2nd best yakuza. I really enjoyed this game, I loved all the playable characters, they all had unique combat and each one had their own town to explore. Each character also had their own huge minigame side quest, like playing need for speed, hunting giant bears, being a popstar, and playing baseball. The non kamurocho/sotenbori maps were cool but were pretty small and Nagasugai was hard to traverse because of the huge building circles you had to go around. They did well to differentiate each chapter, never making you lose interest. Kiryu is still dropping tigers, Saejima finally got rid of that Snape hair, Haruka is finally playable, Akiyama has a beautiful singing voice, and Shinada is the greatest thing to happen to humanity since the birth of Shaq.

I do admit, I was confused on where the story was going for a while. The first chapter progresses normally, then in the 2nd it almost feels like a whole other self-contained game. But by the end, you see some dots connect in your head, slowly. Then you move onto the next part which appears to drop the whole "yakuza" part of yakuza and is now a teen girl popstar movie complete with the mean girl rivals. But again, it masterfully and subtley connects everything together.

and by the last part you're introduced to a whole new character and are forced to open the wikipedia on baseball terminology.. and again, like the last chapters it connects together like a cool puzzle.

The finale chapter is really sick. The final boss is so great, probably the fairest hard boss in the series. And the parts where you could choose who to play as for the next part was cool.

Overall, this may feel long at times but I felt the length really was justified in how huge the scope of this game is. Instead of feeling like you start the game and 5 sidequests later you're shirtless on the millenium tower, it takes its time and encourages you with a slower pace to enjoy your surroundings and have fun with the side quests and minigames. Let me put it into perspective: By the end of chapter 2 in yakuza 5, I had more hours than I did by the end of yakuza 3. Good game!!!

The new combat being turned based works really well. Basically, it takes what would normally be a heat animation and turns it into a special move that takes what replaces heat in this game, MP. So in any other game you could walk up to a fella with full heat and do a cool little attack animation, in this game you choose which one to do from a menu and they all have different stats and there are different builds you could do with armor and equipment and there's just so much depth to the combat. Yeah, you could just mash. But when you get to the bosses, you can't just spam the highest damage moves over and over until it's done. You gotta use your support characters, lower their stats, raise your own, use every tool in your arsenal. But yeah, it kinda sucked having to grind in chapter 12 but that was the only time I felt under-leveled, and after that, even if I was a lower level I could whittle their health down with strategies and good team comp. And it fixes a system-based problem with the original that also happens in a lot of action games and kinda ruins them: you can't just pause the game anymore and down 30 staminans. Stopping time and healing really kills difficulty in a lot of games (that's why dark souls are so godly) and that's why this game is great. I had to really think and strategize. I had to make one party member into the medic/support. It's a great battle system and while it's no replacement for the good old fashioned real-time tiger drop, the turn based combat really came together as you got more party members and the jobs opened up. Unfortunately, my favourite character out of the gang was the weakest (or at least didn't fit in my playstyle) and I never got to have him on my team :( sorry Adachi

The music, boss fights, side quests, minigames, and quality of life changes are all amazing. Two boss fights, in particular, stand out, and yeah everyone whos played knows exactly what I'm talking about. Chapter 12 was probably the most eventful and insane chapter in any Yakuza and a shoutout to the voice actors both English and Japanese. I played subbed like some stupid weeb and I thought Ichiban's voice was perfect. It's really easy to make a character like him dislikable and annoying, but there's a lot of subtle kindness and heart in his voice and demeanor that is great. And an extra special shoutout to the business management minigame. In the beginning, I was so confused and I failed the shareholders meeting minigame and I was in the red and losing money.. but then 4 uninterrupted hours later I was in full swing and I was doing the minigame like it was my job. They put crack into the code of that, I swear. Anyways god-tier game, god-tier Yakuza, and the story is obviously great. GG (good game)

