https://imgur.com/cxXhk3t

Just for the soon-to-be dead online, this game is amazing and ranks top 3 3ds games for me. Great gameplay, great characters, great online despite the lagginesss. Endless and fun grind, including for just playing online to get more hearts + weapons to fuse to make even better weapons. Online maps are a little hit or miss unfortunately.

I heard complaints about the controls, but I disagree. The touch screen is vital for precise aiming, and the mechanics behind them (different normal shots + charged shot moves depending on the direction your moving, strafing, dodging, etc.) makes it a very well in-depth game.

I'll do a proper review sometime soon when I replay the game, I'm just very sad that the online is soon going away.

This is my first Outlast game, and I really, really like the game, to the point where the other Outlast games are high up on my backlog now. I have done a good mix of solo and multiplayer gameplay, as well as having A+ in both the Program Genesis and Program X and dipped my toes into Program Ultra (though I will probably go for the A+ in that too).

The gameplay mechanics are intuitive, well-crafted and fun. I personally love stealth games, and I do like how the enemies have a somewhat unpredictable patrol pattern. The level design and mission structure is incredible, barring Vindicate The Guilty (wtf were they thinking). The MK-challenges are diverse enough to the point where I do not notice I am
playing on the same map. This, combined with the multiple variators including weekly variators, stretches the measly five maps' content thin.

While I love this game, this game is a $40 live service game made by a small team. Genuinely new content that will assist in bringing in new and old players will be at a snail's pace, only for casual fans to consume said content in ~5 hours. In addition, with the current structure of the game, there is nothing to keep playing for unless you're a hardcore fan getting 1000+ reborns.

Speaking of reborns, let's talk about progression: It sucks. There is no incentive to do Program Ultra or even Program X because I can simply gain reborn tickets from doing Program Genesis. There are no exclusive cosmetic rewards in any of the programs, only the additional money and XP gain, which I will not need because I will just do the "Sabotage the Lockdown" MK-challenge in 3 minutes and gain a rebirth ticket with some additional XP and cash. I don't like to backseat gamedev in reviews, but I would just make it so you can only gain rebirth tickets on first completion in Program Genesis, and replace the "Sabotage the Lockdown" MK-challenge in both Program X and Ultra. In addition, add exclusive rewards only obtainable in those Programs.

I was going to give this game a lower star rating, but many of my complaints are addressed in the roadmap: New events, new MK-challenges, new trials, a new prime asset (thank god), new rigs and amps, as well as other things that incentives people to come back: daily/weekly quests, an infinite mode, and even a new game mode. Like I said, the developers are a small team of people so I had doubts on if they will deliver the content. Judging by everyone's love for the team and how good they are, I think I have faith that they will actually deliver on their promises.

Gosh, I love wondering around aimlessly on the slowest horse imaginable in a somewhat barren wasteland only for me to find a copy and paste cave/catacomb to then fight a copy and paste boss fight to then get a stupid ashen remain, which is useless to me because I did not want to enable easy mode.

In short, I do not like open world games for the most part. Almost every open world game, including this one, can be made better by decreasing the amount of wasteland you have to traverse by 60%.

That being said, Elden Ring's positives triumphs its own major negative. The combat in this game, while not the best in all of video games, is extremely fun and fluid, and Fromsoft's best in the Souls series (Technically, I like Sekiro's combat more, but that game only had one weapon and one general moveset, so its much less impressive). The hyper-aggressiveness in the combat is nicely balanced by its challenging hyper-aggressive bosses, such as Margit, Malenia and Maliketh.

Although I trashed on the open world, the sense of discovery is amazing. Finding a basic cave/catacomb is cool and all, but turning a corner to reveal a massive valley with so much content. New unique items, a fort, and even a never-before seen Great Enemy, it makes me believe I've missed so much more in my 70+ hour playthrough, which I have.

I did a little bit of NG+ because I didn't realize I missed an armament for one of my achievements. During my run specifically from point A to point B (AKA no exploration), I found three new pieces of content: Two new caves and a new questline. Nothing special, but from this information alone, I believe I missed much more significant content.

Like I said, I didn't love the open world. However, whenever the game slows down and gives you a giant castle to explore with many deviating paths, the game becomes much more special. In addition, there are underground segments where it does exactly what I wish for: A significantly reduced wasteland but with a denser amount of content. It helps that those underground are borderline beautiful due to the impressive skyboxes that are prevalent throughout the game.

I have a couple of gripes. As a part of the "git gud" crowd, I don't like the ashen remains. They invalidate the difficulty of the game and therefore doesn't create a genuine conversation about how well bosses are designed. You could say that about any Souls game technically, like back-stab chainning in DS1 or whatever meta stuff that exist in the other games (I don't pay much attention to them). However, in this case, it is much easier to call out because there is little to no risk implementing it into any build. That being said, I may be wrong, and eventually I will start a fresh playthrough using ashen remains to judge for myself.

Overall though, fantastic game. Maybe a 10/10 is a bit generous for the problems I have with this game, but I know that the upcoming DLC will put it up there regardless.

