I'm having trouble seeing what everyone else sees in this game. Maybe it's because I went with a Strength+Endurance Great Sword build, maybe it's because I had covid while playing this and it's affected my mood towards the game. Maybe it just didn't click with me for reasons I'll get into. But whatever the case is, I didn't seem to enjoy Elden Ring as much as others have. And that bothers me.

In previous Souls games, a lot of what made those games interesting for me was that their design involved a lot of interlooping paths. It's similar to how a Metroidvania is designed, where one area is locked off by progression gates that you open to bring about shortcuts for that area. Elden Ring has this, but only in the more linear areas of the game that are there for progression. The rest of the world, in turn, is designed like a regular AAA open world map, albeit with the non-linearity of other Fromsoft games. The non-linearity is great, and I understand the appreciation for it. The open world part is where I get confused with the praise. A lot of it is your standard tropes of open world design; small dungeons, forts, repeating geometry, paths within the terrain that direct you where you need to go, enemies scattered everywhere, reused bosses to fill out open world. All of this is stuff I've already seen before in other games, and in games I love, but just with a Dark Souls twist to it. Which, if you're really, REALLY into open world games, and you're really, REALLY into Souls games, it's probably like chocolate and peanut butter making out for the first time. Which is great, I love seeing those two suck face! But to me, it's a lot more of the same from each. And I'm beginning to become fatigued by it.

This may be Breath of The Wild's fault. My brain may have decided, consciously or unconsciously, that anything that doesn't provide the same feelings that Breath of the Wild has given me for open world games is a lesser experience. Which isn't a fair point of comparison. Breath of the Wild isn't a perfect game, and if someone with different tastes felt the same way about it the way I do with Elden Ring, I think I would understand where their preferences lie. I am in love with exploring. I love interacting with the environment. So climbing everything and seeing where I could go, what I could do, what I could skip, what I could manipulate, was something that appealed greatly to me. Elden Ring is more for the type of person who wants to control a build, customize it, and do crazy damage to tough enemies through their own skill mastery.

But I think there's a point where the Dark Souls and the route they took with the open world design tends to clash. I think it's also, in part, because they've broaded the appeal of the games to a wider number of players. They provide the player with a lot of options to get through the game much easier. Dark Souls has done this before with things like summons, but they usually required some drawbacks like the use of humanity. Here, it's simply a matter of finding the right summon, leveling them up through grinding, and having them do most of the work, or distracting the boss. On top of this, enemies tend to be a lot easier, especially given the fact that you can summon your mount almost whenever. This means normal enemies, mid-boss enemies, and certain boss enemies become a repeated game of using your horse to circle around the boss and hit them until they're dead. And when the horse is essentially an incredibly fast option with the only drawback is if you take enough damage, your horse uses up a healing item, it's by far the best option to pick from. Not to say that the game can't be challenging, because it can be, but the selection pool of my options feels less strategic when all I'm really doing is circling an enemy with my horse and chopping them down as my summon distracts them. The easiest option for the player tends to be the one that the player goes and chooses. It's best to prevent those types of things entering your game if possible. It's like with back stabbing abuse in Dark Souls 1, it's usually the most effective, and would get used a lot. But you still had more interesting options to roll, dodge, parry attacks with Dark Souls 1, with the horse strat, you're just running around.

Maybe in a couple of years, I'll come back to Elden Ring, and give it another chance. I'll try a new build, I'll try different strategies, I'll try not to think about other games. Who knows, maybe I'll like it more. It would not be the first, nor will it be the last, where I go back to a game that I didn't much care for and take away something different. But as of right now, I don't get why people love Elden Ring. And it's going to keep bother me.

Extremely weak season, the changes to the map never felt substantial and I really don't like the chrome gimmick. The overall loot pool is fine other than the Cobra DMR which is one of the most busted weapons Epic has put into the game so far. It felt like they wanted to make this season partially focused on Halloween but the additions made with Fortnitemares were insignificant and wasted potential time for the map to develop. On top of all that, the performance has been atrocious and the game runs worse than it ever has for me. Overall, a filler season to get us to the next Chapter.

The game made a holiday weekend evaporate for me as I sat down and embodied Kratos to become the god of my couch. Platinum in 47 hours, and I was hooked.

A mixed bag when compared to GoW 2018 of pros and cons. Definitely more non playable cutscenes but they come hand in hand with a more epic story. Deeper gameplay, but it feels more like a video game with some obtuse mechanics that pull you out.

If ya make me choose, I think 2018 was a bit more novel and WOW, but Ragnarok is still in the pantheon of Sony first party games that demand to be played. AAA as fuck.

There's nothing I can say about Overwatch 2 that hasn't been said already. This was a massive misstep that strikes down everyone's dwindling faith in Blizzard.

From the start, this should never have been called Overwatch 2. The biggest mistake publishers seem to be making these days is setting unrealistic expectations. If this was marketed as "Overwatch 1.2: A massive patch that introduces new characters, maps, and hero abilities", it would have been a better experience. In fact, calling it a sequel straight up seems like a lie given that this runs on the OW1 client.

An even better way to handle this would have been to just continually update Overwatch 1 and get it to this state gradually. Instead, they abandoned OW1 entirely, leading to rot and meta fatigue, tarnishing the goodwill of the community. They let a good game die a slow and painful death, only to make the revival somehow worse than the original.

