cool game, cool puzzles, really easy to understand despite the game not uttering a single word through it's entire duration.

but also, what the fuck is the meaning of ANYTHING in this??? I genuinely think there's no explanation at all and it's just cool stuff randomly thrown at you, with the only objective of letting the animation and art deparment flex (and a well deserved flex to be honest).
however, while playing the game this comes across as "this alien shit is incomprehensible so don't even try" and i think thats pretty cool.
It also fits into the game aesthetic perfectly: you are constantly looking at these weird organic/robotic creatures, sometimes more fleshy sometimes more metalic but always a mix of the two. The level design is the same, with this natural landscapes, broken paths, corridors that lead nowhere... as if they were trying to tell you a story; but you also have the puzzles that are implemented in this environments in a very unnatural way, almost as if they were Portal test chambers. Again, a mix of organic and inorganic, of real and false. It's incredible how they took something that is often considered a "mistake" in videogames (take for example ICO and how nonsensical it's level design was) and implemented it perfectly into the vibes of the world.

Lightfall itself was highly disappointing. Neomuna was not fun as a patrol zone, drop rates for weapons were awful. The story. God, the story. Congrats for adding the first(?) nonbinary character to Destiny, but the writing for them was truly atrocious. Caiatl should've been way more important in the story than she was, too. Sadly, this whole campaign is a filler arc from an anime. One big training montage while old man Osiris yells at us.

The complete revamp of buildcrafting is godsend.

The seasonal content hasn't excited me as much this year, but it's still solid enough.

The soundtrack is great but I do prefer the music from The Witch Queen.

Dungeons this year have been pretty good. Ghosts of the Deep is unfortunately a bit of a slog to me, but I still think it's gorgeous and interesting. Warlord's Ruin is genuinely extremely cool and gives me some great Grasp of Avarice vibes. My only complaint is that the final boss mechanics for standing in circles while transferring hex is quite finicky in practice, especially when the AI is so unpredictable, and it really pushes your team super hard on add clear to stay alive. Otherwise two incredible boss fights and just a super original design.

I don't raid much any more, but frankly I didn't like Root of Nightmares. I know it's derided as being too easy, especially compared to Vow, but I just wasn't feeling this one mechanically. The jumping puzzle with the death mechanic especially was an absolute fucking slog. The visuals are great, though, and I love the concept, but it just wasn't as fun as RoN to me.

PvP is still pretty fun. Still too many abilities in PvP I think.

Loot is getting really out of hand and I feel like we're due for another round of sunsetting. Idk we've just got ridiculous power creep in the game but whatever.

Also fuck the layoffs.

I still love playing Destiny, but this year my interest dwindled a lot.

I had very little familiarity with Batman when I bought this game years ago. I tried playing it once and was put off by all the references I didn't get. I didn't have access to comics as a kid, and my only understanding of Batman was from the Adam West series. I remember when the Michael Keaton one came out thinking "Wait, they're trying to make a serious Batman?"

Still, it's the only super hero franchise I have any connection to at all, and with it being such a beloved game I thought I should give it its fair due. This time around, to prime the pumps a bit, I watched the first season of Batman: The Animated Series. This was extremely helpful to get a bunch of the backstory and feel like I was in on the references.

It's a ton of fun to see how many gadgets and activities from Batman's escapades they were able to translate into gameplay. I don't remember him crawling through quite this many vents though; seriously the guy spends more time in ducts than Harry Tuttle, heating engineer. I don't normally like stealth gameplay; it makes me feel weak and I feel like you spend all your time waiting for something. But here they did a great job making me feel like a predator. I like the way the chatty enemies slowly getting more and more freaked out as you thin their numbers gives you a sense of power even when you're hiding in a drain.

Both the gameplay and the stakes of the plot built up at a nice steady pace that kept me moving forward. I really liked how Batman looked more haggard and unkempt as the game progressed. The voice work is amazing; I know it's been said a million times but this is the performance of a lifetime for Mark Hamill. His voice is in every scene but I never got sick of it because it was always in flux. He's constantly sliding between high and low, rough and smooth, fast and slow, loud and soft; he uses his full vocal and emotional range and through all of it never lets up on the energy. It's like 10 straight hours of him dialed to 11.

