Western search action with an X-Files plot tied intimately with Alan Wake and the rest of the Remedyverse. It's obviously a banger, gorgeous, with many genuinely heartfelt moments as well as fun speculative worldbuilding. Anyone who grew up loving "monster of the week" shows like me would undoubtedly adore this game.

The core combat loop doesn't really gel until you get Throw, but once you do it's so fun. Played correctly, you're practically invincible, thanks to how good all of your weapons and utility powers are. Floating around the battlefield like some vengeful god, smiting corrupted soldiers with a flick of your finger. It's intoxicating and I think a much better expression of the combat loop of Quantum Break, which I liked but didn't love.

My biggest complaint? Ends sort of abruptly - almost like a TV cliffhanger - even with the DLC, some odd difficulty spikes, and a mod / challenge system that seems completely out of place. Seriously, why are there repeatable challenges to grind for weapon mods? I would've greatly preferred scattering concrete secrets around, like missile tanks in Metroid. Feels so out of place here.

Platted on PC and near-platted on PS4 so it's unlikely I will ever return to Control. I enjoyed my time here though and I hope the next game in this series leans into the exploratory strengths and discards some of the cruft.

There is clearly so much effort and passion and heart put into this that it kind of pains me to say it's one of the most miserably frustrating experiences I've had playing a game in a long time.

First, the positive: the whole aesthetic is top notch. I'm not the biggest fan of pixel art, but this is how it's done. The whole visual design drips with such a wonderfully moody feel, elevated more by the brash, gothic music.

The problem in this game, for there is only one, is the controls. This is not roleplaying as an eldritch god controlling the armies of evil, it's a simulation for herding cats. Your rally point is not saying "go here", it's saying "go in this vague, general area", and even then, units will just wander off the complete opposite direction for literally no reason. This is made even worse by the fact that units engage enemies as soon as they see them. This means if one happens to feel like wandering too far away and engages the enemy army, it'll peel off from your main force to be slaughtered on his own little kamikaze. The vague movement controls and complete lack of any targeting system makes strategy essentially non-existent; ranged units would frequently decide to focus fire on pointless barricades while they're being shelled by multiple enemies. Every encounter boils down to throwing everybody into a mosh pit and hoping you kill them first, so any unit meant to be more clever than that is useless. Cats in particular feel worth mentioning as being completely unusable; as soon as you run into an enemy behind a barricade, every cat will leap over the defenses straight into the meat grinder.

I played Pikmin, a fairly similar game, after playing this (review soon tm). That game had the good sense to make pretty much all of its enemies "big guy that just kind of swats at you", as that's about all you can deal with when you have an army of the stupidest soldiers known to man (or whatever Olimar is). In this game, meanwhile, they expect you to deal with Bloodborne players dodge rolling and shooting and big heavies unleashing AOE attacks at a moment's notice, amongst other things, while you're trying to get your fishman to stop dry humping a fountain. You watch helplessly as your troops are massacred, continuously restarting the section until enough of them manage to fight back that it's even possible to move on.

There's a decent variety of content, but most of it is underwhelming, to say the least. Only one of the other cult leaders seemed even remotely usable (the idea of expecting me to go through this slaughterhouse capped at one lich and nothing else is laughable). Most of the units you unlock are either pretty weak (droghers, maggots) or too niche to ever be useful in a game where you can't actually plan your attacks at all (toads, black cats). There are more branching paths with more unlocks and levels to see, but I honestly struggled to find the motivation to finish this once. It's four hours long and it felt like a lifetime.

One of the few modern roguelites that feels like it uses randomness for emotional purpose instead of an excuse to turn a short experience into a never ending one. Game is purposefully overwhelming and disorienting and having non random levels would heavily reduce the chaos of pushing through it all. Post Void's packs exciting combat and flow in short little bursts and allows my adrenaline to pump in a way few other action games can do. Absolutely wonderful game that does exactly what it sets out to do

As someone who first played cod at the age of 5 I can safely say this is better then any cod in the past 5 years and that's thanks to no SBMM. Look xdefiant absolutely has some issues that need to be fixed and they will. But I'm glad that there is a fps game that's fun and reminiscent of old school cod games. The transparency from the devs and Mark Rubin on Social media is also great. People need to stop being overly critical of a free to play game. The devs are listening which is far better than what any other game is doing. So support this game as it may eventually lead to Activision wanting to give a shit about making a good cod game.

I've now played enough to give a review and atrociously stupid name aside, overall this is a really solid multiplayer FPS. Movement and gunplay feel like classic CoD, the guns are all good for the most part with each having strengths and weaknesses depending on the map/mode/situation. There isn't one gun that is definitively better than any other. The abilities of each faction are good and fun to use. It's very much a simpler FPS mechanically that harkens back to the 360 era but I think that's a good thing. There's still room for improvement, I wish each faction had more characters, the ability selection feels small since abilities are per faction not character, and I think Ults charge a little too slowly in relation to how game-changing they are. But the bones of the game are solid and it's in a good place to build off of.

