I was a big fan of Absolver though the school system isn't as traditional as pressing square and triangle like Sifu has. Sifu makes you feel like a kung fu master from the moment you press the first takedown animation and that's a good testament to the game. At first, you get your ass beat a lot until you start to learn parry timing and what attacks to avoid. Repetition is key in this game as by the time I got to the final boss, I truly felt like I mastered the game enough to take on the challenge.

SOUL.

simply a game made first to be enjoyable from start to finish. Systemically everything just connects to a point that you kinda forget how archaic this game was. For this last replay before DD2 was released, I finally played with Magic as a Mystic Knight. Even knowing the exact story beats, the game still feels fresh.

Watching a griffin fly down in the middle of your fight with goblins is an incredible experience every time it happens. Grigori is the coolest antagonist. The size and sheer terror he emits every time he speaks or chases you is an amazing experience even experiencing it now for the third time.

The biggest thing that surprised me was how open truly the open world was. After you reach Gran Soren, you're just trusted to complete quests, bounties, and explore the world to gather strength and experience to fight Grigori. Its just fun man play it before the 22nd

I have a new guilty pleasure. This game is surprisingly short by ARPG standards but that is much appreciated. The world feels lived in, with such a homely hub town. Once I sat down to play it each time I couldn't stop playing it. The soundtrack and effects are frozen in that Y2K vibes that hits a nerve with me. It reminds me a lot of older Korean MMOs from the time and flash games, where you just mindlessly grind and fight adorable monsters. I have to give it up to this game just for the fact it made me map out each map to figure out what the fuck was going on.

I'm glad they gave this game away for free. Its the game of all time. It plays it incredibly safe. Usually, souls-like zone in on one specific mechanic they liked, and not on what made the souls games work. Steelrising focuses on the bloodborne quickness and Sekiro posture system. Weapons are samey. Blocking, parrying, and special attacks are restricted to only one of the respective options which makes combat and experimentation have this gross film covering it. I found myself pretty overpowered by the end of the first major boss. There isn't much intrigue in the game. The setting gets antiquated when the enemy variety can be counted with two hands.

For some reason, I can't find anything impactful from Steelrising. Jumping is a nice feature, but verticality isn't respected enough to go further than simple platforming. There aren't tricks in the environment. That kinda sounds weird as I typed this, but the enemies and environment just felt....robotic no pun intended. There wasn't a chest that turned into automates, or a random boulder or stab in the back. You just sorta waltz into each battle without much surprise. Loot density is disgusting, and I started to just beeline it to avoid being pissed fighting a mini-boss just to get a Resistance potion. I don't know...it's just....a game.

For what it's worth, I think this is a testament to how beautifully this game has aged. It's more of the same Persona 3 that you have played before either through Portable or the original, but sprinkled with fairy godmother dust. It's a gorgeous game, the UI is incredible to just stare at, just like Persona 5.

A lot of people will simplify this to "just Persona 5-ifying Persona 3", and they wouldn't be wrong to make that assumption. Certain QoL features, like the Network surveys, trivialize the need for a guide to follow for quiz answers and what to do on a daily basis. Though most are a welcome addition, such as the limit break like theurgy system, or the Monad Passageways. I played through the game with my party on Act Freely to relive that experience I had just like the first time I played FES all those years ago. The game was easier in the later half once I switched over to direct command.

It's a true remake in the best of case: making the game prettier than ever, while adding minor modern changes to improve that experience for newer fans.

What a disappointment... but I should've expected this, especially after the previous two games. Dawn of Dreams does a lot to change the formula in a bad way. While the parter system is novel, it's proven worthless when your partner can't stay alive, and if they are alive are barely noticeable in combat. The game is entirely too bloated with multiple stages and bosses being reused. The worst part of it all is how lackluster the story is. Even with 2 which I still think is the weakest game, the story was at least engaging enough to keep me going through. Where as the story here takes a huge shift from what is expected. Like others have said going "full blown anime" was a detriment to this game as the story is by far the weakest part of this game.

I've grown to be a surveyor of Jank and weird C to Single-A games. For every B-Boy and Shinobi, You have games like this. Without Warning is a game with a lot of potential.

From a technical aspect, the game runs like a bag of dog shit. Constant 19fps and frame rate drops with some of the most obnoxious repeating banter from the totally not racist stereotypical terrorists make for an unbearable listening experience. The premise of constantly changing characters that all indirectly affect one another's paths in the timeline, Is severely undercooked. Often you are playing as the three-man spec-ops group as they kill mooks in an arcadey run-and-gun auto lock-on shooter. Objectives are pretty much always the same: Free hostages, clear the area, and defuse the bombs.

