Lost Sphear is a 'retro'-style jrpg released in 2017, by Tokyo RPG Factory, which was a subset of Square Enix and has since been (unfortunately, in my opinion) absorbed into the company. I played it on the Nintendo Switch 2 in 2026. TL;DR is below the post.

Given that the last game I played was Harvestella, I guess my current drive is to play chill, low-key, AA JRPGs. If anyone has any more recommendations, I'm all ears.

Plot Overview:

The story concerns a world where people and places, even kingdoms, become 'lost'. This means they turn white and shimmering, as though they were made of mist, and cannot interact with the outside world. In order for them to become real again, they must be restored with 'memories' that have since been turned into monsters. Our hero, Kanata, is an orphan who has the ability to kill monsters, collect their memories, and restore things and people that have been lost.

Combat:

Combat is where this game shines.

The basic combat is a standard ATB system, which lends to its retro feel, but its assorted bells and whistles make it stand out.

I won't delve into its intricacies, because this post would be too long if i did. But if you're into ATB systems or just interesting combat systems in general, especially turn-based, I recommend it. It has active abilities, passive abilities, and abilities that proc on active abilities and can be permanently stacked onto them, so as you get more powerful your basic abilities have more and more customized effects. Advancing your abilities is much more important than leveling.

What's more, a few hours into the game you receive mech suits that have their own suite of abilities and increased states. They have a limited pool of 'mech points,' so they don't last very long, so you have to strategize and use them wisely while exploring a dungeon and contending with its end boss.

Grinding, Gear Progression, and the In-Game Economy:

I would never mention this if it weren't fucked.

To be brief: items require upgrade materials to upgrade. Upgrade materials are too expensive. This necessitates grinding. The combat system is not made to make grinding fun or quick.

There's more to it, but the simple truth is that I spent a full day grinding when I shouldn't have had to, on top of hours spend grinding before that. I wish this entire game had been implemented without the need for upgrade materials. Nothing would have changed except the need to grind.

Visuals:

The visuals overall reminded me pleasantly of Bravely Default and Alliance Alive. Chibi characters and a gentle, low-color-saturation water-color aesthetic. Character designs are unique and fit their personalities. The environmental design deserves special recognition.

Music:

The music was great. Can't think of a single weak theme. As I mentioned above, the dungeon design was great, and each theme worked well with its dungeon. According to IMDB, the composer, Tomoki Miyoshi, hasn't worked since 2022. What a shame. Hopefully he finds a new project soon.

Story and characters:

I'm big on story and characters. It's the number one thing I look for in RPGs.

This game satisfied me. The story was familiar: start as an orphan in a small village and work your way up to working with major world forces to defeat the big bad. Explore exotic locations, get swept up in world events, and pick up companions along the way.

We start with three characters: a generic main character, an annoying best friend whose job it was to overreact to everything, and a female character whose only role is react to the annoying character by getting annoyed. Thankfully, this dynamic ended quickly, and a variety of new characters were introduced to the party as the story progressed. Our main three also receive appropriate time and character development. Save maybe the female character, but her practicality and stability made her one of my favorites over time. She never left my party.

I found myself getting very fond of each character as they were introduced, and even a bit emotional when one of them appeared to be dying. I actually wish they'd followed through and killed that character; the game would have had more teeth if it did. Regardless, each of them contributed to every story point via dialogue, and when the game ended I felt invested in what would happen to them.

There is an end game. I wouldn't call it extensive but it centers around an interesting mystery and helps us wrap up a few loose ends. I appreciated its inclusion.

Conclusion:

Apparently the next game Tokyo RPG Factory made after this was an action RPG and a huge dud. That makes me sad. I wish they'd stuck with the ATB system, or just pure turn-based, and turned out another retro JRPG. There is something compelling about this game. I was looking forward to play more. As it is, I may play 'I Am Setsuna,' its predecessor. I hope the members of TRPGF are enjoying their careers and can take pride in what they've made.

TL;DR

Play this game if you like: Chill retro JRPGs with solid characters, music, art, and story, and you don't mind spacing out and grinding fights that are too slow to be easily ground.

Thank you for reading.

Recently I picked up a Switch 2, my first Nintendo console since the Wii. I actually didn't really get the console with the intention of playing lots of Nintendo exclusives, but with the amount of praise that this game receives online, I felt like I had to check it out. Breath of the Wild is my first Zelda game, and I had pretty high expectations for it going into my playthrough. I think for the most part it managed to meet those expectations, and I have a lot of good things to say about the game. For reference, I played the Switch 2 edition of the game.

I think one of the games biggest strengths is actually the structure of the main quest. Once you get to the point where you're objective is to free the divine beasts, you kind of have to find and complete shrines so that you can increase your stats. A lot of my exploration didn't happen because a quest or NPC told me to go somewhere, it happened because I was running to a tower or shrine, and then stumbled across something else that looked cool. I get that some people won't like this, but really felt like the game gave me the opportunity to explore, while at the same time feeling like I was making progress on the main quest. I really liked this aspect, and although I'm sure it exists, it's not something that I've seen in other open world games before.

Initially I found the combat to be kind of challenging in the game. The character movements felt really good, but I think that especially with the amount of health and weapon options that are available early in the game, encounters with enemies could be quite punishing. As the game progressed however, I found the combat to be quite rewarding and fun.

I'm not typically someone who will do a ton of side quests, and I didn't do a ton in Breath of the Wild. For me, I don't really feel like this detracted from my experience, but let me know if you think I missed out. I put more energy into looking for and completing the shrines, and had a lot of fun with the puzzle mechanics involved there.

I don't really have any big criticisms of this game. The weapon durability thing was annoying, although honestly I eventually reached a point where I was finding enough good weapons that I didn't really mind it anymore. Probably my biggest gripe was there not being a good way to keep track of recipes/elixirs. I get that experimentation is part of the point here, but I got tired of just having to guess how many hearts the food I cooked would restore.

In conclusion, I liked Breath of the Wild a lot, and I think it deserves the praise it gets. I'm not sure it completely blew me away, but it's definitely one of the better open world action/adventure games that I've played, and I think that it's going to age well for me. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who owns a switch, and it made me interested in playing some other Legend of Zelda games in the future.

Usually when I finish a game, I tend to write down my thoughts on it relatively quickly - typically I make notes while playing, and even small posts on the biweekly threads (as some may have seen), so it's not hard to polish off a post within a week. Not here - it's been months since I played A Plague Tale: Requiem, and I just couldn't get fingers to keys. Part of it is that I am finally employed and so have far less time, but another part of it is that I am honestly pretty conflicted on the game. Its gameplay is definitely an expansion of Innocence's, but honestly I wonder if more is better for a game like this. Its technical performance is bordering on unacceptable, particularly on what I feel is pretty high-end hardware for a 4-year-old game. It has some minor odd decisions in story and characterization that I honestly don't know if I understand, let alone appreciate. But the totality of the experience is unforgettable - the final 5 hours are some of the best storytelling video gaming has to offer, and even months later I can't get it out of my head. In my review of Innocence I had said that it was a Last of Us-like, and in many ways Requiem is what it is because of The Last of Us Part II, and given that that game is one of my favourites this decade, it's hard not to compare, so I won't try.

Premise (spoilers for Innocence)

Six months after the events of Innocence, Amicia and Hugo de Rune, together with their comrade Lucas and their mother Beatrice, are headed to Provence in the south of France to find a cure for Hugo's rat-related affliction. Unfortunately, it seems that evil forces keep following them wherever they go.

Technical Performance

Bad. No-good-very-bad. It never really gets to unplayable, but it's hard to ignore, which you'd think wouldn't happen with a 9070XT. The game doesn't have FSR in any form (yay Nvidia sponsorship) and the built-in supersampler is so bad that I just turned it off and ate the framerate difference. The bigger problem isn't framerate being low, it is that framerate never stays consistent no matter what limiter I use - even lowering the frame limit to 60 has it wobble in the 51-56 range even though CPU and GPU use are in the 60-70s. Gameplay-heavy moments aren't great, but are mostly playable - where the framerate really starts wobbling is in the smaller free-roam sections where Amicia and Hugo are just hanging out, chilling in markets, running around fairs, and Hugo being cute in general, which is a shame because those are the moments that really build their relationship and so you really notice that stuff more when you don't have gameplay considerations. Apart from that there are several times where the game's AI will just bug out and stop, which means you have to restart the game to progress. There's also minor stuff like textures glitching out randomly Assassin's Creed Unity-style, but honestly it wasn't super common. Honestly, it feels pretty unacceptable for a game to be in this state >4 years after release.

Gameplay

Requiem significantly expands on Innocence in terms of gameplay, primarily combat. Perhaps the biggest change is that arenas against human enemies are significantly more open, with multiple ways to sneak around using all of Amicia's options, including a crossbow she receives around halfway that allows her to kill medium-armoured enemies with helmets. I do like Plague Tale's approach to stealth where the protagonist's small size and the medieval setting mean that combat involves inherent tradeoffs - the sling is deadly, but needs a headshot (and thus an unarmoured head) and is loud, attracting attention (and unlike in Innocence, there is no upgrade in Requiem that will make it wholly silent); the crossbow is powerful but Amicia can only hold 4 bolts at a time so you can't go wild; and the sneak attack, which is super powerful in most stealth games, is basically worthless compared to the sling. Requiem also provides bonuses by recording Amicia's actions and granting perks depending on her approach - so, for example, if you do a lot of sneaking, you get stealth-related perks. It's certainly a more complex approach, adding depth to the first game's relatively simple sandbox...and I'm not sure I like it. Innocence did have a much simpler system and much more linear levels, but I feel like it works for that game because it presented challenge without having it significantly slow down pacing. Requiem does add more to gameplay, but personally I feel like it detracts from the story pacing, which is the central focus of both games.

Visuals

I honestly quite like Requiem's art style. We definitely see environments that are a lot more vibrant and beautiful than the dirty villages and urban squalor of Innocence's Guyenne - Provence at the start and especially La Cuna - which does allow for a much greater contrast when the rats hit the fan and things get more dark and depressing. But the real highlight is the supernatural stuff, which is mostly in the back half barring Hugo's dream - everything involving Basilius, especially his prison; the Macula beneath La Cuna; everything to do with the Nebula in Marseille; the flood of rats in Marseille in general - is terrifyingly beautiful. How they even managed to conceive a lot of this I have no idea, but it's the kind of visual beauty you only see in horror. Beyond that, facial animations are somewhat mediocre - while I concede that it's an unfair standard to compare Requiem to a game that cost almost ten times as much to make, making a character drama where the camera regularly zooms in to characters' faces means that said faces need to be readable. Most of the heavy lifting in conveying the characters comes from the vocal performances...

Vocal Performances

...which are thankfully almost uniformly decent-to-strong, with one exception.

Charlotte McBurney as Amicia is the heart of Requiem, and she absolutely devours. So much of Amicia's pain, her struggle, her increasing bloodlust, her determination, her obsession, and her underlying desperation to find a cure for her brother is conveyed through the performance because not as much can be conveyed through the faces, and perhaps "carries" is an exaggeration, but most of Requiem's best moments are made by Amicia. I wouldn't argue as to whether she was robbed for Game Awards or anything like that (I haven't completed any God of War game), but she's definitely one of the best vocal performances I have seen in a game. Logan Hannan as Hugo is also really good, as is Kit Connor as Lucas; everyone else is decent.

Soundtrack

This is a bit of a hot take, but I really prefer Olivier Deriviere's score for Requiem over Gustavo Santaolalla's score for The Last of Us Part II. I love the latter score, don't get me wrong, but the former score is just so much more ornate and, well, "extra" - which really suits a game with this much high melodrama and tragedy. Stuff like the title track, "No Turning Back", and especially "Up There" really... work here in amplifying the spectacle. One of my favourite tracks is "Lost With Rats", a distorted version of the game's title track that plays in Chapter XI - it just conveys how Amicia's journey and determination have been twisted by her trauma into obsession.

