The first Final Fantasy! I've been playing the PSP version off an on but rarely got very far in it - I played the original with a friend decades ago (we had fun making a bunch of different names based off our friends) but no idea how far we got. But then Square decided to remake 1-6 in a new pixel style and I decided to leap in from the start!

So from the get go - this game, despite the many cool additions over the years, IS OLD! The story is barebones even by low standards, there are lots of glaring gameplay oddities we'll get to, the pacing is off... but damn it is a solid game

The job selection process and getting to choose the names is very cool and adds replay
Story is barebones and then gets needlessly VERY confusing at the end for... some reason? To call you the hero I guess/to justify replaying with a new party.

Finished BG2 for the first time in a VERY long while! Evil Cleric/Ranger Sunrider continues her journey! Fresh off defeating the Shining Crusader and her evil Half-Brother Sarevok, incidentally saving Baldur's Gate twice, she has been captured by the evil mage Irenicus - tortured and experimented on, the mad mage keeps talking about her "heritage" and "power", trying to unlock it. But what use does he really have for the Bhaalspawn? You find yourself in a strange land and in short order both this mage and your best friend/sister Imoen is carted off by the local mages guild. Do you follow for revenge, curiosity, or to rescue someone you care for?

Baldur's Gate 2 is generally considered one of the best RPGs of all time and is one of my favorite games that I've beaten several times. It has however been several years since I managed to get all of the way through so I am delighted to report I still love it dearly. The game now has a much greater focus on your companions and each has a solid questline for you to follow and they're mostly very good? A Paladin who has trouble balancing his family life with his (very important) work, Jaheira's harper days catching up with her, Jan having a Very Serious moment actually with a former fling... characters had bits of personality in 1 (helped out by mods of course) but they really shine in BG2. The quests in general are all quite good - this is a proto Bioware "4 side/main plot points then follow the story to the end" though it is much more freeform here. You only need 20k gold to go after Irenicus/Imoen which is what gets the main plot back on track... taking hardly any time at all, really. This gives the game a great sense of freedom - you know you what your goal is, can get to it fairly quickly if you want but.. will you be ready for what awaits you if you move too quickly? It also helps a lot with replays because you can do things in whatever order strikes your fancy, or makes most sense for your character.

Breath of the Wild - GOTY 2017 by a bullet for much of the internet, bought a switch for it myself, and have now finally finished it! And not even on the switch... This Zelda games follows its series formula on paper - Ganon has returned to the land of Hyrule to cause Mayhem, Zelda is incapacitated for whatever reason, and now Main Character Link must save the day! Except this time it is very very different... Zelda is saving Link this time! Well no, that's just because I got mods...

Breath of the Wild's gameplay is the series shift into "open world" and for one of a handful of times ever I will say - they did it with brilliance. Other than the opening section on the "Great Plateau" which is the games' prologue to hand out your basic abilities + give you the gist of the story, the land of Hyrule is like 80% open to you from the word Go. There's a beautiful freedom to the game as you head from area to area, stopping by whatever oddity in the distance catches your eye and then investigating. Due to the expendable nature of everything you find (other than armor and ONE weapon) it makes everything you find have SOME value, up until the End Game when you're able to finally take on Ganon. And in fact you don't even have to do the four main quests to fight Ganon, you can head straight there if you want to! (I'm 99% certain someone has done it on Youtube) So this is the brilliance of the game - you have a clear objective: kill Ganon. Why are we fucking around in the open world? To get strong enough to beat Ganon. It's such a straightforward premise I'm strongly tempted to use it for a DnD game one day...

Breath of the Wild also has voice acting for the first time, and also tries its best to show its work for characters and their success is... mixed? Each of the four previous Champions for each race are pretty cool for what little we see them, but the "replacements" of each race we work with are pretty hit or miss. Prince Sidon is a frickin' badass, where the Rito warrior is... who again?? Don't get me started on the fucking Goron... The characters that are in the modern day are fine enough though they get very little to do. They're quirky enough however to be at least somewhat memorable so nice going BOTW! It is also trying to set up some beef with Zelda who is mad that she's treated like a delicate little flower all of the time (oooo shit we calling out past games?!) but the story does not really follow up on this too closely.

