It's all about the mood.

Animal Well, to me, really distinguished itself with its atmosphere. The almost total absence of music, replaced by a myriad of sounds and wobbles. The sparkling colors and dancing smoke effects moving across the scan-line post process. The weird animal designs and encounters where random otters can jump on screen to mess with your plans.

It also has very interesting power-ups which are all thematically consistent as a toolkit and really creative in how they shape your relationship to the environment.

It's a bit of a bummer that the game offers almost no tools to hunt down all the remaining secrets once the game is over. I would have loved to get to the true ending, but there's no way I'm scouring every inch of a gigantic map (where it's tough to fast-travel) with no pointers to get to that point.

It still is a fantastic little game for what it is and I'll mostly remember it for it's unique art direction and thick ambiance.

For a game that garnered impossible levels of critical acclaim, I have surprisingly little to say about Journey. Journey is a game. You play as this red dude that jumps on things. It looks really pretty. The sand mechanics are impressive. I thought the flying was fun.

My review of Journey sounds like a bulleted list because Journey itself is a checklist of Good Game Design™, for better or for worse. "Good games show, not tell their stories." And so, Journey is a wordless game. "Good Games use gameplay to enhance the player's experience." And so, Journey's gameplay heightens our protagonist's highs and lows. "Good Games present the player with polished and professional art and music" And so, Journey is unbelievably polished. Journey is the closest a game has ever come to being objectively good. Pick the aphorism of your choice, and odds are, Journey already puts it into practice.

This polished design is Journey's greatest strength... but also its greatest weakness. Journey is a great game on paper, but it almost feels more concerned with being a great game on paper than being a great game.

What's missing from Journey is hard to quantify. It's not soul: I have to admit Journey has that in spades. No, whats missing is subtler. It's missing risk. Every single aspect of Journey is so carefully made it is impossible to find fault. And yet, as a result, Journey lacks a certain boldness that is the defining quality of the games I truly love. It's fitting that Journey is modeled after the Hero's Journey--a trope so old it literally originated in the first book ever written.

Metal Gear Solid massively overuses dialogue. OFF's core gameplay is essentially an afterthought. Stephen's Sausage Roll is maybe the ugliest game I've ever played. And yet, Journey isn't half the game these are.

This probably comes across as a negative review. Actually, I really enjoyed playing Journey. I easily recommend it; it's so absurdly refined it's impossible not to. Journey is short, poignant, and beautiful. But, it's not my favorite game. And it probably isn't yours either.

With the heavy saturation of Souls-likes on the market, I've always wanted to see modernisations of From Soft's extensive past. Lunacid is one such game, taking directly from the King's Field and Shadow Tower series. I was unfamiliar with these games, and therefore was able to enjoy a new kind of gameplay experience.

The exploration is incredibly engrossing. Aided by amazing atmosphere and music(shout out Thor High Heels), it's easy to get lost by design, but this means that the player must be attentive at all times, and build a mental map of each sprawling dungeon. It was satisfying to start each level feeling completely aimless only to get a feel and mastery over the layout.

Combat is also surprisingly fun, despite its simplicity. There's a ton of build, weapon and magic options allowing for various approaches, and while battle can start out relatively difficult it's not hard to build up something that can end up shredding them. Again, the progression feels really nice.

That said, sometimes the game was a little too obtuse for its own good. Overlooking a single easy-to-miss ladder in a dungeon can lead to missing half of it as the rest leads to nowhere. Some dungeons are completely optional, yet I had no way of knowing until I exhausted every corner thinking I had missed something. One door that's mandatory for the rest of the game is very confusing on how to open. Needless to say, I had to resort to a guide more times than I'd like.

Overall though, the obtuse parts of the game weren't enough to ruin my enjoyment, and in some ways did add to its mysterious nature somewhat. I loved Akuma Kira's last game Lost in Vivo, and it seems like he's only improving. I'm very much looking forward to a potential sequel to this game, or trying out some of its inspirations.

