Recent reviews by Metalzchamp

In Sekiro you play as 5’8 Chinese Orlando Bloom on a Napoleon Complex addled inquest to eliminate shinobi, samurai, ghosts, and apes that are taller than you in order to rid Japan from the hereditary incursion that is tall people. The game is good, but I will not recommend it, simply because, odds are, you have played it before.

FromSoft has garnered its reputation in the last ten years making games all in the same vein: something with challenging but learnable combat centered around interactable checkpoints and stringent punishments on death. It’s a winning formula, to be sure, which explains both the commercial success of FromSoft games and the offshoot “souls-like” genre that they have essentially created.
I never played the Dark Souls games (in order to avoid talking about them with the greasy, pony-tailed, needle-neck kids wearing their Artorias shirts to school) but I have played Bloodborne. While many people on here insist that the game is “not dark souls” I must vehemently disagree. Sekiro’s emphasis on parrying is hardly saves it from the comparison to Dark Souls when you consider the dodge-centric Bloodborne having its overt emphasis on being “Dark Souls but faster.” FromSoft continues to strangle the game design they have seemingly perfected over the years with Sekiro. While it is simply stellar they added a… jump button… and uhm… stealth mechanics (which are incredibly similar to those featured in the Tenchu series, also developed by FromSoft) the game dispenses the exact same experience you could get not only from any FromSoft game released in the last ten years, but an experience similar to those you could get from any number of well-done “Souls Clones” available on the market.

Don’t get me wrong, the Soulsborne experience really is a winning formula. But how many other “winning formulas” have we seen in recent years? Studios like Nintendo/Game Freak with Pokemon, or Ubisoft with their Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry franchises are often ridiculed for peddling sequels and new entries that barely improve (or even change at all) upon their predecessors. Are these games entertaining? Certainly, otherwise they wouldn’t sell so well. But at the same time these successive titles draw derision from even series fans who grow fatigued from purchasing near-identical experiences year after year.

For whatever reason, FromSoft has gotten away with just that. If you have ever played one of their titles, be it Dark Souls or Bloodborne, then there’s no need to purchase this game. You’ve experienced the spectacle the studio provides. Maybe one day FromSoft will move on and innovate in some new way, but the way things are now, that could be a long way off. And by then, the “Soulsborne” series and its vehement fans will be another laughing-stock within the community, idly consuming the same ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game so long as the start-up screen reads From Software and the steam-tags promise “Souls-like” and “Difficult.”

LawBreakers is an exceptionally fun game that proves we live in a decaying, broken, sick world where fairness and justice are rhetorically empty pieces of jargon. The game is a delight to play, and when in-game I always found myself having a good time, even when dying, which is something that I could not say about any shooter I've played in recent memory (and I play an embarassing amount).

I am writing this positive review knowing that the playerbase holds at about the level of a small Wyoming burrough, and with the hopes that in the future when patches come through and sales hit that it will simply add to the game's well-deserved reputation as an excellent first-person-shooter.