Renzokuken

Honestly can't understand how this is getting such glowing reviews. As far as the monster gathering mechanics go, it's good, but tedious in the sense you can't just capture something by fighting it once, you need to fight something over and over again sometimes accruing as little as 5% progress per kill, with 100-200% required to recruit it. The plot is good on paper, but poorly executed, I'm 60 hours in so far, and the game has taken me to every major area at least twice, and the latter half of the game has a nasty habit of having you replay the entire area you just completed due to time travel shenanigans. I'm engrossed enough to want to see how it ends, but not particularly happy about having to replay areas and trudge through anime slop filler conversations, not a single word that comes out of Inori's mouth has any bearing on the plot. The absolute worst thing about this game, are the digimon following you around. Now they had to make them follow you, because you're supposed to chat with them to change their personalities through a series of repetitive trite questions. However the further into the game you get the bigger most digimon are, they're programmed to run in front of you when you stop so they can be spoken to, but all this does is constantly block your camera, it's absolutely infuriating. So if you want a mid story, with cliche anime conversations, a series of decent but overused locales and a good but somewhat grindy monster collecting experience, check this game out.

A game built from the ground up for the git gud crowd, tedious and time wasting, difficult for the sake of being difficult. Act 3 is a masterclass in how to double down on everything that made your game bad. Avoid, unless your idea of fun is searching the world for the next wall to bang your head against for hours at a time. I recommended this to friends based on how good Hollow Knight was, every single one bounced off it.

Gacha trash, only worth playing if you want to develop a gambling addiction. They ply you with freebies at the start and in a few months they'll tighten the screws and power creep everything, best to avoid it in the first place.

Garbage. The initial tutorial is fine, the game plays fine, it's absolutely rammed full of microtransactions, and keeps pitting me against higher ranked players who kerb stomp me. If all I have is a starter deck, put me up against other players who only have a starter deck.

An absolutely abysmal cringey story, married to a decent action-looter game, with tedious inventory management, and an awful endgame. The endgame and subsequent DLC are essentially just a series of item grinding to unlock gated content with modifiers that have you playing the same stuff over and over again. Maybe check it out if you're a die-hard Nioh fan, or are one of those people like myself who has to play every Final Fantasy game, otherwise just go play Nioh.

Bravely Default is an excellent game, but the Switch 2 version offers very little over the original, a new UI and two new minigames, no new jobs or dungeons, online functionality now tied to a subscription service, and a complete inability to actually buy the game and own it, since all physical versions are game key carts, the better graphics simply aren't worth it.

A really solid RPG, with style and substance far exceeding what you'd expect from it's small studio origins. While it nails the RPG, story and exploration aspects it does succumb to a few pitfalls, wonky parry timings, poor lip synching, a total lack of any map or minimap to aid navigation in their fairly expansive dungeons, and the Xenoblade penchant for dumping random minibosses that are far stronger than you into stages to encourage backtracking add some frustration to what is otherwise a really fantastic example of a modernized turn based RPG experience.

Sea of stars is a very pretty example of a boring game, if the developers took half the effort into the story and game mechanics that they put into the fantastic music and absolutely gorgeous pixel art, they might have something worth playing here. But at the end of the day the game falls flat due to its boring, predictable and cliché story, it's absolutely atrocious one-note combat, and it's complete lack of any meaningful character customization or even progression. Each character gets a grand total of four attacks throughout the entire story, combo attacks exist, but they all amount to spending combo points for a minor damage increase. The panel system that allows you to prevent enemy attacks by hitting the enemy with a string of specific elements, is utterly frustrating as it presumes you have full access to everything at all times, which runs directly at odds with the games MP system which heavily limits your use of abilities, you frequently find yourself out of MP when you need a specific attack to prevent an enemy's big hit. The game lacks any kind of fast travel, but actively blocks access to major locations with dungeons, there are a few shortcuts to open, but may locations you will need to revisit require traversing a dungeon you already cleared, all over again. Overall, this game is nostalgia bait in it's purest form, gorgeous to look at, but a tedious slog to play.

I'm genuinely not sure why this game is scoring so highly, don't get me wrong, from a technical standpoint animal well does a lot with very little, it has a charming art style and a unique atmosphere with a large world to explore and engaging puzzles. My issue is that the gameplay quickly becomes tedious, many puzzles are fairly obtuse, which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, if many of them also didn't have a huge time to retry due to mandatory backtracking, either due to having to return from one of the very sparse save points, or having to escape to reset the puzzle. If this game had some kind of reset room button it'd go a long way a alleviate some of the worst aspects of this game.

Ender Magnolia takes everything that made Ender Lilies fantastic, and runs with it, while improving on some of the less flattering aspects of the original game. The music is still amazing, and the world and art direction are still gorgeous. The combat feels weightier and far more impactful, your abilities feel far better curated, and the world is larger with more to explore This is probably the best metroidvania we've seen since Hollow Knight, Ender Magnolia is a must buy for fans of the genre.

A bog-standard, textbook kill god plot, with a somewhat unique twist on the FFX battle system, utterly ruined by a number of poor design choices: Sky-high encounter rates. A dimengeon system that does nothing but offset that time sink, rather than mitigate it. Some of the most obtuse, time-wasting, frustrating, and down right awful boss encounters I've ever had the misfortune of experiencing, but only after you've sunk 20 hours into this game to reach the second half .The juice here just isn't worth the squeeze, avoid this.

