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.

Look, I know I nitpick a lot but I see the positive reviews for this game and I think to myself, have these people actually played this thing? I put a few hours into this but it got too unbearably frustrating to the point I just gave up on it, and that's saying something because I've powered through some hot garbage in my time on this site.
So my review of the mechanics and story will obviously be limited, but a few hours of this is enough to warrant dunking on this game to this degree.
The story had promise, and as I'm reading the cliffnotes it's pretty good. You have to read a lot of journal entries to get the real gist of it, but this is an extremely ambitious story for a shooter, even by today's standards. You wouldn't think they'd put a high drama about family strife and generational curses into a frenetic early 2000s horror themed first person shooter, but they did, and that's pretty cool.
The atmosphere is decent enough, but the entire game feels like traversing through hallway after hallway. It's very boring.
The shooting mechanics would be fine if they didn't feel so floaty and awful. The entire thing just reeks of "it's a horror game so let's make the shooting and combat feel like hot garbage". There are no health packs but enemies can and will instantly hit you and you can do very little to avoid damage because leapers move at the speed of light and other enemies practically have hitscan weapons, so you're in a constant state of save scumming. The enemies in general have this Dark Souls 2 level of hit tracking, where they can change direction mid-throw to hit you.
The guns do very little damage and something more substantial like the shotgun takes like fifteen minutes to reload. The only real viable gun that outclasses the rest is the Himalayan cannon, but even that gets annoying to use after a while.
You can't hit quickload once you're dead, you have to reload and then hit quickload after you've loaded back in. This wouldn't be an issue if the game weren't so unplayable.
The ectoplasm spell is really your only viable damage dealing spell in the beginning, yet still is inaccurate when it comes to the enemies that zip around and deals about as much damage as lightly farting on enemies. I'm sure there are more substantial weapons and spells later on in the game, and I'm sure the game gets more playable later on as Patrick gets more powerful, but overall I absolutely hated this.

Pretty decent Halo clone with a little Red Dead Revolver and other shooters thrown in there for good measure. It's not nearly as good as Halo, of course, but it's pretty fun and inoffensive overall. I enjoyed the atmosphere and licensed soundtrack, though it did take itself a little too seriously. The story was okay, though the good ending was kind of lame because you get no hoes. There are some good levels, and some pretty awful sections of the game like the mission where you are in the sun and your powers are nerfed beyond belief, or the mission where you drive a knockoff warthog from Halo that controls like complete garbage. The suicide bomber enemies are also fairly annoying because they can spawn right on top of you, the jumping is extremely floaty and difficult to control, and the bosses kind of suck because you only get the worst guns in the game to fight them and Jericho moves frustratingly slow in reaction to their moves.

This game is a technically unstable piece of jank. A very intriguing and sometimes very fun technically unstable piece of jank. The dialog is cheesy, the story makes very little sense, the graphics are weirdly good but the poor performance and animations make it feel like it's held together by cardboard and duct tape, and the gameplay is extremely awkward. Yet, I can't help but love this game. It plays its absurd story completely straight, yet it teeters on the brink of self-awareness.
The story involves Simon, an American World War 1 soldier who's fighting alongside the British in the Battle of the Somme. They did, however, take a few liberties with the World War 1 setting. The Germans are cartoonishly evil, the weapons and technology verge into World War 2 era technology, and there's one other minor thing that might make me question the historical accuracy of this game just a bit: demons and vampires didn't spill out of hell to fight both the Germans and allied forces in World War 1. This game has you going from the trenches of the European theater to the belly of Hell itself. It goes from fighting some German mad scientist to killing Mephisto to save the vampires and humanity from the apocalypse. It's presented through very stiff and boring cutscenes, which have people speaking slowly over still images or characters that stand in the same place for a long period of time. There are also way too many cutscenes in the beginning of the game, when you're itching to get right into the action. I'll leave the discussion of the endings, all of which are stupid and awful, at the end of this review. An aside, Simon being a folksy southerner who says one-liners that reference other shooters or Evil Dead is a hilarious contrast with the grimdark World War 1 setting.
The graphics are decent for a game made in 2009, but if you don't turn off anti aliasing and VSync, the game will slow to a crawl if you use fully auto weapons. The loading times can take up to a full minute as well, which is absurd considering this game is almost 15 years old. That's all loading times. So every time you die, you're going to wait a minute to load your last save.
The gameplay is pretty weird. The first half of the game is basically a World War 2 shooter, with a few demons and a lot of zombies here and there. The difference between this and something like Medal of Honor, though, is Simon can take an absolute beating. All of the enemies go down pretty easily, but you are an absolute bullet sponge. This encourages you to play it more like Doom or Serious Sam with World War 1/2 weaponry, rather than playing conservatively and taking cover. Your health also regenerates much faster when you're in melee range of enemies. The melee system is not to be ignored either. Like in games such as Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, the kick is extremely powerful and can knock down entire squadrons of enemies. You can also use a bayonet or a shovel alongside a pistol, and throw any spare bayonets you may have to take out multiple people with one throw and get more fury. The combos give you a fury multiplier, which temporarily makes you more powerful by helping you do more damage, but hearing the vampire whisper in your ear that you're doing a good job at killing is a reward in itself. In the halfway point of the game, you get a gauntlet and vampire guns, making the WW2 guns more or less obsolete and turning the game into a more traditional shooter with magic in your off-hand and a powerful gun in your main hand. The game is much better after this halfway point, though the final level is awful. There are also vehicle sections, some of which coincide with bosses. The mech is pretty fun to control, basically giving you a larger and more cumbersome version of yourself with unlimited rockets and ammo. The dragon is pretty fun as well, though he can be annoying to control and feels like driving a buggy and slow fighter jet. The bosses are pretty good for an FPS game as well. This isn't really a compliment to the bosses, rather a condemnation of most FPS bosses. The only boss I could say was bad was the final boss. He was pretty easy, he just took forever to kill to the point where I thought I was doing something wrong because his health bar was draining very slowly.
The endings are all pretty bad. None of them have you triumphantly defeating the bad guys. I don't think an ending needs to be happy for it to be a good ending, but this is a game about fighting German hell wizards and ancient demons with guns and magic. It's unabashedly stupid, which I love, but needs to have a triumphant ending like other shooters.
The easy ending has you wake up as if from a dream, like nothing happened.
The normal ending is one of the few video game endings where the final boss says "join me!" (as final bosses are wont to do) and you actually join him. Simon becomes a general for Mephisto and waits 100 years to fight the demons again in 2016. I guess this game must be historically accurate, because 2016 is when the world started to go insane. I guess the demonic war he was speaking of was much more subtle than in the first game.
The hard ending is similar to the normal ending, except he kills Mephisto and assumes control of the demons himself.
The normal and hard endings are much better than the easy mode ending, though I was disappointed that he turned evil at the end of them. If it's any consolation though, Simon's demon form looks absolutely badass.

