Where it Shines:
Card System - 9/10
Replayability - 8/10
Custom Runs - 7/10

The Good:
StS is undoubtedly the gold standard for Rogue Like Deckbuilders. It deserves the praise it gets, for the most part.
Runs feel satisfying, you learn quickly, and the relics, shops, events, cards, etc, all feel really fun. It's definitely the "Just one more run..." game.
The game on steam also has an incredible modding community and there are tons of extra characters, modes, modifiers, and other changes to breathe life into the game once it gets stale.

The Bad:
For all it's praises, the game really does have a lot of flaws. It's easy to just 4 star review this and move on, but I want to highlight areas where I think it really desperately needs some attention.
- music is serviceable, but very generic
- artwork feels like an early 2000's flash game. You'd have expect to see homestarrunner and his gang pop in
- only 4 main characters, half of which are very basic and make runs too easy, the other half of which are overly complicated and runs feel like a coin toss
- good run customization, but the game needs a sandbox mode where you can experiment without restriction
- ported a ton of times over the last 6 years but no real improvements made at all
- some relics and run modifiers just flat out suck. Like trash garbage, unusable.

Summary:
So is it good or not? I think base StS, although hands down is the best out there, still has flaws that drag it down. However, it's still fun overall to play. Will you get bored of it? Sure, but that could be 20 hours in, 30, 40, 100...it depends on how into it you are. And then you can mod it to get even more life. It's probably the most average game I've put over a hundred hours into and counting, which is maybe why I'm so critical of it. I want it to be better. I want it to sound better, look better, play better. Because people keep making rogue like deckbuilders, and they keep trying to reinvent the wheel when StS has the fundamentals down pat. I just want someone to copy StS and give it the polish it deserves.

Note on my ratings:

Treat my stars like Michelin Stars - just having one means the game is worth playing in some way.

1/2 ⭐: hot trash garbage, since you can't do zero stars here
⭐: below average, needs work
⭐⭐: average
⭐⭐⭐: pretty good
⭐⭐⭐⭐: excellent
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: all time favourite

its insane how this shit is still the goat 20 years later. this must be like the fifth or sixth time i've replayed prime, and even now i think it's the only game i love so much that i can actually sit through and finish it in 1-2 sittings. it's a massive comfort game for me and a huge source of nostalgia - but i will admit, every time i finish a new playthrough i find more flaws with it. still, this shit is really nice.

this is probably the best example of a remastered game that looks how you remember it as a kid. they improved upon this game's environments SO fucking well. prime was already a game that looked great for its time, and the remake amps that up to 11 - imo one of the nicest looking games on the switch. i feel like even now the amount of work that went into this game is unappreciated, it's really incredible how they dropped this one and then dipped.

combat feels great as always, and I love how many different control schemes they provided. i was so used to the wii pointer controls that i couldn't imagine using anything else, but i got used to twin stick shooting pretty easily. there were a few times where i fumbled with switching beams or some shit, but it didn't bug me too bad. shooting feels great, platforming gets better and better the further along you go, shit is just NICE man. this is a primo-ass game right here.

i think with this playthrough, though, it finally hit me just how awful the backtracking can feel at times. even when compared to other metroid games, there were plenty of moments that had me scratching my head as to why they'd make me retrace my steps so far for a single upgrade. easily the worst offender was the game leading you directly to the crashed frigate and waiting until you're halfway through it before saying "oops uwu you need the gravity suit get fucked" and making you backtrack through some pretty terrible underwater platforming. then the gravity suit is halfway across the fucking planet! how would i have assumed to go that way without a guide or waiting around for the game to literally show me where it is? if this was literally any other game, i'd be foaming at the mouth over having to spend so much time backtracking - but prime is lucky that i hold it so dearly. it gets a pass, even though i didn't like that shit.

also the x ray and thermal visors are somehow even worse on my eyes than they were in the original release. that's pretty bad too, i always hated using those. but both of these were also issues that were present in the original version, so it's not like i can fault them for it now. these are my only real complaints tbh.

i still think this is one of the best FPS games out there, and one that everyone should try at least once if they haven't already. seriously, if you haven't played prime you gotta rectify that shit!!

I wanna start by saying, there will never be a fair comparison to the first playthrough i did of this game. That was a totally unique experience and it took hold of my life for a solid month. It was an amazing 80 hours of video games that I remember very fondly. Every subsequent playthrough of this game, while still captivating, makes me enjoy this game less.

I think this is a very well made open world game that suffers from its "souls" qualities strangely enough. Everything up to leyndell feels perfectly executed and balanced with the true highlight in my eyes being both stormveil and volcano manor. These areas harken back to classic soulsbourne design both in their layout but also their verticality. The bosses in all these places also feel like legitimate bosses, bar morgotts sudden affinity for string cancelling like hes fucking option selecting a jump kick in a mortal kombat game. Bosses and late game spikes is where this game really starts to fall apart for me.

