More of my favorite game of 2022, but honestly even adding more of what I could have wanted.

The towers have really good challenging platforming, the three characters are fun to play around with, the 40ish new songs are excellent, the mini bosses actually take effort to beat and ones that were gimmicks are now more traditional fights, the new final boss is kino (I still prefer the og The End fight a bit tho, it’s much better than Supreme though), and seeing all the soul and effort put forth and Sonic being his 2000s rawkino self again has brought me more joy than very few other things have. Frankly just playing the game, walking around the map exploring going from objective to objective with the movement system, blending spindashes and boosts and using the environment and characters' movesets to cheese different objectives and obstacle courses best I could was just such a fucking blast.

But its time to cover the part of the update that I feel the most strongly about, the cyberspace stages are legit some of the best fucking 3D sonic levels ever imho. They so excellently test your platforming skills by being more challenging than the base game stages, they have an absolute metric fuckload of different paths to take, good usage of the spindash will let you soar through the air like its an SA1 stage, the music is incredible, and there's a shitload of collectibles and objectives in every stage that encourage replayability, and there's also next to no 2D sections at all (I dont have a huge problem with 2D stuff personally but fans have desperately wanted thsi). This is everything that people have been asking for out of 3D Sonic stages and nobody's talking about it, its such a shame. This is what I need more of in the future of Sonic, if they take this level design ethos into the next Sonic game, we could have some of the best Sonic platforming we've ever seen.

There’s some issues, increasing Knux’s speed too much makes climbing challenges way too finicky, and the boss rush near the end is goofy and should’ve been an optional thing, there's definitely some bugs like jump deceleration being decreased affecting the other three characters negatively, etc

But if you like Frontiers it’s more Frontiers, and I fucking love Frontiers and I certainly enjoyed having more of it.

This game is peak late 2000s edge rawkino ubersoul. Its an extremely fun superpowered open world game which, to this date, still feels fucking incredible to control. A decade+ later and this is still one of the best feeling open world games to just traverse and explore, with Alex's different mutated abilities, parkour and gliding allowing for seamless and really damn good feeling movement. Being able to just wallrun up damn near anything and the flow state presented from chaining jumps, airdashes and glides together is something that few open world games have ever really gotten close to, maybe only really Insomniac's Spider-Man has made open world movement feel as good.

The game is definitely a little rough around the edges though. Its a little buggy, some missions are definitely super rough, and the last two bosses suck mega ass, but the core gameplay experience of causing carnage is just super satisfying to the point of being able to carry the game through even its weakest moments.

I love how good superhero stories can be when you give a shit about good storytelling.

Anyways, very solid continuation of the Insomniac Spider-Man storyline, that shows Miles coming into his own. Miles himself is just such an endearing and fun character that I've really come to love as time goes on, who's helped rekindle my appreciation of superhero stories in general, and this game is yet another part of weaving that appreciation together.

While the gameplay isn't anything super noteworthy, it's still the same Spider-Man experience offered by the last Insomniac game and it's still damn fun. The stealth has actually been marginally improved via Miles' specific stealth mechanics such as the Invisibility Cloaking. Very excited to see how Spider-Man 2 continues after this.

A very solid 3D platformer overall, but not one I had any strong attachments or opinions on.

I think some of the levels with a large focus on supercharge jumps could get hella annoying, and the nature of this game's collectathon nature could lead to you missing a single gem somewhere in the level which leads to multiple minutes of scouring through it just to find out that Sparx just barely missed collecting one or something, which can lead to the game feeling like it has rather slow pacing at points.

But overall its a decently tightly designed collectathon with solid mechanics, and this remaster gives absolutely stunning visuals.

An interesting mix of extreme highs and intense lows. The core combat system is pure, simple, but oh so incredibly satisfying. The game absolutely makes you feel like you're playing as Guts. Guts' sword swings feel absolutely incredible, with an intense, weighty feel, excellent SFX and feedback, a decent variety of moves to utilize, and incredible momentum and feel on every swipe, allowing you to use the momentum of the blade to bring yourself across the battlefield to help trim down the enemies. It's genuinely impressive how well they got the game feel down. The boss battles are also rock solid, with fun movesets with solid tells that make landing hits inbetween counters and blocks oh so satisfying. The game also animates like a dream, with incredibly detailed and fluid animations for both standard combat animations, but also the more cinematic attacks and counters in battle. The game is also rather technically impressive for the time as well, it includes a detailed dismemberment system when fighting the bosses that when combined with the excellent game-feel and fluid animations is just a blast to tear enemies to pieces in. The game also has a solid soundtrack, a good and faithful retelling of the Millennium arc with some interesting and non-intrusive additions, and is aesthetically pleasing overall.

However, to counteract those staggering highs, the game has some extremely strong faults. The level design sucks ass, with levels dragging on way, wayyyyy too long, and being way too meandering with long, extensive hallways and the majority of levels being semi-mazes with long straight paths from point to point making exploration flat out not fun. Several levels just flat out can be boring as shit to play, and when they drag on so long it can get borderline agonizing. The combat, while stellar, can also get extremely repetitive, as its the majority of what you'll be doing in the stages, as the game CONSTANTLY shits enemies out at you. They literally ceaselessly spawn 24/7 the entire time you explore, and when you're running across long, winding maze hallways as 26 quadrillion enemies spawn and chase you the entire time, it gets a bit repetitious.

I still can barely believe that it's actually here and I've actually completed it, 10 whole fucking years.

What I especially can't believe is just how absolutely incredible this game is. Pikmin 4 is an absolute masterpiece and is probably my choice alongside Forgotten Land of my favorite game on the Switch.

Pikmin 4 is largely a sequel tp Pikmin 2 in terms of gameplay, and anybody who knows me knows that Pikmin 2 is one of my favorite games ever made. While 4 doesn't beat out 2 in my hearts of hearts, I accepted years ago that no Pikmin product would ever scratch the itch that 2 does for me. 4 is an easy second favorite Pikmin game for me though, and when every Pikmin game lands in my top 30 games that's some stiff competition.

I could talk about this game for ages, I could go into the nitty gritty about every little thing it did that I loved and adored and the few small issues I have with it, but I simply have too much to say in such a short, simple review. This game makes me more happy than I could fully explain in a text review, all I can do is ask that you play it and give it a shot yourself. If we can get another Pikmin game of this quality again within 5 years instead of 10 this time I would really appreciate it.

Game of the fucking year man.

I've been playing it about daily since I first installed it, and really its nothing special, just a perfectly competent walking app that makes a game with rewards for getting up, going outside and walking around. I get a good amount of physical activity and walking in from my dogs and my job, so it's nice to see the little Pikmin running around and have little tasks to send them on, it helps set off my ADHD pretty nice, but its a very basic game with not much to care about if you're not a Pikmin fan really.

I do have one major detractor in that the game very frequently has audio glitches for me, with music tracks overlapping and playing over one another making a complete audio mess to the otherwise simple, cute music the game has. I've had 3-4 tracks overlayed at once in the past and its quite obnoxious. I also had some visual bugs that were frequent a few weeks back, but they seem to have been patched out as they haven't occurred in the past two weeks for me.

Still a WarioWare game so its still rather soulful and the basic experience is still fun overall, but you can definitely feel that this is the weakest game in the series. I feel like the game's main mechanic actively holds it back, as instead of the endless possibilities presented by all prior games where anything goes, every character having a specific way to play forces the microgames to be designed in very similar ways and limits what can be done.

Definitely one of the better Switch era Mario spinoffs, but still kinda mid.