Rarely in my experience as a gamer have I despised a game as much as Ori. Yes -- everything is beautiful to look and listen to. But the game is cheap when it should be challenging, and the controls work when they feel like it. I f**king hate this game.
Easily one of the worst games ever made. There is no structure to levels, it's just "throw as many bad guys at you as possible" and hope for the best. Reloading takes forever (and your character freezes while you're doing so), combat is absolutely terrible, and checkpoints are a **** joke. I hate this game with a passion.
There are technical issues and glitches here and there, but all in all it's a hell of a lot of fun and kicks all kinds of ass. A bit DOOM, a bit God of War, dripping with attitude and original ideas.
I guess this is the best we can expect from the soulless suits at EA. Sloppy combat. Choppy graphics. An Uncharted-esque adventure without any sense of adventure. It was pretty-looking, but about four hours in I realized I wasn't actually having any fun.
One of the most frustrating games I've ever given up on half way through. All of the right ideas are here, but their execution (pun...whatever) is half-baked at best. Why bother implementing a "disguise" mechanic if the disguises barely work? An irritating mess ****.
A beautifully realized treatise on the curse of depression. The combat is good, as are the environmental puzzles. But what truly sets Hellblade apart is the investigation of mental illness through the eyes of a young woman desperate to save her lover from the clutches of Hella. The performances are nothing short of stunning, and the storytelling is top tier. I was in tears by the end.
Would have been great to try FC3, but Ubisoft's **** login system is so broken that I had to return it. If Ubisoft is actively trying to go bankrupt, then, well -- GOOD WORK!
Alan Wake 2 is far and away one of the worst, and easily the single most boring, game I've played in years. You do LITERALLY ALMOST NOTHING for the first hour, except listen to the protagonist yap -- and she will NEVER STOP TALKING -- and stick pieces of evidence up on an imaginary wall. As someone who adores the first Alan Wake, and has played through it at least four times, I can't comprehend the utter train-wreck of AW2. To say I was disappointed is an understatement. I absolutely DESPISED this game. It makes everything Remedy made before this worse. And I will never play another game from this studio again. I wish I could wring the experience of this out of my brain like a dirty dish rag. **** AW2 with a long, hot stick.
Bought game. Played through to the end of the first mission. The final door won't open. Bugged. Returned game. Dear game designers -- fix your ****! Don't sell broken games.
It's truly a shame that Astro Bot won Game of the Year, because it is just not in that weight class. It's fun. Great graphics. Cleverly designed. But it just doesn't do much that Mario Odyssey did eight years ago. If critics could keep their **** in their pants, and call this what it is -- a fun way to pass the time, the video game equivalent of playing with action figures --then it would have been fine. But to hail this as a masterpiece is absolutely insane. This is Playstation's version of Mario. Full stop. Nothing less, but not much more. Winning GotY has simply set this game up to fail to live up to anyone's expectations.
Was more or less enjoying this game until it sent me on a side quest to get beat up by five dudes over and over again. Losing my resources and molotovs with every attempt. So much for a "normal" setting. Seriously **** ****.
It is truly shocking how poorly TW3 has aged -- like soft cheese in hot sun. I wanted to give the PS5 Next Gen upgrade a whirl, hoping that many of the game's rough edges would have been sanded down. No luck. Roach is still awful to ride -- spawns wherever, can't follow a trail, and constantly gets **** on brush. Most of the time I opted to sprint rather than try to use the horse. Anything involving boats is a gigantic PITA. Just skipped anything boat-related. The skill points system is insanely stupid. If you're even a few levels above your current quest, then you're rewarded with next to no points. This effectively de-incentivizes doing any quest that you're overlevelled for. Which may, in the end, be for the best, as this game is INCESSANTLY, INSUFFERABLY fetch-questy. I enjoyed TW3 eight years ago, but after Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate3, The Witcher is hopelessly clunky, boring, and irritating.
Why bother going to all the trouble of releasing an Enhanced Edition, but not fix any of the dozens of game-breaking bugs? The frame rate is much improve, but otherwise same nonsense from the first game. Constantly having to reload saves in order to progress missions. Riding Roach still ****. (Seriously the worst horse in modern day gaming.) I appreciate that the update was free, I only wish it had actually enhanced the game. Typical CDPR ****.
Why bother going to all the trouble of releasing an Enhanced Edition, but not fix any of the dozens of game-breaking bugs? The frame rate is much improve, but otherwise same nonsense from the first game. Constantly having to reload saves in order to progress missions. Riding Roach still ****. (Seriously the worst horse in modern day gaming.) I appreciate that the update was free, I only wish it had actually enhanced the game. Typical CDPR ****.
Typical metroidvania backtracking ****. Most of your play time is spent A) being lost, or B) being forced to go over ground you've already covered again and again and again. Ubisoft is a soulless corporation pumping out personality-free garbage. Every Ubisoft game has one priority -- to waste as much of your time as possible while preventing you from actually having any fun. Hated this game. Hated it.
