When playing other video games, you can feel competing interests at play in how the final product was designed and implemented. Fun. Profitability. Mass-appeal. Accessibility. Franchise potential. Maximizing playable hours. DLC opportunities. You name it. Compromises are essential to modern video game development.

When playing Titanfall 2, you get a very convincing sense that nobody considered those interests. No compromises were made. The game has a singular goal, and every element of it satisfies a single question:

"Does it fuck?"

The goal was achieved. This game fucks. Trust me.

Destiny 2 is an excellent video game, sometimes. You already know many of the weaknesses—a drip-feed of bland seasonal content, obnoxious monetization, poor storytelling (despite compelling underlying lore), and the perpetual anxiety of relying on an unreliable studio to hit the highs it is capable of.

The aggravating thing about those shortcomings is that the game is often fantastic. Destiny 2’s core gameplay is so good that every other shooter feels like dogshit. I could write an entire review glowing about the gunplay. The loot is varied and allows for a moderate amount of totally unnecessary buildcrafting. The abilities sandbox demonstrates Bungie’s (natural) mastery of the 30-second gameplay loop. Playing D2 tickles my neurons in just the right way. It’s just plain fun.

Destiny really shines when that gameplay is matched with its best content. D2 raids and dungeons are excellent in every facet. They maximize Destiny’s audiovisual prowess and flex Bungie’s creative muscles to the fullest. They’re great experiences to tackle with randoms, but D2 shines most with friends. I’m grateful to this game for connecting me with a great group of people I never would’ve met otherwise, because it is so bad at connecting players in game that I had to join a clan on Discord.

A kinda-addicting, often-maddening, occasionally-brilliant, always-fun game to play. I’d never recommend it to someone I love, but it’s a great fit for me.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is the biggest game ever made. When you start, the map is a forest, and you go “damn, this game is big.” Then you go through a door to another map and realize, “oh my god, this game is big.” Then you get an achievement saying that after 3 maps and like 40 hours, you only just now completed Act 1, and you go “WHOA, this game BIG.”

Then you realize there’s an entire other world underground,
and an ethereal island,
and a massive city,
and an entire secret dimension (three of them actually).
There are secret zones within secret zones within secret zones, so the absolute highest compliment I can pay this game is to tell you that I have beaten this game four one times now.

Right out the gate, boom, we’re rippin off Zelda. You literally wake up in a tomb (on a spaceship), open a big door (if you count destroying the ship’s hull as a door), and the game says go. No hand holding, no bullshit, just go wherever you want to go. Except don’t fight that bear, and don’t go to the swamp because you’ll die, and don’t follow the quest markers because that’s a fucking scam.

Baldur’s Gate’s gameplay loop is to put an innocuous quest in front of you and say “okay, now imagine if innocuous quests were actually raw as fuck.” Having absolutely no idea of what narrative twist the game will hurl at you next makes exploration feel that much more meaningful. And, visually, this is a world worth exploring. Walking around in this game is like drinking out of a fire hose. There are hundreds upon hundreds of unique ideas which seem impossibly curated and intentional, and the spaces in between are populated with an absurd array of creative enemies and bosses.

Larian is famous for their enemy design and they are really bringing the heat here, not only in sheer quantity but also in terms of moves and variety. Cats is in this game, brain lizards, brain wizards, flying eyeballs, omnipotent devils that sing the monster mash, they got the Harkonnen spider pet to be in this, stretchy ghost man, the list goes on and on and on and you’re saying Bug PLEASE don’t spoil this game for me but I can’t—this game cannot be spoiled because this game does not end, okay? This is Choose Your Own Adventure, The Bible Edition.

But what’s cool about Baldur’s Gate 3 is that for all the effort that has gone into the world and enemies,… you can also select your difficulty at any time so the balancing is irrelevant. 5/5.

anyways yea uh this was my first proper go at a CRPG and I really hated it for the first 40 hours or so but then it clicked and god damn this game is good and I haven’t seen the sun since January tho someone tell my family I miss th—