Sandy Cater

Not sure why people call this a masterpiece, or better than Garland's Ex Machina. Annihilation is just another one of those neat sci fi films that tries really hard to be deep and smart, but ultimately doesn't end up making sense unless you REALLY stretch. This film will have people trying to explain the ending to you in a deep psychological sense, but their theories only make sense if details from the movie are left out entirely. Not worth recommending, but not something you shouldn't watch with your partner when you've got nothing else interesting to watch.

In the context of gaming in it's entirety, Elden Ring is a 10 out of 10 masterpiece. However, this is a FromSoft game. Thus, Elden Ring left me unsatisfied (outside of a couple notable bosses). In short, the game's difficulty is made trivially easy by naturally progressing through it and utilising the new tools. This game lacks a natural balance in combat that others previously had, and 95% of bosses feel less like a challenge to learn and overcome but an easy 1 and done, even on first playthroughs with little knowledge. Even with putting myself at a disadvantage by deciding to not use summons and stay true to my starting uchigatana because it was my favourite DS3 weapon, I felt OP as I reached end game. When I transitioned to pure endgame, no boss presented any real difficulty. My friends (who have never played a soulsborne game before) have been enjoying its accessibility, which is great and I'm glad they can enjoy it, but they have received a far lesser experience than I did with my first Souls game. They do not understand what it's like to go head to head with a behemoth of a boss for 3 hours and rise victorious and more experienced. They do not understand the fear of the unknown as they attempt to find the closest bonfire. You can make any game harder by setting parameters on how you play, regardless of how easy the game is. It is just slightly disappointing as a 'veteran' that I have to so actively avoid endgame builds to enjoy this game and receive the same satisfaction as previous games. This game is a masterpiece and will be enjoyed by many. This is likely the equivalent of Modern Warfare 2, at it's peak but nearing the beginning of a long and slow decline from what made these games great to begin with.

I found this game to be really difficult to get through. I understand the praise it received, but I just didn't feel it. About 3/4 through the game i wanted to just put it down and be done with it. I'll start with the good. Graphics are excellent (except for the back drop sometimes being a grainy wallpaper, which is a shame because this world is really mesmerising as a fan of all things scifi). I really digged midgar and found myself just staring up at 'the plate' because I thought it looked so damn cool. I also really came to like the characters. The bad. The combat in this game made it SO boring. This isn't a difficult game, the difficulty is artificially upped by how spongey the enemies are. I found myself just getting annoyed if an enemy had too much health because it would just take ages of dull combat to end it. This lead me to dreading bosses because they simply weren't fun- 20 minute grinds of rinse and repeat and some of the mechanics like rolling were almost useless. I genuinely put the game down for a couple of days because I could not suffer going up against a boss I knew was coming. The writing is fine, but sometimes it feels like it was written by a middle schooler- example: Barret shoots at what is clearly bullet proof glass, the bad guy then says its bullet proof (DUH), then in the next room Barret procedes to shoot at the glass again! Some of the side quests are notably boring and even one of the first ones makes light of how boring the task is. Overall, I would have been upset if this was not free to download. This game felt like it took twice the time to finish, and that is not meant in a good way. However, this is the only FF game in a long time I have finished so I am clearly biased against the series. I wouldn't recommend this game to friends and, unless combat and enemies are drastically improved from its current boredom, I won't play the sequel. I will instead just watch a cut scene movie on YouTube to see what happens.

You're doing yourself a disservice not playing this game. I bought a ps4 to rinse through all the exclusives I'd missed out while owning an XBOX before the 5 is out and this where I started. I originally wanted to rush through the game to get to the others but I've enjoyed it so much that I'll 100% it before moving on. Even then I will play it regularly because the FREE legends update will bring me back to play with a friend. My only complaint is the difficulty can be very cheap. Some of the bosses have move sets and tracking that you would see on a spammy dark souls boss, with more speed than you and the ability to instantly block after attacking so you don't have an opening to do damage. Then at camps when they spam 6 or 7 enemies on you and multiple attack you, it becomes very annoying. It doesn't ruin the experience but cheap difficulty is the worst kind of difficulty. GoS is the gold standard of what games should be and spending your money else where before buying this game would be wrong.