KillerTeddyB3ar

Metro 2033's focus on atmosphere and horror does wonders for the game's longevity. Its post-apocalyptic setting that mostly sees you exploring dark, dingy, and barely lit underground metro tunnels is filled to the brim with fantastically realised locations that are very easy to get lost in. From the minimal HUD, the small light indicating how visible you are, to Artyom's breathing that gets more and more desperate as his filter slowly depletes, the game tries (and succeeds) in completely immersing the player in its world. That is until you hear the often awful accents and voice acting, until you shoot your way through the 15th horde of enemies, or until you realise that not only are most of your companions invincible until their scripted deaths but also that they are also there for a pretty big chunk of the overall experience, destroying the tension in the process. While I would still recommend this experience, I have to say that I wish the game was more confident in its world and tone and allowed Artyom to be stuck alone in the tunnels for far longer than he actually is.

Civ VI is probably one of the most addicting and well-put-together 4X games I have ever had the pleasure of playing and replaying year after year. Unlike its predecessor (Civ V), where I swear I started every single game the exact same way, Civ VI adds a whole bunch of depth and replayability with its districts, world-altering natural disasters, and diverse cast of characters that make every single game feel like a new and fresh attempt at building a civilization that will last throughout the ages.

Spoilers ahead: Death Stranding 2 is a way more polished, player-friendly, and just downright fun take on the Death Stranding gameplay loop. There are more ways of traversal, more ways to deal with enemies, more ways of dealing with BTs, etc. In short: if you liked the first game for its gameplay and want to play that game again, only this time Kojima decided to give you a personal arsenal that would make Doomguy blush with you ripping and tearing your way through simple enemy encounters left, right, and centre, then this game is for you. Unfortunately, this shift in tone has sanded away all of the interesting edges that made the first game such an interesting artistic experience. While the original game presented players with one of the most cohesive and interesting worlds ever put into a video game, it also explained said world in such great detail that Death Stranding 2 doesn't have any way of expanding this world any further. With the world-building being at essentially 0, a lot of the weight is therefore put on the shoulders of the game's characters. And unlike Sam, who is clearly capable of hauling 300 kg of "bazinga material" over a mountain pass for a VTuber science girl that rewards him with a hat that forces him to say "Peko" a bunch, the surrounding characters aren't capable of picking up a snail without crumbling to the ground before taking their first step. The three girls on your ship are indeed girls. You can see that by the way that they jump around, giggle, and gossip like a bunch of ten-year-olds; meanwhile, most of them have a backstory that should leave them scarred for the rest of their lives. The year is 2026 (in-game it's way beyond that). Sam mentally and physically suffers more than any man or woman ever has, yet the best his crewmates can do is to tell him to pick himself up by his bootstraps and remind him that another settlement needs our help. Seriously, if these same characters were part of a Bethesda game, most people would be making memes out of them and endlessly talk about how stupid they are. But because they look realistic, exist in a Hideo Kojima game, and do awesome anime moves on occasion, they get a pass. How am I supposed to feel any sort of tension when basically every person that dies in this universe returns in one way or another? The question of "Do Frankenstein-like monsters have their own souls and beaches?" was one of the many interesting ones left unexplained in DS1. Not only does this game just give you a blatant "Yes, they do." but even when they give Deadman a well-deserved goodbye as he decides to go swim with the fishes, he just returns later because apparently the heart houses the soul, or something. One of the few deep and interesting debates that happen in this game (Should humanity forgo their bodies / natural states and exist as souls without pain and suffering?) is literally ended by a character arriving out of nowhere, doing a K-pop dance and Fortnite emoting all over the place, telling us, "Nu-uuuh, that can't happen :3", solving the problem for us. And I guess that I'm supposed to stand up and clap as that happens? Just how I'm supposed to stand up and clap at the random guitar-riffing battle that occurs as the world is nearing its destruction? Don't worry, if DS3 ever happens, Kojima will find a way to retcon Fragile's entire story arc in this game. Similarly to my TLOU2 review, I can see the vision. The technology on display is incredible, the visual clarity of the game is insane. The fact that this game has no issue rendering the ending battle or the first "Nirvana" scene is nothing short of technological magic, let alone in a time where popular engines like UE5 can't even render an empty room without massive frame drops. The enemy design is awesome, the world and premise are superb. It's just that much of what happens in between feels like it completely misses the mark of what made the world of Death Stranding so interesting to begin with.

The most fun I have ever had in an arcade racing game. The AI difficulty settings aren't exactly tuned the greatest. I wish there was a penalty for people that intentionally ram into you. Some cars with specific tunes are just broken and outperform other cars by literal seconds per lap. I find the rewards for completing online races to be too stingy, and I wish that there were more races in the official Horizon playlists. But other than that, Forza Horizon 6 boasts over 600 different-feeling cars, deep car customization, the ability to share basically anything you've made online for other players to use, a gorgeous and diverse map that still feels fresh to explore after over 60 hours in the game, and just in general a borderline perfect driving model that translates well to whichever surface you find yourself racing on.

Mixtape is yet another video game that is receiving a barrage of negative reviews without any valid justification. It is also (unfortunately) a game that I really don't have that much to say about. It is a three-hour-long game where the story, characters, and soundtrack composed of over 20 licensed tracks take centre stage with very little meaningful player interaction to speak of. While the visuals themselves are great, most of the game's set pieces and emotional punches leave a lot to be desired. Where I would recommend most other "walking simulators" for some of their biggest, most bombastic, most emotionally charged, or just expectation-subverting moments, (What Remains of Edith Finch's fish conveyor belt scene as an example) Mixtape many times falls flat in these exact scenes. Where it thrives, however, is in the calm mundanity of everyday life. Skipping stones in a pond and talking to your friends, reminiscing about all the stuff you got up to in your youth, or trying to buy a couple of movies while black-out drunk are some of the highlights of this experience. However, I wouldn't say that most of the set pieces were necessarily designed in a way where they play to the strengths of the medium, managing to convey something that only a video game could in the process. When people say that this could have been a movie or a series, they're not necessarily wrong; I just don't understand why this type of approach to a video game narrative is in any way bad. In many ways, Mixtape is as inoffensive as it is predictable and, ultimately, (to me) forgettable. I don't regret playing it. It also probably won't stay in my mind for very long. But if this is the type of game we're getting our panties in a twist over, then holy hell do we need to grow up.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is a perfectly paced third-person beat 'em up that holds up remarkably well for its age. Everything to do with the game's tone and especially its ambitious set-pieces / story beats revolving around Scarecrow will probably remain timeless and never go out of style. Every single voice actor, from Mark Hamill's Joker to Tasia Valenza's Harley Quinn, portrays their character to borderline perfection, with only the limited resources and technology of the time illuminating a few cracks in their performances. Granted, as time mercilessly ticks away, many of the game's systems tend to age for the worse. The bossfights, which were a big sore spot even when the game initially released, feel worse to fight with each passing year (especially the final boss, if you know, you know). I actually find fights that revolve around gimmicks (Scarecrow, Killer Croc) to be more enjoyable than the beat 'em up ones. Your skill tree is pretty lame, with half of the upgrades being borderline useless. And while I don't think the game is long enough for the combat to ever really stagnate, I do still wish there was a bit more to it than what was delivered here. Despite this, the game remains a memorable and pretty remarkable experience through and through. I'd no longer jump out of my seat to give it a glowing recommendation like I would a decade ago, but I also can't really find much to hate in the experience.

Esoteric Ebb feels like a love child of Disco Elysium and D&D in the best way possible. It is a story-heavy, lore-dense and profound CRPG that marries together a simple premise (find out why a tea shop exploded) with a colourful, outlandish and magical setting that possesses many characteristics of our modern-day world and its messy history. While also never shying away from the complicated topics of politics, voting, fraud, philosophy, etc. In a random corner of the map I found (what I at first assumed was) a cartoony satirisation of Slavoj Žižek, only to sit there and talk with him about gender, manhood, family, voting, change, and more for almost an hour, with it never feeling overbearing, preachy, heavy-handed, or like the game didn't give me an ample amount of ways to respond depending on the character I wanted to roleplay. That is Esoteric Ebb in a nutshell. A view on the world presented through the lens of an entrepreneurial girl just trying to make it through the world; a hard-working dwarf who is firm in his beliefs even if they are sometimes not the best; a seemingly immortal sphynx that perceives time differently and doesn't seem to age in the slightest; and everyone in between. In this regard, Esoteric Ebb feels like an absolute must-play for any CRPG lover. Because of this insane depth, I unfortunately found myself losing the plot many times throughout my playthrough. As a character that put a lot of his starting points into INT/WIS/CHA, I was bombarded with over an hour's worth of lore, history, stories, knowledge, myths, etc. before I even made it out of the first building your character wakes up in. This oversaturation of lore with no knowledge of what this world even looks like, how it functions, nor which of these events I am reading about is even important to the overall plot lead to many dips in my interest. I'm kind of bummed that I chose this type of character for my initial playthrough (I'd even go as far as to say that this really isn't an ideal way to experience your first playthrough), yet on the flip side, this means that every subsequent playthrough will (paradoxically) be that much deeper AND easier to wrap my tiny / smooth brain around.

Pragmata (hopefully) represents a fantastic building block for a new and original franchise spearheaded by CAPCOM. And even if that doesn't come to fruition, and this game happens to be a one-off, it was still a pretty great experience through and through. Stuck on the moon due to a massive seismic shift, Hugh Williams teams up with an adorable little girl named Diana as they try to survive and fight their way through a massive robotic force that has turned against its human overlords. While Hugh is responsible for all of the usual third-person shooter mechanics, such as movement, shooting, platforming, and dodging enemy attacks, Diana brings a fresh twist to the tried and tested formula by being your designated hacker who exposes the weak points of the enemies you're facing. This one change alone differentiates Pragmata from many of its contemporaries, making it feel like a breath of fresh air in the over-saturated genre, even if the hacking mini-game does become a bit too repetitive by the time the credits roll, with it losing a good chunk of its lustre. The story is not particularly noteworthy... It has all of the usual sci-fi elements that make it very predictable, yet it's just enough of a driving force to push the characters in the hopes of reaching safety. For a while I thought that all of the e-mails and messages scattered throughout the game would lead to more interesting discussions on the uses, validity, and morality of AI, but that never came to be. Ultimately, (for better and worse) the story is just kind of there. I'm guessing that the star of the show for the majority of players will be Diana's and Hugh's father-daughter relationship, yet I found it to mostly just be okay. Diana is oftentimes adorable. I love the fact that the game didn't go for the typical "grizzled dad who hates kids adopts one and treats her as her own child" trope, but for whatever reason I just never felt a really genuine relationship between the characters. Don't get me wrong; this relationship was never bad, cringe, or written poorly... I just don't think it really reaches any particularly high highs. The game also looks fantastic, runs great, and has a great soundtrack. As I said in my opening paragraph, on the whole I find this game to be very good, and I hope that CAPCOM decides to further flesh out and enhance the systems implemented here, because this feels like they are but scratching the surface of what is possible with this gameplay loop. 7/10, 8/10 on a good day.

