More of a comedy than a horror when the character got a shoe and a can thrown at her in the locker room.

PROS!:
I really enjoyed the the cherry blossom monster, most chase sequences are fun albeit only 3 of them exist, especially during the last chase when you had to find those photos, it actually felt like a horror game and it was definitely the peak of the game though it only lasted like 8 minutes.
The settings themselves are also pretty nice I really like the graffiti art platters on every single wall, they’re all different and unique. There was one that said “swag” on it, thought that dope af.
Great visuals, great art design and soundtrack was superb.

Cons.:
Why is this game titled silent hill? This feels more like a higher quality version of a shitty horror game you’d find on steam.
The message it portrays, while a nice message, is blasted in your face 5 seconds into the game and it doesn’t let go.
More of a walking simulator with un-skippable dialogue and snooze fest cutscenes than anything interesting.
A total of 2 puzzles and the first one was just find 4 numbers in an empty room so it was easy as shit, 2nd one was kinda dope (see the pros list again if you’re a dumb fool who can’t register words)
They use a flurry of words on the sticky notes layered in the rooms and when one of them is a slurred way to say “whore” and one just says “NO WAY!” I chuckle.

This game ain’t silent hill at all, fuck man. But hey it’s still better than Silent Hill Ascension.

An addictive mobile card game that respects your time in ways that something like Hearthstone does not. And the best part is - you can play as much as you want without ever spending a dollar.

I always had trouble getting into Hearthstone specifically because of the time investment needed to play it. Marvel Snap remedies that problem with its short 6-round games that only take a few minutes to play making it easy to squeeze in a couple rounds while waiting in line somewhere, brushing your teeth, pooping, etc.

What's more is I never felt pressured to spend even a dollar on the game. Spending money in this game gives you no gameplay advantage over other players because the main thing you spend money on is just cosmetic variants of your cards. Season Passes do have a handful of cards in them you can get if you buy the pass, but all those cards are unlockable through normal gameplay.

My biggest issue with the game is that their microtransactions are insanely overpriced across the board. The battle pass is $10 and you cannot use any premium currency gained to unlock it. The amount of items you get in the pass is abysmal compared to other F2P games. You get 3 card variants themed after the season, 2 random variants, and then a ton of filler currency and XP. Additionally, the pass is only 50 tiers and the seasons only last 4 weeks. Compare that to something like Fortnite which has 100 tiers over 3 month, has 5x the number of actual items in the pass, and enough currency to buy the next season's pass. If you bought every season pass in Marvel Snap for a year, it would cost you $120 and you'd have a handful of cosmetic cards to show for it. In contrast, you could spend $10 in Fortnite for the whole year and be set as long as you play. And that's not even mentioning Marvel Snap's ludicrous bundles that cost $75 for 1 card variant, a profile picture, and some currency. While Fortnite is a game for everyone, Marvel Snap's target customer is clearly whales.

I loved the game for the amount of time I spent on it but eventually the grind set in and the absurd microtransaction costs got to me. Great game but boy do they need some new direction on the live service side.

+ Fantastic, addicting gameplay
+ Short rounds that value your time
+ Great card designs that are really satisfying to level up
+ Plenty to do in the game without ever spending a dollar

- Some of the worst microtransaction pricing I've ever seen in a game
- Terrible battle pass
- Progression becomes a grind at higher levels

It's not pokemon with guns. It's ARK survival Evolved with pokemons. Even the progression system is lifted from Ark.

There's not a single original bone in this game, and I think that's ok. Even the UI is a ripoff of DEATH STRANDING of all things.

But as a survival game, it's quite enjoyable and much more approachable than Ark, Conan exiles, and maaaybe Valheim, because the whole point of the base is to have it automated by the pals.

Gameplaywise, it's serviceable at best, it takes ohours to get to a proper gun and everything in between the Bow and the handgun feels super slow.

It's a hit game just because of the memes, not because it's a great game.

It's cool that the pals can be used for many different things, but that's the only reason I gave it a star.
The game is creatively bankrupt. Everything it has, from the gameplay to the creature design, is ripped off. I think if you're gonna rip off Pokemon, you should lean in to it more and give me SOMETHING of substance. It just felt like the parody could have been a lot stronger.
The biggest sin this game commits is it's just boring as hell. These kind of games generally aren't for me anyway, and I was hoping for this to be an exception, but it just wasn't.
It's only January but if I play anything I like less this year, I'm gonna be sad. This is without question one of the laziest and comically bad games I've ever played. I can see why it might work for some people, but this is not my thing at all

Congrats to the devs for reaching such a massive milestone of like 5 million sales (at the time of writing this) in a couple days without even counting gamepass. Whether you hate the game or not, thats a feat. That being said, If I hear about this "pokemon killer" one more time I'm going to explode. I played for about 4 hours before couldn't continue playing. I do not tend to like survival games, theres too much babysitting and base building is never something I care about. If it wasn't for gamepass I wouldn't have even bothered. I hope for everyone who is actually enjoying it, they don't abandon the game like what happened to plenty of Early Access survival games of old.

