gamerz4life

At its most basic level, you could call A Sky Full of Stars a dating game. After all, the four routes involve the main character, Akito, choosing one of four girls to date. But if that’s all this game was, I’d never have picked it up. The characters, not only Akito and the girls, but the others you meet through the 6 Stars Club, are all well-fleshed out and I loved reading every moment of these stories. The relationships felt real and all had their problems that the characters needed to work through. Not to mention that each route involves a different big star event, and an after credits future scene. There are two choice points in this game. The first will decide if you go down the Saya/Hikari path or the Orihime/Korona path, and the second choice will decide which of those two remaining girls you choose. But the heart of this story was definitely a love of the stars. These characters all loved staring up at the night sky, learning and experiencing, and I came to love it just as much as they did. There was talk of stars, constellations, myths, and meteor showers, and the ever present wish to bring back the bright night of years ago. I cannot express how much I loved this visual novel. I was so sad to come to the end, to have to leave these characters. It really imbedded in me a deep desire to look at the stars myself. The soundtrack was also superb and I’m so glad that I purchased it with the game. I would absolutely recommend A Sky Full of Stars to someone looking for a great story. Routes ranking: Saya>Orihime=Korona>Hikari

I came across this free-to-play KFC game shortly after learning about the KFC Colonel Sanders book. You would think something this weird, with this much advertising for a business would be bad, but no. This game was a gem. It is hilarious and well worth a playthrough. With my first ending, I received the Colonel’s respect but not his love; so of course, I went back so I could get both for the true ending. If you’re looking for a laugh, but also a game you will weirdly find yourself drawn into, I Love You, Colonel Sanders is it.

I have to question the sanity of people who think Little Nightmares is not only a great platforming-esque game but also an interesting mystery of a story. Did anyone who thinks this actually play the game? There is not a single piece of storytelling going on here, not one line of dialogue, no memorable music, and certainly no horror elements. In fact if one were to look into the game’s history before release, the studio had something completely different planned. They announced the game in 2014 and were not heard from again until 2016 when they had changed the title from Hunger to Little Nightmares. Let me tell you, Hunger would have fit the game much better. With the weird giant creatures gorging themselves and the kid in the yellow slicker doubling over in hunger pains, it makes more sense because I don’t know where the nightmares are. When you finish this three-hour game (the nerve of selling this thing for $20, three levels of DLC for $4/each or an expansion pass for $10, and eventually a complete edition for $30!!), you will come away no wiser as to what the heck was going on and you will wonder why you even bothered. And if you insist on putting yourself through this game, you should absolutely play with a walkthrough at your side, otherwise you will be wandering for hours with not a clue where you are supposed to go or what you are supposed to do because this game just drops you into the world and abandons you. Then there is the platforming that is atrocious because the camera is like a side-scroller while the world is still able to be interacted with in a 3D environment. 2.5D fellas! You will find yourself falling to your death often enough because of this camera angle. I hated this game, I feel like I wasted my time, and the fact that they got two more, none of which connect to each other, just tells you the state of gaming. What a nightmare. Pun intended.

Did you think the movie was bad? Well, just pick up this game! They clearly were trying to address complaints from Order of the Phoenix, in that the back of the box alone shows you will be making potions, playing Quidditch, and dueling. Mini games are back! The only thing they don’t tell you is that is all you will be doing. This is another game that I definitely picked up at the time and played through during summer break. Going back to it now, as a full-fledged adult has me questioning everything. Hogwarts is a complete nightmare where its layout is concerned, completely different from even the last game, they give you the option to call on Nearly Headless Nick to direct you to your next location. And, trust me, you will be using it. The mini games are, at first, okay, especially if you’re coming right off playing OotP. The best would be potion-making (it’s definitely what they used on sites like Pottermore later), but when you’re forced to do it for the umpteeth time and wondering why you’re brewing a potion in the greenhouse for a random student, it’s over. Quidditch is a nightmare. You’re forced to do a practice round before every match, and I didn’t even want to do one time! Ginny follows you around, even in the official match, berating you. She and all the other Gryffindors fly into you and get in your way, you fly way out of the stadium after the Snitch, and for some reason these practice dummies exist during the actual match too. Dueling quickly becomes a nightmare because you can only cast spells in a certain order, otherwise they won’t hit or will be blocked. Also, some are made where the computer can just spam hit you while you’re incapacitated. You’ll quickly start taking advantage of this fact too, if only to end the duel sooner. Would you believe the end has you battle random, faceless Death Eater, then Fenrir Greyback, then Bellatrix, one right after the other? This game was a nightmare on a whole different scale from OotP. And I would not wish these last three games on anybody.

I must have been the right age for this game (not to mention a huge Harry Potter fan) when it came out because all these years later all I could remember about it was it being the best looking Hogwarts to that point. And apparently that’s what everyone else cited too. I have been going through and replaying all the Harry Potter games. Goblet of Fire was atrocious with its inability to even complete the game without grinding through the same levels over and over. So at first glance, it looks as though Order of the Phoenix decided to get back to letting you roam the school in adventure game style. But you’d be wrong. The school may appear beautiful but it’s just a veneer. You can’t go through most of the doors you come across and indeed many of them have notes with doors with an ‘x’ drawn through them on it, as though they forgot to finish what they were working on. There is nothing to do in this school, whether wandering about or actually trying to play the game. It is fetch quest after fetch quest with cutscenes thrown in to pretend like we’re following some story. And don’t get me started on the piss-poor way they make you do Occlumency. You will regret everything as it dulls your mind into a stupor and you mess up and have to do it again. They made a new, unique way to do spells which required you to move your sticks in different directions. This seemed cool at first glance but if you go even two days without playing this game, you forget everything and have to consult the buttons. At that point I would have just preferred sticking spells to my particular buttons like the first games. This game might be fun for children, I mean I finished it all those years ago, but as an adult, it’s absolute garbage. Don’t bother unless you really can’t give up the need to play every one of these Harry Potter games.

I played YangYang Mobile’s first game, The Letter: A Horror Visual Novel and absolutely loved it. It was so creepy, the tension and mystery were high and there were fabulous different endings. Thus, when I found out about Saint Maker, I was intrigued. However, I initially read reviews and saw people were complaining that the game wasn’t as long and didn’t feature as much horror. I was confused because this was obviously a different game and it never said it was going to be a clone. Eventually, a sale came around and I picked it up and I am so glad I did! The characters are really interesting and the game featured awesome ways to slowly learn each of their backstories and how it got them all in this one location today. There were freaky moments and sweet, but heartbreaking, moments. Unlike The Letter, this game does not feature branching paths, but that does not do this game a disservice. There is the ending and then there is a further section added to the ending if you choose the right choices in your friendship with the other girl. I got the full ending on my first playthrough. I would absolutely recommend this game if you enjoy well-crafted visual novels. Sometimes it’s nice to play a shorter one. This one didn’t take me months nor require me to keep all the branching paths straight in my head.

Red Dead Redemption 2 has to be one of the most over rated games I have ever had the pleasure of playing. It is like most games of the 2017-19 generation, a chores and boredom simulator (and Horse, if it was a horse simulator I would give it a 10/10 FYI). So little actual gameplay happens within the game and there is just so little player agency that it really is like watching a movie while holding a controller and pushing a button once and a while. There’s very little to talk of in the gameplay department, as it is very much the same gameplay loop as the first RDR but this time it’s more sluggish (as such less fun). As Rockstar adds a significant control lag to all of your movements, aiming, shooting, etc.… Along with overdone animations along with a hardly intuitive menu system that makes most of the combat and horse riding a slog. (Which is what you will be doing 99 percent of the time). Not to mention saving the game, as most the time you are not allowed to do so in any mission which can be quite a long time… I guess that’s what counts for realism in Rockstar. The difference though between RDR 1 & 2 is the fun; the Gamey feel. In a quest for “REALISM” Rockstar forgot the fun. No longer does the player decide how they want to play, oh no as most of the story missions are on complete rails and full of hand holding. Like how most of the guns in the shop are locked until a certain point in the story and they are just handed to you. Like the sniper rifle for the sheep mission where you don’t really even use it in any meaningful way… why? Even better is the early missions where the game forces you to shoot up towns and the law, to force a $300 bounty on your head before you really even started the game (good luck paying that off in the early game that’s more bounty than I had in any play through of RDR1). The same happens later during a story train robbery where even if you are wearing a hood, you still receive an over $100 bounty on you because the game says so… So much for playing as the Hero on the Hero-Villain bar, because Rockstar’s Movie has already decided that you are a villain and a scumbag, then why still have the bar from the first game if it is already decided by the creators. By that time I was wearing a mask everywhere just so I could stop getting bounties for bumping a NPC on the streets (also fistfights always end in a murder in RDR2 that’s some punch). The bounties in RDR2 really are just for artificial difficulty to get random NPCs to shoot at you. Making money in RDR2 is really shallowed down from RDR1 too, seeing as hunting now gives you at most 8 dollars for an excellent condition carcass. Which all of it is now a test of your boredom levels as you cannot just quickly skin it and move on as in RDR1 (which would be $25-30), as you have to drive the whole animal to town if you want that whole $8 (the whole thing talking about 20-30 minutes now that’s time filling a game). Also the secondary collection fetch quests that were in RDR1 as gamey jokes about the times (like the snake oil salesman), feel incredibly strange in a game constantly talking about ‘realism’, where your deer kill rots and your horse needs brushing to maintain its heath bar, and you need a bubble bath for the same??? But for some reason I might as well look for random dinosaur bones for some women I just had two sentences with in the wilderness??? Rockstar’s gameplay priorities are all over the place in RDR2. The story’s nothing big, as you are part **** trying to play themselves off as virtuous freedom fighters trying to escape the law in the east, when really they are just a group of gangsters robbing and killing people on their way west. Really no different than the rival gang the Driskels which you are told are evil. It’s funny when you’re told to lay low, then two missions later the gang leader Dutch is the instigator of shooting up an entire town of law getting you another bounty. Whereas in RDR1 John was looking for “Redemption” from the bad things he had done with his old gang for which you could be a Hero or Villain in doing so. But don’t worry as the Gang from RDR1 which in RDR2 you are now a part of, has been completely retconned into oblivion. Arthur, the character you play as, is completely made up and is never mention or talked about in RDR1. Also good luck ever remembering any of the other gang members because most are complete throw away characters that serve no purpose narratively to the first or second game. When most of the 10/10 reviews for RDR2 are about three sentences that go on to say how beautiful the graphics are never once talking about gameplay or why the story’s the ‘greatest ever’ you know you’re in for a good time. 3/10 where is the gameplay in this Video Game?

