Recent reviews by BinaryMessiah

I love Japanese horror as it has such exciting mythology and creatures that are great for video games. Ghostwire does a great job making an entire game focused on Japanese folklore and mythology while also mixing it with the modern world of Tokyo. Ghostwire has great visuals and art direction - well as fantastic monster designs - but it falls flat in more ways than I wish it did.

You play as a man named Akito who finds himself awake in the Tokyo streets apparently dead and being possessed by a spirit named KK who is trying to stop a demon named Hannya. And that's about as far as it gets. Sure, there's a side plot of Akito wanting to bring his dead sister Mari back to life and Haanya wants her to seemingly become queen of the underworld? I don't know or care. The story is so underbaked and doesn't really go anywhere and that's no thanks to the story only lasting about 6 hours or so. It's incredibly short compared to the rest of the repetitive and mostly boring filler throughout the game.

Let's just start out with the combat, because Ghostwire is pretty exciting during the first two chapters of the game and then that quickly fizzles out. You get three elemental attacks that are thrown out with your hands. A speedy green wind gust which is your main weapon, a more powerful fire piercing attack, and a wider range water attack. Think of it as a shotgun. You can charge these up and do more damage, and then there's a super ability that lets you do extra damage. You can manage your health with food items and you acquire "ammo" by destroying enemies or ghost-like objects scattered all over the place. One of the gimmicks of the combat is destroying the cores with a cool animation of Akito using his hands to pull their soul out with a wire (thus the title of the game!) and the animation looks cool, but it's fleeting at best. This becomes incredibly repetitive early on as you're just spamming attacks and using each weapon depending on whether you have a tougher enemy or not.

That leads to enemies. They are super cool-looking. They reflect Japanese mythology and folklore such as the Students of Pain and Misery which are headless school children who were either bullied or had some other issue in real life. These are fast-moving enemies. There are Rain Walkers who look like Slenderman who are salary men or women in real life. They block with umbrellas and are slower moving. These enemies all look cool, but in the end, there are only half a dozen kids with different variants of those. They aren't all that challenging in the end as you just spam all your weapons until you run out of ammo essentially. Despite all these cool visuals and monster designs there just aren't that many.

That leads to the open-world filler which many games unnecessarily think they need to do these days. Ghostwire would have been a really great 8-10 single-player linear adventure so more focus could be had on the story and enemies and deeper combat. While Tokyo seems big it all looks the same. The same empty streets with nothing on the outside of groups of enemies you can walk into. There are various tasks here such as cleansing trees, finding Jito statues to max out your ammo, and cleansing Tori gates to clear the deadly fog that opens up more of the world. You can find coins and food spread throughout and can give animals food for money too. There are various collectibles you can find and outfits to deck out Akito, but once you finish the story you never see his body again so I feel this is pointless. Most of your cash will be used to buy more paper dolls to capture spirits, but again, this is another large task that felt like it wasn't worth doing. There are hundreds of spirits throughout the area and most side quests give you more spirits to capture.

You can cash in spirits at payphones to empty your paper dolls and get some XP. This leads to the most useless ability tree that takes pretty much getting 100% completion to unlock, but once the story is finished there aren't any tough bosses or anything anymore so why would you continue to unlock more stuff? You could argue it's for a new game plus, but that's also pointless as the story isn't worth revisiting as it's so shallow and underdeveloped. You're left with this huge empty boring world with stuff to do that leads to basically nothing outside of 100% completion. Games like God of War make you want to find everything thanks to challenges you can complete that still require further upgrades beyond what the story can give you and Ghostwire just completely fails here.

There's also a vertical element to Ghostwire in which you can grapple up to demons that are flying and jump around rooftops, but platforming in this game is quite annoying. You can glide around a bit, but it requires upgrades to glide longer. But, with all that said, Ghostwire is a shallow game that tries to be bigger than it needs to be. It's another victim of trying to cram a pointless open world when there's so much great mythology and art to make a solid single-player experience and it's just squandered.

I do have to mention that you need to complete at least a couple dozen side quests to upgrade enough to make the game not super difficult. Getting more health, max ammo, and some abilities really help, but things like sneaking and your bow are totally useless outside of specific story scenes. It's clear that this was meant to be a single-player linear adventure and was crammed and stretched out into an open-world game that no one asked for. It looks cool enough and plays well enough to warrant maybe 15 hours inside this world (I clocked in 12 and I explored quite a bit and nearly unlocked all Tori gates and got nearly half the spirits lying around). Maybe at a discount, this would be fun, but in the end, you aren't missing out on anything. Tango Gameworks has done better work in the past.

