AllstarBrose
Very solid campaign, I really enjoyed how run and gun it felt for 90% of it compared to some of the other CoDs being mostly corridor shooters. The cast of characters is solid but a bit forgettable and the story was fine, but I was most surprised by how much I enjoyed the weapons. I tried a bit of zombies as well and while I enjoyed it, Zombies in Spaceland has too many moving parts for me too care much about it. Unfortunately I can't try the multiplayer due to servers on PC being completely dead (I sat for 30 minutes waiting for anyone to join my lobby and got nothing).
Finished a replay of the trilogy today and it's crazy to me how good these games are as remakes. They still fundamentally feel like the original trilogy in their gameplay but the refreshing of the visuals and character designs are stellar (especially Spyro 1). Spyro 1 is my favorite game of all time so when this was announced I was both extremely excited and hesitant. When it finally came out, I was shocked at how well Toys for Bob managed to keep the spirit of the original games while keeping their identity completely intact. Spyro 2 and 3 are pretty obviously rushed compared to Spyro 1 but all three games are still fantastic and this is still a great way to play the games (I still prefer the originals but that's solely due to personal taste).
2016
Decent little puzzle game, cute art and decent music, but the puzzles aren't particularly interesting or fun. Only took about 30 minutes to finish too, so there's not much to this game
2022
Buggy as shit, looks terrible, atrocious average FPS, missing some old QoL features, and yet it's the most fun I've had with a mainline Pokemon game in ages (bar Arceus). The exploration is really fun with each region having lots of unique mons to catch, the progression system is really satisfying and if you stay around the recommended levels, some of the gyms and Team Star bases can prove a bit of challenge, the raids are extremely fun and rewarding, I have had such a good time with this game since it came out and I can easily see myself popping this game on pretty consistently going forward.
Half-baked, frustrating, and tedious. The last thing Portal 2 needs in its gameplay loop is waiting and unfortunately this mod requires you to do a lot of it. None of the puzzles are satisfying to finish, none of the courses feel rewarding, and the very start of the game invalidates everything Portal 2 finished off. Highly recommend avoiding.
2015
Yup, that's a walking sim. Some pretty visuals, alright music, and decent philosophy but god if it isn't boring otherwise since you're extremely slow and have nothing to do between the landmarks you must reach. The time loop restarting is both a blessing and a curse, as it means you won't have to slowly explore everything in one route but at the same time, if you're close to a landmark and it restarts (cued by the music getting louder), it's quite frustrating since you just have to go straight back with wasted time being your only reward.
2004
Half-Life: Source? More like Half-Life Sucks!
2021
I downloaded this game back when it was released on Game Pass and completely forgot about it until they announced it was leaving the service, so I decided to knock through it really quick since it looked interesting on a cursory glance. After beating it, I think I'd say I'm content with the experience I got and I wanna give it a full review because I haven't seen any discussion on it anywhere.
To start off, the visuals are fantastic and I'd say it's one of the most visually pleasing games on Unity. Normally I'm not a fan of voxel-based art styles since most games that use them tend to look a bit samey but Vanessa Chia and her team did a great job at creating their own style with the tools they used. On top of that, the lighting is fantastic and used very well in conveying tone and atmosphere. I feel it shines best in bigger, open areas where they use 2D pixel art to create distance detail, like sunsets, distant cities or neighborhoods, and plains. In terms of the world you're interacting with though, every area is full of lots of clutter and detail that all feels intentional and makes the world feel lived in which makes taking in your surroundings a joy. The music and sound design are also great, with the soundtrack matching very well with the lighting and coloring of every scene and the ambient audio creating good tension when needed. Props to Pusher for making an overall fantastic soundtrack.
