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Nexomon Extinction is what one might call a "side-line" of the classic Pokémon JRPG-style monster catcher. Which is to say, it has its own direction and flow, while still feeling in-line with what you already know and love. There's a lot of Quality of Life improvements over Pokémon, and it'll be too long to list them here, but know that there are some nice takes this game has over what you might have come to expect in this genre.

I enjoyed the story, the world-building and the overall feel of the game. I liked the humour too. The graphics are vibrant, the music is good, and the combat is what you'd expect, with a slight twist in that "stamina" is required to use moves. I also liked the catching mechanics; it tells you your capture chances as well as offering ways of increasing said chances (like feeding a nexomon their favourite treat for example).

There's a nice focus on exploration and adventure in this game too which is awesome, I enjoyed going around and finding all sorts of areas and loot during my journey, doing side quests and catching nexomon as I went. Speaking of, the nexomon themselves are unique: from the cute to the monstrous - you get some awesome, as well as some bland - but well, with over 400 Nexomon, this is to be expected.

Overall, a solid game and especially if it's on sale and you're a fan of this style of game give it a go!

It's hard to truly show or describe the expanse with which Siralim Ultimate works through. As an example, when they say it has thousands of hours of post-game content, they mean it.

With a nice, simple mechanic of simply slaying a particular monster to then be able to summon them back home; there are over a thousand monsters, each belonging to a particular race, and with their own 'trait' that gives them and your party an edge in battle. With 6 slots in your party, already this has a huge amount of depth and playstyles available to you with how you choose to combine these traits.
But it gets even better.

You can 'Fuse' any two monsters together (even complete with a new colour palette for the new monster based on the two you fused) and the result will have the average of the two monsters' stats, as well as both of their traits. If I'm not mistaken, this leads to literally millions of potential combinations. In other words, between the fusions, the monsters you pick for your party, and their equipment which in itself can also house different stats, traits and the sort - there's a nigh guaranteed chance that your team has never actually been seen before by anyone else, except you. Talk about standing out!

Siralim Ultimate consists of two sides, the Dungeons, and the Castle. Your Castle is your domain. You even loot decorations to place in your Castle, and can place Custom NPCs in too! It is here that you will theory-craft to your hearts' content on your Magnum Opus: a team of epic proportion. Whatever it is you would like to go for, chances are its possible. A spell-spamming team that wins before turn 1 is even over? How about a team that relies upon dying, to then come back stronger each time? You get to dictate the power of your team, and it even extends to the power of the enemies too - when you go to explore a dungeon, you can (after a little bit in the story) increase the difficulty by adding random modifiers to combat for that particular dungeon run, for the added benefit of far better loot.

And there is a lot of loot to be had! From plushies of the monsters in the game to display in your Castle with utter regality, to stat-boosting gems for your monsters, or even extra traits to slot into equipment for yet more added fun - there's so much to be explored and gained, in Siralim Ultimate. Combine this with a hugely in-depth combat system complete with custom macros you can set up for your individual monsters to execute, it very much feels like you are in charge of your flow, and that feels wonderful.

There's so, so many things I haven't spoken about here, and to be honest, I'd go over the review limit by far if I did. There's so many different mechanics, even some minigames, to discover and explore for yourself here. It felt like as I was progressing through the story I was going "how can this get any more expansive?" and yet, it always did.

If you are into the theory-crafting of Path of Exile, the Monster-Collecting of [insert JRPG Monster-Tamer title here], the loot style of Diablo, heck even someone who wants to swag out their Castle to show heathens how to actually live in style (which is clearly making the entire floor out of lava and shoving wooden tables on top) then I would suggest checking the game out!

This really Chilled my Quarium when I needed it most

Beautiful combination of the two genres. All the fun of the dynamic, ever-changing runs of Roguelites mixed with the tactical challenges and on-the-fly thinking of City-Builders. Each settlement will have its strengths; its weaknesses, and a big chunk of the difficulty is decided by you before you even set off to settle! Incredibly enjoyable and addicting. There's so many routes one can take towards victory and there is no "one-size-fits-all" strategy that works every time. Love it and highly recommend!

Absolutely addicted to this Roguelite Deckbuilder.

