I hope i can continue to give you good comms and hot tales on vidya gaymes.

What in the overly sanitized garbage was that????

I honestly could not even write a review because even I'm still struggling to wrap my head around the many bad design decisions that went into this game.

First and foremost, the story is just so bad that its like they tried to mix friendship is magic with millennial humour and tried to make it gangsta. The story had no edge to it at all and i'mgoing to spoil it for you because you deserve to know why the ending is so fucking dumb.

You decide to throw a company team-building party for a Latino Assassin who sticks out like a sore thumb but this causes him to want friends so he steals your friends and leaves you to die, forcing your friends to be the ideal friend circle he never had. You go through a dream sequence that has you collecting game board pieces in the shape of animals before shooting evil game pieces to break out of your nightmare and get a 2nd life. You kill the latino in a showdown and you get a nice sunset but what the hell was that story.

The characters are so bland and cringe with no conflict between them and one of them (Eli who's basically Urkel) gets you to sign up for a mandatory LARP session that got its own DLC on top of its mandatory story missions which is as cringe as it gets. Another is Kevin, a shirtless white guy whose personality is that he likes to cook and shirts are his kryptonite. Neenah should have been an interesting character as she left Mexico to join an american gang in a car that means a lot to her so you would expect her to have some edge but the game just forgets she exists after her gang blows up her car.

The gameplay is just a modified version of Saints Row 3 & 4 which is fine if you liked playing SR3&4. Its servicable but thats all i can say. The devs attempted to make it more interesting by giving you Takedowns which function like Glory Kills but on a cooldown instead with animations that make you go "meh" and lack the brutality that you expect a mechanic inspired by Glory Kills to have. On top of having no edge, there's pratically no blood or gore so you get stuck with goons that just ragdoll or have exaggerated death animations.

The open world missions are genuinely HORRIBLE as you end up with discoveries that just amount to you pixel hunting targets to shoot or tourism boards to press. I'm serious. One of the open world activities you can do in this game is pressing 5 tourist boards just to get crappy exposition. For a game that does not need it in the first place. Then you get to the Empire-Building section of the open world which is basically where all the Respect missions are located now. You have to select a district, then select the activity, and then do the same respect mission until you complete the district, and then boom you're done!

ONLY THE RESPECT MISSIONS FUCKING SUCK. One of them has you waiting for RNGesus for a fashion store truck to show up, then you have to gently hurt the truck or snipe the driver so you can steal it because the truck is immune to normal hijacks. Then you have to take your (nealy destroyed) truck home in one piece and trying to shake off the cops. TWELVE FUCKING TIMES.

Another Respect mission has you skydiving to fuck up some cell towers but you have to do this 20+ times. I did all of the respect missions so YOU dont have to and what do you get once you finish all of them? This absolute beauty of a music video where you see all of the unlikable cringey ass cast of the whole fucking game rapping their hearts out.

The first DLC is just you pulling an Ocean's 11 on a douchebag A-List actor in a mission line that can be cleared in under a hour. The second DLC has you reenacting game of thrones in the very same cringe LARP setting where you team up with your former boss that hates you so much to kill winter elves. 2 hours long.

In short, dont play this game. I cant even go to bat for it because everything is so poorly thought out and designed that i'm surprised this hasn't become this generation's Superman 64.

"Keep the change, ya filthy animal!"

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So i've been on a bit of a GTA clone phase as of now because I wanted to finally dust off my free copies of Mafia 1 & 2 DE from PS Plus. For the first game, I'm glad i got a chance to play it but for the second? Not at all.

Both games are basically GTA clones that are remakes of Mafia 1 & 2 released in the 2000's but with a twist, by being more of a realistic simulation game than an arcade experience that denotes the PS2 GTA games & the Saints Row games.

Mafia 1 takes place in Chicago (called "Lost Haven" in game) during the roaring 20's & the great depression where you play as Tommy Angelo, a cabbie who got caught up in a gang war between 2 mafia families and ends up joining the Saleri mafia family, eventually becoming a Made Man working with his partners in crime, Paulie & Sam. This story honestly impressed me with how well written it is such that each plot point actually matters and each mission you go on has a reason to be there. You actually feel much more connected to your partners and even the Don at some points as all of you end up going through various trials that ends up making your bonds stronger. All of that is in service to one of the better endgame sequences i've played in a GTA clone where it genuinely is heart-wrenching realizing how bad shit just hit the fan. The facial animations and voice work also deserves a fair amount of praise for being able to nail down the tone the game is going for. The experience from seeing Tommy go from a cabbie to a made man and the choices he makes along the way almost feels like it could have been an interactive black & white movie.

As for the gameplay, its so so so much better with a major focus on third person shooting than the driving sections which I appreciate because GTA feels like a driving game with bullshit controls and only like... 3 or 4 shooting missions. Even better is that Mafia 1 DE actually has a feature that lets you skip driving to your objective so you get more time to enjoy the excellent gunplay if you're not someone who likes driving missions. The game is basically a 1920's mafia Gears of War and i am all for any Gears of War clones as there's nothing like a good ass cover shooter. The kills are so damn sastifying with the realistic death animations that keeps you on your feet wanting to lay waste to any wiseguys and cops that dare step in your way.

Even better is that you can just set the difficulty to easy so you don't have to deal with cops being too realistic (No officer, I was not speeding) and the changes from the original PS2 version ensures that you don't ragequit because of the game's bullshit difficulty. If you die in this game, its your fault and vice versa. The free roam mode is a nice addition with some insane missions should you choose to tackle the postgame or just to explore Lost Haven at your own leisure.

If you want to get into the Mafia series, than Mafia 1 DE does an excellent job of getting you into the universe with how good the game looks, how well the story is written, and how much ass the game kicks.

I cannot say the same for Mafia 2 DE. The DE of the game actually feels like the inferior version of the game that was just rushed out of the door instead of getting the love that Mafia 1 DE got. Nothing about this game feels definitive.

Mafia 2 is set in a post–WW2 New York City (called “Empire Bay") where you play as Vito Scaletta, a Sicilian immigrant and war veteran. After being wounded during Operation Husky in Sicily, Vito is sent back to the United States, where his return to civilian life quickly pulls him into the criminal underworld.

I went into this game expecting the same story where the everyman turns to crime so they can make a name for themselves or get more morney. In Vito's case, he teams up with his old buddy Joe Barbaro who gets Vito into the criminal life so he can get money fast enough to clear his father's debt and allow his mom & sister to live a debt free life. As you can tell, things get out of hand very quickly as Vito's attempts to step up is often met with significant setbacks that feels like the world is out to get Vito. This makes sense as the dev team wanted to be more gritty and avoid the glamour of being a made men but I feel like this causes the missions to be less about carrying out mafia jobs and Vito having to salvage a botched plan.

I.... just stopped feeling things with how many times the game kept kicking Vito in the face. Compounding that is the fact that this game seems to introduce too many characters that dont leave a lasting impression. I still couldnt tell you what mafia boss Vito is working for at the end of the game with all the unnecessary middleman and families showing up in the story. I did find Joe to be a good character as his antics kept the story interesting enough to watch. As i'm sure you know by now, Mafia 2 was a rush job back then and it still is, carrying the abrupt ending with no satisfying conclusion. Even the final line said just had me laughing because what the fuck was that ending?

The gameplay is WORSE than the Mafia 1 DE as its just basically the original PS3 / X360 version copied and pasted to the DE. All of the QoL improvements you got in the DE of Mafia 1 is not present here. Its stilla GTA clone but if you're playing this after Mafia 1 DE, then you will feel just how Hagar 13 did this game dirty compared to the love they showed Mafia 1.

First and foremost, the game decided that placing the crosshair at the top of the screen instead of the middle like Goldeneye: Rouge Agent is a good idea. This fucks with your aiming as you're taught to aim at the invisible reticule at the centre of the screen only to miss your shots because Vito is aiming above the enemy instead of at centre mass. I cannot stress how much this ruins your muscle memory and recoil control skills you learned in past shooters. The guns are alright but just feel..... meh overall as some guns just do not feel good to use. The hand cannon (heavy pistol) needs 2 shots to kill instead of one as is the same problem with the Garand. The gunplay just feels so goddamn annoying.

Checkpoints are fucking awful such that you can fail a stealth section in an enemy base AND SOMEHOW RESPAWN ALL THE WAY ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MAP. This happens at several missions and you don't have the ability to instantly fast travel to your objective unlike Mafia 1 DE. This game has multiple instance of "lose all of your guns" which i'm fine with provided I get my shit back but in Mafia 2, you don't get ANY of your shit back if you lose it because of story reasons. Once time is fine but this happens so often that it makes you question why the game even gives you money and the option to spend money on guns, ammo, cars, and outfits. I would have been fine if Mafia 2 had separate wallets so one is for money earned by completing missions and another that would be for key items such as money needed to pay off debts so you don't get fucked over by the story. This even fucks you OVER at the end of the game where you need $27,500 dollars and you can be forced to grind money by stealing cars if you happen to spend any of it. WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ACCEPTABLE BREAKS FROM REALITY???????? shit man I even brought a casual suit and I somehow lose it and have to rebuy the same suit. I'm LOSING things I EARNED. I get its part of the story but ONCE IS ENOUGH.

And here's what gets worse. Mafia 2 DE is more of a bad port than a remaster as i'm getting slammed with bugs 5 years later after the game has been released. Even better is that the DE has bugs that were never in the original game. Here's what I had to deal with:

- Random Crashes (and combined with the awful checkpoints, you have to restart 5 minutes though shit that is not your own fault)
- Tunnels somehow having sunlight spawn and despawn in front of you
- Joe bribes a cop in a cutscene so Karma strikes and causes the whole cutscene to stutter at 5 FPS
- Getting pushed out of cover by the AI which causes you to get gunned down
- NPCs forgetting how to operate doors
- A hostage face's fucking melted during a cutscene
- Another NPC's eyes bugged out so badly that he stares to the left instead of looking at you
- Cars that fly once you step in
- Broken map markers
- if you don't wear Vito's default outfit, his skin will clip through the outfit you chose such as his forehead clipping through the hat and vice versa.

So since this is just a bad port, there's no reason that Hagar 13 and 2K should have released this in the same year as Mafia 1 DE. This game is so fucking undercooked that its ice cold. This is a game that should have been put back into the oven so that they can actually do a full remake that tells the story they intended to do so and actually incorporate all the DLC as part of the main story, including all of the QoL improvements that were there in Mafia 1 DE. This is a game that i cant recommend playing yourself. Just stick to LPs or cutscenes for Mafia 2. Had this released in 2022 or 2023 with the same love Mafia 1 got, we would have a much better experience with a story the developers wanted to tell the first time around. Instead, they blew their shot.

Overall, Mafia 1 DE is a must play while Mafia 2 DE is one hell of a dud.

Reviewed on the PS5

KILL FRIEND: YES

(that is actually what they call their friendly fire setting)

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Turok is a boomer shooter series (that started out as a comic series) where the whole game is the embodiment of "No Kill Like Overkill" & "More Dakka" and unfortunately, rage wars has very little of those moments.

Turok Rage Wars (RW) is a multiplayer focused boomer shooter that takes after Quake 3 and Quake Live in which the whole focus of the game is just all about arena shooters. This on its own is fine as Turok does have a pretty fun MP mode especially as the N64 was the ultimate couch multiplayer machine back then. So it makes sense that Turok would pivot to a multiplayer only game and expand on what the devs did with Turok 2: Seeds of Evil.

Now, I have a soft spot for this game as I had a blast replaying the game over and over because I didn't have a memory pack so everytime I turned off the N64, I lost all my data. Even I tried to leave the N64 running just to keep my progress so when I turned on my TV the day after, the game froze after only 5 seconds. Point is that I have too much memories from playing this game when I was 9 - 10 yrs old.

And here I am more than 2 decades later, having fully completed the game (via a crappy emulator) and all the extra modes knocking this game off my bucket list. So how does it hold up? That's what I aim to elaborate upon.

Rage wars starts out with the choice of playing MP but the meat and potatoes of the game is the 1P trial mode in which you pick a character and play through a unique mission tree for that character. You also have a fixed loadout for that character that you have to learn and master. Each mission takes place on a predefined MP map with defined win conditions such as "Get 5 kills with 3 lives" and it's really that simple. If you complete the trial, you can either get new guns, unlock Alt-Fires, get lives, or get upgrades to your max HP and ammo capacity.

This game is unique among arena shooters in that it lets you pick your load out before you start the game so you can choose from 2 Bullet weapons, 2 energy weapons, and 1 explosive weapon. This is reflected in the maps as instead of picking up guns, you just pick up ammo boxes located on the map next to special weapons and powerups.

I loved the 1P mode because i was so fascinated on wanting to find out what I would unlock for each character but it gets very repetitive when you're playing "Crossroads" for the 13th time with no changes beyond increasing the number of kills required to win. You do get a little better every-time you play it so you feel like you are getting better at RW in terms of mastering the maps and guns but its hard to deny that it just feels like a chore. This is further exacerbated when you actually DO need to clear all the 1P trials with every character as that's the only way you can unlock new characters for couch MP. One character at the very end of the 1P trials is the only one who gives you a gun you can only use in MP and the 1P mode gets harder with each character beaten to the point that you have to get 7 kills with 2 lives against hard AIs. It just gets tiring and loses its magic the more characters you clear.

The weapons should be the best part of the Turok games but RW just has so many mediocre weapons that very few stand out. A lot of guns in T1 and T2 came back redesigned for RW but they feel like straight nerfs. The auto shotgun from T1 becomes a pump shotgun while the Mag 60 from T2 goes from feeling like a rapid M93R to the slow ass fortnite burst rifle. The Scrorpion launcher comes from T2 but it fires a single rocket instead of the 3 in T2. The Tek Bow becomes the Tek crossbow and has no splash damage. of the 8 energy weapons, 5 cost too much ammo to use for so little while 2 of them need their alt-fires unlocked to become good and 1 is MP only. As you can see, the guns that came back got worse while the new guns fail to impress save for the Inflator.

And yes, the inflator does with it says, blows up the enemy till they pop. Also the good energy weapon with an absolutely broken Alt-Fire that even ignores invincibility powerups.

You do get new weapons in-game which come in the form of support weapons but 3 are just for show. The PFM mines and iron claw often dont get triggered while the Cerebral Bore no longer instantly kills an enemy. The sentry gun is the only good one as it gets consistent kills.Power-ups are fun but sometimes they suck as you can end up with a useless power-up such as teleporting when you take ANY type of damage. It just adds to the feeling that everything is nerfed for the sake of balance.

The AI is decent at least but the hard mode AI just cheats so often that I would not fault you if you used cheats to clear those missions while your friendly AI just gets themselves killed too often. Its serviceable. Each character does look diffirent but they often end up feeling the same as they have to be the same size in MP for fairness so you have giant monsters such as the mantid soldier and the oblivion spawn being as tall as Turok despite being taller in T2.

The maps themselves are fine and snappy for 4P multiplayer but the best I can say is that almost all of them feel meh like you jut show up and you're done. They end up reusing a lot of textures so you will see the same tileset show up across multiple maps which again, contributes to the samey repetitive feeling. What confuses me is that there are maps with lava in them so you shouldn't jump into them, right? Well Acclaim unironically put powerups and weapons IN THE LAVA so if you're at full HP and dip into the lava, you could ens up with 40 or 30 HP left with only a Cerebral Bore to show for it. Just, WHY.

If you clear everything in game, then you get two bonus modes "time trial" and "Frag fest" in which you have to beat the mission on a time limit while the latter forces you to use only 1 or 2 guns to clear the mission. Both are decent but I think they would have been better implemented into the standard mission trees. The bosses are challenging but manageable especially as you kill them multiple times.

So overall, this is a very repetitive game. Its s a solid shooter but everything has been sterilized or nerfed for balance so it just feels very very rote. Had Acclaim put more work into making the trials and maps feel unique, I would be telling a different story but as it stands, RW is a game that you're better off ignoring if you're not a completionist or a die hard Turok fan.

