Slarvath
2022
It's fun but way less depth than Vampire Survivors. Three levels with no real reason to play anything other than the one you're most used to, 15 difficulty levels that barely scale at all, no real rewards for anything outside of currency that buys runes. It feels good and it's worth your time, but it's not VS.
2023
Very janky. The sense of humor is funny if you like tony zaret type humor which i do, but the gameplay is not great. It's also distinctly not like postal 2 in terms of gameplay at all despite being advertised as such. Probably will get patched eventually and I'll check it out then because there's some alright level design here but this needs a little more time in the oven IMO.
RGG studios finally figured out that making the minigames and substories have tangible benefits to combat is based as hell. Add on top of that the best combat in the series and a story that is not super good but does a good job bridging the gap between 6 and 8, and you've got one of the better yakuza games. I still think K2 is my favorite but this is top 3 easy.
2023
A very clever and difficult puzzle game that's completely unique, as far as I know. Decode different languages as you ascend the tower of babel. Stealth sections are lame but few and far between, and the game is so fun that they fade into the background. Possibly a late contender for my GOTY. Definitely play if you like Return of the Obra Dinn
2016
The first time I played this I thought it was fine. Not as good as braid but not bad. A few years later I went back to it because I liked the puzzles enough to go for seconds and discovered the second half of the game. Then I thought it was great and people underrated it. I've now played through it for the third time, completed the challenge, and am working on cleaning up the last of the puzzles, and I think this is one of the best games ever made. This game seems pretentious but it's exactly as smart as it claims to be and I'm glad that the narrative surrounding the game is shifting from "shitty maze game for art majors" into "actually really cool puzzle game". It takes a while to chew on, but I love this game. I don't really consider this a rating for this year, so I'm not putting this on any lists, but this recent playthrough solidified to me just how much of a 10/10 this game is.
Might as well rate some games I'm never going to replay but want to give my takes on while I'm rating replays this year. Ace attorney 1 is rough compared to the later games but also has a very different vibe. There's a sort of noir feel that isn't really there as much in the rest of the trilogy, and is completely gone by the DS games. I feel like whether most people think this is a rough but good start or a weak link hinges on whether they fuck with 1-5. I like 1-5 a lot, so I give it honors.
If I ranked individual cases in this game, the final case would get a 10/10 and the others would hover around the halfway mark. I don't think 2-3 is as bad as people say, I think 2-1 is just about the worst opening case in the series, and 2-2 is kinda good, but that doesn't change the fact that the whole package feels like filler for the real meat. The final case here was unanimously the best in the series for a long time, and for good reason. Worth playing for that alone.
Yet another case of "Main plot good, middle plot bad". Case 2 and 3 suck, 2 less than 3, and 1 and 4 are good. Amazing how this happens for like, every ace attorney game for a while.
An unnecessarily bloated game where things just kind of happen until a main plot is scraped together and a villain is named. If any AA game deserved to be 4 cases long instead of 5, this is it. There's a lot to like here, but even as a kid I knew this was too much.
I never finished this game. I got bored in the third case and called it quits. Every bad thing about ace attorney since the end of the first trilogy coalesced into this game while GAA was singing beautiful songs in Japan only. Overreliance on gimmicks, comically overblown stakes, boring investigation sequences, bloated cast, this game really does have every criticism of ace attorney in one package. Doesn't help I was playing this on my phone, which is absolutely the worst way to play these games.
2016
If it wasn't a ubisoft game I think people would rightly recognize this as an insanely fun and versatile open world stealth game. The amount of interactions different machines have is really something. Wanna clear out an area? Get a radioactive payload from a stolen truck in the central bay island and use a magnet crane to lower it into the enemy base! So good
2009
I find this game completely unenjoyable unless I am playing as my favorite character Marie Poppo and ruining the experiences of other people in the voice call. Then it's pretty fun
Very solid start to the series but going back to it, there's some serious growing room to be done. Stealth and combat are both good but not all there yet, and the environments are pretty samey. Still, it's a great time, and an easy recommend.
2019
It's a solid BR game that I've won a few times, but not one I ever really feel the call to go back to on my own.
See Valhalla works because its side quests are all bite sized 10 minutes long at most events that could be creative and fun. Odyssey is a bloated mess that tries to be 10000 different things and excels at none of them. I guess it doesn't matter because Ubisoft has given up entirely on this style of game, but yeah.