Subject98

Was looking forward to this and finished with mixed feelings. I thoroughly enjoyed the story, music, visuals, atmosphere etc, the only strike I'd make against the story is that it's a bit overwritten at times. Stretches of dialogue are not uncommon to last over an hour or even close to 2. Where this game lacked for me is the gameplay. Coming from Zelda titles, Alundra, Crosscode etc, the dungeons here in Eastward seem to have been designed without much care. Linear, straightforward and require very little thought, finding a key is a minute detour every single time, and the majority of them are over in 20 minutes. I guess if you hate dungeons then you'll like the game more for being that way. To highlight a dungeon I liked, one of the first ones 'Ancient Ruins' was probably my favorite. The manner in which it was constructed made it fun to explore. You're not just following a straight line through sewer tunnels, you're exploring the floors of a long abandoned shopping mall. I was hoping this feeling of urban exploration would be expanded upon in future dungeons and I could have forgiven the simplicity of the level design if so, but there were only 1 or 2 others that were interesting. To pluck out one more positive though, there is a dungeon theme they start using later on that's one of the best I've ever heard, called 'industrial'. The combat is okay but nothing particularly special. At best it's passable, at worst, being so sluggish can make rooms full of enemies feel like a big mess. Since you have two characters who can both take damage, your partner following you can still take damage even if you successfully avoid an attack as the one you're controlling, which makes it feel pointless to do anything but have a DPS race with the enemies. The bad stuff aside, I did really enjoy the boss fights pretty much across the board. Some were better than others but none of them ****, and for the most part they became crazier and more fun to fight the further I got. On the whole I would still recommend this game even if it has some blemishes where gameplay is concerned, because the experience is such a wild emotional rollercoaster ride all the way to the end.

It's been a good while since I enjoyed a game enough to play through it twice in a row. Really missed horror games like these that put so much effort into the audio visual experience, it's almost like a Little Nightmares take on the Silent Hill setting but they totally go in their own direction with it and have their own story to tell. I've seen this game get flak for it's length and mechanics and I don't really agree with them. I think some of the people reviewing it like that IGN reviewer are misremembering how painfully short the original was. This game is probably about twice as long as the first, it just happens to have the same amount of chapters. Each one is more fleshed out with more variation in them. About the mechanics, I often do see people talk down about trial and error and clunky mechanics in horror games, but that's not really as much of a flaw as they say. I would argue that a horror game's environment should have dangers that keep you on your toes and punish you for not paying attention to where you're going. Some people will get frustrated with getting caught, walking into traps and dying but that sort of thing has been a hallmark of the horror genre since it's inception with games like Alone in the Dark. You're supposed to watch yourself because anything can happen. I died a lot in this game not gonna lie, but I never felt the trial and error got to be bull except maybe 1 or 2 times. I do hope they plan for at least one DLC because the pale city is such an interesting place and begs to be further explored more than The Maw did, in my opinion.

I will admit, I'm very picky about turn based RPGs and hardly ever play them. There are some that I like but this one hit and doubled down on pretty much every gripe I have about this genre. On top of tons of job grinding, this one has time management mechanics and even a pay to win microtransaction they threw in there, how any of that is supposed to be fun or enhance the gameplay in any way is beyond me. Even if you do get a good party going, the late chapters have battles and boss fights so unbalanced that you're forced to loop the same actions until the boss is dead, somtimes for over half an hour. If you step outside of that loop even for one turn then you're probably dead. I can usually stick with an RPG of this size if the story is interesting enough but I barely remember any of what happened. I think I cared less about the characters the further I got. This is one of those games that is so confident the player wont mind it's endless repetition that it continuously adds more and more ways to be a slog on top of it. After dragging my feet to the end of the story, I find out they want me to go around the world and beat all the major bosses again, not once, but like six more times before I can access the final dungeon and true ending. No thanks. The only big positive I would give Bravely Default is that it's beautiful to look at. I think seeing all the diverse locations and set pieces was the driving force for me to keep playing as far as I got. It's just a shame the rest of it had to be so tedious.

