PREAMBLE: If you find yourself playing a 2K game, make sure you disable 2K launcher after your initial start up. It is a program that uses up an ungodly amount of your CPU resources. Go to your "Properties" options in settings, copy paste the address of your .exe location in quotation marks, and then type %command% afterward. Doing this will solve your problem of stuttering, choppy framerates, and/or bad background program performance. Mafia III: Definitive Edition thankfully also has an option to flat out disable the launcher in the main menu, so you can use that too.

I don't drop my games most of the time, I like to play through them through and through to see if a game gets better at a certain point, or I just truck onward because its the middle point of a big series... but man, I just cannot bring myself to complete Mafia III and it is HEARTBREAKING that's the case because the story was so great in the beginning. To start your story off by establishing it in the 1960's with the most harrowing parts of the nation's history was ballsy. The way people interact with new main character Lincoln Clay is heartbreaking too, turning what was supposed to be his return home into a Heart of Darkness story where he cannot afford to trust anyone. I was feeling the Rambo: First Blood vibe the game was giving off for the first seven hours, and then it just all fell apart from there.

I didn't mind doing the busy work for the lieutenants at first. It gave the game interesting character moments, especially between Lincoln and series mainstay Vito Scaletta, but then I realized that its all the game had to offer. You drive, shoot, drive, interrogate, drive, shoot, drive, interrogate ad nauseam. There is little narrative drive to these, it is completely banal.

It had only taken me 10 hours to beat the first two games each (mind you I didn't even like the first one very much either), 8 hours into this one and I'm stuck doing Assassins Creed 1 levels of bloat because Hangar13 wasn't confident that their story was compelling enough, so they had to stuff filler into the main story. If Hangar13 didn't cave to the baseless critiques of Mafia II and just sold Mafia III as just its story instead, it would have been so much better, but that's not what we got. Its so sad because not many games tackle the subject matter of Mafia III, but I can't be bothered to put 20 more hours into a battered and mistreated experience.

Deeply flawed and extremely inconsistent from level to level, but a clearly promising start from a small group of developers whose talent is obvious.

Environment design ranges from gorgeous and almost AAA-quality to "unfinished Source map" with random fullbright props, badly authored LODs, and weird render occlusion problems. Ray-traced lighting is very pretty but also drops performance to 15 FPS on an RTX 3080 Ti - but only on some maps. On others, it's fine.

Despite the visually intriguing setting, the story fails to raise any interesting questions, which is just as well, because it doesn't answer any of them either. At least two of the three (3) characters are likeable and have personalities.

I had fun playing this game in 2013, it looked amazing back then and it still looks amazing now. In terms of graphics, Ryse Son of Rome looks better than most games released in recent years which is weird, it makes me think that the peak of graphics was reached at the beginning of the 2010s.
The gameplay is alright, the executions were badass but there's too many QTEs in the game. The combat could've been a lil bit better, it has a repetitive nature.
The story was alright too, its based on the Roman Empire and the Barbarians so bonus points for that.
I wish there were more games based on the Roman Empire, it's strange that most of them are RTS's. It was one of the most influential empires and still... not that many games about it...

Few games really make me actually laugh out loud or just smile to myself whilst I'm playing them but Guardians of the Galaxy had that effect on me almost constantly during its 20 hour playtime.

There are so many things I want to say, lines I want to quote, characters I want to discuss but it's nearly all spoilers so I will just say that Guardians nails character interactions like almost no game I've ever played. The crew talk amongst themselves constantly and in such a way they really feels like a real dysfunctional team through a movie or show and I flarking loved that. Eidos Montreal absolutely nailed almost every character from hilarious insults and comments to the more poignant moments it just felt so good, so right. (Mantis is easily my favorite character, every line she says is just gold.) The writing is just excellent.

On the negative side though you only get to make first impressions once and when this game was initially revealed I thought the combat looked really boring and unfortunately that just holds true. When not on ship or exploring locales you are in combat but despite having 5 Guardians at your disposal you can only play as Star-Lord. That in itself wouldn't be so bad but they just made him painfully dull to play, he can barely use his rocket boots, his blasters just feel like toy guns etc. To compensate you can order your team to do special attacks with cool downs on enemies which just means most the time you are micro managing them rather than really doing a lot and all of their moves are far more interesting then a single thing Star-Guy can do. It would have been far more fun to simply be able to change character during combat and use those moves yourself when you want to. It all results in some what clunky feeling gameplay and terrible lock on to boot. I almost inwardly groaned at every battle that began.

Presentation wise Guardians is a slam. The character designs are brilliant, they are close enough movie, close enough their own thing that they feel familiar and different all at once. I really liked the art generally and playing it on PS5 in performance mode it was very smooth. The game has a great attention to detail especially on The Milano (their ship) and Nowhere when exploring around I looked at everything and their are Easter eggs everywhere. That said I ran into quite a few little bugs getting stuck in some scenery or glitches forcing me to checkpoint restart.

The sound design to this game is a 10/10. The game wouldn't be Guardians without amazing 80's music and there are over 30 licensed tracks you can listen to from then plus some original tracks by the band Star-Lord and it all couldn't be more perfect though I wish during battles you could manually choose to listen rather than do this cringey huddle first the game has. On the voice acting front it's absolute perfection. Each characters voice fits them perfectly. Rocket's angry sarcasm, Drax's oblivious warrior front, Star-Lord's quippy pirate leader, I am Groot? I am Groot. I can't fault it at all.

To sum up I think guardians of the Galaxy is a wonderful experience, but it's kind of a bad game. The voice acting, dialogue, music, atmosphere and visuals are absolutely nailed but the actual gameplay is so mediocre. Still, I desperately hope they get a chance to make a sequel and improve that because even with it's flaws this is still an absolutely fantastic game.

+ Character dialogue and interactions are so very good.
+ Laugh out loud funny at times.
+ Fantastic voice acting and music.
+ Great art design and atmosphere.
+ Mantis.

- Combat is just bad.
- A few minor bugs here and there.

This was a nice surprise. Very funny with a surprisingly enjoyable story. I really liked how the team felt like they were growing as the story went on and how that was even reflected in gameplay by them automatically doing things you'd have to directly ask them too earlier in the story. The gameplay is nothing incredible but its fun enough that I was never bothered by it, and the huddle mechanic was really neat (although feel like it' should of occured more often) But the game isnt perfect. For one - the amount of dialogue in this game is insane when roaming the levels especially considering how well its done and how funny it can be, the problem is that theres just so much of it in each level that characters are getting constantly cut off. Second of all- some of the levels just go on way too long and makes the game feel a bit more bloaty than needed. Other than that, this was one of the most surprising and charming games i've played in recent memory and I simply wouldn't feel right giving it any less than five stars.

96/100