Good:
+It's Animal Crossing. It's hard to explain exactly what makes Animal Crossing fun in words because it sounds boring on paper. But it's fun, okay?
+The new home editor mode makes customising your house so much easier and more fluid.
+The ability to fully customise your island really helps bring out your creative side.
+There's some really neat visuals, like the wardrobe screen when changing clothes.
+The museum looks beautiful now
+Villagers seem more alive and have more random actions they do around the island

Cons:
-There are some massive quality of life improvements that this game lacks.
-For some reason you have to donate bugs/fish/fossils 1 by 1 during start of game until the museum opens up.
-Can’t craft multiple items at once.
-Breakable tools. Seriously this isn't just the lack of a quality of life thing, it's something they specifically made worse in this entry compared to older ones.
-I've never been a fan of AC's turnip system. Feels like a broken mechanic that just allows you to get insane profit with no effort due to the fact you can buy and sell from ANY island. Due to timezones (or even just time skipping) if you find a player who has a high turnip selling price, while your island has them to purchase, you can literally just make back and forth trips for infinite money.
-For some reason the little indication of what items are customisable is only present at certain times, like in the crafting menu. It isn't present in the inventory or your house storage, so I had to make multiple trips and pocket changes switching items in and out just to find out what I could customise. The fact that a little icon DOES exist in some places just makes it more noticeable that it's missing from other places.
-Trying to set up to travel anywhere, be it a friends island or nook miles island, takes way too long. Supposedly it's just a fancy loading screen, but in that case my complaint is the loading times in this game are atrocious.
-The shop closes at 10pm and they have a little box outside that let's you sell for 80% of their original price...and you only get the money the next day. Why would I ever sell things for less price if I could just keep them in my storage and sell them for full price the next day? If you got the money straight away the 80% would make sense, but there's no logical reason to use it as it is now.
-Can’t build and demolish bridges/inclines at the same time. For example I wanted to destroy the wooden bridge you essentially make as a tutorial and replace it with a better one, but it turns out demolishing an item not only takes a day, but you can't even build a new thing at the same time, so it took 3 days for me to finally get a single bridge (1 day for the bridge to be removed, 1 day to set up the new bridge location and 1 day for it to actually be built)
-The house editing mode is unavailable outside, meaning you still have to place items the old fashion way which can be very imprecise and finicky.

Notes:
•Despite that huge list of cons I still rated it fairly highly... Like I said, Animal Crossing is a hard game to really sell to someone.

Pros:
+Crossover between Nintendo's beloved icons. And Jigglypuff.
+Classic mode is more than just a generic "fight other playable characters" that a lot of fighting games have. You have mob fights, team up fights and even a couple of unique mini-bosses like Giant DK and Metal Mario (The mushroom and metal box weren't items in this game, meaning those fights were completely one-off)
+Sound effects sound kind of cartoonish compared to later entries, but I love them. It sounds powerful.
+Everyone talks about Break the Targets, but Board the Platforms is also such a great minigame that adds a fun platforming element.
+Having said that, Break the Targets is still great and deserves a mention.

Cons:
-As with a lot of old games, the controls have aged horribly. Movement can feel very clunky.
-Arcade mode path is always the exact same. Even after unlocking the new characters they don't start appearing (although Luigi appears even before you unlock him). It'd be nice if they changed up the order of the regular 1v1 matches, so Link wasn't always first and Samus wasn't always last, and add Ness, Captain Falcon and Jigglypuff as random replacements. And maybe swapped out Mario and Luigi's team match for something like Pikachu and Jigglypuff sometimes. Just shake it up a little.
-Lacking in content. 4 characters to unlock, 1 stage and a couple of extra bonuses (sound test and item switch for multiplayer). Considering how arcade mode is the exact same everytime, the game can get a bit dull very fast.

Mixed/Not important enough to be a pro/con
~Some targets can only be broken through walls. This is such a weird thing to me because it feels like hitting through walls like that is more of a small glitch than anything, but apparently it's a gameplay feature? I mean literally there can be a solid wall in front of a target and you're just expected to assume that if you do a smash attack you should be able to clip through the wall, and that's the INTENDED method?
~I'm honestly a big fan of how the Pokéball Pokémon aren't legendaries. I find it much more interesting to see how they'd use regular mons, compared to newer games that just make 80% of them legendary Pokémon. I'd much rather see Hitmonlee than Ho-Oh honestly.

Notes:
•The main reason to play this game is really just the novelty of replaying how Smash started.

