A great remaster from Nightdive as always. Maybe a bit short for its price, considering I beat it in 4 1/2 hours though. But more importantly, this unlike Tomb Raider 1-3 remasters, are as playable now as they were on release. Maybe more so with improved mouse controls. The technical advantages over doom are quite impressive for the time. Though I wish they'd do a bit more with it and maybe make the map layout make a bit more sense. Both as fun and confusing as I remember it from when I first played it.

I'm genuinely starting to think that nostalgia might actually be a mental disorder. I can't fathom the high ratings on this. And for some reason it's much higher than the individual games. At their time they were ok, though I never got into it much aside from playing through the demo on PC. But by todays standards, this is just unadulterated jank. It quickly becomes a chore with its unfathomably poor camera that seems to intentionally work against you. When firing at enemies the camera often looks at you rather than your target, in small spaces it flips around and messes up your controls. A really bad example of this is in the first TR2 map. As you walk into a room, two boulders come after you, and without pausing the action the camera goes to them. The issue being that as that happens, it also reverts your controls so you end up running towards them. Then it suddenly switches to a view in front of you, so if you're holding forward, you're running right into them. With tank controls it works, but aside of resident evil, I just can't use them. Especially for an acrobatic game like this. It's just so stiff and slow that everything is a chore. I can't believe no one in the making of this thought to put modern controls to analogue and tank to digital, or have the one unused controller button be a switch between them.

Then there's the button delay. I ended the first game with over 600 saves. All thanks to half my jumps not registering and I ended up saving for pretty much every single jump.

As far as the combat goes, it's as bad as anything else. Enemy ai is simply enemies moving towards you and balling up all around you as the camera spins around trying to track one. Though with more than one you can't even tell who. This is another thing that probably works better on tank controls as you can move backwards and shoot, but then again you lose the ability to run circles around certain enemies and shoot them in the side as they try to turn towards you. The first half, at least of tr1, isn't that bad as you can usually find a safe spot to shoot from. But once they start shooting back, I have no idea how it's intended to be played without just trading health.

The only reason I don't rate this below mediocre is that it does retain the original for the people that enjoy it, though the framerate for the classic look is unplayable. And I did manage to get through it despite all its issues.

My biggest concern about this game isn't that I didn't like it all that much, but more that this might have killed the genre. At least in triple A form. The mechanics and such are all here, Taking inspiration all the way from System Shock to Dishonored. But thinking that replaying the same 4 maps over and over would make for a good single player game is baffling. It took me forever to actually finish this as I got so sick of traversing the same areas over and over, doing more or less the same things. And the whole loop thing feels like an excuse to limit the play area this much as you don't even really feel it much when playing. And as a gimmick, I wouldn't even say it's remotely original as it's existed for as long as saving and loading has. It's the same thing, but this just takes longer.

Movement mechanic and such are for the most part solid, but I'm not as big of a fan of having such limited abilities per map. And the guns just don't feel right. Mainly the lack of a good silenced weapon as you don't want to fight every single enemy each time you go through the same area. Just give me a powerful pistol with a silencer, not a nail gun I have to charge where the damage fall of starts at 10 feet.

Tekken has been all downhill since 3 for me. And this is no exception. Online is laggier than dark souls pvp. They've added a simple mode that's designed specifically for mashing, and it's actually usable in online, so why even bother with that anyway. The heat system etc just makes the game messy and more like Street fighter in the worst possible way. And I really hate the anime cutscenes in the middle of matches for certain moves. There is just 0 rason to take control away from a player in a fighting game. Then again, none of this matters as it's unplayable online and there's nothing fun to do offline.

No arguing it's a good game, but I'm also pretty tired of playing the same game over and over. And with a much bigger game like this, would it hurt to have some more user friendly interface to tell you where you've been, what bosses you've killed and how many items are left in an area. Or just even a quest log. As I don't think I could even get halfway through this without a guide. Coming back to it after 6 months I almost felt like just starting over. Every other open world game has this, but From seems to just refuse to be innovative after they struck gold with demon's souls.

Also, stop it with the platforming and massive bosses. Jumping from small platforms or crawling around thin branches is ok for one area, as it's been in every game, but here it just gets tiresome. As for the large scale bosses, I don't understand how anyone enjoys those fights. Run half a mile to reach the, they jump or fly away, then you have to go hunt them down. Then they do aoe attacks on the ground or swoop in from the sky, but your camera is always in the wrong spot. Or you can't even see your character while locked on. Then they push you around while you already don't know where you are as you try to swing at their feet while a wing or something keeps you from reaching it. It just gets so tiresome. And if they want to keep having these bosses, at least try to design it well.

