This review contains spoilers

So much better than the previous DLC's.

For one thing, since this acts as a standalone story, the level scaling problems of the previous expansions aren't present. It's not a case of blowing through the early game just to fight the super strong extra boss at the end. Now it's a full on story that you level up with naturally. And the amount of content here blows the other 2 expansions out of the water five times over. This is basically an entire extra saga, complete with the little extra padding and giving focus to little things that the original story may have skimmed past.

One of my favourite parts was when it used the ui to creative effect during Future Gohan's last stand, and his final attack completely breaks the ki bar, and then the following battle has you basically unable to do anything. Neat little touches.

I especially like that they didn't just stop at the Androids, and added a little post-game for the Babidi stuff that was told in Super.

I love the combat in this game, it has a lot going for it that avoids it falling into the cycle a lot of turn based RPG's go, where you only pick the strongest/super effective move every time. Not that some battles can't turn in to that, but generally I had to think a little more about the best option for each turn.

I did find that the starting magatsuhi skill is basically the best one. Guaranteeing crits every single turn means you're getting a guaranteed 8 action turn with boosted damage. I almost never used any of the other skills I unlocked from completing side quests and whatnot.

Unfortunately the game failed to sell me on anything except the combat. All the environments are insanely barren and boring. And I know that there's an in-game reason for that, but like...if you're designing a 50 hour RPG, maybe don't make an in-universe reason for all the environments to be boring as fuck?

The story feels like it had a bunch of other JRPG stories fed to a computer and this was the result from machine learning. It's just so boring. It's also paced horribly, trying to shove long story info between jarring halts in the otherwise unbroken gameplay sections.

I know comparing this with a certain other monster RPG whose name starts with P is always too easy and an obvious go-to, but this really does feel like Pokémon without the heart.

I was expecting this to be meme level bad, but in reality it's just a generic kart racer that plays well enough. It has some pretty good tracks; one of my biggest pet peeves in kart racers is when the tracks are just generic race tracks with themed elements, but this game really makes you feel like you're driving on dangerous cliffsides, or through a construction site. It does weirdly have 1/4th of its tracks be a desert theme, which...is that a Garfield thing?

The items can be pretty creative too. The UFO as this games version of the blue shell is a standout.

There's some light customisation, and my favourite thing is that the hats aren't just stat-based, but give little additional effects (usually improving the effectiveness of a weapon).

But it lacks content. 16 race tracks and that's the game. And while the game plays well enough, it doesn't really do anything except be kart racer #100.

I would have given this game 2 stars, but it suffers from some serious crash issues, which if you get will cause you to re-do an entire grand prix, or get that top result in time trials. Kinda ruins what should be a quick, simple one-time kart racer.

If you're a huge kart racer fan (or maybe even a huge Garfield fan lol) I'd say it's worth a go round, but the crashing might make you drop the game before you can even do all 16 tracks.

Person who has only ever played Pokémon Platinum playing his 2nd game ever: "Not getting many Platinum vibes from this"

This review contains spoilers

I love the tone and atmosphere of this game. It's so unlike anything else I've ever played; having to focus on like 5 different "health" systems at once which means you really need to be smart with item usage. But despite it's unique gameplay, it can't escape the pitfalls of its time, mostly things like clunky movement, bad level design (there's way too many long corridors with nothing happening, or maze-like areas that make no sense when you have a map), slow pause speeds which you'll be doing a lot to look at the map, or use an item.

Some of the flaws actually do help it though, the lack of lip movements, the bad voice acting, really help capture the cheesy B movie feel. I'd argue even the clunky controls could help it, as if it was more polished it might become too easy (but fuck the car platforming section).

Though if we're being honest once you get to grips with the game it becomes very easy very fast. The first boss is honestly the hardest part of the game for me. Once you can start upgrading your character and buying as many healing items as you need, levels can't throw anything at you that you can't just heal off. This is kind of a big flaw as part of the appeal of the early stages is the need to take it slow and figure out what is a trap or not as your resources are so limited. It loses any sense of its survival horror once you can just run into every trap head first because you have so much health and so many items to recover heart rate.

Luckily the game does something different with every level to help alleviate any feeling of repetitiveness that might come with the decreasing difficulty. Level 3 has you turn into a wood puppet, while level 6 is a Toy Story parody with Sonic as the boss. It's all just so crazy that you'll want to experience it even after you've reached a point where the game can no longer challenge you.

This was THE game that drew me to the Xbox 360 back in the day. Not Halo, not Gears of War, this. Just the idea of a sandbox game that let you pick up basically anything to use against hordes of zombies was so enticing to me.

The mall itself has cemented itself as an iconic video game location. There's so many secrets to find, whether they be from boss fights that unlock weapons you can keep using for the rest of the playthrough, or shortcuts you can unlock via saving certain people (or completing the main quest to a certain point) to secrets that are 100% unmarked.

There's definitely a balancing problem though, like the fact the single best weapon in the game is dropped by one of the very first bosses. And you can get books to extend its durability so high you'll basically be set for the rest of the game if you pick up 2 of them.

Survivors and Psychopaths are full of personality. The former of which might play into how to recruit them, like needing to give them food, or having to hit them a few times before they'll join etc.

