My issues with this game can best be summarized by the fact that i kept re-doing a mission over and over again, and looked up the best way to deal with it, and the only thing i learned was to just change my build and do something the way the game wants me to do it. I think customization has no purpose if you're actively punished for playing the game in a way that even slightly deviates from the optimal way to do things. Towards the end of the game enemy builds even start to get more unvaried, so i think the devs were fully aware that they were making a horribly unbalanced game in which around 60-90% of the equipment is completely useless. It has far, far too much busywork in it for a game that came out a month ago. It's mostly based on trial and error since you never know exactly what you're fighting until you actually play a mission, and thus have no idea how to pick the specific weapon the game wants you to use. It'd make sense if you had 8 weapons, not 4. It doesn't help that there is essentially no purpose to ammo as a mechanic, it's irrelevent 90% of the time and nothing but a nuisance the remaning 10%, it never challenges you, only irritates you, it's a mechanic made to punish you for playing too aggressively in a game designed around playing aggressively, it has a stagger bar for Christ's sake.

Coming back to it i can only see this as an even worse game now that they've patched the game to completely rebalance weapons and fundamentally change the way the game works, i've no idea how that became normalized in games because it's essentially just releasing another form of finishing a game after you release it.

I dropped this game because i found the first third of it to be quite enjoyable, the second third to be an extended derailing, and then i realized that that was all there was to it. I found the earlier parts of the game to be tense and gritty, while still having fun and presenting this aesthetic flair that just feels emblematic of what mecha stories typically are. I loved how it established this violent conflict on a hostile world and presented the player as this ambivalent mercenary that's only loyal to the paycheck, and also showed us glimpses of the characters that fought this war and served these various different factions, i thought it was building up to a greater conclusion, these opposing forces inevitably intersecting and the war coming to a close. Most of the actual worldbuilding is just set dressing that gives you an excuse to play the earlier missions until you get to this dull, trite, tonally oblivious plot of meaningless characters and stories told entirely through Gears of War-esque combat dialogue that replays endlessly across missions. I died to a boss like 12 times and i still don't even remember his name, and he was one of the characters i liked the most.

The game really does feel like a 7th gen game that would have gotten 6/10's at the time, it has the gameplay depth of The Darkness 2, a worse story than Inversion, and boss fights a little bit worse than Binary Domain. I'd be impressed by how banal it is if it weren't so bad at adding variation, boss fights based around waiting for them to turn around so you can shoot the weak point on it's back, hacking segments where you wait for a bar to fill, and rooms full of enemies that load in in waves. This game doesn't just feel western, it feels like what western games have outgrown, it feels like it'd be the third best game of High Moon Studios, there's just no creativity here.

I'd be open to returning to this game, but all i hear from people is that it just gets worse, with a multiple-phase final boss that makes you go back to the start when you die, that concept felt juvenile by 2008, i'm not sure why Fromsoft insists on doing it. Loss of progress means repeating the same parts of the game over again, and that just means you're using your own game as a punishment.

A game should feel like a reward, not a punishment.

My issues with this game can best be summarized by the fact that i kept re-doing a mission over and over again, and looked up the best way to deal with it, and the only thing i learned was to just change my build and do something the way the game wants me to do it. I think customization has no purpose if you're actively punished for playing the game in a way that even slightly deviates from the optimal way to do things. Towards the end of the game enemy builds even start to get more unvaried, so i think the devs were fully aware that they were making a horribly unbalanced game in which around 60-90% of the equipment is completely useless. It has far, far too much busywork in it for a game that came out a month ago. It's mostly based on trial and error since you never know exactly what you're fighting until you actually play a mission, and thus have no idea how to pick the specific weapon the game wants you to use. It'd make sense if you had 8 weapons, not 4. It doesn't help that there is essentially no purpose to ammo as a mechanic, it's irrelevent 90% of the time and nothing but a nuisance the remaning 10%, it never challenges you, only irritates you, it's a mechanic made to punish you for playing too aggressively in a game designed around playing aggressively, it has a stagger bar for Christ's sake.

A respectable attempt at offering a middle ground between the more classical style of RPG that Bioware started with, and the more casual style that they've found themselves making since Mass Effect 2 or so.