Pros:
+The Beerus fight was a lot of fun. Obviously that's the main draw too.
+You can easily grind training items to get to max level for the main event.

Cons:
-There's an extremely weird level curve to this. The main fight, the Beerus fight, requires you to be max level, and yet the very first "fight" requires you to be level 5. I guess they intended to let anyone play the DLC even if they just started the game, but it's so short by itself that no new player will EVER have a chance at the later stuff and no late game player will need to do the early stuff. They even let you unlock the Super Saiyan forms early for some reason, so even if you did play this as a new player it feels like it'd take away a huge experience from the main game.
-They didn't really do any story here. They didn't take the Battle of Gods story from either the anime or movie, instead just teleporting you to Beerus' planet and you just go through a couple of fights with Whis and Beerus.
-The actual SSj God ritual cutscene is shown in still images. Kakarot CAN have some amazing full cutscenes (See Vegetto vs Super Boo), and that would have been the perfect place to put one of those. Even outside of that disappointment all the other cutscenes are just the standard lifeless models with text boxes ones.
-In one cutscene my character models just...disappeared. It was pretty weird. In any other review I wouldn't call this a full on con, but since this DLC is so short, that glitched cutscene makes up quite a bit of content.

Mixed/not important enough to be pro or con:
~The two sidequests they have aren't too thrilling, but Vegeta's did have some laughs.

Notes:
•It's really hard to consider the worth of the price of this. On one hand this by itself feels like it should be a free update, but it's only part 1 of a season pass worth of content (there's 2 more stories like it I think). All 3 of them together could be good, but since you absolutely have to pay for the pass at once, having this be the first and only thing you get right now feels a bit underwhelming.

Pros:
+The music is catchy
+Controls are tight. I never once felt like I wasn't in control even in the tight platforming sections in the last world.
+Rewards the player for getting a high score since score is based on how your health increases. Considering score is an arbitrary thing in most games it's nice to have a reason for it.
+Likewise with health, you can get stronger arrows by exploring every doorway, and you can get the extra items by completing challenges, also in doorways. There's a huge sense of power creep for the players who put in the time and effort and it feels great, while it's still possible to ignore everything for a hard mode run.

Cons:
-There are 3 types of enemies that really stop this game from being a very solid platformer. The first is the flying enemies that can move through walls. Their massive amount of mobility combined with your relative lack of it often feels far too unfair. The second is enemies that pop out of the sky or ground directly onto you without warning. The third is the eggplant enemy. Those three enemies alone (which to be fair take up a large amount of the enemy types) turn what should be fun skill-based action platformer into rage inducing damage sponging.
-Like with a lot of old games NOTHING is actually explained in-game. I assume you're supposed to use the manual to learn what all the items do and such, but as I was playing on the Switch's Nes emulator I had no such thing, so I had to have google handy at all times.
-All 3 dungeons felt the exact same.

Mixed/Not important enough to be a pro or con:
~The game honestly gets easier as it goes on. The actual difficulty never really increases imo, but the extra health, strength and weapons you get mean that the first levels where you're working with nothing are by far the hardest.

Notes/Comments:
•Kid Icarus deserved to be a long running series like Mario and Zelda. Too bad the series went into sleep until Uprising and has been dead since.

Pros:
+The music is pretty good

Cons:
-Absolutely zero direction, with no map and everywhere looks exactly the same. There isn't even any indication of where you've already been, which would have been simple by just leaving the doors you've already opened, well, open.
-There appeared to be a lot of random dead ends, although I never finished so maybe they do have a purpose...
-Game has terrible frame rate issues.
-Annoying enemy placements and infinitely re-spawning enemies, and relative stiff movement means you're often just forced to take damage. Although I don't think the game ever had any straight up unfair enemies like in Kid Icarus (although I didn't get that far here).

Notes:
•Gave up after about 2 hours of what felt like little progress. If the game was more linear or the bare minimum had a map you could see that would let you know where you've been, it'd be a decent NES game. I may try again one day with a walkthrough, but for now it's going in the abandoned pile.

It's just classic 2D Sonic on GBA. There's a couple new moves in Sonic's arsenal, but nothing as game changing as homing attack or the dash boosts. Tails and Knuckles also appear with their Sonic 3 kits. And most interestingly, Amy also appears. Not only is Amy included, but she has by far the most unique playstyle, not having any spin dash or indeed any type of "ball" moves, relying solely on her hammer. This basically makes her the hard mode of the game, and while I don't really think her play style fits well with Sonic (not being able to turn into a ball during a fast section massively impacts the game since you have no safe way to get through enemies), I do commend them for putting effort into making her truly special instead of just a clone.

