As a Doom superfan, it goes without saying that I had very high hopes for Eternal, and those hopes were ground up and discarded by about the game's halfway point. It's only slight hyperbole to say that I disagree with almost every aspect of Doom Eternal's design.

It's clear from the very first moments of the game that the designers took all the wrong lessons from Doom 2016, piling on more and more plates for the player to spin. The shooter series made famous for its precise but simple gameplay now has meters and resources counts fully colonizing its UI. Even your ability to avoid attacks (here embodied not from Doom-style skillful WASDing, but through a character-action game style SHIFT TO DODGE) is tied to a resource you must keep track of during every fight.

This visual overload is a reminder of a simple fact: Doom Eternal desperately wants to be a character action game, but it has no idea how to make that work in a first-person setting. Eternal's entire structure is built on an increasingly contrived rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock strength and weakness matrix that the game's tutorials strongly encourage. Shoot the neck cannon off of the Arachnotron with your precision rifle, or blow it off with your shotgun grenade. Now do that 20 times in an hour, and apply that to more than half the monsters in the game. Oh, and if you mess it up, you take massive damage. When the game really gets going, it feel like you're managing a spreadsheet that 3 people are editing at once, not battling the hordes of the undead. Are you having fun yet?

Even if Doom Eternal successfully transformed the franchise into a character-action game, its blueprint would still fail. This is a game that has zero conception of positive reinforcement: it's all electric fences and boxed ears, especially on the higher difficulties. I very rarely felt like the badass Doom Slayer ripping and tearing his way through hordes of undead; I felt like a scared puppy running away, trying to remember which of my 17 tools works effectively against Enemy Z. Even the Glory Kill animations feel hasty and uninspired, as though the game's trying to rush you to the next challenge. Doom Eternal wishes that it had the courage to give players the catharsis that you feel from a Bayonetta Torture Attack, or the triple-S ranking from a Devil May Cry combo.

To me, character-action games are at their best when they give you the freedom to express yourself through their mechanics, to develop your own playstyle. Doom Eternal seems absolutely opposed to that perspective. There are many interesting weaknesses and strategies that players have found to deal with some of its more obnoxious enemies, particularly the Marauder, but the game does a terrible job of encouraging that sort of experimental play. Doom Eternal wants to be a violent playground, but it actually feels like a rickety Rube Goldberg machine that might fail at any juncture. You never feel comfortable enough to try a new strategy; the game is always pushing, pushing, pushing you toward its intended design, and it really dislikes when you push back. Doom Eternal wants you to play it its way, and you're going to get chewed up and spit out if you don't play by its rules, and that's really the bottom line. It's great if you're willing to do that, but I think I'll just stick to ULTRAKILL.

Sonic Mania is the rare retro revival that manages to do it all. It's a love letter to classic Sonic fans that manages to showcase why we love the Blue Blur in the first place, but it's also a great introduction to the series for newcomers. There was definitely an opportunity here to sand down some of the more divisive elements of classic Sonic gameplay - where it can often feel like you need to memorize a level's layout to actually feel like you can master it - but it's so committed to delivering an authentic experience based on those Genesis games that it's hard to fault it for that. It achieves its goals on every level, and I honestly think that the new Zones are some of the best in the game. The new special stage is really tough, but oh well, gotta work hard for those Chaos Emeralds. It's hard to imagine a 2D Sonic game that's better than this, and in a sense, that's the highest possible recommendation I can give to a project like this.

Cancel me if you so desire, FromSoft fans, but I have to speak the truth: this is the best Dark Souls game by a significant margin. In terms of world design, bosses, and especially gamefeel, this game is a cut above both 1 and 2. Though it's often described as the true sequel to Dark Souls, 3 departs from (and adds to) the lore and themes of the original to a far greater extent than 2, and many of its characters and levels feel like responses to the first game (most obviously Aldrich's Anor Londo), rather than simply remixing and rehashing the same themes. The two DLCs add more phenomenal bosses to the game, and the "final boss" of the Ringed City is perhaps my favorite in any game, and the perfect conclusion to the franchise. DS3 was unfairly dismissed at its initial release by some hardcore Souls fans. If you're one of them, please give this game another chance. Second only to Bloodborne in the FromSoft pantheon.

