Last Game You Played and What You Would Rate It Out of 10

[Mysterymask]

So been on disability for like 2 months and got through a bit of the backlog and some new stuff LET'S GO

Persona 3 Portable: 7/10
First time playing this one after playing the other 2. I put a few mods in to return the original cutscenes cause PSP bullshit doesn't fly in my Persona games. I don't think I would of liked this game in 2006 the gameplay loop is very VERY dull as there's just "Hang up with people and play the randomized grind tower the game!" and compared to 4 and 5 the social links...kinda suck. The story is good but took a long LONG time to get to the good parts and I had to force myself to get to those parts. That being said the ending literally saved this game for me. If you never played a Persona game I would wait for the remake but if you aren't a fan of the series this is a slog you aren't gonna wanna go through.

Hi-Fi Rush: 9/10
I love Rhythm games and I love DMC style action. This game is incredibly fun and probably one of the first Bethesda games I actually LIKED! (sue me I cant stand Elder Scrolls and Fallout) Great voice acting a game that doesn't overstay its welcome and no bullshit in between other than play again with upgrades and harder! Solid game and its on Game Pass.

Sea of Stars: 10/10 (Objective rating probably an 8/10)
Ok I loved LOVED The Messenger. I've been waiting for this for years and what I got is a damned Masterpiece. Sea of Stars is essentially a love letter to Mario RPG and Chrono Trigger and if you loved those games you're gonna love this. The combat a fun and easy to learn and bit tricky to master but I felt it was a little on the easy side, but I feel that might of been because I'm good at timed hits and been playing these for years. Music is wonderful with a combination of the composer of the messenger collaborating with the composer for Chrono Trigger makes for some very catchy and lovable themes throughout. The story is beautiful, funny and well worth every minute AND if you got game pass its there! Took me about 30 hours to 100% and well worth every second I HIGHLY recommend this if you like JRPGs and are old enough to remember Chrono Trigger

[Gaidax]

Starfield: 7/10

Quite frankly, the game is quite dull. You don't get anything particularly exciting for many many hours.

• It has all it needs to be good, the world and worldbuilding as a foundation is good, but the main story is dull.
• The side quests are a rollercoaster between feeling good and feeling like a chore.
• The combat is passable at most. The guns and gunplay are okay, but the enemy variety is pretty poor.
• The visuals are decent, but just that and performance is pretty bad given the said visuals - it looks like something you'd see in lets say 2017, but for some reason it demands hardware as if it's a game from 2026.
• The systems are pretty bad, there are some highlights like dialogue options and lockpicking minigame, but then you have it coupled with absolutely atrocious inventory management and weird stuff like scanner and interaction - where while you scan, you can't fully interact with what you see in front of you.

It really feels like this is a sandbox for modders to improve or change the game as they see fit and I am sure eventually it will get good, but I am not a modder so hard pass and a refund here.

I personally suggest giving it a pass for at least half a year, so that the bugs get quashed and quality mods will come out. Then it may become an 8/10 game for a price that makes sense.

[janeSmith]

Warlock is a full caster in BG3, just as it was in d&d 5e. They just have extremely limited spell slots & much different casting mechanics.

To clarify "full caster" just means they get full spell casting progression with a new spell level available every 2 levels. As opposed to rangers / paladins (half casters) and eldritch knight / arcane trickster (third casters).

Ok. Yes. Full caster progression. But then the guys complaining about warlocks not being full caster is even more funny

[Fencers]

Starfield 7/10

Pretty fun but typical Bethesda fare. I was impressed by how stable the game ran. I only encountered a few minor glitches that a quick reload fixed. I really enjoyed the skill system- one of my favorite design choices is actually having to use the skill or accomplish some feat to improve a skill such as in Doom Eternal or Ghost Recon.

My major gripe was that the ship and settlement building interfaces were somewhat cumbersome. I felt I couldn't zoom out or see enough of an area to really judge placement.

