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Wow, what a disappointment. I've been looking forward to this game for years, and then all it turns out to be is Hollow Knight but with unfairness cranked up to max. Many of the regular enemies deal double damage, meaning you're dead if you're hit 3 times, and there are no (or extremely few) invincibility frames after getting hit, meaning you can take damage in quick succession and die in no time at all even if you started off with full HP. I've lost count of how many times I was completely fine one moment, only to be dead before I even had time to react. The game never actually gets fun; it's just pure frustration from beginning to end.

Considering the fact that this game kinda falls into the same category as some other games I enjoy very much (Nier, Souls, etc), I thought Stellar Blade was going to be a homerun for me and was really excited about finally getting into it. Sadly, it turned out to be the biggest disappointment of 2024 and one of the most infuriating gaming experiences of my life. Unoriginal, boring story. Generic enemy design and world. Clunky controls with input lag on every action. Awful platforming sections made even worse by the subpar, unresponsive controls. Enemies are extremely tanky, have almost infinite poise (meaning they won't care if you're hitting them) and will swarm you from every direction and stunlock you to oblivion. Timings on dodging/parrying are horrible because enemy attacks have some seriously awkward delays, and you barely get any invincibility frames from succeeding. Sneak attacks almost never work. Targeting is absolute garbage (the character will often just start attacking the air instead of the enemies right next to you). Open areas are a pain to navigate because it's just sand and rocks everywhere, making everything look the same. During climbing sections, the character will randomly just refuse to grab onto ledges despite perfect positioning, often leading to you plummeting to your death. You can't interact with any objects while you're in combat. The "Story" difficulty is way too hard (basically on par with Hard difficulty in other games, thanks to how poorly designed the gameplay is). Tons of tedious timesinks (mindless puzzles, smashing breakables, constantly using a scanner on the environment to find any hidden items, and so on). People saying this game is great must either be delusional, bought off or they just haven't played any games in this genre that are actually fun and fair.

Ubisoft's best game in at least a decade, but it's unfortunately ruined because of a critical bug that makes me unable to heal. Pushing the heal button does nothing whatsoever despite the fact that I have potions in stock, and getting through the entire game on a single life bar is just not a realistic scenario. Until this issue is fixed, which it will probably never be considering they've done diddly-squat about it in the half year that has gone by since launch, I won't be able to keep playing this game. If I'd bought it on PC, I'd be requesting a refund right now, but since I got it on PS5 and Sony's refund policy is ridiculously bad, I'm unable to do so and will just have to accept the fact that this was a complete waste of money.

1. Graphics that look like something from early PS4 era. 2. Constant stuttering. 3. No HDR support. 4. Clunky combat. 5. Slow movement speed (while sprinting, the character kinda seems like they're being pulled backwards at the same time, making it look like she's running on ice). 6. Empty world, both with a lack of enemies and things to find 7. Invisible walls block your path even in areas where it seems like you should be able to go. 8. Boring protagonist and story. 9. Enforced wokeness by Sweet Baby Inc. To wrap things up, the only reason I can see to play this game is if you, weirdly enough, happen to have absolutely nothing else to play and an active Game Pass subscription so you can try it out for free. It definitely isn't worth paying for.

This DLC is the very definition of "hard for the sake of being hard" rather than being made with fun in mind. Enemies deal ridiculous amounts of damage, are super aggressive and have some seriously long combos even for regular attacks. Meanwhile, they tend to take very little damage themselves (the bosses especially are absurdly overtuned) and have such high poise that even medium sized enemies barely care that you're hitting them and will just start hitting you right back even if you're in the middle of a combo against them. The new "level" mechanic, where you're forced to scour the map for items that will then be used to recover some of your nerfed stats, is extremely poorly implemented. The idea is kinda cool, but each upgrade grants you such a miniscule boost to damage and defense that it barely makes a difference at all no matter how many you find. Imagine if you're trying to protect yourself against a gun shot with a piece of paper and then add layers of paper to the stack every now and then. Sure, the stack will eventually be thick enough to protect you, but until you reach that point, every single shot against you is going to be lethal. That's pretty much what it feels like here. Basically, From Software decided that enemies with more HP and damage equals more challenge, and more challenge always equals more fun. I hate to tell you, but that's not how things work. Rather, what this all has led to is me not even being able to enjoy the exploration part of the game, because I find myself rushing past enemies more often than not simply because fighting isn't worth the huge risk it brings. Elden Ring had some issues but felt fair most of the time, whereas Shadow of the Erdtree is riddled with cheapness and feels nothing but frustrating to play. As a big Souls fan, I can say that it's the low point of the series by a wide margin. As far as I'm concerned, Elden Ring is a complete game and it has no DLC.

Very underwhelming graphics (only looks slightly better than a PS3 game), boring world (both in terms of design and exploration) and some seriously janky animations and controls. The combat system is what truly ruins the game, though. The biggest issue by far is the fact that poise is basically non-existent for you as a player, but enemies have a ton of it. What this means is that even basic enemies can be walking tanks, and even if you're in the middle of a combo against them, they'll just brush it off like it's nothing and start a combo of their own instead; one that can and will interrupt you and possibly kill you. It's cheap and unrealistic beyond words, and it takes away any fun that could have been had and replaces it with pure frustration.

It's sad to see how Ubisoft have so completely lost their touch in recent years. I feel like Ubisoft games peaked during the PS3 era and have since then only been getting progressively worse, to the point where you can literally feel the lack of passion that go into every project. It's so bad that I'm actually looking forward to seeing what AI will do to their games in the coming years, because I sincerely doubt it can do a worse job than what the current developers are doing. The story and characters are utterly uninteresting, combat and controls are clunky, animations are laughably bad and the world is really bland despite being the only thing that looks somewhat decent from a technical standpoint. Most of all though, the game isn't fun to play. I've spent many hours now hoping "it'll get fun soon", but it never does. Not once during all this time have I thought that "this was pretty cool", and I sincerely doubt that'll ever change. What baffles me most about the Ubisoft situation is how people are still giving these janky, uninspired games good review scores and are willing to preorder them for a minimum price of $70. You're basically telling the developers that you're fine with eating whatever they feed you, and that will most definitely lead to them feeding you the lowest quality garbage they can get away with.