My one complaint about this game is the damn special stages. In concept they're not bad, but there's no depth perception, and no way to really tell the exact location of the rings and your character, so lining yourself up is next to impossible. Possibly the worst special stage I've played in a Sonic game.

Super short too. But it's just fun Sonic gameplay.

Post review edit: After playing through the game with each character and getting all the Chaos Emeralds, the special stages did seem to get easier. I found focusing on just the board helped to line up right.

Doom Eternal takes the 2016 game and cranks it up to eleven. Everything good about the first game is in here, like the fast-paced gameplay, rewarding upgrades, the variety of weapons that all have their use and all feel viable even in the endgame.

Many of the things it adds do come with a downside though. While it can definitely make the original feel lacking in features, this one feels more like they didn’t put much thought into what should or shouldn’t be added and just threw in anything they could think of and just didn’t do any trimming to make them actually work properly.

I do like all the new combat options which complement the even more chaotic battles. The ice grenade and flame belch add a whole new layer to how you play the game and manage resources. The chainsaw is now much more utilised as an ammo refresh.

One of the things I mentioned above about adding things without properly sculpting it to fit the gameplay is the extra lives system. It makes sense to have them I guess to fit the more difficult game. The problem is that they don’t refresh either on death or reloading checkpoints. In other words, let’s say you get to a really tough encounter with 3 lives, but lose all your lives and die near the end, at that point you’ll respawn at the start of the battle with zero extra lives, meaning that the game was basically handing you extra lives to say “We acknowledge you may need this extra help to survive the 10 minute warzones all over the level, but if you die during one of them we expect you to somehow succeed the second time with even LESS lives”. Just seems like a crazy system.

They also added some extra strategic elements to many demons. Unfortunately this is another 50/50 feature because while it’s nice that some enemies have weak points that you can destroy, the gameplay just does not give you the breathing room required to properly aim at specific portions of an enemies weak spots. You’ll be overwhelmed in seconds if you try to aim at a manucbus’s arms to slightly lower his damage output rather than just unloading into his fat stomach which you can do much easier while avoiding the other 70 demons in the room. Some of them though, like shooting a grenade into the cacodemon to instantly stagger them, work well.

Then there’s the additional enemies. Many are great, many are annoying. The marauder completely changes the playstyle of the game and is near impossible to properly fight with the other demons in the room. The arch-vile is just a pain in the ass, being a bullet sponge, teleporter, area of denial-fire user, summoner and buff totem all in one.
It feels like for everything the game adds, it doesn’t take 2 steps back so to speak, but each step they take isn’t as finely tuned as it should be.

As for the story… I don’t like the way Doom handles story. 95% of it is told in collectable codex’s. Unfortunately these contain so much lore-specific terminology that it’s near impossible to read any of them without constant cross-referencing with the other (missable) codex’s. I kind of just gave up after a while because not only is it a huge pace-breaker to try to read these in the middle of a mission, but trying to piece anything together when half the words they use require the knowledge of something else you need to find became a chore. If you’re going to have this much backstory why not actually use it to tell the story, and if you’re not going to use it why bother making it up? It’s the worst case of telling and not showing I’ve ever seen.

Even the stages didn’t feel any different from before, despite the massively improved potential of being on Earth for some portions of this game. Hell, Mars and Earth all feel too similar to each other. It actually seemed like it’d go in the opposite direction at first, I seem to recall feeling like the first 3 levels had their own unique style, but then it devolved into fire and brimstone everywhere with random destroyed buildings or ruins.

I will say this though, the platforming never once bothered me. I actually found it kind of fun. There’s some other things that were a pure net positive for me too, like removing challenges for runes. I never liked how the original would force you to use specific runes to master them. Now you can just set what you want and go. I’m also a fan of the fact you can unlock cheat codes that let you both go on a power trip and make re-runs through stages to do missions and get collectibles much faster.

So throughout the entire campaign I was fighting with myself whether I preferred this version to the 2016 game. Half the time I’d feel the benefits of the new things, and half the time I’d feel the frustration.

Then I tried the multiplayer. Instead of any kind of fun, balanced standard FPS deathmatch multiplayer we have a single asymmetric gimmick mode.

Battlemode is basically the equivalent of coin smash in Smash Bros. It’s something that should be an extra, something that you see on a menu and go “huh, I wonder what this is?” then maybe play it a few times for the novelty then forget about it and go back to stock smash. Except now there is no stock smash. Or time smash. Or anything, there’s only coin battle.

