Took so long to put this out that the next update is already live, but I was writing this because I really gotta hand it to Mihoyo. Reading back my review for the game upon release I was obviously a hair away from shit talking this thing if I so much as sniffed that it was getting worse. The good news is that - generally speaking - that hasn't happened.

Don't get me wrong, they haven't all been base hits, but they've steadily improved on all the things I liked best about this game upon release. The characters are more interesting than they've ever been, and while I'll still object to the visual design of some of these characters (Jade? come on now), they've continually dropped characters with mechanics that make them genuinely fun to play despite sticking to the two-skills-per-character rule. I have more fun playing my tank than I've had playing most characters in other turn-based games.

I think I feel some obligation to be a little more moderate in my praise because I know plenty of people who will tell you that this is competing with the best games of the year, or that it's "the most generous gacha game", and while I don't think it's quite there yet for me, I can at least understand where a lot of the praise is coming from, because Hoyoverse aren't being lazy with this one. I've been surprised by the amount of times they've dropped a ridiculously high effort cutscene for a quest with virtually no impact on the main story, by the amount of minigames they've added, by the ways they use new enemy mechanics to switch things up, with the fact that the companion quests can tell stories that I found genuinely compelling. There's no "for a gacha game" here, my shock is solely because I recently gave Genshin Impact another spin and I just can't believe this is the same company. A lot of love has gone into this thing and as time goes on I'm only having more fun mixing and matching characters and farming up to improve new ones. The important note here is that I'm the person who will deliberately avoid levelling good characters to be different, so there's a lot of room for people to complain about a stale meta or what-have-you that I'm simply not capable of touching on.

I still think that there's too much to nitpick for this game to become one of the undeniable greats that converts the haters - the fact that there's a gacha here will always work against it, to point out the biggest issue - but I think there are hooks everywhere if you have any interest in finding them. I was unemployed for the past four months and still managed to snag multiple shiny new characters (with no resources saved up) so you shouldn't feel like you're being locked out of something special by keeping the wallet closed.

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Deserves a lot better than to be called a "joke game" as the devs very clearly put in some effort to make this a game that's actually enjoyable to play. It's not bad (despite making me want to play Sayonara Wild Hearts instead) but despite being consistently engaging, it's never really fully fun. It starts off a little too slow - I can imagine a lot of people dropping this before all the mechanics have been fully revealed. The controls are a little too stiff for my liking. The music carries about half the experience - the tracks are all good, but most of them don't really fit the atmosphere of the game very well. There are a couple tracks here that sound like they would fit into the original OutRun soundtrack and those are by far the best fit - they're still funky enough to fit into this game's overall aesthetic but upbeat enough to fit the pace of everything that's going on on-screen.

All in all it's a solid game, but I wouldn't encourage anyone to go out of their way to pick this one up. If you're just looking for a chill game that plays like an endless runner then this should be your cup of tea - grab it while it's on sale.

One of the more palatable visual novels for someone who isn't normally into the medium.

The campy characters and eerie atmosphere lend it a compelling B-movie horror vibe, and the classic visual novel "free time" events are goofy breaks from the murder mystery. Admittedly the "mystery" aspect of this probably the weakest part - there are layers upon layers of twists, but you're doing very little detective work yourself and the minigames at the trials are really just different methods of picking pre-determined dialogue choices, obfuscated by frustrating mechanics.

Danganronpa 1 benefits a lot from novelty - if this is your introduction to the series you likely won't realize that this series really loves pulling off a specific kind of twist, that they can only draw like 5 different faces with 4 base personality types, etc. Because it's new though, none of that matters - personally I fucking loved my time with DR1 until I played DR2 and felt that this cheesy murder-filled school drama was a little less special after being re-contextualized by the sequel.

If you have the opportunity to get it cheap, do so - if you're not hooked on the story by the end of the second chapter (the first is a cakewalk and legitimately the worst part of the game) then you're welcome to drop it. It cranks up the intensity with time, but if you're not on board early you won't be at the end.

It's more Forza Horizon but it's hard to be excited about - they've done the Hot Wheels thing before, it's cool to do a big-ass loop-de-loop a couple times, but ultimately it's just a handful of bright orange lines that keep you from using your fastest cars until you've done a few races and played a few of the Hot Wheels Advertisement Missions. I don't have any nostalgia for Hot Wheels, so I primarily find myself wishing that it was a little more like FH4's LEGO collab - slightly more imaginative.

