Trepadora

It's a good game but jesus christ it's overglazed. It's not the best game of all time, it's not even the best RPG. It's an amalgamation of other games features that it doesn't pull off quite as well as those games. I hope in a few months people will be able to take a step back and look at this game with a more critical lens. Because it's no masterpiece, even if it shines.

I seriously do not understand the insane hype this game gets. At best it feels like a first time game devs pet project. So much of it is just beset by poor or awkward game design choices. It's mildly competent at what it tries to be but to compares it the likes of A Hat In Time or Super Mario Odyssey is baffling - just because you could do a few speedrunning skips doesn't excuse the utter lack of polish on anything in this game. Empty, repetitive environments and an instance on a low poly aesthetics don't help this game any.

The game has a nice soundtrack and pretty looking visuals, but the problem is the gameplay just is not fun. So many mechanics (most mentioned here in other reviews) are just so poorly designed that the game is better served to be looked at than played.

I have tried and tried and tried to give this game a chance. Too see this amazing gameplay everyone constantly cheered about. But, as soon as I broke out of the opening area, it began to feel like the mechanics of the game were actively working against me, stopping any fun from actually happening. It's not a large thing. At first it was just a few annoying things that were easily ignored. But once the game really starts pushing you, all the cracks feel so apparent. The gameplay feels so incredibly slow and clunky. Simple things like putting away a weapon take a needlessly long time, it may not seem like much, but given how much you'll be putting it away and drawing it during a fight for absolutely anything other than hitting and that this could well lead to you dying as a result, it's hard not to feel frustrated at it. No, it being worse in the past does not magically excuse any criticism.

Pirate Warriors 3 is a decently fun game for a fan of one piece. However, Koei has a history of bad pc ports, and I'm glad to say this particular port smashes all expectation by being **** terrible. -Uses the PS3 instead of PS4 graphics for some reason - All online features are conspicuously missing -Keyboard controls are awful - Controller support barely works - Game crashes. I had this game crash twice on the final stage. A stage that last nearly an hour. Even being smarter and trying to save before the final boss where it crashed, it crashed on trying to save. Please if you want to play this game, play it on PS4. This awful port doesn't deserve a penny of your money.

Rainbow Six Siege is actually a surprisingly good game. It's a thankfully breath of fresh air amidst the run-n-gun regenerating fair that FPS' usually get. It's just a shame that everything that surrounds the game is so **** bad. I can't praise enough about the gameplay. The emphasis on tactics and teamwork makes for a very tense and exciting shooter. If I could just play the game like I wanted this would be an 8 or 9 out of 10 straight away. Unfortunately, Ubisoft is pretty good at stopping that. The different operators are pretty well balanced. Everyone has their own niche and can be useful in their own right. One can shoot clusters of bombs into a particular room through a breakable surface, and another can set up additional cameras to spot enemies from. There are a decent amount of operators in the base game, however a significant amount are locked behind season passes. Yes, plural. It's not the most gregarious example in gaming, but after being spoiled by the likes of overwatch, it's hard not to raise an eyebrow. A major issue however, is the servers. It's not infrequent to be kicked from squads, games and experience large spikes in lag during gameplay. For a game in which a fraction of a second can mean the difference been victory and defeat, it's a very concerning issue. Another problem is the players. If you don't go in with a squad full of friends, you're very likely to find yourself on the receiving end of a painful situation. Team killing is extremely frequent, and more often than not completely on purpose. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be very heavily punished other than a slight docking of points. It's not unusual to find the defending team a man down before the attackers have moved an inch. Speaking of which, quitting is also very frequent. The matchmaking doesn't always find replacements, often meaning you'll find yourself in a match where you are missing teammates and at a significant disadvantage. Even just one missing teammate can make a match impossible to win. Terrorist hunt is almost unplayable for this reason, as by the one minute mark you'll frequently find yourself with only two players on your team. That's ignoring the pretty severe issues this game has with AI. Finally, bugs plague this game, even to this date. In my short time playing, I found numerous glitches such as your gun turning invisible, or getting stuck at 0 bullets in your clip and being unable to reload or do anything but move despite having ammo. In summary, Rainbow Six Siege is a very good game. Unfortunately, it seems Ubisoft royally screwed the pooch on this one and packaged it very incompetently.

