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

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Kingdom Come Deliverance - 8/10 (very good)

It's a great game. Absolutely worth it ($30 on Steam). If I could I would have bought it at $60, but it was really buggy in 2018 so I'd imagine I would have been pretty upset. Fortunately I've encountered only a few bugs.

KCD is pretty much Skyrim (open world sandbox simulator RPG set in a medieval setting with some quests and a main story you can follow at your leisure), but in 1401 AD Bohemia. You can be a thief and enjoy the thrill of trying to sneak into the armorer's shop and rob him blind, and trying to slowly sneak out of town hauling the goods hoping you're not caught by a guard. You can play an assassin who sneaks into enemy camps and poisons their food, be it with sleeping powder or actual poison. Etc. Or you can play as a plated knight who fights in direct combat. There are also some pretty fun minigames, such as alchemy to create potions, sharpening your sword at a grindstone, playing dice (in a game that's kind of like Poker), an archery competition where you shoot at logs, etc.

The main thing that sets Kingdom Come aside is the combat. It's like Mount & Blade in that you have directional attacks (except unlike M&B you don't have to directionally block as well; you just have to press the block button at the right time and you block an attack from any direction). Except instead of four directional attacks, you have six (five directions and a thrust). You also have a combo system, where if you correctly chain together different directional attacks and thrusts, at the end of the chain you will perform a high damage combo finisher.

(Long explanation on the problem with this system)

Spoiler: 

The combat system is hypothetically interesting, but in practice it's just not fun. The combat is designed around 1v1s and requires that 1. you react and press the block button at precisely the right time, and 2. you pull off combos. Unfortunately, the combat is pretty much entirely based on your stats. It doesn't matter how fast you can press a button or if you can memorize the combos, because the window of opportunity to press the button is so short that you will never be able to press the button in time until you get your agility and defense stats up to near 20, and you will pretty much never be able to get a combo off because you will always be blocked after the second hit. You won't be able to pull off hits uninterrupted until your agility stat is near 20, and by that point combos don't matter because you can just spam attack and beat a guy dead anyway. I found that the best way to get through combat is to use a shortsword (with no shield) and spam thrusts at the head.

Archery is useless in combat unless you can sneak up on someone and shoot them at point blank, in which case you mind as well either just stealth kill them or spam attack them with your shortsword. When using a bow, you have no targetting reticle, your camera is constantly moving, and I'm pretty sure that the arrow actually veers off within a radius of the center of your screen, meaning even if you were aiming at a target and released an arrow at the exact same movement of your camera, the arrow would still fly towards a different part of the screen. In order to level up archery to minimize these effects, you have to hit mobs hundreds of times with arrows, which is pretty much impossible to do via combat (because you'll likely miss and enemies will be upon you by the time you can release a second arrow), meaning that the only real way to level up archery is by grinding hares in the forest for hours and hours on end.

Because combat sucked and was thoroughly unenjoyable, I decided to try playing as a thief. I avoided combat, snuck past enemies, poisoned their pots, lured them away from their positions and stealth killed them, and in the rare event I did get into combat, I spam stabbed them in the face with my shortsword. For confrontations with multiple opponents, I had to run away until they stopped pursuing me, then stealthed back and killed them one by one. The game became trivially easy once I got a horse, as I could just charge towards enemies in full plate armor and thrust at them with my shortsword and they'd be one shotted, and since I was on a horse galloping I'd never be injured or caught. However, I was eventually forced into becoming a knight in full plate armor anyways. There are story battles where you have to directly fight 30+ enemies at once, with people attacking you from all sides. You can't use your horse and you can't stealth kill the people, and again archery is useless because by the time I'd get a second shot off they'd be upon me in melee range. So my only choice was to buy a suit of armor. Combat against multiple opponents is absolutely awful due to the game's auto-lockon system. I can never target the guy I want to target or even the guy right in front of me, and when I hold down to shift to break target and run away, I end up locking on to some other target and start strafing around him, or I end up getting hit in the back and locking on to the guy who just hit me, and it turns into a never ending chain stun.

