heavily rushed and anticlimactic. Minor gripe I had with it is that it relies a little too much on environmental storytelling, and it might require you to know a bit more about the lore and the Alien universe in general in order to be fully enjoyed. I jumped in having only watched the first Alien movie and I felt slightly lost at times.

My all time favorite game. Words cannot describe the feeling of playing this for the first time.

Final Fantasy X is genius. It is downright heartbreaking, but the contrasting cheerful, dreamlike setting compensates for the melancholic story that slowly unfolds over the course of its playtime. It’s a deliberate artistic choice, one that is carefully made. If the game’s setting had been as profoundly depressing as the story then it wouldn’t have sold so well. Parents bought the game for their kids because the artstyle intrigued them. The devs knew their game would resonate with both adults and children so they strove for a balance. On the one hand, kids will love it for its colorful direction, and on the other, adults will enjoy it because it’s sophisticated enough for a video game to respect the player’s emotional intelligence. You rarely see that kind of artistic ingenuity nowadays. Regarding the story, the best compliment I can give it is: I don’t play games for their stories, and this game’s story still managed to get me hooked really early on mainly because of its intriguing premise and how it does an excellent job at making the player ask a lot of questions (Where is Jecht? Who is Sin? Why has Tidus travelled a thousand years into the future?) I still think the overall themes outshine the somewhat weak plot though which is also poorly executed at times. It’s a great game nonetheless and outside of the clumsy voice acting (which I think is serviceable and still light years ahead of everything else that came out in 2001), it’s aged gracefully for a traditional JRPG. Last but not least, the music is simply phenomenal.

Modern AAA games are rarely ever this good. This is an actual treat to play.

Resident Evil 6 is ridiculously fun. If we’re going to criticize this as a standalone title then I can promise you it‘s a very fun game, well worth your time and money. For whatever reasons that I’m not going to get into, the people who passionately hate this game somehow fail to exactly pinpoint the reasons why. They seem to hate it for the sole purpose of hating it. Their main point of “criticism” is one that boils down to “too much action, not enough survival horror” or “too much shooting” which is a shockingly bad way to retrospectively summarize a game that advertised itself as an action-oriented shooter. If this game came out today as a brand new Naughty Dog title with updated graphics & animations, completely separated from anything Resident Evil stands for, the same people who hate it would be praising it to the moon. If you jump in thinking you’re going to get the traditional Resident Evil experience, you will obviously be disappointed. If you jump in wanting a surprisingly polished, high octane, fast paced, cover-based third person shooter with a ton of variety in weapons, enemies, and locations then you are going to have a blast. The game successfully delivers on that front. The movement is fluid, the hand to hand combat system is both flashy and rewarding, the skill ceiling is wonderfully high, the enemy design is fantastic, and the gunplay is fairly engaging. The game is not graphically impressive, but it is artistically gorgeous. I highly recommend watching TheGamingBritShow’s review on it. It succinctly highlights its merits. As with everything, the game isn’t without its flaws. The most notable one probably being the way the game loves to take control away from you, sometimes even at critical moments. I’ve had a few instances where I was about to gain the upper hand on a zombie/enemy, only for a sudden cutscene to interrupt the momentum, leaving me at a disadvantage. Some areas of the game also show signs of not being properly playtested. Easiest example: the train section earlier into Leon’s campaign. Whenever you get close to the train from the rear, the game recognizes that as Leon getting directly hit by the train from the front. There are a few other instances of this spread along the way that will surely frustrate the player. Quick time events are far less frequent than what everyone tells you, but I can imagine how off putting they might be for those with weaker reaction times. If you could stomach them in 5 you wouldn’t have much of an issue here. None of these problems however affected my time with the game in a drastically negative way, because again, the core gameplay managed to keep my attention. It’s good arcade fun, and that’s all I was looking for. I loved the campy storyline, and I absolutely love the linear level design of the game. I was originally going to give it an 8, but given how much fun I had, I’ll bump the score to a 9 despite its issues. It is seriously one of the most underrated games I’ve had the chance of playing, and it’s such a shame that this came out during an era of genre fatigue, back when everybody was starting to get tired of shooters. Bottom line: if you loved RE4 and 5 for their action, you are probably going to like this game. It’s everything I loved about RE4 taken to an 11. Don’t read the negative reviews and deem the game unworthy. Play and evaluate it for yourself.