Psychonauts 2 is a platforming treat, but I feel like it's lost something that the original had.

Don't get me wrong, it's a stunning game. Visually it's a marvel, it has some really great characters, wonderful soundtrack and some great level design.

My problem, which is a personal one and in no way detracts from the game, is that it lost the point n' click elements. The first game was very clearly made by LucasArts vets, and used the inventory system while solving puzzles, albeit lightly.

But it was levels like the Milkman and getting past the Orderly that made Psychonauts so memorable, it was a problem solving game, and it's a shame to see them move away from that (in their defence, it has been nearly 20 years.)

What Psychonauts loses in that aspect it makes up for everywhere else, and I really do hope we get to see more of this world again in the future.

I'm not one to call a game perfect, there's always something that could be improved to make it just right. But Rez is perfect.

It accomplishes what it set out to do. It's an art piece, an audio and visual spectacle, a skillful shooter. It was all of these things when it came out 20 years ago and Infinite adds more. It's somehow like this game was made for VR, before VR was anywhere near what it is today. And Area X is something to behold.

All of that aside, the core five areas of Rez are unforgettable, weaving you through a story that says so much while barely saying anything at all. All while providing a rhythmic on rails shooter that's all killer and no filler.

I could go on singing this games praises for eternity, and I'm sure I will, but it's best experienced yourself. Find some headphones, dim the lights, grab your controller.

Welcome to Synaesthesia.

Proof that just because something is revolutionary, doesn't mean it's good.

I'm 20 years late on this one, and maybe that's why I'm missing the appeal of the game because I don't have the nostalgia glasses on, but I really don't understand the hype that Shenmue gets.

Sure, the NPCs have routines, and sure you can talk with all of them in this immersive world. But when 99% of the NPCs regurgitate the same responses, refuse to talk to you, or just point you in the direction of the 1% you DO need to talk to, what is that adding to the game?

All of the ideas presented by Shenmue are good on paper, but executed poorly. Exploring the world to investigate a mystery? Good! Having the "investigation" be asking people the same questions ad infinitum until exposition happens? Not so good. A day night cycle with characters following a routine? Good! Locking players off from certain things until a certain time and not allowing them to advance time in hour-long loops? Not good. I mean for gods sake the whole game up until finding Charlie is a wild goose chase that leads nowhere until you get the Chinese letter!

I'll admit that Shenmue popularised a lot of really interesting mechanics, I won't say it introduced them when examples can be see elsewhere (see Mizzurna Falls doing a lot of what Shenmue did the year prior), but when they're presented like this it makes for a slog that doesn't want to show off the one feature the whole concept was based around; the fighting, which is actually really good!

I'm sure we haven't seen the last of Shenmue, and I will play the others, so I only hope that they learn to take these incredibly interesting ideas and really show what you can do with them, realism is all well and good but when you try to make a game too realistic, you end up losing what makes a video game fun.

For a game that gives you a lot of freedom, it feels intent on holding your hand.

Each level is incredibly detailed, a true spectacle of level design and a veritable assassins playground, but I guess it's indicative of modern games in that it never wants to let go of the players hand and risk alienating them.

You can turn the opportunities off, and I highly recommend doing that otherwise the game becomes a paint-by-numbers challenge. But even with that off you get the NPCs playing Extras just waiting for 47 to walk by so they can loudly announce the targets achilles heel.

It's a let down but it doesn't diminish the quality of the game, everything from the design, art, to the voices are immaculate, if you can look past why citizens in Paris sound eerily similar to the ones in Marrakesh.

Hitman is a wonderful entry into the series, I just wish they would make it a bit more of a challenge, and push players outside their comfort zones rather than letting them follow a linear path, especially when they've designed such a rich series of levels to explore.

It's difficult to give games a perfect score, there's always something wrong with a game which keeps it just short of a 10. But the only thing I dislike about HL2 is so nitpicky and only applies in some sections.

Sometimes the route forward isn't clear. That's it, only sometimes I had to spend 5 minutes figuring out what was next. Like three times tops.

