It's always really funny to me how games with a ton of vitriol and discourse surrounding them on this website still tend to average out to a reasonable average rating due to both sides overcompensating their ratings out of spite, and I'd generally agree with that final rating as a score. Apologies if I burst the bubble that rating a game you haven't played but "just don't like existing in your space" a .5/5 isn't going to change the gaming landscape, nor is your ironic 5/5 making the sides of the masses burst from your widely known highly prestigious humor. Fanning the flames only serves to put more eyes on a game like this, so the best you can do is ignore it and hope it passes if it really bothers you so much that a game that amounts to nothing more than slop is fun enough to make a ton of people enjoy it in complacence. Ultimately it really shouldn't bother some of you nearly as much as it does, especially when the devs definitely just don't care about any of this and definitely didn't care before they even made the damn thing.

Anywho, as someone indifferent to allegations that just "seem" true (and possibly could be, as I'm unable to fully dismiss them out of hand and will be happy if they reach some point of resolution) and having the basic ability to competently evaluate a game by the sum of its whole and not by the parts that stitch it together, I'll try to give it an honest review of the actual game and my first draft speedrun through my thoughts instead of just shitposting or slinging shit.

The game is where I'd say it's currently fine if not well made for an early access title. It has a strong number of pals at 111 exactly and they're pretty well spaced; anywhere you go you can frequently find new pals even as you near the completion of your "Paldeck" and the addition of eggs having Pals randomly assigned by size/type and the Black Market traders having daily refreshing random shops means you should make constant progress towards filling out your deck to completion. Palworld succeeds where many monster collectors fail and manages to make finding new Pals exciting; though in this case its less because of combat purposes and more for general base utility and the optimization of automation. Never been more stoked than finding out that my newest Pal has 4 in kindling and can breeze through ingot smelting.

The current amount of content is worth the asking price and your time, and the world is shockingly huge, offering a pretty enjoyable time exploring for a good number of hours (assuming you actually enjoy the slow burn of a survival crafting game - some complaints I see boil down to "I was promised Pokemon with Guns but guns are late game wtf do you mean I have to craft"). There are a ton of bosses in the game if you don't mind the fact that most can be found in the overworld normally, albeit smaller with weaker movesets, but the core 5 "story" bosses (used loosely) offer a legitimate challenge and some strategy due to being HP sponges with attacks that require careful dodging and little room for error. Thankfully they're also totally optional if this isn't your cup of tea, as they don't really provide rewards other than completionism.

A feature I don't see talked about much that I greatly appreciate is that you can adjust the difficulty and the amount of time the game requires in the world settings through scaling EXP and drop rates and those settings definitely solve otherwise balancing issues I'd have with the game played on its default "Normal" settings. This is a great accessibility feature and eases the current imbalance of the game's awful Iron requirements and how inaccessible it is to farm via Pals (as badly as I was hoping) as well as my impatience for EXP, which is a good system in its own right (catching 10 of all Pals, likely requiring borderline the full Paldeck filled out just to reach level cap) but too steep of an investment for my own liking as someone with other games I'd like to get around to this month yet.

Beyond that, it's really just a survival crafting game with the spin of also being a creature collector. It works surprisingly well and is very engaging.

The game has balancing issues otherwise, as expected of a dev team who allegedly made the game from 10 grand with a small team of game devs who were apparently borderline coding-illiterate working in an engine they hadn't ever touched before, and the final result is pleasantly playable through to the very end. I have encountered a few bugs likely due to my CPU being on the weak side but have enjoyed my time more than enough to praise the game's stability.

It's not a groundbreaking game by any means, which again I can't stress enough that it's honestly kind of just slop; but it's fun slop regardless and feels to be higher effort than a majority of slop on the market.

I think rating it any higher is mostly disingenuous and conflating having fun with quality of the end product. It's okay to have fun with mediocre games just as it's okay to not enjoy games that are highly praised, which is a point I think many people forget and overlook when reviewing a title like this. Debated giving this 2.5 stars instead of 3 but I'd still consider it an overall well made game in spite of flaws that become apparent the longer you play. It definitely brings enough unique to the table in its mash-up of game ideas that's incredibly addicting and doesn't feel like anything else I've ever played despite experience with all titles it's directly imitating, which makes it somewhat hard to rate, but still.