Fortunately, most of the game can be played without getting into direct combat, so the combat isn't a dealbreaker. Also, if you're playing on PC, there are several combat rebalance mods available. I'd recommend checking them out. I'm pretty sure a first time modded playthrough can't be less unenjoyable than a first time playthrough with vanilla combat.



Should I buy the DLCs?

TL;DR: just get the tourney and dog DLCs.

The DLCs are for the most part pretty meh. "Band of Bastards" has an introductory cutscene that exudes more character and promise than most of the base game, but after talking to the characters of Kuno's band for the first time, you never get to talk to them a game, and 3 out of 4 patrols are pretty meh, with only 1 actually being somewhat interesting. "A Woman's Lot" is also pretty meh, with you doing a lot of fetch quests and grinding to gather bandages. The 30 minute stealth segment in the mines was good but IMO it's not worth spending three hours slogging through the rest of the DLC just for the stealth segment. The "Amorous Adventures of Lord Capon" DLC lets you hang out a little more with one of the few actually interesting characters in the game, but the actual content of the quest itself was pretty meh.

The only decent DLCs were the Tournament and the dog DLCs. The Tournament DLC adds a weekly tourney event in Rattay, which is pretty nice in that allows you to practice combat and grind up your skills in a safe environment (whereas grinding against Bernard gets pretty tedious, moreso if you try to grind up faster using real weapons, which means you have to constantly go back and forth between the nearby inn to sleep to heal up, and to the armourer to repair your weapons. With the Rattay Tourney you heal up after every match and you're given tourney equipment you never have to repair). The Dog DLC is really nice if you REALLY, REALLY want to be an archer. You're going to spend several hours in the woods shooting game to grind up your archery skill, so you mind as well bring a dog to level up your hunting skill (which has combat perks like stealth) and your Houndmaster skill (which has perks that allow your dog to fight in regular combat).



WARNINGS

The game runs on Cryengine and you will need a pretty good rig to run decently. You'll need a Ryzen 580/GTX 1080 or better and a pretty good CPU to get smooth 60 FPS at the lowest setting at 1920x1080. If you can't meet that standard, you'll probably want to get it on PS4/Xbone, or just wait until you can get a better rig. If you want a fun medieval sandbox to romp through in the mean time, I'd recommend checking out the Elder Scrolls games (Morrowind, Oblivion, or Skyrim. Don't play ESO) or Mount & Blade Warband (don't buy Bannerlord right now, even if you have a good rig. Wait until it's finished).

There is a LOT of swearing in this game. I've never before heard this much foul language in a game before. I'm not prudish when it comes to language, but it became pretty frustrating to listen to after a while. If you are living with a rather prudish family or roommate, consider playing with the door closed or with headphones on).



I've heard that the developers of KCD are working on a new game. I really hope that it is another open world sandbox simulator RPG and that they are able to improve upon their ideas from KCD. My features wishlist:

Spoiler: 

• More weapons and skills. Archery perk tree. Crossbows and slings (make no mistake: slings were deadly weapons in war! Just ask the Moors who were decimated by Spanish slingers!). Spear perk tree, halberd/warhammer perk tree, and quarterstaff perk tree (quaterstaff can be used to beat people up and force them to surrender/knock them out rather than killing them, thus enabling a matrial pacifist playthrough). Unarmed skilltree.

• I wish the disguise system was expanded upon. Outside of two scripted quests, the disguising thing never really applies to the rest of the game. It would be really cool if you could knock out a Rattay guard, and then disguise yourself as him so you can walk around Rattay and enter restricted areas. It'd be cool if you dressed up as a Cuman, and walked into Ratay, and then everyone turned on you. After I became a criminal in Sasau, I was disappointed to return in full plate armor with a helmet covering my face... only for people to immediately act as if they recgonized who I was. Lots of room for improvement there in future games.

• The character models look nice, but they just can't do facial animations. It also hurts that the faces can look pretty bad in the dialogue-cutscenes, with bizzare flickering and shading. They could do with having spotlights shining on their face to add consistency.

