Decent self-contained adventure that has you explore new locations and do some activities not present in the main game.
+ interesting storyline involving the primary faction of the second act
+ more colorful (if just as linear) environments
+ enjoyable boss fight at the end
+ not perfect but bearable try at a stealth section that can be skipped
- awkwardly comedic dialogue whenever romance is involved
- questionable new main character who sports a suicidal combat AI and is nowhere near as cool as the developers might have wanted her to be

Going into A Short Hike, I expected just a cute and quick visual novel. But no, it is so much more than that. Game developers take note, because this is just about the most perfect small videogame you can create. It has something for everyone: cute characters and character development, amazing art, exploration, challenges, rewards, emotion, finetuned controls, gorgeous OST that develops during your hike and a beautiful and touching ending. I am so incredibly glad to have played this! It deserves all the praise it has gotten over the years.

A really well-polished 2-d stealth platformer, the speed-run twist doesn't motivate me personally but the core mechanics are all solid.

It has some of the best stuff from games like gunpoint and trilby the art thief: levels of visibility, and manipulating shadows.
beyond that the tools are a bit limited.

so while it doesn't quite compare to Mark of the Ninja/AC Chronicles, it's still a great stealth game if you're weird like me and crave these kinds of games.

I've played some wildly inadvisable games on PSP but this takes the cake.

First off take a look at that cover art and take a wild guess what type of game this is... I'll wait...

Didya guess marble platformer? no? well me neither.

Ok fine, I'm a fan of venineth and marble madness, I'll bite... actually it's sort of a marble... suggestion game...

no really, you don't actually play the marble, you play a column of light that DIRECTS the marble, awkwardly.
You can increase or decrease your influence on the marble and even toss it a tiny bit by hovering over it directly. It's one or the other tho, you can't exactly tell it to jump one way or another all that well.

On the whole, a monumentally bad way to control a video game. I cannot imagine this had a very confident development cycle.

Also, the end gates have a massive hitbox meaning you'll finish levels whether you want to or not.

I don't recommend you actually beat this game, but you really should at least pop open an emulator and play it.

Valhalla Knights is a strangely compelling little action RPG with little to no story, VERY PSP graphics, and slightly clunky gameplay.
Crucially, however, it's fun.

There's nothing quite like this game mechanically except maybe its sequels.
It's a big team dungeon crawler with shockingly harsh leveling and economy, there are no random battles, it spawns enemies in that you can mostly avoid if you have to.

The dungeon crawling part consists of pathing out small levels, finding switches to open locked doors, and occasionally finding quest objectives.
The quests give you zero guidance and little reward, except the ones that randomly award you a party member that's absolutely essential.

Almost everything about this game is extremely obtuse, but I kinda just love it.

Combat has a surprising amount of strategy and fun to be had, the atmosphere is perfect.
If you're nostalgic in any way for ps1/psp graphics, this game can be a treat to look at.

I dunno, definitely don't try beating it, after the halfway point the game absolutely DEMANDS you grind your way to max level, which takes literal hours of tedium.
but the first 15 hours is genuinely enjoyable. Just know that the story isn't getting any better than the first hour of nonsense and call it a day.

To be honest, and I have the feeling I'll be crucified for this: I don't understand the love Diablo 2 has garnered over the years. The Diablo series managed to co-opt and narrow the term “ARPG” to mean an isometric, point-and-click game through its sheer popularity, and over twenty years later Diablo 2 is still considered the ARPG among many gamers. Blizzard gave Diablo 2 quite the tune up with Diablo II: Resurrected, but is the game still a “masterpiece” with a new paint job? TL;DR at end.

I got D2:R because I played Diablo IV's beta as a necromancer and enjoyed that a good bit. Necromancers are rarely offered as an option, so it felt fresh summoning an army out of recently-slain corpses. I figured D4's launch would suck (nailed it, though you don't have to be Nostradamus to know Blizzard has a failure streak to maintain) and I didn't want to pay $70 to wait for a game to be good. So I got D2:R (and 3, on sale as a combo) as I figured, “When people say “Diablo”, they mean Diablo 2. It's gotta be good.”
So, is it?
To sum up my thoughts: kind of, not really. Many games are important, defining moments of the medium and easily cement their place in history; the harder part is still remaining good – or even playable – years later. With the press of the 'G' key, the game immediately shifts over to the original audio/visuals and good lord, have things improved. More remasters need to offer this, if for nothing other than the five seconds you'll spend in the old graphics to know you were wise to buy the remaster.
I'd say Blizzard was able to breathe a lot of life into Diablo 2 thanks to hard work on the visuals, but it still plays like a very old game and I fail to see why this is considered one of the greats when most of it is a bland and repetitive snore. I'm pretty sure the only reason I had fun at all was because I played with a friend, but every game is improved with friends, so that's hardly a "pro" to me. Alone, D2:R is almost dreadful.