There's some good ideas here such as the loadouts but they're so far and few in between that its no wonder why Nightdives does not want to make RW remastered.

I don't think i've played a narrative game that is full of hopeful moments yet hates you with every mile you travel.

As you can tell, there's no witty one-liner to make here simply because this game is full of gut punches with some hope spots sprinkled in. It is a game that tackles all the serious topics that feel like realistic interpersonal conflicts.

Road 96 is an rougelike narrative game where you play as a faceless teenager who's running away from their own country of Petria ruled by the dictator Tyrak. The game takes place in the 90's in an authoritarian USA where Tyrak rigs everything, represses protests, and has no qualms sending children to work in oil pits for profit.

You play the game by going along your road trip in which the computer picks out the next story event based on what you choose to travel. Each event is built like a standalone short story / vignette with one of the 7 main characters you interact in your journey so your goal is to try and see all the short stories over multiple runs that end in many ways.

Eventually, you hit Road 96 in which you get to cross the border and you have various means of trying to cross the border, each with different costs. your actions in the run determine how easy it'll be for your chosen teen to jump the border and leave the shithole behind.

Now the main selling point of the game is the narrative itself. It does such a good job tying all the 6 main characters together into one story and seeing how they're all connected. You'll consistently find yourself being pleasantly surprised when you connect the dots together and decide your next actions based on what you experienced even if you're playing as a different teen.

The cast is well done with some characters that stand out (Jarod, Sonya, and Stan + Mitch) as key examples) but the rest of the cast carries their weight. I cant talk too much on what each character is but all of them are worth listening to and interacting with. It is one of the games that are full of small but unpredictable twists that throw the event for a loop. One moment, you hate their guts and want them to suffer but the next you find their deeper motivations and change your opinion on them so your POVs on all of the characters are constantly changing. It feels like they're friends you meet up every so often as each one of them is uniquely flawed and is morally grey than actually being full black or white. You will walk away with mixed feelings for even the most morally black characters so every interaction is gonna make you spend your time daydreaming if you made the right choices in this current run or past runs.

Another thing i like is how subtly oppressive the game is at its core. While you're shooting the shit with another traveller, you can find yourself isolated at an abandoned McDonalds, or you can find yourself talking your way out of death. Yes, you can actually in fact DIE in this game and start a new run. (Tip: Honestly is NOT the best policy) Shit man, even calling home makes you feel bad and snaps you back into the reality of your situation.

You also have the option to make significant choices which affects the ending whether you choose to overthrow Tyrak via a revolution, vote him out (HAH!), or say fuck this and leave the doomed country. I ended up picking the escape option on all of my runs as I know that Tyrak wont go down without a fight and theres no point trying to pretend that a doomed nation has a chance in hell of recovering from a dictatorship without making a deal with another devil.

One lesser talked about part of the game is how it simplifies the experience of being a runaway teen that does not get talked often. You have a stamina meter and a wallet as you need stamina and money to travel. You refill your stamina by sleeping and eating and you get money by any means necessary wheather it be stealing, looting, or doing odd jobs. However, there's consequences to choosing how to keep your health up and your wallet full. If you do good things such as eat good food, sleep in a room, or help others, you get good karma which makes your RNG dialogue choice rolls favourable. If you do bad things such as eat food from the trash, sleep on the floor, or steal a car, your RNG rolls are against you. This is genius because it really shows how easy it is to keep circling the drain if you make a string of bad choices and hammering in how desperate you have to be to get the fuck out of Petria. Of course, if you run out of stamina, you get captured by the cops, ending your run so you have to start over with a new teen.

if you've played story-based games like the Stanley Parable, then Road 96 is no different only you get the ability to learn special skills or get new tools from your companions that you can then use in future runs to solve puzzles easier or unlock new dialogue choices. I did find myself getting annoyed at all the invisible walls that kept popping up but i can let that slide. I wish i had more aggressive dialogue choices too because as a teen, i feel that it is my god given right to tell someone pointing a gun at my head to go fuck themselves.

Overall, I STRONGLY recommend this game and you should go in blind. You will find yourself thinking about the game and how raw & visceral yet mundane the game feels from being broke, being hungry, or even getting into trouble. It is a subtly brutal game with some of the best short stories & character development I've ever played.

{°д°}

Even on FurAffinty, F.O.E!
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Etrian Odyssey 5 is presently the last mainline numbered entry in the DS/3DS dungeon crawling games that successfully modernized the Wizardry / Bard's Tale dungeon crawler formula. The series is known for having you explore the dungeon in first person on the top screen while using the touch screen to draw out the map. This simple feature (among others) defines Etrian Odyssey to a T.

And honestly. that part is still fun.

The premise is that you play as a guild of adventurers you create and customize seeking to climb the Yggdrasil Labyrinth, a tower that spans 30F into the sky seeking to discover new materials, dodge monsters, and uncover the mystery behind the creation of the labyrinth itself. The story is still as barebones as ever, expecting you to use your headcanon to make your own story. Its allright but just... really dosent have that kinda pizzaz or spice. You could remove the dialogue boxes and it wouldn't make a difference.

Now, Etrian Odyssey 5 is a unique game in the series in that it acts as a soft reboot to bring the series back to its roots with a single 30F dungeon as seen in Etrian 1 & 2. However, that's where the similarities end as Etrian odyssey 5 introduces so much new ideas related to character customization, a revised damage formula, and an all-new roster of monsters.

The loop is simple. Create your own characters, stock up on items, and explore the labyrinth fighting random encounters and dodging FOEs going as deep as you can before you have to tap out. Its a simple but effective loop that has been refined so well that Etrian 5 is easily the best the series has gotten so far. It goes without saying that Etrian 5 is an Atlus game so you will have use all the tools in your disposal as Atlus does not fuck around in ANY Etrian game on standard and classic difficulty.

Character creation is one of the core pillars as each and every class plays a unique role that often works well with other party members. This is a game series where each and every role matters and you NEED to make the best of your limited party slots. You start out by picking a race which determines your overall stat growth and racial skills before a class which gives you your skill tree and weapon choices. Then you pick a portrait and your character is created. You choose from 4 races, Earthlains(Humans, good at tanking & aliments), Lunarians (Elves, good at spells), Therians (Demi-furries, Strong and Speedy attackers), and Brounis (Halflings, good at supports) and each race has several classes that they specialize for a total of 10 classes. You also unlock the ability to reclass characters so you can have a class with a different stat growth table than their base race. In addition, you can now recolour your character portraits using an incredibly detailed colour scheme allowing you to pick between all 255 shades of RGB. This is the best the character creator has gotten so far.

The skill trees got overhauled as you now have 2 separate trees, one for racial skills and one for class skills. You use racial skills to get useful passives and limit breaks unique to your race while your class skills are what gives you your passive and active skills. In previous games, you could pick sub classes but in EOV, you now have to pick between 2 master titles which determines your class specialization. Each master title act as an upgrade to your current class. For instance, if you have a Dragoon (tank class), then you can choose to become a shield bearer which makes you more of a tank or a cannon bearer that makes you a tank that can bite back with overwhelming artillery. It is basically Atlus' answer to resolve the broken subclassing system that cracked the game wide open. (Though they ended up adding them back in nexus) I prefer the legendary titles as subclassing is nice but I like seeing base jobs get upgrades to stronger versions of themselves.

Now this game is still excellent in how it continuously improves and modernizes the dungeon crawling formula with a hard as hell 1st stratum that gradually gets easier once you unlock your abilities. Adding to the difficulty are puzzles and obstacles in the form of F.O.Es, enemies you have to avoid on the dungeon map as they represent mini-bosses that will paste you unless you prepare well for them. They are just as tense as they are in past instalments when you first see them simply because you don't have the levels to even meet them on equal footing.

The design of each stratum (6 in total, each being 5 floors) is decent but I feel like it could have been done better as it felt meh besides the 3rd and the 5th & 6th stratum. The vibe each straum gives off is well executed and the monsters reflect the theme rather well. I do miss the overworld that you could explore in Etrian 4 as i felt that added a LOT of character to the world and 5 falls short of that as you're stuck within the 30 floor tower the whole game.

Overall, this is a game that I can't really talk about in text as its one you have to explore for yourself to see how good it is. It is like dark souls (its a meme but it really does earn its Nintendo hard reputation) in that its tough but fair. The game wants you to use ALL the supportive tools in your arsenal such as disables (Aliments & binds) and items to get yourself out of tricky situation. As such, random encounters within the Etrian series feels more engaging than normal because you have to actually mitigate damage, you can't just outdamage everyone else and hope that you live after the 2nd turn.

If you're interested in the Etrian series, then you should start with the HD remaster instead of trying to Pirate 5. Etrian is a series that you have to play to see how it grows its beard and tries to be unique with multiple callbacks. Furthermore, the ending (normal and true end) will have a greater impact if you've played all the other Etrian games up to 5 first. Nexus is meant to be played after you play all the EO games.

So in short, shut up and buy the HD remaster to start at Etrian 1. You'll also appreciate Metaphor RF more.

I never thought I would be able to hit 5000+ faves on my work and comms..

Seriously. I appreciate yall for enjoying my stuff and I will continue to provide you with more good furry pron.

Would you kindly read the review?

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Bioshock is a series that needs no introduction.

Bioshock (2007) is easily one of the best immersive sim games you can play just because of how the developers wern't sastified with just making a first person shooter set in an underwater city. They wanted you to feel like you were trapped and isolated in a failed underwater utopia brimming with story and style.

As you know, Bioshock 1 takes place in the underwater city of Rapture in 1960, a libertarian utopia dreamed up by the cartoonisly evil oil tycoon Andrew Ryan at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean built using 1920's Art Deco and Greco-Roman architecture styles. As you can expect, Rapture is already fallen the moment you get there after a plane crash lands you near the lighthouse with a ship that takes you underwater to Rapture. After an impressive tour of the city, you are greeted by a poor guy getting torn to pieces by a crackhead with hooks for hands in a dark room just to illustrate how fucking gone Rapture is.

Honestly, i'm gonna stop explaining the story here because this is a game that you have to really immerse yourself in because you can tell that NOTHING is wasted in this game. While some other games have throwaway rooms and corridors just to spawn enemies or give you supplies, Bioshock has no such thing. Every part of the level is there for a reason and it shows through the environmental storytelling or puzzles for you to solve for extra loot or a tape recorder. The story as a whole is basically told through the environment and its about how Andrew Ryan is the biggest hypocrite who embodies the "Rules for Thee but not for me" brand of libertarian ideology and it shows.

And it is for that reason that the game's writing falters in quality after the climax.

After you kill Andrew Ryan, the next villain is Frank Fontaine who fails to command the same presence that his counterpart Ryan does. Ryan is a villain because he is a flawed bastard who wanted to create his own world while Fontaine only exists to be a moustache twirling villain. Rapture was built, controlled, and destroyed by Ryan's own hand while Fontaine is just the opportunistic cockroach who only exists to be the true final boss. The last two missions of the game feels like Fontaine is playing with you and it just gets annoying because Fontaine doesn't really evoke a presence compared to Ryan (and Cohen) with all the gloating he does. Fontaine is just there to fill the void Ryan left when he died and the same problem goes with Sofia Lamb of Bioshock 2 so it feels like hes just there to fill a role instead of being a part of a world. I feel that Fontaine would have worked better as a pragmatic villain who minces no words and knows what he wants to be an effective foil to Ryan.

The gameplay itself is full of jank which make sense, its basically trying to modernize the immersive sim genre by improving upon the framework established by System Shock 1 & 2. It plays like a Half-Like with physics and the ability to carry all of your weapons at once but the twist is that you gain the ability to use Plasmids. Plasmids are superpowers granted to people by injecting the miracle drug ADAM which rewrites one's genetic code to provide superpowers. In simple terms, its basically magic you cast whether it be fireballs, ice blasts, electro bolts, etc. ADAM plays a major role in the downfall of Rapture as ADAM is an addictive substance so ADAM withdrawals causes your body and mind to deform in grotesque ways turning you into splicers, lunatics who only care about getting their next hit of ADAM to fuel their superpowers.

Which is the main game play loop of Bioshock 1 and 2. You explore rapture using plasmids in creative ways to solve environmental puzzles and take out Splicers. You also have to figure out how to take down Big Daddies, monsters in diving suites who act as protectors for Little Sisters, brainwashed little girls who drain ADAM from corpses so they can continue to produce more ADAM. The Big Daddies function as challenging minibosses who make their presence known and you CANNOT take them down without proper planning and utilization of tools at your disposal. You have to kill them anyways as the Little Sisters can be rescued or harvested to get more ADAM to make yourself stronger.

You also get your standard roster of weapons being the standard melee weapon, shitty pistol, always useful Thompson, shotgun, grenades, etc. each weapon has access to 2 special ammo types designed to exploit enemy weaknesses or set up traps. The weapons can be upgraded and each upgrade carries the same art deco style Bioshock is going for ensuring that all weapons really feel like they belong there. The main issue is that the pistol quickly becomes useless by the time you get to the climax so you're better off getting all your weapon upgrades for the SMG and leave the final 2 upgrade stations for the pistols.

Of note is that this game lets you build your character using gene tonics that give you passives that improve your performance. You can even build yourself to become a wrench murderer killing splicers in one or 2 hits with your wrench. It is HILARIOUS.

Bioshock also has some major flaws though; Hacking is useful in Bioshock because you can hack machines for cheaper prices or hack turrets to make them fight for you but the actual minigame is so fucking TEDIOUS. The minigame is basically a pipe puzzle where you have to sort out pipes to make the energy flow from point A to point B and it quickly becomes boring. Even worse is that the game throws in trap tiles that make you fail the minigame but what makes this even worse is that you can end up with hacking puzzles that are unwinnable. Yes, unwinnable because you don't have the right parts to solve the puzzle or there are a set of trap tiles surrounding the end of the puzzle making it impossible to solve. You're better off installing a mod that skips hacking in its entirety.

Bioshock also tries to implement a morality system by giving you the option to rescue little sisters which reverses their brainwashing and genetic modifications but gives you less ADAM while harvesting little sisters is just basically murdering little children for ADAM. It goes without saying that rescuing should be your only option of dealing with Little Sisters because you get unique plasmids and ADAM gifts later on to make up for the ADAM lost via rescuing. Furthermore, the difference in total ADAM gained between recuing and harvesting is just 300 ADAM and at that point, you already have your plasmids and gene tonics you need for your build so what's the point with all the extra ADAM you don't need? Harvesting is just being cruel for the sake of being cruel.

Bioshock also has a feature where you can research enemies to get damage bonuses and plasmids/gene tonics but its so tedious as you have to keep the subject alive while spamming pictures of them. Researching just adds nothing to the game and you should mod it out if possible.

Overall, Bioshock 1 is a game that lives and dies by how well the gameplay and story is interwoven together. Bioshock's gameplay loop would not exist if every single gameplay mechanic was tied to the story and vice versa. It is the perfect blend of immersive sim elements and you owe it to yourself to play Bioshock.

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So with Bioshock 1 setting the bar so damn high, how can Bioshock 2 (2010) improve upon this? The simple part is that you improve the gameplay and just add more worldbuilding.

Bioshock 2 takes place 8 years after the events of the first game in Rapture after the death of both Ryan and the true villain where you play as Subject Delta, a Big Daddy who has to reach his Little Sister or else he dies of loneliness. The Little Sister in question is Eleanor Lamb who is the daughter of Rapture's top psychologist turned cult leader Sofia Lamb who seeks to implement a collectivist utopia using Eleanor as the conduit. Its basically a long-drawn custody battle between you and Sofia over Eleanor.