One of the most boring games in the last decade. It looks and sounds amazing, but that's really all there is to it. The whole thing with the player hearing voices and whatnot is just a gimmick, and both that and the "cinematic feel" that they've been pushing hard for (especially in the form of black borders that cover 30% of the screen at all times), just take away from the experience rather than add anything of value to it. The gameplay, if you could call it that, boils down to basically walking in a straight line, with brief pauses consisting of a few instances of underwhelming puzzles and clunky 1 vs 1 combat. Senua's Saga could have probably been a pretty decent movie or TV series, but if I'm going to judge it as a video game, which is what it's being sold as, it's subpar at best.

One of the most poorly optimized games I've ever played. Aside from all the frequent crashes and terrible performance, there is also an abundance of bugs that can screw you over thanks to the fact that you only get a single save file that overwrites itself every so often, meaning you can get permanently stuck without any way to progress if you're unlucky enough to have the game autosave at the wrong moment. Oh, and Capcom deliberately made fast travel as troublesome as possible in the game just to push players towards paying 3€ a pop for fast travel items as one of 20+ paid DLC available at launch.

The worst launch for any online game I've ever played. Thanks to the servers being overloaded (or whatever the issue is), I wasn't even able to log on until several days after launch despite numerous attempts. Even now, I'm seeing extremely long load times and frequent disconnects, and I'm often not able to log back on for a while whenever it happens. Furthermore, I've encountered a critical bug that caused a quest to get permanently stuck on incomplete status, and the quest reward, which was by far the best item I'd found so far, disappeared out of nowhere after a relog and now it's gone forever. Then there's the fact that the game seems to be really poorly optimized. My GPU ran at a temperature of around 70°C with Ultra settings in Cyberpunk, but Last Epoch makes it go straight to 80+ even on lower settings for some reason, making the GPU fans sound like jet engines and forcing me to use my noise-cancelling headphones, which otherwise wouldn't be my go-to choice for gaming, just to avoid having the fan noise drown out the game sound. It also **** that you can't pick a gender for your character or alter their appearance in any way (you can't even do something simple as changing hairstyle), meaning you're going to look the same as every other person playing the same class as you. The game also does a terrible job of telling you if a weapon is stronger than what you're currently using. Unless you're some kind of math prodigy that can somehow make out in your head which combination of half a dozen different stats are superior to another combination, the only way you're going to know is by equipping every single item and see if it makes the damage shown in your skill/spell tooltip go up. They could've made it really easy to tell by adding an up arrow on weapons that will be an improvement compared to your current one and a down arrow if it's worse, but they apparently prefer this really annoying way of handling it. I wouldn't be nearly as bothered by all these things if the game was free, like Path of Exile, but the fact that you actually have to pay up front for Last Epoch makes all this so much worse. All in all, Last Epoch in its current form is a huge disappointment. I'm sure it'll be great eventually, but there's too much bad stuff here right now to leave anything but a negative review. [UPDATE: SUNDAY, 25/2, 4 DAYS SINCE RELEASE] I've barely been able to log on at all today. The few times I actually managed to get in, I either got disconnected soon after or the game crashed unexpectedly (something that's started happening since the latest patch was deployed). The fact that it's been several days since the game's release and I can't really notice any improvements to stability is equal parts ridiculous and infuriating, so I'm lowering my score.

The game looks great, but that's pretty much all it has going for it. The combat feels clunky, constantly searching small containers for loot gets annoying very quickly, and there are important aspects to the gameplay that the game doesn't even bother to tell you about, so you have to either learn through trial and error or by googling it. I got this game for free on Game Pass, but if I'd purchased it with my own money, I'd feel ripped off right now.

There's some serious garbage programming in this game that still hasn't been fixed in the decade that's gone by since its release. For example, every time I change a graphics settings, the sound permanently dies and I'm forced to restart the game to make it work again. Considering the fact that there are some major stuttering issues in this game that require you to tweak the graphics settings, the audio getting killed off every time you do so is seriously infuriating. Also, flight controls are still bad beyond words and ruin the entire game, because it's borderline impossible to finish any mission that requires flying. I've replayed one probably a thousand times now without being able to beat it, and I'm so sick of it by now that I'm uninstalling the game and giving it the lowest possible score. Here's a tip for you, Rockstar: If you can't make decent flight controls, don't force players to rely on them to progress in the game. When flying is this poorly executed, it shouldn't be mandatory.

One of the most overrated games of all time. The PC version is so poorly optimized that it can't run a steady 60 fps even on modern systems, the controls are really clunky (helicopter controls are bad beyond words), enemies are literally immortal until the game decides it's okay for you to kill them, there are no checkpoints (meaning you'll have to replay entire missions if you do a single thing wrong at any point during one), and so on and so forth. GTA IV isn't fun; it's just frustrating.

Whoever decided that it would be a good idea to include a chase scene where you're killed instantly the moment the enemy comes near you (sending you back to the last checkpoint and forcing you to watch an unskippable cutscene every time), shouldn't be allowed to participate in game development. Phantom Liberty was a decent DLC up to that point, but this single-handedly ruined my overall impression of it.

