Back to basics story, trash to basics structure.
The soft reboot of God of War does a good job of bringing the narrative forward in a way that's both approachable to new fans but provides a nice little award for long-time players, where it falls apart for me is that insistence on turning this in some to some sort of Zelda/RPG ,as Kratos constantly collects gear upgrades moves and searches for cash to craft better gear, it's not as obnoxious as many of great action game devs who filtered their hands into the gross sludge of the RPG rive, lacking random loot and many of our worst traits of RPG genre, but it still feels like a big step down, certain gear contains cool extra combat abilities but you're chuck it quite quickly because a higher level piece of gear comes along and it's really useless to be dragging around something which can't compete, also despite the simple narrative the game is just too long often feeling like it's simple story would have been better served with a 12-hour game than the 30 to 40 one, so could the gameplay really, many of the bosses and enemy types grow stale and it's just to big for what it has to show you.

1/2 of kiwami is the solid action-adventure game from years back, the other half is a grind heavy mess a terrible pace, repetitive combat encounters, "you will spend more time refighting Majiama than all the other bosses combined" and balance issues all over the place, Kiwami is what happens when you carelessly try and shove as much fan service into a game as possible while also trying to triple the playtime, could probably cut this thing down and have a pretty decent remake of the first but it's hard to recommend it over original when enjoyable gameplay requires an insane amount of grind which ruins the pace of the story, Ultimately Kiwami feels like it would have been better off had it been split into chunks, one a faithful remake of the first game and another, a fan service heavy expansion pack that could be unlocked at the end.

Sega temporarily end Kiryu's story with a solid high-point yakuza 6 cuts the fluff ignoring the numerous side characters and stories to focus on just telling one solid orc which wraps up in a satisfying way and provides a solid send off to Kiryu, rather than plates of gratuitous and poor quality fan service which a good chunk of the people who dislike this game would have likely preferred along with that the gameplay is not amazing but solid enough for its runtime, there are more action stages and the game is better paced than most RGG titles, you can pretty much upgrade and collect or the moves your need by the end of the game without grinding or playing any shitty mini-games, which is a blessing when you consider how obnoxious that could get in later entries, a solid return to form for the series, paced like the PS2 game's but made with PS4 tech and budget, if you're sick of the series feeling like a RPG with melee combat this is the one to try, also it doesn't force you to play the same stage of the same mini game over and over to progress, looking at you Lost Judgment.

In trying to appeal to everyone Ragnarok more or less succeeds, I came in wanting a challenging action game and Give Me God of War mode is legit the best it's ever been in the series, the RPG systems from the prior game is still here but they've been scaled in such a way that you can ignore most of them, with certain upgrades and gear giving you extra abilities at the expense of stat boosts it offers a nice way to cut the grind and instead focus on the play style you want, I'm convinced God of War Ragnarok might be the best 60-hour game ever made at the same time the game would probably be better if it would if it was 30 hours because let's be real, no game has justified being over 30 hours.

A monument to how good you can make a sequel by just building on what you had before, taking the bones of the still rather good Saints Row 1 and adding meat, Saints Row 2 is packed with stuff to do and see, NPC's to fuck with, even its upgrade system is fun, trading shitty perks and level up for new toys and persistent upgrade none of which are needed, you can beat the whole campaign on hard without them, point is getting no fall damage is so much better than a 20% health boost, oh and the plot might be the best plot in an open world crime game, partly due to it being one of the few games that has fun with the player being a bad guy without turning into some comedic, consequence-free farse, see it's sequels, an improved PC port has been in the works for a while and I really hope the so so reception to SR5 and steam users being cunts to the devs hasn't killed it.

A fantastic world, mostly good story, shit gameplay.
Cyberpunk's setting has tons of characters from the satirical billboards that never take the GTA path of beating you over the head with the joke, to the designs of various cars to the way you can just tell what income bracket of people live in what part of the city, the story itself is mostly saved by its characters, despite V being a blank slate and this being a PC RPG it rarely feels like you're just some husk for NPC to bark their scripts at, I even liked the Waifu's, them being of age helped, what not so great about CP2077 is playing it, ignoring the bugs the game is far less the peak of AAA that the setting presents, it more like some really low tier ubisoft game, I wanna say sorry to Watch_Dogs 1 because this is below that in terms of gameplay by miles, NPC's hardly react, AI is incapable of basic things like chasing you in cars, every mission that isn't tightly scripted is a case of going into an area and killing someone, killing everyone or taking/hacking something, the hacking and guns have no balance and you can break the whole game with little effort to the point that you can stand outside an area and slowing widdle away at the dumb AI's health bars as they are unable to react, not only that but it's difficulty is pure grind, enemies drop ton's of junk for you loot, including random weapon drops and you better believe that in some areas guys who will take 50 shotgun shell to the head unless you level up, it's the pure shit gameplay something like little inferno warns us about, it's just a depthless dumb shooter that sticks RPG systems on top to try and disguise that, play it for the story and the world but not for the gameplay.

This a legit good example of a game being bad on purpose to make a point, should you play it, I'm not sure, it's bad, but it might make you rethink some things, you really can't fault something for being bad when the whole point is that you should stop playing crap designed like it, and hey, better than buying some stupid novelty game that can't even be assed to even put effort into its visuals, what's funny is that, unlike Spec Ops, I did find it so bad that I turned the game off before I got to the twist, so credit to them, they got the message across just via gameplay,

I freaked out when this game was first shown, a sequel to the poorly reviewed and highly flawed but still creative and daring as fuck Nier, and it's done by Plat, the studio that just saved MGR and brought us some of the best games of the last few years, sadly I can't be as positive about this as most people, all the problems from the first Nier are back, poor combat, grindy side content, strange issues, the amount of invisible walls is crazy for such an exploration heavy game, Taro is also pulling from is worst bag of tricks, reusing large chunks of the game to pad the run time and seemingly be totally uninterested in balancing things so combat is fun for people who don't just love the sight of their character letting off of a bunch of flips and swords swipes via the player mashing the attack button, difficulty outside of normal is busted and for a game that expected you to replay large chunks it's got some of the weakest gameplay Plat have made, even the story isn't that great, lacking the charming cast of the first Nier, we now have a character mostly known for her ass and 9S, who's not all that likeable but is at least interesting to follow, look I played this on PC so maybe that's why I'm so mad but sorry, for me this was a massive letdown and the true start of Plats dark age.

Yakuza 4 presents a world that is both gritty and charming at the same time, it might be the closest the series has gotten to being the perfect mix of a gritty HBO show and a hilarious TV sitcom fans are so keen to present the series as, sadly it's way too easy and the second half of the game is way weaker than the first but it still presents a solid entry, now if only they'd had the balls to not bring Kiryu back.
Also, credit to them for giving our first two leads some actual grit and edge, remember when heroes were allowed to have flaws outside of just killing too many people?