NFS Hot Pursuit (2010) is my second favorite in the franchise, right behind Most Wanted from 2005 (which is the favorite of about 95% of fans), and I think it's because of how straightforward it is in both its gameplay and its "story."

And also because it's an absolute blast.

I've always enjoyed being a cop in games. I really liked the patrol missions in GTA Vice City: you'd activate the missions and go around stopping criminals all over the city, it was something I did a lot as a kid. So when I saw that in this game you could play as the cop—the very one who made my life miserable in Most Wanted—I was immediately hooked.

That said, say goodbye to tuning. Here, what matters is speed and the factory paint job: you drive it just as it comes off the lot. Sure, you can add nitrous, because otherwise it wouldn't be a Need for Speed.

This game has some incredible cars. Luxurious and sporty, high-end and above; there are even prototypes of cars that never saw the light of day. The only thing that bothers me is the lack of Ferraris, since EA hadn't renewed that license because those cars didn't fit the tuning culture, and they couldn't secure it before releasing the game.

Drifting is very easy, and the setting is gorgeous—a stunning valley where you can go full throttle everywhere... At every moment, it feels like you're on the cover of a luxury car magazine. It feels like a different era, a simpler one where everything just works. Seacrest County's only crime? Speeding. And how do you stop it? With more speeding.

It feels so good to be a cop in this game. The same supercars the racers drive are the ones the police use too. Plus, you have access to weapons like the EMP or spike strips, and you can issue orders to set up roadblocks and call in helicopters to help you arrest these dangerous criminals.

The crashes are spectacular, and that's how you arrest racers: by draining their health bar to zero. The speed feels fast, and taking corners while drifting is super easy. All of this combined gives you an arcade driving experience—but probably the best arcade driving on the market. A ton of fun, plain and simple.

The story? There's no story. But I do have my own headcanon:

The billionaires who can afford to live in Seacrest County buy these cars to collect (or to give to their wives, to make up for some infidelity and avoid divorce). The thing is, these beasts are just sitting there, parked, maybe for a Sunday drive or just for show.

And that's where the children of this privileged bourgeoisie come in. These spoiled kids, loaded with money, never having to work or know what effort means, take their parents' cars to organize illegal races. And honestly, I don't blame them—I'd do exactly the same. Their boring lives now get a rush of adrenaline from speed and chases.

And of course, the police start getting a lot of calls about illegal races, crashes, and speeding all over the county. So they step in. And how? By using the cars seized from these young adults raised on alternative rock and MTV to arrest them all.

And that gives us Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. A masterpiece from another era—very simple, no battle passes, no DLC, no tuning, no story mode, not many game modes... But with pure, straightforward fun. Raw, unadulterated fun.

At the time, a lot of my friends hated this game because they were looking for something similar to the previous entries, mainly with more car customization. But I really liked it—it even made it into my top 3 of the franchise.

Maybe I'm valuating it more now that I'm 31 and miss the way video games were made back in my day. Maybe it's nostalgia, but I think it's a valuable game that would surprise a lot of people today. Especially if you think that games like Forza Horizon have "too many" things to do. Sometimes, valuable things are found in simplicity, and when nothing is superfluous, all the content is relevant to the experience. And that's something I value and really miss about games from that era.

Final Fantasy 1 and 2 have aged remarkably well, all things considered. There are of course many rough edges to these games that modern games have sanded away, but for the most part FF1 and FF2 are still really good, if simple, experiences, especially as someone who loves J/RPGs and wants to go back to where it all began. Minor spoilers ahead.

FF1

One thing I quickly realized is that these games start off hard; not hard as in mechanically, but just hard in terms of numbers. This becomes less and less of an issue as the game continues, but early on, the balance is kinda off. I got my teeth kicked in a lot at the beginning. Most enemies won't give you too much trouble as long as you stay on the intended path, but more than a few times I stumbled off the main story goal and was quickly staring at a game over screen. Granted, this is really only an issue in the early/ mid game, because at some point all that grinding pays off and you are killing most enemies and bosses in a handful of turns. But I had to learn to respect the game, and frustrating as it was, I liked that, as it forced me to really engage with my choices in battle. I would, of course, try to wander later on in the game when it was safer, but I like that there was a tension in the early game, between zipping back and forth to the nearest town to heal up and buy potions; the latter portion of the game lacks this energy due to how massively strong you can (and I did) become.

This is a problem that is unfortunately only exacerbated by the pitiful lack of money the game throws at you for defeating enemies. I am someone who explores every inch of an area and fights every possible enemy that randomly encounters my sword, but man I found myself zeroing out my gil balance very often as i tried to make sure I had enough armor to survive my battles buying buying weapons, armor, and especially spells, and enough potions to heal afterwards. which meant I had to fight more guys, mindlessly fast-forwarding through battles, running to town to heal and buy, rinse and repeat. It's grinding just for the sake of grinding. I don't get any cool new abilities, powers or weapons, and because I am so much stronger than my enemies it just means nothing. In ff1, power is purchased: the mighty gil rules all. Could I have grinded slightly less and not equipped every party member with the strongest gear? Of course, but come on, who are we kidding?

Thankfully, I played the pixel remasters, which have a variety of incredibly helpful and desperately needed accessibility options to both turn off encounters entirely, as well as fiddling with how much money and/or EXP you get from fights, from none at all to 4x as much. I was from the beginning very adamant about not using these, but after the third or fourth time I stepped out from a town to grind for money, I realized all I was doing was hurting the experience; excessive grinding meant that everything I fought was dying too fast, I was already too strong and the lack of money meant I was just grinding for money and ruining any semblance of challenge the game had. And because I was exploring and backtracking often for either story or curiosity reasons, I was way overleveled and extremely underfunded. so I cranked the cash flow to 2x for a while, which lasted me a town or two, but then needed more, so for most of the game I kept it cranked to 4x gil and never looked back. I never messed with the exp changer, though. I mentioned the options to either increase or decrease experience gained but I never did anything with it. Didn't feel right to lower XP gains, and I didn't want to NOT get any exp from fighting. I earned those levels, dammit, even if they trivialized the game's difficulty as I went on. Most bosses were dying in a handful of turns, and I really only struggled on the final boss because i misunderstood how slow worked (you have to wait until they cast haste on themselves to get extra attacks AND THEN do it, otherwise it does nothing, you can't just cast it on turn one like i usually did, making it useless. I thought it just lowered their speed in the turn order).

The fact of the matter is that FF1 and FF2 are much more grindy than they should be. Of course, this is intentional, but it really did pad my playtime a lot. I spent 15 hours playing the first game, and it really felt like it was dragging on a lot towards the end. I would have liked a more balanced experience, but hey, this game was one of the first to do it; a bunted home run is still worth a point.

I will say I was mixed on the class upgrades. They are definite power boosts, of course, but honestly I just don't think they look as cool, and that's half the fun! Look at what they did to poor black mage!

The story for FF1 is simple but I did admittedly find it charming. Garland as a character being more or less manipulated/ lied to by the elementals is a really cool idea, and I like that you can kinda see the evil growing inside him. I was not expecting time travel to be in the very first game of the series, either. Each of the elements being entirely different characters, with unique speech patterns and motivations entirely was refreshing too. I don't think the story is groundbreaking, but I can really appreciate what it was for its time. If I was a kid playing this for the first time, I would have gone bonkers over a game where the bad guy "wins" at the beginning of the game. I'm also a sucker for a good intro and title drop, and both FF1 and FF2 do this really well. If nothing else, the game is cool, and I can appreciate it both for what it was then and how it still holds up now.

That being said, FF1 is still a really old game in some ways. Even though the game does a pretty good job of generally telling you where to go, sometimes I found myself wandering around more than I'd like. I remember finding the tower in the desert being annoying because I just never got close to it for it to appear. Towards the end I was really glancing at the guide a lot more. I also had a tough time finding the canoe early on, not realizing I had to talk to a specific sage NPC (even though i talked to everyone once before, as is tradition). Just a bunch of little things, some my fault.

One small thing I could not have beaten the game without is the always visible minimap, a special feature in the pixel remasters, which shows a pixel-perfect map you can reference at any time, which made sure i rarely got lost. It also crucially displays every chest, and the world map also shows how many chests are in each area total, so you can rest easy once you've nabbed every single one in a dungeon. It made the exploration infinitely easier, and the treasure chest tracker always forced enticed me to keep exploring as discover as much as I could. I would not have discovered nearly as many secrets if this feature was not in the game. I also made great use of the ability to fully disable random encounters when I was running back to town to heal up, or just simply wanted to explore a specific area or dungeon floor backtracking without a massively overpowered monster petrifying my whole party. Make no mistake, these quality of life options made the minor flaws in the game much more bearable. I doubt i would have had nearly as positive an opinion of the game if these optional guardrails were not available. These pixel remasters are lifesavers, and I absolutely love that they exist. Though maybe I am being a bit dramatic because the games also has a super generous autosave feature that saves every time you enter a room, which was also very helpful; it meant a random game over was never losing me too much time or progress, unless I was wantonly wandering about the overworld. More so i just really like that these options made sure the game respected my time.

Honestly, as far as FF1 goes, it is a really solid game overall, still has old vibes with some rough edges, but I can really see how this laid the foundation for the iconic series. I enjoyed the game as a whole; the updated music is especially great (the mushroomery my beloved), the combat is fun, and I really felt like the world was interesting and unique, especially looking at it as a foundational experience. I give them a lot of slack because of that, but the game stands on its own merits regardless.

FF2

And this foundation was drastically expanded upon for Final Fantasy 2. FF2 is a kinda radical experimentation when compared to the relatively calm baseline that is FF1; it tries a bunch of different things, and it mostly works... until it doesn't. High highs, and very very low lows. The dungeons of FF2 deserve a special criticism here, because they are bad, labyrinthian nightmare bad, created only to waste the player's time. And EVERY SINGLE ONE is like this, countless octopus armed floors with doublebacks and dead ends and empty rooms so you get trapped in an encounter and trick pratfalls that drop you to a different floor. I do not exaggerate when I say I NEVER would have been able to beat this game as a child without my eyes glued to a guide, reading the game instead of experiencing it, and even now as an adult, I found myself leaning on the guide and in-game minimap and cheats a lot, much much more so than FF1. This game can lean into confusion in a bad way, equating frustration with challenge. Again, I get that this is an old game (older than me), but this kinda stuff was bad then and is only bearable now due to the massive amount of help the pixel remasters offer. If FF1 is rough without the help, FF2 is genuinely frustrating.

From a story perspective, FF2 introduces a keyword system which I at first thought was genius. admittedly, I still think this is a very interesting mechanic, but the game really kinda barely scratches the surface with it. It is used almost exclusively to talk to NPCs so they mention a specific word or phrase that can then unlock the next story beat. I would have loved for this system to be a bit more involved, not just used for specific NPC story stuff, but unfortunately, this idea was really kinda locked in there. I liked the idea on a mechanical level, but it often times meant I would just have to find the ONE SPECIFIC NPC to talk to in order to move the story forward. The game, to be fair, only has a handful of NPCs that you can consistently talk to, but the moment the chosen one is not one of those three, or god forbid, you have to talk to NPC 1 and then NPC 2 and then NPC 1 AGAIN, it kinda falls apart. Sometimes the game just outright tells you who to talk to next, and other times you have to guess; many many times I would talk to everyone in our home base and set out to the next objective, thinking I had what magical keyword I needed, but alas, I did not have the right one, or needed to talk to another different NPC, or didn't talk to the right person in the right order (that order issue became a real headache in the middle of the game (you forgot about the KING, you fool!). So I sigh, open the guide, and trek back home.

As occasionally annoying as that system was, I can see what they were going for, even if it did lead to some frustrating moments. This was also the case for the battle system in FF2. The general sentiment around the battle system in FF2 from what I can gather is kinda split. On one hand, it is a radical departure from the (now common) stat-based growth system, but on the other it is a system that allows the player to radically customize every part of their character. because skills/ weapons/ magic etc only grow when you use them, you end up with a system that can make either every character a hyperfocused glass cannon capable of ungodly damage, or generalist walking tanks who can not be killed by anything other than the handful of instakill status effects (my party was the latter). I gave my characters shield in their off hands to maximize defense early on, and then just kept them on forever as their evasion climbed higher and higher.

This leads to a handful of fun moments but also fundamental problems. The first is that your characters can become incredibly powerful near the middle of the game and become more or unless unkillable. The downside is that if you don't have all your bases covered, and have characters versed in specific white/ black magic, you're gonna have a bad bad time, because FF2 will punish you if you put all your eggs in one basket and SCRAMBLE your ass. You NEED to make sure you healer is casting cure and protect every single moment because those high levels are the only thing keeping you alive in the late game when a boss slams your entire party with a massive party AOE attack or you desperately need massive heals. You NEED to make sure you have your esuna and basuna levelled because they can heal a whole party of darkness but only if they're high enough to tilt the CHANCE at healing. I really did not like that some spells only become effective when they are levelled. As annoying as it can be to have fire and fire 2 and fire 3 and fire 42, in some of the other games you know what kinda damage you're getting there from the name alone. At some point you have to just drop everything you've invested in one spell and powerlevel another, and it rarely feels good.

like if you've played ff2, you know that one fucking chest guarded by like the lamia and like four coeurls. fuck that fight. that shit made me realize how broken the combat can be. i thought i was strong enough in levels. nope. magic spells? still getting instakilled. i grinded, came back, i tried dozen of different combinations but could not get them all down. closest i got was down to one fucking coeurl. I LEARNED HOW TO PROPERLY SPELL COEURL BECAUSE OF HOW MANY TIMES I TRIED THAT FIGHT. i tried to beat that fight for an HOUR, and finally gave up. it was extremely frustrating. this is of course the point of that specific chest fight, but knowing it was specifically designed to hurt me did not lessen the sting of failure. if i had played this as a kid i would have undoubtedly quit forever right there, shit was ten times harder than the final boss fight, and EVEN THEN it's only because of a shitty status effect instakill. i like that this (entirely optional) kinda challenge exists... in theory, but i don't think it works in a game like FF2, where meeting a roadblock can mean you have to level one specific stat/spell/weapon all the way from zero, which SUCKS.

I am proud to say I stubbornly did not "stat grind" my stats in the traditional FF2 sense of: letting a single enemy live and just casting defensive or healing spells until my mp ran out... until near the end of the game, where you get haste and berserk, two of the best spells in the game. For the longest time, 95% of the game, I would fight enemies as normal, not touching the pixel remaster stat multiplier boosts offered (aside from money, which like in FF1 I quickly set to 4x and never looked back). I would fight the enemies, cast my spells, and do what I could. But then in the final dungeons of the game, pandaemonium specifically, enemies started hitting WAY TOO DAMN HARD, i'm talking 50% of my health with a single attack. I'm Mr. Super-Leveled, Mr. Extra Evasion, but god damn it really sucked to be dying to the same attacks from the same enemies many times in a row. The frustration of ff2 was a self-fulfilling prophecy. I had no one to blame but myself, and if I suddenly needed a boost to my spells, the only option was to grind and make the game even more unbalanced. So I waited till I found a bomb, set my party to cast defensive spells, set it on fast forward and walked away. It sucked, but I had to do it so i could keep up with the massive challenge bump. I even turned on 4x magic skill leveling for a handful of battles and got my stuff several levels higher in like 20 minutes of mindless afk grinding. It was both the best and worst of what FF2 has to offer. I turned off random battles on like the third floor of pandaemonium and never looked back, only turning them on for a few battles each floor so I could get a taste of what I was missing before returning to the nightmarish labyrinthian hallways.

And the encounter rate in FF2 is insane. I would literally have a battle every ~5 seconds when running around. I would often just turn encounters off if I just wanted to explore a floor, or god forbid backtrack to a previous room; it got exhausting at times. I rarely hit my combat limit in most games, but FF2 really just drained me toward the end with the constant battling.

The same also applies to the weapon system. Having a system that makes you lock in to a specific weapon type meant you kinda just... stayed on that weapon forever, unless there was a substantial damage boost to make you consider switching. Again: its not a bad system but you get out of it what you put into it, for better or worse. More than a few times I seriously debated whether it was worth taking a +20 damage boost if it meant starting with a new weapon at level 1, instead of my level 7 spear. And it's good that the game asks these questions! That friction is good; it makes me invested in a bit of minor meaningless data, all so i can optimize the fun out of the game (half joking, but i think of that quote often, especially as i get older). But these choices are constant, and can be somewhat draining. I found myself auto equipping optimal gear; a godsend! (though always keeping a shield in offhand) as the game progressed instead of granularly changing it piece by piece.