If there was one word to sum up this game it's overrated. For too many reviewers seem to believe this franchise is some kind of golden goose that can do no wrong. But it's not: it's a bloated, self-serving mess. This the call of duty to the 'lolsorandum' crowd. The madden to the tumblrites. Lets make this quick. -The gameplay is almost completely indentical, the sole change being the oxygen mechanic. Which is entirely worthless. It's only purpose is meant to serve as a leash, forcing you back to designated points. This is immensely annoying near the beginning of the game. However, at the end of the game it swings in the other direction and enemies drop so much oxygen that it's not even a thought any longer. -You can use your oxygen to boost yourself up an inch or glide for a second. It adds almost nothing, except more and more annoying jumps -If you ever thought some of the characters from the first two games were annoying or flat, believe me, it's worse. Every character is throughly boring or just flat out unlikeable. There's no real reason to care about them other than whatever sob story the writers drew from a hat. -I really have nothing to comment about the plot. It didn't interest me, that's all I'll say. -Again, difficulty and balance it completely all over the place. There's not much I can say about it that hasn't already been said. Hope the RNG doesn't hate you, or no fun for you. I can see only bad things in this franchises future. It seems pretty inevitable that this game is going to wrung for all it's worth, until the last penny has been drained.

In a way, Tales of Symphonia was doomed to a sub-par score. Much of the Tales fanbase seems to have developed a severe case of nostalgia blindness towards some of the older Tales games, and none more prevalent than the ever touted 'best of the series'. Make no mistake, Symphonia is an old, dated game that falls a fair short amongst modern JRPGs. No HD re-release is ever going to change some of the underlying flaws with the game. I hardly have to say that they really cheaped out on the graphics. The models are blurry, stiff and have only a couple of extremely jerky animations to accompany them (the talking animation looks like they're always grinning, ruining any attempts at emotional scenes at all) . Backgrounds are boring, towns are uninspired and everything looks like it's barely been touched since its original release. In regards to the soundtrack, it's not bad but unlike other Tales games, no track is going to stick with you after you power down the console. On top of this the repetitive sound effects are likely to annoy you very quickly. The gameplay is as barebones as it gets. Then again, nothing less should have been expected from a game this old. Imagine any other Tales games except your only options are block, attack and artes. That's the entire battle system. There are a lot of archaic design choices from this game as well, such as: magic being completely unblockable, the enemies only able to receive hitstun sometimes. Notably bosses rarely seem to be bothered by your attacks and will continue going about their business regardless. Consequently, the battles become boring; a chore. With such a complete lack of options and such a mountain range of difficulty, you'll find yourself wanting to avoid battles. Which you can't. You'll find plenty of grinding in this game. And don't expect much from your AI teammates - you'll have to hold their hand for the entire ride since they seem to have been injected with an extra dose of artificial stupidity. The story is average. So average. The first half of the game holds a predictably boring arc through typically boring RPG shenanigans. Even despite the later twists and turns, it's hard to care about any of the characters. So many of them barely emerge from their shell of loose caricatures slapped together Tales of Symphonia isn't nearly as much as the hype would have you believe. Perhaps is was an outstanding game in its time, but against the future refinements to the series its flaws only stand all the more prevalent.

I'm sat here wondering how this game came to be known as one of the better games of the Tales franchise. I would consider myself to be a Tales fan - I've played every game I could get my hands on. But this game just doesn't spark. It feels like they were trying to gut most of what made these games so good. One thing I've always enjoyed was the story. But, I'm here thinking, 40 hours into the game, and can barely recall much bar a few vague descriptions of major moments and nothing else. Nothing about the plot is particularly memorable. It feels as though it stumbles from location to location, going through the motions and never really providing anything exciting. Despite being near the end of the game, I don't feel as if I am - I'm not on the edge of my seat as the story reaches it's finale: I'm strolling along with detached disinterest, vainly hoping that perhaps it will surprise me with some well-thought twist that makes it all worth it. If you're a Tales fan, you're well aware of the host of memorable characters. Characters such as Kratos or Yuri likely stick out in your mind as interesting, fleshed out characters. However in Graces F, we have 'I want to protect my friends protagonist' and 'cool mentor guy'. If you play this game, this will likely be the extent of the characters you will see. None of them ever become particularly fleshed out beyond the first impression you had of them. Very little attempt is ever made at development, and what little is, falls flat on its face. The voices don't fare much better. While the voices themselves are okay, it is very rare hear the character to genuinely sound like the emotion they are meant to be conveying. Combined with the clumsy writing, it is more than a little awkward to listen to. Finally the battle system. It feels completely gutted and replaced by something else entirely. I recognize that a lot of effort went into this system to make it have more depth and complexity. However, it feels unnecessarily overcomplicated. I played most of the game on hard, and it rarely evolved beyond pushing one button a lot and then waiting for my CC to replenish. Certainly, there was also back or sidestepping, but it never felt particularly involving. Reducing it to what is essentially a two button system feels like it took away much more than it gave. I feel as if that sums up the majority of my time playing with the game, changes that took more away from my experience that added to it. I had numerous other gripes with the game as well: the titles felt like more grinding, the mixer felt superfluous, the AI was catastrophically stupid, the difficulty was horrendously balanced (tying battle rewards to difficulty level was pretty dumb) and the characters felt unsatisfying as whole to play with. Overall, this does not feel like the game series I fell in love with, and I fear I will never understand the praise it receives.

