Much like this review, the game started out very positive. The game looks absolutely fantastic. And the way they integrated the enemies, areas etc. from the original is absolutely masterful. And all this at a constant 120fps (though there is clearly some sort of resolution scaling or other such things running in the background here to achieve this.) The art team really deserve all the praise in the world for this.

The game started out very fun, with the new battle system feeling very fitting for the first few chapters. But once you get a bit further in it gets downright infuriating. Teammates are absolutely useless if you're not controlling them, with their ATB bar barely moving if not controlled, and all enemies will attack you 90% of the time. Meaning that in boss fights especially, you are constantly plummeted with attacks. Constant aoe attacks, shot from off-screen, or spamming freeze toad or what have you to make it impossible to do much. I think the main issue is that once you progress a bit, you control 3 people and you just get overwhelmed with attacks. Which wouldn't necessarily be that big of a deal if your attacks couldn't be cancelled. Having your limit break lost because an enemy teleports or a spell miss because the target zooms across the room is infuriating. And not only will attacks be cancelled, you also lose the MP it costs and a chunk of the ATB bar. While I really liked the early combat, I absolutely hated it by the end. This would work much better if you simply just controlled one person or or it bas based on turn based to the extent where an attack couldn't miss because the animation gives the enemy time to do endless things. On top of this the game treats the lock on system as a suggestion, changing its target whenever it feels like. The battles also get endlessly convoluted as you progress. Everything seems to have some gimmick to beat it, but you fight each enemy so rarely I never saw the point of trying to figure it out. And even when I did it was so poorly explained and shown that I just gave up. Like some enemy that had to be hit with magic first, then physical. I never got it to work, I couldn't tell which one was procced and I just brute forced it to get past. And the boss battles just got increasingly long, to the point where: had I died, I couldn't have been bothered to try again and probably left the game unfinished. I don't know what it is with these anime tropes where everything is godlike and can never just die. It's just fight after fight after fight. The last boss taking about an hour or so with no deaths. I guess it's an attempt to make something seem epic, but really it's just tedious.

Another thing that stopped me from not finishing the game was the ability to skip cutscenes. It's just endless. Every single time you enter a room, there's a cutscene. Even outside of that there's constant slow walks with dialogue. Not even the fights are safe from cutscenes. With them I'd guess the game would have been twice as long. And that is most likely intentional as the game is filled to the brim with small things that makes the game that much longer. But none of it fun, be it the fetch quests or those ungodly rhythm minigames where they don't even let you know what to press or when. It's just there to make you retry and retry, so you spend more time. The same with hard mode that seems to expect you to have several master materia and be level 50. It's just a massive and tedious grind.

What worries me the most about this game though is how ok everyone seems to be with games being cut in to parts like this. The normal price for this game is the highest I've ever seen and they expect people to pay that maybe 4 times. plus DLC on top of that. How are people complaining about regular DLC, microtransactions etc. but this is right? I really hope this isn't where singleplayer games are heading, because that will be the death of them. Make a game, split it in 4, make everything a slow grind so it feels like you got your money's worth then sell the next installment at the same price.

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.

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.

Literally the perfect game. Elevating the gameplay of the mindless and tedious labyrinthian FPS games that came before it in every possible aspect. Bringing countless things that are a standard still to this day. An arsenal where every weapon has its use, enemies that are varied and distinct and great music and soundtrack. But probably its biggest appeal today is that its source code was released by id, letting us still play this on modern computers with 100% combability in any way we want. And an endless catalogue of mods, wads and complete overhauls.

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.

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.

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.

As a remake, Dead Space is fantastic, more so than even Resident Evil 2. It improves what is needed and keeps the rest. It's been a decade since I last played it, but it feels exactly as how I remembered it, including visuals that in line with my impressions of it at the time. The gameplay however reminded me of why I never pursued the series past the first. The really close camera with fairly stiff controls and the persistently dark surroundings doesn't mesh well with enemies that pop out of everywhere and are often faster than the player. It gets frustrating. And on top of that the sound design is constantly blaring. Either with tense music or noises of enemies that often aren't even there. I get why a horror game has this, but it also wears on you when you constantly have look in every direction even when backtracking. And in zero gravity it becomes downright awful as there's no indicator of where the enemies are, not even the sound really works to pinpoint them. Have the music relax if noting's there and if there's a sound of a creature it should be in play. And everything you do kind of feels like filler. A lot of technobabble as you go from one broken contraption to the nest and you have to fix it by going to every area in that specific sector. It really feels like doing the exact same thing over and over.

