Terraria kind of left me feeling… mixed? IDK, at least the main quest, made me feel kind of sour afterwards. It really isn't a bad game; hell, I enjoyed it quite a bit and still do. But I do feel like the game kind of got better, and simultaneously fell off in hardmode. If you didn’t know, most of Terraria’s progression is based on killing bosses. Many of these bosses are pretty well designed; particularly in the EARLY game. But the late hardmode bosses are really, really dogshit. A lot of them feel poorly designed around the player’s moveset and hitboxes, but not even considering that, a lot are a fucking bitch to summon, PARTICULARLY in hardmode. While the mech bosses and the Golem are pretty easy to summon on their own, the rest are quite annoying to even attempt. Plantera requires you to find a small bulb in the Jungle Underground, which takes forever. And then you have to go through the process of building an arena, prepping your NPCs, potions, etc. And if you die? Find a new bulb, because fuck you. And then the Moon Lord can be annoying to summon because if you fail too many times, you have to start the whole Lunar Events over again. That's just an annoying design choice IMO, maybe they could've had Moon Lord be a random spawn at night like the Eye of Cthulhu? And if you aren't ready to face him, just go underground for a few minutes. I get that they want players to get prepared for the harder fights in the game, but still. As a random example, The Binding of Isaac (which has a lot of parallels I could make here) has you face bosses needed for progression that you could face by chance, but they also had guaranteed methods (albeit more difficult methods) of achieving the same end goal. For example, you can kill Hush by taking Mama Mega in a shop, or by killing Mom’s Heart in 30 minutes. I could totally imagine something like this working for Terraria too, and they actually DO this, but only for certain bosses. And then we have the boss fights themselves. What happened here? Golem is probably my least favorite fight in the whole game. You're in a cramped as fuck area and there's traps everywhere. You can't even mine around you to build a semi-decent arena. So you just end up getting your shit wrecked with barely any room to dodge. And while I found the Lunatic Cultists to be a really great fight, the Towers were such an anti-climax. They're not even that hard, they're just annoying. You have to kill a hundred enemies that deal nearly a fourth of your HP. They aren't that hard to dodge, but they trip me up on occasion. And then you fight the Tower… and they suck, too. They barely even attack you, so you can just spam the Terra Blade until they die. At least they have good drops! And the Moon Lord himself… this fight just confuses me if anything. There's so much small shit on screen that deals a bunch of damage, and the massive ”fuck you” laser (with NO visual telegraph btw) does a shit ton of damage. It felt like a fluke if anything when I killed the boss. Now, to any of these, you could say “skill issue”. And TBH yeah I see where you're coming from. But I did nearly everything according to the wiki (minus one accessory and getting 500 HP; I had 480), and I still wasn't sure why I died at points. But for every bad thing I have to say about Terraria, I still think I can recommend this game. For one, the boss fights! For every Moon Lord and the four fucking Towers, there are lots of good bosses! The Empress of Light is easily the best fight in the game, being a great test of your moveset, being ACTUALLY FUCKING TELEGRAPHED, and also just being visually stunning. Also, the fucking music. That's all. While I don't like summoning Plantera, making his arena and finally killing him was very satisfying. It helps that he’s an easier boss to kill. I'm a fan of the Mechanical bosses, too. They were a nice upgrade in difficulty from the original bosses. Another thing I love about Terraria is its music. Do I even need to say anything about the Terraria soundtrack? It's popular for a reason. My favorite tracks would be “Mushrooms”, “Boss 1”, “Boss 2”, and of course, “Empress of Light”. I also love the fact that Terraria has progressive difficulty, making sure the game is never too easy, nor too hard. And despite my quarrels with Terraria’s Hardmode bosses, I absolutely love the new items in Hardmode. They transform Terraria from “oh it's just 2d minecraft” into something that can easily stand on it's own. And do I even need to say anything about the large amount of content in Terraria? One of my best friends on the internet (@DragonMals) has over 3000 hours in it, and more in tModLoader. I myself have been enjoying it for years at this point. So yeah, I do like this game. Quite a bit, actually. But I'm not head over heels for it, per se. I might go back for a few playthroughs every now and then, but for now at least, I think I'm finished. Overall, I'd give it around an 6/10. A good game, but it's a loooooong shot from a masterpiece.

