It’s really a shame that reactions to Stellar Blade are more focused on the fanservice or the coomer reactions. You got one group of people who just focus on the fanservice and hail the game to be the savior of sexualized women in gaming, and then you got the other group who view the game in a negative light because of the first group. And you know what? I can’t even blame them because the first group is really insufferable.

I don't care in the slightest about Stellar Blade having a "sexy" protagonist. I saw a trailer for it once and was immediately interested, because of how fun and unique it looked.

But coomers saw the female Protagonist’s butt and were obnoxious about it ever since. Like come on, it’s bottom of the barrel fanservice you’re going all crazy for. Literally everything I've seen about this game online is people with underaged anime character avatars cream their pants over how this game is "destroying wokeness" or whatever. Nothing against Eve, because she is really pretty and I actually really like her, but she looks like every female character in every korean MMO ever made. It's like people going to war over white bread. Apparently, these guys are now whining about censorship, signing petitions, and making videos of themselves (they look about as you'd expect) about why their cause matters lmao. These pathetic gamerbros will never not be incredibly annoying and cringe to me.

Because Stellar Blade is just so much more. Picture all those apocalyptic gachas and their really great world-building, fantastic atmosphere but really cheap and dull (chibi) gameplay, then amp it up to AAA levels – that's the magic of Stellar Blade.

The environments are beautifully crafted and the atmospheric soundtrack is another aspect I deeply appreciate and thoroughly enjoyed in this game. There's nothing quite like losing yourself in a captivating melody as you journey through vast, lonely landscapes and cities. Just like Nier, Stellar Blade really nailed its soundtrack.

The gameplay is just so much fun and showcases an exceptional level of refinement and polish. Every movement, dodge and parry hit the mark perfectly. The more skills you unlock, the cooler and more fun the combat gets. There's never a dull moment - the gameplay remains consistently exciting and stylish from start to finish.

I found the plot to be really intriguing, and I really enjoyed uncovering plenty of secrets and snippets of lore. But what really surprised me were the sidequests. Sure, some were usual filler content, but most served to make the world feel alive and deepened the lore. Completing them was enjoyable, they never felt like a chore. So good job there.

Oh, and I'm pleasantly surprised by Eve! Initially, I expected her to be the typical "waifu" (ugh, I hate that word), merely there for visual appeal with little personality beyond conforming to generic “anime girl” tropes. Most of these tropes revolve around being “innocent”, "naive" or a "sweet flower girl." But Eve defies those expectations, and I couldn't be happier about it.

Even though Stellar Blade took huge inspiration from Nier and other apocalyptic gacha games, it's still an extremely unique and fun game that everyone should give a chance. Don't listen to the manchildren throwing tantrums or all the buzz about the “fanservice," which is honestly vastly overexaggerated due to some optional skins. Honestly, aside from the optional skins, there are absolutely no horny aspects present in the game.

There are just so many little touches to the point where you can tell the developers really cared about making this game great, and they succeeded. Stellar Blade is simply a beautiful game.

Final Fantasy XVI definitely exceeded my expectations and I couldn't be happier about it. I like how the game falsely leads you to believe it's going to be yet another revenge narrative but it swerves into oppression and revolution after they solve that issue. Some people might be disappointed if they go in expecting a complex political thriller, but what we get instead is a compelling narrative revolving around destroying a divine foundation and return mankind its freedom.

I also really like what they did with Clive. He is actually not half as edgy or bloodthirsty as I expected him to be. He never dives into blind murder territory, so excellent choice. Sadly, the same cannot be said about Jill. Don't get me wrong, I like her and was really hype for her after her arc, because I feel we learn why she was so muted before and placed priority on Clive's emotional needs over her own. But after her revenge they slipped her back into the role of Clive's love interest and echo of kindness. I hoped to see her be more of her own character than Clive's emotional crutch, so I'm bummed they didn't deliver on Jill's potential. Seeing strong female characters reduced to that is just a waste and a huge pet peeve of mine.

But overall, I'm glad I got to experience a highly immersive, mature and dark Final Fantasy game filled with phenomenal visuals, stunning cinematics, an immaculate soundtrack and a simplified but fun DMC like action gameplay featuring epic Eikon fights. You could tell the developers really cared about making this game great, which they did.

On a sidenote, it's interesting to see people try to define what a "true Final Fantasy" game is, because I feel like it's a franchise that has recreated itself on multiple occasions. There are some common threads of course, but gameplay style, plot style, etc. seem to always have morphed.