The combat is amazing, fantastic. It's like watching a john wick scene in 2x speed with some slow-motion courtesy of Zack Snyder. All the guns feel great to fire, the headshot sound and effect may just be the best of any game. The way that weapons work in this game works so well with the insane movement , there's no reloading you only have one mag. So once your weapons done, you gotta throw it and get another. You could take an enemy's holstered weapon off him if you're unarmed, you could kick and stun him and you can close your distance with the sliding, wallrunning, and diving. This system leads to some seriously badass moments, a lot of them to be witnessed in 4k slowmotion. I came out of a walljump, unarmed with a jetpack enemy below me. I kicked him downwards, took his holstered weapon and killed his friends in midair. Felt like an action movie and it wasn't a set piece or anything. Crazy! And something else that realy helped with the action feel was the flipping. Dusk had this too, but it was less useful because youre a lot more mobile and jumpy here. If you continue your mouse upwards while in midair, you do a backflip. Now see that shield enemy? flip over him and shoot his back while youre upside down. It's genuinely useful, you're not just doing it for style. And you could go in the settings and turn off the automatically get up feature so you could keep firing while lying upside down until you choose to get up. Super cool. Now the big gimmick and best selling point of the game is how everything in the environment is destructible. Walls, doors, floors, ceilings, you name it. Your objective is on the other side of the door? Use a shotgun to blow the door down. Enemy under you? feel free to start unloading. A lot of the objectives involve cutting through thick steel to get where you need. And thats all brought together with your megaman blaster. With a simple click of the middle mouse button you shoot hot lava and tear down anything in front of it. It really changed your way of thinking and kept momentum up. Gotta get upstairs? shoot at the ceiling and jump. And the way it gibbed enemies was so satisfying.

Lastly, the music was great and fit the tone and the cutscenes were pretty aesthetically pleasing, black and white with purple highlights. Couldn't make much sense of the story though

great game, super short but replayable and fun. I found it fairly easy on the normal difficulty so i'll give it another run on the higher one. Recommend!!!!

it's better than smash but that's not saying much... as a high intellectual gamer (some have called me the roger Ebert and daniel day-lewis of gaming) I find this childish baby nonsense to be an idiotic waste of time. This game makes no attempt to explain how Spongebob is breathing outside the loud house, or how cat dog urinates. One of the stages is made of metal but toph is unable to bend the metal of the stage, so what's the point of having the stage be made of metal?

a complete pile of garbage and pathetic look into the downward spiral of the ""Videogame."" If you are above the age of 4, don't bother ... and if you are and you still play this spaghetti coded, soulless, cashgrab, gamecel, scientologist, soybridging, lumbersexual, seattle indie beta-male, drakelike, carbon monoxide infused omega trash tier excuse of a videogame, don't bother calling yourself a gamer.

this DLC is a Refinery of Doom Eternal's enemies and Unruly Evil mechanics. A lot of the punches pulled from the original campaign are now punching you in full as you fight through the Halls of the Damned and climb up the Fortress of Mystery, trying not to turn into a Human BBQ. The ghost enemies are new and difficult but the way you deal with them is Dead Simple. It's a perfect dance where you feel you are in Nirvana, and after the Doom Eternal story, you think you are in control. But once you see two marauders, you know they Gotcha!
Because the designers don't have to hold back, every encounter is like an Inferno of Blood. Very difficult and fun, a lot of Tricks and Traps in the levels make it fun even when you're not fighting. I just hope part two will not be Even Simpler.

The gameplay is serviceable and a competent stealth action game but my god everything about the visuals and the audio is amazing. So creative and unique. I honestly didn't call that it was gonna be like this SCP type deal I thought I was gonna play as a Burt Reynolds or Tom Selleck Magnum PI fella trying to escape a terrorist robot compound or something. But what I got was also amazing. A couple of flaws - if you get captured and die and respawn, any keycards you found or terminals you activated would stay activated or found. So that just saves you the trip of sneaking back. and the way the level design is the safe point is like a mini hub world between the mini levels that have a powerup or the key at the end. IDK. And while the sound design was amazing, the footsteps were weird as I genuinely could not tell from where they were coming from. And sometimes the enemy AI would be a bit dumb and not see me even if I were clearly in their view and undisguised. The game is super short, like an hour or two and it does everything super well and wraps up. A good and nice short adventure. Great level design too. Fun, soulful and recommended!

