Doesn't age. Absolutely perfect. I played this for the first time during COVID. I got bored and picked up one of those PS1 minis everyone hated and modded it to add more games. Really a great box! I played through a bunch of classics, just sampling in a demo disk kind of way and approached SotN with some trepetation. It has a big reputation and I have heard it doesn't really hold up.

Turns out that was a fool speaking. This completely holds up. The only thing that doesn't is the weird abilities that use the fighting game style button combos to execute. That was such a 90s mechanic. No one liked that. Hence, it never reappearing in later games.

Beautiful design, great music, stunning sprites, bad story. This has it all. But most crucially, the power fantasy is strong here. There is nothing more satisfying than struggling through various insanely bullshit areas that you then always try to avoid only to eventually return and just turn these screens of enemies into swiss cheese. This game infamously has some bonkers broken weapons from a balance standpoint but thank you, SotN. Thank you. More games need god-tier end game weapons, because at that point you are a god and you should feel like one. I rotated between my arsenal to scale the difficulty to my liking. It's a winning feeling to turn a challenging game into something that challenges you on your terms, not its. A sense of true mastery. Very few games understand that.

A pretty brilliant game. It is the first attempt to boil down Symphony of the Night's new direction for the series into handheld, but the limitations that come with that mean they still kept one foot in the old Castlevania design direction. It's very much a compromised work, a bastard child of both veins of Castlevania, but to me it's the best of both worlds.

Of course, Iga would take later GBA games and make them look and feel exactly like SotN did on PS1, but the simplistic design of CotM makes it stand out as its own thing entirely (not to mention it helps visual clarity). Movement of different and takes some getting used to, like the old games you hop vertically more than leap horizontally. There are fewer secrets to discover and the game uses a basic "card" system for upgrades and builds. It's all very much in the experimentation mode.

But there are some really cool bosses that we will see reused later (giant ball of corpses, anyone?) and the card system is ripe for exploiting. And what is a Castlevania game if not to cheese to the maximum extent of your ability? This game is prime cheese, in every interpretation of that statement.

Beautiful game in so many ways. Rich with exploration, satisfying combat and some great puzzles. Personally, I am not a fan of the uber-obtuse puzzles and don't have the facilities to ever decode a language so at a certain point, puzzles become an obstacle that is not worth even approaching. Is this going to be a "fun" puzzle to solve, or is it going to require me to spend hours to days of my time deciphering something? I guess the difficulty spikes in this game are full of that: it can be difficult to gauge how radically this game will change in a moment-to-moment. Gameplay-wise, that didn't bother me. I found most of the encounters difficult but fair. I think they screwed up parrying, which was a mistake, but I don't really parry often in games anyway so I just ignored it.

The biggest thing here is that this is a GAME, first and foremost. You are thrust into the world and left to figure it out through your own exploration. You are playing immediately. The art style and the music are so amazing, the world is extremely soothing, despite being so hostile. It feels very good to unlock a new area or discover a shortcut cleverly disguised by the game's design. The manual mechanic was lovely, and the amazing detail in how they rendered the printed pages felt so real and detailed especially as you zoom in. So well done.

Knowing it's made by a very small team it's understandable this is so short, but I will say for a "soulslike" game, it was pretty disappointing there were only really 3-4 bosses in the whole thing. Still, a game of great polish.

I played this as an antidote to Cyberpunk, and while initially the storytelling and world were so much richer I felt great, I quickly felt an amazing sense of opinion whiplash.

I've tried three times to play this game, and three times I have bounced. The reason: the combat just outright sucks complete ass. A 100 hour RPG with terrible combat? I could get past that if the RPG systems were deep and rewarding or the sense of adventure was great. While the traversal has its strengths, ultimately you are just wandering a generic fantasy environment looking for bad loot in sacs for most of the game.

The combat is too central to this game to be written off. It's impossible to enjoy. Even the biggest fans admit it's broken and simplistic. The way Geralt's animations work with attacks being determined based on distance to enemies makes it absolutely impossible to anticipate exactly how he will attack leading to an extremely unsatisfying flow for combat.

