Arkane is washed. Deathloop was a bad, watered-down "Dishonored's Greatest Hits" with an irritating structure, but this is even worse. There is no Arkane DNA anywhere to be found here, only an awful looter-shooter that occasionally lets you enter buildings through the back door OR the front.

You know what's good about Arkane games? Fuckin' NOT THE SHOOTING! And that's all there is here. Harvey Smith's first stinker. An historic occasion, much like the Hindenburg disaster. I'm so angry.

Normally I would give this 1 or 1 1/2 stars, but coming from Arkane, I have to go Scorched Earth. I'm sowing salt in their fields so this can never happen again.

I wasn't a fan of Fallen Order, but I really enjoyed Jedi Survivor. It's still largely the same: a search action game with very minor soulslike elements, but almost every aspect has been improved. Instead of a scattering of small planets, you have two major ones with a couple of smaller areas. And, thank christ, they have fast travel between save points now.

Over the course of the game you also get even more traversal options, which was the most fun part of the game for me. By the end you're grappling, air-dashing, and wall-running all over the place. Combat is mostly the same, but with two new styles: a slower, more powerful stance that gives your saber the dumbass little vents on the sides, and a saber/blaster stance, sorta like in Ryu Ga Gotoku Ishin. However, for some reason, you can only equip two stances at a time, so you pretty much just want a stronger one for bigger targets and a faster one for large groups. There isn't a whole lot of difference between most of them.

I had a better time with the combat in this than I did in the first game, but I also made the mistake of playing the first game on hard. It made the already sloppy, weightless combat feel even worse, as enemies could take a whole lot of hits from a damn light saber. I played this one on normal, and at least most "regular" enemies will die from one hit, which feels... accurate. The Jedi cut through these guys like butter.

The story is another strong suit. I would say the characters are the main area in which this series excels. They're better Star Wars "movies" than anything since Empire Strikes Back, with the exceptions of KOTOR and Andor. Greez is good and my best friend and also my space dad.

Another plus is that Cal has a variety of sick outfits this time. I hated the stupid-ass poncho in the first game, and the developers seem to be aware that nobody liked it. There was One decent outfit in Fallen Order, and it's the one used in flashbacks here. Characters also joke about Cal's stinky old fuckin ponchos pretty frequently.

So, I would say this is a solid 4/5 game, b--

hold on, the review crashed. I have to restart it. Oh, wait, now it's stuck. Restarting again...

Alright, look. I'm not saying EA are technically "Criminally negligent" in allowing this game to ship in its current state, and I'm also not saying it's "actually fraudulent" to charge 70 dollars for a game that's, at best, an early beta build. But one certainly could come to those conclusions! My total count of Things That Required A Restart are as follows:

- 6 hard crashes to the dashboard.
- 1 freeze.
- 3 softlocks: twice, the game would not allow me to force push an item that I needed to push to progress, and in another instance it would not let me use BD's electro-dart ability to raise a platform. Nothing would enable it, not even fast traveling to another point and back.
- 2 memory leaks, degrading performance to the single digits. One of these ended in a hard crash.

As weird as it is to say, these crashes might not be a huge deal in most games. You know, games that autosave all the time? But, in their strange dedication to providing surface-level Souls elements, this game only saves when you rest at a meditation point. So if you're running around finding collectibles, make sure to rest as often as possible so you don't lose an hour of progress. I did.

And about the performance... hoo boy. It seems to be bad all around, and PS5 is probably the most stable version out there. I played on the 30fps mode, because the "60" one is more like "somewhere from 30-48" and it was usually fairly consistent, but also a low-res mess. The entire game was blurry, with weird trails following most characters, especially near foliage and reflective surfaces. I don't know enough about underlying tech to say exactly what causes this, but it looked awful. The game was frequently running at what appeared to be 720p or lower, causing me to miss collectibles that I passed by because they simply blended into the rest of the visual soup.

