Pretty good. The new dungeons are fun, the building is janky but enjoyable, the new areas are cool. The greater enemy variety, the honest to god bosses, and the overall pretty well designed world map revamp make this game. It's basically a jankier weirder BotW.

I'm not super hot on the new powers--there was an elegance to Breath of the Wild that I appreciated a lot. Sequence breaks and shrine skips in that game feel cool and earned because you're working within boundaries definite enough that breaking them is an accomplishment, often requiring obscure knowledge like the shield surf double jump or the use of special weapons in combination with slate powers. Tears of the Kingdom sometimes had a really good puzzle, but I was able to cheat at a lot of them very easily--many minecart puzzles are weak to the minecart shield, many gap-crossing puzzles are weak to gluing everything in the vicinity together into a huge bridge. Overall it's fun and technically very impressive, but it loses something in its versatility. (As an aside, Ascend is such a half-baked idea for a mechanic in a game already basically centered around different ways of gaining and losing altitude. It comes in handy occasionally but 90% of spots designed to require it could have had a ladder or climbable wall available and functionally changed nothing.)

The plot is written terribly and is structured very badly. The characters are paper thin, the voice acting is generally wasted on pointless material, and if you do things remotely out of order things start falling apart--do the memories sidequest before beating the dungeons and you will tear your hair out over Link's inability to share critical plot details with everyone, ignore the game nudging you towards exploring certain areas first and you'll be locked out of game mechanics until you cave and do what they tell you.

The new enemies are genuinely very very cool. Gibdos rock and should have gotten more screentime. The final boss is my favorite fight in any Zelda game, I think, from a gameplay standpoint at least.

Also the game is broadly very pretty and I very much appreciate that exploring the map and completing segments of the game makes it prettier (removes environmental hazards, turns off big ugly map tower spotlights) whereas BotW rewarded you for completing parts of the game by permanently ruining the view with laser pointers.

It's a weird game. There are things in this that I really hate and things in it that I really like. The moment to moment gameplay is quite good, so I would recommend it overall, and I think in some ways it corrects problems I had with BotW and hits some of the 'classic Zelda' notes the last one was missing. But I also think that viewed as a whole it's a worse game than BotW that loses some of the charm by the very act of trying to recapture it.

Playing it in 2023 for the first time is a weird experience, especially since I first played the series back when it came out. On the one hand it's almost inevitably going to be less impressive than when everybody was raving about it back in the day, but now there's also nostalgia involved. What's more, what I found most interesting (and useful for future endeavors) was the understanding that playing a DLC long after the original game means there's been enough time for the cup of pleasure that carried the name of the original game to empty due to time and for there to be more room for enjoying the same old thing. Meaning, shouldn't play DLCs right after the original game because you're just gonna be a bit bored. Give them time.

And oh boy is this a good Bioshock game. Perhaps even my favourite out of them all. Small enough to not overlive its welcome, tight enough in its story and mechanics to feel like a tasty little package, and yet still long enough as well to not leave you feeling like you want more. And the little twist (that’s inevitable with any Bioshock game) doesn’t feel as preposterous as it sometimes does; I even quite liked it.

And to imagine, having finished this I was excited for The Burial at Sea DLCs (which I ended up considering either okay or outright bad). Oh well, at least there’s this.

A continuation of the base game that feels much less ambitious and more tedious than the main campaign.

For a story with rivaling gangs as its crux, it's surprisingly bloodless. This anemic presentation also serves as a good metaphor of the rest of the DLC's content, which is bursting at the seams with repetitive missions and uninteresting plot lines. While my individual reviews go more in-depth, I'd still like to emphasize just how badly the central conflict with Hammerhead is fumbled. There's very little driving his antagonism other than "Hammerhead is bad" and "Spider-Man is in his way." I also really couldn't get over how off-putting mafia thugs in mech suits were. The visual style ended up being a bland homogenized mess.

Combat from the base game was generally good and left unchanged in the DLC, but the excessive and unvaried missions stretched a good thing to its breaking point. Getting 100% completion was painfully devoid of fun.

And while all that might sound scathing, this DLC did have some bursts of fun. And besides, it at least sets the stage for more good things to come.

This was the only classic Mario I never played cuz it wasn't in the All-Stars pack, but... WOW

Levels are awesome
Cape is so cool
So many secret exits to find
It's probably the best of the bunch