Armored Core 6: Fire of Rubicon 7/10

Also, fun. The game environments are not well designed overall. I think AC4 and AC5 considered space and geometry better than AC6. This is somewhat disappointing because I thought Elden Ring had the best environmental design and geometry consideration in years. This was a step back for From Software in their iterative design of play space.

The gameplay is a bit more shallow in AC6 too. That could probably be solved with encounter layering, but that is a design step back from Elden Ring as well.

[hellhamster]

Armored Core 6: 10/10

I just finished the normal NG campaign, now I'm plowing through the NG+ (and NG++ soon) for the correct endings.

I don't think it's an hyperbole to say that for me, this is the most fun Fromsoftware game I've played. At first, it seems kinda strange and overwhelming, and the combat seems like an archaic run and gun, but then everything falls into place once you realise you can make such drastic changes to the gameplay depending on your personal mech build. Then the gameplay is pure joy.

You can opt for a slow tank with gatling guns and grenade launchers, or go for a dual pistol wielding nimble fighter that can move all over the place in the blink of an eye, or even a melee fighter which is very overpowered if played correctly. There are close to a hundred different weapons and like 80 other parts for customisation, the possibilities are infinite. There are no bad choices, all are equally good and can be used for different circumstances. It's good to plow through the beginning of a mission with a spider leg helicopter mech, but the boss rekts you for staying in the air too long? No problemo, you can change to something else. The game offers you plenty of money to do what you like.

Fromsoft has made some amazing games with jaw dropping universes, but this return to a more "normal" type of videogame was also done exceptionally. A pretty good storyline and voice acting that seems generic at first (but quickly becomes deeper than expected) is one of the highlights that made me feel connected to the game. The soundtrack is moody and reflects the broken world of Rubicon well.

The missions have different outcomes depending on your NG+ playthrough and choices you made. They all vary greatly from one another, which was the thing I was most afraid. Luckily, there is enough variety to never make it boring.

In terms of game difficulty, it is by far the easiest Fromsoft game, but make no mistake, there are a few bosses that will give you more than a grand ol' time.

The only thing I can nitpick is the weapon balancing. Some builds really feel like easy mode, which can then give you a lesser experience of the game. Looking at you Zimmerman/Songbird/Stun Needle builds.

Haven't tried PVP yet but I heard the builds can be pretty cookie cutter, kinda like in Elden Ring.

All in all, I am convinced that Fromsoftware really can do no wrong. The release window is kinda bad, with BG3 and Starfield and whatnot, so it will go under the radar for a lot of people. Still, this might be my favorite game of theirs.

Edit: finished NG++ and wow, what a game. That final boss was absolutely brutal.

One of the best games I've ever played, period.

[Frostfred]

Battle Chasers: Nightwar - 7.5/10

A nice RPG with turn-based combat. While there is an overworld map to run around with some fights and events, most of the game plays in 8 dungeons + some smaller caves. You run around and explore, fight enemies, and get loot, up till there's a final boss in each dungeon. The story is okay-ish, nothing special, but not too bad.

I really enjoyed the jRPG style turn-based fighting system. Dungeons are supposedly grinding you down, as (with 2 exceptions) you don't regenerate mana. But you have "overcharge", a resource which is generated with basic attacks and can be spent instead of mana, but resets to 0 after each fight. There are also dungeon skills, which you can use when you see enemies in a dungeon before getting into fights, for small buffs for you or debuffs on them, to avoid traps, to stealth by them, etc. There's also "boost", which is a special bar shared between all characters and filled up by all other actions, which can be unleashed in special attacks.

Hero variety is good as well. You can take 3 out of 6. In the base playthrough, you start out with 1, but get the second before the first fight and the third very soon. The other 3 are added later in the story. In NG+, you get all characters very early, before the first dungeon, allowing you to play however you want. They play really different, and most of them have lots of options. Each one can get up to 4 basic attacks (instant, generate overcharge), 10 abilities (cost mana, have a cast time) and 3 boost attacks. In addition, they have perks, which is a skill tree filled with passive abilities, allowing to specialize them.

