I booted this game up with low expectations, needless to say i am incredibly pleasantly surprised , I remember having tried wasteland 2 early in its life and bouncing off of it.

Wasteland 3 Really does just a fantastic job of balancing the serious themes of the story with the more wacky and outsider humor. In this way i would describe this game as "Lutheran Fallout" It rejects the modern action oriented first person RPG design by giving a nuts to butts classic CRPG experience instead, the game takes place in an isometric perspective, with very xcom inspired combat, cover system, hit chances, etc.

What the game is really good at though is giving interesting permutations of the story and meaningfully different paths that the player's choices throughout meaningfully affect. These choices often lead to unique battles not seen if taking a different path. This is so refreshing as there are very few instances of being forced through the same situation with slightly different dialogue.

These battles rip the kitchen sink from the wall and brutalizes the player with it , on hard difficulty i was constantly being tasked to do the same; finding ways to exploit the games spiderweb of combat systems and mechanics to be able to overcome certain fights. Get deep enough into the weeds especially as a completionist there will be a vast toolbox of death dealing instruments to discover and upgrade. Spending the first half of the game scraping through encounters makes melting people in the mid game all the more satisfying

I also really enjoy how the game rewards the player for exploration; lots of neat unique weapons, armor, and gizmos to equip, customize, and discover. The best equipment is off the beaten path and the game has many paths that are very... Unbeaten

This game is not perfect however and the first set of issues arose from playing on series x,

The menu and ui is not made with controller in mind, by the hour mark i was realizing just how much faster the game would play out if i could just click on things, i won't exaggerate when i say that controller menuing added ~hours to the runtime vs the speed and precision of the mouse. Another console specific issue is how absolutely mercissley screwed up the targeting was at times, enjoy wrestling with the game to allow you to shoot the person you want to, oftentimes i'd have to reload a fight because of the game snapping to a target across the map when i had already been hitting another enemy spamming A to attack them, the game would send my targeting to the another mook 8 ap of movement away to attack because it decided in between my button presses to target a random enemy and screw the whole strategy.

Another issue with controller is any attack that arcs in a cone, you cannot move the camera when attempting to aim it, meaning that if its a long range weapon you will not be able to see your target on screen while trying to line it up or while the attack is being delivered, I really wish the camera centered on who was getting attacked because i would often not be able to see the results of my attacks. Denying the satisfaction of seeing the enemies blow up or vaporize while also denying critical information to make informed decisions about tactics.

The issues with the games controls really brings it down score and pacing wise ;75 hours could have been 60 (seriously)

there are also a few other nitpicks

-Hyper situational perks that have no use 95% of time (looking at you; pressure cooker, how many fucking cars did i even fight in this game? 3? Maybe ?)

-RNG based loot can play unintentional favorites leading to situations where certain party members embody a walking apocalypse, while the rest of the squad look like weeny hut jr. employees by comparison .

This game is awesome, do yourself a favor and play it with KBM. Controller is a straight up inferior experience

