Platform: PlayStation 5
Date Started: December 26th, 2023
Date Finished: December 28th, 2023
Time Played: 20 Hours

"A puppet cannot lie."

A potentially interesting narrative, the Pinocchio basis, with an initially wonderful atmosphere and excellent presentation makes Lies of P an easy game to get quickly absorbed into, but one that soon lost me and that I grew to hate.

Like most games of this ilk, the difficulty is a major emphasis from the developers, and also a major detractor for my enjoyment. Really hard games aren't my thing anymore, and as usual there are thankfully a few options here to help alleviate that hurdle a little, mainly the spectre summons that really aid a lot with bosses, and the throw-able items which also make them more manageable and cheesable, but ultimately things go very south as the game goes on.

Just past the halfway mark things quickly plummeted in terms of my enjoyment. The bosses get harder and all seem to have multiple forms, so you're essentially fighting two back to back bosses each time, all with annoying, ridiculous move-sets. The areas become pretty unbearable, ugly and annoying, too, and I ultimately ended up just running through them by the end. The swamp area was horrible, and everything past that became a chore that I couldn't wait to get through. It's a shame especially because the earlier environments such as the streets and opera house were wonderful.

Ultimately, this is a lacklustre offering for me, but may be more enjoyable for huge fans of the genre - one that offers a nice story at times and lovely areas in the first half or so, but it's altogether a genre I have found myself getting tired of at this point, and it wasn't long before I wanted this game to end.

mayhaps visually a bit of a step down from monster hunter world, i think rise still has a lot of charm, and it plays as good as mhw, with stuff i sometimes even like more. i do think the actual story content is pretty light but monster hunter's usually more about the actual hunting anyway, so it's all fine.

if you liked monster hunter world, there's a pretty good chance you'll vibe w this one too, much faster gameplay loop though, without the need to go out and search for the target monster(s) after the first time you do it. it does expedite farming quite a bit which is nice enough.

my one real complaint is kinda just not vibing too much w the way spiritbirds work, capping off max hp until you find enough of them, which i find to be a little annoying sometimes tbh

First of all, fuck J.K Rowling.
This game was super ambitious and had a lot going for it. I remember the general public being pumped for this, even non-Harry Potter fans. When it came out I was disappointed to learn switch users were gonna have to wait longer and for the most part, it was worth the wait. The open world is beautiful with a lot of exploration to do with secrets around every corner. I was hooked to the story from the beginning but I soon found myself putting the main quest on the backburner for a long time because of the amount of side content. But I pulled through and finished the main quest and I was very happy with it.
This game has many faults though and it wasn't stuff I could overlook most of the time. This game has TOO much content first and foremost. As a completionist, this game hurt me. There are way too many collections, for example; landing pads, balloons, demiguise statues, field guide pages, Merlin Trials, collection chests, SOOOO MANY COLLECTION CHESTS. And for the outcome and lack of new "treasure" it felt like a chore to do it do I chose not to (and that's unusual for me). The only thing I 100% completed was the challenges and there was no reward for completing all of that (just saying), but it didn't bother me too much as by that point in my playthrough I was SO READY to put this game down. The Room of Requirement was fun in theory and I'm sure it could have been better if I messed around with it but it just wasn't worth it in my opinion, the creature care was actually one of the strong points of this game and could have been a lot more fun if they had the offsprings grow up instead of them staying little forever. It doesn't give you any reason to come back to it. Combining genetics to get different creatures after generations and generations could have been super fun and satisfying but they just.... didn't? It felt like a dead end and kind of annoyed me.
The voice lines also get super repetitive because there just isn't a lot of variants. Every enemy camp you came across had the same voice lines, it just got annoying after awhile. I did enjoy the combat and I after I realized that you can set 4 different spell sets, it was even better. The Ancient magic meter was super fun to use and I loved the variety of different attacks.
I had heard horror stories about how laggy this game is and I found it to run surprisingly well on the switch, but one of my complaints that was hard to ignore (and I'm not sure if it's like this on other platforms, let me know) is the fact that there are so many loading screens, I don't mind if it needs to buffer a second while you're walking through the door but Hogsmeade was especially super annoying to navigate because every single building had a loading screen, it made it hard to collect pages or finding treasure because Revelio wouldn't show what was inside buildings behind loading screens. Hamlets and Hogwarts didn't have this problem but I hated going to Hogsmeade for this reason.
The last point I'm going to talk about is the MC being insufferable, I wish they had different varieties or points of personality that you build up with your reputation over time but I know this was a large game and there was a lot going into it, I just wish they made them feel less stuck-up.
Overall, while I had a lot of fun with this game, it's not worth it to 100% it and I probably won't be going back to it ever.

