This game honestly kind of came at the perfect time for me a lot like Mario 3D World. I was in a pretty dark place and i just played this game for a solid week. The gameplay is so simple but so fun. you just roll around as different fish in little fish bowls with each fish having different abilities letting you traverse the various beautifully designed levels and solve fun puzzles.

This game has a very special place in my heart for helping me get through one of my darkest hours. Highly recommend :)

Ico is probably one of the most forgotten games in history. Being one of the first graphical powerhouses for the PS2, it proved that you don’t need a complex story and characters to have a good game. All you know is that you are a boy named Ico who is trying to save a girl named Yorda from her evil mother queen and escape from the castle. You enter as a captured prisoner because you have horns. You then escape and find Yorda along the way. What made Ico such a big deal was that you led her around manually by holding R1. This forced you to become attached to her, and they rarely spoke.

This game was way ahead of its time. That’s probably why people passed it by for Jak & Daxter and other PS2 games at the time. The game consists of some pretty cleverly designed puzzles that involve pulling switches, climbing, cutting ropes, and swinging on chains. You also push and pull the occasional block. The level design is really well done, but there were a few obscure puzzles like jumping off of a chain to knock a bridge down. This is completely against the game’s mechanics so you would never know to do this. Leading Yorda around sounds annoying, but it prevents you from having to rely on the already shoddy AI. The game mechanics work well enough in design but they are sloppy and frustrating to deal with.

When you jump Ico tends to clip into ledges and ladders making you have to slightly adjust him until he latches on. If you press the analog stick just slightly and jump he will jump 20 feet causing you to jump off ledges or fall down to your death. There’s just so much bad collision detection and the animations are janky and not well done. When you drag Yorda around her arm looks like a flopping noodle that can go through her body. I know this was originally designed for PS1 before the game jumped ship to PS2…but still. There are other mechanics like setting your sword down to pick up a giant stick, light it on fire, then set off a bomb. Sometimes you have to toss these before they blow you up. Fun game mechanics and all but they repeated through the entire game making you be grateful for the short length (just about 4 hours).

A lot of times I didn’t know where to go because the middle of the game has two areas that are identical, but just slightly different. The constant backtracking can confuse you requiring a walkthrough. There are no boss battles to speak of except the final boss, but the combat is so frustrating and annoying. Ico swings his sword around aimlessly and you can’t move while doing so. The AI jumps away as soon as you run after it so if you get stuck in a three hit combo you get knocked down and Yorda gets dragged away. You can’t die in this game during combat, but if Yorda gets dragged underground you’re done. You can pull her out of the hole, but sometimes a shadow creature will hit you and knock you back then you have to suffer the long animation of getting up. A lot of games had these animations (The Mark of Kri) and I don’t know why. It breaks the fluidity of everything. Once you get the hidden mace in the game combat is really easy, but you still get annoyed by the creatures constantly backing up when you approach.

The graphics look great with the new HD upgrade, but even back then they were amazing. A lot of textures have been slightly upscaled and some bloom and HDR has been added for better lighting. You can still notice the game’s age during up close shots of areas. Textures are muddy and so blurry they don’t even look like what they are representing. The main thing is that you can pan the camera around more now that the resolution has been bumped up making navigation easier. This is how you do HD upgrades right.

Overall, Ico is a great game, but the dated mechanics really show their age. If you can look past all this you are in for a great, albeit short, game but don’t expect engaging characters or a complex story. There are 4 cutscenes in the whole game, but this is about the journey and not the story.

