52 Games Challenge 2026!!!

[kamikazekeeg]

17 - Abiotic Factor (PC 2025) - BEAT - Properly counting this as beat as after I ended the run at a place I viewed as "good enough" for why I came back for a second run, I ended up eventually continuing afterwards, as while I do view this game as having way too many fights going on with dudes and guns in the later game, it's such a good game, so addictive, definitely up there for me as far as like survival crafting games go, it's like this, Grounded, and maybe Subnautica.  Can't recommend this game enough.

[bikingjahuty]

38. Snipperclips Plus (Switch)

Like most people, when the Switch launched in 2017 I was hyper focused on pretty much one game and one game alone; The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. However, despite Breath of the Wild being the reason I got a Switch at launch, my eyes were open to the other launch titles in an attempt to extract even more value out of my new console purchase. Funny enough, the one other game that stood out to me was Snipperclips.


I rarely ever buy digital games, and at the time, Snipperclips was a digital only game on the eShop. My wife and I bought it, played it for a bit, but unfortunately the call of Breath of the Wild was too strong and neither of us would pick the game back up for years. With it approaching a decade since the Switch came out, Snipperclips did receive a slightly upgraded version in the form of Snipperclips Plus, which I recently picked up a physical copy. My wife and I decided to co-op the game once more, this time with the intent of finishing it. Snipperclips is undeniably a unique, fun little puzzle game, however its charms do begin to wear thin the longer you play it.


The basic premise of Snipperclips is you and a friend (or friends) control a rectangular box with a cartoonish face and work together to cut sections out of one another to accomplish tasks. The result is a mix of a puzzle and creative game wrapped into one package. The game is compromised of a series of many mini challenges which will have you do things like you and the other player cutting each other into specific shapes, turning yourself into a platform or scoop to transport an object from point A to B, or turning a gear by making yourself into a shape that can turn it. There are certainly a pretty impressive variety of challenges in Snipperclips, with new ones popping up the further into the game you get.


Unfortunately, I feel like the nuances between challenges starts to grow a little stale by the time you reach the second or third world. Not only that, but the margin for error in some challenges becomes so small that the game just becomes tedious and annoying. On top of that, many challenges and levels in Snipperclips boil down to haphazardly throwing something against a wall and seeing what sticks; it's often way easier to randomly cut your partner and see if they're able to turn a gear or guide an object rather than think it through methodically, which only seems to work a fraction of the time anyways when playing the game like this. The end result was a game I began to feel fairly bored from the longer I played, despite really enjoying it when I started.


Beyond the good and bad that define Snipperclips' gameplay, this game has an indefinable charm and cuteness to it. When you and the other player(s) are snipping each other's characters, the characters will snicker and make funny noises as you're doing this. On top of that, you can be an asshole and cut the other characters up to the point where they auto regenerate. It's a fun little distraction and something my wife and I frequently found each other doing, particularly at the end of a challenge. There is also a cute, almost Yoshi-like OST that plays during this game that fits well with Snipperclips' overall aesthetic. Speaking of the game's overall aesthetic, the graphics in Snipperclips are intentionally simple, while also being colorful and charming at the same time. This does unfortunately lend itself to the game feeling a bit dull and repetitive the longer you play it, but at least from an artistic standpoint, it all mostly works.


Even though I didn't necessarily get the mileage out of Snipperclips I maybe hopes to get, especially after purchasing the game twice, I still enjoy playing this game with my wife. We definitely laughed a decent amount and also had to put our heads together to figure out many of the game's more difficult challenges. While this game isn't going to blow anyone's socks off or be a game you'll remember as an all time great on the Switch, it's still a pretty fun co-op game that you and a friend will almost undoubtedly enjoy playing together. (5/25/26) [32/50]

[telly]

Game 7 - Metaphor: ReFantazio (PS5) - 84 Hours

Ohh boy. This game was a hard one for me to finish. I don't think I've ever been down on a game this much in a very long time, especially one that's been so well received by others. The TLDR is that I found this game to be a painfully anemic spiritual successor to Persona, with a lot of problems that added up to an underwhelming experience.

The best part about the Persona series is that juxtaposition between the high-school simulator and the dungeon crawling fantasy. In Metaphor, however, the setting is about as generic fantasy as you can get, which takes out a lot of the intrigue for me. I thought it was going to be a reverse fantasy, where the main reality takes place in this middle age setting, and the “fantasy” is a world akin to our real-life modern reality. This is present, yes, but only as far as the story and isn’t actually realized in gameplay, which was incredibly disappointing. The best part about the setting was the relationships between the multiple races, but the rest of this game’s world is not all that exciting if you’ve played a JRPG before. Compare it to Persona, and it feels like so much is missing.