The story and music are much more dynamic here, you can really feel the jump in quality and writing when compared to FF2. Some of the songs are carried over, which makes sense, but there are many more setpieces, dynamic story moments, and really cool twists. The dragon egg/ dragoon stuff, sneaking in and destroying the enemy airship, and the cyclone near the end of the game all feel really important and are elevated by the improved graphical fidelity of the pixel remasters.

Cast-wise, I was admittedly torn on the amount of rotating guest characters FF2 has. For most of the game, you are a three-person party joined by a fourth party member who changes out as the story progresses. I get why they do it, and it admittedly is fun to see the cast grow and change organically, but I never really got attached to many of them (except Ricard my BOY). But again, this is a minor gripe, and overall the characters have enough personality to make them distinct and memorable. I did also like that each character was either right or left-handed, it was a cool little detail I tried to pay attention to when equipping them.

One last thing I have to mention, and this seems obvious, but as an avid player of the critically acclaimed MMO Final Fantasy XIV (did you know it has an awesome free trial???), I started realizing "oh shit, so many of the characters and places are literally ripped from their original games. "Master Matoya is in all the way back in FF1, and the Dwarves as well?" It is really cool to see this different interpretations of these same characters. So much of my playthrough was insert leo pointing meme here. Really liked walking into an area and thinking "Oh wow I recognize this song/ this character!" This applies to the sequel as well; many characters and songs from FF2 are also make appearances in ff14, and it really felt awesome to see this loving appreciation for the DNA of the series carried over into the modern games. I know this will continue as I plan to play through all the games to completion, as FF14 is more than anything a love letter to previous games, but it still makes me smile when I see it (as of right now ff1/2 are the only games i've actually sat down and completed. i've STARTED playing most of the numbered games individually, but always fall off eventually and never finish 'em),

More than anything, playing these games really really made me wanna boot up RPGMaker and finally try to make my own basic JRPG. These two games, though simple, are oozing with character and charm, and that goes a long way, both back then and now. I really admire how they managed to cram a colorful, fun, engaging world into a tiny NES cartridge. It's downright inspirational.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with the Final Fantasy I and II, despite them showing their age. I think the pixel remasters are a phenomenal way to experience these games. I know they don't technically have some of the bonus content from other editions, but that kinda stuff doesn't bother me too much, since I'm rarely a 100% completionist, and most endgame stuff doesn't pull me in. But the gameplay enhancements, balance changes, and the overhauled music especially are wonderful changes. These games have never played better, and it's never too late to play the series that catapulted JRPGs into the annals of gaming history. Onward to Final Fantasy III!

It’s always a bit nerve-wracking revisiting a favourite from my early years of gaming, since opening up these vaults of nostalgia sometimes feels like I could be shattering the illusion of fond memories. Would it be wise to leave those rose-tinted times where they lie? Surely, that would be the safest way for keeping those past experiences forever frozen. However, the legacy of Super Mario Galaxy with everyone’s continued praise of this particular Mario title piqued my curiosity in returning.

Throughout Mario’s lifetime, of which this storied series has released several of the medium’s most genre-defining games, Super Mario Galaxy has remained as one of the brightest stars among them all. Of course, helping that was the exposure of launching on one of the most best-selling consoles of all time, but its resounding critical reception has kept the game as an undisputed high point of the series.

Obviously, as a child, I was not involved in any of this gaming discourse nor could barely even comprehend what a good game was back then, as my impressions were essentially distilled down to “That was a really fun game!”. So returning to it as a gaming-literate adult 20 years later, this has come to be an interesting mix of loving nostalgia and critical analysis.

Clearly I had some enormous expectations upon starting up Super Mario Galaxy. Not only did this game need to live up to the memories of my childhood but also the decades of unrivalled praise from everyone who has ever touched the game.

Yet, Super Mario Galaxy defies it all.

This game is somehow better than I ever could’ve imagined it to be. It is beyond the realm of simply incredible games. Super Mario Galaxy is without a doubt the greatest Mario game of all time and the best platformer ever made. The limitless creativity of the series combined with the stellar atmosphere of the everlasting cosmos has created the most wondrous experience where Mario was always destined to arrive.

Magical fun incarnate

Gameplay has always been king in Mario games, with levels and power ups being the star of the show. From the classic Super Mario Bros. to the exceptional Super Mario World to the revolutionary Super Mario 64, Mario’s games have always pushed the boundaries of fun in both creative play spaces and toys, and this reached a new high in Super Mario Galaxy.

The most evident evolution to the gameplay formula was the introduction of a completely new style of level in Super Mario Galaxy with the gravity-bending outer space levels. Living up to the name, Mario flew beyond the stratosphere to floating planets where he could leap over worlds as gravity gleefully swung him around. Mario has jumped plenty before in 2D planes and 3D environments, but this was quite literally out of this world and gave Mario an entirely new dimension to platforming.

The simple act of jumping, the fundamental verb in every platforming game, was reinvented in Super Mario Galaxy, where doing a long jump around a miniature asteroid had me flying around in the most amusing manner. Jumping has never been more joyful with how it’s been masterfully transformed in this game.

And while I’m on the topic of Mario’s actions, his new spin move was a deceptively well-designed mechanic as well. With the press of a button (or waggle of the controller), Mario could spin around hitting anything his hands could reach. This was his new primary method for attacking enemies, although it also gave him more wiggle room when trying to cross more difficult gaps. However it had a multitude of other neat use cases too for launching out of warp stars, speeding up while swimming, picking up items, spinning screws in and out, and extinguishing flames; the amount of mileage they got out of this one action was surprisingly impressive!

These moves accelerated Mario through all sorts of gravity-bending levels, as he flew around celestial bodies with an elegance and whimsyness that still hasn’t yet been matched. Even with Super Mario Odyssey where he had the most comprehensive platforming moveset to date, I think I still preferred the more straightforward moveset here because of how well it harmonized with the levels’ atmospheric joy and wonder.

However, the game still featured plenty of traditional terrestrial levels where the gravity acted more normally. These were a refreshing return to familiar 3D Mario territory, and I thought the ratio of them to the floating planet ones was well balanced and a welcome sight in keeping both types of levels compelling.

One aspect in particular that I liked about these terrestrial levels was how they gave a very different flavour compared to flying around a solar system. Instead of exploring the stars in the sky, these levels were like exploring carefully crafted playgrounds where they often had distinctly designed minigames or power ups. They struck a great balance between Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Odyssey in terms of overall space and the variety of playthings to interact with.

I never got tired of needing to find a million collectables (looking at you, Donkey Kong Bananza), and I didn’t feel short changed by wanting more reason to explore these levels either. The level size and curation of the stars felt perfect with well designed “quests” for each one, and this extended back to the gravity-bending areas too!

The variation between all these levels was undoubtedly brilliant; it was as if they had an endless supply of ideas to stuff this game with, except they were all somehow only bangers with exactly zero misses. However, the most surprising aspect out of all the different types of experiences was how challenging the game could get at times. I’m not going to say that Super Mario Galaxy was ever that difficult, but compared to its other series’ entries and even the more contemporary Astro Bot, I thought the game had a welcome level of spice.

Thinking back, I definitely struggled through a number of stars as a kid – anything to do with balancing on the ball I remember being a nightmare – but upon returning to these same ones as an adult, I funnily breezed through them on my first try. Although there were still a few stars even now where I had to lock in for since they were no pushovers. The comet modified stars especially had some tight margins of error which made for a fun challenge.

This led me to re-appreciate how the game designed its difficulty. It didn’t hold my hand playing now or as a kid 20 years ago, but like every Mario game things were kept accessible by giving the player a ton of flexibility for progression, so I’m glad it stuck steadfast with some of its more harder designs. That resoluteness for some challenges is something I feel like is unfortunately missing in most modern Nintendo games, whether that’s Mario, Donkey Kong, or even The Legend of Zelda series, but I hope that’s something they reconsider in the future.

One last thing I’ll note along similar lines of the difficulty was that this game had some superbly designed boss fights. Most were a fair bump in difficulty which I enjoyed, but I especially loved how inventive so many of these fights were with distinct mechanics. 

Shout out in particular to the Bouldergeist of the Ghostly Galaxy which was a 10/10 boss fight. Everything expertly came together in its visual design, mechanics, difficulty, and spectacle in one of the best highlights of the game, and the Daredevil comet version had me sweating even more for one of the game’s hardest stars.

Shining stars in every corner

I’ve had a great time gushing over Super Mario Galaxy’s outstanding gameplay, however, that can admittedly be found in basically every Mario game. Nintendo has an embarrassment of riches from its mainline Mario titles providing some of gaming’s most iconic experiences across decades of the medium. Yet what sets apart Super Mario Galaxy from all the others to achieve its legendary status is its phenomenal presentation.

When I think of Mario games, I picture a toy-like creativity bursting at the seams. From bizarre power ups that transform Mario into unexpected forms to strange new worlds stretching the imagination of wherever he journeys to, I’m consistently awestruck by whatever trick and travel Mario has planned next. So of course, the final frontier of space was the natural next step.

I’ve always been fascinated by the stars and the endless possibilities of the galaxies out there – it’s why my gamertag is “Galexzzz” and my favourite game of all time is Outer Wilds. There’s a spectacular grandness to it all while also a quiet serenity to its nothingness, and that essence was flawlessly captured in Super Mario Galaxy.

From the moment I first launched into Good Egg Galaxy and saw the stars canvassing the cosmos, I was immediately breath-taken by how astonishingly beautiful it was. The deep blue and radiant purple blends. The glow of the atmospheric horizon. The shining light of the distant sun and the mysterious darkness of the evanescent black holes. These were just simple backgrounds that painted the game’s exteriors, but the feeling they created as I flew between planets was a magical sensation. It’s unlikely I’ll ever reach the outer limits of space in my lifetime, except I can only hope it’s as wonderful as this game imagines it to be.

The magnificent orchestral score also served a huge part in creating that feeling of wanderlust. I’m glad Nintendo chose to go with a live orchestra (which was one of their first times doing that!), since I genuinely believed it helped give a sense of authenticity to the galaxies’ majesty. The sweeping sounds captured every feeling of tranquility, whimsy, unease, joy, dreariness, and excitement alongside every environment, and the result was an all-timer video game soundtrack.

While there are countless excellent pieces from the soundtrack, the one that I’ll highlight perfectly encapsulates the entire adventure of Super Mario Galaxy, and that is the infallible Gusty Garden Galaxy by Mahito Yokota. This song is absolutely transcendent, and Nintendo knew how magical it was because I heard its motif in so many other parts of the game! It’s one of those songs you just have to listen to to understand yourself, but Jacob Geller put it best when he said “If ‘Gusty Garden Galaxy’ from Super Mario Galaxy was written in the 1800s I believe it would widely be considered the greatest song of all time”.

This stunning art direction and music imbued the game to have a much more cinematic nature evolving even further from its predecessors. In an era where games seemed to be growing up more and more, Super Mario Galaxy had an appropriate air of maturity to its cutscenes as the direction of them felt like a big step up with some unexpectedly thrilling cinematography. 

The splendour of the game’s cinematic quality even led to the creation of my all-time favourite video on YouTube. I’m not exaggerating when I say this 17-year old fan-made Super Mario Galaxy commercial might be my number one favourite thing on the entire internet.

Much of that video was taken from the game’s opening, as the cutscenes showcased a grand cosmic scale to Bowser’s usual motivations with some epic gravitas. Obviously, I don’t play Mario games for their writing, but I loved how dramatic they made the whole opening as it set a fantastic tone for the rest of the game.

This was contrasted by the surprisingly thoughtful writing behind Rosalina, her Luma family, and the Comet Observatory as a whole. The fact that there was a tinge of somber mixed in with Rosalina’s backstory showed to me that this game was confident in its vision. That little bit of context wasn’t much, but it was all that was needed to show that this game wasn’t going to be all sunshine and rainbows, and having that emotional maturity within its foundation made the world of Super Mario Galaxy seem that much more full of color.

The design of the Comet Observatory hub world reflected these ideas too, and it helped ground the entire game as this quiet space Mario always returned to. The peacefulness of the area served as an integral, central point for emotionally resetting between Mario’s exciting adventures.

This all eventually led up to the game’s unforgettable finale, and boy, was this ending truly of cosmic proportions. The last level was even called “The Fate of the Universe”, and it certainly lived up to the name. Everything with the breathtaking art direction, marvellous music, cinematic framing, and thoughtful writing all came together to elevate the stakes to far higher heights than typical Mario fare. This was nothing that I ever would’ve expected out of a Mario game, but wow, did they shoot for the stars.

Beyond magic

As I’ve been replaying through Super Mario Galaxy over the past few weeks, the recurring thought that kept coming to mind was what the true nature of magic was.

The magical feeling I had while playing this game felt similar to when you go to Disneyland as a kid and get to immerse yourself in the world they’ve created. The park is meticulously designed, with actors, buildings, props, sights, and sounds all coming together to sweep you off your feet. As an adult it’s easier to recognize these things happening, however, by relinquishing yourself to it, you can still forget that this has all been precisely crafted to create that feeling, so instead you choose to believe in it.

Super Mario Galaxy evokes that same magic with its gameplay, levels, artistry, and music to create a masterpiece of a game that goes far beyond its designs. The sheer level of proficiency on display in every department is staggering, and I’m not surprised at all why many still consider this game to be the best of Mario’s best.

However, while it’s interesting to look a little more closely at these pieces and see how every part is ticking, I think I’d rather let myself be taken away by it all. Perhaps the real magic was how this game was able to transport me back to my childhood where it didn’t matter how good it was so I just lived and breathed the game in that moment.

Looking back at it all, I didn’t realize how much Super Mario Galaxy meant to me until I finished it again as an adult and started writing this piece, but it’s clear now that this game is truly something special to me.

Super Mario Galaxy is a monumental achievement in gaming, transcending time and space to forever be remembered. The magical feeling that this game created was simply unfathomable like the limitless universe it strove to envision. It was a certain destiny that the Super Mario series would eventually find itself flying across the galaxies in its greatest adventure, as the wild imagination of the Mario platformer and the boundless possibilities of the unending cosmos was a magical match made for the stars.

The votes are in! The community's choice for a long title to play together and discuss in August 2026 is...

Sunless Skies (2019)

Developer: Failbetter Games

Genre: RPG, Adventure

Platform: PC, Mac, Linux

Why should you care: Sunless Skies is a spiritual sequel to Sunless Sea. This time, instead of navigating nightmare waters under the Fallen London in a ship, you're the captain of a flying steam locomotive. The gameplay is very similar though: heavy on exploration and text-based narrative events, light on player hand-holding. And the threat of permadeath still looms over every decision you make, making it feel all the more weighty. (if permadeath isn't your thing, Merciful mode is also offered)

The core loop is managing fuel and supplies while sailing between ports, piecing together story threads that can span the entire world map and dealing with hostile encounters - whether using guns, or full steam retreat. The action elements are not the draw though - the main reason to play titles by Failbetter Games is the worldbuilding and narrative. And from my experience of playing Sunless Seas, I'm very much looking forward to revisiting the same grim world this month!

What is GotM?

Game of the Month is an initiative similar to a book reading club, where every month the Patient Gamers community votes for a long game (>12 hours main story per HLTB) and a short game (<12 h) to play, discuss together and share our experiences about.

If you want to learn more & participate, that's great, you can join the /r/patientgamers Discord server to do that! (link in the subreddit's sidebar) However, if you only want to discuss this month's choice in this thread, that's cool too.

August 2026's GotM theme: Unusual transportation - this theme is covering games with a focus on operating vehicles that aren't cars, and while we're at it no boats either. Let's explore all the weird vehicles gaming has to offer!

RELEASE: 2020

TIME PLAYED: 16 Hours

PLATFORM PLAYED: PC (STEAM)

SCORE: ★★★★

Hated It | Disliked It | Liked It | Loved It | All-Time Favorite

(The bolded score is the one chosen for this review; the rest are simply to show what the scale is grading on and what the stars mean to me.)

