It's rare that I love the first 15-20 hours of a game and then come to actively dislike it by the end, but unfortunately that’s what happened when I finished my 60 hour playthrough of Dragon's Dogma 2. What starts as a seemingly rich open world of interesting exploration and engaging friction turns into a repetitive chore of lifeless quests, copy and paste encounters, shallow combat, endless time wasting, and a terribly boring main story.

There is so much happening in this game and it's really hard to gather my thoughts into one cohesive review (that isn't 30 paragraphs long) so I'm gonna try my best to keep it as brief as possible.

In short, I loved that initial feeling of exploration, where the game prompts you to go out and hunt for secrets and new encounters. Looking at a precarious spot and saying "Hmm, I bet there's a token there" was fun, and led me to always attempt dangerous jumps or risky climbs. Seeking out all the nooks and crannies in the environment was initially a blast too, as the vast landscape is visually engaging, and has lots of layers (both figuratively and literally.) Watching your idiot pawns dive off cliffs unprompted, is both frustrating and funny, but usually worth it for the entertainment. And since fast travel is scarce, choosing your route wisely and having to find spots to make campfires felt like a nice way to extend your journeys, at the cost of using a camping resource of course. Only… that's not what happens. Because you have infinite camps, which means that camping is actively just more effective than returning to a town most of the time, since it's free and allows you to buff your character. Then you start to realize that while it's fun to collect those tokens, the rewards aren't great, and your final reward for collecting 220 (TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY) is total useless dog ass. Then while exploring you realize you're only ever gonna fight the same 3-5 enemy types over and over, with the occasional mini-boss (of which there are only about 3-5 types as well). And your rewards are mostly just crafting materials, with the rare item find usually being a worthless ring, or something I already had. And if you're like me, by this point you might say "Hmm this exploration is losing its luster, I should go check out more quests.” And when you do, you'll be treated to some extremely lame game design where you; walk to a character, talk to them, walk across the map to other characters, talk to them, walk back across the map to the first character, talk to them again, the end. Repeat endlessly for probably 2/3rds of all quests. And because there is so little gameplay interaction, it never feels like I'm actually involved either, I just feel like an errand boy. It also doesn’t help that many of these quests are not very interesting narratively, especially because you have extremely little input/decision making. And even when the quests are interesting, the game has no idea how to raise tension or bring something to a climax, usually stopping before any actual gameplay occurs, going into a short cutscene, and then the quest is over. There is a moment where the Captain gives you a speech about how “You need to wear a special getup to do this quest, but beware, this is a point of no return, so prepare yourself! We make for the ceremony!”, only for the game to enter a 30 second cutscene, have a small issue occur with your pawn, and then the Captain says “Guess we can’t attend now, sorry”, and then you get spat back out to run more errands.

To top it all off, the main story is incredibly uninteresting. It feeds you new details at a snail's pace, constantly repeating the same shit over and over, only for the endings of the game to disregard all of it without so much as a single cutscene to wrap it up. The entire game I was doing countless errands, running everywhere to gather enough “evidence” to weed out the evil plot and basically lead a coup to retake the throne for myself, and yet the game just ignores all of that shit. There is no coup, there is no comeuppance or explanation for the evil queen or the false ruler she had in place, no resolution for her son or anyone else in the palace, nothing. The game just simply shows you taking the throne and completely skips over all of what the game was building towards. It’s a pretty embarrassing attempt at storytelling.

Due to how bland the main story/quests are, it makes it clear that the focus was really on the world and the different systems at your disposal. But if the main focus is on me exploring, then why does every mission just retread lots of the same map space? If you send me on a mission across the map, I'm gonna explore that region until I reach my destination. But then when you send me back across that space MANY times later in the game… the fuck do you want me to do? The area is already explored, I'm not re-exploring it. So now it just feels like a bit of a chore to constantly travel back and forth across the map (even with fast travel). Which also makes me question what the fuck they were doing if they thought that 3-5 enemy types (3 during the day, 2 more at night) was gonna be enough for this bigass 40+ hour game. I'm not re-fighting the same goblins or lizards to get a few hundred XP when I can just run to the mission marker and get 50 times that. The main combat itself is also a bit too simple, as you can kinda just get in a rhythm of spamming the same shit over and over, but I’m not gonna lie and say it’s bad combat, just a bit too simple. Also doesn’t help that several of the classes are just significantly worse than others, meaning you really only have like 2 viable options that don’t suck ass.

