The west's answer to Earth Defence Force, and man does it live up to the title. A great combination that takes on some of the best aspects of sci-fi to create a uniquely fun satirical take on authoritarians conquering the galaxy.

Visually this game is highly cinematic. There's a large variety of planets each with their own weather effects lit in day and night, with vivid colour schemes and contrast. All of them make for wonderful backdrops for your destruction to rain down on and you'll regularly be recreating the cinematic moments from classic action films just by playing the game. There's a lot of film references and inspirations that are worn on its sleeve and all of it used fantastically, down to the hilarious satirical setting and voice lines peppered throughout. The music adds to this as it's highly atmospheric and while the title theme is the most memorable tune I appreciate the tense 80's synths that fill the space between bot attacks.

I've mentioned this idea before of 'generosity' as a design concept and HD2 encapsulates it perfectly. You have a ship that is bedecked with orbital weapons, heavy weapons to drop down to you, and a hangar loaded with attack ships to call in. You have your standard array of light and medium arms, grenades, and all of these things deploy in style. You start off where most games leave off and while you do have to unlock and upgrade a lot of this, you still feel like a one-man army from the get-go.

The next thing this game gets right is not only giving you a ton of stuff to play with, the vast majority of it has a reason to exist. The two types of enemy have very different units that require very different equipment to take on properly. Bugs come in huge numbers, low armour, and prefer melee while Bots have smaller numbers, heavy armour, and prefer ranged firepower. So while some gear is made obsolete by upgrades, there's still plenty of weapons and stratagems to experiment with along both tactical lines.

The enemies themselves are takes on familiar concepts, Bugs being 40k Tyranids by way of Starship Trooper bugs, and Bots being 80's Terminators by way of 40k Orcs. Even the human faction of helldivers have a 40k space marines by way of Destiny 2 guardians feel. While the comparisons might sound reductive, the focus here is on high quality DNA being used in ways we all wished the respective IP owners would use them. The bugs are a fun and simple introduction to the game's core mechanics and as you increase the difficulty new enemies are introduced that require you to make use of your weapon and movement options, coordinate with your team, and communicate with them.

The bots being so tactically different, heavily armoured, and coordinated make them quite a steep difficulty curve to adapt to as you'll need that late game gear to stand a chance, but once you get to grips with their fighting style and weak points it's every bit as satisfying to shoot down drop ships and bomb their heavily reinforced bunkers. Don't get me wrong, you'll still get curb stomped occasionally but you aren't penalised for lives lost. Quick reinforcements and those powerful stratagems to back you up mean it's easy to bounce back and it makes the victory feel all the more hard fought for.

Missions meanwhile offer something to do besides blasting waves of enemies. You'll have to make your way across the map to various way points, interact with terminals to play mini-games, and adjust the settings on radars, open pipes, and unlock ICBM silos. It's simple stuff but easy to keep in mind amdist the chaos of enemies baring down on you at the same time. That said there can be some tedious wait times for bars to fill, long walks from one side of the map to the other, and at later difficulties you'll want to avoid setting off encounters you don't need to. This can slow things down but it's never long before you're back to combat. Plus while the objectives are a fun 2nd layer of things to do, they can get repetitive at the 30hr mark - thankfully the simplicity leaves plenty of room for new tasks to be implemented down the line.

Speaking of expansion it's also worth addressing the Warbonds. Functionally they're a masterclass in non-abusive ways to implement battle passes. I genuinely never thought I'd see the day! Still part of me feels like for the way it works and what it is, they could have built this points > shop system in any number of ways besides the structure of a battle pass. I almost feel like it sanitises battle passes conceptually and I don't know how to feel about that as I'm quite against the abusive trends they're historically associated with. At the very least HD2 shows the rest of the industry that live service games aren't the problem just the predatory practices that accompany them.

In conclusion HD2 is beautifully presented, designed, put together, and most importantly fun to play. It has its flaws of course, going single player isn't nearly as strong of an experience, there's some bugs which show up from time to time (from visual issues to straight up crashing mid-game), but when it works it easily outshines those blemishes. The studio are rolling out patches with new weapons, vehicles, and balance adjustments regularly so I'm confident this will all get dealt with - not to mention that it's exciting to have a game releasing new content that isn't exclusively paywalled and actually builds on the existing content. Since everyone can have it by default the playerbase isn't weirdly broken up and segregated which is surprisingly rare. In an age of the games industry taking, this is a game that gives a lot back and I respect that.

