This is a tough one, I really had a good time with the combat, and the game is only okay when you’re not out in the open world. Which could have been remedied if they just took the repair bots out. I don’t want to stealth my way through the game because fuck that it’s an action shooter, and any time you try to do ANYTHING fun in the open world you are flooded with a literal armada of infinite respawned enemies, you will find out quick that it is best to just run through every area. It’s obvious one of the games strengths is the visuals but god forbid you try and explore to enjoy them. Oh and significant performance issues on the Series X (no clue how ps5, and PC handle the game) but for now I would maybe avoid the Series X port. Let’s get to the story, awful dialogue, a completely weak ass beginning, The bit with the underwater facility and the mind control was cool I guess, that weak ass bioshock reference made me wince, why the hell was that even in the game? Anyways I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to it because of how shit it is.

I honestly think it was a valiant effort of the team, and in a certain light I can see someone really enjoying themselves and appreciate the game, but that ain’t me. I’m sure their next game will make this one look like a poop stain in their catalog or something to that effect.

Pros: neat take on a dystopia with whacky shit around every corner. Good graphics.
Combat especially with the shotgun feels satisfying and the way the robots dismember adds to that. And… yeah, that’s all the game really has going for it.

Cons: dialogue is awful, story is somewhere between ‘hey that’s kind of interesting to a complete boring travesty.’ Most of the bosses are forgettable. Beautiful hub world that’s ruined by infinite enemies. And that ending was terrible.

This reminded me of No More Heroes in that the combat is shallow but effective. It doesn't get old, and is satisfying, cool, and empowering. It also reminds me of Sifu as in the goal is to get into a flow state where you are slashing, parrying, dodging, and activating finishers. I think it is more successful at that than Sifu because the controls are more responsive here. I didn't think the parrying worked well in Sifu. The story and characters are offbeat, funny, but they are also intriguing. The game sets up a alternate history 2022 that immediately sounds wild. It keeps a lot of the story to a minimum, but still managed to pack an emotional punch at the end. The game is buggy (crashed twice on me and some framerate drops), but it never got too bad for me.

Playing this over the course of many months, I spent many nights staring at my phone displaying bedtime via the large lock screen clock, wondering if instead of sleeping I should play smtv. Some nights weren't much of a choice, my brain too awake and too stimulated to sleep anyways.

When I was pretty young, late elementary/early middle school I convinced my parents to let me play world of warcraft, subscription fee on their dime and all. I still remember that thick box pc games use to come in which I finally got during a target run after a few months of parental debate. What followed was (maybe on and off? I can't remember exactly) years of constant playing. I think I got out, I was bullied but I had some friends? Family activities? But it was a lot of weekends from 8am past midnight doing basically nothing else. Tapping 1, 2, 3, 4, eyes blurry as hell, watching numbers go up.

My brains wired, or been wired, for these dopamine hits. I hate reading YouTube comments of a game, seeing people call shit addictive as if that's good. Now back into games as an adult I constantly have a little voice telling me I'm wasting my time. I try and be cognizant of this pull of games. Designed to be predatory or not, the vast majority of games' job (as dictated by corporate ethos) is to keep you playing. Videogames or not, all humans want to do is complete a little task for a reward, it's brain chemistry. So I tell myself: No mmos, nothing endless, no lootboxes. I'm an art enjoyer goddammit! I'm going to play single player games because the art design is nice, the design is cutting edge, cool, and subversive - and did you know the best anti capitalist and gender queer art of the 21st century is on a website called itch.io?

My mom recently told me how I was mostly angry during my time playing WoW. Maybe it was that any interaction outside of the game wasn't giving me experience points. Or that WoW's loop ultimately keeps you on an endless treadmill with no real reward and instead has you spend hours getting little synapses of the brain to fire off for turning a quest in or defeating a boss.

SMTV is good, maybe very good. Narrow corridors are (mostly) dropped for wide open spaces which feature some fun, simple platforming and exploration to get upgrades. (When narrow corridors do show up it highlights how piss poor they are.) There's a few different things to collect that pop up on a mini map and this both feels slightly bloated with open world design of the day while also justifying some grind and circular mechanics that is all in all pretty fun and well balanced. Unfortunately, all four maps are covered in repeat generic building ruins and sand??? Not sure about why sand? To suggest the passing of time - rocks breaking down maybe? Idk we could imagine the apocalypse as more than that.

The music is a well known highlight here. Synthesized voices swirl, clearly a choir has been mapped to launchpads or keyboard keys because they cut in and out in an inhumane way. Frequently, just like the guitar and drums, the voices are modulated with reverb and gain. Almost sounding angelic only to be dragged back down to the gritty, mechanic, and metallic matching the aesthetic. The cadavers hollow theme is wild and with some curation you have a pretty smart 40 minute electronic album I think. On a similar note a lot of the demon design is pretty rad and helped fuel the obsession with the games loop I had, always wanting to see what the next demons were. In general there's a lot of bipedals and especially leggy ladies. The more abstract the better.

Much has been said about the plot. It's fine idk the characters are poor with hardly enough dialogue until there is a longer cutscenes with not much to say. Someone here mentioned a development restart and obviously the budget isn't large on this one (also the reason for the repeat environments surely). at least the team knows their strength and didn't bloat the game with too many pointless cutscenes. Beyond mechanically, this game doesn't justify it's length. The last area is exhausting especially cause they give up the ghost and start handing you ways to level up quicker. Nothing to really keep you going except to see what Zeus, Amon, Alilat, etc. look like

All in all, this one had me thinking. Was it worth 55 hours? What do I want out of games? I don't think it's this generally. The loop actually wears off on me quicker than when I was younger, or it's not as successful as WoWs was. Still it has its vibes and it's strengths.