Enemy variety is okay-ish, but some of the basic types repeat too often, and there are far too many fights against them, with not enough of more special ones in between. That can make the game feel grindy. Especially the achievements are also very grindy, having to do some dungeons up to 10 times or so, depending on how lucky you are to get enough spawns of rare enemies to fill the bestiary. Another downside is the lack of difficulty setting. The base game is trivial, and there's no possibility to change the difficulty. NG+ ramps it up, but mostly not by giving the enemies more variety or new abilities, but just by boosting some numbers and the enemy levels. These boosts are also quite random, with some enemies still feeling like the base version, others being able to one-hit your tankiest character (if they don't have some good defensives up). The latter just means, that you level much faster yourself in dungeons as higher level enemies give more experience, which makes you catch up by the end of the respective dungeons. You usually reach max level in the 6th dungeon already because of that. However, accordingly the gear doesn't really keep up. E.g. my rogue still had the level 1 starting weapon till level 15. Still, even there the game is fairly easy, again with no possibility to spice it up, outside of artificially gimping your characters. Though, granted, as I'm a completionist I filled up everything in the bestiary, which gives a few small buffs like 2% more AP. Doesn't seem like much, but it sums up.

Still, all in all, a nice game to chill out a bit in the evening and explore a bit. I'd recommend it.

[Gabriel]

Lords of the Fallen: 1/10

Complete and utter dog shit. 3 hours of not being able to beat the first non-tutorial boss later I've issued a refund request to Sony on the PS store. I fucking hate this game. The parry system is absolute trash as the delay between pressing the button and the parry animation actually playing is about seven seconds. The wither damage system is retarded and the soul flay system feels like an afterthought.

Looks pretty tho, hence the 1.

[ReleaseDay]

Starfield: 3/10

- Awful, garbage level of optimization
- Soulless & hollow
- Loading screens
- Ultra deranged woke
- Overall mid

[P for Pancetta]

You meet Karlach and she tells you that there are demon servants posting as Tyr paladins which want to kill her, and she is a good devil. Or tiefling, or whatever. You have little reason to trust her, because earlier you meet guy who help you and others with goblin attack, Wyll. He is hunting Karlach, because she is naughty devil, according to him. But sure, ill give her benefit of the doubt. We go to the place where there is, supposed evil does and find abandoned place, with a lot of gnoll corpses. Gnoll bads, killing them good. I sneak up from the back, got to the balcony above the main room where there is a bad guy. But i still dont know if i can trust Karlach or not (gamification: she is a companion so of course he is in the right here... ;/) so i decide to walk down and talk. And sure, we go into talking and due to my mind reading it gets obvious they are bad guys and Karlach was right. So fight break loose and they nearly decimate our group of 4. But we win, with no spell slots etc. So rest is in order. I could make it easier by dropping flaming chandelier on them from the balcony BUT THAT IS METAGAME KNOWLEDGE. So, if i would save scumm this i would get better combat result. This is how each and every encounter is "balanced". They are not hard per se, more like - you get overwhelmed and killed unless you are lucky or play with save scumming.

I disagree with this point. I never played a Larian game before and I did have some issues with the turn based combat at the start. Once you get the hang of it it's not a difficult game even on the hardest difficulty. I'd go as far as saying the game isn't really balanced at all. Yes you can use the environment or barrels to win every encounter easily, but that takes a lot of time to setup in most cases and isn't worth the hassle imo. If you min max a character you can solo the game and end most fights in one or two turns. I went with a traditional party of a warrior, healer, rogue, mage and most encounters where fairly trivial. With all the crazy items the game has it's fairly easy to build very strong characters. But even without using those the game isn't very difficult, it doesn't require fast reaction speed, and you have all the time in the world to make your decisions.