When it comes to gameplay, Echo Generation has you going between two main methods - Paper Mario-style combat and point-and-click-style exploration. Every combat encounter is turn-based with you, your sister, and one of several pets you can find each having unique skills with different purposes. When you level up, you have the choice of choosing between upgrading each characters' health, strength, or skill points. I WOULD HIGHLY RECOMMEND upgrading health evenly with all characters, while having the humans focus on strength past that and your pet upgrade skill points. Your humans will be the main damage dealer and the pet will be mostly focused on healing them both. Unfortunately, early on the combat isn't particularly fun since most enemies can take you out really quickly unless you get a feel for the timed actions for blocking their attacks and landing yours. Thankfully the enemies are physically in the world except for two areas so you can pick and choose your fights, but there aren't that many and they respawn on a timer so if you need to grind, it can be a hassle. As your journey progresses, you can find comic books which expand a specific characters' moveset while adding more utility to their kit, like making the enemies bleed or poisoned or stunned. Unfortunately, these status effects aren’t that important as they all last for less than three rounds and deal only one damage per enemy turn while nearly every enemy has over 50 health past the 1/3 point.
My biggest gripe is that you don't have much of a reason to use anything except the first pet since it has a cheap healing move and every pet you get starts at level 1 in a game where grinding is time consuming. Once you hit about the 1/3 point in the game, every fight ends up going the same way with you spamming the same moves over and over just because they're more efficient than anything else. This slightly changes when you hit the 2/3 point and you swap to some new moves, but most of the encounters go the same way and take a while because enemies are extremely tanky and combat is a bit on the slow side. They are very well designed in a visual sense however. There aren't many enemies in the game overall, but all of them have incredibly good designs and the animation work done by Edgar Abrego and Ian Mendoza make them all stand out. I just wish fighting them was more fun.
Past the combat, the exploration and story progression were some of the few things I didn’t like from the start. Like I stated earlier, exploration is like a point-and-click adventure game where you search every nook and cranny for items to pick up and for where they might need to be used. The highly detailed environments you explore through are very nice like said earlier but some areas have so much clutter that it’s hard to tell what you can and can’t interact with. On top of that, there are a lot of items your character will just decide they need for an arbitrary reason so it makes the discovery process not very satisfying overall. At a certain point I needed to use a guide for several things because I missed small items or couldn’t find the single interactable object that I needed to progress. I feel it was an interesting choice since it encourages full exploration of each area, but some things felt really obscure and didn’t make sense to me. If you’re a more patient person than I am, this might be something about the game you’d enjoy but I personally didn’t like this aspect. The world is also a little annoying to navigate since there isn’t any form of fast travel, unless you can consider a bus to an area that’s disconnected to the rest of the map to be that. There are two points where the end of an area would connect with a previously closed off part of the map, but the movement speed of your character when sprinting is just slow enough to make it not feel convenient.
I don’t really have much to say about the story honestly. It’s fine, it’s not particularly interesting and felt like most of the plot just kind of happened without much cause or effect. I’m probably misremembering, but the initial drive for the story was also completely unrelated to what ends up happening, other than the inclusion of aliens. Early on, people around you are talking about you and your friends are going to make a movie about aliens the next day, but you’re not driven to go to the first plot beat of the game which involves the player heading to the right and entering a repair shop. Everything felt really disconnected and lacked any sort of stakes so I was hard pressed to care about what could happen next.
In the end, I would recommend this game to someone wanting a more puzzle focused game who is fine with the combat shoving you around a little bit. The story doesn’t do enough to keep you engrossed in it and the lack of variety is a little disappointing, but the art, music, and world are solid enough to make the experience enjoyable. If they were to make a follow-up, I would want them to make the combat have more variety in terms of enemies, useful skills, and options in the early game and I would love to see a quest log or character thoughts page or something to make the direction a bit less vague.
To start off, the visuals are fantastic and I'd say it's one of the most visually pleasing games on Unity. Normally I'm not a fan of voxel-based art styles since most games that use them tend to look a bit samey but Vanessa Chia and her team did a great job at creating their own style with the tools they used. On top of that, the lighting is fantastic and used very well in conveying tone and atmosphere. I feel it shines best in bigger, open areas where they use 2D pixel art to create distance detail, like sunsets, distant cities or neighborhoods, and plains. In terms of the world you're interacting with though, every area is full of lots of clutter and detail that all feels intentional and makes the world feel lived in which makes taking in your surroundings a joy. The music and sound design are also great, with the soundtrack matching very well with the lighting and coloring of every scene and the ambient audio creating good tension when needed. Props to Pusher for making an overall fantastic soundtrack.
