FF7 Remake was my favorite video game of all time. It was my first Final Fantasy game. I loved the characters, story, gameplay, world building, music, everything. However, the main reason it was my favorite was because it taught me to open up, try out new things (and I'm not just talking about video games). Before, I was really stubborn, only sticking to what I know. After playing FF7 Remake, I became more open minded. With that said, how does Rebirth compare? As expected from a video game sequel, Rebirth expands and improves upon FF7 Remake in very matter. It should be no surprise that this is my new favorite video game of all time.

There is so much content! Took me 101 hours just to be the main story. Granted I did all the side quests and world intel, but still. It never got boring or long but that's thanks to the fast-paced combat, basically non-existent load times and how refreshing the level design is with all the sections with other characters and minigames (I'll touch upon that later). I've had a PS5 for 3 years now and this is the first time a game felt "Next Gen" and not just an enhanced PS4 game. Really got my money's worth, unlike with Spider-Man 2 which took me 20 hours to 100% complete.

My biggest gripe are the minigames. Most of them are fun and fairly simple. However, there are some that I absolutely loathed playing. The Whirling Whack frog Fallguys, the sit-ups, the third Chocobo flying and the Two Legs? Nothin' to it piano. Of course, I eventually beat them with the highest score, but still.

I am absolutely awe struck by FF7 Rebirth and I can't wait for Part 3, whenever that comes out. Will probably release before Kingdom Hearts 4.

So, you’ve come hoping for a really in depth and detailed review? Unfortunately I’ve only ever played this game once and to be honest…it is a much MUCH more interesting story. In the future, I promise I will actually sit down and review this game. But for now: get a drink and a nice snack, sit back, and enjoy my glorious tale.

It was around about 8 years ago I’d say and me and a friend were in a random arcade. We were sort of browsing around, looking through all the different games they had to show. And that’s when…we saw it. Time crisis. For those that don’t know, time crisis is essentially a first person on rails shooter which were pretty popular in the arcades during the late-ish 90’s. The thing is here is that you have a small pedal which if pressed: will allow the player to duck down and reload their weapon. So when me and my friend saw this game, we decided to give it a go. How hard could it possibly be? We said to ourselves.

I’m sure this is the point where in your mind you’ll probably hear thinking ‘oh this is the part where he reveals how hard it actually is and then there is some funny moral to the story later’. Unfortunately, I’m gonna have to crush those expectations.

So my friend inserted 50p of British currency into the machine and started playing. We’d both agreed that he’d have the first go and later I’d have a go after he died. But after 10 minutes or so, we realised that he was better at time crisis than we thought. He was brilliant at it in fact. I just sat there watching him. He decimated every single enemy in his path. The villain laughed: thinking that he was some sort of joke. But, he was so, so wrong. My friend kept pushing the pedal like there was no tomorrow and landing every hit. After a while, I began to wonder if the machine was rigged. But those thoughts were soon put to sleep as finally: he beat the game.

So what is the moral to the story then? Just because you think a game is gonna be really hard doesn’t mean it always will.

Great gameplay, story happened, pedal was harmed, ACTION! RELOAD!

Extremely solid gameplay with a great variety in combat abilities, classes, perks, and items that made it fun to discover what the game had to offer. Sadly, that discovery and randomness grew stale as I was eventually faced with imbalanced difficulty spikes and bad progression grind.

Starting with the good - Rogue Legacy 2 feels great to play. Within minutes of my very first run, I was having fun. After my first death, it felt good to spend what I had earned on upgrade and I was excited to jump back in with a new class and new random abilities to discover. It got its roguelike hooks in me early.

Expanding my skill tree was initially satisfying as you're not only working towards upgrades for your character but also unlocking new classes and features to make future runs a bit easier. However, as you get further into the skill tree, it becomes a repetitive grind with repeating skills at increasing cost. Every skill upgrade offers a minute improvement to one trait - +1 strength, +1 intelligence, etc. All of which are barely noticeable during combat until you're several upgrades deep. It also doesn't take long for the upgrades to get so expensive that you're lucky to be able to upgrade 1-2 nodes per run depending on how well you do. And since each upgrade point doesn't feel significant, it's hard to feel like you're making much noticeable progress when you're only able to afford 1 upgrade at the end of a 30 minute run. This sort of thing feels like artificial padding to get you to spend more time with the game than really organically feels necessary.

The game is broken up into 6 regions with one boss per region. The zones all feel a bit different with some variation on enemies. And each of the 6 bosses offer their own challenges and movesets to learn and master. RL2 also has some semi-Metroidvania-y elements to it as you earn permanent upgrades when you finish areas that let you gain access to new areas you aren't able to access previously. So if you've beaten bosses 1 and 2 already, on your next run you can jump straight to the 3rd zone.

