Woah god this is a doozy. An incredible piece of tech (minus the pc port) pushed to its limits to do everything for the time, with occasional story beats that work so well for what the engine was designed to do and more. God there is so much to love about this game, it’s timeless look that looks as good on a steam deck as well on a beefy pc, its character models, its attention to detail wow. And all the physics make the world so much fun to drive around and interact with, I don’t love the tank but I definitely enjoy it.

But it’s deeply flawed, which makes it more interesting to play and examine. Pacing in the final third is messy AF, and doesn’t reach the consistency (from memory) of the first two games. Sometimes the batclaw / movement is not as nice as Spider-Man. And the Riddler puzzles are dull for the most part (and also clunky), compared to TOTK. Not to mention the detective work, scanning, hacking is all tedious and unskippable (I just want a mod to turn this all off).

But the combat hits, especially on hard. I struggled a bit towards the end without all the upgrades, which I never felt in the Spider-Man games. Boss fights are surprisingly good, and have big set pieces both on foot and in boat. And the level design is so good for the game I could do challenge levels over and over for stealth sections.

Best open world action game ever? No, I guess TOTK gets that. But if you remove the mid-2010s fluff, the core combat and movement is so much better than 90% of comparable games, it deserves an achievement for that.

Voice acting is also top notch

If I could port the combat / design to Arkham City’s story, this would be 4.5/5. I hope rocksteady gets another attempt at a game like this, there is so much talent in this studio holy moly.

bouncing between this and Batman: Arkham Knight, for whatever bizarre torturous reason. watched my friend play a good chunk of it so i know the ending and some of the bigger story beats.

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having only played the intro (2 hours), i'm already fatigued by this game from the outset. this is going to sound like one of those insane VGDunkey screenshots from metacritic where people REEEEEE against nonsense, but this game just doesn't grab me. having played so many open-world action games with skill trees, with endless side quests and gating, i am too burned out to pick up another 25-hour version of the Ubisoft-esque formula.

the good: the swinging mechanics are excellent, the decision to make this more like SM2 with physics is the best decision. traversal feels excellent, is compelling in its own right, and has a high skill ceiling. compared to Batman AK, it's hard to go back to grapple and ~AAAA~ to glide quickly.

story is probably good, i'm just fatigued by the quippy dialogue 24/7, even if moment to moment writing is excellent. this is part of larger Marvel-fatigue personally, and probably why i am gravitating towards Batman's cynicism/urban-decay compared to "everything will be alright if you go to therapy and talk openly about your feelings" of Marvel's Spider-Man. it's very healthy instead of Bruce Wayne's "men will x instead of therapy" approach, but as a character study, there isn't a lot of tension within Peter Parker, although Miles does have some nice internal conflict.

graphically, game looks great, pushes PS5 to its limit, and is occasionally movie-like in its presentation. fun for people around to stop and watch large set pieces.

the bad: the combat, while the intro is comically easy even on "Spectacular" difficulty, is just too many systems layered on-top that feel disparate. a forced parry system that doesn't allow other options? while you are already dodging every bullet red icon around you? doesn't make any sense. its a video game system forced upon a character within a universe, because of existing metatextual experience from recent blockbusters (Elden Ring, Zelda). But in both of those games, you could dodge every attack, or you could dodge and it would put you in a position not as strong as a parry, but you could experiment and learn. here, it's just another MMO icon telling you to click a button. no learning, no thought process, just "move your thumb gamer." i would occasionally pick up the controller from my friend during a late-game fight and just felt like mashing jump/dodge/air juggle could protect you from getting hit and just waiting for skills to recharge to finish larger enemies, who still follow the same "sniper/heavy/trash mob" archetypes. i should probably adjust custom health to 50% because they take wayyyy to many punches when they just keep clown car-ing out of vans that show up later in the fight.

in batman AK, i find myself dying a lot more. especially on hard. your hits feel like they have more weight, but you are more of a glass cannon. and the stealth sections have way more dynamism to your style of play, compared to spider-man which does not feel good in the caves. spider-man is free flowing at its best, batman is best as a precision instrument.

(minor spoiler of character involvement below)

is this game worse than a 2015 game? no absolute not. this to me is probably a nice 3-3.5/5 game that you turn your mind off and enjoy. the comparison is more of a meme than anything and interesting thought experiment. what is compelling for me in comparing them is that Batman AK is reaching for the sky in presentation, ideas, etc.... while Spider-Man 2 is doing the slow Venom-esque/Kraven-esque consumption/iteration of ideas. slow and steady wins the race in selling AAA console-exclusives to move hardware. Sony is laughing themselves to the bank with this and Final Fantasy 16 compared to Microsoft's laughable laundry list of exclusives that fail to make a strong impact (until Hollow Knight Silksong releases).

i just can't justify spending the time when I still need to finish TOTK, BG3 (multiple campaigns), have a life outside gaming, and a job.

