It's kinda funny that the first game I played turned out to be my new favorite game of last year. Funny how things work out like that.

Alan Wake 2 is for my money the best game Remady has made to date and is currently my new favorite pick for best recent survival horror game that's not a remake. Everything from that always great Remedy combat, to Sam Lakes writing feeling REALLY on point this time around, and even the actors and voice actors doing a fantastic job both in live action cutscenes and through VA and mocaping. I can't say I have a full understanding of the story yet, mostly since there's still some lingering pieces that don't fall into place yet but even then the number of twist and turns this story took kept me on the edge of my seat, and the way they were able to weave the story in between neo noir nightmare to a horror mystery and still have story cohesion is honestly really impressive.
I will say the only part I'm meh about in retrospect is how long it takes before it starts becoming a survival horror game. What I mean is for the first 3 to 4 hours or so you're railroaded down this linear line of progression pretty much having ammo given to you and it's not until the first boss when the game finally starts to open up more and spread its wings. On the topic of its gameplay I also really love how Remady was able to explore the different types of survival horror games. In the game you can bounce between two characters; Saga and titular Alan Wake, Saga's gameplay is much more akin to the gameplay of RE4 or Dead Space; where the item management is still an important aspect of the gameplay but it's still more skewed towards action. The titular Alan Wake's sections however are much more oriented towards classic survival horror like classic Resident Evil or Silent Hill, you have half the inventory space that Saga has and only have access to 3 weapons which are kinda unreliable and ammo is super scarce. The titular Alan Wake's sections take place in the titular Dark Place and most of the enemies are these shadow monsters; there's a shit ton of them but only some of the shadows are real enemies. You have to carefully maneuver through these shadow enemies without them seeing you which requires you to turn off the flashlight and move in pure darkness, and if you think one of the shadow monsters is coming to kill you the only options is use up one of your flashlight charges hoping your right and it's an enemy, or waiting to see if it's an actual enemy but also taking the risk of losing health.
It's not perfect, the exploration on Saga's side can feel a little tedious at times and The titular Alan Wake's sections feel really short and don't have the same lasting feeling that Saga's sections have, but even then I feel as thought Alan Wake 2 found that certain sweet spot of balance that rarely see most survival horror games reach without making some limitations.

14 years and Remady somehow hit it out of the park with one of my new all time bangers, and to think..........it's all because Epic wanted a new exclusive game for their shitty pc store front and have nearly infinite amounts of cash to throw around. Good on you Sam Lake and co......good on you for gaming the system.

How.........how in the name of god did Santa Monica do it.

Somehow.......they made a FREE dlc, more content rich, more story rich, and more meaningful to the greater series then most paid dlcs.....I'm just...shocked. Santa Monica has reached a peak with this era of GoW, even if the rougelike gameplay is shallow and no where near as other games in this field; they still hit it out of the park with the writing and acting. No joke Naughty Dog wishes they could write a character as good as Santa Monica writes Kratos it is unreal how great he is in this.

I'm just glad I ended this year off with kino instead of the last Saints Row reboot dlc pack because how boy that would've been depressing.

Soullikes have never been my thing but somehow this game clicked something in my brain that made me fall in love with it. I don't know if it was the mix of bloodborne and sekiro's mechanics that makes for a more fast and aggressive combat system, the beautiful art direction, the fun and well paced areas you explore, or the story which is a fun retelling of Pinocchio that isn't told in a obtuse way like most of FromSoftware's other games. Either way I fucking loved every second of this game and I am 100% down for other Soulslike from this studio that take from public domain literature. (That end credit scene thought)

I think I finally understand why people like Cruelty Squad now.

It's bad enough that this shitpost of a game is actually a good retro shooter and better than most games genuinely trying to replicate that era of shooters, but the length to which the game keeps committed to the bit; that bit being this game was made by a sad loser who never went anywhere in his life and dug out this old high school project as a hail mary attempt to make it big and leave his job at the dollar store run by his step-father.
Not only does it have the layer of a cringe edge lord high school project that's amateur at best, but it also has that hidden layer of sadness when you start realizing all of the maps in the game are just places from the main programmers life in Ohio which range from a dollar store and a fast food place. AND ON TOP OF THAT you have the meta context where it's replicating how kids and teens in the 90's and 2000's would get into Doom map making by primarily recreating their homes or other buildings in Doom.

For a game that has this stupid shitpost veneer this had so much more going on under the hood and I kinda admire it.

On the first day of christmas my true love gave to me...........Banban...........

I'm so tired dude.

