Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze is clearly a high-effort production: the visuals are gorgeous, the soundtrack is outstanding, and the levels are packed with creative setpieces. I understand why so many reviews call it a top-tier platformer. My issue is that the game’s fun relies on a very specific kind of challenge loop — one that doesn’t work for me. Tropical Freeze is built around momentum-heavy movement, dense visual presentation, and “gotcha”-style hazards that often punish you before you can reasonably read or predict them. As a result, many failures don’t feel like a clean “my mistake” moment; they feel like lost trust in the input-to-outcome chain (“I pressed it — what happened?”). That is the point where difficulty turns into frustration rather than mastery. Yes, you can learn the levels through repetition, and yes, finally clearing a section can feel satisfying. But the satisfaction often comes from familiarity and endurance more than from skill that generalizes across new situations. Checkpoints and assist options (like Funky Mode) reduce the sting, but they mainly soften consequences rather than improving clarity, readability, or causal feedback. For players who enjoy punishing, memorization-driven platforming wrapped in amazing presentation, Tropical Freeze can absolutely be a 90/100 experience. For players who value reliability, readability, and skill-driven learning over repetition, it can feel exhausting and even anger-inducing. For me, it’s well-made but not broadly enjoyable.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate fails as a coherent fighting game system. While its surface is polished and content-rich, the underlying mechanics are erratic and inconsistent. Inputs register unpredictably, hitboxes are poorly defined, and movement physics feel imprecise and floaty. The result is a game where causality between player action and on-screen outcome is constantly obscured. The AI routinely reads player inputs, eliminating the possibility of fair pattern learning. Competitive play exists only after stripping the game of most of its own systems — items, random stage hazards, and balance-breaking characters. That alone indicates fundamental design incoherence. The Adventure Mode amplifies the issue: rather than providing structured progression, it relies on artificial grinding, random buffs, and cryptic mechanics to simulate depth. It extends playtime but undermines learning. Smash Ultimate rewards reaction and chaos over intentional mastery. Despite its audiovisual polish and iconic roster, its gameplay lacks the reproducibility and mechanical clarity that define serious fighting games.
Donkey Kong Bananza is not really a game but a behavioral design experiment wrapped in childish aesthetics. Beneath its bright colors and hyperactive cheerfulness lies a crude mechanism of sensory conditioning — a product perfectly tailored to a cognitive economy built on overstimulation. Everything in Bananza screams for attention: constant motion, saturated sound, endless reward loops. It trains reflexes, not thought; response, not reflection. Its purpose is not to be played, but to keep players reacting — a digital Skinner box disguised as family entertainment. That such a primitive work is celebrated by journalists and industry cheerleaders only confirms how deep the complicity runs. The loudest praise comes from people, mistaking noise for excitement and excess for depth. In truth, Bananza is a mirror of our distracted culture — vivid, hollow, and utterly infantilized.
Ninja Gaiden 2 Black (PS5 Remaster) is a frustrating and poorly designed experience. The camera constantly locks into awkward angles, loses sight of enemies, and exposes you to off-screen attacks. Most of the time, you’re fighting the camera more than the actual opponents. The controls feel clunky and inconsistent. Dodges don’t always register, and overall responsiveness is poor. The hit feedback is vague — it’s rarely clear when an enemy is defeated, and some keep attacking Monty Python–style even after multiple amputations. The result is chaotic and unsatisfying. On a PS5 Pro, performance is fine, and the visuals are acceptable, but far from impressive. Some models and environments lack polish, giving the game an uneven, dated look. In the end, this feels like money wasted — an old, frustrating design packaged as something modern. Beneath its surface lies a relic that mistakes technical failure for difficulty. Deleted for good.