Not a bad souls-like, not a great one either. It has great music, atmosphere and artistic vision but the gameplay mechanics feel kinda cheapo and the enemy designs are mostly just cavemen and crabs. Or ghost cavemen. I probably would give the game a 7 if not for the fact that it's technically a multiplayer focused game. When I play souls-likes I prefer adventuring on my own, but the sheer number of enemies that hoard you make it feel like you're playing it wrong by not having at least an AI helping you. On that front I enjoyed it less than I would have had it been designed better for one person. While the main game is mostly a pleasant enough experience, do yourself a favor and don't buy the Nightstorm Isle DLC. It's the worst designed area I've ever experienced in a souls-like, and I've played a lot of them. The boss fight has a massive health bar, seemingly unlimited stamina and never gives you room to breathe so you need your companion's help to beat him. Unfortunately they decided to give this particular boss fight a long run back packed full of enemies, many of which snipe-grapple you from across the room unless you painstakingly kill everything on your way through every time. If that's not bad enough, the worst part is that your AI companion is too stupid not to jump into the lava and die 90% of the time you try to make it to the boss with her anyway. There's always some reason she ends up in that lava one way or another, to attack an enemy that fell in, to get across a chasm she easily could have jumped across, to stand still and stare blankly ahead until she dies, or my favorite was when a ghost grappled her and they slid for absolutely no reason like a gravitational pull right into the lava. Again, save yourself the money and frustration. XD

I had high hopes for this game but I could smell that something was up. For the first several hours of playing I was really impressed and got hooked on it. Everything from the atmosphere and environments to the music and sound design, the sheer variety of gruesome enemies, the massive world size, it all definitely appeals to the Salt and Sanctuary fan in me in almost every way. It's very clear that this developer poured in tons of effort here and we could easily have a solid 9/10 game on our hands. Unfortunately, I wont be the first to say that the game has some blemishes in it's current state. While I don't think there is anything wrong with the level design itself (it's pretty dang good), the map is the worst thing in the game by far. With such a huge labyrinthine world full of secrets and npcs and a book full of fail-able sidequests to keep track of, you need a reliable map that clearly shows you where points of interest are, and rooms you haven't gone into yet. The problem is that the only clear borders shown are for the ground. Walls and ceilings are left open so that if you leave a section of the map unexplored to do something else, it will often be impossible to tell where the place even was if you even remember it at all. I know Salt and Sanctuary didn't have any map but the difference with that game is that it's locations were more numerous but smaller sized so it's easier to remember generally where things were. Plus there weren't really any sidequests in that game, it was just you and the world for the most part. Bottom line, this game definitely needs a better map, just adding clear borders so the player can see what's a dead end and what isn't would improve it tremendously. As it currently exists I've decided to stop playing for now as I do want to explore as much of this world as I can but just trying to find anything late in the game is too overwhelming to be worth it. Much of the other stuff holding this game back may only apply to the switch version. It doesn't seem like anyone is having too many issues on PC, but on Switch, on top of bad load times it crashes once in a while and sometimes deletes some of your most recent saves from the save point you're currently at, and reverts to when you last saved at the previous save point, almost like the game went back in time. There are also some item glitches as well, changing equipment causes the game to freeze anywhere between 1 and 10 seconds. The worst however is that spells can break forever on you. There was a spell I really liked that I was using often but suddenly it stopped responding to the A button for no reason at all. I literally can't use it anymore even after resetting the game. While problems like these don't ruin the whole experience, it's still unacceptable to release a game that has issues like these. To the dev's defense though, this is not nearly the only switch version of an indie game that's come with all sorts of jank. They almost always provide inferior experiences than when they release on other consoles so I kinda wish this idea that the switch is the best place for indie games would die already. In conclusion, I think this is a really great game with a rough launch, so I hope there are some patches in the pipeline. Considering how much care went into making this game, it would be a shame for it to fail over some surface level scratches. I would recommend waiting for a patch to fix some of the issues or just get it on PC or wait for other console releases, if they happen.