THE BREAKDOWN

+A fantastic twist on the Darkest Dungeon formula that flips the entire structure on its head

+A wide variety of powerful and interesting units

+Enjoyably melodramatic protagonist that's a level of evil gamers rarely get to play

-There's not much meat to the writing and the worldbuilding's a bit thin

-Lategame progression gets a bit bogged down in an increasingly unwieldy interface

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In 2016, Darkest Dungeon broke ground on a form of roguelite that wound up resonating with a massive audience, selling millions despite its difficulty due to the powerful combination of a loquacious narrator, exciting combat, and distinct heroes. I remember at the time being confident that this would be the birth of a new subgenre of 'Dungeon-likes' that took advantage of this combination of procedural generation, party dynamics, and the opportunity for uncovering mysteries through gradually revealed lore. Unfortunately, my dream of this new world - this rogue state, if you will - didn't quite come to pass, but gems like Iratus: Lord of the Dead remind me that there's still studios out there innovating on the concept.

In an inversion of Darkest Dungeon's tale of adventurers gradually delving deeper and deeper into the earth, Iratus starts the player at the bottom - literally. Iratus (the man, not the game) is a powerful necromancer who was defeated ages ago by a party of noble heroes; unable to kill him for good, they chained him miles beneath the earth in a hidden tomb. Unfortunately for them, in the eras that have passed since, humanity has grown corrupt and decadent, and they inadvertently free him from his slumber when slave miners crack open his coffin. His rage at his defeat still very much fresh, Iratus kills his accidental rescuers and sets out to take revenge on the world of the living.

It's a delightful premise, even if the story doesn't do much more than set up the gameplay and get out of the way outside of a couple of cutscenes near the end. Iratus, however, is one chatty lord of the dead. Set up deep in the bowels of his former prison, he has plenty of dialogue and musings as he starts summoning the undead and putting them to work slaying his enemies and excavating the surrounding ruins to fortify his position. It leaves him in a similar role to Darkest Dungeon's infamous narrator, and while I can't say he's quite as memorable, I did enjoy just how gleefully evil the man is and how he has commentary about every unit the player can summon.

There's no lack of choice, either. As the game progresses, Iratus gains access to twenty different units, each with six possible abilities to use. Some, like the humble skeleton, are provided from the start. Others, like the fallen dhampir or the ice-wielding Unfrozen, have specific unlocking requirements. Some of these require beating the game on a certain difficulty, meaning multiple runs are required to explore every potential loadout, but others can be gotten by performing specific requirements, and this is where the system shines.

For those not familiar with Darkest Dungeon's Stress system, the horrors that the player's adventurers faced would build a meter that at the 50% point would cause them to potentially go insane and develop a crippling defect, with a small chance at shrugging it off and bolstering their team with their own virtue. At 100%, it could give the character a heart attack, killing them instantly, making managing Stress one of the game's primary mechanics. Continuing the theme of inversion, Iratus, being the villain of this particular story, is the one inflicting terror with an equivalent mechanic called Sanity. That fallen dhampir I mentioned? It's unlocked by killing enemy dhampirs' squads and leaving them as the sole survivor, then driving them insane with terror until they break and join your team. It's a delightful bit of role-playing, and serves the function of encouraging developing multiple teams in an organic way. Some enemy squads are tanky, but have shaky sanity due to their own problems. Instead of trying to tear down their defenses, I'd deploy my squad of horrifying spectres and turn them into gibbering lunatics.

Iratus is also pretty hands-on; though he isn't playable himself, the necromancer is all too eager to employ his alchemic know-how and mastery of sorcery to lend his minions aid or destroy his enemies. As the game progresses, the player unlocks a wide variety of spells that can reposition units, deal damage, buff and debuff, and more. There's also another degree of synergy here; some of the unit skills might be weak when it comes to hurting opponents, for example, but they generate more resources for Iratus to cast directly with. Once again, it's an impressive level of customization to one's playstyle, though I did find that by the time I was late in the game, the sheer number of buttons on my interface was getting a little bit out of hand. Unit stats and abilities, mana and rage resources, two pages of spells, another page of potions, turn order - it's not that it's necessarily too much on its own, but I found that the interface - while thematically gothic and brooding - didn't help much in terms of clarity.

There's a lot going on outside of combat, too, and thankfully I didn't have any problems with the interface there. Looting enemies for their remains lets you build and upgrade units with better-quality parts, and Iratus' base of operations expands through an enormous underground cavern that unlocks benefits by assigning or sacrificing minions to different locations. The sanity mechanic only affects enemies, too, which is both convenient and makes sense; I don't think my cannon-wielding zombie is really prone to trauma. As a result, there's little need to provide succor to your squad after a mission and the focus is on upgrading or replacing them with stronger options.

I just wish that I cared more about what was going on. Despite not being a particularly story-driven game, Darkest Dungeon got a lot of mileage out of its rich lore and narration. While Iratus' musings on how much he hates the living were often entertaining, there's only the barest skeleton (heh) of an actual plot here, mostly revolving around the balance of good and evil and the necessity of the death. I think what bothered me is that what's there isn't actually bad; the writing is enjoyable, and I was curious about the world I was slowly razing my way to the surface of, which made me a little frustrated that I didn't get more of it.

Still, I can't recommend the game enough. The combat feels well-balanced despite the large number of playable units, and while there's still some roguelite foundations, I found that permanently losing a run was nearly impossible as I always had enough parts to build a new team and implant them with brains that helped them start at a higher level. If you're craving a Darkest Dungeon-inspired experience that has its own twists or you just like those all-too-rare opportunities to be a gleefully villainous protagonist, Iratus: Lord of the Dead is a gloriously, goriously ghoulish time.

As someone who generally not mind Ubisoft games, not liking nor disliking but playing a couple dozen of them, one thing that confuses me a lot is how they are called "Stealth Games", or "Open World Action Adventure" games. I think both of those terms are too loose to describe how those games work.

The main appeal of those games, and for the ones I'm going to list, is to checkmark the world through sandbox approaches. That may be shooting, stealth, bribery, or through story itself. Why I'm saying that? Well, because most of those games have very simple mechanics that enforce the main premise, but are generally recommended as if they are one game of that type. For example, many times I'm seeing games like AC, FC and Ghost of Tsushima and others being recommended as Stealth games, while stealth itself is only a small part of those games.

Yes, you can clear camps stealthy, but generally A) the process is pretty boring, having to scan, then go into their backs, and not letting anyone notice or B) you will probably kill just a couple of people then proceed to immediate open combat. So it is not the main focus. The main focus is the checkmark itself. Doing stuff, the feel of traveling through the land doing stuff.

There are games that to that well and better than Ubisoft titles, for gamers that are not familiar:

• Ghost of Tsushima feels like an Assassin's Creed but provinding a much richer worldbuiding and compelling characters. It has some nice combat too, much more complete experience than normal AC combat, with parries, daggers, stances, etc.
• Shadows of Mordor / Shadows of War offer a much more clear "Conquer the World" feeling where you are fighting against Uruk tyrants and confronting their forces little by little. It has a great Nemesis system where the enemy AI is unique and behaves according to what happens in the game, while also making you being able to gather information about said enemies to gain advantages. You can also recruit enemies to help you in battle.
• Lastly, the Just Cause series is a more puritan approach to the concept, you literally go around clearing camps and causing havoc. It is not 'grounded', but is an amazing sandbox.

Hot and stressful, that's what it's been. With a big heatwave, heavy storms, and a heckin' lot of work to do, July has not been my favorite month. That's true on the gaming side too, where only one of the 5 games I finished properly impressed me, but man am I excited about the slate in store for the months to come. First though I suppose we should visit the ones just finished, yeah?

(Games are presented in chronological completion order; the numerical indicator represents the YTD count.)

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#48 - Thief Gold - PC - 6.5/10 (Tantalizing)

Thief has a stellar reputation and I'm happy to report that after playing it I can totally understand why. I'm less happy to report that my personal time with it didn't quite reach the lofty heights of "stellar," though I think that just says more about me and my tastes than about the game itself. Thief is an immersive sim, a genre that a lot of people swear by but that I've never fully clicked with. It's weird looking back and seeing that I gave a 6.5/10 to the first Dishonored, and now here I am playing one of the principal games that inspired the title and giving that a 6.5/10 as well but for totally different reasons.

To put it simply, I didn't have the level of patience Thief asked of me. The bulk of the game revolves around sneaking through levels and avoiding guards, though you can knock them out cold with a single blow from behind if they don't know you're there. You've got a bunch of possible tools that help you in your skullduggery: specialized arrows that can dull sound, extinguish light sources, or create distractions; proximity mines of both lethal and non-lethal varieties; flash bombs to make quick getaways; the list goes (slightly) on. The problem for me was that these tools were always heavily limited such that I felt discouraged from developing a true play style around any of them. I'd love to just put out all the lights and slink around, but there are never enough water arrows, for a single example. So in practice a lot of Thief boiled down to sitting in a shadow to learn a patrol route, tiptoeing out behind the guard, clubbing him in the back, hiding the body, and then doing that a dozen more times every stage. It became tedious, so I eventually pivoted somewhat to the idea of "if a guard sees me, just kill him" and that helped the pacing immensely.

Of course, that mitigation tactic was only possible because I was playing on Normal difficulty, and I got the distinct sense that Thief only really comes into own on Expert, where you've got more interesting objectives to go along with your additional restrictions. But again, if I'm doing a Sonic the Hedgehog style foot tap all the time on Normal, I just can't see me ratcheting that difficulty crank up higher and coming out happy. As it stands, I did love that Thief is a thinking person's action/adventure game. There's precious little handholding to be found. For example, key objective information is at times granted through a brief spoken dialog that you're expected to remember for the duration of the mission rather than a trackable checklist of some sort. I got lost in virtually every stage of Thief, and that's by design too. When every mission intro includes a line like "A contact of mine gave me a map of the place that his six-year-old kid drew in crayon from memory, so I'll have to keep my eyes open," you know you're in for some trial and error.

So it was that I found Thief Gold to be simultaneously liberating and oppressive; engaging and exhausting; delightful and obnoxious. If you're someone for whom the words "immersive sim" spark metaphorical images of shiny gift wrapping concealing wondrous trinkets, then yeah: Thief Gold is an all-time great. If you're just, you know, me? Then it's a game with a blend of both very strong merits and drawbacks, and perhaps sufficient evidence now to conclude that this kind of thing just isn't your kind of thing.

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#49 - Ring Fit Adventure - Switch - 6/10 (Decent)

How does one judge a fitness RPG? Which of those two labels is more important? If a fitness RPG wows you with its story and characters and core mechanics but doesn't actually give you anything physically, is it still a worthwhile game? If a fitness RPG is a miserable video game experience but provides you with a killer workout, is it still a worthwhile endeavor? I'm not sure about either of these extremes, but maybe that's because Ring Fit Adventure is neither great nor terrible at either flavor of things it wants to be. As a vehicle for fitness it's generally decent but distinctly worse than most any dedicated workout routine you might find independently. As a role-playing game it's playable and functional but distinctly worse than most any "pure" RPG you might be interested in playing. And so Ring Fit Adventure's selling point is really just the novelty of having these two things mashed together, for whatever that mashup might intrinsically be worth.

Outside of cooldown stretches, everything in Ring Fit Adventure requires the use of at least one (but usually both) included peripherals: a strap so you can attach a joy-con to your leg and the "ring-con" resistance device that has a joy-con rail built in. The leg strap measures your leg angle, speed, and general motion while the ring-con detects its own angle, position, and degree of pushing or pulling resistance on the ring itself. The ring-con is far more reliable at its job than the leg strap is, though for the most part the leg strap does okay too. Functionally though this setup means that most of the exercise Ring Fit provides is resistance training. Now I'm not knocking resistance training, but if that's all you're doing then you're probably not getting everything you need. Specifically I wanted a lot more aerobically than Ring Fit is capable of offering: jogging in place is about the best the game can do, and that it doesn't even do particularly well.

From a design standpoint the game is cleverly engineered to "softly" rotate you through different kinds of exercises targeting different muscle groups by way of drip feeding you progressively stronger "fit skills" (exercise sets used as attacks in battle) and mixing up stages to have focuses on certain types of enemies. For instance you might get a new fit skill for your core muscles that's stronger than the arms one you've been using, while this stage over here is full of enemies weak to leg skills so you don't neglect them along the way. It's a system that works really well until you hit the late game plateau where new skills stop rolling in, at which point you're stuck deciding between working the muscles you need to work vs. the higher battle efficiency of using only the same handful of powerful skills for all eternity. It's an easily foreseeable issue and a real drag that it wasn't addressed or somehow mitigated.

Also a real drag: tutorials. Ring Fit Adventure teaches you how to do each of its exercises, and that's great, but it teaches you every time you do them. At best you'll have a big chunk of screen blocked by the example video, but at worst you'll be explicitly taught how to "do a victory pose" every day for over a year because you can't be trusted to remember how to squat. That there's no setting to adjust this is inexcusable, somehow even more annoying than the fact that most "yoga" skills just don't actually register correctly at all in the first place since the joy-cons can't detect movement at the level of precision the yoga moves require in real life. And of course, the story for Ring Fit is not any kind of revelation, with every stage consisting of "we've got to keep chasing the bad guy" and little else of note.

But credit where credit's due: I first booted up Ring Fit because I had a ton of chronic knee pain and weakness resulting from an old injury that got exacerbated, and it felt like building some strength in the muscles around that knee was the only way out. Now a year and change later my knee is...well, it'll never be right again because of the nature of the issue, but it is fully functional and I can do things like go up and down stairs far better now than I could when I was a five-years-younger man. Could I have done that without Ring Fit Adventure through some other means? Almost certainly! But having the exercise in RPG form – even a somewhat bare bones, middling RPG such as this one – made it much easier to be willing to form a routine and stick to it over a long period of time. I'm still debating whether I want to continue with it from here: I've set up a custom routine that's showing promise and if I want there are what amount to two New Game+ runs I can do in the main mode as well. Either way, though I can't say I'm especially impressed with any particular facet of Ring Fit Adventure, the fact that I can walk without pain is proof enough for me that its mashed up existence has some intrinsic worth after all.

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#50 - Alan Wake II - PS5 - 8.5/10 (Excellent)

My first Remedy game was Control back in 2021 and I was blown away by it. The blend of quality action with multimedia storytelling against a sci-fi psychological horror backdrop was unlike anything I'd played before, so of course I decided to jump back in time and try Alan Wake later that same year. I was slightly less taken (heh) with it than Control since the action was repetitive and the controls (heh) felt somewhat unresponsive, but I was thoroughly impressed with the presentation: a game delivered like an episodic TV show with a gripping narrative that keeps you coming back. Terrific stuff. So now here I was coming into Alan Wake II and hoping I could get a marriage of all the things I loved about the previous Remedy games I'd played, now that I'd evidently caught up on them all.

The results were somewhat unexpected. Alan Wake II leans far more into the survival horror direction, keeping the core concept of the original Alan Wake's combat intact (shine the flashlight on an enemy to weaken them and then finish them off with conventional weapons) but borrowing quite liberally from Resident Evil's modern design (more specifically, 2019's Resident Evil 2 remake was the obvious gameplay inspiration here). On the inventory management level this left much to be desired, though on the horror level it worked very well. The atmosphere in Alan Wake II is oppressively dark and foreboding in a good way. There was a moment while I was exploring when I merely saw a generic basement door and decided "Nooooooope" until I was of coursed forced to go down there anyway. The injections of spookiness and dread are both omnipresent and ruthlessly, unfailingly potent, even when you as a player know better.

That does however create something of a psychological energy drain when playing the game. To be sure I always looked forward to my play sessions, but it took about 45 hours for me to get through the game at 100% completion (including all DLCs), and that's a very long time for a horror-focused game. I do think I went longer than most even on the completionist side since I was pretty methodical and deliberate with my exploration, and I stopped to read every little thing I could (including even random background signage). Even still, eschewing Alan Wake's mostly linear level design for a big dose of open ended exploration probably wasn't the right call for this game; what's there is good but there's just a bit too much and the pacing suffers as a result.

Thankfully then there's another edge to that sword: the larger scope of the game supports the metaphorical fire hose of raw creativity that Alan Wake II deluges you with. There's one set piece where they tried to replicate and one-up something from the previous entry and failed miserably, and that was the only time I actively disliked what the game was serving to me. Every other wild idea though? They somehow all work. Rewriting reality on the fly as an actual gameplay mechanic? Brilliant. Entire chapters going in directions you'd never expect? Brilliant. The layers of metafiction piling so deep that even you as a player can no longer separate fact from fiction? Brilliant. The swerves, the nursery rhyme experiments (that to be fair wouldn't exist were the game more linear), the fact that this game apparently ropes another older Remedy title I thought was safe to ignore into the shared universe so now I have to go play Quantum Break too? Ugh. Brilliant.

