mwil236

A powerful, frenetic and stylish game that has impactful action and ridiculous characters. The strange but quintessentially Japanese BDSM themes and cheaply enticing lewd imagery made me cringe as an adult man but the base gameplay is satisfactory compensation. The arcade-style level structure and variance (several are rail shooter or Space Harrier style; you play an arcade shooter for a bonus at the end of each mission) keep the game lively and prevent action fatigue. Satisfying, huge-scale boss fights make you feel legitimately powerful and crowd-controlling common enemies looks incredible and feels weighty. My only complaint with this game is the difficulty options. Unbeknownst to me when I started my playthrough, "normal" is the highest difficulty level, and I started to feel that toward the final chapters. Since "normal" demanded good combat performance and extensive exploration for items, I always felt like I was treading water - I typically earned barely enough currency to purchase the maximum possible amount of healing items between missions, almost all of which I typically needed to survive the missions, and never saved up or earned enough to purchase quality combat upgrades or bonus items which would have improved my experience. When I finally switched to "easy," the actual medium difficulty, I murdered the final boss. The "easy" difficulty also turns almost every button press into a tremendous, high-damage combo, and makes the game feel cheap and showy rather than rewarding. In other words, normal was hard enough to make me feel like I wasn't getting to experience all the game had to offer because I **** by, and easy made the game feel cheap and unmotivating. All told, with the exception of some very short window QTEs that can break the immersion if you miss them, the action was amazing and the gameplay exciting. For a casual or impatient gamer, though, normal may be too challenging, but easy too cake-walky.

The Gears of War franchise, which has been quite as of late anyway, may finally be dead. This game is an absolute chore to play. From a ridiculous, unresolved story all the way down to ruinous basic gun play, Gears 5 is a total disaster. I found myself compelled to finish it only because I was playing co-op with a more devoted fan; thank God it was on GamePass and I didn't have to pay for it. All of the weapons have insane recoil, making gun play a chore of timid burst-fire and readjustment. The new additions and even editions to old classics are for the worse. In nearly every mission involving a major gunfight my partner and I both ran out of ammo, forcing us to take reckless action to melee or otherwise kill enemies just to clear the room. The rambling plot has you criss-cross and backtrack through the same bland, empty open world. There is no leveling up and no incentive to explore and do side activities. The most tragic issue, however, is the incompetence of the NPCs that are forced to fight alongside you. The sole moment of excitement came when we finally got to use the beloved Hammer of Dawn; we had to restart that gunfight at least half a dozen times because an NPC would walk through your laser and cause the beam to hit and kill you instantly. On the final boss, we had to retry 5 times when uncontrolled NPC would get themselves killed. In one instance, within 3 seconds of reloading after a death, an NPC got himself killed again. A great number of unwarranted restarts will find you in this game, which erroneously focuses on squad dynamics when you cannot control the squad. Another **** irritation is the lack of navigational assistance leaving you to wonder what the hell you're looking for at several points. "Jack" performs a ridiculous McGuffin where he can fly through vents to activate a terminal to open a door or something; oftentimes you'll see the switch he needs but he'll refuse to fly through any but the designated opening to reach it, regardless of how obviously other paths might work. In some cases this opening is rooms or meters away and punitively nonobvious, forcing you to mash the button giving you an environmental scan until you miraculously see the highlighted vent you need to use. This game is a 100% pass. The plot remains unresolved and whimpers to an end with a shameful sequel bait. Fitting that the voice actor for JD is also the worse of the two Spartacus in this pitiable attempt.

Greedfall suffers from budgetary limitations and strange design decisions; at its core, it really wants to be a good game, but the developers made it kind of a pain. There is nothing unique about Greedfall. The combat is similar to Dragon's Dogma and the Witcher, but worse and unbalanced. You have two companions, but you can't control them at all. You have a light and heavy attack which affect health and armor differently; you can set traps, use blade oils and use magic. The lack of coordination among your party can be very frustrating - for instance, one skill immobilizes enemies and damages their armor, so the appropriate tactic is to immobilize the enemy at the beginning of the fight and wait however many seconds the effect lasts to drain their armor. Well, forget that, because your party will instantly attack no matter what, ruining that tactic. They cannot use items or help each other, or themselves - if they are poisoned or hurt it's up to you to stop fighting and save them, every time. You basically fight some humans, mostly animals, and every boss fight is a monster created from tress and sticks and the like which vary widely in their challenge. Never did they seem unfair, per se, but rarely did they feel satisfying to finish. Humans remain the easiest and stupidest enemies to fight, which even at endgame amount to about 3 or 4 hit annoyances. There isn't one single human boss or even one good human encounter. On the other hand, toward the end of the game you fight almost exclusively "possessed" animals with an enormous amount of armor which are extremely monotonous and an absolute dread to slug through, because they couldn't kill you if you wanted to them to, you just have to bash on them until you can move on. Progression in your skills and attributes is abysmal. You get skill points every level but attribute or "talent" points only every 3 or 4; I was level 30 at endgame so I didn't get even half of the available attributes or talents. If you wanted to max one out, you'd have to totally skew your gameplay style to favor one method. For instance, certain quests can be bypassed entirely if you maxed a talent (for instance, "vigor" allows you to climb rock faces, jump gaps or balance on narrow passages which may allow you to skip a boss or walk right into a room you need), but you have no way of knowing which you'll need. And, as I mentioned, it's basically impossible to max more than two of the six throughout the game, so you never feel well-prepared. There are helpful skills, but they're hidden behind strings of useless ones that you basically have to waste points on just to reach the better ones. Real progress lies in buying (never finding) better armor or weapons and using the only truly useful talent, crafting, to make upgrades. Two of the talents, intuition and charisma, are almost completely useless and never felt tempted to put even one point toward them. Questing is generally benign but is sometimes mind numbing. There is an ungodly amount of running throughout the eerily empty game world, where there will sometimes be absolutely no other people or background music. You'll run through stretches of outdoor maps with no creatures or sounds. In palaces and marketplaces, even, guards or maids will stand completely still and never move. No one speaks unless spoken to. Most quests boil down to someone needing help, you having to investigate an area, finding another person who will only help you if you do something ELSE for THEM and finally getting what you want, then backtracking to the questgiver. The final quest has one of those dreaded, wide-net moves where you have to go back to every single faction and ask for help, which is 100% just a time **** and has no effect on the final boss fight, which for the first and ONLY time all game, you fight completely alone. Otherwise, the game is riddled with odd visual and audio glitches. Your companions will sometimes not follow you for reasons unknown. Failure to maintain good relations with a faction a companion comes from will result in them abandoning you without warning. The basic RPG elements are ok. There's lots of loot, crafting, selling and improving gear. But, ultimately, this is a hollow game with bad structure and ambiance.