This sentiment of “something’s missing” came through the strongest during the road trip segments which are prominently featured as part of your day-to-day story. You'll be traveling along the ground through the water and in the air and you'll be watching these cutscenes where the characters are standing as still as statues with their hair not even blowing in the wind. Then you'll stop along the way to feature this panorama of this broad landscape or a town but there's no 3D exploration at all and it's just provided in the form of text that you read. Then the final dungeon that you get to ends up being a carbon copy of the previous dungeon and there's really only three layouts for the entire game (tower, jungle, tomb). Outside of the 5 major cities, any other towns you visit is just a single screen with maybe a shop or dialogue option. It was painful to watch your party takes in these beautiful vistas that serve as brief respites during your journey because I wanted to actually explore those through gameplay! I thought the game was going to have more open world exploration, as was teased with the large desert area outside of Grand Trad. This seems to have been dropped entirely in favor of tedious and overly long dungeons that just don’t feel exciting to explore.

I found the combat while pretty decent to be at the end of my experience very long and tedious. I don't like the mixture of real time and turn based combat. The combat is either extremely difficult or extremely easy and it is all based on whether you can get the jump on the enemy in the real time combat version. And a lot of enemies have fast, unpredictable and uninterruptable attacks, and if they hit you first, you might as well just run away and try the fight again. I did end up liking the archetype system, and the different ways that you can customize characters ended up being really fun to explore. It was definitely my favorite part of the game and the bosses offered up some really satisfying challenge. But outside of combat, there’s maybe about half of the activities that you could do in P5: no ability to romance any characters, no jobs, no clubs, nothing.

The last thing that just didn't do it for me was the visual design and the music. I will say that the character design is incredible and the human designs are top notch. The monster designed though is about as generic as you can get, and overall I just really didn't like the visuals the constant shifting of magla crystals in the environment - felt very distracting to me. The user interface just wasn't very strong, and the music just isn't very good. It's either generic, or a heavy reliance on these fast vocalizations that clash incredibly with the amount of spoken dialogue that happens during this game, especially during the battles.

And of course, the nail in the coffin for me is the 80+ hour story. Like other Atlus game, I question why the game needs to be that long finish the story – it’s fine, but I really didn’t feel like it was worth. There’s a lot happening in the story, sure but to me it really boils down to unrelated smaller story plots that are done to gain favor in your bid for king. There’s a LOT of political posturing and flowery dialogue about how to run a country and yada yada yada but it just didn’t really resonate with me because the overall story movement (except for the anti-religious movements in Martira) didn’t really feel all that exciting. The main antagonist, Louis, still manages to fall into the typical villain video game pitfalls with most of his backstory really coming out towards the end of the game.

Metaphor is a fine game, but really didn’t capture me like it did for other people. For a game that’s been scored only one point lower than Persona 5 and was a contender for GOTY, I felt like the move away from the Persona series led to a lot of sacrifices, and it didn’t feel like Metaphor had enough time in the oven to really flesh out the new ideas.

[marvelvscapcom2]

27. Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed [PS1] - finished May 15th, 2026





DATE depth, DIVORCE Repetition,
MARRY Brevity. 


This is how it's absolutely done when it comes to an Arcade racer! So much so I dare call it the recipe. Those days of sitting in a big top arcade next to big bass spin wheel knocking quarters into a Cruisin Exotica rig, the sense of speed, racing the time, racing the mirage of competition fading into the sunsets of pre adolescent angst.  Need for speed Porsche Unleashed simply gets it.  And captures it instantly. An arcade racer doesnt need 2000 cars, 20 50 cent soundtracks, nitrous or even special upgrades to cars. All it needs is adrenaline and confidence.  And this game milks more from minimum than later entries do from the whole farm.


The game is beaten by competition of it's "factory driver" mode which tbh is actually a fun idea. And believable. You play as an Unamed racer for Porsche motor company. A pick yourself up by the boot straps type of gainfully employed race car test driver. And you are tasked with the job of delivering rich snobs their Porsches in a timely fashion and with minimum damage. Jerry Sienfield on a 3am acid trip orders a 911 Carrera S. It's your job to zoom through cones, master dirt power sliding and just whip some of the most iconic 90s sports cars to ever exist into rapid rebellion to appease them.  Other missions mostly exist plot wise to "test the cars performance" and the main goal is to become so good at trusted you get promoted to "ace driver" in which you get the attention of some sassy and sexy James Bond spy of a woman who I guess is their elite Porsche racer.  Who degrades you as being inferior to her throughout. Her time sets are the master times to beat. "You have set a new track record" is a fun thing to hear. And trust me. She sets the bar high. The times sre demanding but not overly so.



