Lords of the fallen is pheraps the worst medium-high budget soulslike i have played.

Movement feels clunky and floaty at the same time. Every weapon has too much forward or side momemtum and it feels like there is this constant struggle to maintain the character position.

The two worlds mechanic is interesting but the implementation is awful. It's impossible to explore at your own pace when in umbral because enemies keep respawning and they get stronger the more time passes. This happens throught the entire game and the enemy variety barely changes, by the end it's impossible not to feel bored by the constant stream of trash mobs on your way.

Visuals are ok but there is performance problems. Enemy/armor designs are good but there are so few of them. Audio is ok.

The last nail in the coffin is the last boss. Yes i know there are multiple endings and bosses but the main antagonist teased throught the game is a minion fight with barely any interaction. One of the worst last bosses i have faced.

Soulslike fans couls find some fun in here, but honestly i would rather any fromsoft game or lies of p or nilh instead of this. Huge wasted potential.

Visually a treat. That's where my compliments end. This game is disappointment personified for me. I came into this game from Lies of P, a game which I adored. I thought it had such promise. I've now come to find that it's just not good. There are two main offences. first, Enemy placement and level layout is straight up asshole design. No it's not "git gud," it's "yes we're doing a ranged enemy behind 2-5 melee enemies again" for literally the whole time you're not fighting bosses. Second, the combat for this game is TERRIBLE. I can't exactly identify what makes it so poor but it feels AWFUL. Attacks feel floaty and without any weight. Parrying somehow feels meh. The most annoying thing is that almost all attacks make you travel forward a decent distance, this leads to a feeling of lack of control over your character. Then the game has the audacity to spend the first 5 hours on cliff edges.

You know I was originally going to write out my thoughts after my first playthrough, but then I ended up doing two more and I somehow am finally putting the game down two months later. This is both a testament to it being good and me poor as shit.

Dragon's Dogma 2 can be a problematic game cause if you liked Dragon's Dogma, well I hope you really liked it. This game is Dragon's Dogma, but more and with some kinks ironed out, but not all of them. The game is janky and crusty, it can be frustrating, there's a bit of the Red Dead 2/Rockstar Games FUCK YOU physics going on. Yet unlike that it doesn't bother me as much here cause similar to Death Stranding (which I have yet to finish oops) it all still feels very responsive and snappy in comparison. The most annoying thing being really that to this day and forever going forward I will always be spoiled by Breath of the Wild just letting me climb any surface and any game that doesn't let me do that is immediately going to be worse off for me. But who cares this shit is fun as fuck. It really makes you work for that Frank Frazetta art power fantasy, but when you get to the point where you're doing that? Oooohhh babyyyyyyyy. Lordy it looks good too. Seen a lot of people say it looks like a PS3 game with the art direction it has and like yes bro. I want the sequel to a PS3 game to look like a sequel to a PS3 game. PS3 could never pull off the lighting you get from the RT in this. Probably the first implementation of it in a Capcom game I've really liked. I took the FPS hits fuck it. That shit mean nothing to me when the game good enough.

Honestly would say the game's weakest element is its story again. It does the whole very minimalist thing where everything is sort of just happening as it goes along shtick once more. This time though it hits a massive brick wall when you reach Battahl for a couple of hours. You're just left there sort of meandering doing random quests. Getting attacked left and right cause someone decided every inch of the map needed to be goblins and wolves and gore harpies. Then it suddenly straps you to a jet engine off a cliff into the craziest climax I've seen in a game since well... Itsuno's last project which was DMC5. The Unmoored World is just oh my god holy fuck the Unmoored World and the concept of it is just so sick. Cannot believe this game got to do it's own version of the depths from Tears of the Kingdom, but then fused that shit with the Red Earth hellscape from Shin Evangelion. I cum.

Excited for whatever the DLC ends up being especially if we get something that's a follow up that actually expands on everything that happened and isn't just another BBI. God it's so refreshing to play a new Action RPG that isn't a stupid ass Soulslike. God bless.

Wilhelmina best girl I ain't arguing with anyone who tries to say otherwise.

