Yakuza 2 is very obviously a game that tries a Icarus stunt and I don't think it reaches the sun how it should have done, the game is better than the first one on a macroscopic level but the devil is in the details and the microscopic level actually shows that the first one is more consistent game all across the game, the story is more complex but its execution is messier, the gameplay is better but some of its fight can be really a chore given some harder spikes, the side content is bloated and not really consistently interesting with some side content being a downright chore or simply not really interesting, I wanted to like this one more than the first one but simply I can't, which is a shame because it could have touched the sun but it still reached very far and it's a damn good achievement, the game has an amazing vibe a mostly (MOSTLY) good pacing, the story is great when it doesn't get messy and kamurocho is still a great place to bum around in, both Yakuza on PS2 are really amazing games damn easy to recommend.

The music and aesthetics of this game are really great. Richter's character design is iconic, and I especially love how he looks in the anime-style cutscenes, which are also a cool touch.

Gameplay is pretty fun, if a bit frustrating because I suck at old platformers like these. Still, the game is pretty short so the difficulty doesn't bother me all that much. There's also a decent amount of side stuff because of the branching paths, so you can go the straightforward route or explore a little bit. Overall, just a really cool game.

Omori is a terrible game. Not only is the gameplay sleep inducing for a horror game that's supposed to keep you on your toes, the cast of characters is also abhorrent; each one of them showing no purpose to the narrative and the worst one being the main character Sunny. He starts out as someone who wants to find his sister, but when the main twist actually happens, it's like he's never even changed. He's the same person before and after his "development." Overall a horrible game if you want a game like this, but actually checks all the boxes on what makes a story about coping with death amazing.

Play SILENT HILL 2.

One of the best roguelikes you can get on the Steam Deck. Super relaxing, feels good on controller, and has an excellent job system that really snowballs into something special as you play the game.

My completed run (Hardcore mode) took about 8 hours with a Soulkeeper/Floramancer (with a touch of budoka to increase my damage). Crazy summoner archer build that when played right let me have 5-6 summons on screen absolutely shredding shit. The final boss was tough, but I managed it blind just barely.

So many ideas for replayability and challenge runs (Solo, no class changing, etc) as well as Ronin mode makes this a game you could easily sink 100 hours into.. For only about 10 bucks on sale!

My only gripe with the game is I feel Heroic mode (The Roguelite mode) is a bit too focused on preparing for the next run vs enjoying your current. That's why I decided to play the game on Hardcore instead. I could also see the appeal of playing the game on Adventure and enjoying it more as a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon-esque adventure, there's plenty of content here to sink your teeth into even playing withoiut permadeath.

Highly recommend this one if you enjoy grid-based RPGs of any time, especially roguelikes and class-system enjoyers.

There are some cases where a clone exceeds what its inspiration is. In Ghost Rider’s case that isn’t hard, as Devil may Cry is an atrocious series. In terms of its other inspiration, God of war, it falls short, but impresses with what it has.

Game play is divided into two segments, on foot and bike levels.

Before I begin, I highly advise that you save and reload in the first level over and over to fully max out ghost rider before continuing with your play through, the game is at its best when you are fully upgraded with a full move set.

I also implore you to not play this on anything higher than normal. The damage scaling on hard or higher is ludicrous, you’ll be getting 2-5 shotted nonstop and it will do nothing to instill you in the required rhythm the on foot combat requires, or the quick reflexes of the bike levels.

Combat in Ghost Rider is fun and competent, unlike DMC, you actually have a reason to get a high style rating even after you are maxed out, when you get a B rank, the size of your attacks hit boxes are extended, making it imperative that you maintain a high rank (getting hit resets it to zero). You also only get green orbs for your screen nuke when you have a style ranking on screen, with more rewarded the higher the rank. It’s astonishing but also hilarious how a pathetically shallow mechanic was made genuinely useful here.

As for said screen nuke, don’t be afraid to use it! The game’s waves after waves of enemies are designed around you firing off a link charge once the meter is full to quickly build style, which can then be quickly refilled with green orbs enemies leave behind. This makes combat frantic and tense, and solves the issue most games have with screen nukes where you are never sure when to use it.