Even movement feels awful with that GTA-style accelerated movement where you turn like a drunken sailor. At the end of the day, a game that feels this AWFUL to play is a waste of time beyond a few hours. No matter how good the writing is. If the writing is the ONLY redeeming quality I struggle to see how this is so beloved. But yes, the writing is good.

The ultimate irony for me is that after blasting Cyberpunk, I find myself drawn back to it, because while its narrative is dogshit, the gameplay is actually satisfying and isn't that the whole point?

I played this at launch on Stadia (!) and now that they "fixed" the game I picked it up again on PS5 to see if I wanted Phantom Liberty.

Took me about 4 hours to come to the conclusion that, no, this game actually still sucks. You can change police AI all you want, but when a game is fundamentally mediocre, it will always be mediocre.

The real issues with this game is an identity crisis at its core. It's neither a satisfying RPG nor a chaotic GTA-style open world game. It fails at both. What it excels at is gunplay. Guns feel good, it's responsive and snappy. You can get a great arsenal of weapons. That is great, and when you are doing side quests and roaming around, the game is a simple joy.

One of my biggest gripes with open-world games is their reluctance to give you freedom. They promise it to you like a carrot on a string, but so often they will hide quest lines behind main-story progression gates or even lock out skill trees or abilities or what have you. That is an insane philosophy to me. So, colour me shocked when I decide, fine, I'll do some story missions just so I can get the ball rolling but I'm locked into mind-numbing conversation missions for hours on end. Almost the entirety of Act 1 is sitting on various couches listening to various plots and occasionally chiming in with dialogue options of no consequence. The writing is awful. It basically feels as though you got together with friends for some table-top Cyberpunk and your DM ran a story. At least then it's a bunch of friends just shooting the shit. This tries way too hard to be BLADE RUNNER to be let off the hook. This is just embarrassing to watch, and it's embarrassing to play. Literal hours go by where you just sit and listen to faux-tough-guy shit. The cut content is shoved in your face, my favourite being when your little spider-drone has to sneak through hotel rooms but rather than control the drone as is obviously intended, you are just the camera on the wall. You scan vents to tell it where to go. Riveting. Uh oh! A maid is in the way in this room! Catch your breath, player! Get that blood pressure down, we'll figure out this high-stakes problem! Scan that TV so they look the other way! Wow, that was close. What a thrill!

I installed The Witcher 3 again and wow, the difference is IMMEDIATE. That game doesn't even get going right away, but you immediately get put into the world, the dialogue is in a different league entirely and even the simple choice of shaking down the first guy you meet, or not, is the game communicating that it's going to be a game of player choice and agency. Cyberpunk is not that. Never was, and never will be.

I sequence broke the shit out of this game so by the end when the expected me to go to all this stuff they added a line along the lines of "oh, you did that already? Amazing!" and continued on.

Yes, some dramatic punch is lost when you stumble upon something that is supposed to be a big reveal but thank you Nintendo. Thank you so much for not giving a shit. The decision philosophy of this game accepts that we might spoil their plot and progression but they are willing to accept that in the name of freedom. Every single other open world game would block you or give you a "you're not able to do that right now" finger-wagging. These last two Zelda games have taken gameplay freedom to a militant extreme, and the sheer polish and consistency of that experience has become a humiliation to every other game. It has been very difficult for me to go straight to another game after this and BotW. There are few things in gaming I hate more than that initial 3-5 hours of an open world game where there lock you in to stupid tutorials and limited access to your abilities because they assume you won't figure anything out on your own. Zelda has its tutorial island but even it basically begs you to break it, if you can.

I have to say, the building in this game is just beautiful. I was really worried initially because I had no interest in Minecraft style base building and resource gathering. By making the building oriented around exploration and creating tools to help you navigate the world it encourages expression and innovation rather than just hunkering down and never doing anything. The amazing flexibility of building encourages you to try and solve things again the developers wishes, and that permission is absolutely beautiful. This is a game that puts its full trust in the player.

Oh look, another Sony exclusive that is a carbon copy of the previous PS4 hit. Remarkable.

