Blending genres is a popular trend because, when successful, it can result in a fresh experience with the best of both worlds. Disjunction is one of these hybrid games as it attempts to fuse a stealthier Metal Gear-type title with the top-down action of Hotline Miami. But this Hotline Miami Gear is far less than the sum of its disparate parts because of its imbalanced, tedious, and repetitive design.

Read the full review here:
https://www.gamerevolution.com/review/673136-disjunction-review-ps4-xbox-one-pc

I've never understood the hate for Streets of Rage 3 ever since I played it for the first time around a year ago. Though I was familiar with both previous entries to the series, the status of 3 being the "black sheep" had me mostly turn away from it until I got curious and played the Megadrive Classic Collection version. Though that version is tough as nails and has some censored content compared to the Japanese original, I still think of it to be the best of the series. That opinion is only solidified with the original Bare Knuckle III.

A point and click adventure about a young woman coming to terms with her own past as well as that of her family’s after going back home for a funeral and the mystery that is unearthed surrounding that death.
I came away thinking that the game was perfectly fine but that’s it. I often thought of Hobs Barrow and how that really set the scene for a small town story with its sense of place as I’m still quite fond of Bewlay whereas the setting for Kathy Rain doesn’t stand out for me nor does the time period it’s set in. Although it does allow for some nice interactions because of the technological constraints of the 90s.
The central mystery is interesting enough and it feels like a series in the making which I wouldn’t be opposed to playing. I just wasn’t as engaged as I would’ve liked which is a shame as it’s not bad. I think it’s partly down to the voice acting. The main character is okay but everyone feels somewhat middling to be honest as I didn’t warm to anyone.
It’s fine! If you’re a point and click fan your mileage will vary with this it might hit for you but it didn’t quite do it for me.

I ended up buying the Alex Murphy Edition, so I got to play it 48 hours earlier. As someone who has watched all the Robocop films and absolutely loves this franchise, this game was way better then I thought. The gameplay was smooth, doesn't get repetitive, the story is great besides the off sync lips when they talk. The missions and side objectives doesn't seem forced. The story is really short 10-15 hours same with the 100% in achievements/trophies, I wish for the price they charged for this game it was longer least somewhere in 20-25 hours. There is no autosave & no photomode. There is great optimization for PC with a few graphic settings and the game runs very smooth on ultra settings. Some parts especially the Bank Heist mission with the dude speaking through the mic it so reminded me of Payday. Would I suggest this game? Yes, but for full price no. UNLESS you are a Robocop fan, if you are just a casual fan and a gamer then wait till it's on sale for least $30!

My ranking for all the Robocop films: https://boxd.it/q3uEG
2023 Video Games Ranked: https://www.backloggd.com/u/RavenTargaryen/list/2023-video-games-ranked/
My Steam Review: https://steamcommunity.com/id/RavenZorEl/recommended/1681430/

Blade: The Edge of Darkness parece condenado a ser un juego de nicho. Lo fue de lanzamiento, cuando su dificultad y gráficos jugaron en su contra y también lo es veinte años después. Como suele ser habitual, las cinemáticas del juego delatan la edad de este. Blade es un juego de aventuras y RPG que, desde los primeros pasos, se empeña en que aprendas a moverte bien. Es obligatorio pasarse el tutorial, aunque seamos veteranos deberemos aprender o recordar a movernos en este mundo grimdark de muerte y destrucción.

Es un juego maravilloso, que no ha tenido buenos momentos, y el remaster parecía que ofrecía más, pero únicamente han tocado “los port”. Lo han hecho jugable y disfrutable para ordenadores de ahora. Sin embargo, los fallos o carencias que tenía, las sigue teniendo. Y es una lástima.

No obstante, si no os importan los controles de tanque, las paredes que hacen ghosting, sombras demasiado oscuras, o en general fallitos como digo de hace 20 años, Blade: The Edge of Darkness es vuestro juego. Disfrutaréis de una historia magnífica de Grimdark, con mucho gore, espadazos y amazonas que pegan hostias como panes.