Hyperdimension Neptunia isn't a particularly good game by any standards. Within the first few moments of playing you'll begin questioning the developers design choices. It's hard to describe, but everything about the UI just feels off. It feels clunky and unintuitive, actively denying you the information you so desperately want. The graphics aren't very pretty in themselves. The 2D sprites look okay, but the 3D models are lifeless and awkward to look at. The soundtrack might be one of the few redeeming features about the game, but you'll find it grating on you as you repeat the same areas again and again. The main issue is the gameplay, however. Information about it is poorly conveyed through slides that don't really tell you much of anything, leaving you to flounder around as you try to figure out what you're doing wrong. You'd better get on your knees and pray to RNGesus, because half your attacks will just flat out miss if you don't. Which is another thing: the difficulty is all over the place. Chances are you'll be spending a significant amount of time grinding. On most encounters you'll strike first and the battle will be a breeze. In other cases you'll be wiped before you can even question what happened. (So you can reload your save and do more grinding again. Yay.) So, in summary, combat is something you'll want to actively avoid, but you'll have to spend all of your time in if you want to do anything. The story...barely exists. I've yet to see any of purported wit and satire this game has. So far it's been a bevy of typical anime tropes. And, no, commenting that something exists and replicating it isn't satire. I entered Hyperdimension Neptunia curious, and left it confused. In my brief time, I saw nothing of merit - rather a substandard game that could only be enjoyed by the most hardcore of fans. You'll have to try really hard to find any fun here, all you'll find is a clunky, boring experience that leaves you worse off than when you began playing.

I can honestly say I've never been so disappointed in a game. This thing no longer bears any resemblance to Dragon Age Origins. Where do I even begin? It's pretty obvious the devs feel so very proud of themselves for their new engine and "open world" gameplay. And you know what? It resembles an MMO perfectly: tedious, boring grinding and fetch quests. There's so many it's practically a joke. If you play this game, this is 90% of what you do. It's every bit as tedious and boring and it seems. I've seen many people claim that the game magically becomes much better after you invest the ludicrous sum of 20 hours into the game. I'll tell you straight up: it doesn't. They try to throw a bunch of crap in your face to try and distract from it, but it's sure as hell still there. I have my gripes with the combat as well. Of course, there's no auto-attack. The tactical camera is almost worthless since micromanaging your team has been disemboweled. No longer can you stack commands and control every detail. Instead you can marvel at your teammates teleporting next to you and mages running into melee range. I played a 2H warrior, and it was honestly completely boring. Battles only really come in two flavors: ones that require no thought, but go on forever because they have ludicrous amounts of health, or battles in which you die instantly because the game makes no attempt to communicate enemy levels to you. Limiting potions seems to be a decision made solely to leash you and force you back to a camp all too often. It's hardly even worth mentioning how worthless the AI is in the game either. Graphically is where this game surprised me the most, by not surprising me in the least. They were pretty clearly pumping this up to be something huge, but it looks awful on previous generation consoles. Both of the previous games looked far better. The biggest issue of all is the optimization. This game is beyond broken. Over my 25 hours of play, I experienced countless freezes, more graphical glitches than you can shake a stick at and all kinds of wild and wacky bugs. Facial textures seem to often fail to load, and pop-in is horrendously slow, often only catching up near the end of cutscene. Slowdown is a very common occurrence as well. It really is a marvel of poor programming. The story is choppy at best. Most of it a fairly bland affair, but the characters get a few glimmers of interest here and there. However, it's only enough to make you hope you were playing a better game. Wholly, the characters just aren't very interesting or likeable. In general they'll be fairly one-note the entire game. The Dragon Age series deserved better. I can only hope that it'll be left to rest in peace, but given the slavemasters in control of the IP, we can expect to see it die a slow painful death as they wring every last penny out of it's once good name.

