I think that games are at their best when the main thing you're doing in them is the most fun. And that's why a lot of open world games miss the mark for me. The primary gameplay in most of these kinds of games is traversing the environment. And boy does Sunset Overdrive absolutely nail this.

Bouncing, dashing and grinding in Sunset Overdrive is just an absolute blast. It always felt exhilarating to zip through the city full of orange goblins. The grind rails spread around the city remind me a lot of Bioshock Infinite's Skyhook system except actually good and well realized.

Somehow I went through all these years without anyone telling me that Sunset Overdrive is a stealth Ratchet and Clank reboot. It really feels like the design culmination of all the crass humor and weapon systems from the prior R&C games. Most of the guns feel like they're straight ripped out of R&C (and this is a VERY good thing). I can't help but compare Sunset Overdrive to other games it seems. As another game it made me think of is Saints Row 4. It feels like the natural step up from that. I'd argue that Sunset Overdrive does most of what Saints Row 4 does much better though. The silly humor and 4th wall stuff is very hit and miss but it hits enough times to make the game endearing.

I was let down slightly by Sunset Overdrive's repetitive mission structure. It feels like the game is maybe 1/4 too long. The core gameplay is fun enough that even doing monotonous tasks feels good but there are just so many "grab x amount of items across 5 areas of the map" missions.

All in all, Sunset Overdrive is a fluid score chasing thrill ride that builds on Insomniac's strengths as a studio (while also expanding into an open world which massively helped them build Spider-Man). A very unique and rad game.

Completed an 18 hour playthrough with all Side Missions done and Gold Rank on all Challenges.

Oh wow this is way more fun that I remembered it being.

It's a big dumb fun military shooter that never takes itself too seriously like its predecessor does. The fast paced globe-trotting nature of the game made it so I never felt bored.

The remaster aspect is also done incredibly well. They improved the graphics so much that it looks like a modern game. So yeah. I had a real fun time with this one.

Awesome soundtrack and sprites make this brawler such a vibe.

I'm not a huge fan of brawlers to begin with, so the gameplay, while good, was nothing that blew me away.

A fun diversion for an hour or two that's even better with friends.

I went in with an open mind and Saints Row 2022 still managed to be worse than anything I could have expected.

The narrative isn't silly enough to justify how nonsensical a lot of the characters and world stuff are. It's also not grounded enough for me to care about the stakes it puts it's characters through. I never once cared for the dialogue spouted by the Ryan Reynolds wanabe protagonist. It's so so dull.

The gameplay is just tired third person shooter stuff, but it can't even get that right. Since SR 2022 feels notably worse than 10 year old games. Nothing much of value here.

I haven't even mentioned bugs yet. I'm usually someone who is very generous for bugs and glitches because they're so often either funny or non-intrusive. The bugs in Saints Row just mean core things like opening car doors won't work until you reboot your console. FUN STUFF.

I played 50 hours of this in coop only to have a trophy glitch on me. Dogshit game.

Final Mix version on PS4

Kingdom Hearts has an incredible foundation held back by so many wacky design decisions. The levels all feel really small and rely on very specific backtracking. The rooms also constantly respawn enemies and the game gives you no indication on where you’re supposed to go. I got stuck and frustrated so many times due to this. Oh and don’t get me started on the Gummi ship stuff. The editor is terrible and so is controlling the ship. My god is it bad.

And yet despite all that, I had a good time. The story is told in such an earnest way with characters that are so sincere that I couldn’t help but get enraptured by it all. Visiting the different Disney worlds always felt exciting and I got the sense that Nomura really cared about all these franchises. Every Disney character felt like such an authentic version of that character. It’s great.

Kingdom Hearts is a game that feels stuck between ambition and simplicity. I appreciate that it exists and I’m excited to see how this series evolves.

I'm stuck between a 3/5 or 3.5/5. Game feels like it's right in the middle of the two.

Where to even start with this one?

First of all, it's worth mentioning that the game had an embarrassing hate campaign against it for the past year. The part that bothered me the most is the whole "this game is disrespectful to Kevin Conroy" takes I kept seeing (and still do on this website even). It's gross and completely unwarranted. Batman isn't a real person. Grow up. Another portion of the hate campaign was mostly directed at the GaaS aspects of the game. Which is, to be honest, understandable. GaaS games have taken over the industry and it really felt like Suicide Squad was the outlet for the pent-up frustrations many had with that model. I get it.