Bioshock 2 maintains the stellar worldbuilding standard set forth in Bioshock 1 as it introduces even more districts chock full of lore as you learn how the city intended to work as a libertarian utopia but falls apart in reality. The best examples are basically Ryan Amusements which is a propaganda centre disguised as an amusement park to scare kids away from leaving Rapture and Pauper's Drop which are slums showing how the poor lived in Rapture away from the rich areas. Again, the environments and worldbuilding are so beautifully done ensuring that each and every level really does feel like a mini story in itself.

The problem is that the story is just very meh as Sofia is just a parasite in Ryan's city who took advantage of the power vacum to instill her utopia. She is meant to be emotionless and calculating which she does but her presence leaves a lot to be desired as she is overshadowed by the mini-stories and bosses you deal with that tell far more compelling stories. You even have the option to spare or execute the minibosses based on the cases they present to you as you go through the levels but the final choice is dependent on your actions throughout the game. IDK I just never really felt close to Eleanor and Sofia is just... there until the ending. In Bioshock 1, you FELT Ryan all throughout the game as his city was HIS vision alone but Sofia has nothing to lay claim to in the decaying Rapture, benefiting of her status as a Parasite in Ryan's eyes.

For Sofia to work, I think that you should have been in a different setting altogether as part of a collectivist utopian dystopia so that you actually see Sofia's ideas play out in practice and experience what it would be like. That way she can establish herself as a creator and you tasked with surviving and fighting your way out of Sofia's city as opposed to fighting your way out of Ryan's city. Nothing in Bioshock 2 screams "I, Sofia Lamb, built this for my ideals." but Bioshock 2 screams "I, Sofia Lamb, Hijacked this for my own ends." and it suffers for it.

The gameplay though is a MASSIVE improvement. The gameplay and story are integrated so well because you move and behave like one. You make thunderous stomping sounds while walking and jumping, you're taller than the splicers you lay waste to, and you're strong enough to carry guns that average 1.5m in length and 60 lbs average with one hand while casting plasmids from your free hand. You can now dual-wield guns and plasmids so you don't have to equip spells to use them, you can just cast them freely and it works WONDERS. This game is basically telling you to mix and match plasmids even more and the guns are now all useful including the standard rivet gun. A LOT of the guns now feel bulky and powerful in your hands as they should be and are far more unique such as the rivet gun replacing the pistol, the speargun replacing the crossbow, etc. You can even do a drill-only run if you wanted to using the right combo of Plasmids and Gene Tonics.

You also get a new gimmick when dealing with Little Sisters such that you can escort them to corpses and protect the girls as they drain ADAM from corpses which makes all the defensive plasmids and tools much more useful this time around and it pays off. You still have the shoehorned moral choice of choosing to kill or not kill a Little Girl and like the first game, the difference is minuscule at only 200-ish ADAM if you choose to recuse / harvest all of them. Naturally, your only option is to rescue each and every single one of them.

Hacking is vastly improved as its a simple "stop the meter in the green section" meaning that the minigame now takes a few seconds compared to how long the hacking minigames were in Bioshock 1. It is so, so, so much better this time around. Researching also comes back in an improved form but it is still tedious and you're better off modding out the researching minigame if you can.

Overall, i would treat Bioshock 2 as a continuation of Bioshock 1's lore with a VASTLY improved gameplay loop and so many QoL changes that it feels like a breath of fresh air. I would also give the Minerva's Den DLC a run for your money as it has a pretty good story and nails all the beats just right with a new plasmid and gun to try out. I wish that the devs had stuck to their guns and left the Machine Gun out of the DLC basically challenging the player to use single-shot weapons and work around that but that's just me.

And if you did like Minerva's Den, then Gone Home should be on your list of games to play as it was made by the same dev team.

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If Bioshock 1 and 2 are games made by a team confident in their development vision and convictions that wanted to say something with their games, then Bioshock Infinite (2013) is made by a team of cowards who wanted to say something but pussied out at the last minute.

I honestly think Bioshock Infinite is the weakest and worst game in the series that basically killed it off. It fails at creating a compelling believable stylistic world, fails at providing varied combat, fails at even providing a compelling story, and fails to be Bioshock at its core. It says everything but ultimately says nothing of value in a boring world full of wasted potential.

Bioshock Infinite takes you back to the 1910's where you play as Booker Dewitt, a man with a gambling debt so large that he has to go to the flying theocratic utopia of Columbia led by Rev. Comstock to rescue his daughter from him. The world of Columbia is basically MAGA as it is inspired by the Antebellum and the Jim Crow era of American history with rampant racism against fucking EVERYONE including the Irish, dickriding Jesus and God so hard, and nationalism so feverish it makes Super Earth shed a tear.

To its credit, it nails the feeling of being an Americanized dystopia so well in the first few hours.... and then forgets what it's supposed to be after the 4rd hour. You go through a lynch mob wanting to stone an interracial couple at the start to seeing washrooms for whites and coloureds but then the game forgets about the world they just built by the time they get to the halfway mark. Infinite fails to even immerse you in their world as Bioshock 1 had you living and surviving in the Rapture like a survival horror while infinite just has you moving from scene to scene; never giving you a chance to be part of the world.

Infinite fails to capture the vibes of being trapped inside a flying city as everything feels so open that the risk of falling to your death feels trivial. The civilians you fight in Columbia lack the insanity and tragedy that splicers suffer from as a result of their ADAM withdrawal as they are just regular soldiers you shoot in every CoD game with some heavies thrown into the mix. You never get up close and personal with the special types of enemies such as the Handymen or the Igniters and when you do, there's practically no lead up showing what they're capable of or even a proper mini-boss against them.

Cumsock is the worst of the bunch as he's supposed to be this game's Andrew Ryan but the flying city of Columbia lacks the personal touch from Cumsock. Furthermore, he just only shows up in a few cutscenes, drops some cryptic bullshit, and then fucks off. The voxophones (audio tapes) are even worse as Bioshock 1 and 2 gave them subtitles. Infinite.... removes subtitles from them. Making them pointless to listen to. The relationship between Elizabeth and Booker is decent at least though they themselves get stuck in the convoluted mess that is Bioshock infinite's lore and plot twists.

There's another character that shows up as Daizy Fitzroy who is a black freedom fighter who ends up being there just so the developers can say "both sides bad" as she represents the bloodthirsty Bolshevik revolutionaries / terrorists that you end up fighting later on in the game. I really dislike her as a character because as said before, she and her faction is only there to present a false sense of nuance and she only exists for a few scenes so you never get the chance to build up a relationship between Fitzroy and Booker just like with Cumsock and Booker. So, so, so, much wasted character just to say "both sides bad". If you're going to go there, have the fucking balls to make Booker and Elizabeth suffer from both sides PERSONALLY so the player feels deeply uncomfortable with what they're doing. Bioshock 1 & 2 made you fall for traps where you watch a splicer ramble about how they;re gonna fuck you up as you go through carefully crafted levels that build up the villain and you see what they're capable of. I should walk out the game feeling like a cynical bastard disillusioned by both sides, not just seeing them as set dressing for a generic shooter. If you're gonna take inspiration from the Bolsheviks, the Reign of Terror, and Pol Pot then make us live as a civilian watching those atrocities unfold in front of us.

To me, bioshock has always been a game about the world. The story that is going on is secondary to the worldbuilding and lore presented and that's where Bioshock excels in but infinite fails with how convoluted the world is with characters that make you feel nothing, the plot means nothing, the world means nothing, and your actions don't matter.

And the gameplay suffers from this as it just becomes a halo ripoff. You lost your ability to carry all your weapons as you are forced with a 2 weapon limit. Your gene tonics have been replaced with gear which you only get 4 slots to play with in the whole game compared to the 18 slots you got in Bioshock 1&2. No more physics objects you can use to win fights, no more metroidvania-like environmental puzzles, no more hacking, no more visual changes to the weapons as you upgrade them, and so on. What really sells this as a halo ripoff is that you also get a shield bar in addition to your health bar. No more morality choices that affect the story. Sprinting is added to the game. Nothing works and everything suffers for it.

The levels are all linear save for one level near the endgame being "Emporia" that plays like a traditional bioshock level. It is the ONLY one that's there in game. You get the tool called a skyhook that you can use for Glory Kills and to ride the skylines but more often than not, you want to hunker down and take care of enemies at range. The level design feels too open as i keep running past massive open spaces with barely any cover to work with and very few levels have the charm. I first played Bioshock when i was in middle school and i can recall all of the names and vibes of each place by heart but I couldn't even tell you what all the levels in Infinite are. I guarantee you that I will forget about "Emporia" by the time 2026 or 2027 rolls around. Thats just how forgettable this game is.

You do get vigors which act as your plasmids but most of them are just variations of stuns and you don't get the chance to mix-match. You can just go the whole game by treating vigors as grenades especially because vigor upgrades are so expensive that it's not worth it as you'll be using weapons far more often to kill and as such, weapon upgrades are more important.

You have Elizabeth who fights with you in battle but she throws you supplies and opens up tears which give you more combat options but it just felt like a gimmick that's just like: "neat".

I'm going to end it here, Bioshock infinite is a game that lacks any form of conviction as it just copies halo, fails to say anything, fails to build up an immersive world, and fails at being Bioshock at its core. Its a competent shooter but it is NOT Bioshock at all.

And please don't play burial at sea. The rectconning the DLC does is criminal and you have FORCED STEALTH FUCK THAT SHIT.

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Bioshock is a series that is meant to be played multiple times. I played them when I was a naive young teen and but playing them recently as a adult cynical bastard actually made the games even better. I was able to listen to all the audio tapes and put myself in the world. I was able to read in between the lines and get what the scene was talking about. I was able to understand the themes and how they interacted with each other to tell the story of Andrew Ryan's Rapture. Truly, Bioshock 1 & 2 aged the best.

"Kiwami 1 was great so how do we make Kiwami 2 better?"

"What if we gave Kiwami 2 immersive FPS / Source Engine physics?"

"You get your own title card"

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*Rex the sergal walks in; camera goes into black and white*

REX - PATRIARCH OF THE SERGAL CLAN - A THICC FAMILY SUBSIDIARY

Yakuza is a game that doesn't disappoint and Kiwami 2 continues to show why the Yakuza / LAD series deserves all the acclaim it gets. If you love any yakuza game, you will love this one as RGG pulled out all the stops with this one.

The story is honestly mixed this time around, Kiryu gets dragged into a clan civil war that leads to finding the true instigators of the civil war and finding out just how deep the conspiracy goes. It is however a story with highs where the highs are high but the lows are really low as it fleshes out the characters of Y1 but then introduces multiple throwaway plots that would be best suited as substories. The ending was honestly decent and touching right until the end where they throw it all away in a scene of Kiryu doing something he would never do.

The main villain Ryuji Goda needs MUCH more screen time as does the conspirators. There's just so much filler chapters that really should have been replaced with scenes and arcs of dealing with Ryuji seizing control following the start of the civil war and establishing how he is a force to be reckoned with during Yakuza business. Its a key part of gangster movies, seeing the many thugs and goons go at each other while dropping civilians and destroying property just to drive the brutality of the Yakuza home.

As you know, the next part is story spoilers so click at your own risk.

I appreciate the game for going the extra mile to help flesh out why Kiryu looks up to his adopted dad as well as establishing the consequences of trying to escape your past. The main point of content is Sayama, the Yakuza Huntress introduced as a badass detective who later becomes Kiryu's love interest. She started out great but the whole game kept knocking her down so many pegs including her making rookie mistakes, not defending herself, and letting the other male leads order her around turning her into a damsel in distress. It felt like I was watching her devolve in the story with no chance of self-reflection or improvement. Sure, she fights with you during the random encounters but she;s unable to hold her own in cutscenes and even in the final boss rush. I would have loved to see her get some more fight scenes including in the final boss where she shows her determination to arrest the true culprit of the Omi civil war. Instead, all we get is a gut punch between Sayama and Ryuji but then she gets locked out of every fight leading up to the most bullshit ending. Kiryu and Sayama go down on each other expecting to die in the blast next to a bomb. Yes, they fuck in front of a bomb. Kiryu was perfectly OK with leaving Haruka alone instead of hauling ass to make sure he lives for Haruka who sees Kiryu as a uncle. That is just not something Kiryu would do. I get the secret ending but again, this is not Kiryu. Imagine being Kiryu having to console Haruka, who thought you left her all alone again.

Overall, the story had good highs but has too many filler chapters and an embarrassing ending

Now for the gameplay.

Kiwami 2 is basically two games in one; the beat-em up battling that drives the main game and the immersive tokyo simulator experience where you eat food and play minigames including two major minigames. Kiwami 2 ditches the style system in 0 and Kiwami 1 in favour of a single style instead while combining various aspects of the style system into a unified dragon style. It works fine so far since you get a versitaile combat system with new moves and weapons to use to beat up foes. Its basically a mashfest anyways so you can just brute force most fights.

The best part howeever, are the heat actions in which you get to destroy people with your firsts and weapons capable of breaking arms while being made of rubber. there are badass ones and then you get the obligatory silly heat actions such as the fluted pole heat action. Yes, i used the pole in every single final boss rush fight.

The substories are actually an improvement from 0 and Kiwami 1 as substories that require you to win obscene amounts of chips from gambling for completion points are reduced down to manageable amounts. This simple change actually made me appreciate minigames a lot more and pushed me to do so well that I gain completion points which I did for most of them. I even got into playing Koi Koi online just because the hanafuda deck was so stylish and the game was just that fun. Oicho-Kabu (Japanese baccarat) was interesting to play and I suck at Shogi (japanese chess) and Mahjong (gin rummy on asian difficulty). Point is that I spent so much time completing and 100% all the minigames including the Cabaret Club & Majima Construction so you know they did so well with the side content.

So in short, I honestly had fun throughout the game, 100% the bouncer missions, Haruka's requests, etc. and I think thats really where Yakuza also shines by giving you so much meaningful side content that it puts other open world games to shame. The beat-em up is still fun but got boring once you maxed your stats out which is fair, it is what it is. Story still has the narm charm of Yakuza but has some moments that leave your head scratching. The dragion engine;s jank does make the game better though.

Again, this is from a series that is best experienced by starting with Yakuza 0 and going in chronological order but Kiwami 2 is such a fun game that I recomend it.

This game should be called Near Cry 4 because of how closely it plays like Far Cry 3.

And that's really all I can say about this game. If you loved Far Cry 3 and wanted more of it, Far Cry 4 is your thing. In some ways, Far Cry 4 is an improvement over Far Cry 3 with a larger world, more beautiful graphics, and a world that feels like you're in Nepal. Unfortunate, you get a story that falls short with a great villain that is woefully underutilized and a map that is too large for what it actually is full of filler and fluff content.

Far Cry 4 starts with you playing as Ajay Ghale, son of the legendary revolutionary leader Mohan Ghale who led the Golden Path, an organized resistance group taking arms against the tyrannical King Pagan Min who rules Kyrat (basically a fictionalized version of Nepal/Tibet) with an iron fist. Ajay is there to spread the ashes of his deceased mother at a place called Lakshmana. You get invited to Pagan's palace where you can choose to go to Lakshmana with Min or escape his palace and take arms against him choosing to work with the two leaders of the Golden Path; the progressive and pragmatic Amita and the traditional idealistic Sabal who are at each other's throats.

The thing that disappoints me about the story is that there are legit some good plot hooks that are severely underutilized. You likley already know that Far Cry 4 has a secret ending where you can wait in Pagan's palce for 15 minutes to get a secret ending where he takes you to Lakshmana and ends the game there. I wish you actually had a choice to choose to side with Pagan Min because he's a charismatic villain who just doesn't get enough screen time. No surprise but you find out that Amita is just another Pagan Min who wants to turn Kyrat into a drug state with child soldiers destroying buddhist temples and icons considered sacred to the Kyrati people. Sabal leads the country into an economically bankrupt theocracy as he turns into a religious fanatic who cant stop glazing Ajay's dad and kills off anyone who isn't a Buddhist. And given the context of those two endings, you really should have gotten the choice to fight for Pagan Min because the "good guys" are actually bad including Ajay's dad as a full villain play-through where you get revenge on Amita and Sabal for using you to fulfill their extremist ends.