Say what you will about Microsoft's follies, their games are starting to look more appealing by virtue of being unique experiences. Not just "that game you liked 4 years ago, now with raytracing." My prediction is Sony's safe-mode approach is going to eventually backfire as we wait longer and longer for essentially the same game over and over. The generational leaps are getting smaller but the waits longer. After Horizon, God of War and now this, it's getting really boring.

Ok, with all that console war bullshit aside, I still ended up liking this game. It's just fun to play on a basic level and I thought the Symbiote powers were really cool and it satisfied my love of Spider-Man. There is also one section of the game that is so fucking awesome it made the game for me. I won't spoil it but... it made me a happy man child.

I didn't care that much for two characters that basically play the same, although I found it more fun to be Miles, I guess because his animations are more fun. This is still a knock-off Arkham game. I had numerous moments wishing Rocksteady would have just made another one of those. Better atmosphere, better combat and cooler integration of tertiary characters. It was cool to see Gotham brimming with strange heroes and villains. Most of the side quests here allude to characters but are nothing more than enemy bases or fetch quests. Why?

And for the love of God, no one plays a Spider-Man game to ride a bicycle or walk around a research facility or be Mary Jane. We didn't in the first game and still don't want to do that. BUT there is one horror section with MJ that almost forgives it, but still, I just can't understand why they force this stuff upon us. The writing isn't that good, sorry folks. No need to subject us to this.

Swinging feels great, and the web wings were much appreciated.

I vividly remember standing in EB Games with Knights of the Old Republic in my left hand and Doom 3 in my right. I had only enough money saved up to pick up one game for the foreseeable future and this was a real game-time decision. I had walked into the store with the intention of picking up Doom, having spent many months pouring over the unbelievable graphics in screenshots on GameSpy and wherever. But when I was there, scanning the shelves, the good word of mouth of KotOR stopped me.

I stood deliberating for a solid twenty minutes. I remember standing there so long I became aware of how long I was standing there and how ridiculous it was. Just choose one already! But I had this anxiety that whichever one I chose would be the wrong one.

Eventually, perhaps just fatigued by indecision, I put Doom back. I remember the hesitation. I came here for it, after all. I played the demo and loved it! I lived for Doom II! I fucked up.

Of course, when I got home and installed KotOR that feeling was forever washed away. This was, and still is, one of my all time greatest gaming decisions. This game was revolutionary to me. The impact of my decisions, the weight of my relationships with my party, the writing, the builds! Developing Jedi powers was incredibly satisfying. I remember going down the Dark Side — when I was younger I'd always do the evil path because initially being allowed to be the villain was completely novel. I recall how satisfying those powers were and how I felt bad for betraying everyone. I thought the twist was awesome, and I remember the evil ending was lame. Having the power to double cross people or sabotage missions and develop bonds with my party changed a lot about how I thought about RPGs - yes these elements are present in other D&D based games but BioWare's cinematic approach cut deeper. I felt like I was in a really interesting part of Star Wars lore.

Now I have this game on my phone.

Better than I expected, which in turn made it more of a disappointment; the world is so beautifully realized with amazing environmental details. Hogwarts is really beautiful to wander around in. But it's quickly clear this is about as engaging as that Matrix Unreal 5 tech demo. You clip through other students, everyone stands around cluelessly, everything you can interact with serves no purpose or offers you a mindless puzzle to solve for nothing other than a piece of trivia--errm.. lore, as the kids call it.

The combat is surprisingly engaging. It takes a working formula and doesn't change it, and that's fine. It's just too bad so much of the game is running back and forth from lifeless room to lifeless village talking to lifeless characters and doing nothing of consequence. Had they embraced that this is a SCHOOL and that there are all kinds of strange secrets hidden in its walls, this could have been great. But instead, it's made to satisfy everyone in the possible world who might ever see it, so it's braindead simple. And so much of it is spent doing fuck all.