The graphics are chefs kiss. Truly some polygonal dreams capes and I believe incredibly swell for the time of release. Light shading creates confident illusions. It's got a certain car and driver magazine, Laguna Seca sunset, top down, rubber peeled kinda badass vibe. The game reeks of tanned denim and sex.  Immersively fun to play because the concept of speed is made evident by the game's fade in fade out approach to background textures. It doesn't try too hard to be goofy or cool. It just is in a cool matrix on its own.


Porsche Unleashed has a fun and engaging plot that just feels more real life.  It has a certain charm in not trying so hard. It is a compact, quick, enjoyable and never dull rapid dash that takes itself with maturity and grace rather than silliness and neon glow. And for that? Id say it doesnt differ much from the Porsche brand itself  


[Side note] - when I was a kid my brother won me this game in a Pokémon card tournament from some kid.  So it holds a special place in my heart. I had no clue how actually interesting it would be. Makes me interested in the other OG PS1 NFS titles


93/100.

[marvelvscapcom2]

28. Need for Speed: Underground [PS2] - finished May 22nd, 2026



Does too much

Need for Speed: Underground is a campy, fun and nostalgic trip that could have been even better if not for being a bloated, incessantly repetitive experience plagued by rubber banding. Which at this point even with its age. I consider rubber banding bad game design and always will. It voids the entire point of building a car/developing skills within the game if all the corner cutting, memorizing of shortcuts and pure passion for the game and it's culture doesn't translate directly into a larger gap between you and your opponents.  Rubber band aka the act of opponents pulling closer or becoming more skilled the further you pull away to keep things "fair" is so bad in this game that fans suggest literally staying in 2nd place until the final lap on the final few races to make it easier to win. That's just sad and it cant be overlooked.


Another glaring issue with NFS Underground is that because the first few cars you get can be upgraded to be the best cars in the game track spec wise and because the amount of money you earn is so massive compared to the amount you spend. The incentive to sit through a 111 race 20 hour game to get the cool cars at the end is essentially non existent for me.  There isn't that white whale Lamborghini Diablo to chase, there is only JDM tuners. None of which can be modded to out-corner the stock Neon you begin the game with after upgrading it.  It takes away the soul of why I enjoy racing games. The chase, the ooooo I want the 2 million dollar car but i'm a Crack distributor in San Jose so let me race people until I'm the leader of an illegal street race syndicate to buy a dodge viper.  Festivals?  Anything.  This is


Sprint

Circuit

Lap knockout

Which are essentially the same thing just formatted differently.  Lap knockouts are circuit races on closed tracks except someone gets eliminated after each Lap. And sprint is just a point A to Point B race.

Drift

Drag


Repeat.


111 times.


The game spends so much time looking at clouds that it overlooks the stars, it could have trimmed itself into something special because outside of all these flaws that become like eczema on a buffalo's balls. It does have the incandescent glow of 2000s Mod Culture. From Radio Shack adverts, magazine covers and Japanese models.  It brings you into the too fast too furious, DUB city kinda culture that was the early 2000s auto scene.


Also if it has a plot it hasn't been made transparent to me lol.  Hell if I know what i'm racing for.  "Dude you made it on German OFFENSWAGGIN magazine.  Rad. You're officially the man" idk.


The graphics are palletable for the day. Id say they've aged worse than Porsche Unleashed. But it gets the job done. There is a lot to love here but sadly for only hours at a time.  It's a cute friend from your past you used to hook up with until you found a better partner. Now you look back and go idk what we seen.  Most wanted, Carbon and Heat are those better partners. 

73/100

[marvelvscapcom2]

29. Mixtape [PS5] - Finished May 26th, 2026





Mixtape

CONTROVERSY BEGINS HERE

So before playing this game I was lured in by of course the display of it on digital stores abroad. It tickles my rom com/90s alt pickle that I grew up in. So I bought it long before hearing about it's many controversies. And didn't both to learn of those until recently. And i'd say....

The world needs shock therapy.