I would say that I recommend this game when these issues are fixed. I WOULD say that, but I won't, because many of the first game's bugs were never fixed. At best, I hope the PS6 or PS5 Pro version can brute force it into running a bit better, like the PS5 version of Fallen Order did.

There's a great game in here. It's a shame that Respawn keeps releasing broken products.

On one hand, Palworld is on about the same level of creative bankruptcy as Lies of P. In addition to the obvious Pokemon ripoffs, you've got Zelda fonts and sounds, you've got Xenoblade world design, you've even got freakin Limgrave.

And yet on the other hand, despite all these very questionable and almost certainly litigious similarities, it's a better Pokemon game than anything Nintendo has released in at least a decade. It's also a far more tolerable crafting game than most, thanks to the Pals providing some level of automation, and pretty lenient hunger/sleep/whatever mechanics. In light of this, I find it much less egregious than something like Lies of P or Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, which were simply soulless, inferior versions of the things they were shamelessly trying to emulate.

Palworld has issues for sure. Pathing is total shit, Pals don't appear to have swimming animations so they just run in water, and building is bizarre, with objects refusing to connect to others for no discernible reason. The controls are inconsistent, where sometimes Tab will exit a screen, sometimes F will exit, and sometimes you have to hit Esc. There's no "exit game" option on the main menu, so you have to alt+f4 this bitch. It would also be nice if your Pals had a setting to stop them from trying to Last Hit every enemy like they're playing Dota.

Despite all this, I'm having a pretty good time with it. Hopefully the developers don't abandon it, but with its success, they have a pretty good incentive to keep updating it.

Also, fuck Nintendo. All my homies hate Nintendo.

EDIT -- I would like to clarify: Do Not Spend Money On This Game, You Idiots. It's on game pass if you really want to play it. I do not say this because of some moral issue regarding stolen designs or (as of yet unfounded allegations of) generative AI usage. Don't pay for games in early access! You're buying broken shit that will probably never get fixed! Goddamned Mindcraft ruined everything.

80s/early 90s anime is one of my favorite things, so a game trying to capture that look, combined with old-school shooter action, immediately caught my interest. Unfortunate, then, that it only half-commits to that aesthetic, while also being yet another Procedurally Generated Roguelike Slop-fest.

In Mullet Mad Jack, you run through floor after floor of the same rooms over and over, occasionally punctuated by a boss fight, while listening to some of the worst humor since High on Life. Do you like references? We've got Demolition Man, we've got Bane-posting, we've got RE4 Merchant lines that I forgot to screencap and I don't want to re-install the game!

The core concept is that you have 10 seconds to live, and killing enemies adds to your timer. This is because you're on a livestream and dopamine etc etc yadda yadda The Horrors of Capitalism because it's 2024 and everyone thinks they're fuckin Paul Verhoeven now by stomping this already well-trod ground into De Planet Corrrrre.

The time limit, however, means you have to always be moving forward. This also means the level "design", such as it is, can't be too complex. It's really just a series of hallways, some bigger than others, and they didn't even bother to make very many of them. You'll see the same very distinct rooms countless times, often several floors in a row. This, combined with how easy the game is on Normal (the Easy difficulty is named "I want a boomer shooter," as some weird dig at boomer shooters... But this game was easier than any boomer shooter I think I've ever played) mean you're just mindlessly blasting and holding Forward. Lasers are the most intimidating obstacle in the game, because they do a ton of damage, but you can also get an upgrade that halves that.

About the upgrades: You can pick from 3 every floor, and after 10 floors they reset except for your weapon (the weapons also appear in the upgrade screen). Just always make sure you get the shotgun, +max time, and increased chances for ricochets and enemies exploding. Those are really all you need, and you can cruise through. I never used any of the other weapons.