Blade of Darkness is a remaster released in 2021 of the original Blade: the Edge of Darkness (or Severance: Blade of Darkness), an action-adventure game from 2001. It's hard for me to sort out my feelings about this game, since it's one of the PC games that I played in my childhood (last time I played it was at least 14 years ago) and I love it, but it is difficult to recommend in 2022, because it just feels old and somewhat dated; furthermore, the remaster does little to update the game: there is now support for 16:9 screens, it is more compatible with modern OS, there are achievements and it has support for joysticks (although it has some problems: there are som combos you can't perform and overall it just felt weird, I generally prefer to play with a controller, but this game was easier with M+K). I didn't see any changes apart from those. I'm glad I can play this game without any headaches on Win10, but I can't help but feel a bit disappointed to find various bugs (I'm 99% sure I experienced some of these in the past) and the same jankiness when I was a kid (if you're very nostalgia driven this could be a plus? idk).

Getting into the gameplay, the main focus of the game is combat. You have to select between 4 characters: the Knight, the Barbarian, the Dwarf and the Amazon; with different stats and more importantly, with different weapons to wield. At this time, one could say that combat is proto souls-like: enemies have (basic) attack patterns and one has to identify them and react accordingly. One mistake and you will be punished for it, possibly in a fatal way. You have to press buttons simultaneously to make combos, akin to Street Fighter if you like, to make more powerful moves and thus eliminate the enemy.
The levels are linear, although they allow a certain degree of exploration, encouraged by the discovery of more powerful weapons. In addition to weapons, there are the typical healing potions which you can grab and save for later. Also, some levels have traps and present some level of variety: There are castles, fortresses, caves, tombs, temples, graveyards, among others. Is not that much, but they're a nice change of scenery. There is not much to say about the music and sound other than is serviceable, although completing it more than once makes it feel repetitive but still I liked it. On the other end of the spectrum, there are sections that don't have music, and I think it would be better if they had some kind of background music or ambiance.

On the narrative and theme, it is a fantasy game (low fantasy), resulting from mixing Conan the Barbarian and Lord of the Rings (not my quote but very spot on imo). There are orc enemies, knights, trolls, minotaurs, demons, among other monsters. The mission is to find a holy magic sword to definitively defeat the Evil. Simple. The story is definitely not the focus here, I don't think it's even necessary to enjoy the game, but it seemed like a good addition that gives flavor to the game; in the introductory cinematics and at the end of the levels it is implied that there is a world much bigger than the one the player sees, naming characters and places that I had next to no idea what they were, but it was cool. I like that they spent some thought in worldbuildind, trying to make it believable, despite not being the focus, and in my opinion, not even a necessity.

Now, why did I have a hard time reviewing this game? In short, because this is bumpy, rough and janky to play. At least by the standards that, in one way or another, we have acquired over the years. The game, when it works, is fun. I'd be lying if I said it isn't: after all, I completed it with all 4 characters and, for the most part, I had fun (not so much with the dwarf tho, fuck the dwarf). The problem is that there are many times that the game does not cooperate: Faulty hitboxes, attacks that visually clearly connected but didn't deal any damage, faulty jumps that more often than not make you fall to your death, instances where you'd get stuck either inside an enemy (be careful of skeletons), inside a wall or inside a hole, moments when the volume suddenly rises for a couple of seconds and nearly kills you with a heart attack, janky lock-on system and maybe a gamecrash or two. I had just one, when I was trying to get the no saves achievement and was 60% through the game. Pain.
They're probably more bugs, but these were the major and annoying ones. Also, if I'm talking negatives, it's impossible not to mention the "final" boss. I truly believe is one of the worst bosses I've ever fought in a videogame (beware, rant ahead), because it is not very well designed. This motherfucker teleports when he's in your weapon reach, and, if you manage to hit him, you can only hit him once before he tp's because he has some kind of magical shield or barrier that provokes your weapon to bounce (as if you were hitting a real, physical shield). This is because this dude (that only appears on this level and I'm not sure if its even mentioned earlier in the story) is supposed to be beaten with the sacred sword I mentioned at the start. But, and big but, you need the fully powered sword. To unleash the full powers of the sword you have to collect 6 runes, which are hidden in different levels and are deemed as OPTIONAL; and is the only way to consistently hit his barrier because the upgraded sword has ranged attacks. So, if you are clueless, or want to beat the game quickly (both cases are me. Also if you collect all runes, then you have to beat one extra level, with the true Mr. Evil, which is a very linear level, kinda long, and very boring imo) and didn't get all runes, you are pretty much fucked (I realized all of this playing with the Dwarf, which has a laughable reach. Paaaaain.), unless you are the Amazon and maybe the Barbarian, which have combos with long reach, and maybe they can hit him, I really don't know. Luckily, when you destroy his barrier, you can hit the guy normally and stops teleporting whenever he has the chance. I'm sorry for this very long rant and going a bit off rails, but I really HATED this boss. Fuck you Dal-Gurak.

