It is absolutely depressing how much lower Valve gets in my personal view year after year, I spent most of my childhood being a diehard Valve fan and they do nothing but repay their customers with NOTHING.

We're talking milking a game with cosmetic drops made by community members for months, taking a majority profit off of those, and not producing any actual meaningful content updates, they did this somewhat for CS:GO during its many long hiatus periods, and they do this incredibly for TF2, It is genuinely insane that this is okay, these games generate massive amounts of profit, any other dev would be bending over backwards to support it, at the very least hiring a crew just to support it, but they do nothing, but they'll gladly continue screwing community content creators with bad cuts, and pushing people into gambling, causing high tier items to become stupidly rare, going to hundreds and sometimes even thousands of dollars.

Why? Because Valve's management, are the dumbest fucks on the planet, rivalling some of the worst in any other industry, Coyote VS ACME cancellation level, they've got some of the best talent in the industry but they're so mismanaged due to their shitty corporate structure that all they're ever incentivized to do is work on new projects, new projects you'll never see, outside of the blue moon chances, like a VR Half-Life game that barely made it past the finish line and was totally reworked from the bottom up a year before release, and an update to Valve's second biggest cash cow, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

Onto that disgrace, we have Counter-Strike 2, the Counter-Strike you knew, but now everything is worse.

To start the game, you have this gross sleek competitive style they're trying to go for, that looks like complete and total dogshit, 2011 called, they want their art designers back, and it's piled on with the shitty menu design that prioritizes you seeing your shitty ugly agent skins and gloves before anything else, great!

You fire up a game, but oh no, what's this? They've removed short and long matches, now you can only play this middle of the road medium length match that appeals to nobody, Yay!
Oh well, at least the gameplay isn't that much different, all they did was add the smokes, and to start off the gameplay just feels like shit now, something changed and everything feels floaty and imprecise, it's gotten a lot better than what it launched at, but the fact that this was a replacement for one of the biggest competitive games in the world, and it launched like this, after months of beta, is nothing short of a colossal embarrassment.
And what's this? The buy menu, it's shit now!
You have to pick a small selection of weapons in this Valorant styled menu list, effectively dooming most off-meta weapons to be never picked again, and thanks for just reinventing the wheel to blur together with your vastly superior competition.
And to top it all off, there's been a gigantic cheater problem, bigger than I've ever seen when I was playing CS:GO, Multiple times when I infrequently play in friends in low rank lobbies, you will run into blatant wallhackers, the ones you can check in replay and see them staring at people through walls, fucking fantastic, and the matchmaking isn't much better either, did I mention that there were multiple bugs of innocent users getting VAC banned for extreme things like using a console command to look like you're spinbotting, or simple things like, using certain AMD software?

And guess what? Several fucking things from the original were just completely dropped in the transition, Arms Race was removed, only to be reintroduced months and months later and advertised as a content update, thanks for bringing back the thing you took away, dipshits!
Danger Zone was removed, though I doubt anyone will miss it.
Wingman lost like most of its map pool.
Riot Shield was removed from Casual hostage playlists, no fun allowed I suppose.
Multiple console commands stopped working, like net_graph, left-handed viewmodels, and the anti view bob commands.
Achievements were removed for no reason.
And to top it all off, now all the maps use the same default operators, incase you were worried that they weren't shoving the awful agent skins down your throat enough.
I'm pretty sure it didn't launch with community server support, so thanks for pissing in the face of what your companies games were built on, douchebags.

But here's the good part of the game, they update3d the graphics.
That's it.
That's all there is to this.
There's the interactive smokes I guess, but they're a pretty minor thing and it's nothing that couldn't have been done on the old engine.
Onto those graphics, it just looks... bad.
Sure, CS:GO's graphics weren't great either, ranging from oversaturated to too dirty and gritty, one looking like a fashion show model and the latter looking like a Call of Duty NPC.
But this? This is fucking awful, Half-Life Alyx is one of the prettiest games I've seen in my entire life, and this just looks like complete and total dogshit, like the models were just sloppily ported from source 1 to 2, and then hiding any imperfections with their new shading.
Sure, the shading is pretty, but it makes the aesthetics of the game wildly inconsistent, realistic guns, colorful shiny pseudo-cartoonish characters, oversaturated world, realistic blood, disgustingly ugly bloom coated fire, etc.
It just makes the whole thing look like a visual mess, and a sloppy attempt at converting the game to a clean visual ala Valorant.
Sorry Valve, as much as I love you, your art team is no match for Riot in terms of aesthetics mixed with readability, they're placing your teeth on the curb and jumping on your head from a second story window, and the viscera left from the aftermath is in the shape of a shiny Phoenix Terrorist Model.