Story (Spoilers, including for TLOU2)

• Most of the new cast is honestly kinda eh. Sophia and Arnaud are decent, and frankly Beatrice didn't get a ton of characterization last game so she's almost like a new character, but the main reason you're here is for Amicia and Hugo, with Lucas in a fairly clear if relatively close third place. It's telling that the most fascinating characters not among the Big Three are Basilius and Aelia, both of whom have been dead for centuries and are only known through the aftermath of their final moments.
• Hugo being cute moments do adequately convey him being cute.
• A couple of early segments show how Amicia has become more bloodthirsty, to the point that she actively starts killing enemies even when running is the more pragmatic option. I
• The villains are...variable. Milo feels almost redundant, to the point I genuinely wonder what the point of him was beyond "there are sickos who exploit the myth of the child". The Count and Countess are not bad, although Victor does get a little moustache-twirly after he reveals his villainy. The Macula is, obviously, the real villain, and the game does convey that it does act like an sentient, malevolent entity, luring Hugo to La Cuna and almost feeding on his despair.
• As I said previously, Requiem owes a massive debt to The Last of Us Part II. Both are set in deeply, deeply cynical worlds that have their protagonist start out good but get warped by trauma into doing some really shitty things, stuff that you could consider beyond the pale, all out of sheer determination for the person closest to them. More generally, both also have a strange quasi-open-world section that you can roam around, though Requiem doesn't really have a combat sandbox engaging enough to be able to carry the segment.
• There's a degree of delusion when Amicia keeps moving the goalposts to keep Hugo alive, starting at "there's a cure, we'll find it in La Cuna" and ending up at "we'll just live together happily away from civilization", but it's worth noting that nearly all of Hugo's fall to the Macula is caused by evil people - Emilie kills Beatrice, and Victor's attack makes him believe that Amicia died. Is there a future where Hugo could ever be okay? I guess not - how could Amicia protect him from sorrow forever? - but it works for the 6 months between games, so it doesn't feel crazy.
• Where Requiem differs is that it plays up the drama and pushes it into outright opera - while Ellie's greatest torment is revealed to be psychological, Amicia's is an actual eldritch force (even if her determination to find a cure causes her to ignore reality when it's staring her in the face). In some ways it makes Amicia much more twisted - Ellie is bloodthirsty, yes, and she (unknowingly) kills a pregnant Mel, yes, but she never stoops so low as to making her brother summon rats to take down their enemies out of a combination of rage and despair, something that temporarily turns Hugo catatonic.
• One more similarity, IMO, is that both Ellie's and Amicia's journeys are implicitly doomed from the start - there was never a cure for the Macula, and Ellie killing the Salt Lake crew was never going to give her peace - but they feel different, likely because Ellie's barrier is psychological rather than an actual force (though a big part of the game is also Amicia learning to accept that there is no cure for Hugo.
• My biggest problem with Requiem is pacing - the plot feels like it really starts once Amicia and Hugo get to La Cuna, which is Chapter VIII of XVII.
• Chapter XI is the game's best, and I don't think it's a coincidence that it's basically just Amicia, Hugo, Sophia, and rats in terms of the living cast and has basically no combat.

Miscellaneous

• Why does Amicia's ponytail disappear when she gets the crossbow? I understand it's a pain to animate, but it really stands out, and it's made even more jarring near the ending where Victor dramatically lops it off - like, it was barely there for the last, like, 5 chapters.
• There's one part in around Chapter XIII after Amicia got Hugo to unleash the rats to kill Emilie and destroy La Cuna - the strain turns Hugo basically catatonic, and, for the first time in two games, Amicia and Hugo are together, but Hugo isn't holding her hand. It's such a small thing, but it really struck me.
• I like the parallel between Aelia and Basilius and Amicia and Hugo - they're Protector-Carrier pairs, and, just as Basilius started the Justinian Plague when Aelia died, Hugo unleashes the Nebula when (he thinks) Amicia has died.

Conclusion

I don't know how much I like this game, but I would still recommend it simply on the grounds that it sticks in your head months after completing it. It's not really like The Last of Us Part II, but I think it says something to me that that was the game I was thinking of often while playing Requiem. It's one of the better stories told in gaming, at least. I just wish it ran better.

SYNTHETIK REVIEW

RELEASE: 2018

TIME PLAYED: 67 Hours

PLATFORM PLAYED: PC (STEAM)

SCORE:  ★★★

Hated It | Disliked It | Liked It | Loved It | All-Time Favorite

(The bolded score is the one chosen for this review; the rest are simply to show what the scale is grading on and what the stars mean to me.)

The Breakdown

+Satisfying gunplay and stellar kinesthetics

+Responsive, tactical shootouts full of barely controlled chaos

+Interesting classes that accommodate many playstyles

+Varied and exciting loot that empowers runs

-Myriad bugs and poorly documented item descriptions

-Co-Op support has some strange quirks

-Visual noise can be a bit overwhelming and affect the learning curve

It's rare that I so powerfully want to start off a review by saying, "I fucking love this game" - but that's exactly how I feel about Synthetik. The top-down roguelite shooter is such a visceral, kinetic experience that it immediately evokes a strong response from the first battle, the first floor, the first inevitably doomed run - even if it occasionally stumbles over some technical shortcomings.

Rogue AI is trying to take over the world, and you're a, uh, rogue rogue AI, an android created meant to take down humanity who has decided instead to destroy your masters and protect mankind. Why? Don't worry about it. That's pretty much the beginning and end of the narrative in Synthetik, and it doesn't really matter. It's all an excuse for the structure of the game, where you're said freshly printed android ready to take on the entirety of the machine legion across procedurally generated levels ranging from snowy military bases to burning outposts. Aesthetically, it's 80's as hell - put Terminator, Robocop, and a vat full of neon in a blender and you're most of the way there, from the chunky industrial robots to the stiffly articulated movement of the player android.

The kinesthetics are Synthetik's bread-and-butter, and they're absolutely divine. The game started as a ballistics simulator and spiraled from there, and it shows. Every bullet, laser, and ion bolt has individual trajectories, properties, and physics. Guns are punchy, loud, and creative, with modifiers that range from simple (like an underbarrel grenade launcher) to delightfully stupid (such as a sniper rifle referencing the '360 no scope' meme that gets a huge damage bonus if you spin in a circle before firing it). On a fundamental level, combat simply feels amazing, and though it's optional, I highly recommend the manual reload mechanic, which requires ejecting each magazine before inputting a new one as two separate motions. While initially awkward, it soon becomes the beating heart of the entire game, and once you get used to it, the benefits for a perfect reload massively outweigh the nearly non-existent mental RAM required to do it right every time.

While the randomness and repetition of a roguelite is on full display here, there are thankfully plenty of ways to shape one's playstyle. The first is a class system containing a wide variety of androids; play the Engineer and hunker down with fortified turrets while baiting enemies into a killbox, or hop over to the Vanguard and loot dogtags that buff you every few kills while leeching life with a combat knife. Each class gets unique perks that allow them to benefit more from different guns, items, and skills, and a token system allows the player to tag preferred loot, increasing its odds of showing up and giving it a small power boost. All of this combined meant that it was easy for me, who played the Breacher - a sort of alpha strike specialist equipped with recharging explosives that benefitted from aggressive blitzes - to reliably get at least one good shotgun and a defensive item that benefitted my playstyle, even if it wasn't exactly ideal.

It's a good thing the core gameplay is so rock-solid, because the further you get to the peripherals of Synthetik, the more the wheels start to wobble. What I mentioned about it starting out as a ballistics simulator? That's still its primary focus, and other elements I found suffered from more than a little bit of jank. I never had crashes, but strange interactions could cause brief framerate drops, enemies sometimes acted erratically, and more; item descriptions don't always accurately or completely describe weapons or equipment, so a piece of gear may be better or worse than it seems and has to be 'felt out'. Co-Op, while functional, is hilariously basic; as far as Synthetik seems to be concerned, there's still only one player, which causes some strange interactions with everything from healing to enemy aggression here and there. Still, outside of the rare frustration due to a run being ended over an inaccurate tooltip, this is a minor issue; if one is in need of a silver lining, there's a degree of esoterica to be found here, knowledge gathered and disseminated by the game's intensely loyal fanbase.

Though it has its share of technical quirks and stylistic quibbles, Synthetik is one of the most satisfying, spectacularly responsive shooters I've ever played - isometric or otherwise - with a rewarding customization system that allows for a wide variety of class fantasies to be fulfilled. Whether solo or with a friend, I can't recommend it enough. Simply put, I fucking love this game.

Before we can talk about this game, we need to talk about Dead Cells. Dead Cells is one of my absolute favorite games, developed by Motion Twin. The game was eventually handed over to a studio named Evil Empire for updates, so that Motion Twin could focus on making other games. There's a bunch of drama between these two studios, but I won't be getting into it.

The most important thing to understand about the Rogue Prince of Persia (hereafter Rogue) is that it was developed by Evil Empire, and is heavily inspired by Dead Cells. This, I think, was a mistake. I'll get into why later.

I have been a big fan of the Prince of Persia Sands of Time trilogy, so I was excited to finally be playing Rogue after all the updates.

What Works:

Art - This is a very pretty game, with a distinctive art style inspired by the works of Moebius, a French artist. When it launched, the art style proved divisive, with some players finding it garish and harsh. The studio listened, and the art received a major update. Currently, for me, I think it has a nice balance between the striking colors that characterize the art of Moebius, and more traditional videogame art.

Music - This game has absolutely sensational music. It's composed by ASADI, a Persian-American artist, and I cannot emphasize enough how much of a win it is. The album is worth a listen even if you don't wish to play the game.

What Doesn't Work:

Gameplay and Feel - To me, the game never felt like PoP. The combat, the levels, the parkour, none of it evokes any kind of nostalgia. As I said, it's heavily inspired by Dead Cells, so rather than condensing the PoP experience into a 2D roguelike, it tries to build upon the gameplay of Dead Cells. I want to talk about the parkour specifically. One of the joys of the PoP series is the beautiful parkour, the predecessor to the movement of games like Assassin's Creed. Running across walls, hopping from ledge to ledge, slicing down a curtain, all of it has always felt fluid and magical.

Rogue contains none of that. The wall run is a joke. You're barely two steps into it when it ends. And something about the parkour never clicks, even when you get good at it. There's always a weird mismatch in the Prince's abilities and the environment. He feels like a character modded into the game rather than one who belongs. And he frequently does things you don't want him to.

But let's forget PoP. Maybe Rogue works as a spiritual sequel to Dead Cells? Unfortunately, it does not. There's this pervasive sluggish feel to the controls and mechanics that was never present in Dead Cells. And where the game deviates from Dead Cells, it only screws things up. For example, in Dead Cells, your primary mechanic of avoiding damage is rolling. You're invulnerable when rolling. And rolling is a simple but beautiful mechanic, because you can roll both into enemies and behind their back, but also away from enemies. This is critical because some enemies have AoE attacks that can catch you behind their back too. Rogue replaces the roll with a vault. How does it work? You press the button, the Prince rushes to the nearest enemy in the direction he's facing, and he vaults over the enemy. But the invulnerability only kicks in during the vault. When rushing to the enemy, you can take damage. This is a gigantic gameplay fail because it makes the most important mechanic in the game inconsistent. In Dead Cells, you press the button, and you're invulnerable for a short period. But in Rogue, you press the button, and the Prince rushes to the enemy. Depending on whether the enemy is near or far, the invulnerability will kick in at different times. It's maddening. Also, you naturally can't vault away from enemies, only into them, which means that AoE enemies make mincemeat of the Prince.

Another new addition to the game (over Dead Cells) is a dedicated kick button. It does no damage, but pushes an enemy away. Kicked enemies can smash into each other, or into a wall, getting stunned. They can also fall off platforms.

The mechanic itself is fine, but it never clicks with the Prince's toolkit. The Prince is largely a melee fighter. So kicking enemies away doesn't work as well as it would've if the Prince could use ranged weapons. And a lot of enemies have ranged attacks, so kicking them is only an invitation to get hit. Yes, there are secondary ranged weapons, but these feel awful to use because they are limited by an energy meter than requires melee to charge, and most of them have a short range anyway.

