Adrenaline inducing, mindless, non stop action. Basically Hotline Miami but you play as an Ape. What really makes this special is getting on that state of flow, just focused, while some amazing music is playing pretty much syncronized with and based on your gameplay.

Really fun and quick experience.

Edit: Great game for beginners at speedrunning too. Grinded a lil bit of it and managed to get to 7th place on speedrun.com. Fell to 10th place now though.

"Until the day we meet again"

Gonna pump out some Shinra propaganda for listening while you read this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftFF70_9cog

Bai Gawd it has been a wonderful year for so many great new releases and this one has yet again topped my list so far this year. I am definitely a major fanboy for this one since I grew up around this Final Fantasy as my introduction to this life changing series for me. From playing the games, watching my brother play it, to watching the Advent Children movie when we were younger and reaching this point now and playing the next installment of this remake. Revisiting the locations and witnessing some of these scenes and nearly improving in so many areas and the party feels so alive and the interactions made my heart so damn happy. This game is a rollercoaster of emotions in a great way! From laughing out loud to the unexpected jokes to the tearful emotional moments.

Overall gameplay has been definitely improved on and I love how the quicker you think ahead pays off with the synergy moves and making nearly every party member so damn fun to play and experiment with. RED XIII was definitely one of my absolute favorites to play with! I love how the other party members are in the background in some of the fights as well and you can see them fighting other enemies as well. Could not believe how much mini games they threw in here as well and all are pretty nice to breakup the repetition and have you always doing unique things and Queens Blood is definitely the brightest most addictive diamond of the bunch.

I knew the soundtrack was gonna hit me with some damn fine tunes like the first installment did, but of course I still underestimated them. I will also say some of the side quests are pretty good to do and the banter between party members is so good and makes for some additional lore and fanservice for our favorite characters except Chadley who can go suck a Chocobo egg! I loved how much Barrett was fleshed out in this one they did his story with Dyne damn well and goddamn that man is such a badass party member to have once you get into late game territory.

By no means is it the perfect game, but for longtime fans of the original it is one hell of a treat and I am curious to see where they continue to go with telling the story in its new ways. I was on the fence about this one with its new twists and turns to the story changes, but I feel like it worked out really well. I am definitely cool with waiting a bit for the next part considering all the RPGS I still need to get to, the new and old ones! I could certainly go on and talk about every little detail, but I don't wanna be like these game trailers nowadays that tell you every little thing about games and want you to experience it for yourself!

Playing Vanquish is like having three seizures at the same time, all while jumping with a parachute from a skyscraper. It's up to you to figure out if it's a bad thing or a good thing.

I'm 100% sure that this is exactly how Shinji Mikami and all of Platinum Games percieve the United States and americans, and I'd say it's about 90% accurate. This game was made by (talented) monkeys, for monkeys, so it's just my thing. The story is stupid, and most of it is told through goddamn loading screens, that last about 2 seconds, so you better read fast. But of course it's not about the story, but the incredibly realistic and absolutely not charicaturised cast of characters; from the top of my head i can't remember a single name, but there was the dude that looked like Raiden who was really cool and smoked like 4 packs of cigaretts in a 7 hour game, the old bionic commando, who's sometimes an asshole and sometimes a little puppy sweetheart, the hot lady, who was there because she's hot, and the russian guy with the same name as the italian volleyball guy (big fan). I'd say that's about it.

The gameplay is fun even though it's pretty unpolished, and it's really easy to see that at higher difficulties (you get one-shotted sooo many times without knowing how you actually died that it's hard to count).The shooting is simple but fun, the cover system surprisingly works pretty well, most weapons are fun to use and there's a good enough enemy variety for a game of this lenght. The bossfights are really cool when they're not completely unfair, with 10000 bullets flying everywhere and 0 covers (but this may be a problem of higher difficulties), and there are a couple that stand out (like when you have to kill dr Manhattan twice). The game works best when you're moving everywhere at the speed of sound, but i'd hoped that there would have been more mechanics related to the dash, other than the slowmo. The highlight of the game though are the cutscens; you can smell Shinji Mikami a mile away.

It's dumb fun, but I think this will appeal only to a certain kind of public. It's roughnessess are forgiven only because this feels like an indie project without an indie budget (and I say this in the most positive way possible). Surely not the game of life, but you'll play this with a big, stupid smile on your face most of the time (when you're not trying destroy your room cause of the oneshot deaths). It also has the greatest end credits of videogame history.