Marvel's Three Houses is an extremely fun game. Even with the 80+ hours of repetitive grinding for the 100%, I loved it all.

As someone who doesn't really know too much about Marvel, it was cool learning about their backstories and how they interacted, especially with the really good voice casting. A few of them got annoying though, mainly Iron Man since he never stop quipping.

The gameplay for the first three hours seemed like a knockoff mobile game to me at first, mainly because I was expecting XCOM but Marvel. As you get deeper though, so many more strategies become available and it becomes and extremely fun create your own solution puzzle game, which was interesting and really fun.

The overall story I thought was fine. Nothing that had me at the edge of my seat or made me actually feel for any of these characters, but it was interesting enough for me to not be bored.

Exploring the Abbey was a hit or miss at best, and borderline boring at worse. Sure, you can ogle at the pretty graphics, but all you were doing was just pressing E on everything and doing only four minigames.

Although I think the battle animations are gorgeous and flow so well (especially Blade's), but all other animation looked extremely poor. Facial animations were robotic, bodily animation were mainly just standing still, and overall just felt soulless.

My biggest gripe with the game falls with the level design. While I absolutely love using the environment to my advantage, I found out that most of the time, objects were aligned in an X shape, making level designs super repetitive. I would've liked to see more varied designs with more unique pit positions (like the Venom bell level) and more varied environment interactions. If they ever do a sequel (which won't happen unfortunately) I'd love their take on having different elevation.

An overall forgettable game. Other than the atmosphere, I struggle to give it any compliment. Awful controls with equally awful camera angles, a predictable story matched with predictable jumpscares to boot, and a bunch of characters I couldn't care for. Also, in my opinion, there weren't many tricky options with lasting consequences that could screw you over.

Similarly to how I reviewed The Quarry, I'm giving it a higher rating than it I think it deserves due to the benefit of the doubt of me not recognizing just how many pathways this game can lead towards.

This is my first one of Supermassive's games, and I don't quite get the hype. I don't know if it's intentional, but the characters in this game have pretty terrible voice acting and they don't act like a normal human being would. This has created some unintentionally funny moments though, combined with intentionally doing wrong QTEs and decisions. Also, the "werewolves" look terrible.

I'm giving it a higher rating than I actually think because it seems like these games are meant to be played over and over for different endings, which is a cool concept for a heavily story based game like this. I've only played through it once.

I like this game, but I really wanted to LOVE this game. MFE is pretty intense with its hand-to-hand combat with extremely stylistic animations. A lot of people only liked the hand-to-hand and disliked the guns, but I disagree. Combo'ing an enemy before taking his gun and shooting the killing bullet, then doing a 180 before shooting a guy and then doing a gun finisher while intense club music is playing almost fulfills my dream of a John Wick-esque game. And while I really like that concept, it unfortunately does not have enough depth to carry this game.

To explain my point of the lack of depth, let's consider the enemy aggro system. Suppose every enemy in the room is revving for an attack at me. What I do to avoid that, is simply to grab a person. After grabbing a person, all enemies cease aggro, which is disappointing. I would have liked to seen something like if I grab a person while someone is about to punch me, I could push the person I grabbed into the fist, and maybe give me a bit of i-frames so I don't get shot by a stray bullet. Something I always try to do is to grab an enemy and move them towards a person who's about to shoot from their gun, but unfortunately they never shoot because all aggro was taken away.

In addition to the above, another point to my lack of depth argument is countering. You can counter whenever you want even in the middle of an attack, which is fine because in realistic mode, you do not get the button prompt, so you have to pay attention to an enemy's attack pattern. In theory this is nice. However, there is no punishment to countering when no one is attacking you. This means, even on the realistic difficulty, as long as you mash the counter button, your character will always counter, which makes the counter system very easy.

Overall, in the current lack of market for cool and stylistic John Wick-esque games, this game is satisfying on the surface level, but as you get deeper, the flaws become much more apparent and trivializes the game.

In a year with countless amazing AAA games this year, Roboquest is in my top 5 (technically released in 2020, but 1.0 came out in 2023, so it counts in my book) and probably one of my favorite roguelites. The gunplay is amazing, the movement is fluid, music is a banger, tons of secrets, and the cherry on top: a unique comic book-esque art style.

A lot of times in roguelites, a loss comes down to RNG much more than they should. Unlike something like Gunfire Reborn, Roboquest provides tons of skill expression to edge you out of unfair RNG, while also having the ability to make crazy overpowered runs. The only real gripe I have with this game is that stage 1 and 2 of the game are kind of slow and boring, but after that, it ramps up rapidly.

Overall a fun platformer with a lot of charm, but despite a decade passing since a traditional (NSMBU) and non-traditional (3D World) 2D Mario game launched, it hasn't innovated much and overall feels lackluster with a disappointing amount of content.

