Sincerely heartbroken. I haven't been subjected to a AAA game this broken, unfinished, visually incoherent and unfun in a good few years. It especially stings as Arkane is one of my favorite developers working. Prey, Deathloop and the Dishonored series as a whole (alongside Arx Fatalis) are incredible, so it pains me to see the studio come out with an experience this dreadful...

Sigh...

Edit: On further reflection, Redfall is the worst AAA game I've played. Whew.

yesterday i was watching utube videos and i saw one about spiderman ps4. then im like damn i never played the dlc for that game, thats crazy. i should go buy and play that. Then i remembered i packed up my ps4 cause im moving. Oh thats ok, i think. Now there is a pc version. its pirating time. but then i remembered again that the pc version has the weird new peter face. so I decided to replay this instead. And I've got some stuff to say. Firstly this game kind of sucks but at the same time it is like the industry standard still 20 billion years after its come out and its crazy. Now hold on. Did I just say it sucked? maybe it does suck a little bit. The animations, the flat voice acting, glitchy combat, basic stealth, and especially the story, it's all done better in city. But like I don't care because there's nothing quite like this game. Even games to this day are still copy pasting it and failing ballstacularisly (ghost of tsushima) ((sucks))

maybe it's just the mood ive been in but replaying stuff always just helps me see the flaws more clearly. But on the other hand it also helps me to see the upsides more clearly too. Combat is awesome despite the little hiccups and the atmosphere is untouchable. The riddler's riddles are elementary for a mind like mine but thats ok some of them were pretty fun. I'm really glad I played this when I was little because if i played it now i would've said "i wish i played this game when i was little" games like lego dc supervillains, scribblenauts unmasked, gotham knights, oh man gotham knights. We have to talk about gotham knights don't we. Okay here we go. gotham knights.

Umm. I didn't play it. I did not. I know I said i pre ordered it but I lied. I lie about a lot of things. I think it's funny to lie, i think it's really the only power a person can truly have over another. If you think about it like that when you lie you just change reality for the other person. I walk up to a guy and i tell him my name is Dr Shrimp Puertorico then he will just be like "ok shrimp. my name is billy smith" and he will have no idea that the reality in his head is a fake reality. That's what gotham knights basically is. A big lie. They lied to me by telling me the game would be good. I didn't think the game would be good. I thought it would suck. And as more and more info came out, it was clear to me that it would suck. Which is terrible. I mean what videogame does everyone in the universe want? that's right. a co op arkham game. OK and they set it up after the knightfall protocol in arkham knight. this will be a good continuation of the arkhamverse. BOOM its not in the arkhamverse. Why? because that shitty pooicide squad game is in the arkham verse. Firstly fuck the suicide squad and whoever decided that was the huge new dc thing. It's not. Suicide squad is so lame. I don't want a game where i play as captain fucking boomerang trying to kill superman I WANT TO PLAY AS FUCKIGN SUPERMAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! same shit with avengers. you took the blandest, most c tier filled superhero team and just because marvel studios made one good movie now they're the big guys. newsflash pal... Xmen, fantastic 4, fuckin that little team in ultimate spiderman where they went to stop kingpin. u know the ones. spidey, daredevil, moon knight, shang chi, iron fist, dr strange. hell throw punisher in there too why not. They're all cooler than boring lame avengers. For crying out loud avengers has iron man and captain america and thor and black widow and hawkeye. the most bland and boring and lame and fucking lame and boring af guys ever and you put em together? you know whats truly screwed? the 3 actually cool avengers.. hulk, ant man, and the wasp... hulk barely is in the avengers movies and in the new ones hes like a little baby, and ant man and the wasp are like super old in the mcu. WTF? scott and hope are cool but like hank and jan r the guys u care about. whateversauce. What was i talking about? oh how lame suicide squad is. U know what was so terrible about this? they teased suicide squad in arkham origins. They did. And it was for deathstroke. he was gonna be in it. And years later we get rocksteady's suicide squad which they seem to have been forced to make at gunpoint, with a new deadshot, a new harley quinn, and superheroes that were only subtley and (masterfully) hinted at before. U know my theory? The guys who made gotham knights and the guys who made suicide squad swapped projects. Gotham knights was supposed to be a sequel to arkham knight and suicide squad was just supposed to be some co op live service avengers clone. Which it probably is already going to be. my theorem is that because that new THE suicide squad movie came out and was actually not terrible, the warner brothers dickhead investor dudes were like OMG OMFG OMG OMFG OMG WE NEED OUR A TEAM ON THIS and the devs were like umm sir the A team is working on gotham knights which is a high quality very good awesome game where you co op with the batfamily in an open world gotham and the story is good and we built off the already made batfamily movesets from the arkham series and like omg this game is a slam dunk waiting to happen and it didnt happen because why because who knows because i can't have good things because elden ring came out and was good and there can only be one good game per year and this is like some message from god that tells me i need to move on from superheroes and videogames and pay my taxes and my alimony and visit my son and apologize to my ex and stop listening to eminem and get a life. Wel screw you god i'm not doing any of that. You know what im gonna do? you can smite gotham knights into being bad but you can't smite me into somehow not liking arkham city on replay. So who's laughing now? bitch?

