Played via the ECWolf source port: it's the essential way to even attempt to play the game, adding mouselook so that you can strafe without having to hold Alt every time - plus support for modern resolutions.

While not the original FPS, Wolf3D was arguably the first game to not just get it right, but really make it a proper, fantastic videogame that goes beyond its gimmick. What id crafted here is nothing short of fantastic for its time, and while it's definitely difficult to revisit today as anything more than a museum exhibit, a sign of how far we've come, I still think it's pretty playable if you give it a little patience.

Wolf3D is the FPS genre stripped down to what is practically its most bare: You have a gun (and a pathetic knife if you run out of ammo), there are enemies to shoot, and you have to find the exit. Levels are entirely flat and consist of rooms, and mazes. Oh, so many labyrinthian mazes. ECWolf contains an automap to help remember the path you've taken, but the vanilla game expected you to bust out the ol' pencil and paper. The design gets tiresome after a while, but it convincingly keeps you on your toes, especially given the danger enemies present.

The Nazis - always a fantastic choice of guilt-free targets (except their poor guard dogs...) - come in a few shapes and sizes. Most go down easily and take embarrassingly long to aim their gun at you, whereas later ones can aim faster or forgo it entirely. However, their damage output is not to be underestimated: all standard enemy guns in this game are hitscan, meaning that if their gun is aimed at you when fired, it will instantly hit you. Several factors determine if the bullet actually hits you or not, such as your relative speed and distance (and the same applies to your own shots). From there, bullets can either scratch you, dealing minor damage, or crit: taking as much as half your health instantly. Encountering an enemy at point blank range without immediately unloading your weapon into them is a certifiable death sentence, and that's a layer of challenge persistent throughout.

The base game on PC has 3 episodes, while most versions available now add an additional 3 "prequel" episodes, though they're far harder than the base game. The console ports supposedly have completely redesigned levels to accommodate the limited memory, so I'm only speaking for the DOS original here. Having played on "Bring 'em on!", the normal difficulty, I found Episode 1 to be a great entry into the game, and 3 to be a satisfying if maybe a little underwhelming finale to the original trilogy. Unfortunately, there's an outlier: Episode 2 marks a huge difficulty spike from 1, and makes 3 seem easy in comparison. This is due to, among other things, the "mutant" enemy type, who has no alert sounds, and can sneak up on you very easily. Oh, and they don't even have to aim - if they see you, they're already shooting you. They're never seen again after, but this spike in difficulty is incredibly off-putting so early into the game. The prequels aren't too remarkable, but generally ok - Episode 6 is the hardest by far, as it should be, but Episode 5 has one level that you can get permanently stuck in by design, which is frankly a horrible concept for a stage.

The music is a little varied: Bobby Prince would later compose the iconic soundtrack we know and love from Doom, but while a few tracks here are also pretty great, some are just utterly goofy. Yes, the hidden morse code message is cool and all, but i'm afraid it does not constitute a bop. The soundfont used here is also not at all as good as Doom, which holds it back a bit.

I always wondered why id never came back to Wolfenstein back in the day (save for the expansion Spear of Destiny, which I will absolutely play next), and just went straight on ahead with Doom and Quake, leaving other developers to pick up where they left off every 5 to 10 years. But now having played all the way through, I can see that they really did just immediately perfect the formula in this iteration of the engine. Those 6 episodes are practically 2 games in of themselves anyway, and I can't see a 7th episode being any more difficult in terms of design without stretching into the criminally unfair.

All in all, this shooter still shoots just fine - though I can't exactly give a glowing recommendation in this day and age.

The culmination of the Hexcells trilogy, and uh yeah! It deilvers!

Hexcells Infinite, first and foremost, offers more of the same in regards to the content. You liked the puzzles in Hexcells and Hexcells Plus? Here's more! And of course, it's harder than ever. It wastes no time getting to some brainscratchers, and the final few puzzles are not to be underestimated.

It really does test your logic and understanding of the mechanics to their absolute limits though, and I'm not ashamed to say I had to break out a guide on one more more occasions because I simply could not comprehend the logic calculations I was being asked to make. Hell, they should just replace exams with this, if you beat this game without help you are certifiably clever.

