Tear Ring Saga: Berwick Saga is a tactical RPG with a lot to offer, but it also has its fair share of drawbacks.
On the positive side, the game boasts a richly-crafted world and a cast of unique, interesting characters. Players are incentivized to train and use every character, thanks to their differentiated skill sets and prfs. The tactical gameplay is challenging and engaging, and the game looks and sounds great with impressive 2D graphics and animated sprites and a good OST. The battle save feature every 5 turns is also a helpful addition.
However, there are some frustrating aspects to the game. The weapon durability system can be a drag, and capturing can be too random. RNG can be especially punishing early on, and there are some obscure mechanics and information hidden from players that require external resources to fully understand. Promotion can be a hassle due to weapon rank requirements, and the long battles and animations can require a significant time investment.
Overall, Berwick Saga is a solid tactical RPG that offers a great world and engaging characters, but players should be prepared for some frustration along the way.

If only that '2' hadn't come at such a prohibitive cost.

Rogue Legacy 2 is the long awaited sequel to 2013's indie darling Rogue Legacy, and it promises to be the first game, but better. The first impression left by the game indeed points to that: it has sharper, more modern visuals; it controls much better, with spin kicks in particular being a much more comfortable maneuver, and it even gives you the dash ability right off the bat, which is important since that was at the center of much of the movement and combat tech in the first game.

The defining aspects of Rogue Legacy are still here, with the same core loop of picking an heir on death, the same NPCs, the family estate screen, Charon, and the randomly generated map. Except now, instead of Castle Hamson, there is an entire kingdom to explore, with all-new areas filled with a variety of new challenges. It sounds like what every RL1 fan could wish for, however, inexplicably at first, the game feels slow, and is rather exhausting compared to its prequel. The reason for that is apparent if you take a step back and analyze RL and RL2 side-by-side.

Rogue Legacy is a roguelite where the player enters a randomly generated castle and attempts to find and defeat four bosses. During their time in the castle, the player obtains gold and blueprints: gold can be used to both upgrade your characters and build equipment you have blueprints for. Secret bosses that can be fought at the locations where defeated bosses once were. Optionally, after the credits, the player can start NG+, which is the same game with harder enemy placements.

Rogue Legacy 2 is a roguelite where the player enters a randomly generated kingdom and attempts to find and defeat a number of bosses (ten by my count, depends on whether you count void beasts or not). During their time in the castle, the player obtains gold, red ether, ore, souls and blueprints which, upon death... Gold is used to buy upgrades, Gold + Ether is used to buy runes, Gold + Ore is used to build equipment, Ether + Ore can be exchanged into more Souls, and Souls are used to level up the family estate and upgrade the shops so the stats and items in them can be upgraded further with the respective materials. After finishing the game, the player gains the ability to switch threads, which is moving back and forth between NG+ states with a series of customizable modifiers that change a variety of things about the game's balance, including but not limited to powering enemies up, increasing the map size and unlocking upgraded versions of the game's bosses. Not all modifiers aren't available from the start: most of them must be unlocked by beating higher numbered threads.

To say nothing of scars, mastery ranks, Unity levels, weight classes, Charon's tribute level and so on. A common occurrence when playing RL2 is to ask oneself "why is this here? How does it make the game any better?", and a lot of the time, the answer is "it does not": Many of its additions to the formula feel overdesigned to the point of being bothersome or poorly designed in a way they're plain skippable. The best display of the latter case is the relics, which are an evolution of the mechanic where you prayed for help in the first game and got a boon (or curse). RL2's Relics are items that add passive traits to your character. They're found randomly in certain rooms across the kingdom, and have a whole new stat, called Resolve, associated with them: Resolve is allocated when you take a relic, and having less than 100 Resolve reduces your Max HP to that amount as a percentage.

Relics are, aside from the revamped classes, the reason why RL2's main menu offers a glossary to help the player navigate the specialized vocabulary that comes with item and skill descriptions now. Much of the effects feel like reading TCG cards, and although a departure from the original, that's potentially a good thing: TCGs have these crazy interactions and combos that are part of the fun of playing the game. It must be fun to look for relic combos and... no, in reality, the drawbacks are far too punishing to pick relics up willy-nilly. Their effects seldom compensate the loss of HP, rarely match your class and even less frequently interact with one another. Plus, you can't even swap them out if you find a better set, the only way to get rid of them is to die, and yes, you do lose them on death, so when fighting bosses, unless you're planning to win first try, you can't count on them either.

Ah, yes, the bosses. What should be highlights are actually the most infuriating parts of the experience. The problem with the bosses in RL2 is that, individually, their attacks are fine: there's always a clear window, a clear movement pattern that spares you from the punishment. It's the overlaps of attacks that often leave the player without a place to run to. This almost always happens with bosses that are two or more separate entities that act independently, or those that summon minions, like Tubal, but is a frequent occurrence in other fights as well, where a low recovery period on bosses' attacks, combined with them being randomly picked instead of having triggers or patterns, makes it so they overlap each other and thus cancel their safe spots. Boss fights in RL2 basically force the player into playing classes with long invulnerability periods, and even then, feel less like a test of skill and more like a grind against the RNG.

Mind you, this is not a new issue! RL's bosses had the exact same problem, as anyone who fought against, say, upgraded Alexander will tell you. The difference was that the main bosses' patterns were simple enough that this never became an issue, and upon killing them, you were given enough gold so that the next area and boss's difficulty would be in a comfortable spot in your next run, if you happened to die. As for the upgraded versions, they were easy to unlock, and you could just rematch immediately if you lost, letting you focus on the fight instead of making the trek to the door over and over again.

RL may have been a janky game, but it's impossible to argue that it liked to waste your time. RL2, on the other hand? Upgrades rarely have an impact, bosses barely give any gold, there's multiple currencies whose only purpose is to stall progress... just think about it, the addition of souls is solely so you have to grind to unlock more grind. And to make things worse, the narrative is contrived so that you have to play multiple NG+ to get to the end of it. Take a wild guess at how many playthroughs are needed to get to the true ending. Two? Three? How about eight? You need to go all the way up to NG+7 to see the end of a story that could very effectively be told in three playthroughs, and even then, the pay off would not be worth it. The entire game is designed like it desperately had to justify two years of early access.

Like I said before, RL2 did bring a bunch of improvements with it. The vast majority of the game's issues lie within its balance, which could easily be tweaked; in fact, it seems cutting down on the grind is what most of the game's top mods concern themselves with.. But as much as I'd like to see this dream version of RL2, where its strong points are enhanced instead of its weak ones, that's not the game I played. RL2, as it came out, is a terrible experience, an unbelievably unsatisfying grindfest. I remember playing 30 hours of the original Rogue Legacy when it came out and having a blast: it amused me for a while, then left before it got boring. I played 60 hours of Rogue Legacy 2, all the while waiting for the fun part to begin, and it felt absolutely miserable.

Inside is a game I've heard about for quite some time but I hadn't gotten around to playing it until now and I am so shocked by the quality of this game.

Immediately, Inside immerses you into it's dystopian world through it's fantastic qualities. Perfectly crafted audio design coupled with the daunting soundtrack work in tandem to create tension, peace, and horror throughout the game. Visually the game design is simple but timeless and Playdead did a fantastic job of utilizing these features to create one of the best unsettling atmospheres I have ever seen in a videogame.

Inside begins with a cold open, not a single word of dialogue is spoken, yet somehow convinces the player to care deeply about this boy's journey, as you guide him throughout treacherous territory. Challenging puzzles and intense action set-pieces are extremely well done, and I found myself really having to think about my next decision, finding pride in my intuition when I got something right the first time.

Achievements are tied to secret collectibles that can be found throughout the game and most are extremely well hidden and off the beaten path, and I'd recommend using a guide to attain them. There is also an alternate secret ending that you should look up afterwards.

Story-wise, the game is open for interpretation, and you discover more nefarious things happening throughout the plot and this game really gets more dark and twisted as you progress. Several times throughout the game I felt so uncomfortable with what was going on (in a good way), I highly recommend going in blind and allowing Playdead to take you on this journey.

I simply cannot fault the game, it didn't overstay it's welcome, but I didn't crave more once it was over. The stakes were raised with each progression point, and the puzzles coupled with the atmosphere makes this honestly one of my favourite experiences I have had to date with the genre.

A phenomenal start to one of gamings most iconic franchises that manages to get the gameplay and setting so right despite some mechanics not aging the best.

In comparison to the rest of the series, Fallout 1s general story and atmosphere are a bit of an oddball, with the focus of its main quest mainly centered around saving the Vault Dwellers home of Vault 13. Of course things don't finish this way but the escalation that does occur feels incredibly natural. The various towns and such are also one of Fallout 1s strongest points, with each brimming with fun and interesting Characters that play off the world well (my favorite being Junktowns mayor Killian Darkwater). Gameplay wise Fallout 1 also rocks, with the turn based system working incredibly well making each fight pretty exciting (especially with Bloody Mess). The games non-combat options also work well in the world, with special mention to how dealing with the endgame quests in the most efficient way requiring both a high speech and science to circumvent some pretty brutal mutant encounters.

While I adore the turn based system of Fallout 1 I can't say the same about navigating its world. Even with numerous patches and mods NPCs have the worst tendency to block you from important areas or bunch up in fights leading to lots of unintentional carnage in fights that should be relatively simple. The final areas in particular have so much splash damage going around that 90 percent of my groups casualties came from my own group (fucking Blades). Another odd quirk of Fallout 1s is how some systems tend to break quests and other relatively simple systems, with one in particular locking out an early set of high tier armor requiring a fight I wouldn't have done otherwise. Speaking of fights Fallout 1s balance is perhaps the most fucked I've seen so far, with Energy Weapons clearly being top tier making some early investments feel a bit squandered (though Guns still stay effective for the minor skirmishes of the game).

Despite all that I'd still say to give Fallout 1 a shot because behind all the clunk is a phenomenal CRPG that laid the groundwork to some of my favorite games of all time (and Fallout 76).

9/10.

[PRE-2.0 UPDATE REVIEW]

2077 is not the exact game I wanted or many of its biggest anticipators wanted. Still, it's an experience I sincerely enjoyed, oozing with atmosphere and grit, despite the considerable simplification of its source material's mechanics, intricacy, roleplaying, style, politics, and themes.

