KillerTeddyB3ar

The Blood of Dawnwalker is very rough around the edges, especially for a 70€ game. Like, even ignoring the usual stutters and frame drops that are the standard for an Unreal Engine 5 game, a lot of this game requires you to play it how the developers want you to play it, with very little in the form of player creativity. You don't have ranged attacks or stealth at your disposal, so the only way to start a fight is to just bumrush into an encounter and hope for the best. One of the first abilities you unlock (throwing pocket sand in the eyes of an enemy) stuns the enemy, leaving them wide open for 3~4 attacks in the process, yet when using said ability, the game always decides to switch the lock on to a different person 5 miles away (without fail), leaving you unable to deal with the enemy you just incapacitated. Trying to do anything creative with the lock-on feature in this game just leads to frustration, so it's best to just go with what the game deems to be the appropriate target, even if that is not the target you personally want to be focusing on. With the awful lock-on system in mind, and seeing as how every encounter is a 1 v 1 with only the occasional rogue attack from a second enemy, I found many of the abilities that revolve around stuns to be borderline useless and just focused on skills that output damage, which isn't really a great thing to say about a game where careful consideration about which skills you want to unlock and upgrade is one of the key parts of it. This isn't even mentioning the fact that certain enemies just decide to not be stunned for how long the tooltip says they're going to be stunned for, nor the messy wall climbing or the fact that it is surprisingly difficult to get your character to run away from an encounter in a game where beating an encounter might mean you lose a bunch of hours off your already limited time. However, if you just decide to let the eurojank wash over you, trust the game and go with the flow, then The Blood of Dawnwalker proves to be an incredibly ambitious debut game that just begs for a sequel. The stories and quests present here have that tried-and-tested Witcher 3 depth and layered storytelling. Everything that has to do with the presentation is fantastic. Again, once you let the eurojank wash over you, there are actually quite a lot of things to enjoy about the combat system. There's a good layer of depth and character progression here, even if late-game encounters just turn into "parry this attack that you've seen 5 billion times already, and press any active ability button whenever you sense even a semblance of an unblockable attack coming your way." I found the inclusion of a time limit to be a stroke of genius, even if it is a bit too lenient, with me achieving (basically) every ending in one playthrough with heaps of days to spare. And while I don't think it's going to be in GOTY conversations for most people, overall it is a tight, beautifully paced, superbly written, and oftentimes gruesome piece of eurojank that definitely isn't for everyone.

Star Wars Zero Company is a remarkably fun isometric turn-based strategy game developed by a chunk of the staff that worked on the XCOM titles. While it might be simple to just call this game XCOM with a Star Wars skin, I'd argue this game's action economy, story, and approach to gunfights bring quite a lot more to the table. Even if we decide to ignore the well-written story, fantastic voice acting, and the surprisingly fleshed-out cast of supporting characters, the way this game handles engagements with enemies only screams "XCOM!" in the broadest of strokes. This game revolves way more around teamwork and proper use of abilities instead of just flanking an enemy and shooting at them until they die. Almost any source of damage you deal to an enemy builds up adrenaline, which you then use to unleash incredibly strong abilities that completely turn the tide of battle. Medics can buff their allies with a heal that restores HP at the beginning of each round, Trick has a giant AOE RPG shot, a Jedi can throw their lightsaber, etc. The game is very lenient when it comes to injury and death. A character needs to be downed three times before they actually die. Getting hit once doesn't mean they instantly get injured, the game shows you the chance to hit an enemy before you even move. Flanked enemies have a 100% chance to hit, negating any frustration that comes from those missed 95% to hit shots where the player got screwed by RNG despite doing everything right. Most importantly: a single mistake doesn't mean the end of your soldier. ZCOM operates on much larger health pools compared to many similar games. Whereas games of this ilk usually treat a soldier standing out in the open as dead before they can even blink, in this game, putting a tanky soldier with boatloads of HP and armor in the middle of the battlefield to soak up some damage isn't necessarily a bad play. This means that you're not just looking at which cover to move behind, every single tile in this game is potentially a good move with the right operator and the right cast of supporting characters. A missed shot still has a high chance of destroying cover. This means that both you and the enemies are never really safe and will hence rarely stay in one place for long. This results in dynamic engagements where both sides are constantly adapting, repositioning, and targeting the enemies whose cover just disintegrated, all the while attempting to outflank each other. If you couldn't tell from my tone of writing, I really like this game and think it's a fantastic isometric turn-based strategy game. It's unfortunate that ZCOM suffers from a lack of polish. The usual UE5 frame drops and stutters are always present, the game even crashed a few times. Many times your overwatch just doesn't trigger, all the while enemies overwatch your team through walls and solid objects. I've actually missed quite a few 100% shots for some reason. This mostly occurred when I was right above an enemy, but even that wasn't consistent. These issues on their own weren't enough to ruin the experience for me, but I do believe they were present enough to keep this game out of the upper echelon of all-time great strategy games for me.

