I wish so, so badly that this were a better game.

Throwaway lore justifying the type of "pirates v. ninjas" conflict that the internet of ten years ago seemed so madly in love with. A fighting game core stripped down to its basics, so that even people who don't normally engage with fighting games can enjoy it. And I do, but none of the modes here ever feel like the one that you're meant to be playing. I'll break this down in detail below, but if you want the TLDR you can skip to the end.

1v1 - The character movesets offer mixups and combos that are easy to memorize, but leave very little room for player expression - there are players who use the entire hero's kit, and players who only know how to chain together 2 or 3 moves. Very rarely will you feel like you've played someone who has used a hero in a unique way, meaning that 1v1s feel more like a training mode for the "real" game than a mode that can stand on its own. There's no glaring flaws with 1v1s, so I understand why this is one of the more popular modes, but what am I doing this for? A lot of the things that draw people to play fighting games aren't present here - continuously honing your play on a character you like, expressing yourself by developing your own playstyle, etc.

2v2 - Mostly the same problems as 1v1, except for with the wrinkle that there are now additional players to worry about. Typically, people in this game mode will pair off into 2 duels, and whoever wins their duel first has to go deal with the remaining opponent. Sure, you could gank while your duel opponent is still alive, but because they can clearly see where you spawn and every hero is roughly the same speed, they're just going to come slap you in the back of the head as soon as you get to their teammate. This feels like the right number of players for a game mode in For Honor, but with no neutral objectives or macro gameplay to worry about, there's not a lot to chew on here either.

4v4s - There are a couple iterations of 4v4, but Dominion is definitely the more popular of the two. You capture and hold 3 zones that passively grant you points, and once your team has 1000 points, respawns are disabled for the enemy team. This is definitely the closest For Honor comes to having a "core" game mode, at least in terms of how it feels. There are entire systems present in 4v4 that are unusable in smaller game modes, and the maps allow for all kinds of traps and playing around enemy sight lines, taking advantage of the fact that 4 people is just enough that your brain can't hold all of that info while you're squaring off with someone chain-spamming Orochi's light attacks. The loadout system and the objectives allow people who are weaker mechanically to contribute to the team, and it means that even heroes with more rigid movesets (warlord) can still contribute to the game by adopting a support-like playstyle (or by cheesing players into environmental hazards). The issue here is that the fighting game-like nature of the game makes the ganking and other "no honor" behaviors incredibly frustrating for everyone involved. Despite all this, this game mode is so chaotic that there's no real way to strategize unless you can recruit three friends to join you (lol good luck). Most of your time in Dominion will be spent running from capture point to capture point, trying to formulate a personal strategy that makes sense amidst the broader chaos. Time for the Revenge mechanic!

Revenge - This is one of the ways the game tries to balance things for players who get ganked. Your combat options are severely limited unless you lock onto a player, at which point a little "shield" pops up on your HUD. With rare exceptions, every attack comes from the left, right, or the top, and you defend by matching the direction. When a player ganks you, any attacks from them will always be from the side they're standing on, making it easier to defend against them, and you'll build up extra "Revenge" meter, a buff not worth describing here except for the fact that you hulk out and temporarily gain a larger health bar. Skilled players can often 1v2 with the help of this mechanic, and skilled gankers will often try to repeatedly guard-break an opponent instead of throwing out a parryable attack. What this means is that a gank from an unskilled player will often result in the victim killing both of you, frustrating both attackers. If it does work, it feels like playing a fighting game where a second enemy player suddenly connects and starts throwing out special moves in the middle of your opponent's normal combo.

Conclusion: There are some interesting ideas here, and I really like the medieval-ish fantasy aspects to this game, but the same mechanics that are intended to serve as anti-frustration measures often make this game more frustrating for everyone involved. It's a shame that Ubi didn't immediately knock it out of the park with this new IP as it's one of my favorite ideas from them in recent years, and I'm not even sure what to call it other than a "truly 3D" fighting game. If you want For Honor without playing For Honor, your closest comparison is probably Absolver (maybe?), but I never felt like Absolver's world does anything to sell a fantasy. Beyond that, I'm not aware of anything that plays like this. This is the kind of fighting game that I want, the kind of fighting game I'd like to learn, but this iteration of it definitely needs more time in the oven. I'd love to see For Honor 2 (or a shameless rip-off), but I don't know if I trust Ubisoft to take the right lessons from this game.