I passed on inFamous back when it came out for many reasons. Open-world games were being pushed hard in the late 2000s and none of them were unique or interesting to explore. It was an excuse to add filler, and repetitive missions, and most of them just felt lifeless and empty. inFamous is no exception, but it's not a bad game. Very few games could capture a fun open-world like Grand Theft Auto or Assassin's Creed, but at least Sucker Punch tried. The protagonist is a typical bald generic white male character with no personality. Cole McGrath is not a likable character in this game and he and all others are entirely forgettable. Cookie-cutter dialog to just barely get the story across. There's no actual personality put into any of the characters. The voice acting isn't bad, just not personable. The game focuses on a good vs evil aspect as this is supposed to be an original superhero game, but it's binary. There's nothing organic about it and it feels completely forced. Save the citizens by healing them or leaving them be, help a citizen fight off attackers or steal their shards and let them die. It's a contrived concept that was done to death at the time and the game doesn't have the depth of let's say Mass Effect to allow a natural progression of good or evil.

Poorly implemented morality system aside, the game does do action and combat well. Your main power is a lightning bolt that you can shoot like a machine gun at enemies. This plays out like a third-person shooter and feels pretty good. Over time Cole gains more powers via underground generators that end up becoming pretty repetitive missions. You are in a dark sewer with various platforms and it's just a training ground for using the new ability you acquired. Various abilities include a missile, shield, ground pound, force blast, sniper blast, and a few others. They are quite useful and feel good to use too. You do have an energy meter that requires recharging via anything that stores electricity. Walk up to a car, lamp post, electrical box, AC unit, etc. and you can absorb its power. Each item has different amounts of stored energy, but this will also heal you.

Enemies come in the forms of more genericness. Boring dudes wearing gas masks, trash bags, or red jackets all using machine guns or rocket launchers. There's an occasional heavy enemy that's a bit more unique, but there are three factions in the game - one on each island - and there are just variations of the same type. What gets frustrating about the combat is some times there are just too many enemies thrown at you. This can become especially annoying during missions in which you have to protect something and said object gets damaged super fast. You have to really be accurate with your aim, make sure an energy source is nearby, and utilize more area of effect powers first. Later on, you get a massive lightning storm ability that can be controlled with the Six-Axis motion and that's useful for massive groups or vehicles. So, there isn't too much strategy needed, but just in making sure you don't die by prioritizing large groups first.

There really aren't any boss fights in the game outside of maybe three including the end boss. There are about 40 main missions and most are rotated mission types. Protect this object, destroy this group of enemies, escort this person, destroy these vehicles, climb this large structure, etc. Side missions make up the bulk of the game and reward you XP for leveling up your powers, but it's the same recycled stuff and there are so damn many of them. My God, there are at least 30 on each island. These are all the same 8-10 types of missions similar to main missions recycled ad nauseum. You're either protecting something, killing something, or escorting something and it's fine at first, but if you want to unlock Trophies this will test your resolve. I did end up finishing all side quests and most of the dead drops.

You can upgrade your energy meter by adding blips by finding blast shards, but these are spread out randomly and there's no way to track them. Dead drops are tracked via pinging on your radar and aren't too hard to find, but this leads me to the biggest quality of life issues. There's no fast travel. Running around in this boring and lifeless world is bad enough, but it can take five or more minutes to get from one island to the next. You can ride power lines, but they are broken up and don't all connect around the islands. This means running around on foot, but when I say lifeless I mean it. Pedestrians just wander around doing nothing and are just animations filling the world. Cars just drive in straight lines and don't react to you. They just stop on a dime if you walk past them. The world is gray and brown and dull to look at despite how decent the visuals are on a technical level. There are no buildings to enter, no shops, and nothing that can be destroyed. It's a very static world.

With that said, inFamous is only worth playing if you feel you need to start the series or want an older open-world game to play. The controls are great, and the gameplay itself is solid, but many quality of life improvements would have been nice and a more fun world to be in. The story feels too binary and in itself isn't anything interesting or memorable. The characters are lifeless and generic and the quests get repetitive and annoyingly hard quickly. That doesn't mean the game is bad, but just needs lots of improvements in the sequel. Cole's powers are fun to use and the parkour and overall combat gameplay work well. There are too many side quests, it's hard to find blast shards, and I did run into come crashes and glitches here and there.