I can't think of too many other games that are so fundamentally flawed, yet it is easy to ignore those flaws because it manages to nail the primary objective: it's just really good fun.

It's the best way I can think to describe Maneater, a monumentally daft game that relies on zero brainpower, and showcases pretty much everything within the first 10 minutes of gameplay. It's not a huge spoiler to say that the only real progress you can make here is that the shark you control gets big. Really big. And really fierce. And by the end of your 10-ish hour playthrough, you'll find taking out boats, whales, other killer sharks isn't much of a challenge. Yet it remains undeniably fun.

It's an incredibly simple plot - you're a shark, a shark hunter is after you, you eat a lot to get bigger and eventually confront aforementioned shark hunter. It's presented as a very tongue in cheek nature documentary - the kind you'd see on Discovery or something - but the cut scenes are few and far between. You'll spend 99% of your time scouring the different sections of the map (these actually DO have a bit of variation and range from a swampy alligator filled bayou to a vast open ocean) chomping of various marine wildlife. And the occasional careless bather as well.

It's definitely a flawed game - it really could have done with a bit of variety with the main missions, but throughout, you'll be given the same objectives - kill x number of seals/sharks/swordfish/turtles/humans etc etc. There are plenty of intertwining underwater passageways and a stack of collectables to find and I found enough enjoyment at the daft killing frenzies to get all 1000 achievement points for finding all collectables etc, but I can't deny that I was relieved to finally finish it.

It's not the prettiest game in the world - aside from the various body parts you can equip to your shark, all other creatures seem to look the same, and the effects of the sea are actually pretty rubbish. I'm probably just spoiled by the incredible water effects on Sea of Thieves, but when you're cruising around below the waves, things just seem to aimlessly float. And it would have been far more interesting to see the different sea creatures interact with each other, rather than just with your shark. Maybe the other marine predators are just REALLY fussy eaters, as they only attacked me and totally ignored the shoal of mackerel/seals etc etc that were minding their own business just a few feet away.

I would be very interested to see if a sequel is ever made, because there's a fair bit to work with here. It's undeniably enjoyable - being a bloodthirsty, ravenous killing machine is quite a laugh.

Maneater is silly, samey and not exactly a technical masterpiece. But there's some charm here that like a drop of blood in the ocean make it difficult to ignore.

A game in the "Endless Runner" genre with a hip hop aesthetic. Whether you want to pick it up or not is basically tied to how appealing you think that first sentence sounds.

To me, the appeal was to find something short that I could achievement hunt in. In that regard, Aerial_Knight's Never Yield was a solid option. Getting all achievements, which requires you to check out all three available game modes, took me about 3 hours overall. That includes finishing the story mode, doing a bonus level and spending 30 (!) minutes in the endless mode.

So what do you do in this game? Well, it's an endless runner game, meaning your character runs to the right of the screen and the challenge is to dodge obstacles whenever they appear within a short amount of time. There are only four different obstacle types that you either jump over, slide under, dash through or jump inbetween by pressing the correct buttons based on the color shown. It's very easy to pick up after completing the first level or two, and once you've seen these obstacles once, you've seen them all. For the rest of the game, they just repeat for a while without really mixing it up. You can turn off your brain and just play, which has its appeal from time to time. The hip hop aesthetic is pretty cool and the soundtrack has some pretty nice tracks to listen to, but everything in this game just gives the impression of "limited". That's not necessarily a bad thing, the game does only last a bit over an hour for a normal story playthrough after all, but that should be your expectation going in.

The endless mode is basically you running from corner to corner in a gym and dodging stuff two times in every lap. I think it took me 150 or so laps to get the achievement there, which, again, took half an hour, so go for 100% achievements at your own risk.

If you just found this game in your Steam library and are thinking off checking it off your backlog, there are definitely worse ways to spend an afternoon, but also plenty of better ways.

This game had me hooked from the start. I loved the original story and the fun dialogues between the characters. The visuals are beautiful and the space settings are stunning, which made me feel part of this universe. The gameplay is very good, and the combat is very dynamic, although I still don't quite accept the fact that we only play with Peter Quill, despite understanding that it would be better that way... but overall, the game provided hours of entertainment with its charismatic characters and an exciting plot.

Toradora... I mean, Yakuza Foura.

You start out with a different protag, Shun, and I actually like him, he's just a financial dealer that allies with homeless people, the Yakuza are just stuck in his path for better or worse which I think is nice to set yourself outside of the box for a minute.

It really gives a new perspective on Kamurocho in general because you're no leader of it, you're just a guy that sees trouble all the time. You know of Kazuya but so does everybody else, you know what he's done, you see its effects. For one, you can knock people's teeth out, including your own!

