Tubey

007 First Light is a game of contradictions. On a surface level, it's a very passable action game that pays good tribute to the source material, keeping the narrative flowing and not overstaying its' welcome. On the flipside, it's overly streamlined, extremely easy even on the hardest difficulty settings, has absolutely woeful driving segments and stilted combat. It feels like a movie that reluctantly has gameplay sections. It's by no means bad, I enjoyed it, but the critic scores are clearly over the top - but then critics enjoying a game you need zero skill to play isn't exactly a new phenomenon. My advice would be to wait for a sale and treat it like you would a rental game back in the day - good for one playthrough, something you won't regret playing but you'll forget about soon enough.

For me at least, this is a reasonably well done narrative. But it's a very heavy duty one that goes almost over the top with the detail and excessive cut scenes. But I generally liked it - it's probably the best the series has been narratively since Diablo II. But the game itself is still extremely mediocre. It lacks the scope of titles like Path of Exile. It lacks the heart of titles like Grim Dawn. It has improved since release, but it's adding polish to something that is fundamentally broken. The best ARPGs hide the inherent repetitition through excellent skill systems, fluid combat and brilliant loot - D4, unfortunately, has none of these things. It's a paint-by-numbers, highly polished, baby's first ARPG that has no soul, something you'll enjoy like fast food for the first few hours with the campaign, but then realise you're hungry for something better after the novelty wears off.

I watched the critic reviews with a bit of healthy scepticism (they're usually awful after all), but after playing this... if anything, the critics are being generous. It's not awful, really. But it is so deeply flawed that it's hard to enjoy the good things that it offers because of the weight of all the bad. The pacing and storytelling is atrocious in the early stages of the game, so much so that it puts a dampener on everything else. The environmental detail her is staggeringly good. The combat gets better as you go further into the game, but is a bit of a quagmire at the start. But yeah I don't care about the characters, pretty much ever. I don't care about what's going on. The quests are monotonous. Everything that defines the 'RPG' part of an 'Action RPG' here is varying degrees of terrible. But when left alone and allowed to just enjoy the world, the game does shine, and it gets better as you persist. But that really is the problem - you have to persist, you have to ignore hours upon hours of monotony to unearth the hidden gem. I'm giving it a 7, but it could easily be a 6 or a 6.5. It's a 'wait for a sale' thing.

For me, gameplay is usually king, and I don't really care about what a game looks like. That rule, however, goes out the window for Marathon, because whilst the moment-to-moment experience is often fun, the game is an eye sore to look at. Not because they're 'bad', but the art style is so garish that it gives me an actual headache after half an hour or so of play. But it isn't a 'bad' game. The sound design is really good, the shooting is satisfying. It's just all let down by a terrible aesthetic and abysmal UI/menuing system, complete with the most bland, generic character design you will ever see. Indeed, the word 'generic' pretty much is the review for me. It's not bad, it's not great, it just... is.

An outstanding game - the perfect use of the HD-2D graphic style to reimagine a classic. It retains all the elements that make the Dragon Quest formula such an addictive experience - the lovable characters, the grindy yet satisfying gameplay loop, the weird monsters and impeccable world building - and emphasises all these positives with a beautiful new coat of paint. It's not perfect, solely because the source material obviously shows its age. But what it promised it largely delivers in spades, and it is an easy recommendation as a result.

Highguard throws so many ideas into a blender in an attempt to be unique, and the ironic net result is that it fails to find a reason to exist. There isn't one element where it stands out from its' competition. It isn't an atrocious game. It functions well enough, with some relatively minor bugs. The gunplay is so-so. But the problem is the mechanical game design of it, which is convoluted, poorly paced and quite often pointless - so much so that the first part of every game is quite literally redundant. You'll struggle to remember the name of a single character, because in that regard this really is Concord 2.0 (but to be fair, in every other respect the comparison is unjust) - just bland, by the books, safe characters with safe abilities and nothing more. Which is shocking given that you'd think monetisation would rely on players identifying with these characters, but instead they feel like an afterthought. The initial 3v3 was, clearly, a terrible idea for maps of this size. The addition of 5v5 nudged it up a point for me, but it's still insufficient to save the game overall and, indeed, compounds a core issue with how this was designed - it was clearly not playtested properly, at least not with the aim of listening to constructive criticism. Highguard represents a concept **** which, in a healthy studio, would have been largely left on the cutting room floor. It certainly wouldn't have survived extensive testing. And it wouldn't have been hyped up to the moon with a Game Awards trailer. It isn't good, it isn't even bad. It's aggressively mediocre, and doesn't have a reason to exist. In many ways, it would have been better if it was bad - at least then it'd be memorable.

Not just a bad Football Manager game; it's a bad game full stop. A UI that is all but unusable and, given the game is basically a spreadsheet simulator, that is 90% of the game that is basically broken. The match engine has visually improved, but... who cares? It still looks like an early PS3 game, and if you bought FM for graphical fidelity you are clueless. It's a disaster, from an incredibly complacent, lazy developer, and deserves everyt single ounce of criticism it gets. Seeing the critic score at an average of 70 at the time of this review is laughable and once again shows just how useless the mainstream gaming media is.

Forspoken suffers from really poor dialogue and unlikeable characters, repetitive gameplay and the overwhelming feeling is this is a project that should have really been cancelled early in development, but nobody ever pulled the trigger. It's not a total write-off - visually it's OK, and there's some promise with the overall 'isekai/Alice in Wonderland' premise (unfortunately never realised here.) The sound design isn't terrible either. And the parkour type movement is, at least for a while, pretty decent. But that's it. Everything else - gameplay, characters, dialogue, progression... everything - is pretty awful. But it's the writing that really kills it, because this thing is littered with cut scenes, all over the place, every few minutes, and every single one, without exception, is abysmal, with a script that feels it was written by a really bad AI. The lead character, Frey, is the worst character in the entire game. And it's not entirely the fault of the script either - she's badly acted, with weird delivery of the lines throughout that don't match the context of the situation. So yeah, it's a poor game. It hasn't been unfairly blasted by a 'hate mob' - it's just a bad game.

