(Episodes 1 - 3, will revisit E4 after Doom II)

I don't think there's anything I could say about Doom that hasn't been said better by someone else, so I won't. Instead, I'll talk about the VR port by Team Beef because that's how I played it. It was also my first time playing Doom I all the way through.

The game looks surprisingly great in VR, I would have expected sprites to look jarring but it is all incredibly immersive. The environments look really cool and seeing them in this way really helps you appreciate the detail.

The controls are also incredible, very smooth and very natural for the most part. My only gripe is jump being on B, it's easy to forget but there is also isn't really a better option so it isn't major.

Really enjoyed playing it in VR and I think I'm just gonna play all of the "essential" classic FPS games this way.

I've played a bit of 2 and a lot of 3 (and unfortunately, 4), but this was my first time touching 1. Some parts aged a lot better than others. The story is engaging and the way bits are sprinkled out through books is cool, the atmosphere and music combine in a great way to be just eerie enough to keep you on edge, and the overall spookier, more horrorish vibe than the later games sets a nice tone for the game. I'm very mixed on the gameplay, the actual mechanics of it were no issue to get used to and loot and skills were pretty self-explanatory.

The more glaring issues come from the grid-based system. When levels start getting crowded, moving around and aiming gets really rough, with it feeling like you're fighting the game just to hit your target sometimes. I had a good bit of fun with it up until Hell, and Hell didn't make me hate it entirely, but I'm not particularly in a rush to return.

There's the bones of a good ARPG here. The story is pretty standard, world overrun by evil and YOU get to save it, though with a vampire flavor. The gameplay itself feels pretty good as far as mechanics go, and it has a neat approach to builds. Each class of weapon has a specific skillset and they all feel unique and fun enough to play. The crux of your build comes from a tiered tarot card system, with each card having different effects. It's fun to play around with at first but I found it hard to really utilize in a playthrough because you have so few card slots and so few discipline points (you have a cap on these points, and each card costs so many) to really work with.

The game had two primary issues for me, one big, one small. To start with the small, there is so much CC throughout this game. Basically every fight I found myself getting annoyed because of constant knockbacks, stuns, or pulls, and slightly related is that there's a lot of enemies that will randomly turn invisible in a fight due to two affixes, hitting them in that state seemed like a complete coin flip, sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't.

The bigger issue, however, is the way scaling works. Scaling feels absolutely awful in this game, and it works in a way that you almost feel progressively weaker rather than stronger. The way the developer explained it is that enemies have set stats, but as you level, they are granted new affixes that make them stronger and those affixes have varying levels of difficulty themselves. I get the idea behind it, to have some modicum of challenge across the board, but it just really hampers gameplay and slows every fight to a crawl when combat just gets longer and longer as the game continues on.

I was so annoyed by it on my first character (who made it up to the final boss, but couldn't beat it) that I made a second one (to make use of the knowledge gained on my first playthrough) and ended up beating the game in nearly half the time by actively skipping content like challenges and farming and instead just rushing the final boss, and at five levels weaker. I can appreciate trying to take a unique approach, but it really just turned the game into a chore.

That said, it's a fun enough game. If you're a fan of ARPGs, I'd say it's worth a shot at the very least and it's generally pretty cheap during sales. Just be prepared for an odd difficulty curve.

ODST isn't quite up to snuff with Halo 3, but it definitely has some strong points. The atmosphere throughout the game, though especially on the "hub" level of New Mombasa, is fantastic. The music is also at its best here, with quite a few heavy-hitting and memorable tracks on it. The gameplay's fine, not overly different from 3 but you can see some aspects of what's to come in Reach starting to show. The story's fine, it's a bit underwhelming compared to the other three but it holds up fine independently. There's also a side story going on via audio logs found in New Mombasa that I enjoyed, it was a nice touch. Speaking of underwhelming, the final mission's "warthog run" equivalent is also pretty subpar compared to what we got with the last three games. Other than that though, ODST is still a pretty solid experience, if a bit of a short one.

