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Just improves on everything the first game did and gets rid of my main annoyances, while still having rough edges and difficulty spikes that I think are necessary to avoid turning a strategy game into rote repetition. It's a longer campaign, too, but manages to stay consistently more interesting than the first game did as well. I love some small scale tactics scenarios.
First time actually playing all the way through this myself (tho i watched most of metal gear scanlon) and I'm legit blown away how well this game captured the AAA story focused "prestige" game formula 25 years ago. The stealth was a bit hard to get a handle on initially (mainly cuz I'm a baby and the sneaking stresses me out) but after the initial bit it flows so well from cutscene to boss to a little bit of exploration back to the next cutscene. The codec is such a good tool to put hints into the game itself instead of forcing outside guides and the game has enough roots in adventure games that you get a ton of really interesting interactions between your items and the world and your enemies throughout. METAL GEAR.
Still don't fully know what to make of this game in terms of coming to a thematic "point" but I love the way Remedy is embracing their design and aesthetic sensibilities. Just a dozen of the coolest moments I've ever played in a video game in this thing to the point where even the needlessly stressful combat couldn't put a dent in. Love this world and these characters and so so excited to see what Remedy can do next now that they're operating at this level.
The problem with every pikmin sequel is that the first game was a perfect, singular, complete thought that just happened to be about half as long as a full priced single player game is expected to be. Pikmin 4 is by far the best at adding layers and progression and treadmills to that base formula while still keeping a focus on exploration (which is the entire appeal of the series for me) and it really got me hooked on that treadmill for a good week or 2 but looking back after beating it, I enjoyed the time limited Pikmin 1 style Olimar side story more than anything in the main game. Getting rid of co op is a bummer but I like how oatchi adds layers to puzzles as well as micromanagement & the new pikmin types and their interaction with the world was all around really fun.
Love the basic concept & execution of attacking/visually syncing to a beat, but the game adds too many layers and systems to that that distract from that great foundation. The most aggregious is how much it relies on color coded enemies & even worse needs you to cycle through 3 assists in order to deal with them which really interrupts the flow (also a wild decision to put them on a cooldown, but the timer is fast enough that it's mostly not an issue). The way it doles out upgrades felt really stingy until I realized (at the final mission) that there's a place in the hideout that gives you money based on achievements and suddenly I had every basic ability unlocked. Story is totally fine, I like Macaron & CNMN a whole lot, and I love the cartoony, dreamcast aesthetic but found it a bit at odds with the fairly standard pop-rock music selection. I saw a combo video online that replaced the music with a JSRF track and it hit so much harder for me. Still, this is a really strong realization of a type of game I've wanted for a long time & pulls it off way better than I expected for a first attempt.
Astonishingly competent. New character designs are great, and returning ones almost all look and feel great too. Best balanced year 1 of a competitive fighter imo but parts of the drive system seem a bit too skewed and it overall benefits all arounder style characters that were likely to be top tier anyway more than it lifts up the weaker cast. Wish the art style was going for something more interesting but really happy with it so far overall.