Idk now i'm just rambling and this ended up being much longer than I wanted it to be, but this game is just all over the place. It was always gonna be a bit of a mess (even those who love it will agree) but it just sucks that even after all the time it took for them to essentially re-make the first game, this still feels like the first draft of a much better product buried deep inside. It is by no means a bad game, but it is an unbelievably mixed bag of a game that I certainly can't recommend if you care at all about storytelling. If you're more interested in exploration and systemic gameplay, then I can say the first 20 hours are pretty cool! If you don't mind paying $70 for that, then maybe it's worth it. For everyone else, best to wait on it. Also might give them the chance to make it not run like total dogshit (unlikely).

Figure I should finally just log this even though I do plan on playing more.

It's a really engaging shooter that does a fantastic job putting the focus on cooperative work, by using a biting satire to wrap us all into propagandized patriotism under the guise of DEMOCRACY!!! YEAAAHHHH!!! HOORAH BROTHERS!!!

The tight controls, great gunplay, and hectic encounters obviously help too, and the game being expertly designed for both maximum money up and maximum funny up is just icing on the cake.

Giving this the same score I gave the base game, because it's pretty much just more of the same. It's a solid little 2 hour addition, and I liked everything here. Admittedly though, if you've already played the base game and are looking to go back to this... its kinda hard to recommend. The reason being is that it's balanced around mid-game level, so if you've already finished the game, it's gonna feel a little weak. If you play it DURING your first playthrough like I did, I think it's definitely pretty cool however. Not sure why they chose to make DLC mid-game content, and asking $5.99 is also a little steep, but im in a good mood so I'll keep the score at 3.5

My 3.5 score should in no way deter you from trying this one out, as its an absolute blast! The gameplay loop is simple but addictive, the OST slaps, the lovecraftian undercurrent is a fun inclusion, and just being out on the waters is a total vibe.

My complaints simply come in the form of wanting more depth to this ocean adventure. Because while the story was cool, I really think the NPC interactions were underutilized and certainly could have been pushed a little further. I also kinda wish there was more of an economy aspect, though admittedly that may just be asking for a whole different type of game. But the opening hours reel you in with really engaging time and resource management, so I was a little dissapointed when that kinda fades away after around 6-7 hours.

Regardless, I really enjoyed my time with it and it's an easy recommendation for anyone looking for a cozy-horror fishing adventure. It's just simply a short, chill little adventure full of vibes, so I came away very satisfied, despite my small issues. Perfect Steam Deck game as well!

MASTER COLLECTION: VOLUME 1

Narratively, MGS2 is an absolute knock-out mix of batshit "video-gamey" storytelling and incredibly prophetic real world connections.

Gameplay wise, the stealth picks up right where the first left off and is a lot of fun. The direct combat on the other hand... sometimes made me want to shove a rusty knife up my ass. I know that playing without the PS2 controller is doing it a bit of a disservice, but even still, it always felt unintuitive and a bit clunky, so it just never clicked for me. This is worsened by the fact that for some unknown fucking reason neither Bluepoint, nor Konami added a sensitivity slider for the first person aiming. I am very serious when I say the way sensitivity works here is the polar opposite of how I like it. Needless to say, having to quickly navigate things in first person was just never a good time for me. Yeah yeah, I know, I know, I've been spoiled by modern games but counterpoint - if you're gonna charge $60 for your 2023 re-release, MAYBE DO ANYTHING TO MAKE IT WORTH THAT $60.

That all being said, I did really like most of the game and much like in my review of the first, I don't want to hold this shitty re-release against the OG game. For a 2001 game, yeah its pretty fuckin insane, and for a first playthrough in 2023, it's still pretty damn great. It did piss me off enough times for me to hesitate giving it a higher score though, but maybe I'll sleep on it and reconsider. And you can probably blame LiquidLink98 for setting my gameplay expectations too high.

Edit: Hmmm fine. I slept on it. Bumping it up.