Marvel's Midnight Suns is a game of two halves. The first half is a fun, brilliant, and surprisingly deep turn-based strategy game that sees you building and upgrading the decks of about a dozen characters from the Marvel universe. This half of the game is remarkably well made and genuinely feels replayable for a hundred hours. There was always something new to learn when it came to building decks, positioning my heroes, upgrading their abilities, and many others, so the gameplay loop never felt tedious for the 35~ish hours that I spent with the game. Mix that in with some stellar animations and sound design that made every single one of the Marvel heroes feel unique, and all I can say is that I have almost nothing bad to say about this part of the game. The only negative remark I can find for it is the fact that decks HAVE to be a certain size (no wiggle room) and that you can only have a max of each type of ability (max 4 attacks, for example). That is the only thing that slightly hinders the player's creativity in an otherwise remarkably well-designed strategy **** other half of this game is a dreadfully dull and pointless life sim game that sees you building up relationships with these characters. You can also buy skins for everyone, explore the grounds of your home base, and slightly customize the look of your room. Every single one of these aspects feels tacked on in the worst possible way. I am already not the biggest fan of modern Marvel's writing. The jokes that feel crammed in to retain audience attention are present here as well. Tony Stark will babble on for about 12 hours on how he is scared of the spooky mansion, with the joke never properly landing. Any sense of urgency that is lost with the inclusion of said jokes is present here as well. And the biggest problem being that the game is missing the most important part of what makes some of these awful lines actually work in the movies: the banter between the actors and their expressions. Most of the lines in Marvel's Midnight Suns were clearly read by the voice actors when working alone in a sound booth. So there is no way of them playing off of one another or bringing any sort of physical comedy into the scene. The jokes either land or they don't, and for me, 99% of the ones that I heard before I decided to start skipping cutscenes absolutely did not land. In fact, that is the only good thing about this game's cutscenes: you can skip all of them and just focus on the fun parts of the game. Which, unfortunately, makes about 50% of this game feel like redundant weight that almost manages to drown and destroy all of its great parts.

Batman: Arkham Origins is a very safe release that feels rushed in many places. Most of the game's upgrade paths and gameplay mechanics are essentially copy-pasted from its predecessor, Arkham City. This means that by playing this game, you essentially get another dozen hours of Batman flying around Gotham City, beating up bad guys in the process, only this time it's a lot glitchier. Enemies ragdoll a thousand miles into the air, side quests don't finish properly and need to be redone every once in a while, Batman sometimes glitches while flying, etc. On the story side of things, this game is a prequel to everything that happens in the previous two installments. While I believe that the story starts off very strong, with it introducing a whole new slew of characters that (for the most part) you don't see in either Asylum or City, after a few hours pass, the game reverts back to yet another story about Batman, Bane, the Joker, and Commissioner Gordon. This means that basically all of the tension and unpredictability is lost. Luckily for the game, however, the voice actors yet again do an incredible job at portraying their characters, which oftentimes made me forget that I didn't really care for much of what was going on in the story. A noticeable step towards the positive can be seen in many of the boss fights. Basically all of them are a pretty big mechanical and spectacle upgrade from anything this franchise has served before. And as one last positive, the map of Gotham feels a lot less suffocating thanks to a huge decrease in Riddler puzzles. TL;DR: this game is a glitchier and slightly less interesting version of Batman: Arkham City. And, in my eyes, there are a lot of worse things that a game can be than a slightly lesser version of one of the best 3rd-person beat-em-ups ever created.