“As I continued to play, I found that Super Mario Bros. 2 asked me again and again to take a leap of faith and that each of those leaps resulted in my immediate death. This was not a fun game to play. It was punishment. Undeserved punishment. I put down my controller astonished that Mr. Miyamoto has chosen to design such a painful game.”

— Howard Phillips, 1980s Spokesman for Nintendo of America

Yeah I think I'm with Howard on this one, but it was pretty cool to finally be able to finish this with an actual NES controller through the NSO. Can't say it's a good game, can't say it's a bad game, but I can definitely say it's an evil game!

Shigeru Miyamoto invented Kaizo Mario in 1986.

Neon White is the most innovative and refreshing action game I have played in years. Fantastic music, sense of speed, and layers on layers of mechanics you feel that you've mastered in seconds, and that's only the tip of the iceberg.

I have never been into watching speedrunning, nor have I cared to try it myself, but the compartmentalization of the technique into 15-30 second doses is brilliant. Why did I suddenly care about beating my friends on the leaderboards? It's not something I've ever, EVER cared about before but in Neon White if I saw a friend beat a level a fraction of a second faster than me I'd spend the next ten minutes doing a hundred reruns to beat them.

I will be very open, I think the story is kind of stupid and I did not engage with it after the first hour. The dialogue is badly written and a lot of the VA sounds amateur. This is thankfully not an issue at all, as there's a giant prompt to press the F button to fast forward through every scene, and the game is 100% enjoyable without knowing what's going on. My only other negative is that the game drags for one world before you get the final powerup card.

The final boss of Neon White was so much fun that after a half hour of running it back over and over again, when I finally won, I laughed out loud like a maniac. I can't remember the last boss battle that made me do that, and I'd absolutely list Neon Green as a top 10 final boss of all time. And I got an Ace first try! In addition, the final world is actually the most fun because of a single new mechanic that changes the entire game to make it feel EVEN FASTER. While I wish the story had been any good, it is impossible to deny the sheer brilliance of Neon White. I wish it had gotten more recognition over a certain cat-based indie game, but I'll settle for it residing in the Nirav Hall of Fame.

An incredibly cool and inventive iso action RPG that hooked us in before dropping us on our faces with its terrible checkpoint system.

In Nobody Saves the World you play as a blank slate of a person wielding a wand that lets you transform into anything from a rat to a robot. In order to improve these forms and unlock more forms, you don't just have to kill X amount of enemies - every form has its own unique combat quests you must complete to earn XP to level up the forms - poison X enemies as a rat, dodge attacks as the ranger, gallop through 8 enemies at once as the horse. The game constantly has you rotating between forms for different combat encounters and it's incredibly fun.

It's absolutely perfect as a couch co-op game because not only is it fun to run around with a buddy, but all quest progress is shared between the players. So my wife could be the mermaid while I play the slug and we're both progressing the quests for our shared character pool. As you level up, you also unlock the ability to mix and match abilities across characters. Want to play as a rat that can siphon life using the zombie's passive or summon animals using the magician's secondary ability? Go for it!

