The idea of combining Streets of Rage with rogue-like elements is so great, that it hurts so much greater, that its such a bad execution of this idea.

The randomness should more so be in the quality of the items you find than in the difficulty of each individual level. The items range from completely useless to very slight upgrades, which is sad, because nutters synergies are often the biggest appeal of rogue-likes.

One might then hope for rogue-light elements, meaning a skill tree between runs, but that one sucks even more. You only unlock more moves, that are too slow to be viable.

I love this game through and through. Be it the gameplay, the setting, the aesthetics, the soundtrack or the presentation.

But I am getting tired ...

I am getting tired of whatever the game does today. Every week the game changes way too drastically. Some weapons and strategies now work, others not anymore. Make sure to read the patch notes otherwise you won't have a good time on the higher difficulties.

I honestly wonder how casual players see the game which is different every time they log in.

One week the game crashes after every mission, the next week a new broken enemy is introduced, that makes some missions impossible or missions are flat out broken anyway, another week your favorite weapon is not usable anymore.

These constant radical changes kill the momentum. I am just so tired. And here are the news for this week: The "Quasar Cannon" is now not fun anymore and you have to create a Sony account, so that they leak your information as they do every year - guaranteed. (Set a different password and do not use your credit card!)

The perfect start for the hobby called “Gaming”

Portal 2 is such a perfect video game that I find it hard to point out where to start.

It has a perfect difficulty curve that introduces new mechanics in such an intuitive way that at the points where you reach the first “headscratchers”, you will not be jumped by any new mechanics.

The story is to quote it in the words of Wheatley “just brilliant”. The short quips, the demeaning insults, you receive on a minutely basis must bait a chuckle out of anyone. It gets quite politically incorrect at times, which I love even more.

The art direction is one of the best corporate identities, I’ve even seen and it is just for a virtual company. And they really went out of their way to show the structure breaking apart behind the nice façade.

To this day, this is a milestone in game design and should still be analyzed for every puzzle game to come.

The most accessible Street Fighter yet

The Street Fighter series always scared me off for its complex controls, but it always held a certain appeal for me. So naturally, I was excited for the announcement of "Modern Controls", that present an alternative to the controls, which stem from the old arcade machines.

I expected the modern controls to sacrifice a part of every fighter's moveset, because due to its simplicity, it cannot hold all of the ridiculously long combo list. But sadly, it comes with additional disadvantages as well, for instance, the attacks simply dealing less damage. Additionally, the a lot of moves of the classic controls are also contained inside the modern controls, which often leads to you performing random moves unintentionally.

In short, I like the addition of more accessible modern controls, but a lot of the design decisions feel like these new controls were just seen as a crutch for starters to then evolve into the classic controls.

I am well aware of the state this game was released in. But alas, my review is of the current state.

And honestly, I love it. Finally a chance to dive into the 40k setting that isn't a complete mess. It has everything a co-op game needs, different classes, but more importantly different roles the classes need to fulfill. It has hordes, filled to the brim with splatting enemies, special enemies and bosses, the combination of which keeps you on your toes.

What I'd like to see for a sequel is procedurally generated levels out of combinable set pieces. It's a shame that so few games try out this concept.

This game clearly suffered from feature creep.

I've had this game on my wishlist for about two years, because its artstyle and the promise of coop was appealing. But sadly, this game was created without focus.

It could have doubled down on the combat, the crafting, the progression or the world, but it did not decide and did a littlebit of everything, making none of these choices suffice for a game.

My personal fix for this game would have been the following: Make the home base completely static like in Bastion or Hades, visually pleasing and filled to the brim with the various progression systems. Then focus the rest of the work on the gunplay, the game is called "Wizard with a Gun" after all and sadly, you do not feel like a teleporting, gun-slinging maveric in the game.

Then it could have been a great 8 hour experience. Now it's been a 16 hour grindy and janky slog.

A great adventure game, but a completionists nightmare

Tears of the Kingdom is a fantastic game if you're looking for a 60-hour experience, but if you set yourself completionist goals, for example discovering all shrines, the flaws of this game weigh in heavily, since the game then easily reaches the 200-hour mark.

These being:
- The horrible controls (not remappable)
- The recycled and way too small soundtrack
- The grind; 100,000 rupees to upgrade all armor sets while a quest rewards an average of 20
- Enemy Sponges
- The repetitive weapon fusing
- The Ultrahand vehicle puzzles

I recommend this game to any fan of exploration games, but do not plan to complete it to 100%.

Arcade Racing Perfection

While its predecessor was held back by its technical implementations, this one exceeded my expectations.

The controls are tight, the way you slingshot around corners with 350 km/h is addicting, and the presentation both in sound and graphics is pristine.

I know, that I might sound like an advertisement, but the arcade racing genre is a desert and I am glad not only to get a new entry, but an ambitious one at that.

