A game that manages to be quite fun to play most of the time despite being absolutely filled to the brim with baffling game design choices.

I've never really cared for Sonic games - 3D or 2D - but I found this to be a surprisingly compelling experience, so much so that I even got the platinum trophy for it. Maybe because they actually tried something new here? I thought the tacked on more traditional 3D Sonic levels (the Cyber Space stages) were a bummer and really unnecessary. At least they usually had fun music in them. Speaking of the music, I think the soundtrack is the highlight of the game for me. The tracks vary from chuckleworthy yet sincere (nu) metal battle themes to short and sweet house tunes to Breath of the Wild-esque ambience - I really, really liked it.

I don't have the energy or the will to go over every little thing that made me go "what? why?" while playing the game but rest assured that list was not short. I can't say I really paid much attention to the story but it felt like the characters' dialogue was written in a deliberately fanservice-y manner with various name-drops and references to previous games' events(?). If you're a hardcore Sonic fan (like most Sonic fans seem to be to be fair) you might appreciate it, I thought it was annoying.

I think Sonic the game character suits an open world game really well: it's fun to traverse environments at breakneck speeds and hop around amusement park like devices in the air! Sonic the game series, however, has a lot of structural things that need to either be heavily revamped or let go entirely in order for this type of free roam action-adventure game to properly work IMO. I'm not sure SEGA or Sonic Team are up to the task though but time will tell, I'm not not looking forward to seeing what a potential Sonic Frontiers 2 will be like I suppose? Yeah, that's about the highest praise and/or level of intrigue I'll allow myself to give for 3D Sonic.

The Callisto Protocol is a visually impressive but ultimately hollow survival horror action game and a disappointment on more than one level.

Firstly this is simply not the game most people, myself included, were expecting it to be. Besides the apparent similarities in the setting and visual design, The Callisto Protocol is not the spiritual successor to Dead Space. It is not a systems-driven physics playground full of space terrors to stomp but rather Glen Schofield's take on The Last of Us Part II in the most generic "AAA game from the Xbox 360 era" sense imaginable. The game is very linear and way more focused on wowing the player with noninteractive cinematic setpieces rather than through the gameplay itself; you won't find any interesting game scenarios resulting in emergent narrative in Callisto. That's the initial letdown with the game in a nutshell but its core faults still lie elsewhere.

The second layer of disappointment stems from what Callisto is rather than what it isn't. The sci-fi horror adventure that Callisto promises to the player is completely clichéd, unoriginal and outright bad. The high production values and the script filled with (attempts at) bombastic story beats are all for nothing when the plot is so unbelievably trite. From their paper-thin backstories to their B action movie dialogue the characters are also about as generic as they come - wasting Sam Witwer on that Batman: Arkham Asylum thug looking dumbass is some bullshit. The original Dead Space was no clever head-scratcher either but the slow revelation of what had occurred aboard USG Ishimura was infinitely more interesting than Josh Duhamel's journey through narrow passages on Jupiter. If you've seen a bad sci-fi film circa 2000 you've experienced The Callisto Protocol - this is way more Ghosts of Mars than Alien.

The third and final (major) disappointment for me was the uninspired game design mixed with the general lack of polish around its mechanics. We're still talking about a video game here so even if the story didn't land I could easily look past that if the actual game part felt fun and engaging. Unfortunately this isn't really the case with Callisto.

It's clear that the game was rushed out hot from the oven to beat EA Motive's Dead Space remake to the punch, but this also lead to a lot of technical hiccups and less time to fine-tune the game mechanics. With that being said, I doubt that the experience would've been much better had the game been released, say, a year from now if e.g. the basis for the combat system remained largely the same - most of it just isn't that great to begin with. That's not to say that the gameplay is all bad however, I had my fair share of fun beating mutants to a pulp or using the GRP Device, this game's equivalent to telekinesis, to fling them into spiky walls but the mechanics in place feel either strangely disjointed from each other or too janky to actually feel satisfying. Some of these shortcomings may have been fixable with further development but things like extremely static environments and objects, the complete lack of exploration or puzzles and the scripted nature of many enemy encounters are seemingly parts of the intended experience. Whether that's due to a lack of vision on Schofield's part or budget constraints, in any case, it's still a bummer.