So, listen. I don't really play fighting games. I know what most of the terminology means and generally understand what the frame data people talk about means, but when I'm playing these games I am two measly notches above truly mindless button mashing. I'm never the person who excels in games due to superior mechanical skill, so I'm not particularly interested in getting deeply invested in a genre of games where I'll never feel capable of mastering anything.

But this game? This game feels good. Other reviews here seem somewhat displeased with this game's potential as a competitively viable fighting game, but this is a dream for someone who engages with fighting games on the same level as I do - a level where you "learn" a character until you feel like you can do some mildly cool shit sometimes, and your eyes glaze over when you see some 40-input combo string appear on your screen. The lightning fast pace and truly bonkers mobility options set things up so you always feel like you're a split second away from doing something flashy and just laying into this little idiot baby who thinks they can cook you. Even defense feels chunky - successfully shielding an attack feels like a lightning strike. I can't even be mad about it, I get just as hype watching them block my own attacks.

Gotta love the characters too. These are VN characters, baby, and Nasu can't stop you before each match to make you read for 45 minutes about what constitutes a "vampire" in Souya, so it's a lot of fun seeing how they've adapted the newly-HD cast to squeeze character expression out of the animations. Mostly, this work was already done with previous iterations of Melty, but it's still fun to see the way Shiki and Aoko's mentor/mentee relationship translates into moveset similarities (and the way you can show someone three seconds of gameplay from the identical red-haired maids and they would immediately understand the dynamic the two have). Not exactly reinventing the wheel in terms of characterization here but it's schlocky anime fun all the way down. Even its most serious cast members are wound so ridiculously tight that you can't help but laugh at them ("the perfect combination of human and demon blood").

It is completely brain-off fun? No, but it's as close as a mainstream fighting game will come to providing that kind of experience.

The biggest thing this game gets right is survival/action gameplay combined with defined goals that can be knocked out in 30-90 minutes. In the same way that Battlerite felt like a MOBA without the laning phase, this feels like a survival game where the first five hours have been compressed into five minutes. It's a shame that there's nothing else really special about this - take a survival game, add a class system, compress the entire "run" into a couple hours, and that's it! Because things move so fast, there's never a whole lot of room for individual runs to shine - there's not enough time for you to feel like your "build" is doing anything unique, or like you've been forced to play in a weird way due to the way each run is "randomized". I think the ideal version of this game is somewhere in between the two modes presently available, where you'd have enough time to feel invested in a particular run and its unique qualities without feeling like you've just started a new full-time job. Creating this hypothetical game mode would require a pretty drastic re-imagining of the game's identity, so while it's unreasonable to expect devs to completely reinvent their game just for me, I hope there's a game dev out there playing this and going "Damn.. survival games really should be shorter."

You're telling me that two years after this game was unceremoniously shoved into its "Former Game of the Week"-themed grave, we're trying to bring it back? I won't stand for it.

I would've assumed that a game like this needs a hook, that the minigames need to actually be good, but after two years you can now play Tip Toe with friends and I'm not really convinced that that's enough to redeem the experience. Winning is still primarily the consequence of lucking out and not getting griefed into the sun, rather than a reward for actually doing anything right during the course of the minigames.

Maybe I just hate fun? Definitely a possible answer, but I'm mostly tired of streamers as tastemakers. I don't care about the latest Free-to-Play battle pass, no matter how many Hatsune Miku cosmetics or Lebron Jameses you put in. Release my friends, demon, I want to play games with them again.