A good, fun metroidvania which in many ways is an improvement over the original. It's longer, the combat is much better, there are boss fights now, more uniquely designed characters with their own animations, the environments are even more impressive and diverse. It seems to me they may have taken some inspiration from Hollow Knight when making this game, some of the progression systems and sidequests feel a bit similar to that like the charms. They are welcome changes as the first one was fun to explore but everything you collected was more straight forward. While the game itself is good, there are some things that held it back a bit for me. I'll start with the more minor thing. I didn't care for the story for this one quite as much as the first. Both of these games can be kind of depressing. I think what bothers me about it is these are heart string tugging games for sure but they don't necessarily do so through strong story telling, but by presenting you with ridiculously adorable animal characters and then threatening to kill them right before your eyes. XD The reason I could tolerate that better in the first was how empowering the final act was. With Will of the Wisps, by the end I felt like there was a little bit of wasted potential. I don't want to spoil too much of what happens but not much of a relationship was built between Ori and Ku. Again, it feels heavily reliant on the cuteness factor to make you feel for the characters, which does work but it's not quite enough. For example Ku is the best and most expressive character in the series. It just kinda **** that she barely has any screen time with Ori and not much was done with her in general, save for short scenes at the very beginning and the very middle. There was potential for a better story if she weren't totally gone from it for 95% of the game. Now the thing that actually made me have to drop the score is performance. I can forgive the inconsistent resolution because most of the time it's still very beautiful to look at and moments where things look pixelated and muddy are pretty infrequent. But my god, does this game crash. In the 17 hours I spent on this game, it crashed on me roughly 20-25 times. That's not at all an exaggeration, it was pretty frustrating. Additionally there is another bug that happened about 6 or 7 times where I accidentally ran off screen into an area that was still loading and got stuck underneath the floor with no way back out. Even reloading from a checkpoint would respawn me under the ground again. Thankfully they implemented a 'backup' save system which keeps a log of 10 saves for you to revert to if you run into some game breaking issue. If not for that bandaid the game would be pretty much broken, but the backup system did successfully keep me from losing any progress so at least they thought of something.

I can't speak for those who got this having already owned the originals but I bought this to play Galaxy and Sunshine since I slept on Nintendo games back during the gamecube and wii eras. Coming from that perspective I have very little issues with the collection and wouldn't even realize there were problems with it if I didn't see all the negative reviews online talking about them. To me this is just an HD collection, and I knew that going in so I wasn't expecting all kinds of big sweeping improvements. I started with Galaxy, got all 120 stars over about a week. Pretty easy game, and I feel the motion controls were pretty gimmicky and not necessary, but overall I still enjoyed it for the creativity and fun gameplay. Sunshine I'm still playing currently, about 3/4 of the shines collected. This one is definitely one of the jankiest Mario games I've played especially where minigames are concerned. At first I didn't like it very much but once I started playing the second level (Ricco Harbor) was when it started clicking for me, and since then I've really been liking it. I might be in the minority but I think I like this game more than Galaxy. I like the water mechanics with fludd and the location is probably my favorite I've been to thus far in the mario universe. It helps that I'm a **** for sunny colorful water levels in videogames so the atmosphere really does it for me as well, and it's cool how the island feels like it's an actual place you're exploring where you can see other levels in the distance from the one you're currently in. It took me some time to get settled in but I can see why there are people who hold this one in such high regard despite it's rough edges.

My personal favorite in the series, the platforming and puzzle mechanics are the best and most clever yet. The levels are dripping with detail and personality. As a collectathon this is a great example **** that respects the player's time. Each individual level is quite long which normally would make returning to round up collectibles a complete chore. This is fixed with the ability to start at any of the 20 or so checkpoints you want, and you're even shown how many experience drops are remaining in range of each checkpoint so you don't have to comb back through the entire level again, the hunt is narrowed down just enough to keep it from getting tedious. Some might call it too streamlined but I think it totally works and made me 'want' to go back and collect stuff I missed. The only aspect of this game I found executed rather poorly was combat. I realize Trine is more about the puzzle platforming than action, and that's how it should always be, but any time I got to a combat section, I didn't want to deal with it. There's very little feedback when hitting enemies and the areas you fight in are so small and cramped with enemies that combat mechanics for the wizard and thief get hindered by the platforms. It has been a while since I played the first two but I don't remember the combat being this unsatisfying in either of them. Regardless I still think 4 is a cut above the rest in most aspects. Trine 1: 6/10 Trine 2: 7/10 Trine 3: didn't play Trine 4: 7.5/10

One of the precious few actually creative horror games to come out in recent memory. Underrated too. When talking specifically about dark flavored puzzle platformers, I would easily rank this up there with the likes of Limbo and Inside to be honest, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't. I do wish this one were longer though, it's a tightly paced 3 hour experience like most of it's peers, but I was left wanting to see even more of this world and it's disfigured characters, since what's here is already so well executed. The sequel is one of my most anticipated games right now, if not THE most. The three DLCs are also pretty good and provide trickier puzzles than before, but the experience is not as strong as the main story. The only one in which you meet a new monster is 'The Depths', so that one was my favorite. The other two were fine but were a little disappointing for standalone purchases since aside from different environments to explore, there's not much presented that feels 'new'.