We were having a blast until we died in the middle of a dungeon and the game drops you right back at the beginning of the dungeon. 10 minutes lost. "Wow. That sucks" we said. But we jumped back into this small side dungeon to beat it.
The next dungeon we did was one of the larger story dungeons. That time, we were almost at the end of the dungeon when we died and got sent back to the beginning. 20 minutes lost that time and nothing to show for it. With 30 minutes of combined gameplay lost in about an hour, we let out a huge sigh and turned the game off. I'm at a point in my life where I do not mess with games that don't respect your time, and lost progress on death is a big no-no. So, after 6 hours of mostly fun, we dropped it.

This game could've been great but making you replay dungeons on death is a baffling design decision in the year 2022. Why play more of this when I can play hundreds of other great indies that actually respect your time?

+ Great pool of characters to transform into for fun combat
+ Progression system based around combat challenges instead of just killing enemies
+ Fun visuals and good map design
+ Great couch co-op

- Terrible checkpoint system that sets you back 10-20 minutes on death with nothing to show for it
- Zero accessibility or difficulty options

God of War: Ragnarok is a fantastic game that improves upon God of War (2018) in many ways, yet it still ultimately fails to live up to the gold standard set by its polished predecessor.

If someone tried to tell you that Movie X was better than Movie Y because “Movie X is longer and therefore better”, you’d probably laugh. I think most folks can agree that length is not a metric for quality, and yet game devs continue to operate under the assumption that “more = better”. God of War Ragnarok is no exception to that flawed logic. When faced with the question of “How do we improve upon God of War (2018)?” it seems the devs just said “I don’t know. More” More story, more characters, more collectibles, more equipment, more abilities. It’s literally just more. While God of War felt like a tight clean game from beginning to end, Ragnarok struggles with pacing issues and desperately needs an editor to trim the bloat.

None of that is to say I do not like this game. I really enjoyed my time with it and there is a lot it does better than the first game. While God of War has a pretty small cast of characters (and only one woman), Ragnarok blows the doors open and introduces a much larger crew that I enjoyed getting to know and spend more time with. The story of GoW2018 was small and personal, while Ragnarok’s story is grand. Yet despite the scale of Ragnarok’s story, it still manages to keep a lot of intimate elements. In fact, I’d argue that the small moments carry more weight than the large bombastic ones. The moment-to-moment writing and dialogue carries the weight of the story here while a lot of the gigantic cinematic story beats often didn’t feel earned and mostly just felt like they existed for either shock value or excitement.

The gameplay is as good as ever. I was worried at first because it basically felt like I was playing the same game I played in 2018. But once I had spent more time with it and unlocked more combat options, the game had more than a few surprises that kept the gameplay feeling fresh. My biggest complaint with the combat is the massive swings in difficulty. You’ll have some insane cinematic god versus god boss battle where you end it feeling like a king. And then the next scene you’ll get stun-locked by a giant chicken that kills you in a few hits. Whenever I start to feel like The God of War, the game firmly reminds me that I am playing a Video Game and kills the mood. Eventually I bumped the difficulty down one tick which helped with side content, but then it made the story battles too easy. I get it, it’s a video game, but a god should not be easier to kill than some random side enemies.

When not in combat or enjoying story beats, your time is mainly spent solving puzzles (while Mimir and Atreus talk your head off about how to solve the puzzles you’re already solving) or collecting a mind-numbing amount of collectibles. Every time a new collectible was introduced over the course of the game (and it happens a lot), I audibly groaned. This game has 418 collectibles scattered across the realms. While some of those collectibles are fun to do or add to your character (upgrades, gear, etc.), a majority of the collectibles just exist to give you things to collect. There are ravens, poems, artifacts, lore, and many other collectibles that serve no purpose beyond checking a box. You just stare at some text on a wall, pick up some crystals, grab a scroll, and then listen to Mimir yell some piece of stock dialogue at you “Nice work, brother! I’m sure this crystal will come in handy” or “Good thing you learned the runes, brother!” Annoyingly, you can’t even get most of the collectibles out of the gate; it slowly introduces you to them as you play the story, unlocking the very last one after you roll credits. I generally like to complete areas in games as I go through them to avoid back-tracking but the game is quite literally built around the need to backtrack. That said, because it was designed with that in mind, the backtracking (mostly) feels deliberate which is quite nice. As you revisit areas after the story, you’ll get little bits of epilogue story, dialogue, etc. from the characters that makes the backtracking feel worthwhile (even if the fast-travel is still absolute trash).

