There's nothing quite like Balatro.

On its surface, it's a deckbuilding game using the Poker ruleset where the goal is to overcome the odds in an increasingly difficult points system where every ante you are expected to score more and more to proceed.

Different cards can be used to modify cards in your hand, change the scoring rules for different types of hand, and all kinds of other wacky things like copying, destroying, or changing the suit of the cards in the deck.

As you continue playing, different strategies will start to emerge to allow the score to climb higher and higher.

The graphical presentation is simple and clean, with some like CRT emulator effects. There's one song on the soundtrack (with many variations) but it's very catchy and I find it getting stuck in my head after a play session.

If you know the rules of Poker, and like the idea of a deckbuilding game built around them, then you should definitely give Balatro a close look.

Senua's Saga was a beautiful game to experience.

There's a lot to love about it. The audiovisual presentation is excellent, with detailed locations and special effects, and the motion capture is the best I've seen anywhere so far. Everything about the sound is top notch, and I found myself at times almost overwhelmed by the cacophonous soundscapes (in a good way!) I highly recommend putting on your most expensive headphones for this one.

Combat feels nice, and the responsiveness of the controls meant that I felt fully in control of Senua's actions throughout.

The story is par for the course. A harrowing course it may be, with hardly any time to think about golf metaphors, but I do think the tale in the original game is a bit better done.

What I didn't like:

The puzzles. They're improved from the ones in Senua's Sacrifice, but they're definitely not my preferred way to interact with the game world. Any game world, really. The only times that made me think "Hey, this is a VIDEO GAME" were during the puzzle sections.

There were also times when the game's performance suffered, and my framerate dipped down into single digit territory. To be fair, it was only in the most demanding scenes, and it's likely something that could be better with a more powerful PC

All in all, it was an experience well worth my time. If you enjoyed the first game, then there's no reason not to check this one out when you have the time. If you didn't enjoy your time with Senua's Sacrifice? Then this game is not likely to change your mind.

What's to say about Yakuza 4 that I haven't already said about the other Yakuza games I've tried so far?

The game expands on everything that works in the previous entries. Kamurocho, while appearing familiar at the street level, now has rooftop and underground areas, which provide new avenues for exploration.

Over the course of the game, you'll take control of 4 distinct characters with their own unique fighting styles that keep the gameplay feeling fresh.

I felt the urge to play through the main story without pausing for sidestories, so I might revisit this one day in premium adventure to see what I missed, though I might want to move on to the rest of the series instead.

This game has a reputation for being pretty bad. While not entirely undeserved, I think there's something to enjoy here nonetheless.

Let's start off with its many, many problems:

Sound Design: There's a distinct lack of music for most of the game. What music is there is pretty good, but most of the time spent is listening to a mish-mash of stock sound effects blended with a few original sounds. Sometimes the sound just stopped playing.

The Story: The story is pretty uninteresting as presented in the game, which is too bad! There's a lot of lore here that would have benefited from being presented in a better tale.

Tutorials: A lot of the game's mechanical elements aren't explained fully, and some of them aren't explained at all. I still don't know what requirements there are for triggering some of the special abilities.

The Puzzles: Often, progressing through an area requires Baldur to jump into cyberspace to "solve" puzzles by activating special abilities only available in cyberspace. That doesn't sound so bad. The problem is that they only ever amount to the player character walking to clearly marked spots, and pressing a button. Sometimes there's treasure, sometimes there's not.

The Camera: This is the big one for me, and likely lots of other people. Your only control over the camera is to press the center camera button to turn it toward where your character is facing, and even that doesn't work much of the time. You can also choose how far back the camera is, but the game so regularly wrestles the camera away from where you're facing that I ended up bumping into invisible walls way too many times for my own liking. The auto-camera doesn't work, and makes a lot of assumptions about what I want to be looking at.

The Level Design: Don't get me wrong, the areas are very pretty, and definitely represent some of the finer 3d work from the Xbox 360 era. That being said, progression through the stages is very predictable, laborious, and just kind of a slog.

There's probably a lot of other things I could criticize about the game, but that's not why I'm writing this. Now that my major grievances are out of the way, it's time to talk about the good.

Art Style: The art assets have a grimdark charm to them, reminding me a lot of the world of Warhammer 40,000 with grandiose halls, full of futuristic greeblies and science-fantasy doodads. Every weapon and piece of armor has its own appearance, and you can apparently change the color of your items with a consumable, something I never bothered with.

The cutscenes are pretty well done, and I especially like the sections of the game where the camera zooms out or up and the player gets a birdseye view of the surroundings.

The Combat: While I certainly spent a lot of time fighting against the auto-camera, most of the combat was thoroughly enjoyable for me. Controlling things with the right-stick provided a fresh take on third-person action combat.

Melee combat was blissful, with Baldur quickly jump dashing between separate enemies, air juggling them, triggering special abilities, and building up a combo meter that's used to power those abilities.

Ranged combat is another story, but I did find the variety of available ranged weapons to be fun. The problem for me was that the lock-on system often had trouble finding enemies, even if I was facing them directly.

The Equipment: There's a lot of gear! It's not all useful but I kept finding improved gear throughout my playthrough, so I never felt too held back by having inferior equipment, because I knew I'd soon find something better.

Weapons, multi-piece armor kits, charms, and runes allow for a lot of customization and optimization. I could see myself spending a lot of time here, in any other game.

There are also crafting blueprints for various items, but since they only cost money to build, I would have preferred just finding the item I wanted rather than a blueprint that essentially functions as a buy-in ticket.

The Setting: Is there anything more 2008 than a science-fantasy romp through a grimdark Nordfuturist Helscape, with marines? That's a rhetorical question.

I think it's a lot of fun, but your mileage may vary.

The Bottom Line:

All in all, this game is deserving of its reputation, but for some players there is still something to love about Too Human.

Just don't tell me it's your favorite game; I won't believe you.

No, YOU used a guide to get through this game.

It's like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book with some dice rolls thrown in.

I can't recommend it to anybody, because it's no longer on sale since the license lapsed, but I enjoyed my short time with the game.