I am so incredibly disappointed with Dragon Age: Origins. There is common discourse online that this is one of the greatest fantasy RPGs ever made. To address this, let's look at the two core pillars of the genre - gameplay and writing.

The writing for this game, the plot and setting, the dialogue and the characters, feels lacking in a way. The world is well crafted enough, but it lacks a distinct edge. It's fantasy, it's evil monsters, it's civil war - but it's never innovative. I found the characters to be underwhelming too. Alistair and Morrigan were my two favourite companions, while everyone else I found felt disconnected from me. They just join you basically out of some vague duty to save the world or just because they don't have much else going on. I can recall very few characters relating to quest lines that were interesting enough to make any lasting impression either.

But whatever lacks in the writing department, it's still a cut above most video game writing - I will give it that. My number one issue with this game is ironically how much the game gets in the way. Simply put, the gameplay is tedious. Bad, even, at times. And yet there are literal hours between story beats that oblige you to trudge through dungeons killing room after room of bland enemies. I know this is a 2009 release, and therefore isn't going to be technically fantastic, but the enemy variety is so poor. This is exacerbated further by every enemy being fought the same way anyway, meaning any visual variety (of which there is little) hardly matters.

On that note, the game is ugly. Again, expected, but that doesn't change the fact. Animation is stiff and the world is so utterly bland. This is worsened by the abysmal soundscape; the game's soundtrack is so poor it may as well not exist, while the sound design is distinctly lacking. From a bustling market in the capital city to the otherworldly planes of the Fade, there is basically just complete silence - maybe the bare minimum ambience just to keep you from thinking your sound system has entirely stopped working.

So in the end I find little to recommend about this title. I have seen online that this game is placed alongside other contemporaries in a certain "big three" of the fantasy gaming genre. This in 2009, Skyrim in 2011 and The Witcher 3 in 2015. These comparisons do the game no favours. The world is far too unimmersive to be mistaken for Skyrim, while its narrative lacks the charm, wit and creativity of The Witcher's setting and characters. There is a place in the gaming canon for Dragon Age, but I don't believe it is worth revisiting. Know it's place in history, but feel no obligation to ever visit it.

I find the history behind Crisis fascinating. I love how the developers just wanted to make a game so ahead of its time and didn't care about hardware limitations. It's interesting now that every game released easily looks like this or better, but the fact it still holds up this well despite coming out in 2007 is insane (I know this is a remaster, but the original still looks great).

The game its divisive among fans because of the (spoiler alert for the 17 year old game) fact it goes full alien in the final third. I personally very much enjoyed the shift. I didn't find the open level gameplay of the start of the game to be very exciting anyway. I hated how stealth was nigh impossible because of how well the enemies can see, and also just the sheer amount of enemies - to the point I still don't know if they were infinitely respawning at points.

I know that the first levels where you fight the humans are definitely more open to experimentation than the final linear sections - I won't argue against that - but I found that how fun and different the aliens were as combatants that it made up for the game cutting back on its more open elements.

This game is quite challenging, and not always in a fair way. I only played on normal difficulty, but I still found myself dying a lot - and usually to something I didn't even know was there. Regardless of my own skill level, something that is quantifiable is how infrequent the checkpoints are in the earlier missions. Dying to a man that was hiding silently in a bush is one thing; it is another to lose 10 minutes of infiltration progress and to have to resupply myself, walk back over to the base and then try again. This problem I have with checkpoints completely vanishes as the game gets more linear so maybe that's also a reason I don't mind the shift.

Overall, Crysis was fun. It was frustrating at times, sure, but honestly this game is very short anyway so having to die and reload a lot at least made it so I couldn't blast through the whole thing in 5 hours. The gameplay is solid and the graphics are lovely, while the story is completely fine as far as video game stories go.