I somehow enjoyed playing this back when it was released, but now when I returned several years later, I can't stand it. The game can be somewhat okay if you're playing in a team, but if you're going solo, it's going to be pure cancer. Enemies are spawning out of nowhere and swarming you from every direction, spamming skills, lobbing grenades and deploying borderline indestructible mounted machine guns that'll barely ever cease firing. You'll need to move around constantly, but that ends up being basically impossible since you're the only target they're gunning for and there are deadly projectiles coming from everywhere you look. While you're trying to survive in this chaotic hellscape, you also somehow need to bring your foe's HP down, which is easier said than done. The enemies in this game are the very definition of bullet sponges. You can literally unload a full magazine from a brand new LMG into their unprotected face without them caring much about it at all, much less dying from it, but they can bring you down from full HP to dead in less than a second even if you're wearing the strongest armor you can find. While you're busy trying to stay alive while taking down one of these walking tanks, his 20 friends and one or several additional patrol groups who appeared and decided to join in the middle of the fight are all flanking you and bombarding you with everything they've got with nearly flawless precision. Then, when you finally die from one of the gazillion damage sources after a 10 minute, non-stop firefight, noone will be there to revive you and you're sent back to your base with the knowledge that you will have to start that insufferable encounter all over again from square one if you want to progress. This is what the entire game is like, so unless you're somehow masochistic enough to actually enjoy ridiculously unbalanced and unfair combat, you should probably sit this one ****, and the DLC, Warlords of New York, has the most poorly designed end boss I've ever seen. He has a ridiculous amount of HP, and he can somehow deploy every single skill in the game, without any cooldown. He's just constantly hiding away behind cover while endlessly spawning new drones, turrets, mines and whatnot that are attacking you from every direction possible all at once. Meanwhile, he's literally immortal if even a single defender drone is active, and he can also heal himself back to full HP almost instantly. This boss fight proves beyond any doubt that the developer has no clue whatsoever how to make a game fun. It isn't challenging; it's just a less than amateur level showcase of cheapness. If this is what they consider entertainment, I hope the studio gets shut down so we don't see more garbage like this on the market.

Barren and bland world that's annoying to navigate due very few fast travel points and a lack of map and minimap, no information whatsoever about which items you've already collected in certain areas, extremely repetitive gameplay and enemies, and both the parrying mechanic (which the combat revolves around) and the overall controls feel clunky and unresponsive. Strayed Lights seemed kinda fun from what I had seen, but it really isn't. Don't bother trying it unless you can get it for free from PS Plus or Game Pass.

I've been looking forward to this game for a long time, but it's nothing but a disappointment. The "innovative" mechanics they've added to the game, such as using the lantern to see the umbral realm, quickly starts to feel like a chore more than a fun addition, and combat is plagued by awful hitboxes and stupid AI. Rather than fixing that, they just artificially increased the difficulty by adding a ton of more enemies, many that will stand in areas that are either hard to reach or where you can't see them until it's too late and you're already falling to your death in some pit. Furthermore, the game has some major performance issues and critical bugs. The framerate frequently drops below 20 even on performance mode (on PS5), and I lost arguably the most valuable resource in the game, which you exchange for boss weapons and armor, because if you attempt to buy the few available at a vendor, there's a bug that'll consume those you already have in your inventory instead of actually give you the ones you bought. I almost had enough for the weapon I wanted and had built my character around, but that bug set me back so much I lost all motivation to even keep playing. Simply put, Lords of the Fallen is a broken mess that shouldn't have been released in the state it's in, but was so anyway because the developer and/or publisher cares more about getting money as soon as possible rather than releasing a quality product. It's basically an early access title sold as a finished game for full price.

A subpar remaster, and two of the worst JRPGs ever made. The only reason I'm giving this a 1 and not a 0 is because the story is somewhat decent (if you can disregard some serious plot holes and scenes that seem to be pulled from someone's drug-induced hallucinations), but the gameplay is horrendous beyond **** combat system is heavily reliant on RNG, and battles take forever to finish. The dungeons are a prime example of how to not design a game, with loads of backtracking, awful puzzles and game mechanics so frustrating they're likely to make your blood boil. Story progression is almost entirely based on trial and error during exploration, where you need to run around aimlessly and interact with more or less every single NPC and object in an area until you finally find the one thing the game wants you to interact with. The only clues you get are usually something along the lines of "It's somewhere in town", but sometimes you're not even told in which general area something is, so you'll have to search every nook and cranny of the world map until you eventually reach the right place. Once you've managed to pinpoint the target, you'll get a short story scene, and then the game asks you to find something else, forcing you to do the area search all over again to find the next item or person needed to progress further. This pattern repeats endlessly, so unless you somehow enjoy mindless timesinks, get ready to get annoyed and bored out of your mind. Simply put, playing these games feels like a tedious chore that you want to be over as soon as possible because you can quite literally feel the fun being drained from your body.

Wow, what a letdown. The Bloodborne-esque artstyle, the soundtrack and the weapon crafting system are all great, and this game would've certainly been one of my favorites of the year... if it wasn't for all the other issues it has, mostly revolving around combat. Here's a list of some, off the top of my mind: 1. Bosses and even a lot of the regular enemies are ridiculously tanky. It doesn't really add much to the difficulty; it just makes battles way longer and more repetitive. 2. Besides the tankiness, enemies are also constantly regenerating HP passively. You can't regenerate HP yourself though, despite the fact that you're also a puppet, just like them. No explanation is given for this; we're basically just told that "This is how it is. Deal with it." and forced to accept this cheap way that they artificially enhance the difficulty of the game. 3. Poise is non-existent. Even if you're wearing the strongest armor in the game, even the most basic attacks from the weakest enemies will still stagger you, interrupting your own attacks. 4. Many enemies, even small ones, don't react to your attacks at all. Even if you're right in the middle of a combo against them, they'll just brush it off and start attacking you before you're finished. Due to the previously mentioned lack of poise, this also means that your own attack will be completely halted, since you'll get knocked back or down on the ground. 5. If you get knocked down, it takes forever to get back up. Also, the enemies can still attack you while you're down, meaning you can get stunlocked to death before you're ever able to rise up again. 6. Once you finally hit an enemy enough to make them open for a fatal attack (which is basically just a stronger attack that isn't even nearly fatal in most cases), indicated by their HP bar glowing white, you need to hit it with a charged attack within the next few seconds, or else it recovers and you will have lost your chance. Problem here is that enemies can still move as usual while staggered, meaning your charged attacks, with their long wind-up times, tend to miss completely and then you most likely won't have enough time to give it another try. 7. The dodge mechanic is one of the most useless ones I've ever experienced. The invincibility frames are so few, you're more often than not taking damage even during dodges. 8. Hitboxes, especially from bosses, can be extremely inaccurate and unfair. 9. The status effect "Decay" is one of the worst in gaming history. What happens is that whenever you take decay damage, your weapon durability degrades at an insane rate. You can literally go from 100% durability to none in an instant from a regular enemy, and since having no durability in this game means every single attack you make gets deflected and barely deals any damage, it's basically a death sentence. There's an item you can use to repair weapons with for free, but it can't be used if the durability is at 0, so your only other option is if you happen to have a consumable with you (of which you can carry very few) that can do so, but chances are that you've already run out of them. 10. Environmental details can and will block your attacks, but only yours. Enemies can hit you just fine through various objects. 11. Running back to the bosses is a real pain in the ass, because you usually have to pass a whole bunch of regular enemies to get there, often taking damage along the way so you'll have to face the boss when you're already in a hurt state. 12. The NPC you can summon to aid you during boss battles deals laughable damage and usually dies early on in the fight. 13. There's no multiplayer whatsoever. 14. One of the late areas in the game (IX) is the closest thing to hell that I've ever experienced. I thought the entire point **** was that it's supposed to be entertaining, but this area is the very antithesis of fun. Enemies gang up and rush at you like maniacs, have enormous health pools, deal ridiculous amounts of damage, can leap at you from a mile away and with pinpoint precision knock you right into one of the many pitfalls/ravines that are everywhere and will kill you instantly. In the middle of all this chaos, you also need to somehow find the time to destroy a whole bunch of crystals that are littered around the entire area and will give you a debuff that also kills you instantly as soon as the bar fills up (which takes maybe 5 seconds). And, of course, you couldn't have **** Ultra 2023 without Decay, so count that among all the other crap you have to watch out for, because there's just no way you'll make it through the area if you run out of durability on your weapon. If you're going into this game hoping it will be Bloodborne 2, do yourself a favor and lower your expectations. Bloodborne has its issues as well, but it's vastly superior to Lies of P in almost every regard, so keep that in mind while you consider your purchase.