I'm not a big fan of the rogue lite/like genre, but I have to admit that this surprisingly works pretty well! I enjoyed the experience and I think it takes the biggest strenght of the core game (the combat system) and brings it in a very different context, but it still doesn't feel forced at all.
The thing I was most interested in though was the story, and even if it didn't deliver the ending to Ragnarok i would have hoped for, it still brought a satisfying sense of conclusion to Kratos' story and struggles. I appreciated it a lot, but I think this will hit much harder for those who have played the og games.
Most impressive thing is they decided to give this DLC for free; it feels criminal to play this without paying for it

My first instinct was to regard this as a “flawed, but promising” take on the game-night horror boom - but as the experience sat with me, Ive started to realize: I dont think this game has a soul. I dont believe that the game itself' believes in its concept. Much like its subject matter, this feels like a stunt. A toothy-grinning facade hoping to capture nothing but attention, like a decoy predator. A skinwalker, a doppelganger. A veneer. It almost tricked me, almost got in.

Which isnt to say the game is nefarious. What Im saying is, I dont think its… well-meant. Theres an obscured hollowness to it. A fakeness. Plastic, dressed to look warm but when you touch it all you feel is cold - and there is a low-level deceptiveness to that. Your nerves sense it, they fill you with distrust. I withhold my trust from it.

The worst thing that you could do to a series like this is make it an open world experience when the previous formula already described the universe in itself, jumping into a narrative that's more complex than it is for it's own good.

Although I didn't finish this game, I saw enough to think "yeah, this is not Metro" or at least, not the Metro I grew to appreciate and love. I don't know what they were thinking, there's just so much wrong here I would have never have expected from this series.

What made 2033 and Last Light so special was that the gameplay spoke for itself in terms of portraying the narrative and the universes' characters. You came across things that were visually presented to you instead of in your face exposition dump in every scene. I think that's what annoyed me the most when I attempted to play this and not only that, but the complexity is just too much for this franchise.

2033 and Last Light were masters at making something great out of something so simple. Just a straight forward task. Exodus introduces you with complex ideas and dumps so much on you within an hour of playtime that it just feels more unnatural and less organic than it's predecessors more than anything. It's overreaching, trying to live up to it's past glory by attempting to create something that they thought would make the narrative the best in the series simply by adding things that didn't need to be there.

In the way of gameplay, I don't know why this feels more jank than remasters of older games. It doesn't feel as smooth as 2033 or Last Light, it felt a lot more sluggish.

I'm afraid Metro fell victim to the threequel curse, but that doesn't mean I'm giving up on this game as a whole. I may be shelving it for now but hopefully I come back to this game in a few months time and find that instead I don't mind it as much.

"He is gone, he did what he could, and now he has gone to meet his kin. I can't judge him for that, the remainders of humanity are finishing each other off in their final fight. It is not his war. I hope he was able to forgive us... me, for what we did to his brothers and sisters. His mother and father."

Once in a blue moon a studio releases a sequel to a cult classic game that not only lives up to it's expectations but also elevates itself above it's predecessor. Metro: Last Light is one such case in which this rarity in gaming is achieved.

In every aspect, Last Light takes what made 2033 great and does something even greater. Not only delivering a more straight forward, exhilarating and epic narrative, but despite very few changes, delivers the best gameplay experience of the two.

2033 felt very eerie in it's own right (as did Last Light) in a sense that the tunnels owned you and there was very little enjoyment in confronting endless waves of enemies. It was a great sense of dread that brought to 2033 one of the best survival horror atmospheres. What I liked about Last Light though is how much the tables seem to have turned gameplay wise. No longer feeling stuck in tunnels with the enemy, but rather the enemy being stuck in them with you.

I think it's a nice contrast to show to the player what Artyom has become and how you can change him by the end of the narrative in such impactful ways. I'm not even sure if it was intentional, but it added such a great layer to the gameplay that I absolutely loved making every enemy encounter endlessly fun and satisfying.

The cast of characters are mostly the same but they are so much more likable here. I remember not having much of a thought about any of them in 2033, I think that was really my only complaint, but they're so much more easy to invest into here. Especially characters like Pavel and literally anyone who was involved within the narrative bits relating to the war. The dialogue and voice acting seems to improved too, not that they were too bad in 2033 anyways.

What else can I say? It's Metro at it's finest, though I am yet to play Exodus, I think it'll be a challenge for Last Light to be topped by anything that comes after it in this series be it Exodus or the in-progress fourth installment... but I'm willing to give them a chance.