★★★☆☆ - Good

Great gameplay, awful monetization. Feels a lot like a more polished, less spectacular cousin of Earth Defense Force. No story/campaign makes me a sad panda.

I love third-person shooters, and Helldivers 2 absolutely nails the gameplay, with great animations, deep gameplay and lots of explosions.

However, it doesn't have a campaign, meaning that, once you've unlocked everything that interested you, there's no more incentive to keep playing. This is made worse by the fact that a lot of equipment and items (and even some stratagems) are locked behind Season Pass-like "warbonds" that cost 1/4 of the game's full price each. Sure, you could spend dozens of hours mindlessly looking for "super credits" on the map (each map has 1 or 2 of them, each giving you 10 credits - all warbonds cost 1000), or you could just play another game.

Cool game that wastes its potential.

★☆☆☆☆ - Bad

Absolutely awful.

Blood Omen 2 is an extremely basic game that excels at absolutely nothing. It commits the worst crime of any entertainment media: being boring.

The level design is, from beginning to end, just linear and narrow levels, with the occasional combat - which is equally simple: one button attacks with a 3-strikes combo, one button blocks, one button uses the currently-equipped spells, of which there are just a few and rarely do anything other than damage. There are some puzzles, but they're also very obvious, like mind-control someone through a glass wall and push the previously-unreachable lever.

Even the story and voice acting, typically very celebrated by franchise fans, are tepid at best.

Perhaps the worst crime is how weaker Kain became: even at the end of the game, he's a far cry from his Blood Omen 1 incarnation - he's so under-powered he can't even drink blood from multiple victims at once now.

Disgraceful.

★★★☆☆ - Good

It's Path of Exile 1 with WASD movement and some quality of life improvements.

I'm not a huge fan of diablo-likes, specially ones that stick so close to the original formula like this series.

Very polished, but otherwise kinda uninteresting.

★★☆☆☆ - Decent

Looks great even today, but the 90's level design hasn't aged well.

Some levels are quite large and impressive (for a 90's game), but there's not much to do in them besides follow the path. Others are some huge, confusing mazes with lots of backtracking, at times with obtuse puzzle-like progression: go this path, press this lever, return this place, shoot this thing, go back that other way, press that hidden button, go back to the beginning of the level to see a new path open, so on and so forth.

Another pain point of the game is the combinations of enemy AI and weapons: most weapons fire projectiles with painfully slow travel speed, while AI, particularly the Skaarj, are fast, aggressive and will almost always dodge your stupidly slow bullets. This means that you'll often have to rely on the few hit-scan weapons, and once they run out of their relatively-small ammo reserve, then it's pain time. Trying to hit a Skaarj with a rocket launcher on an open space is definitely not fun.

The multiplayer Tournament version was definitely way better.

★★☆☆☆ - Decent

A short indie sci-fi/horror-themed metroidvania.

It commits the gravest of sins of being a metroidvania and not having a map, so you'll probably end up running everywhere trying to remember the place where you'll use the latest power you've found.

It does have some interesting ideas, like enemies having HP and a stun meter, with weapons dealing greater damage to one of these resources, and enemies taking double damage when stunned.

But the gameplay is slow and boring, and initial progression is quite confusing, with a few different paths apparently available but only one being actually viable.

The story is also not particularly interesting, and having to finish the game twice - with barely any changes between plays - to see the ending is really annoying. At least it's not as bad as Ghouls and Goblins.

All in all, it's just another basic indie metroidvania.

★★★★☆ - Very Good

A relatively short and simple but pretty fun action rpg.

You go around an island and its dungeons, hitting monster from behind to deal extra damage, maybe using one of the 3 elemental magics to deal more damage (but most likely not, since changing skills is a bit of a pain in the ass, and magic kinda sucks until you get the high-level stuff near the end of the game), levelling up your weapon to increase its attack and obtain its skill, solving some surprisingly elaborate box-pushing puzzles, obtaining new items that allows you to cross new paths, in a sort of metroidvania-like way, collecting diaries and tablets that give you insight into the island's history and the fabled Dragonslayer blade, killing a few bosses along the way.

