SJile

This is one of the best games I've played in recent years. Enormous amount of consideration, thoughtfulness and time went into crafting this gem. Incredible value, top game of 2020 for my money.

It's a good game with a lot of heart and a lot of charm, and I'm already nearly 20 hours in after just a couple of days. The biggest criticism I have is that it lacks any sort of meaningful customization, so every run will look and feel more or less the same. You can distribute your stats a little differently, but it doesn't change how you play and mainly feels like an afterthought. You can also choose what summon to bring into a fight, but you're always going to bring the ones with the most obvious advantage on a given map, so again, it won't really change from one playthrough to another. There are also a decent amount of grammatical errors, but that's life on an indie budget. It doesn't really detract from the experience, which is overall very positive. The visuals are great--the spritework is really high quality and interesting to look at. The music is also great. I think the FF Tactics Advance/A2 aesthetic, as much as I love it, will hurt some of its first impressions, because it doesn't do the same things that draw people to those games. It's really its own beast, and it has to be played and appreciated without that same expectation looming over it.

The platforming and the ATB-style combat with live-action elements meshed surprisingly well--much better than I was afraid they would. Mechanically and visually, the game is stellar. The characters are mostly interesting to look at and visually distinct. Narratively, the game is not very strong. The writing holds the game back considerably, making it a good game when it could have been a great game. Some of the characters can be unbearable. But at a fundamental level, the game is incredibly fun to play and has enough depth to keep me invested for a long time in spite of its flaws. I'm playing with a Hori Fighting Commander, and it's perfect.

I don't want to spend a lot of time on this review, since I've already lost a lot of time playing RAGE 2, so I'll just say this. Mechanically, as a shooter, it's pretty good. I would rate it an 8/10 for its gameplay alone. The writing is AGGRESSIVELY bad, to the point where it treats its own story and characters like a joke and expects you to do the same. 1/10. Exploration is the least satisfying of any open world game I've ever played in my life. There are a few weapons and powers you have to find scattered across the wasteland, but that's it. It's a big open waste of time and space. Since the writing and characters are atrocious, and every bandit-infested gas station or roadside attraction is exactly the same, there is exactly zero motivation to do anything but follow the arrows to your next objective. At least the original RAGE had character, and a fun CCG built in. Skip RAGE 2.

This is an astonishingly good game and has utterly captured my imagination. I dumped a whole weekend into this world, and I'm eagerly waiting for my chance to dive back in. My only qualm is that I occasionally feel like the entire game is a tutorial, and you're always sort of holding off doing what you REALLY want for that next step, but that's probably more to do with my personal neurotic tendencies than any major design flaw. The content drips in fast enough that I never really tired of what I was doing but slow enough that I still had time to experiment with my own little ideas. And there's a staggering amount of content packed into this game, so I have a hard time imagining myself getting tired of it any time soon. It's all the best features from games of this genre packaged in a familiar and fun IP, and all my qualms with it feel trivial in the face of just how much fun I'm having.

The game is still fairly new, so I understand the hype. Visually, it's stunning. Every entry in the series is good for its time, every entry feels like a genuine graphical upgrade from the last, Ultimate being no exception. In terms of content, the game is packed full of it. The roster is gigantic, and the value is incredible. You would be crazy to complain about these features, but as a competitor, the game has been a profound disappointment. Mechanically, it just doesn't feel as good as its predecessors. It's certainly faster-paced than the previous couple of entries, but that's it--the high input latency and the ludicrous buffer coupled with the worst online system in modern AAA gaming all amount to a deeply unsatisfying experience. Mobility feels clunkier than at any other point in the series, which is a real issue for a game in which mobility was so crucial and interesting. The big single player attraction, "World of Light," is also a disappointment. It's perhaps the least fun single player mode in Smash history. In a vacuum, Ultimate is a triumph of scale. It's big and bright and colorful, and people won't get tired of the ever-growing roster for a good while. But when examined closely, part for part, I just don't think it's going to be the Smash game people remember down the line.

This game was baffling unfun. Graphically, it's passable--has a Darksiders feel with an aesthetic reminiscent of Wildstar. It's not my cup of tea but I don't mind it, either. The audio levels are all out of whack, and I couldn't hear any of the voice acting, even with the sound effects and music turned down and the voices at max. Mechanically, it really gets in the way of itself. The movement is insufferable. The animations are uninterruptible, and combined with the high inertia, it makes for a slow, clunky, unsatisfying and just unpleasant core experience. If this was an MMO with tab targeting or a tactical RPG, the movement would be a negligable issue, but it's integral to the gameplay in Dauntless. It would be like making a racing game where the car physics felt bad, or a platformer where it took 3 full seconds to change directions. Alas, it doesn't really matter how much cool content they add if the gameplay isn't well executed at the most basic level. Definitely a skip for now. Maybe they'll take another crack at it post launch. I hope they do.

This game is quite unlike anything else out there. It's like a visual high fantasy novel meets... hockey? And the matches (on PC, at least) control a lot like Diablo or a MOBA, where you point-and-click your way into the goal, passing and dodging your way across the arena. It shouldn't really work, but it does. And in traditional Supergiant fashion, it's all wrapped up in superlative art, music and writing.