Ajay is a crappy protagonist to boot because he esentially gets pushed around by Amita and Sabal in the main game behaving like a dumb silent protragonist when the game should have made Ajay more assertive and basically tell off Amita, Sabal, and Min to help sell his character. Ajay spends too much time being sildent and letting people order him around when the story would have benefited from Ajay pushing back against other characters and saying his side of the story and thoughts instead of being steamrolled in cutscenes. If you're gonna give me a voiced character with an established backstory, USE IT! I also find it hilarious that Ajay keeps going back to the stoner duo who drugged and kidnapped Ajay for several sidequests because Ajay is not permitted to stand up for himself. The stoners are even squatting on his father's property for FREE! Honestly, its just seems that Ajay is forced to carry the idiot ball instead of throwing it back and telling other characters to fuck off.

And honestly, i'm harsh on the story because this is a game that comes close to making a meaningful message but fucks it all up. Amita and Sabal are both different shades of Pol Pot, a brutal Communist Cambodian dictator who led the Khmer Rouge and committed multiple genocides/purges of undesirables. I feel that the story should have continued after you usurp Pagan Min in which you now have to fight against the Golden Path to remove Amita or Sabal with Ajay being furious that he was tricked by them into a real boss battle and give a proper ending to Ajay's story. It should have not ended with Pagan being deposed but ended with Ajay cutting through their bullshit and give Kyrat a chance to breathe from the grasp of multiple power hungry cunts. Instead, all you get is a post-game cutscene showing how bad Sabal and Amita are which feels unsastifying. Perhaps realistic but I would have liked something more than the current ending.

Really, I just wish we got a more vocal and cutthroat Ajay alongside a more prominent Pagan Min who gives you the option to pick his side over the Golden Path. For how weak the story is, Ubisoft is able to make the shocking moments feel real because initially, I sided with Amita back in 2015 as I disliked child marriage and Sabal's religious fundamentalism / disdain of women so when I replayed the game this year choosing to side with Sabal, I always felt like I was going against my values. I valued Amita's pragmatism in making sure we get the intel we need and using drugs to keep the army funded but not to the point that she starts using child labour and soldiers to keep Kyrat occupied by her and vice versa. I went onto the internet to see what people chose and I was surprised to see that the general sentiment was that other people picked Sabal because Sabal keeps glazing you and actually wanted to save you at the start while Amita wanted to leave you alone in Pagan's palace. Another person remarked that they grew up in a post-soviet country where places of worship were destroyed so the moment that the commenter saw Amita destroy Buddhist temples, they switched over to Sabal because they knew destroying religious figures will lead to worse things down the road. To me, the fact that I actually went to see other people's choice and justifications shows me that they had a good choice and branching system with compelling but flawed options; I just wish they did MORE with it.

Story aside, the world of Kyrat is a massive step up from the Rook Islands in Far Cry 3 as it feels like a lived-in version of Nepal instead of the Rook Islands feeling like it was made in a level editor overnight. There are multiple Buddhist objects, shrines, and mani wheels that really help sell then fact that this is Kyrat and even the addition of those strings of prayer flags, sherpas, and even the Urdu text make this feel real. The UI is also well done as it feels clean like a mobile UI while also incorporating vibrant purple, orange, and blue colours. Far Cry 4 is not just content with taking inspiration from Nepal, it want you to feel like you're there compared to Rook Islands, Hope County, and Yara. (How do you even manage to fuck up recreating Havana in Far Cry 6 but have it be so fucking barren and lifeless Ubisoft?)

The gameplay is the same as Far Cry 3 down to the open-world formula and gameplay loop so there's nothing new there. It carries over most of the same guns from FC3 while also adding in some new guns which is nice including new signature weapons. You get the same mission of clearing open-world outposts and collecting items as you deal with sidequests and hunting. If you liked Far Cry 3 and want more, Far Cry 4 is for you. Its the comfort food of FPS being that you get to be a guerrilla unleashing chaos on the oppressive forces with copious amounts of guns and explosives. You get a pocket M79 grenade launcher you can shoot while driving and you get to use mini choppers to rain grenade rounds down on outposts if you wanted to. The freedom is ALL there for you.

As for me, I liked Far Cry 3 but like every Far Cry game, it always overstays its welcome. The open world is divided into two areas, North and South Kyrat. You start in the south and work your way up north but I'm going to be real with you, the game did not need North Kyrat in its entirety. You could have just took some landmarks and shrunk them down into one map so the game does not feel like a slog while also reducing the amount of fluff in there. That's really all I can say because it becomes so apparent that once you go into North Kyrat, you see just how haphazardly it was put together compared to the south. I wish we got a LOT more missions set in the mountains as the whole Willis Quest line was honestly amazing for how you got to see snow-capped monasteries and caves of Tibet taking care of both guards and animals. It looked and felt so good that we should have gotten a lot more of it.

One final point is that I liked the Shangri-La sections where you played as Kalinag who explored Shangri-La with just only a bow and a knife plus his tiger. It was a nice change of pace but perhaps overstayed its welcome.

Initially, I had good memories of playing Far Cry 4 when I played it back in high school. I honestly enjoyed it but as an adult who played more than enough Ubisoft games, I really started to feel bored and burned out by the end especially once I ended up at the point in the game where I maxed out everything before the final boss. I will say that my rose-tinted glasses fell off but I was able to learn more about Far Cry 4 as I explored areas I never did first time around. I even read through the readable collectibles such as the lost letters and Pagan Min's handbook that puts a LOT more background into the story than the game gives you.

So overall, Far Cry is like every Ubisoft game, it starts out with legit good ideas but they never commit to them fully even when doing so would make the game far more memorable. I would still pick this as my favourite far cry game because of of all the Far Crys 3-6, 4 was the one that kept a long-lasting impression on me.

If you just want to try out far cry for the first time, I would pick 4 myself because it improves a lot on 3 but I wouldn't ignore Far Cry 3. Its ultimately up to you but I feel you cannot go wrong with Far Cry 3 or 4. Far Cry 5 & 6 are games i cannot recommenced sadly.

You ever seen a game that does everything it should be doing on the surface but just falls flat? That's Payday 3 for you. It is a game that does what it needs to do to improve upon Payday 2 but somehow fails to stick the landing because Overkill tried to make a promise they cannot keep.

Payday 3 is a heist based co-op shooter that both behaves like a stealth game with a horde mode, somehow managing to combine both things into a game that works. This is no different here as you still go through various heists, casing the place before you make your move either quiet or loud. Going quiet has you sneaking through the bank avoiding guards, civvies, and cameras to complete the task while going loud has you brute forcing your way through gates and cops. Both approaches are just as sastifying as they should be for the Payday series.

What makes this interesting is that instead of the usual "Hold X to do task" each task now has a QTE that is appropriate for what you are doing such as doing a lock picking mini game for doors and safes, hacking minigame for computers, etc. You also gain the ability to take people hostages and move them around which is actually useful in completing some objectives such as needing a manager's fingerprint to open a door or their eye for an optic scanner. That alone solves the issue of hostages getting stuck on the geometry since you can just drag them if they get stuck to where you need them to go. Besides that, not much has really changed from the base gameplay loop from Payday 2 to Payday 3.

I think the levels are better this time around as they do feel like real world locations such that nothing looks too game-y but just enough so it functions properly as a game. The graphics and art style is also good being realistic enough to sell you that this game takes place in NYC after the pandemic. The story is just meh which is fine because you don't play Payday for the story though seeing the faces of all the classic heisters in-game is a welcome addition. They honestly look how I expect them to look and then some.

The skill system has been overhauled by giving you various smaller skill trees with the option to respec as needed to adjust your build for the job you're going into which works fine as expected. The progression has moved to a hybrid system where you need to level up first so you can then buy the new gun and attachments. Each gun now has its own weapon level which unlocks new attachments as you get more levels like CoD. On one hand, I like this system as you no longer have to rely on lootboxes / shuffle time just to get new attachments but I don't like that the whole ass weapon attachment system is just one big grind so I never really got past the pump shotgun before I said I was done with this game. The experience system also suffers here as the game calculates XP based on approach and loot to the heist. This is fine but I struggle to understand why they haven't worked out a system that gives you XP based on how you completed the obejctives. For instance, I could be running a heist in stealth and 50% in I get detected which causes the game to treat it as a loud heist and give me XP only for playing loud and give no XP for being sneaky. I feel like I should be given bonus XP for completing objectives in stealth even if I screw up and go loud like how Deus Ex: Human Revolution & Mankind Divided did it for their objectives; It gave you XP per objective, not per mission so you can complete some objectives loud or quiet and get rewarded appropriately.

I like the idea of the Overkill weapon system but the implementation is quite braindead. Basically, overkill weapons are your "ults" in which once you get enough charge, you call in someone to drop your overkill weapon. The problem is that they drop the overkill weapon outside the building in front of every single cop car. I have no idea WHY they would choose to do this instead of just having you whip out your M32 MGL on the spot. Nobody is gonna bat an eye when you're carrying around a drill in a hammerspace bag so why would they care if you whip out a MGL from your ass? Also, melee attacks don't do any damage even though they should. I tried to pistol-whip a guard from behind and he just turned around and raised the alarm ending my stealth run. Lastly, why can a bulldozer tank 12 MGL rounds? Aren't overkill weapons supposed to delete those kinds of units?

And that's really where the problems begin. After I finished each heist once, I was just done. I didn't feel a need to go on any further because I felt that i had seen everything the game had to offer. Payday 3 is like L4D, B2B, and Payday 2 in that if you've played one mission, there's no real reason to play it again despite the AI director changing some parts. The same goes with the progression system. I've gotten tired of the weapon level system such that i just really don't see myself staying in the Live service for the long haul especially since the carrot on the stick just isn't there for me.

And really, I don't think the launch or bugs was the problem though requiring you to make a starbreeze account just to even play fucking sucks. Nor do I think the common modern gaming slop is there such as shops and dailies hurt the game.

I think the reason why Payday 3 doomed to suffer low players was because Payday 2 has content all the way from its inital 2013 release date; effectively 10 years of content. That means people can just go back there to Payday 2 and get all the missions, cosmetics, weapons they paid for and worked to earn as well so in the mind of the player, they expect Payday 3 to match the level of content that Payday 2 presently has which is an impossible task. Think about it, Payday 3 is a whole ass new engine, new look, new mechanics, etc so to make sure Payday 3 has the same level of content as Payday 2, they would need to spend a LOT of time and effort to remake the maps in the new Payday 3 engine for a questionable payoff. Each new map will also increase the storage size of the game as they try to fit all the old maps, weapons, skins, etc into one app and once you consider how comically large Call of Duty post 2019 (passing 300 GB even!) is and the forced Warzone shit, yeah it gets to be massive. Even if you manage to optimize the game to keep the storage space low, you're gonna end up with at least 200 GB of storage space for Payday 3 alone and seeing the reception to other games with massive file sizes, it would be a losing situation for Overkill overall.

So in short, the bugs and flaws in the game wasn't the cause for its poor performance. It was the fact that Overkill basically had to invest significant time and money to transfer and optimize every single map, cosmetic, weapon, etc from Payday 2 to Payday 3 which is impossible to do so in a reasonable amount of time. The players wanted a game that Overkill couldn't even make happen unless the players were willing to wait up to 5 years just so they get the Payday 3 that replaces Payday 2 and succeeds them. At its core, Payday 2 makes multiple improvements but those improvements will end up being for naught because why play the improved Payday 3 when Payday 2 has all the content you'll ever need?

What a damn shame.

Played on PS5 as part of PS+ Essential Free Games.

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Metaphor Re: Fantazio. Unfortunately, I do not have one.

Metaphor Re: Fantazio (MRF) is a JRPG that takes place in the fantasy setting of the United Kingdom of Euchronia where you play as a travelling boy tasked with removing the curse cast upon the prince of the kingdom while stopping a dictator from becoming the next king.

Story

Since the story is a major part of the game, the detailed review of the story will be spoilered. In a nutshell, i found the story to be a very cliche one of a prince coming back to save their kingdom from certain doom making sure to hit all the JRPG story and character tropes. If you've played any other Atlus game, then you know what to expect here. However, the characterization of the party members and the Followers / Social Links is better than past Atlus games as Atlus took note of the shortcomings of past party members and made new characters that are miles better than what they came out with. Strohl being the key example as he serves the same role as Junpei, Yosuke, and Ryuji from the Persona series but without the annoying parts of their character. You will see that Atlus uses the same character archetypes from their Persona games in MRF but there are noticeable improvements in their storytelling and characterization and that easily is the best part about the game story wise even if there are some characters that fall flat. I did find that the overall story fell flat at times because its a predictable story that you have seen multiple times and ends as you would expect it to be. There are just too many missed opportunities that would have made the story better and more impactful instead of being predictable.



MRF has an interesting high-fantasy world as they focused on making their own races instead of falling for the usual tropes of elves, dwarves, etc. which fits perfectly with the game world. The monsters here are actually called humans which are basically characters from Bosch's art made reality so its a fantasy game that ends up taking their own twist on what they define as fantasy compared to existing fantasy setting conventions such as the LOTR universe, the FF universe, the Elder Scrolls / DnD universe etc. I am all for it as it leads to interesting takes on the races but I feel that alone is a missed opportunity in gameplay section which i'll explain further but I like it when stories take the familiar and twist it in their own ways. One example is the Roussainte tribe which is marked by their long ears be the brawny military-men race which subverts your expectation as you would expect them to be magically adept like the Elves but Hulkenberg is a pure stone wall in terms of story and gameplay. I wish they did more with certian tribes / races such as the Clemar feeling like regular guys with horns or Ishka and their wings feel like accessories and not actual parts of their character. I feel that Atlus could have gone further with the unique races they made and incorporated their traits into the story like they did with the Nidia, Mustari, and Papirus.

(we were robbed of minotaur Strohl, bird Neuras, and furry Basilio)

Another thing I loved about the story is that the protagonist (Will) is no longer silent but he becomes a protagonist that takes after Commander Shepard from Mass Effect 1 where his lines are what you pick as this dialogue options. As such, I ended up naming him Shepard for that reason but I love that this is a step forward from the silent protagonist of previous Atlus games (and JRPGs as a whole) because too often, they sit in the corner of every scene and watch people speak for him like the infamous "Ramierez, Do everything!" meme from MW2. Will has a companion fairy named Gallica who serves as the navigator role for MRF and she often speaks on behalf of the protagonist which I'm fine with for the most part as Atlus is working out how to actually do a non-silent protagonist going forward.

Will however, has so many missed opportunities for him as a character. He is an Elda that is basically the most reviled tribe in the world because the Sanctist (Catholic Church in the world of MRF) basically identified them as heretics that are responsible for all bad things happening in the world including the existence of humans. However, you don;t get those moments in game where you actually feel the racism crushing your neck in the form of stores refusing to sell to you, getting harassed in the street, or having areas in towns be inaccessible because a racist gang /knight will beat you up if you get too close. The only impediment that you face as a result of anti-elda racism is the church refusing to sell goods to you and purify your gear until you become smart enough to be one of the "good ones". Another instance is that Will is supposed to be naturally good at magic as an Elda but the game lets you pick out Will's stats at the start and all throughout the game by letting you allocate your stat points. I wish the game took that away from you and made you naturally adept at magic with future stat points focused on making you a mage to really hammer in who you are. Hell, the game could have made the racism into a social link tutorial such that stores will refuse to sell to you as an Elda so you're SOL trying to get supplies for the first dungeon but Gallica could have suggested asking Strohl to help you so you meet up with Strohl for a SL event in which he speaks for you and convinces the shopkeeper to sell to you on behalf of Strohl using his wits This would have counted as character development for Strohl while also showing just how much Will needs them as much as Will needs his friends.

