Stuck between an 8 and a 9 with this one. I absolutely loved it, and that's for sure. I think it mixes moments of breathtaking action and some extremely horrifying moments very well. The first half of the game is an easy 10/10 and I loved every second of it. The second half still shows glimpses of that but begins to become even more campy and loses some of its steam. Despite that, there is still some absolutely stellar moments, including that jaw dropping twist near the end - both of them. Needless to say, I loved this game and it is survival horror at it's finest with a gorgeous but grimy setting and fleshed out, interesting characters. I just wish it was the 10/10 it was set up to be.

Difficult game to rate.

The simple part is the gameplay, music, and overall structure of the game. All three are fun, fast, and punchy. I personally didn't think the game was that much harder than 1, or maybe any harder at all, but it's been awhile since I played 1 so maybe I'm misremembering. At any rate it wasn't insanely difficult -- sometimes if you're willing to just dick around at high speed you can create combos that will nearly clear out a level by pulling basically everyone straight to you. Other times you'll have to be far more methodical and those were the levels I had the most trouble with, but they were never unfairly difficult, just frustrating when I realized I missed that one last guy who was patrolling the area in a circle with a gun and killed me with one shot from a distance.

The story is the thing that makes this game tough -- it seems pretty good and well thought out, as well as intricately and intimately tied into the first game. For one thing, you will have some difficulty getting the meat of the story of some of these characters without having played the first game (and ideally with enough dedication to unlock a secret ending). Even if you have, though, if you didn't pay a lot of attention to that story the impact of this one will be lost on you, as you struggle to vaguely remember what the point of that one was and how these characters and events were presented in that story, if at all.

Unfortunately the story struggles don't stop there, HM2 introduces several new characters to play around with in new themes, with their own narrative links, and to make it even more difficult on you it jumps back and forth in time as wildly as a double pendulum. The outcomes of some characters are never plainly stated but only showed by context hints in short gameplay sections as other characters... etc.

It's a story that requires a very high level of player engagement to even follow the events of. This is an interesting move and one that I don't disagree with as a creator (hell, do whatever you want if you're in charge) but it is one that to me borders on pretentiousness simply because it demands so much effort to understand. While I think that intentionally obfuscating your plot does create a fun mystery for people to solve, my cynical side says it's something you do to make your story only accessible to the ultra-dedicated who would find it compelling anyway because of the high effort and high interest in the game required, no matter what the quality of that story was. My optimistic side says it's just a story-telling choice like any other and that I'm overly cynical.

At any rate, this game is fun and frantic and would be enjoyable even if you skipped every cutscene in the game. You shouldn't though, because the story is interesting, but I guarantee you unless you play the first one, keep a notepad log of events and dates and characters, play the second one, do the same, and then play the first one again, then maybe the second one again, you will never unravel this story in its entirety on your own.

I personally chose to read three separate story synopses of this game and the first one instead of putting in actual work (the curse of modernity). They all reached different ultimate conclusions about the point of the game and even the arcs of some of the characters, with different things they noticed that the others didn't. Is that the result of good storytelling on the part of the storyteller? You decide for yourself -- my unhelpful answer is: "My gut says no. But maybe. I don't know."

4 - Great: A solid, memorable game with standout features

One day, I’d like to offer some thoughts about the rest of the game but, tonight, I’m here to kill Chaos.

Dishonored on its face is a tightly crafted game. You are Corvo Attano. You’re here (Dunwall) to kick ass and protect the Empress and, thanks to a bunch of cartoon rogues and one extremely cool guy, you are all out of Empress. Well, maybe 98% out of Empress. Let’s just say you have a head full of silent protagonist and a heart full of a familiar sounding lady who knows the exact geographic location of all of Satan’s heretical artifacts. Either way, revenge is on the menu and everyone is your main course.

The game looks and sounds pretty great for its age and the setting works well. Dunwall evokes a sort of hyper-Victorian era scummy English or New English port town. Nothing looks like it’s in good shape and scientific advances are confined to cures for a horrible and mysterious zombie rat plague, guns, and security systems intended to vaporize a normal burglar. The music, ambient or otherwise, isn't much of a main attraction aside from a somewhat outrageous but undeniably catchy ending number. As sounds go, you're here for enemy chatter that's difficult to forget and a solid cast of voice actors for the main characters, aside from - conspicuously given the sequel - Corvo himself.

