This was my first video game ever.

I have a very vague memory of going to the local mall, and the GameStop inside, and picking this game out on the shelf. It was probably like 2004..maybe 2003? So it was right in the middle of the GameCube/PS2 era and they still had plenty of gen 5 games. Besides that, I have some nice memories of playing this with my dad and asking him to help me with levels I was stuck on at the time. I can still picture the final boss level select screen on our old living room TV in my head, I remember thinking it was crazy we had finally gotten to the end of the game together. Sadly, I was never able to get 100% and beat every level back then but when I eventually got back into Playstation gaming, Croc was the first game I decided to play and yeah I was able to finally achieve 100% after all those years. I also did so last year as it had been 7 years since I played it at that point. Croc is not perfect, god knows this site definitely thinks it isn't with that 2.9 average, but I can't help but love Croc and I do think it is somewhat underrated.

The story consists of an opening cutscene and then some small ones before bosses and then the ending cutscene or two. The opening cutscene has the tribe of creatures called Gobbos, finding baby croc in a basket floating down a stream. They decide to take him in, train him to fight and eventually he becomes fully grown. Not long after, the evil Baron Dante appears with his minions and kidnaps all the Gobbos. It's then up to Croc to save them all and defeat Baron Dante. Incredibly simple plot but an effective one due to the cutscenes being very charming.

The general gameplay is where people have issue with the game. Croc can jump, butt stomp, swipe his tail as an attack along with other more situational moves like climbing monkey bars and swimming. That's all fine and dandy, but the issue people have with all this is the fact this game uses tank controls. Tank controls in a 3D platformer sounds super bad but I think Croc's levels generally accommodate for this. The game requires more thought to be put into your platforming due to these controls rather than just jumping and not even thinking about it once like other games. With how the platforming generally is in the first couple worlds, I think the game does this well. It relies on slower more methodical platforming which does the games controls justice. That and you can switch to analog which makes Croc's move set just smoother in my eyes. It's a bit easier to trip up your movement with analog but I also just find it to be more fun. The first two worlds are really good about this slow and methodical philosophy. I also like them more because I'm more nostalgic for them and because I like the music that plays in them more. The latter two tho aren't quite as good. I still like them overall, the desert more than the castle, but a couple of times they can rely on some really tight jumps that are almost unreasonably hard to pull off and they generally have the worst moments in the game.

Actually talking about what the levels are like, it's basically a very linear level-based 3D platformer. The levels are broken up into rooms and along the way, there are collectables to get. The aforementioned Gobbos are in each level, 6 in total to save however you can only get 5 unless you also collect 5 colored crystals and open the door at the end to get the 6th gobbo. Other than that, you can also collect white crystals as well. These act like rings from Sonic, you get hit you lose them and can get some of them back. If you get hit without having any, you die. You can also collect red hearts which are the lives in this game. They're usually very scarce unless you find the various bonus rooms in the game. If you see a little thing of sparkles on the ground, or a random floating platform in a bottomless pit, you might want to check them out as they always give you a lot of lives. I definitely don't know how to get to every single one, I honestly never tried to look them all up, but I had great joy as a child discovering these for myself. I still remember being blown away somehow finding the secret in the first screen of the game you can unlock by butt stomping on a specific platform three times.

The game is very colorful and nice to look at, though it's also a victim to texture warping. Honestly, I never really thought about it much back then, just thought that's how PS1 games all looked but yeah it can be pretty rough in this game. It doesn't bother me too much tho as the general vibe is what sells this games aesthetics for me. This game is THE reason I love the liminal space like atmosphere you see in a lot of early 3D games. The skyboxes are just wonderful in this game, sometimes I just stop playing and look around to see what my environment looks like in the level I'm playing. Even on this most recent playthrough, I was still doing it. The Ice Island, besides just having the best level design I'd say, is my favorite aesthetically. Some of my favorite snow/ice level aesthetics ever are from this game.