I played Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater for about 70 minutes — and had to put it down in frustration. The reasons: On Hard, Sanke can absorb absurd amounts of damage. I stood in front of several AK-47 soldiers taking sustained fire, yet only lost a fraction of health. Additionally, the accuracy is Star Wars-Level bad. This breaks immersion and turns stealth into a bizarre “Terminator” mode. The AI is poor. Enemies react late, fail to search systematically, and at times I had to force them to even shoot at me. It feels outdated and laughable. The controls are clunky, and despite modern visuals the classic level design and new control schemes simply don’t mesh. Beyond gameplay, one thing is striking: The user score originally hovered around 6.7, but now sits at 7.5+. Many of the glowing 10/10 reviews come from one-off accounts, posting only for this title, often with highly generic phrases like “masterpiece,” “greatest of all time,” or “truest remake.” At the very least, this is unusual and gives the game a rosier public score than it seems to deserve. For me, Delta is a visually upgraded but mechanically disappointing release that fails to capture the spirit of the original or meet modern gameplay standards.
Ready or Not is one of the most ambitious tactical shooters in years – and at times, it genuinely delivers. When the map design aligns with the AI's limitations, the result is an intense, atmospheric, and methodical experience that rewards smart play. However, several missions (notably Sins of the Father and Greased Palms) reveal serious flaws in design balance: AI behavior becomes omniscient, sightlines are inconsistent, and the solo squad often fails to respond to threats. Players are punished from off-screen angles, and RNG/trial-and-error replaces tactical control. It’s not always “skill issue” – sometimes it’s just poor structure.Despite this, Ready or Not has strong fundamentals and could easily have been a 9/10 with more polish and smarter mission curation. As it stands, it’s a 7.5 – impressive, often immersive, but frequently frustrating. Solo players on console, be warned: certain maps can break the experience.
This is one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had with a console game. Within my first session, the game hard-crashed my PS5. The image became blurry and green-tinted, the signal to the TV dropped, and the system had to repair core files on the next boot. That’s not just a crash – that’s a serious system-level failure. There is no excuse for shipping a game in this condition. It's not "deep," it's not "artsy" – it's just broken. And the fact that the critical press still praises it while ignoring the state of this version is nothing short of negligent. I deleted it immediately and will never touch it again. €25 gone for something that never should’ve passed QA or platform certification. Absolutely disgraceful.
Deathloop is not the experimental systems-driven shooter it claims to be. Instead, it’s a rigidly linear mission-based game dressed up in a time loop aesthetic. Beneath the surface of slick menus, cleverly phrased logs, and stylized UI lies a mechanically shallow, structurally restrictive, and downright incompetent experience—especially as a **** first glance, the game gives the illusion of openness and systemic freedom. But this is just that: an illusion. In reality, the game is hyperlinear, with only two real points of exploration flexibility. Most forms of interactivity within the world are tightly coupled to the main quest line. Side content is nearly nonexistent, and the world quickly reveals itself as decorative rather than functionally interactive. It’s not a playground for emergent gameplay—it’s a gated corridor disguised as a sandbox.Ultimately, I deleted Deathloop from my console—not just uninstalled it, but fully removed it from my library. That, for me, is the ultimate gesture of rejection. I wasn’t even angry—just stunned by how empty, misleading, and hollow the entire experience turned out to be.
Great, entertaining title that does justice to the Robocop franchise in every respect in terms of staging and narrative design. Initial technical shortcomings (unfortunately omnipresent these days) have now been ironed out - i.e.: I didn't notice anything significant during my playthrough. The gun combat is extremely satisfying and excellently solved - you slowly stomp through the stages and distribute headshots. The “Immersive Simulation” light interludes provide variety and give the battles a cognitive background. An absolute recommendation! By the way: The game is in no way crammed with any silly social messaging!