After taking my time beating the first zone, I flew through zones 2 and 3 without much trouble before hitting a massive wall in zone 4 when the difficult takes an insane spike. And due to the aforementioned slow upgrade system, the game turned into a tedious grind of doing a 30 minute run in easier zones to earn money, buy an upgrade or two, try the new zone, die without earning enough for a new upgrade, repeat. It honestly sucked and almost made me quit the game. Luckily, the game has fantastic custom difficult options that make it easy to tweak parts of the game ever so slightly to make it easier to push through these difficulty walls to compensate for the game's lack of balance.

After powering through several difficult roadblocks, I did eventually beat the game and excitedly dove back into NG+.
And that's when I realized that, while my skill tree was maybe only 15% complete, I had seen everything that the game had to offer me. I've played every class, I've tried every weapon and ability, I've seen every perk. The randomness of the hero generation in this game is a pretty fun gimmick, but it never ends up really flowing together in any kind of organic way that lets you feel like you're crafting fun builds like in other roguelikes like Hades or Slay the Spire. I played Hades for 120 hours and constantly felt like I was discovering new builds and new synergies between abilities I didn't know I could pair together. In RL2, that synergy was extremely rare to find.

All-in-all, Rogue Legacy 2 is an excellent roguelite that feels fantastic to play and I had a lot of fun with it. But it sadly suffers pretty significantly from balance issues in both its difficulty curve and upgrade economy, as well as randomness fatigue due to a lack of good build synergies.

+ Gameplay and combat feel excellent
+ Great exploration with Metroidvania-lite features
+ Lots of fun classes, weapons, abilities, spells, perks, and items to discover
+ A fun sense of humor with some goofy random perks
+ Solid soundtrack
+ Great custom difficulty options

- Poor difficulty balancing
- Mid-to-late game grind due to horrible economy balancing with minute skill improvements and expensive upgrades
- No real way to control or create a fun build. Random skills, perks, and abilities rarely have synergy.
- Randomness grows stale instead of exciting

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

Ok ok, before fully diving in, a little bit of background: A few years ago, it must had been in 2018 or 2019, while checking my Twitter feed, I saw this game. It looked pretty interesting and so I began following the developer, but after a long time without updates and beacuse I deleted my account, I lost this game's track for a long time... so imagine my sheer surprise when I see the trailer announcing the release date, and when it comes out, the internet completely blows up and everyone says that it's a masterpiece. I felt almost obligated to play it, both because of my short-lived past with it and how amazing, fun and unhinged it looked. Well, I finished it, and the question is, did I like it...?

I mean you already saw that I gave it 5 stars but also HOLY SHIT I FUCKING LOVE THIS GAME.

Look, I value A LOT of things that a game can provide as an experience, be it a story, a theme, an atmosphere,... Pizza Tower does a little thing I like to call ''being fucking insane'' and what provides is a genuine fever dream in all of the best ways. The characters don't talk at all, yet because of how they act or interact with each other they feel alive, catoony and funny as hell. The fact that The Noise only has one real major appereance in the whole game and still it's one of the mos memorable characters I've come across in a long time says a lot, and this basically applies to everyone, even the minor enemies; everyone here is animated in such a way that they feel straight out of a 90's cartoon, and the internet has clearly noticed it too.

Gameplay wise desings, I'm really sad to report, that at least to me the game feels like the bEST FUCKING 2D PLATFORMER I'VE PLAYED IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. Pizza Tower makes clear that its isnpired by Wario Land 4, Sonic and Earthworm Jim, and uses these references to create one of the most satisfiying controls, level designs and movement I've encountered, and belive me I've played my share of 2D platformers. Each level feels like its own world, the mechanics feel distinct to one another, the themes, THE MUSIC, it all just clicks and each time you fail it's just another chance to do it better and faster, and faster, AND FASTER, AND FASTER, AND FASTER, AND THEN IT'S PIZZA TIME AND THE MUSIC KICKS IN AFTER YOU BREAK JOHN GUTTER AND IT'S NON STOP RUNNING DING THE LEVEL YOU JUST DID IN REVERSEANDYOUFEELTHEPREASSUREASTHECLOCKTICKSANDYOUTRYTOGETANYTOPPINGYOUMISSEDANDBYTHESKINOFYOURTEETHSWITHSECONDSLEFT you arrive at the door, and it's this adrenaline, paired with how the level is designed, the personality and the secrets, what makes Pizza Tower, well Pizza Tower.