Vampyr is one of those sleeper B-games that is going to be talked about a great deal in a couple years, despite the fact that it'll be like $17 at GameStop. It's basically a SoulsBorne-inspired, vampire-themed game, but rarely will you find a game wherein your basic decision making has such great effect on what's going on around you. Now, it isn't executed perfectly, particularly at endgame, but it's still better than anything I've seen. The strongest and most interesting aspect of the game is your interaction with the NPCs. Throughout the game, by doing side quests, finding notes, journals, etc, you unlock special dialogue options for each person in the game which improve their "blood quality," or the amount of XP you get from "embracing" them, or drinking their blood. Interestingly, every single NPC in the game is of value - there are no bumbling characters who just say "good day!" and ignore you. All of them have a place, relationships with one another and interesting stories to tell, like mob leader and a pair of PTSD-suffering soldiers who are secret lovers. Those that you choose to embrace are erased from the game permanently, and the relationships they have will suffer as a result. The trade-off is that drinking blood is the biggest source of XP in the game, so learning the most you can about someone before embracing them is critical. However, each time you kill, the general health of the district falls - people get colds, headaches and fever which reduce their "blood quality." Luckily, as a doctor, you can cure them by crafting medicine, but these won't last forever. This mechanic starts to fall apart when it becomes hard to find citizens (who aren't marked on the map and move around town), hints required to raise blood quality aren't easy to find (and the game gives no hints to their location) and some even require you to kill other people to unlock them. In other words, it's impossible (or at least very hard and time consuming) to maximize blood quality without at least killing some people or just wandering the streets looking for a note hidden somewhere. If you don't keep on top of curing citizens' sicknesses, as well, it gets completely out of control and unreasonable to manage - you'd have to spend hours finding each one to heal them. Additionally, if you let them all get too sick or kill too many people, the district will "fail," and it will be repopulated by enemies. The writing and voice acting are good, and you do a LOT of talking for quests and blood quality alike. It never feels painful, but if you're impatient you may be bothered. The plot is reasonably well-explained throughout. Side quests are unrelated to and do not distract from the primary goal. The intrigue of the main quest builds nicely and comes to a satisfying conclusion, depending on how many citizens you kill and how many districts "fail." Combat is fine. Taking from SoulsBorne and Nioh it incorporates a stamina bar for you and a posture-like bar for them. The primary attack does damage, and the secondary attack damages posture. By depleting posture you can drink their blood, which replenishes your blood (basically magic energy) and health, if you upgrade it. Weapon upgrading is satisfying and helpful. Character progression is a bit confusing, giving you more options than you can actually use, and basically coming down to raising you special attack damage, health, stamina and blood pool. Boss encounters are sometimes unpredictably much harder than the local enemy population, and you may have to go back and kill a few citizens or upgrade weapons to level up to manage a boss. "Grinding" isn't really an option, because every single enemy is worth only 5 XP (drinking blood averages about 3000, for instance), whether that enemy is 10 levels below you and takes 2 hits or 3 above you and is a full-blown 3 minute encounter. My primary complaint was the map and the travel situation. There is absolutely no fast travel, the map is very serpentine and confusing and contains lots of doors that will conveniently lock or unlock based on quest progress. There's a whole sewer network (which is very important at end game) which is all twisting tunnels that does not even appear on the map, leaving you to circle endlessly until you get lucky and find the path you wanted. The game will also unpredictably freeze for a loading period as you run through the map. The guidance doesn't help much; you basically have to open the map every 5-10 seconds before you make a turn so you don't run halfway across the map in the wrong direction. All together, the combat is serviceable, the NPC interactions are very strong, the acting and story are good and the quirks are minor. For a B-game, it's excellent. For a blockbuster, it's still pretty good.