Gameplay works. Dishonored has a solid gamefeel that reminds me in some ways of DOOM 2016; you feel very agile and capable of parkour in a way I haven't been primed to expect from a first-person game. You have an assortment of powers which, to be honest, feel pretty eclectic. On one end, you can teleport all over the place, which feels pretty incredible and adds to how nimble Corvo is to play. On the other, you can summon giant rat mobs and tank more hits and regen faster, which...playthroughs differ, of course, but these never struck me as especially useful or fun to play with. Levels, for the most part, are all larger segments of Dunwall with some instances where you're left largely free to take guards and security devices out as quietly or visibly as you'd prefer. There's an incredible tactile satisfaction to the wrist-mounted crossbow you have that I never got tired of and that I never really picked up from other weapons the game hands you such as grenades, guns, and, barring a noteworthy exception, your cool sword.

The story isn’t going to be your main attraction. Admirably for a relatively prominent title in a larger franchise, the game answers most of the pressing questions it puts forward. The answers are all kind of ridiculous. What narrative appeal there is comes from two things and it is the second I want to really focus in on. First, the gameplay and setting come together to give the proceedings a unique character that would otherwise be pretty much nonexistent. It’s a grimy city full of outsized personalities and there is certainly something to the individuals Corvo interacts with. Satan talks to you whenever you pick up certain items that advance your character and it’s hard not to be at least a bit charmed by being beneath the watchful eye of a teenaged, socially puzzled atheist who also is responsive in some ways to your morality. Which…

Okay, yes. Let’s talk about the morality. Let’s talk about Chaos.

Dishonored is a fundamentally confused game. I wonder in some ways if it wasn’t to do with trends at the time in the broader gaming landscape but, based off developer interviews, that likely doesn’t fully capture it. You are a man left for dead out to get revenge against a heinous cabal of elitist creeps who had your wife murdered and your daughter taken. The game gives you a large suite of options in terms of how to carve your way through your enemies or, better yet, tricking them into carving themselves up against their own tools or against dark forces beyond mortal comprehension. But it is also a game that cannot help but make it clear to you that, as unbelievably awesome as killing is, it is also very wrong and you are a bad person if you indulge in it.

Now, lest anyone worry, obviously that is correct. But Dishonored feels like it was built around playing a gleeful vigilante. The Chaos System, the game’s morality meter, is violently at odds with that. You are chastised by the game for indulging in High Chaos actions but it’s so obviously the path the game is begging you to choose that the whole idea of a video game morality mechanic comes across as very confused and to the game’s detriment. A Low Chaos player has very few tools at their disposal for interacting with the game; you can sneak around and avoid being seen and either choke or tranquilize guards that you can’t avoid. This as opposed to a player less concerned with all that who can drop carnivorous rats into rooms full of people to distract them, blast people into walls with telekinesis, or resort to the visceral satisfaction of just stabbing them, picking them off with crossbow bolts, or what have you.

This is only superficially the issue. Corvo, at the end of the day, is the hero of the story no matter how gruesome his methods are. His enemies are all, barring one cool and one troubling exception, as cartoonishly evil as you could imagine. So Dishonored has to be a story of revenge no matter where any given player falls on the Chaos scale and it has very clearly obligated itself to make the player feel like, even if he isn’t a killer, his enemies get what is coming to them. Low Chaos Corvo does things that are almost absurd: he consigns foes to work as slaves in their own mines; he brands a man to live as a disease-riddled, penniless leper; he hands off a woman who may have done little wrong other than sleep with the wrong man to her stalker. It’s hard to really say any of this is much better than killing his enemies in the night. But since Corvo doesn’t actually put the knife in himself, he is a good person and Dunwall by extension is a good place.