All in all it was a grand old romp; the combat was sweet, the bosses were a little iffy, the environment was amazing, the stealth was exciting and it really made me feel like ductman. I'm looking forward to the second one!

I thought it was a hoot! I mean, let me be a skateboarding dog and everything else is pretty much window dressing right?

Honestly though I love the colors, the diversity and the way it maps familiar gameplay mechanics to social situations. It was a bold choice to structure it the way they did; they drop you right into the middle of this person’s life and you get to know her and her family and friends as they all fight about what happened in the past. There were moments when the negativity got a little overwhelming. But your sweet dad is always there at the end of the day, and I think they managed to pull off all the various reconciliations without becoming too saccharine or contrived.

Some individual elements felt a little undercooked, but it didn’t really bother me given the small scope and big ambitions. I’ll take a slightly unpolished passion project over something super safe any day. All in all I really dug it and I’m really looking forward to what’s next from this team.

…and you get to be a skateboarding dog.

This is pretty much everything I look for in a game, and then some. It's bright and colorful. It's got a giant pile of incredibly wacky guns, like an acid sprinkler and bowling ball launcher. It's unique, with its own voice. Its core mechanics are polished to a shine. It's bombastic and surprising. It's funny. Like, really really funny.

Unfortunately it's the kind of comedy that occasionally veers into being completely annoying, but generally you only have to tolerate these detours for a moment before the genuine guffaws start again. Parts of it are very much "of a time," but that doesn't bother me. I've done a bit of comedy writing, enough to recognize that this sheer volume of jokes only happens with lots of work and iteration. Video games are the hardest medium to be funny in; every element both technical and artistic has to be tuned just right. My hat is off to the whole team, here; the animations, sound design and snappy load times all bolster the writing in what I found to be a truly jaw-dropping display of artistic prowess.

The biggest flaw is one that a lot of games fall prey to: absurdly aggressive hinting. There was one quest where I had to get into a factory. "The front door is blocked; see if you can find another way in." Literally 3 seconds later: "Try looking around the yard for something that you could use to get in the factory!" Literally 2 seconds later: "Use the crane to smash the wall of the factory!" Literally 4 seconds later: "What's taking so long? Use the crane to smash the wall!" Like at this point I'm still getting my bearings trying to figure out what building they're talking about. It's an incredibly common problem and for a game of its era it's not surprising to see, but it is one that I've always been baffled by.

The repetitive voice lines during missions only got super bad during a couple moments. The final boss fight in particular I had to disable dialog for because it was purposely written to be grating, and the fight was challenging enough that I had to retry it a few times and hear those same grating lines over and over. Again, forgivable, but annoying nonetheless.

The voice acting is top notch; I played with the female protagonist and voice actor Stephanie Lemelin brought an incredible energy and bravado to the character. She simultaneously sounded like she was born of this weird world while also being the most relatable part of it, a tricky needle to thread that had me cheering for even her most eye-rolling quips and one-liners. Her voice felt like mine.

The traversal is fantastic. I think this is the only open world game I've ever played where I basically never used fast travel because just getting from point A to B is so much goddamn fun. Bouncing, wall-running and grinding my way across this city never got old. The stunt scoring system that enhances your damage output ties it all together in a multiplicative way.

In a lot of games it feels like they give you the fun parts to get through the challenging parts. In Sunset Overdrive, they give you fun parts to have more fun with the other fun parts. There's still plenty of challenge, especially in the boss fights and base defense segments, but even when I'm dying it's usually because I'm so overwhelmed with weird guns to shoot, barrels to explode, and cars to bounce off of. If Assassins Creed is like a gumball machine, giving you one piece of candy at a time at a steady consistent pace, and Dark Souls is like crawling through a bombed-out munitions factory looking for the last grimy jawbreaker, Sunset Overdrive is like diving head-first, mouth open into the candy vault, Scrooge McDuck style.