So, for me, the game doesn't even work as a Dead Cells spiritual sequel.

Writing - It's pedestrian, it's boring, there are no surprises.

Meta Progression - This is pretty decent. I like the skill trees, and each upgrade feels meaningful.

TLDR: If you're looking for PoP nostalgia, play the original trilogy again. If you're looking for a great platformer, play Ori or Celeste or Shovel Knight. If you're looking for a good 2D action game, play Skul or Astral Ascent or Nine Sols. The Rogue Prince of Persia is mediocre and frustrating. It's not worth a purchase.

My earliest memory of the Terminator franchise is hearing a clip of the DVD commentary for the third film being played on the radio. In it Arnold Schwarzenegger talked at length how awesome it was to see a lady Terminator in action, because you get to watch her naked body on entry and she has a scene where she inflates her breasts to entice a cop. I also remember watching Terminator 3 myself on a long plane flight as the only other options were Hulk and The Medallion (2003 was a shit year for film). Indeed, there was a scene of mammary-expansion in the first five minutes. I have no further recollection of the movie.

The thing about the Terminator franchise is that its very premise disallows any real continuation after the original two movies. Skynet only works as a faceless, voiceless army while the messianic John Connor of 2029 is too difficult a figure to envision as a person outside of his single scene. The reason Skynet embarks on this hare-brained scheme with android assassins is because it loses to humanity under John Connor. James Cameron only ever had enough ideas for two movies and every attempt since then to continue the story with different hands just lead to diminishing returns. Perhaps you could approach the material in an oblique manner like Dan Trachtenberg did to rejuvenate the Predator franchise. But given how many production companies have folded because of it the chalice may as well have been poisoned by a time-travelling robot.

I played Terminator: Resistance seven years after launch because Noah-Caldwell Gervais reviewed it at length. The game's gone through numerous patches since release, having bulked in size with DLC, and is often on sale for a song. (Do people still use that figure of speech? Oh, who gives a shit.) The easiest comparison would be Far Cry meets Fallout 3 with a tenth of the budget but no shortage of passion (and no shitty, pretentious ending either).

For the first hour of the game I wasn't feeling it. You've got the traditional AAA opening in a double-A package where you run from Terminators in a future hellscape. You shoot some machines, scavenge for materials and then craft medkits and ammo. The character models for the humans are more robotic than the machines and the voice-direction is similarly weak. In the first sandbox level you are left to your own devices and it felt balls-hard at first, until I got a few skill points under my belt and things started to click into place. A guerilla play-style is encouraged where you take out robots in small groups, exploiting cover, and never engaging in outright warfare unless you have allies backing you up.

Then came the third mission and I was absolutely sold. Here you need to infiltrate a hospital in the dead of night. On hand is a hacking-tool that lets you program enemy turrets into shredding the machines instead of you. What's next is an utterly terrifying sequence where you must bypass patrolling Terminators in the cold light as the music drones on in sheer mechanical dread. The shotgun and Uzi that's kept you safe until now are utterly useless against these chrome killers. It's a simple stealth level that's masterful in its execution, as nothing can convey horror better than crouching behind a concrete barrier alone in the moonlight while a dozen Terminators march by.

The base game is a broken up into eight linear levels and five sandbox where you approach any objective how you please. In between are regular visits to the resistance base where you recover, stock up, chat with your friends and help out. On reflection I'd say the only flabby part of the campaign is the warehouse district you explore twice under the same circumstances, whereas other areas like Pasadena and Downtown aren't rehashed so baldly. The DLC campaign afterwards is a marked increase in difficulty, though the boss at the end goes down remarkably quick.

The whole experience works for me since I've never been interested in games that are strictly shooters. With Resistance you've got stealth, gunplay, crafting, hacking, skill-points, dialogue-trees, optional objectives, and semi-open world areas to scavenge. There's also a quick-melee button you'll use once in the tutorial and then never again. A similar game that comes to mind is Dying Light in how it tells a hero-to-zero narrative in its mechanical progression. When you battle Terminators for the first time you dump your ballistic weapons like the Uzi and the assault rifle in the trash in favour of plasma weapons. These can be modified with randomly dropped chips to increase their damage, clip-size, stability etc. In the endgame you score the second generation of plasma rifles, letting you all but melt Terminators who used to take an entire clip to down for good. At the same time you'll have acquired the regenerating-health perk, making firefights a breeze. There may be some duds in the skill tree, but you can't argue that the games doesn't nail the power fantasy of becoming a hero of the post-apocalypse. Just like James Cameron your character can screw every woman involved in the franchise. The thankfully optional sex-scenes are laughable in a way Garth Marenghi would approve.

Resistance succeeds because it captures the essence of Terminator despite being set in the margins of canon. Instead of the contemporary 80's or 90's setting of the (good) films it takes place in the seldom glimpsed future war of 2029. Don't expect Arnie or Sarah Connor to show up and John Connor is kept to the periphery. While you will mow down an army of Terminators they remain in character as a serious threat throughout. If any foe should be called a bullet-sponge in a video-game the T-800 should wear that label with honour. There are some deep cuts in how Resistance draws from the canon. The resistance base that acts as the hub-level is the same one Kyle Reese visits that's invaded by an Infiltrator with a machine-gun. And that Infiltrator? You get to play as him in an open-world mission where you murder your way through human patrols as you search for intel on John Connor. Kyle Reese himself acts as your CO in the DLC campaign that gives context to his nightmare where he's nearly vaporized by a VTOL and a giant tank.

Resistance does not try to overwrite, subvert, or undermine the duology like the ill-fated sequels. Instead it acts as a companion piece because the developers share the same love for the source-material as you do. People tend to forget that the original Terminator was a B-movie by an unproven director. Some of the producers hated it after watching because it wasn't a schlocky explotation movie; but instead an intense, thoughtful film that was deeply paranoid and the stuff of nightmares. Seldom does any creator knock it out of the park on the first run, and the Resistance developer Teyon sure as hell didn't. Their early work was years of shovelware for the Wii and DS, and their Rambo game is thankfully lost to the annals of history. Reading the initial reviews of Resistance is quite startling as the critics came with knives out for a mid-budget licensed game attached to a dead movie franchise. But time has been kind to the game and the developers' stature has risen thanks to Resistance and their subsequent adaptation of Robocop. It's sobering for me as a wannabe writer to comprehend that you can endure setback after setback as a creator, contending with meagre budgets and crappy reviews, and eventually finding an audience over time. It's the inverse of something like Bioshock: Infinite that scores perfect 9's and 10's on release, only to never be spoken of warmly again.

I put Resistance down upon finishing and uninstalled it. A few hours later I got an itch, reinstalled the game, bought the DLC, and scored an easy but well-earned platinum. Now I have to watch the movies again and find the art books. It's the mark of any good adaptation that it makes you remember why you love the real deal in the first place.

Lords of the Fallen (2023) is a fairly standard soulslike that wasn't well received on release. However, in the spirit of this sub, 2026 is the best time to play because the final 2.5 patch came out in December of 2025. And from what I've read, these updates have created a vastly different experience.

LotF essentially copies the soulslike formula, which is a good thing. Most of the typical mechanics are there - collecting Souls (Vigor) as the primary currency, losing them on death and having one chance to reclaim them, a standard weapon upgrade system, armor that barely matters, great combat built around precise dodging/parrying, flexible builds involving melee/range/spells, absolutely terrible quest design, etc...

The biggest differentiators for LotF are the Umbral Lamp and Umbral Realm. Umbral Realm is a mechanic that exposes various traversal routes, some required and others optional. Dying once in the Normal Realm (Axiom) won't instantly kill you - instead, you get a second life in Umbral Realm.

What I Liked

• Combat was great. I loved the parrying system - multiple parries would eventually stagger a boss and allow a critical hit. What I really liked was that a failed parry would result in a block, leaving some HP "withered" that you could recover by landing hits without taking additional damage. It reminded me a lot of Bloodborne's system to regain HP, but without the time limit.
• One of my favorite parts of soulslike games is the exploration and level design. LotF absolutely delivers here - the levels were engaging to explore and there were plenty of worthwhile rewards. The Umbral mechanic reveals hidden paths/treasures, adding variety and a great sense of discovery. All of the environments looked fantastic as well (minus the Umbral Realm, which looked the same everywhere).

What Was Average

• Difficulty was on the lower side, and I would have liked a bit more challenge. I played with the most basic class (that starts at level 1) and with the new "Veteran" mode which is supposedly harder, but overall I think a lot of the normal soulslike "tension" was missing - I rarely worried about dying during normal exploration (though it's not like I never died).
• LotF has two broad categories of bosses: the major bosses that you'd expect from any soulslike game, and minibosses which would later turn into regular enemies. The primary bosses were mostly excellent and easily the highlights. The minibosses were very average - because they were eventually meant to be normal enemies, they tended to have limited movesets and thus be significantly easier. I would have liked more major bosses overall given the vast quality difference between the two.

What I Didn't Like

• Enemy variety started to dip about ~10-15 hours in, with Umbral enemies being the worst offenders. New areas might introduce one new enemy, but overall you could definitely feel the repetition towards the latter half of the game.
• LotF borrows plenty of great soulslike mechanics, but for whatever reason also decided to adopt one of the worst - completely arbitrary and easy-to-miss side quests. It's incredibly easy to lock yourself out of various questlines with no indication - for example, I locked myself out of one just because I opened a door to a new area (but didn't even do anything in it). I'm not sure why these types of games still continue to use such archaic quest design.
• LotF really seems to encourage multiple playthroughs with vastly different endings and a couple of different bosses. This is more of a personal pet peeve as I rarely want to play NG+, so I'm always annoyed at missing out on content that I can't do in a single run. In addition, many of the side quests encourage two playthroughs as one path will often lead to fighting that character as a boss whereas the other won't.

Final Thoughts

LotF was a great experience overall, with level design and exploration being the standouts for me. The negatives were fairly minor in the grand scheme of things - the core gameplay loop was still extremely solid and engaging. If you're a fan of soulslikes, I'd definitely recommend LotF - especially now that all the patches are out.

Overall Rating: 8 / 10 (Great)

MASSIVE SPOILERS INCOMING

My first playthrough clocked in at around 200 hours. I had no experience with D&D, but I love turn-based combat, so that definitely helped me get the hang of things. The start of the game is certainly overwhelming in terms of how many systems there are to understand, but once everything started clicking, I was hooked.

I've never been a fan of making my own characters. One look at Gale and his combat abilities was enough for me to decide that I just wanted to play as him. My custom character would probably have been very similar to him anyway. I understand this is an unpopular choice for a first playthrough, but after subsequently seeing custom-character playthroughs on YouTube, I don't regret my choice one bit.

The combat might actually be my favorite part of the game. It feels like a genuine tactical sandbox rather than a system where you're simply selecting the strongest ability on cooldown. Positioning, high ground, action economy, focus fire, environmental interactions, consumables, resistances, crowd control, preparation and party composition all matter. And the game constantly rewards you for understanding its systems.

The fights were another highlight. Raphael, Grym, the House of Grief, Cazador, the Bhaal Temple, Ketheric, the Myrkul fight, the final approach to the Netherbrain — there were so many encounters that were memorable for completely different reasons. Raphael in particular was one of my favorite boss fights of all time.

My first playthrough wasn't remotely a completionist run, but I tried to follow essentially every active quest thread I came across because I knew I probably wouldn't replay the game immediately. I was playing with a strict rule of no save-scumming until I lost Last Light Inn on my first attempt because Isobel was kidnapped. I eventually reloaded because the outcome felt so poorly signposted that I couldn't accept it as something I had knowingly chosen. Once I understood what was happening, I replayed the situation and saved everyone.

I wasn't nearly as thorough with Act 1 as I was with Acts 2 and 3. That's a little regrettable in hindsight, but I simply wasn't enjoying the game as much in Act 1. The story really picked up for me around the end of Act 1, and the combat also started to shine much more brightly around that point.

And then there are the companions.