This Past March Out of boredom i subjected myself to Hogwarts Legacy and has someone who has seen 3 or 4 HP movies in their childhood and then never bothered to do so again nor really thought about them, i will say that hogwarts legacy is a very pretty game, the castle itself is actually pretty interesting to explore, you can tell they focused 75% of the effort of the game into getting that core aspect of hogfarts experience just right and I will applaud them for that, however the game falls short several key aspects .
In Hogwarts Legacy You Sort Yourself At the Beggining of the game because the developers knew their audience, Im sure the idea of a somewhat long and poignant questionairee was played with at some point, but knowing their auidence, the developers of this game opted to belay all criticisms and twitter meltdowns by just letting you exclusively choose what house you are in. Great! Self induced indentity crisis avoided! I don't really care about this , i just thought it was interesting they went against one of the very first traditons ever established in JK TERFherder's frankly kind of medicore library abecedarian YA novels.
I would be lying if i said this game wasn't well made in a coventional sense, technically the game runs quite well on my System, but what really matters to me is gameplay and frankly the gameplay loop of hogglefart smegmacy is not engaging enough to carry the game to the end of the story I Put about twenty hours into bogglecarts biopsy before realizing that the journey was kind of just as bland as the destination I was heading for< so i dropped it. i dropped it cold , i played for a week or so and thought that the game was okay at best, this game is made exclusively for hardcore HP fans or someone who has not touched any open world game since farcry 3.
Lets get into gameplay, You have a Four slot wheel where you can equip a spell in each slot, these spells come in four different flavors, Control spells that sun or pause an enemy, damage spells that do big damage,k and movement oriented spells that pull and push people away from you, all of these spells are coolodwn based and you activate them by holding right bumper and pressign the corresponding face button. These special spells are also combined with a basic magic missle attack that you can use by hitting the right trigger, which brings me to my first gripe about combat, every attack in this game FEELS the same to use, none of them particulary feel good, because they are all just different colored blasts especially the damage spells, the only one that is mechanicaally different is IGNIO and is is just a shotgun blast of fire. Fine combat is simplistic, but the ven bigger problem is enemy design, i am not exggaratin when i say there are 4 enemy types in this game, enemy wizard (goblin or human), spider, wolf or dog, and armored knight guy with mace or sword, there is nothing else to be seen for a world full of mystical creatures how do we never fight or encounter a dementor or something more threatining, the armored knights feel especially out of place and unfortunately the enemies are not fun to fight, they all are one trick ponies , especially the human enemies which dont operate under the same rules as the player, these enemies can put up a colored shield red purple or yellow to correspond to damage control and push/pull spells. Once again game devs have not learned the lesson taught to ninja theory in 2011 that color -coated enemies are a huge crock of shit and being forced to match the color of spell with what bubble the enemy arbitarily blows on themselves makes the combat feel frustrating, not to mention that if you don't get the other quick switch spell slots from the upgrade tree you are seriously gimnping your character, i wouldn't be surprised if people played all the way throguh the game without ever knowing you could unlock more spell bars. The bubbles on the enemies force you to use certain spells on targets that are moving around and con stantly regenerating those shields making for a frustrating game of spamming doge roll until the correct color ability comes off cooldown, it simulatanely makes fights drag while simplifying your options. Matching the color of the bubble takes almost no skill, aside from not being colorblind, it is also the game very u8pfront telling you that only one type of tactic will work on these types of enemies. Hogwarts legacy could have created a vast roster of enemies with different weaknesses that weren't blatanly signposted like the big glowing colored bubbles .
This could have lead to interesting experimentation but instead the developers chose to cater to the lowest common denominator for people who are not traditional gamers,ergo a singular path through the enemy and most encounters, you might say "well APE turn up the difficulty then" as far as im aware the dififculty makes enmies put up their shields more often makes the player take more and deal less damage. The odd thing is they do kind of have this in the game, the inferi are zombie creatures weak to fire, you can find that out just by playing the game, no tutorial message needed, the dugbog will flip on their belly if you hit it with a force spell, theese are neat, but when a large majority of your games emeny roster are 18 different variations of goblin or human evil wizard who throws magic at you, and puts up a colored shield the fights never seem any different from the front half to the back half of the game. By the ten hur mark you will basically have every spell in the game minus the last curse and the combat loop never evolves past the first fight you have with a dark wizard. The combat in this game reminded me alot of the arkham games and not in a good way it has that same style of loose auto targeting stick flicking kind of action right down to the counter being on the top face button of you respective controller. One of the things btman got right which Hogwarts does not is the flow of combat, even to this day i wouldn't call the rocksteady melee combat formula exactly deep or memorable, but i still feel like the game is trying to nudge me into staying active instead of slowing me down arbitraily. There are no mechanics that actively make you wait on cooldowns in batman tyo get the upper hand, you could shift from defense to offense dynamically, while troghearts dynasty way too much of the combat in this game is spent dumping your abiities on poor sods who get too close and then dodge rolling around the arena like maniac until your spells come off cooldown so you can burst more shields. This may sound like an nitpick, but i can't think of many action games (Except for dmc devil may cry) where the game forces you to wait around for so long before its "effectivley your turn to attack" Lets take sifu for example a game that has absolutley excellent combat, some of the best ive played in a game, there is never a moment where the game makes you sit and wait for things to happen in combat you are more or less alweays in control and can alway be gaining the upper hand through creative and masterful play. Granted I myself am not an expert at Sifu, but I have absolutley played enough action games to realize where skill ceiling might land, Sifu has high higher skill floor than hogwarts does a ceiling. Unfortunately the potential for creative play in snogtarts pregnancy is severly limited by just hopw mucgh the game insits you wait around for your chance to attack. The human enemies while annoying to fight are sadly the most interesting enemy, every other enemy is a nothing-burger melee fight with i frame dodge rolls. The ennemies of the game operate under different rules than the player, those shields seem really strong, if the player charcter could pop a shield that was resitant to all but one school of magic the game would be an absolute cakewalk, the human enemies of the world know a secret magic technique completly unknwon to school staff and students Colored orb shield.
Unfortunaetly for hogwarts combat against humanoids (all 19 variants of them) Feels like a bit like simon says (simon says red , simon says yellow, simon says purple spell. The game give you a toolbox of mechanic that must be used how they want it based on what color the shield is. In my oppinion if hogwarts wanted to get away with thnis combat system the shield sytem needed to be removed, even in the dueling minigame where you partner up in the courtyard with other students only the enemy team can put up the funny glwoing colored orbs, where if my team could do that we would wipe the floor with the AI. I would have much preferred to see the humans more varied, as it is they are poachers hunters and genral crooks and all share the seam movesets, i was more expecting something in line with differentiall factions of badits or evil wixard who have different themes or only use fire magic for example, instead every enmy thowes out the same colored blast from the begging of the ga,e to the end, and while some people love hogwarts so much that this will nevr bother them, the repetive combat is what made me want to drop the game ther fastest.
My otherr major gripe with the game in general is how the open world adds literally nothing to hogwarts universe, the open world does not feel like the wizarding world, it is about the most bos-standard european looking forest blandess i have ever seen, once outside of hogwarts or hogsmeade the game stops feeling like anything HP related this has got to be one of the least rewarding games to explore of all time, i mean there is literally ntohing to do in the open world aside form when the game demands you go meet a charcter on a far away part of the map for a story misssion. The worldbuilding in and around hogwarts and hogsmeade is fantasic, these are the tow standout areas of the game and as a reult there is a huge open world around the castle that just their to fly over essentiallty I personally could not care less about the open world activites in this game, its all standard copy paste icons, dens of monster and villains, go get this item festch quests and etc .
Hogwarts legacy is a well made product, product being the operative word here you can squee out for a few hours being impressed by all of the seemingly moving parts before the honey moon phase ends, i don't see alot of people finshing this game as the story is largely uninteresting, the combat sytem has one too many frustrating desicions from it lack of depth to the froced cadence it requires you play at with its coolodwn system. This combat is further excaberated by the game extrem lack of enemy variety, its the same reason why god of war (2018) was let down, really annoying and samey enemy design, what the fuck is it with these wird action rpg's boner for trolls, it same like every boss fight in GOW (2018) is a troll and much the same can be said about dogbarks tegrity, a giant hodgepodge of trite triple A design tropes all blended into a homogenous grey slurry that the masses will consume without a second thought, this is literally the game that made me never want to play an open world action rpg game ever again.
God I wasted my fucking money on this