The bosses are another low point in this game. They just honestly suck, like all of them. Every single one just has you waiting for a boss to do a move, and then attacking when they're tired or just open to being attacked. The first boss in the castle island I'll give props to because you must have the little guys it throws walk on these platforms that send them back to the boss. The 2nd ice island boss I also like just because the arena is really nice to look at. If there's anything I'll give the bosses, it's the fact their actual designs and the arenas they're in all feels very different from each other. That I can appreciate at least. But then there's something like Neptuna, the Neptune fish boss that you must defeat while underwater and the swimming was not made for a boss fight so it's just awful lol. So yeah, overall, the bosses do kind of suck, but I only really hate Neptuna. The others are just easy and that's it really.

If there's any aspect you should play Croc for however, it's the soundtrack. It's all good, tho my favorites are mostly in the first two worlds. I will say tho, Desert Island 1 was always a banger to me as a kid and nowadays I really love the first 20 seconds of Baron Dante 3 a ton, even if the boss is dummy easy. Outside of that however, a song I really love nowadays is Cave 1 just because it's so goddamn catchy and feels like the perfect song to play outside of your house on Halloween. I also just really love the first island's themes cuz they're so nostalgic to me and my entire family. If I played one of those songs around my parents, they'd instantly know it's from Croc lol. However, I think nowadays my favorite song overall is Snow Island 3 and it's all because of how atmospheric it is. Idk man, it's hard to be objective with even this game's soundtrack just because it's burned into my mind lol.

Maybe a 7 is too high for Croc, or maybe I'm actually underselling my own feelings because it's closer to an 8 for me. I'll give it a 7 for now tho I may bump it up in the future. Either way, idk if I'd even be on this website and a fan of video games if it wasn't for Croc. It means the world to me even if it's not perfect. I do recommend people at least give this game a try despite the low rating on here. Who knows, you may actually see some good in it like I have lol.

Stalker's world is very atmospheric and is excellently designed to feel a lot bigger and more complicated than it actually is. I think I missed a lot of content in the game, which seems somehwhat deliberate as the game does a great job of crafting a world that appears as though it does not care about the player. It is easy to make a game that feels like it hates the player, or one the revolves entirely around the player, but one that acts like it truely does not care whether the player achieves their goals or not is impressive.

The last few hours of the game are terrible, up untill this point the game had been challenging but fair and allowed for careful planning and rewarded a slow and tactical style of play. However the final sequence of the game forces you to play more aggresively as you're either being chased by helicopters or slowly losing health due to radiation. This seems like a massive design flaw and leaves the game on a downer note.

Fire Emblem Engage was a welcome surprise for me. On one hand, it has arguably the best gameplay in the entire series, but to balance this, it probably has one of the most cliche and basic stories in the entire series.

To begin with, the story isn’t that good. It’s a bunch of tropes meshed into one and it’s just really boring. It’s not bad, just not good either. There’s really not much else to say without getting spoilery but that’s my thoughts on the story.

I enjoyed a lot of the cast. Yes, a few of them can be annoying at times like Clanne, Framme, and Alfred, but some were pleasantly enjoyable. I didn’t expect to enjoy Goldmary as much as I did, and her support conversations with various units (including Ike) just made me laugh. I also enjoyed Kagetsu, Ivy, Fogado, and Timerra. I liked how units also had support conversations with the different emblems, and you got some pretty funny lines from certain conversations, and some callbacks from others.

In contrast to the story, the gameplay is kind of peak. Emblem rings, engaging, and the break system are all welcome additions to the series (albeit some of these things are kind of busted). Having the weapon triangle back in the form of the break system is great and it honestly makes gameplay a lot more strategical to prevent enemies from being able to counterattack. Like Three Houses, the game is more lenient with class variation, but it is just more worth it to stay in their base class, or one with a similar role (unless your Anna). I find using Backup units hilarious, seeing the battle menu say that 6 allies will do 4 damage to the enemy, a really great addition imo, even though it sounds and plays really stupidly because you can just make an entire army of backup units. Emblem abilities are kinda bonkers and can really turn the tide of battle into your favour, and I love how enemy units can also use these emblem abilities, and you need to find the correct strategy to neutralise them as quickly as possible, with as little damage as possible. One great thing about emblem rings was that you’re able to pass down special abilities to any unit. You can essentially have your entire army, including your mages and your dancer, have Canter, allowing them to retreat after initiating combat. Overall, I had a lot of fun with the gameplay in this game, and probably one of my most enjoyable fire emblem experiences.

