A truly gorgeous game let down by the a very drab and tired open world formula and a story that, from my 8 hours with it, was just okay. I can't overstate how pretty this game is, it's one of the few games I've played that has made me want a massive 4k OLED display, the talent on display here is unparalled. I just wish that extended to playing the game. Maybe if you've not played many open world games and were willing to get into them, it'd be fine.

Pray at x amount of fox shrines, cut x amount of bamboo, soak in x amount of hot springs, pray at x amount of temples - all for minor and iterative gains to things like health and item slots. This isn't mentioning the Far Cry 3 like crafting that requires you to loot branches and random stuff strewn about the world. It's just really formulaic, you'll be doing the same chore like things over and over across the map, squandering the gorgeous world they made. I wish they made the experience tighter, or varied the things you'd be doing. I got a prompt to pray at 2 more fox shrines to unlock a minor charm slot and decided that was enough for me.

The combat is pretty punchy but also a little too easy even on the hardest mode - maybe it gets more challenging later on. It's an okay game that's gorgeous to look at, maybe I'll revisit it some day.

It's a fast paced, snappy game that's punishing but also gives you more than enough leeway to overcome it. Combine that with wonderful art, a fantastic soundtrack and some great voice acting and enough variation in your boon and weapon choice run to run to make the repetition a non-issue for the most part and you have a great game.

The amount of reactive dialogue is paced excellently, I never found myself getting tired of any character and wanted to interact with pretty much all of them. Overall, the game really plays to the strengths of being a roguelike you play over and over again, both narratively and in terms of the gameplay in a more typical meta-progression fashion. These two things made it well worth it for me and it's a game I imagine I'll come back to for a run here and there to eventually unlock the true ending. Well worth it, if you like Supergiant games.

Unfortunately, it was really disappointing and there was no fun to be had here. At best it was an incredibly bland attempt at making Saints Row horribly contemporary and at worst it was a technically broken nightmare. You remember the intro to Saints Row 3 where you dive from a helicopter into a party while a Kanye West song plays? It's over the top, ridiculous and fun as hell. In Saints Row 2022 you're a faceless soldier with a bad boss going through boring third person combat training and you have to do a turret section.

The only pro I can say is that the character creator was, as ever, pretty good and had a lot of decent options but less so than the other games. You had to put a bit more effort in to make a neon green mineral man in underwear and personally I struggled to create WWE superstar Byron Saxton with any degree of accuracy, but this may have been a skill issue. Outside of the first two games which I finished solo, I've played the series exclusively in co-op and it simply didn't work on a technical level in this game. Don't get me wrong, it was hilarious, but I was laughing at how broken the game was and this was after they'd patched it. Any interior shop was a portal to the void under the map, where I could paraglide for a really long time. The base combat was strangely unsatisfying compared to the other games, especially the melee combat.

The characters weren't terribly appealing either. Every character I saw would've been overshadowed by the previous cast. Stillwater wasn't all that iconic or anything, but I still remember parts of the map. This random desert town felt pretty unremarkable. All in all, it's just not really worth the time - I'm glad I got it for free on Epic.

Gave me the same special feeling that Dragon's Dogma 1 did, if not surpassing it sometimes. The exploration and combat are both truly stellar and this game absolutely nails the feeling of going on a classic fantasy adventure, the same way DD1 did. If that's what you want out of this, I'd highly recommend it. It's the same trajectory as DD1, the story gets infinitely better the later in the game you are.

Despite some weak writing and questing, the emergent narrative and gameplay that comes from the exploration and combat makes this a joy to play.

It took me until about chapter 4 for it to start winning me over properly. The intro to the game functions essentially as a 2 hour epilogue from the previous game and you're quite railroaded until you finally get to start switching jobs and whatnot. Dondoko island is also pretty addicting, it took me about 12 hours to beat it which I thought was a good pace. Sujimon battling didn't really grab my attention, personally.

Contrasting the two, 7 (which I really enjoyed) felt like a tech demo in terms of the new RPG system and character writing. Infinite Wealth was the real deal in that regard. The cast being a group of mature adults is always a plus and Ichiban, Chitose, Tomizawa and Yamai were stand outs.

One quibble I had is that the translation was off at times, or it felt like it which is never an issue I've had with a Yakuza game. This means that sometimes there's a mismatch between the English sentence and the Japanese voice acting, be it tone or cadence and the like. Someone might say "thanks" in a pretty even mannered tone in Japanese but the subtitle will be "thanks breddah!" which I'm sure is a reflection of the line in the English VA script. I found it a little overbearing at times in Hawaii and a minor irritant other times which is a shame because I'm all but certain 7 had two far more differentiated scripts to avoid this issue. Other than that, no problems

This felt like the game that finally passed the torch. It wrapped pretty much (with some exceptions...) everything I could want up and there were call backs to pretty much every Yakuza game. I especially enjoyed some of the encounter callbacks like the guy who looked like Shimano at the front of the old Tojo HQ and then the guy who took over Nishiki's family with the white suit and katana in the side little building.

The theme of the game also struck a chord with how genuine and empassioned it was, despite many beats of the story having that Yakuza, er, jank to them.