[WARNING: PREPARE FOR THE LONGEST REVIEW I'VE EVER WRITTEN]

Simply put, if this game had come out around the time I first got into the cyberpunk genre and had heard about it (around 2014 when I was 16), I probably would've found this game to be a masterpiece. Don't get me wrong, I still loved the game, but I think there was this itch I wanted to be scratched back in 2014 after I cleared most of Skyrim for the first time, like something that had lots of quests and a great, immersive setting, but with gunplay instead of melee fantasy combat. I was entrusting this when Fallout 4 was announced mid-2015 and released later that year. While I enjoyed the game, it's different from what I wanted, as it felt there were far fewer quests in comparison, and the Commonwealth could have been more interesting. Cyberpunk was the game I wanted for the most part, and unfortunately, I never played it until more than eight years later, two years after it came out. I went many distances during that wait, which slowly decreased my excitement as time went on. I created my own fantasy cyberpunk universe that I started writing in 2015. Not far from there, stemming from my getting into D&D in 2019, I got interested in the TTRPG that 2077 is based on, created by Mike Pondsmith, who only receives a seemingly small credit in the final game, and from there, made a homebrew campaign for the game set within my created universe (with, and this is ironic considering what I have to say about 2077, some simplified mechanics of the TTRPG), which my friends and I are still playing to this day, mostly stemming from how busy I've been with school. All my friends in this friend group participate in each other's tabletop campaigns, with four campaigns going on with about the same group of people. But each time I have the time to run a session with Pumps, Clare, John and Jared, tabletop Cyberpunk is a unique experience. It could be any combination of the guns, the darkness, the synths, and more, but it's pretty novel. The TTRPG is very interesting to me, as it's a relic of the budding interest in the genre back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and there are a lot of elements of it that didn't make it in the final game for reasons that seem either obvious or unclear. A bit more upsetting is the absence of Morgan Blackhand, a pretty important character in the lore, but there are several references to him and one of the NPCs implies he's still around. More understandable is the absence of, among some other weird street gangs that the TTRPG saw, the Bozos, a gang in Night City from the lore that is mostly left out in 2077, implying that they just died out. They're a gang of psychotic killer clowns, which is unique, but it's understandable why they wouldn't fit here. The only prominent remnant left is the character Ozob Bozo, the subject of a few minor side quests in the game, a weirdly quiet merc with red clown hair and a red grenade for a nose. Ultimately, some of the game does flat-out rewrite details about the TTRPG, and sometimes it's for the better, sometimes it's not. Ironically, the initial teaser trailer release for 2077 was in 2013, which could be, whether intentional or not, a callback to the first edition of the TTRPG, Cyberpunk 2013. Furthermore, the game was released in 2020, calling back to the second edition of the TTRPG, Cyberpunk 2020. If you want a dark futuristic roleplaying game where your choices actually make a big difference, and there's a lot more at stake, get a good DM and some friends, and play Cyberpunk Red, the recent 4th edition of the TTRPG. However, if you're looking for something much more linear but still fun…

The events of this game all take place in Night City, a famous locale separated from the New United States of America based in the former Los Angeles and San Francisco areas, and my god, this map is stupidly good. Like, it makes me mad that humans created this for a video game. It is such a weirdly intricate map for a game that is much less player-driven than was hinted at. Wherever you look at it from, it seems like a futuristic, unbelievable city in the distance that you're not actually allowed to enter, but you can here. It may seem drastic, but this has already become one of my favourite open worlds in a game, alongside games like RDR2, Saints Row 2, and GTA V. Every single city block feels like it has its own story to tell. It's doing the most with a map that's mostly just "city," but compared to something like Saints Row: The Third, there's a ton of variety instead of dull, unimpressive street corners that all feel the same. Before I got Wallpaper Engine, I had a folder of cyberpunk landscapes and wallpapers that my desktop would cycle through, and there are so many sights and stills in this game that look exactly like them. Slums, ghettos, downtowns, megalopolises, tighter residential suburbs, industrial zones, and downtrodden, forgotten areas all come together, bonded by neon, brazen and immoral advertisements, and rain to make Night City feel alive and breathing, all helped by the density of NPCs, which feels a lot more accurate to Los Angeles streets in comparison to GTA V which gives me a mental image of a handful of 5 or 6 civilians just walking through a vast city street in the heart of downtown, leaving me to believe like 900 people live in Los Santos as opposed to the 4 million that live in its real-life counterpart. The world also benefits from its day/night cycle and weather, with each area feeling different depending on when it is, which brings up the fact that this game has one of the most extended in-game day passages I've seen. A 24-hour day in-game is about 3 hours in the real world, giving it about a 1:8 ratio, which is crazy. I remember thinking the days in GTA V were long, and that only has a 1:30 ratio with the real world, with each day cycle being about 48 real-world minutes. The system encourages sleeping and waiting a lot whenever you have a time-specific quest and gives you slack if you think you might run late. The world is also super friendly for parkour, especially the more residential areas. Earlier in development, the game reportedly had much deeper parkour mechanics, which works since the cyberpunk genre and parkour have this weirdly excellent connectivity that I love, highlighted in games like Mirror's Edge. But from what's left in there, it works, but it becomes supercharged when you get the double-jump cyberware, which I'll get to later. But much of this climbing rewards the player with beautiful vistas overlooking the city, which always feels new. However, there's not as much on the inside as on the outside. For as many buildings and structures as there are, you can only enter a small number of them. I remember coming across a pretty small ratty apartment building where they placed one of the collectibles and being surprised at how much detail existed in one building where a collectible was. However, this building was later used for one of the main missions (Search and Destroy) and left me disappointed. Whenever I saw any semi-detailed building from there going forward, I asked myself, "I wonder what mission they made this for." Even though this was a problem, many of the interiors are fantastic. Its smallness enabled CDPR to add more buyable apartments across the city, but I LOVE V's apartment. Not only does it feel like a weirdly homely place to rest your bones (until you start seeing Johnny in the mirror), but it does one of my favourite things a game does and decorates your home with mementos and pieces of the progress you've made so far. Completing Judy's questline with the diving mission will place a box of diving gear in the corner. Completing the first quest for the Peralezes will put a "VOTE FOR JEFFERSON PERALEZ" poster on your back wall. Finding all the tarot cards will have Misty awarding V a dreamcatcher that will hang above V's bed. It's a great way to show progress and remind you of past events you've endured, even though certain mementos are only a marker of more obscure sidequests.

This game also breaks free from the "futuristic city" side of cyberpunk and introduces the Badlands outside the city, which entirely morphs the game into a futuristic Mad Max with its sandy, derelict towns, dusty motels, and hot deserts. The city also has a surprising amount of plant life. While the most remarkable instance of this doesn't come until doing either The Devil or The Sun endings, the North Oak hills have some nice grass and trees, and the Corpo district has a slightly trashed albeit beautiful park with lots of trees and shrubbery. There is a little bit of optimism about this in the game with the existence of this plant life, even though you can chase it with the brazen advertisements that appear throughout the world. The imagery of sex, power, and suicide dominate the world of what they're selling you, which is a bit of a shallow way to show how immoral and taboo things have become, but is enough of a staple in the genre at this point for the devs/artists to have some fun with it, like some chocolate bar advertisement showing some guy's head exploding in a burst of flavour. It makes me a bit upset that some other city attraction staples seem missing because the devs fixate on the hypothetical futuristic focus on taboo matters. You'd be wondering what a museum or a zoo would look like in the year 2077 when you drive by the 50th XXX sex shop in the city.

The gangs add a nice flavour to life in Night City. There obviously weren't enough resources to properly follow up on the 50+ gangs in the 2nd edition of the TTRPG, but the 10-ish that they settled on in 2077 (some returning, some new) are…good. Maelstrom is a gang that appears in almost every edition of the game, for obvious reasons, being cyberware enthusiasts. In a visual sense, they're adapted pretty amazingly here. What were normal-looking people with a lot of cyberware on in the TTRPG were turned into these walking showcases of body horror, with flesh soldered around steel and red lights. Fantastic stuff here. Many others return from the TTRPG, like the Tyger Claws, Voodoo Boys, and Valentinos, and they're all done pretty well. However, Raffen Shivs/Wraiths are hilariously underdeveloped in the game, mainly developed as a BBEG to the Aldecaldos here and nothing else, no depth whatsoever, and visually looking like a blend of Maelstrom and the Tyger Claws. I don't reckon the DLC will give us a deeper look into these, but who knows? As for the new gangs, some are good, and some…meh. The idea of the 6th Street is okay, being NUSA enthusiasts trapped in a city that has seceded from the NUSA. Still, they kinda just boil down to cartoonish "FUCK YEAH AMERICA!" patriots that don't see much development. Even in a quest where you discover this massive block party that they're throwing, the characterization is nearly nonexistent. The Mox I found a lot more interesting, being this coalition of sex workers and minorities standing up against the brazen sexual violence in NC. This matter is one of the closest times the game comes to making a political statement, knowing that this group was born against the ideals of the Tyger Claws, which is, like I mentioned before, a nice flavour for the world, even if you disagree with it. The Animals are essentially a stand-in for many of those bizarre gangs in 2020. While it doesn't come close to how weird some of those can get (google the KoneHedds, the Elvises, or the Bradi Bunch), the seriousness is mixed with a bunch of muscle-bound freaks who all talk like cyborg gorillas.

Unlike what many people were hoping for, the game has a mostly linear story that only deviates from its beginning and ending depending on, respectively, which lifepath you chose and which ending you selected. Does its linearity detract from its quality? No, not really at all. The game has a great story regardless of your choices, and it fits well within the continuum of good cyberpunk narratives where nothing seems to be going well, but you're forced through human spirit and will to hope for a better future. Johnny Silverhand's quote near the end of "The Star" ending resonates with me here when questioned by V if things could result in a bit happier ending for everyone involved: "Here, for folks like us? Wrong city, wrong people." It plays with the idea of going out with a bang when you're young and hungry rather than worsening your legacy as you age and "fade away." The world is dangerous; In Night City, life expectancy is much lower and dying of old age is exceedingly rare, with actual old age being reserved for those who can afford to prolong their life. Furthermore, suppose you can reckon with selling your soul to the corpos. In that case, that's one of the only ways to make a comfortable life for yourself, as enormous companies like Arasaka and Militech look upon the violent city from their ivory towers. You work your way up to one of these towers, witness some awful events up there, and become afflicted with somewhat of a sickness. The rest of the game focuses on trying to recoup from this, guided by a fractal of those willing to help you through what may be your final weeks on earth. The story feels like this double reflective form of progress, from where you find out more, the more fucked you reckon you are. The game splits itself into three acts; The first is very streamlined where you, while still pretty compelling, essentially follow a straight path to the conclusion that starts the catalyst of the main story. The second act is much less linear, where you follow a handful of leads at your leisure, discovering more information about your condition and figuring out how to climb out of this mess. The final act only includes your chosen ending path; I'll explain it later. It's not particularly a long path of missions, but the acts are weighted a bit weirdly overall, where you're spending about 75% of the main story in Act 2, and it can sometimes feel a bit slow, whereas Act 1 and 3 are short but are always nicely paced.