Having sunk around 20 twenty hours into Hades, I finally reached the end credits and main ending of the game. This is a rouge-like game with about an hour of content, but that content is very difficult and will require persistence and practice to conquer. Plus, to see the true ending will have to escape the Underworld a whopping 10 times. If this opening paragraph sounds negative, I do not intend it to come across that way. I too was skeptical by that pitch, but Hades is an absolute blast - and while I found it began to drag as I approached some of those final runs, the narrative "climax" (for technically this game goes on far beyond the credits) is very much worth the time.

As previously implied, there isn't much to this game when measured by standard rulings. There are 4 bosses (with some variance between attempts and optional harder versions) and you'll encounter just about every enemy the game has to offer after only one or two successful runs. Four areas, all with a handful of enemies, a boss at the end of each - and that's your lot. The variety comes from the six very distinct weapons and the various upgrades you acquire throughout an attempt; the combination of which will likely be wholly unique to that run. This all works to keep things relatively fresh; I still think by hour twenty I was getting rather tired of the combat system as a whole, but there's enough to keep you ploughing onwards through escape attempt after escape attempt until you finally reach the ending.

The story is perfect for a rouge-like game, a genre usually lacking in narrative because of how hard it is to implement. Everyone is immortal, you are repeatedly trying to escape, everyone knows this and can both remark on what you've been doing while also having relationships develop. The characters are all distinct and well voice acted. This isn't the most incredible narrative ever, but it's one that can only be told through the video game medium, and for that it deserves praise.

Artistically the game is great. Isometric games are probably the hardest to make look good because of the obscure perspective, but they have managed to make it work. The character portraits are all beautifully drawn and add a LOT of life to the dialogue.

The soundtrack to this game is absolutely incredible. I would be lying if I said it wasn't the initial reason I picked up the game. It's metal, fast paced and every track is a banger. The final battle theme against Hades himself is without a doubt one of my favourite OSTs ever composed.

All in all, despite some flaws, Hades is very worth playing even if you aren't a fan of this genre. Trust me, I wasn't either - and still am not. But this game is great despite that. And if you're a fan of rouge-likes? Well, you've probably already played this.

Edit: I have since returned to the game and beat it several more times in order to best every boss with the Extreme Measures condition. I've bumped the game up to 5 stars and take back any critique I had for this games combat. I cannot speak highly enough as to the quality of Hades as a game. By far my favourite indie title.

While I usually try to only write reviews after I've finished a game, that would mean I would never write a review for Lies of P, which would be a shame because I quite like the game, but am physically incapable of beating it. Skill issue, yes. Now, acknowledging that up front, I'd like to discuss what I enjoy about the game, because it's difficulty is my least favourite aspect, and yet it is the largest barrier to entry and an ever prevalent aspect of its design.

Lies of P is the only souls-like made by a developer that isn't FromSoftware (that I've played) that I don't despise. Unique enough in setting and tone to be distinct from their mainly dark fantasy medieval settings, yet using every system that makes From's titles work. However, the literal copy and pasting of every mechanic from games I really enjoy doesn't earn this game any points.

Setting wise, the Pinocchio influence is surprisingly well handled, being a unique spin on that novel's story distinguishes it from any game I've ever personally seen when it comes to its world building.

Graphically the game is what you'd expect from a modern title, but deserves more praise because it comes from a smaller studio. This comes at the cost of downsizing the scope somewhat, however. The levels are extremely linear, presumably to account for this budgetary limitation. Enemy design, on a visual front, is highly distinct. In fact, the highest praise I could give this game is having such rich enemy variety in a sub-genre that usually fails so spectacularly in that aspect.

Enemy mechanical combat design is pretty varied too. I'll now reveal that I got to the end of the swamp area, and was utterly stuck on the Green Monster boss that sits at the end of it. That's about 2/3 of the way in, or so sources online tell me. I never felt encounters were repetitive up until that point, and I've got it under good authority it remains that way through until the very end.

