Perfect proof that Uncharted does not need Nathan and Sully to be great.

Might be a hot take, but I don't think the series should end for good here.

Of course give it another few years to rest and let Naughty Dog do something else, but Uncharted is a franchise you could just keep going and it would always be nice to return to.

I'd be fine either way, though.

Seperate Ways, but good. The core problems of RE4R still exist in this one, but the campaign itself is more than I could've asked for. Really shocked that this DLC was only 10€, because they could've easily asked for 15 or even 20 and nobody would've complained. This DLC has about as much content as RE3R had.

The DLC uses some original areas, changes up old areas and even introduces some new bosses. The pacing is arguably better than it was in the original, too. The dreaded sidequests also are less plentiful and tedious, though I didn't do most of those anyway.

Pretty much a must get if you liked the main game.

Looking forward to whatever comes next, because RE5R seems inevitable at this point.

After not being impressed by Starfield I decided to give The Outer Worlds another shot, because on my first run I did not really spend much time with it and got through the story fairly quick.

Since there are two DLCs now and I never got the platinum I went for a replay and while I was pretty impressed by the humour in the writing and how companions are constantly commenting on what's going on, talking to each other or even participating in some of the NPC dialogue, I started to get bored after a few hours.

It's a bit hard for me to pinpoint what exactly the problem is, but I think it's a mixture of fairly boring quests that let you follow a way marker around and barely involve any decision making, a pretty uninteresting skillsystem that makes it really hard to not be good at everything and bland combat.

I was thinking about why I enjoy the combat in Fallout but not in this game and I think a big part of the reason is the ammo. While Fallout has lots of different ammo types, some common, some rarer, The Outer Worlds uses a very straight-forward system with only three types of which there are plenty lying around. You're NEVER in danger of running around, the game is making sure of that. The same goes for healing items. I was playing on hard (would've played on Supernova but did not want to deal with companion permadeath) and I ended up with over 150 healing items without ever buying any.

There being so much money doesn't sound like a problem, but it leads to never having to make decisions in what weapons to use, what to invest in a fight. In Fallout there are always strong weapons with expensive ammo that you typically want to save up for harder enemies. It wasn't a very deep system, but the V.A.T.S. system on top of pretty varied enemy design lead to pretty fun combat. In Outer Worlds I just took the weapon with the highest DPS and started blasting. Sometimes I switched to shock weapons for robots or a sniper rifle for far away enemies, but that's about the whole depth of the system.

The perks are also mostly flat bonuses that aren't all that interesting. With some cool exceptions here and there. The Flaw system is utterly irrelevant in my eyes. I just always took the flaw to get another perk, because what is a slight debuff in specific situations really doing?

The DLC that I was looking forward to, I didn't even beat. I was midway in the Gorgon DLC and started to realize that this isn't fun. I was hoping the new content would ignite something in me, but it was just another planet with the same enemy types and terminals and even the same loot.

Overall, I think Outer Worlds isn't really a bad game ... It's just way too small scale and unambitious. The writing is pretty fun overall, even if the evil corporations are depicted as way too stupid and there isn't really ANY reason to join them, even as a evil character and the companions are fun. I feel like the sequel could be a pretty fun game if it has the appropiate time to cook. But the "haha, we are intentionally making a very ironic and sarcastic trailer to tease our game" thing they've shown doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. We'll see. I'd say this is slightly better than Starfield, but really not by much.

Before I started this game, I was warned that it was supposedly the weakest part of the new three games and after playing it, I can see why. The whole thing feels a little unambitious.

I'm not sure if that's the result of a small budget or simply because they wanted to create a "small" game, but either way, it lacks interesting decision making in the story and character build. Granted, I chose the possibly most bland character class and just went for a combat focused shotgun-wielding troll and simply did not need more than two shotguns in my whole playthrough, but I can still tell by looking at the skill system that another class wouldn't have made a huge difference. The game simply doesn't offer enough opportunities to even use your skills on. For example speech checks were barely there. I also feel like having a set team instead of constantly hiring mercenaries would have been better. The idea of paying for party members is fairly unique though.