Cartoonish art direction.
Awful dialogue. Bland storytelling. Obnoxious virtue signalling. The *actual* BioWare would be ashamed to release a product this uninspired. And the shameful shill access critics lavishing praise upon DA:TV are actually scoring their own arrogant sense of enlightenment. Dragon Age: The Veilguard isn't a game. It's a lecture.
What a scam. Scammy scammy scam-o. Bethesda is all about doing the least amount of work possible, while milking its devotees for as much money as possible. Pathetic.
Far Cry 5 is, in may respects, an excellent and occasionally exhilarating game. There are a hundred great things to say about it. **** is simply unacceptably buggy. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to restart checkpoints because something didn't load properly, or something glitched out. Had they actually polished this and released it in a playable state, it would easily receive an 8 or 9. But it simply shouldn't be for sale in the sorry state it's in.
Mad Max is *fine* while demonstrating the shortcomings of "quantity over quality." The game is plagued with bugs (including one in which my saves weren't working properly), and definitely needed another six or so months of play testing. There are absolutely some fun elements, and some great performances, but all in all it gets very repetitive very quickly. There really isn't much in the way of, like, quests, so you'll be more or less clearing enemy enclaves and/or fighting convoys. Lather, rinse, repeat.
In all the ways in which it is like DOOM 2016, it remains an all-out banger. In the ways that it is not -- the JUMPING -- it is a frustrating pile of ****. It ruins the flow. It ruins the game. It is a terrible design choice implemented about as poorly as a design choice can be implemented. If this mechanic appears in any further DOOM titles, I will not buy them. It is the absolute **** worst. I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate the jumping.
Not the worst, but absolutely nowhere near the best. The key word here is: LAZY. Every element of SS:KtJL smacks of half-baked ideas, sudden development swerves, corporate interference and greed, a company-wide identity crisis, and a sad succumbing to the inevitability of disaster. rocksteady used to make trends, but chasing them has led to its downfall. SS is in almost every conceivable way a severe downgrade from the Arkham trilogy, packed to the gills with loot grind nonsense and rudimentary gunplay. Which is to say nothing of the short, repetitive campaign (unless you just LOVE escorting vehicles from point A to B, in which case you'll have a ball!) which is super weak sauce: unevenly paced, and surprisingly boring. And it's all just prologue, of course, to **** you into the live service component which is destined to die within a year. The only corpse getting pissed on here is whatever carrion is left of the studio formerly known as rocksteady. DC IPs should have been an easy cash cow for WB, but somehow WB turned DC into a total and profound embarrassment. Corporate heads should roll. They should, but they won't.
Oustanding graphics and a luscious score cannot compensate for atrocious controls/combat, stiff mechanics, inane puzzles, and "trial and error" land traversal. There is next-to-no skill involved here whatsoever -- you either die over and over again until you sort out what path / what enemy / what weapon / what skill will get you where you need to go, or some other NPC explains what to do. I absolutely hated this game. Awful.
A marvelous (if still a bit buggy) indie game from the creators of Abzu. The Pathless boasts a gorgeous art style, fun and fluid gameplay, and a stunning soundtrack courtesy of Austin Wintory (who also create the scores for Abzu and Journey, among many many others). This isn't a "tough as nails" challenge as is so in vogue these days (and no slight to Soulslikes). Your character won't die, even when confronting one of the several bosses. Rather, gameplay rests more on solving puzzles, both literal and environmental. Also on the shorter side, which is all good by me. Not perfectly polished, but highly recommended nonetheless.
I'm very sad to say that I just lost interest about 50 hours in. BotW was and is a masterpiece, and likely playing through that game 3 times diminished the impact of TotK. That isn't to say that Tears doesn't do anything new -- it does -- but the fuse mechanic is a real *mileage may vary* addition to the game. Sometimes fusing stuff feels incredibly compelling and enjoyable, while at other times it's a real hindrance and annoyance. Half the time there are simpler solutions than spending 5-10 minutes constructing some sort of contraption, and I found myself skipping fuse activities altogether. A generation brought up on Minecraft will likely find a lot to love about this new facet of the game, but on balance it left me cold. The rest of the game is just...Breath of the Wild all over again. Same map (with some alterations), same combat mechanics, same...everything. Granted, being rocketed into the sky was never not a thrill, but I'm sad they didn't spend any of the 6-year interval between this and Breath updating anything. Riding a horse, for example, is still a chore, with unresponsive controls -- something that could have very easily been updated for this outing. I really really wanted to love this game, and there were certainly moments where the old thrill came back. Unfortunately, in the end, there just weren't enough of those moments to maintain my interest.
