Rating this mainly for the campaign, but the zombies isn't bad (though very overrated in my opinion; the rest of the series is better). I think people kinda overrate this one in general? The guns are mostly pretty bad and all feel super weak, the textures are kinda flat, and the animations feel really stiff, but the story is pretty good. It flip-flops between being legitimately fantastic and being slog shootouts, and the ending is one of the worst in the series (you know it's true), but I can really respect an entry into a game series known for repetition and monotony to go completely batshit like this does. The psychological thriller-mystery aspects are something the series has tried to do a couple other times but they've never come close to being as good as this one is, and the winks at major American conspiracy theories is always a delight from Treyarch's CoDs. Overall, not bad, but not as good as people make it out to be; Black Ops 2 and Modern Warfare 2 are both easily better than this. Plus, I have some personal hang-ups about using Vietnam as a backdrop for mindless entertainment, and showcasing atrocities for "woahhhhh" or "yeeeeeaaahh" factors, but eh. This was before CoD was Fed-funded, so it's just insensitive at worst.

This game sucks ass and I don't recommend it unless you're willing to put up with a lot of bullshit, but I'm still gonna keep playing it. Once I find another game where I can play as Nemesis fighting against Bill Overbeck, Ash Williams, Laurie Strode, and Steve Harrington in Midwich Elementary School, then yeah, I'll stop playing this. I can't think of a better example of a monopoly in gaming than this, though. There won't be another asymmetrical horror game that comes even close to scratching this one's popularity just by nature of all the licenses this one grabbed onto first.

Seriously though. Even if you're a huge fan of horror like I am, I really don't recommend this. Flawed game at its core with an insane amount of nickel-and-diming and a horribly incompetent dev team, and a frightfully toxic playerbase to boot.

Full disclosure, this is a very generous score. I did not enjoy myself very much in the back half of this game, and it did worse than frustrate me; it disappointed me. Let's get the bad out of the way first. The gameplay can be repetitive. That sounds vague, and it is, because repetition isn't always a bad thing. The core gameplay of this feels very arcade-inspired, and I think it works for the most part. It's not the best, but it's serviceable and is greatly assisted by the superb map design and enemy design (to a point). However, the second half of this game is where the repetition starts to become a serious problem. Not only does it practically ask you to search the whole map again, it does so while flooding every room with enemies that deal massive amounts of damage to you while you struggle to get even one hit in due to the game's excessive knockback. It turns a challenging experience into a grueling one, where I found myself skipping over areas simply because I didn't want to deal with the hassle of slogging through more enemies. Similarly, this problematic second half falters in most other departments; the exploration is limited due to the fixation on using the Bat ability to explore, the music gets noticeably less... noticeable, with the tracks feeling like watered down remixes, and even the enemy design starts to use degraded bosses and reskinned enemies to continue the trend of padding (note: the bosses do look great). So with all this negativity, why is my score still so high?

A bad ending can leave a sour taste in your mouth and may skew your perspective, but if I force myself to look at this as a whole, it is an insanely impressive game for its time that, outside of aforementioned problems, has aged quite well. The presentation is simply top-notch; the music is exquisite and fits the tone of every area you go to, be it thumping bass and percussion underscoring your first foray into action, or a delicate regal harpsichord piece reminding you of the gothic royalty that owns this castle. The sprite work is great, with fluid animations, a scarce but effective use of 3D models to enhance certain scenes and give an added richness to the backdrops, and a very memorable art style done by the great Ayami Kojima. Even the story, as simple and clunky as it is, managed to hook me as I found myself shockingly intrigued into the nature of the main cast. As I've mentioned, the gameplay can be a bit stale, but the bedrock is stable enough that it never becomes completely mind-numbing and switches things up just enough to keep your head in the game.

Do I like this game? Yes. Do I love this game? No. Do I have very mixed feelings about this game? Definitely. But, do I have an immense respect for this game's ambition and its shockwaves of influence spreading to so much of gaming that came after it? Without question.

The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

I wrote an old review for this, here it is. https://pastebin.com/NKrkhuMP

Man, I used to hate this game, huh?

I'll be the first to admit, this game is not the best. Not even close. It's still my least favorite game in the series, and by a pretty large margin. The bosses are 2/3 of the time lame, some of the areas are so spammy and annoying (Iron Keep and Shrine of Amana will give me PTSD for the rest of my life), and some of the game design choices are kinda undefendable, specifically Soul Memory matchmaking and tying I-frames to a stat. Now that that's all out of the way...

I love this game.

For every misstep it has, it really does continue to pick itself up and carry itself to the finish line. There's never a point where you can pinpoint where effort started to dwindle, it really does feel like the devs tried their damnedest to really make something all throughout. Obviously, they had massive shoes to fill (and, if I remember correctly, some rather quick deadlines), but they tried, and that effort is what makes me admire this game, even in its lowest moments.