So while the story and characters are mostly... passable, this game is genuinely wonderful. The combat, while relatively straightforward, has a frantic kineticism to it due to the shifting environments + your constantly shifting arsenal. Enemy diversity is GARBAGE but fighting the later enemies is damn satisfying to pull off once you've leveled up and come back to kick their asses (always a great feeling in a game). Getting to go over just that one more hill and seeing a weird formation of trees or rocks in the distance and going "Oooh what's that over there?!" and 9/10 you're going to be rewarded tangibly for your curiousity is just... damn. Feels great!

Resident Evil Village (the 8 is hidden in the letters there, pretty cute!) is the newest entry of my favorite Horror Franchise and is a direct sequel to one of my favorites - RE7. Normally numbered entries are not such sequels, Jill is the main character of 1 and 3, Leon is the main of 2 and 4, etc. So this time we continue following cardboard cutout Ethan Winters, this time in the search of his daughter rather than his wife (who was shot at the beginning of the game.. by Chris Redfield?!). The story is actually pretty respectable in this one I thought, you're in this strange village with four obvious "bosses" you're introduced to and then slowly work your way through their fiefdoms to find your daughter and put your family back together. It's not Shakespeare and kind of two-notes that Ethan has - I'm here for my daughter and being flabbergasted by the spooky supernatural shit - get a bit flat but it certainly works. There's even some revelations about the events of 7 that are pretty cool too, I liked it!

Gameplay wise it is a mash up of 7 and 4 which is a surprisingly good combo... It remains first person (like 7) but has more of an action focus and a weapon upgrade system where you spent money from fallen foes and items you find while exploring. It's a neat way to encourage replayability as you get more guns and can upgrade them (even to having infinite ammo! Neat). This does lead to a fundamental difference between 7 and 8 - horror. 7 was frickin' terrifying from the word Go and basically never let up outside the safe rooms. 8 definitely has some spooky moments (and one sequence in the B House in particular is very well done) but tries to aim more for cool and creative "horror" set pieces rather than genuine dread. I don't think that's inherently worse or anything since it actually remembers to be properly scary unlike 4-5-6 but I certainly did miss it.

There are two parts of the game that I unreservedly love - its art and level design. Every area in the village and the major places around it have such incredible density to them that speaks to what this place is and who lives here. All of the homes in the village are decorated and filled to the brim with the owners "stuff" and this helps ground it as a real place that has undergone tragedy. The castle is a beautiful but sterile place at sharp odds to its monstrous owners, the reservoir is a gross and damp hellhole, the foundry is a dense place of metal and corpses. Each place rarely wears out its welcome (the foundry a BIT, just because it is so much longer than the others) and is stunning every corner you turn. If PCs had "generations" this is truly next gen!

Resident Evil 8 may not be my favorite of the franchise due to its scaling back of the horror elements to make it more action but I do believe they managed to keep one intact while dialing up the other.

Bullet point thoughts!!