To me, it’s a somewhat difficult to ignore flaw. It shows a game that is fundamentally at odds with itself. A game that, even without this, would still be a game that peters out at the finish line, telling the player—at one point—to kill or stun every enemy on the map with a magic electrical device rather than engage with stealth or combat in the course of the level. A game that, even if it did feel consistent, would still be a game ending on a 3D clipshow telling you that you either did good or did bad after an easy map with a host of antagonists who are not worth Corvo’s time. Make no mistake: for two-thirds of its length, Dishonored is a solid game made by people with a clear sense of what world they meant to build and with tools for a player to have a more than solid time playing at being Edmond Dantes. But it is a game that never goes past good to great because pressures either from within Arkane or from games at that time led to a product that seems fundamentally confused and unable to come to any coherent moral conclusion about what it believes you ought to be doing, to such an extent that the game itself feels less enjoyable as a whole.

Skulking on rooftops, blinking to an upper balcony and then possessing a guard and standing within inches of a target, I love those moments.

Being given the choice to kill or get rid of someone through ingenious and sometimes sinister ways is a big highlight.

The world of Dunwall is a dark and somewhat beautiful place, both filled with despair and and a few individuals trying to bring light to a dark world is a sight to behold, a immersive game like no other!

One of the great myths of gaming is that going back and replaying titles from the past exposes you to the faults that were previously unable to be recognized due to the standards of the time period, preventing you from being able to enjoy them to the same degree you once did. This is something I've personally never experienced, knock on wood. So upon revisiting and finally completing this childhood favorite after years away (admittedly with some help from the Switch's exclusive save and rewind features), I was only able to see it more clearly as the borderline masterpiece I've always thought it was.

I think it's no secret this was a technical marvel back when it first released with its pre-rendered graphics that turned 3D models into sprites, making it one of, if not THE, best looking things on the Super Nintendo. I was amazed at how well the style holds up as charming, even if some of the backgrounds get a touch overused. Same goes for the level design which may just be timeless. I still had a blast going through stages and finding secrets I had already experienced probably thousands of times prior.

The stuff I played for the first time was just as meticulously and enjoyably designed, although the platforming challenges can get quite demanding the deeper you go. Not necessarily a bad thing, but as the obstacles get tougher you'll begin to notice some flaws that show not everything is perfect in Country. It, and therefore YOU, often falls prey to what I like to call "beginner's traps" where something unexpectedly jumps in from just offscreen catching you completely off guard, leading to cheap feeling deaths and an element of trial-and-error. Plus, and it could simply be an issue with the Switch's emulator/controls, but at moments the characters inexplicably won't jump the way you expect them to, causing you to miss essential platforms. The frustrations are only amplified by the fact that save points will preserve all of your progress EXCEPT for your life count, which always resets when you step away.

Still, the fact that such faults which would have doomed a lesser game felt like minor quibbles at most here is a testament to it's quality. Rich in the kind of personality and creativity that has defined Rare's career, as well as impeccably crafted with an incredible soundtrack, this is easily one of the best 2D platformers ever made. For some, myself included, putting even the likes of a certain Italian plumber to shame. Thus despite having moved on to the joys and conveniences of modern hardware I was still able to find the same amount of enthusiasm for this that I had back in the days when my dad's old SNES was the only console I knew.

9.9/10

A totally different experience from modern Fallouts but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Despite an absolutely ancient interface and flawed combat (crits you for 323 damage) the game is downright amazing.

The bleaker tone of this game is entirely welcomed and I wish some of the newer games would follow suit in this except the timer which while I liked here would rather have it be a once in a while mechanic. And while the game does look a bit dated graphics-wise I found a lot of charm in its look and didn't really mind it especially when the story and lore is this incredibly interesting to explore especially The Master.

Overall despite some minor flaws in the gameplay I found this game to be one of the best Crpgs I've played. On to Fallout 2.