Ultimately, the sum of its parts, this is a good game. But after enough time with it, you'll start to notice some **** problems that make the final hours more of a task than an experience. Ironic that for a game called "origins," it would be nearly impossible to tolerate the end. Each improvement seems like it was one step forward, one step back. Combat, for instance, has been updated to feel more like a Dark Souls or a Witcher game, but the mechanics lack the fluidity to feel perfectly balanced and fair. It's more engaging than the classic counterattack mob, but it feels rough and imprecise when trying to use longer reach weapons or charge attacks. The inability to heal lost portions of your health bar makes combat very frustrating if you accidentally get hit for a good chunk early in a fight. It also makes use of cheesy tropes like having to buy a charged attack upgrade to be able to hit enemies with shields (who will otherwise block every attack and, presumably, be completely impossible to kill). The stealth and assassinating is the same, with the notable exception that higher level enemies can now be so hard to kill that the hidden blade won't instantly kill them - a believable ruse, almost, except it's an AC game, and the hidden blade should kill anyone (right?). Similarly, a headshot with a flaming arrow may simply ding some of the game's later foes if you haven't leveled up your bow. These roadblocks make pulling off a perfect sneaky approach or lining up a long range shot seem worthless and unfair since all they really serve to do is alert your enemy and do some damage. Quest tracking is improved, but glitches still abound in the AC universe. Many quests seem like they're never going to end - the game will give you a simple task, like bring a letter to someone. Well, surprise, he's not there, and someone broke into his house. Key a stupid investigation where you determine some bandits kidnapped him. Go find bandits. Twist! man is leading the bandits. He tells you he'll never commit crime again if you go tell his wife he's dead. You do it. He gives you a weapon. Quest finally ends. 8 objectives and you running back and forth between the village and the bandit camp later, it finally ends. It sometimes makes you feel quite powerless and foolish for doing all these inane tasks. The game offers enough intrigue at first to encourage side questing and exploration, but if you're like me, sooner or later you want to get down to it and do the main quest. Well, the game shows some cracks by making the main quests leaps and bounds harder as the game progresses, passively forcing you to go grind out a bunch of side quests to level up. Frustrating. The worst part of all is the pitiful, unsatisfying and nonsensical ending. The game gives you the ominous "you cannot turn back after this point. Proceed?" message probably 6 hours before the actual end of the game, making the final bit seem like a cheaply drawn-out slog that reveals unnecessary and (frankly, in my opinion) not believable twists. I genuinely considered the game over three separate times, only to find that, when I finally looked up how many quests there were, I had three still to go. The game very, very loosely and poorly ties the whole story together with the "origin" of the AC brotherhood and makes some pretty significant stretches in changing character personality to force the conclusion to fit the structure that exists in-game. The game, like the quests, has separation anxiety and never wants you to leave. It forces you to do a string of strange, unrelated tasks between actual, relevant tasks which dilutes the experience. There is enough new content to make it fun, but even the map reveals the game's true identity: after 30+ hours of side quests and exploration, I still hadn't touched about 40% of the map, and of the 60% I saw, only about 25% is inhabited with anything worth a damn. It's a big, ambitious game which has a lot going for it, but it falters enough times to prove that sometimes dreaming small and executing precisely is better than a huge and ambitious but poorly guided experience.

Ultimately I felt pretty powerless and found the game repetitive. There's a lot to do in this open world, but there are also a TON of problems - forget about it if you like multiplayer. Online probably functioned less than half of the time and we're sitting at over a year since the game launched. Conversely, there are times where the game kind of forces you into an online server if you happen to walk into an event or are near another player online, which disrupts the single player and makes the game a laggy, choppy mess. In general, movement feels pretty unresponsive and driving is terrible. The problem with this game is it wants to be a stealth game, and it kind of wants to be a combat game, but it can't figure out which. Completing a mission in complete stealth is, in my opinion, impossible. There are very few ways to neutralize guards without alerting other guards, they will see and destroy your RC vehicles and force you to wait for them to regenerate and once they see you, it's over. They call reinforcements faster than you can possibly imagine and you'll have to rely on the game's heinous combat system to save you. Cover shooting is awful. Enemies never miss and always know where you are. Your weapons are weak and inaccurate against "armored" enemies who can endure 3 shotgun shells to the head. Melee animations take several seconds and almost guarantee to leave you exposed long enough to get killed. THERE ARE NO MID MISSION CHECKPOINTS, so even though you just slogged through that high-pressure, timed puzzle segment in perfect stealth, since a guy noticed your drone on the way out, forty cops descend on you and kill you and send you back to the start. The mechanics also don't square up-your RC car can physically hack computers and consoles, but your drone can't do anything? In general you have to suspend disbelief and accept the fact that somehow a rando with an iPhone can control a construction crane by "hacking" it. The convoluted story, which investigates a timely government/corporate spying conspiracy, makes no sense. The side missions, if you choose to partake of them, will only add to the confusion by involving irrelevant characters and events which seem related but actually have no bearing. The game will also not warn you if you're about to start a mission without the requisite equipment - at one point I had to hack a router on top of a tower and could only get there with the drone upgrade, but the game never mentions this. Eventually you realize that every mission follows the same basic formula - go find a guy with a phone or a computer somewhere, hack it to get a clue, then sneak through a security area to find another phone or computer and end the mission. These areas boil down to using your weird x-ray vision and spamming square to cycle through computers and set up traps until you take out enough guards to just sprint through the level and take what you need, lucky to survive the sprint out. "Leveling up" provides very little advantage and very few skills get put to use. The first few levels are easy enough to make the hacking doable, but soon the security areas become so large and well guarded that it becomes a total crapshoot of setting traps and just hoping like hell no one sees you. The game feels very random and out of control. The story and characters are goofy, unless you're a hacker/computer nerd, and much more juvenile than the first game which used hacking as a device to further a compelling story rather than a story revolving around a ludicrously overpowered, fantastical version of "hacking."

