A good game worth a playthrough if you've never played it before and are yearning for the classic open world games of the early 2010's. However, this game falls flat in many areas this day in age. The open world is not compelling, the vehicles are mediocre feeling to drive, and the combat is confusing while the guns don't feel "punchy" enough to be worth using. I just spammed hammer melee the whole game and came out successful 9/10 engagements.

A lot of these reviews I am writing might end up being short and not all encompassing but I am putting serious effort into my backlog and it makes me feel better to write up when I finish a game. It's like a little reward for not abandoning a game after 3 or so hours of playing it.

This game is fun and overall a soulslike that I find more accessible than many others in the genre. The parry and dodge mechanics seem much more forgiving than a game like Elden Ring or Dark Souls while the boss fights have been surprisingly almost TOO easy after I struggled to beat Pieta. Fortunately for me my favorite part of souls games is fighting the minions between boss fights which may sound silly as I really enjoy the combat and grind of souls games I just hate spending 5-10 minutes chunking a big health bar after memorizing an attack pattern. Thankfully it is saved by very strong combat. The fighting mechanics are fun and much more varied than similar games in the genre.

A lot of critiques I have seen of this game I find to be relatively fair critiques. The two worlds mechanic is the biggest selling point and also one of the biggest dissapointments. It sure isn't a Dishonored Time Travel or Titanfall 2 phase shift level of quality but it is mostly well done. It just begins to frustrate you once you realize that so much of the world is functionally identical except for key sections where you are clearly meant to switch worlds. There isn't any creative problem solving here it is just a method to force the player to dimension hop for a few minutes before immediately hopping back.

The critique of "too many enemies" is valid but I don't necessarily agree with it. Most of the enemies in this game are very easily dispatched and it is pretty easy to aggro only one or two enemies at a time. I feel like a lot of people are just sprinting into rooms and then getting swarmed and not being careful. Sprinting in this game has a huge aggro range and 9/10 my deaths have been due to me sprinting into a room like a dummy and then aggroing every enemy for 3 rooms around me. With all that being said I don't think it is an unfounded complaint. The devs definitely padded the difficulty by just spamming you with more enemies rather than making less enemies that were more challenging to fight. The worst examples of this are boss fights where the devs clearly knew the boss was too easy to fight so they throw ranged minions or cannon fodder at you to add difficulty. A game like Elden Ring didn't need this kind of difficulty padding because the bosses in that game stood on their own as a difficult beast to take down.

Overall I would say this game is B tier. I like it quite a lot personally but I can see how many long time souls fans will dislike it or outright hate it by the time they acquire the Pilgrims Perch key.

The gameplay and loot loops are satisfying enough. But everything else just lacks vision. Procedurally generated dungeons and encounter zones that you will see repeated over and over again until you've memorized the location of every single chest credstick and enemy spawn in the game really ruins all the exploration mechanics.

This game is like Cyberpunk in that it is a game that tries to be 2 games at once. However instead of GTA and an ARPG it is trying to combine No Mans Sky with the gameplay loop of Fallout 4. This leads to an incredibly jolting and disjointed experience where nearly every system in the game is completely disconnected from the game itself. You can play the entire main story of the game without once touching the exploration mechanics because they just aren't necessary and really end up detracting from the experience as a whole.

An absolute banger of an action adventure game. It took what Fallen Order succeeded with and built on it with smashing success.

2 nitpicks

The Fall damage/height system is frustrating as hell. Idk who designed some of the dungeons in this game to have areas where you have to fall but are right on the verge of instant killing you if you fall in slightly the wrong spot on a sloping decline.

Some of the enemy types were just annoying to fight. Especially when you are just rushing for a collectible or two.

This review is more for Hitman as a Trilogy rather than Hitman 3 as an individual game. I played the original Hitman 2016 way back in the day when I first got my first real gaming rig. It didn't really click with me then and I struggled to find the enjoyment in it past completing the mission objectives (with the quest markers turned on). So, despite being a huge fan of Immersive Sims like Dishonored I kinda ignored Hitman 2 and Hitman 3 past watching some youtubers do goofy stuff in the games.

This christmas I finally decided to pull the trigger and acquire Hitman 3 (and all the content that came before it) so I could do one big run through the main campaign. I fell in love pretty quick. My (currently 54) hours were split between the Steam Deck and my Gaming PC. I have enjoyed nearly all of them. Between finishing the Mission Stories, which are kind of like guided quests that act as tutorials, or experimenting with the best methods to get SASO (Silent Assassin Suit Only) this game is on par with other Immersive Sims in my book. IMO it offers one of the most accessible and easy to "get into" IMMSIM experiences. Not only do you as a player have nearly complete freedom in how you complete your objectives the devs actively encourage players to get creative with challenges, achievements, and bonus xp for "stealthy but creative" kills. This leads to incredibly satisfying moments like waiting in a box for a character to stand near a cliffside so you can use an explosive to ragdoll them off the cliff and kill them or lining up the perfect sniper shot on a target and just waiting for your target to walk into your crosshairs.

If you are personally a fan of modern day CIA/MI6 "spy" thrillers this game is as close as you can get without turning into a mindless 3rd person shooter. It can sure be a mindless 3rd person shooter if you want it to be as the difficulty on professional isn't really enough to prevent you from just killing every character on the map. But that is not the goal of the game nor should it be the goal of the player on their first play-through. This game is designed to emphasize creativity and on your feet thinking.