(Edit- I just realized this was my 1000th review........................god I just.......fuck my life dude honestly.)

It alright, it not subtle or nuanced, it tasteless and lukewarm.........naa that's being a bit too mean.

The truth is I did enjoy this game quite a bit, the combat is still pretty solid, the side missions feel less like filler and more like proper missions, everything with Kraven is fantastic, and side stuff with Peter's former villains are all really great and do a better job delivering the game's overall narrative themes better than the main story to an extent. I feel like the further we get into the story the worse it gets and the more rushed it feels. I genuinely believe if you gave the symbiote arc more time to breath, made Venom less of a one note villain, and actually found something for Miles to do in the main story besides getting over his anger towards Mr. Negative you could've had something really special on your hands, and I know that for a fact since Kraven is by far the best part of the game hands down, Insomniac did their homework and then some like holy shit.

All and all a perfectly serviceable sequel that I wished tried a little bit harder
(Wake me up when Arkane's Blade comes out in 4 years)

God the drop in quality between Heist & The Hazardous and this is staggering.

What started out as a pretty alright horde mode/survival mode turned into a god awful monotonous slog of pretty much doing the same thing over and over again with 4 different characters that all play the same with zero enemy or map variety.

I get that Volition wanted to give this reboot it's own Super Ethical Reality Climax and the murder circus was the closest thing they had to it, but this mode lives or dies on whether or not you think the combat in the fun/good, and personally as I've been replaying through the game I find the combat slow sluggish and dull. The SR3 and 4's combat wasn't great either but at least in that game most fights ended within five minutes. Every enemy in this game is super bullet spongy and nine times out of ten the high power guns you're using feel less like guns and more life BBguns.

Each run is around 44 to 50 minutes long, and you have four different characters to play as, each can be leveled up to level 8 which can take 3 to 4 runs for one character. Do the math and it becomes really evident how this DLC gets really boring really fast.

The one part of this DLC that completely eludes me is why this glorified horde mode doesn't even let you play in co-op, a mode like this was made with multiplayer in mind so why not at least give it as an option? This whole DLC feels so slapdash together it's pathetic they expect $10 for this. The Genkibowl DLC from SR3 was 5 dollars and you pretty much got what this DLC would've given you, a piss poor expansion of a mode you played in the base game. But at least Genkibowl was 5 dollars

Idk why I was so excited for this mode when for most of my life every single time I play a rhythm game I just become that one Spongebob image of Mr Krabs playing golf and then remembering "Wait a minute........I hate golf"

So far the song list is pretty decent and overall it's just an alright version of Rock Band which is cool for those who like stuff like Rock Band and Guitar Hero I just never got into them, but I really don't like how overly monetized this mode feels. I know that's a weird statment since this is Fortnite after all but I really don't like how much a lot of the skins for your instruments cost and the price for the songs in the shop are way too much for what your getting.
It's not as bad as the racing mode asking 37 dollars for a fucking car but for what your getting and the price of the songs and the skins and even the stand along battle pass for this mode is twice the amount the normal battle pass cost.
This mode along with the racing mode feels like Epic is testing the waters on how much they think they can get away with nickel and diming their players before they start realizing their getting ripped off and stop buying them. This will never happen since people who play Fortnite are children and autistic adults with no sense of saving or having a budget............𝘗𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘮𝘦...............:(

Recently I saw the SR Reboot season pass was 10 bucks so I thought I'd finally play through these DLC missions to see if the team ever listened to criticism thrown at the game, while also using this opportunity to reevaluate my overall thoughts on the base game.

My overall thoughts on this DLC? I beat in 44 minutes and it's pretty much just the base game but with missions that are slightly more fun if not a little too scripted. The new area that the DLC takes place in is pretty neat, I like that we finally have an area in the game that reflects some upper class neighborhoods that kinda ties in with this game's stupid themes. But after you finish the three missions this DLC has the area just kinda goes back to being empty and pointless, it doesn't help that the area is so far detached from the main city you'd never willingly go all the way out there unless you forgot to 100% the area for "true" 100% completion.

I don't know what I should have expected from 10 dollar DLC but all I got was the same game just in a slightly cooler looking area. I thought it would've had more content in it since the DLC missions for SR2 and 4 are sometimes better then the base game with how much new and better stuff they add to the game. Here it's more so just another hour of fun and a new area that you're never gonna return to after finishing the DLC.

Not a very good start to these DLC huh.

What a 𝙒𝙤𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙧ful game............AH...AHHHHHHHHHH........𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨.

