if you want the campaign get it on gamepass and save yourself the money.

Most of my MP experience with Halo was splitscreen Halo 3 on the 360 and that was all. I don't really enjoy the slow TTK in Halo, the floaty low-gravity movement or arena-shooter map design but Infinite has really surprised me. The guns feel great to use, combat feels very fluid and although I'm still no fan of the slow TTK I enjoy feeling very big, wrinkly brained when I outsmart someone using a combination of equipment, nades and weapon swapping.
Tactical slayer is by far my favourite mode as it removes shields and lowers the TTK to a single burst of the combat rifle which feels more natural to play as someone who has put more time into games like CS:S/GO, CoD and Siege.

A complaint I have is the lack of variety. They are drip-feeding in new content but 343 are struggling with their battle pass and monetization when they should be focused on fixing big team battle which has currently been broken for nearly a week, adding new maps, improving desync/lag issues and generally building the foundation.
I find the maps in particular to be very weak, they aren't in any way memorable in a way that Sandtrap was in Halo 3, they don't feel particularly fun like Valhalla was, and they don't flow as well as they should for a game that really wants you to make use of its movement.

If I had paid €60 for this game I'd probably be bitterly disappointed at the lack of forge, custom servers, coop but given that I can get the campaign for €1 on gamepass and the MP is F2P I'd say it's a good deal.

The main reason I'm giving it a negative review is the performance - I'm running a Ryzen 1600 with a 1660 super, I can handle MP at 60fps, 1440p on low/medium settings. Campaign is very hit or miss. However hardly anyone else in my friend group is willing to play due to the poor performance even on systems that should be more than capable of running it. In one instance after the game crashed somehow the display drivers on the PC were either uninstalled or flatout broken. Most of my friends report hard crashes or PC reboots in every session. If they fixed this I'd say absolutely give it a go.

I can imagine this game will be something special in a year's time so maybe hold off until then.

Edit: April 2022
Yeah they still haven't fixed the performance, they added one new gamemode (then took it away), forge is still broken, custom matches don't work, the game is just dead in terms of actual updates. Can't recommend it at all.

Borderlands 3 makes me sad.
It is SO good. Gearbox nailed the combat in this one, killing enemies is satisfying, loot progression is just perfect, abilities and grenades are so fun, the core experience is nearly perfect.

What makes me sad is that every time I want to go back and put more time into it I am reminded of the writing. Borderlands 3 stands out in my head for having the absolute worst writing of any game I have ever played. The main antagonists are so incredibly cringe, they are meant to be (almost as a parody), but the game takes them so seriously that it fails in its irony and is just bad. They aren't the worst however, Lorelai gets that award. Lorelai is a character you have to endure for atleast an hour, and it's excruciating. If you've ever spent time around someone who thinks a coffee mug that says "don't talk to me until I've had my coffee" is a replacement for a personality then you've met Lorelai.

The writers also smoked crack and decided that Tannis for some reason is a fan favourite I guess because she has been around since the first game? She is bad. Her story arc is atrocious. I can't properly put to words how lame it is, it really feels like an 11 year old creating their Mary-Sue OC. I genuinely burst out laughing at the final cutscene when "That Girl Is on Fire" starts playing earnestly as what can only be described as a YA fiction GMOD scene happens.

All of this would be fine if it weren't for the fact you cannot skip any dialogue or cutscenes. If I could do that I would probably have upwards of several hundred hours in this game but the narrative experience is always (literally) slowing you down or blocking your progression for minutes at a time. I have very little gripes with the actual gameplay, except maybe exploration being boring and vehicles still being bad, but everything else ruins what would otherwise be a 5/5 game.

I played Fallout 76 on Gamepass and still felt ripped off.

Leaving aside the numerous controversies surrounding this game and focusing only on the experience it offers, it's bad. Like, really bad.

Firstly, it's the same old Creation engine Bethesda refuses to dump, but now it's got the added complexity of multiplayer. That same old, plasticy, uncanny valley look that was outdated when Fallout 4 released is here again!

I could overlook that if the gameplay was fun, but it's not. What really turned me against this was the fact that you have to pay extra for a private server to play with friends, and you have to pay extra to enable friends to get unlocks and rewards from quest lines completed in your instance.

Utter contempt for players is the only way to describe it and after 2 hours I uninstalled. There is probably fun to be had somewhere but why market a multiplayer Fallout game then lock core MP features behind a paywall?

The recent wave of "oh wow they fixed this game it's fun now!" is entirely cope.

