This game was good to start, but in the 8 months since I last played it, it's become incredible. This dev knows how to make a killer core gameloop and how to properly incentivize long term play with a bunch of cool unlockables. A lost art in this day and age. No obnoxious monetization either, just some classic arcade style fun. It's not a super complex game, but it's effective.

One could, theoretically, point out that the art is pretty low budget, but at this point that's decidedly part of the charm.

Highly recommend unless you need a tight reign on your time.

Overwatch 2 is a failure. This is the worst online multiplayer ever just by principle of what it is. A glorified update in every way shape and form to a game in an already pitiful state. This game feels like it was in a box that said “in case of massive PR nightmare break glass” and that’s exactly what Blizzard did. You can’t even find a better alternative because Overwatch 1 is fucking dead. The battle pass sucks dick and the in game shop is overpriced as shit. Fuck Blizzard. Fuck Activision. 1/10

"Hey guys, remember what we did to all those women? It doesn't matter anymore, we've just made a sequel to our most anticipated game of the last decade? No its not Diablo its Overwatch 2."

"We added 3 new heroes and reworked a few as well as adding maps to give you ultimate Overwatch experience. We've also added a paid battle pass, all the heroes are behind an unlock wall and the skins you could get for free in Overwatch now cost £16. But hey at least its free to play right?? We're delaying the Story Mode to 2023."

This is probably the biggest sequel dissapointment in history. As someone who played OW for a while (100+ hrs) as well as have friends who are big fans of the game this feels all the while confusing on why they made this. After playing the beta I just enjoyed the overall experience of the first one more and now with all the micro-transactions it has me extremely worried. The fact that the game literally changed itself to OW2 on my Xbox is extremely concerning. This just feels like a reskinned cash grab that a shitty company is trying to convince us that it's good again. If your own fans don't agree with the way you're making this, then who is this for?

but hey the porn is good so yknow

edit: for those who haven't seen my comment, this is me mostly complaining about blizzard's shitty way of treating fans and the game itself, rate the game whatever you want!

He's dead, Jim.

I legitimately can't believe it, Blizzard actually went ahead and "released" the exact same game that they'd compartmentalized and destroyed over the last six years with less features, a board-room bland UI, and a predatory battle pass. There is almost too many issues when it comes to Blizzard's decision making process in the last decade plus that even pointing them out becomes a chore, there is quite literally a surplus of awful, and Overwatch 2 is no exception.

I was a competitive player when Overwatch first released, and the game was a catalyst for me becoming a more social person as I met and befriended a completely new circle of people as well as for taking games much more seriously. I put hundreds upon hundreds of hours playing casual, custom, and competitive matches to hone my skills as both a single player and teammate. As the years went by, Blizzard did their best to make that experience that I had molded, a chore. The balancing team released meta-destroying characters and refused to change the game, more or less saying "deal with it" as the consensus of the beloved Overwatch took a nose dive. What people had fallen in love with, myself included, with Overwatch in 2016 was a completely new hero shooter experience that emphasized teamwork and jubilee. Time progressed and the experience of playing Overwatch became an experiment. Additions to maps and characters were lazy at best and boring, communication to the playerbase was insulting, the company did its best to ruin its internal image by doing a complete disservice and committing to horrendous acts upon its female employees, and they removed features from the Overwatch that gave it the identity it held. I didn't want to gloss over the treatment of women at Activision-Blizzard, as it is completely deplorable. Moving Overwatch to a five player team felt like a decision for decision's sake rather than actually investing in making the gameplay fun or invigorating. It felt like a corporate "what-if" scenario to throw at players to make them feel like "OOOH AHHH something new!" rather than put content in the game that would be genuinely interesting or engaging. Moving away from the open queue to a role queue that made it nigh impossible to play as a DPS further cemented the downfall of Overwatch from an acceptance standpoint. How does Blizzard expect working adults or anyone with a time constraint to wait anywhere from ten to fifteen minutes to find a match? In my previous days, when the game was still a little fresh, you could pop in and play as whichever character, and that was beautiful! If I wanted to play a ranked game, I could jump on and pick my Hanzo within a few minutes, play the game and be on with it.