• The cutscene introducing me to Kuno's band was the most invested I ever was in KCD's characters. Had me excited there for a moment that we'd get some really fun, interesting characters. But no, after that cutscene, you only talk to each character once... and that's pretty much it. You do three quick patrols and then they're gone. Maybe I'm expecting too much character focused stuff in the vein of a JRPG from an open world WRPG, but I kinda wish that the band characters were with you for the whole game. Main story wise, the only characters I care about are Radzig and Capon, and it's a shame that Capon basically falls out of the story right after his introduction.

• Bohemia in KCD really benefits from Jade Forest effect, where it actually FEELS like a country with hundreds of people in it. To elaborate: in most games, a country or a continent or whatever usually consists of one city, and then one or two tiny villages... and that's it. And these civilizations are SAID to be huge nations with armies of thousands... it's just unbelievable. But then sometimes you get something like the Jade Forest, where there are dozens and dozens of houses and settlements spread out across the world, making it really feel like a huge country. You can believe that an army could be raised up and that there would be the infrastructure required to support it. It also helps that Bohemia in KCD had redundancy, which further makes it more believable. Rather than just having one place you go to buy horses, you instead have three different villages with horse farms. And then you have two different cities with big business armorers/weaponsmiths/tailors, and so on.

[list]One of my few complaints is that most of the NPCs in KCD Bohemia have generic names, like "Townsfolk" or "Artisan". They already went through so much effort trying to create an immersive world. I don't think it would have been too hard trying to insert medieval Bohemian names into a random generator to assign the NPCs names. When I go on a serial rampage in Sasau, it doesn't really feel as impactful as it could because most of my kills were "guard" and "townsfolk". I feel like they don't matter, like they're just going to respawn. But when I kill Zora in Neuhof, that feels impactful (even though I know she's probably going to come back. Eventually).

• It's rather jarring that there are no children and babies in this game. If you're concerned about "violence against children" ratings, you could just release the base game with children being invincible, and then release an optional day 1 patch that removes the invincibility.

• Speaking violence, I'd like to be able to decaptiate people or spill their guts on the floor. Feels weird after all of the unarmoured people I cut up, none of them were missing limbs or their insides.

• I feel like the devs could have borrowed some lessons from Skyrim in how to get people quickly invested in the new towns they visit (in Skyrim, whenever you enter a town for the first time, an event plays that involves every major NPC in the city, so the player is quickly introduced to them all, and the event also says a lot about the world or the characters, sometimes a lead in to a quest).
  
