An absolutely incredible and sometimes brutal strategy game. Nothing compares to the feeling of completing a campaign for the first time. It's difficulty may cause some people to bounce off it but i'm always coming back for more nail biting shots. The game becomes hilarious with mods installed. For me XCOM was comprised entirely of video game characters such as JC Denton, Kiryu Kazuma and Gordon Freeman. The game sort of became this weird showcase of all my interests after a while and I love it for that.

It’s hard to even find a place to start when considering the prospect of writing a review for XCOM 2. This is a game I’ve been playing on and off for years since it’s release and one that I simply can’t let go of. XCOM 2 is the perfect mix of turn based strategy with enough challenge and customization to ensure almost unlimited replay value.

Every couple of months I always find myself thinking about this game, wondering if the time I remember spending really was as good as I remembered or if my memories were just tainted with nostalgia. And every, single, time, I get drawn back in like a moth to a flame.

Wether it’s a new mod I want to try, a character I want to make, or a little rush of courage taunting me to go ironman just one more time, XCOM 2 has become ultimate video game comfort food and something I could legitimately have playing in the back of my head at all times. Sure, it can still be buggy and frustrating, but the mechanics and gameplay loop displayed are so damn good I genuinely find myself looking for a similar level of prestige in a bunch of other games. Usually with little success.

I started another run a week or two ago after taking a good look at my backlog and realizing I was feeling too lazy to boot up a brand new game just yet. “Just one more for old time’s sake” turned into a relentless steam workshop dive and yet another obsessive playthrough that had me cheering, yelling and cussing out my monitor at all times of the night.

With the addition of War Of The Chosen, what was already an insane package becomes this ridiculously good story crafted by your own soldiers, their respective triumphs and defeats, and stakes that are always looming over you. Everything from the base and time management to the tactical gameplay and world events just fits together perfectly to create an engaging experience that is so, so hard to put down.

For what it’s worth, nothing in terms of turn based strategy has come close to this game for me. Both a blessing and a curse, XCOM 2 has cemented itself as one of my favorite games over the course of many years and many campaigns. Until the sequel inevitably comes out, I’m sure there’ll be many more hours to come where I will be absolutely rinsing this game, but in the meantime, don’t forget your advent burgers.

Like XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the first 10 hours of XCOM 2 were brutal. I had barely anything to work with, a constant barrage of problems to solve, and soldiers that died left and right. It was a real power struggle, and one that made me frustrated quite consistently. Unlike EU though, once I was over that hurdle, it wasn't entirely a walk in the park from then on out. Still easier, sure, but it maintained a stable level of challenge that didn't extinguish even going into the finale.

XCOM 2 continues the series tradition of balancing that fine line between accessibility and complexity, while adding plenty more mechanics in to further deepen strategy. New tools have been brought in to alleviate some of Enemy Unknown's problems. One big example of this is through methods of scanning ahead for targets, which fixes the major issue of feeling like you've screwed yourself because you moved one of your units slightly too early. There's also more depth to each character, with various attachments to lightly buff their weapons, installable upgrades, and more.

Speaking on characters, the personality that made Enemy Unknown as good as it is has received far more attention with tons more ways to customize your character. You can even write backstories for them if you're really into it. Combined with what I hear is more interactivity between units in War of the Chosen, and it's a storyteller's dream. I made many of my friends in the game and it was fun seeing some survive, while others saw their stories brought to a sad end (including one on the final mission).

All of this is combined with some heavily increased variety which was sorely needed. Missions are much more diverse (I can count the amount of repeated missions I ran on one hand), enemies are more numerous and unique both in design and in challenges they present, and surprises are far more plentiful.

These aren't even touching on some of the minor improvements. You can load a past save while the enemy is still taking their turn (thank god), more diverse equipment can be researched, the base building mechanics have been tightened up, the geoscape is far more interesting. The list goes on.

The only issue I can genuinely hold against this game is the time some turns and actions can take. It isn't obnoxious, but I've had moments where enemy turns can feel like they take way longer than they need to, even with some unnecessary pauses. I can forgive it given everything the game does right, and a mod can easily fix it, but it's still an issue.

Even with that, I don't see any reason to give this game any lower than a 10, and I didn't even play the beloved WotC expansion yet. This is a masterpiece that builds upon the first game's foundations while adding its own flavor on previous mechanics, helping it feel refreshing even after recently playing XCOM EU. It's easy to see why the game has received such endless praise, and it's one I very much plan to revisit down the line with WotC enabled this time. If you're on the fence about turn-based games or simply want one of the best experiences in the genre, this is it.

While I'm not typically a fan of turn-based games, I thought I'd give the XCOM series a go since so many people have said it's great, and about 20 hours and a complete campaign later, yeah I think I see why.

