With the new updates. I started again after a long Hiatus. Picking back up as of October 2023. This game has went from middling/good to awesome. Fatshark may have stumbled but have made this game worth yours and your homies time. Just don't overplay it if you can resist. Over the course of the upcoming years I'm anticipating a ton of new maps to continue rolling out. They even kept their promise of an Xbox release though its late. Squad up with friends and slay heretics today for the golden throne!!!

One of the most beautiful PSX title hands down. Its aesthetic and story carry it pretty far I found myself pushing through the extremely cryptic mechanics. Just so I can see the end of this story. Unfortunately, this is a video game and at the end of the day the mechanics and snail-paced gameplay holds this game back from being a four or five star game. Without a guide or almost detective levels of research and time you're not going to get far. I suggest only the most die hard JRPG players with an indomitable spirit play this title. Only someone of a peculiar character can make it through this one.

So far, I'm loving D4! It being a live service title will probably hold it back from being a masterpiece. What is here is very enjoyable. D4 is a mix of the other two entries of the series DNA. Big change here is that it has gone open world. (Gee what a shocker am I right?) In the case of D4 I like the change makes the world feel more seamless than its level-based predecessors.

Expect an absolute blood fest of demons to kill keeping you constantly busy, while on the grind to get your item level as high as you can. All the while trying to tweak and find the perfect aspects for your build. Which in D4s case is immense when it comes the sheer number of styles on offer here.

Of the five classes you can mix and match style of combat to your hearts content. Allowing theory crafters with a lot of options. Are they balanced? Meh... not really. You still have a strong meta that will change from season to season.

Shouldn't hold you back from experimenting until you reach late game as to know your class inside and out. This is important knowing balance changes can come at any time.

The music is atmospheric as per the Diablo style with a rearranged version of a beloved classic coming back in a part of the story. The story telling is a huge step up from D3. I felt more invested this time around. Even if a few of the characters were annoying and added little to the story overall.

The art direction here is a big selling point for me early on. Going from the cartoonish stylings of D3 to this is a much-needed improvement. Diablo is actually kind of scary again. With darker muted colors. Really sold me on this world besieged by demons. With death around every corner.

Now the downside of this game. IMO the live service model will do major damage in the long run to this title. With the introduction of a battle pass that will reset roughly every three months. A cash shop for some I have to admit really cool cosmetics. Just feels so predatory micro transactions territory. Or even like a mobile game.

If you want to explore the full breadth of this game, be prepared for a grind that kind of doesn't respect your time. That being said when a new season comes around starting all over again. Only keeping map exploration and alter of Lilith statues from season to season.

Overall, my opinion of this game is that its right step in the right direction. We just need the current trend of microtransactions from spoiling it. With Blizzards track record I'm not too optimistic about that happening anytime soon.

Its Resident Evil with dinosaurs. Often the quick answer when you have to describe Dino Crisis to someone who has never played it. The long answer is a bit more complicated. Dino Crisis was developed and published by capcom in 1999, being spear headed by one Shinji Mikami. Whose most famous project before was the first Resident Evil. During this time capcom was really trying to capitalize on Resident Evils' success. Shinji not one to enjoy working on a series more than once. Decided to make not a survival horror title, more what he considered panic horror. Which I find to pretty accurately describes this games mood.

Story starts out with a squad of spec ops level soldiers parachuting onto an island harboring a secret military facility. Their mission is to find and extract a scientist named Dr. Kirk. Who was thought to be dead from said island. Their mole on the inside of the facility Tom confirms Dr. kirk is indeed alive and still working on a new energy source known as third energy. On the way down one of the four soldiers sent to find Dr. Kirk, Cooper winds up missing the landing point and is immediately set upon and devoured by a Tyrannosaurus Rex unbeknownst by the rest of the squad.

We end up finally getting a cool reveal of our main protag Regina who is one of the most badass females in gaming. Capcom has a tendency to make their female protags badass. Regina has a very calm collected demeanor about her but takes no shit when describing her situation throughout the story. The other squad mates are Gail. The leader of the unit and your standard head strong, tough guy. Then finally the gem Rick the smart techy of the group who always has something quippy to say. Not going to detail the rest of this story but lets say this infiltration mission doesn't go as expected. With our group having to fight their way through a nest of Dinosaurs.

The story in Dino Crisis is told with a pretty straight face with some of the comedy coming from Rick. Other times With Regina's reaction of gore and viscera being the coyest you'll ever see in a horror setting.