Quite a bad game, especially compared to the other options out there. I think about how this responds to Breath of the Wild which blew the first Horizon out of the water in 2017 in terms of exploration and combat and atmosphere. This game tries to adopt the parasail tool to allow you to glide over the terrain much like Breath of the Wild - but unlike Breath of the Wild which allowed you to open it with a satisfying "pop" by just hitting a button, offering fast maneuvering and flexibility, Horizon needs a long-hold. That, to me, is the crux of everything wrong with the spirit of this game. Maybe it's on theme? Everything is mechanical to the point of sucking the life out of it. The gameplay's sluggish movements, Aloy's magnetic sticking to ledges... it all creates an on-rails-like experience that is the antithesis of the free-form exploration of something like Breath of the Wild that used actually game MECHANICS to make something unique and fun to explore. While Horizon, with its long holds and insanely convoluted menus and items and pouches and sockets, is basically a series of guided paths that it funnels you through giving you some limited form of freedom and experimentation, but all within the confines of the tools it wants YOU to use and places it wants YOU to climb, rather than things that YOU want IT to provide for you.

Taking it a step further, the idiot logic of the game also includes Aloy - a character so annoying she can't help herself but spoil her own puzzles. She is faced with a world of mystery and yet if she sees a mysterious growth on a door she is confident within a second of seeing it that she can't do anything about it. Nevermind that she is an unstoppable force in this world, but this door is too much, she's decided. Of course, she's just telling the player we don't have the tool to open it yet, but her constantly yammering about anything and everything in front of you removes any semblance of atmosphere from the world, as Aloy always holds this tone of bemused impatience. Her story bends over backwards to insist it needs to be told in order to justify this game existing but it's basically just one big McGuffin: chasing a dragon from one place to the next dressed up in some of the corniest "lore" given to a property of this budget. The fact that people attest to this game's world as being compelling is just mystifying to me. They want to make a TV show? Of this? Even efforts to voice-act even trivial conversations actually becomes another burden, not a boon, because the writers can't help themselves but write and write and write for the most benign interactions. Every chore in this game truly does indeed feel like a chore.

There is also a personal element to this: I am, like many people, just tired of opening a map and seeing an onslaught of icons telling me that there is some item to pick up somewhere and I should go there to see it. The world is lavish, and yet completely without personality. Once again to go back to Breath of the Wild: a game with much more limited graphical horsepower and yet it's beautiful and, most importantly, I can actually see things. Horizon, similar to the first game, is so littered with particle effects, sun flares, foliage, mist, ruins that it is a visual mess. Everything is cluttered. The low camera makes it hard to see vistas unless you find the designated "look at the pretty view" spots, riding a mount creates a claustrophobic blur on the edges of frame to, I guess, simulate the pure intense adrenaline of riding.. kinda fast. It's just a big ol dump of colours and textures.

And then, at the end of the day, this really just isn't that fun to play. The AI is atrocious, making it tediously easy to destroy a gang of enemies. When Aloy is hit it doesn't really register so you'll be surprised when you discover you are low on health. I have had many encounters where the AI breaks and the robots just sit around while I wail on them. Melee is unremarkable. And too much of the game is spent digging through a skill tree that is... quite literally... extremely wide and but insanely shallow. You have a half-dozen "options" for what to invest skill points in, and very few of them make you feel stronger or give you new fun abilities to experiment with or change how you play. A lot of it is passive or, frankly, just useless. And then there is the whole armour modding system that puts God of War Ragnarok to shame with its overly complex nature for a game that is brain-dead stupid easy to begin with.

In conclusion, this game is an expensive Big Mac - looks good from afar, but once you've got your hands on it, it's just a reheated mess; a real disappointment.

God of War 2018 was my favourite game that year, in fact I even called it my favourite PS4 game period. Playing God of War Ragnarok was an interesting experience, the immediate tinge of disappointment crept through me and slowly made me reconsider my praise for the first game. Was it really the best game on the PS4? Or was it just surprisingly great? That's the impact of expectations: I had no idea how the redesigned GoW experience would play, and was enthralled by it. The burden of expectations put onto Ragnarok made less of an impact, but also made me lose some of that rose-tinted memory of the first game.

