GTA 4 was once hailed as the pinnacle of technical achievement in open world design. A richly detailed city and a focus on gritty realism to sell the cynical and satirical life of Niko Bellic and others in the “land of opportunity.” But what happens when the standards of realism is elevated, when the technical achievement is thoroughly outmatched by the ever shifting rat race to make the biggest most detailed game? What happens when making your protagonist bluntly state the themes of the game is not enough? As you might have guessed, I don’t think the once pinnacle of open world games is all that impressive anymore.

Recently I had finished Red Dead 2 and despite sorely lacking in combat depth, I was thoroughly enraptured by its slow methodical approach to gameplay and the quaint humanity afforded to its wide cast of characters. I remembered below the satirical edge of GTA, the 4th entry attempted something similar so jumped back in to see how it held up.

What caught my eye immediately on starting was the brown and grey visual style it went for in the city. I can’t say that it was very appealing but I wanted to see if it was justified by the narrative. I tried making excuses for it, maybe they wanted to represent Niko’s humble start among Liberty City’s lowlife, or maybe it related to the themes of the game about how despite leaving his eastern European roots this city was the same with old and new vices.
But I fear it just doesn’t work. Moments of sincerity are few and far between and the darker tone are used as little more than cynical sarcasm. The story and characters are far too wacky, many nothing more than a caricature to justify the grim tone. When you’re driving with various flavors of clowns as companions, frequently crashing into cars and then shooting up a neighborhood worth of people for “amusing” reasons it’s really hard to take grim tone of the city seriously. GTA 5 and RDR2 did a much better job of embracing its silliness and realism respectively.

1 thing I keep hearing from fans of the game is how much better the story is compared to 5. I can’t compare since I haven’t played 5 since release but man does 4 have a really messy structure. Now credit where credit’s due, the humorous dialogues feel quite natural helped by amazing VA from all and Niko is a really well realized flawed protagonist. I really like his dynamic with Roman as both have quite an opposite approach to life but still very much care for each other. Roman’s insistence on playing by the rules and maintaining a constant optimism and faith in the American Dream is not played as some naivete but rather a tragedy of how the whole premise is false. Niko on the opposite side is a trigger happy maniac that doesn’t play by anyone's rules and on the surface is may look like he’s moving up in life faster but he’s also paving a path of destruction, living a highly dangerous life and still gets pushed around just as much as Roman by mob bosses above him. So despite lacking an ounce of subtlety in the themes of the game, I quite liked it.
Problem is that’s where most of my praises end. The story lacks any form of structure as you keep meeting new people and doing jobs for them while having the carrot at the end of the stick being a vague revenge motive. This wouldn’t have been a problem if the game has a strong set of side characters or Niko’s personal investment in those stories. But most characters doesn’t have anything to offer beyond being amusing and Niko’s only motivation is looking for a pay check. This also where the “friend” mechanic fell apart for me as why would I spend time with characters I barely care about?

Lastly I come to gameplay and world design. Usually cities or location in an open world game take on a character by itself as you spend countless hours traversing it and engaging with the details and secrets it has to offer. GTA 4 might have been a technical achievement at release and even now is quite a large city but it absolutely isn't impressive or detailed enough anymore. I’m sure I sound like an asshole trying to bash an old game for not being comparable to newer games but I don’t do this without reason. That reason is that GTA 4 made a noticeable attempt at being realistic. Niko’s movement have long and deliberate animations, the cars feel really weighty and can’t turn corners fast, you pay a toll every time you cross highways etc. This is the same approach RDR2 took but unlike that game GTA4 simply didn’t have the tech to make an immersive open world. Streets feel too empty, there’s not enough shop or activity variety and too much of the city looks samey due to lack of detail. Thus when you couple an un-immersive city with dull gameplay, the whole experience becomes a slog.
And I didn’t even mention how dull the mission designs are. Rockstar games have never had great combat depth but in this game it feels specially lacking as you frequently drive slowly across long distances in a boring city only to shoot up a bunch of people in a building or drive some variation of vehicle that control just as bad as regular cars. In return of doing them your reward is some amusing humorous dialogue and money you have nothing to spend on. By themselves, each aspect they might not be that bad but the experience as whole was a chore to me.

