I'm not sure of what to think of this game exactly, on many aspects it surpasses Asylum but also isn't necessarily better on others.

The presentation and map are things I'm mixed on, I like the atmosphere of Arkham City but it feels both too big and small at the same time, gliding around the map is cool but still feels like a chore and collectibles are much less natural to connect. The open world design is also something I'm not necessarily a fan of, the more Metroidvania adjacent style of Asylum made me feel more excited, but this is probably subjective and the side missions are nice.

On the good though, the combat has been polished up and feels much snappier, combos are way more satisfying and you fight more enemies on average alongside having a couple of new enemy types that are sadly rare. Your gadgets start off mostly like what they are in Asylum and you get new ones, with the gadgets overall also integrating better into combat and navigation.

The bosses are more varied and while they're not particularly challenging, I prefer them to Asylum's idea of mostly making them big brutes. They also contribute more to the pacing of the missions.

The story has way more going on and a couple of surprisingly amazing moments coupled with a very powerful ending that hit me hard. Sadly, the GOTY Edition takes away from this by integrating Catwoman's missions into the main game, and they feel awkwardly placed disrupting the pace and even taking away from the ending, I think this could have been handled better because it's nice to switch up the gameplay but it feels like an interruption.

Overall the design of the game map and progression has me mixed, I prefer Asylum but this game is still a great sequel and maybe does deserve its place alongside its predecessor. Play both of them. After playing Origins though, I think you really should play that too, it's City but more focused!

skipped to endgame raiding with these new jumpstart servers. game's presumably dying hard, so they're giving new/returning players stuff valued somewhere around $30-50 (having quickly glanced at its ingame store). there's some rly neat raid design here, unfortunately stuck in a game structured to make you not only hate playing it but ur fellow man.. you at least can ignore that (sort of) if you can get some friends together for this one occasion

it's fun to see amazon repeatedly acknowledge how bad the situation is. i feel for them a bit -- fixing it would require reengineering almost the entire game, which is not at all in their control. all they can do is reapply the same few mitigation tactics they have, which are increasingly becoming desperate

This game had me addicted for over a month, then it dropped off hard. Every few months I tried to revisit the game, but due to the game being P2W, and gear honing being inconsistent I hit a hard wall in the progression system. It was too alt grindy, playing 5 alts a day to funnel gold into your main. The game felt less and less fun overtime and more like chore. It felt as if I launching the game was identical to doing homework. I give the game a good rating due to 99% of the time I spent on it, I enjoyed it.

This games good is really good and this games bad is REALLY bad. The amount of spells you can mix and match and combo into each other is absolutely insane. You can absolutely make yourself feel like the Avatar by wielding all 4 elements which is so cool and I feel no game has truly done that.

And while it's fast paced combo game can feel amazing the music is painfully generic in a lot of places and can feel very repetitive. The randomly generated levels also feel super underwhelming and uninspired to explore, with very little variety and annoying dead ends or trapped rooms with nothing in or past them to reward exploration. It has a weird way of trying to remove backtracking with portals that can spawn in some key areas and all link to the boss room after finding it. ...But that only works when the level generation is in your favor and you actually find the boss room before most other stuff on the floor.
The game is REALLY HARD, and often times falls into feeling unfair. The game lacks fair i-frames and allows you to be stunlocked and combo'd to death from groups of enemies or the beginning of long boss attacks. Health pickups feel far too scarce, most of my runs are spent at low HP with few ways to refill. The game also has a lot items that are just not that good or aren't compatible with your current spell loadout like element specific benefits and boost. The cursed item system's downsides seem to always overweigh any good sides to the items and can feel like crutches on the run for trying something different.

