INSIDE is unique as it is the first game I have played, or the first piece of art I have experienced, to not really have a story, but still has themes and a message. It's very open to interpretation (I'm still debating if this is a game about socialism or about a parralel universe where a nazi-like regime is instaured), but will not leave you incensitive.

As for gameplay, the puzzles are smart, set a great oppressive ambiance. There are a lot of very strong moments, because of the oppressive ambiance, that will force you to do horrid things to survive. Also, the animations are suprisingly smooth and the artstyle, whilst not perfect, is nice to look at most of the time.

Summary : Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga was an ambitious project, maybe too ambitious. A Lego Star Wars Open World game, giving you the possibility to explore every planet seen in the movies (except for Kijimi), and relive the events of the movies with that classic Lego charm ?? Sign me up !! However, the game wants too much, throwing countless meaningless objectives at you, which makes the game feel quite boring after a while. The story levels aren't great, playing through them in quick play is a catastrophe. However, the open-world, the vast roster of characters and ships, the humor, and the attention to detail make this a very good game for Lego Star Wars fans ( even though you should not try to 100% it) and a very average game for non-Lego Star Wars fans.

This game is not a game for kids, it's a game for those who grew up with The Complete Saga, like me. To accomplish this objective of aiming for a more mature audience, the game isn't designed as the other Lego games. It's a third person action game, with different character classes, and a ton of young adult humor. You'll find plenty of Star Wars memes exploited by the writers, but also references to the real world. This game doesn't hide its target audience. The exploitation of the memes is so good that I don't regret the good old days of Lego mumble anymore.

The gameplay varies wildly in quality, to a point where I need to split this up in multiple parts to get every thought organised.
The open world is great. Exploration is fun. This game clearly has inspiration from Super Mario Odyssey with its collectathon style gameplay. The quality of the planets you explore changes a lot from planet to planet. Endor is terrible, being a maze of small claustrophobic platforms on multiple floors, while Yavin 4 was way more enjoyable. There is no doubt that the game really overdoes it though. There are more than 1100 kyberbricks to collect. You'll find 270 in levels, sure, but the rest are in the open world, just waiting to be found. If you thought Super Mario Odyssey had filler moons, wait until you see this game. This isn't a terrible problem, but it's one of the factors that made me quit my 100% playthrough after I was something like 65% in.
We need to talk about the side quests, because they are some of the worst ever. They are all the same: either an NPC will ask you to protect them on their way, or they'll ask you to go fetch X amount of a certain item (which can be on a different planet of course), or they'll ask you to fight a space battle. The only one that sticks out that I can think about on the 15 planets I completed the exploration of was on Exegol, where I was charged with fighting 5 short boss fights, with every boss being very different from the other personality wise. But even then, the fights themselves were pretty much identical. What's really bad is that there are 140 of them. Even if every one of them was unique, that would already be too much. Breath of the Wild has like 75. Just to add insult to injury, the game only rewards you with either kyber bricks (lame), characters that you mostly don't care about (like a variant of a stormtrooper for example), or a capital ship. The capital ships are really cool, basically unlocking them allows you to call a huge ship, like the Death Star, and explore it. It's a shame you can't pilot them though, and that they're pretty small, and that the side quests to unlock them SUCK. I only did two out of the 6, but both were simply "we need you to go get this". What a shame.
Space exploration now: it's surprisingly good. The races in space are fun, they were really well layed out, and really made me feel the speed of the ships I was flying. The shooting challenges are pretty good as well. The space battles are fun the first couple of times, but get pretty tiring pretty quick.
The levels now. Oh boy what a flop. They suck. The worslt levels in any Lego game ever. I just wanted to be done with them and move on to the exploration to be honest. The boss fights are cool, it's a shame they force feed you unnecessary QTEs. Free Play is a complete miss, as it often makes certain side objectives hard to get. Side objectives, as an idea, aren't bad. But, in this game, they most often come down to just "do this funny thing haha" and sometimes don't even work. They feel like more of a chore than anything.
Controls aren't the best either. You often end up doing an action by pressing the circle button that you didn't want to do. How many times, as a Jedi, did I break apart a protocol droid instead of force lifting something. Why is breaking apart a protocol droid an option, if you're not playing as the protocol droid ?? It's totally useless and gets in the way.
The game's pacing is pretty slow. Like they sometimes show you something during a level, but for some reason the camerajust lingers there. For example, a group of enemis will appear, and the camera will show them. The enemies will start firing at you, and the camera will just stay there. Sure the enemies can't damage you as you're still in a cutscene, but it just slows the game down so much. Also, the UI sucks. Like badly. The hologram isn't bad, but some of the menu placements are weird (why are the level side objectives not placed with the levels themselves ???) and the HUD is sooooo slow. Often, when I unlocked a ship for example, it would show me the ship once, and not have time to finish its animation before I entered a room or collected something else. Because it didn't have time to finish, the game just decided to show the ship unlock again. If the animation was shorter, like 2 seconds instead of the 5 or 6 it actually takes, this problem wouldn't exist.

