I find the history behind Crisis fascinating. I love how the developers just wanted to make a game so ahead of its time and didn't care about hardware limitations. It's interesting now that every game released easily looks like this or better, but the fact it still holds up this well despite coming out in 2007 is insane (I know this is a remaster, but the original still looks great).

The game its divisive among fans because of the (spoiler alert for the 17 year old game) fact it goes full alien in the final third. I personally very much enjoyed the shift. I didn't find the open level gameplay of the start of the game to be very exciting anyway. I hated how stealth was nigh impossible because of how well the enemies can see, and also just the sheer amount of enemies - to the point I still don't know if they were infinitely respawning at points.

I know that the first levels where you fight the humans are definitely more open to experimentation than the final linear sections - I won't argue against that - but I found that how fun and different the aliens were as combatants that it made up for the game cutting back on its more open elements.

This game is quite challenging, and not always in a fair way. I only played on normal difficulty, but I still found myself dying a lot - and usually to something I didn't even know was there. Regardless of my own skill level, something that is quantifiable is how infrequent the checkpoints are in the earlier missions. Dying to a man that was hiding silently in a bush is one thing; it is another to lose 10 minutes of infiltration progress and to have to resupply myself, walk back over to the base and then try again. This problem I have with checkpoints completely vanishes as the game gets more linear so maybe that's also a reason I don't mind the shift.

Overall, Crysis was fun. It was frustrating at times, sure, but honestly this game is very short anyway so having to die and reload a lot at least made it so I couldn't blast through the whole thing in 5 hours. The gameplay is solid and the graphics are lovely, while the story is completely fine as far as video game stories go.

The fundamental problem with Immortals of Aveum is that it is so utterly standard. I’ve never seen a game exactly like it, but I have certainly seen a lot of games that are very similar. I suppose it isn’t bad, and there is clear love put into the project, but I feel the effort was misplaced.

The narrative is what really hampers any potential enjoyment that might’ve been had. It’s worldbuilding is so simple yet has that problem a lot of games do where the characters just start throwing so many names and concepts around that it jsut becomes white noise. Seriously, basically every single line out of any character’s mouth with involve the name of someone, some place or some high concept regarding the political and magical systems. The result is a world that feels alien in all the wrong ways - it just existed as nice set dressing to me as I found it so utterly inpenetrable for the majority of the runtime. However in the closing hours of the game I did grow to appreciate the world building a bit more. The ending stretch of the plot, while flawed, is satisfying enough and I found that I was almost growing to like the game by the end.

The characters all leave nothing to latch on to. Both allies and villains alike are all incredibly uninteresting at best, while at their worst they can be absolutely intolerable. The dialogue is bad, both for its over-indulgence in exposition and just because they are poorly written lines. If I said it was Marvel-esque dialogue, that would be an apt fit - loathed as I am to use that as a point of comparison. It sacrifices it’s own potentially gripping tone to cram one-liners in all the time. Certain characters are worse for this than others, but the worst ones always seem to be hanging around to drag everyone down. All these weak links circle around a protagonist who is simply uninteresting and unlikable. I don’t care for his story one bit and I found him to be gratingly whiny. What happens to him right at the end is one of the laziest bits of writing I’ve seen in a hot minute, but I won’t spoil it.

The combat is the game’s fundamental flaw, which is a shame because it could’ve been the high point. However, throwing bolts of light at enemies that have no visable reaction is the antithesis of a visceral feeling combat engine. It’s sad, because there’s some okay ideas in there. The range of different spells is impressive, and the various enemy types are designed to be best tackled with a varied approach. But it just doesn’t feel good - and when the health bars get spongy in the mid to late game it feels even worse. I’d praise the game’s enemy variety, but it unfortunately stagnates about a third of the way in. The game opens with so many new types of foe being constantly introduced, and there’s a cool variety of early game bosses too. But then it just stops; boss fights become very infrequent and most of those early game bosses keep getting brought back as frustrating standard encounters, bogging down the pacing with their huge health bars and ridiculously high damaging attacks.

The game’s art direction was the clear focus and I will admit it does a great job. While the gameplay becomes repetitive, the world remains grand in scale and unique in presentation. The highlight for me has to be the sequence where you battle in and around the giant body of a colossus as it wades through the sea - that was just great start to finish. It is graphically very impressive (despite semi-frequent frame drops), however there is too much visual clutter during combat as everyone throws their light powers around. As stunning as the environments are, everything becomes a blur of flashing lights and HUD elements when any battle begins. It is common to not be able to see the enemy you are trying to shoot, which is great evidence that maybe they should've toned down the effects a bit.

In conclusion, this is a flawed title that is hampered by a lot of mixed elements. The open world, the gear mechanics, the skill tree; it’s all unnecessary additions to what could've been a much tighter experience. It might also have benefitted from writers that actually know how to write compelling dialogue.

The original Donkey Kong Country Returns on the WII was a game I very much enjoyed as a kid, and one that I replayed on the 3DS port last year - finding that it still held up very well. I never, however, played the sequel. After all these years, I’m glad that I finally got around to it, because it is great!

What sets this game apart from other Nintendo platformers (and platformers in general, mostly) is that everything is consistently framed within the game’s context. That is - all the platforms are actually things that believably exist within the world, and aren’t just floating blocks. This seems a small difference, but this aspect of art direction places this game far above just about any other platformer on the market in my opinion; this now sits comfortably as one of my favourite 2D platformers ever.

So the graphics and art design is great, but so is the soundtrack - every single one is an absolute banger. I really don’t understand enough about music to be able to tell you why it is so good but once you play the game, you’ll understand. This is quite typical from Nintendo though, they quite often have some of the best music in the whole industry.

The gameplay is also very solid and a cut above most contempories of the genre. It’s quite simple, at least in terms of the player moveset, but the level design remains constantly engaging and thoroughly challenging. Paired with the smooth animations of both the player character and what they are interacting with and you have a game that just feels good to play.

The boss fights here, although few in number, are fun across the board too - with maybe the exception of the fourth world boss. The pufferfish boss Fuga is fought with entirely underwater mechanics, which I didn’t really enjoy in this game. Water traversal is very hard to get right in videogames, there is literally decades worth of examples of this fact, and while it certainly isn’t terrible in this game, it represented the games lowest point for me. I thought the foruth world was easily the weakest of the six purely due to it being water themed and therefore relying heavily on that stiff water movement. It’s something about how DK maintains momentum for longer than is comfortable, meaning that you drift into hazards that you see coming but can do nothing about. Maybe this was just me going too quickly for the levels pace and isn’t a common problem, but it plagued all of world 4 for me.

To balance out that criticism, world 5 was my personal favourite world in all aspects - gameplay mechanics, theme and boss fight. The uniqueness of all the different world themes is impressive and one of the games most commendable aspects. The previous game had pretty good variety too, the devs for these two games really get how to make a world memorable.

Little side note: the fact that minecarts and rocket barrels now have three hit points instead of just immediately being destroyed in one hit makes those levels so much more tolerable compared to the previous game. Sure, it makes them way easier, but the difficulty in those levels always felt artificial to me anyway.