Put this off for so many years, have had in on multiple platforms and always liked playing it, but some of the collectathon stuff got super tedious and a bit boring after a while, as there's way too much stuff to do, but kind of... not enough at the same time? A lot of filler for side stuff, but at least it helps with progress.

Story was absolutely worth playing through though. Was really well-written, and full of charm. Ending made me tear up a little. This is more than just a GTA-clone. It has a well designed map, interesting direction with it not being very gunplay focused, and has some really fun combat mechanics that don't get old that quickly, as you're constantly learning new moves to spice up encounters. There's a lot of cool vehicles, but honestly driving is a little strange at times. Not a lot of main missions really. I think like 50 maybe total? Could've used more of those instead of so many short side-objectives, but all of the missions were pretty good, and nothing super tedious. Just the collectathon and side missions were mostly tedious.

Also I don't recommend doing the DLC. I only did so for all achievements, but they both didn't really add anything to the story and felt more like cheap cash-ins. Wish the publishers had this dev team work on DLC that centered around the future of Hong Kong after the story, and perhaps a DLC exploring the events prior to this game, as both are kinda vague. Would've made for more compelling DLC. Though these two are just holiday-themed DLC's and feature very little content. The content there is very lackluster.

A few things bugged me about achievement hunting. Triad XP takes forever to get, and requires you to go way out of your way to get to level 10. Some of the stuff was bugged too.

Bugs are kind of common on PC it seems. Had a few issues where gun sounds, car engines, or dialogue would play over everything else going on, and persist no matter what I did. Exiting the game fixed it. Also a few missions became bugged a couple times where objectives were not visible. Two of the DLC ones involved driving cars into the water and they gave you no marker. There's also sometimes graphical bugs which maybe was due to me playing at 170 FPS, but barrels and other props sometimes flew in the air. People sometimes were stuck in the ground, and sometimes getting into cars shot me or other people up into the air, or fixated them into weird positions. Not game-breaking, but kinda takes out of the experience.

Main story and gameplay is worth a play though. If you don't really care about achievement hunting, this is a fantastic game. I won't say too much about it, other than it's just really well-written. Probably see no real reason to play this again. Doesn't really have any replay value I don't think. Kinda sad I finally 100%ed it, as I kinda enjoyed playing it a lot, but now I can move on to other things.

Easily one of the best games of all time. Absolutely stands on its own in multiple levels. I have too many hours in this to count. At least 1000-2000 from Xbox 360, and around 200 on PC.

With how much praise this gets, there's really not much people can say about this now, without just parroting what's already been said though. Yeah; this game is one of the rarest open world games that 100% deserves the open world. There might be some emptiness at play, but it feels like an accurate depiction of the real life place it's trying to portray. The wild west, Las Vegas-esuqe atmosphere just goes with this post-apocalyptic game like two peas in a pod. Much of the voice acting is top-notch, and albeit suffers from the Bethesda trope of so many minor characters being voiced by the same pool of around 5 voice actors, they all definitely feel likable or hatable. This is just from top to bottom one of the greatest games of all time.

So much to explore, and so much to do. Character builds don't feel too linear, but there's definitely charm to hyperfocusing on specific skillset. Certain skills matter more than others, which is just always how Fallout games have been. The unlinearity really lets you try out everything you find, which makes the game more fun to discover new areas. For those that wish; lots of lore is hidden in each individual area, which some may consider cheap lore, but I absolutely adore it. One of my favorite pieces of lore is entirely through terminals, and said areas reward you with some of my favorite items in the game. That's how much detail there is in just about everything.

You cannot talk about the magnificent levels of detail without talking about the sheer unlinearity of the story. Unlike most unlinear games; this one really takes notes of your path, and you see the impact of it as it goes on. I'm at least a few dozen playthroughs into this game now, and I am still finding out new dialogue based on how differently I've done things. That's how much attention to detail there is.

Of course I must bring up what others say; that this was all done in 18 months, which is why much of the planned content was re-worked into DLC. All of the DLC's are fantastic, and completely worthwhile experiences. You can expect a few to maybe play differently to how you've played the game before, but they're all top-notch and all link to each other in some form. As well as linking to the main story in some way or another too. One of the DLC's in particular: "Dead Money" has got to be my favorite part about the game.

In 2024; this has aged perfectly well. Maybe the FPS mechanics are a bit clunky if you play on controller, but for keyboard players, rejoice in how fantastic this aged. I do recommend some performance mods and retexture packs if you wanna spruce up the game a bit. Thankfully the commonly recommended ones tend to be very easy to install, and don't take away from the vanilla experience of the game. Some bug fixes might help some too, but I tend to not play with them; as I find some of the bugs easy to avoid, and others to make the game more fun. There's lots of guides for these things. So an easy search engine search can hook you up.

