"Against all odds, you must run. Run. Run...and survive. You must run till you uncover the truth."

The original Blue Rescue Team game (never had Red Rescue Team) is one that I have very fond memories of. I have some strong childhood memories of my many times playing it, from bawling my head off during the ending to more personal amusing moments such as how I had a bad habit of erasing my save file thinking I could beat the game by myself after having just had one of my older brothers beat the game for me (I would inevitably ask one of them to beat it for me again). I still have a save file from around 2012 or so when I beat the game with an Action Replay to make all my Pokémon Level 100 and have all items in the storage. When I heard this game was getting a remake in 2020, I was cautiously optimistic. I was not really a fan of the art style at the time and I just felt like nothing could replace the original for me. For a long time, I kinda just forgot this remake even happened until I got it as a Christmas present in 2022. After having finally played this game I hadn't beaten since I was a preteen, I came out just a little disappointed. It isn't the deep emotional rollercoaster I remember it as, although it was still a tearjerker at times from me. It isn't anywhere near as difficult as I remember it being, although I imagine a large part of that is probably because of either remake differences or because I am an adult playing this game. Nonetheless, I did still enjoy my time with this one and I would recommend it to anyone. Its just a bit unfortunate to have my rose-tinted nostalgia goggles taken off like this.

I'll start with the story, since its always what stood out in my mind whenever I think of any of the Mystery Dungeon games. I used to think this was really gripping, deep, and immersive as a kid, but I can see beyond the childlike amazement now and I see a story that has a lot of heart to it but doesn't have much substance. As far as I can tell, Rescue Team DX's story is exactly the same as the games its remaking, since I don't recall a single plot point here not being present in the original. Basically, the big hook of this one (and pretty much all the other Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games) is that you're a human who got transformed into a Pokémon and you're trying to figure out why. From the very beginning, you stumble upon your soon-to-be best friend, who's the partner you choose at the beginning of the game. I like goofy names in games, so I named my character Dude and my partner Bro. I'm just going to use those names here so I'm not constantly saying "the partner" or "you". Dude and Bro go into their first dungeon - Tiny Woods - to save a Butterfree's child and they inevitably succeed. From here, they decide to form a Rescue Team (hence the name of the game), which is...well, a team of Pokémon that make it their job to rescue those unfortunate souls that got lost in dungeons. I am very unfunny and uncreative, so I named mine Team Gigachads. As a newly formed team, the only members are Dude and Bro, although it gets bigger later. From here, the story mostly consists of a good amount of rescue missions with their own motivations behind it, like how you go to Silent Chasm to save a Jumpluff because another greedy Rescue Team got persuaded into doing it and nearly died trying. Sometimes you also just go through dungeons for your own sake, like how Dude goes to Great Canyon to talk to the mystical Xatu in hopes of seeing if Xatu knows why he became a Pokémon. You also have these dream sequences where, slowly but surely, Dude starts to piece together why he was placed into the world of Pokémon. In my opinion, the story doesn't really start getting interesting until the part where Gengar - the leader of Team Meanies (yea that's genuinely what they're called) that has a bone to pick with you - finds out you're a human through spying on your conversation with Xatu. He immediately tries to sabotage the goodwill you've been building up with the townsfolk and other Rescue Teams. Dude has been telling them that he's a human since he first got here, but they either never take him seriously or don't know what a human even is. Alakazam's team - the big team that everyone loves but was never given an official name - are the only ones with suspicions about Dude being evil, with Alakazam specifically being the one to suspect it. Gengar takes advantage of everyone's lack of knowledge about humans to spin a narrative that the reason why all the natural disasters happening in the world lately (you get hints of this through conversation with the legendaries you fight since they talk about the balance of the specific part of the world they govern being out of wack) is tied to Dude becoming a Pokémon. There's a legend that a Ninetales tried to curse a human for pulling its tail, but a Gardevoir with a deep bond protected that human, and the human selfishly ran away. This tale is used as "evidence" by Gengar to convince others to join the mob. They kinda just immediately believe him, even the big hotshot Rescue Team that Dude and Bro admire so much. Said Rescue Team breaks the news by threatening to kill you if you don't turn back, and even then they are going to send a bunch of the best Rescue Teams to hunt you down tomorrow so you better start running real fast. I remember something like this was genuinely really shocking to see in a Pokémon game for me as a kid and you start to really care for the characters after seeing how far these two little unevolved Pokémon have to push themselves to escape the elite Rescue Teams that want them dead. In my opinion, its the real emotional core of the game, and it does last a good while. For a while, you're just going through a bunch of dungeons with the goal of getting as far away from your pursuers as you can. It only ends once Gengar gets proven wrong, I thought it was a little anticlimactic that you're kinda just accepted back at the drop of a hat but Gengar being chased out of town was pretty satisfying. There's a decent chunk of the game still left, where you go to take down a group of Mankey to help Wobbuffet and Wynaut, Groudon to save Alakazam's team, and finally Rayquaza once you find out that there's a huge meteor that will destroy the world if you can't convince Rayquaza to stop it. As it turns out, Dude was not the human in the Ninetales legend, but instead he was sent to the Pokémon world with the specific goal of saving it from disaster. This leads to the pretty touching ending, where, when the day's finally saved, Dude disappears to return back to the human world, making Bro and the townsfolk break down into tears. I honestly felt this would have been more impactful if they actually committed to it, but Dude soon returns because he wished hard enough. Congrats, you're in the post game; enjoy the good chunk of extra content after the main story. This whole story took a long time to summarize, but, despite how text heavy this game is and how it seems cool on paper, the execution felt a bit off to me. I appreciate what it was going for but I don't think it leans enough into it, if that makes sense.

