altaz
8 reviews liked by altaz
God of War Ragnarök
2022
i feel like i can't really add anything to the conversation as to why this is one of the greatest video games ever made, most people have already covered it but everything they say is completely true. they took everything the first game did and made it better! one of the greatest video game stories ever, some of my favorite combat in any game, amazing bosses, amazing graphics, soundtrack, voice performances, writing, everything you can think of that a video game should be this game excels in. there are games i find more pure fun, but there is not a game, and likely won't be a game for a very long time that ever reaches this height of the medium in my opinion. an absolutely beautiful triumph of an experience from start to end.
God of War II
2007
this game rocked! for sure a peak of the hack n slash action game genre! the gameplay doesn’t fully captivate me but it’s mindless fun and this game was full of fun set pieces and exciting moments! a little reliant on QTEs compared to the norse sequels and some of the timing is frustratingly tight (namely they don’t give enough buffer to mash O on the mash QTEs imo) but i never minded QTEs so i wasn’t bothered. a fun time for sure! less of a whole experience (and IMO less fun) than the norse sequels but still well worth playthroughs.
i played god of war 2 and this on my vita, and i was shocked at how good this game looked! maybe i had some bad settings with god of war 2 but it was much darker/harder to see compared to this one. god of war 2 still looked great, but still it was very shocking how nice this looked for a psp game. gameplay wise it was fun, the magic was worse and less fun but the blades felt as fun as they always have and the gauntlet had a good punch to it! the general puzzle/world design was a bit more obtuse and the spectacle is a lot lower than the ps2 ones (naturally, it's a psp game) but it was still a good time! the story was interesting too, which i wasn't expecting, i'm not a big prequel guy but i thought the deeper dive into kratos's struggle and past was cool. as silly as the let go of your daughter QTE looks out of context but it's very beautiful in the context of the game, and it being one of the most demanding QTEs in the series really shows how much he loves his family and how much it destroys him that they're gone. very much a worthwhile experience! not as great as 2 but still lots of fun!
God of War: Betrayal
2007
obviously it's not great, it's a java mobile game but it genuinely has some decent qualities to it! for a short little 1 hour game, i had a solid time. combat was okay, not really any combos just mash the button. there were 2 weapons and 2 magic, the magic was absolutely useless and i gave up trying to use it. wasn't particularly fun either, the 2 weapons were fine but the sword felt inferior in every way, especially since if you upgrade the blades you're kinda locked into that since the game is so short and you get so few red orbs lol. there's absolute no music, and if you turn sound on all you get is a way too loud crashing sound when you finish a string with one of your weapons... so i turned sound off. it looks pretty good honestly, nothing too mind blowing but some solid animations and really cool pixel art. i'm not saying you should play this, it truly offers nothing but it was kinda cool for what it is.
Sonic Frontiers
2022
This review contains spoilers
this is gonna be a really long one, sorry i fuckin love sonic.
tl;dr: this game fucking owns. the open zone is even better than i was hoping for, and cyberspace pleasantly surprised me. writing was absolutely top notch, story was great but had a bit of an odd ending. bosses fucking owned too.
i saw a tweet recently that essentially said "a 7 out of 10 that is exactly what you wanted is the best game you can imagine" and i don't know if any game captures that feeling more than this game. i recognize there are tons of flaws here, it's far from perfect, and there's a million things to fix and improve on with an eventual sequel. that being said, i just had such an absurd amount of fun the entire way through. everything about this game lived up to what i wanted from it and often exceeded it.
the open zone is so absurdly fun to explore and sonic feels a lot better than i was expecting, with some fine tuning on the sliders obviously. i could genuinely do those tiny little obstacle courses endlessly and i would never get bored. i wanted to jump on every spring and grind on every rail i saw and that feeling of excitement truly never left me. the missions weren't as exciting, but still were fun! i never found any of them terrible and unfun, at worst it was just ok but they're so quick it wasn't ever something that stuck with me if i didn't love it. the ones where you race to a platform or run through blue squares were the best ones easily though. i preferred this to standard towers unlocking the map, although i will say i wish there was a bit more variety in the missions. not only do completing them unlock more of your map, but they also spawn in rails that lead you to various parts of the island and i thought this was absolutely genius. such a fun and creative way to essentially fast travel! it fits in with sonic incredibly well and felt really good. the game has standard fast travel as well, but when sonic feels so fun to control and can go so fast i found myself almost never using it. i'd much rather just run to wherever i needed to be. generally the gameplay loop of the open zones never got tiring for me, i can understand how it would for some people but i just never wanted to stop doing those little obstacle courses.