I like that your allies are homeless people. But it goes beyond that, shows just how deep this goes through the eyes of different characters. And man, I understood why people liked Majima but I get more reasons every time, he's not just one thing, he's kind of the unsung protagonist of this saga.

With Saejima, his route (literally) navigation is dumb. It makes sense to venture into the underground but you get twisted all around and it just gets tedious. It made me not want to do the side stuff because I didn't know what route to take, so make sure that you do whatever you're going to do as soon as it's introduced to you, that way you can keep track of it. If not, there's a place at the end of the game before the final battle where it lets you revisit all the characters and their side missions to your leisure, but you still have to follow the weird routes with Saejima.

Now, next is Tanimura who is a 29 yo. Hey, wait, the plot takes place over 25 years so this guy-That's smart, could've been cool if he was born then but to show just how much time has passed to have a whole new generation be in line. This is the part where I decided I was going to take my time with it, I'd spend days doing side-quests and just leveling up because the first two seemed like they were fleeting.

With an action game of this caliber, you begin to see the calm in the eye of the storm. Check out the Hangout or the Cuez Bar in the underground mall where Lyn Inaizumi type music plays. It's nice. Meeting characters like Nair and learning her movesets and story, it's like a story away from the story but good enough to be apart of yours personally.

Lastly, our original protag, Kiryu, that gets roped into this and kind of expands on what happened in Yakuza 1. I would like to see a game expand on what happened while Kiryu was in jail but I do see us getting a ton of spinoffs already so it's probably not far behind.

There are a lot of enemies with batons that I've come to despise and always took me the longest, never learned how to handle them. It's got a weird obsession where it tries to impress you or fake you out. "Uh-oh, someone got shot but did they actually get shot? Or is it a twist murder?"

But this game is in a weird spot for me rank wise because it has the ingredients to be great and perhaps even second favorite so far due to its scheme, story, characters and gameplay toss-up but it's also the most disappointing because it could've used those elements to much greater effect so I can't really say what I prefer it over or if I prefer others over it, I'm in the middle with it and even after a nice break of time to settle my opinion, I feel the same way, so I may just never get over that.

Yakuza 0 is generally considered the modern day gateway into the Yakuza/Like a Dragon franchise for numerous reasons. Not only is it a prequel that doesn’t require any prior series knowledge to understand what’s going on, it’s constantly regarded as one of the best games in the series by a majority of the fanbase. While I had emulated the original Yakuza prior to my first playthrough of Yakuza 0, I didn’t really have a desire to play the rest of the franchise until after I finished Zero, so for all intents and purposes, it was my gateway too. After playing it back in 2022, I spent a good chunk of 2023 playing through every single game in the series currently available on Steam, including the spin offs. Needless to say, I’ve become a huge fan of the franchise. After playing almost every game in the series, I wanted to return to Yakuza 0 and re-evaluate it with my knowledge of the titles that come before and after it. I was really pleased to find that I still consider it the best of the Kazuma Kiryu-centric games.

Coming from Yakuza 5, which had five playable protagonists, Yakuza 0 scales down to just two: series star Kazuma Kiryu and his long-time rival/eventual close ally Goro Majima. I think that dialing back on the amount of playable characters was absolutely the right call. It allowed for both Kiryu and Majima to have plenty of room to breathe in each other’s own lengthy campaigns.

The story is undeniably one of, if not the best in the franchise. It’s more straightforward compared to the complex conspiracies of Yakuza 4 and Yakuza 5, and I think that it’s better off for it. Its focus is on telling an emotional narrative that enriches the background of both Kiryu and Majima while giving some sorely needed additional context to the original Yakuza game, and it absolutely knocked it out of the park. This is in part due to this game’s mostly original cast of characters. These characters and events do an absolutely tremendous job explaining how Kiryu and Majima become the characters that we know today. The clash of each character’s extreme and over the top personality is what makes Yakuza 0 such a thrilling and emotional joyride.

The three lieutenants of the Dojima family are some of the best and most memorable antagonists in the series, with Daisaku Kuze in particular standing out with his venomous tenacity. Other characters such as Makoto Makimura and Tetsu Tachibana serve as the core of the story’s emotion and mystery, as getting to the bottom of their true aspirations and learning about Makoto’s tragic backstory is a huge appeal of the narrative. Then there’s Akira Nishkiyama, Kiryu’s sworn brother. He was the primary antagonist of the original Yakuza, but one of the biggest problems with that game’s narrative was that it barely featured him. We had no real context to their relationship and how close they were, so the character was completely forgettable as a result. This game fleshes out their relationship immensely, with some of the most heartbreaking and hypest moments of the entire series featuring the two brothers.