Gameplay's next to bat. I have to agree with the consensus here that it is pretty basic, but it is fun and feels very different from mainline Pokémon games despite having all the same creatures and a lot of the same moves (though there's also a lot that are different from the main series). The Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games are turn-based grid-based dungeon crawlers where you explore a bunch of floors with randomly generated layouts to find goodies or fight enemies. There's also some invisible traps that can bamboozle you. The goal is to find the stairs on each floor to keep going up until you reach the top floor. Of course, the top floor is different for each dungeon: for example, Tiny Woods ends at 4F and Sky Tower ends at 33F. Either the dungeon just ends entirely once you reach the top floor or you have a boss to fight. There's also requests that you take where you must fill certain criteria in the dungeons, which is almost always going to be finding a special Pokémon on a specific floor. You're either rescuing it, giving it a specific item, or having a Pokémon you've been escorting throughout the whole dungeon reunite with it. This sort of ties into one of the main complaints I've seen about these games; you're going to need to go through the same dungeons at least once since you need to grind for levels to catch up with the harder dungeons or to stock up on important items (although I found this game was very generous with items if you're doing a decent amount of requests), especially if you're trying to have a varied team that isn't just you and your partner. I didn't mind it, though; the fact that you also often have requests to do while you're in that dungeon makes it feel like you're at least accomplishing something rather than just going through the same thing again. Sometimes a dungeon you're revisiting will temporarily become full of loot and boost any gains from finding money, which was pretty satisfying to go through whenever it happened. The dungeons aren't super difficult, but I did die to the last dungeon once and once to the penultimate dungeon. Something relatively frustrating is that your experience can be completely different based at least partly on luck because of the way the floors are generated. Sometimes you come across a Monster House, which is when a whole cavalcade of Pokémon come out of nowhere and you're pretty much guaranteed to die at least once in my experience. Sometimes a Pokémon has a move that can shoot you from across the map or smack an entire room with massive damage (like how Bubble travels a long way and Earthquake destroys anything unfortunate enough to be in the same room), which can leave you feeling rather helpless if you don't also have one of those kinds of moves. Multi-hit moves are absolutely broken in this game and can easily melt you or your enemies if so much as two hits are achieved. Each hit of a multi-hit move does pretty much the same damage as a regular attack and I don't know who decided this was okay. I guess it's supposed to be balanced by the accuracy rate, but I found that, more often than not, you'll get at least two hits from the multi-hit moves, and its not that much of a problem when the game gives you items to raise your stats which includes accuracy of specific moves. Its ridiculous, but at least you can also take advantage of this too. It was hilarious seeing how Rock Blast is a move I never use in the main series games, but, as soon as I had it on my Geodude, I made the Rayquaza fight a complete joke. Another odd quirk about the Mystery Dungeon combat in comparison to mainline is that type coverage really isn't that important. It's always smart to have moves that are Super Effective just in case and there are types that are immune to the moves of another type, but, for some reason, moves that are not very effective can still hit like a truck. Also helps that moves get upgraded to hit harder the more you use them, and, if they're upgraded enough, you have the chance to attack twice in the same turn without using up any extra PP. This makes multi-hit attacks even more insane because you could potentially hit a Pokémon four times - which is already crazy enough - and then smack them around FOUR MORE TIMES for absolutely massive damage.

As a remake, I think this was pretty much a direct improvement over the original as far as quality of life and mechanics goes. There are some very nice QoL changes, like how you can now swap over control to any Pokémon in your party from the very beginning whereas it used to be that you could only control the main character until you beat the game (unfortunately this came at the cost of no longer letting you use any Pokémon to wander around town with but that was such a minor thing anyway). When you first start the game, you do a personality quiz that determines what Pokémon you get; it used to be mandatory that you accept whichever Pokémon you got from the quiz, but this remake lets you pick who you want if you're not satisfied with the quiz result, which was a great change imo. Personally I just stuck with what the quiz gave me, I feel that was really charming in the original but there's nothing wrong with giving people more options and I'll always commend that. It also removes the gender restrictions that were in place in the original, so boys can now pick Skitty and girls can pick Machop for example. A very specific nuisance that got fixed is how, if you wanted to go to Sky Tower again after beating the game, you needed to have the Fly TM in the original. This got removed in the remake and for good reason. I wouldn't be surprised if this also happened to the dungeons that you needed the Dive TM to enter in the original games, but those are in the post game and I only just beat the main story so I can't confirm for sure. Unfortunately, I do feel the changes in presentation resulted in a loss of personality from the original. Maybe its just my rose tinted glasses still being there but I think the sprites were just more expressive and charming. The Friend Areas (the places the Pokémon you recruit into your team go to) are also just a bunch of menus now when they used to be full-on...well, areas. You could walk around the areas - which I often did just to admire the neat DS sprite visuals - and each Pokémon had a certain spot they would often hang out at. Was just a cool touch that got removed. On the plus side, I found myself really loving the watercolor-like art style and I'd be happy to see more games that look like this.

Overall, I think playing through this game again has sort of ruined that childhood magic its always had for me, but I'm also glad I did it so I could form a more concrete opinion. Its still a lot of fun imo and had plenty of heart to it. If you're into dungeon crawlers and Pokémon, I would definitely recommend this one to you. It gets a solid 3.5 stars from me.

So, this was quite the interesting experience. I did not expect all the twists and turns this game would put me through (one of the rare cases I go through a popular game completely unspoiled) and they were intriguing indeed.

SUPERHOT's gameplay is definitely the main appeal of the game and for good reason. The idea of having time move only when you move (it isn't entirely true since time does still move its just incredibly slow when you're standing still) really sort of flips the way an FPS is usually played on its head. I have never played an FPS game where moving slowly is optimal and trying to move fast is punished, but that's exactly what SUPERHOT does. You are encouraged to move slowly so that you can properly deal with enemies, otherwise you will likely either get shot by very fast bullets or you will get ganged up on to the point where you might as well just restart. Admittedly it could get very frustrating - I died countless times to the last section of the final level - but the concept is intriguing and it felt satisfying once I got it right. The levels are basically short gauntlets where you need to defeat every enemy to progress to the next level. Enemies can be hiding anywhere in the map, so it can get pretty tricky in the bigger areas. You either use your fists, throwable items like bottles or garbage bags, full fledged weapons like baseball bats or swords, and guns (which you will always want to use over anything else). There's three kinds of guns: pistols, shotguns, and rifles. The pistol is the most straightforward one and is probably the best in my opinion. I found that the rifle's rapid fire is awkward in SUPERHOT's whole gimmick of time being incredibly slow when you're not moving, but there were some levels I got good use out of it in. The shotgun is your standard FPS shotgun in that its usually only all that good in close combat; the spread is large but concentrated, so its harder to hit enemies from far away. Overall I think this was great.