Never has the shine come **** so quickly and thoroughly. In my first 5 hours with Returnal, I was having a blast. Gorgeous graphics, awesome haptic feedback, and fluid combat. This, I thought, is some kind of minor masterpiece. By the time I hit hour 10, I gave up. The same slog, through the same (procedurally-generated) environments, over and over, always hitting the same wall (if I could even get to said wall). Unlike Hades, there's no real sense of progression and build -- your character, Selene, is nearly as weak at the beginning of each run as she was at the get-go. Yes, you accumulate the valuable resource ether, and you keep your consumables slots, and certain weapon upgrades are available immediately. But this is accompanied by a significant difficulty spike in even the earliest levels, rendering those advantages relatively moot. The overall difficulty is just preposterous, to the point where Returnal really shoots itself in the foot. I hope the hard core gamers are happy, but I'd be surprised if there were enough of them out there to make this title a success. I played Hades for hundreds of hours. I played Returnal for 10. The former is a perfectly balanced rogue-like. The latter is a very unfortunate failure.
GoW: Ragnarok is not a *perfect* game. Backtracking can be frustrating, parrying can be frustrating, difficulty spikes can be frustrating. And so on. But while I was expecting a righteous hack'n'slash paired with a gripping narrative similar to the 2016 reboot, I was unprepared for one of the most powerful and resonant meditations on grief, parenthood, and the true toll of violence, of our time. This is not just a phenomenal game, but one of the best stories I've ever experienced. EDIT: Bumping the score down due to the awful endgame. I can't even fathom how horribly the Muspelheim Trials are designed, requiring repeating trials ad nauseum to derive specific rune combinations (the game does not explain this at all, btw. I had to look it up online and scroll through multiple confused Reddit threads. Which execs moronic nephew designed this?)
Shame on Arkane for releasing this half-baked, empty-world garbage. We expect this kind of nonsense from Bethesda, but do they have to drag down another formerly-prestige developer in the process. They should rename this game Refund.
Have never played a Souls game before. Elden Ring is one of the best games I've ever played, full stop. Incredibly difficult/challenging, but rarely unfair. An insane and gorgeous open world dense with lore -- worth every minute of exploration. I've put nearly 300 hours into ER, and can't wait to play more.
Control is aggressively mediocre -- a classic case **** tripping over its own ****. Many of the mechanics work beautifully, and the environment is well-conceived and creepy. The weapons and powers can be incredibly fun. I've heard a lot of buzz about the story, but it's pretty boilerplate "evil corporation exploits the paranormal" stuff. Where Control falls flat on its face is a) technical issues (yes, frame rates drop precipitously right when the game spams you with enemies), and b) extreme fluctuations in difficulty. Enemies will appear out of nowhere, or manifest behind you with no warning whatsoever, decimating your health. Then you wait for 30 seconds for the game to reload, only to get kicked back 3-5 minutes and have to work your way back to where you were, re-fighting enemies along the way. One boss randomly destroys the floor, causing you to fall to your death, causing you to wait for the load screen, causing you to claw your way back, etc. Control would have been exceptional but for these perpetual frustrations that could have so easily been solved.
Just completed Elden Ring and Sekiro pales *drastically* in comparison. Stunning graphics and fluid gameplay, but the swordplay mechanics are just shallow.
I was a huge fan of the sequel (Will of the Wisps), but find the predecessor far, far more frustrating. The visuals and music are still stunning, but the controls and difficulty are all over the place. I'm only a few hours in and have already died dozens upon dozens of times. The save system is somewhat forgiving, but constantly falling into pits with spikes or water or whatever -- everything kills you -- simply means doubling down on pattern recognition rather than your wits. No flow = not fun. The Will of the Wisps was one of my favourite games of that year, but this one goes on the ash heap after only a couple of hours.
Came to Cyberpunk post 1.61 patch -- can't speak to the manifold performance issues on this or other consoles (though the game still has plenty of bugs, they are fewer and far-between than your average Bethesda product, or Witcher III for that matter...) -- and it's an absolutely fantastic experience. It wears its influences on its sleeve, but what a stellar slate of influences: Grand Theft Auto, Fallout 3/4, Dishonoured, Blade Runner, Necromancer, and so on. Cyberpunk crafts a complex and intricate futuristic world, complete with believable slang, outfits, weapons, and music, while steering the player through a riveting story of gross corporate malfeasance, populist rebellion, and our biological integration with sophisticated technology. Clearly the game should have stayed in the oven far longer than it did, but that's more the fault of short-sighted C-suite execs and investors than the creative team behind this masterpiece. In its current shape, Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best games I've played in years.