This is the one 2D Metroid game you should play if you only ever had to play one. I thought people were just overrating this game for years whenever they would lament that the newer 2D Metroid games never recreate the same kind of magic. The short of my experience with Super Metroid is that they were right, and I even played it on the uncomfortable handheld mode for Nintendo Switch on their SNES emulator. It was still a blast going through it for the first time. Anyone who says Metroid Dread recreates the same feeling you get running through Super Metroid is either a sicko or just really wants to believe that it is.

flashback to my fusion review: I am not a fan of that game. the new concepts it brings to metroid are interesting, but the design language it draws from previous metroid games is not. as the game takes a more linear approach to its map design, it often locks you to a small set of rooms at a time to figure out how to proceed, and when it provides a legitimate puzzle it works wonderfully. however, the game mostly relies on tedious invisible blocks instead of properly testing your understanding of the tools at your disposal. likewise there's an increased focus on bosses, but with little added depth to the encounters past the "shoot missiles like crazy and occasionally dodge attacks." even SA-X is mostly restricted to scripted encounters and of no real threat to the player other than a couple of chase sequences. the concepts and mechanics they draw from super metroid work in super because that game has a slower pace, a wider realm to explore in, and a relatively forgiving difficulty overall. the mixups that fusion presents are novel but can't thrive when they're welded to mechanics meant for a different kind of experience.

what dread succeeds at is rewriting the mechanics of old-school metroid to make the fusion concepts work. the world structure is now not meant to be a contiguous space but a linearized series of discrete areas broken up by items you need or challenges you must overcome. bosses are now fleshed out with phases of discrete attacks that rely on samus's wider set of movement options. rather than the sparse SA-X sequences of fusion, you now are chased by EMMIs as you criss-cross their zones in order to progress, with stealth moves now baked into the mechanics. the environments even draw heavily from fusion's synthetic/organic dichotomy. it's hard to argue that the resulting project really feels like old-school metroid, but it's a very fun simulacrum of that style.

of course, I think it has to be said there's a sense of artifice to the "metroidvania" aspect of it, since your progress is so tightly constrained that pushing against the game will yield no quarter. the doors are locked behind you at every opportunity to keep you moving completely forward, and the planet itself isn't really explorable in a traditional metroid sense until the point of no return at the end of the game. the upside to this is there's really no getting lost, and hidden items are generally laid out so that you'll always run into them when you have the power-up you need to get them. it's a very western take on the series where the areas are laid out like a series of Skinner boxes, where you have just enough in each place to solve something cool and get your dopamine before you're shuttled to the next one. the biggest downside of this is once you actually get out into the world it doesn't feel like it breathes like in older games. I'm not really gonna fault it for its level design on the micro scale, as fusion does basically the same thing this one does. what makes it feel more jarring is that fusion at least had ludonarrative coherence for why the areas were so choppy, whereas this game seems like it should flow like a living area.

to combat the superficiality of the exploration content, the devs chose to raise the execution ceiling to keep the gameplay satisfying. this is definitely the hardest metroid game other than fusion, but it's balanced out by a wealth of new movement and combat options. bosses pretty much follow the same pattern as in the latter half of samus returns: multi-phase fight, spend most of your time dodging, and use the parry when you can. I didn't really have complaints about any of these, though I could've used maybe one more big boss fight towards the end, maybe instead of golzuna. samus now has access to a "flash shift" dash move that puts the game in line with a lot of other big western platformers like hollow knight and celeste, as well as a very handy slide maneuver that doubles as insta-morph-ball when you're standing still. these two really extend the expressiveness of the player's tactics beyond a point that space jump alone allowed.

there's also the EMMI areas, which I think do a better job of capturing the fear of being chased than SA-X did. the early section where you're forced to drain the right amount of water to get into a chute leading out for the area while the EMMI creeps up is a perfect implementation of this concept. later EMMI zones don't really capture this however... it ends up being more like walking in and out until you get a cycle where the EMMI is far away and then running like hell. part of this is because stealth does not seem to be the viable option the developers intended, or at least that's how felt after trying it for a while. the EMMI is so highly mobile that it feels better to evade it rather than hide and hope that it doesn't decide to blindly run right into you. the omega cannon sections make up for this a bit in how they encourage you to search the environments you were previously hauling ass through to look for long areas you can comfortably fire from. even with the flaws present, this exceeded my expectations of the quality of these sections from the trailer, so I'd say it's a net win in the end.