A neat short visual novel. It creates a setting that's some kind of vaguely dark technofuture, lacking references to our real world that suspends it in something that feels a little like bits of 25th Ward, or BLAME! A girl is able to be grown via praise to create weapons, a scientist harnesses the power of a 4Chan message board and the mix of hate/love the users direct at girls (anime girls, etc), in order to more quickly grow the girl, eventually freeing her. Personally I've always been a little curious about the culture of some corners of the internet of people who seem young, are fairly aggressive, yet wear anime avatars or frequently consume extremely moe visual novels, anime, Japanese culture, etc.

This story was made pretty quickly and could go in various directions, but I liked how it connected certain 'real life topics' to these otherwise strange SF elements.

Before we get into the expansion Given Time, let me share my thoughts on the base game first, since they're obviously connected. The Far Shore is one of my favorite games in the year it came out. Its story of interstellar travel to flee a dying planet is certainly not a new idea, but the way it approaches this premise with a heavy dose of surrealist religious perspective, while still having a strong, rational scientific presence is remarkable. As the story driven campaign goes on, I grew attached to the smart characters who are trying their best to coexist peacefully within the new world they're in, even when a mysterious force forces the scout crew to adapt, or risk taking humanity's last hope with them to the grave. The game has a lot of small annoyances and rough edges, especially concerning how to progress the story at certain parts, as the game doesn't hold your hand often, but overall its unique qualities makes it a very worthwhile experience.

Jett's gameplay centers on driving the titular futuristic hover-glider vehicle, as you master its throttle overheating tendencies, the ability to postpone said mechanic by collecting and using vapors at the right time, and learning the art of handling it in order to tackle objectives or outrun hostiles. I'm playing this on the PS5, and I consider the Dualsense implementation to be essential to the experience, as the haptics and adaptive triggers and such contribute to a deeper understanding and connection with your vehicle. For example, the triggers will rattle when you're close to overheating. It's important to add that the vehicle has a learning curve, and it may take some time to fully understand how the game wants you to use it, which is not going full throttle each time, and not brute forcing your way through obstacles. Once you do, it truly feels like no other video game vehicle. Personally, the Jett is one of my favorite video game vehicles ever.

Now, with Given Time, the game capitalizes on the potential that TFS left on table. Like TFS, it is also a open world vehicular based experience, but this time around the story is much lighter, and you'll get to tackle the game's objective with much more freedom. After a short story-driven opening, you're set free to find and solve various obstacles in order to collect Brine Wisps, which are basically sentient flying orbs. These obstacles follow a couple main templates, which includes keeping up with a fast creature flying across the land, baiting certain creatures to activate a mysterious local flora, and blowing up rocks with heavy bombs. The game does not overstay its welcome, and although the variation of these objectives may seem limited, the way it tests your knowledge of how various objects in the world interact and the mastery of handling your titular glider makes it very engrossing. It reminds me of something like Skyrim or BOTW, where your solution to one of the puzzles may feel like you're cheating the game's mechanic, and it's quite satisfying because of it. If you have mastered the game's mechanics in TFS, then GT will be much more fun, in pure gameplay terms.

GT also seems to fix one of my slight complaints with TFS, which is the usage of its music. The soundtrack is pretty great, but a lot of the best tracks in TFS felt underused. In GT, they seem to use these tracks more liberally. I will post a video highlighting one of these tracks at the very bottom of this review, which I really recommend you to check out.

Are there still rough edges here? Absolutely. In fact, I think this expansion is slightly buggier than TFS. The framerate gets sluggish when you're going between the large sections of the map, the sun seems to be violently shaking at times, and the ending glitched out on me a few times (which was saved by a very timely patch). But I do not think that these are close to be dealbreakers.

TFW is a unique sci-fi game that pushed it self to be as unique as possible, while maintaining a coherent but somewhat limiting structure. GT lets go of that structure, and instead pushes the game to be the very best version of itself, without losing its identity. With this expansion, Jett has become one of my favorite games of all time.

Here's the video I talked about earlier, highlighting one my favorite tracks!
https://youtu.be/OadANTTiUJA

Hate is undeserved, fun if not average game. I liked the mobility and parkour mechanics a lot. When you get more of the abilities and skill trees opened up there is a lot to play around with and especially on the harder settings with all the spells at your disposal. You are able to have some really thrilling fights. However the game is sort of a mess and the development shows, the pacing is way off and the game basically ends with a 2 hour walking and lore dump chapter that is fucking painful. Maybe I was just stupid but some of the twists got me. I didnt have much issue with Freyas personality. She is a bit unlikable at times but all in all was a fun protag. I will say I think Square needs to ditch this busted ass engine. Its not as good ast they think. FF15 showed it. And the controls are so wack. My hand is still hurting from clawing so I have camera, parkour and attacks all available to me at the same time.

If you asked me until now, I’d have said Citizen Sleeper was my sleeper hit this year. But Signalis just blew my mind. One of the best times I had with a game this year, which is unbelievable, since it was one hell of a year for games yet again.
I need to think about this a lot more before I can put it in proper writing, but what those two devs managed to achieve in terms of atmosphere and style is stunning. And the fact that it’s clearly being an homage to games from a time, where I was too young to play the clear inspirations, makes this all the more rewarding to play through as an adult. It’s a love letter to clunky ps1 horror survival games, it even doesn’t spare you from the more tedious and unforgiving parts of the era. But it worked for me. The limitations worked wonders, because it asked me to be more resourceful than other games. It made me plan my trips from safe house to safe house, it made me micromanage my inventory to adapt to certain trips. All of it worked so well for me, I didn’t dislike a second I spent with the game. It’s more like I embraced its flaws. And did I already say the atmosphere knocks it out of the park? It really does.

I’m kinda speechless still, because it pushed all my buttons. Holy fuck.