Tom Ruess

BioWare is dead. Dragon Age Origin is a top 25 game of all time for me and Knights of the Old Republic a top 10. This is just genuinely sad.

If you love speedrunning games there’s a very small chance you’ll like this game; if not, you won’t. Story and dialogue are awful and cringe, gameplay is a series of ‘missions’ that all feel like minigames, and the shooting is terrible. Also, and this is the aspect of the game I detest the most, to advance the plot you MUST do multiple time trials with extremely strict time limits - this is what most of your playtime will be spent doing. Played for 4 hours, awful game, but stupid people will say anything to defend indie developers.

Localizers DESTROYED what could have been a decent game. Can’t believe Suikoden has sunk so low/ I wish this project had never happened.

Not a good game. As a big Dragon Quest fan, the best thing about DQ heroes is the ability to play as a ton of cool and memorable characters from the Dragon Quest universe. It’s also easy to pick up and play, and it’s fun to have an ACTION rpg with DQ characters. Now for negatives… plot/ writing is just awful. I wasn’t expecting a deep story but wow this is bad. And the terrible/ overwrought voice acting makes the lines come across that much worse (Healie is quite literally PAINFUL to listen to). Gameplay is generic to the extreme and quickly becomes a boring slog. It’s deeply repetitive and without nuance. Another annoying issue is the limited inventory space; you’ll constantly be selling old items to make space for new ones. This isn’t Fallout lol, and it adds nothing positive to the experience. Also, I hope you like tower defence games (I don’t) because this game implements that kind of game design frequently. And this might be an idiosyncratic complaint but I’ll say it anyway: I haven’t come across a COSTUME CHANGE yet in this game. It’s disappointing that you essentially can never change your character’s outfit, especially since there are so many cool characters you know and love from DQ. I want Jessica in her Magic Bikini! I’m half-joking, but also mean it haha. I’d describe most reviews I’ve seen for this game as generally positive and I don’t agree at all. I’ve played it for 11 hours at the moment and can safely say I’m not a fan.

One of the best games from an endearing series! Controlling the mechs with Kirby is awesome and the visuals are also very cool. The final boss fight is epic and ends the game on a high note. Nice music as well. Kirby has come a long way from the NES!

A fun game that feels like Game Freak is finally trying to make something NEW/ MODERN again. I'm 29 and have been playing pokemon since my earliest childhood; and Pokemon Red, Blue, Gold, and Silver were all classic, boundary-pushing games that made Gameboys worth owning. In the past 10-15 years, however, Game Freak has been WAY too content to rest on their laurels and literally remake the same exact game with a (marginally) fresh coat of paint/ new (albeit less and less creative) pokemon each time. Sword/ Shield IMO are the epitome of this mentality and were incredibly dull; I got bored, felt disappointed, and put the game down after 3 gyms. Scarlet/ Violet, while VERY rough around the edges visually, is finally a mainline entry that makes many steps in the right direction. It finally embraces a truly open-world landscape and shakes up the Pokemon formula for the better. For instance, [MINOR SPOILER] you get the legendary pokemon within the first 30 mins of the game and it actually acts as a mount to help you traverse the open world. Another nice new feature, you can choose a pokemon from your party to walk beside you and engage in instant battles with wild pokemon to build up exp faster. Also, as a more general comment, this game has a very bright and lively colour palette compared to recent mainline pokemon games which likewise works in the game's favour. The music is also quite enjoyable - the song that kicks in when a gym leader uses their last pokemon is ABSOLUTELY AWESOME (can't overstate that lol I literally started singing along and bopping up and down to the beat whenever it came on hahaha...). The battle's themselves are good too and addictive as ever. Tbh, I'm not gonna spend too much time on the negatives because from what I've seen on the internet they're already very well documented lol especially the visual glitches and screen-tearing issues. A couple quick things though: as much as I like the giant and wide-open open world, it's often very empty. This game def takes a couple nods towards Breath of the Wild in terms of exploration, but BoTW was no where near this devoid at times. I also find the pacing of the battles, particularly with wild pokemon, to be much too slow. I think they'd be better if they were a bit snappier and didn't waste so much time on onscreen text. The section of the game where you do battle with Team Star are also not great; they're a nice change of pace in terms of gameplay but could've been done a lot better. And, last, as much credit as I give this game for finally trying new things, it still could try MORE new things lol. Imagine a pokemon game set in the ancient past or the distant future... imagine pokemon in space! There's still so many new places they could go. Final thoughts: having beaten it, Pokemon Violet is a solid game that I'd def recommend if you can get past the visual rough edges. You'll have a fun time!

Objectively speaking, Chrono Cross is a really generic RPG with a sentimental, disappointing story that quickly becomes bland and uninteresting. BUT the saving grace of this game is its aesthetic: the tropical visuals are great for their time and the music is some of the best you’ll hear in an RPG. That being said, most of my enjoyment when playing an RPG comes from story and gameplay which are both lacking here. There’s also about a million characters in this game who all receive next to zero character development; it would’ve been much better if they made less characters and gave them more nuance. I’d recommend seeking out the OST for this game for sure (it’s on steaming services) but I’d also recommend passing on Chrono Cross itself. After about 20 hours I got really bored of it and stopped playing; I suspect many others will do the same.

I have extremely mixed feelings about this game. On the positive side, it’s one of the scariest games I’ve personally ever played. The dark (and, at times, gruesome) aesthetic and lore work well together to craft a truly terrifying game world. BUT this game suffers from a really big really fundamental flaw imo: the gameplay is almost entirely about TRIAL AND ERROR. Especially if you’re playing on a harder difficulty, you’re going to be spending TONS of time being brutally murdered and trying again (and again and again and again and…). It really detracts from the fun to the point that I considered stopping playing this game more than once. It’s also frequently VERY unclear where to go next with the game only offering a vague, usually useless tip. In summary, I have a hard time reviewing this game. It’s great in a lot of ways and the scare-value is through the roof but it’s also fundamentally crippled by its trial and error based gameplay. Whether or not you like this game might ultimately come down to how tolerant you are of this style of gameplay. But given this game’s massive positives AND negatives I’d score it a 7/10.

About 8 hours into the Quarry and I’m not liking this game nearly as much as I did Until Dawn. The developers made several changes to the core gameplay that hurt the game more than help it (for instance, they changed how action commands are performed and in so doing actually made them much worse/ more annoying). Unskippable cutscenes are also a massive problem with this game as they absolutely MURDER any replay value; this is doubly a shame because this is exactly the type of game that you will WANT to replay to get the many different endings and outcomes. I’m not sure why, but I also find this game much less scary than the first one. Maybe I just don’t care about the characters as I did in Until Dawn. I’m harping on the negatives because Until Dawn gave me very high expectations. This is still (mostly) a solid and enjoyable horror story; it also looks great and has pretty high quality acting. It just seems inferior in comparison to the heights set by its predecessor. (Edit/ Update. Having now beaten the game, I actually like it a bit less than an the time I posted this review. I could forgive the games faults if the storytelling was better but it isn’t. The endings in particular are kinda disappointing and unsatisfying.)