Finally, for the visuals I have nothing to say. I mean, it's a game from 2001, you can't say it looks good compared to what we have now, but I don't think it looks awful and I liked the style and setting the devs were going for, although I think there are like 3 or 4 levels that don't mesh very well with the rest of the game. I read that this was one of the first games with real-time shadows, so round of applause. Seriously, very cool.

I can't say in good faith that it's a good game and that you should play it, nor do I think it's a bad game. It is simply a game that, currently, is somewhat mediocre. I found there is some mods for both the new and old version but I didn't dive much into that. Might be some pretty cool stuff there.
I’d recommend Blade of Darkness to someone who likes “old” PC games, specially action/adventures ones and/or to someone with high tolerance to bugs and jankiness that could make you load or restart your game. Despite this lukewarm review, I still love it very much. Do yourself in favor tho, and if you play pick the Amazon or the Barbarian.

well its much better than yakuza 3 ill tell you that

all the characters feel very fluent and comfortable to play as, the game never often has downs and is so clean of an experience it makes this 20 hour experience feel like a feature length film.

im definitely never forgetting this game. i’ve already forgotten 50% of what happened in 3

    Baldur's Gate III is the most ambitious, high-production Computer Roleplaying Game since Dragon Age Origins. The degree to which they realize that ambition is astounding, but its scale also amplifies the effect of the many footguns in its design.

Footguns I can talk about with confidence because I put well over 100 hours into the game. That said, the fact I put that much time into it in a month should be seen as a glowing endorsement for the game.

In terms of core gameplay, technical depth, the presentation of the story, and visual aesthetic I can't call BG3 anything less than a superb evolution on what Larian has been building since Divinty Original Sin. It's pretty, it's flashy, it's deep, and it's densely packed with handcrafted encounters for you to discover in ways that will be unique to each player and playthrough.

Almost everything has narrative context. Every character is voice acted and most are motion captured. The writing has many great moments: rich layers of character, surprising plot developments, capturing moments of drama, excitement, intrigue, levity, and—more often than I expected—some rather dark turns.

    | The meat of it |

Exploration is immensely rewarding and varied. Talking to every NPC can lead to unexpected quests and opportunities and sometimes even open new paths on the central narrative. The nooks and cranies of the map hide unique treasures that often have the potential to completely change or enhance your playstyle. And the various fights you'll end up in are almost never repetitive and allow for a great deal of tactical approaches while still being quite challenging.

Compared to its Computer RPG peers—Pillars of Eternity, Dragon Age, and of course its own predecessor the original Baldurs Gate—the game is borderline an "immersive sim" with its mechanics, level design, and quest progression. My greastest point of evidence being how much I relied on my characters being built to abuse stealth and really high jumps.

Locked gate? Jump over it. Blocked Bridge? Jump past it. Running enemy? Jump on it.

Too many enemies? Hide, jump up to a high place, and pick them apart with arrows.

But I've played with alternate builds enough to know that you could have a party of physically inept nerds and still have a rip roaring good time with combat and adventuring.

Its hard for me to say how approachable it is, given my many hours of experience in the Original Sin games carrying over almost completely, but given how many CRPG newcomers I've seen enjoying the game, I wager it does well enough.