Once you hit mountaintop of the giants the game becomes a free for all of fuckery. Zamorian knights welcome you to your first ruins on the snowcaps and send a clear message of whats to come. Enemies are now easily 2 shotting you with 50 vigor, and the areas themselves become bloated arenas to stream with on torrents back. I never found fire giant to be particularly difficult for what its worth, I just found him boring. I love lookin at his tootsies as i slowly whittle down his enourmous health bar.

So you finish that area and get sent to Farum Azula. The first look at it is awe inspiring. Crumbling ruins held up by gigantic tornados echoing the era before the erdtree. So what do you get then? Beast men that have a 6 chain combo that can melt you if you take 2 hits. This becomes yet another area to scrambe and get your shit before being met with
1) godskin due
2) malekith. (fuck this bossfight)
Nothing needs to be said ab the duo that hasnt already been said. Summon and sleep them. Malekith on the other hand was infuriating. His first phase chains incantations and swipes with nearly flawless dodging and the smallest windows of punishes. His second phase is EVEN more tedious with him slinging through the collumns like some spiderman wannabe while youre health bar decreases exponentially when hit with his red blade attacks. so much fun!

Returning to the burnt capital you do a gauntlet of FP spam the man, chain combo godfrey, and a duo fight that perfectly embodies how I feel about this game. Gideon is just a meme fight to me, ive never really struggled, but it is funny to see him chain rings of light, giant glintstone and then rykards rancor without dropping a sweat. I find the first phase of godfreys fight blanaced as the game has been teaching you to jump over certain attacks, his second phase is what drives me mad. Get hit by one horrible hitbox grab? good luck trying to get half your health back as he zooms around chaining 3 attack strings into his 7 hit combo string!

And so comes the final boss. Radagon is a beautiful dance between the two strongest warriors in the lands. He can cancel his attacks much like every boss, but they dont leave you with no health, and IF they do, that big holy lightning bolt getting your ass is entirely your fault. Your reward for learning this incredible fight is the most drawn out, stupid end game fight in this series. Homing missles, sword swipes, elden stars, jumping over three circles, good job tarnished, now do it again because the dumbass is all the way on the other side again. I dont even find this fight challenging, its just tedious and boring.

I think theres a lot to be said of the freedom this game gives you. You can make any weapon work as long as you have the build to back it for the most part. Summons are there to help you out of the buttfuckery that this game presents you with, but it often trivializes these encounters, so it feels unearned. Theres a very clear split in how to play this game and its why I am so conflicted on it. For this fourth run I tried soloing as many bosses as I could without losing my mind but with Malenia, horaux loux, malekith, mohg, I was so upset with the design of these fights I summoned for my sanity. This world feels so rewarding in that you really can explore everything that you see, and chances are youll get something okay out of it, but its the spectacle of it all that upsets me. Fromsoft really made these bosses feel like they are gods fighitng for their lives, but in that process created a wildly unbalanced game.

All this being said I really cannot wait for the DLC because it will be that first experience that I will cherish, much like my first character in the base game. I am sure I will find similar complaints in the DLC but its the world I love in this game, not necessarily the gameplay itself.

This game man... apart from 2 other titles (ratchet/returnal), this feels next gen. The dualsense vibrating on its sticks indicating something coming out you, the sound design in both the controller and the headphones, as well as the incredible lighting in this game raised my hopes for the coming games in the ps5 library. There are plenty of annoyances in this game that bluepoint couldve tinkered around with. Consumable healing, world tendency confusion, the 4-2 runback lol but even with these quirks i find its what sets this game apart from the other fromsoft titles. I will die on the hill that it has the best lore and score of any soulsbourne game fight me punks

this game isn't outright bad, i just really didn't vibe with it. i'd probably feel a lot worse about this one if i paid full price for it.

even though it's decent as a puzzle game, i really hated how you had to actively find diamonds to proceed, and there were only a few levels with actual fun gimmicks that weren't recycled to death. they also padded the hell out of it by reusing bosses and level concepts too.

worst of all though (and the reason i put this game off for almost a decade) this shit just gives me the absolute worst motion sickness of any game i've played. i don't know what it is - just a few minutes of having this thing on my tv was enough to make me feel like i was gonna puke. i know probably nobody else has had this issue with this game, so. sorry for dragging the average score down but that definitely did factor in to how good of a time i had.

there just wasn't anything i really enjoyed about this one - it's got a funky concept, but there are a dozen other puzzle platformers i'd rather play instead.