Minus half a star for the copaganda parts being how you reveal stuff on the map, but without that, this would be my perfect superhero game. Swinging around the city is some of the most fun I've ever had with movement in a game, you almost never want to use fast travel because of it. The music and bright aesthetic also give it a great superhero vibe. This game kind of ruined the Arkham series for me, because I played this first, and it plays like Arkham but better. The different web abilities are very fun to play around with, diving in from the sky and immediately sticking guys to walls once you get powerful enough. Even the story is a great Spider-Man story, which cares just as much about getting Peter Parker right as it does about getting Spider-Man right. When I finished this game I was already craving more, which is one of the best complements I can give, especially since this game has a decent length to it already, especially if you get the DLC.

This has one of the best openings I've ever seen in any game, and I played the campaign on game pass in the hopes that the rest of it would be in a similar vein. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. The opening level of this game establishes such a strong tone as a "war is hell" type of experience, as when you die the game simply zooms out to show you the name of your character and his lifespan, and then puts you straight into the shoes of another similarly doomed soldier. Everything is full of mud and grit and soldiers dying all around, and it hammers home the meaninglessness of all of it. After this level, you unlock a variety of mini-campaigns to play, each showcasing a feature of the game; tanks, planes, sprinting, armored soldiers, etc. While the game does try to keep the tone of the opening level somewhat, all of these levels play like the same kind of one man army power fantasies you've played in every other military shooter ever. It's a massive let down going from "war is hell" to "look how good you are at killing, you badass." Also, lmao at the campaign that is all about glorifying T.E. Lawrence and ends with "T.E. Lawrence remains controversial to this day."

Oh man, I'm surprised nobody has reviewed Tron yet! Well, what can I say? This game consists of 4 modes, the two shooting games are definitely the most boring to me. There's was nothing very exciting about them that you couldn't get better from another game. The tank game is cooler, as you navigate a maze in a tank and your shots can ricochet off of walls and around corners, which is pretty neat. The lightcycle is by far the standout as the most rad thing in this game and the most iconic Tron thing in general. You drive a neon lit motorcycle around what start as an open plane, but you and your opponent leave permanent trails of light wherever you go. It quickly makes an obstacle course of where you've been and you have to both navigate around all this and also think of how to use it to defeat your opponent. Most of the 3 1/2 stars I'm giving this are due to the lightcycle game tbh. Also, I'm just a sucker for the whole techno aesthetic of Tron.

This is one of if not the most played game that I have. I just re-installed it to check my hour count and it was at 869 hours. I love the concept of bringing the hero style gameplay of MOBAs, a genre that just isn't for me, into an FPS. The sheer diversity in ways you can play, with 21 heroes at launch and 32 to date, makes each match fresh as you have to account for the many different combinations of characters on a team. It also has different characters for players of various skill levels, so if you aren't some master of twitch reflexes, you aren't entirely out of luck. The character designs themselves are also super cool. Each of the characters have very distinct personalities which shine through in their animations, both in your third person emotes, and your first person animations as you move about, as well as a great team of voice actors bringing them to life. The tactical team based objective play is where this game can really shine or at the same time fall apart completely. As with any game like this where players have specifics roles they must fulfill as part of a team, when everything works out and you're up against a team of similar skill, it's some of the most fun in a competitive shooter I've ever had. However, as someone who was largely stuck in the lower ranks, you would get the common problem of teams simply not grouping up, and there's nothing you can do at that point other than listen to a bunch of grown men get angry at each other over a video game.

Which ultimately brings me to why I stopped playing this game. This is the only game I've ever quit specifically because its community was so toxic. It seemed like every other match I would have to report someone for shouting or typing out some slur, their username being a slur, or just being toxic to their teammates for not playing well, or the way they think they should. It was to the point where my login screen for the game was the "thank you for reporting" message, and yet toxic players still showed up game after game. I started out the game as a very talkative player, making tactical callouts, and generally chatting it up when I could. Eventually it got to a point where I had to just never enter voice chat, taking a tactical hit in order to just be able to play a game without dealing with the toxicity, and when even the text chat got to be too much, when it was nearly every game, that's when I just had to let it go. It's a shame because when the game launched it really seemed like Blizzard intentionally put in all of these features to encourage positivity among players. There's no leaderboard to check who the "worst player" is. It shows you the play of the game so when someone does something cool, they are rewarded for it. At the end of the match it only shows positive medals for you to upvote to encourage good players. And during a match you're only shown your own medals, something people somehow decided to take and run with as "If I have a gold medal that means I should be a jerk to my team."

It's really unfortunate that the player base ended up like this. I'm not factoring them into my score because ultimately, I think the game itself is a wonderfully crafted experience that I spent hundreds of hours enjoying, and it shouldn't take a hit just because the people who ended up playing it were horrible. I'm sure there's some kind of meta-balance issue that some would argue makes it deserve a lower score, but I was never high rank enough to get into all that. My overall opinion on the game itself, is that it's a really creative execution on how to do a multiplayer shooter, with tons of variety, and even fun side-modes and seasonal events. Mystery Heroes and Mei's Snowball Fight in particular ended up being some of my favorite stuff in the game. I will subtract half a star from it for being one of the first games to introduce loot boxes, a mechanic which has driven at least a couple of my friends away from the game. Also, Blizzard, add a black woman for the love of god.

This was basically the Soul Calibur of the N64, which was kind of cool if all you had was an N64 and wanted to play a weapon based 3d fighter. I've got a lot of nostalgia for this one, but with that said, a great N64 fighter is still overall pretty mediocre. I had to search pretty hard to even remember the title of this game, as almost nobody talks about it, but I was finally able to find an episode of Super Best Friends where they play it. Honestly, bless that channel for being an archive of some of the weirdest and most obscure fighting games out there.

I think this game didn't get the attention it deserved because it released on the same day as Untitled Goose Game, and the whole internet went wild for that game. This is a pop album as a video game, and has a really cool double narrative that is at one time about defeating evil arcana to restore balance to the world, and at another about learning to love yourself. This is the most pure joy I've felt playing a video game in a long time, I was mouth open in awe and grinning with joy throughout the entirety of its 1 1/2 hour long playtime, which like any album you love, you'll want to play over and over. The mechanics of the game start with you just moving around collecting hearts to the music, and then the game adds new twists to the gameplay with every level, while keeping everything so intuitive that you feel like you're playing something new but you're never lost as to what you're supposed to do. The game is just bursting with color and creativity, and I'm going to stop writing about it now so that I can go play it again!

This is a strategy game in which you play as a small resistance group during the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. The gameplay consists of choosing where to send your limited number of people to gather support, finances, resources, or carry out missions. After a certain number of days, story segments will play out depicting major events that led to the rise and fall of the Nazi party. The gameplay bits are good at portraying how difficult it is to move around and get anything done when the whole state is against you, but the story bits were what really elevated the game for me. For one, this is the only video game I can think of that actually tackles the holocaust, despite so many games being set during WWII. But it also just excels at giving you a timeline of events of how a nation descended into fascism, and the efforts it took to defeat it, and that’s something I think everyone needs to learn right now, because it really seems like too many have forgotten the lessons of history.

The definition of "bang for your buck." This was one of the first XBLIG games and was a fun twin-stick shooter centered around a funny meta-humor song about the developer using XNA to make the game, and selling it for a dollar. The visuals get a little trippy as they start to show the lyrics to the song in a big bold pixel font on the stage, and laser light shows start happening. The enemies also get nice and varied throughout the game so it doesn't get too stale. For a dollar, it was a good buy back in the day. I played it through multiple times and would always recommend it to friends around the time of its release.