I was unfortunate enough to have played through two very, very bad sequels to two very good games this past weekend. The other was Medal of Honor: Underground. I feel like the Angry Video Game Nerd.
Gauntlet: Dark Legacy was a perfection of the Gauntlet formula that was built over the course of 15 years, starting with Gauntlet 1985. It was jam-packed full of engaging content that was extremely fun and oozing charm and soul. It was extremely fun both in single-player and co-op. Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows takes everything Gauntlet: Dark Legacy perfected and throws it in the garbage in favor of creating a soulless hack and slash with terrible combat, a lackluster story, and very little fun.
To start: the presentation. The graphics are much better than those of Dark Legacy and the games before it. However, the art style is bland compared to Dark Legacy. It looks and plays like a generic fantasy game from the era. The music is also fairly mediocre. It has some decent points, but it kind of just blends into the background. The sound design is horrendous. I don't usually notice this kind of thing in games, but it undercuts the entire weight of the combat. Most of the time, weapons sound like wet farts blowing in the wind. They barely make any substantial noises, making you feel like you're slashing at the air. It also makes you forget that you're actually taking damage, because it looks and feels like you haven't been hit but half your health bar vanishes into thin air within seconds due to a lack of feedback. The game is sure to remind you that you've gotten hit, with the narrator saying "[class] needs food badly" and all of the sound in the game completely bottoms out. It's very annoying.
The story is your standard dark fantasy story. It's mid. Just like most of the game. Basically this emperor is manipulated into chaining his heroes to a tree by these treacherous advisors. It almost reminds me of the story for the Overlord games, but without any of the charm, soul, or humor. If you haven't played Overlord, you should play that instead of this piece of crap. It's a really good game.
The gameplay has some things that it does better than the Gauntlet formula, but it's not really "Gauntlet", if that makes sense. It's just a mediocre hack and slash. There are actual combos you can do now, as opposed to walking up to the enemy and smacking them until they're dead. The ranged attacks do jack squat in terms of damage now, however, making it far more viable to do melee and spam magic. There are now also magic attacks besides the AoE spell. There is nothing stopping you from spamming these attacks with the directional button, because they take very little mana to cast and are far more effective than melee and ranged attacks. However, the aforementioned combos are very bland. The classes also have more meaningful differences than in the previous games, which more or less based their class designs on aesthetics and stat caps. The classes now have different "feels" and different combos you can learn. I played as an elf, which feels like you're playing a Dollar General version of Legolas. This was probably intentional, because Return of the King came out a few years before this hunk of junk. These "improvements" are not worth the gutting out of the core of the game, which mostly focuses on ranged combat with some melee combat in certain scenarios and is more stat-focused. The leveling up in this game is also not nearly as quick as it should be. The game is mercifully short, only about 5 hours, yet the levels are very long and very bland. You only get one or two levels at most with each mission in the late game, despite going up to level 99. You don't feel like you're progressing much in terms of character build. This isn't helped that when you run out of lives, you lose all of the experience that you got throughout the level. This is bad game design. It essentially turns that attempted run into a waste of time. This wouldn't be an issue if the levels were shorter, but there is a substantial amount of time that was wasted when you die. There are weapon and armor pickups that drastically increase your stats, but they're few and far between. This wouldn't be an issue if the game weren't short, but I'm not exactly itching to play more of this trash. Unlike Dark Legacy, this game is not properly designed to be played solo and co-op. There are sections of this game that were clearly designed with co-op in mind, and the entire game is much better when you have someone else to suffer through it with you. It's bland when you play it co-op, and downright miserable when you play it solo.
The bosses are pretty bad. They're all more or less the same, they do a small AoE in a circle, or they do a big AoE in a straight line. The only way to really beat them is to spam your d-pad moves and throw yourself into their meat grinder until they're dead. It's not very fun or well-designed because they can stunlock you into a coma. Since this is Gauntlet's first real hack and slash game, there are no ways to really stunlock bosses to prevent this or dodge out of the way in time, like you'd find in better hack and slash games.
As for content, this game is very short, as stated before. I would normally have no issue with this, because unlike people such as Angry Joe, who have contributed to a dialog which led to bloated games, I know that a long game is not necessarily a good game. That being said, a short game would benefit greatly from replay value and unlockables. Aside from difficulties, this game has no unlockables or fun skins to play with. Dark Legacy had plenty of replay value and secret classes to play with, as well as atmosphere that kept me coming back for more. And one playthrough of that game takes about 40 hours!
Overall, this is a pretty bad game. I had nostalgia for this game after having played it a lot as a kid, but it's just not good. Like I said before, I'm tough, but fair. Give this game a shot if you want, but don't expect something very fun.