So a week ago, me and a friend of mine decided to buy Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. We kind of got it to hate-play it to be honest. While I wasn't really onboard with the people irrationally upset about heroes dying, I am very tired with GaaS stuff, so I didn't expect this to be my cup of tea.

My first impression with the game was how incredible the production values are. The character models for the squad are industry best and the facial capture puts recent AAA games like Spider-Man to absolute shame. This is something that really helps the humor. There's a lot of physical humor that comes from seeing a character (usually Boomerang) making very human facial expressions when reacting. It's awesome and something I'm not used to seeing outside of Naughty Dog games. So yeah, all the production stuff, including the genuinely great voice acting really lends a legitimacy to the story campaign.

But how does it play? Again, something that surprised me. It plays really damn well. All four squad members have complimentary playstyles and feel truly completely different from one another. I mostly played as Capatain Boomerang and god was the traversal ever fun with him. Zooming past the environments with a teleporting boomerang is great. The movement is a highlight and it was always fun to get around Metropolis.

Likewise, the shooting mechanics are extremely well thought out. The shield breaking melees mixed in with maybe the best third person shooter mechanics I've used in a decade come together to make the game feel like a spiritual successor to Crackdown and Sunset overdrive. Everything feels punchy and the game throws tons of enemies at you. Especially coop, the campaign shines.

The story is nothing really special but I did appreciate the character moments sprinkled throughout. Not every joke works but it's a game that's frequently funny. Captain Boomerang is my kind of dumb degenerate.

For as great as the core mechanics are, there are parts of this game that just puzzle me. First of all, the map. Metropolis is extremely fleshed out and detailed but there's not much of value to do in it. The artists at Rockstead cooked up a great looking world but it's just there. The amount of detail feels superfluous.

The main issue I have though is the level design. It's really uninspired and almost always uninteresting. It's not to say it can't be fun. It's often very fun because the core mechanics are so great. But like, there's 3-4 mission templates that they just re-use the entire game. They're not that interesting. Sometimes it gets broken up by a cool boss fight (Green Lantern fight is awesome) but otherwise, it's really standard fare.

And then there's endgame stuff which I'm not factoring much into my rating. It's there. It's repetitive. That's what a live service game is. I played this game as a story campaign game and got damn near 40 hours out of it. For me, that's enough. And I think that on those merits, SS succeeds as a fun time.

If the level design was brought up to the standards of the core gameplay loop, I genuinely think this game would be a 4/5 or even higher. I think in today's age, too many devs are trying to strike gold with GaaS and it's hurting the quality of the game. Suicide Squad is nowhere near as bad as internet commenters will try to convince you. There's a good game here, if you approach it with an open mind.

AI: The Somnium Files - Nirvana Initiative is a magician's trick.

Every twist or interesting plot turn is only there because characters are arbitrarily and deliberately withholding information for sole purpose of making the narrative more "mysterious". This game is so egregious in this regard it's insane. Don't even get me started on the amount of times amnesia is used to justify why certain characters don't speak up at certain times. Either that or the character will be obviously hiding important information and when asked about it will answer "i don't want to share that". Like motherfucker, this is a police investigation. All the characters are like this and it's gets old fast.

Oh and the Somnium's themselves almost all suck. They have adventure game ass logic where you have to think the exact way the game is thinking. Logical options often don't apply. I will say that the last Somnium in the game is a noticeable step up from all the others because it's more involved and not as braindead.

The pacing is also glacial. Everything interesting happens at the very end. The first half is remarkably more dull than the second half because Ryuki just isn't as interesting as Mizuki. There's also just so much flavour dialogue here meant to flesh out the characters. Which would be fine if they weren't constantly hammering home the same points over and over and over. It really DRAGS.

I still really like the quirkier stuff and overall charm here. The AI games excel in that regard. I like a lot of these characters. Mizuki especially shines in this game. The side story with Kizuna and Lien was especially heartwarming. I wanted to like this more than I did.

I do appreciate some of the later narrative stuff. It's neat and pretty well done. But it also feels like it's just there to serve as a gotcha to the player. "Look how clever we are". Like yeah, it's clever. It's also not making the story any better. Purposefully obfuscating information is fine. Every game needs to do it. But Nirvana Initiative takes it so far that I just can't bring myself to enjoy what it does. I somewhat respect it, but it's not for me.

