I absolutely respect Ico for the influence it had on artistic adventure and exploration games along with Shadow of the Colossus. I really wanted to like it, as Shadow of the Colossus is one of my favorite games ever.

Unfortunately I hated Ico.

The loose controls, weird camera, and blurry, eye-straining graphics with way too much bloom gave me an actual headache. I just could not continue playing when the game had made me physically unwell in the first half hour.

Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow is a respectable sequel to the first game, but still retains all of its jank, making it equally frustrating despite its magnificent ideas.

There are some meaningful improvements from Splinter Cell 1. The swat turn is invaluable for staying unnoticed in certain indoor situations, and there is now an indicator for whether it's safe to hide a body. The laser sight on the pistol allows you to see exactly where your shot will land with the tradeoff that it's also visible to enemies. It's still ultimately a bandaid solution to the problem with Splinter Cell's shooting, though. The unpredictable bullet trajectory, which seems to exist to discourage shooting willy-nilly, can also completely blow your cover when you line up a seemingly accurate shot only for it to come out of your gun sideways and alert everyone nearby. Adding a sight made this issue less frustrating, but it just didn't need to be there in the first place and it took until the third game for Ubisoft to finally do away with it.

The lighting and atmosphere are superb as ever, and the level variety is much better than in Splinter Cell 1, with much more diverse and memorable locations.

Unfortunately the action sequences from the first game have been forced in again, though thankfully slightly fewer in number and I found them less annoying. But they also just didn't need to be there and it once again took until the series' third attempt to understand this. And even then, Chaos Theory didn't completely learn from the mistakes of its predecessors.

The detection system is incredibly janky, much like Splinter Cell 1, and was by far the most frustrating issue I had with this game. Even the tiniest movements could make the enemy turn around and start blasting while alerting everyone around immediately. This is the main reason, along with the bad combat sequences, that I can rarely recommend the first two Splinter Cell games.

Small town. A few brahmin herds, and a single watering hole. I step into the musty saloon. A local girl slithers up to me, complaining about her quiet farm life. She tells me about a local Vault - Vault 15. She mentions it by name. I press the "ask about" button and ask her about Vault 15. "Never heard of it" she says. I try to ask her about anything else whatsoever. She's never heard of anything. Alright. Keep your secrets honey... I tell the local gay man, Ian, he will get paid if he follows me forever until his eventual inevitable death. He agrees immediately and eagerly, because I am very "good at speaking".

We wander to the Vault that doesn't exist. We wander back, because we forgot to bring 50 ropes. We try again - the dungeon takes 10 minutes and nothing happens. A weapon is hidden in the bathroom smeared by 10 layers of poop, piss, pixels and blood. We find what we came here for (it's nothing), and go back to town. "Noo you gotta save my girl she's gonna get boiled in shit". I find the raider camp - I tell them I will fuck their mom. They let the girl go for some reason.

8 hours later my dog and all 3 of my friends I tricked in the same way as Ian the Twunk die in a single dungeon because they won't wear any clothes thicker than a dress shirt. It's a Mad Max reference or something. The travel time on the overworld gives me time to think. I think about the giant, barren wasteland. I think about how far and dangerous there is between settlements. I think about how no one has grabbed a broom in 100 years. I think about telling murder mutants where my family lives. I don't know what my meds do and I'm not sure how to find out. I found a backpack in this videogame that I simply couldn't figure out how to use - What? I think about why I have 4 CHA instead of 1. I think about the 2 hours I spent getting this game to run on a modern PC and a 4K monitor. I think about so far only having found one character that allows me to sex and cum in the entirety of California. It's lonely out here. Many games would throw sex and cum at me. Fallout? In Fallout it's about the lack thereof.

Eventually my player character completes their quests and drowns in an ocean of jank - jank that would later continue on through an entire genre shift, a new company, several new engines and somehow be recognizable still as the same old jank. After being stuck for half an hour I had to google an alternate solution for one of the final dungeons because it bugged out on me. Luckily there was one, because many quests don't have that kind of privilege. Some bugs in this game somehow persist in Todd Howards' Starfield. No one knows how. It's beautiful in a sense. A red string of jank.

This game is unfinished - like half the quests have cut content and an entire act of the game got left on the floor. It's a good basis. I hope the sequel will use it well. I hope someone mods it for Steam Deck controls.

It is a miracle that I got to finish this brilliant game, and now people can stop bullying me because I haven't played it before.

