The mighty Ubisoft Gods have molded a fragile world that's just as puzzling as the Collyer Brothers' labyrinthian apartment.

The moment I lost hope for Fenyx: Rising Immortails was during the first real boss fight: Achilles the Corrupted Hero. Okay so like, you know how Achilles Heel is a thing? Well, one of Fenyx's Achilles Heels is the combat. If you exploit Dark Achilles obvious weakness you don't stun him or deal massive damage (His HP is insane btw). No, what happens is you do maybe 10 points more damage, and he kinda stumbles for half a second before attacking again. The combat system is so reliant on it's tedious stamina mechanic that even boss fights feel copy-paste. Simple concepts such as dealing extra damage for headshots are locked behind a skill tree which makes the beginning of the game a slog. All of the skills feel like a gamechanger but it's an artificial feeling because all they do is curtail the epic fun you have button-mashing to death OC do not Steal Jaba the Hutt, and cute lil' boars high on bath salts. One of the few skills you unlock that feels like a legitimate skill is slowing down time when using a bow mid-air. Cool. Cool. Cool.

Let's double back on epic Achilles battle again. I personally finished the fight by shooting his foot (it's literally bandaged) and then went in with heavy attacks when he finally gets stunned; this took me roughly 25 minutes. The faster solution is to ignore the famous weakness and just parry his first move and hit him with some heavy axe attacks, rinse and repeat (It feels bad... like exploiting AI bad). Wanna know the real kicker? When you stun him with the axe: he falls down and gestures towards his foot and grabs it. This fucking caned animation doesn't make even make sense in context. What kind of game punishes you for exploiting a bosses weakness?

Beyond my issues with the combat there's a lot of cool looking armor and weapons to find in chests and finding them is the best part of the game, however there's another "but" here. I didn't feel any of the benefits of the equipment. During the Achilles fight I was wearing a hood that gave the bow extra damage if I was at full health, but like it still took me 25 minutes slay Achilles. There's many concepts they utilized that originated from Breath of the Wild (which I have no issues with), but they decided to not implement the actually interesting subtleties like having equipment have a more important role with the world itself. I don't get any cool moments like being struck by lightning during a storm, or changing to more appropriate clothing for hot or cold climates, nope, we just get static buffs that don't make much of a difference.

There's a lot of other problems here too. The map is refreshingly more compact than Ubisoft's previous titles, however it's so cluttered with cliffs (The map is 80% mountains man!) god statues, useless broken bridges, and the usual copy-paste temples/houses/statues. Navigating the map is a nightmare, you spent half the game slowly climbing up endless cliffs. You can't utilize your mount because the map has zero flow to it. Remember how all the Korok puzzles subtly blended in with the environment aiding the atmosphere? Ubisoft thinks you're a fucking idiot because all of the puzzles are marked with red. You can't walk 30 seconds without spotting these blights upon the land. It clashes with the mood they're trying to set (not to mention red wall blocks are archaic at this point). The camera is too zoomed out and left me feeling detached from the world and it's characters. I want to see the details of the art but I can only do that with the camera feature, not naturally. I think this is the worst world Ubisoft has crafted. The surreal style I think they tried to accomplish just ends up looking like some glitched auto-generated terrain from Sim City.

Puzzles range from pushing boxes onto pads, pushing balls into holes, throwing rocks at damaged walls, and platforming; there's no innovation here. You get the feeling you've seen all the puzzles Fenyix has to offer puzzle within the first few shrines. The ball puzzles are infuriating because the physics are wonky; the shrine where I fought Achilles starts with you pulling a lever to spawn a ball which moves across upward wind tunnels, and you have to speed-platform (movement feels sluggish) to catch the ball before it falls off the other side of the platform it's headed towards. My first three attempts the physics failed and caused the ball fall into the abyss before it even reached it's destination. It's random if this lever works as intended. You could say GTFO OR GET GUD at platforming and catch the ball before it falls but the controls are baffling and unintuitive. Like why is square crouch? Why does pushing the analog sticks do nothing useful? Why are the R1/R2 the attack buttons? It's impressive how this game manages to feel sluggish even outside of the game. You can change the controls but honestly I didn't feel like playing the text-based version of sliding block puzzle that is fixing the controls, I'm already sick of finishing the actual fucking sliding block puzzles in the game itself. No thanks.

I'm going to finish off this review with a video I took showcasing how passionless this game is.

https://twitter.com/chadhacheydev/status/1413024881265029120?s=20

Doom Eternal is the closest thing to perfection you can get from a first person shooter.

With the amount of enemies, the fact you don't get much ammo and the sheer speed of how things went it made for the most engaging shooter I've played in a long time, if not ever. Whether I was shooting demons or looking endlessly for secrets, I was not once bored or out of the experience and I ended up getting all the little toy collectables, the albums, all the upgrades, did all the mission challenges and just overall did everything there was to do, I never do that shit in video games, collecting collectables is the thing that always keeps me far away from even attempting to 100% a game but here I actively looked for all of them.

This game feels like it was made to simply be a lot of fun and every decision made was to keep you engaged with it's combat which is very refined and feels a lot better than in Doom 2016, it's also more brutal, longer, more action packed and lacks the little moments of boredom that 2016 had in it.

I don't mind the addition of cutscenes and making the game...well not more story focused, but just have more story in general, personally thought the story was fine and that's more than I could ask for in a Doom game given that...I couldn't care any less about whatever was going on story wise in Doom 2016 (not necessarily a negative, the Doom Slayer himself didn't seem to care about it either) but here...well I also didn't care much but I was following the plot and not zoning out whenever someone was talking with me. Cutscenes being included also means that there aren't any parts where the game's pace slows the fuck down so that robot guy (forgot his name) can talk to you for 3 minutes in his office.

