Core gameplay loop can be addictive as hell, but the game is mediocre overall. Vibes aren’t nearly as good as other older BGS games. Revisiting it for the first time since 2015 I was kind of shocked at how much you feel the absence of a lot of the things they normally do right, like iconic towns. It is easy to look past those things in the moment sometimes, especially when enemies are being turned into ketchup and the XP sound effect is constantly pinging in you ear, but as soon as you put it down, damn is it forgettable.

Performance woes aside, it’s a pretty great game. It feels like a direct rebuke of the sentiment that the original didn’t turn out how they’d wanted it to. This game literally is them saying “we made the right game before, the masses just weren’t ready for it”. But in a post Elden Ring and/or BOTW/TOTK world, I believe these types of emergent, player driven adventures are much more sought after.
Having said all that, the narrative is all over the place. At times its backseat structure feels like par for the course with the more player experience focused structure. Then all of a sudden a ghost tells you you’re about to go to the end of the game. The true ending feels complete enough, and had some satisfying surprises in store, but it just kind of ends just as it feels like it’s actually getting started properly.

Similarly to Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, I’m incredibly confused how this is the highest rated game of the series in recent memory.
When reaching the end of that game, I found myself thinking that the reason it was so well received was not because it was actually better than the last one (it absolutely wasn’t), but just because it was the MOST of one of those games yet.
I can’t shake the feeling that that’s the case here. While Remake drew a 4-8hr section of the original game up to about 35hrs, it felt relatively focused aside from a couple of dud chapters and boring side quests which feel like a series staple at this point.
Rebirth on the other hand feels lost; never able to balance the more sincere but serious tone established in Remake and the desired quirkiness of the ‘97 original. It also stumbles at nearly every hurdle with how they have chosen to implement the open world aspects. While promising in the open hours due to a seemingly more hands off approach, it’s quickly turned into another map clearing checklist. Only this time on top of this standard open world fair, you’re also treated to constant harassment from one of the worst characters in a video game; incessantly calling you to tell you that you just activated a tower right after you just activated a bloody tower. There’s this immense friction to the open world in this game; a constant stopping and starting which really kills any sense of momentum you might be gathering. By chapter 10, I was so checked out of the open world activities and how badly they felt just tacked on that I tried just mainlining the story. However, level requirements forced me to go back and do them just to eke out a few more levels.
As far as the story is concerned, there were at least a few moments where it felt relatively consistent. I hated that the game started in media res, with near to no setup dovetailing out of Remake. I felt compelled to continue at least.
As things progressed it became increasingly clear that while Remake only had to introduce the story and could play freely in that space up to the point of leaving Midgar, this one has to tackle a midpoint. It never feels like there’s clearly established stakes other than this aimless wandering; every few hours you are quickly told “the princess is in another castle” and it’s time for “next location” and ferried off to another open world map littered with banal activities and a litany of new mini games. It’s genuinely hard to shake the feeling that they realized this would be the same length as the last game for what should be a much bigger part of the story if they didn’t stuff it to the brim with side content. Unfortunately quantity over quality definitely beat out the alternative, but Queen’s Blood is good at the very least.
Liked the combat for the most part, it feels like some good changes were introduced from the previous game. However party management is so atrocious in this game and at several points I felt like the game was actively screwing me over because it locks you into mandatory story sections with a few specific party members. If you’ve got one party member you’ve not paid attention to or not outfitted adequately, as I had, these sections are utterly unbearable (looking at you Chap 12, I’m sure most people will know what I mean).
Really don’t know how they’ll pad the next one to make it a “full length” game, but after this one I doubt I’ll be rushing to play it whenever it does come out.

Update 03/01/2024:
Still having fun with it but there’s definitely a shortage of content here. The unlocks feel a bit quick to acquire and it renders most future rewards meaningless.
All that said, it still feels like the most fun you can have with a group of friends online right now.

02/13/2024:
After about a week, it’s simply one of the best available co-op games in recent memory.
Moment to moment gameplay is incredibly fun. They’ve managed to rend mistakes a sense of accidental achievement in a way that I’m not sure I’ve seen before.
Seeing a giant enemy bearing down on your buddy, shooting a rocket at the enemy to slow them down only to catapult your ally away on life support but getting them out of the fire in a backwards kind of way. It’s hysterical but also kind of magical.

Some performance/network issues hold it back from being absolutely top notch. When a mission can take upwards of 40 mins and the hosts game crashes at the 35 min mark, it’s not ideal!
Also - while this shouldn’t have to be noteworthy, the monetization in the game is actually fairly non intrusive. After just a few days of playing I was able to earn enough of the premium currency to get the paid battlepass equivalent. Not ideal for any game to have microtransactions but at least here it doesn’t feel abjectly evil.

genuinely good shooting and movement mechanics, as well as an exciting destruction simulation system, completely bogged down by a host of awful design choices.
the fact that over a month after its release there’s no duos queue is baffling. having to play with a stranger in the queue who fights against you at every turn because they want to play it as if it’s an arena shooter and not an objective based game is infuriating.
there’s a laundry list of questionable at best balancing choices.
it has perhaps some of the worst free to play monetization I’ve seen in recent online games. absolutely nothing to work towards for non paying players.
another case of trying to get it on the free to play live service marketplace that will end up abandoned because it’s not Fortnite.

We used to make sequels that felt like they pushed every known boundary. Playing this for the first time in so many years and I felt as though I had to remind myself it wasn’t a game that came out in the last year. It’s obvious why this is still held among the best games of all time, but I think it’s easy to forget how few games years later end up surpassing that benchmark. I’ve heard nothing but good things about Half Life Alyx but god I wish more than anything that her could have actually got HL3. Seeing the way they evolved the already excellent formula of the original for this game makes my mind spin just thinking of what that game could have been.

Had never played this one before now.
Feels like the first of what would be the now definitive AC Formulae™️ for the foreseeable future; map littered with semi mandatory objectives, stealth that feels like it sort of works for the first time ever, oversized map and some of the worst writing in the series to date.
After Unity it definitely has the same feel of a step down in quality similar to that of AC2 following the first game. It doesn’t look anywhere near as good as Unity did with its much moodier and film grain laden Paris. While the visual fidelity here doesn’t take nearly as much of a hit as the aforementioned AC2 did, it feels as though they took similar things away from the criticism of both of their respective predecessors. AC 1’s climbing is too slow? Well let’s just speed it up without really considering how that might impact an already hair-trigger movement system. AC Unity’s combat feels sluggish and unresponsive? Well let’s just make the next one have nigh incomprehensible button mashing with animations that look like they’re playing back in 3x speed, while somehow maintaining the same feeling of input delay for parrying/guard breaking.
Also it’s not that’s any surprise at this point but these games are insane trend chasers. 2017s Origins having a more Witcher 3-sequel approach (according to Ubisoft but hardly in practice) following that games blowout success, and then having practically every surface be climbable 6 months after BOTW came out. It hit me almost immediately that the grappling hook you’re given in the early hours of the game here feels like a direct response to the much better one featured in Arkham Knight of the same year.