There's still good stuff here, especially with the ice and water flume tracks, but you could mostly achieve this same result by adding more "Dirt" and "Cross Country" races in the base game. It's alright, but unless you're a massive Hot Wheels or FH5 fan, you'd probably find more enjoyment in purchasing an entirely new game at the same price point.

The unreliable narrator is clearly the main attraction here, implemented in a way that is both clever and fun - exaggerating to seem more badass, and backing down when challenged, all of this affecting the gameplay in real time. Beyond its unique storytelling method, I never felt like it was doing anything terribly special, but it also doesn't really need to. The gameplay works fine as a vehicle for the story, but at times it does feel like a rail shooter due to obvious and unimaginative enemy placement.

Honestly a shame the dev decided to give up on this one, it's a simple but satisfying action game that lets you pull off some pretty flashy stuff. There's not a lot to the game - if you look up gameplay on youtube and it's from a couple years ago, that's about what you're getting now.

People rate this negatively on Steam because the dev abandoned it, but I don't fault them for not working on a project if it wasn't pulling in money and their heart wasn't in it - they were honest about ending development, warned everybody in advance, the game still says "Alpha" in the title and they dropped the price. It's neat as-is and I don't remember what I paid for it, but if I bought it now I certainly wouldn't miss the $3 I paid for it.

- I can unreservedly say that the environments in this game look gorgeous, but animations in the world vary wildly between being 1. unnecessarily detailed for a top-down MMO played at this level of zoom, and 2. absolutely horrendous, like they were legitimately only half completed

- The big setpiece battles look incredible! The rendered scale of battles here shits all over the battles in Diablo 3 (and similar battles in other Diablo clones). It's the only time during the main campaign where you feel like your character is as powerful as the story says they are. I'm level 40, why am I still killing six boars at a time? Spawn more enemies please.

- Loads of classic MMO bullshit. Classes locked to a certain gender, painfully over-acted dialogue (even for an MMO), horrendously horny animations and armor for any female subclass. I tend to play as female characters in most games and I think this is the first time I've ever been outright embarrassed about it. I've got a fairly high tolerance for it but when I equip all the new, strong armor I get after a dungeon and see my character is wearing dolphin shorts and a... uh... cheongsam crop top(?) it's gonna get an eye roll from me.

- For an MMO it's actually kinda hard to play with your friends? You can party up but you have to go back to the friends list to see where on the map they are, you don't get to see what quest they're doing or where their objective is, but if their objective is "eliminate 10 rats" or w/e you can contribute to that without being aware of it at all. If someone who isn't the party leader tries to start a dungeon it just laughs at you and doesn't notify the party leader at all, so you've gotta tell the party leader what waypoint is closest to you (if they're not on the same map) and have them manually run all the way to the dungeon to start it. Maybe endgame content is easier to coordinate, but boy did they make the main campaign a pain.

- Classes are actually fairly interesting overall, and the ability to modify each skill as you level it provides an opportunity for build variety among each subclass (although not to the same degree as D3). The specialty skills are my favorite part of this system, as it offers you a sort of gameplay "anchor" to build around. Personal favorites are the gunslingers' gun-swapping, the soulfist's 3-tiered damage amp, and the gunlancer's shielding/status immunity.

- I'm not at endgame yet but I've enjoyed my time with it so far. There's a lot of bullshit "mash G until the quest is complete" nonsense mixed in here but fighting stuff is enough of a treat that I'm hoping for something like the rifts from Reaper of Souls once I clear the story. There are a lot of systems here that I haven't had to engage with yet (or don't care to, e.g. housing) but unless this game takes a hard left turn before endgame I'll probably continue to put time into this for a couple more weeks. I can't really see myself coming back to this long-term, though. We'll see if that changes - right now I'm biding my time until I can see what this game looks like once you're truly finished with the story.