So, you may be asking, why am I giving it a 3.5/5, which is the third highest score I give games, if it's so flawed ?? Well, simply, this game is magical for a Star Wars game. If you aren't a Star Wars/ Lego Star Wars fan, don't play this game. It's pretty unremarkable for an average gamer. But, as a young adult who grew up with The Complete Saga, who discovered vide games through Lego Star Wars, and discovered Star Wars through Lego, this game was amazing. It's very funny, the character interactions in free play are funny, the exploration is amazing if you consume it in small doses. Never did I think I would say this about a Lego Star Wars game, but this game made me realise just how subjective a critic of a video game is. This game really asks the question of how we should critique a game that is made for a specific part of the population. Objectively, this game isn't great, but it isn't meant to be amazing for everyone, it's meant to be an hommage to Star Wars and to Lego Star Wars, it's meant to be a "fan service game". If you like Lego Star Wars, buy this. If you don't, don't buy this.

If DOOM 2016 was a blast of testosterone, DOOM Eternal is a rush of adrenaline.

At its core, the game is the same as its predecessor, however the game's improved movement thanks to its fast-paced nature is the key to unlocking this rebooted DOOM series' full potential.
Because it's now fun to move around, weither in combat or out of it thanks to some decent platforming elements, you want to explore more. Because of this, Bethesda couldn't just put you in forgettable, generic levels made with a colour palette of grey, black and washed out browns, like most FPS' and, it has to be said, most levels of DOOM 2016. The decors are so godamn pretty in this game. I remember no level from DOOM 2016, but every single one of the levels in DOOM Eternal left an impression on me.
The only real problem with this game is the introduction of a few enemies that kinda suck. Marauders for example are ridiculous in how much time they require to kill, how quick they are and how little a time frame you have to shoot them. The game does lack a bit of variety for how long it is. IF it was three levels shorter, the selction would've been more than fine, but with an FPS that lasts more or less 15 hours, which are stacked with tenths and tenths of encounters, the current roster does end up feeling pretty repetitive.

Papers Please is a cult classic, and it's easy to understand why. It has very simple gameplay mechanics and is relatively easy, but it brilliantly tackles themes that aren't simple or easy, that being an authoritarian regime. Corruption, xenophobic laws, heartbreaking separations between family members are all featured in the game. The extraordinary feat this game pulls off though is that the game still comes off as light-hearted. Thanks to the great humour it can produce. Weither it be the guy that comes every two days, never has the right papers, and eventually comes with contraband and is 100% honest about it because he feels like your his friend, or all the times I just accepted a bribe and then refused to let the person enter because they were a real douchebag, situations can be very funny, and aren't necessarily as heavy as when you need to choose if you're going to be able to afford eating and heating the place that evening.

The gameplay is simple though, perhaps a bit too much so. It isn't easy, but it isn't hard either. It's just that at some point, it becomes very monotone. They add new mechanics every day (new documents you need to check, a new procedure) but they don't make the game ahrder once you've gotten the jist of the game. At that point, no matter how many documents there are, you'll just zoom past them. And yes, I know, the difficulty of the game isn't to make you commit mistakes, it's to slow you down so that you can't win as much money as before and therefore, struggle keeping your family alive more. The difficulty is to force you to get better at your jib. Thing is, the difficulty curve isn't steep enough I feel like. I was always able to win more money than what I lost once I had gotten the hang of the game. This led to me putting the game down, as its very charming presentation, characters and interedting themes just weren't enough, in my eyes, to justify playing through the gameplay for another 30 in game months or something like that.

