This is a fire that burns bright.

An absurdly tight campaign that remains focused from the moment you land on Rubicon to the final cinders drifting in the wind. Including what are in my opinion the best boss fights I've ever encounter (good since like almost every mission ends with a boss). Complete with the things that directly appeal to me: mechs, impossible scale, and bleak brooding tone & atmosphere.

Dodging a wall of missiles while launching your own at what sometimes feels like incomprehensible speeds and breaking defenses with a shotgun the size of a city bus never gets old. The action is always dialed up to 11 and escalation in only a way that creates more shock and awe. Apocalyptic destruction in horrifyingly impossibly large unnatural constructions.

In a year of absolute bangers, there are many GotY contenders, but at the end of the day, they ain't Armored Core 6 baby. Once again, I do not know where From Soft goes from here.

I've played enough of this game over the last 3 years to see enough updates and determine that while in many ways it's still the best co-op ghost hunting game, it's also still very lacking in substance once the magic has worn off.

The problem is how anti-climatic everything is and how easy it gets. I don't mind the slow pacing. Infact, I love the slow pacing, I just wish there was more to do. And it's clear the community has thought the same thing because all the phas clones since have tried to add more to do but they also still sorta just aren't as good as phas.

I truly do wish the best for the devs on this. I want a truly great ghost hunting game and I love to see how much they've earnestly been supporting their game as it's grown. I just hope they can figure out a direction that hits that same homerun the game did when it came out.

A lovely little game that proves to me what I always knew in my heart: Resident Evil Gaiden could have been great with some minor tweaks. Just remake it through this game's bones.

There's some aspects of this that are great in concept but a little half baked in execution. The roguelike mechanics don't seem to matter too much other than unlocking some bonus ammo and health packs aside from one major side quest. The enemy variety is also a bit lacking. But you know what? Extremely solid bones for a better sequel.

I think what could have helped was just a little more meat to the separate characters to make them distinct and feel less like extra lives.

I also love the visuals in this game a lot. The CRPG look combined with the full 3D combat encounters are just lovely. Everything has just the right look for the game's story. I also think for what enemy variety there is, combat is always pretty fun and decently balanced that I never felt over prepared but never felt cheated. The bosses can definitely feel like they're a meat grinder though.

I know there's plenty to improve on... but to be honest, I don't really feel like being overly harsh with this game. I think for the price it was, I got a solid Resident Evil fan game that was having as much fun as I was.

Initially this looked like it might be another shovelware title on switch. Pretty fake screenshots for a game that actually looks terrible and plays terrible. Instead, I found a surprisingly competent shooter that is only held back by some rough edges.

There is a surprising amount of enemy variety, the visual design is pretty consistent and cool (love when games take visual inspiration from Beksinski), the soundtrack is appropriately a combination of gothic ballads and cosmic buttrock, and the gunplay feels just good enough to be enjoyable.

I think where the rough edges come into play is primarily combat and level design. Hit detection feels randomly calculated leading to some shots that can be instant kills where the same enemy next to them may take 4 shots from the shotgun. Similarly damage to your character also feels off. Where some hits may take most of your health away because it was just a pixel closer to you than another. Meanwhile most melee enemies barely do damage at all and the spiders are just annoying to hit. I wouldn't say the game is hard personally, but the offness can definitely cause some weird scenarios where you feel like it's not working correctly.

With level design it can just be a little tedious going through some samey rooms and they can feel a little haphazard. It's nothing egregious and I think it shows effort on the devs part, just needs fine tuning.

All things considered for a roughly 5 hour game, I think this was overall solid! I'm curious of the dev's other games and hope to see polish their combat engine, because I think there's good bones here!

I gotta be honest, I respect the hustle of these devs. They churn out these absolute scuffed Resident Evil clones like twice a year it feels like and REALLY they shouldn't be good.

