The Callisto Protocol: A video game designed to teach people the concept of “hurry up and wait”. It's very flashy with excellent textures and lighting effects, but it's a hollow and boring game experience barely worth it even while heavily discounted.

You're Jacob, a cargo transporter and maybe smuggler. You and your pal are hijacked by terrorists, so you give them a fat middle finger and crash your ship back on Callisto, a prison planet. Only you and Dani, the hijacking ringleader, survive and the two of you are immediately arrested and thrown into Black Iron Prison. Jacob wants out, but warden Duncan Cole may be up to some scientific buffoonery.
I feel like this game is in a rush to get wrapped up before I ever got a chance to get interested. You're rarely given any sense of scale for the prison and you see zero prison life; Jacob gets arrested and when he wakes up next, he's escaping. He was in prison for 30 minutes, apparently, talk about timing.
The scale of where the plot goes is just embarrassing. The Illuminati shows up when they absolutely did not need to and visually they look like they got off the set of “Squid Game”.

A lot of The Callisto Protocol is made up of time wasters like crawling through vents, shimmying through crevices, or climbing ladders. In areas where Jacob can walk, often something like grime or entrails will impede him so he cannot run. This game is comically paced to a point where I cannot help but suspect these are no longer “hidden” loading screens but rather padding to make the short game feel longer and more deserving of your money. In other games such as God of War (2018), when Kratos and Atreus are climbing a wall (time waster), they at least have a conversation to help with worldbuilding and deepen the relationship. Striking Distance Studios just puts Jacob in vent after vent with nobody to talk to. Seriously, why?
When you're not wasting time in vents, you're fighting very easy enemies with a repetitive melee system or guns that can hit weak points and kill them in one shot. The "exciting" stuff is pretty lame, too.

There are plenty of problems with this game, stuff like motion blur making me want to vomit, melee combat following a very boring pattern, needing to tediously stomp every corpse to get necessary supplies, environmental effects (like lights turning off or ceiling panels falling) replay when you leave a room and return, there's no map system, enemies can grab you and easily get a free hit in, the ending is locked behind paid DLC, you're rarely rewarded for going off the beaten path, and probably more I'm missing.
Good things? As previously mentioned, the graphics are insane. The game looks great, but since it looks SO good and plays SO bad, this just seems like poor time management or focus and a waste of manpower. The DLC mission does some hallucination stuff well. The stealth sections with Jacob killing blind enemies worked okay, though maybe it was too easy (the whole game was). They just lifted some stuff right out of Dead Space and what worked well there works kinda well, here.

It's only $20 for the “full” game right now (again, the ending is in paid DLC... outrageous) and I still don't think it's worth that. There won't be a Callisto Protocol 2 and that's a very good thing. I've read people saying this game is some kind of hidden gem that wasn't given a fair shot and that's a load of horse shit, it's just bad. I feel bad for Josh Duhamel, a sentence I never expected to say.

I do not recommend The Callisto Protocol. If it ever goes to $10 for the whole thing and you far-too-passionately LOVE Dead Space, sure. Otherwise, this can and should be avoided.

Master Collection is eh, but replaying this game reminded me why this is the greatest series in all of gaming. Never before in gaming had the gameplay and story been intertwined in such an engaging way. Controls are dated, but easy to adjust to and the music, presentation, and voice acting is so far ahead of its time in terms of quality it’s insane! Play on the Easy or Normal difficultly for your first play-through as Hard / Extreme mode can be really cheap given the aged design, but the experience of playing this game is so worth it.

This just felt like a game that should have come out a long time ago. The original 2016 Detective Pikachu on 3DS was a flawed but charming mystery/adventure game with a clever premise, and if this game came out a year or two afterwards it probably would have gotten a similar reception. Instead the gameplay feels dated and the presentation is just not up to snuff. The plot isn’t bad per say but it also has the problem of the Detective Pikachu movie coming out in 2019 despite the movie adapting material that would be eventually used in this game, so the release timeline for this franchise is all out of whack. The last case in the game makes up for a lot of the slowness in the rest of the game but I just wish the game was more dynamic in structure, it would be nice to feel like you are solving something instead of being dragged along with no agency. I did like how it all wrapped up at least and it did retain some of the charm of the original, I just sadly think this missed its window by multiple years… if it had come out right before the movie it would have felt much more at home.

I still remember the exact moment that this game was revealed, I was ecstatic. Nintendo hadn't forgotten about Mario Strikers after all! They knew what we wanted and were gonna give it to us, and to make things better it was coming out in just a few months! I couldn't have been more clueless. Mario Strikers Battle League is to this day the most disappointing game that I have ever played and has little to no redeeming qualities.

