This game started off so strong but devolved into the most laborious action-adventure game I've played in some time. The opening of this game sees you fighting Death in a badass 1v1, then the opening levels are brimming with visual variety and constantly introduce new enemy types. Then I guess the budget ran out, because nothing new gets introduced and all the levels begin to look exactly the same. You also begin to realise that there is no variety in the combat or the game systems - it's all just a series of doing the same thing over and over. The (very) occasional boss fight doesn't break the monotony because they look visually impressive but are mechanically indistinct from regular foes. The unique enemies all but disappear as you just fight the same demons and birds until the game meanders to a boring conclusion to the most uninspired game story ever written. This game was fun, for a time, but cannot sustain itself even through its poultry runtime.

I really don't understand what people see in this title. The psychosis representation is well done and the pattern identifying gameplay is interesting because it's indicative of paranoia - but that doesn't make the game any better.

I could rant about just about every section of the game, but in the interest of my own time I'm going to keep my critique brief:

- The graphics are technically nice, yet every area looks the same and the whole game is far too dark.
- I didn't care one bit for Senua, her journey or any of the other "characters" in the plot. The narrative was entirely ungripping to me.
- The puzzle design is loathsome. I know it's subjective but I never had any clue what the game wanted from me, and when I eventually fumbled my way to a solution it still made no more sense. It's all so obscure and poorly informed to you.
- The combat sucks. I have the feeling that's the point, but it didn't need to be so plentiful if it was meant to be bad. I did, however, like the final boss encounter (the music and the "let go" solution was cool).

I know this game is entirely unique (excluding the existence of the sequel) and that the developers should be praised for their creative vision, but I really didn't get on with this game at all. It is a very short game and yet I spent most of it just begging for it to end. I know it's a representation of Hel and that it isn't supposed to be fun, but I don't think that's an excuse for being just plain not very good.

This isn't the type of game that I usually play. It isn't a title with a lot of substance, but I enjoyed it for the simple and heartwarming little adventure that it's meant to be. It's quite a lot like A Short Hike, which I also quite enjoyed for what it was, and I can't say which of the two I really enjoyed more. So I won't bother wondering about it - they are both good games to just chill and relax playing. Do I recommend Lil Gator Game? I can't say that I do really, but it's very sweet and inoffensive and there are worse ways to spend a few hours. The graphics are charming, the soundtrack is upbeat, and the dialogue is snappy enough that it never became a slog to sit through. There's some good pieces of writing in here - the part where the sister buys the ice creams is my favourite.

Mirror's Edge excels at two things: art style and first-person parkour. This fictional world is full of bright colours contrasted against harshly bright whites and it looks amazing. This does not look like a game from 2008. However, the cutscenes do not look anywhere near as good. The 2D animation looks terrible, frankly. They are a tiny portion of the game, but they look so awful I have to wonder why they even bothered.

The free form parkour is the game's main selling point, of course, and it works very well. I can tell it does because there is a lot of room for error. Only towards the end of the game did I feel like I'd acquired any sort of skill with the systems, and that allowing for genuine player skill growth and learning was refreshing.

However, outside of these two points I find little to recommend about Mirror's Edge. I think the level design, while looking nice, doesn't adequately inform you of where to go sometimes. Even with the button that jerks your head towards your destination, sometimes I found that the route to get there is unnecessarily confusing. This is highlighted best by the big tower climb section in Chapter 8, which begins by having you go to a small dark corner of the room and doing a backwards wall jump to an equally dark area you can't even see. Optional collectable areas are sometimes better telegraphed than the critical path, and that is a problem.

The other big problem is that these levels almost always take place in small cramped buildings instead of outside. The game is at its peak when you're jumping from rooftop to rooftop, but that makes up a surprisingly small amount of playtime compared to the hours of navigating vents, elevators and corridors.

The game's biggest flaw is the story. It's just so uninspired and boring. Nothing happens; all the allies and villains alike are equally dull; the plot twists don't land because they're incredibly obvious (the masked killer is so obviously Celeste that I'm not even going to put a spoiler warning on it, and if you care then I am sorry but no one in the game's plot does so I wonder why you do) and it ends with nothing being achieved and everything being exactly the same it was at the beginning - minus a few characters being dead. It was terrible. I get that this is a game that is meant to be replayed a bunch, that's why it's about 5 hours long at most, but they could have put something better than this together...

All in all, Mirror's Edge is flawed. But I liked it all the same. The gameplay loop is strangely addicting. For all my critique, I can definitely see myself revisiting this - this time skipping every cutscene so I can enjoy the parkour as much as possible. The combat in this game sucks too by the way, but I think it's meant to so it hardly matters.

Having just played the entirety of Dead Space 2 in a single sitting, I'm willing to admit that it was a fantastic game. Also the fact that I beat it in about 7 hours might have helped that. It's a short game to be sure, even compared to the original which clocked in closer to 12 hours if memory serves. It's 7 hours of pure quality though, so I can forgive the brevity.