I decided to play this as I just finished Steins;Gate 0 (I played Steins;Gate Elite the year before). I had read that it was ten different stories in a pure visual novel sense; just reading, no choices here. (Turns out there are actually eleven!!) And that worked for these. These are short stories following ten different characters in the Steins;Gate universe and the most interesting part is you can see how they fit into the different world lines. They are really quite brilliantly done. The first story follows Okabe and when I found out where the story is going, I was completely floored. It turned all the events I thought I was understanding on their head. I loved it. The others are equally as strong and really help to further flesh out the characters and in some instances, explains what they were doing during moments we didn’t get to see them in the game. The translations here aren’t as well done as in the original game and 0 but it’s not horrible. You’ll just have some moments where you find yourself tripping over what you’re reading before you figure out the right grammar. And some of the descriptions in the Kyoma story were so crazy and unlike anything we’ve seen before, it was kind of hilarious. (Why does Okabe have milk from a bag and then put the empty bag in his pocket? Sure he doesn’t want to litter, but still…) Not to mention their sudden interest in letting us know the different food the characters are all eating. Though it was fun to look those meals up. This game is included with the purchase of Steins;Gate Elite and I’m so happy it was. It was a nice little treat and I am so sad that I’m nearly done with my Steins;Gate journey, at least where the visual novels are concerned (I only have My Darling’s Embrace left). I’ve really come to love this world and its characters. Ordering the stories starting with my favorite and working downwards: Okabe, Kurisu, Braun, Mayuri, Kyoma, Moeka, Nae, Daru, Suzuha, Faris, Luka

The original Steins;Gate had an interesting story that was bogged down by too much superfluous information and otaku nonsense, characters I wanted to strangle, and an absolute snail’s pace. I had to watch the anime not even halfway through to want to continue on. All of those problems? Completely nonexistent in Steins;Gate 0. It’s like they actually learned from feedback because this game’s story is tighter, the characters are likeable, and I couldn’t wait to see how everything turned out. The game is still the same. Read the story, click X to continue, reply to text messages as you see fit (they don’t factor into the ending), but there is a new concept with the phone of answering a particular system or ignoring calls at certain times which is how the endings get chosen. There are far less slides of ‘…’ which I greatly appreciated. The game has six endings and it is far easier to get each of them than it was in the first game. Not to mention playing each of the endings here actually provides you with more of the story until you reach the game’s true ending. The endings had specific songs and the music was as wonderful as ever. Okabe being riddled with guilt and dealing with PTSD after Kurisu’s death is a fantastic concept to explore with his character and I was drawn in to every second. All the characters are far more likeable in 0 than the first game. I enjoyed that we switched between characters which helped with rounding out others and helped us see even more about Okabe and how the others are viewing him. Moeka and Luka who I felt weren’t the best in the first game are in this one less, while the screen time they do get is more conducive to the story. My only disappointment with this game is that I thought the true ending would be longer and actually show getting back to the moment where Okabe would initiate Operation Skuld. Looking up information I found pretty much everyone was confused as to why the game ended rather than giving an explanation for the ending. I guess one exists that fits in found in the Drama CD β - Arc Light of the Point at Infinity which has English-translated videos online, which do help. I just don’t know why they didn’t include it when the rest of the game’s story is so amazing. I would heartily recommend this game and rate it as far superior to the first game. Now I’m off to see how the anime pieces all of these different world lines together!

Sam & Max: Save the World is Telltale’s real first game that anyone might remember. It consisted of six episodes following Sam & Max, private detectives, as they investigate a case involving a hypnotism conspiracy. This game was a lot of fun. It’s an adventure game with puzzles and exploration. Sometimes I found myself confused with a puzzle but eventually managed to come to the conclusion. I suppose they could have added some sort of hint system perhaps but otherwise I liked trying to solve each puzzle. The story was wonderful and so funny. I loved Sam & Max’s banter between each other and with the other characters. I was really curious to see how the mystery would play out. Each episode has its own story but they all connect into the larger story of the season. The game was ported to the Xbox 360 and was still designed as a point and click computer game, so the controller can be hard to use as you have to use the stick to slide the pointer around and choose things. Sometimes you’ll end up clicking on the wrong thing because options are close together. I would definitely recommend playing this original story as I know they said they were removing things for the remastered to make it more politically correct. A few months after release they released the original episodes as free DLC on Steam, does that tell you something?

I couldn’t pass it up. This is a pure visual novel. You won’t be making any decisions here, just reading. But it is an incredibly cute story. It has funny, charming, and heartwarming moments. If you want a nice Christmas-time story with a dash of the supernatural, I would recommend Big Dipper. It takes about 5 hours to complete.

LEGO The Hobbit is quite a conundrum in the LEGO series. It released in 2014 and only contains the stories of the first two Hobbit movies. At one point, they considered releasing the third as a DLC but I’m sure they realized that there wasn’t enough story in that movie to make gameplay for, and thus it just ends with Smaug heading to destroy Laketown. Overall, the game isn’t fun. The audio here is just terrible. It uses clips from the movies but it’s like they used some bootleg recording because it is muffled and quiet. There are several game-breaking moments where Player 2 has to drop out just to have any hope of getting past the glitch. There are also times where you will be completely stuck on what to do and the game does not help you. Often the solution is really dumb. The only thing that can really get you through this game is the fact that you can play with someone else. Surprisingly, using Steam’s Remote Play with this game does work. There is next to no lag unlike most games that you can use this function with. Wandering the map isn’t fun, in fact it can be a chore since it is so large and the map is impossible to understand when there is so much on it. The levels were not thought out at all. You don’t get an Eagle fast travel until you’ve completed the game and considering we finished the game, attempted one fast travel, and it ended with the game crashing to desktop, I’ll call that a wrap and never come back to this game. I have played a lot of LEGO games and own several more to play, this game should not have been made. It was not fun, especially when there are such better co-op choices and far better LEGO titles.

Puzzle Agent 2 continues the story that began in the first game. Agent Tethers is back in Washington and is told to forget about the case in Minnesota but he can’t let the unsolved mystery go. The game is much the same as the first with clicking for hint bubblegum, talking to the locals and solving puzzles. I felt the story found in the first Puzzle Agent was stronger than the story here but it was still a decent wrap-up to the series. I enjoyed playing it and was sad when it was over. I would definitely recommend these games.

Puzzle Agent is an adventure/puzzle game by Telltale Games. It released in 2010 and was the first game in their experimenting with other ways to make and play games. I loved this game, though it should be known that Puzzle Agent and Puzzle Agent 2 are actually one full game. This first game will end on a cliffhanger that is picked up and resolved in the second game. The puzzles were quite difficult but also a lot of fun. And I certainly didn’t expect the spookier elements but it totally made the game. I loved the main character Agent Nelson Tethers and all of his reactions to the townspeople and their mystery. It kind of reminded me of the Professor Layton series as well. This is a must for those who like to solve a mystery and puzzles.

Off the Rails is the follow-up game to the original Thrillville. Uncle Mortimer has new ideas and wants you to continue creating and running his park. This is just as fun as the original game. I love the ability to not only design the park but to actually run around the place and experience it myself. Riding the rides, playing the games and talking to the visitors is so much fun. You need to get so many stars in order to open up the next park but you’ll find yourself sticking around longer as you try to complete everything. There were a few new things here with earning trophies for each park completed and trying to change critics’ minds. If you enjoyed the original Thrillville or are searching for a theme park builder with an added twist, then Off the Rails is for you!

The pictures on the PSN store drew my interest in Big Dipper. And for $1.24 I couldn’t pass it up. This is a pure visual novel. You won’t be making any decisions here, just reading. But it is an incredibly cute story. It has funny, charming, and heartwarming moments. If you want a nice Christmas-time story with a dash of the supernatural, I would recommend Big Dipper. It takes about 5 hours to complete.

I decided to try out Sonic Colors Ultimate. I assumed that if a Sonic game got a remaster then that meant that the game was good. Sadly, that was not at all the case. The intro video is amazing with its song, but sadly it’s pretty much downhill from there. For some reason, they never remastered the cut scenes and they all very clearly still look like the Wii game they came from, not to mention the audio is quiet. You’re given a hub where you can choose which of the ‘theme parks’ you wish to run through at any time. However, as you get further along, it seems as though the game was designed to be played in a certain order because cut scenes play in the different parks that are most definitely out of order. One actually seemed like it should lead into the final boss battle but I still had two other parks to complete! I didn’t have any problems with freezing or crashing as others did, but I began to question my sanity with continuing this game through to completion. After the initial first park, I found myself having less fun the further I went on. This game was incredibly frustrating. The racing parts could be anywhere from one minute to around seven because they toss in platforming at random intervals that take you forever to get around. I had so many times where I couldn’t get past what turned out to be the last tiny part before finishing the level. And should I mention the full-on water levels??The addition of the wisps was clearly an attempt at trying something different in a Sonic game but it never really paid off. I was annoyed every time I was forced to use them because it would often hinder me more than help and it was obvious that to use them in their intended format would require numerous replays of the levels. Something I had no intention of doing. Sonic Colors left me feeling wrung out. I was so disappointed that I bought this game. I didn’t end up having the good old-fashioned Sonic fun. I just wanted a fun arcade game after playing multiple long story games but this did not hit that mark. I would not recommend anyone buying this game. If you want to see what a travesty it is, just get it from your library.

When BioWare passed on the offer to make a sequel to Knights of the Old Republic, Obsidian was chosen and I can’t rightly say why. They were a brand-new company that had never made a game before and it is so very clear that they did not understand the Star Wars universe at all. I added the Restoration Mod on before starting this game and the most I can say is that my game didn’t crash once thanks to it. Otherwise, this mod was clearly never tested by its makers. When they say that everything is restored, they do mean everything, whether it was a completed portion of the game or not. There are so many empty places in this game, with useless side quests that add nothing to your experience. Just the community patch will do fine. I don’t know why this game was rushed out before it was even near ready. The little bits of story you get are so convoluted, contradict both itself and the original KOTOR, and never get satisfactorily explained. The characters have no depth; you’re only allowed to talk to them when the game deems it. If you don’t get the proper influence right away, you just plain will never be able to unlock those conversations. Do you think asking Atton in five different ways how to play Pazaak is too much? Well, Obsidian didn’t! The game also never removes the conversation trees that you’ve already done and sometimes several options have the other character saying the same lines. The villains basically don’t even factor into this game. I find it amazing that the faces of Darth Nihilus and Sion are so well known when they are hardly even in the game. It keeps saying how dangerous the Sith are and that the Jedi are gone, but you never see them! The feats and Force powers are so OP but don’t worry Obsidian’s answer to that was to fill room after room with standard enemies and to really add flavor, once in a while you’ll run into two enemies who will do 60+ damage to you and kill you in two hits. It’s impossible to feel like you’re progressing as a character when one minute you’re slaying guys and the next you’re dead because they sneezed on you. So many areas are copy-paste from the first game except with nothing going on in them (i.e. the Taris cantina can be found on Onderon). Most of the voice-acting sounds like they just pulled random people off the street who didn’t know how to express emotion. The soundtrack here is ultimately forgettable. I wouldn’t even be able to recall a track unlike the first game. Don’t let the positive reviews fool you. This is not a good game. You will feel awful every step of trying to play it. Not once did I feel like I was having fun. 50 hours in and back to Onderon, I just couldn’t do it anymore. My time is better spent on much better games. The real reason there was no KOTORIII is because of KOTORII, this game was such a flop and destruction of all goodwill from KOTORI that there was never any hope of a third game.

V2 is better than the original Sniper Elite, but not really the sniper/stealth game that was promised on release. The enemies are somewhat glitchy, and almost always stupid with great accuracy and sight from long range. Also after replaying the V2 in the Remastered form, I could not tell you what’s remastered it’s the same game and even runs out of the OG’s game folder??? I would recommend playing in co-op if you do play!