Still an amazing stealth-assassination game to this day, Dishonored's layered and reactive approach to player agency holds up remarkably well over a decade after its release. No matter whether you want to be a stealthy, shapeshifting ninja that assassinates only his targets or a swashbuckling, grenade-throwing, plague-spawning menace that leaves no witnesses behind, this game has got you covered. Arkane put more than enough paths and choices for you to leave an everlasting mark on the empire that you're so desperately trying to protect. This might be a controversial take, but not only do I believe that Arkane's movement system will stand the test of time and be an evergreen part of their games, but it might also be one of the best-feeling and just downright fluid movement systems that any developer has ever made. This makes it so that no matter how much I dislike the generally easy difficulty of this game (for a variety of reasons, namely that enemies can't seem to look up nor understand the concept of looking behind them when their enemy vanishes into thin air), it will probably never feel bad to just exist and move about the worlds that they create. Other than that, it's the usual critiques... The voice acting is pretty bad even for the time. I wish there were even more changes that happened depending on your playstyle, etc. Yet these pail in comparison to just how great this game feels to play on a moment-to-moment basis.

Over 15 years since its release, I count at least half-a-dozen attempts from my side to earnestly attempt to play and enjoy Skyrim, and I have never been able to enjoy this game. The best way I can find to describe Skyrim is to say that I don’t feel like I am actively learning or getting better at anything. I am not trying to understand the intricate ins and outs of this world, I am not approaching combat encounters any different whether I am an hour into the game and just picked up my first sword, or thirty hours in having killed hundreds of bandits, dozens of mages, multiple dragons, and that dreaded Riverwood chicken. I’m not unlocking cool new combos or new ways of approaching any given quest. I’m not building up trust with a faction in order to betray another faction. My stealth level doesn’t actually correspond with how easy it is to steal something. The only things that are changing are my skill numbers going up, which ironically makes the things that are already pretty boring and mindless to do at the beginning of the game, even more mind-numbingly easy and boring to do. And this is my experience every single time I try Skyrim. I think about all of the awesome and cool adventures I’ll get into, I then proceed to play it for 10-or-so hours and then bounce off. Because the game never evolves much past that first hour or two. There is barely any progress or friction, there are no deeper mechanics, nor things for me to learn, think about, master, or make interesting decisions about.

Even at its generous 25€ price point, Samson feels more like a solid premise that still needs months' worth of polish, quests, and additional things to do in the world, rather than a full game. After a strong premise that sees the titular character Samson accrue a debt of $100,000, with the loan sharks holding his sister captive as collateral, the game quickly turns into a repetitive game about driving banged-up cars and punching dudes in the face. You do that for about 10 hours or so, and then the game ends with you saving your sister and potentially finishing the clearly tacked-on story that sees you put an end to a criminal ring. Just in case the repetitive nature of the game wasn't enough, with there only being about 5 different activities in which even the missions themselves repeat over and over again, the driving and combat themselves don't really feel all that great. I'm willing to overlook most of the problems with the driving because I kind of got used to it by the end in the same way I got used to the driving in GTA IV. However, unlike in that game, cops clearly cheat in this game with them knowing your exact whereabouts even when you manage to elude them for a substantial amount of time. But the combat remains bad throughout the entire game. The janky animations, lack of depth as you mostly just mash one button, and Samson sometimes just refusing to throw a punch – this part of the game (which is a pretty big part of it, mind you) doesn't even rise to the level of "servicable". On the flip side, the city you explore tends to be pretty well made, believable, and even gorgeous to look at (in its own weirdly disgusting way). Yet the game is also plagued with the usual Unreal Engine 5 stuttering and FPS drops that make certain parts of the city feel pretty bad to traverse.

After one of the worst introductions to any game I have ever seen, Crimson Desert opens up into what I can only describe as one of the greatest open-world games I've ever had the pleasure of playing. This game is so jam-packed with interweaving mechanics, systems, locations, puzzles, and more, that it just beats you over the head with them until you eventually realise what an astonishing experience this game really is. If ever there was a game that showed just how much unique content that respects the player's intelligence can be packed into a world, it's this game. 110 hours in, I am still finding completely new puzzles that I've never seen before, fighting unique bosses I've never fought before, uncovering weapon moves, combos, and rune upgrades that I've never tried before, and am just in general having a blast exploring the absolute behemoth of a map that Pearl Abyss have so lovingly crafted. Not since Elden Ring and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 have I had this much fun exploring a world and trying to understand its systems. (Granted, each of these games has its own unique reasons as to why I enjoyed their worlds as much as I did, but I digress). It's just a shame that Crimson Desert needed 20 hours, multiple patches, and a lot of tinkering (and getting used to) on my part for it to slowly start to feel like a good game. Just how it's a shame that quite a few of the systems present in this game feel completely underbaked (stealth, many of the tools at your disposal, character creator that's locked behind at least a couple dozen hours of play, etc.) Because if these things were addressed prior to launch, Crimson Desert would have been one for the ages.

Following a pretty great opening and some great world-building, Far Cry Primal just devolves into the usual Ubisoft collect-a-thon. It's awesome to see that they not only tried something new with the amazing neanderthal setting, but also that they also took a big swing and made everyone speak in what I can only imagine is a made-up language similar to how our predecessor must have actually communicated. What I don't understand, however, is the sheer reluctance to change anything on the gameplay side of things... After you tame your first beast, most encounters become a joke, so for most of the game you're just running around the map collecting wood and rocks to upgrade your village. The gameplay side of the game is boring, safe, and Ubisoft to a tee, and it drags the rest of the (very short) experience down along with it.

Ubisoft's decision to shift Assassin's Creed towards a more RPG-lite style certainly has its moments. The world is gorgeous and an absolute feast for the eyes. The different weapons that both you and your enemies wield lead to more gameplay variety than in any previous AC game. And if you're a fan of how it feels to play a Ubisoft game, that feeling is still here in droves. With a few other positives lurking that I could talk about for a bit. But when most of the game just feels like filler, I really can't bring myself to talk about the positives any more than that. There is just a stench of cynicism throughout this entire experience that I can't get away from. Whether it's the "time-savers" that you can buy with your real-life money. The fact that levelling up feels like it's happening at a glacially slow pace (probably to incentivise people to spend money on the previously mentioned time savers), with enemies that are but a couple of levels higher than you essentially killing you with one hit, no matter how good your gear is. Many of the abilities feel either: A) As inconsequential as allowing you to sit on the ground to pass time, or B) things that just make you go, "Why would Bayek need to spend two of his ability points for MERCHANTS to SELL MATERIALS to him? Like, isn't selling things what a merchant does?!?" About a third of the game could easily be cut for a much better-paced experience. I say this both because the enemies never really evolve past anything you encounter in the first ten or so hours, but also because most NPCs, conversations, and even essential characters are just boring, stoic, and almost never memorable or interesting in any way. Quests and world events just tend to repeat ad nauseaum. Whether the 26th optional quest sends me to rescue YET ANOTHER person who got captured by the Greeks/Romans, or if the question mark on the compass leads to yet another house with a chest that contains 3 coins and a mid-tier weapon. This entire experience just feels like a bunch of content you mindlessly do because you have nothing better to do, with basically no memorable moments to speak of. Yet, with the ever-looming presence of those time-savers, making my view on every single decision Ubisoft made in this game just that tiny bit more cynical than it probably should be.

For a good chunk of my life, Dark Souls 3 was my favourite game of all time. Returning to it for the 10th anniversary of its release (Happy Birthday!) has illuminated a few of its cracks, but it's still, ultimately, a fantastic game through and through. Returning to a game like Dark Souls 3 in a post-Elden Ring world and seeing the vast majority of weapon skills be borderline useless, heavy attacks only occasionally finding some use, no dedicated jumping and everything that comes with that, and a washed-out art style that is used for what I would consider far too long makes for a slightly bigger difference than one would imagine on the surface. Despite all of this, DS3 still remains the quintessential example of how far a game where you mostly just properly dodge enemy attacks and return an attack once they stop attacking can really go. The enemies and bosses are insanely varied, difficult and ultimately completely fair to go against (for the most part). Even though I don't fully dig the washed-out colours of most of the game, thematically these fit perfectly with the story and themes of DS3, and you still end up going through a wide variety of locations. Each one of these locations is blessed with its own distinct architecture, visual style, enemy and trap placements, and paths that oftentimes loop in on themselves that spruce up the moment-to-moment gameplay and make every single area feel unique. I still find the world and lore of these games to be astoundingly fascinating and deeper than many other worlds, even if the vast majority of it is hidden behind small visual motifs and item descriptions. And while I'm no longer the biggest fan of how weak and pitiful many of this game's weapons / spells feel to use compared to something like Elden Ring, Dark Souls 3 is still a game where, above everything else, it's the player's skill, perseverance, ability to remain calm, and critical thinking skills that are the stars of the show. And I deeply adore any game that puts those things at the forefront and not just lazily copy and paste enemies while artificially raising their level depending on the area. And, hey... How angry can I really get that I no longer like this game as much as I once did because of FromSoftware's ability to make something even greater than DS3? Times change, gaming evolves, and so do people's preferences.

The final game in what is nowadays thought of as the "old-school" style of Assassin's Creed goes out with a whimper, not a bang. While some of the new systems like the grappling hook do give a nice amount of additional player expression, most of the game is just the textbook definition of "fine". It's still pretty fun to run across rooftops, even if it is way too mindless. It's still fun to assassinate random enemies on the street with a flashy finisher; I just wish it was more difficult than you literally sprinting at them and assassinating them. Because the game is as easy as literally just sprinting in a straight line towards an enemy and killing them instantly, many of the upgrades feel way more useless than they should feel. And while I love the idea of dual protagonists, each with their own unique playstyle, both Evie and Jacob feel borderline identical to play on a moment-to-moment basis, which begs the question: Why even have two protagonists if that's the case? Overall, Assassin's Creed Syndicate is just another in the line of mediocre Assassin's Creed games.