Very strong themes through the game of Libertarianism/Objectivism run amok, the plasmids being a very clear "This NEEDS to be regulated" coming to a head with a 'government' that really doesn't want to regulate anything at all
Art style is off the damn charts - the art deco holds it all together. People are weirdly all twisted, even the actual people. I want to call it strongly fallout inspired, but in fairness its just the 50s aesthetic they are both leaning on.
Combat is passable, bordering on good! Mixing plasmids and weapons feels pretty good, lots of different ammo types to play with. A lot of the weapons can lack some oomph however. Plasmids are a bit overdone, and too many are not that good for how much you have to invest in them. Enemies got VERY bullet-spongy at the end, until I just started freezing them solid + breaking them rather than fighting fair lol. Enemy variety isn't BAD but we needed another non-human splicer enemy other than robot + big daddy.
Despite the many options mentioned above, this is NOT an RPG or even an Immersive Sim. There are very little 'systems' to interact with using your abilities outside of the very obvious --> ice can be melted with fire, water can be electrified. That's basically it. While you can choose different plasmids you are always just hacking things and fighting dudes. Stealth/conversations are never options.
Level design is okay but not great - there are some secret spots tucked away to search but very little verticality or thought needed for exploration, basically just going through doors that the arrow DOESN'T point you toward. I can't recall any secrets or puzzles that required me to figure out what to do. The game really insists on holding your hand the whole way through.
Music! It's pretty dope... some 50s songs but also a strong orchestral theme. All of it plays into the fallen beauty and tragedy of Rapture.
The intro is 11/10, seriously.
Big Daddy's/Little Sisters are ICONIC
Morality system is REALLY poorly done - it actually works out BETTER for you to save them! What the hell is the point of being an actual monster and MURDERING LITTLE GIRLS to get a bit more of a resource you don't really need that much of?
The story twist - is it good? In a way, yes. In another way, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Why did Fontaine put on the "Atlas" disguise, when he could just order us to do literally everything we did anyway? Why not order us to harvest the little sisters? Why did Atlas bring us back when he did, and how exactly did he think one extra soldier would make the difference in bringing down Ryan? Why didn't he just order us to kill ourselves immediately? Why did he act like WE betrayed HIM? I have, I think, some partial answers to some of these but certainly not all. The easiest and most plain explanation for it is - "To surprise the player, duh!!", and that's not a bad reason, though I don't think it really passes the "Fridge Test". I had a lot of questions immediately after, but honestly I also knew the twist was coming so it is perhaps unfair of me to judge in this context? It works okay at the time at least

Prey belongs to one of my favorite subgenres - the Immersive Sim. Kind of a weird title for what is essentially just an action-rpg with a focus on interactive worlds and systems that let you play the game YOUR way. The most famous of these types of games is Deus Ex - you can sneak, shoot or talk your way through pretty much anything. Use weapons not for offense but for distraction or utility, options that are rarely afforded to us in video games that are primarily "Here are your tools - go kill enemies in the only way we intended with them". This game is very much a spiritual successor to another Immersive Sim that I hold dear - System Shock 2. The scifi elements, the philosophical themes, horror mixed with exploration, it all feels very familiar. While Prey is not new (I beat it very shortly after it came out in 2017, I liked but did not love it at the time) I did really enjoy my time back on Talos 1.

The story of Prey is at first seemingly standard sci-fi fare - you're aboard a space station in the near~ish future and aliens are attacking! Well, except even from the beginning things take quite a twist... The intro to the game actually implies you are on Earth, and you undergo some tests with your brother on a new technology - things are going quite strangely until a doctor is killed by a Mimic (the main enemy of the early portions of the game) and the day seemingly resets itself again, Groundhogs day style. Pretty weird huh? Well it gets weirder when you receive a message from a Robot Lady with your voice who reveals that your existence is a lie - it is several years after the day you had yesterday and you've helped develop technology that rapidly expands the human mind, with the help of some evil aliens who have now escaped onto your space station! This technology is the neuromods - taking human experience and abilities, turning it into brain matter, and being able to inject those skills and abilities into just about anyone. Excellent sci-fi tech, with a twist you quickly learn, that it is all based off of these aliens and their biology, and that you and your brothers meddling has called these creatures to the station thus making YOU responsible for all of the death and destruction happening. As you escape your 'cell' into the wider station, the usual ImmSimm conventions appear - VERY few friendly NPCs, as you make you way through levels of enemies and obstacles to progress the story forward. The station has an opprossive, abandoned atmosphere as you make your way through trying to piece together what happened here exactly and the lives of the crew before ultimately deciding all of their fates. While it leans far too heavily on the old tropes of "audio logs and hacked emails" to tell its story and not quite enough environmental story-telling (Human Revolution still holds the crown there) but the people who lived here are, by and large, incredibly sympathetic in just how normal they are. There's a few exceptional bits (the budding romance between two high ranking crew members, ultimately cut short by murder, or your former girlfriend who kinda sorta hates you) stand out, but a few too many are simple fetch quests that, due to the length of time and number of loading screens to resolve, often lead to a "What quest was that again..?" when you see the quest-completed pop-up.

