To me, Legend will always feel like the fullest realization of what Tomb Raider and Lara Croft should be. The variety in terms of locations is incredible: Besides the tombs the title promises, Lara also visits the remnants of Russian Cold War experiments, the roofs of Tokyo's skyscrapers, just to name a few. The game is barely 5 hours long, but I prefer a game that introduces a new location or mechanic every 20-30 minutes over a boring 12 hour slop.

While some of the dialogue might seem cheesy by today's standards, the delivery and the emotional weight behind it still make this one of the better Tomb Raider stories. I just wish Rutland, one of the main antagonists, got more screen time. He's severely underdeveloped, especially when compared to Amanda, who is a surprisingly deep character.

It's also worth mentioning just how fucking cool Legend's Lara is. Whereas reboot Lara offers a weird mixture of slasher movie villain and slasher movie victim, Legend Lara resembles a John Woo protagonist. Jumping off of an enemies shoulders only to empty half a magazine into them midjump in slow motion never gets old, and the lock-on feature allows for a surprising degree of mobility during firefights.

If you're going to give Legend a try (which is something you definitely should), try to get a hold of either the PS3 or the (backwards compatible) Xbox 360 version. The PC release is extremely buggy, with broken visual effects in both regular and "next-gen" mode. It's still playable, just far from ideal.

Also I think Amanda and Lara should kiss, and the lack of fan art/fics is very disappointing.

Yeah, this might actually be worse than Angel of Darkness, because despite its broken release, AoD had at least some level of ambition and creativity behind it. Relic Run is just a Temple Run clone, and it's not even a good one.

Movement feels sluggish, ragdolls upon death take way too long to play out, there's almost no background music, and for some reason there are rail-shooter segments. Very, very bad rail-shooter segments. Even during regular gameplay, the mission based structure feels boring, repetitive, and the game offers little challenge.

Bizarrely enough, Lara is now fighting lizardmen. Apparently someone had rewatched Raiders of the Lost Ark and decided that battling against Native Americans in their own home was slightly problematic, so now we're fighting against a race of intelligent lizards in their own home - I guess that's what progress looks like.

I'd recommend to instead play Temple Run, Subway Surfer, or an actual Tomb Raider game, literally anything that isn't the case of intellectual theft called Relic Run.

It's an alright version of Ace Combat, but there's ultimately little that Ace Combat X excels in. Graphics are about average for a PSP title, which isn't great for a genre so reliant on spectacle and sense of speed. Voice acting, at least in English, isn't particularly great either.

Unlike the other Ace Combat entry on the PSP, X is set in a fictional world, which could in theory afford the game greater freedom when it comes to exploring its themes. The game attempts to tell a story about dictatorships and how intertwined they are with the military industrial complex, but the plot remains shallow and has little of interest to say. It doesn't help that most of the plot is delivered in cutscenes separate from the actual missions, and explained in monologues by a reporter that never even meets or interacts with the player character. The missions themselves tell a fairly standard story: the evil neighboring country attacked us, now we'll kick their asses and take back our land (and airspace), all while enemy fighter pilots become more and more afraid of our faceless protagonist the more missions we complete. It works as a power fantasy, but the series has shown that it's capable of more.

The missions themselves are simultaneously the best and worst part of X: they're fairly varied and there's no way to see all of them in a single playthrough, encouraging players to replay the campaign and try out different mission orders. That being said, some missions are absolutely brutal, and the game doesn't have any checkpoints.

The worst offender was an escort mission that sees the player defend a couple of helicopters whose pilots seem determined to get the attention of every single RPG along their path. RPG crews spawn in during the mission, meaning there's no way to clear a path ahead of the choppers, and there's a very small window between RPG crews spawning and firing. What made me furious was learning about what's going on behind the scenes: some RPG crews will always miss their shots. There's only a couple of enemies actually able to hit the choppers, so it's entirely possible to hunt down enemies that pose no threat at all. The mission seems to try and subvert every assumption a player with a functioning brain would make about how it works, and it's borderline unplayable because of it. I somehow made it through, but if you're going for an S-rank remember to schedule an appointment with your nearest mental health professional, cause there's no way you're making it through this with your sanity intact.