An Ode to Neon White:

Oh Neon White
Your levels are well designed and controls are tight
Before you I was never into speedrunning much
But now I've went and done every Hell Rush

Oh Neon White
Last summer all I did was play you into the night
Sweating in my chair at 37 degrees, hunched up to my knees
Replaying the first level to beat my friend's record
Accidentally entering the Top 50 world leaderboard

Oh Neon White
Your aesthetics are on point, character art is a delight
There's not much I can fault you for, if I'm to be polite
You're the game of 2022 as far as I can see
Oh and by the way, thanks for the Machine Girl LP

But Oh Neon White
Your story and dialogue could be better
I just wish it wasn't written by Twitter

Contrary to 90% of the people reviewing this game, I have actually PLAYED it. As of writing this, I've got around 15 hours of time played on this game, so I feel like I have some legitimate grounds to review it. I'll definitely play it more and probably enjoy it with my boys if/when they eventually get it. With that being said, the best way to review this game is sadly (and predictably, might I add)... Mid. The fact that this game has mostly positive reviews is depressing to me, because this is literally Generic: the Game.

I had very low expectations for this game. Which is funny because when the first gameplay trailer came out, I was beyond excited. An Arkham game with Batman's allies? I GET TO PLAY NIGHTWING? THE DICK GRAYSON? That was enough to warrant a purchase for me in itself, but I suppose it was wishful thinking that this game would play like the free-flow combat & traversal oriented Arkham games. When the second gameplay trailer came out, after more than a year, everyone was very disappointed and for good reasons! The gameplay looked very basic and barebones, with no added flairs or cool niches. It was the bread and butter system of a fighting game but with a little butter and burnt toast. Light attacks, heavy attacks, a dodge and a special ability. Woohoo! Innovative! Needless to say, I (and many, many others) was very let down. And with less than half a year left for the game to come out, our wallets began to shake in anticipation of the inevitable disappointment that Gotham Knights would be. And wouldn't you know it, it got delayed! And also cancelled on PS4 and Xbox One which in all honesty, I think no one was expecting. The game looked like a mid-level PS4 game, and yet it was getting canned?

I suppose that, to give WB Montreàl some credit, they did manage to patch up the terrible aftertaste that people had after all of these happenings by showing off cosmetics, story missions, concept art and open world traversal in a way more in-depth way. But no real fixes were done in that time. Gotham Knights has come out and, to no one's surprise, it is an average game at best. In the moments where the game TRULY shines, it's a 7 out of 10. But when it's at its worst, and it happens way too frequently, it basks in it. I remember when people used to call it a mobile game as a joke and while I sorta agreed, I figured it was just that. A joke. But it was way more relevant than I would have ever thought.

Let's start with the most controversial thing about this game that's behind the reason so many people review-bombed it. The performance. A few weeks prior to the release, some folks leaked that the game was locked at 30FPS on console and it not only had NO performance mode, but it also ran horribly. So many people cancelled their pre-order and cursed at WB Montreàl for keeping it a secret and hey, I don't blame them. Having seen how it performs on PS5 and Xbox, I am actually shocked by how terrible console gamers have it. But personally, while I did feel it was scummy to not reveal this up until the last moment, I felt no real impact since I was gonna play it on PC. But boy, oh boy. Now I understand how console players feel!

I'd say my PC is very good. I can run most titles, including recent ones, at 60+FPS with high settings at 1080p. So imagine my surprise when, while playing Gotham Knights for the first time, it ran like absolute dogshit. I'm not kidding when I say that I dipped into the 20FPS range during some sections even while playing on medium settings. The game is horribly optimized and sure, it'll probably be fixed in the future, but that is something I'll talk about later on. As of now, the performance is inexcusable. The game runs like ass and unless you have the hefitest gaming rig on the planet, you'll have a hard time running it at a stable 60FPS with ultra settings. I suppose that's the one thing this game and Arkham Knight have in common!

But hey, I'm not one to only look at the graphics. My priority has always been performance and, after tweaking a lot of the settings, I managed to get stable frames and some pretty good fidelity nonetheless. But when the performance problems aren't the main issue, the game itself is.

Listen, I'm a huge fan of both the Arkham saga and classic beat-em-ups, even if their mechanics are very outdated. Hell, I've enjoyed TMNT: Out of The Shadows way more than I'd like to admit and this game has basically the same gameplay. But I believe that's the problem. If 10 years ago, a game like that with a very small budget was acceptable, it is utterly disrespectful for a modern game with a huge budget to have those same mechanics (sometimes, even less refined) and lame problems. I appreciate that the developers wanted to distance themselves from the Arkham games in a way that would make it feel like they were similar but not set in the same universe. But this is NOT the way you do it. They removed the "free-flow" part of free-flow combat by having your character constantly dance and jump around from target to target like a drunken ballerina, barely even hitting anything because the lock-on is incredibly awful, and worst of all they took away the counter button. I understand that every game's combat does that "counter+spam attack" thing nowadays but it is incredibly jarring to have a game about the Bat-verse without its signature combat. I mean, Arkham games invented it for christ's sake!