I think I'll never forget Peppino and his friends, enemies and adventures, it all just feel to good to be real and I just... I really cannot stress this enough, this just doesn't feel real, yet it's marvelous. I've left a ton to talk about 'cause belive me, this game has A LOT, but I want you to discover it, it's unique and full of insanity, the best kind of insanity.

Never had I thought that a game I discovered so many years ago starring an stressed and angry italian called Peppino could make me feel so much joy, but at the same time, it makes so much sense...

AA-games are back! RoboCop is back! Teyon did it, they got Robo loaded up full of baby food and Oreo cookies and put him in a good video game!

It's hard to imagine what RoboCop would've looked like without director Paul Verhoeven, who famously threw his copy of the script in the trash and only dug it out at the insistence of his wife. It is even harder still to imagine Johnathan Kaplan turning down Project X to stay on for RoboCop, or how the film would sound without Basil Poledouris' excellent score, or what shape its themes and humor would take were it not for Michael Miner's thirst for corporate blood. I cannot envision a version of RoboCop absent of Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Ronny Cox, or Kurtwood Smith bringing Edward Neumeier's characters and world to life. Making a sequel game intended to be accepted as part of the series canon is a tall task, and it's one Teyon managed to pull off about as well as Terminal Reality did with Ghostbusters: The Game. I don't know what's up with these movie franchises struggling to find their place in modern cinemas instead getting excellent games that actually understand the source material, but I'd buy that for [Sixty US Dollars.]

Obviously, RoboCop makes the most sense as a first-person shooter, and for the majority of Rogue City, that's exactly what you get. Stomping around in open environments, rarely taking cover as you blast junkies into hunks of meat with your Auto-9, because RoboCop can take it. Every firefight plays out like the factory shootout from the first film, homing in on scum while shots glance off your solid metal chassis, occasionally grabbing enemies to fling into concrete walls and through high-rise windows, or chucking cans of gas into crowds, or CRTs into skulls, you know, if you want to be a capital C Cop.

You can pick up a variety of other firearms, but outside of the opening few missions, there's very little practical reason to do so. The Auto-9 gets the job done, start to finish, and it can be upgraded with PCB boards that can increase penetration, damage, and add additional upgrades like bullet split. I ran through most of the game with a board that provided unlimited ammo, an auto-fed clip, and enhanced gore. The end result is, in a word, ridiculous. Teyon ought to be commended for making the Auto-9 feel every bit as good to use in the game as you'd expect it to from watching the movie.

These linear sets of shooting levels are interspersed with trips back to Rogue City's two hub areas: the police station and downtown Detroit. It's during these sections of the game that Rogue City more closely resembles an immersive sim, with dialog trees and skill checks influencing the outcomes of side stories. Blowing up chop shops and de-escalating stand-offs by promising the perp three hots and a cot (a veritable golden ticket out of the hellscape of Detroit) can be initiated at your leisure, usually between handing out tickets and dancing for children. I like to call that serving the public trust.

It's just a shame that skill checks and the number of available side quests dry up the further in you get. A lot of it feels front-loaded, though there's still a lot of joy in walking around downtown and seeing the residual effects of those early choices. Near the start of the game, I had the option to let a graffiti artist go or fine him an unreasonable amount of money. I decided to uphold the law and bankrupt his ass, giving me the prompt "RoboCop has made an enemy of the graffiti artist," and later causing a large anti-RoboCop mural to appear in retribution. Don't know how he afforded all that paint. Scumbag probably stole it.

The subversive humor of the movie is alive and well, though the writing is a little flat near the start of the game and some performances are a bit questionable, save for Peter Weller who reprises his role as Murphy/Robo and doesn't sound like he's skipped a day since RoboCop 2. Once things gets going, Rogue City keeps its momentum. Literal bratty children lecturing adults on not voting (who in turn threaten to punch them in the face), letters from prisoners upset that they're forced into a baking program that makes them look soft, and Robo reuniting an elderly woman with her lost cat before destroying all her personal property in a shootout and just leaving is so perfectly in tone with RoboCop. There's plenty of direct references to the movie as well, and they never feel out of place, like the Delta City model one of OCP's executives collapsed into being unceremoniously stored in a supply closet that you can explore, or Kaplan again calling for a police strike in every scene he's in (Cops don't strike!) In any other game these callbacks could feel pandering, but in Rogue City they provide a sense of continuity.

