This game was made for speedfreaks. It's all about that non-stop pop-pop of stainless steel. Here's how it goes: you enter a room, quicksave, die to 5 enemies who spawned behind you, quickload, die to five HUNDRED enemies who spawned in front of you, rinse and repeat. Seriously, sometimes it throws over 800 enemies per level after the first half.

It's very fun, but you can certainly feel that it's a game from 2001. For the amount of enemies that we have, Sam doesn't have the appropriate mobility to deal with. It's like you're playing Doom Eternal, except your character can't sprint, double jump, hookshot or melee and he walks two times slower. Sometimes, traversing the open areas is a chore just because of how slow Sam is. Reminds me of walking the semi-open world Halo in Halo CE with slow-ass, sprintless Master Chief.

Level design is sometimes confusing and the assets all look the same, which makes it even more confusing.

More often than not, you're gonna have enemies spawn right behind you or jump at you immediately as soon as you open a door, which feels cheap because usually one jump from a Kleer takes 20% of your total HP on normal. At least it has the VERY helpful saving system of Doom and Half-Life (blessed be the one who came up with it), where the game encourages you to savescum like a motherfucker by giving you unlimited saves, quick saves and a quick save log so you won't lock your character by quicksaving right before dying.

Overall, it's a really fun, turbo-hardcore game for fans of FPS games, adrenaline and high blood pressure.

Bonus points for somehow not giving me motion sickness 👍

I kind of love Ghost of Tsushima. A basic bitch open world game it may well be, but it's easily the best in it's class and it uses it as a vector for some outrageously beautiful visuals and some pretty good storytelling. And in the base game, it ends just about right. Just as the new techniques are drying up and the combat starts to feel like a solved game, it gets to a big emotional climax and the credits roll. It's a huge game in it's own right, there's no need in this world for just more Tsushima, and as the Legends multiplayer expansion showed, maybe there is more value in doing someting a bit different than just giving us another slice of a good time.

Iki island is another slice of a good time. Ostensibly a post-game expansion to Tsushima that adds a whole new landmass of shrines, mongols to slaughter, and ridiculously beautiful landscpaes. And for me, that leaves it needing to justify its existence. If this is just more of the same, its a missed oppurtunity.

And, really, it is just more of the same. Gameplay deviations are very slight, mostly amounting to improved horse combat and a few extremely new cool charms which alter things. Enemies will now also switch between multiple weapon types, and a lot of little things. The world is another slice of beauty, and the quests follow very similar structures to that of the base game, albeit occasionally with some twists.

The story content on offer here is great though. Iki island leans way harder into the semi-supernatural angle seen in the mythic tales and the legends expansion, with Jin getting high on some mongol LSD and being forced to reconcile his relationship with his father and the commonners of Iki island through the medium of cool visions. The entire questline of Iki island is almost entirely focused on Jin, and basically serves to give him a set of tales like Masako and Ishikawa have in the base game, and it really helps a character who's presence in the base game is fine, but a underdeveloped. Particularly if you play Iki before act 3, it makes his motivations a bit more clear and is generally good stuff.

And that's really what Iki does in general. Nothing here is absolutely crucial, but the small amounts of gameplay changes, the story snippets, the absolutely adorable animal shrines, some great new cosmetic options and the general vibe - it just really rounds out tsushima. Whilst Iki is a very purely additive expansion to a game that's already bursting, it puts the new stuff in places that needed it - Both in jin's characterisation and providing more options for specific playstyles which might run out of steam in the later game - especially bow and parry based ones.

It's also fortunate it's pretty short. The main questline can probably be breezed through in a couple of hours, and the island itself is about a sixth of the size of the main game's map, making the whole thing much more of a slight detour than an ugly growth on the main game.

I think if one was to play it when it's clearly intended to be as a post-game thing, it would lose some of it's stength, but as another 4-hour segment in that long, long act 2 of Ghost of Tsushima, its one well worth taking.