Remember when later Guitar Hero games had songs that can't do anything but have boring easy-mode charts? Yeah, that's this.
Pair it with a really shitty rotation model where if you want to play a song for any other period than when it shows up for a few days, you have to pay 5 whole dollars for it and only when it's in the item shop, and you've got Fortnite Festival.

Pair it with incredibly boring visuals, as you've got a very ugly giant stage with band animations going below even GH2 quality, but hey, during those long breaks certain instruments will get in songs due to a bad track-list, you can use your emotes!
There's really no huge flair either, there's nothing like the audio getting filtered when using Overdrive, the particles while you're using it are very small and tied almost entirely to just your player, and most of them are battle pass/shop purchases anyways.

Generally it just is very clunky as well, you can't quick restart a song or practice it, instead you can just jump into the song from the start and if you fuck up you have to back out to the main-stage with on some songs this being a downtime of like 40s.
You've also got to deal with the fact that all the notes share the same color so on harder tracks (if you can actually FIND one) it's a bit annoying to deal with as it's harder to read for no other reason than it has to be the Fortnite purple color.
Lastly there's just a lot of instabilities, It's on the second season now and there's still major issues with just random hitching in the middle of songs (far better than it used to be at-least) and crashes happen randomly as well.

AAA Licensed Rhythm games are pretty much dead, and this is the best you'll get out of it in the modern industry, just move on and go download like Clone Hero or YARG or something.

Epic, Stop trying to make metaverse Fortnite happen, It's not going to happen, nobody plays the shitty racing mode, Festival is mediocre, Lego Fortnite has been nothing but boring and the Creative mode's expansion has pretty much exclusively been used to make things that you could already play, like arenas or boxfights etc. but now they have a random theme of Streamer/Country/IP, or just are something I could have played in ROBLOX back in 2009, it's not working and players are just going to jump to the one where they already have all the different things they want to make.

I'm honestly kind of surprised by how much pure vitriol this seems to be getting from folks on here compared to the far cry excitement I've seen from the Clone Hero community folks? Festival still has a long ways to go in terms of features, songs and especially visual polish, but the key thing that makes me enjoy it as much as I have so far is that it fits a somewhat unfulfilled niche of a casual and accessible rhythm game. I love rhythm games! I play way too much Project Diva to be considered healthy! I've definitely been getting more into DJMax Respect V ever since I caught it on a sale! All of those games are great, but they're great for someone like me who has spent likely hundreds to thousands of hours getting used to the harsh difficulty and learning curve of those games, and also likely more importantly I like the more foreign niche appeal of their set lists.

In terms of more current modern pop and rock songs, Guitar Hero/Rock Band leaving the rhythm game space as well as stuff like Just Dance becoming less popular have left a void in that space of music that I've had a good time with seeing again here with Festival. I do wish their launch picks were a bit more interesting, but like, I'm not going to deny that I've probably played the one Olivia Rodrigo song more times than I should be and that's reminiscent of the power older GH/RB games had for me. Discovering new current songs is entertaining and fun, and I don't need ridiculously insanely tough high-accuracy focused gameplay to completely seal the deal here. I don't really get why some are so shocked by the multiplier score-focused gameplay when that's always been how Guitar Hero and Rock Band has worked? Just don't miss?

The real issues for me at the moment is the sheer lack of visual variety compared to those predecessors and the pricing model. The notes desperately need to be color coded like those games because when some of the more overcharted songs come along, they're needlessly harder to read than they really need to be. The dances and motions the band have when playing songs also gets old fast, and that feeling of that high intensity concert energy being missing was only further emphasized for me when I recently tried out modding World Tour again and seeing just how wild the animations were for your characters. I miss having the audience chanting along with the music when you kept a high streak going, having the lead and vocals singing together every now and then, the close-ups of the guitar, the extra visual effects and filters for certain song segments; I could go on and on but this is one area that I really hope gets improved sooner than later. Seeing that stupid animation of the vocalist sliding back and forth playing three to four times in a row might actually drive me insane.

The pricing model is really the bigger deeper core issue here that I think only time is going to reveal the effects of however. Rhythm games have always had a difficult tug and pull balance regarding how do you reasonably price out extra songs for DLC, and Rock Band was always up there with being some of the worst in my mind because of the insistence toward individual songs at a high price rather than song packs which more recent rhythm games have pushed towards. Festival pushes the line way too far however with songs now costing $5 dollars each with the only extra benefits to supposedly justify it being you can use them as emotes in Battle Royale and the weird half-baked Jam Stage mode. Absolute utter snore. The Festival Pass also being separate from the already paid Battle Pass that the rest of the game uses is also really out there and priced far too high for what it offers, alongside the grind itself feeling like a slog. The whole model mostly concerns me at the moment because I get the worried feeling that this isn't going to meet Epic's sales expectations the way they hope it will, and I'm not excited for whatever possible "solutions" they might try to come up with as time goes on.

As it stands right now though? I still think this is a very fun mode that's genuinely been getting me to load up the game on a somewhat daily basis just to play a few songs, either on my own or with friends and trying to beat out our scores on the leaderboards, and while I love those harsher more difficult other rhythm games like DJMax, they don't compete in the accessibility and easy appeal factor like this does and that's a feeling I've missed for a while now. Hearing that Harmonix somehow convinced Epic and PDP to create a new guitar controller coming out very soon along with full instrument controller support might actually make me bust.