You also have this games take on Devil Trigger, named Retribution mode here. It’s best saved for dealing with large brute demons, as they normally don’t stagger when hit. If you are being liberal with your screen nukes and maintaining high style, your spirit gauge will fill very fast and you will never have to worry about being SOL to use it.

As for your regular attacks, they all feel useful. All of them are just fast enough to feel smooth, but not so much that it ruins game balance. Like God of war, there is a heavy emphasis on crowd control. You’ll need to be using strings like triangle X2 > square > triangle to supercharge your style meter to level B, and for solo foes, it’s best to launch them away with basic combos or use strings like squarex2 > triangle X2 to knock them aside so you can pull off a risky taunt that leaves you wide open but fills an entire meter of style, or execute a safe finishing prompt by pressing circle to avoid enemy attacks with I-frames. By using your Nukes, Retribution, Finishers, and crowd controlling regular attacks, the wave after wave of enemies you’ll be dealing with never feels tedious at any point due to the game forcing you to use these well designed tools.

There are also skill check enemies that have barriers around them where you can not damage them unless you have a certain style level, further incentivizing you to learn how combat should be played rather than just whacking the triangle button in a hallway. There is no pretentious, shallow. and pointless mechanical bloat like DMC here. You must learn the game to survive.

In terms of enemy design the game makes up for it’s low budget by expecting you to rely on audio cues snyched to decent animations. Each enemy has a distinct sound you’ll need to memorize so you can block or dodge accordingly. Making combat feel much more involved. All regular enemies aside from brutes only have one attack, which have competent animations and are perfectly synched to audio cues, so memorization comes quickly. Your Dodges also have zero i-frames, so you can not abuse holding the right stick, Your recovery animation is also a little slow, so poor dodging can rightfully punish you as well.

Blocking is the fastest animation in your toolkit, but like God of war the game balances this out by making it so only the first two hits of your strings can be block canceled, meaning that while you must use a variety of moves to maintain high style and keep those larger hit boxes, you also need to know when to use your long, non cancelable and powerful last button inputs, making any instance of button mashing incredibly punishable. Whacking triangle and dodging every blue moon will not work here, you need to actually be aware of your attack animations and properly weigh the risks. A movie licensed game going this far to make sure they have smart combat is incredibly commendable.

Your shot gun is also an incredibly useful tool. From stopping an enemy dead in their tracks, or opening up space so you can execute risky moves, It should always be in your rotation, and the fact that it also uses up one bar of retribution is a great balancing act, as you somewhat need to weigh the risks of creating space to survive, or eating the hit and saving your meter for brutes.

The game does unfortunately lack a good screen shake effect, so while attacks feel fine to execute, they lack the sheer raw power of God of war or the finesse and skillful swiftness of Ninja Gaiden. Enemy damage animations are good enough that this is mitigated somewhat. But the combat is definitely missing that last bit of torque to make it truly incredible, rather than just great here.


While combat is carried by its strong rhythm, level design for the on foot segments is non existent. You’ll be going north-south and then, in a funny coincidence, going south-north DMC4 style in order to pad out the games length. Thankfully when going backwards, the game does have different enemy sets, and you can also ignore most of them during the back tracking if you want to get over the level quickly. The game was originally planned to have puzzles in the levels, but due to the film being pushed up to February of 2007, these had to be cut out. It’s unfortunate that the level design had to be left with hallways, but at the very least the combat makes up for it.


Breaking up the game play for variety, and authenticity to the character, are motorcycle levels, These are simple, fun segments that don’t over stay their welcome and make ghost rider feel unstoppable as you light up enemies with homing shots, power slide under rails, and make massive jumps over gaps. There is some trial and error in later levels, as the steering is very sensitive and knowing when to double jump, or lean forward to not run into walls can be annoying, but the track design is so well telegraphed and laid out that knowing where to land is never an issue, ramps will have huge arrows and rails have orangish red piping to let you know well ahead of time how to react. Once you nail down the timings after a few retries, it becomes and absolute joy to chain together power slides and huge jumps for the segments 2-7 minute play time.

