As a kid I always judged a games last impression by whether or not I immediately wanted to start a new save file as soon as I beat it the first time.
It doesn’t happen often nowadays, but I could not stop playing this. Steamed through my first playthrough over a matter of days, and immediately went into NG+. By now I’ve done maybe 5 clears and have played Mercinaries for hours.
Mechanically punchy, visually stunning, refocuses the narrative - despite losing some of the originals goofy charm, the remake is a treat.

A devastatingly disappointing game.
The demo felt like the ideal primer; getting what felt like the first two eps of the first season of a new show. Then the full game basically punches you in the gut and skips you all the way to mid season four. Confused? How about you grind the game to a halt and read a bunch of text logs to catch up on character profiles and lore.
The game is constantly wrenching control away from you to show you things that look like they’d have been fun to do yourself. The cutscenes do look stunning, mind you. It’s just frustrating when the makeup of the game could be summarized as run for a minute, 4 mins of cutscene, fight for 2 mins, 7 mins of cutscene, run back and forth talking to lifeless NPCs for 10mins, 3mins of combat, 6mins of cutscenes
Cutscene heavy games aren’t the issue either, it’s that you have to give me an interesting story, something this game absolutely does not have.
Combat is very fun, but it never feels like it really evolves past what you can do in the opening hours. New powers acquired never feel like they really open up any new paths.
Tried to commit to clearing the story, but got to the final act and realized I had to run down what amounted to another long corridor with spongy enemies and decided I’d had enough.

Triumphant sequel to a tremendous game. Fumbles in a few spots, and at a couple of moments feels at risk of having severe bloat, but there’s some kind of grim magic to its excess. Come the halfway-ish point, I was all in on the twisty story. The combat is viciously wonderful. There’s a much more horror tone to this than the first which really works to hit at the sense of utter despair.

Much has been said about Drukman’s politics and what he drew from as an Israeli American for his influence. The clear attempts at paralleling the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict comes across as an insane misreading of what is a genocide being inflicted upon an ethnic minority by an apartheid state. If you go off TLOU Pt2 you can more or less surmise that he thinks “both sides are just so violent, no?”

One of the true magic moments in a Bethesda game is that feeling of stumbling upon a stunning vista that reveals just how boundless the world really feels.
Starfield promised that in epic proportions, but falls short of their games legacies in nearly every way. Had this been just a dozen actually hand crafted planets or so across a few solar systems, this could have almost singularly saved the game. As it is, Starfield is a soulless game supposedly about the spirit of adventure - but here the call for adventure is barely even a whisper.