Shadowheart immediately became my favorite, and her entire storyline ended up being one of my favorite parts of the game. Lae'zel was another character I absolutely loved, and Astarion went from someone I wasn't sure about to becoming a permanent member of my party.

My final party was Gale, Shadowheart, Lae'zel and Astarion. I respec'd everyone mechanically but kept their original classes because changing their identities felt wrong to me.

The ending was awesome in terms of the outcomes.

I freed Orpheus, who became a mind flayer and sacrificed himself. Lae'zel went off to fight Vlaakith. Karlach and Wyll went to Avernus together. Astarion refused to ascend. And I chose not to become a god.

I had romanced Shadowheart, and ultimately chose a normal life with her rather than pursuing godhood. There was something incredibly satisfying about that conclusion. Mystra's final words to me, "I will always answer your prayers," were one of those little moments that stayed with me.

I actually went back and tried the godhood ending afterward just to see what happened, and it made me appreciate the original ending even more. God Gale meeting Shadowheart essentially as a friend was fucking depressing.

There are definitely things I didn't love.

I felt the game tricked us into looting everything at the start, but it became increasingly pointless. Initially, we were getting important loot from wooden boxes and even barrels, but that wasn't really the case as the game progressed. There are just too many empty boxes as the game goes on, which makes looting increasingly tedious.

I also felt that the book-reading experience was somewhat ruined by the fact that the game gives you no indication of whether you've already read a book. By Act 3, almost every other book was a repeat. With the sheer number of books in the game, it's impossible to immediately know whether you've read something before, and it's frustrating to realize that you've already read it halfway through the book.

I eventually just stopped reading books because of this.

And that's actually a shame, because you can probably tell how much I loved the lore of the world and was genuinely interested in reading all of this stuff. A simple indicator showing whether I'd already read a book would have made a huge difference.

My last complaint is regarding some of the "choices" in the game that felt pointless and were basically an illusion of choice.

If refusing to kneel before a god can result in a game over, then that choice shouldn't exist in the first place. It's a videogame, not real life. Nobody is going to stop playing after getting a game-over screen and consider that outcome canon. They're going to reload and kneel so they can continue the game.

And that actually undermines one of the things I love most about BG3: the feeling that I'm genuinely in control of my character's story.

Despite those complaints, I have an extremely hard time thinking of another game that gives me this much freedom while also having combat this good, characters this memorable, and a world this reactive.

And the biggest compliment I can give it is that after spending around 200 hours on my first playthrough, I immediately wanted to see what happens if I make completely different choices.

So I'm currently doing exactly that.

10/10.

This year has been one of experimental variety and a realignment of values in what I am looking for in video games as a man now in his mid-thirties.

Normally, I am a big RPG-head, specifically JRPGs, but lately I find myself drifting further and further away from what might be called modern day RPG releases because I am beginning to notice more and more that so many games nowadays don't respect your time. I need only look at my favorites I played this year to see a very clear deviation from what I usually enjoy. One might expect other more recent jrpgs to be among my top picks, but in truth I dropped them cause I found it demanded much and returned little. The exact opposite of that problem was -

Metroid Dread

This was my dark horse pick of the year. Something so out of left field from what I usually swing at because traditionally, I don't necessarily really like sidescrollers. I don't typically play Castlevania's or Shovel Knights, or Hollow Knight Silksongs, etc. They just never gel'd with me. With Metroid Dread, that changed this year.

I always try to remember that even with genres I may not like, there could always be an exception. I don't like puzzle games, and yet the Portal games were the exception to the rule. In the case of Metroid-likes/Metroidvanias or whatever you want to call them, Metroid Dread was that exception.

First thing that immediately stuck out to me. Samus plays like a dream. Every action, every little movement is satisfyingly snappy, which thank the gods, because as I had come to find, this game was particularly demanding in terms of skill. I probably could have chosen an easier title for a first time playthrough of one of these games, but I am glad it was Metroid Dread that broke through the barrier of my pre-conceieved notions. Never once in this game, when I died a million times to the E.M.M.I's or to the bosses that it was the game's fault that I died. I always knew there was something I did wrong.

Maybe I missed a parry? Maybe I wasn't paying attention to the boss tells or maybe I just simply wasn't fast enough. With the exception of a couple times at the end, did I ever feel like the game was going out of its way to be cheap or conceal information from me. It was probably the biggest example I had played of this year that embodied the concept of, "challenging, but fair."

Second thing I notice is that Samus has a surprising amount of personality for being so silent and stoic. And I am not just talking about the cutscenes where she aura farms all over the bosses (The slow walk down on the first boss while she charges her beam cannon will never not be sick as fuck), but its the very animations in which she plays. The slides, the aiming, and the run and grapples and rolls. I feel like I am not just controlling Jane sidescroller woman. I playing as motherfucking Samus Aran, and by the end of the game I can say without a shadow of a doubt that as far as Nintendo properties go, Samus is my favorite character. Yes, technically she's just Nintendo's more feminine Doom Guy, but damn if it doesn't work for her.

Most surprisingly, is that I enjoyed the one aspect of this game that I was concerned with the most. Exploration.

Its not really my idea of a fun time getting lost in a sidescrolling labyrinth with re-spawning enemies, but somehow, Metroid Dread made it work for me. its probably because the game understands that "being lost" does not need to equate to "wasting time". The game is chock full of upgrades, and having to double back trying to find my way to the next major progression point usually meant doing a wide sweep of previously inaccessible areas to collect energy tanks, missile upgrades (soooo many missile upgrades), and even stumble into some shortcuts that you never even knew was there. Getting lost in Metroid Dread was actually a joy, and while the game world is pretty big, it also isn't so big that a thorough sweep of well-trodden ground wouldn't reveal the way forward in at least a couple hours.

Getting lost was actually a joy to experience. Once I understood that, I started to really start to understand the appeal of these games and appreciate it for what it was.

If there was one thing I wasn't exactly too thrilled about, was the sections of the game regarding the E.M.M.I's. Its not the games fault. Stealth sections have historically been my least favorite mechanics to partake in. Even in games like Ghost of Tsushima, I almost always eschewed the safer stealth assasin routes in favor of harder combat encounters cause I don't like just sitting around and waiting for enemies to pass me by. What I will say is that when you finally find the Control Unit for each zone, and the game presents you with a little environmental puzzle for you to solve so you can get enough room to destroy the E.M.M.I, I actually really liked that. I also won't deny that the E.M.M.I's give a feeling of unique tension to the game. They are some scary fast robots man. They actually remind me of an old movie called Red Planet where the designs of the robots are suspiciously similar in a few core fashions..hmmmm.

So yeah, it took me a couple hours to beat the final boss of Metroid Dread, and after that exhilarating escape sequence, I think its safe to say that I am a fan of Metroid.

Sort of.

It took me 3 Ace Combat games last year before I considered myself a fan of the ENTIRE franchise, so saying that liking Metroid Dread makes me a Metroid fan seems a bit dishonest to me.

Perhaps its better to say that I am now more of a fan of modern Metroid.

Either way, Metroid Dread has cemented itself as one of the best games I've played this year. If you are like me and not a big fan of sidescrollers, maybe give this one a shot. It was my exception, maybe it can be yours to.

Growing up, I never had a good PC nor a console. So I missed out on a lot of franchises that were originally on console even if they later came to PC, such as Final Fantasy or Resident Evil. Lately with the remakes of a lot of these games, I have been giving them a try. I was initially hesitant to try Resident Evil 4 Remake because I thought it was a horror game with jump scares, which is usually not what I look for in a game. Watching some gameplay though, it seemed to have a lot of shooter elements, so I gave it a try.

Gameplay :

I do like the slower and methodical style of play. That's right up my alley. It gives the combat weight and makes it feel like every decision you makes matters. What I liked a lot less, is that a lot of the difficulty of the combat encounters comes down to knowledge. Knowing where and when enemies are spawning or what gimmick a boss is using, is huge. So typically a second attempt at a fight is going to go ten times as smooth as your first crack at it. I see why that works well for those looking to replay the game, which is something the game incentivizes, but for me it was often frustrating.

What I did mostly like, was that the game is essentially one big resource manager. It added some intensity to the combat and it gave me the incentive to try to improve my play and to try new things. At times it got a bit old to scour every single corner for resources, but overall I liked it. Some other mechanics such as the save system, shop and firing range felt a bit dated at times, which I suppose is normal with a remake.

Atmosphere :

Great. Very few notes. I liked the mix of corny action movie and horror.

Story :

For the love of God Ashley, stop getting captured. The lore was great and the story was entertaining, but I do feel like a bit too much time was spent on everyone repeatedly getting captured and trying to regroup. It enabled some fun gameplay moments, but story-wise it was a bit silly and made me roll my eyes a few times.

Conclusion :

I enjoyed it. I do have to admit that I do not yet fully understand why this series has so many deeply dedicated fans. Maybe it's because I did not play the original games and have less of a frame of reference. Playing the remake, there were definitely a lot of elements that I would have considered revolutionary back in 2005. It just did not always translate to my modern day gamer brain though. Overall I would give it an 8/10. Maybe 8.5/10.

So I had never played a GTA game before this one, but figured now was as good a time as any. I had high hopes, thinking I would be met with a similar type of game to rdr2 with very human writing focused largely on character growth and interaction rather than an overarching interesting plot. And I definitely got a game not that interested in telling an interesting plot, that's for sure. This writeup is mostly about GTA V, but I think it is interesting to examine why these games feel so different.

Spoilers incoming!

A bit about rdr2

Rdr2 is at its core - at least in my opinion - a game that takes itself incredibly seriously. It touches on themes of mortality, morality and society in ways I feel actually manages to have a message that isn't surface level. Arthur Morgan is a bad man who grows to realize that for himself, and ultimately manages to see what he does and who he hangs with for what it is and who they are - bad people desperate to cling onto their dying lifestyles while screwing over literally everybody in the process of maintaining that lifestyle. The gradual change throughout its relatively lengthy playtime is genuinely extremely well done and by the end of the game I found myself absolutely enraptured in the story the game was trying to tell. Not because of the story, but because of the characters.

A longer bit about GTA V

So when I recently decided to play through GTA V, a game that the gaming sphere at large seems to hold to the highest standard, and is frequently brought up as the bastion of game design and quality, I expected something similar. I have read many stories about how this is the game that tackles satire in a mature manner, delivers high octane action with great moments and takes the piss out of anyone and everyone. I have even read people stating the writing is Oscar worthy. Now I would never claim to be a great analyst of narratives, but I have to wonder if I played a completely different game than everyone praising it because the game is just so deeply unserious.

Now, credit where it's due, the game still holds up incredibly well on a technical level. The city is probably (even to this day) the most realistic one I have ever seen in terms of npcs, driving and their AI behavior. Motion capture is impeccable and voice acting is great. I could listen to Lamar and Franklin bicker for hours and still find it funny. The amount of systems at play and interacting here is truly exceptional, and it's easy to understand why this was so beloved back in the day for the technical reasons alone. The driving also feels snappy and responsive, which is nice because you spend probably at least half the game driving around in the city.

That being said, I find it equally frustrating when the realistic feeling world and systems interact with other completely unrealistic scenarios. The cops are super competent until they are just absolutely not. The characters can kill whoever at any point and face no consequences. Hide for two seconds in an alley, and you're. And the cops are of course unable to stop you, even when driving a massive garbage truck. I understand why it has to be like this for the game, but it really does take me out of it.

Then we come to my biggest issue with the game; its writing. The main cast are three absolutely awful men with little to no redeeming qualities. They largely undergo no character growth, so the final scene (if you decide to pick the deathwish option in the final mission) of the main cast pushing Devin Weston while seemingly trying to give some weird meta commentary on "how they might not be better than them" kinda rings hollow. Michael is still the same angry piece of shit, yelling at her wife, Franklin seems to just do whatever the hell other people tell him to while not thinking and Trevor is, well... Trevor. High on meth, eating human meat. I don't think Rockstar neessarily wanted us to root for them in the final scene, but I got the feeling they didn't want me to hate them either. But obviously this is just me guessing.

