This is a great open word action game but just an average RPG. Overall i was really engaged throughout my playthrough but there are clearly some deep problems with the game. Many of the RPG systems are bad or just underdeveloped and the general progression and levelling up is not great. Most skills are simply small percentage boosts and the looter shooter style of item acquisition is sucky and doesn’t really fit with the game in my view. The optional implants you can get at ripper docs are cool tho. You can give yourself a double jump, gorilla arms or mantis blades which are very cool. The gunplay itself is average but guns look and sound incredible. Melee combat is fine but has been done better in other first person games like dishonoured, its not quite as satisfying as you would expect but its serviceable. The driving is fine but a little bit too floaty, driving through the city with the radio on is very enjoyable tho and the city looks beautiful (most of the time) the general art designs and the look of the world and the fashion is all really cool and the general atmosphere the game gives off is perhaps its greatest strength along with its music which is one of the best osts of all time and its writing which is exceptional in both side missions and main missions. There are some really great characters that you can befriend. The overall impact of your choices and the ending are similar to how choices worked in the witcher 3, which means there really isnt a great deal of consequence for your actions, the 3 beginning backstories are really unimportant to the overall plot. The endings are fine, often bein very miserable. They dont beat the ME2 suicide mission but its still decent. The bosses are very few and far in between and they arent really too great. Now for the technical issues, oh boy. There are some horrendous issues that need to be solved here. My game crashed about 10 times in my playthrough and there are some other terrible game breaking bugs. If they fix these bugs and the game starts to look great on console i will up my score to 4.5/5

Really enjoyed this one. Not quite as good as the OG overall but the gameplay has been refined and enhanced really nicely. I really like miles as the protagonist and he separates himself from being too smilar too peter with his own personality and interests. The villains are kind of meh, troy baker’s character is just like pure evil and its kind of funny, the tinkerer is a decent villian but theres alot of things she does that annoy me or are hypocritical. She’s relatively unlikeable which isnt what they were going for. Prowlers role is alright too and rhino is just rhino. There are some really impressive set pieces and Seamless cutscene to gameplay transitions. The overall structure and pacing of the game is relatively well done, its certainly not bloated but i think the middle section of the game kind of drags, its like 3-4 hour stretch with no bosses for the entirety of the middle section. but the opening few hours are perfectly done and the final act is pretty great too. Peter parker is hilarious in this game even tho hes not in it a whole lot and the tease after the credits for the inveitable spider man 2 is really exciting. The bosses themselves are good i would say, none of them are bad, i enjoy the rhino boss fights and the final boss is excellent, the prowler boss fight is kind of whatever tho. The score is actually fantastic, it perfectly fits the atmosphere and miles gets his own memorable motif. The gameplay is alot of fun, the swining feels so natural, so seamless and the animations are beautiful, its been refined to a T and the combat has seen some really nice improvements too. Miles special powers are super satisfying to use and his abundance of new AOE attacks lets there be even more enemies on screen and this leads to the combat being alot more challenging than it was in the original, theres more of an emphasis on stealth too because there are so many enemies, you have to pick off atleast a-few of them before going loud. They have gotten rid off the boring MJ sections from the last game and replaced them with puzzles which are better but still not great. I can see puzzles working really well as a way to break up the great combat, traversal and cutscenes, they just need to improve them to create that perfect video game formula for the next game. The game obviously looks great even on a ps4 but i did have a few frame rate issues during moments where there was just too much going on for the ps4 to handle, get it on ps5 if you can.