Overall, it really is a beautiful digitalization of the tabletop experience it intends to emulate, just as its predecessors were in their time, but perhaps even more dramatically so now. From the on-screen dice rolls to the sense of humor and adventure, its an almost 1:1 emulation of D&D 5e.

What then are these issues I speak of?

    | Inherited flaws |

Firstly—and most cheekily—that tabletop game it's emulating is D&D 5th Edition. 5e has some longstanding design problems as a tabletop ruleset and a few new problems in the context of a video game where there is no human Dungeon Master to fill the holes on the fly. (I'll still take it over 4th Edition every time, though)

For one, class design and scaling is erratic. Some classes, like the Ranger and Barbarian, get left in the dust after a certain point while others (Paladin) rocket up to the moon with all of their damage and utility. A lot of this Larian thankfully smoothed over with some reworking of class progressions and changes to specific class ability rules, but some of its is in the core designs which didn't get changed very dramatically.

    | Illusory viability |

I would even say that 5e is generally not very flexible or experessive in terms of play styles. Or at least not flexible and expressive in the ways it thinks it is. Take for instance Shadowheart's starting class as a "Trickster" subclass Cleric that focuses on Stealth.

If you try to play into that concept, you either lock yourself out of a Cleric's secondary role as a tank by picking armor that doesn't negate your bonuses to stealth, or you're locked to very particular sets of armor that you may or may not find, and to add insult to injury there's not a single useful action a Cleric can do that either maintains or benefits from stealth. Half of their spells are giant glowing AoEs for crying out loud.

Ah, but they could buff your actual stealth character to make them more effective... which is fine until your Rogue gets a few pieces of gear that give the same bonuses with less hassle, and by then their skill is more than high enough for every scenario where stealth is even a viable option in this game.

Oh, and their unique decoy ability takes a full action for a mere 1 HP on it and uses your "concentration," blocking you out of any of your other actually useful spells. By the start of Act 2, enemies will delete it from existence by sneezing in its general direction then proceed to pummel you anyway.

Then on the other end of the spectrum is the "Light" Cleric who gets free explosions on every short rest and the ability to "nope" an arbitrary enemy's attack every round.

If you're playing on Exploration or Balanced modes, none of these class design issues will likely ever matter to you, as they are balanced well enough for casual play. But it's one of the more frustrating parts of the system in how it promises certain combat archetypes and playstyles but doesn't actually support them either through poor decisions on the classes or just by flaws in the fundamental rules.

    | "You notice that you can't see the treasure. Sucks to suck." |

Speaking of: pass/fail dice rolls still don't translate well to computer games. They work on tabletop because tabletop is casual and abstract. A fully realized virtual environment is not so much the latter. Especially one where I can just rewind time with a reload if I can't make it (You call it save scumming; I call it "respawning after a failed attempt."). And this is ultimately just a clumsy attempt to replace the narrative smoothing a good Dungeon Master would be able to do in tabletop.

Sure, all is well in good when your Charisma 8 fighter fails a DC18 Persuasion check to convince the guard to let you off scott free. That's just getting what you paid for and hoping for a rare exception. But try and tell me you won't reload when your master thief character fails a narrative sleight of hand check that you need to save an NPC you like.

If this was a 10 or even 20 hour game, I'd say sure: maybe you will let the dice roll as they do.

This is a 100 hour game and there are hundreds of significant dice rolls with many ways for things to go wrong. Not just a little wrong, like ruin-your-story wrong. Lose-your-spec'd-out-Cleric wrong. You aren't going to wait until a replay you never actually do just to get the sequence of events you actually wanted.

You are going to reload to redo dice rolls.

So why does the game waste so much time on them?

This is why almost every other series in the genre threw out dice rolling for pass/fail conditions. Larian found ways to do it better than its been done before: inspiration, active bonus selections, a cool interface, and plentiful alternate methods if one fails (in most cases). But that doesn't fix the problem, it just makes it more tolerable. The fact that Larian dropped the "Honour Mode" option that both Original Sin games had—limiting you to one save and erasing it on death—is very telling to this fact.

