I usually stick with games longer before reviewing them but I really truly am not being grabbed by this one. With all the hype and the new IP I was thinking this would be the Bethesda game to make me finally understand their appeal - but it's just not happening.

Every system in this game feels like it's half-baked and I can easily think of examples of other games that focus in on those systems and do them a lot better. Discovering new planets feels meaningless when you can't actually fly to them and instead just go through a loading screen, point your ship at them, then go into a menu, then load again. I'm not even necessarily asking for something seamless here, but space travel just feels pointless and I genuinely feel like it could have been cut out entirely?

It wants to tell a gripping sci-fi story - but none of the characters seem very interesting and the complete lack of evolution in their dialogue system makes it impossible to feel anything for them. How they still design these games to match what people make jokes about with the "oblivion NPC" videos is insane to me. The fundamental design of the game feels outdated.

The stars I'm giving it go toward how nice things look in the world, and the lovely UI style (though, the UX isn't the greatest). I also just have to appreciate the ambition at play here and the fact that I know this is going to make a lot of people very happy.

Still currently playing through NG+, but really impressed with how much I liked this considering I bounced off the older AC games. I loved almost every part of it, from gameplay and customisation to the story and characters. The only reason I'm not giving it 5 stars is because I feel the story could have done with exploring some things in a little more depth, and it relies too much on doing timeskips and just telling the player what happened instead of letting us experience those changes to the landscape first-hand.

Despite feeling a bit rough around the edges in terms of performance and UI, I had a lot of fun with this. The tactics gameplay is just the right level of complexity for me to enjoy, more similar to something like Chimera Squad than the main XCOM games. It's got enough options to lead to interesting situations and moments that make you feel smart, but its not so difficult that making one wrong move will ruin an entire mission. I was a little worried about how random card draw would affect the tactics, but with such small decks and plenty of deck-cycling options like targeted redraw, I never ran into a situation where I found myself drawing the "wrong" card and losing a mission due to that.

Character moments are fun and cute, though I did find myself not caring about some of them and feeling like more characters got highlighted in the story while others could have just been left out entirely without much change to the overall plot or team relationships. I will say that not letting us properly romance characters was disappointing. Let me date Magik you cowards.

Rating this as a bundle rather than for its individual games (rated those separately) - its a pretty decent bundle and expansion. Having Amy playable (and Knuckles in other games) is a fun addition, mission mode and the extreme missions are fun though most of them are a bit easy, and the museum is fun to flip through though a lot of the stuff has been included in art books and other resources for so long that super fans of the series have probably already seen a lot of it. It is also a bit annoying to purchase multiple things when you have the coins to afford it.

Game Gear titles are also a fun addition, though a bit of a novelty if I'm being honest. Most of it was just fun nostalgia for me since I remember playing them on the 3DS virtual console years ago. They aren't exactly great games.

S3&K music is also really not great at times, I understand they couldn't use the original tracks for legal reasons but the replacements don't even come close - Ice Cap Zone especially.

Beautiful graphics, amazing characters, amazing story, and one of the most enjoyable and satisfying combat systems I've ever played. Pretty much every second I spent fighting things in this game I was enjoying myself and had a massive smile on my face as I discovered new techniques and optimized my way to higher and higher damage numbers.

Every boss fight just kept getting better and better, I didn't even mind when they turned into playable cutscenes - the spectacle was enough to keep me hyped.

My only real criticism is with the side quest pacing. I think a lot of the side quests have tons of care put into them, the stories they tell have to be some of the best I've seen from gaming side quests in a while - a good few of the scenes present in them could easily deserve to be part of the main story. The main problem is that they'll tend to drop all at once after every story mission, with the highest amount dropping at once being just before the final main quest. It takes away from otherwise great quests since I tend to get burned out and start skipping through dialogue. I don't really consider this enough to knock the rating down though, considering I could have easily just chosen to pace it out and do stuff post-game. I'm just insane and need to do everything before moving on.

Replayed with Sonic Origins Plus. I've warmed to this one quite a bit, and outside of Collision Chaos I don't find myself actively disliking many of the levels anymore. That said, I feel like I still don't understand the love for the game. The time travel mechanics make no sense, serve no purpose, and are so hard to execute it just isn't worth the effort. I found myself just shooting through the levels as fast as possible and not engaging with them. I like that they are optional, but wish I felt more want to engage with it.

The game looks and sounds absolutely incredible, though personally it can be a bit overwhelming for me. The special stages are also incredibly strong, not sure if I love them more than blue spheres but it is close.

Played again through Sonic Origins Plus, haven't touched it since last year when the initial release of Origins came out. I've warmed to it a bit, but I still feel like there are just so many inherent issues with the level design, such as way too much reliance on instant death mechanics, that it just frustrating to play. The game doesn't even come close to the heights of Green Hill until Scrap Brain, which is then ruined by Act 3 just being Labyrinth Zone again. It also has the worst special stages in the series.

Pretty good Kirby game, nothing amazing compared to the other entries in the series though. I felt the lack of collectibles in the levels outside of the spheres took away from it for me, I would have preferred dress-up masks be collected like Keychains in Triple Deluxe or Stickers in Robobot, instead of tied to the mini-games.

Magalor's Epliogue elevated my overall rating a good bit, it was a bit short but such a fun experience. Nintendo keep nailing it with these extra side modes in their ports.

Bleak Sword is a stylish, polished, simple action game with great feeling combat and a basic but appealing art style.

It's also way too long.

What could have been a simple, 2-3 hour game is instead bloated with far too many levels than it knows what to do with. There's a perfect time in the middle where levels are just long enough to be enjoyable without feeling like a slog everytime you re-attempt them, but the game just keeps adding more and more enemy waves to each stage and it quickly becomes frustrating.

It's also got some bizarre design choices, like a levelling system for increasing your stats - there's no need for it, the game could have just kept enemy and player stats the same since the difficulty comes from enemy combinations and patterns! All it results in is sometimes needing to go back to grind EXP (in one of those super long late-game levels, since older ones won't give much EXP) and it completely breaks any flow you were in.

I was really disappointed in it by the end, and despite starting the game being in love with the style and combat - I felt no sense of achievement when I finished it - more of a "oh finally". All the game had to do was tone itself down and end early, and it could have been an amazing experience.