Unfortunately, Rogue City runs about as well as RoboCop does while trying to arrest Dick Jones. I frequently had visual effects stop working, including a screen that was meant to depict a key character during a climactic moment in the game which remained blank. Audio frequently desynced and became covered in a heavy whine that required me to reset the game more than once, and artifacting is noticeably present during camera cuts when characters are talking. Temporal anti-aliasing also rears its ugly head once again, caking Rogue City's visuals in a muddy filter.

If Rogue City were a bit more cleaned up and embraced the immersive sim model more fully, I'd say this is a 5/5, but even as-is, I had more fun with it than most AAA releases this year.

Nope. I barely had enough patience for Shenmue and Shenmue II's meandering bullshit, I am tapping out here.

I played about three or four hours of this, maybe less. Might've just felt like I put that amount of time in, it's hard to tell when you're stuck in the Shenmue time-dilation chamber. Not that you need to play much to get a sense of what this game is going for. Shenmue III is incredibly faithful to the previous two entries, and so authentically captures the feeling of those games that you could tell me it's a cleaned-up build of an unreleased 2003 game and I might just buy it. Ryo still controls like a car, you still spend an inordinate amount of time running around asking people for information, and characters still talk in a way that feels like they're engaging in two disparate conversations at once.

"Hi there. Do you know where Shenhua is?"

"Ah, don't tell me that!"

"I am looking for Shenhua, have you seen her lately?"

"I go to bed at 7pm."

"Ok. Thank you."

That may not be line-for-line, but it should give you an idea of what I mean. Yu Suzuki's writing hasn't aged a day, and whoever the voice director is clearly still has The Touch, too. None of the actors sound like they were ever in the same room as one another, even Johnny Young Bosch is giving a performance that feels plucked from the original game. Toe to tip, this is a Shenmue!

That's not to say there haven't been any changes to the formula, however. The Virtua Fighter-style combat is much stiffer this time around, and there exists a sort of disassociation between input and action that really makes it feel crummy. Juggling a ton of enemies at once with Shenmue's lousy camera was never fun, and actually lining yourself up with a target was clumsy, but I actually felt like I embodied Ryo more than I do here.

Ryo also suffers from stamina drain now, and if he doesn't eat eight god damn pears every five minutes he'll whittle away to bone. This is the mechanic that threw me off Shenmue III, and I can't imagine anyone actually likes it. I haven't run across anyone posting apologia for it in the wild, and I'm not going to seek out stamina defenders if they even exist at all. Running around, fighting, and breathing chews away at Ryo's health at a pace I've never encountered in a video game before, the man is straight up hemorrhaging energy. I get it, Shenmue is a series that seeks to emulate the mundanity of life, so naturally Ryo needs to have himself a little snack every now and then, but if someone out there is pulling whole cloves of garlic from their pocket and eating them with half the same voracity as Ryo, I'm gonna assume they have a medical condition.

Early in the game, you have to beat up a carny to get intel, but the dude can chip off nearly a quarter of your health with every blow. Ryo practically destroyed the Kowloon Walled City with his bare hands in the last game, so this dude is just jacked, he's a genetic freak and he's not normal. Every time I lost to him, I had to restore my health before trying again, which meant going back to the store to buy more food that barely heals a pip of energy. Only now Ryo is so low on health I can't run, so I get to take an excruciating stroll up the hill, back and forth, hoping to God I don't run out of money and get forced into a shitty wood chopping minigame so I can earn a few bucks. I'm not Goku, I shouldn't be undergoing intense physical and spiritual training disguised as errands so I can defeat Shenmue's version of Cell, who is some fuckass running an illegal Lucky Hit booth.

A few hours of this and I realized I had to make a choice. I could stick with Shenmue III for another 20 hours or whatever, or accept that the likelihood of the game improving mechanically or actually going anywhere meaningful narratively is slim and that I could spend that time doing something else. Like playing Final Fantasy II. I've slogged my way through two Shenmue games, what do I have to prove at this point? I spent three dollars on this, the price of a delicious hot dog from Tom's, is it really so bad to be out that much money?

I can't imagine Yu Suzuki is ever going to make another one of these, I don't see there being a resolution to Shenmue in my lifetime, and while I do appreciate that he was so uncompromising on his vision that he didn't truncate the story, the fact that all roads out of Bailu Village lead to a dead end is a compelling reason to drop Shenmue III. Helps too that it's just a bad game.

you wouldn't think pinball and platforming would mix but yoku makes it work. sure there are going to be times you miss a shot and need to try ten or twenty times but that's pinball baby!!!! and its not dissimilar to missing a jump in a platformer and needing to clamber back up.

great soundtrack, fun writing.

some of the collectibles are a little fussy but they're entirely optional. i would rush to buy a sequel on day 1