Assassin's Creed: Unity is a game that can feel amazing when it works. I'm not necessarily referring to the glitches and bugs when I say that since most of that was fixed with me playing the game 8 years after the initial release. The parkour system can be fantastic and has a lot of depth. It feels great once you get better at doing side hops and transitioning in and out of buildings. Then there are times when Arno gets stuck on something or keeps aiming for the wrong thing. Some of that could may just be me not using the controls properly but it can be very frustrating when it happens.

Likewise, the stealth can absolutely feel great. There's a sort of fast stealth system which can make you feel like an amazing assassin when you nail someone with a phantom blade, throw a quick smoke bomb to take out a group with your hidden blade before slinking back into a crowd. It works well until it doesn't. The detection can feel unpredictable and annoying and later missions can have way too many guards in one area. There are some decent "black box" assassination missions but there's also plenty of boring rote mission design.

Paris is an absolutely gorgeous world map with some of the wonderful landmarks practically being 1:1 scale. There's an impressive amount of interiors that can run into and out of seamlessly. It's also filled with a ton of markers, most of which are an endless supply of chests to open for meagre sums of money. I know some people are allergic to that sort of icon bloat but for some reason, I'm not sick of it yet.

The story is a complete waste of time. They don't take advantage of the French Revolution setting and Arno doesn't really accomplish anything of note. He feels like a side character in his own game and he is as dull as dishwater. Very few of the charcaters stand out. Elise probably would have been protagonist but I'm not sure that would have saved the narrative. The modern day part of the story basically ends with one of the characters admitting that everything they did was completely pointless.

I am pretty conflicted on this game but I do wish it became the template for the series going forward to build off of. I suppose Syndicate is that but they pivoted fairly quickly into RPG Assassin's Creed after that. I did enjoy the game but it comes with a ton of caveats.

It's a bite-sized RGG story with the very likeable Kaito so what's not to love. Admittedly, I do really like side content in these games which this DLC is lacking. You can still play the minigames but there isn't much point and there isn't any substories. The combat is really fun and Kaito has a reasonably sizeable movelist. I feel like they're at a place with the Dragon Engine where they can do a game with multiple protaganists now. I definitely would not mind a potential Judgment 3 going in that direction. The story is compelling if a little predictable. It being so much shorter does make it feel like it races through the reveals and twists at a break neck pace and gets dark pretty quickly. If you like Lost Judgment, it's certainly worth playing.

The urban parkour was the main thing I liked about the main game so it's odd that I enjoyed this expansion more considering it's a fairly flat map in the countryside. Granted, I don't like it that much more and generally still think it's average. There is still some decent parkour sections in the mountains and racing around in the dune buggy can be fun. Running over zombies always stayed funny even if going back and forth between mission markers got tiring pretty quickly. The dune buggy having a level could be kind of interesting if you like progression mechanics in games. The story and characters are moderately more interesting than those in the main game but it's still dull. I enjoyed it but was happy to be done with it even with the short runtime.

I'm surprised by how much more I like this than AC3 and Black Flag. It has mostly the same systems and a less developed plot and characters but there feels like there's more confidence in its design. The world design and level design is really great here. I'm a completionist and this might be the most fun I've had going for 100% in an Assassin's Creed game. The myriad of collectibles and side objectives throughout the areas have a real nice flow between them that makes running through them feel very satisfying. The game is mostly side content due to the shorter story so it's good that I enjoyed that part.

The mechanics may be almost the exact same from Black Flag but I do appreciate the variety in locales in Rogue. There is a big city area with New York (which admittedly is just taken from AC3 and wasn't that great to begin with) and there are two different areas to sail around in River Valley and the North Atlantic. There's slightly more thought to sailing around in the River Valley since it's a bit tighter and the land areas there remind me of the Frontier from AC3 which I really liked. The North Atlantic is oddly beautiful in its icy starkness. It feel weird to say I prefer the cold North Atlantic to the gorgeous vistas of the Bahamas in Black Flag but I did. The great design of the land areas compared to those in Black Flag help too.