On top of the standard 6-world campaign, the main gimmick lies in the title: Hexcells Infinite. As in, there are practically infinite, seed-generated puzzles available, so now there's no need for another Hexcells game! You can just have infinite new puzzles, forever! This is a really cool feature that ensures that everyone can get their literal fill of Hexcells, whether it's until you get tired of it or until you drop dead.

Altogether, it's a fantastic, if very hard puzzle package deal, and I'm very interested to see if the spinoffs, Crosscells and Squarecells, live up to the Hexcells trilogy.

So...I'm not a fighting game person. AT ALL. I think I just cannot comprehend memorising and then carrying out perfectly precise button combos that are frame perfect. Everyone else seems to be able to do this no problem, but no matter how many hundreds of hours I try, I just can't do it and instinctively just mash until I die.

So I'm not exactly fit to judge this...thing that is, due to awkward regional naming shenanigans, the first entry in the Dynasty Warriors series...a series that would switch genres immediately after this one, except that's because what we know to be Dynasty Warriors is an entirely separate series in Japan than this game, simply sharing the cast of characters from Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

The fighting is...awkward. It's really hard to do any particularly fancy combos, the super attacks would only procure at random even after following a movelist guide, and the arenas themselves are pretty shoddily put together, even for PS1.

In spite of that, I kinda like the little technical touches added here? The weapon-on-weapon hits, general animations, a decent training mode, there's something cool buried in here, but it'll never rise above neither the technical issues that plagued it, the overbearing shadow of its rival fighting games at the time, and the mockery at how it isn't even a musou game like its successors in the first place.

Again, I'm not qualified to judge this thing, and I didn't like playing it at all...but I think it's secretly a little bit cool.

Yikes.
Now, I get it, old racing games have it stacked against them, but this game is violently bad. There's little to no content here to enjoy, the driving is bearable but twitchy, the cars and tracks are pretty boring, and the entire crashing mechanic almost renders the game unplayable.

Criterion had no idea what they wanted to make here - crashing is glorified, to the point that your car making any kind of physical contact immediately takes you out of the race, never to catch up to first place again. Limited continues pour salt in the wound of the inability to actually win any races thanks to how violently the AI rubberbands, always breathing down your back and ready to end your entire run at a moments notice.

For the time, the game looks and drives fine, but everything else stops this game from being any fun at all. The boost mechanic is completely useless, for instance - it just causes you to crash instantly, and the AI just rubberbands to remove any distance covered by your boost anyway.

I couldn't stomach this game even when it was all I had for my PS2 as a kid, and even today, actually understanding the mechanics, I find it to be an abysmal first draft that will hopefully at least become playable in future iterations - I've heard good things about 3, and I'm interested to see if it's actually any good, or just rose-tinted glasses once again.

Now, I can't be too harsh on this considering that it costs less than most fast food these days, but this is a completely bare-bones platformer with but a handful of content and little in the way of challenge.

The aesthetics are fine, the low-poly PS1 era visuals do their job and the colour palette ensures that everything is clear and distinct - your path ahead is clearly defined, while enemies and collectibles are hard to miss. Inhibiting this somewhat is the camera, which is controlled entirely manually and isn't nearly sensitive enough to be convenient. Despite the emphasis on speedrunning, I find myself having to awkwardly manage charging around corners while manoeuvring the camera into place so as not to run into an enemy or fall down a pit.

Speaking of enemies, there really aren't a whole lot of them, and are usually pretty easy to avoid. Challenge in general is limited to simply landing your jumps right, and even this is only really difficult in the second half of the game. There are only 9 levels, and 4 sets of assets between them - the times required to S rank stages are pretty demanding, but finding the collectibles is a cakewalk - you keep everything you picked up even if you die, and there's rarely that many in the level. Given how linear each level is designed, you'd struggle to actually miss any of them in your first run.

There's certainly replay value, which mitigates the tiny amount of content on offer, but it's so vanilla and easy to play that there's very little motivation to do so. You can unlock 2 other characters - one for collecting every star and another for getting A ranks on every level, but only Toree's runs let you get ranked anyway, so they're just fun extras.

Altogether it's a pretty mediocre, basic game that I could only really recommend to small children...except the game has weird out-of-place horror elements that mean nothing at all due to an absence of actual story or resolution, so maybe don't let your kids play it.