Resident Evil Requiem isn't just a nearly flawless amalgam of the past decade of Resident Evil releases. It is a victory lap of an experience that takes the best elements of its predecessors and somehow manages to elevate them to 11. The tense and horror-induced first-person elements inspired by RE7 are experienced through Grace's perspective, and they somehow surpass what the Baker estate managed to conjure all those years ago thanks to much better visuals, fantastic sound design, and even astounding voice acting from Angela Sant'Albano. Meanwhile, the third-person action-adventure parts see Leon back to his old, one-line spewing self, this time with a greater emphasis on being a walking tank of an action hero as he mercilessly slaughters hundreds of enemies. The game then combines both of these survival horror approaches in a way that makes RE Requiem an almost perfectly paced game from start to finish. Oftentimes, I find myself enjoying a game way more than I should based on how the game "feels" to play. In Requiem, every bullet you fire feels more impactful than ever before in a Resident Evil game, no matter if it results in a gory hit that dislocates the enemy's eye straight out of its socket or if it misses and hits the wall behind it, illuminating the surrounding area in the process. The guns feel chunky and difficult to handle. The way Leon's hatchet reacts to bruising flesh instead of just slicing through it like a hot knife through butter. How awesome it still feels to roundhouse kick a staggered enemy, let alone chainsaw them to death. Or how a parry stops even some of the strongest attacks straight in their tracks, giving you a few milliseconds of breathing room to recollect your thoughts. On a purely moment-to-moment basis, this game feels incredible to play. Much of the enjoyment I get from this game can also be attributed to the downright godlike optimisation. I have no idea what kind of pact with the devil Capcom signed to make the game look as good as it does while also allowing me (on a 12GB VRAM GPU) to have everything except for one setting set to the highest, with Ray Tracing set to "high" on a 1440p monitor, 60FPS, and for it to (at max) take up 80% of my GPU. I just hope the deal they signed doesn't take effect until after Capcom have given us a few more of these types of games. Oh, without spoiling anything, I didn't like either the story or the ending. One of these just doesn't fit if you retrospectively think about many of the previous games' events, and the other was also a letdown for reasons I can't fully explain because of spoilers.

Too preoccupied with ignoring everything that is supposed to make the hero's journey fun and interesting, Final Fantasy 1 is a journey where you have to look up a guide every dozen minutes or so to know what your incredibly linear next step should be, which really doesn't make it that great **** experience in 2026. Luckily, the opening few hours of this game actually tell a straightforward story with dialogue and cutscenes guiding your way through the world, yet after a certain point the game just devolves into tedium. I can easily look past the bloated number of enemy encounters, the simple mechanics that are more influential than they are actually fun to engage with, the BS design of the final boss encounter, and even some of the jank that is bound to be a part **** this old. But when you're trying to make me believe that my group of characters are the saviours of this world, yet (outside of the most random, hidden characters and absurdly convoluted riddles) nobody on this godforsaken map gives me any type of clue as to what I'm supposed to be doing, where I'm supposed to be going, or anything, really, in order to save their lives... And all I can say is that I'm glad gaming has evolved from these earlier stages into what it is today. Influential? Absolutely! Fun to play? Nah, not really.

Oh no, tall lady with big mommy milkers, pweety pwease don't sneak up behind me while I'm bending over to pick up Handgun ammo x4. That would be such a shame, and I'd be soooo scawed for my life UwU. As a strapping young lad from rural Europe, I have to say that Resident Evil Village presents the closest representation of my daily walk to the nearest grocery store to pick up some bread and vodka. I'm not sure where the developers got the idea that my gamer body is being stalked by 4 charming young ladies who can't seem to get enough of me, but I'll let that slide just this once, merely because everything else is depicted with such pinpoint accuracy. While I'm not impressed with the technical side of this game, as it drops frames way too often for my liking. The "animal hunting" minigame. How long certain characters wait to tell certain other characters the "real plot". Ethan's insistence on commenting on every obvious thing in front of him. Nor how little time the game spends characterising its memorable boss encounters, with most of their backstory being lazily dumped into your lap via notes a couple of minutes before the game ends. And a few other bits and pieces here and there. RE:8 still does enough things right for me to overall enjoy the experience. It somehow manages to have some of the scariest and most tension-filled moments of the franchise, all the while a good chunk of the game succeeds in bringing a bit of levity to the mix, being a really great spin on the horror-fantasy genre. Vampires, robots, werewolves, giants, dolls, and more are all intermixed with a surprising degree of nuance and logic that makes about as much sense as a setting with all of these types of enemies can potentially make sense. Not only do all of these make sure that there is more than sufficient enemy variety for the entire game's runtime, but each one of these enemies also poses as their own unique and formidable threat towards Ethan's life, with you having to learn their individual strengths and weaknesses in order to survive. This game is like a consistently fun roller coaster that never really dips into tedium nor strives for excellence in my eyes. The initial section that serves as the usual Resident Evil chase from an unkillable antagonist is done about as well as in RE2 or RE7, yet it is not nearly as scary as those. The psychological horror parts of this game are top-notch, yet, unfortunately, also heavily telegraphed, with lockers for Ethan to hide in being placed in those parts alone, taking away from the sting of that section. The more action-packed parts where you just mow down enemies (which bothered me in RE7) are now even more action-packed, but I don't think the guns pack enough of a punch for those to be any more than good. And the entire experience can just be summed up by saying that I felt it was consistently engaging, with a few bright spots here and there shining above the rest. Nothing more, nothing less.

The remake of one of the most important and critically acclaimed games of all time is, unsurprisingly, astonishing. Leon Scott Kennedy's trek through a deserted Spanish village is filled with thrilling set pieces, memorable characters, amazing graphics and sound design, cheesy one-liners ("nighty night knights" is my favourite) and overall just borderline perfect gameplay. The combat and movement options of both Leon and the numerous enemies you face have been expanded to modern gaming standards, leading to much tenser and heart-pumping moment-to-moment gameplay. Whereas you now have way more mobility, defensive options in the form of parries, and even a few more offensive options (sneaking) at your disposal, the enemies get heightened aggression, quicker gap-closers, more attacks, and many other things which perfectly balance out to where you never feel any less helpless, out of your depth, or surrounded by death than in the game's 2005 counterpart. The choice between playing it safe but using up more of your ammo and a risky approach that sees you going in for a roundhouse kick into a melee kill still feels as potent and relevant as ever. Every single thing the developers expanded and built upon from the OG works wonderfully and makes for a richer experience. And, most importantly, the progress you make throughout your playtime feels real, earned, and makes for an unforgettable journey. Is this game perfect? For my personal taste, no, but it's so close that it doesn't really matter. I feel like either a new late-game enemy design or one / two fewer shooting arenas in the late game would help with pacing. And I would love to see the case attachments you accrue in the shooting gallery mini-game be a part of every subsequent playthrough from the start instead of you having to go through those mini-games on every new playthrough if you want a few attachments. These two "problems" lead to about 5~10 minutes of unnecessary tedium in what is otherwise a perfect experience. Yet, as I said earlier, these few annoyances are so tiny that they barely even bother me. What an incredible game!

Even as I return for what must be the nth time to the Resident Evil 2 remake, I am still left absolutely flabbergasted at how much of an amazing survival horror game it is. The Raccoon City Police Department is one of the best, most intricately designed locations I have ever had the pleasure of exploring and mastering. The gunplay feels excellent. The enemies are just difficult enough to never turn into either bullet sponges or push-overs (much of this can be attributed to the game's hidden difficulty slider that tunes enemies based on how well you're doing in your playthrough). Many of the light puzzle elements feel just right, with them breaking up the survival-horror elements with just a bit of necessary downtime and levity. The bossfights are great, and the soundtrack even more so, with it weaving through horror ambience and orchestral spectacle with pinpoint precision. And Mr. X just rules; if you know, you know. Ultimately, the only thing that brings the entire experience down a bit for me is everything to do with the sewers. I don't particularly like either the level design (way less interconnected than other parts of the game) nor the big goop enemies (stay far away and shoot at one specific weak spot with little in the way of interesting resource management elements). TL;DR: Fantastic game, but the part of the game that's covered with faeces brings down the experience just enough for me to not think it's a perfect game.

Setting aside the few times that enemies blatantly teleport in order to cheaply scare you and the annoying fact that you can't combine items in your backpack with items straight out of the environment (which leads to a bit too much backtracking for my liking), the first half of RE7 serves as a prime example of a borderline perfect first-person survival horror game. The Baker residence oozes its atmosphere through every pore it has. The sound design is amazingly creepy, with the creaks of a settling house, random thuds, and subtle random noises always keeping you on your toes and engaged with the mansion that you are exploring. With the addition of an ever-present looming threat that's searching for you immensely helping with the game's tension. Even if it many times steps a bit into the campy side of things, it's still a brilliant 3-4 hours of horror-filled gameplay. On the other hand, the second half of the game derails pretty heavily. I don't hate it per se; I just find it to devolve into a mostly boring shooting gallery with enemies (especially in the mines) just lining up one by one to be shot in the head or slowly waddling into your remote-controlled explosive devices in the ship part of the game. The ship section has gained a lot of notoriety over the years for how bad it is, and while I'm not one of those staunch haters that thinks it's the worst thing ever or anything (from a storytelling perspective it is absolutely necessary for it to exist), it really does mark a noticeable step down from the beginning hours. These things on their own don't make me dislike the game, but as time goes on, they make Resident Evil 7 a pretty difficult game for me to return to and replay in its entirety.