All in all; this game is easily one of my favorite games ever. A masterclass. Well-detailed, well-loved, and well-maintained by a wonderful community of people who all see this for what it is. The best Fallout game. One of the best role-playing games. One of the best games of all time. It's hard to find things to hate about this game, and if you do dislike this game, it's understandable. I know people who played this and trashed the shit out of it, and now it's one of their favorite games of all time. Most things with perfect scores always have their share of flaws. I honestly do not have much ill to say about this. It's absolute perfection in my eyes.

There's so many janky elements in this game, but I am generally willing to excuse it due to how much fun this game is.

I feel like all of the FromSoft games I've always came away with a sour note, but as I keep playing this game on new playthroughs; I start to appreciate them even more. This one is the game I seem to just keep appreciating more about it as I keep replaying.

All of the bosses are difficult, but not really in such a way that I feel defeating them becomes a chore rather than entertaining. I mean, sometimes I still get a bit frustrated at myself because the outdated mechanics do get in the way at times, but largely I feel I've become good enough at how this plays that it's not much of an issue.

I feel though, Dark Souls does have certain things it does right as opposed to the other titles FromSoft has released since then. Notably the parry system. I like how forgiving it is once you really know how it works. I get that they probably realized how overpowered it was, which is why in modern games its frame-based depending on what weapon you use, but the muscle memory has meant that I've had a really hard time adapting to other games.

Overall though this is probably my favorite soulslike game. It's definitely the one I return to most at this point, and still always get excited every time I start a new playthrough.

There's not a lot of games I feel are a big mood, but this is definitely one of them.

Some of the best atmospheric storytelling in any game, and I think the janky voice acting at times really adds to the experience of all of these Silent Hill games, but especially this one. Like with the other Silent Hill games; I feel like I'm really good at making observations, and even still with these games; I find myself still finding out things I never knew about certain details much later on.

As for what makes this ones story so good; it's the fact it uses a lot of aspects of femininity to really display the sheer terror and unease some women face when undergoing puberty, and becoming a woman. Some things it uses as horror devices are things I relate to personally as well. Having been a victim of some of the things Heather faces throughout her journey.

This is absolutely one of those games that is worth going into completely unaware of what you're getting yourself into. You'll get to experience the horror genre at its finest. Thank me later.

Elden Ring does a lot of amazing things in terms of how well this game was made and all the depth within its content. Though I feel like a few issues really drag it away from being something I'd consider really good. Having completed this all the way through on about 3 or 4 playthroughs now; one of which is still at NG+3 and I plan to get to +7 on it before its over with, I have some qualms with this games design philosophy that really take away some from the enjoyment I have.

Positives out of the way first; this game looks magnificent. This is what I can point to and say "This deserves to be an open world 100%". So much caves and areas to explore; to which I feel like there is always something worthwhile to obtain from every cave that leaves you wanting to try out practically everything you get. That's how my first playthrough went honestly, before I settled with an easy weapon (we'll get into that later). Subsequent playthroughs have led me to want to try so many different weapons and I've come to enjoy this a lot more with replays, but I still run into those issues. The combat depth is just unrivaled I think, and all weapons really stand out as unique in some form or another. So many different weapon playstyles, many different effects, different abilities and buffs. It really creates a lot of different things that I can say really put this game above other Fromsoft titles in how much freedom you have. It actually feels genuinely free unlike most open world games I've played.

The problems really start to arise with pacing and the approach to how this game was made difficult. I feel like Dark Souls 1, and to a lesser extent; Dark Souls 3 really embody a sort of philosophy that I enjoy about why these games were difficult. It's all about learning bosses attacks, adapting, and even if you make some mistakes, it's not always the end of the world. Elden Ring kinda takes the and throws it out of the window. Where in Dark Souls; most bosses usually have a few reasons to list why they're difficult. A boss may do a lot of damage, or have a lot of health, or have a couple phases to really keep someone on their toes, but otherwise it's just like fighting another boss. Elden Ring's main bosses have all of these things. At once. For every single boss. To which you can also add on the fact many of them have attacks that feel almost RNG whether or not you'll dodge them, and sometimes if you dodge at just the wrong time, because you read the boss as executing a different attack, you're punished by follow up attacks after these; which usually just one shot you. Safe to say, sometimes you make a mistake; you just immediately die because of it, and sometimes you might not even notice you done anything wrong until you're dead. It leaves a lot of the boss grind somewhat unsatisfying in a way. I did not find a single boss that I was incapable of beating, but I do feel that where in other soulslike games I get excited about beating bosses after so long of learning attacks, I don't get that excitement here. Usually just relief. It doesn't feel as fun and exciting to have beat a boss, which I thought was a core part of what made FromSoft games special. The bad boss design is largely concentrated to early-game and end-game; making this game very V-Shaped in terms of difficulty I think. There is another annoying boss I think in mid-game, but it's the only real exception. As a result the pacing feels all sorts of messed up. I don't like how the game doesn't open up truly until you've beaten two major bosses that will pose a huge challenge to most. FromSoft seems to expect you fully explore the prior area before taking these bosses on, but it takes so much time, and a lot of the early game rewards feel so worthless and like they're hardly doing much to level you up or give you experience. Small tweaks could've easily mitigated this, but alas; that's just how I feel. I'm sure many are fine exploring for more than 5 hours before taking on the first major boss. I personally just kept brute forcing the boss until I finally got past it.