I will say, though, it was refreshing in some ways for a game to try this method again so wholeheartedly. The little dice noises are very satisfying.

    | Fickle People |

Another long standing issue for Western RPGs in general is diplomacy in its many forms. The wider genre is pretty infamous for "No u" style dialogue options to talk your way through "tricky situations." Ideals dismantled, higher reason found, passions cooled (or maybe ignited?) all because a pretty guy said "have you tried X instead?"

That isn't actually that unrealistic on its own (human history is full of a lot of hard to explain decision making) and Baldur's Gate III does a much better job avoiding this tendency than a lot of games. A certain pivotal moment in Shadowheart's storyline stands out to me, as the skill marked options actually made things worse when I tried them. But, despite Larian's immense effort on the writing and motion capture, there's still a few too many important moments where characters change their minds way too quickly and for far too little.

Act 3 in particular suffered this in my experience, with Gale's storyline there being one of the prime examples of that kind of emotional whiplash. One minute he's venting pent up frustrations and resolving to go one way on a decision, then the time comes to choose and he talks like he had always intended to go the other after you say one line of your opinion on the matter.

    | Almost too chaotic for tactics (almost) |

A good amount of my core issues with combat are downstream of the dice rolling problem as well. It's hard to feel tactical and clever in the moment to moment when the deciding factor between your plan handing you a quick victory or a miserable defeat is a mostly arbitrary 30% chance for a spell to either work completely or not at all.

This kind of chaos is fine for a casual tabletop session with the boys where the DM is probably fudging the roles for the most exciting outcome anyway. Or even a faster paced game where the individual chances aggregate more. It's less fine for a game that offers you a "tactical" difficulty, tunes things relatively decisively, and hits you with some pretty insidious encounter designs.

Is it an unmanageable tactical experience then? No. The tools at your disposal are just well enough designed and plentiful enough that there's almost always some way to recover and wrest out a victory. But those recovery options burn a limited pool of resources.

    | Resource management and risk mitigation (the HR way) |

There is almost no item farming in this game: once an area has been looted, it's empty. So, if you rely on chugging potions and burning scrolls on every fight, you will only make future fights more difficult by exhausting most of what's available. Not to mention the rest and recovery mechanics require a steady supply of food and can advance certain time sensitive quests so you have to be mindful there as well.

There are shops that replinish some consumables every day, but that requires gold which you also can't farm. (Those willing to pickpocket, however, bypass this issue entirely)

Where this led me was the practice of intense pre-fight risk mitigation and stingy consumable usage. Most fights ended in 2-3 rounds for me because I had already scoped out the field and used stealth to position myself for the greatest advantage I could, leveraging my power-gamed character builds.

That might sound very enticing to many of you, and it is, in fact, a lot of fun for a while.

But I'm a bit too familiar with Larian's mechanical design at this point and know a lot of really nasty, tension deflating exploits that have ironically been reintroduced from Original Sin 1. Yes, I could just not use them, and I try not to. But when the first two fights of a potentially expansive dungeon drain most of your resources playing the normal way and you don't know what's next, you tend to stop pulling punches.

And the main set piece fights really hammer in the long term immersion issue with this risk averse playstyle as I often ended up reloading after a failed first attempt only for "divine inspiration" to tell my characters exactly where to stand and what pre-fight buffs to use before triggering the cutscene. All because the alternative is risking another 15 minute failed attempt because some bad dice rolls foiled my most important plays of the fight.

Which brings us to another inherited issue.

    | D&D 5e does not scale gracefully |

Both up and out.

As mentioned Larian did tamp down on the worst of the power scaling. They limited player levels to 12 as opposed to the tabletop game's max of 20 and smoothed out some of the class designs. But what I'm actually focusing on here is the "action economy" of the game (how many actions per round each side of a fight has available) and the time scaling of combat.

The further the game goes the more health everything has, the more actions they have, the more effects get layered into fights, and the more enemies there are. In Act 3 especially the combat tracker is frequently overflowed because of how many combatants are actively fighting, and that's before everyone starts summoning more. None of this scaling comes free from a real-time standpoint. The bigger the fight, the slower it goes as a rule. The variables at play, the more you and the AI have to figure out to make good decisions.