If anything it's probably too early to give this game a rating at all as it could just as easily become one of the greatest games of all time through years of updates just the same as it could become abandonware before its first update. We could see Nintendo Ninjas nuke this game from orbit any day now - but until then I'm enjoying my time and will choose to abstain from the discourse surrounding a game with no concrete evidence of any wrong-doing (so far, will be happy to retract my statement if more information comes out).

To conclude my rambling and as a final note, it probably doesn't deserve this explosive popularity. If anything this is just a booming outcry by long-since abandoned Pokemon fans who grew out of Gamefreak's target demographic and were left to cling onto games with very little complexity despite coming into their late twenties and early thirties (myself included). Thankfully all discussion around this game will die in a few weeks and we can stop seeing head-ass takes by people engaging in outrage culture to no real success.

Beyond that I'm tentatively hoping to see if the devs provide any more content of substance.

Jet Set Radio is initially a difficult game to evaluate. My thoughts weren't dissimilar to the majority; a game that should be played mostly for the experience, but is largely outclassed by its successor, Jet Set Radio Future. At the surface the game is bogged down by clunky controls and borderline insane difficulty spikes that could make a Disney princess swear like a sailor. I tried the tutorial, of course, after hearing of its infamy and similarly walled on the inability to even do 30 tricks in a row and struggling to grasp the concept of maintaining momentum being so...unintuitive while attempting trick loops. I threw in the towel and started the story, where I grew increasingly frustrated with my inability to not bonk off of every wall and how, at the slightest inconvenience, my character would grind to a halt. Grind City in particular made me reconsider whether I wanted to finish the game at all, at which point all of my forward momentum to actually finishing the game was dashed (much like my attempts to rail grind...) and I was content with the evaluation that the game was just trash when the majority online seemed to agree with the sentiment after a few hours of similar experience.

I slogged through what I had left of Chapter 2 out of sheer spite and decided "maybe it's just this one particular level that blows". After all, the grind rails are way too inconsistent and the verticality is plain frustrating when the camera controls are non-existent and you can't make heads or tails of the level layout.

I couldn't have been more wrong at the time when I inevitably hit the single largest filter in the game, "Fight or Flight".

I don't generally consider myself to be someone who struggles to pick up a game, but in this instance I was nearly finished with the roughly ten hour story and hadn't yet been able to grasp why the game is so beloved. This experience may have shaved a dozen years off my life in just a couple hours of hair-pulling torment.

I threw in the towel and put the game down. I decided to read more online, maybe I was just missing something. It was a review on this site, by the user Drax, that encouraged me to re-evaluate my stance on the game and analyze exactly why I was struggling. After all it wasn't like the controls were necessarily hindering me as much as I wanted to blame them. I took the time to look at things from a different perspective, in the light of a 3D platformer that had a focus on the optimization of movement and time rather than just the free-flowing exploration most skating games ask you to embrace. The game asks you not to understand just how to move faster in the moment - but to totally conquer the map and its possibilities. Things began to fall into place, I already knew the levels I just had to apply that knowledge. Before I knew it I blew through the end of the game and decided I would tackle the infamous tutorial again. I hit a 100 trick loop in just a dozen attempts; suddenly the momentum of jumping from rail to rail was natural. Turns out a dozen hours of practice was maybe necessarily to get a handle on the movement. The very idea of getting Jet rank in every level ceased to be something feasible only to the most absolutely deranged fanboys, and before I realized it I sank another 20 hours in the game to clean up the rest of the achievements.

By this point I realized something I'd consider a fundamental truth of the game; the game's controls aren't bad. Not in the slightest. Unintuitive at first? Sure, but I'd argue the game's controls are simply difficult. They're consistent by all metrics. Even those sudden moments where your character shoots far left for seemingly "no reason" was just the hair difference of the twitch of the thumbstick by accident. Jet Set Radio is not an unfair game, it is just a tough game - and then, after taking the time to know it, one as natural as breathing. Knowledge and muscle memory are extremely valuable, which may not be everyone's cup of tea, but you just gotta learn the exact same way a child learns to skate.