The story...if it weren't for the gameplay being so great, I'd think this was intended to be the real meat and potatoes of the game. That's not to imply its some masterpiece, but it was genuinely compelling in my opinion. Essentially, you have received access to a VR game called...well, SUPERHOT. The game's main menu mimics a PC menu (but a very simple and retro feeling one) to show how the player logs into superhot.exe and that sort of thing, it has a meta aspect in that way. You play the game as normal, but, as you keep playing, a glitch happens claiming you have unauthorized access and the game (in the story not the actual game) kicks you out. You get messages from an unknown friend of the player who seems to have sent the game to you in the first place and he informs you that there's a new version of the game that fixes the glitches. Again, the game plays as normal for a while, but that same error message eventually pops up again. The friend tells you there's a new set of levels but they're password-protected. Thankfully you don't have to find or memorize a password anywhere since the automatic typing sections of SUPERHOT do it for you. Another session of levels later and you get met with an ominous screen detecting a breach location, where the game then claims it knows where you live, showing a depiction of the player with a VR headset on. The game glitches and kicks you out again. Basically, to not overexplain the story, things get more and more strange from here as you continue to play levels. The gist of this, as I understood it, is that the game is made by some sort of malicious AI program that wants to suck people into it. Near the end of the game its implied that the program gave the player a concussion (there's a level where you have to attack the game's depiction of the player with a VR headset on and there's a text section where the program talks to you and says you're suffering from brain trauma). It constantly warns to leave while you still can but the player continues playing, and eventually the player's brain gets downloaded into the program where you essentially become a slave to it. This is also when the infamous meme spammed everywhere about this game happens: the program tells you to get other people into the game by saying "Superhot is the most innovative shooter I've played in years!" I'm usually not a huge fan of the whole sentient game concept - I really don't care for how Doki Doki Literature Club did it for example - but it wasn't done in a pretentious way here and it was pretty unexpected. I like the game's story.

I'll take this last paragraph before the conclusion to briefly shout out how much I like the art style of SUPERHOT. I don't know what they call this style but I really love how vibrant and polygonal it is, its simple but pleasing to the eye and very cool looking in my opinion. The enemies and the player especially just look so nice here. The PC sections also have an interesting style that almost reminds me of the Five Nights at Freddy's games for some reason.

SUPERHOT isn't going to completely blow your mind in my opinion and I don't really think its super replayable (then again not many games are in my opinion), but I think it was a great experience overall. I would recommend it, gets a solid 4 stars out of me.

After seeing the recent surge in Wario Land inspired indies - mainly Pizza Tower (which I'm interested in playing sometime soon) and ANTONBLAST - I had a newfound intrigue in playing through these games. I've long heard about how fun and charming they are, but I didn't care much for checking them out until hearing the explosion of praise they're getting as of recent. Of course, I typically try to start from the very beginning when I start a new series, so naturally I began with this one. Thankfully, I was able to snag the whole quadrilogy before the 3DS + Wii U eShop died. Took me some time to beat this one, but its a Game Boy platformer so its not very long. I tried to use as few Restore Points as I could: I beat every level without it, but frankly the last few boss fights were pretty irritating so I used them just to save me the headache. Sorry if that makes me a fake gamer to you, I guess.

I'll jump straight into the gameplay. Wario Land feels like a pretty good successor to the Mario Land series, having the same basic structure as SML2 but shaking things up in a neat way through some of Wario's unique characteristics and a different gameplay focus. Wario has his signature shoulder bash, which has him running forward and knocking out whatever enemy he hits unless they have a weapon in front of them. You get a coin whenever you defeat an enemy with the shoulder bash. He can also pick up enemies and toss them around; if you really want to, you can just throw them around forever and they won't recover, but they only die if you toss them into a hazard (lava, bottomless pit, spikes, etc.) or if you...lodge them into blocks? Yea sometimes when you throw an enemy they just get stuck inside blocks and die that way. The goal in Wario Land is a little different from Mario Land. You're still getting to the end of each level, but, rather than that being the only real focus, Wario Land has you slow down a tad to focus on getting as many coins as you can. There's a bit more of a focus on exploration, with a bunch of treasures you can find (treasure hunting is far from my strong suit though so I only found two of them) and a coin counter that builds up as you gain more wealth. In replacement of the coins usual function of giving you lives, there are hearts you grab that give you a 1-Up when you get 100 of them. I think the focus change is a neat idea and it fits very well with Wario's character, but ultimately didn't feel too impactful or purposeful until literally the very end when your wealth determines what house the Genie gives to Wario. I got the birdhouse - the worst option - because of course I did. I died a lot, and lemme tell you, it's hard to make any bread when you're dying. If I had something to complain about with the gameplay, its that something about it just feels awkward. I'm not sure how to really describe exactly what it is, so instead I'll mention specific complaints. Wario's jumps are very floaty, but there were many times I thought I could go far enough to cross a gap and just couldn't. Usually, you have your dash to help you with going farther, but, when you don't, there are certain sections of the game where you pretty much just have to die and start again since Wario can't dash when he's small and you need to dash at certain parts. This also makes that dragon powerup feel like something you would never actually want because it replaces your dash with the fire breath. Grabbing enemies felt pretty janky to me, there's a few times where Wario just stopped in his tracks and didn't move when I was moving. There's this ghost enemy that functions like a Boo in that it only moves when you turn around, but you can jump on it too and I swear that was so awkward to finagle with. Especially annoying because there's a ghost boss where you need to jump on those ghosts to beat the boss. Any boss where you had to grab something and throw it at them was awful because of how janky the throwing feels. The physics are also just really odd and it can make taking out any enemy that moves around in the air an absolute pain in the neck. Overall I think this set a good precedent for the other Wario Land games, assuming they build off of what this one made, but it does feel pretty clumsy and odd. Surprisingly pretty difficult, too.