Marvel's Spider-Man has the same base mechanics that this game has, yet I have a blast playing that. Why? Because it's polished and fluid. Gotham Knights has characters move very stiffly and awkwardly from target to target, with a dedicated dodge button that is very unresponsive at times and rarely (if ever) flows well into combat. I played Nightwing, one of my favorite superheroes and like 90% of the reason why I even bought this piece of shit, who's arguably the most athletic of the bunch but I STILL felt so janky when doing virtually anything! Even the fortnite glider, as goofy as it looks, isn't that bad compared to the combat itself. And you know, I wouldn't be so angry for this if it wasn't the MAIN GAMEPLAY MECHANIC. If the system your whole game is based on is buggy, underwhelming and unfun then you kinda have it coming for the game to be so heavily criticized. I mean, this is the ONE thing they had to get right! Anything, from the graphics to the story, would have been excused if the combat was somewhat engaging. And yet, here we are, with the upteenth game of this calibre to be a light attack spam-fest. When this game was compared to Marvel's Avengers, I believed it was just the usual "people being harsh" thing. But as GOD IS MY WITNESS, saying that shit is disrespectful to Marvel's Avengers. I mean it. At the very least, Marvel's Avengers had variety with a few abilities and a wide range of characters. This game has 4 characters which basically all play the same, as much as I'd want to let the placebo effect tell me that they're super different, and nothing is done to reinvigorate the formula that so many games have used even going as far back as the freakin' PS2.

It's disappointing that a game which heavily relied on how varied and different each character would feel ended up being so shallow. Sure, Red Hood is a damage-focused tank (whatever that means), Robin is an agility focused attacker, Bat-Girl is a hacking focused attacker and Nightwing is a damage-focused support but at the end of the day you're still just spamming light attack and dodging. There is no quirk or interesting playstyle change to any of them. Take for example something like inFamous Second Son. Each superpower, while sharing the same buttons, plays heavily differently and it feels like a "class" more than anything. So while I did, even if very little, somewhat enjoy the combat I can't honestly recommend buying the game if you like action games. It's repetitive and the punches don't feel satisfying, even if there IS a health-bar/level remover in the options. The enemies are damage sponges and it takes no real skill to win. In Arkham Knight, players had so many options to express their skills through gadgets, combos, dodges and counters. Here, you probably wouldn't be able to tell a new player from a seasoned vet.

I've ranted enough about the combat. Let's talk about the traversal.

Oh boy. Okay. It's not HORRIBLE. It's passable. I suppose. The momentum is pretty much non-existant (which is hilarious to me because at least 3 out 4 characters are the most agile characters in the whole Bat-verse) until you get further updates but I have to admit that the different batcycles were pretty cool and fun. It was a nice addition and I enjoyed it quite a bit. The grappling hook was almost better than Arkham Knight, in my opinion, and it was the only thing that actually felt somewhat fast. I wouldn't play it just to have fun traversing around Gotham though, unlike Arkham Knight and other superhero games like Marvel's Spider-Man.

Also, I have to talk about this. Okay. The suits were amazing. Almost all of them were masterpieces. But... HOLY FUCKING SHIT HOW IS THE HUD THIS BAD?! IT'S 2022 AND WE STILL HAVE THESE CONFUSING, CLUTTERED AND MOBILE GAME-ESQUE HUDs?! I swear, the mobile game thing was a joke guys! You didn't have to go and make the HUD and menus ACTUALLY look like a P2W something something Injustice 2 mobile game. The menus are confusing and pretty ugly, but I'd be okay with it if it wasn't for the god-awful RPG elements that clutter the whole screen. Rant over. Good god fuck the HUD and menus. All my homies hate the HUD and menus.

Let's talk about the story. As of now, no DLCs/sequels have been announced so I'll take the story for what it is.