Character creation itself is probably the greatest strength of Baldur's Gate 3, as i find it to be one of the most engaging i've ever seen in an RPG, from race to class and everything inbetween. I find that there's actually a pretty good amount of variation in playing seperate character types, as soon as i finished playing a tanky paladin, i immediately made another character, a more stealth and dialogue focused bard, one who was able to get to some way higher leveled areas than i initially was able to, simply by sneaking past enemies with their invisibility skills. I found Baldur's Gate to be a game that made me love roleplaying again, i spent entire hours in the character creator to make more and more unique combinations with the options given, writing out their own lore and developing attachment to them.

When you get into the actual game, Baldur's Gate doesn't hold your hand but refuses the brutal newcomer-slaying of the earlier titles, and a lot of more hardcore RPGs. Characters can be easily re-spec'd, money comes just as easily, and you can save whenever you want. It's a light adventure, but one that has it's challenges here and there.

The world of Baldur's Gate 3 feels more like a sampling of what the DnD universe as a whole has to offer, going through light developments in a number of iconic locations, with similarly iconic beasts here and there. I can't say it uses these concepts to it's full potential, but one could also praise it for refusing to oversaturate the player on it's world. When you see a dragon in this game, it feels like a big moment, a monstrous and terrifying beast that towers over the player with it's double-digit level, you fear it, yet respect it's majesty. It's a very classical fantasy story in that case.

I'd say i could do with less of the combat, but maybe i was doing a little bit more of it than i had to, playing a combat-based character.

Overall it's a great game, possibly the best western RPG since New Vegas, i'd absolutely recommend it. You might want to wait until they iron out more of the bugs though.

A game with a decent amount of interesting elements, the story and characters have potential, and the world isn't wholly boring. The gameplay is just far too dull for me to invest any time into, there's not much point in doing anything other than smacking enemies with your sword over and over, upgrades are miniscule and unecessary most of the time, and abilities seem to have limited to no use. Once i got to the second area i was just not feeling it anymore because the game turned into a series of fetch quests and obnoxious dungeon crawls that just felt designed to waste as much time as possible, it's too much of a video game for it's own good.

If you play this game on PC it's actually not the worst thing in the world. It was a baffling design decision to create two campaigns (one of them costing an additional $20) instead of just focusing on making a campaign that's good all the way through. They have plenty of half-baked ways of varying gameplay that just make you realize how middling the gameplay actually is, having a few more enemy types would go a long way because most of the game is just zombies and generic goons with guns, there's about 3 B.O.W's outside of that, rarely encountered and even more rarely made fun, would've been nice to have a chimera or bandersnatch. This also brings up my biggest issue with RE6, the bosses feel too "on-rails", like your bullets barely do anything and you're just waiting for a cutscene to finish things. For the most part, the game is actually pretty fun, if i got to play multiplayer again i'd assume it'd be a lot better.

I like the aesthetic elements but anytime a RE2/3 character shows up it's just so meaningless, the fanservice is very middling in this game. I liked seeing the original characters a lot more than just seeing the old ones appear. They have a strangely large amount of effort put into playable characters in cutscenes, every one of them seems to have unique dialogue (i didn't play enough times to check what causes what dialogue), so to fully experience every single miniscule voice line you'd have to play both campaigns atleast 6 times each, which is wild. The voice acting is a point that sticks out as being notably good, Sherry's voice in this game is the same as in RE6 and she actually does a good job making herself sound notably younger, strangely she seems to be the only returning voice because the other characters sound like shit, yet another strike against fanservice.

The multiplayer elements are lacking due to the fact that most of the abilities in this game are absolutely worthless, so only 2-3 classes should even be played in the first place, less than the amount of players on one team.

Overall you can have fun with it, but you're pretty unlikely to in 2023.