It's... okay. I hate to complain about things that already saw plenty of outrage early on, but the game really is hurt by having the NPCs grafted on after release. I didn't play until after their addition, but they still don't play a sufficient role in making the world feel alive because they're so poorly integrated into the fabric of the game. It feels incredibly empty, meaning your focus is drawn to the gameplay - gameplay that isn't good enough to carry the whole experience on its back. It's Fallout 4 with even more jank and even less to do, but it's entirely possible for it to be a more enjoyable experience for someone who enjoys collecting scrap material and building cozy campsites with the settlement mechanic.

My friends and I used to browse the free-to-play section on Steam for the weirdest multiplayer abandonware we could find. It's a lot of fun, actually, blazing through five or ten games a night that are partially translated, have invincible enemies, have no enemies at all, etc. We were particularly enamored with fishing in any form, and stumbling across "World of Fishing" did briefly feel like we'd hit the jackpot. It was about the same level of quality we were expecting.

This game is long dead now, which isn't much of a surprise - it was an MMO dedicated entirely to fishing whose fishing mechanics were less interesting or complex than most other MMOs I've played (where fishing is barely even a footnote). It didn't look appealing, and the controls when you actually got a chance to catch a fish were not particularly intuitive or engaging, often being frustrating and finicky. I genuinely have no idea who this game was for. Usually, when you ask this question, you can at least assume that the developer is making this for themselves, but if anyone on the dev team liked fishing at all, they weren't given enough time for that to shine through in the final product. It is neither relaxing nor engaging, lacking as both a social activity and a solitary one. There were plenty of opportunities to spend money if you were inclined to do so, but whatever "progression" you were paying for was unclear.

Having also taken a peek at some of this developer's other offerings, I truly feel bad for anyone who is still expecting them to do anything interesting with the GunZ IP after buying the rights several years ago. I don't like writing off creators as a whole, but I would not be optimistic about them doing justice to a beloved product based on their previous output.

Consider me a non-believer, I guess. Turns out a game/toy/tool that is mostly dependent on an AI churning out long strings of interesting and/or logically consistent text is a tad underwhelming. I purchased one of the turbo big-boy cool-kid tiers for a month just to see what the "real" versions of AID were capable of and I'm sorry to say I'm not reporting back on some mind-blowing main attraction.

It's probably a pretty neat tool to have if you're 1. stuck in a creative rut and want to throw some ideas at the wall, 2. just trying to create little vignettes, or 3. using it for shitposting, but I still think NovelAI has it beat on the first two. It's simply too easy to get this thing stuck going in circles or spitting out completely incoherent text, even with their "best" AI models. If you're trying to use it seriously to generate chunks of text more than a handful of sentences long, you're still going to be doing most of the legwork trying to wrangle the AI so it stays on course and editing it so it gives the right attributes to the right people.

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I do think the developers have started to realize, though, that there's something good here, because there are AI Dungeon-related toys (The "Voyage" feature, only available to Premium tier 2 and higher) that are... actually kinda fun? The common theme here is taking advantage of 1. the AI models' ability to generate SHORT bits of text, and 2. its ability to take any situation and make it do a hard left out of nowhere.

"Medieval Problems" is overtly a clone of Reigns - you are presented with a short, simple problem, except in this circumstance you can type whatever you want in response. The AI here is designed to put up a little more resistance than the standard AID2 models, but the completely open-ended responses offer you plenty of opportunity to have some childish fun in the style of "insisting that you win rock, paper, scissors because you played 'gun'". Corrupt magistrate embezzling tax money? Send my 200 strong adult sons to beat the soul out of him.

"Loom" takes advantage of the wild derailments the AI model is capable of producing by taking your input and offering you several responses to choose from. Continue picking responses to advance the story, or return to an earlier prompt to create a sort of parallel timeline. These are all stored in a map on the left side of the screen and you can hop between them freely, moving these stories forward and abandoning them in equal measure until you've generated tens of increasingly erratic plotlines. It's classic AI Dungeon in a format that makes non sequiturs fun instead of frustrating.

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Not really a review of AI Dungeon proper, of course, but I think it's worth pointing out the other things Latitude's doing that make the most of the AI's strengths while minimizing its weaknesses. These are still just toys and tools instead of full-fledged games at the moment, but it looks like they're planning on opening this up to third-party creators eventually and I'd be interested to see what people produce. With such a steep entry fee for this playground I don't think we're going to see any kind of viral success for anything hosted on Latitude's platform, but it wouldn't surprise me at all to see something in this vein crop up as an app (at a cheaper price point) and spread like wildfire.

