A man snatched my phone from me on the street the other day. I tried chasing after him but he was too fast, I was close to giving up. But suddenly he stopped, staring down at my unlocked phone screen in silence. I was mentally preparing for a fight as he turned to face me but as he turned around I saw a look in his eyes of pure sadness. He pointed at the PvZ 3 app on my homescreen and shook his head slowly. He placed the phone in my hand and gestured toward it. Eventually I realised what he was getting at and I deleted the app. With a weary smile on his face he proceeded to give me a full body bear hug, I whispered "Thank you" into his ear, tears now streaming down my face, he replied "You're free now". The man left without saying another word, I thank him every day for setting me down the right path.

The games strongest aspects are is visuals, sound design and the moral choice aspect of the game. For example in most games stealing is not a moral choice, even if there are consequences for stealing such as getting attacked if caught, this isnt a moral choice, most likely the NPC you steal from won't react unless they directly see you doing it. However in This War of Mine if you steal food or medicine from someone, chances are they will die, and you may be forced to do this in order to survive, through no fault of your own, you may have to choose between killing a stranger or one of your own survivors.

However there are many issues with the game, the mechanics are incredibly shallow, the aspect of managing the safehouse is very basic, there aren't many things you can build and certain resources are rare so you never have much choice on what to build, and where you build things never has any effect. Same with trading, the trader comes around every few days and with a few minor exceptions the value of items never changes, I remeber seeing on the radio that there was a water shortage and tried selling some to a trader and found that it was still worth fuck all, and the trader that comes directly to your safehouse seems to have more items than the ones that you have to go out of your way to find.

Another problem is how over the top the game can be at times, the misery of the game can be almost comical at points, and as well as this it sometimes feels like the city has been nuked, rather than a war with how little civilisation there is.

I wish the game was a little more complex mechanically, and maybe a bit faster, the game is not a rougelike, so you will be going to the exact same locations every time you play, and this severly hurts the replay value of the game, and makes me not want to do a playthrough with all the characters. While scavenging at night is mostly fun and where all the interesting storytelling happens, the day sections with the basic and boring base management slows the game down, I dont mind a slower pace given the setting but its incredibly simple and has little opportunity for strategy

I still think the game is worth playing and has multiple emotional moments despite its shortcomings

I am writing this having just finished my first playthrough of the game at 115 hours, I will almost certainly beat the game again, for this alone I believe that this game is a masterpiece despite it's many flaws.

This game is huge. I mean that in every sense of the word. The map, the density of content, the variety of weapons, spells, armour sets, special abilities, secrets, bosses, lore and on top of that the game looks incredible at all times. This entire game is the refinement and expansion of a formula that started with demon's souls and has now probably reached it's peak.

However the game has many flaws, much more than in DS3, Bloodborne and Sekiro, however I can overlook them as the game is so much more ambitious. The difficulty is not balanced well at all, I know these games are meant to be hard, thats what makes them satisfying, but a couple of late game areas are just not balanced well. In particular the Haligtree area is absurd, suddenly enemies will kill you in like 2 hits, the damage scaling is worse than any soulslike fromsoft have made before, but again, the game is so open and allows many ways of getting around this thats it's not as much of an issue as it could have been. A lot of the scaling issues which aren't present in the early and mid game is probably a result of the soft cap being too low for all stats.

Another problem is the summoning and late game bosses , there are two bosses that I could not beat without using spirit summons (not mimic tear I wasn't that desperate), Malenia and the second phase of the final boss. There is one reason for both of these, they both had combos that would kill me even if I dodged perfectly. This was especially annoying with Melania becuase I fought her so many times I could avoid all her other attacks consistently, it was just one specific combo that was impossible to completely avoid unless I was already running away and had full stamina. For both these fights I used a spirit summon and Malenia was STILL difficult with it. The final boss (which I had spent about 2 hours fighting previously) I beat my first try after summoning.

Despite all that, this may be my favorite game of all time. What it does well, it does so much better than any other triple A open world game on the market right now. It makes other open world games like Far Cry and Horizon look pathetic by comparison as they cram everything in the players face, forcing them to sit through terribly written dialogue and shoving them through an aggresivley linear campaign, despite being an open world. This game has the balls to put gigantic and beautiful areas with unique bosses enemies and wepons in difficult to find secret areas, and I still found them without using a guide, becuase Fromsoft made a world I want to explore, not one where i'm following icons on a map. Ultimately the perfect game does not exist, and the more ambitious a game is, the more flaws end up appearing. I could nitpick and in detail in great explain every flaw in this gigantic game for hours, but at the end of the day almost every triple A game released in the last five years has been a generic uninspired slog designed to suck money out of the player at every turn, and Elden Ring is a vast, creative, risky and goddamn addicting game that still feels like someones personal vision.

I want Fromsoft to make a completely different game after this. While I absolutely love all their souls likes and I have played all of them (except demons souls) I feel like their talent and creativity as a studio will be wasted if they only ever make games in the same very specific sub-genre. I'm not saying they should never make a soulslike again, just for at least one game I want to see what else Miyazaki and the studio are capable of becuase this game is a fucking masterpiece.

Kane and lynch 2 is a completely fascinating game.

If all you care about in a videogame is how fun it is, or if it tells a satisfying story this is not for you, the shooting mechanics are pretty bad and the game barely even has a story in the traditional sense.

However if you are interested in experiencing something other than fun or excitement in a videogame, and if you want to experience a very unsual third person shooter with an unique aesthetic then this is the game for you.

The game feels like it is physically assulting you as you play with it's cheap camcorder sound and visuals during gameplay and cutscenes. One thing that really shocked me was the music, it sounds more like a horror game than a gears of war style game. For long stretches of time there is no music at all.

We never see anything the two protagonists do other than killing people, literally, as soon as the characters run out of people to kill the level ends and it abruptly cuts to the next level, where barely a minute passes before the shooting starts up again, this starts as soon as the game starts and continues right up untill the end.

The idea of games using violence to condemn violence in videogames is an idea mocked by many people online, especially after the last of us 2, but Kane and Lynch 2 in my opinion manages to do this without being preachy by pushing this very popular type of game (6 hour third person shooters about americans killing foreigners with a tacked on multiplayer mode) to it's absolute extreme, with completely unlikeable, irredeemable protagonists, an abrasive as possible style, an overwhelming amount of violence and a strange, disjointed story.

An unforgettable experience worth going through (if you have the stomach for it)