The Secret of Monkey Island was yet another game that is heralded as an amazing game that can do no wrong. And once again, I come away completely disappointed and wondering what everyone else was playing. This game took me 8 hours to complete and that was with liberal use of the hint system. I don’t know how anyone could have played this game before the special edition put in a hint system. Just about everything you’re supposed to do is so convoluted and illogical that there is no way you would ever think of the next step on your own. You should not use your brain here, but rather the most idiotic thing you can think of. I thought I knew where this story would go, that Guybrush would go through his pirate trials, become a pirate, join a crew, and eventually fight the great pirate LeChuck. Yeah… once you’re out of Part One: The Three Trials, which is by no means superb, the game quickly goes downhill. I mean, for heaven’s sake, part two is just creating a soup to pass out and end up on Monkey Island! And why did we have to save the mayor just for her to not be in any danger at all? How does your crew end up in Hell when I needed a head to give me broken directions? How does the mayor get the same ghost-killing spray when she was locked up on a ship the entire time and I was traversing an entire island having to do fetch quests before achieving my goal? This game must have inspired the entire genre of fetch quests games. I must say that whoever created this special edition deserves to be smacked upside the head. Whereas the classic version had the action keys right on the screen where you have easy access to them, the SE puts them in separate screens that are near impossible to maneuver. It was far easier to switch to classic mode when you needed to do some quick work with the action keys. The absolute best example of this is when you have to transport a mug of grog across town and have to switch it between mugs before it disintegrates. It is impossible to do with the SE screens, I tried twice! I had to switch to classic to accomplish it. This just shows that there was no testing of this game. At the end of the day all I can say is, at least I didn’t ‘pay more than $20 for this game’.

I picked up Resident Evil 5 because I was looking for a couch co-op experience and knew this one advertised itself as such, and hey it’s Resident Evil, surely it’s good right? Ha what a funny joke! This game released in 2009 and was incredibly dated at the time, running more like a PS1 era game. The controls are old and cannot be changed. You can’t move and shoot at the same time. The inventory system is so small and can’t be upgraded, leaving inventory management a relative nightmare. Most of this game copies Gears of War, from opening doors together, to taking cover, to splitting up to fight enemies in different areas. I cannot stress enough how much better Gears of War is than this. You start in West Africa and are told you’re there the whole time but hey we enter the swamp lands and underground ancient ruins, so it’s a little more than suspension of my disbelief. They clearly wanted to check the different environment boxes. The story is paper-thin if almost non-existent. How the game starts, is not where the game ends up. The little story you do receive is through the documents you can read lying around or unlockable files that can be read on the main menu. For some reason, Chris is now an idiot. Everything that happens is a complete surprise to him; you’d never guess that he lived through the first Umbrella incident. And Wesker seems to be completely confused as to who Chris is, as though they weren’t on the same team in RE1! While Chris was taken off-guard by everything, I was not. I was able to successfully predict pretty much the whole game, from story to gameplay to when enemies would appear. You did a pretty poor job making your game if I can do all that. The game was clearly not tested if you play with two people instead of an AI. There are a few QTEs that are near impossible to accomplish as a human being. I nearly lost a finger mashing that button prompt in the end boss fight. The co-op screens are tiny for some reason, big swaths of black bars on the sides because apparently they didn’t have the first idea how to make a co-op game. The boss fights are just ridiculous, you can shoot their weak spot all day but you won’t defeat the boss until the game decides it’s time for you to do so, hence no health bars. And the end battle? Holy heck when you waste all this ammo and time fighting an enemy to discover that there’s just some QTEs you’re supposed to do to trigger the next cutscene before the next boss fight in a new environment, you know you’re in a good game. Both story DLCs (Lost in Nightmares and Desperate Escape) can be completed in an hour each. LiN is pretty much trying to recreate the Spencer Mansion of the first game, complete with actual puzzles, the thing the main game didn’t remember. It’s mostly just wandering the place and the end battle with Wesker is pathetic, just waiting for a time limit again. There is no talking between the characters, they clearly didn’t even get Wesker’s voice actor back. DE shows what Jill and Josh were up to while Chris and Sheva took on Wesker. It emphasizes the action gunplay. If you wondered why you didn’t shoot your way to the ship in the main game, it’s because they pulled that out and put it here. This is insane and in the worst way. They upped the amount of enemies coming at you until you drown in them and they are pretty much infinitely spawning. Not to mention all the rockets and grenades launched at you over and over. The most audacious thing they did was the end battle. Hold out against endless hordes of enemies for 5 minutes, 40 secs left you get a radio call that it’s going to take longer to get to you, they add another two minutes on. Not once did an enemy drop shotgun ammo during this battle. This game is a clear example of Capcom deciding that what they were doing before didn’t matter anymore because now they should just copy what was successful instead. This series was aiding its own decay with constantly changing what Umbrella was doing, is it bioterrorism, a virus, bioengineering, something else? The writers certainly didn’t know. I would not recommend this game. It gave me more frustration than fun which always makes you feel good at the end of the day.

I played 2013’s Tomb Raider reboot and thought the first 75% of the game was pretty good but the ending was rushed and not well-developed. Now you would think going into the second game they would work their hardest to rectify those writing mistakes. What’s that you say? Rise of the Tomb Raider did even worse? That’s right, the story here is so bad it might as well not even exist. I predicted every so-called ‘twist’ well before it was revealed. Every character here is completely unlikeable and none more so than Lara herself. I can’t stand what they’ve done to her in this reboot series. In the original, she was kick-butt, tomb robber *ahem* excuse me, raider, dual pistol wielding. Here, she’s a whiny little girl who can’t decide if she’s some archeologist searching for the world’s lost secrets or if she’s still working through her daddy issues and a bit psychotic who doesn’t care who she hurts in her quest, if she’s someone with no training taking out an entire army of seasoned mercenaries or being blind-sided by someone obviously wanting to kill her. The other characters barely get enough screen time to even attempt to establish what their motives are. Not to mention a certain character who shows up at just the right moment simply to prevent Lara from her goal and pretend like she cares about something for a change. The combat is a thousand steps back from the first one. You are always required to be zoomed in in order to shoot so if the enemy is fast, you’re going to be missing a lot. You have all these ‘different’ weapons in each category but there’s no real reason to switch. There’s one obviously best weapon in each category. The stealth is just sad. And if you take out an enemy or they notice when you miss a shot, well there’s no running off and hiding until they stop searching. In fact, they usually know exactly where you are. And if that isn’t enough the AI is programmed so brilliantly that they will often rush you, one after another, while holding a gun. Are they all trying to kamikaze me? After I managed to finish this lackluster game, I decided I hadn’t had enough with the bad and did the two DLCs: Baba Yaga and Croft Manor. All I can do is laugh the laugh of the crazy. Baba Yaga could have been cool. The hallucinations you initially endure are well-done and had me invested for all of the five minutes you get before it clears and you’re sent on a fetch quest to make a potion… What? I am not kidding. And it was completely obvious who Baba Yaga really was, the end fight was just do one thing several times, the enemies were just reusing assets, and the ending was so poor. I feel bad for anyone who paid for it separately. But the one that really takes the cake is Croft Manor. You think hey this might be a mini sequel, something akin to exploring the mansion in the original games. No, noooo, it is a complete collectathon of relics and documents so Lara’s uncle (on her mother’s side so how does he have claim on her father’s manor?) doesn’t kick her out of her own home. I’d like to know how much later this was made than the game itself because Lara’s voice actor couldn’t have phoned that in any harder. There was no emotion to her voice. Half the time I couldn’t tell what she was even saying as though she was speaking through mashed potatoes in her mouth. And if you swung around to stare at Lara’s face while she spoke, the lip movement was just open/close, no syncing at all. Neither of the DLCs were worth it or added anything to the story. In fact, this game tries to degrade the story with rewriting her father into this pathetic man. I got this real cheap and still feel I paid too much. I wish I had been paid to play it, at least then I would have got something from it. The worst part is that I also got the third game but have no motivation to even give it a try. It would be a miracle for there to be any positive upswing from here. Just don’t bother. If you must, play the first one, at least there was some attempt at innovation and fun.

Dishonored 2… now here is a game that never should have been made. One that was trying to make quick and easy money with a name that would be recognized. This was also when every game needed a female lead so it has Empress Emily be playable, but late in the development they decided to add Corvo in as a playable option too (which is who I chose cuz why do I care about Emily?) but it’s clearly half-baked with the dialogue clearly signifying that you’re meant to play as Emily while at the same time the lines are hardly even changed between the two. There is so much poor retconning, which of course there is otherwise this game couldn’t exist. How does Corvo allow someone to get the drop on him and Emily again?? How in the world can a simple witch remove Corvo’s mark when it’s specifically stated in the first game that only the Outsider can do this? (This ensures that you start back on level 1 with powers.) And now the villain, Delilah Copperspoon, from Daud’s DLC in the first game (who was literally taken out whether you went for the good or bad ending) is related to Empress Jessamine. And there’s some really bad backstory cobbled together for the Outsider that nobody asked for. I can’t even begin to help you wrap your mind around this mess. It’s so copy-paste. Instead of rats, we have blood flies which operate in the same fashion, kill more people, more blood flies appear. The stealth and combat are just as bad in this as they were in the first one, if not worse. In the first level, the stealth was so bonkers that I ended up just bolting down the street and the AI had no idea to do with this strategy. The AI was just all around bad, shooting their own guys and presumably seeing me where I was nowhere near and attacking that spot. The power upgrades are just stripped out of the Daud DLC from the first game. Suddenly Corvo has powers he never did in the first one. Remember how the Outsider gives the Mark to particular people to see what they do with their abilities which are specially tailored for them? Not anymore. The Outsider’s voice actor has also changed and man the new guy is awful! He also no longer makes commentary on your actions throughout the game because at the end of the day, they don’t really matter. The final boss battle just has you screaming to be done with the game. And when you are done, you wonder why you put yourself through such a pathetic ordeal instead of playing something good. Do not play this game. I didn’t think the first game was all that good, I felt that it dropped the ball on many of its aspects but this ‘sequel’ is just disgusting in how obvious it is as a cash-grab. Save yourself and find something else to play.

Dishonored has been heralded as one of the best games ever made ever since its release. People have cited the steampunk environment, the atmosphere, the story, the stealth, etc etc. I finally decided to play the Game of the Year Edition and I must say I came away infinitely disappointed. What a mess ****! It certainly didn’t make good on its promises. When the first two chapters of the game are just reusing the same map, once at night and once in the day, I immediately started questioning how much effort was put into this game. There’s no real tutorial to your powers either. The game is made out as a stealth game, one where you can do the entire thing without killing anyone. In fact, if you want the good ending, this is exactly how you need to play it, but the game doesn’t make this easy on you. The stealth is just atrocious. NPCs can see you when they shouldn’t, you have very limited options for where to go to be unseen, and there are no shadows to lose yourself in. The game pretty much just turns into how fast you can run and teleport around the map, keeping just out of range of the NPCs weapons. And God help you if you ever are forced into combat. These are some of the worst controls I’ve ever seen. The two-part Daud DLC are the best parts of this first game (available with the GOTY edition, how did this game win GOTY??). He has such better powers and gets to operate with a team. The story is more concise too and gives you an idea what Daud was up to during the main game. Not to mention the fight with Corvo is actually done well here and thus doesn’t match up with the actual game. In the main game, you have the choice to go in guns ablazing and kill Daud or you can stealth in and leave a note in his pocket and head out. How satisfying!! In the DLC there’s a battle but Corvo allows Daud to live if he leaves Dunwall. I don’t know what game people were playing when they say this is not only one of the best games they’ve ever played, but also one of the best stealth games ever. Dishonored qualifies for neither category. It’s a shame because I can see what this game should have been. The story held so much promise but in the end it fell flat and didn’t deliver. Don’t bother with this game. It will only sadden you to see all the potential that was here, in both the world and the story, but how it fell flat and never reached anywhere close to what it could have.

