This is a far cry of what Serious Sam stood for in the early days of the franchise. This is no longer a game where you need to carefully position yourself in between the enemies and choose the right weapon for the situation. Instead you just shoot at hordes of enemies coming mostly out of the same direction with the strongest weapon you have in your arsenal. In the second half of the game (which you reach after just 2 hours...) you gain weapons that simply outclass every weapon you have collected before. Many weapons are simply obsolete towards the end of the game. Story wise this is a pile of garbage. No one ever played a Serious Sam game for the story or its characters, but these developers thought it would be a great addition to introduce audio logs and written pages to the franchise... like who wanted that ? The characters Sam encounters during this 4-5 hour adventure are not memorable at all, even though the games cut-scenes want to tell you the opposite. I really hope Croteam takes back control of this franchise and gets back to the roots with it, but they really need to improve or change their engine as it is a hot mess in its current state. I can not really recommend the game to anyone except those that want to make fun of it in coop.

finally got around to that second playthrough. while i still didn't finish it i got a lot further in (11hours) which was enough to tell me the game is just ok. mission structure is very repetitive and the combat is so slow and uninteresting especially when compared to the incredible combat of the arkham games. bosses are just health sponges and drag. the movement is slow and the grind to get the movement options at the start of the game is bs. the game isn't bad but it just leaves a sour taste in my mouth as an arkham fan and i don't think i will be returning to this one

Monster Hunter World is the first game of the series that managed to interest me enough for me to buy and play it. I even managed to beat it and plan to play the addon as well some day, I already started it, but needed a break from the game for now. There is a lot of depth in this game and it is quite fun to check out how the many different weapon types actually play. The main story is one of the weakest points of the game, there is a lot to be desired here in terms of presentation, storytelling and character building. Also the multiplayer is horribly implemented IMO. If you want to play the main story in coop, then you need to finish every mission alone beforehand, like who thought that would be a good idea... All in all this is a fun game though that I have spent quite a lot of time in.

In the conversations about great arcade racers I've never heard Moto Racer's name come up. In fact I don't think I've ever heard anyone talk about this game ever. The only reason I know about it is my vague memories of playing it as a kid. I feel like the gaming community is biased towards certain titles due to their reputation. Because this here is the original Sega Rally, except with motorbikes.

And it really makes this distinction tangible with higher speeds, fragile vehicles and more verticality in the tracks. There are two types of races here: your regular speed racing and motocross, and there is a different emphasis in each. The first is a suspenseful, adrenaline-pumping experience that requires hyper attention and reaction. But, when you're able to pull off some of the rather snaky series' of turns at 200+ km/h it feels extremely rewarding.

The motocross tracks give you more time to assess the upcoming turns, but add the challenge of calculating the trajectory of your air time that's gonna result from driving up the hills at high speeds. It's all much simpler and more intuitive than it sounds though. One kinda stand-out feature is the ability to speed up by doing a pop-a-wheelie, which is something that's not explained to you in the game, even the control scheme doesn't tell you about it. It's handy after crashes, but normally you don't need to speed up, as you're already going so fast, it'll only make your bike harder to control.

The graphics and music are gorgeous on some tracks and kinda vary in quality on others. Some songs with vocals sound pretty corny. The game does let you select which song is gonna play mid-race, which is pretty cool, but it's just extra busywork that nobody needs. Perhaps, if the game let you pick a selection of songs like EA BlackBox's NFS titles do, I might've even rated it higher. Because, although this game doesn't really do anything exceptional, everything it does do is extremely well-done. Certain tracks provide such a stellar audio-visual experience that, if the game managed to keep this up for its entirety, it would've really been a perfect experience.

I guess, if I really had to nitpick, I'd complain about the pop-in, which, from the footage I've seen, is as bad on PC as it is on PS1. But it's not THAT bad, and is actually better than most old racing games I've played.

On one hand the combat here is a huge improvement to the formula. In addition to this being in three dimensions, the way your character slides forward a bit when kicking and you having a back-punch move that lets you completely reverse in the middle of a combo and smoothly transition into an offensive makes this so much more complex than the old school side-scrolling beat-em-ups. The fighting here is about distance-management and strategy. You want to avoid being surrounded, which is a thing that can happen only in 3D (or top-down/isometric). And it surprisingly works very well for a while.

On the other hand you're unable to block or break through the enemy blocks, you rarely have an opportunity to grab an enemy, and sometimes you get stuck in that loop of being unable to pick up a weapon because you're being punched and unable to punch back because you're standing over an item and that's when your punch button turns into a "pick up" button.

All these issues kinda come to the forefront on the first boss[1] where the difficulty suddenly spikes and his every hit knocks you down. I still don't know whether I beat him correctly or cheesed him because the only way I was able to do it is get close to him, let him electrocute me, get up and try to hit him immediately before he electrocutes me again. Rinse and repeat till you go insane.

After that boss it seems to me that the issues were starting to become more exacerbated. Enemies became more agile and made you feel like your animations are slow and clunky. New types of enemies started to feel cheaty, as some could incapacitate you like that boss and some would have replenishable health.

All these issues really made the game start to feel stale after that point. A shame because I feel like this had the potential for a masterpiece. But I've definitely played better 3D beat-em-ups and this ain't it.

[1] it was that robotic boss that hits you with electricity. Might've not been the first, I don't remember.

For a mainline Halo game, I didn't expect this one to have such a melancholy tone. The agonies of the development team can really be felt when playing the game, but despite that, it's the most solid Halo title 343 has made so far.

The gameplay feels great, shooting and traversing the environment is very smooth. Initially, I was skeptical about the addition of the grapple hook, but to my surprise it worked great and added a lot to both combat and exploration.

Same skepticism rings true for the hub like nature of the world. Again, I was surprised how well it worked here, none of the side activities ever felt intrusive, nor did the HUD get cluttered with "points of interest". Most of them were found naturally by just exploring the world.

Co-op worked decently, though we encountered some soft locks, luckily restarting the game or mission fixed most of these issues.

It's close to a really great game, it just needed that extra push to make it shine. Hopefully with the change in leadership at 343, they will rally together and make the new Halo entry their best one yet.

Forza Horizon 5 has it all, a gigantic map, hundreds of activities, a roster full of the most exciting cars in the world and almost instant access to all of it. You want for nothing in Horizon but when you want for nothing you end up having little to strive and work towards.

Horizon 5 is still a great game, it looks great, sounds great, plays great, it's well made, it's polished and you could get lost in it for hours at a time or just hop in for a race a day. But it didn't quite hook me after playing Horizon 3 and Horizon 4 for hundreds of hours each. Maybe that's just a bit of fatigue on my part but ultimately I feel there's just too much Horizon 5 and too much all at once. Even going slow unlocking festival sites there's dozens and dozens of map markers in just a few hours and a garage full of half a million dollar sports cars almost instantly. I get that it provides full freedom in what you want to do and when you want to do it and even with that accelerated pace there's still hundreds of hours of content but the trade off is you don't really get to savor any of it. I have like 5million dollars in 25ish hours of playing but why buy cars when Horizon gives them out like candy. There's plenty of excitement to be found in playing but no excitement upon unlocking anything, no excitement on finally saving up to get that expensive Ferrari or Lamborghini after driving Golfs or beat up off-roaders for a while. You can only go so big with these games and I would love to see more purposeful and focused progression for Horizon 6 a bit more restraint in rewards, I just think Horizon is due for a bit of a change up.