the presentation didn't strike me the wrong way at any point - thank god for how good the framerate is - but it isn't all great. the UI easily trumped all other aspects for ugliest aspect for me: that font feels so wrong to be slapped on absolutely everything, and it reeks a bit of Unity project style menus in a way. the actual environments mix up locales often however, and hit a variety of both natural and constructed styles. it's unquestionably a very bright game tho, as it's kept in line with nintendo's in-house graphics style for the most part. however, there's still a great deal of detail to be had, even if the areas end up a little on the generic side.

there's a couple other random things I wanted to bring up: there are honestly too many items in this game. there's not enough time to enjoy a new upgrade before you get another one, and getting major upgrades super late in the game is a letdown considering how little you get to use them before the final boss. the map could use some fine-tuning to make it less visually dense, or at least a better way to see what items on your map hasn't been collected. the parry is utilized much better than in samus returns, and doesn't impede the action remotely as much as it used to. the story is not really at the forefront, but there's a very cool cutscene halfway through that was a fun treat for fans that put a grin on my face.

it's odd to play an official metroid game that draws so much from the indie games that came many years after the last mainline titles, but mercurysteam really felt themselves with this one. the game repackages the old standards of metroid into an extremely polished experience that stands as one of the most solid switch titles to have dropped on switch up to now. if mercurysteam keeps working on this series, I'll be happy to play whatever they put out without the reservations I went into this game with after samus returns. there's still room to go up from here if they keep listening to fan feedback.

Several days ago I had a sudden, conflicted whim. On the one hand, I was overwhelmed by a long-suppressed appetite for Fire Emblem's particular brand of tactics gameplay; on the other, I wanted to play a game in said franchise that was new to me but without feeling bad about potentially not sticking with it for the long term. For the first time, I was in tune with the Venn diagram of appetitive desire that has kept Fire Emblem Heroes in business for nearly five years.

In retrospect, it's surprising this didn't happen sooner. I'm an easy mark for free-to-play mobile games when they're branded with Stuff I Already Like™, and I've burned more money at the altars of games like Marvel Future Fight and Pokémon Shuffle than I'm willing to admit. Considering that Fire Emblem is one of my favorite video game franchises (despite the fact that Awakening is the only entry I've sunk a truly substantial amount of time into), you would think I'd have been a day-one player.

But the combination of free-to-play mechanics and Fire Emblem gameplay has always seemed contradictory to me. I'm the type of FE player who plans battles meticulously and leaves combat animations on, in order to amplify the role-playing experience. Battles are long, hard-won affairs that follow their own emotional arcs, many of them of my own making. The unique appeal of the franchise, for me, is feeling like an actual military tactician who charts out a battle plan, then watches with equal measure of pride and horror as my friends and loved ones attempt to execute it. The stakes could not be higher.

The absence of permanent death, critical hits, and other chaotic-neutral gameplay elements certainly is one factor impeding that sense while playing Fire Emblem Heroes, but even more than that it's the amount of content to complete each day. There are the main story levels and their side missions, which together appear to number in the hundreds, but which the game also discourages you from playing in favor of 24-hour Special Maps and the Training Tower. There are limited-time events such as Hall of Forms (in which you control pre-built characters) and Mjölnir's Strike (a tower-defense mode). There's asynchronous PvP in Aether Raids as well as the Coliseum. The latter area includes modes like Arena, Arena Assault, Allegiance Battles, and Resonant Battles; I'm unable to meaningfully distinguish between any of them. There's a FarmVille-esque social hub where your characters congregate, and in which you harvest crops and cook recipes.

Most of these modes refresh each day. Many are also the primary destination for farming a particular resource that's necessary for character-building. Speaking of which, did I mention there are nearly 800 characters in Fire Emblem Heroes? Sure, some of them are the same character in different outfits, but they still count as different units when it comes to battle. You can have multiple copies of the same hero (at multiple different star levels), which you can merge into a single copy for better stats. And because apparently this game wasn't already enough like Pokémon, you have to be careful of sacrificing a copy with good internal values (IVs) in order to build the character optimally. Each character also has seven skill slots, which can be individually leveled and/or swapped by sacrificing a different character with access to the desired skill. An optimally built Brave Lucina, for example, would require sacrificing five or six other characters with access to the skills that best complement her base stats. The system itself is legible, but as you can probably already tell, it's... a lot.

