MessyStinkman

The intro mission is nearly perfect: fast-paced and chaotic without feeling uncontrollable. Weapons that are loud and kick like mules, slow-mo effects, it's very big on spectacle and makes you feel like you're one bad SOB in a very cool sandbox. In the very next mission the gameplay shifts and forces you to play in a very specific and hyper-focused way: sliding at all times in combat and running at top speed. Thematically accurate to be sure but in practice it feels bad and constricting, especially after they took such pains in the first area to loosen the leash and tell you to go have fun. Enemies have unerring aim and regularly prefire you around corners, forcing you to play at too dizzying a pace to really enjoy or focus on what you're doing. Not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination but my enthusiasm for it died incredibly quickly after such a great start. It looks nice and sounds fantastic, at least.

Recently replayed due to a good Steam sale. Homefront contains virtually every element that was common in this era of FPS that we have discarded and it has aged pretty badly. The story is interesting - fight a revolutionary war against overwhelmingly powerful North Korean occupation forces. Where it stumbles is that the story is completely one-note and is extremely small in scale; "follow these guys, shoot those guys". You never feel like you're contributing to a larger war effort and instead are just shooting guys. Gameplay-wise, the shooting is fine but the monumentally stupid AI ruins almost the entire experience. Norks will regularly pop into existence directly in front of or behind you, and you can watch them pop into reality. Your teammates will push you if you are in their way, so if you're using a piece of cover they want, surprise! You're now out in the open. Mission objectives are infuriating because 90% of them are "follow Connor", and you are led by the hand through each and every level. A very significant portion of your game time is going to be spent standing there watching your teammates open doors, move furniture or open the way for you. It's disappointing because this could have been a great experience. I can see a great game like this where you're traveling across the American heartland and stabbing at the invincible occupation force until they're weak enough to topple. A few Metal Gear Solid-esque mechanics such as sending out NPC squads to raid Nork outposts, steal supplies etc would have made this feel less like a forgettable action movie and more like a war of liberation.

I see a lot of praise for this expansion and I don't understand it. The new weaponry is cool, and that's about the only nice thing I can say. The characters are "hey do you remember Star Wars", the locations are nice, but the biggest, most glaring problem is that nobody ever SHUTS UP. I am not exaggerating when I say that nearly every second step of this expansion's questline is "talk to x" or "listen to y". During missions they talk literally non-stop in your ear about a bunch of garbage I defy you to care even the tiniest bit about. It legitimately begins to wear at you only an hour or so in, and you must struggle through it if you want the coolest lightsaber abilities or upgrades. The Renegade missions are a mixed bag: fun the first time you do them, a monumental waste of time afterwards. They gate a lot of the really juicy rewards behind the game mode where you will be invaded by other players and murdered, so if you don't like PVP then this will feel like punishment. Conclusion: I bought the Destiny 2 Complete bundle on steam for I think twenty dollars so price-wise I feel perfectly fine about this expansion, but I just don't understand why they tried to hide a crossover this large, important and likely expensive to produce under several thousand lines of voice that you truly do not want to hear. I struggled through it all, felt nothing, and will not be returning to this expansion's content.

I'm a big fan of Way of the Samurai from way back and this is so close to those games I'd call it a spiritual successor. Ronin takes itself a bit more seriously than WOTS ever did but that's not a bad thing. Cool characters, tons to do, lots of interesting places to explore and a great combat system that gets more and more accessible the more practice you get. The PC port is absolute dog water though and if this had been ported properly I'd probably give it a 9. It runs like crap no matter your hardware and if you want decent framerates in town you'll need to dial your settings back further than you'll like. Still, the game is fun, engaging, entertaining and I can't wait to fire it up again.

This is not a game. A linear story where you rarely if ever need to push a button, character interactions you have nothing to do with, and brutally ugly animation. Would have made for a fine animated show but why is this marketed as a videogame?

tl;dr buy it on sale: I got it for thirty bucks and I'm having a good time. A fun game overall. Some real major missteps in the writing leads to a very overall childish feel to most of the events and goings-on; this is the first game I've played in a long time that feels this much like a young adult novel. I also hope you're ready for a whole lot of girlbosses because virtually every important character is a female. Shooting, exploring, driving and "leveling up" all feels fine and it's compelling enough to keep you wanting to keep going, to unlock that new thing or see the next story development. Absolutely abysmal technical performance is the order of the day with this game engine though and let me tell you that it is utterly brutal. I have a Radeon 7900 XTX, a boatload of RAM and a decent processor and this thing still runs like crap and crashes like there's no tomorrow. It's a real testament to the fun factor of this game that I still keep firing it up, because I have uninstalled and demanded refunds for much less.