  • Also kinda sad that there is no roof jumping or sneaking through windows.
  • Also wish I could pinch out candles and put out fires like in Thief.
  • One gripe I have with the world design is that it looks very samey. The different parts of the map are very indistinct from each other. Unless I were to look at a map, I wouldn't be able to tell whether I was in a forest on the East side, or the West side near Sasau. Now, yes, I know that the map is supposed to be based on real life historical Bohemia, but gameplay wise it's just not very good to play in, and there are easy ways to fix this. To take an example from another game: WoW has a map called Kul'Tiras, which is a large island kingdom that looks very similar to the terrain seen in KCD, but Kul'Tiras was designed to have three very large, distinct mountains (surrounded by smaller mountain ranges) around the island, that are visible from anywhere on the island. In between the three mountains was a large valley bowl, and a lake, so if you were on one side of the valley, you could see the rest of the map. You ALWAYS knew where you were.
  • One thing I liked about Skyrim was how sometimes there would be bounty hunters or assassins sent after you, and they'd even attack you in town when you weren't expecting it. It made you keep on your toes. In KCD, I feel absolutely no danger. The only time I will ever be attacked is if I am quicktraveling and choose to engage a random event. Perhaps if you fought one faction a lot (ie if you killed a lot of Cumans), then perhaps Cuman champions would try coming after you for glory. If you were rising through the ranks of medieval society too quickly, assassins might show up to kill you, and then when you killed the assassins you could find an order from a jealous noble who hired them to kill you, and then you could go after that noble...
  • The wildlife system could be improved tremendously. It feels like Bohemia is very sparsely populated with wild animals. You hardly ever see wild animals, even when you are at a hunting grounds. It'd be cool if you could see the foodchain in action, with foxes eating squirrels, a pack of wolves hunting herds of deer, etc. Or seeing animals going down to a stream or a lake to drink water. Could have a bear trying to get salmon at a stream/river (also, add fish please. Spear fishing?). Etc. It'd be cool if you could accidentally run into a bear, or while you were sleeping at a camp, you woke up to a bear rummaging through your stuff and/or mauling you. Also feels like there are no birds in this game; you hear ambient bird noises but you never see birds perched anywhere or flocks flying.
  • Another thing Skyrim did well: in Skyrim, it felt like there were other adventurers, other people going about on their urgent missions too, but in KCD you're the only person sprinting through town or galloping through the countryside. You NEVER see couriers galloping through the countryside, or wagons bringing their goods to market. It really stood out to be while I was doing the Band of Bastards DLC that the only time you ever saw other people on horses was in the beginning of the game, when you travelled to Neuhof with Bernard, and when you did the patrols with Kuno's band, all quest-based scripted events.
  • KCD also suffers from a similar problem Skyrim did, in that there is supposed to be a war ravaging the country, but ingame you see no evidence of war of any kind outside of a handful of story battles, and the occassional random encounter while quicktraveling where you see a couple of Cumans fighting guards. It'd be cool if you could see the military going around buying up arms and armor and supplies from various shops (or even confiscating them by force, thus the merchants start going out of business and the economy plummets), or people being drafted or people going out to join the army, and battles in the field.
  • Lack of an economy. You don't see people mining metal, and then bringing that metal and selling it to the blacksmith, and then seeing adventurers, mercenaries, and soldiers buying arms and armour from the blacksmith. You don't see trade caravans or wagons of goods going between settlement to settlement. You don't see travelling peddlers or anything. When you completely clean out a blacksmith of all his goods, you can just talk to him in the morning and he will act like everything is fine as usual, and he will even have a full inventory. The merchant should be destitute, trying to get a loan from the bank, with guards on heightened alert across the region and searching buildings for the stash of stolen goods. If the merchant is able to get a loan, the number of shop guards should be increased, with a night guard or two on watch, and with better locks. If he isn't able to get a loan, then the shop should straight up be closed and the building taken over by a different merchant (using a Black Desert style of house interior instancing/phasing). A newbie apprentice blacksmith might enter town later and he'd have to slowly build up his business. Also, rather than having all of the shop's items be locked away in a chest menu screen, do the Skyrim thing where they are physically placed throughout the building, like in Skyrim. Furthermore, if you accidentally dropped something or bumped it off a table, it could cause a sound and wake people up, thus adding more tension to the heist as the player either has to run or try to take out the people coming.
  - Other thieves out in the world thieving independently of you. Perhaps while you were breaking and entering, you could accidentally meet one too. You would both fight each other over the goods, or could join forces and endeavor to raid noble mansions or heavily guarded shops. Or, you could be hired as a shop guard and bump into an extremely skilled thief. You could also meet them while selling your goods to a miller.

[list]Money should have weight. You shouldn't be able to walk around carrying 130,000 coins on you, unless you bought a wagon and you're carrying all of your money in a chest in the back... in which case beware highway robbers. Furthermore, there should be the threat of pickpockets and robbery. You should store your money at a bank or the Knights Templar (who were historically bankers) and get bank notes which you can turn in at other banks in that network.

• More professions, such as enlisting in the army and auto-travelling with the army and fighting until you decided to leave with your wages, like in Mount & Blade. Become a merchant, be it a travelling peddler or opening up a shop and trying to run it. Or a trader going around with a wagon. Or become a bard. Add knighthood orders, or become a noble and enter aristocratic society. Etc.

• Get your own house/land, even if it is as basic as what Skyrim did. You can also look at the plethora of housing mods for the TES games for inspiration.