Playing Quantum Break right off the heels of Alan Wake 2 and a replay of Control is a very interesting thing. Add to that the fact that I had no idea this game existed at all prior to looking up Remedy's catalog lately, and it did make for a pleasant surprise.

This game really feels like a stepping stone for future Remedy games. Many of its faults have been adressed in future games. For instance, jampacking all the narrative pickups in cramped corners just completely kills the flow of the game. In Alan Wake 2, there's way less flavor text of the sort, and it's trickled through the environment at a much more pleasing pace. Improvement.

The same could be said about the FMV episodes. They are an interesting experiment which has some merit, but always cut the gameplay when I just felt like shooting bad guys. Once again, it was handled so much more seamlessly in Alan Wake 2.

The best things about the game are absolutely the time stutter sequences. They have that signature Remedy vision about them of creating something wholly unique in a game that is such a pleasure to experience.

And so, the game kind of works. It's also got a decent story with mostly generic and unremarkable characters, but hey, its functional. From my perspective, it was more of an fun experiment to play this to see the process of Remedy maturing into a new form storytelling and game design.

The studio still has stuff to improve on the Alan Wake 2 formula, but if we compare the progress made between that and Quantum Break, we can estimate that we have some truly fantastic games to look forward to in the future.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder does what so little 2D Mario games try, to breathe innovation in the fun of Mario and the major points every sidescroller Mario game has. The Wonder Flower Changes the atmosphere entirely in a level and allows you to use an ability, whether its becoming an enemy, like a Goomba, Hoppycat, or those gooey blobs, or an attribute such as becoming lavaproof. These Wonderflower changes the way youre playing entirely and allows challenges some of which have never been tried before in Mario. My favorite of the Wonder Flower levels are the ones where you become a goo slime, you just look so cute and it allows you to traverse in a very fun way youre not used to in Mario. The overworld and the level road seem pretty standard, besides the Giant Bowser and the unifying hub world around him. The one time where bowser was just... there like that was in Bowser's Fury. The badges are very interesting, im not too huge of a fan of beeing able to use them in any level, but the challenge levels are great and i think maybe they should be limited to that. The Bowser fight was honestly so cute i couldnt stop smiling throughout it all, the phases in the fight were all fun and the way it turned out was just all fun and extremely enjoyable. Something i will critique is the online multiplayer system, it would be lovely to just simulate a classic multiplayer mario experience with the friends you either have met online or have moved away from, i still had a blast with my girlfriend in this game but it was nowhere near as enjoyable as a mario game should be with multiplayer. All in all this is easily my favorite 2D Mario game and it was a blast experiencing the ride with my love.

This'll probably be the best Venom game we're ever gonna get, to some people that's alright but for me........eh it could've been better.

Prototype is probably the most 7th gen trying to kill the 6th gen open world games I've played in awhile. What I mean by that is it has all the annoying hallmarks of 7th gen that I've honestly gotten sick of while also having that "fun comes first" mentality a lot of open world games of the 5th gen had; games that come to my mind being Destroy All Humans, Bully, Simpsons Hit and Run, and funny enough Hulk Ultimate Destruction which this game is the successor of.
When you break it down to Prototype's core gameplay it's a great game to just sit back and vibe with friends on a Discord call while you brutally disembowel innocent civilians with your knife fingers. The variety of weapons is plentiful enough to where it never gets boring and the traversal is sleek and fast; as you bolt through the streets of NYC slicing through people and leaping from building to building as this walking Biohazard, I'd be lying if I said it never got old or tiresome after a while and while the map isn't too big to make traveling around the map a chore, I'd sometimes think about all the traversal mechanics of other games and think about how much more I'd rather be playing those games instead of this one. And I think that leads into one of my biggest gripes with the game is that I don't think it's that fun to play besides the surface level fun of causing panic in the streets.

