pretty good. the dialogue and story suck balls of course but in a funny way most of the time. i like how you can make the writer's oc look like the biggest douchebag on planet earth. the core gameplay loop is easily enough to fill the almost 100 hours of playtime, but it kind of feels unfinished. not in the way of being buggy or broken, but like missing content. hulk in particular has a single conversation, and no friendship path. it feels like they ran out of time to finish him, especially when he was revealed so close to release. the game is also has some minor but reoccurring glitches, wolverine will often fall through the ground, the game will stall at turns, subtitles will be wrong, the game will forget choices you made hours ago, etc. nothing big, but noticeable. still, the core combat is fun, and the dialogue is (unintentionally) hilarious a lot of the time. i enjoyed every one of the many hours it took to beat this game, which is impressive for a game that's this repetitive!

it's as if capcom were like "ooh resident evil 6 was bad, we should make the next one more like slender the arrival, that oughta do it!" it's probably the most pathetic type of horror they could do, consisting of mostly gross out shit. the only reason this game was exclusive the ps4 and xbox one was probably just because the ps3 and 360 couldn't handle the sheer amount of maggots being rendered in the low res sludge. at least that's my assumption because the game looks like complete dogshit while still having horrible frame drops, though i do wonder how much of that can be attributed to the new ray tracing patch. when it's not focused on being gross, it also tries to be scary by the other cliche, that of course being a dark hallway. dark hallways may be the single most overdone thing in horror games, and it's never been scary. "what's in the darkness?" i know whats in it, a video game enemy. i will shoot it and move on or run away and move on. this also marks the return of stalker enemies, and they may be the worst in the entire series. at least mr. x searched for you. jack baker literally just sits in the area you need to go to with his thumb up his ass until you show up. if you lose him after he chases, he walks right back to that area. it's just annoying.
the gameplay itself is fun enough. it's a more classic resident evil fare than the previous main series, or revelations, though it never reaches the complexity of puzzle that something like resident evil 2 would throw at you. while those games would have faith in you to remember areas you went to a long time ago when you got the thing to unlock it, this game will never make you go longer than half an hour without finding the key or item you need to progress after seeing what it activates unless it's an optional secret, and those items will never be used for more than one or two things. it's still a marginal improvement over something like the original revelations since it has a far better laid out map. bullets are once again basically completely useless against the monsters, but unlike the originals it's basically a requirement to kill those monsters to move on. i assume this was to add some kind of ammo management but it really only boils down to "pistol when one enemy, shotgun when more than one enemy." the first half of this game is also dominated with AWFUL boss fights. just filled with gimmicks that weren't thought out at all, like a chainsaw battle or driving a car or some crap. it would be cool if these didn't feel awful to use, but because they are it's so frustrating, they honestly remind me a lot of resident evil 6.
writing has never been resident evil's strong suit, but also they never took themselves seriously until now, or at least, if they did they did such a poor job that it was funny. resident evil 7 is just middling. it takes itself 100% seriously, but cannot back it up at all. if resident evil 8 never came out, ethan winters would be the worst protagonist in series history, and it wouldn't be close. there is no corny charm to be found in resident evil 7 like the original titles, theres nothing completely over the top like the action titles, and the story isn't stupid enough to laugh at like the revelations titles. it's just nothing.
still, i would play this any day over resident evil 5 or 6, or even revelations 1. while this game isn't even close to being one of my favorites in the series, there's no doubt the series needed to change perspective (ba-dum-tiss) if it wanted to live on, especially after the rather bad sales of revelations 2 in comparison to series heights. i don't see myself ever revisiting this unless i'm checking out the psvr version, but i more than appreciate what's it's ushered in for the series. RE2 remake, and RE8 are some of the best games in the series, and both never would have been made had this game never come out. there's still something to appreciate on it's own, while it doesn't fully capture it, it is a good step towards returning the series to it's roots, but that's all resident evil 7 really is to me. a good step.