I played about 20 hours in 2020-2021 and about 5 hours for Echoes. Any review of this game will be outdated because Hello Games will always keep updating and adding little features which makes the game slightly better. Will it be enough? I'm not sure. It's hard to overhaul what is basically a task list with randomized space art. Sure maybe smoke some w33d and just vibe out to your own playlist of music and endlessly mine/shoot/trade. Great. But all for what? To go back to base to organize your pitifully small inventory? There are so few meaningful interactions that make you want to see more of the world (unless its game breaking bugs), i don't know why you would want to. Every outpost is the same, all the dialogue is the same, nothing feels unique.

Now this can work if the mechanics feel good and the interactions give you some tension, but my god the m/kb controls are still terrible, and the controller controls are only slightly better. Every fight can be done with circle strafing, or just pumping recharges for your ship. Clunky controls mean you cannot design precise fights (also without fixed locations/set pieces it's hard to code AI to respond accordingly).

Now maybe if the game had always-on multiplayer where you can always interact with individuals, it might feel more alive and dynamic. But after getting out of the first system realizing i would have 10+ more systems all with endless mining and resource farming, I saw no point.

At least Minecraft has some gimmicks/mods to each encounter/fight.

I made it about 60 hours but then picked up another long RPG and couldn’t handle both

Story-wise very compelling, while the party members/questing varies from decent to very good. Dialogue trees are a bit rigid and not super flexible but again that’s a design limitation of the time. combat mechanics/party design are really solid to tinker with. The over world stuff is very limited and very much of its era, but I do think there is a very good game here if you come from either a BioWare background or an isometric RPG background.

this game is amazing in the combat and multiplayer aspects. I am in the middle of a 3-person co-op session alongside a SP campaign and they are wildly different and the MP is the highlight of my year. This is GOTY for me based on content and discussion amongst my group of friends.

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My biggest gripe with the story is that as someone not from a D&D background, the lore is not really that exciting or gripping for me. It’s very generic fantasy. Which I think leads to issues when so many of the quests propositions are “we have a problem with these people.”

Stern British accents makes some of the tribalism spouted by NPCs funny, but this grew tiresome very quickly for me. Especially since the majority of responses are “why you racist” “I’m not sure what to think of them” and generically “I agree with you” (which you can say no matter what race you are)

It made me miss the discussions that behavioral traits are shared by all races from Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Fallout New Vegas, and most importantly STAR TREK… and you just have to understand people individually as being shaped by a culture/race, rather than generalizing them as a race. the dialogue responses are still funny as hell.

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In terms of the gameplay, BG3 still doesn't attempt to fix the "this is a party of people with abilities" problem, and still make the player character/or the selected one for dialogue the only person who interacts or has ability checks. if you have a buff character who likes to intimidate, they should be able to interject and cow someone. or the smart one interjects on the party's behalf to solve a riddle. especially since the player character who enters dialogue don't speak (to solve the 100000000s of hours of player-character dialogue needed), this should be feasible.


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Player-character sexuality - everyone is bisexual/queer as long as you get enough goodboy points. i mean i guess this is the future liberals want, but sometimes real people just aren't wired to fuck anything that cares about them. sometimes they have to be a nonbinary dragonborn.

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still in act 1 after 80 hours lololol

Borrowing elements from Hades and ROR2, coupled with Overwatch-esque animations and gun play it’s a solid combo. On sale for $10, load up with your friends, it’s fine.

Tooltips/UX is clunky and hard to navigate. Occasionally just incorrect compared to Wiki.

Visually ugly imo and the voice lines for the characters are a bit too anime for my taste, but YMMV

Enemy designs are very much recycled, there is always a tank, a sniper, and a suicide bomber at each stage. Boss fights I occasionally get 1HKO’d because the telegraphing doesn’t make a ton of sense. Very frustrating when you don’t know what killed you and why. End of round screen is also useless.

The best idea this game has is putting traps on the floor playing a FPS where you never look down. That’s killed me quite a bit in a way a 3rd person game wouldn’t when you circle strafe.

As someone who bounced off Minecraft and NMS, this scratched an itch here for a month. The combat jank is actually really fun in my opinion, definitely with elements of Souls-games with the dodge roll/stamina/blocking. Sailing on a ship has an appropriate amount of sim elements like wind / deteriorating boats / monsters to keep you on your toes. Exploration + jank combat = good stakes.

What ultimately fell apart for me is the late game. You simply increase the power of your weapons from wood —> bronze —> iron —> etc. But the abilities don’t change or grow in complexity. Coupled with ok boss design you kinda start to feel the grind without system intertwining complexity.

Maybe if it had an MMO-style environment with job specializations (via mods), or weapons with abilities that can be crafted or forged, there might be more to chew on.

But it’s still in beta so TBD. I just saw that quests are being added, but I doubt this will help fix the late game design problems. It’s also visually bleh and the music is non-existent.

reminds me of the early 2000s when museums would develop these virtual pets that kids could interact with. Janky, limited in appeal, but even as an abstraction of relationships it’s still compelling if not even meaningful and revealing.

If the game had more interactive systems (limited by the hardware and the tortuous game design), this would be amazing. A more ambitious free climbing system like BOTW/TOTK and less “move object from here to here” puzzles would really boost this.

It blows Nintedogs out of the water

More a piece of art than a fun game

Holy god put this in a museum

I don’t think I’ve had a game question my morals/ethics/beliefs so vibrantly and in a such short period of time