There are a plethora of ways that any given game can completely immerse you in its world. While some games go for ultra-realistic graphics or attempt to tell a profound and relatable story, Cairn successfully achieves said immersion by making the player be a part of almost every single minute movement that the protagonist Aava makes along her excruciating ascent to the top of Mount Kami. Every piton you place, every tiny crack you manage to find and grip with your toes, every gust of wind you soldier through, and every successful plan and ledge you manage to clamber over feel like a monumental achievement. It is actually shocking to see how much I've learnt throughout my multiple journeys to (or at least close to) the top. Whereas my first ascent was littered with almost a hundred falls and dozens of deaths, my latter attempts saw me reaching almost 2/3 of the mountain on the hardest difficulty (no pitons and way more limited inventory space) without a single fall. There is a consistent logic to the game's climbing systems, and when you begin to come to terms with said logic, the game becomes nothing short of meditative. Paths that don't seem viable at first glance become a great test of skill and knowledge on return visits. Exploration and experimentation aren't just encouraged; they heavily reward the player with unbreakable pitons, flowers that revive, maps that show the best routes, a bunch of ingredients that can be prepared in a plethora of ways to provide Aava with game-changing buffs that last for minutes on end, and more. With every other survival element, from taping your fingers one finger at a time to recycling unwanted items to make chalk for more grip, just adding to the game's depth and the overall gameplay loop. That's not to say that Cairn doesn't try to tell a profound story or anything… I just found the execution of it to be a bit sloppy. From the overly monotonous way that the main character delivers her lines to the unnatural way some conversations evolve, I can see what the developers were going for, but it didn't quite work for me. The ending(s) themselves tend to be pretty great, and the few moments where the game allows you to just quietly ponder over what's going on in Aava's head likewise, I just didn't care for much else surrounding Aava's story. There also tend to be a few frustrations on the gameplay side of things. Once in every one thousand or so times the game just decides to choose the only limb that is keeping you stable and alive (killing you in the process), you can't just eat a granola bar or recycle a broken flask you find in the open... You have to first put it into my inventory AND THEN interact with the item, which leads to more moments of frustrating inventory management than necessary. A few moments and encounters (that I won't spoil) feel unnecessarily oppressive and resource waste-y, and the game in general just tends to be quite glitchy with Aava sometimes refusing to step on solid ground, phasing through the wall or even getting softlocked if you decide to place a safety piton at the jump on the final bridge before reaching the last part of the ascent. Luckily these few frustrations don't bring my enjoyment of the overall experience down too much. For me, Cairn is a very early contender for not just Indie GOTY, but potentially one of my top 5 games of 2026, depending on how the rest of the year pans out.

Douze Dixièmes' sophomore game is a carefully curated Metroidvania that features an amalgamation of different ideas which manage to set it apart from the sea of other Metroidvanias and make it its own unique experience. If there is something this game does "the best" that would be the visuals. The hand-drawn style elevates every room you step foot in, and the backgrounds that seem to stretch endlessly lend such an enormous amount of credence to the feeling that you are exploring a deep, complex, and once-lived-in world. I especially love how many of these backgrounds "lose quality" the further they stretch, making them seem like early drafts of what these places would look like. Mix that in with some stellar music, and we already have a "game with the strongest vibes and best art style of 2026" contender releasing in January. When it comes to the other parts of this game (combat, exploration, abilities, runbacks, etc.), the long and short of it is that I found all of them to be really well done, yet every single one of these aspects could use a few tweaks and improvements here and there that would really make me enjoy the experience more than I already enjoy it. The "augments" system reminds me of Hollow Knight's charm system, where you insert different value upgrades for different effects, yet most of them are either just basic number tweaks that don't really change your playstyle in any way or are found too late in the game / cost too much to really be all that viable. I don't really mind runbacks as long as there is a point to them. I found most of the early to mid-game runbacks in this game to be quite alright, with plenty of opportunities to collect "nacre" to help you buy upgrades. Yet most of the late-game runbacks just feel pointless, many times involving minute-long runs that pose no threat, challenge, nor real purpose.I found the exploration to oftentimes be a bit too cumbersome. There are story-progressing paths that are many times obfuscated by a variety of foreground objects. There is one particular path that I was searching for for ages that just so happened to be hidden behind a developer-placed map marker. There are even post-endgame locations that show an open path down a corridor, yet reaching said path after a few minute-long parkour gauntlet proved the path to be closed, with me pointlessly losing minutes of my time. Many of the parkour sections feel a bit too trial and error for a game where you have essentially no healing. And while I absolutely love the fact that you start the game without a map, the fact that you can't donate the nacre that you don't lose upon death just punishes players who are playing well. I could actually give more examples... Whether it's the sometimes bizarre tonal clash when transitioning between rooms, where certain tracks need a way longer time to fade in/out, or how certain bosses become absolute snoozefests once you realise just how powerful the fact that the enemies don't have any contact damage is... Overall, I really enjoyed this game and found it to be a worthwhile addition to the Metroidvania / platformer genre, even if I don't think it reaches the same heights as some of the best in the genre.

I actually don't have much to say about Diablo IV... While I found the moment-to-moment gameplay much more enjoyable than its predecessor (thanks to the fact that in this game I actually died a few times and had to heal with my flask every now and then), everything else about it is just so bland... Every enemy scales with you, so levelling up or getting that sweet new loot drop almost always feels pointless. Instead of epic pre-rendered cinematics that punctuate the end of each act you instead get two absolutely stunning cinematics, one at the start and one at the end of the game, yet every other cutscene is just a bland, ugly, and uninteresting in-game scene. The world is clearly designed with a quantity-over-quality approach. There are some weird design choices pertaining to animation priority, where my bear shapeshifting Druid character would many times refuse to attack an enemy right in front of him, yet because the claw swipe attack I used most often had animation priority, I would be unable to do anything for a good few seconds, so I just stood there hoping an enemy doesn't spawn one of their high-damaging AOE balls under my belly. And not a single part of this game sticks out as particularly memorable... It's just content you do and grind away at while slowly getting better and better loot.

I think that the highest praise I can give to Crash Bandicoot 4 is to say that it feels exactly like the originals but bigger, brighter, and more colourful. Everything about the N. Sane trilogy – from the amazing soundtrack and imaginative levels to the whacky, cartoony visuals and constantly shifting gameplay that builds upon itself throughout the entire game's runtime – is present here in droves. Only this time there are more characters to play as, more secrets to uncover, optional skins to acquire, and overall just a plethora of additions to push the players into spending more time with this game (if they are enjoying the experience). It is an unfortunate shame, therefore, that a few of the aforementioned things didn't really hit the nail on the head, though. With just how little mobility some of the playable characters have, playing as a couple of them felt way too jarring. The pacing could be tightened up just a bit, with Crash 4 boasting a campaign that is about as long as the original 3 games combined. + A few notable increases in difficulty that felt like they came and went out of nowhere are all things that left a small blemish on the overall experience. Still though, it's a fantastic game!

The best way I would summarise my experience with Death Stranding is to ask the reader of this review to imagine the following: You think of a cool idea about a game centering around a post-apocalyptic mailman reuniting an entire country by delivering packages and connecting people to DSL. You do some rough pen-and-paper sketches and outlines, just enough for a basic gameplay loop and story. Then, out of the blue, a hyperactive neurodivergent person walks up to you, asks you what you're making, and then proceeds to go on an hour-long monologue about multiverses, dinosaurs, the Egyptian beliefs of Ha (body) and Ka (soul), the afterlife, mirror dimensions, world-ending catastrophes, movies and music they like, why the pee pee of a man should clearly scare ghosts away, parallels and visual motifs so deep they entangle themselves thrice over and then some, the philosophy about what makes a human, well... human and just how much a person has to lose before they aren't considered themselves anymore, and many others. They then beat you into submission with random facts about all of these topics and how they all connect, so you just kind of give up on trying to understand what's going on halfway through. But they clearly have a vision. They clearly have passion and energy for this project, so you ask them, "How are we going to merge all of these themes together with the gameplay to make it feel like a cohesive whole?" They shrug, tell you that you'll be able to place postboxes down for other people to use and build roads out of thin air because of the chiral multiverse or some such nonsense, and that unless you Mahashmashana their ass, you won't be allowed to kill a single soul in this game. That if anyone doesn't like that idea, you'll put in a character who speaks directly to the player themselves just to make sure you hammer in the point. And just so it doesn't get too boring, this person will also write a wide range of dialogue between characters. This "wide range" encompasses everything from a clearly constipated alien telling you that your adventure is akin to "Mario and Princess Beach", a second clearly constipated alien trying to emote about how they aren't all that fragile, and yet another clearly constipated alien locking you in the shower for the sole purpose of very uncomfortably whispering state secrets into your ear while hot water sensually runs down both your bodies... Naturally, you befriend this weird creature within the span of a few more dialogue exchanges... But, hey, at least Mads Mikkelsen kills his role and is fantastic throughout. That's this game in a nutshell. It is a marvel to behold on an artistic level, with it somehow bombarding the player with dozens upon dozens upon dozens of ideas, concepts, and visual allegories, yet somehow managing to come out the other end a mostly cohesive (if overwhelming) whole. The interpersonal dialogue feels way too unnatural, forced, and oftentimes repeated for me to care about most of it. It many times quite literally ruins the stakes and pacing of entire sections. Meanwhile, the gameplay succeeds in beautifully tying together this game's themes of connectedness, pacifism, community, and selfless help into a wholly one-of-a-kind work of art that isn't scared of breaking gaming norms at every opportunity. But only if you exclude the parts where you shoot at the big bad enemy with a goddamn quadruple rocket launcher, or the parts where you get **** into a war and shoot at soldiers... What a weird, fever dream ****...

Equipped with nothing but a notebook and a magic stopwatch that shows you the final moments of a person's life, Return of the Obra Dinn tasks you with investigating and solving the fate of the crewmates who disappeared on their journey aboard the ship "Obra Dinn". The game takes this premise and manages to squeeze every single drop of intrigue, style, substance, and drama, and with the help of some stunning retro-inspired visuals, a fantastic soundtrack that perfectly punctuates every new case, great voice-acting, and just sheer brilliant execution, moulds itself into one of the best puzzle games on the market. (Without spoiling anything) each and every scene is filled with little hints to a person's true identity. The situations these people found themselves in couldn't be more imaginative, and the notebook that holds a whole bunch of ways any single person could potentially die does wonders for the imagination. With the entire collection of investigations shaping up into an impressively coherent story by the time you reach the end credits. My only gripes with this game would be that the visuals can sometimes obfuscate the nature of death, with you needing to do multiple 360-degree rotations around a victim to really understand what's happening. This many times leads to you not having enough time to observe many other details in a scene, and hence, a bit of unnecessary backtracking. And that some people are just nigh-on impossibly difficult to identify, with me always hitting a roadblock at around the 20~35 solved cases, which just leads to a bit too much frustration for my liking. Otherwise, it's an incredible game and an easy recommendation.

