Cindered Shadows adds four new units, a couple of new classes, an additional side story and an underground location for the base game.

The side story is surprisingly difficult and the maps can feel overwhelming at times, especially since you're given units with predetermined stats and classes for the course of the story, so you can't cheese your way out of it.

The new location, the Abyss, is an underground city which adds practical new uses for your renown from the base game, like increasing support levels between units or exchanging various items for renown (very useful for NG+).

As a reward for beating the new maps you unlock the Ashen Wolves one by one for the base game and their respective classes.

Now to the actual characters; in my opinion Hapi and Balthus are underwhelming and are easily powercrept by other units from the base game, Yuri is very situational and only Constance is the one unit to really shine because of her Dark Flier class, which is very handy under many circumstances.

Overall, Cindered Shadows is worth a play if you're planning to use the Ashen Wolves in the main game, but I wouldn't recommend getting it just for the side story alone.

IMPORTANT: The review and rating are NOT meant for the DLC, but for this standalone port.

There's not really much to say besides this being a completely pointless port of Borderlands 2's biggest DLC, and it's simply because the entire premise of said DLC is built upon a big plot point of BL2.

I don't even know for which audience Gearbox intended this for. Most Borderlands fans have already played Assault on Dragon Keep anyways and if you played this port as a complete newcomer to the series you're directly thrown in the middle of something with unfamiliar faces, which you're expected to know already.

Besides these points, the port lacks basic little things from the original DLC, including accessibility features like dubs for different languages (the port is only dubbed in English) and has an unbalanced level curve, since the entire leveling process is sped up by a lot in comparison to the BL2 counterpart to compensate for the lack of skills you'd usually start this DLC with.

TL;DR: As a standalone port the connection to the main story is entirely missing and basic things have been changed to the worse. You're better off just playing the DLC in Borderlands 2 instead.

Engage's Fell Xenologue DLC feels like the complete opposite of the base game and not in a good way.

It has worse maps, a completely broken difficulty curve and being forced to always repeat the side story on future playthroughs for the additional characters is a terrible and questionable decision.

The new characters are fun though and provide atleast some incentive to play through this mess, but I would not recommend it.

The idea behind Haven sounds interesting on paper and while I was somewhat interested in the story, the gameplay itself is a huge letdown. The overworld mainly consists of empty plains (I know it's supposed to be an abandoned place, but it's just so bland) and the combat system never clicked with me and felt unresponsive. The menus are unorganized and cluttered.

I wanted to like this game, but because of the reasons mentioned above I could never properly get into it. Maybe I'll pick it up someday again for the characters alone, but I don't think it's gonna be in the near future.

Yakuza 6 was a turning point in the series in more than one way, so I felt the urge to express my thoughts on the game I've had for a while now.

This is the first entry made with the 'Dragon Engine', which also was used in the newer games of the series like Yakuza 7 or the Judgment duology. It's notable for the more fluid combat and ragdoll mechanics, but also introduced small changes like directly being able to walk into street fights without having to sit through the loading screens disguised as intros. I won't go too much in-depth about this, since the review is about the game and not the engine :p

Let's just say it feels very obvious that Yakuza 6 was the first game to run on the Dragon Engine, as the combat is really wonky and a lot of heat action moves from the previous games are just missing, even simpler ones. People love to meme about Yakuza 3 enemies blocking all of your attacks, but it's honestly almost as bad in 6. Not to mention that fighting groups of enemies at once in this game is a disaster, since they WILL stun you. Repeatedly. Very fun. Fortunately the combat in general was fixed in later games and Kiryu got a proper Dragon Engine moveset in Kiwami 2.

After complaining about the combat for a while now, it's time to name the strong aspect of Yakuza 6 - the story. It might be very divisive in some regards, but in my opinion it's one of the best stories in the franchise and has lots of well written and memorable characters. Without giving away too much, it feels reminiscent of Yakuza 3's story, but in a new light.

The side content in this game... exists. All substories in this game are voiced, but I only found a handful of them actually interesting and memorable. Substories are always a subjective topic so your experience with them might differ from mine. Some other new side activities include spearfishing (rail shooter), the gym (press some buttons) and the Clan Creator, which I won't go in-depth about because I personally hate that minigame. To put it short, you deploy troops in battles to take down other troops, paired with a pretty generic and boring side storyline.

In conclusion, Yakuza 6 has a great story, but suffers from the annoying early Dragon Engine combat and the side stuff is mediocre at best. Not the best game for a cohesive Yakuza experience, but still a good finale for the Kiryu Saga.

(Also it's locked to 30 FPS on consoles, just a heads up :p)

Three Houses has the best cast out of any Fire Emblem game, a very memorable soundtrack and an interesting narrative.

While the monastery might look cool and engaging at first with all the activities, after a couple of hours you'll realize it's basically just filler content to artificially extend the game's length. This is especially a problem if you plan to play through the game multiple times to experience all the different routes, as the monastery always stays the same with a few minor changes depending on your current house.

The gameplay itself is also weaker than what entries like Fates or Engage have to offer, as many units in the different houses feel very similar (with different passive abilites) and some students easily overshadow others in terms of general usefulness.

Despite these issues, I would still absolutely recommend at least one playthrough of Three Houses to experience the game for yourself - it's hard to describe. I can just say that the characters and soundtrack have stuck with me a long time after finishing the game.

Justice for All is a really strange entry.

The first two cases are just kind of bad and not really memorable, meanwhile Turnabout Big Top is a case you're either neutral on or absolute despise.

However, the fourth case in this game is one of the best cases in the entire series and is a welcome breath of fresh air after the rest of the cases. It's probably also the only reason this game gets 3 stars.