Larian did introduce a nice mechanic allowing allied characters with adjacent turns to act together, but that's another thing that gets mangled by dice rolls and class balance. Eventually characters' "initiative" values vary too much even on the same side, causing allies and enemies to get evenly distributed in the order and forcing everything back to one-at-a-time.

By the late game it wasn't uncommon for a single round of combat to last 10-15 minutes. The finale getting the absolute worst of this and unfortunately deflating the rest of any emotional momentum I had at that point.

    | There's no "oil field" moment for me |

Ultimately, I walk away from the combat of Baldur's Gate III a bit disappointed as a fan of Larian's last two games. 5e has some fun stuff, but its ultimately not as interesting of a tactical sandbox compared to Original Sin. Abilties and effects have relatively unintuitive, restrained interactions in general and have to rely too much on special cases and rule exceptions. And the ruleset's general lack of determinism only multiplies that effect.

Most people won't engage in the game to a level where what I've been talking about matters, and there's still plenty of fun to be had even if you do.

I was just hoping the game would eventually give me another moment like I had in Original Sin 2, where a seemingly non-descript fight next to an oil drill organically evolved into a desperate fight for survival on a smoke filled tower amidst a sea of flames—and that was after multiple attempts. But everything in BG3 felt rather tame in comparison. Often creative, surely... but tame.

    | That's enough about 5e |

It feels unfair to critique problems with a ruleset Larian didn't actually design and which the majority of the gaming sphere has determined they are fine with. So I'll focus now on what they are actually responsible for.

    | Scope |

If this was 10 years ago, I would have nothing but praise for their ambitions and be perfectly willing to overlook every rough edge, disappearing player model, out of sequence dialogue, and Vulkan rendering crash. But now we're in a world where Final Fantasy games are considered "shorter" compared to the average AAA release.

The first two acts of Baldur's Gate III were fantastic. Act 2 definitely a bit rougher, but constrained enough that most of the polish of Act 1 still carried through.

Then Act 3 arrives and is both larger and much messier than both. The hard part for me analyzing it, is that it doesn't have any less heart. There's a lot of cool things going on in the Act and clearly the team at Larian was excited to do it all. And a lot of it is good. Like 80%.

But that other 20% is cripplingly problematic: screwed up quest progression; rushed dialogue; pacing sinkholes; immersion killing glitches. The works. I was fortunate enough that none of it broke my solo playthrough entirely, but my co-op partner was not as lucky with his solo games and had two of his playthroughs borked by glitches.

    | Plot juggling |

And by Act 3 there are just too many active plot threads going on in general for me as a player to follow meaningfully. As an example, there was a major companion questline that I let end with the companion's (permanent) death in an unrelated event because I just couldn't spare any more brainpower to figure out how to reconcile it with all of the other threads I was trying to resolve.

In this game, quests do not just automatically resolve because you follow a marker and they often spill into each other in both symbiotic and conflicting ways. That is special and I love that.

But that also limits how many you can actually handle dealing with in a single playthrough.

If this was a 20 hour game like Obsidian's Tyranny, that would be fine. But this is very much not that short and the overwhelming majority of players will not be seeing Act 3 a second time. So it's pretty frustrating when a plotline you were interested in gets borked because of a decision you made 10 hours ago without quite realizing it (sorry, Lae'zel).

Again, that would be exciting in a short game. This is not a short game. So instead I experienced snowballing apathy for the last 20-30 hours of the narrative.

    | Faerun's babysitter |

This apathy I think also really colored my experience with the companion characters and a lot of the supporting cast. I'm not sure if the apathy was the start or the result, but by the end of Act 2 I began to feel less like my character was a "budding hero with his band of troubled but ultimately dependable allies," and more like I was "the designated driver after a particularly bad bender and we have a group assignment due tomorrow."