You know, after playing this, I get the nagging feeling that this game isn't very Christian. I still enjoyed it though, it was pretty fun.
The presentation is some of the best you can get for a high-budget AAA game from 2010, during the late middle years of the xbox 360 and ps3's life cycle. Of course, it has a lot of the hallmarks of late 2000s/early 2010s graphics, such as a fairly monochrome color palate and cartoonish looking gore. A lot of these gorier games like Dante's Inferno and Darksiders had very inky looking blood and cartoonish gore, making it hard for the game to really feel Visceral (heh). The graphics and art are absolutely breathtaking though, immersing you in these hellish landscapes and taking you through the progressively more twisted realm of the underworld. The soundtrack is your average "insert epic operatic and orchestral music here" soundtrack, with a few standouts. The music that plays when you enter the river styx is excellent, almost reminiscent of Nier Replicant in its haunting beauty. Everything else in the soundtrack is just like the gameplay, more or less a bland knockoff of God of War.
The story is silly. I've studied theology for a while, but I'm not going to go into the intricacies of why this game might not be very theologically accurate. I'm not exactly playing this to bone up on the finer points of soteriology, as that would be like reading a McDonald's menu to familiarize yourself with the finer points of French cuisine. To be fair, the original Divine Comedy wasn't exactly theologically accurate either. Without indulging in sectarian infighting - I'm pretty sure there are not Greek mythological figures currently in Hell as Dante says there are. The story is an average over the top fan fiction about the Divine Comedy. Instead of a timid, mild-mannered medieval poet, Dante is instead a sinful crusading gigachad whose sheer powered overcame Death himself, reducing him to a quivering soy caricature of himself. Speaking of - Dante kills some very important people. Do people still die after Dante killed Death? The game never answered that. There are also instances when Dante kills (but isn't shown absolving) certain bosses, like Marc Antony and Cleopatra. Where do they go after they die again? Is there a mega-Hell that they have to go to now? Did Lucifer drop Hell 2? The story also has this strangeness to it, where it seems like the denizens of Hell are far too interested in the fact that Dante cheated on his wife and she sold her soul to the devil as a wager that he'd be faithful. Why would she do this? I have no idea. Dante basically has to battle through Hell to defeat his wife's boyfriend and send her to heaven. That's another thing that's funny about this story - Dante can absolve people of their sins. After all, it is written in the Bible: "Dante is the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father but by him."
The gameplay is more or less your standard God of War clone. The enemies range from unremarkable to poorly designed, like the guy who spins around and can only be hit by being parried or through a charged cross attack (I did a holy playthrough). This would be all well and good, but he grinds the game to a halt since he's an absolute damage sponge with an irregular attack pattern, so you have to dedicate an inordinate amount of time to chasing him down to intentionally put yourself in his line of attack so you can parry him. The holy powers are also completely overpowered. You're basically invincible to enemies in the later stages of the game, because of the sheer amount of health regeneration and protection you're given. Plus, the cross is a powerful weapon that works at both close and long range. The platforming in this game is surprisingly competent. There are plenty of fun spectacles to platform through, though some of the instant death pitfalls and puzzles they put in this game are downright annoying. Especially the puzzles, since they don't have a lot of environment tells to help you solve them or even indicate that a puzzle is there to begin with. The bosses, for the most part, are also very good. The one exception is the final boss Lucifer. He has three phases (well, more like two and a half) and his second phase takes like ten minute to whittle down. This man's health bar is obscenely long, to the point where I wondered if I was doing something wrong.
Overall, Dante's Inferno is worth playing if you're into the whole God of War clone thing and are looking for more games like it. I know I was, considering how soulslike mechanics have infected the action game genre to an annoying extent. I want to zip around doing crazy combos, not control a sluggish character through a decaying world for the four hundredth time in a row. It was cool the first few times when FromSoft did it, but it's getting old.