For Honor appears to be experiencing an identity crisis. It's attempting to straddle the Smash Bros-esque line between casual fun and competitive depth, but unlike the Smash series, it's not QUITE succeeding at either just yet. In keeping with Smash Bros parallels, while For Honor has tremendous competitive potential, it squanders it with some of the worst map design I've ever encountered. Stage hazards and power-ups are basically anathema to a competitive experience, but they're absolutely everywhere you look. With better maps, better class balance, a reduced dependence on defensive gameplay and a significantly reduced focus on power-ups and the tedious "Revenge" feature, For Honor would be well on its way to taking the PvP world by storm. And this rating would go from a 7 to a 9 or 10 in a heartbeat.

I want to say "I don't get it," but I mostly get it. People loved Team Fortress 2 for whatever reason, and people love Blizzard, so when you combine the two, you get lots and lots of success. So, I get it. This game is fun for a few rounds as far as I'm concerned, but its competitive potential seems shallow compared to a lot of titles on the market right now. The character design is hit-or-miss, but mostly miss for my money. It has generated an insane amount of porn, so I guess we have Blizzard to thank for that.

Super fun Metroidvania with shades of Shovel Knight and pixelated Dark Souls . Unless you're a speed runner or the kind of person who gets enjoyment from doing the same thing over and over, you probably won't get more than 4 or 5 hours out of it, but for my money, it was worth the investment.

This is far and away the best Zelda game to date, and will be remembered as one of the greatest games ever made. It's almost too good to be true--but over 40 hours in, it's still really that good. It takes the groundbreaking innovation of the very first Zelda game and Ocarina of Time, and basically asks: what did people love about these games? What do people love about games in general? It's impossible not to think sometimes about Elder Scrolls when you're out scaling mountains and picking flowers. As someone who grew up on Ocarina of Time and Morrowind, this is the game I've spent my whole life waiting for.

Splatoon is a beautiful thing. Are you a kid or are you a squid? You just don't know. You don't care. You need to cover everything with ink, because your OCD demands it. It's fun, creative, fast-paced, and what's perhaps even more genius is that it allows anyone--skilled or unskilled--to succeed. This is a phenomenal feat if you are the game's primary demographic. Alas, if you are a gamer who actually cares about improving and competing, it is also Splatoon's downfall. They have an almost meaningless "ranked" mode, which is essentially a cluttered, frustrating, uncoordinated version of king of the hill, with paint. The control area is small enough that one ink strike special will mitigate a team's possession, which seems weird to me. Because it's Nintendo, they were very careful to insure that nobody had too much of an advantage with skill alone. Rollers are a great equalizer for people who have no gaming experience or hands, and the gear bonuses appear to be totally randomized to ensure you don't get any smart ideas or feel inclined to play with an outfit that you actually like. You cannot communicate with your teammates online, and players are often afk or disconnected on account of Nintendo's lackluster server configuration. In a 4v4, this is typically a death-sentence for the unlucky team. You play with a mix of people across the world, which sounds neat, but any seasoned gamer will realize what it actually means: a mix of pings on a mystery server that people on one half of the globe or the other will have the advantage in. The game's other big flaw is that you can't seem to play with your friends locally unless you want to do the vastly inferior 1-on-1 balloon popping game. There is no local cooperative play, no split screen, and no ability to even play with your friends online, because while you can join their game, it's seemingly random which team you are on. At the end of the day, it's a fun game. You'll play it, have fun with it, grow frustrated at its blue shell equivalents, and wish it was more than it is. But you'll play it and have fun with it.

This game starts out pretty good. I was invested, and everything was going fine. Then right when my attention was about to wane, and I started wondering "if this was it," the game ACTUALLY started, and my mind was blown to **** I liked Dragon Age: Inquisition and every entry in the Elder Scrolls setting as other examples of open world western RPGs. I think Morrowind is still one of my top 5 games of all time. But the plain and simple truth of it is, The Witcher 3 is just better. This game is unreal. If you vote this game down because of graphics, you're a tool. The graphics are not only phenomenal, there's literally NOTHING better out there on such a huge scale. This game deserves a straight trip right into the RPG hall of fame. Maybe the video game hall of fame. I think it might be the best game I've played since the turn of the millennium, and that's not hyperbole.

This is a very well-executed high-concept project. Its detractors are the voices I have seen in-game--the same ones you get in any game that does not coddle the player like a newborn babe. This game ain't easy, but despite what some of these tragic user reviewers might try to tell you, it is anything BUT imbalanced and simplistic. It is simply that the depth requires a higher degree of skill to access than your average shooter or MMO. The cacophony of "incomplete!" is true, but not a detractor. Only a fool thinks it is, because what we have here instead is a very fine game that is continuing to evolve and improve. The critic reviews are astonishingly shallow and reflect a great deal of what is wrong with the gaming journalism industry. The ONLY real complaint I have is that the developers made a decent profit, then lost a lot of their playerbase because of the issues I mentioned above. Despite this, they continue producing essential content at a bit of a crawl, falling back on the "we're indie!" or "you're not a developer, you don't understand!" platform whenever their design decisions are questioned. I know the business better than most, and when something crucial needs to happen to a game, I have seen studios just as small and even smaller get it done exponentially quicker. I think making the money up-front may have hurt the longevity of the project in some ways, believe it or not, because with cash already in-hand, the impetus to produce results is not fueled by a promise of reward.