With the DLC you have 30 possible Clan Combinations (otherwise it's 20), each dictating the general playstyle of your run. As with all Roguelites, you get God runs; you get runs you scramble to do your best and maybe scrape a win out of pure blood, sweat, and tears - or just lose to go again and hope for better next time. A huge part of the fun is simply experimenting and discovering new, sometimes broken strategies that allow for some smooth and chill wins.

Super fun, very varied, plenty of mechanics that interact in awesome and dopamine-inducing ways - and a game I simply love to recommend!

I've missed you, Paragon

It started off so simple. Place a smelter here, a constructor there - ooo, look! A cute blue radioactive slug!

[UNCOUNTABLE HOURS LATER]

Is this even a game anymore? My world feels like a separate, living and entirely sentient entity; begging for growth and evolution. It may seem like I'm just pressing buttons and giggling to myself: "haha conveyor spaghetti go brrrr" - but I can't shake the feeling that I am actually feeding an SCP-level super-organism made out of wires and machinery. I look back at work I know I put in, yet cannot fathom where it all stemmed from, or why I feel so compelled to keep on going...

10/10 would ♥♥♥♥ up my sleep schedule time and time again for the sake of feeding some eldritch metal horror of my own creation

I've never felt more like an anime protagonist than with the frenzied, fluid and fun gameplay of Rushdown Revolt. Each character is unique and the insane combos, set-ups and punishes you can do with each of them keeps on giving the dopamine my brain has so often craved in my life.

It's great, coming from other platform fighters in my past like Smash and Rivals - it was a lot nicer of an experience to delve into Rushdown and its core gameplay and mechanics than I was expecting it to be looking at the trailers.

Quite possibly my favourite fighting game so far! You should try it :3

This review is split into two parts; the first reviewing the base game, and the second reviewing Iceborne. It's a long one, so best get those reading glasses out!

Monster Hunter: World took an interesting but very good direction in the Monster Hunter series, with many quality of life changes over past games; new and oftentimes scary monsters (except you Dodogama, you're a sweetheart), expansive locales, and updated movesets for all weapons. The story is okay, nothing special - but this is a Monster Hunter game, we're here to hunt monsters!

Overall, the game felt a lot easier to pick up over prior instalments: the gameplay and weapons felt more fluid and polished. A "Slinger" is a new tool available for hunters to use, and whilst fairly niche in World, in Iceborne you'll come to see this new toy to be quite amazing. The addition of turf wars, endemic life to capture and show off in your room, and the open locales that don't require loading screens between areas really sold home the bustling and dog-eat-dog fight for survival of these magnificent creatures. No other Monster Hunter game has ever achieved a game world that feels so... alive.

All of these factors make World a good addition to the series, and a definite step in the right direction going forward. Plus, those graphics look amazing. Go look up "MHGU" and see that game's graphics. That came out in 2017. So... yeah.

Yet, while World was a good game, it did lack a lot of the character and uniqueness of past games. The distinct visual blandness of weapons via the "base" and "material" system Capcom went for when designing weapons has lead to most weapons looking pretty much the same. Sadly, performance-wise, these weapons suffer too. In past games, there was so much variety between weapons in a category, and as much as there were 'best' weapons for certain jobs like applying element damage; you could get away with basically any weapon and have fun at the same time.

World suffered pretty badly from this as most of the time there is only one or two go-to monsters to farm for materials to make their set of weapons that work well, and every other weapon lacks almost all value in comparison. Combined with a disappointing number of monsters, and a quick-to-get-to endgame - it was a bit of a let down. Furthermore, the new content Capcom put out for the game at the time were crossover quests that weren't exactly... mind-blowing. The Final Fantasy crossover was the best by far thanks to the difficulty and "raid-like" feeling to the quests, but unfortunately gave an armour set so good that it once again went back to World's issue of only needing one monster to farm for and you are all set.

In short summary, World suffered from a lack of variety and fun that previous games had, but damn did it set for an amazing foundation going forward. Which leads me onto...