All there is to know about Valve at this point is that you just should not interact with their live service games after like 3-5 years of release, that's around the time they just totally give up and stop giving a fuck and start screwing their customers.
And all there is to know about their upcoming products is that their upcoming game that is basically a total blur at this point, Neon Prime is rumored to be dropping the sci-fi aesthetic because some idiot at Valve got spooked by sci-fi games not doing so hot lately, mainly in context to Starfield, which is a game that sold well and only bombed due to being a shitty Bethesda game.

To all of the people fucking their customers day in day out on the live-service areas of Valve, Fuck you. Except Eric on what's left of the TF2 team, love you man.
To all the Valve devs slaving away at new single-player titles? Bless your heart, as your monetization pisses your customers respect for your company away, thank you for constantly reminding them what Valve was built for, making quality games that don't ask for anything more than the entry ticket price, Half-Life Alyx is one of the best games Valve ever made, and Counter-Strike 2 is going to live in the pits of hell next to Ricochet.

This game is really a sleeper hit. one of the best 3D platformers I've ever played, elegantly combining the Metroidvania style with Super Mario 64-esque movement and level design, it's a really well put togehter and a must play for any fan of the genre.

However, there are a good few snags that keep my overall score for the game low, to start, the current version of the game lacks a map, and while it's easy to figure out where you're going without it, it's a convenience that would have gone a long way, it really makes it feel like you're just totally stuck but it was just a matter of not having explored a specific room.

The combat sucks, just straight up sucks, but after you've gotten a few abilities you're able to avoid it or just dance around your opposition, but due to this the very beginning of the game is a total drag (especially the tutorial boss, a lot of shitty hits you'll be receiving) and the final boss, the only real boss battle of the game, ends up feeling boring and tiring.

Some of the abilities as well are a bit awkward to control, particularly the wall run and the wall kick.
The wall run just performs very awkwardly, not going forward if you're facing the wall too much, but not making up for this by having a larger range from which you can start wall-riding from, on this one section where you had to wall-ride a long distance, I had more consistency doing a sequence break jump over the intended route.
The wall kick is just annoying, you're intended to use it for a bit of extra air-time, but if you use it and you connect with a wall at any point during the animation, you'll kick off of it, instead of only kicking off the wall if you click while/right before you hit the wall, it's easy enough to learn how to deal with this but it makes comboing wall kicks into wall-rides nearly impossible.

But back to the praises, the level design is just phenomenal, it's really fun to jump across all the areas, and the level design has a (potentially) unintended ability to allow you to sequence break quite often, but not soft-locking your game due to either feasible jumps or carefully placed save-points, and it adds a lot to the movement of the game.

The art-style is gorgeous, really making everything feel hazy and dream-like, whilst not feeling like a mess thematically, with my biggest criticism being that the protagonist not wearing any leggings just looks... weird (Which you thankfully can change in the settings, looks great!)
And on-top of all that, the soundtrack is great, a very, again "dream-like" feel for a lot of the tracks, but still catchy and unique enough to give each area it's own "feel"

There's not much story to speak of and what does exist is a
[SPOILER WARNING]
very VERY abrupt ending with no fanfare, just being kind of a hand-wavy "the final boss was the personification of the dreamer creating this world and your victory was merely just letting them know they need to wake up and move on from whatever is holding them back from their real life"
[SPOILER WARNING END]
but it's not a big deal as the story isn't really the hook for this type of game, but rather is just a dressing to give it all a nice theme.

Not sure what the mix with art-deco and medieval castles is about though, probably just something stitched together because it looked cool or whatever.