The first Shadow Warrior was a lot of mindless fun that brought back the craziness of the original DOS game. It did a good job throwing great visuals, crazy monster designs, cool weapons, and that fast-paced feeling of classic FPS action. Shadow Warrior 2 really sets the series back by trying to do too much and not doing any of it very well. First off the story is just stupid and pointless. You are once again, doing jobs for the Chinese mafia and you end up stuck in some sort of family drama of a woman's soul who gets trapped in your head and you must reunite her with her body. It's pretty dumb and uninteresting including the barely passable voice acting and lame jokes.

After DOOM came out in 2016 it set the standard pretty high for rebooting classic 90s FPS games. Shadow Warrior 2 misses the mark in almost every way. One thing it does get right is are the awesome monster and enemy designs and cool levels as well as plenty of interesting weapons, but less is more and Shadow Warrior 2 doesn't implement this practice. For starters, the game is incredibly repetitive and poorly balanced. You repeat the same themed levels just to meet different objectives. A couple of levels were literally repeated twice over and I just hated it. There are three different themes at play here. There's Hell with demons and monsters, the real world with assassins and ninjas, and then a weird cyber world with robots, drones, and mechs. The monster designs are pretty awesome, but there's no strategy to each enemy like in DOOM. In that game, you know what weapons work well against each enemy and can strategize on the fly, but here you just empty all your weapons as fast as you can starting with the most powerful.

I really hate this as this leads to more useless filler such as weapons upgrades. These are just mindless stats that boost weapons and there's no strategy here either. There are so many of them and I literally just equipped the highest leveled ones and got rid of the rest. It honestly never mattered. Some enemies are immune or weak to certain elements, but I didn't bother with this either. I'm not going to sit and sort through dozens upon dozens of upgrades for different enemy types. DOOM did this right with just a couple of weapon upgrades per weapon and you knew how you wanted to use these. Less is more. Then there are just the insane amount of weapons. There are different styles that match each area such as a demon, real-world, and cyber weapons. Sure they look cool, but they all mostly felt the same. They had no personality or uniqueness to them. I just picked the most powerful ones and spaced my arsenal out with one of each type. Then there are the pointless powers. I rarely ever used these as I was so busy mowing down enemies and trying not to get killed. They're not even useful. Spikes to hold a single enemy down and it doesn't work on larger enemies? Invisibility? Why?

So combat is pretty mindless and there's no strategy here and the story is pretty silly and pointless. This leads to the fact that you get side quests and trials. I didn't even bother with these. The game starts feeling like a chore less than halfway through the game. The thing is I started this game back when it came out and shelved it for years because it was just so boring and monotonous after the first few missions. I had it installed on my PC this entire time and I finally just plowed through the story in about 7 hours and I didn't have a lot of fun. Sure, sometimes when you get the right weapon and gib a group of enemies it's pretty satisfying. The bosses are pretty cool and felt good to take down, but these are little bites in a giant cake that just don't taste very good. The developers should have stuck with a more linear design and fewer weapons and upgrades. Other than that the visuals are really good and the art style is great.

Bright Memory was an impressive tech demo that was in Steam Early Access a couple of years ago. It had a scantily clad female protagonist (which doesn't do anything for the game honestly) and a mix of sword and gunplay in the first person which felt fast-paced and punchy. Infinite is the fully released game, and it's basically a much longer tech demo. You can finish the game in 90 minutes and this leaves nothing for story or character development which is almost non-existent. All I gathered is that there's a black hole forming near-Earth and you must stop an evil military guy from taking some sort of artifact that will bring Earth back to Feudal Japan? I'm honestly not even sure.

The best part about the game is the gunplay. The swordplay kind of takes a back seat and is only needed in certain situations. You get a standard arsenal of four weapons. Automatic pistol, auto-shotgun, assault rifle, and sniper rifle. Each weapon has an alternate ammo type that's usually explosive and does massive damage which is best saved for larger enemies and bosses. The weapons feel heavy and punchy, and they are fun to shoot and use. The gunplay was so good that it kept me wanting more from the game. It had a AAA budget quality to it that's not seen in many indie shooters. The swordplay consists of mashing a single button or launching enemies into the air. There's a tacked-on afterthought of a skill tree that lets you unlock abilities and upgrade your alternate ammo firepower, but in 90 minutes you upgrade almost everything pretty quickly so it feels trivial.

There is a grapple line for traversing long distances which are scripted, and you can wall run. These ninja acrobatics feels a bit stiff and not as refined as the actual gunplay. In fact, all of the animations feel stiff and like they were hand done. The faces almost don't animate and thankfully there are less than 10 minutes of total screen time where the camera shows any faces. Your main character, Shelia, is questionable in the sexy department since you hardly ever see her and there are DLC costumes that seem pointless due to the short run time. You can go through the game again on higher difficulties, but I don't see the point.