There are a couple of duds, but it's hard to find fault with a single product that delivers this much entertainment. There's a lot of experimentation, some really creative mechanics and ideas, and all of it is wrapped in a consistent and believable audio/visual presentation style that is impossible to dislike. My favorite, Night Manor, is worth the price of admission alone, and there's at least ten more games you'll like just as much. An awesome product you definitely ought to buy.

Truly awful supporting NPCs. Everything else about this game is fantastic. No, the motorcycle is not as bad as they say it is (but I still don't really like it either).

I have never 100%ed a JRPG in my life before P5R, but I genuinely didn't want it to end. The 3D visuals looks good, the 2D looks good, and the transitions between them are phenomenal. Even the menus are works of art. The soundtrack is absolutely perfect, the story is fun and asks some interesting questions, the characters are well-done and all have their own personalities and motives. Combat is fun but gets stale once you've figured out each enemy's "gimmick", and some boss battles turn into frustrating slogs if you're not built specifically to counter what they do - and one in particular will almost assuredly require you to "cheat" in order to defeat it. That said though, while I personally think Shadow Hearts: Covenant is subjectively my favorite JRPG of all time, P5R might objectively be better. It just doesn't miss, and there isn't a single part of it you won't like.

It's just okay. Tsushima was a desperately needed breath of fresh air in the open world Assassin's Creed-like genre and I feel that it did nearly everything right. Yotei wears out its welcome much, much faster, and pads out the (underwhelming) main story with an enormous amount of side activities, ranging from kinda fun to "please don't make me do this again". Still looks great and sounds great, but it's missing that secret sauce Tsushima brought in spades.

Truly excellent visuals and sound design. Zero hand-holding; it simply drops you into a bizarre new world and you learn how it works by observing and doing. I especially like how the mechanical designs have an overarching common theme, and after being in the game for awhile you will begin to "think like one of them" and will begin to understand what certain machines or puzzles are about much faster than when you've just begun. The combat is awful though. I wish they had just not even bothered, because it's really quite bad, and drags you out of the otherwise excellent experience every single time you have to fight (and you have to fight a lot more than is really necessary).

Good God what an unbelievable disaster. The people who made this either don't understand or utterly hate what made Civ a great series in the first place. Maybe in the next five years they can patch it to be merely mediocre, but at the moment this is easily the worst Civ game ever made. I would rather go back to the Xbox Live Arcade boardgame version.

I've definitely played games that looked bad, or sounded bad, or were insultingly poorly written, or just plain weren't fun. It's only rarely that you get a game like Dustborn that is all of the above at the same time. I would not play this game on a bet, I would not play it for free, I would not play it ever again.

Looks bad, runs worse. Sounds pretty good. A story that is so unbelievably stupid, disconnected and up its own rear that it beggars belief. Gameplay that is dull and uninspired, and outside of the "mindjacking" mechanic does nothing that hasn't been done a million times before in other, better third person shooters. This is still, to this day, the only game I have ever just thrown in the trash. Do not pay money for this under any circumstances.

After putting about six hours into it I feel I can safely say I might genuinely hate this game. The combat feels terrible, the story is so bland and uninteresting it might as well not exist, the setting ****, the visuals are washed out and boring, the soundtrack is boring. It looks great and the sound effects are good, but that's probably the only positive thing I can say about it. It lacks literally everything that made Eternal unique or remarkable and has replaced it with a flat color scheme and some "epic" dragon and mech levels that you absolutely cannot wait to end. Combat has replaced the almost puzzle game-like problem-solving where you need to chose the right weapon for the right situation and has made the entirety of every engagement revolve around parrying green whatsits and avoiding or tanking the red ones while using whatever weapons you want. That's it. That's the game. This is easily the weakest mainline Doom game in the entire franchise.

The high point of Dragon Age has always been its worldbuilding and its writing, and they have utterly obliterated that with this entry in the series. None of them have had what I would consider "excellent" combat or mechanical systems, but the other games - particularly Dragon Age: Origins - had a unique and sometimes extremely innovative take on the fantasy genre that at the very least had you interested to see what would happen with your favorite side character, or see that new city or vista. That has been replaced with the most childish writing I have seen in a game since the disastrous Saints Row reboot. I know you've heard a million times about the "woke" stuff in this game but that really isn't even the worst part here; this is a game that doesn't think you're mature enough to handle a grown-up or uncomfortable story. This is a game for much, much younger audiences, and calling it Dragon Age was a strange choice because thematically it's just not Dragon Age. Extremely poor showing and I am glad I refunded it.

