[blog] Calbon's Wild PlayStation Backlog Crusade (Featuring Nintendo and PC games)
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3 Yrs♥✓#
Calbon
3 Yrs♥✓#
The Last of Us Part II Remastered
This is a review I have been wanting to do for quite some time now, ever since I first played this game back in 2021. That was just a little bit before I began this whole blog so I never really jumped on the chance to talk more about this game. The Last of Us Part II is a game that i’m pretty mixed on overall. On one hand, there is a lot to love about this game, such as its fantastic gameplay, visuals, and music, but on other hand, there are a lot of things about this game’s story that I'm not particularly fond of on top of the somewhat messy pacing. That’s not to say that you may differ in opinions when it comes to this game, as lots of people love and hate this game. This is easily one of the most interesting aspects to this game, at least to me, is everyone's overall opinion on it. I would urge you to check this game out if you haven’t already and are interested. It’s a lot better to go into a game like this with an open mind rather than being closed to some of the more controversial aspects of it that you may have seen beforehand. Along with that, this game just received a remaster, which is what I’m going to be talking about primarily today. I’m going to begin this review by talking about aspects of this game and some of the new remastered additions that don’t tie into spoilers, but I will eventually branch off into them as I begin to run out of non-spoilery things to say. I’ll make it perfectly clear when I reach that point with a spoiler warning, so don’t be afraid to read up until then if you are interested. I also ask if you plan on leaving a comment on this post about your thoughts to keep it civil. I feel as if it's almost impossible to talk about this game in a civil nature on any social media environment and I don’t want that to transfer over to here with this review. With that all said, now onto my thoughts on this game.
I’ll begin here by talking about this game's visuals, as they are still some of the most realistic I have seen to date. It’s honestly impressive that this game could run on a ps4, and at an even better rate on ps5 with the remaster. The visual fidelity on everything is incredible and does a really good job at bringing each section of this game to life. Every single moment in this game looks amazing as well in terms of an artistic standpoint, whether the rainy streets of Seattle, or the snowy town vibes of Jackson. That said, I honestly couldn’t notice any real significant visual improvements between the base game and remaster unlike the part 1 remake. This isn’t really that big of a deal with the remastered version since that package comes with a lot of really cool new things, but it’s just something to take note of. The Last of Us Part II looks amazing regardless and especially liked how it blended with the gameplay.
Initially on my first playthrough, I didn’t particularly feel as positive about the gameplay due to a lack of new enemy variety, but this time around I really came to love how this game plays. The Last of Us Part II’s gameplay is a lot more phrenetic this time around, and I honestly love it. This game does an amazing job at least on harder difficulties of making the playable characters both feel incredibly powerful and weak if you are not careful. Good planning and quick decision making is rewarded heavily and helps make this game’s gameplay so engaging. Stealth is it’s own tough battle of managing large swarms of smart enemies, and all out combat is absolutely insane with how quick it can move. The new additions to this game’s gameplay such as being able to prone, and some of the various new weapons at your disposal are a ton of fun to work around with. The best of this game’s gameplay comes with the really large enemy encounters and the zombie bosses which are a real rush of adrenaline. That said, I do wish these moments were spread out a bit better when it comes to the gameplay, as it takes roughly 4-5 hours before you can really start to dig your teeth into the combat at it’s absolute best and there are a lot of moments in this game that just kind of drag out with how much they try to fill them with dialogue and gathering supplies in between. The pacing overall is pretty rough with a lot of this game in my own opinion, but I can see others not having nearly as big of a problem as me.
With this remaster, there came a lot of really cool new things that help justify in my eyes it’s $10 upgrade. First up there are the lost levels, which did slightly disappoint me considering that they are still unfinished, but I did really enjoy their inclusion. I always enjoy a look into how a game is made and the thought process on why something may have been cut. There are 3 lost levels and each offer their own interesting insights. First there is the Jackson Dance which is supposed to take place before the events of the game fully kick off where Ellie and Dina both dance with each other. The section that was present, houses a carnival of sorts where you can interact with a few different minigames that reuse a lot of features from the base game in really clever ways, such as turning the workbenches into drink mixing tables. This section was easily the most incomplete with there being no audio but it was really neat regardless. Next up there is the sewers which is supposed to take place on Day 2 of Ellies campaign in Seattle, which was surprisingly decent and I almost wish it was actually put in the remaster. It’s only like 5 minutes long but it has an interesting water physics puzzle and some really claustrophobic tunnel sections that do a good job at building tension. Finally there is the boar chase, which when fully explained is a bit spoilery, but I did like this one the least of the 3. The writing was a bit too on the nose here with some of its themes and the overall boar hunt is a bit too pretty lame, even though it’s not fully finished. Along with the lost levels is a guitar freeplay mode which is something I wish the game had from day 1 because it’s really neat. The guitar minigames in Ellies section of the story is super cool and having a full on replay of it is amazing.
Finally, there is the No Return mode which I found to be slightly disappointing. I played a few rounds of it and dropped it due to not really being all that invested in playing all of the characters out to the end. When compared to something like the free GoW Ragnarok: Valhalla expansion, this one really isn’t anywhere near as good since it doesn’t incorporate a new story and most of the various events are reused constantly with little to no new changes. On top of that, most of the characters play exactly the same as each other, thanks to them being separated out into two team depending on what faction they would have been a part of in the base game. Each and every character in their faction plays almost identically, and the weapons and loot they can collect is almost identical. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of this mode was built on the bones of the recently canceled factions project, as everything here really feels thrown together. However it is still a good bit of fun if you just want to experience more of the Last of Us Part II’s gameplay with some more arcadey elements slipped in. The great gameplay is still present and is a lot of fun here, so if you want more of that it’s worth at least checking out.
Anyways, I'm starting to reach the branching out portion of this review where I talk heavily about spoilers, but I do want to use this portion as a sort of sum up of what I don’t like about the story beforehand without the spoilers for anyone interested in this part without getting the entire plot spoiled. The biggest complaint I have for this game is it’s pacing which is really all over the place. It’s not awful on a few particular sections, but it definitely does get in the way. The Last of Us Part II is a pretty long single player game, clocking in at around 23 hours to beat which is roughly double the length of the original game. This should be a good thing, as more video game content for your buck is always fun, but I honestly really found the game to drag out too long on a few particular sections. Especially the ending which sours me quite heavily on this game's story. There is also a character shift halfway into the game which really caught me off guard and drags the pacing at a really important moment to a halt in a really frustrating way. Certain moments in this game’s story really needed to be expanded and some really should have been cut down. I also found a lot of the side characters in this game to either be underdeveloped or outright unlikable in a way that I don’t think was intended. That all said, there is still a lot to enjoy about this game’s story. The moments where the game isn’t trying to be as nihilistic as possible are really great, and even some of the more controversial elements such as the inciting incident are a good hook for this story. I really liked a lot of this game's story up until the ending, which takes a turn that just doesn’t feel natural and is a bit too depressing for my taste. That said, many others really enjoy this game's story and I applaud you for it, but these are just some things that I didn’t like and that’s ok. This is my last spoiler warning as the next paragraph up until the end will all be spoilers. My final score is 7/10 if you are wondering, but I recommend either scrolling past the rest of this review to see some of my other posts, or clicking off right now.
My first biggest issue with this game’s plot comes with the intro, which feels a bit too rushed for its own good. It’s overall fine and would be good if not for the character shift to Abby near the halfway point in the game. The major inciting incident with Joel’s past deeds finally catching up to him isn’t a bad hook and isn’t something that makes me hate the game. I’ve always really liked Joel and I expected something like this to happen back when this game was first announced. I do take partial issue with this moment due to some of the marketing of this game showing Joel in scenes of the game he is not in to throw off theorizer’s trail, due to it being some quite significant false marketing. I don’t have an issue with a trailer being deceptive, in fact I think it can be great if done right as with something like Metal Gear Solid 2, with the twist that Snake isn’t the main character, but I do when a trailer shows or does pretty major that’s not in a final product. The inciting incident for why Ellie went to Seattle was always speculated to have been Joel’s death, and seeing a trailer show me what looks like to not be that is something that frustrates me. On top of that, this moment and the build up to it does a lot of harm to player perception of the second main protagonist Abby. First impressions are often key to how someone perceives a character in a game, and Abby’s introduction isn’t very flattering. Watching a new character who we barely known anything about or who they are, absolutely brutalize a character that most of us love for an unknown reason is beyond frustrating and builds hatred towards Abby that could have been beneficial for if this game focused solely on Ellie, but with the shift halfways through I have always felt it does more damage to my perception of her than what should be good. Letting the player stew in hatred towards a character that you are supposed to empathize with is not a great situation overall. and I feel as if this is the catalyst for why many people don’t like this game.
From here we move onto the overall majority of the game that takes place in Seattle, and I genuinely quite enjoy most of it. That said, the pacing is a bit all over the place, and it can make some of the moments in between each major gameplay or story section a bit of a slog. The Last of Us part I did a really good job of ignoring this issue thanks to both Ellie and Joel’s banter through each portion, and then with each of these parts being relatively short with a decent amount of things going on in between. The Last of Us Part 2 however I noticed didn’t really nail it down as well thanks to most of these sections just feeling barren of an overall enemy threat, and mainly comprised of buildings filled with resources to explore. I swear in most chapters I found myself scavenging more than actually engaging with anything else in this game. The worst of it I feel is back on day 1 of Ellies campaign, where enemies can be borderline absent for upwards of an hour. Though I really like how the chapter Downtown, is layed out thanks to it being semi open and filled with some really great bits of banter and environmental storytelling with Dina and Ellie, there literally isn’t any enemies in this portion of the level besides the jail, behind the synagogue, the courthouse and then the hotel afterwards. Seattle Day 1 and 2 are filled with these types of sections, where I think this game would have benefited with more of an available threat. On top of that I also can’t say that I was super attached to any of the new side characters this time around compared to the original. I think this is partially due to how little time we actually get to spend with them. The same goes for all of Abby’s pals, who we either don’t entirely get to know or they come off as incredibly unlikable such as with Manny. The only real side characters that I actually came to like were Dina, Jesse, and Owen, who all have their own moments to shine, but still really could have benefitted from some more in the grand scheme of things.
Day 3 for Ellie’s journey in Seattle is easily my favorite section with Ellie thanks to its pacing flowing really well, and then the build up to the Aquarium. I also really liked the small portion where you get to control a boat through the flooded stormy streets of Seattle. That said, I really dislike how this day ends up concluding with its almost cliffhanger back at the theater. This jump halfway into the game which I mentioned a bit before is an absolute pacing killer and almost always makes me want to drop this game. I don’t mind the shift of perspectives, but the way it was implemented into this game just does not work for me. Going from what feels like the game’s climax where you just witnessed Abby beat the hell out of Tommy and kill Jesse with Ellie and Dina’s survival on the line all the way back to square one with Abby and her father back at the hospital is a gut punch in the worst way possible. I personally don’t think it’s particularly great game design to flip your story on its head like this on a dime at its climax. It absolutely ruins all of the tension that the scene was going for and really kills the mood for me wanting to continue on with this story. I also absolutely hate the flashback sequence that takes place immediately afterwards due to how emotionally manipulative it feels. This may just be a me thing, but I have alway hated how superficial this part feels as you get to play as Abby and help her dad free an injured zebra outside the hospital. This part just feels so on the nose with how it’s trying to humanize and make you feel bad for Abby’s father and it's a lazy way of trying to establish an almost Giraffe moment from the first game with Abby.
Moving on over to Abby's 3 days in Seattle, I really enjoy most of it. That said, the first day drags on a lot near the start, but once you make it to the forest scene, the rest of her campaign picks up in pace. Abby’s portion of the game focuses primarily on her having to make a choice to continue following the WLF into battle against the Seraphites, or breaking away from the pack to help two Seraphite children who have been banished from their tribe. I honestly wish the Last of Us part 2 ditched trying to be a continuation from the first game and focused only on Abby and her getting caught in the crossfires between this endless war between each faction. A lot of her story is really good and I even enjoy how it ties back to her trying to somewhat forgive herself for going after Joel. That said, I do really wish Abby actually reflected more on her actions and what she has done instead of just trying to vaguely make up for it by helping Yara and Lev. Moving on, Abby has some of my favorite sections of this entire game with the entire island raid and most of all, the Rat King encounter. This part of the game is a complete twist into survival horror with Abby venturing into the depths of the hospital to retrieve surgical supplies, where patient zero and original quarantine was located. Though I have actually seen a lot of people completely hate this section of the game due to it being a lot more gamey since we fight a giant mass of fused zombies, I think this portion is amazing. I love the buildup to this boss with roars in the background, notes talking about the early days of the breakout, and even the moment where Ellie sees a glimpse of it in her campaign. The actual boss fight against the Rat King is really awesome and one of the most tense moments in this game. With my overall thoughts on Abby’s story out of the way, I now need to move onto this game’s ending which is really what I dislike the most about, the Last of Us Part 2.
Personally, I would have ultimately loved this game if it ended back on the farm, but the way it continues onward from there ruins a lot of my perception of this game. By the time the game reaches the farm after Ellie and Abby fight it out in the movie theater, I honestly feel like the plot and the story it’s trying to tell wraps up well here. The cycle of revenge has been somewhat broken with Abby choosing to spare Ellie and Dina, and Ellie and Dina being somewhat at peace back at the farm. That said, there were consequences to their journey to Seattle with Jesse being killed, the remaining group badly injured, and Ellie suffering from PTSD, which makes for this whole journey’s conclusion to be bittersweet. I feel as if the game would either have had Ellie outright refuse Tommy’s request since she now has a family with Dina and JJ, or have the game end somewhat ambiguous on whether Ellie can really let things go would have been a phenomenal ending. Alas instead the game just needed to keep going on through what feels like a depressing drag of an epilogue. The pacing is a complete mess from this point onwards, where it both feels like it’s trying to drag things out for a long time than it should have been, while also not really feeling like enough by quickly establishing the Rattler faction only for Ellie to completely annihilate them in less than an hour.
The biggest kicker for me is Ellie's final decision with Abby on the beach which I feel makes little to no sense considering that Ellie sacrifices everything to reach this point. What good does a little bit of humanity kept by Ellie mean when she willingly sacrificed everything to get to this point again to kill Abby. Her deciding against it just feels nonsensical to me, but I can see others feeling differently. I also just hate how awful the game ends with Ellies biggest fear of being alone coming true, and her losing her connection to just about everything she loves such as Dina and JJ and her ability to play the guitar Joel gifted to her. I don’t mind bad endings in video games, heck a large chunk of my favorite video games such as Silent Hill 2, can end as such, but the way it all ended here in the Last of Us part II just wasn’t satisfying, even in a twisted bad ending sort of way. I partially think this way since the whole game is fueled by nihilism and depressing moment after depressing moment with little to no moments to spare and the build up of everything just being awful just to see it all end awful, leaves me unsatisfied. One of my favorite pieces of fiction that is incredibly dark and messed up all the way to where it’s at now is Berserk. I’d argue that Berserk goes way farther than what the Last of Us Part II does with its themes and moment, with its truly awful world, but it’s countered quite well with the main character, Gut’s journey onward through hardship despite everything being awful. The small moments of levity, and Gut’s and the crew’s sheer determination to keep pushing forwards make everything feel worthwhile in the end. With a piece of media like Berserk or The Last of Us part II, at the very least concluding on a bittersweet note does a great job finalizing a dark project and giving the audience something to at least feel positive about. The Last of Us Part I does this well with Joel saving Ellie from the fireflies and giving us a bittersweet conclusion that asks the audience a question of Joel’s morality of the situation. Despite seemingly dooming humanity, we can bask in the fact that both character’s survived and have arrived back at Jackson together with a newfound understanding for one another. The ending for part 2 just leaves me with none of that when I think it should have happened a bit earlier on, and a lot of my enjoyment of this game’s story begins to crumble under such a nihilistic conclusion. There is nothing wrong with liking how this game ends, but I really just wasn't for me.
Overall, I’m pretty mixed on the Last of Us Part II. It’s got a lot of amazing stuff such as its gameplay, visuals, and a good sized chunk of its storytelling, but the issues I personally have with a large chunk of the story and the somewhat messy pacing really do put a hamper on my enjoyment. If I had to suggest any changes to how I would have liked the story to play out, I first would have really liked an extended prologue in Jackson. I feel like this could be a great opportunity for helping establish many of this game’s new characters such as Dina and Jesse, while also letting Ellie and Joel’s drama and flashbacks play out. I also think this would be a great opportunity to help introduce Abby and her crew, by letting them infiltrate Jackson as a group of survivors with ulterior motives the audience may not fully grasp onto until they ambush Joel and Tommy. This could be a great chance to make the audience like Abby initially, and then feel conflicted when all of the pieces come into play. I also wish both Ellie and Abby’s days would play out simultaneously instead of a direct switch halfways through. I could have sworn that I have seen elsewhere that they partially went with this choice to help prevent players from getting confused on each of their playstyles, but I don’t think it’s really all that big of a deal. Both characters play almost identically with different weapons and the fact that Abby has to use shivs to kill clickers. Combining both of their campaigns to progress at roughly the same period of time could also be a great opportunity to cut out some of the filler sections where you pick up a ton of resources between combat encounters. Combining both portions together would help make the story flow so much better and wouldn’t take away from the tension in the finale. I also do slightly wish that the game would have ended sooner at the farm, with Ellie, Dina, and JJ. I’ve already gone into detail with this, but I think it would be a satisfying conclusion to the whole revenge story arc, and is overall bittersweet with the remaining crew being injured greatly, Ellie suffering from PTSD, and the fact that Joel’s killer is still running around. It leaves open a lot of questions like with how the first game ended on whether Ellie should go forwards with revenge again and lose everything, or if she should just give it up for Dina and JJ. Despite me being mixed overall, I recommend trying this game out for yourself if you can handle the subject matter. It’s a gaming experience that I don’t think there is a black or white answer on which side is correct on liking this game due to how its story plays out, but it’s well worth seeing for yourself first hand.
7/10
This is a review I have been wanting to do for quite some time now, ever since I first played this game back in 2021. That was just a little bit before I began this whole blog so I never really jumped on the chance to talk more about this game. The Last of Us Part II is a game that i’m pretty mixed on overall. On one hand, there is a lot to love about this game, such as its fantastic gameplay, visuals, and music, but on other hand, there are a lot of things about this game’s story that I'm not particularly fond of on top of the somewhat messy pacing. That’s not to say that you may differ in opinions when it comes to this game, as lots of people love and hate this game. This is easily one of the most interesting aspects to this game, at least to me, is everyone's overall opinion on it. I would urge you to check this game out if you haven’t already and are interested. It’s a lot better to go into a game like this with an open mind rather than being closed to some of the more controversial aspects of it that you may have seen beforehand. Along with that, this game just received a remaster, which is what I’m going to be talking about primarily today. I’m going to begin this review by talking about aspects of this game and some of the new remastered additions that don’t tie into spoilers, but I will eventually branch off into them as I begin to run out of non-spoilery things to say. I’ll make it perfectly clear when I reach that point with a spoiler warning, so don’t be afraid to read up until then if you are interested. I also ask if you plan on leaving a comment on this post about your thoughts to keep it civil. I feel as if it's almost impossible to talk about this game in a civil nature on any social media environment and I don’t want that to transfer over to here with this review. With that all said, now onto my thoughts on this game.
I’ll begin here by talking about this game's visuals, as they are still some of the most realistic I have seen to date. It’s honestly impressive that this game could run on a ps4, and at an even better rate on ps5 with the remaster. The visual fidelity on everything is incredible and does a really good job at bringing each section of this game to life. Every single moment in this game looks amazing as well in terms of an artistic standpoint, whether the rainy streets of Seattle, or the snowy town vibes of Jackson. That said, I honestly couldn’t notice any real significant visual improvements between the base game and remaster unlike the part 1 remake. This isn’t really that big of a deal with the remastered version since that package comes with a lot of really cool new things, but it’s just something to take note of. The Last of Us Part II looks amazing regardless and especially liked how it blended with the gameplay.
Initially on my first playthrough, I didn’t particularly feel as positive about the gameplay due to a lack of new enemy variety, but this time around I really came to love how this game plays. The Last of Us Part II’s gameplay is a lot more phrenetic this time around, and I honestly love it. This game does an amazing job at least on harder difficulties of making the playable characters both feel incredibly powerful and weak if you are not careful. Good planning and quick decision making is rewarded heavily and helps make this game’s gameplay so engaging. Stealth is it’s own tough battle of managing large swarms of smart enemies, and all out combat is absolutely insane with how quick it can move. The new additions to this game’s gameplay such as being able to prone, and some of the various new weapons at your disposal are a ton of fun to work around with. The best of this game’s gameplay comes with the really large enemy encounters and the zombie bosses which are a real rush of adrenaline. That said, I do wish these moments were spread out a bit better when it comes to the gameplay, as it takes roughly 4-5 hours before you can really start to dig your teeth into the combat at it’s absolute best and there are a lot of moments in this game that just kind of drag out with how much they try to fill them with dialogue and gathering supplies in between. The pacing overall is pretty rough with a lot of this game in my own opinion, but I can see others not having nearly as big of a problem as me.
With this remaster, there came a lot of really cool new things that help justify in my eyes it’s $10 upgrade. First up there are the lost levels, which did slightly disappoint me considering that they are still unfinished, but I did really enjoy their inclusion. I always enjoy a look into how a game is made and the thought process on why something may have been cut. There are 3 lost levels and each offer their own interesting insights. First there is the Jackson Dance which is supposed to take place before the events of the game fully kick off where Ellie and Dina both dance with each other. The section that was present, houses a carnival of sorts where you can interact with a few different minigames that reuse a lot of features from the base game in really clever ways, such as turning the workbenches into drink mixing tables. This section was easily the most incomplete with there being no audio but it was really neat regardless. Next up there is the sewers which is supposed to take place on Day 2 of Ellies campaign in Seattle, which was surprisingly decent and I almost wish it was actually put in the remaster. It’s only like 5 minutes long but it has an interesting water physics puzzle and some really claustrophobic tunnel sections that do a good job at building tension. Finally there is the boar chase, which when fully explained is a bit spoilery, but I did like this one the least of the 3. The writing was a bit too on the nose here with some of its themes and the overall boar hunt is a bit too pretty lame, even though it’s not fully finished. Along with the lost levels is a guitar freeplay mode which is something I wish the game had from day 1 because it’s really neat. The guitar minigames in Ellies section of the story is super cool and having a full on replay of it is amazing.
Finally, there is the No Return mode which I found to be slightly disappointing. I played a few rounds of it and dropped it due to not really being all that invested in playing all of the characters out to the end. When compared to something like the free GoW Ragnarok: Valhalla expansion, this one really isn’t anywhere near as good since it doesn’t incorporate a new story and most of the various events are reused constantly with little to no new changes. On top of that, most of the characters play exactly the same as each other, thanks to them being separated out into two team depending on what faction they would have been a part of in the base game. Each and every character in their faction plays almost identically, and the weapons and loot they can collect is almost identical. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of this mode was built on the bones of the recently canceled factions project, as everything here really feels thrown together. However it is still a good bit of fun if you just want to experience more of the Last of Us Part II’s gameplay with some more arcadey elements slipped in. The great gameplay is still present and is a lot of fun here, so if you want more of that it’s worth at least checking out.
Anyways, I'm starting to reach the branching out portion of this review where I talk heavily about spoilers, but I do want to use this portion as a sort of sum up of what I don’t like about the story beforehand without the spoilers for anyone interested in this part without getting the entire plot spoiled. The biggest complaint I have for this game is it’s pacing which is really all over the place. It’s not awful on a few particular sections, but it definitely does get in the way. The Last of Us Part II is a pretty long single player game, clocking in at around 23 hours to beat which is roughly double the length of the original game. This should be a good thing, as more video game content for your buck is always fun, but I honestly really found the game to drag out too long on a few particular sections. Especially the ending which sours me quite heavily on this game's story. There is also a character shift halfway into the game which really caught me off guard and drags the pacing at a really important moment to a halt in a really frustrating way. Certain moments in this game’s story really needed to be expanded and some really should have been cut down. I also found a lot of the side characters in this game to either be underdeveloped or outright unlikable in a way that I don’t think was intended. That all said, there is still a lot to enjoy about this game’s story. The moments where the game isn’t trying to be as nihilistic as possible are really great, and even some of the more controversial elements such as the inciting incident are a good hook for this story. I really liked a lot of this game's story up until the ending, which takes a turn that just doesn’t feel natural and is a bit too depressing for my taste. That said, many others really enjoy this game's story and I applaud you for it, but these are just some things that I didn’t like and that’s ok. This is my last spoiler warning as the next paragraph up until the end will all be spoilers. My final score is 7/10 if you are wondering, but I recommend either scrolling past the rest of this review to see some of my other posts, or clicking off right now.
My first biggest issue with this game’s plot comes with the intro, which feels a bit too rushed for its own good. It’s overall fine and would be good if not for the character shift to Abby near the halfway point in the game. The major inciting incident with Joel’s past deeds finally catching up to him isn’t a bad hook and isn’t something that makes me hate the game. I’ve always really liked Joel and I expected something like this to happen back when this game was first announced. I do take partial issue with this moment due to some of the marketing of this game showing Joel in scenes of the game he is not in to throw off theorizer’s trail, due to it being some quite significant false marketing. I don’t have an issue with a trailer being deceptive, in fact I think it can be great if done right as with something like Metal Gear Solid 2, with the twist that Snake isn’t the main character, but I do when a trailer shows or does pretty major that’s not in a final product. The inciting incident for why Ellie went to Seattle was always speculated to have been Joel’s death, and seeing a trailer show me what looks like to not be that is something that frustrates me. On top of that, this moment and the build up to it does a lot of harm to player perception of the second main protagonist Abby. First impressions are often key to how someone perceives a character in a game, and Abby’s introduction isn’t very flattering. Watching a new character who we barely known anything about or who they are, absolutely brutalize a character that most of us love for an unknown reason is beyond frustrating and builds hatred towards Abby that could have been beneficial for if this game focused solely on Ellie, but with the shift halfways through I have always felt it does more damage to my perception of her than what should be good. Letting the player stew in hatred towards a character that you are supposed to empathize with is not a great situation overall. and I feel as if this is the catalyst for why many people don’t like this game.
From here we move onto the overall majority of the game that takes place in Seattle, and I genuinely quite enjoy most of it. That said, the pacing is a bit all over the place, and it can make some of the moments in between each major gameplay or story section a bit of a slog. The Last of Us part I did a really good job of ignoring this issue thanks to both Ellie and Joel’s banter through each portion, and then with each of these parts being relatively short with a decent amount of things going on in between. The Last of Us Part 2 however I noticed didn’t really nail it down as well thanks to most of these sections just feeling barren of an overall enemy threat, and mainly comprised of buildings filled with resources to explore. I swear in most chapters I found myself scavenging more than actually engaging with anything else in this game. The worst of it I feel is back on day 1 of Ellies campaign, where enemies can be borderline absent for upwards of an hour. Though I really like how the chapter Downtown, is layed out thanks to it being semi open and filled with some really great bits of banter and environmental storytelling with Dina and Ellie, there literally isn’t any enemies in this portion of the level besides the jail, behind the synagogue, the courthouse and then the hotel afterwards. Seattle Day 1 and 2 are filled with these types of sections, where I think this game would have benefited with more of an available threat. On top of that I also can’t say that I was super attached to any of the new side characters this time around compared to the original. I think this is partially due to how little time we actually get to spend with them. The same goes for all of Abby’s pals, who we either don’t entirely get to know or they come off as incredibly unlikable such as with Manny. The only real side characters that I actually came to like were Dina, Jesse, and Owen, who all have their own moments to shine, but still really could have benefitted from some more in the grand scheme of things.
Day 3 for Ellie’s journey in Seattle is easily my favorite section with Ellie thanks to its pacing flowing really well, and then the build up to the Aquarium. I also really liked the small portion where you get to control a boat through the flooded stormy streets of Seattle. That said, I really dislike how this day ends up concluding with its almost cliffhanger back at the theater. This jump halfway into the game which I mentioned a bit before is an absolute pacing killer and almost always makes me want to drop this game. I don’t mind the shift of perspectives, but the way it was implemented into this game just does not work for me. Going from what feels like the game’s climax where you just witnessed Abby beat the hell out of Tommy and kill Jesse with Ellie and Dina’s survival on the line all the way back to square one with Abby and her father back at the hospital is a gut punch in the worst way possible. I personally don’t think it’s particularly great game design to flip your story on its head like this on a dime at its climax. It absolutely ruins all of the tension that the scene was going for and really kills the mood for me wanting to continue on with this story. I also absolutely hate the flashback sequence that takes place immediately afterwards due to how emotionally manipulative it feels. This may just be a me thing, but I have alway hated how superficial this part feels as you get to play as Abby and help her dad free an injured zebra outside the hospital. This part just feels so on the nose with how it’s trying to humanize and make you feel bad for Abby’s father and it's a lazy way of trying to establish an almost Giraffe moment from the first game with Abby.
Moving on over to Abby's 3 days in Seattle, I really enjoy most of it. That said, the first day drags on a lot near the start, but once you make it to the forest scene, the rest of her campaign picks up in pace. Abby’s portion of the game focuses primarily on her having to make a choice to continue following the WLF into battle against the Seraphites, or breaking away from the pack to help two Seraphite children who have been banished from their tribe. I honestly wish the Last of Us part 2 ditched trying to be a continuation from the first game and focused only on Abby and her getting caught in the crossfires between this endless war between each faction. A lot of her story is really good and I even enjoy how it ties back to her trying to somewhat forgive herself for going after Joel. That said, I do really wish Abby actually reflected more on her actions and what she has done instead of just trying to vaguely make up for it by helping Yara and Lev. Moving on, Abby has some of my favorite sections of this entire game with the entire island raid and most of all, the Rat King encounter. This part of the game is a complete twist into survival horror with Abby venturing into the depths of the hospital to retrieve surgical supplies, where patient zero and original quarantine was located. Though I have actually seen a lot of people completely hate this section of the game due to it being a lot more gamey since we fight a giant mass of fused zombies, I think this portion is amazing. I love the buildup to this boss with roars in the background, notes talking about the early days of the breakout, and even the moment where Ellie sees a glimpse of it in her campaign. The actual boss fight against the Rat King is really awesome and one of the most tense moments in this game. With my overall thoughts on Abby’s story out of the way, I now need to move onto this game’s ending which is really what I dislike the most about, the Last of Us Part 2.
Personally, I would have ultimately loved this game if it ended back on the farm, but the way it continues onward from there ruins a lot of my perception of this game. By the time the game reaches the farm after Ellie and Abby fight it out in the movie theater, I honestly feel like the plot and the story it’s trying to tell wraps up well here. The cycle of revenge has been somewhat broken with Abby choosing to spare Ellie and Dina, and Ellie and Dina being somewhat at peace back at the farm. That said, there were consequences to their journey to Seattle with Jesse being killed, the remaining group badly injured, and Ellie suffering from PTSD, which makes for this whole journey’s conclusion to be bittersweet. I feel as if the game would either have had Ellie outright refuse Tommy’s request since she now has a family with Dina and JJ, or have the game end somewhat ambiguous on whether Ellie can really let things go would have been a phenomenal ending. Alas instead the game just needed to keep going on through what feels like a depressing drag of an epilogue. The pacing is a complete mess from this point onwards, where it both feels like it’s trying to drag things out for a long time than it should have been, while also not really feeling like enough by quickly establishing the Rattler faction only for Ellie to completely annihilate them in less than an hour.
The biggest kicker for me is Ellie's final decision with Abby on the beach which I feel makes little to no sense considering that Ellie sacrifices everything to reach this point. What good does a little bit of humanity kept by Ellie mean when she willingly sacrificed everything to get to this point again to kill Abby. Her deciding against it just feels nonsensical to me, but I can see others feeling differently. I also just hate how awful the game ends with Ellies biggest fear of being alone coming true, and her losing her connection to just about everything she loves such as Dina and JJ and her ability to play the guitar Joel gifted to her. I don’t mind bad endings in video games, heck a large chunk of my favorite video games such as Silent Hill 2, can end as such, but the way it all ended here in the Last of Us part II just wasn’t satisfying, even in a twisted bad ending sort of way. I partially think this way since the whole game is fueled by nihilism and depressing moment after depressing moment with little to no moments to spare and the build up of everything just being awful just to see it all end awful, leaves me unsatisfied. One of my favorite pieces of fiction that is incredibly dark and messed up all the way to where it’s at now is Berserk. I’d argue that Berserk goes way farther than what the Last of Us Part II does with its themes and moment, with its truly awful world, but it’s countered quite well with the main character, Gut’s journey onward through hardship despite everything being awful. The small moments of levity, and Gut’s and the crew’s sheer determination to keep pushing forwards make everything feel worthwhile in the end. With a piece of media like Berserk or The Last of Us part II, at the very least concluding on a bittersweet note does a great job finalizing a dark project and giving the audience something to at least feel positive about. The Last of Us Part I does this well with Joel saving Ellie from the fireflies and giving us a bittersweet conclusion that asks the audience a question of Joel’s morality of the situation. Despite seemingly dooming humanity, we can bask in the fact that both character’s survived and have arrived back at Jackson together with a newfound understanding for one another. The ending for part 2 just leaves me with none of that when I think it should have happened a bit earlier on, and a lot of my enjoyment of this game’s story begins to crumble under such a nihilistic conclusion. There is nothing wrong with liking how this game ends, but I really just wasn't for me.