While the gunplay of Prey leaves something to be desired, the leveling system and item management feels pretty great. You can choose a variety of categories of abilities to use your mods towards that generally lean you in two directions - Human mods which increase your physical stats, engineering or hacking skills. Or, you can lean towards Typhon abilities - essentially straight up magic powers. Telekinesis, pyrokinesis, mental assaults, even becoming a mimic yourself to squeeze in small spaces! Nearly 20 hours in turning into a coffee cup and rolling around was still fun... Sadly the rest of the abilities are only "pretty good". The attack skills feel pretty similar, mainly point and click with very little punch. The weapons similarly are interesting in their uses, the GLOO gun being one of my favorites weapons/tools in gaming, but also lack some PIZAZZ outside of the few notable exceptions. I do always appreciate scifi games that TRY to make their arsenal be more than "Assault rifles and pistols but IN SPACE!!", but I do think the team just needed some more work on these to make them feel cooler and more useful. I fell back on my trifecta of GLOO/Pistol/Shotgun 99% of the time.

So yeah, Prey is kinda awesome. The level design is excellent, the enemies are suitably creepy and weird even if there are too few of them (and visually they're all a bit too samey - kinda RE7 style actually) , and you have an impressive array of abilities and weapons with which to do battle against the alien menace. So while I don't know if any particular part of Prey stands out as exceptional, I do think it manages to be more than the sum of its parts. It asks some interesting philosophical questions - if this is all a simulation, what does it matter how we treat anyone inside it? Why do them any favors, any kindness? What purpose does that serve, other than to be good for nothing other than its own sake? Or do you have another motive perhaps? As the game says, it has no real idea why you did anything at all you chose to do, but it chooses to believe in you. What do you think? Why do we always try to be the best we can in a roleplaying game? Because we want to be, or because we just think that we should?

Narrative Vampire The Masquerade CYOA game #2, and this time it's all coming together! Similar to Coteries of New York you play as a young vampire making their way through their Early Nights and trying not to get tooooo caught up in the Camarilla bullshit that's going on. This time however there's only one character rather than a choice of clans, Julia the LaSombra vamp. The intro is a whole prologue of who she is before being turned - a damn good investigative journalist who is slowly having her whole life go completely to shit. Then she's attacked by a vampire and well... turns out everything tearing her apart was a hazing ritual to see if she was worth joining the clan. Then, the real game starts! A total shithead from the first game is murdered and we do get a proper sequel~ish to Coteries which is great since that story was particularly unsatisfying! Julia is also very much her own character and she is all the witty and snarky you would expect, and you have to manuever her successfully through this investigation while she's trying to decide just how much of her actual humanity to hold onto...

A vastly improved main story however means that the very intriguing side characters and plots from the first game are mostly dropped - the focus is on Julia and the cast already around her, no forging allies here. People like you or hate you already. One of the main people in her life is her former human girlfriend, whom she is still with. There's a pretty interesting look here at a vampire/human relationship and how that is kind of inherently fucked and I appreciate that its not all sunshine and roses for them, even if the 'bad ending' is about them trying to make it work. And speaking of the ending - I really love the fact that the "bad" end is the one where Julia tries to be decent to others and look out for her own mental wellbeing, whereas the "good" ending is the proper Vampire ending of "everything is fucked but at least I'm having a great time right now!"

While Shadows of New York isn't an amazing, ground breaking experience, it is a damn good whodunnit along with a compelling main character and side plots. And I'm here for more of it!

Gosh I do love this world... Definitely a very interesting take on a CYOA type game, its all text with some pretty nice art backdrops. You can choose one of three protagonists though it doesn't seem to affect TOO much of the plot going forward. There's a lot of good in this game - intriguing characters, great art, solid music (do I detect some tracks calling back to Bloodlines..?) and some interesting subplots. However there's a pretty big vacancy there - what about the main story?! Well, that is kind of garbage, I'm afraid.