What if you wanted to go fast but God said you have to stop and find the collectibles?

This game was built with speed in mind, and you're set off to figure things out for yourself. Learning movement tech as you keep playing is actually satisfying and you can eventually chain moves together to skip large gaps, and complete stages much faster. The main character makes use of a yo-yo, offering a double jump, a dash forward through the air, and the ability to spin around the yo-yo while it stays in the air after a dash. This lets you carry the momentum as you swing forward, like choosing where to place a rope at any time. You can also drop down onto the yo-yo and ride it like a wheel.

The stages are mostly fine, not many of them stand out to me except the penguin world which was my favourite. It's a decent game which can be played casually, HOWEVER, there's bugs everywhere. Getting stuck in terrain, falling through the floor, the game literally crashing after clearing stages, those all happened to me.

There's also a score system, but it's kind of pointless since you can do things like bounce on a platform 100 times to get a 100 combo.

God of War meets the order with a little bit of souls.
Very good game. Nice gameplay, very good story and characters.
Graphics are also very good and doesn't have huge problems on PC.

The main problem of the game is that theres no variaety of enemies. youll figth the same type of enemies until the end of the game.

But overall everything about the game is good enough.

Okay, let’s do a short story version of what I thought of the game and then, if you feel like reading way too specific stuff about this game, you can keep reading for the long version, because there is a lot to say about this game, both good and bad.
Short version: the strongest point of this game are its story, characters (and voice acting), historical setting and visuals. The weakest point, for me, was combat. I found combat boring, repetitive and slow. If it weren’t for the characters, their dialogues and the overall story, I don’t know if I would have completed the game, because gameplay itself can get boring after a few hours.
Now for the long version, let’s go with specific stuff that I liked:
• The visuals were amazing. I don’t mean just realistic graphics (which it has), but also the designs of the enviroments, the houses, the landscapes, the characters themselves, their outfits and accessories; the objects you find lying around, everything. The interiors of houses and buildings in general were beautiful. Every time I entered a room I kinda lost myself for a bit just looking around.
• The dynamic between Red and Antea (both in gameplay and in the storyline) was great. It was fun to switch between characters, and it was fun to hear them talk to each other.
• The gun/rifle was fun to use in combat. I think it was one of the few things that I liked about the fighting in this game.
• I loved the story and themes of this game. The game deal with topics like love, death, loss, betrayal, violence, grief in a way that I really liked, because you feel all of that through the characters. As I said, for my experience, the story carried the game. If it wasn’t for the story, maybe I would have drop the game before finishing it. I played a few of the side quest that had very good stories as well. I because of the repetitive gameplay, I only played a few of all the side quest available.
Sadly, the game has a lot of things that I didn’t like. Some of this are small things that don’t represent a real problem for the game as a whole, and others are more important.
• I found the combat very boring. At first, I thought it was because I needed to upgrade my gear, learn new abilities, learn new mechanics later on in the game, etc. But at around 10 hours into the game, I was just tired of the fighting parts. The game doesn’t try to hide the influence of “God of War” (2018). But while in that game the combat feels very real and dynamic, and fast and actually rewarding, in Banishers it feels slow, repetitive and very inefficient. In every enemy encounter I found myself taking way too long to defeat them, but not because they were hard or challenging to fight (that would have actually been great), but because the damage was ridiculously low, even after upgrading the weapons and character. It took me forever to defeat the most simple foes, after hitting and hitting buttons. The boss fights were a bit better, maybe because they look different, or maybe because you had to focus in just one enemy. The only thing that made the combat good for moments were the interaction and witch between characters. I think they could have explore that mechanic a lot more. Add more combos, more weapons, etc.
• There is not “bestiary” where you can look the different types of enemies. Maybe because there is not a lot of enemy types. But I would have like to have a section where you could read about the enemies, maybe even combat tips for each of them, and stuff like that.
• Played it on XBOX Series X and I had about three or four crashes in the middle of the game or cinematics. One of the glitches came right after I defeated “The Beast”, so I had to play that boss fight again, because the game wasn’t saved before crashing. Not a big deal, but a bit annoying.
• The compass on top of the screen is just bad. I don’t know, maybe this point is my fault, but there were a lot of times when I was running around trying to guess where the compass was actually trying to make me go, because it kept moving a lot, even walking in straight line. So I had to open the map, see the destination and try to go that way.
• In the final part of the game, it feels like they were trying to stretch it maybe? In one of the last quests you have to go from point A to point B several times, just to start a dialogue that sends you to another point. This isn’t always a bad thing, but I found the map not very fun to explore after a few hours.
• The game probably has a few different endings (I didn’t google this, but I think it does, because you have important choices all throughout the game) and I’d like to see them all, but I don’t see myself playing this game again, so I will probably look them up on Youtube.