Overall, I’m pretty mixed on the Last of Us Part II. It’s got a lot of amazing stuff such as its gameplay, visuals, and a good sized chunk of its storytelling, but the issues I personally have with a large chunk of the story and the somewhat messy pacing really do put a hamper on my enjoyment. If I had to suggest any changes to how I would have liked the story to play out, I first would have really liked an extended prologue in Jackson. I feel like this could be a great opportunity for helping establish many of this game’s new characters such as Dina and Jesse, while also letting Ellie and Joel’s drama and flashbacks play out. I also think this would be a great opportunity to help introduce Abby and her crew, by letting them infiltrate Jackson as a group of survivors with ulterior motives the audience may not fully grasp onto until they ambush Joel and Tommy. This could be a great chance to make the audience like Abby initially, and then feel conflicted when all of the pieces come into play. I also wish both Ellie and Abby’s days would play out simultaneously instead of a direct switch halfways through. I could have sworn that I have seen elsewhere that they partially went with this choice to help prevent players from getting confused on each of their playstyles, but I don’t think it’s really all that big of a deal. Both characters play almost identically with different weapons and the fact that Abby has to use shivs to kill clickers. Combining both of their campaigns to progress at roughly the same period of time could also be a great opportunity to cut out some of the filler sections where you pick up a ton of resources between combat encounters. Combining both portions together would help make the story flow so much better and wouldn’t take away from the tension in the finale. I also do slightly wish that the game would have ended sooner at the farm, with Ellie, Dina, and JJ. I’ve already gone into detail with this, but I think it would be a satisfying conclusion to the whole revenge story arc, and is overall bittersweet with the remaining crew being injured greatly, Ellie suffering from PTSD, and the fact that Joel’s killer is still running around. It leaves open a lot of questions like with how the first game ended on whether Ellie should go forwards with revenge again and lose everything, or if she should just give it up for Dina and JJ. Despite me being mixed overall, I recommend trying this game out for yourself if you can handle the subject matter. It’s a gaming experience that I don’t think there is a black or white answer on which side is correct on liking this game due to how its story plays out, but it’s well worth seeing for yourself first hand.
7/10
3 Yrs♥✓#
Calbon3 Yrs♥✓#
The Haunted Ps1 Demo Disk 2021 - Part 4
Hi, welcome back to my final portion of my review of the Haunted PS1 Demo Disk 2021. Before going on to talk about the rest of the games on this collection, I want to mention the hub world that was created to help allow for access to the demos. In the last collection, games were accessed via a menu, whereas now there was an entire museum built that you can wander around to find access to the various demo’s. This new change is a lot of fun, and I especially like how it’s laid out. There are 4 floors, 3 of them being access points to the demo’s where as the the other is a lobby of sorts. On each of the floors with demo’s you are presented with a doorway with each demo’s name and a pedestal that you can interact with to learn a bit more about each available game. These things include things such as trigger warnings, basic game descriptions, and credits for the teams that worked on them. Once you enter each doorway you enter a small area that looks just like maybe a particular moment in the demo that stands out. It’s a fun way of introducing each game and each section is really neat. For instance, something such as Chasing Statics room represents the diner where the demo mostly takes place, or Risu’s room that looks just like one of the Hallways in the game.Another thing I really liked about the museum was the music that plays on floors 1 and 2. These are where the majority of the demos are located, so when writing in between each one I tried out I left the game open. I wish I knew the name of the song used as it has this really unique and quite soothing feel to it that I absolutely love. I just wanted to mention the launcher here to bring attention to it as it’s really awesome and a significant improvement over that of the original. Now onto the last 6 demos
Lorn’s Lure
Lorn’s Lure is a first person retro platformer, where you play as a robot lost inside of a mysterious metal and concrete structure. Your main goal is to try and find a way out of this seemingly endless labyrinth. Gameplay is mostly just comprised of you jumping around various different platforms, and climbing along walls with some climbing pickaxes. The overall platforming feels pretty decent and with maybe a few more platforming mechanic implemented into the final product could be really neat. Besides that, I have nothing else to say about this game. It’s pretty basic and overall unremarkable.
6.5/10
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1417930/Lorns_Lure/
[Echostasis]
I initially wasn’t vibing with this one at the start, but this demo really grew on me as it progressed. [Echostatis] has you play as someone at a seemingly abandoned facility where people are hooked up to a sort of machine where their consciousness is projected into dreamscapes. Your main goal is to tamper around with the systems and try to figure out what to do. This isn’t really a good explanation at what going on, and to be frank I don’t fully know what to expect with this game and it’s story. The game begins with you dropped into a tutorial area that was kind of frustrating to figure out. This is mainly due to the locations of entrances being kinda hard to see thanks to the overly darklighting and not super great explanation at some of this games mechanics upon booting up the game. Past the tutorial is where this game really kicks off and blossoms into something quite interesting. Now you are dropped off in the lobby of the facility and given somewhat free reign to a computer in the center of the room and a viewing station of a [Station]. From here, it’s up to you to try and figure things out by playing around with commands on the computer. I’m a sucker for these types of indie games where you are left to your own devices to try and figure out what to do with something like a computer system. After fooling around for a bit, I gained access to someones dreamscape where while exploring in it, I managed to completely mess it up and cause something called [Echostatis]. It’s kind of hard to describe this demo as it’s something well worth checking out if you are into a spooky puzzle game. My only real issues that come with the lighting and filters that are a bit too overabundant in my own opinion as it made it really hard to make out what I was trying too look at. I also wish the dreamscape timer was extended just a little bit so that I didn’t feel so rushed to try and explore a section as fast as possible before being booted out. Besides that I had a really great time with this one and I can’t wait to see what the final project ends up being as this was cool.
8.5/10
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1558000/ECHOSTASIS/
The Drowning Machine
Similarly to An Outcry in my first post, I’m not going to be giving this demo a rating. The Drowning Machine is a walking simulator style game that acts a a memorial of sorts for the creator, Fannon Valentine’s friend Charlie who took their own life back in 2019. This game began as both a project that they were both working on, and is something that the creator wants to finish for their friend Charlie. The main reason I’m not rating this game is because I just don’t feel like its justifiable to give something like this to a clear passion project about such a serious topic a rating. This game is supposed to be split into 6 chapters, and only 3 of them are available in this demo. Each chapter is based around a poem written by their friend. Though personally, I didn’t enjoy my time with this game as it’s super sad and depressing, especially with chapter VI: Eulogy which is ultimately a Eulogy written out by the creator for his dead friend. That’s kind of the point however, and I have a lot of respect for this project for trying to tackle these topics. I think overall the saddest thing about this project is the fact that it almost seems abandoned for now based on the Itch.io page for the game. That said, Fannon Valentine would like to go back one day to finish this project with a complete remake, so hopefully this project finally reaches it’s conclusion.
https://rabbitrungames.itch.io/thedrowningmachine
Protagoras Bleeds
Protagoras Bleeds is a fixed camera survival horror game where you play as someone who’s car starts bleeding out of nowhere when driving around in the middle of the night. You then pull over at the side of a hotel where you plan on staying the night and then checking out the mess in the morning. While here at the almost completely empty motel, you then stumble up on some terrifying fleshy tech monsters. This demo was pretty cool and did a great job at replicating an older survival horror game. It looks like this project may be dead in the water as of this point, but I do hope the creator comes back to finish this game up as the demo was cool.
7/10
https://bryce-bucher.itch.io/protagoras-bleeds-demo-2021
tmOD
tmOD is more or less a game that tries to captitalize on the whole liminal horror trend that got pretty big in 2020 and 2021. Particularly by trying to replicate the feel of old source engine games that for some reason feel really off when all alone playing them. While I like what this demo was going for, it was also pretty bad overall with various different bugs and performance issues that plagued my time with tmOD. The most impressive thing about this demo at least to me was how it managed to almost port over the same look and feel of Gary’s Mod on Unreal Engine 4. Upon spawning in, you have access to all of the different tools you normally would have in Garry’s Mod and can play around with them to your hearts content. Whether it be you spawning a million different objects and lagging up your game, or actually trying to build something, this demo nails this aspect pretty well. It does really do the whole horror and story aspect well in the slightest however, as the plot is pretty much you play spooky gmod, and you get haunted, and the scares were not even scary in the slightest. My biggest gripe were the performance issues which would drag this game to a stutter when it comes to spawning in certain objects, along with issues such as the game hard crashing on me twice for no apparent reason. I also had some issues with the resolution which made this game borderline unplayable until I managed to do some tinkering in the menus to get it to where my cursor on my screen would actually line up where it should have been. Without these issues, I think this game would be a pretty great time, but even then I just don’t know how well this can translate into a full game.
6/10
https://tmdev.itch.io/tmod
Super Skully 3D: Skully’s Nightmare
This is the final secret game of the collection, and it’s unlocked by completing all 25 of the other available demos. In this, you get to play as the Haunted PS1 mascot Skully as you get to experience his worst nightmare. That nightmare being him stuck in a cutesy 3D platformer. This demo is mainly just comprised of you collecting CD’s and bones to enter a castle at the way end. There really isn’t much here to this demo besides this one level that is a good bit of fun. It’s a perfect little reward for those like myself that wanted to see all of the available demos
7/10
Anyway’s thanks for reading this final part of my experience with the Haunted PS1 Demo Disk 2021. This overall disk was a significant improvement over the last disk and nearly every available demo was really cool. The biggest highlights in my eyes throughout the entire collection were [Echostatis], Loveland, That Which Gave Chase, Peeb Adventures, ARD, and Agony of a Dying MMO. Please be sure to check all of the games that interest you, whether it be just a simple add to your wishlist or even checking out the demos themselves.
https://hauntedps1.itch.io/demodisc2021
Hi, welcome back to my final portion of my review of the Haunted PS1 Demo Disk 2021. Before going on to talk about the rest of the games on this collection, I want to mention the hub world that was created to help allow for access to the demos. In the last collection, games were accessed via a menu, whereas now there was an entire museum built that you can wander around to find access to the various demo’s. This new change is a lot of fun, and I especially like how it’s laid out. There are 4 floors, 3 of them being access points to the demo’s where as the the other is a lobby of sorts. On each of the floors with demo’s you are presented with a doorway with each demo’s name and a pedestal that you can interact with to learn a bit more about each available game. These things include things such as trigger warnings, basic game descriptions, and credits for the teams that worked on them. Once you enter each doorway you enter a small area that looks just like maybe a particular moment in the demo that stands out. It’s a fun way of introducing each game and each section is really neat. For instance, something such as Chasing Statics room represents the diner where the demo mostly takes place, or Risu’s room that looks just like one of the Hallways in the game.Another thing I really liked about the museum was the music that plays on floors 1 and 2. These are where the majority of the demos are located, so when writing in between each one I tried out I left the game open. I wish I knew the name of the song used as it has this really unique and quite soothing feel to it that I absolutely love. I just wanted to mention the launcher here to bring attention to it as it’s really awesome and a significant improvement over that of the original. Now onto the last 6 demos
Lorn’s Lure
Lorn’s Lure is a first person retro platformer, where you play as a robot lost inside of a mysterious metal and concrete structure. Your main goal is to try and find a way out of this seemingly endless labyrinth. Gameplay is mostly just comprised of you jumping around various different platforms, and climbing along walls with some climbing pickaxes. The overall platforming feels pretty decent and with maybe a few more platforming mechanic implemented into the final product could be really neat. Besides that, I have nothing else to say about this game. It’s pretty basic and overall unremarkable.
6.5/10
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1417930/Lorns_Lure/
[Echostasis]
I initially wasn’t vibing with this one at the start, but this demo really grew on me as it progressed. [Echostatis] has you play as someone at a seemingly abandoned facility where people are hooked up to a sort of machine where their consciousness is projected into dreamscapes. Your main goal is to tamper around with the systems and try to figure out what to do. This isn’t really a good explanation at what going on, and to be frank I don’t fully know what to expect with this game and it’s story. The game begins with you dropped into a tutorial area that was kind of frustrating to figure out. This is mainly due to the locations of entrances being kinda hard to see thanks to the overly darklighting and not super great explanation at some of this games mechanics upon booting up the game. Past the tutorial is where this game really kicks off and blossoms into something quite interesting. Now you are dropped off in the lobby of the facility and given somewhat free reign to a computer in the center of the room and a viewing station of a [Station]. From here, it’s up to you to try and figure things out by playing around with commands on the computer. I’m a sucker for these types of indie games where you are left to your own devices to try and figure out what to do with something like a computer system. After fooling around for a bit, I gained access to someones dreamscape where while exploring in it, I managed to completely mess it up and cause something called [Echostatis]. It’s kind of hard to describe this demo as it’s something well worth checking out if you are into a spooky puzzle game. My only real issues that come with the lighting and filters that are a bit too overabundant in my own opinion as it made it really hard to make out what I was trying too look at. I also wish the dreamscape timer was extended just a little bit so that I didn’t feel so rushed to try and explore a section as fast as possible before being booted out. Besides that I had a really great time with this one and I can’t wait to see what the final project ends up being as this was cool.
8.5/10
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1558000/ECHOSTASIS/
The Drowning Machine
Similarly to An Outcry in my first post, I’m not going to be giving this demo a rating. The Drowning Machine is a walking simulator style game that acts a a memorial of sorts for the creator, Fannon Valentine’s friend Charlie who took their own life back in 2019. This game began as both a project that they were both working on, and is something that the creator wants to finish for their friend Charlie. The main reason I’m not rating this game is because I just don’t feel like its justifiable to give something like this to a clear passion project about such a serious topic a rating. This game is supposed to be split into 6 chapters, and only 3 of them are available in this demo. Each chapter is based around a poem written by their friend. Though personally, I didn’t enjoy my time with this game as it’s super sad and depressing, especially with chapter VI: Eulogy which is ultimately a Eulogy written out by the creator for his dead friend. That’s kind of the point however, and I have a lot of respect for this project for trying to tackle these topics. I think overall the saddest thing about this project is the fact that it almost seems abandoned for now based on the Itch.io page for the game. That said, Fannon Valentine would like to go back one day to finish this project with a complete remake, so hopefully this project finally reaches it’s conclusion.
https://rabbitrungames.itch.io/thedrowningmachine
Protagoras Bleeds
Protagoras Bleeds is a fixed camera survival horror game where you play as someone who’s car starts bleeding out of nowhere when driving around in the middle of the night. You then pull over at the side of a hotel where you plan on staying the night and then checking out the mess in the morning. While here at the almost completely empty motel, you then stumble up on some terrifying fleshy tech monsters. This demo was pretty cool and did a great job at replicating an older survival horror game. It looks like this project may be dead in the water as of this point, but I do hope the creator comes back to finish this game up as the demo was cool.
7/10
https://bryce-bucher.itch.io/protagoras-bleeds-demo-2021
tmOD
tmOD is more or less a game that tries to captitalize on the whole liminal horror trend that got pretty big in 2020 and 2021. Particularly by trying to replicate the feel of old source engine games that for some reason feel really off when all alone playing them. While I like what this demo was going for, it was also pretty bad overall with various different bugs and performance issues that plagued my time with tmOD. The most impressive thing about this demo at least to me was how it managed to almost port over the same look and feel of Gary’s Mod on Unreal Engine 4. Upon spawning in, you have access to all of the different tools you normally would have in Garry’s Mod and can play around with them to your hearts content. Whether it be you spawning a million different objects and lagging up your game, or actually trying to build something, this demo nails this aspect pretty well. It does really do the whole horror and story aspect well in the slightest however, as the plot is pretty much you play spooky gmod, and you get haunted, and the scares were not even scary in the slightest. My biggest gripe were the performance issues which would drag this game to a stutter when it comes to spawning in certain objects, along with issues such as the game hard crashing on me twice for no apparent reason. I also had some issues with the resolution which made this game borderline unplayable until I managed to do some tinkering in the menus to get it to where my cursor on my screen would actually line up where it should have been. Without these issues, I think this game would be a pretty great time, but even then I just don’t know how well this can translate into a full game.
6/10
https://tmdev.itch.io/tmod
Super Skully 3D: Skully’s Nightmare
This is the final secret game of the collection, and it’s unlocked by completing all 25 of the other available demos. In this, you get to play as the Haunted PS1 mascot Skully as you get to experience his worst nightmare. That nightmare being him stuck in a cutesy 3D platformer. This demo is mainly just comprised of you collecting CD’s and bones to enter a castle at the way end. There really isn’t much here to this demo besides this one level that is a good bit of fun. It’s a perfect little reward for those like myself that wanted to see all of the available demos
7/10
Anyway’s thanks for reading this final part of my experience with the Haunted PS1 Demo Disk 2021. This overall disk was a significant improvement over the last disk and nearly every available demo was really cool. The biggest highlights in my eyes throughout the entire collection were [Echostatis], Loveland, That Which Gave Chase, Peeb Adventures, ARD, and Agony of a Dying MMO. Please be sure to check all of the games that interest you, whether it be just a simple add to your wishlist or even checking out the demos themselves.
https://hauntedps1.itch.io/demodisc2021
2 Yrs✓#
Fri
2 Yrs✓#
The biggest kicker for me is Ellie's final decision with Abby on the beach which I feel makes little to no sense considering that Ellie sacrifices everything to reach this point. What good does a little bit of humanity kept by Ellie mean when she willingly sacrificed everything to get to this point again to kill Abby. Her deciding against it just feels nonsensical to me, but I can see others feeling differently. I also just hate how awful the game ends with Ellies biggest fear of being alone coming true, and her losing her connection to just about everything she loves such as Dina and JJ and her ability to play the guitar Joel gifted to her.
I totally agree with you here. Ellie goes through the enitire game mowing down dozens of WLVs with seemingly no remorse. Theres nothing at all shown for that on the farm, making the ending feel even more bullshit to me. Nakey jakey has a really good video on this topic on YouTube.
3 Yrs♥✓#
Calbon3 Yrs♥✓#
I saw this video a few years back when it dropped and I really enjoyed it. Nakey Jakey always drops bangers.
1 Yr
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hellobion#
1 Yr#
#Great backlog. I feel like the playstation has more "quality" games to play than the xbox just by how much longer playstation has been around than xbox.
3 Yrs♥✓#
Calbon3 Yrs♥✓#
Thank you. I do also think that PlayStation has better all-around exclusives than Xbox, but I mainly think it's mainly a matter of what game style I prefer. I really enjoy the more narrative style they go for, whereas with Xbox, a pretty large chunk of their first-party offerings are mainly focused around multiplayer, which really isn't my style. I don't know if I would really say that they have more quality exclusives based around them being around a bit longer than Xbox, mainly due to most of their older franchises from the PS1-PS3 days not being all that utilized by them as a company, or heck even really all that acknowledged on most modern systems, such as with series like Twisted Metal, Sly Cooper, Infamous, Resistance, etc. I do appreciate that Xbox doesn't have that issue nearly as much thanks to their focus since the original Xbox on backward compatibility for most titles, unlike Sony.
3 Yrs♥✓#
Calbon3 Yrs♥✓#
Yakuza Kiwami
I have been quite interested in returning to the Yakuza series for a good bit of time now after beating Yakuza 0 a few years back. Initially, I was considering just jumping into the new Like a Dragon series so that I can be somewhat up to date with this franchise, but I decided to opt out of that due to it looking like the newest game, Infinite Wealth heavily involving the past protagonist Kiryu. From there, my best course of action was to pick up where I left off with Yakuza Kiwami, which is a remake of Yakuza 1 from the PS2. I went into this game pretty interested to see if I would want to continue the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series from here, and after becoming incredibly invested in this game to the point where I did all of the substories, I can thankfully say that I am now kinda in love with this series.
Yakuza 0 is a pretty great game overall, but for some reason, it didn’t really grab me like it has for so many. I partially blame it on me being a bit too invested in juggling around a ton of games at the time, which is something I’m trying to avoid as much. That said, I went into this game with the mindset of giving it all of my attention and I am really glad I did because. The story for Yakuza Kiwami takes place a bit after Yakuza 0. The game opens with things seemingly going well with Kazuma Kiryu and his crew, before things go wrong with Nishiki murdering the Dojima clan leader who attempted to assault one of their friends, Yumi. Kiryu takes the blame for the murder to protect Nishiki and ends up serving 10 years in prison. Upon getting out, Kiryu is met with a Nishiki becoming one of his former clan’s leaders, Yumi going missing, and 10 billion yen being stolen from the Yakuza. From here Kiryu is set on trying to figure out where Yumi is, while also coming into contact with a girl named Haruka, whose aunt is Yumi. The story for Yakuza Kiwami isn’t nearly as strong as that in Yakuza 0, but for some reason, I somehow liked it a lot more. It may have been how absurd some aspects of it are, and the over-the-top cutscenes that never ceased to make me laugh. I also found myself surprisingly invested in Kiryu as a character a lot more than in 0, I think mainly due to how much this game focuses on him and his bonds with his prior friend group, new friends, and with Yumi and Haruka. The story is definitely not without its faults, particularly near the middle of the game where you can tell it’s trying to pad itself out to be longer overall, but I honestly really liked it here. I also think I enjoyed it more due to it having a lesser focus on the Yakuza clans overall and more on the characters. A lot of the Yakuza clan stuff is kind of hard to follow in these games due to how much they change up in and outside of each game, and having less of a focus on them directly and centering it around the many different characters across Kamurocho really did it for me. I also really enjoyed how it all wrapped up despite the main villain and their boss fight being just the worst.
Instead of somewhat half-assing the combat this time around such as with Yakuza 0, I dived fully into learning all I could about it and I am glad I did so. Since Kiryu has been locked away in prison for the last 10 years, he is back to square one when it comes to his fighting prowess. You ultimately start off super weak once the game begins, but as you progress you can become insanely powerful by gaining and spending XP along with participating in the Majima Everywhere system. I am personally super glad that this game moved to an XP-style system for leveling up instead of paying money as with Yakuza 0 since that system somewhat didn’t vibe with me since I didn’t participate with the Mr. Shakedown encounters, and the various major money maker side activities and I was often left trying to hoard what money I did collect. Yakuza Kiwami brought back the 4-style combat system as with 0, where you can swap on the fly between 4 combat styles. Those are Brawler for overall balanced movement and attacks, Rush for quick attacks, Beast for slow and heavy combat, and finally Dragon style which is pretty much cheat mode if you are willing to grind this system out. I really like the 4 style combat system and even more so this time around due to me being more willing to experiment and learn the ins and outs of it all. Having 4 styles to master did a great job at keeping combat interesting over roughly 40 hours. I’m also glad that this game got rid of the heat gauge from Yakuza 0 since it was a bit overly complicated for its own good. That said there is another new addition to make combat somewhat annoying, with Kiwami actions. In particular fights, an enemy may slump over and heal a ton of health, with the only way of stopping this being Kiwami actions that cost heat. This idea isn’t all that big of a problem in the late-game, but it’s an absolute nightmare in the early-game sections. Besides this, combat felt mostly the same as 0, which was already pretty good. As much fun as the combat is in this game, I can’t really say that it’s my favorite aspect of this game. That honor goes to just exploring the semi-open world of Kamurocho.
Instead of having two cities such as with back in 0, Yakuza Kiwami is tied directly to one playable city as with the original game. That city is Kamurocho and from what I have heard is in every Yakuza game. Revisiting Kamurocho was definitely a bit weird since I already knew how to maneuver it from 0, but I really like how this game changes up the city from that game. Stuff like the brand new millennium tower, or the park turning into a homeless city was really cool to see in contrast to how they were back in 0. Kamurocho is definitely not as filled with things to do, which was slightly disappointing, but I didn’t mind it all that much due to the stuff being here being a lot of fun. As someone who loves travel but can’t due to it being way out of my budget, just being able to run around this city and soak up the culture was something that I honestly loved. Every single section of Kamurocho feels alive and really just allowing myself to soak in the setting was really cool. Thus this brings me to the side content.
The Yakuza games are plentiful when it comes to this aspect, and this game is no exception. There are all sorts of different minigames to try out along with a wide slew of substories to really liven things up. The minigames have always been a bit hit-and-miss for me, especially since they are needed for 100% completion and the NPC Ai is on something else when it comes to some of the harder ones. I love their inclusion and they can be a really fun distraction from the main campaign, with things like Karaoke. There are also some larger sets of minigames in each of these Yakuza games that play like entirely different games within themselves, which are incredibly impressive. I didn’t do the Real Estate Royal and the Cabaret storyline back in 0, which in some ways I regret, but I at least want to give these modes a try with the future games I play. In Kiwami, there are two pretty big minigame modes that have a large storyline that is attached and honestly worth sitting through, those being Pocket Circuits and Mesuking. Pocket Circuits is a minigame that I can’t say that I love due to how time-consuming and overall annoying it can be without a good guide, but it was well worth doing here for the storyline involving the Pocket Circuit Fighter. Mesuking was a lot more up my alley as it’s a rock-paper-scissors card game where you play this totally kid-friendly card game against some kids across various arcades. The overall game mode was really fun, albeit a bit cringey due to how NSFW the card game and visuals are. It’s not something to be played in front of your parents, that’s for sure. The storyline for this one was actually pretty good.
The substories this time around definitely ranged quite a bit in terms of quality. Substories 1-7 are honestly really good and are well worth consulting a guide on how to access them. The rest are really take it or leave it. Instead of being like Yakuza 0, where nearly every single one is a really fun break from the story, these ones tended to be quite dull. A pretty large amount of them are based around Kiryu either getting or almost getting scammed by a variety of con men on the street, which are not bad substory concepts in general, but the sheer amount with this premise and the overall execution leaves a lot to be desired. My favorite of that trope were the 4 substories where the same group of thugs try scamming Kiryu repeatedly by faking an injury, just due to how stupid it was overall. Besides those and a large amount of also still fun ones, what felt like half of the substory list was stuff like training with Komaki, or playing Mesuking which really were not that remarkable. I still did have a lot of fun with the substories, but looking back after playing 0 and currently Kiwami 2, they really were not all that impressive. That all said, amongst the midst, there is one other piece of side content involving a particular Yakuza member that I really enjoyed despite some of the issues with its system called Majima Everywhere.
For anyone unaware, one of the main protagonists named Majima from Yakuza 0 returns to this game to cause as much trouble as possible against Kiryu. This system is introduced very early on in this game, as Majima both wants to reawaken Kiryu’s fighting prowess as the legendary Dragon of Dojima, and also just for fun. The Majima Everywhere system more or less has Majima attempt to hunt Kiryu down everywhere to cause problems, which is honestly one of my favorite things everywhere. Majima is such a likable character and this system really lets the Mad Dog of Shimano shine with his crazy antics. I loved how creative this system can be with him literally appearing anywhere to attempt to issue a fight, such as in something basic like jumping into a street fight out of nowhere or even something more egregious like him out of nowhere being your bartender and attempting to scam you out of a lot of money if you don’t fight him. One of my favorite moments with this system was when Majima somehow staged a zombie infection spreading around Kamurocho just to scare Kiryu into fighting him to stop the invasion. Stuff like this really made the system shine and allowed for some absolutely absurd moments in the best way possible. That said, for everything amazing that the Majimi Everywhere system does, it also comes with a lot of its own downsides that take something incredibly fun and waters it down into something tedious. One of the main gameplay styles for this game is completely locked into you engaging with this system if you want to upgrade it, and trying to do so really ruins a lot of the magic for this. Having to continuously fight Majima over and over again to where the surprise really begins to lose its luster along with trying to land the perfect RNG to get a certain variant of an encounter just so that I can unlock a new move for the Dragon-style really twists this from something fun into a pointlessly annoying grind. I also think Majima appears a bit too frequently across the city in general which can really become annoying after a while. That said, I love this system’s inclusion and it really made this game a lot more fun.
Overall, I had a blast with Yakuza Kiwami. I went into this game with little to no expectations and left more than satisfied with what I played. The story, despite being a bit messy at points was really enjoyable. The overall gameplay and combat was really fun and the various side activities despite being a step down from Yakuza 0 were still a blast. Definitely give this game a try if you are interested in the Yakuza series past 0, and if you haven’t played 0 beforehand, go play Yakuza 0.
8/10
I have been quite interested in returning to the Yakuza series for a good bit of time now after beating Yakuza 0 a few years back. Initially, I was considering just jumping into the new Like a Dragon series so that I can be somewhat up to date with this franchise, but I decided to opt out of that due to it looking like the newest game, Infinite Wealth heavily involving the past protagonist Kiryu. From there, my best course of action was to pick up where I left off with Yakuza Kiwami, which is a remake of Yakuza 1 from the PS2. I went into this game pretty interested to see if I would want to continue the Yakuza/Like a Dragon series from here, and after becoming incredibly invested in this game to the point where I did all of the substories, I can thankfully say that I am now kinda in love with this series.
Yakuza 0 is a pretty great game overall, but for some reason, it didn’t really grab me like it has for so many. I partially blame it on me being a bit too invested in juggling around a ton of games at the time, which is something I’m trying to avoid as much. That said, I went into this game with the mindset of giving it all of my attention and I am really glad I did because. The story for Yakuza Kiwami takes place a bit after Yakuza 0. The game opens with things seemingly going well with Kazuma Kiryu and his crew, before things go wrong with Nishiki murdering the Dojima clan leader who attempted to assault one of their friends, Yumi. Kiryu takes the blame for the murder to protect Nishiki and ends up serving 10 years in prison. Upon getting out, Kiryu is met with a Nishiki becoming one of his former clan’s leaders, Yumi going missing, and 10 billion yen being stolen from the Yakuza. From here Kiryu is set on trying to figure out where Yumi is, while also coming into contact with a girl named Haruka, whose aunt is Yumi. The story for Yakuza Kiwami isn’t nearly as strong as that in Yakuza 0, but for some reason, I somehow liked it a lot more. It may have been how absurd some aspects of it are, and the over-the-top cutscenes that never ceased to make me laugh. I also found myself surprisingly invested in Kiryu as a character a lot more than in 0, I think mainly due to how much this game focuses on him and his bonds with his prior friend group, new friends, and with Yumi and Haruka. The story is definitely not without its faults, particularly near the middle of the game where you can tell it’s trying to pad itself out to be longer overall, but I honestly really liked it here. I also think I enjoyed it more due to it having a lesser focus on the Yakuza clans overall and more on the characters. A lot of the Yakuza clan stuff is kind of hard to follow in these games due to how much they change up in and outside of each game, and having less of a focus on them directly and centering it around the many different characters across Kamurocho really did it for me. I also really enjoyed how it all wrapped up despite the main villain and their boss fight being just the worst.
Instead of somewhat half-assing the combat this time around such as with Yakuza 0, I dived fully into learning all I could about it and I am glad I did so. Since Kiryu has been locked away in prison for the last 10 years, he is back to square one when it comes to his fighting prowess. You ultimately start off super weak once the game begins, but as you progress you can become insanely powerful by gaining and spending XP along with participating in the Majima Everywhere system. I am personally super glad that this game moved to an XP-style system for leveling up instead of paying money as with Yakuza 0 since that system somewhat didn’t vibe with me since I didn’t participate with the Mr. Shakedown encounters, and the various major money maker side activities and I was often left trying to hoard what money I did collect. Yakuza Kiwami brought back the 4-style combat system as with 0, where you can swap on the fly between 4 combat styles. Those are Brawler for overall balanced movement and attacks, Rush for quick attacks, Beast for slow and heavy combat, and finally Dragon style which is pretty much cheat mode if you are willing to grind this system out. I really like the 4 style combat system and even more so this time around due to me being more willing to experiment and learn the ins and outs of it all. Having 4 styles to master did a great job at keeping combat interesting over roughly 40 hours. I’m also glad that this game got rid of the heat gauge from Yakuza 0 since it was a bit overly complicated for its own good. That said there is another new addition to make combat somewhat annoying, with Kiwami actions. In particular fights, an enemy may slump over and heal a ton of health, with the only way of stopping this being Kiwami actions that cost heat. This idea isn’t all that big of a problem in the late-game, but it’s an absolute nightmare in the early-game sections. Besides this, combat felt mostly the same as 0, which was already pretty good. As much fun as the combat is in this game, I can’t really say that it’s my favorite aspect of this game. That honor goes to just exploring the semi-open world of Kamurocho.
Instead of having two cities such as with back in 0, Yakuza Kiwami is tied directly to one playable city as with the original game. That city is Kamurocho and from what I have heard is in every Yakuza game. Revisiting Kamurocho was definitely a bit weird since I already knew how to maneuver it from 0, but I really like how this game changes up the city from that game. Stuff like the brand new millennium tower, or the park turning into a homeless city was really cool to see in contrast to how they were back in 0. Kamurocho is definitely not as filled with things to do, which was slightly disappointing, but I didn’t mind it all that much due to the stuff being here being a lot of fun. As someone who loves travel but can’t due to it being way out of my budget, just being able to run around this city and soak up the culture was something that I honestly loved. Every single section of Kamurocho feels alive and really just allowing myself to soak in the setting was really cool. Thus this brings me to the side content.
The Yakuza games are plentiful when it comes to this aspect, and this game is no exception. There are all sorts of different minigames to try out along with a wide slew of substories to really liven things up. The minigames have always been a bit hit-and-miss for me, especially since they are needed for 100% completion and the NPC Ai is on something else when it comes to some of the harder ones. I love their inclusion and they can be a really fun distraction from the main campaign, with things like Karaoke. There are also some larger sets of minigames in each of these Yakuza games that play like entirely different games within themselves, which are incredibly impressive. I didn’t do the Real Estate Royal and the Cabaret storyline back in 0, which in some ways I regret, but I at least want to give these modes a try with the future games I play. In Kiwami, there are two pretty big minigame modes that have a large storyline that is attached and honestly worth sitting through, those being Pocket Circuits and Mesuking. Pocket Circuits is a minigame that I can’t say that I love due to how time-consuming and overall annoying it can be without a good guide, but it was well worth doing here for the storyline involving the Pocket Circuit Fighter. Mesuking was a lot more up my alley as it’s a rock-paper-scissors card game where you play this totally kid-friendly card game against some kids across various arcades. The overall game mode was really fun, albeit a bit cringey due to how NSFW the card game and visuals are. It’s not something to be played in front of your parents, that’s for sure. The storyline for this one was actually pretty good.
The substories this time around definitely ranged quite a bit in terms of quality. Substories 1-7 are honestly really good and are well worth consulting a guide on how to access them. The rest are really take it or leave it. Instead of being like Yakuza 0, where nearly every single one is a really fun break from the story, these ones tended to be quite dull. A pretty large amount of them are based around Kiryu either getting or almost getting scammed by a variety of con men on the street, which are not bad substory concepts in general, but the sheer amount with this premise and the overall execution leaves a lot to be desired. My favorite of that trope were the 4 substories where the same group of thugs try scamming Kiryu repeatedly by faking an injury, just due to how stupid it was overall. Besides those and a large amount of also still fun ones, what felt like half of the substory list was stuff like training with Komaki, or playing Mesuking which really were not that remarkable. I still did have a lot of fun with the substories, but looking back after playing 0 and currently Kiwami 2, they really were not all that impressive. That all said, amongst the midst, there is one other piece of side content involving a particular Yakuza member that I really enjoyed despite some of the issues with its system called Majima Everywhere.