I think beneath a lot of the troubles I have with the games difficulty feeling more tedious than challenging, there is a 5 star game here. A masterclass of world design, rewarding exploration, so much replayability, and much more. Unfortunately my qualms with difficulty, pacing, and much more often make replaying the game challenging, and it always serves to remind me exactly why this game leaves some sour notes in my mouth at times.

As the QoL features for how it improved the competitive experience are kind of irrelevant for just a review of 90% of peoples gameplay experience, I think it's best to exclude it from the discussion.

This game did not need to be open world, so little about its world design is really centered around exploration or anything but just catching pokemon. The unlinear experiment for how you tackle gyms is awful because of how it does not scale at all with the level of your Pokemon, so I could see some players just rushing into a late-game gym fight, and getting clobbered without realizing it. Though if you decide to do these gyms early; then it makes all of the earlier ones piss easy. The Team Star missions are awful and all revolve around doing the exact same thing for all five of them. Not much to say about those.

The only real redeeming qualities have to do with the herba mystica quests and the last 5% or so of the game involving around Arven and whatnot. These are some of the only good storytelling in this game, and it happens so late. Also love the music for this stuff. I guess the Team Star lore is interesting too, but I think the Team Star quests are just so boring they kinda take away from it.

The performance issues are very bad. It's pretty obvious these teams are rushed to push games out due to TCG cycles and whatnot, so expecting them to polish a game; when they have to focus entirely on new content for these games, and developing new ones while the current one is going; it's pretty hard. FPS is usually less than 30, and often less than around 15 or so in some areas. Some Pokemon spawn in walls too. I've had issues of pokemon falling through the map during raids and other things. The raids themselves can be extremely poorly designed; especially with setup moves being able to be used by the raid pokemon on every single person in the battle, so they're +4 after one turn. There's a lot of really annoying oversights, that really drag the experience down.

Though I can't really say I didn't at least have some fun playing this, it's just a bit of a shame the issues with this game ruined some of that. The DLC's really didn't improve on too much, and the lore for all of them was equally forgettable to me like 95% of vanilla S/V.

The only major plus is that shiny hunting is not a tedious slogfest of resetting the game 10000 times to get something you want. Shiny hunting is legitimately fun in this game, and if that's something you enjoy; I think you'd really like this. Otherwise I think most who don't care about competitive or other things I praised, you could easily ignore this game.

Probably the worst game I've ever played all the way through. The story is extremely vapid and meaningless, with no real payoff due to how worthless the progression is. Exploration is boring and unrewarding once you realize you've explored 50 caves and found only 1 or 2 things you want to use, and the rest of what you've obtained is completely worthless. Combat and movement does not really feel satisfying, and more of a meandering, empty task for pressing jump and attack 200 times every fight or mountain you want to climb. Skyrim I think is the epitome of why 99% of open world games do not do anywhere remotely enough to justify being open world. When you can get basically the same experience out of a free to play, 20+ year old game called Old School Runescape; you know something is wrong.

Don't wish to deny how big this probably was in 2011, but it really just goes to show how much further open world games needed to go before being truly worth being open world.

I honestly don't know how to rate this game, seeing as I have at least 2500 hours on it and have been playing it since around the time it came out. I watched it grow from a pretty barebones, interesting game, to a mess of griefing and grinding the same missions 5000 times just to afford one thing, to the game getting quite a bit better for solo players. Lots of highs and lots of lows. I'd say if you didn't play the game from day one, or you don't have the the best money making facilities; this game is awful. It's very unfair to new players, and you probably have to put over 100 hours in the game before you can really start to have fun and buy things that are really enjoyable.

In its current state though, unless you play on PC and have a mod menu; it's a pretty bad experience. Getting into public lobbies to make money by yourself is a hassle, and there's only one major money strat that works in private sessions (albeit; it's the best thing to farm for the time to money ratio so it has that going for it); unfortunately optimizing it to be the most efficient farming strategy requires well over 10-15 million dollars in-game, and a new player probably won't get that any time soon without being stuck in public sessions with new players who will destroy hours of your work in an instant; for a measly $2000 for themselves, because Rockstar incentivizes griefers to keep people from making money so they get angry and buy shark cards.