They say the first Final Fantasy game you play will be your favorite one. This was my first Final Fantasy game, and I'd say it's up there with my favorites but not necessarily my favorite. It took me three attempts at a playthrough and ten years to complete. It was not only my first Final Fantasy, but my first JRPG, and I finally completed it in 2023 after about five years of JRPG experience (I started this in 2013, got filtered by Gran Pulse, tried again in 2017, got filtered by Barthandelus 2, started playing different JRPGs in 2018 including other FF games, then breezed through this from start to finish in 2023). This game gets a lot of unfair heat for being overly linear and having a combat system that's very different from not just every other Final Fantasy game, but every other game, period. I won't say it's a masterpiece, particularly after chapter 10, but I will say that this is a very solid game that's worth at least one playthrough.
The presentation is gorgeous. This is still an amazing looking game, even for something that came out in 2009. The art direction and aesthetics are downright inspired, they make me feel nostalgic for the shopping malls of the late 2000s. It has that indescribable Japanese charm to it that's hard to pinpoint, but a weasel word that can be used would be "comfy." The music is also incredible. It accentuates all of the emotions that go into the story, like a good soundtrack does. This is one of the best soundtracks in the entire series, with the best battle theme I've ever heard in this series. The console versions of this game are locked at 30 fps, which is a shame because it obfuscates a lot of the beautiful combat animations and world design. The voice acting is... serviceable. It's not early 2000s 4kids bad voice acting, but it's not exactly Cowboy Bebop's dub either. To be fair, it's mostly due to the more stilted and unintentionally Lynchian dialog. Everything about the presentation is a perfect 10/10, minus the framerate.
The story is pretty interesting for a Final Fantasy game. One thing I found really cool about this is that no other Final Fantasy game really capitalizes on the weight of being a hero and saving the world. Unlike in other games, the characters in this one (save Lightning, who is a soldier) are just normal people who got torn out of their day to day lives and lost everything to be unwillingly pulled into a quest to save the world and fulfill their focus. I won't go into great detail on the story, but it's pretty good. The big issue with it is the fact that you have to read the data logs to know what the hell is going on, because the game pulls a Dune and throws a lot of new terms at you from its own lexicon. The story is fairly simple once you get the hang of it, and the delivery is nice. This is a very emotional game, up to the tenth chapter. That's when the story kind of falls to the wayside and the gameplay takes a front seat. The ending was also kind of underwhelming, but I guess that's what the sequels are for.
The gameplay is excellent - to an extent. This combat system is great because it keeps you engaged and caresses the lower levels of action combat without being a full-on action game. Personally, I prefer action combat because you have more control over your character's positioning and can more easily dodge attacks, but this game still has its merits and is a really fun time. The auto-battle button receives a lot of flack, but later on in the game it just becomes a tool in your toolkit rather than something to mash over and over again in order to automatically win battles. Most of the strategy comes from creating the proper paradigms and shifting at the right time. The game is fairly rewarding once you get the hang of it. There are some things that I have a gripe with though. There are too many enemies who ignore the stagger system, where they are essentially gimped after you reach a certain level on the stagger meter. This is especially true for bosses, who may have one or two attacks interrupted but not the rest of them. Another issue is the enemies like the sahagins, who constantly interrupt your attacks to an obnoxious extent. Once or twice is fine, but the fact that the one mission where you have to fight a bunch of these minor enemies is harder than the literal final boss of the game is really saying something.
The endgame content is really nothing to write home about. It's just a bunch of text blurbs with "go here, kill group of guys, get next mission and do the same" as your objective. I did a handful of these missions, and they got boring after a while. Here's a nuclear take, but the endgame content for most of the Final Fantasy games I've played was never very engaging.
Overall, Final Fantasy XIII is a great game that you should try. It's not the best Final Fantasy game in the world, but there are plenty of beautiful and emotionally hard-hitting moments that make it worth experiencing all the way through at least once.

Pros:
Soulful atmosphere and soundtrack, perfect for October's spooky season.
Fun, simple gameplay.
Well-designed levels (with the exception of the Battlefield levels, those are a tedious maze).
Game teaches you how to interact with its mechanics through gameplay.
Fun rewards system that keeps you playing to the end and gets the dopamine flowing.
Voice acting.
Cons:
It's too long to the point where it overstayed its welcome.
Bosses aren't very good in single player, you just end up tanking their hits for a few minutes and killing them through attrition because they move way too fast.