this game sucks balls. at its core its better than re5 was, but at least you only have to play that game one time to beat instead of the 4 fucking campaigns this has. i hope you enjoy playing the same levels over and over in slightly different environments. maybe you can fight the other campaigns boss fight, but from a shittier perspective! do you wanna do your fifth door opening quick time event? choo choo, here comes the next dogshit vehicle section! fuck you. it actually took me 3 hours less to beat this game than it did resident evil 4's two campaigns, that's including the hours i spent staring at the pause menu wondering what i was doing with my life, but the repetitive bullshit this game constantly throws at you made it feel like a goddamn lifetime. i came in expecting a great action game, as i had been lead to believe, by like a hundred different people comparing this to much much better games and movies, but this was just a bad one. theres a ton of moves that have no utility besides looking cool, basically only good for losing health. the resident evil 4 roundhouse kick was cool, over the top, silly, but it also had utility. there is no utility in using melee in this game except putting yourself in needless danger to look cool. theres no utility in sliding except to look cool. even if they did, it feels like crap to use them, overly scripted, and taking far too much control away. the environments might be the ugliest yet, resident evil 5 was ugly, but the environments, textures, and modelling weren't the problem. resident evil 6 has less ambitious levels, and is on par with resident evil 4 graphically, a game that came out 7 years before this one.
nobody hates resident evil 6 because it's not survival horror. resident evil 4 isnt survival horror. they hate it because its an ugly shit game, with underbaked mechanics. i hate this game. i hate you. i hope you DIE! in a FIRE!!!

Sonic Frontiers is one of the worst displays Sonic Team has put out to date. Every single aspect of this game feels like no thought was put into it beyond the initial conception. Everything, from the combat, the skill tree, the open levels, the classic levels, the story, the menus, even the fucking layout of the controller, nothing had any thought put in at all.
Let's start with the levels, both the open, and the classic. First, the classic. Simply put, these are some of the best levels Sonic has ever had. At least, Sonic Team thinks so because the level design is copied verbatim from other Sonic games, in what might be the biggest display of laziness I have seen. I would be surprised to learn there was a single original asset in these levels at all besides Sonic's model, and the boost meter. The fact they would put out these levels is downright embarrassing, not only because they copied them, but because Sonic's control in Frontiers is just outright not designed for them. Controlling Sonic in these levels feels terrible, he goes at 2 locked speeds, stops instantly, the homing attack feels incredibly restrictive compared to previous Boost games, hell you lose massive amounts of speed if you jump. You cannot jump in levels without being slowed to a crawl. I would say "how did the developers think this was okay?" but it's clear to me that this is the bottom. Sonic Team has reached a new level of simply not caring about anything other than it working, this is a marked step down from Sonic Forces, let alone Sonic Unleashed; a game that came out almost 15 years ago using this same format. Sonic can't even accelerate anymore; the defining feature of this entire series. Is the standard for this series so low now that this is truly what they come out with, and it's accepted as the best in years?
The open levels don't fare much better, though I struggle to call them open. They are filled with constantly barrages of platforms and areas that force you into a 2D plane, restricting your movement, and stopping you from actually exploring and going where you want to go. Why on earth are there even sidescroller sections in a 3D open world? I don't know, because they don't control well that's for certain. Sonic was a defining sidescroller, not only his classic games, but even more recent games like Mania, Rush, and the DS versions of certain console games were good. The sidescroller sections in Frontiers are awful. They do not control well, they are restrictive, and they are markedly less fun than the already not fun 3D game. They shouldn't have been in this game, they shouldn't have been in Colors, and they shouldn't appear again. Sidescrolling is only a part of the open world though, and in it, you are tasked with collecting memory tokens to unlock cutscenes and progress. A basic collectathon format, but it's hindered by the fact that these platforming puzzles, and open levels are terrible. Many of them don't involve any player input, simply the player walking on a grind rail, while the game does the rest for them. Player input can actually lead to death a lot of the time, as even though you don't conform to the games railroading, and want to actually add some creativity and platforming into the game, it will still act as though you are following it, changing to awful camera angles that feel hand chosen to make sure you have as little depth perception as possible. Even getting to these is awful, you can't plan out how to actually get to an area as you have to be 3 feet away from something before you actually see it, as this game has no LOD system of any kind as far as I can tell. This is a massive problem, as you can't plan your jumps or navigation, or anything. Outside of collecting, you also do mini "puzzles" to unveil the map Ubisoft style. These can range from anything from holding the bumpers, to sometimes even pressing the bumpers. It's groundbreaking stuff, I mean even a four year old might struggle a little to figure out how to run in a circle around something, let alone three year olds. Occasionally, you might even have to do some platforming, could you imagine? Platforming in a platformer? I didn't even know it was possible, I thought all there was to platformers was sitting through railroaded booster sections, and walking through the finest the Quixel Megascans stock asset library has to offer.