Does this game deserve its praise ? Sure. Is it overhyped ? Probably. Will you enjoy it a lot if you don't get bored as quickly as I do buy gameplay loops ? That's for certain.

Resident Evil 4 was a game I was honestly kinda anxious to play. I had heard so many sing its praises, all while describing "atypic" controls. Honestly, I was scared that this game was nothing more than a nostalgia trip for most, and in no way the all-time classic it was heralded as. I truly believed that there was a good chance that this "atypic" control scheme was just a poorly aged one, and that I, as someone who didn't grow up with this game, would find nothing but frustration in it. However, the hype around the launch of the Remake made me want to pick it up, but I did tell myself it would be better for me to play the original first, and decided to make it one of my must plays of the summer, once I was done with TOTK of course.

Yes, the game controls awkwardly, but anyone who played this game will tell you that it was by design. In most games, getting swarmed by enemies is not a problem, as you can just run and gun. Here, that's not an option, as Leon is some sort of mobile turret, standing in place as soon as he gets his gun out. This makes crowd control an art to master, requiring you to often take your eyes off your foes. Indeed, Capcom didn't sacrifice the "horror" part of their survival-horror franchise on the altar of action-packed gameplay. Instead, they adapted it to make the two mesh together really well. Leon's shaky aim, combined with the nerves of needing to make this shot to avoid damage, will often lead to missed shots, or triumphant headshots giving you that rush of dopamine.

Everything about the game's atmosphere just nails it on the head. The decor is sublime, the characters are memorable, the dialogue reeks of early 2000s because of how campy it is. Much to the contrary of the last two resident evil games, RE4 doesn't get worse as it goes along. Instead of completely changing gameplay styles midway through like Biohazard and Village (both of which ending up playing more like Gears of War/Call of Duty than Resident Evil), it stays consistent with its formula and expands on it. For example, the longer you go along, the more precise the games asks you to be, with specific enemies being only weak to headshots or shots to a specific part of the body more generally. This makes the game feel challenging all the way through.

As for negatives, I will say there were a bit too many insta-kill enemies/QTE's out there, a bit too many QTE's in general, and the final act of the game does drag on a bit, and is a bit too packed with new or barely introduced characters. It's not bad by any means, it's just that by the time you actually get to the final boss, that excitement rush when first arriving at the final location will have slightly wavered.

Overall, I'm gutted I took so long to get to this, as I maybe would've bought RE4 Remake on launch and indulged in all the excitement that generated. This is absolutely worthy of all the praise it gets, and defintely is one of the best games I have played ever, and, besides TOTK, my favourite game I've played this year.

I feel so bad for giving a game that clearly is a passion project such a low grade, especially because it really has its charm and a lot of breathtaking moments. My problem is that those breathtaking moments are surrounded by nothingness, in terms of gameplay at least.

If you want me to boil down why I didn't particurlaly enjoy my time with this game, I can do that quite easily : it shouldn't be a game. This would've been an amazing short-film, but as a game, all you do is press down on the triger and move the left stick around to move. That's it.

Sure, the environments are breathtaking, the story charming and some sequences are magnificent, but over a two hour playtime, those moments constituted 5, maybe 10 minutes. What's worse is that those great moments are basically all the same conceptually, but with a different setting.

Please make this into a short-film...

Summary: Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze features level-design so perfect it makes you forget about the very few, small by comparison problems it has.

Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze nails everything a 2D platformer should nail: the level design and the music. These two components of the game are close-to-perfect. There's only one level in the whole game that was, in my opinion, bad. The rest of the game levels range from decent enough to absolutely amazing. This game is pretty slow-paced for a 2D platformer, and really emphasizes collecting everything you can see on screen. It's a very different pace to other 2D platformers, but it's by no means worse, far from it. The vehicle and rhino levels aren't the best, but they're good enough. It's just a shame that these nice changes of pace aren't as good as the usual gameplay. The rhino just controls awkwardly and the vehicle levels aren't anything amazing.