The multiplayer is cool, it's like reverse Evolve where there's 3 demons vs one Doom Slayer. It's a cool little time killer that I honestly didn't care much for but I enjoyed the little time I played with it and it’s a LOT better than the MP in doom 2016.

I remember when this game dropped, I downloaded it legallyn’t to try it out for an hour or 2 before I bought the game, what happened is that I beat the game and didn't play anything else until I made sure that I had beaten it because it was just that mind blowingly good and addicting.

Now I got the game on steam and replayed it, just as good as the first time, maybe even better. I also got the DLC which I’m looking forward to playing.

My only issue is that the gameplay loop has been so perfected that there really is nowhere to go but down from here if they choose to make another Doom game anytime soon, if it becomes any more complex it'll be too much but if the next one goes for something a little more back to basics it might seem like a downgrade, and if they add nothing then it’ll feel pointless.

But at the same time it says a lot about how much I loved a game if the only negative I have about it is that it’s so good no sequel can even dare to match it.

Dauntless and insurmountable feat would it be to fill in Earthbound's ridiculously sized shoes, but nonetheless not only does Mother 3 achieve such task, it charts its own course through one of the most unique and thoughful experiences the medium has ever seen.

In contrast to Earthbound's freeform and loose storytelling, Mother 3 opts instead for a much more laser focused narrative that has its characters witnessing the corruption of their idyllic reality, which destabilizes their community and family bonds in the process. This change of narrative structure translates to a reduction in off the beaten path detours and non sequiturs that decorate much of the diverse and out there adventure found in Earthbound, but Mother 3 more than makes up for it by utilizing the pre-established and beloved tone of the series to subvert it and twist it just enough to frame a much more personal and intimate experience, while still maintaining the foundation that defines the franchise.

Without sacrificing any of the strengths and characteristics that make videogames unique in the storytelling artform, Mother 3 manages to create a surprisingly emotional and meaningful story that contemplates the disruptive nature of time and progress on stagnated unrealistic ideals, the folly of a lack of introspection and hindsight in day to day life relationships, or the need for growth and maturity during the moments life beats you down , without ever having to condescend to the player or step outside its fun, joyful and charismatic universe. It uses the power of nostalgia and childhood, inside and outside the game, to construct a strong connection between the player and the screen, while also acknowledging the danger of said sentiment and even weaponizing it against you, cementing its antagonist as one of the greatest villains in fiction in the process.

As you watch your home town transform during the course of the game just by the act of walking by it and speaking to its neighbours, Mother 3's seemingly surface level anti-capitalism theme opens up to reveal a much more empathetic and understanding examination of the mundane and human misgivings and mistakes we all end up falling into once in a while, never fully condemning the characters that inhabit its world, unlike much more blatant and obvious recent titles aspiring to some artistic merit.

While there's a certain sadness in the inevitability of Itoi never again making a videogame, it is fitting that he would leave us on such a high note. Coming back to this series would in some way detract from the overall message these games have always strived to impart on the player, and trying to one up Mother 3 would be a massive mistake. As it stands, Mother 3 has the qualities of a great novel. You can pick apart its more obvious themes and messages and always find something else beneath it more interesting. I could go on about how engaging the rhythm combat is in contrast to other JRPGs. I could ramble on about the numerous NPCs that betray their 2D aesthetic with incredible one liners that destroy any pretentious triple A story driven shlock. I could fawn over the incredible execution of the final boss and how the game manages to poignantly break the 4th wall once again like its predecessor did.

But why bother? Discussing these aspects would be reducing the art, Mother 3 is meant to be played. Oh, wait. You can't play it. Add it to the ever increasing bucket of baffling and nonsensical Nintendo decisions.

What makes Deus Ex so impressive isn't just the amount of choices you're given, it's the way that they're presented to you and how they entertain your curiosity. When the game responds to your decisions from such an early point, it sets the tone of the rest of the experience: if it'll call you out for something as inconspicuous as messing around with the bathrooms, what else is it going to track? What other actions can you get it to react to?

It's this relationship of your curiosity being encouraged and then rewarded that defines Deus Ex. Although there are extrinsic bonuses for exploration (upgrade points, weapon mods, etc.), most of my motivation was intrinsic. There was never a time where I stumbled upon an unlocked vent and didn't want to see where it lead. Deus Ex's story deserves its own review, but the gameplay is about you and the designers. It's about inspecting every painting in a building and trusting that one of them will have a secret vault behind it. It's about lockpicking your way into a building at the front door before stopping yourself and asking "Wait, I bet there's another way" and reloading your save to see how else you can break in.

Sometimes it's very unbalanced, occasionally frustrating, jarringly unintuitive (especially considering the extended tutorial sequence), many aspects that would normally hold it back. But it doesn't need to be perfect, because these issues ultimately become drowned out as you're constantly making new decisions, answering new questions, and testing how mechanics interact with each other. Your imagination keeps being sparked and once you reach a certain point these shortcomings will suddenly stop mattering--nothing can break that unstoppable desire to see what the game has to offer next as everything finally clicks together.

This is, again, not even beginning on the story, atmosphere, or especially the music (because holy shit the OST is phenomenal). The gameplay alone is fantastic but the experience as a whole is just as special and is absolutely worth your time if you can get past some initial frustrations. The payoff is worth it.