The fox imagery at the end made me cry.
So far this and Portal 2 are the only videogames that have made me cry, I don't know what that says about me.

Incredibly simple but clever storytelling, though the length of the individual chapters does hinder it. The ending is honestly fantastic and goes so well with the slightly eerie feeling of being watched that permeates through the entire first half of the game.
If this was 1-2 hours shorter it would've honestly been a 5 star game, but as it stands the length holds it back ever so slightly.

First off: Borderlands has always had crass and insensitive 'jokes', but calling tribal enemies "savages" is downright insulting and disrespectful towards the mocking and suffering indigenous tribes have faced.

Regarding the actual DLC content: It's pretty decent. The first area feels taken right out of Dr. Zed's Zombie Island, but everything else has a distinct feel to it and the new enemy types are welcome additions.

It does not overstay it's welcome, but it does suffer from issues other DLC's have (abrupt ending, lack of interesting new ideas, some bad sidequests). However, it's a pretty enjoyable 3-4 hours.

Broken Age has fantastic characters and art direction, but once act 2 starts the gameplay quickly becomes convoluted and frustrating to the point that it takes away from the beauty of the rest of the game.

I've never had a puzzle game experience where I correctly did part B of a puzzle but it just acted like it was wrong because I had not done part A yet. This led to a ton of just wandering around and exhaustively clicking on things because why would I go back and try a solution the game explicitly told me was wrong an hour ago?

Then there's the solutions that just go against basic game design. The solution to the snake puzzle was doing nothing because I just had to guess I wouldn't actually get choked out? This is especially ludicrous because Shay remarks something along the lines of "Yeah this is going nowhere..." after which I left the second time I went there (first time I blew the horn to get the snake off, which further cements the idea you need something to deal with the snake). I figured you'd have to put on the clothing that the sad girl in the trees makes for you or something along those lines but NOPE!
Just stand still for an unnessecarily long time, with the game actively telling you to not do that. It's maddening!

The story also goes kind of off the rails once part 2 starts with the whole ethnic cleansing and hidden civilisation thing. They didn't feel like satisfying pay-offs to the mysteries set up in the first act, and a lot of the explanations attempting to glue together the increasingly wonky story feel a bit flimsy.

Don't get me wrong though, I do not hate Broken Age. There really is a lot to love here. Vella is one of my favourite protagonists in video game history, and Shay has a lot of great moments too. The side characters are genuinely wonderful and help make the world feel more realized and fun to explore. Vella's Act 1 does a great job at hooking the audience in, and Shay's first act creates some interesting plotlines too with his whole obsessed robotic parents thing.

I suppose I'm just kind of in the same boat as I was with Oxenfree, where you can just see the potential of the product in front of you and have to painfully watch your enjoyment degrade over time as the gameplay devolves into frustration or boredom and the story starts to frantically overexplain itself.

I would give Act 1 around a 4/5 stars, but I cannot in good conscience give Act 2 and the rest much higher than a 2 or 2.5/5 stars. So I'll settle on 3 stars. Glad I played it for all the great jokes and characters, but ultimately I'll remember my growing dissapointment with it the most I think.

Has the reverse problems of the first game. Gameplay is much improved over xenoblade 1, but a majority of the cast and the story just falls so flat that this only barely squeezes into a 3.5/5. I also just do not care for the gratuitous fanservice (especially of characters that are supposed to be children!!) and just how generally horny this game is. Many of the blades were more often annoying than charming as well, and wow do some of their designs suck (I'm looking at you Dahlia). Combat is solid but still has some jank to it, mainly the many moments of dead time before you get your builds going where you just stand around waiting for an animation to finish.

I've written entire rants about the story and its flaws to my friends (spoiler: it is not that it is slow-paced, I didn't mind that) but to shorten it as much as I can my main issue is how much of the final 10 hours and the climax of the story rely on caring about the villains and caring about pyra/mythra, and I just had neither experience. I think the idea of having 'reluctant' villains (e.g. Malos, who is basically being mind-controlled, and Jin) is interesting, but it makes it so that you spend the last ten-fifteen hours chasing people who you know are probably going to switch sides anyways, or in the case of Malos, are just being mind-controlled by the Praetor because Malos is not allowed to be an individual. It is thematically interesting, but narratively unsatisfying. We needed a more direct, consistent and personal threat akin to Metalface to patch up this hole because now it felt like I played 50+ hours just to see Malos do exactly what the Praetor wanted anyways. Speaking of the praetor, what a wasted character. He is all vague and mysterious the whole game, then shows up for the climax to become a squid monster and then dies. It just was not satisfying. As far as Pyra/Mythra are concerned, the main driving force behind the plot, who cares man. Pyra says basically nothing of note or value for 30+ hours, and by that point its far too late for me to start caring, and Mythra is fun but gets far too less screentime in comparison to Pyra. Mainly it just feels like these characters are here as bait for horny people, and I audibly groaned every time the camera angled itself to get a better look at their chest or butt.