Look, maybe I'm rating this higher than it actually desevers, but I never understood the mixed reception Ascension received when it launched.

This is one of the best looking PS3 games, the scale of the setpieces is just unbelievable. You thought the big snake in the new God of War was cool? You get a new setpiece of equal scale every other hour. Ascension rivals and arguably surpasses even the Poseidon fight at the beginning of God of War 3 when it comes to pure eye candy. You sometimes even lose sight of Kratos because the camera has to zoom out so far to capture all of the action.

Granted, the frame rate suffers in some scenes, but the 60 fps framerate target means that game stays playable even during dips. Experiences may differ, but I never felt like I missed an input because of low fps.

The combat system has been reworked and while I think the one in 3 is still slightly better, I like Ascension's new mechanics too. Making more use of the chains and the ability to pick up several secondary weapons are good additions, and I also like the different infusions Kratos' blades gain. Each of the four is themed after a god and offers a slightly changed moveset. They aren't as specialized as I would've wanted them to be, but what's there is still great fun.

Many of the other common points of criticism are either nonsensical or also apply to the other God of War games. Pacing issues? Every God of War pre 3 is worse. Tacked on multiplayer? Noone forces you to play it and the game is still as long and polished as the other entries.

I do agree that the story isn't adding too much to the overarching plot, but it works well enough. Kratos even gets to show emotions and is able to peacefully interact with another man! It's clear that they tried to do something about the series' sexism and while Ascension still sexualizes women, it's far less cringe worthy than the prior games with their sex QTEs.

All in all, Ascension is a great action game filled with awesome setpieces and deserves to stand next to the mainline titles. I'd rather replay this over the first two games or Chains of Olympus any day, and I recommend anyone who owns a PS3 and enjoys character action games at least gives it a try.

How much enjoyment you get out of this really depends on how much you vibe with the game's humor and style. The writing, partially done by James Gunn of Guardians of the Galaxy and Suicide Squad fame, is great. It's refreshing to see a game embrace humor and make it one of its core selling points, especially since a reliance on jokes is often seen as hurting potential sales.

The voice acting and line delivery are some of the best I've seen in the medium, it's just so expertly directed. Cutscene direction, licensed music, and the overall insanity of it all also help make this a pretty unique game.

Unfortunately, the gameplay can't really keep up. Sure, it works, but combat is simple and not especially smooth. The ps360 generation is one filled with character action games and solely based on gameplay, I have a hard time recommending this over the likes of Bayonetta, God of War, or even something like Force Unleashed.

Level Design is pretty boring, and the game's visuals often look bland. There are also tons of loading screens that break the flow of the game, occasionally even interrupting cutscenes.

Ultimately, watching a few minutes of game dialogue or cutscenes is probably enough to determine whether this game is for you. Did you laugh at the jokes and do you enjoy R-rated James Gunn writing? If the answer is yes, then get the game. Or at least try to do so - the prices for used copies are skyrocketing, and I personally don't think that a 4 hour game with mediocre combat is worth $40+ for a used copy.

There is a remaster/remake coming up, so at least you can always wait for that. Personally, I'd have prefered a simple port. Lollipop Chainsaw is a product of its time, but that also means that a remake would either have to change some of the jokes (and potentially lose what makes it so unique) or risk carrying forward some unfortunate elements.

Don't get me wrong, the humor didn't age terribly overall - but at the same time, fighting through a school setting with panicking students and cops unloading their guns really doesn't feel as fun as the creatives thought it would back then. It's a 2012 game, released pre-BLM and pre-#metoo, in a time in which America thought racism was over as they got ready to vote for Obama a second time. Times are different now, and while it's possible that a younger version of me would have laughed at "that's racist against cows" jokes, I'm glad that we have moved past that point.

There is, on a very fundamental level, no reason for this game to exist. Everything it does has not only been done before, it has been done better.

The only good thing about Declassified are the graphics. The game looks similar to Black Ops 1, although slightly scaled down and running at a lower resolution. Gore effects have been removed, and every map and level is pretty small, but this is still one of the best looking games on the Vita.