"you're on a boat, motherf**ker; please try not to forget"

You start off as a slow little tugboat captain hauling in small loads of tiny mackerels for a pittance, afraid to sail in the open ocean for fear of not being able to make it back before nightfall. In the opening hours of the game there are many moments where the game-play loop of trying to catch enough fish before dark rolls in and slowly upgrading the nameless captains little dingy into a vessel capable of carrying multiple oceanic giants. is pretty interesting

sadly imagination greatly outweighed actuality here, there are a multitude of issues regarding gameplay.
The first being almost how immediately the tension deflates after you figure out that nearly ever "threat" in the game boils down to slow enemy that mindlessly chases the boat, the real problem was that as soon as i was able to get my speed over approximately 29 mph combined with the burn engine ability and then hull upgrades, I never died even once in my time with dredge. A game with no fail state, (or in this case one that is incredibly hard to achieve) has very limited potential for tension.

Myy boat by early mid-game was doing it' s best impression of the honeycomb cereal creature ; zooming around every threat with my cthulu vibes pumping through the engine block conglomerate of my never visually growing ship.

There are basically two enemy types in dredge with certain environmental hazards being unique within the different gimmick biome each of the 5 main islands clusters (Rhode Island staring area, Swamp, Rocky Cliffs, Hawaii with extra squid, and volcanic hot zone). these enemies come out at night and they are red clouds of bad vibe whispers and big angler fish that look like other fishing boats (That are all black and chase you) so i never let them near me except for experimentation because I wanted to see what happened.