The issue with a short game like this is there is no incentive to come back. There are no modes, no multiplayer, and hardly anything to aim for. The visuals in the game are fantastic with great use of ray-tracing, but again the animations are weird. There's a short scene where you drive a car and it feels really janky and half-baked. Overall, the boss fights are fun, but there are literally only four types of enemies in the whole game so it gets repetitive quickly. At a sale price, this could be a fun evening, but that's about it.

Whenever Valve releases a new in-house first-party game people pay attention. They are masters at storytelling and world-building. Aperture Desk Job is set in the world of Portal. You'd think this is a Steam Deck exclusive Portal game, but it's not.  This short 30-45 minute tech demo shows you the Steam Deck's unique features.

Desk Job opens up with Cave Johnson giving a riveting motivational speech to his employees (J.K. Simmons retains his role) and the game pans down a factory level by level. You arrive at your desk with a new Wheatley-type character. He's funny and got some laughs from me, but he isn't as energetic. He's a bit masochistic and Valve did a great job with his writing for the short time he's on screen. Your desk has the exact layout as your Steam Deck and the short story unfolds with you as a toilet tester. Valve's on-point humor hits here with the subtly they're known for. You test a few toilets and then time goes by and you see some ridiculous number on the counter board.

You eventually turn the toilets into turrets which is pretty funny. Here you learn about the right stick's touch sensor inside the Steam Deck for gyro controls. It's calibrated pretty well, and I haven't used good gyro controls before. It's done right here. Without telling too much more of the story you take a ride back through the factory and you get a fun turret song at the end. The humor punches throughout and I had a good time. There are a lot of missed opportunities here like just a longer game or even some mini-games. It almost seems pointless for Valve to go through all this effort to create such a well-produced tech demo. I'm hoping this means more is coming along, but knowing Valve, it's not.

The visuals are great and run well on the Steam Deck. 60FPS throughout with great textures and lighting effects. I don't see the point of playing this on PC unless you just want to enjoy the writing and characters. In Valve's defense, handhelds are subject to tech demos. Sony did it with the PSP and Vita, and Nintendo loved doing this with the DS and 3DS. Anyone who has played handhelds their whole life won't feel so shocked or hate Valve for this. They just used such a beloved IP and didn't go anywhere with it. It's a painful tease as we all know there's nothing else coming from it.

If you have a Steam Deck this is a no-brainer. It's a fun 30-minute demo to play while you wait for other downloads or something. While the main character didn't get enough time to fully mature like in other Valve IPs just the fact that they got laughs out of me in 30-minutes says a lot. Most games can't get a smile over the course of hours.

I love cyberpunk settings. There's so much darkness and imagination that can go into the setting. It's also a setting we could possibly be heading into ourselves with the way technology is advancing and how much we rely on it. Stray is all about exactly this issue. You play as an unnamed orange cat who ends up in the middle of trying to help a race of robots see the "Outside" again. You befriend a robot named B12 who helps you communicate with these robots and he also learns about his identity along the way.

Stray has some really good pacing. It's a very short game that can be completed in a single sitting, but it has exploration, puzzles, scripted action events, stealth, and collectibles. That's a lot to back into 5 hours and it's done very well. Let's start out with the obvious. This is the best representation of a cat in any video game. The animations are insanely realistic, you get a meow button that's pretty much useless, but it's there, and you can do cat things like knock stuff over, sleep, scratch on carpets and walls, and get paper bags stuck on your head that reverse the controls. While it may seem superfluous on the surface it helps add to the love of cats that the developers have even though none of these things really involve advancing the game further.

Jumping around in the game is dealt with context buttons. The jump button will appear on top of the platforms you can climb onto. Outside of this, there are no other actions except accessing B12's menu to look at items and the flashlight. On occasion, you will have chase sequences in which you are running from a swarm of insect-like creatures, but most of Stray involves finding ways into rooms, platforming, and minor puzzles such as rolling barrels underneath things to jump up to. There are three major cities you end up in. The first one involves vertical platforming that lets you find lost music pages, B12 memories, and various item gathering to progress past certain points. The second city is a brief visit, but the last one is pretty large and looks beautiful. You can also talk to the various robots in the city to help you find out where to go or give you hints.

