I haven't gotten too far in the story mode so it could suck ass but versus mode is incredibly fun. Frolf is casual and unpredictable but in a way that never feels like you were screwed over by the game's RNG. It rarely ruins your plans with something you couldn't technically have seen coming. Even when your masterful swing is disrupted by a stray fly you neglected to factor into your calculations, it often just leads to some ridiculous combo that leaves you with enough points to make up for the lost distance. Nobody can really stay mad at Ribbit King for too long.

It's insane how similar this is to God of War. The combat, the upgrades, the bosses with QTEs at the end... Being able to fly around freely whenever is pretty unique, I'll give it that. It doesn't even break the levels in half like you'd expect it to. The final boss is fucking terrible though – the amount of blinding effects on the screen is comical. Half the time you genuinely can't see shit. Even some of the QTE prompts get covered by purple lightning vomit somehow??

The story is some melodramatic garbage but honestly, would you really even expect it to be good? No idea how fun this is in single player but co-op is a decent enough time.

An insane amount of insane new mechanics thrown at you constantly for how unengaging all of them are – the first half an hour must average somewhere around one tutorial screen per minute. It's like the someone wanted to make a game based on rescuing people from disasters, had lots of ideas about little mechanics based on disaster rescues but no idea how to make any of it fun. Most perilous situations you get into have one (1) correct response on the player's end, so you press the correct button and you move on. Every time.

Your lungs meter fills up with smoke when you go through it, unless you sprint, in which case it will basically never fill up. If it does fill up, you have to press the "take deep breath of fresh air" button and if you time the Gears of War perfect reload meter perfectly, you get a Perfect Breath that empties your whole lung meter in one go and the character does a little celebratory animation. This also gives you Survival Points (SP). You can use these to level up one of your five Survival Skills. One of these is Metabolism. There is an entire separate gameplay mode that kicks in during combat sections, which plays like a terrible rail shooter and we turned the game off about 10 minutes into it.

Interesting for an hour or two as a novelty, I suppose? The story seems like it'll get fucking bizarre later on based on the opening cutscene that spoils what seems like half of it. I really don't want to risk suffering through the dull shooting bits just to see it, though.

It's very hard to grasp the balance of different hands and strategies and builds since you get so little feedback but I do think it is a little off – flushes feel by far the most consistent for beating a run though they do fall off in endless. I suppose being luck based is to be expected of a poker roguelike but I doubt I'll venture into the higher difficult stakes too much with how much the game fucks you over sometimes. The more I play it the less I like it, I think. I still like it though! Just playing it casually making decisions based entirely on vibes is a great time.

Many movies are described as being "so bad they're good", but that's much more rare for a video game. As an enjoyer of both I think that has to do with games being fairly long and interactive. The Video Gamer can't just sit back and enjoy the ride – they must engage with the mechanics. It can be difficult to extract any fun out of whatever is "so bad it's good" about a game if the moment to moment interaction with its systems is unenjoyable. Fahrenheit, though, is the moment David Cage realized he doesn't actually want to make video games – he wants to make movies.

The tutorial takes place at a movie set with an appearance from Mr. Cage himself, saying he's the director of the game and guiding you through the basic controls. There's an in-game news headline saying director David Cage has won an Oscar for the latest entry in his movie trilogy. The top option in the main menu isn't even "New Game", it's "New Movie".

Fahrenheit still meets the minimum of interactivity to qualify as a game. Even if most of that is just basic adventure game use-item-on-thing-puzzles and dialogue choices. The actually challenging gameplay sections usually make the player literally play Simon (like, the thing where you just repeat a sequence of colored buttons) to represent whatever action is going on. The other mode of active gameplay is stealth sections where getting spotted leads to an instant fail. I wish those were also just Simon.

The real joy is seeing Mr. Aspiring Hollywood Director David "David Cage" De Gruttola absolutely COOKING with the story for the last time in his career. It's a goofy 8 hour B-movie that keeps jumping increasingly larger and more toothy sharks until it's unrecognizable from the relatively subdued opening moments. Every single time you think it's peaked it surprises you 30 minutes later with some fresh new bullshit. Kino.