That example is maybe a bit too hyperbolic. The character storylines are quite interesting in their own rights. The issue is that once you mix in the rest of the supporting cast failing miserably to resolve their own issues without killing someone, themselves, or selling their souls to the devil (literally) you start to have flashbacks to your college days. Or at least my college days.

I did not get any sense of reward or accomplishment when the other characters showered mine with praise as a hero. All I heard were the desperate pleas of my fellow back row sitters looking for someone to tell them what to do.

In one sense, that made one particular villain character's offer very compelling near the end, but I can't abide ends-above-the-means logic so I had to refuse it and trudge on as the reluctant babysitter.

I would perhaps recommend to other to pick one of the origin characters instead of a custom. The story might work better when your character is also damaged. My great weapon fighter and his pristine moustache were simply too untainted, reliable, and self-sufficient for what the story was trying to do, I think.

Off the top of my head, the only characters I can think of that got by fine without your handholding were an 8-year-old orphan, a strange ox, the literal devil, and the final boss. The last two of which I killed, so...

I understand that it being an RPG means the story is geared to give the player as many important things to help with as possible, but there's a point where you compromise the believability of the world. The investigators are incompetent. The guards are useless. The freedom fighters are outmatched. The gods are impotent. Their champions are failures. The "good guys" are all wearing red shirts under their armor. The defenseless civilians emulate deer on the road. The villains are self destructive. And even the thieves guild is outdone.

Your character is not just a "factor" to tip the scales of the conflicts in the story, they are the single, final brick holding up an entire collapsing building.

    | The exploration really is quite excellent, though |

Despite all of the critiquing (or perhaps complaining) prior to this paragraph, I still hold this game in rather high regard. That's because as an immersive sim experience it's so intricate, varied, and reactive that my disappointments about the narrative couldn't spoil my whole experience. Even if I no longer really had much emotional investment in the proceedings, I was still really curious to see what routes and outcomes were possible.

    | What about co-op? |

I had fun with it, but this is going to be so heavily dependent on who you're playing with that I can't comment much, other than to say that it's the most properly accomodating co-op CRPG I've played, just as Original Sin was before it.

Actually, it shouldn't be understated how well it works. You can even properly quick save and load safely while one player is mid conversation and the other is in combat on the other side of the map.

Any other game I've played, that scenario would be unthinkable. But it's effortless here. So major props to Larian on that.

That might sound small, but multiplayer in CRPGs is usually tacked on at best so everytime its good I'll celebrate.

    | Not the crowning achievement I thought it'd be, but an achievement nonetheless |

Between great art direction, a rich world to traipse through, plentiful moments of genuinely entertaining dialogue and action, and a wide array of possible playstyles, Baldur's Gate III is a very impressive game and Larian should be proud of their work so far and enjoy its great opening sales and acclaim. But it's a shame that so many of the fibers of the game are left loose at the end and easily frayed.

I recommend anyone interested in RPGs and especially D&D to give it a go, but I also think most people could probably wait a bit longer for the first few big post-launch patches before they get deep enough to hit Act 3. My reaction actually seems to be a minority view on the story as well, so maybe you'll fare much better than me.

In any case. Cool game but glad to be done. I will probably not finish my co-op games anytime soon.

Yakuza 1 has a good foundation for building a future series.

The fighting is weighty and violent, the characters are likeable and memorable, and the story builds intrigue easily.
Issue is, the combat also has a feeling of stiffness, where you're either trapping an enemy in the corner and beating them to paste, or you're constantly swinging at air because there's no real lock-on or tracking for your punches. You'll also be getting into a lot of random fights, hearing the same generic dialogue, and executing the same combos.

The story is much the same way. It starts real strong, setting up pieces and intrigue and motivations, but just when it's reeling you in and you think you're about to get payoff it throws you into a series of fetch quests to pad for time and that promised payoff turns into a "Our Princess is in another castle" scenario. The characters I thought were going to be the main antagonists take a backseat in the final act, as it introduces a character out of nowhere to exposit how he was the mastermind all along.

Kiryu is an immediately likeable protagonist, and I hope many of the characters that actually survive the finale stick around for sequels.

Like I said it's a good foundation.