Ambitious? Maybe. "Unprecedented" would be extremely high praise. While it is definitely unlike most other games, that doesn't simply make it good, or even worth playing. What barely makes it worth buying is that I got it for $6 at GameStop. It's full of "gamer" humor and fourth wall breaks, which I think is supposed to be charming, until you realize it's just a mask for using lots of tropes - the game makes a joke like "escort quests are the worst, aren't they? The idiot always gets killed!" And you're supposed to think that's a funny reflexive joke, but the game then throws you into an annoying escort quest. The examples keep going - "Aww, another fetch quest?" Not that funny when you realize you do literally dozens of them. It tries to make fun of video gaming cliches, but it's really just executing them. Combat at first seems kind of interesting, requiring you to be grinding or bouncing about to get skill multipliers, but this becomes a huge nuisance in areas that are not designed to accommodate it. The frenetic combat design also prohibits any precision, so most guns either auto-target or do splash damage, making combat feel more like randomly spinning the right stick around and shooting bombs at nothing. There's really no sense of accomplishment in combat, because it's lazy and saturated with area-of-effect weapons, giving no sense of skill. You just sort of errantly shoot ridiculous guns and look at pretty lights and explosions while having no idea if what you're doing is effective or not. The game is repetitive in almost all respects - combat, movement, mission design and soundtrack all feel stale by the end. Predictably stupid, self-deprecating jokes become grating; shooting bombs and turrets at hordes of indistinguishable, unsatisfying enemies becomes a chore; completing fetch quests and defend quests is endless and all the while you get to hear the same loud, brain-rattling indie rock power chords over and over again. Definitely the type of game that you're hoping will end once you'be been at it a few hours. Its probable only redeeming qualities are an indisputably unique combat and traversal system and depth of character customization, which is purely cosmetic. Maybe worth a look if you can find it cheap and are tired of playing Call of Duty, but otherwise not the masterpiece people seem to think.

There's a good game somewhere inside Prototype, but they couldn't pull it out. The use of different enemy types and different power/weakness combinations could make for fluid combat, but the game chooses to ramp up difficulty not by requiring you to think about your play style but by cheaply overloading the screen with enemies and forcing you to dumbly button-mash. After about 25% of the way through the game, missions go from interesting and requiring you to learn different game mechanics to being super chaotic and frustrating slash fests. Missions range from incredibly stupid drive-a-tank-and-blow-up-a-building easy to almost unthinkably cheap and hard, like a mission toward the end that requires you to stop helicopters from leaving New York with no resources except jumping from buildings. Forget everything you knew about blocking, dodging and timing your attacks. If you don't just abuse the attack and jump buttons, you'll suddenly get hit with a flying tank and die. The game really makes no sense to me. The story, aside, is also bad. It attempts to build up a satisfying mystery, but requires you to find an appalling 100+ random NPCs wandering around if you really wish to understand it. Otherwise, just keep doing the missions - around mission 29 of 31 the game just flat-out explains to you what happened, which is pretty much required. The ending doesn't seem like a cop it, it seems like the developers believe they came up with something real sharp, but it's embarrassingly nonsensical. Ultimately, the final insult is the 4, maybe 5, hour campaign. I initially played alternate "activities" like races, timed kill events, etc but you are absolutely never in need of the "evolution points" you need to get new abilities that they provide you, so they feel pretty unnecessary - particularly considering that many of them are hard enough to make you struggle to earn bronze. The game attempts to pad length by requiring you to have some random ability to unlock new missions, but since the EP are so plentiful, that you usually means opening the menu and buying it on the spot. A real mess of a video game.

I didn't think there was a such thing as too big an open world until I played this game. The gameplay is exactly like Far Cry or Metal Gear, inasmuch as you sneak up to a base, mark all the enemies, try to take them down silently or just blast your way in. The problem is, it's almost always impossible to get them all silently because they realistically (but un-funly) stay inside buildings or somehow know exactly where you are if you miss a shot at them. And, you guessed it, once they're alerted, they'll sound an alarm and get an attack helicopter on you and that's that. Initially the game stays fresh by implementing squad tactics, but the map is so huge and the missions so numerous that you invariably feel like you've done that stupid mission where you have to silently interrogate a boss to get intel and you'll sigh when you realize your next objective is 17 kilometers away. The biggest problem is that the upgrade system is completely meaningless - you get such amazing skills as 5% less scope movement on a sniper rifle or 5% faster squad revive - so you never feel like you're getting any better. Even worse, the only way to get new guns (and actually be better) is to do a minimum of 3 of the aforementioned repetitive intel missions only to find the gun is buried in some cave 32 km away. Honestly, I played the game about 25 hours doing side missions and the main missions and I finished about 30% of the game's massive main mission to take down a drug kingpin. The though of how repetitive that journey would be led me to trade it in.

