I want to preface this review with three notes. One: I played the original Saints Row the Third when it came out and while I agree that it was sillier than the previous games I did not care, unlike the rest of the internet. Two: My favorite part of any Saints Row game has always been creating outfits for the Boss and it's always what I spend the most time on. Third: I played Remastered on Hardcore mode because I thought the original Third was too easy and had no reason to play any of the side activities.

I wish I knew more about game development, maybe then I would understand how a remaster can look worse than it's original, how it's character creation can be uglier than games that came out before it, how you can screw up colors. Sunset Overdrive looks better, and that came out in 2014. It's bad enough that I had to spend an hour trying to make my Boss not look like a bug-eyed Neanderthal, but I cannot make any good outfits. They screwed up the color black, most of my clothes look terrible because they think dark grey is black and my Boss can either look old or have a bad dye job. Same with dark blue, your only choices are aquamarine or violet.

There's something off about the character models and the clothes that I cannot quite describe. The clothes don't look like they are naturally hanging off your Boss, everything looks like it's made of wool and are one size larger than the Boss.

There was a point early on when i killed a guy and his pool of blood perfectly reflected the sky. That's not how blood works, why would you put that in your game?

As I said before I played the game on Hardcore mode, and it was harder, but not harder in a way that's satisfying. I am pretty sure Volition and Deep Silver didn't test the hard mode to make sure it was reasonable. I would lose heli assault mission because Pierce would drive 20 mph even though he was getting shot at by rocket launchers. I would lose insurance fraud missions because the cars would forget to drive fast. I would lose main missions because the guy I was escorting would stand out in the open and let his health bar be obliterated in a second by a guy with a minigun whose health I could not hope to deplete in time without explosives.

This is the most boring Mario game I've ever played. I've played previous Mario vs. Donkey Kong games, they were a lot more challenging and the level design was more creative. This feels like Nintendo dug out rejected levels from past games and slapped a fresh coat of paint on them.

You know what's the best sign of how uninspired this game is? It's not the fact that the second player character is a nameless Toad instead of Luigi or Pauline, it's how the cutscenes are the same action of Mario chasing after Donkey Kong instead of the varied actions in the cutscenes in Donkey Kong '96.

It's better than 2 but worse than 3, because dungeon crawling is still less fun and interesting than exploring large overworld maps. Despite the emphasis on multitasking this time I found myself multitasking a lot less than in the previous game because Oatchi, your new companion, is too valuable as a pack mule to separate from and the maps are too small to justify splitting up anyway, while in 3 the large maps and time limit encouraged you to split up the party to get more done in time. And while I know it's not important I'm angry that they retconned the first three games, I hope future Pikmin games take a broad strokes approach to the canocity of all four games.

I guess Gears for Breakfast learned from the base game because this is the best level in "A Hat in Time". It doesn't feel unfinished like Subcon Forest, it isn't linear like Battle of the Birds, it isn't empty and boring like Alpine Skyline, it isn't too short like Arctic Cruise, and it actually feels like a realized world with characters and a societal structure. I wish every level felt this thought out and stylistic. My only complaint is that sometimes the branches can still get a little too confusing.

I didn't realize this the first time I played Pikmin 2 on the Gamecube, but this is just the Pikmin 1 maps with a bunch of caves on them. Nintendo pulled a "Tears of the Kingdom", the lazy bastards. The caves are awful, discouraging exploration by being small and tunnel filled, and highlighting the limitations of the game's Pikmin controls by filling them with enemies that have attacks which are harder to move 100 Pikmin out of the way. If you have a choice between playing Pikmin 1 or 2 I would go with 1, exploring is more exciting and there are not caves to pad out the game.

This possibly has the most hours logged on my Steam account so I should probably talk about it. Colony/building sims have always been my addiction, and this one has been the most addictive to me, because the objective to reward drip feed is constant and it is very easy to pick up. The game is always egging you on to build more specific buildings, another school, more farms, a prison, etc., all to watch the two big numbers, your popularity and your treasury go up. You're not so distant from your island that it feels less like a place and more a graph, nor are you expected to micromanage everybody, it's a very good balance, Where the game fails significantly though it informing the player when something is wrong. Suddenly you'll find yourself deep in inescapable debt with no explanation, or your popularity will steadily tick down no matter what you do to satisfy your population's needs, rebel threats will go from none to medium in an instant and never go away. The game is also very bad at explaining it's mechanics, for example how can a house be more efficient or why are criminals on your island is bad from a gameplay standpoint. Tropico 6 is still incredibly addictive, but it could be better.

It has just a few too many permutations, a few too many side challenges and busywork, that tips it over from fun all the time to tedious after a while. Levels having night and day version with different Pokemon to record, great! Levels having multiple paths that you have to all cross to see everything, okay. Different tiers of those same levels with different Pokemon that you have to EXP grind to unlock, that's kind of annoying. Having to take pictures of every Pokemon in four unique positions for it to count as "complete", meh. Having to use four different items that only sometimes work to get those positions, that's just boring.

You know those old Sierra adventure games where you were screwed if you didn't pick up some random thing at the beginning to solve a puzzle at the end? Ixion is like that in city builder form.

Unlike some other city builders Ixion is divided into levels where your progress carries over. It sucks when after working for twenty hours you realize you simply cannot continue working on your space station because of something you didn't do, or mine, or properly build in the first level, and you have to start all over again.

It's not that this game is difficult, it's that this game is unreasonably difficult. Time limits are razor thin, the AI for the cargo hauling robots is stupid, and even if you memorize the location of all the resources and build everything in the most space efficient way the game might bug out on you and people will refuse to pick up food and starve to death. I just wanted to have fun building a space station, not be penalized for taking too long designing the layout.