Senran Kagura isn't a particularly deep or compelling game, evidently, as the front cover consists of a faceless pair of breasts and not much else. Sadly, that is an all too accurate picture of the game itself - the game's main drawing point is fanservice alone with a lackluster beat 'em up underneath. Though the story may seem like it attempts to be something interesting at times, it ultimately comes down to boring cookie-cutter drivel that ends before it really even starts. The characters are ultimately little more than two dimensional archetypes that were clearly designed with aesthetics in mind and a short 15 minute break for the actual personality the developers threw in at the last second. The gameplay is really the main issue here, though. While the initial spectacle and titillation may draw you in, don't be fooled. Before long, the basic game will devolve into simple button mashing through far too many side levels that drag on far too long. But even if you don't want to spend the time on the pointless side missions in favor of finishing the story, you'll have little choice as grinding is completely mandatory. Combined with all five characters being required to be used for certain missions, this means far too much time spent grinding up character levels through the same dull levels, with the same mind-numbing, repetitive gameplay. The difficulty is another issue. While for a good chunk of the game, it will pose absolutely no challenge, the game is prone to difficulty spikes. The final chapter in particular is filled with enemies with ranged projectiles which will lead to stunlock, and inevitably death, unless you've over-leveled enough to simply tank the damage or get lucky enough to avoid it. Nowhere is the difficulty more evident than the games 'Frantic mode', basically shedding your clothes for increased attack but decreased defense. For the first couple of chapters, this will be laughably easy. However, after you reach a certain point, you will die in a hit or two. Honestly, it seems like a cheap ploy for yet more tedious grinding. Ultimately, the game barely has anything going for it. It works (that is when the framerate isn't acting up, which is almost always) and that's about it. The titillation runs dry very fast, and all you'll be left with is a shallow, boring and frustrating experience.

This game is by no means a perfect one, but it is still a well rounded, enjoyable experience. As always with Metacritic, a lot of dissenters seem to be awarding absurdly low scores for laughable reasons. I'm going to keep this one brief. Lightning Returns is a good game, but that's it. There a few flaws (noticeably, performance seems to have taken a hit), but they are by no means deal breakers. What the game lacks is any truly amazing standout moments and features. The 13 series has stumbled since it's first steps, but it still manages to land on it's feet. The battle system in particular is a far more interactive and thoroughly enjoyable experience. If you're looking for a fun JRPG to spend the weekend on, give it a try, you might be surprised.

Make no mistake, Sonic Generations is a step up from the series' misguided foray into the third dimension. Classic sonic stages are a breath of fresh air that are immensely satisfying and fun to play through. Relying far more on skill and quick thinking, they fare far better than the Act 2 Modern Sonic stages. Unfortunately, Sega still haven't quite figured out how to handle 3D well. These stages suffer from ridiculous control issues and twitch based gameplay that is more frustrating than fun. You will constantly be starting and stopping without prior knowledge of the stage, denying you the sense of speed you really crave. As far as the graphics go, all the remade stages look very pretty, with minimal performance issues. The soundtrack too, is pretty good with some standout tracks, with a few being forgettable at worst. The story is pretty paper thin, but it's far better to have a minimalist story than a completely **** crazy one like Sonic '06 for example. Sonic Generations is a step in the right direction. If Sega can manage to handle Sonic in 3D, they might be onto a real winner in the future, but who knows if they'll ever have enough blast processing for that.

Arcana Heart 3 is an embarrassing failure on all fronts, and something I'd expected a lot more from given ArkSys was behind this. After enjoying the crap out of Blazblue and Guilty Gear, I expected a similar experience from this. Unfortunately what I found was no doubt a cheap cash grab with very little effort or thought given to it. The graphics are low-res and murky, the soundtrack while passable is completely forgettable. Normally in terms of UI, we'd talk about how user friendly a game might be, but in this case, it's more a case of user hostile. No attempt at explaining anything is made it the game whatsoever. The controls, the story, the terminology. Not to mention, the story itself. It is a complete joke to call this a story. Call Of Duty has more sophisticated and deep storylines. What this is, is an arcade mode that has been poorly patched together into something meant to resemble a story. Arcana Heart 3 attempts to boast numerous amounts of characters with great variability in the 'Arcana' system. When it comes down to it, the characters all play too similarly for the Arcana system to even make a difference. What we actually have is slight variations on the same character. While the game has 23 different characters, each personality can be fit into the same archetypes that we've come to know and hate over the years. Additionally as every character is female, each is milked as much as possible for pointless fanservice. The game, even if you somehow find enjoyment in it, will not grab your attention for anything longer than around 10 hours. There is a distinct lack of options avaliable. No unique game modes, no arcade mode, no combo challenge mode. You will spend most of what little time you spend on it playing online or grinding through the same cut-and-paste story mode for all of the characters in some vapid attempt to convince yourself that you did not waste money on this. In short, Arcana Heart 3 is a poor cash-and-grab attempt aimed at hormonal adolescents, with lacklustre performance is every area and shameless fanservice painted all over the game. If you are considering buying this game, pick up Blazblue or Guilty Gear. You will find a much more complete and satisfying experience well worth your money.