There's basically no story at all, so I'm completely skipping the section I'd usually dedicate to that and instead going to aesthetics. Wario Land seems to be very much going for a zany weird style. The Mario Land games were already pretty goofy, so, in my opinion, it only made sense to make the next game in the series make use of one of the Mario series most wacky characters. Wario was even invented by the Mario Land series, so its fitting to have him take the reigns. The music especially goes for a silly goofy sound, with none of it sounding particularly great on its own and rather just existing to elevate the mood. The worlds all have some kind of food related puns in the name (Rice Beach, Mt. Teapot, etc.) and the level design itself usually includes some weird looking enemies that have very expressive cartoony death animations. I think this is pretty neat.

Overall, I don't think Wario Land is all that spectacular, but it has some fun ideas despite its jankiness. It was decently fun to play through and it does have a good amount of content (about 40 levels and 5 bosses if I remember correctly). You might enjoy it more if you're all about finding secret collectibles; I'm not really a treasure hunting fiend myself so I don't mind being stuck with the silly "bad ending". Wario Land gets an alright 3 stars out of me, the game is far from bad but its absolutely carried by the great silly vibes it has and it has some weird issues that sets it back from being a 3.5 stars to me.

Dedede's Drum Dash Deluxe is one of those quirky 3DS Kirby spin-off games that not a lot of people seem to care about. Seems to be pretty similar to the likes of Kirby Fighters, Kirby's Blowout Blast, and Team Kirby Clash Deluxe, except two of those got Switch versions (and even a sequel in the case of Kirby Fighters) while Dedede's Drum Dash Deluxe has been left to rot as an exclusive to the 3DS eShop. It's a real shame honestly, this game feels pretty unique and I don't think it deserves to just officially die out in a month from now when the shop closes. I mean, emulators will always keep it alive, but I think Dedede's Drum Dash Deluxe could make for a nice port for HAL to put on the Switch. It doesn't rely on any 3DS features that the Switch doesn't also have (aside from the whole gimmick of Dedede's jumps making him go up to the top screen at times but that definitely isn't necessary to keep).

Also, just as a disclaimer: I have always been pretty terrible at rhythm games, so this is coming from the perspective of a total rhythm idiot. I tried my hardest to get the platinum medal on every course, which I managed to do for all of them...EXCEPT the final level. I don't think I can ever do that one without spending a ton of time attempting to master it, so I figured I'd just take the basic gold medal and leave it at that.

For those who don't know, Dedede's Drum Dash was a side-game in Kirby Triple Deluxe. This game essentially is just an expansion with more levels and some small extras like masks you can slap on Dedede's magnificent mug and viewable trophies you get for reaching milestone scores in the game. I imagine the trophies were included partly as a Miiverse boasting thing, but...well, yea that's long since been shut down. Anyway, I remember Drum Dash was by far my favorite side game in Kirby's Triple Deluxe at the time it came out but I barely remembered anything about it, so this expanded version was a nice memory jogger. Its sort of a rhythm game and an obstacle course type of game, where the terrain is a bunch of drums you jump off of and you have to avoid hazards along the way. The rhythm part is in how the levels are structured, which tends to go along to the beat of the music, as well as a backbeat you need to keep track of if you're looking to get the platinum medals. Press A at a certain timing in Dedede's jump arcs to do the backbeat. Seems simple, but it gets really hard to keep up in the more difficult levels, at least for me. Keeping up a good sense of flow is important; if you just barely graze a drum or land on the far side of it, Dedede will be sent into the air flailing which ruins your backbeat combo. You get a score after beating each level that will get bonuses added to it with each special criteria you fulfill. The criteria includes: Time Bonus, No Damage, All Notes (there are note coins to grab in each level), and Backbeat Perfect.

I have to say, this game has made it to where if I ever hear C-R-O-W-N-E-D again I will immediately think of the pain I felt trying to beat both of the levels with this theme in it. I'm not kidding when I say that I spent two hours late at night to try perfecting the first C-R-O-W-N-E-D level and I still had to try again the next day. Ironically enough, it only took me four tries the next day, so maybe I just really didn't click with it until then. Certainly taught me that I'm still not any good at rhythm games, that's for sure. The other levels also took me anywhere from just a few tries to several attempts to get the platinum for. The other big spot of misery for me was Level 6 of the second set of levels, which was just so difficult to get right for me but did feel satisfying once I finally got the platinum for it after god knows how many attempts. As I mentioned earlier I just completely gave up even trying to get the platinum for the last level, I had a hard time just beating that level normally so I figured I shouldn't go for the platinum or I'd go insane. The thing about Dedede's Drum Dash Deluxe is that, if you just want to finish levels normally, there's pretty much nothing to worry about. So long as you're fulfilling like two of the criteria for getting extra points, you can get up to a gold medal pretty easily and call it a day there. However, if you really want that platinum, well you're going to have to work for it. The problem is that getting in the rhythm of jumping at the right time to get all the notes, getting a Perfect Backbeat, and avoiding obstacles all in one run is ludicrously difficult for me at times. The backbeat especially was the direct cause of so many fails for me, the amount of times I accidentally moved slightly too far and sent Dedede flailing to regain his balance or the times I missed just one beat and had to restart was countless. Some levels were more forgiving than others with the Platinum medals, but for the most part if you mess up once you're not getting it. This isn't too bad because obviously the levels aren't long (aside from the final level which felt like it dragged on for forever), but man when you're as bad at this whole perfect rhythm thing as I can be it's so painful. I did enjoy my time with the game, though; it's a pretty fun rhythm game. I don't want my salty rant for a Kirby game of all things (and one I haven't seen anyone else complain about) to take up the brunt of a review. I like the base idea a lot and there's a surprising amount of content here.

Despite my previous rant, yea I really think this is a solid little game. It's never gonna blow your mind, but it does what it sets out to do well and its charming. I could see this being a gateway for more people to get into a rhythm game since it's Kirby and it stars our beloved king of Pop Star. I'm a little sad I couldn't finish the job in getting the final platinum medal, but I really think I'm better off not doing it. Definitely not gonna lose any sleep over it.

