I can understand the general praise the game gets. It's very fresh feeling both in terms of it's vibe and presentation. The mechanic feels unique too where combat is on a beat.

Story wise it's pretty silly, power of friendship thing but it's entertaining for what the game is. Combat is ok, you don't have to follow the beat with your presses but if you do you get bonus damage.

Music is overall good, I think though that it's hard to feel that it's good since a lot of the game is platforming, and during those sections they dial the music down to basically being a metronome so there's no excitement or build up. Music was best during boss fights or when they generally used a licensed track.

Overall for a 10-12 hour game it's pretty enjoyable but more iteration/licensed music budget (amazing how much lyrics help hype up a track) would be great.

Probably one of the best 2D platformers to come out in a long while. Inspired by the Wario Land series the style and wackiness seems to be based on 90's cartoons and the animation is very fluid. Music is top notch and fits the game well.

Tight game design on most levels really allows you to fly through the levels once you understand the layout and why things are placed where they're placed. Most levels have some new element/gimmick and while some work better than others, in general it manages to keep every level feeling fresh enough to make you want to keep going.

If you're just trying to get through the game it's roughly a 6 hour experience. But there's plenty of additional enjoyment in unlocking all the achievements/collectables along with getting P rankings on every level that will add hours to your playtime if you want.

If you've ever enjoyed platformers in your life, it's worth checking out this indie gem.

It's BotW only more refined. Ultimately the fusing/crafting elements of the game make it stand out with the creative freedom given in a lot of situations. Downside is they doubled the map size by including another map but it's very samey without much interesting.

Would rather they focus on a smaller map with more points of interest that are actually interesting.

Solid game overall but gameplay is the focus, not the story which is fine but immaterial.

I enjoyed this game overall but it's not flawless and while it attempts to reach the heights of classic JRPGs, namely invoking Chrono Trigger, it falls short.

Graphically this game is top tier and it's wonderful to look at from it's characters to varied environments. It's a feast for the eyes.

Music is overall good, it fits the game and you can tell they were trying to make it feel like a 16 bit inspired soundtrack which they did but at times I wonder if that actually held them back.

Gameplay and combat was ok. There's a lot of pressing A to get around the environments like the devs felt your thumb needed the additional workout outside of combat. Overall the areas are relatively linear and filled with light puzzles, nothing particularly exciting from a design perspective (graphically look great)

Combat is inspired by Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG with timed button presses that become relatively key to navigate bosses and enemies at time to interrupt their casting. It also helps keep you engaged but at times feels more like another puzzle that needs to be solved without much variety. Also later bosses become HP sponges with little move variety which makes them become stale as the combat basically never evolves past the 6 hour mark.

Story and characters is overall poor. The actual bullet points of the story and characters are fine but the actual writing and expansion of those ideas is incredibly poor. Most of the characters have very little personality which automatically turns Garl into the main characters most of the game having the only personality it seems and is the face. As the game goes on too the writing makes less sense, lacks explanation and feels ham-fisted in a lot of areas.

If you're a fan of old school JRPG's Sea of Stars is worth checking out but it's probably not a game you'll return to again like you would Final Fantasy 4/6 or Chrono Trigger.

Really great game from a narrative front with some great artistic moments. It really takes some of the themes from Alan Wake 1 and executes them a lot better and in more interesting ways. I think where the game gets a ding is that the gameplay can be a bit too much RE Lite that isn't particularly compelling but they do a better job with the survival horror style shooting by limiting your supplies and the enemies making it more important to conserve.

Another ding is that the game as of 11/23/2023 has some audio glitches and sync issue with the subtitles which hopefully they patch up. And I was not a fan of the ending itself without going into details.

There's a lot of artistry in this game and it's done well and helps make the game stand out with using real life acting and utilizing musical elements to great effect.

Overall very good, takes about 15-25 hours depending on how much you want to run about doing collectable stuff and explore around. Looking forward to Remedy's next game.

Never played the original Gamecube game so I don't have any attachment to this. Overall it's a product of it's time. It's very much a Metroid game, collecting upgrade to access new areas and power up and it's fun to explore.

But there's a lot of clunkiness in the movement, camera angles, and general design. For the time it showed that Metroid was able to make the leap from 2D to 3D successfully.

But without the nostalgia glasses the game is just ok, it's a good remaster, faithful to the original for better or for worse with nicer graphics.

A story that's all about the emotional connection with the main character and his companions. It's overall done pretty well and you go on a lot of ups, downs, happy and sad moments that all work well together to form the narrative.

The actual gameplay itself is where it suffers. The concept is a loop and exploring the same things gets a bit annoying since some of it feels like just padding. Up to the third floor then welp back to the first floor then got to go back to the third floor but then back to the 2nd. This wouldn't be so bad except to move quickly between floors requires a currency that you get by killing enemies, so you're forced to kill enemies unless you want to walk your way back to where you want each loop.

Plus the combat itself isn't really engaging to begin with but just gets easier as the game goes on and ultimately serves little purpose after a certain point, the game does eventually give you a way to cause enemies to run though.

But the character writing is very good and the way each character feels unique but exaggerated is nice and it has a nice emotional punch if you can handle the more sloggy portions of the game. Game takes about 20ish hours to get through but can vary a bit depending on how much combat you end up doing.

A serviceable strategy game that has some interesting ideas that unfortunately translate into plodding unengaging gameplay.

The aspect of being able to create your own race and modify them as the game goes on is excellent and thematically can give your race a different feeling. While the differences aren't massive as it's only a handful of spells, of which you likely won't immediately learn them all, over time it adds up and you can steer your faction in certain directions.