My favorite parts of Stray were the areas in between cities. I liked climbing around, jumping, and running from the insects. The city areas slowed the game down too much for me especially trying to gather the items needed to progress out of the city. The game looks gorgeous with lots of neon lights, and it's surprisingly dark and gritty for a cat starring a cute cat. The story is pretty touching and tugs at your heartstrings towards the end. Despite the short length, the developers did a great job connecting you with these characters. However, there does seem to be a missed opportunity here. This is a game that would benefit from being open-world. A vast cyberpunk city with side quests and tons of areas to explore. While quite ambitious for such a small team, it would be great, and I think a lot of people are mistaking this game for something like Cyberpunk 2077 in its scope.

Overall, the game is a lot of fun and quite enjoyable despite the limitations of exploration. The game is sadly, poorly optimized on PC with lots of stuttering, terrible temporal anti-aliasing, and shader caching issues. I played the entire game on Steam Deck and it suffered from stuttering when going into new areas. When it's all said and done, Stray is a very unique game and the love of the domestic feline companion oozes through the screen and pulls on your heart.

We as humans tend to dwell on death and what lies beyond. It's only natural as we simply don't know. Behind the Frame explores this concept with an emotional tug-of-war of a story, but you really need to pay attention, and a lot of the story is more between the lines and not what's really being shown in front of you. There's a lot of assumption that you know what's happening when the main character looks shockingly off in the distance based on the previous scene. It's done fairly well too.

Most of Behind the Frame is puzzle solving. It takes a dark twist halfway through and it surprised me. Your goal is to acquire all five missing colors on your paint palette to finish your painting. To do this each color is locked away behind a chapter puzzle. These got rather complex towards the end, but nothing you can't figure out without exploring and finding that key item that gives you that "AHA!" moment. Some puzzles are as simple as matching colors on a painting to memorization. Nothing is overly complex and it does eventually come together. The painting itself is a matter of scribbling enough in the empty space and it will auto-fill. Nothing extraordinary there. There are some other small tasks like making food which is as simple and dragging items around.

There isn't a lot of context on the main character's life itself through any reading of notes or anything. It's pretty much learning about her past and her connection with her neighbor. The game has gorgeous anime-Ghibli-inspired art with a few small cut scenes thrown in. I never got tired of looking at the game, but it is confined to mostly her apartment. Every so often you "dive" into a painting, but it's usually just for story context. There were a few panoramic scenes that were breathtaking. I actually felt like I stepped into a painting myself a few times.

In the end, the game is over in about 90 minutes or less depending on how long it takes you to solve the more complex puzzles in the final chapters. Without having to solve these this game is over in an hour. The story does unfold quite a bit towards the end and without voice acting it gets a lot of emotions across and I have to give the developers credit for that. Most of these short indie games don't have any meaning behind them. They have some clever gameplay ideas or neat visuals and nothing beyond that. Behind the Frame actually tugged at my heart strings a bit and got me thinking at the end which is more than I can say for 60-hour-long AAA titles. If you want a puzzle-filled emotional evening with great visuals and fun gameplay mechanics then look no further.

The Lost Planet series is one of those sad ones you see on "worst of" or "what happened" YouTube videos. The first game is great if not repetitive. It was early in the HD era of gaming and showed off what the Xbox 360 could do. The second game took a serious dive and tried to be a Monster Hunter rip-off and the third game tries to blend both but doesn't do it very well. The biggest strength in Lost Planet 3 is the continued story from the first game and it's done quite well with story twists and surprises, but it's dished out too slowly and the game in between is repetitive and slow.

You play as Jim Peyton. A man who is just using his rig to make some money to send back to Earth for his wife and baby. You are back on E.D.N. III and you are back to work for the NEVEC company just like in the first game, and the story starts out really slow. While you wait for that to pick up you get to learn the two main gameplay loops here. On foot shooting and your rig. The rig is a hulking mech that can't really fight. It's mostly used to trek across small areas to get to an objective and I honestly find this a waste of time. The whole trapesing across areas to get to somewhere isn't done right. The areas are small, there's zero exploration, and it just wastes time. You can eventually unlock fast traveling, but you can only fast travel at the opening of each area. The first 2/3 of the game starts each mission with you doing the same preamble of walking out of the base and then across the same areas dozens of times to get to the objective. When fast travel is unlocked it helps, but why wasn't this an option from the start?

The rig can kind of fight, but it's melee brawling with larger Akrid which are the planet's native creatures you must kill. The same five-six enemies repeat throughout the entire game and it gets old quickly. There are a ton of repeated boss fights in the game and to mix things up (not really) you can fight them in the rig as well. This consists of timed blocks and then using your claw arm to and drill to get at their weak points which glow orange, a series staple. This orange stuff is the lifeblood of the planet and used as currency in-game and is sent back to Earth to solve the energy crisis. The mech itself is very clunky but in a bad way. It feels unresponsive and sluggish to move and the boss fights are never epic feeling or satisfying. The most irritating missions are the ones in which it turns into a drilling platform and you must defend it. These missions last for what seems like forever and you never have good enough weapons for the enemies at hand.

