Better than the base game, actually kind of ripper. Ditches Sheva's boring boringness for a proper Jill Valentine, has King Wesker doing the cool trenchcoated cyborg stuff, takes place in an updated Spencer Mansion, puts a (more) proper emphasis back on classic RE note-reading, but most importantly... the door opening transitions are fucking BACK! The puzzle/cat-and-mouse part in the waterlogged area when you're without your weapons is as good of a section as there are the best Resident Evil games. All of the reskins here are also superior to the original (despite there being a sad lack of enemy variety), but Chris is still a bulging freak of nature though - and it's way too short for what it is - but imo they absolutely understood what they were put on to make here even if it's daisy-chained to the mostly unsatisfactory RE5 engine.

Could very well be the most nothing DLC experience you could possibly play. That being said, it's nice to see these two characters actually do something within the context of this game's story - even if it's just another mundane Borderlands-style enemy hell that was popular around this time. In that respect, feels about as tacked-on as the Ada side mode in Resident Evil 4 (though I think I might like this a little more). Mind-numbing repetition.

All those groundbreaking game mechanics and nothing to do with them. What a shame. I love the abstract art style, and its general unfiltered trippiness - but that's about the extent of nice things I can say about this. Got ruined (in large part) by the age of the game theory - where every one of these offbeat, colorful horror games has to have piles of shitty esoteric lore that people on YouTube make 45 minute videos analyzing yet not actually say anything about. So what could have been a lean, trailblazing stealth-platforming horror game is instead littered with purposefully incoherent portent which I could accept if it didn't halt the core gameplay in its tracks, and wasn't so unrealistically obtuse that you pretty much have to look up a walkthrough for it because who the hell would think of these stupidass solutions? Pointlessly cryptic to the point where the game just became tedious even in spite of its flickers of strong moments, at its best when you're breaking it beyond belief.

Top 50 Favorites: #24

Games I Like That Everybody Else Dislikes

I realize I'm alone in this, and that's fine - but this is a truly spectacular horror game brimming with atmosphere and filled with careful shit-your-pants jumpscare moments that each feel earned. Mixes the tantalizingly campy creepypasta era of gaming with a genuine lingering sense of real dread - full transparency, I got this thinking it would be a funny meme but the level of creativity on this at any moment is just insane. Equal measures of scary, silly, stylish, and smart. Even its small but memorable one-off predecessor had a fun sense of inevitability and this one not only pays homage to that one in the best way possible, but also amplifies it to levels above. Always loved the variety on display, each vignette essentially serving as a new visual template for something you just know isn't going to end well - the question is how will it proceed to get there? Too few horror games these days take advantage of that simple but effective mindset because it works like a motherfucker here. Also the bizarre lore actually feels like it was cared about in this one, unlike the smarminess of something like Hello Neighbor which only really wanted its bullshit non-story to be streamer bait. Plus it looks rock-solid for what it is even all these years later. Really good shit, severely underappreciated.

Games I Like That Everybody Else Dislikes

My biggest flaw with this is that it's only half a game - it legitimately just ends dead on the halfway point. Now granted, that's a pretty massive flaw - but when that half of a game is as lush, tight, and intriguing as this is then honestly I'm able to look past that a bit. Obviously even the game's detractors can agree that the thing is just a graphical behemoth, beautiful looking work all-around that takes full advantage of the PS4's hardware and its historical setting. And tbh it's just impossible to argue with gunplay this righteous - being able to mow down rows of enemies with a real murders' row of sick weaponry straight out of a graphic novel. The weird mix of serious historical drama and deliciously dorky, gadget-driven 'secret spies vs. werewolves' narrative which occasionally gets splashed with gore always worked for me and the characters within it are so appealing - I also love how literary it is, its chapter system feels fully-realized as well as unique. All the more reason it made me doubly pissed off when the plot just abruptly ends when there should be so much more game left. I understand the frustration but come on, this was cool - a sequel was (and still is) absolutely deserved. Gets bonus points for being cinematic without being overbearing with it.