The reason for my rambling about racism being a key theme is that I keep thinking about MachineGames' Wolfenstein: The New Order. In this game, you play as B.J. Blazko who has to free Nazi-Occupied Europe from the Nazis after they win WW2. The game never misses an opportunity to show how awful the nazis are from sticking you in front of an officer murdering disabled people, sneaking into a concentration / labour camp that has become more efficient and brutal under the Nazis, and seeing Berlin get turned into a concrete monstrosity dreamed up by the Nazis. In short, the game always shows just how awful the world is and how important it is to stand up and kill every single Nazi. Of course this is an extreme example but it shows that Metaphor had such a shitty world that they should have made you get mistreated and be the victim of racism so that you have a desire to become the new King / stop Louis from becoming king by killing him.

Now that Will is out of the way, I love the character and camadrie of the party members as an adult cast actually lets the better character tropes and designs show off with all of them still having jabs at each other but generally being chill with everyone else. They manage to avoid the pitfalls of Haru's arc from P5 while feeling more mature and refreshing. Even Heismay who's supposed to be the token mascot character is actually the best written one in the cast that he would even be a husbando just off his charm alone. I also like the other characters as Hulkenberg is honour-bound to a fault but it never gets annoying and her VA is very talented to begin with. Eupha radiates Adorableness that never feels unsettling while Junah uses her charm but its for a practical purpose. Basilio is dumb muscle but he has enough street smarts to give him more depth as a character (and he's a baker JUST LIKE ME). In short, all of the characters follow well-established tropes but they never overstay their quirks such that it becomes unbearable and annoying.

The same goes for the social links as they are shorter (8 levels vs Persona's 10 levels) which allows their stories to be more focused with less filler in the way. You can also make the wrong choice or pick the funny response without worrying about losing progress on the SL because SL EXP has been removed and replaced with just levels. This is the best implementation so far and the SL themselves are better written such as Brigitta, Cuculus, and Bardon that deal with the reality of their jobs.

The main bad guy Louis is a good villain but i feel that Atlus missed the mark by having him hang back after the first dungeon. I expected him to be a constant pain in the ass everywhere you went undercutting the church at every opportunity and making him a desirable politician. Had Atlus implemented the harsh Elda racism i suggested earlier, you would be in the perfect mindset to follow Louis and consider his points valid. On the same token, I wish that the game had shown you a vision or a gameplay section of Louis' ideal world just to see how much of a threat he really is beyond just hearing his speeches. The church has no shoratge of enemies including the Papirus Riots and the game should have done more showing and less telling to radicalize you into following Louis which would have made future plot twists even more shocking. (The same can be said with Pope Forden to show how much of a vile racist he is because well, go on Facebook, you have no shortage of racist boomers to work off.)

The final section is more gameplay related but you have side-dungeons in the game that take the form of stereotypical forests, caves, and towers that act as places to get stronger. I found them to be boring and yet another missed opportunity because since the game takes place after the end of the world with Euchronia being on top of the ruins of Tokyo; they could have made them take the form of modern day buildings with towers being office buildings, caves being subway stations, and forests being public parks / community centres. This alone would make the side dungeons more memorable as you get to see the people gaslit into believing those are normal caves when they are not by the Church and it would have made one of the final scenes with More be more impactful going from a rambling crazy man to a rambling crazy man with an actual point. Again, i can't say more because EVERYTHING about More and Akademia is a walking spoiler so i'll leave this as is.



So the overview of the story is that the characters are the best part but its full of missed opportinities as it often violates the rule of "show, don't tell". Make no mistake, the scenes where they show are good but there needs to be a lot more not only in the story but also in the gameplay department.

Gameplay

The gameplay, like the story of Metaphor is familiar in that it's a turn based JRPG with SMT's press turn system where you get extra turns for hitting weaknesses but lose turns for missing or getting attacks blocked / reflected back onto you. Its still good in SMT and it works very well here. MRF adds some new twists such as adding in skills that grant enemies one-time weaknesses so that you have a means of getting extra turns on enemies but the enemies can do the same to you. This works well because enemies with no weaknesses are the bane of your existence in SMT / persona games that serve to make you waste MP to kill them off especially if you don't have the insta-kill skills. Fittingly enough, the game does have Hama and Mudo but they deal light and dark damage. The particular skills that are insta-kill are locked behind a particular job instead. Again, it's the same press-turn system but better this time.

The dungeon exploration works just as well in MRF with decent dungeons (the 4th one being the best in the game) but some dungeons are vastly superior than others. the 3rd dungeon and story arc was just... ugh. One great thing MRF does is that it lends into being an ARPG such that you can actually attack enemies to stun them to get free turns. Basically, you hit the enemy and dodge their attacks like in an action RPG depleting their stun bar and once the bar falls, you get the option to leave them stunned or enter battle in which the enemies start off stunned and you get a free turn. This is so fucking satisfying and if the enemy is weaker than you, you can just instantly kill them without having to enter battle. Will also gets unique attacking animations and styles for each weapon type so you have to be careful and learn the weapon as to avoid getting attacked by the enemy and forced into battle at a disadvantage. I often found myself wishing that the game was an ARPG / character action game based on that alone.

MRF uses a job system akin to FF in which each character gets archetypes which are basically fighting spirits the character transforms into to attack. Everyone can be any archetype they want to be but they all have an ultimate archetype you'll be working towards. It's decent but the existence of ultimate jobs ends up forcing characters down particular job trees so that you get their ultimate job during the first playthrough. You also gain the ability to inherit skills from other jobs into your current one like mix & matching in FF5 / Dimensions 1 and this works very well. I think this could have been improved more by introducing racial bonuses as character passives and personal skills because for most of then, they only get one passive which is boring. I feel that levelling up your character's social links should have also given you a LOT more racial bonuses that apply regardless of job so that instead of each character feeling the same up till they get their ultimate job, each character would have felt unique right off the bat and help with the worldbuilding.

Conclusion

Metaphor is a very competent game full of references to other Atlus games that tells a decent story with the characters being the best part of the package. However, it feels like a love letter to Atlus which has me thiking that the best way to play this game is to make sure that it's your 3rd or 4th Atlus game and i simply cannot overlook the missed opportunities. I hope that Atlus is able to tackle the same-high fantasy setting but making sure to explore all opportunities such a setting presents. The story itself being familiar and full of cliches / tropes is generally not a bad thing as long as you execute it perfectly but I feel they could have done so much more.

As such, I cannot recommend Metaphor to first timers to Atlus games. I feel that this game will be better appreciated if you have played and cleared several Atlus games from various franchises being Shin Megami Tensei, Etrian Odyssey, and Persona. If you have, then I recommend giving this game a try.

The Final Fantasy 7 fans had DREAMS of more FF7 content. Square HONOUR-ed their dreams with FF7: Crisis Core for the PSP with some of the most goofy ass shit you'll ever see in a game. A remake was released in 2022 that takes this game but modernizes it with FF7:Remake controls and graphics while keeping the goofy ass shit.

What do I think of FF7: Crisis Core Reunion (CCR)? I think its a game that has a story so bad its good with combat that feels good enough for a handheld but is held back by the missions sucking the fun out of the game. if the game just had the story itself and left out the filler missions while keeping the unique story-based ones, it would have been better.

ACTIVATING COMBAT MODE

So the story has you playing as Zack Fair in a prequel set before the events of FF7 that expands upon existing characters in the original FF7 including Sephiroth, Tseng, and Aerith. For the most part, it feels like a Memberberries episode as it copies some existing plot points from FF7 while dropping some new ones. It feels like FF7 but instead of Cloud, Zack, and Sephiroth, its Zack, Angeal, and Genesis. I honestly liked seeing Zack grow into becoming the badass and seeing how his story ends as i found his character endearing and Angeal was also interesting to watch tough Genesis does feel tacked on as a villain.

What I also liked about the story was that it felt like a Yakuza game from start to finish with over the top sequences and horrible voice acting that blows up the game into so bad its good territory. I found myself playing through the main story more just to see how ridiculous and absurd it could get and the game did NOT disappoint in any way. Even the mini-games the game has you doing is equally absurd and goofy. You have to go in there with the expectation that you're going to play a Yakuza game and let the ride take you where it goes. Of course the game has its fair share of serious moments and it does a good job of showing a new perspective on the Nibelhelm Incident. I also like how they handled the aftermath of the incident as you feel like you're tripping balls just because of what happened and leaning so much into the dreamlike experience right up until the end.

The reason why the final arc works is because think about it, Zack has been poisoned by Mako for the past 4 years. The world has changed so much that it does not feel like the same world he just fought and grew up in so the appearance of an Angeal Clone, a Genesis Clone eating Zack's hair, the poetic ending that Genesis gets, etc. None of this makes sense and that's fully intentional showing how Mako and loneliness ended up destroying Zack's mental state foreshadowing how Cloud ends up getting his mind and memories broken in the main game. I thought that it was actually brilliant.

So overall, I loved the story for feeling like a Yakuza game with writing and voice acting so over the top that it just works. I feel that Genesis is misunderstood because throughout the game, you end up seeing so many unnatural clones and experiments that its really going to fuck with your sanity and who you are as a person, just like what happened to the Hero in FF7.

Now for the gameplay, I liked how they took what the PSP set out to do and modernized it into the FF7 Remake engine making it feel smooth and snappy. If you've played the FF7R, you'll feel at home here only you get the ability to cast spells at any time instead of waiting for the ATB to fill up. This game does demand that you be on your toes as you're a one-man army and nobody else is coming to save you, heal you, take hits for you, etc. I personally did not like it as I like fighting with a full party and trusting my AI teammates to fight with me like other Action-based JRPGs such as Tales and Ys. I get that they were limited on the PSP hardware and tey have to make do with what the PSP version set out.

One unique feature is the DMW system that acts as a slot machine dispensing limit breaks, in-battle buffs, and character & materia level ups. A large portion of it is straight up random as is the nature of a slot machine. On one hand, I like the randomness that makes getting a limit break feel good. However, I found myself having to run around avoiding enemy attacks just so that I get an invincibility or an Null Phys / Magic to make an annoying boss fight easier. Attaching both Character and Materia Level ups just does not work and feels unfair as explained below.

Another point of contention was the materia system. I feel that CCR just ended up over-complicating a Materia system that just worked for no reason, Basically, you now have the ability to fuse materia to create new and stronger materia which sounds neat but the problem is that some recipes are inconsistent or just don't work at all. Several materia require the base materia to be a master rank which seems fine in theory but given that materia level ups are RNG compared to character level-ups, you have to keep fighting battles and hope the DMW is in your favour. I feel that if they got rid of materia ranks and just kept them as is so that the fusion system is easier to manage.

You also had to learn how to fuse stat boosts into materia just so that you stand a chance in the endgame and several missions as you wouldn't be able to rely on your normal level ups to be strong enough to tackle some side missions. Again, this was over-complicated for no reason as you had to think about doing two fusions just to get the stat boost on the materia you're using which gets complicated VERY fast. Having the stat boosts just be tied to materia itself with the stat boosting items being used on Zack would have been much better.

Remember when I said that the game has a story mode and side missions? Yeah, it feels like the game had a decent main story but the devs wanted to pad out the game time with side missions you can do anytime during the main story. All of them feels like padding with repetitive maps, enemies, and objectives combined with an annoying random encounter rate. You could cut out just about say 80% or 90% of the missions and the game would have been better off for it.

CONFLICT RESOLVED

So where does that leave CCR? It leaves its legacy as a game with a Yakuza-like story bogged down by bloated game mechanics and side missions that add little value to the game. If you want to experience it for yourself, I would suggest watching a Lets Play or just the cutscenes itself as the side content and materia systems just don't feel worth engaging with.

This is gonna be an interesting review because i'm gonna be comparing the PS5 remake to the PS4 remaster and there's a lot of external factors that go into this game being one hell of an experience. You can't talk about the remake without talking about the TV show, you cant talk about this remake without Part 2, you can't talk about it without talking about Sony's remastered game strategy that dominated the first half of the 2020's, etc.

So with this in mind, lets get into the review

_______________________________________________________________

Platforms: PS5 & PC

The Last of Us: Part 1 (TLOU 1) is a remake of a 2013 game that got a PS4 remaster. the difference between the PS4 remaster and the remake is that the remake updates several character models and environments while also adding in a weapon system and more guns to play with. In my perspective, the PS5 remake is the definitive version of the game.

The game takes place in 2033, 20 years after the Cordyceps fungi mutated and turned humans into mushroom zombies sending the whole world into ruin. You play as Joel, a middle aged survivor who is tasked with transporting an immune 14-year old Ellie to a medical facility run by the Fireflies so they can use her immunity to create a vaccine against the Cordyceps infection.

I can;t go any further without getting into spoilers but the game knows that it;s cliched but uses the cliches effectively to tell a honest story of trying to live and seeking a reason to live after the world just fucking ended. However, I think the game is best experienced after watching the HBO TV show (2023) because there's something horrifying about playing the game knowing exactly what happens to each character including the foreshadowing. I loved this story and its world for how most of the horror is not in the cheap jumpscares but in the collectibles that detail life before and after the end of the world that really drives the horror home. I even used a collectibles guide to get them all just because each and every collectible (besides the firefly pendants) serves as worldbuilding including warning you of future dangers and telling you about possible secrets.

As for Part 1 and Part 2, i also can see why Part 2 happened just because the moment the game ends, you're like "Oh no... oh no no no no... oh FUCK" as the ending is just that shocking in how poor communication and impulsive behaviour kills.

The Left Behind DLC is also one of the better DLC stories i've played with fun minigames and one of the better romantic tragedies that does a great job of making you care more for Ellie and the other main character. It's short, sweet, and heartbreaking at the same time.

Personally, i would have loved for Naughty Dog to make a 3rd mode that is just open world and letting you enjoy the excellent environmental storytelling ND uses in the game to learn more about how people reacted to the end of the world. I just want to see more of the aftermath of the infection not only in the USA but also in other continents such as Africa and Central Asia.

The gameplay is just allright since its a lite version of a survival game played in the 3rd person. It plays more of a stealth game as the combat is more clunky than it should be but it makes sense as the playable characters are not supersoldiers like Nate from uncharted. I ended up playing this game on easy as I don't like survival style games so that I make sure I always have ammo to keep blasting away enemies. What I did like is that they have added new guns to your roster so it keeps the game fresh. I found the original game boring because all I got was just a pistol, revolver, shotgun, bow, and rifle. The remake adds in a shorty shotgun, sniper revolver, and a flamethrower, all which are helpful against regular humans and infected humans alongside a weapon upgrade system that encouraged exploration to get more upgrade materials.

Overall, the gameplay is rather basic with the typical stealth and action sections you see in every AAA action game but i appreciate the fact that the remake improved the weapons and enemy AI especially with the upgrade system.

I do think that remaking the game was a smart move on Sony's part because the original game was stale with their weapon selection and the character models do look better than the original counterparts but if you've already played the PS3 or PS4 game, then you don't need to play this game. If you do, I would recommend that you watch the TV show first and then play the game after just to go through the game with a very subtle feeling of dread enhancing your experience.

Man, it was something else but I'm glad I was able to play the game and enjoy it more than the first time I beat it.

