Recent reviews by Super Blyat

There is something oddly engrossing about this game.

It's decidedly a 7/10. The story is plodding, The characters are fun but bland. The combat gets very repetitive early on.

And yet I can't put it down. The recreation of Tokyo is an astoundingly beautiful place to explore and lends itself so well to the myriad of objects they've added to find. Gliding around is fun and the side quests and collectables all feel impactful. The game has systems to make collecting everything easier. The melding of japanese horror folklore is phenomonal, being both unsettling and creative in design.

I hate open worlds, and yet Ghostwire does it well enough to make me love it.

People are saying the open world is empty but I think they were expecting a tonne of mini-games, boring ass repeatable side missions like Spiderman, or NPCs roaming around like a sandbox Japanese GTA. The reality is the open world is a collectable paradise like the old Crackdown games or Prototype. If you enjoy that, this game is for you.

Rockstar Launcher is borderline malware. Been able to play this game for a decade no issue but now its unplayable and linked to some random hotmail address that isn't mine

A pretty good game but also cookie cutter.

Visuals are pretty fantastic and the game runs phenomenally well. Nixxes did a great job with this port.

Story wise I enjoyed it though it sometimes feels too busy, and othertimes the narrative completely loses momentum. All the voice acting is great, mo-cap and facial animation is fine, nothing special.

Combat is actually great. It has the simplicity of the Arkham 1 button fighting with lots of fun modified abilities. Gadgets, much like Arkham, are fiddly and boring to use during combat as they break momentum. I would have liked to have seen a more refined and streamlined set of gadgets that could be used with button combos more easily.

Traversal is an absolute joy. This games gets swinging around NYC exactly right.

The side content can be fun, the Taskmaster side missions were decently fun, but many of them are too long just of themselves, and there's so much repetition it makes them completely filler and not fun to fully complete. I liked the Landmarks, backpacks, Black cat, and the lab stuff a lot. Most other stuff was a chore of 10-15 minute combat sequences. The crimes are especially bad side content. Some of them can be completed by just pressing your ultimate too.

The difficulty of this game is a major issue for me. I am playing on Hard and honestly,the game was a breeze until 3/4 of the way through when Doc Ock starts causing problems in NYC. All factions are unfair to fight and it drains the fun out of the end game.

Overall, it's a good game. Not anything that truly wowed me like God of War, but for maybe $30 you'll get your fun out of it.

I do not recommend this DLC at full price. The Shadows of Rose campaign is 2-3 hours long, making it hard to justify at $20. However, at even $15, maybe less, it's a worthwhile piece of post-game story. This also includes the 3rd person mode for the main campaign.

Shadows of Rose has some great elements. The 3rd person camera is used well to shift the gameplay back towards the slow, horror pacing of Revelations 1/2. The story has some very enjoyable elements: Rose is a great character, Michael has some intrigue (though it's obvious who they are if you have 2 functioning brain cells) and the return of a few characters was fun to see.

The DLC is visually impressive with horrifying creatures, unnerving non-humanoids and some great visual language.

The extra powers Rose gets honestly... kind of suck, and I was very dissapointed we didn't get to rely more heavily on mutamycete powers. Using guns a lot in this DLC felt kind of crappy. The mutamycete powers essentially boil down to an knife grab-break and a stun. I would have had a lot more fun if there were minimal guns and much more focus on a new set of powers.

The DLC unfortunately follows the trend of End of Zoe where they just went full stupid in some sections. RE8 on the whole is more hammy and campy than RE7 but Shadows of Rose has some really anime cringe moments.

The 3rd person mode in the base campaign feels bad? It's odd. Rose controls and works perfectly in 3rd person, but Ethan's animations look all wrong and like it was cheaply slapped together as a bundled feature to make this expansion worthwhile.

This DLC has some fantastic scares. The non-combat section with a hunting enemy was fantastic. No spoilers but I'll just say if you like Blink, this will work for you.

Mercenaries mode I've never cared for. 3 new characters I guess? Great.

