Most of this game is so painful to slog through. The level design does not hold up under any modern scrutiny (which is not the case with other great games from the same era). Dear god the missions around The Library are some of the most painful levels I've ever experienced. Each level picks a single room, creates a few small variants, and then sticks corridors between them. When it's not doing that, you have a huge open arena with no cover so you just die whenever you get remotely close to an enemy. I detest cover-based health regeneration too which this game solely relies on. The final two levels are really the only interesting design, where you get some variation is environments (e.g. being on a Covenant ship and dropping off it, or having the genuinely entertaining final escape sequence). Even then though every level outstays its welcome since they take so long on high difficulties.

The gunplay is ass. Like everything is so bullet spongey on higher difficulties. The movement is ass. I hate how floaty everything is which makes any platforming unbearable.

It's not like the story is great either. It feels so MacGuffin driven - go here because you have to. The voice acting is hilariously bad for MC as well.

The only fun to get out of this game is the coop campaign, but more due to having someone else to vent with. So many strange decisions, like having a static death cam around your partner, random teleporting when you cross a loading border (which basically ruins the final escape scene), and baffling respawn mechanics.

A must-avoid game.

(I will be replaying the second game too)

It's good. It's really good. Why has it taken me 8 years to play this? It's visceral; it's brutal; it's all you want in a Boomer Shooter. And damn does it not look 8 years old, and it certainly doesn't play it.

Yeah sometimes the movement before the unlocks can be clunky (mostly when you're climbing ledges), and yeah some enemies are annoying (the guys you can only shoot from behind), but the gunplay is so good. The exploration is fun and rewarding, and it doesn't feel like you're under/overpowered based on how much you collect. It also doesn't outstay it's welcome at all. It's a fairly short game (only ~10 hours), which is great given there isn't too much actual gameplay variety.

I will say this game is a must play on the higher difficulties. This should absolutely be a challenge. Being pressed to move constantly is the whole fun of this game.

There are some glitches which caused me to soft-lock, which was a shame. I will say by the end of the game I wish there was a little more variety enemy-wise. It felt about 50% of the way through was when you stopped encountering new enemies and from then on it was just variants. I think the bosses were kinda mid too, but they were few and far between that I really didn't mind.

Yeah go play this.

I mean what is there to say. It's a survival crafting game. It's janky, uncomplicated, with no depth to any mechanic, but with some mates it's a great laugh.

The best part was becoming a serious threat to local fauna with how ruthless I was with the bow.

Having a raft as your base was something novel to the formula though, so you've got to give it that.

You can tell this game was incredibly formative for so many puzzle games that came after it. You can feel it start to explore the limits of what video games can be, especially geometry-wise, which to my knowledge was never done to this extent before.

I think it would have been a much more impressive game had I played it on release. While figuring out how rooms link together it nice and novel, it rarely has any bearing on the actual puzzles (and when it does it's slightly annoying). Beyond the fun level layout the actual puzzles themselves are basic and largely uninteresting.

But really these criticisms are only relevant in hindsight. It's an incredible play, even if it does feel dated due to its influence. A must for any fan of puzzle games, and I'd even recommend it for everyone if nothing else for some of the "woah cool" moments you get.

I wish I was more ashamed to admit that I have finally become the thing I hated. I normally think video games have incredibly shallow takes on philosophy and moral decisions (often boiling down to "must shoot but make sad"), but the Talos Principle games probe and poke at your ideologies in such interesting ways, to the point of making me think "Woah that's kinda deep" on a few occasions. I had to stop and think about how I was going to respond to questions, only to be made to feel like an idiot when the cloud of dust wafts away my arguments like they were silly.

But The Talos Principle games are much more than an interesting philosophical exercise, and it's because of this I believe that it aids the execution of the former. I think TP2 is a perfect sequel. It takes nearly everything about the first game and expands on it.

The choice to add companions beyond a text-adventure friend and Elohim from the sky was genius, and everyone is so well-written and voice-acted that it lets them take you along on their journey and character arc. You really want to consider their own philosophies and points-of-view, and there is not a single character to felt unmotivated in their actions.

The puzzles, while I wish they were more difficult, had mechanics that were distinct from the original. Thematically however, they felt like a perfect evolution, and no puzzle from this game would have felt out-of-place in the first.


Yeah sure the game isn't without its issues. As mentioned I think the puzzles were a little too easy, and the hub worlds, while beautiful, were a little too big/aimless sometimes. I wanted to feel like I'm exploring but trying to find all the collectibles in an area sometimes felt like a chore because of the size. This game has a lot of walking around.

I think the biggest step-down from the first is the removal of the star puzzles and replacing them with the shrines. There were really only 3 or 4 different puzzles duplicated through 24 shrine puzzles, and I would say only half a dozen were genuinely satisfying to solve. The star puzzles were the strongest part of the first game, making you re-evaluate the geometry of the level or solve a puzzle in a new and interesting way. This time it was more brute force the solution by chasing a cloud of dust, or find a part of the level by accident.

