84

The story rips, the soundtrack rips, the atmosphere rips, the gameplay kinda rips if you play a couple missions a day, stop, turn off the game, leave your room, go down stairs, prepare yourself a nice lunch, prepare your two cats a meal as well, sit down to eat your meal, finish your meal, let out a long, hard burp of satisfaction, before getting off your ass and considering cleaning the dishes, but ultimately deciding to hold off on it till later. You decide to move your way into the living room, so you can relax on your newly bought, comfortable couch. You fall down onto the couch, and start to ponder what you should do next in the day. You could go back to gaming, but the weather is unexpectedly nice today and a walk in the park does sound relaxing right now. Oh, what the hell!" you say, as you attempt to get off the couch. Unfortunately, the comfortability of the couch magnetizes you to it leaving you unable to get up. You try again to get up, but despite all your effort and might you're unable to win. The couch looks at you with a smug grin as you helplessly attempt to rip yourself from its grip. Time goes by at a rapid pace, and you're losing your chance to take that much needed park walk. At long last you gain the strength to break free, and you lift yourself with the might of a lion. You've a taunting glance at the couch, before heading outside and getting inside your car. You drive all the way to the park, take your walk, and come back home exhausted. You prepare you and your cats a large meal, eat it, and then head upstairs to play some rounds of (Insert multiplayer game here) with your friends. After a long day, you get yourself ready for bed, before finally falling on the bed and getting yourself a nice four hours of sleep. A couple more missions of Drakengard will be pretty fun after that.

92

Tomb Raider in a few ways feel like the antithesis of Mario. While Mario is focused on fast and slick movement throughout zany and expansive worlds, Tomb Raider is more slow and methodical with its platforming and is more focused on grounded and atmospheric levels. They are wildly different in their goals, but that doesn't stop the both of them from being fun as hell.

Tomb Raider's style is not for everyone, but I never once thought the game was being too unfair. The most seemingly unfair mechanic that being the combat can be clunky, but as long as you're smart with your jumps and conserve the right ammo most combat encounters won't be that much of a problem. Everything else in this game is perfect, especially the save point placements. The person who placed them deserves a raise and a kiss on the cheek.

55

Solid dungeon crawler with a barebones, yet fun demon system along with surprisingly solid art design and atmosphere.

Second half unfortunately drops the ball with boring navigational puzzles and once fun gameplay systems losing their magic due to a lack of interesting progression.

Some of the late game design choices are so hateful towards the player that I can kinda respect it.

90

Don't understand all the hate this series has recently been getting on this site. It all just mostly feels like really sensitive people missing the point and getting butt hurt over nothing. I saw a review here saying the first game is xenophobic, despite the game very obviously making fun of it. I even sometimes see posts of people thinking the game is on Nicole's side. It isn't, with multiple routes here either having her being criticized for being a garbage person or her facing serious repercussions for her actions, sometimes both happen in a single route. The game does has a very dark and cynical sense of humor, and if those kind of jokes don't tickle your funny bone that's fine. However, it does not support shitty people or ideas. It's just portraying certain people within a certain time period in an exaggerated fashion. In my opinion, both games are incredibly funny and handle their subject matter well.

Anyways, this one is much better than the original. It's just as funny, while also managing to make the characters and story routes even more interesting and complex.

57

The story makes absolutely no sense at all and the game isn't nearly as complex as it thinks it is. However, I would be lying if I said that the game isn't still fun to play. The mechanics themselves aren't anything new or mind-blowing, but it doesn't have to be if it is executed well. The weapons are all satisfying to use, however, the abilities you gain throughout the game feel almost useless even when playing on "Hard" difficulty. Levels are also all beautifully constructed, and fun to play through.

91

I played this one on expert mode and this is the most fun I have had with a game in a while.

Aside from the annoyance of unskippable cutscenes, there is very little majorly wrong with this game, and the reviews here saying that the game is "janky" and has "aged poorly" ring false in my ears.

The story is simple, but there are enough interesting plot threads and progressions here to keep things engaging. The game also goes through its perfect roster of worlds at such a brisk pace to where it was impossible for me to lose interest. To be honest though, the combat and side content were more than enough to keep me engaged. I understand to a small extent why some people would label the combat as "janky", but aside from a couple annoying bosses and moments everything here feels tight and punchy. There are a perfect amount of abilities and spells to play around with, and almost all of them feel useful. There are many challenging moments sprinkled throughout this game, but none of them felt like the difficulty was due to poor design choices. As long as I consistently dodged and parried, strategized well, and engaged with most of the side content, the game was smooth sailing. The game forcing me to do the side content would be a problem, if it wasn't for how much fun it is. colosseum fights, collecting secret items, and hidden bosses all feel fun to do and the game never makes these side quests outstay their welcome.

Couple more things I wanted to add at the end here. First, the party A.I. is garbage for anything other than healing, but your main playable character more than makes up for them, and having your party members heal you and serve as meat shields definitely come in clutch multiple times. The A.I. being bad is unfortunate, but it is barely a problem. Second, gummi ships are annoying, however, these sections are really easy and after a certain point you can skip most of these sections entirely. This makes gummi ships more of a minor inconvenience rather than a major problem.

88

I really dislike visual novels. Their basic mechanics and cliches aren't my thing at all, and the ones I have played all display awful pacing that bore me to death. However, Class of '09 is one of the rare visual novels where I don't just play it to the end, but actually try to find all the endings.