I decided to play Silent Hill Origins for Halloween and finally get the information on Travis Grady and how he helped Alessa. I certainly didn’t expect what I got. I found out that this was the first game to be given to an American team. They weren’t doing their jobs, got fired and it was carted over to the UK branch and given about a year to rebuild the entire game. And boy does that explain a lot. The story is severely lacking. You know, one of the biggest points to choosing to play a Silent Hill title? I was under the impression that this would be the story to show how Travis was the one to pull Alessa out of the fire which connects them and then find out why he’d be stuck in the town. But nope, most of the time you’re questioning as to why you’re even in the town, let alone why you’re wandering through most of the buildings. Nearly all the story that exists is revealed through notes scattered around. Many times Travis states that he’s ready to leave but he doesn’t actually try. Eventually you start getting these repressed memories of his childhood but I don’t think that it actually took place in Silent Hill so I don’t know why he’s traveling between these locations in the town. The gameplay is absolutely atrocious. For some reason they decided to have breakable weapons rather than the tried and true method of pistol/shotgun/rifle and three levels of melee. So now you have a boatload of items in your inventory because there’s no sorting system and how many times you get to use them is unclear. Best part? You certainly don’t want to go into a boss battle without bullets for your guns. Trying to melee them is stupid and impossible. The boss battles also take place in locations that are far too small for the battle. The enemies are ridiculously copy-paste. This game was truly awful and in no way has a right to call itself a Silent Hill game. It’s like Alessa’s parts were just slapped on there so they could say ‘Silent Hill’! I ended up replaying the first game to wash the bad taste Origins left behind. Also, the PS2 version is a clear port of the PSP version since we don’t have any use for L1/L2/R2 or the right stick. Don’t waste your time or effort trying to get a hold of this game or playing it, the other Silent Hill games are far superior.

Detention came out in 2017 and a movie was made in 2019. I bought the game but ended up watching the movie first and really enjoyed it. It was an amazing story of both a historical time period in Taiwan and a fascinating character dive. I decided to next play the game and I’m glad I did. First I’m amazingly impressed that a movie was able to be made from a point and click game. This is very well-made. It is fun to try and solve the puzzles that will allow you to progress. And the creators were wonderful in that if it was a super-long walk between where you started and where you ended up for the puzzle and no longer needed that section of the map, they cut out the middle walking section so going between the doors just takes you where you need to go. The story is well-done and the last chapter has you go through the reveals of what happened and answer several questions which determine if you get the true ending or the normal ending. If you’ve been paying attention to the story you should be able to get the true ending as I did. Once you complete the game, a chapter select option opens up on the main menu so you can go back in to the last chapter to get the other ending. Playing through with just one ending took me just over four hours to complete and I feel completely satisfied with this game. It didn’t overstay its welcome. I would absolutely recommend this to anyone who enjoys story-focused games.

I decided to try Outlast for a Halloween playthrough and man was this eye-opening. So many people herald this game as an amazingly scary-fun game and this illustrates perfectly how nobody has actually played this game. In fact, the trophies show this, by the fact that the first one you get (turning on the generators) only 47.6% of players have received this. This is in chapter one! You know how long you’re scared in this game? The first five minutes of driving up to the asylum and seeing the shadow in the window. Once you’re inside and running through the same copy-paste corridors and rooms and having to avoid patients who have no real search pattern for you to avoid, it gets stale fast. There is no fighting back, not because it makes the game scarier, but because the developers didn’t want to program even a simple self-preservation raising your arm. This game is a running simulator as you get increasingly frustrated with the lack of direction and the fact that each area has you do the same ‘turn this back on, hide while someone investigates, now go to next area’. I got through 50% before I gave up. When it takes 30 minutes to try and figure out how to continue and that’s with the terribly bad walkthroughs online, I call it quits. The fact that so many games copied this is a travesty in the history of games. I give it a 3, only because hey I never fell through the map! Avoid this game like the plague if you have any interest in having actual fun in a game or wish to actually be scared as you play.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is a step down from the two previous entries. While still a free-roaming adventure game unlike Goblet of Fire, there is less to do here. There isn’t the same magic of roaming Hogwarts mainly because the game locks off areas as it tries to railroad you into doing what it wants you to. If you so much as not immediately set off to your assigned task, both Ron and Hermione will badger you with things like ‘it’s time to get to class Harry’ or ‘we should look for those potions ingredients’, every 30 seconds. Not to mention that you no longer get the fun of mounting your broom and flying across the ramparts of Hogwarts. But hey you can fly the terrible to control Buckbeak and will find yourself crashing more than flying, so that’s totally the same thing right? The one cool, new thing is that you can switch between the trio as each one has their own unique spells you’ll have to make use of during the game to progress. But this game seems to follow the book and even the movie far less than the first two. When you go through the Whomping Willow you end up in some weird underground cavern fighting fire salamanders and various other creatures while navigating doors and halls. The game plainly gets lazier as you go along. The map is also redone to reflect the changes the movie decided to do to Hogwarts and its grounds. Everything is simplified. Now if you’re caught by a prefect, there’s no house points lost or any trouble at all, you just have to re-sneak through the area again. It is literally impossible to lose the House Cup (I managed to come in second in COS). POA also has no penalties if you lose all your health and pass out. The game just resets you with full health and you’re good to go. For a good old-fashioned fun adventure game, you’re better off sticking with Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out in 2005. I originally played it back in 2009 but remembered nothing about it except that it was co-op and the trio liked to do a lot of screaming about ‘BEANS!’ I got in the mood to play the old adventure games again and also was wanting a co-op experience and decided to try out Goblet of Fire again. Oh boy, I did not remember this game at ALL! There is no free-roaming in this game at all like the previous installments had and the adventure aspect is similarly non-existent. Instead what we get with Goblet is a level by level game that requires you to go back and play them again NUMEROUS times once you have the proper spells in order to continue with the game. This game keeps you from continuing on by requiring a certain number of Triwizard Cups. And the only way to get them is by replaying levels at least three times, and let me tell you that’s the last thing you want to do. This game is not fun even when playing with someone else. For some reason there’s also a new card system that is supposed to upgrade your magic, health, etc but you really only need about three cards and there’s sooo many and you’re supposed to buy them with beans! If you’re feeling like you want to go back and pick up a Harry Potter game, avoid Goblet of Fire like Little Hangleton’s graveyard, you won’t see the ending to this game.

I was looking into narrative novel games and came across Steins;Gate and saw hundreds of positive reviews raving about the amazing story and characters. I have now come away from finishing this game and have to wonder what everyone else played. First, this is not a narrative novel game. You don’t get to make choices (no the emails don’t count, or whether or not to send D-mail) and will spend most of the game, around 35 hours, clicking the ‘X’ button to go to the next line of dialogue. That’s all you do, is sit there and read it. (There are so many text screens that are just ‘…’) Why was this made as a video game? Indeed the first three chapters alone took 11 hours, without trying to rush through it, as I did with the rest of the game. This game screams that it had no idea what it wanted to be. We have science fiction with the ideas of time travel and all the science-y talk, a relationship thrown in at the last possible moment, and then all this Otaku-info dump (have you ever wanted to know the deepest levels of Japanese culture thrown up so that they needed to add an entire dictionary so you could kind of understand?). If it could have chosen one genre, the story could have been far stronger because the two halves of the game don’t really connect with each other. Much of the info dump at the beginning in regards to time travel and SERN don’t come up again once their device is operational. They also try to act like they’re butterfly effect without ever using the concept correctly, and often mock it and Groundhog Day when they decide to throw that in too. I got so frustrated by this drawn out process that I paused after chapter three and ended up getting ahold of the anime just to see if that was any better. The fact that they were able to cut out a lot of the endless prattle to make the story tighter, only showed how many useless hours were in this ‘game’. Not only that but I had absolutely nothing but disdain for the main character Okabe in the game. He doesn’t have any cares about what he’s doing and indeed actively tells complete strangers, just try our time machine, we don’t know what will happen! For most of the events, he doesn’t even know what the others are setting out to change! The anime made the characters more bearable and likeable as well. I didn’t want to completely strangle everyone. Technically, there are multiple endings here. I say this because most of them are based on not fixing the timeline and just allowing a certain character to die. Faris’s ending was probably the best as it made the most sense. Okabe was always the problem and this ending illustrated what taking him out of the equation would be like. The other two are letting one character live or the other, and then the final ending is saving them both. You will never be able to get two of the endings without a walkthrough because it involves choosing the correct email replies and collecting the correct amount of relationship flags for these. All of these endings were just whatever, because it just required you to suspend all intellectual thought as the writers continuously contradict themselves, sometimes in the same character conversation! Once you try to get these other endings are just fast-forwarding (beware when the D-mails options pop up because it will blast through those and not send the mail) the game is a whole 2 hours long! The best part about this 'game' was the soundtrack. They were such beautiful tracks that as I listen to them I'm immediately transported to moments that they took place during. Steins;Gate is not what the creators advertise and indeed, not what all the positive reviews make it out to be. If you must try this story, you should stick with the anime. That is the form this story was meant to take. I’m just so happy to finally be done.

7 Days of Rose is a narrative novel game. I don’t use the term interactive narrative novel because unlike other games of this nature you don’t use a pointer or such to click on things or investigate things in the environment. But that doesn’t mean that you just sit there reading. No this game has many points where you choose from three conversation choices that influence how the other characters, typically your parents and Rose, sees you. I loved being able to decide these and I definitely found myself reading into Rose’s dialogue and actions on how to proceed. This game was only 4 hours long but seeing as you can get it on sale for $2, I’d say it’s worth every penny. I loved this story, I loved the characters, I loved every conversation and was constantly laughing at things both my character and others were saying. But the game didn’t only have comedy; it had a lot of heart. I cared about what might be happening to Rose and found my interaction choices with her reflecting that. As usually happens with interactive novel games, 7 Days of Rose has multiple endings, in this case three. These are of course tied to the conversation choices you make and it’s run on a point system. Each can be +1, 0, or -1 and certain total ranges decide which ending you get. I played through on my own for the first playthrough and then looked up a guide on how to get the other two endings. You’re able to fast-forward through any of the dialogue you already saw and it stops during each dialogue choice. Each ending was well-done and reflected how you interacted with Rose. The positive ending was of course the best. If you want an amazing story experience in a quick little well-made game, 7 Days of Rose is for you!