Balatro is a really unique game that combines traditional poker, with rogue like deck building elements to create something truely unique. The presentation is barebones, but it has a unique style with it's jokers and use of transitioning audio. It's fairly cheap, available on mobile, or steam deck and it's got an endlessly playable quality in a similar vein to slay the spire, making it ideal for those moments you just have some time to kill. My only complaint with the game is with it's boss blinds, which have unique abilities for example "disable all hearts" or disable a random joker", some of which just straight up hard counter certain playstyles. The game randomly pushes you into a style of play, and it can feel particularly unfair to reach the end of a challenging run only to find the boss hard counters your otherwise winning deck. For example, if I randomly get stuff that buffs heart cards and I build around that, then a later boss disables all hearts. Feels terrible, in an otherwise enjoyable game.

Without question the best metroidvania we've seen since Hollow Knight. The world is stunning, the characters are endearing, the story is interesting, the music is beautiful, and the combat is punishing, difficult to master, but incredibly satisfying once you do. My only complaint are there are some severe difficulty spikes that just sort of come at you from nowhere and really push the limits of how much time a player should need to spend learning a fight, the final boss in particular is several orders of magnitude more difficult than the previous two bosses.

They might have got away with a story as middling as Dawntrail's, had they switched up other aspects of the game. A brand new story would have been the perfect opportunity to change up the end game tomestone grind, maybe introduce new types of raid or trials. Instead, we get the same thing they've been delivering since day 1, only this time the story **** because it's mostly world building. I can understand why it's mostly world building, but that doesn't make it fun. At the end of the day, it's more FFXIV, which is good, but it's not exciting.

A poorly optimized, buggy, crash ridden mess ****. The gameplay has promise, however it has none of the charm of the original, but all of the negative aspects that Capcom really ought to have fixed over the last 12 years. Movement is still sluggish and clunky, pawns are still unbelievably annoying with no option to shut them up without entirely silencing them and losing the odd useful pointers they give about loot and secrets. The colour pallet used is incredibly drab and everything looks washed out. I can see a good game under the roughness, but my god is it a chore to get to with all the technical problems and 12 year old game design.

I've played the game up to the start of chapter 10 so far, I'll withhold judgement on the ending, because it could go either way, but generally speaking I'm disappointed. Performance is awful in performance mode with textures looking blurry and dated, Graphics mode gives a solid 30 FPS though. The absolute biggest problem is that this game just loves to waste the players time, the world is jam packed with time-wasting rubbish. The story is constantly interrupted by a seemingly endless stream of slow walk sequences, gap squeezing and minigames. Some of the minigames like Queen's Blood are worth playing, but the majority of them are tedious, boring, and utterly pointless, for example one side quest has you play a reoccurring Chocobo minigame to find mushrooms which you then have to play a minigame to pick. Every quest has this, the main story is constantly interrupted and the pacing is utterly suffocated by it. The game is probably 100+ hours to 100% and only around 20 of those are spent playing actual story content. The bloating doesn't stop at just minigames either, the entire world is a series of zones populated with Ubisoft towers and generic open-world map icon collecting nonsense, XP, AP, party levels and materia are all heavily tied to this nonsense, so while it's skippable your party will suffer for it. Navigation in the early zones is fine, but there are two midgame zones that are absolutely awful, the maps **** and combine that with verticality that doesn't specify where in the vertical space you're moving to, and it just adds tedium to the already tedious task of collecting up all the open world rubbish. The audio, is a mixed bag, there are many faithful modern renditions of classic tracks, but for every one there's a number a modern electro remixes that just don't fit, and some new tracks that just miss the mark. Basically every flaw with Remake's combat still exists in Rebirth, attack telegraphing is poor, defence is slow meaning responding to attacks feels sluggish and sloppy. There are too many options to use in combat, with your core attacks, dodges, blocking, held inputs for specific commands, ATB menu commands, shortcuts, and sync abilities, it's confusing and extremely difficult to get into at a base level, although I'm sure a lot of depth exists if you take the time to master it. The story, is fine for the most part, the bits where they stick to the original plot are fantastic, some stuff has been switched around for expedience or to make the journey flow better and that's fine. My biggest contention with the story is the whispers, metaverse subplot is bad writing and should never have been greenlit for this game, it adds nothing of value.

A must play for any serious JRPG fan, particuarly those who enjoyed key titles from the SNES era like Final Fantasy VI. This game has the whole package, lovable characters, an engaging plot, a varied and interesting world, combat that's challenging but not frustrating, a progression system that isn't dependent on grinding, in fact almost every system in this game respects the player's time. I really, REALLY enjoyed my time with this game, and I hope you will too.

Ok, so I can't in good conscience recommend Honkai: Star Rail, which is kinda depressing because in many respects it's a fantastic game. The core RPG here, is great, it's a fun space adventure, that breaks many of the tropes of the genre, you're a member **** of travelling explorers who essentially rock up to worlds, solve their problems, and leave. There's no BS about keeping your origins hidden, or non-interference, and it's refreshing to see. The characters are all fun, the dialogue while a bit excessive is light-hearted and witty, the plot has enough to get me hooked, and the combat is simple but fun. The game runs well, has some really great standout set piece moments, and has a really good soundtrack. So why the low score? It's the free to play elements. Had they just charged me $60 for this game, I'd have given it a straight 8/10 and been on my way. But this game is absolutely drowning in horrible systems designed to get you to spend. Trailblazer levels gate your progress through the main story, an endless list of materials gate your character progress, exp items gate your character progression, energy gates your acquisition of these items, but you can pay for energy refills of course. There's not one but two season passes, both paid separately, one with a track and one for daily bonus currency. The worst part though, is the gacha. Rates for obtaining characters are an absolutely abysmal 0.3% for a five star character and that pool is grossly bloated by useless equipment items. It's depressing in the extreme, that a game this good, with production values this high, is a vehicle for such trashy free2play mechanics.