Coteries of New York is set up in much the same way as Bloodlines - you are an unsuspecting mortal who is rudely and roughly tossed into the world of vampire politics, your sire pays you no notice and are forced to make your way through this labyrinthine world of murderers and monsters to try and hold onto a piece of your humanity.... or just hold on, period. From the get-go of Coteries it is pretty clear however that your very creation is part of a plot, however very little of the main story makes it clear that this is a central part of the story until the very end where it comes as a bit of a shock, and not really in a good way but we'll get there. The main story essentially boils down to - the red haired lady on the boxart saves your bacon when you're supposed to be executed as a baby-Vamp and you're now sworn to her in fealty. Seems like a good spot for a lot of drama right? Well, not really. The bulk of the game's story is actually you recruiting your eponymous "coterie", a group of allies and friends you do favors for in the hopes that down the line they will come through for you in the end. There are 4 "main" ones of these however there are also at least 3 side story characters who have pretty similar arcs, and they all play out in a sort of "Persona"~esque system of hanging out with them during your free time to go through their own little plots. All of the ones I met in my playthrough were actually VERY cool - my favorite being the Ace Detective nosferatu who has actually taken on the persona from a character he used to write in trashy novels! There's also a Malkavian who expresses her multiple personalities via twitter/insta handles... and constantly has a phone in her hand so she can express all of them at once. Driving with her is quite an experience... In contrast to these bombastic and likeable folks, the main story is pretty anemic (heh). You do a series of jobs for Sophia as she plots against her rivals but at no particular point do you have much say in how things go down, and the game comes to what is initially a pretty tense conclusion only for it to abruptly end with almost no fanfaire or explanation whatsoever. The game needed either a few more minutes to the story to serve as a mini-epilogue for you and your choices OR some kind of thematic narration by either you or Sophie or SOMEONE who can kinda tie up whatever themes or story they were going for here....

While Bloodlines 2 has been delayed and switched developers, I thought it was a good time to dive back into this crazy and wonderful vampire world and I'm fairly happy with what I got, especially in relation to how much I paid for it... Coteries of New York has some great characters and some fine characters, and tells a story that is surprisingly boring in comparison to its cast. It feels half-baked and almost entirely unfinished at the end, some interesting surprises notwithstanding. It might scratch this particular Hunger a bit but certainly does not sate it. Lets see if the sequel can get it right...?

Dying Light is a zombie survival... action game? from several years ago. I played it around release time and got about halfway through the game but stopped - I have been meaning to go back as I thought it deserved a proper shot and it went on a pretty deep discount in the last Xmas sale, so here we go round 2!

You are Kyle Crane (called Crane 99% of the time) and a Secret Agent of the mysterious UN Agency "The GRE", and you have been sent into the fiction arabian city of "Harran", which is currently under a strict military lockdown due to a severe zombie outbreak. Much of the game involves running around this city, accumulating crafting parts and fighting off the occasional zombie or two or twelves. Your parkour skills are extraordinary but you do eventually get tired - meaning you have to plan your routes carefully. The zombies themselves are some seriously tough hombres - you have a meaty melee combat system but with a standard "gray" weapon, you essentially have to break it to kill a zombie, meaning you will be defenseless quite quickly if you put down every beast in your path forcing you to think about how to distract or outmaneuver the dead. This leads to the game's greatest strength - being perched on top of a building or bus, SURROUNDED by dozens of undead, and seeing your destination off in the distance and wondering to yourself "Okay how the heck am I going to make it over there with what I've got? And where could I maybe stop for a bit of loot along the way...". When the game sticks to this gameplay loop, it shines like a diamond. You unlock more abilities that help you traverse and fight off the dead (my particular favorite being an upgraded drop kick that hurls enemies off of whatever building you are leaping towards) and your arsenal slowly grows over time as well. However, not all is wonderful in this rough undead land - there are some sections, few at first, many later, where you are confined to small areas and must fight off hordes or groups of zombies with what weapons you have. This is where the game seriously falters to the point of significant frustration - these sections just kind of suck. The enemies are rarely any fun to actually FIGHT, and the autosave system that normally works well in the overworld parts is very constraining in the sections where you must then repeat fights with LESS resources than you had at the beginning.