On the one hand critics will argue that "ign" giving this game a 10 is simply poor journalism and subjective heavily biased critic work. They always undercut artistic standards and praise odd anomalies and it can feel like a slight against the culture of gaming. Which do I agree with?  1... hundred... fucking percent.   This game is not a 10.  IGNs scores have lost all meaning at this point.

However those same critics will say things like "its only 3 hours long, it doesnt have complex mechanics, it isn't some shitty 50 hour Dessert game that I love that requires you to bring democracy to Cuba to beat it's levels. It isn't some void of emotion pit of guts and guns. So it shouldn't be ranked as a game. Its not even a game" And is that equally as insane as the 10? No it's more so. Its worse. At least the 10 is IGNs very isolated subjective opinion. This? This is gatekeeping garbage and its tired.   Because it argues that a "walking simulator" or a game that almost entirely depends on interactive story telling and plot in bite sized immediate form factors shouldn't be allowed to be perfect score. Under what metric?  Puzzle games, linear on rails shooters and even collectathons with no challenge at all don't get held to this same standard.  Do we reward monotonous hardship more than simple enjoyment?  Do we prefer a 50 hour climb vs a 2 minute stroll?   Thats subjective but I certainly do not.   A game is a game if it requires user input to influence an action on screen.  The rest is history.  These are story telling masterpiece.  Same way short form content is still art in any other medium.  A sweet poem.  A little painting.  Brevity is sexy folks.  The game is 20 dollars. 

Then they claim its political posturing because God forbid 90s teens be rebellious, have varying sexualaties and anti establishment concepts and do things like party and say buzz words to trigger adults. Gee so shocking.  They should have represented 90s teens as do gooders who never touched a smashing pumpkins CD in their life. Yeahhh totally. 


This world is borderline cultist and it drives me up a damn wall that video game journalism and the people who consume it has been hijacked in such a way.


REVIEW BEGINS HERE




But anyway.  Annapurna has struck nostalgic oil again. The development team seems to chip at the rock of yearning often. Knowing what human elements evoke fond memories of either existential crisises of the past or the pain and burden of now.  I as a more wave than rock energy love this about them.  The game feels instantly relatable and it clearly is trying to be the "last blockbuster" of gaming.  Id say what it succeeds most in is the underlying dynamics rather than the overall motife.


[The music]

The game prides itself on the title, a mixtape window into 90s expression. But here is the funnest bit of it.  As the games story commences the main protagonist Stacey Rockford takes the emotional mood set by the current story and uses it to break the 4th wall and display to the player her Playlist that defined these moments for her.  Including licensed tracks from radiohead, roxy music, sonic youth and smashing pumpkins.  It is a absolute genius way to take a borderline untamable soundtrack and make it feel not only fresh, consistent, locked down, relevant but also bond forming. It helps you introspectively feel what the protagonist is feeling through music.  It's simple yet so unique. I've never seen this done.  It should have been done more.   For example. Stacey will pan to the camera and say "this is Love by smashing pumpkins a track off their 4th studio album. It covers feelings that cabt be explained or blah blah blah" I'm paraphrasing. Its semi educational for a music nerd and 90s buff like me who loves this stuff.  And it actually introduced me to a new band.  Roxy Music whom I find I enjoy.   These moods blend seamlessly with the plot.  That is absolute intense genius on profound levels. I love the idea. 


The game is essentially mini games that have no challenge outside of that.  For example you gotta move joysticks to have teens make out.  Pour slushies for a skater kid named Slater,  and raid your sisters drawer for booze by pressing X.  Id say the flaws of the game dont come from its simplicity. It comes more so from it's all over the place story telling and often times repetitive nature of the bedroom sequences.  Dialogue evolves but some of the items it calls on you to interact with dont add much depth to the story. 

The story ends abruptly, sadly and with not much reward or major plot twisting bang. Just bloop.  And I feel the ending... without spoiling it. Left me longing for more.


Then there is the fact


YOU CANT SKIP CUTSCENES WHEN TROPHY HUNTING


Oh my lord how?  This has been a standard feature since like 1992.  Speedrunners be agast. 


But overall its a delightful little treat, not a flawless game by the means of what I said alone but a sweet coming of age film on par with the movie stand by me by Stephen King with fun abd cute sequences of rebellion.  A 7.5 by all intents and purposes if not for the music element and how that is done. How blissfully the main protagonist tells her life through another art.  For that... its a 9 to me.


Rating - 90/100.