I'm a fan of platformers and metroidvanias, and while this game certainly functions okay in terms of controls, the way it was constructed utterly ruins the whole experience. Instead of being true metroidvania with an interconnected map, this one is broken into 6 separate linear levels which require you to return to and replay each several times to do very minor tasks. I'm not even joking when I say I probably went back to the water level a dozen times. They do allow you to skip segments of each level but of course the water level had to have a sliding section at the end of it where you can't pause the game to skip it. Not to mention most of the quests you have to return to levels for make absolutely no sense, so it's not uncommon to go through an entire level again only to find out that wasn't the right place to go with the new transformation you unlocked or item you got. This is a 2 hour game stretched out to 6 or 7 hours with loads of padding. Way Forward do make really good games sometimes, I was quite fond of Shantae and the Pirate's Curse and The Mummy Demastered, but they missed the mark hard on this one.

Played this a few years ago and really enjoyed it for what it was, pretty underrated. Starts out simple but later on it becomes very tense and challenging, where even though there isn't much danger from enemies so to speak, the platforming itself is highly treacherous. It's basically like if Getting Over It or Jump King were actually good, fleshed out games and not just ragequit/speedrun bait.

A budget game that should have gone for a budget price. 40 dollars is straight up robbery for this game, so get it on sale if you're interested. I would recommend a hard pass for any price over 15 dollars. It has a pretty interesting gameplay concept where you fight ghosts by making the right dialogue choices or using the right items but everything around it doesn't hold up. The dialogue and characters are dry and lifeless, and there are only a few very small locations that reuse images for many of the 'rooms'. There are only 5 chapters yet not every chapter sends you somewhere new to explore.

I normally don't click with expansive open world games, they usually get stale for me, but I found the world in this game to be a joy to explore, so much so that I went probably around 60-70 hours to get the platinum and never felt exploring and slicing up enemies ever overstayed it's welcome. It's just a really FUN game through and through. One of my earliest concerns was how they would handle combat variety since everything you fight are human enemies, there are no big mythical creatures and demons like you get in Sekiro or Nioh for example. Well it's true there isn't a whole lot of variety in the enemy types themselves, but what I think makes the fun factor of this combat system last so long is how versatile the mechanics are. There are a bunch of different tools and tactics at your disposal that you can approach one fight very differently from another. Even super late in the game I was still learning new tricks I didn't know you could do, like kick someone into the air and fire an arrow into them as they're flying. Still even though all the enemies are people (besides a few animals), they do mix up the fighting styles to keep you on your toes. But really that's just scratching the surface on why this game is good, all I'll say is if you're craving an open world samurai game, THIS IS THE ONE. You get fun combat, an absolutely stunning world to play in, and a great, more traditional samurai story with memorable characters.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

At first it seemed very promising, and they got pretty much all of the gameplay mechanics down very well, but after several dozen hours of playing it I came away feeling like this is just good ground work laid down for an even better game in the future. I've heard so much about how this is the best open world game and that it fixes all of the problems that have plagued the genre for years... and I couldn't disagree more. It fell into pretty much all the same old habits. The world may be huge, but aside from the main quest locations, the rest of the world is just filled with samey, borderline copy/paste material. Again it's fine at first but it starts to feel like you're never seeing or doing anything new after a while. There are lots of enemy camps, NPC stations are almost always the same horse ranch again and again, puzzles to get collectibles like the korok seeds repeat dozens of times. There are certain key areas of the map with unique events, but most of these I found pretty boring if not aggravating in some way. There's that big featureless maze box in one corner of the map, the lost trial and error woods, and the Yiga Clan Lair which is a forced stealth section with instant failure if you're spotted, just to give a few examples. Most of these side places that should have been interesting didn't make me very happy. Another example of reused assets is the shrines. I'm actually on board with the idea of these, since the world is so big it makes sense to have a lot of smaller mini dungeons dotted around the map, but I still felt they managed to botch this to a degree. They all have the exact same big blue cube look to them no matter which region they're in, and at least a third of them are empty except for the reward, or just put you in a combat challenge with the same enemy with slight variation in what weapons it carries. That brings me to my next example, the enemy variety. 80% of what you fight are moblins or lizalfos with color palette swaps. You go to one side of the map, red lizards. Go to the other side, blue lizards. Even mini bosses are the same everywhere you go too, either the fat pigs, the stone golems, or the man-lions you don't ever want to fight anyway because they kill you in one hit and tank 50 million damage. Hell even the main bosses at the end of each proper dungeon just feel like a variation of the same boss. Would it have killed them to put some more variety of foes in here? The world certainly is big enough! (Past Zelda games with 1% the map size had more content, and I'm talking about unique content, not copies.) To add insult to injury, after completing each main dungeon, the difficulty in the world increases by populating the world, not with new enemy types, but more of the exact same ones with different colors that now take a dozen hits to kill rather than a few. They don't function any differently, or challenge you in any way, it just makes combat more tedious and eventually I started ignoring enemy encounters out in the world whenever possible. I don't think BOTW is a bad game, I just don't see how it's any different from the medium standard of what open world games are like, except not having quest markers. They can do better than this.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