I don't necessarily need a game to always leap ahead of its predecessor, but Ragnarok is so buried in GoW 2018s design that it took me several hours to acquaint myself with how its cumbersome, bloated menu system worked, remember how the abilities played into combat and the general flow of combat. This game wants to act like nearly 4 years haven't passed since the last game, and while the gameplay continuation can be a stumble, the story is worse: the game will namedrop people, places and fights that the characters remember easily but are only faint memories for me. The "recap" in the main menu is a sad, incomplete recapturing of events and did little to help me reconnect with this world or characters.

The first game had a simple story of father-son bonding and overcoming personal burdens and barriers. Couple that with aggressive combat and epic setpieces, it was a special experience. The sequel is so steeped in continuity and lore that it becomes a slog of organizing Norse mythology and figures. The first act of the game struggles to answer what exactly we are doing here and what our motivation is really. The game also takes one of the most despised plays from the single-player playbook of breaking up the story content by forcing us to play as a different, less powerful character at certain intervals that lock you out of side content for the duration. I don't understand why developers do this. In Spider-Man, no one wants to play as Mary Jane, they want to fly around the city as Spider-Man. In God of War, no one wants to be anyone other than Kratos tearing monsters apart.

I sound quite harsh, and I am because I consider this game to be a massive disappointment, but overall I still enjoyed it. The combat is still satisfying, although the illusion of depth faded a bit for me this time around, making me a bit more aware that the combat, while still satisfying, isn't as complex as it lets on. I wish that creating a "build" meant something outside of the last 5% of the game. The diversity of areas was great and the natural dialogue between companions worked. I felt that the game became more fun in the last third, when I didn't feel railroaded by blocked pathways or limited armour and weapon perk selections. At this point I enjoyed just exploring the world and found satisfaction in that.

I consider the story a critical failure, while the themes that the game concludes with are nice and there are good character moments, the scale of the story smothers the simple interactions that made the first game so memorable. The developers seemed more focused on addressing criticisms of the first game than really expanding and stretching the imagination of the world. For example: this game has much more enemy variety. Yay, I guess. While that is appreciated, I hardly considered that a critical flaw in the previous game, but some might disagree. Whereas the first game introduced the retrievable axe which was such a novel, satisfying and cool game mechanic it made the entire experience feel so unique and polished. There is nothing in Ragnarok that attempts to pull in truly new ideas like that. This is a game of simply refining what was already working, rather than taking even the smallest risk of its own.

Finally, after all these years, played this on my Switch. Kind of baffles me, as a kid I would rent absolute garbage for my N64 but I always passed this up. Why? The mind of a child can not be rationalized.

A lot of this holds up. There is something nice about a game where you enter a level and aren't racing to some boss. You just explore and collect things. You start out knowing nothing of the environment and eventually master each stage. The only criticism for that is the overworld, or hub, or whatever. It's very confusing and tedious to backtrack through and having puzzles and stages in different places? Get the fuck outta here.

There is some frustration and tedium here. Naturally. It is an N64 game after all. Missing a jump because you were fighting the camera can be a big setback and you have to wonder what the logic of punishing players with damage for missing the aerial dive bomb attack. Thank the Lord for save states. I'm a grown ass man, I am not going to climb the stage four times because I slipped off. Nope. This especially goes for the bullshit last boss. Rare made fun games, they made awful bosses. That was one of the things that killed Donkey Kong 64. BK has just one at the end, but she certainly does suck. The controls are not tight and responsive enough to make it enjoyable. It just feels like you are drunkenly swaying around trying to survive. Oh you better believe that's a save scum.

Overall, a lot of charm and satisfaction in just collecting stuff. Simple is good.

Simply an impossible game to enjoy if you didn't play it when it was new. I can sit back and appreciate how brilliant the aesthetic and writing and cutscenes and music all are, but when you get down to it, it's just so obtuse it's like climbing a mountain that promises once you conquer it you might find fun on the other side. I tried for several days to endure that and eventually realized it's just not worth it. Menu digging and unbelievably incomprehensible battle system number crunching. Room after room of single dull enemy encounters. Nuggets of good ideas like a primitive VATS kind of system and a cool story and world but unfortunately you need a time machine to go back to the year 2000 for this if we're being totally honest.