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 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?

Oddly, the most fulfilling and simply fun VR game I have played. Poker with lots of silly props that maximize interactivity and being surrounded by other people in a controlled environment where the human gestures and interactions of VR truly shine. Watch people face palm in disappointment, a whole table lean in to see a high stake face up game, getting flipped off, first pumped, hugged or even having your cigarette lit. It's all a lot of simple fun that emulates the actual poker experience so the VR elements aren't just tacked on but essential to the core of the game.

Absolutely loved this game. My two goals as a kid with an SNES were to find a great Dragon Ball Z game and a great Spider-Man game. I could find neither. Sure, everyone loves MAXIMUM CARNAGE but, honestly, I never understood wtf was going on in that game.

Spider-Man on N64 was the first time I felt like Spider-Man in a video game. Actually swinging between buildings was an honest-to-god thrill for me. Wall-climbing, webbing up bad guys. Truly the dream.

But this is also the game that made me realize I owned The Amazing Spider-Man #1 via collectables and that my mom had GIVEN IT AWAY at a garage sale. In the game, you collect comics and can view them in a gallery, where I saw the one I owned and was confused why it was the first in the list. I scrambled to my computer and looked it up and was blown away. I used to read issue #1 all the time! To this day my mom denies I ever owned it purely as a coping mechanism.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.