When it comes to gameplay, Echo Generation has you going between two main methods - Paper Mario-style combat and point-and-click-style exploration. Every combat encounter is turn-based with you, your sister, and one of several pets you can find each having unique skills with different purposes. When you level up, you have the choice of choosing between upgrading each characters' health, strength, or skill points. I WOULD HIGHLY RECOMMEND upgrading health evenly with all characters, while having the humans focus on strength past that and your pet upgrade skill points. Your humans will be the main damage dealer and the pet will be mostly focused on healing them both. Unfortunately, early on the combat isn't particularly fun since most enemies can take you out really quickly unless you get a feel for the timed actions for blocking their attacks and landing yours. Thankfully the enemies are physically in the world except for two areas so you can pick and choose your fights, but there aren't that many and they respawn on a timer so if you need to grind, it can be a hassle. As your journey progresses, you can find comic books which expand a specific characters' moveset while adding more utility to their kit, like making the enemies bleed or poisoned or stunned. Unfortunately, these status effects aren’t that important as they all last for less than three rounds and deal only one damage per enemy turn while nearly every enemy has over 50 health past the 1/3 point.
My biggest gripe is that you don't have much of a reason to use anything except the first pet since it has a cheap healing move and every pet you get starts at level 1 in a game where grinding is time consuming. Once you hit about the 1/3 point in the game, every fight ends up going the same way with you spamming the same moves over and over just because they're more efficient than anything else. This slightly changes when you hit the 2/3 point and you swap to some new moves, but most of the encounters go the same way and take a while because enemies are extremely tanky and combat is a bit on the slow side. They are very well designed in a visual sense however. There aren't many enemies in the game overall, but all of them have incredibly good designs and the animation work done by Edgar Abrego and Ian Mendoza make them all stand out. I just wish fighting them was more fun.
Past the combat, the exploration and story progression were some of the few things I didn’t like from the start. Like I stated earlier, exploration is like a point-and-click adventure game where you search every nook and cranny for items to pick up and for where they might need to be used. The highly detailed environments you explore through are very nice like said earlier but some areas have so much clutter that it’s hard to tell what you can and can’t interact with. On top of that, there are a lot of items your character will just decide they need for an arbitrary reason so it makes the discovery process not very satisfying overall. At a certain point I needed to use a guide for several things because I missed small items or couldn’t find the single interactable object that I needed to progress. I feel it was an interesting choice since it encourages full exploration of each area, but some things felt really obscure and didn’t make sense to me. If you’re a more patient person than I am, this might be something about the game you’d enjoy but I personally didn’t like this aspect. The world is also a little annoying to navigate since there isn’t any form of fast travel, unless you can consider a bus to an area that’s disconnected to the rest of the map to be that. There are two points where the end of an area would connect with a previously closed off part of the map, but the movement speed of your character when sprinting is just slow enough to make it not feel convenient.
I don’t really have much to say about the story honestly. It’s fine, it’s not particularly interesting and felt like most of the plot just kind of happened without much cause or effect. I’m probably misremembering, but the initial drive for the story was also completely unrelated to what ends up happening, other than the inclusion of aliens. Early on, people around you are talking about you and your friends are going to make a movie about aliens the next day, but you’re not driven to go to the first plot beat of the game which involves the player heading to the right and entering a repair shop. Everything felt really disconnected and lacked any sort of stakes so I was hard pressed to care about what could happen next.
In the end, I would recommend this game to someone wanting a more puzzle focused game who is fine with the combat shoving you around a little bit. The story doesn’t do enough to keep you engrossed in it and the lack of variety is a little disappointing, but the art, music, and world are solid enough to make the experience enjoyable. If they were to make a follow-up, I would want them to make the combat have more variety in terms of enemies, useful skills, and options in the early game and I would love to see a quest log or character thoughts page or something to make the direction a bit less vague.