cyberspace was something i was a bit more worried about, and some of those worries were true for sure but i had a much better time with cyberspace than i thought i would. realistically reusing level layouts should bother me more than it does, and i do prefer the original levels but it never upset me too much. it was most lame when they reused generations/unleashed level designs since i feel those games feel better and it just felt weaker here, but reusing SA2 level designs felt a lot more interesting and unique since it's so different from how the adventure games were. i initially was pretty upset at the controls/physics of cyberspace, and to be clear they are far from perfect. i still think unleashed and generations feel significantly better, but this game is a lot more different than i was giving it credit for. the stomp bounce is an all time favorite move of mine now, and one i know i'll be sorely missing when replaying older sonic games. i didn't utilize it a ton in the open zone (it still got a decent usage) but it was my main move in cyberspace. it was so satisfying to utilize it in smart ways to find shortcuts/keep your speed up. the stomp boost alone made cyberspace fun! the last island for sure had the best collection of cyberspace stages, every one felt super fun to run through. my major complaints are the homing attack pausing you mid air (i realize why it does that in open zone but it's just a pace breaker in cyberspace), and i found it kinda inconsistent/confusing on when i could use moves or not. multiple times i'd try to stomp or air boost and nothing would happen and it would feel a little awkward. i think it was something to do with having to land to recharge some of those moves but it was a bit confusing and annoying. i also wish some of the S rank times were harder! it's not a big deal but some of my favorite cyberspace stages were ones where i really had to buckle down and figure out how to cut my time down for an S rank (lookin at you 1-2). i wish there were more themes than the 4 we have, and i also wish they were all original but honestly i didn't really care that much. it didn't really ruin the experience for me but new/more themes for sure would have elevated it! all in all cyberspace impressed me, and i hope the general negative attitude about it online doesn't detour them from keeping the concept in a sequel. cyberspace has the most room to improve, but i think having these to break up the open zone works incredibly well and with more tweaking/originality i think it would be absolutely perfect.
the story and writing here absolutely blew me away. i've read all of IDW sonic currently released so when i heard ian flynn was writing this story i was excited but man it really impressed me. i think part of it is just the stark contrast from the last few sonic games but god damn does this man understand these characters. without even getting into the implications for the overarching sonic story just the characterization and character interactions in this game are so damn good. tails especially, i was ready to tear up at some of the scenes with him and sonic. i really hope he continues to write sonic stories because i absolutely want to see where amy, knuckles, and tails all go from here. tails has historically been one of the most inconsistently written characters so to see him done so perfectly is really cool. the little cutscenes between sonic and his friends were easily one of the biggest motivators for exploring the islands and it never disappointed. i really hope ian can get a hold of some more characters next time. eggman and sage were a super interesting dynamic too, the eggman logs you get from big fishing were some of my favorite things in this game. mike pollock is at his peak and it's such an interesting look into the character and his thoughts. sage was very interesting and engaging as well, i hope this isn't the last we see of her.
soundtrack is great, obviously. cyberspace have some super high energy great songs, and the dynamic music in the open zone ranged from beautiful to intense. the boss tracks were all great (the third boss track being my favorite) and i still love "i'm here" and "vandalize". i don't think this is my favorite sonic soundtrack, more middle of the road but that's less about the quality of this soundtrack and just how absurdly good sonic soundtracks always are.
fishing was fun! i don't have a lot to say about it, but the music was so calm and beautiful i loved just sitting there listening to it! the mini game itself was fun, and seeing some of the silly things you fished up was fun!
last big thing i want to talk about positively is the boss fights and combat. combat was solid! i don't think it's gonna completely blow anyone's mind, but you can get pretty intricate with it and pull of some really cool looking and satisfying combos. pretty much every move felt worth having and i was swapping between them constantly. they all also transferred over to the boss fights as super sonic and looked even cooler there! speaking of the boss fights, oh my GOD the boss fights in this fucking game. easily the best bosses we've had in sonic, especially for super sonic boss standards. the insane scope, the banging soundtrack, and phenomenal spectacle made these bosses absolutely amazing. i will say the final titan, and true final boss were for sure the weakest, and that's a bummer but i still enjoyed them! i think the true final boss is gonna be very divisive and that makes sense, it's a weird decision but i honestly liked it. it was the weakest boss in the game but i kinda love shoot em ups so i had fun.