So I don't know what to say: Many user reviews here are undifferentiated. Nonetheless: I find REmake 4 redundant and am of the opinion that it in no way makes the original obsolete. Rather, it's a poorly cobbled-together hodgepodge of "modern" gameplay mechanics that other games implement far better and more consistently - the makers lack any understanding of why the OG RE4 is considered a classic. For example, the parrying mechanic is completely superfluous and unnecessary. You can tell that the makers realised that parrying is too effective and for the sake of balance they implemented a durability indicator for the knife, which was already incredibly idiotic in the RE2 remake. The "realistic", momentum-based movement and the equally "realistic" gunplay mechanics also stand in contrast to the arcade-orientated, fast-paced/responsive gameplay of the original. These are simply elements that were probably inspired by "The Last of Us" - just like the completely superfluous stealth mechanics, which seem out of place and ineffective here. I don't find the game particularly difficult. The only thing that took me 3 tries was the cabin siege scenario in chapter 5. This scene inspired me to give the game the title "Chicken Simulator" - after all, the most effective way is to run around the room like a chicken whose head has been chopped off and shoot your opponent in the legs/head to land roundhouse kicks. This strategy almost trivialises the combat - just like circle strafing and aiming for the head. Finally, Capcom should be stopped from producing these lousy remakes. When I think that there's an RE1 remake in the making that declassifies the classic into a lame third-person shooter with parrying and stealth mechanics and idiot puzzles, I feel sick.
Demon's Souls is not so much a video game as a symptom of social degeneration, which the creators around FromSoft guru Miyazaki shamelessly capitalise on. The target audience for such a title is single men in their 20s to 40s without social, family or professional responsibilities. The kind of people who are springing up in the wealthy societies of our time and who invest all their time resources in gaming. Games such as Demon's Souls provide such people with a tool, a strategy of distinction, to boast about their apparent elitism on the internet - in my view a very questionable mechanism for regulating their self-image. The success can be explained on the one hand by the journalistic glorification of the title (often not present in the original game) and on the other hand by the fact that a product profile that primarily appeals to the Japanese "bachelor culture" also works on the international market. In this dynamism, both the industry and the print media vie for the favour of a lost generation whose opium is overcoming a pointless, artificial challenge.
I'm not exaggerating when I call "Returnal" the biggest piece of crap I've ever played and a complete waste of money. The game is so incredibly boring that I had to uninstall it and was upset about the 29 EUR I paid for this rubbish. I was expecting a difficult game that would challenge me and have a well thought out combat system, what I got was just the exploration of the same empty and depressing worlds that look like a better textured PS3 game. The game gives you no indication of what to do, the enemies within the stage are undemanding, the boss is brutally difficult. I have no problem with learning the pattern and starting over after a lost battle, but that means another hour of "exploring", which is nothing but boredom and takes away any momentum from the game. Housemarque should be stripped of their licence to ever develop a video game again.
To be honest, the fact that the press unanimously ranks ‘Elden Ring’ as one of the best games of all time makes me question the extent to which traditional gaming journalism is still legitimate in the 21st century, the age of technology-driven democratisation of game reviews via YouTube, reddit, etc. I am very sure that the title will not stand up to a retrospective re-evaluation. In terms of art direction and gameplay, I see a generic dark fantasy third-person action RPG here that doesn't set its own accents. The graphics are largely unspectacular; although there are some appealing architectural set pieces, the title is still on a par with a PS3 HD adaptation. Ugly subtleties, such as the mounts jerking (or ‘clipping’) over the uneven landscape, do the overall impression no favours either. The descriptions in most reviews resemble a veritable promise of experience, a form of immersive overpowering that I - especially as someone who has no experience with the developer studio's previous work - cannot comprehend in this way. Anyone who doesn't enjoy running in circles to defeat woodenly animated enemies should give the title a miss. After 10 hours, I had run out of steam.
Unfortunately, the game has aged badly, if it ever was good at all. The controls are clunky and contra-intuitive, the movement of the crosshair - like the movement of the player character - feels very slow. I find the fact that they decided to put running and the dodge move on the same button particularly annoying. Wild Guns, for example, plays much better in this respect because the game speed is much higher, which makes running unnecessary. Since one button is only for jumping/dodging, the controls are much more intuitive. I have no problem with extremely challenging games if the gameplay carries the difficulty. Unfortunately, this is not the case with NAM, but it is with Wild Guns. I absolutely advise against it.