By far the greatest strength of XCOM EU is the personality given to your characters. I would stream this in Discord calls every once in a while and had my friends create soldiers, which led to some laughs and sadness when one would land a lot of shots in quick succession or proceed to die. Besides my personal soldier, one of them even ended up being the "hero" of the story who decimated everything in her way. I knew the character storytelling was interesting before playing, but I didn't expect to become that attached to characters that frankly don't have much to say.

The gameplay systems also add a lot to the experience, particularly outside of individual battles. Having to choose between certain countries to protect while others collapse and stop supporting XCOM was great, since it never felt like a choice was particularly easy. Combined with researching and purchasing upgrades for soldiers, managing a pretty tight economy, and building up the base, and the sense of progression is great.

Only have some minor gripes with the game that hold it back from being a masterpiece. Namely, that you can't either pause during or fast forward an enemy turn. The amount of times a turn started with something that made me want to load a save, only to have to watch the other five aliens on the field necessitate that loaded save even harder, can be really annoying. Also the odd bug here and there, including some that made me close and relaunch the game itself.

But yeah, I'm really happy with the 20 hours I sunk into this game. It isn't too long, has plenty of strategy, and feels rife with personality. Will totally be checking out XCOM 2 at some point soon.

P.S. Found out after I finished the main game that Enemy Within is the same game but with added features. I only feel slightly stupid

After playing Baldur's Gate 3 last year, I remember telling one of my mates: "I have no idea where this came from? Larian just showed up and was like, I'm the greatest RPG developer ever, here's a certified godlike banger, goodbye." Having now rolled credits on Divinity 2, it turns out I'm just stupid. Larian's been cooking for years but my debilitating fear of top-down cameras and ability hotbars as long as Route 66 meant I completely avoided it. Divinity 2: Original Sin is essentially Baldur's Gate 3's older, slightly nerdier brother, and by extension, it's another boundary-breaking master class in how to make ginormous, sprawling experiences that are still somehow rewarding, reactive and quality-rich. And when I say quality-rich, I mean unfathomably quality-rich.

This game is like 80 hours long. It's just filled to the brim with stuff. It's one of those games that I have to dig deep, speak mystical incantations and summon my relentless 13-year-old, gremlin-brained self to have the patience, stamina and sheer lack of self-preservation to get through in a timely manner. And somehow, while offering such a vast spread of stuff to engage with, nothing in here ever really feels like it's scraping the bottom of the barrel. It's never just serving you up content. It's mission after mission of main event, must-play stuff, largely because everything from the side quests and the companion missions to the core story sections and even random NPC encounters are intertwined. Every quest somehow links into the larger story, every character has something relevant to say and every corner is filled with something worth investigating.

Having played this and Baldur's Gate 3 only a few months apart, it's wild to me how good Larian is at spinning these kinds of stories. They're unparalleled at setting up a huge world that you can explore freely while still somehow making every element you interact with feel like it's part of one, seamlessly unified narrative. Their games are labours of love, and Divinity 2 is no exception. It's just a really saucy, well-made, video-game-ass video game.

And that extends far beyond the story. The way it doesn't establish arbitrary rules regarding how you play or solve a situation. The way combat is a puzzle that challenges you to think outside the box. The way it never holds your hand or tells you what to do but slyly always somehow guides you back to your objective.

And yes, I don't think it's quite as good as BG3. It's more tedious to play, the inventory management is hellish, and act 4 is filled with bullshit gimmick fights and puzzles that are more annoying than fun. The difficulty spikes are also ROUGH at points. The tutorial area's my personal favourite, because it's like, oh here's some slugs to fight. Really learn the game and all that. Then it randomly just decides it's tired of all the loser baby shit now, and spawns in giant alligators with teleporting magic who will absolutely push your shit in for no reason at all.

And don't even get me started on the many, many sections where you get a potato-brained AI teammate you have to protect. Every single one of these goofy lil bastards will single-handedly pull off the most elaborately stupid manoeuvres you've ever seen, to the point where you wonder if they're throwing on purpose and you're gonna pop up in a YouTube prank video in two months' time. They'll actively cancel out every big-damage-set-up you're currently putting together, and then after they inevitably die, every NPC you meet will just chat mad shit about what a terrible person you are for not reloading every turn 9 times to protect them from their own stupidity.

But this is still an absolute banger from a studio that I'm slowly learning is incapable of dropping the ball. Considering the talks before Baldur's Gate 3 were that Divinity 3 could be the next big project on the docket for Larian, I'm pretty gassed to see what these dudes could do with the IP now they've managed to launch arguably one of the best RPGs ever made. Gonna hazard a guess that it'll feature way more horny vampire dudes and shapeshifting grizzly bear sex...