Saints Row IV might be repetitive, cringey 2013 gamerbro filler - but this one is... like, actually the slow-motion death of a franchise. Held together by duct tape, goes out with a total whimper. Takes a former titan of a side character and turns him into a nearly unrecognizable lolcow, then pairs him with one-off-joke-gone-on-too-long Kinzie Kensington in one of the ugliest open worlds of the 2010s decade (a cheap reskin of an already bland, barren open world) with seriously airless gameplay. And come on, not even a fucking metal soundtrack or like a joke bubblegum pop radio station or anything at all? Post-ironic hell. Not even worth the space it takes up in storage - would later be re-released in a worse state as Cyberpunk 2077.

Diet Skate 3 is actually really enjoyable. Still suffers from that instantly-identifiable Ubisoft openworldification where you essentially just snap from side mission to side mission without really feeling a desire to explore the map at all let alone in full. However, what a wicked atmosphere this thing crafts - a soundtrack that's (reliably) filled with lesser-known bangers, gorgeous lighting system, and I mean... snow just always seems to look pristine on eighth generation hardware. When you're careening down a high mountain peak on the snowboard and the sun is setting in just a certain way so that the rays are glistening off the slopes while "Cinnamon" by Cullen Omori or "Falling Down" by The Birthday Massacre is playing? Come on bro, it's just so damn sweet. Controls are a tad iffy but they serve their purpose fairly enough. There might not actually be all that much here but at least when it comes to aesthetics Ubisoft always delivers the goods.

Games I Dislike That Everybody Else Likes](https://www.backloggd.com/u/Chromentur/list/games-i-dislike-that-everybody-else-likes)

Staggering graphical fidelity serves a hugely shaved-down experience. If looks could kill, this game would have you flatlined in an instant but instead it decides to save that lack of a pulse for its story - after the Telltale hysteria fatigue of the mid-2010s I'm personally not entirely against the dissolution of at least most of its different endings; I get the appeal and all that but I'm just not interested in missing out on giant chunks of a game just because I decided to go with one route over some other one and needing to play it like ten times to get the full experience. It's a cool feature on occasion but if it has more than two or three endings max it's just not really my thing anymore (plus with these sorts of series only one of them is going to end up being canon anyway). With that in mind, it's still inexcusable just how much they removed from a Triple A, highly-anticipated remake of a PlayStation 1 game with far more content. As outstanding as these luscious, neon-lit towns are - where's the clocktower? Why does it feel like its narrative is just one rushed mad-dash to the finish line? Why are the levels so oversimplified? Still gets points for having one damn fine satisfying shotgun, and because I'm trash the visuals alone were enough to push this over into 'just mediocre' territory for me - far from terrible, just has no excuse not to be more.

I realize I'm in the minority here, but after some reevaluation this one's my favorite Mario Kart. It's got the edge in difficulty balancing over Mario Kart 8 Deluxe - where in the latter it goes from a 150cc so laughably easy it's almost mundane to a 200cc so overamplified that it isn't always that fun to play once the novelty wears off. This looks and plays like a dream on the 2DS in particular - with the single tightest and virtually faultless control setup I was able to find on any game in the franchise, these shoulder buttons and thumbstick feel like they were handcrafted specifically for this game, and with the screen all up in your face like that during the heat of battle? Unbeatable. It's got a (as of writing) quick and still up-and-running online mode you don't have to pay for, and it successfully walks that tightrope between simplicity and spectacle which some of the other games in the series have struggled with. My mixed feelings about the flying/underwater sections here haven't changed since release, but overall they get a harmlessly decent treatment here (the underwater moreso than the flying) and it feels like the natural progression of the series anyway. It has far and away the best Rainbow Road - I mean come on this one is a pure knockout - and in addition just features some of the finest original courses (Music Park, Maka Wuhu, DK Jungle, Piranha Plant Slide, Neo Bowser City, Daisy Hills, etc.) and retro courses (Coconut Mall, Daisy Cruiser, Mushroom Gorge, Kalimari Desert, Waluigi Pinball, Maple Treeway, etc.) out of the whole collection. Sorely undervalued, but with all that praise out of the way there's one fatal, fatal flaw that sours an an otherwise great experience... where the FUCK is Versus Mode??