That's where the positives end. Multiplayer is still alive, at least for TDM, but the controls make it feel less satisfying than on an actual console. All the maps are taken either from Black Ops or, in the case of Shipment, Modern Warfare. They have, unfortunately, been heavily downscaled. There's no reason to play them here when you could just play better versions of them on console or PC.

Zombies mode is absent, replaced with a wave defense mode and a couple of challenge levels resembling the Modern Warfare obstacles courses. Again, all of this has been done better in other Call of Duty games.

The campaign is probably the low point of the entire game. At least everything else was mostly bad because of the Vita's control layout and performance capabilities. Meanwhile, the campaign is just all around bad, and no amount of porting to more powerful systems could help it. The 10 missions are barely connected through introductory voice overs over poorly compressed prerendered cutscenes. Whereas the other Black Ops games at least attempted some commentary on the Cold War, Declassified operates on a level of "Russians suck" that hasn't been observed since Rocky 4. The writing is terrible, with characters saying fuck in nearly every other sentence, as if that would somehow make the game seem more mature. The campaign ends with what is supposed to be a setup for Black Ops 2, only that the same twist has already been done in Black Ops 2 with more set-up, payoff, and thematic depth.

What makes it even worse is the game's balancing. I'm assuming that the devs must have realized at some point that their campaign can be completed in less than an hour, and decided to make it seem longer by cranking up the difficulty. The game's ai is hilariously stupid, and Declassified tries to make up for that by spawning dozens of them all around the player and making them spot the player through walls. Recruit difficulty and checkpoints during missions are both absent as well, making it seem even more as if this was supposed to tire out players so they don't rush through it in less than an hour.

I've seen all the game has to offer in the span of an evening, and can confidently say that there is absolutely nothing worthwhile in this game. Fancy graphics don't help when everything else is so painfully bad. Get literally any other Call of Duty game instead of this one.

Look, I know this isn't high art redefining the medium, but even as someone who's never listened to 50 Cent I can't deny that this is a pretty fun game. It's incredibly stupid but that's also what makes it so entertaining. Even the often pretty mediocre voice acting just adds to the vibe.

That's not to say the game isn't well made. Shooting mechanics, the scoring system that rewards players with bonus weapons like explosive handgun rounds, the way containers pop open to reveal their loot - all of it works together nicely in creating a game that's not interested in wasting the player's time or striving for realism. You bought the 50 Cent video game, so now you get to play as 50 Cent, shooting bad guys while listening to his music; that bitch got your diamond covered skull, better get it back! Games like Gears of War ultimately edge out Blood on the Sand in terms of content and variety, but those were also prestige Xbox games made with a way higher budget.

What somewhat drags the game down are a couple of minor bugs, the repetitive environments (brown Middle Eastern/North African city, never saw that one in a game before), and the same helicopter boss fight repeated 3-4 times throughout the game.

Still, if you're a fan of 50 Cent, you should absolutely get this, and even if you're not, the game is worth a try if the idea of a short 3rd-person-shooter that's not taking itself too serious sounds appealing. I wish there were more games like this, I love those short but memorable AA experiences we used to get back then. Give me more of that, maybe even with some other artists: Taylor Swift flight sim, Olivia Rodrigo FPS, the possibilities are endless...

This might genuinely be the worst game ever made. Firstly, it's terrible in all the usual categories: the plot is generic, gameplay isn't fun, performance and graphics are awful, even the subtitles often flat out don't work and sometimes sound effects and music are straight up missing.

But hey, other games are terrible too - what makes Blackwater so unique is its message, the reason for why it exists: This is a barely disguised propaganda game advertising a group of war criminals. Devil May Cry 2 might be a terrible game, but at least the people who produced it didn't shoot a 9 year old in the head. The fact that a company like Blackwater was even able to find a developer willing to work with them is sickening, and I can't fathom how Microsoft and game journalists at the time thought this was a normal thing to release.

This is an evil game and even if it actually was fun I couldn't recommend it to anyone. Unless you're interested in the culture that made the release of such a product possible there's no reason to ever touch this.