I genuinely loved Legends Arceus, the predecessor to this one. ZA feels like it took everything that made Arceus good and threw it all away. The world is limited to one city, and it feels it at every step. I didn't think I'd see a worse world than Dragon Age II but this takes the crown. It is soulless, with the attempt at adding verticality with rooftops etc. completely misses the mark. The traversal around it is awful too, with a weird gliding mechanic that is hard to even describe; it's one of the worst travelling mechanics you'll ever see. The quests are repetitive, lazy and largely pointless. The cut scenes, particularly at the start, are egregious in amount and length - the hand-holding feels like the game is made squarely for a six year old, with no consideration to anyone else. Graphically, the game - even on Switch 2 - is lacklustre. But it's a Pokémon game by Game Freak, arguably the laziest developer on the planet, so that's par for the course at this point. But graphics don't really matter, especially in Pokémon - what does matter however is the art design, and that's where ZA is one of the worst the series has ever seen. Everything is flat, uninspired and 'same old same old' - you're constantly surrounded by plain walls, copy and paste windows, locked doors etc. etc. etc. The battle system is where they've attempted innovation, and it completely fails. It's an attempt at a halfway house between realtime action and turn-based combat, and the net result simply doesn't work. Before I typed this review, I was going to give it a 4. I've had to drop it another point because I'm struggling to give anything to be positive about with it. Yes, there's mega evolutions - some look cool - and... there's not much else. Even the difficulty is awful; it's somehow even easier than Pokemon X/Y which this game takes direct inspiration from with the setting of Lumiose City, and that game basically played itself. So yeah, it's just terrible. Pick up Legends Arceus if you haven't played it; that game is leagues ahead of this one.

It lacks the compelling story and protagonist of the original in a big way, which detracts from what are otherwise some improvements on the open world formula. The net result is that it's very cookie cutter, with no real surprises or pushing of the envelope in any area, nothing unique that pushes the boundaries and keeps the player invested, which Ghost of Tsushima had in spades. Is it bad? No. It's a perfectly acceptable game. But it's not the masterpiece iteration that many hoped for.

An example of what happens when hype goes far in excess of reality. Mario Kart World is a mediocre game, outclassed in pretty much every way by its' direct predecessor, and in many ways a downgrade on competitor games from over 20 years ago. That's not to say it's 'bad', because it's not - it has fairly tight mechanics, lovely art design and a lot overall to love - but it has too many poor elements to be a recommendation in the category of game that it's in, particularly in terms of lobbying/matchmaking and the really badly implemented 'open world' mechanics, which truly deserves to be only mentioned in quotation marks, because it's as bare bones as the term gets. In absolutely no way is this title worth the RRP.

A really beautiful, really cosy little city builder/match-3 hybrid title that is priced right for what it offers. It starts simple, gets trickier, but always feels 'chill'. It could do with better tutorials at certain points in the later maps, and it slightly runs out of steam towards the end. But it's well worth the price of admission. A special note of praise for the soundtrack, which is perfect.

Sometimes you just have to admit when a game is pretty poor, even if it's from a studio you fanboy for traditionally. This is one of those times.Nightreign is deeply flawed. Not because it's a spinoff/a different genre to Elden Ring, but because it does the new genre badly. It's a roguelike that misses the compelling nature of progression that good roguelikes have. It's a multiplayer game without basic functionality that any good multiplayer game has. Everything the game has that props it up comes from Elden Ring, whilst everything new they've added misses the mark entirely. And I mean everything - there's not one thing here that Nightreign does better than any half decent competitor in the genre.This is lazy. It's an asset-flipped spin-off that should have been, at most, a £10 multiplayer DLC for Elden Ring that people would have picked up, said "that's not very good" after an hour or so, and got on with their day playing the real game. But to charge £35 for it as a standalone game is insanity.FROM Software have, deservedly, earned themselves a rabid community fanbase, to the point criticism is considered borderline heresy, but I'm a believer in honesty. This is a poor game. The devs need to be told it's a poor game, so they can learn from it. This half-baked, lazy endeavour into multiplayer isn't something they can pull off in my view, and they need to focus instead on their strengths.

Quite the disappointment. It's not terrible, but compared to the first game it has regressed in basically every way. Which is surprising given the projected development cycle of this one - those following it expected something great. Unfortunately, it isn't. The art style is going to be subjective of course, but for me it lacks the charm of the original - it feels very amateurish and clutters the screen on many an occasion as you play. The story in a tower defence title is never the focus, but again the only way I can critique it is to say it lacks the charm of the original, which had it in spades with the quirky narrative. Indeed, the original game hangs like a shadow over the entire sequel - it's superior in every way. It's got rid of everything that made the original fun, like character creation and so on. It hurts to write this as I don't want to dunk on a game that was made with the heart in the right place of the dev, but it is what it is. What I can do, however, is highly recommend Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten, the original title. If you haven't played that yet, pick that up - it's a tower defence gem. There's a free demo on Steam to see if it clicks with you. But as for Mists of Ruin? Not for me.

They front loaded the first hour or two with decent enough stuff, but after that it really is shallow as a puddle. Plenty of performance issues too. It's like The Outer Worlds but without any of the personality that helped elevate that one above being mediocre. It's not terrible, not at all, but for it to have an 80+ Metacritic score from the critics is genuinely ridiculous.

