I treated myself to AC III back in November of 2012 . A 1-night rental from Redbox - a small Birthday treat to myself that day. I remember being excited by the prospect of a game set during the Revolutionary War - a period that is greatly underrepresented in games.

I was as unimpressed as I was returning to the game 10 years later. I picked this back up after Ubisoft threatened to close the Xbox 360 servers. Seemed like a good excuse to revisit. Satan help you, if you decide to 100 sync this game. The mission parameters are agonizing at times.

The general direction and design of AC 3 is often confusing and unintuitive. I had a little fun jumping through trees and the alternate history DLC is actually pretty damn good.

Drinkbox Studios is a favorite of mine. I've enjoyed everything I've played from them. This brief adventure is no exception.

I played through a completionist playthrough in co-op, which was a blast. The writing is often funny, which is increasingly hard to find in video games and the avatar is a quirky little dude, despite being essentially faceless.

But while the world is rather large and the cast of archetypes you can embody fairly extensive, everything is a bit samey. Combat stays essentially the same, no matter the form you take. Gnaw as a rat or strike as a soldier. The dungeons are randomly generated and offer variety in modifiers but little else.

It was worth the initial adventure, but NG+ started to drag, even after taking a 6-month break.

Author's note: I am considering "Mastered" as acquiring all achievements.

I played this on and off for years with my brothers and that's where the game shines. I got no joy creating in this world alone. And after hundreds of hours, I was happy relying on the creativity and ingenuity of player realms to hastily complete the remaining objectives.

I prefer more goal-oriented play. So while I appreciate the creative nature of Minecraft, it was never totally in my wheelhouse.

PowerWash Simulator was only as good as its co-op, in my experience. The strange satisfaction of erasing digital dirt only carried my interest so far. And eventually, this started to become Nap Simulator.

But when playing in co-op, it's a blast - the jobs move at a decent pace and it's a great place to just hang out with friends while performing monotonous chores. Unfortunately, the co-op is poorly implemented. The game limits the Campaign to a buddy system, simply making you a duplicate of the host. They likely implemented this to prevent an end-game player from carrying a newbie, which doesn't really make sense, as the end-game washers don't turn you into a power-washing God by any means.

The late levels jump the shark a bit and start to deviate from the core charm - which is getting in a rhythm and seeing that grime wash away. I'm hoping they just go bananas with it at this point and do some different things with the game engine - like arena combat or something.

Some levels were very reliant on luck - which discs were spawned, where yellow orbs were spawned, etc.

It felt like Disc Room started to spin out of control around the midpoint - adding various hazards and room effects that were more annoying than creative.

Still, the music was good and the feeling of clearing a level at 10 or 20 seconds was a frequent, nice reward.

This game was just shy of greatness. A very inventive pinball metroidvania - I was in a magical place for the first few hours of gameplay. But every new power made the game just a little bit worse. The abilities are typically frustrating instead of empowering and the new modes of exploration just aren't that fun.

Back-tracking is tedious because of the limited fast travel system. Why can't I board at every launch point?

This little dung beetle deserved better.

An improvement over the original in almost every way. My personal preference is the pixel/retro graphics from the first outing. The sequel has a cartoon quality which isn't as appealing.

The game can drag, so I eventually turned on House Rules around the NG+2 mark. This made the grind far more bearable and really improved my enjoyment.

Oh, and Valkyrie is the best.