An unnecessary prequel with a worthless story, frustrating combat encounters, and very little to give praise toward. When I played through all the God of War games in 2020, I specifically bought a PS3 so I could play this game and while I don't regret it due to homebrew being fantastic, I hated the game for the same reasons I do now except I played it on normal. Playing it on hard for the platinum trophy was like throwing myself at a wall over and over to see if I could break through it. Every combat encounter was frustrating, every puzzle wasn't fun, every platforming section was boring. The only thing I can give this game credit for is its visuals - it's absolutely gorgeous for a PS3 game. Much like Ratchet and Clank: Into the Nexus, you could have easily fooled me into believing this game was released on the PS4 due to the overall visual fidelity. Besides that, I don't think I'll ever have any reason to replay this game again and I'd even go so far as to tell people to steer clear of it.
Played the PSP version back in 2020 and had a great time with it. The story is simple but enjoyable with good payoff, the combat is very well tuned for the encounters, and the levels are fun and challenging. This review of the game is for the normal difficulty. This time around, I played on hard and earned the platinum trophy and it had a negative impact on my enjoyment of the game. Encounters don't feel properly balanced and most of them left me with little health and magic. The game can also be cruel with some levels where you have several encounters in a row with minotaurs, cyclopes, and medusas with no healing or checkpoints in between. This might just be a skill issue on my part but I never remember having issues close to this on normal. I'd definitely recommend this game as long as you don't play on hard though, because the core game is quite fun.
My three stars is an average review for all three modes in the game, but I'd like to cover each one individually.
For starters, I'd give the campaign a 1.5/5. The only thing I really enjoyed about it was the core gunplay of BO3. The levels were too long, the story was too convoluted and uninteresting, the encounters weren't fun. I wouldn't recommend this campaign at all.
My memory of the multiplayer is a bit hazy since I played it years ago, but I'd give it a 3.5/5 if it's accurate. The core gameplay of BO3 is so satisfying and Call of Duty games have such an addictive gameplay loop when it comes to leveling weapons up and getting new attachments/camos. In the modern times however, it doesn't seem very feasible to play multiplayer on PC due to the excessive amount of hackers so I guess my review of it's current state is 'don't play it'.
I would say zombies is as good as both of the last modes added together. The sheer amount of maps in the base game is fantastic and they all feel unique and fresh. The biggest plus for the game is its modding community however, as you have access to endless amounts of custom maps and modifications for the game. Don't like the weapons in the normal maps? Just install a mod to put in ones from other CoD games. Need something fresh to play? Go to the workshop and browse the top maps from whatever period you want. I wholeheartedly would recommend getting BO3 just for the zombies alone since you'll have near endless amounts of hours of content with it.
For starters, I'd give the campaign a 1.5/5. The only thing I really enjoyed about it was the core gunplay of BO3. The levels were too long, the story was too convoluted and uninteresting, the encounters weren't fun. I wouldn't recommend this campaign at all.
My memory of the multiplayer is a bit hazy since I played it years ago, but I'd give it a 3.5/5 if it's accurate. The core gameplay of BO3 is so satisfying and Call of Duty games have such an addictive gameplay loop when it comes to leveling weapons up and getting new attachments/camos. In the modern times however, it doesn't seem very feasible to play multiplayer on PC due to the excessive amount of hackers so I guess my review of it's current state is 'don't play it'.
I would say zombies is as good as both of the last modes added together. The sheer amount of maps in the base game is fantastic and they all feel unique and fresh. The biggest plus for the game is its modding community however, as you have access to endless amounts of custom maps and modifications for the game. Don't like the weapons in the normal maps? Just install a mod to put in ones from other CoD games. Need something fresh to play? Go to the workshop and browse the top maps from whatever period you want. I wholeheartedly would recommend getting BO3 just for the zombies alone since you'll have near endless amounts of hours of content with it.
2013
I never had the "pleasure" of playing GTAV in its prime back in 2013/2014. I eventually got to play it a bit on my Xbox 360 for a bit but the loading times and the torture mission completely put me off of it as a 13/14 year old. Years later after it was given away for free on Epic, I finally started a new playthrough without having played any other Rockstar game except Max Payne 3, so my judgment on the game isn't clouded by its predecessors.
