I know this is a debatable point, but to me this is the peak of an already incredible franchise.

This is the same grand strategy you know and love from Civilization games of old, but with improvements to nearly every aspect of the game, ESPECIALLY the domestic ones. Playing peaceful games and/or "building tall" has never been more fun than with the districts mechanics Civilization 6 introduced. This made WHERE you settle cities as important, if not maybe moreso, than how often you settle them, and added strategy to the home front.

They also revamped how science worked, giving boosts instead of full technologies, and I am a fan of the weather system. They also added a bunch of game modifiers, and while I'm not a fan of all of them, I do strongly enjoy using some of them, like the secret societies.

Individual leaders and civilizations are also very varied and can drastically change up the way you approach the game, with more being added as recently as a few months ago.

Honestly this game is a must-play in my eyes for fans of strategy games, board games or civilization fans in general.

I love this series, and this is clearly the culmination of everything that came before it.

From the wealth of music, to the incredibly large cast of characters and stages, this game is a complete package and a true love letter to all of gaming history. If somehow you can't find someone you like in the over 80 character cast, the game even lets you create your own characters to use.
Most players though will use the iconic characters on display, and they feel like they popped straight out of their games and great to control. In fact, game mechanics as a whole feel great (except the buffering out of hitstun and ability to get off platforms sometimes). The game is fast enough to be fun competitively without being too fast to overwhelm new players. It does an excellent job of maintaining the "easy to play, hard to master" philosophy that made this series great.

That said, It's not a perfect game. The single player content doesn't stack up to the Subspace Emissary from Brawl, and honestly probably not even Smash Run from its predecessor. It's also lacking the target trials which does matter to some, especially since the target trial music is in the game.

The other main issue is balance, but this is a tricky one because it's only an issue to a small subset of people. If you're a competitive player, you already know where the problems lie without me even needing to tell you. For casual players though, I honestly doubt the balance affects the game at all, and the hype of having characters like Kazuya and Minecraft Steve far outweighs their effect on the competitive environment to those players.

My final issue would be the online, but this too is a weird one. On one hand, Smash Ultimate's online is nowhere near the standard emerging for modern fighting games. On the other hand, Ultimate's online is leaps and bounds above the standard set by previous Smash Brothers Online services.


All in all, this is a great game held back by just a few issues, and a great celebration of gaming as a whole.

This game is very special to me.

I'd played Starcraft before, but this was the first strategy game I really put a significant amount of time into, and the first game I ever took competitively. I didn't enter tournaments, but with the addition of its ranked ladders, something unheard of at the time, I threw myself into this game and grinded it for literal years.
The game's balance was solid, and the strategies were varied and interesting, especially in 2v2 formats.

That said, it wasn't just a game to be enjoyed competitively. Warcraft III truly was a complete package. The story and campaigns were solid, with top notch cinematics and voice acting for the time.

However all of this pales in comparison to the custom maps. Yes, I know I'm saying basically all of the game didn't stack up to its own custom maps, but honestly that's the truth. As amazing as this game was, the map editing tools the game offered dwarfed it a hundredfold. Blizzard basically gave every player dev tools to create their own games then made a battlenet that facilitated sharing and playing those maps. Any player could create a map, boot up a lobby, and the game would automatically make any player entering that lobby download the map, allowing for quick and easy access to any and all maps that interested you.

These were not basic maps though. The access to game tools allowed players to significantly alter the game, leading to all sorts of custom games, like Vampyre (A more in depth game of mafia), Tower Defenses, RPG campaigns, Angel Arenas, and of course the birth of the entire MOBA genre: Aeons of Strife. You thought I would say DOTA, but it went through several iterations, like Aeons of Strife and Tides of Blood, before finally becoming the DOTA we know and love today and spawning an entire e-sports genre.

And these were just a few of the many, many maps created constantly. There were entire clans dedicated to developing new maps. In fact, I helped develop a Warhammer based MOBA in these custom maps.

To this day, there is nothing to my knowledge that comes even close to what Warcraft 3 Battlenet was. The closest comparison would be if you could boot up Steam and just join any game for free after a 2 minute install. It was a hub for competition for the most battle hardened RTS and MOBA players, as well as the most casual place to try all sorts of crazy game modes and maps. It truly had something for everyone, and was somehow the best possible version of all of it.