I rate the game miserable because I find it an insult to not give the player the option to disable these idiotic inverted controls. This is an arcade game, not a simulation. As an STG player, it really gives me a headache after 2 minutes.
Some people really claim that Thunder Force 4 (bears the idiotic name "Lightening Force" in the US) is one of the best shootemUps of the 16-bit era, which is either the incompetence of these people or the willingness to be blinded by the aesthetic qualities (graphics, sound) ****. In this way, TF4 exhausts the technical possibilities of the Mega Drive and almost approaches the NeoGeo. In truth, the title can be described as an object lesson in bad game and level design, where the creators have failed in guiding the player's interpretation of what is happening on the screen. The vertical principle (several levels in TF4 consist of superimposed screens) makes it massively difficult to identify orientation points within the level structure in order to develop a successful choreography through the infamous try and error approach - the game is pure chaos. Stages 1-5 are doable without any problems, from stage 6 onwards an absurd guessing game begins, what is destructible and what is not and where the area boundaries of a level begin and end. Considering the necessity of a ShootemUp to communicate this through a clear, sensory-motor oriented structure, this is inexcusable. Another weighty point of criticism: Even with the weapons, it often seems to me as if they don't do any damage to the enemies, especially with the final bosses. From a purely compositional point of view, the music is cool, but the sound design is weak. Play all the Compile or Toaplan titles - here, destroying the enemy results in a satisfying bang! I therefore recommend Thunder Force 3 or Thunder Force AC, which was also ported from M2.
I can't understand the rating at the time - in the end, it's just a rip-off of Virtual Fighter that's been polished up to a technical showcase without any unique features worth mentioning, as long as you exclude the creepy sexism and the questionable, stereotype-oriented portrayal of Zack. It's not for nothing that the game has never played a significant role in e-sports, but rather seems to represent a sort of digital rubber doll for middle-aged virgins. The former will be mainly related to the poorly implemented gameplay, which robs the matches any dynamics due to the counter mechanism. The game rewards a restrained fighting style, with the often underworldly collision detection doing its part and ensuring that the input of attacks remains ineffective. This is especially noticeable in the unevenness of the various stages. I find it almost ridiculous to stylize the game into a myth and therefore advise the successful Soul Calibur, Virtual Fighter or Tekken representatives.
Aha. According to the Metacritic ranking, Soul Calibur is the best fighting game of all time. First of all, this should show the low degree to which lists created with spongy "indices" serve as a criterion for judging the quality of computers or video games. Secondly, Soul Calibur is of course not a bad game, but in single player terms - like almost all DC beat em ups - it is completely irrelevant and boring after 2 hours. The sequels do a much better job of balancing the strengths and weaknesses of the characters. Don't be blinded by the ranking!
I bought the collection - not least because of the extremely positive feedback from the press. After trying out the thoroughly aged games for a while, I was disappointed beyond measure. Especially the first title, Aleste 1, is actually unenjoyable without the solidly implemented comfort features. The game is very simplistic and unfairly difficult. The gameplay is also nothing special, even though reviewers often try to construct a historical relevance here that I don't see in any way. Darius (1987), for example, is even older and has aged much better.
The remaining titles play better, but are still inferior in quality to other early genre representatives in my opinion. The solid restoration as well as the functional enhancements are template-like, but still well done. After all, this is where the developer studio M2 has distinguished itself over the years. Nevertheless, even the updates don't save the overall package.
The 2020 GG Aleste 3 is admittedly conceptually interesting as a postmodern pastiche. The game is ultimately symptomatic of an infatuation with the aesthetics and gameplay experience of the past, but to put it polemically on the level of a mobile game from the late 2000s. K
All in all, I strongly advise against buying it. For those who consider such releases as collector's items, be my guest, for any "rational" buyer the price is almost a cheek. P.S.:
The 8-bit soundtrack was still cool (even if that's not a reason to buy).
