Short but neat first person horror adventure game. Shares some DNA with the recent Resident Evil Remakes (similar puzzles, inventory space etc.) but offers more freedom when it comes to movement.
Took me about 2 hours to finish. Enemies are pretty janky and could not handle the might of the baseball bat I found 10 minutes into the game which, after upgrading it a couple of times, pretty much one shotted everything until the very end. It's a short and fun experience if you're looking for something like that.

Throughout the entire game I wondered if the dive button was really only there because, well, Max Payne had a dive button and this game is clearly, unashamedly inspired by Max Payne. But the thing is, the dive button works when you dive between a hail of bullets fired at you by stereotypical mobsters yelling "IT'S PAAAAYYNE" and less so when you jump headfirst into a wall while 3 ghouls charge at you. 95% of the time diving just puts you at a severe disadvantage in a game that really isn't that challenging to begin with.
The writing and voice acting are well done but the "bit" gets a bit tiring after a while. I also feel like the whole "my ex girlfriend tries to end the world" part just really doesn't work with the actual personal story they want to tell. Something more small scale would've worked far better here for me. It's pretty hard to feel anything for her seeing how she kidnaps "innocents" to sacrifice them to end the world. So the whole "James, am I a monster" can really only be answered with an emphatic "yes, absolutely you are".
Overall the game is good, helped a lot by a great soundtrack that really carries a lot of the levels. It just gets repetitive after a while as the game clearly runs out of ideas.

What a weird game. None of the individual elements in it feel like they work with each other.
Combat is fun, fast and fluid, freely letting you change classes is very welcome and offers a lot of possibilities. But combat also gets extremely easy very early on and besides the Dragons never changes. You'll spend most of the game fighting the same 4-5 enemies, none of which will pose a challenge to you. And that's a shame because the combat offers a lot of possibilities. A mage can cast an ice attack that a fighter then might use as a ramp to jump onto an enemy! That's neat! But the fights are usually so easy there is never much need for it. It can happen for fun, and is fun, but it never feels necessary or strategic. Since the combat is so braindead easy getting new gear barely feels like a reward since it won't change the way you play the game and will just...do more damage. And that's if you can find gear for your class at all. The much maligned fast travel system (or lack thereof) worked for me - until it didn't. There are definitely "I'm miles away from the next town, I'm running low on supplies, everybody is hurting and it's getting dark" moments which feel great. But the downside is that you'll have to run through the same environement over and over and over and over again, fighting the same enemies over and over again.
I don't care how much people love the pawns in this game, I don't get it. I can only hear them repeat the same dialogue 4 times, which you will usually do within a single trip, before wanting to throw them off a bridge. I don't think it's charming, it just feels soulless, sorry. Soulless is also a good way to describe the story and characters which were so uninteresting I stopped paying any attention at some point. But every time I thought I was done something happened in the open world that gave me some hope that there might be more to it. Be it a griffon carrying me away (which then killed me but it was fun regardless) or encountering a dragon fighting a cyclops.
I just wish there was something more to it. If it had engagine side quests, if the combat was just a bit more complex, if there were more interesting things to find in the open world, if travelling from place to place actually felt dangerous and not like a chore, this could've been a really cool game. Instead it is a game that charmed me for the first 10ish hours when all of that still felt like a possibility, entertained me for 5 more hours and then bored me.

I was hoping this would solve the biggest issue Arma 3 has: really bad AI. Sadly, it is about as dumb as Arma's AI while offering you way, way less options and customizability and variety. The most effective way to play is still to equip a long range scope and simply snipe all the enemies who are randomly strewn around the maps. They will never find you, look for you or even get into cover. Enemies will casually wander around in the open even if there are bodies of their comrades everywhere. Of course a lot of games can be ruined by playing them in a boring way but the issue is that I don't think the "intended" way is much better. Since enemies just wander around there is no real tactic or strategy you can use as a team. The level design is just too open and the AI too random to really feel good.
Compared to Arma it doesn't have things like vehicles and teammates which would genuinely be fine if it had decent AI.
But as it is, there is no real reason to play this over Arma's Dynamic Recon Ops mod if you want big open maps or SWAT 4 if you like tightly designed levels and you can probably get both of those games for less than 20€ by now