Not rating this yet because it doesn't feel like a full game, being in the preseason and mostly limited to unranked games. But I'm having fun! Progression feels slow but I'm actually enjoying it, every little weapon attachment I get feels satisfying and that's more than enough to me to keep grinding. The map design seems alright overall, and I do like the mish-mash of Ubisoft IPs. Gunplay feels solid enough, it's a bit lacking in the impact of hits but the aiming and movement feels decisively snappy. The abilities of each faction is mostly fun to use, although some definitely feels not as useful as others, like the Phantom's tactical shield. I would prefer it if you can earn the ultra abilities a bit faster, I think that would add to the chaotic feel of the gameplay even more.

My concern would be the battle pass seasons, because the preseason stuff doesn't entice me enough to buy it. I really hope they are cooking things up for the seasons, otherwise this will probably be an every-once-in-a-while kind of game, rather than a game I want to keep playing in the long run.

As somebody who's not into the direction of CoD games these days, XDefiant fits my speed much better, and I'm rooting for Ubisoft to support it well for the long run.

Fun at its core but so many flaws make it a very barebone experience

This is 2024 and after years of developpment and open/closed betas we're getting a COD-like fps with :

- Fewer weapons than COD 4 (which released in 2007 mind you)
- Fewer game modes
- Fewer maps (1/3 of them are terrible imo)
- Awful netcode with hitmarkers which don't deal any damage and case of dying seconds after getting behind covers because somehow your opponent still see you on their screen

- Almost no unlockable, where are the camouflages ? COD 4 has around 6, here there are 3, bronze, silver and gold. I'm not counting shitty battle pass rewards, also where are the titles, emblems ? Where's the fucking soul of this game ? It's trying to replicate the golden age of call of duty but don't understand what made it cool.

- Very bad balancing with broken abilities, a spider that you just throw out and it will autotrack any ennemy in the map and jump on them, paralyzing them for a good 5s while you can take your time killing them. Ultimate abilities are broken as fuck, not fun to fight against and can make a battle completely one sided as the team winning will get their ultimate first, which result in a complete snowball in many game modes, notably escort and zone controls, in which you'll probably lose without having the time to get your ultimate and then the meter goes back to 0 at next round, neat.

- It's more of a subjective thing but I personally hate the jumpy metagame where everyone just jump around permanently even during duels as it has no downside and make you harder to hit.

To think this is among the best arcade fps I've played among recent years sadden me because holy fuck there's not a single world where I would not trade this to play COD4 again.

To end on a positive note, I think many of these points can be fixed and the game is not as bad as I make it sound but it can be better and I hope it'll get better.

While I'm giving it the same score, I do believe Echoes to be on the higher end of 4.5/5 than its predecessor (EDIT: It's a 5/5, on reflection). So many problems are addressed: bosses are generally less formulaic and can be defeated quickly with good player skill, area segmentation gives way to better internal coherence and improved backtracking, the dark world mechanic deepens puzzle design, and aesthetic similarity between areas gives the impression of a coherent physical space more-so than the original's world design.

The segmentation also reworks the Prime structure for the better. What we get here is essentially three increasingly excellent Zelda-like dungeons, with an overworld connecting them. Poking and prodding at each map's various moving parts made me feel so much more connected to the environment

What are we losing with Echoes' changes? For one, we lose environmental variety, though I feel this was worth it. More importantly, the commitment to the structure Echoes sets out with demystifies the game somewhat, as the player knows what to expect (on a basic structural level) when entering a new zone. The music is also generally less compelling, which is perhaps downstream of a commitment to atmosphere.

This is an exciting moment for me, as the gap between Echoes and Dread is one for which I was out of the loop. On top of that, I finally beat this one 100%, which I'd done for all others I'd played prior. My initial plan for this series playthrough was to do main series games, but it's pretty ambiguous as to what counts. There seems to be a hierarchy of what is most "main", but where the cut-off point lands lacks definition. So fuck it, I'm doing them all! Next Metroid game on the agenda is (checks notes)... Metroid Prime Pinball.

Um, ok I guess!

UPDATE: Yeah, so my laptop is not coping well with DS emulation, and Metroid Prime Pinball is frankly too expensive for a game called Metroid Prime Pinball. It looks like this series playthrough will be limited to the non-pinball titles, which means Hunters is up next! Also if anyone is wondering why I'm reviewing video-games on Christmas Day it's because I got COVID. Samus Aran and I are quite alike in our isolation, but quite opposite in how said isolation manifests (stoic heroine vs anxious sadsack eating chocolate).