Boneworks is the best VR game I've played so far.
While I bought VR to play Half Life: Alyx, Boneworks has proven to be the game I enjoy the most. It has a barrier to entry however, you need to be accustomed to playing smooth locomotion games and you have to have a strong stomach, especially the first few times. When I got Boneworks first I played for 30 minutes and spent 2 hours feeling like I was going to throw up. After playing other smooth locomotion games and playing for a little bit here and there my motion sickness was gone. I've not experience sickness in any other VR game. It's unique to Boneworks because your player model is a physical item in the world, there's slight head-bobbing, small tilting and bumping effects on the camera, basically a bunch of micro-movements that makes your brain feel weird, more than most titles that have you as a disembodied head and arms.

If you can get into it though what you get is a very fun game, the combat is the best part. There is a huge variety of weapons to use, knives, axes, pistols, rifles, baseball bats, swords, etc. The guns almost rival H3VR for their weighty feel and action, especially the glock, I'd ignore everything else and just have two glocks on me at all times because it was so much fun to use. Melee weapons hit well and carry a good amount of weight, though the game could do with even a basic gore/dismemberment system. The biggest issue with combat is two handed weapons; I've yet to see a VR game do them right. Anything that requires two hands to hold feels too light and bouncy, the swings are inconsistent, aiming with a rifle can be a pain, ultimately I found one handing these weapons while not great was easier than using both hands. Another issue with combat is that there is not much variety in the enemies, they're great targets but that's it, nothing ever feels too challenging, I wish there were enemies that would try to flank you or hide behind cover, or enemies that had armour perhaps, it can get repetitive after a while.

The campaign is very heavy on platforming. At first I hated it, but as it went on I didn't mind it so much, what's disappointing is they hide ammo crates in hard to reach spots but I never felt like I had to try and get them, even collectables were never worth the effort, I'd rather just press on and get into the next fight. They need to make exploration more rewarding, especially for the amount of real world physical effort that goes into it sometimes.

The world is very bland in Boneworks too, I get the aesthetic they are going for and it makes sense for the games story but you could show me a screenshot from 5 or 6 different levels and I probably wouldn't be able to tell them apart. There is fun world building all over the levels but it just feels like a decoration you take note of and pass by. It never pulled me into the world.

The game still gets updates and a big one is due soon which hopefully adds more guns and levels. I may sound like I am pretty harsh on this game but it's because it's difficult to explain what's so good about it, out of all the VR games I've played it just feels the best and the most fun to run around in, there's nothing more to it than that. The issues I have with the game don't ruin it for me but I would like to see improvements. I would highly recommend it. Also Arena mode should be available from the get go, easily the most fun part of the game but it requires you to beat the story mode.

Rocksmith has been a really great tool for learning bass, but after almost 300 hours I find it more enjoyable as a means to relax. Most songs I can play to 99% but it's pure muscle memory, my brain sees things on screen and my fingers react accordingly, without RS I really can't remember how to play the songs, but I'm okay with that. It's a good foundation for if I ever want to put in the work to be good without it. It's very fun to just hop into it for an hour and bang out some good tunes and feel like you've played them yourself. I found the regular 6 string guitar very confusing on RS but bass guitar is wonderful for it.
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Initial review:

So far it's been a pretty good tool for learning bass.

The actual teaching elements of the game are kind of barebones, even the guitarcade stuff isn't great for learning but it's a fun distraction. Learn a song and Session mode are really where most of the experience comes from. My biggest problem when I first picked up guitar was mostly a lack of interest but RS14 provides me with a constant set of goals and a pretty decent library of tracks to keep pushing through with bass, unofficial listings make that playlist even bigger and more to my taste too. The ability to customise tones is fantastic too, it's not the same as investing in waa peddles, cabinets and heads, but it's as close to Dan Maine's set up as I'm going to get. The riff repeater and dynamic difficulty are key to what makes this such a good learning tool, being able to isolate a specific part of a song and slow it down and repeat it over and over without loading screens or fluff makes it easy to correct mistakes. I think most of my time in this game comes from 2/3 hours doing the same 20 - 30 seconds of a song over and over.

Only negatives are that the Realtone cable is actually pretty difficult to come by now and it's still really expensive, also DLC is quite expensive too. It's not bad when you consider you're getting a high quality, licensed song broken down into a format with dynamic difficulty but they always become dirt cheap during sales and it's kind of annoying to wait for that window. The tuner isn't always as precise as it could be and sometimes lower notes and especially chords don't register but it happens infrequent enough that it's forgiveable.

This is my original Steam review, updated in 2019.
DSII is the worst game in the Dark Souls trilogy.

Edit 2019: This game still sucks, especially so after sinking so many more hours into 1 and 3 since I posted this review. I can't honestly comprehend how people defend this game, nothing about it is fun, the entire ethos behind the design team must have been to ♥♥♥♥ up the formula as much as possible. Just skip it, it's not fun, it's not interesting, it's not worth your time or money.

It's not a bad game but it's got some really poor design choices that just make it such a chore to play compared to one and three. If you just finished playing one and you really want more Dark Souls skip right to three because two is incredibly disappointing if you're coming off the fun of the first game.