However, I am kind of tired of a main hub. The Somniel is as tedious as the Monastery (I probably enjoyed the Monastery more because I liked it conceptually). The Somniel just seemed out of place and was only made because Three Houses did so well? Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy both Three Houses and Engage, and I don’t mind either the Somniel or the Monastery, but having to go through so much after each chapter, especially on a replay is sort of tiring. At least this game has dogs that you can get silver ingots from.

Being able to explore each map after a battle and pick up items and adopt pets was something I also enjoyed. Though it did start to get boring when some characters started having the same dialogue in different maps.

I played the game on Hard difficulty until the very end of the game, where I switched it to normal because of never-ending reinforcements (definitely a skill issue and me turtling too much). The maps in general were really enjoyable (Chapter 13 and 17 made me want to cry though because of how many resets I did, I think Chapter 13 took an entire day because I was making so many stupid mistakes). Albeit, this was my first FE game on a higher difficulty than the lowest. Chapters 17 (despite how painful), and 11 were probably my favourite maps because of the retreat condition and the amount of bosses present that just felt really really epic. I also really enjoyed the Paralogues being a callback to the emblem rings original games. You get maps like Arena Ferox and the Plains of Hoshido that are iconic to their respective games (they did Lyn dirty giving her a map that wasn’t even from her original game). These were a lot of fun of challenge, especially the Sigurd one with all of the units that appear in the end.

The music in this game slapped, especially the Solm music, it just slapped harder on a different level compared to the rest of the game. The art style is also great, but I will say some character designs are extremely questionable. Why did we need Colgate-kun as the protagonist, or for Celine to have a macaron for a dress. But other characters had some pretty killer designs like Ivy and Timerra.

Overall, a great game that you should only play for the gameplay and not the story.

Also, please save me from all of the marriage and divorce puns, I’m so done with them.

One of the sadder things I’ve realised recently is that the original Fallout may not be as influential as much as it’s made it out to be, at least when it comes down to its mechanics. But I’m no real historian, and it may very well have changed the world of RPGs forever. Still, I don’t think it really matters because at the end of the day this is still a damn good game.

Four years ago I played this game for the first time and finished it in one sitting, and recently I ventured out to the wasteland once again. Shining blue spandex, bright hot sun, searching for a water chip; it all feels too familiar. Ah, that control scheme…it feels clunky but once you get the hang of its fits this game like a glove. Fast and snappy, perfect for that retro-future aesthetic. Still, I can’t deny I’ve ever particularly liked how this game’s combat is. Nothing horribly wrong with it, but often times it feels too static, like I’m playing a board game with a computer that’s determined to kill me. Probably what they were going for too.

Stopped by Shady Sands, and gave birth to a nation there. Went to Vault 15, and I saw ruins. Ran into the Khans, and slaughtered them all. Headed to Necropolis to give the mutants dirt naps, and saved my vault. Strolled into Junktown for the casino and killed the owner; I left as quietly as I came. Stopped by The Hub for the water, and stayed to help uncover the disgusting truth behind both the missing caravans and those delicious Iguana Bits. Ran into The Brotherhood of Steel; they told me to fuck off. I saved Los Angeles for last, and it was as much a shithole as I had expected.

After you get the water chip, the last half is really unsettling. You feel that there’s an imminent evil heading into this world as you encounter these monsters more and more. As you spend hours upon hours searching for a man you assume to be the devil himself, you grow accustomed to the hell that is this world. Despite being coddled at birth, you make this wasteland yours. And by the time meet the creator of this madness, it really just does feel like a Wednesday in this irradiated world. This game is absurdly funny, not only with its writing and critiques of American culture but right down to the game design itself with the funniest bit being that the thing you spent the last half searching for is just straight left. Haha, all that work for something so simple.

I hated the Overseer four years ago. Really thought of him as nothing more than an ungrateful speck of a man. But today, as I blew up that evil lair and saw everything that my actions wrought and how I changed this world forever, I stood in front of that cold metal door wearing dark green combat armor and a rocket launcher in hand. There, I saw myself. I saw a man in shining blue spandex walking up to someone he just doesn’t recognize anymore. He is confused now as I was in the beginning, he just doesn’t understand and I now realize where he’s coming from. I could hear the fear in his voice, fear of this horrible world that just sucks.