I really love this game. I know it's the worst of the Arkham's and no Kevin Conroy or Mark Hamill but It's so unique and awesome. Combat is sick and in NG+ there are no counter warning markers so it's a lot more crazy and fun. Gadgets are really cool too like the remote claw and the glue grenade, they really spiced up the combat and I loved getting high combos and doing the bat swarm. I felt the stealth portion of this game unlike the other ones felt pretty unpolished especially on PC with keyboard and mouse. Some inputs like the one where you knock out a guy lying on the floor needs ctrl+right click to do and everyone knows combination button presses are terrible. Maybe it worked on a controller but on a keyboard, I've got like 90 other buttons there's no need. Especially considering the spacebar is used for sprinting, jumping, gliding, interacting, and generally acting like the x button on a ps controller. Very lazy pc port. The worst aspect of this is the contextual button prompts. Walk up behind a guy no you cant' just knock him out with the punch button, you have to wait for the game to pull up the prompt so you can right-click and knock him out. If you do it before the game can comprehend you're crouched behind a thug, you just do the counter animation which moves you forward in what I'm seriously considering to be a massive troll on their part to ruin my predator runs. But considering the pc ports of the other Arkham games, we should feel blessed that this one even works at all. Anyways I love the Christmas setting and the assassin's setup. This game really delivers on all their boss fights - this series is known for awesome bosses but I think this one has the best collection.

I really like the presentation of this game. The UI is great, the graphics are nice the art style/look of the enemies and guns as well as MC himself are amazing. The sound design is awesome, for instance, the kill hitmarker and the juicy sound it makes will play in my head on repeat for the rest of my life. The cutscenes are well directed and nice looking. Some of the special variants for vehicles and weapons look super cool. The combat is probably the best part of this game: MC controls well and it's fun to fight enemies. The grappling hook was a great inclusion and it totally changes my playstyle from the other halo games. Enemies are cool and it's fun and the open world has some quaint easter eggs with cool boss battles and cool variations and stuff to find and it's good and fun and nice.

But this game just feels like a single halo mission stretched for 10 hours. Seriously it's insane how little variation there is in environments and every single mission goes the same with no difference at all. You get a waypoint to a structure. You go to the structure. Probably not on a car because the terrain sucks for vehicles. The honeycomb mountains look cool but you can't drive with them. Vehicles control terribly in this, and it sucks. OK Back to my thing. Once you get to the structure you clear out the enemies in front and touch the terminal. You go inside. Go thru a hallway. Identical, metal hallways. You go into a big room with tons of grunts, a couple of brutes, and maybe a few elites. Kill them and touch the terminal. Go into a hallway. This time you cant touch the terminal until you find a power seed. Go grapple back thru the room and get the power seed. Put it in. Touch the terminal. Repeat for like an hour and thats the whole mission. You finish the mission and maybe theres a boss battle at the end, and then it plops you back into the open world. Already you have your next marker. If they cut out like 80% of these missions the whole game could have been one, singular level. I get it, in the original halo's like maybe silent cartographer in CE there would be a big open area and then a small interior. But what I loved about the games was the varying environments. From a forest to a huge earth city to a snowy battlefield to the destroyed remains of a ship in a desert. Alright, who cares about repeating the same sequence for 10 hours? does it at least use the open world for the crazy stuff you could do in the old halos? Like the SCARABS? No there is not a single scarab level moment in this game. In one section, there were a couple of those big ships that drop off enemies flying level with me when I was on the top of a tower. I saw my cursor turn yellow when it went over the plane and I got really excited. Is this the unique set piece? hijacking a flying plane and fighting everyone inside? I tried it and the screen gave a huge warning telling me to return to the battlefield. I went back and when I saw 6 rocket launchers scattered around the floor... a part of my soul died. Oh and I'll just tell you now there's no repulsor in campaign. I wasn't told and I was waiting to unlock it so I can do crazy stuff. Nope.. u just don't get it at all. Ever! This game is really fun and good and there's a lot of creative stuff you can do with the tools you have but there's no point to most of them. Maybe u can hit a car and make it go flying, grappling onto it or something. But whatever its fun it's good it's a single level stretched super long. It's like 343 finished their first level and was getting ready for the 2nd one, but then they realized the game is due tomorrow so they just put the same level over and over again with the same hallways and the same combat rooms it's insane. It's just so fun to play though. When I was in the open world, I did find a small swampy area containing a boss battle. Why? Why put the unique environments in random areas if you're not going to put missions there? granted the swamp looked super ugly. It was just a small area with dirty water and like green mud or something, but it would've been interesting for a level to be there. We had enough grassland battles and metal bases. Jesus!!!!! And don't even get me started on the absolute worst part bar none. What the hell were they thinking? Who approved this? There's no god damn warthog run!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You had it perfectly set up in the end everything was falling apart but oh here's a magic teleporter so you don't have to have a cool escape sequence with awesome music!