For anyone unaware, one of the main protagonists named Majima from Yakuza 0 returns to this game to cause as much trouble as possible against Kiryu. This system is introduced very early on in this game, as Majima both wants to reawaken Kiryu’s fighting prowess as the legendary Dragon of Dojima, and also just for fun. The Majima Everywhere system more or less has Majima attempt to hunt Kiryu down everywhere to cause problems, which is honestly one of my favorite things everywhere. Majima is such a likable character and this system really lets the Mad Dog of Shimano shine with his crazy antics. I loved how creative this system can be with him literally appearing anywhere to attempt to issue a fight, such as in something basic like jumping into a street fight out of nowhere or even something more egregious like him out of nowhere being your bartender and attempting to scam you out of a lot of money if you don’t fight him. One of my favorite moments with this system was when Majima somehow staged a zombie infection spreading around Kamurocho just to scare Kiryu into fighting him to stop the invasion. Stuff like this really made the system shine and allowed for some absolutely absurd moments in the best way possible. That said, for everything amazing that the Majimi Everywhere system does, it also comes with a lot of its own downsides that take something incredibly fun and waters it down into something tedious. One of the main gameplay styles for this game is completely locked into you engaging with this system if you want to upgrade it, and trying to do so really ruins a lot of the magic for this. Having to continuously fight Majima over and over again to where the surprise really begins to lose its luster along with trying to land the perfect RNG to get a certain variant of an encounter just so that I can unlock a new move for the Dragon-style really twists this from something fun into a pointlessly annoying grind. I also think Majima appears a bit too frequently across the city in general which can really become annoying after a while. That said, I love this system’s inclusion and it really made this game a lot more fun.
Overall, I had a blast with Yakuza Kiwami. I went into this game with little to no expectations and left more than satisfied with what I played. The story, despite being a bit messy at points was really enjoyable. The overall gameplay and combat was really fun and the various side activities despite being a step down from Yakuza 0 were still a blast. Definitely give this game a try if you are interested in the Yakuza series past 0, and if you haven’t played 0 beforehand, go play Yakuza 0.
8/10
1 Yr#
hellobion#1 Yr#
#Great Yakuza post. Also funny story I actually onely played one yakuza game. The original on the PS2 about 15 plus years ago.
3 Yrs♥✓#
Calbon3 Yrs♥✓#
Nice, I lowkey kinda want to try out the original game for it's English dub. It seems pretty fun from some of the clips I have seen.
3 Yrs♥✓#
Calbon3 Yrs♥✓#
The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe
The Stanley Parable is a really quite bizarre experience that was well worth checking out. In it you play as an office worker named Stanley who works a mundane job of just following orders on a computer without questions. One day Stanley the computer Stanley is working on doesn’t give him any sort of orders in the slightest. From there you are lefts somewhat to your own devices to explore and forge Stanley’s path. Throughout the game, a narrator is both present to explain Stanley’s journey and even help give Stanley directions on what to do next on a particular path. This is definitely a tough game to fully describe since it’s so abstract, but it’s also really cool and worth checking out. It’s also kind of hard to talk about this game without outright spoiling some of it’s best moments.
Your main goal for this game while running through it can really be anything. From disobeying the Narrators orders, to maybe following some of their orders and disobeying others. By forging your own path, you will find yourself reaching a variety of crazy endings. These can range from something thats quite funny, to something a bit more thought provoking. I really liked how this game does it’s looping playthrough style as it doesn’t take a super long amount of time to stumble into many of the endings. Most playthroughs only take somewhere around 5 to 10 minutes to complete, and all of them are pretty fun. The writing plays a pretty big part in why this game is so much fun. I love how a lot of it centers around analysing player choice and just story writing in general. Stuff such as the not listening to the narrator ending and doing something like carrying around a bucket the whole time spark some really fun playthroughs. The game is also pretty funny thanks in both to the pretty solid writing and narrator. The Narrator of this game is phenomenal and really makes the experience. I love all the commentary that comes from him and the voice used is pretty iconic.
Originally I was going to play the 2013 remake of this game that I bought a few years back, but since I bought that version, a brand new ultra-deluxe version of this game dropped, which is the version I played for this review. This new version is a much more expanded version of the game with a bunch of new content. The main meat of this version comes with the new content storyline that was honestly amazing. The few new endings attached to this storyline are actually pretty long, but are a really fun piece of satire on stuff like remasters, remakes, sequels, and the game industry as a whole. I honestly think this main storyline added for the Ultra Deluxe version to be the best content in this entire game just due to how nails it’s commentary and overall humor. Overall, I don’t have a ton more to say about this game, besides that The Stanley Parable is a really good time. This is one of those games that you should really jump into blind as me explaining what it is doesn’t give it justice and it also ruins a lot of the best moments.
8/10
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty
It’s been about 2 months since I talked about Cyberpunk 2077 and I kinda forgot to talk about the DLC once I finished it. Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is a large story DLC that was released last year alongside the 2.0 update. After sitting down and playing through everything this expansion had for all of the stories, I can confidently say that it’s pretty much up to par with the base game in terms of overall quality, especially since this DLC didn’t launch overrun with gamebreaking bugs. That said, I personally didn’t have the best of time with it, not because the DLC is bad or anything, mainly just due to me being a bit burnt out on Cyberpunk. I didn’t realize this upon booting the game up a few weeks after wrapping up it’s platinum trophy, and then after just a few hours I found myself just completely worn out. I did do everything here for this DLC, but I can’t say that it was the most fun experience for me personally.
This DLC takes place during the events of the base game as V is contacted by someone called Songbird about a possible solution to their chip problem. Your main task is to help save the president of the NUSA who was just shot down in their aircraft above a closed off district of Night City called Dogtown. After rescuing them you are thrust into a spy drama centered around assassinating the Dogtown leader named Kurt Hansen alongside a group of undercover spy’s such as Solomon Reed who is voiced by Idris Elba. The story for this DLC is pretty great, but it never really grabbed me as much as that in the main game. I think it’s mainly due to V taking a bit more of a backseat this time around, but this DLC’s story is great. I also really liked how it branched off depending on your choices near the end. There are 4 DLC storyline endings, and one brand new ending to the overall main game. I honestly didn’t really enjoy the new endings added with this DLC. It feels a bit tacked on and doesn’t really do a good job at nailing down everything by the end. I found the way that certain characters react to V’s solution to feel very out of character, and some of the new narrative elements it adds to fall flat.
The new location for this DLC, Dogtown, was a pretty cool place overall, but I can’t say that I really enjoyed it as much as Night City. Everything was a bit too worn down and post apocalyptic feeling for my taste as this is an abandoned city still under construction. I also wish it was a bit less cramped together, as it made driving vehicles around a bit of a pain. Besides that, the area is pretty cool. The side objectives are a bit different than those in the main campaign. Gone are the NCPD scanners which was nice, and the few new things such as enemy bases and relic chips are pretty fun. There are some brand new vehicle hijacking sections added that are a bit boring overall when you are primarily trying to do them to get and achievement, but I would love to see these return for a potential sequel in a larger scale. The side gigs with Mr. Hands were also pretty good and I really enjoy what they did with his character here, compared to the base game. The main gigs that you can do are also pretty good, but I can’t say that I enjoyed them nearly as much as those in the main campaign. Besides this, I really don’t have much else to say about this expansion besides that it’s pretty good and well worth checking out if you love the base game. The new story and content is all really solid and I would say is up to par with the base game.
9/10
The Stanley Parable is a really quite bizarre experience that was well worth checking out. In it you play as an office worker named Stanley who works a mundane job of just following orders on a computer without questions. One day Stanley the computer Stanley is working on doesn’t give him any sort of orders in the slightest. From there you are lefts somewhat to your own devices to explore and forge Stanley’s path. Throughout the game, a narrator is both present to explain Stanley’s journey and even help give Stanley directions on what to do next on a particular path. This is definitely a tough game to fully describe since it’s so abstract, but it’s also really cool and worth checking out. It’s also kind of hard to talk about this game without outright spoiling some of it’s best moments.
Your main goal for this game while running through it can really be anything. From disobeying the Narrators orders, to maybe following some of their orders and disobeying others. By forging your own path, you will find yourself reaching a variety of crazy endings. These can range from something thats quite funny, to something a bit more thought provoking. I really liked how this game does it’s looping playthrough style as it doesn’t take a super long amount of time to stumble into many of the endings. Most playthroughs only take somewhere around 5 to 10 minutes to complete, and all of them are pretty fun. The writing plays a pretty big part in why this game is so much fun. I love how a lot of it centers around analysing player choice and just story writing in general. Stuff such as the not listening to the narrator ending and doing something like carrying around a bucket the whole time spark some really fun playthroughs. The game is also pretty funny thanks in both to the pretty solid writing and narrator. The Narrator of this game is phenomenal and really makes the experience. I love all the commentary that comes from him and the voice used is pretty iconic.
Originally I was going to play the 2013 remake of this game that I bought a few years back, but since I bought that version, a brand new ultra-deluxe version of this game dropped, which is the version I played for this review. This new version is a much more expanded version of the game with a bunch of new content. The main meat of this version comes with the new content storyline that was honestly amazing. The few new endings attached to this storyline are actually pretty long, but are a really fun piece of satire on stuff like remasters, remakes, sequels, and the game industry as a whole. I honestly think this main storyline added for the Ultra Deluxe version to be the best content in this entire game just due to how nails it’s commentary and overall humor. Overall, I don’t have a ton more to say about this game, besides that The Stanley Parable is a really good time. This is one of those games that you should really jump into blind as me explaining what it is doesn’t give it justice and it also ruins a lot of the best moments.
8/10
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty
It’s been about 2 months since I talked about Cyberpunk 2077 and I kinda forgot to talk about the DLC once I finished it. Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is a large story DLC that was released last year alongside the 2.0 update. After sitting down and playing through everything this expansion had for all of the stories, I can confidently say that it’s pretty much up to par with the base game in terms of overall quality, especially since this DLC didn’t launch overrun with gamebreaking bugs. That said, I personally didn’t have the best of time with it, not because the DLC is bad or anything, mainly just due to me being a bit burnt out on Cyberpunk. I didn’t realize this upon booting the game up a few weeks after wrapping up it’s platinum trophy, and then after just a few hours I found myself just completely worn out. I did do everything here for this DLC, but I can’t say that it was the most fun experience for me personally.
This DLC takes place during the events of the base game as V is contacted by someone called Songbird about a possible solution to their chip problem. Your main task is to help save the president of the NUSA who was just shot down in their aircraft above a closed off district of Night City called Dogtown. After rescuing them you are thrust into a spy drama centered around assassinating the Dogtown leader named Kurt Hansen alongside a group of undercover spy’s such as Solomon Reed who is voiced by Idris Elba. The story for this DLC is pretty great, but it never really grabbed me as much as that in the main game. I think it’s mainly due to V taking a bit more of a backseat this time around, but this DLC’s story is great. I also really liked how it branched off depending on your choices near the end. There are 4 DLC storyline endings, and one brand new ending to the overall main game. I honestly didn’t really enjoy the new endings added with this DLC. It feels a bit tacked on and doesn’t really do a good job at nailing down everything by the end. I found the way that certain characters react to V’s solution to feel very out of character, and some of the new narrative elements it adds to fall flat.
The new location for this DLC, Dogtown, was a pretty cool place overall, but I can’t say that I really enjoyed it as much as Night City. Everything was a bit too worn down and post apocalyptic feeling for my taste as this is an abandoned city still under construction. I also wish it was a bit less cramped together, as it made driving vehicles around a bit of a pain. Besides that, the area is pretty cool. The side objectives are a bit different than those in the main campaign. Gone are the NCPD scanners which was nice, and the few new things such as enemy bases and relic chips are pretty fun. There are some brand new vehicle hijacking sections added that are a bit boring overall when you are primarily trying to do them to get and achievement, but I would love to see these return for a potential sequel in a larger scale. The side gigs with Mr. Hands were also pretty good and I really enjoy what they did with his character here, compared to the base game. The main gigs that you can do are also pretty good, but I can’t say that I enjoyed them nearly as much as those in the main campaign. Besides this, I really don’t have much else to say about this expansion besides that it’s pretty good and well worth checking out if you love the base game. The new story and content is all really solid and I would say is up to par with the base game.
9/10
3 Yrs♥✓#
Calbon3 Yrs♥✓#
Marvel's Avengers
One of my favorite things to do is try and pick up games that may have been critically panned and haven’t entirely sold well in recent years for a pretty cheap price and then play them to see if they are truly as bad as I have heard they may be. Sometimes doing this can lead to surprisingly rewarding experiences with games like Outriders or Scarlett Nexus that though do have some big flaws are still a lot of fun. However, this often does lead to me playing games that are stinkers and do kind of deserve their infamy. Marvel’s Avengers is one of those games, in which I spent an exorbitant amount of time playing last month despite really disliking it. Most of that time was used to play through its story mode and extra DLC chapters, but I also did attempt to try the multiplayer out as well. This game is currently not available for purchase as of around September last year when this was taken off most digital stores. I’m pretty sure this is due to licensing fees expiring and Square Enix not wanting to continue paying for this game due to how badly this game flopped. This does suck as I’m pretty big on video game preservation and it will kill off the potential for more people to try this game out and somewhat keep the online function alive, but it is what it is. I managed to pick up a copy of this game for like 10 dollars a year or two ago and I went into this pretty hopeful since all of the microtransactions have been removed and all of the premium cosmetics were given to the player base for free, which is amazing. I do have to give this game that, instead of just shuttering everything and just outright removing the ability to earn these cosmetics, they gave them all out for free which was really nice. That said the actual game itself is a mess where I fully understand now why this game completely bombed. There are some things to enjoy, but the overall experience is just bad.
Where to even begin, I definitely thought that when I made it to the main menu for this game. If you also have this game and haven’t checked it out yet and are interested in the story mode, don’t click on assemble and go directly to campaigns because if you try and access the online mode, you are greeted with a confusing cutscene spoils the entire campaign to catch the player up on what's going on before giving access to the multiplayer. I definitely got confused with this and seeing the entire campaign spoiled through this cutscene before I even knew what was going on was frustrating. The menus overall in this game are pretty bad and are genuinely some of the most confusing I have navigated in a game. Overall movement through them can be incredibly confusing thanks to awkward UI and bizarre controls that just don’t work. The worst is honestly the war table, which is used to select missions in this game. There really is no easy way to cycle through what you want, and the method needed to select each of the main and DLC campaigns is a confusing mess that required me to constantly go to the main menu to cycle to another campaign, which sometimes may not have what I want which would require a lot more tinkering to try and figure out. I think this partially is behind a common game-breaking bug that I experienced where the game will not mark the main campaign as complete once you finish it and will lock you out of a ton of side content in this game since it needs to be completed to access certain raids and main game modes. This game is a complete mess in a lot of ways and just trying to figure out how to play it is a massive problem.
(This is the main menus I was talking about. To access the campaign, you need to click on operations instead of the play now button)
If you want to try and play this game I recommend starting with the main campaign, which though I think is a bit of a mixed bag, it’s honestly not awful. The main Reassemble campaign is roughly 12 hours which is a solid length for a multiplayer game’s campaign. In it, you primarily play as Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel), as she tries to reassemble the Avengers who disbanded after something called the A-day incident. She is doing so to stop a massive corporation called A.I.M. which has replaced Stark Industries and controls a large portion of the world. Their main goal is to outlaw superheroes and “cure” the mutations that cause them to have powers. The main campaign’s story isn’t awful but it’s filled with a lot of missed potential and overly repetitive mission design. Kamala Khan as the main protagonist wasn’t something that I really found all that exciting once I began the campaign, as she is a superhero that I have never particularly liked, but I actually really enjoyed her involvement in pushing this campaign along. Her being a fangirl of the Avengers and the main catalyst for getting the team together was a pretty smart move. Trying to pick one main character from the main Avenger’s cast would be tricky and trying to make separate main campaign structures centered around whichever one you pick sounds like an absolute nightmare development-wise. Picking someone else not already part of the team to bring everyone together was a good call. Kamala Khan also was pretty decent as a protagonist and her overall story arc, despite some more messy bits of writing and cringeworthy dialogue. In terms of messy writing, I’m more just referring to most character decisions being based on leaps of logic and then treating all of that like fact. The rest of the Avengers cast ranges from pretty good to heavily underutilized. Bruce Banner and Tony Stark were some particular standouts for me, but that’s mainly due to them actually being present in this game’s campaign. Thor and Captain America in the campaign was pretty disappointing as they only really appear within the last 1-2 hours of the campaign and have little to no part in this game’s story.
All good aside with the main campaign, there was a whole heap of issues I did end up having with it, mainly regarding the mission design and gameplay. The story itself just kind of meanders around and doesn’t do all that many interesting things through its runtime. I mentioned a bit above about Thor and Captain America’s involvement overall, which disappointed me immensely. I understand not wanting the player to feel overwhelmed with the ability to play all of the characters at once, but having these two locked up until the end was really lame. The story also has a large slew of pacing issues that make everything all the more disappointing. A lot of the time it just meanders around when there is a lot it should be doing and by the time when things start to get interesting it just kinda ends. The most disappointing thing for me with this game was the lack of overall Marvel Villains. Square Enix had access to the entire Avenger’s catalog of characters, and they chose to only include 3 super villains, 2 of which are introduced near the start of the game and immediately dropped after their respective fights. M.O.D.A.K. as the main villain was fun, but I really wish this game at the very least brought out some various minor villains to spice up many of the story moments instead of just having the crew fight boring robots. I also really disliked the overall mission design mainly due to how boring it was overall as I can tell this game was attempting to cut some corners by including a majority of the multiplayer maps with some objectives included inside. There are some unique ones, but they are very few and far between.
Before talking about the mission design, I should first talk about the general gameplay. The overall gameplay plays somewhat similarly to something like the Batman Arkham, or Spider-Man games, which was inherently what got me somewhat interested in this game. That said the general gameplay is this weird amalgamation of overly complex and annoying mechanics, on top of the somewhat easy-to-recognize gameplay of those other games. Besides the overall common gameplay that comprises of beating up enemies, and dodging attacks, there are a bunch of other things inter-spliced into the gameplay such as parry’s, special attacks that have a cooldown afterward, and this one strange counter-like move that does different things depending on the hero, but It mainly powers up their attack while also allowing for a dodge. I don’t personally know what it does since it’s so confusing and its effects are almost negligible in gameplay. When compared to that of something like Spider-Man, this game’s gameplay just feels overly confusing, and this is coming from someone who loves games with a lot of complexity in the combat such as Devil May Cry, or Nioh 2. I blame a lot of it on the tutorials, which are both incredibly intrusive due to how many different ones this game has, while also never really feeling all that helpful for explaining things in the gameplay due to the overall focus of them being all over the place in terms of trying to teach the player each character’s mechanics. Aside from the gameplay being overly confusing for a new player, it also lacks the weight and feeling that the other superhero beat-them-up games do so well. Every character feels incredibly sluggish to control while also lacking the weight when each attack aligns which makes other game’s combat satisfying.
I partially blame this on the fact that there are so many different Avengers and that they each play so differently, but it really shouldn’t feel as bad as it does. I do have to praise the fact that each plays pretty differently from one another, and I actually did like to play as about half the roster I tried out. Iron Man, Captain America, and Kate Bishop were my favorite of the bunch to play, whereas I would argue that Hulk and Thor were the worst. Hulk suffers from the problem where his moves are incredibly slow and weightless thanks to how bloated enemy health bars are, and he really lacks the destructive feeling that playing as the Hulk should have. Thor’s entire moveset feels incredibly sluggish and almost none of the attack flows together well. On the fun end of the spectrum, I like how Iron Man balances his ranged and aerial gameplay with his melee combat, along with the sheer amount of tools at his disposal. Captain America also hits this really great balance with his gameplay that fits how I presume he would fight in combat. The other characters either play just fine or are kind of boring overall.
The just ok gameplay is especially hurt by the repetitive mission design and lack of enemy variety to keep me wanting to play. In total, I think I counted 9 different enemy types in total for the main game, which is awful, especially considering that this is a live service game. This has been something that has been frustrating me a lot in modern games, especially in live service games. You can’t have a good combat system in a game without having fun foes to fight and use it with. Fighting the same 9 enemy types that you have seen since the first hour of the game without any new ones introduced as the campaign passes by is awful and makes everything super boring. This is especially bad when almost every single enemy is a basic boring humanoid robot with similar movesets and widely bloated health values. I get that this game wanted to primarily stick to having robots as the main enemy, considering that A.I.M. specializes in robots, but you can also do so many cool things with robots if they put their minds to it. The few bosses in this game and its dlc campaigns are mostly regular enemies and minibosses repackaged with bloated health bars which are incredibly disappointing. All of these issues I have already mentioned connect back to the mission design which is abysmal.
Each and every mission in this game takes place in similar boring badland, tundra, or laboratory setting that lacks any sort of interesting appearance. Each of these areas are littered with the same reused A.I.M. facility assets that were already boring the moment I booted this game up and relies on reusing them at every possible moment. Most missions require you to go to an objective which is usually kill enemies, and then progress forward to do more boring objectives comprised of standing around an area to capture it or opening a safe, and you repeat these things until the mission ends like half an hour later. There are some side objectives such as opening loot chests scattered around the level, or freeing prisoners, but none of them are worthwhile since they all reuse like 3 different assets and building structures across the large amount of missions I did. Every single mission that wasn’t handcrafted to be used specifically for the main campaign is a slog like this and I just don’t know how anyone can have fun repeating these over and over again as a live service-like game, even with a group of friends. Every single mission is grindy and boring and just the sheer amount of levels and gear you need to grind to try out the harder missions that were added to new areas added with new updates is a drag. I just don’t understand how publishers and developers can think this kind of content can hold itself and a player base up for years as a live service project.
I do need to talk about the live service elements as though the microtransaction-related stuff is gone now, the general live service structure is still here and it’s still awful. First up there is all of the loot and gear you can collect by completing missions, defeating enemies, and opening chests which is all awful. The best example for having fun loot in a game I can think of always comes down to the Borderlands franchise thanks to how that loot can greatly change up gameplay. Each piece of loot you can collect in those games can drastically change how you play depending on what the weapon or item’s loot can do. You could find something cool like a gun that reloads by you chucking it at enemies, or something like a shield that drops your main health value to 1hp while having an absurdly massive amount of protection from that said shield. Every single item like this does an amazing job of spicing the gameplay up. Compare that to something like Avengers where all of the loot you pick up and equip to your characters only does things like increase attack and defense exponentially. Why would I, the player, want to grind crappy loot like this that will not matter in the long scheme of things instead of something interesting like say giving the Hulk new attacks or changing how I would play as him. There is no fun grind in this game as it takes forever to really get anywhere with any character. I partially wanted to try and fight a super boss that was added with one of the updates, which I figured that I could reach pretty easily considering my level after playing through all of the extra content, just to learn that I would need to grind with a single character up to 15-20 more hours just to even get to a point where I could even unlock the level, followed up with the fact that I would still need to do even more to have a chance at that said super boss. Like I understand that something may be a super boss and that requires a bit of grinding, but I just can’t force myself to even want to play the game in general, why should I want to farm for so long to attempt something like this?
I think it’s time now to briefly talk about the main extra free content added to the game. There were 3 main story mission drops before this game kicked the can. Each of them ranges quite a bit in terms of quality. The first that I checked out was Taking A.I.M. which is the first part of a 2 part Hawkeye storyline. In this, you gain access to play Kate Bishop, who I think is the best feeling character to play in the game. Her moveset feels good to chain together, and her overall kit is really great. The campaign isn’t so as it reuses the same tundra environment from the base game and the campaign is mainly centered around setting up the story for part 2. There are no new areas or side objectives and the campaign is laid out almost the same as every single multiplayer mission in the game. There are technically 3 bosses, though only one of them is unique. The other 2 are just reused enemies from the base game which is disappointing. The new boss at the end absolutely sucks as it just doesn’t work well in a multiplayer-like setting due to how the moves mainly lock onto a single character. The second operation, Future Imperfect was a step forward in terms of quality as it features a whole new area and a pretty fun campaign overall. Hawkeye is a more boring version of Kate Bishop which was a bit disappointing overall. The storyline itself was pretty fun up all the way until the end where it just kind of ends unceremoniously with it expecting you to beat the Scientist Supreme super boss I mentioned earlier, which wasn’t going to happen for me. The new main campaign boss fight was also absolutely awful. You fight Maestro who has this insanely bloated health bar that no joke took me 15 minutes to whittle down with constant aggression. Finally, there was the War for Wakanda operation that was actually quite good. It’s got a basic but fun storyline, a really cool new area, new mission and side objectives, new enemies for the first time since the game launched and new texture change-ups to just about every single thing that returned from the base game. This campaign was a huge step above every other one in the game and was easily some of the most enjoyable content overall. Really, the other 2 DLC campaigns should have been more like this, and if so I think this game could have had a future. Sadly this is where the game just kinda died off. There were a few extra characters who were added which I didn’t try out besides Spider-Man who played like complete crap.
Overall, I kinda hate this game. I think there are some pretty good bones here to be something cool, but the overall focus on being a live service completely takes away from all of that. I feel as if this game was developed solely to be a single-player game. It could honestly be great if they put in the effort to really polish the present characters and have an interesting campaign with interesting level design. It’s a shame that this project ended up being a dud, and that I couldn’t come around to liking it in the end regardless of its flaws. I can’t recommend this game, both since it sucks but also since it’s not available to buy. That said, you're not really missing out on much.
5/10
One of my favorite things to do is try and pick up games that may have been critically panned and haven’t entirely sold well in recent years for a pretty cheap price and then play them to see if they are truly as bad as I have heard they may be. Sometimes doing this can lead to surprisingly rewarding experiences with games like Outriders or Scarlett Nexus that though do have some big flaws are still a lot of fun. However, this often does lead to me playing games that are stinkers and do kind of deserve their infamy. Marvel’s Avengers is one of those games, in which I spent an exorbitant amount of time playing last month despite really disliking it. Most of that time was used to play through its story mode and extra DLC chapters, but I also did attempt to try the multiplayer out as well. This game is currently not available for purchase as of around September last year when this was taken off most digital stores. I’m pretty sure this is due to licensing fees expiring and Square Enix not wanting to continue paying for this game due to how badly this game flopped. This does suck as I’m pretty big on video game preservation and it will kill off the potential for more people to try this game out and somewhat keep the online function alive, but it is what it is. I managed to pick up a copy of this game for like 10 dollars a year or two ago and I went into this pretty hopeful since all of the microtransactions have been removed and all of the premium cosmetics were given to the player base for free, which is amazing. I do have to give this game that, instead of just shuttering everything and just outright removing the ability to earn these cosmetics, they gave them all out for free which was really nice. That said the actual game itself is a mess where I fully understand now why this game completely bombed. There are some things to enjoy, but the overall experience is just bad.
Where to even begin, I definitely thought that when I made it to the main menu for this game. If you also have this game and haven’t checked it out yet and are interested in the story mode, don’t click on assemble and go directly to campaigns because if you try and access the online mode, you are greeted with a confusing cutscene spoils the entire campaign to catch the player up on what's going on before giving access to the multiplayer. I definitely got confused with this and seeing the entire campaign spoiled through this cutscene before I even knew what was going on was frustrating. The menus overall in this game are pretty bad and are genuinely some of the most confusing I have navigated in a game. Overall movement through them can be incredibly confusing thanks to awkward UI and bizarre controls that just don’t work. The worst is honestly the war table, which is used to select missions in this game. There really is no easy way to cycle through what you want, and the method needed to select each of the main and DLC campaigns is a confusing mess that required me to constantly go to the main menu to cycle to another campaign, which sometimes may not have what I want which would require a lot more tinkering to try and figure out. I think this partially is behind a common game-breaking bug that I experienced where the game will not mark the main campaign as complete once you finish it and will lock you out of a ton of side content in this game since it needs to be completed to access certain raids and main game modes. This game is a complete mess in a lot of ways and just trying to figure out how to play it is a massive problem.
(This is the main menus I was talking about. To access the campaign, you need to click on operations instead of the play now button)
If you want to try and play this game I recommend starting with the main campaign, which though I think is a bit of a mixed bag, it’s honestly not awful. The main Reassemble campaign is roughly 12 hours which is a solid length for a multiplayer game’s campaign. In it, you primarily play as Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel), as she tries to reassemble the Avengers who disbanded after something called the A-day incident. She is doing so to stop a massive corporation called A.I.M. which has replaced Stark Industries and controls a large portion of the world. Their main goal is to outlaw superheroes and “cure” the mutations that cause them to have powers. The main campaign’s story isn’t awful but it’s filled with a lot of missed potential and overly repetitive mission design. Kamala Khan as the main protagonist wasn’t something that I really found all that exciting once I began the campaign, as she is a superhero that I have never particularly liked, but I actually really enjoyed her involvement in pushing this campaign along. Her being a fangirl of the Avengers and the main catalyst for getting the team together was a pretty smart move. Trying to pick one main character from the main Avenger’s cast would be tricky and trying to make separate main campaign structures centered around whichever one you pick sounds like an absolute nightmare development-wise. Picking someone else not already part of the team to bring everyone together was a good call. Kamala Khan also was pretty decent as a protagonist and her overall story arc, despite some more messy bits of writing and cringeworthy dialogue. In terms of messy writing, I’m more just referring to most character decisions being based on leaps of logic and then treating all of that like fact. The rest of the Avengers cast ranges from pretty good to heavily underutilized. Bruce Banner and Tony Stark were some particular standouts for me, but that’s mainly due to them actually being present in this game’s campaign. Thor and Captain America in the campaign was pretty disappointing as they only really appear within the last 1-2 hours of the campaign and have little to no part in this game’s story.
All good aside with the main campaign, there was a whole heap of issues I did end up having with it, mainly regarding the mission design and gameplay. The story itself just kind of meanders around and doesn’t do all that many interesting things through its runtime. I mentioned a bit above about Thor and Captain America’s involvement overall, which disappointed me immensely. I understand not wanting the player to feel overwhelmed with the ability to play all of the characters at once, but having these two locked up until the end was really lame. The story also has a large slew of pacing issues that make everything all the more disappointing. A lot of the time it just meanders around when there is a lot it should be doing and by the time when things start to get interesting it just kinda ends. The most disappointing thing for me with this game was the lack of overall Marvel Villains. Square Enix had access to the entire Avenger’s catalog of characters, and they chose to only include 3 super villains, 2 of which are introduced near the start of the game and immediately dropped after their respective fights. M.O.D.A.K. as the main villain was fun, but I really wish this game at the very least brought out some various minor villains to spice up many of the story moments instead of just having the crew fight boring robots. I also really disliked the overall mission design mainly due to how boring it was overall as I can tell this game was attempting to cut some corners by including a majority of the multiplayer maps with some objectives included inside. There are some unique ones, but they are very few and far between.
Before talking about the mission design, I should first talk about the general gameplay. The overall gameplay plays somewhat similarly to something like the Batman Arkham, or Spider-Man games, which was inherently what got me somewhat interested in this game. That said the general gameplay is this weird amalgamation of overly complex and annoying mechanics, on top of the somewhat easy-to-recognize gameplay of those other games. Besides the overall common gameplay that comprises of beating up enemies, and dodging attacks, there are a bunch of other things inter-spliced into the gameplay such as parry’s, special attacks that have a cooldown afterward, and this one strange counter-like move that does different things depending on the hero, but It mainly powers up their attack while also allowing for a dodge. I don’t personally know what it does since it’s so confusing and its effects are almost negligible in gameplay. When compared to that of something like Spider-Man, this game’s gameplay just feels overly confusing, and this is coming from someone who loves games with a lot of complexity in the combat such as Devil May Cry, or Nioh 2. I blame a lot of it on the tutorials, which are both incredibly intrusive due to how many different ones this game has, while also never really feeling all that helpful for explaining things in the gameplay due to the overall focus of them being all over the place in terms of trying to teach the player each character’s mechanics. Aside from the gameplay being overly confusing for a new player, it also lacks the weight and feeling that the other superhero beat-them-up games do so well. Every character feels incredibly sluggish to control while also lacking the weight when each attack aligns which makes other game’s combat satisfying.
I partially blame this on the fact that there are so many different Avengers and that they each play so differently, but it really shouldn’t feel as bad as it does. I do have to praise the fact that each plays pretty differently from one another, and I actually did like to play as about half the roster I tried out. Iron Man, Captain America, and Kate Bishop were my favorite of the bunch to play, whereas I would argue that Hulk and Thor were the worst. Hulk suffers from the problem where his moves are incredibly slow and weightless thanks to how bloated enemy health bars are, and he really lacks the destructive feeling that playing as the Hulk should have. Thor’s entire moveset feels incredibly sluggish and almost none of the attack flows together well. On the fun end of the spectrum, I like how Iron Man balances his ranged and aerial gameplay with his melee combat, along with the sheer amount of tools at his disposal. Captain America also hits this really great balance with his gameplay that fits how I presume he would fight in combat. The other characters either play just fine or are kind of boring overall.
The just ok gameplay is especially hurt by the repetitive mission design and lack of enemy variety to keep me wanting to play. In total, I think I counted 9 different enemy types in total for the main game, which is awful, especially considering that this is a live service game. This has been something that has been frustrating me a lot in modern games, especially in live service games. You can’t have a good combat system in a game without having fun foes to fight and use it with. Fighting the same 9 enemy types that you have seen since the first hour of the game without any new ones introduced as the campaign passes by is awful and makes everything super boring. This is especially bad when almost every single enemy is a basic boring humanoid robot with similar movesets and widely bloated health values. I get that this game wanted to primarily stick to having robots as the main enemy, considering that A.I.M. specializes in robots, but you can also do so many cool things with robots if they put their minds to it. The few bosses in this game and its dlc campaigns are mostly regular enemies and minibosses repackaged with bloated health bars which are incredibly disappointing. All of these issues I have already mentioned connect back to the mission design which is abysmal.