My favorite thing in this game, as many people also agree with, is powerstancing. It is just so much fun, and it feels like a genuine reward for leveling up your damage stat of your choice rather than just seeing numbers go up. In fact, my replay was done completely powerstancing between rapiers and maces, it makes for a super enjoyable experience.

Another thing that this game has that I honestly don't know if the other Souls games have is the art style. I think DS1's style fits its mood, and DS3 has higher highs, but DS2 is so consistently pretty in every area. Majula has a beautiful look and theme music to it, Heide's Tower of Flame might be the best looking area in the Souls games, and Frozen Eleum Loyce has great atmosphere. Pretty much every area just looks and/or feels amazing, to a level that I don't think the other Souls games get to. I also love the much more apparent sombre atmosphere, with characters like Maughlin and Lucatiel (the latter of which I think is the best written character in the trilogy) going through dementia-like symptoms of this unseen "curse" that everyone is said to go through.

I don't have too much to say about this game, since I'm still kinda love/hate with it, but it has grown on me tremendously and I appreciate the game for what it is. Give it a try, just make sure to not view in through the lens of DS1 or DS3. It's its own beast, and I love it for that reason.

As an avid Half-Life fan, my opinion may be a little biased, but I thought it was a pretty fun expansion. The gameplay is the same as HL1 which is fine, since it's fun to play, but it falls short really hard when it comes to how it tells the story. Valve has never been an "exposition" team when it comes to developing a story, only really having it in small doses to serve where the gameplay is going and for some iconic monologues. Unfortunately, Gearbox fumbled in that category and has Jon St. John dump info on you multiple times, and it's really jarring. Are they necessary to understanding the story of the expansion? Somewhat, but they could have been trimmed down and more spaced out. The level design was passable; nothing as good as Blast Pit or Questionable Ethics, but it never particularly bored me. A serviceable and fun expansion pack that misunderstands Valve's development process but still remains enjoyable.

Let's get the obvious out of the way: Yes, this game looks fantastic. I won't be someone who tries to deny very obvious quality simply because I don't like the game itself, the graphical fidelity is stunningly pretty. The magic effects look really bright and colorful, the detailed armor makes for great photos, and some bosses benefit greatly from the upgrade, especially Leechmonger. Aside from graphics, there are some good QoL features this remake provides, too. Your World Tendency being shown at every teleport is useful, the increased ladder speed is heavily appreciated, and being able to rest at Archstones a la Bonfires makes farming a bit less tedious. Oh, and the way the controller's speaker and vibration are used is pretty excellent too, really wish more games would use DualSense's vibration to this extent.

Now, typing that entire paragraph made me feel a bit strange, and that strangeness is reflected in my low rating. This remake is not meant to be a thoughtful recreation of the original game, it is meant to show off the capabilities of the PlayStation 5. I take no real issue in games being made to be essentially tech demos (Mario 64 and Halo: CE for example), but I do take issue in a company pulling out an old IP that was locked to a far outdated console and tossing it to a team who do solely remakes with no input from the original developers. I want to make that very clear: I don't think the remake's issues are solely a fault of Bluepoint's, but rather Sony for letting this entire thing happen without enough care given to make it a true re-imagining of the original artistic vision. However, I will still take issue with the way Bluepoint handled a lot of the game, and I'll list them out just so I don't have to string them together cohesively.

=== SOUND DESIGN ===
The worst offender, which is why I'm putting it here first. I find that all the Souls games, especially Demon's Souls, have a very deliberate stillness to their sound, with great attention taken to when noise is being made. You have your obvious times like killing an enemy or getting hit, but there's a lot of subtle ambience that often goes unnoticed (e.g. the nature sounds in 3-1) but provides a lot of atmosphere, giving so much with so little. The remake decides to ignore that design philosophy entirely and have everything make as much noise as possible, the biggest offender being your character grunting and hollering with nearly every move you make. Certain cutscenes that had a very delicate low volume are now flooded with dramatic breaths, coughs, and grunts to really sell you on just how epic this current moment is. Aside from that, there's a particularly big offense in Tower of Latria, a previously dark and skin-crawlingly eerie level turned into just a generic fantasy prison due to both overbrightening and a constant distant female vocalization. Sure, it's subjective, but I find that all of the scary atmosphere is broken by changes like that. The bosses themselves feel like they just make more noise, too? I can't really place it, but everything just feels very very loud at all times, and it feels like a complete opposite of the faint, quiet nature of the original.

