The first half of Resident Evil 7 is awesome and actually frightening. Like in the first game, they managed to structure an entire game around a single location and it works. The shooting feels satisfying, the difficulty is challenging but not unfair and the game comes up with new stuff all the time. Unfortunately as soon as you start to embrace the combat and everything falls into place the game takes a hard turn into another direction. It's a mistake that's very common in video games. Resi 7's second half (or third) is not that bad but it just isn't satisfying, following the excellent first half. It doesn't feel like a culmination of the skills you learned. Even the final boss fight, out of all of them, is by far the weakest.
Overall Resi7 is a fine game that could've been great.

A terrible disappointment and missed opportunity if there ever was one but it's not as bad as some people say. The game has an endless amount of flaws but there is some fun to be had. The graphics and story aren't great but if you like Aliens you will feel at home with the environments the devs have created. If they'd given the weapons more punch and the aliens a bit more brain, that would've done a lot. Fixing the now infamous spelling error doesn't improve the enemy-AI that substantially and therefore doesn't fix the brainless combat. The odd thing is, that there are sections where the aliens (must be other models, I suppose) act a lot smarter and are a genuine threat. They lurk behind objects, attack and vanish again. But the cannon-fodder-enemies they throw at you for 99 percent of the game are just an embarrassment to the brilliant creature H. R. Giger once created.
The fact that they tried to "fix" the beginning of Alien³ is a nice gesture to some fans (I don't care) but what they do with Hicks and Bishop isn't exciting either.
If you want to get terrified by an Alien game, play Isolation. As far as Alien-shooters go, try the marine-campaign from AvP2. That stuff is much more intense than any second of Colonial Marines. If you are lazy, like me, and just want to play a game that takes place in that universe and doesn't take much effort or dedication from the player, Aliens Colonial Marines is alright.

This game has one of the best openings ever with the first two hours. The atmosphere is dark and moody with a good bit of humor. The exploring is fun because you never really know what kind of game its gonna be.
As soon as you get guns and stuff like AI, hit detection and movement become more important, it starts to fall apart. This is a buggy mess for sure. Much love went into the leveldesign and there are so many nice little ideas but often times they just don't work because of the execution.
This remains an interesting game to play until the end but my god, are there painful sections. Some aren't even fun to look at with the factory probably being the blandest part. And to hell with those headache-inducing visual filters.

The Sinking City is a good Lovecraft adaptation caught in a mediocre game.
The open world seems insanely detailed and intricate at first glance, but unfortunately there isn't as much hidden behind it as hoped. On the one hand, some side quests are interesting. They offer quite a bit of variety in terms of content and expand the lore. On the other hand, the game hardly rewards you for exploring. Apart from crates, there is hardly anything to discover off the quest paths.
The big problem with the quests is that they almost always follow a very similar pattern. You enter a place, shoot a few monsters, examine all the clues and reconstruct the events. With the clues gained, you then move on to the next station at the other end of the map. In between, you look at loading screens and popping textures very often. Not particularly challenging and or fun.
The combat and really all the other mechanics seem screwed on and don't quite fit. I was grateful for the variety, but the implementation lacks skill and budget.
Focus would have done the developers good in general, because many elements are also really great. The character design, though clunky, is something else and shows a lot of innovation. Apart from ape-ish looking patriarchs and fishy looking dudes, even the protagonist looks a like guy who has lived through and seen some effed up stuff. The same goes for the environments. The city really feels like it could exist exactly like this in a tale by Lovecraft. I also liked how grey most of the important "choices" felt. No obvious good or bad ones.
Certainly the better game compared to Call of Cthulhu (2018) but had much more potential.

I kind of admire that they went all the way with the 90s/early 00s clichés and stereotypes. I never played the first game, but I imagine this is basically a mix of The Faculty and Resident Evil. That being said, it's very monotonous and we shouldn't forget that the game was released in 2007 or even 2009 if you count the PSP version. We've seen this many times before done better and moved on by this point. I could see it being fun in co-op, but as a single player it's a very shallow, dated experience.

This obscure pre-movie adaption of The Hobbit book by Tolkien was the game of my childhood. The game mechanics are pretty simple and you can see how they tried to make it more interesting by adding things like little puzzles and stealth sections. The latter were my nightmares at the time (those stupid trolls!), but it's actually not that hard. I would say the weakest part is perhaps the combat, as there isn't much to do other than crush orcs and other creatures with your stick by pressing X or throwing rocks at them.
The great thing about the game is that Bilbo's journey is pretty faithful to the original, and you have a lot of variety in locations during the campaign. You see Hobbiton, the forests, orc mines, mountains, Lake-Town and so on. The dialogs and presentation are also very charming.