A game with very fun combat, a bunch of different class options and a silly storyline. If you can get it on a sale, you'll have a good and fun time which is all you can ask for. All in all, it gave me very Xbox 360 2006-7 vibes in a positive way. I played the whole thing co-op. Well, nearly the whole thing, there are several sections including the final boss which mandate you do it solo. Here's a tip though, for these sections you can usually just run through if you don't feel like fighting. There's a heap of jobs/classes to change into to vary up your playstyle and you can have two ready to go at all times, so you can be fairly versatile to handle the myriad of different enemies coming at you.

If you know anything about the first Final Fantasy, also, you'll get an extra kick from the game. The protagonist, Jack, is absolutely hilarious and even if you aren't paying too much attention to the story, you can't help but follow along with it thanks to how ridiculous and amusing he is. It's so refreshing to have a JRPG character actively resent some of the JRPG tropes and just call them out in real time. It's all explained in universe, for the most part. He's just an angry man and I appreciate him for that. I have no idea if I was meant to take the story seriously and honestly, I don't ever want to know if I was. As a final note, I enjoyed the voice acting - Mocean Melvin who plays the main protag did a genuinely good job despite the goofy lines. Thanks Jack, the best 7/10.

Twelve hours in, I found myself incredibly bored so I just stopped. The loot felt meaningless and every few steps meant another bland combat encounter where I used the same abilities which would then incrementally increase my gold, or maybe some of my stats via a drop. The world seems to be entirely scaled, so no area feels threatening and revisiting initial areas, I don't really feel particularly more powerful. The side quests revolved around you either following someone or going somewhere to then do more identical combat and you might stop in by one or two identical basements or caves to do one of maybe 3-4 "events" for more inconsequential loot. Also, the setting features humans giving into their worst impulses and, fair enough, it was executed well but I personally found it a little drab and draining.

The intro cutscene was truly gorgeous and the little music I heard was nice and atmospheric, but there's a layer of live-serviceness lurking in your periphery at all times, even when you do your best to turn it off. You have to sit through two (admittedly quick at the time of writing) log in screens to play this, you're unable to pause and there are pop-ups telling you about multiplayer world-events happening, not to mention when I started my intro experience was hijacked by some strange live service seasonal event that I had no context for. Also, in towns, you'll frequently see other players and their hordes of skeletons or whatever. I found it rather immersion breaking but that's a me problem, the real problem is that you cannot turn this off, for some reason.

I believe the level cap is about 50 and I got around halfway there and didn't find the skill tree engaging at all. You're bombarded with a steady stream of dopamine stimulating pop-ups, including season pass reward pop ups. If you earn enough good boy points, you can get a FREE cosmetic item but these are the exception, not the norm.

The one positive I will say about the live-serviceness of this game is that all the microtransactions (which are ludicrously priced, of course) are only cosmetic as far as I can see and I didn't feel as if I was being manipulated into viewing items they wanted me to buy outside of the season pass reward pop up, but this is hardly praise.

Another reviewer here said "Great until it isn't" and I can't think of a better way to phrase it. The parts of this game where you're engaging with the dialogue, soaking in the atmosphere and trying your best to play the game of vampiric politics as an exploited newcomer are where the game truly shines as a fantastic avenue to experience the World of Darkness setting. The facial animations, if a tad overwrought, are seriously impressive for a 2004 game, much less one of this budget. The music too, it's pure late 90s/early 00s goth and I very much enjoyed it. To this day, no game has better player dance animations.

While in the first half of my playthrough, I thought I'd probably end up doing multiple playthroughs of this game, I was having so much fun and I couldn't wait to try out the different clans, but man oh man, then you get to that second half. It's an extremely frustrating and frankly boring time trudging through labyrinthian combat section after combat section to face tedious bosses. One of the final bosses actually made me laugh in how ridiculously stupid and poorly designed it is. I had a character who was fairly specialised in combat and had powerful disciplines, I can only imagine it'd be next to impossible if you leaned more into stealth or speech. It's not as if you get any experience or rewards for killing enemies, outside of ammo, either.

I really wish I could give this 4 or 5 stars and if the game continued on the foot it started off on, I'd have gladly done it, but at this point I'd hardly recommend the game outside of that first half. It just wasn't worth finishing at all. Oh also, it goes without saying, you need the unofficial patch - even with it, I was still getting stuck in the geometry on those last few rushed levels.

In the immortal words of (fictonal) fifty: "Bitch took my skull".

Join fifty and his G-unit compatriots as they go on an adventure to get rich or die trying. It was a pretty fun game at the time and I can't imagine there's a lot of fun to be had to this day outside of having a laugh at the time capsule nature of it. It's a bog standard third person shooter with some over the top characters. It was part of the 50cent cinematic universe, since I'm pretty sure there was also a 50cent related movie that came out around the same time. Anyway, I'm very glad to remember this exists and honestly in terms of tie in games, you can do a lot worse.

I bought this while in want of more things to scratch the itch the TV show "The Expanse" left and it mostly did scratch that itch from the hard sci-fi angle, but first and foremost this is a game about being an asteroid miner. You can bounty hunt and the like, but asteroid mining is undoubtedly what you'll be doing the most of and there's a surprising amount of ship customisation you can partake in.

You can even change the OS on your ship to change the UI to find one you like. If you don't get anything from the idea of playing around with "realistic" space physics, I doubt this game will do anything for you, but for those that are interested in it, it's one of the very few that model this rather than take the typical fighter plane approach.