as for the negatives, obviously pop in is a problem. it's pretty inexcusably bad, this isn't something i care so much about it ruined my experience in any meaningful way but it is rough how consistently not good it is. i'm still not in LOVE with the art style, it looks a lot better than it did on reveal and i genuinely think it can look beautiful often, but it still doesn't fit sonic incredibly well. i also think advertising the game as having 5 islands is a bit silly, the 4th island is barely an island. i had a lot of fun there, don't get me wrong! i loved climbing the towers and the obstacle courses to do that were super fun but it's clearly not the same thing as the other 4 islands. the 5th island was arguably the most fun but i will say i wish it was a more unique biome or something. we have "5" islands and only 3 biomes, a snow biome would go absolutely insane and i really wish we got one. the physics in general are a bit rough, they can be really fun to abuse but there's also other times where it gets you stuck/slows you down for no reason and it doesn't feel great. the main missions for chaos emeralds can be fun, but some are pretty lame/uninteresting. like pushing koco to a goal, or cleaning up grass. i don't think they were BAD but none of them were particularly great (except the shoot em ups i liked those hehe). pinball was okay, but i wish the board was a bit bigger/more exciting and the score you needed wasn't so high. it feels pretty bad to lose all your balls and being forced to restart the whole thing. i also wish the skill tree had a bit more, i don't even really know what it could have had but i had 334 skill points by the end of the game. i had it maxed out on the second island although, i was doing everything on each island before moving on. there's some other small things i mentioned in the other sections but that's about it. none of this was really game ruining for me, i genuinely can understand why it would be for some people but it just simply wasn't for me.
this is the best sonic game we've had in a long time. it's truly up there with the greats for me. i haven't had such pure constant fun with sonic in a long time. even with something like unleashed or generations which are two games i absolutely adore there's sections i really don't want to do but i just had a blast the entire way through this game. i don't think it's as re-playable as those two games or some of the other all time amazing sonic games, but i also don't think it has to be. that's not to say i won't come back to this game for years to come, because i absolutely will but it being such a big game it's harder to just pop in and beat in a day obviously. i'm so glad this game lived up to what i wanted it to be, i put way too much hope and faith into this game so for it to meet that is a great feeling. i hope sega is telling the truth when they say this is what they see the future of sonic being, because it's a damn good future. it's been a while since i've been so happy and hopeful for the video game aspect of sonic but it feels really good. i love this stupid blue guy and i can't wait to see what comes next.
tl;dr: this game fucking owns. the open zone is even better than i was hoping for, and cyberspace pleasantly surprised me. writing was absolutely top notch, story was great but had a bit of an odd ending. bosses fucking owned too.
i saw a tweet recently that essentially said "a 7 out of 10 that is exactly what you wanted is the best game you can imagine" and i don't know if any game captures that feeling more than this game. i recognize there are tons of flaws here, it's far from perfect, and there's a million things to fix and improve on with an eventual sequel. that being said, i just had such an absurd amount of fun the entire way through. everything about this game lived up to what i wanted from it and often exceeded it.
the open zone is so absurdly fun to explore and sonic feels a lot better than i was expecting, with some fine tuning on the sliders obviously. i could genuinely do those tiny little obstacle courses endlessly and i would never get bored. i wanted to jump on every spring and grind on every rail i saw and that feeling of excitement truly never left me. the missions weren't as exciting, but still were fun! i never found any of them terrible and unfun, at worst it was just ok but they're so quick it wasn't ever something that stuck with me if i didn't love it. the ones where you race to a platform or run through blue squares were the best ones easily though. i preferred this to standard towers unlocking the map, although i will say i wish there was a bit more variety in the missions. not only do completing them unlock more of your map, but they also spawn in rails that lead you to various parts of the island and i thought this was absolutely genius. such a fun and creative way to essentially fast travel! it fits in with sonic incredibly well and felt really good. the game has standard fast travel as well, but when sonic feels so fun to control and can go so fast i found myself almost never using it. i'd much rather just run to wherever i needed to be. generally the gameplay loop of the open zones never got tiring for me, i can understand how it would for some people but i just never wanted to stop doing those little obstacle courses.