Anyways, I recommend this game big time, and I'll probably be upping my score on this if I get back around to the game after they add a map to it (and maybe some QoL changes)

Remember when later Guitar Hero games had songs that can't do anything but have boring easy-mode charts? Yeah, that's this.
Pair it with a really shitty rotation model where if you want to play a song for any other period than when it shows up for a few days, you have to pay 5 whole dollars for it and only when it's in the item shop, and you've got Fortnite Festival.

Pair it with incredibly boring visuals, as you've got a very ugly giant stage with band animations going below even GH2 quality, but hey, during those long breaks certain instruments will get in songs due to a bad track-list, you can use your emotes!
There's really no huge flair either, there's nothing like the audio getting filtered when using Overdrive, the particles while you're using it are very small and tied almost entirely to just your player, and most of them are battle pass/shop purchases anyways.

Generally it just is very clunky as well, you can't quick restart a song or practice it, instead you can just jump into the song from the start and if you fuck up you have to back out to the main-stage with on some songs this being a downtime of like 40s.
You've also got to deal with the fact that all the notes share the same color so on harder tracks (if you can actually FIND one) it's a bit annoying to deal with as it's harder to read for no other reason than it has to be the Fortnite purple color.
Lastly there's just a lot of instabilities, It's on the second season now and there's still major issues with just random hitching in the middle of songs (far better than it used to be at-least) and crashes happen randomly as well.

AAA Licensed Rhythm games are pretty much dead, and this is the best you'll get out of it in the modern industry, just move on and go download like Clone Hero or YARG or something.

Epic, Stop trying to make metaverse Fortnite happen, It's not going to happen, nobody plays the shitty racing mode, Festival is mediocre, Lego Fortnite has been nothing but boring and the Creative mode's expansion has pretty much exclusively been used to make things that you could already play, like arenas or boxfights etc. but now they have a random theme of Streamer/Country/IP, or just are something I could have played in ROBLOX back in 2009, it's not working and players are just going to jump to the one where they already have all the different things they want to make.

Utterly miserable, all the writing doubles down on everything that was shit from the first and any note of something interesting has been eradicated, the first game struggled with not talking about vapid bullshit metatext when what it had going for it regularly was quite interesting and thought-provoking, and now it's just been boiled down to obnoxious "HOLY FREAKIN COW EVERYTHING IS FREAKIN SCARRRYYY MY MOM IS LIKE A DEMOONNN"
Whereas the first one lead me on something interesting and then let me down, I could barely stomach 10 minutes with such a fucking horrible opening, just low-fi beats to study to bullshit for people who beat off to one or multiple of things like psychological horror, mental illness and "failgirls"

This is one of the few times I genuinely feel like I have had the reverse of what I usually expect to feel from art, I don't feel like I've grown, I feel like my perspective on the world has been reduced, I can only hope this was made to cash in on the people who went "OMG SO RELATABLE" to the first game.

This game is a fucking travesty and the damage it has done to the video game genre has been a huge scar in the shape of an open world, it's really a shining example of everything that was completely wrong with the game industry in its time and the years after.

You've got
- The masculine urge to make your games realistic even if they can't feasibly pull the look off, or just generally look ugly.
- Bear ass collecting, pretty sure Todd Howard said one of his favorite quests was the one with the stupid fucking stones.
- Mind numbingly boring gameplay, everything handles like shit and is unfun to use and imprecise, but it doesn't matter because all the NPCs in the game have the behavior of a lobotomy patient.
- Writing that an AI could out-skill and outpace, can you remember any moment from this game that wasn't the generic shit of "KILL DRA GON GO TO VAL HAL LA SUCK DISGUSTINGLY UGLY KING'S BALLS"
- Buggier than an anthill.
- Having like 3 voice actors but no casual player can tell because they're playing through their TV speakers and the dog is barking.
- Anything neat needs to be heavily scripted (because otherwise the games engine would fall apart)

The fact that you can mod out like 50-60% of what makes the game so awful, and it's still shit is a statement to how awful this game is, it's like Fallout 4 without any guns.

Props for eventually supporting mod developers by even adding support on consoles, even though it'll never be good due to them being walled-garden shitboxes, but they're just doing it because it's the only reason any of their games have any staying power.

