Finally playing this just before the sequel is released feels like cheating - I'm sorry to everyone who waited for ten years without knowing if they'd ever get their wishes. Can't think of another game that feels so much like going on an adventure with both your pawns always doing their own thing and all the other little details that never feel quite under your full control, which then feeds into the combat that is everything that was promised despite how outlandish those claims sounded from the outside... and even the story, which kind of stays in the background for most of the game, still finds the time to spectacularly stick the landing not once but twice. For all the talk about how it is "unfinished", it's hard to imagine it being even more of what it already is; in its best moments, it feels larger than life in a way that only video games can be, but usually never are, and rarely even aspire to be.

Wild to think that there are already Rift Wizard-likes out there, much less one this good; also borrows heavily from DCSS with the race-class-god character creation, from ToME4 with the insane skill trees, and possibly from... Path of Exile, with how these character perks and skills can combine with a variety of build enabling items (and most of the items in Path of Achra are potentially build enabling to some extent) to the point where if you're not deleting the screen by the end of the game you probably screwed up at some point. It does, after all, advertise itself as a "broken build sandbox", which at first makes it sound like it's some super easy power fantasy - and early runs might even give that impression - but you're really going to need to figure out how to put together and pilot these broken builds to survive the higher cycles (optional difficulty increases after each victory, with monsters getting higher stats and the player gaining more levels).

Finally had enough of this fucking game. Even while I enjoyed it, it was an unenthusiastic 3 stars at best, a decent enough collection of random activities to pass the time with butt robots effortlessly committing genocide, but always an unmistakably garbage game where the main design principle seems to be making it impossible for anyone to ever fail a mission, with the only real obstacle being how absolutely terrible it is at explaining how anything works. And with each new recent update slowly eroding away what little internal cohesion this might have ever aspired to have, the horrible truth of Warframe is now clearer than ever: DE are thoroughly incompetent developers who somehow fluked upon a solid core 10 years ago and have been trying their damned best to undo that mistake ever since.

APRIL '24 EDIT: of course I came back to it lmao most games suck even more (and they fixed shield gating! and it looks like some of the newest content is actually... even a bit demanding!?!?!? for a change). still dismayed at how they're slowly drowning out some interesting enough lore built over the years with absolute garbage like jojo memes tho

Not a surprise that famous video game hack Hideo Kojima has famous movie hacks Guillermo del Toro and Nicholas Wingdings Refn as guest stars on his latest video game movie - in hindsight I should have dropped it and asked for a refund as soon as their names showed up in the opening credits. Gameplay looked promising but when your reward for a successful delivery is half an hour of the worst TV show on Earth, it's impossible to stay motivated - this was my first Kojima game and after just five hours into it I'm sure it'll also be my last, absolutely cringeworthy garbage. Late 00s webcomic AXE COP had better writing and it was copaganda written by a literal 5-year-old.