=== GRAPHICS ===
The thing everyone focuses on, and one that I don't have as many personal complaints with outside of general things. Yes, it's incredibly bright. The original game had a very deliberate visual style (hey this sounds familiar) and used stark contrasts between darks and lights to create a striking image despite the lower texture and model quality; a good example of this is with the boss Maneater. In the original, it's a harshly-silhouetted flying monster against the dark Latria sky, the main thing visible being its blank green eyes, and in the remake, it just looks like a generic Warcraft monster. That's really the whole game; there's no contrast between lighting anymore, everything looks bright and comfortably lit even in times where it was a very specific and obvious choice to not have things lit, the best example of this being the Valley of Defilement. Yes, I know the original's dark swamp was hard to navigate, but that was part of the challenge, learning to navigate it. By raising the brightness to, again, a comfortable level, there's no challenge anymore, it just becomes like every other FromSoft poison swamp. Why keep things unique when you can make them like later games?

=== GAMEPLAY ===
This is simultaneously the least touched part and also the one that's maybe the most upsetting. Demon's Souls, for both its flaws and its strengths, is a unique and daring game, still fresh as a new player 14 years later. The lack of elements from future installments helped add to the uniquity of the game as well, still providing new things you had to get used to, but very appropriately fit the game due to it being designed around these "outdated" elements. Bluepoint, for whatever reason, thinks that they understand the design of this game better than the creators, and choose to add in the ability to warp to any Archstone from any Archstone, thus kneecapping the importance of the Nexus and making it feel like the "pitstop" hub world of Dark Souls 3 (and 2, to a lesser extent). In Demon's Souls, the Nexus is a safe haven, a break from all the combat to level up, upgrade your weapons and, unique to this game, attune spells and manage your inventory. Later games may have those former aspects, yes, but they lack the atmosphere that the Nexus (and similarly, Bloodborne's hub world) has that make it feel less of a hindrance, and more of a decrescendo before embarking on another adventure; a specific way that The Nexus handled this was by having each world be separated, thus making the jumps between worlds feel a little more weighty and purposeful. By being able to warp to and fro however you like, sure, it makes the game more streamlined and simple, but it takes away from that unique player choice and strips the Nexus of some of its importance. Similarly, both the inventory system and Stockpile Thomas have been butchered by a "Send to Storage" option being added in the menus and even when you pick up a potentially-overburdening item, thus removing any real importance to managing your weight at the Nexus and directly halving your amount of time spent with Thomas. In the original, he became a fan favorite character due to how reliable and compassionate he was, and that was because you saw him and used his services so much; by removing the need to see him to move items out of your inventory, you're doing that character a disservice by making him feel like a checkpoint to get your items back. Also, it bothers me to no end that they changed a couple balance things for whatever reason. By adding in a ring that allows for normal movement in swamps hidden behind Pure Black World Tendency, not only do you make the swamp seem like less of a challenge to overcome by giving the players an out, but it also makes that out incredibly tedious rather than challenging. It's not hard to use a bunch of valuable items to return to human form and dive off a cliff in 3-2, it's just time-consuming and annoying, all for a "get out of jail free" card that didn't need to be there. But I suppose I shouldn't be that surprised, considering the team wanted to add an Easy Mode before realizing that would be taking a step too far.

I know a lot of my complaints seem like nitpicking, and to be fair, they are, but they're representative of a team that didn't care about truthfully recreating the original game and just cared about drawing new players in while still keeping just enough the same to not completely invoke the rage of veterans. So, despite all my complaints, why the relatively high score? Well, because, at the end of the day, it's still Demon's Souls. It's still a good game, not so much because of Bluepoint, but rather in spite of them, and it's probably the version I'll return to the most out of sheer convenience (and a more lively online server), but I would recommend any beginner to play the original first, and then play this as a subpar substitute for getting janky emulators to work or setting up an entire older console for one game. I'm upset that I have to dislike this game, but oh well.

Definitely a SURVIVAL HORROR game in every sense of both words. I didn't dislike it fully, but it was a very mixed bag for me. The final chapter is brilliant, and I liked the beginning mansion bit quite a bit, but a lot of the middle parts were either great or terrible. All the boss fights were pretty pathetic, but the puzzles were all really good, I never felt like they were cheap or time-wasters. Jill was a frustratingly stupid character at times, but that's more of a fault of the writing than anything else. And man, the writing (and voice acting) was noooot great for a lot of the time.

At the end of the day, I enjoyed it, and would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in horror games, but I don't plan on really ever coming back to this. Maybe I will for a Chris run. Maybe.

By all rights, this should be a 5/5. This should be the best FromSoft game. This should be the spiritual successor to Dark Souls 1 that we've been waiting 10 years for. But it isn't. Or, rather, it was at first, but now it isn't.