Let's get to the on-foot combat. The weapons here are completely useless. Only the shotgun and assault rifle is any good. The hunting rifle, bowcaster, and grenade launcher are mostly useless. They fire too slow as every single enemy moves fast and swarms you. They only became useful in the final chapter when you finally fight human enemies. The same few enemies repeat. Three small swarming enemy types, two larger giant dog-like creatures, one centipede-like creature that can use cover, and three boss types that repeat often. That's it. The game relies on quick-time events when enemies get too close and especially in the rig. They all move fast and don't benefit from long-range weapons or slow-shooting weapons. You need a lot of ammo to pelt at them to keep them off of you. There are upgrades and weapons to purchase, but you wind up not needing most of them for the other weapons because they are useless. You can also upgrade your rig, but outside of armor there really isn't a reason to do much upgrading.

The entire game is also dull to look at. Sure it looks nice graphically, but artistically the entire game is just ice and snow. There's no variation and it just looks boring. Even the base is boring to be in because it's all ice and snow. I know this is a frozen planet, but there are usually other biomes on every planet type. Mix it up some. Outside of shooting Akrid you are pulling levers, turning knobs, and pressing buttons. There are some scripted events, but the few interior areas are drab and just as boring as the outside. The game has no soul and feels like a typical cookie-cutter shooter. It feels like it tries to be Dead Space 3 sometimes with odd horror music that doesn't fit and the creatures that hide behind cover.

Overall, the game is just so underwhelming. It doesn't have compelling shooting, the weapons suck, the rig is wasted by not having any weapons, and the areas repeat just like the bosses and enemy types. The story is the only thing worth sticking around for, but unless you're a hardcore Lost Planet fan there's no reason to play this. The story is for fans of the original game and newcomers won't get the full impact of the twists in the story. The graphics look nice, and the voice acting is great, but the same repeated ice and snow levels for 10 hours get old really fast. Sadly, this series doesn't end with a bang and there's a reason why Capcom left it in the graveyard.

Ys is a series I have barely dabbled in. I rarely finish JRPGs either due to their insane difficulty spikes, incessant grinding, or boring story and characters. Ys I is a game that's older than I am. It's also incredibly short because of this and due to the cryptic nature of games from the late 80s, I decided to play this game using a walkthrough guide. This is sadly one of those JRPGs that has a specific way to play or it becomes an incredibly hard game. There are so many things you can miss, but also encourages multiple play-throughs. For a game this old, I don't see any reason to play it other than to complete the Ys series from the beginning. It is as basic as JRPGs come due to its age as well.

The story is pretty decent despite the short playtime. I actually enjoyed the characters as well. There isn't a lot of talking that drags on forever. The game does get to the point with some short and sweet dialog. You play as series' main protagonist Adol Christin who must collect the books of Ys to save the world from evil. It's pretty typical, but I enjoyed the small little world they built around the books of Ys. They were interesting to read and I felt this was a world you could get sucked into if it were to progress (which surprise, it did). The art is amazing with beautiful backdrops. The music is also fantastic thanks to legendary composer Yuzo Koshiro. Lots of rock and beautiful orchestral music. The Chronicles+ version contains both the chiptune versions and the arranged versions.

Ys' main combat system is called the "bump" system in which you just walk into enemies and are dealt knockback damage if hit straight on. The idea is to hit them on the edge of their sprite kind of like speed jousting. It's a weird system but keeps the pace of the game moving and I like that. Again, the game is really hard unless you quickly level and are constantly acquiring the best equipment. You can get some for free if you do things in a certain order or find a certain key for a certain chest. These are JRPG tropes that I absolutely hate because most of the time no one will know this without a guide or accidentally coming across it. Easter eggs and extra dialog are fine, but essential things to play are something that really irks me.

Due to the short length, you can easily hit the level cap in a few hours. The cap is 10 and you quickly acquire money and XP as you advance to more powerful enemies. For such a short game there is a large variety of them as well and their design is really cool. I always looked forward to seeing what was next. The dungeons are also varied such as a mine (which is dark), an ice floor with mirrors, a 20-floor tower that you must climb towards the end, forests, and other places. It's crazy just how much unique content was crammed into a 4-5 hour game. One thing I was relieved by is if you keep up with the equipment and level up to maybe 4-5 before the first boss you can easily fight each boss with just a few hits. I know that sounds crazy, but there's only so much balancing in a game this short. The final boss is notorious for being impossible to beat, and even with the best armor/weapons, level cap, and on Easy I still had to try nearly a dozen times to beat him. You also can only fight him with a specific weapon.