I'm glad I was ultimately able to come to terms with what turned out to be nothing more than a monumental skill issue. Jet Set Radio is a fantastic game, and I had a blast with the strategical aspects and the process of familiarizing myself with each route. The level design is generally fantastic (even Grind City, once you actually learn how to cross the centerpiece of the stage, which the game makes no effort to make you even able to see the jump across the center) and I'm truly glad I gave it a fair shake in the long run, thanks in no small part to the amazing community willing to go to bat for it.

I still absolutely HATE Grind City though and it's not even close, I'm gonna hear the fall damage crunch in my nightmares playing on repeat for years.

Going through my logs and wanted to write a brief retrospective now that I'm no longer blinded by the "it's finally here" hype.

My most anticipated game of 2022 wound up leaving no lasting impressions on me whatsoever. Instead I felt empty after completing it. This was the game I waited so long for? Word of Elden Ring's arrival had been passed down, the coming of the most innovative Soulsborne game yet.

Instead we got a game that showcased more of Miyazaki's favorite tricks, complete with the usual bells and whistles, set to an open world with shockingly little intrigue that we hadn't already seen before again and again. This time, however, it's open world with a crafting system I hardly touched, and a beloved horse.

Well, at least the horse was a fun touch.

Ultimately I'd say the game just feels more like "Dark Souls but BIG" instead of "Dark Souls but open world".

I don't think open world lent itself to this title very well and it critically lacked the intricate and memorable level design of prior levels in favor of, what I would describe as, content bloat. I stopped being excited about those little side dungeons around the time I realized I'd already seen all of the dungeon bosses and had no use for any of the rewards they offered. The highs are as high as ever, the feeling of beating the fight that'd been kicking your ass for five hours straight is hardly matched in gaming regardless of genre. Yet, Elden Ring's runtime is padded with significantly more mids than highs, fights you forget not so long after. What does this equate to? The game's runtime may be twice the length of Dark Souls 1 or 3, but somehow you're left with about as many memorable moments as games that are significantly smaller - but the amount of quality content in those titles is so much more dense.

Frankly another thing Elden Ring lacked for me was a distinct lack of lows that often tend to set the tone of the Soulsborne games, and often are talked about and cherished as much as anything else. Blighttown and Horse Fuck Valley are looked back upon with as much fondness as Artorias and Slave Knight Gael (until it's time to replay those games, and then suddenly they're the worst things ever) but I would argue this game lacks anything of the sort as its broadly generic dungeon layouts sacrifice challenging (and sometimes nonsense bullshit) design in favor of something like conforming to a formula. Shy of the dungeon that requires the key beneath the tutorial area (which I foolishly challenged at a very early level and got walled on the boss for an entire evening), I can hardly recall anything as memorably frustrating that made me reassess my approach and question if I was getting skill issued or not.

Overall Elden Ring was an interesting experience, and I'm sure it was for the devs as well, but I'm hoping for a return to form in their future projects. It's still a solid title, but I couldn't rate it any higher than anything but DS2 as someone who really wasn't engaged by the idea of "you can go anywhere". Open world is hard to get right, I'd even argue it's a flawed concept inherently in many cases, and I think Elden Ring really did miss the mark on this.

There's a lot to say about this game and I really could waffle on about it for an entire thesis but some things are better left unsaid and are better left experienced.

Tales of this game's bad gameplay are greatly exaggerated (as someone who actually likes Musou games and enjoyed the dragon segments after I got a handle of the controls) but the story's artistic vision is phenomenal.

It's not a perfect game by any means but I just can't help but deeply adore this game even playing it 20 years later for the first time.

You push the button. Ice cream is dispensed. It's the same animation you've seen play over two-hundred times in the last ten hours, the color its only deviation from the first time to the last time.

This game is not a nostalgic dream; make no mistake, Papa's Freezeria is a dive into a nightmare hellscape that serves as a glimpse into a capitalistic void.

