A fascinating and short experience with an extremely deep and customizable combat system based on learning new moves and including them in your ever growing catalog of moves. While I'm sure there is a "solved" or meta way to play the game at the highest levels I believe the best thing you can do is let yourself experiment and play around with moves until you find a way to express yourself through your tailored and designed move list. While my time with the game was brief this is something to come back to and praise for its seemless pvp/coop experience and its interesting combat system that is unlike anything else I have ever played.

Genuinely an incredible mod for Terraria with so much additional content that even on a full completion I feel like I haven't scratched the surface. If I had to point out some downsides it'd be how dependent this mod feels on wiki diving or having some external source to help with your gear and weapon progression. As someone playing completely blind initially the amount of use certain items had in future crafting recipes meant that I was spending a good chunk of my time double checking what I could do with crap weapons I had already moved on from hours earlier. For me that led to a lot of clutter but that's not a major issue. My other issue with the game comes from coop where the bullet hell elements of the game become far more difficult and hard to dodge as hundred more projectiles from different classes and weapons clutter the screen. I'll have to do a proper replay solo to experience certain bosses as I feel they were intended to be seen. Fantastic mod though, anyone looking for more Terraria should look here.

The soundtrack and story elements of this game linger in my mind all these years later after playing it for the first time. The worldbuilding includes some of my favorite tropes that I won't dive into here because it is pretty late game spoilers. I'm uncertain if I would call this a must play given the rough edges when it comes to gameplay and requirements for seeing all endings being quite tedious at times. The primary difference between this version of NieR and the remake (Called Replicant ver.1.22474487139...) is the protagonist. While this version you play as a father attempting to save his daughter, the remake features brother Nier trying to save his sister. I find the former more compelling but do believe that Replicant is probably the version to seek out for a modern audience who may be coming to this game off the heels of a Nier Automata playthrough.

A game I plan to return to in the future to experience again. Just an incredible recreation of 1950s LA by the developers at Team Bondi that deserves all the praise in the world. It's only fair to also mention that this game is a product of extreme crunch that unfortunately seems to have adversely impacted many of the devs at Bondi as they made it. I feel so conflicted praising the game but I still believe it is a must-play. One of the most non-traditional open world experiences where I feel like the map and details of 1950s LA serve as their own character, something that speaks to the film noir inspirations this game takes from.

As a purchaser of the annual pass for this one and someone dumb enough to play the bulk of their nearly 1200 hours with this game during the year of Lightfall content, I can confidently say this is an exceptionally mid DLC. Lightfall as a campaign is incredibly boring and every new character introduced or focused on in its main story was incredibly uninteresting. The marketing team knocked it out of the park selling this expansion as something that would add a cool traversal method that would elevate the way players moved around the patrol zone when the reality is that there is no verticality in the zones to use grapple with and any moment spent on a rooftop is entirely simulated by the game just kind of putting you unceremoniously on rooftops with no sense of height or scale to them unless you decide to look down into the endless void below which is no different from the endless void below when you walk the streets of this dumb patrol zone. The seasonal content did its usual thing of being good for like a week or two and then becoming bland, tedious, or pointless because the game is fundamentally flawed especially as Bungie phased out light progression in favor of...nothing?

Dungeons for this expansion were ok. Ghosts of the Deep was tedious to grind out because multiple boss fights use incredibly unfun shield mechanics which facilitate the usage of arbalist to avoid wasting time in short DPS windows which kind of hinders build variety. It also has what feels like insane ad density in these fights which isn't exactly bad but on day 1 it did make it kind of wack to play when figuring the fights out. Warlords Ruin is pretty cool. Solid fights, ok weapons, cool environment. No real complaints to be honest besides Bungie needing to give me my damn Buried Bloodline I'm too lazy to farm out.

Strand is cool I guess.

The storytelling for Destiny in the leadup to Final Shape feels meandering and kind of pointless. Having a year of content and storyline after the conclusion of Lightfall has kind of ruined any hype or excitement I had for the story since much of the plot centers around leading us into an event that literally can't happen for months.

I do think its cool that Bungie is adding old Exotic missions back in as a rotating thing, sucks it took like literally 8 years for them to decide all that content they spent resources on should probably be used for something. Also wild to finally play the Outbreak mission and have it be nostalgia for Red War, a piece of content that has been missing from the game for four years. How many current players have even experienced that stuff? Truly baffling decision tbh but I don't want this to be a whole thing about content vaulting, was just a thought I had as an old player who only recently got into the game in a bigger way well after the vaulting happened.

In all this year has really felt like watching the slow acquisition of Bungie by Sony. Between the deranged layoffs of their incredibly talented staff to the decisions made with this game, it feels like desperate levers have been pulled to right a ship that has no recourse other than acquisition after the devils bargain the incredibly stupid executives and higher ups at Bungie made with their masters at Sony. I hope everyone hurt in the transition or the layoffs that precede or those that likely will come after this review find themselves in a better place that actually respects their artistic talent as developers because its clear the higher ups and Bungie think you are all disposable.