some mad lad woke up one day and asked ''what if sonic but good ?''

spark has some amazing level design that focus more on obstacle courses than pits of death and precise platforming, a game that understands the strenghts and weakness of the style its trying to emulate, but it does it so well that it also create its own identity and flies away, its unashamed to pull its inspirations out for the world to see and embrace the cheesy fun of anime\game.
i could only wish 2D sonic was this competent.

it has plenty of gamemodes and unfortunally they don't seem very balanced, fark levels straight up tested my patience but also game a very fun way to do bosses.

its peak, its the best

out of the trilogy this was the most personal, humane and touching story of the series, so many positive points.

+ miller is my favorite character and this whole game is just ''have a journey to the west with miller and the gang''

+a long journey of survival putting the best of the best in human moments, touching situations that if you played the good way, can give that little warmth of humanity.

+the stakes are always being raised, i cared so much about this crew that despite them all being professional beasts that could clean a entire fortress solo, i still feared for each one.

+god that ending is so good, uuuuuugh....

sure there are negative points like bugs, ai suddenly finding you making you reload, long loadings depending on your rig, forcing you to a 3rd weapon you can't change (and some downright mean bad ending related stuff, but at this rate having a idiotic karma system is tradition) but all this gets put aside as you play, i can't carry out the peeves when this hits me with so much emotion like that, it honestly gives me hope for AAAs, maybe there are still some stories wanting to be told by the industry

i had to buy this game twice, both on steam and GOG it simply does not work.
not only did i need to get this game twice but the time spent on making this run was much more than the time i've spent playing it, i had to download several patches, all of which did not work (i am no stranger to pcgamingwiki and gaming forums to tweak old games), my last bet was forcing it to work with a voodoo card emulator, which still didn't work, its insulting they sell this game on official stores without even giving it the proper care to make it playable.

i did managed to make it run however, after retrying all my steps above (go figure) eventually the steam version worked, but not the GOG version, but what i got was not a old gem forgotten by time, it was just an average shooter in a time where people had a ton of mech games to choose from, it was not a dying genre as people make it up to be.
the game itself was constantly crashing to add to the mediocricy of it, had to watch the last chapter on youtube

not worth the hassle, screw this broken old game and screw all those youtubers who keep calling this a ''underrated masterpiece'' or ''forgotten gem''

a 7\10 that would become a 9 if it had some polish

they took it out of the oven a bit too soon, because despite the brilliance of some points present in this game, its riddled with ocasional death indulcing bugs, getting stuck in geometry, bosses that seem to still be in their beta stage.
the funny thing is, those bugs only begin to show up when youre about 2 hours in, the levels start to become more bland and even a bit repetitive, i doon't believe its malice but rather the dev running out of steam because i can garantee take two pushed them into some absurd crunch, as is their tradition.

with some more polish this game coud become a absolute diamond because whats here is to be treasured, it has some of the most stylish baloony visuals i've seen, its like the stereotype of a saturn game brough to life, the movement (when it doesn't glitch) is some mario sunshine levels of freedom in your inputs, allowing you to just skip bits of the level if youre precise enough (and you don't get stuck in geometry beforehand) now why everyone seems to know how to make a sonic game but sega ?
i am willing to overlook some of these issues here but not on SA2, why ? because that game gets praised to high heaven despite being one of the worst platform experiences i've had, while here its precise, straighfoward, willing to bring joy and passion being brough down by what i assume to be consequences of publishers being the devils that they are

heads up however !
the eula and the data can check everything in your computer, crash logs specify that they can check your emulator folders, last open programs, access to your pictures and location, this is a huge yikes and i don't believe its the dev's fault, this reeks of Take Two because i don't believe in a second the dev of sonic mania would do something like that, forcing you to agree to sell all your data like that in a game that costs more than most indies around, oh yeah the price is another point to be removed, it costs the price of a full energy bill in brazil.

when you put a bunch of different people to make levels, you end up with some amazing level designs and some bullshit that should put the developer on some kind of watchlist.