Bound by Flame is a fantasy RPG that seemed like it was trying to compete with the likes of Bioware’s library of games and the Witcher series. Here you are a mercenary, where you become inhabited by a flame demon. You’re supposed to choose whether to give into the demon and gain the powers it offers or deny it and remain human. However, once you’ve made your very first choice in this regard, the game takes over and each subsequent ‘choice’ is made for you, ensuring you stay on the demon or human path. Overall, this game is nothing to write home about. The combat is very poor. You will get your rear handed to you in the tutorial and they actually have you go against a huge boss right at the end of the tutorial! I ended up putting the difficulty down to easy and it didn’t make fighting any more enjoyable. It’s just a hit, dodge system, and turns very repetitive with very little enemy difference. There is a leveling system with a skill tree but it doesn’t really factor in. You don’t feel like you’re getting more powerful and will just end up running past enemies as you get further in because it’s just so frustrating and boring. The story is likewise paper-thin. Why have you been possessed and what is this demon? Who knows because you’ll never get any answers. The game in fact, just abruptly ends, and neither ending choice elicits big changes. According to the achievements, you can romance your companions? But I never got any such options and barely got to talk to them to learn anything about them. You only get to choose one person to journey with you and have no say in their abilities; tactics are as deep as: stay back, rush in, or heal, and they tended not to listen to any of those and just took blows to the face until death. I wouldn’t bother with this game. It’s so plain and average; you won’t be thinking of this game years down the line or rushing to replay it. There are much better games to spend your time on.

I originally discovered this game as something one would enjoy if they liked Ace Attorney & Danganronpa. Then I found they had a 1st game called Root Letter: Last Answer. I was blown away by how amazing Root Letter was with the story, characters, setting, music & was looking forward to seeing what Root Film had to offer. I couldn’t be any more disappointed or furious. This game clearly had no direction or idea what it wanted to be. It takes ideas from Root Letter while also now trying to act like it’s Ace Attorney with also using Nonary Games elements. There is a different writer here than Root Letter and it shows. But it’s like someone who had a good idea for a story and game started this but then left and those who had no idea what they were doing took over. I did find that after Root Letter released they immediately started trying sequel ideas which would fit with what’s going on here. The story starts out promising but quickly peters out. After finishing Yagumo Chapter 1 it unlocks Riho Chapter 1 but the game never integrates where you should play it. Eventually it’s brought into the main story but in the dumbest way possible. I would have felt better if they had just cut her two chapters out. You will not see the ending coming, not because it was a great mystery that had you on the edge of your seat, but because they continuously bait and switch who the culprit could be and then choose someone you never got to know, with a paper-thin motive. There were a few character moments that made me laugh, which would have improved the game considerably if they had focused on the characters and how they interact. But that’s the problem, characters didn’t matter to this story as much as the convoluted mess they called a mystery. For a brief moment at the end of Yagumo’s 3rd chapter and part of the 4th I thought I was finally going to start enjoying myself but the game instead started its worst bout of time-wasting yet, making me go back to the same locations so many times just to get information that we already knew we needed but why get it all from one video footage viewing when you can do it three times!! In Yagumo’s Chapter 4, cut gameplay is obvious as the cops reference a piece of evidence we brought to their attention which never happened, because we never were allowed to find the item. I was told it had disappeared!! The Max Mode in this game was ill-created and used. Why was Yagumo going by Max? It made sense in Root Letter and the Mode was completely innovative. But Root Film’s was half-baked, including how Yagumo collected his information. There is no investigation, and it’s clear that there was supposed to be but it’s been cut. There are many moments where the game says we’re off to investigate, the screen cuts to black and then we come back, investigation done but I wasn’t part of it. I, the player, am not participating in the game!!! They are telling me what happened, where is the interactive part, you know the gameplay??? Unlike Root Letter, Root Film has no other pathways, no other endings. What you play is all you get. I’ve never experienced that in all the interactive narrative novels I’ve played. Whereas Root Letter was concerned with showing off Matsue, going into all these different locations and buildings & at the end I felt the urge to visit & that I could find my way around the area because I had played it, I got none of that from Root Film. I never entered a location; the art was weirdly water color-esque so nothing seemed real. I didn’t learn as much from this second game. And not once did food get shown, Root Letter loved showing each meal I had and explained its significance. The music is 75% reused from Root Letter, except whereas that game has specific types of moments where these tracks were used, Root Film just tosses them carelessly about, sometimes using a track for mere seconds before switching to another. Let’s mention the grammatical and spelling errors that got worse as the game went along. Yagami (Yagumo) & location scooting (scouting) were some of my favorites. It felt as though someone who was familiar with English but not fluent translated this. It was clear that the translator did not have access to who the characters were because numerous times a woman was called ‘he’ and a man got called ‘miss’. The writers also had to show they were hip with the youth in Yagumo’s 1st two chapters, talking about Instagram and using terms like ‘boomer’. It made me cringe every time. Despite being in Japanese, I can still praise the voice actors who seemed to have given it their all. Indeed I enjoyed some moments simply because of how the voice acting was done. In the end, please tell me why this game was around 30 hours? There was no reason for it to be this long and I found myself dreading to continue playing it. What more can I say then that? I finished it and I would never recommend it to anyone. I wish I had never heard of Root Film. Play Root Letter: Last Answer only!

Gotham Knights was announced as a game where Batman would be dead and thus focus on his protégées of Nightwing, Red Hood, Robin, and Batgirl, and one that would be separate from the Arkham game universe. Yet shortly after release it was being blasted for not being an Arkham game and for not being able to play as Batman. Uh duh? They straight up said that? It was exhilarating to be in a Batman universe game where you weren’t Batman and could only play as another character in either short DLCs or in the fight mode. We finally got a real game where you could play as Nightwing, Red Hood, Robin, and Batgirl! They did really well making each have their own separate gameplay and tactics. It was fun trying out each character. Gameplay-wise it could be classified as your common looter-shooter type such as Borderlands, where your crafted gear determines how well you do in combat. You could play like crap or be under-leveled but if the ‘power’ of the equipment is at the right number you’ll do just fine. It’s basically a punch, shoot, dodge-type system. You can get the flow down but there’s really no combos to learn or excel at here. It’s again a shame because the moves you learn as each of the characters are quite cool and really fit who they are. Nightwing can go hopping around the map like the acrobat he is, Red Hood uses guns (do you have any idea how amazing that is to do in a Batman game??), Robin has stealth, and Batgirl has tech and gadgets. The downside of the game is that it felt like they set out making a linear-type story game but executives got their mitts on it and demanded that it needed to have an open-world as that’s all games are allowed to be these days. I say this because the way the villains are set up seem like they are all supposed to flow into each other and connect but it never got finished. Many things, the Court of Owls for example, felt like they were left open and forgotten when we switched over to another villain for the end-game. And things like the opening cut-scene, why was Ra’s there? were never explained. It’s a real shame, because you can see the potential this game had to be absolutely amazing, if only it could have come out when games were allowed to be games. There needed to be more fleshing out of the characters. A lot of their story and interaction seemed to only happen through emails. Part of the problem stems from that you have four heroes, but whichever characters aren’t currently being played don’t really exist. When you’re out doing the story or out on patrol, for all intents and purposes, it seems the other characters are just hanging out in the Belfry doing nothing. It’s so weird. They’ll chime in now and again on coms but they’re not participants. They didn’t need to do anything too crazy. Just something like have them talk as if they were on patrol in a different part of the city or when doing story points, have them show up in the cutscene but say they took a different way through. Something that tells me they have a purpose and it’s not just so you can switch to whatever character you want. The game is advertised as having co-op and indeed that’s how it feels the game should be played. But it doesn’t feel like co-op was tested. When playing with a friend, you'll get many fatal errors that drop you to the desktop. These occur less as the game goes on and usually the host would be able to stay as it drops your partner, and then they could rejoin. This could happen during patrol in the open-world for something as simple as trying to talk to a contact or being too far from each other, to happening during the story moments. While incredibly frustrating, it’s not game-ending. When player 2 goes back to their own game world, it knows that you’ve played through story missions in another world and asks whether you’d like to skip forward to the next mission so you don’t have to repeat if you choose to play on your own! We also learned later on in Heroic Assault that despite the game saying player 2’s stats are raised or lowered to mirror the host’s level, it’s untrue. If you’re farther apart in level, player 2 is screwed up, nothing is changed except lowering their base level stats in that they can’t do any significant damage but take massive damage. But back out on the streets of Gotham, we were still able to do equal damage. Don’t listen to all the negative reviews, having completed this game as much as possible, I can clearly see via the achievements that most people didn’t play past the first hour/tutorial and first mission. I don’t regret having purchased it or played it. I had a lot of fun with what was there and was so happy to finally be able to play a game as Nightwing. Though, I would buy it on sale as I did (I even got the Deluxe Edition in order to have the characters be able to look like their original comic book versions). Even with its bugs, when comparing it with other games that have released in the last 10 years, I’d say this game was a raging success.

If you ever thought a visual novel couldn’t pull off a horror story then you would be dead wrong because The Letter: A Horror Visual Novel did just that! It involves a mansion that is being sold when a haunted bloody letter is found. The scares were positively fabulous; the sounds mixed with the visuals were very spooky and got me jumping quite a few times. There were six total characters. I really liked the idea of switching between characters as the story progressed. You got to see similar events from different points of view along with how the mansion was affecting each character. You also got to delve more into each character and see that despite how they might appear to others, things were not always as they seemed. As the story progressed, you begin to have inklings of what might be going on in the mansion and what is happening to certain characters. The quick-time events were hard as nails and provided very little direction (possibly why you’re allowed to skip them?) but I stuck to them and successfully completed each one. I got a great sense of satisfaction from this accomplishment! Like all visual novels, this game has multiple paths and endings and naturally the ‘true’ ending. However, you can tell this is one of the company’s first games because when you finally look at the branching tree to see how to go about different endings, it’s a mess. Not only is each tree separate based on character, and some are wayyyy longer than others, but the little icons have no explanation, no saying which choice this is. Also, the paths aren’t clickable in order to go to particular branching paths and starting there. No you have to start a new game each time or have saves at critical junctions, and then you can skip forward until it reaches new text. What I will say is that even though you click new game, the game does recall every past decision you made and feat or gallery item you unlocked. I was able to do several different choices successfully but it wasn’t the easiest. In fact I needed a person’s guide online to figure out how to unlock memory fragments and how to get the true ending because the game and developers provided nothing. Sadly, as is usually the case with visual novels, you won’t have the full story until you play multiple paths. My first time I successfully got through without a single death, though I got no history of what really happened at the mansion. If you want the knowledge of the history of the mansion and the letter, you have to do the ‘true’ ending but it’s not a satisfying ending at all. The satisfying ending has everyone live but you don’t know anything about the spirit haunting everyone. It’s definitely a give and take. In the end, I would recommend playing The Letter, though definitely get it on sale as I did. It was a fun Halloween play, even if it ultimately took longer than I thought because of that crazy unskippable tree when going through second and third playthroughs for those other endings. The characters were wonderfully created and you’ll start to feel for them and their different relationships, as you may help to try and mend them. Ultimately it was a pretty good first game for the company.

