Not terribly interesting, you take a fromsoft game and strip it down to nothing but the combat, you get this game. Walking from boss to boss in Lies of P has got to be the most empty I've felt playing any soulslike to my memory. Combat is fine, though for this kind of hard locked focus on it to actually work you'd need the consistency of Sekiro, which Lies of P doesnt even come close to.
The fresh ideas and feeling of exploration of demon's souls and dark souls 1 seem so distant now when you realize this type of slop defines the current "soulslike" genre, though fromsoft's recent output is also partly to blame. Well, at least Laxasia was a fun boss.

A return to form for Tekken after the lacklustre Tekken 7, graphically impressive and packed with content that casuals love.
Competitively it's kind of a mess. Youre getting a vanilla arcade experience with all the insane amount of bullshit balancing and bugs except as a worldwide release. Itll take a few patches to make this presentable at tournaments. I can also write a whole essay about heat burst being the most retarded mechanic ever but I'll spare you the details.
Netcode can feel wonky, it's marginally better than t7 but still not amazing, get someone with wifi and a shit pc and the experience turns into a slideshow.

I appreciate some things that this game does, otherwise I would've dropped it like every other Remedy game I tried. I finished it thinking that in the end I would've rather watched an Alan Wake tv series.

When you make a narrative that strives to be very out there and meta, you should ensure that the gameplay matches the weirdness or you end up with a disconnect. That's exactly what I felt whenever the shift happens from story to gameplay.

There's nothing interesting about Remedy's approach to survival horror, in fact they watered it down in many aspects. The levels are mostly designed around linear progression, puzzles are rehashed more often than not, enemy variety is very lacking and the resource gathering is made boring by the amount of powerups that are utterly useless and the dynamic drops. There's just no flavour to the design here, nothing about the gameplay makes me recommend Alan Wake II alongside genre staples like RE or Silent Hill.

It's quite a shame, since when it comes to the storytelling I really fuck with their inspirations and I won't deny their great taste in music and visual direction. I wish I could just watch a film or series that is just an expanded version of whatever that finnish fever dream movie was in the cinema level.

Maybe one day Remedy will be brave enough to not only make their narrative weird and meta, but also the gameplay.

I enjoyed the first game and was willing to look past the pc performance issues as a "first attempt" kind of thing, which in retrospect I really shouldnt have. Now there's a sequel and all the same terrible issues are present like intrusive shader and traversal stutter as well as baffling cpu limitations. I cba anymore.

Ship a functioning unreal engine PC game in 2023 challenge (impossible).

I fail to see any value provided in making this game open world. A desperate attempt at aping a Kurosawa movie within game format, with none of the great characterisation that his movies are known for.

It's the first game but with more polish. Melee combat and character animations are improved, but it largely has all the same problems the first game had. If you took issue with all the open world AAA Sony first party bloat of the first game and the general awful writing, this game won't turn you into a devout fan either. Personally I had my fill of fun shooting robots, mainly due to this being the only "third person shooter" that has implemented GOOD gyro controls on PS5 for some reason.

Against all odds I managed to finish this game. Unlike other open world games I think this one has a little more meat to its combat, so it manages to stay interesting enough to finish the main quest at least. Unfortunately the whole experience is dragged down by unnecessary busywork and tacked on mechanics that are just there to cross off the obligatory AAA open world game checklist, it makes the experience much more annoying and tedious than it should be.
It also features by far the worst character writing in a Sony first party title - that is no small feat.

No idea how to rate this really since i played a couple of werehog levels in emulation and thought they were pretty inoffensive but not interesting enough to power through the incessant crashes. So - I just installed unleashed project and had a great time.

Everything after the mansion sucks so hard it completely invalidates the first half being a pretty decent classic re game.

This conversion is in first person and it lets me run and gun, so it's infinitely better than the original as far as im concerned. I originally intended to finish the pc hd project mod first but that felt like trash to play so I naturally bounced off. Finished this one in pretty much 2 sittings, motion sickness is a foreign concept to me.

Did they HAVE to bring back hydrocity?

It's all right, probably about as good as you can get as a remake.
I ended up preferring the original, it's more attractive to me. The remake has this really dark and hazy look to it with most of the game having a very elevated black level that makes the game appear desaturated. The new soundtrack is also just a bunch of white noise, the original soundtrack gave the game a certain character that this remake misses for me. I also didn't really gel with how the script and characters have changed, a lot of them come across as crass or annoying, leon and claire basically don't interact in the remake which is really odd to me. The sherry stealth part in claire's story stood out as a particularly low point for me, it's a very typical modern AAA game type deal where interactivity is essentially ignored in favour of the player having to sit out a setpiece.
Highlight for me in the remake was in the sewers, that's the area that got redone most extensively and didn't give me the feeling I'm playing an inferior looking version of a game I like. All enemy redesigns were great as well, particularly the lickers and the plants.

Unlike RE0 this one actually doesnt suck. Enjoyable, scratches that puzzle exploration itch. Only issue I have really is the doors in the mansion, it asks too much memorization work to remember what kind of key each door requires since theyre visually identical. You end up wasting a lot of time trying out every door whenever you get a new key.
It also felt bizarre to me just how few enemies the game threw at me by the last third even though I was loaded with guns and ammo. I played Jill on normal mode though, maybe it's a different story on hard but im not interested in finding out.
If I had to choose a survival horror I'd probably still play silent hill over this, even if resident evil 1 admittedly has better level design than any SH. I just dont find managing a super small inventory all that fun, even 8 slots on Jill feels suffocating.

You get 6 inventory slots, of which a bunch get occupied with weapons and healing items. You have no item box and the game has an arbitrary limit on how many items you can place in a given room. Played like 2 hours and all the puzzles have been a variation of "put this thing in this thing" or some really forced team based "let billy hold a handle while rebecca passes a gate" type thing. Not wasting my time any further.