Portal 2 is similar to Portal, but it features much better pacing, a memorable cast of endearing characters with incredible performances from legendary figures such as Stephen Merchant and J.K. Simmons, a world that adds a significant amount of lore and texture to Aperture Science, and additional puzzle elements like different types of gel and bounce pads that introduce a whole new dimension to solving puzzles with your trusty portal gun. The players must come to grips with velocity, timing, and quick critical thinking skills in order to beat the memorable campaign that stretches 9 acts, with the fun not stopping there as Portal 2 also boasts a co-op campaign and thousands upon thousands of user-created maps that test everything I listed before for as long as the player wants to continue playing. Are there any negatives to this experience? For my personal liking, the seventh and eighth acts could do with fewer puzzles that rely on you seeing a far-off distant wall to place your portal down, and that's it... Other than that, Portal 2 remains a perfect game even 15 years after its release.

Short, sweet, all-killer-no-filler portal puzzle game that uses complementary colour theory to guide the player's eyes like no other. It's considered a classic, and for good reason... It comes from a time when Valve was putting out some of the most unbelievably forward-thinking games out there, and while I find it a bit too short and simple for my liking, its place in gaming history is all but cemented. If you somehow haven't played these games yet, please do yourself a favour and go play them ASAP.

Gone Home tells an incredibly straightforward story that managed to quite effectively tug at these decrepit heartstrings. Considering the fact that over a decade has passed since its release, I can imagine that I missed a whole bunch of very civil discourse over this game's topics and themes. So, with a 13-year-old delay not so dissimilar to that of trying to open a tab in Internet Explorer, here are my surface-level thoughts for this hour-and-a-half-long game: The home you explore is just a bit before my time. While I can see anybody a few years older than me (and living in the USA for that matter) connecting a lot more to the myriad of references that inhabit this game like a 90s time capsule, personally, I found the house itself to be just relatable enough for me not to zone out while picking up and examining every single thing in it and nothing more. The voice acting was pretty great, managing to portray the emotions of the storyteller in a convincing manner. I found some of the notes to not be all that well written, especially for somebody as talented in writing as Sam apparently was. And while I'll always adore a game that doesn't stretch its runtime, I feel like an additional 45 minutes to an hour to properly explore the characters wouldn't be amiss. I am also not fully convinced with the idea that a "return from abroad after a year" plot and the story you uncover in this house are the best way to tell this type of story. Don't get me wrong, I didn't hate it; I just feel like the emotional impact could be far greater if this was told from a first-person perspective and not via journals that the player has to find. P.S. Mouse acceleration, smoothing, and mouse focus while over important objects are war crimes, and the fact that all three of these were enabled at the beginning means that anyone less tech-savvy, new to video games, or just impatient for that matter might bounce off this game before even giving it a proper chance.

Perhaps I'd have a more positive outlook on Diablo III if the game wasn't so stingy with its difficulty selection. The "normal" difficulty of this game tries to convince you that it's the preferred setting for not just your first playthrough but also a return playthrough where you haven't played Diablo III in a couple of months. Yet selecting that difficulty for my first-ever playthrough led to a horrendously boring experience where I didn't need to use my healing flask a single time. This situation wouldn't be so bad if you could just freely change the difficulty, but the game insists that the player can change the difficulty only once during the campaign. This change from "normal" to "hard" difficulty barely made a difference, with many of the boss fights falling within seconds of my clearly unoptimised build. And while I didn't exactly dislike my experience playing this game and can very easily see the appeal of it (especially those cutscenes and music, gawd dayum dog, they are still epic to this day), most of my playthrough of Diablo 3 just felt like a "second monitor / playing while having a podcast in the background" experience.

Huh... I enjoyed this way more than I expected to... Assassin's Creed Rogue is a mix of AC3's map and characters (my least favourite AC game so far) and AC: Black Flag (which up to this point was my favourite), yet with none of the filler and all of the killer. Putting you in the shoes of Shay Patrick Cormac, an assassin turned templar, AC Rogue provides the players with a templar's view of the story surrounding the Kenway family. Due to his Assassin upbringing, Shay plays exactly as any other protagonist from the series, yet with the added bonus **** launcher with which he can more easily dispose of enemies and quickly destroy certain locked doors. At first, that might seem like a negative. Despite being in control of a character that is on the opposing side of the order of assassins, he controls the same as them. However, the game very smartly adds a slight deviation to the usual gameplay loop by sprinkling a smattering of highly skilled assassins to oppose you. These can all see you from afar, blend in with a crowd, use guns and smoke bombs of their own, hide in a bush, or wait for you to round a corner just so they can shank you for like 75% of your starting HP. This makes it so that even though you're intimately familiar with your character's moves (if you've played any of the previous AC games), the added tension these enemies provide breaks up said loop just enough for it to feel fresh enough to be constantly engaging. This feeling of being constantly engaged is further aided by the fact that this is about a 10-or-so-hour-long experience, where I counted a grand total of one tailing mission and can actually think of several missions that quite smartly turned the usual Ubisoft quest design on its head, or at the very least, tried something new for the franchise. Even as I am writing this, I can barely believe that there wasn't a single moment during this game's runtime where I felt bored, underwhelmed, or like the developers were unnecessarily padding the runtime. All of this led to the best-paced and most fun game in the franchise (so far), and easily the first of these games that I can say I've genuinely enjoyed from start to finish.

I firmly believe that calling The Outer Worlds 2 just a slight upgrade over the original is a disservice to the sequel. Guns feel way better to fire, with not only a much higher variation between them but also many variations in fire mode depending on if you're aiming down sight or hip-firing. There are way more locations where your choices in character creation actually make a difference, with at least a couple dozen rooms, buildings, or alternate paths that I couldn't access throughout my playthrough due to the fact that I didn't pick the required traits/perks/stats. The overall presentation value is much higher across the board. The game doesn't take control away from you every time you use a companion ability. And there are just a whole bunch of other changes that make this experience a much better one than the OG. Yet, at the same time, I also believe that the companions themselves tend to be completely uninteresting. The worlds you explore are not all that interesting or visually cohesive. Nor are they fun to explore for prolonged periods of time. The factions in this game are presented with their worst qualities front and centre, only for the game to then backtrack on giving each of them a sliver of humanity. This type of presentation isn't even really that bad and many times leads to a whole bunch of funny and preposterous moments, but I feel like this writing style doesn't hold up for the entire runtime of the game. Due to me not really caring for basically any of my companions, many of their quests just felt tedious and unnecessary. With the added bonus that many of the side quests and companion introduction quests just feel like they wanted to give me a free win no matter my choices. Whether I just needed to look a bit for a vent to crawl through (modern Deus Ex style) or a companion joining my team even if I proved to be basically useless in their intro quest, these are some of the things that prevented me from fully enjoying the game.

Honestly, considering the fact that this game is a year older than me (so it's basically an ancient fossil), I had more fun with it than I thought I would, but it still isn't really that outstanding of an experience in 2025. I have basically no incentive to distrust anyone that tells me this game was a game changer back when it was released. Ignoring the fact that it basically pioneered an entire new genre of game into existence, almost three decades after its release Diablo still oozes its oppressive atmosphere every second that you're playing it. From the downright demented soundtrack that only shows glimpses of levity in the hub town to the fact that you never see a single ray of sunshine, Diablo is dark, bleak, and haunting even to this day. On the gameplay side of things, a lot of this game really doesn't feel that great to play. Left-clicking on enemies a bunch while hopefully having a door to funnel them through is about the extent of gameplay variety. And the few spells that I did manage to cast with my warrior character really didn't feel all that satisfying to cast. Hell, I don't even know if I hit anything with them. Again, keep in mind that I'm saying these things in the context of an almost 30-year-old game, but you can just feel that Diablo was made in an era of games where difficulty was used to prop up the runtime. From rooms where every single square spawns an archer to the spam fest of blood knights in the final few levels, Diablo shows the player no mercy. Even if they get softlocked, the game might as well just respond with, "Too bad, time to start a new character and do all of that all over again." And while I may respect the game with all my heart, that doesn't change the fact that I didn't have a particularly good time with it, which is the basis for all of my reviews.

Even when Ubisoft tries their hardest to sabotage their pirate epic set in the golden age of piracy by making 75% of the missions the most boring and horrendous tailing missions known to man, Assassin's Creed Black Flag comes out on top as the most fun out of the first half-dozen mainline games. Seriously, I could go on for hours about how much of this game is just pointless tailing missions, some of which see you tailing not just people but entire ships in plain daylight, about 150 metres behind them, while rocking a giant jolly roger, with them somehow having no idea you're following them, but I refuse to do so.That's because everything surrounding this game's quest design is what holds this game afloat. Ironically, this game is as enjoyable as it is almost solely because of everything that isn't a hallmark of this franchise. The ship combat is pretty shallow but insanely satisfying, with a special shoutout to that boarding sequence that feels awesome every single time you do it. The sea shanties left me leaning back in my gaming chair, closing my eyes and just humming along to the few that I learnt during my playtime. The fact that you can acquire more of them while parkouring is a stroke of genius and goes to show just how little of a "tangible" reward many people need to find a game mechanic satisfying. The blow dart gun is awesome, even if the berserker darts didn't work a few more times than I'd like. The supporting cast of characters is easily the most memorable bunch in the entire series so far. Even the RE4 Del Lago-inspired harpooning side quests proved to be a bit of mindless fun. Again, everything surrounding the "Assassin's Creed" part of this game is a joy. It's just a shame that a big chunk of the game makes me want to fall asleep, as I just mindlessly follow a bunch of people across a small shanty town while waiting for the game to pull a miraculous switch and allow me to finally assassinate the people I am following as slowly as the game engine allows for.