• Allow you to recruit/hire followers/bodyguards to accompany you on your journey. Each follower could have their own quest, could have unqiue dialogue where if you're passing by a certain place, they start talking about how it related to their backstory, how they grew up there or how their father painted that painting, etc.

• More indepth romance. Right now, you just do the romance with Theresa, and that's it. You never talk to here again. It sucks that in so much fiction, romance just stops once people get together. Why not show the two people actually BEING TOGETHER? Have the romance continue. I'd also like to be able to dress up my wife in fancier clothes. Also add parenting. Would be cool to be able to raise/adopt a daughter and try to find good husband for her, or teach my son to be an honorable man (or a thief who brings home the bacon) and train him to become a knight/master thief too.

• Lack of water trade. Water is the best medium to transport a lot of stuff and people in. There should be a lot of boats going up and down stream carrying goods. Also, if the setting of the next game allows it, add naval combat! Allow you to serve as a sailor or an officer on a ship. Get into naval battles.

• Holidays. Have a weekly market where stalls are set up in town, shops have sales, and people pour into town from throughout the local region to peruse through the wares. Festivals. Etc.

Recommended.

[Vrinara]

Last Game I played (I haven't finished yet) was Dragon Age Inquisition. I'd give it a strong 8/10

[Eapoe]

Phantasy Star IV. 6/10
Unless you want a new game, that would have been:
Innocence: A Plague Tale 7/10

[Popastique]

Persona 4 Golden 9/10

[agentsi]

Grim Dawn, 8/10

Great Action RPG if you like diablo/poe style games. I love the skill system and loot, it really allows for tons of different builds that all work for the most part. Unlike PoE though, you can change builds/talents really easily without much hassle. You're just stuck with the two masteries you picked at the start. Good end game progression, fun boss fights. Worth playing for sure.

[schwank05]

Ark: Crystal Isles, 9/10

I think this is the best map since Aberration, I love the new Crystal Wyvrens and the fact that there is every zone and the fact that on the Server I play on we have every creature in the game that spawns in the map and it is a total blast to play, been back at it for about 2 months now.

[Thekri]

Among Us- 9/10

I don't usually go with fad games, and this one is definitely all the rage now. But it is a heck of a lot of fun. It is $4, it takes up 250mb, it runs on a Pentium 4 if you still have one, and it is some of the most fun I have had in a multiplayer game for a decade. One of those games which is basically a thin shell over a social interaction, it works more like a board game then a video game.

Manipulating people is just so much fun. My favorite play so far is as an impostor I befriended a crewman, kept vouching for his innocence, and so he trusted me too. Together we kept voting off innocents until I won. He did feel pretty used in the post game, but he was a good sport about it. Just making up brazen lies when you get caught is good too. The only reason it isn't a 10/10 is because I doubt it has any staying power. People will be bored of it in a month or two, but go have fun while it is the rage!

[Littleraven]

Genshin Impact: 8/10

For a mobile game this thing is fucking incredible. If not for the obvious mobile game trappings that stare you in the face (the gear upgrade system and everything around it) you couldn't have told me that this was something that can run on a phone or tablet. I'm not even knocking mobile games because I play a ton of them but just the pure scale and scope of this game is impressive for what it is. I have only spent about 10 hours with it so far so I can't speak to what it will look like later but my first impressions are very solid.

[Jastall]

Middle Earth: Shadow of War - 8/10

Got this on the cheap and it's rid of all the microtransaction bullshit that plagued it on release. Pretty good game, if a bit too similar to the previous entry and fairly heavy on the downtime between missions if you want to take down fortresses. But happily said fortress battles are very, very fun and cinematic. The random Orcs are often pretty run of the mill, but sometimes the RNG creates a fun, goofy or badass character that is great to fight and/or have on your side. Performance is also great, never dipping below 80 FPS on Ultra 1080p on my mediocre rig. Some other open world games released in 2017 and ported to PC should take notes (looking at you Horizon Zero Dawn).

