I'll forever curse The Fast and the Furious for making game developers think their racing game needs plot.

Unbound is slightly better than Heat as at least it's visuals stand out but I just don't get who is this game for?

Are there arcade racers who actually enjoy rigging and customizing their cars down to the side mirrors and exhaust pipes?
Is slowly grinding high risk low reward satisfying to anyone?

Burnout Paradise starts you in a solid car and within five minutes lets you Smash and grab your 2nd ride. The game for all its age riddled flaws - had a flow.

Unbound gives you a high end car for the intro and then lets you pick a fixer upper for the first chunk of the game - better do this blind pick right because there's no backsies and time and money are on short supply.

My entire time with the game felt like it teased me that it will get good soon™, incredibly frustrating.

Just make a new Burnout man, hell I'll take any arcade racer that's actually fun.

Battles begin to drag and the plot isn't engaging enough to balance it.

There are few clever design choices. Iiked items restocking every battle, it completely overcomes the I Might Need It Later Syndrome and I wish more games will adopt similar solutions. Characters getting some class experience by teaming up with others who main said class is also clever way to mix up your builds.

In the other hands some basic features are missing I.e there's no way to visualise your opponents threat zone.
You can't rotate the pre rendered map, this would be a non issue if some treasure chests were 100% obscured by the scenery. You don't feel clever when you find them .

Art style is a hit and miss mostly because all the elements don't really compliment each other. Backgrounds being the strongest element - beautiful hand painted scenes that made every battle and city unique.
Portraits are nice but again they don't work too well with the backgrounds. I like that your faceless troops can have very unique portraits. They actually have more personality than most of the cast. That along with varied model costuming brings them to life. You also see them in cutscenes hanging out or guarding perimeters, nice touches. I liked building my characters around their visuals rather than minmax my way through.

The drawback is there are crowd funding "marks" - some of the portraits are based on patrons and they usually stick out, they are well rendered but lose some of the style in favor of details that are simply not present in the rest.

The name bank was also sponsor made I assume - they vary widely in style and complexity and also repeat far too often.

The unites themselves lack personality and all have generic anime face.

Animation is barely there, but considered how awefuly slow the game can get even on double speed this may be a blessing in disguise.

Despite some harsh words I do think fans of FFT and the genre in general should check it out, even if for a short while.

Like an early Inscription build expect the core mechanics aren't fun.

It's a short experience that pulls a few neat tricks but doesn't carry enough emotional weight to feel like it worth the slog.

I'm pretty sick of meta games shutting down on me, few games are doing something clever with it. I hope the upcoming sequel has something new to say.

Beautiful and moody.

It took me ten years to go through this trilogy, for me it symbols both how impressive and mesmerizing it is but also frustrating to play.

Part 3 offers a few new mechanics but its short running time doesn't let them shine. Waved battles lets your b and c teams see some action. Unique titles let you customize your most used characters with additional abilities. Cool feature but personally I reached the end with most of them unused.

Combat remains unintuitive but it's manageable and leads to a lot close calls. It serves the theme at least.

Characters and dialogue remains the strongest aspect of the game. I chose to play through them with a guide so I could get the most out them and lead the narrative - there are a few characters that close a nice arc in the finale that could have died randomly at ten different occasions. I get that losing characters to bleak events fits the world but if I were to design this series I would intentionally give players clear awareness about the consequences of their choices. Let them write their own stories onto the banner.

Part 3 length and pacing feels like budget issue rather than a choice. Not all characters gets the spotlight but there are a few nice moments woven in between story beats.

I like the world of Banner Saga a lot. I hope stoic would get to revisit it in the future.

Unapologetically colourful with hyper stylised cartoonish characters and bright fun UI that looks like a modern GBA game.

The game is essentially an enclosed JRPG that uses dodgeball as its combat system - it works for a short while but as it goes on it feels more like a quirky, if fairly limited action combat, rather than a sports RPG. Which is what I expected going in..

The game feels padded - the map is small and sends you backtracking a lot while dotting your way with a lot of pokemon like challengers.

You can't use items during combat but outside of combat you usually have an access to a "pokecenter". You do get a lot of health items and you're encouraged to use them by the very nice taste system (characters have different preferences and items affect them accordingly).
I don't see why the game don't auto heal you between battles? It does for the first chapter and then drops it and it doesn't add much.

The Sports game are fairly superficial and it's not the Mario Tennis spiritual successor I hoped it would be but it has enough merits of its own to at least give it a try.

For me the biggest flaw of Rollerdrome is that it doesn't feel like a sport. There are no other rollers in this drome other than your character. You're the only thing moving around shooting down mooks that manifest out of thin air and stay mostly static.

The Tony Hawk mechanics leave much to be desired, eveything feels too floaty and imprecise, I didn't find the flow I could with THPS.