While I did recommend earlier that you should reload your saves in the first level to fully max out, so long as you maintain a good style meter, you’ll have plenty of souls to spend on upgrades, though you’re better off doing as a I recommended and using those extra souls for unlocking the neat bonuses like concept art, behind the scenes videos on the games development, and a random assortment of comics picked from the Johnny Blaze era of the character. These bonuses are nice extras that very few licensed games would even bother trying to include, so it’s awesome they are here.

The game does suffer unfortunately from very poor boss fights. For the on foot ones, you will simply run around and wait till a boss makes themselves vulnerable, and then wail on them with a screen nuke or retribution, Black Heart is the worst offender of this, as he is one of those god awful “Giant creature who slams down fists” fights that plagued video games in the late 2000s. The two bike boss fights don’t fair much better, as you’ll just wail on circle when chasing Vengeance, or dodge a few slow attacks from Black-Out before again wailing on circle.

When you finish the game, you unlock Blade as a playable character , and while it’s great that he has his own move set, he only has 4 combos in his kit and no Retribution or screen nukes. Making all of the combat encounters an absolute slog as you’ll have no way of getting out of tight jams with a well timed screen Nuke or Retribution. The game does try and balance this by giving blade decently larger style gains, a quicker taunt animation, and the ability to drain health from stunned enemies by pressing circle, but it is ultimately a waste of time. If blade had his own levels designed around him, this could be a great bonus, but instead, it comes of as an unfinished concept at best.

You also unlock cheats when you finish the game, though the only one worth mentioning here is Turbo mode. Just like DMC, Turbo mode destroys the game balance due to the fact that enemies are not designed around your increased attack animation speed, like wise, your timing for blocks and dodges are thrown off as the audio cues and animations do not line up properly. The increased speed also destroys the timing for jumps and slides when playing the motorcycle sections, meaning you have to annoyingly retrain your brain if you wish to do these segments with this toggled on. Hilariously, Turbo mode does make playing as Blade far less tedious due to the increased game speed ,as it makes his light attacks borderline unstoppable, and it does make the slow chugging menus far smoother, but the breaking of game mechanics is not worth your time.

The story is basic and uninteresting. Presented with cheap, overly grainy, motion comic cut scenes. Mephisto needs Ghost Rider to round up demons who have escaped from hell that he can not go after due to his agreement with heaven, you then go to location after location, mop the floor with a villain, and then repeat until surprise surprise, Mephisto was wanting to trigger the apocalypse the entire time and needed Ghost Rider to unknowingly draw a glyph with the flames of his bike. You don’t actually fight Mephisto though as Black Heart comes out of nowhere, somehow seals him away, and then you fight him in an incredibly mediocre final boss fight. At the very least the game play is mostly solid enough sans boss fights that you can keep coming back on replays for a good time, cause the story sure as shit isn’t the reason why.

Graphically the game impresses. Bloom is used intelligently to make hellfire glow eerily, and textures are solid, though a bit flat in places. Environments often have massive moving background structures, like gigantic gears in hell, a fire breathing skull at the circus, and massive pipes with huge waterfalls for example. You also have some good looking particle effects, like dust blowing in San Venganza, dry ice mist in the government facility, and sparks when in hell.

While the level design on foot is borderline non existent, the game makes up for this in location variety. From the creepy, industrial prison that is hell, the dilapidated and abandoned wild west town of Sanvenganza, the rusted out laboratories of the military base, and the macabre circus, you won’t be wanting for location variety. All of this is presented with stylish fixed camera angles that frame a world under siege in a beautiful way.

Menus are OK looking, but definitely look like a “good enough” job, you may get a giggle out of the PNG of Sam Elliot in the upgrade menu, but the slow main menu with a grainy FMV will get annoying every time you launch the game, as said FMV makes it chug with every confirm or back button press.

The game mostly runs at a very smooth 60FPS, but it can drop to the low 40s when over 8 enemies are on screen during on foot levels, or heavy density sections of the motorcycle levels, these drops thankfully only last a few seconds, but can feel quite jarring when they happen.