Each and every mission in this game takes place in similar boring badland, tundra, or laboratory setting that lacks any sort of interesting appearance. Each of these areas are littered with the same reused A.I.M. facility assets that were already boring the moment I booted this game up and relies on reusing them at every possible moment. Most missions require you to go to an objective which is usually kill enemies, and then progress forward to do more boring objectives comprised of standing around an area to capture it or opening a safe, and you repeat these things until the mission ends like half an hour later. There are some side objectives such as opening loot chests scattered around the level, or freeing prisoners, but none of them are worthwhile since they all reuse like 3 different assets and building structures across the large amount of missions I did. Every single mission that wasn’t handcrafted to be used specifically for the main campaign is a slog like this and I just don’t know how anyone can have fun repeating these over and over again as a live service-like game, even with a group of friends. Every single mission is grindy and boring and just the sheer amount of levels and gear you need to grind to try out the harder missions that were added to new areas added with new updates is a drag. I just don’t understand how publishers and developers can think this kind of content can hold itself and a player base up for years as a live service project.
I do need to talk about the live service elements as though the microtransaction-related stuff is gone now, the general live service structure is still here and it’s still awful. First up there is all of the loot and gear you can collect by completing missions, defeating enemies, and opening chests which is all awful. The best example for having fun loot in a game I can think of always comes down to the Borderlands franchise thanks to how that loot can greatly change up gameplay. Each piece of loot you can collect in those games can drastically change how you play depending on what the weapon or item’s loot can do. You could find something cool like a gun that reloads by you chucking it at enemies, or something like a shield that drops your main health value to 1hp while having an absurdly massive amount of protection from that said shield. Every single item like this does an amazing job of spicing the gameplay up. Compare that to something like Avengers where all of the loot you pick up and equip to your characters only does things like increase attack and defense exponentially. Why would I, the player, want to grind crappy loot like this that will not matter in the long scheme of things instead of something interesting like say giving the Hulk new attacks or changing how I would play as him. There is no fun grind in this game as it takes forever to really get anywhere with any character. I partially wanted to try and fight a super boss that was added with one of the updates, which I figured that I could reach pretty easily considering my level after playing through all of the extra content, just to learn that I would need to grind with a single character up to 15-20 more hours just to even get to a point where I could even unlock the level, followed up with the fact that I would still need to do even more to have a chance at that said super boss. Like I understand that something may be a super boss and that requires a bit of grinding, but I just can’t force myself to even want to play the game in general, why should I want to farm for so long to attempt something like this?
I think it’s time now to briefly talk about the main extra free content added to the game. There were 3 main story mission drops before this game kicked the can. Each of them ranges quite a bit in terms of quality. The first that I checked out was Taking A.I.M. which is the first part of a 2 part Hawkeye storyline. In this, you gain access to play Kate Bishop, who I think is the best feeling character to play in the game. Her moveset feels good to chain together, and her overall kit is really great. The campaign isn’t so as it reuses the same tundra environment from the base game and the campaign is mainly centered around setting up the story for part 2. There are no new areas or side objectives and the campaign is laid out almost the same as every single multiplayer mission in the game. There are technically 3 bosses, though only one of them is unique. The other 2 are just reused enemies from the base game which is disappointing. The new boss at the end absolutely sucks as it just doesn’t work well in a multiplayer-like setting due to how the moves mainly lock onto a single character. The second operation, Future Imperfect was a step forward in terms of quality as it features a whole new area and a pretty fun campaign overall. Hawkeye is a more boring version of Kate Bishop which was a bit disappointing overall. The storyline itself was pretty fun up all the way until the end where it just kind of ends unceremoniously with it expecting you to beat the Scientist Supreme super boss I mentioned earlier, which wasn’t going to happen for me. The new main campaign boss fight was also absolutely awful. You fight Maestro who has this insanely bloated health bar that no joke took me 15 minutes to whittle down with constant aggression. Finally, there was the War for Wakanda operation that was actually quite good. It’s got a basic but fun storyline, a really cool new area, new mission and side objectives, new enemies for the first time since the game launched and new texture change-ups to just about every single thing that returned from the base game. This campaign was a huge step above every other one in the game and was easily some of the most enjoyable content overall. Really, the other 2 DLC campaigns should have been more like this, and if so I think this game could have had a future. Sadly this is where the game just kinda died off. There were a few extra characters who were added which I didn’t try out besides Spider-Man who played like complete crap.
Overall, I kinda hate this game. I think there are some pretty good bones here to be something cool, but the overall focus on being a live service completely takes away from all of that. I feel as if this game was developed solely to be a single-player game. It could honestly be great if they put in the effort to really polish the present characters and have an interesting campaign with interesting level design. It’s a shame that this project ended up being a dud, and that I couldn’t come around to liking it in the end regardless of its flaws. I can’t recommend this game, both since it sucks but also since it’s not available to buy. That said, you're not really missing out on much.
5/10
3 Yrs♥✓#
Calbon3 Yrs♥✓#
Castlevania Anniversary Collection
The Castlevania Anniversary Collection has been something I have been playing through slowly over the last year and a half. This collection originally released back in 2019 and contains 8 classic castlevania games, which range quite heavily from good to bad. I picked this collection up for pretty cheap when it released since I’ve always wanted to give this series a try and where else would be a better starting point than the series original games. Anyways here are my thoughts on the entire collection.
Castlevania
Castlevania is still a really good platformer from the NES era today. I really love the 8 bit visuals in this game, especially with how each stage feels vastly different than one another. Castlevania is indeed very tough, but for most of the game, I found the difficulty to be actually pretty great. The progressive ramp of each stage getting harder was paced really well for the straight forward nature of the game. Although, near the end of the game, there is Stage 15, which is a real test of patience and is honestly extremely unfair. Simon Belmont feels pretty decent to play as, with gameplay being a simple dash to the ending of each stage while fighting off obstacles. I like the weighty feeling of how Simon moves and jumps, although it can be rather annoying on sections involving staircases. The sub-weapons you can unlock are all pretty fun to use, with the cross being my favorite of the bunch, followed by the axe. The bosses in this game range from being pretty fun, to being an absolute nightmare to beat. Dracula and Death particularly are very rough to face, with Dracula almost being the breaking point in this game for me. It mostly comes down to the fact that a lot of Dracula’s moves aren’t the best telegraphed with the 8-bit graphics, along with me not knowing the trick for the second phase of the fight. Death’s fight, although brutal was really neat, and considering the fact that it’s supposed to reappear through a majority of this franchise, i’m interesting in seeing the evolution of such a tough encounter. This really wraps up what I have to say about the original Castlevania. Its still a pretty great game after all this time.
8/10
Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest
Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest is an infamous mess of a video game that was definitely an experience to check out. I do appreciate that this game is willing to try something new with its somewhat open Metroidvania style, which if i’m correct, hasn’t been attempted yet up to this point. The problem with this comes with the fact that it's a complete boring and confusing mess. I assume part of this is due to hardware limitations that were on the NES, along with it releasing less than a year after the first. Anyways, though most of the new stuff kinda sucks a lot of the great aspects of the first Castlevania return. Things such as the tough but fun gameplay, good soundtrack, the pixel art. That said, the pixel art can be a bit repetitive with the main mansions and overworld reusing a lot of the assets and areas. The main gameplay loop of this game has you play as Simon again, where he needs to find pieces of Dracula to destroy Dracula once and for all to cure a curse put upon him. Throughout the game, you will be venturing from mansion to mansion to collect a Dracula piece. The mansions all had a good opportunity to be different smaller levels, but ultimately look nearly identical and offer an annoying gameplay loop of saving up enough hearts to buy a wooden stake, where you can then use it to destroy an orb and obtain a dracula part. Most of the gameplay boils down to saving up hearts from slaying enemies to buy upgrades to your whip, and other goodies to better make your journey more pleasant. This does make this game overall probably the easiest of the Castlevania games, and with how boring the main gameplay loop is, i’m alright with it. Extra frustration with regular Castlevania annoyances on top of the fact that this game is pretty confusing would have made this game borderline unplayable, at least to me. Going back to what I said about this game being confusing. Most of the main gameplay here is frustrating thanks to not very great direction in the hints, and even clues on how to progress to areas. The worst of all is with the infamous red gem needed to reach a much higher-up area not specified by the game. Another thing that absolutely sucks are the bosses, who can all be best described as small road bumps. There are only 3 of them and each of them can be defeated in less than 30 seconds. The Dracula fight is especially baffling. I managed to defeat the boss with the fire whip before Dracula was given a single chance to fight back. More or less Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest is a pretty awful sequel to Castlevania that I don’t really recommend playing.
4/10
Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse
Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse is a pretty great sequel to Castlevania. Instead of continuing forwards with the more Metroidvania established style with II, this one goes back to the series roots. One cool new feature that this game has is branching level paths where you can occasionally choose between playing through one level or the other. This was a fun new feature that does bring some replayability to this game. Castlevania III is easily the hardest of all 3 games in this collection which is something I’m kind of mixed on. On one hand, most of the levels are tough but fun in an overall fair way, but on the other there are a lot of really annoying elements that make this game unnecessarily frustrating. The first few levels hit this pretty good balance, but the issues begin to spring up once you reach the ghost pirate ship level. Stuff such as stair being used everywhere with the most annoying possible enemy setups and an insane amount of bottomless pits really makes this game a nightmare to play. Without save states, I really doubt that I would have been able to beat this game just due to how unfair and unfun some of the later levels are. This all sucks since everything else this game does is amazing. The levels and artwork is a massive step up from the first two games, and the music is great. The gameplay is just as good as ever, especially thanks to you being able to switch characters on the fly. Castlevania III has you primarily play as Trevor Belmont, but depending on which routes you take when venturing through the game, you can come across 3 other characters who are all quite a bit of fun. For instance, I primarily used Sypha Belnades as my secondary character, who can use magic to defeat enemies. Despite not really enjoying how unfairly difficult this game can get, I still had a lot of fun with this game thanks to the inclusion of save states in this collection. I try to keep save scumming to a bare minimum for games like these and Mega Man, and thus I only really save at the start of each level and boss fight. Being able to do this made going through this game quite fun despite some annoyance and it really allowed certain aspects to stand out without a lot of the stress of managing lives. For instance, this is actually the first game of the collection that I have played where I enjoyed the final Dracula boss fight. Everything all said, I had a pretty good time with this game and I would recommend playing it if you are up for a challenge.
8/10
Super Castlevania IV
Super Castlevania IV is a fantastic game and I think easily my favorite of this collection. The jump from NES to the SNES was absolutely massive and ended up resulting in something really amazing. Visually this game is amazing and easily my favorite up to this point in time. I love the usage of color, which is a lot more vibrant this time around thanks to the SNES. I also love the shear amount of variety when it comes to each level and how they play out. Up to this point in the series, most levels felt pretty static on what they were able to do, but this game really switches things up with different level themes. Where as in the game prior, most levels just kind of stuck to their unique visual’s and themes, most in this game really change things up as they progress. Take for instance the first level which begins at a ruined fortress which eventually leads to a barn where the boss is located. The levels in this game were fantastic and hit this really great balance in terms of their difficulty both thanks to the much more enjoyable level design, and movement. Out of all of the games in this collection, I think that this one may have the most fluid gameplay thanks to it’s snappier movement and Simon now being able to whip in 8 directions instead of the usual 2-4. My favorite new addition is when you hold down the attack button, Simon holds the whip and then you are given the ability to control how the whip swings. At first I just assumed that it was a fun little gimmick to show off the SNES capabilities, but you can actually do a lot with it, such as using it as an almost shield against certain enemy attacks. I love how this game feels to play, and I honestly think it and the more fair level design make this game easily the most enjoyable of the series to me. The boss fights are also quite a bit of fun here, with this game also having a pretty fun Dracula fight, with a real kickass final phase. I think my favorite boss was the Dancing Spectres in stage 6, due to the really cool concepts of two people attacking and dancing together and sliding arena that just looked awesome. Overall, I honestly really liked Super Castlevania IV. This game is well worth trying out and has been a real highlight of this collection.
9/10
Castlevania: The Adventure
Castlevania: The Adventure is a pretty awful little gameboy game that may be the worst game in the entire Castlevania Franchise. Most of the problems with this game stem from its overall janky platforming controls. More or less, the already slow platforming mechanics in Castlevania games prior are a lot worse here and end up making any moment involving platforming a real frustrating experience. This game is comprised of 4 stages you progress through similar to the original Castlevania, albeit a lot shorter overall. Each area progressively gets harder and ends up leading towards some incredibly frustrating moments. I do think that there are some decent things about this game, but they do get dragged down by the frustrating gameplay. Most of the enemies in this game are completely new and somewhat unique to this game which is pretty cool, and I don’t really mind most of the enemies here such as the Zeldo, and the large zombie torturer-like enemies throw boomerang-like blades. Bosses range from very easy to unnecessarily frustrating as the game progresses, with the Dracula Fight yet again being the worst of the bunch. The Dracula fight starts off pretty decent with the first phase, but the final phase where he turns into a bat is a complete mess and is very annoying. The pixel art is decent for a gameboy game and the soundtrack, although not amazing, is still relatively decent. I don’t really recommend this game as a whole, even though it's only a bit over an hour and a half long with save states. It's a really bad gameboy and castlevania game as a whole. I’d much rather recommend it’s sequel Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge, which I will talk about next
3/10
Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge
Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge is a pretty huge step up when it comes to the last gameboy title. This game is structured very much like a mega man game where you are given the option to choose the order in which you tackle each of the levels. There are 4 main levels that you can choose from and then a final one once you complete those 4. The levels are all based around an element and were all pretty fun. The gameplay was still a bit stiff, like with the last game, but it was still pretty fun. Sub weapons are actually present in this game, and though a bit basic were a welcome return. I had a really good time with the game up until the last 2 boss fights that honestly brought the overall great experience down quite a bit. Soleil and Dracula are both really awful fights that are borderline impossible to beat normally thanks to how you need almost computer-like reflexes to evade attacks. Both of these bosses took me almost longer to beat than the rest of the game which is frustrating. Besides these bosses, Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge is a pretty solid game that I had a good time with
5/10
Castlevania Bloodlines
Castlevania Bloodlines is the most modern out of all of the games on this collection as it came out in 1994 on the Sega Genesis. In this game you are able to choose from two vampire hunters named John Morris and Eric Lecarde to go after and slay Dracula once again after he is awoken by another vampire named Elizabeth Bartley. This game consists of 6 stages which were a mostly great time. This game is easily the best one visually in this collection as it does an amazing job at showing off the power of the Sega Genesis. Though there were only 6 stages, each of these stages are pretty long and overall have a lot of variety visually and from a gameplay perspective. This game takes place over quite a few recognizable places in Europe such as Greece, Rome, and Paris. I really liked just about every stage minus some parts in stage 5 that are just a bit too annoying. This game mostly hits a really great balance of being difficult and fair with my only real issues coming from how you only get 3 lives in like the entire game and some of the levels being just a bit too long. These are mostly alleviated with save states, so it all ended up not being too big of an issues. I also liked how there are 2 players to choose from. John primarily fights with a whip and Eric uses a spear. I played this game as John, since I already felt pretty comfortable with the whip, and didn’t really want to change it up for this collection. The gameplay did however feel like a bit of a step back in terms to how it feels since Bloodlines decided to do away with the better controllability in air, 8 directional attack, and flacid whip ability from Super Castlevania IV. That said, it still does feel pretty good and is easily the best feeling game in the collection besides IV. My favorite thing in this game were the boss fights, which were both some of the most creative and enjoyable of the series. The fact that I came out of this game having both enjoyed the Death and Dracula fights despite usually not liking them in the games prior is something worth calling out. I also do want to mention the Gear Steamer boss fight that was easily one of the coolest in the game due to how it breaks apart and rebuilds itself with it’s almost 3D visuals. Castlevania Bloodlines is a fantastic game that is well worth trying out in this collection.
8/10
Kid Dracula
Kid Dracula is a real oddity in this collection. Kid Dracula is a Castlevania game that was released on the Famicon, where you play as who I assume is a younger Alucard. This game was never released in North America and Europe until now with this collection, which makes this game especially interesting to me. The story for Kid Dracula has him venture off to beat a demon king named Galamoth who stole his army and woke him up from his slumber. This game is a parody game and isn’t canon in the overall Castlevania series, but I did still think it was a good bit of fun. I enjoyed the more cartoony artstyle this time around as it was a fun switch up from the more spooky one that the last games all had. There are 9 levels, and they are all surprisingly varied in terms of their level design and appearance. For instance, one level you may be all the way in some snowy field platforming on icy platforms, and then the next level later you are in New York city platforming off buildings and subway trains. The overall level design up until stage 7 and 9 is pretty fun and overall quite fair. My favorite stage was easily the New York one I mentioned before. Stages 7 and 9 do end up kicking the difficultly up to what I would say is pretty unfair with some of the platforming and enemy placement. Overall gameplay was also quite fun as Kid Dracula controls pretty differently to how the main series plays. Kid Dracula plays somewhat like Megaman in where he shoots out fireballs normally and can charge them to a big one with a held button press. After you finish each level you are usually rewarded with a new powerup that can be switched on the fly that allows him to perform various other attacks such as homing fireballs, or platforming based abilities such as turning into a bat. These were all quite a bit of fun to experiment with as I blasted my way through this game. Another quite fun thing were the boss fights which although are pretty easy, were pretty fun thematically. One real notable one was the Lady Liberty boss fight that literally just has you play trivia based around the Statue of Liberty and American history. I had a pretty good time overall with Kid Dracula and I would recommend trying this game out if you pick up this collection. It’s a pretty fun little experience that I’m glad got a port.
7/10
And that was the Castlevania Anniversary Collection. I had a pretty good time overall playing through these classic games, despite their varying levels of quality. The collection itself is mostly put together pretty well, with my only real issues coming from some technical hiccups. Throughout each of the games, I would notice that occasionally the games would slowdown quite a bit once either a bunch of enemies were on screen or there were a lot of particle effects, along with some serious issues with screen tearing and flickering textures. They were at their absolute worst with each of the gameboy games and Kid Dracula. Besides those issues, the collection is mostly well put together. Everything is bundled up pretty neatly and has a good chunk of extra content such as their overseas versions and guidebooks bundled into the main launcher. Though I can’t really say that every game in this collection is really great, I’m glad that they included these titles for both preservation and completion sake. It’s nice to be able to try out bad older games from time to time just to see where the series went astray and how it evolved over time. The Castlevania Anniversary Collection is a pretty great bundle of games that can go for as cheap as $3 at times and I would absolutely recommend it if you want to try this series out.
8/10
Series Ranking from Best to Worst
1. Super Castlevania IV
2. Castlevania: Bloodlines
3. Castlevania
4. Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse
5. Kid Dracula
6. Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge
7. Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest
8. Castlevania: The Adventure
The Castlevania Anniversary Collection has been something I have been playing through slowly over the last year and a half. This collection originally released back in 2019 and contains 8 classic castlevania games, which range quite heavily from good to bad. I picked this collection up for pretty cheap when it released since I’ve always wanted to give this series a try and where else would be a better starting point than the series original games. Anyways here are my thoughts on the entire collection.
Castlevania
Castlevania is still a really good platformer from the NES era today. I really love the 8 bit visuals in this game, especially with how each stage feels vastly different than one another. Castlevania is indeed very tough, but for most of the game, I found the difficulty to be actually pretty great. The progressive ramp of each stage getting harder was paced really well for the straight forward nature of the game. Although, near the end of the game, there is Stage 15, which is a real test of patience and is honestly extremely unfair. Simon Belmont feels pretty decent to play as, with gameplay being a simple dash to the ending of each stage while fighting off obstacles. I like the weighty feeling of how Simon moves and jumps, although it can be rather annoying on sections involving staircases. The sub-weapons you can unlock are all pretty fun to use, with the cross being my favorite of the bunch, followed by the axe. The bosses in this game range from being pretty fun, to being an absolute nightmare to beat. Dracula and Death particularly are very rough to face, with Dracula almost being the breaking point in this game for me. It mostly comes down to the fact that a lot of Dracula’s moves aren’t the best telegraphed with the 8-bit graphics, along with me not knowing the trick for the second phase of the fight. Death’s fight, although brutal was really neat, and considering the fact that it’s supposed to reappear through a majority of this franchise, i’m interesting in seeing the evolution of such a tough encounter. This really wraps up what I have to say about the original Castlevania. Its still a pretty great game after all this time.
8/10
Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest
Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest is an infamous mess of a video game that was definitely an experience to check out. I do appreciate that this game is willing to try something new with its somewhat open Metroidvania style, which if i’m correct, hasn’t been attempted yet up to this point. The problem with this comes with the fact that it's a complete boring and confusing mess. I assume part of this is due to hardware limitations that were on the NES, along with it releasing less than a year after the first. Anyways, though most of the new stuff kinda sucks a lot of the great aspects of the first Castlevania return. Things such as the tough but fun gameplay, good soundtrack, the pixel art. That said, the pixel art can be a bit repetitive with the main mansions and overworld reusing a lot of the assets and areas. The main gameplay loop of this game has you play as Simon again, where he needs to find pieces of Dracula to destroy Dracula once and for all to cure a curse put upon him. Throughout the game, you will be venturing from mansion to mansion to collect a Dracula piece. The mansions all had a good opportunity to be different smaller levels, but ultimately look nearly identical and offer an annoying gameplay loop of saving up enough hearts to buy a wooden stake, where you can then use it to destroy an orb and obtain a dracula part. Most of the gameplay boils down to saving up hearts from slaying enemies to buy upgrades to your whip, and other goodies to better make your journey more pleasant. This does make this game overall probably the easiest of the Castlevania games, and with how boring the main gameplay loop is, i’m alright with it. Extra frustration with regular Castlevania annoyances on top of the fact that this game is pretty confusing would have made this game borderline unplayable, at least to me. Going back to what I said about this game being confusing. Most of the main gameplay here is frustrating thanks to not very great direction in the hints, and even clues on how to progress to areas. The worst of all is with the infamous red gem needed to reach a much higher-up area not specified by the game. Another thing that absolutely sucks are the bosses, who can all be best described as small road bumps. There are only 3 of them and each of them can be defeated in less than 30 seconds. The Dracula fight is especially baffling. I managed to defeat the boss with the fire whip before Dracula was given a single chance to fight back. More or less Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest is a pretty awful sequel to Castlevania that I don’t really recommend playing.
4/10
Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse
Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse is a pretty great sequel to Castlevania. Instead of continuing forwards with the more Metroidvania established style with II, this one goes back to the series roots. One cool new feature that this game has is branching level paths where you can occasionally choose between playing through one level or the other. This was a fun new feature that does bring some replayability to this game. Castlevania III is easily the hardest of all 3 games in this collection which is something I’m kind of mixed on. On one hand, most of the levels are tough but fun in an overall fair way, but on the other there are a lot of really annoying elements that make this game unnecessarily frustrating. The first few levels hit this pretty good balance, but the issues begin to spring up once you reach the ghost pirate ship level. Stuff such as stair being used everywhere with the most annoying possible enemy setups and an insane amount of bottomless pits really makes this game a nightmare to play. Without save states, I really doubt that I would have been able to beat this game just due to how unfair and unfun some of the later levels are. This all sucks since everything else this game does is amazing. The levels and artwork is a massive step up from the first two games, and the music is great. The gameplay is just as good as ever, especially thanks to you being able to switch characters on the fly. Castlevania III has you primarily play as Trevor Belmont, but depending on which routes you take when venturing through the game, you can come across 3 other characters who are all quite a bit of fun. For instance, I primarily used Sypha Belnades as my secondary character, who can use magic to defeat enemies. Despite not really enjoying how unfairly difficult this game can get, I still had a lot of fun with this game thanks to the inclusion of save states in this collection. I try to keep save scumming to a bare minimum for games like these and Mega Man, and thus I only really save at the start of each level and boss fight. Being able to do this made going through this game quite fun despite some annoyance and it really allowed certain aspects to stand out without a lot of the stress of managing lives. For instance, this is actually the first game of the collection that I have played where I enjoyed the final Dracula boss fight. Everything all said, I had a pretty good time with this game and I would recommend playing it if you are up for a challenge.
8/10
Super Castlevania IV
Super Castlevania IV is a fantastic game and I think easily my favorite of this collection. The jump from NES to the SNES was absolutely massive and ended up resulting in something really amazing. Visually this game is amazing and easily my favorite up to this point in time. I love the usage of color, which is a lot more vibrant this time around thanks to the SNES. I also love the shear amount of variety when it comes to each level and how they play out. Up to this point in the series, most levels felt pretty static on what they were able to do, but this game really switches things up with different level themes. Where as in the game prior, most levels just kind of stuck to their unique visual’s and themes, most in this game really change things up as they progress. Take for instance the first level which begins at a ruined fortress which eventually leads to a barn where the boss is located. The levels in this game were fantastic and hit this really great balance in terms of their difficulty both thanks to the much more enjoyable level design, and movement. Out of all of the games in this collection, I think that this one may have the most fluid gameplay thanks to it’s snappier movement and Simon now being able to whip in 8 directions instead of the usual 2-4. My favorite new addition is when you hold down the attack button, Simon holds the whip and then you are given the ability to control how the whip swings. At first I just assumed that it was a fun little gimmick to show off the SNES capabilities, but you can actually do a lot with it, such as using it as an almost shield against certain enemy attacks. I love how this game feels to play, and I honestly think it and the more fair level design make this game easily the most enjoyable of the series to me. The boss fights are also quite a bit of fun here, with this game also having a pretty fun Dracula fight, with a real kickass final phase. I think my favorite boss was the Dancing Spectres in stage 6, due to the really cool concepts of two people attacking and dancing together and sliding arena that just looked awesome. Overall, I honestly really liked Super Castlevania IV. This game is well worth trying out and has been a real highlight of this collection.
9/10
Castlevania: The Adventure
Castlevania: The Adventure is a pretty awful little gameboy game that may be the worst game in the entire Castlevania Franchise. Most of the problems with this game stem from its overall janky platforming controls. More or less, the already slow platforming mechanics in Castlevania games prior are a lot worse here and end up making any moment involving platforming a real frustrating experience. This game is comprised of 4 stages you progress through similar to the original Castlevania, albeit a lot shorter overall. Each area progressively gets harder and ends up leading towards some incredibly frustrating moments. I do think that there are some decent things about this game, but they do get dragged down by the frustrating gameplay. Most of the enemies in this game are completely new and somewhat unique to this game which is pretty cool, and I don’t really mind most of the enemies here such as the Zeldo, and the large zombie torturer-like enemies throw boomerang-like blades. Bosses range from very easy to unnecessarily frustrating as the game progresses, with the Dracula Fight yet again being the worst of the bunch. The Dracula fight starts off pretty decent with the first phase, but the final phase where he turns into a bat is a complete mess and is very annoying. The pixel art is decent for a gameboy game and the soundtrack, although not amazing, is still relatively decent. I don’t really recommend this game as a whole, even though it's only a bit over an hour and a half long with save states. It's a really bad gameboy and castlevania game as a whole. I’d much rather recommend it’s sequel Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge, which I will talk about next
3/10
Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge
Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge is a pretty huge step up when it comes to the last gameboy title. This game is structured very much like a mega man game where you are given the option to choose the order in which you tackle each of the levels. There are 4 main levels that you can choose from and then a final one once you complete those 4. The levels are all based around an element and were all pretty fun. The gameplay was still a bit stiff, like with the last game, but it was still pretty fun. Sub weapons are actually present in this game, and though a bit basic were a welcome return. I had a really good time with the game up until the last 2 boss fights that honestly brought the overall great experience down quite a bit. Soleil and Dracula are both really awful fights that are borderline impossible to beat normally thanks to how you need almost computer-like reflexes to evade attacks. Both of these bosses took me almost longer to beat than the rest of the game which is frustrating. Besides these bosses, Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge is a pretty solid game that I had a good time with
5/10
Castlevania Bloodlines
Castlevania Bloodlines is the most modern out of all of the games on this collection as it came out in 1994 on the Sega Genesis. In this game you are able to choose from two vampire hunters named John Morris and Eric Lecarde to go after and slay Dracula once again after he is awoken by another vampire named Elizabeth Bartley. This game consists of 6 stages which were a mostly great time. This game is easily the best one visually in this collection as it does an amazing job at showing off the power of the Sega Genesis. Though there were only 6 stages, each of these stages are pretty long and overall have a lot of variety visually and from a gameplay perspective. This game takes place over quite a few recognizable places in Europe such as Greece, Rome, and Paris. I really liked just about every stage minus some parts in stage 5 that are just a bit too annoying. This game mostly hits a really great balance of being difficult and fair with my only real issues coming from how you only get 3 lives in like the entire game and some of the levels being just a bit too long. These are mostly alleviated with save states, so it all ended up not being too big of an issues. I also liked how there are 2 players to choose from. John primarily fights with a whip and Eric uses a spear. I played this game as John, since I already felt pretty comfortable with the whip, and didn’t really want to change it up for this collection. The gameplay did however feel like a bit of a step back in terms to how it feels since Bloodlines decided to do away with the better controllability in air, 8 directional attack, and flacid whip ability from Super Castlevania IV. That said, it still does feel pretty good and is easily the best feeling game in the collection besides IV. My favorite thing in this game were the boss fights, which were both some of the most creative and enjoyable of the series. The fact that I came out of this game having both enjoyed the Death and Dracula fights despite usually not liking them in the games prior is something worth calling out. I also do want to mention the Gear Steamer boss fight that was easily one of the coolest in the game due to how it breaks apart and rebuilds itself with it’s almost 3D visuals. Castlevania Bloodlines is a fantastic game that is well worth trying out in this collection.
8/10
Kid Dracula
Kid Dracula is a real oddity in this collection. Kid Dracula is a Castlevania game that was released on the Famicon, where you play as who I assume is a younger Alucard. This game was never released in North America and Europe until now with this collection, which makes this game especially interesting to me. The story for Kid Dracula has him venture off to beat a demon king named Galamoth who stole his army and woke him up from his slumber. This game is a parody game and isn’t canon in the overall Castlevania series, but I did still think it was a good bit of fun. I enjoyed the more cartoony artstyle this time around as it was a fun switch up from the more spooky one that the last games all had. There are 9 levels, and they are all surprisingly varied in terms of their level design and appearance. For instance, one level you may be all the way in some snowy field platforming on icy platforms, and then the next level later you are in New York city platforming off buildings and subway trains. The overall level design up until stage 7 and 9 is pretty fun and overall quite fair. My favorite stage was easily the New York one I mentioned before. Stages 7 and 9 do end up kicking the difficultly up to what I would say is pretty unfair with some of the platforming and enemy placement. Overall gameplay was also quite fun as Kid Dracula controls pretty differently to how the main series plays. Kid Dracula plays somewhat like Megaman in where he shoots out fireballs normally and can charge them to a big one with a held button press. After you finish each level you are usually rewarded with a new powerup that can be switched on the fly that allows him to perform various other attacks such as homing fireballs, or platforming based abilities such as turning into a bat. These were all quite a bit of fun to experiment with as I blasted my way through this game. Another quite fun thing were the boss fights which although are pretty easy, were pretty fun thematically. One real notable one was the Lady Liberty boss fight that literally just has you play trivia based around the Statue of Liberty and American history. I had a pretty good time overall with Kid Dracula and I would recommend trying this game out if you pick up this collection. It’s a pretty fun little experience that I’m glad got a port.
7/10
And that was the Castlevania Anniversary Collection. I had a pretty good time overall playing through these classic games, despite their varying levels of quality. The collection itself is mostly put together pretty well, with my only real issues coming from some technical hiccups. Throughout each of the games, I would notice that occasionally the games would slowdown quite a bit once either a bunch of enemies were on screen or there were a lot of particle effects, along with some serious issues with screen tearing and flickering textures. They were at their absolute worst with each of the gameboy games and Kid Dracula. Besides those issues, the collection is mostly well put together. Everything is bundled up pretty neatly and has a good chunk of extra content such as their overseas versions and guidebooks bundled into the main launcher. Though I can’t really say that every game in this collection is really great, I’m glad that they included these titles for both preservation and completion sake. It’s nice to be able to try out bad older games from time to time just to see where the series went astray and how it evolved over time. The Castlevania Anniversary Collection is a pretty great bundle of games that can go for as cheap as $3 at times and I would absolutely recommend it if you want to try this series out.
8/10
Series Ranking from Best to Worst
1. Super Castlevania IV
2. Castlevania: Bloodlines
3. Castlevania
4. Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse
5. Kid Dracula
6. Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge
7. Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest
8. Castlevania: The Adventure
3 Yrs♥✓#
Calbon3 Yrs♥✓#
Mirror's Edge
Mirror’s Edge is a first-person platformer created by DICE back in 2008. In Mirror’s Edge, you play as Faith, who is a runner, which is a courier of sorts who transports stuff while evading the government surveillance. In the world of Mirror’s Edge, the main city where this is set is controlled by a totalitarian government regime that has full control of the population through surveillance. The main story is centered around Faith trying to free her sister, Kate who has been framed for the murder of a politician. To do this, you are going to need to parkour your way all throughout the city to try and find an out for your sister. The main story for Mirror’s Edge is pretty decent, thanks to it mainly sticking to the point and not really making up the whole focus of game. The gameplay is the real star of the show here, and I respect how this game doesn’t waste your time with that. Most of the story is told through stylized cutscenes that use this fun cel-shaded style. I’m pretty sure that they were done like this to help ease the budget, but I think they work well. The only real thing I didn’t love with this game’s story was it’s conclusion, which felt incredibly anticlimactic.