I enjoyed each role in the first few years of Overwatch, playing at nearly the highest tier as both a tank and a healer, and near that as a DPS. I'm experienced in every role and I would like to think that made me a good well rounded player, yet having a queue and rank devoted to each seperate role enforced that I would never commit to the grind, because I simply couldn't afford the time for what was becoming such a middling gameplay experience. How is it that a game like Halo Reach, a game that I frequent, has aged better than Overwatch? Well you can abandon any of the incomprehensively poor gameplay decisions that Blizzard has made with OW in favor of a completely free, cosmetic only, not even available to purchase with a seperate currency, cosmetic pass for items not available in the original game. Overwatch, victim of a poorly designed ever changing meta, cannibalized itself by never having a gameplay identity that felt reliable. Reach fundamentally today is still the Reach it was back in 2010 from a matchmaking standpoint. Playing Overwatch now after the six years have passed since its original release feels like you've landed on the Planet of the Apes. Gone is the joy, gone is the happiness, gone is the gameplay loop that once took the world by storm, and now you have... role queue's, a poorly optimized engine, a few new characters which have boiled down the competitive and casual experience, an eyesore UI that robs the game of its flare, and a battle past thrust into the player as soon as they load up the game.

You know what's crazy? I've basically gone this entire "review" without mentioning Overwatch 2, and that's because it doesn't exist. Overwatch 2 is legitimately Overwatch again. It's the same exact game. Nothing is new, I figured that with the release of this game I'd be getting a plethora of new characters and maps, but that was not the case. Remember back in the day when Super Smash Bros Brawl came out and you cracked the game open, ran through the gambit and unlocked freaking Sonic and Solid Snake? That's what a new title based on heroes should feel like. In Overwatch 2 you load into the game, should you have an account from the first Overwatch, and you have all the characters, the same ones from Overwatch and/or the Overwatch 2 beta, which again is just Overwatch with a new character. How is this excused? How was Blizzard able to craft this update as a new game and how are journalists and consumers even treating this like its a second game? I'm at a loss for words at the predatory greed that Blizzard continues to embark itself on, between WCIII, Diablo Reforged, and Overwatch 2, Blizzard has done nothing but demonstrate that they do not care for their consumer base, just for their coffers.

I remember having the physical copy of Gameinformer two years ago, long before GI got culled in the same style of corporate greed as Blizzard, that went into extreme depth detailing the story and narrative experiences of Overwatch 2. Can you recall that adding a story to go along with these heroes was the entire reason that this game was coming out? Probably not! Blizzard went into depth about the mission structure and RPG elements of Overwatch 2 as its selling point, giving some love back to the players who requested more out of the attractive new IP. Not often does a company like Blizzard, which has some committed series lore in games like Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft launch a new title in a completely new universe. Players were hungry for some insight on the characters they were playing as, clawing for any exposition they could get on the world of heroes and Overwatch 2 was it!... until it became clear that the company couldn't offer what they had promised players and instead realized they could be milked like the cash cows they are. Why give your players, after years of clamoring for more and promising of a new story experience what they asked for when you could opt for a faux relaunch of the baked down version of the game they're already playing (and leaving?)

It's for this reason that I'm granting a half star review for Overwatch 2, I don't know what makes it a new game, other than the predatory battle pass and resoundingly boring new UI experience. There's no single player, there's no new exciting group of characters, there's no graphical update, there's no improvement to user communication, there's just more of the same. Why don't we start releasing new Fighting game characters as new games. Bridget is now out in Guilty Gear but its the exact same game? How about release it as Guilty Gear Strive 2! PUBG has a bug fix update and a new 3x3 map? Let's release it as PUBG 2! This is an inexcusable, undeniable cash grab by a former legendary developer that is now a complete husk of its former self.