I think the game deserves more criticism then it got, but claiming the game is too difficult or unbalanced to the point it forces you to play in certain ways isn't one of them. It's universally hailed for giving the player options in dealing with encounters for good reasons.

Personally I hated the rolling for a lot of important dialogue moments and Act 3 is considerably lower quality then 1 or 2. I also don't vibe with the general atmosphere of the followers, it feels more like they're acting in a dramatic play then living in this weird world.

[batballet]

Binding of Isaac: Rebirth 9/10

[Malkiah]

death stranding director's cut:
as a video game: 2/10
as a weird work of art that is maddening but somehow also compelling: 7/10

the best way to describe this game is to imagine that someone who's 3 favorite things in the world are QWOP, the 6th season of lost, and getting Likes on instagram, was for some ungodly reason made the lead developer for a AAA funded bog-standard open world jiminy cockthroat game and given a 100 million dollar budget.

this game reminds me a LOT of elden ring - in fact, it's nearly identical to elden ring excepting for one focuses on shitty uninspired janky combat and one focuses on shitty uninspired janky traversal.
the controls are sloppy, the gameplay is horrendous and never fun or satisfying, and the story is intentionally vague and cryptic when it isn't outright stupid and is only doled out sparingly through tediously repetitive word-salad dialogue, and the only thing they have going for them in any capacity is that occasionally something weird happens and a kind of cool visual in on screen and for 8 seconds you're like "wow! wtf is going on with this!?" before you're back in control of the character and have to actually play the stupid thing again.

and yet for some reason despite the fact that i hate playing it every second that i'm playing it, i keep playing it.
it's got this really bleak atmospheric vibe to it, and this kind of background simmering of hopelessness that no matter what you're doing you're not really changing the state of the world at all.
i know the whole 'hero saves the world' trope is the norm in video games but i find myself very drawn to games that don't give off that vibe, and death stranding is definitely one of them.

elex, infamous, callisto protocol, ashen, demon's souls (ps5):
oh, you can't change the light attack/heavy attack from R1 and R2?
okay cool, well go fuck yourselves and die in a chemical fire, i'm not playing you.
those buttons should always be square and triangle, jfc what the hell is wrong with people.

[hellhamster]

Super Mario Wonder: 9/10

Most fun 2d Mario since Yoshis Island, which was almost 3 decades ago.

An absolute blast, very fun and imaginative levels. My only qualm has been the level of difficulty. Other than 2 courses in the special world, most are pretty easy.

Not nearly as lengthy as the 3D Mario games, but it felt just right. Nintendo did great with this one.

[Kyphael]

I'm constantly playing Hearthstone and it's always a solid 10/10 with every new expansion, especially Battlegrounds.

Let's see...

Mortal Kombat 11 I think was the last console game I played that blew me away. That was a solid 10 as well, I don't recall enjoying an MK game that much since I was a kid with Mortal Kombat II.

WWE 2K19 was good, but a bit of a letdown with Universe Mode being a bit of a headache to manage and not as good as GM Mode. That was probably a 7/10 for me.

Dragon Ball Fighterz had an amazing, original new story and such a fun gameplay, 10/10.

Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 gets a 9/10 for me, so dynamic and engaging. Different than Fighterz but awesome in its own way.

Tekken 7 was very good, loved the rivalry between Kazuya and Heihachi finally ending after what was like 20 years? 8/10.

Looking forward to Tekken 8 and Street Fighter 6. I'll come back to review them when I get a PS5 which probably won't happen until January at the earliest unless there's a crazy good sale before that.

[Toby451]

Lords of the Fallen: 1/10

Complete and utter dog shit. 3 hours of not being able to beat the first non-tutorial boss later I've issued a refund request to Sony on the PS store. I fucking hate this game. The parry system is absolute trash as the delay between pressing the button and the parry animation actually playing is about seven seconds. The wither damage system is retarded and the soul flay system feels like an afterthought.