This isn't a Dragon Age game, nor is it really an RPG. It's a third person action game with simple mechanics and party members who act as turrets rather than any strategic option you can manage or control. It has no consequential outcomes in dialogue, everything is overly pleasant or humerous, no one can really be offended, nothing is 'dark' or challenging in the narrative. The art design is awful, despite being graphically fine. The characters all have a plastic sheen to them and massive heads; a style choice I find absolutely baffling given the IP this game is supposed to belong to. It's essentially a modern but very poor replica of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, rather than anything Dragon Age has been before, but with awful comedy dialogue and, of course, the inevitable modern audience political sensibilities shoved in, because heaven forbid a gamer wants some escapism from the dreariness of real life when they play a fantasy role playing game. For the positives, it runs well, it has excellent sound design and animations and has the occasionally well done set piece. Everything else is a dud, and yet here we are - again - with major gaming outlets praising a dud as a masterpiece, solely to preserve their access journalism.

Strangely disappointing. I say strangely because on the surface it's not that much different to the vastly superior Wargroove 1, but everything it adds somehow detracts from the experience of playing it - missions are too streamlined and simple, the optional objectives are often annoying, the characters are cookie cutter and basic, the storyline swinging from dull to nonsensical. Everything lacks that little bit of heart and ingenuity that made the original a decent game, even though the multiplayer was always dead on arrival for both titles. It's also strange in that I can't criticise the professional reviewers for scoring it highly either, because I can see where they would because it gets a lot of basics right. But for me the downsides spoil it significantly.

Simply not a very good game. It has the veneer of a AAA gaming experience but none of the depth you'd expect for the price tag. But even on the Ubisoft subscription you can't help but feel short changed. It's primarily a stealth game but with mechanics just a rung up from the abortive Gollum game fiasco. The AI is frequently broken, the maps - apart from key city hotspots - are barren and uninspired. The controls vary wildly, with the land vehicle being atrocious but space combat being passable. The narrative is cookie cutter, predictable from the outset and only improves slightly from an abysmal start near the end. The much lauded reputation system is tacked on and inconsequential. And while the game is graphically OK to good for the most part, animations are lazy, as is the stilted voice acting. But as said, this is primarily a stealth game with bad stealth mechanics and poor AI. It doesn't matter how pretty the Star Wars coat of paint over it is, the game is fundamentally bad. Unless you want a 'girl goes around implausibly punching people unconscious like Deontay Wilder while everyone else stands round confused' simulator - which isn't as fun as it sounds - then you can give this a miss.

A really good remaster of a classic. It's not perfect, but it's a unique title that holds up really well and the devs of this did the smart thing and didn't 'remake' it - if it's not broken, don't fix it. I'm delighted it's got exposure to a wider audience after being locked to the Gamecube. If you want to play a JRPG that's just that little bit different, this one is for you.

Disclaimer: I've wrote 170 game reviews on here for fun, being as honest as I can be. I think I've scored two games 10 and two games 0 in that time. So when I give Starfield this score and review, it is not 'review bombing' - it's embarrassing to see media outlets time and time again dismiss user generated reviews because they're generally actually more reliable than their scores. On with the review... I was excited for Starfield. Not to the extent most were - I didn't expect Game of the Century - but I expected a really fun experience, Skyrim in space as people say. I even bought the special edition headset and controller because they're incredible. I have zero regrets doing so either. So yes, it's disappointing to say that Starfield is... mediocre. In many ways it is actually Skyrim in space, and if that was the aim they technically achieved it. But it's done with no heart, soul or innovation. It's a relic, a game from ten years ago, clumsily dressed up and disguised as a modern one. But it's like plastering over a wall that's falling apart; the cracks quickly begin to show. And boy does Starfield have cracks. NPCs look and act like robots. They don't feel part of the world. Even the voiced primary cast have a vague empty feel to them. The cities suffer from uninspired design - either painfully bland or cookie cutter. They get a bit better than the first one you'll bump into, which isn't hard as THAT one almost feels like a practical joke in how generic and beige it feels, but it never gets to the territory of 'good'. Indeed, The Outer Worlds - a game this borrows heavily from and is inferior to in look, story and character - smashes Starfield apart in this respect. Yes, the game is 'big'. But 90% of it is lifeless. Literally. Barren planets acting as resource deposits. Again, The Outer Worlds - smaller, more focussed and hand crafted - is leagues beyond what Starfield offers in terms of curated content, because it's a more even experience throughout. The writing and cast... no, actually, I won't criticise the voice actors too much. It's done well for their part. But the writing... it's Maguffin 101, you largely know what is going to happen throughout inside 15 minutes and there's very little turn of pace or direction. And to again compare to The Outer Worlds, nearly everything is so serious - yes, it occasionally 'lightens up', but it feels like a side-mission of levity to the main mission of deadly serious, boringly delivered lines. Without Skyrim's 'one voice actor voices like 200 people' novelty, this really, really starts to grate. Combat is, for the most part, good. Gunplay - a concern of mine ahead of launch - is surprisingly very decent. The levelling system, however, isn't. It's... not pointless as such, as the perks work, but it's all delivered at snail's pace and in terms of combat perks can mostly just be straight up nearly ignored. The UI is classic Bethesda - terrible. But I could have lived with that personally as it's par for the course. The lack of mapping, however, isn't. It's an almost gamebreaking design fault, absolutely shocking and I can't for the life of me understand why they went in this direction. It's supposed to be a sprawling open world RPG - how can you NOT give the player mapping? Speaking of RPG, this comes to the crux of my issues with Starfield. It's decidedly an average looter-shooter first, and an RPG second. Fresh off the back of Baldur's Gate III and Sea of Stars, Starfield REALLY feels limited in its role-playing aspects. Is it a 'bad' game? No. There's a lot of fun to be had, it does a lot right. But it's a disappointing one overall. From the makers of Skyrim and Fallout, over a decade after the latters release and with the company surely learning from the mistakes of Fallout 76, I simply expected a lot better. This is going to be a game that review sites will cringe when looking back on the 9s and 10s it's been rewarded out of sheer hype, because it's quite honestly not even close to that score. It's a 4/10 'Bethesda' game for me, but a 6/10 'actual game' - I expected so much more and got, what the kids call, a 'mid' experience. To this day, I can pick up and play Skyrim for a few hours and have a great time; whereas I pick up and play Starfield and I'm looking for reasons to carry on after 15 minutes. Therein is the difference.

