This game is full of fun traditional fromsoftware dungeon crawling in a dank and broken world heavily inspired by Kings Field but From Games in general too. So if you don't go in for first person, slow-paced (initially) gameplay this won't be for you entirely. What's here though takes the creepiness in atmosphere, design, and music Kira is known for most prominently in Lost In Vivo, and jams that skill and passion for creating an original horror world, into a dungeon crawler. Lots of fun weapons to use and upgrade, secrets to find, and sometimes funny others nightmareish stories to come across. If environmental/written lore is your thing there's a lot here. Since the combat is the meat of the game though, I can say it's some of the best of the genre it's attempting to source inspiration from. It surpasses the classics which felt clunky at times with modern smoothness, while still controlling as expected within that deliberately constricted dungeon crawling genre. The main setback at the moment is getting caught awkwardly on some terrain particularly in the fetid mire, but also some awkward bugs such as NPC quest items and being stuck in menus. After finishing it I can definitely say this is my top indie game of 2023 but not without problems that are yet to be fixed.

I've tried a decent amount of previous Monster Hunter games to some success but this is the only one where I've "finished" it rolled credits on the story and reached post credit content. I attribute this to the movement being much faster overall and much more fun via the palamute, grapple options, and just fun movement up there with Zelda BOTW and arguably better. This was also the easiest to get into for me, in terms of intros to the systems a lot of it I could largely ignore besides the basic mechanics. Combat felt more fluid, and combos/abilities easier to pull off. The music and art is great if a little held back in terms of fidelty by the Switch hardware. Most impressive is the 30fps rarely if ever dipping though. Great entry in the Monster Hunting series probably my most recommended besides World and Tri.

This is currently the best modern stealth/action sim on the market. The number of creative options in your hitman toolbelt is a lot, maybe overwhelming for some or even pointless for others who just roll through with a gun to the end. But as much as you want to do is there to do to tackle each mission, have as much fun as you want to it's very much a sandbox each time where you can only have as much fun as you think of and seek out. Which is the beauty of it, someone who runs through and guns down people is going to have a completely different experience to someone who sneaks around without ever being seen, heard, or noticed. Then there's the person that uses a wine grape hydraulic press to kill someone. It's got fun for everyone, if you want a story it's okay I think it does stories very well for humour or intrigue inside of missions particularly Berlin and Dartmoor. Overall the narrative isn't the selling point though it's the experience of being a Hitman and getting fun out of that gameplay which is at the top of it's game here. For now this is the best in class of its genre at a AAA quality.

Really good open world experience. Terrible Zelda game. The lack of any traditional dungeons, puzzles, exploring is a real shame it becomes alarming how densely packed every other Zelda game is against even the beautiful art and direction of this game that spans a massive open space. It's main flaw is the shrines being the main source of side content. Which are okay at times terrible at others and very repetitive often. Motion control based shrines are the worst offender but there's plenty to complain about. I'm not sure it's a good idea to not scale difficulty when it comes to the easy, medium, hard etc challenges fighting the ancients too. It's hard pill to swallow when you're entering a hard shrine in an early zone, and you may have finished the game later, and approach a shrine and it's an easy one. Based on the fact on the exterior every shrine looks the exact same, to scale these by difficulty would be 1. easy and 2. worth doing. In terms of the story it's your standard case of exploring zones hot, cold, desert, water, and fighting a boss in each zone. Sounds good on paper, but they forgot to add the dungeons I think? I'm not sure but the only actual dungeon in the game is at the end which is not good at all. The Divine beasts are very very weak by Zelda standards of dungeons, and puzzling. I really enjoy the gameplay but It felt like I couldn't interact how I would expect in every other Zelda game. Side quests are very bare bones, puzzles barely scratch the surface of the tools you're given, and considering they give you all of the mechanics for puzzling in the first area I would think they planned ways to challenge the player with them and expand on them. But you'll be doing the same; magnet, ice, bomb, and stasis puzzles with little to no variance for the entire game. With no dungeons to use them against you to challenge you. This is the worst Zelda game but one of the best for open world exploration, movement, controls, and the combat is pretty decent. It's just a shame it doesn't use it's greatest strengths to make a Zelda experience proper.

A serious lack of sex mini games in this one so I can't really give it more than 3 stars can I? No but in all seriousness this is a great game TO PLAY but the story is fairly weak in the "personal relationships" between atreus and kratos the whole dad narrative is over played and weak. It wasn't good in Bioshock Infinite, it wasn't amazing in the last of us, and the same applies here. Too much of this God of War is quite literally not a traditional God of War, which is fine, but for me the one-shot camera technique to fit the narrative experience hurts this more than helps it. Fights are good sure, but they could be so much better, which is to say this game does fights as a spectacle (bosses in particular) well but against the sheer number and quality of bosses in past games it pales in comparison to any previous GoW entry. Take a step back into the past of this franchise and look at what it is. You'll see the 180 spin in gameplay, and narrative to shift to a more cinematic or tv like experience has hurt it more than helped. It looks amazing, plays good, but it's the weakest God of War experience. For me this is yet another exploration into the "deep" and "powerful" narrative of a shitty father figure slowly "growing" while also juxtaposed completely with fighting monsters. Me I just like fighting monsters and cool twisting of mythology.