The gameplay of Mirror’s Edge is primarily centered around momentum based parkour. Faith is capable of all sorts of crazy parkour maneuvers that I did find to be kind of confusing at first, but I ultimately came around to quite enjoying it. The fluidity once you get a grasp on it all is pretty good. My only real complaint with it mainly comes with the speed of it all which is just a bit too slow for my taste, but that’s I think mainly due to it trying to be somewhat realistic instead of some cracked out movement based game that I normally enjoy. Though the fluidity is generally really good, there is still a lot of room to improve with that. On the other end of things, there is also some combat mixed into this game, and it’s honestly really awful. Mirror’s Edge attempts to try and blend the momentum of parkouring with combat through parkour, and it really just doesn’t nail the mark. The game doesn’t really explain how to perform the melee aspect of it all that well, along with it just not feeling all that great in practice. The shooting portions don’t really fare all that much better as well. Luckily most combat heavy sections can just be avoided outright and it’s often incentivised. Running away from large patrols of armed security forces is actually pretty fun.
Level design plays a good part in what makes a game like this fun and I think Mirror’s Edge does a mostly good job. For the most part, each of the levels in this game are quite fun. Each one usually has some pretty cool and unique locations and set pieces that made them all pretty memorable. Portions like the construction site in the chapter Heat, and the mall section in New Eden really come to mind when it comes to quite fun sections. When talking about level design, I think it’s also a good time to mention the overall use of colors that do a really great job of setting up the world and helping guide the player through the level. The city that this game takes place in is almost entirely the color white with some variation in color usually to mark certain buildings around the area. This ends up making the game look very slick in terms of its appearance while also does a good job at tying back to how sterile everything is here due to government control. It also works really well with how this game uses the color red to very subtly influence the player’s decision making and to act as an almost guide on how to proceed in a tough to figure out section. I never really found myself all that confused on how to proceed forward which was nice, and by doing this it very subtly makes it much more easy and fun to just focus on keeping up a quick pace with the gameplay. The only real thing that I wish this game did different with it’s level design was maybe being a bit less linear. Most of the levels just have one definitive way of progressing forwards, which isn’t inherently all that bad, but with a heavy momentum based gameplay style like this, I personally would have preferred for some more levels that allow for player experimentation with how you can progress through them rather than a static solution. That said, the level design is still pretty great and was a blast through my 6 hours.
Before wrapping this review up, I have a few small things that I want to mention. First off is the lighting which was really bad on my end. I’m not sure if the game was intended to look as bright as it was, or if it was a side effect of everything being the color white, and the overuse of lens flares. I spent a lot of time in the settings for this game trying to fiddle with the brightness to bring it down to a level where I could fully see what was going on in the environment, but I was unable to do so. I could have sworn that when checking around online at the time I played this, it might have been an issue with the PC port in general, but I could also be mistaken. This game overall is just a bit too bright, which is something I don’t normally have to mention. I also did have some issues with trying to get the PC port of this game to run properly, which is somewhat of a norm for older EA games with things like Dead Space, but this game also does fall victim to similar problems like that. Things like constant crashes in areas like the sewers, or the resolution and frame rate being really all over the place were things that I had to tinker around with for a while. This is definitely something to do with the age of this game more than say the game itself, but it’s worth bringing up for anyone that still wants to try this game on PC. Anyways, Mirror’s Edge is still a pretty great game and is worth trying out even today. It’s a quick and fun 6 or so hour long experience that doesn’t overstay its welcome.
7/10
Mirror’s Edge is a first-person platformer created by DICE back in 2008. In Mirror’s Edge, you play as Faith, who is a runner, which is a courier of sorts who transports stuff while evading the government surveillance. In the world of Mirror’s Edge, the main city where this is set is controlled by a totalitarian government regime that has full control of the population through surveillance. The main story is centered around Faith trying to free her sister, Kate who has been framed for the murder of a politician. To do this, you are going to need to parkour your way all throughout the city to try and find an out for your sister. The main story for Mirror’s Edge is pretty decent, thanks to it mainly sticking to the point and not really making up the whole focus of game. The gameplay is the real star of the show here, and I respect how this game doesn’t waste your time with that. Most of the story is told through stylized cutscenes that use this fun cel-shaded style. I’m pretty sure that they were done like this to help ease the budget, but I think they work well. The only real thing I didn’t love with this game’s story was it’s conclusion, which felt incredibly anticlimactic.
The gameplay of Mirror’s Edge is primarily centered around momentum based parkour. Faith is capable of all sorts of crazy parkour maneuvers that I did find to be kind of confusing at first, but I ultimately came around to quite enjoying it. The fluidity once you get a grasp on it all is pretty good. My only real complaint with it mainly comes with the speed of it all which is just a bit too slow for my taste, but that’s I think mainly due to it trying to be somewhat realistic instead of some cracked out movement based game that I normally enjoy. Though the fluidity is generally really good, there is still a lot of room to improve with that. On the other end of things, there is also some combat mixed into this game, and it’s honestly really awful. Mirror’s Edge attempts to try and blend the momentum of parkouring with combat through parkour, and it really just doesn’t nail the mark. The game doesn’t really explain how to perform the melee aspect of it all that well, along with it just not feeling all that great in practice. The shooting portions don’t really fare all that much better as well. Luckily most combat heavy sections can just be avoided outright and it’s often incentivised. Running away from large patrols of armed security forces is actually pretty fun.
Level design plays a good part in what makes a game like this fun and I think Mirror’s Edge does a mostly good job. For the most part, each of the levels in this game are quite fun. Each one usually has some pretty cool and unique locations and set pieces that made them all pretty memorable. Portions like the construction site in the chapter Heat, and the mall section in New Eden really come to mind when it comes to quite fun sections. When talking about level design, I think it’s also a good time to mention the overall use of colors that do a really great job of setting up the world and helping guide the player through the level. The city that this game takes place in is almost entirely the color white with some variation in color usually to mark certain buildings around the area. This ends up making the game look very slick in terms of its appearance while also does a good job at tying back to how sterile everything is here due to government control. It also works really well with how this game uses the color red to very subtly influence the player’s decision making and to act as an almost guide on how to proceed in a tough to figure out section. I never really found myself all that confused on how to proceed forward which was nice, and by doing this it very subtly makes it much more easy and fun to just focus on keeping up a quick pace with the gameplay. The only real thing that I wish this game did different with it’s level design was maybe being a bit less linear. Most of the levels just have one definitive way of progressing forwards, which isn’t inherently all that bad, but with a heavy momentum based gameplay style like this, I personally would have preferred for some more levels that allow for player experimentation with how you can progress through them rather than a static solution. That said, the level design is still pretty great and was a blast through my 6 hours.
Before wrapping this review up, I have a few small things that I want to mention. First off is the lighting which was really bad on my end. I’m not sure if the game was intended to look as bright as it was, or if it was a side effect of everything being the color white, and the overuse of lens flares. I spent a lot of time in the settings for this game trying to fiddle with the brightness to bring it down to a level where I could fully see what was going on in the environment, but I was unable to do so. I could have sworn that when checking around online at the time I played this, it might have been an issue with the PC port in general, but I could also be mistaken. This game overall is just a bit too bright, which is something I don’t normally have to mention. I also did have some issues with trying to get the PC port of this game to run properly, which is somewhat of a norm for older EA games with things like Dead Space, but this game also does fall victim to similar problems like that. Things like constant crashes in areas like the sewers, or the resolution and frame rate being really all over the place were things that I had to tinker around with for a while. This is definitely something to do with the age of this game more than say the game itself, but it’s worth bringing up for anyone that still wants to try this game on PC. Anyways, Mirror’s Edge is still a pretty great game and is worth trying out even today. It’s a quick and fun 6 or so hour long experience that doesn’t overstay its welcome.
7/10
3 Yrs♥✓#
Calbon3 Yrs♥✓#
Yakuza Kiwami 2
After I beat Yakuza Kiwami, I still had the urge to play more Yakuza, so I started up and beat Yakuza Kiwami 2. Yakuza Kiwami 2 is the first game in the series that I have played thats on the modern Dragon Engine that most titles in this series are made on. This change was a super welcome one in my own opinion thanks to how much more advanced it allows the games to be. Though it’s now without some of it’s own faults which I will mention a bit later, but I was super glad to see this shift. Yakuza Kiwami 2 is an overall pretty good sequel to the last games that does suffer a bit from it’s lackluster story
I’m gonna kick this review off with my thoughts on the story, which are all over the place when it comes to this game. Yakuza Kiwami 2 kicks off a year after the events of Kiwami 1, where Kiryu is overall enjoying his life outside the Yakuza. Trouble strikes when the leader of the Tojo clan, Terada is assassinated by a sect in the Omi Alliance, thus sparking massive amounts of conflict that could escalate to an all out war between the clans. Kiryu is then tasked with helping find a replacement clan leader before getting thrust into the center of this entire conflict. From here we are introduced to the main antagonist of the game Ryuji Goda, who leads the Go Ryu sect of the Omi Alliance, who wants to take full control of the Tojo clan and kill Kiryu to become the one and only dragon. Problems also arise when it comes to Kiryu and his groups attention that a Korean mafia is also partially behind the assassination as an act of revenge for a massacre caused by the Tojo alliance years ago, and now plan on painting the streets of Kamurocho with blood. The story for Yakuza Kiwami 2 is a mixed bag of really good aspects and other parts that really fell flat. Some aspects I really liked were seeing Kiryu become somewhat romantically involved with Sayama, a new police character introduced with this game. I also really enjoyed Ryuji as the “main” villain despite how little screentime he gets. He’s easily my favorite villain so far in the series, and it was really a shame with how much he gets sidelined for everything else happening in this story. My biggest overall negative with this game mainly comes with the rest of the story which I just found overall to be pretty boring or outright confusing to follow. There is just too much going on with so many clans to where I could hardly make out what was happening before the credits rolled. The entirety of the Jingweon Mafia stuff going on in the story really drags things down due to how convoluted and stupid it all gets with pretty much everyone in this game being a secret korean past or current member of their gang. The ending is the absolute worst aspect of this game’s story due to how it constantly tried to one up itself in terms of it’s insanity to where it ended on a really confusing and sour note. This said, the story is still pretty fun overall in a dumb, don’t think about it sort of way, but I can’t really say I liked it as much as that in Yakuza 0, and Kiwami.
The combat also took a bit of a hit this time in part both to it’s overall design and the engine change. The biggest downgrade to me is the change from allowing Kiryu to wield 4 different fighting styles, and now lowering it to just one. Combat is now a lot more basic and overall less enjoyable since it doesn’t have as much variation as with the past 2 games. That said, it’s still pretty fun overall, and the main combat style overall is a pretty good blend of the best features from the 4 beforehand into 1. There is also a larger emphasis on using weapons this time around, which was fun, but even then, they start to get a bit boring after awhile. Another thing that I noticed this time around was how broken heat is in this game. Ontop of your regular heat actions that are already insanely powerful, there is something new called extreme heat mode that can outright break the game. Extreme heat mode more or less is a super powered up form that Kiryu can activate upon filling his heat gauge all the way in fight. Extreme heat mode powers up all of Kiryu’s attacks and can allow him to absolutely obliterate everything in his path. It’s insanely overpowered and can almost completely break any challenge in this game, including the Jo Amon super boss, which I was able to annihilate in less than 30 seconds thanks to it. I do enjoy extreme heat modes addition overall, though I do think it would be better for it to be less powerful. The switch to the Dragon Engine also made the combat just feel slightly off to me. There was something about how the game feels now that didn’t fully click for me. That said, it also introduced ragdoll animations to when Kiryu or enemies get launched, which is more than a plus for me due to how funny it was to see firsthand.
Though I didn’t love this game's story and combat, I absolutely loved the side content this time around, especially thanks to this new engine change. The shear amount of quality of life changes thanks to the upgrade is massive and made everything all the more fun. Small things such as allowing the player to seamlessly enter stores and buildings without loading screens, on top of actually being able to explore the insides of most of them was massive for me. There were so many areas across Sotenbori and Kamurocho that I have noticed in the last few games that I have been somewhat interested in entering, and now I can, which was really cool. The overall selection of minigames was a huge improvement over Kiwami, and the ones here were mostly pretty fun. Though that said, I didn’t play nearly as many as I usually do in these games mainly since I wanted to focus on the substories and main mission. The substories were a real highlight this time around, with them hitting this perfect level of insanity that tends to keep these games fun. My favorite substory in this game and maybe in the entire series so far was Be My Baby, which I won’t spoil here as it’s worth seeing for yourself. I also really enjoyed how a large chunk of the substories connected back to ones from Kiwami with both main and side characters. I’m not exactly sure if they are new to this game or if they were a part of the original Yakuza 2, but they are still fun regardless. Doing all 78 of the substories this time around felt well worth my time and was much more fun than those in Kiwami. There is a lot more substance and more interesting scenarios than just Kiryu being robbed, which made them all a blast. The same I really can’t fully say for the large minigame storylines.
Yakuza Kiwami 2 features 2 larger overall storylines centered around a set of minigames. First up there is the returning Cabaret club minigame from Yakuza 0, which I initially skipped out on in that game. In it, Kiryu has to help a smaller Cabaret club called Four-Shine win a Cabaret club tournament against Club Sunshine who is trying to shut down the club and their competition. This whole section can be split up into two portions. First there is the main minigame where you need to open and manage the club to raise money and build up a fanbase to then compete against one of Club Sunshines groups to raise up in rank. This minigame overall is an absolute blast, and slowly trying to build the best club loadout and achieve the best performance to rise in rank ended up being a lot more fun than I anticipated. The overall story tied to this minigame is also pretty decent, and had some pretty good bits of payoff for those who played it in Yakuza 0. That said, this overall questline was a bit of a double edged sword overall thanks to the other half of it, where you need to take your platinum level hostess out for dinner to raise your overall bond for them, which was a complete drag to my enjoyment with this storyline. Each of these dates last around 8-10 minutes where Kiryu needs to listen to each of their problems and answer some questions asked to him by the hostesses. This might not sound awful right now, but having to do this around 18 times, totalling out to around 3 hours just completely destroyed my enjoyment with the Cabaret club. Though fun, I found the storyline to go on for a bit too long, and ended up taking me 12 hours to finish overall which was just a bit too much personally. If there was an option to skip through the text during the dinners instead of having to listen to all, I wouldn’t feel like this, but this whole section was just a bit too much.
The second large-scale minigame storyline was the Majima Construction Clan Creator. In this, you are tasked with protecting the construction going on at Kamurocho Hills from a group of greedy land investors who want to take the land for themselves. The minigame for this has you build up a crew of construction workers, earned by paying for them with help wanted ads, or doing sidestories and unlocking special workers there. The main minigame is primarily a set of tower defense missions where you need to protect your own construction equipment from waves of enemies. This minigame is pretty fun overall, though a bit barebones once you start to reach it’s conclusion. Unlike the Cabaret Club storyline, this one is decently short, with it only taking me around 4 hours to beat, which was a perfect length overall. The story though wasn’t the most interesting. I didn’t really like the cast of characters present besides Majima, and it really just felt like a drag out near the end, with the each proceeding main villain proceeding to be double crossed and then a new one seemed to take their place. The minigame itself also just wasn’t as fun as the cabaret one and it can really become frustrating when your team's AI doesn’t feel like listening to your commands. So yeah, these big minigame storylines were not something I all that enjoyed this time around. I think they are fun overall, but they often either overstayed their welcome or had large flaws that just made the experience not all that interesting. Their worth at the very least checking out, but I don’t entirely think I would recommend doing them to completion.
Before I wrap this review up, I do want to mention this special side mode that was included in this game called the Majima Saga. This was something that I was quite excited to see once I unlocked it in the game, but after going through it, I am somewhat conflicted on it overall. With the Majima Saga, you get to play as everyone's favorite mad dog, Majima, who is trying to solve the murder of some candidates for an officer position in the Tojo clan before the events of the base game. The main storyline was pretty interesting to see play out, and I really liked how a lot of it tied back to the main story for the base game. Though that aspect was cool, the best thing about this campaign comes with a bit of fan service and the way it wraps up a particular storyline from Yakuza 0. This aspect alone makes this extra mode worth the 2 hour time investment. That said, the rest of the Majima Saga was mediocre. Majima’s moveset this time around in combat feels incredibly slapped together, and lacks all the fun that majima was to play as in 0, with his gutted mad dog style. Majima only has like 3 different combos you can use to fight enemies with and feels like complete doodoo overall. Though I did enjoy where the story went and it’s fan service, the time it takes to get to the point where it payed off was not the most interesting. The little bit of side content present was really just Majima being able to fight a few reused street bosses from the base game which was really disappointing considering some of the sidestory potential this extra campaign had. Overall, despite some really good bits of payoff for the overall story of this game and 0, the Majima Saga was a massive let down.
Yakuza Kiwami 2 is a pretty good game overall. It’s got some really big highs thanks mostly in part to the engine change, and the great blend of side content, but it’s also got some of the lowest lows of the series I have played thus far. Though I did have quite a few complaints, I still loved my time with this game. Most of the stuff I talked about with this review was focused on what new stuff this game did, rather than just repeating a lot of what I have already said about this series as it can get redundant very fast considering how similar each game can be, so don’t take everything negative here as me highly disliking the game. Stuff like the great side stories, a large chunk of the story, and the overall exploration were a blast, whereas some things didn’t fully impress me. This sequel is well worth trying out if you have enjoyed the last two games prior.
8/10
After I beat Yakuza Kiwami, I still had the urge to play more Yakuza, so I started up and beat Yakuza Kiwami 2. Yakuza Kiwami 2 is the first game in the series that I have played thats on the modern Dragon Engine that most titles in this series are made on. This change was a super welcome one in my own opinion thanks to how much more advanced it allows the games to be. Though it’s now without some of it’s own faults which I will mention a bit later, but I was super glad to see this shift. Yakuza Kiwami 2 is an overall pretty good sequel to the last games that does suffer a bit from it’s lackluster story
I’m gonna kick this review off with my thoughts on the story, which are all over the place when it comes to this game. Yakuza Kiwami 2 kicks off a year after the events of Kiwami 1, where Kiryu is overall enjoying his life outside the Yakuza. Trouble strikes when the leader of the Tojo clan, Terada is assassinated by a sect in the Omi Alliance, thus sparking massive amounts of conflict that could escalate to an all out war between the clans. Kiryu is then tasked with helping find a replacement clan leader before getting thrust into the center of this entire conflict. From here we are introduced to the main antagonist of the game Ryuji Goda, who leads the Go Ryu sect of the Omi Alliance, who wants to take full control of the Tojo clan and kill Kiryu to become the one and only dragon. Problems also arise when it comes to Kiryu and his groups attention that a Korean mafia is also partially behind the assassination as an act of revenge for a massacre caused by the Tojo alliance years ago, and now plan on painting the streets of Kamurocho with blood. The story for Yakuza Kiwami 2 is a mixed bag of really good aspects and other parts that really fell flat. Some aspects I really liked were seeing Kiryu become somewhat romantically involved with Sayama, a new police character introduced with this game. I also really enjoyed Ryuji as the “main” villain despite how little screentime he gets. He’s easily my favorite villain so far in the series, and it was really a shame with how much he gets sidelined for everything else happening in this story. My biggest overall negative with this game mainly comes with the rest of the story which I just found overall to be pretty boring or outright confusing to follow. There is just too much going on with so many clans to where I could hardly make out what was happening before the credits rolled. The entirety of the Jingweon Mafia stuff going on in the story really drags things down due to how convoluted and stupid it all gets with pretty much everyone in this game being a secret korean past or current member of their gang. The ending is the absolute worst aspect of this game’s story due to how it constantly tried to one up itself in terms of it’s insanity to where it ended on a really confusing and sour note. This said, the story is still pretty fun overall in a dumb, don’t think about it sort of way, but I can’t really say I liked it as much as that in Yakuza 0, and Kiwami.
The combat also took a bit of a hit this time in part both to it’s overall design and the engine change. The biggest downgrade to me is the change from allowing Kiryu to wield 4 different fighting styles, and now lowering it to just one. Combat is now a lot more basic and overall less enjoyable since it doesn’t have as much variation as with the past 2 games. That said, it’s still pretty fun overall, and the main combat style overall is a pretty good blend of the best features from the 4 beforehand into 1. There is also a larger emphasis on using weapons this time around, which was fun, but even then, they start to get a bit boring after awhile. Another thing that I noticed this time around was how broken heat is in this game. Ontop of your regular heat actions that are already insanely powerful, there is something new called extreme heat mode that can outright break the game. Extreme heat mode more or less is a super powered up form that Kiryu can activate upon filling his heat gauge all the way in fight. Extreme heat mode powers up all of Kiryu’s attacks and can allow him to absolutely obliterate everything in his path. It’s insanely overpowered and can almost completely break any challenge in this game, including the Jo Amon super boss, which I was able to annihilate in less than 30 seconds thanks to it. I do enjoy extreme heat modes addition overall, though I do think it would be better for it to be less powerful. The switch to the Dragon Engine also made the combat just feel slightly off to me. There was something about how the game feels now that didn’t fully click for me. That said, it also introduced ragdoll animations to when Kiryu or enemies get launched, which is more than a plus for me due to how funny it was to see firsthand.
Though I didn’t love this game's story and combat, I absolutely loved the side content this time around, especially thanks to this new engine change. The shear amount of quality of life changes thanks to the upgrade is massive and made everything all the more fun. Small things such as allowing the player to seamlessly enter stores and buildings without loading screens, on top of actually being able to explore the insides of most of them was massive for me. There were so many areas across Sotenbori and Kamurocho that I have noticed in the last few games that I have been somewhat interested in entering, and now I can, which was really cool. The overall selection of minigames was a huge improvement over Kiwami, and the ones here were mostly pretty fun. Though that said, I didn’t play nearly as many as I usually do in these games mainly since I wanted to focus on the substories and main mission. The substories were a real highlight this time around, with them hitting this perfect level of insanity that tends to keep these games fun. My favorite substory in this game and maybe in the entire series so far was Be My Baby, which I won’t spoil here as it’s worth seeing for yourself. I also really enjoyed how a large chunk of the substories connected back to ones from Kiwami with both main and side characters. I’m not exactly sure if they are new to this game or if they were a part of the original Yakuza 2, but they are still fun regardless. Doing all 78 of the substories this time around felt well worth my time and was much more fun than those in Kiwami. There is a lot more substance and more interesting scenarios than just Kiryu being robbed, which made them all a blast. The same I really can’t fully say for the large minigame storylines.
Yakuza Kiwami 2 features 2 larger overall storylines centered around a set of minigames. First up there is the returning Cabaret club minigame from Yakuza 0, which I initially skipped out on in that game. In it, Kiryu has to help a smaller Cabaret club called Four-Shine win a Cabaret club tournament against Club Sunshine who is trying to shut down the club and their competition. This whole section can be split up into two portions. First there is the main minigame where you need to open and manage the club to raise money and build up a fanbase to then compete against one of Club Sunshines groups to raise up in rank. This minigame overall is an absolute blast, and slowly trying to build the best club loadout and achieve the best performance to rise in rank ended up being a lot more fun than I anticipated. The overall story tied to this minigame is also pretty decent, and had some pretty good bits of payoff for those who played it in Yakuza 0. That said, this overall questline was a bit of a double edged sword overall thanks to the other half of it, where you need to take your platinum level hostess out for dinner to raise your overall bond for them, which was a complete drag to my enjoyment with this storyline. Each of these dates last around 8-10 minutes where Kiryu needs to listen to each of their problems and answer some questions asked to him by the hostesses. This might not sound awful right now, but having to do this around 18 times, totalling out to around 3 hours just completely destroyed my enjoyment with the Cabaret club. Though fun, I found the storyline to go on for a bit too long, and ended up taking me 12 hours to finish overall which was just a bit too much personally. If there was an option to skip through the text during the dinners instead of having to listen to all, I wouldn’t feel like this, but this whole section was just a bit too much.
The second large-scale minigame storyline was the Majima Construction Clan Creator. In this, you are tasked with protecting the construction going on at Kamurocho Hills from a group of greedy land investors who want to take the land for themselves. The minigame for this has you build up a crew of construction workers, earned by paying for them with help wanted ads, or doing sidestories and unlocking special workers there. The main minigame is primarily a set of tower defense missions where you need to protect your own construction equipment from waves of enemies. This minigame is pretty fun overall, though a bit barebones once you start to reach it’s conclusion. Unlike the Cabaret Club storyline, this one is decently short, with it only taking me around 4 hours to beat, which was a perfect length overall. The story though wasn’t the most interesting. I didn’t really like the cast of characters present besides Majima, and it really just felt like a drag out near the end, with the each proceeding main villain proceeding to be double crossed and then a new one seemed to take their place. The minigame itself also just wasn’t as fun as the cabaret one and it can really become frustrating when your team's AI doesn’t feel like listening to your commands. So yeah, these big minigame storylines were not something I all that enjoyed this time around. I think they are fun overall, but they often either overstayed their welcome or had large flaws that just made the experience not all that interesting. Their worth at the very least checking out, but I don’t entirely think I would recommend doing them to completion.
Before I wrap this review up, I do want to mention this special side mode that was included in this game called the Majima Saga. This was something that I was quite excited to see once I unlocked it in the game, but after going through it, I am somewhat conflicted on it overall. With the Majima Saga, you get to play as everyone's favorite mad dog, Majima, who is trying to solve the murder of some candidates for an officer position in the Tojo clan before the events of the base game. The main storyline was pretty interesting to see play out, and I really liked how a lot of it tied back to the main story for the base game. Though that aspect was cool, the best thing about this campaign comes with a bit of fan service and the way it wraps up a particular storyline from Yakuza 0. This aspect alone makes this extra mode worth the 2 hour time investment. That said, the rest of the Majima Saga was mediocre. Majima’s moveset this time around in combat feels incredibly slapped together, and lacks all the fun that majima was to play as in 0, with his gutted mad dog style. Majima only has like 3 different combos you can use to fight enemies with and feels like complete doodoo overall. Though I did enjoy where the story went and it’s fan service, the time it takes to get to the point where it payed off was not the most interesting. The little bit of side content present was really just Majima being able to fight a few reused street bosses from the base game which was really disappointing considering some of the sidestory potential this extra campaign had. Overall, despite some really good bits of payoff for the overall story of this game and 0, the Majima Saga was a massive let down.
Yakuza Kiwami 2 is a pretty good game overall. It’s got some really big highs thanks mostly in part to the engine change, and the great blend of side content, but it’s also got some of the lowest lows of the series I have played thus far. Though I did have quite a few complaints, I still loved my time with this game. Most of the stuff I talked about with this review was focused on what new stuff this game did, rather than just repeating a lot of what I have already said about this series as it can get redundant very fast considering how similar each game can be, so don’t take everything negative here as me highly disliking the game. Stuff like the great side stories, a large chunk of the story, and the overall exploration were a blast, whereas some things didn’t fully impress me. This sequel is well worth trying out if you have enjoyed the last two games prior.
8/10
3 Yrs♥✓#
Calbon3 Yrs♥✓#
Well, this set of reviews kinda came out of now, as this all came from a spontaneous bit of steam dumpster diving turned spooky. Unsorted Horror and Buckshot Roulette are both horror games created by Mike Klubnika. My only real knowledge of any of these titles beforehand is that Buckshot Roulette became somewhat viral earlier this year, but that’s really it. Initially this review was just going to be Unsorted Horror as I stumbled across it in the free games section on Steam, but after doing a bit of digging into who made it, that's when I managed to stumble onto Buckshot Roulette, which has been something I have heard good things about. Anyways, enough psychotic ramblings aside, now time to talk about both games
Unsorted Horror
Unsorted Horror is a collection of 5 separated horror games created by Mike Klubnika that are all centered around the theme of operating machinery. The idea sounded pretty cool once and after trying out the collection, I can say that it was. Upon booting up the game, I was greeted with a locked box opening up and 5 disc boxes being extracted from inside. From there I was good to choose whatever game intrigued me the most to begin. This menu was put together pretty well and I really liked how clean it was overall. Now onto each of the games
First I tried out a game called The Other Side. In this, you play as a person trying to escape a dystopian city by drilling a hole through a metal wall with an auger. The gameplay is primarily centered around you doing such by properly setting up and resolving issues with the auger while attempting to escape. A good majority of my time with this was spent trying to figure out how to perform each step with the parts available, and then putting that learned knowledge into play to drill a hole. I always really enjoy when a game gets technical in a sense like this as I love tinkering around with an object of sorts to try and resolve a problem, though that may just be my engineering brain talking. Once you manage to drill your way through one layer of the wall, you are then discovered trying to escape, where the game then puts a timer on you to drill through the last layer in 5 minutes before enforcements show up. This last little bit is where the spooks really kick in as it’s quite stressful trying to solve each little problem occurring in such a brief period of time. Once your drill through the wall, you win the game and get to bear witness to why you are walled up in the dystopian society in the first place. Overall, I enjoyed this little game for what it was, but it wasn’t the most remarkable. It’s got a good basis and shows a lot of potential gameplay wise that is applied better in some of the later games in this collection.
Next up, I tried Control Room Alpha, which ended up being a spider horror game, which automatically makes this game the scariest on the collection for me. In it, you are tasked with using a crane device to collect some sort of specimens from a large nest of spiders in the ground. While doing so, the crane breaks down and you need to go pick up some more specimens manually, which is just great. From there you get some spider based scares that I absolutely hated and that's this game in a nutshell. Overall, this is probably my least favorite game in the collection for more reasons than it containing spiders. The gameplay this time around is a lot less interesting as it really just boils down to you using a crane to grab some eggs and then having to grab a specimen afterward by going outside which isn’t really the most interesting. The story also really wasn’t much of anything besides you getting told to grab stuff from a spider nest. Control Room Alpha was just kinda mediocre overall, but I assure you that the collection gets a lot better from here.
Carbon Steel was the next game I tried out. In this game, you are hired to work at a research station for 3 days. Your job is to extract some sort of strange creatures using a vessel dropped deep into the earth, where you then need to extract some unnamed material for them for testing. This game was the longest of all of them in this collection, taking me around 25-30 minutes to complete, mainly due to how confusing it was to try and figure out what the exact procedure is. The biggest problem with this game is the overall visibility of each of the machines and items you need to use. The general procedure is explained well enough, but overall operation of the machinery is made tough by not knowing what do due to everything just kind of blending in visually. Mike Klubnika’s games all tend to fall under this similar rusty look, which is interesting overall, but does make it kind of hard to actually see whats you need to do. Primarily, I found myself almost lost trying to operate the anethetic machine due to not being able to see the lever you need to pull to actually begin mixing. The overall puzzle in of its self is actually pretty fun to figure out, and feels like an overall upgrade to the gameplay that came with The Other Side. I especially liked how the game introduced new mechanics as the 3 days went along such as having to measure the depth where you gathered the creature manually, and having to monitor the condition of the pod. The scares are not super direct in this game, and I really liked how it mainly focused on the unnerving atmosphere this time around. Carbon Steel feels like a more realized version of the Other Side and I really enjoyed the game for that.
Concrete Tremor is probably my favorite game in this collection due to it having in my opinion the most interesting gameplay of the bunch. In this you plays as a few different people in a massive walled off dystopian city as its being bombed by another city right next to it. The general gameplay has you playing a deadly game of battleship where you need to bomb the other sides towers before they manage to bomb all of yours. I really liked the concept and it’s generally handled really well, until you start to notice some of the cracks in the game’s seams. The biggest for me is the lack of replayability once you figure out the battleship puzzle. Initially I thought that the solution of the overall game would be different with each playthrough, but no it’s exactly the same. Ontop of that, the general story and message it tries to tell is a bit undercooked which is a bit disappointing. That said, this game does a really good job at setting up it’s depressing atmosphere and also just being fun. I liked how it took a somewhat basic game that many of have played, and created an interesting little universe centered around it. It’s very much a predecessor to the game Buckshot Roulette, but a cool little experience overall.
Finally there is Tartarus Engine, which is unique to this collection. In it you and a group of technicians are executing a plan to gain control of a portion of this VR like system that the people in this dystopian society are hooked up to. This game is primarily built around telling it’s story and less so about the gameplay which was a fun change of pace. The only real section of gameplay is this portion where your character needs to break into a wall panel to change out a data drive, where as the rest is mainly just cutscenes. I enjoyed the quick little story for what it was, but I almost wish there was a bit more to this game overall. Really my largest issues with a lot of games on this collection mainly come down to how quick and underdeveloped many of the games feel. They all feel like great pitches for something larger, but never really blew me away in terms of their overall execution. This game is good example of this as this is one of the most interesting of the stories established, that doesn’t really go anywhere in the end besides everything backfiring on the group in the end.
Overall, I enjoyed Unsorted Horror. All of the games on this collection do some pretty cool little things, but did need a bit more overall in terms of their execution. If anything I really want to see Mike try and make a larger overall game. This collection is a great example of him knowing how to make a good horror game, I would love to see him create a larger overall project that doesn’t feel so undercooked. Luckily that somewhat seems to be the case with his next game called Buckshot Roulette.
7/10
Buckshot Roulette
Buckshot Roulette is an amazing evolution on the style of games Mike has been creating up until now. In this game, you awake in a club bathroom and walk into darkly lit room where some demonic looking dealer sits with a shotgun. From here you are to play a deadly game of russian roulette against the dealer. Buckshot Roulette is a pretty short game overall, only taking me roughly 25 minutes to beat, but the experience for the main story mode was a blast none the less. The main mode is split into 3 rounds, where the stakes continuously raise with new additions to change up how you compete against the AI. Round 1 is just pretty simple, where you and the dealer take turns either aiming the gun at yourself or the dealer and pulling the trigger. You are given a certain amount of revives by a smoking doctor figure, and once you run out, your dead. Round 2 is when things really ramp up as items are introduced to the game. Each item can be used to change the tides of the round either in yours or the dealers favor. There are 5 different types of items that can be pulled from a mystery box and each have their own helpful uses. Those items being cigarettes, beer, handcuffs, handsaw, and magnifying glass. First there are the cigarettes which can be used to regain a revive after taking a shot to the face. Beer is used to rack the shotgun, which removes the shell currently in the gun. The handcuffs skip the opponents turn and give yourself another shot. The handsaw increases the amount of damage dealt by the shotgun for that one current shot, which ends up resulting in the loss of two revives if you are unlucky and shot with it. Finally, there is the magnifying glass which is used to see what the current shell in the shotgun is. Items really add a lot to the overall gameplay loop, and really add a lot of strategy with how you tackle a certain situation. If you get lucky you can take the dealer out even before they can take a turn, or they might be able to do so with you if you are not careful. Round 3 has you and the dealer face off once again, but once either of you reaches your last revive, you are unable to heal any more, and need to finish the game quickly. The overall main campaign is a lot of fun despite being quite short, and is well worth playing on its own. It’s a twisted yet fun game of Russian Roulette that both doesn’t over or under stay it's welcome. That said, the real fun at least to me comes with the double or nothing mode that unlocks once you win.