However, the game does fail with everything that surrounds the level-to-level gameplay sadly. There are only three different Kong companions: Dixie, Diddy and Cranky. Sadly, Diddy is pretty much useless as he's just a worse version of Dixxie. Dixxie allows you to float and gain a bit of height (Diddy only allows you to float). Cranky allows you to pogo off his stick. Dixxie is by far the best, for most levels, but sometimes Cranky is useful.
As for the shop, it doesn't offer anything exciting. You can buy Kong companions, hearts, ballons to save you from different hazards, mystery boxes that give you figurines (that don't look too hot)... It really isn't a very exciting way to spend the ton of banana coins you get. Also, the fact you need to equip the items you bought in the shop before the level really discouraged me from using my items, ad I didn't know what type of item would be useful.
The boss fights can be very good or quite poor. I would say they're all too long, and that the final boss is unnecessarily annoying, because of how ridiculously small his hitbox is.
Overall, I would sum up every one of my complaonts under the umbrella that the game feels rushed. The UI outside of the levels looks cheap, the shop feels like it was tacked on... I don't know if it was rushed, but the Switch re-release could've brought a few improvements with it, but it didn't sadly.

Overall, you may not understand the high grade for this game given how many things I've complained about, but with level-design this good, and a game this fun and easy to breeze through, Tropical Freeze is a masterpiece at heart, but with a few cheap aspects that stop him from being perfect.

A Way Out is very unique. I'd call it both a callback to older video games, and a testament to how far games have come in the past decade.
I say this because it's pitch is simple: a modern, story-driven game, combined to an old-school, couch multiplayer game. That is a very interesting pitch, and in the most part, it's executed quite well.

First off, the game has good ideas. For example, I thought playing the whole game in split-screen was really dumb at first. Then I realised it was a very good idea, as it really gives you the impression of being on the same couch as your friend. There's one instance where splitscreen is super dumb though as it directly contradicts gameplay, a moment which I won't spoil. But overall, this is the kind of really good idea A Way Out has. Hell, the pitch itself is a great idea: escaping prison with a friend ? That sounds cool !
The story is really good. It's a bit basic, but the characters are very enjoyable, their backstories are interesting, their dynamic is good... There's more to it than just "get out of prison". There are a few interesting plots in here as well, making the story the best part of this multiplayer game, which feels weird, but is what the game aims for.
As for gameplay, A Way Out focuses on variety more than quality. The game isn't that great in this department. a lot of the game is just a QTE basically, but the context of those QTEs are what make it interesting. It's also great that the game changes up its gameplay so often, because it would get really boring really quickly if not. The little minigames you can face your partner in are probably the best parts of this game apart from teh story.

However, this game does have its problems. As I said, the gameplay isn't the best thing out there. I've heard that It Takes Two does a way better job at this.
Also, the shooting sucks. It isn't enjoyable at all. You could say the same thing about stealth. For 90% of the game, this isn't a problem. However, the last 10% is mostly gunfighting, and those final 10% are easily the worst part of the game. See, every variation in the gameplay is fun because you only get to do it occasionaly. The first time we got a gun, I was really jealous of my friend because he was the one with it. My friend told me it wasn't the most enjoyable shooting he'd done, but who cares ? After all, this was just a one off. Like I said earlier, the gameplay isn't the greatest, but the context, the scarcity of the different phases of gameplay is what makes them enjoyable. So, when the game showers you in its terrible shooting, the fact that it isn't good isn't an excuse anymore, since you're not ecstatic about finally getting a weapon anymore.
And finally: the whole thing feels cheap. The animations are stiff, the cutscences often have robot-faces, the art-style feels like they tried to hide the fact that they couldn't do the best job at making the game look good, and so they decided to make it a cartoony, simplistic artstyle, which doesn't really fit the tone of the game, and that simply makes everything look like it's made of plastic.

This was however a very enjoyable time, maybe a bit too long, especially during the previously mentioned final 10%, but a good story, enjoyable enough, varied gameplay should make for a great time with a friend. A Way Out manages to fulfill its ambitious vision, without perfectly executing it sure, but for a first try at what I would call a new genre of games, this is very promising.

This game tries something different, but for once I didn't come out of it saying "good ideas, a lot of potential, would be intrigued by a sequel" They hit a home run on the first try.

It reminded me a lot of Breath of the Wild, in the sense that it feels like *I* did everything. In Breath of the Wild, that sense of freedom makes exploring enjoyable, in this game, it makes revealing the secrets of the world immensely satisfying.

I loved this, I don't want to talk about it extensively, because I feel like that would ruin the experience for potential other players. Just know: if you're frustrated because you're feeling stuck, stick with this game, I didn't regret it. The ending is amazingly simple, it's nevertheless one of the best endings in video games ever.