If Hollow Knight is the best Metroidvania for it's world design and lore, Guacamelee might be best with the combat and powers. At the very beginning it feels pretty standard but the more abilities you unlock, the more genius you realize how well everything clicks together. All the fighting moves you obtain are not only insanely satisfying to chain together in combat, they also double as platforming techniques you use to further explore the world. It's a blast, easily one of the must-plays of the genre.

In most respects, this game is improved over the first one. I liked the first Tomb Raider better than the Uncharted games because of it's more open level design, and this game takes that even further by providing a few much larger scale areas to explore at your own pace. None of the exploration feels like boring filler or copy/paste jobs, and the environments look awesome. The optional tombs are still very small in this game, usually providing only one puzzle before the reward. Still would prefer something closer to mini dungeons but these are better than the tombs in the first since they tend to look cooler and the puzzles you have to do feel a bit more inspired. Combat functions and feels virtually the same as the first, which isn't a bad thing but it's a generic third person shooter with regenerating health. It's still fun but doesn't provide much challenge, I was able to scrap my way through every fight without having to think and only died once because someone punched me off a ledge. This game doesn't saturate you with action though, so it never gets too repetitive as long as you're exploring the world and trying to find everything. I got 100% and probably only about a quarter of my time was spent in combat situations. All in all I had a great time with this one, giving it a full score higher than the first for the further improvements to level design.

I remember when this game first was coming out I was pretty skeptical it would be anything more than mediocre. I know Tomb Raider has been around a lot longer than Uncharted but this game bears striking resemblance to how Uncharted is structured. They're both treasure hunting games with hollywood-esque action, standard cover shooter combat and QTEs. However I was pleasantly surprised that this game managed to elevate itself above that series pretty significantly in the gameplay department, by doing more with the environments, exploration and methods of traversal, the character progression system, even the combat feels weightier and less floaty. Not to mention I think the more cohesive world design fits the treasure hunting theme nicely, since you can always return and wrap things up if you missed items without having to redo whole chapters again. That's not to say the game isn't without a few shortcomings. The setting and more supernatural things going on were great, but the supporting cast failed to breathe any life into the story for me. Lara is fine but the rest of the crew is pretty boring and forgettable. Secondly, the 10 or so optional tombs are appreciated, but all of them stop at one easy to solve puzzle. It would have been cooler if these had been more like mini dungeons than one-off puzzles that take no more than 3 minutes to solve. It wont blow your mind but it's definitely a fun experience worth playing, and one of the better examples of this genre gameplay-wise.

To me the praise Nier Automata gets is like someone saying 'This toaster is a **** masterpiece. You put bread in the slot, push the lever down, then 3 minutes later it pops back out! See how ground breaking and innovative it is?' N:A doesn't do much of anything that hasn't been done already, and it doesn't do any of it justice. The world is really small, kinda ugly to look at and overall not gratifying or rewarding to explore. Graphics aren't everything but most environments don't even look good artistically. RPG elements are really tame, almost non existent despite the game being advertised as an RPG. Sidequests are mostly fetch quests, NPCs are mostly lifeless, just standing around staring blankly ahead like action figures. The story can be entertaining but whether or not you still care by the time you get to the good stuff will depend on how many times you can stand being forced to retread the same bland locations, since the full story is locked behind NG+. The combat functions fine but even that is screwed to a degree because your only options for difficulty are play on autopilot, or die in 2 hits and go back to your last manual save, which feels totally out of place in a game like this and ends up making it even more tedious than the easier mode. It's a serviceable enough hack n slash if you're just looking for something to turn your brain off and slice up enemies, just beware of the hype surrounding this one.... It's just a freaking toaster!

Dark Souls is... does Dark Souls really need an introduction at this point? Most people, myself included, eat sh** and die for the first dozen or so hours and then fall in love with it. So go play it and DIE!

Saw this wasn't getting a whole lot of reviews, wanted to drop my two cents. I played it on PC a while ago and absolutely loved it. It surpassed my expectations in nearly every way from gameplay to the RPG system, to the story. If you're into retro-style action RPGs, Zelda-likes, Ys games, Alundra, etc. Whatever you're playing right now, finish it and pick this one up. It's got pretty much everything you need and more.