i loved what Night dive did with the remaster, as someone who been trying to play and finish this game for years, it was with this remaster that i toughed through, was it worth it ? no
still i had fun and avoiding the hassle of configuring the source ports make the remaster worth it, specially since i got it for free for owning the original quake.
doom is still better

not the 9 that is the first game but its a solid 7 for a pseudo dlc
yes it is canon and alan wake 2 confirms this as just one of many times alan tried escaping the darkness, thing is, its cheesy for a purpose, people gotta remember alan wrote this to be part of a TV show, thats why everything is a bit less serious.

lore aside it is a bit more budget tight than the first game, probably because they were getting enough funds for their next game, remedy is a small studio, and lets not talk about the leechers that rockstar are.
overall its fun to play something sam had a lot of fun writing

to quote yusuke : for any creative work, one should be able to feel some sense of its creator's passion, no matter how crude or unrefined the work may be, there should aways be some sort of spark for those who engage with it, i feel nothing when playing this game.

this game fixed all the problems i had with the first entry of the reboot series.
it made lara more independent and less stupid
it gave a better cast and even brough back a favorite character.
it stopped making the characters being stupid for the sake of bringing back the next gameplay sequence.
yet this only revealed how hollow these games truly are, the game might throw the most amazing set piece with explosions and action yet all youre doing is holding foward, the game itself will make the actors mare grandiose than the scene itself, this game feels like its just a bunch of checkmarks for how a game in today's standarts should be, yet its competent enough to not be irritating
i truly felt nothing when playing this game, its like i can feel the corporative decisions taking over this game and any sort of spark or vision the creators could have is long gone, nothing, i could say i had fun shooting but i can have fun shooting somewhere else.

lara is so desperably trying to fit in with her new rival nathan drake that she falls flat not realizing what makes him tick

not the 10\10 the internet promises, but the best 8\10 you'll ever play.

there are problems with this title, bandai rushing production making some areas of the game straight up be incomplete (a fan will come up and say that its to symbolise the hollowing of the world), back when this game was made, some devs said they wanted to implement more of the internet forum based discoveries upon their works, what you get from this is cryptic quests that i have no idea how some people found out really, and i found that quite jarring specially when it doesn't even make sense (i shouldn't have to deposit 1 humanity at a time in order to hit 30 on that specific quest, and who exactly found out that was necessary to do it ? if you know you know), and to top it all off this game has one of the most dogshit toxic sides of a fandom, they sent death threats to a IGN writer for a dated guide, go out of their way to guarante that everyone has the exact same experience as them by reporting respec mods, going into nexus pages and harassing modders.

if youre a new player, please, you paid 60+ dollars for this game, play it any way you want, if you want it authentic go for it but if you want help, if you want to be handheld by a guide, dude thats totally ok, don't let others come to you and say ''if i suffered through this, so should you'', the best part of this game isn't even the first playthrough, because once you finish the game and go into NG+ you realize how much of a amazing sandbox it truly is, then youre set free to do as you please with the knowledge you gathered and all the equipment, you truly become the ''lord of the dark'' of this world.
veterans, please don't act like this game is a religion, its a product mean't to be enjoyed in any way they want.

that all said, if you decide to get into this, be prepared to learn a lot and adapt but really it isn't that hard, most of the challenge comes from not knowing what or how to do things, with the proper knowledge and equipment you can breeze through most enemies, i've seen some people who played with a guide beat artorias first try ''but it takes away from the experience, it takes the discovery away'' different strokes for different folks.