Don't be completely discouraged by my rant though, The Callisto Protocol is not entirely void of fun - it's just quite a big letdown for me personally. I'll end this wall of text on a slightly more positive note with a list of pros: both the player and enemy deaths are very gruesome, the melee feels nicely weighty most of the time and for once the DualSense's haptic feedback is actually utilized well on the PS5. And just to reiterate: the graphics are genuinely great - the game looks like a proper next-gen title. Better luck next time, Glen! I think I'll stick with Dead Space for now.

An unbelievably abysmal shooter riddled with some of the worst game design known to man. I'm genuinely baffled that something like this was released in the year 2022. Gungrave G.O.R.E promises the player a stylish character action spectacle filled with bullets and anime but that's all mostly a facade. Instead, what you get is an unreasonably long, soulless husk of a third-person shooter designed to give the player carpal tunnel syndrome and a migraine. See, rather than allowing the player to hold the right trigger to shoot, the game forces you to manually tap it for no less than the whole duration of the game. ...and somehow that's still among the least of G.O.R.E's issues which should let you know just how rotten this game is. At some point I realized I was actually compelled to finish this trainwreck: I was fuelled by sheer morbid curiosity to see just how bad a video game can be. I wish I hadn't.

Gungrave G.O.R.E has a scoring system like any other action game. The game wants you to keep up a combo by constantly shooting at something, whether it's enemies or breakable objects, and earning "beats" but not only is the time window between hits needlessly strict, worse yet, the system is incredibly inconsistent. The same objects that are destructible in another level are simply a static part of the environment in another. That or they are misplaced way off the intended route resulting in abrupt stops to your combos. The enemies though? Don't worry, the enemies will come after you. Wave after wave, knockback attack after another, with no cooldowns on their rocket launchers. I was in constant disbelief at the absurdity of the combat encounters and it kept getting worse stage after stage. While Gungrave G.O.R.E is not janky in the technical sense it is an absolute mess in terms of design. The enemies' AI has not been balanced at all and the nonstop attacks leave the player little to no room for error in most situations, especially in the latter half of the game. And no, not in a difficult but rewarding way but an "a hundred Silver Knight Archers locked on to you" way.

One of the game's worst offenses is teasing multiple playable characters throughout the story (and apparently way before the game's release as well) just to let you play as the two other characters for only three stages out of the thirty-one total. Embarrassing. The rest of the game is all Grave which might've not been such a bummer if Grave wasn't so sluggish to control. You can upgrade Grave's stats between levels - which is to say that you can make the experience of playing this trash fire a tiny bit less miserable - but make no mistake, even with fully upgraded health, shields and damage you will still falter from a couple of rockets while the enemies are merely tickled by your bullets. All of this on the intended (?) normal difficulty. The enemies are not only incredibly overpowered but their spawn placements have to be the worst I have ever seen in a video game. It must have been the developers' intention to irritate the player as much as humanly possible, I simply do not see any other reason for them. A special shoutout to the platforming sections as well, I think I popped a blood vessel or two during one of those.

The list of pros I begrudgingly gathered for Gungrave G.O.R.E is not too extensive as you may have guessed but it is not void either. A couple of the music tracks were fun (despite bad sound mixing), there is some variety to the boss fights in the game and the few CG cutscenes (four to be exact) there are are actually cool. Everything else in this is varying degrees of dogshit. Gungrave G.O.R.E wishes it was a C-grade PlatinumGames release. Go watch the anime based on the original game rather than enduring through this. Or play Shadows of the Damned or some other bullshit action-shooter instead. Just don't play Gungrave G.O.R.E, please. For your own sake. Should've stayed in the grave, Gungrave.