Corrupted all my saves on Ps5 at launch, and CDPR can't fix them.

Yu-Gi-Oh in general, but especially Master Duel, are a masterclass in why the developers of games of this nature need to guard closely against power creep. The majority of duels are won before they begin based on the initial coin flip, because cards are so insanely powerful, special summoning and searching mechanics are incredibly unbiqutious and deck consistency is near perfect. Win conditions these days involve going first, and special summoning a field of heavy hitting monsters with various effects that negate anything your opponent plays. The player going second, loses before they even get to play a card. The game makes no concessions for new players, you will be dumped in with very little explanation, no ability to pause the game, and a 300 second timer to understand what your opponent is doing, make your plays and complete your turn. It's not uncommon for your opponent to pull out a 20 card combo on turn 1 to set their field up and you'll be given zero opportunity to digest this information overload. The game is broken, the community is toxic, there are many better alternatives out there, there's absolutely no reason to download this game.

Starfield is more of the same from Bethesda, an unpolished, unfinished, poorly optimized, buggy mess ****. In any other industry, a product with this many flaws would be recalled, but as per usual gamers get shafted, and Bethesda makes bank while modders fix their product for them. This has to stop, it's one thing for a developer to release a broken mess one time, like Cyberpunk, it's entirely another when every single game they launch has colossal technical problems that don't get fixed for months to years. The annoying thing is, I want to love this, the near future aesthetic is 100% my jam, the plot while basic is enough to keep me going, the ship building when it works is one of my favourite parts of the game. But the horrendous weight limits, the horrible menuing, the AI companions that bug through terrain and engage enemies making any investment in stealth pointless, the graphical glitches, the wonky NPC behaviours, the crashes and neutered performance, all add up to make this a game to avoid.

FromSoft 100% lied through their teeth when they said they weren't making another Souls game, make no mistake this is an Armored Core game right up until the moment you enter a boss battle, then it becomes Armored Souls. FromSoft just couldn't resist, and the end result is a game where 95% of the missions you're gunning down easy fodder, and the rest you're stuck fighting a soul destroying monster of a boss. The problem is you'll spend 1-3 minutes in each of those normal missions, but you'll spend hours banging your head against each boss. The difficulty curve is non-existent, there are only extreme, brutal and punishing difficulty spikes. Each boss has specific intended strategies to beat them, many of them are loadout checks just as much as they are skill checks, that's all well and good, until you realize they gave you the ability to change your loadout if you die, but not the ability to buy new stuff. If you just spent 5 minutes clearing the path to the boss, expect to have to do that again, and again until you buy the weapons that work. Honestly, whether you like this or not is going to be down to personal preference, I've cleared every Souls title to date, I've also been a fan of Armored Core since day 1, but I, for one, did not ask for Souls difficulty in Armored Core, and I feel cheated that they did it despite specifically saying they wouldn't. I play these games for different reasons, I don't think they work melded together. I think the crux of it, is Souls games were methodical, they required you to learn patterns, react to signposting, understand your build and use it, the pacing allowed you to digest the boss mechanics and learn. You can't do that in this game, most of the bosses have no signposting, and even if they did, they're far too fast for it to be meaningful. Most of the time your screen is going to be filled with explosions, lasers, bullets and zooming robots, there's nothing to digest here, you're reacting purely in the moment, fine when the stakes are low, kinda crappy when every either two shots you or breaks your ACS instantly.

To preface this, I'm a long time FF fan, I fundamentally disagree with a company building a series of RPG games off the money of long term fans, then throwing them to the wayside in order to make action games, under some false pretence that turn based RPG's don't sell. That said, I'll put that to one side in this review and be strictly objective, I'm 23 hours into my play through and have just passed the second time skip, this review will be spoiler free, however. The Good: The graphics are excellent. The soundtrack is good, Soken is putting in the work yet again and doesn't disappoint. Set piece battles are an absolute visual treat, probably some of the best in the franchise, they're really spectacular. The main cast of characters are all very likable. The voice acting is for the most part fantastic Combat is flashy and looks excellent The plot is good, if you put in the reading hours. The world is very pretty. The Bad: Performance is abysmal, graphics mode runs at a decently stable 30fps, performance mode runs at anything between 30 and 45fps and jumps around constantly, I found myself playing on graphics mode as a stable frame rate is less distracting than one that jumps around all over the place, still I'd have taken a graphical downgrade for a stable 60fps performance mode. Combat is visually flashy, but lacks any depth, you evade, hit stuff with square x4 then triangle, and use your abilities on cooldown, there is no other meaningful strategy involved. During my 23 hours with the game I've noticed quite a bit of reuse of bosses, the one that stands out are the dragoon bosses, I'm not sure if we're just going though the whole colour pallet but so far I've fought a silver, white and black one. Combat is laughably easy, and difficulty options are locked behind new game plus, enemies engage you in groups but attack you one by one, completely breaking any immersion, not that it matters since anything that isn't a mini boss or boss, never gets a hit in because you stun lock them with all your attacks or one shot them all with AoE abilities. Equipment, crafting and just items in general are massively gutted and mostly pointless Quest, chest and combat rewards give you materials for crafting most of the time, leaving you feeling cheated, as they're feeding you items for a pointless system. Side quests are bland and boring, they feel like MMO fetch quests. The plot makes sense, but you need to do a large amount of outside reading in order to understand it, if I can't understand a plot without external help, that's a bad plot. Also it's a real rollercoaster in terms of pacing, one minute I'm in some hype set piece encounter then the next I'm gathering apples for some reason, and these peaks and troughs happen throughout the game. The world is very empty, there isn't much of anything to discover by going off the beaten trail. The set piece battles are either VERY simplified versions of regular combat, or entirely QTE events, they're extremely impressive to look at, but not very interesting to play. All in all, this game is a middling action game, it gets a decent amount right, but all the bits it gets right are the bits I'm not playing, they're the bits I'm watching. It pains me to know we lost the best RPG's in the history of video games, and this is what's wearing its skin.