Played on a PS5

Reviews

- Rollerdrome : https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/11047853/

- The Last of Us: Part 1: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/11053090/

- Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core Reunion: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/11068795/

- Metaphor Re: Fantazio: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/11084035/

- PAYDAY 3: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/11092627/

- Far Cry 4: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/11102687/

- Yakuza Kiwami 2: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/11122706/

- Bioshock Trilogy: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/11149120/

- Etrian Odyssey 5: Beyond the Myth: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/11185901/

- Road 96: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/11209693/

- Turok Rage Wars: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/11212576/

- Mafia 1 & 2 DE: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/11225153/

- Saints Row 2022: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/11249244/

Played but no Reviews

- Dragon Taker (Beaten)
- Antiqua Lost (Beaten)
- Black Ops 6 Season 1
- Overrogue (Beaten)
- Forager
- Asdivine Hearts 2 (Beaten)
- Warframe
- Fairy Elements (Beaten)
- Onigo Hunter (Beaten)
- Balatro
- Yakuza 3 (Beaten)
- Fernz Gate (beaten)
- Wizards of Brandel (Beaten)
- Dishonored: Death of the Outsider (Beaten)
- Sayonara Wild Hearts (Beaten)
- Killing Floor 2
- Raging Bytes (Beaten)
- Ancient Phantasma (Beaten)
- Mario Kart World (Beaten)
- House Flipper 2 (Beaten)
- Splitgate 2
- Super Mario Kart (Beaten)
- Mario Kart 64 (Beaten)
- Mario Kart Super Circuit (Beaten)
- Mafia: Definitive Edition (Beaten)
- Battlefield 6 Beta
- Ridge Racer 64
- Wave Racer 64 (Beaten)
- Star Fox 64
- UFO 50
- Dragon Sinker (Beaten)
- The World is Not Enough (N64) (Beaten)
- Dragon Quest 1 & 2 (GBC) (Beaten)
- Kirby Dreamland 1 & 2 (Beaten)
- Dragon Quest 3 SFC (Beaten)
- Agent Under Fire (Beaten)
- Nightfire Console (Beaten)
- Nightfire PC (Beaten)
- Kirby's Adventure (Beaten)
- The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered (Beaten)
- Alphadia 3 (Beaten)
- Astral Taker (Beaten)
- Alvastia Chronicles
- Ring of Zelda / Arkista’s Ring Hack (Beaten)
- Timesplitters Rewind Early Access (Beaten on Easy, Hard is a little fucked)
- Cat Quest 3 (Beaten)
- MotoGP25
- Resident Evil 4 Remake
- You Suck At Parking
- Helldivers 2
- Battlefield 6 (Beaten)
- Castlevania (Beaten)
- Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest
- Merge Miner (Beaten)
- Dig Deep
- The Legend of Zelda: Second Quest (Beaten)
- Oceanhorn

Lets get the piracy out of the way; the devs who worked their asses off on this game were all laid off while the CEO got a 25 million dollar pay raise. None of the sales made from Rollerdrome will ever see the devs as you're paying for a publisher that stole their fucking money. https://www.gamesradar.com/games/ac.....ll-for-piracy/

Piracy is required for this game.

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Platforms: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X / S

Rollerdrome is one of the most stylish fusion game I have ever played being a cross between a TPS and a Skating Game complete with tricks and bullet time. It is also very Nintendo Hard.

You play as Kara Hassan in a 70's inspired rendition of the year 2030 where capitalism turned the world into a bit of a hellhole with Rollerdrome, a blood sport being created to keep the masses entertained. If you've watched blade runner or the hunger games, its basically the same premise only the protagonist is interested in glory and resolving her debts. Rollerdrome itself is basically extreme roller skating where you have to kill competitors while pulling off skating tricks to build up combos and get the high score to progress further into the tournament.

First things first, the game's minimalistic 70's themed artstyle is easily the best part of the game and I wish the devs were still around to make a FPS based on the artstyle alone. It does such a great job of capturing the feel of a roller-skating rink in addition to a mountain base and a shopping mall inspired by sci-fi / spy media of the 70's and 80's. Seriously go take a look at Eiger Resort and tell me that aint inspired by 007's On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969). Its just so fucking good man though it gets repetitive when the level theme are just skating rink, mall, desert, and mountain base.

The gameplay is very frustrating but fair and it comes with many assists for you to make the game easier and more bearable. You go through each level with the goal of killing everything in the arena and being the last woman standing and it plays like a gamecube tony-hawk game but you can now shoot enemies who are trying to kill you at the same time. You get a decent selection of weapons being the dual pistols, shotgun, grenade launcher, and a railgun but the game has its own twist; you have to perform tricks to reload your weapons. The better the trick, the faster your weapon reloads and vice versa. You also get a set of 10 challenges per level and you need to clear at least half of the total challenges to unlock every level in the game.

Now, the moment to moment gameplay works rather well with its focus on combining tricks and chaining kills to keep the multiplier high while dodging enemy projectiles and the game has a massive selection of tricks for you to perform during combat. Each weapon in the game has a purpose for taking down the varied enemy types you see as the grenade launcher is crucial to exploding robots while the Railgun and Shotgun are good at taking out Stompers and Polybeams but I always found that I kept running out of ammo too often which often brought the pace to a halt as I had to focus on tricks and then resume killing. I wished that we could upgrade our weapons especially as some of the guns really do need them such as Ex mags and more damage. The game does get overwhelming with its effects that makes it impossible to keep up with your dodges as there are too many enemies attacking you all at once and again, there are assists for this but I really do feel like toning the frequency down may help. The challenges themselves can be annoying especially when you need to clear them to progress further in the game but there's an assist that turns off the mandatory challenge requirements and the game is nice enough to count a challenge as completed regardless of victory or defeat allowing you to dedicate runs to clearing one challenge with no stress about making sure you win in the end.

Overall, the gameplay is solid and fair in terms of the challenges and what the game expects out of you but there are some nitpicks here and there that does bog down the experience a bit. The number of assists you get does help thankfully but I only found out that they existed... after I beat the final boss.

I raw dogged the whole ass game on its default hard mode.

But it did make for a very satisfying "FUCK YEAH" when i beat the final boss.

Another part of the game I wish they did more was introduce more first person story sections as I felt myself wanting to explore more of the world and backstory behind Hassan and the Rollerdrome Championship. I want to get to know the world she is in better but I respect the devs choice to keep the focus on the game. I just want to see more of the world in that amazing artstyle/graphics.

Overall if you loved the Gamecube/PS2 era tony hawk games, you'll love this twist on the genre and you'll love the style and gameplay of this gem. They don't call it Tony Hawk's Pro Shooter for no reason.

Played on a PS5

Edit: Forgot to mention that Rollerdrome has a hard mode called Out For Blood which is basically NG+ but with tougher and more frequent enemies. This is where I used all the assists just to clear the levels. Its allright but I would have preferred something more substantial.

So i've played a fuck ton of game and i may not remember them all but hell might as well do a TGA but shitty. Most of the picks below are gonna be games I played this year so lets get started.

Game of the Year

- RESIDENT EVIL 2: REMAKE

This game easily got me invested into the RE series and just seeing how much they improved upon the original is something to behold. This is a game with so much new and refreshed content that nothing else compares to it.

Best Direction

- ROBOCOP: ROGUE CITY

The whole game feels like an interactive RoboCop movie just on account of how well the graphics and atmosphere contribute to nailing down the grime of Detroit City. The game took all the correct lessons from Deus Ex: HR & MD when they developed the tone and atmosphere of the game.

Best Narrative

- THE MESSENGER

The game goes beyond using the 8 bit & 16 bit graphics as nostalgia bait as it actually serves a purpose in their light story. Its amazing to see how the various plot points end up being tied together at the end of the game even when you think the game is over, there's another whole-ass section for you to play.

Best Art

- STREETS OF RAGE 4

I said it in my past review so i'll say it again, every single background in this game can be a desktop wallpaper and I would pay for it.

Best Music

- ROMANCING SAGA 2: REVENGE OF THE SEVEN

I wanted to select Rift of the Necrodancer but since I never played it, this will do. The theme of Avalon and Somon is still as patriotic and depressing respectively.

Best Indie

- THE PLUCKY SQUIRE

Despite the many glitches and technical issues, this game has a lot of heart and pays homage to various games that came before which helps sell the game as an experience of being a 90's kid.

Best Live Service

- BLACK OPS 6

It was the only live service I played and to its credit, i do like the MP so much that I went and got Diamond camo for the LMGs and Shotguns. I would have put XDefiant here but um...... *gestures towards Ubisoft*

Best Mobile

- SNES9XE

I played many retro games using various emulators so I used SNES9Xe the most which allowed me to enjoy the atmosphere and charm of the Soul Blazer Trilogy (Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia/Time, and Terranigma).

Best FPS

- TREPANG²

While Trepang² is not as good as its inspiration (F.E.A.R.), it nails down the best parts of being a chaotic woo shooter and has some good horror sections that I hope the devs learn from this to make the horror more meaningful. (Also, we don't need fancy shiny graphics because F.E.A.R.'s original graphics contributed to the unease and horror so stay in that area, k?)

Best TPS

- BINARY DOMAIN

Never would I ever have thought that I would be playing a third-person Yakuza game. And what an experience it is from the narmy voice acting, over the top cutscenes, lubricious robo-gibs, and hilariously implemented voice commands makes this game a must-play.

Best Action - Adventure

- IMMORTALS: FENYX RISING

Its Breath of the Wild but more story focused and I found myself loving the charm of the characters and seeing how they interact with each other even though I wish the ending could have been a bit better. The amount of ways you can solve puzzles truly shows that Ubisoft was cooking when they made this BUT the fact that Ubisoft nixed a sequel based in the pacific islands fucking SUCKS WHAT THE FUCK UBISOFT.

Best JRPG

- ROMANCING SAGA 2: REVENGE OF THE SEVEN

The original Romancing SaGa 2 was a game that I found charming but could never get past South Varenees/Cumberland in the 2017 remaster due to how hard and clunky it felt. This remake takes ALL of the issues in the original Romancing SaGa 2 (and the SaGa series) and fixes each and every single one of them that this becomes the definitive version of Romancing SaGa 2.

Best ARPG

- Ys SERIES

This was a tough choice between Diablo 3 and Ys but ultimately Ys won out for being a series willing to try so many things using what they learned from the NES era all the way to modern day era becoming its own thing. Diablo 3 was good but i cannot get over the crappy and unsatisfying skill system. I get why they did that but I don't like it.

Best Survival Horror

- RESIDENT EVIL 2 REMAKE

As mentioned above, this game is so well done that nothing else compares to this.

Best Simulation

- HOUSE FLIPPER

The game is still as liminal as ever and fixing up the houses is satisfying, The DLCs are also pretty neat though the luxury flipper was over the top with hour long missions that ended up feeling like a slog.

Best Co-Op

- LEFT 4 DEAD 2

The fact that this game has such an active modding scene keeping the game fresh is worth your time. Army of Two: 40th day would have gotten this but its too short for what it is.

Best Remaster of an Older Game

- TUROK 3: SHADOW OF OBLIVION and TOMB RAIDER 1-2-3 REMASTERED

Both of them freshen up the OG games in many meanigful ways such as Shadows of Oblivion getting 60 FPS and two new characters to play as while TR 1-2-3 allows you to save anywhere and adds in the DLC that never got released with the PS1 games making those two games worthy of being the best remasters of 2024.

Worst Game

- CRIME BOSS : ROCKAY CITY

This game isnt even good enough to attain "So Bad Its good" status as there are so many fucking glitches that cause you to lose. I lost missions because an enemy didn't spawn, there was a pool of fire in front of a mission objective so I couldn't complete the objective without failing the mission; etc. This game is why IDGAF about star power because all of the actors here have passed their prime. They're done. Finished. Kaput. What a goddamn waste.

Most Disappointing

- STRANGER OF PARADISE : FINAL FANTASY ORIGIN

This is a game whose only redeeming quality is Jack. Nothing else really helps with the game as equipment feels obligatory, levels don't mean anything, and skill trees feel depressingly weak. I expected more when I saw they has all the skill trees but again, just disappointing and the post-game wasn't even worth it.

That was one hell of a game. In a nutshell, it was the ideal SaGa game I've been waiting for so long and i hope they keep this momentum going forward. Romancing SaGa 2 started out as a SFC game in 1993 that got a remaster in 2017 due to how Romancing SaGa 2 became a cult classic that never got translated into English properly by Squaresoft. Revenge of the Seven is a full on 3D remake of the game building it up into a more modernized take on the classic.

Romancing SaGa 2 is more of a CRPG with JRPG features and style. You play as not a single protagonist but multiple emperors you play as over time leading the Varennes Empire over multiple generations expanding your empire while defeating all 7 heroes who have fallen from grace and became evil as a result.

In a nutshell, each emperor/empress is granted the power of inheritance magic which allows emperors to pass on their memories, skills, and weapon / magic skill levels to their heir should the emperor die. And you will be doing a fair bit of dying so this is to ensure you keep some progress on death. This single feature is easily the best as it encourages experimentation and trying out different classes so your emperor gets stronger through inheritance magic such that if you died as a Court Mage (M), you can choose a Heavy Infantry to inherit your stats and skills which grants you the ability to become a self-sustaining tank who can heal and buff themselves with water magic inherited from the Court Mage and vice versa.

This is the best mix of non-linear quest design where you can choose how to complete quests in various ways and choose where you want to expand. For instance, you have a quest where you need to invade a landship to kill one of the 7 heroes using it. You can choose to hire a strategist to sneak onto the landship or pretend to be slaves to get onto the landship. Even when you fail, you can take a 3rd option such as picking a robot to be your emperor so you get a formation that makes the rematch against the hero easier. Nearly all quests in this game can be resolved in 2 ways or more and the remake even improves upon the original by giving you quest markers, something that the original Romancing SaGa 2 needed badly.

The combat is a massive improvement as it takes what SaGa learned from Scarlet Grace & Emerald Beyond by refining the SaGa formula to be something better. It's your basic turn based JRPG fare but with its own SaGa twist on the formula in that there are no character levels; everyone has a series of base stats that are fixed and can only be improved with gear while leveling is done by Weapon & Magic skill levels. The combat takes on more of a Persona approach in that everyone acts once they select their commands which is important as you can see the turn order so you need to be able to time your interrupts and vice versa. Elements now plays a much larger role as you can see what the weaknesses are and hitting weaknesses is the only way you're able to get your limit breaks. In addition, Formations are important as you will need to use different formations for various buffs benefiting your team that is more suited to your current situation. Again, the whole battle system is a MASSIVE improvement over the original and remaster.

What ties this all together is that there are so many different character classes for you to pick as your emperor and build your teams around. I also love how each character from the class has its own quirk so no two classes are the same such as two freelancer mages being martial arts specialists and vice versa. Furthermore, each class now has its own passive ability that enhances their specialties such as the Heavy Infantry gaining the "Auto-Parry" ability which makes tanking much more viable in the remake than the original SFC version. You can even master the abilities and pass them onto other classes ensuring that even if a class becomes useless, their ability will help make others stronger. Not only are you passing on your skills via inheritance but so are the units with their skills and abilities. Again, a massive improvement over the SFC version where too many classes just felt like upgrades or overlapped with each other. You can now swap out party members at will meaning that you don't have to kill off your members once they outlive their usefulness. There are still several cases of classes being overshadowed such as the Dancer being a better Nereid or the Mole being a better Freelancer Mage but the abilities system makes the power creep more bearable and actually consistent with the game's world.

Revenge of the Seven also adds in more story content that explains the backstory behind the seven heroes which adds more into the world and the voice-acted animated cutscenes ends up making the game feel like a complete whole. The additional content from the 2017 remaster makes its appearance here as the Diviner and the Ninja class shows up here but not the Maze of Memories which makes sense as the game is already full of content as is.

The major flaw is that the emperor/empress is made into a silent protagonist which defeats the point of being an emperor. In fact, there are only 4 (5 if you count Coppelia) that are actually voice acted during story beats. The emperor being a silent protagonist really makes them stick out like a sore thumb instead of an emperor and I had many moments where I thought they would talk with an air of authority but they just nod, grunt, and shrug. I wish that Square-Enix would have taken the Mass Effect 1 approach to the protagonist by voicing lines used in dialogue choices so that they are still silent but when they talk, its exactly what you want to say. This change would have made the emperor actually stand out rather than just being someone the NPCs yell at all the time. Another nitpick is that the voice lines don't change if you pick a female emperor as everyone still calls you the emperor even though you should be called the Empress. Its really a minor nitpick but a noticeable one.