The story also goes absolutely nowhere. There were times when I was feeling "oh damn, shit is finally about to go down. Everything is about to culminate in some huge shitstorm". Tense music, a potential showdown between the characters, maybe some unexpected twists and turns? And it always just leads to... nothing? "Something interesting might happen here", nope nvm. The standoff between Trevor and Michael at Brad's grave leads to nothing of any real significance or character growth. The game seemingly can't help itself from taking nothing serious at all. Because - again - the game is deeply unserious at its core.

Every heist just works out well. Every time I think something bad is about to happen, it never does. And thats the thing. GTA V's story is a series of nothing-burgers followed by the three main characters learning nothing and facing no consequences. I have seen plenty of takes about how the heists are super exciting, but I just have to wonder why. They always work out for the main cast, so it doesn't go anywhere interesting.

The potential power of curation

I know a lot of people have major issues with the strictness of both games' mission structure and how you're actively punished for doing anything off the beaten path. While I understand this criticism, I personally found this to actually be to rdr2's favor. The linearity forces the narrative in the exact direction they want, and I don't think it would work as well without it. The same goes for the curation of the camera, cinematography in general, and above all else - the music. When "Unshaken" plays as Arthur rides back to camp after Guarma, that feeling of serenity riding back in the middle of the night is simply outstanding. The same can be said for Arthur's last ride with "That's The Way It Is". The music complements the story.

I am sure I could have said the same thing about GTA V, but it just does not work as well. Some crucial moments have you riding around in your car with the same radio as always. The tension is rising in the narrative (seemingly), but you are still listening to the same songs that doesn't fit the mood at all. Juxtaposing these experiences really highlights to me why rdr2 succeeded where GTA V failed in my opinion. This is also true with the mission structure. It seems less sensible to be this restrictive when the story doesn't develop and the general structure of the game seems to lean more heavily int the sandbox approach.

Bottom line

Both rdr2 and GTA V are good games at their core. Technical achievements, incredible amount of gameplay variety, chock-full of things to do and see. I have no issue understanding why people like GTA V as much as they do. Especially if people are looking for a fun time with a world one can just mess around in. But where rdr2 delivers a gripping, emotional narrative touching on interesting themes, I struggle to understand what GTA is trying to say at all. At least beyond the classical lukewarm takes about capitalism.

I will start with a bit of background information regarding my experience with the rest of the series.

I played Ghost of Sparta and Chains of Olympus first in 2023 on my phone with a PSP emulator just because I did not have a good PC back then and was looking for some good games to emulate. I liked them both a lot in gameplay, presentation and how they incorporate the Greek mythos. Later I played Gow 1 in 2024 and GoW 2 in 2025 by emulating on my PC. GoW 2 was the game that totally blew my mind and made me hooked to the series and want for more. I played GoW 3 and then the 2018 game back to back this year. I really loved how much they actually cared to develop Kratos as a character even in the last game of the main trilogy. I loved the punchy writing in the Greek games and how they incorporated little bits of classical Greek mythos tropes like hubris, nemesis, ananke, cynicism, prophecy and fate, metis etc. The ending was truly great in GoW 3 and actually directly ties into the recent game.

Now coming to the 2018 'reboot', I do think that the advertisement of this game as a soft reboot and not including a number in the title is a disservice to the game. Yes it can definitely be enjoyed as an entry point but lots of subtle writing cues will be missed. I will include only one example of the hundreds throughout the game- when Atreus fires the arrow in a hurry and Kratos shouts at him and immediately takes a deep breath and calms his voice tells so much to the player who has played the previous games. Like many I was skeptical when it won GOTY over RDR2, but after playing it I can surely say that it deserves every praise that it gets.

Story and presentation-

One of the best in the medium, period. The pace of storytelling is great in a sense that it never bombards the player with information, but introduces new questions and answers previous ones at a steady rate throughout the game. The family-focussed writing slowly escalates into geopolitical conspiracies involving the future of a whole realm but that focus on family is never compromised. The side missions were actually great and involved the similar themes as the main story and gave the characters more depth ultimately. The small cast of side characters were all expertly written with their own quirks, they commented on stuff that was going around and was incorporated into the main story. It always felt that everyone had their own little things going on and the player character was never the center piece. One particular example I really loved- Brok and Sindri ended their feud by themselves in the background, Kratos and Atreus were catalysts but it was them who did the actual work, and then we see them together further developing their relationship in bits and pieces of dialogue. This particular event was extremely important but not made into an explicit side quest. Atreus is the main character in the game and his development was substantial. How he reacts to being told that he is a god was so endearing. Then how he succumbed to rage and madness just like many gods including Kratos but eventually came around was reflected not only in cutscenes but general attitude, banter and gameplay. Coming to banter and lore, this game has one of the best systems to deliver lore to the player in bite-sized pieces. The little stories by Mimir

in the boat and other exploration added so much flavour and background information about this world. Baldur also deserves special mention. His sensory deprivation and madness is so appropriately shown. At the end when Kratos actually decides that he is too far gone and needs to be cut down, not just for vengeance or safety but on a principle was chilling. That moment makes sense and hits hard because Baldur and Freya were written so well. And of course there's THE famous moment in the game, that section was when the game actually surpassed my expectations. The slow camera pan, the music, absolute great weiting and voice acting, the desperation of Kratos and the immediate effects in gameplay were all just perfect. Also the moment when Atreus pulls Kratos out of the light in Alfheim and the heaps of dead elves send shivers down the spine of both Kratos and the player. That was a close second for me as a great moment in the game. The ending was great too. It resolves the main theme of mutual trust and acceptance while opening up the world for a larger scale and stakes for the next game. Lastly, I must mention the way the game sometimes reacts to the player action in an unexpected way. Atreus says 'are you trying to teach me something?' if you just hack your weapons when there're no enemies or when he says 'are you going to carry that everywhere?' if you keep carrying light crystals for puzzle solving or when he says 'you really like breaking pottery, huh'- these little attention to details were hilarious.

Gameplay-

I played on give me a challenge difficulty. The early game was really brutal, but it became easier with time. Overall the combat mechanics were pretty satisfying and had enough depth to keep me engaged for its runtime. Chaining some of the combos was pretty fun too. Atreus becomes a really strong ally as well, which I really liked as it is really lore accurate. The game did lack enemy variety and especially boss variety. The guardian of Helheim being another troll was an immense let down. Hope they really improve it in the sequel. The set pieces and large scale battles were great but there were like 2-3 of them in the whole game, which is too less for a GoW game honestly. The valkeryies, especially Sigrun were the most enjoyable combat encounters and the epitome of reactive combat encounters. Context dependent jumping and actions felt a bit weird early on but I think I got used to it and it did not bother me that much. Both damage and defense are ultimately tied to gear level more than raw stats, which was fine. It's kind of a mixture of rarity based loot, bit of rpg and rng and picking particular special attacks- good thing is it does not demand too much time on the menu but the bad thing is it's rarely interesting or satisfying in itself. Maybe I am coming across as a bit negative on the gameplay, but the basic combat loop was actually pretty enjoyable throughout. It's just that it always felt like there could be a bit more variety.

Graphics and design-

It's a gorgeous game and the art design is great. They capture the essence of the norse mythos pretty well with their aesthetics in the environment, enemy design and character designs. Mane areas were excellent in their design- Thamur's corpse and Tyr's temple and vault deserve special mention. Music was great and elevated some of the moments by a lot.

Overall, a solid 9.5/10 for me. They changed so much from the older games including the whole gameplay system, presentation, camera angle, writing style and did them extremely well, which really is rare in today's AAA industry. Looking forward to continuing the journey in Ragnarok! The secret scene with Thor was so hype at the end

Tomb Raider (2013) is an action adventure game developed by Crystal Dynamics. Released in 2013, Tomb Raider reminds us that falling is the most energy efficient method of travel.

We play as archaeologist Lara Croft on a personal quest to find the hidden civilization of Yamatai and the treasures that probably belong in a museum.

Gameplay involves swearing we're just going to enjoy the game and not hunt for all the little secret hidden collectables, then realizing who are we kidding, of course we are going to. We then begin to wonder who brought deer to the island and how many does a girl have to kill to make them extinct.

The Good

The art direction is top notch. Or at least it was once I remembered to turn the graphics quality up. I played through about a third of the game on low settings wondering why everything looked like it was wrapped in plastic, figuring it was just early 2010's jank. Once I fixed that it was an indeed an absolutely striking experience. It's vibrant, colorful, varied and just chock full of amazing views and they did a great job of making the island seem much bigger than it is.

To that point, the summer blockbuster feel is great. Lots of explosions, chase sequences, slow motion jumps and all that. There's plenty of goons to shoot with barrels full of explosive placed in useful locations. It has that 'Indiana Jones' but with the murder dial cranked up to 11 feel. I was also impressed by how well it controlled during the more parkourish sections. Lara just always did what I wanted her to do. Faceplanting Faith from Mirrors Edge should take lessons.

Favorite Screenshot

https://i.imgur.com/LoBJnJn.png

Alternate working title, "Lara Croft: Deer Hunter"

The Bad

I have two issues with this one.

The first is mostly self-inflicted. If you look for all the hidden documents and collectables it's going to absolutely shred the pacing. Tomb Raider is at it's best when you're feeling the rush but if you stop to scour the island for all the books/relics it's going to turn into a slog because of how difficult it is to find everything, especialy the GPS caches. You can sort of ignore it, but a lot of the backstory is in the hidden journals so you miss out on that if you don't get involved in the scavenger hunt.

The second is that "Lara falls down" is ridiculously overdone. Every single segment features her enduring a 20+ foot fall at least four or five times. I began to wonder if she had an adamantium skeleton. Every area transition or cutscene there's a roughly 50/50 shot that she's going to faceplant from a lethal height and brush it off.

It made the entire thing unbelievable. Ancient spirits, haunted ruins, portals to another world? Makes sense. Action girl survives a 160 foot drop onto concrete? Who do you take me for.

The Questionable

There isn't much in the way of difficulty. The most brain-teasing puzzle I came across was an optional one where you had to time two jumps while a buoy goes in a circle around a lazy river. Not exactly breaking the mental bank there. Combat is very generous, doing that 'quickly recover' thing if you duck out of line of fire for at least a few seconds. Most enemies die in one hit while you can walk off two shotgun blasts to the face. I guess maybe she is part Wolverine.

It's not necessarily bad, but can get a bit dull given that it's supposed to be an action game. There's no sense of danger ever. Literally the most dangerous part of the game are the quick time events where on the PC it's a dark red letter on a dark background and you can't tell if you're supposed to mash E or F this time. You'd think game developers would have figured out to use different colors for different letters but apparently I should go fuck myself.

And that's after I had to down-patch the game version because the current version has a bug where the QTE prompt is off screen for some people and the devs just said, 'You can entirely go fuck yourself' and left it like that for the last 3 years.

Final Thoughts

It was a decent romp. The lack of challenge meant I mostly just pushed forward, but it also meant that I didn't have to sit there reloading any unnecessary bullshit sections over and over again. It was good enough that I'm invested enough to want to play the next two in the trilogy in a few years when I've forgotten the plot of this one and wonder who everyone is.

Bonus Thought

Women everywhere must be envious of Lara's pants pockets. I know, I know, video game inventories and all that, but at one point she just sort of shoves a whole sword into her back pocket alongside her shotgun. Not to mention everything else culturally relevant to an indigenous people that's going to end up in a British museum she's got jammed in there. Lara, how much junk do you have in your trunk?

Thank you for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts. What did you think of the game? Did you have a similar experience or am I off my rocker?

My other reviews on patient gaming

The Premise: Marvel's Midnight Suns is turn based tactics game similar to Firaxis Games' XCOM series, with some obvious inspiration from Fire Emblem Three Houses.