Combat was still quite good. Shadowrun Returns plays pretty much like modern Xcom and it was fun finding the perfect position for your characters, make the best use of AoE effects and buffs and get through missions without casualties. I probably should've played on hard, but I don't have much experience in the genre and wanted to play it safe for now. Dragonfall is getting played on hard.

Returns feels like a solid groundwork. A decent combat system, varied classes, pretty good presentation and music. It just needs more complexity ... the story feels too linear and it seems like you can't impact it in a meaningful way. If the other games offer actual involvement in the story and makes your profession or race more relevant in dialogue I could see them being really fun. But in this case I tried to play as a somewhat dumb but loyal street-cred guy who just wants revenge for his friend and while some of the dialogue seemed to fit that kind of character, there were other moments where the game clearly railroads the player into a certain direction and only gives you very smart and convoluted answers to choose from.

I may sound a little negative here, but I appreciated that the game didn't overstay it's welcome and I feel pretty positive about it overall. Like I said, it feels like a solid foundation. If it gets uphill from here, I can see myself becoming a fan.

It's ironic that a game with intergalactic space travel and so many different planets feels so bland to explore. Bethesda's philosophy to game design has always been "size matters" and Starfield feels like the natural evolution of that approach.

However, by having so many planets, moons, even galaxies to explore ... everything feels bland. We all know deep down that no developer could ever create entire galaxies of content. And honestly, nobody would even want that, because even if it sounds cool, after a while you would realize that it gets tiring to play the very same game over hundreds of hours because the mechanics simply can't carry such a massive experience.

Thanks to the amount and the resulting emptiness of these planets I ended up wanting to explore none of them. I occasionally tried to wander around aimlessly, looking for markers on my map and usually just ended up in samey caves and outposts that provided nothing of interest. It was "content" in the strictest sense but it wasn't worthwhile or meaningful. It was just there to make the game bigger.

A good game, as far as I'm concerned, leads the player to where the good content is. Starfield does this by randomly putting quests into your log (seemingly by your character hear about rumors NPCs talk about) and while that is definitely an option that does work, it also makes it feel like you're just working off a list.

Maybe that's a matter of preference, but if I reach a new location in an RPG I want to talk to NPCs, gather information, stumble upon interesting places and actively look for the quests. In Starfield it feels like you're running around and your questlog gets filled automatically while you're doing something else. It's the Ubisoft design of doing content. Nothing needs to be explored, everything is on your map or your questlog. Now choose something and do it, damn it!

And it feels wrong to me. My questlog was filled with stuff like "talk to person X", talk to person Y", "apply for random job", "go there" and without context I simply did not know what I should even go for. Sometimes I ended up randomly following a marker to a quest and it ended up being something that my character that I had in my mind wouldn't even be interested in. But since he put it in his questlog, he obviously is somehow.

There are some quests in this game that I liked. Most of them don't really offer the interesting decision making of something like Fallout: New Vegas, but you can choose to be an asshole or a helpful citizen and I particularly enjoyed the lengthy storyline of Ryujin industries, full of industry spionage and betrayal. It wasn't interesting in terms of gameplay, but it lead to some cool choices at least. Though I imagine the end result will still look fairly similar in every case.

The gameplay is basically Fallout, but more boring. Instead of having the cool V.A.T.S. system you have nothing interesting to do. There are tons of weapons and also grenades, mines and drugs to use but combat encounters boil down to simply shooting people without really having the character use specific abilities or really any decision making. The skill tree mostly offers percentual boosts to your weapons and nothing really stood out to me that made combat interesting. There is one thing you unlock fairly late in the game, that feels like the equivalent of Skyrim screams, but these also did not seem very interesting to use.