The story is interwoven with some outstanding characters I found myself quite attached to. While they vary in dimensionality, they all demonstrate great windows into the giant boiling pot of life and experiences in Night City. Protagonist V obviously (slightly) changes on the lifepath you choose. However, they're still a viable candidate of a relative nobody cast into hell because of the story's events. While the highs and lows sometimes feel static and cringy, the voice actors did well. The game finds okay excuses to bring back older characters from the TTRPG who were mostly much younger, 50-60 years prior. Most are obviously how the game handles more well-off people who can afford to live much longer, but in some instances, like Johnny Silverhand, the fact of his mere existence is a central plot point in the main story. He's brilliantly, stiltedly, and edgily brought to life by the legendary Keanu Reeves, a viable candidate to star in this genre after his history in cyberpunk movies like The Matrix and Johnny Mnemonic. I got a bit more used to him as time went on; My initial impression was similar to how I felt about Bane in TDKR, just this cartoon anarchist that wants nothing but chaos and death for the people on top of the economic ladder, but the more I got to know him through his routine speeches in Act 2, I understood there was a good bit more depth to him than his pretty rudimentary world views. He sometimes gets challenged on his beliefs and their inconsistencies, and it's nice to see. His placement in the game sometimes feels shoddy; They wanted him to be your sidekick in a manner who appears far beyond the main story, but sometimes you can tell his reaction to quests you're doing is just the most neutral response where his appearance could have been more appropriate. Like you'll be doing a straightforward quest where you search around for gear, and he'll appear like "Hey! Yo! Look at this! Over here! Look!" all at once. He also does have a nice arc as the story progresses, and while it might be unbelievable at points, it's pretty compelling and goes even further, depending on the ending you choose. As for other old characters, you have Rogue Amendiares, appearing as the head of the Afterlife bar and its mercenaries, as well as a significant character in the story. You also have Kerry Eurodyne, who has little significance in the story but has a questline if you choose to do it. There's also the matter of Adam Smasher, whose physical design is massively overhauled in a significant way in this game and is brought to "life" in all of his complete brazen vulgarity and lack of empathy, but is cast into an unfortunate primary antagonist role, even though he barely affects the story in the slightest. A more suitable pair of antagonists is Saburo Arasaka and his son Yorinobu. Some other returning characters are reduced to minor/cameo appearances, like Santiago Aldecaldo or Maximum Mike. Still, it was nice to see them here in some way, either in Johnny's flashbacks or surviving the many trials to make it to the age they're at in 2077. I'll mention Morgan Blackhand's absence again and how much it could've been a great foil and boost to Adam Smasher's underutilization in the final game. As for the new characters, there are lots of great ones. Jackie is a beautiful aspirant as well as mechanically a fantastic set of training wheels to get familiar with Night City, Panam is a hardened nomad with a sweet interior, River is an emotionally bereft cop haunted by his past, Judy is a bubbly and friendly punk overqualified for her work, Viktor is a resilient aging ex-punk as gritty as he is genuinely caring, Takemura is an intensely dogmatic man in an un-dogmatic world with his dissonance boiled in betrayal, Padre is an old school fixer almost romanced by the violence around him, and Joshua is a madman forever cursed by his sins. The dialogue in the game produces some excellent lines here and there, but it's a step back from the story itself. Although I think people rag on it way too much because of the attitude of the game, which is something I'll go into later, so hearing slang like "choom" and "flatline" and "choo" and "corpo" and "eddies" and "input" used all the time almost seems forced and chaotic. But I'm attuned to it, as it's all basically plucked from the TTRPG, and it's brought to life pretty well, even when there are a handful of memorably bad lines.

V's chronicle has several endings. However, the total number can vary depending on what your definition is. The number could range from 4 to 21 unique variations depending on what you consider different, but I will group these into 5. None of these endings particularly go well for the protagonist, but as mentioned before, that's usually the nature of cyberpunk stories. In that vein, I do like all of these five endings. Although, I will discuss the concluding questlines and their respective epilogues together, and I will refer to each package as an "ending." First getting out of the way is the suicide ending, a complete dodging of any concluding questline right into the final option; I originally thought CDPR may have played this ending silly for its bluntness and how it entirely skips Act 3, but honestly, they didn't. The initial cutscene and following voice messages from V's remaining friends and contacts are honestly heartbreaking, and this option genuinely does seem like it could make sense from V's perspective, considering how fucked everything seems. As for the more intensive endings, all named after Major Arcana tarot cards (as most of the game is based on), the first is the one that most people will choose: The Star. It's a nice ending, and it is the ultimate way to end things if Panam Palmer was your ride or die, even though it is pretty bittersweet knowing that it's implied Panam doesn't know about your remaining six months. For that reason, the final shot of V and Panam gliding on autopilot over a lake (if you chose her as your love interest) reminded me of the ending of The Graduate, with two people continuing their newfound relationship into the unknown, with uncertainty on their faces. As for The Sun, I like this ending quite a bit, but it's probably my least favourite. V gets sucked into that mental vortex I mentioned, where you either go out with a bang or live long enough for it to temper your legacy, which I personally believe is a pretty shitty way to live life. Furthermore, I feel like the game doesn't particularly want you to think it's a good worldview. Either way, the game doesn't reckon with the choice that V has made here. For that reason, it just kind of ends like so many other things, where you've reached the pinnacle and are in charge of things from here on, even if it does have a cool final scene where your next big job is pulling a heist on a casino in space, something that might very well lead to your death. With this and the persisting fact that V still has about six months left in their body, this ending redeems itself a bit. Another ending is The Devil, the only one available to you no matter what, whereas The Star and The Sun require some previous quest completage. This ending is certainly much more enjoyable if you saved Takemura at the end of his questline, as well as, to a lesser extent, Oda if you showed him mercy following his boss battle at Takemura's request. Otherwise, you're just stuck with Anders Hellman, easily one of the most "nothing" characters in the game outside of being a smart science tech guy. The ending does result in a pretty unique conclusion, though, with the concluding epilogue "Where Is My Mind?" turning into a nightmare of routine stuck in outer space, with Arasaka's best scientists attempting to help you recoup. It contrasts with the reports of Saburo's resurrection via Yorinobu's body. You're seeing all this public outcry of some pretty impious shit, and here V is recouping from dealing with the same thing. It ends with the scientists concluding that you're unsavable, but they offer you free entry into the Secure Your Soul program, an initiative advertised across the entire game in the city hidden in plain sight. Great ending here as well. In many ways, this feels like the full-stop antithesis of The Sun, where you directly contest Johnny's wishes and formally attend the boardroom meeting you "crash" in that ending. There is also this reflexive Dark Souls-y nature where you assumedly become an engram, just like Johnny. The final ending is Temperance, which begins with either getting Rogue's help or the Aldecaldos' help, but in cyberspace, accepting your fate and letting Johnny take over your body as V crosses the bridge beyond the black wall forever. It's extremely somber, living out the epilogue as a fully integrated Johnny Silverhand, still assumedly living under V's identity and persisting their memory by buying a niche at the Columbarium. I love this ending a lot, Johnny already had an arc in the story where he made peace with not wanting to return to the land of the living as he wanted V to live on, so there is some internal conflict within Johnny in this ending. While he's certainly content with being in control again, he's ultimately conflicted. My favourite of these endings is a tough question, but I'll probably stick with The Star, as bringing Panam into the central story is a great re-incorporation of what was essentially a main quest turned side quest. I have a problem with these endings, though, in how one achieves them. Yes, it does make sense that you'll have to call one person to help you continue to the endgame. Furthermore, I ultimately do appreciate the game, after completing an ending, knocking you right before the point-of-no-return quest "Nocturne Op55N1", so I could play all 5 of the endings and reap all of the rewards (I've still yet to do the secret "[Don't Fear] The Reaper" path where you take on Arasaka alone). However, this gets irritating when you're completing side content, and the game automatically locks back on to this quest whenever you're done. Anywho, it feels a little unambitious and kills replay value that you can play the game in a way where any of the 5 (6 including Don't Fear The Reaper) endings are possible right before the endgame begins. I'm not electing that this game pulls a Fallout 3 and lock you out forever after beating it either, but I'd prefer having to make certain choices in the game that result in getting certain conclusions. Maybe helping Panam and the Aldecaldos weakens your relationship with Rogue (who introduced you to Panam) to the point where asking her to storm Arasaka with you, at Johnny's wishes, is something she's mostly or completely uninterested in doing. Play the game again to save that from happening. Boom, more replay value.

There is a burning question this game leaves me with after putting 150 hours into it: is this game an RPG? One common criticism of the game was that it washed away many of its source material's deep RPG mechanics and ended up being a Skyrim-style action game with RPG elements. I can't entirely agree with this, but I also don't believe this game is a complete RPG, either. Cyberpunk 2077 is an RPG in the same way a hot dog is a sandwich: sort of, kind of, but it depends on who you ask and what their definition is, but it's going to be hard for people to straight up say no, and even then, who cares? Because my criticisms and problems, as widespread as they are, don't have anything to do with that. The game's story is relatively linear, the lifepath you choose doesn't affect many things outside dialogue options that don't influence much and a couple of exclusive quests, and as I mentioned, the ending you get is the one you want depending on completing certain quests or not, rather than given to you depending on the choices you ultimately made. One of the only times the game acknowledges your choices is in the Adam Smasher fight, where he recounts several things you did in the story, such as sparing or killing Oda in "Play It Safe." His remarks weren't particularly extraordinary either, just feeling a few steps away from how a Telltale game will review your choices and what percentage of players made those choices after you beat an episode. Speaking of these folks, the boss battles in the game don't resemble bosses I see in most RPGs, and aside from the ones I mentioned there, alongside Royce, they are just "enemies with a lot of health." Furthermore, it's evident that your choices don't matter much, but this game has a lot more depth than people give it credit for, and this doesn't come down to just RPG-levelling the game has. There are a lot of little things, secrets, and dialogues placed throughout the world that the game doesn't point you towards at all, and I love that this stuff justifies exploring the map on your own terms, besides the fact that Night City is so gorgeous and exciting on its own. You can make skill checks that sometimes can make a significant difference in quests, but most of the time, they open up new dialogue options to let NPCs know you're the real deal. Most of the tech stuff boils down to V remarking, "Wow, that's an old 480 ram megacylinder-hydrocarburator? Haven't seen gear like that in years, must be from the fourth corpo war," most strength checks are successfully going, "Bro, stop being a big Ass Penis Head or I'll rip out your spinal sinew," and most cool checks have you spitting absolute game fit for a thinktank shooting quips for a direct-to-VOD Marvel romp. Regardless, it does help immersion and adds a nice bonus to the game's levelling. Ultimately, even though I do overall like the game's dialogue, there still is little to pick from, and a lot of it is mostly variations on a theme that mostly ends up at the same destination. It still helps to hear V's voice actor edge it up with their edgy voice. Still, this game sufficiently brings to life a lot of cool mechanics from the TTRPG, even though CDPR did a lot of simplification. The lifepath mechanic in Cyberpunk 2020 (the second edition of the game) is one of the most incredible methods of character creation I've ever seen, opening up opportunities to craft some really sick and unique backstories for your edgerunner, and how they put it into 2077 was pretty disappointing, alongside the classes that they avoided including. The others are some level of understandable, but no playable Rockerboy class/lifepath is fucking insanity to me, and I feel the same about the Netrunner. Even though I don't think all these actions in the name of genre accessibility made the game suffer too hard (this is a point I'll return to), I'm glad that modders are taking a lot of these mechanics into their own hands and making the game much more of an RPG through mods. They don't interest me a ton, but I'd rather have them out there than not have them out there. Vox populi, aye? But the more scaled-back nature of the game certainly didn't ruin it for me.