I tried to post an in-depth review for this game, but the coding on the Metacritic website is as bad as always and gives me a 403 error whenever I try to post it. I guess I'll make a shorter one and hope it's accepted. The story, characters and soundtrack are all great, but the combat system is one of the worst I've ever had to endure throughout my life as a gamer, mainly for one reason: enemy HP. Basically, every enemy in the game has a ridiculous overabundance of health, especially the bosses. It doesn't really add to the challenge of the game; it's just there to artificially prolong it. The situation is so bad that the button mashing that is required makes my hand physically hurt to the point where I deliberately have to take breaks from playing just to recover from the pain. This is the first game I've played since Track & Field on the NES where this has happened, and that should say something about how awful it is. Do yourself a favor and just watch a Let's Play of Final Fantasy XVI instead of playing it yourself.

I heard this game is supposed to be great, but I strongly disagree. The old-school aesthetics are accompanied by several of the many glaring issues that made those old games (that this was inspired by) so infuriating. Those issues include, but are not limited to: - Enemies respawn endlessly. - You get knocked back (often into a pit) whenever you're hit by something. - You die instantly from various falls. - You take damage simply by touching an enemy's hitbox (something they constantly abuse by running, jumping and flying into you). - You have low HP that only lets you take a few hits. - There are no, or very few, invincibility frames, meaning you can get hit by several different attacks, objects and traps in succession. - Enemy placements have been optimized for maximum cheapness, to make sure you're suffering as much as possible from the previously mentioned knockbacks and whatnot. You're also punished every time you die. Not only do you respawn with depleted health; there's also a creature that starts following you around and steal all your loot for a while. Whoever thought that this was a good idea that would add entertainment value to the game is clearly delusional and should not be allowed to make decisions during game development. At the end of the day, all I'm looking for from a game is fun, and in the case of The Messenger, I'm currently not feeling any of that. Now, the game will supposedly get better later on, but I sincerely doubt it'll be even remotely worth all the agony of getting there. There are so many other games out there that are great right from the getgo, so I really don't see any reason to waste my time on something that isn't.

I have no idea why this game is so popular. The dialogue/narration is full of pretentious garbage, and the gameplay is extraordinarily slow and boring. Disco Elysium is a snoozefest, plain and simple.

I enjoyed Callisto Protocol for the most part, but this DLC is just a quick cash grab that ignores the good parts of the original game and instead give us an extra large helping of the bad ones. Some annoyances: 1. There's still a heavy focus on melee combat, and it's still wonky as hell. Especially when you get swarmed by a whole bunch of enemies, which happens quite regularly. 2. Hits will often not register on enemies, letting them start hitting you right when you're in the middle of a combo and can't defend yourself. 3. Collectibles and other items are permanently lost if you enter a door where the story progresses. This wouldn't have been a problem if there was an indicator for which door does just that, but there isn't one. You'll just have to hope you're lucky enough to always choose the story doors last, because as soon as you enter, you'll get effectively locked out from obtaining whatever items you haven't picked up from the optional routes and will then have to replay the game if you want them. 4. You'll spend a lot of time on slowly crawling through vents. 5. Instant death mechanics. This is a bad idea in most games, but even more so when, like in this case, checkpoints are scarce. I've had to clear out entire areas all over again just because the last checkpoint was way back at the start. 6. Damage you take from hallucinations counts as real damage despite not being real. Some of them can even kill you in a single hit. If you want more Callisto Protocol, go replay the main game instead of wasting your time and money on Final Transmission.