The biggest video game mystery of the past decade. It's the most groundbreaking, medium-redefining experience of our generation - and nobody can explain why. I'm convinced this is all a conspiracy orchestrated by YouTube video essayists. The promise (yet unfulfilled) of The Great Open World Video Game blinds us to the fact that we've seen all of this many times before.

Fundamentally, Breath of the Wild is a pastiche of the safest, most focus-tested game design principles of the preceding decade. You could call it the 'Tower' type game. Climb a tower to unlock a new area on your map, which will reveal the repeatable skinner box activities you can complete there. Puzzles, dungeons, enemy camps, the usual. These activities give you something like XP, increased health, or a new item, which account for progression. Once you're done, you climb another tower and repeat the process until you're ready to fight the final boss (or more likely, until you're bored and ready to rush to the game's end).

That's the gameplay loop. And like every single other one of these games ever made, the loop eventually becomes a dull grind. Breath of the Wild does nothing to solve this problem endemic to open world games. Some have praised the game's traversal, which, other than shield surfing (which is cool to be fair), is really just climbing walls, riding a horse, using a glider, or fast travelling; the same traversal methods in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, released seven years earlier (Shadow of the Colossus is also a clear influence). Really I would challenge anyone to explain how Breath of the Wild is a masterpiece while Assassin's Creed is a soulless corporate product. You're playing the same game. What's the difference besides some nice vibes and a cell-shaded art style? Grass? At least Assassin's Creed has that cyberpunk meets ancient aliens meets secret societies meets historical fiction bullshit made up by French people. That's creativity.

Proponents of the game may praise the Shiekah slate physics abilities as an innovation, and that feels true at first. But eventually your enemies become too powerful for hitting them with rocks or whatever to do a thing; you'll need to use some bullshit level-scaled RPG weapon. And even if the Shiekah slate remained effective in combat, you would still end up doing this. Why? Because this game has so much dull, repeated content to wade through that it becomes easier to take the path of least resistance, the least thought required, and just hit them with your sword. 30 hours in, no player is using cool Shiekah slate tricks to clear those regenerating bokoblin camps.

Much discussion has already been had on the monotony of the 120 copy-pasted shrines, which make up the bulk of the game's content (its version of the side tasks from Assassin's Creed), and the 900 copy-pasted korok seed puzzles, which act as the collectibles obligatory of every Tower game. I won't rehash that too much here, copy-pasted content is already the most common criticism of open world games in general. But knowing that, I want to talk about something I've noticed with a lot of the praise for this game.

Some of the most common sentiments expressed toward Breath of the Wild are that it's "magical" and captures the "joy of discovery" and a sense of "childlike wonder". And I think if you play through the entire game and still feel this way, then that is a horror beyond comprehension. What was your childhood like? Did you spend it as a laboratory subject or something? Just completing mundane, repeated tasks and being awarded food pellets? Because that's what Breath of the Wild is: a world filled not with a sense of mystery or infinite possibility, but the exact opposite: A world where you know exactly what you will find under every rock, inside every strange ruin, over every next hill. A completely controlled, sterile environment of utilitarian systems for the player to exploit. Completely antithetical to anything "magical".

I think there's a pretty strong argument to be made that video games fundamentally cannot represent anything magical, emotional, or spiritual. Depicting anything in interactive form drains it of all sacred meaning, makes it a joke; it's the "press f to pay respects" problem. The tenets of game design stipulate systems and mechanics that are rational and understandable to players. That might be the biggest sin of video games as an artistic medium: taking everything unquantifiable and beautiful in life and reducing it to man-made systems for a single individual to exploit (For more discussion of this issue, play the Metal Gear Solid series).

This is felt especially harshly in a Tower game like Breath of the Wild, where an entire open world is reduced to a few classes of interactive activities. Progressing through a game like this is a process of total disillusionment with the entire world; spiritual death. It accidentally replicates the central theme of Ocarina of Time: the transition from idyllic childhood to grim adulthood. But Ocarina ends with Link confronting the darkness of adulthood and returning to a childlike state of play with his adult wisdom integrated. Breath of the Wild, though, is a state of permanent adolescence - it never goes anywhere, and simply decays over time. Eventually, you exhaust all of this life's possibilities and choose to finally, mercifully end it. Deciding to face Ganon isn't about bringing the story to a climax; it's the gameplay equivalent of taking a plane to Switzerland to get euthanized. And the game practically spits in your face after you defeat him, simply reverting to an old save before the final fight. There is no salvation, no redemption for this world. Only the ceaseless march of content.

