This game is such a grind... I don't really play JRPGs, but man, this was a slog. The combat is slow, the exploration is slow, the story is slow. You constantly die and have to respawn and get back to where you were. The game throws maze-like environments filled with enemies at you and expects you to get through them just to experience more unfunny humour and give you more party members to make the combat even more difficult and complex? Just why?

Getting the second party member was a game changer, because death actually had a consequence now. It set me back so significantly that even holding down-left and pressing the turbo button couldn't fix my problems in a few minutes.

Okay, time for the actual review. The music was pretty good, and the premise was interesting. The pacing, however, was way too slow, with me logging over ten hours to get to Threed, at which point I just gave up. The combat mostly involved spamming damage and healing until I ran out, dying, respawning, and going back to where I was. Essentially, I'd fill up my inventory with healing items, try to physically go somewhere to progress the plot, get lost, get caught in a bunch of battles, die, and start over. It was horrid. The story ended up massively losing pace, and I pretty much dreaded playing the game until finally, after I was able to get out of Twoson, I realised that I hadn't had fun within the last five hours and quit on a high.

Basically, I don't get this game. I can die a hundred times in Dark Souls and come back until I can SL1 +0 No-hit Four Kings, but that's because in that game, victory is never more than ten minutes away, and defeat is always my fault for making a poor decision or having poor reflexes. This game feels like a brick wall, where you have to continuously punch it until you break through, only to reveal another, thicker wall for you to hit your head against. I'm more than open to discussion in the comments, but don't expect me to have anything meaningful to say about the story or the symbolism of the game, because the gameplay prevented me from getting to them.

You build fortifications, the zombies come, and your weapons are not strong enough to kill them, so you lose and have to spend V-bucks to buy lootboxes to get crafting materials to craft better weapons. It's complete bullshit. There is basically no gameplay beyond running around the map looking for things to collect and then shooting brain-dead zombie hordes. There's just no reason to play this.

Oh, there's a Batlle Royale mode, too. I don't like the building mechanics and the guns feel worse than PUBG. Everything else from my review of PUBG applies. Battle Royale is just a slightly more elaborate cash grab than Save the World.

The battle royale format is the most confusing thing ever... Why would anyone want to take the classic deathmatch formula and add lots of looting (I hate looting in games) and running around being bored? It adds tension, sure, but you can get just as much tension from constant pressure — always wondering if there's someone around the next corner. In this game, you can spend minutes at a time simply hiding and waiting, so the tension comes from the possibility of losing the time you invested, but that formula literally relies on wasting your time.

As for the gameplay itself, having revisited it two years after I initially played it, it's actually surprisingly good. Obliterating people with the shotguns is fun, shooting unaware people running from place to place with a sniper rifle is also fun, and I've gotten 12-kill matches (where I finished second place) so I can't exactly not recommend the gameplay.

With that said, the issue of finishing second place is always prevalent. When there's five people left, the first two to engage will both get killed, as they'd be revealing their locations. Because I'm the guy who gets >5 kills in every match, I always end up shooting first in those crucial last moments, and always get shot in the back right after eliminating the third-last person. I just don't think this format is very good.

The puzzles really pulled the experience down for me; They were never particularly difficult, nor imaginative, mostly just tedious with how much pushing those blocks needed to get them into the correct positions, and just how many times the same pattern had to be repeated. Some puzzles were also plain obtuse, making me resort to a walkthrough to finish the game, something I don't often do (then again, I don't often play games with such an abundance of puzzles).

The combat was fine, with a snappy dodge and a nice, simple string to be used by mashing square, though I found it strange how the main mechanic of stunning enemies and then needing to find a way to kill them was mostly made obsolete less than halfway through (not going to elaborate further for fear of spoilers).

The atmosphere was quite good, with sound design showcasing the upper limits of the Playstation. Playing it on an emulator on my phone due to not having access to any other gaming hardware, I was about as immersed as can be. Had it not been for the puzzles breaking up the pace of the game, it would have been a pretty enjoyable 5-or-so-hour experience. As is, I found a lot of the game to be a chore, to the point where I didn't even bother finding all the glyphs (surprising considering my affinity for exploration games like King's Field). Something about my reward for exploration being another tedious puzzle and an ability I would never use didn't quite tickle my fancy.