One of the biggest disappointments or 2023. It has beautiful pixel art and a nice soundtrack, but that's pretty much all it has going for it. The awful combat system singlehandedly ruined the whole experience for me by turning the game into a tedious slogfest. To make things somewhat easier to follow, I'm going to break it up into parts. 1. Combat animations are extraordinarily slow, with long wind-up times even for basic skills. Since there's no way to turn animations off or increase the combat speed, a ton of time is wasted in each battle just watching the same animations over and over and over again. 2. Another element of combat in this game is a timing system where you deal extra damage or lower the damage you take by pushing a button whenever an attack is about to hit. It sounds like it would add depth to the combat and make it more fun, but it feels like they've also deliberately made the fights slower just to make the window of opportunity for the timed inputs somewhat easier to hit. This obviously means that the whole combat, which is slow enough already, gets even slower. 3. Many enemies are completely immune or heavily resistant to damage, and you'll need to hit them with regular attacks to make them drop orbs that you can then absorb and use on the next turn to actually deal damage. The system seems kinda interesting on paper, but what it really means is that you're wasting time and turns on dealing little to no damage, prolonging the battles even further. You can also only attack once for every time you absorb orbs, so you're forced to waste half of your turns just to make new orbs appear so that you can deal actual damage with a single attack on the following turn. 4. Bosses have way too much HP. It doesn't really add to the difficulty in any meaningful way, so it just serves as yet another timesink, further adding to the tediousness of the gameplay. To top it off, some bosses (and regular enemies) can even heal themselves, making the fights longer and even more boring than they already were. 5. When enemies are charging skills/spells, they get temporary weaknesses which you can exploit to cancel their turn if you hit them with the right attack. Problem is, they're usually just casting for 1-2 turns, while the weaknesses you need to hit are more than that. What this means is that even if you actually take the time to use attacks that they're temporarily weak against, it's impossible to cancel their attack since it'd take more turns to hit all different weak points than it takes for them to finish the cast. 6. You can only ever have three party members participate in battle, even if there are others present. That only applies to you, though. Both regular enemies and bosses will often fight you in groups of 4-5, but you'll never be able to utilize your full party against them. I would've understood if the rest of the characters were busy elsewhere or hanging out back at a base, but they're literally right there in the same scene with you, and yet they're not participating in the battle despite the enemy outnumbering you. Honestly, I find it baffling that this game has been under development for 5 years, and at no point in time did anyone on the development team consider that "Okay, the combat could probably use some improvements or customization options." There are so many things they could have done to improve the situation, yet they didn't, and now we're stuck with this atrocity. Combat aside, my biggest issues with the game are probably these: 1. The story is littered with clichées and lacks a real conclusion (even in the true ending). To avoid spoiling anything, I'll just say that there are a whole bunch of plot points that are never addressed or concluded, and important characters that just disappear without you ever encountering them again. 2. The text speed is extremely slow and there's no way to increase it. 3. The dialogue/narration has some serious lack of punctuation, making me think the developer didn't even bother having someone proofread it. 4. No (or very few) autosaves. I lost a lot of progress once because the game crashed when I'd forgotten to make a manual save for quite some time. 5. One of the worst minigames in the history of gaming. It's completely reliant on luck, so you'll have to replay the same matches again and again until you're finally lucky enough to get decent rolls. There's also no way to quit a match once you've started it, so if you accidentally start the wrong one or notice early on that there's no way you're winning, you'll still have to sit through the whole thing until you're able to retry. I'm going to end this review with a simple recommendation: If you're looking for a modern game with a retro JRPG feeling, go play Chained Echoes instead.

They fixed a few of the issues from the first game, like the daily stat decay, but the sequel is still extremely grindy and you'll have to repeat monotonous tasks for hours on end just to make slight progress. Furthermore, I realized after sinking quite a lot of time into the game that Strength builds are hot garbage in the later parts, to the point where I now can't progress because I'm getting obliterated even by opponents with stats lower than half of my own. All of this wouldn't really be an issue if I could respec and try out various different builds to find a suitable one, but there's no such function in the game. Once you've put points into a skill, there's no turning back. In other words, if you don't make damn well sure to pick the right build from the very start of the game, you've pretty much screwed yourself over and will inevitably, just like me, run into a wall that you can't get past without replaying the entire game. If I was playing on PC, this is where I would have used Cheat Engine or something similar to reset my skill points, but since that isn't something I can do in the PS5 version, I'm forced to quit playing the game and accept that all this game was for me was a waste of time and money.

Was having a blast with the game, but then the last boss bugged out on me in a way that makes it literally impossible to fight again, thus also making me unable to get the rewards for defeating it and finishing the story. The only way to do that now is to start the entire game over again. No thanks.

Aside from a few minor annoyances, this game was pretty fun up until the final boss, but then it's all ruined because of the fact that you're forced into using all 8 main characters during the fight. This wouldn't have been an issue if this was like any other normal RPG, where all party members gain EXP and whatnot even if they're not actively participating in battles, but in Octopath Traveler II, they get NOTHING if they're part of your standby team. In other words, unless you go out of your way to spend tons of hours on farming EXP and JP to level them up separately from your main team, they're going to be severely underpowered by the end of the game, and you will inevitably be unable to defeat the final boss because of it. I get why the developer wants all the main characters to participate in the conclusive battle, but it's stupid beyond belief that they wouldn't add such a basic function as EXP sharing if that was the idea from the start. The way it's handled now just turns the game into a tedious and unnecessary grindfest, and it makes it really hard for me to find any motivation to continue playing. There aren't any difficulty or accessibility options in the game either, so it's not possible to make things any easier that way. If there's ever an Octopath Traveler III, I won't be buying it unless I'm sure the developer has handled this issue better.

A decent game completely ruined by a game-breaking glitch. I had been playing the PSP version for a good 15 hours or so when I arrived at the block puzzle in Angel Tower, but it's impossible to proceed from there, because the easternmost block gets destroyed the instant I try to move it, no matter in which direction. I've tried reloading my save, leaving the area and whatnot, but nothing helps. That one block cannot be moved without breaking, and since it's actually needed to proceed to the next area, I am now unable to progress any further in the game and have thus effectively wasted hours of my life on a game that is literally impossible to finish.