What was meant as just a quick dip into No Man's Sky to see what I think of the game at the end of 2025 has (over the course of a few weeks) ballooned into a 40+ hour playthrough where I reached the centre of the galaxy (survival mode), even if the game didn't award me the achievement for some reason. What I can say for certain is that the reviews don't lie. This game has experienced something of a modern renaissance, with free update after free update adding significant depth to this universe-wide experience. Basically all of my time spent in this game was in singleplayer, though the multiplayer HUB that you can spawn in at the press of a few buttons did provide a quick glance at the missions and events that you can partake in with other players; I just personally chose to ignore this aspect for my playthrough. So understand that this review is coming from a single-player-only perspective where my ultimate end goal was exploration, scanning of wildlife, and reaching the centre of the galaxy. Here are my thoughts: I love space, and I love exploring it. This game absolutely scratches that itch of feeling like you're part of a seemingly endless universe, slowly charting your way through. Planet by planet, solar system by solar system. I have seen everything from idyllic planets of purple skies, red forests and orange grasslands to hostile planets where a constantly aggressive robotic force was chasing me in the midst of a superheated sandstorm mixed in with lightning strikes. From planets devoid of any life or atmosphere to freezing/toxic/magma-infused habitats that somehow still managed to sustain their own flora and fauna, and even planets comprised of only bubbles, hexagons, heavenly pillars of light, and more. Every warp into a new system, every scan of a planet, and every landing was met with anticipation of what wonders I might encounter this time. However, I would also like to make it abundantly clear that not everything in this game is as prestigious as my prior words would have you believe. In fact, there are quite a few disappointing factors that, while never ruining my enjoyment of the game, did hamper it quite a bit... For how imaginative the planets themselves are on a macro level, you soon find that when looking at them from a gameplay perspective, most of them play the same. Most of them have the same gravitational forces. Most of them have the exact same 4 or 5 types of hazardous flora that are just repeated ad nauseam. Most of them have the same robotic enemy types that are slower than you, that can't follow you into a cave or hole you've just made, and that just predictably spawn in front of you when performing certain actions, so they never feel like a threat. No matter what the planet in question's schtick is (let's say that it's a very cold planet), no amount of altitude change ever helps you survive the planet any easier. Whether you're at the top of a mountain or in a ravine somewhere, the temperature always stays the same, yet step two feet into a cave, dig a small hole, or make a 1x1 shelter, and the temperature/toxicity/whatever always stabilises. Not only does this lead to planets that have no real diversity in their biomes, but it also leads to a gameplay loop where everything becomes way too predictable for my liking. A planet type where the ground and caves are toxic yet everything else is normal would be highly appreciated... This same feeling of predictability goes for the fact that every single star system has a galactic trade station orbiting one of the planets. Don't get me wrong, I understand that from a "give players a bunch of quests to do and things to barter" perspective, this absolutely works. But when you're trying to roleplay as a guy exploring the vastness of space, it just feels a bit deflating to know that you're never the first to really uncover a star system. Just like it's absolutely deflating to spend hours of your life painstakingly learning the language of an alien race, word by word, in the hopes that it would lead to something cool like additional quests, them joining your fleet, etc... Only for the reward to be virtually nothing. In short: I believe a game with 69 billion quintillion sextillion planets could use a lot more gameplay mechanic diversity… And that makes me feel like an insane man…

Only after prolonged exposure to XCOM: Enemy Within, a couple of cracks may begin to rear their ugly head. Sometimes there really aren't enough different maps even for a single playthrough. The UFO mini-game **** for a plethora of reasons. Some enemies are too rare, so researching certain upgrades in the foundry is nigh-on impossible. The early game tends to be a bit too punishing, yet the second you get squadsight on a couple of snipers, the pendulum swings too much in the players' favour, etc... But looking at these **** in the context of the entire game, they become nothing more than exactly that... **** in an otherwise fabulous piece of armour. I don't know how this game can throw so much at the player without feeling overwhelming, but it does this dance almost perfectly. It might be the fact that the game takes its time and allows players to strategically think through every single decision they make, both in the base building and combat sections. It might be the fact that no matter what the player decides to build or research, it almost always leads to an increase in their power/player expression. It might be the fact that the difficulty settings actually DO SOMETHING other than just increase the HP and accuracy of enemies, as they have a clear impact on enemy AI and their decision-making capabilities. All of this, coupled with the fact that at any given moment one wrong move can mean the death of your favourite soldier, the withdrawal of a country from the XCOM foundation, or even an entire mission going awry, makes for some of the most enjoyable high-risk, high-reward gameplay I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing. Do I think that it's kind of dumb that an entire entourage of aliens is just chilling in the fog of war while heavy fire rains all around them, only for me to end my turn by moving one of my soldiers for a single tile, exposing them, and for these enemies to only now become aggro, killing one or two of my soldiers in the process? Yes, absolutely. This leads to me usually playing a bit too passively for my liking and just in general doesn't exactly feel good or fair. But when my biggest problems with a game are a few nitpicks and a game mechanic that the entire game is built around very rarely feeling unfair, I feel no remorse recommending this game to anyone. Especially if you're into turn-based strategy games.

I mean, let's be honest here. This game is about as close to an idle game as one could get. You stare at a map and click on the red bubble to get the dopamine receptors in your nervous system to go *brrrr*, only to then use the points you get from clicking on said bubble to upgrade your red bubble-making capabilities. But I'd also be lying if I said that I didn't find this to be one of the most addicting clicker games out there. The concept of making your own disease and using it to eradicate the entire world is enticing enough of a premise as is (I am a mentally stable person, I swear). But then the game also gives you different disease types, all of which can be further enhanced with a unique set of properties before even entering the game. Only for you to actually start a run and notice that you have complete and utter control over where the outbreak happens, how it transmits across the world, what its symptoms are, and even how difficult it is to find and cure it, all of it mixed with a random set of variables that make it so the world in each run has the possibility of being just a tad bit different. And on top of all of that, you then throw in the now countless custom scenarios, two dozen or so official scenarios, the speedrun mode, and the CO-OP and MP modes that I haven't even really engaged in. And what you have on offer is a recipe for one of the simplest, yet most replayable games out ****'s not deep enough to really hold your attention for longer than a few hours at a time. But a few hours every year or so adds up to a fun game that I find really difficult to dislike.

While I can't comment on the whole "remake" aspect of these games since I've never played the originals, what I can comment on is my time with this trilogy, playing it for the first time in 2025, which I found to be N. Sanely fun! The Crash Bandicoot trilogy takes everything that a basic 3D platformer could offer and adds, morphs, and just generally builds upon itself over the course of three games to bring players a ridiculously fun time. While I can safely say that the first game is my least favourite due to some insanely precise platforming sections that felt just a bit too frustrating/punishing and that those jetpack and underwater sections of the later games can go eat rocks, everything else about these games just oozes fun, style, and vibes. I honestly think that the stars of the show are the whacky, cartoony visuals and the soundtrack. These made it so that even when the games were throwing some real difficult trial and error sections at me, I never really cared because it was always a delight to see Crash's head balloon after the sting of a bee, him freezing when landing in ice-cold water, or Coco getting cute kisses from the tiger whenever she face-planted into a part of the Great Wall of China. At its "worst" the soundtrack fits the theme of the level almost perfectly; at its best it's so upbeat and catchy that you just want to sit there and listen to it for hours. For what these games are (basic 3D platformers with very little in the way of deep movement tech), I was constantly left surprised by just how many tricks the developers pulled out of seemingly thin air to keep the levels captivating. Whether it was the constantly shifting camera perspectives, enemies that required specific inputs to destroy, game mechanics and level themes that made sure almost every level felt unique, or the honestly staggering number of secrets scattered throughout the fifteen-or-so-hour-long adventure. Each and every one of these games rarely feels like it's rethreading old ground or not at least building on top of an idea that was introduced in a previous level. All of this is aided by a plethora of really great design choices that make it so your run through these levels is rarely annoying. Sure, dying because you decided to hit some boxes that had a strategically hidden box of TNT inside can feel a bit cheap. But with the checkpoint system, generally short levels that rarely take more than a couple of minutes to beat, the additional lives you get, the invincibility masks you collect, and even the fact that if you lose all of your lives, the games just give you a couple for free so you never have to perfect any of these levels, make up for almost any inconvenience the game dares throw at you. And none of this is even mentioning the gems you can collect by destroying every box in a level, nor the sigils you acquire for speedrunning through, both of which just bring a whole plethora of reasons to revisit and master these delightful levels.

This is the first game in the series that actively feels like a sidegrade at the best of times and a downgrade at the worst of times... AC3, weirdly, takes some of the most hated, dated, and infuriating mechanics of the entire series and packages them into a singular experience. It takes the empty fields of AC1 where barely anything of note was happening, expands them tenfold, and adds a piss-poor hunting minigame that is either a bunch of incredibly easy quick-time events or a game of "when the bunny rabbit glows white, hit the R button to shoot it with your bow automatically." Outside of it just being kind of cool to do parkour, it takes away most of the reasons (loot chests) for you to run across the rooftops and balconies and swaps them out with the aforementioned boring hunting minigame. They even decided to put the wanted posters on street level, so there's even less incentive to take up to the roofs. And if anyone would like to argue that the floating pages you can collect offer a good substitution, half of the ones I collected just decided to become invisible when I was chasing them, which made even that activity feel frustrating to engage in. Speaking of frustrating, the combat just isn't it, chief. Enemies can attack you with the same attack in the span of a few seconds, and sometimes a red indicator shows above their head; sometimes it doesn't. Most of the time I parry an incoming attack; about a third of the time I press the parry button once, twice, or sometimes even thrice, and it does nothing. I don't get it; it wasn't a problem in the previous games. All of a sudden it is a problem. The ending to Desmond's story wasn't worth it; I'm just going to put that out there without spoiling any of it. And considering the fact that (from my knowledge) this storyline never crops up again, I say it's for the better. That ending faceplanted hard. The same goes for Connor's story, honestly. I don't understand the fixation of Ubisoft's writers on just having you meet a dozen different characters and only having them be there for a mission or two while insinuating some sort of deep bond between these people. It's like they were more interested in having you be a part of as many cool historic sequences as possible in the hopes that people wouldn't notice the story is pretty meh. And this isn't even mentioning the writing, which is your usual "I am going to kill you now"; *Connor does something that prevents the guy from killing him*, and then two missions later Connor asks the same guy, "Why didn't you kill me when you had the chance?" only for him to reply, "Because I was intrigued by you" or some lousy bs. THE REASON HE DIDN'T KILL YOU IS BECAUSE YOU KICKED HIM AWAY IN SELF-DEFENCE. DO PEOPLE IN THESE GAMES HAVE SHORT-TERM MEMORY LOSS? AM I GOING INSANE? Most gameplay sections feel overly scripted. You can literally get in front of a person you're chasing, and the game just doesn't allow you to kill them until you hit a cutscene trigger, at which point some random bs will probably happen that will allow your target to escape so that this game can be twice as long as it should have been. The mission design is still awful; only this time it's taken to new extremes in the Washington DLC, where Ubisoft gives you some insanely fun abilities to play around with (including invisibility), only for any hope of fun to be squashed by enemies that sense you in your invisible form being intermixed with mission design that fails the quest if you get spotted (or sniffed in this case). The "tower climbing puzzles" are gone. Instead of there just being one correct way of climbing up a tower, you can basically just approach it from any angle. It's less tedious/frustrating but also more mind-numbing. Granted, not as mind-numbing as the decision to allow Connor to synchronise on top of copy-pasted trees whose canopies hide the stack of leaves on the ground that you dive into. But it is what it is. Didn't enjoy, wouldn't recommend.