Overall, Ys I is a memorable JRPG if you play it the way it was supposed to be played. Many will get frustrated due to needing to constantly level up fast and always have the best weapons, and the weird boss difficulty spikes will turn many away. I only recommend this game if you're a fan of the series or really want to start from the beginning like I am. It has fantastic art and music and is a well-contained and fun JRPG...if you play it right.

Being a direct sequel to Ys I, and being the late 80s, I came into this not expecting much. While content-wise it's completely new, with new locales, new characters, new weapons, and armor, otherwise it looks the exact same and plays the same way. You still play as Adol Christin trying to save the world of Ys from another evil source and rescue the Goddesses Reah and Freena.

The game even starts out the exact same way. You wake up in a house in a quiet village and must start your adventure in a green forest area like before. Sadly, the game is just as cryptic and obscure when it comes to figuring out what to do. I followed a guide through my entire playthrough, but if I hadn't there would be so much backtracking and aimless wondering. Some of the dungeons are more improved layout-wise, but the final two dungeons are a labyrinthine mess, more so than anything in the first game. I had to resort to a map online to figure out where to go, especially when I had to backtrack and start learning shortcuts.

The bump system still exists but seems a little easier and more forgiving this time around. You don't need to hit enemies off center, but it's still not a fun combat system. It makes the game fast-paced and I like the lack of random battles, but it's still not engaging in any way. Thankfully, this time around, you don't need to rely on hidden obscure equipment and can just buy stuff as you can afford it. Only the short sword, in the beginning, can be had for free in the first dungeon, but everything is to be purchased. I liked the addition of magic wands in this game. It helps add a layer to combat, but sadly it's abused with boss fights. All but the final boss need to be beaten with the magic only, and the only offensive magic is fire. Which I found a bit weird. Everything else is passive magic such as being able to turn into a Roo to talk to enemies to pass certain areas, Light Magic which is used to see secret doorways and light dark areas, and Time Magic which slows enemies down. Unfortunately, a lot of items, required or not, are hidden in obscure areas and can be easily missed without thorough exploration or a guide.

I did find the boss fights more manageable this time around and less frustrating. The leveling system is also improved, but only slightly. While the cap this time around went from 10 to 55 you can easily reach the first 30 levels in the first two hours of the game. Before the first boss, I was already almost level 20. Bosses are a lot more reasonable and I only struggled with a couple of them, but once you learn their attack patterns it becomes much more manageable.

Overall, Ys II is a good sequel to the first game. With enough new content to explore and an interesting story and fun characters. While I wouldn't say the story itself is memorable, the adventure itself is fun I just wish the magic system was more expanded and there was less backtracking. Most of the game's fault comes from the cryptic items and confusing dungeon layouts, but it's manageable with a guide. It's a fine Ys game to send out with the 80s and still remains a solid RPG today.

The entire series is well worth playing, but only if you're curious about the beginning of the series, want to start the series from the beginning, or just like 80s JRPGs. Expect basic combat, cryptic progression, confusing dungeons, and unbalanced bosses in the first game. If you play with a guide you will most likely have a great time.

The Yakuza series had massive success with its spinoff Like a Dragon. While it had flaws it was entertaining and had great characters and a detailed story. The entire Yakuza franchise excels in the storytelling and character development department. Judgment is no different. You play as the lawyer turned-detective Tavo Kagami trying to rid of his demons and upturn a bunch of corrupt politicians. An Alzheimer's cure and a murder mystery are at the center of this. The story is well constructed and kept me on the edge of my seat at every turn. The entire story has chapters ending on cliffhangers like addictive binge-worthy TV shows. I always wanted to know what was going to come next. At many points, it felt that Yagami and co. were backed into a corner and I didn't see any way out only for the story to twist and turn in crazy ways.

I don't want to say too much about the story as any small detail can spoil it. Just know that this is the strongest point of the game and what makes it worth sticking through the 30+ hour game for. The second reason is the characters. There are many and they are well-acted and have great backstories. They are slowly introduced throughout the game and by the end, I either loved them or hated them. Tavo himself is a well-rounded character that's stubborn and unwilling to back down from anything. I really liked the personalities of each character. They were unique and interesting and they all stood out in their own way. For such a large cast this is usually hard to pull off or not done well enough.