Very good. Solid in all the right areas, absolutely gorgeous pixel art design, tremendously endearing. The combat is unfortunately the weakest part of it, it never really evolves and it starts to get a bit repetitive past the halfway mark, but the game itself held my interest very well throughout. So yeah, very good. Not a game of the year contender, and not up there with the classics of the genre, but it's a brilliant homage and well worth your time and money if you're a classic JRPG fan.

Absolutely outstanding. It's all the classics rolled into one and given a modern shine - no hint of developer BS with microtransactions, just a beautifully realised game in every single way. Art design, graphical fidelity, story beats, voice acting, game mechanics - everything is near enough flawless for the type of game it is. I score it a 9 solely because of one minor **** - I think it could have been easier on the beginner early on with a better tutorial system and I think the beginning overall is a bit weaker than the rest of the game, but I'd be scoring it like a 9.5 if decimals were allowed. Well worth the asking price, in every way imaginable.

After the emo boyband car journey that was FF15, 16 represents a minor improvement, with it's more gritty, heavily inspired Game of Thrones aesthetic and story arch, but it drops the ball too often with it's mediocre world building and surprising lack of an RPG 'feel' to it. Too often I'm thinking just how good FF7 Remake was in comparison rather than feel invested in this one. I can see why people, at least initially, were bowled over by it - it has really good presentation, very much 'next gen' with a vast feel to the experience, but the more you play the more humdrum it gets, with the title too often descending into 'when's the next decent fight?' and 'can these characters shut up I'm not interested in what they have to say or do.' Also, a Final Fantasy game should never have a protagonist named Clive. Indeed, that sort of represents my overall main problem with 16; there's too much of an attempt to appeal to western audiences, to the point where it's lost a lot of what Final Fantasy is loved for. This feels like Bayonetta x Game Of Thrones rather than Final Fantasy. So yes, in short, it's a decent action game, at points it's great even, but not really a decent RPG. Final Fantasy in name only. It leaves a fantastic first impression but ultimately can't quite last the pace.

Imagine a shop that has a fantastic window display, and you're tempted inside, and then you realise it's all show; all the goods are past their sell by date, the only thing working is a slot machine in the corner designed to be addictive and take money off anyone foolish enough to start playing it - the rest of the shop is neglected, falling apart, the owner forgot about everything but the slot machine long ago because it made all the money they ever needed out of gullible idiots. That's FIFA. That's all FIFA is. Ultimate Team, with the pretence of having other game modes, designed to trick the stupid out of their money on an annual basis. This review is July 2023 as, obviously, I wouldn't pay a penny for this piece of crap and I downloaded on Game Pass for 'free' out of curiosity. Looks amazing, but an hour in you see it's as shallow as a puddle and just non-stop, constantly pushes you to FUT. EA, do a proper career mode or drop the licences, you greedy, morally inept gang of bar stewards.

A bit torn on this one. The aesthetic is much improved from D3 but feels like a 'nightmare' skin plastered on top of a cartoon rather than something created from scratch with a horror theming in mind... it's really hard to explain but it too often doesn't 'feel' right to me. But that's by the by if the gameplay was fantastic and... well, again, it's not 'bad', it's just uninspired. Rarely does a game leave me a bit lost trying to describe it and having to resort to the word 'feel' but... yeah, again, too often it just doesn't 'feel' right. I'm honestly sorry but it's one of those 'you have to play it to see what I mean' scenarios because words don't do it justice. The story, on the other hand, I can describe easily - shallow, tepid nonsense that falls off a cliff, every bit as pointless as Diablo 3. D2 got the 'show don't tell' balance right, nothing in the series has since. Microtransaction/battle pass nonsense unfortunately exist. In a full price game. They have no right to, but unfortunately the consumers have been stupid enough to lose the war on that one to the point it's barely worth mentioning anymore, but for me any paid game with them in loses points. That's not 'review bombing', it's just common sense that **** features a system that is to the detriment of a consumer, then it should be marked down for it. As it is, it's not the worst implementation of it, but it's Blizzard, so expect nonsense down the line. I don't hate Diablo 4. I absolutely don't love it either. I actually prefer D2:R overall - yes, it's 'simpler', but it still does what it intends to do very well, has no bloat/filler and respects the player. But if we're all being honest, there's simply better aRPGs outside the Diablo franchise now - much better in fact - and Diablo 4 doesn't do enough to reclaim the title.

It's a game that feels very niche throughout, and that's because it is. Before this version give the artwork a big upgrade, on the DS the Mystery Dungeon games felt very much "indie title with a Pokémon skin on top", and was a sharp divergence away from what the core series was all about. Rescue Team DX feels the same way, but much more polished visually and with some quality of life additions. Surprisingly, in many ways it's harder than the originals, whcih was a pleasant surprise for me. The critics didn't understand the game when first released and don't understand it now, hence the mediocre reviews - it's not meant to be a 'Pokémon' game, it's a spinoff, and a very good one. It's a hard game to explain, so I'd recommend trying the free demo before purchasing. If you like that, you'll like the final game. I'd also say try getting a physical copy second hand maybe, as the asking price is a bit too steep for what the game is.

I adore this game - it gets nearly everything right that you want from a reboot, retaining the charm of the original and 'glowing up' the elements that needed attention, with a stellar soundtrack and fantastic CO art design. The 'toybox' aesthetic is so-so but it does grow on you, but I understand if it's offputting for some. But the only reason I can't score it a 9 is because the multiplayer is half-baked, which is a massive shame as this could have had a dedicated online audience for years to come if it had something that could supplant Advance Wars By Web, but alas it does not. So for me it's a solid 8 and very much a recommended buy for any strategy enthusiast, particularly those who like single player experiences rather than multiplayer.