I’m sure GTA 4 felt a lot better at release and I didn’t give enough credit to the game in this review. To mention one of them would be that despite disliking how the cars drove, I quite liked how distinct each vehicle felt. At the end of the day, I liked the concepts of this game far more than what it delivers.

Fallout 3 opens with the birth of your character, you go through a relatively long prologue through the years upto the point where you're forced to get out of the secluded protection of the vault. It grounds your character in the setting in an organic way, more so than any other Bethesda in my opinion. Which is why I find it funny that I felt least connected to the setting and my character of this game than any other.
These games have always have always had a theme-park design to them, sandbox with toys to play around for you. But if you decide to meet the games half way, acknowledge the limitation and roleplay within the confines of the sandbox, they can be some of the most immersive experiences in gaming. But here I felt really hard to connect myself to the world. The writing and the quest design lacked the extra oomph for me to get immersed in the characters and their struggles. The main story is supposed to be deeply personal to the PC, but the none of the main characters have enough depth to make you care. It felt more like playing an outside observer briefly looking into the stories of the people in this worlds and way too happy to kill some mutants and raiders. It really was like being in a theme park.

This is not to say I didn't have fun with it, the labyrinth of DC metro aside exploration is a lot of fun like all Bethesda games. There are a lot of attractions in this theme park, both quantity and variety. The comically evil choices also makes more sense with that perspective. I even got used to the janky gunplay after a while, it's oddly satisfying blowing up meat bags with bullets. That's why the positive rating here. Still, this is probably my least favorite Bethesda game.

Pathfinder Kingmaker is a CRPG that feels pride in it's table top roots and tries hard to emulate that feeling while taking inspiration from more contemporary CRPGs and I'd say they mostly succeeded in that vision with some hiccups.

1st the positives :
• The character creation is very deep, possibly overwhelming for new players. But once you get a hold of it, it's very rewarding with how much build variety can be done.
• The Pathfinder table-top rule set makes for very engaging battles. It used to be very hard at launch, relying more on rng luck but after several patches I think it's quite fair now. Using proper buffs, feats and spells to counter the enemy strength never stops being exciting.
• Without going into spoilers I'd say the story while nothing groundbreaking works well enough to keep the player invested. Each story arc has enough plot intrigue to have it's own game but since there's so many, individually they feel a bit shallow. Despite this complaint I would argue that it works to serve the larger narrative.
• Companion characters have actual personality with history and are not just stand ins for their race, this I greatly appreciated. I loved the camp side banter and how they can interject during story moments. Having to have them in party for romance to trigger properly was nice too.
• Kingdom management mini game is quite fun with choices than can have consequences with the companions. Watching your city having the buildings you built show up in the map screen never got old for me. Small side quests from unlocked locations were nice too.
• The visual design is gorgeous with perfect use of special effects. Using powerful AOE spells never got old. But I wish the game had camera rotation like D:OS2.
• Voice acting for the most part was great and added to the immersion. Though I wish important story dialogues weren't half voiced, either keep it silent or voice it fully. Having to hear half dialogues in great voice acting and having to imagine the rest took me out of experience slightly, though this is a minor nitpick.
• The music, my god. Inor Zur is a genius and it shows. Every tracks fits the game ambience just right and quite a few of those I would listen to ousdide of the game too.

