I had fun with this one, and honestly it made a lot of quality of life changes from the original that made the game more enjoyable in general.

Unfortunately, I ended up preferring the first one (despite Meat Circus) simply because of how much more creative it was. Almost 2 decades later I still vividly remember several of the Psychonauts 1 levels, such as the spy level or the godzilla one. For psychonaut 2 which I played last year, I barely remember any of them outside of the library one, and was not motivated enough to even push through the rest of the final stretch of the game just because it didn't feel quite as inspired as the first one.

That said I seem to be in the minority opinion, and I love that others seemed to enjoy it as much as the original. All in all solid game imo but lacks the spark that set the first one apart.

This is one of my favorite games ever made, and a direct sequel to another of my favorite games ever made.

This is the fallout game that truly embraced the "RPG" in the Fallout franchise. While the gunplay was already somewhat outdated on release, and at launch it was full of bugs, this game became an instant classic for a reason.

This is a grand RPG that really allows you to roleplay your character however you want, and has player actions significantly affect the world around you. I could gush on and on about the near limitless ways you can complete missions, or how every action you take seems to have lasting consequences, or the masterfully crafted stories in this game. That said, this feels like a game you have to experience for yourself, and I strongly suggest that you do.

This is really hard for me to judge.
My first playthrough of it was quite fun, but I had almost every aspect of this game's story spoiled so I had no interest in running any additional playthroughs, and it kind of soured my opinion on the game as a whole.

That said, it is objectively an incredible game with a great story, good humor, inventive battle system, an incredible soundtrack and very interesting themes.
If you haven't played it/know the story, then you owe it to yourself to play through this game. Its reputation is earned.

This game is just plain fun.
It's not particularly pretty, and it doesn't have the unlimited replayability of most roguelikes. What it does have however, is a very addicting gameplay loop and a killer soundtrack, which are the most important qualities for a roguelike rhythm shooter to have.

The core of this game is that every action, player and enemy, is taken on the beat and adds to the soundtrack. I cannot explain the euphoric feeling when it all comes together with you shooting, dashing, and reloading on beat, adding even more impact to the already incredible soundtrack.

All in all, this is an incredibly solid roguelike and worth checking out the grand-daddy of rhythm shooters. Even if you pass on this one, you owe it to yourself to give Huggin's shop music and Draugr boss fight music a listen.

This is such a unique and one of a kind game that could only exist on the DS.

The story is incredible, full of twists and turns that I never saw coming, which is fairly rare. The characters are all well fleshed out with pretty clear motivations you uncover as you go through the story. The game's premise, which I won't spoil, also allows for some interesting story-telling, and the post game content fills out the narrative perfectly.

The combat though is why I say this game can only exist on the DS. This game uses a really unique combat style that fully utilizes the dual screen nature of the console. The bottom screen has your main character, controlled through stylus actions corresponding to equipped combat pins. The top screen meanwhile, is where your other party member is fighting using Dpad inputs. Anytime one character gets a successful combo, they can power up the other character, until they build up a gage and unleash a team-up move for tons of damage.
This sounds hard to manage, yet while it gets complicated in late game fights, it's a lot more intuitive than one would think. Pretty quickly you get the hang of things and are fighting on both screens to make quick work of your opponents.

Outside of battles you solve some puzzles of varying creativity, help various NPCs and explore Shibuya. Most puzzles are pretty fun, and NPCs are good at nudging you in the right direction so you don't get completely stuck.

Overall this is in my opinion the best game on the DS, and everyone owes it to themselves to try it... well, try it on the DS anyway. Please don't try the awful and over-priced switch port or the mediocre sequel.

A really cool idea that needed more time in the oven. I admittedly haven't gone back to it since shortly after launch, but when I did play it, the game was clearly unfinished. It was buggy, lots of skills were missing, and the quests I did have during my admittedly short time with the game felt like busy work, I suspect to keep players busy to buy time to finish making the game.

Hope it got better because the premise was cool, but there sadly wasn't much difference between the demo and the final product, and I'm not going back to find out if that has changed.

It took a while for me to give this game a try, and that's a shame because once I did it became my favorite MOBA overall. It does a lot of things very differently, which may be why it didn't get the same popularity as its competitors, but I really appreciate the uniqueness and crazy ideas it brings to the table.

I doubt it has the same competitive depth as DOTA or LoL, but honestly the gap is not nearly as wide as some make it seem. It's a shame it had a stigma around it because every moba player I know who's given it a try ended up loving it.

I'm a bit biased on this one since it's the game that got me into competitive smash bros, which in turn introduced me to a lot of my dearest friends.
Trying to look at it objectively though, I see a game that may be praised too highly by the casual community and hated too strongly by the competitive one. Brawl was a groundbreaking game in the franchise in several ways, and I think overall it's positive contributions far outweigh the negatives.

First off, you can't talk about Brawl without mentioning Subspace Emissary. This took the bare bones Adventure mode from Melee and turned it into a whole adventure which feels like it's own game, complete with great cinematics and a pretty decent story, especially by fighting game standards. Maybe I praise it too much, but I would say Subspace Emissary is such a good single player fighting game experience that even to this day it remains the best of its kind.