Dying Light is a great survival zombie game that is held back by the developers insistence on mixing up the genuinely great thing they had going with obligatory "shooty bang bang" parts and it was a damn slog to get through them at the end. More than half of this game is a solid 'A' but the mandatory bits in sewers and buildings that could've been an interesting twist end up being anything but.

Little Nightmares 2, finally! I vividly recall my playthrough of LN1 and while quite liking it and being blown away by the ending - feeling like there was definitely a good amount of growth available for a sequel. Is Little Nightmares 2 that amazing follow up? Yeah, sort of...

So, Little Nightmares 2 main strengths is most certainly its encounter/level design and its monster designs. The art direction OF COURSE is 11/10 just like the first game so I won't gush over that element too much- the forest feels almost too mundane in how normal it is except it then contrasts with how weird and fucked up the City proper is so it does its job well. I do think the game's color palette is a liiiittle too monochromatically gray, which I think the first game did a pretty solid job at having a decent variety so I'm a bit sad that was a step back. Otherwise, LN2 fuckin' kills it. And one of the main weaknesses of 1 was the monsters - are they all great? Yes. But there are only like... 4 of them? Maybe 5? And they all overstay their welcome a bit. The sequel fixes that issue with style - there are definitely a dozen or so monsters, if not more, and each is paced fairly well (perfectly, in many cases) so that once all the interesting things have been done with them they make their graceful exit. So visually each part of the level is just fantastic to look at or interact with... except there are some difficulties.

My problems with the game, thankfully, are almost entirely things that can be patched up in due time. The controls are still a bit wonky however this is exacerbated by the AI companion who is with you for half~ of the game - you can hop into cover and she will come and push you out to make room for herself, alerting the monster. And if the monster alert that is basically game over except in some edge cases. Yet again, they provide very little slack from the monsters in terms of alerting them - you MUST have your route planned out and if you catch on some geometry (basically never a fatal issue in 1, fatal several times in 2) then tough shit you're dead and back to the autosave point with you. Also the game has a strong minimilist streak to it - there is no HUD on display and there are no control directions either outside of a tiny amount of prompts. This plays along very well with the strong art style but... there's one sequence in particular that requires you to do something that is not really intuitive with the controls or you will die many, many, many times until you figure out, utterly annihilating the tension of the scene.

While this game may have some significant strengths over its predecessors, the new drawbacks are also a bit too hard to ignore. While much of the gameplay is the same solid traversal through spooky environments solving relatively straightforward puzzles and obstacles, the sections of the game where I had growl in frustration for one reason or another added up far too many times. The art design being superb and an engaging story between our two main leads makes this more than worthwhile but I do wish the game hadn't fought me to a standstill so many times. In a year or so with a bunch of patches this game can be legit great with little holding it back and I do envy those folks a year+ from now who pick it up on sale and get that far smoother experience.

Hitman 3 is the end of assassination trilogy, and while I don't think I loved it QUITE as much as Hitman 2 I do think it was pretty great. The basics of the series remain the same - go to new cool looking map, get some toys and play around in their clockwork levels to take out some other group of assholes who are trying to ruin the world.

So what sets 3 apart? Well, it is certainly more story focused than its predecessors. Several of the levels start with an "intro" section where you are making your way to the 'proper' level entrance and gives more context about what is going on. Sky diving into the UAE and breaking into a giant skyscraper, investigating a gas station and nearby woods before getting into an exclusive club... You might think these are annoying but after completing the level the real intro is put in so you can skip all that nonsense and get right to the murderin'. 47 and his crew are finishing off the organization of "Providence" - a straight Illuminati ripoff that tries to control the world and was using you as a patsy all these years with your ICA kills. You are joined again by your "brother" from the Children's School of Assassination which fleshes out 47's character juuuust a bit as we see how he contrasts with all the people around him. Is he haunted by what he's done? Does he care for these people at all? What does he really want out of his life? We do get some answers to these actually and overall I found them pretty satisfying.