****! is like a point-blank shotgun blast of adrenaline aimed straight at the nervous system.This game is one of the most fun, colorful, and joyful experiences you can hope to have in video game form. If you've had the pleasure of playing Neon White, ****! does for score attack games what Neon White did for games where speedrunning and creative use of tools is the aim of the game. Spread across 9 chapters and like 50 tracks of varied difficulty, ****! sees you operating a sick-ass train that behaves like a skateboard. You can execute everything from basic ollies and flicks to 720° mega flickity super switch combo wombos that end up landing on a rail grind, all the while collecting consumables, unlocking new trains, unlocking new mechanics (double-rail drift, wind surges, etc.), and listening to an awesome soundtrack composed of electropop, J-pop, J-hop, and all manner of genres that elevate the entire experience. The main point of the game, honestly, is to have fun and try to do as many consecutive tricks as possible. While the game isn't an open-world game like one would initially imagine, the routes and set pieces are varied enough to where that's not an issue. There is a starting point, and there is an end point, yet all of the creatively placed train tracks and scenarios in-between are ripe for experimentation to your heart's content. This is aided greatly by a very forgiving scoring and death system, which almost never see you losing more than 10 seconds of progress. While the score needed to progress might be incredibly simple to achieve, mastery over any given level requires quite a bit of patience. Some of the stages are more linear affairs that still manage to hold plenty of secrets and different ways of reaching your goals, while others are laps that branch out into 7 different ways of trying to set a new high score on your personal leaderboard. Because of the sheer speed and adrenaline-pumping action happening on screen, it is actually really difficult to tell how most of the levels are designed.Every level feels like it has a style of its own, every boss you encounter is memorable in its own way, and every new mechanic you unlock just deepens the moment-to-moment gameplay. The only negatives that I can find are as follows: ****! is clearly not a AAA-polished game, with me experiencing quite a few bugs during my time with it. Despite its short runtime (8~ish hours) I found some of the final tracks to drag quite a bit. Otherwise, this game is one hell of an accomplishment.

During my playthrough of The Old Blood, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was playing a DLC for "The New Order" that ballooned out of proportions and got packaged as a full game. Doing a bit of research, apparently my suspicions were correct. This places Wolfenstein: The Old Blood in a very weird position. On the one hand, I feel like it's not as "important" as its predecessor, yet (gameplay-wise) I also think that almost everything in this "DLC" is done better than in the base game. "The Old Blood" doesn't feel like it has much of the same gravitas and importance as its predecessor. Instead of storming heavily fortified beaches and fortress strongholds, you find yourself trying to infiltrate Castle Wolfenstein and hopefully making it out without anyone noticing. When that plan obviously goes awry, you find yourself back in your usual FPS gameplay loop of murdering hundreds of **** look, I'm not going to pretend like this game evolved Wolfenstein's combat in any way. You're still mostly just sitting behind cover and shooting at enemies. The player agency of going into every enemy encounter either stealthily or guns blazing is still there. However, this gameplay loop is (thankfully) mostly devoid of any bullet sponges, enemies that feel like a chore to interact with, or poorly explained boss fights that see you through 7 miles of smoke. That alone makes this game feel better to play than "The New Order" even if some of the forced stealth sections, climbing sections, and difficult enemy encounters did feel a bit tedious at times. All of that, combined with fewer immersion-breaking moments and a better presentation, leads me to enjoying The Old Blood quite a bit, but not enough for me to be yelling about it from the mountaintops.