I have no idea why this game is so well received. It's basically just another highly mediocre Souls inspired action game that also happens to take place in the Star Wars universe. Some annoyances: 1. One of the most uncharismatic protagonists I've ever seen. If you look up the name "Buzz Killington" in a dictionary, you will most likely find a picture of this guy. 2. The protagonist feels really clunky to control. I expected fluid motions and combat, considering how jedis and siths in the movies usually move, but this guy is about as nimble as my refrigerator. He's also got what is probably the shortest dodge in the history of dodging. He literally just takes one baby step to the side (measuring maybe 8 inches/20 cm), which looks absolutely pointless and doesn't really get him out of harm's way at all. He can also do a roll by double tapping the dodge button, but it's slow and annoying to use compared to single tap dodges. 3. Extremely repetitive combat, even if you pick up all the skill upgrades in the talent tree. 4. Enemies attack you with no regard for their own safety. Expect to have people firing rocket launchers at you from point blank. 5. You can upgrade your lightsaber, but it's completely redundant. It could've been pretty cool if it would alter its stats, but it doesn't. All it does is change the appearance of the handle in various ways, but you can only see it in the game menu anyway, because it's so tiny and the protagonist is holding it at all times while you're playing. 6. It's often unclear which way you're supposed to go. You're usually presented with several ways to go, but there's no indication which one is an optional route and which one is where you need to go for story progression. If you accidentally pick the correct one right away, you tend to get locked inside the next area, and all the other routes, with collectibles and whatnot, become inaccessible so you'll need to backtrack through the entire area again at some point later in the game if you want them. 7. There's no fast travel, meaning you'll sometimes have to run back to the start from the end of a map you've already cleared, while also encountering all the enemies that have now respawned. No fast travel also means that coming back for collectibles you've missed becomes a tedious chore. 8. You will fall down pits A LOT because you either got knocked down there by an enemy or because the character didn't move the way you wanted him to while trying to jump, wall run, etc. These are just a few things I thought of off the top of my head. I might update this review with more later on, but I think I already got my point across in regards to what I think of this game.

For a completionist such as myself, the "Can't Cat-ch Me" trophy ruined the entire experience and made this game go from decent to utter garbage. What happens is you're chased by a horde of enemies that jump around all over the place, and to get the trophy you can't be grabbed by one of them even once. The sequence is way too long, and whether you're grabbed or not is based entirely on RNG, meaning it literally boils down to a matter of luck rather than skill if you make it through. It's frustrating beyond words and a prime example of awful game design. Unless this is addressed in a patch to actually give players a fair chance, I'm never touching this game again.

The battle arena ruins the entire game. I wouldn't be bothered by it if it was skippable, but you're actually forced to go through it to get a couple of cards, so there's no avoiding it for a completionist such as myself. To sum it up, they're expecting you to survive through 17 rooms filled with enemies constantly moving around while spamming attacks and homing projectiles at you from all directions. Everything you touch hurts you, which is something the enemies abuse by running, flying and jumping right into you. They don't stop next to you to attack you in a normal manner; they're literally trying to stand in the exact same place you are to hurt you through touching, because the developers decided that programming them in such a cheap and unfair way would be fun. Add to this the fact that your special skills (DSS) are deactivated, there are no healing items inbetween rooms, and you need to complete the entire arena in one go (because otherwise you'll have to do it all over again). To top it off, you also need to be lucky enough for the two cards to actually drop from the enemies, or else you have to start over from room 1 and try again. To call this bad game design would be an insult to bad games; this is atrocious beyond words and quite possibly the worst gaming experience of my life.

There's no separate trophy list for the games contained in this collection, meaning you're forced to play (and complete to 100%) the absolutely atrocious and severely outdated Rondo of Blood if you want to pick up a Platinum trophy for Symphony of the Night. I've seen people getting bashed a lot for saying that Rondo of Blood ****, but speaking as someone who didn't play it back in the days, it really does. SOTN has some of the same issues, such as cheap enemy placement and attack patterns, but you can take a lot more hits in that game, and you can upgrade you character to get even stronger. Here, you die in just a handful of hits, and after dying 3-or-so times, it's Game Over and you have to do the entire stage over again. However, the biggest issue by far are the controls. If they were decent, I could probably endure the other stuff, but it feels like they're constantly working against me here, making things a thousand times harder than they should be. Some people may say it's just a matter of getting used to them, but if "adapting to clunky controls" is a skill, it's certainly one I don't want to have enforced upon me. Rondo of Blood really doesn't hold up to today's standards, and anyone claiming otherwise must simply be blinded by nostalgia. For me, this was one of the worst gaming experiences of my life, and considering the fact that I've been a gamer since the NES era and have seen my fair share of horrendous games throughout the years, that should probably tell you more than any further words possibly could.

Excellent in terms of narrative and atmosphere, but also one of the worst gameplay experiences of my life. The game relies heavily on stealth, but unlike most other stealth games, where combat is an option whenever you're discovered, you will instead be killed instantly in a cutscene as soon as you're caught. The guards runs faster than you despite wearing heavy armor, so unless you're lucky enough to have a patch of grass right next to you, being noticed is more or less a guaranteed death sentence. This means that you'll be forced to waste large amounts of time on replaying the same sequences over and over again, including grabbing all the loot, which you lose whenever you die. It's frustrating beyond belief, and I eventually got so fed up with it that I couldn't be bothered to continue the game, despite wanting to see what happens in the story. A Plague Tale: Innocence could've been a remarkable visual novel or movie, but as a game, it's an utter disappointment.

1. Unplayable on "Quality" or "Resolution" modes due to how slow and sluggish the gameplay becomes. 2. Performance Mode looks blurry and undetailed and still suffers from lots of major frame drops. 3. Tons of bugs, several of which are gamebreaking. 4. Extreme amounts of copy+paste. Most areas look more or less identical, even down to minor details like where bags and containers are placed. It basically feels like you're just clearing out the same area over and over again. 5. The parkour, the most fundamental part of this game, is wonky at best. Expect to randomly fall (often to your death) just because your character decided to not grab a ledge when he should, or get stuck on a wall because he grabbed something he wasn't supposed to. This is irritating beyond words during any of the myriad of parkour challenges/sidequests littered throughout the game. 6. One of the choices in the game permanently lock you out of an entire district of the map, and there's no indication whatsoever that this will happen. You can swim in the area to grab a few chests, but it's extremely slow and any enemies or other encounters you would normally run into in there will be unavailable to you unless you replay the entire game and make a different choice. 7. When an enemy calls for reinforcements, they can spawn out of nowhere right next to you and attack you immediately, meaning you won't have the chance to finish looting that chest or whatever you were doing when it happened. 8. Human enemies dodge a lot, and they're immune to damage while they do it. It isn't unusual for them to keep dodging one attack after another, and you won't be able to hit them until they decide to stop. You can still hurt them by using AOE attacks (such as grenades) or a ranged weapon, but the former will alert zombies and other enemies, and the latter are extremely rare, have limited ammunition and deal low damage compared to the melee weapons. 9. Hitboxes are godawful. Even if there's an obvious distance between you and an enemy, they're usually able to hit you with attacks that would be a clear miss under normal circumstances. 10. There are trophies for maxing out your Health and Stamina respectively, but you can only do one per playthrough, so you're forced to go through the whole game twice. You can kinda circumvent this by save scumming, but that would require you to not upgrade your Health and Stamina until late in the game, effectively locking yourself out of using most of the Parkour and Combat skills and thus make playing even more of an annoyance than it already is. 11. Permanently missable sidequests and collectibles, which are required for trophies.