The story is... Okay. It's not bad, I admittedly enjoyed it, if a little bit predictable, and I thought it felt very serviceable to the game itself. It offers a very comic book-y story with a few twists and a lot of cameos that I enjoyed. Clayface is a great rendition of the character and it's definitely the best we've seen so far. I also thought Harley Quinn was uh... Interesting, I suppose. Mr. Freeze was also a highlight, but in all honesty Freeze is a great character by itself so it's no surprise. I also thought all of the Knights were characterized very well and I really loved them all. Dick, who of course was the one I looked forward to the most, was very very well written and coherent with his comic counterpart and there were a few nods to the 90s run that made me smile. He was definitely (and obviously) my favorite character but that doesn't take away from how great Robin and Bat-Girl also were. I enjoyed that they included the fact that Barbara was shot in the spine in the past and the way she was back in action was explained pretty well and realistically. I also loved how much Tim was clearly the most affected by the story because of his attachment to the Bat-Family and his youthful optimism. Red Hood on the other hand... Yeah, Jason was okay-ish. His main character trait was "yo did you know I died?" and I FELT that there was gonna be so much more to say but it never came. He was slightly two-dimensional. Very, very slightly. And so, this all leads to... The Court of Owls. Or might I call them the Court of Jesters because they were absolute clowns the whole game. I don't think we'll ever see a good and/or faithful adaptation of these scary, mysterious and powerful characters at this point. The whole game, my hopes kept getting crushed more and more as I realized that they were simply "the guys you have to beat" and rarely, if EVER, were they a threat. Especially during the half-way twist that just kinda made me go "Aww... Really?". I get it, they're hard to get right and I'm not one to cry about things not being comic accurate all the time, but MAN AT LEAST FOR ONCE I'D ENJOY SOMEONE GETTING THEM RIGHT! But alas, it is what it is, and the final reveals/boss sections kinda made me roll my eyes at how corny and predictable they were. Nonetheless, I can't condemn the story for what it is. It's not bad, it's just very... Vanilla. It doesn't take any risks and it just goes from Point A to Point B. Something I very much appreciated, though, was the fact that depending on which character you were playing as, you'd have different dialogues and cutscenes. That definitely makes the game a bit more replayable and I like that a lot.

I haven't been able to play COOP yet but I'm not expecting too much out of it. I'm sure it's fun but that's kinda expected, isn't it? Also, I still don't understand why they decided to make it 2-player only. What sane person makes a game whose whole gimmick is that it's a multiplayer Batman game with 4 majorly different protagonists and thinks "yeah no we should make it 2-player max".

The game feels like the developers constantly saying "look guys! We're different!" but with its constant fear of being like everyone else, it forgets that at its core, it's supposed to be fun. No counter button, no free-flow, no interesting traversal mechanics, no bold storylines, no 4-player COOP, no Live-Service aspect (which I swear to god was supposed to be the original plan but it got scrapped after the failure of Marvel's Avengers) and absolutely no real redeeming qualities turned this game from a potential GOAT to a total flop. And sure, many people are saying to wait and that it'll eventually get better, but isn't that getting tiring? Is it just me? I feel like every game that comes out is bad, unfun or underwhelming and it "eventually" gets patched and fixed but is that what we really want? Games are supposed to come out in finished fucking form. I don't care that 2 years after its release, Cyberpunk is slightly better. It's shit, it was shit and it will always be shit simply because of how dishonest, disingenuous and straight up careless the developers behaved. They announced a game they couldn't finish and eventually started to finish it AFTER everyone had already paid for it. It's disgusting and 99% of games do this now. Off the top of my head I can think of numerous! Fallout 76, Cyberpunk 2077, Dying Light 2, No Man's Sky, Mass Effect Andromeda, Marvel's Avengers, Mirror's Edge Catalyst, any recent Halo game. It's shitty and disgusting to take advantage of the hype community that generates after an announcement and it legitimately scams the paying customers.

Please vote with your money and don't pay for a game that is underwhelming on release. It's only gonna push more companies to do this exact practice and take advantage of consumers.

Overall, Gotham Knights is okay. It's a game that is not gonna be remembered in 10 years time and it's not a revolutionary title. Its main quirk was executed in a barebones way and while the characters are well-written, this is a videogame and not a movie so it's not excused. I suppose as of now, we can't know what the future of this game will be. But so far, I doubt the developers are gonna make bank on it.

So I'll leave it with a statement. In Batman Arkham Asylum, I became the Batman. In Arkham Knight, I became Joker. In Under The Red Hood, I became Red Hood. In Gotham Knights, I became disappointed.

Wow this game is incredibly mediocre.

The atmosphere is pretty cool, the cat is really cute and you get to do cute things as the cat. That's where the good parts end.

Almost 30 bucks for a 4 hour experience is stupidly expensive. The story in this game is really boring and not very engaging, the actual gameplay is just... okay. I didn't think just walking around was too bad, but the narrative was mediocre, the characters felt kind of cliché and as the game went on it became more and more boring and predictable.

Chapter 4 and 10 might be my favourites simply because they're the only ones where you actually get to do things. Last part of Chapter 10 is probably one of my least favourite parts though.

Overall, okay game. Not a bad experience, not worth the price tag. I enjoyed the first parts of it quite a bit but the enjoyment heavily deteriorated especially during the last parts of the game and the predictable ending was just a huge let-down.

I was really excited to finally play DNF Duel after months of seeing really good footage of it and, well, it's certainly flashy! It looks gorgeous!

It's also my fighting game nightmare scenario. Huge moves freely available on almost every character, massive strings and loops that don't amount to much more than wasting the time of the recipient, and utterly bare defence mechanics. It's the dream game for people who only use training mode to get longer and longer combos and if you like that, then DNF Duel is for you. But it surely isn't for me. What a damn shame.