I don't really have much to say about this since it's just more 2D Mario only this time the devs learned from the wild success of Mario Maker and started making levels that aren't boring or easy as hell. It also helps that the game is charming as hell with one of the best styles a mario game has had in years. I don't think it's perfect though, I would've liked it if the bosses had variety instead of them being just Bowser Jr but with a new gimmick, and if I'm being honest I think the game is a little short even going for 100% like I did. But at the end of the day Nintnedo did the impossible by making me give a shit about 2D Mario again which I thought would've been a herculean task.

MK and I have had a strange relationship for many years.
I'm not the biggest fighting game fan nor am I the biggest MK fan but every single time a new piece of MK media comes out I feel this morbid urge to at least check it out to see if it's any good. Which I've always found very funny since I don't like MK as a game and I think MK as a franchise creatively bankrupt since MK 9 in 2011 which was a much needed reboot after Midway Game drove the 3D era into the fucking ground. After that I didn’t really like any of the MK games by NetherRealm, I've still yet to sit down and really play MK9 but MK10 was alright. It's not great and as a fighting game it's kinda dog water at times but it lets me play as Jason Voorhees so I automatically like it. (Yes it is that easy for me to look the other way of glaring flaws as long as Jason Voorhees is in it.)
That story though is pretty.............bad it's pretty bad. MKX's story is riddled with long strings of what feels like pointless character exposition toppled with a shallow narrative that never knows what it wants to do or where it wanted to go, until it just ends abruptly. The MK11 came into the picture where it promptly pissed me off so much I swear off from MK from that point forward (which didn't last very long). MK11's plot is so surprisingly convoluted and poorly written you'd think Ed Boon had handed off the story to some brand new intern who only had a vague idea of the MK characters and lore and tried to have them reboot the whole series not even 2 games into a brand new timeline. Along with fighting game mechanics that still annoyed the shit out of it, really annoying fan pandering, and disgusting live service bullshit MK11 left a super bad taste in my mouth; a taste that has honestly never went away.

So, why did I play this? Well for starters I rented it from my library so I didn't end up spending 70 bones for a game I knew I probably wasn't going to like. And mostly I was bored and I was kinda interested in how Ed Boon was gonna write his way around another reboot of the series. What I got was actually something I was not expecting, I got a piece of shit video game with a piece of shit story mode that gives the MCU a run for its money, and I'm not mad. Hell I'm not even pissed I wasted my time I could've used to learn a second language or something else productive.

MK1 (dumb name) is probably the most soulless MK game released by NetherRealm so far. It's chock full of the usual NetherRealm tropes that grind my gears, stiff combat with bad impact animation, bad UI, strange picks for the roster of fighters, and a really greedy live service system that ruins fun as we know it. I'm not gonna get into how the game plays since like I said before fighting games aren't my favorite genre so I have no interest in explaining my thoughts on why I don't like how NetherRealm does their games, I'm just here to talk about the story and why I think it's dogshit.