This gets increasingly repetitive when these missions are bite-sized and can be beaten in less than 5 minutes. There are other characters such as the security guard, the secretary, and the news cameraman. The Security Guard's levels are just like the Spec-Ops team but with a pistol instead. The beginning of the game is a lot of back and forth between these 4 gun-wielding characters into the later third. The last two aren't introduced until the last couple of missions, and sadly only have a handful of missions between them. The pacing of these characters should've been added in between these shootouts. Since it goes in chronological order, you sit there thinking "Wait, where were they for 4 hours of this situation?"

For the quickness of the levels, there are a lot of them and I feel the game would've been better gutting half of them to give better credence to the 3 nonmilitary characters. For 50 whole levels, you spend most of the time with a majority of the characters doing the same thing, and that thing isn't even done well.

My interest waned in the latter half due to this repetitiveness. while the introduction is strong as hell and I wanted to give it a fair shake, but after rolling credits, it'll probably collect dust until an eventual trade-in.

Listen, do not let the naysayers steer you away from this fucking raw ass game. Once you get used to analog-controlled combat, the game is a poignant Metroidvania with deeper puzzle-solving. I can best describe this as a 2006 Straight to DVD action movie in game form and it's so amazing to see until the credits roll.

While there is some annoying difficulty spikes towards the later half of the game that makes surviving the extreme backtracking the real challenge, It was all worth it for that finale. That final boss goes down as the best final boss I've ever faced in a video game. I'm not being hyperbolic.

What happens when you combine a rhythm game with a character action game?

, in theory, this should be my GOTY, as both of my favorite genres meshed into one, but for me, the rhythm elements took away from an otherwise breathless experience. The story and the characters are amazing. There were many laugh-out-loud moments and the art direction is top-notch. Even when it switches to FMV or the comic book-esque rundowns it still looks so clean.

For me combat was visceral. I loved the combos and mix-matching with your gang to combo people, but the rhythmic timing was a little off. At first, I thought it was my frame rate being too high and capped it at 60. Then I thought it was my latency and tested and recalibrated it for almost an hour. I just couldn't hit anything on time and it threw me off for most of the game. Luckily this game is beatable without having to be super precise with your controls.

I dug this a lot. I want to go back to it on consoles or on Steam Deck eventually to see if the latency issues continue.

This is like a wet fart as a game. If I wasn't playing the legendary edition I wonder how much of this game I would've loathed more. There's so much to unpack story-wise, that I don't think BioWare thought about certain parameters actually being met come the finale. There are two literal walking plot devices in the party and the main one that you waited three games for is regulated to a background character after their introduction.

The overabundance of "hey let's chill at the bar" character interactions was annoying especially with what's at stake currently in the galaxy. Hanging out and getting to know my party members was the highlight of the second game, but in this game, they didn't even have some background catching up to talk about. They become just one-liners until you see them somewhere else. And for a game that pushed so much one-on-one time with these characters, It felt forced at this rate. Certain characters didn't get a proper ending to their built-up arcs over the years.

Story aside, while once again the gunplay and moment-to-moment gameplay are improved, something is adversely affected by it. This time it's a compound of a bunch of small things. While guns have better modification and distinct use cases, the weight system is a really neat feature to stop the class-based limitations, and the combo systems with powers make for more engaging firefights, not being able to just put your gun away is weird. Planet scanning is annoying with the Reapers chasing you for hitting scan one time. Side quests being regulated to scans and random pickups and eavesdropping made them boring to do.

I guess that's the best way to put it. This game is boring, not because the story wasn't engaging or the gameplay was, but because after trekking through 2 games of build-up, I expected more. My disappointment just compounded when there wasn't a "man that was all worth it" moment. I slogged through unbearable gauntlets of firefights only to end off with a lackluster finale, and I'm not talking about the ending, but the entire third game.

I'm left amazed at the vast improvement Mass Effect 2 is. The core gameplay has been refined and tweaked to make the firefights and biotic slinging that much more impactful. Along with some superb storytelling. From the bombastic opening, I was hooked more into this game than I was in the first game which left a sour taste in my mouth coming into this game. I thought of this game more like a training arc between the first game and the second game that allowed me to truly explore the galaxy at my leisure. Being able to see the slums of Omega to the Love Hotels of Illum made the galaxy feel as full of life as it implied.