[2ko]

Game 7 - Metaphor: ReFantazio (PS5) - 84 Hours

Ohh boy. This game was a hard one for me to finish. I don't think I've ever been down on a game this much in a very long time, especially one that's been so well received by others. The TLDR is that I found this game to be a painfully anemic spiritual successor to Persona, with a lot of problems that added up to an underwhelming experience.

The best part about the Persona series is that juxtaposition between the high-school simulator and the dungeon crawling fantasy. In Metaphor, however, the setting is about as generic fantasy as you can get, which takes out a lot of the intrigue for me. I thought it was going to be a reverse fantasy, where the main reality takes place in this middle age setting, and the “fantasy” is a world akin to our real-life modern reality. This is present, yes, but only as far as the story and isn’t actually realized in gameplay, which was incredibly disappointing. The best part about the setting was the relationships between the multiple races, but the rest of this game’s world is not all that exciting if you’ve played a JRPG before. Compare it to Persona, and it feels like so much is missing.

This sentiment of “something’s missing” came through the strongest during the road trip segments which are prominently featured as part of your day-to-day story. You'll be traveling along the ground through the water and in the air and you'll be watching these cutscenes where the characters are standing as still as statues with their hair not even blowing in the wind, and then you'll stop along the way to feature this panorama of this broad landscape or a town but there's no 3D exploration at all and it's just provided in the form of text that you read, and then the final dungeon that you get to ends up being a carbon copy of the previous dungeon and there's really only three layouts for the entire game (tower, jungle, tomb). Outside of the 5 major cities, any other towns you visit is just a single screen with maybe a shop or dialogue option. It could feel the ache as your party takes in these beautiful vistas that serve as brief respites during your journey – I wanted to actually explore those through gameplay! I thought the game was going to have more open world exploration, as was teased with the large desert area outside of Grand Trad. This seems to have been dropped entirely in favor of tedious and overly long dungeons that just don’t feel exciting to explore.

I found the combat while pretty decent to be at the end of my experience very long and tedious. I don't like the mixture of real time and turn based combat. The combat is either extremely difficult or extremely easy and it is all based on whether you can get the jump on the enemy in the real time combat version. And a lot of enemies have fast, unpredictable and uninterruptable attacks, and if they hit you first, you might as well just run away and try the fight again. I did end up liking the archetype system, and the different ways that you can customize characters ended up being really fun to explore. It was definitely my favorite part of the game and the bosses offered up some really satisfying challenge. But outside of combat, there’s maybe about half of the activities that you could do in P5: no ability to romance any characters, no jobs, no clubs, nothing.

The last thing that just didn't do it for me was the visual design and the music. I will say that the character design is incredible and the human designs are top notch. The monster designed though is about as generic as you can get, and overall I just really didn't like the visuals the constant shifting of magla crystals in the environment felt very distracting to me the user interface just wasn't very strong and the music just isn't very good it's either generic or really stupid with the heavy reliance on these fast vocalizations that clash incredibly with the amount of spoken dialogue that happens during this game, especially during the battles.

And of course, the nail in the coffin for me is the 80+ hour story. Like other Atlus game, I question why it needs to be that long to finish the story – it’s fine, but I really didn’t feel like it made a good use of it. There’s a lot happening in the story, sure but to me it really boils down to unrelated smaller story plots that are done to gain favor in your bid for king. There’s a LOT of political posturing and flowery dialogue about how to run a country and yada yada yada but it just didn’t really resonate with me because the overall story movement (except for the anti-religious movements in Martira) didn’t really feel all that exciting. The main antagonist, Louis, still manages to fall into the typical villain video game pitfalls with most of his backstory really coming out towards the end of the game.

Metaphor is a fine game, but really didn’t capture me like it did for other people. For a game that’s been scored only one point lower than Persona 5 and was a contender for GOTY, I felt like the move away from the Persona series led to a lot of sacrifices, and it didn’t feel like Metaphor had enough time in the oven to really flesh out the new ideas.

I'm 55 hours into Metaphor and have the same general sentiment as you. I really don't see what made this a GOTY contender, as the story and characters are all very surface level. Visually, Atlas (after all these years) still hasn't figured out how to animate in a way that doesn't make everyone look stiff as heck. Side by side with a Square Enix game, or even something like Expedition 33 and it looks like amateur hour. I really don't get how they have gone so many years without improving in this area, it's been a problem for decades.