It's certainly not a rip-off, especially if you get it on sale, but honestly? The main thing you'd be wasting is your time.

I found Half-Life 2 to be a pretty impressive technical achievement for its age, with some really good level design and generally holding up well, but held back by gunplay that lacks the punch of the original Half-Life.

Guess what Half-Life 2: Episode One uses as its main crutch?

I found this game to be pretty unmemorable and not nearly as well designed as its predecessor, but that's not to say it was without merit. The game still employs smaller physics puzzles to make the most of the ever-iconic Source Engine, and introduces the tougher Zombine enemies to give some more spice to the existing headcrab zombie pool, and certain setpieces work well - but without doing much new, it just feels like retreads of what Half-Life 2 already did.

The narrative holding it together couldn't be any more different than Half-Life 2 if it tried. Half-Life 2 presents a twisting, near-seamless narrative that doesn't really make any sense coming off of 1, but whatever, you're in the thick of it now so just roll with the twists and turns as they happen in front of you. The plot of Half-Life 2: Episode One on the other hand, is simple: Get The Fuck Out. Does it fit? Sure! It's just a little polarising in comparison to the game it immediately picks up after.

It feels like I should be doing more here than just comparing Episode One to Half-Life 2, but it really just doesn't have enough going for it. The dialogue is about on par, at least, but the only thing that sets it apart is the fact that Alyx is practically joined to your hip, which makes for some...grating dialogue, given Gordon Freeman's whole silent protagonist schtick does not work in this particular scenario. She's also a nigh-invincible marksman, which surprisingly doesn't take away from the difficulty as much as I expected it to.

All in all, it's fine I guess...but not a game I think is worth revisiting and probably the weakest non-Gearbox HL game that I've played so far. Here's hoping Episode 2 is an improvement!

A sequel that very much rings more hollow than the iconic first instalment in terms of its narrative, but makes up for it in spades with small but absolutely essential upgrades to the gameplay that leaves it a lesser, but still worthy follow-up.

Now, that's not to say that I consider the story in this game to be bad, by any stretch. The steps the narrative takes to follow on from the first game is to be commended - my issues lie in the style of which this second outing is presented. The comic book cutscenes remain, but the writing comes across as less snappy - the metaphors are heavily toned down and James McCaffrey's line reads are far dryer, with less of the biting cynicism and more of a cold emptiness. In-game cutscenes are animated in better quality, but lose the pseudo-cinematic direction of the original. Most of all, the story itself is a deeply personal one, to Max himself, rather than the conspiracies of the original he found himself tangled up in - no longer as much of a throwback to the noir crime dramas the original game was a loving homage to.

To put it simply, this felt like a sequel that was never expected to happen, and becomes something different. But that's not to say different is bad.

While the story still remains interesting - certain odd choices and flashbacks/flashforwards aside - it's the gameplay that forms the star attraction this time around, and just as well, because Remedy brought their A-game. Movement feels much smoother (aside from the weird jumping that brings you to a dead stop mid-air like a cartoon character, not sure what's up with that), the shooting is more responsive, the quicksave adaptive difficulty bug brings enemy reflexes and accuracy back down to sane levels. Bullet time is also overhauled, making it less about dodging the slowed-down bullets and more about landing more shots before the goons can fire back, and the bullet-dodge is finally not mapped to the same button as regular bullet time, a big problem from 1. You even get a very cool spin-around fast reload animation, to further incentivise usage.

With all of 1's worst elements addressed and fixed, 2 does not stop there - ragdoll and physics objects are implemented throughout and Remedy have a lot of fun with how they're presented. Certain enemies get a special slow-mo killcam as their body violently descends off of a sheer drop, hitting multiple objects on their way down or landing in a trashcan. The physics objects are mainly just there to look cool, but holy shit for a 2003 game, they blew me away. Little pieces of debris from an explosion slowly falling over as you nudge them really adds so much to so many setpieces, but Remedy wisely stop short of making them any kind of important gameplay mechanic - I mean, this was post-Trespasser and pre-Half Life 2, so I guess that makes a lot of sense.