Beast of Reincarnation is a true disappointment on basically all fronts. The story moves at a glacial pace, which isn't helped by the fact that every single character in this game has the emotional range of the Sahara Desert. Every sentence is elongated by a 5-second pause, every shot of the characters spewing dialogue is just a shot - reverse shot affair, and when it isn't that, it's just a black screen with subtitles. All of this culminates in an ending that could (in theory) work, but the game drains your soul far before you reach the game's emotional climax. P.S.: No skip button during cutscenes is a war crime. The art style and graphic fidelity are truly baffling. A "nature reclaims human lands" style that is too afraid to show any real colour or personality. Every area is smeared with this lifeless filter that makes everything look muted and muddy with almost no contrast. Every area (apart from the final few) looks exactly the same. If Brad hadn't remarked on the fact that we've moved a substantial distance, every single time we moved, I would have assumed we were just moving in increments of 500 metres, because 90% of this game looks exactly the same. Meanwhile, the soundtrack's blatantly saccharine vibe grates your ears because the visuals just don't hold up to its **** combat can be fun and flashy at times. You truly unlock an ungodly amount of moves, combos, combo extensions, etc. This is the game's crowning achievement, and for what it is, I think it can be fun most of the time. Unfortunately, the enemy forces are comprised of 10 different enemies that get repeated ad nauseam for 20 hours straight. You basically see 95% of the enemy variety in the first zone, and the game never deviates from those enemies until the final few bosses. Speaking of bosses, all of them repeat 3 or 4 times. Basically, all of them are just bigger versions of normal enemies with one or two added attacks. Hence, literally none of them are difficult, memorable or fun. I'd call it lazy, but I feel like that would be a compliment, because it seems to me like most people are putting more effort into their reviews than the developers put into the enemy variety.There is no input buffering, so Emma feels stiffer to control than she ought to. If you press the dodge button and, while in the act of dodging, you press the aim your bow button or the heal button, nothing happens. You literally have to wait until most animations end before you can do anything else, otherwise you just end up standing there like a dumbass with his **** in his hand. Before I forget, Koo's abilities are kind of neat, and the pause that happens when you decide to use his abilities was nowhere near as flow breaking as I thought it would be. Some of them even give you some nice new ways of dodging incoming **** exploration of this game is also just kind of... there? The game obviously wants you to explore these zones, but Koo just sniffs out literally every single pickup in a radius around him, so you never feel surprised to find a new pickup. Because of this, most areas just felt like checklists of things to pick up, and not zones that I would look forward to exploring. The same goes for the enemies. Because Koo sniffs them from a mile away, giving you wall hacks in the process, there aren't any fiendishly placed traps or ambushes. Most enemies just waddle around aimlessly until you decide to end their suffering. The game also has souls-like bonfires scattered throughout, which is especially odd, because you don't lose anything when you die. Some of them are also placed right next to each other with no rhyme or reason. In short, even as a gamepass game, Beast of Reincarnation doesn't do enough to warrant me giving it a positive rating. I didn't hate my time with this game, but it could have been half as long as it is and nothing of note would have been lost.

Getting the obvious out of the way up front: Palworld has one of the most addictive gameplay loops I've ever had the pleasure of playing. I have lost count of the number of times I said to myself, "Just 15 more minutes until I get x done," only to find myself looking at the time 2 hours later, having done 15 other things that weren't x, and promptly facepalming and asking myself what's wrong with me. While it feels like this addicting loop was made specifically to tailor itself to people that need constant stimulation via shiny objects and plentiful upgrades, those shiny objects and upgrades just work. The chests you open and the pal spheres you find around the world are tailored to a specific region's difficulty level, so as long as you're progressing at a steady pace, they never feel useless. Slowly upgrading your items from a scrappy bow to an assault rifle, from barely any defense to armor made out of high-tech steel feels rewarding. And upgrading your base to a point where most of the tedious aspects of the game are being automated by your pals feels extra rewarding, as it allows you to focus on more important gameplay loops like exploration, boss fights, pal capturing, and all the goodies that come with those. There is a serious hit of dopamine every time you return to your base, just to see 2 new items that will drastically aid with exploration / combat waiting for you. To be fair, I still haven't even tried stuff like breeding, mutations, decorations, nor any of the post-endgame content, so I might actually be missing out on some large gameplay systems here. But with 80 hours under my belt and a defeated final boss, I consider my time with the game to be plentiful enough to leave this review. On the bad side of things, I sincerely think this game's late game just ****. Granted, I was part of an always online server with a bunch of friends, so I couldn't just change the game settings all willy-nilly like I could if I was in a single player game, but I still think the late game ****. At about the time you start making computers, my interest in the game just plummeted. Items take forever to craft. You're already at your fifth furnace built with 3 more different furnaces to go, a new pal sphere assembly line gives you one new recipe instead of like three, pals become impossible to catch unless you have the turbo mega ultra ancient pal spheres, an assault rifle needs 25 headshots to kill a level 50 human that's wearing a bandana, in order to find "metal x" you need to bring "item z" to "location s" at "time b" and then twerk to the Palworld gods in the hopes of a favourable drop, and so on... Like, I understand the need for a late game grind in these sorts of games. But the way it's handled in this game it actively makes much of what you did in the early to mid game feel irrelevant. What's the point in getting most of the effigies that help with capture rate, if I am basically required to use the last tier of pal sphere to capture late game pals. What's the point in having +40% running speed, when even most early game pals run and fly faster than that. You get the point.I'd ultimately still recommend this game. But I'd be lying if I said that the late game didn't sour my experience quite a bit.