It might be a controversial thing to say that this is my second favourite arkham game but idc, this game is so damn good and people shit on it for no good reason. First of all its a common misconception that the story sucks, if you ignore the fact that this is the joker again which tbf does kinda suck and i would rather someone else could get the spotlight for one game, however the joker stuff in this game is actually fuckin cool and no one can tell me otherwise, we learn about his origin and get to see how he falls in love with a younger batman voiced fucking excellently btw by roger craig smith who perfectly portrays that kind of young, aggressive, filled with rage type batman who is still out for vengeance. And plus we do get to see other villians take a large part of the spotlight, fuckin bane in this game is cool af and actually threatening, he works out who batman is, raids the batcave and almost kills alfred! And alfred btw in this game is certainly the best he has ever been in this series, he and bruce actually have arguments and confrontations, its interesting af too watch and it shows how much alfred gives a shit about bruce and its such a breath of fresh air after the last few games where hes just essentially an info dispenser. Also the bounty thats placed on batmans head works beautifully in this games story to give us a whole host of villains to face down. Which leads me to the boss fights which are some of the best in the series. Deathstroke, bane (All 3 of his fights) , firefly and killer croc are the standouts. The combat is pretty much the exact same as arkham city’s but with some excellent new enemy types, the many bane guys are cool and the ninjas that can counter your attacks are sick. The shock gloves are OP as fuck and completely unnecessary tho. The predator combat in this game is super underrated, it has some of the best designed rooms and maps in the series because they are all unique and provide a huge amount of variety in the ways you can dispose with enemies. The traversal is again just the exact same as city except you get the gragnel accelerator from the beginning which is fine i guess. The map is made up of 2 islands. One of witch is the arkham city map and the open world is OK but a little dull. The game did introduce new crimes in progress to spice things up a bit but that doesn’t really save it. The side missions average out as OK, theres some boring arkham knight busy work here and there but there are good ones like the anarchy, deadshot, shiva and mad hatter side missions so thats about half i think. The rest are just whatever with the exception of the one hidden side mission about cyrus pinkey ,which i gaurantee no one knows about, Which is actually so fucking interesting and im so sad it was never continued because it touched on the old families of gotham and teases the court of owls which is badass af. As a final note i would just like to point out that this game was made in a year which is impressive af considering what they were able to do and i have replayed this game probably joint the most with arkham city at this point. And yes it is in fact underrated. Fuck arkham knight dude.

Pretty much builds on everything introduced in arkham asylum. Excellent freeflow brawling, probably the best arkham game for predator gameplay, contending with arkham origins. The arkham game with far and away the best side missions, the best riddler challenges, the best story and again contending with arkham origins for the best bosses. This is what i call a perfect batman game. Kevin conroy and mark hamill are better than ever and the ending is fucking amazing. Catwoman is a great addition and the side missions introduced story threads so interesting and cool that they managed fuck up all of their follow ups in Arkham knight. I will also say that the open world is pretty great for the most part. Its rich with depth and interesting places to go and explore. The environments and character designs still hold up and look better than they do in the awful return to Arkham remaster. I spent like a whole year as a kid just playing this game and i love it.

If i played this when it came out the score would undoubtedly be much higher but unfortunately the gameplay hasnt really aged well. This is the game that created the combat systems we know and love so it should receive credit for that but compared to any other arkham game ofc in the gameplay department it doesn't look very good. All that aside the story is still my second favourite in the series behind arkham city and the voice cast are all fantastic. This game more so than the others just feels like a continuation of the classic batman animated series. Theres one or two good bosses. The scarecrow and killer croc “encounters” are both amazing. The finale kinda sucks and everyone knows that but you should definitely still play this game.

This game is so fucking good. A literal perfect mix between bloodborne and fucking bugs life. Hollownest is such an interesting and unique world to be dropped into, almost immediately the atmosphere and the bread crumb storytelling hooked me in. The environmental storytelling is on another level and the few mysterious tidbits of lore that you get keep eggIng you on in search of the next clue or NPC to interact with. And speaking of the NPCs, the world is filled with them and all of them have great story threads to follow. Among other things in the world these side stories are often genuinely depressing and the world constantly lands you in these areas that are tinted with sadness and destruction, ruins of what the world once was but the game manages to keep you going with small moments of wholesomeness and joy to convince the player that hollownest can be saved. The combat is an excellent free flowing reflex based collage of dodging, weaving, slashing and smacking. Aggressiveness is encouraged, especially in the high Intensity boss battles which are ALL great. There was not a single boss i beat and then thought to myself, “oh that boss was annoying” it was always a “fuck yes that was cool as hell weather it was any of the many EPIC main bosses or the equally entertaining secret optional bosses which can be found throughout the world hidden behind breakable walls or secluded passages which brings us to the Metroidvania esc level design which is a fantastic achievement of interconnectivity and area diversity. There are about 14 areas in the base game and my favourite has to be the city of tears where its always raining because above it there is a beautiful blue lake. But all 14 of them have a gorgeous piece of score to accompany them and holy shit the boss OSTs too. There is just such an attention to detail to the way the world is structured and its an absolute joy to explore. The art direction is sexy af, there is not a bad looking frame in this game, The game is also super meaty, its base main campaign took me about 30 hours and i stll have more to dsicover in the world, not to mention all the FREE dlc that this game has, its honestly unbelievable to me that in my playthrough i didnt experience a single bug, crash or any type of frame rate issue. And this poInt is accentuated when you realise that the development team of this game (excluding vocalists and the composer) consisted of 3 people. Its a mind blowing feat for such a small team to outperform most triple A studios. A truly mesmerising experience that i hope to spend alot more time in. Play it.