That aside, Half Life 2 is a masterclass in games design. This game is 16 years old and I am hard pressed to think of games that do a linear, story driven FPS as good as this one. Every encounter is a puzzle, the environment is your weapon, even the enemies can be your weapon. There's so many ways to tackle encounters and they make you feel like a genius.

And like design aside how has barely any dev team managed to match the physics of this game, the ragdolls alone feel absolutely perfect. Ravenholm is a complete masterpiece of physics-based game design that feels fun throughout.

And everytime I reached a puzzle I was absolutely expecting the dreaded "place a janky path and do your own hellish jumping puzzle" which a lot of these games are guilty of, but it happens ONCE, and it's a SUPER EASY puzzle, because Valve know how to make FUN.

That's it, everything I have to say is just gushing about this game, it's incredible, its barely aged, it deserves the pedastal it has been on for nearly two decades now. It is Half Life.

Bloodborne made me understand the Souls games.

If you find yourself struggling with other FromSoft titles, if you feel like you're missing something that's preventing you from getting the hype, give Bloodborne a go. The game starts by refusing to give you a weapon until you die, and at that, never gives you a shield.

From the get go you are told to throw yourself into situations, never play defensively, and keep moving. It made me realise that the shield was quite possibly the most crippling thing Dark Souls could give me because it makes me believe that it's a core part of the game, when it really should be a suggestion. Now that it's not here, I know HOW to play.

And even all this aside, Bloodborne is just a spectacular game, the lore is engaging, the environments are stunning, gameplay feels absolutely crisp and the enemies are pretty well balanced. There's a few that can get you caught up in shitty loops, but they are a relatively rare occurance.

I can see why Bloodborne gets all this praise, it's shown me how to enjoy these games, and done so by showcasing the best it has to offer.

Guardians of the Galaxy advertises itself as a character-action adventure game, but there's not where its strength lies. What GotG really is, is a stellar narrative experience with some combat peppered in between.

Starting with the negative, which unfortunately is the action. Don't get me wrong, for a game that has you fighting off swarms of enemies while juggling your four companions as well as your own abilities, it does quite well. All members of the team carry their weight and I frequently used their powers. Problem is that in general it feels very clunky, and really when the combat is this fast paced you want it to snap a little better. I think with a few tweaks a prospective sequel could really nail it, but it falls short this time around.

But again, the combat isn't what you're here for, it's the stunning narrative. Leading the guardians together through their quests and getting to know each otf them along the way. The best parts of the game are when you're walking with the team, making observations about the world around you, choosing the right things to say. These little moments are remembered throughout, so something you may have said earlier will come back in full force later in the game. Team members will really appreciate what Star Lord may do for them.

It's a thing that narrative games don't do often, they focus a lot on the bigger picture. Which is fine, but when your branching narrative focuses on the snowball of littler choices (do I throw Rocket across? Do I pay off the fine? Do I just choose to shut up at this moment?), then the characters really start to feel alive. You get to know their quirks and personalities, and suddenly the Guardians feel much more like YOUR team.

Don't go into Guardians of the Galaxy expecting an action romp, because really the combat begins to wear thin by the third act. The story on the other hand? That'll keep you hooked long past the credits.

Disco Elysium is one of the best narrative games I have ever played.

It's a game that I struggle finding faults with, only minor ones that, in the grand scheme of things, really don't matter. It's movement is a little clunky, and the UI is difficult to navigate on console, minor gripes. The biggest issue I immediately had with it I quickly got over. I initially had an issue with the ending, and the resolution to the mystery, but it was when I realised that the result wasn't the important aspect, rather the intricate stories of everyone involved, I overcame my upset.

This game is fantastic, it's written excellently, the voice acting is superb, it's funny, it's dramatic, it's heartbreaking and it's intriguing. I can't really do much else aside sing it's praises and tell you how much I love Kim Kitsuragi. Play Disco Elysium.

Despite it only being in early access, ULTRAKILL is one of those rare perfect games.