Maybe this is carried by nostalgia in my mind, but this was easily my favorite MMO ever made, and I still sometimes play the fan servers that still exist.

The concept is so well executed, and it had so many quality of life mechanics that didn't exist in other games at the time of its release.
The expansions only further improved this game, and to me it stays the best PvE MMO to ever exist.
On top of that, the community was mostly friendly and welcoming, and I cherish the Task force races, costume contests, raids (Even when Kronos bot ambushed) the massive ordeal that was spawning Caleb in the Nerva Archipelago, and all other great community moments.
Eventually they even added tools for players to create their own missions and quest lines, and this made community involvement even better. Not all of them were gems, but some were absolute gold involving long time members of the community and really allowing people to become a part of the game world they played in.

The PvP was pretty lacking, but that is truly the only thing I can ever hold against this game. Even then though, most PvP zone ended up just becoming excuses for the heroes and villains to work together until that became a feature in a future expansion.

This is a great game and I know that. Everyone tells me that. It's the grand-daddy of some of my favorite games.

I hate this game. I don't know why but nothing hits for me. I dislike the art style, the grossness, the humor, and the themes aren't doing anything for me.
That just leaves me with a game that controls clunkily (Intentionally I believe for the theme), looks ugly and doesn't tell me what any item actually does, making trying to make builds incredibly difficult. That's an issue when building power based on your power ups is kind of the core of these kinds of games.
I've been told that specific complaint gets solved by mods, and that this game should always be played with those mods, BUT to me that's an indictment on the game itself for not having these basic features.

Full disclosure, I played Enter the Gungeon long before getting to this game, and by the time I reached Isaac, it felt like a massive downgrade in absolutely every way from Gungeon and left me wondering why people rave about this game so much.

TL DR: This game must be good for so many people to think so, and it inspired so many games I love, but it is clearly not for me.

I know people hate on this one, and I do see why. The single player was decent, but easily the weakest of the series.

HOWEVER, the multiplayer in this game was so damn cool that I kept coming back to it far longer than any other game in this series. The dynamic of trying to fight rival gangs while fearing the mysterious and elusive Batman and his traps was such a cool and immersive experience to me.

This game is not perfect, but that multiplayer kept it one of my favorite Arkham games.

I really enjoyed the demo because the gameplay loop was awesome.

That said once I got my hands on the full game I started to see an issue. The gameplay/narrative balance of the game is so heavily skewed towards narrative that at times there were several hours straight between battles. Worst yet, the over-arching story may be great, but the moment to moment story beats were not always interesting, and between barely being in the "gameplay" sections and sometimes boring story moments, I got very bored by my 7th hour of the game.

I made the mistake of playing the original version of this game.

There is a good game here, and I am glad that eventually Nintendo fixed it to make it so. Unfortunately, the original version of this game was easily the most frustrating Zelda game I've ever played.

There's several baffling design choices in this game. The sailing is an easy target, because it was significantly more tedious than fun. To alleviate this, the game lets you teleport to certain spots on the map, but for some reason someone thought it was a good idea to have the ONLY teleportation spot in the NW part of the map be completely blocked off from any other location, meaning you have to do large amounts of the tedious sailing any time you go in that direction. They also made a whole dungeon that forces you to navigate it using not only sailing, but the no-wind type of sailing, making that dungeon a slow slog for absolutely no reason. There's also a needlessly tedious stealth mission. And don't even get me started on the giant fetch quest at the end of the game. I heard it's less tedious in the updated version of the game, but in the original version this is one of the most blatant examples of padding I have ever seen.

There is some good here though. The game itself was pretty fun. The combat system is excellent, especially for its time, and that in turn made the submarines a blast to play. The music is excellent, and I vaguely remember the story being decent too.

All in all, the game showed promise and I'm glad there exists a version out there that lives up to that promise. I however cannot ever rate this game well or show it goodwill. I hold lifelong grudges against Beedle and ESPECIALLY Tingle from this game. They, and this game in general, committed the ultimate gaming sin of wasting my time in an unfun way, and that's just one I can't forgive.

The beta was so promising, and for a while the game seemed to be heading in a good direction, especially when hurtboxes were fixed.

Unfortunately, there was too much that needed to be done and not enough staff or money to do it I think. With deadlines that clearly needed to be met for characters and seasons, some of the more important issues with balance and network stability went unaddressed for far too long.

It's a real shame, because this had the potential to become one of the greats.