Early on I said this game's reputation is a mystery, and I actually lied; there's a pretty simple explanation, one that I briefly mentioned: grass vibes. The game has an incredible atmosphere when you're first starting out, and that's what people are talking about when they call it "a breath of fresh air" or whatever cliché they think of. It has nothing to do with any game design element found here. Because there is no common understanding of what that would even mean. There's no concept of the formal elements of game design, or the storytelling language of video games. We're all just making this shit up.

People only pay attention to, y'know, the actual art: music, animation, visuals. The game itself can be anything, nobody really cares. The discourse surrounding games as a medium of art in themselves is mostly bullshit. People appreciate the traditional artistic aspects of a game (music, animation, visuals, acting performances, writing) and then project that sense of artistry onto the game design itself, where there is none (and in fact, there is a profound dissonance between it and those elements). That's how people process games as an art form. And that's why games like Breath of the Wild are held up as the pinnacle of games as art.

(I'll also say that I have no respect for any open world game like this after the release of Metal Gear Solid V (2015). It correctly portrayed this breed of AAA open world game as something that cannot be revived or rejuvenated as Breath of the Wild attempts to do; this is all salted earth. If MGSV had been properly understood, we would have seen it as the just and merciful execution of games like this.)

people talk about this game like it's some groundbreaking, breathtaking, wonderful pinnacle of video games and i really wish i understood that. this game feels really nice to move around in, its visuals are really appealing and its score is pretty cute. but there's not much of a real narrative (or writing at all), no memorable characters, no cool side-quests, no dungeons, a pitiful lack of enemy variety + almost no bosses, and nothing that made exploring feel worthwhile. most of it feels like filler check-list fluff (towers, shrines, koroks). the world is well-designed but there's not much substance inside of it beyond its sandbox elements. i genuinely feel like, insane for not liking this the way people talk about it but i just do not see it personally. it's just okay!

Despite being set in a kingdom in ruins, with dead bodies littered everywhere, I've played few games as teeming with life as Hollow Knight. The world of Hallownest has such a rich history, and every area you explore, each with its own distinctive, memorable ecosystem, is dripping in hints towards what came before and the true nature of what is happening now. As a piece of storytelling Hollow Knight is very subtle, but as an act of worldbuilding it feels so rewarding to experience and full of depth. It feels like it's impossible not to learn something new every time you return to Hallownest.

The characters of this world exude so much personality too, written with such clear, individual voices. Even minor side characters feel like they have their own motivations, their own history leading them to this point, and like they exist beyond this game and your interactions with them.

As far as gameplay is concerned, I've never before played a metroidvania that gives such a compelling sense of freedom to its players, letting them genuinely choose their own path through the game. There's a huge amount of the game you can explore without access to the majority of your unlockable traversal abilities, and only the gentlest hints of where to head next. The downside to this is that very little of the world map can truly push your ability to use these traversal abilities to their fullest since it's simply not designed with the knowledge that you'll have them all available when you reach any individual place (thankfully The White Palace exists for this purpose), but the huge upside is that it feels like your first journey through Hallownest is distinctly yours; so many moments you experience will feel like your own personal story because of the fact that you're given so much freedom as to how to approach things and what order to do things in.

The design of this world you explore is even more impressive due to how much it understands player psychology. Deepnest is the clearest example of this, inverting a bunch of things you'd been taking as givens in regards to gameplay in order to contribute to the oppressive atmosphere and feeling of helplessness, but this sort of understanding of player expectations and how to either play into them or exploit them is, on a subtler level, everywhere. I had to use a guide and have some slight hints for a few bits and pieces I missed throughout my playthrough as I wanted to find every major thing in the game, but considering how many secrets Hallownest holds and how vast it is I really didn't have to look up that much and in part that's because the game knows how to direct you towards its secrets without ruining the feeling that you were the one actually uncovering them.

Finally, whilst it starts out very basic, the combat grows to become something incredibly elegant and satisfying; there's a moment as you're unlocking movement abilities where everything just clicks as you float from one enemy to the next, and that moment is so satisfying that it is worth the slow build-up to that point. There are a ton of different approaches you can take to fighting, the charm system allows you a lot of versatility in terms of complimenting your play-style or even creating a new one, and the game is very good at forcing you out of your comfort zone and making you fight in new ways as its creative, thrilling boss fights ramp up in difficulty. I expect to spend a fair amount more time in Godhome before I finally put down this Hollow Knight, and I'm not someone who's usually interested in replaying boss fights over and over in games.

Hollow Knight is certainly far from flawless, but this game was just so good at making me feel things; the joy of exploration, experimentation and growth, the adrenaline rush of barely clinging on against the game's hardest fights, all the emotions that come from digging into the past of Hallownest and its residents, soaking in its atmosphere alongside its gorgeous soundtrack. A true joy.