Unfortunately of course a few things hold it back. The story didn't click with me at all, some maps are far worse than others, sometimes the game has difficulty spikes that feel really sudden and can frustrate you if you aren't mindlessly following the mission objectives layed out for you. My personal biggest gripe is in the way the mission objectives are set up to work with the HUD turned off for them. I got about halfway through the first game on this playthrough before I couldn't handle having them turned off anymore. Many of them are lacking context or direction due to them obviously being designed with a quest marker in mind. Some of them are the opposite and those I cherish. But the rest of them just get frustrating and can easily become marathon sprints in circles around the map looking for one character/objective that was mentioned as "by the garden" or a similar broad description. In addition to this this game suffers from the same issue any game that has a "detective vision" does. It kind of encourages you to play the entire game through the lens of detective vision. Characters are near impossible to hear through walls, many quest objectives blend into the environment and require detective vision to highlight them, and the all seeing enforcers don't have their enforcer dot show up through walls unless you are using detective vision. It really hinders observing the environment and I wish that there was an easy way for devs to implement detective vision without it being this all seeing eye of sauron.

All in all though even with its flaws I genuinely love this game. I never thought I would after my first attempt to play it way back when. But IO Interactive really smashed the ball out of the park. Here is to many more hours enjoying the new "freelancer" mode where the systems of this game truly put you to the test.

Idk man there is just something about this game that takes me back to 2009. It really feels like a complete remake of what made MW2 fun with the additions to modern movement mechanics and killstreak balance changes. Although I still wish killstreaks would be reworked or removed from the franchise the gunplay in this game is just so immensely satisfying and fun I can't help but keep coming back to it. Pair that with the high accessibility to an extraction royale mode (DMZ) I can enjoy short bursts of the enjoyment one might get out of Tarkov without having to invest hundreds of hours to understand the base game mechanics.

The biggest pro I can think of is how much they slowed everything down from MW2019 and more recent COD games. You will still find people zooming at 1000mph around corners but they are punished pretty aggressively for doing so. No longer is everybody sonic the hedgehog jumping like Master Chief. The game relies much more on map knowledge, aim, and timing than movement skill. For that I love it.

Although the community sucks and the maps for the most part suck the core gameplay is IMO the pinnacle of the franchise. Between customizing weapons and tuning them to be "perfect" to what you want out of them to the more goofy sides of exploits people keep pulling off this is objectively the best (and last) Call of Duty I will ever play. There is a lot of drama right now with the lifespan of the game and a lot of issues people have with the direction Activision seem to want to take the COD franchise in the future which I can agree with. But if you just want a good arcade FPS game that has some of the best feeling guns in any game to date this is the game for you. The cost/content ratio is also tremendous for a typical AAA style game.

To summarize what you get with this game
- Fully Fleshed out Multiplayer with really good new gamemodes
- Warzone & DMZ on two fantastically designed maps
- A full (albeit IMO bland and boring) Campaign
- 4 large scale Co-op missions for your and a friend to get really into

And all 3 of the non campaign modes are getting updated with new content every 3-6 months? Count me in!

I finally beat this game on Survival 2. Overall I think if you like zombie shooters you will love it as I did but it is a game that is not without it's faults.

On the first playthrough you will find yourself enjoying the progression, open world, and story. But on a NG+ playthrough you will likely find yourself hating all 3 of those things.

The story is good and reminds me a lot of the first 3 seasons of the Walking Dead insofar as there are a lot of dumb scenes that makes no sense alongside some actually decent character arcs and writing. However, there is a lot of forced flashback scenes that could have easily been completed through a simple cutscene rather than making you spend 5-10 minutes slowly walking or riding thorugh an unengaging boring narrative dump. The game fails to integrate these in an interesting way unlike Star Wars Fallen Order where the flashbacks act as tutorials and storytelling moments. On a second playthrough almost every single aspect of the story just sucks. Much in the same way that you likely would never want to rewatch the first 3 seasons of the Walking Dead.

The Open World on a first playthrough is great. It is smartly designed and layed out and has all kinds of things to complete from repetetive puzzles to hordes you can hunt and kill. However at a certain point it just becomes a tedium to navigate. Between the constant marauder traps and the groups of zombies at night by the time you finish the game you will be begging for it to all end. On the second playthrough it has 0 pull. You just want to completely ignore it and blast through the interesting parts (killing hordes).

The progression is great but at a certain point on your first playthrough you will notice all difficulty has been removed from the game. Once you have a consistent gun in each slot for killing humans, hordes, and strong enemies the game just loses all difficulty. Especially if you have been stacking stamina upgrades like I did on my first playthrough. On a second playthrough the progression is nonexistant which would be fine if the game had any form of difficulty to throw at you. You really start to notice how much the gameplay was designed around controllers because on PC even killing the largest horde in the game becomes a cakewalk. M+KB makes killing humans and zombies so easy because everything in the game except for a select few mutations is killed in one headshot. So once you unlock the Rock Chuck you basically just get to mow everything down without missing a shot due to it's high accuracy and good mag capacity. My go to loadout is Rock Chuck, Eliminator, and MG-55. The sidearm handles strong enemies in 5-10 hits. The MG mows down hordes without effort. While the Rock Chuck is a jack of all trades silenced beast.

Final notes: It is worth a play if you like zombie games. I loved most of this game because I just love mowing down zombies. There is a level of catharsis that you get just taking out zombies that most other genres can't give you. However, much like State of Decay 2 this game really falls flat on too many fronts for it to be the ideal zombie experience.

I think this game will be perfectly adequate for a lot of people. It just didn't grip me in any way. Maybe I am marvel-ed out? Maybe it was the shoddy game play mechanics? Maybe it was the mediocre "done a million times" marvel writing?

Either way this game is carried by the aesthetic and soundtrack. The visuals are absolutely amazing and the songs constantly hit you with that "hell yeah" feeling while fighting enemies. Respect to people who find it fun I think this makes for a great game pass/console game.