As the player you work under the titular Papa; a man with a friendly enough appearance, goofy and innocent in nature, but he is unmistakably the villain of the title. He is an emperor playing the fool, the head of an empire that exploits minimum wage workers whilst he charades as a working class citizen himself under the guise of a chef's hat and coat. He is not your friend. It's as soon as he hires you he leaves to go on a cruise with his undoubtedly vast fortune before even bothering to train you to do your job. You're left with an empty shop, hardly any ingredients, and no direction.

You proceed to work; far beyond what anyone should be expected to work. Seven days a week, holidays, from sun up to sundown. You are spared no breaks as an endless trickle of customers waltz through the door and scream their orders at you. This is your only human interaction on the daily; where not you as an individual but rather the quality of your work is evaluated by people who determine your worth through arbitrary means and dictate the amount they tip solely off of these metrics alone. They are a cruel people, often making abstract remarks such as "the center cherry was slightly too far to the left" and docking the difference from the amount of pocket change they toss at you as a result.

And with this money? You're expected - borderline required - to reinvest in the business. You have to buy the furniture and your own uniforms from the hard-earned cash in your tip jar. After all, where else? This is the only place you spend your every waking hour in, day after day. You slave away for a full year straight in this way until Papa's return; and your reward?

Nothing. Papa becomes a customer who tips you just as poorly as any other. You will not be reimbursed for the fortune you poured into the business. You will not be compensated for your extended hardships. Though the name of the Freezeria is Papa's, its your essence that serves as oil for the machine. This is your life now.

But I like the jingle it makes when you get the money so I enjoyed my time honestly.

lot of cute ideas but ultimately not executed in a way that's interesting or distinct from other "heckin' wholesome games that turns out to be a SCARY game". it plays its hand way too early with no buildup and barely tries to even hide the genre mix-up midway through, leading to a woefully boring and overplayed yandere-type antagonist at the end of the road.

thank god we're out of this era of storytelling in gaming, it should've died with doki doki.

a fun experience at best but dreadfully overhyped and unoriginal at worst.

By the very foundation of a rating system a PVP game will never be able to be evaluated in an "objective" way; even aggregating scores as the user experience is defined wholly by one's willingness to engage with the facets of a game. These games have to deploy tactics to sustain long-term player engagement, such as introducing new mechanics even when the formula already felt fine to play, and the opinion of any individual may always vary from "great" to "awful" in just two weeks time based on their own personal preferences when it comes to a game with skill expression and character pool receiving constant balance patches. If the character you main is weak you may have a substantially different opinion than someone who's main has been coasting by in A tier for several seasons. If you refuse to learn and adapt to the changes made in a game, your opinion may sour. You may have just downloaded the game and stumbled into the weakest character on the roster because you liked the design and had a marginally worse experience than someone who picked a pub stomping right clicker by total accident. These balance issues do not dictate the inherent quality of the game, though it may effect the individual experience, especially when you can simply pick a different character. Unfortunately many are averse to change and would prefer to write off a game as being garbage and the devs incompetent if their preferred playstyle or character remains weak for an extended period of time.

Regardless of that, my experience with the game over 1.5k hours; game is fun (even more so than ever before since 1.0 launched). Has an insanely strong foundation and a concept I wholeheartedly enjoy when compared to its contemporaries. The community is incredible and helpful and the people who have had negative experiences are, generally, seeking problems firsthand or have come through the Discords being obnoxious unprompted. If you tried an early iteration of it I'd highly recommend checking it out again for the game's full release; though if you preferred the Solos mode that's temporarily disabled. I find squads to be a ton of fun as someone who used to solely play Solos, however. I think the Devs are incredible for a game like this, transparent and exceedingly generous with the amount of free stuff they give away (as well as numerous events a month) and all of it is in my opinion high quality.

The game has rough balance patches and sometimes poor decisions are made by the devs, but as someone who came from League... Anyone who tells you the devs suck must not have, because Nimble Neuron is a breath of fresh air. Riot looks disturbingly incompetent by comparison.

ok now that we're done here pls queue ranked ive been stuck in queue for 30 minutes