There’s a stretch in the middle of the game that easily reaches a 9/10 (everyone that’s finished it knows where it is) where I was hopping from main mission to main mission like I haven’t done in a long time, actually eager to see where the plot was taking me, enjoying some major high budget spectacle along the way. The climax isn’t super satisfying and ends up going down the only path that Insomniac has left to explore. I’ll be there for Spider-Man 3, no doubt about it - these titles are all rock solid 8/10s for me. This iteration in particular performs amazingly well, the combat is reactive, the traversal is better than ever and the whole thing generally looks superb (particularly at night/sunset, whilst some daytime moments can look a bit plastic and less flattering on the character models). There’s a lot of really nice music here too by John Paesano and his team, much of the best stuff sadly not included on the official soundtrack release. There’s also generally just too much music, actually, with the experience being filled wall to wall with some occasionally heavy handed musical accompaniment - it’s ok to let the writing and actors breathe for a bit!

Somewhat spoiler territory here: both this game and its predecessor suffer as soon as the story focuses on Martin Li. The issue stems entirely from the treatment of Miles who is often pushed to the side and given missions that feel out of place. In the same way that the writers clearly wanted to tell a Doc Ock story the last time around, this was obviously their Venom story. Much of Miles’ arc doesn’t really fit in with that, so he’s left to deal with the uninteresting Mr. Negative once more. A mission towards the very end of the game really stops the pacing dead in its tracks, and I don’t think it ever quite picks back up.

Specifically played with a partner, this is way more fun (and funnier) than you'd expect a puzzle game where you move cubes around to ever be. We only had to look up solutions for about 4 of the 120 total levels (and it's very comforting to see that all 4 of those were the top searched for solutions on YouTube), so the game does a really solid job of making things seem challenging without ever pushing you to feel like you're losing your mind. The fixed perspective of some of the levels can be frustrating when you aren't sure if there's a drop to your certain death or a wall on another plane of verticality, but never often enough to be anything more than a little bit annoying

I’m 2 out of 4 playthroughs deep into my Dead Space 3 platinum journey and at this point am certain I won’t find any new critiques between now and the end of playthrough 4.
There’s nothing controversial about the idea that Dead Space 3 is a fall from grace, even in the eyes of Chuck Beaver, a writer and co-producer on the title who recently shared his opinions about the game a decade on. The story is a sloppy mess which halfway through devolves into a bizarre love triangle between Isaac, Ellie and a third character so unmemorable that I don’t remember his name. It doesn’t help that a bunch of important story beats are told through patchy intercom transmissions whilst you’re doing other things. A newly introduced co-op function allows you and a pal to tackle the entire experience together, and certainly adds some levity to an otherwise eventually dull endeavour; the story drags on too long and is full of so many questionable plot decisions and holes that none of it matters by about the half way point. Remove your co-op partner from the equation and the respective in-game character becomes an NPC that teleports from cutscene to cutscene whenever appropriate, never to be seen in any actual gameplay moments.
The atmosphere in the first third of the game whilst you’re exploring abandoned space vessels is still pretty strong, encouraging exploration outside of the predetermined path and rewarding you for doing so. Those rewards often present themselves in the form of weapon crafting parts and upgrades to be used in one the games more interest bullet points: gun customisation.
You can either build weapons from the ground up or work with blueprints that you find throughout the world, and experimentation is fun, although some weapons are clearly more interesting than others after just a single shot of the trigger.
Add in some of the least impressive visuals and artistic direction that the core trilogy has to offer, and it all becomes a bit of a middling experience, saved (…just!) by the innate pleasures of co-op and some spooky creature and world designs.
This is by no means a terrible game, but it is almost a bad Dead Space game, and given the lofty heights of the first two titles, that’s a damn shame.

Maybe I'm biased, I do think the original Mirror's Edge is one of that generations most interesting titles; A genuinely innovative game with deeply enjoyable gameplay whilst also being a total visual feast. The story is ultimately forgettable, but the game works wonders where it matters the most.

All of the above is true about the sequel, prequel, reboot: Mirror's Edge Catalyst. That's not to say a worthwile host of characters following an intriguing plotline wouldn't have made this a better title, it absolutely would, but instead we're stuck with a vanilla lead, Faith, and a bunch of the usual suspects - the quirky hacker, the father figure mentor, the teammate who doesn't really like you but will almost certainly come around by the end. The first couple of hours are actually interesting enough, there's an unknown history and tight bond between Faith and Noah (the previously mentioned father figure mentor) that is almost immedaitely dispatched. Noah is subsequently treated worse and worse by the writers as the game goes on and the final story mission sees Faith displaying silly superhero level acrobatics.

But when you're out in the city of Glass, a place aptly named thanks to all the glass, traversing the rooftops feels incredible. It's fast, kinetic, and a newly added FOV slider will help quell some of the motion sickness. The open world feels like a completely natural choice for this series.

If you're familiar and comfortable with the gameplay in the original game, you'll fit right in here. Some of the movement options are locked behind a skill tree (the roll being the most unforgiveable exclusion), this is definitely a mistake, but you can, and should, unlock the important stuff so early into your experience that it matters very little.