Love some authored, bitesized tactics puzzle missions. Initial tutorial and missions set up a much bigger scope, though, so I spent most of the game waiting for it to "open up" before realizing that the missions are intentionally designed to not give you the full ruleset & I think that's the right decision. A lot of the missions did feel kinda samey though & the fog of war stuff stayed pretty frustrating (especially the 3 missions against Sonja, whose CO ability just negates the whole fog of war system anyway)
I'm a bit disappointed that the gameplay is mostly isometric/top down, since Signalis is clearly pulling so much from ps1 era survival horror and one of the most impactful parts of early RE & SH games was the really dynamic fixed camera angles you had to navigate (signalis feels like it kinda knows this, since it plays with other perspectives throughout the story, just not in general gameplay). Aside from that, when it's in that mode I think this is the closest a game has come to creating the same flow of tense exploration & stragetic resource usage that I love from those classics. Unfortunately, while most games emulating that era tend to play a little too easy & forgiving, Signalis feels downright mean with its balance. This is a recurring problem I have with Horror games (especially big modern ones) -- mechanical tension demands punishment for failure, which usually means getting pushed back to a checkpoint and repeating an encounter, but that repetition robs tension, both atmospherically & mechanically; the challenge is never going to be as meaningful the second time, the monsters aren't going to be as scary. A perfectly tuned survival horror is great at getting you to accept losses and continue forward, on the edge of death, low on resources, but just continuing to scrape by. Games that skew more lenient lose tension as you build a reserve of health & ammo, but in a game that's tuned too difficult, the player is encouraged to repeat content and min/max to reach the same ends, but more tediously. All that said, the atmosphere mostly holds up here & even on easy combat difficulty, the game is fun to explore. The areas aren't nearly as big as the mansion or police station from RE1&2 but they are intricately connected and planning routes to complete puzzles and unlock new paths is as satisfying as any game in this genre. Unfortuantely, like the camera angle, the enemy & area design stays pretty same-y throughout the game, it's industrial dystopian retro sci-fi hallways all the way down & it doesn't make much of a difference if you're in an apartment complex, spaceship, or abandoned mine, you never get the equivalent of the nurses or babies from Silent Hill that make areas and goals feel unique. I really feel like I'm nitpicking at this point, though. The game is so painfully close to the classics of this genre that every percent that isn't quite there feels like a big deal. The actual big deal, and the reason that this is a 4 star instead of 5 is that the story doesn't pull off what it's going for. It's clearly aiming for a SH 2 tone, with heavy surrealism, a lack of clarity until the end of the game, & an adjacent take on the idea that the world is filtered through the psyche of a single person's trauma (tho the way the sci-fi concept literalizes that instead of just letting it be spooky & unexplained undercuts it a bit) & it ultimately doesn't land. The premise of love & pain spreading like a disease, psychically infecting & corrupting entire planets of sentient robots is cool, and there are touching moments between Elster & Arianne, but getting the rest of the story through text files & static npcs makes everything feel very stiff & cold, while SH2 is remarkable because its strange interactions feel very human and emotional (full voice acting & animation helps, & is not quite feasable on this budget, but it feels like Signalis took that limitation as an excuse to not even try, or maybe because it's about robots they wanted things to be a bit more stiff but then centering the story on this grand power of love metaphor is at odds with that). There's also some themes early on about corporatization & capitalism but they never really step to the forefront, and as a backdrop didn't feel as effective in the later areas as they did in the mines. Ultimately it's a story with some strong sci-fi ideas and a beautiful little tragic romance but there isn't enough to carry a game this long. More interesting than the story, though, is that the whole vibe here is really shooting for the moon, the mood in the cutscenes and first person segments rules but that too is undercut by how many references there are in the visuals, worldbuilding & literal text of the game. The premise is inspired by the King In Yellow which shows up physically in the game, the anime character designs make things feel less human, some of the coolest cuts of animation are lifted directly from Ghost In The Shell & Evangelion, the robots are called replicants & gestalts straight from Nier, I'm sure there's a ton of other ones I didn't even get and I'm not sure what the point of all that "homage" is. People who get really into the internet detective-ing say the story is commenting on all that but I don't see it & I don't enjoy engaging with media like a puzzle to be solved. The vibe here is strong enough on it's own, but pointing to outside influences makes it feel a bit shallow & insecure in a way that it just didn't need to.
All time great sim-cade game feel on a controller. I've got some issues with the AI and wish there was so much more to the progression, but just as a game about the Gran Turismo idealized car-brochure experience of driving it's an incredible achievement. Look forward to revisiting it throughout next year whenever I want to listen to an audiobook.
It's hard for me to get into a tetris-like cuz the initial impression is always "well it's not tetris" but I've got over a hundred hours logged now and I'm pretty into it. Biggest problem for me is that it doesn't ever get all that fast, which is great and I love that they wanted to make an action puzzler that doesn't just inevitably get extremely frantic and stressful but the flip side of that is that most of the modes have a time limit (which i personally find extremely stressful even in an otherwise chill game) or the endless mode that just feels like a test of patience and mental endurance, since I've had runs that can go well over half an hour and it just gets kinda monotonous by that point. All that said, this is my go to steam deck game when I just want to play something while watching/listening to something else and don't want to get turbo stressed playing Tetris Grand Master or I know I don't have an hour to spend playing Lumines