Overall, Shadows of Rose is far better than any of the DLC Resident Evil 7 got. It doesn't particularly set too much up for a Resident Evil 9, which is nice in a way. RE7 left the door open for RE8 to do something of it's own, and RE8 is paying this forward. Buy on discount.

I'm sad it's over and 9S must be protected at all costs.

God of War far exceeded my expectations. After the stellar spectacle fighter trilogy I was looking forward to a deeper story and revamped combat. What I got instead is one of the most enthralling pieces of interactive fiction out there. The only downsides were some abrupt difficulty spikes and frustrating collectables that either require heavy grinding of a ♥♥♥♥ area or a guide to find some extremely hidden things.

Audio-visually, this game is a treat. Every area is loving crafted and full of artistry in its colourfulness, design and ability to leave you awestruck. Voice acting, especially that of Mimir, Baldur and Brok, really are great. Christopher Judge's Kratos is passable. I don't really prefer it, nor do I dislike. I'm simply left wondering what the original VA would have done differently with the lines. Sound effects and ambience are brilliant. The soundtrack is great, but often too understated. I think for a game focused on the journey, allowing music to play a bigger role would have been good.

Combat is tight, engaging and a refinement of many action games that came before it. God of War borrows a little from recent from software games with a sekiro style exhaustion meter for enemies that allows 1-hit kills or at least scripted high-damage sequences. The axe feels great, although using the throws was not something I was able to weave into combat seamlessly. I hope (having not played/looked into it) that they simplified this a little so ranged moves are more versatile in Ragnarok. The second weapon you acquire was whatever for me. It can serve a more AOE focused purpose but it just felt especially weak to me and I had little use for it outside of it's special abilities. Which is another great part of combat. Both weapons have 2 special abilities you can slot in to change how your arsenal deals with encounters.

The RPG elements of gear, stats, and upgrades are all fantastic. The only downside is that some of the absolute end-game gear requires some serious grinding of side content, some of which is poorly balanced compared to the base game.

The true downsides for me are the games inability to communicate every collectable. Despite having a completion list and 100% counter for individual areas and realms, the game still hides collectables like Shrines from the player, and sometimes an absolutely enormous area will have 3 very small little ravens to find. Santa Monica could have done more to make these fun to find and collect.

Other than that, I actually think there's too much side content, at least during the main game. It is far too easy to get sidetracked from the main story for hours on end if you're so inclined, and I think Santa Monica could have gated some of this as post-game content and no one would care. It's definitely on me for seeking it out, but developers create this content expecting it to be experienced. Niflheim is just terrible. It's the only truly bad part of the game. A grindy area full of annoying enemies like the revenant ghosts and the burrowing lizard creatures. Even after about 8 hours in that area I still didn't have enough of the resources to full upgrade the armour, while also being able to complete the chests/tears.

Overall, God of War deserves a 9.5/10

An absolute shame of a game. Dying Light 1 was a wonderfully fun co-op romp. Dying Light 2 is, even 1 year after release, a bug ridden mess with very little in the way of meaningful content, interesting characters. The combat, parkour, traversal and world are all arguably worse than the first.

What a waste.

I want to love this game. REmake is my 2nd favourite Resident Evil and I love the series as a whole. Silent Hill 1 was a ground breaking psychological horror game. And Tormented Souls feels like a brilliant fusion of the two.

Unfortunately, the perfect atmosphere, intriguing story, intricate level design and tuned Silent Hill like combat is let down by a few glaring issues.

Firstly, this game really needs difficulty options. The core game was about right for a series veteran like me, but I've beaten most resident evil games on a high difficulty. There's no reason they couldn't add an easier mode for new horror gamers, and a harder mode for Survival Horror fanatics.