I like all the Overwatch 1 aspects of Overwatch 2. I'm happy to play a really polished team-based shooter with a really cool art style and lovable characters. I love the character abilities and ultimates and combining them together to get some really great gameplay moments. I love all the little dialogue moments between characters while waiting for the game to start. Overwatch 1 was one of my favorite games, and I played it a lot during some formative years of my life. It felt like comfort food.

Overwatch 2 on the other hand feels like the same kind of comfort food, but the taste is off, as if its the same ingredients but stale and not properly put together.

5v5 seems weird. I was hoping I'd get used to it, but I haven't. The 1/2/2 meta seems nice at the start when you realize there's less shields and the pace is faster, but that also means you can't play tanks defensively as much anymore. Everything is about getting kills fast. In Open Queue, I rarely see 1/2/2. It's as if the community knows thats not fun. All the damage dealers feels weaker now too. I just don't see as many great ultimates as I used to.

The worst thing though is even if they reversed the changes to the meta and the characters, I still don't think I'd be motivated to play. By abandoning OW1, they allowed a lot of players to get tired and leave, and OW2 isn't big enough or revolutionary enough, or generating enough buzz for them to want to come back. The people I loved playing OW1 with aren't going to come back to this. The time has passed. On top of that, the new ranking system that replaces the SR system isn't nearly as satisfying to work through. There's no clear indication of progress until 7 wins and that hurts the overall experience.

Overwatch 1 should have been kept alive and Overwatch 2 (at least without the PVE) should not have existed. Bring Jeff Kaplan back!

I quite liked and was surprised with the first Mario Rabbids, enough to be excited for the follow up here. Don't get me wrong, I played the full game and basically did a 100% run. It was engaging, commanded me to play more, and had improvements from the first in terms of combat. By those metrics this was a "good" game. However most of my playthrough felt less like I was having joy, and more like I was doing work. The fun here is in the battles. Not the overworld. Not the platforming puzzles. Not the story. Definitely not, and never will be, the rabbids. I actually don't know why I stayed committed through to fully 100%, because when loading back up the original I think that would be my recommendation out of the two games.

Shadows of Rose was a nice little revisit to RE8. I like how they emphasize survival horror a little more than in the original game. I also think the game is gorgeous looking. Maybe one of the best looking games I’ve played. And for me, the prettiness kinda makes up for having to play through the same rooms that we already did in the base game. Which I was a little split on actually. I thought it was cool to revisit the environments I really liked like the demitrescu castle but then when we had to revisit other environments that I didn’t care for too much, I kinda wished for something new. But yeah overall it was cool. It was like a RE8 Best Hits album. Oh and what everyone is saying is correct, there is a very scary part in it lmao. It was so scary that I was falling asleep while playing it and then the scary part started and it woke me the fuck up lol. 3rd person mode is way better for this btw imo tbh.

Did I expect the next game in the Dishonored series to be a PS5 launch title about dismantling an impressionist time cult? No, not really. But now I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Deathloop is a special game in that it continually gave me more than I asked for. Traversal that feels great? Check, but here are items and upgrades that really bust movement wide open. A story that justifies the game’s looping premise? For sure, but we’ll also give you knockout performances in every role and some real depth to each character if you’re willing to dig. Levels that feel purposeful and lived in? A tall ask but we’ll do that and make each space feel unique, interesting, and have at least three different versions. It’s a deceptively deep experience. At first what feels like Prey quickly gives way to Dishonored–all of which makes sense given Arkane Lyon’s tenure–but as you tug at each thread of the game, more and more reveals itself creating this standout rougelite action RPG experience that’s unlike anything else I’ve ever played. Okay, so that’s only sort of true. It’s like a TON of things I’ve played before but in the best of ways. The way it threads together the lineage of immersive first-person action games with an exceptional polish makes everything feel fresh.

Deathloop is its own marvel as much as it is the logical next step for Arkane as a studio.

I really thought this was fun. The story was entertaining enough, and the combat is good enough to keep you interested for the duration of the game. Some minuses are all the collectibles, and I don't really think the light RPG mechanincs serve the game well.

For short, it's a good game in the HALO series, but certainly not the best one. (Also, I've only played the singeplayer since multiplayer doesn't interest me much). You can get it on Gamepass if you want to try it out but not commit too much money.

I was never big on Metroid games. I tried many of them before on previous consoles, but they never really clicked with me.
Metroid Dread was different, I got hooked on it. Even though it took me a lot of time to finish it I still enjoyed it a lot.
The gameplay is very nice, the atmosphere is great, the fights, the dread.
Although there are some things that I didn't love they aren't that big to bring down the game that much.
This game was a pleasant surprise, I may play the next entry after all (if there even is one)

This was a fun little puzzle game with very nice physics that were fun to use. Some of the later levels were actually so difficult that I had to take a break from the game for a while before going back to try again because I just couldn't figure it out. The physics are fun to use and it is extremally fun to just go around and mess up the whole level, destroying everything you can in the wackiest ways you can think of.

There is also a fair bit of collectible cosmetics for your character that you can work on if you want to, but some of them can be easy to find but hard to reach, making a handful of them very antagonizing. I've also heard that multiplayer is extremely fun to play on here and I can imagine it being that way, but I have yet to try it myself.

(5-year-old's review, typed by her dad)

You get to go on a slide and at the end you gotta beat Bowser, because you get to MOVE and MOVE if there's turns, and also there's a slide in the snowy place!

[Dad's note: She would use the Wii U gamepad to go do the secret slide in Peach's Castle over and over again, every day for the entire summer of 2020]