I played The Callisto Protocol with a lot of quality-of-life patches applied to the game. While I had an okay time with the game, it’s not often I play a game that make me feel a lot of potential had been squandered.

The visual presentation seems to be where most of the time and effort has gone into the game. The graphical fidelity and animation are some of the best that I have seen for the 9th generation of games. The detail of the facial features and animation is excellent, and I believe The Callisto Protocol has set a new bar of technical quality that other games should aspire for.

I did like the game went for a melee brawler combat system rather than opting for the over-the-shoulder shooter that has been done so many times now. I know some people had issues with the combat system, but I found it worked fine for the most part, most likely due to the patches that were released for the game. I liked that you had to use the left stick to dodge enemy attack and wait for an opening to bonk them on the head with the stand baton.

Sadly, the gameplay loop doesn’t evolve beyond hitting zombies with your baton and occasionally shooting them with your sidearm. Most zombies you’ll come across are human like, so combat encounters will work the same regardless of what you are fighting.

The art design feels uninspired. You’ll navigate through medical wings, prison cells, hydroponics centres, and mining towns. However, with everything being so dark and the walls being covered in metal and pipework, the levels rarely feel distinct from one another.

Levels are linear in their design. Being linear isn’t really the problem. The issue I had that, while the levels themselves can be very detailed, there was very little reason to explore the immediate environment that you were in. There’s rarely any loot that is hidden away in a nook somewhere. You do occasionally come across optional route that will lead you to a loot chest but it’s never clear if the path you’re on is the main path or the optional one.

The story is nothing to write home about. You’ll probably guess where the story is going after the first hour of playing. You’ll collect audio logs to get more backstory on what’s going on but even they are not worth listening to. It’s not like the original Dead Space or System Shock 2 where you’re piecing together the story of the events that happened have occurred before. The audio logs could be completely omitted from the game and the very little would have been lost from the removal.

My review probably gives the impression that I had a terrible time with the game but that’s not the case; the game is fine, but it should have been a solid first entry to a new series in the action-horror genre. It is a difficult game for me to recommend to others to play, at least as a full price game. The takes around 10 hours to complete, so if you see it bundled as part of PlayStation Plus or Xbox Game Pass, or you see it going cheap on a sale, I think it’s worth giving it a go.

First of all, I have to say how incredible this game is on Xbox Series X with Dobly Vision and Dobly Atmos. The cinematics are beautiful.

...But... It has some problems.

The story made me fell kind of lost. I only played Gears 4, so maybe that's the reason but what the hell is CGO? It's the same problem that I saw on Gears 4. Could you take a moment just to explain me this universe? I know there's a flashback right in the beginning but wasn't enough to make me understand everything that I needed.

The gameplay is really cool and I undestand why this franchise is so import for the game industry. It has one of the best cover systems that I ever see. It's really fun to move fast from a wall to another one.

By the way, Kate is so much better than JD. I really liked the fact we play with her in this one.

It's a really nice game but I had headackes sometines when I was playing with headphones. Pay attention if you usually have this problem!

You'll probaly have fun with Gears 5 if you like third person shooter games games but something is missing to make Gears 5 special and unforgettable.

I may be the person who has played this game the most on the planet. Or at least top 0.1%. it is a forgotten entry in the Civ series but one that I love dearly - it was my first ever turn based strategy game and whilst it is overly simple at times it is a great "casual" strategy experience. I have cheesed so many deity victories and seen everything that the game has to offer but I would love if they made another (real) sequel - Sid Meier's if you're reading this I have ideas please talk to me baby...

I also want to mention the fantastic music and art styles, I'm happy Civ 6 went a bit cartoony as it felt similar to this one in tone.

and you know you want to
shake it up and pour it on you
you know you want to
wear the purp
don't ya

ok honestly i know this game is not good and also honestly i was never able to play it because i could never get it to work for me however i thought it was silly how two white mfs just starting singing
even their "rap" names are awful everything about it is just not great and kind of cringe especially now after many years have passed.