This game perfectly encapsulates what it feels like to fall down a rabbit hole in internet mysteries, in sudden tragedy from a face you'll never see the eyes close forever, let alone see ever, their only appearance to you being a small avatar and a name that represents them in a sea of other similar people.

The innocence of that pre-social media world, the more sincere nerdiness, the closed mindedness of the older generations and their fear of the devil in any product their children consume, the juvenile arguments two kids in their teens get into as well as the fake girlfriends they make, the kids who join the platform even if they're underage and stand out from everyone else, the corny mascots for the teenagers that all the teenagers make fun of, the cardinal sin of pissing off a nerdy community and then they pull the rug out from under you (Long live the freelands!)

Each character feels like a human being, though the story writes the personalities to be a little more indulgent in the problems rather than cowardly or just suddenly disappearing like how it would work in reality.

[SPOILER WARNING]
Dylan is such a well written character, he's just this enthusiastic programmer who gets wrapped up in the speeding away success of MerchantSoft and ends up getting too big for his boots, becoming an egotistical prick, and a hypocrite, to a point where he even punishes you for striking the content that you were told to take down, due to a copyright claim from a music artist, who ignores a poor girl upset that she's getting harassed, who acts snobby and rude to everyone including his coworkers like Samantha, and causes the Mindcrash, killing at least 4 people and putting Tim in jail for 6 years, as well as injuring thousands of others, all because he was overenthusiastic about putting his game Outlaw into the new version of Hypnospace, and has to live with that for 20 years, only coming clean once he's finally been discovered, he had truly become rotten at that point but he at least was finally ready to repent and take responsibility for his crime, with a eulogy that feels half as a tearjerker letter to those poor innocent souls taken away, and half as a nostalgic goodbye to that old internet from Jay Tholen himself, but, hey, wait a minute maybe Dylan's honesty isn't what it seems.
Maybe Dylan is just building himself another safety net, only waiting till the eleventh hour to finally come clean about his crimes, clearly only having a face value idea of those people who's blood is on his hands, he asks you to send things related to MerchantSoft to him in hopes he can get it deleted letting him get away freely, he probably joins the archival project so he can cover up his tracks when news came out that Hypnospace was being explored by archivists, he centers his eulogy around himself and his fucking stupid game that was the cause of all these problems in the first place, and his perceptions into the people he killed are shallow face value tearjerkers, meant to get him into court on a favorable confession rather than being nailed down with the evidence and the story that he ruined a teenagers life by throwing the blame on him, this weaselly worm that represents the worst out of the tech bubble, the Mark Zuckerbergs, The Elon Musks, or what could become that any condescending nerd if you give them the power of god for a moment.

Tim is just tragic, he's just a kid wanting to impress a girl he likes by doing cool hack-y stuff, and ends up getting wrapped up in the mindcrash all because he made a scare to win his love interest back, and ends up going to prison for it, and getting blamed for something he had no responsibility for, getting sent to prison for 6 years over it, all the while M1NX and R3ckoning in particular, were trying to reveal the truth, but they were just too late, Thankfully Tim moved past it (but probably spent years dealing with the guilt, and the remorse over Tiffany) getting a job in Computer Science, and having a loving wife and daughter.

Adrian is a huge hidden big bad, he's a soulless corporate tool, who hired his brother (who are separated by TWENTY YEARS, they hardly know eachother. he's using Dylan's ego as a springboard to get programming work out of him) and barely is seen until LeakyPipes, where you see he's a total bumbling idiot and doesn't know the first thing about tech, and doesn't know the damage he's done by letting a puny, worm of a man play god, and just goes totally hands off, not hiring enough extra staff to do proper work on Hypnospace and letting Dylan move programmers that question his authority off of the programming and onto things like HSPD Dispatch, culling geek forums and putting them on backburner servers because he wanted the product to sell better to general audiences and thoughtlessly allowing malware onto his platform, even punishing you if you try to take it down, due to it being a sponsor.

It's a beautiful story, really, offering a storybook version of these modern/late 2000s social media controversies, mixed with the condescending web admin who shuts down the entire forum because people made fun of him of the 90s, through the lens of Geocities and email chains, wrapped in a bow of hazy dreamlike 90s nostalgia.

Truly one of the best games of all time.