One thing I differ from you on though is the character designs. I just don't think they look that interesting. The human designs are cool, but of the characters you meet in the game there isn't a single one who I would ever buy a figure or poster for to show off. Maybe I'll meet one later on in the game I like but as of right now all the character designs fit firmly in the "fine" category. I don't hate them, but I also don't particularly like the either.

My favorite part by far, which you touched on, is the archetype system. Having the ability to mix and match abilities between classes to kind of build your own custom class makes for a crazy amount of skill expression in building your team. You can make some really broken classes. My favorite right now is my mage who actually gains mana each turn passively, allowing for easy dungeon clears as he can spam his skills and still enter the final boss with nearly full mana. I love RPGs with deep customization like this because it is fun to theory craft party builds that let you steamroll dungeons.

[kashell]

Game 7 - Metaphor: ReFantazio (PS5) - 84 Hours

Ohh boy. This game was a hard one for me to finish. I don't think I've ever been down on a game this much in a very long time, especially one that's been so well received by others. The TLDR is that I found this game to be a painfully anemic spiritual successor to Persona, with a lot of problems that added up to an underwhelming experience.

The best part about the Persona series is that juxtaposition between the high-school simulator and the dungeon crawling fantasy. In Metaphor, however, the setting is about as generic fantasy as you can get, which takes out a lot of the intrigue for me. I thought it was going to be a reverse fantasy, where the main reality takes place in this middle age setting, and the “fantasy” is a world akin to our real-life modern reality. This is present, yes, but only as far as the story and isn’t actually realized in gameplay, which was incredibly disappointing. The best part about the setting was the relationships between the multiple races, but the rest of this game’s world is not all that exciting if you’ve played a JRPG before. Compare it to Persona, and it feels like so much is missing.

This sentiment of “something’s missing” came through the strongest during the road trip segments which are prominently featured as part of your day-to-day story. You'll be traveling along the ground through the water and in the air and you'll be watching these cutscenes where the characters are standing as still as statues with their hair not even blowing in the wind, and then you'll stop along the way to feature this panorama of this broad landscape or a town but there's no 3D exploration at all and it's just provided in the form of text that you read, and then the final dungeon that you get to ends up being a carbon copy of the previous dungeon and there's really only three layouts for the entire game (tower, jungle, tomb). Outside of the 5 major cities, any other towns you visit is just a single screen with maybe a shop or dialogue option. It could feel the ache as your party takes in these beautiful vistas that serve as brief respites during your journey – I wanted to actually explore those through gameplay! I thought the game was going to have more open world exploration, as was teased with the large desert area outside of Grand Trad. This seems to have been dropped entirely in favor of tedious and overly long dungeons that just don’t feel exciting to explore.

I found the combat while pretty decent to be at the end of my experience very long and tedious. I don't like the mixture of real time and turn based combat. The combat is either extremely difficult or extremely easy and it is all based on whether you can get the jump on the enemy in the real time combat version. And a lot of enemies have fast, unpredictable and uninterruptable attacks, and if they hit you first, you might as well just run away and try the fight again. I did end up liking the archetype system, and the different ways that you can customize characters ended up being really fun to explore. It was definitely my favorite part of the game and the bosses offered up some really satisfying challenge. But outside of combat, there’s maybe about half of the activities that you could do in P5: no ability to romance any characters, no jobs, no clubs, nothing.

The last thing that just didn't do it for me was the visual design and the music. I will say that the character design is incredible and the human designs are top notch. The monster designed though is about as generic as you can get, and overall I just really didn't like the visuals the constant shifting of magla crystals in the environment felt very distracting to me the user interface just wasn't very strong and the music just isn't very good it's either generic or really stupid with the heavy reliance on these fast vocalizations that clash incredibly with the amount of spoken dialogue that happens during this game, especially during the battles.

And of course, the nail in the coffin for me is the 80+ hour story. Like other Atlus game, I question why it needs to be that long to finish the story – it’s fine, but I really didn’t feel like it made a good use of it. There’s a lot happening in the story, sure but to me it really boils down to unrelated smaller story plots that are done to gain favor in your bid for king. There’s a LOT of political posturing and flowery dialogue about how to run a country and yada yada yada but it just didn’t really resonate with me because the overall story movement (except for the anti-religious movements in Martira) didn’t really feel all that exciting. The main antagonist, Louis, still manages to fall into the typical villain video game pitfalls with most of his backstory really coming out towards the end of the game.