I have to say, Half-Life was quite the interesting experience. I've heard many people talk about how good the series is, but I never played it before this year. As of typing this review, I have just finished Half-Life with 32 hours put into it on Steam. My time was a little inflated by the time I left the game on while I was doing something else, but, for the most part, this is accurate. I admit to using various outside sources for walkthroughs often, I had a difficult time understanding the ways this game tells you what to do or where to go next. I also save scummed quite frequently, but I don't feel this is discouraged by the game so I didn't feel bad about it. Nonetheless, I feel satisfied by my experience and I feel I still completed the game fairly. I did not use any of the cheat commands, for instance, like no-clip and whatnot.

Half-Life is one of the progenitors of fully 3D first person shooters, and, while its age can be felt in some areas, I feel the gameplay itself has aged well. The controls are responsive if not a little oversensitive (maybe there's a way to fix that in the options that I didn't see), I didn't have to fight with the physics to get where I needed to go, all the guns are enjoyable to use, there is a good variety of weaponry available...it's just a very solid time overall. Maybe I shouldn't be so impressed with all that, but I wasn't expecting this game to feel as nice to play as it does.

As for the story in this game, there isn't a whole lot of it from what I understood in playing it, but it has nice bits of lore and leaves you with a bunch of questions after playing it. There are a few NPCs you talk to in the game that give you information about where you need to go, but there are also some NPCs that give you some lore about this world and that's pretty neat. The G-Man gives you a little speech in the last chapter of the game that was cool, it was likely meant to be a big twist but I had a basic idea of who the G-Man was before playing this game since he's such a popular character even outside of the Half-Life fandom. The mere existence of the various aliens you have to kill, their home planet Xen, the Nihilanth (the final boss), and various other strange aspects of Half-Life add an eerie atmosphere to things that I think was pulled off well. There seems to be a lot of subtext and theories about this game, but, in all honesty, I don't think the plot of this game interested me that much for me to look into every detail and all the lore about it. Nonetheless, I did still enjoy this aspect of the game.

Something I find odd but interesting about Half-Life is that music is pretty sparse. Most of the game is silent when it comes to music and typically music only comes in whenever you reach an important location or some major event happens in the mission. I think this makes it to where the music in the game is more memorable and adds to the atmosphere. This isn't something I see much in games, but it works very well for Half-Life in my opinion.

Overall I am surprised and impressed by my experience with this game. Although I felt kind of dumb and confused by the design sometimes, I enjoyed my time with Half-Life. Maybe I'll visit Opposing Force, Blue Shift, Decay, as well as Half-Life 2 and its two episodes sometime soon.

So...Sonic Frontiers was quite the interesting experience. I'm someone that has always had a passing interest in Sonic, but haven't really took the time to sit down and play through the games to completion. Nonetheless, I do know a lot about this series through the fact that I used to be obsessed with it as a kid (can't count how many wiki articles I've read through and fan discussion I've seen of stuff like the IDW comics which I've been meaning to read through). I've always loved the Adventure games and I have at least tried many Sonic games. The Genesis era games, Heroes, Sonic 06, Shadow the Hedgehog, Generations, even Sonic Chronicles...these are all games I've played over the years from my childhood love of the blue blur, but none have interested me enough to go through the effort of beating them. That wasn't the case with Frontiers, which interested me enough to take the time to fully complete. From what I can tell, this game is supposed to be a "return to form" from the strangely comedy focused and watered down direction that Colors and Boom took the series in. Personally, I think this one tries a little too hard and overcorrects at times, but that's a complaint I'll detail later in this review.

When I played through Sonic Frontiers, I sought to do everything I could. There's no shortage of activities to do in this game, so I figured: "Why not do it all?" Thankfully the Platinum trophy was pretty easy to get, it will be yours so long as you do most of the stuff the game throws your way (aside from one specific trophy that's annoying to get unless you exploit an enemy's design). I wanted to fully complete everything I possibly could in the game, so I went through the trouble of doing a bunch of stuff that doesn't actually count towards the Platinum. Needless to say, I saw everything the game has to offer...except for the secret final boss only accessible through playing Hard difficulty, but honestly its just one extra boss fight and doesn't change the ending at all so I'm still counting my playthrough as 100%. I found that Sonic Frontiers is a game with some great stuff I love and some weird stuff that made me scratch my head at best or actively annoyed me at worst. I will detail all my thoughts in the later paragraphs of this review; you know, organization and all that jazz. I'm fairly confident in saying that I did overall enjoy my time with the game, though.

The story...eh, it has it's ups and downs. I didn't find it all that remarkable in total, but I appreciated the more serious tone it has in comparison to other more recent Sonic games and it does have interesting additions to the lore for the whole series assuming this game is canon. Essentially, the story's premise is that Sonic's friends get trapped in the same dimension Cyber Space is in and Sonic is sent to a strange new world. Sonic has to explore through the four islands of this world to find his friends and help them. Whenever he finds them, they're trapped in cages that he must get rid of, but this causes corruption to his body every time he does it. This becomes important later as Sonic gets more and more corrupted, but strangely this doesn't impact gameplay at all which I feel was a bit of a missed opportunity. He also must find the Chaos Emeralds in each island so he can turn into Super Sonic to defeat the four Titans; one Titan per island. Sonic Frontiers introduces the Ancients, a new species that is very important to the plot. The Ancients are the big new super important historical civilization that built a ton of the stuff Sonic interacts with on the islands. Specifically, they are aliens with highly advanced tech that moved to the world that this game takes place in after their home world was destroyed. The Ancients share some key similarities to the Echidnas: both are closely tied to the Chaos Emeralds and nearly got completely wiped out. Even Knuckles notices the similarities. Also, as a somewhat interesting side detail, the Ancients bare a noticeable resemblance to Chaos from Sonic Adventure, which I doubt was merely coincidental considering that Chaos also has a close connection to the Chaos Emeralds (and the Echidnas). All of these connections admittedly makes me hope and pray they haven't forgotten about the Chao since I love them and I desperately want a new Chao Garden feature in a game, but I digress. As the story progresses, Sonic learns more about who the Ancients are and what the purpose behind their elaborate machinery is. You'll find things like cranes, cannons, towers, large obelisk-like structures, and more, all identified by a distinct style of architecture almost similar to something you'd see in Breath of the Wild. The Challenges, Guardians, Titans, and Cyber Space are also all invented by them...yea, they built both the enemies and things that help you. The lore reason for this is because the Titans were built to take down a big bad that you only see at the very end of the game. So, naturally, the Ancients are a huge deal to Sonic lore; SEGA went as far as to make a canonical origin story to the Chaos Emeralds (as far as I know that hasn't been done before) tied directly to the Ancients. Apparently, their old home world is now where the Chaos Emeralds were originally native to before finding their way in Sonic's world. I'm not sure if I think that was a good addition or not, but it sure is something that happened. You know what was also something that happened? The ending. Everyone talks about how disappointing it was and unfortunately I have to echo that sentiment. Overall, this game definitely focuses on story quite a lot, but things still feel a bit half-baked and that ending just reeks of disappointment.