The original My Name Is Mayo is pretty much the poster child of the easy trophy genre. Trophies are a great way to increase your playtime with games and it turns out that little dopamine hit you get with every "ding!" can be quite addicting for some. It did not take very long for developers to capitalize on it. The trophy hunting crowd is surprisingly big and full of everyone from casuals to of course "hardcore gamers" who get mad at people who don't solely go for "Beat the game without dying while you're blinded and dismembered" type of trophies. Its a sizeable crowd of addicts and makes it easy for publishers to take one of two routes. They can shit out shovelware asset flips for like two bucks. Or they can use the promise of easy trophies (that often unlock far before completion of the game) to get hunters to try out an obscure indie game and maybe even like it enough to beat it. I chose to believe the second option was done the most. Even if most of the games end up being cheaply made or bad, with how some hunters even buy the same game in different regions or across systems to stack I can't deny how enticing the profit sounds. However overtime it quickly became a lot more of the first option. You couldn't look at the new games section on PS5 without being spammed with shit like "Hot Dog Jump" and "Hot Dog Turbo Jump" and it was actually insulting. Sony never bothered before because its more money for them but it got so bad they actually did something for once and delisted most games like that.

So, that's all the background information you really need about these types of games. My Name is Mayo is the most popular one. You simply click X a few thousand times and boom that's 50 trophies for you. For every couple milestones you'd get a little random fact. Or you could do some side stories (if you can really even call them that) that would maybe put your mayo in a costume or do something silly with the background with every new milestone you reached. Basically the very bare minimum to even call it a game, its pretty lazy even for a clicker game. But the sillyness and quickness of just tapping a jar of food a bunch made it become both popular and infamous. The sequel, My Name Is Mayo 2, was surprisingly an improvement. It's still pretty terrible but it looked better, had a few minigames and was a little funnier too. Unfortunately 3 feels like a step down.

It is funny to me that this series falls into the common trilogy trap of the 2nd being the best and the third being kinda uninspired. This is certainly the best looking of the three, it tries to go for like a 60s vibe. But everything else leaves a bit to be desired, even for a game of this quality. The little side stories are dull and sometimes even derivative of previous entries, and only once do something interesting with the background. But after you've gone through all of those you unlock a bonus final story. Now you are no longer tapping the jar, but instead holding up the left stick as you peacefully walk up a randomly generated forest. With a goal of making it ten miles. Each mile you unlock a trophy and a little blurb like usual. Along the trail you can find different types of mushrooms. These will either change the visuals in a psychedelic way which is cute, or will throw you into a random minigame. Before you start it briefly shows you what buttons are used but it never tells you what they do or what you're supposed to do. All of these minigames are terribly designed, terribly explained and feel terrible to play. What's worse is for the little story bits it tries to be a solemn reflection on the titular Mayo's father passing. This would of been a great opportunity to reflect on trophies or something in a meta way, but they try to do some wholesome "spend time with your loved ones thing" and with how its framed - you being a fucking jar of mayo, for one - it comes off like a really longwinded, out of touch and borderline disrespectful joke. Good intentions or not it just feels gross and cheap. It soured the already lackluster experience to begin with. This is the worst one yet.

Nancymeter - 30/100
Time Played - 1 hour 25 minutes
Trophy Completion - 100% (51/51) Platinum #226
Game Completion #8 of December
Game Completion #154 of 2022

It's basically Quick time Events-The Game but for an interactive documentary... it's far from bad but it's also far from good. Legends of Wrestlemania lets you play some matches from Wrestlemania 1 to 15. Kinda cool to see how the showcase mode as a concept came to life here before establishing itself in WWE 13. The roster is also pretty good although some wrestlers like Roddy Piper look weird.

All in all... I had a bit fun with it but it fades in comparison to the SvR-Series, which is actually a totally different game with a different system.

Not a bad sequel

Gears of war 2 feels like a big expansion to gears of war 1 rather than the next big step-up sequel that most games get but its still a great game that improves in some areas.

Gameplay: Pretty much exactly like Gears 1, Gears 2 is a 3rd person cover-based shooter action game with some semi horror elements. Gears 2 plays almost identically to 1 with only some variations and changes in some weapons and the way guns work. The controls, combat and Ai is all almost the exact same with a few improvements like being able to get revived by Ai when you get downed on solo, and the campaign is still 2 player co-op. You can now have chainsaw duels with enemies and in Pvp. If you are downed, you can crawl away and now can use enemies as shields. A lot of movement and handling has vastly improved, and grenades can now stick to walls. The multiplayer has a cool horde mode but from what I remember Gears 2 had very laggy server problems making multiplayer almost unplayable or at least for me and my connection was fine on other games at the time. This all might sound like a lot of changes, but it didn’t feel like 2 was massively different from Gears 1, hell even the main menu was the exact same. I will say I did run into a few glitches on my return to this game including a game breaking one where every time I try to restart the game it crashes so I basically can’t play Gears 2 at all currently. Not sure if this is a backwards compatibility problem or what. This game needs a remaster asap Microsoft!