Everything you've heard is true - this is a solid game with an original story and some pretty cool gameplay combining dinosaurs and futuristic technology. The nitty gritty is that this game suffers from what I call "quest overload" where you get so many side quests thrown at you that you can't decide on one, and soon you realize that you're level 17 and that quest you got was level 4 so you ignore it. Some enemies (and almost any enemies if they catch you in a group) are excessively challenging and have only one weakness, requiring you to squander all of one resource killing them and requiring a concerted attempt to resupply yourself afterwards. Generally, though, the right weapons, upgrades and skill can take down any enemy. The story is a little hard to follow; there are kind of three big things going on at once and I was only really able to figure out one of them by the end. The voice acting and visuals are quite good, the game loads fast and plays smoothly. Definitely a good title.

The game has an amazing first impression and feels a lot like BioShock. The gameplay, however, reveals itself to be punishing and unaccommodating. Early in the game I had to switch to "easy" which did not make the game very easy at all - you are stuck with just your wrench, a pitiful stamina pool and the game pits you against an enemy that can teleport about and has an absolutely tiny hit box. The early hours of the game are a mind numbing struggle as you are underpowered, slow moving and restricted in your number of approaches. Furthermore, the game throws you into a huge map with no indication of area difficulty and could see you wander into an area with very challenging enemies completely unprepared. As you collect weapons, resources and powers (basically, plasmids) you level the playing field a bit. But right around 2/3 of the way through the game, when you finally feel powerful and prepared to fight, the game just goes wide and starts putting unrealistic numbers of powerful enemies everywhere and hiding behind that "sometimes it's smarter to sneak or run from the enemies" story. Additionally, the side quests are not motivating. You essentially get nothing for completing them, and since they're basically just a long series of fetch or kill quests you end up having to backtrack a ton. This process is hampered by long loading screens and tiny areas that you can quickly traverse only to reach your next loading screen. Ultimately the game makes use of some extremely arbitrary and predictable tropes to extend the gameplay - you found that keycard you needed? Well, just as you try to open it, some villain somehow cuts off power to the room and now you have to go back 6 areas to the power plant to kill him and restore power to wait through 6 loading screens back to open the damn door. The basics are there; puzzle solving and exploring for an alternate path (like Deus Ex) are exciting. Finding item schematics and resources is rewarding. But combat is unbalanced and unfair and the ending is a total disaster. The game needs work.

Conflicting game: fun, I say to myself, but also noticeably imperfect for all the critic fanfare about it. The game is repetitive, not in a minute way that you notice frequently, but in bigger chunks - almost every grouping of 3 or 4 chapters includes a vehicle part, then a big puzzle, a shootout and an escape. The escapes are also pretty predictable - see a bridge? It'll collapse, and you'll get separated from your partner and have to find your own way up. In a series way it follows many of the same tropes: you get a lead which turns out to be a clue that takes you somewhere else that takes you somewhere else and on and on until eventually it just is the spot you were looking for. It was a nice break that they didn't try to include the stupid supernatural thing they always seem to push. The story is... fine. Initially it seems pretty exciting, albeit similar to previous games, but not boring. As time goes on the game takes a shot at a lofty "greed-destroys-all-partnerships" allegory, but its conclusion is not as impactful as it could have been. Not to mention the waning hours when you really just want to be done with the game but it drags you on about 2 hours start to focus on the awkward breakdown of Nathan and Elena's marriage, which maybe could pan out in a movie, but in an action game more akin to funny quips and light dialogue it seems very out of place. I started to get really irritated with the game after about ten hours. They try to mix shooting with platforming to make it more exciting? I think? But what really ends up happening is that you focus on one or the other and the other one kills you; if you try to move into position to shoot you get shot and if you shoot too much you end up awkwardly jumping off of a cliff to your death. Additionally, some of the final exploration or quicktime platforming is either vague or so subtle that you'll almost definitely miss your cues and wander around or die immediately, ruining the tension of the moment. When I think about it, there were lots of things I didn't like: combat is included pretty lightly and sporadically but is extremely difficult; in most cases you're much better off running about doing stealth kills than trying to fight, the platforming gets really old pretty quickly and becomes more of an obstacle to you making your objective than an enjoyable part of the game and the storytelling is just pretty been-there-done-that. On the other hand, the game does drive you along and make you want to finish it, the graphics are great, the load times are good, the characters interact in interesting ways and there are some good setpiece moments that make you feel the spark. Ultimately I feel like I played this game because I liked the other ones and Naughty Dog was mostly right that I would play this one.