Also the soundtrack is amazing.

SPOILER FREE SUMMARY
God of War Ragnarök has a better story than its predecessor, and gameplay, whilst not substantially better, still feels fresh and more exciting than its predecessor. The game doesn't fully deliver on the story promises of the first few hours, and is dragged down by a few awfully linear, slow, and long sections, but overall, it is an excellent game, that is but a few milimeters away from a perfect score.

SPOILERY REVIEW

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God of War Ragnarök is a near-perfect sequel, in the sense where it builds upon the first game marvelously. After playing Ragnarök, gameplay and story-wise, I see no reason to go back to its 2018 counterpart. But, while 90% of the game feels perfected, with Santa Monica Studios building on an already excellent base, you can really feel that 10% of the game is completely new and in that sense, unpolished. Those last 10 % are the Atreus sections.

I spent 48 hours completing this game, and I must've played maybe 5 hours as Atreus total. Not a big deal right ? Wrong. Those 5 hours felt like ten. It's to the point where I can't this game a perfect score because of the Atreus sections (even though other minor gripes add up, further discouraging me). Don't get me wrong, I was hyped as hell when i was given control of Atreus, and the first section was really cool. Yeah, the combat wasn't great, but for short, story driven sections that would happen once or twice during the game, it wouldn't be a big deal. Problem is, you play as Atreus on 6 different occasions, and two of those occasions are at least three quarters of an hour long, where you do such interesting things as picking fruits or, and I'm not kidding, climbing a wall for five-ten straight minutes. I don't mind climbing in video games, as long as the sights are worth seeing, but this is overkill.

Atreus is the only overwhelmingly poor part of this game. The rest of it is at least good. There are two poorer aspects I would like to evoke. Firstly, this game being cross-gen really hinders it from a pacing perspective. The game is forced to include hidden loading screens because of the PS4, which is just annoying when you know that your version of the game doesn't need those loading times. On PS5, when you travel between realms and the characters don't tell a story, the loading time is instantaneous, but they still had to put in the waiting room that is the realm between realms to accomodate the PS4. It's not major, but it is a shame, and we're two years into the PS5's life cycle by now, everyone who really wants a PS5 can get one now, it would be nice if this game was the last cross-gen release.
The story is epic, in the litteral sense of the word. it feels like you are playing through a mythological tale, rather than playing through a story with mythological lore. The beginning of the game really takes it time to set the scene, establish the dynamics between different characters, build tension between Atreus and Kratos, Kratos and Freya, Odin and Kratos and Atreus, tension between the prophecy of Ragnarök and the characters wishes... There is a lot of tension in the relationships, to the point where it is genuinely hard to see how the writers are going to conclude every storyline and I was really excited to see how Ragnarök would play out. But then, everything just started to resolve itself. Tension with Freya ? Go for a walk around her home-realm and it's solved like nothing happened. Tensions between Atreus and Kratos ? Nope, it just goes away after Atreus LITTERALY WENT RIGHT TO ODIN AND COULD'VE BEEN BRAINWASHED BY HIM. It's to the point where the conclusion to every story doesn't make. i'm not against this game having a good ending, but it's just that the tension between characters blows off way too early. The scene before the final fight with Odin should be this really stressful resolution to all the tension between different characters, but ends up being predictable because all doubt about the different characters intent in regards to one another has been solved. Kratos and Atreus are bound to the ground, Freya arrives: had the tension not been completely wiped out between these characters, you could've had a tease of Freya maybe turning on Kratos to avenge her son, and then face Odin one on one. Later, Atreus has a choice to make between his father and Odin, but there is no doubt about the fact he'll choose Kratos, because he keeps saying that he doesn't trust Odin, and he never even starts to trust Odin. Basically, it just feels like this game's story had an insane amount of gunpowder, and instead of just blowing up, it blows away in the wind. Don't get me wrong, the story isn't bad, it's epic and the first half is some of the best characterization I've seen in a video game in a while, but it doesn't deliver on its promise.