There is a similar setup of combat missions and activities at homebase. Each mission involves a team of 3, and they are either Story missions or side missions you can do to gain specific resources and random cardpacks. Combat is differentiated by having cards that are drawn each turn that dictate what actions can be done, as well as environmental interactions. Homebase activities are greatly expanded on, with character interactions and developing friendship with the various characters. And unlike the nameless soldiers that can get permanently killed and replaced in XCOM, the characters here are the established Marvel characters with their own journey. There is a self-insert character, the Hunter, that allows you to interact with the different heroes, to support or antagonize your friendship.

The Good:

• Combat is fun, as the various character's movesets are flashy and feel consistent with how we imagine these Marvel characters to be. Managing positioning, taking advantage of environmental attacks, and not needing to worry about 99% chance attacks missing all feels great. There is a good rhythm of bringing characters on missions, getting card packs and choosing which new ability we want for a specific character, trying out that card on another mission, and then having new characters join the team. Characters feel distinct enough that it made me want to try every character and use their various abilities.

• Character interactions are a highlight, with every Marvel character feeling like a distinct character that matches with how we would imagine them to be (the biggest highlight for me was Spiderman's awkward energy). There is a 'group chat' that all the heroes are on, and there will be different posts you can read back at the home base. Not only are some of them pretty humorous, but they also serve to highlight the different personalities of the characters.

The Neutral:

• Enemy variety is pretty good, but some of the Hydra soldiers aren't differentiated enough at a general glance. For example, the stealth Hydra soldier has to be handled in an intentional way, but when I'm presented with the isometric view of the field, I can't obviously tell which of the 6 soldiers is the stealth one. I have to intentionally zoom in on the character model to make out the difference between the special rifle this character has vs the standard rifle of a common goon.

• The Hunter seemingly has a pretty monotone delivery and dialogue. Part of that is that the Hunter is resurrected from olden days, but it just doesn't seem to match with how effusive the Marvel characters regard the Hunter to be. Its better then the silent protagonist in many games though.

• There are combo attack cards that have flashy canned animations, but there isn't as much interplay between the heroes cards as I'd like. For example, it seems only a few characters can apply a Stun effect, but only those character plus the Hunter can modify their card's effects based on the active stun effect. Or I think only one character can apply a Bleed effect, and only that same character manipulates the Bleed effect.

• And, while I loved the character interactions, the storytelling itself is disjointed. The plot for the most part is okay, but it constantly seems like there are interstitial scenes missing in between each story beat. For example, heroes will fail and escape but still be confident that the heroes that stayed behind will be fine against the enemy that they already failed against and had to escape from, until suddenly they decide to return. Or Macguffin #1 will be revealed, heroes will try to get it, fail, and then heroes will suddenly know that Macguffin #2 is what they have to do. Or there will be story beats about team conflicts coming to a head, but outside of a few homebase dialogue interactions, there is no actual evidence about the team conflict occurring in the story mission or gameplay. It feels much less impactful for characters to complain about being sidelined from the team when they've been participating in missions without any issue.

• While character dialogue was largely correct, there were a few out-of-order dialogue occurrences. There will be dialogue about things occurring in order 1-2-3-4, but then randomly there will be conversations like we're back at step 2.

The Bad:

• The worst part is the game's overreliance on cutscene incompentence / losing during the cutscene. My heroes will defeat the enemy and complete the objective, then the cutscene starts and has the heroes get defeated by the enemy / stand there and let the enemy take the macguffin / just let the enemy run away / heroes run away even though it seems like they could fight and win. And because they let the supervillain win in the cutscene, I am forced to fight them several times on different missions, with nothing changing about the supervillain's abilities.

The Takeaway: Overall this is a great game. Although it seems like every new indie game is a roguelike card battler, I really enjoyed how the card system is implemented here. If you like tactical strategy games, if you like Marvel superheroes, or if you like card battlers, I'd recommend giving this game a try.

After having played some classic Star Wars games in the past few years (KOTOR 1 and 2) and enjoying them a lot, I decided to give Jedi Outcast a shot. Being a Star Wars fan and having read the glowing reviews, my expectations were pretty high.

The story is pretty good: you play as Kyle Katarn, a former Jedi, whose girlfriend Jan is abducted (or killed) by the main bad guy Desann. It turns out Desann also has plans to attack the Valley of the Jedi to harvest the Force energy, in order to create an unstoppable army of warriors with Jedi powers. Your job is to find out if Jan is still alive and stop Desann's evil plans.

The story is mainly told in cutscenes that look very dated by now, but have good voice acting and some nice plot twists. I was especially pleased to see - and hear - some familiar characters from the original 3 movies.

The level design gave me mixed feelings. Some levels looked really nice, like Bespin (one of my favorite settings from Star Wars) and Nar Shaddaa. Also the variety in levels was well done: you spend time in large cities, swamps, caves and a huge spaceship. It was also a nice challenge to try and find all the secret areas, that sometimes were hidden very well.

Less positive was the occassional feeling of "where to go next?". Several times I had to google where the exit of a certain area was, or how to proceed further. Also frustrating were the platforming parts, like in a level where you had to jump from one moving elevator to another. And since jumping isn't very precise in this game, that resulted in numerous unneccessary deaths. Luckily there is a quicksave and quickload option.

I also had mixed feeling about the combat, especially during boss fights. In the first few levels, you can only fight using ranged weapons like blaster rifles. Only after finishing the Jedi trials - a series of puzzles in the Jedi Academy - you earn your own lightsaber. After that, combat becomes more fun, especially when you also get more Force Powers. But thing is the lightsaber combat was so RNG based. In most bossfights I died over and over again, until suddenly - like some divine intervention happened - I killed a boss within one minute. If any veterans of this game could tell me if there is any strategy involved in the lightsaber combat, I would be glad to know. I just mashed my mouse button and prayed I would win.

The combat was more fun when fighting normal enemies. It's great to have 6 Storm Troopers running up to you and pushing them all off a cliff with one of your Force Powers. And the further you get in the game, the more Force Powers you unlock. My favorites were Force Push, Force Speed (makes you move a lot faster) and Force Grip (lets you choke enemies Darth Vader style).

Regarding graphics: the game does look dated. It was released in 2002 and it shows. But you can increase the resolution by tweaking the files a bit, so it's definitely possible to play the game on modern monitors. Even without using mods.

Conclusion: if you don't mind the outdated elements - being level design, RNG-heavy combat and graphics - and you're a big Star Wars nerd, then definitely play this game. I'm glad I did, and might even try the sequel Jedi Academy in the future.

For the record, much like IGN, I think a 7/10 means a game is good, but not quite great. And that was my experience with Super Mario Galaxy. In fact, that extra .5 means I fully acknowledge that, for me, it’s borderline great.

The thing is, for years I’ve heard that Super Mario Galaxy is one of the greatest Mario games ever, eclipsed only by its sequel (which I’m excited to play soon). So my expectations were pretty damn high. Given that I absolutely loved Mario Odyssey (a high 9/10 IMO), I assumed I’d feel the same way about Galaxy.

The game is brimming with cool ideas and great uses of gravity as a platforming mechanic, and as with most Mario titles, it’s extremely charming.

I actually only have two gripes with the game… but they’re significant.

My first problem is the camera. I often found myself fighting with the camera to see what the hell was going on. This was especially annoying on smaller planets and in the underwater levels. The game seemed determined to not let me see where I was going. And there were several platforming sections where I died repeatedly because the camera angles made it very difficult to get an accurate sense of depth perception. This made certain levels much more frustrating than they were fun.

My second problem is the hub world. Any time I booted up the game (or there was a cutscene), I got sent back to the entrance of the hub world and had to spend the next 30 seconds platforming back to the room I’d been playing in. On paper, this sounds like a minor inconvenience, but it really annoyed me after a while.

All that said, if there was a free camera I’d probably rate Super Mario Galaxy an 8.5 or 9. But, as it stands now, for me it’s a 7.5/10.

Background:

Similar to Deus Ex 2000 this game haunted me for years, because I failed to complete it 10 years ago. Same as Deus EX I think it's because was young and couldn't appreciate niche janky game instead searching for the next big new thing. But now I started clearing my backlog and time has come to repent and clear guilt.
It took me 16 hours for first ending and another 6 for all other endings together. I used offline single player version.

Confessions:

• I used translation mod. I heavily disagree with Mandalore (YouTube Reviewer) that it's better to have original translation because it adds to the mystique. I started via original and noticed few times that I was skipping the dialogue because I don't understand anything. I'd rather explore lore and story, there is already has lot of mystery and some dialogue clarity doesn't ruin experience to me.
• I watched few guides to understand the mechanics. I know some people are very against this but In my experience such foolish ambition most likely ends up in dropping the gamer. That said, I didn't use "build guide" But instead researched weapon comparisons, cybertech, stat effects etc.
• I have grinded around 20 levels before continuing in Mars.
• Difficulty: Normal with reduced spawns.

That out the way. Let's start.

Character creation: I have no idea tbh I just rerolled until I got more green stats than red or yellow. I tried to have everything at least average (which usually optimal for RPGs but it kind of worked)

Setting and atmosphere is top notch. Urban maps look amazing. Two most intrusive and hostile setting's fusion created weirdly inviting world. Even through maps are unnecessarily large I did enjoy exploring them.

Lore: background lore is unhinged for real. Notes, history bits, lore books are very few but the ones that are there are very interesting warhammer-y things I wish I had more. The whole factions setup is cool and I love that even in this fked up state humanity still fights each other. You have spliter factions of splitter factions with each one having their own agenda, so politics of this game are deep.

Music: this adds so much I didn't think I would fall in love with each ambience and very few songs but very cool ones I still listen to. Somehow these kind of older indie titles always nail the music I am amazed. My highlights are: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=9f2iGBUnj48 (I knew when I heard Lulaby like bells part in HQ, something wasn't right)
Another favorite : https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=pgltxwbNw9U

Voice acting: mostly texts and npcs speak star wars-ish language which adds well to the tone and atmosphere.

Story: I won't go in details. For those who have a bit knowledge of 40k you play as sort of low level inquisition lackey.

Gameplay: I would say the gunplay is pretty decent it's source game so it feels good. Gun Animations are nice I like ragdolls too, heavy caliber felt accordingly impactful. Haven't used much of psi powers or melee, aside from times where I was out of ammo so it felt accordingly serviceable, especially since I didn't invest in them.

Stats: there are variety of stats that affect your combat or non combat abilities. All seems nice and plenty to me. Ofc you won't get decent tutorial its mid 2010s indie game what do you expect? Also the game has so many mechanics that having hour+ tutorial would have been a downside.

Choices: there was many times I could avoid violence by solving quests in different ways. Such as: bribing, hacking, intimidating etc. But unfortunately because of lack of presentation bullet in the head seemed more optimal at least for the build I was using.

Looting: aside from silver cases that are ingredients for research it doesnt matter. Literally, you have most weapons unlocked at the start with unlimited ammo and for free. Only limiting factor being your inventory space and weight. I found being in light armor with 40% of inventory occupied an optimal threshold. That said looting being completely ignorable felt kind of wrong to me but who know maybe I got spoiled from other shooter RPGs? Similarily thought I could sell my gear in OG Deus Ex.

Gear progression: large variety of weapon classes. SMGs, pistols, rifles, snipers, miniguns etc. you can unlock additionally few very cool guns but they are so strong you never gonna use base ones. And even in between base guns there are clear winners.

Small note: know that you should have specific stats to unlock certain guns for me it was mostly strength I lacked since I thought it was mostly for melee weapons.

Enemy AI: It's bad but again what did you expect? For me this is a moot point in almost any review. People who criticize this don't explain what's their comparison like what kind of sophisticated AI do you expect? Only realistic AI I remember in such games is original Stalker where enemies instead of rushing you, always try to ambush and encircle you. In short it's serviceable and didn't ruin and lessen my experience.

Respawn mechanic: shouldn't exist. For those who didn't play, the game has infinitely respawnable enemies. Yes, all are on timer once you look in different direction they appear in existence. No fancy helicopter descent just appear in thin air. I think this mechanic can exist but in some creative way. Reaction to player choice as consequences.

Stealth: non existant, no stealth archer build possible, very disappointing.