The look of the game is perfect for what it's recreating and there are no issues there. But whatever engine or graphics tweaks they use to make this run is another thing. A lot of textures will switch between the usual high res and some pixelated mess. And it doesn't seem to have to do with distance from the camera or even the texture as a whole, but rather blotches here and there. Some times even the models themselves seem to vanish in parts into some low res nightmare in parts. I tried different settings, but couldn't really pinpoint it. But I expect it has o do with DLSS, and it's another reason as to why that shouldn't exist in the first place.

This is the future of videogames? A feature that even on a 15 old games will make it barely run on the average computer? A graphics setting that needs you to upscale the resolution to a blurry mess to even be playable and still reduces your fps to at least 1/10 of what it would be without it. Just work on it for a decade or so, then get back to us. DLSS looks very, very bad and the miniscule changes that ray tracing brings add nothing to the gameplay and isn't nearly as impressive as it's made out to be, especially at the enormous costs it comes with performance wise. And both are a step in the wrong direction when it comes to computer games. Use it on consoles or something, they seem to think 30fps is acceptable.

This is as generic and monotonous as you can get it. Locked into an arena: Kill everything. Something that gets boring less than an hour in. With very few cannon fodder enemies, and mainly minibosses that just take forever to kill. And that in turn makes every single weapon feel underpowered. And in creating as much spectacle to the fights as possible they made everything fairly hard to identify. I don't think I could describe a single enemy from memory here, more just weird shapes and colors.

There are secrets, but with the way the game is structured, even they are annoying to find as you're as likely to find a noclip wall as you are a secret route. Also some parts that focus on acrobatics, but are little more than QTE's. I would guess they're there mostly to hide the general repetitiveness of the game as a whole.

If it wasn't for the fact that I've played Final Fantasy Tactics, I might enjoy this a lot more. But having played it, Tactics Ogre is a pretty dull experience in comparison. The job system first of all doesn't allow for much customization, and the amount of magic and abilities you can equip is much to limited compared to what you have and not knowing what you're up against. The battlefields are much too large and it can take up to 3 full rounds before you even reach the other team. And I've found that standing your ground is better than approaching them, so it's usually 10 minutes of nothing before you even start. And despite the size of the battlefields, you use very little of it. Usually a straight line towards each other. But the biggest issue of all is the horrendous map design. In way to many fights you'll have characters almost permanently stuck behind others, unable to attack. And with the limited amount of abilities, really do anything at all. So you end up skipping round after round as there's no move to make. An alternative is of course range units, but because of their weak defense, the enemy will go directly for them possibly even killing several with a critical AOE. Of course this way of doing things is heavily hindered by everyone starting with 0 mp and items that restore it are in limited quantities and the skill that replenishes it is completely random, again something that reduces early rounds to nothing but waiting for the next. Another added annoyance is the fact that characters can be knocked of a platform and permanently lost. Gear and all. Characters you've spent hours leveling. Some missions are even build around trying to kill your characters in this way.

I haven't actually finished the game yet, but I'm 30+ hours in and starting to think there's not much reason to continue. As every fight now has the same annoying issues. And I'm now on a seemingly endless string of missions with no way to by more items or replace lost soldiers. It really feels like they couldn't get the difficulty right here and just made it incredibly tedious and annoying to play towards the end instead.

Never played the original, but as far as the changes made that I know of, I'm both for and against. Equal split exp at the end is neat and an easy way to level up weaker soldiers. But having vouchers to change jobs just seems asinine. What's worse might be the handholding, or rather holding back, that the level cap introduces. Fight after fight after fight with no exp, worthwhile items and so on just adds to the mindlessness of it all. And when the level cap rises you some times have to grind extra battles to complete the ones in the story line.

Square, just release FFT on Steam already. In the last few months they've released at least 3 of these other tactics games but ignore the one that put it on the map. I as hoping this would be equal, but it's not even close. And after playing this I have zero interest in giving any of the others a chance.