My rating criteria for this game are games released in 2010 and prior. 
I had so many technical difficulties. Even by the standards of that time, this game has so many bugs that softlock you, tons of crashes, and buggy graphics settings. Also, controls got bugged, and I couldn't press the ESC key at all. I had to Alt-Tab every time to pause the game. These technical problems made me finish the game in a week, in about 25 sessions.

However, the story was intriguing, and the horror elements were used in such an amazing way that I got scared of my own shadow multiple times. The library part was made because they hate us players and they want us to have a heart attack. Plus. I liked the funny Ulman jokes.

Oh, the ending was also crazy! Here is footage of me during the ending!

A worthwhile entry in the Ratchet & Clank series, but too brief to make much of an impact.

With its short length, everything good about the PS3 Ratchet games gets to shine without any filler. Unfortunately, being a DLC-sized entry that followed two poorly received spinoffs is one of the reasons the game failed to leave a lasting impression on most players, and in the eight year wait for a continuation of the story, which we weren't even certain was coming after the PS4 reboot, it was something of an unceremonious ending for Ratchet's story. Into the Nexus doesn't do a whole lot to progress the overarching story, and A Crack in Time had a much stronger ending that could have even worked as a conclusion to the entire post-PS2 narrative. Into the Nexus and Rift Apart both retread themes that were already resolved by the end of A Crack in Time.

I will give this game credit for trying some novel ideas, though. I thought the villains were decent and a breath of fresh air when the series is otherwise insistent on recycling Dr Nefarious at every opportunity. I also liked the jetpack levels and the sidescrolling Clank levels.

For some reason Into the Nexus has some really noticeable framerate issues when most of the other Ratchet games run a lot better, which made the gameplay feel less smooth than the other games in the series.

I also think Ratchet looks really weird in this game after A Crack in Time nailed his character design.

It's not one of the best Ratchet games, but it's still fun enough to play at least once if you're a fan of the series.

I'll fully admit BattleBlock Theater isn't the most...sophisticated of 2D platformers, in more ways than one. A lot of my fondness for it is due to childhood nostalgia. Even so, it holds up incredibly well in 2024.

The aesthetics are very charming, capturing that Newgrounds artstyle very well while also sporting some wonderful details. The music absolutely slaps too, with the time trial and final level themes being personal favorites of mine. And the narrator is actually pretty funny! A large part of it is due to the performance, but there's some really good dialogue for him, the "pathological liar" bit being one of my favorites.

The gameplay is also fantastic. Your character is very responsive, easy to understand, and even has some nuance to their movement, like how you can double jump in midair with good timing or use the different weapons to sequence-break. The level design, while pretty simplistic, does a very good job consistently introducing new gimmicks and switching things up in a way that feels both fresh and fun. And that's not even mentioning the co-op, versus, and level editor modes, which add tons of really fun content.

And I really love the horses in this game. They're just these strange, cubic creatures and they're beautiful.

The Ascent is an enjoyable video game that excels in many areas. The isometric view, cyberpunk setting, and diverse gameplay featuring various guns and melee weapons are all truly impressive.
However, there are a few drawbacks that hinder the overall experience. One issue is that when you die, the game reloads you in unpredictable locations. Sometimes you respawn far from where you were, while other times you are placed closer to your intended destination. Additionally, there are occasional bugs that can cause the game to crash or prevent the next objectives from loading, requiring a restart to resolve.
Despite these challenges, The Ascent is available at a relatively low price and offers a great deal of entertainment. I have even enjoyed playing half of the game in multiplayer mode with friends, which added to the fun and excitement of the experience.

(reposting as I reviewed a different version of the game from the one I played)

A middling end to a middling series.

The first few hours of Crysis 3 were the most fun I had in any of the Crysis games. (Note that at the time of writing this review, I have not played Crysis Warhead.) The predator bow is awesome and the levels are well designed for creative gameplay approaches. The game fully embraces a sneaky hit-and-run disappearing into the shadows style of combat which is where this series is strongest. After Crysis 2's sharp turn into linearity, it seems the developers listened and brought back some of the sandbox creativity from Crysis 1. On top of that, it all takes place in beautiful overgrown ruins of New York, totally dripping with atmosphere. It's tremendous fun.

For a while.

