The core gameplay is really fun, and it looks fantastic, but some of the later levels (especially boss fights) kind of fall apart and aren't as polished as the rest. Story is also incredibly generic, but it's all told by voiceover playing during gameplay, so it's very easy to just ignore. Wish it had stayed more with its main formula instead of trying to fit so much variety in, because half the time when it adds a new enemy or tries something different from the main gameplay it's much worse. Still, the majority of it is great.

This was really surprisingly good. I've been skeptical of all of the attempts at Spider-Man stories since the end of Sam Raimi's trilogy, but this is a great portrayal of not just Peter, but the surrounding cast of characters as well. The gameplay is way better than I expected as well. Just moving around the city is great and never got old to me, didn't feel the need to fast travel once, and the combat is a lot more than the arkham-clone I first wrote it off as. The narrative is nothing groundbreaking, but I did like how well it conveyed having your attention split between so many pressing tasks, having to save people all over the city while maintaining some semblance of a personal life. That attachment to gameplay was definitely enjoyable, and even something small like that is still unique enough to stand out among video game stories. The combat started to get a little old by the end, though I did pretty much all the side content which wasn't really necessary. Also the story was kind of predictable at times, though I think all of the characters were really enjoyable and it nailed the ending. Looking forward to coming back to play through the DLC soon, and then Miles Morales.

Pretty fun Ninja Gaiden-like, if you enjoy NES style action platforming you'll probably enjoy this. It stays pretty true to the games it's based on while making the controls feel just a tiny bit more modern and adding some interesting twists like purchasable temporary upgrades at checkpoints. The story is pretty bad, though I don't think it's meant to be taken seriously and it definitely gives off the Ninja Gaiden/Mega Man vibes it's going for. The latter third of the game is quite the difficulty spike, I still enjoyed it but the checkpoints were very inconsistent there, being too easy at times and brutally long/hard at others. The final boss was quite the challenge too, but in a very enjoyable way. I think you probably already know if you like this type of game, but if you do it's a solid one of these.

Cool concept, the art style and music are great, but it gets very frustrating very fast. The game is too punishing when you die, removing all of the collectibles you've gotten since the last checkpoint, most of which feel very repetitive and pointless to re-collect. The checkpoint system as a whole feels outdated, and would've been improved using something like Celeste where as soon as you're on safe ground the collectible is saved. The difficulty continues to increase and the main objectives of the levels start to be pretty challenging later in the 2nd world, and that's around where I stopped. I feel like most of my deaths were due to the controls not doing what I was trying to do, when I knew exactly what I had to do to in that spot, which is very frustrating. Unfortunate, as it's a neat game and I really wanted to like it.

A nice little game that can be easily completed in one sitting. The style is cute and I especially liked how dialogue was presented, as well as how it was written. The story is pretty simple but full of fun characters and also is a concept I haven't really seen done much before in any medium, with some interesting themes. My main problem is actually that it's too short and could use some padding. The dialogue is good but in a lot of scenes that's all there is to do, and some more segments like the bird watching section or the unpacking the car section for example I think would really add to the game and give you some more time to digest the story after some key moments. If you play it keep an eye out for the bonus chapters at the end, they're nice.

This is a weird sequel, it's better in some ways than the original Ori and worse in others. The combat and movement have been overhauled and feel great, you get all the abilities from the first game back quickly and are getting new stuff early on which is nice. I like the way swapping abilities/weapons works in particular. However, the combat never really gets challenging and I felt like I breezed through everything, and even if you didn't want to learn enemy patterns the heal is so powerful and you can use it so often you can just mash through combat. The platforming and exploration is fun, and I do think this game makes backtracking less tedious than in the first one, but despite that I didn't really feel the need to 100% this, which is something I do with most metroidvanias. The purchasable upgrades felt really unnecessary because you're so powerful already, and it didn't do a very good job getting me to care for the myriad of side characters it quickly introduces then doesn't bring up again. The side quest system also is pretty vague about where to go or how to actually complete quests, so I just didn't bother with a lot of it. I also got lost just trying to follow main story objectives a weird amount in this game, there's a point where it opens up and gives you multiple main directions you can go, but some of them are walled off until later and don't tell you that until you've already gone there, and some of them seemed like dead ends but turned out I was just missing a new ability in an awkward spot. The overall story has some interesting ideas, but it does feel heavy-handed at times, and feels like it's trying too hard to live up to the emotional impact people liked in the first game. I did like the ending though, it gives you some pretty cool abilities in the late game, the final section is pretty fun, and the story conclusion is decent.

I really loved this, annoyed at myself that I put off playing it for so long. It takes the style of Blendo's earlier games but adds much more substantial gameplay in the form of hacking puzzles that tie into physical heists, which is a genius idea that I'm surprised I haven't seen more of before. There's so much potential with the tools the game gives you and I had a ton of fun messing around with them and coming up with unnecessarily complex solutions. If I have any complaints with the game it's just that the later missions don't live up to the complexity of the tools you're given, but at the same time I get how that would probably turn away some players.

Wanted to like this but it has a ton of issues. The visual clarity is really awful, like the art is nice but there's a ton of spots where it's bad for gameplay, with stuff like instant death spikes that are hard to see. All the platforming feels really bad for the jump height like they just didn't test it or something, lot of stuff just a few pixels out of reach which even if intentional feels bad. The save system is horrible, the save points and item system are obviously dark souls inspired but every single other game like this saves items you pick up or doors you open even if you die, but in this if you don't manually select save at the bonfires it erases all that. I got to a boss and opened a one-way door next to it that led back to the save, and I thought I was still fine but it closed that and took away all the items I got and made me go through the whole area again. Also there's a ton of instant-death spikes and stuff which feels like a terrible fit for this kind of game, especially with the bad platforming and huge knockback when you get hit.