Definitely an underappreciated game. Some might complain that it isn't exactly ground breaking; it has the same combat system (more or less) that we've seen from other WB hits like the Arkham series and the smash Shadow of Mordor, but the addition of vehicular combat and how well it is incorporated into the gameplay keep it fresh and variable. The beginning of the story is a little weak and the game has to make use of some goofy time-killing mechanisms like forcing you to do side missions to unlock main missions but the final hours are exciting and emotional. There are some other iffy features: getting hit by a car doesn't seem to hurt you very much, there are random "storms" that occur and the only way to have them not kill you is to drive or fast travel to a base which just sort of interrupts gameplay and the game tempts you with encounters which give you "intel" on how to take down a base but they don't actually help at all or seem to matter one way or another. There's no shortage of things to do in the game though, and the environment, though bleak, seems authentic and enthralling. Racing and vehicle combat are excellent and very well incorporated. Though sometimes irritatingly difficult and buggy, this is strictly confined to the upper-level optional tasks and do not impede the story. The characters are rich and varied, enemies are often disturbing and loathsome; Max himself gives a believable performance as a tortured soul who still seems to care a little about his dying world. Probably the most unfairly panned game of 2015; based on that the price is way down so you should almost certainly give it a try.

It's hard to believe that a game with the word "complete" in its title could be so obviously unfinished. The game could fool you; it almost seems like it should be a good game. It has all of the classic elements **** RPG: lots of gear, lots of quests, magic, melee, character upgrades and an open world. What it has none of, though, is variation in the quests, any sense of improvement and no semblance of reality. Your inventory is completely unlimited so pick up everything that isn't nailed down. Every level up you'll choose from a few extremely lame and derivative "skill trees" which basically mean bonus health or mana or bonus melee, ranged or magic damage. The enemies get harder every level though, and it just seems ridiculous that every one takes about 5 melee hits or 3 arrows and none of them can ever kill you. Movement is jerky and unpredictable, especially while dodging. If you back an enemy into a corner they might just glitch away behind you. Ultimately the game will keep your attention for a few hours but quickly lose its appeal as its extremely monotonous nature takes over: go kill a few bugs, go talk to this guy, get some useless item back. Luckily I only purchased it on the PS store for like $2

Those of you who already know you like Call of Duty will feed the machine for years to come as your blood sugar approaches pre-Diabetic and your sperm count falls lower than ever before; for the salvageable few who are on the verge of leaving the Call of Duty franchise forever, take it from me: this should be your sign that the franchise is not just dead, it's like a squirrel that got hit right in the normal traffic pattern so people can't drive around it and it just keeps getting hit over and over until it's an unrecognizable mess on I-95. I will admit that I have had it out for Call of Duty ever since Black Ops. As a capitalist, I envy Activision for turning a tired and overhyped gameplay schematic into billions of dollars at the hands of overweight, Doritos- and Mountain Dew-consuming, neckbearded community college slag. As a human being and fellow consumer of video games, I resent them for creating a culture in which the aforementioned human garbage can feel accepted or successful. This is a particularly desperate attempt by the CoD administration to claim just-outside-of-copyright gameplay mechanics from Halo and Titanfall. Ultimately the franchise has simply collapsed into an unplayable, unbalanced mess that favors gameplay exploiters and over-practicers. Absurdist perks and weapon modifications make this game further from warfare than ever before - exoskeletons, inexplicably well-focused and discerning thermal scopes and jet packs may make for an interesting sci-fi experience, but ruin the formula of shoot your damn gun at the other guy better than he does back.

This is a tough one: Final Fantasy X is a tremendous game with an emotionally challenging story line that has implications far greater than its childlike, fantasy-based universe would lead you to believe. I recall playing it as a kid in what I thought was its target age group of 10-12, but playing it as an adult was far more interesting. You definitely have to like the turn-based type combat and be willing to grind; there are no shortcuts in this game. Frequent saving and dedication to killing hordes of common enemies are required to succeed. The story tackles very adult issues like challenging your faith, suspecting an administration of victimizing its constituents, confronting your parents and losing your loved ones. On the other hand, Final Fantasy X-2 is one of the games I am the most embarrassed to admit to have ever played as an adult man. The mechanics are similar to FFX; they tried to "speed up" the game, which is nice if you know what's going on, but at first it's jarring because it doesn't give you much time to decide on a course of action. That's about it, though - the story is ridiculous and meaningless. Most importantly, however, it genuinely seems like it was designed by either Japanese teenagers or Japanese pedophiles. The game stars three presumably underage girls whose powers are granted them by wearing different clothes, the transitions of which are given an undue amount of attention while playing the game. Set aside the incredibly misogynistic implications **** whose female cast is portrayed to be obsessed with and dependent upon collecting clothes and looking cute in battle, the game just has no substance - they're supposed to be bounty hunters looking for spheres, which rarely happens in the game. You have an even more ridiculous and provocatively dressed "rival" who never seems to die flanked by two (I assume, as a white person) insultingly stereotypical Chinese bodyguards. It's kind of like someone took the formula from Pokemon Red or Blue and thought, "let's see how many Western-looking teenage girls in short skirts with big boobs we can jam in here." So in my mind FFX is like a 9.5, but X-2 is like a 6. The combat in X-2 is admittedly pretty fun once you figure out how to play, but it still shames me to own it.