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 other day the AC unit broke in my apartment, and maintenance sends up this kid (probably 16 or 17) to set up a portable AC unit until they could get it fixed. He looks over at my computer and says "I like your setup, what games do you play?" I tell him I hop between things and crank my brain up to Jimmy Neutron-brain-blast levels of power trying desperately to think of a single example of a video game I've played that a normal person would know, and I end up going "oh, have you heard of Dinkum?" He shoots me a look, immediately says "uh, no. I play Apex," and leaves without saying another word

I had a coworker describe this as "oh, it's like Day Z meets The Sims" and I guess that works? Really, I think the best point of comparison is NEO Scavenger, but that game gives me the impression that its fans use command-line web browsers, and Backloggd probably doesn't look great on those, so I'm assuming there's not very many of you here.

I normally despise survival games, and I think it's because for most of them, the "challenge" in surviving is that you have to run around for a long time before you can find the right thing to press E on to fill whatever bar is currently low. If you've only played a couple hours of Project Zomboid you'd be forgiven for thinking that it's similar, since you can survive pretty well doing just that for the first few in-game days. Food rots quickly, though, and canned food is finite, so you'll need to find a food source that isn't just "my neighbor's refrigerator" pretty early. Survival requires real planning and investment in Zomboid, not just reacting to short-term needs. And given that a single mistake of basically any kind can cause your death on standard settings, setting and achieving a goal (or even just surviving a week) feels like a real victory, no matter how small the ambition.

The early game of NEO Scavenger and PZ are pretty similar, although in my experience you escape "early game" much faster in PZ - unless you chose the "starter kit" option, your earliest moments in the game will be defined by running around the map with whatever you can cram in your pockets/hands: a bag of some kind (probably a trash bag), some vaguely weapon-like object, a couple ready-to-eat food items, and the most portable water receptacle you can get your hands on. If you survive long enough to set up a secure-ish base, you're probably set until the power and water cut off. After that, your next big difficulty hurdle will be to do all of this in the winter, with all that entails.

Big flaws? It's survival for its own sake, there's no endgame, and the developers have indicated that they have no interest in adding an end other than death for the player. If you can survive the winter and have a sustainable food source, only respawned zombies (on by default) will still pose a threat, meaning that the player will have to come up with some additional goals that aren't survival-related to keep things going. There's also the matter of early access - as things stand, the level of detail present in the game can lead players to make some misleading conclusions. In a game where you can die from cuts acquired while walking without shoes, you would assume first aid is a useful skill - wrong. Levelling carpentry or foraging will radically change your capabilities when interacting with those systems, but some skills (first aid is just the worst offender) function as noob traps, something that you should never go out of your way to improve. For the impatient, this game is also updated slowly - every new system added has comparable levels of depth right from the start, so while the devs post about upcoming changes constantly, no major content has been added since their (massive, overhaul-level, and yet remarkably stable) Build 41 update 7 months ago.

PZ seems to be one of the great success stories for Steam's Early Access program - you could release this game as-is and I don't think people would have much to complain about, so it's exciting to see that the devs are still feeling ambitious - NPCs, animals, an overhauled crafting system, etc. I think I've given somewhere in the range of 10-15 copies of this game since it first arrived on Steam 9 years ago, so I'm probably not the best suited to an impartial evaluation of this product, but $20 seems like a no-brainer of an investment for a product that has steadily improved this much and maintained a consistent level of stability/polish along the way.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that my (slight) discomfort when playing the Sims comes from the fact that I constantly boot it up expecting a different experience than the developers are willing to provide. The Sims contains a truly insane range of activities, hobbies, etc. that you probably wish you had the time/money to master IRL - as things are in the Sims 4 right now, you could go to your day job (President of whatever country this is), come home, learn how to bring a ghost back to life, go skiing, build a relationship with your pet llama, and write a hit song before you have to go to work again the next day. Honestly, it's kinda rad! I like that there's a huge variety of things for your Sims to dabble in and improve at. It's nice hopping between activities and watching your Sim grow, watching them rack up a truly silly number of life achievements. Despite this, playing the Sims feels like I'm constantly speedrunning activities and careers without really getting to enjoy any of them, and it took playing Project Zomboid and a couple major Sims mods to understand why.