Of all the aspects to dislike about this game that gameplay is the one that I hate the least, granted that means I still hate it quite a lot but it's not as bad as the rest of what makes this game bad. The general gameplay here feels like they completely forgot how to make a Mario Strikers game, because it just straight up doesn't have the balance or fun of those games at all. The captain and sidekick system are completely gone, now there's just a roster of like 16 or so Mario characters to choose from, none of which are all that surprising to see present or different in ways that makes them feel better. What's even stranger about this is that you can break all continuity and just choose four of the same character to fill your team, so if you want four Bowsers or four DKs you can have it, and nobody will say a thing. It's like if in real soccer four Messi's walked onto the field for a game, you'd think that would be bizarre and pretty unfair, but it's done completely straight faced here and it just shows that they really put no thought into this game at all. The way items are handled is really bad here as well, instead of the game giving them out to a team that fills the requirements to earn one in the situation, the game just drops random item blocks on the field from time to time. If the current match is at a neutral state an item block that anyone can grab will drop, if one team is at even a slight disadvantage though the game will drop team specific item blocks that only the disadvantaged team can get and will continue to do so extremely frequently until that team gets its shit together. Another feature done for the worse here is the Hyper Strikes, this game's equivalent of the captain specific special shots from the previous games. In this game you can no longer pop one of these whenever you want, you have to wait for a Strike Orb to appear on the field, grab it and then you'll have around 30 seconds to pull off a Hyper Strike. Pulling off a hyper strike is insanely easy, given that you get to a spot on the field with ample distance between you and your opponents all you have to do is press "A" twice on a meter that determines the shot's accuracy, if you press the button twice while on the smallest blue section your shot will go in no matter what and score you two points instead of one, the problem is that this timing is incredibly easy to hit leading to virtually no challenge when it comes to these other than finding a safe spot to use them. The fact that you can't use them whenever you want though and that any character on the field can use them, rather than just the captain, makes them quite useless in the long run. These kinds of shots were so useful in the other games because they were a risk and reward type scenario to use helpful for tying the game when you got desperately behind or pulling farther ahead, here they just show up to infrequently to strategize around and to be considered any kinds of useful.

Like I've already mentioned, I was extremely hyped for this game before it came out and bought it Day 1, I remember coming home and playing like 2 to 3 hours of the main tournament mode before inevitably getting bored and putting it down, hoping I'd never have to play it again. What's funny is if I had only played a like 2 more hours of the tournament mode I would have seen all that the game has and ever would have to offer in terms of content. Mario Strikers Battle League is easily the most barren and worthless Mario Sports game in terms of content and surprisingly enough it wears that on its sleeve unashamedly. I am not joking when I say that literally all there is to do in this game is the tournament mode, which consists of six tournament cups, each having a four-match bracket within it and that's all. Now there is of course also the online mode that Nintendo was clearly putting all their stock into when making this game but clearly after seeing how bad this game is everyone who bought it as a whole decided to forego the online and move on with their lives and I don't blame them. This is quite honestly one of the lightest games in terms of content that I've ever seen and it's absolutely shameful, then again perhaps I should thank it because if there were more content here I'd be forced to play this game longer.

Finally, we get to the most egregious aspect of Battle League, the presentation. I loved the style of the other two Strikers games and have already gone on in lengths about that in the reviews I've done for them, so you can imagine my distaste when I'm presented with a game that throws all that out the window. Battle League attempts to copy the former games' style visually and musically in some places but completely misses the point of it but toning things down and not allowing the characters to be unhinged like they were in the previous games. Instead of actually charming and funny win/lose animations like we got in the previous game we instead get the most homogenized cutscenes of Mario characters doing typical Mario character things that fit Nintendo's evergreen vision for them rather than one that makes them more fun and interesting because God forbid these characters be interesting. And it's not just the characters either, the stadiums are no longer fun or different instead just being basic stadiums with themed backsplashes that do nothing but change the color of the grass, the UI is abysmal and boring to look at, and the music tries so hard to be crowd-pleasing only to be the most forgettable few notes repeated that I've ever heard. It's because of this game that this series that I loved has lost its soul and Nintendo refuses to let it go and find it again.

I can say in confidence that Mario Strikers Battle League is the both the worst Mario Sports game and just one of the worst games I have ever played in general. It is a spit in the face to the legacy of Mario Sports games and those like me who grew up enjoying them and now that I have finished it, I am glad I will never have to play it again.