Metaphor is a fine game, but really didn’t capture me like it did for other people. For a game that’s been scored only one point lower than Persona 5 and was a contender for GOTY, I felt like the move away from the Persona series led to a lot of sacrifices, and it didn’t feel like Metaphor had enough time in the oven to really flesh out the new ideas.

I'm 55 hours into Metaphor and have the same general sentiment as you. I really don't see what made this a GOTY contender, as the story and characters are all very surface level. Visually, Atlas (after all these years) still hasn't figured out how to animate in a way that doesn't make everyone look stiff as heck. Side by side with a Square Enix game, or even something like Expedition 33 and it looks like amateur hour. I really don't get how they have gone so many years without improving in this area, it's been a problem for decades.

One thing I differ from you on though is the character designs. I just don't think they look that interesting. The human designs are cool, but of the characters you meet in the game there isn't a single one who I would ever buy a figure or poster for to show off. Maybe I'll meet one later on in the game I like but as of right now all the character designs fit firmly in the "fine" category. I don't hate them, but I also don't particularly like the either.

My favorite part by far, which you touched on, is the archetype system. Having the ability to mix and match abilities between classes to kind of build your own custom class makes for a crazy amount of skill expression in building your team. You can make some really broken classes. My favorite right now is my mage who actually gains mana each turn passively, allowing for easy dungeon clears as he can spam his skills and still enter the final boss with nearly full mana. I love RPGs with deep customization like this because it is fun to theory craft party builds that let you steamroll dungeons.

I enjoyed Metaphor, and I agree with all the above. I think combat and overall atmosphere helped with the story's shortcomings (which I enjoyed because the characters drove it). That said, I remember being more than ready for it to be over. I've played games longer than it but they either had better pacing, better writing, or a better combination of the two.

[ssj4yamgeta]

8: Dragon Ball FighterZ (XBOX One)

I've finished all 3 story arcs and beaten all 3 Arcade routes, so I'm calling this one finished. A very visually impressive 2.5D fighter that uses cel shading to make 3D models look like 2D sprites. Though the game itself seems to run at 60fps, the character animations seem to run at 24fps to make it look more like an episode of the anime. It works most of the time, but looks odd in some cut scenes during close-up shots where the framerate stutter is obvious. Surprisingly for a modern fighting game, FighterZ has a decent amount of single-player content with a story mode that lasts about 20 hours and 3 arcade routes with their own hard and randomized modes. The story mode is pretty good by fighting game standards, borrowing the "game board" concept from Dissidia where you move a piece on a game grid to battle other teams and get to the boss. However, it suffers from being roughly one arc too long. The battles themselves have very little variety to them, with you mostly fighting the same 12 or so characters over and over again. It gets very repetitive and tedious after about 12 hours, and by the end I was ready for it to be over. Arcade Mode is actually more fun because it's shorter and you can change character costumes for added variety, not to mention you can fight the entire roster. The game also loses points due to aggressive monetization. Slightly less than half the damn roster is paid dlc, with only 3 characters being unlockable. With characters costing $5 each, you're looking at some serious cash if you want everyone.

Something I forgot when I was originally typing this: someone on the dev team definitely had a vore fetish. The main antagonist, Andriod 21, turns powerful fighters into sweets and eats them to increase her power level. This is due to part of her DNA being from Majin Buu. But while it was treated as just another one of Buu's abilities in Dragon Ball Z, FighterZ places a bizarre amount of emphasis on 21 doing it. It's actually a major plot point. After about the third time Android 21 described in a vaguely sexual way how good it was going to feel to fill her belly with powerful fighters, I laughed and said, "Yeah, this was somebody's fetish." Also, because 21 resembles a female of Majin Buu's species, I shall forever refer to her as Majin Boobs. Nobody can stop me from doing so.

The game is a lot of fun, but not nearly as fun as Sparking! Zero in the long run due to the much smaller roster and the limitations imposed by the 2.5D format. I'd still buy a sequel, but only if it had a larger roster before DLC. Paywalling so many characters really limited FighterZ' potential.