This is the most infuriating good game I've ever played, but it's going to get straight 9/10's because it's a LoZ game. The world is expansive, and absolutely jam packed full of stuff to do, the crafting system is easy to use, but so nuanced the physics involved can only be described as some kind of black magic, how Nintendo pulled off such complexity in their engine is beyond my comprehension as a mere mortal. The plot is fairly simple but works as a motivator for exploring their world. But this game isn't perfect, in fact, in many regards it's actually terrible. The game is locked to 30 FPS with dips into the 20's due to the switch's awful hardware. The controls are awful, as Nintendo are trying to do too much with too few buttons and have crammed the game full of items that you'll need to scroll through mid combat. Basic combat is sluggish and hasn't really been touched since the N64 days, except for the addition of parrying which isn't very useful, and flurry rush, which is super broken. The control system is so bloated, they didn't even bother to put your companion abilities on it, you need to find and speak to them mid combat to use them, and for bosses, they're often required, having multiple companions summoned makes this almost impossible, and you'll constantly be triggering them by accident when trying to perform other tasks. Weapon durability makes its return from Breath of the Wild, and personally I still don't like it. Yes, it forces constant switching and some people may dislike that, but for me personally, I dislike it because it's ruined chest rewards. Finding new equipment isn't exciting any more, it's just another stick for me to mess around fusing and using for 5 minutes before it breaks, and speaking of fusion, whoever designed the menuing behind it needs to be fired. You acquire your weapon, equip it, open the menu, find the fusion material, hold it, close the window, drop it, open the power wheel, select fusion, target the material on the ground, press Y and it'll fuse to your current weapon. You have to repeat this for every. single. weapon, otherwise it's weak AF and will break in a handful of hits. And it's not just weapon management that's a pain in the ass, armour upgrades are basically mandatory or everything will two shot you, from around the second temple onwards, or earlier if you kill a lot of stuff. The issue, is armour upgrading is locked behind an entirely optional and poorly signposted series of side quests and requires specific monster materials, some of which are very rare. So your options are to drop what you're doing and go farm, or never get hit. And if you thought you could just take them down before they hit you, think again, because anything in the black or silver tier is super spongey. You'll break multiple good weapons trying to take down your first silver moblin. In conclusion, the world is amazing, the crafting is a miracle of modern video game design and the plot is serviceable, but everything in terms of performance, combat and controls really ****. It feels like I've been given the most amazing meal to eat, but I'm struggling because they replaced the cutlery with a jackhammer.

The Star Ocean series is dead to me, and this game killed it. The plot is bland, and feels like half of the exposition is missing. The characters lack any nuance, have threadbare backstories and terrible voice acting, Laeticia sounds more like a robot than the god damn android in the party. The player has zero reason to care about any of the cast. The world is for the first half of the game, boring, empty and lifeless with very little to do outside of travelling from point A to point B, then back to point A then to point C, then to point A again for the main story that has you constantly backtracking, thankfully with a fast travel system. Combat is poorly explained, and has a difficulty curve so bizarre it's almost offensive. Random encounters are laughably easy, random enemies die in one to two combos even with the brain-dead AI. The moment you walk into a boss fight though, the AI walks into all their attacks and dies within seconds, you spend half the fight picking them up off the ground. The combat is messy, and in boss fights where actually being able to react to attacks is important, the screen being full of noise frequently gets you hit. Performance is god awful, I had to turn off HDR due to numerous lighting bugs, and even on performance mode, the game had a constant stutter, and in some areas even dropped well below 30 fps despite a supposed target of 60. Some areas were giving me headaches due to how stuttery the experience was. I also experienced multiple crashes, and even a disk read error despite playing on a perfect working PS5 with a disk that went straight from box to console and has never left the machine. What's more, the save functionality is useless, the game crashed after a boss, and despite a manual save outside the boss room, loaded me back outside the dungeon as if I'd never started it, and even the manual save I made, just puts me right back outside. I bought this on sale and still feel cheated, this is low budget, unfinished garbage that sullies the name of a series I used to love. Between this and Valkyrie Elysium, everything I loved about Tri-Ace is dead and buried now.

Overall a really great game. Engaging mechanics, lots to do, a fantastic story with likable characters. My only beef is that the climbing mechanics ****, and for some odd reason every NPC is LGBT. No problem with them but it knocks your immersion a bit when every other NPC is a minority orientation.

It's been 24 years since Sonic Adventure, and Sonic Team still haven't found a way to make controlling sonic feel good. The physics, controls and texture pop in ruin what is otherwise a fairly decent sonic game. Even in classic sonic stages they've managed to make the game feel like Sonic is running through custard, and that's the bit they normally get right. The only saving grace are the boss fights, otherwise this is an entirely skippable experience.

It's really just kinda meh, it's a linear hack and slash game, the environments are bland, the soundtrack is boring, the characters are uninteresting, and the whole thing just feels very low budget. Buy it if you like mindlessly pressing buttons, I guess, but this is a far cry from the brilliance of previous entries into the Valkyrie series.