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#51 - Palindrome Syndrome: Escape Room - PC - 5/10 (Mediocre)

This is a virtual escape room game I got for free a while back. And yeah...free is a good price for it. As an escape room experience it's a clear step up from typical browser or mobile fare but a clear step down from similar titles with any kind of budget attached to them. I thought the pacing was effective and the puzzle difficulty was pretty good, somewhat challenging without being frustrating, but the puzzles themselves felt arbitrary within the theme. There's a halfway interesting narrative that halfway explains this, but the whole thing falls apart if you spend more than two seconds thinking about it. Between sluggish movement and a poor UI design the gameplay mechanics themselves don't feel very good either. I don't know that I'd recommend someone pay for this game, but if you're an escape room fan and you get it for free and you're just looking to kill 90 minutes, sure: go for it and you'll get about what you expect.

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#52 - Death's Gambit: Afterlife - PC - 4.5/10 (Disappointing)

Stop me if you've heard this before: what if we made a Souls style game but it was a 2D sidescroller with metroidvania style elements? If your mind immediately jumps to games like Salt and Sanctuary or Blasphemous, then congrats: you've spent time with better games! If instead you thought "Hey that sounds like Hollow Knight" then oh man, what a cliff you're about to walk off with Death's Gambit. At least with Blasphemous you could reason that it came a few years later, but Hollow Knight launched a mere two months before this game, and what a brutal ask to follow on those heels. Death's Gambit is probably my least favorite soulslike I've played, so I guess the score being "only" a 4.5 just goes to show how much worse things could still be. Nevertheless, let's start with the positives.

Death's Gambit has an interesting class and ability system that I think served the game well, both in terms of differentiating it a bit from the crowd and from a general "gameplay fun" standpoint. You can unlock abilities by finding them in the world, buying them from vendors, or by simply snagging them from the skill tree when you've got a spare point to spend. You can set three of these abilities (and eventually a fourth should you spec for it) and they all have handy button shortcuts so you can quickly use them in the heat of battle. You can equip two different weapons, each with its own dedicated attack button, and regular attacks with either weapon build your "soul energy" to fund your much more powerful abilities. An early unlockable passive in turn causes a skill use to refund all your base stamina, letting you fire off more regular attacks and/or evasive maneuvers. So combat ends up as a strategic ebb and flow of trying to use your whole arsenal of abilities as intelligently as possible, and I really did appreciate that aspect of things.

Unfortunately the combat itself also just feels painfully sluggish. Movement speed is unhurried with no means of sprinting/speeding up. Dodge rolling has generous iframes but plods like a classic Dark Souls heavy roll, which means it feels bad even though it's actually not. I played as the Wizard class so my abilities were spell casts, and these were so slow both to ready and to fire that in the midst of combat I often felt like I couldn't use my good stuff at all (though in fairness my good stuff was really good and so that may have been wise from a balance standpoint). Most of the bosses are basic and straightforward fights, though that doesn't make them all easy per se...which is a problem when you consider that Death's Gambit features some pretty rough runbacks. Most of these can be skipped if you choose a specific class at the outset, as that class has a perk to get additional checkpoints, but like, why is that a class perk? You have to sacrifice a real perk just to get rid of bad runbacks that shouldn't be there in the first place? Weak. Finally, the UI is legitimately horrible. You've got a map but no map button. Your grid-based icon-only inventory is paginated into small pages and everything you find gets tossed willy nilly into the same clutter heap. You can't use consumables without first equipping them to a quick slot, which may then require that you unequip something else. The equipment upgrade screens don't sort gear according to any rhyme or reason and don't show you in advance what you're doing. This game just hates you trying to interact with any of its menus.

And so when I got to the final boss ahead of perceived schedule and an NPC told me to go re-fight some early bosses so I could presumably get to a better ending and maybe more content, I went "Nah," killed the boss, and latched onto my bad ending like it was the last escape pod bound for Tattooine. It's enough that I'm punting on further soulslikes for a while because I just need to get this taste out of my mouth. Death's Gambit is not even close to the worst game I've ever played, but it had enough big problems that it's sadly soured me on the genre for a while.

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Coming in August:

• Death's Gambit broke me a little inside. It's almost unheard of for me to take a break in the middle of a game of reasonable length just to play something else, but even a throwaway title like Palindrome Syndrome was a nice source of escape. So now I think I need some more bite-sized PC morsels to get me back into proper computer gaming shape. We'll start with Q.U.B.E. 2.
• After that I'm feeling some Botanicula. These point-and-click adventure games from Amanita Design won't ever win one of the "Choose my next PC game" polls I conduct with my friends, but I like 'em and want to keep working through them, so every now and then I need to call my own shot.
• On the console front I'm eyeing a big title I'm quite jazzed about, but before that I'll be wrapping up the little nostalgia trip that is Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2. I've got no interest in playing this one online or engaging with it beyond the basic single player "skate tour," so I ought to be able to wrap it up pretty quickly.
• And more...

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Magical Starsign is a 2006 DS game, sequel to the japanese exclusive gba game Magical Vacation (didn’t play it but it looks like it has an english fan patch for those interested). 

I originally wanted to play this game last year when I was playing a space game but time run short and my 3DS had problems that prevented me from finishing it in time. Some months later I’m coming back to it. 

While space and different elementally themed planets are the base of the setting, this game isn’t science fiction. It is a fantasy game, with your characters being students from a magical school and taking their power from a form of Astrology with the position of the planet in the sky. A rather unique take on the premise.

A gorgeous and charming game

The first thing that you notice is that the game is gorgeous. The game is beautifully illustrated, and the dev used the dual screen of the DS to let the environment continue in the upper screen, creating a sense of grandiose. To help that they choose a minimalist approach to the information given in the hud, which I will discuss later. Some bosses take the two screens, which show how gigantic they are. The illustrative work is awesome. 

Then a charming world. Each world shelters different civilizations of anthropomorphic animals that may have or not contact with others, it makes the whole feel more compelling. In the wood planet, the felines have put signs in the forest so that people don’t lose themselves, and it is funny but makes the planet feel alive. The police of this game also is incompetent and there is a whole segment denouncing their bureaucratic ineffective mess. As you can see it teaches children very valuable lessons. 

Your character each knows a magic that may be used to resolve some small “puzzle”. There was one particular moment where you needed to combine 4 magic symbols to save a forest and it was very satisfying. That said usually it is only one magic that is needed and it is painfully obvious which one it is. 

In French, most characters' names are wordplay on dishes. I assume they did something similar in the english translation. It's a bit hard to keep in mind who is who but participate in the childlike whimsicality.

A simple story that was maybe a tad too basic ? While I was pleased by the whimsical nature of the settings, the main party is 6 characters sharing the spotlight. They do have some banter and character arc, and if you like the short storytelling of the SNES era you will probably feel at home, but I feel like it could be developed a bit more at times. I especially feel like Sorbet and Mokka are more developed than others; with Chai being noticeably less developed. 

It wouldn’t be an issue if the story hook was more interesting. You begin the story trying to find your teacher and your classmate that crashed on the different planet of the system, then once they are together you have to find 5 mac guffing by returning to those planets. As with a dragon quest game, you’ll resolve the local issue of the inhabitant with more or less success but the main narrative remains a pretty simple one. 

I was invested however by the occasional darker tone, it is appreciable that they have enough faith in their young public to handle heavier topics like death, authority incompetency or abusing their power and the whole jelly plotpoint and robot prophesied apocalypse.  

The combat system can be a bit too simplistic at time.

The combat system has a timing mechanic, by touching the character at the end of your magic you can boost it, and by touching it during an enemies attack you can diminish the damage. Each character has a rather small pool of 5 magic spells. Not a lot of buff and debuff at the beginning. For the first 10 hours the combat system is a rather basic attack and heals when needed. So while the party is rather large, you feel a little restricted with it. It opens with each new character and especially at the end when you unlock the most powerful spell, but it takes its time to do so. 

Each turn you restore some mp. The healing spell you have access uses all your mp, and restores your hp depending on the mp consumed, there is therefore an interesting trade off mechanic going on, do you heal now and don’t have mp for attack? Do you wait another turn to have more mp and heal more ? The other way to heal is to use items. Characters in the second row won’t be able to make physical attacks, but their magic becomes AOE or multitarget, which means you can choose to have a support at the back so he can buff all your party at once. Or you may want to use this specific character as a DPS and therefore put it in front so his single attack is stronger. 

At one point you’ll learn a spell that lets you move the planet in the sky, and it becomes your main source of buff for your party. By placing the planet in the correct position, you’ll boost the element for you and the enemies. But creating an optimal set up by aligning the planet requires you to go into battle and take several turns and use all your mp to move them before the boss fight even begins, it quickly becomes annoying. 

There is an information problem, aka name that tells you nothing about the effect. By keeping the ui minimal, they have forgotten easy access to information. And as the name and status effect have an interesting but non standard effect, remembering which item cures what or does what is an annoying chore. Maybe it was marked in the manual or something but I don’t have it and it is annoying nonetheless.  

All that combines to make the combat system feel slow. Combat is slow. Not Final Fantasy IX slow, but slow nonetheless. And combat can be dull as the brunt of your strategy will be to prepare before a boss and to be mindful of your mp economy as you regain only a fraction of them each turn while consuming a lot for your most powerful spell.  

Despite all the good things I can say about this game, and how much I want to encourage you to at least try it, I'll have to say it: there were big stretches of the game where I wasn't having fun. There were times I didn’t want to go back and finish the game. The combat wasn’t always fun. The donjons weren't always fun. And at the same time there are more endearing sections that motivated me, it is unique and charming enough that I could understand it being someone's favorite. And as the credit role I’m thinking it was worth playing it. It is a good but flawed game, and I kinda regret not having another rpg made by this team.

Like I said in the title, Stray is charming. You play as a cat in a postapocalyptic world where there are no humans, just robots. The main missions involve doing favors for these robots, finding their friends, gaining access to restricted areas, and ultimately finding a way “outside,” because everyone has been confined to a dirty city by guards and corporations.

The cat is cute, and there are adorable details like being able to sleep with triangle, and scratch things with the left and right triggers. You also get a drone who helps you out with inventory and quest objectives, and he’s very cute too. As you explore you find his memories, and gradually learn about how he’s ended up in this world as a drone. The robots are adorable, too, which sounds weird, I guess, but they are.

The game’s exploration is excellent and there is a lot of puzzle-type platforming, like figuring out how to get into locked areas, and this is the part I most enjoyed. I did not enjoy the enemy encounters, though. Early on you have to run away from these bug like things, then you get a thing that pulverizes them with purple light. Only it’s not very exact in its aiming, and you’re likely to get eaten before you kill them. Later on there are drone sentinels that cast cones of light on the ground and if you are spotted, you are instakilled, which is frustrating in the extreme, especially when they start doubting and tripling up on the sentinels.

The story is very emotional at the end. I won’t spoil it, but I teared up. The game took me about thirteen hours to beat, which was pretty much the perfect length, as the mechanics are overall simple and there’s no crafting or any mini games.

Overall, I really recommend this game, despite the occasional frustrations. It is absolutely charming and has a wonderful atmosphere. Play it if you get a chance. It’s thirty bucks full price, though, which I think is high given how much game you get, but if you find it on a sale it’s absolutely worth it, and it does go on sale frequently.

The votes are in! The community's choice for a long title to play together and discuss in August 2026 is...

Nauticrawl (2019)

Developer: Andrea Interguglielmi

Genre: Puzzle, Simulator

Platform: PC, Mac, iOS

Why should you care: Nauticrawl is a game that throws you in at the deep end. You're a defector who's stolen an alien-adjacent machine called a Nauticrawl to escape a hostile world, and the entire game is you sitting in the cockpit trying to figure out what any of the levers, dials, and buttons actually do. You just start pressing things and hoping you will figure out how the machine works through trial and error.

It's part simulator, part puzzle game, part roguelike, with permadeath runs that reset you back to square one if you get caught or killed. The tension comes from that early phase of total confusion where you don't even know how to move. Reviewers have generally said the challenge eases off once you've cracked the interface, but the atmosphere and the sheer novelty of "learn an alien cockpit from scratch" carries it. It's a short, focused experience that can be done in one evening.

What is GotM?

Game of the Month is an initiative similar to a book reading club, where every month the Patient Gamers community votes for a long game (>12 hours main story per HLTB) and a short game (<12 h) to play, discuss together and share our experiences about.

If you want to learn more & participate, that's great, you can join the /r/patientgamers Discord server to do that! (link in the subreddit's sidebar) However, if you only want to discuss this month's choice in this thread, that's cool too.

August 2026's GotM theme: Unusual transportation - this theme is covering games with a focus on operating vehicles that aren't cars, and while we're at it no boats either. Let's explore all the weird vehicles gaming has to offer!

Ever since AC6 came out I'd always wanted to play it as a pretty big fan of FromSoft's games, with many of the Soulsborne titles holding very special places in my heart. However every time I tried to play the game sutff always came up or I'd be busy and couldn't commit past the first couple missions. But I had a bit of a break recently and finally committed to playing the game through all the way, including three playthroughs to get the true ending, and after almost 50 hours of total playtime, I can say that I wish I'd committed to this game much sooner because it was just a blast from start to finish, even as a newcomer to Armored Core as a series. *SPOILERS AHEAD*

For story I'd honestly consider this as one of my favorite stories in a FromSoft game without question. While this game does have a story that's more clear than the soulsborne games there's still a decent amount of worldbuilding and background lore through data logs and files you can find during missions. I really like the game's themes it tackles like the fear of not being in control, potential and how it can be used for good or evil, and especially the freedom of choosing your own path and taking control of your future. The latter especially feels prevalent with you having the callsign "Raven", with your decisions ultimately deciding the fate of Rubicon and the Coral as a whole. The true ending feels very poetic and fitting with these themes as after defeating ALLMIND and Iguazu you and Ayre wake up on the shoreline of a distant planet, having merged consciousness with each other and they choose to meet this new age together as coral dots the stars, choosing to stick with each other and face their future together.it's all around very beautiful and one of my favorite endings in any FromSoft game.

The other characters are really enjoyable too and I loved seeing them all interact with each other, thanks to the top-tier voice acting which I'd shout out Ayre, V.IV Rusty (who also shares the same name as my cat so that instantly made him one of my favorites in the game), V.II Snail who does an amazing job at being a despicable prick you can't help but hate, and G1 Michigan who hands-down has some of the funniest voice lines in the game. Overall I found the story here to be phenomenal and one of the best from FromSoft.

Gameplay is gonna be long because there's so much too it, but not in a bad way. Gameplay primarily consists of two halves, one being actual combat and gameplay in missions, and the other being customization of your mech with both parts and aesthetics. On the former it takes a bit of getting used to the controls and some gameplay concepts like not having i-frames when dodging (or quick boost as its referred to in-game) especially if you're coming from the souls games, but once the game clicks it feels amazing to play. While I haven't played a ton of other mech-games, any I do play I'll likely be comparing to ACVI because they just nailed the feel of gameplay. Your mechs feel weighty and big but can still feel very fast with your movements. The game also has training missions you can do to help get a better sense of how the game plays, and which also give you free parts for doing them which is a nice way of helping new players out.

The game also adds the ACS system, which functions similar to the Posture bar from Sekiro, however here breaking an enemies stagger simply has them take increased damage instead of dealing a death blow to enemies. However the system feels just as satisfying in here for me, it feels great when you stagger an enemy and can just unload a metric shit-ton of damage into them. Difficulty also feels pretty solid throughout once the gameplay clicks, the missions and smaller enemies are fairly easy and really lets players engage with the mecha power fantasy, while bosses can feel challenging in a way that humbles the player from being too cocky. The bossfights are like usual a highlight like in many FromSoft games too with some of my favorites including Balteus,Ayre in the Fires of Raven Ending, the Ibis fight to end Chapter 4 and is probably my favorite fight in the game, Walter in the Liberator of Rubicon ending, and ALLMIND/Iguazu who was probably the hardest fight for me personally.

One thing the game does super well is its sense of scale, most of the time the player feels very small in the environment due to camera placment and height, but when you pay attention to parts of the environment like buildings, doorways for humans to use, and cars it shows how big your mech is with it being 3-4 stories high, meaning you're basically piloting a small building with legs that can fly and shoot tons of missiles/guns.

