Discards a lot of what I enjoyed about the other games to appeal to a wider audience but wishing for a PS2-era AC game (or even AC4/FA) in 2023-vision was always a pipe dream. What we got is still a great time with decent build variety which is honestly one of the most important things to get right for these.
I do miss the more unfeeling, utilitarian approach to the older games where bosses were usually just massive health pools that softlock shit builds where here there's a lot more things you can take advantage of like the stagger system. This new system plus the reliance on long wind-up animations for some of the more major bosses does make the Sekiro comparison seem fair, you can tell a huge difference in design philosophy between this and 4/FA though there are plenty of homages and ideas from the older games (surprise multi-AC fights, music changing in menus as you progress).
FromSoftware is a very different company now than it was 10 years ago. Less J-rock and 10-second missions, more refined and well-made. I still prefer the former but I can absolutely get behind the latter and I'm very excited to see what they'll change in the next game if they get to make it.

The moody atmosphere from GTA III returns but with a fantastic physics engine that makes everything feel visceral and weighty. Unfortunately these are some of the most repetitive and monotonous missions I've played in a sanbox game and I was sick of it by the halfway point.

The story is average though the solid voice acting and cutscene direction helped to keep me engaged most of the time, especially before all the mob stuff takes center stage and it just becomes an average gangster movie.
The effects are all excellent and made the shooting feel satisfying enough but mouse + keyboard makes this game a joke. With checkpoints like these though I would rather just make the game easy instead of plugging in a controller and having to retry driving sections over and over.

The driving is quite satisfying to pull off well but by the end you wish that Niko would rush just a little bit faster to get things done when you fly off a motorcycle and your mission target is rapidly escaping.

Some aspects of the humour have aged EXTREMELY poorly even knowing what I was in for and expecting a bit of dated stuff here and there. Domestic violence especially seems to get ribbed on a weirdly high amount. The way they handle Gracie as well is just downright awful and mean-spirited, playing off some atrocious stuff for laughs because she fits the stereotypical 'dumb blonde' and the main characters get annoyed by her, lightening the horror of what they're doing to her, apparently?

I played a LOT of this as a teenager and going back to complete it helped me to appreciate how much effort went into the city, the engine, and the mood. They really wanted to take themselves more seriously and it sometimes pays off but then the classic GTA gameplay gets in the way and massively overstays it's welcome. Maybe wanting to commit to the realism made them scale back on the mission variety a whole lot.

Really fun multiplayer for what it's worth, even if most of my sessions involved just going into the walkable buildings and staging a siege against infinite waves of police.

A couple of bullshit moments but otherwise the most interesting boss roster in the series. Has an etherial atmosphere that I feel only the PS3-limited graphics can afford even over Bloodborne. Has a stronger commitment to the JRPG aspects than others in the series, forcing you to experiment with different stats and builds to hard-counter enemies, which in turn makes the message system extremely useful (emulating online play is a must). Only Dark Souls 2 came close to that but sacrificed a lot of what made DeS/DaS enjoyable to actually play and look at.

Fun fact: I played this on release when everyone started talking about it but got barely any further after killing the first boss. I beat every other Soulsborne game pretty much in order, until recently coming back to finish this one. This might be my favourite game in the entire series.

Nintendo are just showing off at this point.

With Breath of the Wild they already reinvented the open-world genre pioneered and iterated on for years by other game companies well after Nintendo was founded. Now they're flexing by further refining and improving on an already great foundation in creative ways, such as 'solving' the fast weapon degradation in BOTW by letting you stick two flimsy weapons together here. Travelling is faster but only when you use a new ability you have to work for, or work to unlock shrines on the sky islands. You have to 'fix' what might have started to grate you in BOTW yourself, they just give you the tools here to do it.

What they do give you upfront are much more varied and interesting temples, which feel a lot more exciting than what felt like bigger shrines in BOTW. You can tell they used the resources freed up from having already created the engine and world from the last game to greatly improve the content of the game outside of it's systems, which is seen the most in it's story.

The cutscenes here are almost Ghibli-level good, especially in the latter half of the game. Playing with the English voices is a crime when the voice acting serves everything this well.

My only gripe is how drawn-out the first half of the game can feel at times, especially if you've come to this not long after BOTW (which I beat maybe over a year ago), the improvements don't immediately feel all that fantastic and the boredom can start to set in. I was massively surprised at how much more enjoyment I was getting the further I got, sort of the opposite of BOTW where I just wanted it to end. In that game I got a disappointing final boss after a fantastic introduction, here I felt I was going through the motions until I ended up with tears (OF THE KINGDOM LOL) in my eyes by the credits.

The depths are kind of annoying considering how long you have to spend in them but this doesn't stop Tears of the Kingdom from being the best open world game ever made.

Main benefit is the recompiled maps having a much improved draw distance so grass doesn't just appear in front of you like it used to, which was really the only major sign of age on the original game. I'm not always a fan of how the colored lighting changes the mood of some scenes though, I preferred Half-Life 2 with a bleak eastern-european feeling environment which is tarnished somewhat with the splashes of bright orange and blue in places.

I was willing to forgive the bizarre choice of YouTuber commentary if it was at least insightful but really doesn't provide more than short, surface-level development facts written like a student project. Ironically YouTube analyses have done a better job and stealing clips from those would give you a better commentary track. Commentary nodes are also far too short and frequent so it's really just an interactive bullet-point list.

It might seem like I went in hard on two quite small aspects but really that's all this offers. Still a valid way to play one of the best FPS campaigns of all time but the original is still being updated to work on modern systems.

Great game to play with people who aren't that good with a controller since it levels the playing field for the loser. The immense power of some of the perks make it basically an even score until the final round though, at which point the person who is better at platformers will always win. Physics are a bit fucky and there don't appear to be that many levels either. Still good fun though and priced very fairly for what you get. Far too easy to cancel character customization for both players by accident.