Okay, I had to come back to this one because I've completed a lot more of it since my original post. Many already know that the framerate is all over the place, sometimes it's okay, other times some of the worst you've seen, but a lot of people seem to be having different experiences with it, so I just wanted to go over my own. Jak 1 starts out with bad framerate for about the first third of the game. It improves somewhat during the middle part of the game, and then the final third main area of the game the frame rate is much smoother. It wasn't just because I was getting used to it, I actually went back to the first hub of the game and the FR was bad again. Moving onto the second game, I have no idea why people are saying it runs the best of the 3. Sure the very first room of the game runs smooth but trust me, when you get to the main city the framerate absolutely plummets. There are some other levels in the game that run okay and others where it's so bad that it makes some of the missions seem damn near impossible to complete without blind luck. I actually gave up on the game at around 85% because the FR was beginning to directly hurt the mechanics of the game. As for the third and final, I played a little past the tutorial and decided it was unplayable. I remember the tutorial being easy as hell on the ps2, playing it on the vita I died about 5 times since I had to fight the god awful framerate! I rarely ever say this but I honestly think this port was not worth making.

Ragnarok Odyssey is the only game of it's type on the vita (monster hunter clone) that I've been able to get into. The gameplay is simple and quick paced. Some may think it's a little TOO simple but that doesn't strip the experience of fun or challenge in my opinion. There's enough depth to the RPG system to make the game addicting. Not to mention it's a long game, apparently nearly twice as long as the original version because of the new 400 floor dungeon they added. My one complaint is that the professional reviews are mostly right about the game feeling very one-note later on. Go kill this boss you've already killed 4 times in earlier missions. Go kill 100 giants in an area you've already visited over 30 times. A story also may as well not even exist but they still shoehorned it in and it comes off more awkward than immersive. But besides all that I feel the game is really solid, especially in multiplayer.

Just finished the game recently and... man. How does a game like this stay under the radar for so long? I only recently got into the Ys series and this was undoubtedly the best portable RPG I've ever played. Usually I start to get bored **** like this around the 30 hour mark, but Ys Seven didn't feel repetitive to me since you're always gaining new powers and each dungeons always introduce new kinds of obstacles. To me the gameplay and length are perfect, my only complaint is that while the story is good, I feel like it could have been conveyed much better. The amazing soundtrack does well to set the mood, but if the game had voice acting and more cinematic cutscenes than people standing in place with speech bubbles, that could've gone a long way. I'm still giving it a 10 though as I thoroughly enjoyed the game from start to finish.

This was probably the most fun I've had playing a horror game in a good while, which surprised me because I really wasn't expecting much out of this one. Jump scares are definitely not the only things that will give you the chills, this game has strong atmosphere, and lurking around to avoid being seen by enemies can be some of the creepiest parts of the game, and can be terrifying when you're being chased. The game also has enough meat to it to put all of it's mechanics to good use without ever feeling underplayed or gimmicky. I also feel that the game does a good job of making you care about the main character's well being, he goes through so much crap in this game that it makes it all the more motivating to keep going and see what happens next. I wont say more, overall I highly recommend this to horror fans, it's pretty awesome.

Perhaps I'm just not a fan of the work that The Chinese Room does. What was supposed to be an 'interactive horror story' is really nothing more than a walk through dark and empty maps with nothing to do and not much to be scared of. By the last hour I found myself running through the rest of it wondering when it would be over because I was starting to get bored. I generally like the idea behind this game, the story, the setting, the enemies, it's cool and all but the short length and few enemy encounters, and all the mechanics they took away from the first amnesia really left me scratching my head. It feels incomplete to me, is the best way I can describe it.

Where do I even begin with this game? It started off really good and I thought I could get into it, but after a while the problems start surfacing when the platforming decides to require really precise jumping when the game's controls are so damn sensitive. On episode 2 level 4 there is a part where you have to jump into this doorway with a broken floor beneath it. I've tried to jump in about 5 times now from different angles and nothing works, I just keep sliding into the lava. To make it even more annoying, you have to do the whole level again up to that point if you're that one pixel off. Still haven't gotten past it and I feel like it's such a waste of my time trying to do this one jump that should be so simple. In most cases during the game so far, about half the time I don't feel like it's my fault for dieing. The vast majority of the weapons are rocket launchers of some sort and all the objects, pillars and railings have hit barriers larger than you would think, so getting damaged by your own weapons happens all the friggin time. Much of the time the damage that traps do to you is extremely inconsistent. One time I got blasted by fire dead on and it only did like 20 damage. Another time I barely touched the edge of the fire and I practically exploded at full health. That's just scratching the surface but when the game decides to stop being unfair, it can be fun. The shooting for the most part is satisfying and the humor at some parts has made me laugh out loud.

