Played through this once on playstation, loved it. Played through it a second time on PC, and somehow enjoyed it even more. It's a dead horse at this point, but this game follows an epic journey with a father and son with great visuals and fun albeit somewhat repetitive combat (especially on harder difficulties, I recommend just playing on normal). I have some gripes, like a lot of things just taking longer than they need to and the shoehorned in RPG mechancis, but overall I can't think of a reason not to recommend anyone giving this a try.

Holy fuck, this is peak world design. I just want to start by saying that this game had be completely captivated nearly all the way through. I felt many other emotions, but the ones that carried through the entire game were curiosity and wonder. Maybe it's partly a personal preference about the aesthetic, but I was excited to round every corner and turn over every stone. I didn't find a single area that I loathed to explore, unlike the souls games where inevitably there's a couple places I always dread to visit.

Alright, with that said I can delve into the actual gameplay. Bloodborne is a bit more focused in its approach than From's other titles, which I tend to like. The game strongly encourages an aggressive playstyle from the very start, and beats the brakes off of you until you learn to play by its rules. Even after that it still kicked my ass over and over -- many times to the point of frustration, but in the end I carried myself through. There is a relatively small amount of weapons in the game, but the melee weapons each have two forms and intricate movesets to master.

There's some nice quality of life features, like not having a weight limit, but there's a whole hell of a lot more active detriments to QoL. Having to farm healing items and not being able to teleport between lamps are definitely the biggest annoyances, but I had plenty of other minor gripes like that.

Bosses are HIT or miss. I mean, Bloodborne has some incredible boss fights, but it also has several meh boss fights that kinda blend together. There's only like 1 or 2 that I would call bad, but regardless. Like I said though, the highs are big hitters and there's a fair amount of them.

So yeah, Bloodborne is a fantastic game that's absolutely worth a playthrough. I've even been doing some digging into the game's story after playing and I find it very interesting. Just a shame we have to deal with 30 fps lock and exclusivity for now...

A satisfying beat 'em up that drags on too long and is riddled with bugs. Full disclosure: I played the game on hard entirely in co-op, and some of the issues are probably exacerbated by one or both of these factors.

From the start, it was clear I wasn't going to give a shit about this game's story. I was right, it's not horrible but it obviously just exists to exist. In fact, everything that isn't combat including the traversals between encounters and "puzzles" kind of just got in the way in my opinion. Co-op made those non-combat gameplay sections even worse because you have to wait for your partner to be in the same place every 30 seconds.

So, combat then. It's fun and satisfying. There's a good variety of moves and equipment you unlock throughout the game to brutalize the enemies, which is an awesome spectacle with the sick ass visuals. It reminds me a lot of the modern God of War entries with the weightiness and balance between melee and ranged combat. In the second half of the game though, enemies just start to become sponges and encounters start taking way longer than they should because of it. Come to think of it, God of War (2018) also had this issue with higher difficulties... There was a sharp difficulty spike at the end too which led to a frustrating conclusion.

Now, a word on the co-op because I really don't understand the design here. This game had huge potential as a co-op experience, but it ended up just being a tacked on feature. In the beginning, you're introduced to the main character's partner in crime and there's cutscenes and in-game combat where he fights by your side slinging dynamite and blasting enemies. So, once I got past the tutorial mission and invited my friend to play, who do I see he gets to play as? An exact copy of my character, which the game obviously pretends doesn't exist. I don't feel like I need to spell out how big of a missed opportunity this is, both players could have even diverged in their abilities and gear.

Finally, I have to mention the bugs. There were so many, including but not limited to: crashes, getting stuck in the floor, audio cutting out, co-op partner not being able to heal or use combat abilities, rifle shooting at an offset from the onscreen crosshair, and numerous (harmless and sometimes funny) visual glitches. Safe to say, these definitely impacted the experience due to their frequency.

This was a long one, but overall I wouldn't recommend against trying this game out on a sale if you're an action gamer looking for some simple monster-gibbing fun. I'd recommend against playing in co-op however, and don't set your expectations too high.

I'm tired after this laborious journey so I'm gonna break out my secret weapon: the bulleted pros/cons list review. Many of these points are in comparison to other Dark Souls games.