The 2013 cynicism that fills this game is one of the most poorly aged facets of the overall experience. Nearly every single character in the game hates the world and everyone in it which makes meeting new characters completely uninteresting. On the other hand this makes the few positive or opportunistic characters a breath of fresh air, like the old couple Trevor meets, the daredevil Franklin hangs out with, Solomon the movie director, and Franklin himself. Other than when those characters are present, it feels like most dialog exchanges are simply characters espousing how much the world sucks and how everyone in it should die, them included. The trope is so played out at this point that it makes the main plot nearly unbearable to me. Characters in the side content are overall more bearable due to their eccentricities but they have another issue going for them.
Most of the content in this game just involves you driving for several minutes to sit and watch a cutscene for a few more minutes, to then drive for a few more minutes until something might happen, or maybe you'll just end up seeing another cutscene and driving some more. This is the one reservation I have towards the side content, as the lengthy drives combined with lack of rewards don't make going out of your way to do them fulfilling. I didn't find any of the minigames particularly enjoyable either which I feel is mildly inexcusable due to other contemporaries such as the Yakuza series having such engaging side content despite their tiny budget when compared to GTAV. There is one thing this game does quite well though.
The sandbox that is the open world has some of the highest potential for chaos and comedy. This is where the 1.5 stars for my rating comes from. I have had such a good time just causing chaos while driving around, my personal favorite thing to do being hitting motorcyclists as fast as I can. Just being able to cause mayhem at a moment's notice is one of GTAV's biggest strengths. Honestly I don't really have anything to say about this facet other than it's just fun compared to everything else in the game.
It feels odd to not have enjoyed the second highest selling game of all time. You'd think it'd be near flawless with the fact it's still making as much profit for Rockstar as it is, but when it comes to the singleplayer content there's very little I can give praise toward. Maybe there's something about the multiplayer that makes up for the missing 3.5 stars in my rating but I feel I'm about eight years too late to play it and I'm not willing to drop the real world money required to get fully invested into the game. I'm glad I played this game though, as an adult it's interesting to me since it's a time capsule of 2013 culture in terms of how vapid and worthless celebrity culture and media could be. I can't recommend it if you're looking for an interesting story or fun characters due to both being simplistic and cynical, but if you just wanna smack a car going 110MPH into an innocent person on a moped, I can't think of many better options.
The 2013 cynicism that fills this game is one of the most poorly aged facets of the overall experience. Nearly every single character in the game hates the world and everyone in it which makes meeting new characters completely uninteresting. On the other hand this makes the few positive or opportunistic characters a breath of fresh air, like the old couple Trevor meets, the daredevil Franklin hangs out with, Solomon the movie director, and Franklin himself. Other than when those characters are present, it feels like most dialog exchanges are simply characters espousing how much the world sucks and how everyone in it should die, them included. The trope is so played out at this point that it makes the main plot nearly unbearable to me. Characters in the side content are overall more bearable due to their eccentricities but they have another issue going for them.
Most of the content in this game just involves you driving for several minutes to sit and watch a cutscene for a few more minutes, to then drive for a few more minutes until something might happen, or maybe you'll just end up seeing another cutscene and driving some more. This is the one reservation I have towards the side content, as the lengthy drives combined with lack of rewards don't make going out of your way to do them fulfilling. I didn't find any of the minigames particularly enjoyable either which I feel is mildly inexcusable due to other contemporaries such as the Yakuza series having such engaging side content despite their tiny budget when compared to GTAV. There is one thing this game does quite well though.
The sandbox that is the open world has some of the highest potential for chaos and comedy. This is where the 1.5 stars for my rating comes from. I have had such a good time just causing chaos while driving around, my personal favorite thing to do being hitting motorcyclists as fast as I can. Just being able to cause mayhem at a moment's notice is one of GTAV's biggest strengths. Honestly I don't really have anything to say about this facet other than it's just fun compared to everything else in the game.