On the positive side, the graphics look nice and the enemies are extremely creative. However I can't seem to get into this game, it's just not that fun. The weapon (or spell) system is horrible. You basically have to guess when your spell is going to run out as you're spamming attacks on an enemy, because very likely you'll end up casting it again when you didn't mean to, and you REALLY want to conserve your magic in this because you run out fast and the bosses take for-freaking-ever to kill. Enemies, and even your own friends will be knocking you around like a ragdoll the whole game, in a game where you have to stand still and charge up to do pretty much anything. The locations look pretty nice but again, it's boring and void of depth. I mean that literally, every mission just spawns you into a big flat arena to fight enemies, and that's it. Already bored to death of it and I've only put around 7 or 8 hours into it.

I like this game, as it does a good job of creating a haunting atmosphere. Would normally give it an 8 but one thing knocks my score down and that's the choice of how to release the game. 25 bucks for part **** now, and the rest of the parts later when they get around to releasing them. Really? I bought it because I figured each act would be long enough to suffice paying such a price point but I guess I was the fool. Act 1 only takes about 2 hours. It's a cool game but I would recommend waiting for more of the parts to release before purchasing it.

As of this review I haven't quite yet finished the game but I think I pretty much get the gist. It's a decent game but a bit over hyped in my opinion. As a tower defense game it's pretty good. It's set up like a board game and the plants/zombies are the 'pieces', and each provides a unique dynamic to the power struggle. There is definitely strategy involved here but for the most part all you really need to do to win is set up pea shooters and wait for them to mow down the zombies, and pick off any that are virtually immune to the pea shooters with anything else you have. That can get a bit tedious after a while but I guess this game is more meant for short bursts anyway. The night levels provide more challenge but they manage to be more boring than the day levels at the same time, since it takes so much longer to build up your line of defense. On the other hand the game is packed full of content. Besides the story mode itself, there are 20 unique minigames and a section of puzzle games as well so you're definitely getting some replay value for your money.

A great game, probably in my top 3 point and click adventures I've ever played, and it translates nicely to the vita. The only minor problem is that through most of the game you're expected to rely on visual queues to figure out what to do and some people may have trouble with that due to the small screen. It's really not too bad though. The puzzles are as tricky as they are varied so it's fun to play and never gets old all the way through. The music and visuals work really well in unison and are likely to haunt you long after you play. It almost reminds me of a David Firth animation except not quite as dark. Overall I adore the game.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

The presentation oozes style and the gameplay mechanics are well realized and pretty unique. Beyond the core game itself however, the side missions and minigames feel half baked and drag down the fun too often. Most of the quests boil down to 'hey some guy stole my watch and he's hiding in an alley clear across town, can you go kill him and bring it back to me?' And there are tons of these pointless fetch and delivery quests. If you're going to play it I would suggest ignoring most sidequests unless you need the cash or items.

Under the glaze of hype and piles of merchandise, Angry Birds is an unoriginal puzzler with very little variety and annoying sound effects. For a game that's priority is to waste your time, it sure gets a lot of praise.

I liked this game, but couldn't help but be a bit disappointed with it as a sequel. In some ways it improves over the original, but overall I thought Criminal Origins was far more compelling and ominous. It's a shame that a Condemned 3 isn't possible due to poor sales, because this series had a ton of potential.

I like this game quite a bit, it's very weird and unconventional, yet keeps you glued with wide eyes trying to help the main character get out of the mess he's in. The claustrophobic approach to gameplay coupled with the vague story and visuals make this one of the most unsettling games I've played in recent memory. It's definitely not worthless or nonsensical as some of the other reviewers try to make it sound. The story is told fine, it just requires you to pay very close attention and piece things together for yourself.

What were they thinking? An HD 'clean up' means upres and polish the visuals, not run a street cleaner through the whole map and erase all the hard work the original artists put into the environments. Silent Hill was made to look run down and grimy for a reason. It's unfortunate that this project was handed to a team that clearly didn't know what they were doing. Silent Hill deserves better.