Enjoyable if wildly unfocused mechanics, paired with situations that permit expression without exactly inspiring much strategy: as cursed as it sounds, Bayonetta 3 has big Action RPG energy in how it lets you choose a setup and run that exact flowchart for the entire game. It's cool that these massive enemies aren't limited to formulaic set-pieces, instead roaming each arena relatively freely, but individual actions seem to not carry much weight when 90% of your button presses amount to screen-filling unga bunga shit. Enemies either stagger in a roughly similar, sort-of simplistic way or are still weirdly inconsistent (Grace & Glory parry in mid-air now, which wasn't the case even in Bayonetta 2; unique health thresholds for when enemies can be launched in a game with this many foes leads to an awkward amount of memorization for an intentionally-minded player; leg sweeps sort of exist but only work on a particular set of enemies and don’t actually result in a proper “downed” state, etc.)

This is obviously disappointing when compared to the original's roster of challenging enemies that allow for a wide variety of meaningful soft-counters, set against devilishly varied level design: Grace & Glory with their distance-blocks and fast movement, encouraging attacks with strong hit-stun, knockdown effects or wide hitboxes, Fairness with their anti-air grabs, disincentivizing (but not strictly prohibiting) jumps, Route 666 allowing for risky insta-kills or how you’re asked to maintain a combo during chase sequences — nothing really like that here in the regular mid-level verses from what I’ve played.

So, rather than Bayonetta’s happy medium, 3 ends up opposite to 2 on the “BRUHHHHHHHHHH”-end of the expression vs challenge spectrum: as a pure technical action game, the experience feels about as inconsistent and littered with holes (still no item penalty, totally broken strats like Phantom’s self-destruct, density of mini-games only an insane person would want to master, etc.) but the fact it’s so much less prescriptive appeals way more to my sensibilities. Demon Slave feels like a different take on Umbran Climax that is much more flexible and inviting to experimentation: you get to use it more regularly for longer spans of time (meaning you feel less rushed and encouraged to mash,) but the attack speed and range of your demons is now focused enough that it’s difficult to just stagger the entire screen by mashing X (despite my prior hyperbole in the opening paragraph.) Not only are you allowed to instantly switch between demons mid-combo (either adopting the previous demon’s position or summoning it right next to Bayonetta, granting even more flexibility,) it’s even possible to queue up commands and then take back control of Bayonetta while your demon executes them. It is genuinely clever that the queue can only hold up to two commands (rather than having a larger queue you can fill up for longer just by mashing,) meaning you’ll have to regularly tag between the two actors and coordinate between them positionally to get the most out of the system (specifically, you have to tag back to your demon before the second command has been executed to prevent them from leaving the play space.) The scoring system (while flawed) even takes this into account by having each actor contribute differently to point acquisition (Bayonetta raises points, demons raise the multiplier.)

Like I said, whatever strategy you pick kinda linearly works for the whole game — but at least there’s a lot of stuff to play around with! It almost doesn’t matter that I don’t actually click with a lot of the weapons and demons here when playing through the entire game mostly with Scarborough Fair (meaning “as sub-optimally as possible”) somehow doesn’t turn it into an active chore. I’m not fond of demons where control feels indirect and disconnected (Umbran Clock Tower, Dead End Express) or how weapons in general take control away from Bayonetta for too long (Yo-Yos, Color My World charged Heel Stomp, etc.) and don’t seem to follow intuitive/useful patterns in their dial combos and hold properties, but if anything that actually speaks to the variety on offer and just how many swings Platinum took with the player’s arsenal here. Unique Shot or Umbran Spear variations per weapon don’t even strike me as great inclusions (having Shot as a consistent action was helpful in the previous games to cancel out of certain states or target enemies, and a lot of this stuff just feels linearly better/worse,) but I’m honestly not sure any action game up to this point matches Bayonetta 3 as far as the pure AMOUNT of shit in it. That, and how much freedom you’re naturally given over the enemy’s position as you're toying with them, makes it an absolute buffet for combo fiends, and I can respect that.