At the time it came out there were a lot of emotions tangled up in this. It had been 10 years since we saw a game that lived up to the Hitman name, but it was served to us as an always-online, episodic release. Paris was good, sure, but we had no idea what the upcoming levels would look like and whether IO would ever let us carry over our unlock progress when offline.

It's strange to look at now because it's obvious that everything turned out fine, that the World of Assassination trilogy ended up being even better than Blood Money was, that the QOL features imported from Absolution provided new depth instead of simply making the game easier, and that the entire trilogy when taken as a single, massive game would be one of the best games of the decade (perhaps ever?).

The gameplay core of the trilogy begins here, remaining relatively untouched throughout the three games. There are additions of course - it's strange to go back and play this game without briefcases, without bushes, but you really only notice these now that they've been added in later games. There are other minor changes of course, things that don't really sound big until you've put some time into the levels - enemies won't notice your reflection in mirrors, emetics send them to toilets instead of trash cans likes in later entries, etc.

All in all, there are a number of reasons why I would recommend people get Hitman 3, purchasing the older levels and playing them there. Not only is the entire trilogy in H3 roughly the same file size as H2016 is by itself, but little convenience features and performance optimizations have stacked up over 5 years. If you're getting H2016 for free and have never played a Hitman game before, play it and have a good time. But if you're looking at these games in 2021 and are trying to figure out how to best spend your own money, getting the complete trilogy inside Hitman 3 is by far the safest bet.

With how long the ending sequence is, it feels like there are two games here, and I really love the idea of both of them. Both the "bartending and conversation" portion and the social engineering portion are really interesting, and with a less strange ending I'd probably rate this a full star higher. I can't say it "comes out of nowhere" but it really makes me wish they went in a different direction with all this momentum they'd built up, because as things stand I'm left reflecting on the other sour moments - moments where I was stuck doing the drink-pouring minigame for slightly too long, the moment where a trans character's deadname is a puzzle answer (even knowing this was a thing going in, it still feels... very weird and unnecessary), etc. When this game is at its strongest it creates those moments that your mind just latches onto, a powerful vignette that you just want to capture forever in amber, but with such prominent shortcomings for its short runtime I'm left wishing we got a slightly different product instead.

Whoever is making the DLCs for the Watch Dogs series needs to be given control of the main games. Don't get me wrong, it's not perfect - it's still built on the frame of the base game, meaning the mission structure is mostly the same, it's still largely repetitive and slightly too easy. But the things this DLC does right are fascinating to me, because it feels like it's getting closer to the place Watch Dogs wanted to be when it all started - a focus on how ordinary citizens are affected by the actions of society's bigger players.

Aiden Pearce is still far from being a fun-loving guy, but watching him try to reckon with how his actions have affected his now-adult nephew Jackson is compelling, human drama. Jackson is the one who introduces Aiden to the questgivers in the DLC, and together they paint a much different picture of what "resistance" can look like. With a single protagonist (well, two) to focus this DLC around, the contrast between Aiden's gunslinging and the compassionate mutual aid focus of the questgivers is especially prominent.

The result here is a story that cares much more for its characters and the connections they make than anything in the base game, a work that is supposedly all about random people coming together. Every mission feels like a lesson for Aiden or Wrench about the value in connecting with other people and learning to help others in a way that doesnt involve murder. It's not flawless - the presence of the black market dealer is an especially strange inclusion - but I was surprised at the way in which this DLC seems genuinely compassionate at times in a way I didn't expect from a Ubisoft game. If they were willing to be a little more brave and decouple this story about the consequences violent vigilantism can have from the gameplay about how fun violent vigilantism can be, there's a possibility we could've had something special. That's asking for a lot, though, and I think asking Ubisoft for a game without combat that isn't explicitly made for kids may as well be a pipe dream.

I'm looking forward to finishing this (it's a lengthy one) and I'm hoping I don't have to come back and revise this due to the story shooting itself in the foot. I would love for this to be a send-off for Aiden (and for Wrench, who has concerned voicemails from Marcus about the fact that Wrench is putting himself at risk again). But I'm afraid that Ubisoft's status as a AAA developer will result in them clinging to these series mascots instead of giving them a graceful, dignified exit that they probably don't deserve.