Secondly, you need 180 IQ and also to be an alien to solve these puzzles. Many of them are completely baffling, or the "hints" are more cryptic than they need to be. Silent Hill 2/3 have some bad puzzles, but about 75% of the puzzles in Tormented Souls made me scratch my head. Some of them straight up don't make sense. For example, very late in the game you have to choose a material that relates to a clue. The clue is basically that a man is adrift at sea, what would he want? The options are iron, copper, gold or wood. I chose Wood, because obviously he wants a boat to row to shore. No of course not, the option is iron because... a steam boat is made of iron I guess?

Lastly, some of the core diary entries are poorly written, the cutscenes are poorly animated with stiff characters, and some of the voice acting is just straight up bad. The protagonist Caroline, who does the majority of the talking, sounds like she's in a college play. Some of the other supporting cast is well done but when your narrator and protagonist sounds like a hobbyist audiobook maker on YouTube...

I can't recommend this game to most buyers. It basically requires a guide to play unless your goal is to be frustrated. There's definitely something here for genre fans and Pqube has given the game a lot of support and have proven to make a product that has enough content for the price, but that content is unfortunately of varying quality. The first 2-3 hours of gameplay made me genuinely excited that this would be an amazing successor to the survival horror of the 90s/00s, but it turned out to be a convoluted mess of puzzles on a map that doesn't help you track your position well or what you've done.

Personally I wouldn't recommend this game. The gameplay and level design don't compliment each other and often lead me to frustration. I am an avid fan of Mirror's Edge and Doom 2016, and this looked to be a stylised fusion of both. Unfortunately, the "grounded" approach to level design combined with fantastical movement abilities means platforming is easy to break, and often the pace of the game is dramatically slowed down by the platforming design. Combat encounters are more puzzle than reflex test. It feels like a 3d fps version of Hotline Miami at times, but without the visuals and stylised violence that makes Hotline Miami fun to reset. As a result, if you don't immediately get the puzzle you need to solve in combat it can frustrating, and sometimes lead to bruteforcing encounters. Often the combat puzzles are designed in a haphazard manner to the point where bruteforcing or utter grind feel like the "intentional" way to play.

Elden Ring is a great game and another milestone in open world design, however it is a step back from the utter polish of Bloodborne, Sekiro and Dark Souls 3. It feels like a fusion of everything FromSoft have learnt since they began this *genre* with Demon Souls. Areas are lovingly crafted and the legacy dungeons are interconnected masterpieces, combat is fluid and visceral, stealth is a welcome and thought out feature not a last minute addition, and the story pieces together many of Miyazaki's most common tropes, metaphors and allegories to create a story that most players can follow and only the dedicated will truly "understand".

Traversal, exploration and discovery feel incredible in this game. The sheer scale and density of the world is mind blowing. The visuals are artistic if a little flat and 8th generation. The story is fleshed out and, dare I say, a fair bit easier to follow than anything in the Dark Souls series.

Combat is basically Dark Souls 3 with much more emphasis on multi-stat builds. Most things are viable, but unfortunately due to the design of many later game bosses, only a couple builds are "optimal."

Elden Rings greatest downfall is it's boss design. Some open world/dungeon bosses are overused too much. 2 or 3 variants is fine, especially if spaced out enough, but some bosses you see up to 8 or 9 times AS BOSSES. Many "hidden" or optional bosses are very unfair and a chore, requiring you to fully abuse your toolkit to beat. If you were playing this game offline I truly don't understand how some challenges can be overcome without over-levelling, cheese builds or just spending a dozen hours on broken bosses.

Performance is STILL an issue after 2 patches, and I actually found it worse on the most recent path 1.03. However, FromSoft has made a commitment to fixing the game and has been adding in even more content with it's patches such as new NPCs and questlines.

For the price, if you have the sticking power, this game has easily 100+ hours of enjoyable content for your first playthrough as a completionist, or a generous 40 if you're just powering through the minimum amount of content to see the end. I can't see any obvious holes for DLC, and honestly, I kind of wish they don't add DLC like in Sekiro. The game FEELS complete. Even going for the 100% achievement isn't laborious, but instead focuses on a few key collectables and otherwise leaves the player to get things done at their own pace.