After yawning my way through 80 floors, I was surprised when the game just... Ended. I had assumed it would be 100, but I can't say I was sad that I wouldn't have to trudge through 20 more floors of rooms that I had already seen approximately 65 times so far. Then, to end things on a really great note, you have a final boss fight where your health is represented by a "badass-o-meter" and the last line is the same joke as the end of the Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks Dragnet movie.

2/10 - One grace point because sometimes there's stuff in here that looks pretty neat, even though other times it looks like art from a spinoff Meet N Fuck game.

PS: If you want something similar to this (as in, the game Mullet Mad Jack ripped off wholesale), I recommend checking out Post Void, which is 3 dollars at full price and also looks way cooler.

I love everything about Ghostwire: Tokyo, except for actually playing it.

The game has massive Vibes, and feels almost like a first-person action spinoff of Shin Megami Tensei. The blend of supernatural elements and technology is interesting (transferring spirits via payphone devices is very SMT), and the art design is top-notch. The story is good enough, following a guy who is brought back from death by a spirit that co-inhabits his body. There's nothing incredible there, but the banter between the two can be entertaining.

It's unfortunate, then, that everything else doesn't live up to the game's style. The combat, where you launch various projectiles via hand-signs, looks pretty, but has no sense of impact. Your default "rapid-fire" attack, Air, particularly feels like an ineffective peashooter. Water is far more useful, being the equivalent of a shotgun, and Fire is your "rocket launcher". They can all be upgraded, but that's another issue...

See, almost every upgrade only exists to make the game feel slightly less sluggish. Normally, when you damage enemies enough, you can rip their cores out to finish them. You don't actually have to, but it gives you some ammo back. Kind of like a Glory Kill from DOOM or something. The problem is that enemies can interrupt this animation. So the game's solution? Give you a bunch of upgrades that make it faster. Or give you other core-ripping abilities that can't be interrupted. My solution? Just stop doing it and hit them a couple more times to kill them.

Other upgrades are similar: higher rate of fire. Slightly wider splash damage radius. It's all very incremental and feels like a waste of time. That's appropriate, though, because most of this game feels like a waste of time. If it had simply been a straight-ahead, linear first-person action game, the combat's flaws could be more easily overlooked. However, because More Hours = Better Than, the fine folks at Tango Gameworks (or, speculating, their parent company Bethesda) decided this should be an open world game with copy-pasted sidequests and, uh... 250,000 spirits scattered around the map to absorb.

Yeah. 250,000. Sure, those are in bundles of, like, 100-300 at a time, but holy cow, that's still a LOT of things to absorb!

And then, if all that wasn't bad enough, there are segments of the game where you're separated from your Ghost Man, so you have none of your shitty little magics, and instead have to rely on the Very Good™ stealth.

I liked talking to the Tanuki. They were cool.

Barely a game. There are no puzzles, you just walk around and talk to people to exchange items. The simplicity would indicate that this is aimed at small children, but the grating dialogue is very clearly Cozy Tumblr Adult themed. Almost every interaction is as follows:

Says something strange
"Oh, really?"
"Yeah."
"Okay. Cool."
"Yeah."

This is only about 20 minutes long, yet still feels padded due to the repetitive dialogue. Feels like the product of a 3-day game jam (derogatory).

I'm probably going to play the other 2 for the achievements...

For whatever reason, it is apparently a long-standing tradition that Prince of Persia games, despite being mostly known and well-regarded for platforming, must feature combat. From the very first game, it's been an aspect shoehorned in that is always to the game's detriment. At best, it's simply There and unobtrusive (Two Thrones, '08) and at worst, there's way too much of it and it's not fun anyway (Warrior Within). This one goes in the "at worst" pile.

The Lost Crown takes heavy inspiration from character-action games, with launchers, midair combos, parries, etc. It's not a terrible idea, except that by filling every area full of ass holes that are constantly shooting things at you from offscreen, the already sometimes-tedious navigation is made even more irritating. It's bad enough that some areas have almost no fast travel points, forcing you to jump through mazes of spikes every time you want to go anywhere. The game also has the now-standard for the genre reverse difficulty curve, where early on enemies are damage sponges that delete your life bar in 2 hits, but by about a third through the game nothing poses a legitimate threat anymore.