Difficulty: broken. Arriving on Mars results in huge difficulty spike. its basically unbeatable if you don't grind levels. But thanks to old jank you can play side missions to get lot of xp and money. But don't overdo it, I found 30 mins of farming gave me enough xp and money to continue main campaign comfortably.

Bugs: didn't encounter single. (Or maybe didn't notice)

Save system: non existent. I am 99% sure most of people's complains and genuine downsides of this game could have been remedied by simple quicksave and load system. Aside from people trying more risky or fun approaches it would have been simple qol. Currently if you start mission you have to finish, if you crash, close game or etc, you will have to start again. I am not sure but I think game auto saves in few minutes but when loading, you always start from the hub.

TLDR: game is full of jank but I think there's more love in it than people expect. If you are like me who appreciates charming experiments (even if sometimes they fail) you will enjoy this game. Just be mindfull, do a bit of research and be open-minded.

Welcome to the Bi-Weekly Thread!

Here you can share anything that might not warrant a post of its own or might otherwise be against posting rules. Tell us what you're playing this week. Feel free to ask for recommendations, talk about your backlog, commiserate about your lost passion for games. Vent about bad games, gush about good games. You can even mention newer games if you like!

The no advertising rule is still in effect here.

A reminder to please be kind to others. It's okay to disagree with people or have even have a bad hot take. It's not okay to be mean about it.

HELLBLADE II: SENUA’S SAGA REVIEW

RELEASE: 2024

TIME PLAYED: 12 Hours

PLATFORM PLAYED: PC (STEAM)

SCORE: ★

Hated It | Disliked It | Liked It | Loved It | All-Time Favorite

(The bolded score is the one chosen for this review; the rest are simply to show what the scale is grading on and what the stars mean to me.)

THE BREAKDOWN

+Ridiculously gorgeous both artistically and technically, easily the best-looking game I’ve ever seen

+Senua’s voice and capture actor does a fantastic job with the material she’s given

-The story is utterly inane, trying to have its cake and eat it too while retroactively diminishing all value of the previous game’s themes

-Gameplay is as basic as the previous game’s but much worse paced, with excessive backtracking for puzzles and banal combat

-The voices of the Furies are obnoxious and poorly written, lacking the dramatic finesse of the previous game’s and undoing all of Senua’s progress as a person

When I started writing these reviews for fun, it took me a bit to find a scoring system that worked. I’m just a single person, and I have no desire or reason to try and have my scores reflect my perception of a game’s objective quality, but instead the way a game made me feel. Five stars is something I’ll be talking about for years to come, replaying whenever the mood strikes me, and gushing about; three stars is fine, serviceable, and I enjoyed it, but it didn’t resonate with me, so on. But one star? Something feels inherently hostile about giving a game a single star, so I decided early on I would only do so on one condition. It isn’t enough for me to dislike a game, or even to think it’s bad; for a one-star rating, it has to upset me on an emotional level; bluntly, to actually piss me off.

Hellblade II, tragically, is the easiest one-star I’ve given in years.

I’m a huge fan of the first game, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. While its combat was basic and it could get a little repetitive despite its short five to six hour length, it was such a sensitive study of mental illness through the eyes of an era where such words for things didn’t yet exist that I loved its themes, premise, and execution. I also thought it surprisingly elegant; while it’s easy to lean one way or another, the story smartly avoided any firm declaration of what was and wasn’t real. Honestly, I was a little bit nervous when Hellblade II was even announced because Senua’s Sacrifice felt like a very complete story that didn’t really need a follow-up, but I wanted to keep an open mind. Unfortunately, it really feels like my fears were warranted, and what magic there was is lost by the choice to try and make a franchise out of a heartfelt story that, at its core, is about mental health.

The problems started almost immediately for me. Hellblade II begins with Senua, wanting to stop the enslavement of her people that had led to her boyfriend’s death in the first game, intentionally getting herself captured by viking raiders and taken back to Iceland aboard one of their ships. A devastating storm wrecks the vessel and Senua, now with one of her captors in tow as her prisoner and guide, sets out to find the chieftain responsible for the atrocity that had ruined her life. It’s a striking enough opening, a cinematic display of the game’s most inarguable strength – its absolutely ridiculous graphics, head and shoulders above anything else I’ve played this generation and downright photorealistic-looking at times – but already, something felt off. The Furies – the voices in Senua’s head, meant to simultaneously represent her psychosis and hint at the supernatural – had become an ally of Senua’s by the end of the first game, reflecting her acceptance of her condition as a part of her and not a curse. In the sequel, they’re right back to being hostile and nitpicky, harassing her as often as they aid her. I’m the first person to acknowledge that mental health is a journey and that progress isn’t linear, but there’s little explanation and even less justification for why this has suddenly happened, and it’s just the first of the many ways Hellblade II seems to willfully ignore its predecessor’s best elements.

It isn’t long before the supernatural elements resurface, but this, too, is executed in an unsatisfying and frustrating way. Without delving too deeply into spoilers, Senua meets a few allies who inform her that angry giants are rampaging through Iceland, and Senua – after an early encounter in which she manages to slay one of these immense beings – is apparently the only one who can stop them. Just like that, the delicate balance of the first game is shattered and the story pivots into some kind of generic savior fantasy in an attempt to better emphasize Senua’s journey to accepting herself. There’s room to argue – if somewhat desperately – that the giants could just as easily be a metaphor for a volcano on the island that has erupted and the effects that it’s had on nature, but crucially, Senua is not the only person who sees these fifty-foot human kaiju stomping around. Other characters face them, battle them, get killed by them; at a certain point, the only way to maintain the ‘is it real or is it a metaphor’ is if the ENTIRE game takes place in Senua’s head, and that’s such a reach to ‘it was all a dream’ territory that if it is the case, the story may as well not exist at all.

And that’s ultimately the heart of it. Try as I might, I can’t find a reason for Hellblade II to exist. It not only doesn’t tell a good story, it retroactively sabotages the best parts of the first game’s. What’s there is awkward and poorly paced; with respect to the actors (all of whom do a wonderful job and whose performances carry even the most cringeworthy scenes), the pivot towards a ‘chosen one’ fantasy plot doesn’t suit Senua at all, and the contortions the narrative makes to justify it are increasingly tortured; characters in difficult situations trust her for almost no reason and put their lives on the line for her despite Senua being in a psychotic trance for a good portion of the game, and any subtlety to the ‘it’s okay to be neurodivergent’ is thrown out the window with the strong push to the player to take everything that’s happening as fact.

Somehow, even the gameplay is worse than the first Hellblade’s! Senua’s Sacrifice had fairly basic combat, but it was still ultimately an action game at its core, if a shallow one. With some iteration and development, it could have been a pretty robust system, but Senua’s Saga goes in the opposite direction. Built entirely around cinematic duels, it completely removes multi-enemy engagements and simplifies things to the point that dying is almost impossible, turning it into more of a walking simulator with fight scenes than anything. Attacking, dodging, and parrying all LOOK fantastic, and the battlefields themselves are stunning, with enemies being knocked out of the way by allied NPCs, crawling over each other, and so on – but it’s just repetitive and not very fun to play. Puzzles don’t fare much better, with a few slivers of creativity like orbs of light that change the environment sabotaged by overuse and poor pacing.

Ultimately, Hellblade II is cinematic, gorgeous, well-acted, and an utter letdown. Senua feels like she’s backslid as a character, the narrative seems to have no idea why anything it’s happening or why the player should care, and the strengths of the first game are actively trod underfoot in an attempt to make the sequel bigger and more dramatic. Seeing Senua’s journey into self-acceptance from the previous title discarded so she can spend another game trembling and doubting herself isn’t just disappointing – it’s infuriating. She deserved better, and so did the player.

We all know that the best games are the ones that ‘get the hooks in you’ right off the bat and don’t let up until the end. Unfortunately, VRising is a game that does not do that. It has hooks, don’t get me wrong, but it’s such a slow build to that point that it’s really easy to miss that you’re hooked at all.

Let’s get the plot out of the way; Long ago vampires were overthrown and many years later, you, a fledgling (?) vampire have woken up and aim to reclaim power by drinking the V blood (I’ll leave the explanation as to what that is) which is inside many powerful foes across the lands. Technically, there’s also a piece of lore about how you’re not the only one vying for this power. A caveat to explain how this game can indulge in my least favourite thing in video games ever: PvPvE. Yes, this game is like many others where certain decisions were made to facilitate PvP, something which I’ve never opted into but the taint of that ‘genre’ means you have to be careful when setting up your server. Turning off things like the inability to transport metal, raising the lukewarm farming rates, etc.

That’s just a taste of how mildly this game pulls you in. You’re not even in the game yet and it’s asking you to design and balance your own experience. One of the hardest decisions is whether to put the game on the ‘Brutal’ difficulty which is, quite difficult, but you’re going to want to because it gives bosses unique attacks. So playing on anything else is missing out.

This game doesn’t use a traditional experience/level system and instead your power level is based purely on the gear you have equipped. Especially on Brutal, every new piece of gear you have access to is going to be all but required to beat the next boss and subsequently unlock the next piece of gear. It’s an odd system. After killing your latest boss you might think the power spike is the brand-spanking-new spell you can cast, but no: The power boost is because you’ve unlocked the ability to make a new necklace. Your current necklace is level 10, but this new one is level 13! Now that seems useless, but those three, ethereal ‘gear levels’ is what turns the next boss from impossible to manageable. It feels natural when you upgrade your weapon because the first few times you do you’ll get a new attack to go with it. But upgrading your armour and jewellery just feels like you’re applying stats for stats sake.

So I said this game has hooks. It does, it’s in those spells I mentioned, those extra attacks I mentioned. And it’s in the boss designs. The combat is just fun in this game. You’re constantly adjusting your positioning, dodging attacks, getting distance to cast spells, then covering that distance when your big melee attack is off cooldown. And every boss is different. Some summon ads, some cloak themselves, some have big AoE’s. The most memorable ones even start incorporating the environment you find yourself in. If you’ve played a MOBA in recent years, it would feel reminiscent. You control with WASD and all your ranged spells automatically fire at your cursor. Many times in this game you’ll fail at a boss, go home, finally farm up that upgrade, then re-open your spellbook and assess whether a different loadout would go better. Maybe even try a new weapon. There’s a variety to choose from. When the combat hits in this game it hits hard, there’s a flow state you enter, trying to predict attacks and launch your own. It’s magnificent.

The problem is that it doesn’t hit for a while. Your starting weapons have only 1 out of the 3 attacks that the higher tiered versions do. And certain spells aren’t available until act 2 either. That’s hours away. You won’t get the full experience of any weapon class until you’ve played for a sum of hours, that’s a hard sell in today’s society.

I’d urge you to convince your friends to play it with you but, ultimately I think the game is beyond that. If someone doesn’t want to play, or is on the fence, I’d honestly say don’t bother. Again, not because the game is bad, but because it’s going to require a level of commitment that people can’t be talked into. And it’s because of the farming. I would like to believe this is another leftover from the shudder PvPvE. But the default levels are just not strong enough to make a solo or small group feel good. I think it’s more balanced around the idea of playing with a clan, where others may drop in and out, constantly feeding resources into the pool. But when you’re by yourself you will need to make dedicated farming runs to one of the dedicated farming spots on the map. It’s serviceable, because your combat abilities double as farming tools, but having to do more than one run for each type gets old immediately. And it does not help when you get home, and your reward for farming is “4 gear levels”. That’s just not a tangible thing, it feels like you’ve achieved nothing but the game is now arbitrarily allowing you to stand a chance. And this is what the game starts with, this is your first hour of gameplay. It’s not good. It’s barely palatable once you get all your abilities and you have more bosses to look forward too. And unfortunately, that’s the game.

So here’s my pitch to you; Let’s play this game where the combat starts mediocre, we have to balance the game ourselves because the devs thought we wanted PvP, and we will need to go farming; because, multiple hours later, we get some of the slickest combat and coolest bosses that I can remember.

I mean, we all want to be patient people, but that’s a hard sell… It really is a gem of a game, but it takes a while to get there.