Impossible to reckon with that effortless N64 allure, and it sports a handful of tracks that are still a blast to play to this day (Koopa Troopa Beach, Choco Mountain [before Mario Kart Tour robbed it of its hazy dreamlike atmsophere], Yoshi Valley, Luigi Raceway, among others) - but in the same breath definitely has its mid tracks (Mario Raceway is as bland as can be, and come on this Rainbow Road is a total snooze). The drifting is also ass but they would somehow fuck it up worse in Mario Kart: Super Circuit to such a degree that we can forgo - but not make excuses for - that mistake in this one right now. However, above all other flaws, there's a reason its menacing rubber band A.I. lives in infamy - it's like they barely even tried to hide it at all. Still as great of a time with friends as it was back then (given you're not playing on anything higher than 2 players, where anything more seems to cut like half the assets off of every track and neuters the framerate) and has a clean, simplistic charm to spare. In its own way absolutely still worth playing.

Novel little historical Telltale knockoff that starts engrossingly but goes nowhere fast. As someone who's kind of over these episodic, choice-driven narrative-focused games I actually don't mind at all that most of the choices don't really amount to anything here - but out of all the places you could have gone with this genuinely mysterious premise and enticing cast of morally questionable characters (most based on famous real life figures from the time)... THAT'S the conclusion you decided to settle on? Really? That? Bummer, because while there's noticeable hiccups along the way (some weird pitch issues, a few bugs, and the occasional clumsy voice performance) this actually adds a lot of new elements to what I consider (at least in 2018) a rather tired genre. It's clear that a lot of brains went into developing the lore and puzzles, as if it were tailor-made exclusively for history geeks - which I am not, though I still admit that's a nice niche to fill. And idk about you but the locales in this thing are graphical beasts, anything made out of marble is pretty much guaranteed to look divine on PS4. Play the first two or three episodes then just use your imagination, trust me it's better than where this anticlimactically ends up.

Complete meme - the Devil May Cry 2 of the SpongeBob game series. The bones of one of the greatest 3D Platformer Collectathons ever made dressed in such an unavoidable lack of polish that it's hard (dare I say impossible?) not to laugh - making you repeat the vehicle sections four fucking times to get tokens you could easily achieve in one go to pad out a product of rushed deadlines to the point where mechanics we've seen implemented so well before become grotesque, twisted, and unrecognizable. Call it Stockholm Squarepants Syndrome. I think the term 'ironic enjoyment' has lost all its meaning these days, but just play one of those goddamn Spongeball stages and tell me you don't get it too. Ridiculous and deserves to be laughed at.

On the one hand I'm sort of glad we as a society have progressed passed the 'Walking Simulator' era of gaming where you slowly gawk at graphics that seldom age well enough to warrant an expiration date over a year or two with very little actual gameplay involved. But on the other, apart from maybe The Witness this is definitely one of the better ones. Like most of these, the story does most of the heavy-lifting for you - with almost insultingly easy 'crime solving' elements tacked in there to trick you into thinking this is a game and not an interactive movie. But as that interactive movie - it really ain't bad. There's this impending emotional horror in progressing through such quaint, stunningly pretty nature environments to follow a story that progressively becomes more and more doused with pure dread. The ending is a bit of a cop-out but otherwise it's full of really affecting setpieces of poignancy that seldom left me with dry eyes. Not sure how much longer this can still be played with fresh eyes and remain as good as it is now, but I dig it.