cyberspace was something i was a bit more worried about, and some of those worries were true for sure but i had a much better time with cyberspace than i thought i would. realistically reusing level layouts should bother me more than it does, and i do prefer the original levels but it never upset me too much. it was most lame when they reused generations/unleashed level designs since i feel those games feel better and it just felt weaker here, but reusing SA2 level designs felt a lot more interesting and unique since it's so different from how the adventure games were. i initially was pretty upset at the controls/physics of cyberspace, and to be clear they are far from perfect. i still think unleashed and generations feel significantly better, but this game is a lot more different than i was giving it credit for. the stomp bounce is an all time favorite move of mine now, and one i know i'll be sorely missing when replaying older sonic games. i didn't utilize it a ton in the open zone (it still got a decent usage) but it was my main move in cyberspace. it was so satisfying to utilize it in smart ways to find shortcuts/keep your speed up. the stomp boost alone made cyberspace fun! the last island for sure had the best collection of cyberspace stages, every one felt super fun to run through. my major complaints are the homing attack pausing you mid air (i realize why it does that in open zone but it's just a pace breaker in cyberspace), and i found it kinda inconsistent/confusing on when i could use moves or not. multiple times i'd try to stomp or air boost and nothing would happen and it would feel a little awkward. i think it was something to do with having to land to recharge some of those moves but it was a bit confusing and annoying. i also wish some of the S rank times were harder! it's not a big deal but some of my favorite cyberspace stages were ones where i really had to buckle down and figure out how to cut my time down for an S rank (lookin at you 1-2). i wish there were more themes than the 4 we have, and i also wish they were all original but honestly i didn't really care that much. it didn't really ruin the experience for me but new/more themes for sure would have elevated it! all in all cyberspace impressed me, and i hope the general negative attitude about it online doesn't detour them from keeping the concept in a sequel. cyberspace has the most room to improve, but i think having these to break up the open zone works incredibly well and with more tweaking/originality i think it would be absolutely perfect.
the story and writing here absolutely blew me away. i've read all of IDW sonic currently released so when i heard ian flynn was writing this story i was excited but man it really impressed me. i think part of it is just the stark contrast from the last few sonic games but god damn does this man understand these characters. without even getting into the implications for the overarching sonic story just the characterization and character interactions in this game are so damn good. tails especially, i was ready to tear up at some of the scenes with him and sonic. i really hope he continues to write sonic stories because i absolutely want to see where amy, knuckles, and tails all go from here. tails has historically been one of the most inconsistently written characters so to see him done so perfectly is really cool. the little cutscenes between sonic and his friends were easily one of the biggest motivators for exploring the islands and it never disappointed. i really hope ian can get a hold of some more characters next time. eggman and sage were a super interesting dynamic too, the eggman logs you get from big fishing were some of my favorite things in this game. mike pollock is at his peak and it's such an interesting look into the character and his thoughts. sage was very interesting and engaging as well, i hope this isn't the last we see of her.
soundtrack is great, obviously. cyberspace have some super high energy great songs, and the dynamic music in the open zone ranged from beautiful to intense. the boss tracks were all great (the third boss track being my favorite) and i still love "i'm here" and "vandalize". i don't think this is my favorite sonic soundtrack, more middle of the road but that's less about the quality of this soundtrack and just how absurdly good sonic soundtracks always are.
fishing was fun! i don't have a lot to say about it, but the music was so calm and beautiful i loved just sitting there listening to it! the mini game itself was fun, and seeing some of the silly things you fished up was fun!
last big thing i want to talk about positively is the boss fights and combat. combat was solid! i don't think it's gonna completely blow anyone's mind, but you can get pretty intricate with it and pull of some really cool looking and satisfying combos. pretty much every move felt worth having and i was swapping between them constantly. they all also transferred over to the boss fights as super sonic and looked even cooler there! speaking of the boss fights, oh my GOD the boss fights in this fucking game. easily the best bosses we've had in sonic, especially for super sonic boss standards. the insane scope, the banging soundtrack, and phenomenal spectacle made these bosses absolutely amazing. i will say the final titan, and true final boss were for sure the weakest, and that's a bummer but i still enjoyed them! i think the true final boss is gonna be very divisive and that makes sense, it's a weird decision but i honestly liked it. it was the weakest boss in the game but i kinda love shoot em ups so i had fun.