The story has excellently rendered cutscenes accompanying each of its five Acts, but you'll never care about what's going on. Diablo was an asshole but someone killed him, oh wait he's coming back to life, kill him again. That's the game. The world is a few varied landscapes depending on the Act but there's nothing to learn about it except through maybe “gossip” dialogue options of NPCs. That's fine for me: I don't need to know more, they already lost me and they're sure to lose you, too.

The visuals all look good with great textures and the animations clearly kept the “jerking” look of yore intentionally; all very solid. Again, you can go back and look at the old textures and sounds with one button press, then right back to the Resurrected look when you realize how awful that was.
The UI is pretty terrible and probably my least favorite part of the game's experience. Only two buttons are shown, your left and right mouse clicks, and you can look through a clunky menu or use the F-row of keys to swap between abilities. 'W' can be pressed to switch weapons instantly to a second set, which can have its own presets. I don't think there's any denying that this feels bizarrely limited and stiff to navigate. For some reason, the controller support is quite good, where they bump that number from two visible inputs to five, and you can hold a trigger down to see five more! This is huge!... but since I prefer playing on a mouse and keyboard, I'm stuck with the clunky shit, memorizing what each key from F1 through F8 does and whether its assigned to M1 or M2. Very disappointing. At least key remapping works well?

ARPGs, as now-defined by Diablo, never interested me much. I think they're pretty boring. Your abilities rarely change and while boss fights may be exciting changes of pace, the game is almost always going to be a grind. By design you're supposed to walk into a room and, through basically muscle memory, wipe the whole place out, probably without opening your eyes. You will then do this several hundred times with little to no variety. Because your inputs are so miserable, having to actually swap between abilities on the fly is a nuisance and the developers seem to know this, so it's walk in, slaughter, move on.
To overly simplify, as I see it, there's really only two styles of gameplay: direct and summoners. Barbarians, Amazons, etc. are direct: they'll attack each enemy directly with their melee or ranged weapon and aside from maybe your slave-- I mean “hired help”, you're doing all the damage on your own. Necromancers and druids are summoners: they spawn an army to do their bidding for them and are largely managerial, making sure their wolves or their skeletons are full in number. Occasionally, they chip in with melee or ranged attacks, too, but their power comes from their numbers.
Summoners are insanely strong. I played as a necromancer while my buddy played as a druid, and together we just ran through most of this game while our combined armies tore shit up. This made the game pretty boring, honestly. Only Diablo and his brother, Baal, forced us to actually try and play differently. Two boss fights across god knows how many hours, that's it. Most of this game played itself for us.
Direct fighters are laborious. I've played a few hours as an Amazon, and while it's nice to actually have a direct role in the death of my enemies, now it's all on me. Everything has slowed way down, and since I've beaten the game as a necromancer, I know exactly how much more I have to go and it seems like quite the painful endeavor without someone else there acting as a summoner. It's less “boring”, I suppose, but not in a very good way. I doubt I'll finish as my Amazon.

You ever have a friend recommend you a TV show with the addendum, “Oh, the first season sucks, you gotta get through it because the second is where it gets good!”? You're probably not watching that show, right? People do that with games, too, of course: “Final Fantasy XIII gets good twenty/thirty hours in.” Diablo 2 is the first time I've ever seen a game really start to get good only after you've beaten the entire thing and can go through again on Nightmare difficulty.
Once beaten, you can just start the whole thing over again immediately as your same character. You keep all your gear and whatever is in your storage box. In the starting zone for the second time, my buddy and I finally started getting good loot. Maybe it was because we didn't play as Ladder characters, but we rarely ever saw yellow gear on Normal, it was now on Nightmare that we finally got a bit more of a challenge (as summoners, mind you) and loot to accompany the added trouble.

I have the ball rolling on that slightly better Nightmare playthrough, but I'm not sure I'll finish. I feel comfortable reviewing the game here. Finishing that Amazon's playthrough is even less likely. How can I possibly recommend a game to someone when it takes an entire playthrough to start feeling something from it? Most of my first playthrough felt like I was atrophying and the game ran on autopilot.
Maybe the real Diablo was the sheer number of times we had to teleport back to base to sell all of our junk along the way.

TL;DR This game isn't very fun to me, regardless of your class's play style. I like the variety offered (necromancers, hell yeah), but really it boils down to just two styles and they both have issues. As far as “classics you need to try” go, this isn't one of them.
Also, it has been two years and yet if you don't cap your frame rate in the settings, D2:R will try to set your computer on fire. Why hasn't Blizzard patched this? Other than attempting to melt your hardware, this is a pretty good remaster of a boring game.

Desperados III: A unique, difficult, and massive test of planning and patience with a pretty satisfying payoff when everything comes together. Should you like its esoteric concept, you'll find plenty of content here, as well.

In Desperados III, you are a crew of nefarious outlaws lead by Cooper, a man who is seeking out a powerhouse named Frank to duel and get revenge for his father. There'll be mistakes and misadventures, too. The “gang” is actually a duo to start, and along the way you'll find more tag-along rapscallions to aid in the revenge tale. While self-aware that it's cheesy, it's not very captivating; it's really only there as an excuse to get the characters to a new set piece with new challenges. It's fine.