you paid for the product, you enjoy it anyway you want, its yours.
(my final note represents the game as a whole, the point about the toxic fandom does not interfere with my review, but its worth bringing up for, as a game with online features, newcomers will have to deal with the community and they should be aware of it)

mixed feelings left and right.
at times i was loving the experience, at times i was dreading the massive jank this game is, getting stuck on geometry mid run, buttons fighting each other to decide which input to commit to, enviromental hazard not working as intended, it was almost as if the game was trying to balance itself by having a super fun rule of cool style of story and the most bland and broken gameplay, it gets a little better with shadow stages but you play so little of the two main characters, i overall enjoy SA1 much more, it had its fair share of jank but i could at least trust the systems to work, man if this is sonic all the way to next gen i dunno if i wanna continue the series, i asked a friend of mine who has much more experience with sonic (one of his fave stuff) and he quoted ''you havent experienced sonic until you ve died to shitty rails a dozen times'' power to whoever likes this game or liked back in the day but good grief, at least in SA1 the character while fast had some ground for proper controlling, SA2 perpetually left me stuck in a janky fight for proper control as even turning might break the physics and bring the running to a halt, lost count the amount of times i died to sommersault and light dash fighting each other to see who will register the input and kill me.

it stopped being fun at the hero sections, whose idea was it to triple the size of knuckles and tails levels anyway ?
i've seen the troubled development hell this game went through and its honestly a miracle this game and even sega stood after the storm like that, it makes me respect the story, but it doesn't make this game any less icky to play, story is cool tho, hopefully i can get to later entries and never open this again.

being blown away by 2033 didn't do the sequel any favors in my eyes, but its still a great game.

while the first one deal with the themes of ''the journey of the hero'', it's main plot had more of looking into the bigger picture of things, embracing the way of nature instead of fighting it because nature is not fighting you, its understanding you.
the sequel takes the opposite approach delving into the internal conflict of the people in this world (which was never my interest in the first game) and while i do appreciate its approach in explaining the structure of politics this world adopts, i couldn't help it was a step back, again the whole ''looking through the bigger picture'' part of the first game made me feel like arthyon was dealing with a pseudo sub-plot during it all, its just not the same weight, but then the redemption plot began showing up and suddenly i'm much more invested, ashamed even (even tho i did the good ending, blame arthyon not me) as if wishing for nature to heal. so plot not as good as the first game, but it has its ups, but i still believe the whole ''main villain'' thing felt disjointed by the expectations the first game sets, suddenly i'm no longer avoiding minor conflicts within this world to dive into benificent horrors beyond my comprehension, but rather going headfirst to deal with these conflicts while occasionally being reminded of the old world you once met, like tarzan leaving the jungle to learn how to do his taxes.

on gameplay tho, its pretty much the same, they try balancing the weaponry so you have what the devs allow you to have available when the first game went balls to the wall and let you go crazy with all the weaponry, felt lame but not to the point of making the experience bad.
the first game had a better balance in its moral system, you could kill everyone in combat sessions, but if you did all the good deeds you'd still get the good ending, here if you go weapon nut but still do the good deed, the game goes ''NUH UH'' and locks you into the bad ending, is the moral here ''don't fight your enemies even if they are shooting at you'' ? come on..
overall last light is a solid 8 while 2033 is almost a 10
i should take a extra point away tho, the shrimp enemy almost makes this game an 7, if not for that, i'd say the extra dragging is the final nail in the coffin for it

7\10 but i wish it was a 10

a bealtiful well crafted story about diversity and the bealty of being a stubborn kind, the true strenght of humanity is our differences and our abbility to cooperate with each other and create bonds, and in that premise, TeC excells, however, it gets sabotaged by its own desire to be a video game, and thus falls into the traps of having the little quirks and annoyances of a mid title.

many people don't know but using the inventory map (press i, the game doesn't tell you that, i know) you can find exactly how to progress to the next tower, otherwise it becomes a frustrating game of guessing, while many games with multiple characters have the decency of making non controled characters take care of themselves, in this game you will find yourself babysitting most of your family because if left to their devices, they will drown without getting out of the water, be attacked by creatures, turn on traps that remove the items you deposit on their inventory, it ends up making this bealtiful tale be accompany by the world's longest bodyguarding quest in gaming, it seems to be a trend with ace team to make bealtiful games brough down by their own need to be mid to average games, to your next title, focus on being fun pleace