I will do my best to avoid spoilers in saying my thoughts. The first 40 or so hours of the game is genuinely maybe the best thing that From Software has put out. The exploration is such a delight, every nook and cranny feeling so fleshed out, it makes you feel like there could be an entire city through a hole in a mountain for all you know. The bosses, for the most part, are pretty good in the early game. Margit is a great brickwall to make people learn to explore, Godrick is fun, and Rennala has both a great fight and a really good area surrounding her. It genuinely felt like the "real" Dark Souls 2 with how detailed the world felt. Unfortunately, by the time you've beaten Radahn (if you went the route I did and did him a bit earlier than supposed to), the cracks in the game will start to reveal themselves.

The biggest and most notable offender is the amount of times they reuse bosses. Soulsborne is no stranger to reusing bosses (see: DS1's Asylum Demon hat trick), and I know that a game of this scale would most likely have at least one boss that you see multiple times, but it's to a point where it's tiresome. I have fought at least 6 Erdtree Avatars, with 5 of them having the exact same moveset, and I have to wonder: did the devs think this was a good idea? I get having a boss be at all the Minor Erdtrees as a running thing, but the exact same one each time? It got to a point where I just started avoiding them because, I mean... what's the point? The caves are mindnumbingly similar, with only the most minor changes in layout and with a reused boss at the end of every one, which I can kind of excuse since they're not really meant to be taken seriously, they're just a mini-dungeon to level your weapon up, but it would be nice to have a little variety. Not only do they reuse bosses from their own game, but I have definitely noticed a few undeniable differences between some bosses in other Soulsborne games. The most egregious to me being the minor boss in "Village of the (blank)" having the exact same moves, down to the death animation, as Capra Demon from DS1. They even had two dogs around them! I get that this might be a bit of an homage, but it really just feels lazy to me. If I wanted Capra Demon again, I'd go play DS1, but I don't. I want new bosses.

Outside of this, the last third or so of the game is just... untested. I'm level 111 with 40 Vigor and 59 Poise with some of the best armor in the game, and I'm getting 3-hit by basic enemies. Moreover, some of the bosses in "M(blank) of the (blanks)" and "(blank) Farum (blank)" are just unfair. I know, I know, "git gud", but there comes a point where I don't believe gitting gud will improve the design of the enemies and areas. I should note, I am a Strength player, and I've seen a fair amount of other Str players having similar issues, so maybe that's what's causing it? I'm not sure. As it stands, however, this is my reason for the game being shelved. I am putting my playthrough on hold until the next update, maybe two updates, in hopes that FromSoft will tweak the later areas. If updates come and there's no hint of change, then I'll just suck it up and finish it as is, but for now, I'm going to hope that they will hear the complaints that a lot of people have been making and fix these issues.

An absolutely brilliant blend of cheesiness and seriousness. My friend put it best: if Silent Hill took inspiration from David Lynch films, then this takes inspiration from all those cheesy 80s action movies. However, just leaving it at that understates how well this game understands tone, for the most part. Outside of a few very odd moments, the game manages to perfectly balance itself between being a completely straight-shot story about a rookie cop trying to save his town, and an over-the-top extravaganza of gore, guns, and G-viruses.

The gameplay is silky smooth, it never felt clunky despite the fact that I was playing on controller in a game VERY aim-heavy. Some QOL features from the original RE in regards to your map marking unfinished puzzles and missed supplies also make things a lot more enjoyable, as well as being able to craft ammo for whenever you might need. Inventory space can be expanded, which makes things so much more comfortable than RE1, while still retaining moments of having to properly manage space. Puzzles are still fun and rack your brain without ever feeling cheap, and feel very satisfying and rewarding when you solve them. The length was also perfect, it never felt like it was dragging or losing steam, everything had a constant momentum and consistent pace to it.

So you might be wondering, why the 4.5? Well, as much as I did love this, I really was not a fan of the sewer area. I know they tend to be low points in most games, but man it really shined here. I had multiple instances of the sewer monsters completely blocking my path, forcing me to take damage, waste ammo, or use a self-defense item. Perhaps I played it wrong, I don't know. It was still an unenjoyable experience that stuck out like a sore thumb in a game this fantastic. Maybe I'll get over it in future playthroughs.

I am writing this upon just finishing my Leon playthrough, and I plan on going back to replay the game with Claire, and perhaps more after that. Not only does the game heavily open itself up to replayability, it's also just a downright fun experience that you'll WANT to come back to over and over again. I can definitely see a 5 for this in the future if Claire's run turns out to be good.

Edit: Ahahahahaaaaaaaaa, fuck yeah. This is a 5. Any potential problems I had with Leon A were wiped out in Claire B, while still having the difficulty to always make things interesting, as well as switching up where certain things were to make the experience similar, but still different enough to be an entirely separate path. Toss in an awesome ending section and a gnarly final-final boss, with some added emotional connection from Sherry, and you got yourself a playthrough that I actually think I preferred more than my first. Can't recommend this enough to anyone both inside the horror game realm and out.