Team Fortress 2 is an icon of first-person shooters. While Battlefield 42, Team Fortress Classic and Star Wars Battlefront are seemingly some of the first hero-shooters, Team Fortress 2 served as the layout (that has barely been changed or altered, by the way) in terms of its structure.

Where Team Fortress 2 shines is its small set of cast that are balanced upon one another. I'm unsure how would I describe it, but Team Fortress 2 feels like it's balanced out of "vibes", being a casual game that is.

As with other Valve games, Team Fortress 2 is ahead of its time, serving as a precedent of the shudders wave of hero-shooters in the current video game landscape.

Astral Ascent is extremely confident on its combo-system that it decided to throw comprehensibility and readability out the window, in order to make sure that your dopamine is at an all-time high.

Surprisingly, Astral Ascent loves to hammer variety. Every single move has its own unique utility. Some are for mobility, some strike vertically, some leave a tornado for a short amount of time; it's fun, stupid and is even furtherly customizable by an element and sub-stat upgrade system that makes your moves furtherly unique. UI and UX unfortunately suffers due to the wonky implementation of this system. The recent update also gave all four playable characters two additional unique weapons that shift their playstyle. The game also encourages the player to engage with its hard-mode system, providing higher difficulty for its seasoned players.

The game also throws a lot, by a lot I do mean A LOT, of progression systems at the player. You may like it or not, but it's progression system feels just right, only ever relying on a single meta-currency.

Astral Ascent is fresh. While it may not be a perfect game, and it obviously wears much of its influence on its sleeve, Astral Ascent presents so many options that each and every run feels chaotic and experimental enough, that it embraces its roguelike roots fairly well. If there's anything else that I can say, it's power-fantasy done right, provided that you find decimating your screen with dozens of particles alright.

It's unfortunate that I cannot seem to enjoy Hollow Knight whatsoever. Coming from someone who loves Igavania and Metroid's design, I don't think that Hollow Knight manages to scratch that same itch.

I dislike rating games based on game-feel, but I think it's the point that Hollow Knight does well. Walking from bench-to-bench, and frolicking through its interconnected areas with my map out feels all nice, contrasted by its eerie sound-design.

Otherwise, I cannot really see anything of note in Hollow Knight. Perhaps, it's the same experience that I've had with Undertale. Feelings that Hollow Knight should've brought out of me have probably been done by other games, if not better.

If you enjoy this game, more power to you. I'm glad that people are getting introduced to metroidvania, but please, stop labelling games as the pinnacle of the genre if you've only played one. It's literally that one Hard Drive article titled "‘If You Only Watch One Anime, Watch Attack on Titan,’ Says Friend Who Has Watched Exactly One Anime".

Chaos. If there’s anything that would encapsulate the term roguelikes or roguelites, chaos would be its perfect descriptor. Rogues separate themselves from the rest of the genres by building a core gameplay loop where the moment-to-moment experience revolves around randomness and player decision. Each and every run is different, from enemies, stages, items, abilities that you get. Of course, frustration is inbound when randomness is decisive on the outcome.

I’m not the one to say, but stripping these qualities from a roguelite game turns it into a homogenous experience. Yes, I’m calling the poster-boy of roguelites homogeneous. Let’s get this out of the way first, Hades looks pretty, and has really good voice-acting. Some like it for its dialogue, but I find it too “internet-y” for my taste. Now I can begin my rant, can I?

Hades’ lacks spine. Rail-roading players' decision to get synergies and allowing them to filter their choices manually to remove frustration removes that chaos. Not only this, but the lack of variety, room-wise, enemy-wise, and choice-wise, exacerbates this homogeneity. What about player adaptation? Hades has none of that. Simply mash the same few buttons to kill the same few enemies, the same few bosses set in the same few areas with the same few room-designs. Same, same, same. Before someone screams skill-issue at me, I finished Hades at 32 heat.

Dying is perhaps the fun part of Hades. You hoard and slave away multiple meta-currencies that allow you to make the game easier, find yourself some dialogue you’ve never heard before, and finally, do the grunt-work all over again. Hopefully, you find some new meta-currency-locked drip-fed dialogue this time around.

Monster Hunter Rise turns everyone's favorite roleplaying game slash hunting sim by peeling it back purely into an action game. The game wastes no time, shoves you in the middle of the battle with the monster marked in your map. Every hunt is fast, movesets are expanded heavily, and the game understands what it wants to be, a simplified Monster Hunter game.

Perfect, I thought. I love Devil May Cry, and was so willing to accept the changes brought by Rise, yet it never impressed me. Before I begin bashing this game like a Congolala's skull, I would like to say that Rise and Sunbreak has the best monster selection, quantity and quality-wise, amongst the series.

Monster Hunter Rise loses one of the biggest core-aspects of the series, the game's eternal foundation that it taught you since the beginning (yes, that shitty one from 2004), positioning. Offensive and defensive plays are some of the most satisfying beats that Monster Hunter has mastered, old-gen and new-gen alike, yet it is absent from Rise. It's disappointing.

The game is still likeable enough, it's a Monster Hunter game, after all.

A fever dream intoxicated by a gut-slapping, face-punching atmosphere. Brutal Orchestra is tight, understanding that roguelites are also about trade-offs, not just progression.

Some call it charm, some call it quirk, but Brutal Orchestra has attitude. An attitude reinforcing not only its visuals, sound and atmosphere with oppression but also its mechanical aspects.

It's easy to say identify what is "peak" or not. Simply stand on the foot of the mountain, point your finger on the highest point of a mountain, and tell your peers it is "peak". Unfortunately, it takes a very few people to climb a mountain and actually stand on its "peak". Brutal Orchestra? It is the peak.