Gameplay, not too much has changed here. You slip on various disguises in order to make your way through the levels, figuring out what might be a good way to take out your targets. There are also mission stories (greatly reduced in 3 compared to 1 & 2, unfortunately) that are more 'guided' routes through the level and can reveal some tidbits about the target or level that are generally pretty interesting.

Hitman 3 might not blow the doors off of the World of Assassination trilogy to finish with a clear crescendo to close it out, it does accomplish the task of adding 6 more great clockwork levels to work through and nasty capitalists to blow away. The graphical improvements are nice and all and while there's no significant gameplay shifts like hiding in crowds or in foliage like 2 it does enough with its diverse levels to seriously impress. Not only that, it carries forwards 2's imports of 1 meaning you now have 20~odd levels of challenges and feats to work through to make an absolute smorgasbord of clever kills and macabre humor all in one very neat package. It may have only impressed rather than wowed but damn I am glad I made time for this series and it has firmly entrenched itself as one of my favorites, and I uninstall it knowing that in 2~3 years I will enjoy digging through this whole glut of content yet again, my progress intact.

The actual title for this game is Total War: Warhammer II, however I think the folks at the Total War series had a slam dunk with the name I used so I'm gonna put that instead okay? So as part of the Total War series the gameplay loop is essentially Grand Strategy (campaign maps, resource management, population happiness, tech trees, etc) + RTS individual battles (you can see where each individual guy is and then you direct them around a separate battle map to fight) to form a cohesive whole of WAR! I was a huuuuuge fan of Medieval 2 many years ago and I've played a couple TW games since then but typically bounced off pretty fast - but I've put 40~ hours into this one, what's the difference? WARHAMMER IS FRICKIN AWESOME THAT'S WHAT!! Where every other TW is some humans with different colors fighting other humans in another color this game has an enormous variety of races and each of them plays pretty differently and watching all these crazy fantasy units go at it just looks and feels amazing + the campaign parts are no slouch as well.

As this is Warhammer II there is a Warhammer I, and I do own that as well - I played the "Mortal Empires" campaign that combines the maps from 1 + 2 plus all the factions as well from I to form a GIANT world map to fight over in a sandbox-style campaign and frankly it is awesome. In each game there are 4 base factions - 1 has Humans, Dwarves, Greenskins & Chaos while the second game has Lizardmen, Skaven, High Elves & Dark Elves. I did a quick mini campaign as humans and High Elves to get used to the mechanics then jumped into the game proper with Lizardmen and I have mostly completed (just a formality at this point to wrap up the last few victory conditions) one Mortal Empires campaign and DAMN did I love it to pieces. You start off with some relatively simple units (basically alligators with big sticks and thin lizards with javelins) and slowly progress your way to cooler and cooler units ending with some wild shit - I had one army that was almost entirely T-Rexes and Stegosauras - that sounds amazing right??? Well, yeah, it was. And that's really the magic of this game: building up YOUR armies and YOUR heroes then getting to watch them smash into other armies until one side gives up, followed by that ever-satisfying feeling of expanding your "color" across the world map and holding more territory. It just felt great.

The campaign layer feels juuuuust complicated enough for a game called "Total War", there's diplomacy involved between factions that can add some interesting complications and you have to keep track of a few different variables (depending on your faction anyway) so you're rarely JUST spoiling for the next fight, there's always some administrative or colonial task to keep in mind while you're moving your army pieces around. They could've very easily gone overboard with this and make it a slog (and I fear some of the other races might just be that) but for Lizardfolk at least it felt like a good balance, even giant slugfest battles can get boring if you do them too often. As you progress through the campaign you begin to fight more and more enemies of different races which keeps things feeling fresh long into your game with a world-shaking event occuring about 'halfway' through - Chaos Invasions. So there are a few Chaos-adjacent factions that are in the game that you go toe to toe with like regular enemies however at certain intervals armies of special chaos will show up and just wreck shit all over the map - and it provides an amazing and tense challenge when it does occur.