What makes Deus Ex so impressive isn't just the amount of choices you're given, it's the way that they're presented to you and how they entertain your curiosity. When the game responds to your decisions from such an early point, it sets the tone of the rest of the experience: if it'll call you out for something as inconspicuous as messing around with the bathrooms, what else is it going to track? What other actions can you get it to react to?

It's this relationship of your curiosity being encouraged and then rewarded that defines Deus Ex. Although there are extrinsic bonuses for exploration (upgrade points, weapon mods, etc.), most of my motivation was intrinsic. There was never a time where I stumbled upon an unlocked vent and didn't want to see where it lead. Deus Ex's story deserves its own review, but the gameplay is about you and the designers. It's about inspecting every painting in a building and trusting that one of them will have a secret vault behind it. It's about lockpicking your way into a building at the front door before stopping yourself and asking "Wait, I bet there's another way" and reloading your save to see how else you can break in.

Sometimes it's very unbalanced, occasionally frustrating, jarringly unintuitive (especially considering the extended tutorial sequence), many aspects that would normally hold it back. But it doesn't need to be perfect, because these issues ultimately become drowned out as you're constantly making new decisions, answering new questions, and testing how mechanics interact with each other. Your imagination keeps being sparked and once you reach a certain point these shortcomings will suddenly stop mattering--nothing can break that unstoppable desire to see what the game has to offer next as everything finally clicks together.

This is, again, not even beginning on the story, atmosphere, or especially the music (because holy shit the OST is phenomenal). The gameplay alone is fantastic but the experience as a whole is just as special and is absolutely worth your time if you can get past some initial frustrations. The payoff is worth it.

baby's first apocalypse narrative matched with the worst gameplay elements of the Uncharted series. the last of us released at the peak of gaming media's obsession with finding validity as not just a medium for adults to enjoy, but one on par with cinema and literature. for whatever reason, this game was heralded as gaming's 'Citizen Kane' for a while. it's a third person shooter with zombies and it's one of the many pieces of media that spawned from a boring dude who saw Children of Men and decided he could also do that. everyone's angry and tense all of the time and there's lots of violence, which is how you know it's for adults (serious). but there's a dad and a daughter, so it's sorta heartwarming af tho. nothing about the game part of the game is very fun to play in a conventional sense - large parts consist of just walkin' around while you listen to dialogue. maybe you move a ladder. maybe you collect materials and craft a knife. maybe you crouch walk around enemies and press triangle to view the killing cutscene. i love games that aren't conventionally "fun", but the last of us makes no statement with its mechanics and design. more than anything, it feels like a game that is embarrassed to be a game and decides to entirely ignore any of the medium''s advantages and possibilities in favour of being completely conventional. and like, obviously there's a place for conventional stories but i just don't find this particular one interesting - especially as a game. naughty dog's uncharted series at least face the player with spectacle and dozens of enemies but tlou doesn't evolve much over its runtime, aside from having more guys. it's a culmination of the 7th gen's most boring elements distilled in one package that might as well just be the TV show it became.

this is also a game that was so successful it set the standards for what most big narrative driven triple a releases would be for the next couple generations. very much not a fan of that and the impact it had on the industry as a whole - it's the final turning point for PlayStation going from a system with a diverse library of colourful games to mostly just games like this. wide appeal titles very-normal narratives that are just like some other thing tonally and narratively but slopped up into a game that plays like a million other games. boring!!!! it's just boring.

It’s no secret that I love the first four Harry Potter Games on all the consoles they’re on. However, this one stood as the one I hadn’t played up to this point. Turns out, it’s a solid installment in the series. Starting out with the negatives, firstly the visuals are a mixed bag. The game looks (and is, but we’ll get into that later) barren. There’s very few NPC’s on screen at a time, and it’s not the console I choose. The GameCube was only a little worse than the XBOX power wise. The models have not aged well, however, quite a few of the environments have, so it’s 50/50. Another negative against the game is that there were numerous bugs I encountered that halted my progress for a little bit. as well, Final Boss of the game is not good, and if you die you only respawn with a 6th of your total life bar. Seriously. This game had big issues with life management, because when you start a new level you don’t actually get your life restored. The final negative that comes into the game is that there’s a lot of waiting for excessively long animations and cutscenes to play out. Far too much of the game is spent not in control of Harry. However, past that, this game is pretty damn great. The greatest thing here is how fun Hogwarts is to explore. As you learn new spells and gain new abilities, you can basically open up the entirety of the map and explore. It’s so much fun and it really lets you take advantage of every piece of Harry’s arsenal. Hogwarts as a big giant level to explore carries this game SO HARD. It’s also extremely rewarding to collect the cards in the game because every 20 cards you collect gives you another Health Bar, up to 5 additional bars. Another great thing about this game is the dungeon design. Although simple, it really helps you get accustomed to each new ability you gain in them. Really this game is a simpler Legend of Zelda Clone, and I think I’m okay with that.