The fun of Deadbolt comes from formulating a plan & seeing just how well you can stick to it. Deciding what enemies to take out first, what items to grab, figuring out what areas you can use to your advantage & when to reveal yourself to enemies

And what makes this game a true triumph in the stealth game genre is its best levels are the boss fights, because Deadbolt understands that stealth bosses are at their best when they're a well guarded target the player needs to figure out how to take out. All and all, Deadbolt is fantastic

Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne is perhaps the closest thing we'll ever get to a Silent Hill RPG. A foreboding, atmospheric other world. A genuine sense of unease when fighting monsters. And characters that aren't so much good as trying to define their own path, for better or for worse

The highlight of the game is the battle system, which incentivizes hitting enemy weaknesses with more than just bonus damage. And being able to add nearly any enemy to your party & customize their skills to your heart's content, I'd recommend this game to everyone if it weren't so long

Encore Mode is where Sonic Mania finally hits its stride. The mode is barely different, most notably all the levels having a new palette. But the big difference is you can play as any two characters, swap between them, and rotate through the whole cast. This is Mania at its best

Everyone finally feels useful since some characters are better in certain areas, incentivizing you to change your team. And when you have the wrong characters it feel truly challenging. Despite my misgivings of Mania, Encore Mode is a delight & I'd love to see the idea expanded upon

Sonic Mania Plus is quite the improvement over the original Sonic Mania, which is funny because almost nothing changed in gameplay. But Mighty & Ray, characters that have been MIA for years, kind of solve the problem I had with Tails & Knuckles offering nothing to the game

Ray is an expert speed-run character, difficult to get a hang of but can get across the stage faster than any character when used right. And Mighty being immune to spikes once per jump makes him an idle for those who hate all the spikes in Mania (ME). Overall solid improvement

You can feel the love put into every pixel of this game. You can tell this was made by people who love Sonic. Sadly it's marred by frustrating level design. It's not just the death traps you seem to keep speeding into; Tails' & Knuckles' abilities feel wasted in Mania.

In S3&K you could find new paths & items by flying & climbing, but that doesn't happen here. Levels seem designed only considering Sonic, which sucks. There's also a lot that is cute in theory but annoying in gameplay (THE BOSSES). There's a good game here, but I can't say I enjoyed Mania as much as I wanted

Everything about Bioshock Infinite is awful. As a gameplay experience it's bland at best & soul suckingly tedious at worst. As a story its use of real issues is indefensible. And the story is put together with a hackish lack of finesse that it'd be a mess even if it wasn't racist

Everything from mechanics, to theming, to visuals, to characters, to its writing from its macro level story beats to its micro level dialogue & exposition is atrocious. And it ends on a note so devoid of meaning that it bottoms out farther than I ever thought it could

Not a game I'd recommend unless you want to experience a very important moment in gaming history. It's an esoteric game, one that encourages you to figure things out on your own. This is charming when you're online and can read player messages. It's less charming when you just want to know how many souls an item gives your, or how many more you need to level up

The interconnected world is very cool, where you can open a door and behind it you find an area you were in hours ago. But without warping it gets tedious quick. The main defense I hear of this is it makes you memorize the areas you enter, but I only need to go through an area once or twice to keep it in my mental map, and this game wants me to go through them 50 times. It also didn't help when I found a secret area you were supposed to warp out of before gaining the ability to warp, so I had to climb back out on my own

Character building is a lot of fun, tho it feels like the things that make you functional, not even over powered, are hidden away or gated behind arbitrary walls. I wanted to get great lightning spear near the beginning of the game, but I need to either play online (not an option) or grind enemies that are in an area I can't enter until more than halfway through the game. The breaking point was learning the armor set I wanted was inaccessible because I killed a boss that caused the enemy who drops the armor to disappear from the world because ?????. So it was either continue on and get it in NG+, start a new file after killing after I had just finished killing all the great lords, or just shelve the game. In the end, I chose the later

I sincerely think that a lot of Dark Souls is very cool and unique. I just don't think its rough edges are worth slogging through it. It's an important game in the history of gaming, but it's not a fun one

All single player modes are a 3/5, tbh. They're fine, give you enough challenge, but are also frustrating given the limited check points, high difficulty of some missions and they lock away fun additions for multiplayer (which I get, but this was annoying to me even back in 2003)

The multiplayer is what gets a 5/5 because it is a fun, chaotic time. It has a ton of customizable options such as what weapons spawn and where, a tons of unique weapons (electro tool and remote mines are great), many weapons have duel-wielding variants (such as sawed-off shotguns and tommyguns) and dozens of unique characters to play as, including but not limited to a gingerbread man, monkeys, a skeleton priest, robots, a duckman, golems and zombies