The game is pretty good when you start out; you do all these activities that really make you feel like a cowboy/outlaw of the old west but eventually about half way through you’re forced to head to Mexico where the story and gameplay take a really fast dive. Why are we getting involved in some Mexican civil war? The only reason seems to be that Rockstar felt if they threw this in they could claim the game had some historical significance. Or that they didn’t have enough ideas for a full game and if they made this giant map you wouldn’t notice how empty the world and quests are. They’re pretty much all fetch quests around 5-10mins in length and the game’s favorite is to have you cut scene travel across the whole map, do the ‘mission’ and then it wraps up and leaves you there, no matter that the next quest is back on the other side of the map. Come on ride shotgun in the carriage! How this game ever won Game of the Year and got critics to herald it as one of the best video games ever made is beyond me. The game is downright boring and the ending has to be one of the worst ever made, not to mention then switching characters and now being left as this character 10 years later but you can continue to play quests you picked up as John Marston??

The English release of this game is called Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly. However, in Japan, this series has no numbers for they saw them all as standalone, none of them connecting. Naturally outside of Japan has to have numbering for marketing reasons so this game is called Fatal Frame II. The game has no tutorial so it’s a good thing I played the first game before this except that that they significantly changed how the Camera Obscura works. The second game also had difficulty settings! You could choose easy or normal for your first playthrough, how innovative! I read that the creators were hoping more people would finish the game this time around, but that was based on the fear factor, not the difficulty factor. Seriously? I decided to choose easy based on the hard as nails normal setting from the first game but I definitely could have played this second game on normal, they really made it easier. I barely got injured, never used a Stone Mirror, and was flooded with Herbal Medicine and film. The fear factor definitely was less in this game; I found the first one far scarier. Which was disappointing, I’m playing a horror game to be scared!! Not to have just a couple jump scares. Not to mention that the presence of a second character along with you in a horror game really limits the fear factor along with the fact that when Mayu is with you the ghosts choose to attack her instead. Sure half the time she’s gone but still. There was a bit of a bigger story than the first game but it was far too similar with the sacrifices to a gate to Hell. Many of the elements that were supposed to be big reveals I was able to predict at the beginning of the game. Crimson Butterfly is pretty much rehashing the same storyline of the first game. Except that this village went to a wayyy more complicated method of sacrifice to quell their Demon Gate. If you thought the game’s camera was bad in the first FF, I bet you didn’t think it could get worse in the second! But it absolutely does, now worse than tank, as the camera isn’t even hooked onto Mio but full loosely goosey as you wander the map. Oftentimes, Mio will walk around a wall or corner and you don’t follow her, you’re left staring at a wall wondering if there’s anything over there. The game’s ‘puzzles’ are now almost completely Silent Hill and Resident Evil-esque. You will be looking for so many keys to locked doors. At one point I knew of three locked doors and had acquired two keys! Because of the locked door system you will be doing a lot of backtracking through these houses and sometimes back through the village. And after halfway, the game kind of gives up and just starts repeating puzzles or putting the answer right next to the lock. And good gracious the backtracking. If you’ve been in one house in this game, you’ve been in them all. They reuse the same aspects and rooms and just change them around. You have to investigate the whole place despite there being very little in the houses. And when you reach Chapter 8? You have to go through them again!! Because they also reuse ghost battles for these ‘boss’ battles, their ways of attack are exactly the same just with a bit more health. The continuous backtracking also removes the fear factor. Technically, this is a linear game in that each time you go in a place you’re stuck there and must work your way out to go forward and there’s only one right answer. But the fact is that there’s no real way to know what you’re supposed to accomplish and how you just try to click on everything. For heaven’s sake the diary entries one lines are supposed to give you all the ‘clue’ you need on where to go and search! I would have thought more highly of this game if it would have been half its length. It took me 14 hours and that was using a walkthrough which I was only too grateful to have. If I had been on my own it probably would have been double that time plus I wouldn’t have found even half the items since most of them were hidden in drawers or the camera never faced their blue glow. Lastly, I don’t get how people can see this game’s story as actually having happened in universe. It’s so obvious that Mayu was dead the whole time and that Mio felt incredibly guilty at her death, having fallen during their playing. Thus she went back to the place of Mayu’s death before it became a lake and the whole village thing was in her head as a way to work through Mayu’s death and her own guilt. A way to come to acceptance. Which is way better than the current idea of it actually happened and thus it’s connected to the other game. Still, basically, once again Fatal Frame is ripping off Silent Hill. I’m so sad that Fatal Frame never has its own identity. All it has is the camera and if they could have done their own unique story and gameplay it would have been a lot better.

Fatal Frame released in 2001 on the PS2 and thus was heavily influenced by both Silent Hill and Resident Evil. You will oftentimes feel that you are in both games while wandering through the Himuro Mansion. Fatal Frame is not without its own unique element though. It has the Camera Obscura, a really cool idea to combat the ghosts by taking photos to exorcise their spirits. However, the Camera Obscura requires that the ghost’s face be showing in order to get a shot. It’s not too bad on the first night but the second night onwards, all bets are off. As we now have swooping, speeding, disappearing through walls and floors, and the best, ghosts without heads! The game has no difficulty setting, and thus the health system is truly horrendous; ghosts can take half health in one attack, but there’s hardly any health drops. Save points are few and far between and half-way through the game I started backtracking to save as much as possible for fear of having to redo significant portions of the game over. To add onto everything else, we’re in full tank controls here and you will forever walk through doors and walk straight back at them as the camera changes. Not to mention combat with this poor camera. The English voice acting is truly horrendous. Miku and Kirie aren’t too bad but everyone else sounds as if they’ve never spoken aloud to another human being before. There’s no emotion coming through and there are long pauses between words and sentences. For some reason, the numbers for the puzzles were never translated and thus are still in Japanese. I had to look up the translation and once I solved the first puzzle, I was able to do the rest without any problem. The story was pretty interesting (why the Western release claims it’s based on a true story is beyond me) though it was few and far between. The game concentrated more on its scary atmosphere and jump scares than fleshing out its story and characters. I mean we never get a satisfactory answer to Miku and Mafuyu’s mother, in addition to why the brother and sister can see supernatural occurrences. As another reviewer said, after a certain point I wasn’t willing to walk away from this game. I couldn’t let this game defeat me! I do feel proud that I managed to finish it, almost by the skin of my teeth at times. Fatal Frame I is a pretty good game for its time. Today it’s a little hard to play. A remaster that fixes the game’s controls, camera, and gives it bigger maps and difficulty settings would significantly improve this game. Some new voice acting would be wonderful too.

These Uncharted games have been worshipped ever since their release but I never really got around to playing them until now. And wow, I really wish I had continued never having played these games. These were absolutely praised solely on the fact that they were PS3 exclusives and it was during the height of the stupid ‘console wars’. Because nothing about these games is stand-out, they don’t set the bar for anything. Everything they copy was done better in its original game or movie. In fact, The Uncharted series is probably hurt the most from the fact that it never has its own identity. Every game stole from other games (Tomb Raider. Prince of Persia, Assassin’s Creed, Splinter Cell, etc) and movies (Indiana Jones, The Mummy, etc) and thus never managed to pull off any of their aspects better than the original source material. It’s so much fun to climb buildings and other things in AC because you get to choose where to go. Here, there’s one set path and if you don’t take it, you fail. I don’t understand how people say they stick around for the characters. What characters?? No one in this series ever grows, ever changes. Nate makes the exact same mistakes every single time. I should have started a tally of how many times the bad guy got the drop on him and ordered him to ‘drop your weapon’. Elena is straight up unlikeable without any substance to her character. She could have had in the first game, but then they started tweaking her job with each subsequent game and the outlandish ways she kept popping up in the adventure. And don’t get me started on her and Nate’s ‘romance’, oh yes there was so much love between two people who didn’t even know each other. Sully is barely in the games and his character completely changed from the first game. I can’t understand why people say he’s the best character in the series: an old, cigar-toting, money-spending, womanizer who wants to get rich? I don’t understand Nate at all. It never says anything about him possibly being an archaeologist and it certainly never mentions how he gets the money to fund his little expeditions (especially since he never succeeds to get any treasure). But hey he’s the best at finding these places and somehow is the best climber, jumper ever known to man. There’s only so long I can suspend my disbelief. Each story is the same. Nate learns of possible lost city with a fortune of treasure. Nate must go to several cities and solve many puzzles while bad guys easily follow behind him/beat him there. Suddenly fortune is bad, will end the world, oh no Nate must now be a hero and save the world. City is destroyed, no treasure, but oh we all had fun didn’t we? The combat is some of the worst. Each game puts in a stealth option but it was never made to work. Not to mention the enemy will start shooting at you if they see your AI buddies that you have no control over. The first game never tries for stealth, two begins the ‘stealth’, and three gives you idiotic AI to try and make stealth, otherwise you’d never be able to take people down quietly. And people worship the ground at Naughty Dog’s feet? Have they never played an actual GOOD game?? I can in no way recommend these games. A great story and fun gameplay is what keeps people coming back, what gives it replayability. This series has none of that. 2: Among Thieves > Drake’s Fortune > 3: Drake’s Deception > 4: A Thief’s End

Upon release Uncharted 4 was immediately heralded as the greatest game to ever exist and awards, including game of the year, were dropped upon it. Those critics and people have clearly all been drinking the Kool-Aid because this is one of the worst games I’ve ever played. It’s funny because it’s not even that this game is a broken mess, it’s not, though it certainly has its buggy moments. No, instead this game is so fundamentally flawed on every level. Uncharted 4 was said to have a new writer after the last left and that they scrapped her draft, but it’s so clear that they used most of it and probably just tweaked or added a few things. Because this story is so in line with the last three, so copy/paste, just following the same beats they always have. The story doesn’t even get truly rolling until Chapter 17 (of 22!), as usual the whole beginning of the game has no bearing on the rest. The amount of times the characters are mocking the annoying parts that are put in every game: ‘Oh look an entryway is caved in. Again.’ ‘Do you notice we crawl through a lot of holes?’ The Uncharted series is probably hurt the most from the fact that it never has its own identity. Every game stole from other games (Tomb Raider. Prince of Persia, Assassin’s Creed, Splinter Cell, etc) and movies (Indiana Jones, The Mummy, etc) and thus never managed to pull off any of their aspects better than the original source material. It’s so much fun to climb buildings and other things in AC because you get to choose where to go. Here, there’s one set path and if you don’t take it, you fail, the game can’t continue. I felt that the Pirates of the Caribbean movies were more faithful to pirate history than this game. Nothing says ‘I didn’t do my research’ like throwing in every pirate name they could find no matter that none of them operated during the same time period. Gameplay comprises of the old wall-climbing, which is no different from the very first game. This time around, they did steal the ice-pick idea from Tomb Raider, which served no real purpose as it doesn’t show up til 2/3 through the game. The puzzles were so cheaply done, I felt no satisfaction from completing them, and then there were short combat ‘encounters’ which last usually around 5mins. And parts that aren’t combat or wall-climbing? Well those are cutscenes! And the cutscenes, especially at the beginning, were ridiculous! Who allowed them to be so lengthy? I was actually able to put my controller down on the ground for awhile. They didn’t even provide much to the story; I certainly didn’t need 20mins of watching Nate and Elena in boring ‘domestic bliss’. (About 8 hours of gameplay and 5 hours of cutscenes) They actually put in a whole section of you being forced to play Crash Bandicoot while the characters go ‘wow what a fun game!’ Pat yourself on the back much Naughty Dog? All it does is showcase how they haven’t grown as a gaming company much since their Crash days. Uncharted even has the run at the camera sequences that are so hated! Let’s talk about that garbage epilogue. Just throwing in your face how Nate could have gone legit for his whole life and still gone treasure hunting AND become rich but no they didn’t feel that would make a good story. Also, good god Nate and Elena describe their travels yet AGAIN!! I was there I don’t need to be reminded every second of their past failed adventures. Sure they discovered something but no one ever found out and they destroyed it so who cares? And people worship the ground at Naughty Dog’s feet? Have they never played an actual GOOD game?? I can in no way recommend these games. A great story and fun gameplay is what keeps people coming back, what gives it replayability. This series has none of that. 2: Among Thieves > Drake’s Fortune > 3: Drake’s Deception > 4: A Thief’s End