Alright, let's talk characters and writing. The main new character introduced in this game is Sage, some kind of cyber girl that was created to serve Eggman. She is a case of being intentionally meant to leave a bad first impression since she starts out pretty unlikeable and strange, being antagonistic to Sonic and utterly refusing to explain anything about where he is. She slowly opens up to him more and her reasons are revealed later (her data says Sonic will die and she's already programmed by Eggman so she's naturally antagonistic to him at first). I think she blossomed into a neat character and I can see why the fandom seems to like her so much. Not a fan of the fake out death they did with her, felt it was just done for a cheap attempt at emotional manipulation especially since we learn in this game that Eggman is going to bring her back anyway. Nonetheless, I would like to see her show up again sometime, maybe even become a staple character as one of Eggman's assistants alongside Cubot and Orbot. As far as the characters in general are, I think they were all handled pretty decently. With the way the story is put together, each major character essentially has their own island to themselves with a bunch of conversations to unlock. I liked most of the characterization and moments of interaction, like how Sonic helps Tails through his insecurities and that moment when Sage starts to cry after she realizes just how strong Tails and Sonic's bond is. However, I do have some gripes with the writing itself. There's two major things this game's writing does that I don't like: parts that feel like very on the nose responses to criticism - like the infamous scene where Tails calls himself inconsistent (which seems to be a direct nod from the writers on how much fans hate that one scene of Tails cowering in Forces) - and parts that reference facets of Sonic lore or obscure Sonic facts seemingly just to flex the fact that the writers do indeed know that. I know the latter point is criticized a lot, which I think has become way overblown since its not like it ruins the game's storytelling, but nonetheless I did find it odd when the characters randomly bring up something from the past that hasn't been relevant in several years. At one point, Tails says that the big bad must be way stronger than Dark Gaia. You know, the main boss from Sonic Unleashed, a game that came out 14 years ago and has never been directly ported to modern consoles (aside from Xbox backwards compatibility)? I don't think Dark Gaia has even shown up in anything since Unleashed. In one part of the story, Sonic tells Amy he'll be back "before she can even do a Tarot card reading"...for those who were understandably confused by that line, Amy is sometimes associated with tarot cards and I'm pretty sure it's not something she has done in the actual games in decades (and it's not like she does anything with it in Frontiers either so it's just here for a giga brain reference). Don't get me wrong, I like me some deep cut references every now and then, but these feel like such random inclusions whenever they show up and they're shoved in a little too much for my liking. Also, the game has two instances of random flashbacks to previous games through a screenshot ripped from the games and slapped on the screen for a few seconds. One of these moments didn't even really make sense in the context of what was happening and I just thought this was weird and unnecessary. At the very least, they clearly had fun here with the tons of references and I can see the merit in it. I just think it's too prevalent in this game.

Okay, with all that story stuff out of the way, time to finally actually talk about the gameplay. I felt it was pretty fun and satisfying overall, but it has some weird jankiness at times that makes precision difficult. In the open world, the game has segments of 2D platforming indicated by a spring, boost pad, or something of the like just sitting out there for you to interact with. I've seen a lot of people complain about it and I can definitely see why, its the jankiest part of the game in my opinion. Most of the time, it works fine, but the 2D perspective will shift back to a 3D one whenever you fall or when you accidentally leave the scripted 2D area. If you're just running through the world and accidentally touch a spring or something, the game is going to instantly snap into 2D mode and make you go through the area. These segments also have dedicated walls for you to climb, and I swear these are absolutely the jankiest part of the game bar none. You'd think the slow climb would give you more precision, but Sonic would move straight down or up when I was clearly holding a different direction. The wall-run sometimes just refuses to work and has you zoom away from the wall. This was very annoying and made the 2D parts of the game's open world irritating. On the plus side, things feel pretty solid overall in the open world. Once you get the massive speed boost from filling up your ring counter to 400 (or increasing your speed stat to Level 99), it feels exhilarating just darting through the world. Open world games are so much more fun when you have a crazy method of travel, like how Spider-Man has his web-swinging, and Sonic's high speed works great with that, although you'll need to max out your Speed stat if you want to stay super quick indefinitely. Speaking of which, not really a fan of this game's stat system. I think it was done to try and inspire a curve of progression, but it doesn't really feel all that natural. There are so many levels for your Attack, Defense, Speed, and Ring stats that it just feels excessive.