You all probably know what's good about this game already, so I'll go ahead and just list some negatives that have impacted my overall impression of it. - Subpar graphics. Breath of the Wild looked way better than this back when it was released, five years ago. - Low framerate. It's 30 at best, but often far below that. - The camera is constantly shifting on its own, and there's no way to make it stay in place. - Empty world. Aside from pokémon wandering around and some farming points, there's nothing else to find anywhere. No trainers, no points of interest, no treasure chests, etc. - You can't switch pokémon inbetween turns in battle. - Story NPCs and wild pokémon can fight you using several pokémon at once, but you're stuck using a single one even in those battles. Having to go 1 vs 3 isn't uncommon. - Unless you're fine with wasting precious money to buy poké balls, you'll have to craft your own. This, in turn, means that you'll end up having to farm resources, which is more than a little tedious. - To actually add a complete entry for a pokémon in your pokédex, you need to fulfill som criteria, like catching a certain number of that pokémon, defeating a certain number of that pokémon, and so on. It might seem like a fun addition on paper, but being forced to do more or less the same tasks over and over and over again for every single pokémon gets annoying pretty quickly. - The "flying mount" isn't actually flying but rather just gliding, making it borderline useless for travel unless you start off on a high plateau. - Clunky controls while riding mount. - Even if you're close enough to an enemy to focus on it, that doesn't mean your poké ball will reach it. You'll often be a few inches off, alerting the pokémon to your presence and potentially make it turn aggressive. - A lot of pokémon have a very long aggro range, making them impossible to approach unless you sneak up on them from behind. - Sneaking is extremely slow, so the pokémon you're approaching will most likely have turned around and noticed you by the time you're close enough to actually hit it with a ball. - If you're hiding in grass and throw a poké ball that then fails to catch a pokémon, you'll be noticed and probably attacked by that pokémon even if you're still hidden and should be impossible to find. - Boss fights against frenzied (yellow) pokémon are godawful. The dodge mechanic is clunky at best, and the window of opportunity for sending a pokémon in to fight the boss after it's been injured enough is frustratingly narrow. Unless you do it basically the same second the message pops up on screen, the poké ball will just bounce off and the boss will recover. What this means is that you'll usually be stuck slowly whittling away the boss' entire HP with throwable items.

Nothing to write home about. Some annoyances: 1. Poor performance. I'm usually at around 70-80 fps, but there are a lot of drops below 60 fps as well, despite the fact that I'm using an RTX 3080 card and play at ~1440p with several graphics options lowered from High to Medium. 2. No dedicated fullscreen, so you need to choose between windowed mode or borderless. There's also no way for you to alter the internal resolution, so you're forced to either use resolution scaling or change the resolution of the monitor itself. 3. The open world feels empty and pointless, since everything looks the same everywhere. 4. Only some of the collectibles are marked on the map after clearing outposts, so you'll be looking for needles in a haystack or be forced to use a walkthrough if you want to find the rest of them. 5. Some of the collectibles are located in mission areas you can't return to, and since there's also no way to replay missions after they're finished, you're permanently locked out of collecting these items (and thus also 100%ing the game) unless you get them all the first time you play these missions. 6. Collectibles you've already picked up still show on the map. You can barely tell them apart from uncollected ones, and there's no way to filter which ones to show. 7. Boring story. 8. No co-op. 9. Awful enemy design. The antagonists look like some sort of space gorillas, with little to no variation from individual to individual, and they all have the same burly voice. 10. Bullet sponge enemies. You'll have to unload a whole stream of shots into their unarmored heads for them to die, and even more if you're hitting armor or anywhere else on the body. 11. Enemies can kill you in one hit from full HP even on lower difficulties, forcing you to clear out an entire area all over again. 12. You randomly fall through the ground of the game world and die. This has happened to me on several occasions, usually when I'm using a special ability. I'll update this review if I notice anything else.

The racing itself is as great as expected, but the PC version is plagued by graphics optimization issues, and there's something weird going on with the sound, where it randomly cuts out for a second every so often. I think the thing that annoys me the most is a little more unexpected, though; the EXP and fast travel boards littered across the map. On one hand, I get that it's a way to validate the open world of the game, since without them, you'd basically just be roaming around an empty world going from event to event, but on the other hand, a lot of them are a real pain in the ass getting to. This is especially true for the fast travel boards, which are often located on top of buildings, meaning you have to do long jumps from mountains and whatnot just to reach them. They tend to require immaculate precision, which means you'll have to try over and over and over again until you finally get lucky enough to hit the right spot. I would've been fine with this if it was just a matter of the EXP boards, since EXP can easily be gained by other means, but ALL of the fast travel boards I've run into so far have been placed in such a manner, effectively forcing me to do these godawful jumps unless I want to traverse the map by road every single time I need to go to a different area. It's extremely tedious and irritating, to the point where it alone makes me lower my score by several points.

Oct 27 Update: As of today, the game is now crashing whenever I try to launch it, making it literally unplayable. I've tried a bunch of different solutions, like reinstalling, verifying files and whatnot, but nothing works. Thus, I'm lowering my score to the lowest possible. Original review: The same outdated concept once more, and this time, with lots of crashes to desktop. You play for 15 minutes, get a crash, lose 10 minutes worth of progress that you have to redo, and then start over again. Suffice to say, it's not a very fun experience.