Overwatch is dead.

There was a time where The Force Unleashed was the one of the most anticipated releases of the year which is wild to reflect back on. While not without its charms, the game has a lot of drawbacks and proves too repetitive has it goes on.

The Force Unleashed features Starkiller, Darth Vader’s secret apprentice who hunts down the remaining Jedi across the galaxy after the events of Revenge of the Sith (the most popular time for Star Wars stories it seems). This is a pretty ludicrous concept but the game does its best to fit into canon and at the time was considered an official piece of the narrative. The story is passable and I don’t mind the good ending, but it’s definitely shoehorned into the mythos.

The hack and slash gameplay is fun for a while but lacks any depth whatsoever and definitely grows stale, especially as you start returning to the same planets. More environments and variations in the samey boss battles would’ve went a long way in making this a better experience.

The Wii version had some special features that made it standout from other versions. The Darth Vader level at the beginning where you tear up Wookiees I’m pretty sure is exclusive to this version. There is also a (fairly clunky) multiplayer dueling mode where you and a friend can piss each other off by force throwing each other into pits.

The Force Unleashed is fun for a while and definitely has its fans, but probably isn’t in the upper echelon of Star Wars titles.

this game requires no introduction anymore so i'm not beating around the bush. drakengard has been on my mind a fair bit recently - on the off chance you'll forgive a second log i think it's worth examining some of what the title accomplishes uniquely well, or what it's able to achieve with respect to the various titles that it's in conversation with. first of all: there's nothing quite as flatline-inducing or revealing of the author's own tendencies as reading that drakengard was intentionally poorly designed, a commonly held idea in various hobbyist communities frustratingly stemming just as often from its supporters as from its detractors. not only is this a frightfully pedantic and dull reduction of the text - it's also just an elaborately constructed fiction masking deeper truths. for instance, i think it's plain as day our burgeoning critical language still struggles with titles seemingly antithetical to traditional enjoyment, and are only able to escape from suffocating evaluative lexicon through irony or genre labels. survival horror isn't normally 'fun' & people appear willing to understand this so the genre gets a normative pass en masse, although it seems worth mentioning that the longer they exist in the public eye the more their mechanical frameworks get totally demystified by the public, arguably reducing them to vehicles for pleasure and gratification anyways, resident evil being the prime example.

drakengard, of course, isn't survival horror. it's largely a musou with some horror trappings, but it's rather plain about its affectation. however, because the traditional 'game' part of it is in such conflict with its aesthetic, we end up with the idea that this dissonance is a result of intentionally languid, engineered dissatisfaction. oh wow that wacky yoko taro wanted you to feel bad so he made his debut game bad. bzzzzt. wrong. square enix wanted a commercial success with drakengard. if they didn't, they wouldn't have requested that a project starting out as a simple remix of ace combat (owing massive inspiration to electrosphere in particular, another game that combines peerless arcade bluster with bleak narrative proceedings) would incorporate elements of its contemporary blockbuster peer, dynasty warriors. none of this is to say that drakengard can't be an awkward game, but it's in large part due to a friction with cavia's inexperience/lack of technical expertise, their attempts at holding true to their initial vision for the project, and square enix being desperate for a worthy competitor to koei tecmo's success.

here's where i'll stake a claim on something potentially contentious and risible. on the basis of the title's struggles in production & development, it is somewhat shocking that drakengard is not just 'not bad', but is a totally competent musou game. given the milieu in which it released, you might even dare to call it 'good', or 'well-made'. i'll double down with something absolutely no one wants to hear: most people have no point of reference because musou is rarely put in its historic context, appreciated for its strengths, or even, broadly speaking, played. disregarding popular experimental offshoot licensed games which carry their own unique magnetism, dynasty warriors has an especially prevalent stigma in contemporary action game circles, and few seem willing to return to reevaluate the franchise. if we accept this as the case, we can begin to understand why nostalgia is the primary driver of fondness for early musou, and why you always hear dynasty warriors 3 is the best one. 'load of bull', you say, 'drakengard is not good', you say, 'dynasty warriors sold millions and is beloved for inventing the drama; surely it's better', you say, but take a look at these admittedly small sample sizes (evidence A and evidence B) and you tell me which is actually the niche ip at present. one of these broader game worlds got a FFXIV collaboration. it was not dynasty warriors.