So, the combat. Sonic Frontiers definitely puts more of a focus on it here than I think any other mainline Sonic game has done before. I feel that it had a lot of potential, but ended up pretty middling. You get some new moves from the skill tree (since I guess every game needs to have that nowadays) and they are decently fun to use, but realistically you'll only be using a few of them. The Sonic Boom is probably the most fun one to use in my opinion since its a speedy barrage of projectiles that keep shooting out the longer you hold down the button. Combat is unfortunately another area of Sonic Frontiers that is affected by jank. A big example is how the game is supposed to automatically target enemies, but sometimes it just doesn't work as intended. Moves like the Sonic Boom and Cross Slash (no not the FFVII kind) suffer majorly from this issue since a dynamic camera angle happens every time you use those moves, which can really screw up the auto-targeting. Also, sometimes the game just doesn't recognize that you did a combo move. Some combo moves require you to press two buttons together, but those buttons are also tied to other features, so the game may prioritize the regular move over the combo move. The Boost button (R2 on PS4) has a few combo moves, and these were especially janky since the game tends to prioritize Boosting over the combo moves. It is very irritating, but, when the combat isn't refusing to work, its a lot of fun. One thing I will praise about the combat is the awesome Titan fights, those were always a blast even if they weren't all that challenging. The only problem with them is that there's so much happening in them and Sonic moves so fast that its very easy to just break the camera. The Titan fights also tend to suffer from the problems with auto-targeting perhaps the most out of any other fights.

One thing I will say about this game's structure is that I think it feels a little bloated. There are a ton of collectibles, each with their own intended purposes, and it does feel like a bit much. The Seeds of Power and Seeds of Defense raise those stats, the Kocos are collected to be used for increasing your Speed and Ring stats, the Vault Keys open the Chaos Emerald Vaults, the Gears are used to open up Cyber Space levels, purple coins let you go fishing with Big the Cat, fishing tokens are used to buy stuff from Big, gold cards are also used to buy stuff from Big, the Memory Tokens are different for each island and are used to gatekeep story progress (as well as let you talk to the characters for Side Stories)...it's just a whole lot of stuff and I can't help but feel like half of it could've been trimmed out. Also, the game likes to just insert random mini games you have to play through. It's not a bad idea to break things up a little so it doesn't get monotonous, but I really don't think this game needed several Koco herding mini games, three Space Invaders style mini games (four if you count the secret final boss that uses this style of play for some reason), and a single pinball area just shoved in there. As much as I love the fishing, it also felt pretty unnecessary and honestly kind of breaks the progression balance since you can just buy nearly everything you need from Big if you're good at fishing...and the Purple Coins aren't hard to come by at all if you got lucky like I did with the Starfall. Whenever that event happens, it brings back the enemies you took down, but it also activates a limited time slot roulette that can give you a shit ton of purple coins if you know how to play it. I got the Starfall at least once on every island and it made it to where I was at 999 purple coins for a long time, so naturally I had plenty of money to fish with Big and buy just about anything I needed. Once I was on the last island, I was rolling in fishing tokens, so I could just buy all the Koco and Seeds I needed to max out those stats with a ton of tokens still left over. It's kind of busted and makes me feel like all of these collectibles and extra systems weren't needed at the end of the day.

I'll dedicate this paragraph to some nitpicks I have with Sonic Frontiers. I previously discussed my major grievances with the game, so I will just talk about minor problems here. Biggest one of these nitpicks for me is that it's VERY tedious to level up your Speed and Ring stats; for whatever reason, you have to manually level it up one by one until you run out of Kocos or you reach Level 99. They literally already have leveling in bulk with Hermit Koco, since he just takes every seed you have on your person to instantly increase your Power and Defense to the appropriate levels, why is there no option to buy Speed and Ring upgrades in bulk? If they're worried about players regretting the choice of one over the other, there already is a way to swap Speed stat gains with Ring stat and vice versa (which you also can't do in bulk for some reason). The game just expects you to patiently spam to get through Elder Koco's dialogue each time as you sluggishly level up and it makes no sense to me. Another notable nitpick of mine is that there's no way to change the in-game time of day...which is a problem when every island has some Challenges that can only be attempted when it's night time. You either have to go do something else while you wait on it to be night time or do some other activity in the game and remember to come back once the moon comes up. I'm no developer, but I don't see any reason why there is no option to immediately skip time unless it's meant to be some kind of immersion thing (which would be silly imo considering this world has random springs, speed bumps, rails, walls, and loop-de-loops that just unnaturally lead to each other when Sonic does platforming there). Probably my least significant nitpick is that I don't like how you can continue to get collectibles even if you've long since used them for what they're meant to be used for. It's just a personal gripe that bothers me, I don't like to keep getting useless things and have it tally up in the map. For example, I finished the skill tree pretty early in the game and it drove me mad that my skill points just kept building up to nearly 200 by the end of the game when I had no use for it anymore.

The last topic I'll talk about here is the visual design. I think everything looks pretty good graphically aside from the distractingly common pop-in and the fact that the fishing area's water is buggy as all hell for some reason. However, my big problem is that the islands themselves aren't that interesting. Kronos Island is pretty much just a big grassland, same with Rhea Island and Ouranos Island (those areas also noticeably reuse a lot of stuff from Kronos Island). Ares Island is the most generic desert area you'll ever see. Chaos Island is a big volcanic wasteland. The Cyber Space levels are somehow even more generic since all of them just repackage the same aesthetics of previous stages in the Sonic series. I got tired of seeing the same Chemical Plant Zone, Green Hill Zone, and City Escape aesthetic that a ton of the Cyber Space levels share. I know this is done for a lore reason - they're built on Sonic's memories - but I really feel these could have been so much more creative than they actually were.

Phew, that review was ludicrously long, wouldn't you say? I have a bad tendency of rambling. I'll just end this with a short conclusion. Sonic Frontiers gets a decent 3.5 stars from me; it had potential to be truly amazing, but all the little problems really add up. Nonetheless, I still enjoyed my time with it, and I look forward to seeing what SEGA does with the extended campaign coming out as free DLC later.

For me, Deadpool is one of those games that isn't SUPER fun to play, but the other aspects of it really hold it together and make it worth at least checking it out. The game didn't take me too long to complete and I was enjoying most of my time with it. Unfortunately, I don't have an exact time, which seems to be a common trend among games I've been reviewing lately. Would love if more games told you how long you took to beat the game, but, alas, not all of them do that. I do know that I started my playthrough in March, but I took a long break from continuing the game since I was juggling so many other games at the time...so, now its November and I can finally say I beat the game.