It's a game that forces you to get absorbed in it. It doesn't mess around, it's fast and expects you to catch up. And when you do it comes as natural as breathing.

The controls are flawless, just watch somebody play and you might be tricked into thinking that it's beyond you, but everything comes so naturally that you'll find yourself pulling off shots you didn't even realise you were capable of, I don't know if it's the music, the design, or just how the guns feel, but something about ULTRAKILL just feels like second nature when you get to grips with it.

Speaking of, the music is absolutely brutal in the best ways, incorporating high intensity breakcore to really get your blood pumping and move with it.

I have no critique on ULTRAKILL, I hope the rest of the content that comes to ULTRAKILL is more ULTRAKILL. Enjoy ULTRAKILL.

Max Payne 3 is criminally underrated.

Sure, the story probably doesn't kick quite as much as the other two, it rehashes old story beats gone over in The Fall of Max Payne. He's grappling with having to overcome his dead family yet again. However that doesn't mean it's not still a good story in of itself, it's engaging, has plenty of twists and turns, and has a lot of satisfying beats.

But that's not why it's underrated, it's underrated because it is one of the most satisfying and well constructed third person shooters out there. Max is a joy to control, fight scenes are excellently choreographed because of how Max stumbles around the battlefield wielding whatever guns he can get his hands on, which makes most gun fights look like they jump straight out of the John Woo movies that originally inspired Max's creation at Remedy.

The limited arsenal means that you're constantly switching through guns, you might have your favourites but they won't always be there, so you're always keeping an eye out for what your enemies are using and if you can nab anything off their corpses when you're done filling them with bullets.

Levels are distinct and memorable, setting the game in Sao Paulo with flashbacks to NYC means you have a cavalcade of set pieces to explore, with moments like the Airport being some of the most memorable in gaming history (go listen to TEARS by HEALTH now)

Max Payne 3 doesn't get the respect it deserves, it might not be as narratively impressive as its predecessors, but its gameplay is well worth your time.
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What a truly wonderful game Pentiment is.

It's nice to see companies like Obsidian willing to hedge their bets on a game so truly niche, what other companies would look at as something "difficult to market". Sure, it has Josh Sawyer at the helm, which allows people to claim it's "by the mind behind Fallout: New Vegas", but even still its truly inspiring to see something like this come out from a big studio.

And what a fine choice they made, Pentiment is a deeply intricate, well written narrative adventure that made me regret not paying more attention in GCSE history. Its knowledge of 16th century Europe is fascinating, but if the pages upon pages worth of history on Monastic Scriptures don't hook you (which, frankly, it should) the story it tells is one to behold.

It's a murder mystery, that tells an enthralling tale over three points in time, towards the end I had prepared myself for a vague sort of ending, where interpretation is left to the viewer, and yet I was pleasantly surprised by an exceptionally neat bow tied around the story, with a fantastic message about our place in history and the impact we have on our futures to boot.

The controls are a little janky, and the prose can get a little heavy, but this is more than made up for with its benchmark writing and stunning art.

An impeccable story trapped in a modern open world game.

Zero Dawn hooks you on it's main story from the get go, the mystery of Aloy's heritage has intricate twists and turns that culminate in a beautiful story about the persistence of human nature, and how simply the care of one person can take so many so far. I wish that I could gush about the rest of this game like I could the narrative, but it suffers from so many problems that can be found in tons of other modern open world games that, toward the end, I just wanted to play the main story and ignored most everything else.

First off, the world itself. It's beautiful, the environment team did a spectacular job of bringing the landscapes to life, it is a crying shame that the design doesn't encourage exploration whatsoever. EVERY LITTLE THING has a big, obnoxious marker on it that you can't turn off, which meant most of the time I wasn't paying much attention to the world around me and instead just kept following markers. Which is infuriating, because the world is BEGGING to be explored, and yet the mood only took me once or twice.