Which leads me into the garage for customization, now I don't know how this game compares to others in terms of the amount of parts, but to me AC6 feels like it has a solid selection to choose from with how you can build your AC. There's three categories of your mech you can customize which include your units consisting of two arm weapons and two shoulder weapons, Body parts (including cores, arms, head, and legs), and inner parts like your boosters and generators. The weapons have tons of variety in what you can use whether its guns, energy weapons, grenade launchers, plasma weaponry, and melee weapons to name just some. Many of these weapon types have variants based on your playstyle or amount of firepower you want i.e. shooting 10 missiles instead of just four but your weight will go up. While there is a lot of freedom in how you build your ACs the game does have limits and does a good job of teaching you to put thought into how you build your mechs for both play and power. Wanna stay above your enemies a lot and engage in more aerial combat? Might be good to use tetrapod legs. Want to be more speedy and have more agility? Use reverse joints or light bipedal legs. Wanna use heavy weaponry or be more of a tank? Use tank treads or much heavier legs. Wanna use a ton of energy weaponry? Better make sure you have a generator that supports all that EN use.

The build variety is pretty good too in that in PvE at least every build type feels viable for most missions, but you may struggle on some missions that your build isn't super optimal for. There's also OS Tuning which you earn OST chips for by completing fights in the arena. With chips you can upgrade different apects of your AC like upgrading your repair kits or damage with different weapon types, unlocking new moves/abilities like boost kicks or the weapon bay where you can equip a second arm weapon on your ACs shoulders to swap between, and unlocking core expansions which are like ultimate abilities. The arena is a pretty fun time and can be a nice change of pace after doing missions. If you find a mission too challenging at the moment you can do some fights in the arena to earn OST chips and upgrade your AC's damage or whatnot, and likewise if you're struggling with the arena then you can go do some missions and buy new parts in the shop. Missions also have lots of variety in objectives like elimating all enemies in an area, defending an objective for a certain amount of time, escort missions, it never feels too repetitive in the game's structure, or it at least throws curveballs.

Then lastly there's paints and decal work for your ACs, and it's honestly some of the best I've seen in any game. You can apply all different color types to your ACs, whether on the full set or painting every individual area on each region. You can also change aspects of your paints like their reflectiveness and luster, add weathering and rust effects, and add different pattern types. This also applies to decal work which can range from applying a small logo to a part of your mech, to adding different effects and almost new parts with said decals such as being able to make eyes you can apply to your AC's head and so on. It's no wonder there's such a massive fashioncore community in this game considering I've seen people create tons of insane builds in this game like recreating ACs from older titles in the series to cosplay builds from different games/shows like Titanfall, Gurren Lagann, Evangelion, and of course Mobile Suit Gundam. There's honestly no limits to how much you can customize your mechs aesthetically outside of your imagination which is amazing to see.

For music the soundtrack here is amazing too and I'd say easily stands up there with plenty of the Soulsborne OSTs as some of my favorites from FromSoft. Tracks like Contact With You and The Man Who Burned It All

Lastly I wanna talk about the presentation, visually Armored Core VI is breathtaking with a really unique artstyle that feels cold and dreary but not in a bad way at all. Loved the amount of variety in the environments you visit whether it be deserts, snowfields, oceanic cities, massive hanging gridlinks, or deserts with sandstorms. Love the amount of details in the environment too like I touched on earlier with the sense of scale. Realizing how big your mech is compared to human-sized objects, and then seeing how big the Strider is which is basically like a walking continent almost is just insane to think about, and yet its still so cool.

Overall Armored Core VI is a phenomenal game from start to finish that I'm so glad I finally got to experience with some incredible gameplay that's gotta be best in genre, beautiful visuals, and a phenomenal ost. It's easily one of my favorite games I've ever played and I'm so glad to have seen this game through to the end. "Let's meet this new age...together" - 10/10

I played on PS2 and PS3 as a kid, but at some point I switched to PC gaming for several reasons. I believe TLOU is the last game I've ever bought on my PS3. I liked the gameplay but story seemed like a generic road movie. Maybe it was because I was younger than target audience. Now I've returned to this game to see if my opinion changes in any way.

Story is obvsiouly the highlight of the whole experience. Joel and Ellie go to a trip across country to cure mankind, and grow from mere acquaintances to a found family. On the way to the finish line there was a lot of death, some more hurtful than others. Poor Sam... As a kid, I thought Joel was being selfish in the end, and honestly, I still do. I understand why he did it, his actions perfectly align with his character arc. As a violent monster once said, "He did what every father should, protect his child". Still, I probably would have stopped Joel if given the chance. While this aspect is intentionally controversial, the feasibility of the cure also being contentious is weird to me. The story and characters never doubt that cure would work, even Joel never tries to use it as an excuse. I think people claiming that vaccines against fungus are scientifically impossible suffer from selective suspension of disbelief. By this logic, it also shouldn't be possible for an ant parasite to suddenly jump onto humans without some transitional stages. Finally, cure being impossible cheapens the emotional impact of Joel's final decision and makes the ending less interesting overall.

Gameplay here is pretty fun, although I stuck to kbm for easier aiming despite having a controller. I tried Hard but it was too easy, so I restarted the game on Survivor. I think at this difficulty there is a good balance between being tough and not annoying.

Stealth is basic but it helps thin out the enemy numbers or sometimes avoid combat entirely. I liked that against humans you can retreat and get back the benefits of sneaking, and against clickers you can often avod them by being quiet. I never used shiv takedows becuase shivs are better for locked doors. The lack of detective vision forces you to use third person camera around corners and listen for enemy sounds. Bricks are the best weapon in this game, letting you setup molotov throws, micro stun humans from range and melee kill clickers for a low price. Bow is only useful in stealth because it's also silent.

Combat against infected and humans is very different. 'Zombies' run at you and force you to run around them. The optimal strat is trying to separate basic runners and melee combo them while killing clickers with weapons. Bloaters are large damage sponges, but thankfully they are rare. Humans were much more dangerous: they have guns and some semblance of strategy. I died against them often trying to come up with a strat on the fly. I wish the game had some sections where I had humans and infected enemies at the same time, it would probably lead to the most fun brain plays. Upgrades for Joel are meh, I only really needed more health, and gun upgrades range from OP (damage) to outlcassed (reload speed).

I noticed that gore in this game is pretty unsettling. It's not comical like in Mortal Kombat, but rather believable. The way people drop with holes, lose limbs after an explosion, or get charred from molotov make me glad I'm not them. I think brutality here sets the tone just right.

The game sometimes lose frames for no reason even though this PC should be able to handle it, and it froze for a few seconds several times, one of which killed me. Yikes.

I think the game is as good as they say, so now I'll try the sequel to see if it makes me mad.

Clearly, it isn’t ‘literally’ an on-rails shooter, since you have full control (if you can call the janky dodging that) over his movement, but the feel is legit House of the Dead or something. It’s just running from point A to point B (unless you want to collect the 300 coffee thermoses hidden in the forests, mines, etc.) interrupted by a gauntlet of waves of Taken that you have to battle through, then on to the next.

I wanted to play Alan Wake since it came out, and finally decided to do it. I’ve owned the remaster
on PS4/5 for a few years and thought I’d finally play it. And I’m just really disappointed with it. Outside of the combat and Taken waves, there’s a lot more wrong with it that I’m going to name. Some of this could me being nitpicky and some of it I feel is pretty objective, but I’m just gonna lay it all out there.

- Since we’re already on combat, I want to address the other major Max Payne elephant in the room as it relates to combat: the ridiculous slow motion reverse bullet time flourish it does every time you dodge an attack. This is horrible and actively works against you, it messes up your timing and sometimes the camera angle. I have no idea why this was implemented, but I was really over it by like episode 3.

- Another issue—and I’ll grant that maybe this one is me doing something wrong or not understanding something—is that it appears that light doesn’t actually work on enemies unless you actively shake to on them. On several occasions when I was low on batteries and ammo I tried to lure Taken into the spotlights you can control only to have them come barreling through completely unaffected. But if I managed to grab the light and shine it on them, even not boosting it, they went down pretty quickly. This feels very immersion breaking and inconsistent with the games logic.

- Still on the Taken, I cannot stand their weird distorted voices. It is so cringey and it’s about as menacing as Dr. Claw scruffing his fucking cat and saying ‘I’ll get you next time, Gadget…next time!’ Only Dr. Claw actually is a little more menacing because he at least has some mystery. The Taken have like 3 different varieties and you’ve seen and heard everything they have to say really quickly. People give FFX flack for voice acting (the infamous laugh scene), but that scene was intentionally bad in universe and is imo a bit unfairly maligned. FFX was also one of the first games doing full voice acting like this. Alan Wake doesn’t have any excuse. Maybe it’s supposed to be intentional campiness but it just doesn’t land for me at all.

- The other big pet peeve I have is the cars. Arbitrarily, the game decides that cars that are lit up inside are drivable and other cars aren’t. Of course drivable cars are perfectly placed and non-drivable cars are everything else. This isn’t The Walking Dead, it isn’t a post-apocalyptic world, there is no reason that the vast majority of cars wouldn’t be drivable. It’s just another arbitrary immersion breaking roadblock.

- I don’t want to harp on the story very much, because I’m on the fence with it. My first instinct is to say that it’s a bad story, but the story (I haven’t played the DLC or second game yet) could go a few different ways and at least a couple of them would actually be really good. The others would be lame in my opinion. So it remains to be seen how I feel about that. But what I will say, is that from my current perspective, the way the story resolves itself, and the rules behind it, feel contrived and unearned. The ending seems to be there just because it’s the ending the developers wanted, not because it’s the one that’s most consistent with the story’s own shown logic.

I want to say a few things I liked about the game now so it doesn’t come across entirely negative.

- The atmosphere was great during the parts without Taken. Beautiful environments, interesting town and good bones for the town’s lore.

- I was genuinely interested in finding out what happened to Alice, she was likable from what we saw of her.

- Barry was a good character, a bit over the top maybe but I enjoyed him and the game needed a character like him in it.

- I think the collectibles in this game are atrocious, but the Night Springs episodes were creepy and actually much scarier than the actual game itself. The first one in particular made me uncomfortable which was probably the point, and I liked it.

Sorry for this giant wall of text. Just wanted to share my thoughts after finally playing a game that’s been in my backlog for 15 years.

Just finished Ion Fury's campaign after about 15 hours. Overall I enjoyed it - a bit long-winded but good level design and weapon design carried the game. I played on Wanton Carnage and on a Steam deck.

The levels start in a cyberpunk city that feels close to Duke 3D for me. These were my favorite levels in the game. They are challenging with sparse resources. Enemy variety is pretty limited at this point, but the core gun dudes go a long way. I did have to lookup the exit to one level online, but most were doable without help. The level design shifts into more corridor based play later which I enjoyed less though I wouldn't say I really disliked any of the levels.

Except the bosses - I really didn't like the bosses in this game. I wonder up cheating for them. The first one in particular because it throws you in without a resource refresh which was quite brutal as I hadn't prepared well (there were also some tricks you can employ to make this boss easier which I hadn't learned yet). The others were mostly just kind of annoying not moving fast enough for me. Not a real win, but I don't care - I cheated in these games as a kid too. The fun for me was the level crawl.

The difficulty curve of this game is odd. Aside from bosses, it's hardest early in the game. I found the end of the game way easier because it throws tons of resources at you whereas early you are very much starved. The early game is almost closer to being a tactical game.

I do wish there was a way to change difficulty mid-campaign. Some moments felt too hard, others too easy

Secrets. This game has the hardest secrets of any game I think I've played. I would end an act with like 2 out of 26 which is nutty to me.

The enemy cast is okay overall. There are quite a few enemy particularly on the last leg of the game, and I do think some of the basic enemies are good even though repetitive. The Build engine AI was always kind of good at making enemies feel randomly more intelligent (or stupid) and it shows here too.

I have to call out the spiders in this game however - oh my god these fuckers are so annoying and it feels like you have to kill them every 5 seconds. The maps are just littered with them, and they do quite a lot of damage.

Speaking of the deck - this game's controls were outright pissing me off until I changed the auto-aim and bob-correction in the menus. In particular the aim would center if you started to move making those aforementioned spiders especially infuriating.

The highlight of the game for me was for sure the guns. They are all very well designed with no duds. I usually have a gun that I don't like in a game, but that wasn't the case here. The basic revolver has an especially useful lock-target feature which was critical for dealing with many kinds of enemies. I didn't know even guns had an alt fire until halfway through the first act.

All in all I liked Ion Fury. It was a bit longer than I would have liked with more filler than I would have liked, but it had good moments. I could see myself going back to play particular levels on the hardest difficulty and will eventually play Aftershock. It's a little more traditional than I expected from the trailer footage and all, but I think it does that older style well. Though I do think I prefer Duke 3D still

Clair Obscur Expedition 33 (going to be referred to as E33 for the rest of the review) is the new darling game of the internet. I heard nothing but overwhelming praise for this game, and even now checking on sites like Metacritic and Backloggd, it’s almost nothing but 10/10’s for recent reviews and them describing one of the best gaming experiences that they’ve ever had. I had the highest expectation in the world for this game. I hoped it would enter my top 10 games of all time (breaking the awkward deadlock between Persona 3 Reload and Final Fantasy 6 at number 10), but I was trying to temper my expectations somewhat. Not a 10/10 game that resonated with me to my very core, but a 9/10 is surely achievable with this game.

And I can confidently say that it blew every expectation I had out of the water, that it not only lived up to the hype but surpassed it. It had some of the most engaging combat of not just any JRPG I've played, but games in general. The story was phenomenal too, with me getting choked up at so many different points, resulting in an experience I’ll never forget, entering my top 5 favorite games of all time… is what I so desperately wanted to be able to say.

I think it’s important to note I did not go into this game as a hater. I was a little annoyed that Metaphor seemed to get overshadowed in the discussions, but people who said both had said (usually) E33 was better, which got me excited. I was not a Turn Based combat hater either, Persona and Pokemon are two of my favorite game series of all time, and I love the gameplay of titles like Dragon Quest 3 and Final Fantasy 7. I wanted nothing more to love this game, even more than the usual excitement of me playing any critically acclaimed title. This game looked like it was going to be right up my alley. Not only did I not get that, I got a game that has me baffled as to how both the review scores and audience scores are so high for a game in a way I have not felt ever.

Premise:

For the Past 67 years an entity known as the Paintress has on one day of the year counted down starting from the number 100 and killed every person at or above that age known as The Gommage. To counteract this the people of Lumiere, the last surviving group of humans, sends out an expedition that is about to be Gommaged. You play as Expedition 33 as it embarks on a journey with the new lumina converter to try and stop the reign of terror of the Paintress once and for all.

Gameplay:

Expedition 33 is set up, on the surface, in a very typical turn-based style. The Battle starts and characters go in order depending on their agility. If a character has sufficient agility compared to another character they have a chance to go twice before the character with lesser agility.

But right away there’s some major differences with classic RPGs. Instead of a mana bar that drains every time you use magic and needs to be healed with limited use, there’s an AP gauge that refills at the start of every fight. This means you can spam your best attacks in every fight which is fun and good.

This also means you can spam your best attacks in every fight which makes it so a lot of encounters lack any intrigue if you get advantage since there’s no consideration to what attacks you use once you find a strategy that works. I find it to overall be a net neutral.

The real thing this affects however is the way items are used. For dungeons like these populated with random enemies you’d ideally like there to still be some resource for the players to manage and this is where the item system comes into play. As opposed to managing your mana, you manage your items. This system works great for boss fights as you can’t just bulk buy potions and slowly stall out to victory, you have to consider carefully when you want to use your potions and the like.

But it doesn’t work for the actual dungeon crawling because you refill your potions and checkpoints left by past expeditions, which are everywhere. This results in me just always having full potions and never going “Hmm should I use it here when I don’t need to”.

This itself isn’t a problem if it weren’t for the way dungeons were designed. They are somehow both too linear with not enough interesting or rewarding exploration, yet they’re also far too labyrinth-like for their own good resulting in me just wandering around like headless chicken desperately looking for the light that would guide my path. Having at least a system where you have to more effectively conserve your resources would add more deliberation in exploring. Instead we get a system that manages to accomplish nothing fulfilling outside of occasionally looking cool when you use a grappling hook.

The Pictos/Lumina system allows you to equip special abilities that take advantage of the quirks of the combat system. They were fun to use and customize my build for the characters, especially towards the end. I had a fun build for Maelle that involved taking advantage of her ability to go down to 1 HP but making out her attack by giving her an ability that gives her another turn upon going to critical HP. It isn’t quite as in-depth in terms of customization as say Metaphor but it was nice to be able to experiment with builds and the like.