This was a pretty good game for the Halloween season.
The thumb stick-based combat wasn't as bad as, say, Too Human, but I'm glad that game developers left the thumbsticks alone when it came to combat after a certain point. It was kind of annoying in this game, it was annoying in Too Human, and it was annoying in Metal Gear Rising with its left stick parrying mechanics.
The combat is overall very simplistic and is mostly in service to the puzzle based gameplay. Most of the time the puzzles involve strategically selecting weapons and power-ups to work around the challenges presented, such as not killing a certain type of enemy of killing every enemy within the time limit. These start off simple before getting brutally difficult in chapter 3.
You can tell this game had a fairly troubled development because the design is extremely linear and room to room rather than the more open pseudo-metroidvania of something like Resident Evil. It feels like it settled on the former because it didn't have the development time to create the latter, and that's fine by me. This game is great because it's short and sweet, a longer and more open experience would make it more of a slog.
The atmosphere is very cartoonish and aged well. The soundtrack is your standard goofy, spooky style of music with some absolute bangers like the main theme and the ballroom theme. The game is very funny as well. Even though this is an E rated game, it's filled with dirty jokes that would fly over a kid's head. The name of the game itself is a double entendre, and there are scenes like Cooper giving Amber the ointment to cure her disfigurement (if you played this part you know what I'm talking about). It's not all dirty though, there's plenty of slapstick, wordplay, and absurdity.
The reason I docked points from this game was that it was brutally difficult in chapter 3 and chapter 4, though chapter 4 was basically just the final boss. It was extremely frustrating, but luckily the difficulty drastically decreased in chapter 5 after beating the final boss, who was the last big hurdle to jump through before your victory lap, saving all the captives.
Overall, this is a pretty good game to play during spooky season. Would recommend, but only if you're up for an extremely difficult challenge towards the end.

So I won't mark this review as a spoiler, but I'll mark where the spoilers start. I have three words for anyone who hasn't played this game yet: PLAY. THIS. GAME. There are a few ways to play it: on original hardware, that is, the xbox 360 or the ps3; on an emulator, like xenia or RPCS3 if you don't have an xbox 360 or future xbox releases; or, backwards compatible on an xbox one or xbox series x/s. I took the third option, and it ran just fine, though it did not have an unlocked frame rate or save states. The unfortunate truth is, you'll be stuck playing this on a controller rather than on PC.
If you know anything about my reviews, you know that I love to nitpick and don't throw the word "masterpiece" around lightly. This game is a masterpiece. The reason I give this game five stars is simple: The Darkness is a game that deserves high praise and is much greater than the sum of its parts. The plot of the story is average, the gameplay is subpar and has aged poorly but is still fun, and the graphics and presentation show their age quite a bit. However, this game contains peak SOVL. It's unfortunate that this came out in 2007, and as a result was overshadowed by titans gaming that released that same year such as Bioshock, CoD 4, Halo 3, and Mass Effect, among many others.
The graphics are a mixed bag. You can definitely tell this game was made for consoles in 2007. It's about the same level of quality as some of the other releases from 2007, but shows its age a bit more because it tries to go for a "realistic" look. The lighting makes the game a little frustrating, but overall it's nothing too bad. It perfectly captures the dingy atmosphere of mid 2000s New York City. That entire city is just one massive public restroom at the street level and below, and the art style shows that. There are moments of comedy seamlessly thrown in to make the city more lively and believable, which is something I appreciate. The strange ramblings of the locals, the idiosyncratic street performers, and the unlockable voicemails you can listen to when you collect certain letters around the city are hilarious and charming. They don't veer off into Saints Row 3 style wacky territory either, as these are things people in the real New York City would absolutely do because being cooped up in that hellhole does things to people. The layout of the city is also incredibly immersive. I really like how the game doesn't spell out where to go, you have to talk to people and call the city's information center in order to figure out where to go next. It reminds me of the immersive way Morrowind is designed, but on a much smaller scale and much more linear. This helps put you into the shoes of Jackie Estacado.
Unlike something like Silent Hill 2, which I've admitted has an excellent story and atmosphere but extremely boring gameplay, there's still a pretty fun game buried under the jank of the combat system in this game. The fact of the matter is, the gameplay simply hasn't aged well. There are things like auto-aim that will help ease the transition from PC to console if you're not used to playing with the controller, but the game takes a lot of getting used to. For one, the Darkness takes a while to figure out using. It's kind of immersive in that way, because Jackie is just learning how to use his powers as well, so it's like you're learning how to control the Darkness alongside him. That being said, you'll only start out with one or two abilities and will have to rely on the subpar shooting mechanics and unreliable guns. Staying in the darkness will recharge the Darkness, and, if you have all of your powers unlocked and maximum darkness level, you can wreak absolute havoc all over the place. Things like the darklings, which have terrible AI but can still do some pretty serious damage and turn off the lights in the rare occasion they actually work properly, help make the combat much more enjoyable with their fun banter and their chaotic nature. The darkness powers itself are really good as well, like the overpowered black hole, the stealthy creeping darkness, the darkness tendril that I just used for taking out lights, and the darkness guns I never use. Overall, the game is pretty fun but has some issues. For one, the puzzles are unintuitive when they show up, and the elements you need to solve the puzzles blend into the environment too much. Another thing is the fact that the game does have you fighting in open fields, which is incredibly frustrating because your powers just weren't designed for combat in open fields. Another final thing is the fact that your darkness powers get automatically put away when you run out and you have to manually bring them back. This is a simple button press, but can lead to you forgetting to bring them back and getting brutally killed by your enemies in like two shots.
The story (Big spoiler warning here):
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"JENNY IS DEAD, PAULIE BETRAY ME, I SO FED UP WITH THIS WORL"
- Tommy Wiseau in his breakout role as Jackie Estacado.
The plot is nothing to write home about. However, this is a video game, and video games have two advantages over movies: they're longer, and you directly control the character. It starts kind of in medias res, at the moment your boss and uncle Paulie betrays you. Eventually, the events leading up to Paulie's betrayal are revealed, and you grow more attached to Jackie and realize that the situation isn't really his fault. You also grow to become attached to his girlfriend as well, because in the beginning of the game there's a romantic scene where you just sit on the couch and have the opportunity to watch the entirety of To Kill A Mockingbird. You feel guilty for leaving her alone in her apartment, which leads to you feeling even guiltier when she is killed by Eddie Scrote - I mean Shrote, and you feel a bloodlust towards the villains. The villains themselves aren't really compelling, as they're very one dimensional, but this game does really know how to make you hate them and relish in their demise. There's also a psychological element to it, where you not only feel for Jackie but also the Darkness itself. The World War I levels show how the Darkness feels isolated and paranoid, and how Jackie's family has borne the curse for a very long time. There is some very disturbing imagery that gives you a good insight into just how bleak things are for both of these characters.
Overall, I wholeheartedly recommend this game and am looking forward to the second one.