Also, while I'm not the greatest of Tolkien purists, anyone who thought the first game or even the movies took liberties with the source material may suffer an aneurysm playing this. Shelob the hungry giant spider-thingy being turned into a sexy wizard lazy who wants to save the world is only the very tip of the iceberg of the nonsense on display here. As I said, I don't mind that much and still had a fun time because Talion and Celebrimbor work really well as a duo, but still found some of the decisions taken here unnecessary deviations for no other reason than "because video game".

[metzger84]

death stranding 8/10

you're norman reedus, delivery man extraordinaire, traversing a picturesque post-apocalyptic america with a fetus-in-a-jar strapped to yourself, occasionally lobbing shit grenades at tar dolphins to the soundtrack of bands like low roar

[Mashingspoon]

Kingdom come was an incredible game, really a shame that it was plagued by bugs for so long. Both my friend and I played it and got completely screwed, my save file got obliterated and would randomply put me at random spots that I had already played through, as well as sometimes just outright kill me when I logged in. My buddy had some weird bug where anytime he logged in, his character would just float away, forever. After putting so many hours into the game I couldn't bring myself to replay it up to that point, however, the time that I spent playing was amazing. Great story and really interesting and fun gameplay. would definitely recommend.

[Kuja]

HS Battlegrounds 9/10

The new elementals are very fun. But some of the new "heroes" are simply broken, like Ragnaros. I have never seen him losing. But I assume a board full of poison might be a good counter. Same goes for Illucia. Both very imbalanced, and I think there's nerfs coming soon.

But what annoys me is that Bob keeps telling me to unlock perks, but the perks button does nothing. I assume it could be related to shop and arena also being closed for many months now.

[Ausr]

Far Cry 5 - 5/10

The story is alright. I get it's retelling a religious tale and according to Ubisoft, there were hints from the outside world that there was trouble brewing, but how that would be possible considering all radio from the outside was supposed to be cutoff and there was literally nothing that would have told you that otherwise. Getting kidnapped every 1/3 of an area you completed was fucking retarded. In the middle of a stronghold? Kidnapped. On a mountaintop far away from anything? Kidnapped.

The combat was good when you were in it. Didn't have much of a problem with it.

Music was meh. Had some classics but you weren't really hearing much at all.

They should've done more with the perks. Gun upgrades consisted of "paint job, scope, silencer" and multiple guns were just sidegrades. Disappointing.

I REALLY hated the fact that everyone and everything could magically see you. They turned that awareness shit crank up to 11, even with any stealth upgrade.

I hope 6 is better.

[Zuben]

The Witcher 3, 9/10

Love the aesthetic, writing, characters, music, how the world is affected by your choices etc. Blood and Wine is the perfect expansion pack, perfect way to end the journey that is Witcher 3 (though I do think you should've been allowed to punch the religious zealots preaching in the tournament grounds; easily some of the most annoying characters in the game).

Combat is merely okay, too easy even on the second hardest difficulty I played the game with; it only felt like picking up when I got to the DLCs, found it quite enjoyable that way. Perhaps I should've just nocked it up to the hardest difficulty, but guess I always anticipated it to pick up as it is when I got to a new area.

Worst part of the game is the incessant traveling at high speed on horseback. The world is vast, which isn't good when it's just riding between hotspots. I mean, yeah, that's how open world usually is, but the trick is to hide it from the player. In Witcher 3 I noticed it right away and got really tired of it before even leaving Velen. Like said the writing of the quests is exceptional, but mechanically they are mostly just Geralt following mission markers or trails of tracks/scent, then fighting a thing at the end. These are transitions between actually engaging content that should've been made better. Adding to this most people you meet are just part of the scenery, repeating one-liners as you pass them by and nothing else, not even having names. Combined it makes the world, as visually grand and dynamic as it is, feel like a set. If you stop and just walk around, taking it all in, you may feel the surroundings are an actual place, but this sense isn't served to you through designed gameplay, you have to look for it yourself. To describe it even further, it feels like they took Witcher 2 and filled the gaps between Acts with useless space you have to ride through. Roach can also be awful to control, especially through a forest or by a coastline, though I like how the devs gave a nod to it in a DLC quest. I think I find it more jarring than usual because Witcher 3 is otherwise so exceptionally well-made.