You are mostly doing the same stuff as you may be well used to in these games. There's a lot of naval combat, sneaking up and stabbing dudes and clearing out outposts which people may be tired of at this point. There's a few new weapons here and you get hunted by Assassins which is more annoying than anything. Seeing one of these games from the Templar perspective could have been interesting but it is pretty simplistic in its approach by making the Assassins awful and the main Templar guy the nicest guy in the world. They could have done more with the protaganist Shay Cormac but I'll mostly just remember the bad Irish accent. The game does feature Haytham Kenway who is one of the bect characters in this series so the story has that going for it. It provides a connective tissue for the Kenway Saga or whatever you want to call this era of Assassin's Creed and somewhat of a conclusion to lead into the next era. The narrative may not be particularly satisfying but they got the best of what made this era of Assassin's Creed fun to play.

I've always been more interested in the idea of zombie games where the zombies are more obstacles to get around rather than as fodder to bash or shoot at. There are moments like this in Dying Light where the game shines. The first person parkour is really fun (albeit not as well developed as that in Mirror's Edge) and leads to some thrilling moments with the zombies.

That said, there is still a lot of combat that is mostly pretty boring. I just used the DLC that gives you a fairly overpowered bow pretty quickly so I didn't have to deal with the dreary melee combat where the weapons degrade too fast. There's a lot of of crafting options too but I found myself not wanting to really bother with it. The story is pretty uninteresting with no decent characters to latch onto. I still enjoyed my time with it but wouldn't be rushing back to it.

There's a lot that could probably be said about Dark Souls 2 feeling like it is made by a B team and not being directed by Miyazaki but it still is a great game. The combat is as fun and tense as ever and there's some decent build variety even though I'll always do a dexterity build. Give me a fast sword and allow me to dodge around and I'm happy. And there sure are a lot of bosses to fight. They're not all amazing but the sheer amount of them means there's going to be some you'll love. It also means there will be plenty you hate too.

Dark Souls 2 does lose the wonderfully crafted interconnected world from the first game but there is still some solid level design to explore. The DLC areas which are included in this Scholar of the First Sin edition are of a pretty high quality with the strong exception of the Frigid Outskirts. Good lord, does that are suck. It's probably the worst area that's ever been put in any of these games I've played. There is some interesting lore to mine through in this game even though I will mostly use lore videos of which there are plenty on Youtube.

I've said a lot that the folks over at RGG Studios are great at refinement and Lost Judgment is a perfect example. The first game was already fantastic and now its sequel is a marked improvement in every way except for the story.

Whereas the first game was only set in Kamurocho, an area we've seen a lot of over the years, Lost Judgment gives us a second area in Yokohama. Admittedly Yokohama was introduced in Yakuza: Like A Dragon but it's still fun to explore and we get a big school area to run around in. The combat is absolutely stellar and feels like it brings the Dragon Engine combat up to the heights of the previous era. The two styles from the previous game, Tiger and Crane, are improved while introducing two more with Snake and Boxer (The boxer style is DLC which is a little sleazy). Snake is a whole lot of fun with parries and disarming. Boxer is the least developed but it is still pretty satisfying to get a good hook in. Switching between the styles is very quick and
making your own combos between the styles is great.

The side content is reminiscent of Yakuza 5 where it has a ton of varied gameplay mechanics and stories to go alongside them. Most of this content is in the school stories which has Yagami going undercover in school clubs for an investigation. Not all of them are great but there is a lot there and it's fun to be dancing one minute and fighting robots the next. I said the main story is the only thing that the sequel didn't improve on but it is still pretty compelling. It has a mystery that will keep you guessing and there are some great new characters which give us some wonderful boss fights. There are some particular story developments that I really could have done without though.