Double or nothing mode is more or less an endless mode where you can either keep the $70k you would normally make after winning 3 matches in a row, or risk it to double it to $140k or even higher if you so push. Outside of the main campaign, I have actually spent a considerable amount of time playing this mode just for the heck of it as it’s a lot of fun. This mode also adds 4 new items, being the inverter, adrenaline, expired medicine, and burner phone. The inverter changes the polarity of the shot, and transforms a normal shell into a blank and vice versa. The adrenaline allows you to steal an item from the dealer. Expired Medicine gives you a 50/50 chance at either gaining 2 extra revives or losing a revive. Finally, the burner phone tells you the location of a particular shot in the gun that you should look out for as the rounds progress. All of these new items really change up the gameplay and add another layer of strategy that really makes this mode shine. I’ve only been able to reach a max amount of 10 rounds myself, but the mode in of itself was a great addition to this already fun experience.
Buckshot Roulette is a really great little indie horror game for a large multitude of reasons besides just having fun gameplay. I absolutely love the atmosphere the game sets up, as it nails its bustling club with illegal activities going on theme really well. The game isn’t really all that scary, but it does offer some good creep factor with the dealer initially. I also really liked how this game looks overall and I think it’s easily the best looking of all of Mike’s games thus far. The gameplay is pretty simple but a lot of fun. The Dealer’s AI is really well done in my own opinion thanks for it really hitting this great balance of both being smart, but also quite fair. For around $3, Buckshot Roulette is a great usage of your time and I would highly recommend trying it out yourself if you want a really neat horror game. I can’t wait to see what Mike Klubnika cooks up next, as mentioned in a recent steam news update, this game was initially supposed to just be a cut piece of a larger overall project that may still be in the works, and I can’t wait to see what it may be.
9/10
Unsorted Horror
Unsorted Horror is a collection of 5 separated horror games created by Mike Klubnika that are all centered around the theme of operating machinery. The idea sounded pretty cool once and after trying out the collection, I can say that it was. Upon booting up the game, I was greeted with a locked box opening up and 5 disc boxes being extracted from inside. From there I was good to choose whatever game intrigued me the most to begin. This menu was put together pretty well and I really liked how clean it was overall. Now onto each of the games
First I tried out a game called The Other Side. In this, you play as a person trying to escape a dystopian city by drilling a hole through a metal wall with an auger. The gameplay is primarily centered around you doing such by properly setting up and resolving issues with the auger while attempting to escape. A good majority of my time with this was spent trying to figure out how to perform each step with the parts available, and then putting that learned knowledge into play to drill a hole. I always really enjoy when a game gets technical in a sense like this as I love tinkering around with an object of sorts to try and resolve a problem, though that may just be my engineering brain talking. Once you manage to drill your way through one layer of the wall, you are then discovered trying to escape, where the game then puts a timer on you to drill through the last layer in 5 minutes before enforcements show up. This last little bit is where the spooks really kick in as it’s quite stressful trying to solve each little problem occurring in such a brief period of time. Once your drill through the wall, you win the game and get to bear witness to why you are walled up in the dystopian society in the first place. Overall, I enjoyed this little game for what it was, but it wasn’t the most remarkable. It’s got a good basis and shows a lot of potential gameplay wise that is applied better in some of the later games in this collection.
Next up, I tried Control Room Alpha, which ended up being a spider horror game, which automatically makes this game the scariest on the collection for me. In it, you are tasked with using a crane device to collect some sort of specimens from a large nest of spiders in the ground. While doing so, the crane breaks down and you need to go pick up some more specimens manually, which is just great. From there you get some spider based scares that I absolutely hated and that's this game in a nutshell. Overall, this is probably my least favorite game in the collection for more reasons than it containing spiders. The gameplay this time around is a lot less interesting as it really just boils down to you using a crane to grab some eggs and then having to grab a specimen afterward by going outside which isn’t really the most interesting. The story also really wasn’t much of anything besides you getting told to grab stuff from a spider nest. Control Room Alpha was just kinda mediocre overall, but I assure you that the collection gets a lot better from here.
Carbon Steel was the next game I tried out. In this game, you are hired to work at a research station for 3 days. Your job is to extract some sort of strange creatures using a vessel dropped deep into the earth, where you then need to extract some unnamed material for them for testing. This game was the longest of all of them in this collection, taking me around 25-30 minutes to complete, mainly due to how confusing it was to try and figure out what the exact procedure is. The biggest problem with this game is the overall visibility of each of the machines and items you need to use. The general procedure is explained well enough, but overall operation of the machinery is made tough by not knowing what do due to everything just kind of blending in visually. Mike Klubnika’s games all tend to fall under this similar rusty look, which is interesting overall, but does make it kind of hard to actually see whats you need to do. Primarily, I found myself almost lost trying to operate the anethetic machine due to not being able to see the lever you need to pull to actually begin mixing. The overall puzzle in of its self is actually pretty fun to figure out, and feels like an overall upgrade to the gameplay that came with The Other Side. I especially liked how the game introduced new mechanics as the 3 days went along such as having to measure the depth where you gathered the creature manually, and having to monitor the condition of the pod. The scares are not super direct in this game, and I really liked how it mainly focused on the unnerving atmosphere this time around. Carbon Steel feels like a more realized version of the Other Side and I really enjoyed the game for that.
Concrete Tremor is probably my favorite game in this collection due to it having in my opinion the most interesting gameplay of the bunch. In this you plays as a few different people in a massive walled off dystopian city as its being bombed by another city right next to it. The general gameplay has you playing a deadly game of battleship where you need to bomb the other sides towers before they manage to bomb all of yours. I really liked the concept and it’s generally handled really well, until you start to notice some of the cracks in the game’s seams. The biggest for me is the lack of replayability once you figure out the battleship puzzle. Initially I thought that the solution of the overall game would be different with each playthrough, but no it’s exactly the same. Ontop of that, the general story and message it tries to tell is a bit undercooked which is a bit disappointing. That said, this game does a really good job at setting up it’s depressing atmosphere and also just being fun. I liked how it took a somewhat basic game that many of have played, and created an interesting little universe centered around it. It’s very much a predecessor to the game Buckshot Roulette, but a cool little experience overall.
Finally there is Tartarus Engine, which is unique to this collection. In it you and a group of technicians are executing a plan to gain control of a portion of this VR like system that the people in this dystopian society are hooked up to. This game is primarily built around telling it’s story and less so about the gameplay which was a fun change of pace. The only real section of gameplay is this portion where your character needs to break into a wall panel to change out a data drive, where as the rest is mainly just cutscenes. I enjoyed the quick little story for what it was, but I almost wish there was a bit more to this game overall. Really my largest issues with a lot of games on this collection mainly come down to how quick and underdeveloped many of the games feel. They all feel like great pitches for something larger, but never really blew me away in terms of their overall execution. This game is good example of this as this is one of the most interesting of the stories established, that doesn’t really go anywhere in the end besides everything backfiring on the group in the end.
Overall, I enjoyed Unsorted Horror. All of the games on this collection do some pretty cool little things, but did need a bit more overall in terms of their execution. If anything I really want to see Mike try and make a larger overall game. This collection is a great example of him knowing how to make a good horror game, I would love to see him create a larger overall project that doesn’t feel so undercooked. Luckily that somewhat seems to be the case with his next game called Buckshot Roulette.
7/10
Buckshot Roulette
Buckshot Roulette is an amazing evolution on the style of games Mike has been creating up until now. In this game, you awake in a club bathroom and walk into darkly lit room where some demonic looking dealer sits with a shotgun. From here you are to play a deadly game of russian roulette against the dealer. Buckshot Roulette is a pretty short game overall, only taking me roughly 25 minutes to beat, but the experience for the main story mode was a blast none the less. The main mode is split into 3 rounds, where the stakes continuously raise with new additions to change up how you compete against the AI. Round 1 is just pretty simple, where you and the dealer take turns either aiming the gun at yourself or the dealer and pulling the trigger. You are given a certain amount of revives by a smoking doctor figure, and once you run out, your dead. Round 2 is when things really ramp up as items are introduced to the game. Each item can be used to change the tides of the round either in yours or the dealers favor. There are 5 different types of items that can be pulled from a mystery box and each have their own helpful uses. Those items being cigarettes, beer, handcuffs, handsaw, and magnifying glass. First there are the cigarettes which can be used to regain a revive after taking a shot to the face. Beer is used to rack the shotgun, which removes the shell currently in the gun. The handcuffs skip the opponents turn and give yourself another shot. The handsaw increases the amount of damage dealt by the shotgun for that one current shot, which ends up resulting in the loss of two revives if you are unlucky and shot with it. Finally, there is the magnifying glass which is used to see what the current shell in the shotgun is. Items really add a lot to the overall gameplay loop, and really add a lot of strategy with how you tackle a certain situation. If you get lucky you can take the dealer out even before they can take a turn, or they might be able to do so with you if you are not careful. Round 3 has you and the dealer face off once again, but once either of you reaches your last revive, you are unable to heal any more, and need to finish the game quickly. The overall main campaign is a lot of fun despite being quite short, and is well worth playing on its own. It’s a twisted yet fun game of Russian Roulette that both doesn’t over or under stay it's welcome. That said, the real fun at least to me comes with the double or nothing mode that unlocks once you win.
Double or nothing mode is more or less an endless mode where you can either keep the $70k you would normally make after winning 3 matches in a row, or risk it to double it to $140k or even higher if you so push. Outside of the main campaign, I have actually spent a considerable amount of time playing this mode just for the heck of it as it’s a lot of fun. This mode also adds 4 new items, being the inverter, adrenaline, expired medicine, and burner phone. The inverter changes the polarity of the shot, and transforms a normal shell into a blank and vice versa. The adrenaline allows you to steal an item from the dealer. Expired Medicine gives you a 50/50 chance at either gaining 2 extra revives or losing a revive. Finally, the burner phone tells you the location of a particular shot in the gun that you should look out for as the rounds progress. All of these new items really change up the gameplay and add another layer of strategy that really makes this mode shine. I’ve only been able to reach a max amount of 10 rounds myself, but the mode in of itself was a great addition to this already fun experience.
Buckshot Roulette is a really great little indie horror game for a large multitude of reasons besides just having fun gameplay. I absolutely love the atmosphere the game sets up, as it nails its bustling club with illegal activities going on theme really well. The game isn’t really all that scary, but it does offer some good creep factor with the dealer initially. I also really liked how this game looks overall and I think it’s easily the best looking of all of Mike’s games thus far. The gameplay is pretty simple but a lot of fun. The Dealer’s AI is really well done in my own opinion thanks for it really hitting this great balance of both being smart, but also quite fair. For around $3, Buckshot Roulette is a great usage of your time and I would highly recommend trying it out yourself if you want a really neat horror game. I can’t wait to see what Mike Klubnika cooks up next, as mentioned in a recent steam news update, this game was initially supposed to just be a cut piece of a larger overall project that may still be in the works, and I can’t wait to see what it may be.
9/10
3 Yrs♥✓#
Calbon3 Yrs♥✓#
Super Mario Bros. Wonder
Super Mario Bros. Wonder was definitely a surprise to see released last year, and a welcome one. I personally haven’t been a fan of the more recent New Super Mario Bros. games for a large multitude of reasons, such as with their boring level design and overall quite formulaic feeling that just felt like I was seeing the same game regurgitated repeatedly from each entry to the next. Luckily Super Mario Bros Wonder is not that, and an excellent evolution of the 2D Mario formula.
The biggest star of the show with this game is the brand-new inclusion of the Wonder Flowers. When you interact with these in levels, Mario and the crew go on a crazy hallucinogenic trip where all sorts of wacky stuff happen until you can pick up the wonder seed. These sections range from Mario transforming into all sorts of things somewhat akin to Super Mario Odyssey, or the entire environment transforming around him. I love how this mechanic changes up each level and the overall gameplay. It does a great job at breaking up the monotony of just platforming from point A to B, and it really does a good job at giving this game its own identity. Each of the available worlds are also quite good thanks to them drastically changing up the regular themes from what I am used to with most Mario games. Instead of just having say a normal lava bowser’s castle like most of the other games, in this one you can travel through a lava-filled grotto. My only complaint when it comes to level variety comes with there just being a few too many desert-themed worlds for my taste. I believe there are roughly 3 in total that have a rough desert feeling to them, but they all still do a good job of feeling different.
The overall gameplay for Super Mario Bros. Wonder is quite similar to many of the past entries with a few twists. This is easily the best feeling out of all of the 2D Mario games I have played thanks to it overall feeling the most refined out of them all. Another really cool feature that is unique to this game is badges which can be equipped before each level. These badges offer up some pretty sick gameplay modifiers that can completely change up how you traverse a level in a good and bad way. I wasn’t sure how to feel about this initially, but I love the inclusion of the badges. My only real criticism of the gameplay comes with its difficulty and an overall lack of powerups. When it comes to the difficulty, I’m not asking for it to be tough like something like Super Meat Boy, but I would like for it to be a bit harder than what it was. I would put this game about on par with a Kirby game with how tough it is, and that for me is just a bit too low. I also wish there were a few more power-ups besides just the 4 that appear in this game. They wouldn’t have to be all unique as it would be fun to see some things such as the ice flower and tanuki suit return, but I just wish that there were a few more as these 4 get kind of stale by the end. That said, I really did enjoy the new power-ups quite a bit.
Besides all this, I don’t have much else to say about Super Mario Bros. Wonder. It’s a fantastic game and platformer that is well worth checking out if you enjoy 2D Mario games. It’s a fantastically creative entry in the series that really impressed me as someone who doesn’t love most modern 2D Mario games.
9/10
Super Mario Bros. Wonder was definitely a surprise to see released last year, and a welcome one. I personally haven’t been a fan of the more recent New Super Mario Bros. games for a large multitude of reasons, such as with their boring level design and overall quite formulaic feeling that just felt like I was seeing the same game regurgitated repeatedly from each entry to the next. Luckily Super Mario Bros Wonder is not that, and an excellent evolution of the 2D Mario formula.
The biggest star of the show with this game is the brand-new inclusion of the Wonder Flowers. When you interact with these in levels, Mario and the crew go on a crazy hallucinogenic trip where all sorts of wacky stuff happen until you can pick up the wonder seed. These sections range from Mario transforming into all sorts of things somewhat akin to Super Mario Odyssey, or the entire environment transforming around him. I love how this mechanic changes up each level and the overall gameplay. It does a great job at breaking up the monotony of just platforming from point A to B, and it really does a good job at giving this game its own identity. Each of the available worlds are also quite good thanks to them drastically changing up the regular themes from what I am used to with most Mario games. Instead of just having say a normal lava bowser’s castle like most of the other games, in this one you can travel through a lava-filled grotto. My only complaint when it comes to level variety comes with there just being a few too many desert-themed worlds for my taste. I believe there are roughly 3 in total that have a rough desert feeling to them, but they all still do a good job of feeling different.
The overall gameplay for Super Mario Bros. Wonder is quite similar to many of the past entries with a few twists. This is easily the best feeling out of all of the 2D Mario games I have played thanks to it overall feeling the most refined out of them all. Another really cool feature that is unique to this game is badges which can be equipped before each level. These badges offer up some pretty sick gameplay modifiers that can completely change up how you traverse a level in a good and bad way. I wasn’t sure how to feel about this initially, but I love the inclusion of the badges. My only real criticism of the gameplay comes with its difficulty and an overall lack of powerups. When it comes to the difficulty, I’m not asking for it to be tough like something like Super Meat Boy, but I would like for it to be a bit harder than what it was. I would put this game about on par with a Kirby game with how tough it is, and that for me is just a bit too low. I also wish there were a few more power-ups besides just the 4 that appear in this game. They wouldn’t have to be all unique as it would be fun to see some things such as the ice flower and tanuki suit return, but I just wish that there were a few more as these 4 get kind of stale by the end. That said, I really did enjoy the new power-ups quite a bit.
Besides all this, I don’t have much else to say about Super Mario Bros. Wonder. It’s a fantastic game and platformer that is well worth checking out if you enjoy 2D Mario games. It’s a fantastically creative entry in the series that really impressed me as someone who doesn’t love most modern 2D Mario games.
9/10
3 Yrs♥✓#
Calbon3 Yrs♥✓#
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth was easily my most anticipated game for this year and it fully delivered. FFVII Rebirth is the second game in the FF Remake project, with one more game to complete the story in the following years. I loved the first remake, and so I went into this game fully hyped to see what was in store for Cloud and the gang. For this review, I completed just about everything I could find around the open world, including a majority of the minigames, which in total took me around 113 hours, which is pretty insane to think about. Though I absolutely loved this game, it wasn’t without its small problems that didn’t fully bother me, but I can see them being issues for many others trying to play through this game.
The story for this piece of the overall FFVII journey follows Cloud and the party attempting to find a way to stop Sephiroth and Shinra. It’s kind of hard to write a brief summary of the events of this story as it’s weirdly directionless for the first 2/3rd’s, but I think it worked really well for the game. I loved how the majority of the story plays out almost like a giant extended adventure/vacation for the party as they travel all across Gaia trying to find a way to save the world. This is normally a bit of an issue I have with middle pieces of media in a trilogy, where it just kind of acts as a way to bridge the first and third entries together, but I really like how it was done here. I love how each chapter of the game helps show off the world in a somewhat casual approach before locking in for the insane final 3 chapters. This game also does an amazing job at using each section to flesh out each member of the party. I already loved the party in the first entry, but this game really made me love them, even more, thanks to how much this game expands each of their roles and shows of their stories. Characters such as Cloud, Tifa, Red XIII, and Barret were some really big highlights for me here. I also really loved how this game expanded a lot of the different returning and new side characters from the last game. Certain characters that I didn’t love such as Roche were given a lot more new material that was really awesome and really redeemed them in my eyes. The story itself was a really great time overall, but some problems did start to arise as the game began to reach its close.
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One thing that did make me a bit worried about the first remake was its decision to break away from the main canon with something called the whispers. I don’t hate the idea of the whispers, but the ending for part 1 did bring up a few small things that had me quite worried. The largest worry was the inclusion of a multiverse that may intertwine with the main plot. Luckily, this concept was barely even addressed until this game's ending, which I think was great since this kind of stuff always muddies the media I consume, but its inclusion with the final chapter of this game was pretty awful. I seriously still just don’t understand why every piece of media involving Tetsuya Nomura has to include this kind of garbage. All of the multiverse stuff offers absolutely nothing to the main overall story, and all it did was make things overly confusing here. It all just feels like a device to provide Zack fan service for all of his fans, and in my opinion, really takes away all of the emotion of his death. I also feels somewhat mixed on the way Aerith’s death was handled in this game. On hand, I really like the idea of showing Cloud hallucinating Aerith still being alive, as it really shows how messed up he is at the end of the game, and I think will lead to a very satisfying conclusion with the third game. I don’t mind that they obviously left out scenes from the original depicting the water funeral, as I can tell it’s going to play a big part in Cloud’s mind hopefully healing. But on the other hand, the way her death was handled with the scene itself was way too confusing. At first, it looks like Cloud stops Sephiroth from skewering her, but like 2 seconds later, some multiverse bullcrap happens and now Aerith is dead. The scene is shot in this really awful, confusing manner that takes what should be an insanely sad moment and makes it incredibly jarring and frustrating. That said, Aerith’s death did hit me hard with the Jenova Lifeclinger fight immediately afterwards thanks to the fantastic use of her theme in that fight. Though I personally didn’t love the ending as a whole, it did leave me very interested in where the story goes with part 3, and I’m fully in for the finale of this legendary story.
One of the biggest new things that this remake does is have an open world. Though personally, I’m kind of sick of every game needing to be open-world, I absolutely loved how this game integrated and used theirs. There are 6 regions, those being the Grasslands, Junon, Corel, Gongaga, Cosmo Canyon, and Nibelheim. Almost all of the regions are perfectly sized and were incredibly fun to explore and complete. I did find myself a bit burnt out by the end, but I did play this game for almost 2 months straight with there not really being any other games I switched between at the time. 113 hours is an insane amount of time for me to put into a game, as I tend to burn out on most games at the 60-hour mark, but I was thoroughly hooked on this game. Each of the regions felt overall quite unique and were a blast to explore. My favorite was either Gongaga, or Junon to explore. I really enjoyed the jungle theme of Gongaga, and I didn’t mind the initially confusing mushroom jumps to get around the area. Junon was all around really good and felt like just the perfect amount of content to where I didn’t find myself feeling slightly bored. The worst to me was easily Cosmo Canyon, thanks to the stupid flying chocobo gimmick that made exploration incredibly frustrating. If I had one complaint overall when it came to the settings, it mainly comes down to there just being too many desert / rocky canyon regions overall. Besides that I loved how full of life each section was and how cool the world was to explore. Being able to fully explore places such as Kalm, Costa Del Sol, and the Golden Saucer was amazing and one of the coolest things in this game.
Each region is filled with a ton of fun activities that though are somewhat basic, I did still really enjoy their inclusion. I understand that many may not enjoy many of the different objectives since they somewhat replicate the played-out Ubisoft open-world game tropes, such as having intel towers, but I found their inclusion here to be a fun way to break things up from the more linear main story. Most open-world objectives are tied to the ever-so-annoying Chadley as he wants our group to gather intel on the world around us. I didn’t mind doing things like interacting with lifesprings, doing combat challenges, or even the infamous Ubisoft-style towers, mainly due to their rewards all being quite great, and them being just a simple occasional distraction from the main path. You don’t have to do any of this if you want to play the game, which is nice, but I can understand why others may not love these types of activities. My biggest issue with these bits of extra side content mainly come with Chadley having to ring up Cloud and talk to him after doing literally anything, which gets incredibly annoying fast, but besides that, I found almost all of this stuff to be fun.
Side Missions are something I quite disliked with the last remake, due to how repetitive and generally uneventful they were. Going back and reading my review on the first remake, I somehow forgot to talk about them, but I generally quite disliked them. My biggest gripe with them comes with how missable they were, which is luckily not the case in this game. Almost nothing side-content related this time around is missable, which is something I’m incredibly thankful for. The side missions this time around were actually quite great, which I’m super glad about. I really liked how they helped show off more aspects of the world and also allowed for us to see more of the lesser side characters from the last game, who appear in this game. Their rewards are also quite good (Final Fantasy XVI take note) and fully felt worth doing. Some of my favorite side missions included the one where Cloud and Aerith went on a pretend date and the infamous chicken one. There is also some other chain of quests that appear in each of the regions called Protorelics, which partially brings me to one of my biggest negatives for this game. These protorelic quests have the party search for protorelics in each region, where they often end up getting into a long string of minigame-based quests that I often found incredibly frustrating. I don’t mind having expanded minigame questlines, but the way that they were included here was awful. The minigames here are overly complicated for what they were and leave little to no margin for error by the time you reach the last mission. The worst of it to me were the Gears and Gambits, and Cactuar crusher questlines, that were honestly awful. That said, doing them was well worth it as they led to the amazing superboss fight against Gilgamesh. The minigames as a whole are what slightly dragged this experience down for me.
I don’t hate minigames overall, in a matter of fact their inclusion really made this game’s experience a lot more fun. My biggest issue with them comes with the sheer amount of them, and the fact that a lot of them are just not a lot of fun to play or complete. There is a grand total of 28 different minigame types, which is quite insane. Some of these minigames are really great such Queensblood, which is this card game that reminds me somewhat of Gwent from the Witcher series. This minigame is absolutely massive and there is a ton of opportunities to play it all across the game. I went into this one kind of dreading it, as card-building minigames like this are not exactly my strong point, but I absolutely fell in love with this minigame. I love how this minigame starts out somewhat simple as the game begins, which was a great way to ease someone like me into it, and gradually introduced new mechanics and modes as the game progressed. It’s also got this entire quest line tied to it, which was really fun to go through. I also really enjoyed some of the smaller 1 or 2 time minigames that would appear at places like Casa Del Sol, and the Golden Saucer such as Run Wild, which is kind of like Rocket League but with Red XIII, and Galactic Saviors, which is an on the rails arcade shooter. I also really liked the Parade, Loveless, and Chocobo Racing minigames. The more expanded minigames, primarily the ones tied to Protorelic missions, were pretty awful. Most of the time, these ones border the line between being really great conceptually but also end up suffering due to how basic they are since they are tied to small questlines. Gears and Gambits and Fort Condor both have a lot of potential to be really great but end up sucking hear due to how stripped-back they are mechanically. I also think the completion requirements for most minigames also ended up souring me greatly on them. Ones that were initially fun like 3D Brawler, and Fort Condor, end up becoming absolute nightmares to complete, and ultimately left me very bitter on how I felt about them. The worst of the worst when it came to side missions were the returning gym one, and Gilde De Chocobo, which are genuinely some of the most miserable things I have every played and beaten in a game. I don’t think a lot of these minigames were fully play-tested since they were where I found the most bugs and glitches in this game, and some of the objectives are borderline impossible due to incredibly poor design. I don’t mind a challenge with minigames, but the ones here absolutely destroy all enjoyment I already may have had for a large chunk of them. For the third entry in the series, I would personally like for there to be a bit less minigames overall, but rather focus on fleshing out some really great ones that make me feel like completion of them is worth it. This all said, I did like the inclusion of minigames overall, I just really don’t recommend going for completion on all of them.
One of my favorite aspects of the last remake was the combat, which hits this perfect level of being fast-paced and engaging, while also offering an excellent layer of strategy that keeps me on my toes mentally. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s combat is pretty much the same, but much more expanded. One of my favorite things about it is the inclusion of a few mechanics from the Intergrade DLC for FFVII Rebirth. I’m super glad that perfect guards and teamwork attacks returned, and their inclusion really helped change up the combat for the better. On top of that is a new type of limit break-esque attack called synergy attacks, which have two characters in your party team up and perform a heavy attack against an enemy. Each of these synergy attacks has its own benefits besides the attack such as giving you unlimited mana with both characters for a short period. All of the new inclusions really flesh this combat system out even more and mostly avoid being a bit too much to handle. I do wish the teamwork attacks did a bit more, like those from the DLC, as I tended to forget they existed while playing, but they were fun regardless. I also really enjoy how this game brought back many missing materia and other mechanics not present in the first remake, but rather in the original game, as I felt a lot more prepared for them this time around thanks to my prior knowledge from the last remake. I’m also glad I get full control of my party this time around and can create my own party configuration instead of just relying on the game doing it for me. Over my 113 hours, I experimented a lot with my party makeup and was able to create some fun loadouts, My favorite being Cloud, Tifa, and Cait Sith. Speaking of your party, FFVII Rebirth technically adds two new party members, three if you didn’t play the Integrate DLC in the last game. First, there is Red XIII who briefly appeared in the last game, and is now fully playable here. Red’s combat style is primarily based around perfect blocking enemies and then buffing up your party by charging up his vengeance meter. I personally didn’t love playing as Red the most, due to his play style just not being my favorite, but he was a lot of fun regardless. Finally, there is Cait Sith, who is pretty rough to figure out how to play initially, but is incredibly fun once you get used to his controls and a lot of his luck-based attacks. There is also Yuffie, who appeared in Intergrade, but if you want to hear more about her I recommend reading that review as she plays nearly the same here. All of the returning party members have received a lot of new changes as well to their combat to allow for better usage against stuff like Aerial enemies, or even some new overall changes to how they play, as with Aerith having a larger slew of wards. Everything has been improved greatly in terms of gameplay in this game, and I can still easily say that this is one of the best combat systems ever made for a video game.
Before I wrap this up, I do want to mention the enemy and boss variety which is absolutely amazing. I’m pretty surprised that roughly 90% of the enemies in this game are all new, which is crazy to think about, but also that there is just so many different types to fight in general. I think that there is well over 100 different enemies, which is something I really have to commend this game for, as enemy variety is a bit of a problem in most modern games I play. The boss fights are also really great once again, with there not being a single bad one amongst the roughly 40-50 I found in the game. My favorite fights were Gilgamesh, Gi Nattak, Rufus, Red Dragon, Demon Gate, and Jenova Lifeclinger. My only real complaint bosswise comes with the final Sephiroth Boss Fight, which I feel is way too long. The fight, including all of the phases, is well over an hour long, which is just too much for a final boss fight. By the time I was able to finish it, I found myself quite bored or it all and just wanted it to be over. It also played a pretty negative impact on the overall emotion of the scene before it. I also want to mention the soundtrack a bit, as it’s really amazing. From what I saw online, there are roughly 400 different tracks that make up this game, which is quite insane to think about, and all of the music here is amazing. Whether it be fun remixes of already existing songs, or brand new exclusive pieces to this game, this game’s soundtrack rocks. I love the large variety of tracks such as with some of the more goofy, throwaway tracks such as the Stamp song that plays with any mission involving following a dog around, and the flamboyant jazz piece that plays for a single scene involving a minor character called Gus. Besides the fun tracks, the soundtrack really nails all of the emotional moments it strived for, while also offering a great amount of epic songs to accompany your party in combat. This is easily one of the best soundtracks ever created for a game, and will be a part of my music playlists for the foreseeable future.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is an amazing game that I absolutely recommend checking out if your either a new or old fan of the franchise. This game is an incredible experience overall thanks to it’s insane amount of great side content and a meaty story that almost masterfully connects the bridge between the Remake and the inevitable third game. Though I did have some minor annoyances with aspects of the late-game story, and the minigames, those aspects were minimal when taking in the full picture. I can’t wait to see where this game’s story goes with part 3, which should hopefully release within the next 3-4 years.
9.5/10
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth was easily my most anticipated game for this year and it fully delivered. FFVII Rebirth is the second game in the FF Remake project, with one more game to complete the story in the following years. I loved the first remake, and so I went into this game fully hyped to see what was in store for Cloud and the gang. For this review, I completed just about everything I could find around the open world, including a majority of the minigames, which in total took me around 113 hours, which is pretty insane to think about. Though I absolutely loved this game, it wasn’t without its small problems that didn’t fully bother me, but I can see them being issues for many others trying to play through this game.
The story for this piece of the overall FFVII journey follows Cloud and the party attempting to find a way to stop Sephiroth and Shinra. It’s kind of hard to write a brief summary of the events of this story as it’s weirdly directionless for the first 2/3rd’s, but I think it worked really well for the game. I loved how the majority of the story plays out almost like a giant extended adventure/vacation for the party as they travel all across Gaia trying to find a way to save the world. This is normally a bit of an issue I have with middle pieces of media in a trilogy, where it just kind of acts as a way to bridge the first and third entries together, but I really like how it was done here. I love how each chapter of the game helps show off the world in a somewhat casual approach before locking in for the insane final 3 chapters. This game also does an amazing job at using each section to flesh out each member of the party. I already loved the party in the first entry, but this game really made me love them, even more, thanks to how much this game expands each of their roles and shows of their stories. Characters such as Cloud, Tifa, Red XIII, and Barret were some really big highlights for me here. I also really loved how this game expanded a lot of the different returning and new side characters from the last game. Certain characters that I didn’t love such as Roche were given a lot more new material that was really awesome and really redeemed them in my eyes. The story itself was a really great time overall, but some problems did start to arise as the game began to reach its close.
One thing that did make me a bit worried about the first remake was its decision to break away from the main canon with something called the whispers. I don’t hate the idea of the whispers, but the ending for part 1 did bring up a few small things that had me quite worried. The largest worry was the inclusion of a multiverse that may intertwine with the main plot. Luckily, this concept was barely even addressed until this game's ending, which I think was great since this kind of stuff always muddies the media I consume, but its inclusion with the final chapter of this game was pretty awful. I seriously still just don’t understand why every piece of media involving Tetsuya Nomura has to include this kind of garbage. All of the multiverse stuff offers absolutely nothing to the main overall story, and all it did was make things overly confusing here. It all just feels like a device to provide Zack fan service for all of his fans, and in my opinion, really takes away all of the emotion of his death. I also feels somewhat mixed on the way Aerith’s death was handled in this game. On hand, I really like the idea of showing Cloud hallucinating Aerith still being alive, as it really shows how messed up he is at the end of the game, and I think will lead to a very satisfying conclusion with the third game. I don’t mind that they obviously left out scenes from the original depicting the water funeral, as I can tell it’s going to play a big part in Cloud’s mind hopefully healing. But on the other hand, the way her death was handled with the scene itself was way too confusing. At first, it looks like Cloud stops Sephiroth from skewering her, but like 2 seconds later, some multiverse bullcrap happens and now Aerith is dead. The scene is shot in this really awful, confusing manner that takes what should be an insanely sad moment and makes it incredibly jarring and frustrating. That said, Aerith’s death did hit me hard with the Jenova Lifeclinger fight immediately afterwards thanks to the fantastic use of her theme in that fight. Though I personally didn’t love the ending as a whole, it did leave me very interested in where the story goes with part 3, and I’m fully in for the finale of this legendary story.
One of the biggest new things that this remake does is have an open world. Though personally, I’m kind of sick of every game needing to be open-world, I absolutely loved how this game integrated and used theirs. There are 6 regions, those being the Grasslands, Junon, Corel, Gongaga, Cosmo Canyon, and Nibelheim. Almost all of the regions are perfectly sized and were incredibly fun to explore and complete. I did find myself a bit burnt out by the end, but I did play this game for almost 2 months straight with there not really being any other games I switched between at the time. 113 hours is an insane amount of time for me to put into a game, as I tend to burn out on most games at the 60-hour mark, but I was thoroughly hooked on this game. Each of the regions felt overall quite unique and were a blast to explore. My favorite was either Gongaga, or Junon to explore. I really enjoyed the jungle theme of Gongaga, and I didn’t mind the initially confusing mushroom jumps to get around the area. Junon was all around really good and felt like just the perfect amount of content to where I didn’t find myself feeling slightly bored. The worst to me was easily Cosmo Canyon, thanks to the stupid flying chocobo gimmick that made exploration incredibly frustrating. If I had one complaint overall when it came to the settings, it mainly comes down to there just being too many desert / rocky canyon regions overall. Besides that I loved how full of life each section was and how cool the world was to explore. Being able to fully explore places such as Kalm, Costa Del Sol, and the Golden Saucer was amazing and one of the coolest things in this game.