The game also has an "all-new" combat system, but it's really just the old one from Heroes, and 06 with flashy animations. It has a skill tree now, implemented in the stupidest way possible. Skill points are dropped when you defeat an enemy, you have to manually pick them up. Not a big deal right, but if you think about it for three seconds, you realize it's an issue. You have to stop running, moving, platforming, whatever you're doing, so you can go pick up those skill points! It slows the game down, breaks flow, and it's an incredibly obvious issue, and yet it's here. The game also has the standard ring health, but now you can just run in a circle to generate infinite rings, so it really doesn't matter. You also get extra boost speed when you reach max rings, so often after a combat encounter you will spend a minute or so running in a circle to get max rings, and when you do you have to watch the same 5 second long cutscene of you powering up. The game is just filled with tedious time wasting garbage like this that makes it draining to play.
I wont spend much time on the rest, it's not worth it, but I'll do a rapid-fire paragraph here. The story, is bad obviously. It's a story for kids, but I honestly found it funny how predictable the whole thing was from the second Sage came on screen. The menu, requires you to click twice to restart a level, making a brief annoyance. The control layout, they kept everything the same, but for some reason assigned boost to the trigger, and gave attacking it's own button? This makes things like moving from side to side with bumpers uncomfortable, and also makes boosting feel far less responsive in classic levels. Traversal, walking around you are magnetized the ground. No launching in these parts! Except when you do for some reason. I don't know what causes it to happen. The final boss isn't even the actual game. It's Galaga. The final boss of the fucking game is advanced Galaga. I cannot make this up.
One of the defining moments of this game to me has to be a crane minigame. One of the easiest, and most common puzzles, something that's been dozens of times in many games before. It's basic, you control a crane, pick something up, guided by shadows or some kind of marker that will let you know where your crane will descend. In Sonic Frontiers, the crane has no marker, and no shadow, leaving the player to guess where to drop the crane in vague areas because the camera is aligned in a way that you can't actually line up the crane and the ball, deforming into trial and error solving. It may seem like nitpicking to bring up a one-time minigame and decry it so much, but I do this to make a point. Literally nothing in Sonic Frontiers is executed right. One of the simplest mini games ever, mastered decades ago, is done wrong here. Sonic Frontiers is the worst Sonic game. Period. It is a game filled with bafflingly bad design decisions leaking from nearly every faucet of the game. It is scary, how this game is being praised. The standard this has presumably now set for Sonic will be incredibly easy to surpass, but I won't be there. Unless it's on sale for like 5 bucks or something then I'll probably get it.

Breathtakingly stupid story. While I could probably pick it apart for multiple paragraphs, let's just say there is absolutely nothing to take away from this. It exists purely to give "emotional moments." There is no meaning to be gathered whatsoever that is not contradicted 100 times over by the game itself. The facial capture is extremely dry, and ruins what are some decent voice performances from the cast.
The gameplay is the same as the first, and while I do get people thinking there wasn't enough for another game, I don't think it's that bad as someone who hasn't touched the original game since I beat it years ago.

A bit of fun, and a cool feature, but a bit too limited to be put behind a price tag. It doesn't nearly reach the limit Oblivion did with it's smaller DLC, but Hearthfire doesn't add much in terms of new content, and the main selling points, that being the ability to build your own house, and adopt children are very underdeveloped.
Kids basically serve no purpose, they stay static, never aging, never growing, they have no emotion towards having a parent who is barely around, and in a series that has basically set it's goal as making every character feel real, and have the player feel as real as those characters, it's distracting how little personality each kid has, and how indistinct they are from each other. Ironically, the new adoption shares a lot of the same flaws as the base games' marriage system. Throw some child beggar a coin, and they'll instantly ask "Can you be my mother" every time you pass them for the rest of the game, and if you accept, they do nothing but show robotic love towards the player, and on occasion give you a gift.