The Sims games are very good at simulating social interactions, to the point where just clicking someone and selecting "Friendly" gives you a downright overwhelming number of conversation choices, from telling knock-knock jokes, to trying to console them, to just unloading on the poor fucker about every hobby you have (I think the "sentiment" system is one of the best things the Sims has ever added and I really want to praise them for that, but that's a topic for another day). Improving skills, on the other hand, seems to be less about playing out the fantasy of building expertise and more about providing opportunities to socialize, acquire money, or smooth out other inconveniences (e.g. becoming so good at repairing something that you can make items unbreakable). Bringing your Do Things Level from 1 to 5 mostly looks like clicking the "Do Things" or "Research Doing Things" buttons over and over until you unlock the ability to "Do Things Quickly".

To be clear, I don't think this is a problem, I just think it's a mismatch between developer focus and what I want in a life sim. But it's clear that the Sims is capable of more, because some of the most fun I've had with the game comes from the skills that change how you interact with the game, or ones that link with other skills. Cooking is already one of the more interesting skills because it's split into 3 different types of cooking - cooking, baking, and gourmet cooking, where you have to choose portion sizes and account for the dietary preferences of the sims eating the food. Acquiring the DLC that lets you grow a garden means you can try to live entirely off your own home-grown food, and when you have virtually no money and no recipes to cook at the start, the challenge it provides was enough to single-handedly renew my interest in the game.

This is what I want more of! I think the Sims would truly ensnare players to a dangerous degree if there were more of these skills that allow you to really dedicate your attention to improving them and working with their systems. There are mods that allow you to use the systems present in the game to grow and sell drugs, interfacing with the cooking system (making edibles), the social system (can discuss/share drugs), and the aging/family system (parents can search their teens' furniture for hidden drugs). I mentioned Project Zomboid earlier, and I think the Sims could learn a lot from Zomboid's approach - the way that many skills are still primarily performed through menus, but there are additional layers of investment required to interact with them. Cooking requires that you have the correct utensils (and is done by selecting a recipe template and filling it with compatible ingredients); repairing a car requires that you have the replacement parts, the tools to remove/install said parts, and also the tools to remove/reinstall any parts that are in the way of whatever you're working on. This is a bit technical, and I think it works for Zomboid, but it would definitely require some tuning to work in the context of the Sims, which is a far more casual game with a more casual audience.

I'm asking for a lot here, because I think the Sims is at its best when it offers players the option to really get lost in a fantasy, instead of skimming the surface of twenty different fantasies. Other games will always do this better if you want to go play a dedicated Lumberjack Simulator or MouthSimulater [sic], but by adding like 20% more depth to the skills and/or changing the ways they interact with each other, the Sims may just start consuming the souls of unsuspecting players.

Has perfectly scratched the rhythm game itch I've had lately. Between the massive tracklist and the huge amount of difficulty customization you'll always have a good amount of songs that are in the perfect sweet spot of being fun to play while also providing a reasonable challenge.

About the tracklist here - it's decently large, it covers a fair amount of genres (some of which seem like they straight made them up), but it won't be everyone's cup of tea as techno and D&B are wildly overrepresented, and if you're not a fan of K- and J-pop either the pickings are somewhat slim. The hip-hop here ranges from uninteresting to god-awful. The best offerings in both gameplay and music here come from YUKIKA (understandably) and other rhythm games. I don't want to link the whole tracklist here but I do really want to highlight some of the most bonkers shit that's on here: their tokusatsu parodies, the worst song I've ever heard in a rhythm game, this song that sounds like every alt rock song that was on American radio in 2002, and my personal favorite - whatever this song turns into.

About moment-to-moment gameplay - the timing is fairly lenient, but you get virtually no buildup on your "Fever" meter if you're more than slightly off, it just lets you keep the combo. Notes are clear and it's fairly easy to sight-read songs, even with the music videos (which exist for every song) playing in the background. They're charted well, and it's always fairly easy to tell what sounds you're actually "playing" in the song. If it's hard to tell the difference between chords and slightly offset single notes, it's probably time to turn the note speed up a bit. The UI can be changed pretty thoroughly (and to some pretty absurd, borderline-unusable elements), and doing so makes it pretty easy to find a combo that makes the game more readable or gives it some personal flair.

Quite possibly the best rhythm game on PC at the moment - at least, the best among the games that have a fixed tracklist.