Like a mix between Max Payne and Hitman Blood Money, with a little sprinkle of the PS1 spider-man game. Max Payne's inspiration is the most obvious: shoot dodging in new york as a vigilante just goin and killing bad guys. Blood money is the ingredient with the apartment, upgrades, weapons, hit list, and stuff like human shielding and flashy accident kills. And the final perfect ingredient is the spider-man ps1. That game was a cool game where other characters crossed over willy nilly and it felt like a comic book. Frank narrates and it's written in yellow comic narration bubbles, with some familiar faces visiting you on your journey. It feels like a part of the marvel universe but not to the point where the world feels small.

These are all coincidences, right? totally? WRONG! Max Payne narration is in this game. You can dual-wield ingrams. Coincidence? at this point, if you're calling coincidence you're either a dumbass, a stupid person, or both. Hitman blood money choir is in this game's soundtrack. Not only that, you pop out of a casket with a machine gun killing all the funeralgoers. Coincidence again? Absolutely not!

And there's a secret other inspiration I never told you about. What if I described to you.. you airdrop into a jungle filled with soviets trying to shoot a nuclear weapon guarded by a tough tall Russian man with blond hair who gets set on fire and continues to chase you and you escape the place on a plane with your newfound buddy? You'd say that's obviously metal gear solid 3 snake eater. You'd be right, but you'd also be right if you said it was one level of the punisher.

So why am I giving this game such a high score if it just copies off the best games ever? That's easy: number 1, it rules. It's awesome. number 2: It came out before blood money. And if there's even a one percent chance that this game in any way influenced or inspired the greatest videogame ever made then we need to treat this game as royalty.

Now the games own merits: The interrogation system is genuinely fantastic and im shocked how new superhero games especially batman have not used the system. I obviously used the fan patch that restored the extremely gory and violent torture minigames and it was great. The only problem about it is you lose points for killing a guy in the torture minigame. Probably put in there to penalize you for failing it and going too far. But even if you get the information out of him and THEN kill him in the torture minigame it still loses points. But if you pull him back into shield and quick kill him you get points. It's kind of a sucky oversight.

The level variation is extremely awesome. Crackhouses, chop shops, zoos, mgs3 jungles, towers, jails, you name it. But the last 2 or 3 levels get kinda ridiculous with the number of armored enemies they throw at u. Those guys reward a slow playstyle with the rifle where you go for headshots and it's not really fun.

Anyways it's super awesome and a great surprise. And make sure to download the uncensored patch otherwise what's the god dam point?

Alfred, I just completed a playthrough of RETURN OF THE OBRA DINN and I am left wanting for more. Set up Opera Browser to download Lucas Pope's gameography from FreeGOGgames dot com.
Then, using the special parameters "Most Relevant", pull off a YouTube search and find me a video explaining what happened at the end of Obra Dinn, encrypt it and then download it using youtube-dl-gui.exe and then open it on VLC Media Player so I can better understand what just happened.
After that, pull up the Obra Dinn article on TvTropes dot org and go to the "characters" section so I can better understand The Captain's motivations. Download the page in HTML format, send it to my Google Drive and open the file on Opera. Also, I'm all out of Coca-Cola Zero and Doritos, send an order on the Lyft app and have them send me another week's worth.

If you're impatient I'm just gonna sum it up in this convenient haiku

same formula again
braindead stealth AI, cant see you
the world is pretty

Now as for my true elksters? go ahead and read below.


