Very similar to West of Loathing, with the same good writing and style of gameplay. The combat didn't feel great - most of the interesting things to do were on the first turn, and by the end of the game many encounters just were played out the same way over and over. I also felt that the over-abundance of equipment made it tricky to figure out the best equipment for any one time. One final issue was that the game dragged out in the end for me, there were a few places where the RNG caused some items I needed to advance to not spawn for a long time.

It feels like if the game was a bit tighter and shorter that it would have been better. The writing is fun - and that's the primary reason to play this one.

I liked the twists to the turn based combat from the last game - and in general it was a fairly fun game.

Navigating the overworld wasn't as fun, and it got to be a bit too finicky (especially when trying to figure out how to get to some of the quests in the late world).

I also wish the time to level up the characters was a bit shorter, and that the level cap of 30 was higher. Especially since many of the abilities take multiple level ups to unlock, it felt like it took a long time to unlock new abilities for the characters. I also hit the level cap before the end of the game, so no new mechanics were available to me as I finished it up.

Overall, I found the game itself enjoyable if somewhat repetitive.

A fun enough auto-shooter, although I wish there was a bit more variety and perhaps some meta-progression to work toward. It was great how each character has very different rules - which forces you to change up your strategy for each one. I also liked how the RNG biases toward decisions you've already made, so you can influence what kinds of build you would like to have while still retaining some level of randomness.

I do wish that there was more variety in terms of the map - both the physical map and the types and waves of enemies that spawn. As it is, you play each character on the same map and the enemy waves are the same each time, which creates a feeling of repetitiveness. I also wish there was some sort of meta-progression. While each character you win with typically unlocks a new weapon, that wasn't enough to make it feel like I was growing with each run as is common in rouge-lites.

This is the kind of game that is best played if you have 30 minutes here or 30 minutes there to put in a run, rather than playing it straight all the way through. It's quite fun in short bursts, but rather grindy when played in longer sessions.

This is very much a Yakuza game, so it's baseline is "good". All that you would expect - serious main story, goofy side stories, mahjong, is here.

It definitely shows that this is a remake of an older PS3 era game - it's a bit clunkier than you would expect from a more modern game (lots of loading when going into buildings just as one example). I was also not in love with the gun combat styles (either the straight out gun one or the Wild Dancer one), but Brawler and especially Swordsman were good fun.

I found the plot a bit hard to follow, but that's also because I am used to these characters from other games, and I didn't do a great job of associating familiar faces with new names.

Overall, a solid game, just not one of my favorites in the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series.

Insomniac has taken the formula from the first two games and honed it down to near perfection here. Despite increasing the map size, this actually feels much less Ubisoft open-world-checklist than the first Spider-Man game did. Traversal continues to be tremendous fun, and the addition of the ability to fly makes moving around the larger map fun all unto itself. Despite how impressive the fast travel system is, I rarely wanted to use it. (And, I must say, having the map zoom in to an arbitrary location in the city - no matter how far from where you are it is - and morph into the actual playable city is incredibly impressive).

The combat is similar from the previous entries, and switching between Miles and Peter and using their different abilities kept things fresh and prevented the minute-to-minute action from getting stale. The best way I can think of to describe the combat is that it is techincal, but you get into a flow state with it, moving between your different targets and abilities. In fact, typically when I felt like I was falling out of that flow state is when I would then find myself losing the fight. In general the difficulty was right on point as well, with only the Unidentified Target missions feeling like they were a bit too tricky.

The story was decent, and I appreciate the way that it integrated several ongoing plot lines for other villains through the game (similar to how the first two games did it).

 Boss fights did feel a bit same-y, all of them basically taking two phases to get through, and I didn't have as much fun fighting the final type of enemies the game introduces -- but aside from that, I really enjoyed this game.

I'd never played a Pikmin game before, but I enjoyed Tinykin last year, so I was keen to try this one out. It was a very fun chill game, while I enjoyed the occasional Dandori challenge I found just gathering things in the overworld to be relaxing and fun.

I completed the extra two levels, but wound up bailing out when I got to Olimar's challenge because that was much more focused on the Dandori style challenge of doing things as optimally as possible. While I can see the fun in that, it ran counter to the more relaxed way I was enjoying the game.

My understanding is that the Olimar story is more like how the first 3 Pikmin games were, so I'm not totally inclined to go pick those up at the moment.

The core gameplay of this game is so strong that I'm giving it 5 stars, even though there are obvious areas for improvement. Going into this, I had heard that the card combat was solid, but that 2/3 of the game was Persona style conversations with your teammates. Superficially, that's true. However, the loop of:

1. Mornings: prep for the upcoming battle - gather new cards, strengthen existing cards, train with one of your teammates.
2. Combat: turn based, deck-building, sublime.
3. Evenings: activities that strengthen the team to help you level up for the next day.

Really worked well for me. To the point where more than once I decided to play "just one more day" even though the time on the clock told me I would regret that decision in the morning.

Sure, the graphics aren't great, there were quite a few bugs (including one that made the Clean Sweep task impossible to finish), some of the DLC achievements won't unlock, the actual Abby grounds tasks felt underdeveloped, the fact that the missions level with you neutered that feeling of progression, there's a lot to improve. But that core gameplay was so fun, that it really overcame the parts that were lacking for me.

Normally I would say that this means it sets up really well for a sequel where the team at Firaxis could expand upon what they did well here and improve on the areas that need help. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that this game did very well so my hopes for that are muted.

There seemed to be a lot of praise for Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope while this one got burried. For my money, Sparks of Hope was fine but wore out its welcome, while Midnight Suns kept growing stronger as it went on.