One of the first of the non-classically styled Lego games, this game introduces plenty of good ideas, but is brought down with some odd choices and lots of bugs. Having the hub area be all of Middle Earth which you physically travel across makes the game feel more engaging while still having the classic level structure within that. On the other hand, the ability spread between characters is very slim, with certain characters taking a lions share of puzzle abilities. This means most of extra characters feel pretty useless compared to other Lego titles. This is partially solved by the item trove you unlock through the course of the game, but ends up feeling clunky with how many items you end up sifting through. This game also has one of the more tedious 100%-ing processes I've experienced in the series, along with a boatload of bugs that almost softlocked completion for me in the process. I would ultimately just recommend a normal playthrough for those who do still enjoy Lego games or Lord of the Rings.

i dunno. i've heard so much high praise for this game. it's not just good praise, it's like, "this is the best game ever/best 2d platformer ever" and i'm like, REALLY? dont get me wrong there are good levels here and once or twice i thought "i can really see this working" but it was just massively, massively overblown to me. i'll admit to going into this with scepticism because i dont care for rayman as a character and i dont like the artstyle, but i dont think that contributes to my particular feeling too much here. to be fair, i'll say what i did like about this game

rayman moves really fast! and i like the almost combo nature to his attack. i like his charge attack that you can aim, and i particularly like when i get a long range punch gun. i like just how many costumes there are, there's SO many! content generally speaking is something this game has in spades and i think that genuinely owns. it's cool that on top of the costumes, there's multiple characters, and i actually think in a game like this it's better that they all play the same way, as that compliments the level design more. so it's cool you can play the game as multiple characters/costumes! i played as ray-man mario because i like mario :)
but i also played as teensy king and a bunch of the different viking girls. there are SO many levels that you can do, the origins ones, the murphy ones, the daily and weekly challenges, the multiple invasion types, i dont know, thats cool! there's a lot to be played here if you really want to. and it's nice how this game commits to being silly and just wanting to be about having a good, fast paced time. i remember thinking the level Quick Sand right near the start of the game was creative and fun, the way that Rayman is basically staying in the same place for much of the level and just navigating a sinking object. it was neat!

but to be honest, i'd heard that this game was constantly coming up with all these new and crazy and amazing ideas, but nothing ever surprised or interested me beyond that level and maybe a couple others. i liked 20000 lums under the sea at times! the music was good there. but then i just got a bit bored! and most levels i found quite uninspiring just kind of, going along. there were things that were annoying! like every time murphy appears you have this little 3 second animation of him showing up, but if you die after getting him and not reaching a checkpoint you have to watch it each time. and if you die in one of the teensy chambers with a teensy royalty, it spawns you outside the room so you have to go through and load it all again. the level select via menus in rooms is a bit tedious because it's kind of hard to navigate all those rooms, and the notifications being things you cant just dismiss because you have to select each one and have it take you to teh relevant screen is annoying. every lucky ticket needing to be manually scratched becomes tedious. and i know that theres no plot to this game, but it sets up this thing of the evil teensies or whatever capturing all the teensies, then the game just sort of stops when you've finished mount olympus? like it's just over? when i rolled credits i was genuinely just surprised. also, a small thing, but i never didnt find it annoying on levels where a platform would suddenly appear in front of you, like a vine or something, just before you need to jump. even when i jumped on time i just felt like id been lucky, and when i didnt jump on time the death felt cheap.
i did a few levels of living dead party, but then i got to the 8-bit frog orchestra one where the screen kind of cuts out, which is a fun little affect, but after dying twice and it taking me back to the start of the level i thought "nah, not worth it" and was done
i just dont get it! i was told this game is incredible! the endless, limitless creativity and the music levels are so amazing and like... they're just fine? they're certainly not bad! but they're certainly not amazing either. like the gimmick was described to me before, and i felt like having it described to me was enough because it never did anything interesting or surprising in those music levels. it was exactly what was described on the tin, which again, not bad! just fine.