Looks pretty tho, hence the 1.

im bad so the game 1/10 - lmao

[Doffen]

Marvel's Spider-Man 2
9/10

Love the gameplay, great fun! Story is okay, while the game as a whole is Amazing

[Haytham]

Street Fighter 6.

Around 7, pretty fun but quite unbalanced with a handful of character clearly in a league of their own.

[Spear-a-Lot]

Against the Storm. 7/10. Good survival strategy game but needs to have the possibility to play longer levels. Currently, the player can reach the endgame fast and it becomes to easy after that. The only challenge is in the beginning of the level. However, the game is being constantly developed and should improve with time.

[Jastall]

Super Mario RPG (remake) 7.5/10


I rarely get a nostalgia itch, especially for 80$ CND, but the first RPG I've ever played had to be it. The soundtrack was burned into my skull and I gotta say I do like the remixed one so I switch between them at regular intervals.

Otherwise it's the same game with some endgame content added. It's a fair bit shorter than I remembered, perhaps because I played it roughly 1 hour at a time as a kid admittedly. The combat is simple but fun enough thanks to the timed hits mechanic and I enjoy its lighthearted writing and atmosphere after a second playthrough of Wasteland 3.

I do think the remake could have done a bit more, but it's still a lot of fun. Likely going to sell it once I'm done with it tho. Hooray for Switch games barely losing any value!

[Mojo03]

Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 & Phantom Liberty - 10/10 (masterpiece)

I love it.

It's not "perfect", but it's a damn good experience.

DLC was overall a good addition.

Probably in my top 5 games of all time.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Aselia the Spirit of Eternity Sword

I first tried this game out last year, but dropped it towards the end. The game was difficult and I didn't fully understand what was going on, so I had a bad time slogging through chapters 3 and 4. Little did I know that I was past the hard part and I was very close to the end. A couple months ago, I decided to give the game a second shot and started over a new playthrough. I buckled down and made an attempt to really understand the atypical mechanics and wound up doing much better, achieving SS rank on all but two missions (where I had to settle for merely S rank).




Basically you just make two types of parties: 1. parties with low magic resist who need a blue mage supporter to interrupt an incoming enemy AoE spell:

Party #1
Attacker: Aselia
Defender: Esperia
Supporter: Selia

Party #2
Attacker: Nellie
Defender: Halion/Niminthor
Supporter: Shiah


and 2. parties with high magic resist that can survive the AoE spell so you also bring a red mage who can cast an AoE spell:

Party #3
Attacker: Yuuto
Defender: Faren
Supporter: Nanaru

Party #4
Attacker: Himika
Defender: Uruka
Supporter: Orpha

And then you're set. Try to sic your high magic resist parties on enemy squads that don't have red spirits and thus don't have high magic resist and are vulnerable to your red mage's AoE magic spells. Build a recovery station whenever you capture a town so your parties can quickly heal back up, and if you're going to be defending a town for a while, build a training facility so they can level up during that time. Only build teleporters in preparation for taking out the optional dragon superbosses. Build five tier 5 ether converters in the towns around your capital city of Rakios and then dismantle them at the end of the game if you need extra mana. Don't freak out if you don't have the last trainer or don't have enough mana to levelcap everyone, you can still beat the final chapter.




On my second playthrough, I decided to go down the Aselia route instead of Lesteena, and enjoyed it a lot more.

Good aesthetics, great story, good music, good game.

Also, since I wrote that first review, I changed from an AMD graphics card to a Nvidia GPU, which meant that I couldn't use Radeon settings to scale up the game window anymore. I had to use Magpie version 0.10.3 to get the game to scale up from a small window and fit the whole screen. This created a little bit of jaggedness, but it wasn't super bad and I didn't know of any other way to fix this problem. IntegerScale also resized the game window to fit the whole screen but felt more jaggedy.