A parkour focused fast pace game with a short linear story, basically just mirror's edge if it aged well. Seriously, having played this right after playing mirror's edge, it's easy to see where this game draws its inspiration from.

The game feels good to play, there will still be the occasional moment where the game feels like it missed a input or isn't working consistently but overall I don't think it harmed the experience too much. The game play does fall short in two moments, in cyber-void you don't have access to many of your abilities, even taking away the dash sometimes. I don't see any reason why the devs felt the need to do this. The second is the boss fights where again the game takes away some of your abilities.

The boss fights in this game are a mixed bag. One feels like the pinnacle of what a boss in a parkour game should be, one feels kinda unoriginal but still a decent fight, and one is quite frankly an incredibly boring fight. If you're looking to fight bosses I wouldn't recommend this game.

The story is serviceable, that's ok because it's not the focal point for the game.

Overall a good game that I would recommend to anyone who likes 3D platforming or was a fan of mirror's edge.

This game is genuinely frustrating, and not in a "I screwed up kinda" way that incentivises you to try again and be better, but rather in a "WHY THE **** DID THAT NOT WORK" sort of way. The game feels surprisingly inconsistent despite its focus on speedrunning and player improvement. Jump for a pipe and you don't quite reach it, try again in the exact way a second time and it just feels like working. Now I'm sure the game isn't actually inconsistent, it's probably more akin to missing the jump by a pixel or something like that, but this is known quirk of video games and many games have solved such problems while mirror's edge feels like it made no attempt at doing so.

Despite this I'm still giving the game a middling score of 2.5 and that's because the game knows who its target audience is, and the game caters to them well. This game was built with speedrunners in mind having speedrunning modes as well as additional time attacks to play once you've completed the main story, and having been made in 2008 I imagine it's one of the first games to do so. factoring this in it's no wonder why this game ended up having quite the eager fanbase... well until catalyst came out.

It's a great game and it's just as good as the first game in my opinion.

It does everything a sequel should, adds more playtime, more mechanics, overall just building on what Ori and the blind forest first provided.

Unfortunately I feel it really hasn't done much beyond that, which is why I'm rating it below the original. Despite being a metroidvania it feels surprisingly linear, there's next to no backtracking and exploring required beyond the first few areas. The story although good feels incredibly straightforward, I would argue even simpler then the first game. without going into much detail I'll say there's no twist and the motivations of the antagonist feel rather weak.

Overall a great game, that's why I'm giving it a 3.5/5, it probably deserves 4 or more but I'm knocking it down for being a bit unambitious.

Now, on paper Starfield is a very mid game... for 2015. I don't need to elaborate on that everyone on every corner of the internet has already told their reasons for why they feel the same. 2.5/5

And yet I put 100 hours into it over the course of just 1-2 months.

It's a mid game when you analyse it yes, but simply looking back at how I felt when I played Starfield I really enjoyed myself with it. it was just pure Bethesda crack I could not put down for 6 hours a day from start to finish.

Factoring that in it's a 3.5/5 for me.

My main problem with the game is the story, it started of being pretty generic, and screwed up by placing quite a climatic moment right near the beginning. Then it got really good and I thought "hey this might actually be a good game" but then it decided to fuck it all up with the last 15 ish minutes.

I don't like writing spoilers in reviews so I won't go into any specifics, I'll instead focus on my problems with the game itself in the rest of this log.

I'll start with a minor issue, the graphics. It's a minor issue because I can play games with bad graphics, and maybe we're focusing too much on photo-realism lately, but life is strange, the original, came out in 2015. The same year everyone was shitting on fallout 4 for having disappointing graphics. Like what??? The remastered edition I played in 2022 has comparable graphics to what rockstar and naughty dog were making back in 2008.

Now onto the gameplay.
A lot of annoyances that only served to cost me a lot of time. I'll start with the saving, which is only done automatically. This was likely done to stop players from save scumming with save files but each chapter is 3-5 hours long and I'm not doing that in a single sitting. which means whenever I leave and come back I have to go through about 2 minutes of gameplay I already played. And this is only compounded by my next gripe, there's no way to fast forward or skip a cutscene you haven't seen before. which would save a lot of time whenever I get back to the game, but also in case if there's a crash which did happen to me in one of longest cutscenes in the game. There should also be a way to fast forward dialogue just a single line even if it's your first time seeing it, I swear half of my playtime is waiting for the characters speech to catch up after I already finished reading the subtitles. still on the topic of saving time you can't rewind time in the middle of a conversation or cutscene, you have to wait for the game to give you control of that. This is really annoying because sometimes you'll make a decision that has pretty immediate effects and instead of being able to rewind immediately because you didn't like that decision you have to wait another minute before the game hands control back to you. This all just makes for a really frustrating experience. Game devs need to learn to give the players more control and stop restricting us to whatever their intentions are, we bought the game, it's our product, we'll take responsibility if we fuck our own experience of it up, so stop fucking it up for us.