Now for the purely good parts of the game. Combat has somehow been made better, thanks to the momentum mechanic and the introduction of the Draugnir Spear (which is maybe introduced a bit too late since at that point, I was so established in my usaged of the Blades and the Axe that I felt like going to the spear would just be inneficient). Traversal has been made immensely better thanks to the Blades now serving as a grapling hook, helping the game feel better paced in exploration sequences (even though it does lead to me kinda rolling my eyes when I need to climb somethign the old fashioned way as it feels like I could just grapple up).
However, the real x-factor of this game is the presence of all 9 realms. Even though only 6 are truly interesting (Asgard can only be played through in story sequences, Jötunheim is worthless outside of the Atreus section and Helheim doesn't have a lot of side content), they all feel fleshed out. Alfheim has a huge (but small by comparison) desert to explore that will take a good three hours to complete, Svartalfheim is truly huge with lots to do (and looks amazing) and Vanaheim is ridiculously huge. There is a whole region that is completely optional and that just keeps on going. That region alone will take you 5-7 hours to complete, which you can add to the original 3-5 hours of extra content in the main region. This game went all out on the size and content of the realms, which makes it a bit annoying that the artefacts returned. They do give you hacksilver, but I was crawling under hacksilver after a few hours (i don't know why, but it felt like this game was way more generous with money than the first game) so their main interest is the trophies. Sidequests are now more interesting, as way less of them are given by spirits it feels like (except in Vanaheim which is a bit dissapointing in this regard). Favours are way more story-driven now, exploring the past of different characters like Mimir or Freya, as well as building the relationship between Kratos and Atreus. The themes of the story (parenthood, accepting the past and trying to be better, trust in your allies etc...) are often explored in the side quests, which makes it a nice, coherent package. I was surprised, but I actually really enjoyed raven-hunting this time around: there 48 (compared to the 51 in God of war 2018) which is quite small when you put into perspective with the size of the map. Furthermore, there is actual purpose to collecting them now, with equipment being given to you for (more or less) every 8 ravens collected.
I was however a bit dissapointed by the optional fights. Even though the common enemy selection is more varied than in the first game, the optional boss fights do feel a bit redundant. You fight a lot of the same dragons but with different elements (even though the sidequest of dragon hunting is really cool), there is only one optional valkyrie (which is an awesome fight) and the replacement for valkyries, Berseker souls, do feel awfully samey. The final berseker's moveset is nothing more than a combination of all the different bersekers you've killed, and that's what the final valkyrie was in the last game, but in this game I already couldn't tell apart two berskeker fights in terms of moveset (except when I was facing multiple at once sure) so the king just felt like any other berseker, but with more health and who deals more damage.

This is video game junk food. It's objectively terrible, but I really liked it.