I hope Project Red learned this for Cyberpunk and Night City will be more about journeying around than running between hotspots.

I won't take points away from the game for this, but is has to be mentioned: Witcher 3 is poorly optimized for PS4. It's very rare for games to crash on the system at least by my experience, but this one did so constantly, at least once per session. Likewise managing inventory and other menus was sluggish af.

[hellhamster]

Metroid Prime 2 Echoes: 9/10

A sequel that has to follow up one of the greatest games ever made is not an easy task, but it's done so rather well. It even improves on certain aspects. Boss fights and weapons are just better designed for example. It kinda loses its freshness on everything else though, but overall it is still an exceptional game. The difficulty is also a welcome change but it was overdone on certain setpieces like the Spider or Boost guardian. I'm not a novice on hard games, but these bosses gave me a hard time honestly. I wasn't that fond of the parallel world aspect, it made me traverse the same rooms way too often. Some places are incredibly well designed while others are very bland and not very memorable. Overall though an excellent sequel and worth your time.

I really wanna play the third installment but I need to find a decent Wii motion control scheme for my PS4 controller, I can't get past the parts where you have to grapple things no matter what I do.

Super Mario Galaxy: 9.5/10

I really wanted to give this a perfect score, it's pretty much exceptional in every way, but the fucking fixed camera on many spots really pissed me off. It's not a good idea to change the way you're moving on a fucking ledge as the fixed camera changes place. Also, it's kinda weird you have to finish the game like 4 times to get the right ending. Other than that, this is pretty much peak creative genius from Nintendo's part. Every level has an incredible design choice, the soundtrack is godlike and the game is a joy to behold and get immersed in. Can't wait to play the sequel, which I heard is even better.

[Unholyvamp]

Hades 10/10

For the genre and style this game represented it was an absolute beast.
Every aspect was trully enjoyable.

[CrossNgen]

Outer Wilds 9.5/10

Can't really talk about this game because of how it's designed, but if you're a fan of mystery adventure games, or even slightly interested in them you should definitely play this one.

[Shedaar]

AC Origins

6/10?
I thought I would love the Egyptian aesthetic, but the main character is simply stupid, side quests and story are meh (i'm lvl 35 now), you don't change your appearance unless you buy another outfit and I feel like I'm running from 1 point to other to finish the quest asaps.
Idk., at lvl 35 I feel like there is lack of progression, no enemies are difficult for me. Not even the big red guys (phylakites?).
I will finish it, then go AC odyssey, and then I wanna play Valhalla when it comes out, but if Valhalla is just re-skin of origins/odyssey then I'm afraid it will be boring after 15h

[dlld]

Doom Eternal Ancient gods part 1 DLC 9/10

Basically just more doom eternal, the difficulty curve simply continues upwards from where the base game left off, took some time to get back into it after not having played since launch. Only downside is there is no power progression for yourself at all this time around you start maxed out same as at the end of the base game except no crucible.

[Dervrak]

Baldur's Gate 3 (Early Access) -

I would give it about a 7/10 in it's current state but with the potential to be better once the game is complete.

As with most early access games there are a lot of issues, mostly things like graphical bugs that should be sorted out, but there are several gameplay issues that need to be sorted out as well (like how every battle can be cheesed by throwing a barrel or chest at the enemy). The story is your standard roleplay fare, a bunch of very different characters are forced together on an adventure because of a shared dilemma. Not exactly Shakespeare, but not terrible either. The NPC's in your party are hit or miss personality wise, but it is kind of hard to judge with only the first Chapter available in early access.

It seems the biggest complaints currently are from old time Baldur's Gate 2 fans who's real beef is with 5th edition DnD rules on which the game is based, which they feel are clunky and dumbed down the game, essentially they wanted Baldur's Gate 2.5 with the old 2nd edition rules and real time combat with a pause option instead of turn based. The other big complaint is that it's "Dungeons and Divinity" (IE it borrows too much from the Divinity series and not enough from DnD).