as for the negatives, obviously pop in is a problem. it's pretty inexcusably bad, this isn't something i care so much about it ruined my experience in any meaningful way but it is rough how consistently not good it is. i'm still not in LOVE with the art style, it looks a lot better than it did on reveal and i genuinely think it can look beautiful often, but it still doesn't fit sonic incredibly well. i also think advertising the game as having 5 islands is a bit silly, the 4th island is barely an island. i had a lot of fun there, don't get me wrong! i loved climbing the towers and the obstacle courses to do that were super fun but it's clearly not the same thing as the other 4 islands. the 5th island was arguably the most fun but i will say i wish it was a more unique biome or something. we have "5" islands and only 3 biomes, a snow biome would go absolutely insane and i really wish we got one. the physics in general are a bit rough, they can be really fun to abuse but there's also other times where it gets you stuck/slows you down for no reason and it doesn't feel great. the main missions for chaos emeralds can be fun, but some are pretty lame/uninteresting. like pushing koco to a goal, or cleaning up grass. i don't think they were BAD but none of them were particularly great (except the shoot em ups i liked those hehe). pinball was okay, but i wish the board was a bit bigger/more exciting and the score you needed wasn't so high. it feels pretty bad to lose all your balls and being forced to restart the whole thing. i also wish the skill tree had a bit more, i don't even really know what it could have had but i had 334 skill points by the end of the game. i had it maxed out on the second island although, i was doing everything on each island before moving on. there's some other small things i mentioned in the other sections but that's about it. none of this was really game ruining for me, i genuinely can understand why it would be for some people but it just simply wasn't for me.
this is the best sonic game we've had in a long time. it's truly up there with the greats for me. i haven't had such pure constant fun with sonic in a long time. even with something like unleashed or generations which are two games i absolutely adore there's sections i really don't want to do but i just had a blast the entire way through this game. i don't think it's as re-playable as those two games or some of the other all time amazing sonic games, but i also don't think it has to be. that's not to say i won't come back to this game for years to come, because i absolutely will but it being such a big game it's harder to just pop in and beat in a day obviously. i'm so glad this game lived up to what i wanted it to be, i put way too much hope and faith into this game so for it to meet that is a great feeling. i hope sega is telling the truth when they say this is what they see the future of sonic being, because it's a damn good future. it's been a while since i've been so happy and hopeful for the video game aspect of sonic but it feels really good. i love this stupid blue guy and i can't wait to see what comes next.
i can't be THAT mean to this game, it's like an hour and a half long and is a cute little experience, just not one that really grabbed me or anything. seeing the little lego builds was cute, but the story wasn't all that great (not that it was trying to be a masterpiece but still.) and the puzzles weren't very satisfying or great. some even got a little frustrating/annoying by the end and part of that is on the controls. to be fair, i think playing this on PC would 100% be ideal but the mobile controls were pretty janky and annoying. i can't imagine controller is much better.
this also isn't really my exact kind of game, and i didn't have a terrible time but i was hoping it'd be a bit more charming or the puzzles would be a bit more interesting to feel super worth it.
this also isn't really my exact kind of game, and i didn't have a terrible time but i was hoping it'd be a bit more charming or the puzzles would be a bit more interesting to feel super worth it.
Sonic Omens
2021
nvm this game fucking sucks and the devs are creepy freaks!
i loved this so much!!! the game is very pretty and makes the original triple trouble locales pop. i'm a sucker for the sonic 3 sprites too, they've always been my favorite! this is one of the most official feeling fan games i've played, especially when it comes to level design and overall polish. it truly feels like an official remake of the game gear original. a lot of the DNA is there but if you remember the game gear game you'll be thrown for a loop occasionally. it's incredibly impressive how true to the original the game is while feeling very original at the same time. stuff like the bosses being massively improved while keeping the general attacks and designs of the original is really cool. i also loved the variety that stuff like the snow board/rocket shoes/submarine added, they all felt fun to use. my only "complaint" would be that it's pretty short, but that's really just cause triple trouble is so short so i can't be too upset about it.
all in all absolutely adored this game. sonic fan games i feel had a stigma of "of this is cool, it'll probably never get finished though." which i think is still a fair worry but with things like fallen star, p-06, this, and many others progressing super well it feels like the best time to be into sonic fan games and fan content in general. it's always been one of the best things about being a sonic fan but each passing year it only gets better and better.
all in all absolutely adored this game. sonic fan games i feel had a stigma of "of this is cool, it'll probably never get finished though." which i think is still a fair worry but with things like fallen star, p-06, this, and many others progressing super well it feels like the best time to be into sonic fan games and fan content in general. it's always been one of the best things about being a sonic fan but each passing year it only gets better and better.