Now, the big topic - the difficulty. For my money, only the bosses of this game are hard. The areas and enemy encounters can be challenging, but the bosses are consistently designed to not be beaten, but to be perfected. Each boss is a mechanical and visual spectacle, I can't speak highly enough of their quality. However, I am not a player who enjoys analysing and memorising an enemy move-set, but I certainly persisted far beyond the point I thought I would. Knowing how utterly stumped I was, despite trying every strategy the game would afford me, only feels worse when I know there's like three bosses after this one that are even harder. That is always what kills any motivation I have for these hard games, the knowledge that my struggle is for nothing, because an hour from now I'll be put against something even worse.

But hey, there's a definite audience for this type of challenging game, and I'm glad that those types of masochists can play such a high quality knock-off of the FromSoft games for a change, rather than the usual drivel of this category of games.

I really used to like this game back when it came out. I played it twice back in the day. How disappointed I was to come back and see just how bad this game is.

The script is absolutely non-sensical, especially the twist at the end, and the dialogue is both incredibly poorly delivered and written. People simply don't talk like this - I don't know how this got off the cutting room floor sounding this stilted. The choppy pace as you just teleport between set pieces really doesn't work either, and the less said about how much this game rips off other works the better.

The gameplay is a mixing pot of a lot of half baked ideas. I must admit it is the sole thing that still kind of holds up in my eyes. It doesn't play well, there aren't many good ideas, but it is varied and silly enough to at least remain funny.

And that's about the best praise I can give this game. It is definitely a so-bad-it's-good type game. The awful animations, contrived situations, poor script and intense melodrama make for an experience to be laughed at, not engaged with.

This one really hurts, and I mean that. I was pleasantly surprised when I began this game by the quality of its writing. It's genuinely very impressive, and the premise is very interesting. I would've loved to see where the plot was going.

However, I literally could not. This is possibly the most broken game I have ever played (and I played Cyberpunk 2077 on PS4 day 1). This isn't just glitchy, it is progress haltingly broken. The amount of times levels would entirely break, with things not spawning, level triggers not going off, collision with terrain completely breaking, and being killed for reasons I cannot see or understand. It happened constantly, but the worst thing is that every single time it happened, something about my save would corrupt. Numerous times I was booted back to the very beginning of the level, because something near the end would break and I would insta-die to nothing. I suffered through this far beyond where I would for anything else, because I really wanted to keep playing and to see where the plot went, but there's only so many set backs I can endure.

The game feel is quite terrible. The movement is clunky and the gunplay feels strange. I had attributed this strange feeling to Jack Joyce, the character you play, being relatively unfamiliar with firearms, but that fact can only excuse so much.

Graphically, the game is quite nice, albeit bogged down by massive amounts of motions blur, and also a 30fps cap. This isn't something I normally complain about, but there's something about games from this era that are so close to looking like they do in 2024, but technically just missing the mark. The graphics and animations are great, but the system can't cope with it well enough. At least, that's my unknowledgeable stance on the matter. See also 'Ryse: Son of Rome' and ' The Order 1866' for more of what I mean.

The strongest part of this game to me was, very ironically, the TV episodes that you are sometimes obliged to watch. I can't say it's the greatest show ever produced, but it sure beats playing the game; the story can shine without the game bogging it down. I'd a mind to watch the rest of this game on YouTube, from the perspective of someone who presumably didn't have so many game breaking issues, but ultimately I'll probably just move on. I will lament what could've been though, it really saddens me that something so promising was attached to a game this badly made.

Palworld is at the forefront of a lot of controversy surrounding its likeness to Pokemon. As someone who hasn't played a Pokemon game in about 12 years, I have no stake in that game.

This is a graphically unimpressive, slightly enjoyable time killer. For the 15 or so hours I put into it, reaching what I'd consider the mid game, I was confident I'd had my fill of Palworld. I would regret the time I spent with it, had I not enjoyed the co-op aspect; time spent having fun with friends is never time wasted.