Let's start with the negatives, as they are numerous. The game is slow, tedious, and repetitive.
The game is slow : Climbing is a chore, as it's quite clunky (I often ended up jumping of a wall even though I didn't want to) and Altaïr is very... careful when climbing, by what you should understand that he's as quick as a snail crawling up a skyscraper. The combat relies mostly on you waiting for enemies to attack so that you can counter them with dope-ass animations that one-shot kill a lot of the enemies, or at least give you a window to do serious damage.
The game is tedious : If I have to go through the "kingdom" one more time I will find everyone who worked on this game and make sure their families pay for their Ubisoft-working family member's sins. For the first three sequences, you have to ride your horses to the three main cities, and doing so is the worst part of the game, by far, as it is completely barren, with nothing to do except climb observation points every five meters. The map requires you to climb observation points to reveal it, and there is WAY TOO MANY OF THEM. I actually like observation points, some can procure breathtaking sights, but there is around 60 in this very small game, so the area they reveal is quite limited, and it gets very repetitive and boring, especially given Altaïr's climbing speed. To make things worse, even after going through the tedious process of revealing the map, navigating thanks to it is no easy feat. The mini-map is useless, as it doesn't show anything at all except for where the north is and where your objectives are, and the actual map isn't much better, as it doesn't show you roads for you to follow, so you just kinda pick a path and hope that it isn't a dead-end. Thankfully, you then unlock fast travel, but you still have to walk all the way from the Assassin's fortress to the the fast travel point, which will take 2 and half minutes, WHICH YOU HAVE TO REPEAT 9 TIMES. That makes 22 and half minutes out of this 12 hour game where you're repeating the same exact boring journey.
The game is repetitive: if you've done one assassination in the game, you've basically done them all, and they really aren't that interesting. You'll start by being given a speech by Al-Mualim, then you'll do the boring travel section to the town you need to go to, get into the city by camouflaging yourself in scholars, get to the bureau, then accomplish 2-3 "investigation" missions which consist of either a/ eavesdroping (sit on a bench, aim for the two guys that are talking, and press triangle) b/theft (listen to two guys talking, walk up to the the back of the one you need to pickpocket, hold circle) c/interrogation (listen to a guy talk, follow him until no guards are nearby, beat him up(which consists of alternatively pressing square to punch and then holding R1 to block without any timing involved), listen to him talk) d/collect the flags (basically a parkour challenge, pretty decent but I only got to play one even though I did around thirty of the 54 possible investigation missions) e/ assassination timer challenges (kill 2-5 dudes without being seen within the time-limit). For those of you keeping count, that's only 5 mission types for 54 possible investigation missions. That means that, on average, one type of investigation is repeated ten times, and I'm sure that there aren't as many timer challenges or eavesdropping missions that they are interrogation of theft missions, so you'll mostly be following dudes around to beat them up or pickpocket. It gets very repetitive, very fast. After that, you go back to the bureau (which can be pretty far away as well), then you do the assassination. Now this is where the game could've shined. Every investigation mission gives you info on the guy you need to kill and tips on how to kill him. For example, one guy told me that scholars would be attending a ceremony where my target would be, so I could hide amongst them. Here's the problem: firstly I never found the scholars or a victime to save to make scholars spawn, secondly, I didn't need the scholars because this game is way too easy. Even though security is often pretty tight, with a lot of enemies around the target, the target can't escape, he'll just stand and fight you. Had he been programmed to flee, putting the mission under an invisible time limit, having to avoid combat would've been a priority, and I would've been heavily encouraged to engage with more investigation or at least to be smart with my assassination, but because of how easy it is to do assassinations, I just acted as a brute who would force his way through guards. Furthermore, even when I tried being smart, the detection system is really quite clunky, and I often got spotted even though I wasn't doing anything wrong (I wasn't running, or jumping, or climbing or anything that requires "active mode" as the game calls it). The problem can be resumed to this: the game gives you a solution to a non-existing problem. After the assassination, you escape the guards, hide, they forget about you, you get back to the bureau (again) and you're done.
Lastly for negatives, the story isn't good. It's not terrible, but the Desmond sections are a whole bunch of nothing where you just walk from your bed to the animus, and then from the animus to your bed, and it never gets interesting, even though there was potential for it to be I will say that. Altaïr really is a dick, and it feels like his arc just happens without any rhyme or reason: he's a dick at the beginning, and ends up being a humble guy because.. he killed 9 dudes ? The thing is the game shows reasons for him to humble himself (his arrogance is responsible for a death and a lost limb to be fair) but when those things happen, he keeps being a dick about it and only becomes humble at the end of the game, so surely that's not the reason for which he humbles himself, and there's no other reason given. Sure, he talks with the templars who make him realise the world is multi-faceted and complex, with no real good or bad guys, but that doesn't have anything to do with him being humble. Maybe becoming wise is what makes him humble ? It's weirdly done, that's for sure. Overall, the story is kinda there and that's it, but the ending is just hilariously bad. It's not even an ending, the game just stops abruptly. It feels like the writers had a heart attack while writing the climax of the story and nobody bothered to finish it.

Now for the positives: this game is all show, and that is what saves it, and, I must confess, made me enjoy it. Altaïr is a meh character, but hot damn his outfit is so cool and charismatic that it makes me love him even though he has all the personality of a dry sponge. That's the word to describe this game: cool. it has a cool factor which makes me enjoy it. The fighting animations are cool, pushing everyone in the crowd while trying to escape guards is cool, running on rooftops, hopping from one to the other is cool, the whole assassin's mythos is cool, killing someone with the hidden blade in the middle of a crowd without anyone noticing is cool, climbing, even though poorly executed, is cool, especially when climbing huge buildings. This game is objectively bad, and I feel terrible for enjoying it this much, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a good time. This is McDonald's: gourmet food is cool, but there is something comforting about those cheap burgers and fries. Breath of the Wild or Outer Wilds are cool, and I vastly prefer them to this by the way don't get it confused, but playing a game this simple and brain-dead was a nice experience.

I'm going to get torn to pieces for this...