The gameplay of Dino Crisis is admittedly a bit clunky by design. Regina moves by one of my favorite styles of movement tank controls. What you have to understand is in this situation you may have guns, but you are the prey! Fighting should only be your last resort. Your enemies are as fast as you are on a dead run. They can tank a lot of shots especially early on before you get decent equipment. Fighting every single one of them will stress your resources. Your choices to fight or avoid dinos is pretty diverse. With using laser fences to in some places keep them on one side, while shooting them from the other. Or making haste into one the ceiling vents to get away. Or abusing Scene transitions to reset and make them not notice your presence and quickly run past them. Now Dino Crisis sets itself apart from Resident Evil in the screen transitions being that in some areas Dinos will follow you into the next room! Another fun bit is instead of pre rendered backgrounds Dino crisis has fully 3D rendered ones making for some pretty cinematic shots.

For when you must combat you have a pretty decent set of weapons at your disposal including upgradable pistol, shotgun, and grenade launcher. All having different kinds of shots you can load into them. Finally, you have mixing system that allows you to mix medicines into better ones that can heal you fully and or patch up bleeding status effect. Bleeding leaves a noticeable trail of blood everywhere you walk and slowly drains your life. Which with the choice of weapon your hunters prefer to use you will be doing often. You can also mix your resources into tranquilizers to put them temporarily to sleep or mix your tranqs even further into a deadly potent poison that quickly kills them in one shot! You could say why not just poison them all? Well, if you make poison, it will dip pretty heavy into your health resources, so it makes it a bit of a balancing act on your end. Alot of freedom to experiment here.

The music in Dino Crisis fits its setting well most tracks being not scary but unsettling during times of investigation with tracks really selling this high-tech facility. Then you have your high intensity loud tracks that are erratic in nature when set upon by hungry dinos. My favorite track being the save room music. I find the save room tracks in survival horror games to be some the best in gaming. Dino Crisis save room music being among the greats being calming but ominous. With usually blood, gore, and viscera in them really setting the tone of "Am I really safe in here?". The track still holds onto a high-tech feel as well. All the tracks are cohesive in this title with none of them feeling out of place.

Finally, I want to touch on the most important part of Dino Crisis which is the puzzles. The puzzles in this game are at times brutal to figure out. In comparison to other games in the survival horror genre. Silent Hill puzzles are usually more cryptic in nature with some kind of symbolism to understand. Resident Evil puzzles are usually more visual and or move blocks around. Maybe reading a document here or there to give you a clue to a safe or tip you off to a key item. Dino Crisis does share some of Resident Evil's DNA here. With the visual pushing stuff. It also takes the document reading stuff to its extreme.

As your infiltrating the facility the puzzles here are also varied and keep the high-tech thing going. You'll have to find multiple disks in sets of two, that unlock DDK doors. These doors have you deciphering a code to unlock them. Clues to solve them are in readable documents usually close by. At first, you'll think you're a genius then later on get stuck for several hours trying to figure these out. Laughably the codes are pretty contextual to certain keywords you'll be reading a lot as well while exploring the compound. You'll need to collect fingerprints to overwrite and forge IDs to get to inaccessible areas. The devs did a really good job making you like feel like a special agent using detective skills to sleuth your way around this giant compound. I often would find myself getting out a piece of paper and pen to figure out a lot of the puzzles or write down safe codes or important names and ID numbers of scientist and facility workers. Anytime a game has me do this it really makes me feel all warm inside.

As you can tell from this review, I adore this game. Being one of the defining games of my childhood. I was playing Dino Crisis as much as I was playing Pokemon yellow and Final Fantasy VII! Being a dumb 11-year-old at the time I really question my taste in games back then. Going from catching cute little creatures making them battle one moment to playing a game with a bunch of blood and gore in an adult setting the next. While I must admit no way in hell did, I figure out all the puzzles in this game back then. Hell I still managed to get lost often now. I love the memories of calling the number in the back of the jewel case to bother some guy over the phone to explain some codes and locks I got stuck on. Speaking of which you have to make a lot of choices in this game. When I was a kid, I preferred taking Gail's side and just fight my way through to the end. In my older age I enjoy taking Rick's side for more puzzle-based solution to progressing the story. With choices comes four possible endings to the game. Yes, this time around I managed to beat the game four times and beat the unlockable mode in 16 hours.