Graphics, Voice Acting & Music: Graphically this game doesn’t take any huge leaps to look better but I would say they made the game significantly more colorful in the environments, same can be said about the voice acting its all about the same in this game, though there are some much more emotional and tense moments in this one with better character development and story threads. The music is also about the same as the first one with similar themes and ambience but nothing too crazy or memorable.

Story/ no spoilers: The story of Gears 2 follows like 6 months or so after the events of 1 and follows Marcus and his squad as they push back on the front as they fight Locus enemies and face a new threat after defeating RAAM in Gears 1. The new enemy Skorge, is a predator looking Locus with a Darth Maul double chainsaw staff, he is intimidating but not as scary as RAAM to me and his boss fights are kinda lame. The vast majority of this game is about the COG forces pushing into the Hollow which is like the underground caverns the Locus come from. I do think the story is a lot more fun and better in this game along with a lot of the level designs and overall, this was a good sequel to the first game but not a great one. There are a couple DLC chapters for this game that fit into the story as extra chapters in between missions, and I did play them some years later. They were okay but not amazing, I remember one of them you get to dress as Locus enemies to sneak into a palace and that was kinda fun but aside from that they weren’t crazy memorable and are probably only there for hardcore fans.

8/10

Killzone 2 is a technical marvel. A massive step up from its predecessor. Releasing 5 years after the original game in 2009, it still looks great to this day. Yes, it has aged but for a PS3 title it achieved a level of visual quality no other game from the generation I have come across can match.

Starting with a lengthy opening cutscene, you begin to wonder the age-old question. "What does the game actually look like?" Something that during the seventh generation of games consoles was a common question. For a lot of games, there was a disconnect between the visual fidelity of their cutscenes and their true in-engine, gameplay graphics. But for Killzone 2, there is almost none. Cutscenes, do have slightly higher quality character models but the difference is negligible at best. Again, the game is a technically beautiful feat of game development of its era. Lighting objects cast realistic shadows well before ray tracing was possible for games. Even the muzzle of your guns is a lighting object when fired which casts its own shadows. The torch on the shotgun also casts shadows as it interacts with environmental objects. The way the devs approached the lighting in this game, which you can find out more about how they achieved this via Digital Foundry's retrospective on YouTube, gives it a great sense of visual depth.

While not the first game to introduce it, the game features destructible environments. Not quite to the level of the Battlefield games, being able to strip away elements of cover the enemy is using or strip off layers of concrete on buildings allowing you to see the enemies’ limbs, allows for a more tactical approach to combat that the first instalment couldn't hope to achieve.

Gunplay has been vastly improved upon with a COD like level of tightness in the aiming system. Most weapons in the game aren't completely useless now and there's more variety in the weapons you can use. However, gone are the 3 weapon slots of the original and now you only really have a single weapon slot. You do carry a primary and secondary weapon but it's only the primary weapon that can be swapped out, with the secondary being a locked slot filled with your revolver handgun which has infinite ammo.

So, does all of this make Killzone 2 an enjoyable gameplay experience? Yes and no.

While the introduction of a more standard shooter gameplay experience is welcome, with the introduction of aiming down sight (ADS) on basically all guns except the shotgun (which has a flashlight instead) and the LMG (which has a zoom much like the first game), the controls don't make for an easy time using it.
I don't mind that the game controls a little heavier than most other FPS games like COD and Battlefield as it lets the game stand apart from them. However, the control scheme is extremely awkward. The first game allowed for total customisation of the control layout but here, there are around 6 layouts to choose from. This may sound like a great degree of choice, that surely has at least one really good option. And the answer to that is unfortunately, no.