While playing God of War: Ragnarok, I genuinely had a fun time - I loved the combat and I was interested to see where the story went. But as soon as I turned the game off, it left my brain. The pacing issues and the constant reminders that you’re playing a capital V “Video Game” get in the way of the game being truly special. Despite some of the issues I had getting through it, I had a really good time with the post-game and I ultimately finished the game with positive feelings and good memories of my time with it.


+ Added variety to God of War’s already fantastic combat
+ Great intimate moments between characters
+ Fantastic cast of characters (both new and old)
+ Solid post-game with new quests and backtracking with new dialogue
+ Excellent soundtrack

- Pacing issues and often feels bloated. Desperately needs an editor
- Balance issues with wild difficulty swings
- Way too many collectibles
- Fast travel still sucks
- NPC chatter while solving puzzles or finding collectibles is obnoxious
- Bad/dated menus and UI

🎮 Platform: PS5 - legendary edition
⌚ Time played - 15h - could have done it in 10-11h but explored a bit to see if the non main story stuff was interesting. Unfortunately it wasn’t.
⭐ Score: 3.5/5 ( a good game, appetizer feeling)
📈 Difficulty: easy game
📚 Full Review:
I am a huge BioWare fan and they made me love rpgs as my favorite genre thanks to baldurs gate, kotor, and more. With that said this game was just good. It was missing that magic sauce in BioWare games that makes it addictive. Throughout the game I kept wondering if I should replay kotor instead of this. However just starting me2, I am feeling my investment is paying off. That game is really gelling with me! Anyway this is a me1 review.

- The world building is great! They are really going for something big here. Unfortunately we don’t learn enough lore about the world, beyond main quest related lore, to make it engaging even with some side quests I tried.
- main story has some interesting Sci fi elements which kept me going. It’s a pretty short game.
- companions backstory was lack luster. This is often a standout in BioWare games. Companion interaction and squabble was also missing.
- the combat was fine. I just shot everything and rarely used any powers. BioWare games often force you to use your other powers against bosses and play with your abilities.
- side quests were run of the mill and did not grip me
- no real gear juggle or hunting. Just go for drop with highest numbers and SMG were always most powerful. Rest of weapons I tried to use them like a shotty in close combat. SMG was still better.
- lots of mechanics in game aren’t explained.

Overall play it and the payoff is probably in a future game than this. I think they used this as a learning testing game. It reminds of how drake series the 1st was fine but the pay off was starting drake 2.

An addictive mobile card game that respects your time in ways that something like Hearthstone does not. And the best part is - you can play as much as you want without ever spending a dollar.

I always had trouble getting into Hearthstone specifically because of the time investment needed to play it. Marvel Snap remedies that problem with its short 6-round games that only take a few minutes to play making it easy to squeeze in a couple rounds while waiting in line somewhere, brushing your teeth, pooping, etc.

What's more is I never felt pressured to spend even a dollar on the game. Spending money in this game gives you no gameplay advantage over other players because the main thing you spend money on is just cosmetic variants of your cards. Season Passes do have a handful of cards in them you can get if you buy the pass, but all those cards are unlockable through normal gameplay.

My biggest issue with the game is that their microtransactions are insanely overpriced across the board. The battle pass is $10 and you cannot use any premium currency gained to unlock it. The amount of items you get in the pass is abysmal compared to other F2P games. You get 3 card variants themed after the season, 2 random variants, and then a ton of filler currency and XP. Additionally, the pass is only 50 tiers and the seasons only last 4 weeks. Compare that to something like Fortnite which has 100 tiers over 3 month, has 5x the number of actual items in the pass, and enough currency to buy the next season's pass. If you bought every season pass in Marvel Snap for a year, it would cost you $120 and you'd have a handful of cosmetic cards to show for it. In contrast, you could spend $10 in Fortnite for the whole year and be set as long as you play. And that's not even mentioning Marvel Snap's ludicrous bundles that cost $75 for 1 card variant, a profile picture, and some currency. While Fortnite is a game for everyone, Marvel Snap's target customer is clearly whales.

