I could talk about the almost frightening freedom.
I could talk about the way he's reactive to the point of blowing your mind.
I couk talk about the roleplay, combat system and the masterful game design.
And I could talk about the amazing exploration and the unparalled sense of adventure.

(I could even talk about act 3 which is almost broken, sorry guys, just telling the truth )

But you know what?
Forget all this. The game Isn't awesome because of all that.

Above all else, Baldur's Gate 3 is the fruit of the passion and love of an entire team that has dedicated body and soul to successifully capture the magic of video games. A milestone that deserves to be celebrated for years to come. Thank you, Larian.

When you're in the thick of this game's core missions, where you're tackling scenarios with a mixture of sneaky, versatile stealth and tense swordfighting action and furthering the storyline of honour and betrayal, Ghost of Tsushima feels like it should be a bit of a classic.

Unfortunately, there's far, far too much time spent doing absolutely fuck all. Some of the worst open world bloat, gating fun combat mechanics behind skill trees and a world map that, although gorgeous to look at, offers little more than distance to travel ensures that you spend more time in Tsushima bored out of your mind than doing all the genuinely brilliant ninja/samurai hybrid stuff. A shame.

I woke up one morning after a dream. A dream of a perfect zombie game. A huge map with cities to explore, construction to build your own bases, surgery mechanics like metal gear solid 3, and total freedom to survive in the apocalypse in whatever way you want. But most importantly I wanted people and characters that you could invite to your group, having to make tough decisions and have arguments with them like who gets how much food or who needs medicine the most. That very day, I was looking for a game like this and zomboid fit the bill pretty much to the letter, excepting my last wish for the NPC friends. It's a zombie survival game that's been in early access for almost 10 years. These words should be like sandpaper to my brain. But I played 12 hours of this bad boy in 2 days and I am impressed. The sheer depth of every mechanic and how it doesn't feel like you can't do what you would do in a zombie apocalypse. You can pretty much do anything you can think of. Collect rainwater, but you have to heat it up to clean it. You could use the oven but one day the lines are gonna get shut off. Same with the sink. One day canned food will run out, so you better take the time you have to learn to fish or set up a farm. A huge chunk of my playthrough felt more like stardew valley, so when I went into town for more supplies and I saw a zombie I was like oh right. So it feels like you can safely get away from zombies with proper planning. But the zombies aren't a joke. If you make a SINGLE mistake then you're pretty much dead. Saw a fancy car I wanted. Didn't check my corners and boom, zombie. I panicked and broke the glass window of the car and got in. Deep wound, glass stuck in there. I had to hotwire it, and drive away from the horde of zombies while doing hand surgery on myself in real-time. This shit was so intense I think I lost a few years off my life from stress. I'll see you guys in heaven at 77. But anyway, you don't know shit about these zombies. You don't know how they work. Sure, you can customize them in sandbox mode but you don't know if they're drawn to corpses of other zombies or if they can smell the blood on your shirt. The game won't tell you, but if you're paranoid or cautious you can get rid of zombie corpses and wash your clothes and self to get rid of the blood. It reminds me of the early days of the walking dead when they didn't know how the bites worked or if the walkers were still conscious and could come back once the whole thing blew over in a week or two. I dunno about you guys but I like not knowing things. This game is just pure awesome.

But there is a flaw. Yeah, it's early access and it's still not done. There's just one aspect I really need from this game and that's the human NPC update. If you check the developer's Twitter updates you can see they are working on it and just like everything else in the game it's insanely detailed and ambitious. But unlike an ambitious promise from a game like no man's sky, I totally trust this team that each NPC will have deep memories of relatives going back to their grandparents and can tell you about the time their stepdad fell into the lake while fishing. These guys. That's the one thing that's missing and the part of a zombie apocalypse that I think is one of the most important. Because if you have nobody with you, then you are just struggling every day to keep living so you can survive tomorrow. I'd honestly get sorta bored just not even being able to chill at all. I like that this game has books and CDs and VHSes so our character can pass the time. But I'm adding that extra half-star when this game gets the NPC update.

Few games really make me actually laugh out loud or just smile to myself whilst I'm playing them but Guardians of the Galaxy had that effect on me almost constantly during its 20 hour playtime.

There are so many things I want to say, lines I want to quote, characters I want to discuss but it's nearly all spoilers so I will just say that Guardians nails character interactions like almost no game I've ever played. The crew talk amongst themselves constantly and in such a way they really feels like a real dysfunctional team through a movie or show and I flarking loved that. Eidos Montreal absolutely nailed almost every character from hilarious insults and comments to the more poignant moments it just felt so good, so right. (Mantis is easily my favorite character, every line she says is just gold.) The writing is just excellent.

On the negative side though you only get to make first impressions once and when this game was initially revealed I thought the combat looked really boring and unfortunately that just holds true. When not on ship or exploring locales you are in combat but despite having 5 Guardians at your disposal you can only play as Star-Lord. That in itself wouldn't be so bad but they just made him painfully dull to play, he can barely use his rocket boots, his blasters just feel like toy guns etc. To compensate you can order your team to do special attacks with cool downs on enemies which just means most the time you are micro managing them rather than really doing a lot and all of their moves are far more interesting then a single thing Star-Guy can do. It would have been far more fun to simply be able to change character during combat and use those moves yourself when you want to. It all results in some what clunky feeling gameplay and terrible lock on to boot. I almost inwardly groaned at every battle that began.

Presentation wise Guardians is a slam. The character designs are brilliant, they are close enough movie, close enough their own thing that they feel familiar and different all at once. I really liked the art generally and playing it on PS5 in performance mode it was very smooth. The game has a great attention to detail especially on The Milano (their ship) and Nowhere when exploring around I looked at everything and their are Easter eggs everywhere. That said I ran into quite a few little bugs getting stuck in some scenery or glitches forcing me to checkpoint restart.

The sound design to this game is a 10/10. The game wouldn't be Guardians without amazing 80's music and there are over 30 licensed tracks you can listen to from then plus some original tracks by the band Star-Lord and it all couldn't be more perfect though I wish during battles you could manually choose to listen rather than do this cringey huddle first the game has. On the voice acting front it's absolute perfection. Each characters voice fits them perfectly. Rocket's angry sarcasm, Drax's oblivious warrior front, Star-Lord's quippy pirate leader, I am Groot? I am Groot. I can't fault it at all.

To sum up I think guardians of the Galaxy is a wonderful experience, but it's kind of a bad game. The voice acting, dialogue, music, atmosphere and visuals are absolutely nailed but the actual gameplay is so mediocre. Still, I desperately hope they get a chance to make a sequel and improve that because even with it's flaws this is still an absolutely fantastic game.

+ Character dialogue and interactions are so very good.
+ Laugh out loud funny at times.
+ Fantastic voice acting and music.
+ Great art design and atmosphere.
+ Mantis.

- Combat is just bad.
- A few minor bugs here and there.