One of the most unique, immersive, and interesting games I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing, Pacific Drive is an atmospheric survival horror game that sees the player venturing out of their mechanic shop into S.T.A.L.K.E.R-like, post-apocalyptic zones and hopefully bringing back as much loot as possible to upgrade and manage their car, shop, and personal arsenal of tools and protective clothing. In short, it is a roguelite, open-zone exploration survival game, wrapped within a car-management game, with a creepy atmosphere and an interesting story to boot. Huh, reading that back, I guess that isn't as short as I thought it was in my head. How the developers managed to get all of these pieces to work as well as they do is beyond me. On paper, this just seems like a bad idea. A "too many cooks in the kitchen" situation. Too many different genres, which will inevitably devolve into a forgettable pool of mediocrity. Yet as you're experiencing this game for the first time, after a while, all of it just gels together into one fantastic, cohesive whole. Even as I finished the story, I was still encountering new anomalies and wacky conditions that the game was throwing my way. I am still unsettled by the game's ambiance, even though I'm pretty sure that nothing is actually out there making those noises... I think? I hope! At the time of writing this review, the only thing I want is to return for more runs out into its anomaly-infested zones. Your car is everything. Your guidance, your light, your best friend as you just briefly escape the dangers of the zone, and your worst enemy when a tire pops at the wrong moment, when it decides to develop a quirk that annoys you to no end, or when a ghost decides to inhabit it and starts playing with all the buttons. Because of this, you'll become very well acquainted with it and all of its adorable quirks. While you're on one of your runs, you have to take care of the gear shifting, lights, wipers, radio, and all manner of things, which just deepens the game's immersive feeling and deepens your connection with this inanimate object inside a video game. Things that seem tedious at first (repairing every single part of your car) slowly turn into quiet, meditative moments where you collect your thoughts in the safety of your garage as you prepare for another run where that goddamn car will take most of the beating for you as you refuse to turn on the headlights so that you can save a microjoule of battery energy, just for you to inevitably drive face-first into a humongous rock at 50 mph. And while I do sincerely believe that the game might be a bit too easy (in fairness, there are higher difficulty settings that I just haven't gotten to yet) and that a few more things could have been thrown into the mix to better keep the facade of the entire experience, I ultimately love basically everything this experience has to offer.

Night in the Woods is at its best when it is directly confronting you with life's grim realities. A truly wonderful art style and a soundtrack that, at worst, fits the situation perfectly are intermixed with a story about trauma, stress, mood swings, depression, relationship issues, dread about what tomorrow will bring, etc. These things are written with such heart that I can't help but adore them every time they happen. Wondering why a character is the way that they are, only for them to drop a bombshell about their life, their upbringing, all of their doubts and insecurities, and how they cope with it all... It hits hard in a way that few games dare tackle. It feels so human that it transcends the adorable caricatures that are spewing it, to where you start seeing them as incredibly complex characters with their own lives. I found the game to be an almost perfect blend of nihilism and whatever the word for "Eh, whatcha gonna do about it? Might as well have fun with the time we do have" is. What doesn't hit as hard is the game's runtime, and some of its other plot twists and revelations. While I refuse to spoil anything major about the game, its chunky 9-hour runtime puts it leagues above most other "talking simulators" I've played. Mind you that I haven't even experienced everything this game has to offer, so if anybody wants to be even more thorough, that playtime might go up to at least a dozen hours. By the end, you really feel each one of those hours. When you mix that in with some plot threads that didn't really resolve in a satisfying manner and just a general lack of comprehension from the world surrounding our main characters (seriously, somebody goes missing during the course of the game's story, and nobody bats an eye), it leaves you with a wonderfully told story that unfortunately didn't fully stick the landing.

