Disco Elysium is the kind of game where any explanation or review doesn't really do it justice. All the reading may make it an acquired taste, but it's certainly an experience to behold. It was the first game in a while where I finished it, and then was immediately ready to jump into a second playthrough just to go about the whole thing in an entirely different way. It goes without saying that the writing is on another level, all of the characters are unique and stick out in their own ways, the music is great, the atmosphere is great, and there's entertaining options at every nook and cranny for any kind of character build you choose. Phenomenal game, highly recommend.

Some of the enemies are annoying (specifically turrets and mechs) and veer more towards being a nuisance than being difficult, and the lab aesthetic gets a bit old after a while. That aside, FEAR is fantastic. The gunplay feels great, bullet time adds a fun dynamic to combat, the ambiance and atmosphere are incredible, the horror is mostly subtle though there are some minor jump scares. The story isn't anything spectacularly but I found interesting enough to be engaged with it, and the environmental storytelling through phone calls was pretty neat. Overall great game that aged like wine, highly recommend it.

Extraction Point has both more combat and more scares than FEAR did which is pretty impressive considering it's about half the length. Fights are quite a bit bigger with more enemies and that's great because the gunplay is one of FEAR's strongest suits. The mechs that were pretty annoying in the base game seem more bearable now, either because they're squishier or just because strong weapons seem a bit more readily available. This is a great follow-up to FEAR but can also stand on its own even if you haven't followed the story.

If I could use one word to describe Perseus Mandate, it would be "chore". The story is just kind of pointless, the pacing is stilted, the characters are mostly unlikable (Chen was the only one that got beyond indifference from me), the relatively subtle and eerie horror from previous entries is replaced with cheap jump scares, creatures/enemies that were scary and/or difficult now appear so frequently that they lose all novelty. Then, there's the combat. One of the series' strengths thus far is also just overplayed in this expansion. There's more fights than Extraction Point, with each fight having many more enemies, and the fights themselves seeming almost constant to the point where I was wishing for a dull moment just to break the tedium. The new weapons are mostly lackluster, the new enemies are just old ones but stronger (meaning bullet sponges and unreasonably fast), combat was already exhausting by Interval 3 (less than halfway through the expansion), not because of difficulty, but simply because of the frequency. By Interval 5 I had fully stopped caring what was going on and just kind of waltzed through what was left with no real regard just to simply wrap it up. While it has a few good moments, Perseus Mandate is mostly an underwhelming follow-up to FEAR and Extraction Point and kind of hard to recommend unless beating your head against a wall for 5 hours sounds appealing. The final stretch of the game is an absolute joke, it's a meatgrinder just for the sake of being one and individually breaking each of your own fingers with a hammer may unironically be a more fun experience.

I'm not quite sure what happened during development, but the magic that made FEAR enjoyable was lost somewhere along the way.

Halo 2 took everything that CE did well, and made it even better. It's an improvement in basically every way; better gameplay, better story, better environments, better ambiance, better weapons, more and better characters, and they're more fleshed out (even cannon fodder like enemies and marines have more character to them), etc. The difficulty is amped a bit, it's just hard enough at times that reaching the end of a mission that killed you a dozen times over is more gratifying than anything. Overall, the Halo 2 campaign (also) holds up very well, and it's a fun ride the whole way through. I'm glad I managed to stay spoiler free of it for so long.

I was going to give it a slightly higher rating but the ending was so bad that it singlehandedly took that last point away, FEAR 2 is a demonstration of how to do everything wrong in a sequel. The story sucks, the characters mostly suck (Stokes is okay, the most likable character doesn't get a personality until the literal end of the game), the gunplay is a massive downgrade, leaning is gone which is one of the stupidest decisions I've ever seen, there's very little tension at any point in the game (there was exactly one horror-esque scene that really drew me in, everything else was just cheap jump scares, blink and you miss it appearances, or entirely unengaging due to said lack of tension). They added a sprint for some reason and it's useless, you barely go faster and stamina drains so quickly that it's basically pointless to use, audio seems to be massively buggy (glass shattering makes no noise, explosions make no noise, gunfire's often silent which makes finding where you're being shot from a pain), at one point I encountered the "sound acceleration error" that quite literally removed all sound until it randomly fixed itself on a new launch. It suffers from the same poor choice that Perseus Mandate made with combat just being so constant it becomes a drag, enemies seem to die slower than ever, and enemies that made for tense encounters in the past are spammed so much that they might as well be generic fodder.