While it is a big upgrade over the previous game and I would certainly like to see what this team does next, a bit more restraint would certainly benefit them. When you find a flayed person in the second "room" of the game and then a...thing roughly 40% through it, there's not much room to escalate to it just sort of bathes in it's own brutality and horror. There is little build up and no real escalation since it already starts you at 9. Some of the puzzles are slightly annoying with interactable points that don't tell you what they are supposed to be (a switch? a button? A slot?) or what prevents you from using them, especially because all the items have to be moved between the three characters which, since that can just happen whenever you want feels a bit pointless. A shared inventory would make just as much sense in the world of the game and alliviate some that tedium. Still, it is a good game after all with an interesting and mostly likeable crew of characters and a weird tale to tell.

It achieves what it sets out to do even if that's sometimes to it's own detriment. The biggest issue was the tedious inventory management that doesn't really add much to the game and instead sort of demystifyed the enemies for me. By being forced to run through the same rooms over and over again it just showed me how easy it is to avoid them and how little of a threat they actually posed. Thankfully this was later patched and you now have to option to play with an expended inventory which I would highly recommend. There are some slight annoyances with the game (I find the extremely aggressive combat music that starts playing even if you spend only a couple of seconds in a room as you track back to the inventory room) more annoying than tense, sometimes the hit boxes feel a bit off and you get hit when it really feels like you should be out of reach etc. But that's really about it, some slight annoyances, nothing more. The story it tells is both interesting, giving you just enough clues and hints about what might be happening while simultaneously being loose and dreamlike enough to keep certain things a mystery which fits well with the themes and the overall atmosphere.

This has the ingredients for a fantastic strategy game but just never gets there. The combat in the game is really fun at first and the "precognition" mechanic which allows you to see the enemy moves in advance and position your units so they either don't get hit at all or make enemies attack each other is really interesting. But also sadly the way it is executed feels a bit too clunky and overall the combat just stays too same-y to keep me interested. You really just move from fight to fight to fight. In theory there are multiple spots you can attack in each area but after roughly 15 hours I still couldn't tell if it mattered at all which one you attack. There really isn't any story to speak of which in theory is fine for a strategy game but without that and the combat already starting to feel stale while I wasn't even close to the end (there are approxiamtely 30 regions and I liberated 4 after ~20 hours) there just wasn't anything to keep me going. I would love to see a Phantom Brigade 2 that builds on this foundation tho

At it's core Blood West is basically a smaller scale Stalker with more traditional RPG elements, set in a "weird west" setting
That sounds good at first, and at first it is! You are very vulnerable so sneaking around, taking enemies out silently one-by-one (which doesn't even have to be silent as long as it's a one hit kill?) before it devolves into frantic fights for your live are fun - at first. The issue is that the combat in the game never really evolves in a meaningful way. The enemies get tougher, sometimes you cannot headshot them immediately and you unlock perks like more health or a short bullet time mode whenever you aim down sites, but the general combat flow doesn't change. And there really isn't much to the game besides combat. You can explore optional areas to level up and find loot but all of that is still all in service of the combat. I had fun with the game for roughly 7-9 hours and then stopped when it became clear that this is how the rest of the game would play out.

Sprawl is not a bad game but one that never shines. It takes a lot of ideas from other games but often doesn't really know what to do with them so. The wall running is slightly too janky to feel good. Bullet time is way too generous and you will hardly ever run out which leads to an overreliance. A game that does wallrunning and bullettime a lot better is Severed Steel where both elements are integral to the gameplay experience. The weapons feel unbalanced, I never found a reason to use the smgs or minigun and even the railgun turned into an occasional "Well, I guess I could use this now for variety" gun. All I'm gonna say for the story is that you are woken up by an comically evil sounding AI that constantly says things like "Muahahaha I love seeing you kill people, you are so good at killing, yes! bathe in their blood" and wants you to "set it free". Ultimately it's hard to recommend that game. If you want a game set in brown corridors play Incission. If you want to play a game about stylishly jumping around in slow motion, play Severed Steel. If you've already played all of them and need more, you can try this. I guess