Yeah, its rough around the edges, the garbage Renpy models and backgrounds hurt to look at as someone who places a large focus on a game's presentation. The thing is the writing and voice acting is at peak form, so I can't help but tell my brain to shut up every time my mind starts to dwell on the game's look. I can go from hysterically laughing towards the insane satire to feeling genuinely a little moved by some of social and political commentary the game provides. I'm not saying that the game is necessarily deep or complex, but when the game decides to be emotional those rare moments are written with enough genuineness that they don't feel forced or manipulative. The game is also not long at all with me taking only about half an hour to get my first ending, and three hours to get all of them, so if you end up hating the game at least you won't have to spend that much time with it.

70

I had my fun with this one! The exploration of Hyrule, finding shrines, upgrading Link, and that overall sense of adventure and discovery is just as good as people say it is up to a certain point for me. After a while, the overall structure starts to fall flat for me with the find a shrine for spirit orbs then go to the statue to upgrade once you have enough. The sense of discovery that I felt during the early portions starts to lose itself on me the more I go on, and some of my biggest problems with the game starts to shine.

Most of the problems can be contained into the fact that many of the gameplay aspects here are done much better in previous games, and some of the changes Breath of the Wild makes on the Zelda Formula don't appeal to me. The dungeons and boss battles are one of my biggest problems with the game. The dungeons themselves feel formulaic and basic even without comparing them to the previous games. Not that the previous games didn't follow a dungeon formula, but they did a far better job making each one feel fresh despite following one. Here, that isn't the case, and the same can be said for the bosses. There are about a handful of fine bosses, and a lot of reskins of those bosses making for a very boring roster. The only boss I would call "Good" is Ganon, and even he suffers from a second phase that is way too easy.

Many of the changes that Breath of the Wild makes on the Zelda formula do actually work for me. The open world feels justified as that sense of exploration, discovery, and experimentation is felt when playing around in this fully realized environment. The focus on shrines is more hit and miss for me, but I think it was a needed change to support the open world, and the game never forced me to start grinding shrines once I started to get tired of them. However, I do think that the change from finding heart containers to a full fledged upgrade system doesn't appeal to me. It feels much lamer and generic compared to heart containers which encouraged exploring the much smaller worlds of previous Zelda games. Second, I personally find the weapon degradation to be more of a bad thing than good. I understand that it functions as a way to support the survival and item management mechanics of the game, but it makes one of the most fun parts of the game for me which is exploring the world to find cool weapons feel useless to do. I think with a good weapon repair system this could have been fixed, but unfortunately it doesn't exist in the game.

I do complain a lot here, but I do genuinely enjoy the game. Dungeons, bosses, shrines, upgrades, and weapon degradation I find to be mediocre, but those systems working in unison with other gameplay mechanics that I do actually enjoy helps makes those problems much easier to bear. I also spent about 45 hours playing this game, so if I hated it I don't think I would have poured that much time into it.

88

Minor disappointments and a couple problems lingering from the second game (albeit the severity of these problems are minimised here) hold this one back for me, however, these are only minor issues in an otherwise fantastic game. Sly 3 isn’t the radical shift in gameplay and tone like the second, but rather the developers focusing in on the details and creating a much tighter experience. This is all best illustrated by the drastic improvement in the missions. The repetitive missions that overstayed their welcome from the second game are gone, replaced with fast pace missions booming with variety. I think what helps this variety is the developers honing in on the Ocean’s 11 style from the second. The storyline’s focus on setting up a team of different playable characters to crack a vault not only allows the story to go through many interesting story beats, but also allows the gameplay to be far more unpredictable and experimental. However, despite this sense of unpredictability, the game remains consistently fun and engaging throughout the entire experience whether you’re fighting an operatic mob boss or an evil genius mandrill.

74

Sly 2 is just as filled to the brim with interesting ideas as the first to the point that the game is forced to shift genres and atmosphere. The original’s focus on arcade style platforming with noir influences has completely shifted towards semi open world stealth with a more outwardly confident sense of Ocean’s 11 style. This new direction helps keep things fresh and interesting, sneaking around snowy mountains, gothic prisons, and villainous blimps is fun and the levels are an absolute blast to admire. However, I would be lying if I said that this was nearly as consistent as the first. Upgrades, thieving mini games, and multiple playable characters are cool concepts that don’t harm the game at all, but they all lack refinement and a real sense of usefulness and cohesion with the rest of the gameplay systems. Don’t even get me started on the mission structure and pacing, not to say I didn’t have my fun, but questions like “When will this mission end?” or “This is so boring?” were constantly ringing in my mind for quite a lot of these missions. I will say though despite my major faults with this game, the passion of the developers shines through every crevice of it’s levels, and that helps me to just barely look over my major issues with the game.

86

Occasional Playstation 2 jank aside, this was an absolute joy to play over the weekend. Saturday morning cartoons, noir films, and graphic novels all stirred together to create a game beaming with an amount of personality hard to find in most games. It isn't all style, however, as the game shoots you into its gorgeous, cell-shaded levels that are packed with (mostly) tight platforming, races, mini-games, collect-a-thons, bosses, and polices chases that can be all finished in a tight, addicting six hour period! It's crazy nowadays to see a game this to the point and focused, not bogged down by unnecessary parts, that leaves you satisfied but wanting more. sigh, if only there were sequels made.