My game was played as the Lizardman Slaan Mazdamundi who I chose since he seems like the "default" Lizardman option. I tried my best to roleplay as an agent of Order - I was benevelent to humans, elves, dwarves (though I basically never encountered them) and my fellow Lizardfolk. In fact I spent HUGE chunks of the game just getting my fellow Lizardmen to ally with me rather than just have peace treaties and the other races treated me in a way that could be charitably described as "standoff-ish". The faction I picked started off in the "Central America" analog of this world with some Dark Elves to the North and much of "South America" being populated with Skaven and rogue human factions and then some vampire pirates further at the end, who I spent much of my time battling. After nearly 100 turns I was getting to be pretty unstoppable when suddenly... CHAOS ARRIVES!! Full stacks of chaos units who are tough as BALLS start showing up and absolutely annihilating the dark elves. I go in and start colonizing and wondering... what the fuck happened up here?! Then I get into some VERY tense battles with these guys and eventually form a shieldwall with my 4 armies fighting as one and I beat them!! It was amazing and then... chaos again?!?! I fought them basically to a standstill and then destroyed them, and order prevails!! I needed to do a bit more for the formal Victory conditions but... I won okay??

Total Warhammer 2 is an excellent strategy/RTS game with a compelling world and super awesome factions to control and I can't wait to drop into more areas and try to dominate the world. Slowly expanding your roster with weird and cool units and watching them RIP into the enemy is just... its beautfiful. Watching your T-rexes charge into hordes of chaos warriors and watching them get ripped to shreds is just what gaming is all about.

Secrets of the Maw is the expansion levels for Little Nightmares (#9 on my list this year! And beaten just the day before lol) that combines 3 levels telling the story of another denizen of The Maw and his journey. The levels are more or less retreads of previous areas remixed in new ways, with more or less recycled monsters as well, with one significant and fairly cool exception. That is one of the reasons why I was not really wild at all about this pass - a lot of what we'd seen before but again, and a new focus on puzzles that I found more tiresome than enjoyable. In fact, I'd say I actively disliked much of the pass outside of the first level that has one pretty good gimmick that unfortuantely falls into a poor trap for a horror game - repeating a section several times to get it right basically destroys all of the tension and thrill. And damn does this game like to fuck things up for you so you have to repeat them 10 times!

Our new hero is a bit more lanky but unfortunately controls pretty identical to our Raincoated heroine from the main game. I thought it would have been neat to have the character control a bit different but that might be a bit too ambitious for a DLC. There is a new ability though that is used mainly in Episode 2 that lets you cuddle with the gnomes for a moment to 'mind control' them into being your buddy to help solve puzzles which is kinda neat but then they just had to make it annoying and turn a whole section into 'find the 10 buddies to help you', however they never actually EXPLAIN what the fuck they want you to do so you only realize that was your goal near the end... kind of a pain in the ass. The story has some creepy moments and ends on a dour but honestly pretty expected note (you just happen to be the gnome Six eats near the end of the main game, SHOCKING TWIST), but I do believe the highlight is in Episode 1 with the Underwater monster who is essentially just a retread of the Shoe monster in the main game and which is just a ripoff of the Water monster in Amnesia The Dark Descent. And it is then kinda ruined in its final encounter where I spent about 10~ tries going through the motions of figuring out how exactly the designers wanted me to solve the puzzle of killing this thing off before finally figuring it out, but since they were going for ACTION it instead forced me to try and figure things out on the fly which went poorly (10 times) which meant that it was just frustrating and annoying rather than exhilarating.

While I enjoy the beat-by-beat of the Little Nightmare game of going into creepy new areas and solving straightforward puzzles while occassionally dodging monsters - the Secrets of the Maw expansion focused WAY too sharply on new puzzles rather than new monsters and got to the point of sheer tedium many, many times. Even finishing the game was a complete drag and the kinda obvious ending didn't help any. If I hadn't already pre-ordered and paid for Little Nightmares 2 this genuinely may have gotten me to reconsider my purchase... When I replay the main game in 5+ years I will 100% be skipping this crap.