Some of the time trials that you'll find hopping around the city are tough, but 99% of them are between 60 to 90 seconds and all of them super enjoyable. The first trick is figuring out the fastest route, the second is perfecting it. It's such a shame that the leaderboards (about to be closed, anyway, as of December 2023) are full of impossible times to beat. I'm not talking 'get good' impossible, I mean glitched and cheated impossible.

I've seen a lot of criticisms thrown at the combat here which is so massively improved from the first game. Faith won't be picking up guns this time but her moveset is wider (most importantly, a dash function!) and it feels way more intuitive to kick ass this time around; this is about as close to a first person Matrix combat style that you're gonna get. Enemies react a little slowly sometimes which can look a bit goofy, but transitioning from a springboard to a wallrun to a kick in the face of some government grunt is always satisfying.

The game is so artistically distinct, the bright white cityscape punctuated by primary colours as you fly across the concrete jungle, I think it should be celebrated.

Obviously Mirror's Edge isn't for everyone, if the idea of a first person parkour game puts you off then don't even bother. For me, Catalyst felt just right to play with just the right amount of main, side and collectible content.

It makes some marked improvements over its predecessor which shouldn’t be ignored; The game handles and looks better, sometimes significantly. Sadly even at 5 hours-ish the campaign doesn’t sustain itself, both the major boss battles that appear at the halfway and end point of the game drag on for too long whilst the story is even less interesting than the first game - Starkiller and co are not at all compelling characters here.
The usual suspects from John Williams’ timeless scores are welcome and even the original composer Mark Griskey gives Gordy Haab a run for his money as the most natural heir to the Star Wars Music Throne. Beneath all this remains a game that is fundamentally unimpressive, Starkiller doesn’t feel particularly intuitive to control and that pesky delay between pressing jump and him actually jumping lingers on to present us with a serviceable jump animation instead of a tight control response.
This series desperately needed to feel like OG God of War but with lightsabers and the force (the 10 uninteresting challenge rooms are all the evidence you need that this was the idea). Instead, The Force Unleashed dies here with 2 deeply average titles under its belt, them being Star Wars entities their only truly worthwhile quality (and with that, your mileage may vary).

it improves on very little from its predecessor (swinging through the city now requires that webs actually stick to buildings, that’s it) and adds a bunch of stuff that actively makes it a less enjoyable experience; the story throws a thousand villains at spidey and and the incessant threat of being hunted down as a public menace if you choose to not complete the wildly repetitive side content that appears on the map literally by the minute. the whole thing feels janky as fuck but it’s still a playable and mostly engaging spidey game and sometimes that’s enough

I knew this was a God of War clone going in, but I had no idea it was THIS much of a God of War clone. Even strangely trivial details like the sound design of the pause menus are eerily similar. Still, if you're in the market for playing a game that evokes the scale, angst and mythological nudity of the classic God of War titles, you can do much worse; Dante's Inferno spends the first couple of hours putting it's best foot forward with a range of enemies, locations, powers, relics and lore and then forgets to introduce any better ones after roughly the half way point. The last hour in particular is filled with frustrating and uninspired level design that will see you slowly walking across an icy chasm and repeating a combat arena 10 times.
One thing in particular though that Dante's Inferno can't replicate is Kratos. Dante ticks all the necessary boxes (angry, powerful, terrible person) but is fundamentally unlikeable in contrast to Kratos, who you can't help but feel sympathetic towards (after all, he didn't intend to kill his wife and child, but Dante most certainly did intend to commit every sin imaginable and wanders through hell as though he's above judgement).
Still, the combat feels good and the game looks okay for it's age, and much of the creature and boss design really do shine.

Having played this over a decade ago and having just done a replay of the campaign and spec ops in 2023, MW3 ends up being the weakest instalment in the Modern Warfare trilogy, purely because the first entry has the novelty of being Modern Warfare and the second entry reached almost impossibly lofty heights; there are actually plenty of fun set piece moments to enjoy here but none of them go as hard as MW2 and I can’t really pinpoint how/why that feels the case. It’s still lusciously over the top but It’s definitely missing the kick-ass Hans Zimmer/Lorne Balfe score. Spec Ops is a welcome addition as always but the missions are essentially just campaign environments rolled out in reverse. Still, fun (and frustrating) with a buddy and worth your time. Also, for all that’s said about performance of games these days, the Modern Warfare titles always run a rock solid frame rate and play just as you’d expect them to, these things are really well made and hold up pretty nicely

this thing looks absolutely sensational, the lighting, animation and effects are all top notch and the addition of the super fast hover boots and dash ability make it a joy to traverse and even reach out of bounds areas whilst skipping some platforming puzzles entirely (and I mean this as a great compliment because it never feels like you’re breaking the game by getting a big run up and jumping to a platform way off in the distance, and I would often climb some structures that clearly had intended me to take a different route). The story is nice and light and the game length just right, Insomniac are really good at this.