Musically the game kicks ass. Composed by Timo Baker, who if you’re in your mid 20s-early 30s you may recognize as the man who did the music for River Monsters on the Discovery channel, you’ll get a fantastic duo of ambient hellish tracks and fast paced demonic rock. The game gives a great first impression with both tracks in “Arrival in hell”, the ambient version features minimal instruments and notes, with loud short horns instilling a sense of unease, and reverb heavy painful moans letting you know you are in the land of the damned. When combat kicks in, your drawn in to a fast paced guitar solo frenzy, with steady drums hyping you up for the proper rhythm for combat. Other tracks that stand out are the strum heavy sounds of “Perimeter breach (fight)”, the electronic wubs of “In Black-Outs Wake”, and the wild west rock rich “Lightning strikes”.

There is a good amount to like in Ghost rider, you have a very intelligently designed combat system that requires full memorization of your small but powerful toolset to survive, cool motorcycle levels that are a good 7 minute power trip, great visuals and an excellent sound track. And while it is marred by 50% mediocre unlockable content, empty hallway level design, mediocre at best and bad at worst boss fights, and a boring by the numbers plot, It’s still a great hack and slash in spite of those flaws and well worth the 2-3 hours you’ll put in.

8/10.

Hinokami Chronicles has set a sad and potentially depressing precedent to me that CC2 can’t even live up to their own standards of a basic but enjoyable display of spectacle.

As someone who absolutely adores the manga (yes the manga, the anime is an adaption, it is not Koyoharu Gotouge’s work) I knew going in that since this is based on Ufotable’s terrible anime adaption, I shouldn’t be expecting it to capture everything that made the manga such a great read. But even people who like the adaption will be let down here.


Asking for an Anime licensed arena fighter to re tell the story it’s based on well is already asking for a bit much, but I didn’t expect CC2 to be so lackadaisical that pivotal scenes like Sanmei testing Nezuko’s resolve to be shoved in lazy flashback slide shows using stills from the anime with adobe after effects filters slapped on top. The usual issues of just telling the cliff notes version of the plot that most of these games suffer from is also on full display here, but the models here don’t even have canned animations for emotions either, making the story feel extra cheap in the process.

You also get these pseudo omakes that have some charming low rate frame animations to them, but they’re just a different framing device for the same lazy slideshows made to save money.

Given this is aimed at people who are fans of Ufotable’s poor anime adaption, I expected that the cut scenes would at least carry over some of the goofy faces and non sequiturs that make the manga so enjoyable, as that is one thing the horrible anime adaption gets mostly correct. Sadly you’ll barely see them aside from a handful of major moments of humour that just couldn’t be cut, (like Zenitsu’s rant about how the boys aren’t exploiting getting nursed by good looking girls enough) so you’ll just be bombarded by bland, lazy stiff cut scenes for around 8 hours.

Due to the hacked up cliff notes approach, the pacing is sometimes even worse than the anime adaption, as the story constantly gets in the way of the game play with scenes that drag. Many scenes and events the anime fucks up by extending them for far too long over several episodes (Like the 1st training arc, which in the manga is at most a 20 minute read) is fucked up in the opposite direction by being overly brief and never having time to breathe.

Game play wise you’ll get an attempt at level design, but the implementation is so astoundingly minimal and low effort it borders on Devil May Cry levels of terrible. Aside from the collectible fragments (that unlock more slideshows) and paltry points globs you can spend in a shop, You’ll just be running through a flat hallway to point B marked on your map so you never have to worry about getting lost (you wouldn’t anyway cause you always go north).

This is also sometimes turned into boring slow walking sections, with Zenitsu’s two segments being insufferable. Yes, he is supposed to be immature and annoying and obnoxious, but what works in a manga panel that you can read through in around 12 seconds becomes borderline unplayable in a video game when you need to navigate him through a hallway and he frequently stops in place to have screaming fits. When creating a licensed game it is imperative that developers know exactly what won’t translate well to a video game. I am baffled that CC2 decided that a character that is intended to be insufferable should have two scripted segments where he annoys you cause of misplaced authenticity, this could have been replaced by something actually fun like Inosuke shoulder charging through walls, but that would probably cost too much money.

Combat is thankfully enjoyable. It’s even more simplified than the Storm series was but that’s not a bad thing as pure spectacle is the goal here. Unlike the storm games matches aren’t absolute hell on higher difficulties due to substitution spam being non existent. Chaining infinite combos is impossible thanks to a smart blow back timer that expires after around 4 seconds, and you have to weigh the risks of calling in your tag partner to rescue you from a combo as it will use up both of their assist slots and put you at a disadvantage for around 10 seconds.