Level design is far more enjoyable than 1, with surprisingly large-scale areas to engage in combat in, and a lot of entertaining side details to explore or ignore at your leisure. Guard conversations, unread answer machine messages that add extra story details and those random TV shows that have become Remedy tradition from what I've heard. The AI is also very well-made, aggressively chasing the player when you take cover, diving for cover when being shot at themselves, and lobbing grenades and/or molotovs; although their aim is a little haphazard.

My major complaint, if I have to be honest, is the difficulty; I feel like I breezed through the first chapter, and it's to be expected due to one baffling decision: forcing the first playthrough to be on Easy. I don't know if they were afraid of game journalists or something, but whatever the case the game sadly bombed in terms of sales anyway, putting the series on the back burner for a good long time until Rockstar went it alone with Max Payne 3: although given the story in 2, perhaps it would have been better had the series moved on peacefully. I'll just have to see what it brings to the table once I've played it.

So, at the end of the day, the story? I think it's a little worse. The gameplay? Much, much better. Absolute must for third-person shooter fans, or honestly just videogame enjoyers in general.

Having watched someone play this game for about a minute, I think I see what's up here, and I think I understand what the developer's intention was when it came to bringing this belated sequel into the world, where most others wouldn't dare attempt. However, merely 10 seconds into the gameplay, it became very clear to me that Mr. Tomkow didn't quite understand what made the original Chess the timeless classic that it is in our society.

The beauty of Chess - the original Chess, released on the physical plane of existence back in ~538AD - is that any bout between players can last between 30 seconds, to in excess of 20 hours. Chess 2 makes a deliberate attempt to streamline the experience, but while it may seem appealing to newcomers who find the complexity of the original Chess too daunting, it leaves the feeling of victory hollow, and unsatisfying.

Call me too old-fashioned, or unwilling to accept change, but I also have to address something I feel quite strongly about; the addition of the Duck, while endearing, clashes in a way with the existing and unchanged chess piece designs in a way that I just simply cannot ignore. The cel-shading aesthetic also feels like it was put in place with the sole intention to empower the Duck's appearance, with no regard for how it muddies and blurs the detail of the chess pieces themselves. If Mr. Tomkow felt so strongly about making the Duck look good, why even call it Chess 2 anymore? I don't recall there being any sequel to Duck (although I am less than fond of the spinoffs, such as Goose).

Overall, Chess 2 is an interesting experiment in breaking the boundaries of what can be called a sequel, but doesn't quite come close to matching the original. At the very least, much like the original (basically) is, the sequel is also completely free for anyone to try. Mildly recommended, but not remotely endorsed.

EDIT:
WAIT IT'S SINGLE PLAYER ONLY THAT'S LIKE, COMPLETELY NOT THE POINT OF CHESS HOW DID THEY MISS THAT, FUCK THIS GAME

I am convinced they used the power of the PS2's emotion engine solely with the intention of crafting Kazuma Kiryu into the most handsome protagonist possible at the time. The rest of the game is just a fun bonus they did in their spare time.

The wonderful Backloggd community threatened - that is to say, heavily suggested - that I play Yakuza PS2 instead of the remake, Kiwami. To that I say, screw it, release order supremacy, I will get around to Kiwami eventually. But of course, that means starting with this, the original PS2 release, and I'm happy to say I quite enjoyed it, in spite of everything.

The story is the main draw of the game - well at least, it sure seems to believe that it's the case - and I found it decent, but not particularly sound. It gets a bit too bogged down with filler early on, and a lot of characters go severely underutilised. Heck, it was to the point I found myself completely forgetting about a lot of them over the course of the game, making any reappearances they may or may not make later on more than a little confusing. The emotional hooks are pretty good, but - without getting into spoiler territory - I think it doesn't resolve the plot threads in satisfying ways, and kind of collapses in on itself by the end. So many issues could have been easily avoided, and certain twists are wholly unnecessary and exist purely for shock value.

Main story aside, a big selling point of the games (mainly through the hype given by the fandom) are the substories, side quests dotted throughout the district of Kamurocho that see Kiryu meet all sorts of weird and wacky people with problems that need solving...actually, in the first game, it's mostly just scam artists and guys who want to beat Kiryu up. They get pretty tedious, and can be annoyingly obscure to even find in the first place, and only a few have particularly likable stories - most are just thinly veiled excuses for an utterly ordinary combat scenario.