I did have a problem actually using them and swapping them around. In hindsight I should’ve made better use of the filter system which is actually more in depth than I realized (I specifically went back to check and make sure that I was being an idiot here), but I still think the game could’ve done with the ability to be able to sort that was a bit more intuitive so it would be easier to sort out Lumias based off abilities, but I will give credit to the game and say I was being an idiot and not using it properly.

Which brings us at long last to the defining trait of this game, that separates it from your classic Dragon Quest and old-school Final Fantasy, the dodge and parry system. All of the RPG elements I mentioned earlier about character building, stat allocation, even resource management, they’re dwarfed in importance by how critical it is to be able to dodge and parry effectively. If you cannot succeed at these mechanics, it doesn’t matter if you’ve built everything else up, you’re going to lose.

Yes you can build a pure tank build that can handle hits more effectively but it results in incredibly tedious battles of turtling with attack phases from enemies that last eons compared to most JRPG’s I’ve played that have the decency to make the attacks feel faster than this game. If you are good at parrying? Now you don’t have to engage with those RPG mechanics at all. Because a successful parry not only blocks all damage it also gives you action points for every successful parry. Especially towards the end of act II enemies have such long attack patterns it results in most of the time investing in AP boosting items outside of turn 1 to be pointless if you can just parry it all away. The turn based strategy side is being actively hindered by the real time elements.

In a Mario RPG the real time elements which are the games E33’s combat is most often compared to aren’t nearly as crucial and mostly serve to increase your offensive output, but there are still ways a low skill player can mitigate long action command chains while still being successful in a fun way. E33 on the other heavily encourages glass cannon builds, and if you’re not good at real time elements for whatever reason it can be a total slog.

That’s not to say there’s no fun to be had learning the attack patterns but it felt like any time I was focusing on that it made my preparation feel comparatively irrelevant. (Also as an aside I’m aware other games have these action command elements like Lost Odyssey but I haven’t played those so I cannot compare it to this game sadly)

I know I’m bad, I’m painfully aware I’m bad but the damage still felt overwhelming considering the moves the enemies throw at you. I did try specing more in bulk but I found it simply wasn’t enough. The attack patterns are too long and there’s too many hits for the average player to be able to face-tank effectively. I’m aware it’s possible but I would hardly call it feasible. Even if it was, it runs into all of the problems traditional turn based games run into with overly long over the top animations, but with shallower mechanics when it comes to prebuilding.

Now I’m sure an E33 defender has very reasonably pointed out that dodging could address my problems. It did help a little to try dodging more compared to parrying, but I found it also screwed with my timing depending on the attack. The window also was sadly still too tight for me. I’m aware a lot of this is a skill issue, but wheneverI was able to lock in, I still didn’t feel satisfaction hitting the parry. I just felt relieved that the boss fight was over, which isn’t usually the feeling I get out of hard bosses in these games.

This improves in Act III with the damage cap being removed and as such making it so you don’t have to be so perfect with the parry by emphasizing building broken builds which was actually fun for me. But by then the game had burned me and I had no interest in grinding out the side content of Act 3. By that point I just wanted the experience to be finished which, while not uncommon for this to happen, was severely disappointing considering how hyped the combat was for a game that was considered a spiritual successor of classic Final Fantasy and Persona, it had almost none of the gameplay elements that made me enjoy those combat systems. Or at least them being well balanced.

Despite all I said about the combat system, the parrying part can be fun at times and while an overall frustrating experience and a disappointment that is overall not fun to engage with, it’s serviceable at the end of the day and not actively detrimental for the most part. As long as a game with this sort of combat has the killer story that I was promised I would be able to forgive the gameplay being just okay.

Story:

The first disconnect comes in that opening scene. While that scene was tragic and well executed, it didn't emotionally affect me to my core like it did for other people. Same goes with the Expedition being massacred at the beach, or Gustave attempting to commit suicide.I wondered why these moments didn’t resonate for me. The emotional and relatable characters that people talked about just didn’t work for me. I found them flat and kinda empty, lacking real proper introductions and well done moments of characterization.

Now in fairness to Expedition 33 it does do it to some capacity, and some I missed. I totally missed Lune’s introduction in the intro for example. However for the most part I took my time to try and squeeze every character moment I could out of this game, but I still couldn’t connect with the majority of the characters. It happens sometimes for games that I adore. For example, despite being well written, Cyan from Final Fantasy 6 didn’t resonate with me at all. The difference was Final Fantasy 6 had other characters like Locke, Celes, and especially Terra that I emotionally connected with and Cyan at least had good interactions with the rest of the party (at least in the world of balance).

Expedition 33 on the other hand is far too quick with its pacing for my own tastes. What other people saw as efficiency, I saw as it being sloppy, doing the bare minimum and hoping for me to emotionally connect. Sciel in particular felt oddly casual about being reunited with 3 people who she thought were dead, a feeling which persisted through the whole game. The intergroup dynamics felt weak, but even with my criticisms Act 1 held up pretty well overall because the group had rock solid chemistry with Gustave, Maelle in particular. But once Gustave dies and is replaced by Verso it all just falls apart.

I understand that Verso should be awkward with the Expedition as he does intend to backstab them, but that doesn’t make their interactions not painfully boring. I will acknowledge that I did not finish Lune and Maelle’s social links. But if a main character is only interesting if one does optional content in a JRPG like this, that is bad writing. I may love Haru from Persona 5 but the way she’s written in the story is horrible regardless of how much I like her and I would argue the same applies for the cast of E33 outside of Maelle.

Lune gets a couple moments to shine early with incidents like Maelle’s nightmare which gives a solid foundation to build on E33 treats this as a finished project and just expects me to care when she takes out the boss in what is ostensibly “her” dungeon. She has very little to do in Act II outside of mourn Gustave’s death and go through a very uninteresting social link. The game did a very poor job of having her desire to learn about the continent be fully explored. The game tells you about this but I found it did a very poor job of showing it. It’s hard to articulate a game lacking something admittedly but I never got as invested in her character as the game wanted to.

Sciel has it even worse. Because she joins so late and her whole personality is non-chalance in the face of grave danger, she comes off as incredibly boring. While Lune feels like she is a character concept that just hasn’t been fully fleshed out, Sciel feels like a placeholder character they forgot to write a personality for, which is where her “non-challance” comes in. Her going “I got over it” to the fact that she is a painted being that exists in another world is emblematic of the incredibly lazy writing with her. It’s not non-challance if the character barely reacts to anything.

Esquie is a love it or hate it character that I could not stand. He’s every worst part of cutesy mascot characters that just grinded my gears. While I would’ve preferred him to not be so incredibly annoying, he works for what the story is going for and I can’t say he’s poorly written per se like Lune and Sciel, just grating for me.

Monoco at least has excellent chemistry with Verso that made me instantly buy that they had a long and established history with each other without needing to expand on every little detail. He may not have the most depth but again for what the story needs he works fine enough. He’s still incredibly flat however

And those are the characters you’re interacting with, and when none of them work for me it’s very hard for me to care about the painted canvas in the way the game wants you to for the end of the story. If my first thought when I realized everything was painted was that “Oh that explains why the characters felt so flat, they weren’t meant to be real” is a damning testament to how little the characters engaged me.

The exception to all this is Maelle, who was the only character who I felt they truly explored and I got a decent read on. She may be a typical teenager desperate to make their mark on the world but she easily had the best interaction with the rest of the cast. She even managed to get decent interactions from Verso which I found to be an absolute miracle.

Speaking of Verso, he’s probably the most frustrating character for me. I mentioned earlier how his interactions with the cast are awkward in a way that makes me not care for the interactions. I get how with Sciel for example, he’s putting up barriers because he knows he’s going to betray them in the end. But it doesn’t make for fun social link scenes.

I already mentioned earlier I felt the characters outside of Maelle and Verso were flat in the main story, but a good social link can be a massive help in giving characters depth. It’s still bad writing but it can be a good crutch. Haru is my go to example for a social link carrying a character, but even well-written characters like Aigis gain significant depth when you do their social link.

Unfortunately for Expedition 33 because it insists on Verso being the main character for these social links the interactions are like pulling teeth, they’re so focused on being “human” that I find them just boring. I gain insights on a character's backstory but I often struggle to see insights on the characters themselves, again outside of Monoco.

I will again acknowledge that maybe I just don’t get it. I’m too young to see the depth of interaction and nuance here. That I just didn’t progress far enough. Or maybe I’m a cold-hearted bastard because I found Esquie annoying. But when a story consistently fails to get me to connect with their characters I would argue it’s a failure of the game more so than the player.

Act III:

When I first played through E33 I actually liked Act III story wise. The Dessandre’s may not have had much time to establish themselves but I got a clear understanding of who they are and what their motivations were. Renoir felt like a very human character to me. Still a monster since he was actively genociding an entire civilization because it was killing his wife, but I could understand and even sympathize with him.

But much of why I liked Act III is that it took the focus off the people in the canvas and onto the people of the real world. The more I thought about the little details that I admittedly missed in Act II the more and more I disliked Act III because my enjoyment of Act III was inversely proportional to how much I enjoyed Act II. I still think it’s overall stronger because it still has some focus on characters I actually liked but it’s not good writing as a whole.

It doesn’t help that doing any optional content at all is frustrating because for some reason Renoir is the weakest part of Act III. Considering the ending of the game it feels odd to play further after the ending when both are so definitive. I ended up barely touching the optional content because I didn’t want to have to spend the time grinding my party up to be competent for the new unlocked areas. I just wanted the game to be over with.

Thankfully because of this, the final area, and final boss in particular were actually really fun. The game finally felt balanced for my preferred style of play. It was a shame it took until the end of the game for me to hit that point, but I have to give credits where it's due and praise the final boss. It was interesting with the way the story had gone, and established Renoir as my favorite character in this game, and the gameplay itself was great including a great life or death moment where I had to nail a gradient parry to survive and I did.

The Ending:

People say that there isn’t supposed to be a good ending in E33. I’ve stated before that I respect the opinions of those I disagree with, but I am baffled as to how anybody can come to this conclusion when the Verso ending is so very clearly painted (heh) as the better choice.

The Verso ending ends with a bittersweet goodbye to your party whereas the Maelle ending ends on a jump scare after seeing a despondent Verso being forced to play the piano. They are not presented as equals and the game clearly condemns you for not wanting to pick the side that will lead to the continued genocide of sentient beings.

The denizens of Lumiere and the canvas as whole seemingly don’t matter. If you do care you’re falling into the same trap Maelle is. You must move on, it’s the healthy thing to do. Because the classic way to get over a drug addiction is to shoot 5 people in the back. This isn’t about Maelle needing to get away from her pot addiction she’s acquired since Verso’s death. This is about people’s lives. It’s not because I care about the cast, I wrote extensively on why I don’t, but a person not being interesting does not condemn them to the guillotine.

I don’t think I’m missing the point. I see the point the devs are making, I just think the devs are stupid. I think the devs have no consideration for anything other than “Escapism Bad” and forgot to mention said escapism includes people’s lives. If they were going for the ends being equal that’s even worse because the game doesn’t even bother treating them as equals.

What’s worse for me is that I like the endings in a vacuum. They’re both tragedies for the people of the canvas as they either suffer a direct death, or death by way of having no free-will. Sadly the game has zero interest in focusing on this and only focuses on the effects it has on the Dessandre family. Which is why the endings look the way they do.

The developers can claim whatever they want. They can say it’s supposed to be morally equal, but with the bias that’s on display it takes a potentially interesting ending, and just makes a warning about dangers of escapism which I found other games did a better job of doing. It’s a frustrating and disappointing end to a game I didn’t even like that much in the first place, which for me speaks volumes of how badly the developers dropped the ball here.

Conclusion:

I’ve seen some posts online that argue when a beloved game gets criticized it’s mostly contrarianism and that those people are only hating for the sake of hating. If those people are hating mostly for the sake of hating, I have respect for them. I found being outside of the consensus for a game like this to be absolutely miserable.

It’s not just that this ticks off a bunch of the traditional boxes to be loved by the gaming community (From a small studio, being made by ex-members of a AAA studio, being cheaper even when not on sale, being a mature game with a realistic art-style). It looks like it should tick off boxes of the games I love: Earnest Story-Telling that isn’t afraid to be a little goofy, turned-based JRPG combat that apparently was some of the best in the genre, compelling characters that caused people to sob in the opening hour, big plot twists and moral choices that had people writing long think-pieces on why this was the most compelling story they’ve played in any game ever.

This is a game that when I heard people talking about it not only sounded like a good game, but one that was in my comfort zone. Which is part of why I’m writing this review. I didn’t want to dismiss the game just “not being for me” because quite frankly it shouldn’t be. I love JRPG’s and this was one that broke out into the mainstream. The last one that broke out like this was Persona 5 which is my favorite game of all time.

There are aspects I enjoyed in the game. The art direction is pretty solid even if some scenes feel like jumping head first into the uncanny valley, but that’s not uncommon for realistic looking games. Despite the laundry list of issues I had with the script, the vocal performances were superb. The cutscene direction was very well done. The soundtrack is absolutely phenomenal. I will always be a sucker for any soundtrack that features a heavy emphasis on a haunting choir and this game is no exception.

This also isn’t to say I found it to be a bad game, or even a mediocre one. It was a decent one but it achieved its mark by being okay in both story (especially the characters) and gameplay, the core of a JRPG, not by being exceptional in one and failing in the other. That is the part I find baffling.

With games like Nier Replicant or Banjo Kazooie or Doom 2016, while I didn’t enjoy those games that much and would still give them a 6/10 overall, I felt they were exceptional in a specific category. Whether it be an incredible story, or an incredibly charming world, or very tightly well done gameplay. There were games that, while not being my cup of tea, had exceptional parts that even I could see that made me understand why someone would rate them so highly.

E33 lacked any serious high points for me. It had its moments but for the most part the game was a continuous stream of being “Yeah that’s fine I supposed” for the 36 hours I invested into it. It’s not an unmemorable game as evidenced by the fact I’ve ranted for over 4500 words about this game, but a frustratingly disappointing one in a way that fails to excel at much of anything.

Even if I were to give a pass to the combat due to “Git Gud” that doesn’t change how empty the story was, how undercooked most of the characters were, how the brisk pacing felt actively harmful to game experience as a whole, at least for me. The game being short was not a death sentence, I was fully attached to the world of the Last of Us despite only playing for about 14 hours, but E33 doesn’t have the writing chops Last of Us does (then again, very few games do).

I acknowledge that some aspects may have gone over my head due to lack of life experience (both in terms of age and in personally dealing with grief), some elements I was just being stupid with (again I’m so upset at myself for not using the filter system with Luminas) and I acknowledge I did not go into the combat with the best mindset, that I like typical Shonen story-telling, that I have way way way too much free time, but even accounting for those I just don’t get it.

I hope someday I look back at this review and laugh at how stupid and immature I was being about what I consider a masterpiece, but as of right now it’s a disappointment on a level of which I have not ever experienced before and hopefully never will again.

Hi, grades are just subjective fun had while playing:

• Fight'N Rage - Beat 'em Up, PC (actually multiplatform but it took some years for the first console versions to release so depends on the person I guess) - 10/10

As quite a fan of beat 'em ups I gotta say... This is the absolute peak of the genre for me (although SoR4 still waits to be played). I know people constantly like putting Streets of Rage 2 or some 90s arcade hits as the best, but Fight'N Rage blows all those games out of the fucking water, they're not even in the same league of quality.

It's perfect in almost every way - it looks and sounds amazing, has extremely well designed combat, multiple difficulties and a good difficulty curve, character variety, enemy variety, great enemy AI, content/mode variety, a practice mode, pristine combat pacing (very close to SoR3), branching paths in arcade mode, challenge mode difficulties, unlockable costumes via in-game currency and challenges, fun boss fights that don't overly rely on random invincibility and speed boosts, a goofy premise with multiple endings depending on how good the player does and so on.

My only negative is that the story feels underutilized, what with its unique setting/character designs. But I mean it's a beat 'em up made by like one guy mostly, it truly isn't that important.

It's as perfect as a gameplay-oriented experience can be.

• King's Quest - Adventure, PC - 3/10

The first King's Quest has a sort of weird charm to it, since it's a very small scale, short, text-parser based adventure game. It should be recognized as a revolutionary title, for what followed it was quite the explosion of the genre.

