The peak of 3D cat-based gameplay.
This expansion offers a very weird, but insanely appealing taste of what an "open-world" Mario game could be like.
How exactly? Just make normal levels with godlike design and scatter them across a big ass lake. Problem solved!

Also Bowser is just fine, cool design aside, his boss fights are kinda meh and after a certain point the game just stops introducing new levels, which forces you to re-explore previous areas in order to find the cat shines.

AAND since this is built upon 3D World's engine and assets, you don't get the same amount of wacky moves like in Odyssey, which is a shame, but still, this is a 3D Mario game, which automatically means it's all quality, start to finish.

I like platformers, they're by far, my favorite genre of all time, it's just so fun to have an insanely athletic character at your disposal to traverse various wacky enviroments, to the point where the physics of a character in any game, no matter the genre, is what makes or breaks a game for me.

Sonic 4 is a disgrace to humankind.
Yes i only played for 5 minutes. Yes i got this for free. But i don't care.
The controls are so fucking sluggish and abysmal that i could not even get past the second stage because i was just not having any fun at all. The game looks bad, it sounds bad, it controls bad. It's not unplayable, far from it. But is that really a compliment?
This is just a shitty mobile game blown up to an HD resolution and thrown to consoles, treated as a major release to bank in on the big retro boom of the 2010's.

4 years. 4 years of builds, things of the week, and many WIPs, both in image and video form.

Tour de Pizza, despite being fairly new to game development (from what i've read) they have somehow managed to create not only a game that FAR surpasses it's many inspirations but it is also one of the richest, most expressive and unhinged gaming experiences i have ever had the pleasure of even seeing.

You will laugh, you will scream, you will cry. Mostly screaming.
It's a game that takes advantage of it's ludicrously goofy premise and artstyle to the extreme.
It's a game that makes it's inspirations look like prototypes of something that never came.
But most importantly, it's a game made by people who understand what makes a game FUN.

It's Pizza Tower.
Go play it, what the hell are you doing reading this?

Holy Shit.
HL1 was a groundbreaking marriage inbetween gameplay and story, but you can still tell there was a Doom/Quake influence. Lots of guns that felt punchy as hell, Lots of enemies from the low level fodder to the threatening grunts that all had their clear and distinct purposes in the combat puzzle, with many diverse ways to take them out.
It's primitive, but it still holds up insanely well.
It has that primary gameplay loop that made those shooters so damn good.

But... instead of expanding on what made the gameplay so great, HL2 has a greater focus on the story, there is more downtime and a greater priority on setpieces instead of perfecting HL1's combat loop, making the gameplay take a backseat, there are less enemies, WAY less guns, and overall the game has an honestly pretty boring cast of threats (gameplay-wise) that should make this game worse than the original, hell, half of the game is just shooting the same low-level combines without any real challenge, (Ravenholm being an excellent exception) but it absolutely makes up for LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE.

The artstyle, the story, the characters, the atmosphere, the level design, it's all so damn GOOD.

I don't know how they did it, but GOD DAMN.

Janky, yet masterful.
That's the best way i can describe this banger i have played and replayed so many times during my early teenage years, but never actually beat it, until now.

And Xen isn't that bad. Sure it has awful platforming and VERY questionable level design but eh. It's a little speck of dirt in a very shiny and oddly shaped diamond.

Also something i see very few people mention is the sound mixing.
It is awful. It is dogshit. It is ass. I legit cannot play this game with headphone beacuse of how LOUD everything is. Especially during heavy combat sections.

What happens when you throw Sonic into a big ass open world with lots of things that throw you into random linear segments, including reused stages from almost all 3D Sonic games as "bonus stages" while having very little variation in how the linear segments in the open zone are executed with some of the best boss fights in the entire series?
The answer may surprise you:
A very fun but flawed game held back by a lack of budget and manpower, which is insanely noticeable by the time Chaos Island comes to an end.

Also fuck the true final boss whoever made that fuck you

The amount of potential this game has is honestly amazing.
Gameplay is the only thing holding this back from being truly great.
Any attack in the game lacks the weight that it feels that it would have (a fully charged "smash attack" against a foe at 100+ won't knock them all the way to the blastzone, but a simple attack that aims upwards will send them flying 100 miles per hour? it's weird.)

It's way too easy to completely delete any impact a punch may have had thanks to the dodging mechanic (just dodge in the opposite direction of the attack and you'll be back on track), and like i said before, most "strong attacks" feel weak; creating a game where it's more effective to spam the same move over and over again until somebody fucks up and dies.

Movement is snappy and fun, and the way to unlock characters is JUST grindy enough to not piss me off.

A slightly less good experience than TAG1 due to a certain lack of.... creativity in the gameplay department i suppose?
TAG1 had lots of wacky combat scenarios and it felt like the designers weren't afraid of pushing the limits of what could be done on an expansion released to the unsuspecting public.
Meanwhile TAG2..... eh
But it's still Doom Eternal at the end of the day, and i feel like it's impossible to fuck up the combat loop due to how refined and perfected it is.
it has a cool hammer tho
and the final boss sucks dick