The worst part of the game bar non is the terrible survivor Ai. Trying to save them is a fucking chore. They're extremely slow, incredibly stupid and get caught by zombies so much you wonder how they survived this long in the first place. The worst part is I don't even think this was entirely due to bad programming, since there's a book you can unlock from a boss that will slightly improve their ai (it's still kinda bad, but passable). You can't even unlock the book until half way through each playthrough. They should have just made that the default and then made the book make them like super survivors or something I dunno. Or have the book stay dropped once you pick it up once for NG+ playthroughs.

Another super annoying thing is whenever you get some info on a new scoop or case, you can't do ANYTHING in the time it takes you to listen to the info, so you can't defend yourself even if you're surrounded by zombies or in a boss fight. And worse, if you get hit once while the call is happening, it'll stop and you'll have to listen to it all again while also being chewed out on ending the call early. Between that and the survivor ai, it really ruins the whole "saving survivors" part of the game. Luckily the story parts, boss fights and sandbox make up for it, since saving survivors is optional (but a great way to level up).

Overall this was basically like the best zombie toy box game. Surpassed only by its sequel.

A slight improvement over MP2. The fact there's a story mode now is nice, even though it's basically just regular board and duel games with some extra presentation, but I like the effort they put into making playing single player feel worth it.

The minigame selection is strong, though the 1v3's kinda suck, and the fact there's 2 pure luck battle minigames is annoying.

Boards are probably my least favourite of the N64 era, but still overall some good ones.

A glow up compared to the first game. Much better rules, infinitely better selection of minigames (including bringing back the best from the first game with improvements).

The boards are good too, though I thought the boards were the best part of the first game, so I won't say these ones are "better". I did love that each character got their own outfit for the boards.

Not without its minor flaws. Only 1 item at a time kinda sucks, especially when you can't swap it for another (which means skeleton keys a pain in the ass). It'd also benefit from having added a couple more characters. But w/e.

It's a fun Mario Party experience, but I can't say that it's the best as some people do.

This game plays like a bunch of people who don't know exactly how to play Mario Party so they make up the rules as they go along.

Half the minigames are pure shit. Why are there team based 4 player games? Why are there 1v3 games where the 3 literally can't do anything, like the pipe choosing one?

Mario Party did not start out with its formula properly refined.

At least the boards are good.

"The return of good Mario Party's" as many say and praise it for. It's kinda weird though that when literally all they had to do was recreate the old magic they still put in the bare minimum. I mean...5 boards? That's less than 1 N64 games worth of boards. Also, and this may be an unpopular opinion, but the N64 boards were kinda meh in comparison to Mario Party's 5-7. Like they function fine, but those boards just have so much more depth to them.

10 characters? Come on now. Even 100 minigames, which technically is a fair amount for a MP game, feels lacking as hell when they didn't even need to come up with any new ideas. And the games they picked aren't even that well curated! You have 10 games worth of minigames to pick from and you still pick stinkers like Pirahna's pursuit, or minigames that are basically identical to each other? How do you fuck up that badly when ALL you had to do was make a "best of" compilation. Just ask the fans which boards and games they wanted.

There's also supposedly some changes made to the boards to make them "easier", but truth be told my knowledge of N64 Mario Party's is kinda limited, so I dunno how much they affected them.

Of course THE reason this game basically is worth anything at all is that it's the first time in Mario Party's history that it has had a (competent) online mode. And yeah, the online works amazing in this game. I've played multiple games with randoms with very little problems. The stickers even provide a really fun way to communicate without voice chat.

I do also like the customisable player cards, and the stats you can view, like your minigame win percentage and what everyone's favourite boards are.

So yeah, it's a game that literally is "good" because of one simple element - the fact this is classic Mario Party online. It's just frustrating that they came so close to such a winning formula, and didn't even need to think up new ideas to make it work, and still settled for good enough. It could have been the definitive Mario Party, but as it stands, it's only the best way to play Mario Party online. If you still wanna play with friends irl, then basically any of the first 7 are better.

Addictive despite, or maybe due to, the repetitiveness of the gameplay.

Honestly after the first level I stopped noticing the frame problems. But the camera issues when fighting close to a wall, and accidently jumping off the wall when trying to dodge persisted across the entire game.

Even though large amounts of the game are the same basic thing, or even just "quests" that ask you to provide materials, the constant progress and unlocks kept activating the "feel-good" part of my brain, so I enjoyed myself.

Multiple improvements to the first, like a proper story mode, way more characters, a level up system. Ai are a cheap son of a bitch though.

This review contains spoilers

It's not quite the "explore the maps and work everything out by yourself" game that many were expecting. It's more of a "explore the maps and you'll find things the game will then tell you how to use". I don't mind it too much. At first it seemed way too hand-holdy, but honestly by the end of the game there's just SO MANY notes, audio logs, eternalist conversations etc that I doubt most people would be able to piece this game together by themselves.