This is a very, very good game. It has just about every element of an open world game, but the world and travel is just a touch too restrictive to really call it that. The only lacking elements are the side quests and leveling-up system. Leveling doesn't seem to really affect you much, and there isn't alot of stuff to do off the beaten path that would really benefit a player who really likes to explore every corner and get more experience or gear. The side quests are pretty hard to follow; the guidance system doesn't seem to work too well for them and the quest givers frequently move around making them hard to return to when you do complete their tasks. Those minor issues are easy to ignore when the game is as well-paced and balanced as this one. Combat is almost reminiscent of a Souls game; if you're not comfortable dodging, observing and playing patiently you will get burned hard in some stages of the game. Boss fights are challenging and rewarding. The game never gets too caught up in combat, breaking it up smartly with platforming and riddling. Those, too, are not too long or arduous to make them no-fun. Just when you think you should be expecting a fight, one comes up. And just when you think you won't survive another wave of enemies, you finish them off and move to the next puzzle. The meat of the story and the main game mechanics are good enough to cover auxiliary features that are not even bad, they're just not as good as the primary stuff. Challenging, exciting and fun, Darksiders 2 is certainly a game worth playing.

Let's all agree that we're adults here, and admit that no company is ever going to break the mold or smash the glass ceiling in a sports genre. To negatively review a game for being similar to its predecessors is unfair and ignorant. This is a really fun game - dynamic considerations such as pitcher confidence and fatigue, hot/cold spots for a batter, a stat for clutch performance - which adds just enough human element to make it better than a simulation of the big leagues. Unfortunately, one of the only major departures from the traditional formula of pick-a-team-and-play is where the game suffers. The "road to the show" mode allows you to play as a prospect from scouting through the minors, which is a realistic and intriguing twist - the only problem is, your player will ****, and the game only allows you to play as him sometimes, which doesn't give you much of a chance to get into a rhythm. You'll occasionally get tossed into a jarring scenario to field a ball, giving you little chance to see what's going on around you before the play happens. Or you'll be placed into the lineup as a pinch hitter in the ninth and get one at-bat. Each time you fail at these one-off endeavors, the game thinks you **** even worse, and soon your team will bench you most games. This is really disappointing, because playing the game is really fun - but when you get basically one at bat per game, it's very hard to get hits. And oh by the way, you'll earn about 7 training points for this, and you need several hundred to level up your skills. Ultimately RTTS ends up being a mess of simulating games until you get to play, waiting for the loading screen, playing one at bat or one play in the field, then the game ending and watching another loading screen to start the whole process again. Maybe I just do genuinely ****, but the game is a little odd - unless you play as a pitcher, and don't mind doing nothing but pitching, which is super easy to succeed at.

A disappointing iteration of an excellent franchise. The issues with this game lie entirely in story organization and key element execution. The gameplay is still tremendous, but the aug system is lifeless. It really doesn't matter which augs you choose; the only ones that seem to matter are the hacking and life/energy increase ones. Different weapon, ammo and enemy types keep you thinking, and stealth and strategy are still king. The problem is that the story is convoluted and semi-dependent upon side quests, which are very hard to find. You have to sort of stumble into the right NPCs at the right times, and that's pretty hard to figure out. I had no idea what was going on toward the end of the game. Unfortunately the worst part is the end; the final boss is confusingly hard and easy and the encounter will leave you not only underwhelmed, but if there were such a thing, negatively-whelmed. Still worth playing if you like your Deus Ex gameplay, but you'll probably have to google a story explanation if you want to keep up. Keep your expectations realistic for the final hours as well.

A truly tremendous game; you already know the deal. Amazing characters, thrilling combat, a huge world, robust crafting, countless items and many surprises. The only perceivable flaws with the game are that the story is so long and complex that it is possible to forget exactly what's going on, mainly because you'll get sidetracked with so many other quests. There are a handful of technical flaws, but given how large and ambitious the game world is it's acceptable to see a few graphical tics. Skill trees aren't as good as they could be; you can only level up your signs which aren't hugely important in the long run anyway and you'll never level up enough times to get to where you want to be with them either. Otherwise, everything from exploring the vast landscapes to playing the damn card game will keep you interested when you aren't do other witcher things. Definitely not perfect based on the complex story and so-long-it-can't-help-but-be-repetitive gameplay but also one of the greatest of all time.

A game with all of the crippling confusion and ambiguous difficulty of a Souls game, without any of the charm or user-friendliness. From the outset the "story" is a confusing and disastrous mess which never materializes; if you can even manage to sit through the PS2 quality graphics and listen to the horrific Japanese-translated dialogue you'll spend hours sorting through a political upheaval whose players are never clearly defined. For a totally unique game world never seen in a FF game, they act like you should already know about the "obvious" political strife. At any rate, graphics are horrendous, interim gameplay is essentially nonexistent, the mission system makes no sense, the time cycle makes no sense, the leveling system is terrible and the inventory system is somehow combined with the skill system and that, unsurprisingly, makes no sense. The ONLY saving grace is that combat is fast-paced and exciting, but that's only really true for about 6 of the 15 playable characters. One is a girl whose "power" is somehow damaging enemies by playing the flute, one katana-wielding dude walks at about 1/10 the speed of your other characters (and your enemies, more importantly) and many other characters' powers are hard to control. The interface for selecting your party is miserable, you can only change party members when one dies and the party members are hugely unbalanced in ability level which will make leveling them up evenly almost impossible. I genuinely tried to play the game for awhile to see if I would get a grip on it, but aside from the temporary joy of exciting combat with your one or two favorite players the game is a tremendous bore. Pass.