The actual gameplay loop can sometimes feel exhausting when you're not talking and walking, but the gunplay and stealth are fun enough to carry things along. It isn't super unique, with that recent classic blend of optional stealth on gameplay, but it's working at max capability for most of the time. It's not one of those other cases where shitty gunplay makes you want to stick to stealth because both are equally viable and fun. Shotguns feel amazing in this game; Being able to ragdoll nearly any enemy when you point blank them with a shotgun is so empowering. Most of the guns feel great, although my one personal weak point was the sniper rifles. I admit they're probably not one of the firearms I usually associate with the streetbound nature of the genre, but a great set of options for stealth weapons was something the game was missing. Yes, suppressors pretty much exist for all of the guns, but, and I'm sorry for not shutting the fuck up about the TTRPG yet, the TTRPG had a lot of cool, unique weapons, like bows and crossbows, which is a main staple of a lot of the game's contemporaries like Far Cry and Skyrim. The TTRPG also has a ton of bizarre "exotic" weapons like tasers, beanbag guns, boomerangs, tranquillizers, and more. 2077 washed away a lot of that unique personality. However, I could get behind both the game's encouragement to focus on melee combat instead of gunplay and the game's variety of melee weapons, even though I never found myself messing around with either. I can forgive it because of the game's good weapon customization. While there are no custom camos, you can still deck out your favourite weapons with mods and a variety of sights, which, while not game-changing, does help with some personalization. I also didn't mess around too much with the ricochet features on guns, but I love the depth it adds to gunplay. Combat overall has a nice depth that extends considerably beyond how fun the guns and melee weapons are. The quickhacks are fantastic for the most part. There's a bit of influence from Watch Dogs here, but while there's a bit less focus on being able to "hack the world" where WD2 had some insanely cool combat situations and maneuvers, the combat quickhacks in 2077 are pretty great for the most part. The suicide one is maybe one of the most insane things I've seen in a video game, but also very useful, but it's even more unhinged when it's not enough to kill an enemy, and they just continue fighting you with low health after shooting themselves in the head. As for thrown explosives, it needs to be more balanced. There are many cool grenades to experiment with, but it's easy to stock up on regular frags and huck 'em like there's no tomorrow. It becomes a really easy way to approach fights, and the game lets you carry as many grenades as you want, so you can flick 3-5 of them at a time and shatter everyone to smithereens. I'm not too fond of it, and there should've been more restrictions. Doom Eternal had the great idea of having infinite grenades that recharge after throwing one. Heals are standard-issue, having a Dark Souls 2 type split where MaxDoc functions as your estus that instantly brings back a chunk off your health, and BounceBacks are your lifegems that heal a chunk over time. However, just like fucking Dark Souls 2, you get to a certain point in the game early on that the slow regen item becomes pretty obsolete, and you're only using the insta-heal. I also try to eat food and drink whenever I get the chance, mostly because I like to RP and wake up from an in-game rest by having a coffee and cigarette (the best breakfast both now and in the future), but also because of the boosts they give you, where sleeping gives you a Skyrim-esque well-rested bonus for gaining XP. The bizarrely colossal amount of food they put in the game for these few effects is insane. RP is king, I guess.

Pretty sad to me that the game was kind of easy. I cranked it up to Hard on my first playthrough (as with most shooters nowadays) and had a painless time aside from a few instances. I could try it on Cyberpsycho for when Phantom Liberty drops, but that might be ridiculous, the same yuge jump between Hardened and Veteran in 00s COD games. The AI certainly doesn't help the game's challenge, as enemies are comfortable without moving around a lot, instead having capabilities to quickhack you. It does help immersion a lot that enemies have similar toolkits to you. Still, unfortunately, they can't replicate how much of a brazen rizzler I am, bouncing around the battlefield with my double jump. As I hinted at the beginning of this section, this, unfortunately, is all chased with a big problem the quests have: there is a lot of gameplay where you're just following people as they talk. This isn't close to always being bad, as, opposed to stuff like Assassin's Creed that bog down their games with this garbage, you actually care about the characters a lot of the time, and the dialogue doesn't make you want to kill yourself. But sadly, this isn't always the case. There are a couple of tailing missions in the game, but they're not close to taking up enough space to be worth complaining about. I understand it's an RPG, characters will have a lot of things to say, and there's a heavy emphasis on the story, lore and worldbuilding, but I'm sure on my second playthrough, this stuff is probably going to be grating to do a second time.

As mentioned, stealth is fun but not much more than what I'd call serviceable. CDPR didn't try to focus on it, but it's only a little deeper than what you'd find in a Far Cry game and a viable way to get through most gigs and encounters. The game's RPG elements clash with the stealth, whereas you're not allowed to take down higher-level enemies at all at lower levels. Takedowns are usually satisfying when you pull them off, especially death from above kills that initiate whenever you drop onto an enemy when you unlock it. A lot of mainstream action games where you hide bodies in stealth have left me paranoid because of this stupid glitch (or mechanic, I guess) the Far Cry games had, where if you're carrying a body, there's no detection meter on it independently of you and enemies will instantly notice it if you enter their line of sight, implying that they believe they're seeing a floating dead body until they notice someone is carrying it. Thankfully Cyberpunk doesn't have this, and they'll only notice a body you're carrying if they notice you.

The side content made up for the relatively brief main story and drew out my time with the game. On top of priority were the more traditional sidequests, and most of them are real stars of the show here, serving as non-repetitive short stories with variable gameplay. Many of these sidequests lead into longer questlines, which may or may not be romance questlines depending on the gender you chose for V. There are two for each of the game's genders, making for four overall: Panam Palmer as male V's hetero relationship, River Ward as female V's hetero relationship, Kerry Eurodyne as the game's MLM relationship, and Judy Alvarez as the game's WLW relationship. Either way, all of these questlines are still available in their relative entirety no matter what gender you select, but may or may not have a somewhat-concluding "scene" depending on your gender and the choices you made. Panam's questline is excellent, regardless of the romance. Even though I thought it could've gone in a better and more satisfying path, it's a lovely tale about helping an outcast rekindle her relationship with her "family," and the budding relationship with her is excellent; As I previously alluded to, it's nice seeing a much more bubbly and sweet side of her emerge from a pretty hardened exterior. The game's MLM relationship does leave much to be desired, though. Even though it's with the lore-famous Kerry Eurodyne, it doesn't slowly bubble up like the other romances do, where the face of chaos and surviving through some pretty heavy shit together makes you slowly bond, and feelings develop. It's just a questline of babysitting this old washed-up rockstar crab while he tries not to lose his mind over how the music scene has changed since he was younger. Then suddenly, you decide to kiss him out of nowhere during a personal moment and initiate a sex scene one mission later (at the weirdest possible time). It's also funny to me that Johnny has little to no thoughts about you initiating this with his old friend. I did enjoy his questline, to make that clear. The whole "getting the band back together" first act leading into his ventures with the Us Cracks girls is delightful, even though in the latter, the game barely lets you talk to him saying, "Listen dog, music has changed," but instead has you silently disapproving whilst helping him terrorize a young Japanese pop group for no other reason that he just hates that they're successful and he's not anymore. The game's other gay relationship with Judy was much more well done. Regardless that I didn't initiate it with her since of my male V, Judy is a fantastic character who reminds me of my friends working in or parallel to the SW industry. It's almost a reverse Panam, though, because she has a pretty friendly and intuitive exterior, with her conversations with you letting you know how much she values your friendship and allegiance, but the questline slowly paints out her harrowing past and shows you how resilient she is, with hints at her previous failed and complicated relationship with Maiko, a character of interest in Judy's questline. Helping her achieve vengeance for a lost friend is a great venture. River's questline is also fantastic, spinning out into a big mystery questline that has you and him uncovering some pretty heavy shit. My friend referred to him as Jackie 2.0, which isn't particularly untrue, with a serious bromance forming with male V, or, you know, without the "b" if you picked a female V. It's pretty common in all these questlines for the last mission to be kind of a chill, laid back approach where you and your "friend" kinda hang out without much threat, and River's concluding mission is especially great. It is disappointing that the game only has four romances (although there are a few more people you can optionally sleep with). There was room for more, especially when it seemed like the game was trying to meet the bare minimum of each type of relationship, with both of V's possible genders having a straight and gay romance. Also, I noticed that romantic partners are the only people you can hug. As a dude who universally views hugs in a non-romantic way that is fine for friends, compatriots, and loved ones of any gender, this was quite odd to me, even though I know everyone doesn't agree with me on that point, and I respect and adhere to friends who aren't that comfortable. But the fact I could never give a good friend like Jackie, Judy or River a hug was weird, even with the fact that this game did its romances as well as it did.

There are a few mini-questlines here, like the great Sinnerman → There Is A Light That Never Goes Out → They Won't Go When I Go about the previously mentioned Joshua Stephenson, a cursed soul who completely lost himself becoming the subject of exploitation from a film studio. There's also the great I Fought The Law → Dream On duology, seeing esoteric powers far beyond control manipulate a potential future mayor and his wife. Also, the surprisingly fun Epistrophy septilogy, which I feared would be the same mission seven times over, but they found ways to make each one unique and fun. The races with Claire were great, too, backed with a nice unravelling backstory. There are many great one-shots, like Happy Together, Sweet Dreams, and Kold Mirage (named after a song by my favourite musician, Lorn). From there, they packed the game with many fairly run-of-the-mill "gigs" that range from great to dull. These are usually where Cyberpunk's great variety of gameplay comes into view, in which these pretty straightforward gigs give you several options to approach. If there's an item in the office of a restaurant that I need to steal, I could always gun down all the bad guys in there to get in and grab it, but I could also enter through the open window to the office, down the one guy in there, steal the item and leave. Your toolkit in weapons, cyberware, quickhacks, and environments dramatically helps here. Furthermore, while many gigs are similar deals, sometimes you have something unique and cool, like an abandoned transport car stuck in a minefield in the Badlands, which you have to extract somehow.

The deal with cyberpsychos is something I'll touch more on when I discuss cyberware, but this activity is a mixed bag. While excellent backstories paint these missions that explain why your target went insane or do a good job of building up the tension for when you encounter and fight them, the actual encounters are kind of all the same, just super fast and aggressive enemies that try to kill you, some who are in a mech. You can take an alternate path for close to all of them where you can distract them, sneak up and do a non-lethal takedown (the handler who gives you these cyberpsycho missions prefers you not kill them so they can be researched and hopefully nursed back to health). You can't do this to all of them due to the mechs or scripted fights, but this gets so addicting as it's a much more tolerable way to deal with them. The last little bit is packed with NCPD scanner hustles which are the closest thing this game has to small "enemy outposts," where some local gang or corp is in the area doing some illegal activity, and you must get rid of them. These go the same more frequently than anything else, even though some are weaved with small stories, such as Militech in some back alley seemingly killing vagrants. Ultimately, a lot of this is just filler, but it's filler that I enjoyed a lot.

The game, unlike its contemporaries, thankfully doesn't have a lot of collectables, really only one small set of them involving Misty's Fool on the Hill questline, having 20 tarot card graffiti arts on your map you can look out for (with certain endings withholding the other two, Judgement and The Devil). A great post by u/kayzooie on the r/LowSodiumCyberpunk subreddit outlined that, besides a few, all the placement of these cards have a lot of significance to the story and V themselves. I started to notice this with The Fool appearing outside V's apartment, The Empress being outside the Afterlife representing Rogue, and The World is right by the rooftop retreat at the end of Act 2, where you decide how you want to proceed with the endgame. This post highlights deeper meanings considering what the cards usually represent, where The Hanged Man is right by Johnny's "grave" in the Oil Barrens, Death is right outside the point of no return in the story at the Embers bar/restaurant, and Strength is in a Santo Domingo industrial plant where you meet Panam for the first time (representing her). As I said, some still seem ambiguous, like Wheel of Fortune, The Star and Justice being vague in their placement and association. The previous interpretations may affect how I view it, but I think Wheel of Fortune is at the motel because it represents a couple of different crucial Arasaka-related story events happening here, where V's life and outlook change on the subject of respectively bad luck and good luck, as this card represents luck and turning points. For example, the kidnapped Anders Hellman admits he doesn't think V is curable, and Hanako Arasaka uses a proxy to tell V that she supports them in uncovering the reality of Saburo's death, as she knows the truth. While The Star doesn't have that much relevance to its specific point, it may have a connection to the Badlands and the nomad namesake ending. The post illustrates the Justice tarot being in the power plant where you find Evelyn demonstrates the exact opposite of what happens to her. I was trying to see if the reversed meaning of the card held any significance, but it didn't.