Immortals of Aveum does something that I'll always respect in a video game. It takes its "elevator pitch" idea and does that idea remarkably well. Puts it into a game that lasts for about a dozen or so hours. Then it proceeds to end before it has any chance of getting boring, while also leaving the player with quite a bit of side content if they are still hungry for more. While that opening paragraph might come off as a bit empty or showering the game with vapid praise, I'd like to argue quite the opposite. Immortals of Aveum's "elevator pitch" is essentially: "What if we made a Call of Duty game, but it's a first-person spell-slinging game with a bunch of abilities peppered throughout?" And it executes that idea so well that I can't remember a single game outside of Avowed doing such a great job at first-person magic. The three colours of magic you control all have three different weapons attached to them, each of them feeling unique and fun to use. Saying that your magic has recoil sounds absurd without context, but when actually playing the game, it adds so much to the weighty feeling of just decimating the enemy forces in front of you. And even though most of it is pretty shallow, the aforementioned 12-hour runtime makes sure that the gameplay rarely dips into tedium. Unfortunately I can't really say the same for much else in this game. I actually found the story and world to be quite interesting, but when the game constantly goes into "He's right behind me, isn't he?" levels of writing, it's difficult to take seriously. The exploration and puzzles do an impressive job at pacing those bombastic magic battles, yet the game rarely does anything all that interesting with them. And there's something about the art style of this game that just doesn't gel as well as it should. Whether it's enemies blending way too well with their environment or certain spells being too over the top in the number of particles they emit, so you have no idea whether the shots you're firing are even hitting your enemies or not, this art style ain't it, chief. Mixing that with the fact that this is essentially one of the first Unreal Engine 5 games, so there are frame drops and stutters around every corner, and all I can say is that the gameplay carries this title hard; meanwhile, I found most other aspects to be lacking.

BALL x PIT is a fun BRICK BREAKER x ROGUELITE for about a dozen or so hours, and then it quickly becomes tedious. Unlike a bunch of reviews that call this game out for being poorly designed, I'd like to put forward the notion that it's less about it being poorly designed and more about it just being uninteresting. When BALL x PIT isn't tedious, it proves to be a very effective dopamine rush that hits hard. As I am writing this review, the game is playing itself in turn-based mode on my second monitor, because the two characters you bring on your brick-breaking adventures allow for that. The choice between "generic knight with no passive" and "assassin that spawns bullets behind enemies", and everything in between, diversifies the gameplay loop A LOT. And with you being able to bring two of these characters on each run (after a certain point), it allows for you to make some crazy combos. The point where this game loses me, however, is that when looking back at the now 16 or so hours I spent with it, I actually have no idea why I lost certain runs. Outside of using an item that constantly kept my HP at essentially 1 HP (and then proceeding to get hit by a stray arrow), any time I lost any of my runs was because the enemies just overwhelmed me with numbers. I'd lose on the basis of not having enough damage, only for me to return to my base, upgrade a building or two, and try the same level again with the same characters, only this time I won. This leaves the game between a rock and a hard place if you ask me, because either those miniscule upgrades you get from levelling up are strong enough to drastically change the tide of battle, or the balls I chose on my winning turn just so happened to be way better, without me really understanding why since most of them are just different types of elemental damage. My point is that no matter if the difference between those runs was the 1 or 2 stat points that I got between runs (that just invisibly give you more stats in the background) or just that I got lucky with the balls I chose, neither of those feels all that interesting or rewarding. And when I didn't lose a run, the game was basically only a step or two away from an idle game, which I just don't find all that enjoyable.

If you can ignore and get through the hyper ADHD, gambling-infused, and just confusing bombardment of things that is the first 6 or so hours of Forza Horizon 5 in 2025, then what you'll find is a thoroughly enjoyable arcade-y racing game that still looks stunning today. Set in a Mexico that contains every vista known to man within a 10x10 km region, Forza Horizon 5 tends to be an incredible playground for awesome-feeling and just generally fun racing. Boasting almost 900 cars and a wide variety of ways to upgrade each and every single one of them, while also giving you all the tools necessary to fine-tune and craft the perfect vehicle for any condition the game throws at you, you simply cannot say that FH5 doesn't have enough things to keep players occupied for at least a few dozen hours. Mix that in with the fact that the average online race looks and feels like a car rave on MDMA, with a truck drifting through a sandy turn and overtaking a Mazda Miata, all the while the Ford Bronco I drive blasts the DOOM E1M1 OST in the background as a Lotus that clearly isn't tuned for offroad racing narrowly misses the Batmobile, and what comes out of it is a recipe for pure, unadulterated fun distilled into a racing game. Unfortunately though, I find many of the things surrounding the actual races and events to be pretty amateurish. From the fact that this is an always online game, which sometimes causes you to be unable to buy or upgrade a car even with a great internet connection. The fact that certain cars can't be bought with the in-game currency with nothing in the game store even remotely indicating that. Instead, the game sends you directly to the "buy this with real-life money xd" screen. The fact that online matches tend to always be 3-ish-minute-long races (it gets pretty boring) that also happen to sometimes take over a minute to load into. These, and quite a few other problems for that matter, are just prevalent enough to drop my overall enjoyment (and hence my score). And with how fun the actual moment-to-moment gameplay is, I wish it were different.

Desmond Miles: Game 4, Chapter 2, Flashback 1: "You are an assassin. And this is our creed." Scorsese wept, for true cinema was born with that quote. Ezio Auditore Da Firenze remains the fan-favourite protagonist to this day and will probably remain a favourite until the AC franchise inevitably implodes on itself in the year 2047. While I certainly understand this sentiment, I cannot overstate how jaded I was with everything surrounding this game, his story, and more. This is the second game in a row where the famous assassin that has assassinated dozens of important people, mercilessly murdered hundreds of their lackeys, and single-handedly rebuilt the creed of assassins multiple times, is stripped of everything and forced to go through a ****, overly long tutorial for basic movement and combat that boils down to "mash buttons, win easily". Luckily, in this game the tutorial lasts for only 3 hours or so, which is half the amount when compared to the previous two games. So that's great, I guess. But seriously, video game developers, make the tutorial an option in the Animus and let us get on with the fun parts, please. The story follows Desmond Miles, who is now trapped in the Animus and forced to relive the memories of Ezio, who in turn finds himself reliving the thoughts and memories of Altair, who mostly ponders of the good old days when their creed wasn't a complete clown fest. Just so we're absolutely clear on this: all of a sudden the only way to save the world from whatever it is that the modern-day assassins are saving it from, because the game just doesn't want to tell us for 4 games in a row and instead just jerks us along because they've got to get every single dime out of the names "Altair" and "Ezio Auditore Da Firenze", is to use the most advanced piece of technology known to man and go into a memory, within a memory, within a memory. Can you tell by the tone of my writing just how bored I am? I intend on going through all of these games and am already losing interest 4 games into a franchise with 75 games and 32 spin-offs. Needless to say, the enthusiasm I had for much of the story, world and supernatural elements is just about gone, but luckily (to my knowledge) only one more game follows this storyline. Who knows, maybe in the end it will all be worth it. The gameplay is still as fun as ever. Parkouring keeps getting better and better, the combat has kind of stagnated at this point, but it's still flashy enough to be engaging. Most of the tailing missions are gone from this game (probably due to the game being quite short), which is nice, but I'm noticing a worrying trend where these games seem to want to one-up each other in terms of sheer spectacle. I already barely remember sitting on a Middle Eastern bench and listening in on conversations. But to go from that to using a flamethrower and flying a carriage-drawn kite and assassinating guards with it in just 4 games is insane to me. The option to craft bombs is my absolute favourite addition in Assassin's Creed Revelations. Don't get me wrong, this made my experience with the game feel less like I was playing AC:R and more like I was playing AC130 ABOVE!!!1!, with me just chucking bombs at enemies and watching their bodies fly around and spaz out from the explosion. But hey, at this point anything that changes up the usual formula of *follow this guy as slowly as the game engine allows for 15 minutes until he reaches the other side of the city, just for him to say something like "Yes, I am indeed a bad person,"* is welcome in my books. I don't even want to go into the whole mission design discussion; I'll just say that anyone who thought that it was a good idea to design missions around the objective of "don't get seen or you fail the mission", only for you to fulfil that requirement and for the guards in the next mission to still magically know that you killed someone... Why? Just why?

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood: The one where you employ a whole bunch of brothers (gender neutral), make them wear robes with hoods, and then proceed to send them halfway across the world to bang a beautiful babe or beat up an old librarian. The more I play these older games, the more I see a pattern emerging. The developers at Ubisoft were absolutely nailing certain positive aspects of these games, while unfortunately doubling down on all of the things that make them boring. What do I mean by that? The exploration in AC:BH feels great due to the game having only one city instead of spanning 4 or 5 of them. This allowed the developers to make a much more compact gameplay loop that revolves less around running through open grassy fields with nothing of note in them and more around awesomely designed parkour jungles. Not only are you parkouring across roofs and learning escape paths and clever routes, but you're constantly on the lookout for shops and landmarks to buy, parts of the map to free from Borgia control, and collectibles to get, because, hey, it's right there and you might as well pick it up and do some more awesome parkour, right? Yet, on the other hand, all of this comes at a cost of way more menu time than both previous games combined. Buying a shop takes time with an identical animation playing every time you buy one. Chests now give you items to sell to vendors that take up menu time because a "sell all" button doesn't exist. Sending your fellow assassin's takes up menu time. You get the idea... The story benefits greatly from being a direct continuation. While I'm not in love with the ending of the previous game where Ezio decided to do the same thing Ellie did to Abby in TLOU2 (iykyk), having a game that revolves around people you already know makes for a way less jarring experience. The monkey's paw curls, however, because even more than the previous games, this one is filled with so many overly long tailing missions that I don't understand what the developers were thinking. Somehow these missions aren't even the worst ones, with a special shoutout to one particular mission where you have to find a route through the city of Rome by listening to the reactions of the people following you. That one might just go down as an inductee in the Geneva Convention of gaming missions, and if that doesn't exist yet, this mission should be its founder. And don't even get me started on those Leonardo Da Vinci missions where you take his war machines on a rampage, or 6, only for those same machines to control about as well as a sumo wrestler rolling down Mount Fuji. My main problem with this game is that no matter how I try to put my words into review form, it just comes across as too pessimistic. I enjoyed my time with the game; I'd even recommend it. I just can't believe how strongly the negatives stick out like a sore left hand...