With the introduction of the cover system, a core mechanic of the game that is needed to survive the campaign, crouching has become a necessity. But there is no option to change crouching from a hold interaction to a toggle interaction. Meaning that no matter the control layout, you must hold down the crouch button in order to stay in cover. On most layouts, this is L1 or L2, that sounds fine right? ADS should be the L button that crouch isn't assigned to, right? No, bafflingly, ADS is assigned to R3 and is toggled (which unlike crouch you can change to a hold interaction.) If this were an early console shooter, an awkward control set up could be forgiven but they were well established at this point in time and the control scheme as well. This makes for a frustrating experience trying to utilise the game's cover system. Holding L2 to maintain cover, pressing R3 to aim down sight and then firing with R2 but as a semi-cover based shooter, you have to duck behind cover every so often to allow your health to regenerate. However, thanks to muscle memory of years of playing FPS games, rather than pressing R3 to stop aiming down sight, I consistently accidentally release my hold of L2 which means I end up standing up and taking more damage. Eventually, I used my adapter’s ability to remap any controller buttons to swap L2 and R3 but that didn't really solve the fact I still had to hold down R3 to maintain cover. No matter what button crouching is mapped to, I think the need to constantly hold it down makes for an extremely awkward experience. But eventually, once in to the swing of the game I accepted this was just how the game was.

The AI of the Helghast is very impressive, realistically reacting to your gunfire. Whether that's scrambling for cover or staggering around a bit after being shot. And while I appreciate the tacticalness that it brings to the moment to moment gameplay, the time to kill (TTK) on the Helghast does feel a bit long. At times, the Helghast feel like bullet sponges with expending more than half my mag to kill just one enemy. Sometimes, I think I've killed an enemy, only to have them get back up off the ground and continue shooting at me.

Once again, this brings a level of tactical thought that makes Killzone 2 stand apart from most other shooters but it can make some sections of the game far more frustrating than they have any need to be.

Finally, to wrap up the gameplay, let's talk about how the game performs. This was a major issue for the first game, so obviously it was a concern jumping into the sequel and when you see how graphically impressive it is, it becomes a worry that it might follow in the footsteps of it's older sibling. However, for the most part, Killzone 2 runs well. Being a seventh gen title, it only targets 30fps and while it does dip fairly often, it's not a large enough drop to effect gameplay. This really only happens during the more intense combat sections of the game as well. This next part, I'm not sure if there are varying factors to it such as, which version of the PS3 you have, whether you have the physical or digital version of the game. But when navigating each level and I entered a section that the game needed to load it, my game would freeze for a solid 5-10 seconds. Now, this would never occur during combat so it doesn't really have any impact on my enjoyment of the game. However, it was something that would interrupt the flow of the game just a little.

Now, what about the story? Well... it's... mostly forgettable.

Gone are the hilarious character dynamics of the first game and also, gone is half the cast of the first game. Rico is here and part of your squad, but his characterisation feels extremely off. For some reason, he's now a total loose cannon and while he was hot headed in the first game, his whole character arc revolved around him coming to trust Hahka. Which the Rico of this game would never get to do as I can't see him listening to Templar telling him to not kill him. Oh yeah, Templar's also here but it's pretty brief and I didn't even realise it was him until near the end of the game. Actually, given that the game does most of its story telling via the cutscenes, so we barely have any interaction with the other 3 members of our squad, I struggled to keep track of who was who and due to the previously mentioned characterisation of Rico, I also didn't realise he was from the first game until the second half of the campaign.

To sum it up, the game takes place 6 months after the first game. With Helghan weakened, the ISA grasp the opportunity to invade and wipe the Helghast threat out completely. They meet far more resistance than they expect and your split up from your squad with the first half of the story mainly being about regrouping and storming the main Helghast training building to take out an enemy commander. Then out of nowhere, the Helghast are looking for codes to some nukes they stole from the ISA. Which happened in the PSP game, Killzone Liberation. So, I was really confused when this plot thread just showed up in the third to last mission.

Finally, there's also music now. The first game completely lacked any music during the main gameplay sections but here, the game is fully kitted out with music. The score sounds like a mash of Star Wars, Halo and Sam Raimi's Spider Man scores but it gives the game a much greater impact during the moment-to-moment events and gameplay.

In summary, Killzone 2 is an impressive game for its time and holds up well today visually and sonically. However, awkward controls and leaning too much towards a sense of realism, the game can be frustrating to play. Which for a lacklustre story that has forgettable characters and lack of really great set pieces, may not entirely be worth the effort. It lands the game in the realm of being just okay. Being more concerned with technical achievement has held it back from being as tight an experience it could be and as enjoyable as it could be. To quote the show Chernobyl. "Not great, not terrible."