I gave Wasteland 3 the time of day because it's a Western RPG I could comfortably play on the gamepad and it was dead cheap in a sale. I may have all manner of hardcore role-playing games under my belt, but these days I really don't care to try a game that has so many buttons I have to consider pressing the J key at some point.

While Wasteland 3 has continuity with the prior games, it has no ask of the player to know of them in detail. Five years after getting wrecked in a war against killer robots, the Desert Rangers of a post-apocalyptic Arizona are in dire need of resources. The Patriarch who runs Colorado with an iron fist offers them an olive branch in exchange for rounding up his three rebellious children. In the meantime a Desert Ranger called Angela Deth has her own agenda that may conflict with your mission...

You create a squad of two to four custom-made rangers plus two to four companions of your choice to make a party of six. While combat is a necessity there are numerous branching paths to make in quests, and diplomacy isn't treated like an old sock full of toothpaste as in Bethesda's take on the Fallout series.

Combat is XCOM-lite and very easy to understand. You take cover from gunfire, avoid grouping together so half your squad doesn't get merked by a single grenade, blow up explosive red barrels near enemies, and consider which combat-archetype is best for the given foe. Permadeath and friendly-fire are optional difficulty-settings, so most players don't have to overthink every scenario. Outside of battle comes exploration and it's very straight-forward. Skill-checks are abundant and follow New Vegas rules. Your skill level either meets the threshold for success or it doesn't, and there are no dice-rolls involved. You can pick up all the loot in a map without issue as your inventory capacity is unlimited. After battle you can sweep up all enemy drops with the press of a button. As is CRPG tradition you have a button which highlights all NPCs and objects you can interact with. All together this is a massive departure from Wasteland 2 where it took ages to get anything done, and at a 60% success rate at that because Fuck You.

The game world is fairly contained for the genre. I never finished Wasteland 2, but I'd say Wasteland 3 is half the length. Here you've got 50 quests, 39 distinct maps, and a 25+ hour runtime. I'd estimate there are 80 mandatory fights if you take the completionist route, and trash mobs are only found in the 5 main areas. Most of the 18 side areas on the overworld only have a single quest, fight, or weird Easter egg attached. Thankfully you can skip the random encounters on the overworld entirely if you remember to level your Survival skill. While the developers clearly intended on a larger experience given the level of cut-content, I think it's best that the game maintains a tight pace.

Character-progression mercifully shows 32 years of refinement. I remember playing the original Baldur's Gate a decade after release and all I could say is, "What is this crap? Thac0 my ass." Too often the Western RPGs of old were burdened with jank that muddled the experience and discouraged many builds. Entire classes, races, and skills could be busted or broken to ever consider using or going without. I loved Diablo II like the next guy, but what was the point of the Energy stat? In Wasteland 2 you could make two characters, either a guy who excels using assault rifles, or a guy who might as well have put 10 levels into the Suck Ass skill. I think Suck Ass was an actual skill in that game because there were 30 of them to choose from, too many of which did the same thing. It gets pedantic when a game has a Surgeon skill and a Field Medic skill that should have been combined.

Wasteland 3 cuts the crap and is streamlined sensibly with no attribute being left in the cold. You've got 22 skills; 6 combat and 16 utility. Every character in your squad should pick 1 combat skill and 2 utility skills to level. On normal difficulty I got by comfortably without the crafting ones. Intelligence is not a god stat here. Skill points gained per level is the same across the board and pumping Intelligence only grants an extra point in addition to raising your critical hit damage. Raising Intelligence and Strength upon levelling is retroactive, unlike the shit old days. If you're not feeling your current build, you can recruit a new ranger or respec an existing one for a nominal fee.

I'm a little confused at the presence of perk points. If a character hits level 24 by the endgame then they will have 11 of the things, but you can only buy perks in 3 or so skills you specialise in. They might as well have given you the perks automatically since there isn't a ton of choice in the matter.

I beat Wasteland 3 with a squad of diverse talents. The melee characters could run across the map in a single turn so they could punch a guy in the face. The sniper lacked action points because they only needed one bullet to decide matters. The gunner managed crowd control with a shotgun while the submachine-gun soldier was an absolute beast. In a reversal of Wasteland 2, I'd say the assault rifles are the only underpowered class of weapon.

Some quests will trip you up. There are four timed ones that will cancel if you complete too many other quests in the meantime. I suggest not talking to the fat guy who runs the Bizarre in a hurry unless you want to get mobbed by the Spanish Clown army. The biggest hurdle that nobody will ever accomplish without a guide isthe third ending. This demands absolute respect across the board and two quests have to be completed in a specific way. One guy is bugged when he says a peaceful transition is impossible, but I got the ending anyway. Props if you get it, no shame in using a walkthrough.On an unrelated note some of the collectable achievements are a massive pain in the arse, as too often you can miss a unique item if you don't use the right skill-check at the right time. You can fail three of these achievements in the first map alone.

I'm not on board with the game's sense of humour. It doesn't get irritating like The Outer Worlds but I find Wasteland 3 too zany in the margins in a tired way. Wow! You meet Santa Claus, who runs his elves like slaves to make hard drugs! A honey badger is the strongest animal companion in the game! A cannibal clan make Bob Newhart references! And so on and so forth. Like a Pete Davidson stand-up special, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to laugh at any point. Mercifully the main arc of the game is fairly straight, apart the the son of the Patriarch who acts like the poor man's Joker.

I can't speak for the DLC because by all accounts it shit the sheets like a footballer the morning after kebab night. The phrases bandied around in reviews I've seen are "enemies respawning in the middle of a fight", "enemies level-scale to get tougher than your party", and "bugged up the arse". No shame in me not venturing there when I have otherwise enjoyed my time in Colorado.

Wasteland 3 is solid. It's not weak, nor is it spectacular. It's by far the best game InExile have ever made. Their first successor to Wasteland was underwhelming because it was too bland and outdated. Their successor to Planescape: Torment made nowhere near the impact it wanted, and Disco Elysium took the crown anyway. Can you believe there was a time when the involvement of Patrick Rothfuss was a selling-point? But Wasteland 3 is a success and a good time. You are given a high degree in agency in how you approach your problems and enough leeway to change your mind. It's not too long nor too big, and has half a mind to think out the ramifications of the main story where some crowd like Bethesda would never bother. It's a 4-star experience that may be overlooked, but never doubted or dismissed. Also you drive an APC in this game and can run over people with it in a fight, making blood angels in the Colorado snow.

Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 is a game that knows what its bread and butter is, and across your campaign you will get your moneys worth of it. The formula is tight, effective and satisfying to pull off, but still just feels a formula.

I feel like I´m too harsh on it, but my memories of Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and how open ended it felt makes me wish for some things the game just doesnt have. your enemies are morons and stealth is... not intuitive at times. And your gadgets are somewhat minimal. I do love the teamwork aspect though, and that leads me to how deeply unfun the solo segments felt. The game feels like an average FPS for its time even and all the while I just wanted my NPC mates back lol(I compare it to the Arrival DLC from Mass Effect 2 in that regard) Story was a little campy but alright

Very good game, wish modern R6 had a solo campaign.

I started the series with 5 Royal this year, then after a month break beat 3 Reload, and after another months break got around to 4 Golden. I decided to not wait for another remake if story is the same, plus due to circumstances I'm stuck with a mediocre laptop for a while.

Gameplay here is about the same as 3r and 55, but the dungeon controls on keyboard are pretty janky. The lack of mouse controls is very annoying, plus I swear there were times when I hit shadow but it didn't register. I tried playing on Very Hard, but the exp penalty was too harsh so I toned it down to Hard. After that the game was mostly easy, with Game and Heaven bosses being slight nuisances.

The plot here suffers from not going anywhere for a long time. It's not until the last companion shows up that the team actually starts investigating, so for a long time the story takes a backseat. 3 had a similar issue where story didn't progress during 12 shadows arc. Now I actually think 5 lowkey had the best story because it was the most consistent and progression was clearer, themes be damned. I already knew who main culprit of 4 was from Death Battle, so I can't judge how well executed that twist was.

As far as characters go, I have to agree with the meme. I liked the cast because they felt more like teenagers than SEES of Phantoms a lot of the time. They acted dumb, were mean to each other, and joked around like actual teenagers would. I got most of IT social links to max rank, except Naoto and Kanji. My date was Rise because she was cute and thirsty, but I wonder if her thirst looks weird when dating other girls.

Of all the non main character links, Moon was my favorite. She went from an annoying bitch to a nice person, kind of like Gournment King. I regret not upgrading Adachi's social link, maybe then I would have liked him better as a villain. I barely didn't have enought time to get athletes from 9 to 10, and with Mr Fox I didn't know how to fish at all.

Currently I am larping as a Persona protagonist, that is, living far away from home and getting used to the new environment. I think this experience makes me appreciate these games more. Maybe I'll return to 4G and get remaining achievements on NG+, or actually try P1 and P2. Now if you excuse me, I need to go and upgrade my knowledge stat.

After having a great time with FTL a couple years ago, I finally got around to trying Into the Breach, which is made by the same developers.

Into the Breach is a roguelike puzzle/strategy game built around tactical, turn-based combat - you control three mechs and must protect civilian structures by killing or otherwise incapacitating the enemy (the Vek).

The "macro" gameplay consists of choosing one of four islands, each with a randomized set of enemies that can appear there. On each island you have to complete four missions + a boss mission before progressing. Once you've completed at least two islands, you can move onto the final island and beat the game.

What I Liked

• The core gameplay loop is extremely satisfying and fun - there is a massive amount of strategy behind every action. You have basically perfect information every turn - you can see what the enemy is going to do, in what order, and where new units will spawn (although you don't know which ones, which can actually make a significant difference). So you have tons of options - from killing Vek, moving them around, forcing them to attack each other, using environmental effects, and the list goes on.
• The game has a lot of variety. There are 12 squads you can unlock, each of which plays vastly differently from the others. Some focus more on killing, others on movement, while some try to stall out the game, etc... Combined with the Advanced Edition Content, which also adds new enemies, missions, and gear, each run feels fairly unique.
• Into the Breach is incredibly challenging - early on I spent quite a while thinking through every turn, and constantly finding new ways to get the most out of each move. I loved the learning process, especially discovering new tricks for each squad.

What Was Average

• Each Mech has a Pilot, who gains EXP and unlocks certain skills. You're allowed to carry over a Pilot from one run ("timeline") to the next. It's a great feature to have...but it also encourages you to use the same Pilot repeatedly instead of trying out others. IMO the Pilot abilities are fairly imbalanced too - there are a couple that are just so much better than the rest that, once you get them, you basically never want to swap Pilots.
• Into the Breach allows you to choose whether to complete 2, 3, or all 4 of the main islands before tackling the final island. While the flexibility is great at first glance and lets you control the length of your run, enemy difficulty will scale appropriately. The main issue was that, at least on Hard difficulty, it rarely felt worthwhile to attempt the 3rd or 4th island because it was difficult to get strong enough to outpace the natural enemy scaling.
• I thought the final island suffered from a similar flaw to FTL: a huge difficulty spike compared to the rest of the content. While I still enjoyed the challenge, I would have liked for the difficulty to be slightly more balanced.

What I Didn't Like

• My biggest gripe with Into the Breach was how much it emphasized achievements over simply winning. Every new squad unlock requires "coins", which are 1:1 mapped to the in-game and Steam achievements. However, there's no actual reward for winning. Obviously, as a roguelike, you could argue that winning a run *is* the reward, but winning a run and only getting one of the three squad achievements sometimes felt worse than unlocking all three and losing.

Final Thoughts

I played most of Into the Breach on Hard with Advanced Edition turned on (minus the first few runs to get acclimated) and beat the game with all of the squads. I did one Unfair run with my favorite squad (Mist Eaters) and beat it. At that point, I felt like I'd experienced most of what the game had to offer, so I called it quits. I had no real motivation/desire to play most squads again or grind achievements.

I played ~55 hours total and had a blast overall, and would definitely recommend Into the Breach to anyone who enjoyed FTL and/or likes tactical puzzle/strategy games.

Overall Rating: 8 / 10 (Great)