The worst Dark Souls game, besides the meta-commentary on being asked to raise the dead over and over until they crumble to nothingness (do you get it?!).

The combat is annoying and unpredictable, enemies track way too aggressively, and the RPG trappings are less esoteric and therefore less interesting. By smoothing out so many of the rough edges in favor of "just make it harder", it smooths out all of what I love about Souls games. Plus using the "boss has two or more phases" with EVERY boss completely ruins the point of having surprise phases delineated by cutscenes.

I can understand why people think this is the best one, and why it's so popular, but I think it loses a little bit of that fire (heh) that made Dark Souls so special to me.

I went into this game expecting to hate it - since FF7 is one of my favorite games and all I want from a remake is just slightly improved models - but I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it! Once the combat system clicked, it was very satisfying to play and buildcraft, and I like a lot of the story changes and meta-commentary on trying to live up to player expectations and misconceptions.

However, the ending is so fucking stupid and bad, presumably because they didn't wanna just end with the highway fight like the original, that I finished with a sour taste in my mouth. Hoping the sequels don't continue down that path, because if so I will hate them.

While I didn't like it quite as much as Red Alert 2, Yuri's Revenge is still a great game and wonderful expansion to a superlative RTS.

I like the new Yuri faction, but the mind control mechanics are both too strong and too weak. Too strong in that you can lose control of a unit in an instant to a Mastermind, Yuri Clone, or tower; too weak in that once you have the hard counters to these things (robotic units, air units, and dogs) then he's got dick all to stop you. Yuri feels underbaked and overgeneralized in this regard, whereas the Soviets and Allies gets lots of interesting and varied units to fill specific gaps in their arsenals.

They try to use the campaign missions to introduce you to the new "national" units - like the Black Eagle - but there's not really much opportunity to use them. Most of the missions are straightforward slugfests where you get a base, he gets a base, and now it's time for mass destruction. Vanilla RA2 struck a better texture with its missions in this regard. Still, this series has come a long way since Tiberian Dawn's soul-crushingly difficult micro-fests, and I still enjoyed the whole campaign, so whatever.

Rest in pieces CyberLenin...

Awkward, over-ambitious, and not particularly good, but I have such fond memories playing the multiplayer that I can't in good conscience rate this lower than what I did.

You can tell this is an FPS made by an RTS studio because they didn't really know what to do for things like 'weapons' and 'enemy variety' and 'map layouts'. Buildings in the single-player are mostly mazes packed with various kinds of easily-dispatched infantry, the vehicle sections are almost completely linear, and the 'gunfeel' is truly terrible. There is a nice variety of weaponry, but not a ton of reason to use things besides the rifle or sniper. The vehicle physics hold up surprisingly well though; driving a humvee kicks ass???

The worst part though is that the player character is an obnoxious action movie dweeb with zero comedy or camp to him. In one scene he scopes his ex's butt and actively comments on how hot she is. Sometimes he says the commando catchphrases. Concentrated cringe! Likewise, the plot is oatmeal mush that means and amounts to nothing.

Still, it swung for the fences even if it hit a foul, and the multiplayer on huge servers of people mowing each other down in endless stalemates was so much fun. It's not unplayably bad, but definitely a relic of its time. While there is an Unreal Engine remake (Renegade X), it doesn't have very many players at time of writing, and has been stuck in development hell working on the Tiberian Sun version of this game's core loop.

A nice trip down memory lane. Only worth playing for the Command and Conquer completionists.

Last mission too hard.