Some stuff I really liked: Nia, Vandham, Morag and Zeke are fantastic, worldbuilding is great and the game looks beautiful, and there's like one major scene with Nia near the end that I adore. Also I like the cutscenes in which Rex uses Vandham's weapons its so baller and it just activates the neurons in my brain.

Seemed like my kind of game but the gimmicks are way too surface level and often end up boring rather than zany or fun.

The best levels are locked challenge versions of old ones, which is a shame and I would have much preferred these challenge versions to be the actual levels and the crown maps to be standalone levels.

The gimmicks also are surprisingly unimaginative for a game that's completely build it around it; especially early on a lot of the levels are "Hit unexpected thing instead of the ball!"

Admittedly I did smile when it flashed the words BALLS. in front of me in full caps at one point, sue me.

Genuinely the best storytelling of all the Borderlands games and a great cast rivalling that of Borderlands The Pre-Sequal.

In a lot of ways this game is the opposite of the other Borderlands games. While the gameplay is nothing to write home about and I don't feel my choices mattered all that much, save for the final fight, the story, visuals, humor and characters make this game shine for me and kept me very much engaged (whereas with the mainline entries, sometimes the gameplay was all that kept me slogging through those stories).

I feel I should make a special note about the humor in this game. Borderlands is (in)famous for its crude and repetitive humor, and this game does away with it completely. Most of the jokes land and I found myself laughing out loud on several different occassions (especially in chapter 1 & 3).

There's so also so many little touches that make this game more fun. A lot of references from all over the series are put into this game, without taking up much space in the actual story, which are just a fun and welcome addition.
I think that's the best way to describe this game; its just so fun. Hell, this game has a little interaction between Gortys and Loaderbot which you can accidentally stumble upon where Gortys questions why a mystery person's design has a tie going from his neck into his pants, which made me look closer at Rhys' design for the first time and yup it really does have a tie going into his pants. That's such a cute and funny little touch while remaining totally in line with his character.

Honestly, this belongs up there with TellTales' best games (Walking Dead S1 & 2, The Wolf Among Us), I wish I could give this more than 4 stars but the (lack of) gameplay really does start to hinder the game after a while.

Well damn. Now I want a Borderlands game with the gameplay from 3 and the storytelling from Tales. We might actually get the masterpiece people claim Borderlands 2 is.

Adorable little game. You can beat it in just 3 hours at the time of making this review, but I'm sure more worlds will follow.

As someone who doesn't like roguelites all that much I'm really liking this auto-battler/roguelite hybrid-genre Vampire Survivors has spawned.

Some small gripes: Even on 'Wicked' difficulty the game still feels a bit too easy most of the time, and sometimes when nearing a corner it can definitely feel like you are fighting with the controls when your characters start spinning in all kinds of directions.

But the game (as of writing this review) is still in BETA, so i'm very excited to see where it goes!

This game has the worst first impression with that horrible lizard boss, but from the second boss on its short and pretty enjoyable.

Swinging into bosses with the grapple to crit them with your sword for a good chunk of their health is strangely satisfying.
You can beat it in an hour, and I had my fun with it. Won't ever come back to it but as a free game it's just a silly little adventure.

Also someone check on the guy reading Moby Dick, he seemed to be struggling quite a bit.

Compared to the other 3D Mario platformers, It's not very complex or innovating. But the game does a great job at introducing new elements and ideas with every level, while never becoming overwhelming.

My main issue with some of the other 3D Mario's is that in their quest for unique and zany platforming they often create levels and worlds that end up more frustrating than fun. Mario 3D Land, in contrast, has quite safe level design. It never reaches the highs of 64 and Galaxy, but it never reaches their lows either. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing.

Furthermore, while the lack of an interesting post-game is unfortunate, I still appreciate the main game very much for what it is: A relaxing, pleasant and charming Mario platformer.