A good basis with horrible layers on top

Nintendo Switch Sports is by far not a very ambitious approach to a sequel. I am actually fine with that because I was longing for a pick-up-and-play game to enjoy on the couch with friends. Sadly the experience is tainted by an unnecessary limited progression system that is locked behind the Nintendo Switch Online service.

The games themselves are a mixed bag. As you can read from the other reviews here. Everyone has a different opinion on each sport. Some like the volleyball a lot while others see it as sluggish and thus unplayable. I certainly like all of them a bit which is fine by my book.

Especially the fact that every player, no matter the experience, can get into the games quickly is an important factor.

But I cannot, with emphasis, support the decision they made with the online multiplayer progression. Nintendo wants you to subscribe to their crappy online service pretty conspicuously by locking the entire progression - yes, that means every cosmetic and level up - behind this paywall. You not only need to pay for it, you also need to play it online, so basically any match you play with your mates in the same room means nothing in terms of progression. Keep that in mind! Knowing this would have affected my decision to buy this game.

Even better - Nintendo themselves realized that this system is beyond crooked and released a day one patch that allows you to unlock two items per week by playing against bots - alone, which again defeats the purpose of players like myself who just want to spend an awful lot of money for a game to play in social gatherings. I never expected by all means Nintendo to fail so utterly on their core approach to video games.

So, all in all - the core game is still fun with friends but I just can't ignore the feeling that I am missing out when I'm not playing online. I despise feeling forced to spend money in games that I already payed 50€ for, be it for battle passes, season passes, online membership, cosmetics or any other shenanigans the developers can come up with these days.

A refreshing take held back by traditionalist game design

Over the last decades, the metroidvania genre has come a long way. Especially from the indie scene, we've got many great entries.

Metroid Dread feels like a time capsule due to its traditional design choices for better and worse. It is always encouraged to expect investment of the player like old games did, but the game is also littered with mechanics that you would not expect from a game released in 2021.

Here are some examples. The controls expect you to hold 3 buttons, just to fire a rocket, while one would have sufficed, boss difficulty is artificially raised by sponginess and quick time events are back, even necessary to beat nearly every boss. A lot of the bosses are repeated up to 6 times.

These choices would be fine years ago, but due to fantastic examples like Hollow Knight or Ori and the Will of the Wisps, one knows that the metroidvania genre has come a long way and can do better. A comparison: In Metroid Dread and Hollow Knight, you are given a kind of super-jump in the game. It Hollow Knight you cling to a wall, hold a button and perform this jump. In Metroid Dread, you have to click your stick, run a bit, press down, then B, then the direction while holding B, and then you perform the jump.

Why this artificial complexity? For a game, that advertises its tight controls, this feels unlike Nintendo, who usually simplify things, which take other games three sub-menus to explain.

A good core shining through a pile of bad design decisions

Overwatch 2 cannot be explained without its predecessor. Overwatch 1 was one of the very best multiplayer experiences in terms of accessibility and clear design choices. The multiplayer landscape is littered with games, designed for young players, eagerly waiting to spend countless hours to sharpen their skills. Overwatch 1, led by Jeff Kaplan, achieved to combine a more mature player base with a high enough skill ceiling for younger players. It did so by following two clear design principles: “fun over balance” and “easy to learn, hard to master”.

The core of this game was so good, that even now, where none of these principles are kept, it can only leave scars at it, no matter how hard the developers try to destroy it. They introduce tanks, which have unclear abilities and no tank-resembling physique. They implement duplicates of existing heroes and new ones, which skill gap is so huge, that you can’t expect success with less than 10 hours of practice.

And these decisions or “scars” start to add up, blurring the clear vision of a once great game, leaving only a feeling of hollowness and anger against the incompetence of the new staff. Adding to this, is the utter ridiculous new monetization system, charging players 26$ for one skin for one of the 36 heroes. Even the “Trostpreise” (German for consolation prizes) reach price tags of 10$, consisting of worthless profile pictures, sprays and victory poses. One might ask if there are unlockables, well, if you mean with money, then yes, there are unlockables.

Last but not least, the wokeness of this game must be addressed. Due to the fact, that Blizzard employees can’t keep their hands off of women, proven by countless controversies, the executives are now trying to paint over their dark past by sending mendacious letters of excuse. These letters consist of posing only black heroes on the cover, cutting away from the Asian e-sport players in their trailers, renaming existing heroes and pushing an all-female agenda (and many more ridiculously small steps). I always liked Overwatch for pushing boundaries, but with this, they are not brave, but instead playing it safe to appeal to a modern audience.

Since Blizzard tries to be responsible for the Top 5 Worst Rated Games on Metacritic, I must congratulate it to be one step closer to its, now very achievable, goal.