There were a few puzzles where I soft-locked myself, and needed to hit the reset button. I always feel like this is a weakness in puzzle design, but I can mostly forgive it here due to the complexity of certain mechanics making it almost impossible for it not to happen sometimes. There were some mechanics I wasn't too keen on (mostly fiddly ones that you needed to wait for or be in a specific position), but these came around infrequently enough to not be a major bother.

The game does run like ass too.


These two games have been incredibly formative for me, shaping my views on video game design, but also broader societal ideas, and honestly I cannot think of any praise higher than that. A must play.

A passion-filled little adventure game. Charming if a little annoying dialogue, a pretty nonsensical plot, no real challenge in any way barring some clunky movement and combat, but it doesn't outstay its welcome.

I'm not sure if there's enough here to really recommend it to anyone who isn't already invested in the Runeterra lore, but maybe if you're a lover of kid-friendly exploration game there'll be enough here to warrant a play. I would definitely wait for a hefty sale here regardless. It's expensive for a ~6 hour game.

I'd like to preface this by saying I do genuinely really like this game. I think most of what's good about Sly 2 holds up exactly the same.

However, I feel that there is nothing in this game that is better than the previous iteration - the only steps taken are steps backwards. I could talk about the voice other than Bentley acting being surprisingly weak (especially Murray and Carmelita - did they change voice actors?), and the writing has fewer stand-out moments. I could also mention how there is an increased reliance on mini-games for missions - they're not executed badly most of the time, but it feels like they are frequent enough to get in the way of Sly's excellent movement and exploration.

But for me the biggest culprit for this game is the lack of bottle collectables. It sounds so trivial, but when you take out the driver of exploration in the levels, there really isn't any need to learn the environment, to master traversal, or to really engage in any of the world-building that is scattered around.

I think the game starts of especially weak here with the Venice level. It feels samey to walk around, and there's nothing there to make me want to learn or explore. I ended up running from objective to objective and that is all, which I think is a real failure to find what's fun about the Sly Trilogy. I will say I think the levels get better and better as the game goes on, and the final traditional level in the Pirate cove is excellent, minus some dodgy ship mechanics.

A good game by most accounts, but feels like a missed opportunity to make another great one.

Truly one of the great PS2-era platformers. There's so much charm to everything about this game, but you've got to start with the characters.

It's difficult to imagine 3 better-written stereotypical comedic characters than Sly, Bentley and The Murray. Relentlessly funny throughout the whole game. The main villains are amazing too, and they really embody the cartoonishness and their own respective levels so well. I would love if there were a few more though, since a couple of the crime bosses get two levels, where by the end you're just waiting to see the back of them and get your teeth into a new colourful baddie.

The world design is also top-notch. For sure there are a few better worlds than others (Paris is always the notable mention for what shines about this game), but even the slightly more bland environments are easy to look over when they still contain consistently varied and entertaining missions.

They really don't make 'em like this anymore!

Ugh JRPGs are slogs aren't they. I don't really feel like writing down all my thoughts here. I could genuinely speak for hours about a game like this - what's good and what's not.

It boils down to being a JRPG at the end of the day. It has all the greats and all the disasters associated with it. Incredibly bloated, large uninteresting parts of the game, some incredible story beats. The gameplay loop in general is super repetitive, and the combat is only just interesting enough to keep it bearable.

I would also add that the side-content in this game is not as good as people say. Most of the mini-games are like "fun" in that it's amusing to see your character to do one of them once like the karaoke. Games like the pool though are irredeemable.

Also an hour long ending cinematic is just tiresome.

I think the next game is shorter, and the story is well-done enough to tempt me into it, but my patience likely won't last the whole series.

I think it has interesting ideas. But I don't think it pulls them off in a cohesive experience. It genuinely feels like there isn't any genuine challenge here.

The game involves going around and speaking to all the characters at the start of the game. After this most of the puzzles kind of solve themselves. The ones that don't are locked behind dialogue options that end the loop if you guess the wrong one. Gets to a point where save-scumming is the only real option unless you want to spend a few minutes dealing with the loop mechanics and then running back and dialoguing back to where you just were.

I struggle to find much good about this game, and that annoys me because it feels like it could have been good. It's like 60% of the way to an Obra Dinn-like experience, and I'm not even super keen on that game.

I wouldn't necessarily not recommend this game, and I think it's interesting to look at the reasons why it doesn't work as well as it should.

Way more fun that I was expecting. I think while the narrative is pretty good, the characters are where this game shines. Combat is satisfying once you get over the first few hours of the game where you don't really have any tools to deal with enemies, and it isn't always perfect, but it does more than it needs to.

Exploration is fun as well. The game doesn't waste your time too much, and the accurate compass really helps you get right to the point of finding cool loot and hidden areas.

The game DEFINITELY drags at the end, and the way it keeps you constantly at arms length of your ultimate goal gets really frustrating. It puts a damper on the whole experience I think, but the rest of the game is still really good. Also it's way funnier than I thought it would be, there's some top tier writing in here.