Granted, I am reviewing the game from the perspective of a Souls fan, but even non-Soulers are encouraged to take a crack at DS3. The best thing about it, probably, is that it is not Dark Souls 2. It hearkens back to Dark Souls but maintains series classics like impossible-to-follow "quests," the killing of several primary bosses to advance, poison swamp levels and brutal gameplay. Potentially less difficult than Dark Souls but certainly harder and more satisfying than Dark Souls 2, it is the true heir apparent to the Dark Souls series. An excellent game, no questions asked.

An interesting attempt at Bethesda to claim the MMORPG market for consoles; unfortunately, due to the lack of competition, they will probably succeed in this endeavor despite creating one of the most stereotypical and uninspired cookie-cutter games of all time. You know how at the Redbox they'll have a famous movie like (for example) Saving Private Ryan, then they'll also have a Russian knock-off called Rescuing Sergeant Johnson or something? This is the Russian knock-off to a game like World of Warcraft. The exact same gameplay, but in the Elder Scrolls environment. Character classes and skills make zero difference because the game scales the difficulty based on what level you are anyway. It is suspiciously impossible to find enemies that are a much lower or higher level than you. You will never find that one great piece of equipment because it might throw you outside of the difficulty band Bethesda carefully manufactured for you. The game is a horribly disappointing walk through missions and locations forced to be the exact right difficulty. You simply pound your different attack buttons to kill the enemies fed to you and pick up the gear they drop which is either your level or one level above you, but is never magical or unique. The flash and sparkle of crafting, other characters, big cities, the auction house and other MMORPG staples will hold you over, but after about ten hours the curtain is lifted and you realize the game is not challenging; it never lets you fail, but it also never gives you any moments of glory. Items are uninteresting. Missions are uninteresting. Let's just try again on the Elder Scrolls 6, shall we?

Fallout 4 is, most importantly, an impressive distance from Fallout 3. Several new features, a fresh environment and the same variety of gameplay styles amount to a distinct and quality game. All rock solid mechanics (shooting in particular is improved) and pacing make even wandering Boston fun. A more attractive graphics suite and more variety in characters make this wasteland more exciting than the last. My only complaint about the game is that the faction system is a little rigid and makes for a pretty predictable endgame if you play through on multiple characters.

I'm as confused writing this review as I was reading reviews of it; the best way I can describe this game is to say that it's sort of like being a kid and knowing you're allergic to something, but you love the way it tastes, so you eat it anyway knowing it'll make you sick. The game is not fun. Lots of time spent running. After about level five average enemies take about 6 headshots to kill, let alone "elite" enemies. Loot drops are unpredictable and useless. The leveling up and base improvement systems appear to give you lots of freedom, but ultimately you just unlock everything and choose between three special powers. Story missions can take up to an hour and may devolve into you waiting in cover with your cursor in one place, waiting for the enemy to pop up, shooting him, taking enough bullets to almost kill you, and retreating to heal. God help you if you join up with another player who is a dumbass and keeps getting himself killed, because once he dies, the game will leave you alone and stick you with multiplayer enhanced difficulty. Auxiliary missions, required to upgrade your base, are painfully repetitive and unrewarding. The character attributes aren't well explained, so item equipping is sometimes a total crapshoot. The PvP aspects of the "dark zone" are a total mess but are capable of providing some fun. Perhaps most irritating is the game's online requirement. You encounter chilling moments where you shoot enemies endlessly and their health does not go down, they will stand still as you move around, and you suddenly realize you're in the middle of a lag. When the game finally comes through, anything could have happened. That is, if the game doesn't just crash and send you back to login. Despite all of these complaints, you will keep going back to the Division. Something about a shooter RPG with MMO elements will tickle your gamer scrot and you will want to play. I hope you have a good internet connection.

I believe it is unfair to give sequels negative reviews for being repetitive, but the manner in which Just Cause 3 shamelessly replicates even major plot missions from Just Cause 2 is not ideal. Initially, the game shines - missions are interesting, there are a variety of new challenges and a few new features, but these quickly give way to outrageously difficult story missions and a painful fast travel and resupply system. I understand that the developers may have wanted to make the game a little more challenging than JC2, which simply allowed you to drop a helicopter or jet right in front of you at any time, but their new "beacon" system means you only get one resupply before having to traipse perhaps tens of kilometers back to the nearest city you liberated to get more. The real issue here is once the story progresses past the initial island grouping in which you find yourself, you end up on a large island that has about half the content but is more than three times the size - villages and military bases are anywhere from 5 to 30 kilometers away, and many mountain ranges block your way. Travel slows to a crawl and essentially requires you to use the very weak aforementioned beacon system to get a helicopter. And even then, you're in for several boring minutes of holding down the analog stick and simply flying to your next objective. Load times are much longer than they should be, and occasionally a loading gap will cause the game to inexplicably delete weapons from your loadout. Ultimately, the game is a lot of fun, and the old thrills of flying a jet into a satellite dish are satisfying. They are just fewer and farther between, literally.