As for the gameplay, this is where Judgment falters and the entire Yakuza series lacks here in every entry in some way. You get to run around in this open...map called Kamarucho. I don't want to say open world because it's just a small city that can be run across in about 2-3 minutes. It's a city full of crime and underground misdeeds. What's the point of the open city? I don't really know. Mostly for side quests, but I always found these to be underwhelming and repetitive in the Yakuza series. There are a few types. First off are actual side cases which net you more SP and cash. That's bout it. They are mostly uninteresting and don't advance the story or characters at all. There are friend events spread throughout which net you skills that can be unlocked, SP, and cash. These are the two main types of side quests you can partake in and I did finish most side cases just for the SP and cash. You really need cash to buy healing items and stay stocked up.

There are taxis spread throughout to help with fast travel. With such a small area you would think it's pointless but it's great to avoid fights on the streets. These are randomly occurring and you can usually run from them and you should. I felt it hindered progress and after the third chapter, it didn't net enough SP to be worth bothering with. Eventually, you will be wanted by street gangs and your threat level will increase unless you stop a boss-type enemy. This never goes away and will always go back to 100% so I just ignored them. There are also side activities that are mostly used for dating. That's another side quest that I didn't find interesting. You can meet girls through friend events or side cases and later date them by presenting presents. Side mini-games like batting, darts, and gambling can be fun to an extent, but when are mini-games like this ever fun to go back to? It's just filler content and for achievement hunters really. It doesn't advance the story or add to it in any way I just felt like all of these side activities/missions were chores to complete.

Let's get into combat. It's flawed for sure. While it looks cool and it's simple to understand it suffers from unresponsive controls and animations that don't interrupt when you input a command. I always felt like my button presses were delayed. There are two fighting stances. Tiger for one-to-one fights and Crane for multiple enemies. You can pick up objects and hit people with them and there's a special EX finishing move that you can perform which is key to winning tougher fights. You also have an EX boost which unlocks more powerful combos and increases your defense. Again, a key thing to use to win fights. I just felt like no matter what I did I couldn't master the system. There is a block and dodge button, but it seems that the enemies are magnetized to you because no matter how much I dodge or run away they always follow me and connect their attacks. It makes boss fights especially infuriating. While I had plenty of items I could use at my disposal to help I wish I could rely more on my skill, but the fighting system just doesn't allow it.

There are other small annoyances such as mortal wounds. These lockout parts of your health bar and the only thing in the game that can fix this are med-kits which are rare and cost a lot of money. There's only one person that can heal you and they're sold underground in a sewer. Of course, you have to go through the animation of opening the sewer great, sliding down a ladder, running down the sewer, and then the same thing going back up. Just cut all of this out! I also found the game way too long. It's padded with a ton of fights throughout the main story and I wish a lot of this was cut out. There are easily 10 hours of fights just in the main story. Nothing breaks this up, however. There are repetitive detective events like searching for objects in first-person, chase scenes and tailing people. My god, do these get old quickly. Tailing missions are never fun in games and these are dragged out for sometimes over five minutes. You can hide behind objects and that's about it. Just don't fill the suspicion meter. All of these mini-games are just incredibly repetitive and could have been cut out.

The game at least looks decent. It's a PS4 port so some parts look rough. There are some textures that look like PS3-era stuff, but at least the facial animations and character models are really good. There's lots of detail everywhere, but don't expect this to push your hardware to its limits. It mostly looks very realistic and sterile with not much in the way of artistic flair. It looks like a modern-day Japanese city.

Overall, Judgment excels in storytelling and character development but falters in gameplay. The fighting is stiff and unresponsive, the mini-games are repetitive and pad out the hours, and I felt the detective work in the courtroom was a missed opportunity. The open city is an excuse to throw side cases and missions at you that are meaningless and just pad gameplay. Random city fights are annoying and get in the way of progress, and the visuals aren't much of an upgrade. What's here works, but I mostly stayed for the story. If it had a bad story this game would be barely above average, however, it's one of the best and most detailed video game stories I've seen in recent years.

Horizon: Zero Dawn is a game I have struggled to finish for 5 years now. It's not that it's a bad game or a boring one, it just has a lot of promise in the beginning third of the game and you quickly learn it has shown everything it has to offer by then. I got frustrated with the game more often than I wanted to. I found the game had felt bloated with too many activities and very little reward for them. However, it's the game's less-than-stellar combat that made me continue to turn the game off many times over the last five years.

I even repurchased the game on PC and thought the higher fidelity would get me to finish the game. I even tried it on the Steam Deck, but it wasn't until I bought my PS5 and wanted to dive into Forbidden West that made me finally complete the game. I did complete most of the side quests and explore the world for various collectibles, but in the end, the in-game economy is so small and restricted that there's no reward worth the effort. You can buy the strongest weapons and armor about 1/3 through the game and you can't find more powerful weapons or acquire them. The same goes for armor. There are merchants spread throughout the game, but they mostly offer stuff you can craft, but it's imperative that you buy and save for the most powerful stuff early on.