Thought it was about time to talk about sekiro. After completing it 13 times i can safely say that this was one of fromsoftwares best and in my view the best game that came out in 2019.
-WORLD AND STORY
The world of Ashina contains all the intrigue and depth you would expect from a fromsoftware game. Hidden secrets and clues lie in excellent environmental storytelling. A good example of this is in the senpou temple area. Through one mini boss, the armoured warrior, we are able to learn so much about the area. You can tell that the warrior is clearly not Japanese through just the look of his armour. Its quite similar to how a European warrior may have looked at the time so straight away fromsoft have created a mystery for the player to solve. Throughout the boss fight you can trigger dialogue where he speaks of defending his son so that he may be healed and if you previously noticed the piles of dead children that seem to be scattered around senpou then you can infer just like that, that the warrior had come to senpou hoping for his son to be healed by the monks rejuvinating abilities. What he didnt know is that the monks were using the children to try and discover the secret of immortality, experimenting and dissecting the kids for their life force. The armoured warriors son would have been a victim to this and the warrior himself dies thinking he failed his son and screaming his name. There are various examples if this in many of fromsofts games and its a really organic and satisfying way of creating a piece of lore which makes it all the more interesting and tragic. The main story here is basic but again they leave it down to how interested the player is in the world. There are some exceptional characters and the villain genichiro becomes very easy to understand and sympathise with. Sekiro himself shows growth over the game but he doesn’t have too much of a character to be fair. The voice acting performances, english and Japanese are both very well done.
-COMBAT
The reason you should pick this game up is the combat. Dark souls famously tests the players timing and patience, sekiro tests your reflexes and your confidence essentially, hence isshins line “hesitate and you die.” In short the combat system is really one of the best in games ever. The sword combat is absolutely exceptional but brutal. You must be close to perfect in your timing of deflections and blocks else you will be thoroughly punished. The boss fights are really where everything shines perfectly, clashing swords, going back and forth from deflecting and countering to striking at your enemy to try and break their posture is honesty one of the most satisfying things in a video game. The focus on posture rather than the health bar in some of these fights is really an interesting choice and more so than any other game ive played they actually feel like real sword fights because your actually crossing blades and it give the bosses these beautiful rhythms which compare most to something like a guitar hero, it’s basically a rhythm game and it feels so good to play because of that. The best bosses in the game are the ones that have this rhythmic feel, Genichiro, isshin (both versions), emma, corrupted monk and the owl. Then we have the guardian ape who flips pretty much all of that on its head which surely means it sucks? Nah lol. This for me was easily the hardest boss in my first playthrough because he is so different to the others which is why his placement is so well done. It forces you to learn another way of play pretty much throws everything you know out the window. Its truly a great fight. Easily the worst boss is the folding screen monkeys tho, they become a bit of a pain on repeat playthroughs. The mini bosses are also quite noteworthy. There are some really fun ones like O’rinn of the water and seven spears. The game also gives you the option to go stealthy wich lets you thin the heard a little or delete one of a bosses health bars before going all swords sparking. Stealth is no where near as fun as the sword to sword combat but the addition is appreciated.
-BONUS STUFF
The score is very well composed and amplifys the sweat that your balls produce when on the final phase of the final boss. The level design is alot more vertical than the souls games but there isnt really any of that interconnectivity that you would expect from a souls game which is a little disappointing but not a deal breaker. The bonus combat equipment like the prosthetics and the skills can sometimes feel very situational, firecrackers are far and away the most useful tool. The hidden quests and secret bosses are very interesting and many can effecf the ending of the game which is cool.

Overall its another banger from Fromsoft. Highly recommend.

This game is odd, the art direction is very unique and cool, the music is also pretty neat. The story starts off pretty interesting but the intrigue fizzles out after a while and the ending feels pretty anti-climatic. The gameplay is good i think but there are some gameplay sections that take so long and are so annoying to finish which also links in with another complaint that the checkpoints in the game are soooooo bad. There is also a significant amount of stuttering on the ps4 during combat sections. The combat itself can be very fun, the destructible environments are really impressive and the telekinetic powers are fun as hell to use. Facial animations and dialogue can both sometimes be quite janky. The ashtray maze section is quite exceptional though.

The perfect ending to the series. The dumbest most fan service thing you will ever experience but i would be lying if i said I didn’t enjoy it. The gameplay is sharper than anything else in the series that came before it, the music is great, the voice acting is as good as usual. I really didn’t appreciate the Akiba and Meryl thing, that was just annoying tbh, the cutscenes go on forever and theres alot of exposition that could stand to be cut out. The bosses are pretty average apart from the final one but yeah its fun lol but not as good as 2 or 3.