Case in point, there's a part in the story where you're meant to rendezvous with a contact, you find them dead, and they have drawn a map in their blood to where you need to go, in their dying moments. "Oh cool!" I thought, expectations suddenly rising "A puzzle! I need to decipher the map and figure out where to-" and then the cutscene ended, and a big, obnoxious marker popped up on screen, always there, always demanding my attention, always telling me where to go.

Now, this isn't entirely Zero Dawn's fault, these quest markers are a plague on the modern AAA gaming space, but what frustrates me is Horizon is SO CLOSE to being such an incredible, perfect game but it so frequently succumbs to these dull design decisions that it doesn't stick the landing. Side quests are dull and result in "go here, scan thing, talk to person, fight machine" ad infinitum, so I just stopped doing them. Gathering resources in the world is pointless because most shops will just sell them to you and you amass currency so fast that you might as well just fast travel to a merchant rather than go out and gather the things you need.

With just a few changes to its core design, even optionally (no quest markers, limited merchant stock, harsher resource restrictions) then Horizon could really encourage you to explore its world and get engrossed in it. And you should! Fighting machines out in the wild is SO immensely fun, so much thought has been put into each enemy and taking on any of them feels so good, in between fluid, well designed enemies and Aloy's razor-sharp control.

Horizon Zero Dawn is worth your time for the story alone, but it could have been so, so much more.

Hi Fi Rush is a wonderful piece of art.

There's the time-old argument as to what's the most important thing in a video game, is it the graphics? The performance? The gameplay? The truth is, it's the experience. Experience is king. It's a combination of all these parts to make the player the star of the show and make them know it. Hi-Fi Rush pushes you under the spot light in the absolute best way possible.

Maybe I'm biased, "rhythm hack-n-slash with comic graphics and a goofy cast" feels as if it was made for me personally, but this game is just so incredibly well executed that I can't help but want to recommend it to everyone. The gameplay, the music, the cast, the writing, the levels, everything is just immaculate.

My only major gripe is that sometimes during the fights it can get a little too crowded, and there's maybe too many spinning plated without sufficient warning of oncoming attacks/low health. But ultimately its a gripe I got used to with time.

No other game has made me grin ear-to-ear like an idiot while a boss kicks the shit out of me, purely because I'm wrapped up in the spectacle of it. I so desperately hope that this isn't the last we see of Chai and the gang.

I'm not one who takes to Souls-like games very often, and yet I couldn't stop playing Blasphemous.

Sure, it suffers from typically Souls-like tropes, namely with it's painful vagueness in it's prose which can be legitimately frustrating if you want to get the "best" ending (something that gets locked off if you don't do specific things before one of the bosses). But in terms of gameplay, Blasphemous is incredible.

It's tight, responsive, and oh-so-satisfying. Unlocking new abilities is exciting and discovering places to upgrade Mea Culpa or your health genuinely made me gasp with delight. Exploring the world is fun and sufficiently rewards the player. Everything about it's map, enemies, and controls is done so well that I couldn't put the game down.

And I believe that it's handling death punishments is probably the best I've seen in this genre. It doesn't take away your Tears (this games equivalent of souls) upon death, instead capping your prayer gauge (another feature that is just genuinely very cool). This is incredibly smart, one of the more frustrating things about Souls games is death can be a major loss of progress if you're carrying a lot of souls. Here, death is a chance for you to level up, take the Tears you've gathered up until the point you died, get stronger, and try again.

This means that, even with the games difficulty, you always feel like you're making progress, you never feel stuck and it never gets frustrating, death isn't nearly as nerve wracking as it was and that's a good thing, it allows you to enter fights a little more fearlessly and really take some risks during Combat that you might not do if hours worth of progress was on the line.

On top of all of this, aesthetically Blasphemous is stunning, it's Spanish Gothic architecture is intricately detailed and simply wonderful to look at, character and boss designs are endlessly memorable, and the soundtrack is incredible at setting the tone for it's many variations of areas, and there are many.

Even if you haven't stuck to Souls games before, give Blasphemous a go, it seems to do almost everything right.

Sorrowful be the heart, Penitent One.