Recent reviews by bendy

Stray is a great game to grab a controller and slap the recliner on your chair, if it has one. Everyone loves being able to pet cats in videogames so being able to play, and meow on command, as one is pretty great.

The world of Stray is extremely interesting, yet simple. It's a linear game with about ten chapters, each one putting you temporarily in a new part of this cyberpunk dystopian world in which it's your job to figure out why the underground city was locked from the "outside," working with your trusty robot companion B-12 to navigate and parkour through tricky areas.

I'm always a fan of linear gameplay, but there is an open-world aspect to this too, or maybe a better way to describe it would be exploration-based linear. Some of the chapters are large villages/cities, where you have an objective, but can spend time just getting lost in the dark and neon side streets/alley. The world is incredibly immersive, you can interact with all the characters you see, some unlocking side missions, or giving you collectible items that you can add to your cat.

While the game is not incredibly long, I feel it is worth its price, it has decent replayability with tons of collectibles that you'll no doubt miss the first playthrough. On top of that the story is simple yet powerful, and I feel has a great ending.

This is a great continuation to Spider-Man: Remastered, especially after watching the Spider-Verse movies with Miles Morales. The character comes off as a bit of a nervous klutz at the beginning, so eager to impress Peter and help protect New York that he's a bit of a loose cannon. With Pete gone in this game though, he starts to mature quickly as those classic tragic "cannon" events start to happen to Miles.

The map is the same as Spider-Man: Remastered but it's winter, so it's snowing and feels like a different map, especially since Miles' residence is in Harlem, the northernmost region of Manhattan, instead of starting in Greenwich/Chinatown like its predecessor. Whereas the first game starts immediately taking down Fisk and fighting with the police through his tower and offices, this game establishes itself as much more homier and "friendly neighborhood," especially with it being the holidays, the NPCs and passerbys seem much friendlier.

Miles and his friend have built the Uber/Instacart of the Insomniac-verse, the "Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man" app, which has replaced the random-chance crimes from the first game and offers side missions and crimes which can be instantly started whenever you want. I really like this, I can do the crimes when I want, and there aren't literally like 160 as in the first game, it feels much smaller scale, and perhaps that's because Miles is so new to being Spider-Man.

The traversal is much more personable to Miles, as well, while Peter had almost an aggressive style of swinging, Miles' style is much more relaxed and seems to go off that "hip-hop" vibe the game seems to be going for, what with the sound sampling side quests and constant soundtrack playing w/ headphones around a characters neck. He'll swing backwards, upside down, almost circularly, and can use his venom abilities to traverse the rooftops, and this feels much faster then Peter, even if it isn't, maybe because it chains so well together, and doesn't feel like a RT + LT simulator, there's much more variety, even if the moves are basically the same.

The characters are decent, definitely above average, Miles is likable and Ganke is Ganke, but I'm really not a fan of the antagonist. The Underground gang felt like a bunch of highschoolers and was just a bit off-putting the whole game. The story is extremely short, doable in like 3 hours if you're just speedrunning, which is kind of a letdown considering the download size alone, not to mention the price. It does offer a healthy amount of side content, though, it has it's own version of backpacks and collectibles like the first game, and the ratio of hideouts/bases to map sectors is SO much better than the first game. The side content feels much more doable and comparable to the size of the story, something that can be done as you go along with the story and wrap up shortly after finishing, whereas Remastered felt like I had to dedicate time to cleaning up all the map content, and then got to do the main story as a quick wrap-up.

They introduce Miles' new "venom" abilities here, which are fun, but they lean into it really hard. Almost every mission is some variation of "go help someone, they're stuck because generator is broken, use venom to kickstart generator." There was even a side mission where you help a delivery truck driver snowed in and, after pulling the truck out, I jokingly thought "ok, time to kickstart the engine with a venom punch, right?" and sure enough....

It's a good continuation of Peter's story, and introduces pretty likable characters for Miles' story, which I'm hoping are done well in SM2 (no PS5 so we'll never know!), and definitely recommend but almost more as a DLC instead of it's own game, though it does have enough side content to be big enough to stand-alone, just not enough main story. Worth $50? Probably not, but it is another great implementation of Spider-Man, and if you enjoyed Remastered and played on the PS2 back in 2002, you'll like this too.

I can't speak for the original version of this Spider-Man, I've only played the remaster.