Assassin's Creed 2: the one where you play as an Italian man that isn't named "Mario", making it an objectively bad game. Scratch that, a few hours into the game someone literally says, "It's a me, Mario!" Objectively good game design is back on the menu!!!! On a serious note though: on the one hand, Assassin's Creed 2 feels like a perfect sequel. It revamps a whole bunch of systems from the first game and makes them feel better and easier to understand (parkour, stealth). It gives the player a boatload of new offensive and defensive options in their arsenal to truly make you feel like even more of a badass assassin. The production quality is clearly higher, the acting better, and the maps are designed in a much more parkour-friendly way. A bunch of new stuff has been added that helps both with immersion and with breaking up the gameplay loop (upgrading your own town, buying equipment, a wanted system, etc.). On the other hand, however, I feel like the story overstays its welcome. You will be meeting new characters at an insanely high pace; they will be there for two or three missions and then disappear until they're all needed again for the ending. I'd very much prefer a smaller but more memorable cast of characters surrounding Ezio Auditore da Firenze. Ezio's sister and mother especially feel insanely underutilised. The same goes for your targets, who just keep coming out of nowhere, to the point that this story takes 22 in-game years to resolve. Despite giving the player a lot of new weapons and gadgets, the enemies themselves actually feel way less aggressive, making a lot of the combat both easier and a bit more boring than it should be. Because of all of this, the pacing really starts to drag for me. There are numerous moments that just feel like the big climactic ending of the game, only for it to just keep going and going. I especially found the chapter where you help defend a castle to be complete filler. One that isn't helped by the fact that the same guards you're allied to tend to attack you on the spot because you gained infamy when killing the enemies that were besieging you mere seconds ago. And there are many other moments that keep this game from being in the top echelon of games I've played in my life. Still though, great game, and probably the best jumping-in point for anyone wondering why this franchise is so beloved.

Damn, this game really does водка my товарищ! In an alternate universe where the Soviet Union won at everything so hard that they managed to make a fully autonomous robotic workforce by the year 1955, Major Sergey Alekseyevich Nechayev has to stop this same robotic workforce that suddenly became hostile and turned on its human overlords. The fact that this is game studio Mundfish's first game is nothing short of extraordinary. The vibes, graphic quality, and optimisation are through the roof. The enemy encounters are sufficiently varied. The looting mechanic where you just **** up loot like a vacuum cleaner should be a thing in way more games. And the game itself just has a level of presentation that would make you think this was a game made by an established AAA studio and not some indie dev studio out of Cyprus. That entire opening sequence, from when you arrive at this seeming communist utopia on a boat to your first steps in the open world, is excellent. Unfortunately, those first steps in the open world also tend to be where the game begins to lose its steam and never fully recovers. In fact, the longer you proceed in this game, the worse it gets, in my opinion. The story of this game is extremely predictable, which in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, but when the main protagonist of the game constantly plays catch-up to their surroundings and never takes any sort of hint to the true state of the world, no matter how much the people in said world are screaming exposition at him, it's hard to feel invested. This is outright ignoring the fact that Sergey is just annoyingly written, with him being portrayed as this no-nonsense hunk whose tagline of "Crispy Critters" has to be said 10 thousand times. This just leaves him as a seriously unlikeable and dumb protagonist, which is not someone I personally want to be in control of. He's the male equivalent of Aloy from the Horizon games. Just plain annoying. The open world itself feels confused. There is just a severe lack of anything to find and do in it. It is heavily implied that you should sneak past enemy encounters, with cameras that call for reinforcements and robot repair stations being scattered around its world that constantly repair almost any and all robots you've killed. But then the game spams dozens of these robots in and around your quest markers, which makes it borderline impossible to actually sneak past, so most of your time will be spent running past them or just ramming them with a Lada Niva. However, when you spend most of your time running past enemies and the game doesn't even have a sprint button, let alone any other movement abilities, it just becomes a chore to do. Many sections of this game feel like they drag on for too long. Giving me a quest where you have to go through the bureaucracy of finding a train ticket so that the dumb robot would start the train is kind of funny and endearing. When essentially every quest and puzzle is designed in this way, it feels like the game is just padding its runtime. I actually felt that the combat of this game was its best part, but when you spam me with as many enemies as this game does, especially in its later stages, it just becomes far too simple to find mind-numbingly boring tactics to kill all of the enemies on screen. Standing on top of a staircase and just spamming the fully charged spin-to-win axe attack, anyone? In short: a great first attempt at a game which will hopefully lead to the developers listening to feedback, learning from their "mistakes" and making a banger sequel. One that, unlike this game, I would recommend with all my кровавый heart.

Assassin's Creed (2007): The humble beginnings of a now legendary series! I don't want to make it sound like this is some un-critiquable work of art that will stand the test of time for generations to come, but when push came to shove, my 10 or so hours with this game were mostly enjoyable. I don't think it aged as well as a Max Payne 2 or Resident Evil 4, mind you, but when the worst thing I can say about it is the fact that for every positive there is a negative to counterbalance it, I don't see much cause for negativity... The parkour system isn't nearly as polished as it should be and sometimes leads to you getting stuck or being unable to climb something that is obviously climbable, but for the most part it is absolutely serviceable for this game and its world. Certain haystacks will just break your back and kill you when you jump into them, yet most of them don't do that (probably a problem of playing an old game on new hardware). The controls take a bunch of getting used to with you, for example, having to hold right click and spacebar in order to sprint and parkour, but most enemies tend to be on the dumber side, so you'll rarely be actively annoyed by the controls. If you're a fan of "muh immersion", please note that enemies' bodies tend to spaz out, turn into Turbo Slenderman, and fly all over the place... I just found this one to be kind of funny tbh. And many more such occurrences. The gameplay loop is kind of novel for its time, yet leans towards being repetitive even for such a short game. You arrive at one of three different cities. You climb up towers that reveal your surroundings; this gives you a bunch of different quests to gather intel on a target you've been sent to kill. Once you have enough intel, you arrive at the place where the assassination takes place, you watch a scripted segment that gives us a bit more insight into the target, and you go for the kill with very few gadgets to speak of. That is the gameplay loop for all but the final few hours of the game, where the developers decided to just spam dozens of enemies at you in a bunch of linear combat encounters, and I actually found these combat sections to easily be the worst part of the experience. There isn't a whole lot to extract from most of the gameplay loop of this game, but at least the game has the decency to not go on for 45 hours. It's kind of insane how much intrigue and mystique the writers were able to cram into this short experience. A lot of it feels very much like "oh, this is just setup for future sequels", but gosh darn would I be lying if I said it wasn't captivating. You know, as captivating as any narrative with 2000s voice acting and facial animations can be... The supernatural twist absolutely worked for me while also probably being a very handy way for the developers to excuse the 75 different locations they chose for their 135 sequels. With me wanting to cap off this review with an incredibly simple and pointless observation that I've... well... observed... during my time playing. The combat itself is pretty shallow, with your bog-standard parry, light attack, heavy attack, and grab options. However, whenever you end up killing an enemy, the camera tends to choose a more "cinematic" angle as you're locked into the kill animation. With how much fighting you'll be doing in close-quarters, claustrophobic, and just narrow corridors, streets, and porches, you'd think that this would pose a problem with the camera clipping into walls, trees, all sorts of shenanigans... Yet, no matter in how tight of a squeeze I found myself shoving my sword through the gut of a templar, the camera never... And I seriously mean NEVER chose an angle in which I couldn't see exactly what was going on. It never glitched, and it never clipped into anything; at worst, a different enemy would just so happen to be standing a few feet in front of it, but it would never do anything weird or glitch out in any way. And to me, this kind of perfectly encapsulates this entire experience... Half of this game is a product of its time that clearly hasn't aged all that well, yet it's never outright terrible. The other half somehow manages to feel insanely well preserved, with that camera I just spent so long talking about being my prime example. In a day and age where certain developers who shall remain unnamed can't even get their camera to properly work for their shot reverse-shot NPC dialogue, Assassin's Creed perfected this and more almost two decades ago with flying colours. And while it may not be my favourite game of all time, or anything, it still holds up as more than just a curiosity that you visit to see where the Assassin's Creed franchise started. It holds up as a pretty solid video game.

I would like to take this moment to apologise to every single game I have rated prior to Ride to Hell: Retribution. Each and every one of you beautiful and exquisite pieces of art deserves at least one rating higher when compared to this absolute dumpster fire. Ride to Hell: Retribution is the closest I have ever come to changing my view on the notion that "every piece of art has inherent value". Props to this game for doing something as monumental as making me question a pretty big part of my values; I just wish it did it in the complete opposite way. The most impressive thing about this game is the fact that literally nothing works properly. Literally nothing. Even the most basic things, like shooting your gun and riding your bike, are so abhorrently implemented that I don't understand how anybody on the development team played this game and went, "Yeah, this is great, ship it out!" The only tiny amount of props I can give to this game is the fact that some of the shooting arenas border on the interesting side, but that is where my positives end. The animations, graphics, acting, shooting, looting, soundtrack, story, characters, sound design, cover system, driving, and any and all manner of things you can think of don't rise above abysmal. Even the goddamn floor you ride the vehicles on tends to be littered with invisible bumps that just fling you into Narnia. And none of this is mentioning the downright misogynistic portrayal of women in this game, where when they don't just put out on the spot in between a dozen fresh corpses you just made literally less than a second ago, they're always portrayed as a bunch of hyper-sexualised bimbos that only have their **** and ass to offer to the world. I think hell will freeze over 10 times before I ever find a game more insulting and abhorrent than this one.