It's a simple but effective game. The visuals are rough but colorful and cute, the combat is simple but fast, enemies are varied and interesting, the rooms all have unique, interesting layouts, occasionally holding secrets to reward the attentive player, and the adventure is wonderfully paced, with a nice mix of cutscenes, dialogues, character building and, of course, combat and exploration.

It might not be the best action rpg around, but it's a great palate cleanser in-between longer games.

Just ignore the Netherworld dungeon at the end of the game, with its 27th of randomly generated rooms that are mostly the same and ridiculously strong, bullshit enemies. If only the reward at the end was amazing... but it's actually kind of crap.

★★★☆☆ - Good

A third-person shooter with big ideas but lackluster delivery.

Advent Rising wanted to be the next Star Wars plus Halo: its story is an epic sci-fi tale of alien races fighting in the name of gods - which are actually humans - and its gameplay being a third-person shooter with platforming, vehicle driving and jedi-like powers.

Unfortunately, it falls short in nearly every aspect, as the game is plagued with poor execution in nearly every one of its facets. For example, it has a huge number of cutscenes, but they are low resolution, with low amounts of detail, stiff animation and low frames. The combat is mostly ok, but the melee is floaty and you can barely tell if you're hitting or getting hit. There's a levelling system for weapons and powers, but it seems to be completely unbalanced, or just buggy: some weapons were maxed out before their ammo ran dry, while others progressed so slowly I couldn't get them past level 3 (of 5) even though I used them every opportunity I got until the end of the game.

Also, as you'd expect from a game were humanity was nearly destroyed, the human weapons are pretty rare after the first few levels, so what's the point of having them?

And speaking of buggy: the platforming is absolutely awful, with the player character often getting stuck in loops while trying to climb ledges. Even more buggy, the game kept crashing, at some point soft-locking progress - switching to windowed mode was the only way I could get past it.

That's a lot of complaints, and there are more, like the game completely lacking instructions on how to use your levelled-up powers, or obtuse puzzle-like bosses. And yet, there's still an interesting game beneath all that jank. Wielding any 2 weapons and a bunch of super powers is fun when it works.

It's not a great third-person shooter, but you could definitely do much worse. It's surely far from the worst game I've played this year.

★★☆☆☆ - Decent

A very basic SNES-Zelda-like.

The art and music are top notch, and the bard is absolutely delightful. However, everything else is kinda just okay. The combat is simple, easy and not really interesting; the level design is serviceable but largely unnoteworthy; the few puzzles that exist are pretty basic and don't require any sophisticated thinking, and the history is, well, just boring.

And, of course, it has backtracking but no map. I'm really surprised how such an average game was so positively reviewed - I guess art really carries the biggest weight for most players.

★★☆☆☆ - Decent

A relatively short pseudo-JRPG that feels more like a visual novel with combat than an actual RPG.

The premise - and the game - is very simple: you control a group of 4 high school girls with super powers that are a mix between super sentai and magical girls. Half the game is reading the story about them doing Shakespearean plays and half if fighting demonic creatures from nightmarish versions of such plays in classic turn-based combat. It plays out very much like an all-female Power Rangers series.

The game is extremely linear - there are no choices, no branching paths, no side quests. Just story and linear dungeons. You can't even choose your party (out of 7 characters) until about 80% through the game.

This would be fine if the story and combat were really good, but the first didn't really click with me, being about Shakespeare and high school girls and all, and the latter is decent, but not particularly impressive. The art is also very basic, RPG-Maker like, and the music sounds like what you'd expect teenage girls would listen to, which again, is really not my kind of thing.

It's not bad, but I wasn't particularly impressed by it either. Very okay.