The matter of cyberware is, like other things, complicated. As for actual mechanics and their use in combat and otherwise, I think it works pretty well, and you can mod the hell out of your body to veer closer and closer to becoming a superhuman. It does justice to the TTRPG's MASSIVE amounts of cyberware you can deck yourself out with, covering pretty much all the essential body systems and ways to strengthen or mod them. As mentioned, the double jump changes everything within combat and exploration and feels integral to the experience. The game also gives some fantastic trade-off options from your quickhack cyberdeck if they aren't your thing. However, some notable disappointment among fans that aligns with me lies in two big things: the visuals of this cyberware and your own liability to cyberpsychosis. The first is honestly one of my biggest problems with the game, some people went into it almost solely because they wanted to turn themselves into modified cyborgs on a visual level, and the only mods that appear on V are arm mods like gorilla arms, mantis blades, etc., as well as facial "cyberware" available in character creation that does not affect gameplay. It's almost aggravating that you're stuck as mostly human on a visual level, while nearly every NPC you run into has some crazy mods going on. The design of this cyberware looks so good, and it sucks you're not allowed to fit yourself with any of them. I have no idea if one can align this with any deadset values V has no matter how you play the game, as there are some characters like Claire who are hard-opposed to getting any cyberware at all, but the game never glazes over this. I was dead set on giving my V a robotic arm to align with one of my OCs who has one. This matter made it all the more upsetting, but I had some hope when I found out you could equip Johnny's robotic arm so I could do it as a stand-in. But apparently, they removed it from the game because it was causing glitches, and that sucks ass. As for cyberpsychosis, it feels like the game is ambiguous on how this shit happens in the first place. In the TTRPG, you have an Empathy stat that ties into a Humanity score that essentially acts as a secondary currency to installing cyberware. You only have so much, and if you begin to deplete it, you're more liable to cyberpsychosis. I guess it's the more streamlined suspension from roleplaying. Still, I think it would've been a fantastic mechanic in the game, where V just goes fucking crazy sometimes and does horrible things as a result of their cyberpsychosis, maybe seeking a cure from Regina Jones and giving much more weight to the Psycho Killer quest, having to do a Blade Runner and wrangle your own kind down just at a chance of seeking a better life (if you think Deckard is a replicant). But nah, V is mentally invincible, and even if you get that achievement for getting at least one augmentation in each body system available, nothing wrong happens as a result.

As for crafting, I was increasingly glad it was in the game as I progressed, but it ultimately felt like it didn't need to be there. It's not introduced in any way, so you eventually have a moment where you realize it's even there in the first place, compared to something like melee combat which the game spends 10 minutes teaching and I barely use. The schematics are nice in that the game allows you to remake unique weapons you might have lost, but weirdly the schematics are only available for some of them. Upgrading weapons feels a bit more consistent here because it gives some nice variety to scaling your power: you can keep upgrading a weapon you're attached to but eventually run into diminishing returns when it costs more and more materials to upgrade your weapons at a non-accelerating rate, weighing out if it's better to ditch the weapon even though you've invested so much into it and get a new one that has superior base stats. It weirdly fits in with the game's theme of not holding onto anything emotionally in this unforgiving city. Both rely a lot on having the right components, and these can either be a pain in the ass to come across if you can't just bulk buy them from a vendor. This is why I mentioned that the crafting system seems interesting later in the game when you have the money to make it manageable. There is also a nice crafting skill tree perk that instantly turns junk into crafting components, easing things out for the lower crafting levels. Still, unfortunately, there's not a lot of epic junk or legendary junk to turn into epic or legendary components.

Driving was a contentious issue on the game's release because it just didn't work, but now, despite a handful of problems, it's only more than sufficient, which is a bit disappointing. Driving is a big part of the cyberpunk genre; Cruising around the neon sprawls is huge in anything like this, and it should've been pitch-perfect. Regardless, the selection of cars in the game is lovely. It covers all the fronts without feeling like they forgot anything, even though many of these futuristic designs feel generic and lifeless. Handling a lot of the time can feel a bit fucky, and turns can feel weird, but it seems the city is built to accommodate this, and no turns are a complete fuckaround. Motorcycles were usually my vehicle of choice since the first-person POV in cars was kind of bad and something modders aimed to fix. I was initially upset about the game not having a radio tracker like in many other open-world games that, through the radio menu, tell you the song you're listening to, but I noticed it does have one. It's just…on the top right of the screen in tiny lettering when you enter the vehicle, and then it disappears. But most of the time never appears. I think the biggest problem with driving has less to do with the cars and more with how the game loads. At least in my experience, the faster you're scooting through the city, the worse the environment loads. This never gets atrocious, and you never find yourself driving into a bunch of blurry polygons that are supposed to be the city. The worst thing I ever experienced was straight-up glitching through and falling through a bridge near Judy's apartment because I guess it hadn't loaded yet. The vast effect of this poor loading is feeling isolated while cruising; There are no pedestrians, no cars, nothing. Even parts of the road, namely paint and roadsigns, don't load instantly. Is this to help skirt through the streets much quicker without traffic? We may appreciate that, but I'd like to know the alternative before I praise it because if you're going over a specific speed limit, things start to get lonely.

What might be a minor aspect of the game that I'd still like to spend time discussing is braindances. They are not a massive part of the game, but it's implied they to be a pretty huge part of living in the future, with people just addicted to them in wanting to escape their own lives. They're a completely out-of-body experience that taps right into your brain, and from the moment I read about them while studying the TTRPG, they interested me as an early zoomer who grew up in the time of "4D movies" being a short-lived trend during the 00s that presented multisensory experiences that tie into a movie that was always 3D. It's an interesting concept that never moved outside of a gimmick, essentially like 3D movies where a character would point something near the camera in a blatant attempt to psych out the viewer. Braindances felt like the ultimate realization of this potential, something that connects directly to the brain and feels like the crossroads between VR and 4D films, with all the experiences, sights, smells, sensations, emotions, pleasure, and pain palpable within the BD to the viewer. They get a pretty deep tutorial in Act 1 of the game for the BD editor, and there are, like, less than 10 in the game, and they're all used for either main story or questline purposes. It's not like you can fully experience what it would be like using a BD in-universe with the setup, not even if they made a little rinky-dink VR tie-in game, even though that would be a. closer, and b. cool. But hey, wouldn't it be a useless but nice side feature? Just to, I don't know, experience the literal BDs you can buy at stores? Why would they even put those in stores if they're effectively junk that the game would convert into materials/components otherwise? These things must be playable, but they didn't have enough time to iron out the BD player. On the other hand, the editor sections are pretty fun, even though they give you 0 room to figure out things for yourself. If there's an audio clue, they pinpoint the exact moment it happens in the BD and put a huge fucking Youtube-thumbnail-style circle around it. No self-directed problem solving, no clues, just "Hey, here's the solution." This is a problem I had in Doom Eternal, where you were not allowed to figure out how to fight a boss beforehand, and they spell out exactly how to defeat them. I fucking love that game, but I can't act like this issue doesn't bother me. Same problem here, but it feels even more handholdy than that, and I wouldn't even be that upset if V said clues out loud that were pretty explicit.

The levelling and skill trees are one of the main reasons in this game that people shudder when you want to call it an RPG. There are things I like and don't like, but I'm unsure if I'd boil down my thoughts to "complicated." The different skills and stats that exist in 2020 are, to put it mildly, fucking insane. Seventy-nine skills total, with some pretty broad in completing tasks, such as Athletic, Endurance, and Brawling, and way more that are hilariously specific, like Anthropology, Motorcycle, Geology, Diagnose Illness, Stock Market, Personal Grooming, and more. 2077 has liberally whittled this down to twelve. While I think a bunch of cool details were lost in translation, they primarily serve gameplay well, with the one outlier being Cold Blood, an "ability" of sorts that feels unnecessary and hard to adapt to specific playstyles, more namely my own. The compelling take here is that perks on skill trees have "accelerating returns," or however you would define the opposite of diminishing returns. The perks start weak initially, with boosts to abilities and damage usually around a 2% to 5% increase. However, by the end of these skill trees, you can buy perks that provide enormous gains to skill, ability, damage, etc., as well as crazy new abilities or resistances. It's a novel idea but one that makes early progression sometimes frustrating. The separation of level and street cred could be clearer, especially on top of skills' individual levelling, and I wonder if it was worth it. Street Cred is like the game's mock infamy meter with a couple of bonuses for levelling up, like access to new fixers, discounts, and more common legendary items. Still, it's so bare that it could've just worked into your average level. Also, a tiny thing here, but I was glad to see being able to jump randomly and level up your athletics, returning to the days of Oblivion. Like I was trying to pull off some makeshift parkour once, and I kept levelling my athletics. Jump, jump, jump. Jump jump. New athletics!