What if we ARE the only safe place in the world? You just gave us back all these lives…I can’t take the chance of losing them.

I’m sorry. You’re a hero…and you have to leave.


You walk alone. Into this heartless, cruel, unforgiving world. Shining blue spandex, bright hot sun, searching for a purpose. You found it one day, but long after your death, another evil arose. Don’t worry, another hero just like you saved us again.

This kinda rocked. I haven't played a CoD campaign since the first Black Ops and had heard good things about this, especially the campaign done by Raven Software. Certainly scratches that itch of well-polished, expensive-looking, run-and-gun shooter with barely any fluff. Cannot tell you what the campaign was about at all outside there being the big bad of Perseus, and it was a welcome surprise that they just let you be "evil" in the end and wipe out your original team that you've played the whole campaign with.

This is what they were crunching for?

The Callisto Protocol is a man drowning. He’s been swept out by the tides deeper than he can swim, and now I feel compelled to go and be the one who drags him back to shore. I’m not looking forward to it as I swim out there. This always ends badly. I know he’ll kick, and flail, and panic, and drag me under with him. But something compels me. I dip beneath the waves, gliding on the current. Every kick is met only with more water, never ground; it’s been a while since either of us has been able to touch bottom. I get to the man. All of the dread that I felt swimming up to him — the growing pit in my stomach warning me that he’d kill us both — fades as I get a hold of him. He’s calm. He doesn’t fight. He wants to be rescued, and he's coherent enough to tell me as much. So much worry on my end, and for nothing. We’re both going home, and my doubts were unfounded. The two of us make our way back to the shallows, and my heart swells. Nobody’s gonna believe this. I get to be the one who brings back the guy that everyone thought couldn't be saved.

We make it from the depths to a point where the ocean reaches our shins, at which point the man panics and submerges my head in about two feet of water until we both die. I knew I should have let the fucker drown.

What we’re looking at here is a bad start that leads into a remarkably strong middle, hitting an impressive stride just in time to trip and break both legs three hours before the finish line. But that middle section is good. It’s really good. It’s so good that I was ready to come in here and lord a massively inflated score over the heads of all of the doubters who didn’t get it. Reality hits hard when it hits, though, and there’s no denying that The Callisto Protocol just runs out at the end. It runs out of ideas, it runs out of money, it runs out of employee morale — it runs dry and it runs empty until the engine shears itself in half.

This is pretty, but a game "being pretty" hasn't impressed me for fifteen years now. Everything since the early-mid 2010s has given me this shrug-your-shoulders feeling of "yeah, I guess it looks good" and spurred little in me beyond that. I know it's a tired truism to trot out — "art direction is more important that graphical fidelity!", as if we don't all know that already — but even games from that era that were trying to look as realistic as the latest titles don't read as being all that different to me today. Honestly, I think the face-scan mocap shit that's everywhere in AAA games these days looks kind of bad; they're all sitting deep in that uncanny valley where everyone's head looks like it's got a video of the actor's face wrapped around it. Even with (perhaps due to an overreliance upon) all of the tech in place, some of these animations look incredibly bad. Here's a shot of Josh Duhamel's character screaming in agony as he gets an implant stuffed in his neck that hurts so bad that he has a heart attack and dies. It's silly. This is not an expression of pain. He's making a YouTube thumbnail face. Fuck, the source of that image is a YouTube thumbnail.

So, yes, this is all very technically impressive, but in practice it's all just bloom and haze and fog and I can't fucking see any of it because someone turned all the lights off. None of this sparks joy. Everything is gray and bland and devoid of life. There's nothing that even remotely scratches at iconic Dead Space setpieces like the Church of Unitology or the cryopod rooms, because the art direction on display is kind of shit. It's a just-so approximation of enough of Dead Space's elements to provoke familiarity, but it's off in a way that betrays the fact that Visceral was a team made up of a lot more people than just Glen Schofield. He isn't Visceral, and this isn't a spiritual successor to Dead Space. It's a spiritual regression.