How they went from a perfectly functional multiplayer mode in 2016 to this travesty is baffling. If you only care about single player, Doom Eternal is an improvement on the original even with some questionable additions, but if you count multiplayer then Eternal falls flat.

Similar to the first one, but with a bit more polish. There's a wider variety of stage aesthetics too. While you have your mainstays like grass starting level, and snow level, you also get some more unique choices. I think Music Plant is one of my favourite 2D Sonic stages now. Techno Base is also a really interesting zone, but I can't decide how I feel about it because it's so overly bright and flashy that I love it, but it also hurts to look at so I hate it.

There is a MASSIVE increase in boss difficulty here. It's obvious from the first boss, but the second boss honestly presented a legit challenge and I'm ashamed to say how much I died to it. They're also some of the most inventive bosses I've seen in a 2D Sonic game. For the challenge, it's never really to a point of being frustrating (except the Knuckles boss, fuck him), but this game loses a quality of life feature from the first, where you could restart any zone from either act. Now zones must be restarted from the first act, so it's much harder to try and actually get used to the patterns of the tougher bosses, leading to more frustrating defeats as you have to go through 2 stages again.

Difficulty in stages themselves was great up until the last zone. Egg Utopia is just full of unfair bottomless pits, blocks that can crush you etc.

My biggest complaint is the Chaos Emerald system in this one. First of all they don't share between characters like last time, so to get the true final ending you need to get them all as Sonic. But actually getting to a special zone now requires you to find 7 collectables in a stage rather than just one secret spring. And they don't save between playthroughs so you need to get them all in a single go. Way too much hassle, I honestly never even saw a special stage because I couldn't be bothered going through that. They could have easily made it more tolerable in many ways, like maybe having the requirement being 7 rings across both acts, this would still allow players who get all rings to have an advantage since they'd get 2 chances per special zone instead of 1. Maybe have the rings save between playthroughs. Have Chaos Emeralds shared. So many ways it could have been better.

I actually kinda like Cream as an addition though. I only tested her out in the first stage, but she doesn't have the handicap of not having spin attacks like Amy in the last game, and using a Chao as an attack is pretty fun.

For the majority of this game I loved it, my only complaint was the chaos emerald system. But as I neared the end, some extremely frustrating boss and stage designs put me off, especially when coupled with the changes to quality of life regarding level selecting. I'd still say it's an overall better game than the first, but by the time I ended, I'd say only just, whereas if I was asked after the first half an hour of playing I'd have claimed this one was far superior.

Oddworld works so much better in 2D, but there’s definitely a good game in here, it just needs to be polished up a lot. This entry goes for a more classic level-based progression. Each stage is sort of like a world in Mario 64, but instead of having multiple objectives you have a big puzzle to solve to get to the end of the stage, and a side mission to rescue as many mudokons/fuzzles/eggs as you can. Honestly it works pretty well. There aren’t many different themes – I think all levels fall into 3 types of aesthetic, so they become memorable purely by the layout and tasks you have to do, and in that sense some levels definitely stood.

As for the inclusion of Munch…well he plays really well in the water, but otherwise there’s nothing he can really do that you couldn’t have just let Abe do. It does add an extra layer of puzzle solving by having 2 characters at once, but it comes with the drawback of having way too many times when you need to keep catching one character up to the other, and it just feels slow.

Speaking of padding the time out, the new carrying mechanic for Abe leads to waaaaay too many sluggish paced sections where you have to pick up, throw or carry multiple Mudokons to get past an area or over a barrier. And then there’s the eggs you need to save one-by-one in the final levels. It just slows things down to a halt and is really annoying.

One of the biggest difficulties I had with the game was how many tasks are assigned to a single button. The B button (Switch) is used to jump, pick up objects and interact with things. And don’t get me started on the amount of times I pressed Y to run, but ended up burping/farting instead

Another way it’s rough around the edges is the sound design. For some reason some sound effects are insanely loud and drown out the dialogue of the spirit guy who gives you hints throughout a level. Even just the sound of a Mudokon scratching (which plays CONSTANTLY thanks to Abe doing it himself) feels way too loud.

While the overall feel of the game is different from the first, the cutscenes feel right at home, with the same charm and quirky dialogue. Unfortunately there’s far less of them now, replaced instead by newspaper shots between levels.

It's a decent entry to the franchise, but it really shows its age more than the originals ever will.

A great sendoff to the Sonic Advance series.