Koji Igarashi returns to deliver a spiritual successor to the Castlevania series, but the end result is a re-tread of overly familiar territory that doesn't add anything new to the genre he helped create.

Bloodstained feels like a combination of Castlevania and Bayonetta, but plays closer to something like Valkyrie Chronicles or Shantae. The game does some work to set itself apart as a legally distinct IP for the advertising, but spends far more effort on homage and pastiche to make sure you know it's related the moment you start playing. You aren't a vampire, you aren't a dude, and you aren't fighting Dracula, but it is very much a game about gothic era heroes fighting demons using swords and sorcery in a gothic castle. All of the most fundamental aspects of the game are borrowed and recycled in a 'copy my homework' kind of way while failing to deliver anything meaningfully original.

Gameplay is clearly trying to evoke memories of Symphony of the Night but ends up feeling far too clunky and slow by comparison. Symphony was defined by it's flowing movement, attacks without interruption, a variety of interesting mobility options, and a subtle nuance to its simple combat design. Bloodstained meanwhile has attacks that interrupt movement, basic speed improvements locked behind late game equipment, mobility options that are highly circumstantial and inconvenient to use, and a slew of 1 dimensional enemies (some of which feel oddly sci-fi or just don't mesh with the setting at all). As beautiful as the levels are no thought has really gone into how you move through them and enemies are positioned just as arbitrarily, requiring the same attack / dodge / attack pattern until you can just tank and mash.

There's a very shallow streak that runs through bloodstained that leaves every sub-system feeling underdeveloped. Much of the game's design revolves around % drop shards and materials. The shards are unique to each monster and grant a different game mechanic while materials fuel the incredibly tedious crafting system. Both of these are designed with quantity over quality in mind featuring close to 120 shards (about 5 are required to beat the game) and over 120 materials used to craft a staggering number of weapons, items, equipment, and food, but the majority are redundant. In both cases you'll be fine to pick one damaging shard and one type of weapon to serve you, just swapping out to whatever does the most damage at the time. None of the enemies or levels require you to switch tactics or make any meaningful choices leaving all of these 'options' inconsequential.

Much of the game's design, then, feels vestigial. Only the strongest attack really matters, you have 10 types of weapon each with different special attacks to unlock but never a reason to use any of them. You can use magic or melee but neither meaningfully affect gameplay or challenge. Even the feature that makes managing your equipment easier is itself tedious to constantly update as you unlock and change equipment during a playthrough. All of the most practical ability and gear unlocks are saved for the very end of the game when there's barely any game left to use them on, and of course all the late game achievements involve unlocking every weapon, armour, item, and shard which would be fine if looking up items, monsters that drop them, and where they are wasn't also somehow designed to be a slow annoying process of going through 3 different menus each time you want to look something up.

It's stunning to me how the person who created a game as genre defining as Symphony could end up making a game that misses the mark on every aspect that made the original so fun. Bloodstained emulates the visuals, music, and character, level, and combat design of better entries that came before it. It is a game in structure alone and fails to ever really capture a sense of 'fun'. Its features are shallow and there is no interaction between magic, melee, and movement options, nor any enemies that might inspire you to experiment with them. The variety that exists is superficial padding to a bare bones platformer that adds nothing to the genre and does nothing that hasn't been done before. You'd be better off just playing the classics than playing a game that wishes it was them.

Afterbirth+ may have been a bit of a wet fart, but after Antibirth pushed the limits of what a Binding of Isaac expansion could be Ed and the team stood up to the plate and knock Repentance out of the basement.

Here we see a return to the sheer quantity and quality that Afterbirth initially gave us. You have all new environments, atmospheric effects, power ups, item combos, unlockable characters, bosses, more monster variants, challenges, room designs, and more.

While AB+ was clearly meant to be more of a community oriented expansion with lofty goals around the ARG element, it was clear that what people really wanted was the gritty in-game substantive content. An IRL prize that benefits the few hundred people able to take part in it doesn't compare to 5000 new room layouts that everyone can enjoy.

This expansion simply does what made AB so great in the first place - it add more of everything you care about, and makes for a great excuse to get back into the cellar if you haven't visited in a while.