Stumbled onto this game at Best Buy in 2004, and the cashier warned me how addictive it was.

I played it every day for about the next five years!

Yea, it was the first Video Game I took time off of work to play. But wouldn't be the last. And City of Villains was also pretty great.

If you love Super Heroes and MMORPGs, City of Heroes not only set the bar, they created it!!

On the surface this looks like a typical Zelda-like, and in some ways it is very reminiscent of older Zelda titles like A Link to the Past. What makes this game stand out however isn't in it's similarities to Zelda games, but rather in it's differences.

Much like Outer Wilds, this is one of those games where I can't give you too much information without spoiling major aspects of the game. In fact, that is the very premise the game is built around. Despite the Zelda-like layout and Souls-like combat, the core of this game revolves around information. Everything in this game is written in an undecipherable wingding language, leaving the player guessing as to what signs mean throughout the world. More importantly though, as you go through the game, you'll find pages of the game's "instruction manual", being very reminiscent of the manuals in older NES/SNES titles. This manual is also mostly in this wingding language, forcing the player to decipher meanings from the pictures, other pages, and context clues. While you may think this sounds annoying upon reading this review, let me assure you that this is excellently pulled off, making you want to find these manual pages and keeping you thinking about what some enigmatic riddle could mean long after you've put the game down. When you do figure something new out, the "Ah-Ha!" moment is unparalleled and you feel like a genius.
The only time these manual puzzles become really over the top to solve is in the post-game for the "good" ending. I did not actually manage to solve all of these, but despite it, I never found it too frustrating to go on, and if anything makes me even more determined to eventually go back and solve that mystery.

Beyond that, I can tell you that while there aren't that many boss fights, they are quite enjoyable and visually pleasing. The exploration in this game is top notch. The items are very fun to use, and combat in general is fun. The skills you get as you go through the game, as well as how you get them, are also a blast. I will say, while the story is pretty decent, it's probably the weakest part of the game overall.

Truly this is a game I would recommend to nearly everyone. One of the best games in every genre it falls into.

I'll be perfectly honest, I was not expecting to enjoy this game that much. I loved Breath of the Wild, but eventually I got to a point where I'd "had enough", put it down and never picked it back up. All of the promotional content and hype leading up to it's release did not convince me there were enough new things to hold my interest again. Then the game released, and I found I was wrong.

I am truly amazed at how much Nintendo managed to revolutionize their open world sandbox with just a couple simple changes. The highlight is of course the Ultrahand crafting system, which allows you to explore and interact with the sandbox of this world completely new and unpredictable ways, and makes this game even less linear than it's predecessor. This system rewards creativity, and allows for traversal and interactions that make you feel like you're cheating the game. A great example of this would be the climb to the Sky temple, which is supposed to take you through a massive obstacle course to reach the top. Except I grabbed rockets from a different sky area I'd explored, stuck them to a flying machine and blasted past 1/2 of the climb.
The game is chock-full of moments like this, and it feels wonderful.

Ultrahand is not alone though. The Rewind and Ascend powers, while they sounded a bit basic, are also invaluable tools that let you tackle the world and it's puzzles in drastically new ways, and along with Ultrahand make Hyrule feel new and fresh again.
Hyrule is not the only area to explore in this game though. The addition of the sky and depths areas, which I thought would be tedious to explore, actually ended up being incredibly fun, especially since they encouraged different uses of these new exploration powers, and have DRASTICALLY different vibes.

While Hyrule feels like an inhabited world where normal RPG events are taking place, the sky islands feel like archeological sights. When up there you're exploring the ruins of an ancient race, solving their puzzles in ways vastly different from anywhere else in the game, and occasionally dealing with the security systems they left behind. Travel here is almost exclusively by air and such a blast to engage in.

By contrast, the depths are dark, scary and dangerous. The ground and walls can hurt you, and the monsters are much more terrifying and deadly. And god forbid you lose your light sources. This is all compounded by the fact you can't heal damage normally while down there, adding to the sense of dread and danger of being in that area.

For all the praise I give it though, ToTK does have a few downsides that we have to talk about. The most blatant and obvious one is the controls. Nintendo has kept the same controls as BotW for the most part, but those controls were outdated already when that game came out, and now in 2023 it feels even moreso. Not using industry standards like running with L3 push and instead giving it a dedicated button feels like a step backwards, especially when the game is already making you do crazy button combinations due to lack of available buttons for even basic actions like switching weapons or fusing arrows.
Additionally some of the "repeated" actions are very tedious. There is no reason why we couldn't streamline cooking or turning in korok seeds. Yes, you can skip "some" of the animations, but it's still a tedious affair that made me want to engage with those mechanics as little as possible.
Finally, I have to address that it is very possible to get yourself stuck in multiple places in the tutorial area before you unlock the Ascend ability. Might be a minor gripe, but getting ultrahand encourages you to experiment, yet you just might end up get yourself stuck and be forced to reload old saves if you experiment too hard.
You can also do this by entering some temples (At least one) before doing the quest to gain access to them, but this is a minor issue since by then you can teleport out.