This is interesting to me, because the game Lost Crown takes the most inspiration from is clearly Blasphemous. You can obtain a bunch of equippable amulets that function similarly to the figurines in Blasphemous (though dumbed-down and without the interesting synergies), it has health potions that refresh at save points, and bosses are often teleporting around and shooting lasers all over the damn place.

But The Lost Crown has one glaring issue in particular, and it's inexcusable for a search action game: exploration often feels like a waste of time. So many secret areas I found just led to dead ends with a couple of stupid-ass crystals in them. Oh boy! I can use these to upgrade amulets, except there are only 3 or 4 of them actually worth using. And they take several hundred crystals to upgrade, while most of these Secret Areas give you like... 30. You can get that many from killing 2 or 3 enemies. Sure, in Metroid you might just find a missile tank or something, but hey, at least then you can hold more missiles! These crystals stopped doing jack crap about halfway through the game! Or you might find a lame recolor skin after suffering through a particularly harrowing platforming sequence. Because everyone wants a lilac-colored Sargon, apparently. Every time this happened, it felt like the game had spat in my eye and kicked me in the nuts, and it really destroyed my enjoyment overall.

The platforming mostly works fine, though it can glitch out, like the rest of the game. In particular, air-dashing onto the corner of a ledge often makes Sargon get stuck on it for a second, jittering around like he's in Jacob's Ladder. Oh, and those other glitches? Be prepared for softlocks, missing geometry, Sargon floating around on the ground unable to jump, and more. This thing needed a bit longer in the oven.

The plot is pretty stupid. Sargon's fellow Immortals act like total dipshits for most of the game. I'm not sure why every PoP since Sands of Time has to be about Time, with the exception of the unfairly maligned 2008 reboot, but there is some cool stuff in here. There's a weird little old man who sounds like Richard Ayoade. That's neat.

I feel like people are cutting this game a lot of slack because it's a Ubisoft game that's not a 200 hour map-vomit clusterfuck. And, to its credit, it does have two great quality of life ideas that every game in the genre should have: the ability to take screenshots that then appear on the map, and indications of where nearby save stations are. It's too bad that everything else here misses the mark.

Hey, not everything can be as good as Touhou Luna Nights.

5/10

Max Payne 3 is a pretty contentious game among Payne Fans. A large part of that is due to being developed by Rockstar, who wrested control from my beautiful boy Sam Lake's hands, and to be fair, that's certainly a valid knock against it. Rockstar don't really understand the Vibe of Payne, even though that still varied wildly between the first game's apocalyptic nightmare and the second game's depressing fatalism. --Note: My review of MP2 was eaten by this shit website, so I am currently writing this in notepad, as I will do for all future reviews. I am not going to re-write the long-ass review I wrote. It's the best in the series. Play it. With the widescreen fix you can see Mona's boobs.--

The other major problem people have with it is something that's very easily fixed. I'm usually not one to say people are "playing the game wrong," but in this case, I think playing the game on Hard (ideally with mouse and keyboard) is absolutely essential. MP3 added the ability to take cover, and this, combined with the copious amounts of bullet time you get on Normal, causes people to devolve into Cover Shooter Mode, the absolute most boring way to play. On Hard, the bullet time gained DRASTIC goes down, forcing you to shootdodge everywhere constantly, as you still get slow-mo doing that no matter if you have BT in the gauge or not.