It's basically the exact same gameplay loop that made the original so strong. I never actually played the 2008 release, only the 2023 remake, but Dead Space 2 holds up so well that I barely noticed that the game is nearing thirteen years old. It's a good thing that the original had such fun gameplay, because honestly there really is nothing new added. There may have been some new weapons in there but the saw blade gun is just as powerful as ever and therefore I never found any reason to clog up my inventory space with anything else. Whoever was in charge of the gun balancing may have had a little oversight when it came to that weapon...

The environments are beautiful and much more diverse than the original. You even revisit the Ishimura, which was a fun surprise. The narrative is very simple, but it works. Again, just like the original, the plot is mostly that Isaac's plan to escape / destroy the marker is constantly hindered in every way imaginable to comical degrees - making a simple plot last an entire games length. I personally don't mind. What little there was had me invested enough.

I could gush much further about just how great Dead Space 2 is, but I don't feel the need to. PLAY THESE GAMES (if you can). Maybe skip the third one but the original two are such great experiences I cannot recommend them highly enough to anyone who plays videogames and can handle a bit of horror.

The original Psychonauts was an absolute delight. It held up extremely well for a PS2 game and was brimming with unique ideas, creative artistic choices and a lot of good humour. The sequel is much the same, it is blast.

Going from one to the other, the near two decades of quality of life improvements make the act of playing Psychonauts 2 so satisfying. Where the original is clunky and showing its age visually, this gameplay is smooth as butter and the visuals are outstanding - both in their fidelity and in the actual art design.

I do have an issue with this sequel, and it's more a matter of personal opinion than concrete factual critique, so bear that in mind. I found the levels of the original game to be far more compelling. Each and every level in this game just feels like a simple idea. Slight spoiler warning for the level themes: there are things like casino, library, game show, mail room - all of which play and look great, but there just isn't that same charm. There is nothing so bold as entering the mind of a man who thinks himself to be a descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte and having to physically shrink down into a board game to help him win. Months later, I can recall every level of Psychonauts 1, but even having only just beaten it I struggle to remember everything in the sequel.

This is best showcased when comparing the two final levels of the game (although there is technically one more in Psychonauts 2 that you cannot return to and just acts as a final boss arena). In Psychonauts 1, you combine the minds of both yourself and the villain and have to overcome a nightmarish mashup of your childhood traumas - a circus and a butchery. It was genius. In Psychonauts 2, the final level is a theme park ride with cardboard cutouts that act to give exposition on the plot twist that preceded you entering that mind. Do you see what I mean?

Again, this is just personal opinion, and it's not like I don't like the levels of Pyschonauts 2 at all - this is still a great game - but in a way it lacks the same charm. The same can be said of the story in a way; it's grander in scope, more mature, but doesn't have that same vibe that I liked in the original. I still highly recommend both of these titles. They are probably my favourite 3D platformers ever.

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.

I really used to like this game back when it came out. I played it twice back in the day. How disappointed I was to come back and see just how bad this game is.

The script is absolutely non-sensical, especially the twist at the end, and the dialogue is both incredibly poorly delivered and written. People simply don't talk like this - I don't know how this got off the cutting room floor sounding this stilted. The choppy pace as you just teleport between set pieces really doesn't work either, and the less said about how much this game rips off other works the better.

The gameplay is a mixing pot of a lot of half baked ideas. I must admit it is the sole thing that still kind of holds up in my eyes. It doesn't play well, there aren't many good ideas, but it is varied and silly enough to at least remain funny.

And that's about the best praise I can give this game. It is definitely a so-bad-it's-good type game. The awful animations, contrived situations, poor script and intense melodrama make for an experience to be laughed at, not engaged with.

I loathe basically everything about Alan Wake. I played this because the sequel is so critically acclaimed, but after playing this I cannot imagine how. I think this game is a failure in every aspect of design.

First, the graphics. Even with the remaster, these environments are at best passable, while at their worst they definitely show their age. The character designs and animations, however, are truly some of the ugliest I've ever seen in a video game. This is why the developers cunningly made the main enemy force completely concealed in a black shroud - it hides their awful appearance.

The gameplay is atrociously tedious. Every single level the game has to contrive a reason for Alan Wake to leave all his equipment behind but to venture out at night regardless. It became a running joke for me to see just how long the daytime segments were compared to the nighttime ones. I think this town gets about 10 minutes of total daylight every 24 hours based on how the game presents it. The combat system of not being able to shoot the enemies until you have shone a torch on them enough might sound kind of interesting but in practice it just drags the encounters out three times as long as they need to. The enemy variety is tragic; there is only 3. Men with melee weapons, crows and inanimate objects. WOW!