While the combat is not quite as varied as in God of War 3, Ghost of Sparta easily makes up for this with its story. It's surprising to see a PSP spin-off dive deeper into Kratos' character than the mainline games ever did. It's great to see Kratos in a non hostile environment for once (if only for a couple of minutes), and one can even spot a lot of elements that would become much more prominent in the later PS4 era titles.

What holds the game somewhat back is the way it treats its antagonists. Whereas Zeus and Ares both get entire games worth of build up, the main antagonist in Ghost of Sparta appears only a couple minutes before the climactic boss fight against him starts. I don't think the middle part of Ghost of Sparta drags as much as the one in GoW 2 did, but I still think it could've been put to better use to flesh out Kratos' opponents.

The PS3 port is also fairly mediocre. I'm assuming that it runs better than on the PSP, but there's still tons of screen tearing, stuttering, and the game even crashed once (this might be due to my disc copy as the game froze up right when a cutscene was supposed to start). The controls also fail to make use of all the buttons available, as more than one action is bound onto single buttons - a layout that might have made sense on a PSP, but feels clunky on the PS3.

Technical issues aside, this is one of the better Greek God of War games and definitely worth playing. Despite being released after God of War 3, try to play it before playing 2 and 3, otherwise some of the dialogue in 3 won't make sense to you.

I know the yellow piss filter and the washed out colors popular back in 2006 get a lot of flack, but how else are you supposed to simulate the existential horror of existing in the UK?

I've barely seen anyone talk about this game, and when it comes up it's mostly to point out that Resistance is one of the few early PS3 games that made you feel like perhaps you didn't just waste 600 bucks on a console with no games. That's a shame, because Fall of Man is a fairly unique shooter experience. If we imagine a spectrum between fast paced old-school shooters like Doom or Quake and the more modern "you can only carry 2 guns and everything is hitscan" Call of Duty clones, then Resistance sits right in the middle.

Health regenerates, but only in increments and health packs are needed for everything beyond that. Movement isn't as fast as in Quake, but you can still carry the entire weapon arsenal around and the focus is less on sitting behind cover and more on pushing forward. It's a nice mixture and serves as a reminder of just how much damage Modern Warfare did to the FPS genre.

Unfortunately, the game struggles in the difficulty/balancing department. I appreciate a challenge, but Resistance takes things slightly too far. The Chimera are aggressive to a degree rarely seen in shooters, often pushing forward or throwing grenades when players try to hide behind cover. In the game's best moments this leads to tense situations in which players need to quickly dispatch enemies, always staying in motion and choosing the weapon most adequate for a specific range or enemy. In its worst moments, an enemy grabs the player character and you can do nothing but shake your controller (it's a launch title so of course there's some dumb movement feature) and watch in horror as half your health bar disappears. Oh, did I mention there's an enemy type able to shoot through cover? Good idea in theory, but awfully balanced. Finishing the game on easy was already brutal, I doubt anyone could play through this on hard without having a bit of helpful Chimera DNA inside them as well.

What made me continue playing was the game's setting. There's a brutal hopelessness on display here that's rarely seen in games. Half the world is already conquered by monsters, the only hope left is a single man who's half alien himself, and even if you somehow succeed the world will still be in ruin. Add to this the amazing mixture of alternate history retro-futurism paired with horrific alien laboratories and you end up with a fairly unique and equally bleak atmosphere.

At first I considered the protagonist to be underdeveloped, but as I played more I realized this is most likely intentional. You might be playing as Nathan Hale, but he's not the one telling the story. Instead, his story is recounted by a British intelligence officer trying to piece together the journey Hale went on. You don't know what Hale is thinking, but that's because Rachel Parker doesn't either. I don't think that Resistance fully utilizes the possibilities of this approach to story telling, but it's still nice to see an established player character whilst also leaving players the opportunity to draw their own conclusions.

Resistance is a game I can pretty much only recommend to those already experienced with console shooters - its difficulty is simply too brutal, although to Insomniac's credit, it runs incredibly smooth for a PS3 game. If you don't mind a challenge and are into retro sci-fi/horror, definitely go for it. This is one of the cheapest PS3 games I've seen and widely available.