MASTER COLLECTION: VOLUME 1

Very hard to give this a score after a first playthrough in the year 2023, because obviously several things are outdated/annoying and were improved in future titles. But even still, I think all that really needs to be said is that its pretty remarkable how good it still is 25 years after release. The gameplay is pretty fun, and some of the ideas here are just incredible.

Still don't know why Konami didn't implement full analog controls at any point in time though. And this Master Collection is embarrassingly low effort (which is standard for Konami ATP) but I won't hold that against the game itself.

There's a billion thoughts running through my head now, but I'll just keep it brief and say that this is truly a landmark video game that has some of the highest highs the medium has ever offered. I do have pretty mixed feelings about the ending, but even still, the rest is easily worth experiencing.

With a captivating story, mind melting visuals, a phenomenal atmosphere, solid survival horror combat, and just some absolutely insane ideas, Alan Wake 2 cements itself as both Remedy's magnum opus and as one of the finest narrative driven experiences of all time. Not everything is perfect, but god damn is it always fuckin cool. This is Remedy finally realizing their potential as a developer, and it acts as a nice apology for whatever the fuck that nothing sandwich of a story Control was.

I don't even know what to say about this game TBH. I guess I'll give it a 3.5, but just know that it's a very low 3.5 because this shit is kinda all over the place and im rating this on a more overall level, as opposed to how I felt after I finished.

Probably the least accessible game ever, Lords of the Fallen (better known as Eldenborne: Dark Souls Dies Twice: Scholar of the First Sin) literally just assumes you already know how the other souls-likes work and doesn't bother trying to onboard new players, throwing you straight into a gauntlet of platforming and projectile spammers without so much as explaining what any of your stats mean (Souls players can figure it out obviously, non-souls players are completely left in the dark). Of course to make this fair, the damage balancing is also totally fucked for a starting area, where you just die in 2 hits to almost everything. Now personally I actually didn't find this that hard (Maybe because I am a DS2 enjoyer), and I actually kinda liked the section, but it's undeniably a horrible way to introduce people to a game and it's no wonder why so many people were immediately off put by it. Which is a shame because this game does have a lot of good stuff to offer. The levels are super dense, with tons of secrets and branching paths similar to DS1. The Umbral plane mechanic is pretty cool, essentially giving you a whole other level to explore. The combat is a little jank but mostly really solid, and there are a ton of really cool weapons to find. And for the first 15-20 hours, I was genuinely having a really good time, despite the rough edges.

But unfortunately the game just starts to fall apart in the 2nd half and it really does not justify its long runtime, with the main culprit being the very low enemy variety. If this game was only 20 hours, it would scrape by without too many complaints about the enemies, but being 30-40 hours, yeah that shit is not enough. I mean the final 2 levels literally just contain the same enemies you've been fighting since the very start of the game, with no real variation. And its clear they knew they had a problem with variety because their solution towards the end starts to become "Well IDK just put a fuck ton of them in this one small area, that counts as variety I think".

This game also loves to have "bosses" which are just big enemies with a health bar at the bottom of the screen. They're all really easy to fight and usually just end up appearing as a normal enemy literally 5 minutes later. To me that has massive "We made this game too big and need to fill space somehow" energy and its another reason why I think this should just be 10-15 hours shorter. Speaking of bosses, this game actually starts off decently with the first fight being good, and the next few being solid. Then for some inexplicable reason, the quality drops off a cliff and each boss starts to have a PITIFUL amount of health. It got to the point where I was literally able to just spam charged heavy attacks, and genuinely stunlock the bosses until they were dead (which often took less than a minute). I have no idea how the fuck this passed inspection, but it is truly baffling how poorly some of this game is balanced. Though even if they were better balanced, a lot of these bosses are just not good and the game ends with a super lame final boss which leaves a really bad taste in your mouth.

Of course the game has its fair share of technical issues too, with lots of performance drops, visual glitches, small bugs, and general jank.

IDK I wanted to like this game, and I kinda still do but I was so fucking over it during the final 5-10 hours. It's really hard to recommend to anyone who isn't a big souls fan, and honestly I don't even blame souls fans for not liking it. There is a lot of good stuff going on here, but man is it disappointing how hard they dropped the ball in some areas.

Oh yeah and the story stuff is just "What if we copied Dark Souls but made it lame, corny, and boring".