As for the combat itself, I found it to actually be pretty fun for the time...but I have to throw a few caveats out with that statement. Firstly, Kiryu's starting moveset is pretty dire. Light attacks and a combo-ending heavy attack, as well as a grab. Landing hits builds Heat, a sort of super-mode that stuns enemies easier and allow for Heat Actions that play a nice, brutal animation and deal massive damage. As you gain experience and level up (choosing which aspect of your abilities you want to prioritise) you gain more moves, and more still through a certain tutor halfway through the game. Once your move repertoire is more fleshed out via these means, the combat becomes bloody fantastic. Throws, backbreaking, dodging, it's incredibly well crafted. Well, with the exception of certain bosses that render a lot of your abilities useless, but they're usually not too bullshit. Usually.

The major flaws in gameplay come from two sources. Firstly, the camera. Bad cameras in 3D games were still a thing even into the PS2 era, and sadly Yakuza is among the offenders. While you can center the camera with L2 to match where Kiryu is facing, it only works when you're not locked into an animation, and won't always be where you really want it to be facing. The major failing there is not mapping camera control to the right analog stick, which is used for....uh...absolutely sod all. Well, it scrolls the minimap: a feature I can say with absolute certainty is completely useless in every concievable way. The full map displays the second you hit Start, so I really don't get why they gave such a feature to the right analog stick instead of camera control. More annoyingly, there's no proper lock-on in the game. Holding down R1 will cause you to begin shifting around the direction you're facing, and will sort of lock on to any enemy you're facing, but if you miss a swing or they get too far out of the way, you're back to swinging at empty air again. Add in the fact combos cannot be cancelled, and you have a recipe for frustration that goes to show that the combat system, while almost there, has serious room for improvement.

I had mentioned how fantastically brutal the combat animations were earlier; that ties in to what I think the strongest element of this game is - the presentation. Kamurocho is a smallish hub world for the game to take place in, but it's amazing how much work was put in to make it feel more alive than any GTA game could boast at the time. Lots of low-poly strangers walking around on-screen, people holding conversations that appear as brief textboxes around the edges of the screen (shoutout to that one woman who still doesn't know where she is from beginning to end), people chasing after you begging you to go to a hostess club, a sizable number of interactable NPCs who's dialogue can change to suit current story events, the place is jam packed on first impressions. Stores sell food and medicine that restores Kiryu's HP and even give a little experience, enough to imply that these beef bowls are physically making him stronger. Arcades are home to those accursed UFO catchers, and they're fully functional! Strip clubs, massage parlours, the extensive hostess mini-stories, it's a game that rewards you for breathing it all in.

This extends to the cutscenes too - the direction and animation is superb, and the voice acting - the proper, Japanese voice acting - sells it very well. Let's not forget the sound design, a very underappreciated aspect of making the big, impact punches actually come across as visceral as they are. For a breakout title that noone but Sony seemed to have any faith in, RGG visibly put all they had into making sure that the game made an impact on audiences, and - at least in Japan - it's clearly paid off.

I deliberately try to avoid giving out 7/10s to games, as it's a very cliché score that is often thrown out as a "it's good, but not fantastic" rating, as opposed to acknowledging it as an 8, or daring to give it a 6. However, I cannot in good conscience give Yakuza a 6 given how much it accomplished of what it has clearly set out to do. That said, the story and gameplay issues hold it back from an 8. So, Yakuza gets the ol' 7/10 - exciting, impressive, but significantly flawed. And let me just say, I cannot wait to see how Yakuza 2 improves on everything.

It's more Hexcells! More importantly, it's harder Hexcells, and it strongly reinforces the mechanics of the original while also adding some new surprises, and is absolutely a more satisfying experience than its predecessor.

The core idea is the same - as it should absolutely be, else you might as well call it something else. There's a grid of hexes, and you can left click them if you think they're blue, or right click if you think they're black. A black hex will (usually) then offer a hint, a number indicating the amount of blue hexes directly in its perimeter. New to this installment, however, are blue hexes being able to display a number of their own, showing how many other blue hexes are within a 12-hex radius. Puzzles are generally bigger, better, and far more demanding.