This is a pretty mediocre remaster that adds little besides a new photo mode. Everything that looked good in the PS3 original still looks great, while some of the character models could've used an overhaul. I also encountered two minor graphical errors during my playthrough, although those might be due to the PS5 backwards compatibility mode.

Luckily, God of War 3 is still as much fun as it was on the PS3. Combat has a wonderful flow, the game is lengthy but without any filler content, and there's just so much variety here. The previous games left a surprising amount of gods and titans alive for Kratos to battle, which he does in a series of incredible set pieces, wielding a ton of different weapons.

However, what keeps me from fully recommending this game is the way it treats its female characters. The God of War games were always edgy, but to a point where it's so stupid you can't help but laugh. Ripping off a god's head to use as a flashlight is metal as fuck, and Kratos interrupting his quest for vengeance to sleep with Aphrodite has to be one of the dumbest QTEs ever.

Unfortunately, God of War 3 doesn't seem to know the word restraint. Roughly in the middle of the game, Kratos encounters a half naked and chained up woman. The game heavily implies that the woman has been abused and most likely raped by her former lover Poseidon. Kratos grabs the woman, shoves and throws her through half the level all while she screams for mercy, and ultimately ends up throwing her into a mechanism, crushing her to death - all of this to open a door btw. I don't mind Kratos being an edgelord, but the scene is never reflected upon and seems insanely cruel. I don't even want to imagine how female devs working at the studio felt when their superiors came up with this scene.

All in all God of War 3 is still fantastic game - just be aware what you're getting in terms of some of its more problematic content...

Let's get the obvious out of the way first: the game looks incredible, especially for a Vita game. This wouldn't look out of place on a PS3, perhaps not even on the Nintendo Switch. Mercenary does exhibit heavy frame rate drops in some levels, but it running on 2011 mobile hardware is a miracle in itself, so I won't complain too much.

Despite its short length it's also a contender for best Killzone campaign. The game takes place during the events of the first two Killzone games, taking the player to the locations of both games and offering lots of level variety in the process. Players are also free to choose how they approach most situations and can buy guns and equipment supporting their respective styles. Stealthily taking out commanders even yields additional lore bits and currency rewards. There's tons of different weapons and shooting them feels great. I didn't even mind the touchscreen minigames and QTEs since they work so well, way better than rotating the controller did in the console games.

The story's great too. In my other reviews, I criticized the earlier Killzone games for not building onto the tone and stories their predecessors established. Mercenary manages to nicely tie the stories of Killzone 1 and 2 together, even offering a unique perspective since you play as, well, a mercenary. The protagonist and his allies generally aren't constrained by annoying things such as loyalty or basic ethics - they're in it for the money.

Not only does the game make both sides of the ongoing war seem morally gray, it also ties this into the gameplay. Ammo costs money, so you better loot it off the people you killed instead of buying it. Got shot and died? Now you get a (very very slight) punishment in the form of a "life insurance" payment taken from your account. Accidentally blew yourself up like an idiot? Suicide costs twice as much. But don't worry, both sides of the conflict will happily pay you for all the people you killed and things you destroyed. It's perhaps the most cynical the series ever got and I appreciate what the game is trying here, even though it sometimes suffers from the short length of its story - it's hard to flesh out characters when they're only around for less than 4 hour.

If there are, by some miracle, still Vita owners out there that haven't played Mercenary, they should at least try it. It's not only a masterclass in pushing the system to its limits, it's also a great game on its own that I would happily play on a bigger screen, provided Sony ever again allows Guerilla to work on something not called Horizon.

This must've been quite the experience on the PSP, but playing it on a PS3 makes it look like a somewhat generic game. It released after God of War 2, even though it partially sets up the events of that game, but looks worse and lacks both set pieces and impressive boss fights.

There's also a lack of interesting additions to the combat or gameplay in general, and the whole game is not very well balanced: slightly past the midway point I had fully upgraded every weapon, as well as my health and mana bar. That's not to say the combat is bad, it's fun, but it has a very "been there, done that" feel to it.