I loved the game for the amount of time I spent on it but eventually the grind set in and the absurd microtransaction costs got to me. Great game but boy do they need some new direction on the live service side.

+ Fantastic, addicting gameplay
+ Short rounds that value your time
+ Great card designs that are really satisfying to level up
+ Plenty to do in the game without ever spending a dollar

- Some of the worst microtransaction pricing I've ever seen in a game
- Terrible battle pass
- Progression becomes a grind at higher levels

A good example of how old games can be incredibly difficult and also wildly obtuse. On top of that, the game doesn't control super well. Jumping and using your whip to hit enemies on the ceiling or out of the air is pretty finicky. Game difficulty is all over the place ranging from "wow that was easy" to "how tf did anyone beat this without rewind???" Truly, if not for rewind I would not have stood a chance at finishing this game. Especially with the final boss having one-hit KO moves. Wild stuff.

The DSS system is cool but it relies on RNG for the cards to drop and I have zero interest in grinding enemies to try to make some DSS build I like. It's pretty neat how the game has a full XP leveling system with health/MP upgrades. I feel like not many Metroidvanias have an RPG-like system built into the game.

+ The DSS system is neat
+ RPG-like system for leveling up, equipping gear, etc. is really cool in a Metroidvania

- DSS system, magic items, and your moveset are obtuse and not explained at all
- Wild difficulty swings for some of the boss fights
- Controls feel bad

🎮 Platform: Switch
⌚ Time played - 3h
⭐ Score: 2.5/5 ( Fine for a few hours and then boring and repetitive )
📈 Difficulty: easy game
📚 Full Review:

Simply put the game's novelty wears off quick and its super repetitive. There isn't enough variety in game play or the challenges and battles to keep it going. I played it in prep for the new mario + rabbids game. I think playing this for 3h was more than enough for me to see whats going on. I had no interest to return to it and abandoned the game.

Alex's Cowabunga Collection Marathon, Pt. 9 of 13

"I'VE BEEN BEATEN BY A BUNCH OF TEENAGE TURTLES." - Leatherhead

Why is the dialogue weird here? Feels like it may have been written by a native Japanese speaker, while the other games have felt more natural, "Milk Shake" epilogue aside. It's definitely not a bad thing, the bizarre way the characters speak here is one of the most charming things about the game!

The HyperStone Heist is based off of Turtles in Time, so it's automatically better than most TMNT games. It's not a direct adaptation though, there are far fewer bosses and levels (though the levels seemed longer to me in HyperStone), but the combat is arguably better here, and there's a dedicated run button.

There's a button-combo attack here that really confused me. I noticed that if you hit Jump and Attack at the exact same time, you do a slightly more powerful swing. I started mashing that constantly, but soon noticed that every time you perform this attack, you lose HP. The move isn't remarkably strong, it might be the same as two regular swings. So why the massive drawback? Seems like there's no reason to ever use it.

HyperStone Heist is different enough from Turtles in Time to justify playing both, they're both excellent brawlers despite their short length. You'll encounter some of the same enemies and locations, but... come on. It's a 90s TMNT game. They all draw from the same well.

Alex's Cowabunga Collection Marathon, Pt. 3 of 13

This has the exact same Epilogue text as Fall of the Foot Clan! Even the "Milk Shake" bit!

This definitely doesn't hold up compared to how it felt in an actual arcade in the 90s. This would be a fun enough standard beat 'em up, but the hitboxes are atrocious, which makes damaging most enemies come down to luck. It's a bit of a shame that this doesn't stand the test of time, but it's short enough that it's still worth finishing. After all these years, the legacy and influence of this classic arcade game are more important than the game itself anyway.