I am so torn on what rating to give this game.

Let’s start on by singing its praises. This game has everything I want in a Metroidvania. Great boss fights, amazing world building and setting, expansive combat system… you get the idea. I also loved how long it takes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a 6-10 hour metroidvania, but I also appreciate the 15+ ones like this.

The combat steals the show here, as it is the main focus of your abilities. You get a few traversal upgrades along the way, but most of your time is spent unlocking new combos and fighting methods.

I also love how the devs pay homage to the greats that come before it(Metroid, hollowknight, etc..) and even shout out other works that I guess they just like(Akira, Dark souls, etc..)? Pretty cool stuff.

The things I don’t care for in this game are more nitpicky.. but they stand out quite a bit in my opinion. For starters, one of the weapon choices you have(there are three in total) I didn’t use unless I had to. I’m sure some people actually like it and dislike my favorite, but in my opinion it just felt bad to use. Honestly I used the last option you get pretty much the whole time once I unlocked it, so while there is variety, not all of them are created equal.

I also didn’t love the enemy variety. Don’t get me wrong, they introduce a ton of new enemies in this game, but I got pretty bored of the “grunts” by the end. They are the bulk of what you fight and most of them stay the same or vary slightly all the way up until the end.

The voice acting in this game is rough. I’m not sure if it’s because of the way the mouths on the animals are animated, because of the choppy cutscenes, or if it’s just bad. But it’s hard to sit and watch through the forced story cutscenes. Speaking of, this game really tried to force feed you a story, and even more so a backstory that is pretty… tired and boring.

Last negative I’ll talk about is two-fold.. there are some trophies in this game that are absolute slogs to get. This is not helped by the fast travel options that you are presented with. I think they would have be fitted from adding a few more spots throughout the map.

There is a lot to love about this game, and also a ton of ehhh. But that didn’t stop me from wanting to play constantly. I guess that’s the best thing I can say, I really didn’t want to put this game down.

Everyone that follows or knows me might know that I'm a huge Dinosaur nerd and I'm also a huge fan of the Resident Evil franchise. What do you get when you combine these two things, correct Dino Crisis. Because of that I always wanted to play Dino Crisis for years but for some reason my Dino Crisis 1(PC) Version doesn't let me save my progress. Then I tried to play Dino Crisis 2 and luckily I can save my progress in this game. So here we are and the first thing that I noticed quickly is that Dino Crisis 2 isn't a survival horror game in the style of the Resident Evil like the first Dino Crisis was. It's more of a arcade like game and the majority of the game comes down to mowing down hoards of dinosaurs this may sound repetitive but the game manages to stay interesting by frequently giving you new weapons to fight all kinds of prehistoric reptiles like Raptors, Oviraptors which are your main enemies but you will also encounter Allosaurus, Triceratops and even Marine Reptiles like Plesiosaurus or Mosasaurs. I was surprised that Dino Crisis 2 even included lesser known prehistoric animals like Inostrancevia. Yes, I said "prehistoric animals" on purpose because Inostrancevia, Mosasaurus, Plesiosaurus and Pteranodon aren't Dinosaurs but this was just the Dinosaur-Nerd in me getting the upper hand. Visually the game is still beautiful if you consider when it was released and same can be said about the surprisingly good looking cutscenes.
The controls are arguably the best and most responsive tank controls which is necessary for the arcade like gameplay. Dino Crisis 2 also throws in a few rail-shooting segments which were extremely fun and a a nice change of pace. All in all I really enjoyed this game, it's not hard to beat because of it's focus on action and the arcade like gameplay that rewards you for high combos. I would have like a bigger focus on survival horror but thanks to the genre shift Dino Crisis 2 manages to create it's own identity. Yes the story is nothing special, still the big variety of enemies, weapons and set pieces made the gameplay very entertaining. But the water segment can go fuck itself. Now Capcom, please give us a remake of Dino Crisis 1.