On a more positive note, I appreciate the absence of the insanely difficult QTEs that were common in God of War 1 and 2. Some of the environment art is great too, although repetitive. The story is somewhat predictable, but still manages to flesh out Kratos as a character.

Nevertheless, I could never shake the feeling that the reason this game exists was purely to get a God of War game on the PSP. There's just not enough there in the graphics, story, or gameplay department to make it feel like an important entry in the series. If you're interested in playing it, at least try to do so before playing God of War 2.

Look I'd love to just write "we have Modern Warfare at home" and end it there, but no, Medal of Honor 2010 is waayyy worse.

Good things first: The score is actually great and I wish it was part of a better game. Same applies to the Linkin Park song used during the credits (what's up with Linkin Park being everywhere during the late 00s?). There's a single mission I enjoyed, and I guess the gunplay is occasionally serviceable, at least when it's not ruined by the weird mouse input.

Everything else is just varying degrees of awful. Unlike the long dead multi-player part, the campaign runs on Unreal Engine 3 and looks exactly like you'd expect a generic military fps in this engine to look: incredibly ugly, almost as ugly as the ui. The game's story is similarly generic and an incoherent mess filled with stereotypical characters.

As if all of that wasn't bad enough, the game is also very buggy. I'm not talking about the occasional animation bug or flickering texture, no, this game will force you to replay entire mission! Occasionally, your teammates will get stuck on level props and not move any further. Doesn't sound that bad when you consider how stupid their ai is, but once you reach the next scripted event, the game will not proceed since one of the NPCs needed to trigger the script is missing - you're stuck.

In a case like that, even loading a checkpoint won't work, since a lot of the time the NPC got stuck before the checkpoint save was created and will still be stuck upon reloading, somewhere in a now inaccessible part of the level. Just imagine having to constantly keep track of all the soldiers running around in Call of Duty, or Elizabeth in Bioshock, just in case they get stuck... I had to replay not one, but TWO missions because of this bug! Including the final fucking mission of the game in its entirety, since the script that didn't trigger was what was keeping me from the final cinematic and the end of the game!

It gets worse: the game's story has aged incredibly awful. This is a game that portrays the fucking War in Afghanistan as a noble cause fought by heroic US troops that they'd surely win, if it wasn't for those evil bureaucrats in Washington. The game has the audacity to make you conquer Bagram airbase during a mission, a place that would later be used as a prison, with the Red Cross reporting multiple human rights violations, including inmates being tortured. The devs couldn't have known how the overall situation in Afghanistan would ultimately develop, but the Bagram prison torture had already been reported on for years when the game came out in 2010. Reactions at the time of release were more focused on the fact that the multi-player let players play AS THE FUCKING TALIBAN, which I still cannot believe is something that made it into a commercially released game.

This game is a buggy, incoherent mess, dragged down even further by its absolutely tone deaf political messaging. Unless you want to see how bad it is for yourself, or you're looking into it for research purposes, I genuinely don't see a reason for anyone to play this.

Hades is a fantastic game, don't get me wrong. However, finishing it before the Hades 2 release (or at least playing up to the ending credits), I also saw some of the flaws in it.

While there is a wide variety of viable builds, some are just more efficient than others. Once I had finished a few runs and got closer to the ending, I found myself having to choose between established builds that work well but get boring over time, or more experimental builds that could potentially cost me the run in the last third. I found it hard to "trust the process" since some boons are just way too useful not to use all the time.

Again, this is a very specific criticism, and one I didn't have early one. The game's story progression does a wonderful job at always giving you new dialogue to listen to, even when you fail a run. In fact, the voice acting and story are simply incredible, even outside the context of the game's progression.

I also love the overall approach to Greek mythology and the colorful artstyle. Both Hades and the new God of War games have similar, often quite serious themes, but I enjoy how Hades still manages to embrace some of the more lighthearted aspects of the mythology.

Overall, Hades is an easy recommendation for anyone even remotely interested in roguelikes, action games, Greek myths, and/or bisexuality.