So I've finished the game, I'm going into the post game now. The good: Great plot, not as good or coherent as the first game, but still fantastic. Some of the best individual character development in the series. Heroes mean that key characters you meet are more than just window dressing and cheerleaders. The class system is great and each one really brings something unique to combat. Probably the best combat system in the series. Side quests have been reduced to manageable levels compared to previous titles. Side content, particularly side story and ascension quests, are surprisingly high quality. The bad: The least memorable soundtrack in the series, it's still good, but only because of one or two standout tracks. Performance and visuals on the switch still leave a lot to be desired, this game deserves better hardware. Some of the most clunky menu's in the series. A really nice quick swap quest tracking element in the UI, that paradoxically only lets you assign a single sidequest to it. Side content was not factored into the main story progression at all, doing any substantial amount of side content will leave you grossly over levelled, I was 10+ levels higher than the bosses for the majority of the game. Overall, it's a great game, a worthy new entry into the series and a must buy as far as I'm concerned, it has some drawbacks over previous entries in the series, but also does a lot of things better, showing that monolith aren't just resting on their laurels and are really pushing to make this series great. On better hardware this would have been a 9/10 easily.

As a disclaimer, I'm not one of the "souls games should have an easy mode" crowd, and I've cleared every soulsborne title to date. Elden Ring offers one of the most expansive, most carefully crafted and painstakingly curated open world experiences ever created. The game, it's environments, it's enemies, lore and set pieces are all stellar, there's so much to do, explore and conquer here assuming you're up to the game's considerable challenge. The only reason this isn't a straight 10/10 experience, is I feel FromSoft, in search of ensuring the difficult experience translates over to an open world game, have sacrificed fairness in some aspects of the game and have also left in some of the jankier aspects of souls combat that really should have been addressed by now. Firstly, melee is grossly out shined by magic and status effects, the balance here is very poor for a game that focuses so much on melee combat. Input delay is fairly prominent and makes the experience feel a little less fluid than previous games. Hitboxes vary between ultra precise and horrendous depending on the enemy. Jank within it's combat systems remains, for example I can knock an enemy down, and it's completely untouchable until it stands up, meanwhile enemies can wail on me if they knock me down. There are several instances of twin boss encounters that just use two of a normal boss you already fought, many of these aren't balanced for a duo encounter. There are some bosses that forgo the tight reaction based combat of previous entries and rely on what can only be described as random, uncounterable flailing around and/or AOE spam, thankfully these aren't present in great numbers. Player experience would be greatly enhanced if the map gave a recommended level range for its zones. Unlike previous more linear entries, I can see people calling the game out as impossible, when they just wandered into a high level zone accidentally as many of the high level areas are directly next to low level ones with nothing restricting access. Balance at higher levels is also off, many attacks are a one or two shot kill at the vigor softcap, meaning even if you stack HP your survivability is still exceptionally poor, this once again favours magic over melee. Anyway, I know that's a lot of negatives, this is still a fantastic souls game, but it's also the one I've had to put down in frustration the most. With new territory comes new BS to iron out, hopefully by Elden Ring 2 we'll have better balance, but don't let that put you off trying this.

Coming off the back of Octopath Traveller I expected a strategy RPG of similarly high quality, and while Triangle Strategy has decent combat, the game just doesn't want you to play it. Buyers should be aware that this game plays more like a visual novel with a bolted on strategy RPG than the full on strategy game we were sold. This would be OK if the game were marketed as a hybrid SRPG/Visual novel, but it isn't and what's worse, the plot taking up 90% of the game, isn't particularly interesting. Pros: Combat is fun and engaging. Art direction is on point. Large number of recruitable characters Cons: Graphics are blurry. Music is uninteresting. The balance of combat to story is way off. The story is boring and uninspired with a terrible script. Character progression is extremely linear with no real customization. The voice acting is horrendous. In conclusion, if you want a good strategy game any Fire Emblem, FF Tactics or Tactics Ogre entry does it as good, if not better. If you love the art direction and 2D/3D hybrid style, Octopath is exactly the same only without the blur. Triangle Strategy is maybe worth a look if you're a die hard fan of the genre and really don't mind slogging through the mundane plot to get to the combat, but for most this game just isn't worth the asking price.

Not charging for this game is a real [[BIG SHOT]] move on Toby's part. Honestly I would have paid [[$4.99]] or more for this [once in a lifetime bargain] Now go play it, you little [sponge].

Metroid dread is on its surface a good, classic Metroid game all about exploring, finding powerups, becoming stronger and conquering bosses in order to reach your goal. Then they added in the EMMI sections and ruined it. They frequently and repeatedly throw you into giant areas of the map where the goal is to stop exploring, stop looking for power ups, and to start running for your life from a huge one-hit-kill murder robot until you can find the powerup to kill the murder robot (and it's the same power up every single time you just lose it after each kill for no real reason). These sections are very frequent, very annoying, and run contrary to the entire point of a metroid game, exploration. The game tells you that escaping from these robots if you're caught (and you will be caught, since they can engage in all sorts of environmental shenanigans) has a 99% chance of failure. This isn't hyperbole, the window for parrying these enemies to escape is randomly generated, and requires you to pre-input a button press within such a small frame window, it makes Dark Souls' parry system look generous. Graphically the game is fairly good, I've noticed some frame drops, but it's very playable. Audio wise it's just OK some classic tracks, mostly ambience, as expected. Buy it if you're a die hard Metroid fan, newcomers to the series would probably be better off with one of the older classic style Metroid titles.