Assassin's Creed: Tsushima's two biggest strengths are the insanely well-designed world and the great ending. Both of these are done so well that if not for those things it would be seen as another Days Gone or whatever that werewolf game was, order 1738 or something. Because it's literally assassin's creed. Open world, climb tower, free outpost, find collectibles, tailing missions, go here kill that, sneak here, climb that, dcuo machinima cutscenes. Every mission is the same and it sort of feels like red dead redemption 2 how restrictive it is. The combat tried to be different from AC by adding some different sword stances and enemy weapons, with each stance countering a different weapon. In the beginning, it's fine, with fewer enemies and you don't have all the stances so some guys still pose a threat. But by the end, you can take care of most enemies with a couple of swings of your sword if you're in the right stance. Break their posture EZ and kill when they're stunned for half a decade. How did they balance this easiness? add more enemies!! now, because there's no lock on- the game attacks the enemy closest to you. So if you're in the shield stance and attacking a shield guy, but a spear guy comes up close on your left, the game thinks that you want to attack spear guy and your guy drops everything and jumps 9 nautical kilometers to the left to lunge at this guy with the wrong stance, you get parried, shot with a fire arrow and you are killed. Now onto the next point... the stealth is undeniably inarguably objectively factually and truly GARBAGE!!!!! Do you know how stupid and terrible it is? If you stand on a table the enemy cannot see you. I was playing on normal mode. Also quick side tangent... I swear the Batman Arkham games ruined stealth forever. Don't get me wrong, every single Arkham game is goated. God tier. But I think it may be to stealth games what Half-Life and Halo were to FPS games. Great games on their own, but started a trend of other games copying them, failing, and making everything boring and sucky. So now every FPS game is slow and story-based like half-life but forgets that half-life had no cutscenes at all and you could just walk away if you wanted. In Halo, you could only carry two weapons but there was a large variety of different weapons with lasers and explosives and different stuff and not 9 variants of an assault rifle or whatever. Arkham games had the stealth be walking up behind an enemy and using a prompt to knock them out, and you can't carry their bodies. This was OK because the bodies were a fear tactic first of all- you can't ghost batman rooms. (for those non-stealthers joining us today ghosting means moving through an area without touching any guards or getting spotted.) And second, walking up behind them was the tough part. But seriously in this one forced stealth segment, I walked through this castle and all the enemies were standing alone looking off the mountain practically wearing "STAB ME" capes. It's a nothing sandwich of stealth. I'm making an official decree - if your stealth game doesn't allow you to move bodies, it is not a stealth game. Unless it's Batman. CASE CLOSED!!!!! Now for the plot... I got some stuff to say and I'm going to get a little philosophical so please take an IQ test before reading forward unless you are confident in your intelligence. Reader discretion is advised. Ok... So this games whole schtick is Honor vs Evil. At the beginning of the game, Jin starts off as a super cool, honorable, and awesome samurai. Is never mean, always cool and kind. No sneaking, sticking to his code. Early on he is taught by his uncle (best character in the game, ez) Shimura to be kind even to your enemies, give everyone respect and dignity. This is definitely not historically accurate but it’s an awesome trope, the honorable warrior. The conflict isn’t actually about the Mongols invading; they are just the spark for the real conflict of the game which is Jin slowly becoming evil out of necessity as the Mongols use cheap tactics to gain an advantage. This is a cool idea for a story even if I don't like the idea of the message that the only way to defeat a cheater is stooping to their level but who cares. It’s a cool story but it doesn’t have any harmony with the gameplay. Sure the stealth is easier than the combat, but I didn’t like the stealth at all so I just played combat for everything. Aside from the forced stealth segments which were stupid, I was 100% honorable. I know this game’s whole theme is about Jin’s downfall, but explaining it as Jin started sneaking instead of fighting is strange, because I didn’t sneak and anyone who played like me will feel like there is a split between the story and the gameplay. The best thing I could think of was a splinter cell double agent style honor meter. But even then that would ruin the whole theme. I dunno, but what they did right here didn’t work for me. Feels like cutscene stupidity.

Finally, after all that hate I wanna talk about the two good parts of the game. HOLY MOLY GUACAMOLE!!!!! THE OPEN WORLD!!!! It’s genuinely breathtakingly beautiful. I don’t know if this is blasphemous to god or whatever but I think sucker punch outdid god on Tsushima's nature. So much variation and so much fun stuff tucked away in there. It’s so omega Giga god tier. I don’t know how else to put it. Like bro imagine this open world on halo infinite. Would’ve demolished the world with its amazingness. But what do I know, I’m only the most important and significant game reviewer on Backloggd.

And the next thing that the game did amazingly was the ending. Your ending has got to be shaq level to get me to care about it if I didn’t care about the story so far. But man. There are spoilers following this, just warning you.













I’m so glad the ending focused on the best parts of the game. Jin and Shimura, the 1v1 duel system, the beautiful scenery, and the classic conflict of honor vs evil. I got the ending where I killed him. I thought I was dishonorable for Tsushima’s sake enough, and even though the island will lose its Jito I owed it to Shimura as my uncledad to let him go out with style and honor. The ending made me think of the ending of metal gear rising, and again anything that reminds me of metal gear rising is awesome.