That's not to say you can, or should, try to create optimal endgame builds for all of the game's characters. That's one of the game's strengths, actually: any character can be viable for practically any game mode. The uphill progression battle is just more uphill for some characters than others. If you don't already have access to a favorite, though, the process of selecting which characters to focus on is daunting. It's comparatively easy to look at the roster of a game like Marvel Future Fight and say, "Okay, Iron Man is probably a better character to invest in than, say, Karnak." (Occasionally you would be wrong, but you would at least be right in principle.) Much of my time spent "playing" Fire Emblem Heroes was actually spent consulting wikis to determine which characters were most worth upgrading.

Luckily, the characters I was able to access are among the best in the game. I was able to freely select a 5-star Brave Edelgard, and I pulled a Fallen Corrin (Female) and Ninja Corrin from random selectors. The latter apparently is considered the game's absolute best character by many in the FEH community. I acquired her on my first and only attempt at her selector, and I pulled plenty of other 5-star characters using free premium currency (which the game dumps on you by the bucketful), so I have nothing negative to say about the gacha rates. Your mileage may vary?

Together, these three characters veritably deleted my enemies with minimal resistance. For a few days, this was fun. But as I discovered increasingly more game modes lurking in the game's submenus each day, I began to feel dismayed: I'd wanted a casual Fire Emblem experience that would be rewarding to play casually, not a game that required several hours of commitment each day!

At first, I met the sheer volume of daily content by turning off my beloved combat animations. When that wasn't enough to work through all the game modes in less than several hours, I began to play levels at a faster, almost reckless pace. But still, there were just too many modes to play and too many characters to comb through, research, and upgrade. It may not demand real-world cash for the player to be successful, but Fire Emblem Heroes demands the player's time in spades.

In my last few sessions with Fire Emblem Heroes, it became clear that whatever itch this game may initially have scratched, it wasn't doing that anymore. The charming characters and colorful artwork became increasingly difficult to discern. All I could see ahead was hours and hours of senseless grind.

To be fair, I suppose, the game doesn't put a gun to your head and demand that you play every single mode, every single day. It doesn't require that you build characters to their optimal or maximum potential. But that's how I've traditionally approached free-to-play games (and I've played a lot of them): I'm all in or I'm all out. Perhaps Fire Emblem Heroes ultimately will prove the exception, and I'll return to it in the future just to play the story mode. In fact, I rather hope that's the case; that's why I'm marking this game "Shelved" rather than "Abandoned." For me, returning to this game simply for the story would clearly mark the progress I've been trying to make in terms of my relationship with free-to-play games: namely, to either stop playing them altogether or to stop playing them as intended by the developers.

After years of hopping from one free-to-play game to another, I'm exhausted by the infinite treadmill they represent. Fire Emblem Heroes, an obviously compromised version of a preexisting game franchise that I already loved, threw this into greater relief than the likes of Marvel Future Fight or this year's Marvel Future Revolution, both games that I played arguably to excess before ultimately quitting them. Becoming more active on Backloggd in recent weeks has helped as well. There's a satisfying conclusiveness to "completing" games, to formulating finished thoughts about finished cultural productions, and to engaging with others' responses to those cultural productions, that I've missed while lost amid the dark forest of free-to-play.

Thank you for being a part of my recovery.

Essentially everything I want in a modern Resident Evil game: satisfying gunplay, masterful growing tension, great scares that never feel cheap, a compelling story, and excellent visuals to top it all off. While it may not be as consistently frightening as RE7 overall, it does contain a few sequences that are much scarier than anything seen in its predecessor. Mostly it feels like they dialed it back a bit and leaned into some action à la RE4. But the action never overtakes the horror and only in the final stretch of the game does it really come into play. And by that point, it feels great to go guns-blazing on this whole damn village. They found a strong balance here. It doesn't even have the exhausting ending sequence that makes the game overstay its welcome, unlike a number of entries in this series (including 7). Not to mention the surprisingly touching story that fits snugly into the larger Resident Evil continuity while still feeling complete and satisfying in its own right.

Can't wait to see where the series goes from here.