Big sidenote: I'm not a big comic book guy, just recently got into reading them and my focus has not at all been on Marvel stuff. I jumped into this game without being very familiar with Deadpool as a character; I just knew he has a tendency to break reality and the fourth wall a lot. I found him to be quite entertaining in this game and pretty fun to actually play, but recall hearing some people complain that he acts out of character. That may be a valid complaint, it may not be. I can't give an opinion either for or against the stance considering just how little I know about the character. Can't help but wonder if the voices in his head that are a big part of him in this game are like that in the comics. My lack of experience with the character is the reason I'm not comparing what happens in this game to any comic books.

So, from what I've heard, people tend to dislike this game. Honestly, I'm not sure why. Sure, it's a pretty barebones mission-based hack-and-slash with light platforming elements (almost reminds me of the Ninja Gaiden reboot games but with much more simple and easy combat), but I never felt it was really trying to be anything more than that so it didn't bother me. I ultimately found the gameplay fun for what it is, it's not deep but it's fun to smack around goons with the three different weapons you get as well as blast them with all the different kinds of firepower you can grab. There's a shop system that uses Deadpool Points, or DP for short, as currency. You get DP either from finding it in the world, grabbing it from dead enemies, or as a reward for pulling off combos. You can buy new guns, explosives, and melee weapons from the shop, as well as various upgrades for those items. You can also upgrade Deadpool's personal attributes, like increasing his health, letting you get critical hits occasionally, making it to where you regenerate health after getting a combo, and more. Sometimes enemies drop powerful artillery that is very satisfying to blow other enemies to smithereens with. The guns themselves felt very fun to use for me, you can keep pressing or holding down the Right trigger to blitz your foes and there's an aim button for more precise shooting. There's a decently wide variety of guns, but the plasma guns and the shotguns are definitely the best (though I did still get plenty of use out of the pistols and SMGs). I feel like they're much stronger than the melee weapons, and I was even using the Hammers which seem to be the most powerful melee. The game also has a few small mechanics to use, like Momentum attacks, which are pretty much super moves to use when you're overwhelmed by enemies or you're fighting an enemy with a lot of health. Momentum is filled up by a bar as you fight enemies, but grabbing the taco boxes that drop from enemies also gives you some Momentum.

If there's one thing about the game I can understand being very polarizing, it's the humor. If you don't like meta humor, you will despise this game's jokes since there's a LOT of meta jokes here. Deadpool loves to both criticize and praise the developers, for instance, and he will constantly remind you of the fact that this is indeed a video game. There's certain parts of missions in the game that reference other games (usually retro games like Castlevania, The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros, and Final Fantasy) or are meant to emulate game glitches. I found the comedy to be hit or miss; I'm not sure why, but a lot of it seems geared towards teenage perverted "memelords" that like dumb edgy humor, boobs, and retro games. Nonetheless, it was charming in it's own stupid way and I didn't hate any of the jokes (well I could do without the perverted fanservice but it didn't ruin things for me). They throw a ton of jokes at you, so the bad ones don't linger for too long. Despite its flaws, I find that the humor and the visual presentation are the main selling points of this game, they're both quite hyperactive and charming. It's primarily silly amusing things, like how Deadpool makes a joke in the beginning of the game about games giving you achievements for nothing only for you to get an achievement right after. There's a scene where you slap Wolverine to try waking him up and you can repeatedly press a button to slap him for several minutes for an achievement. It was cool how, when you meet a new plot important character, Deadpool sometimes takes you on a short montage through comic panels of that character to explain who they are. Of course, cutscenes also have some spice added to them by Deadpool's zany overexaggerated personality and the fact that he avoids exposition like the plague. Usually the game also tosses in little short quick-time-events just to add more to the game's flavor of dumb random comedy, like when Deadpool is so bored by one of Cable's explanations that a prompt shows up for you to "Press R2 to make it stop" (making Deadpool shoot himself). Sometimes you get achievements for doing the quick-time-events in a certain way, like how you get one from always choose the option to be patient while waiting in a line for a circus-like theme park ride (because that happens in this game). Something I found rather amusing about it is that, if you deliberately wait to press the button needed, you don't get punished but you do get commentary from Deadpool. Things like this are cool little features that really add a lot to a game's likeability, which I think makes up for how unremarkable the actual gameplay is. However, I will say that it will be very grating and actually make the game unlikeable if you hate how Deadpool is in this game.

The story...well, it certainly exists. It pretty much just serves as another vehicle for comedy for the most part, Deadpool is in a gritty world but his wacky antics basically bends the world around him to include weird stuff. As I mentioned earlier, Deadpool is aware of the fact that he is in a video game. In fact, the entire story starts because Deadpool gets a call from Peter Della Penna - an employee at High Noon Studios (the developer of this game) in this story - saying that they won't make a game based on him. Apparently Deadpool had a bomb planted there because he pulls out a remote bomb trigger and presses it, then immediately gets called back by Peter to have the game be made. From there, Deadpool goes on a quest to do stuff that I already forgot because it did not feel important at all. I actually like this approach to story honestly; the game doesn't pretend to have more story than it actually does, so instead it just has Deadpool chewing out the scenery and doing ridiculous things. He hates exposition, so whenever someone tries to tell him something about the story he will not be listening or doing some weird goofy thing instead. I have heard that people really don't like how anticlimactic the ending is, but honestly I was not expecting it to be anything all that crazy anyway and I found it to be very fitting. At the end of the game, Deadpool beats the tons of Mr. Sinister clones thrown his way, then the real Mr. Sinister comes out and effortlessly strikes down the X-Men. Deadpool's response is to talk to the player and gleefully reveal the surprise he's been planning all along. You, as the player, get the honor of seeing the secret through a quick-time-event: press triangle (on PS4) to make a Sentinel boot appear and crush Mr. Sinister. Roll credits.

Overall, I give the Deadpool game 3.5 stars. I think it was a fun experience with gameplay that is basic but fun and a sense of humor I found relatively appealing. I can't stress how much the presentation elevates this game above a 3 star for me.