What was a waste of time though, was how often this game crashes. It's unforgivable how frequently this happens, at least on the xbox port I was playing. It crashes when you open menus, engage in combat, catch things - and this is made even worse when every player now has to go through the slog of rebooting the whole game (from the console home screen no less, or else it doesn't work) and entering the unique join code.

Let's talk about other fun glitches. There was one dungeon that kept crashing about 30 seconds after our entering no matter what; there was a point we managed to get to the boss before it crashed for the 8th or so time and we gave up on ever doing a dungeon again. There was also the time I spawned under the map (after a crash) and had no choice but to respawn myself - leaving my bag with all my items and money lost under the map forever.

Fun parts of this game include the catching of the Pals and the subsequent putting them to work in your slave camps. It's a morally dubious concept and I loved every moment of it, it really leans into the stupid idea of having a labour force and I think it's the games best aspect.

The combat is terrible, I managed to do one of the major boss fights and a half dozen or so of the smaller ones. There is no strategy or skill involved, you just need to have a high enough level team of Pals.

Finally, the building is also terrible. It copies the system from Ark: Survival Evolved (as well as most other aspects of its progression system), which in of itself is a terrible system. There was satisfaction in making a half way decent looking base, but the process of building it genuinely might be one of the boring and tedious tasks a video game can oblige you to perform.

I feel my score may even be too high, now that I've highlighted my major gripes with it while simultaneously being unable to give it any real praise now that I'm looking back on my time with it. But I did find myself quite addicted for a few days there, and maybe that's enough for you. Get a few friends together, and play this if you really have nothing else going on. But honestly, just play one of the other survival games on the market; they're probably slightly better.

This is the final COD campaign that I had not played (the campaign is the only topic I will be critiquing). As of right now, I have played them all (excluding the original trilogy but they are so outdated I don't want to touch them).

With the knowledge of the entire rest of the series, I can say with confidence that this is one of the better ones. Even though it came out all the way back in 2008, it didn't feel too dated. However, having played so many, these games have long since become far too formulaic, and this being one of the earlier ones means they had no desire to innovate beyond the core shooting (which holds up well enough).

The story is light, but it's WWII so you know the general plot beats. The game is split between a duel narrative; a voiceless US soldier fighting the Japanese and a voiceless Russian fighting the Nazi Germans. You are a vessel who is present for interesting battles, and the character along with you (either Roebuck or Reznov) is the one with the interesting dialogue and interactions. The Russian plot line as Dmitri does it's best to portray you as a hero by the end, culminating in a pretty great ending sequence, but being silent hampers what could've been a far more emotional story.

On a gameplay front, as I alluded to, it really is just shooting gallery after shooting gallery. The different styles of fighting between the Japanese and the Nazis make for some superficial differences which keeps things somewhat fresh mission to mission. There is also two vehicle missions; the tank one (my least favourite in the whole game) and the plane gunner one (one of my favourite in the whole game). Again, this is an easier title so they weren't looking to innovate yet, so I can forgive it. The differences in locale mean you won't get bored during the 5 - 6 hour runtime.

The soundtrack is particularly noteworthy here. Usually I can't really pinpoint any stand out OSTs from COD titles, but this game has bangers across the board. Seriously, I was hooked on these tracks from mission one all the way to the rolling of the credits. And suitably, the credits sequence just played some of the best tracks, which I happily sat through just to relish in them again.

Artistically, the game looks dated. It is from the early XBOX 360 era after all. Despite this, I wasn't too often hampered by an inability to see what was happening, which is a problem I've had with other COD titles from this era. That's kind of subjective though, so feel free to ignore that aspect. Basically, it looks fine for it's age, and there's some decent art direction to carry it.

In summary, it was worthwhile going back and playing this older gem that I somehow missed. There's something about the older titles that, try as they might, they can never really recapture. And this isn't nostalgia, because up until I recently saw this in the XBOX store on sale, I didn't even know this game existed.