The biggest gripes I have with the game are probably the story and characters and the map of the game itself. On the story front it seems it's taking it's notes from 6th and 7th gen storytelling, where a gruff and stern protagonist with almost zero personality is tasked to track down and kill the scientists of a evil corrupt mega corporation while also secretly being the catalyst for armageddon, it's like Shadow the Hedgehog only written completely straight and it don't have a little girl getting shot dead in the first 10 minutes; some people would say that's a plus but I personally see it as a missed opportunity. I have no problems with a game or movie taking its story seriously; but my problem stems from how horribly generic the whole story is. There's nothing wrong with a generic story I've seen games pull it off pretty well, Uncharted 2 has a pretty generic globetrotting adventure story; but what puts it above forgettable is a quirky cast of characters and a tone that's very campy that doesn't take itself super seriously until it's needed for the plot.
There is not a single iota of camp coming from this game, it's 100% serious all the time with only a few brief moments of poorly done melodrama. The game really wants you to take the events of what's unfolding completely serious and wants you to think Alex Mercer is this awesome badass figure with a lost past, when really I don't give a shit about Alex Mercer since he's about as charismatic and interesting as a self insert mary sue made by a very edgy high schooler. That also goes for the rest of the cast, none of them are interesting or likable; they either just exist to give missions to Alex/be lifeless connections to Alex's past, or are one note antagonist that serve no other purpose other than to have evil villains for Alex to fight against while also have zero personality of their own.
Look I get it, this game is still very much a remnant of how open world games of the 6th gen did their stories, and asking for more is probably asking too much. Except you miss the fact that this game came out with 2009, the same year as other games like Batman Arkham Asylum, Infamous, Bayonetta, and the game I was comparing it to earlier Uncharted 2. I understand wanting to do things simple but when you push the story to me through collectibles and long cutscenes it's very apparent that you want me to at least pay attention and care about what's going on, and I wish I could but I'm sorry I cared more about the story of Shadow the Hedgehog because at least that game knew how to have a modicum of humility in it's writing......................𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵𝘭𝘺

The last aspect I wanna bitch about is how the map of the game looks. I'm not gonna harp on about this as long as I did the story but all I really have to say is, man this is a UGLY looking game. I know 7th gen was a leap a lot of devs needed to get used to so a lot of early 7th gen games looked really muddy and washed out, even games I enjoy like InFamous 1 or Dead Space have a very muddy look to a lot of the models and textures. My problems with the look of the game don't come from the typical 7th gen look, no it mostly stems from how dull and plain everything looks. This isn't just some random made up city, this is New York City; one of the most well known and most used cities in all fiction, and it looks so boring. It's so gray and forgettable I'd sometimes forget that I'm fighting evil flesh monster in the heart of Manhattan, and even when a part of the city gets overrun with BOWs and the virus spreads causing mass panic in the streets; It didn't really change the map besides making some buildings hives for BOWs and changing the color of the area from boring gray to blood red. The map is still the same old map and I find the map boring and lacking character, which is something I shouldn't be saying about New York City in the midst of a biohazard outbreak.

I know I spent most of this review bitching about the problems I had but honestly I still liked playing this game. The core gameplay is still addictive enough to where I can still have fun with the game regardless of the constant boredom the cutscenes and characters give me. It's no InFamous or Spider-Man Web of Shadows but if I'm feeling really and I mean REALLY bored and I wanna pop something midless in and play for a while this isn't that bad of an option.

This game is more than a masterpiece

Outer Wilds is more like the best dream you could ever have, you're exploring, enjoying and absorbing every little detail this game has to offer and just like, it ends. The credits roll up, and you feel awe, you feel complete but also a sense of longing, just how a great dream makes you feel.

THIS.IS.THE.GREATES.GAME.EVER!!!!!

The story ain't nothing to write home about, and the characters are... well they're there, you can't deny that they are in the game. The plot is enough to keep you going from one scenario to the next, but that's about it. The meat and potatoes is the parkour and combat system. I can have endless fun just going around Harran, much like I could have endless fun just swinging around as Spider-man in SM2 for the PS2. The grappling hook is fun, although it makes the game quite easy and the Volatiles that make the night usually terrifying become a bit trivial, especially when you have unlocked safe areas 15 seconds from one another.