Update, October 9: I played for a few hours earlier today, logged off with no indication of anything being wrong, and now when I logged back on, my character had been rolled back several levels and I'd lost a bunch of items as well as progress in the game. I looked around on the Diablo forums and found that this has actually happened to a lot of people, some of who have even lost high level characters entirely. Knowing that you can lose all your progress out of the blue is effectively making this game unplayable, and I'm lowering my score to the lowest possible amount to reflect my dissatisfaction. Original review: True to the original, in a bad way. Diablo II was great back in the days, but gaming has evolved a lot since then and some concepts have since been abandoned for a reason. Blizzard had the chance here to make some great and well needed gameplay improvements to make the game live up to today's standards, but instead chose to cater to all the whiny fanboys out there who start crying the moment something isn't exactly the way it used to be. Here are a few annoyances: 1. The inventory is ridiculously tiny. With no way of expanding it, you're forced to either skip most of the loot you find or teleport back and forth to town extremely often. 2. Ranged ammunition is expendable, and a single stack of arrows/bolts take up roughly 10% of your total inventory space. 3. Potions are single use and each take up one slot in your inventory. There's also no way to move potions automatically from the inventory to your belt (where they must be in order to use a hotkey for them), so you have to move them manually, one by one. 4. Stamina is limited and runs out very quickly, forcing you to walk at a snail's pace while it slowly recharges. 5. Gamepad controls are subpar. Diablo 3 worked great with a controller, but in this game, you're forced into using a cursor that you move around with the thumbstick. Considering the amount of inventory management in this game, this is a major issue. 6. You drop all your gear when you die. Unless you're keeping an extra set of equipment in your inventory or stash for these occasions, you'll have to fight any enemies you encounter during your corpse run in the nude. Every single one of my gripes about Diablo II: Resurrected are a matter of gameplay mechanics that should have been improved but haven't. If they'd just given us a bigger inventory, unlimited stamina and ammunition and some slightly better gamepad controls, this would've been a great remaster. Now, it's highly mediocre and I find myself lacking the motivation to continue playing.

Yeah, this game was a major letdown. Here are some of the things I don't like: - Autosaves are way too scarce. I was exploring the map, clearing out several enemy camps and forgot to make a manual save for a while, then died instantly from a fall with my motorcycle and lost all progress since my last story mission. - You can carry around a bunch of large items (like bottles), but you can only carry a very limited amount of bullets. It's a way to artificially enhance the difficulty of the game, and it's equally parts stupid and illogical. - Getting swarmed by a hundred enemies at once is a bit cool the first time it happens, but after that, it's just irritating. Every time it happens, you're forced into fleeing until you can get out of combat, return to the area and hope you don't get swarmed again. There's no entertainment value in it whatsoever. - You have to constantly refuel your motorcycle, because you can only ride it for a very short time before a full tank is emptied. Imagine if you'd have to stop to find gas every five minutes in real life. - Looting is slow and tedious, and you have to do it all the time if you want to have any chance of survival. They could've easily made the game autoloot everything, but the developers apparently thought we'd enjoy having to waste like 10% of the total playtime on looting. - Having to push R3 over and over and over again to highlight which objects you can interact with. You could technically play the game without this function, but you'd have to either miss out on most of the loot in the game or search every nook and cranny of every area. I could list a whole bunch of other gripes, such as the awful protagonist or uninteresting story, but I can't be arsed to get into any more detail, because it'd be just as big a waste of time as playing the actual game.

BEWARE OF CORRUPTED SAVES! I'd been playing the PC version of this game for around five hours today, suddenly lost my connection to the Ubisoft launcher and when I tried to save the game so I could restart it, I was told that my save file was corrupted. It didn't matter how many times I tried to save; the files just immediately became corrupted and I had to shut down the game without making a manual save. As if that wasn't enough, it also turns out that this game's autosave function is godawful. When I launched it again, I found out that the last autosave was just an hour into the game, meaning I effectively lost roughly four hours of questing and exploring the map. Since I can't know for sure the same thing won't happen again, there's simply no way I'm playing this game again anytime soon, maybe ever.

This is a game I've been looking forward to playing ever since the Kickstarter launched back in early 2016, but now that it's here, I'm tremendously disappointed. To sum things up briefly: 1. Great graphics and sound design. 2. Some of the most awful inventory management I've ever had the misfortune of experiencing in my years as a gamer. 3. A weird color filter, resulting in bad black levels that don't do my OLED TV justice. 4. Having to constantly run back and forth to light switches because a supernatural entity keeps turning them off. 5. Getting killed instantly, forcing you to restart from your last save over and over again, because a ghost materialized out of nowhere right next to you. 6. Wandering around aimlessly in a giant house looking for the one small clue that will let you progress to the next part of the game, where you'll have to look for the next small clue in that giant house. If you, for some reason, feel like one or more of the things mentioned above seem nice, consider giving Visage a go. If not, stay away.

A game that's a lot of fun until you, sooner rather than later, run into the inevitable gacha wall, where you're forced into paying a hefty sum of real money (unless you're willing to spend hundreds, possibly thousands, of hours on grinding, farming and waiting on cooldowns) just for the chance to win one of the characters or weapons you want. To add insult to injury, if you live in a European country, everything's a lot more expensive. 6480 Genesis Crystals, which nets you a total of 40 character/weapon rolls (that will mostly or, more likely, completely, consist of trash), costs $99.99. In Europe, the same package costs €109.99. A euro is already worth more than a dollar, but the fact that they also bumped up the price results in the $99.99 package costing roughly $130 in Europe. It's equal parts ridiculous and unacceptable, considering the fact that you're not even guaranteed a useful drop if you actually spend this amount. To further put things into perspective: In order to get the currently featured five star character, you have to do a total of up to 180 rolls in the game. These rolls will cost you a whooping $444 if you live in the US, and if you're unlucky enough to be European, it will cost roughly €489, which translates to $578. Let that sink in. $578 for ONE character, and this character will be replaced by a different one in a few weeks, meaning you'll have to cough up another $578 for the new one, another $578 for the next one after that, and so on. If there was a non-gacha version of this game, where you could find characters and weapons through some sort of ordinary progression system, I'd gladly pay full price for it, but in its current form, Genshin Impact is just a cheap money-grab that in no way deserves the praise it's been receiving. Quite frankly, I find it disgusting how miHoYo and other gacha game developers profit by exploiting people's tendency for gambling addiction. I wish everyone would stop throwing money at them so we'd be rid of this plague of the gaming world.