A game that should have been cancelled, but wasn't. Instead, it was mandated for release, long before it was finished, because of pure greed. Missing content, crippled by bugs, obscenely unbalanced in terms of gameplay, no video in cutscenes and the most braindead AI imaginable. Graphically it's a manure show as well, with only a passable art design saving it a bit. Arkane, what the hell? How can the developer that gave us Prey and Dishonored release this? It's not worth playing for 'free' on Game Pass. It's that bad, no exaggeration. Value your time more and do something else. The worst game of the year, which is incredible as the latest Settlers game was released the other month and to be worse than that is some going.

A very good open world experience that doesn't do much to reinvent the genre, but does everything it's supposed to do very well and with a fantastic reverence to the source material. You'll find something to enjoy here even if you're unfamiliar with Harry Potter. If you are a fan of the source material, this is essentially a dream game; the best Wizarding World game ever made by a wide margin. Unfortunately, it's not great on PC. I haven't had the issues others have reported to the same degree, but it's still visibly unoptimised and it gets knocked down a few points for that reason for me. But it's still excellent. Those rating it badly are doing so for disingenuous reasons completely unrelated to the actual video game. They can safely be ignored as the petulant crybabies they are.

Five plus years of development and this is the net result... I can't even put into words my disappointment; this was one of my most anticipated games since 2018 and it's a calamity. It looks OK visually, but everything else - everything - is a disaster. It's like the developers skim read a Wikipedia entry about the series and decided to just plow on making the most basic, uninspired RTS imaginable and slap the Settlers name on it. A question for you, Ubisoft - how can you monetise a game with in-game transactions when the game is so god-awful that nobody with half a brain could tolerate more than an hour of it? Thankfully I've got Settlers II to get the bad taste out of my mouth from this - yeah it may be around 17+ years old at this point but it has 100x the heart and gameplay of this modern trainwreck. 3/10, it should be a 2 for the graphics alone but it's also mechanically... fine I guess, it's just that it's a terrible actual game, so I give it a 3. But it's SO disappointing it's honestly tempting to just slap a zero on it out of disgust. Bah.

Temtem isn't bad, but it feels very much like a 'we've got Pokémon at home' game in too many areas. Art style is subjective of course, but for me the art design is too basic, as is the creature designs throughout. Pokémon excels due to creativity and vibrancy in the character design; Temtem does not. The battle system is where it differentiates itself from Pokémon, and it's good, but not good enough to say it's a game changer in the genre. The story is surprisingly on par with anything Pokémon can offer, but again it's not enough to cover the glaring flaws the title has. Game Freak have been lazy with Pokémon too often and it's understandable that other devs have seen an opportunity in the market as a result, but Temtem doesn't do it for me. There's 164 Temtems and it somehow feels less than the 151 original Pokémon did, and by a considerable distance. They're all remarkably unmemorable; they just blend into one another. This isn't a 'Pokémon killer' - it's OK to pass a few hours away with but I'm deeply disappointed with what I got for the price I paid. It should be £20 at the very most in my view.

Pokémon Violet is the first game in the series where I've thought "you know, maybe it's not for me anymore." Not because of the technical issues, but because the game is so dumbed down with Exp. Share and auto-battles and the 'open world' aspect is so half-arsed that it just all feels... wrong. I loved Arceus, I had high hopes of Violet/Scarlet after seeing it being pitched as a hybrid of a traditional game and the new introduced in Arceus, but... while it actually DOES do that to a large degree, it just doesn't work. To touch briefly on the technical troubles, yes, it runs terribly, objects and people in the distance are extremely off putting as they half load into existence, and I had one complete system crash at one point, so it's an unoptimised rushed mess. But it's Game Freak, it's what they do, Sword/Shield was similar too, so as a series veteran I basically expect semi-broken games at this point, so it's not as big a factor to me as it would be for someone coming in fresh. I like the new Pokémon, no problems there, and the academy system is OK. But... yeah, the game just feels all kinds of wrong and the series is moving in the wrong direction. Yes, your target audience is younger, but you don't have to treat kids like idiots, they know how to play games, they don't need everything to be baby mode.

I'm scoring this a zero as it wasn't released 10 November 2021. Indeed, it wasn't released at all, and in all likelihood never will be released, so I have absolutely no idea why this is listed on Metacritic for review. Strange. But if you're reading this, the Star Citizen saga is one worth reading up on - it's basically a vaporware game that started out with good intentions but feature creep and an insane fan base morphed the game into a decade plus long scam where the developers make more money from not releasing it than if they ever did. Seriously look it up, it's a case study on the sunk cost fallacy.

It's not as engaging as Three Houses. It's more streamlined, which is actually a good thing in my view as Three Houses had a fair bit of bloat, especially with the repetition inherent in the game design for that one, but it doesn't have the same character. Indeed the characters range from mediocre to awful, and the plot is uniformly poor. I also hate the character design in this one - the blue and red motif inparticular annoys me at a fundamental level. Fire Emblem still hasn't reached the heights it achieved with Awakening. Engage isn't 'bad'; it's just not great, and when you've played past entries and know just how great the series can be, that makes it a difficult one to review with any objectivity. If you're a series newcomer, maybe you'll give this a bit more leeway than I am, but I honestly can't see anyone being blown away by this regardless of your past with the series. My advice would be to go and pick up Fire Emblem: Awakening if you want to see the series at its' best in the modern era. Full Disclosure: I haven't completed this game, I'm around 15 hours in, but I've basically lost interest at this point and felt comfortable scoring it.