But despite all of that, they're punching way above their weight class and actually doing a pretty decent job too. Dinobreak is the best of their games so far and I love seeing someone try their own spin on DinoCrisis. I love to see their commitment and clear love for the genre. I think it's worth a huge point of praise that they frequently not only have pretty good fixed camera angles, they've also got traditional third person and first person cameras across a lot of their recent games. In addition to that the Outbreak series has some interesting mechanics to add to a survival horror game from some randomized elements to weapon durability, and hell there's even their own spin on Mercenaries/Raid mode here too with unique characters and load outs. I wish some of these mechanics were a little more expanded or played more into the core gameplay.

Because honestly, if there's one problem I have with these games, it's that they are insanely easy. Maybe if they were any harder they might be too difficult to want to put up with some of the less polished aspects, but maybe that'd be encouragement to add some more polished combat in the next games?

Really if there's a bigger sin, it's that the main character does not look like the one on the game art and that makes me sad. I like the poster design a lot! Add it in to a sequel even!!

To be honest though, if you have a good tolerance for crust, give this and the other Outbreak games a try. Once you get into the vibe, they're a fun time.

I like the tone of the previous games a lot more, but I think Portrait of Ruin is otherwise one of my favorite IGA Castlevania games. It feels weirdly underappreciated and I can see how some aspects are considered sort of half baked. But I really love the attempt at melding a more classicvania style levels with Dracula's castle being more like a hub map and I think the combat just feels very polished. Some of the more fun boss fights of the series.

I think my main problem is there's maybe a little too much backtracking to the same like... handful of areas (I was sick to death of City of Haze by the end) if you do any of the side content. But I'm glad to see they didn't try and chase after Symphony of the Night again.

For an engine update of a very simplistic free game, I appreciate the QOL here. Having all the DLC + a lot more polish makes this a relatively easy experience to go through and recommend.

It's very charming in it's simplicity and effective at keeping you guessing what you'll encounter next. I think all the various chasers are unique and interesting and there's some really fun set piece locations in the back half of the game that I think help freshen things up.

Though I think the game can definitely be on the tedious side. Even at like 3 hours, I felt like it overstayed its welcome by just a little too much. Sometimes RNG just makes 1000 rooms feel like a lot of padding.

And for all the annoying YouTubers out there, there's JUST enough meat and lore here for them to make 6 hour video essays about.

I think overall it's a pretty competent shooter. The level design is super boring and the guns all feel extremely unsatisfying. The story is also a mess with a trillion left out details. It feels improved on the spot while also extremely tropey. But I think it's still fun and has plenty of neat ideas with the glaive and the viral infection preventing you from holding enemy weapons for very long. It's also interesting to see what served as some of the bones for Warframe. A game born out it the ashes of a different project who eventually rose from those ashes as massive burning phoenix that is still unstoppable today.

I find the post resident evil 4 era of horror games to be really interesting because it's a distinct turn for action oriented. Basically marrying shooters to more horror oriented elements while also missing why re4 was still effective at it. Dark sector at least has some really good atmosphere and monster design. I always like the concept of government agent gets mixed up in a bunch of horror stuff.

I think the gameplay and replayability do most of the heavy lifting here.

The gunplay is fast and fluid and strikes a very solid balance between encouraging you to switch your primary and secondary and your melee during combat. It's a ton of fun dodge rolling and blasting dudes with the coach gun or using the pistol to quick fire two dudes running me down while I reload my primary. Boss fights are all engaging and hit just the right amount of aggression. The weapon mods are also useful, though some are very distinctly much better than others. I also think the game doesn't do a great job as incentivizing you to ever really switch up your load out. I ran through with the same armor and starting guns in my entire playthrough which felt... bizarre.

The level generation is solid but never really creates standout areas but it also means level design can vary greatly between playthroughs. A playthrough with a friend had none of the same layouts as my playthrough alone. However, it feels like I was missing a large swath of the game in my recent playthrough and I don't now how much of that was just luck of the map... because I explored literally every inch of a map before I moved on.

Overall though, it's great when a game does want me to replay it a bunch without just being an endless slog of 300 hours of checklist items. The main campaign is surprisingly short for a souls like (like 15-18 hours I guess?), so if you only wanna give it one go, it's perfectly reasonable to tackle and move on.