But as desperately as this wants to stay latched to the teat of Dead Space, it isn't open to those who want the game to be Dead Space. This is a melee-focused system based around dodging, combos, and environment kills; Dead Space is a shooter based around positioning, dismemberment, and, uh, also environment kills. You've gotta meet The Callisto Protocol on its own terms; playing it like Dead Space is a losing position. You should be doing this for everything you consume, by the way. Don't try and cram a work you don't like into a box that doesn't fit it. Play the game that they designed, not the one you wish they'd designed. It took a little readjusting over the course of the entire opening hour of The Callisto Protocol, but I eventually came to understand what it was going for, how it wanted to be played. And I liked it.

Actually, I really liked it.

Combat is simple, but raw enough to be really satisfying once you get the loops figured out. Each fight will take place either as a gauntlet of enemies that pour out one after the other, or as group battles where you'll be caught between three or four monsters at a time. It's a game of dodging, waiting out the combos, finding an opportunity to strike, and then going all-out until you're forced to stop. Weave around a three-hit combo, dole out one of your own that takes the arm off of a monster, get whipped around by another, block his strike, take his legs out, get shoved, pop one with the new space you've been given; it's a wonderful little system that isn't hard to come to grips with, but is punishing enough to mean that eating a bad hit or two will send you back to your last checkpoint. The added complexity comes in the form of your GRP (pronounced as "grip") and your guns, though you'll be rocking with the starting magnum for the vast majority of the game. The GRP can pick up enemies and hazards to toss them around, and your guns are your combo enders. You can also open with gunfire if you've got some distance on the monsters; they've gotta come to you, so you can filter a group down a chokepoint and take one of them out before you're forced to rely on the melee to take you the rest of the way. Combo-ender gunshots can sever limbs, decapitate enemies, force staggers to open up rushdown opportunities, and generally just act as a major force-multiplier to make sure a crowd of monsters is never unmanageable. If you're thinking that this sounds like it's not really a system primed for a horror game, you'd be right. The Callisto Protocol sucks dick at being a horror game. As an action game, though — much like big brother Dead Space — I thought it was great.

Eventually, you'll progress to a point in the narrative where hitting the monsters for long enough will make worms rupture from their body. These worms need to be shot within a fairly tight window of time, or else they'll cause the monster in question to undergo a transformation that makes them bigger, stronger, and faster. You really do not want to let the worms make the monsters evolve. In theory, this is an interesting escalation — you can't afford to drag fights out the way that you could earlier — but as we've seen throughout this write-up, theory is distinct from practice.

In practice, the worms will always erupt from the same place; the generic guys who smack you around will have them erupt from their guts, and the spitters will have them erupt from their heads. These are the primary enemy types that you'll be fighting against for the overwhelming majority of your playthrough, so combat encounters go from frenetic punch-ups where you're desperately trying to make the right call to something that's solved by a flowchart: three or four hits always followed by a gut shot or a head shot, rinse and repeat. There's basically no reason to ever open up by firing your gun now that enemies can heal by evolving, which leaves you the options to fling the enemies with your gravity glove and hurt them a little bit, or to swing at them with the baton. The baton expends no resources, is fast, is always guaranteed to connect, is a safe option, and will open up enemies for the instakill gut/head shot in no time at all. So many tools, and no reason to use any of them besides the fucking stick. Everything was useful only two hours prior, so being boxed in to what's obviously an optimal strategy to repeat on every single monster serves only to squander a system that was working just fine before.

Where things really fall apart, however, is in the third act. Jacob, our protagonist, falls down a gutter or some shit into an underground area where all of the enemies are blind. They've got super-hearing, but they can't see. Firing a shot or swinging at one with your baton may as well spare you the ceremony of kicking off a fight and just reload your checkpoint the second you press the button; you'll get swarmed by too many monsters to deal with, and they'll chew through every resource you have before they kill you. What you have to do instead is pull a page from Joel Thelastofus's book and crouch-walk around while shivving these clicker expys to death. Unlike in The Last of Us, however, the shiv that you get has infinite uses, meaning that you can very easily just crouch-walk around and kill everything without alerting a single enemy. This is optimal. They don't hear you shivving them, even as Jacob grunts and growls and the monsters gurgle and shriek, and there's no reason to sneak past them; they still drop ammo and money and health packs just the same as everything else. If you could just blast your way through this section, it'd be over in thirty minutes; instead, you have to play the most boring stealth section ever devised by human hands and it takes upwards of two and a half hours.