Each region is filled with a ton of fun activities that though are somewhat basic, I did still really enjoy their inclusion. I understand that many may not enjoy many of the different objectives since they somewhat replicate the played-out Ubisoft open-world game tropes, such as having intel towers, but I found their inclusion here to be a fun way to break things up from the more linear main story. Most open-world objectives are tied to the ever-so-annoying Chadley as he wants our group to gather intel on the world around us. I didn’t mind doing things like interacting with lifesprings, doing combat challenges, or even the infamous Ubisoft-style towers, mainly due to their rewards all being quite great, and them being just a simple occasional distraction from the main path. You don’t have to do any of this if you want to play the game, which is nice, but I can understand why others may not love these types of activities. My biggest issue with these bits of extra side content mainly come with Chadley having to ring up Cloud and talk to him after doing literally anything, which gets incredibly annoying fast, but besides that, I found almost all of this stuff to be fun.
Side Missions are something I quite disliked with the last remake, due to how repetitive and generally uneventful they were. Going back and reading my review on the first remake, I somehow forgot to talk about them, but I generally quite disliked them. My biggest gripe with them comes with how missable they were, which is luckily not the case in this game. Almost nothing side-content related this time around is missable, which is something I’m incredibly thankful for. The side missions this time around were actually quite great, which I’m super glad about. I really liked how they helped show off more aspects of the world and also allowed for us to see more of the lesser side characters from the last game, who appear in this game. Their rewards are also quite good (Final Fantasy XVI take note) and fully felt worth doing. Some of my favorite side missions included the one where Cloud and Aerith went on a pretend date and the infamous chicken one. There is also some other chain of quests that appear in each of the regions called Protorelics, which partially brings me to one of my biggest negatives for this game. These protorelic quests have the party search for protorelics in each region, where they often end up getting into a long string of minigame-based quests that I often found incredibly frustrating. I don’t mind having expanded minigame questlines, but the way that they were included here was awful. The minigames here are overly complicated for what they were and leave little to no margin for error by the time you reach the last mission. The worst of it to me were the Gears and Gambits, and Cactuar crusher questlines, that were honestly awful. That said, doing them was well worth it as they led to the amazing superboss fight against Gilgamesh. The minigames as a whole are what slightly dragged this experience down for me.
I don’t hate minigames overall, in a matter of fact their inclusion really made this game’s experience a lot more fun. My biggest issue with them comes with the sheer amount of them, and the fact that a lot of them are just not a lot of fun to play or complete. There is a grand total of 28 different minigame types, which is quite insane. Some of these minigames are really great such Queensblood, which is this card game that reminds me somewhat of Gwent from the Witcher series. This minigame is absolutely massive and there is a ton of opportunities to play it all across the game. I went into this one kind of dreading it, as card-building minigames like this are not exactly my strong point, but I absolutely fell in love with this minigame. I love how this minigame starts out somewhat simple as the game begins, which was a great way to ease someone like me into it, and gradually introduced new mechanics and modes as the game progressed. It’s also got this entire quest line tied to it, which was really fun to go through. I also really enjoyed some of the smaller 1 or 2 time minigames that would appear at places like Casa Del Sol, and the Golden Saucer such as Run Wild, which is kind of like Rocket League but with Red XIII, and Galactic Saviors, which is an on the rails arcade shooter. I also really liked the Parade, Loveless, and Chocobo Racing minigames. The more expanded minigames, primarily the ones tied to Protorelic missions, were pretty awful. Most of the time, these ones border the line between being really great conceptually but also end up suffering due to how basic they are since they are tied to small questlines. Gears and Gambits and Fort Condor both have a lot of potential to be really great but end up sucking hear due to how stripped-back they are mechanically. I also think the completion requirements for most minigames also ended up souring me greatly on them. Ones that were initially fun like 3D Brawler, and Fort Condor, end up becoming absolute nightmares to complete, and ultimately left me very bitter on how I felt about them. The worst of the worst when it came to side missions were the returning gym one, and Gilde De Chocobo, which are genuinely some of the most miserable things I have every played and beaten in a game. I don’t think a lot of these minigames were fully play-tested since they were where I found the most bugs and glitches in this game, and some of the objectives are borderline impossible due to incredibly poor design. I don’t mind a challenge with minigames, but the ones here absolutely destroy all enjoyment I already may have had for a large chunk of them. For the third entry in the series, I would personally like for there to be a bit less minigames overall, but rather focus on fleshing out some really great ones that make me feel like completion of them is worth it. This all said, I did like the inclusion of minigames overall, I just really don’t recommend going for completion on all of them.
One of my favorite aspects of the last remake was the combat, which hits this perfect level of being fast-paced and engaging, while also offering an excellent layer of strategy that keeps me on my toes mentally. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s combat is pretty much the same, but much more expanded. One of my favorite things about it is the inclusion of a few mechanics from the Intergrade DLC for FFVII Rebirth. I’m super glad that perfect guards and teamwork attacks returned, and their inclusion really helped change up the combat for the better. On top of that is a new type of limit break-esque attack called synergy attacks, which have two characters in your party team up and perform a heavy attack against an enemy. Each of these synergy attacks has its own benefits besides the attack such as giving you unlimited mana with both characters for a short period. All of the new inclusions really flesh this combat system out even more and mostly avoid being a bit too much to handle. I do wish the teamwork attacks did a bit more, like those from the DLC, as I tended to forget they existed while playing, but they were fun regardless. I also really enjoy how this game brought back many missing materia and other mechanics not present in the first remake, but rather in the original game, as I felt a lot more prepared for them this time around thanks to my prior knowledge from the last remake. I’m also glad I get full control of my party this time around and can create my own party configuration instead of just relying on the game doing it for me. Over my 113 hours, I experimented a lot with my party makeup and was able to create some fun loadouts, My favorite being Cloud, Tifa, and Cait Sith. Speaking of your party, FFVII Rebirth technically adds two new party members, three if you didn’t play the Integrate DLC in the last game. First, there is Red XIII who briefly appeared in the last game, and is now fully playable here. Red’s combat style is primarily based around perfect blocking enemies and then buffing up your party by charging up his vengeance meter. I personally didn’t love playing as Red the most, due to his play style just not being my favorite, but he was a lot of fun regardless. Finally, there is Cait Sith, who is pretty rough to figure out how to play initially, but is incredibly fun once you get used to his controls and a lot of his luck-based attacks. There is also Yuffie, who appeared in Intergrade, but if you want to hear more about her I recommend reading that review as she plays nearly the same here. All of the returning party members have received a lot of new changes as well to their combat to allow for better usage against stuff like Aerial enemies, or even some new overall changes to how they play, as with Aerith having a larger slew of wards. Everything has been improved greatly in terms of gameplay in this game, and I can still easily say that this is one of the best combat systems ever made for a video game.
Before I wrap this up, I do want to mention the enemy and boss variety which is absolutely amazing. I’m pretty surprised that roughly 90% of the enemies in this game are all new, which is crazy to think about, but also that there is just so many different types to fight in general. I think that there is well over 100 different enemies, which is something I really have to commend this game for, as enemy variety is a bit of a problem in most modern games I play. The boss fights are also really great once again, with there not being a single bad one amongst the roughly 40-50 I found in the game. My favorite fights were Gilgamesh, Gi Nattak, Rufus, Red Dragon, Demon Gate, and Jenova Lifeclinger. My only real complaint bosswise comes with the final Sephiroth Boss Fight, which I feel is way too long. The fight, including all of the phases, is well over an hour long, which is just too much for a final boss fight. By the time I was able to finish it, I found myself quite bored or it all and just wanted it to be over. It also played a pretty negative impact on the overall emotion of the scene before it. I also want to mention the soundtrack a bit, as it’s really amazing. From what I saw online, there are roughly 400 different tracks that make up this game, which is quite insane to think about, and all of the music here is amazing. Whether it be fun remixes of already existing songs, or brand new exclusive pieces to this game, this game’s soundtrack rocks. I love the large variety of tracks such as with some of the more goofy, throwaway tracks such as the Stamp song that plays with any mission involving following a dog around, and the flamboyant jazz piece that plays for a single scene involving a minor character called Gus. Besides the fun tracks, the soundtrack really nails all of the emotional moments it strived for, while also offering a great amount of epic songs to accompany your party in combat. This is easily one of the best soundtracks ever created for a game, and will be a part of my music playlists for the foreseeable future.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is an amazing game that I absolutely recommend checking out if your either a new or old fan of the franchise. This game is an incredible experience overall thanks to it’s insane amount of great side content and a meaty story that almost masterfully connects the bridge between the Remake and the inevitable third game. Though I did have some minor annoyances with aspects of the late-game story, and the minigames, those aspects were minimal when taking in the full picture. I can’t wait to see where this game’s story goes with part 3, which should hopefully release within the next 3-4 years.
9.5/10
3 Yrs♥✓#
Calbon3 Yrs♥✓#
Rise of the Ronin
Rise of the Ronin is an open-world soulslike game created by Team Ninja, who are behind my favorite soulslike, Nioh 2. This game was definitely an interesting experience overall as it’s so much more different than the Nioh and Wo Long series, and I would argue that this game is a lot closer to something such as an Assassin’s Creed game. For this review, I played through the entirety of this game and achieved the Platinum trophy, due to how much fun this one was.
Rise of the Ronin takes place during the tail end of the Edo Period in Japan. The story has you create your own set of characters called Blade Twins, with whom you choose one to play and one to have as your Twin. Upon getting split up during a botched assassination, your main task is to try and find out the fate of your Twin while also getting dragged into a massive revolution to shape the future of Japan. The time period this game takes place in is quite interesting and not one I ever expected to see tackled in a game, but it was really neat regardless. The whole aspect of centering the story around this period of time when Japan as a country was dealing with an identity crisis where the residents were faced with the decision to dispel Western influence or get with the times and embrace change was really interesting. I’m not doing a great deal of service as an explanation here for this game's plot, but it was surprisingly decent. The Team Ninja games that I have played have often had some pretty mediocre overall stories that I have never been able to get invested in, but this game is an exception. This is thanks to the various opportunities to interact with and do quests for all of the various historical figures that are in this game. I found myself a lot more invested with certain characters like Ryoma and Shinsaku, who are major side characters, in comparison to someone like Tokichiro from Nioh 2. Another aspect that made this story pretty decent was the inclusion of giving the player the ability to make decisions impacting it that may cause a much different alternative to that of what happened in real life. Having the ability to make choices, despite most not mattering all that much really helped me get somewhat involved with what I was playing, rather than just praying for cutscenes to be over so that I can slay bad guys.
The gameplay for Rise of the Ronin is also pretty great, which wasn’t really that much of a surprise considering Team Ninja’s reputation for great gameplay. This game plays very much like Sekiro, but with a lot of different things to differentiate it. For instance, there is a ton of possible build variety present, which really did a great job at making the near 60 hours I spent playing it feel worth it. There are 9 different weapon types ranging from your normal Team Ninja affair like Katana’s and Spear, but also a few really unique weapon types such as the Bayonet and Sabre’s that were an absolute blast to play around with. Unlike something like Nioh 2, there really aren’t any major build restrictions that limit you to playing with only a few weapons during your playthrough, but rather you can use any weapon you want at any time. With each weapon you can use, they all contain a minimum of 3 combat styles that can be switched into on the fly that offer different ways to use that weapon along with some more dangerous attacks. The styles offer a sort of rock-paper-scissors aspect to battle, where properly managing what style is best against particular enemies will help greatly with some of the tougher encounters. To defend against attacks, there is all of your average soulslike stuff such as blocking and dodging, along with a deflect mechanic called countersparking. More or less, when an enemy is about to land an attack, you can then attack back at that moment with a counterspark which slowly builds up ki and can break an enemies stance. Out of all of the soulslikes I have played with a deflect mechanic, countersparking is probably my least favorite of the bunch mainly due to the button placement feeling pretty weird and there being something about executing a counterspark attack that just didn’t feel as good as something like Lies of P or Sekiro. Along with your basic combat stuff, there is a ton of different tools at your disposal such as usable items, firearms, and a grappling hook that can all be super helpful for more tricky encounters. There is also stealth which was also pretty fun to use and felt quite good to execute. Overall I did really enjoy the combat of this game, but I would definitely place it on the bottom end of things when it comes to those from Team Ninja’s games. A lot of it was heavily simplified to something like Nioh or Wo Long, which isn’t a bad thing at all, especially since it’s a lot easier to grasp for those not wanting a super tough soulslike, but it just didn’t please me nearly as much as that in something like Nioh.
The open-world sections of this game remind me quite heavily of the recent Assassin’s Creed games that are a lot more RPG-focused. Most open-world tasks boil down to what are normally boring tasks such as liberating bandit outposts, grabbing collectibles, and visiting points of interest which I can see a lot of people heavily disliking. That said, despite not normally loving this style of open-world activities, I had a blast grabbing nearly everything I could find. I think the main reason for this, whereas I tend to get bored with other games doing the same thing comes with how strong the overall gameplay is. Whereas something else like Assassin’s Creed, taking down an enemy camp just tends to feel like the same old ordeal of stealth-killing enemies and maybe fighting some others when I get caught, taking down an entire bandit camp in Rise of the Ronin is a lot more fun thanks to how threatening the enemies are due to a lot more threatening enemies and highly varied combat that really made things fun. On top of that, most of the collectibles are really simple and only take a few seconds to grab while on the path to another mission. I never really found my time wasted when just bolting around Japan on my horse grabbing everything I could find. Also one of the main collectible types is literally just your character petting cats, which is honestly peak collectible design.
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The open world is actually split up into three sections correlating with each of the 3 acts making up this game's story. Though not the most graphically impressive, each section does look generally quite good thanks to the great use of color and layout. There are a lot of really beautiful-looking locations that if you can get past the last-gen visuals that are quite cool. The open world is also quite fun to traverse thanks to stuff like your horse, grappling hook, or glider. My favorite of the open-world sections was probably Kyoto since it had the largest overall focus on vertical city structures rather than larger stretches of mountains and open areas. Besides the open world, the game itself is primarily built on a mission like structure, where you travel to a location to start the mission, with there usually being a boss fight at the end of things. These missions play a lot like a normal level from Nioh or Wo Long, although much smaller. There really isn’t much to write home about them. The bosses often at the ends of each level are usually pretty decent, though never really all that memorable.
I also want to bring up a bunch of the accessibility and quality of life features that Rise of the Ronin has since they really do a lot to make this game very enjoyable. Though being a soulslike, this game can be quite easy thanks to the addition of multiple difficulties. I played on the hardest one available at the start called twilight, since I like a challenge with these types of games. This game is a lot easier overall than most soulslikes, and I would recommend trying this game out if you want one that’s a lot easier than many. On top of that, there are a lot of really great quality-of-life features such as making worrying about filtering loot almost obsolete thanks to how large your inventory now is. There is also something called the Testament of the Souls which gives you easy access to redo any pivotal moment again if you don’t like your decision or outcome, which makes replaying this game quite easy.
Overall, I would recommend checking out Rise of the Ronin if you want an overall simple open-world game with complex combat. It does have some of its own problems such as having overall uninteresting open-world activities and main missions, but besides that this game is really fun. I would personally rank this just behind Nioh 2 as my favorite Team Ninja game thanks to it being a lot more fun than both Nioh and a lot better put together than something like Wo Long.
8/10
Rise of the Ronin is an open-world soulslike game created by Team Ninja, who are behind my favorite soulslike, Nioh 2. This game was definitely an interesting experience overall as it’s so much more different than the Nioh and Wo Long series, and I would argue that this game is a lot closer to something such as an Assassin’s Creed game. For this review, I played through the entirety of this game and achieved the Platinum trophy, due to how much fun this one was.
Rise of the Ronin takes place during the tail end of the Edo Period in Japan. The story has you create your own set of characters called Blade Twins, with whom you choose one to play and one to have as your Twin. Upon getting split up during a botched assassination, your main task is to try and find out the fate of your Twin while also getting dragged into a massive revolution to shape the future of Japan. The time period this game takes place in is quite interesting and not one I ever expected to see tackled in a game, but it was really neat regardless. The whole aspect of centering the story around this period of time when Japan as a country was dealing with an identity crisis where the residents were faced with the decision to dispel Western influence or get with the times and embrace change was really interesting. I’m not doing a great deal of service as an explanation here for this game's plot, but it was surprisingly decent. The Team Ninja games that I have played have often had some pretty mediocre overall stories that I have never been able to get invested in, but this game is an exception. This is thanks to the various opportunities to interact with and do quests for all of the various historical figures that are in this game. I found myself a lot more invested with certain characters like Ryoma and Shinsaku, who are major side characters, in comparison to someone like Tokichiro from Nioh 2. Another aspect that made this story pretty decent was the inclusion of giving the player the ability to make decisions impacting it that may cause a much different alternative to that of what happened in real life. Having the ability to make choices, despite most not mattering all that much really helped me get somewhat involved with what I was playing, rather than just praying for cutscenes to be over so that I can slay bad guys.
The gameplay for Rise of the Ronin is also pretty great, which wasn’t really that much of a surprise considering Team Ninja’s reputation for great gameplay. This game plays very much like Sekiro, but with a lot of different things to differentiate it. For instance, there is a ton of possible build variety present, which really did a great job at making the near 60 hours I spent playing it feel worth it. There are 9 different weapon types ranging from your normal Team Ninja affair like Katana’s and Spear, but also a few really unique weapon types such as the Bayonet and Sabre’s that were an absolute blast to play around with. Unlike something like Nioh 2, there really aren’t any major build restrictions that limit you to playing with only a few weapons during your playthrough, but rather you can use any weapon you want at any time. With each weapon you can use, they all contain a minimum of 3 combat styles that can be switched into on the fly that offer different ways to use that weapon along with some more dangerous attacks. The styles offer a sort of rock-paper-scissors aspect to battle, where properly managing what style is best against particular enemies will help greatly with some of the tougher encounters. To defend against attacks, there is all of your average soulslike stuff such as blocking and dodging, along with a deflect mechanic called countersparking. More or less, when an enemy is about to land an attack, you can then attack back at that moment with a counterspark which slowly builds up ki and can break an enemies stance. Out of all of the soulslikes I have played with a deflect mechanic, countersparking is probably my least favorite of the bunch mainly due to the button placement feeling pretty weird and there being something about executing a counterspark attack that just didn’t feel as good as something like Lies of P or Sekiro. Along with your basic combat stuff, there is a ton of different tools at your disposal such as usable items, firearms, and a grappling hook that can all be super helpful for more tricky encounters. There is also stealth which was also pretty fun to use and felt quite good to execute. Overall I did really enjoy the combat of this game, but I would definitely place it on the bottom end of things when it comes to those from Team Ninja’s games. A lot of it was heavily simplified to something like Nioh or Wo Long, which isn’t a bad thing at all, especially since it’s a lot easier to grasp for those not wanting a super tough soulslike, but it just didn’t please me nearly as much as that in something like Nioh.
The open-world sections of this game remind me quite heavily of the recent Assassin’s Creed games that are a lot more RPG-focused. Most open-world tasks boil down to what are normally boring tasks such as liberating bandit outposts, grabbing collectibles, and visiting points of interest which I can see a lot of people heavily disliking. That said, despite not normally loving this style of open-world activities, I had a blast grabbing nearly everything I could find. I think the main reason for this, whereas I tend to get bored with other games doing the same thing comes with how strong the overall gameplay is. Whereas something else like Assassin’s Creed, taking down an enemy camp just tends to feel like the same old ordeal of stealth-killing enemies and maybe fighting some others when I get caught, taking down an entire bandit camp in Rise of the Ronin is a lot more fun thanks to how threatening the enemies are due to a lot more threatening enemies and highly varied combat that really made things fun. On top of that, most of the collectibles are really simple and only take a few seconds to grab while on the path to another mission. I never really found my time wasted when just bolting around Japan on my horse grabbing everything I could find. Also one of the main collectible types is literally just your character petting cats, which is honestly peak collectible design.
The open world is actually split up into three sections correlating with each of the 3 acts making up this game's story. Though not the most graphically impressive, each section does look generally quite good thanks to the great use of color and layout. There are a lot of really beautiful-looking locations that if you can get past the last-gen visuals that are quite cool. The open world is also quite fun to traverse thanks to stuff like your horse, grappling hook, or glider. My favorite of the open-world sections was probably Kyoto since it had the largest overall focus on vertical city structures rather than larger stretches of mountains and open areas. Besides the open world, the game itself is primarily built on a mission like structure, where you travel to a location to start the mission, with there usually being a boss fight at the end of things. These missions play a lot like a normal level from Nioh or Wo Long, although much smaller. There really isn’t much to write home about them. The bosses often at the ends of each level are usually pretty decent, though never really all that memorable.
I also want to bring up a bunch of the accessibility and quality of life features that Rise of the Ronin has since they really do a lot to make this game very enjoyable. Though being a soulslike, this game can be quite easy thanks to the addition of multiple difficulties. I played on the hardest one available at the start called twilight, since I like a challenge with these types of games. This game is a lot easier overall than most soulslikes, and I would recommend trying this game out if you want one that’s a lot easier than many. On top of that, there are a lot of really great quality-of-life features such as making worrying about filtering loot almost obsolete thanks to how large your inventory now is. There is also something called the Testament of the Souls which gives you easy access to redo any pivotal moment again if you don’t like your decision or outcome, which makes replaying this game quite easy.
Overall, I would recommend checking out Rise of the Ronin if you want an overall simple open-world game with complex combat. It does have some of its own problems such as having overall uninteresting open-world activities and main missions, but besides that this game is really fun. I would personally rank this just behind Nioh 2 as my favorite Team Ninja game thanks to it being a lot more fun than both Nioh and a lot better put together than something like Wo Long.
8/10
3 Yrs♥✓#
Calbon3 Yrs♥✓#
Hi y'all, it’s been awhile since I posted on here, but I just wanted to give a little update on what I have been up to and as to why I haven’t been nearly as busy posting here. The last couple months have been pretty hectic for me, albeit pretty good. Over the summer, I was primarily quite busy helping my family out with tasks, trying to find work, and also helping my dad renovate our old sunroom attached to our house. With all that, I ended up not really having as much free time as I would have wanted to sit down and just write up my thoughts on the various video games I played. Ontop of that I just haven’t been feeling as motivated to write about games as I normally am. The amount of games I have played has been pretty big, although I just couldn’t get myself hyped up enough to write about them. Though the biggest culprit for everything just kind of coming to an end is with me getting accepted into the Disney College Program, which is what I have been busy participating in for the last month or so. I’ve been wanting to get into something like this for a while now, and getting this opportunity has been a pretty exciting moment for me. With this program, I have been incredibly busy with work, trying to attend various learning programs, and also just theme park exploration around Orlando, Florida to where I haven’t really had the time to really invest in a ton of games. I also don’t have access to my PS5 due to me traveling so far for this opportunity, which does limit me a bit on what I can play. Another massive thing I have been busy with has been a youtube channel project that I have been running for over a year now.
Another thing I have been busy with is a youtube channel I started up back in 2023. I don’t think I have ever really plugged it here in this blog, but the channel primarily is centered around archiving boss fight related footage in video games. For the last year I have been recording and editing together all of the boss fight footage from games I have completed and have been publishing them to youtube in a nice organized fashion for anyone interested in seeing and potentially borrowing footage from boss fights in all sorts of games. This project has been something I have been quite invested in, and for the time has been stealing a lot of my freetime, which also helps describe what has been up with me being missing. I’ve also been trying to make youtube shorts lately with fun edits of some of the videos, which is something I have been quite enjoying. As of the time I am writing this, I have just finished up editing all of my footage for every boss in Black Myth: Wukong, which has been absolutely brutal to edit and publish, but very fun regardless. Though I’m going to be reducing what I do here on this blog quite a bit over the next year, I do plan on keeping this channel managed and filled with new videos almost every day for anyone interested. The footage here is all able to be borrowed for any sort of video project you wish, I just ask that you please ask beforehand and credit the video in the comments and description.
So what exactly do I plan on doing now? Well I do have some stuff up my sleeve at least for here, but there will be a reduced quantity of stuff I talk about. I want to try and just briefly give my thoughts on some of the games I have played recently, which I plan on posting soon. I also plan on doing a few larger reviews for some games I have a lot to talk about like Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, and Silent Hill 2 Remake, but those are still up in question as for when I am able to do so. I still plan on being active on my youtube channel, and I might post some cool stuff I have seen in Orlando for the time being if I feel up for it as well. That said, everything is going to be reduced for the next year or so but I do plan on posting here from time to time. Thanks for jumping in to read this bit of ramblings, have a great day!
My youtube channel!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCgyYgGeFDy3OCSERgonm3Q
Notable Games that I played and would recommend
Another thing I have been busy with is a youtube channel I started up back in 2023. I don’t think I have ever really plugged it here in this blog, but the channel primarily is centered around archiving boss fight related footage in video games. For the last year I have been recording and editing together all of the boss fight footage from games I have completed and have been publishing them to youtube in a nice organized fashion for anyone interested in seeing and potentially borrowing footage from boss fights in all sorts of games. This project has been something I have been quite invested in, and for the time has been stealing a lot of my freetime, which also helps describe what has been up with me being missing. I’ve also been trying to make youtube shorts lately with fun edits of some of the videos, which is something I have been quite enjoying. As of the time I am writing this, I have just finished up editing all of my footage for every boss in Black Myth: Wukong, which has been absolutely brutal to edit and publish, but very fun regardless. Though I’m going to be reducing what I do here on this blog quite a bit over the next year, I do plan on keeping this channel managed and filled with new videos almost every day for anyone interested. The footage here is all able to be borrowed for any sort of video project you wish, I just ask that you please ask beforehand and credit the video in the comments and description.
So what exactly do I plan on doing now? Well I do have some stuff up my sleeve at least for here, but there will be a reduced quantity of stuff I talk about. I want to try and just briefly give my thoughts on some of the games I have played recently, which I plan on posting soon. I also plan on doing a few larger reviews for some games I have a lot to talk about like Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, and Silent Hill 2 Remake, but those are still up in question as for when I am able to do so. I still plan on being active on my youtube channel, and I might post some cool stuff I have seen in Orlando for the time being if I feel up for it as well. That said, everything is going to be reduced for the next year or so but I do plan on posting here from time to time. Thanks for jumping in to read this bit of ramblings, have a great day!
My youtube channel!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCgyYgGeFDy3OCSERgonm3Q
Notable Games that I played and would recommend
3 Yrs♥✓#
Calbon3 Yrs♥✓#
Dread X Collection 5
Happy Late Halloween y’all and welcome back for what I think is the finale of the Dread X Collection series. The Dread X Collection 5 is the newest of the Dread X Collection’s and it was released in 2022. From then to now, there hasn’t been any other entries, which I think is a shame, but alas it’s time to wrap this series up.
Karao
Karao is a fps horror game that is centered around the entertainment medium of karaoke. In this your character ends up getting lost looking for the bathroom in a karaoke bar and stumbles upon a weird abstract homeless encampment. Around here you encounter a ghostly female apparition and are left to try and piece together what her relation is to a disturbing song sung at the karaoke bar. Karao overall is a pretty good blend of elements that deliver a pretty good horror experience, but is slightly held back by some of it’s level design and some unintentionally funny scares. The overall main story is pretty decent, and I really like how you can piece it together quite early on by just paying attention to some of the details and the main song that the game is centered around. It’s simple and gets the job done quite well. One of my favorite aspects of this game is it’s sound design, which really excelled at a lot of points where it got under my skin. There is this one sound that plays when loading into a new area along with some dialouge that really fucked with me and gave me heavy Silent Hill vibes thanks to it’s industrial feeling. The main song that the story is centered around is a disturbing earworm that perfectly builds some tension and ties the story together well. I also really loved how this game looked and some of the visually impressive set pieces at play throughout. There are a lot of really fun moments that did creep me out, such as seeing the womans ghostly body float around and spell out a gate code with it’s own blood, and an overall great usage of lighting. That said, most of the scares here can come off a bit goofy if you can’t get yourself invested in this games mystery, due to how unnatural they look, but I still enjoyed them regardless. Probably the worst of the bunch was with the ending with the main song being played out at full, which I found to be unintentionally kinda funny due to the stupid Karaoke machine text with the follow along dot going absolutely wild to the depraved song. That said, I think it’s a great ending to round things out and it’s super memorable in it’s own creepy way. The gameplay for this game is pretty basic, but still overall fun. Most of this game is a walking simulator with some minor combat elements that I didn’t particularly enjoy. I found the overall level design to not work well with the combat, due to a few portions just dumping enemies on you with no reliable way to deal with them besides getting lucky while running away. The slide and rooftop portion in particular were just not good fun to try and play through. Besides some of these minor complaints, Karao was a pretty solid little horror game that I would highly recommend checking out in this collection.
8.5/10
Spirit Guardian
Spirit Guardian has your character venture inside a haunted daycare to investigate what bad thing happened there long ago. The entertainment theme this time around I think is Daycare, which is not what I would have assumed is a form of entertainment but ok. The story for this game is as barebones as barebones can get, as there is no fun twist or even substance to it. This game overall is pretty awful and definitely a personal contender for worst of all 5 collections. Gameplay wise, this is just your standard run around a spooky area game and solve basic puzzles while evading a stalker enemy. The level design is incredibly poor as it’s pretty much just a straight shot from where you start and to where you end. The puzzles are for the most part baffling and not fun in the slightest. The worst of the bunch is this egg puzzles where you need to balance an egg on a spoon and then deliver it to a shrine, but the controls are insanely finicky and it mainly just felt like I got lucky on my run where I delivered the egg. The main spooky monster of this game is a haunted nanny who is not scary in the slightest due to poor AI and an awful overall jumpscare and appearance. This game also just looks really not great as well. Everything feels very lazily put together and genuinely looks awful. This game also tries to add some cartoony elements to some of it’s visuals, which also look incredibly poor when used, and are overall quite lazily done and contrast greatly with the already crappy look of the game. This game is also glitchy as hell and can softlock quite easily thanks to the glitchy enemy AI killing you mid cutscene whenever it feels like and you can even permanently lose items needed to progress if you are not fully careful due to this crappy inventory system in place. I genuinely can’t think of a single positive thing to say about this game. It’s awful from start to finish, and honestly not worth playing.
2/10
Ludomalica
Ludomalica’s main medium it represents is board games. In this you play a mysterious board game that was owned by your grandpa who disappeared many years ago after playing it. There really isn’t much else here for a story, but it’s a fun little hook. Most of this game has you sitting around a simple little wooden board with various blank and question marked spaces. To play the game, you must abide by 3 rules at a time. Those being to make sure that you are alone, all lights are turned off, and that the door needs to be closed. From there you can play the game by just rolling the dice to see what happens. The premise is pretty good and definitely had me intrigued, but the end result in my opinion was very undercooked. Whenever you land on a question marked space, some of those 3 rules are breeched and you need to alleviate the problem before getting back to playing. This has you walk around a bit around your house and shut the doors and lights while dodging an entity, which is overall pretty boring. The scares mostly fell flat for me, as a lot of them end up being repeated over and over, and didn’t really achieve the effect I think they were going for. The entity haunting the game is very boring in appearance, as it’s just a black translucent figure with red eyes who just stands around you, which is a monster trope that I feel is very played out with most indie games I have played recently. Ontop of this, the overall objective of the board game feels very confusing as there technically is no end to it, nor any reason to really play as the main character. Besides that, there really isn’t much else to this game. It’s an interesting premise that just wasn’t expanded upon enough to really leave an impact. It reminded me quite heavily of this one game called Summer Night back in the first Dread X Collection, which I feel is a much more superior version of this idea adapted.
5/10
Beyond the Curtain
Beyond the Curtain is a walking simulator where your character falls asleep while watching a puppet show, and reawakens in a nightmare like plane made of wooden set facades and marionettes lifted by string. The medium chosen for this game is that of stage shows, puppetering particularly. Beyond the Curtain is a pretty decent mix of good scares and atmosphere and some boring moments near the start. One of this game’s biggest issues comes with a disclaimer given as you boot this game up that warns the player that running instead of walking though a large chunk of this game will ruin the atmosphere and scares, which considering that it is somewhat the case, I think is bad overall game design. A good scare in a horror game really should not be limited to a player not using features given to them for maneuvering the environments. I still ran though a great majority of this game, and was still able to catch just about everything and I personally glad I did so as I don’t think that mainly walking through it really all that worth it. The first part of the game in particular is just kind of boring, as you mainly just walk around some wooden facades that all look pretty close to the same with no real scares besides a foreboding atmosphere surrounding it. After than, the rest of this game is pretty good, and has a few of it’s own clever chase scenes and scares. The overall atmosphere is easily my favorite part of this game as the whole surreal vibe it was going for really is creepy. I also really enjoyed the music and sound effects that were quite tense in each part. I think its at it’s absolute best with the ending, which though I found predictable, the sound of it all happening was pretty horrifying. Overall this game is decently solid, though a bit slow and boring.