This is a good narrative experience but a lot of the gameplay can be over-immersive. This is an issue of taste, and time, but the moment to moment shooting, looting, and riding feels off in the worst ways. Shooting is very clunky with time appropriate quirks, but I'll never turn aim assist off because it's not engaging when every enemy acts the same. Looting is deliberately slow which is fine! If someone wants that level of "immersion" but a simple gameplay options tweak for fast looting, skinning, picking up and putting down anything etc... now riding is a little different because while the horses may be detailed, sound good, feel good in the controller. They don't actually act like horses, now this goes hand in hand with the ragdoll physics of the game itself but, a horse would not just let itself run into; a person, a tree, a building, a fence a cliff, a drop. I could go on but you get the idea, what makes it worse is your control is only taken away when a crocodile, or extreme cliff or awkward turn appears (awkward in the constraints of how the horse AI operates). These all pile on top of each other in between the stories you find and make and they don't ruin what's here but they nudge you constantly. In the same way the story is held back immensely, for all its attention to detail it only allows for minor player choice in gameplay disappointingly so. Almost every mission will be a shootout and if not one with so many constraints on your movement and freedom its an audible sigh whenever I see an opportunity the game refuses to let me take in case it overrides its narrative direction. This is alleviated somewhat in the open world, but your options are usually fairly binary you either kill or don't help or don't.

Both times I've played this game from start to finish I've done it in one sitting and that definitely means something good I think. I'm not sure the story is all that amazing but Insomniac makes weapons feel really good, hybrids are fun to kill Grim enemy sections are like Ravenholm but more punchy in the combat. I think it falls short towards the end and the objectives aren't amazing, but what's here is a fun linear shooter. A shame it hasn't been returned to since because there's a great deal of potential for a modern take, or retake. A lot of the physics and interactions with enemies and the environment are rock solid even today, just iffy in it's visual blur, browness, and FOV. A remastered trilogy would fit nicely in the current Insomniac catalogue to tide over between the blockbuster releases like Ratchet and Clank or Marvel stuff.

Almost every problem I had with Spider-Man is fixed here, side-quests are a major improvement, stealth is a much better mechanic and faster to re-engage. It's more than that though the characterisation of Miles Morales just had me thinking by the end where was Spider-Mans character in his city? Now this is mainly because this game is an origin story whereas Spider-Man 2018 drops you in because we've been through so many Spider-Man origins now. This game puts forward a character with a better angle and attention to detail with Harlem (the central narrative area), and it felt more down to earth for it. More combat options with the venom punches, but balanced with less gadget options. Overall just a better Spider-Man game for me.

A remaster shouldn't be this bad, in fact a remaster shouldn't be released at all with as much bugs as this. That said as far as my first attempt at playing the series, this was actually much better than mafia 1's remake. Visually more drab and of course lacking a remade games visual polish but that worked in its favour for me somehow? Hard to explain but the brown and dull colours of the late 2000s and early 2010s games works in this seedy 1940s-50s mafia games favour. Damage models on cars are much better than mafia remake, shooting felt better which?? Has a marginal improvement in terms of mission to mission gameplay, but more open world things to do. Set-pieces are better presented, narrative closes in an untidy way as to be expected of a mafia drama. It's as I see it the high point of a series with so much squandered potential which is really disappointing plus the remastered cursed touch it's been given with bugs, glitches, and bad checkpoints just made it all the more a shame.

Controls the most annoyingly between it's predecessors Shadow of the Colossus and Ico but, visually stunning, and when it works it works amazingly. Music and sound is king here, and with possibly one of if not the best realised animal companions in a game? Narrative is unclear and can be picked at if that's what you go in for in the same way Journey is a fun and emotional desert adventure with music, but the pseudo historical drawings doesn't do much for me. Worth playing or at least trying, and if you can't get to grips with the controls at least you tried.

I remember playing the demo for this game around 2017 and thinking this is a kinda neat 2D puzzle game in the vein of Limbo, or Inside. This still holds true but the narrative at the core of this game is worth much more, it gets very heavy emotionally as you progress, a lot more depth in character in text dialogue than a lot of "AAA" games. Definitely underrated as a narrative experience, as a game it's a little mixed with the movement and some bad head scratcher puzzles but overall worth playing.