I haven't played this since I was around 6 years old. I had so many vivid memories of this silly monkey game. Playing it today, over 20 years later revealed to me that 6 year old me retained the most important part about Ape Escape; the silly monkeys. I love collectathon platforming games and I think that having the collectibles be these little apes wandering around levels is what sets Ape Escape apart. It's instantly charming, and the soundtrack certainly helps with that too. Just a bunch of bops throughout.

Now one thing I didn't remember was just how gimmicky this game was. Ape Escape has a very unconventional control scheme that attempts to use the dualshock in a lot of different ways. Mostly, this means using the analog sticks in wacky ways. This only kind of works. Some stuff is really fun with the analogue stick like catching monkeys with your net but other stuff like using the tank, slingshot or rowboat is downright painful.

Ape Escape works best when it's just this vibe that you want to exist in. When it comes to the actual platforming, it's also subpar with lots of weird camera angles and a double jump that only works when it wants to. Because of this, I found the game to get worse at it goes. The later levels are especially a pain in the ass as the game environments get more and more generic.

What's here is honestly really impressive ESPECIALLY for 1999. It's so inventive and charming, I couldn't help but have a grin on my face while playing. This game would be a certified banger then, but today it's pretty average. Which, to be honest is pretty impressive considering my issues with it. Ape Escape is a decent game that I had a good time replaying. I'm absolutely torn between 3 and 3.5 but I think I'll stick with 3.5 and give it that nostalgia bump.

Ghost of Tshushima is one of the absolute best games from a decade ago. Seriously, if the Ubisoft formula wasn't so damn tired by now, this would have been a really special game. Instead, It's a very good one in a sea of contemporaries.

GoT especially excels in it's presentation. Everything that has to do with UI/UX is best in the industry shit. The way Sucker Punch uses the environment (wind, birds, fireflies) to direct the player is nothing short of genius and something I'd LOVE to see more devs attempt in the open world space. I'm also just a big sucker for weather effects in general. So I found the wind stuff really impressive graphically as well.

The way the game plays is not very inspired but functional. Most of the gameplay consists of riding your horse from one location to the next and basic parry-focused Assassin's Creed style combat. There are also a ton of "investigation" segments that I'm frankly just so tired of. All this involves is arriving to an area and interacting with a handful of intractable objects to advance whatever scenario the game places you in. It's just so uninspired and feels lifted off of games that do it better.

Narratively, the game has a few strong moments but is overall a letdown. Most of the characters are simply not interesting. I understand Sucker Punch wanted to have a more grounded take here, but I couldn't stop myself from comparing the wet blankets of Tsushima to the memorable cast of the Sly and Infamous games. You can make characters both realistic AND interesting, I promise it doesn't have to be one or the other. The main narrative feels more interested in storming forts over and over, rather than exploring Tsushima's cast of characters to their full potential. The side content does help make the story a little richer. But, it's ultimately inconsequential as well.

Ultimately, for a game that's all about breaking tradition, it's unfortunate how strongly Ghost of Tsushima clings on to the ideas of the past. It's a good game, but it could be so much better.

I am a person who gets distracted easily. Especially these past few years, my dumb brain has a hard time doing games where reading is the main thing you do because well, I get bored.

I'm impressed that Pentiment managed to engage me in it's world the way it did. It's a bit of a slow burn to start, but once I got familiar with the world and characters, I started to see just how rich and dense Pentiment is. The writing is so good and the quality never slips. It's so impressive. Especially considering the fact that the vast majority of characters are just regular people with regular problems. Well, regular for the 1500s. And this is a big part of what makes Pentiment so refreshingly different.

The sprawling scope of the game also makes the choices I made pan out in interesting ways. I found it really rewarding to make a decision and then find out the ramifications of that choice so many in-game years later. This also allowed me to get this sense of growing up with the protagonist. It felt very connected to them.

This game's approach to decision making within the narrative is also really special. There's a "history is written by the victors" aspect to it, where decisions you make, even if they are wrong will shape other characters' perception of events. And those perceptions become reality. It's something that added a lot of weight to the narrative and gave me a lot to think about. If enough people believe that something is true, does it even matter if it isn't?

One thing I'll mention that didn't detract from my enjoyment, but did make me feel overwhelmed at times was the sheer amount of characters in this game. There are so many characters to keep track of. And some of them either have similar names or look like each other. So, occasionally, I'd lose track of who's who. This isn't a complaint, but it is something i struggled with sometimes. I do think it's indicative of the care put into Pentiment. For it to have such a sprawling cast of characters that all have their own distinct voices.

Obsidian simply keeps winning.