Overall, this is in the same running of being the best remake of 2024 as P3 and this game deserves your attention if you love CRPGs like Baldur's Gate but with a JRPG twist. You should pick this game up if you also love Atlus RPGs past SMT3 Nocturne and onwards.

This is a game that I had to start multiple playthroughs just because the game got too frustrating for me. This current playthrough is no different as I played as Urpina and cleared Chapter 1 before calling it quits as i feel like I had seen everything the game has to offer.

SaGa: Scarlet Grace Ambitions (SGA) is a game that has very solid bones but is held back by the tedious and often unrewarding combat with too many contradictory game design choices that stops SGA from being a very solid game.

SGA is a JRPG that is the 10th mainline game in the long-running SaGa series that focuses on a non-linear progression system and open world exploration at your own pace with 4 protagonists and story lines to follow. The game does a good job of being open world as you gain the ability to complete quests in any order you want without railroading you for large portions of the game. Compared to previous SaGa games, the protagonists actually have more to say this time around as each story-line is more in depth allowing the personalities of the protagonists to shine. In addition, you can find different solutions to various quests which allows for replayability to see which solution is the optimal one.

This game is also unique in that there are no dungeons and there are no random encounters in this game as all battles take place within event nodes ranging from Easy to Hard nodes each with their own rewards and bonus win conditions. I found it disappointing because I like exploring dungeons and collecting powerful loot and gear.

The main problem is in the combat itself. It's a unique JRPG battle system with more emphasis on playing defensivley and manipulating the battle timeline. In this case, SGA is a turn-based JRPG but the twist is that you spend Battle Points (BP) to use skills during battle including your basic attack which is shared by all 5 members of your current battle party. This means that you need to think about how to spend BP during the turn including choosing the correct formations to optimize buffs and BP gain as some formations have unique means of earning BP, diffirent max BP, BP restored per turn, etc. In addition, Magic also got changed as all spells have a casting time. Status aliments are just as important here as in past SaGa games as you need to make good use of them such as poisoning bosses so its easier to disable them with paralysis or spamming skills that cause stun on a boss about to drop a nasty attack so they can't use it. The battle timeline is also present and visible to the player so they can focus on targets and set up unite attacks that act as bonus attack if an enemy is defeated in between allies on the timeline.

Long story short, this is a completely new and unique battle system that turns nearly every battle into a boss fight as even the trashiest of mobs can hit hard enough to KO characters in 2 hits. I am conflicted on the battle system as I think it's very well thought out but feels too dependent on RNG to actually feel satisfying. Having so many battles hinge on one status aliment landing or hoping that only one person in your party gets poisoned is a common occurrence which ends up making you feel like you're never in control of the battle for a system that rewards players taking control of the battlefield.

The progression system retains the traditional SaGa weapon and magic level system from past games with HP, Skill levels, and Skills being semi random including Sparking/Glimmering techs. It always feels good to see those stats increase after every battle but as with SaGa games, enemies scale to your level so they're always challenging. I'm fine with level scaling if its done right but more often than not, I feel like I keep getting weaker compared to enemies. There is an option to make enemies weaker but even easy mode still feels like hard mode and is still just as frustrating.

Life Points (LP) also shows up here as a resource to discourage you from getting KO'd too many times. Since you recover full HP between battles, your LP acts as your lives such that you lose 1 LP if you get KO'd and if your LP hits 0, you're "dead" for a set number of battles until you get revived and your LP is returned to full. I feel that LP has no point being in this game as the game expects you to have crutch characters and makes grinding to resurrect your crutch characters a living hell. It feels like punishment for no point especially in past SaGa games where 0 LP meant permadeath but not here.

Another issue is that the game wants you to experiment and try out new parties so the game lets you have as many characters as you want in your reserves but nearly every new character you get requires grinding. In other JRPGS, this is no issue as Past JRPGs already worked out solutions such as Suikoden making new characters slingshot to your level in 1-2 battles or Chrono Cross tying levels to battle stars earned and scaling their stats based on how many stars you have. But in SGA, new characters do come with weapon and magic levels similar to your party's current level BUT they only join with either 1 or 2 skills known for their favourite weapon type meaning you have to grind to get the useful techs you need such as Mizuchi or Sweep for spears; skills that your current spearmen ALREADY know. This just creates bullshit situations in which your spearmen you've used since the start of the game is better than any spearmen you get in the future and vice versa so what's the fucking point of new party members if they join underdeveloped compared to you?

To add insult to injury, there's few areas that are easy to grind in as with SGA's enemy scaling, you're always having to work your ass off bit by bit just to get your underdeveloped characters to your level. Furthermore, you always have to make sure your crutch (In my case, Urpina) picks up the slack so they don't lose any LP and extend your grinding time. And wouldn't you like to know that your new party members start out with base weapons meaning you have to grind out resources to upgrade their gear to their current level?

Upgrading also ends up feeling like a hassle as there's no GP in the game. Instead you get elemental stones and other crafting materials to upgrade your current weapons and armour. The upgrading system feels like padding as the requirement for crafting materials just serves to make the game longer than it should since some of the ways you get unique crafting materials besides the elemental stones is to complete battle challenges which often requires you to beat the battle using sub-optimal parties. And with a game where every battle feels like a boss battle, this gets annoying and grinding VERY fast especially with how easy it is to get KO'd and lose LP which means MORE grinding to restore your LP you lost while grinding.

Another feature in the game is Roles you can give to your characters which act as passive skills offering stat boosts. To learn new roles, you have to make sure you have weapon techs learned and weapon levels at the required levels. In other words, you have to grind and use suboptimal parties in battles where EVERY battle feels like a boss fight just to learn new roles. Yeah.

Had the game just toned down the number of battles where it feels like a boss fight and less luck based (or even adding in a proper easy difficulty), I could see myself enjoying this game more and even finishing it. This game best exemplifies a comment i saw a couple years ago: "If you know and get annoyed that you're grinding, its grinding done poorly. If you don't know that you're grinding but you want to do more of it, then its grinding done right. " So many of the game's systems and features designed to encourage experimentation and customization require stupid amounts of grinding that feels like you're always at a stone wall even if you're gaining stats and levels.

Sure, this game may have a very in-depth combat system and be accessible to new players but none of that matters if the majority of the game feels like a chore. It gets very tiring thinking like a chess game in a JPRG that it ultimately sours the experience. As such, I cannot recommend this game. I appreciate that the devs swung for the fences on this experimental take on a JRPG but like most SaGa games where its either an excellent hit or a massive miss among players, i found this one to be a miss.

I do love how the game made sure to give everyone lubriciously over the top animations to every single tech including making the "Teleports Behind You" meme literally.

So this review will focus only on the story mode as the Multiplayer and Zombies are a live service and as such, I cant really speak on it until a year has passed. However, you can rest easy knowing that the pervasive bullshit in CoD hasn't changed from obnoxious grinds to game-breaking bugs. Nothing much changes on that front anyways.

Now, the story mode is easily a solid James Bond experience that you didn't know you needed. The story puts you in the shoes of "Case", BO6's obligatory mute protagonist as he works with Woods and Adler to stop a bioweapon from hitting the USA. There are new faces including Sevati "Sev" Dumas, an assassin from Avalon (Fictional city-state based on Monaco) seeking revenge on the Guild a crime syndicate based in Avalon, and Troy Marshall a Rogue CIA Agent who is leading the effort to find the mole within the CIA working with the terrorist group Pantheon.

The story is very hit and miss in terms of narrative as it is interesting going on a globetrotting adventure to find out the mystery but several story beats fall flat. The main villain for one has little presence in the main game until the ending and you don't feel a sense of urgency or hate towards the villain. In addition, you never really see the main villain commit evil acts that makes your mission to stop Pantheon personal. I think that 3arc should have make the main villain known from the 2nd mission but in such a way that they taunt you and make you jeopardize the mission. This would have made the villain more impactful and led to a better ending. I also feel that the Guild could have acted as the fake villain for the first half of the game before the big reveal but its done in such a way that YOU know who the real bad guy is but you can't even say anything to your team so they go after the real bad guy.

Thankfully, the characters are decent and none are too annoying as they all have their own personal stories and snippets you can learn more about in between missions. Most of them is just the backstory for the team you're working with and other mission related banter that's at least worth listening to.

The game has a hub mission called "The Rook" where you get debriefs, talk to your team, and spend money found on missions for upgrades. Its a neat hub with its own puzzle but once you've solved the puzzle, theres really no reason to explore the hub any more besides just to purchase upgrades. I was able to get all upgrades in a playthrough with enough money but I found that I barely had enough money to buy blueprints you could use in MP. This is an oversight because the game doesn't offer you efficient ways to get money and once you've opened all the safes in each mission, they remain open so you cant restart the mission and grind out safes. Enemies give very little cash and each blueprint costs 3K each for a total of 9K you have to grind. This fucking blows because how are you supposed to grind 9K for the blueprints? If you still want them, then save up all your money and buy the blueprints first if you don't care about trophies / achievements.

Now BO6's levels are honestly really good with some stinkers in between. The best missions are the ones where you have to do spy shit such as sneak around and rig games in a casino to convincing guards to sabotage their own weapons. The game excels here as there's always some form of contextual clues that will help in your mission such as looking at the list of winning hands in poker so you know how to rig the poker game in the future to your advantage. The little puzzle minigames such as cracking codes and safes open helped keep the game varied and made sure you felt like you were an actual spy with gadgets and the jazz. The game however suffers when it remembers its supposed to be a CoD game such as making you clear a boring open-world mission just to get to a much more interesting level after.

But there were two missions that really soured the experience; the first one being the mandatory drug trip mission and the final mission. The novelty of the drug trip mission falls flat on its face as it reuses assets from zombies just to make a scary level so the level that's supposed to be creepy just feels out of place and does not belong. I found myself getting tired of the mission before I was halfway done just because of how boring and repetitive the enemies were. This mission is supposed to show why the bioweapon is scary but it cant even do that right. Compare to Nova 6 in Black Ops 1 where you watched people fucking MELT in front of your face to Black Ops 3 where you watched Taylor and his crew move like creepy mind-controlled drones. Hell, Cold War's drug trip mission was better in that it was a CYOA style with Adler delivering the best sarcastic voice lines should you choose to fuck around in that mission. I would have scrapped the whole thing and made it more like Resident Evil 7 / 8 where you're no longer the super-soldier but just a scared person who has to pay attention to their ammo and pick fights carefully.

Another point of contention is the final mission where BO6 continues the same issue that Cold War had, they had short final missions that didn't feel like the Very Definitely Final Dungeon. For instance, CoD 4 had you clear out a missile base before chasing Zakhaev down, WaW had you storming the Reichstag, MW2 had you clear out a PMC base, etc. But in here, the final mission feels like it should be the 2nd to last mission as that's where the climax happens and once its done, you expect to actually go to the HQ of the real bad guy and rip shit up. But no, you end up with an unsatisfying villain death for a villian who barely had an impact on the story. Did 3arc run out of time & ideas to make a proper final mission?

The gunplay and combat is about the same; if you've played one CoD, then you've played them all so there's nothing interesting worth talking about here as the game's Omni-Movement is really just for MP and Zombies than story mode.

In conclusion, I think the game had some great ideas to make a Spy Shooter and it works very well in that respect but the game kneecaps itself with trying to be a Black Ops game that it causes some of their excellent and fun missions to be hampered by rushed, boring, and pointless filler missions. If 3Arc actually had balls, they could break free from Activision and the CoD name so they can actually make the spy shooters they want to make. Unfortunately, 3Arc just dosen't have it in them to tell Activision to fuck off.

I recommend this if you grew up playing 007 and Perfect Dark or someone who likes story based FPS of the 2000's. I can also recommend this game to those who played the Hitman Reboot trilogy and want something like that but more action focused.

In both cases, either get it on Gamepass or wait until it goes half off.

I'll be honest, this was my first Tomb Raider (TR) game I played & Beat back in 2013 so this game actually did a really good job at introducing me to the Tomb Raider series. So how does it hold up now that I have the experience of TR 1-2-3 fresh in the back of my head?

This is a reboot of the TR series where Lara Croft is more grounded and focuses on her becoming a badass. The premise is that you play as Lara Croft who's a newbie archeologist going on an expedition to find the lost island of Yamatai with a dysfunctional crew when their ship gets wrecked. Now Lara is trapped on an island surrounded by perpetual storms with multiple natural hazards and a bloodthirsty cult who wants to search for the new Sun Queen as a key to escape the Island.

The premise itself is very solid as this is the grittiest TR game thus far but maybe too much to the point where Lara survives so many fall and crashes that should have killed her. She gets captured and tortured by the cult quite a bit and the death scenes in the game are absolutely brutal and not for the faint of heart. The game really does a great job of nailing just how gritty and fucked Lara is that it kinda causes some aspects of the game to fall short.

The story itself is not very good because you're given all those characters on the ship that you're to care about but you never get enough time with all of them that it feels like they're just there for one arc and that's it. With a game as gritty as this feeling like a grindhouse flick, you already know that your companions are going to be very expendable and the plot twists are rather predictable. I will give credit to how the game handle Whitman as he nails the arrogant celeb/influencer so well that its cringe in a good way. The scavenger cultists are also rather good enemies story wise as they have their own characters but you hate them so much for being fucking monsters in human skin. There was a lot more that could have been expanded on so that your companions dont feel as expendable or just reducing the cast size so that each one of them gets more time in the spotlight. Overall, i found the story predictable but fitting for the tone of the game.

The gameplay is much more combat focused than previous Tomb Raider games and its better for it as the combat feels smooth yet challenging. Its basically Uncharted's combat but ground focused. One thing to note is that Lara goes into cover automatically which works fine but feels weird coming from games where you have to press a button to go into cover. There's only 4 weapons in the game being the Pistol, Machine Gun, Bow, & Shotgun and each weapon fills their role well. The game skirts the lack of weapon variety by making it so that your weapons can be upgraded into stronger versions for better upgrades. You get upgrades by spending salvage you collect from the world and it gets the job done. I also like how satisfying it feels to get kills but you end up fighting the same human enemies for a large portion of the game which gets boring. Plus with how detestable the cultist enemies are, its a shame you cant gib and gore them (such as blasting their legs off with a shotgun, instagibbing with GP-25 grenades, etc.) so you can show how much those fucking cultists deserve to die. You do fight supernatural and animal enemies but there are so few and far between that it would have been better if we got more combat encounters where Lara has to fight a Mêlée à Trois between the supernaturals and the cultists. The combat is rather serviceable looking at the bigger picture but there are times where you wish they put in some more interesting encounters.

Another part of the game worth looking at is the exploration sections as this game is a platformer like Uncharted complete with all the climbing and parkour sections. TR actually goes further and turns it into a metroidvania and it works so FUCKING well that I 100%'d the game. Not only are the tools you get interesting such as the rope arrow to create your own ziplines or pull objects to you but even your standard guns have a reason such as the shotgun being used to blast away wooden debris or the GP-25 being used to blow up cracked walls. It makes your arsenal feel more important and you're always wondering what upgrade you're gonna get. In addition, you can actually take a look at each and every collectible and Lara always has something to say which adds a lot to her character. You can even examine artifacts up close for additional facts and clues. I wish this was in Uncharted because those small details really made it worth going to 100% just for the lore and details. This is probably the key example that shows how a fusion of Uncharted and Metroidvania works so damn well.

However, the game is less puzzle focused as most puzzles are in optional tombs that has a simple physics based puzzle just to clear the tomb. The only mandatory puzzle is at the end of the game and that can be solved rather easily. If you're someone who liked the puzzles that TR has alongside the tomb exploration, then you'll be disappointed here. I can overlook the puzzle issue myself since I enjoyed them anyways for being pretty neat physics based puzzles but given how complex the OG TR games was with their puzzles, then the puzzles here would be disappointing. My only other nitpick was the fact that the icon for your machine gun is a H&K G3 yet the only machine guns you get is the Type 100, an AK style rifle, and the U100 so where is my G3????? I also found the mini challenges in each region to be tedious as it feels like a "Where's Waldo" puzzle where you have to find and destroy stuff hidden in the scenery with very little in the way of rewards. The game would be better off without said puzzles unless they make it more interesting and rewarding.