However, it's mainly built on it's house building mechanic, and while it is fun to have a bit more choice in how you decorate your home, it basically is just a standard home, except now you need iron ingots, and stone to build that alchemy lab instead of shilling out 3000 gold or whatever. In retrospect, something along the lines of the Fallout 4/76 building system would be a strong fit, but I do have to say, I am a bit happy it's this way because it's certainly saved us from a generation of videos where people go to their "home" that in reality is just a "perfect" base with no roof or or walls, or anything, just a floor with every workbench in the game on it. I am shit talking you. You know who you are, and just know when I see it I judge you. I hate you, and your ugly base. Build a roof. Stupid.

Yeah, not a big fan of this expansion. This is the first time I've played through on the vampire side since 2013 when the expansion came out on PS3, and it reminded me why I always stick with the Dawnguard. The Vampire Lord mode, while cool on paper, is terrible for a few reasons, especially when used in the DLC's story, mainly having to do with Serana, the companion who accompanies you throughout the entire questline. The way you improve, and increase the Vampire Lord's skills is by killing enemies with one specific attack, and you have to personally do it. Serana, nor any other companion can do it. Kill stealing becomes a huge burden when you just want to level the damn skills, but Serana charges in at the last second to kill them instead. On top of that, for some completely stupid reason that I cannot comprehend, if Serana is in your party, the main attack of the vampire lord, the one that you need to use to level, is significantly debuffed. It devolves in less combat, and more timing your shot to make sure you kill them before Serana does, because it does such a pitiful amount of damage when she's around that you might as well just sit on the sidelines. On top of that, in vampire lord mode, you can't do anything, you can't pick locks, loot bodies or chests, you can't activate certain objects, you can't speak, you can't open your inventory, you can't do shit. You basically have two choices, stay in gimped vampire mode, where your attacks do no damage with your primary companion, and you can't do anything, or you don't experience one of the expansions main new features. It's completely baffling how this mode was handled, especially with the new werewolf skill tree, which avoids almost all of these problems.
On top of that, the story is just awful. Not that I expect a great story from Bethesda, but this one might be their SECOND worst story, I mean they did make Fallout 3. It's less so a problem of their content, and more of their characters. Harkon is a terribly underdeveloped antagonist, and while it's more excusable for the Dawnguard side, on the Vampires, it's just terrible since Harkon can almost always be available to speak with. You are constantly told of how terrible a person he is, and how you can't reason with him, and that he's consumed by power, and the game practically shows you the exact opposite. Hell, if you cure your vampirism, and come back, Harkon will give you it again if you just walk up and ask. We're shown other people, who publicly trying to dethrone him, and yet he does nothing against them. He seems pretty willing to share, and respect those he views as powerful to me. Also, after the brief hiatus in Skyrim's main quest, this brings back Bethesda's tradition since Oblivion of the player not being the main character. This one is particularly bad about it though, in that not a single thing would have changed about the story had the Dragonborn not participated, save for Serana getting released a few hours later. I do think the story has some good ideas, I like the general progression, I think the idea behind both the Dawnguard and Volkihar is cool, I like the general set-up, and characters, but the way all of it is executed is just so bleh. The story needs to do way more showing, and a lot less telling, it needs to spend more time on those characters, and it especially needs to involve the player far more in the conflict aside from "hey you, why don't you accompany serana on destroying these three big skeletons!"
On the whole though, I do still like the expansion's contents. Not only are all the dungeons it adds pretty fun, and lengthy, but it adds a multitude of new radiant quests, brings you across some unique, and interesting locations, has some great encounters, (there's a particular one involving a frozen over lake that I love, if you've played it, you know what I'm talking about) and best of all, it expands the main games content in a significant way. There's plenty of new things, like the aforementioned werewolf skill tree, but also things like a new quest separate from the main story, new armor, new shouts, and a way to change your character's appearance. It's a shining example of the right way to do a medium sized expansion, because it's not just a new set of quests, it genuinely changes the main game for the better too.