Yeah after going back and finishing this one i definitely had a good time with it by the end of things, my first review is mainly ragequitting which is a good, ragequitting is what you're supposed to do, it keeps you from destroying your interest in a game by contiuning to force yourself to experience it when you just don't enjoy it. If you keep playing a game when you hate it, the chance that you'll ever like it becomes even less likely. Hype cycles are also something i think is quite damaging to games like this, having everybody talk about a game in one way just naturally activates the latent contrarian sense that we all have lurking inside us, and when a game divides people often just talking about it can be a miserable experience. If you don't like something sometimes it's best to just take a break and come back, oversaturating myself on something just because it's popular is something that i'm happy i'm learning to avoid better. They say to set your expectations low to avoid being disappointed, when i think you should take that to it's logical extreme and try and avoid having expectations in the first place.

The game did feel very standard and flawed all around, but it's still got spirit and style to it, even though i didn't like the region itself, and the pokemon can be a little underwhelming, i found myself drawn in by the characters. I felt that this game has a certain sense of life to it's characters that's maybe even better than Black and White. They're still too easy even for me, but me entering the Elite Four area before i was ready did cause me to have a pretty tough time with them, it was fun.

Im still worried about this series and the direction it's corporate overlords force it to take, as i am worried my the direction that Nintendo is taking with it's games in general, and the greater video game industry, and the world at large, but the games themselves feel like nice little moments of respite, something that still feels fun to play in 2023, after nearly two decades of experiencing it. Pokemon is still something i like. There was a point in this game in which i was asked the question "Do you like Pokemon?" and mentally all i could say was "Hell yeah, i wouldn't be here if i didn't". Every time the feeling of catching new critters, giving them names, going on a journey with them, and then reaching this moment of finality leaves me feeling something. I suppose in a sense my wariness at the future of these games, and my dislike of many of the decisions they've made is just proof that i still care, that i still like Pokemon.

A good game that i would need strict adherence to a guide to stomach, it's simply made from a time in which video games expected a greater level of patience and more tolerance for obtuseness in game design. Knowing where to go is impossible, and the map is often useless. My problem with games like these is that they often have a great level of diversity and openness when it comes to combat and character building, but in terms of exploration and story progression they are absurdly rigid, even the slightest deviation from the desired path is completely impossible. It's just not engaging to explore.

It's really just frustrating me with how un-great it is, i actually liked Sword and Shield AND Arceus despite how unambitious the former was, it just felt like a good Pokemon game, Scarlet feels like it's caught inbetween both of those good games, and what comes out is that horribly okay.

Terastallizing is by far the worst gimmick Pokemon has ever had, and i'm not a fan of any of the gimmicks, they're horribly forced and make you play a certain way every single time, and leaning them is a chore because you know they're just going to remove them in the next game, they're wastes of time that divert resources from actually improving the game. This one is so, so much more awful than all the others. Tera types can be anything for any pokemon, so type advantage as an entire concept is essentially thrown out the window when they're in play, any pokemon can be any type, but this doesn't even work in your favor because afaik the tera type is fixed to a specific pokemon and there is no way to change it, no idea how this is supposed to work in multiplayer, if it's even there. I encountered a gym leader who's main pokemon just doesn't have weaknesses due to their ability and tera type, not having any weaknesses at all is absurd, and a terrible way to try and create difficulty. The entire point of type advantages is so the game comes down to something other than just numbers, it's what makes the game about playing smart and not hard. Without type advantage the only solution to beating a pokemon that can one-shot all of yours is to just go and grind, and that's in a game where every single battle takes forever.

They still have yet to make the combat faster, it takes several minutes just for random battles sometimes. A good gym fight can take half an hour just because of how long it takes for messages and and animations to play out, and the animations don't look good enough for them to force you to watch them every single time. Fire Emblem has let you skip animations since 2012, technically 2007, and Pokemon still refuses to catch up on making the game more playable rather than more watchable. The performance wouldn't bother me as much if it wasn't making an already slow game slower.

The non-technical aspects of the game are very mixed. The region simply isn't interesting, the areas to explore just feel like stock video game settings, mountains, forrests, deserts, we've been here before. The civilized areas have some good detail to them, just not as much personality. I can remember the tropical setting of Alola, and the industrial setting of Unova, but even while looking at this game i find it's setting tepid and dull, and i can't say i feel like i'm going to think about it after i'm done playing it. The character designs are mixed, some are great, some are the most boring i've ever seen. There are some good new pokemon designs, but nothing killer.