Shooting isn't bad, the slow mo mechanic is pretty sweet but the whole thing is hindered by the movement.

Cool art style, 2nd game I played that borrowed from Moebius. I'm not complaining.

I like the idea of deadly sports match, it's a fantasy perfectly suited for video games. Rollerdrome is sadly not really it.

Road 96 depicts a grim and brutal reality in a superficial and cartoonish way, it doesn't really work.

The idea of a Rogue/Walking Sim hybrid is novel and interesting I think I got a fairly coherent run throughout but some storylines get repetitive.

The characters you meet are fine for the most part, I guess it depends on the episodes - some are very ridiculous: adults tell you to take the wheel and drive into traffic more than once.

I liked Zoe and Alex the least to a point I cared more about the random same face teenagers you meet on the road than those two annoying youngsters your character is supposed to related with. The game seems to really like Zoe - a character that frequently escalates situations and put her serrounding in danger she'll be immune to. The game then expects you to take a bullet for her, twice. I wasn't a fan.

Visually the game is stunning, though the animation is somewhat lackluster.
I really liked the soundtrack and thought it was used well through the game.

It's an alright experience that goes on a tad to long. It takes six runs to finish the game, I think four runs with adjusted encounters would have been enough. A full run is also not enough to complete all the encounters for some reason? I tried new game + and by the 2nd encounter I got a repeat event and lost interest.

All the fundemantals that made Journey great are here but Flower offers a less refined experience.

Controlling the wind proves to be a tricky endeavor as I often found myself overshooting flowers and then circling around trying to pick it up. It hurts the pacing but the game is short and sweet enough so it's not such a big deal and the highs the game reaches makes up for the lows.

It's a lovely short experience that would have probably hit me harder had I played it when it originally released.

Untapped potential.

The mixture of Fire Emblem and Ogre Battle is a great idea and it works here to some degree but the game never really manages to balance itself around the mechanics. Instead it resorts to level design that focuses on large maps swarmed with mostly weak units. Despite that finishing levels well below the turn limit is an easy task that takes a whole lot of time, even if you completely turn off battle animation.

The micromanagement aspect has similar issues, it starts out fun and intriguing but quickly bloats out of control. You assign up to 9 units to squads, assign 2-3 traits per unit, and then assign 3 gear pieces per squad. Later levels allows you to deploy up to 20 squads, shit adds up quickly and with how easy the game is -it turns from tactical to menial.

Story is not that bad but it's not very engaging either. There are few moments and characters that rise above but they're scarce. The 2nd half of the story just drags.
World building is mostly generic with a couple interesting flares like the Donari temple.

The game does try to say something about zealots and curroption but it doesn't commit to it.

Graphics are a very mixed bag and it's where the game shows its budget.
There like 4 different styles going on that don't mix.
Cutscenes are RPG Maker assets complete with overused low res fx.
This era of RPG Maker sprites just looks bad (2000 forever!!)

The battlemap grid and sprites look much better but the cherry on top is the combat sprites who had a lot of love and talent poured into them (though I could do without the pronounced buttcheeks of a certain titan).
The updated portraits are lovely, something about this mixture of western art with anime influences works on me.

Overall it's a nice experience for fans of the genre that overstays its welcome.

RIP Zorro, you were a real one.

Fun gameplay and varied characters - Tekken has a lot of weight and may look a bit sluggish but it makes hits count and it feels satisfying when they do.

Story mode is very bad and revolves around maybe 5 characters, its slow paced, it's boring and ends suddenly. The reporter frame is delivered like dry paint and frankly I think focusing on the horrors of war in a game where half the cast acts like Loony Tunes characters is very weird.

I grew up with Tekken 3 and I think the short endings were much more intriguing and helped building a world even if the plot wasn't so clear. If this is the plot it was probably for the bes. Limitation breeds creativity.

Visually the game looks good but the art direction is muddy and there are not a lot of iconic designs. The slow-mos are cool - helps the fights feel dynamic and gives ques about timing and reach.

It's a good entry but I wish the single player experience was better

I feel like I've been lied to for years into thinking Fortnite is some dumb zoomer meme game.

I mean it is but it's also a ton of fun. It has substance, it's refined, the game looks and feels good!

While I don't think mtxs can be very moral (especially in a game dominated by children) Fortnite is completely free to play, you can't buy power and the battle pass covers several months, is easy to level, and gives enough currency to pay for itself without a ton of effort.

There are still whale traps, and this became more prominent in the new racing and rock band modes who were released with little to no free cosmetics and overpriced storefront.

Fortnite is the closest thing we have to a working metaverse. I imagine that in 10 to 15 years it would look closer to Ready Player 1 than whatever Facebook is trying to cook.