Nothing frustrates me more lately than decent games plagued with all the unnecessary bloat from those "AAA" titles, games with decent ideas, stories, settings, characters, but terrible pacing hurt by the decisions to make the game 5 times longer than it should be.

Banishers is one of those games for me, and as much as I want to like it, I just can't fully enjoy it, because it feels like it just WANTS to waste my time.
This is an obvious AA game trying to do so much, but for what.

It has a great premise, great characters, interesting story, nice visuals, atmosphere, etc. But did it really need to have a painfully weak and basic gear system, upgrades, souls-like stats, witcher-senses, gathering resources, currencies, cleansing totems, corruption, chests, having metroidvania elements at it's basic form "just teleport back later with a new ability and get some loot".

Did it really need to have, I swear to God, a THOUSAND ledges and tight spaces you slowly climb and crawl onto every few STEPS that are there just to add a couple of hours of "playtime" in the long run. Countless things to shoot on a map, collectibles to get, fetching to do, but WHY..

The devs wasted so much resources to bloat the game and it's playtime, but at the same time the core-gameplay is just.. lacking. The combat reminds of the GoW, and yet it's so clunky, and shallow. The enemy variety is non-existent, as you fight the same 4 enemies for hours and hours. There's no interesting gear or accessories. No depth.

The game isn't that bad, it's just "okay", but it could've been so much better if it was a more linear 10-15 hours experience focused on it's strengths, instead of all the bloat that we see in so many games nowadays that try to be big just for the sake of it.

This was a great game marred by a lot of presentation issues.

The game feel and level design was so, so good ! Finally a win for Ubisoft.

A lot of visual things kind of annoyed me though. The animation is very appealing most of the time, but then completely lacking in even basic lip syncing. A lot of visual glitches pop up in spots as well. I also felt the character designs left a lot to be desired at times.

The music was just flat out bad, or felt entirely missing most of the time. The last boss fight is almost done in complete silence which is so awkward and jarring.

Finally, the story did nothing for me. There's a reason why Metroid chooses super simple premises and focuses almost exclusively on gameplay.

A very fun surprise from Ubisoft in the end, and a good way to revitalize the Prince of Persia franchise. It just lacked a polish I hope a future title will bring !

Armored Core VI really grew on me through the course of its runtime.

I wasn't sold at first on the short missions, repetitive destruction of simple enemies and cold atmosphere. But then, by some sleight of hand magic trick, I starting understanding the controls more. I started figuring out the customization. I got that all situations can be tackled in an almost limitless number of ways, that it's like jazz improv to adapt to each moment in a flash. I understood that you can sell back parts for the same price you bought them, thus encouraging experimentation. I found that replaying older missions can net you extra money and parts if you're ever stuck, or want to test out a build.

And so, everything clicked and I became totally obsessed. Add to that a fun story about corporate greed and dehumanizing hyper-technology, and you've got a tight package of mecha-sci-fi, ultra-polished bombastic goodness.

I'm officially a fan of Armored Core now, and can't wait to see what comes next after this !