Every character has varying abilities and they share similar traits, but even those shared traits are personalized. For instance, every character can drag bodies, but some drag them along the ground in a hunched position (slow, but sneaky) while others pick them up and walk (fast, but obvious). Hector can hold two bodies, even run with them, and better yet throw them up a floor or across a gap. They've all got a “distract” option, but while Cooper can toss a coin and get guards to look in a certain direction, Kate can throw a vial of perfume and temporarily blind anybody in the blast radius.
Everybody has a useful specialty, like McCoy with his sniping pistol, Hector with his elite-slaying axe, and Isabelle with her mind-control darts, etc. You've got a destination in mind with a lot of baddies in the way on the lookout for you, so there's plenty of scenarios where you're to utilize everybody's strengths to get through a sticky situation. You can pause the game with Showdown Mode, where time stops and you can commit everybody to a singular action when you press Enter.

I'd say this game is basically a very flashy puzzle that grows in difficulty as times goes on. Honestly, towards the end, it's wildly difficult. I played on Normal and still had levels that took over an hour, some even took two. Hard difficulty increases the number of guards and how fast they spot you once you enter their field of vision, I gave it a go but just found it frustrating. Normal was enough of a challenge for me.
The way the game gets difficult is by making increasingly tough guard patterns. You don't “have” to kill most of them to finish a level, but you'll want to, because fuck them. Towards the end, there are more “Long Coats” (guards only Hector can kill with a melee attack, otherwise they need to be shot, which is loud) and multiple guards are watching other guards. In the beginning, a few people may wander from the group, just begging to be slaughtered. In the end, you'll be throwing Kate's perfume and Cooper's coin in different distraction directions, then killing two other guards linked by Isabelle's dart ability and a third with Hector's axe, then try to move all three of those bodies into bushes before the coin/perfume guys figure out what happened right in front of them. It's a lot.

So I say “puzzle” because while there's definitely multiple ways to approach a situation, you can usually tell what the intended option(s) is/are. You can (and should) beat it all without alerting any reinforcements, this is definitely a stealth game.

Should you like the demo or sound of this, the good news is the game is packed with content. There are sixteen main levels (again, some took me multiple hours, so good luck on Hard) and they all have challenges built into them, like taking a different path or beating it without using someone's abilities, etc. Then there are fourteen challenge levels offered by a mysterious Baron (who is definitely voiced by Geralt, but for some reason I cannot confirm this anywhere). These levels play through the previous campaign levels, only now with minor level variations or character changes. They're considerably harder than normal levels.
There are three DLC missions that are $5 each, or $13 if you buy a season pass, and I think that's highway robbery. This game doesn't need a season pass, first off, and second the content doesn't really justify the price. There's far more value packed into the base game than in these missions, one of which is only a tweaked level from the original campaign.

Desperados III is a very solid game, provided you can handle a lot of trial and error. You will be quicksaving/loading like a madman, as you'll go to kill a guard you think is in the clear but sure enough some dude way too far away barely sees you slicing that throat, therefore changing your whole approach. If you don't have a lot of patience, I think this game isn't for you. If you're looking for something different, this definitely is, and I think beating a level here is an extremely rewarding experience.

Sadly, this game is better remembered than replayed. It Ain't Me intensifies

The Call of Duty with a lot of cool concepts, but is unfortunately still a Call of Duty. I'm glad Cold War brought this world and style back to the series and, I'd say, actually improved on what was established here in Black Ops.

There are few things more frustrating in life than when an idiotic enemy runs past your blind teammates and mag-dumps into you point blank. Even when they maintain a distance, the second they shoot you, Mason's aim goes from “special ops” to “special ed”. Your hip-fire is comically worthless for a guy sent to assassinate Castro.
There are levels tossed in here with no payoff other than explosions; Michael Bay should never be your inspiration.
Quite the Hollywood ensemble, here, Sam Worthington and Ed Harris do a great job. They hired Emmanuelle Chriqui and didn't even use her beautiful likeness? She got paid just to read numbers in a monotone voice, I'm very jealous of that paycheck.
Also, the character of Hudson (Ed Harris) is probably doing more beneficial work for the C.I.A.'s PR image than anything they've ever done before. He's a spook, but he seems like a good person?? Clearly a fictional tale.

Honestly, one of my favorite things about this game is the main menu: it's great for atmosphere to see you're strapped to a chair while a mysterious voice chastises you and demands answers. And should you struggle enough, you'll get up from that chair. Saunter around and play Zork, why don't you. I can't believe I enjoy this as much as I do, but there you have it.

For Call of Duty, this is interesting, but still pretty lousy. You play through an action movie, a somewhat enjoyable one, but not a very good one. And it is still, 13 years later, listed at $40 with $60 of DLC? Thanks for the laugh, Activision!