Damage scaling is also incredibly well done, once your combo hits around 15 you start doing chip damage, you can either make the most of this by chaining your ult after hit stun, or use your forward special to build even more meter for a boost or another ult, or your neutral special to send them flying so you can recharge your energy. The flow of matches is incredibly fast thanks to no substitution spam, and the risk of boosting and surging for a somewhat glass canon approach with super armour, or playing it safe to chain an alt is very thrilling.

You do have a smash bros style panel unlock system in that you can either spend points to unlock stuff like music tracks, online profile banners and the like early, or you can collect exclamation points and get high ranks in story mode fights to unlock them at no charge, this would be a fine mechanic if the main way of grinding points wasn’t online matches, as I can attest at the time of writing this, the servers are completely dead. I tried searching during peak hours in my timezone, and late at night for people in Asia and Europe, and still found no one. While there is a good offline fail safe for unlocking stuff, the tedium sets in fast if you choose either method.

If you bought the digital deluxe edition, you would be gifted 8k, I highly recommend spending that on the two stages on chapters 8’s panel (It’s rather difficult chapter to S Rank), as characters will just be unlocked naturally and most of the stages are tied to bland generic demon matches after a chapter is completed that you can mop up later with OP characters like Hinokami Tanjiro.

Thankfully the game does have a good ratio of CC2’s fun boss fights. All five of them have great exaggerated tells and the reward of exploiting their openings to whittle down their health to get to the incredibly well animated QTE segments never gets old.

Rounding off the game play is two very basic rhythm mini games that are a fun novelty at first, but you’ll end up saying “fuck it” when you find out two stages are locked behind S ranking the hard versions and just want to spend points on them instead.


The visuals as expected of CC2 are outstanding. The anime’s more solid coloured and rounded designs translate to a video game perfectly. Environments do cut a few more corners with some rather basic or outright flat textures in places, but strong lighting covers up these weaknesses unless you really look for them. The series iconic elemental beams of motion look like a Ukiyo-e painting in motion, with graceful front, side and back flips making combat feel incredibly satisfying. The QTE segments look outstanding as expected, with great mixes of motion blur and quick camera cuts to convey power scaling.

Body language is also captured perfectly. Inosuke’s are wild, raw and brutish, Nezuko’s are feral and animalistic, Shinobu’s are graceful and calm etc.

Musically the game sounds almost exactly the same as the Storm series. So while you won’t remember any tracks in particular, you will enjoy the competency of the strong string sections, prominent Taiko drums and serene Shakuhachi’s


If you like Demon Slayer, you’ll get some enjoyment out of the combat and well translated feel of the characters when playing with them. As well as the strong fidelity and competent music. Unfortunately the story is a hackneyed cliff notes adaption of an already bad anime adaption of an exceptional manga. If you’ve already read the manga, this is really only worth your time if you just want to fuck around with a character in vs mode you enjoy from the first half of the story. Compared to CC2’s previous efforts, it’s incredibly cheap, and even if you really enjoy the source material, it’s an ultimately mediocre game.

5/10

Cute little Zelda-like that feels like asdfmovie turned into a video game. Brought me back to that weird time of the internet and kind of loved it.

You can do basically everything in the game in about 3 or 4 hours, definetly the perfect kind of quick game to play on Game Pass over the course of a day or two.

Some of the mechanics can feel kind of jank, and unfortunately on Xbox three of the achievements are just flat out broken (such a shame cause this is one of the easiest and most pleasant max achievements I've ever had in a game).

The lag on the very first screen of the game also got worse and worse every time you did an objective, I have no idea why it happens and it only effects the first screen of the game. Heard neither of those issues exist on PC

Super charming and hilarious game from start to finish, if you have Game Pass, no real reason not to play this. If not, I'd probably only get it if you could get it for like less than 5$.

EDIT: Went onto PC Game Pass and got the last two achievements on there, took me about an hour and was worth it lol. Going through the game a second time I noticed some cool story beats too. Man what a weird game lol