7/10
The Book of Blood
The Book of Blood was a lot scarier than I expected. In this one you play as a carnie who is helping close up a small carnival for the night when a mysterious book is dropped off at your location. Upon interacting with it and engaging with the rest of your closing tasks, you are confronted by a white masked person and are forced into a deadly game where you need to decipher the Book of Blood. This is another game that I think goes off theme, unless you would call getting jumped by demonic entity while closing a carnival a form of entertainment. That said this game is one of my favorites so far on this collection thanks to deciding to go for a more visceral style of horror, which is a nice contrast from the more psychological ones before it. This game is filled to the brim with jumpscares and I would be lying if I tried to say it isn’t scary. Most jumpscares occur thanks to the evil demon trying to hunt you across the level. The game begins mainly with you running around the small carnival area to repower the area after the power went out, and then shifts more towards having you decipher the book itself to try and find a way to get rid of the demon. The gameplay cycle is pretty solid for a small game like this, but does suffer a bit due to how much the game begins to wear aspects of its gameplay down. For instance, going to restart the breakers every once in awhile as you progress through the puzzle goes from terrifying to kind of boring as the game goes on due to how similar each situation feels. This is made worse by the undecipherable AI and overall behavior of the masked demon, which I could not figure out a great way to avoid encountering, but luckily it’s super easy to break away from it through QTE’s and there is a ton of healing around the map. There really is no stakes once you realize how easy it is to exploit the enemy, and the scares kind of drop off a clip. Otherwise, deciphering the book is fun, and I like the almost FNAF element to it where you need to keep watch to avoid having the demon from entering where you are shacked up. These situations could have been a bit better as they very rarely happen, and they always felt quite scripted, but in concept they are great and left me on edge. Finally there is the main story, which I forgot to mention, which I think is pretty awful. This is thanks to the awful voice acting from the main character, who is laughably cringe, and the basic story that’s really just comprised with it’s opening and ending. Ontop of that, I find it quite stupid that the main character actually went to the stupid book to perform whatever ritual was inside, when I don’t think it was ever mentioned that it wasn’t tied to whatever the demon was, and that it would pretty much just summon the devil. Then again, with the main characters voice acting being awful and obnoxious, it very much does feel in character for them to do something so stupid. Though I sound kind of negative about this game, I actually quite enjoyed it overall. It’s got some really fun scares, and the main puzzle gimmick of solving a puzzle in the book was quite fun.
7.5/10
Resver
Resver is a noir walking simulator game, where you play as someone attending a hidden nightclub underneath the Resver Deli. The entertainment medium this time I believe is that of nightclubs and concerts. It’s overall kind of hard to really describe what this game is all about and what it is as it’s so elaborate with it’s visuals and themes, but it was quite interesting nonetheless. I think what I managed to piece together from the story is that of one related to addiction as there is heavy emphasis on drug abuse and tripping at the club, but beyond that I can’t figure out anything else. This game is definitely one that focuses more on it’s style over having substance, which sometimes was cool, but in general led toward being a quite forgettable experience. There is nothing really to the gameplay besides just walking forward through some levels and watching trippy cutscenes. That said, this game does look really good, and the unique visuals and artstyle at play here is pretty cool. Overall, I really don’t have much to say about Resver. It’s got some cool aspects like it’s visuals, but besides that it really just falls flat.
5/10
Hunsvotti
Hunsvotti is definitely an interesting little game, with it being another walking simulator type game, though I think this one was a lot better than a majority of the ones I played so far. In it, you play as a young Finnish child in 1888 who is far different from the rest of their village due to various conditions that make them weaker and less accepted than the rest, when a midsummer festival is taking place to celebrate Juhannus. The entertainment medium this time around is based around a festival game that takes place called Hunsvotti. This game is mainly just a hazing ritual for the villagers, from what I was able to make of it, but I guess it’s entertaining to them. Your main goal is to collect 7 flowers, which you need to drop inside a well, which should reveal whom your true love is supposed to be. My favorite thing about this game is it’s overall focus on finnish culture and midsummer celebrations, which I’m not sure is fully accurate in this game, but it was cool to see regardless. It was cool to go around the game and find various little things to interact with to learn more about the celebration, while searching for flowers. While doing so, you need to avoid contact with the villages, and the ensuing activities, as the more you so the more hostile they become and eventually deem you the Huntsvotti they need to chase down since you are being a party pooper. The overall gameplay loop is pretty basic, but it’s decently fun, and I really like how the game goes from it’s super bright and cheery artstyle to something more dark and sinister the more you get in trouble. This whole game then culminates with the true love being what I think is the Finnish Devil, Perkele, and then a Carrie style rampage that you can go on as a fun way to wrap things up. I wouldn’t say that I found this game all that scary, but it was a pretty fun and entertaining game overall.
7.5/10
Rotten Stigma
Rotten Stigma is a third person survival horror game that takes a lot of inspiration from the likes of Resident Evil and Silent Hill. I’m glad that this game does do something different from the pack of games I have played so far, as so far there has been a massive lack of variety with the games I have played. That said this one mostly falls flat due to it’s bland and lazy artstyle, awful cliched story with some really bad usage of controversial topics as it progresses, and a really short but generally quite boring experience. The story of this game is based around our main character Neil, who is searching for his daughter that has gone missing at a local sports center a long time ago, and is now going after her at this place since he has gone crazy and was let go from the police force for how it affected him. At this place, you get to learn what happened to his daughter and the 11 other people who went missing as there may be some sort of cult like activity tied to it. The story for this game is laughably bad thanks to how cliched it is, with almost no element of what I just described feeling original in the slightest. It very much just feels like a mishmash of various franchises like Resident Evil and Silent Hill by just grabbing popular things from them and just mashing them together in a script. Ontop of that, the main story told through the rest of the game besides just the text crawls in the beginning and end mainly just come down to some notes found that describe the cult or whatever in full detail with no sense of mystery added to it, nor anywhere to even go as by the time you get to the end of the game after like 20 minutes, the whole experience has pretty much just been told to you and doesn’t even show up. I really hate how this game ends, with the main character finding his daughter who transforms into one of the weird mutated monsters found throughout the game, where he then has to kill her, followed by himself like a minute later due to not being able to handle the grief. It’s honestly just awful and borderline offensive with the suicide depiction at the end. Awful story aside, visually this game looks really bad, as it is mainly built around a bunch of stiff and not great Unity / Unreal assets, with a crappy PS1 filter put on it to try and make it look retro. This is something that has been driving me kinda crazy with a lot of indie horror games I have played recently, and this game is a great example of all this at it’s worst. The gameplay at it’s best is serviceable, but overall it’s not great, with the gunplay feeling very forceless and the melee being almost unusable thank to most of your attacks not even landing when hit. Overall, this game sucks and I don’t think it was very good.
4/10
Interim
Interim is another walking simulator horror game with some mild platforming elements to it. In this game, you play as someone named Alfred who is working for a studio that produces a TV show similar to the Twilight Zone called Interim. One day while Alfred is helping clean up the set, his boss is attacked by some otherworldly being and he is forced into a deadly game of cat and mouse as he appears on his favorite TV show. The concept for this game is really fun, though I feel like it’s execution was very undercooked. Like a lot of games I have played so far on this collection, it sets up a really fun premise and then proceeds to do very little with it and rushes to an overall unfulfilling ending. There is so little to this games overall execution and story to where I was left confused at what even happened once I managed to get the credits to roll in around 15 minutes. Ontop of that, this game is probably the most buggy and unstable of the bunch in this collection. I encountered quite a few problems involving FPS drops and freezes, which is pretty awful. The overall gameplay is pretty boring, and the platforming section near the end is pretty awful. Though I sound very negative so far in this review towards this game, I do want to highlight some positives here as there is some pretty cool things. For instance, I really like the little segments where they use a live action narrator in a similar way to how Rod Sterling was in the Twilight Zone. I mainly expected to just see these in locked cutscenes, but no there is quite a few moments where they appear during actual gameplay which was kind of impressive to see pulled off. I also really liked what they attempted with the ending, where the game gives you two choices and then proceeds to fake you out once into thinking that you choose the wrong ending by sending you back to where you can choose again, but this time you whatever ending you choose is the correct one. Overall, Interim is very mediocre game with a fun concept that could have been so much more.
4/10
We Never Left
We Never Left is a combination of both a walking sim/puzzle game and a text adventure. In it, you play as the cousin to someone named Michael who has been missing from his game development job over the last few days, and you need to visit his house and investigate. Here you find out what he has been up to, which has been the development of a point and click adventure game called Massacre: 1983. Your main goal at this point is to play the game and figure out what Michael has been up to, which may or may not be something scary. We Never left is an overall pretty solid game, with a few things that I wish it could have done to be a bit more interesting, but it’s definitely on of the better games in this collection. The main exploration aspects inside the house are pretty mediocre and mainly just boil down to you reading notes and listening to recordings. Things do heat up quite a bit once you find the text adventure game, which was pretty fun to progress through. I did really like the execution of these portions, and the way it builds up tension right at the end was fantastic. Though my biggest gripe with this game is the lack of real choice with the text adventure game, when there really feels like there should be. Particularly with the endings, as the solution to it all is very easy to figure out and the fact that the main character doesn’t just leave while stuff is going down is beyond stupid. Definitely a contender along with one in Ludomalica for the title of the dumbest protagonist in the collection. We Never Left is a pretty solid game, and definitely well worth playing in this collection
8/10
Vestige
Vestige is a pretty cool little game. In it, your character is home alone while their parents are on a trip for 2 weeks, and you stumble across an old game console of yours. Naturally, you dust it off and boot it up to try and play one of your favorite games growing up. The bad news is that it may be haunted by the spirit of your dead friend. The plot of vestige is pretty simple overall, but decently effective at what it wants to do. I really liked how this game gave out it’s plot details through the game itself and a few scenes when you wander the house. The biggest draw of this one for me was it’s gameplay, which definitely doesn’t disappoint. There are two main types of gameplay blended together in this that complement each other decently well. First there is a sort of point and click mode where you teleport around your house to interact with various objects, to either progress the story, or solve riddles or receive scares related to your game’s progress. The other style of gameplay is where you actually get to play the titualar game Vestige on an old TV. The point and click stuff is serviceable overall with a bit of missed potential in terms of how it controls, but the Vestige stuff is a real treat. Vestige is a game where you get to play a skeleton riding a motorcycle who is in charge of delivering mail to the deceased on on singular day of ther year where the dead can interact with the living. Gameplay mainly has you drive around a level dropping off packages and performing tricks Tony Hawk style while under a time limit. Though a bit jank, as somewhat expected, these little parts are an absolute blast to play through and get to become especially fun once some of the scary real world elements get blended into the fray. My only real complaint for this game is it’s sudden ending that felt very rushed, but did have a good bit of emotional weight to it if you found yourself somewhat invested in the story such as I. I highly recommend trying this game out.
9/10
Gallerie
Gallerie is the final game I needed to beat in this collection, and it was a pretty solid conclusion. It’s actually the longest game in this collection, with it taking me just barely under 2 hours to beat, which I think may also be a new record for any game in the Dread X Collection series. The main medium of entertainment for this game was art galleries and artwork, which is a fun idea as a whole. The premise for this game has your main character enter into an art gallery where people have been going missing to investigate, where you end up getting trapped by the curator who may have plans for you being his canvas for an up and coming piece for his collection. I really like the twist that the curator is actually an alien trying to study and understand humans completely, including stuff like their emotion through a scientific and not accurate lens to how we actually perceive emotion. It’s a really fun concept, and it’s execution is quite disorienting and uncanny. Another really great aspect of this game is it’s audio design, which does this super uncomfortable ASMR thing, where the curator speaks to you like your watching one of those weird youtube ASMR videos where someone whispers creepily into your ear. I swear I felt violated the instance that awful drippy voice tried to speak about how it perceives human emotion through artwork to me. The overall audio design past the curator stuff is also really well done and definitely left me feeling quite unnerved throughout. Visually this game is also quite interesting and quite hard on the eyes thanks to it’s usage of reflections and lighting. All the positives aside, the gameplay however is really hit and miss. Stuff like the chase sequences, translation puzzles, and QTE’s are fun on paper, but their execution here was very much annoying. The QTE’s especially since you get these absolutely unfair ones that you need to do on specific points to open doors, while being rushed down by various monstrosities. The translation puzzles however fall a bit too much on the over complicated and annoying side of things due to their vague answers that don’t make a lot of sense, and the brutal new timer addition added for the last set of puzzles. Besides some of it’s more annoying aspects of gameplay, I quite liked Gallerie, and would recommend trying it out.
8/10
Before wrapping things up, I want to mention the wrap around game for this collection, as I think it’s much better than the last 2. In it, you play as a young child trapped in a chucky cheese style arcade called Outpost 3000, and need to solve various puzzles inside to collect presents which contain each of the 12 main games for this collection. Though, there is also a monster running around that will try and get you during a few specific scripted moments, which was a fun way to add tension to the overall location. Besides some of it’s visuals looking a bit too cheap with it’s unity asset look, I really like how this hub was constructed and the puzzles were set up. The puzzles were a real highlight, as there are some real head scratchers in the mix. I also really like how this game handled it’s main wrap around story and do think it’s one of the better in this series thanks in part to it both not trying to continue the stupid over complicated lore that really no one cares about, while also not suffering from having a main character who just can’t shut up like in 3, and 4. The story is mostly told through comic books received after beating each game and completing puzzles in the overworld. That said, I wish there was a bit more freedom to how you can tackle going through the arcade as it very much feels like it’s on rails for how you solve the puzzles.
The Dread X Collection 5 is overall a pretty mediocre collection and I think a contender for the worst of this series along with 4. Only really 4 of the 12 games were stand out, while the others just generally tended to stink. Vestige, Gallerie, We Never Left, and Karao were the real highlights this time around, where as Spirit Guardian, Rotten Stigma, and Interim were the biggest stinkers. Though as of this moment, this seems to be the final collection of the series with no other’s confirmed to having been on the way, I do hope to see this series return. Thanks for reading this massive blog and have a wonderful Halloween.
Best to Worst.
1. Vestige
2. Karao
3. Gallerie
4. We Never Left
5. Hunsvotti
6. Book of Blood
7. Behind the Curtain
8. Ludomalica
9. Resver
10. Interim
11. Rotten Stigma
12. Spirit Guardian
Happy Late Halloween y’all and welcome back for what I think is the finale of the Dread X Collection series. The Dread X Collection 5 is the newest of the Dread X Collection’s and it was released in 2022. From then to now, there hasn’t been any other entries, which I think is a shame, but alas it’s time to wrap this series up.
Karao
Karao is a fps horror game that is centered around the entertainment medium of karaoke. In this your character ends up getting lost looking for the bathroom in a karaoke bar and stumbles upon a weird abstract homeless encampment. Around here you encounter a ghostly female apparition and are left to try and piece together what her relation is to a disturbing song sung at the karaoke bar. Karao overall is a pretty good blend of elements that deliver a pretty good horror experience, but is slightly held back by some of it’s level design and some unintentionally funny scares. The overall main story is pretty decent, and I really like how you can piece it together quite early on by just paying attention to some of the details and the main song that the game is centered around. It’s simple and gets the job done quite well. One of my favorite aspects of this game is it’s sound design, which really excelled at a lot of points where it got under my skin. There is this one sound that plays when loading into a new area along with some dialouge that really fucked with me and gave me heavy Silent Hill vibes thanks to it’s industrial feeling. The main song that the story is centered around is a disturbing earworm that perfectly builds some tension and ties the story together well. I also really loved how this game looked and some of the visually impressive set pieces at play throughout. There are a lot of really fun moments that did creep me out, such as seeing the womans ghostly body float around and spell out a gate code with it’s own blood, and an overall great usage of lighting. That said, most of the scares here can come off a bit goofy if you can’t get yourself invested in this games mystery, due to how unnatural they look, but I still enjoyed them regardless. Probably the worst of the bunch was with the ending with the main song being played out at full, which I found to be unintentionally kinda funny due to the stupid Karaoke machine text with the follow along dot going absolutely wild to the depraved song. That said, I think it’s a great ending to round things out and it’s super memorable in it’s own creepy way. The gameplay for this game is pretty basic, but still overall fun. Most of this game is a walking simulator with some minor combat elements that I didn’t particularly enjoy. I found the overall level design to not work well with the combat, due to a few portions just dumping enemies on you with no reliable way to deal with them besides getting lucky while running away. The slide and rooftop portion in particular were just not good fun to try and play through. Besides some of these minor complaints, Karao was a pretty solid little horror game that I would highly recommend checking out in this collection.
8.5/10
Spirit Guardian
Spirit Guardian has your character venture inside a haunted daycare to investigate what bad thing happened there long ago. The entertainment theme this time around I think is Daycare, which is not what I would have assumed is a form of entertainment but ok. The story for this game is as barebones as barebones can get, as there is no fun twist or even substance to it. This game overall is pretty awful and definitely a personal contender for worst of all 5 collections. Gameplay wise, this is just your standard run around a spooky area game and solve basic puzzles while evading a stalker enemy. The level design is incredibly poor as it’s pretty much just a straight shot from where you start and to where you end. The puzzles are for the most part baffling and not fun in the slightest. The worst of the bunch is this egg puzzles where you need to balance an egg on a spoon and then deliver it to a shrine, but the controls are insanely finicky and it mainly just felt like I got lucky on my run where I delivered the egg. The main spooky monster of this game is a haunted nanny who is not scary in the slightest due to poor AI and an awful overall jumpscare and appearance. This game also just looks really not great as well. Everything feels very lazily put together and genuinely looks awful. This game also tries to add some cartoony elements to some of it’s visuals, which also look incredibly poor when used, and are overall quite lazily done and contrast greatly with the already crappy look of the game. This game is also glitchy as hell and can softlock quite easily thanks to the glitchy enemy AI killing you mid cutscene whenever it feels like and you can even permanently lose items needed to progress if you are not fully careful due to this crappy inventory system in place. I genuinely can’t think of a single positive thing to say about this game. It’s awful from start to finish, and honestly not worth playing.
2/10
Ludomalica
Ludomalica’s main medium it represents is board games. In this you play a mysterious board game that was owned by your grandpa who disappeared many years ago after playing it. There really isn’t much else here for a story, but it’s a fun little hook. Most of this game has you sitting around a simple little wooden board with various blank and question marked spaces. To play the game, you must abide by 3 rules at a time. Those being to make sure that you are alone, all lights are turned off, and that the door needs to be closed. From there you can play the game by just rolling the dice to see what happens. The premise is pretty good and definitely had me intrigued, but the end result in my opinion was very undercooked. Whenever you land on a question marked space, some of those 3 rules are breeched and you need to alleviate the problem before getting back to playing. This has you walk around a bit around your house and shut the doors and lights while dodging an entity, which is overall pretty boring. The scares mostly fell flat for me, as a lot of them end up being repeated over and over, and didn’t really achieve the effect I think they were going for. The entity haunting the game is very boring in appearance, as it’s just a black translucent figure with red eyes who just stands around you, which is a monster trope that I feel is very played out with most indie games I have played recently. Ontop of this, the overall objective of the board game feels very confusing as there technically is no end to it, nor any reason to really play as the main character. Besides that, there really isn’t much else to this game. It’s an interesting premise that just wasn’t expanded upon enough to really leave an impact. It reminded me quite heavily of this one game called Summer Night back in the first Dread X Collection, which I feel is a much more superior version of this idea adapted.
5/10
Beyond the Curtain
Beyond the Curtain is a walking simulator where your character falls asleep while watching a puppet show, and reawakens in a nightmare like plane made of wooden set facades and marionettes lifted by string. The medium chosen for this game is that of stage shows, puppetering particularly. Beyond the Curtain is a pretty decent mix of good scares and atmosphere and some boring moments near the start. One of this game’s biggest issues comes with a disclaimer given as you boot this game up that warns the player that running instead of walking though a large chunk of this game will ruin the atmosphere and scares, which considering that it is somewhat the case, I think is bad overall game design. A good scare in a horror game really should not be limited to a player not using features given to them for maneuvering the environments. I still ran though a great majority of this game, and was still able to catch just about everything and I personally glad I did so as I don’t think that mainly walking through it really all that worth it. The first part of the game in particular is just kind of boring, as you mainly just walk around some wooden facades that all look pretty close to the same with no real scares besides a foreboding atmosphere surrounding it. After than, the rest of this game is pretty good, and has a few of it’s own clever chase scenes and scares. The overall atmosphere is easily my favorite part of this game as the whole surreal vibe it was going for really is creepy. I also really enjoyed the music and sound effects that were quite tense in each part. I think its at it’s absolute best with the ending, which though I found predictable, the sound of it all happening was pretty horrifying. Overall this game is decently solid, though a bit slow and boring.
7/10
The Book of Blood
The Book of Blood was a lot scarier than I expected. In this one you play as a carnie who is helping close up a small carnival for the night when a mysterious book is dropped off at your location. Upon interacting with it and engaging with the rest of your closing tasks, you are confronted by a white masked person and are forced into a deadly game where you need to decipher the Book of Blood. This is another game that I think goes off theme, unless you would call getting jumped by demonic entity while closing a carnival a form of entertainment. That said this game is one of my favorites so far on this collection thanks to deciding to go for a more visceral style of horror, which is a nice contrast from the more psychological ones before it. This game is filled to the brim with jumpscares and I would be lying if I tried to say it isn’t scary. Most jumpscares occur thanks to the evil demon trying to hunt you across the level. The game begins mainly with you running around the small carnival area to repower the area after the power went out, and then shifts more towards having you decipher the book itself to try and find a way to get rid of the demon. The gameplay cycle is pretty solid for a small game like this, but does suffer a bit due to how much the game begins to wear aspects of its gameplay down. For instance, going to restart the breakers every once in awhile as you progress through the puzzle goes from terrifying to kind of boring as the game goes on due to how similar each situation feels. This is made worse by the undecipherable AI and overall behavior of the masked demon, which I could not figure out a great way to avoid encountering, but luckily it’s super easy to break away from it through QTE’s and there is a ton of healing around the map. There really is no stakes once you realize how easy it is to exploit the enemy, and the scares kind of drop off a clip. Otherwise, deciphering the book is fun, and I like the almost FNAF element to it where you need to keep watch to avoid having the demon from entering where you are shacked up. These situations could have been a bit better as they very rarely happen, and they always felt quite scripted, but in concept they are great and left me on edge. Finally there is the main story, which I forgot to mention, which I think is pretty awful. This is thanks to the awful voice acting from the main character, who is laughably cringe, and the basic story that’s really just comprised with it’s opening and ending. Ontop of that, I find it quite stupid that the main character actually went to the stupid book to perform whatever ritual was inside, when I don’t think it was ever mentioned that it wasn’t tied to whatever the demon was, and that it would pretty much just summon the devil. Then again, with the main characters voice acting being awful and obnoxious, it very much does feel in character for them to do something so stupid. Though I sound kind of negative about this game, I actually quite enjoyed it overall. It’s got some really fun scares, and the main puzzle gimmick of solving a puzzle in the book was quite fun.
7.5/10
Resver
Resver is a noir walking simulator game, where you play as someone attending a hidden nightclub underneath the Resver Deli. The entertainment medium this time I believe is that of nightclubs and concerts. It’s overall kind of hard to really describe what this game is all about and what it is as it’s so elaborate with it’s visuals and themes, but it was quite interesting nonetheless. I think what I managed to piece together from the story is that of one related to addiction as there is heavy emphasis on drug abuse and tripping at the club, but beyond that I can’t figure out anything else. This game is definitely one that focuses more on it’s style over having substance, which sometimes was cool, but in general led toward being a quite forgettable experience. There is nothing really to the gameplay besides just walking forward through some levels and watching trippy cutscenes. That said, this game does look really good, and the unique visuals and artstyle at play here is pretty cool. Overall, I really don’t have much to say about Resver. It’s got some cool aspects like it’s visuals, but besides that it really just falls flat.
5/10
Hunsvotti
Hunsvotti is definitely an interesting little game, with it being another walking simulator type game, though I think this one was a lot better than a majority of the ones I played so far. In it, you play as a young Finnish child in 1888 who is far different from the rest of their village due to various conditions that make them weaker and less accepted than the rest, when a midsummer festival is taking place to celebrate Juhannus. The entertainment medium this time around is based around a festival game that takes place called Hunsvotti. This game is mainly just a hazing ritual for the villagers, from what I was able to make of it, but I guess it’s entertaining to them. Your main goal is to collect 7 flowers, which you need to drop inside a well, which should reveal whom your true love is supposed to be. My favorite thing about this game is it’s overall focus on finnish culture and midsummer celebrations, which I’m not sure is fully accurate in this game, but it was cool to see regardless. It was cool to go around the game and find various little things to interact with to learn more about the celebration, while searching for flowers. While doing so, you need to avoid contact with the villages, and the ensuing activities, as the more you so the more hostile they become and eventually deem you the Huntsvotti they need to chase down since you are being a party pooper. The overall gameplay loop is pretty basic, but it’s decently fun, and I really like how the game goes from it’s super bright and cheery artstyle to something more dark and sinister the more you get in trouble. This whole game then culminates with the true love being what I think is the Finnish Devil, Perkele, and then a Carrie style rampage that you can go on as a fun way to wrap things up. I wouldn’t say that I found this game all that scary, but it was a pretty fun and entertaining game overall.
7.5/10
Rotten Stigma
Rotten Stigma is a third person survival horror game that takes a lot of inspiration from the likes of Resident Evil and Silent Hill. I’m glad that this game does do something different from the pack of games I have played so far, as so far there has been a massive lack of variety with the games I have played. That said this one mostly falls flat due to it’s bland and lazy artstyle, awful cliched story with some really bad usage of controversial topics as it progresses, and a really short but generally quite boring experience. The story of this game is based around our main character Neil, who is searching for his daughter that has gone missing at a local sports center a long time ago, and is now going after her at this place since he has gone crazy and was let go from the police force for how it affected him. At this place, you get to learn what happened to his daughter and the 11 other people who went missing as there may be some sort of cult like activity tied to it. The story for this game is laughably bad thanks to how cliched it is, with almost no element of what I just described feeling original in the slightest. It very much just feels like a mishmash of various franchises like Resident Evil and Silent Hill by just grabbing popular things from them and just mashing them together in a script. Ontop of that, the main story told through the rest of the game besides just the text crawls in the beginning and end mainly just come down to some notes found that describe the cult or whatever in full detail with no sense of mystery added to it, nor anywhere to even go as by the time you get to the end of the game after like 20 minutes, the whole experience has pretty much just been told to you and doesn’t even show up. I really hate how this game ends, with the main character finding his daughter who transforms into one of the weird mutated monsters found throughout the game, where he then has to kill her, followed by himself like a minute later due to not being able to handle the grief. It’s honestly just awful and borderline offensive with the suicide depiction at the end. Awful story aside, visually this game looks really bad, as it is mainly built around a bunch of stiff and not great Unity / Unreal assets, with a crappy PS1 filter put on it to try and make it look retro. This is something that has been driving me kinda crazy with a lot of indie horror games I have played recently, and this game is a great example of all this at it’s worst. The gameplay at it’s best is serviceable, but overall it’s not great, with the gunplay feeling very forceless and the melee being almost unusable thank to most of your attacks not even landing when hit. Overall, this game sucks and I don’t think it was very good.
4/10
Interim
Interim is another walking simulator horror game with some mild platforming elements to it. In this game, you play as someone named Alfred who is working for a studio that produces a TV show similar to the Twilight Zone called Interim. One day while Alfred is helping clean up the set, his boss is attacked by some otherworldly being and he is forced into a deadly game of cat and mouse as he appears on his favorite TV show. The concept for this game is really fun, though I feel like it’s execution was very undercooked. Like a lot of games I have played so far on this collection, it sets up a really fun premise and then proceeds to do very little with it and rushes to an overall unfulfilling ending. There is so little to this games overall execution and story to where I was left confused at what even happened once I managed to get the credits to roll in around 15 minutes. Ontop of that, this game is probably the most buggy and unstable of the bunch in this collection. I encountered quite a few problems involving FPS drops and freezes, which is pretty awful. The overall gameplay is pretty boring, and the platforming section near the end is pretty awful. Though I sound very negative so far in this review towards this game, I do want to highlight some positives here as there is some pretty cool things. For instance, I really like the little segments where they use a live action narrator in a similar way to how Rod Sterling was in the Twilight Zone. I mainly expected to just see these in locked cutscenes, but no there is quite a few moments where they appear during actual gameplay which was kind of impressive to see pulled off. I also really liked what they attempted with the ending, where the game gives you two choices and then proceeds to fake you out once into thinking that you choose the wrong ending by sending you back to where you can choose again, but this time you whatever ending you choose is the correct one. Overall, Interim is very mediocre game with a fun concept that could have been so much more.
4/10
We Never Left
We Never Left is a combination of both a walking sim/puzzle game and a text adventure. In it, you play as the cousin to someone named Michael who has been missing from his game development job over the last few days, and you need to visit his house and investigate. Here you find out what he has been up to, which has been the development of a point and click adventure game called Massacre: 1983. Your main goal at this point is to play the game and figure out what Michael has been up to, which may or may not be something scary. We Never left is an overall pretty solid game, with a few things that I wish it could have done to be a bit more interesting, but it’s definitely on of the better games in this collection. The main exploration aspects inside the house are pretty mediocre and mainly just boil down to you reading notes and listening to recordings. Things do heat up quite a bit once you find the text adventure game, which was pretty fun to progress through. I did really like the execution of these portions, and the way it builds up tension right at the end was fantastic. Though my biggest gripe with this game is the lack of real choice with the text adventure game, when there really feels like there should be. Particularly with the endings, as the solution to it all is very easy to figure out and the fact that the main character doesn’t just leave while stuff is going down is beyond stupid. Definitely a contender along with one in Ludomalica for the title of the dumbest protagonist in the collection. We Never Left is a pretty solid game, and definitely well worth playing in this collection
8/10
Vestige
Vestige is a pretty cool little game. In it, your character is home alone while their parents are on a trip for 2 weeks, and you stumble across an old game console of yours. Naturally, you dust it off and boot it up to try and play one of your favorite games growing up. The bad news is that it may be haunted by the spirit of your dead friend. The plot of vestige is pretty simple overall, but decently effective at what it wants to do. I really liked how this game gave out it’s plot details through the game itself and a few scenes when you wander the house. The biggest draw of this one for me was it’s gameplay, which definitely doesn’t disappoint. There are two main types of gameplay blended together in this that complement each other decently well. First there is a sort of point and click mode where you teleport around your house to interact with various objects, to either progress the story, or solve riddles or receive scares related to your game’s progress. The other style of gameplay is where you actually get to play the titualar game Vestige on an old TV. The point and click stuff is serviceable overall with a bit of missed potential in terms of how it controls, but the Vestige stuff is a real treat. Vestige is a game where you get to play a skeleton riding a motorcycle who is in charge of delivering mail to the deceased on on singular day of ther year where the dead can interact with the living. Gameplay mainly has you drive around a level dropping off packages and performing tricks Tony Hawk style while under a time limit. Though a bit jank, as somewhat expected, these little parts are an absolute blast to play through and get to become especially fun once some of the scary real world elements get blended into the fray. My only real complaint for this game is it’s sudden ending that felt very rushed, but did have a good bit of emotional weight to it if you found yourself somewhat invested in the story such as I. I highly recommend trying this game out.
9/10
Gallerie
Gallerie is the final game I needed to beat in this collection, and it was a pretty solid conclusion. It’s actually the longest game in this collection, with it taking me just barely under 2 hours to beat, which I think may also be a new record for any game in the Dread X Collection series. The main medium of entertainment for this game was art galleries and artwork, which is a fun idea as a whole. The premise for this game has your main character enter into an art gallery where people have been going missing to investigate, where you end up getting trapped by the curator who may have plans for you being his canvas for an up and coming piece for his collection. I really like the twist that the curator is actually an alien trying to study and understand humans completely, including stuff like their emotion through a scientific and not accurate lens to how we actually perceive emotion. It’s a really fun concept, and it’s execution is quite disorienting and uncanny. Another really great aspect of this game is it’s audio design, which does this super uncomfortable ASMR thing, where the curator speaks to you like your watching one of those weird youtube ASMR videos where someone whispers creepily into your ear. I swear I felt violated the instance that awful drippy voice tried to speak about how it perceives human emotion through artwork to me. The overall audio design past the curator stuff is also really well done and definitely left me feeling quite unnerved throughout. Visually this game is also quite interesting and quite hard on the eyes thanks to it’s usage of reflections and lighting. All the positives aside, the gameplay however is really hit and miss. Stuff like the chase sequences, translation puzzles, and QTE’s are fun on paper, but their execution here was very much annoying. The QTE’s especially since you get these absolutely unfair ones that you need to do on specific points to open doors, while being rushed down by various monstrosities. The translation puzzles however fall a bit too much on the over complicated and annoying side of things due to their vague answers that don’t make a lot of sense, and the brutal new timer addition added for the last set of puzzles. Besides some of it’s more annoying aspects of gameplay, I quite liked Gallerie, and would recommend trying it out.
8/10
Before wrapping things up, I want to mention the wrap around game for this collection, as I think it’s much better than the last 2. In it, you play as a young child trapped in a chucky cheese style arcade called Outpost 3000, and need to solve various puzzles inside to collect presents which contain each of the 12 main games for this collection. Though, there is also a monster running around that will try and get you during a few specific scripted moments, which was a fun way to add tension to the overall location. Besides some of it’s visuals looking a bit too cheap with it’s unity asset look, I really like how this hub was constructed and the puzzles were set up. The puzzles were a real highlight, as there are some real head scratchers in the mix. I also really like how this game handled it’s main wrap around story and do think it’s one of the better in this series thanks in part to it both not trying to continue the stupid over complicated lore that really no one cares about, while also not suffering from having a main character who just can’t shut up like in 3, and 4. The story is mostly told through comic books received after beating each game and completing puzzles in the overworld. That said, I wish there was a bit more freedom to how you can tackle going through the arcade as it very much feels like it’s on rails for how you solve the puzzles.
The Dread X Collection 5 is overall a pretty mediocre collection and I think a contender for the worst of this series along with 4. Only really 4 of the 12 games were stand out, while the others just generally tended to stink. Vestige, Gallerie, We Never Left, and Karao were the real highlights this time around, where as Spirit Guardian, Rotten Stigma, and Interim were the biggest stinkers. Though as of this moment, this seems to be the final collection of the series with no other’s confirmed to having been on the way, I do hope to see this series return. Thanks for reading this massive blog and have a wonderful Halloween.
Best to Worst.
1. Vestige
2. Karao
3. Gallerie
4. We Never Left
5. Hunsvotti
6. Book of Blood
7. Behind the Curtain
8. Ludomalica
9. Resver
10. Interim
11. Rotten Stigma
12. Spirit Guardian