I suck at side scrollers, but this cutesy kid's game was way harder than it had any right being. I've never played more than like, ten minutes of a Mega Man game so I have no real baseline to compare this. The only thing I can say is the final level is extremely punishing because it makes you restart the entire thing, even if you die to the final boss, and the bosses don't have health bars, which is extremely annoying. Overall, a decent time killer and it's funny to see what's possibly Alucard as this deformed, grumpy little vampire prowling the modern day world.

What can I say? This is one of the greatest games ever made, to this day. It does something that most modern metroidvanias don't even do: gives you a sense of progression and makes you feel like you dominate the castle. The graphics are still some of the most beautiful that gaming has to offer, since it came out at the end of the 2D era of gaming. The aesthetic and soundtrack are extremely memorable, to the point where I think the 1700s drip is an integral part of my personality from having played this game at such a young age. The gameplay is stellar, though since it's made in 1997 not as smooth as something like Hollow Knight. This game does, however have some flaws: the leveling system introduces an issue where you're more or less underleveled for the upside down castle if you've played normally, and requires some grinding to beat enemies fairly if you don't want to use exploits, but other than that this is a great game. 10/10, go play it immediately.

Where do I begin? I loved Killzone 2. I gave it a 4/5. Giving this one a 2.5/5 cuts deep, because Killzone 1 was a decent game and Killzone 2 was nearly a masterpiece.
The game started out promising. The intro sequence had the sad violins going, it introduced Hera Visari (who was never mentioned again), and it had an excellent introduction to the game's snowy atmosphere. Little did I know I was in for an unfun slog. Disclaimer: this is my review of the single player. Apparently this game is much better in co-op, but when the game is a complete slog in single player, that's still inexcusable.
The first and most glaring fault is the lack of weight found in Killzone 2. Instead, this game opts to encourage a faster playstyle by introducing a faster time to kill, allowing enemies to smoke you out with grenades, and making animations and movement more fluid. This wouldn't be a problem if the game didn't also actively punish you for wanting to pursue a faster playstyle. You die in roughly 2-3 shots. This means the entire game is a slog of running from checkpoint to checkpoint getting vibe checked by every single sniper and hidden submachine gunner in your vicinity. I'm underselling how infuriating this is.
The game itself is also poorly paced and doesn't properly flesh out its story of two Helghast warlords fighting for power, instead opting to focus on the escape of the ISA troops. It feels spread thin.
The graphics are some of the best on the ps3, but this game turns into a complete slideshow at times. It also has plenty of bugs and inputs that aren't properly read, leading to a frustrating game of being gaslit into thinking your controller might be broken.
Overall, I might recommend playing this game in co-op but don't recommend playing it in single player. It feels designed for co-op, with no adjustments made for the single-player experience. It would be a much better game if you had an AI-controlled Natko accompanying you, but instead we're left with AI partners who are incompetent and can't do much outside of reviving you once in a blue moon.