Then the game's hurried development rears its ugly head. Crysis 3 is much shorter than Crysis 1 and 2, and it seems the developers knew this because the back half of the game mostly consists of large swathes of land with objectives plonked at opposite ends, which you just sprint or drive across with no actual content in between. It's a very obvious attempt to pad the game's length for as long as possible because it would otherwise be about four hours long. The last level turns into a corridor but still blatantly tries to delay the game's conclusion with pointless objectives and it plays like discount Halo, with a terrible final boss to boot. But desperately trying to stretch the game's length like this only served to make the game's final act more exhausting to get through, despite it still being shorter than its predecessors.

The Crysis series was built on a fine premise of a sandbox shooter with stealth-infused predator style combat. But somehow it let a mountain of potential slip through its fingers and each game fumbled the premise in unique ways. I still think the series deserves a revival, but only if it seriously takes its failures into account and properly builds on its strengths. There is definitely room in the market for a sandbox shooter that isn't Far Cry. A new Crysis would only have to stick to its guns and avoid trading player freedom for linear corridor levels, and ideally drop its nonsensical plot. But as it is, this series will probably be forgotten except for how amazing the first game's graphics looked in 2007.

(reposting as I reviewed a different version of the game from the one I played)

It's one of the seventh gen shooters of all time.

Given the resounding disappointment surrounding Crysis 2 after Crysis 1 was such a boundary pushing game for the time, I expected a lot less of this game. But while it does feel stripped back compared to its predecessor, there is still merit in this game's ideas.

It's certainly nothing to write home about, and could easily get lost in the seventh gen sea of brownish shooters, but it's a fairly solid campaign with some fun setpieces that make it feel like an action movie. And the remastered graphics look excellent. Somehow this game got a much better remaster than Crysis 1 did, despite that game having a legendary reputation for its graphics.

While Crysis 2 lacks the open world design of Crysis 1, the levels are still built to allow multiple approaches. I found the cloak to be much more useful and fun in Crysis 2, but in both games I found armour mode underwhelming. I rarely used it tactically; it was more of a necessity to not die in a matter of seconds against certain enemies.

The much maligned aliens are back in Crysis 2, but I found them to be a lot more enjoyable to fight this time around because they're on the ground and use tactics like cover and cloaking, rather than flying space jellyfish that you just empty endless rounds into with little strategy or creativity involved. I got the feeling that the developers may have taken some inspiration from Halo for the aliens in this game. One thing that was not inspired however, was the AI. Both the aliens and humans have really stupid AI and it feels like a missed opportunity to make firefights more dynamic and tactical. Sometimes they would just stand there trying to figure out where I went.

Though I did find the remaster job better this time around, one issue I ran into was some severe slowdowns in the level Masks Off. It was only limited to this level, but it affected the gameplay experience quite badly.

There isn't really anything wrong with Crysis 2; it only suffers from sharing a name with a much more ambitious and unique game. Though it didn't reach the highs of Crysis 1, it avoided the lows and was a more consistent experience overall. The last third or so of Crysis 1 severely loses steam. The story and setting of Crysis 2 are unremarkable and feel very characteristic of the era, which was dominated by brown and grey shooters, but it was decent enough for me to finish. It's a perfectly average shooter.

(reposting as I reviewed a different version of the game from the one I played)

The graphics are still good I suppose.

The openness of the encounters and the satisfying guns are still fun to this day. You can rush straight in, sneak through the bushes and take the enemy by surprise, circle around with a boat, or my favorite strategy, ram through an enemy roadblock with a truck. And there are even more possibilities than that, thanks to the robust physics and the game's signature feature, the cloak. There's more expression here than in many other shooters.

Though your soldier allies will frequently advise a stealthy approach, stealth is basically nonexistent as enemies can see very long distances and there is no investigation state when enemies get even the tiniest glimpse of your nanosuited ass; they go from completely unaware of your presence straight to full alert. The cloak is more for repositioning than stealth. I notice a lot of fans raving about how you can use stealthy tactics but I found stealth borderline unusable, which really bummed me out. I still had fun thinking up tactics on the fly however.

Unfortunately everyone is correct when they say Crysis drops off quite hard. I didn't hate the final levels as much I thought I would, but it's undeniably a front-loaded game. The zero-G and VTOL sections were the worst parts for me though. Just shooting aliens wasn't too bad. It was still a competent shooter at the end; it just lacked the tactical and expressive gameplay that kept the game on the map when "but can it run Crysis?" wasn't funny anymore.