Cons
- Bugs! and lots of them
- Feels less mechanically sound, hitboxes are all over the place
- Enemy AI is consistently frustrating
- Early game is relatively easy and unmemorable
- Too long, felt like a slog in the last third
- Multiplayer is annoying
- There isn't a little preview image when you pick up items (yes this deserves to be a bullet fuck you)

Pros
- NG+ system is very interesting including the ability to localize NG+ difficulty to certain areas and respawn bosses
- Some late game areas are sick
- All 3 DLCs are solid with interesting areas and great bosses
- Majula theme

As a fishing game, Dredge is a great time. Finding new species, dredging up materials and treasure, upgrading your ship, and just roaming the open seas are all really fun and there's plenty to discover.

However, somewhat (intentionally) at odds with this seemingly relaxing experience are the eerier mechanics of the game like losing your sanity and encountering beasts that may or may not be figments of your mind. The reason I used the word "eerie" instead of "scary" is because the latter would be overestimating the impact of the horror elements. I was less often scared and more often just annoyed when having to deal with a monster or low sanity, etc.

I can't say the experience is ruined by all of those things, but it does feel like the horror aspects were a bit half assed in the name of still having a fun fishing sim.

This is one of those titles that I find difficult to call "bad" but also don't have a ton of praise to shower it with either. Story and characters here are less than remarkable, the setup ends up being a rather cookie cutter "hero must defeat X bad people" and every character is super one-note.

The focus here is clearly the gameplay, which is a unique concept that I genuinely had fun with. Everything in the world moves to the beat and thus your actions are also expected to be on beat, whether it be jumping, dashing, attacking, etc. There were many moments where I felt like I was syncing up to the (pretty good) soundtrack perfectly which was super satisfying.

However, beyond that the rest of the gameplay is gimmicky and clunky. Any non-combat sections are painfully slow and just consist of walking around, jumping, and occasionally having to summon one of your companions to do one of the like 2 things they can do, none of which are really fun to do. Some enemy designs shoehorn you into needing to do specific actions to take them out which just feels braindead, and overall combat just got a little stale sometimes.

If it sounds like I'm being really hard on this game, that's mainly because the vast majority of reception is critical acclaim so I was somewhat disappointed with the experience. I still rated it above average as the game has great moments, but I don't thing anything about it is spectacular.

As much as I feel I should point out a few of my gripes with this game like some of the painfully slow segments or clunky puzzles to lower my score to something like 4/5, I'm not going to because reviewing is arbitrary and I get to make the rules. So yeah, this game isn't perfect but I'm giving it a perfect score. Why? Because I thoroughly enjoyed my time all the way through and it's the first piece of media in years to make me tear up.

The story is hard to explain without giving too much away, but I think it has pretty wide appeal. Otherwise, the game has the feel of an old school point-and-click adventure title. I liked that, and while others may not I don't think it would be that much of an obstacle to enjoying the narrative.

3D Sonic games definitely have an interesting history... but this one is a pretty solid experience, even to someone like me who doesn't consider themselves a fan of the series. Navigating the worlds is genuinely fun most of the time, and the mini levels break up the pacing. Plus, the boss fights at the end of each world are awesome spectacles with some sick tunes.

My main issue is that neither the combat nor the platforming controls feel that great even after ~20 hours of play, which is a pretty big hit considering those are basically the only gameplay elements. Also, the end of the game kinda falls off a cliff; I vastly preferred the middle parts.

Filament is a puzzle game where levels have a deceptively simple concept: move the robot to wrap a wire around all the exits and head through the exit. However, quickly things will start to get turned around as the game throws new twists on this concept like needing to avoid certain pillars or wrap them in a certain order, and even starts mixing them together at the end. I found the puzzle design to be just right for the majority of the levels, both in terms of difficulty and elegance. So many times puzzles had that satisfying loop of thinking it's easy, realizing the reason the naïve solution doesn't work, and figuring a clever way around it.

As you explore the abandoned ship, the game does a good job with direct and environmental storytelling about what happened aboard. There are things to collect which provide codes to unlock archived messages between the crew, either directly or indirectly. I read through a good chunk of these and enjoyed doing so but I was usually just determined to get back to the puzzles.

For puzzle game fans, Filament is absolutely worth a look. If you like it, then there is no reason to worry about lack of content since my playthrough took well over 30 hours.