The story opens up with Liu Kang now lord of all space and time going along with the normal Mortal Kombat timeline. He's looking for earthrealm fighters to fight in Mortal Kombat for the honor of earthrealm only this time around Raiden is the chosen one and the champion of thunder and Johnny Cage's character only exist to spew MCU one liners. Along with that instead of Mortal Kombat being a competition to determine the fates of outworld and earthrealm; it's just a friendly competition between realms where no one dies. The reason why Mortal Kombat is like this is because Liu Kang propagated the idea to Sindel the current Kahn of outworld as a way to keep the peace between realms, and if your wondering why Shang Tsung wasn't the one who started Mortal Kombat; well in this timeline Liu Kang banished him into being a snakeoil huckster which doesn't last very long when some mysterious outside force brings out the true power of Shang Tsung and this timelines versions of Shao Kahn and Quan Chi. After the Mortal Kombat part of the Mortal Kombat game finishes the rest of the story is just centered around the fighters of earthrealm trying to find Shang Tsung and stop his plans to do.......something. It's very vague but it has something to do with Shang Tsung using his powers of deceit and magic to raise an army of the dead to overthrow Sindel so Shao Kahn can take the throne as ruler of outworld and wage war on earthrealm so he can..........umm....take all of their souls so he can become more powerful and then......."flips through pages'' I..I think that's it? Yeah, yeah that was it.
The base plot of MK1 is so fucking paperthin it feels like I'm playing through the equivalent of a DLC story for MK11 rather then it's own game, or even a continuation of the story from MK11. The story is so poorly structured characters will show up for the story and then leave as soon as they show up. There is a whole chapter dedicated to Baraka and Ashrah, a character reintroduced from the 3D era, these whole chapters do little to progress the story and the cutscenes in between fights are nothing but dialogue exposition between two characters as they slowly walk through a forest or in a dungeon. I swear to god that whole portion of the earthrealm fighters hunting down Quan Chi goes on for nearly an hour and almost none of it is worth wild for the story besides reintroducing Ermac into this timeline and showing how Quan Chi became pale white which.....I didn't think needed to be shown at all, he could've just been pale white because he lives in the netherrealm which is basically hell but....okay I guess. So nothing really happens for 3 chapters besides Sindel finding out about the evil plan, Shang Tsung creates his army of undead soldiers, and Sub Zero betrayed Scorpion, and the Lin Kuei clan; causing to Scorpion to disband from the Lin Kuei and creates the Shirai Ryu clan off screen.
Anyways, eventually secrets are revealed and we find out that mysterious outside force that's been puppeteering Shang Tsung and gang for the whole game is....."long exhale" Shang Tsung from MK11. So let me break it down, after Liu Kang defeated Kronika and took control of the hourglass which is the artifact that controls all of space and time Shang Tsung (through some DLC story shenanigans) tries to take the hourglass from Liu Kang so that he can create a whole universe where he's the god of all. At the end of the DLC you get to choice which person you want to win the hourglass, obviously the canon ending is Liu Kang winning with him creating MK1's timeline; but this Shang Tsung that's been meddling with Liu Kang's timeline is from the ending where Shang Tsung beat Liu Kang and took control of the hourglass and made his own timeline where he was a god. This then opens up a whole host of new problems because now that Liu Kang finds out that their exist multiple timelines of almost every conceivable MK character beating Kronika and taking the hourglass and rewriting the timeline in their mind, creating a makeshift MK multiverse........."extremely long inhale and exhale".
Now...I don't need to be the person to tell you that multiverses are an overused trop in Hollywood blockbusters let alone pop culture, but the way this game ends......."long exhale" calling it an MCUrification of MK is being generous, in my opinion once the multiverse shit is brought into the plot it just becomes noise.
So now that MK11 Shang Tsung knows about the existence of other timelines he now plans on using and manipulating all the other "evil" versions of MK characters from different timeline so that he can destroy all other timelines so that he can becomes god of all timelines and ruler of reality itself. So then Liu Kang contacts all the good versions of MK characters across the MK multiverse and then it ends with a huge fight with all the evil and good versions of all the MK characters across all of the multiverse battling it out on the MK Armageddon for some reason. You then fight and defeat MK11 Shang Tsung where then Liu Kang who is now a lord of time again erases Shang Tsung and Quan Chi from all conceivable realities. Then it cuts to the fighters of earthrealm (who've been out of the story since chapter 6) having a bite to eat talking about how crazy the ordeal they just went through was, then Liu Kang walks out congratulating everybody for basically doing nothing since they didn't partake in the battle of the gods of the multiverse, and then he walks out and says something about the realms finally being in peace............okey....so.......that ending was just nothing but a cacophony of noise and blood, it felt like Ed Boon stopped writing in the later half and pulled the Steven Moffat why of writing Doctor Who stories, which is basically just banging MK toys together and making that the finale.
If what I told you sounded like a half assed mixture of random assorted MK characters and moments thrown together with tired and lame plotlines that don't even feel finished then that's exactly what it is. I can't even hate this like I did with MK11. This is just sad now. It's just an embarrassingly pathetic attempt to keep the MK series afloat when it's very clear Ed Boon hasn't had a good idea since MK9, which was 11 years ago.

MK1 is a pathetic excuse for a fighting game, it's a pathetic excuse for a live servies game, and it's a pathetic excuse for a Mortal Kombat game. The best visualization I can give you, is picture someone throwing in all the most memorable bits of classic 2D and 3D era MK into a blender, turning it into a fine and marketable paste, then slowly pouring it onto the skeleton horribly greedy live service mobile game tier game. But they didn't pour that fine nostalgic paste completely over the skeleton, they only poured enough to where you can only make out little fragments of that classic nostalgic MK you knew and loved while being drowned out by cosmetics and paid fatalities, and loot boxes, and a seasonal rpg style game and a item show and all of that AAA horseshit.
MK1 is an embarrassing, bland, and pathetic video game, and the death nail in the coffin that Mortal Kombat is a dead series in my eyes in the hands of WB Games and NetherRealm Studios.