The story and characters are a step-up, as they feel more unique and more expressive than any game before. The open-world nature of the game makes the story's lack of focus work in it's favor.

The open-world isn't a meaningful addition for multiple reasons, it's gatekept by level, it's not an interesting setting, and there's not enough to actually do in it. Being able to challenge the gym leaders in any order would be cool if it actually had a level-scaling system, instead they still clearly have a right way and wrong way to do things, it's actually made even more rigid by removing weaknesses to exploit, i don't see any way you're supposed to beat a significantly higher level gym leader, so a vast majority of all players are just going to go in the exact same order.

I can't see any reason why this game would be considered better than the previous two, it removes all of Arceus' improvements, and accentuates Sword and Shield's flaws.

Update: Starting to have fun with it again.

Somehow, it got even worse.

Overwatch 2 is largely unchanged from the first, but the biggest difference is probably the monetization system, which is absolutely horrendous. All lootboxes are a crime, but Overwatch 1's were as tolerable as they got, Overwatch 2's battle passes are horrendous beyond compare, 10 bucks a character, cough it up. Spending the time to grind for them isn't even an option anymore, you will never unlock even one character, it would take weeks of playtime. You can't even use the credits you earned in the old game on all the cosmetics from the first game, despite being able to do this in the old game. Overwatch 2 is now pay to win, yippee.

Not a single issue from the original game has been addressed, they've actually been made much worse. The gameplay is still highly unsatisfying due to how much it hinges on DPS, one out of three total roles. If you have good DPS you can win, if you don't you lose. There's no point in even playing the other two roles, every game you have will be a total coinflip in the lower ranks, and you'll never even get to the higher ranks because you will always be punished for losing, regardless of how your teammates or you played. Baffilingly they also removed the group finder, making your only options to either play with randos, or go on Reddit and maybe find someone who's actually willing to play with the bullshit, and not in spite of it. That's not even getting into the fact that the game just doesn't have a engaging structure, it's not fun to try and take out healers and tanks because they just regenerate, it's not fun to be a tank because you can't kill things, it's not fun to heal because you're defenseless and unengaged, Mercy and Lucio's main roles are just to avoid enemy fire, a task that's not fun when succeeding or failing. The ultimates are still, predictably, horrendous to deal with.

If you've played Overwatch 1, imagine playing that but with even more greed, and even less time spent actually playing the game.

I'm just not feeling it. Even if i ignore the monetization i'm not a big fan of how this game plays. It feels perfectly wedged in the middle of being a more grounded tactical shooter and a hero shooter, while only taking the flaws commonly associated with either of those genres. It has hectic, hard to read combat, where enemies and allies are constantly flying around with their abilities and weapons, and you can't really tell what killed you, but it also has focused objectives that you're supposed to strategize around and co-operate on, honestly it feels to chaotic to actually focus on the objective of the game, Overwatch made that as simple as just standing in a certain position, but in this game you have to plant a bomb, which simply doesn't feel like a well thought out mechanic in a game with movement like this. It's all too easy to move in on the location, and too hard to keep people out. A point never feels secure or locked down, only the centerpoint of a battle, especially since the maps are small, extremely basic, and the two objectives are placed right next to each other. I don't play enough shooting games to know if this is a common thing, but if the points are right next to each other, why even have two? I thought the whole point of having two was to make the teams split their forces, and give the offensive team an equalizer. In this game it doesn't really feel like there's much difference between offense and defense, just that offense has to do more work setting the bomb and protecting it, while defense just has top protect the point, and diffuse the bomb if planted., actually, that might be the same amount of work. The hero abilities feel neat, but not like they mesh with a specific playstyle or role, again, they feel caught in the middle between a game like Overwatch, where the heroes are very diverse and change the way the game plays in every match, and a game like Rainbow Six: Siege, where they're relatively standardized, so that just causes certain suits to be really annoying, without having a direct counter to get rid of them with, if you don't like Barbatos you just have to play an entirely different game to beat him, and that's the exact problem people have with Overwatch, you have to play around certain heroes.