Now for the parts that in my opinion can be improved:

• 1st point has to be bugs. I'm glad how much the devs have worked to fix the bugs and balance issues of the game but still there is some work to be done. I ran into 2 broken quest that was supposed to be fixed and a few visual glitches here and there. Saving takes too much time and it needs to be fixed, taking 7-8 seconds for a quick save during later parts of the game is unacceptable. Fortunately there's a mod.
• Although visually gorgeous, I'm not that impressed with level design. Specially during earlier positions of the game you get kinda bland maps purely carried by the quest story you have in mind instead of visual story telling. 1st World was a breath of fresh air but even that went stale soon. Also I feel they are too open and lack strategic use like in POE, but it will be a very subjective opinion. Unique locations aside from main quest that have optional bosses often reuses same locations. Maybe this where the kickstarter budget shows most.
• The companions need more flavor text to flesh them out. After you initially meet and talk with them, there's nothing to talk about for 20-30 hours before their companion quest kicks in and even then it's just a couple of lines at most. At the least they should have dialogues after each important story event. Also longer dungeons needs some side story in the form of notes or something. Idk about others but fighting similar enemies over and over without discovering fun stuff about the location is boring. I hope the story's better in the future games too.
• There are unsual difficulty spikes in the game, specially towards the end. Hopefully will get more balance patches.
• A personal grievance but I dislike the over reliance on RNG in everything. I know that's how table top games are probably but on higher difficulties you are forced to reload not because you did something wrong but because the enemy just had a higher roll than you. That is not fun. I'm so glad DOS2 moved away from it although armor system needs some fixing.

Overall it's very fun game and a solid entry into the CRPG genre.

Isometric crpgs have come a long way since Baldur's Gate 1 pioneered the genre 2 decades back and its a wonder that it still holds up in the Enhanced Edition re-release.
A design priority that sets BG apart from the rest of the genre is the focus in free form exploration and roleplaying over a strong narrative hook. Being story light, it might turn away some players but at the same time it give greater freedom to craft your own own story. There are numerous optional areas to explore and companions to find, something that offsets the companion death mechanic. Doesn't help the lack of character depth in companions though.
Is it as good as modern crpgs? In terms of narrative absolutely not, but the gameplay still works if you can get into the old D&D rules.

P.S. fans remade this game into the Neverwinter Nights 2 engine and I'd recommend playing that since I personally like the gameplay there more.

Spiders is a company of lofty ambitions, still holding on to the faded glory of cinematic RPGs from the Bioware era but unable to meet its demands. This was true when they released Mars: War Logs too though it's almost endearing to see how rough their initial attempts were. Despite still not having reached the bar set by old Bioware, they have continued to make incremental improvements with every game and for that they have my respect.
Anyway coming to the game itself, I find it a bit odd that it markets itself as a cyberpunk game. Setting wise if you squint your eyes it might be true on a technicality however it carries neither the themes or the visual motif of traditional cyberpunk media. Here the "corporations" are in change but that didn't happen because of the rot of capitalism but rather them just having the most resources after the countries collapsed so now they act as pseudo countries themselves. There are no themes of profit chasing, humanity sacrificed for progress because these corporations are barely holding on and going to war for the limited resources present on the planet Mars. It would be more apt to call it post apocalyptic. Having said that, I find the setting the most compelling part of this game for its uniqueness alone even if its a low bar.

I could rag on about how dull and lifeless the characters and the story is, how repetitively and clunky the gameplay is along with its maddening backtracking for quests and it would deserve it. It is not a game I would recommend to most, even a RPG fan but I want to take the time to highlight why I even bothered to finish it. There's a surprising feeling of authenticity to this fictional Mars that Spiders had crafted. The grimey dusty brown shithole of a world sells an almost Fallout meets Midgar like dystopia where water is so scarce that you use sand to wash yourself. There are no heroes in this world and everyone is doing the best they can to survive for the little resource there is but that doesn't stop the usual bigotry, power struggle between classes that humanity always has dealt with. People use "serum" as currency which is probably just water or some sort of fluid and given how rare it is, you have the option to kill enemies you defeat to extract it from their body. The equipment you find all fit scavenged and jury rigged aesthetic everything has and Technomacers add the added fantasy spice to make it more compelling.
All considered it's an interesting setting and if the writing and gameplay problems are fixed I could see it becoming a cool franchise someday.

I don't know why but I had notion that Banner Saga was some indie masterpiece so that explains why I'm more than a little dissapointed. The art style is stunning and the world building is fairly unique and well done, I specially like how the map is used to convey the lore in 1 or 2 setences. The combat felt alright if a bit lacking so my initial impressions were quite positive. But the more I played the more I realized something about the whole experience wasn't quite grabbing me.