A step up in quality from Homefront, The Revolution improves in some aspects but is still, ultimately, pretty unremarkable. The gunplay feels a little better, but still not especially good as weapons just lack punch and never really feel powerful, even when they are. The open world gameplay loop (collectables, clearing outposts, hacking transceivers) is pretty similar to something like Far Cry. While fun at first, it wears out its welcome very quickly when you realize that it's the bulk of the gameplay. The more central missions that don't revolve around aforementioned loop are fine enough, and they at least provide a semblance of variety. Enemy spawns are pretty horrendous, red zones in particular will have enemies spawning in waves of 6+ and frequently, making a shootout pretty undoable as you'll be outgunned within minutes. Also airships, if one spots you then you end up with the same issue of rapidly spawning large groups of enemies (and there were several instances that I saw enemies spawn literally directly in front of me). That makes the later part of the game devolve into "do something to advance hearts & minds > shoot your way to a hiding spot > hide until they stop looking > repeat ad nauseum". Alternatively, you can just die instead of trying to hide because you aren't really punished for deaths and it's honestly just quicker than trying to hide. One thing I will give the game credit for is visuals, the game looks good and some of the set pieces make for good eye candy. Other than that, even while being a bit better than its predecessor, The Revolution still doesn't do anything well enough to set it apart from any other mediocre shooter.

This version is better than the 6th gen version, but it still sucks. The goals are still largely bad and unfun (though they're not as bad as the 6th gen ones), balance meters are still weird and inconsistent, AND the controls still feel bad compared to old TH games. This version comes with a bail system and goals that also just kind of sucks and feels awful to control for goals, it's sort of like a prototype of what Skate would go on to include but it's so floaty and unwieldy that the bail goals are just kind of miserable.

This is a surprisingly good port of American Wasteland. The story is fairly similar, though instead of building up the Skate Ranch, you, Mindy, and Tony Hawk (who plays a larger part in this story than the console version) are building up a warehouse called "American Sk8land", and Mindy and her magazine are a bit more fleshed out in this version. The levels are mostly intact ports with graphical changes for obvious reasons, and some small differences (like the Skate Ranch being removed entirely), though Santa Monica and Oil Rig are absent. In their absence, this version instead gets Alcatraz which I thought was interesting. Each level consists of doing goals for money until Mindy tells you about this or that pro being in the area, then you do a goal for them and follow up by picking one of three new pieces for the warehouse. The controls translate shockingly well, the movement can be a bit stiff at times but tricks and combos flow pretty well for the most part. Getting off your board and parkour are removed but not at any detriment to gameplay, skate shop challenges removed and stats upgrade through certain tricks/conditions like in THUG. The soundtrack, as far as I noticed, also seems basically intact which is a nice touch, there may be some songs missing but I heard more than a few familiar ones.

I tried a few levels in classic mode which seemed totally fine, but there's no new levels, only the ones from the story so I didn't see it all the way through.

Overall a very solid port, I think it's fair to say that this is to American Wasteland what Remix was to THUG 2.

Essentially the best we could've asked for, and a great swan song for the series. The gameplay feels smoother and more consistent than ever, it looks great, the character customization is decent, the soundtrack is a solid mix of old and new. It's also looking like a promising platform for the future, with impressive mods like THPSPro bringing a bunch of levels from the unremastered games in. It's just tragic VV didn't get to follow through with 3+4 before Blizzard effectively killed them with a merge and put them to work slaving away on Diablo IV.

I can only pray on Bobby Kotick's downfall.

THPS on rollerblades. It plays pretty similarly to the original run of Tony Hawk games (specifically 3 and 4), open levels with no timer, only a "juice" bar that'll fail you if you run out. The goals are along the same lines, score challenges, trick challenges, photos, etc. The level designs are both the best and worst part of this game. Each level contains closed off areas that you need a key to unlock, but the little (or big) side areas are usually pretty fun and serve as both a good incentive to find the key, and to make the levels themselves more expansive. That said, the level design peaks at the second level and gets a bit iffy from there, though each level does have interactable stuff to change the level or unlock additional areas which is always fun. The goals can get pretty challenging, but you don't need many to unlock a new level so it's not too bad. The gameplay is solid, skating around feels good, combos are relatively easy to string together, all of your air tricks are only on one button but there's the standard 8 direction variations in addition to grinds and manuals. I did have some issues with getting cess slides to work consistently, but that could be owed to my old Xbox controller. Soundtrack is also solid, standard mix of punk and hip-hop and a few ska tracks. Overall pretty fun game, I enjoyed my time with it.