Gathering the Chaos Emeralds is a much more manageable task than it was in SA2. Although admittedly it’s still a big grind, they’ve added so many quality of life improvements that I noted were missing from the last game, such as the fact the chaos you collect between stages don’t reset. I do think that they should have either gone with just keys or chaos though, making you collect both is a bit more tedious than it had to be.

Special stages themselves are much better than the first game (I never played any in the second). Managing to actually hit the rings doesn't feel like a horrible trick on your depth perception. Unfortunately the enemy hit detection is still a bit wonky in these stages. Most of them I got through on the first try, the 6th one took me 2 tries and holy hell that last one was a bitch cos of all the enemies.

I like that the game no longer requires you to go through it several times with every character to be able to play the true ending. In fact all characters share a single save slot now and you can pick and choose who you want per stage. They compensate this by making 3 acts per zone and making the acts themselves longer.

Level themes are on par with the 2nd one, with a nice mix of classic zone types and unique ones, like Toy Kingdom. This is the 3rd game in a row to use an ice themed zone, and I think I love the aesthetic of this one the most. Bonus points for not using Green Hill Zone clone as act 1 again, although I feel like city-themed stages are almost as much of a cliché in Sonic games now.

Lots of fun types of enemy designs too, especially in the toy kingdom.

I was pretty happy with the team system. It never felt like it overtook the game, it was just a nice bonus to have. Plus the fact each pair gives a unique playstyle is a really great way to make the characters stand out and make you try different combinations.

A small problem I had with the game is that the level designs feel worse than before. There’s way too many insta-death crush blocks now. Plus I feel like they reused a lot more assets between worlds, like the “clacker” things. It’s not so bad that it breaks the game for me, but if this had the level design of 1 and 2 I think it’d be a 9/10 for me. Either way it’s still a fantastic 2D Sonic experience that manages to stand out due to the partner system.

A weird mix of a quiz show with general knowledge, Mario Party-esque minigames all with a South Park coat of paint.

The biggest downfall of the game is that when playing single player the other characters don't fill in as CPUs, meaning you're basically answering questions and playing minigames to try and win against yourself.

If you can somehow get some friends together I could see this providing a tiny bit of fun. Especially when it came out.

One thing that becomes abundently clear early on is that this kart racer is not a Mario Kart clone. I only managed to get to stage 7, but in that time I only had a single race. In fact every single stage is a different type of game, and honestly I respect it for that. They make these wide open stages to accommodate the playstyle too.

And then there's the items which they didn't just paint over the standard MK items like a lot of Kart Racers, these items feel truly unique. I didn't even learn what every one of them did.

And the roster is massive and each has fun voicelines that add personality to them. The fanservice in this game is insane.

So why the low rating? It's the damn physics. Nothing feels good in this game. Whenever you get hit your kart reacts as if it's made of cardboard. The irony is if this was a straight kart racer it'd probably get a bare pass as a PS1 game because the controls themselves are fair for the era, but the type of gameplay here involves way too many precise movements.

And unlike the standard cup format of Mario Kart, or any racing game, this game has you try to win all 14 stages in a row, with only 5 continues. Honestly I could probably even let the game slide if it just separated into cups of 3-4 stages, but the difficulty of the physics, combined with the fact you need to learn a new gameplay objective every single stage makes getting 14 wins in a row pretty damn hard. Like I said I only got up to stage 7 so I can't say what the last half of the game is like. And it's such a shame because they really tried so hard to make this game stand out from the competition and went full force with the South Park brand.

The whole transforming into animals thing has always made Bloody Roar stand out among the many fighting games to me. It just feels so cool and even allows personality to show through via the animal choices.

The age of the game means it doesn’t particularly hold up very well anymore, but it’s definitely at least playable unlike some PS1 fighting games I’ve played.

There’s a few combos in the game, most of them are nothing special but there’s some fun ones. Unfortunately there’s no way to see them in-game, so you’ll have to either blindly practice or look them up. It also felt like very few times was a combos able to lead into a special move.

There's a whole ton of unlockables, from game-changing rulesets to fun aesthetics like giant head mode.
Unlocking everything is easy to cheese because not only do you not have to play above level 4 (except for one run with Alice), but if you have no walls mode unlocked you can pretty much just transform at the beginning of the match next to the opponent and almost every time they won't block it and it'll send them flying out of the ring instantly. Unfortunately this doesn't work with the unlockables tied to time attack and survival mode as they have pre-set rules. Luckily these are mostly easy to beat regardless, but match 14 and 15 in time attack were easily the most I struggled with in the game (match 16 was surprisingly easy).