It's also hard to tell exactly how much the game tells you where to go. Through exploring I found a ton of things that the game made notes of, which were then later important parts of a quest. Would the game have told me where to find this step 4 part of the quest if I hadn't found it before, or would I have still had to look for it myself? You just find so much stuff out of order that should feel rewarding, but instead it makes you think "did I really find it myself, or did I just find it earlier than the game would tell me where it is?". It's that kind of thing that makes it hard to judge exactly how immersive this game truly is.

Gameplay is extremely fun though. After a slow tutorial, you start being able to customise your loadout. There's not a whole ton of stuff to unlock, but it's always nice finding a new trinket that fits your playstyle, and the slabs are consistently exciting to get. The problem comes from how limited the loadout slots are. There's only 3 weapon slots, so chances are you'll find your preferred weapons early enough that every other weapon will just be left on the ground since you have would have sacrifice one of your main weapons (for the rest of the run) in order to pick up this new weapon and infuse it.

The game does seem to hint at a different loadouts for different missions idea, but I found using a versatile loadout that kinda does a bit of everything but master of nothing worked for 90% of the game, only requiring to be changed for specific trophies or optional missions.

I did really like the maps. After playing through them all so many times they felt like home. The little touches done between times of day to make the maps feel different are nice, but honestly the majority of the time it still feels like the exact same map as any other time of day, just with enemy placements switched and certain quests only being available now. There's a few exceptions, the one that comes to mind off the top of my head is the complex at night which strips away most enemies and instead turns the level into a booby trapped obstacle course.

The one thing I wish maps had more of was environment variety. I get that the plot of the game kind of requires a lot of laboratories and big imposing areas full of science equipment, but the most fun places to explore were always the one-offs, like Charlie's live action role playing game, or, well, most of Fristad Rock. I wanted way more of that.

The visionaries had some effort put into developing them and making them stand out, but most of it falls into "tell don't show" as it comes in the form of notes, email chains etc. I do appreciate the ones that they put the personalities into the actual locations they're at though, like, again, Charlie's role playing game, or Aleksis's mask party. I guess that's a problem that goes hand in hand with the idea that most of the visionaries had to be scientists though, since labs are where you'll find a lot of them.

I also wish more of them stood out from regular enemies, rather than just being slightly stronger versions. Wenjie is the only one who gets any kind of real mechanic implemented into her battle, as she's cloned herself so you have to kill all the clones. For other characters it's just a case of fight/stealth your way to them and then kill them. So the worst visionaries are by far the ones that have no mechanics AND are just in boring lab locations (like Fia or Egor). If you wanna know anything about them other than "they're scientists" you really need to look for it.

Basically I found the game super fun to play, it's fast paced, full of fun details, a ton of content spread across relatively small maps, and I even grew to enjoy Colt and Juliana's banter. It just feels like it missed its full potential.

Also the online mode is garbage. It uses the concept of invading other players games to try and kill them, but like...most people are going to play in single player mode to avoid losing all their progress from having someone invade their game and kill them. I really can't think of a worse thought out mechanic in my life. Nobody WANTS to have other players come and reset them back to the start of the day, devs?? Why would you think people wouldn't just turn that off as soon as possible?

The Backloggd game club is just a secret conspiracy group specifically made to get me to play bad games

This review contains spoilers

Weirdly, both the best and worst thing about this is that it's "just" another Zelda game. That means it has some incredible music, atmosphere, puzzles, set pieces, and a story that is both dark, yet whimsical and fairy tale-like. The bad part is that it doesn't do much to stand out apart from that, other than of course the motion controls, which I'll get to.

Other than the sand ship, no temples truly stand out, but the rest of them are still good just by being virtue of being Zelda temples.

The weakest aspect of the game is the sheer amount of backtracking. There's only 3 main areas in the game (other than Skyloft) and you have to visit them all no less than 3 times for main quests, multiple times for smaller things that are still tied to main quests, and then more times for optional side quests. What makes it worse is how slow you move in the sky portions - I wouldn't call it bad by itself, but with the amount of times you need to go back and forth, the speed can definitely get on your nerves when you need to leave the fire area to make a small 5 minute trip to the grass area and back again. Land travel also becomes a chore with the tiny stamina bar that never gets any permanent upgrades. The game would benefit massively for having flight speed and stamina increases later in the game, so that after you've explored these areas for the first time, you have faster ways to get through them when re-treading them multiple times in the future. Also there's two separate bosses that you need to fight 3 times each.

It is very, very clear this game banked hard on the motion control gimmick being THE thing that makes it worth while, which is kind of ironic considering most people are saying the game became better with stick controls.

I actually played with motion controls on since it's my first time playing the game, and I wanted the true Skyward Sword experience. It wasn't awful honestly. Like there were a few annoyances with desyncing and general clunkiness with it, but it led to some unique mechanics like fighting enemies from, specific angles. It just felt too shoehorned into everything. I really did not need motion controls for moving when swimming.

The game suffers a weird artstyle that affects characters faces. They all look very weird... But Impa gets the worst of it, her entire model is just ew.

The finale of the game is super cool though. I loved charging through the horde of enemies to get to the last boss(es). Admittedly the very very final boss lacked a lot of grandeur once the fight actually starts, and was generally too easy.

This is the video game equivalent of trying to stretch a 1000 word essay to 3000 words.