Recent reviews by shadow wizard money gang

What can I even say at this point, this is one of the best games of all time.

Persona 3 is a truly great JRPG. The game is carried by a very strong thematic core and great character writing, which is an area where later Persona games stumbled. It's amazing that something written almost 20 years ago still feels this fresh and relevant.

It's almost hard to recommend something this long nowadays, but I honestly can't think of a more well-written game I've played in the last few years.

This is easily one of the best games of this year. It's refreshing to play a game influenced by STALKER that has actual game design (I love STALKER, but I would never actually recommend it to anybody to play, lol)

Pacific Drive takes ideas from the aforementioned STALKER, roguelites, "simulators" and survival games, and instead of feeling like a genre mishmash it all comes together beautifully. The driving feels great, you really feel it when a tire blows out, and it's endless fun to keep swapping out parts on your crazy frankenstein car to keep it going and deal with the challenges of the Zone. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong and you just have to keep truckin'. It's awesome.

I've been waiting a long time for another game to make me feel the way Skate did. Just pure freestyle bliss. You can attempt missions or just freestyle a cool line. There's nothing like bombing down a slope and hitting a perfect flip. The controls feel fantastic. The music is surprisingly awesome too.

It's not perfect - the UI is awkward, sound effects are weirdly broken sometimes, colliding with obstacles or rails feels goofy sometimes. But that's easy to forgive when the rest of the game feels so good to play.

Hate to give this one a negative review after how much I liked Reverie under the Moonlight but this is game is a mess. It feels like the game completely runs out of ideas a few hours in. There's so much contradictory design. Why is there a stamina bar? Why are so many sigils useless or overlapping? The companions do very little and are visually distracting, especially because some of them use the same sprites as enemies. Enemies drop tons of currency but there's almost nothing to spend it on. The level design is by-the-numbers and the areas are bland. The art and animation is still great, but these little inconsistencies and contradictions overpower what is otherwise a very simple game. It doesn't feel like there's a vision bringing the game together, just a bunch of elements cribbed from Castlevania and similar games without a feeling for why those mechanics work.

I honestly think this is an interesting game up until a little of the way through Act 2. After that the writing goes into the toilet, most of the sidequests are just boring filler, and everything drags on waaaay too long. This game has the classic problem where they set up all these interesting stakes for the main character, but then you're encouraged to ♥♥♥♥ around as much as you want, so the stakes of the plot are completely at odds with everything you're actually doing.

The game is trivially easy even at higher difficulties, not that games need to be hard to be interesting, but the skill tree is in the perfect sweet spot of being overly detailed while also being completely pointless, and there's nothing left to carry the game. I literally stopped upgrading anything after about level 35 because I just didn't care any more and I could already kill like 20 enemies at a time easily. Most of the game's systems feel underbaked and there's very little complexity or nuance in any of it.

The GTA-style city simulation is very thin and adds basically nothing to the game. The game promises a sense of scale with all those huge buildings, but most of the action takes place on ground level except for a scant few missions that take you into a penthouse or one floor of an apartment complex or something. The lighting and effects are amazing, but many of the animations of human characters are just incredibly bad, which takes you out of how well-crafted everything else is visually.

This game is over-scoped, but it's also bizarrely conservative and unambitious. It needs something to tie it all together, but all you get is every idea from every open world game ever made crammed into a bland, boring package. Honestly, just play Deus Ex again.

This game has an identity crisis. It doesn't know if it wants to be an arcade racer or a sim racer.

If it's a sim racer, why is there a corny flashing reset when your car flips over? Why does the AI rubberband?

If it's an arcade racer, why do I lose the race as soon as an AI racer pulls ahead? They corner perfectly and never make mistakes. Why do I get punished for going for fun plays and spectacular wrecks?

The whole time I was playing this I had one thought on my mind... I wish I was playing Burnout 3. You get a huge payoff for wrecking another racer, slow mo camera cutaways, extra boost meter... What do I get in this game? A little "Spin out" popup on my UI and 100 meaningless points?

The game is impressive technically. The physics look really good and it's fun to watch a big pile-up... but the fundamental problem of this game is that you can't really do that while also trying to win the race. Presentation is barebones. There's just not enough here. It's basically a really impressive tech demo.

Now that most of the technical issues seem resolved and I can actually play the game...

It's fantastic. The re-scaled players and stadiums feel more like baseball and it's easier to do things like get little base hit pokes. The new trait chemistry system gives you some interesting team building incentives. The sound design is fantastic. There's a great sense of humor and the game goes a long way to capture the little things that make baseball a goofy game, and the player traits create the drama that makes baseball interesting. It feels amazing to slam a hanging slider for a home run, and you'll wince when you pitch a curveball over the heart of the plate.

This game reminds me of a time when sports games weren't just money-grubbing soulless simulators. It might be the best sports game ever made.

A rock solid action-JRPG, one of the best I've played in years. Full of surprises and charming characters. I don't really have any problems with it other than what I consider to be some narrative missteps in the final chapter.

One of the freshest games I've played in a long time. Fantastic level design, very imaginative the whole way through. You never know what's coming next. The game has some tough challenges but it's also not afraid to let quiet moments breathe. Likewise the game has some great humor that coexists with moments of unsettling horror. At first glance you might think the visuals are crude, but look past the surface level and you will find them charming and often beautiful - every level is evocative and there are some actual jaw-dropping set pieces. The music and sound design is excellent, a sort of ambient synth folk style that I've never heard anything like before in a game. It's astonishing that this was made by a single person.