Guardians of the Galaxy is a game that builds on the stories presented in 2007’s comics series ‘Annihilation’ and ‘Annihilation: Conquest’ and 2008’s ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ team. This game is based on the characters and events from the comics, not the movie universe and that only serves to aid this game in every way. This is definitely for people who like story-games, if you’re looking for something that you can turn off your brain and just shoot, this is not for you. For this game is like a BioWare and Telltale game put together. The story is immersive and completely engaging. I felt every moment with the characters and loved each time I got to interact with them or when we got to hear their backstory. I truly felt that the growth the Guardians went through was earned. There were moments where you got to make a choice, in dialogue, in character events, and like Telltale games the characters would remember it and have an effect down the line. And like a BioWare game, the way you interacted with your team could help rally them together or set them against each other. Everyone was well voice-acted and there were so many moments where I was just laughing because the comedy was gold. To say too much about the story though would spoil it, but it’s like a well-written book. The gameplay is super fun. You play specifically as Star-Lord but you have complete control over the rest of the team’s actions in a fight, as you unlock everyone’s abilities as you progress. I loved being able to pair the different abilities together and learning what would work best in a particular fight. The special abilities pair together for combos that are what you’re working for. Each ability on its own isn’t too powerful, but together you can destroy enemies. There’s a minimal skill tree that actually makes sense as it’s paired with the story, you earn things as the characters grow. Just as the creators promised, there are no microtransactions or DLC. They focused completely on story and characters. The collectibles (costumes, things for your companions) were all located in game, in easy to find places if you just looked. And the collectibles for your team would actually enable a conversation with them that gave more history to the characters. My only problem with the game was once I got to Chapter 8 and fighting on the ship begins in earnest, bugs begin to appear. Throughout the next few chapters I had odd happenings of we’d defeat all the enemies but the fight wouldn’t end, I’d be trapped and couldn’t continue to the next scene. The game thought that the last enemy killed was still alive, in fact the first time it happened the enemy was invisible but I found his health bar floating. We managed to trigger a finisher but nothing happened, it still acted as though he was alive. I couldn’t even jump off the ledge to fix it; I had to reload the last checkpoint. This happened a few other times. There was also an instance where I went down the path but no companions followed and I couldn’t get back to them. Once again I had to reload the last checkpoint. One of Drax’s collectibles was bugged where after speaking to him, I was frozen in spot and couldn’t do anything but reload. And nearer to the end a few times, Groot should have been speaking but no sound occurred. It’s very odd especially since when I popped the game in, it had an update. I’m not sure what the update involved but clearly it didn’t do anything to solve what should be easy to fix bugs. But while frustrating, it didn’t ruin the game experience for me. I would absolutely recommend this game for comic fans and any fan of great story games. I’m so glad I got it. I even found that this game has a prequel book that involves the time of the war that is constantly referenced to in this game, along with just before the game!

Have you ever wished while playing Borderlands that there was more story and explanation for what was going on on Pandora, Elpis, and Helios? Then Tales from the Borderlands is the game for you! A pure stroke of Telltale genius. They bring in both new and old characters in these five episodes that will leave you wishing that they had gotten to make a sequel. If you still don't know what a Telltale game, it's not a true game in that you're not off adventuring/shooting/leveling up, etc. It's more of an interactive story. You get to walk around and explore areas at specific moments otherwise you're basically watching a movie and hitting buttons at the right times so you don't die and the story can progress. You also get to choose the dialogue your characters will say to others and thus decide what kind of friendships or animosity you'll create between them. Your choices really do matter. This time you switch between two main characters that also sees them interacting together too. I love all the characters in this game. They are so well crafted and I am immediately drawn back into the world of Borderlands but at a far deeper level. I actually care what happens to these characters, whereas in Gearbox’s Borderlands series there wasn’t too much of bonding you with the characters and the story. The only real downside is that I feel there should have been another episode between Episodes 4 & 5, before the crap really hits the fan in the last episode. It would have helped flesh out the big choices you made in the previous episodes but especially the choice at the end of Episode 4. It would have brought even more meaning to what happens to your characters. I absolutely recommend this game if you've played at least Borderlands 2. It's the only one that's imperative to know before playing Tales as it basically takes up shortly thereafter. Playing Borderlands 1 and Borderlands the Pre-Sequel will give you a bit more info into a couple of characters that pop up but they’re not really necessary. If you can find a fair priced physical copy or the digital version that is available again, then you should do it. You won't regret it.

Call of Duty: Black Ops III is a game that absolutely never needed to exist. The first two games are great stories that didn’t need a continuation, not that BO3 was a continuation of any sort. In fact, this is a game that should have killed the Call of Duty franchise, but hey when people are willing to buy trash Treyarch and Activison are willing to oblige. For heaven sake they had some other no-name companies come up with an online-only multiplayer so this game could make some extra money on Xbox 360 and PS3. I looked long and hard into this wondering whether it was worth buying, whether the campaign was worth it. I found many articles saying what an amazing story this game had. As I’ve now played it, I have to wonder what drugs these people were on. What story? It’s like a computer wrote this story. There are so many story threads here but none of them connect together. It would make you brain dead to try and figure out a cohesive story. What the hell is this story about? Who are we fighting for? Who are we fighting against? Why should I care this guy betrayed us? I never got to know him. The story of the other group would have been more interesting, instead 3/4 of the way through we’re given exposition dumps and weird half-baked WWII and Zombies levels?? This game is so broken and buggy, Treyarch just threw up the game and turned its back on it. This game hard crashed several times and a few other times froze in the midst of the game where I thought it would crash before continuing. There are no checkpoints, you can’t quit and come back in. When you crash you get to play the entire mission over again, even if you were at the very last stage. My first hard crash made sure the game would never load the correct mission on its own again. If I had to hear about Singapore or the Black Ops site one more time or that damn loading screen video I was going to lose it. There were also mission breaking bugs where you go through thinking everything is okay until you’re near the end and the mission can’t continue, again there’s no checkpoints so you have to start all over and get to witness the moments that were missing the first time, such as a character not talking the entire time and thus isn’t really in the mission despite running around with you. At one point, the game crashed so hard the system thought the disc was a PS4 Format Disc. That was an interesting little surprise I’ve never witnessed in any game ever. This is not a game to waste your time with. I only finished because I was playing split-screen LAN and we could laugh about how terrible everything was. But playing in split-screen is one heck of an experience. First you can only play horizontally as though they were convinced you’d play with four people. But the biggest issue is that there are black bars on the sides of the screen. The game doesn’t even take up the whole screen! We had to sit close to the screen to see, everything is so small and cramped. What a disaster ****. The only thing I can say is that I got this super cheap and it was short, so was our agony.

Now this was truly an expansion to the game unlike Hearts of Stone. An entirely new land was created with Toussaint, a duchy under Nilfgaard, and boy was it beautiful. The sun shone, it never was rainy and gloomy, and I didn’t have to hear one hacking cough in a crowd or pamp-pamp-pa-ram. The main quest line was great; it really held mystery and intrigue that you slowly unraveled as you went along. It never showed its hand too early. The characters were fleshed out and ones that were in the books were given greater backstory. I had a ton of fun with a part of the payment Geralt is given for his contract. It was a real nice touch and something that Geralt truly deserved after a lifetime of being on the road monster hunting. I don’t want to say too much as that would spoil the story but this was a really great expansion and the ending was a beautiful wrap-up to Geralt’s story. This was a far superior product than the base game. It was obvious that CDPR learned from it; the animations, the cinematics, the quest structures, the characters, all were better here and had me actually caring what the end result would be. I could feel the love and care that went into Blood and Wine.

Hearts of Stone pulled the fastest bait and switch I’ve ever seen. After taking a contract and fulfilling it, Geralt is taken prisoner by men from Ofier and put on a boat. When you crash you might think you’ve made it to this new country, well my friend, I can tell you, nope you’re just off the shore of Novigrad. Back to gloom and annoying crowds, because this whole DLC takes place in Novigrad, Oxenfurt and its surrounding area. The thing that really got me was how this ‘adventure’ really felt like it was cut from the original game only to be sold separately. After all, how many times can characters mention Radovid and all the kingly things he’s doing, hours and hours after he’s been dead? The best parts of this DLC were the wedding, which was just hilarious, and the Von Everec estate which was a superb mystery and investigation (something the base game was sorely missing). I could have happily ended it on that estate mission because boy was the ending quest just a letdown. The main villain was clearly never fleshed out, what he was was never outright answered and the good ending clearly slapped on, as though the creators thought you would never have done that optional mission and would obviously just get the bad ending. If you wish to play it, do this at the recommended level 35 while in the base game. You’ll definitely want to end on the high note that is Blood and Wine.

