The game stands up and holds on its own pretty well relative to a lot of modern games despite it being an overall short game. Played on PS2 so the button layout was pretty horrendous but honestly it wasn't hard to adapt to and the aim assist was a nice touch. played on normal and honestly the game was pretty forgiving with the side quests giving stat boosts and money for weapon upgrades which just made it pretty quick to breeze through whatever objective I had to get done. pretty cool to see a PS2 game with native widescreen support and the added touch that your horse doesn't despawn after being away from its render distance like personal cars do in the GTA games. the story itself is pretty standard for a western with its presentation at times feeling funny unintentionally. the only real negative this game has is its stereotyping on indigenous and Chinese people, even if its not the worst offender on it its definitely very questionable why they chose to portray it in a very ignorant manner. the only real conclusion for it probably stems on them doing little research since they also got things wrong regarding the the time period its set in such as the weapons. otherwise this game is a pretty good experience for enjoyers of westerns and third person shooters.

Played this with a friend on normal difficulty so I cannot speak on the game as a solo offline experience nor how aggressive it scales its difficulty. Aesthetically speaking the theme they went for was good and the actual game's visuals and effects are stunning and satisfying to see play out however I believe the biggest drawback to it all is the poor execution of macho dialogue and story progression after the introduction to its premise. The story treats itself something similar to a low budget 90s action movie with nothing ever subverting expectations or feeling like they've been polished and fine tuned for a more memorable and impactful story. As for the gameplay itself I actually really enjoyed all the moves, weapons, abilities available to the player as the game progresses. While looking at reviews for this game before and after owning it I recalled seeing some keywords that stood out; jank and repetitive. I absolutely cannot ever say that this at any point janky (especially as someone who has played some really shitty laughably horrible controlled games) but it seems like a lot of people who refer to this game as janky have been spoiled massively by games such as the modern God Of War games so I cannot blame them for thinking this gameplay is subpar in comparison especially when the variety in combos can feel extremely limited with select enemies. As for Evil West being repetitive I can only understand this take from someone whose marathoning it from beginning to end. I absolutely don't think this game would benefit from introducing new enemy types or unique bosses per level, the combination of common enemies and special enemies from area to area should have felt more of a challenge in figuring out the optimal way to play than filler that mindlessly increases the difficulty (even if I agree that the way the enemies can just gang up and one tap you almost instantly feels criminal compared to the effort needed to take a couple of them out). the biggest offenders to me personally for this game were the bugs( an example I can think of was my friend who said the parry button and actions tied to it stopped working at the last level), lack of quality control for the coop (no reason I have to wait for someone else to finish their animation moving forward in-between areas to move forward to it myself) and overall uninteresting story. If they ever produced a sequel I'd be more interested in seeing them prove that co-op was more than just an afterthought and that the story was more well presented because currently both of those two are the biggest reasons my score is low. also worth mentioning that the final level is SOOO brutal even with a 2nd player at your disposal I absolutely do not want to attempt that myself.

This is a pretty nice fan remake of the original Half Life. Really enjoyed the weapons feeling more competent (except the shotgun), glad I don't have to magdump the SMG on an enemy an pray it was enough to kill them. This game feels a lot more easier to beat than the original because of the weapons rework though I don't mind but I'm sure there's a purist out there who dislikes that. absolutely enjoyed their reimagining of Xen visually and gameplay wise. I think if this was a 1of1 modern remake of HL1 I probably would have rated this lower simply on the premise that the original game had a lot of design choices that weren't really fun to play. Would be interesting to see their interpretations of the Gearbox expansions as well if it was in their interest to.

Started my first run picking the Black Eagles on casual normal difficulty. This game definitely expands on the support aspect of the game pretty hugely. initially starting this the game felt overwhelming with all the little gameplay details I had to keep tabs with but I definitely ended up having a good understanding of it in the end. from a story perspective its a somewhat interesting premise for a Fire Emblem game specifically, its really nice how it ties in to the new support and class upgrading system. given the opportunity I will treat this game like Pokémon with no shame to the hours of level grinding being put. I will say despite the fact that I initially enjoyed how the class advancement worked, getting the characters to the final master class seemed way more like a chore than it needs to be, I'm sure it was designed this way intentionally to prevent people like me from overpowering their units and make the lack of a power gap make the Divine Pulse more useful but man it feels hopeless getting some characters to class progress. as for the Divine Pulse itself its nice they found a more convenient method to save time for the people who adore save scumming, I can be guilty of doing that but not for this game specifically. the Devine Pulse mechanic/feature is definitely good to prevent hours of gameplay from going to waste. this game overall definitely feels great and cohesive, a major step above from the 3DS games (Awakening specifically since that's the one I played the most and finished). I'm glad Koei Tecmo was able to pull it off with the guidance of Intelligent Systems however with Engage being their official 30th anniversary game for the franchise (even if it ended up getting hit with delays and missing the deadline for that), I'm very curious how much of a contrast that is compared to this one. Definitely looking forward to playing the other ending routes and trying to play this game as efficiently possible when my gaming burnout fades away. I don't have any real complaints that I felt ruined the experience but I do wish the performance for this game was a bit better and that they didn't cheap out on the cutscenes.

I really enjoyed this game a bit more than the first game despite a lot of the allure of the first one completely being gone here. the big appeal arguably for the first game was the complete mystery and obscurity for why the player is supposed to do anything which made the simple act of walking a hallway pretty nerve wrecking so it makes sense to me that they stopped trying that to push that perspective in its design completely once they explained why things work. the biggest thing I don't understand is why they changed the voice actors, it gave me big whiplash hearing Sebastian sound so energetically edgy and raspy when his original voice was monotone and quiet but I'm sure the budget cut had something to do with it. with the game revolving around the open world I think a lot of its scripted events took a big hit in quality which depends on how you view it could definitely be a bad thing however the massive improvements to the gameplay itself is something that made me enjoy exploring every minute detail (even if the scenery itself began to look a bit more repetitive with its reused assets the more I looked especially in its regard to foliage). some thing people don't point out is how all the miniscule things that could kill you instantly without warning in the first game seem to have disappeared alongside the gimicks to spice the gameplay like the turrets and hallway chases but I don't think the average person cared too much but I'm sure there exists a demographic of TEW1 fan that enjoyed that aspect. I personally don't mind the massive overhaul in its premise simply because I think it would have been really hard trying to top the first game's story and presentation. the story made sense to me from a lore sense but Sebastian's involvement in it with his family really felt janky to me at first cant lie. the boss fights here were great and I enjoyed the call backs to the first game very curious to see if a third game ever comes to existence since Ghostwire: Tokyo was initially supposed to be that & Shinji Mikami has left his own company :(. really funny how Shinji Mikami has made 2 different franchises with 2 different companies and the things they have in common aside from being horror is the fact that they both feature a greedy corporation that has police on payroll and they both had planned sequels that ended up becoming to their own separate IP