It's fun, it's challenging and cool. But I feel a lot of the difficulty comes from the garbage sauce tutorial. Did you know you can dodge 99% of all attacks with ducking? (spacebar -> S) and the sweep attack ( S -> W -> Heavy attack) is your most powerful tool. Once I figured these out around level 3 the difficulty dropped significantly. Also, it doesn't really feel like a roguelike. If that's what it was going for, then it is the most generous and kind roguelike ever made. The shortcuts and it saving your game are two direct opposites of the genre. But it's fun and cool, so it's alright. It just feels more like an old-style game where you had lives, except the lives system is more complex and cool. The aging is my favorite part of this game but also the source of most of my frustration. The last thing before I go... the sound design is bad and garbage. Punching a dude sounds like tapping your fingers on a moist log of wood. Music was sparse and I thought that was interesting, but I actually got way better when I played Eminem. I'm serious. It's eerie I put it on, and suddenly I was in the zone. Eminem was like AndI'mstilltotallyinappropriatewithanopiateGropingitwhileI'mholdingitlikea trophyI'mhopingalittlecodeine'llgetmeOD'in'WhoaeverythingisslowIbegintofloatingIknowthatI'mgettingloadedthepenexplodedHiroshimawiththe flowsautopiaWiththedopeI'manOGI'mliketheG.O.A.T.heretogetyourgoat littlebitofsodiumit'sassaultWhenI'matthepodiumatyourthroatholycamoly and Im like ip man watah haiya dodging ducking under bam bam bam leroy smith rapid fist duck counter block sweep throw like god damn!!!!!! when the game works, it works very well.

Yeah, this review is dedicated
To all the haters that told me my 1050 could never run this game
To all the people that lived with 3090s running the game on ultra
telling me to upgrade my graphics card when I'm just tryin to play this game and have some fun
And all my fellas in the GPU struggle yknow what I'm sayin?

This game is super great and ridiculously awesome. This is what kids must've felt when they played Ocarina of Time on the n64, how kids felt when they first listened to The Marshall Mathers LP or when people saw the Godfather for the first time in theatres or when comic readers graced their eyes with Watchmen. Nothing will be the same and none of this is an exaggeration. The open world is filled with high-quality dungeons like the original souls games and they totally managed to overcome my biggest fear of going open world and they kept their good level design. Secrets go into huge areas and the areas are linked to questlines and they have bosses and stuff. I knew there would be repeated bosses and mini-dungeons, but the ones we got weren't terrible. I did every single one I came across and although they were repeated design-wise and some bosses, some of them had unique elements to them where you wouldn't be sure what to expect. Some fun puzzles and bosses there. Many new additions to the souls formula: the biggest being obviously the open world, but with it comes the horse and jumping. I think level designers might've held a party after they said the horsey could double jump because there's so much fun stuff hidden everywhere behind a little bit of horse platforming. Also, another cool addition is the boss's tendency to hold their attacks back and feint. As much as I love dark souls 1 and 2, a lot of bosses fall into the trope of having a very telegraphed attack so you can roll behind and chip away at their health from behind but now every single boss is a Mordhau master. They go in for an attack- and then hold their sword here. Every single fiber of your souls veteran being is telling you to roll. NOW!!! THE SWORD IS UP!! ROLL!!!!! and you do. And the boss is still holding his sword up. What do I do? roll again? oh god!!!! you keep rolling. You spam roll because you think the attack will come immediately after the windup. But the boss is baiting you and you fell for it- dead! it, like sekiro, makes you VERY closely watch what the boss is doing. Only dodging at the last possible second makes the game a lot more tense and with the crazy heavy combos, shields are basically worthless unless you've put all your points in stamina. Boss design is really tough and I honestly think it's some amazing bosses, but I don't feel as strongly positive about any particular boss as I do with some particular bosses in Sekiro or Dark Souls 3. I'm sure my opinion will change with subsequent playthroughs but that's just how I feel, the bosses are mostly great but I don't think any of them reach the height of Isshin, Ornstein & Smough, Gael, or Freide.

Now onto my two negative points: the PC performance and the final boss.

The pc performance was fine on day 1: after that, they had a patch that decimated my framerate. Like I could not play. You don't know how I felt after waiting for so long, preordering, counting down the days for a year, and waiting through the delay that I just had to sit there and look at the game on my desktop. But at least they promptly fixed it and it worked for me from then but many people faced issues even with high-tier processors so I think the point is justified to be here.

Yep, this is one to be remembered by and is the next huge step in revitalizing open world games. BOTW started it, stumbled a little, but Elden ring took that concept and ironed it out. It would be cool to see games like far cry and assassin's creed take this approach. And despite the rocky PC port and the final boss being a letdown, this game is amazing and fully lived up to my sky-high expectations.



