Recent reviews by The Green Father

While there are quite a few great aspects to this DLC, it's held back by two major flaws: Fromsoft apparently straying away from the base design and philosophy, and ignoring their limitations.

With so many game mechanics, animations and weapons taken from previous games, sometimes with no modification, it is quite important for new additions to be designed to be coherent with the old assets a huge part of the game is based on.

With most weapons retaining the relatively slow and awkward moveset we found in previous Dark Souls games, that look like what someone who never used a sword would do (barring a couple exceptions), it seems important for most new weapons to keep that feeling. Yet From adds more and more weapons that give the user very skilled and graceful movement.

The same character will awkwardly swing around a war axe, then expertly dance around with a bastard sword and precisely strike his opponent, for example.

Over-the-top attacks always existed, like the demon greataxe's weapon art, but we didn't have too many of them, and they generally didn't go too far. Now we have a huge selection of attacks that spawn giant AoE effects, or make you literally fly for a few seconds and over several meters, or spawn a billion particle effects.

The issue is not that these kind of things exist, since they kind of always did, it's that they now go VERY far and are getting too common.
The issue is that we have a huge part of the game that seems designed like an extension of previous Dark Souls titles, but mixed with another solid chunk that seems designed for a very different game. The contrast is noticeable and quite jarring.

In the same vein, and overlapping with the second flaw, is the new boss designs. More and more of them will spawn huge AoE attacks, sometimes with lingering hitboxes, move very often and very far in the arena, have attacks with very fast start-up and short cooldowns, and very long combos. With a movement system that is so similar to Dark Souls 3, where everything is much slower and deliberate, it just doesn't work.
We now have to spend good portions of many boss fights running away from attacks, running towards the boss that flew on the other side of the arena, having little to no time to either recover or attack after a long-winded combo. It feels less like a fight, and more like getting bullied, holding our breath in wait for the boss to let us hit him.

The second flaw comes with From's limitations. They've never been the best when it comes with optimization, camera work, and comfortable movements.

Yet they put many bosses that jump around A LOT, which just doesn't work with a bad camera.
Then the exact same boss will spawn a billion particle effects, which will completely tank your frame rate, and often block your vision of the boss.
If both happen at the same time, you just have absolutely no idea what is happening. It is a confusing jumbled mess.

A few bosses even have to be fought on very uneven terrain. Your opponent is jumping around, pushing you God knows where with his very oppresive attacks and with the fairly unhelpful camera, and you're suddenly stuck on some random lip in the ground or in a tree, blocking either your attack or escape route.
Even worse, you stagger the boss, only for his weak point to sink in the terrain or be lifted way out of reach.
Rivetting gameplay.

Absolutely all of this culminates in the last boss of this DLC, which is maybe the worst of the entire game:
Uncharacteristic design and attacks that look like they're from another game, extremely oppressive attacks, bad camera, screen is filled with a jumbled mess that tanks your frame rate, and you even have a slightly uneven terrain (luckily, it didn't seem to matter here).

All of this was already in the base game, but my problem is that they doubled down with them in the DLC.
From made big mistakes with DS2 before creating three masterpieces in a row, so I keep hope they will realize the ones they did in Elden Ring and do better in the future.

But we now have Igon, which is great.
Curse you, Bayle.

The atsmosphere is really nice, but that's all there is to it.
Boring gameplay, sometimes tedious, ends in a cheap jumpscare.
Builds a tiny story, but utlimately does nothing with it.

Nice if you're really bored and want to spend an hour, I guess.

It's nto awful, but there's so much better things to play.

Oh you think you're GOOD at video games? Have a taste of humility!
It's actually pretty tasty.

I highly recommend to start in easy with infinite continues, and to improve progressively from there. Otherwise you might never see past level 3.
This might not be THE pro gamer move, but face it: you're not actually a pro gamer. Know your place. Embrace it. Learn to love yourself in it.

This is a good game.