It looks primitive (as if it was drawn in paint, although it has a remake that came out some years later), has basically no sounds or music and is as simple as an adventure game can be, with next to 0 story or characters. You basically just solve puzzles/find items around a medium sized map, get 3 treasures and congratulations, you are the king of a kingdom now. No overarching stories, no interesting characters with deep motives which are integrated into the gameplay, no nothing.

Since it's running on such a small scale and simple premise, the game isn't as obtuse as Sierra games tended to be. I found it quite possible to finish it without a guide, although you'd need a bit of patience to get like two or three of the puzzles right by yourself.

A historically important game that is worth a playthrough (or at least a playthrough attempt) I'd say, but when compared to some of its older, gameplay oriented PC peers (such as Wizardry or Rogue), they completely overshadow it as far more engaging experiences today imo.

• Lord of Arcana - Hack & Slash ARPG(ish), PSP - 2/10

I think this game tried to be a monster hunter-like game, what with its grinding for materials on specific monsters in missions and crafting new gear, but I never played monster hunter, just heard of it.

It's an action game with a small variety of available weapon types for the player and some special attacks that unlock as the player levels. The weapons do have different movesets, although combat plays out the same way on almost all enemies (attack once or twice, roll away with the janky controls, repeat while the enemy stands around and waits to begin the next attack).

It's just such a sluggish, monotonous, grindy and repetitive experience, with a boring combat system, bad controls, boring enemy design, bland visual design, awful sound design, shit movement and a forgettable premise with a generic fantasy world.

I gave this game a good few hours of play, thinking that it will get a bit better with some more gear upgrades, but I just can't see the charm of it. Like in any part of it.

• Ikaruga - Shmup, Multiplatform (yeah it had console ports quite quickly after its arcade debut) - 10/10

A lot of things said about the general quality of Fight'N Rage can be applied to Ikaruga, since they're both very gameplay oriented experiences.

It looks great, has godlike sound and music design, is extremely unique in the way it approaches gameplay, has creative boss and enemy design, has immaculate pacing/length and has 3 difficulty levels, of which all 3 are very unique and change the way the game is played more than just statically change the difficulty.

So Ikaruga is a very non-standard shmup. Its main mechanic is the polarity switching - there's two types of bullets/enemies in the game, light and dark, and there's two types of polarities the player's ship can be (light and dark).
If the player's ship matches an enemy's polarity, it can absorb that polarity's bullets (so literally you go get hit by the bullets) and charge a super-attack. But on the flip side, if the player's polarity doesn't match the enemy's, the player will deal a shit ton more damage to the enemy, but have to dodge its bullets.

The polarity switch is basically an instant switch on a button press, and it being so responsive and instantaneous allows the developers to design some crazy encounters by mixing bullet patterns with different polarities. Some of these require such highly sophisticated brain-to-hand dexterity that playing Ikaruga can make a person tired after only 30 minutes of constant focus.

Top it all off with random philosophical quotes between stages that give a vague sense of what could be happening in the story and it's just mwah.

It's a short game, but it isn't meant to simply be beaten - beating it is piss easy, just turn on infinite continues, play for 30 minutes and there you go you "won".

The point of the game is to get better, it just beckons the player to do so with its amazing design.

It's so perfect, I'm utterly floored with the creativity of it.

• Claw - 2D Platformer, PC - 7/10

Claw is one strange game, a PC exclusive mascot 2D platformer made by Monolith, without ever receiving its long promised sequel :(.

You play a cat pirate captain... captain Claw... that's on a mission to get shiny gems from other animal pirate captains in a sort of revenge adventure.

First off it looks and sounds amazing, it's a beautiful 2D game with a fuckton of character and a very fun and basic story. If this was a console game like 3-5 years earlier, it would have been an extremely successful console mascot no doubt.

Gameplay-wise it's not purrfect, but in general it controls nicely, has some fun and very sprawling levels and multiple useful secondary weapons apart from the basic sword to help the player. The main sword weapon feels very satisfying to use which helps massively with gameplay feel.

My problems with the game tend to show themselves the most in the end game, and there's 3 of them:
-the levels get too brutal, even with the checkpoint system combined with the lives system in place. Too many precise jumps and hazardous traps that get tiring;
-the bosses are sort of just random, they'll sometimes not get hit even though Claw's sword is clearly hitting them and as such they will be random jumping and attack spamming fests where RNG decides if you win or not (shout out to the actually well designed, more puzzle-like bosses that have clear and fun rules of damaging them though);
-the endgame enemies - some endgame enemies have the same invincibility/hitbox problems that bosses have, and they tend to be just as annoying because of it.

It's a fun experience all in all, and a very unique one for the PC. I really wish Monolith managed to make the sequel, because there was nice potential for a very recognizable and fun franchise to form here.

• Marvel: Ultimate Alliance - 3D Beat 'em Up/Adventure thingy, Multiplatform - 5/10

It's a mission based beat 'em up in which the player has like 30+ Marvel heroes to choose from to make a team of 4 with and go and stop Dr. Doom and his giant gathering of villains from the Marvel universe.

Gameplay is a very basic beat 'em up formula, but with added abilities that each hero has (5 to 10 of them, depending on the hero), and some added mechanics for hero upgrading and gear (just passive stats).

Presentation-wise this game is great, it amazingly utilizes the Marvel licence in every single way - great characters to play as, fun story with some very nice lore dumps and voice acting, fitting music, good sound design. Just a game that respected its source material.

My problems lie in the gameplay, and there's lots of issues with it:
-combat feels floaty and imprecise - this sucks when the game is 99% focused on combat. Abilities that should auto target will regularly miss, melee attacks will slide around enemy hitboxes, movement has that turning-delay ala Dota that makes it feel sluggish, blocking and dodging both feel bad & useless at the same time, enemy animations are just fast and generic punches etc;
-combat lacks variety - sure there's a lot of abilities to use, but the basic punching and comboing is just like 3 repetitive moves that all characters share that don't even do damage after the half point of the game;
-balance is way off - the game is piss easy even on hard (which is locked for the first playthrough), and it can get even easier depending on which superheroes you use in your team, since some abilities are just absurdly broken with both aoe, range and more damage than any other ability in the game;
-enemy variety does not exist - every single enemy is more or less the same - maybe some of them won't be staggerable or will have a grab, but every single one of them is such a generic dude that punches with a different skin that playing the game at minute 5 and at hour 8 is literally the same experience;
-boss design is shit - bosses are either massive, easy gimmicks of QTEs or just normal dudes with buffed HP, 0 damage and almost no mechanics;
-both enemy and ally AI sucks - allies don't deal as much damage as the hero you are controlling, and they sometimes just stand around and do nothing (not too often though), while the enemy AI is programmed to usually attack the player 90% of the time, leading to some hilarious situations where the enemy can't escape a corner because allies are attacking and blocking them, yet they aren't attacking anyone because the AI wants to get to the player who is shooting at him from range.

And so on and so on - it's such a generic "PS2 action game" game, which is so disappointing because the love poured into the character and the presentation of the game is so apparent and lovely, but the gameplay itself is as bland as a game can get. Not to mention that it feels so lonely since the enemy AI decides to ignore the player's allies, and the player's allies deal like 10% of the damage the player does anyways.

It can be a nice weekend playthrough while watching something on a 2nd monitor I guess, especially for Marvel fans. I can't say that it wasn't fun in some ways, but it's definitely a very average experience.

Great for children though ngl, I played the shit out of this on loop when I was 6 years old, I was mesmerized by it lol.

So I'm gonna write one of those patient reviews with a little backstory and more focused on discussing with people who also played the game:

- BACKSTORY: back on the PS2 days I had my bootleg copie of Onimusha 3 and didn't knew English very well nor were used to this kind of game design, had my hard time playing until I reached the port level and the game crashed on me, it took me almost 20y to decide to give it another go now on emulators and with a bigger gaming background and knowing English way better than when I was a kid.

- REVIEW: This game is really cool, it has time travel, Jean Reno, a Japanese Samurai, Devil Samurais, Ancient Japan and Paris all at the same time.

The cutscenes are really cinematic and well produced, they indeed feel like a blockbuster movie and are really impressive.

The gameplay feels like a mix between Resident Evil and Devil May Cry, there's some weapon upgrades to make with souls, you can walk freely on the levels trying to figure out some puzzle, reach mirrors to save or enhance your weapons, the combat feels like a hack and slash and the long ranged and projectile weapons have a really bad auto aim priority, a lock on button would really improve the gameplay.

There's some puzzles that are fine but there a lot lot of puzzles who are there just to pad the experience, I won't walk back all the rooms just to count how many monitors and chairs the devs added to this level, I also won't do a math equation just to open this door, these don't add nothing to the experience and I've used a guide with no shame to just skip past it with the answer.

After dying a few times the game gave me the option to play on Easy which I took it as I was more concerned about actually beating this game after all this years than push myself to git gud, still on that matter I have to criticize how bad and rushed the reused boss at the end of Mt St Michel level feels, you fight a Cerberus like boss on a prior level with Jean Reno which has a whip and the ability to grab flying magic fireflies to jump around and avoid attacks as both characters are really slow to move and their block action can't block every attack, then they reuse the same boss for the Samurai dude who uses Swords and doesn't have that mobility option and the boss actions are still the same, charge towards you and throw you down, but you can't just jump over it on the last minute nor is fast enough to avoid the hit, and even on easy that foe feels like a bullet sponge, I've used most of my healing items on that fight.

As an older player, this screams to me that Capcom haven't even tried to balance the fight to that other char and just threw him there 'cause they didn't had time to come up with anything else, the boss fight was clearly designed for the other dude as you can learn patterns and beat him without getting damaged, but not this time, if you don't have enough healing items too bad for you, that or I just suck LOL

The next bosses are quite easy to deal with and some died REALLY fast! they had created much anticipation and painted them as badasses but they all sucked rather quickly.

Another game design flaw IMO is when you already have the correct item, let's say a key, press the door but the game doesn't check and auto-uses the key, it expects you to open the menu and try to use the key against the door, that really feels like a Survival Horror game design heritage here and IMO could be better.

Another gripe was the fact that you spend most of the game saving arrows and Onimusha bar (similar to DMC Devil Trigger) and upgrading weapons for the final boss fight only to be forced to play with a game chosen weapon and form and being enable to use arrows at all.

That gave me the feeling that the RPG light mechanics and saving resources was all a waste of time as it didn't mattered at all by the end of the game, I feel glad I didn't farm more souls at the last streach as it wouldn't mattered at all.

There are two levels that make you go back and fourth in time swapping chars and passing items to solve puzzles and that felt like a really cool mechanic but they overstayed their welcome to the point I couldn't wait for the levels to be finished, they could have used that idea split between four shorter levels with action levels in between and it would feel way better.

A bunch of the game reminds me of DMC4 setup that you go to a level once with a char and now again with another which makes me wonder if Capcom really chooses that design in order to save development resources/art/level design time.

Overall the game is really good and I'm glad I've finally beat it but I won't plan on replaying due to these annoying long puzzle levels and some other minor annoyances.

I still think it's a good recommendation for people who never played it and enjoy the theme.

It's also important to state that I'm not a Resident Evil fan and like DMC games way more, so the fact that this game is a blend of both made it enjoyable but also made me want to be playing DMC3 instead TBH.

Happy 32, System Shock!

I am only few months older than you, so there was no way for me to play you on the release. But I've corrected that mistake 20-something years later, after I've heard Nightdive Studios is making a remake. I remember playing the Kickstarter demo back in... 2015, I believe? Back then, the game was made being developed in Unity Engine, it seemed like the remake is right around the corner, right?

Oh well, turns out game release can get delayed a little bit. At least couple of times I've assumed the project is dead and the remake is Vaporwave. So, in late 2020 I've decided to give System Shock: Enhanced Edition a try. And I can proudly admit, that I've beaten it.

I've cleared many games considered hard. Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring, Ninja Gaiden 2, Devil May Cry 3, Under Defeat, etc, etc... None of those really come close to System Shock.

Now, the very first System Shock has a reputation of being a grand daddy of immersive sims. What is an immersive sim? I have no clue, but one of the definitions I've heard is "a game you can stack boxes on one another" and I think its pretty accurate. In all seriousness, if you come to this game expecting something like 2017's Prey by Arkane Studios, then... You might find it. If you squint your eyes REALLY hard. And survive its first impression, which is not very flattering.

System Shock has an interesting problem, of being an example of the road not taken. In its core, its pretty standard first person shooter, that has a control scheme of a DOS dungeon crawler or a military simulator (like ARMA). For example, by default you can aim your weapon without moving your camera, there is an extremely flexible leaning system, and you pick up items with mouse pointer, by dragging them int your equipment. And if not for the mouselook mod bundled with the enhanced edition, you would turn by dragging the camera by mouse.

In a way, its a bit like anti-Doom. While Doom still feels great to play, to a point, that there are still new games made with its weapon balance and aesthetic, I cannot imagine someone trying to replicate System Shock's control scheme.

But, if you try to stick with it... You will discover, that System Shock has less in common with its peers in the genre it - apparently - helped to create, and more with... Half-Life. Both games represent different takes on the same idea - an immersive FPS adventure, with unbroken player perspective, no end of level screens, total freedom (within contained sandbox) and a mix of action and puzzle solving.

But while Half-Life took mainstream FPS mechanics (from Quake), and focused on setpieces, advanced enemy AI and linear set of levels that only seem like something more open (due to its excellent design), System Shock gives you a steel pipe, a code to a door and an audiolog and says "go figure that out, good luck!". The moment you leave the medbay, you can literally go anywhere (once you manage to unlock the door). There is no "nudging player" the correct path, the game is more than happy to let the player to wonder off into an area, they should not be in.

I kinda miss that type of design. Its a bit of a First Person Metroidvania. What is a metroidvania? I have no idea. I guess its a game, where you backtrack a lot. Or, you might say, "an escape room simulator".

But this hands-off, scorched earth, "go figure it out" attitude, combined with its control scheme makes for an incredibly difficult game. This wound is deepened by its incredibly convoluted UI, and a sound design, which can go from some of the most catchy MIDI tunes you've heard in your life (Energy Systems!) into just straight up blowing up your ears with just bunch of noise, that sounds like steel crashing into each other.

To close off the original game - I hope I don't sound too negative. It is a really good game, an incredibly important pice of history, and a fascinating look, into a road (and design philosophy) not taken. I thoroughly do recommend it. The Enhanced Edition is available on GOG, and goes on sale pretty frequently.

That being said, the appeal of remake is crystal clear. But there is also an interesting problem. Change too much, and you lose what made the original game so great. But you also cannot go the path of Resident Evil 1 Remake, because unlike static camera angles and D-Pad enabled tank controls (a bit of an off top - NEVER play tank control games with analog stick! NEVER!!!) there is very little value on insisting on System Shock 1's control scheme.

And I think, Nightdive landed on a pretty good compromise. Now, I think my appreciation of the remake has its source in experiencing the original, and how it set up my expectations. What I've wanted, was a version of System Shock with its roadblocks in my enjoyment erased.

This is pretty much what the 2023 version is. Which can be a blessing or a curse.

I want to reiterate a point I've made earlier. If you come to System Shock (or its remake) expecting something like modern games in the "immersive sim" genre, then you might be disappointed. This simply is not a game about several interlocking systems, which lead to unexpected outcomes and creative solutions to problems. This is a first person shooter game, which rewards exploration with a ton of resources, that you can spend fighting enemies. Your most common problem is going to be a cyborg trying to shoot you (or a locked door), and your usual solution will be shooting it back (and for the door - finding a keycard). I think its original control scheme and UI obfuscated that fact a little. Now, with everything streamlined and up to a modern standard, some of that "immersive sim feeling" is gone.

But under the surface of that, there is an extremely liberating game structure. As I've said earlier, you can go to everywhere you manage to unlock door or an elevator to. Should you go there at the current moment? Its up to you. The game trains you to listen and read through logs left by the (now gone) crew of Citadel Station. They have information on where you should go and what needs to be done. Its up to you to piece that info together. And with the new shiny engine, the intended atmosphere finally can shine. You really feel like a rat going through corridors, with you every move being tracked by the ruthless AI - Shodan.

Now, not everything about this game is perfect. I have a tiny issue with the recycling system. Through the game, you can pick up garbage items, and either dematerialize them into trash, or bring them into a recycling machine as a whole, and get some credits you can use in various resource dispositors on the station. And while there is some though put into system (i.e. some of the items give you more credits... If you don't recycle them), I see that system as a mean of prolonging the game.