Sonic Adventure 2 is a game that I have given dozens of chances, all with different mindsets and understandings of how the game works. And each time I play this game, I feel underwhelmed. This feeling was no such stronger than on my most recent playthrough. Sonic Adventure 2 is a unique game, in that it feels both boring and frustrating at the exact same time. Occasionally it's fun. But overall, you just feel like you're wasting your time. Sonic Adventure 2 starts out incredibly strong. City Escape is phenomenal, and most of the levels here are actually pretty fun to play. But it very quickly goes downhill. Aquatic Base is okay, but most of the levels from there range from mediocre to flat out awful. And also not helping is the godawful playstyle that's attached to these stages. Although Sonic/Shadow have mostly remained the same, good god, what the fuck did they do to the treasure hunting and mech stages? First off, the sensitivity for controls is jacked up to the extreme. Move the joystick ever so slightly and you'll go flying off a ledge. SA1 had perfect controls. Perfect sensitivity and movement, good physics and more, but SA2 had to screw it up. Overall, the characters are just a nightmare to control, with really the only improvements being Knuckles/Rouge. Secondly, treasure hunting/mech shooting is fucking BORING. Treasure hunting is just a tedious task in it of itself; you just fly around til your radar goes off. But they made it even WORSE compared to SA1! Now you can only track one Emerald at a single time, and the radar is just less useful overall, with less levels of tracking. SA1 had 5, but 2 bumps it down to 3, an unneeded change. Oh, and you thought Treasure hunting was bad? Try the Mech stages! The mech stages are just awful. Not only are the controls still dogshit, but the physics combined with the controls make a confusing and bland slog of stages. Just spam B. That's the entire stage. Sure, you can go for higher ranks by holding B, but it still sucks to play + there's basically no motivation to do so, outside of achievements and whatnot. And the level designs themselves genuinely SUCK. I don't know what happened to the level designers from the first game, but they clearly needed to come back for this one, because GOOD LORD. These stages are TERRIBLE. Really the only ones I enjoyed were the Sonic/Shadow stages (although there's a severe lack of Shadow stages for whatever reason), and SOME of the Rouge stages. The level design for the stages I don't like feel tedious. Just the same, boring and repetitive shit you've been doing the last 14 hours. Spam B, fly in circles until your Radar dings, where's the variety? Yes, SA1 had a similar issue, but each gameplay style was different and shorter than Sonic’s, making it feel more fun to switch around characters. The only dud in SA1 was Big’s fishing, but other than that, SA1 was a fun, albeit slightly dated game. SA2 on the other hand, feels repetitive and bland. And when it isn't that, it's frustrating as all hell. And we all know where that applies most. Mad Space was my breaking point. It's genuinely one of, if not the WORST Sonic levels ever made. The antithesis when it comes to fun design. I was so close to beating SA2, but I just gave up here. Going through this War of Attrition was just soul crushing to me. And that's where I just stopped playing. Sonic Adventure 2 is one of my least favorite Sonic games, and I'm shocked at how such poor design is acclaimed by the Sonic community to this day. I didn't bring up every issue I had in this review, but I don't really feel like it. SA2 is just not a fun game in my opinion. Overall, SA2 is just terrible to me.

I picked up Brotato during the Winter Steam Sale because A. it was cheap, B. it was nominated for best Steam Deck game, where I play 90% of my games now anyways, and C. I really enjoyed HoloCure in the past, which is also similar to Brotato. So, it was a match made in heaven, right?


Eh. It's fine. I like a lot of what it does, but the gameplay fell flat for me personally. As I alluded to in the intro, Brotato is an arena roguelike where you star as a “potato” (did they even try here? it looks like an egg) and you walk around killing things. Brotato is very easy to pick up and understand, but has shockingly deep gameplay. You collect materials on the map which you level up with, and it doubles as a currency for items. Leveling up gives a simple stat up, and occasionally on the map you can find crates, which contain items. Brotato is one of the few roguelites that I've seen that fully embrace character builds, rather than just rolling with what the game gives you. First off, the locking system is absolutely genius. It prevents items from being rerolled,which is good enough on it's own, but it has the additional benefit of keeping the item into the next wave. This means that if you're short on cash, you can just reroll and lock in the item you want, then buy it in the next wave, a solid, fun system overall. You can also merge guns and weapons, making them do more damage overall. The overall character building is pretty fun but the rest of the game unfortunately didn't follow suit. Brotato is just way too easy for my liking. It just feels mindless and repetitive to me, and unfortunately I don't really enjoy the game. The auto-aim feels somewhat unnecessary here; it makes the game too trivial. I also almost never died here. Only past Wave 10 did things get actually challenging, and out of the couple runs I did, I won about 75% of them. The win rate I was getting was just too high, and overall the game feels like busywork to me. Brotato kind of disappointed me; the game is highly rated but to me it was just kinda okay. Not terrible, not great, just there. I can't see myself coming back to this one much, and that makes me sad, because it has great ideas. But it's just not that intresting to me overall.

DuckTales Remastered was yet another game I got on the Winter Steam Sale this year. It was solid overall, but it felt a little rough around the edges. DuckTales Remastered, is far beyond a remaster. If anything, it could be considered a re-imagining of sorts. While it has similar level beats to the original, Remastered remixes elements of the original DuckTales to make a more metroidvania-esque version of the levels. While the levels have a defined beginning and end, and Scrooge McDuck doesn't get any new toys to use, the levels are open and usually require the player to do some backtracking in order to face the boss. While most of the levels are solid overall, the moveset holds them back a tiny bit. New to the remake is the ability to hit things with your cane, and it works fine, but it can feel annoying in some cases, such as the boss in the Himalayas. Also, somewhat frequently, I found the cane bounce (landing while holding X which propels you higher) to just straight up not function on certain platforms. This got pretty frustrating when it occurred, and while it isn't a huge deal most of the time, it can lead to some unfair deaths. The levels themselves can also be occasionally cheap; in the lava level I had a section where I repeatedly died where you needed to bounce on two geese to make it across. However, sometimes the Goose just doesn't want to spawn, making a very annoying section to replay. Also, while not a major issue, I did find the occasional bug or oddity. Once again, in the Himalayas, there's this part of the level where there's just a random gap in the ceiling. I don't know if it was a secret or not, because I bounced around for about a minute before giving up. This game feels like a prototype of Shantae Half Genie Hero (not to the detriment of either game for the record, I like them both). With its 2.5D graphics and music, it feels like WayForward were getting their feet wet when it came to platformers like this. And you can definitely feel that in some cases here. Overall, I did enjoy my time with Remastered, but it definitely could've been better.