This is important, as MP3 utilizes Rockstar's amazing and hilarious Euphoria physics engine, from the days before they toned it down to make it "more realistic," aka "boring as hell." Playing this properly, Max is constantly slamming his noggin into walls, tumbling over tables, and crumpling into a pretzel after jumping down stairs. You really should only be taking cover when reloading and/or contemplating where you want to dive to next. In another important innovation, now he doesn't automatically get up after diving, something that often got you killed in the previous games. Now you can just lay there and pump bullets into guys until the coast is clear. One weird change is that Painkillers fully heal you, but also allow you to revive by shooting an enemy if you would be killed when one's available. This also gives you most of your health back when you revive, so there's no real reason to use them normally, especially since most enemies will murder your ass real fast on Hard anyway.

Even with that strange choice, it's the best that a Rockstar game has ever played, and it's baffling how everything learned here apparently went out the window with subsequent titles.

So it plays great. How's the story? Eh, it's alright. It's an obvious departure from the tone of the first two, though I don't think it's as far removed as some people say. It's often said that the Max in this game is barely the same character as he was in the first two, though I disagree: In the first game, he was a psychotic dumbass, and in the second, he was a depressed, horny dumbass. Now he's essentially a combination of the two, drunk and rage-fuelled, continuing his tendency to make bad decisions and not know when to stop. If you really want a canon explanation for why he's this way in 3 (even though they repeatedly mention Max's AA sessions in 2), just imagine this moment late in 2 is responsible, like Homer's brain crayon.

The actual story itself is the bigger issue: I can understand wanting to do their own thing, which in this case means mostly just doing a pastiche of Man on Fire, but it's not as propulsive as the previous games. It goes on a bit too long, but it's adequate, and Max has plenty of good lines. McCaffrey's performance here is his career-best, which isn't a small feat. I especially appreciate that Max has unique dialogue for almost every painkiller stash you can find. It's also a game that understands that short people are inherently evil. This is something understood by many of the greatest pieces of art, made by those with true insight into the human soul: Twin Peaks. Leprechaun 4: In Space. Collateral.

Max Payne 3 is absolutely a worthy end for the trilogy. Would I prefer if Remedy had made it? Yeah, probably. But this is what we got. I'm okay with that.

9/10

I had a great time with the first 3/4ths of this game. There's a nice sense of exploration, and though there's obviously some padding with a game of this type/size, it didn't feel barren or monotonous like many others (looking at you, Breath of the Wild). There's a good balance between the open world environments and the "dungeons" that feel like regular Souls levels.

Unfortunately, after Morgott, the game tanks hard. Pouring one out for my fellow Strength builders, because they decided to make subsequent bosses straight out of Sekiro, and actively hostile to anyone who isn't a fast weapon iframe master. Bosses healing on hits, or stacking dots on you even when blocked? Now that's some garbage.

Then, finally, you get to the last boss. It's alright! And then you get to the second phase, which is maybe the single worst boss in any Souls game. After about 5 hours I finally won because it glitched out and stopped moving. An appropriately anticlimactic ending to a game I enjoyed once upon a time.

Hey, do you remember Jet Set Radio Future?

The folks at Team Reptile certainly do, that's for sure. The concept of "fine, we'll make our own -ABANDONED GAME FRANCHISE-, with blackjack, and hookers!" is a very risky proposition. Sometimes the new game can surpass its inspirations (Stardew Valley), and sometimes it falls flat on its fuckin' arse (Mighty No. 9). It's a fragile balancing act, as you want the new game to be reminiscent of the original, without being a carbon-copy ripoff. It should add some new mechanics or twists on the familiar formula, but not so much that it becomes unrecognizable.

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, impressively, manages to contain the worst of both worlds.