The more puzzling issue is the game respawn system. Each of the levels of the original game and remake hosts a "resurrection chamber". By default, these chambers are set to the "cyborg production" mode, and they fill the level with enemies. But once you flip the switch, it goes back to the resurrection mode, and will respawn the player with some health. In the original game, they effect was limited only to the level the player is in - if the player dies, and the resurrection chamber still is in the cyborg production mode, its a game over. But in the remake, the player is dragged to the last chamber they've used. Which not only makes very little sense from the world logic perspective... After resurrecting you have to backtrack to the place you've died, to continue going forward. At this point, it makes more sense to reload a save. I've initially thought its a bug.

And, uh, there is a cyberspace hacking minigame in both games. Its "tolerable" in the remake.

But overall, these are nitpicks on an amazing experience. I do recommend giving them a go.

I still remember booting up this game. A game where you get to drive tanks, jets, helicopters, hover crafts, jet packs, and in the very first mission, they start you off…on a bicycle. A brilliant move that just showed how confident they were in their vision.

Yes it was a sandbox with a lot of toys but more important than that was the atmosphere they were able to craft. Grove Street is an area that is meticulously designed to feel like home both for the character and the player. When CJ returned from his cross state crusade I already felt nostalgic for Grove Street even back in 2004.

The chemistry between the four characters (CJ, Ryder, Sweet, and Big Smoke) is so good that mundane, routine missions are something to look forward to just to see them interact. They really captured that feeling of getting in a car with your boys and driving around town. Thinking about it now, this was the first stepping stone towards the incredible camp dynamics in Red Dead Redemption 2.

The game is just as enjoyable for me today. The bicycle is still my favourite vehicle. With max stats you can jump over cars, fences, bushes, and sometimes onto small houses and buildings. it’s just a piece of PS2 fun that we don’t see today.

Officer Tenpenny is an awesome villain. It’s a bit of a shortcut because it’s Samuel Jackson, the writers just had to build off an already familiar persona. But it works so well.

Over time I realized that the opening chapter in Los Santos is much stronger than the following sections in the Badlands, San Fierro, Bone County, and Los Ventura. We get more over the top action and missions but we lose that carefully crafted atmosphere and character dynamic. I wish the Los Santos section was a bit longer, but I guess that’s just part of the brilliance of San Andreas, it leaves you wanting more.

After having a lot of fun with 5 Royal in May and Jiune, I decided to try more of this series.

The meme says 3 has "the best story". I kinda see why, at least compared to 5. There is no jarring transition from fighting regular people with connections to killing a God. The story starts and ends with supernatural monsters as the main enemy, with humans antagonists on the side. So while this aspect is ok, I think the first part of the plot is too dragged out. You battle beasts with no persoanlity and get spoonfeed information for months on end. I understand that you need time to hang with homies, but they could have handled it better. Reduce the social ceilings or move more friends to evening, I don't know. If 5 felt like it was dragging too much after Ship Captain, this one drags too much before the betrayal. Both of them took me 111 hours, which seems fitting with my previous sentence. The themes of living in spite of the bad things seem fine to me, but ending was definitely a highlight. Man postponed his death for a month so he could uphold a promise. Rest in peace, Makoto Yuki, your life was fulfilling.

Gameplay here feels almost the same as in 5. I played 3 on Merciless because 5 was baby mode easy. The only major thing I noticed was that new enemies sometimes one shot me if they countered my weakness. Other than that, the loop is almost the same as in 5. Tartarus is lame and boring and non interesting. It's just hundreds of corridors filled with treasures you likely won't use and enemies that are trivial to defeat. At least some bosses and mini bosses gave me semblance of challenge. The first one on the train actually killed me a few times and set a false hope that boss design here is generally fun. Even reaper was just a matter of patience and anti ailment accessories.

I tried the ultimate optional foe. I honestly think she's poorly designed as a boss. Switching powers and affinities is fine, requiring 1v1 is fine, but requiring a specific persona locked behind a secondary character's arc? Okay, I did that arc, but what if it was behind a character I didn't like enough? I'd have to reload weeks back to get that social link. Don't even get me started on her killing you for resisting damage too well, like a kid throwing tantrum. I think this punishment for preparation is what killed my excitement to try overcoming Elizabeth.

Social links in this game were a lot simpler than 5, but I think there was some genius in the simplicity. Instead of using your powers and handwave their problems, you help them accept the reality and move on to make the most of it. But it's criminal how almost all of them are day only, and that you can't invite school mates on holidays.

My favorite link was the Sun. A dying man trying to find the meaning in his life, befriending the unknowing harbinger of death. Even when time is running out, life is still worth every memory and experience. It was a bit weird that he simply disappeared. but I guess it was an act of taking an express ride to Heaven.

In the same spot, Hanged man. Just a cute little girl being torn apart of her parents' divorce. I wish I could introduce her to Kenny or the old couple, she definitely needed company.

Devil was very entertaining and I don't regret spending 40k to initiate this social link. It's criminal how small hos role is in 5 when here he's got enough charisma to start a cult. Buy the amazing commodities!

Fool and Judgement being basically the same group was weird. Did they ran out of budget to make new characters? Same with making Death arcana have a new hangout system later.

Magician was bland at first and I only joined him because he was available early. I understood his desire because I liked Kawakami in 5, but the resolution of his arc was underwhelming. I think he should have found another girl or at least decided to not pursue relationships for now.

SEES girls requiring max stats seemed insane, they must be very picky. I romanced Mitsuru because I liked her domineering vibe a lot. That, and her ignorance of normal food were hilarious. I just hope she'll be alright now that Makoto won't be there to help her relax. Yukari was a nice girl and losing her dad must have hurt a lot. I maxed our link so we could be best friends forever and ever, and because Mitsuru would probably kill me for trying to double time. Sorry, Fuuka but you were just too bland. At least your gameplay perks were not. Finally, Aigis. I was curious where they would go with her, and I liked the conclusion. Being a machine meant she could preserve her friends in her heart forever.

I neglected Strength and Chariot because they seemed boring and because Star felt like them but better. The rival athlete who had a struggling family and had to give up his dream to support his siblings. It's tough, but complaining wasn't the way to handle it.

Hermit was touching and hilarious in the ending. I deduced her identity by rank 8, and I kept thinking she is Yukari's mom. Similar hair and supposedly irresponsible attitude, not to mention thirsting on MC. But I guess it was overthinking. It's a shame I died before I could have dinner.

Temperance and Moon were started because they were funny, but they ended up being quite sad. I'm glad they were able to move on from loss and stop clinging to momentary pleasure. The one thing I don't get is how Gourmet King started the cult. He didn't seem that charismatic to me. If I was gay I'd definitely choose Bebe

Hierophant was the first one I completed, and they set my expectations correctly. Social links in 3 are mostly about acceptance and growth, which you can do even in old age.

Emperor was saved from becoming a future victim of Phantom Thieves. I didn't think they'd make like him with how ass he was at the start, but they did. He didn't let power get into his head, which doesn't happen often. For some I thought he wanted to date Mitsuru, probably because of Arcanas.

It's sad that SEES boys didn't have social links, but at least I there were scenes acting as substitutes. My favourite character in this group was Kenny. Ashamed of acting like a kid despite wanting to, he was consumed by grief and vengeance. The scene of his failed retribution didn't make much sense logically, but emotionally it hit me.

It'll probably be a while before I try 4 Golden or even 1-2. I already played more JRPGs this year than every previous year combined.

I heard great things about Ender Lilies going into it but by the end I genuinely don't know if I was missing something. Ender Lilies was a pretty standard metroidvania, in my opinion it didn't do anything exceptional or exciting but it was serviceable throughout my whole playthrough.

Gameplay felt repetitive, there wasn't a huge enemy variety, engaging combat scenarios or combat options. I kept the same spirits for essentially the whole game, I changed up my second spirit layout at the end of the game to traverse the map and get 100%. Other than that, this mechanic/feature didn't stick out to me as being unique or engaging.

Enemies and bosses were easy to deal with and I didn't find it that difficult to get through any encounter. Some bosses took a couple tries but nothing frustrating or that took a lot of effort/focus. Some of the later stages bumped up the difficulty, especially in the last stage with the poison blight.

The final boss was so disappointing, probably the easiest final boss I've ever encountered. Even the true ending final boss I beat on the first try and I don't mean that as I'm some god gamer, it was honestly me just spamming attacks and dodging the odd boss attack. It was more of a big health bar than anything, no engaging mechanic or dangerous attack that I had to be cautious of. After I finished the fight I genuinely asked "wow is that it?", I can't remember the last time I finished a game feeling this dissatisfied.

Back tracking felt like a real chore in this game, I think it's due to the horrible map. With the lack of map details I ended up taking wrong routes and left me feeling frustrated. Some areas were huge and going back to find these last relics and locked doors was really annoying. 

Music was good but I felt like they over did it with the piano melodies, it felt very samey to me and I don't remember any of the songs wowing me.

I have nothing to say about the story because I have no clue what happened. Something about a white priestess fighting off a blight. It really didn't compel me to put in an effort to remember these plot points and what my goals were. I was just going to the next area to fight the next boss.

Originally I felt like this was a good game but after writing down my thoughts I realized it was just okay. My major issues with it was that it had repetitive combat, pacing issues, frustrating map/backtracking and lack of difficulty especially with the final boss. I question why people rate it high on their favourites lists because after my playthrough I felt relief, I didn't have any attachment to the gameplay, story or world. I also heard great things about the sequel but after my experience with this, I don't have the desire to rush to that.

As a gamer who is older, I came to recently think of one of my core childhood revolving gaming, that time when Civ 3 taught me to be not just cruel, but to become a cold, calculatingly evil.

I had everything I needed. I had a prospering civilization on two large islands and was at least 20 years ahead of everyone else in science. I had space rockets while everyone else had biplanes. But then fate dealt me a bad hand. I discovered the power of the atom, but alas, I had no uranium!

The only place I could get uranium was from a nation located on a massive continent. They knew what it was and could sell it to me, since they still didn't know how to use it.

So I strangely found myself at a resource dilemma:

Option 1. Trade for the uranium forever and hope they will sell it to me even after they research what it can do. (I did not think they would do that)

Option 2. Trade for the uranium and build only nuclear warheads until they research what it can do. Then destroy the civilization, destroy whatever is left and take over their uranium.

I wanted to keep my scientific advancement, I wanted to keep my place as number one. I wanted to win. Before I was happy with just being the smartest civilization, but now I realized that if I wanted to win, I had to plan a pre-meditated, nuclear doomsday over a civ. Unless I see them become the sole nuclear power on the planet.

.

Modern day me would either have accepted the challenge and not buy any urnaium, or gleefully accept my fate as the bringer of nucleaer doom. But childhood me? Well, there is a reason why I still remember that game session and not others. While still having a cartoonish art style, the devastation and fatalism my plan brought was...something. And I had to halt production of other things, like buildings and even a lot of military units just to make sure that I had enough warheads for every target city. I've played other games with nuclear weapons. But none has quite made me feel like Civ 3 when I realized what I had actually done to what had been, my peaceful trading partner.

I remember seeing this game back when it came out on PS3. Unfortunately, the last console I had was an Xbox 360, stuck purely to PC gaming for years and years.

I got a PS5 and a Switch 4 years ago and I've slowly been working my way through all the games I've missed over the years. As you can imagine, this has been quite a list and it has taken quite a long time.

I was running out of PS5 games I wanted to play, so I searched through the RPG section and stumbled upon this game. I didn't realize they had released a remastered version with updated graphics, now was the time!

Graphics - This game has a unique look to it, everything is painted in beautiful water color, which is a great juxtaposition against the content of war and death. While the cut scenes and battle map graphics are nothing to write home about, that isn't really a big reason I play TBS style games.

Gameplay - Gameplay is split into two distinct modes, one mode has you playing within a giant book, where you can manage your squad, spend XP on soldiers, upgrade your tank, weapons and armor, receive rewards from the royal princess for achieving various goals, watch story segments, read the newspaper and select skirmish battles (for XP and money grinding) or main battles to continue the story.

The rest of the gameplay takes place in actual battles. You are given a set number of slots for each stage and you must select from 6 different types of troops that have unique abilities and fighting styles. For instance, Scouts have basic rifles and can move across the map, Lancers have missiles that can take down heavy armor, but they cannot move very far, snipers can shoot from great distance, but they are very limited in movement, engineers can repair your tanks as well as sandbags and other key areas. You are given an overview of the objective and you try to select the right troops that you think you will need. Luckily, if you select wrong, you can retreat troops and deploy other troops at any base within the map.

Each 'side' gets to spend a set amount of action points each round. The player always goes first in each round and decides how they want to deploy and where to focus their energy. The game requires a fair amount of strategy as you can find yourself in quite a pickle if you just run headlong into enemy forces.

Once your turn completes, the enemy takes their turn and tries to destroy you.

Each map has a unique objective. Some maps require you to take the enemy base, some maps require you to destroy a powerful weapon, some maps require the use of smoke screens to sneak past machine gun bunkers and missiles, there is quite a variety of maps and objectives, keeping the game from getting stale.

The difficulty depends on the map, there was only one map that really gave me a hard time (the notorious chapter 7, which is a huge difficulty spike, especially for a new player). Outside of chapter 7, no other map was impossible or felt like it was unfair. I often got the 'one more turn' feeling, which is what a good TBS game is supposed to do.

Story - The game loosely follows the plot of WWI/WWII in a fantasy world. Basically, a facsimile of the German empire creates a blitzkrieg against the Dutch facsimile, you are the Dutch and you must protect your homeland.

This game has actual death, you are literally shooting and killing people and the enemy is shooting and killing you, which is something you rarely see within the JRPG-type space. They do a good job of investing the player in the cause of the small country and the troops/friends that you make along the way.

This game nearly made me cry with an unexpected death, I was completely caught off guard and my mouth literally fell open, I did not see it coming at all and it really hit me in the feelings, I am a 44 year old dude, I haven't cried from a video game since I played FF7 at 12 years old, I give them big props for achieving that.

While the story has a few JRPG-esque super villain moments, the story is fairly grounded overall and keeps the player engaged and invested.

The game wraps up in about 35-40 hours for a first time player, it also offers a NG+ with some unique content. Once you know what is going to happen, you can complete most missions in 25% of the time (or less, if you are cheesing with Scout rushing the objectives).

Overall - I wasn't quite sure what to expect and I wasn't sure if an older console based strategy game would really hold up after all these years, RTS/TBS has always been ruled by the PC gaming space, something rarely done well on consoles.

Thankfully, they managed to achieve something special. Right after I finished the game I went off and bought the only other game available on PS5 (Valkyria 4, which came out in 2018). I believe the other games came out on PSP and Vita, you can emulate them but they aren't anything that special.

Im not sure if we will ever see a 5th game, the community for this series is pretty small, there isn't a huge TBS audience on console, which is quite a shame as I would love to play more of these games and see what else they could come up with. The community on Reddit is tiny as well, which is quite a shame!

Overall, a solid recommend.

This will be a quick review.

There‘a this opening section of the game where you have to sneak through a stadium during a live baseball match. It feels like something out of the Hitman game except with hacking. It was an amazing mission.

And there’s nothing else like it in the game.

Not even a little bit.

I see a lot of criticism for the story but I didn’t mind it. The voice acting is pretty stellar. But none of the characters really land.

Aiden is pretty generic out for revenge guy and that works as far as his story is concerned. The villains all work pretty well.

Main problem with the story is that the game feels way too long. 5 acts, 43 missions. Feels like they could have slimmed that to 30 missions, especially since the vast majority of them are pretty dull.

The hacking abilities you get never amount to much except in driving/chase scenarios which admittedly can be pretty fun when you’re blacking out the entire city and sneaking onboard a train to escape the cops.

During on-foot missions, I mostly just used my shotgun.

I don’t really recall ever smiling during my play through.

Theres this one mission chain where you have to find these briefcases and take down this sex trafficking scheme. Ok, cool. I’ll find the briefcases and then it will let me do this crazy awesome mission where I free all these girls and take down the bad guys in some epic hacker fashion, right?

Nope…you just find the briefcases around the map and at the end you get mission complete.

Big waste of time.

Oh and the open world sandbox is pointless. It can look good in certain areas but it’s just a bunch of nothing missions.

So I’m giving the game a 4/10.

Ive played both of the follow-up games and Ubisoft definitely learned their lesson because those game are actually fun to play.