I'd advise playing the demo before buying it so you know what you're getting yourself into, because even as a mere spin off, there's not one thing it does right. Konami clearly don't get their own franchise if they're content with selling this garbage. I could rant, but the short version is that it's void of depth in every category, and not interesting in the slightest.

I bought this game day 1 and found myself regretting dishing out 15 dollars for it. The island is beautiful and very atmospheric, but that's about all. I would have liked to see a little bit more interactivity than holding down the W button for an hour and a half.

While it's less smooth in terms of gameplay than the later titles, this is still probably my favorite in the series. I don't get why people are calling it such a short game. I've beaten it twice and both times took me over 8 hours, not including mistakes. It doesn't feel rushed or thrown together at all, I actually feel that Pandora's Temple is one of the most intriguing and well designed areas in a videogame. Some of the segments toward the end can be very frustrating, is my only complaint.

Never played any ninja gaiden games before this but I'm definitely interested in the series now. I thought this was a lot of fun and lasted a pretty good while too. To be honest the same night I beat it I was already thinking about starting a new game. Just trying to debate whether to play hard mode or not, I feel like I had enough difficulty on normal. I think part of what makes this game so enjoyable is that the enemies don't just blindly run for you and let you attack them. They actually fight back and defend themselves forcing you to have to outsmart them as well. It makes the combat more involved instead of just button mashing. Not only that but it feels like there's a good balance between exploration and combat so the game never really gets stale all the way to the end. The soundtrack is really good, the music caught my attention many times throughout the game.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Want to play a completely watered down and uninspired version of Resident Evil 4? Then Resident Evil 5 is for you. This game is only about half the length of Resident Evil 4, but not for the sake of quality. It becomes boring after the first 2 main sections of the game, throwing cheap gimmicks at you to make the action sections harder, boss battles are a waste of energy and time and they're all just blobs of tentacles. The final boss was one of the most unfun, unfair fights I've ever played in a videogame. They somehow managed to make the story even MORE generic and predictable than previous games. The music is just a bunch of string stabs and I refuse to call that music. Everything about this game reaks of mediocrity, disappointing because RE4 was so good.

This is, in my opinion, a shining example of a remake done right. It stays almost completely parallel to the original except with updated graphics, cinematics, and voice acting. None more was really needed, as the original resident evil's core was just fine and didn't need to change... with the exception of the bad gameplay mechanics.

I can see what they were going for but it doesn't work. This probably takes the cake as one of the most boring survival horror games I've ever played, and it's not a yummy cake. It's a s*** cake.

The plot is so weak it's almost absurd, but in almost every other regard this is a truly great game. Call me crazy, but I think this game was far scarier than the trilogy. It's still by all means a horror game, just a different type and more action oriented. To be honest, I always thought it would make more sense for the protagonist of a resident evil game to be more action oriented anyway, given what they are and what they're dealing with. The game itself is a ton of fun, very suspenseful, and on top of that goes on and on for probably 20-25 hours in just the story mode alone.

I have the playstation version but it's not here on metacritic for some reason, so I'm just posting my review here. I wasn't a big fan of this one, but it's not a bad game either. It has some cool moments and boss fights, and the atmosphere feels pretty claustrophobic which works for a horror game. However the problems with the first game start resurfacing with the bad inventory design and combat that's unrealistically clunky. The difficulty select is a joke, only easy or hard. Playing on easy is basically a cheat where you start out with a crap load of weapons, ammo and healths in your box whereas hard mode starts you off with absolutely nothing. The game itself really didn't hold my attention for more than a few hours, I'm not sure what it was. It took me like 2 or 3 weeks to beat it because I kept going for long periods of time without playing it because I just didn't care what was going on anymore. Resident Evil has never been strong in terms of plot but at least I didn't have to force myself to finish RE1 and 2.

This game still suffers from some of my problems with the first game such as the weird unnecessary inventory system and very stiff combat, but this game didn't piss me off as much. In fact I enjoyed this game enough to completely overlook those flaws. It's a pretty rough game but doesn't feel unfair about it. Above all, it's fun and probably one of the best games in the series.

I picked this up in 2011 because I had heard so much about it... late I know. I really liked it despite a few frustrations with the platforming. It doesn't focus too much on any one particular aspect of the gameplay, there is combat but it takes a back seat for the sake of exploration and solving puzzles in order to proceed to the next area. I think I still would have enjoyed this game had the combat been completely removed. The graphics are quite good for it's time and I liked that the whole game world is so well designed that you could look over a ledge and see a location in the distance you had been before hours ago. I prefer shadow of the colossus to this but Ico is still a charming game that shouldn't be overlooked.