Here we are in 2022 and it's still a great game despite shit support from Valve and all the bots running around.

So much charm and personality is put into the different characters, taunts, weapons and maps, that it's hard not to love them. Besides, the game is strangely well balanced with most 'unbalanced' weapons usually landing in the 'worse-than-stock' part of game balance rather than the 'overpowered' part, which is quite pleasant and surprising for a game which hasn't seen a major update for about 6 years.

The community is... I don't know what to say about the community. On the one hand many of the people who still play TF2 are fantastic, fun and casual enjoyers who really enhance the (casual) experience. On the other hand, this game has some of the most immature, blatantly racist and weird people I've ever met. There really doesn't seem to be an inbetween with TF2 players.

At the end of the day, the fact that this game still has such an active community speaks for itself. This game is pretty good.

[Part 1 Review:]
There's a surprising amount of jank for such a short puzzle game, which lead to a lot of aimless wandering trying to figure out what the next piece of the puzzle was, especially due to the game not registering me picking up items (I walked over that tree branch 10 different times before suddenly it registered as an item).

However, the game has fantastic presentation. The game has a great eerie artstyle, the deaths are surprisingly brutal, and the soundtrack is subtle but adds to the overall ominous feeling. A great little flash game, and makes me wish it had an extended, polished release on steam.

Unravel Two is a fantastic co-op experience, but I'm not going to argue it is some kind of misunderstood masterpiece.

The story is almost incomprehensible, and the gameplay rather repetitive, but when your primary mechanic is so satisfying to use it almost doesn't matter.
The little flips and animations the characters do are so charming and fun, it was hard for me to get bored of them despite the rather repetitious puzzles and level design.

This game is awesome and relaxing at the same time, and it's the perfect length to boot. I kinda love it. Even if it isn't all that impressive technically, it nails the fundamentals so well that any criticisms I do have feel incredibly minor.

Decided to update my reviews for my VHM playthroughs in Chronological order for the story. [A save editor was used to play as a new character; Vault Hunter mode being locked to the same character is such a lame restriction.]

Playthrough 1: Brick [Rating: 3.5/5 stars]
VHM / Playthrough 2: Roland
While I'm keeping my original score of a 3.5 for the first playthrough, I have to say I enjoyed this playthrough a lot more!
The huge open areas which hampered my enjoyment a lot in the first playthrough felt a lot more doable since we knew to let the sidequests stack up in these areas before getting them all done in one sweep.
I really enjoyed the aspect of building my Skill Tree, which is much more relevant in this second playthrough than the first (half the upgrades in the first playthrough were just "More HP/Shield/Ammo", and now I was really able to mess around with the more gimmicky upgrades; Healing my teammate by shooting them being a particular stand-out).

Some of the flaws were not really alleviated though unfortunately:
- Audio logs and dialogue still bugged out which was frustrating.
- Music is largely bland (Skag Gully slaps though)
- Weapon progression doesn't feel that great without farming [which we largely avoid for the sake of our own sanity]

Some issues unique to the second playthrough:
- Enemy scaling in the midgame was kinda nuts, we had to go back and do a ton of sidequests for xp just to stand a chance. [potentially due to us starting the second playthrough at level 35, but unsure.]
- Weapon balance revealed itself to be even worse than previously thought. Eridian weapons are a joke, SMG's feel largely outclassed by either pistols and/or machine guns, Rocket Launchers felt wholly underwhelming and Snipers became relegated to cheesing enemies in the mid- to endgame [Revolvers just felt superior in every way].
- Crawmerax fucking BLOWS. Who balanced this fight?! You make us grind all the way to level 69, just to still get one-shot if you don't have ultra-specific gear?! The fact that the most popular strat to beat him is to glitch him out is honestly laughable.
- FUCK THE KNOXX'S ARMORY DLC ALL MY HOMIES HATE THE KNOXX'S ARMORY DLC!

Conclusion: The gameplay loop felt a lot more satisfying this time around. There's a charm to BL1's simplicity, and I still really like how using a weapon type a lot boosts their effectiveness. This playthrough also made me fall in love with revolvers, which I largely skipped the first time around. Support Roland was also just a generally fun playstyle, though I did feel like I lacked damage in the early- and midgame, before I started really investing in my turret. Ending still blows, and the VHM-variant of The Destroyer is just a blob of HP so that was really underwhelming (again...).

But yeah, generally I think this was an 8/10 experience this time around. Onto the Pre-Sequel!