Most of the fun of this game is just the silly glitches with cars, and playing new content for the first time. A lot of people still spend most of their time buying and messing with vehicles because GTA Online has some of the most fascinating vehicle customization the video game industry has seen (makes me frustrated Rockstar has done nothing with Midnight Club for so long. I want a game mostly centered around customizing and driving cars around). Unfortunately it's a large time investment for these things, and for most; that time is not worth it. You're better off playing something like Forza Horizon 5 or something like that if you want that kind of experience. Lot less setup and hassle to enjoy a similar gameplay experience that GTA Online offers.

GTA Online is also rather role-playing friendly too though, so it has that going for it. Me and some friends do like to get on it and roleplay as bikers and taking road trips from time to time. Or just have virtual hang outs at each others apartments. Can be some pretty good fun, but like I said; that kinda requires having a friend who has money for those kinds of things, so yeah.

I've been mostly burnt out on GTA Online though. The updates that keep coming out are just not that satisfying; nor do they really offer much in the way of interesting new content. The last major one that was fun was one of the heist expansions, but it's not something you can really interact with your friends with. Every time I got into the heist with friends they kept getting disconnected. There's lots of really annoying bugs too that Rockstar refuses to fix. They're very frustrating. I will sum it up like this. If the bug makes the game easier for the player: Rockstar will patch it instantly. If it makes the game more inconvienent for the player: They won't. It's annoying, but admittedly understandable when you realize Rockstar is just as scummy as most other companies.

So all in all, this isn't worth it for anyone unless you really enjoy these things, and enjoy painstaking grinds just to enjoy the game with your friends. Just ignore strangers in the game as much as possible and if there's a way to get into public sessions by yourself; do it. It saves a ton of rage. For most people though; this is a very mediocre game, and I do admit despite 2500 hours; I am one of those people.

Fallout 3 is the closest Bethesda got to capturing the magic that Black Isle Studios/Obsidian had created with the Fallout games before it. It's quite bleak on Bethesda's timeline with Fallout to say they peaked when they started, but I believe it. I may have rated this below Fallout 4, but I still believe this to be a lot closer to what Fallout stood for, but it has other big flaws too that kind of ruin the experience.

The main way that Fallout 3 does correctly that 4 didn't was the atmosphere. The game really felt like a barren wasteland, which felt a lot more dangerous and rewarding to explore as a result. Lots of interesting locations with interesting stories, but not nearly as interesting as previous games. Quests do feel a lot more satisfying, but still lack a lot of the charm. Some exploration just felt very tedious, like the metro stations for example, but for the most part it was fun. It feels like there was a lot more effort into planning out the map for this game, even if most locations lack the small, intricate details that Fallout 4 locations had. If I did play this again, I imagine I'd enjoy the exploration a lot more than I did when I first played the game. I feel like where this game goes wrong is just the progression system. Contrary to Fallout 4; there is absolutely no pacing whatsoever, so a level 1-2 player could pretty easily explore most of the locations minus just 2 different areas, and hardly have any problem with difficulty whatsoever. The game tried to mitigate this issue; with the introduction of DLC; by introducing tougher enemies, but from what I remember; they would spawn so early on in the game that it is now ridiculously difficult in a lot of segments because these new enemies have ridiculous amounts of health. The DLC is flawed in other ways too; as they just feel thrown into the game because Bethesda wanted to, and have little interaction with the story; if at all. One of them in particular is even more out of place than what I feel "Old World Blues" from Fallout; New Vegas was, and manages to not really tie into the rest of the games DLC either in any meaningful way. The main quest of the game is also pretty unsatisfying, and breaks a lot of game lore by making certain factions act completely different than they would in the western world.

The one shining thing about Fallout 3 is Bethesda's treatment of Vaults. A lot of them have pretty interesting social experiments that feel a lot like what Black Isle and Obsidian did with them. I will admit that I believe them to be just as good at writing the stories behind the Vaults, and that is one thing that I really enjoyed about Fallout 3.

The gameplay is also pretty flawed. The gunplay is really clunky, and there is a complete lack of iron sights which would've helped the game out a bit. Repairing gear is a hassle, because your repair skill is tied to how much you can repair items; instead of just being how efficiently you can repair them, and I always found that frustrating for weapons/armor that break a lot. I mentioned how the wasteland is empty, and feels like Fallout, but it almost feels too empty in some regard, and is not really helped by the fact different locations don't really tie into each other very well.

Fallout 3 is flawed in almost every single metric you can review a game by. It still manages to be somewhat interesting to me in it's own ways, and the story isn't nearly as (subjectively) poorly written as Fallout 4, but it still doesn't manage to be as interesting to me as other Fallout games. Despite all this, I feel like the game had to have done some things right in its time to be critically acclaimed, so it has that going for it. I just feel like it's one of those games that has not aged very well.