I saw all of this because the combat while interesting is frustrating and fairly uninteresting. The entire game's premise focuses on these machines that made humanity go extinct. While I don't want to discuss too much of the story as it will spoil it (the story is really good) I will say that the entire idea of weak points breaks the combat. You can use your Focus, which is a device Aloy has on her ear that can scan the world, and this will show breakable weak points on machines. Each weak point might have different elemental weaknesses. It's essential to break these down to attack the machine and kill it faster. Otherwise, you will only chip health away. While this sounds fine on paper, the execution is poorly done. A lot of the game wants to focus on stealth by sneaking around tall grass and using your tripcaster to shoot out trip lines for machines to walk across. Early on this is fine as single wires can take down enemies. Later on, the bigger ones won't fall for this, and the entire tripcaster weapon becomes useless. The ropcaster is used to tie down machines, but it is useless against humans. There is a sling that throws out bombs, and then a heavy bow and a bow for elemental arrows. That is it. The only difference in price for each weapon is how many augmentation slots you get, now so much power, and different elemental ammo types it can use.

The flaw stems from combat being too chaotic to accurately break down weak points. When multiple machines are coming at you the instinct is to just throw everything you have at them. Forget melee attacks as these only work against smaller machines that are maybe twice your size. Attacking massive Deathbringers up close will result in instant death. The bigger the machine the more you have to roll and dodge around and shoot elemental arrows and really have the ammo for that weakness. The second big flaw comes into account with the crafting system. You have to either buy or craft everything and it's imperative that you have plenty of material on hand or you are left hanging. You can't ever hold more than what you can craft and crafting bigger ammo pouches doesn't help much. You always feel like nothing is enough. Health upgrades with each level up aren't enough, the skill tree takes way too long to get to more useless skills and it always feels like it's not enough. You can't upgrade your base power as weapons rely on augmentations to make them more powerful. It just never feels like what you do is good enough and can't get better no matter how much you level up. I was always dying easily, guzzling health potions, and relying on cheap exploits to get through tougher battles.

It's sad that the combat is so flawed as the rest of the game is fine. The open world is beautiful and I have fun climbing mountains Tomb Raider style and wanted to explore more, but there's no reward for any of this. In combat, you can control smaller machines and you learn to control new ones by finding Cauldrons throughout the game. Think tombs in Tomb Raider. These require taking down bosses to learn a new ability, but I never needed to ride an animal once. It felt pointless and the reward wasn't justified. Why would I go through all this trouble for a new skill I will never use? Side quests in this game are fine for the most part. The other big flaw in the game is the lifeless and boring characters. Sylens and Aloy are the only characters I had any interest in outside of discovering the mystery of what caused the human apocalypse. Most of the side characters feel like mannequins and the voice acting is spotty for them.

Some other gripes are the healing system. You have to run around picking up every little flower you see to keep filling your medicine pouch. This is a health system separate from potions. However, if you want to keep potions stocked you need to hunt animals which is really tedious and gets old fast. The same five animals are spread throughout the game and you need different meat types to make potions. Some pouch upgrades require animal skins which require hunting multiple times before they drop one. It's a very tedious system and there's no relief. After the 100,000 flower I picked up I wanted to scream. The medicine pouch is annoying because combat is flawed. If I didn't have to guzzle health items so often and actually felt like I was getting stronger it wouldn't be an issue. Each system feeds off of itself and it brings the whole game down quite a bit.

The visuals are actually quite impressive. While the base PS4 model is pretty rough the game looks great on PS4 Pro and even better on PC and PS5. The character models look a bit plastic-like, but overall the entire game just looks good and colorful. I didn't run into any slowdown or glitches at all. It runs really solid, however, the game isn't well-optimized on PC. It requires more powerful hardware than is really needed.

Overall, Horizon: Zero Dawn has a fantastic story, and world-building is done well, but the game has many systems that feed off of each other and each one is severely flawed. Combat is hectic and requires breaking machine parts to take them down, and that type of precise combat isn't fun here. Stealth is flawed as it requires trial and error and you don't get powerful enough weapons to ever feel like you can get any job done right. The weapons are mostly uninteresting and the skill tree is a grind. Side quests and NPCs are a bore and there are no worthwhile rewards for getting collectibles and doing said side quests. It sounds like I hated this game, but I didn't. The story and world are interesting enough to keep playing, and Aloy is a great character herself. I just felt like the first third of the game builds everything up too much and you're let down when you realize that's all the game has to offer and you keep playing expecting things to change and they don't.