The next segment contains light spoilers for Elden ring and devil may cry 3, I will go into detail about my distaste for the final boss.





The final boss is the only true blemish on the game itself. Have any of you elksters played devil may cry 3? if you have, then you've fought Arkham for a second time. And you know how amazing the buildup and the story and music and everything is but the fight itself is so undeniably unfun and boring. You have to redo his first phase every single time- which worked for sekiro's final boss but it doesn't work here due to how fast you can dispatch enemies in sekiro with knowledge of their moves and when to parry. But here, you have to output enough damage every time. There's no posture bar to break. But the first phase isn't the bad part: the second part. Here, run at the enemy, slash at their stomach until they teleport away. Now dodge these lasers. Keep going for another 15 minutes. Absolutely horrendous boss design and I was honestly appalled at this because of how amazing the series' previous final bosses were made. Some of the best of all time! Gael from dark souls 3 and Sword Saint Isshin from Sekiro are tied for #2 best boss of all time for me (true elksters know the number 1[It's the final boss from metal gear solid 3 if you're just joining the elk army today]) yet this is one of my least favourite bosses of the franchise, and let's be real at it's lowest it has some doozies. Sorry to leave the review on a sour note but it's one of the best games of all time and an easy GOTY unless Gotham Knights blows the industry to kingdom fuck. Which let's be real it might. Anyways stay safe fellas have a good day. I dunno what my next review or game will be but I'm getting strong feelings of revisiting a classic from the ps3 era, maybe lego batman 1 or 2. Fun fact I almost got the platinum trophy for lego batman 2, the only one remaining was to finish a level in co-op but since I had one controller I never did that one. Would've been my first platinum, but I guess spiderman ps4 is my first platinum now which sorta feels like getting some supermodel to 2nd base and running away to lose your virginity to a hooker. Doesn't matter that much tho the game's still fun. Alright, cya guys later.

First off before I start I gotta say this game has the best graphics ever. Like to this day. It came out in like 2015 and I played the game on low graphics and it's still the most graphically impressive game ever. Not even just the textures or how the rain perfectly shines on batman's cape or all that stuff but the batmobile can crush things as it goes through and the destructibility is nothing short of awesomesauce. it's insane. OK, now we can get on with the review.

Combat is the best it's ever been. It feels amazing to play, and it better be since they've had like 10 years to refine the formula.
Stealth is also great because of how the AI works and how many awesome gadgets you're given. And because the AI learns the way you play, especially against a certain enemy type you have to shake up your strategies but it still feels fair and you're able to do it in any way you like. It's pretty sandboxy and the artform that I find I can most easily express myself in is batman predator rooms.

But man the batmobile is the weakest part of the game. It's not that it's bad, it's one of the most fun vehicles ever, and the insane destruction is very well done. It's also really fun to race with in the optional mode in the menu, and the skins for it are awesome. Do you know my problem with it? the tank mode is used way too much. And don't get me started on the tank stealth parts. Yeah, you heard me. Tank. Stealth. Parts. Parts plural with an S. You - WHILE DRIVING THE TANK... sneak up behind other tanks. And then you charge up your special tank stealth attack and you shoot. I remember being confused with assassin's creed 4 boat stealth but this is a literal tank. If you asked 7 billion people what the least discrete vehicle is, 6 billion of them would say tank, 500 million of them would say a giant bat-themed tank, and the other 500 million were the developers of this game who all said unicycle.

the story is alright, you can tell Dini's not here and some of the characters feel oddly written. Lots of odd choices and weird things that occur in the story. As well as the story having no real climax. It kinda fizzles out after a cutscene. There are no real boss fights either. There are like 2 in the main story. The side missions were mostly good, except one that feels like they rushed super hard to get this character in the game. Totally wasted, could've been a whole thing instead of that mine disarming one (that 1 sucked).

The game's still great, the puzzles are fun, combat and stealth are the best they've ever been, the graphics are very good, driving and gliding and grappling around Gotham feels natural, all the other playable characters are cool, the sidequests are mostly awesome, but it falls short of city and asylum for me due to the lower quality in story and writing, lack of cool boss fights, overuse of tank battles, and anticlimactic ending,. Thanks for reading. I'll do the expansions now and spend the rest of my life doing the batman 89 races. CYA!