Overall though, this is an excellent game that I strongly recommend to anyone who is a fan of Zelda or open world games.

This is the best party game I've come across.

It's essentially easy to understand Mario maker against your friends where each player gets to add one item to the stage, then all players try to make it to the end of the resulting level. If no one or everyone makes it, no points are awarded, but if only some people make it, then points are awarded in accordance to who completed the stage, who did it first, who's traps got kills, and if you grabbed special items. The game then goes on a set number of rounds OR until one player passes the points "finish line".

This leads to an incredibly fun and wacky time where each player is trying to build levels that they can complete but no one else can. It's been a very consistent hit with every group I've tried it with. Strongly recommend as a party game amongst friends.

This is my single favorite game of all time, which is wild because at the time I played it, it really didn't even come close to the genres I played. This game is one of the most unique games I've ever played, and the single best example for games as art in my opinion.

This is one of those games where the less you know going in, the better it is. This is because this is a mystery-style game who's progress is entirely made through player knowledge. For this reason I will keep this review very vague.

You play as an astronaut from your civilization's relatively new space program, and you leave the planet to solve the mysteries of the universe and the other civilization that lived in it. This allows you to explore a variety of planets, moons and any other celestial body you may come across in search of knowledge. These locations are not all the safest environments, so part of these mysteries shall be figuring out how to navigate these various locations.

The way the game helps with this is by keeping track of important information you find throughout the game on a storyboard aboard your ship. This becomes an invaluable tool, keeping track of information and showing you what other information it connects to. That said, most of the game's progress comes from what the player themselves know, which is why everyone who recommends this game says "I can't tell you anything about it, but you should play this masterpiece". The truth is you can only experience this game as intended on the first playthrough going in blind. I truly encourage you to give this game a try, especially going in blind.

Maybe this is carried by nostalgia in my mind, but this was easily my favorite MMO ever made, and I still sometimes play the fan servers that still exist.

The concept is so well executed, and it had so many quality of life mechanics that didn't exist in other games at the time of its release.
The expansions only further improved this game, and to me it stays the best PvE MMO to ever exist.
On top of that, the community was mostly friendly and welcoming, and I cherish the Task force races, costume contests, raids (Even when Kronos bot ambushed) the massive ordeal that was spawning Caleb in the Nerva Archipelago, and all other great community moments.
Eventually they even added tools for players to create their own missions and quest lines, and this made community involvement even better. Not all of them were gems, but some were absolute gold involving long time members of the community and really allowing people to become a part of the game world they played in.

The PvP was pretty lacking, but that is truly the only thing I can ever hold against this game. Even then though, most PvP zone ended up just becoming excuses for the heroes and villains to work together until that became a feature in a future expansion.

This game is very special to me.

I'd played Starcraft before, but this was the first strategy game I really put a significant amount of time into, and the first game I ever took competitively. I didn't enter tournaments, but with the addition of its ranked ladders, something unheard of at the time, I threw myself into this game and grinded it for literal years.
The game's balance was solid, and the strategies were varied and interesting, especially in 2v2 formats.

That said, it wasn't just a game to be enjoyed competitively. Warcraft III truly was a complete package. The story and campaigns were solid, with top notch cinematics and voice acting for the time.

However all of this pales in comparison to the custom maps. Yes, I know I'm saying basically all of the game didn't stack up to its own custom maps, but honestly that's the truth. As amazing as this game was, the map editing tools the game offered dwarfed it a hundredfold. Blizzard basically gave every player dev tools to create their own games then made a battlenet that facilitated sharing and playing those maps. Any player could create a map, boot up a lobby, and the game would automatically make any player entering that lobby download the map, allowing for quick and easy access to any and all maps that interested you.

These were not basic maps though. The access to game tools allowed players to significantly alter the game, leading to all sorts of custom games, like Vampyre (A more in depth game of mafia), Tower Defenses, RPG campaigns, Angel Arenas, and of course the birth of the entire MOBA genre: Aeons of Strife. You thought I would say DOTA, but it went through several iterations, like Aeons of Strife and Tides of Blood, before finally becoming the DOTA we know and love today and spawning an entire e-sports genre.

And these were just a few of the many, many maps created constantly. There were entire clans dedicated to developing new maps. In fact, I helped develop a Warhammer based MOBA in these custom maps.

To this day, there is nothing to my knowledge that comes even close to what Warcraft 3 Battlenet was. The closest comparison would be if you could boot up Steam and just join any game for free after a 2 minute install. It was a hub for competition for the most battle hardened RTS and MOBA players, as well as the most casual place to try all sorts of crazy game modes and maps. It truly had something for everyone, and was somehow the best possible version of all of it.