You get back to the regular action combat in time for the game to end, but the damage is more than done at that point. You fight the exact same boss four times in the span of an hour, and his pattern is literally just doing right-hand swings. You hold left on the control stick and auto-dodge everything while shooting him once per dodge. It's so boring. I knew while I was going through the ridiculously long stealth segment that they were padding for time, but repeating the same boss fight four fucking times really gives it away to anyone who wasn't paying attention that they were running on empty. I went from itching for more in the middle act to wishing it would just hurry up and end by the start of the finale.

Jacob gets to the escape pods, meets a zombie warden who's managed to keep his personality (generic asshole), and then the zombie warden does the Resident Evil boss thing where he talks about having superior genetics and then turns into a big meat monster with glowing orange eyeball weakpoints. I'll take the opportunity now to point out that this game was written by two people. The lead writer has never worked on anything else in his entire life. There were five times as many employees dedicated to the face scanning as there were on the writing team. Remember that the facescanning looks like shit, so adjust your expectations for the quality of the writing accordingly. Whatever. Nobody was ever playing this for the story. It's still a weird choice for a game like this, though; with everything being told to you through audio logs and exposition from characters who have a clue what's going on, you'd think you'd want more hands on deck. Then again, the only thing anyone ever seems to say is "Jacob, go to [the place], I'll explain later", so you probably don't need to put too much effort into putting that together.

But my mind keeps wandering back to the thought that the people at Striking Distance were working twelve hour days, seven days a week — and for what? What about The Callisto Protocol demanded such brutal hours for such a long stretch of development? I can't find anything in the time leading up to the game's release that would indicate what was sucking up so many resources; all I've come up with are some vague gestures towards "new lighting techniques" and "haptic feedback", all incidentals that barely add much of anything to a work that's remarkably standard. This cost $160 million to Dead Space 2's 60 million and it looks and plays worse.

There’s an excellent game within The Callisto Protocol, and one that I imagine would have been able to flourish if made under the banner of someone who actually had a clue. Literally all it takes to turn this from mediocre to great is a better manager. Talented people were overworked and underpaid to make something that broadly isn’t good, but shines in parts; had they been treated properly and overseen by a real leader instead of an MBA meathead who stepped down the second shit got hot, they would have made something that could actually eat Dead Space’s lunch. Instead, we got this, and it’s begging for Dead Space’s scraps.

Glen Schofield can go fuck himself.

Sea of Thieves is a really strange game I've been struggling to understand.
The game is incredibly simple in almost every single way. Combat involves one of three guns and a sword that has a swing and block function. There's extras such as throwables but at its core it is shoot first or swing first to win. There's no stats to level up, there are no better guns or swords to get; what this means is that someone with 10 minutes of playtime can go up against someone with 1,000 hours of playtime and stand a fair chance of winning, everything is completely balanced across the board. Larger crews have a distinct advantage of being able to man more cannons at once, repair faster, split up tasks, etc. but a skilled two man crew can hold their own in the more agile sloops assuming they have the coordination and supplies to outlast larger crews.

The lack of stats/levelling system for your player also means there are no significant rewards. Everything you work for in this game is cosmetic, new paint jobs for your ship, different looking swords and guns, tattoos, decorated cannons, clothing, etc. If this doesn't sound rewarding enough for you then you may not enjoy the game. That being said most of the fun I have had has come from my experience in the game and not from the rewards earned.

The gameplay loop involves completing missions for factions and levelling them up, some factions ask you to fight AI enemies, one wants you to find hidden treasure, another asks you to engage in PvP, etc. There's a nice variety of ways to grind out the game. If you're cautious you can essentially ignore all other players and do your own thing, however by the nature of the game you will inevitably run into other players. A majority of players seem to avoid confrontation, however those that don't wont be shy about engaging you from the second they spot you, regardless if you have any loot or not. You may have spent two hours completing a quest with your ship now stocked up with chests but you can lose it all to a crew that just logged on. This can be very frustrating if you do missions that require a large amount of effort such as the events, however this is exactly what makes the game unique and keeps you on alert.