First game I've refunded on Steam that wasn't outright broken, because I didn't buy it to play a cut scene simulator. Which is a shame as I had this wishlisted forever since the Project Athia demo and expected good things, thinking they'd have elaborated on the foundation of Final Fantasy 15. They didn't. I only played it an hour and a half and I was done - what limited combat I was allowed to take part in was god-awful (if you played the Harry Potter Deathly Hallows games back in the day, where it's a third person shooter? Yeah, that. Fun.), the writing is interminably bad with an extremely irritating protagonist. The world building seemed encouraging enough, Athia wasn't terrible (as a world; the x-ray vision and stupid 'open world' tropes of collecting for the sake of collecting is paint-by-numbers dull), but not enough to pull anyone in because of the obvious other flaws. Because yeah, the real killer was the non-stop fade to black for cut scenes, every 10 seconds, over and over and over and over again. Unplayable. Had to refund as can't reward this game design - it's padding, nothing less than pointless padding. Also, it's unoptimised to a funny degree. I have a 3090 and 32GB RAM, 12900K (not bragging obviously but have to give context), game still stutters along like crazy on everything over medium settings. Awful, just awful.

It's fun. Not every game has to be a pretentious piece of art that doesn't dare offend the perpetually offended. It's not Doom Eternal obviously - the gunplay is lightweight, it's closer to it's Outer Worlds in overall feel. But it's not meant to be a 'meaty' FPS like Doom, nor a twitch shooter (the AI is mediocre to be polite) - no, it's just a fun game with a tongue in cheek, self-aware coating. It lives and dies by whether you like the comedy - I do, I think it works really, really well throughout, so I rate it. If I didn't like the comedy, this score would fall rapidly, because as a game it obviously has flaws - but I love the art style, the characters are memorable, there's some genuinely laugh out loud moments throughout and the gameplay is functional if not great. It's doing nothing new apart from the humour, and that's its' actual strength - it's a throwback to a 'one and done' game, where a developer had a vision, realised it and released it for people to play and enjoy instead of wondering how to monetise it for five years. An easy recommend for me, especially if you have Game Pass and get it 'free'.

Hideous, truly hideous. A zero as it's not a video game, it's a gacha game in disguise. If you're a 'whale' and spend thousands on this, you're an idiot with more money than sense, simply because of just how many other things exist in this world that are real, tangible and provide more enjoyment than this will ever do. Or you're a poor soul with gambling problems who have been **** in, and... well, if that's you, I feel so sorry for you. If you're a free player and don't spend money, you're still an idiot, as you are voluntary being the prey for the predator whales to feast upon, enabling the single most disgusting predatory monetisation practice yet seen in this industry, certainly on this scale. The Asians seemingly love this tripe; they're welcome to it, but for the love of everything this crap needs to take a long walk off a short plank. Truly disgusting. I feel dirty for even installing it, as I feel like I've contributed to this being a 'success' by playing it at all. Truly, truly vile.

Fills a very defined niche of gaming - a roguelike puzzler. And it does it very, very well. It won't appeal to everyone, so it's not one I can recommend without caveats, but if you see it cheap it's worth a pop as you could get 50+ hours out of this if it clicks with you.

The 'black sheep' of the Souls series of games. A 'Marmite' title that you'll either love or hate - but then I honestly can't understand how anyone COULD love it. For me, compared to DS1 and DS3, this is a terrible game. Uninspired level design, terrible enemy placement, drab grey environments, lacklustre mob design. It is totally forgettable too, which is possibly it's greatest sin - Souls, at his best, is majestic; not just the core series, but Bloodborne, Elden Ring, all feature high points that have your jaw hitting the floor. DS2 has nothing, not an ounce of wonder to it. Souls games also live and die by how good it's heavy but fair combat design is; DS2 is lacking in that area too. There's little weight to it and everything feels that tad bit delayed. It's not bad, but just... uninspired. That really is the word to describe the whole game - uninspired. It suffers from being a marked downgrade on the first game, and the devs knew it too, with DS3 basically ignoring DS2 altogether and using the first game as the base instead. But not only is it a bad Souls game, I honestly think it's just a pretty bad game altogether. I now know after the fact that the game had a hellacious development cycle, and boy does it show. My advice would be to play literally any other Soulsborne game by From Software instead of this; they're all dramatically superior.

Great visuals, very highly polished by a developer who knows what they're doing in that respect, even if everything does look a bit too... shiny for my tastes, I can't argue with the fidelity on show here. The cars handle really well too - at its' core, it has everything a really decent driving sim needs. But the menus and user experience is horrendous. As in proper, bafflingly bad. And because of the way the game is designed you are constantly in this menuing system almost as much as on the track, if not more, so it's a complete killer in terms of how enjoyable the experience is. Add to that very limited free play options - you can't design your own races or just pick from the selection of cars and... well, race. In a racing game. And then add to that an always online requirement for single player and hideous microtransactions that inevitably lead the game design to feature hefty grind mechanics and... well, you have a ball that has been well and truly dropped here. This should have been great. It isn't. And that's a crying shame. As said, the racing itself is fine - good even - but there's many more games, even within the GT series itself, which does it just as good, if not better, without having to deal with the maddening nonsense that surrounds it in GT7. Wait for a hefty sale or get it second hand.