The lack of many enemy types and abilities made the combat feel quite stale. Whatever abilities you do get isn't interesting enough to vary how you approach fights, positioning being the main factor to consider. I think the game wanted the experience to one of survival on a long arduous journey but the whole injury mechanic coupled with morale didn't really impact my playthrough in any meaningful way. Maybe I just got lucky in my choices or maybe the mechanics shine on hard difficulty. The writing while quite good on the surface felt too dry for the lack of a better word. Events happened, characters died and people just moved on without much deliberation. I feel odd complaining about that as it fits the tone of the story but it also make me, the player feel like a distant observer to the events rather than intimately engaged in their story.
I've seen people praising the story and since I haven't finished it, I'm hopeful it will get better. I'll give it another shot when I'm less burnt out on viking media.

Certainly an improvement over Mars War Logs but that only serves to highlight how far behind its ispiration it is. From what I remember of Greedfall and now playing through their older games, I'd say Spiders is much better at ideas than execution.
Unlike their other IPs, the setting and story here is a bit too generic but the characters in theory should be interesting. There just isn't enough meat to their story to really flesh out their personality. The romance is good microcosm of the whole issue in all their games, where characters show 0 romantic interest in you, you get a half hearted romance scene towards the end outta nowhere and then it's back to what it was before.
They really need to stop this checklist approach to RPG design and hire writers that can write more evocative characters. Otherwise I'm sure the upcoming Greedfall sequel will fail too.

How much interactivity is needed in a game? I've always been a big proponent of narrative adventure games or walking sims as they are sometimes called in a derogatory manner. I strongly believe just watching a stream of these games is not enough as the interactivity adds something extra, usually immersion and an ownership of the characters and thus their choices: Role-playing without the stats.
I sadly find it hard to make those arguments for Last Stop.

The characters are the main attraction of this game, as the story follows the lives of 3 characters with a supernatural twist. They are decently written and the animation while looking rather low budget, are expressive enough to get the emotion across. But the main problem is despite the supernatural element, it's just all too familiar. If you've consumed enough stories in your life, you'll most likely be able to identify the characters arcs in all 3 stories within the 1st 2 "chapters." That robbed me of any investment I could have had in the charm of this short game.
As for being a game, I feel the gameplay hinders the story more than it enhances, specially the walking sections. You could argue there are some choices that slightly alter how a scene plays out but it's never enough to put you in the shoes of the characters and more often than not it commits the cardinal sin of each dialogue choice giving roughly the same response despite hinting at otherwise.

All in all, it's a decent game that I'd rather be a tv mini series. If you're really into narrative adventure games and got 5-6 hours to kill, no harm in giving this a shot.

Rapture uses a scifi apocalyptic premise to tell personal and intimate stories of the inhabitants of an idylic english town, problem is it goes out of its way to be as vague and mysterious as possible about it. On the surface, it doesn't sound much so the best way I explain the problem by comparing it with a tv show I recently watched called Broadchurch.

The show is a who dun it murder mystery where the dirty secrets of an isolated town are dragged to the broad day light as the investigation goes on. There the mystery is the hook and every detail revealed adds to intrigue. But make no mistake, it is primarily a drama of inhabitants. The show makes you want to know about the characters, and when you do, it's their struggles and pain that you care about over even the mystery.
Now Rapture is similar case, but the hook is vague and kept mysterious. The characters are faceless wisps of light where little dialogues snippets are drip fed to you in potentially (most likely) non linear fashion due to how the exploration is structured. Not only is it hard to keep track of who's who, but the dialogue is of mundane variety. Very little of it adds to overarching mystery, serving more to form a vignete of a group trying to deal with apocalypse that anything concrete. It left me with little reason little reason to care about anyone or what happened to them and that is why I stopped playing.
I can see how some may connect to this form of storytelling as it is a pretty game with great VA and soundtrack. The use of light to guide you and the solitude that comes from the lack of information helps to project your feelings and ideas on to the story. Maybe I could have gotten more out of the story if I finished it but I already played more that I wanted and I don't want to indulge in sunk cost fallacy.