Rating: 7/10 (Great)

Completed:

Tomb Raider II (Evercade)
Tomb Raider III (Evercade)
Mafia: The Old Country (PS5)
Gundam Breaker 4 (PS5)
Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection (PS5)
Resident Evil: Code Veronica X (Gamecube)
Final Fantasy IV Advance (GBA)
Dragon Ball FighterZ (XBOX One)

In Progress:

Nioh (PS4)
Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation Remastered (PS4)
Farmagia (Switch)

[bizzgeburt]

04 - Call of Duty 2: Big Red One [AT][DE] (GameCube)
https://vgcollect.com/item/246456

Hardware: Nintendo Wii + GameCube Accessory
Playtime: about 8 Hours

I finished this game on my PS2 about 2 years ago but I didn't bother to write reviews back then. My history with Call of Duty goes back to Call of Duty 2 on Xbox 360, which I and my peers spent weeks and months playing splitscreen before we all made our first online-steps on consoles. I remember having played Call of Duty 2: Big Red One back in the day too, and I kept it in good memory for having an awesome campaign with many unusual locations and weaponry, like Vichy-french and italian stuff. That's why I couldn't wait to play it after purchase 2 years ago and that's why I had to play it again - but the GameCube-version - now that I finally own a memory card for it. As with almost every german-language release about WW2 at the time, problematic political symbols were removed for this version and famous axis figures are cut out when real footage is shown and are never mentioned by name. For example: Rommel just get's called "Desert Fox" by your commander, though I dare to doubt Americans or Brits used this nickname that the Germans gave him. Today most of this strict censorship in Germany is gone, but back in 2005 we Germans were used to not getting the full CoD-experience … and used to buying the austrian PEGI-version if we really wanted full nazism, gore and bloodfest

This austrian/german release of Call of Duty 2: Big Red One was released by Activision for GameCube on November 17th 2005 as the 2nd console-title of the series. The game was developed by High Voltage Software from Illinois, wich are active since 1993 and have made a huge catalogue of games of different genre for a wide array of systems since then, with many well-known titles included, such as Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laudae, Family Guy: Videogame! and countless sports-titles, mainly NBA-ones.

Call of Duty 2: Big Red One is to be seen as the african/south-european campaign counterpart to Call of Duty 2. Instead of the - even back in the 2000's - typical french and russian battlefields, we were finaly able to experience the fighting in north-africa and Operation Husky in Sicily. As a sicilian descendant living in Germany, I was blown away by the fact that my father's hometown Gela was a playable mission in my favourite game at the time. Sadly, the GameCube-version is singleplayer only, but therefore it's campaign already offers everything a modern CoD delivers: history-channel intro vids, last-stands, vehicle-action, airborne missions, a charming squad of comrades making fun of each other while permanently facing sudden death … tbh, I personally always found Big Red One to have a better solo-campaign than Call of Duty 2. Or at least a more memorable one.

You as the player take the role of young US-soldier Roland Roger, member of America's well-known Fighting 1st, aka Big Red One. This alone is something that differs in comparison to former releases in the series, where you always played as multiple characters during one game. The plot starts with you being severely injured during an intense firefight in 1944's France, ultimately passing out. From then on you skip back to 1942 and all missions are sort-of Roger's flashbacks. Starting in North-Africa, the game leads all the way through Sicily and France into Germany. Over the progress of the different campaigns, you can witness your squad growing more familiar. Btw: Is it just me noticing, or can it be that every story of this kind includes a cocky italian american from, or nicknamed Brooklyn or Jersey? 
The only actual interaction between you and your comrades is mostly some battletalk in between different sections of a mission, but I think that's just fine with a first-person-shooter like this.

I don't really know anything to say about the graphics, because I have Little to nothing to compare it with. This game was released about mid to nearly the end of this system's lifecycle. GameCube-games coming directly from Nintendo had decent graphics for their time, and I think the graphics in Call of Duty 2: Big Red One are totally on-par. Only thing I could compare it to is the PS2-version I played two years ago … it really kind of looks the same to me, maybe with a few sharper textures. All in all it's OK, it's still playable and enjoyable.

The musical score of Call of Duty 2: Big Red One ist intense and cineastic. That's actually no surprise. It's composer is one New Zealand musician Graeme Revell. He first got spotlight as the leader of the industrial/electronic rock Group SPK and has worked mainly as a film score composer since the '90s. And boy oh Boy, what did my eyes roll out my skull when reading through his reference: The Crow, Street Fighter, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie, From Dusk till Dawn, Bride of Chucky, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Freddy vs. Jason, Sin City! Revell is an eight-time recipient of the BMI Film Music Award, including the Richard Kirk Career Achievement Award, and he surely didn't have any downs when creating the score of this game. Call of Duty were highly celebrated games right from the start, and it's interesting to see that the high quality of presentation and effort put in it was there right from the beginning.

I totally enjoyed playing this game … again. It was nice to just travel back to the early days of Call of Duty.

Here we go, 4 games finished in 2026 - on to the next one!