Fully reviewing this now after many, many hours, and all I can say is... I heartily regret not being able to give it a 10. It should be a 10, on so many levels, but I can only score it a 9. Why? Well, may as well get the only negative out of the way first - the performance is ropey. I've seen people defend it, and seen some pretending it doesn't even exist, but the brutal honest truth is that the pop in on display here is staggeringly bad and takes you out the game on a consistent basis, and the frame rate is also patchy - not as bad, not enough to make the game unplayable (at least on performance mode) but it is certainly a factor. That's the only negative. In every other respect - gameplay, world building, level design, controls, writing, literally everything - Elden Ring is an absolute masterpiece. It is, without doubt, the best open world game I've ever played, bar none. Breath of the Wild, Skyrim etc. etc. don't have a patch on it - this is a staggering achievement from the developer. I lost count of the amount of times my jaw hit the floor playing this thing, how I was constantly surprised, intrigued, thoroughly lost in its' world. It's not graphical fidelity that draws you in. Elden Ring looks wonderful, but it's because of art design. There are so many games that have wondrous ray-tracing, all the bells and whistles and yet don't look a tenth as good as this thing because it has no visual pop to it. Compare this to, say, Death Stranding - miles upon miles of photorealistic dreariness - and it's chalk and cheese. So many games have combat that is challenging through sheer cheese, or gear gating etc. Elden Ring does it by simply having outstanding combat design. This is a game you could beat without taking a hit, and speedrunners will be doing so before long, because it is brutally difficult yet completely fair. You can count the games that achieve that on one hand, yet Elden Ring makes it look simple. I'm gushing about it here, but I'm not a From Software fanboy, at all. Dark Souls II is one of my most hated games ever. I scored DS3 an 8/10. None of their previous titles break my top 20 of all time, with Bloodborne coming closest. Before now. Elden Ring breaks my personal top five, because it has taken everything good in their prior games, discarded the bad, and polished it all into a package so ludicrously good that it's actually difficult to imagine how this can be bettered. It earns the term 'masterpiece'. Astonishing. ------ (The below was my review in progress.) I'm writing this as a review in progress and will revisit the score if needed - I'm doing it now to counteract the ridiculous reviews from people who I'm 99% sure haven't even beaten Margit, the first boss yet. This is a massive game and needs more than a day or so to review, from anyone. So yes, first impressions - a flawed masterpiece. There are technical issues - the frame rate, even in performance mode, is occasionally janky, and the game is basically unplayable in 30fps quality mode. There is a fair bit of pop in too, and graphical fidelity isn't the best, but the art style is absolutely phenomenal, and that's more important. For the most part, on PS5 the frame rate holds up, and when it does the controls are tight, responsive and the difficulty as such is completely fair. The world itself is astonishingly well done, beautifully crafted with clever enemy placement and always something new to find round every corner. I'll come back in a week or two and review properly, but those scoring below 7 or 8 are well off the mark; even early on you can tell this is a top tier title, and the only real criticisms of it are a lack of accessibility due to difficulty (but not every game has to be for everyone; the developer should be free to make the game they want to make and not have to compromise authenticity) and technical hiccups.

Deathloop isn't bad. Nor is it great. It's... alright. It has a great core idea behind it and the gameplay 'loop' (quite literally a loop in this case) carries it a fair way. But it has braindead AI, limited graphical appeal and is largely forgettable. It's one of those games where I can understand why the professional reviewers badly overrated it, but it really is a case of it being overrated. If I'd have bought this full price on release, I'd have been bemused to say the least. Back in the day, this one would have been the perfect recommendation as a 'rental' game - pick it up for a weekend, play it, beat it, move on and forget about it. I've seen Deathloop referred to as 'Game of the Year' for 2021... hahaha... err... no. No, it really wasn't. At a push, it may have made the top twenty, but yeah calling it GOTY really is a case of hype overtaking reality at light speed.

I'm really conflicted on this game. It has a lot of negatives to it - missing Pokémon held back for DLC, meaningless characters, dull story, absolutely abysmal graphics when docked and played on a TV. These are all issues that'd kill on the spot 99% of games, and yet... I absolutely love Pokémon Legends: Arceus. I'm just unsure as to whether it's for objective reasons, or extremely subjective ones. So yes, while all the above negatives are true, the gameplay loop of real time catching of Pokémon a la the 'Let's Go' series, combined with battling and a moderately increased difficulty level, improving on elements introduced in Sword and Shield, makes the actual moment to moment experience extremely satisfying. As a Pokémon fan, this is what I've been waiting for since I first played Blue in the 90s. But that's where the subjectivity comes in, because I think I'd be much more critical if I'd never heard of Pokémon and went into this game 'fresh'. Game Freak deserve praise for taking chances and moving the franchise in an exciting new direction, but it really needs to be stressed just how bad this game actually looks. I'm all for gameplay over visuals, but there's a line in the sand where it just comes across as downright lazy from the developers. There's no excuse for the terrible textures that would make a Gamecube title blush - one particular scene at a volcano is almost vomit inducing in how choppy the textures are. This isn't an indie studio; this is a multi-million dollar franchise that can and should be doing better, even with the Switch's hardware taken into consideration. Other aspects of the game, such as the invincibility frame 'dodge and roll', Dark Souls Lite boss battles and the tacked on crafting system, there simply to give more purpose to the 'open world' (inverted commas much needed here, as it's not really an open world as such) are so-so - not offensively bad or fantastically brilliant - and represent an opportunity to move the series forward more in the future. I missed the gym battle system as well to be honest, and hope that makes a return in future games. Flaws aside, this is the best/freshest Pokémon title since probably Platinum, 14 years ago. It can be markedly improved (honestly, I don't remember the name of a single character and I finished playing half an hour ago; truly awful) but the strength of its' gameplay loop is enough to give it a hearty recommendation and definitely enough to get me excited about future games in the franchise.