An issue is that since each spell isn't particularly impactful, it's not really that exciting getting new spells (which is more or less the replacement for technology tree) when in civ there's certain techs that really change your position such as unlocking your special unit or a tier upgrade or special building to get a big jump, and that's very much missing from the overworld campaign.

Where AoW4 puts it's eggs is in the tactical combat, everything eventually ends up there and it's.. ok. Their isn't exactly much maneuvering or positioning as the maps are relatively small and the game encourages you to clump up because of accuracy and that moving can take away from how many attacks you do, and it pays to be aggressive taking out enemies off the map. There are status effects but most aren't impactful since once your forces have met the enemy combat only lasts ~3-5 turns. But after the first couple you're either almost guaranteed to win or not. It does get old and it's pretty easy to just gang up on the AI overall.

Which the AI isn't very brilliant in any situation and I found them most passive. You generally have to just make your way to them for any war to end. In tactical maps they'll just run over bad areas on the map rather than shift around them.

And as for the city building it feels kind of stripped down in some ways. Pretty much you build structures internally so actual size/map placement generally doesn't matter with the exception of your main tier settlement building and special buildings which take up a province on the map. Generally you can just build them all over time as there's very few that have some sort of draw back. And map expansion you lock yourself in mostly with what you want the new province to produce.

There is also an underground map which I don't think execution wise ends up being that interesting and you have to swap your map around to see it. You can build cities there but it honestly felt more tedious to keep in mind.

And the UI is not great, there's a lot of information that would be great to see in terms of what other free/AI cities have that you can't see, or even get a vague idea how powerful or ahead someone is to know if you need to address it.

Overall again had some interesting ideas but in the end, the execution left a lot to be desired where I wasn't really excited to play the game so much as just end them so I can do the pantheon tree.

I'm not a Harry Potter fan, I haven't read the books or watched the movies and don't not a lot. But the trailers made me interested in it. In the end my feeling is that the game's ok. There's some things I thought it did right like the atmosphere and some of the cinematic moments. There's also a couple of sections that felt unique and enjoyable from that end.

But overall it was a pretty generic story of bad guys wanting to find the McGruffin and you the Chosen One must stop them. The dark arts element they teased was disappointing, you learn the spell (pretty late) but it has 0 impact outside of combat itself so there's no reason not to get them. Some individual stories were good, some pretty forgettable.

Combat was pretty fun, though I did get caught up flipping around my spell load outs mid combat. And when there's a lot of enemies on screen it can become frustrating as you spend a lot of time just dodging/blocking. It also gets a bit repetitive as spells sort of do the same thing in the end, they either CC the enemy or just do direct damage so you just have to rotate through them.

The general gameplay is a giant collectathon for appearances for you and your crafting room. The latter I basically never engaged with outside of quests because there was really no reason to other than to identify items. There's a set of players that will really enjoy customizing the room, I was not one of them.

Overall I think the game is fine, bonus points if your a Harry Potter fan, but it hardly does anything really impressive to Open World games other than the atmosphere of the setting.

This game will appeal to a certain type of person who loves the NASA inspired space setting and will want to explore every desolate rocky moon and planet. They'll want to build up big mighty bases up that span the galaxy.

I was not that person. Overall I didn't enjoy the setting, everything felt too samey to me. And where something like Fallout is interesting because it takes the known and perverts it, Starfield doesn't have that with it's humancentric setting.

The exploration is a bunch of loading screens with a majority of planets being uninhabitable rocks with cookie cutter space habs full of cookie cutter guys in suits mostly and the occasional cave area.

While I enjoyed the aspect of building your ship, the reality is the only time you're really in your ship is when you're in orbit around a planet, and you either shoot enemies or fly to a base. A NMS system would have benefited a lot.

The game shines with faction quests being generally interesting and more engaging. And the smaller multi part quests tended to be enjoyable. But there's plenty of fetch/kill quests with basically no story to hold it up.

While I don't consider Starfield a bad game, it was one of the more polished Bethesda games to come out, but the setting, quests, exploration, and general vibe was overall a miss for me and I'd rather replay Fallout 4 or Skyrim again than do another run in Starfield.

I enjoyed Control quite a bit. The lore of the game is very interesting if you take the time to read/listen/watch all the things you can find. Very SCP meets 1960's Government Bureaucracy.

Gameplay wise the combat is relatively enjoyable as you gain powers to levitate in the air, dash around and throw just about everything at enemies. The environment is great with all the physics work they did. There's enough mods that you can build your arsenal and character in a style you enjoy.

Storywise it's mostly just ok, it's actually fairly basic and really doesn't explore the characters at all within it. You learn more about some of the bigger players by reading the lore scattered around. It's much more mundane than the lore it's wrapped in.

The main drawback is that the end of the game is pretty abrupt and anti-climatic considering what came before. The other issue is the combat, while it is fun at a certain point you're just fighting the same enemies over and over again along with the fact that bosses are just the same enemies with more HP. The game doesn't really design itself to use it's more fantastical lore/powers to make interesting set pieces for bosses.

It's enjoyable and I look forward to a Control 2 one day where maybe they can fix some of the shortcomings of this one. But worth grabbing on a sale.

I'd call this more of an art piece than an actual game. I think they did a wonderful job capturing the feeling of playing a cat, abet a very intelligent one. And the actual environmental work was fantastic. The actual story is simple but a bit depressing when you think about it.

But there's not much game here and is mostly exploration based. There's a few fetch type quests, example: find this, to give to this person to get this key item to go to the next area. And some light puzzle and avoid the beams sections. But generally it's fairly light.

But at 6 hours it doesn't manage to overstay its welcome and is well done but not exactly mind blowing in any regard.