Overall, if you like puzzles and/or games with a thick atmosphere (as I do) I would recommend to at least check this game out. This game has at least made me curious about the rest of the series, so it's not exactly bad. However, the tedium of doing pushblock puzzles whilst enemies continuously spawn to beat you up and slow the process of pushing blocks down really wore down on me, pushing the game's rating down to just average.

A nice expansion to the base game, expanding the scope of the mechanics whilst turning down the scope of the story somewhat, making it a bit more... personal, maybe? The story still doesn't really make much sense, but at least it doesn't expect you to be the middle-man in a (sovereign) state-wide conflict.

This game sends you on a quest to find Ozee and stop him from getting his hands on a super weapon. There is more freedom regarding diverging paths, more varied playstyles, and generally more fun. If you liked the base game, you'll definitely like this.

Also, there's a neat OFF reference in here, whether intentional or not. Bonus points for that.

After 23 hours of running around confusingly-designed environments stabbing tons of enemies to death with a washing pole, I can't handle this anymore. This is basically the King's Field III of the Souls series (rather fittingly, it's also the third Souls game) — bloated level design, lore which largely disregards subtlety, and a slower, less enjoyable core gameplay experience (fortunately, the frame rate is not garbage this time around). Overall, this game shows that FromSoft lost their way with the series, focusing on 'epic lore' and 'big bosses' instead of atmosphere and subtle world building, but at least Dark Souls III doesn't feel so sluggish to play. Would not recommend.

Update: I beat the game start-to-finish in preparation for Elden Ring. It doesn't really get better later on. It's the easiest, and crappiest Souls game. Would not recommend.

Pretty much the polar opposite of the first game in a few ways. This game is pretty much entirely filler — you'll be playing through the same stages over and over just to reach a disappointing end, treated to a 'story' that hardly even begun. This game could be squashed down to be the same length as the first SUPERHOT, if you just cut out all of the repeating content required to get to the ending.
Overall, it's just disappointing. This could easily pass of as an expansion pack for the first game, with some new levels and slightly fancier graphics. The gameplay is somewhat more varied this time, though I feel that the format of the game really brings it down (imagine Hotline Miami except you can tank four shots before dying, but once you die, you have to start the entire 'scene' over. It's just a bad fit).

Overall, the game feels bloated and pointless. It really is just MORE SUPERHOT.

While this game does tend to drag on when you have to move six guys across a level, I find that at its best, the gameplay can be quite engaging and even exciting.

However, the real highlight of the game is not in the gameplay, but in the ludo narrative harmony. You see, many games expect you to care about the main character, but very few pull it off as well as this game — I have had people with 50+ kills die because of my recklessness, and their squad members had to carry the torch. By the end, all but one of my long-time soldiers had perished, solidifying the surviving one as an absolute badass in my mind (this was helped by the fact that she could deal 30 damage in a single turn with her shotgun). Overall, assuming you don't savescum, this game weaves its themes of empathy and valuing individual lives into its gameplay rather well, and I grew more attached to the assault-class operative 'Loco' than I did to anyone in Divinity: Original Sin 2. Just for managing to create a real connection between me and the characters within the game, I have to give XCOM: Enemy Unkown four stars. Maybe if it did a bit more to explore the themes I noticed in gameplay, ans if it was a bit less tedious, the ranking would be higher. Maybe XCOM 2 does it better...?

While it is undoubtedly bigger than Hard Time by virtue of having a larger world, as well as giving you access to super powers, I found the campaign to be a bit drawn out, wherein it's just walking back and forth across the map for no good reason. Also, the fact that you are not in prison means that there isn't an inherent ecosystem where it would make sense to get into fights. Overall, it's essentially the same as Hard Time, and while it can definitely offer some fun due to its ridiculousness, you wouldn't be missing out by skipping this game.

As one of the people that got tangled up in the fandom of this game when I was younger, this game definitely changed my life. Just for that, it deserves some credit.

Moving past meta matters, the game itself actually has some legitimately funny dialogue, great music, tons of depth in terms of hidden content, and some surprisingly heartfelt moments.

It's a real phenomenon of a game, and its impact both on the video game landscape as well as the lives of its fans is pretty hard to understate — it's certainly not a game to miss.