As much as i criticize games for lacking in innovation or originality, 2D beat em' ups are a genre of which i will gladly consume by the dozens withoit care for the inherent repetition. The TMNT franchise is already known for having plenty of good games in this genre, and also for being completely unable to replicate that success after a certain point, the world went bad for TMNT games when they went 3D. Now we finally have a game that's not bogged down by any license to force it to make harsh deadlines, Shredder's Revenge is simply a throwback to the often-rehased 80's series of yore, cowabunga, dudes.

Shredder's Revenge is an absolutely fantastic game to look at, for starters. I cannot get enough of this spritework, it's got so much personality to it, with fluid animation to match. The bright, colorful world captures this vibe of the idealized 1980's NYC perfectly. Every character is animated with a reasonable amount of attention to detail.

The basic combat is very well-executed, although like every beat em' up ever released, it's VERY simplistic and repetetive. Revenge in particular is, at the very least, fast, almost to the point where it feels sped up sometimes. I played the game mostly solo, but got 6 players towards the end, and the contrast between those two variables is night and day, it is so much more hectic with all those characters on screen at once.

The boss fights do suffer from how much extra health they add to account for mutiple players, this probably wouldn't be much of an issue if i was playing with people that already knew the individual gimmicks and patterns of the bosses before we had to fight them, they're not particularly obtuse, but they're not always obvious either. I found level design to be a bit lackluster as it is mostly composed of hallways full of enemies (which have great variation by the way), and the skateboard levels are so simplistic that they lose any real challenge.

Overall i think this is the best game of this kind since River City Girls, and the best TMNT game, bar none. 

Neon White is a game that's categorized primarily by it's excellent aesthetic and it's overtly amateurish game design.

The gameplay of Neon White is genuinely brilliant, if not groundbreaking. The way that the different abilities and weapons attatched to them are constructed is something special, i love the card game seetup of it.

The level design was something i found myself more and more dissatisfied with the longer the game went on. In the early levels i found myself having a lot more fun due to the faster, shorter nature of them, as well as the fact that a lot of them felt more open and less rigid. The later levels feel almost on-rails with how little room for variation or mistake there is, every level has an exact way you're supposed to play, and the only real difficulty in them comes from figuring that out with the sometimes obtuse mechanics. It's far too steeped in trial and error for me to find that muh satisfaction from it, even the boss fights are so limited in what can be done despite having such a well-designed moveset, it doesn't feel like it's reached it's potential.

The narrative is, as you can probably guess, paltry, and almost obnoxious in how unambitious it is. I want to give credit to an indie game for even having a story of this calibur, in addition to having voice acting for most of the dialogue, but as soon as i'm ready to ignore the cliche-ridden dialogue and poorly-defined characters, they throw in an almost insulting nod to the audience in the form of a joke or an out of place pop-culture reference, the tonal dissonance in this game is absolutely ridiculous. Just like the levels, the more and more the plot went on the less i found myself interested, it doesn't jive with the rest of the game, nor does it stand on it's own.

The aesthetic, for the most part, is atleast very well executed, it has a problem with a lot of the areas after the first third of the game not looking nwarly as good as that which was designed to be shown off in trailers and used in promo material, but the game never looks actively bad. The character portraits are actually pretty impressive in sheer number, they compliment the excellent designs. Neon White has such a firm hold on looking a certain way, but only some of the time, and i love the way it looks some of the time.

The soundtrack was an excellent addition too, and it made repeating the same missions over and over again a lot more enjoyable, it definitely adds to the vibes of the game a lot, one of my favorite game soundtracks in a while, just off the top of my head.

The thing that strangely bogs this down is the optional relationship-building and bonus level segments, which are required to acquire what is surely going to be considered the superior, and possibly, canonical ending, are such a drain on the game i can barely even articulate it. The scenes aren't particularly fun to unlock, take a lot of time of aimless wandering, and aren't entertaining to watch at all, they are a tremendous waste of time, and i can only see tying the true ending to them as a massive mistake. The game doesn't even account for narrative change that would, in other games, cause these scenes to be inaccesible for the time, once again the game undercuts any emotional significance it might have.

Overall i felt that Neon White was undercooked, but worth playing. I'd say this is a great first attempt for a studio that's only just finding it's footing, and hope that they can either improve upon this idea, or move on to something else that i happen to enjoy more in the future.