For the regular version of the game, as the enhanced edition wouldn't launch (already a big minus).
The graphics and music are alright.
The gunplay works.
Some ideas with the "open world" aspect, and the ability to upgrade your weapons and gear.
I think that's it for the positive aspects.

Now for the negatives, oh boy:
-Fixed FOV. You can increase it via modifying a .cfg, but it breaks the red overlay when you take damage. A cardinal sin for any modern FPS. There's a "photo mode" when you pause the game, where you can change the FOV, apply filters etc to take a neat screenshot. These changes only apply for said screenshot, things revert back to normal afterwards. Why...
-Mandatory motion blur. You can turn it off via the same method, tough.
-Can't see ♥♥♥♥. The enemies' colours tend to blend with the background, especially in the dark.
-Cutscenes after cutscenes you can't skip. Characters love to rub their face into yours during these times. Get away from me. Before and after said cutscenes, characters will talk and talk and talk. You'll get pseudo cutscenes where characters will talk forever while standing still, leaving you to walk around in a tiny uninteresting place with nothing to do. Yawn.
-Boring retarded plot. I don't know how close the game is to the novel, but it feels like I'm watching one of these big American productions, where it's technically incredible, but with always the same kind of stupid plot and development. Doesn't make me want to read that book.
-Add the two above together and you get a yawn fest. Get me to the gameplay already. Speaking of which...

-While there's nothing wrong with the gunplay, there's not much positive to say either. Meaning that you'd have to find the interesting aspects of the game somewhere else.
-You can salvage materials in the level to craft and upgrade things. Apart from the easily recogniseable boxes and lockers, some are just laying around on the ground, tables etc. The issue is, there's absolutely no clear indication as to which items you can pick, and which are only props. You end up constantly hovering over everything. It's boring, breaks the tempo, and makes picking up stuff a chore more than rewarding.
-"Open world". As in you're not in a long corridor, like 90% of FPS of the last 20 years. The levels are basically huge "rooms" with the "recommended" route, stuff around it you can explore, and the single passage to the next "room". Now, the thing is, the stuff you can explore is just boring. Nice try, but you failed...
-You have an invisible stamina bar when runing. Add this to the above, and it makes things even more boringly tedious. Yay!

The first Metro was good, the second one was alright, but this one is just garbage.
I only played two and half hours, so maybe I'm missing something, but I don't want to risk wasting my time any further.
I'm stopping there, which is something I very rarely do with videogames.

Just go play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Or anything else that is not this game.

The story is badly written, to a bore. While I have little to no experience with chinese, the voice acting sounds rather low quality. Everything else (backgrounds, music etc) is bland.
While I finished Voices from the Sea, which I disliked as well, I quickly gave up on Season of 12 Colours.

I don't really have much positive to say about this one. The character sprites are okay, I guess?

It's extremely short (40 minutes), but it's well written and quite cute. Worth a read.

The idea is cute, there are some nice looking wallpapers, but that's about it. Nothing egregious, but nothing interesting either.
The voice patch is... not very good.
I think that the people who worked on this deserve encouragements, though. Keep going.

I highly recommend this game. It is a cohesive experience, where every aspect of the game is well polished and balanced. There isn't really any point where one aspect overshadows the others. The gameplay, music, graphics, visuals etc are always in harmony.

It plays like an experience, more than a classic arcade-style shmup. You're playing the game the moment you launch it, way before you select your character and difficulty.

While nothing would really compete with the giants of the industry (for example, while the music is nice, it's not Grant Kirkhope or Koji Kondo), everything feels designed to deliver you a pleasant time, as an intereconnected whole, rather than autonomous parts trying to work together.

Definitively a nice gem any shmup enthusiast should try, maybe a game one interested in design should look at as well.