My main complaint with the original Hexcells was that despite being a fun puzzle experience, it spent most of its runtime as a tutorial for the mechanics of the game, and only truly tested the player in the final chapter. Here, the tutorials take up far less time - the game assumes you're familiar, gives you a brief catch-up, shows off the new mechanics, then wastes no time in making you prove you have what it takes. If I were to demonstrate this in terms of numbers, the original game took me a little over 2 hours to 100%; this one took me almost 12 - and in the same amount of levels. I think that speaks for itself.

Any puzzle aficionado should absolutely have Hexcells in their library, and if they're left wanting more, then Hexcells Plus doesn't just deliver, it surpasses. Simple, satisfying, and shittingly-cheap.

Clever little minesweeper/picross kinda hybrid that carries a gentle vibe that's absolute bliss to the ears, as you make the hex cells go blue, then make a single mistake and lose your shit.

For real, a simple and really great puzzler. If only it were longer though! Fortunately there are sequels, but I feel blueballed at how it was just about peaking, and then just ends when the puzzles get really good. A lot of the game is easing you into new mechanics, which does keep things fresh but only in the final world does it really feel like an ultimate test of what you've learned over the very brief experience - a little over 2 hours at most, I found it.

Still, for the low price of like, $3 (even better on sale)? If you like puzzles at all, absolutely grab this.

Review transferred from the SNES page that had the Playstation version listed as the same game: this is in fact a remake that overhauls the graphics and adds significant content.

Tales of Phantasia could've been something absolutely special, but production setbacks and publisher demands caused 2/3rds of the game to be cut, and what's left is perfectly adequate, but ultimately "just another JRPG".

The story is incredibly standard, as are the characters, but they all have solid, if generic, personality to them. The gameplay is much like your standard JRPG: overworld, towns, random encounters, levelling, buying equipment, dungeons full of loot, yada yada.

Where the game stands apart from its contemporary competitors is the battle system, which is real-time, but still has some kinda turn-based elements such as giving commands to your party to use their abilities, ranging from magic, to summons, to fancy arrow-shooting. Thanks, Chester. It controls a little stiff and it doesn't help that you don't get manual control over your protagonist, Cless, until a fair few hours in. There's room for potential here, but the spell animations are very slow and can't be skipped or sped up.

It's a very simple and lighthearted JRPG that'll last 40 hours if you do some of the side content, I had intended to do all but some of them are beyond frustrating, and I wouldn't recommend actually trying to 100% this game.

Phantasia represents Tales as a whole: it's perfectly competent, but it doesn't offer much unique to itself.

From it's origins as a basic dungeon-crawler with as much variety as a salt shaker to a weird Zelda-style click-em-up, Bit Dungeon 3 sets its sights on the Souls games for inspiration this time around, and the result is certainly their most mechanically sound yet...and that's not saying much.

The vagueness of the narrative makes the progression feel directionless and confusing, but fortunately the overworld is so small that it's only a matter of time before you figure out what to do through simple exploration. Kill the bosses in the dungeons, and then kill the final boss. Then do it again, because as with all the Bit Dungeon games, the main appeal is in doing an ungodly amount of New Game Pluses, as there sure as shit isn't much satisfaction just from beating the final boss and being treated to an abrupt credits roll.

The enemies are vast in number in the overworld, attacking in groups of 5-10 and usually shadowed by a larger miniboss enemy, but once you're levelled a bit they shouldn't take much effort to kill. Hell, the overworld segments are more akin to musou-style games, just with campfires.

Random loot drops keep things fresh, unless you're maining a mage, as staffs for whatever reason are kept firmly out of the loot pool until 3 bosses in, making about 50% of all drops (weapons such as swords, axes, bows, etc.) useless. At least the rare armour sets look very cool, and lend themselves to a decent variety of builds - though perhaps I'm just this impressed because of how mediocre the last two games were.

This being said, magic is still completely broken, as the main form of projectile attack it would appear enemies have no visible counter. I tore through most of the bosses just by spamming projectiles and dumping most of my stat points into intelligence, ending fights absurdly quickly. I doubt the effectiveness of melee at all to be honest, as whenever I was engaged at close range I'd find my self stunlocked and losing almost half my health per combo from enemies with attack ranges far larger than their sprites would suggest.