The gameplay itself was very good, but also felt similar to NSMBU in a lot of ways due to the lack of a new moveset. That isn't a bad thing though, since that NSMBU's issues were the boring presentation and less creative level designs, both of which this game fixed. The visual presentation is cleaned up and looks more bright and vibrant which is complimented by the insanely charming animations which are filled to the brim with character.

The level designs are way more creative this time around, especially with the wonder flower element thrown into the mix. However, for the few times I've replayed a level without the wonder seed, it felt extremely disappointing especially considering there's only one or two levels that have a wonder flower route and a non-wonder flower route, which is extremely disappointing as it gives less incentive to replay each level.

I'm also disappointed by the sheer amount of filler content in this game. When you look up the amount of levels in this game, there's 129 levels, which is impressive. Now, if you remove the unnecessary but cute "break time" levels, the dogshit "defeat all enemies" levels, the terrible "search party" levels, the wiggler races and the badge challenges, the number of actual levels goes down to 77, which is pretty damn close to a 1:1 ratio of full levels and dogshit filler. Comparing it to 3D World, for example, there are 93 full levels and 24 filler stages (all of which are more fun than Wonder's).

In addition, there is little incentive to replay levels. If you (SOMEHOW) missed the wonder flower, then sure, it's worth replaying. However, in my opinion, there's very few times where I was stumped on searching for it on my way to the end of the level. The only other collectable are the purple coins, which do absolutely nothing except give you 10 purple coins which you can get by normally playing the game. This makes the collectables extremely invaluable, especially since wonder seeds don't transfer from world-to-world. In 3D World you had green stars which help you unlock different levels and different endgame worlds that you had to backtrack to other levels that you missed the green stars on because they're well more well hidden or required power ups. Hell, NSMBU had a similar system with its gold coins. The only replay value in Wonder is getting the 10 (or less) alternative exits to go play the special world's levels, which they're pretty fun and well worth the replay. The only incentive to collect all wonder seeds and purple coins in each of the worlds is to unlock the Final-Final level in special world, which is a SINGLE (1) (UNO) level, which is actually pretty hard and fun from what I understand, but it is only one level.

The badge system is fun, but I feel like there's only two or three objectively good general use badges, while the others are either too niche or are inferior versions of those good general use badges.

Overall despite my complaints, I do like the game a lot. The gameplay is solid (even if it is similar to NSMBU), the animations are really fluid and full of personality, the music is pretty good and hell, I think the talking flowers are a really good addition too.

I should probably clarify that I do not like 2D sonics except for Rush

That being said, while Superstars feels extremely good to play with some interesting sprawling level design in the first half, that's all the praise I can give. The co-op (the main selling point of this game) is unfun at the best of times, and a bugfest at the worse of times. The second half of the game has some of the most mind-numbingly boring level designs with even more boring and frustrating bosses to boot. For the most part, the new power ups are useless and overall a more boring implementation of wisps. The biggest sin of all has to be the music. While I consider it "okay", but for a Sonic game, it is absolutely horrendous.

Honestly, I would give this game a 3/10, but I decided to give it a 4/10 just because I might be a bit too harsh on my not liking 2D sonic games, but I suspect both fans and non-fans will have similar thoughts as I do.

Also, I typically don't really review games based on how expensive they are (it does have some sort of impact though), but holy fuck $60 is way too expensive for this game.

After a hundred hours, I am finally done with this game, and what a ride it has been. From the excellent in-depth combat to the interesting fleshed out companions you have. I'd go on and on what I like about this game, but (one) I'm tired as fuck and (two) there are way too many aspects of this game that I absolutely loved, and I'd rather not spend my day writing an essay no one will read. But I have a couple things that prevent it from being a perfect game:

1). Bugs. Even ignoring Act 3, the game is a buggy mess. I had problems with textures loading in (especially the last part), freezing in between cutscenes, input lag that you fixed by killing a specific character, portraits either blacked out or weirdly rendered, and so on and so forth. Those bugs, while annoying, don't detract me from a great experience. What is absolutely unacceptable is when I'm fighting 20+ enemies and some enemies take 2+ minutes on their turn, only to do nothing because the AI doesn't know how to path properly. This applies to companions as well, when you are travelling and trying to make a jump, only for some of your party to not understand what to do, therefore making you control each character individually to do a very basic action. It is annoying, and happens way too often for me to be okay with it.

2). Level cap. I know it's a D&D thing that anything above level 12 gets too close to becoming godlike, but Larian has already taken some liberties with a lot of D&D rules (from what I know, I don't play D&D), so there's little excuse especially when Pathfinder does it. Although I absolutely loved the city of Baldur's Gate, sometimes it felt like a waste of time exploring all of it because of the level cap.

I have a couple of other problems, such as the party limit, no contextual dice roll (too hard to implement), no upper city and some story issues, but overall a fantastic video game that got everyone to play an otherwise dead video game genre. It deserves its place as one of the best RPGs ever. There are games like Witcher 3 and Skyrim that are always talked about with unlimited replayability, Baldur's Gate 3 deserves to be treated the same (also its better than those two), and with modding and the enhanced edition down the line, it could be one of the best video games of all time, if not the best.