The only good things I can say about FEAR 2 are that the writing was actually kinda funny at times, and while the gunplay is significantly worse than it was in FEAR + expansions, it's still a bit above average even while feeling completely gimped. This is a very hard game to recommend, even as someone that likes FEAR enough to be forcing myself through parts that I'm thoroughly not enjoying.

This expansion is, for some reason, better than the base game of FEAR 2 was. The story is at least an interesting idea, even if it is only a vehicle to reintroduce someone, and some of the set pieces were pretty neat. I won't bother going into detail as a lot of my gripes are just an extension of FEAR 2, though I will say that if the expansion was a bit longer I'd be willing to knock the rating up a tad bit more. I finished it in exactly 46 minutes which makes it pretty hard to put stock in, definitely would've been more suitable as an epilogue than a separate expansion.

Pure fun. The writing is very campy but it takes itself so seriously that you can't help but be engaged in the story, the gameplay feels surprisingly smooth even by modern standards and you have a fun arsenal to complement it. The environments are all fairly interactable, sometimes it's necessary to progress and others it can just net you some spare ammo or pills. There's also a good amount of story tidbits scattered around that you don't need to interact with, but they're usually amusing at the least. This is a game that held up very well and makes for an enjoyable playthrough.

If FEAR 2 was Call of Duty's influence being felt, FEAR 3 is that influence being on full display. The gunplay still pales in comparison to the original FEAR, but it feels better than FEAR 2's limp combat, though removing health kits in favor of regen removes what little resource management there was. Damage also makes you flinch now which is just immensely annoying, alongside new enemies that are also just kind of annoying - though one type seems interesting when you first encounter them, the novelty wears off quickly. Zombies (but not by name) are another new addition which was just kind of stupid frankly, very pointless. There's a story but it's not even worth mentioning. Graphically the game looks pretty okay, it's not as cartoony as 2 (good), but it's also not as imposing as the original (bad). There's a few decent spooky scenes but nothing to write home about, and some of the level design is neat. Giving Point Man a face was a pretty terrible choice, at least there was some mystique as a faceless badass but now he just looks like a generic brooding action character.

Overall pretty unremarkable, there's an option to play as Paxton apparently but I didn't care enough to bother replaying any of the levels, maybe in the future. Also the ending song was an incredibly corny choice.

One of the more polarizing entries to the series, this is where THPS shifted to the mission focus with bigger levels and away from the timed runs from the earlier games. I was pretty fond of it but this was also my first THPS game so there's certainly a level of nostalgia. The gameplay itself is a bit more forgiving, with it seeming a little harder to bail and the addition of flat ground and switching grind tricks making huge combos more doable than previous games. There's more content than ever with more levels and more goals per levels, more customization content with cash, etc. Takes a bit longer to work through on account of that, but still good fun all the way through (except for Shipyard) and it features my personal favorite soundtrack (still can't get over the fact that Chad Muska produced an album with a bunch of old school hip-hop heavyweights).

Keeping with the trend of evolving in each entry, Underground is the first Tony Hawk game to introduce a story, and a surprisingly good one at that. It's nothing spectacular, but I think it's fair to say it's a lot more competent than anyone was expecting of a skateboarding game. The gameplay feels smoother than ever and is, once again, complemented with more new mechanics like getting off your board and wallplants, and some smaller things as well. It also added some more polarizing things like the vehicle missions that, even as a kid, felt out of place in the game, but there's only one per level so it isn't too bad. Complete with one of the most annoying video game villains of all time, THUG is still a very fun game to this day.

Phenomenal ending to the trilogy. Part of it is nostalgia from nearly two decades ago, but the game still holds up very well. The campaign is incredibly engaging the whole way through and keeps you playing at every turn. With the prior games already being great, everything now is just more polish on top of what already felt fantastic to begin with. As is typical with Halo thus far, the atmosphere's great (helped by the fantastic music much like the past two), the set pieces and level design are beautiful, the combat's tight and fun, it's an amazing experience overall and the type of game that leaves you itching for more.