The game runs great, it's visually pretty good, the plot is standard JRPG faire but that's what JRPG fans generally want, if you just want yet another tales game, ignore the rest of this review and go get the game. The combat is my biggest gripe, it's fundamentally broken due to extremely poor AI and systems that just don't work well on anything bigger than standard trash fights. Opponents need to be broken with normal attacks in order to chain combos together, however only small normal enemies can be broken, meaning your strategy devolves into spamming your strongest single arte during bosses or larger enemies. While the plot is serviceable, it has several moments that really don't make sense in the wider context, and several character interactions, particularly in the first half of the story that are just grating. This does improve the closer you get to the end of the game though. My biggest problem though, and the reason this game is a 6/10 is it's horrendous DLC practices that not only offer boosters and costumes, but push adverts into the game and lock abilities behind a paywall. All in all, it's a bog standard tales game, with worse combat than previous entries and worse DLC. Get it if you like tales or are a massive JRPG nut, otherwise there are far better tales games out there for you to enjoy.

The good: The characters are likeable. The job system is as on point as the previous iterations. The updated graphics are nice and the hand drawn locations are stunning. The bad: Speed is now a god tier stat and dictates not only turn order but also how many turns you get before your opponent acts. Most bosses outspeed you and therefore get multiple turns in which to abuse braving and defaulting. The game entirely lacks any means of telling which order turns are going to be taken in. The addition of equip weight adds nothing of value to the game. Counters can be triggered even if you don't do anything to an enemy, for example enemies can counter white magic. There's no way of telling what enemies resist, what they counter and what status effects they're susceptible/immune to as the magnifying glass ability only gives you their weaknesses. The soundtrack is by far the most mediocre of the series. All QoL features related to encounter rates and move presets have been removed for no real reason. The game is the grindiest in the series, and it's made even worse by the removal of the aforementioned QoL features. The story is the least interesting of the series. Framerates struggle in docked mode. There's input lag but only on specific inputs. All in all, if you REALLY loved the previous games, pick this up. But in all regards this feels like a budget JRPG rather than something tied to Square-Enix.

I want to tell you, so badly that Cyberpunk is the fantastic experience we were promised. But I'd be lying and that makes me incredibly sad because I wanted to love this so much. The game is great, the world they've built is sprawling and alive, the systems and combat are nothing special, but they didn't need to be. The problem, is bugs and performance. This is without question the buggiest game since No Man's Sky. I'm 3 main story missions in, the game has crashed on me 3 times, I've been stuck inside objects twice, I've noticed countless graphical glitches, bugs with NPC locations, I've got a persistent audio issue with the main protagonist's voice that makes him drastically quieter than everyone else, I've had enemies shoot me by bugging their hands though walls, rooms with debris on the floor that instantly killed me for no reason, and to top it all off if you're playing on PS4 or XB1, performance is absolutely appalling. CD Projekt Red has in one fell swoop destroyed their reputation and proven that no matter how good your PR, and no matter how grass-roots and down to earth your company acts and claims to be, corporate greed wins out in the end. They knew this game wasn't ready, and they knew this game required more performance and should probably have been a PS5/XBSX title, yet they sold it to us anyway. I'll be returning my copy, to send a message that it's not ok to sell an unfinished product with the promise of fixing it later.

I wanted to love this game, I really did. I'm one of the old guard, I grew up with games like Final Fantasy VII, When square-enix announced this remake I was cautiously optimistic, I knew what square-enix's track record with the series was like after being burned by Final Fantasy XV, but I also knew that as long as they stuck to the source material and added some modern shine, everything would be fine. It wasn't fine. The audio ranges from faithful and fantastic orchestral versions of the original audio, to the barely memorable tracks in place of classics, someone tell me why oppressed people is no longer the theme in wall market when it was so iconic in the original, and tell me what they replaced it with because sitting here writing this, I can't remember it was so forgettable. Area design, is fantastic and faithful to the source material but marred by low quality textures, NPC models, sky boxes and backdrops. This is a crying shame because there are numerous standout moments like your first visit to Aerith's house that absolutely floored me, then immediately after I walk back into the sector 5 slums and the textures are all over the place once again and the NPC's look like they fell out of a PS2 game. Exploring the world, as in the physical movement from place to place is also a mixed bag, animations and movement speed are fine, but the game way over uses forced walking to the point of it being infuriating. Every dungeon has multiple areas filled with debris to crawl or squeeze through at a snails pace, multiple zones where you walk and talk, every time you go indoors you're forced to walk. It feels like the developers added this in just to make the game feel longer, but it's utterly infuriating regardless. Speaking of dragging the game out, sidequests are entirely optional, but entirely pointless. They could have given these some minor story significance, used them to flesh out characters or plot points, but instead they're boring fetch or kill quests for people you don't know and care very little about. Combat for me was hugely conflicted. I'm a fan of classic turn based RPG's, but I was 100% willing to give this game and it's new action hybrid combat the benefit of the doubt, and I'm mostly glad I did, with a few caveats. Firstly hit-stun is absolutely horrendous and needs toning down every single love tap from an enemy knocks you on your ass and cancels your abilities. Secondly the camera is awful, and finally switching from offence to defence is too slow due to animation locking, which exacerbates the hit-stun problem. Otherwise, combat is fun, an awesome mix between tactical and action combat and a standout feature of the game. Animations are fantastic and the boss battles are a stand-out feature you're unlikely to forget should you pick this up. The plot. Ok here's my biggest issue, everything taken from the original game, the characters and their portrayals, the various scenes, most of the script, the additional exposition, the extended dungeons, all that stuff, is fantastic and I believe it really is the best portrayal of these characters we've seen so far. However, all the bits they added on top of this, "feel like some kingdom hearts BS" as IGN recently stated in their review. There's no good way to explain this without spoilers suffice to say that plot elements have been added, especially within the ending, that mean that square-enix can now diverge from the original game's plot. It's poorly written, puts this game firmly within re-imagining or reboot territory rather than being the remake we were sold, and feels like a get-out-of-jail-free card for when they inevitably decide they've bitten off more than they can chew remaking this entire game. This is the primary reason for the average score, you can't sell your game as a remake then sneak in a reboot during the closing scene, it left a bitter taste in my mouth after an otherwise satisfying journey.