Made with a clear hatred for everything the people who ushered in WW2 stood for, Wolfenstein: The New Order is a brutal FPS that is carried by its style and setting. Set in an alternate timeline where the Allies capitulated and the Third Reich now controls the world, The New Order puts you in the shoes of B.J. Blazkowicz as you shoot, stab and sometimes even sneak your way through about a dozen or so hours of **** compounds. While the game gets off to a pretty great start, the mindless repetition of its gameplay, the late-game bullet sponges, some clearly unfinished parts and the sheer unwillingness from the developers to just let you rain chaos on this evil world make for a rather bland and forgettable campaign. Just when you get into the groove of things, the game oftentimes takes away all of your weapons for a designated stealth / traversal section, with you needing to acquire your entire arsenal back again, only for the game to take them away yet again. Rinse and repeat until the credits finally roll. By the end of the game I was still enamoured with the stylishly shot cutscenes, the performances, the world and level design. I just couldn't stomach yet another bullet sponge enemy that I had to destroy with a specific weapon, which forced me to run from battery station to enemy location like five times before it inevitably died. Only to be greeted by yet another two of said enemies in the next room.

Metal Gear Solid V is clearly an unfinished game. Its story and SIDE OPS take a complete nosedive after CHAPTER 1 (even in CHAPTER 1 they weren't exactly stellar), with the second chapter being nothing more than a bunch of repeat missions and a couple of quests that narratively completely jump the shark and feel like fragments of what should have been a game twice its length. There is no satisfying ending, no clever payoffs, nor anything of the sort. The game goes out with a whimper before any of its narrative elements coalesce into something greater. The thing that makes me want to recommend this game to almost anyone, however, is its gameplay. MGS V is still one of the greatest open-world, single-player, tactical sandboxes I have ever played. The fact that this game gives you such absurdly varied weapons, gadgets, and tools with which you then infiltrate your way across two giant maps is nothing short of staggering. Save a hostage by going in guns blazing, stealth your way through while leaving no traces of your infiltration, call in a support heli, mount loudspeakers onto a decoy and distract half the enemy forces with it, run around as a giant box with a poster of a babe glued to the front as you then karate chop those commie **** left, right, and center. This game truly is the wet dream of anyone who wants to try out new and wacky ways of completing any given task. What really helps with this gameplay loop are the enemy forces. While I can't help but feel like most of them are a bit too dumb and could use a buff to their hearing, eyesight, and damage output, the thing that makes them an evergreen enemy is their adaptability. Did you infiltrate a base by mostly shooting enemies in the head? Now they receive helmets. Did you throw around sleep grenades? Now they get gas masks. Have you used a route one too many times? There might be a minefield waiting for you the next time you try the same route. Shoot them from afar with a sniper? Next time they might have mortars at the ready and 3 snipers surrounding the entire area. It is such a simple yet effective way of making every encounter feel fresh, with you constantly second-guessing yourself. The game succeeds in making you constantly think on your feet and second-guess yourself with every choice you make, and because of that, it is remarkably easy to put 40+ hours into this game without ever feeling boredom.