Overall, this is a very solid reboot of a franchise and it got me interested in the OG Tomb Raider games more than a decade after it released. I can understand that the game was trying to figure out how to make this new reboot of Tomb Raider work so there's a fair amount of early instalment weirdness here but I enjoyed my time with the game. I recommend this if you're a massive fan of Uncharted as this delivers a more gritty metroidvania.

MW2023 story mode fucking sucks. BUT their multiplayer is something that I can see myself coming back to as It feels like an upgrade to MW2019 & MW2022. Its still CoD at the end of the day and MW2023 is for people who vibe with CoD's formula.

The story for MW2023 has you picking up the threads from MW2022 in which you play as Soap and Price trying to take down Vladimir Makarov (Who wants to destroy the world with facts and logic like his lookalike Ben Shapiro) just like the original MW3. Unfortunately all you really get is a by the numbers story as they try to replicate all the MW2023 story beats and some nostalgia of MW2019. They try to do something different by introducing open concept missions but it just feels like warzone story mode. It just feels like far cry but with no real progression or memorable moments and the moments that are supposed to be memorable just end up being over in 15-30 seconds.

To its credit, the story does have a decent "shock value" mission but the impact just doesn't hit as the story goes about the same even if the "shock value" mission never happened. The status quo remains the same and the story beats just feel like they happen independently. Hell even the mandatory stealth mission only requires you to kill 2 people and is literally over in 5-10 minutes. If you've watched YouTube videos shitting on MW2023's story, then you already know that my opinion is the same as theirs.

So really, the only reason you would want to play MW2023 is for its multiplayer and its actually honestly better than MW2022 and MW2019 now that they brought back 150 HP so most of the deaths feels fair. The gunplay is still as good as ever and IDK what they did with the SBMM but i've noticed that most of my games are fair save for the occasional curb stomping by Quickscopers and MLG sweats. It does still have the default CoD bullshit such as Quickscopers and grenade spam so you end up needing to have EOD Padding (Flak Jacket/Blast Shield) on all of your classes. I actually like that they improved the camo challenges this time around as each weapon has 4 different camos and completing the challenge for 1 weapon unlocks the camo for all of the guns. This actually encourages people to use different guns so they can get the camo they want. You can also now share attachments between different weapons so if you unlock a stock for the UZI, you can actually take the same attachment for the Uzi and put it on different SMGs so unlocking attachments makes you wonder if you could actually take that and put it on compatible guns. No longer do you feel like you're unlocking the same fucking attachments when trying to max out all the guns, each attachment feels like something new.

If this was the MW3 that I got back when I was younger, I would take this multiplayer over the original MW3. However, the same live service garbage is present as you have to complete daily challenges to unlock DLC guns and perks meaning you have to play Warzone and Zombies to complete said daily challenges. Warzone is the same as the MW2019 incarnation so nothing changed there and MW2023 zombies is so fucking bad that I only played one game and never did so again. It's just basically zombies in war-zone and has nothing interesting backing it up. Its so complicated yet so boring at the same time that I would rather take AW & WWII zombies over this slop.

Really, I got this game for my yearly CoD fix after I got tired of XDefiant and I'm glad to say that the MP is still annoying yet addictive and the MP is the only reason to buy MW2023. If you want something far more substantial and don't give a fuck about MP, I'd just go back to the older CoDs starting from CoD 1-CoD Cold War for the story mode and zombies.

But if you do so, DO NOT PLAY THEM WHILE YOU'RE ONLINE. People are able to hack your computers via Remote Access Trojans (RATs) and Activision never fixed that gaping security breach so this issue affects PC and Consoles. Download them and then turn off your PC/Console's Wi-Fi so they don't fuck with you. Watch this video to understand how fucked the RAT issue is basically making any modes with multiplayer functionality unplayable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlVSpw6414U

So Twitter wont be used by me anymore. Follow me here on Bluesky.

https://bsky.app/profile/pressxforrex.bsky.social

So after 105 Hours of game play time (some spent falling asleep while the game was running), i managed to finish everything in the collection including all DLC expansions. I can see why Tomb Raider took off and why its also a game of its time.

The remaster does a very good job with fixing the lighting of the original graphics while breathing in new life and keeping the atmosphere true to its PSX originals. In some cases like TR3, the remastered graphics actually makes the game less darker and easier to see without having to burn through all the flares especially in the London levels. I also like that they allow you to save anywhere and all the nonsense with save crystals is left to NG+ for anyone who still wants the classic experience as this game is a punishment platformer but in 3D. The models for nearly everything including the level design is well done as it feels like a fresh coat of paint that enhances the base game. The addition of modern controls is smooth though I had to switch back to tank controls for when I need to crawl out of a hole backwards and hang off on a ledge. This is how a remaster should be done.

Everything else is as is but the remaster has some issues that are minor thankfully such as the Remastered TR3 shotgun being the same Compact Cruiser that was use in TR1 & TR2 remastered instead of being the remastered SPAS 12 that was used in the original TR3. There was another instance where I somehow went from 200+ Flares to 80 Flares in TR3 even after doing Nevada as my 2nd mission after India. Turns out it's an overflow glitch that causes my flares to loop to 0 once I go past 255 which should have been fixed in the remaster.

Before I go into detail for each game & DLC, I should inform you that I used a guide because uh, this is game where "Guide Dang It" applies to EVERY SINGLE MINUTE of the game. This means that I got all of the secrets except for all of Peru and Greece-St. Francis' Folly & The Colosseum.

Tomb Raider 1

This is where the series started and by god did it have a rather strong start. You play as Lara Croft, an Archaeologist hired by Natla to find the Scion that would soon open the door to Atlantis by going to Peru, Greece, Egypt, and the Atlantic. First things first, this game is unsettling in all the right ways as it sets up the stage for some very effective jumpscares later on while also introducing levels that are both beautiful and primitive at the same time. This applies to all 3 games as I think they very much nailed the atmosphere of nearly every level in the trilogy. There hasn't been a single level in the original TR1 that feels out of place and I'm able to tell you where each and every level came from in the game. The only real complaint I have is that the levels feel like they tend to go on for longer than they should, again a common issue in all TR1-3 games and there's nothing really to break up the long levels with shorter levels that act as breathers. They're also far too complex than they should be because its very easy to get lost mandating the use of a guide.

The combat in the games is mixed at best such that the game is designed around you being able to jump and dodge while you're shooting but the lock-on system is so clunky that you have to force yourself to face the enemy so Lara shoots at them. I died/got badly wounded so many times because I kept thinking that Lara would continue to fire at the enemy while she was running away from them. This becomes a problem later on when you start dealing with Atlanteans who can rush you or spam you with shots while you have to relocate just so you can aim at them. This ends up turning all the combat encounters into "find a tall platform and use your handguns to kill them from a safe place" which is boring and a total slog. In addition, some of the ranged enemies don't even have a period where they stop firing to reload and only does so when you have to reposition giving you no breathing room. As such, the combat is awful for the classic TR games but TR1 really has it the worst with spongy enemies and not enough tools for the player to counter the enemy's fast movements.

The story is light which is fine for a first outing but I wished that we got more cutscenes to help break up the levels at times. I enjoyed the Unfinished Business DLC but like the main game, the levels felt long and its basically a rehash of Atlanis and Egypt which is kinda meh. The giant statue and the hive was awe-inspiring

The one thing I liked about the game is the awe-inspiring moments such as seeing the Sphinx in full (in the room with the secret MAC10s), the Statue of Midas, and the giant Cat in Temple of the Cat. Those easily made you feel like you were working towards something big to help define the character of each level.

Tomb Raider 2

You play as Lara Croft once again but this time, you're hunting for the Dagger of Xian in a race to get to it before Bartoli and his cult beat you to the punch through China, Italy, and the Adriatic Sea. A noticeable improvement as there are now more cutscenes to flesh out the story but still very light.

Once again, the games all use the same engine so most of what I said about TR1 apples to TR2. Namely, the fact that the designers made sure to give each levels a consistent theme and vibe. However, there's less of the levels that set up the atmosphere or scale of what you're working towards as it feels like there's plenty of filler levels such as the Diving Area, Living Quarters, & the Ice Palace. Again, some restraint on making the levels less sprawling and more focused would have helped here.

I feel like combat has been improved with the addition of more humanoid enemies that forces you to use your stronger guns instead of rushing to the nearest platform and pinking away with pistols. However, this just ends up being a game of knowing where enemies spawn so you can minimize the hit-scan damage you take. If they had just made the enemy fire projectile bullets, then this would have allowed Lara to dodge bullets and put her acrobatics to work. I also like the greater arsenal of weapons but fighting underwater with the harpoon gun SUCKS. Seriously, what the hell is going on with the aiming underwater? I found myself swimming to escape the divers and shooting them with more reliable guns such as the TEC-9s and the M16. The addition of vehicles is a nice touch but I found myself staying on foot to avoid the clunkiness of the vehicles.

The Golden Mask DLC is better than UB in that its an entirely new area being in Alaska. I LOVED the soviet sections of the first 2 missions because it feels like I'm playing Goleneye 007 down to the vibes and the action was great. I thought the gold cave and the jungle levels by comparison were allright as the molten gold was a neat hazard to deal with but getting the 3rd secret in the 4th level was such a pain in the ass. The Vegas level as a reward for getting all secrets was honestly fun as hell for being a level that's so out there it works. This was easily a step up in terms of DLCs for Tomb Raider.

Tomb Raider 3

Now this time, you play as Lara Croft who journeys to India, Nevada, South Pacific, London, and Antartica to recover 4 meteorite fragments for Willard who wants them for some reason. The story took a step up here as there are now cutscenes after every level setting up the next stage and the villain of the level. This is easily the best story of the collection.

The gameplay is still unchanged from pat games being a realistic punishment platformer but it easily has some of the best levels conceptually such as Nevada, Antartica, and London. I felt like I was playing Perfect Dark (N64) which fucking rocks. However, this game is home to several complicated levels such as London: Aldwych & Lud's Gate + India: Temple Ruins. Personally, I really hate jungle levels with a passion so I didn't like India or South pacific that much. (Trying to clear Jungle on 00 Agent will do that to you) Had the devs just scaled back their levels and refined some of the mechanics, then TR3 would be perfection.

The DLC Lost Artifact manages to surpass Golden Mask in terms of quality by being a compact adventure that has you going through Scotland to France via the English Channel Tunnel. You have to recover the Hand of Rathmore from an old foe as they use it to cause chaos and destruction via dumping radioactive materials everywhere. The best part is how amazing all of the levels are including the batshit insane secrets and the creepy vibe. I'll be honest with you, I was getting tired of TR3 but the DLC managed to be interesting enough to keep me going.

FInal Thoughts

Overall, I enjoyed each games for what they were as nobody had done an action adventure game like TR before. I just found it very frustrating and annoying that this game does not have very good signposting and you need to babysit a guide to make sure you're going the right way. This is what I mean when I wish they scaled back some of their levels to be less complex and use more signposting but they kept making the same mistake multiple times over 3 games. There's too many instances where one slope looks like you can stand on it but you can't or massive open areas with no visible starting point such as the Sanctuary of the Scion.

I'm just honestly glad we can save anywhere because I don't think I would have enjoyed the instakill traps this game loves to spring on you which is such bullshit difficulty. It really feels like the games are padding at times when there's no need to.I appreciate the games for what they did for the action adventure genre but there's too many flaws in it for me to consider replaying the games.

For what its worth, I'm happy this remaster modernized the game to the best of their ability and I wouldn't have it any other way as the flaws are part in the original games.

BTW, my fave game is TR3 because I loved so many of the levels in the game even if they sucked such as Aldwych and RX Tech mines.

The Plucky Squire is a British indie game that tries to merge Toy Story with Paper Mario feeling like a blast from the past. It is a very wholesome game whose art style makes you feel happy and nostalgic but is held back by the technical issues and bugs.

The premise of the game is that you're playing as the Plucky Squire Jot who lives in a storybook with his friends Violet and Thrash where he fights the evil sorcerer Humpgrump. Humpgrump took offence to finding out that he loses in every story he's in so Humpgrump gets the ability to manipulate objects in the storybook by bringing them into and out of the real world and does so by pushing Jot out of the book into the real world. Now its your job to stop him before he causes a time paradox in which Jot and his story disappears for good.

Now right away, the game's art style/graphics are easily the strongest part of the game as everything looks cute and adorable being hand drawn that it feels wholesome despite the stakes. The game does a very good job of merging artstyles while making sure that the storybook aesthetic is retained such as having minigames in the style of Saturday morning cartoons while making sure the artstyle does not overstay their welcome. The artstyle also works well with the gameplay by merging both 2D and 3D styles together to help solve puzzles in both worlds and exploring the desk. Honestly, my favourite thing was always wondering what the developers would go next with the setting.

The story is also very simple too and makes good use of the colourful palette to tell a story about why writing, music, and other forms of art make life worth experiencing with various pop-culture references but done in a manner that fits within the setting. Even the big twist is actually well done and uses the fact that the story is meta to up the stakes. My issue is that I wish the first 75% was cut back in half to make the twist more impactful while also giving more screen time and characterization to Violet and Thrash so they become as much of a main character as Jot earlier in the story.

The gameplay is rather simple which fits with the premise of the game being a simple kid's story about the hero vs the big bad as it's basically a mix of 2D and 2.5D Zelda games such as ALTTP and ALBW. However, the game is linear in nature with no real "Dungeons" as each chapter is a dungeon itself which may put off some people. You also have to solve puzzles by using the ability to being items from other storybooks or the real world into your own storybook as well as rearranging sentences on the storybook to create new items. This game also has minigames that take inspiration from other genres and games such as Rhythm Heaven, Punch-Out!, Crypt of the Necrodancer, and Bubble Bobble.

Combat in this game is simple as you basically have a regular sword slash and spin attack (gives you i-frames so very good) but Jot is able to throw his sword (which is more for puzzles than combat) and do a Ground-Pound with his sword which leaves you open to attack. Your friends Violet and Thrash also fight with you at certain points and they're capable of killing mooks on their own and won't die. You also gain the ability to jump and dodge-roll which does the job well. It really is just simple button mashing and works just as well.

In lieu of proper boss battles, almost all of the bosses are fought via minigames which I honestly liked because it allows the developers to make memorable boss fights inspired by other games. As a bonus, Jot and Thrash end up getting Ripped during those boss fight minigames which is fucking awesome while making sure the bosses don't feel like yet another boss you fought before in Zelda or Ys. If a boss minigame is too hard, you can just ask to skip it (which i did for one of the final boss minigames because it was luck based).

The puzzles go beyond simply being "Find object in 2D world and bring it to 3D & vice versa" as I would be spoiling the game but the game expects you to think outside the box and make use of the fact that you're in a storybook to solve puzzles. Remember the puzzle that you have to solve in Phantom Hourglass to open the Temple of Courage? This will become very helpful here.

The main problem is that this game suffers from a number of technical issues and glitches such as having characters that flicker in and out, freezing because I triggered an event flag in an unexpected place, or having to reload a past save because I softlocked myself. I was able to enjoy the game thankfully but this game needed a few months to help iron out the bugs and fix some softlocks caused by the player thinking outside of the box.

Lastly, I recommend going for all the collectibles in the game as the art pages you get help show how the game was developed and its legit interesting to see how different the pre-production conceptual stage was compared to the base game. It really makes you appreciate how much of a passion project this game was and as such, is worth a playthrough.

Overall, a great wholesome game to relax with but the devs have some tech issues they need to tidy up.