The initial game play loop of dredge is to catch fish, then sell them, once you have enough money, you buy an upgrade, make your ship bigger, which lets it carry more fish, install a winch that can reach oceanic, then abyssal and hadal depths for rare and expensive deep sea catches that can be used to spend more money unlocking upgrades for your ship. Unfortunately none of the upgrades made to your ship have any visual representation on the boat, by the end of the game your boat has more than double the capacity for hauling fish and can carry what look to be giant mechanisms for hauling in fish as well as giant bar headlights and huge deep sea fishing rods, but none of that ever is visually represented on your ship, down to every crab pot and trawl net being the same model.

The game doesn't really enough mechanical depth (no pun intended) for this not to be a superficial complaint, i really would have liked to see my equipment represented on the in game model of my boat, as this would have added to my overall sense of immersion as i felt like my boat wasn't actually getting bigger, tougher, and more capable visually as well as just functionally. The boat getting bigger in the over-world as well as the inventory screen would have added for extra needed challenge when navigating the tight corners of certain locations in the games latter half, while being a neat immersive ramp up of the games difficulty. The game only gets easier as you unlock more engine space because your boat only ever gets more nimble

When fishing, the player plays a series of mini games where they rhythmically press the f key in time with little sliders or shapes that fill a circle or etc , this passes time and puts fish into your inventory, all the fish are different sizes and have to arranged manually into your inventory. one complaint i have about the inventory system is that equipment cannot be stored on the boat anywhere except for where it is installed, meaning that in certain situations you will install a new piece of equipment and it spits the other one back out into your cursor holding it, but if you are out of space in storage you are forced to either sell your old equipment at a loss or discard something from storage to make room.

oftentimes i would have my whole cargo hold free but for whatever reason the game wouldn't let me use that as temporary space for my equipment while i did storage management. This especially stung when the game will let you refund something for full price before you have dropped it into your inventory, but if you install your new part and come to find it doesn't fit in your storage you are guaranteed losing money no matter what.

owing to the lovecraft inspired setting (without really committing)the fish sometimes come out very deformed, twisted by the nebulous Cthulhu vibes energy. I do really like the art design of the fish and especially the deformities and you can tell this is where the art team spent most of the time thinking about presentation and i appreciate that as the variety of fish is very neat and wanting to see what was out there is what drove me to complete the game.

There are also trinkets in the game which can be sold for money alongside fish, these can be found in wrecked ships or when dredging for upgrade materials with the winch the man on blackpoint island installs for you. With these trinkets comes another huge complaint, these trinkets can only be sold to the one merchant on little narrows, and that is it, they cannot be sold anywhere else so in most cases i would leave them behind as deep sea fish were often worth more and could be sold at any trader pontoon which are conveniently located in every biome as opposed to all the way back in the starting area.

Once the Upgrade system has been completed there no longer any driving factor to completing anything in the game, the whole economy is spent on upgrading the ship and by the time the last two biomes rolled around I was already the point where my ship was complete rendering the the whole gameplay loop of fishing which is already just a boring series of mini games thankless as there is no traditional skill based gameplay on offer here.

The back half of this game is seriously such a slog and it kind of poisoned the whole experience, basically the game starts out with a good first impression, but as far as indie games go and "vibe games" this game has some neat pictures of mutated fish and really not all that much else, if they wanted to have combat free experience there really needed to be some sort of mechanical or strategic depth somewhere in the game to justify the monotony of the fishing and dredging mini games which both boil down into pressing F at the right time. Couple that with a reward path for the player that ends before the end of the game and doesn't ever really have a tangible effect on gameplay rather than being told yes you can fish here or no you cant. or being able to style harder on the pathetically slow sea creatures that chase you.

Dredge could have deeply benefited from an economy system or something more than the surface level , selling fish at the market for cash to buy upgrades.

Dredge unfortunately wears out its welcome fast with little mechanical or strategic depth to keep the player engaged, overly simple game-play mechanics and an ecomony based around upgrades that don't actually affect the mechanical gameplay of pressing f at the right time to catch fish or steering away from the pitiful threats the game has to offer.

This game has really cool fish art. but very little in the way of replay-ability, longevity or gameplay.