The first problem is input lag, the fact that mods are still coming out trying to fix it shows how bad it is. Regardless as to whether you're using controller or keyboard it's pretty common to experience input lag or even inputs not registering and it's incredibly infuriating to die because the one break you had in an enemy's pattern to heal is wasted since it took an extra second for your character to use their life gem. This isn't the worst problem in my opinion though, the introduction of adaptability is what seperates this game from 1 and 3 and is what makes it so unenjoyable. Adapability as an idea is awful, it makes most builds that aren't tanks or long ranged worthless unless you feel like grinding out a few hours just to get enough I-frames from adapability for it to not feel so unfair. My main build tends to be dex and strength but not an all out tank, I depend a lot on dodging which is fine in any other souls game but not 2. In other games I wouldn't go near sorcery at all but I found ranged attacks make this game way too easy, and why not exploit it considering that direct combat just isn't fun?

This game also lacks the feedback of the other souls games. I first noticed it when fighting the Dragonrider, I realised I had lost a massive chunk of HP and this kept happening but I couldn't figure out how or why. After paying more attention to my healthbar than the fight I realised his swiping attacks can just apparently ignore my dodges entirely (thanks adaptability) and do damage. That's fine I guess, except for the fact it took so much effort to realise this. There was no sound amongst the rest to tell me that was the moment I was getting hit, there was no animation, no jolt, nothing other than "oops your health is gone and here's a tiny splash of blood barely noticeable under the movements". Dying in this game is just plain frustrating. In the first game when you die it was mostly a learning experience, you realise where you went wrong or what can be done differently, in this game you just learn what ways the game tries to cheat you.

Increased difficulty also doesn't equal more fun. I've only played SotFS and I wish I could downgrade it, by all accounts the initial release is more tolerable and not so cheap. This isn't a game designed for fighting hordes or for balancing attacks from multiple distances constantly, DS1 knew this and made use of it by having compelling one on one fights or atleast manageable "hordes". DS2 just throws enemies at you constantly and expects you to be able to balance everything at once, which isn't fun, there's skill involved but luck plays just as big a role in surviving as you hope that fifth enemy that ran at you is just going to put his shield up rather than attack so you might possible have the opportunity to heal or roll away.

The health mechanic isn't exactly a great idea either, I don't hate it and I can appreciate they're trying to do something different but it doesn't encourage retries, it just makes tough areas even tougher which goes back to the point of more difficulty not being more fun and makes me want to stop playing when I have to choose between smashing my head against a wall or grinding for an hour for human effigies.

The atmosphere and world is probably the best part of this game, it doesn't flow as well as the first game but it's still as enjoyable.

Three takes what one done well and what few things two does right and improves upon them. Go play that instead.

Across all Counter Strike games I've probably upwards of 2,000 hours. CS: Source was my introduction in 2008 and was the reason I made my Steam account. I wasted so much time playing Surf and Gun game specifically.

CSGO in 2012 was a strange experience that stripped away all the fun community aspects in favour of a console port. That then grew into an eSports focused version with little room for experimentation. This is where I played upwards of 600 hours, grinding out ranked matches all summer with my group of friends.

Now CS2 wipes the slate clean and gives us.. better graphics? Not much else. Lots of missing content, worse hitreg/netcode, questionable design choices and worse performance.

I feel like I have outgrown the gameplay loop of CS, that's a reflection on me, memorising spray patterns and playing the same 3 lane maps for hundreds of hours while Russians team kill me isn't fun when there are Ranked FPS games with much more depth and substance.

CS2 is a bad version of CS. No doubt in 3-5 years it will be in a better place but no one who has had their fun with CS will find anything novel here.

Overwatch in its original form never grabbed me the way it did other people, I found everything about it felt too "floaty" and it was a game dominated by meta, moreso than a lot of its contemporaries. It wasn't a bad game but I wasn't the target demographic. I saw it get a lot of my more casual friends into competitive FPS games which was cool.

Overwatch 2 is the natural progression of mismanagement and bad ideas. Reducing team size was a silly idea. The new heroes (atleast what I have played) aren't very fun. The removal of the PvE mode, what was the whole point of a serialised sequel is gone.

Who does this game even exist for anymore?

There are entire YouTube essays upwards of 4+ hours that can describe why this game is so phenomenal and for good reason.

It is outdated by today's standards in terms of graphics, settings and UI. It was ahead of its time in terms of sound design, level design, storytelling and world building.

Get it, fix it up with mods and enjoy a piece of history.

Dishonored occupies a strange place in my mind.
I played it not long after release, that first play through was magical in my memory, I was thoroughly hooked and loved the freedom the game offered. I beat it and promptly forgot about it.

Over the years I've gone back to try it again but one or several things have stopped me from enjoying it to the same degree I once did. It definitely shows its age now and even at release the PC port wasn't great.

I do hope to one day do another full play through.