I suppose if I had to sum it up, I would say that Bayonetta 3 is packed with interesting and sometimes even very thoughtfully implemented mechanics that spark a lot of intrinsic enjoyment, but the game Platinum have built around them doesn’t immediately inspire me to want to get truly serious about it. You spend a lot of time dicking around and exploring, with movement mechanics that are surprisingly versatile but still feel weirdly kneecapped in some ways (again lacking Bayonetta 1’s satisfying momentum) and are used in platforming challenges that are mostly just kinda quaint and insubstantial. Even rushing through all that, you’re stuck playing through what are probably the shallowest mini-games Platinum have put into code yet (Rock-Paper-Scissors, literally just moving an aiming cursor across the screen — the P**** shmup section was cool though.) But like I said going in, the biggest offender for me so far still is the seeming lack of meaningful encounter variety — at least the Alfheims with all their weird stipulations are a massive step up from Bayonetta 2, but based on what I’ve hard, I’m skeptical that mid-level verses will reveal more sauce on Infinite Climax difficulty.

TLDR: I recommend it! Expectations about met! Incredibly scuffed around the edges but I’ll take that over Bayonetta 2 any day.

I was dooming extremely hard when my long-range Wicked Weaves didn’t hit despite lock-on in the intro mission though. Come on guys.

Discussion stream I did with more practical examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxop2B5b4rQ

RE4 is a game designer’s wet dream. If you really break it down, all Leon can do is point and shoot; and that simplicity is part of how it immediately gets you into this mode of consciously analyzing situations and being intentional about everything you do. Corralling enemies into a single spot and headshot-ing one of them to set the whole group up for a juicy roundhouse kick seems so basic, but having to actively look for ways to achieve that scenario never stops being engaging.

All the different weapons, the upgrade system, enemy types, random loot drops: they add to the basic formula in a way that’s so elegant and immediate that it makes every modern action RPG looter shooter whatever the fuck hybrid look like a dry, convoluted Excel spreadsheet by comparison. It’s so no-nonsense that I honestly struggle to come up with more ways to explain why it’s so good that aren't insanely obvious. RE4 is endlessly polished and pure and exciting and one of the most perfect games of all time.

Bayonetta has been my number one favorite game pretty much since I first played it back in 2010, but when I had that initial realization I’d honestly barely even scratched its surface. To this day I’m still finding new ways to play and improve my strats, which speaks to just how hard it nails that sweetspot between mechanics that are intrinsically satisfying, malleable, but also highly intentional; somehow it’s the one action game that does everything. The control system is so smooth and flexible it’s influenced every genre title since; knocking dudes into each other or tearing through the battlefield with Beast Within offers a sense of physicality other comparable games still don’t come close to; the enemies are some of the most aggressive, varied and polished you’ll ever encounter in a melee combat game; and all of that is wrapped up in a scoring system that miraculously manages to give you clear rules to work with while still allowing for a huge degree of expression. Even the ridiculous Angel Weapons make sense from that perspective — they give you a generous buffer to use whatever playstyle appeals to you in and still earn a Platinum combo in the end.

Between Witch Time, the equipment system and Dodge Offset, Bayonetta makes it easy to name-drop its most obvious gimmicks and leave it there, but those last two in particular are an insane step up for the genre when it comes to freedom and intentionality. How to trip an enemy up, where to launch them, whether to use magic or not: no other action game makes you consider these questions so actively at this fast of a pace, and I can’t get enough of it.

This and RE7 are the two series entries I hadn't played the longest and was the most curious to revisit, and with RE8 featuring Chris + many similarities to 4 and 5, I thought this might be a good opportunity to refresh my memory. In the case of 5, I decided less than halfway through that I'd quit because I was honestly kind of bored and time is a little too precious at the moment.