Some minor gripes:
- The music video illustrations are DeviantArt-tier, which is mostly fine, especially because you can just turn them off while you play if you really hate them.
- Why bother with volume sliders if they bottom out at 50%? At the lowest possible setting this is still the loudest game on my PC by a mile.
- I can't really tell how the "random" button on the Freestyle menu decides what difficulty to pick.
- Not really a complaint, but I thought the "missions" would be a good introduction to the game. In a sense, they are, as long as you only stick to the first, like, three missions. They ramp up in difficulty extremely quickly and are very clearly more of a challenge mode than anything.
- DLC pricing is downright punitive. I hope you don't like any of the rhythm games they've collaborated with, because if you want any songs from your favorite three-dollar rhythm game it'll cost you six times that price.
- Why can't I favorite songs in the live-play "Air" mode? I get that it lets me play songs that I don't own, but at least let me favorite the songs that I do. It doesn't show the title of the song after you play or when pausing either, so I hope you remember what it said before you started playing.
- I am so goddamn sick of hearing that League of Legends K-pop song, good god.

I've been putting a good bit of time into this lately, but I can't confidently say it does anything special? The format here is perfect for a mobile game - you spam-produce weapons, armor, and accessories for NPC heroes to come buy from your shop, where the only production cost is the materials used to make them. And that's…. about it? You have a limited number of production slots, a rapidly regenerating supply of materials, and an energy bar that doesn't regenerate, but also can basically be ignored.

It's got other systems tacked on too, and again, you can ignore most of these. There's a system where you hire your own heroes and send them out to collect special, non-regenerating materials. There's a system where you upgrade your townspeople for things like "higher rate of material regeneration" or… "sense of accomplishment", I guess? There's a system where you complete quests for a currency that you can probably spend on some things? I have no idea what that one does. There are still more systems I haven't mentioned, but I can't be bothered to name them, and I'm dead serious when I say you only intermittently have to interact with the first two I listed here.

I keep playing because upgrading the items you can produce hits just right - there are easy, frequent milestones, most of which are throwaways (increased chance of producing rare items, reduced material cost) but it's still relatively easy to hit those thresholds to unlock a new blueprint to produce and start the process all over. Sure, I can "ascend" these blueprints to make them even better, but I'm content to produce like 30 daggers so the big "produce" button turns gold and I can move on with my life. It's easy to hop on for 20 minutes a day, put on a YouTube video, master a blueprint, and hop off.

Shop Titans has earned the most lukewarm, flimsiest praise by being a mobile game that still relies fairly heavily on timers, but still provides enough to do that you can keep playing for as long as you want without being forced out by an energy meter (the energy meter is filled by selling and discounting items, and depleted by raising the price of items) or "watch a video ad to continue playing". There's still all kinds of real-money bullshit baked in - the "king" rolls up once every couple days to tell you that he has deemed you worthy of an Extremely Cool Guy Starter Pack for $15.99, and a couple townspeople will ask you to buy their upgrade pack to make shoulder-mounted fuck guns, but as far as mobile games go this is more of a jaywalking-level crime than a murder.

So how long will it last? I'm looking at around 30 hours in this so far and I'm starting to hit the point where the "best" items I can produce are taking around 5-7 minutes to produce (of which I can produce 5 simultaneously), instead of the 45-second-ish average that you see early on. This is just long enough that, since I'm playing on Steam, I'm probably not going to sit there and wait for those items to finish - I'm much more likely to just close it for the day. If you're playing on your phone this is probably less of an issue, but I find that returning to this game relatively infrequently has limited my attachment to the game and made me far less likely to spend money on the nearly impossible-to-earn gems. I can see the signs of a pending "difficulty" spike in the near future and could probably stall it out long enough to double my playtime in the game, but is it worth doing so? Not really. Might be about time to put this one down.

This game has a number of moments where the player is very clearly meant to find something cool, funny, sexy, or endearing, and it is extremely clear to me that the creator and I would disagree on these concepts as not a single one of these moments "landed" with me.