Supposedly Half Life but with a new engine.
For the most part, it is. They did remove some of the platforming and puzzles while on earth, in favor of combat. It bugged me a bit, but the game was still good.
Then you get to Xen: at first it's very nice. A completely different take, which reminded me of Tallon Overworld in Metroid Prime. But then you get to the Gonarch, and oh boy does the quality tanks. It rappidly doesn't look like a Half Life game anymore. Did the devs abandon the game and gave it to their teen little brothers? The part where you run away from the Gargantua is cringy, and the second part of interloper and final fight. Oh god... Did they even play Half Life at all?

They should have reworked the original Xen, instead of trying to create something totally new. Did they think they were at the same level of the original Half Life devs? No, they're not. As much as I appreciate the work they put in the game, and how I was pleasantly surprised by the very first part of Xen, the end is just garbage.

I usually hunt down all the achievements, but I think I'll pass.

This game has lots of potential, and isn't bad at all, but tries to add so much fluff and liberty that it collapses on itself. Just go play the first Bioshock, or replay it.

Gameplay: the shooting and plasmids, err neuromods, are fun to use. I like how there's an "aim assist" with the wrench against the mimics. They can be pretty tough to track, and it's a welcome addition overall. As you progress however, the ennemies are less and less a challenge (between the buffed weapons and neuromods, they all die pretty quickly, even in hardcore mode). The abundance of ressources doesn't complement the "survival horror" aspect of the game, especially food (I've seen people complain about the scarcity of some materials. I have crafted tons of neuromods and ammo and didn't have a single issue). There is a LOT of annoying backtracking. There are very few ennemy types, too. After a short while, the game lets you go in many different directions, which is good, but this adds so much to the backtracking that you end up with less and less incentive to do things your own way... Going around outside the station is a good idea, but there is very little to do in a place way too big...

Story: It's a pretty common, sci-fi trope. It can make for a good story with interesting characters, but not there. There is too much fluff that adds nothing to the story and are poor attempts at world building. Making dozens of copies of the same boring story book only makes the player LESS compeled to check them. The game tries to make us interested in the characters by creating interactions between them, but there are so many of them, are so uninteresting and so badly developed that it ends up making things worse. "Oh, another recording about the love story between X and Y? Yawn." Let's not forget near the end when an important characters shows up out of absolutely nowhere.

Graphics/Sounds/Bugs etc: Yeah it's alright. There are some annoying bugs here and there, but very few for a Bethesda game. The music is pretty forgetable, but not bad. Things serve their purposes here.

They focused so much on quantity that quality suffered, and things collapse on the sheer ammount of uninteresting stuff, backtracking, and lack of new enemies. The good aspects of the gameplay get boring because of how repetitive they get. The interesting parts of the story drown in a sea of boring stuff. What a shame.

I'll add a little something about politics. I have nothing against making a political statement in your game (in the contrary, it's a good media to do so), and they chose to do so here. Except that even there, they failed pretty hard. They tried to push "inclsuivity" and "diversity" in the game, by making almsot every relevant character a "minority" (read: not a straight white male in good health). Except that it gets more and more obvious as you progress in the game, and most importantly doesn't contribute in any way to the gameplay, story, or ethical questions the plot raise. It's as if Nintendo just put a disclaimer on their latest Mario game that says "vote for X". The issue I have is total disconnect between the politics they push and the game itself. (I didn't check, but apparently some developers boasted about how "inclusive" their game was. Players don't care about that, they want a good game, that's all.)

As for mooncrash, it's just repititive, and the moon shark is just really annoying. I dropped it. (Little note for the politics in mooncrash: you play as a black woman that plays a simulation where you can pick between a black woman (engineer), a black man (security), an east-asian woman (scientist), a white man (test subject) and a white woman (JANITOR). Can't be more obvious with pushing their politics and, most importantly, it doesn't serve any other purpose, it doesn't serve the game in any single way.)

So yeah, the game isn't bad at all, and you can definitvely pick it on sale, but there are tons of better games to play out there (like the frist Bioshock). Go play them rather than that.