Wouldn't call this game horrible though, but it's not amazing either. It can still feel really good the play when you build a cool spell loadout and go nuts on enemies with it.

gorgeous looking boss rush/run and gun game where the gameplay is challenging yet rewarding, the OST slaps, and calling it a visual treat is an understatement. The bosses are all very challenging multiphased obstacles that will definitely kill you on the first run, and with every death showing how far you progressed in the fight, the game becomes one of optimizing each run to eventually scrape out a W. I think this parallels the struggles of clearing and optimizing runs to beat retro games, except done with 3-minute long bosses rather than 3-hour long games. For this game to have those kinds of feelings in it while staying modern and digestible WHILE ALSO looking and sounding so good, it's no wonder why this game became such a phenomena.

Borderlands 2 is a fantastic video game that has yet to be beaten in its genre. The world of Pandora introduced in BL1 has been expanded to extreme heights, and the characters living within the world have also been given an overhaul. The writing and story in this game are impeccable, allowing for a truly emotional experience in a game filled with fart jokes and surreal stupidity creating a perfect mix of humor and drama.

The guns found across the world are all creative, and the builds available for the player to create are all masterfully crafted to allow anyone to pick up a character and create a legend. While the game-play isn't as refined as it once was, the character builds and an infinite amount of replayability keeps you coming back and wanting more.

Playing this game with friends is an amazing experience on its own. Playing this game co-op has made me and my friends permanent fans of the franchise and has given us some of our favorite gaming memories.

Borderlands 2 is truly a gaming classic and cements itself as the reigning King of the Looter Shooter genre.

Edit: I did end up going back to finish this game. It definitely has it's moments, but ultimately is far, far too long for it's own good and has way too much needless backtracking.

At the time of writing, I have around 20 hours in this game which if the previous three games are anything to go by, I should be around 2/3 of the way through this game. While all the prior games had their fair mix of fantastic level designs, mixed with convoluted and honestly sometimes annoying puzzle design, Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation just goes too far with the puzzles. With that being said, I don't think this game is nearly as enjoyable as the original trilogy and think I'll be dropping it for now.

First off what I've read, this game runs in a new engine which if you go directly from 3 to 4, is noticeable. Sure, Lara still controls like a tank but the levels in this game have much more polygons and relies less on the grid-design of the past games. This works fantastic in making more believable and interesting level designs but does occasionally lead to Lara getting stuck in the ground/walls more often. There were also 2 game-breaking bugs I encountered in the Alexandria and Cairo levels where I needed to reload saves to continue. One involved water not filling an area I needed to swim in and ice wraiths not turning water I needed to walk on into ice. Both were fixed by loading an old save and doing things different, but I never encountered bugs like these in prior games.

Undoubtedly the biggest change in this game is the fact the levels are now inter-connected. There is no Croft Manor level in this game so that functionality is now replaced by a mandatory tutorial level. With the exception of this and possibly later levels (I didn't finish the game), each area can consist of anywhere from 3-7 different levels. At first this seems great as in the first area, levels are fairly linear so if you need to backtrack, it's not difficult to do. Tedious, yes, but do-able.

However, once you get to Alexandria and Cairo (the level I gave up on this game), the amount of backtracking becomes unbearable if you don't make sure to grab every key item before moving on, an impossible task if you're playing this for the first time, obviously. I found myself very often searching every nook and cranny in a level, only to decide that I must be missing an item and go somewhere else to look for it. This would take me hours of running in circles before I would cave-in and use a guide. It's when I used a guide, I would discover that I missed 3 key items in Level 1 and another in Level 2. So in missing 4 items, I would have to backtrack to each of these levels and perform a separate puzzle to obtain each of these items, just so I could progress in Level 3, which would give me an item I need to unlock Level 4 which can only be accessed in Level 2. See why this is confusing? The game's puzzles basically can be described as:

Find Item A, B in Level 1 -- > Unlock door in Level 2 -- > Retrieve key that goes to a door in level 3 -- > Get another key to unlock another level in Level 1

I felt like I was crippling myself by not following a guide the entire time playing this game and if I am constantly needing a hint as to where to go, the game just isn't fun. Maybe I'll pick this game back up in the future but for now, I'm going to move on to AoD as this game even soured me off of Chronicles for the time being.