It also has the typical hacking, lockpicking, pickpocketing, sneaking ... It does nothing new in that regard. The only real thing this introduces to Bethesda RPGs are the spaceships. However, these can mostly be ignored, since your ship isn't really meant to be used for flying from planet to planet, but mostly just as a way to make quick travel more tedious, since you always have to enter your cockpit before jumping to the next galaxy. The actual fights in space are something I always tried to avoid, since they simply aren't fun to do, but they're there and I suppose it could be fun for some people to upgrade and customize there ships. I certainly didn't need it. I also never bothered to create and outposts since it was simply not something I ever found use for.

The main storyline was there. Really, I could not care less about it. I liked how they handled New Game + in regards to the story, but I was never invested, did not care for the characters and it all lead to a generic conclusion that offers nothing of value. You might as well not do the main story, but you'd miss out on the powers you unlock at some point, so at least play to that point.

In conclusion, I think this game simply caters to a specific type of audience. People who enjoy spending a lot of time in one game, gathering materials and money, building bases and spaceships and have constant progression and tons of quests will probably be happy with this. It does offer a lot. It's a gigantic game and even though I put about 40 hours into it, it still feels like I only scratched the surface. But people who want their RPGs to have some deeper mechanics, quests with interesting choices and less bloat will probably end up like me and leave the experience unimpressed.

Funny, I was thinking of this game as a really poor cashgrab that tried to use an old classic's name for some sales and it remained this way for me since 2015 but I was looking through my Psnprofiles profile to look for some manageable ultra rare trophies and noticed this one has like 20 of them ...

So I tried this game again, willing to put up with it for some trophies and actually had lots of fun. I played this in coop on the hardest setting and it was neat trying to overcome the challenge, going for different set-ups and strategies. I like how this is not straight grinding until you succeed but about execution.

It's still a fairly short and simple game overall, but I'd say it's worth a run. Especially with a partner (or three)

A decent foundation that's led down by several aspects.

1) The game is too long and too many of the encounters are samey and start to repeat themselves. Repetition can be somewhat mitigated by making the leveling process rewarding and fun, but I don't think that was the case here.

2) The presentation is really boring. The way you're constantly driving from left to right, looking at nothing but your vehicle the whole time makes the game feel even more monotonous.

3) The micro management feels tedious. The way menus work makes it more annoying than it should be to switch out your party members and their partners. Same goes for the Tanaris sections, where the way from A to B can feel a bit more tedious than it should be. Feel like you shouldn't walk around the Tanaris but rather make it a menu.

4) The combat, while pretty challenging at times and dependent on ressource management, is a little let down by it's story bosses. Never are those the actual challenging part of the game. Which leads to the next problem:

5) The soul cannon. The big interesting game mechanic that pretty much got me interested in the game or at least more curious about it. The harrowing decision of sacrificing a character for good to get out of a sticky situation is a really cool idea, but doesn't work, because there's never a reason to use it and you even get a bad ending by doing it. The whole mechanic is useless and not encouraged to use at all. Honestly, the game would work better as a shorter roguelike, where a sticky situation is more likely to occur and can't be save scammed or if the game forces them on you anyway and the decision who to sacrifice is what it's all about.

And finally:
6) The story. I can't even really say much about it. It was bland and the characters felt like stereotypes. Obviously nobody can have a huge stake in the main story because since they can be sacrificed, nobody is allowed to be really relevant. So the party feels like one big hivemind aside from one example.

So, even though this was super negative, I don't hate the game. I like myself a turn-based game that forces me to manage my ressources and time (AP) to take priority in one thing over the other. The decision making is what made the game for me. It's the Persona style of RPG, where everything you can do has an advantage, but you could always spend your time in another (better?) way. Deciding if I want to cook for great buffs and EXP boosts, working on relationships, go for more materials or plant more vegetables can be tough! And the biggest success of the game for me.

I'm probably going to give the sequel a shot to see if they made it a bit more interesting. Some of the critique I had are things I could look past in the sequel (like a mediocre story and the presentation, whatever) but I hope the game gets more challenging, encourages the use of the cannon maybe and works on the QoL stuff.