The game's music, through both the original score and the (mostly original) soundtrack, is one of the greatest reasons to play the game and passionately imbues the atmosphere of high tech and low life. For the game's original score, it is a big collaboration between returning Witcher 3 composer Marcin Przybyłowicz alongside senior CDPR composer PT Adamczyk and Scottish film composer Paul Leonard-Morgan. The tougher material centralizes pulsating drums, distorted synths, and chainsaw-riffage guitars, filtered through coded aggression and disintegrating penance. While the softer atmospheric stuff still holds those ideals close, it brings a much more Vangelis-like atmosphere forward with distant reverberating pads echoing through the chambers of the monolithic neon-lit buildings, the machinery and electricity ever so audible. The influences from popular musical genres parallel to the cyberpunk genre, like darksynth, synthwave, industrial, EBM and more, are unmistakable, and it uses it all very well. Much of the game's original score is in the key of A minor, helping the songs feel cohesive and giving way to many cool sonic leitmotifs without ever feeling like the game is repeating itself. The menu opens to the incredible "V," serving as both a masterful overture to the game's music and themes, as well as one of the greatest main menu themes ever, with bouncing percussion guiding dormant synths, strings, and guitars that dance across the soundscape, slowly building up to an amazing climax fronted by an aggressively-catchy riff. The finale of the game's Act 1 gives us the insanely angry "The Heist," built around a bloodthirsty distorted synth riff that feels like it's actively disintegrating yet powering up, guided by powerful percussion that punches through the mix with the force of steel. The track also deviates from the standard A minor key into F minor, imbuing the feeling that something has gone wrong, where small sections in the track return to A minor as a beacon of hope and "home." At the end of Play It Safe, the boss battle paints the incredible "Cyberninja," centring Japanese shamisens alongside some strings to imbue the orchestra of intense distorted synths with a new flavour. We also have the incredible "Badlanders," pitting this incredible wide and headbangable synth riff over some hard drums. During one of the Johnny flashbacks missions, we get to hear what is undoubtedly the most iconic song from the game's score and what I'd argue as the game's masterpiece, "The Rebel Path," a meticulously calculated opus of decimated synths, crushing drums, piercing percussion, and shuddering strings, all of which goes on full blast for the songs' two A-sections and takes a more subtle approach in the song's B-section, the latter of which blares over the game's opening cinematic, recounting the city's daily body count of murders. A lot of the combat with gangs get their own unique soundtrack, like 6th Street getting the catchy "Patri(di)ots)," flavouring an amazing guitar riff with synths, bouncy 808s and trappy percussion, and the Scavs getting "Мусорщики," fusing hectic panning percussion with glitched out synths distorted through pure aggression. The softer stuff hits its pinnacle with the tracks "Rite of Passage" and "Been Good To Know Ya." This dire feeling takes center stage with atmospheric pads backing some haunting vocals and strings playing these funerary dirges for what hope remains in the world. As for the game's soundtrack with the in-game radio, artists made an incredible amount of original stuff for the game, and the variety and genres the game curated perfectly suit the setting and can serve as whatever backdrop you'd like to cruise the streets listening to, whether it be jazz, reggaeton, black metal, tech house, chillstep, industrial rock, and more. The dominantly original side of this music was the fact that licensing existing music for this game would be an implicative task, implying that people just stopped making music between when this game came out and the year it takes place, so instead of focusing on licensing existing music and implying the game's radio wouldn't play music from the last 50 in-game years, CDPR brought in a huge amount of artists to make original songs for the game and have them use pseudonyms to represent artists from the future, a pretty arduous process but ultimately one that worked out awesomely. A lot of artists I love ended up making music for this game, like The Armed, HEALTH, Grimes, Tomb Mold, Converge, A$AP Rocky, SOPHIE, and Let's Eat Grandma, as well as legendary punk act Refused standing in as Johnny Silverhand's famous band Samurai. I loved all the flavours their music added to Night City. Only one station primarily plays licensed music: Royal Blue 91.9, dominated by jazz and jazz fusion from the mid-20th century. It's a super underrated station that I never see talked about, but driving around rainy Night City listening to the dulcet tones of Chet Baker singing "You Don't Know What Love Is," as well as Miles Davis's mysterious and sultry "Générique" taken from the OST to one of my favourite films, Elevator to the Gallows. Indescribably, amazingly noir feeling; makes you feel like chainsmoking cigarettes. That was one of my mainstay stations, even though there are only 8 or 9 songs on there. Another was Pacific Dreams, packed with an amazing variety of laid-back electronic music, such as Bryan Aspey's incredible chillstep tones on "Real Window" and Earth Trax's amazingly Aphexian "Blurred." Up there was also Radio Vexelstrom, filled to the brim with edgy electro-industrial rock, such as Blue Stalhi's fantastically edgy "Black Terminal" and Steven R. Davis's lovesick industrial "With Her," as well as the legends, The Armed, with the loud and no-fucks-given “Night City Aliens." A big complaint aligned with the game's radio is that you couldn't listen to it on foot, and I concede alongside these concerns. Even if the game doesn't want to have headphones, you could have some nervous system cyberware that plays music right to your inner ear so you can listen to it anywhere, even maybe doing a Saints Row where you can make a custom mixtape. Huge missed opportunity here; If Watch Dogs 1 could figure out how to do it six years prior, maybe that's a sign.

Circling back to the game as a whole now, I'd like to ask some broad questions: how does this game feel? What does this game have to say? One of the main reasons I didn't rush to play this game was being aware that CDPR wasn't very interested in the game being too "political," and I think that's a fucking embarrassment. Before I make my stupid-ass "everything is political" rant that none of my friends like, cyberpunk as a genre does have both blatant and underlying political themes, with the hilariously exaggerated wealth gap being a reflection of the ravenous effects of capitalism and trickle-down economics on a world stage. Cyberware is a reflection of body modifications and how vanity afflicts our civilization. And so much more. Mike Pondsmith, during the time he made the first edition of the tabletop game, was a black man in Reagan-era America. Things were pretty dire for people who didn't have the money or support to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, and the inner workings of the people and setting in the tabletop game reflected a lot of what was going on. We've seen something similar happen within the scene of synthwave, where many big artists transitioned from the constructed high-class image of the 1980s being a neon wonderland to the grimy reality it was for many people. Furthermore, pretty much every game is political because they're attempting to portray some type(s) of behaviour or actions that are worthwhile (or aren't worthwhile) for being a good person or creating a better world. People just see women or black people in center stage in a game nowadays and go 🚨🚨UH OH 🚨🚨 POLITICS ALERT 🚨🚨 LIBERAL ALERT 🚨🚨. For this reason, I think this looming discomfort turned militance from losers forced CDPR to pussy out and say they didn't want to make a political statement with the game, as this was around the time TLOU 2, a game with a lesbian protagonist, which OBVIOUSLY means politics, was newly out and had people talking. This ultimately was all to avoid the vicious ire of the terminally online anti-woke chuds who have collective heart attacks and churn out 5-hour podcast thinkpieces of inane rambling any time a game challenges however they view the world in a sociological sense. I could keep going about how people don't understand what "politics in games" are, but I'm still working on a personal essay on this very topic and am saving most of my thoughts for that. Despite this, the game also makes some broad political statements but doesn't seem to stand by anything too valiantly. Johnny Silverhand, the cartoon anarcho-nihilist, is met with counterpoints, 6th Street die-hard patriots you could take or leave, and many such cases. And yes, for the gamers looking out for REAL politics, there are gay characters and a trans character as well, the latter of which only seems to exist because of early screenshots that featured kind of a shitty transphobic advertisement (that still made it into the final game) and caught a bunch of backlash. Claire is a great character, but her being trans only seems superfluous, with it only being mentioned once or twice. Am I or anyone asking for a questline where you complete estrogen/testosterone deliveries for a transitioning citizen of NC against the odds and attacks of transphobes? No, but it's pretty clear when a game is just padding against valid criticism by saying, "Hey, V has a trans friend now. That's cool, right? We're cool, right?" A friend and I were talking about the washed-out politics of this game, and we agreed that it's hard to ship a hypothetical game with hard leftist beliefs with this kind of hundred-million-dollar marketing and audience. The wider appeal means more people want to come to it, and they're clearly trying to regain their budget. This audience includes some interesting specimens that try to mod the game so male V can romance Judy, a character who is clearly lesbian. This effort is gross and reinforces the horrible idea people get that women who are gay can just be convinced to like dudes. Even in respect of this game being a bit politically ambiguous, some of the non-economic beliefs this game has are kind of…weird? Either way, I still think CDPR took huge strides to adapt the "cyberpunk" attitude semi-faithfully. It does insist on itself a bit, though, like I mostly did enjoy the fact they named all the quests after famous songs, further tethering the musical nature of cyberpunk, but this almost didn't need to exist and exudes kind of a "hello fellow music fans" energy. The overall immersion in this game comes together like an impossible balancing act, even though, as previously stated, they intentionally or inadvertently washed away many details that gave the world a more interesting flavour. The immersion hits a pinnacle in the mission Automatic Love, which includes V having an impromptu therapy session with a sex worker. With the music, lighting, voice acting, and tone, I felt every piece of dialogue shooting knives into my heart in the best way possible, with some incredible characterization going on here. This is easily one of the most special and intimate things I've ever experienced in a video game, and it shows how unreal the immersion was.I'm not trying to come down too hard on this game for telling a more personal story that doesn't engage with the sociological aspects of its source material. It's cool that we can all suspend belief and critical thinking about the implications of this world to do a lot of fun, stylish gunplay, stealth, and story in an amazingly-made map with great characters. Still, I wish the game spent some more time grappling with these issues in a way that was more truthful to the genre and its forefathers and foremothers instead of washing away a political leaning to make the game marketable to an audience that includes fascist scumbags who for purely aesthetic reasons enjoy this genre.

Talking about this game is nearly impossible without mentioning the glitches that dominated the discourse when it came out, another thing that kept me from playing it for quite some time after release. These glitches were fucking insane when the game came out (according to videos I watched), not only shit that completely broke the game from any progression or enjoyment but just the funniest, most unthinkable bullshit I've seen in my life. Playing the game in early 2023 on PC, how were the glitches? It could be so much worse. As mentioned before, one of the only horrible things that happened was glitching through a bridge, the game crashing a couple of times, and the intro cutscene with Jackie hilariously glitching for a couple of seconds and making everyone A-posing and shifting around. Besides that, it was minor stuff, like long-loading textures and audio glitches (pause menu ambience not playing or taking a while to play). Everything was pretty okay from there. I don't have the most impressive PC ever; It was probably considered beefy in 2020, but it does the job fine for most things. These glitches, I'm aware, dominated the eighth-gen versions of the game, with it being borderline unplayable on the Xbox One and PS4 at launch, and things seemed to be a bit better on XSX and PS5 and even better on PC. My opinion might seem controversial, but even if this game was launching on the heels of the beginning of the ninth console generation, I do not think the Xbox One and PS4 versions should've ever existed. They seemed to be a tumultuous issue that was just a ton of extra time and work for everyone involved, and it turned out the way it turned out, permanently tainting the legacy of a game that I think is now more than playable, and, you know, really good. The playableness of the game wasn't the same for everyone, as a friend of mine played it on release on XSX and barely ran into any problems whatsoever. Edgerunners, a series I still haven't watched yet, definitely did a lot of good in revitalizing the game's player count and spreading the knowledge of the progress CDPR has made in rectifying all the bugs in the game, encouraging people to make the dive for the first time or come back. I wonder if the glitches will follow this game forever engraved in its legacy because its problems stretch beyond that. CDPR's previous big title, The Witcher 3, was a game that not only had a bevy of bugs and glitches on release but had a significant amount of technical downgrades that upset people. People assumed these massive flaws would make the game even more overshadowed by the then-upcoming Fallout 4, and then no one would care after that, and as we know, that didn't happen at all. Much like 2077, CDPR worked tirelessly to fix these issues, and the game went on to become not only one of the most award-winning and successful games of the 2010s but one of the most beloved RPGs of all time that people today are still raving about. Do that many people remember the less-playable game it was on release? No. I don't mean for this to sound like whataboutism... I'm just curious if 2077's future can lift it out of the glitch-sins of its inception, one of these puzzle pieces being the success of Edgerunners and the audience it brought to the game. Phantom Liberty has a ton of potential to be an absolute colossus DLC as beloved as something like Blood and Wine, which can help cement that legacy. Do I have a ton of hope for this? Not really, especially with the fact that CDPR announced in March that...they'll be making an announcement in June about Phantom Liberty. Also, as I mentioned before, modders have been working on max for sending the game into overdrive, with a cornucopia of overhauls, reworks, QOL enhancements, and all kinds of new stuff. I have yet to dabble with it more, but I'm happy people can combine their passion, disappointment, and talent to make fantastic stuff that extends their desires to the modding public.

Back in October, CDPR announced that they will sometime soon begin work on the sequel to 2077, currently codenamed Orion. I hope for many things from this; First, it doesn't take another eight years to come out and another two to semi-completely fix. Here's my wishlist of what CDPR could integrate to make an even better experience if they're working from the framework of the first game:

-A non-linear story would give the game even more replay value, precisely where entire questlines could precede a certain number of endings, rather than pretty much choosing what ending you want.

-What's an open-world RPG without companions? The fact this got left out of the game is kind of insane to me, it probably was a whole new system that they'd have to work on with everything that is in the game, but I wish I could've done some of the scanner hustles with River or Takemura. That would've been sick and provided some extra characterization for them.

-One that I'd like but I'm not super passionate about is third-person POV. This is one of the things that disappointed me before release: that the game was, at least on foot, limited to a first-person point of view, making it harder to appreciate the work players put into their in-game appearance. This was barely a problem for me by the end of the game, but from seeing how mods made a pretty good vision of this left-out feature, I'd love to see it in Orion, as long as you can switch between that and first-person.