I've seen the story praised by critics, but I couldn't agree any less. It's a very simple story that's told in the most confusing way possible. Don't confuse that with the story having depth - it doesn't - it just makes it even harder to enjoy. The plot sucks, the characters are detestable and everything is padded out.

The only positive I have for this game it that it is playable. I got to the end without many issues. I recently tried my best to play the game Remedy made after this, Quantum Break, and found the worst optimised triple-A release I have ever seen. I could, at least, beat Alan Wake. There was one good section in Alan Wake, the musical number at the end of episode 4. That is 5 minutes of an eight hour game. Everything else in just insufferably standard. Hours and hours of wandering around the same looking dark woodland while shooting the same enemy over and over again, occasionally stopping to feed some awful piece of poorly acted exposition down your throat.

This is a game full of unique ideas and mechanics that remain fresh all the way until the credits roll. This remaster has brought the graphics to a point where it may as well be modern - an animated art style will always hold up better than realism but this game came out in 2007 and you would not think it to look at it. I could gush about all the ways this game is great but in the fairness of my time I'm going to mostly highlight the small negatives I have with it.

The biggest issue that holds back true love for this game is just how much it wastes your time. A level in this game will take around 5 - 10 minutes to complete, but each and every time you get a star (of which you will be getting many) the game kicks you out to the Observatory. End of level animation, animation of coming back to the Dome, score trackers going up, ask if you want to save, wait for it to save, use the blue star to access level select, choose level, confirm, watch animation of Mario flying to level, wait for stars to appear, select star, confirm, camera pans over level, Mario flies in - now you can play. This happening for every single level means you spend collective hours in this meaningless downtime. It seems a small thing to harp on but this game at minimum requires 60 stars to complete, and you are going to go through that process every single time - even longer if the level you want to do is in a different dome.

The other time wasting issue comes from the dialogue; it's overall a smaller issue but the text boxes being unskippable for several seconds is annoying to someone who can read quicker than the target demographic of 8 year olds.

The game's soundtrack is majestic, the graphics awe inspiring and the gameplay is varied and challenging. I would give this game my highest recommendation, but unfortunately it is locked behind this obscenely over-priced bundle on the switch. I get that these games (64, Sunshine and Galaxy) make up some of the most important titles ever released, but £70 for three games that are decades old is a crime.

I have a lot of feeling regarding Mass Effect 3. It is not only a huge RPG in of itself, but also represents the third and final entry into a trilogy of continuity. To keep things brief, I'll say that this game doesn't reach the heights of Mass Effect 2, which to me is not only an incredible game but also probably one of my favourite sci-fi stories ever.

Especially in comparison to its immediate predecessor, ME3 has poorer pacing of its gameplay sequences and a generally more unfocused narrative. However, this game's theme is that of sacrifice, and I believe it is handled extremely well. The highest praise I can give the story of the Mass Effect trilogy is that it somehow makes something as ridiculous as a "galaxy-wide" threat into something that feels relatively grounded and like you really understand the stakes. Shepard is a fantastic viewpoint into this world as an interplanetary ambassador and I had a blast playing through these games - I can't recommend them enough, especially these remasters.

It Takes Two is a very good game that's full to the brim with a constant stream of unique ideas and gameplay mechanics. The sheer variety of settings, boss fights, puzzles and co-op interactions across the game's 10 hour runtime borders on ridiculous - the game never really gets boring because of this. I think you could argue that the game would've done better to explore less mechanics in more depth, but I think part of this game's unique charm is the unpredictability of what will come next.

The focus on co-op mechanics is the game's biggest draw. A lot of "co-op" games more just feel like single player games that occasionally oblige the two of you to stand next to one another to open a door to the next area. It Takes Two is distinct in that nearly everything you do requires the help of the other player; whether it's a combat encounter that requires teamwork to get through or even one player controlling the platforms that the other player must navigate. There is a countless amount of examples of the game's dedication to creating a fully cooperative experience and I must say that it's probably one of the best co-op games ever made for this reason.

The story is very tongue in cheek, I feel. The dialogue is knowingly silly and the characters are all radically distinct and voice acted in a very exaggerated way. There isn't too much critique to lay on the narrative on the whole and it certainly takes a backseat to the gameplay anyway. The cutscenes are well paced and never get in the way of the gameplay side, mostly just acting as necessary interludes and breaks to add context to the gameplay sequences. I also quite liked the ending - it wasn't exactly a twist ending but it definitely didn't go the way I thought it would and I was pleasantly surprised by how realistically it was handled.

I think my one and only problem with this title is that it lacks any challenge. It never really requires much critical thinking or engagement and the result is a game that you can breeze through without really thinking. I'm not saying the game needed to be insanely difficult, but the complete lack of consequence for dying combined with how each mechanic is quite surface-level means that there isn't much room to ever fail. The result is that everything kind of blurs together when looking back, with no specific puzzle, boss fight or mechanic standing out among the rest.