This game is a step in the right direction. I always hated Pokémon as a game, but always wanted to love the series. I love the pokemon mythos, the ambiance, and the character design, but the repetitive gameplay and uninteresting stories (except black and white) meant the only Pokémon game I ever finished was X and Y (because I didn't need to grind XP to beat it).
So when I heard how amazing this game was, I was excited to take a look at it ! My brother, who is a huge pokémon fan, bought it at launch, so I didn't have to buy it myself, which I'm very happy about given that I do not like this game.

It's a real shame, as I was hooked by the game at first. My first 6 hours, I was addicted, thanks to the really good gameplay at hand here. never in a thousand years did I think that I would compliment a Pokémon's gameplay, but I have to say, catching pokémon by sneaking around them is insanely fun and addictive. The fights being so short is also a plus, and the whole ordeal felt dangerous. The fact that pokémon can attack you, and that even a weak pokémon will do a lot of damage if he gets a chance to attack makes the game more interesting strategically speaking. It also really feeds into the idea that pokémon, in these ancient times, are to be feared.
However, once I came out of the second zone, the game just stopped being interesting. The first two zones were great thanks to this amazing basis for a new formula, the mounts were really well executed as you could call them with the press of a button, but I was expecting developments to this formula that never came. If you've played the first zone of this game, you've played everything this game has to offer, and that isn't saying much. In every zone you get in, capture everyting in sight to fill the pokédex, get a new mount, fight the noble pokémon (which is a fun fight, but it's a shame that it's basically the same thing five times) This is a good basis, but it is very far from being enough to fill a whole game, let alone spawn a new subseries. Yeah new mounts are unlocked, allowing you to go on water, fly, and climb. But this does not change the core gameplay loop.
To be fair though, the fights have been made better. Quick and Strong style add an interesting risk/reward mechanic, and having the type advantage doesn't necessarily mean a one-shot anymore (even though you're insured the win).

So the gameplay is pretty good, for its first hours at least, which is the sole reason why this is getting 2 stars.
The story is not interesting in the slightest. Again, there was so much potential, but uninteresting characters whom you'll forget the names of just appearing behind you to tell you that you have to go and beat a noble pokémon isn't an interesting story; It's a shame, as a story about mythological pokémon times, featuring tensions between two clans with a group of strangers coming to explore the land caught in the middle, with the protagonist coming from the sky to spark the fire that is clearly waiting to happen here would've made a fascinating story if oriented towards adults... But pokémon is for children. I get it, of course, but... why give us the interesting premisce of inter-group tensions if it's a game for children ? I will say though, the story does get a bit more somber towards the end, but I stopped playing at that moment, because I did not want to play this game anymore. Basically, for 90% of this game, the story blows a fat one, and, from what I can tell, it picks up at the end, right at the moment where you're completely worn out on the gameplay, and the game tells you you need to keep playing.
The characters are horrible I hate all of them/ am dissapointed that the few ok ones weren't developped more. The pokémon professor is by far the worst.
The music is surprisingly dissapointing.
I won't talk about the technical performances outside of this mention, because I don't like beating dead horses
The landscapes are not very interesting, despite their cool old japanese painting art style. I hope you like flat grassy plains because that's what you're getting (and my favourite game of all-time is Breath of the Wild, which means I love grassy plains, but these ones are just boring. In BOTW, the plains have a volume to them, first because the grass actually looks eralistic as it moves in the wind, but also because the land isn't flat).

This game just isn't the best. Yes there is potential. yes I would take a look at a sequel. But this game is way overhyped. As always, the standard for Pokémon company are insanely low, and anything that clears the bar is considered amazing by desparate fans trying to convince themselves that Pokémon isn't one of the worst video game series on Earth, which is a hell of a shame. The same happens with Call of Duty games, or any EA game for that matter.
Sorry Pokémon fans, hope you don't hate me for saying your favourite franchise sucks. If you want to trigger me in return, tell me that Jedi : Fallen Order is the Pokémon Legends Arceus of Star Wars games and I'll scream and shout and throw a tantrum in the comments.

I was surprised by this game, in a good way. The gameplay is solid, fun and surprisingly varied. I wanted to see the game to its end, but I eventually ragequitted because the checkpoint system in this game is awful, and I just couldn't be bothered to continue. Also, your legs in this game are so annoying, they get in the way all the time, and you have no way to control them except for lifting them (which is useless). Great concept, surpringly well executed, but with a few key flaws that will frustrate you.