-Moreover, there are a ton of popular mods that CDPR could take note of in paying attention to what people wanted to see in 2077 but never got in the base game. Stuff like better bartenders/bar interactions, more interesting idle animations, access to flying cars, more options for character creation, weapon skins, better makeup and piercings, and so much more.

-Put a lot more meaning behind lifepaths and skill checks that transcend simple dialogue options that don't do much more than help immersion.

-Let me mod the hell out of myself regarding cyberware's visual components. Let me look like a machine demon. Make cyberpsychosis a real threat to the protagonist.

This is such an awful request in the face of an open world this good, but make it feel less hollow. Let me enter more buildings.

-BRAINDANCES. PLEASE. Stop putting this carrot in front of me and let me chow down.

Despite the plethora of issues that range from mildly disappointing to fucking awful, Cyberpunk 2077 is a game that is captivating and engaging for so many reasons. It does this brilliant thing where progression near the end doesn't become a slog at all, and the second I beat it, I reloaded Nocturne Op55N1 so I could play through all of the endings, and after that, I still wanted more. After 150 hours, I still have yet to 100% it, but I plan to. Why is that? Is it crazy that all this Ubisoft-style filler bullshit somehow translates to me as fun? It's the product of a game world that hundreds and hundreds of developers, designers, wizards, etc., worked their asses off to make, forging a stunning syzygy of emotion, style, and grandeur that functions as a flawed but sufficient vision of why cyberpunk is a fantasy in thought but a nightmare in practice. It asks us to think about those less fortunate just long enough that we are impassioned to play the game in their world without connecting the dots to our world. This cannot be ignored, along with all the other things the game could've done better and its disastrous state at launch, and I hope CDPR can use the ultra-cornucopia of criticism to guide them to create a worthy sequel that can aspire to meet everyone's expectations. And yet, there are so many reasons to experience this game, for its vast and jaw-dropping open world that lives and breathes as clearly as any of the characters, its coruscating tapestry of people you meet and trust, the shiveringly intense backdrop of music, and the immersion brought together by so many of these elements. I felt utterly tethered to this world, as I also am to this review which I've been working on for months, and that is at least triple the word count of the previously longest document I had ever prepared. It left me with so many thoughts that I had no idea what else to do with, some of which I didn't even feel like writing about here. Much like the hypothetical cyberpunk future that looms ahead of us, the game is virtuosically stunning and expectedly disappointing. Still, as I continue with my experiences with the cyberpunk genre in media and I continue my TTRPG experience with my friends, I am never bound to forget the time I had in Night City, encased like a Relic chip in my brain, covered in grime and glowing a flickering neon teal.

Lil Gator Game is a charming open world exploration game that puts you in control of a self-named hero (I named him Zucchini). The game starts off showing a flashback of you and your sister playing a fantasy game that you created in the real world, using your imaginations to create fun new scenarios to play through during your play time. A few years pass, his sister goes away to college, and in her absence Zucchini longs to play the game with her again. One weekend she returns to town, but to Zucchini's disappointment she is too busy working on a school project to give him any of her attention. He comes up with a plan to play the game with his friends in hopes of gaining the attention of his sister and getting her to join in on the fun. The story was charming from the get go and one of the game's biggest highlights.

Lil Gator Game's gameplay takes very obvious inspiration from Breath of the Wild, but thankfully it didn't feel like a knock off or cash grab. This gameplay style gives players total control over their movement, allowing them to traverse the game world with ease. You can climb cliffs (with a stamina meter), glide, shield-slide, and attack enemies with a melee and ranged weapons. There are a lot of similarities between the two games, but Lil Gator Game still played different enough to make it feel like something special.

In Lil Gator Game you are given free roam of the game's world, a large national park. This park is populated with NPCs that are looking for assistance with some sort of a simple task, such as finding a hidden item or destroying nearby targets. Upon completion you'll receive a reward, usually a new piece of gear or some currency, and the NPC will become your friend and will head off to the park's main camp (where everyone is going for story reasons). Throughout the park there are cardboard cutout monsters, created by your friends, which when destroyed will reward you with currency. This currency can be used to purchase new gear, such as hats, shields, and new weapons. These monsters can't actually hurt you, and in fact there is no threat of death in Lil Gator Game, which makes for a relaxing, stress-free adventure.

I had a good amount of fun with Lil Gator Game, but it wasn't without its faults. The gameplay loop was really fun for a few hours, but at about the two-and-a-half or three hour mark my interest really started to wain and I found myself wanting the end credits to make their appearance. The game's soundtrack didn't help matters either as the limited track list got repetitive and a bit grating. I actually finished the last bit of the game with no sound as I just didn't want to listen to it anymore. The soundtrack was quite good, just very repetitive.

If you're in the mood for a low stress, cozy, open world game, I think most people will thoroughly enjoy Lil Gator Game.

A cute lil 3 hour game that made for a very chill and satisfying evening to complete! Felt like a game that'd be great for young kids who are newly finding an interest in games. Gorgeous fantastical art style, honestly stunning boss designs... the visuals and atmosphere are the high point of this game, and they're a treat to behold. There's a scene with the whole world's landscape as a backdrop at one point, and I stopped in awe to inspect it thoroughly. The music is fitting but not anything too standout.

Sure it's a bit simplistic mechanically, and it doesn't have much depth to it, but I don't think it needs it. While it maybe could've made a more compelling experience if the gameplay was more balanced and challenging, I feel that the devs accomplished what they set out to do.

More than anything, this game gets me excited about the potential of this studio. If the art side of their next project is this good, and they up the ante on the mechanical end, they could have something brilliant on their hands.

funny how the one MOBA I've ever played only caught my eye because the devs conceived it as a modernized Herzog Zwei, except that's something they kinda got away from over time...

I played this back during its alpha phase, before Ubisoft brought it to consoles. Nothing tells me what pushed these guys into trying silly things like a VR port when they could have changed up the core modes, or anything to make this stand out from the crowd. Granted, someone more active in the beta and release periods would know more about whether or not this ended up and remained fun to play. This was also the only time I ever played a Chrome Store game, something the IGDB/Backloggd page won't tell you about its origins. That period of web-based free-to-play games seems to have waned, or just folded into the background as everyone and their mother does that stuff via Roblox instead. Funny how these trends come and go, only as prescient or permanent as the market and its manipulators demand.

Basically, imagine the aforementioned Tecno Soft RTS for Mega Drive, just with distinct factions and heroes + the usual mess of loadout management and heavy micro associated with this genre. Something tells me that I gravitated towards AirMech to fill the Battle.net gap in my soul, not having a Windows PC good enough for StarCraft II and having no idea (at the time) how to get classic Blizzard online games going. The ease of matching with relatively equally skilled players early on helped here, as I generally won and lost games in that desirable tug-of-war pattern you'd hope for. Quickly managing unit groups, keeping up pressure in lanes and the neat lil' alleys on each map, all while doing plenty of your own shooting and distraction using the hero unit-meets-cursor...this had a lot going for it.

There's a bit of a trend with very beloved and played free-to-play classics getting, erm, "classic" fan remasters years down the line, e.g. RuneScape or Team Fortress 2. But because AirMech was always closed source and never had that level of traction (some would argue distinction in this crowded genre), there's no way for me to revisit the pre-buyout era and place my memories on trial. What I've seen from AirMech Arena, meanwhile, seems more soulless and bereft of unique or meaningful mechanics and community. It's very easy to just play Herzog Zwei online via emulators or the SEGA Ages release on Switch, too, and that's held up both in legacy and playability. So the niche this web-MOBA/-RTS experiment tried to address is now flush with alternatives, let alone the origins they all point to.

Maybe this just sounds like excuses for me not to download the damn thing and give it a whirl. All I know is this led me to playing Caveman 2 Cosmos and saving up more for my 3DS library at the time. The beta didn't exactly develop that fast, and when it did, the general concept and game loop started favoring ride-or-die players over those like me who just wanted to occasionally hop in and have a blast. Balancing for both invested regulars and casual fans is a bitch and a half, yet I also can't imagine this would have been fun if imbalanced towards skilled folks constantly redefining the meta. The extensive mod-ability and "anything goes" attitude of classic Battle.net games definitely wasn't and isn't a thing for AirMech, nor do I suspect the developers ever wanted that. If it's a focused, overly polished RTS-MOBA you're looking for, I'm sure there's worse out there, but this no longer has that scrappy, Herzog-like simplicity that I crave.

The premise still has a lot of potential, even if Carbon Games seems content with where they've brought the series so far. I'd love to have a more story-focused, singleplayer-friendly variation, something which spiritual predecessors like NetStorm surely could have used. Until then, eh. This one's just here, sitting in the back of my community college neurons, taunting me with what could have been.

Probably the first NFS game I would actually consider playable.

They've finally fixed the handling. Handbrake won't send your car spinning anymore, but the collision model is still horrendous, so hitting your opponent will. There is this weird auto-correction thing going on, where every time you turn a little, your car returns to the forward direction, but that doesn't affect the gameplay much.

Visually I found the game kinda boring, there's only a couple of pretty-looking tracks. And the PC version strangely looks like an emulated PS1 version. Even on the max settings there is pop-in and that weird deformation of textures and models that you usually see in PS1 games. The music was pretty decent, but kinda forgettable.

I like how much customization you have in almost every aspect of the game. You can tweak your car's stats and handling, radically change the HUD, select the class of the cars in the race and even alter some of the track's settings. There is now an option for precipitation, and the night mode actually feels like night now, although there are still little to no streetlights, making the more urban areas look like ghost-towns. In fact I kinda hated the night-mode, it's like driving in near-complete darkness.

The one thing that prevented me from enjoying this game the most was the absolutely insane difficulty. I could not beat the first track in the tournament even on the beginner setting. The only way I was able to start winning was by playing the Single Race mode and selecting a Class A car for myself and Class C cars for opponents. But even then you gotta make little to no mistakes, as the game is unforgiving.

I would say its sequel, Hot Pursuit 2, is an improvement in pretty much every way, rendering the original obsolete. There is literally nothing here that HP2 doesn't do better.

MMORPG is the genre that requires a strong commitment and a lot of time investment. For this purpose I feel like anything that isn't the greatest MMO of all time in your eyes should not be played for more than 20 hours. I played this for 15.5 hours (that's not counting my first brief attempt years ago), and I wanted to give it a few more before finalizing my thoughts on this. I already knew I wasn't gonna commit to it, but the few additional hours would help me reaffirm myself in my convictions. Unfortunately, due to my hard drive failure last month and my subsequent distro-hopping, I had to reinstall this game thrice. And the last two times it would randomly start redownloading itself, with the first time being after it was installed, and the second time after reaching 80%. The game is 46GB in size, and my internet speed is 3Mbps. So I finally decided it's not worth the trouble just to reaffirm my thoughts on the game I am already planning to abandon.

This game had quite a challenge. Not only did it have to blend the KotOR gameplay with the MMO genre, but also somehow be a sequel to both KotOR 1 and 2, which are tonally and narratively very different games. I kinda feel that it failed at both tasks, though it's not a catastrophic failure.

Story-wise it resembles KotOR 1 much more than 2, which is a good thing in my book. I feel that the KotOR 1 tone and style of storytelling is much more fitting for an MMO anyway, as MMO's goal is to create a living and breathing world, not to convey some agenda or an overarching message. And I genuinely liked the story for how much I played through it, even though I never finished it.