Love the concept of this a lot. Love the Metal Gear parody a lot too. The idea of an infinite stealth game is tantalizing to my lizard brain. The core loop here is pretty addicting and very smooth feeling if a little too basic. The game is weirdly long and you've mostly seen the most of it's tricks by like 1/4 of the way through. It just doesn't have much to mix it up by end let alone halfway through. None of the biomes really matter beyond set dressing and there's 3 enemy types at most with very little in the way of challenge. I'm actually surprised given it's obvious Metal Gear and James Bond inspirations that it didn't borrow way more from them.

But ultimately it's hard to be mad at this game. It's very cute and jokes on me because I ran through it twice (there's a sort of NG+ with a tiny bit of new content). And ultimately, I really really wanna see this fleshed out even more and would love a sequel. I'd absolutely recommend it, just maybe play at a very leisurely pace instead of trying to marathon through it.

I like that it is more of a proper stealth game than 2 felt most of the time. Africa was a solid setting as well.

A stepping stone for the later Sniper Elite games, this game stumbled forward so the ones who came after could flourish. I think as a whole it's pretty good but it's clear the mission design sorta struggles to keep things fresh after the first true mission (which is also it's most open feeling mission). By the end and the 5th or 6th tank battle you're sorta ready for things to end. I just mostly can't see myself replaying this one, but I enjoyed my time all the same.

X-ray cam never gets old too.

I'm usually not one who is into a lot of the precision platforming genre. I don't find most of them fun and I think most of them feel intentionally rage bait-y for the streamer crowd. Beton Brutal feels different. Instead it feels like a game crafted for the love of the speedrunning community and a fondness for Minecraft's jumping puzzle maps.

It's weird to think Minecraft has been around long enough to make the concept of a standalone nostalgia game actually feel right and meaningful. Everything is faithfully recreated while being precisely optimized for this new engine. Meanwhile the beautiful level design both encourages you to give each puzzle a try on your way up while also asking you to look for skips to improve your time. I never found a skip that didn't feel intentional and they all felt brilliantly hidden or laid out. Eventually the weight became taking the risky jumps of a skip I know in and out vs. taking a longer route that is generally safer but has more options to screw up and fall further.

This game almost works as a sort of climb out of a pit of despair. Every climb upwards may not result in success but each ascent you know what you're capable of. I know I can reach this point because I've done it before. And every climb back up comes with improvement. Eventually you're making more progress than not and finally reaching the top.

It's simple and complex all at once. The range of emotions ending with that final sigh of relief. It's hard to find something else that quite hit that same satisfaction.

Also I'm like 90% sure this game is haunted. I'm not just seeing or hearing some of these things right? Unexpected but very appropriate given the brutalist yet hopeful atmosphere.

After 150+ hours, it'd be silly of me to say I hated the game. But I think Nintendo really needs to spend some serious time on QoL improvements for the next game... because given the new mechanics, the issues with BotW's really showed their head here. Everything else? Distinctly an improvement in my opinion. Glad to see actual bosses this time too.

I appreciate the more linear structure to story telling here as it gave something more to chew on without sacrificing the actual freedom of the previous game. A lot of the core mechanics of the game take the base from BotW and then looked at all the various ways people broke BotW to make a game where breaking it feels like entirely the point. Shrines felt like they were more light hearted fun and temples felt like they embraced an open feeling while still retaining a pretty decent pacing. Some parts are better than others for sure, but I like what they're doing.

Also, anything that lets me build shitty Gmod cars is an instant win in my book. The hours and hours of childhood summer vacation I spent cobbling together some barely functional vehicle were replicated in almost the same child like glee and curiosity here. Let me build some houses for these burnt down villages next!!!

However, if you did not like the formula change of the previous game, I don't think TotK is going to win you over. Make no mistake, all the worst parts of BotW are still here, they didn't go anywhere (I actually always really liked the weapon durability mechanic though). While I think there's enough brand new stuff and improvements here to consider this a sequel, it's not really trying to find that much of a balance between that and older 3D Zelda. Like the leap from 2D to 3D, the series is transforming once again and like every major transformation, some just aren't going to like it.

And that's fine! But I'm still loving all of it.