In retrospect, it's absolutely hilarious that Drake's Fortune somehow established one of the most important (for better and worse) franchises for this era of gaming, because it's a remarkably generic cultural product. It's like if the Wanted film adaptation somehow had the cultural impact of The Matrix. Look, I know there are plenty of vocal Uncharted haters out there, but the other games in the franchise have a lot going for them in terms of production values, creativity, and sharp blockbuster writing. They're not to everyone's tastes, and that's fine. Drake's Fortune has literally none of that: it's a soulless corridor shooter that feels like a B-grade Indiana Jones ripoff, complete with the lame supernatural twist near the end. There are many, many worse games out there, but nobody would remember Drake's Fortune if it wasn't for its sequels, and that really says it all. Also, this is my go-to example of a game that takes place mostly in one day (along with Sands of Time), so I guess it has value as an answer to that particular trivia question.

As much as I don't want to give yet another classic Castlevania a lukewarm review, this game is such a weird "three steps forward, three steps back" kind of experience that I'm afraid I don't have much of a choice.

Obviously, coming straight off the 8-bit era of Castlevania 1 and 3, the increased horsepower of the SNES is a welcome change. However, it's a mixed bag, because in terms of aesthetics, SC4 is a clear step down from Dracula's Curse. The game has a muddy, washed-out quality to its visuals, and its music is surprisingly forgettable for a Castlevania game. (There are a few callbacks to the series's best tunes up until this point, but they lack the charm of the originals). Also, the game's designers were so enthusiastic about using every aspect of the SNES's tech to the fullest that the framerate often grinds to a crawl during important sections, particularly boss fights.

Mechanically speaking, this game is a massive departure from the first three games, for better and for worse. The fact that you can now whip eight ways (instead of just forward as in NES Castlevania) completely changes the tenor of the game's combat, and renders the classic subweapons fairly useless. Additionally, the free-whip option makes it very easy to block oncoming projectiles, but the game eventually manages to create some interesting challenge around that in its final few boss fights.

In terms of level design, SC4 lacks many of the more punitive (and arguably unfair) elements of its immediate predecessors, especially in its first half. (This is largely due to a semblance of air control and the ability to jump onto staircases - which I didn't even realize you could do until the game forces you to in the last level). This makes the game a lot easier, perhaps a bit too easy in parts. It feels that the designers didn't fully realize how the eight-way whipping can totally break the sort of level design that was used to great effect in the NES games. However, once you hit Dracula's Castle, SC4 bombards you with intense platforming sections, crafty enemies, and many, many one-hit kill traps. Spikes I understand, but it feels like a designer on the team decided that the game was too easy, so they just made half the static obstacles kill you outright. These issues are exacerbated by infrequent checkpoints (compared to the NES games), which are particularly brutal when you're dealing with trap section after trap section in Level 8.

I was warned about the boss rush in the final level, but I didn't find it to be too bad once I figured out that the game expected me to use the free-whip all the time. However, the tower climb beforehand is probably my least favorite part of the game. The staircase jumping just didn't seem to work for me some random percentage of the time (I think the height required is just a bit misleading) and the diagonal platforms scroll much too fast into the spikes for you to react - you basically have to memorize those sections. Dracula himself is a bit blatantly unfair as usual, but at least he gives you health during the fight this time.

As a whole, SC4 is a pretty decent game that takes the Castlevania formula and twists it far more than you would expect for such a storied series. However, I think it just made me appreciate the simplicity of the stiff jumping and whipping of the NES Castlevania games all the more. Those games have a lot of questionable design decisions, but they have a great feel to them. Basically, what I'm trying to say is this: so far, Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon is the best Classicvania game. On to Rondo and Bloodlines.

I remember when I first started using the internet, I discovered that a lot of people view this as the best game in the series, and that definitely surprised me. Though I thoroughly enjoyed Sonic 2 as a kid, I think a lot of Sega fans remember it with rose-colored glasses - there are several dud Zones here, and the smooth transition between the eye-popping "fast" loop-de-loops and the "slow" precision platforming still isn't quite there. The spin dash is a much-needed improvement, however. Still one of my favorite Genesis games to revisit, but there are much better entries in the 2D Sonic canon these days.

What if an obscure arcade game accidentally invented an entire genre and nobody noticed? Often described as a proto-Smash Bros, Outfoxies is a completely different take on the same basic blueprint, where items and environmental hazards are the only way to deal significant damage, and basic attacks are a stopgap measure at best. In that way, it's actually more of a 2D proto-Power Stone, but let's not split hairs. As an 1v1 arcade game, Outfoxies is much more focused on engaging mayhem and bizarre weapons than competitive balance, so you need to come in with the right expectations. That said, it's a tremendously fun game by basically any standard, and I highly recommend checking it out via the Usual Channels. Shout out to Lost Ark Games in Greensboro, NC for giving me a chance to play it on a real Astro City, that was a fun experience.