To make up for the lack of multiple characters to play as and to keep combat feeling fresh and varied, the game uses the Style System that was introduced in the original version of Like a Dragon: Ishin to offer multiple ways for both characters to approach combat. I really like how the Style System was implemented in Zero. Each of Kiryu and Majima’s Styles concentrate on a particular element that makes up the complete moveset that they would go on to use in the games that take place after Zero. It’s a brilliant idea, even if it does come with some flaws.

Kiryu’s Styles are Brawler, Rush, and Beast. Brawler feels like a slower and less snappy version of his moveset from the prior games. It feels like he hasn’t quite figured out his approach to fighting yet, but he’s on track to getting there. It’s a solid all-rounder Style that’s good for just about any occasion. Rush is a boxing-inspired Style that places emphasis on speed. It’s mainly used for taking out a single, troublesome enemy, as well as during boss fights. Beast is Kiryu’s crowd control Style. It places emphasis on his raw strength. He becomes extremely slow in this Style, almost immobile. In exchange, his attacks become a lot stronger and way more effective at clearing out a group of enemies… so long as he has a large object in his hands. By itself, Beast is not a very effective Style. Kiryu’s attacks are just too slow unless you’ve got a large object that you can use to help you armor through attacks while swatting away groups of enemies at a time. Otherwise, enemies are generally able to get easy potshots in on him and keep him from getting started simply because his attacks just have way too much wind up. More often than not, this Style is a hindrance, and you can do some smaller scale levels of crowd control with the Brawler Style, so I tended to mainly swap between that and Rush when I played.

Majima’s Styles are Thug, Slugger, and Breaker. Thug is Majima’s equivalent to Kiryu’s Brawler Style, only Majima has had more experience as a yakuza than Kiryu at this point, so this Style feels faster and more precise compared to Brawler. Slugger has Majima wield a baseball bat. He can swing the bat in very wide arcs which makes this Style great for crowd control. He also has access to a really easy and brutal Heat action with this move. Breaker is a bit confusing. It also seems to be a crowd control focused Style, only it’s a lot less effective than Slugger. Similar to Kiryu’s Beast Style, it takes too long to perform the crowd clearing attacks that Breaker has. It’s not as unwieldy as Beast, but Slugger just provides easier and more effective crowd control, so I saw little reason to use Breaker.

There is a fourth Style that Kiryu and Majima have which are both referred to as Legend. Both Legend Styles have Kiryu and Majima play the way that they do in previous games. I can’t really give my opinion on these Styles because they’re locked behind two obnoxiously long and grindy mini games that I’ve never bothered to complete. I wish that weren’t the case and that these Styles were either unlocked by reaching the climax of each character’s narrative or by simply beating the game. I think that it would’ve been extremely satisfying unlocking them after the biggest emotional moments of the story to use during each character’s finale segment as opposed to completing two overly long mini games.

The game has 16 total chapters, and it’s structured so that every two chapters, you swap between Kiryu and Majima. This does unfortunately lead to some pacing issues early in the game, as in addition to both characters’ narratives being slow at the start, you have to sit through a tutorial for every single combat style. All six styles come with their own little mini-story completely separate from the main plot. They make the opening hours of the game a bit of a drag. Once the narrative begins to pick up however, it really picks up, and the game becomes immensely hard to put down once you make it past those early hours. There’s also all of the various substories and side activities that you can do, which can add some spice to those slow early hours. The substories might not be as effective if you haven’t played the other games in the series, because a lot of them feature younger versions of characters that you’ll go on to meet later in the franchise, like Shinji, Daigo, and Ryuji, so the significance of them isn’t apparent. It’s not a big deal though, as it just makes it all the more rewarding when you do encounter them in the future and remember the funny substory they were featured in here. There’s still plenty of substories that are just there for pure fun, in fact, I think that Yakuza 0 has the best substories in the series. There are so many memorable and satisfying ones that are worth going out of your way to complete.

Yakuza 0 is such a good time. Returning to it after playing the other games has been an absolute joy. It was really fun comparing and contrasting it to the games that come before and after it. It perfectly captures every single aspect that makes the series appealing. The fun and satisfying combat, the exciting and heartstring tugging story, and the enticing side content are all mostly at their peak here. It’s a game that’s truly earned its reputation, and I feel like I’m never, ever going to get tired of revisiting it in the future.

earlier this year my roommate picked up persona 5 bc I had gushed about it for ages and the only takeaway he had from playing was "yakuza 0 was better". ofc that was blasphemy to my ears bc p5 is my fkn goat jrpg but I decided to give this game a go since he wouldn't stop talking about it the whole time. I shortly discovered that this is one of the best games that has ever been made. like everything about it is just so mf good it blows me away. the story? gripped me to the very end and had me at the conspiracy whiteboard. the characters? peak, kiryu is literally me. gameplay? I like to bowl n play pool. fighting? soooo fkn brutal I love it. overall this is objectively a mf goat