anyways the idea that drakengard could be a respected peer to dynasty warriors - or even, perhaps, better - is not ahistorical. drakengard came out in 2003, only a few months after the release of dynasty warriors 4. by this point in the dynasty warriors timeline, your only sources of inspiration for the musou canon are dynasty warrior 2 and dynasty warriors 3. they're fine games for what they are - content-rich, pop recontextualizations of romance of the three kingdoms that fold the intense political drama, grandiose character dynamics, and poeticizing of feudal history intrinsic to the novel and morphs them into larger-than-life battles of one against one hundred. it works for that series, but having played dynasty warriors 3, it's also very simply orchestrated. DW3 is kinetic and energetic, sure, but form is not function. as a still nascent series, DW3 has yet to experiment with elements that would come to define later entries, such as a strong emphasis on field management - its presence in 3 is largely muted and, dependent upon your stats, can often be negated. it is mostly a game of fulfilling your objectives, grinding up your stats, and engaging in undemanding combat pulling the same strong combo strings against some unique generals and a multitude of carbon copy generic ones. and i happen to appreciate it for what it is, but there is no question in my mind if you slotted that exact same mechanical framework into drakengard's tone and setting, it would be similarly deemed bad on purpose.

other than its tone what does drakengard do differently from this purely mechanical perspective? honestly, not too much from DW3! archers are still often priority targets, because if you don't prioritize them you will get knocked off your horse dragon. mission structure is usually quite similar, arguably with a bit less back and forth. combos require virtually the exact same input. the camera in both games is kind of fucked up. aside from abstruse unlock requirements and a...unique, system of progression, the biggest differences are mostly relegated to additions rather than subtractions. there are more enemy designs than just grunt soldiers. you can dodge now. the game is weapon-driven rather than character-driven ala DW3, which allows for its own form of unique experimentation. the soundtrack is excellent, i'm not accepting complaints. to aid in breaking up the pace, there are aerial missions that play somewhat comparably to panzer dragoon on-rail segments which are actually quite fun; likewise, the hybrid missions allow for angelus to be used as a means of offence in ground warfare and rain hellfire from above. it keeps things relatively varied. there's no troops to manage because caim is fighting a losing war and willingly formed a pact with the only being capable of potentially turning the tides, and the game is content to use the musou form to communicate ideas about caim and angelus to great effect.

of course, it's the narrative which gives drakengard a lot of its greatest texture (and is also demonstrative of its greatest strengths and appeals as a DW clone), but we can save discussion of that for some other time; for now it's more important for me to say that it's not quite the outright condemnation of violence through ludology that so many claim it is (it's far more interested in more subtle forms of violence than the explicit and ceaseless murder it depicts anyways). really, this was just a self-indulgent exercise in placing drakengard in its historic context once and for all, away from all the retrospectives it's been getting as a result of nier's runaway success. drakengard is a game that won't be for most, but it's a game that's lingered in my memory long since i first played it. it takes an, at the time, relatively new genre, and through sheer passion and dedication spins it into a uniquely transgressive idea while still remaining an enjoyable title to let unfold. if it feels numbing or meditative, that's more or less the exact emotional resonance that something like DW3 is targeting - drakengard just uses it to achieve more things than a sense of gratifying white noise. it remains peerless because of all of its contradictions, because of how messy and thorny it is as a game, and because we'll never see anything approaching this utterly unique interplay of emotional rhythms and macabre, uncanny storytelling wearing the skin of its crowdpleasing predecessors ever again.