Slay the Spire is a great **** a point. The problem is that the endgame -- once you have cleared the base quest with all three characters -- is preposterously difficult, even for a Roguelike. In a genre classic such as Hades, the player is rewarded for experimenting with different builds based on drops. In StS, if you don't luck out and get the exact right combination of cards, at exactly the right point in the game, you're totally effed. Enemies are idiotically overpowered, and minor mistakes can be catastrophic. This turns what was an absolutely thrilling and addictive experience into a lame, frustrating grind. Why bother to keep playing if it all comes down to dumb luck? An enormous disappointment. UPDATE: Dropped the score from a 6 to a 4 due to the absurd end-game difficulty. Your capacity to slay the heart has virtually nothing to do with skill, and is entirely based on luck. It is *possible*, but will require you to get every requisite card, in a particular order, while landing only on enemies that it is possible to defeat. The developers ruined an otherwise excellent deck-building experience with ridiculously imbalanced difficulty. A challenge is welcome, but rolling the dice -- which is all that the latter stages of Slay is -- gets very boring very fast.
Slay the Spire is a great **** a point. The problem is that the endgame -- once you have cleared the base quest with all three characters -- is preposterously difficult, even for a Roguelike. In a genre classic such as Hades, the player is rewarded for experimenting with different builds based on drops. In StS, if you don't luck out and get the exact right combination of cards, at exactly the right point in the game, you're totally effed. Enemies are idiotically overpowered, and minor mistakes can be catastrophic. This turns what was an absolutely thrilling and addictive experience into a lame, frustrating grind. Why bother to keep playing if it all comes down to dumb luck? An enormous disappointment. UPDATE: Dropped the score from a 6 to a 4 due to the absurd end-game difficulty. Your capacity to slay the heart has virtually nothing to do with skill, and is entirely based on luck. It is *possible*, but will require you to get every requisite card, in a particular order, while landing only on enemies that it is possible to defeat. The developers ruined an otherwise excellent deck-building experience with ridiculously imbalanced difficulty. A challenge is welcome, but rolling the dice -- which is all that the latter stages of Slay is -- gets very boring very fast.
Slay the Spire is a great **** a point. The problem is that the endgame -- once you have cleared the base quest with all three characters -- is preposterously difficult, even for a Roguelike. In a genre classic such as Hades, the player is rewarded for experimenting with different builds based on drops. In StS, if you don't luck out and get the exact right combination of cards, at exactly the right point in the game, you're totally effed. Enemies are idiotically overpowered, and minor mistakes can be catastrophic. This turns what was an absolutely thrilling and addictive experience into a lame, frustrating grind. Why bother to keep playing if it all comes down to dumb luck? An enormous disappointment. UPDATE: Dropped the score from a 6 to a 4 due to the absurd end-game difficulty. Your capacity to slay the heart has virtually nothing to do with skill, and is entirely based on luck. It is *possible*, but will require you to get every requisite card, in a particular order, while landing only on enemies that it is possible to defeat. The developers ruined an otherwise excellent deck-building experience with ridiculously imbalanced difficulty. A challenge is welcome, but rolling the dice -- which is all that the latter stages of Slay is -- gets very boring very fast.
It's good. Not great. - The art design and music are both fantastic. It's a nice game to look at and listen to. - The combat is simplistic but frustrating. The mechanics aren't nearly as polished as they should be. Hit box detection is all over the place, and can be hard to tell why certain swings land and others don't. - There's a powerful dash-attack move that is difficult to time and gauge for distance. As such, this attack *looks* cool, but isn't super useful. Similarly, the regular attack edges the character forward, which makes battles near to water hazards tricky. - Certain sections lack guardrails, and falling into the water counts as a hit. This can be infuriating during intense moments of combat; i.e., when you're dodging multiple enemies, only to roll off the platform. (The roll/dodge attack doesn't work very well either -- you will sometimes roll in a random direction.) - The camera can be erratic, sometimes obscuring enemies at the worst possible times. - Desperately, desperately needs a map. Why no map? Why no waypoints? Dumb dumb dumb. - There are preposterous spikes in difficulty / enemy spamming. - The level design gets very convoluted, especially the dungeons. Map would've helped...
Celeste is bar none one of the most frustrating games I've ever played. It's the kind of *tough-as-nails* platformer that makes self-professed hard-core gamers creams their knickers (hence the various glowing reviews). And while the concept, design, and music are praiseworthy, the controls just outright ****. For a game with hairs-breadth, one-hit deaths, you need as much precision as possible. But with Celeste, sometimes a jump works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you clear an obstacle, sometimes you don't. Sometimes you grip the wall, sometimes you drop. It all starts to feel so...random and cheap. As such, a cool concept quickly devolves into a mind-numbing grind where you'll pass a level moreoften by luck than skill, which totally crushes any enjoyment Celeste could have offered. A terrible experience I wish upon no one.
Fantastic game (in a retro graphical style) where you get to play as a Thing-esque glob of gore. While movement is awesomely fluid and intuitive, there are a few finnicky control issues that crop up here and there. A bit on the short-ish side, but very satisfying nonetheless.