The Witcher 3 was barely out before being hyped as the absolute pinnacle of RPG-gaming, a must play for everyone & you needn’t bother playing Witcher 1 or 2 before playing 3. Naturally it gets picked as 2015’s GOTY. Who knew it was possible to win more than 800 awards for a video game? Those who say these things clearly haven’t played many video games, not to mention RPGs, let alone Witcher 1&2, which are both far better than Witcher 3 Its biggest sin is being an open-world game. They did this to compete with games like Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014’s GOTY) & Elder Scrolls: Skyrim (2011’s GOTY). Too much time was spent on building this massive world that not much thought was given on how they would fill it. It was empty & incredibly tedious to trek across the map between missions. You’ve done wrong when the player chooses to fast travel everywhere rather than go on foot. You’re also forced to find a sign post in order to fast travel, you can’t just do it from the map. An open world usually means cutting meaningful quests & characters, which Witcher 3 did in spades; the biggest being no Scoia’tael/Iorveth. In addition, the AI chatter was enough to make me go mad; the same lines repeated over & over w/ the same voices. I can say them in my sleep. The cutscenes were supposed to be Dandelion but for some reason aren’t done by his voice actor, the guy doesn’t even sound close. The combat is atrocious, when you feel that the better option is to hack, slash & roll like a ballerina rather than use tactics because the enemies aren’t known for their brains. The use of potions/oils was practically nonexistent until halfway through because you don’t get the crafting diagrams & by then you’ve learned to cope w/o so you don’t even remember that you can now use them. Meditation is not to make potions but to reload your stock using alcohol in your inventory. Tutorials would have been immensely helpful rather than a block of text you’ll never remember. Negotiation is senseless, “A bit high… We’re almost there.” The upgrade system is a complete joke. What’s the point in investing in skills when you can only use a few? Getting to level 30 you can use 12 skills and yet I had many more! You literally need to use a slot in order to have food/drink heal you over time! What? That was just a given in the other games. The story absolutely requires you to have not only played the first 2 games but that you’ve read the books as well. I can’t imagine what anyone could have gotten out of this game otherwise. But even though I had the knowledge of the whole story, I felt this game’s story was super weak. They were trying to tell too much & pull in the worst parts of Sapkowski’s books. The first 2 games felt like CDPR was adding to the story of The Witcher and telling their own tale, they weren’t just making the books a game, rather they continued Geralt’s tale a few years after the books. But with this game, it felt the complete opposite. They were now pulling everything they could from the last 2 books (which were awful) & pulling phrases & jokes from every form of entertainment in the real world. It seriously hurt the story. The idea of Ciri traveling between worlds, including our own is just stupid, they could have rewritten something so much better. Instead what was once a dark fantasy is now science fiction. It was very obvious that they had a completely different writer this time around. Despite calling itself an RPG, there were no significant choices in this game. Sure there were 3 different endings for Ciri’s fate but as to how those endings were decided, it was a couple small things in conversations rather than actual decisions. It really makes you feel good when you read the wiki and see ‘You can choose whatever you want here, it makes no difference to the story.’ When a choice cutscene would randomly pop up, it felt more like a whoops we forgot to give this meaning so here’s a choice that **** either way. The game is at 4.02 & still buggy. The choice scenes are at a far lower volume than the rest of the game, it’s a miracle if you can hear them w/o subsequently blowing your eardrums out when it switches back to the actual game. There is so much clipping, things disappearing from NPC’s hands or hovering in front of them, animals including Roach would appear in the middle of a conversation with an NPC, etc. What exactly did they fix? Now how can we talk about Witcher 3 w/o mentioning the card game Gwent? What a truly horrendous, time-wasting addition. It was clearly there to pad out the game time. You’re forced into your first game to ‘learn’ the directions & I came away no wiser as how to play. All Gwent did was make me miss dice poker. In the main game alone, I completed 141 quests in 104.8 hours. I would only recommend for the serious Witcher fan b/c all I can say is thank the Eternal Fire I’m done, I’m headed back to Witcher 1&2

I got this after reading many things saying which of Syndicate’s DLCs were worth buying and playing. This one was ranked highly after the Dreadful Crimes. So when there was a sale on it, I picked it up. Naturally I played it right after AC Syndicate’s campaign. Wow what can be said for this DLC? As others have said the first 10 minutes (the prologue) are very strong. You meet Jacob, 20 years after Syndicate has ended, he apparently started up his own Brotherhood in London but now these killings have started. After the cut scenes you start as Jack the Ripper himself and it’s a powerful opening. But it quickly jumps off a cliff from here. You switch over to Evie who comes back to London to search for Jacob. And boy has India not been kind; her face model is now ugly as sin and doesn’t look anything like her previous one. You can no longer do assassinations or any sort of killings whatsoever. The scaring power is ridiculous; it just causes people to run around the map like crazy people. The story is paper-thin and what could have been a promising few hours, fell flat with a hurried ending that made no sense whatsoever and wow there’s Jacob, we’ll cover this all up so this never happened, the end. Don’t waste your money, I don’t know what those reviews were talking about, this DLC is not worth your time. Syndicate itself wasn’t good, but this is even worse.

Vampire Masquerade: Bloodlines is a game that was released in 2004 and was low-rated then and vastly over-rated today. The game can’t even be run without the Unofficial Patch (which contrary to many reviews is very simple to install) and even with that the game is still janky as all heck. Many times you’ll get stuck in the map and Noclip will become your best friend. In my playthrough, I had to use it at least 12 times. Even though it’s said to be a great masterpiece, it’s nowhere close to even being remembered down the road. The story and atmosphere start out strong in the Santa Monica map but once heading out from there the game turns into fetch quest after fetch quest until you’re just running through enemies with no story or gameplay in sight. Gameplay is just a non-existent mess. Most quests expect you to stealth through them without hurting anybody but stealth fluctuates between not working at all or no one can find you even if you’re on top of them. Then the others you have to fight your way through but the combat in this game is some of the worst I’ve ever seen. You can’t aim a gun to save your life no matter how many points you invest. God mode will be your second best friend by the time you’re halfway through Hollywood. If you get to the sewer levels in Hollywood, you’ll understand completely, and my thoughts go with you. Whatever you do, do not buy this game. If you’re looking for a strong RPG story game, this is not the place to find it and if you’re looking for well-crafted combat, you’ll be just as disappointed. This game is a mess that no one actually loves and certainly would never play a second time. Save your money and buy a real game. Heck I would even recommend Vampyr over this and I still only found that to be so-so, but at least it was mostly enjoyable.

I stumbled upon this game when seeing an advertisement for its ‘loose sequel’ Root Film. Advertised as a game that would be enjoyed by those who like Ace Attorney and Danganronpa, as it had a similar investigation theme and it was another visual novel type game. The game’s story is really interesting and the mystery of finding your penpal and what happened to them immediately pulled me in. The game said that there was different endings. I thought this was based off of things you said, or clicked on, and the answers and questions you gave in your letters. Basically a conglomeration of all these things. However, after receiving my ending which was truly awful and not a single thing was solved, all the loose threads were still loose, I looked into these endings. First these endings are determined solely on the responses and questions chosen in the letters at the beginning of the chapters. Okay fine, so it’s doing this based on different factors in these responses and you can mix and match as you see fit to get different answers, right? Wrong! Each ending requires you select a specific line, meaning one ending requires you selecting the first response and question for each letter, another ending is the second response and answer and so on. But while Crossing Paths apparently follows this line, it is also the game’s go-to and weakest ending if you selected different answers throughout the game as I did. This would be considered the negative ending because as I said after all your searching and investigation nothing gets solved and you receive no answers from anyone. Don’t be deterred if you receive this ending, the others are much more satisfying. So not only did I figure this out after my first playthrough but it turned out that you only unlock the true ending ‘Bonds of Marriage’ after receiving your first ending. The positive I have to say in regards to these endings is that you don’t have to replay the entire game to see how each ending turns out! The creators thought ahead and put in a ‘skip’ function that allows you to only have to choose your letter responses and then you go into your phone and hit skip to get to the next chapter and letter. You can do this through the first 8 chapters until you get to chapters 9&10 where the story is completely different for each ending. (You no longer have to play through chapter 8 each time as you apparently did in the original Root Letter.) If you’re only interested in playing it the one time and then seeing the true ending I would recommend ‘The Princess of Himegamori Forest’ ending. You can look up a guide to see how to get each ending, they just tell you which responses to choose and don’t actually tell you what the ending is, so you can avoid spoilers! Though if you play all endings, you unlock further Last Answer epilogues for them all except the bad ‘Crossing Paths’ ending (a new addition). I find it interesting that with these five endings, each contains pieces of the whole that when viewed separately leave unanswered questions but when you play all of the endings, you get a clear picture of what was going on in Matsue 15 years ago. In the end, I would definitely recommend this game, it’s a well-done visual novel that is set in a real place in Japan (I played one ending with the dramatic setting on aka the real actors and places, which is a new feature for Last Answer) and the game is spot on. I have no doubt that you could actually travel to Matsue and wander through all the places in this game. After playing all five endings, one after another, I would fully recommend playing them all to get the full story. An unexpected gem ****!

Control is supposedly made by Remedy, the makers of Alan Wake, hence why I picked this title up. It’s supposed to be a story-strong game that can stand on its own but also pulls all Remedy titles into one universe. However, this is not the case. Control plays more like a tech demo, of which it does very well, in its physics and lighting department. Though this does have a drawback on the PS4, with terrible framerates and freezing as the game tries to keep up, even after the patches! And then there is hardly a story to be found in comparison to Remedy’s other titles. I really wanted to like this game, after all it was trying to pull all the Remedy games into one universe, but I think in doing that it lost track of itself. At the end of the day, what makes Control Control? What will I remember in the long run, what will make me come back to this game years down the road? Answer nothing except perhaps watching the videos of the AWE DLC. This is a game that never should have been a full game. Its story is too thin, it would have been better off as an expansion or something that was no more than perhaps 6 hours. At least then it would have been concise and it wouldn’t be filled with ridiculous fetch quests and empty open world. I mean come on you become Director, head of the entire Bureau, and your underlings have you collect mold samples. Seriously? Also, should have been an expansion because this game simply can’t stand on its own. It pulls too much of Alan Wake and even Max Payne into its story, which is the point of the game, but if you’ve never played those games you’d be at a complete loss as to what it’s talking about. You have to play past the first two chapters to finally start getting into some meat of the story and have yourself wanting to know more. But you’re in for a shock of disappointment. Every moment as you progress through the story you’re hoping for that moment where story and explanation starts happening but with every new cutscene you’ll feel your dread rising as you realize the characters know what’s going on but not you. The main character, Jesse had some terrible event happen to her as a child in her hometown of Ordinary. You want to know what happened there and why? So do I, because you’ll never receive a satisfactory answer. By the end of the game, I understood where the Hiss came from and how this event came to be but it just wasn’t that great. It should have been explained over time, teasing little bits and pieces making you want to get to the bottom of the mystery. And how is the biggest explanation in the game a 5 minute monologue where you actually have to stop and stand next to the character because it’s not a cutscene?! And players could totally blow past it without even knowing because it’s during a really monotonous portion of the last level where you’re desperate to get it over with! Gameplay-wise: It has difficulty spikes, ranging from a simple cake-walk to heading into another room and finding the combat impossible, dying four times in a row against the same boss, with a horrendous checkpoint system that has you traversing across a good portion of the map to get back to the battle. It’s so bad to the point that an assist mode was patched into the game later on with reduced damage and invincibility, just to make you want to throw the controller through the tv a little less. This can plainly be seen in the achievement percentages when only 16% of people finished this game! The enemies themselves are just copy/paste, once they’re all introduced they either shoot at you or throw objects at you, with bosses sprinkled in between, it’s not different enough to make memorable combat using tactics. There’s a skill tree and weapon mods, which shouldn’t even exist. The skills don’t add to helping you get through the game and by the end of the game, you’ll be drowning in weapon mods and not giving most of them a second glance before turning them into upgrade points. As someone who managed to get a platinum trophy (and not going way out of the way to do so), I found 323 collectibles throughout the game and that wasn’t even all of them!! I spent hours reading things that should have been put in the game to explain what the heck was happening. Collectibles are supposed to be something that adds to the game but ultimately, doesn’t matter if you miss them, however in Control, you range from if you don’t pick these up you’ll be even more lost or why the heck do these exist because who cares what office drama is happening? Don’t bother picking this title up, it’s not a game and it’s just plain not good. This game clearly exists only to push the Alan Wake story forward, mostly on the monetary level; they wanted to make some quick money to begin the AW sequel. Your best option? Watch someone’s videos on YouTube of the AWE DLC Alan Wake moments, as will probably play a factor into the upcoming Alan Wake 2.