NFS Underground is a blueprint for it's sequel and the single most important game in the series, which set the direction the series would mostly be going in for the next 20 years.
However, on it's own this game is broken, repetitive slog, which forces the player through repeating tracks over and over again while also having the opponents cheat their way to victory no matter what difficulty you pick. Each of the player's wins feels like luck since most of the time the reason why it happened is because the rubberbanding AI wasn't as broken as it usually is, the game's hyper realistic collision physics haven't flipped his car over on a straight road for no reason, or the traffic car hasn't spawned right behind a blind turn, sending the player's riced Honda Civic spinning 360 degrees and flying 3 meters into the air.
Do I recommend playing this game? Eh, purely for historic value. It looks really good for the time, the car selection is overall solid, and the modding options can look cool.
The music also has a silly childish charm to it, looking at it in the retrospect. Since it usually forces itself to be cool so hard that it turnes to being cringey, which in itself provides unintentional comedic value, making it great, albeit again not in a way it was originally intended.

Since I played it for the first time ever in 2022, when I'm already 20 y/o, I failed to really see this game as anything more than a history piece. It definitely has an appeal and is definitely a game which used to be someone's childhood, but from an outsider's perspective, I can't call it anything more than just OK. And as I noticed from the other reviews, people only ever rate it highly because they grew up with it and not because it has some phenomenal design in it. I don't regret my time with it because I at least finally learned what is this Pokemon thing about and why it stays popular even today.

Chipper & Sons Lumber Co is the game most people know about as a game which was criticised for it's art style and made the creator so mad, that he used the said criticism to later create the most popular horror game of it's decade that needs no introduction. But disregarding this criticism, is Chipper any good on it's own?
Sadly, it's not. The game is essentially a grinding simulator, with no end goal in sight. You are required to build structures of varying uses, which themselves require the more and more bloated amouts of resources. While there is automatisation possible, the said auto production structures usually also require bloated resources, which creates a hellish cycle of constantly grinding resources to increase the production rate of the same resources, only to find out that the new unlocked blueprints are bloated even more. The process never changes, you do the same things throughout the entire playthrough.
What doesn't help is that half of the resources you need to progress rely on random chance of dropping, sometimes only dropping from talking to the same NPC in 1 minute intervals. And even adding to the pain of it, the map never actually becomes bigger: you just get more lots to build structures/grow trees, with the rest of the playable area staying completely static from the very start.
The only saving grace the game has is the writing. Scott Cawthon is good at making witty dialogue with dark humor inserted from time to time, even going as far as hinting at Chipper being some sort of murdering psychopath, which is played for laughs. No, I'm not going to write a theory about it, since it's just Scott's way of adding comic relief to the game. I liked the writing so much, that it made me kind of excited to play FNaF World at some point in the future.
Is it worth playing? Well, it's worth at least trying out. I only completed the game because I'm planning to play a fan-made sequel (Tyke & Sons Lumber Co.) in the future.

Imagine Hunt Down the Freeman, but actually good.
This is probably the besat HL2 mod out there, boasting it's great level design and variety, well written story, charismatic characters, and improvements to base HL2 formula, and all this while being as lore friendly as possible for such an ambitious project.
You play as Bad Cop/3650's clone afyer the events of EZ1 who is tasked by the Combine to search and capture Judith Mossman, while being granted freedom of thought just for this mission, which separates the MC from all the other Combine soldiers. Which means, he can talk. Which in itself means, that now we're playing as a Build Engine era protagonist, but this time in HL2 setting.
Surprisingly enough, the idea actually works, because the 3650 is extremely fun to listen to and play as. A lot of character has been put in all of his interactions, as well as weapon animations. The story brings in a lot of unique twists which I won't spoil. I will only say that it is truly a by fans for fans project, which means it's highly recommended to play thorugh at least HL1 with all the expansions, HL2 with both episodes, and at least Portal 1 prior to going into EZ2. And also, make sure to bring Wilson along with you :)
As far as gameplay goes, it seems the devs were playing through HL2 and were taking notes about everything they didn't like, because basiclly all of mine personal issues with it are fixed here. A lot of surprises with returning foes happen, as well as brought back remotely activating explosives from HL1. The expansions are so big that calling this mod Half-Life 2: Opposing Force doesn't feel like stretch at all.
And what's the most baffling about this project is that it's absolutely FREE.
TL;DR It's good, please play it.

An expansion, which also serves as a sequel to the original's events, taking place right before the true ending which also adds a lot of context to its events, while further exploring the nature of a learning AI which tries to understand human culture, history, and art.
Gameplay-wise, the puzzles can be brutally hard and fully expect you to be a master of the game's mechanics. Thankfully, the original's most undercooked elemt (record/play) is not used a lot, so your frustration will never be with the game's design, but with the smoothness of your own brain.
A near perfect expansion to a near perfect game.

terrible ideas at every corner. worst fusion system I've seen in a megaten game so far, mid plot, OK characters, dogshit dungeons, and a pointlessly convoluted but at the same time illogical and stupid combat system. if not for the word "persona" in the title this would be forgotten and abandoned but people still like to pretend that it's any good because they like the later entries.
but on the good side, the PS1 OST is pretty dope, sounds from both demons and characters are very cute and charming, and the story has some value. either way you'll probably get a way better experience if you read the manga adaptation as doesn't have skippable characters
oh, and snow queen quest is completely skippable. it's just a side story with no large impact on the main plot. you play it if you somehow want more of this ass gameplay after clearing SEBEC

The most hilarious thing I can point out about RDR is that it's a sequel to game, which doesn't exist. Or more like, it didn't exist before, since RDRII is a thing now. But that doesn't really excuse the story structure of this one.
The majority of the game is spent on you hunting down some guys who you don't care about, to save your wife and son you also don't care about. Or more like, the protagonist surely does care about all that, but you as the player couldn't give less of a shit. What doesn't help is how most of the story you're just running in circles, with John Marston being treated like a naive schoolboy for most of the game. He constantly gets lied to and treated like a fool, and never even once we see an actual reaction out of him, with him just going along with doing stupid, life threatening and pointless jobs just for a chance to get a lead on some bandit who, again, the player doesn't know or care about.
The gameplay isn't much of a help either. Most of the missions are you just doing repetitive, boring things. Get ready for the same "ride shotgun and shoot waves of attackers", or "keep up an npc and shoot waves of attackers" or "shoot waves of attackers while hiding behind a rock". Not to mention that here Rockstar really likes to place mission markers sometimes in the opposite part of a map from where a mission actually takes place. You can imagine my frustration and annoyance, when I bothered to ride (or fast travel) from the opposite side of the map, only for a mission to start with a long shotgun ride which takes me exactly to the place I had to walk from. Rockstar just needed to insert their classic car talk here, even if it means actively hurting the game. And most of the Mexican missions are like that.
And oh yeah. The map. Is this just me, or did Rockstar overcorrect in their attempt to shrink things down to accommodate that there are no drivable cars in this game? Because honestly, all my immersion kind of disappears when I can travel between 2 widely different locations in just 2 minutes with barely any transition. And Blackwater? It's a joke, how could that ever be mistaken for anything resembling a city? And that while the story likes to treat it as such, meanwhile in my gameplay it's just 5 houses surrounded by nothing.
I honestly feel like all those glowing reviews and praise come from an alternate reality, where RDRII came out earlier than this, and all the boring missions got hotswapped with exciting setpieces that Rockstar was previously known for. Because this is just heavily, agressively mid.
P.S. fuck you Microsoft for bundling the HD versions of the games with the golden guns dlc which you can't turn off. they look ugly and unfitting.