Right, let's not sugarcoat this. Far Cry New Dawn should have been a DLC. You can give me as many new laughably bad antagonists, baffling color palette changes, and new destroyed tree textures as you want, at the end of the day, I am just replaying Far Cry 5's Montana again, only somehow with an even worse story and characters. On the gameplay side of things, Ubisoft actually changed things up. Not only did they get rid of weapon customization and add light RPG progression in the form of tiered enemies that require the same or better-tiered weapons in order to dispose of efficiently, but they also added essentially infinitely replayable outposts and dedicated raids that push you into that tried and tested Far Cry gameplay loop. While I wholeheartedly believe that these moments represent the best of the game, I don't think they are handled well due to a single issue: there is no compelling reason to engage with this content for an extended period.Because of the game's RPG elements, once you get a legendary-tiered weapon or two and the muscle memory to switch to armor-piercing rounds, you've essentially beaten the game. And, in my opinion, these are far too quick and easy to achieve in order for the game to have any meaningful sense of progression. Unless you want to grind the same raids in order to unlock cosmetics, more weapons than you'll ever need, or to upgrade any given weapon so it has 5% more damage with every upgrade, you will probably do a couple of them once or twice and call it a day. 5% more damage on a weapon that kills an enemy with a single bullet is pointless. And 5% more damage on any other weapon feels borderline useless, because most enemies die in a maximum of 5 bullets. Unless you're as dumb as I am and instantly tier an important outpost to its max level, there are very few enemies that ever present any meaningful opposition. Meanwhile, those top-tier enemies that I stupidly spawned in present a borderline insurmountable roadblock, one that becomes as easy to overcome as any other roadblock once you put about 10 hours into the game or however long it will take you to unlock legendary-tier weapons. It's the same gameplay loop as the past few Far Cry games, only this time Ubisoft added difficult-to-kill enemies into the equation. Are these enemies difficult to kill because you need a semblance of tactics, preparation, positional awareness, or any other interesting skills? Nope. They're difficult because their tier is GOLD, and your weapons are tier BLUE, and hence you don't do enough damage to them. **** to ****.

An upgrade over its predecessor in every way imaginable, even today, Batman: Arkham City remains one of the greatest, 3rd-person beat-em-ups ever created. Throughout your dozen-or-so hour-long journey across the rooftops and seedy underbelly of Arkham, you'll come across some of the most memorable renditions of Batman, his colleagues, and his most fierce rivals in recent memory. You will experience a fantastic story full of twists and turns. And in between all of the more character-driven moments, you'll be solving puzzles, exploring a wonderfully realized world, saving the people of Gotham from the thugs that have taken over the streets, and, in general, be put into memorable fighting arena after memorable fighting arena, with you slowly unlocking and upgrading a plethora of gadgets that help with exploration and combat alike. Every new gadget and upgrade feels like a meaningful addition to your arsenal, which makes you want to explore and fight more. And every new enemy heightens the stakes and complexity of any given combat encounter, which makes you want to get better and better at using everything that your arsenal can muster. It is a viciously addictive gameplay loop, one that I can't help but adore with all my heart. The few missteps that the game makes (the sheer number of Riddler puzzles feels suffocating, some bosses aren't exactly the greatest tests of skill, the meh epilogue, and a few others) are just prominent enough for me to not call this game perfect. Yet they aren't prominent enough to make more than a tiny dent in what is an otherwise fun, well-designed, and fantastic game.

As I roll credits on Far Cry 5, I can't help but feel bemused by the experience. On the gameplay side of things, it's more Far Cry as you know and love it. You murder thousands upon thousands of cultists who run death camps, starve and torture people, drug them against their will, and do all manner of unspeakable acts. There are quirky characters waiting for you around every corner, some of which can even join you in your campaign to bring down the deranged cult. The map is gorgeous, lush, packed with details, and beautifully realised, the gunplay feels great. All in all it is just the usual Ubisoft open-world sandbox that they have been repeating since FC3. Sure it's a bit repetitive and uninspired... A few more notable changes to the gameplay loop would very much be welcome, but for what it is, it does its job well. The story side of things is where my bemusement truly begins. A batch of memorable villains are absolutely ruined by their shoddy motivations and the game's incessant need to beat me over the head with the "But what if you're wrong, and we, the crazy cult of lunatics, are right?!?!" spiel, and two completely asinine endings that don't feel earned or satisfying in the slightest. It's really difficult to say anything substantive here, because I don't really understand what the point of this game was. The cult has no other motivations outside of destroying the world. If you stop them, they blow up the world anyway. If you don't stop them, all of the PTSD and brainwashing you've been receiving stay with you, and the cult remains operational. It's a lose-lose scenario in which the only kernel of "wisdom" I can muster to find is "Cults do be bad, you'd best not trust them." Like yeah, no ****?!?