I'll say this now, PLEASE get Iceborne. If you so much as somewhat enjoy MHW enough to get to the end of the base game, Iceborne is a whole new ball game and boy is it a good one. I mean, this more than DOUBLES the content World offers. Some companies would've sold Iceborne as an individual title in the series it's that expansive!

Iceborne takes place after the events of World have transpired, and brings an entirely new difficulty (Master Rank, which for you veterans out there is World's equivalent of G-Rank) along with a slew of new content: new monsters, new weapons, weapon movesets, entirely new locales and storyline (which you'll be happy to know is much better than the base game's) and above all - the Clutch Claw.

The Clutch Claw adds much more depth to hunting monsters, combined with the updated movesets each weapon has with Iceborne - hunting monsters has never felt more fun! And I mean it.

So just what is so great about these additions?
The Clutch Claw allows you to, well... claw onto a monster. From here, you can initiate a weapon attack (which comes in light and heavy forms depending on what weapon you have picked) and this can force slinger ammo to drop from the monster (light weapons), and/or weaken the spot you attacked (light and heavy weapons - but the light weapons require 2 weapon attacks to weaken). A Weakened monster part takes extra damage, and works with some skills too - like Weakness Exploit; at level 3 it provides a 30% bonus affinity to parts weak to your weapon type, but an extra 50% bonus affinity instead if that part is weakened. Pretty neat, huh?

As an added bonus, you can also "Flinch Shot" - utilising your slinger ammo to shoot into the monster at point-blank range. Doing so on their head will cause them to (so long as they aren't agitated) fly forward and hopefully into a rather solid object. If they do collide with anything, be it a wall - or even other monsters - they take a nice chunk of damage and topple, leading you to do whatever you'd like for a solid 7 or so seconds.

The Claw Attack whilst clawed on the monster can weaken parts, but its main use is on the head, where it will literally yeet the monsters head a good 90-120 degrees in the direction you swiped them in. Useful if there is no solid object to send poor Clifford the Big Red Odogaron into in front of him. As an example, of course. Feel free to swap Clifford for any other monster like My Little Pony: Friendship is Useless or even the famous rapper Lil' Shagras which you saw and proceeded to slaughter all the way back in those first few hours of gameplay.

Oh and if that all wasn't enough? Utilising the moves above you can make a monster enter its agitated status quicker - which is useful if you have the skill, aptly named "Agitator" - which provides bonuses when a monster is enraged. I wasn't kidding when I said the Clutch Claw added a lot of depth.

Every single weapon got their movesets updated, so I won't go over all of them - but as a bonus, every single weapon can use their slinger/clutch claw when unsheathed! That's a massive quality of life change over World. Though as a Sword and Shield main I have to say it was a little bit sad seeing one of our few unique aspects no longer a unique aspect. At least we can gulp down rations with a sword in our hands. We're still cool right? Capcom please bring back oils.

So far I've only really talked about the hunting gameplay aspect of Iceborne, but honestly, I feel that's all that I really need to go into detail to. Iceborne has added so, SO much more to World, that quite frankly I'd suggest you go out and experience it for yourself. Heck, Iceborne added some more unique looking weapons too! Though for the sake of your happiness, don't search up a comparison between Brachydios Dual Blades from Iceborne and older games. Oh, and rather disappointingly, Iceborne still suffers the "farm one monster to get all the weapons and armour you need" debacle :/

The greatest part about Iceborne by far, however - is Capcom's continued support of their AAA title. In just a few days of posting this review, Title Update 4 is to release, bringing even more content (including a fan-favourite elder dragon!) and it's completely free! The past 3 title updates have been too, and it looks like Capcom are wanting to spend quite a bit more time on World before their next big instalment. Kudos to them for treating their game and the fans right.

To summarise? Iceborne is the breath of fresh air World needed to truly let it stand out as a major instalment in the Monster Hunter series, and it's even more exciting to wonder what a future Monster Hunter game will look like. As a fan of the series who first played it as Monster Hunter Freedom on the PSP, it's truly incredible to know just how far this series has come. And honestly, I can't recommend it enough.

Only if you're okay with grinding though.

Okay with... a lot of grinding.

There's a reason this game has overwhelmingly positive reviews in its EARLY ACCESS development stage. If this game looks at ALL enticing trust me you'll love it