Oh dear. It's a mess. A real mess. Bugs all over the shop, with co-op completely borked to the point of being unplayable. Single player hasn't been as bad for me, but still has issues, particularly in relation to framerate drops and crashes. But yeah, they might be patched, so how is the actual game regardless? Aggressively mediocre. Combat, while heavy feeling and satisfying when facing hordes of zombies, is simultaneously very basic, particularly against human enemies. Dodge, attack, dodge, attack, win. You find yourself deliberately getting into dangerous situations just to artificially create the feeling of suspense and adrenaline. The story is, again, mediocre. Painfully so, to the point where you zone out of cutscenes and making choices just so you can get back to moment-to-moment gameplay again. But even that gameplay is ruined due to a 'countdown' mechanic, where you need to return to base every few minutes or you'll die. It's not all bad. The parkour is as good as ever, and in some ways improved. The environment is great but ruined by all tension being taken out of everything due to a type heat vision through walls and ceilings telling you EXACTLY where every enemy is in every building. Compared to Dying Light 1, this is chalk and cheese, especially at night where the first game had a genuine feel of dread/terror at venturing out at night. DL2, definitively, does not. Unless you're a mega fan of this world and absolutely need to play something in it, wait for a heavy sale on this one.

Unlike most, I don't have a problem with the chibi art style, nor do I find it particularly strange when it swaps over during battle animations to more 'normal' anime sprites. This is fairly standard fare in Japanese animation, even in gaming (Link's Awakening, Animal Crossing etc. etc.) and I think the game looks pretty good overall. As a faithful remaster (which it is, rather than a remake in many ways), Brilliant Diamond is largely fine. Takes basically no risks, it's just the original with a coat of paint on. However, there are several glaring problems with it. First is the decision not to use Pokémon Platinum as the basis for this remaster - this was done for greed so they could release two versions in Diamond/Pearl instead of one, but Platinum is a series highpoint; arguably it's their greatest ever title, so to see it ignored is irritating. From a series veteran perspective, the second major drawback is just how much a fairly simple game in the first instance has been mechanically dumbed down. Specifically, the Experience Share system. This means every Pokémon in your party gains experience from every battle, even if they're not used. Which as an ease of use feature for younger players or those new to the series it would be fine... but it can't be turned off. At all. So if you play this 'normally', you'll be incredibly overlevelled, and you can wave goodbye to things like EV training with more than one Pokémon in your party. So it's just too easy throughout, and that kills the title for me. It's not a terrible game, but nor is it a masterpiece - in fact, it's bang average, hence the score. I hope Arceus is better than it, or at least more ambitious... and has a toggle switch for any Exp Share!

A Battlefield game that was seemingly made by people who absolutely detest Battlefield games. Horrendous UI that is borderline headache inducing, braindead AI, inconsistent visuals, a total gutting of teamplay with the specialist system, no voice chat (no, really, no voice chat - in Battlefield. It boggles the mind!), terrible weaponry, miserable maps, frame drops all over the shop, shoddy hit detection... the things wrong with it go on and on and on. It gets a 3 solely for the Portal mode, which is... tolerable, but only because it allows you to fix the actual game through your own settings. The other main modes of the game are absolutely atrocious, particularly the laughable take on Tarkov. It's a shockingly bad game. Really, really bad. The critic reviews are unreal - how anyone can score this above a 5 is beyond my comprehension. DICE have lost the plot completely. It really is one of the most head-scratchingly terrible games made in recent memory.

I wish people wouldn't score a game solely on technical issues. Yes, no game should release with baked in issues on launch, but that doesn't mean the game itself is a 2/10 or whatever. Diablo II: Resurrected is a highly polished yet functionally almost identical remaster of the original Diablo II. Depending on your expectations, that's either a good or a bad thing. Mechnically, this can feel archaic at times, missing the variety from games that have been inspired by it and improved on the formula in many ways. However, it's also a classic for a reason; no other game in this genre, at all, including Diablo 3, Grim Dawn, Path of Exile, Titan Quest etc. etc. etc. has nailed the in game aesthetic and immersive experience of Diablo 2. It is just fantastic in this respect. For me, I just wanted what I got - a remaster that left it largely alone. So for me, it scores highly. If you expected something mechanically improved or whatever, I can understand maybe a 6 or a 7... but this shouldn't be scoring any less from anyone.

It's just a terrible game and has been for years. Incredibly scripted (you can have games where you have 30 shots but you know, just know, you're going to draw/lose it, because the game says so in advance). Players are incapable of squaring a ball, they all shoot from the narrowest of angles, all the time, every time. And so on. The above makes it look like the game is 'hard' - no, it's the opposite. It's ridiculously easy. But it's not easy because of anything I'm doing with it; it's just easy by design. They call this a simulation of football; it's not. The makers of this game are too busy with their heads up their arse to actually make significant improvements, instead engaged in prolonged mutuatl **** over pointless crap like an expected goal stat being included. Avoid. It's really, really, really bad.

An inspired hybrid of traditional Dragon Quest and Minecraft. A traditional RPG with a quirky twist in that you build your way through quests as much as fight through them, with the gameplay largely revolving around renovating various hubs on different islands from a ruin to everything from a thriving farm to a majestic castle. It's also surprisingly massive in scale - there's 60+ hours of structured content here, with great dialogue and fun characters. It has flaws though. The camera often irritates - whilst the game encourages creativity, any building with a low roof results in camera chaos; even the missions themselves don't bother with roof building. The story itself is... OK. If I have a problem with Dragon Quest overall as a series, it's that the wheels begin to fall off every game towards the end, and it's absolutely riddled with cliches to the point of parody. Overall, there's a lot of value to be had here. If you've played a DQ game before, you'll be surprised by the twist on the familiar here - go with it, it's fun! If you love Minecraft, you'll again by surprised by how this title doesn't just ape that game but actually brings something new to the table.

It's broken. As in it has game modes that are quite literally broken. In Be A Pro, you can be the best player in world football but if the team you play for doesn't play a player in your position, they simply won't select you in the squad. Furthermore, even if you request a transfer, if your value is too high and you aren't playing (I assume that's the problem anyway), you can't move clubs. So you're stuck quick simming matches at the club you're at because you're never selected for matches for the rest of time. The game is quite literally broken, so it scores a 1. EA only pays attention to Ultimate Team, nothing else - here's cast iron proof of that.