Playtime: 15 Hours
Score: 7/10

A fun little farming game! So recently me and my best friend did Steam Family share with our two accounts so we could bum off of each other's games. While he goes to my library to play Maneater and Cyberpunk 2077, I was like give me that Slime Rancher baby lol But I have been wanting to play this game for a while so it was a nice opportunity to play it.

I'm not a huge fan of farming games but this one caught my attention with its unique mechanics and first person view. It very much has that cozy, relaxing feel that farming games often have and aside from micromanaging your ranch, it's not a very challenging game. You collect slimes and bring them back to your ranch to gather materials from them. You have to put them into corrals, feed them specific types of food and make sure they don't escape. At first it can be a little overwhelming since the game doesn't have a main story to guide you through really and you're kind of just left to figure things out on your own, though the game does have an encyclopedia that gives you information about the different slimes as well the structures and gadgets you can build.

Exploration is another cool aspect as you get a jetpack that lets you get to higher places and you need to find keys in order to access other regions of the planet you're on. It's fun and I liked the artstyle. There is combat but it's very basic and enemies do very little damage to you so it's easy to defeat them or just outright avoid them.

Only thing that disappointed me was the story or lack thereof. There is a story that you learn through reading emails from other characters in the game or finding old messages left to you by the previous ranch owner. It's fine for what it is, but I kind of got bored at the 15 hour mark as farming and building games aren't really my thing like I said and without a structured story campaign to get me through it, it got tedious towards the end. But it's still a unique and fun game to play for a few hours.

All Games I have Played and Reviewed Ranked - https://www.backloggd.com/u/JudgeDredd35/list/all-games-i-have-played-and-reviewed-ranked/

Playtime:10 Hours
Score: 7/10

A decent follow up to the first game or the remake in my case. So I just finished playing the Dead Space Remake earlier this month and I wanted the fun to continue so I decided to replay this game as the last time I played it was over a decade ago, so a replay was in order. So what did I think?

Gameplay wise, this game really excels as many of the improvements they added in the remake of the first game came from this one, so the transition between the two games for me was pretty seamless on that front. You have all the classic weapons from the first game as well as some new ones like the spear gun, seeker rifle and detonator launcher. These were fun to use but I mostly stuck to the classic weapons. I came to the conclusion the other day that Dead Space hands down as the best combat of any survival horror game series, even more than Resident Evil! The amount of options you have from weapons to stasis to kinesis makes for a great combat sandbox to mess around with! While other games will make you feel weak and helpless, Dead Space empowers you and makes you feel confident that you can take on a horde of Necromorphs and boy will the game throw them at you.

The level design was a little disappointing though as it's very linear even when compared to the original first game. While I haven’t played the Callisto Protocol, I did see how people complained about the amount of vents you have to crawl through. Welp, it all started here as you will be crawling through a lot of vents, even with a similar looking animation to the former game. I don’t mind it as much as this game was made in the early 2010s, compared to Callisto, but it still feels very tedious. There's one puzzle room in particular even where you have to crawl through so many vents to get around that I just question why? If the doors were just open you could cut that puzzle time down in half lol

They introduce a couple of new enemy types such as the babies and kid necromorphs which can be annoying as well as the enemies that spit at you which makes your movement slower. Hate those guys! While these enemies can be scary at first, the horror does lose its luster after a while. The beginning areas were creepy indeed with one moment that shook me purely from the sound design. When I was walking through the hotel section, down the corridors, I heard the sound of a baby crying in one of the rooms that I couldn’t get into. It just freaked me out as I wondered if it was a necromorph baby or a normal baby and if so, where are the parents and is there anything inside the room with them? Beyond that though there wasn’t much scares to be had in this game other than some really nasty gore.

The final two chapters were awful though as you're just running away from a regenerator necromorph, as well as an army of others trying to stop you. I hated that section as a kid and I hated it now. The final boss was also disappointing from both a gameplay perspective and a narrative one. About the only challenge in it is not getting touched by the boss as they can one hit kill you, and avoiding the minions.

As for the story, it was very disappointing for me personally. I like Isaac and the one new character named Ellie, but beyond that I just found the other characters to be very annoying and forgettable.The bad guy was just the usual wannabe cult leader, and the dead girlfriend story I felt concluded great in the first game, but it felt really dragged out here. And there's just been so many horror games that have used the dead girlfriend/wife trope including the original Dead Space and that did it better. After a while I just stopped caring and I just wanted to finish the game.

Overall, it's an alright sequel. I remember loving this game as a kid and while it holds up from a gameplay perspective, it doesn’t in most other areas for me personally. Still glad I replayed it though.

All Games I have Played and Reviewed Ranked - https://www.backloggd.com/u/JudgeDredd35/list/all-games-i-have-played-and-reviewed-ranked/