How did we go from the graphical zenith that was Xenoblade Chronicles 2, to this? Pokemon Sword and Shield are not worth your money, here's why: - The game is poorly optimized and features some of the most obvious texture popping I've ever seen. - The game is buggy, digital versions have been reported to corrupt your SD card, online functionality has been reported to interfere with other home Wi-Fi devices - Numerous new mechanics are never explained, for example there's now a huge penalty to capture rates if your highest level pokemon is a lower level than the pokemon you're trying to capture. - Your ability to capture at all, is tied to gym badges, if you see a pokemon you could capture but you lack the badge for that level range, tough luck. - Trading is now gone, with the exception of random trades and trades with a friend code, no more GTS. - All online functionality is locked behind Nintendo's online service which offers very poor value for money. - The music is really bad. - The new pokemon are alright, but they're few and far between. - While some of the animations have been improved, some of them are really, really bad. - The game is super short, and incredibly easy even by pokemon standards. - There is no real enemy until right at the end of the game, and their entire section consists of 5 battles. - The endgame is completely bereft of content. tl;dr - This version ****, but I'm sure nintendo will be along in a few months time to sell us a new and improved "ultra" version of the same thing we already paid for.

Ok, I'll try and avoid major spoilers, but to be honest the plot is so thin here it may well prove impossible. Shadowkeep is the inevitable outcome of destiny players begging for the return of nostalgic content from the first game. This expansion is (if you're a long term destiny player like myself) almost entirely derrived from content you've already paid for. The campaign consists of a handfull of missions where you traverse locations on the moon you already visited in the first game, every single boss is a reskinned "nightmare" version of bosses we've already fought, this includes the final boss, almost all of the non-story related loot I recieved was Forsaken loot or older. The campaign is plot bare, incredibly short, answers no real questions and has you doing sidequest tier "kill X enemies with Y gun" style sidequest content for armour pieces for a good half of it's duration. When Bungie said we were going back to the moon, I expected some reuse of maps, what I didn't expect was almost the entire expansion (that we've unlocked so far) to be recycled content. It's completely unacceptable for bungie to resell us content we've already paid for.

I seriously struggled to get any enjoyment out of The Surge, and that's saying something because I got it for free on PS+. The game feels like nothing more than a futuristic attempt at a dark souls clone. The problem is souls style games live and die on their atmosphere and tight control scheme and The Surge has neither. The controls are especially problematic and on numerous occasions I found myself attempting to dash away from attacks only to have a delay get me hit, and those hits are an especially huge problem when one shots and stun lock kills are extremely commonplace, attacks are poorly telegraphed and often end up obscured by the bulk of your own character model. All in all it's just a shallow experience, I'm sure someone with more patience for the genre could extract some measure of fun from The Surge, but I'm not that person. I'd rather just go play Dark Souls or any one of it's ever increasing number of clones that get the controls right.

This game is an iterative improvement over the first game in almost every regard. The loot is better, the gameplay loop is better, the city is more expansive with more to see and lots more to do. The plot is basic, but who plays a live service looter shooter for plot? If looter shooters are your thing this is a must buy, it's easily the most feature complete live service launch we've ever seen, and all the DLC is free, what more can you ask for?!

Is Spider-Man a good game? Yes without a doubt. Is it a 10/10 GOTY Incredible must-buy? Nah, not really. The game like most things in life, has it's good and bad aspects. The combat for example feels fluid and polished, however in order to give us the full spider-man experience they had to cram moves into every conceivable button combination. This can be super annoying when fighting droves of enemies, but when you get a sniper or rocket dude hitting you and you're fumbling for buttons it's super aggregating when a single hit takes 60%+ of your life away. Oh and they really skimped on the i-frames in spider-man, you're vulnerable in almost every animation leading to deaths that just feel cheap like you died because spidey had to do that extra backflip and took a sniper round to the face, rather than because you did anything wrong. The world is absolutely spectacular, Manhattan looks great, travelling around is fluid and feels right. The world however is filled with your standard open world game busy work, find the collectables, snap some photos, solve some puzzles, beat some horde mode encounters, you know the drill, but it's old hat and I think developers really need to reassess how they go about these open world games in future. The story is easily the best aspect of the game, while it's fairly short if you ignore the open world busy work, it's well made, well voice acted and just generally fun to play though with the exception of the Mary Jane and Miles Morales stages, which just feel like boring padding. All in all spider-man is a good game, the world and story are great, the combat is average with some frustrating parts and the open world busy work is bland and uninteresting. Pick it up to blitz though the main story if it's on sale or something.