Under that light, this 3 out of 5 score may be surprising; I'm coming away from RE5 feeling there's enough of interest going on here on paper that warrants a quick write-up. You could chalk it up to there being way too much of RE4's DNA in 5 for it to be straight-up bad, but that's a little cynical when it actually does elevate itself meaningfully from its predecessor in a few ways. Being able to quick-select weapons and items with the D-Pad is an obvious QoL improvement that, in practice, legitimately incentivizes more spontaneous play — it’s easy to want to tap into weapons you otherwise wouldn’t if they’re right at your fingertips. But it also goes hand-in-hand with a now real-time inventory that's still one of the most elegant, yet tension-inducing systems I've seen for this kind of thing. While RE4's attache case has become far more iconic, RE5's square grid takes that fun novelty of freely positioning your items and turns it into a legitimately relevant choice: your 3x3 item grid directly corresponds to the four D-Pad directions (so a shotgun on the leftmost square can be accessed by pressing left, while the First Aid Spray in the top right can't be equipped the same way,) which is both intuitive and something you'll have to regularly manage intelligently while under the active stress of combat. From that perspective, even putting ammo on your quick-select and being able to hand it to Sheva more quickly that way becomes a valid consideration.

I guess that’s a good opportunity to discuss RE5’s most divisive aspect. I actually feel deciding what weapons to give Sheva and how to manage her inventory space adds sincerely novel layers to gameplay in a way I haven't quite seen like this elsewhere. I recall giving her a sniper rifle being a good way to keep her from getting hit constantly back on PS3, which is both sort of interesting? Because it's a logical result of the mechanics presented? (it's obvious that she aims extremely well but is also very trigger-happy, so giving her a weapon with high damage, long reach and slow fire makes natural sense to optimize her AI’s behavior) But these kinds of considerations can’t help but come across as unintuitive hacks in the moment: in a game with resource management and non-regenerating health, having to specifically leave the way those resources are spent to an AI + a number of dynamic unpredictable factors never feels quite right. Babysitting Sheva because she will otherwise get hit constantly or churn through different types of ammo seemingly at random ironically feels like what the internet always tries to convince you Ashley (who’s transparently deterministic) was like in RE4.

Which begs the question of whether RE5 would've been better off as a solo-game. Sheva's inclusion has much deeper implications on the flow of the campaign than is initially evident, and it's clear that a lot of the encounter design flat-out isn't as good as it was in RE4. It's most obvious with bosses, where a lot of interesting elements get thrown at a wall, only for the game to not capitalize on them. There's this extended on-rails sequence early in the game, at the end of which you fight one of those El Gigante type enemies from RE4 by targeting its weak spots. You dodge some of its punches with QTE prompts, then watch it pull this long pylon from the ground to hit you with. You would expect that pylon to now present some kind of new obstacle, but instead you end up ALSO dodging it via the same QTE as every other attack in this fight.

Another early boss (the crawling bat thing) is set within this circular arena with a couple huts and some elevation changes. You would expect those level design features to factor into the fight somehow, but instead you’re meant to linearly bait it into some proximity mines (place mine, walk back, wait for it to run in, then dash past it, quick-turn, place another mine.) It would play out the exact same way if the arena was just a straight line instead. In a game with this much intelligent game design, it’s surprising how often newly-introduced elements don’t actually provide gameplay variety.

Those two scenarios also serve as such obvious points of comparison for how RE4 always went those couple extra notches with its encounters. The El Gigante fights in either game speak for themselves, clearly being able to run around and choose weapons freely and having to scrounge for ammo as shit goes down in RE4 is more engaging. But even RE4's take on an on-rails sequence, the mine cart set piece, where you get to move between carts freely, have enemies jump in from all sides, and need to avoid multiple kinds of obstacles, takes such a gigantic dump on RE5 that it's kind of hard to believe it was made five years prior.

While all that sounds pretty negative, I hope it comes across that RE5 is more just... boring, rather than offensive. I couldn't find a smooth segue into the weapon upgrade system for this review, but that shit is still exemplary (love how upgrading capacity restores your ammo) and something more looter-shooter type games should take serious note of more. So while RE5 does overall present something substantial and different from its predecessor, I wouldn't say it's engaging enough to really warrant more than one playthrough when you could be playing that game instead.

(footnotes: the headshot context melee attack being changed from Leon's wide-reaching roundhouse to a more linear punch kinda sucks and doesn't really allow you to take as many risks with crowd-control)