The game in general is quite easy but there are strange difficulty spikes here and there. In particular the red-tornado event asks you to take down a skeleton captain who has multiple phases, the first two phases are fine but the third phase gives the enemy 8,000hp and the ability to rain down fireballs from the sky. You'll need to use cannons on your ship to inflict a steady amount of damage but if the fireballs hit your ship you'll be stuck in a loop of putting out fires, repairing and by the time that is done it will get hit by them again. Larger crews won't encounter this problem but as a two man crew it feels unfair.

The community is a mixed bag, as mentioned plenty of players will avoid conflict but like most multiplayer games you'll run into players who have the single aim of trying to ruin your experience. The worst example of this was when a 4 man crew sunk our newly spawned sloop and kept spawnkilling us over and over by camping the tavern. There was no point to this as we had just logged in and had no loot for them to take. We had to scuttle the ship and respawn in a new area of the map. No big deal but a waste of 15 minutes. So far we have had a few very positive encounters, including max level pirates who gave us late game missions to earn easy loot and players who just want to sing sea shanties alongside us.

I have to say that I sincerely dislike PvP in this game though. Any crew that is of a larger size than yours is at a distinct advantage. Ship combat is rarely about who goes down first, it's about who boards first and spawncamps or who runs out of resources first. It feels like a complete and utter waste of time getting into PvP in this. I have had sessions ended because I've been pursued for 20 minutes, got bored and just didn't want to play anymore, the flow of the game just grinds to a halt and I wish there were PvE servers. I get why people think this opinion is wrong but it's not fun encountering other players in a PvP scenario.

There definitely feels like there is a lot of untapped potential in SoT, it's got a fantastic foundation and I hope Rare continues updating it, we've recently gotten the first seasonal update with the most generous season-pass I've ever seen along with the addition of pirate trials that added more content to the game and fleshes out the lore. Around the world there are journals, messages in bottles, named characters, etc. however you're never encouraged to look deeper into this. The game has a real problem with explaining things to player; emissaries play a huge role but I had to learn the ins and out from asking other pirates, I had to look up how to find ashen keys or how to break red mermaid statues.

It wasn't until we started doing higher reward missions that involved carrying 10+ chests, several bounty skulls, crates of tea and silk and an armoury worth of gunpowder from one side of the map to the other that it clicked with me how fun this game can be. The stress of having to coordinate with your crew to avoid conflict or win ship battles is extremely fun and taking 10 minutes to unload every piece of loot is a nice visual indicator of how hard you worked during that mission.

On a final note, it's quite a charming game. My early hours with it included just playing shanties on different instruments, getting drunk until vomiting while playing shanties, launching myself out of cannons, fishing, etc. Little things like that really draw you in and create some memorable moments.

I'd highly recommend SoT, it is at the very least worth trying even if you think it might not be for you, I was very pleasantly surprised. I can't imagine it would be very fun solo however, bring atleast one other person.

Edit 05/09/2021:
It has been interesting to watch this game develop, I can safely this is a game where the devs really care about it. There is a serious level of passion in the updates and their efforts with the community and that alone is worth suggesting the game for.
The Pirates Life update has shown however that the game itself is pretty average in every way possible, having played for a while now I can safely say the following:
- Combat is boring
- Sailing is okay at best
- Factions are bland
- Items aren't varied
- There isn't a whole lot to do in the world
And in a vacuum these are all bad things, however when coupled together in an open world where player interaction is entirely random it leads to some of the most fun you can have. The whole thing starts to unravel with structured, linear missions however, while I appreciate the efforts to try something new this game is made to be a player driven experience and I am excited to see where to go with it.

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.

A let down.

This game has good systems and mechanics but somehow just doesn't work for me. I can't pinpoint anything it does wrong necessarily but the complete experience failed to hold my attention on any of the three attempted playthroughs I did.

None of the stories or quests reach the heights of Fallout: New Vegas (which is the most valid comparison) and even though the combat system is better than NV it is still extremely rudimentary and unengaging.