This game is an easy recommendation for me. I suggest anybody that is a fan of the survival horror genre to play this title before you die. Capcom give us a remake/remaster like you're doing for Resident Evil you cowards!!!!!

Slay the Spire is a stroke of genius. While also being heavily weighed down by rng and stale repetitive design. My first 19 hours of this game was massive fails one after another. Then in my last 3 attempts I managed to reach the end twice in a row. With that said on my last attempt getting wrecked in a random encounter early in act one, made me think is STS more skill or luck? Latter being the bane of my existence. I ultimately put this game down feeling content with what I played. I just feel that roguelike and deck building create way too many variables to be anything other than luck.

Even after becoming more aware of the handful of viable builds, one could make I still found myself losing out to rng a little too frequently. Which the number of possible builds for each character is staggering and with that comes near infinite hours of trial and error. Experimentation is the key here. The question being why would I want to though? Even when I make it to the end of act 3, I just die anyway. Each run also has a very small pool of enemies and each run despite the cards you use feel too repetitive for my taste. I don't normally find repetition to be necessarily a bad thing. After all some of the best games have simple to complex gameplay loops. My problem is when the loop feels stale. I've read there is an act 4 but I don't feel inspired to figure it out.

This game may not be my jam but if a roguelike/deckbuilder is your thang. You will find a huge number of hours of enjoyment in STS.

Ys I chronicles was my first run-in with the Ys series. Tried it at the behest of a couple of friends of mine. I chose a digital version from steam. Which performance wise was great! Weird making a lot of the resolution settings have its own executable, but it works. I can say with ease this game was a good time. Not without some short comings though. First off, the art and soundtrack here are amazing and being able to switch between old school and modern renditions of the soundtrack is a bonus. Even the art can be switched in the settings to change character interaction scenes both of which are great. Some serious waifu bait here. The game has mostly a serious tone with some comedy mixed in that landed pretty well for me. The games runtime was about 18 hours for me. Which is a breath of fresh air in a sea of long winded 100 plus hour rpgs. Ys has a strange approach to combat in the same vein as Hydlide (which was not good). Here though I think the developers did a serviceable job. You fight by running into enemies, (Charmingly called the BUMP SYSTEM) which is counter intuitive to most gamers when running into an enemy sprite normally hurts you. Here it can but if you attack an enemy off center or from behind it only damages the enemy. Feels strange at first but becomes second nature after an hour or two. I was really interested that all npcs in this game have their own name and diary entry giving good context to each townspeople's motivations and personality. Dialogue didn't come off as cheesy to me but I'm a weeb so it was fun for me. Ys does an okay job guiding you and giving well translated hints on what to do. Only downside here is you may need a guide. In every review I do for a standard run not 100% or anything. If I need a guide its one star knocked off no matter what. There is decent number of cryptic directions for where to go at times and needing to find specific items in a dungeon to bring to a npc that you haven't talked to in like 5 hours is annoying especially when they move. Dungeon design here is I think this games weakest point. While not to hard till the final mega dungeon. Most dungeon design here is very winding and maze like you will be wandering a lot looking for a specific Items you need to progress. Most dungeons having very little in the way landmarks and feel samey to the dungeons theme throughout. So will get lost a lot without a guided map of some sort. Grinding here is not terrible but bosses and certain enemies do have pretty hard progression thresholds that need to be meant. If you're lacking really any pieces of equipment and are slightly under leveled for bosses, you're going to have a bad time. Some bosses being outright impossible without certain gear and level requirements. So, you guessed it if you miss stuff more wandering around. Finally and what made me drop another star here is the boss design. Biggest gripe being the final boss fight. These fights feel more luck based than skill not to say there is nooooo strategy here just that I felt bosses you attacks feel like luck to avoid. So, I just throw myself at them and hope for the best while trying to avoid damage. Final boss was where I almost wanted to quit and shelf this game. He is such a prick and a testament to bad boss design I wouldn't blame anybody for quitting. For one you really need to pay attention dont use the best gear in the game one tier down or would will do no damage. As you hit him the arena falls apart roughly where you hit him. So you will die over and over again to falling through a tile. or him justing spamming you to death. which again dodging attacks unless your the one is just luck based. Took me well over an hour to beat this guy on NORMAL. Despite that this game has a ton of charm and I would suggest everybody that is a fan of rpgs and anime to get into this one.