Recent reviews by The Fifth Horseman

Despite billing itself as a Metroidvania, 9 Years of Shadows is in reality a rather perfunctory and linear puzzle platformer with basically no backtracking or worthwhile exploration to speak of (and what backtracking there is often hampered by locking you into certain areas of the map until specific bosses are beaten - NOT good design there).

Most of the gameplay is underwhelming, with regular mobs being little to no real threat - making boss battles horrid difficulty spikes in comparison, made worse both by the way how health recovery works in the game and the absurd amount of health most of them have. The game has a currency system, but it's basically moot - you'll end up with far more coins than what you need to max out Europa's upgrades, so why has this not been leveraged as a means to purchase consumables for boss fights is quite puzzling.

The elemental armor gimmick, while in theory offering interesting design space, is not utilized very well - it's pretty much solely offensive, with no defensive counterplay, there are very few places where you have to actively switch between armors to solve obstacles, and boss fights basically don't use it at all, quite a few outright locking you into using one specific suit. This makes the one fight that actually does something with it (Maelzael) stand out even more, as a testament of what could have been.

As much as I want to like the game, the stellar art and music direction can't compensate for its' at best half-baked gameplay. And so I just can't recommend it in good conscience.

If you've played any part of the Heroes series, you'll find yourself right at home in Songs of Conquest. I would even go as far and say that it is what Heroes of Might & Magic 3 might have been like in an alternate universe.

SOC keeps what worked in the formula, while re-envisioning some aspects - the combat, magic system and settlement construction in particular - in a way that feels like an organic development rather than a radical departure from what came before.

The Dead Island experience, perfected.

Techland developed the original Dead Island and Riptide, and Dying Light was the outcome of a disagreement between them and Deep Silver regarding the creative vision for Dead Island 2 - leading Techland to go their own way and eventually develop their concept into a new IP.

The added parkour spin and more open-world design both massively enhance the game for the better, though. Definitely worth playing if you like parkour, doubly so if you want to see it combined with zombie survival.

... Look, it has a pixel-art gunpla builder. There's no way I'm going to not recommend that!

Not just more levels, but their design is also heavily improved with some interesting experiments (such as a few levels that are basically Ion Maiden's take on arcade shooters), nasty new enemy types, the Arrange Mode which remixes the original campaign, and an entirely new difficulty mode that ramps the challenge up.

Ion Maiden was Great, but Voidpoint really hit the mark on the expansion.
Five dead Heskel's out of five, would buy another expansion if they make one.

An absolute gem. Not only is the game aesthetically pleasing in both visuals and musical score, it's quite possibly THE largest Metroidvania I've ever seen. 33 hours in, I'm STILL discovering new areas.

EDITED: 50-ish hours in and I'm almost done with the main story (although I gather there is more work to get the True Ending). It does begin to drag towards the end, not least because some of the bosses have insanely spongey health pools. Still one of the better MV's I've played, though.

Complete genre shift from RTS to a mish-mash of superficial Action-RPG and real time tactics. The change feels detrimental rather than beneficial to the game.

I tried to give it many, many chances but ultimately still ended up with the same impression: there's an interesting mechanic or two... that are barely used, there's plenty of puzzles... most of which are tedious and uninspiring gap fillers, the story premise is decent... but the actual writing atrocious and boring, and the dialogues come across quite stilted and wooden... as does the whole rest of the game, to be honest. Even the Holmes IP doesn't save it.

I hate leaving things unfinished so I will at least try to complete my playthrough, but if you haven't bought or started it yet - do yourself a favour, give this one a wide berth.

Don't tell Konami, but it's basically Castlevania reimagined as a run-and-gun shooter... and it's actually FUN - certainly moreso than many of Konami's recent titles.

I've originally started my playthrough of this right after Ezio's trilogy and TBH found it underwhelming. The writing ranges between poor and bland, most of the characters unengaging except for Haytham (and you only get to play as him during the prologue) and if you thought AC Unity was when Ubisoft's quality standards began to slip then you haven't paid attention to this game.

In some scenarios, enemy guards can respawn indefinitely in the open-world (particularly noticeable with several chests in the DLC), literally within an arm's reach of you at that.

You can lose the Tomahawk (one of your basic weapons). In the base game, you can at least repurchase it. In the DLC, unless you know exactly where it happened and can locate it before the next reload, it's permanently gone from that episode of the DLC. It could have been fixed as simply as leaving a map icon where it was dropped, or having one of the side activities return it upon completion - but no, it's gone for good.

The lockpicking puzzles work with the Mouse + Keyboard controls in an utterly stupid way. Where on controller you use each stick separately to find the correct angles, on M+K the mouse controls both angles simultaneously and you can easily lose the first angle when searching for the second, forcing you to start over from scratch - an absolute excercise in frustration when the puzzle is all about finding and holding the precise angles. Again, this is something that could have been solved in many ways but wasn't.

Naval missions can be fun, but again the design and QA fail - there's a particular one (The Giant And The Storm) which becomes nearly impossible to get full sync on if you've fully upgraded the ship.

Finally, there's a literally game-breaking bug in the DLC that occurs during the first episode of the DLC. It's fortunate there's a workaround, but that Ubisoft have never tested if the DLC is completable when all episodes are installed together is a giant black mark - as is the fact that they did not bother to fix it in the nearly ten years the bug was known.

All together, AC3 game had potential in the setting and story setup, brought some improvements to the parkour mechanics... and managed to be an utter disappointyment.