Heavy Rain was lauded critically at launch but later on I saw the sentiment popping up quite frequently that David Cage was a hack and this game too was a comedic disaster. Unsurprisingly for me, having finished my first Quantic Dream game, I can say it falls squarely in the middle.

As a murder mystery junkie, this plot was right up my alley. The brown and grey tone with constant rain created a suitable backdrop for the mystery. The murderer's motivations feel reasonable and there are enough red herrings for the player to question a lot of characters. Till the midway point at least cause it starts giving such obvious hints as to who the killer was that it becomes a "why dun it" instead of "who dun it". This is no Fincher movie but I found the story to be quite competent for the most part.

The real issue that's holding the plot back is that the characterisation is paper thin. Not only it is really weak but the only female character is written so poorly that it almost feels misogynistic. What's baffling is that characters have optional inner monologue you can listen to but it's never anything but the most obvious thought. You could describe everyone in a single line and that's all there is to them, they only exist in the moments to serve the scene they are in and push the plot forward. There are no themes to be explored or character arcs to be had. The detective character is hurt by this the most since his role is mainly using a scifi gadget to do sleuthing and navigating office politics with a corrupt cop. It sounds interesting but the sleuthing part is boring and the theme regarding corrupt cops isn't explored. I won't write about the gameplay separately so here I'll mention that I'm really not a fan of fixed camera movement in any game and whatever cinematic view achieved by that is undercut by stupid clunky controls. However the contextual actions that helped characters do a wide variety of mundane tasks was a pretty decent design choice helping in grounding them in the world. The action sequences and Saw type scenes were also quite tense due to how the quick time events were set up. The threat of characters actually dying added to it.
Overall, alright game and worth trying if you like narrative driven adventure games.

The game equivalent of a MCU movie, high budget and polish but generic and utterly safe. Dunno if it's fair to criticize the story too much since it's not poorly told exactly, but I was so fucking bored the entire way since nothing intrigued or excited me.
Highlight of the experience for me is most definitly the swinging, the track accompaning it is suitably epic. It felt so good to boost off perch points. The combat also feels very polished, simply enough to be effortless from the get go but just enough variety in moves to spice things up. For the 1st 4-5 hours I was having a good time with the gameplay but eventually it wore off. No matter how good the swinging track is, hearing it a 1000 times really starts to grate and the combat which seems really fun before now made my thumb hurt from pressing X so much while every non boss fight played out very similarly no matter the location. MJ and Mile's sections which could acted as a refresher are instead some of the most tedious forced stealth sections I've played. At least they let us skip the boring puzzles.

I just feel there's been a saturation of Spiderman and Batman media in popular culture and it's time for something else. Excited for Insomniac's Wolverine.

Fairly good walking sim in the vein of Everyone's Gone to the Rapture where you slowly piece together the story of a remote village but unlike that game, this has a more linear structure to it even if the story is delivered in the non linear fashion. The use of water color styled textures gives the world a unique dreamy look that I appreciated. The story has a tinge more melodrama to it, specially towards the end than I'd have preferred but otherwise this was a good time.
Recommend if you're into the genre.

This review is more a reminder for me than for others

I had played this years back and had forgotten why I dropped it. So picked it back up again recently and it was relatively enjoyable, the plot was simple but with an interesting enough hook and the characters were pretty interesting too as expected of Bioware. But the more I played, the more the small annoyaced piled up on the gameplay side.
The level design is boring, long and confusing to navigate, in-game map does not help. The combat has very little strategy to it and clunky on top. Actually the combat for melee duels look great since the animation does most of the heavy lifting, the really nailed the SW prequel movie type combat but it's so bad for anything else.
All of these issues are something I could put up with individually, but it's a death by thousand cuts type of deal. I could have pushed on just for the story and characters but I choose to spend time on other games that I would enjoy more.
A shame cause I really was looking forward to what's so good about KOTOR 2. Let's hope the remake comes out someday.