mario is just better in every way :)

As someone who considers Monster Hunter World: Iceborne to be among their favourite games of all time, I kinda regret that I never reviewed the base game and its expansion separately. That's because Iceborne was already out by the time I started this Backloggd account, and I didn't think I'd really be able to remember my thoughts on World separately from Iceborne enough to make a full-fledged review. Now THE TURNS HAVE TABLED however, as Sunbreak did release after the creation of this Backloggd account and - if you can believe it after I have reviewed base Monster Hunter Rise. I don't know why I didn't write a review at the time of finishing, maybe because I knew there was post-launch content to come? Maybe because I was feeling lazy or depressed or dealing with another case of old-man-back which made me wanna avoid sitting at my desk or hunching over my laptop and typing. (Realistically, it is the latter.)

Now that the dust has settled and my chiropractor has snapped me like a wishbone, I can confidently say that Monster Hunter Rise's expansion, Sunbreak is - good! Like Monster Hunter Rise itself, it's just kinda good! I like it! But it's not a patch on the combo that is World and Iceborne imo. It does all the stuff that's worth getting excited about for a Monster Hunter game's expansion. It adds a bunch of dope ass monsters, a new hub, some super tough endgame fights and a couple other little niceties here and there. That stuff alone is enough to make an expansion worth it, but it does feel like a noticeable step down from the way Iceborne transformed World. Iceborne's new hub was a significant improvement over the base game's, it added the Raider Ride to make traversal much easier, as well as the Guiding Lands and the Clutch Claw (the latter of which, don't get me wrong did not work out as intended and hugely fucked with the game's balance, but it was something significant.)

Maybe you could argue Sunbreak didn't need to bring such big changes because the Palamute which Rise introduced is already basically the Raider Ride and no one really had any problem with the hub world (except me, I do not like Kamura Village, lmao.) But what we get in these things' stead just feel super inconsequential. NPC followers? A bunch of drab, unlikable characters who talk too much to come along with you and trivialise fights even more? Sunbreak desperately needed to make Rise harder imo, not even easier. The new hub, Elgado is like...Nice, I guess? I prefer it over Kamura at least, I find its music less annoying and think it's more aesthetically pleasing, but as far as layout is concerned it's super uninspired. There's really not much to see here. When you see how little Sunbreak actually does to change or iterate on Rise fundamentally, I think you realise how much the Switch's hardware truly hampered them. Yes, the game eventually got ported to PC, Xbox & Playstation, but it started out as a Switch exclusive and what I would've liked to see from an expansion like Sunbreak is some of the nifty little details World has that Rise is missing. Seeing monsters you've captured in pens back at the hub, seeing the environment of the maps change when an Elder Dragon is present. None of that came, and I think it's clear to me that it's because the Switch just couldn't handle it. What we're left with is some pretty limp stuff like...New Silkbind moves, which I just don't think is something we really needed. Rise already gives you enough options as is, gameplay was never the problem.