Games I finished in 2024 Ranked

I've never been the biggest fan of the first Dragons Dogma game. Tbh. I never finished the game yet I still deciced to play the second one. I overall enjoyed Dragons Dogma 2 but I do think it has some major flaws and no I'm not talking about the microtransactions. Because for everyone who has lived under a rock, Capcom has done this for years and never anyone complained. Not for Monster Hunter World and not for Resident Evil 4 Remake. And why even would I buy mtx to ruin the experience that the developers had intended. Anyway this out of the way, I like the character creator and it's probably one of the most detailed ones I've seen in recent years. The climbing monsters was also fun and it reminded me of games like Shadow of the Colossus. I liked that your Main-Pawn has their own voice, it gives you the feeling that your Main-Pawn is an actual side character. But that the character of the Pawns is just not there. Because they keep saying the same lines over and over again and the dialogue is boring bin general. The problem comes with the core gameplay loop itself. Most of the quests are Fetch-Quest which maybe was intentional because selling point of Dragons Dogma 2 is the traveling that you do during the quests, almost like on a roadtrip where the journey is the goal. The side activities are also useless, you can buy everyone a round of beer or go to the local fun house. What does it do? Nothing, no buffs and no rewards. When I pay 20.000 gold to sleep with someone than I at least what a cool cutscene but no there is nothing.

Dragon's Dogma 2 director Hideaki Itsuno said that "the traveling is only boring when your game is boring" and I agree but the problem with Dragons Dogma 2 is that the gameplay loop gets indeed boring fast. Because you have these dynamic encounters during your travels between cities where you have to fight Orcs or Ogre. At first fighting them is fun but the more I play the more I noticed that I mostly fought the same enemies at the same locations over and over again. The result is that the fighting gets repetitive very quick and the time between fighting one horde of orcs and the next one was often very small. What did I do ? I told my pawns to wait somewhere and then ran past all of the dynamic encounters. So the core gameplay loop is boring, the characters and quest aren't memorable at all because the dialogues mostly consist out of pressing "next" and in the whole game there were maybe two opportunities to choose your answer. Since the dialogue system is rather shallow, the romancing feels also very trivial. Same can be said about the housing, you can buy 2 houses but you can't customize them. They are only there for you to rest and customization in general isn't a big part of the game. Armor is locked to the vocations which means "Fashion Souls" is not possible. This may not be a problem for some people but I'm just a sucker for customizing stuff and it's a missed opportunity in my opinion. A good example is probably the fight against the Dragon Endboss. It kidnaps a character that supposed to be Important to your character based on affinity. The problem is that there is no way for you to tell how high the affinity between your character and the NPC is. Which lead to a hilarious situation where I thought I was romancing Doireann and expected the Dragon to take her hostage but instead that stupid Lizard took her brother for whom I did like two quests. So the Dragon Endboss took a character hostage that I didn't care about and then gave me the decision to fight him or just walk away. I decided to just walk away and got one of the most underwhelming endings in recent years. This just showed that the story and characters are extremly boring and there aren't really any main-characters. The while storyline with the false Arisen also didn't get resolve at the end. So after that I reloaded my save file, fought the Dragon and got an ending almost identical to the first one. Which disappointed quite a bit and is reminiscent for the rest of the game. Because Dragons Dogma 2 is overall a rather disappointing game with gameplay mechanics that feel rather shallow like the romancing, housing, activities or the dialogues and a core gameplay loop that gets annonying fast. As said before the story and characters aren't there. All of them are really shallow or have like 2 lines of dialogue. But I liked that the game creates situations that are different for every player s and which you will tell your friends about, similar like Elden Ring did. Like when the first Dragon I was about to beat deciced to jump into the water and got itself eaten by those hentai noodles. I can still recommend the game in some form because you can have fun with it but sadly most of the mechanics lack depth, story, characters and quests are nothing memorable. I know there is a "secret" ending but I did not care at the end. This results in a game that's mediocre at best.

Games I finished in 2024 Ranked