In many respects, it's creatively bankrupt. Almost every area I entered resulted in me muttering, "oh, cmon..." because they're instantly recognizable as "we have JSRF at home." Versum Hill is Dogenzaka Hill, Brink Terminal is Shibuya Terminal, Mataan is a combination of Highway Zero and Benten-Cho, etc. Even your gang's hideout is damn near identical to the hideout in JSRF. However, these areas also look significantly worse than JSRF's due to how sparsely populated they are. They're far less dense to begin with, but also suffer from a bizarrely short draw distance that makes them look even worse. Sure, you can see a few people scattered around, often in cute little diorama-esque poses that reminded me of Katamari Damacy, but you can only see them when you get within like 20 feet of them. This feeling of lifelessness is made even worse by the lack of voice acting. Most of the characters have short "yeah." or "uhh" clips when they talk, and that's fine, but the absence of DJ Professor K type figure is very apparent. You get cutscenes introducing gangs or saying what's happening in the city, like the ones he would narrate, but with no voice they all fall flat.

On the flipside, everything new here actively makes the game worse. Instead of solely inline skates, you can traverse via skateboard or BMX. In general gameplay, this makes absolutely no difference. All 3 handle the same, and their only purpose is to get you into certain areas that require one of the three. This just means going back to one of the very sparingly-placed spots where you can switch characters (not marked on the map, by the way, and neither are fast-travel points) and backtracking over there, because sliding on skates can break glass floors, skateboards can grind on little fire hydrant things to raise them, and bikes can... open doors by standing in front of them. None of this is ever explained in-game, by the way. I think I was 90% done before I was aware of the skateboard thing.

Another major change is the graffiti system. Rather than being presented with motions you have to complete to throw up tags, you just do whatever you want. The motions you make determine what tag appears, but it's entirely cosmetic except for one achievement that requires unique tags in a level. That achievement is also bugged, by the way. Anyway, this also removes pretty much the only source of challenge that was present in JSRF. Spraying was The Game, and collecting paint cans so you would have enough when you reached the tag spot was pretty much the entire point. Now you have unlimited paint. You can paint the same spot over and over if you want. Who cares. Technically, it is possible to fail the tagging minigame, as there is a meter in the bottom left that depletes during it, but it's so slow that it's never going to happen. After all, for the aforementioned reason, you can just waggle the stick around with wild abandon and it makes absolutely no difference.

But hey, maybe they made tagging completely braindead because they had the INCREDIBLE idea to make cops even more annoying than they were in the games they're ripping off! And, even better, they added combat!!! For real, whoever came up with this idea is going in The Contraption and I will feel no remorse. Your character just kinda does some breakdance moves in the cops' general vicinity and then they get knocked away. There's zero sense of impact. You can hit them, jump, and do a tag minigame to, I think, do more damage to them, but it doesn't matter. You're better off simply ignoring them, because once the cops have showed up, they're not leaving. Pretty much every tag you do will raise your heat meter another level, accompanied by a cutscene showing you the Tools of the State coming to kill your ass and plant fentanyl on your corpse. You can clear your heat by going into a port-a-potty (guess what: not marked on the map!) but if you haven't finished an area it's pretty pointless because they're going to be on you again immediately.

But okay. Time for the positives: there are a couple of areas that I think Team Reptile did a good job. The character designs, when they're not aping JSRF yet again (Bel is Gum, Rave is Garam, etc), are pretty good. The story is decent, and I particularly liked the dream sequences. They're platforming levels in a surreal floating environment in the middle of a swirly void, echoing the final boss of JSRF. The gangs are another highlight. They're the only place that BRC approaches JSRF, with groups like The Franks (a gang of b-ballin' frankingsteins), Eclipse (hot ladies into astrology), and Demon Theory (guys dressed like oni).

The soundtrack is pretty good, too. There are a couple of tracks I found very annoying (I never want to hear Precious Thing or Hair Dun Nails Dun ever again), and for some reason there is no option to create playlists or mute certain songs, but for the most part it's a great selection.

That's about it! Finally, adding insult to injury, they announced a physical version abouuuut 2 weeks after the "digital-only" release. Normally this would really piss me off, but I guess I'm okay with it because there's no way in hell I'm going to buy this again. I want a Fresh Experience, not warmed-up leftovers. Somehow, Sunset Overdrive remains the most faithful successor to Jet Set Radio. Now, on to Lies of P...