I like Sunbreak, but it's not an evolution of Rise the way Iceborne is for World. It doesn't really bring anything new to the table, it's just more Rise. Which is fine! Rise is fun! And getting to play a version of Rise where I can fight Astalos and Seregios and fuckiiin' Espinas is fine by me. Including a Monster Hunter Frontier-exclusive monster like Espinas in a main series game for the first time might be the coolest thing Sunbreak does. The monster himself might be pretty whatever but it sets such an exciting precedent, I really hope we can expect some of the cooler Fronter-exclusive monsters like Lightenna and Akira Vashimu/Jebia down the line in main series games. That'd get me pogging in my fuckin pants

Anyway, it's more Rise! If you like Rise, good! If you were hoping for its difficulty to be ramped up at all, gotta wait for those Risen Elder Dragon fights! Which are good, don't get me wrong (Risen Shagaru Magala actually gave me like 6 heart attacks) - but you gotta wade through a lot of the same old boring characters and iffy presentation to get there. Thankfully, as was always the case, the gameplay might just make it worth it!

Man, this game kicks ass, I had a fantastic time with it. The combat is so fast paced, while hard (and damn does it get hard), it’s just so satisfying.

As you play through the game you almost feel like you're learning to become a kung-fu master. The more time you spend on it the better you become. Going back to earlier levels, which the game heavily pushes you towards with its aging mechanic, and whipping the floor with them feels, again, so satisfising. The combat loop is definitely some of the best I've played.

If I was being nitpicky, I’d love to see a sequel to the game without the aging mechanic. Whereas I think it works very well for this game, I can see why some people might get bored of playing the same levels over and over to end with a better age. Granted you can use shortcuts found throughout levels to severely shorten each, allowing for better aging.

To conclude, I strongly recommend Sifu to any fast-paced action fans, if you were looking for something to fulfil a kung fu fantasy look no further. An excellent game with combat I’ll keep coming back to, especially with its new challenge mode ‘arenas’. To quote a trench coat wearing man, I now ‘know kung fu’.

I found it hard putting my thoughts into words for this one, I’m pretty sure it’s a good game, especially for the monster hunter fans. However for a newcomer to the series I had quite a few gang ups on it. Hopefully my ramblings below will sum up my thoughts. Quick disclaimer, I played this mostly with friends for the Gaming Garnish podcast, so my main experience is with the HUB missions.

Combat - I can see why fans of the series like monster hunter, there’s so much to the combat, so many cool and different weapons, all with very unique move sets. There’s so much to the equipment too, some many different weapon variations and different armours. I feel like the combat is sort of akin to a souls like in the way you can’t cancel out of moves so you’ve gotta time your hits well and learn the monsters attack patterns. I don’t think the combat quite gelled with me though, this might be a personal thing but it feels very slow and a bit limited with your moves. You really have to learn the combos to be effect but then I feel like I’m just spamming them as there’s really not many.

Monsters - The monsters are so cool, so unique with different ways to fight them and they’re just so creatively made. The game really shines here as you fight the more powerful and unique monsters.

Controls - The controls, man, they just feel off to me. You definitely can get use to them like any other game but I just feel like some make no sense. Then again there’s so much going on in the game I can almost see why. Which brings me on to…

New Players Experience - The game is just so overwhelming, there’s so many mechanics to get to grips with. And the tutorials are so bad too, I’m just thankful I had veteran to the series with me to help out. There’s just so much crammed in. On one had its great, there’s so much crammed into this one game, but a lot of it almost feels pointless. If there was more emphasis on hunting down the monsters first maybe I could see the need for collecting herbs and such but I just ended up running past everything to get to the fighting!

Style - The art style is good, almost anime esc, weird but cool but not very graphically impressive, however you have to bear in mind originally this game came out on switch. And for something coming out on switch this game does look really good. The music in the village is ace too, like a calming presence before the inevitable fighting.

Overall I think I can recommend the game but with trepidation, whereas I’ve heard this game is easier to get into and is more fast paced than Monster Hunter: World, it’s still a challenging experience for newcomers. The only way to see if you like it is to try though, I would advise to try with friends first. Personally the experience hasn’t made me want to get into the series further, but that’s just me. It has made me appreciate the franchise more and for the seasoned hunters out there I’m sure you’ve loved it! Oh and monster hunter for smash!