I'm actually quite surprised by how much I enjoyed Metroid Dread. I've certainly liked past Metroids, both side-scrolling and first person games, but I loved this one. There is such a great flow in the level design and the new unlocks and you always feel encouraged to keep moving. This may go against the slow exploration of the earlier titles but it just feels so good to play through. All the abilities are fun and it plays like a dream, although I can imagine some might feel the aiming can de difficult.

The game is gorgeous with some great backgrounds that always pop out even when you're running by rapidly. The story is what you expect out of a Metroid game but they managed to give Samus a bit more characterization and even a voice without it being terrible like in Other M. The game is possibly a bit short but it's nice to play something with little to no filler and I can see myself returning to the game for replays in the future.

Disco Elysium really is a tour de force for writing in video games and it is incredibly impressive that The Final Cut has voice acting for the many, many lines of text the game has. It draws you into its unique world and creates a very memorable cast of characters. Kim Kitsuragi might be one of the most likeable characters I've seen in a video game in quite some time.

As an RPG, there is a fairly sizeable set of skills you can develop and seems to have a decent amount of build diversity. There are definitely things I would be curious to see in a second playthrough if I leveled up some other skills earlier and how much would change. There are a lot of level checks which I find pretty satisfying. You can also find gear and items to help you pass certain checks if you hadn't been leveling certain skills. There is one part near the end of the game that I felt pretty railroaded into needing one specific skill which was quite annoying. Traipsing around the world does become pretty tiresome after a while despite it not being that big. Clicking to walk can get quite irritating since you can't zoom out very far and the fast travel system is all but useless. Still, the adventure is worth seeing through to talk to all these weird characters.

A Spider-man game only has to nail one thing to at least be fun and that is the swinging. Fortunately this game does have some pretty fun swinging although I wouldn't have minded if there was a bit more challenge to it.

Unfortunately, almost everything else in the game is pretty bland. I usually love Arkham combat but it felt lacking here perhaps because it has a pretty liberal dodge move. There's a skill tree but I never felt you unlocked anything that useful and there are gadgets to use in combat but there's only a couple you will rely on. The stealth sections are bad and the game is filled with boring side content. The story and cutscenes are pretty good though. The setpieces are cool but they're usually punctuated with quick-time events which I don't hate but they certainly make them less interesting than they could have been. It's a seemingly very expensive game that ultimately ends up being just OK.

Arkane are a very talented studio and Deathloop is another winner from them. Although Deathloop doesn't have the stellar level design and great stealth mechanics from Dishonored or the open ended mission structure and exploration of Prey, it makes up for it with an ambitious concept. Due to them knowing that the concept may be hard for players to wrap their head around, they possibly overcorrected with the amount of handholding that the game almost feels a bit linear.

It is ultimately a puzzle game, the puzzle being to figure out how to kill the eight visionaries in a single loop. It is somewhat disappointing that there is only one solution to that puzzle and the discovery of which feels too linear but I still had a lot of fun in figuring it out. The powers you can acquire are all pretty similar to stuff you can find in previous Arkane games but they are fun to use and combine although you'll probably stick with the same two once you get them all. The trinkets and upgrades to weapons and your powers are nice to get but you'll also probably just stick with the same few rather than mixing and matching.

I possibly sound more negative about the game than I actually feel. I did really enjoy the game loop and shooting or sneaking my way through the levels feels pretty great. It seems like a game close to greatness for me but there's a few design decisions holding it back. More assassination options and a challenge system akin to the current Hitman series would have gone a long way for me. It's still a very good game despite an anticlimatic ending and I very much want Arkane to stick around to make these weird ambitious games.

I played it after a few patches so some of more the egregious bugs were fixed but it is still a pretty underwhelming for a remaster dubbed "The Definitive Edition". GTA3 hasn't aged all that great especially compared to its two sequels but there still is some decent fun to be had. The missions can be pretty basic but there's a bit more freedom in how you approach them which is something that has been completely forgotten in modern Rockstar games. The remaster doesn't add much; it looks a bit better and you can free aim which doesn't feel great. It's not worth buying again if you already own the game on modern hardware.