It's pretty good. Easily surpassed my expectations, but in honesty my expectations were extremely low. It looks good, sounds pretty good, and for the most part the "modern" changes they've made don't actually ruin the flow or feel of the game (a real surprise to me). Some of the new puzzles are absolutely fiendish and I'm very pleased that they didn't make this game insultingly easy. I am especially pleased with how the Mannequin now behaves: they will regularly sprint around, just barely at the edge of your flashlight's reach, to hide in new spots to ambush you from when you get too close. Knowing that they are there, and even worse, knowing roughly but not exactly where they are, is a deliciously tense and dreadful feeling. There is one major stumbling point, possibly the largest of the entire remake, and it's a "variant" of a common enemy that acts differently. While the rest of the game has slowly tried to overwhelm you with occasionally a couple enemies at a time, the pace is usually more along the lines of "learn the enemy's patterns and attempt to overcome them". When you reach the point of the game where they unveil the enemy variant I am referencing, it becomes a cruel joke; in one single room I killed over a dozen of these guys. They are not scary, they don't sneak up on you or do any of the other cool tricks the other enemies do, they are simply there as an ammo tax. Even worse, when targeting them with melee attacks the camera almost always goes completely bananas, thereby pretty much necessitating using some of your precious bullets to get them out of your face. I hate them, and while it sounds like exaggeration they have legitimately killed a lot of my interest in finishing the last section of the game. That said, overall I like this remake and I'm glad it's out. Is it worth the hilarious asking price of nearly one hundred Canadian dollars? No. Pretty close though.

Signalis is a masterpiece. It is very rare to find a game, especially nowadays, that does literally everything right, and Signalis does every single thing right. It is about as close to perfect as games can get and I genuinely think it might be the best indie game ever made, or at the very least in the top 3. It does a great job of slowly building the story for you, and that story is bleak and dystopian and very sad. The gameplay is engaging and fun, and has a very pronounced progression in that it gets more complicated and "busy" the further you get in the game. Only one of the puzzles was frustratingly obtuse and required trial and error, and all the rest made a great deal of sense once you've sat and thought about them for a few minutes - and one puzzle in particular involving an X-ray machine had me saying out loud "oh, that's clever" once I found the solution. This game is just excellent. Looks good, sounds good, very well-written, and it's just plain fun to play. It's a fantastic, inspired, one-of-a-kind game, and if you like survival horror or good stories and you haven't played this yet you're missing out.

If you liked Subnautica's quiet, reflective underwater exploration and are expecting the same from Below Zero you will be disappointed. BZ has far too much dialogue, and none of it is particularly good. You spend a lot more time on the ground in this one, which kinda defeats the purpose of the entire underwater theme. The vehicles aren't as interesting, the progression feels artificially slowed down to make you do even more busywork than in the first, and it feels like they sacrificed a great deal in order to showcase the story without realizing the story just isn't very interesting. Give it a pass unless you wished that the first Subnautica was more talky and less exciting.

This is a nearly perfect sequel to a weird, niche game. I am one of those freaks who think the first DD was almost perfect and almost all of my expectations were met for DD2. It's certainly not perfect, and needs more enemy variation and more items, but everything else builds beautifully onto the game I loved and simply gives me more of it. If it hadn't released in a barely finished state I would have given this a 9 but man was it f'ed on launch day.

I'm very impressed. ADD pulls a lot of inspiration from a lot of really good games and combines them in a setting that's respectful of the source material while doing a great job of feeling like an actual Aliens bug hunt. The mission objectives get added on as your squads discover more of the colony/infestation, and it really does have a great , progressive feeling of being a dynamic campaign that is changing in scope as you learn more about it. I've never played a strategy game before where I'll go in expecting to accomplish x objective, but will instead discover some valuable items then fend off a brutal alien attack and need to extract - then come back the next day with a fresh squad and finish what I came to do. It just feels good. The only really major thing that I don't like is the stealth. When your squad is detected, the xenos will begin hunting you for a period of time, and I don't feel like there's enough options to avoid being spotted. That said, this isn't Thief, this is a game about state-of-the-badass-art marines blowing up bugs, so I understand why sneaking around isn't a huge focus. I really like it, at least so far. Worth a purchase and I can't wait to fire it up again.

Truly hideous visual design. Truly unbelievably ugly character models. Terrible weapon design. Boring combat at the best of times, broken and buggy at the worst. AI is either cheating or is brain-dead. Combat design is frustrating (why can't I just use a stake as a melee weapon? Why does it have to be attached to my gun?). Game design in general is frustrating: huge glass window next to a locked door? That window is invincible and can't be broken, so you must use a precious lockpick. Huge glass window that leads nowhere and is not important? It can be broken. Glacially slow XP gain means that you don't feel that you're advancing in any way. Enemies can and will spawn either into walls or will just pop into existence directly behind you whenever they please. The gun visuals are so hilariously overdone it's actually kinda shocking: most guns look like they're either out of Borderlands, Tron, or Diablo. The only enemies that offer any kind of challenge are the vampires and they all behave the same way. Just an utter, complete mess. It's free on Games Pass and I still won't play it again. Maybe it's fun with friends (most things are) but playing solo the game's loop is so broken and unsatisfying it feels like punishment.