The problem is how that story and the story-driven gameplay fits into the gameplay systems. And it kinda doesn't at all. I was impressed with how more than one person can participate in a conversation, but that's about the only feature that arises from the marriage of KotOR and the MMO design. Most of the time in this game you're practically playing a single-player game with some hub areas. And yet, if judged as a single-player game, it has terrible quest design (which is common, but forgivable in MMOs). The world itself, which I consider to be the most important aspect of this genre, feels very artificial and lacks interactivity. Which isn't helped by its WoW-like linearity.

Finally I want to comment on the art-style, which I consider to be an important part of any MMO, as it can make or break immersion. And here I really don't like it. It has this mobile-game cartoony aesthetic, and I just don't get why. As a sequel to KotOR 1 and 2, why does it differ so radically? This makes me not want to explore the worlds, as they all look cheap and plastic to me.

All this comes together in a Frankenstein monster of a game, different parts of which don't come together in a natural form. Rather it kinda fails as both a KotOR game and a Star Wars MMO. That being said, it is still a decent experience, as long as you're willing to invest huge amounts of time into something flawed. I am not.

Fascinating to experience for the historical value, this is the next step of RTS design after Dune 2. You can actually select multiple units (as much as four!) and there are two resources to manage. Although there are two campaigns, they are basically parallels of each other - you will play the same maps, just starting on opposite sides. What surprised me is the amount of missions where you can't build anything and have to complete the objective with the units given to you - this is common practice for later games in the genre, but for one released in 1994 I was expecting every map to be a base construction affair. If you're willing to get used to the ancient interface, there is fun to be had in following the simple but effective plot and overcoming entrenched opponents. With regard to balance, this game does not succeed - humans are simply more powerful with the ability to heal units, and indeed the sheer number of healers will be your primary obstacle in the Orc campaign. However, I did find the Orc units undeniably more charming. Charm is, to be sure, the primary currency of this game - the sprites are colorful and units bursting with personality, at least until you're sick of the repetitive voice lines. There is a spark of greatness here, one that is worth uncovering for fans of the genre. Just get used to holding that CTRL key.

Results:
- finished both campaigns

As someone who wasn’t anticipating this release since 2012, and as a massive fan of everything they pulled from in the genre from Strange Days to Akira, I actually quite enjoyed my time cruising around Night City with this memorable cast of characters. That’s not to say twists in this weren’t predictable most of the time or that aspects of this game aren’t still janky as fuck. What sticks out like a sore thumb really foes BECAUSE the rest of this world breathes with such life and vibrancy and seediness.

An aesthetic masterclass on top of an ok shooter. I much preferred playing with quick hacks most of the time, and as someone who sucks at most FPS games I was happy sticking to the shotguns and light machine guns that tore through enemies like butter. You get exponentially stronger very early on if you just explore and do any of the side content, that I found most of the main game to be pretty easy breezy. The opening missions however I did find heavier enemies pretty threatening, but as you unlock skill trees that vulnerable feeling vanishes entirely. When I can double-jump over enemies to chop their limbs off from behind or dismantle their team with all the hacking skills I wanted out of a Watch Dogs game, I’m not particularly challenged but it feels cool as hell.

Still, the story managed to get me invested enough to really care when it came to the climax and I really felt the relationships I had built up between the characters, while somewhat shallow, paid off in a way I found really satisfying. Loved how you can’t really get an ending that’s not bittersweet in some way. V’s male voice actor kinda sounds like an east coast caricature and that never really changes, but the rest of the voice cast is pretty great. I didn’t max out any build completely because I felt more than equipped to beat the game, and I’m not sure if I’ll return to night city because, much like the V I ended the game with, it’s like I already got all the city had to offer me. Maybe I’ll return there someday down the road…

The plot
You are a witch and you have a job to go to some village and help with a harvest festival. There you meet 6 characters who play a serious part in creating the festival. Each one of them has some problem that you help with for a duration of 2 weeks. I want to say there's more, but that's it, everything else is not significant.

Your character and your choices
I really liked the customisation! First of all, I like the style and that there are a lot of fun and pretty clothes. And the hats! There are so many nice hats, aww, I want to wear everything from this wardrobe. The only bad thing I can say about clothes is that there are not that many masc options. For me personally it was not a problem, because I always make my characters very femme, but if you want to create someone more masculine, you'll probably end up disappointed.

In terms of an actual character you won't be able to express yourself. The choices are shallow and don't influence the ending at all. The only thing they influence is romance — sometimes you'll see an option with a heart symbol. If you always choose them, you can go out on a date in your ending.

The main problem with the main character is they are always annoying and unnecessarily rude. I get that it's part of the plot, and in the second part of the game they change and become friendlier. But it's just so hard and boring to read, ugh.

Your quests and your new friends
Almost every day you'll receive a few letters where your new acquaintances explain their problems and ask for help. You buy stuff you need, tend your garden, and collect flowers to make a potion, incense, etc. Every flower is associated with a planet, theme, and a color, and you'll have to choose your ingredients based on that. It might sound difficult, but in reality the game creates recipes for you, you simply need to follow instructions. The mechanics are so easy, they become boring very fast.

After that you deliver the orders to your clients. Of course, usually you also spend some time with them. The dialogues are okay, nothing special, because the characters are pretty dull.

Looks and sounds
These are perfect in every way possible. I want to praise the people who drew everything in the game because I was looking at every piece of art with freaking heart eyes. People, the garden, the village, tarot cards, potions! Potions are especially pretty... Just look at the screenshots, you'll get what I mean.

Random stuff I want to mention
❤️ 1. You can customize your altar. I've never known I needed this this hard! You can choose the crystals, the flowers, the tarot cards. There is not much need in that, but I loved this anyway.
❤️ 2. There is a tarot-spread option. Cool!
❤️ 3. Closer to the end the main character educates their friends on some practices which are good for your mental health.

💔 1. Autosave only. Why?? It's very uncomfortable if you want to replay the game from a certain point. You messed up with some orders and don't want to get a bad ending? You'll probably need to start a new game.
💔 2. Strongly connected to my previous point, but I want to talk about this separately. You want to collect all of the achievements? You will have to replay the game at least SEVEN times. You will have to do the same orders again and again, skip the meaningless dialogue again and again, tend to your garden again and again. This is just cruel, guys.

I'm a person who likes to collect all of the achievements, and I spent so so much extra time collecting them in this game. I'm not new here, I've even tried messing with save files to load the one I need manually. Couldn't do it, unfortunately.

Steam Deck
Works perfectly fine. In the beginning you'll have to use keyboard to enter your name and then to press some button during the tutorial. Other than that you can use touchpad or customize the layout, as I did. I also liked to use the screen and simply tap the stuff I need, it was easier that way.

Conclusion
If you still want to play this, probably wait for a sale. And if you're a achievement hunter, be ready for some pain as you'll become close acquaintances very fast.

Finally pushed through and finished this one after months of putting it off. Engage is a great game, don't get me wrong. This game had a chokehold on me for the first half of it but as it went on, the story got way too unnecessarily ambitious. There were way too many twists and turns that it turned into something I didn't care to be invested in by the end. That being said, the ending was absolutely beautiful and specifically the cutscene with all the emblems right before the final battle. (shoutout to my boyfriend for pulling up the cutscene on youtube when I accidently skipped it). It got me excited for a fight the first time in awhile.
The gameplay was great for the most part. I loved the engage feature, it made fights more fun, finding new and creative ways to take down enemies. The maps were very fun, with terrain effects and gimmicks that made the game not as repetitive.
The characters were enjoyable but compared to the close-knit groups in three houses, they fell short. This game made it a lot harder to achieve A-Support with units that by the end, I was disappointed with the amount of content I wasn't able to see. I can see it being easier if you grind support with a few select characters but me being me, I like to give everyone a chance to participate and Somniel activities and battle (Except Saphir and Lindon, screw them. Literally had to just look up their names, that's how much I don't care about them). A few of these characters became very dear to me, my favorite being Zelkov. Honorable mentions include Pandreo, Amber, Alcryst, Rosado, and Merrin.
As far as units go, this game has some broken characters. I can literally send Merrin off on her own to take out a large group of enemies and she is fine. No one even comes close to even hitting her. A few characters who also are very close to that level of broken are Panette, Kagetsu, Diamont, Yunaka and Timerra. Most of these units can be pretty self-sufficient and were a consistent staple in my army.
I found the game overall enjoyable. It wasn't perfect by any means but it wasn't bad at all. I thought the running sibling theme really worked for a game like this. Maybe it was because I didn't get supports up all the way up but some of the characters didn't even feel like they were close to the characters who were written to be close with other characters. EX: Diamont/Amber, Merrin/Timerra. To me, that just takes away from the close-knit feeling that games like three houses gave me. So perhaps that's why I wasnt as emotionally invested in this story. Some of these characters who are saving the world together felt like absolute strangers. Overall, I'm glad I got to play this game and I'm glad I got to know some of these characters from the franchise that I didn't know about before. For a long time fire emblem fan, I can see this being a great crossover game and a solid stand-alone game with its own story. I usually can tell by the end of a game if its something I'll ever go back to. For this one, I can't tell. Mainly because 'New Game+" isn't an option. If it were, I might be tempted to get support conversations that I wasn't able to get in my first playthrough. But since its not, going back to it feels pointless and starting a new game would feel like a chore. So for now, I'm done with it. It was fun for what it was :)

[Valve Index]

 Pretty much any game developer can tell you that making a title for virtual reality isn't as simple as "hitting the VR button." A lot of work goes into making a VR title—especially one worth actually playing. That makes it all the more annoying that it really does feel like Bethesda just hit the "make it VR" button when porting The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition to VR. Aside from half-baked hand tracking and a custom starting area, very little care was put into making Skyrim an interesting VR game. While it's neat to explore Tamriel in a more immersive way, the game lacks the physicality that VR promises. There's very little in the way of physics interactions—your hands barely interact with the environment, either phasing through people and items or sending them flying erratically. Without collision, melee combat feels like whiffing at the air. Congratulations, you're playing Skyrim again, but this time, you're doing it standing up. To add insult to injury, players are expected to purchase this rush-job separately from the desktop version of Special Edition—which I still don't even own. If they were going to put so little effort into it, it should have been a free update to Special Edition and not a full-price standalone purchase.

 As my score suggests, however, not all is lost. I had quite a good time playing Skyrim in virtual reality, but that's despite Bethesda—not thanks to them. If you're willing to spend half a day modding the game and learning how to correctly apply confusing shit like DynDOLOD, Skyrim VR is more than just a salvageable experience—it's one worth getting into. The Elder Scrolls fan community has done an amazing job of making this port worth playing. With a handy guide and a bit of patience on the player's part, it's possible to make the world of Tamriel a beautiful, jaw-dropping experience worth exploring for the visuals alone. The combat and gameplay... well, it's still Skyrim. That said, I feel like the notoriously same-y combat is made a bit more interesting when the swings of your sword, the drawing of your bow, and the casting of your spells are done with your own hands' movements. There's an additional layer of immersion there that makes the combat feel more worthwhile than the one-button-mashing of the desktop version. If you have a headset, an attachment to Skyrim, and some time to burn, I think it's worth trying out the game after modding it. Just... don't buy it. Bethesda could do without the encouragement.