Stellaris in 2018 is actually a pretty good game, it's an engaging 4x/grand strategy combo with cool visuals, engaging writing and a ton of stuff to discover and play around with. So why the low score? Well Paradox sell this game as a finished product when in reality it's more of a perpetual early access title. Their development methodology goes something like, release patch > patch is a buggy mess > have users report issues and fix them > repeat. This leads to a ton of time spent playing a version of the game that has issues. Right now they're pretty severe with the latest expansion release they broke the enemy AI, End-game crisis AI and caused horrendous performance issues. So, it's a good game, but impossible for me to recommend based purely on the anti-consumer practices of the developers.

A fantastic blend of story telling, biological horror and RPG elements, makes parasite eve a gripping and enjoyable adventure even in 2018. The equipment system and secret dungeon give the game far more replay value than you'd expect.

Stellaris: Megacorp is a prime example of how you can make the greatest game in the world and still manage to ruin it when your quality control is garbage. The new economic system and corporate empires are interesting additions to the game, and I'd love to be able to give you full and fleshed out impressions of them, but it's impossible to properly play the game due to software related stuttering that begins in the mid-game and gets progressively worse, enemy AI is also completely defunct removing any challenge from the game and to cap it all off there's an absolute plethora of other less serious bugs. What we're left with is an expansion that feels rushed to launch and desperately under-baked. 2/10 may seem like a very harsh score, but I consider that generous given that they sold me a game that over two weeks post launch I'm still unable to play it.

Much like Undertale, Deltarune is one of those games that should be played blind, so if you haven't checked it out, head on over to **** and download it for yourself, it's free so you have nothing to lose, once you're done head back for my thoughts. Ok so firstly as I said, this game is free so it's hard to complain about something I got for nothing. But rarely do I get something for nothing that I would happily have paid for. Deltarune is shorter than undertale and can be clocked in about 2-3 hours, but the aesthetic, humour, lovable characters, music and combat are all every bit as amazing as Undertale was. The story is fairly basic but from what I've seen of Toby Fox's twitter he's stated that this game is more a proof of concept and first episode so there's room for it to evolve. What Deltarune proves more than anything however is that despite Toby Fox's self doubt he is capable of putting out consistently amazing work while still innovating. The changes to the combat system are fantastic and the new characters offer a new perspective on a game world that treats you very differently to Undertale. Toby has stated a desire to form a team to continue work on this, and I for one hope he does so, Deltarune takes the amazing Undertale and builds on it in several important ways and is absolutely worth your time.

Forsaken is somewhat of a return to form for bungie, but the stresses of their three per year DLC drops are beginning to show with forsaken, what is promised to be the only Destiny 2 major DLC drop for year 2. Forsaken has a good story by destiny 2 standards, the new areas, the bow weapon type, the new subclasses, random rolls on weapons and the new raid are all absolutely fantastic and some of the best content we've seen to date. Now if you're someone with even a vague idea of how Bungie works, you're asking "where's the catch". Well, the entire progression system has been completely trashed, pretty much every aspect of the game has been made more grindy, the number of activities has increased dramatically which is good because there's more to do, but bad because it's almost impossible to keep up with three characters in a week and not treat Destiny 2 like a job. Basic infusion has been made ridiculously expensive requiring planetary materials, glimmer, legendary shards AND masterwork cores. Exotics are rare again, but with the entire year 1 loot pool being lumped in with the new forsaken exotics don't expect to enjoy any of the new stuff anytime soon. All in all the experience feels like Bungie has pulled out all the stops to frustrate the levelling process and extend the grind knowing that forsaken needs to last them a year with only minor DLC drops to pad it out. All in all, if you can dedicate the time to Forsaken it's a fun experience and a return to form for Bungie, I just wish they'd stop trying to fix stuff like the progression system that was totally fine to begin with.

Microtransactions in a full $60 retail release = An automatic zero, gamers are sick of this moneygrabbing BS.

An absolutely phenomenal release from Square-Enix and proof that traditional turn-based JRPG's can still perform. Octopath traveller is unusual in that it sheds the typical large overarching narrative in order to tell 8 isolated and simpler but still endearing stories. While your 8 party members work together in combat their stories are their own with a few overlapping plot points that come together at the end. The lack of inter-character interaction is lessened by skit scenes but it still seems strange to be playing a party that doesn't interact like a party, that being said the quality on show here more than offsets this one issue. The soundtrack is absolutely incredible and one of the best I've heard in a decade. Combat takes what the studio developed with bravely default, slightly reduces the amount of different jobs, but gives us a ton of additional strategy with the break system. The 2D-HD graphics are both nostalgic and technically impressive at the same time. Voice acting is surprisingly on point, although H'annit's mannerisms leave something to be desired. All in all, if you're a turn-based JRPG fan, this is a must buy, and I hope Square-Enix takes note of it's success.

What can I say about Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, it's a Gatcha scam and it's a very solid and in depth JRPG, it's just a crying shame that those two elements exist within the same game. Brave Exvius will lure players in via the story and keep them playing by drip feeding them a cast of increasingly powerful new characters, stuff to grind for and bosses to kill. But it all comes to a head during the endgame. If you want to make any headway against anything that's not in the main story, be prepared to spend. With rates for good characters as low as 2% prices being incredibly expensive compared to alternative gatcha games and a constant slew of new opponents that require the newest and best characters, you'll never manage to keep up without dropping serious cash into the game. This system of constantly invalidating your investments makes Brave Exvius a dangerous trap to fall into, particularly if you have issues with addiction. One month you can spend hundreds to pull the newest flavour of the month amazing character only to have them be outclassed a month or two later. If you want a good turn based JRPG just pick up a $60 title, this game is designed from the ground up to get you addicted so you'll spend spend spend.