The Walker has guns that feel nice to shoot and fairly impressive visuals, but the game just doesn't feel finished. There are sound effects completely missing at times, maybe 5 enemy types total, a magic system that looks cool but doesn't really seem to work, and the game is described as an "adventure game" but you stand stationary in one spot and use a sword and gun to dispatch waves of enemies annnnd that's it. One rather frustrating issue is that when selecting levels, the game shifts from VR to standard view, you watch the headset buffering symbol, a loading screen comes up, the game loads, it converts back to VR (another black screen with a buffering symbol) and then the level starts. The times weren't long (I was playing on PS5), but I can only imagine they're slightly lengthier on PS4 systems.

I was given upgraded weapons at the end of my first completion of the game, but it looks like you just use those to go through the game again with a slightly higher difficulty. I think I'm done 😅

I rented this game when I was maybe 7 years old, and despite the kind of blah visuals (for its time and now), and its quest based structure not providing much grand motivation compared to the sweeping stories of RPGs like FF that I was used to, it's stuck with me.

Played it recently, and it's still very interesting and very charming despite being janky, slow, and not telling you a whole lot. Maybe it's Mitsuda's soundtrack, maybe it's the Legend of Dragoon-ish combat, maybe it's that the game is about helping people: I'm not sure, but there's something here.

The peak of sixth-generation Mortal Kombat games.

Macabre stages, dark jams to punctuate the combat, plenty of content to unlock, hara-kiris (fatality yourself before you opponent can!!), a fun Puzzle Fighter knock-off, Kombat Chess mode, and a janky but super charming way to explore Mortal Kombat's realms in the open-world "Konquest" mode which makes up for its shortcomings with what I can only describe as a N64-style relaxing ambiance featuring a night and day cycle and plenty of battles against a myriad of fighters from the MK universe.

Plus, the intro is one of the hypest cutscenes of all time, pure kino

Not usually a fan of Battle Royale games (or multiplayer in general, really), but this has me hooked.

Normal battle royale staples like gunplay and navigating the map are already good here but are then elevated by the incredible mobility of the vampire races (scaling buildings, sliding, huge leaps, wall jumping) and their unique abilities for combat and movement.

Vampire the Masquerade doesn't just serve as the game's skeleton, its lore is incorporated stem to stern and there's a menu full of information that gets filled as you play the game and fulfill combat challenges and fetch quests during multiplayer for NPCs in a central hub. You can also give yourself heals and buffs by drinking the blood of humans mid-match and performing a finisher on other players isn't just for style: "diableries" from VtM are how you end the lives of other vampires, powering you up with another slot for blood buffs. Outside of ranked play you can also store up to two "lives", and when you're down to your last chance, you can carefully skulk the streets to regain a life by finding the right human to drink.

The game looks ridiculously good for a 40 player multiplayer game with a huge map, and runs great on PS5 (60FPS/1440p or 30FPS/4K) and is optimized well for PC. Right now at launch there's certainly an advantage to PC players who can use mouse and keyboard at 144FPS against 60FPS controller users (with minimal aim assist), but 120FPS is something they want to add to PS5, and they're looking at aim correction balance as well. I've still managed to win many times on PS5 though 🤷

Overall I'm incredibly impressed with this game; it's one that I'd completely written off because of Battle Royale stigma and the dire state of Bloodlines 2 development, but I'm really glad I gave this a chance