That I kept playing is more a testament to the strength of the gameplay, because despite the slightly floaty controls, running through these levels is actually a treat. The guns feel punchy and the parkour moves provide useful traversal options (save for a few levels that are a little more on-rails), making the choice between "machine gun" or "double-jump" a little more interesting than you might expect at first glance. I don't think anyone's going to sit at home writing about how this is the most innovative set of time trials they've ever played, but it's clever enough and the levels are stylish enough (they all feel like Kaizo Slumber cover art) that I don't feel like I'm getting robbed for 25 USD.

With a different story, I'd be singing the praises of this game a lot louder, but as things stand it's just a neat way to blow $25 if it's burning a hole in your pocket. It's a good time, but don't sacrifice rent money for this.

"Time is wasted when one views it from a subject position whose ambitions the time in question was not dedicated to fulfilling." -Paul McAdory

CSGO is the first game I ever hit 1000 hours in, a feat I admittedly hope I will not replicate even one more time, as I've not yet fully reckoned with how significant a chunk of my life I've spent on beaming the same light patterns into my eyes over and over again. That being said, I've definitely made some progress in accepting its consequences.

At 26, I'm not old enough to reasonably be called "old" by anyone who can legally drive. I am, however, old enough to regret life decisions that prevented me from experiencing new things when I was younger. Those 1000 hours of Counter-Strike spread out over my handful of high school years seem unfathomably wasteful. I didn't go to prom. I didn't really try to make more friends or date anyone, and when I did I didn't really go out of my way to organize things involving those people. In college, I began dating an old friend from high school, and she had plenty of money saved up from her high school jobs. I had spent all mine on keys, cases, and skins.

What did I gain from it? I can tell you at least two stupid meme callouts from each map. I can tell you from memory how to create ridiculous, multi-phase keybinds in the console. I can tell you about the AUGpocalypse, or about watching Segura vids and debating whether or not it was phoon. I can tell you all about the stupid tricks you used to be able to use on Vertigo to out-meme the other team.

What did I gain from it? During a time where I was horribly depressed but failed to realize it, I was able to squeeze genuine joy out of booting up the same program over and over, one of the few that would run on my shitty laptop. It provided me an opportunity to feel like I was an expert on something at a time where I felt useless in every way that I thought would matter.

What did I gain from it? I have close friends from CSGO that have outlasted most of my high school friends. Even after dropping the game, I've made new friends and even furthered my career by talking about it with others who are familiar. Fond memories of the game have helped me break the ice with new people and serve as a reminder of how strong my friendship still is with people I met all those years ago.

I said earlier that I don't really want to hit 1000 hours in another game at this point, and I'm sticking to it. At this point in my life, I value varied experiences too highly to dedicate that much time to one thing. But I do think I'm finally able to believe that all that time wasn't wasted, that the things I've done can have value even if you're not checking items off a bucket list or generating profit for someone. It's about damn time I stop worrying about this.

After spending so long playing 2K, something finally clicked with me and I realized all the shit I've been putting up with in this series that I would never normally put up with from a AAA developer. The basketball simulation is polished - it has to be, or else people would never spend so much money on an online component. But there is just so much to complain about here that it'd be death by a million cuts for anything that isn't the biggest basketball simulation on the market.

Only the biggest basketball simulation on the market can get away with including a career mode each year that increasingly makes me feel like someone has retrofitted a student film with mentions of Gatorade sponsorships and JBL headphones. Only the biggest basketball simulation on the market can get away with forgetting my audio settings at the end of each quarter, blasting my ears with five times the volume for a second before returning to normal. Only the biggest basketball simulation on the market can get away with making me watch full-video car advertisements before every game.

It's gross. It sucks for basketball fans that this is the only real option, given that EA has decided it wasn't worth competing (to say nothing of EA's reputation as a company). I want something better for basketball sims, I want to feel less guilty when I buy the game for a measly nine dollars. It's frankly incredible that Take-Two's greed has so thoroughly coated the game with slime that it deprives you of the enjoyment of basketball, because every break in the action reminds you where the development priorities lie - not in fixing bugs, not in improving the UX, but in finding increasingly blatant ways to squeeze a little extra money out of their game.