A huge game that maintains a pretty consistent average quality of "pretty good" up until act 3 where everything breaks. Wyll and his dad become glitchy lobotomites and even if they worked as intended I'd take some issue with the way his quest is written. And for how "pretty good" pretty much every combat encounter in the game is, the haunted house is a bafflingly bad bit of design. The quest it's connected to is also one of the worst in the game.

Now that I think about it, BG3 starts off showing one of Larian's best qualities but that too falls off near the end. The Original Sin games had basically no "filler" combat encounters. Every fight felt significant, varied and had an at least mildly interesting in-world reason to be there. No random wilderness goblin fights or anything like that. In BG3's third act that too changes, and many of the fights felt fairly easy or even like a bit of a chore.

Still, it's undeniable that the first act is fantastic. It's the best bit of low level virtual DND since Baldur's Gate 1 and probably surpasses it. Act 2 is a bit annoying in execution, but I love how it feels dangerous and very different from the other two with its unique mechanic. There's also lot of imagination put into many of the third act's quests and areas that feel like someone's DND campaign notes in shiny AAA video game form (when they work right). The writing is generally "pretty good", but the way it's presented is fantastic for an RPG of this size – the great voice acting and full motion capture for EVERY SINGLE BIT of what must be hundreds of hours of NPC dialogue is an insane feat. The combat, too, is as "pretty good" as a combat system based on 5e is ever going to be. Basically, despite the bugs 3 Baldur's 3 Gate is a "pretty good" game and it'll probably be a great one once the bugfixes roll out.

A few creeping issues of balance and scope creep still can't stop this from being, in a few categories, the best game ever made.

The best sound in any game ever on a combined technical and artistic level, both incredibly atmospheric AND incredibly functional for the mechanics. From your very first match the gurgles of the monsters, the cries of startled birds, quiet footsteps on the other side of the rickety wooden wall and distant gunshots echoing throughout the whole map sound incredible. After your hundredth match they aren't just there to set the scene anymore – they inform an experienced player about aggro states and the locations of other players more precisely than I've ever heard in a multiplayer game. Crytek sound designers might be actual wizards in the guise of game developers.

The best setting in any multiplayer game. Hunt: Showdown fleshes out the bones of a generic battle royale map, fills in the scattered compounds and the spaces between them with such detail and authenticity that it never feels like you're just running around a map in a multiplayer video game. Yet especially looking at the latest map released as of writing, there's also clearly a lot of effort put into maintaining well balanced sightlines and building layouts so shotguns and snipers feel like they're on equal footing, at least on average. The cursed bayou is so incredibly well realized that many disappointed PvP-dislikers in various internet threads wish for a single player game set in this world or even just a PvE mode.

The bestiary of Hunt's monsters really isn't designed to function as a main adversary to a thinking human player, though. Instead they function as roadblocks, sound traps and complications in the sandbox surrounding the core PvP game of bounty hunting. Each AI monster has a predictable set of behaviours you can learn to observe through their animations and sounds. Every grunt and moan of every creature is so identifiable and so easy to place in 3D space that with enough experience you can form a mental picture of the location and behavioural state of every single AI enemy in a compound with your eyes closed.

Despite what some of the (despicable) bush-crawling players would tell you, shootouts shoot slow but move fast. A single shot from any weapon will kill in a single hit given a short enough distance from barrel to cranium, so crouchwalking or standing still in front of an enemy aware of your presence is a death sentence. The lengthy reload of a revolver is plenty of time for a rival hunter feeling particularly lucky to close the distance with knife in hand.

The balance issues that worry me most really aren't worth discussing in a review, they're more just worrying to a long time fan as small signs of where Crytek's game design principles are heading in the future. As of right now Hunt: Showdown is a genuinely unique and bold AAA(ish) multiplayer video game. Those are in rare supply.