Outside of them getting the pokemon style down (plagiarism allegations, ai art or whatever the fuck else I don't really care) for the pals and the fact they can be captured and used for battle, thats where the pokemon ends.
Battles are in real time, you're fighting with them and they tend to spam the same attack in my experience. There is no story that I ran into, so if you don't suffer from wanderlust syndrome you're gonna be trying to find fun with the genre staple of punching trees to get started. Its Ark but without dinosaurs. You WILL be building and you will be interacting with survival mechanics or you will have a bad time. You can then put your pals to work in the fields while others roll up with you to ice some guy, then catch that person you rolled up on and sell them too. You also gotta babysit your own character as well as your pals cuz you both got your survival meters to keep an eye on like hot and cold.

I really don't see this game posing any sort of "threat" to pokemon like the redditors want it to. These aren't even the same genre. If things that are actually close to pokemon in more ways then just "catch monster" like Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth, Monster Hunter Stories 2, Yo Kai watch, Dragon Quest Monsters and even SMTsona (who did the catching thing long before pokemon) didn't light a fire under their ass then I can't see this doing it. I hope thats the case too cuz if pokemon goes a survival crafting route, I'm gone.

Sequels are often difficult to perfect.

You have an original concept that you've laid the foundation for. This foundation is often original, innovative, and refreshingly new.

When it comes to making a sequel then, constructing a game that lives up to these qualities is an uphill battle. Expectations are now set that were birthed from a new established standard, and those standards not only require to be met, but are expected to surpass them.

In my Crash Bandicoot 3 review, I talked about a specific type of sequel that developers attempt to fulfill this: more is better. On occasion, it is true that more can be better. Systems can be refined, tweaked, expanded upon, bringing about new and exciting ways to approach the original game's foundation.

Doom II does this approach, and it never quite makes the mark of surpassing the original.

Doom's original maps were quick and to the point, driving the combat forward. Ideas would be set up, played with, and onto the next. Every part of the buffalo was used.

Doom II lengthens and expands on these concepts, jam packing them into levels. These levels last up to 5-20 minutes, sometimes even longer if you became lost, compared to Doom's 5-10 minutes.

By the time I reached the middle of Act 3, I was becoming fatigued.

Not to say that the quality of these levels are poor - far from it. These levels bring about interesting ideas that warrant Doom II to exist and become qualified as a great sequel... It's just not as engaging as the first game.

Doom II puts much more emphasis on the setting than the original ever attempted. Doom's slow decline into hell was effective, but would often sacrifice any semblance of tangibility in it's environments in strong favor for tight level design.

Doom II takes Doom's original act progression but diversifies the environments, which in turn ends up constructing a more cohesive feeling. You're still traversing through dark metallic corridors with the occasional flesh walls and demonic infection spreading throughout until finally taking over completely, but they're expanded by including long stretches of terrain, a larger surplus of baddies, and more buildings and structures to enter into.

Because of this, it's easier to set yourself into this world. In the back of my head as I mowed down demons in droves, I reflected on the idea that these structures are of an earth brought into hell, and the effect that the chaos would have over it's populace. There was something more tangible to these areas that felt more lived in as a real place than previously before.

By it's nature of developing a sense of place, this means that level design isn't going to be as fundamentally solid in comparison to the original's. Coupled with the ideals to make a bigger and more expansive sequel, this causes the level design to feel like I'm meandering about, rather than running and gunning down levels.

I would say that despite it all, it's still astonishing for Doom II to accomplish a sense of atmosphere given this is a game released in 1994.

... That is, until I realized that 1994 is the very same year that Super Metroid, Earthbound, System Shock, Donkey Kong Country, and Marathon all released. Some of these games managed to do more with less, some even managed to do more with competing contemporary technology.

Despite that, Doom II mostly surpasses these games in terms of level design even still, (except Super Metroid), which is arguably the more important feat. On the same coin though, it's ultimately more of the same: Doom with extra levels.

For a sequel, you would expect an increase to the weapon sandbox. Doom II only has one new weapon, and that's the Super Shotgun.

And let me tell you, the inclusion of the Super Shotgun is the primary reason why I wanted to play Doom II immediately after it's prequel. It's damage output combined with it's meaty sound effect and animation really makes an impact on you, as well as any demon foolish enough to stand in your way. A gun this good is a worthy justification of a sequel. Sometimes less is more.

That being said, while the weapon pool doesn't need to be expanded further, I do wish there were more mechanics that played into the level design that transformed this formula into something more interesting.

But that's the thing, yeah? Doom II doesn't set out to expand a formula. It's goal is to make more Doom. And as I've learned, Doom is fucking awesome. But while Doom II is still awesome, it's attempt to achieve the "more is better" approach for a sequel just isn't as effective on me.

But that also doesn't mean that Doom II doesn't still fucking rule though.