Looking at the achievement dates, this took me 14 years to complete. But there was over a decade between sessions. I do realize why I gave up on it though. The gunplay is stellar, at least on release, but the rest is mostly nothing and a lot of it. Way to many missions where you shoot a couple guys or pick someone up followed by endless driving. Often taking you across the map and back for little reason other than padding. And the driving is far from good. I really don't understand why these games are even open world. It makes for a good backdrop, but with the missions all being connected, I never explored the world at all. Just drove to a gun fight, then back home to get to bed and repeat the next day.

I've never been good at beat-em-ups, but I do like the idea of them. But I thought the games would have progressed more in the last 30 years. Still the same flat characters that you can't hit if they're an atoms' length above or below you. I get that it want's to stay 2D and I really like the look of this, but constantly missing enemies that are seemingly right in front of you is endlessly frustrating. Maybe even more so because the CPU can't make that mistake. And I couldn't do any other character than Cherry, as none of the others could run and it makes managing enemies around you a pain. I'm also not a fan the lack of crowd control. I know there's the super move, but after getting slapped right after using it a certain amount of times, that became a no go. How people play this beyond normal is beyond me. It was fine on normal, even if the last stage with its endless lengths did start to stretch it. And there's 4 after that. The videos I've seen of higher difficulties seem to be cheesing the same move over and over and knowing where every enemy spawns. I guess it's possible, but I can't fathom how anyone gets any joy from that grind.

If you're in to this old school gameplay I completely get why you'd love this. But as someone who rarely plays them, I really feel the whole genre needs an overhaul. Add some move lists in there, let me do crowd control with grapples. Most importantly though, add some lock on or at least an indicator if I'll hit the person 1 pixel away from me. Even Tekken force had that some almost 30 years ago.

The game looks fantastic, but apart from that I don't see much in the way of improvements since playing 2. And the focus here seems to be majorly on story over anything else. Just endless cutscenes and dialogue, some of them not even skippable. I think the first 4 chapters don't even have you firing a gun. I was really looking forward to this from how much I liked the first 2 games, but even if I bought it on release, I didn't bother finishing it until now.

I played the game on crushing as I remember that was one of the things that made the previous so enjoyable, but I guess other games have improved a lot unlike this series. As this was a chore. There's no running, just a sluggish walk, and you can barely be out of cover for a second before you die. I died endless times to simple things like trying to take cover, just for Drake to roll out of cover or off a cliff. The game gives you barely any ammo despite the enemies having infinite bullets on top of grenades. And after every fight it's a guessing game and a chore to not only find ammo for your weapons, but also to guess what weapons to pick up for the upcoming fight that could be anything. In a couple of situations I even had to start fights with no more than 2-3 bullets and it's near impossible to get to more without dying.

90% padding where you just walk around and talk, often not knowing where it is that the game wants you to go, 10% dated gameplay. Jumping up what quickly starts feeling like the same walls over and over and gunfights that don't feel balanced for the difficulty. All ending with an endless qte boss fight that's as fun as Dragon's Lair and to top it off you have to play through an epilogue chapter where nothing happens and 15 minutes of credits just to get back to the menu. Much too preoccupied with being an interactive film than an enjoyable gaming experience.

If this was the first Mimimi game I'd played, I'd probably be a lot more positive to it. The gameplay and controls are as solid as any other and include all the improvements that came with Desperados 3. But as a continuation of this "series", I'm not thrilled. Instead of huge maps, we now get smaller maps that we only visit a fraction of in each mission. It's a lot easier than the other games, something I'm guessing comes from the fact that you can here play with any character you choose and each mission has to be completable with them. So a lot of the design that was in the previous games is sorely lacking here. It all feels so generic and almost randomly generated. And there's way to much faff going on between the missions. Constantly walking from character to character to talk to them and progress a story I care nothing about. All I wanted was about 9 huge missions that were designed with your set loadout in mind. Instead I got almost the complete opposite. As far as the genre goes, they still know what they're doing, I just don't hope this is the direction their games will follow in the future. At least just keep it to this franchise and give us a Desperados 4 that's more like its prequel than this.

Never that much of a fan of these games, especially since I'm not competent in the DnD system it's built on, but this really grew on me despite a LOT of annoyances. It's mainly my lack of knowledge of DnD rules that annoy, but a lot of smaller things also get in the way. Like how I chose a rogue for my main character, but stealth didn't really work out. A lot of characters I tried to sneak up on would just initiate a cutscene and ruin it and in general the whole luck base of it all isn't great for stealth. Or how after a successful pickpocket, people will still blame you for it and you have to pay them or win another dice roll. The dice rolls in general are pretty dumb, making so many skills just based on luck. With most of my magic never going above 60% in hit rate and healing is pathetic, making it so my whole game was almost completely melee. And that's another annoyance with the class I picked, I get one attack per round, while my warrior can get up to 7, making it no real reason not to just make a party of 4 warriors. The list goes on really with these complains throughout, but none the less, I completed it in little over a week or so and got a lot of enjoyment out of it too. And a big reason as to why I'm not rating it lower is that if I did the research beforehand, I probably would have had a lot more fun.