It feels odd to not have enjoyed the second highest selling game of all time. You'd think it'd be near flawless with the fact it's still making as much profit for Rockstar as it is, but when it comes to the singleplayer content there's very little I can give praise toward. Maybe there's something about the multiplayer that makes up for the missing 3.5 stars in my rating but I feel I'm about eight years too late to play it and I'm not willing to drop the real world money required to get fully invested into the game. I'm glad I played this game though, as an adult it's interesting to me since it's a time capsule of 2013 culture in terms of how vapid and worthless celebrity culture and media could be. I can't recommend it if you're looking for an interesting story or fun characters due to both being simplistic and cynical, but if you just wanna smack a car going 110MPH into an innocent person on a moped, I can't think of many better options.
2009
This is one of those games where if I was better at it, my score would definitely be higher. I had a really good time with Bayonetta though, I was terrible when I started and the big difficulty kick around chapter 6 really forced me to get good quick. Once I finally got that feel the game went a lot smoother but the last few chapters still managed to completely kick my ass. The only big gripes I have with the game are the numerous amount of "die if you fail" QTEs or segments and the minigame-style sequences later in the game, both of those got me pretty frustrated or bored since they killed the flow for me. Overall, quite fun even if you aren't good at this kind of game.
2014
Man this game is such a blast, I finished it the first time when it launched on Steam and got around to replaying it recently since it's on Game Pass. I can't think of many games that feel nearly as good to simply play, the core movement system is so fucking good to the point where I find myself unintentionally trying to do movement like this game's when I'm playing other games (which never ends up successful.....). I can take or leave the story (2014 writing doesn't always hold up but there are definitely some good jokes here and there) and the combat's simple but fun (weapon upgrading can be a bitch though), but it's not hard for me to come back to this game because it scratches an itch nothing else can.
2014
I played SotFS back in February when I did my binge of the Souls series. Going straight into it from DS1 was one of the most disappointing and frustrating experiences in my life, making for one of my least favorite games I've ever played. Going back a couple days ago from this log, I had a few videos pop up on my YouTube feed of people going back and enjoying DS2 after they started with SotFS so I decided "why not" and went for the experience myself. In the end, it was highly worth it because this version of DS2 was very fun and felt like a natural progression of DS1.
The enemy placement in SotFS feels like a kaizo game compared to vanilla, it feels like every single room has three times the enemies it should and so many places have added enemies when they shouldn't have. Vanilla felt perfectly balanced in its encounters, there weren't any locations that felt overly hard for their place in the progression of the game. The difficulty curve feels way more balanced in vanilla as well. I remember dying a lot in the Forest of Fallen Giants in SotFS since every encounter had between six and ten enemies to take care of at once. Meanwhile in vanilla, it felt much more inline with Undead Burg from DS1. This pattern continues for every single area, feeling similar in progression to areas like DS1 would be. The biggest example is Iron Keep, which in SotFS gave me more deaths than every single death in DS1 and DS3 combined. Meanwhile on this playthrough of vanilla, everything up to Smelter Demon took me one try and the run up to Iron King took me only a handful. Straight up this version of DS2 is so much better than SotFS and I think I'll actually get some replays of this game over time.
The enemy placement in SotFS feels like a kaizo game compared to vanilla, it feels like every single room has three times the enemies it should and so many places have added enemies when they shouldn't have. Vanilla felt perfectly balanced in its encounters, there weren't any locations that felt overly hard for their place in the progression of the game. The difficulty curve feels way more balanced in vanilla as well. I remember dying a lot in the Forest of Fallen Giants in SotFS since every encounter had between six and ten enemies to take care of at once. Meanwhile in vanilla, it felt much more inline with Undead Burg from DS1. This pattern continues for every single area, feeling similar in progression to areas like DS1 would be. The biggest example is Iron Keep, which in SotFS gave me more deaths than every single death in DS1 and DS3 combined. Meanwhile on this playthrough of vanilla, everything up to Smelter Demon took me one try and the run up to Iron King took me only a handful. Straight up this version of DS2 is so much better than SotFS and I think I'll actually get some replays of this game over time.