What brings most of the experience down, though, are the bugs. So many bugs. Quest items would simply not spawn, I'd attack NPCs when I was simply trying to talk, important dialogue would skip, inputs wouldn't always register, the list goes on. This game has under gone a lot of patches since its launch 3 years ago, hell, this January alone saw a total rebalance. I tried this for the first time about a year ago, and it was a brutally impossible, broken and unfair disaster, and I'm glad it's been adjusted, but it's clear there's a broken base somewhere as the balance remains poor, as do the bugs.

I also question the permadeath. It's a franchise staple and a playthrough isn't too long, but having it so that dying a second time without getting your old soul back is permadeath is a little cruel in a soulslike...but even more so when invasions are a factor. I opted out, but I can't imagine the invasion element is any fun - especially given reports from players that a high-level player can just trounce a new player and wipe them out at the starting gate.

I concede that this is probably the best Bit Dungeon game so far, but I still can't really recommend it unless you really want a short, janky, new-game-plus-heavy, kinda-soulslike, kinda-musou hybrid that sounds worse and worse the more I try to add descriptors to it.
Oh, there's a horse? Sometimes? He's cool. Get it for the horse.

Based on an underappreciated action-horror TV series, Golden Knight GARO is generally your typical tie-in game affair, not at all unlike the Kamen Rider PS2 games Bandai were publishing around this time. The menu design, the earning points from the story mode to unlock things in the gallery, which in turn unlock more content because weird forced replay value...it all feels very familiar to me at this point. Too familiar, as for once I had no drive at all to unlock anything beyond the base campaign.

Said campaign is distressingly simple - as in the show, you play as Kouga and take on jobs dispatching Horrors, monsters who prey on people with enough inner darkness by possessing and transforming them, with the sole purpose to feed on the innocent. Of course, you get very little actual explanation, as the game assumes you're down with the lore and just throws you into fights with little fanfare (save for Kouga's sentient ring, Zaruba, offering guidance and encouragement). You pick a job, enter a small battle arena, and kill the thing. Repeat until the credits abruptly roll.

Gameplay is, to be brutally honest, a poor man's Devil May Cry, and I mean broke-ass dirt poor, just after being robbed blind by a mugger and losing your house in a fire. There's a lock-on feature by holding R1, at least in theory, as it seems to make your attacks a lot harder to combo. Without the lock-on, however, you just flail madly at the air no matter what. You have a light attack and heavy attack, but they turn into single-strike dash attacks if you so much as think about the left analog stick while pressing them, making getting combos harder than it should be. There's also a dodge button, which is useful but just as floaty as all the wirework in the show, allowing you to basically move freely in midair. The game really wants you to pull off aerial combos, but the movement is just too janky to make it viable.

The Triangle button is the most variable button: if you build up a combo, a meter fills in the top right of the screen. When it's completely full, you can end a combo by pressing Triangle, accumulating the energy built up into your sword or something. This is what's necessary to activate the game's instant win main feature, a spectacular transformation into Kouga's Golden Knight armour. This significantly increases your stats, and also now turns Triangle into a ranged attack of massive damage (which you only get 3 charges of - more than enough to kill anything that moves). The only downside to this form is that it's limited to 99.9 seconds of uptime (exactly like the show), but almost every enemy will be dead long before then.

So, why the harsh score? First, there's not much in the way of content (though perhaps a little more than the 2000s Rider games?), just a brief half-hour story mode, a weird bonus mode where you play as the main antagonist in a...therapy mode? You fight the bosses once again, but have to use a counter mechanic to steal their abilities and customise his moveset. A neat gimmick is that the main antagonist in the story mode will use the moveset that you've given him in this mode, but it's very weirdly framed. There's also a second story mode where you play as deuteragonist Zero, but as far as I'm aware it's almost identical to Garo's campaign.

The other reason I'm docking points is that final boss. After an entire game of encouraging fast-paced combat, the rules suddenly change without warning and it becomes a damn souls fight. You now get actively punished for attacking first, and have to play a calculated waiting game, as a single strike from the boss instantly deactivates your armour and essentially KOs you. So you have to be very slow and methodical...oh wait, your armour has a 99.9 second time limit. So, take your time, but hurry up. I sense a contradiction.

Ultimately, it's not the worst way to spend half and hour to an hour, and fans of the series will likely appreciate the finer details (the Garo theme playing when you transform/KOing a monster for instance) but it's ultimately just another mediocre experience that poorly imitates better games.