This is a truly epic game. Its got to be one of the best open world games ive played. Its contending with the world of skyrim as the best in my opinion. For one the art direction is absolutely stunning, the lighting, foliage, use of colour and weather effects make it visually one of my favourite games. The actual exploration is what makes it tho, visual cues like smokestacks, animals trying to get your attention, random citizens letting you in on a rumour and the wind lead you to mystical shrines or hidden grottoes holding secret stories or items. There is no mini map in the corner of the screen telling you where to go and there is no level gating which is a huge win. Side quests for the most part are also very well done. Some lead to encounters and circumstances that are completely unique to those side quests. A simple rescue mission became a whole lot more interesting when you got to sail out onto a mongolian ship for the first time. Each side quest is unique and hold their own intriguing side stories. There arent 10+ rescue missions or 20+ fetch quests. The game also houses side stories to characters from the main quest which are all very engaging and often as cinematic as the main quest, they also let you in on their characters a little more, the best form of side quests though in my opinion are the Mythic tales which have you tracking down Ancient samurai techniques and tools, theres nothing cooler than hearing a poet at an inn telling the story of a Legendary Samurai’s flaming sword at the top of a mountain peek and then climbing this huge mountain in a perilous blizzard to discover the truth of this old tale. Now onto the main quest, this is where we start to get into a-few complaints, the plot is pretty basic, stop the mongol invasion, which is ok because it means that we could focus on the characters alot more, this is where the game falters, the characters are relatively generic and a little dull at times. The main character Jin has good character development and a good arc but he doesn’t really have much of a personality compared to someone like Geralt from the witcher. The story still has some great moments though, there are twists, betrayals, huge battles, the villian is very serviceable and the ending is really good. Now that we have gotten past the worst thing, lets talk about the combat. The combat in this game is kind of god tier? The moment to moment samurai sword combat never got old, its full of depth, variety and “badassery“ and the game does get challenging at points but not by just making enemies spongier or “higher level” but by actually making the enemies harder to fight to test and increase the skill of the player. Im going to cut this review short because i could talk about this game for a long time but know that i could have talked about, how the soundtrack is my favourite from this year, the terrific audio design, awesome boss battles, the armour and weapon customisation or even the decisions you can make to alter the story. This is an amazing game and a great final addition to the terrific library of the ps4. What a game, what a console.

This is indeed a good game. The plot while basic is very strong in the character department. The wild hunt as villians are meh but serviceable. Geralt is a great protagonist and his relationships are all very interesting to watch unfold. The music is fantastic and sound design is all around pretty decent. The world of the witcher is a fun one to dive into but the exploration of it is either really fun or really frustrating and annoying. Level gating and the mini map need to go and die. The gameplay is quite average overall, the combat is serviceable but its quite shallow and either too easy or too hard. Geralt also feels too floaty to control, he doesn’t have that weighty feel that he should. Overall i think its a pretty solid game thats carried by its great writing.

The unintentional mastapiece. This is the dumbest game i have ever played but because of that its also the funniest game Ive ever played. The story is pretty basic but the characters are what make it memorable, raiden is way better here, jetstream sam is actually a great character and ofc senator armstrong who is so fucking funny and the stuff he says during the final boss made me laugh so hard. This game is really dumb and over the top but it embraces those things and the dumb shit becomes some of the best things about the game. The combat is freaking badass and the bosses especially are the highlights of the game, they are long, sweaty, high octane, fuckin nuts to buts showdowns with badass music. These boss fights are challenging and i died numerous time to lots of them. The final boss alone is literally an hour long, fuck its good lol.

Its pretty much the opposite of the phantom pain, story is king in this game and its well executed for the most part. Theres a bunch of cool memorable characters and mindfuck plot twists. Having to play as raiden rather than snake didn’t really bother me, hes not a bad character and not playing as snake himself for once gives an Interesting perspective and snake is painted as a legendary badass so there was nothing to complain about there for me. The game has lots of clever and or entertaining bosses. The soundtrack is really great again too. The core gameplay is decent stealth action. There are some things that bugged me about it though. I think the level design gets pretty repetitive by the middle of the game and the backtracking accentuates this even more. Also gameplay wise, i think the section with Otacons sister is very weak. The sniper in this game feels like complete and utter ass unless you pop a pentazemin pill. There is also pretty much no choice to go loud, a stealthy approach is always a better option, enemies will infinitely respawn when alerted. This might sound like a foolish complaint because its a stealth game but other games in the series give you the option and its actually a viable way to play.