I really enjoyed this iteration of Spider-Man. It's a classic remaster of what a lot of people, me included, loved on the PS2, too bad we didn't get that classic pizza delivery theme. I like the newer actor's face capture, it feels more "friendly neighborhood Spider-Man," the original just doesn't seem right to me.

The combat is great, it's the Arkham gameplay with combos and finishers and flows great, very fluid, especially after unlocking a decent portion of the skill tree, which doesn't take too long. The finisher animations are great as well, except for that one wrestling finisher with the unnecessary double slow-mo....

The world and story go pretty good together. It's a pretty solid chunk of time just to get through the main story, and they jam-pack a LOT into every nook and cranny of the world. Manhattan's split up into about 8 sections, each of which has collectibles, side quests, and oh-so-many crimes to stop (seriously, I could've 100% the game about 2hrs sooner if there weren't so many damn crimes, and in the DLCs too!). The traversal mechanics are great, and really make you feel like Spider-Man, though they do get just a touch stale after maybe halfway through the game, where you can almost predict each motion Spidey's gonna make, a bit of variety would've been nice here, and the Miles Morales sequel does this much better.

The characters are cast perfect for their roles, Doc Oc feels like Doc Oc, MJ feels like MJ, and Pete definitely feels like a Spider-Man. The lab missions almost feel like a side-bit to the story, not relevant to stopping the main villain, as you watch Octavius' slowly spiral into madness, until suddenly he's not such a side character anymore, which is done really well, and the Act II finale really pulls you in and starts to feel much more serious than the first arc of the game.

The DLCs are pretty well done, very short but I think that's fine considering there's three of them. As for map content, I think they went a bit overboard with all the forts/hideouts. Fisk, Demons, Sable, Prisoners, one of each in every district started to feel like homework when it came to cleaning up the map, and similar to the movement I think Miles Morales' sequel did this much better.

Overall it's a solid implementation of what most people expect for the classic Spider-Man experience, if you enjoyed any of the Tobey Maguire movies as a kid you'll love this.

Lies of P is a breath of fresh air into the souls genre. Most of FromSoft's games have a very Shakespearean dialog that makes it often hard to understand the story, whereas LoP has a much more straightforward method of storytelling, while also letting the character have dialog choices. Playing as Geppetto's puppet, lying or telling the truth will affect your levels of humanity, and steer towards one of multiple endings.

The world, the city of Krat, is beautifully designed based off of what is most likely Victorian London, with wide stretching buildings you fight your way through to poisonous swamps infested with puppets. The design itself in terms of the user experience is extremely solid, every action feels deliberate, from heavy swings, dodges, quick slashes, to even the consumables.

The game's combat is mainly based off of parrying similar to Sekiro, where enemies have fury attacks that can't be blocked or dodged, which is what I'm guessing lead to a lot of people complaining about difficulty. While I do think this is the hardest souls-like I've played, I don't think it's too hard at all. With the option to customize what arm attachment you have from a grapple gun to a flamethrower to a sniper, being able to imbue your weapons with specific effects, being able to disassemble and combine any blade with any handle from your weapons you have (of which there are a lot), customizing your skill tree to special abilities, I think the game provides plenty of opportunity to win boss fights.

The one gripe I do have is that I think there are too many two-phase boss fights, towards the end it was basically the norm, which got rid of that wow factor. If they made some of the last few bosses one phase and maybe added a third phase boss, perhaps for the final boss, the impact would be stronger, I think.

On top of everything, the game has solid voice acting and a stellar soundtrack. Lots of the side quests result in records as a reward, which can be played on the hotel's gramophone while you level up and upgrade your weapons, some of the songs I would just listen to without going to the next area. With multiple endings and lots of different dialog choices, including a new mechanic in NG+ that gives sequential playthroughs a new element, I've just finished my third playthrough and enjoyed every second of it, absolutely recommend this game.

This is without a doubt my favorite game of all time, nothing even comes close. I've recommended this game to people who enjoy all different kinds of games: RTS, FPS, MOBA, singleplayer etc., it doesn't matter what you usually like, this is a must play. The atmosphere, storytelling, gameplay, and visuals are all 10/10, while the music has to be 15/10. I would 100% pay money to be able to experience it again. The DLC is its own amazing experience, as well. Don't look anything up! Enjoy it.