A little bit janky, a slightly underwhelming ending, and combat that doesn't quite measure up to the immaculate atmosphere, but none of these flaws are even close to making this game fall short of being excellent.

Breath of the Wild was good but very overrated, yet somehow Tears of the Kingdom is actually as good as everyone said Breath of the Wild was. It does the open world nature exploration just as well as Breath of the Wild, while dramatically increasing the number of cool things to find, with dramatically better main story content, and with a far better set of abilities and mechanics.

I'm not really a fan of this type of game, but this is undoubtedly the best game in its genre

The magic of the first game is mostly gone unfortunately, but the gameplay has been refined and expanded and the soundtrack is improved as well. The complaints about the level design have some legitimacy, but I think they're overblown. Add in the level editor and this is still a great game

Pure and simple platforming. Excellent level design, excellent music and visuals, excellent variety in mechanics, excellent controls, excellent level of challenge, excellent amount of content.

Atmosphere is just as amazing as Thief 1, sound design is still top tier, and the uncompromising commitment to the best stealth mechanics of all time is still going strong. There's less variety in the missions, but they're of consistently higher quality without feeling samey (and I say this as someone who didn't get filtered into thinking the gimmick levels from Thief 1 are bad). The story and worldbuilding are also better. I have basically nothing bad to say about it.

Tfix2 Lite and EAX sound fix are mandatory, don't bother playing without them.

This is one of the best litmus tests for seeing who has bad taste in video games

Also, Tfix Lite and EAX sound fix are mandatory. Also, Gold2Dark can be used on copies of Thief Gold to get (as near as makes no difference) the original Thief: The Dark Project experience, which has better pacing than Thief Gold and is arguably a better overall experience. I recommend using it for a first playthrough before trying out Gold.

Incredibly flawed masterpiece. Atmosphere and quest design are top tier, and dialogue writing is second to none, but the combat is only okay and the endgame is blatantly unfinished. I didn't use the fan patch for my first playthrough but still ran into very few bugs surprisingly enough (still use the fan patch though).

Easily the best game I've ever played, by a significant margin. I like to be critical of things I love, to think about how they can be improved, but I honestly can't think of a single flaw with Outer Wilds. But, since it's all about learning how the world works it's very hard to talk about without spoiling things. Spoilers can ruin what would otherwise be an amazing experience more than anything else I've ever seen, game or otherwise. Can't emphasize enough that you need to just play it, don't look anything up, and avoid any info about it like the plague until you're done.

With how interconnected and neatly tied together everything is, I was really skeptical about there being DLC, but luckily I was completely wrong and it was amazing. If it was a standalone game, it would also be in my top 5 of all time.

Top tier exploration, top tier atmosphere, top tier enemy variety, top tier level design, and probably my favorite visuals of all time. The way the world keeps surprising you with how much bigger and more varied it gets, and how amazingly cool it all looks, is absolutely unmatched.

In so many ways it's the best game From has ever made, and one of the greatest games of all time, but it also has serious shortcomings. The visual variety in the world itself is amazing, but the majority of the caves and mini dungeons (equivalent to shrines in BotW) have very little visual variety, and they wear out their welcome even without doing all of them. Despite the amazing build variety, the overall structure of the game makes it the least replayable out of all of them - it's best experience in long playthroughs, as opposed to short ones where you skip 90% of the game and are underpowered as a result. There are a lot of amazing boss designs, but the sheer size of the game makes it impossible to avoid reusing them in ways that sometimes make them feel less special. Sometimes less is more.

For me this stands alongside VtMB as a perfect example of a deeply flawed masterpiece.

Consistently high quality all around, but also very samey and formulaic. The bosses are the best example of this: almost all great in a vacuum, but you never really need to change up your approach. It's always just learn the attack pattern, dodge at the right time, hit r1 when it's safe. Way too afraid to take risks, and the constant fanservice hurts immersion significantly. The combat has been sped up to feel like Bloodborne, and that combined with the weapon arts completely destroy the grounded feel that Dark Souls did so well. The healing balance is also off for pure melee characters (probably the majority of players), because if you find all the estus upgrades you'll be able to tank your way through almost anything and the game ends up getting easier as it goes on rather than harder. The DLCs are appropriately challenging, but the endgame of the base game being so easy makes the transition feel really jarring.

But ultimately, when I'm actually playing the game, I'm generally not thinking all that much about those issues. The atmosphere is still great, the combat is still enjoyable even though it's mostly spamming rolls and r1s for all builds, and the level design is probably the most consistently great in the series. The story also makes the constant callbacks fit thematically, and it's so cool that it's pretty easy to forgive. All in all, it's an easy game to criticize but I have to give more weight to how I feel when I play it than to all of those shortcomings.

Awful level design, they ruined the movement, adaptability makes dodging needlessly inconsistent, lifegems trivialize the entire game, hitboxes are bad, traps and ambushes now feel cheap, and enemies get spammed all over the place. There's a clear feeling all throughout the game that the developers didn't really understand why Dark Souls 1 was so amazing, they bought into their own stupid marketing about it being the hardest game ever - and even then they failed because the game is actually slightly easier than the original.

But the atmosphere is still good, and lots of the ideas are amazing (especially for the levels). The combat can be quite enjoyable too despite all its problems. It has a certain charm to it, despite all its flaws (probably because of its flaws, at least in part). Decent and worth playing IMO, though nostalgia is probably part of that.

This is probably the hardest game to talk about in the world. It's so weird and every part of the experience is so intertwined, and it's hard to tell what's deep and profound and what's just dumb or goofy Kojima shenanigans. Amazing game though

Doesn't replace the original, and a couple of questionable decisions were made, but overall I think a lot of the complaints are overblown. The technical improvements make the atmosphere and sense of immersion genuinely stronger than the original IMO, and that more than makes up for the shortcomings. Definitive way to play IMO but I recommend starting with the original.

Honestly amazed at how much better this was than 2018. Combat has been dramatically improved, puzzles have been dramatically improved, variety in enemies and environments has been dramatically improved, pacing has been dramatically improved, and the presentation/storytelling remains as great as always. This is the video game equivalent of a Marvel movie, and even as someone who doesn't like Marvel movies I liked this game quite a bit. And unlike any Marvel movie I've seen, this game actually made me feel things.