Somehow made with the same amount of love as every single one of Bancho's amazing dishes, DAVE THE DIVER meshes the serene and gorgeous act of diving into an ever-changing ocean and the panic-inducing jobs of fighting dangerous sea life and an always overcrowded sushi restaurant into one fantastic experience. As any other great management game, DAVE THE DIVER's progression system allows the player to progress from a scared explorer that can barely catch a few fish to essentially having almost every single part of your sushi enterprise be automated for you as you lay back and mix **** for your clientele. The pixel art is fantastic, the OST and animations are gorgeous, and the game constantly keeps you on your toes, seeing as how basically any boring side quest can turn into a memorable one in the blink of an eye. To me, the game's unpredictability is somehow its greatest weakness and its biggest strength at the same time. Because you never really know what to expect, I found it very difficult to establish a good rhythm with the game. One dive would see me catching a couple dozen fish and finishing a quest in the span of five minutes. The next would see me deeply embroiled in a spy-thriller stealth section with multiple bosses, hidden collectibles, and even a few puzzles thrown into the mix, all the while pausing the gameplay at every possible opportunity to tutorialize completely banal gameplay mechanics, turning what I assumed would be a quick five-minute dive into an hour-long section. After which, I still had to do all of the busywork of tending to my farm, tending to my underwater farm, deciding whether to sell or keep certain things, go seahorse racing, you know, the usual. In moments like these the game felt genuinely overwhelming and like it had no desire to be paced in a fun or coherent way, which made my time with it feel a lot worse than it probably should have. Luckily the pros far outweigh the cons in this one. DAVE THE DIVER is fantastic and an absolutely necessary buy for anyone that enjoys the occasional casual management game.

More than any prior game in the series, Assassin's Creed Odyssey feels like a product to be consumed, rather than a genuine attempt at making something memorable. A visually marvelous open world and a semi-engaging, Witcher 3-inspired story that peaks at the beginning and end of your adventure are wasted on the 30 or so hours that you will spend on repeated encounters strewn about its bloated world. Go there, kill 3 guys, loot 2 chests, burn down 1 war supply chest, and get 75000 XP. Over and over and over again. And when it isn't that, it's fetch quests galore. The repetition became apparent 5 hours into the game. By hour 20 I was fed up with it. And by hour 30, the main quests were still actively feeding into this exact same loop, killing any and all interest I had in its characters and emotional beats. Perhaps this gameplay loop would have been easier to swallow if the game allowed you to actually become stronger than the enemies around you, yet even on the normal difficulty settings some of these fights just go on and on with nothing interesting happening. There are like 5 different enemy types that are repeated ad nauseaum, some of the enemies can't even be one-shot with your assassinations anymore, and the entire world scales with you, with no option to toggle said world-scaling off. There are no builds in this game. You just pick whichever weapons and armor have the higher stats and equip those. Even if someone were to disagree with this claim, the game itself constantly reminds you that you have, and I quote, "better gear in your inventory," which means that even the developers knew that the only thing that really matters in the long run is that dumb DPS or armor rating. This leaves you with a game that is played the exact same way for its entire runtime, plus 4 active abilities that allow you to be a tiny bit more creative than just spamming light attacks a bunch. And if that is the game you want to make, why bloat it to 40 hours when you could have just made a more linear 10-12 hour snack of an experience? My guess is that Ubisoft wanted that sweet, sweet XP booster money.

Metro: Last Light is a grander and more polished continuation of Metro 2033. While I do overall prefer Last Light to 2033, it never felt as scary and resource-intensive as the original. Unfortunately, this game also crashes quite a bit more, and the story, while tighter and more understandable, ultimately isn't as engaging as its predecessor. If you're looking for a couple of great, linear, single-player, and atmospheric first-person shooters, then the Redux versions of Last Light and 2033 will leave you satisfied, even if they clearly aren't some insanely high-budget AAA products.

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.