Moving past Subspace Emissary, another major improvement that Brawl made was with 3rd party characters. This was the first smash game to reach outside of the Nintendo roster, and it did so by grabbing two extremely popular characters, especially at the time: Solid Snake and SONIC THE FREAKING HEDGEHOG. Now I'm not a sonic fan at all, but I cannot explain how big of a deal this was back then. I am almost certain this was the first time Sonic and Mario had ever shared a screen, and to see them both in Smash brothers of all places was insane. This then opened the flood gates and allowed us to get a wealth of 3rd party characters in future games.

Unfortunately, this is not a perfect game, and that's where we have to talk about the competitive side of the game. Let's start with the most obvious flaw: tripping. This is a random mechanic that makes your character sometimes trip when they move in certain ways (I think it was turning around?). This might still be the least competitive idea to be put into fighting games. Let me tell you as someone who's experienced it firsthand, nothing is worse than paying money to travel and compete then get knocked out because your character randomly tripped into an attack to get KO'd.

Unfortunately, tripping was not the only issue. This game's competitive balance is a dumpster fire. There's chaingrabs and infinites as far as the eye can see. Hitboxes are wildly unfair from one character to the next. And of course... there's Metaknight. One of the craziest characters ever developed for any real fighting game. This character was just the best at everything in this game. He had the best moves, he was the fastest, he had the most range, he had the best recovery, he abused all glitches better than anyone else, he could combo the best, kill the earliest, survive the longest... name anything in this game and Metaknight did it better. It got to the point where metaknight was winning over 90% of tournaments WORLDWIDE. Competitively this game was a mess, and it's why the competitive smash community has generally shunned this game and why its mere existence revived Smash Bros Melee.

All in all though, this was a great game and an important part of smash history. Just maybe don't play it for its competitive aspects.

This is the best party game I've come across.

It's essentially easy to understand Mario maker against your friends where each player gets to add one item to the stage, then all players try to make it to the end of the resulting level. If no one or everyone makes it, no points are awarded, but if only some people make it, then points are awarded in accordance to who completed the stage, who did it first, who's traps got kills, and if you grabbed special items. The game then goes on a set number of rounds OR until one player passes the points "finish line".

This leads to an incredibly fun and wacky time where each player is trying to build levels that they can complete but no one else can. It's been a very consistent hit with every group I've tried it with. Strongly recommend as a party game amongst friends.

This is my single favorite game of all time, which is wild because at the time I played it, it really didn't even come close to the genres I played. This game is one of the most unique games I've ever played, and the single best example for games as art in my opinion.

This is one of those games where the less you know going in, the better it is. This is because this is a mystery-style game who's progress is entirely made through player knowledge. For this reason I will keep this review very vague.

You play as an astronaut from your civilization's relatively new space program, and you leave the planet to solve the mysteries of the universe and the other civilization that lived in it. This allows you to explore a variety of planets, moons and any other celestial body you may come across in search of knowledge. These locations are not all the safest environments, so part of these mysteries shall be figuring out how to navigate these various locations.

The way the game helps with this is by keeping track of important information you find throughout the game on a storyboard aboard your ship. This becomes an invaluable tool, keeping track of information and showing you what other information it connects to. That said, most of the game's progress comes from what the player themselves know, which is why everyone who recommends this game says "I can't tell you anything about it, but you should play this masterpiece". The truth is you can only experience this game as intended on the first playthrough going in blind. I truly encourage you to give this game a try, especially going in blind.

Edit: It's with a heavy heart that I have to edit this review. Unfortunately Blizzard did that thing they do best and decided to make their game worse in order to maximize player engagement and they hope microtransactions.

All sorts of baffling decisions like lowering player power, further limiting storage, adding more load times, and reducing rewards have made this game significantly less fun to play.

Despite my original review, I no longer recommend getting this game.

If you're interested, original review can be found below:

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I'm a big fan of this series, and still actively playing it. It's exactly what you'd expect from Diablo with a very addicting gameplay loop. The overworld map is significantly more interesting than most Diablo maps of the past, and the story is more interesting than prior Diablo games (At least it was to me). The story bosses and scenarios are also quite fun to play, and I hope more of the story bosses find their way into post-game dungeons.

As for the classes, they feel very unique, and even builds within the same classes differ greatly. I have yet to try any character I didn't love, and it takes very little time to unlock the "sauce" with each character, especially when making alts who benefit from universal boosts you can unlock through various tasks.

I'm also a big fan of world events, from random zone events that anyone can participate in which drop reward chests, to post game legions and helltide events, to massive world bosses that can spawn. This world map is full of things to find and do, and these events just add to that.

When all these things come together, as well as varied enemy factions, the gameplay loop ends up just being plain fun. If it's any indication, this is the only Diablo game where I have stuck with a character all the way to the Torment difficulties. The wealth of post-game content, the paragon boards, and the gameplay loop staying fun has kept me engaged and likely will continue to do so for quite some time.

That said, it does have some flaws. One of my favorite mechanics, being able to respec at will, becomes more tedious and expensive than fun in the post game since you're not able to save "builds".
Additionally, the game is always online and using a lot of MMO mechanics, but lacking basic tools that usually come with them, like group finders or synching the game world to the host/opening Host's instanced dungeons to party members.
I've also heard complaints about post game farming, but they are ultra-late game and won't affect a large majority of the community I think. Another issue only really seen in ultra late game is you start to see where monetization might end up showing its ugly face in the future, especially when around gold, exp and glyph exp farms. It hasn't yet, but the ultra late game farm for these gets pretty brutal.

Overall a great package that I hope Blizzard won't mess up like everything else they've touched recently.