Recent reviews by Phobos

Kingdoms and Castles is a medieval city builder that starts with a few peasants, some dirt, and the unspoken understanding that you are about to become deeply invested in where to put a charcoal maker. The basic pitch is simple: grow a tiny hamlet into a proper kingdom, keep people fed, keep them happy, build walls thick enough to discourage Vikings, and try not to get your granary turned into a bonfire by an airborne lizard with anger issues. It’s approachable on purpose, and that’s a big part of the charm. This is not the kind of city builder that greets you with seventeen spreadsheets and a nervous breakdown. It wants you building immediately, then quietly ruins your evening by making you care about orchard placement.

Visually, this thing is adorable in the most dangerous possible way. Everything has that chunky, storybook, low-poly look that makes your kingdom feel like a living tabletop set someone lovingly painted before setting half of it on fire. It is not chasing realism, which is good, because realism is overrated and usually just means “more mud, but in 4K.” Kingdoms and Castles goes for clarity, color, and warmth instead, and it works. You can read the state of your town at a glance, but it still has enough atmosphere that watching little houses pop up beside farms and walls feels genuinely satisfying. It’s cute without being mushy, and simple without looking cheap. That’s harder than it sounds.

Most of the time the music has that calm, pastoral “ah yes, my kingdom prospers” energy, and then the second trouble arrives it pivots into something much tenser without making a dramatic theatre kid scene out of it. The effects do the rest: construction thunks, ships at the dock, raids kicking off, dragons turning a peaceful afternoon into a municipal emergency. It all helps sell the idea that your little kingdom is an actual place instead of a toy box with taxes. It’s not the kind of soundtrack that will make you grab a parchment and write home about it, but it fits the game properly, which is more valuable anyway.

This is where the game wins people over. The loop is immediate, readable, and annoyingly moreish: place homes, secure food, expand production, manage happiness, prepare defenses, then stare at your town for twenty minutes because the roads look nice and you’ve become a weird little medieval suburban planner. It’s easy to get into, which is why so many people bounce off heavier city-builders and land here instead. The downside is that the same accessibility that makes it inviting also keeps it from becoming especially deep. The AI diplomacy and kingdom interactions are functional rather than brilliant, and once you’ve learned how the systems click together, some of the mystery evaporates. Bigger kingdoms can also start coughing up performance issues, especially once pathing and AI load pile up, which is the least romantic way possible for a kingdom to collapse. Nothing says “long live the king” like your framerate quietly dying in the treasury.

There is technically a narrative frame here, but let’s not pretend this is some grand story-driven epic. Kingdoms and Castles is much more interested in emergent drama than authored drama. The official pitch even leans on stories created by your own decisions, and that’s exactly what the game is best at: the tale of the winter you almost starved, the raid that smashed through your wall, the dragon attack that taught you perhaps one ballista was optimistic. There isn’t much in the way of a proper campaign, elaborate questing, or character-driven storytelling, so if you’re showing up for plot, you are knocking on the wrong castle gate. The real story is the one where your city survives your management, barely, and you insist that was the plan all along.

What Kingdoms and Castles gets right, it gets very right. It’s charming, readable, cozy, and easy to sink into without needing a civil engineering degree and a support animal. It also clearly still has a loyal player base that treats town layouts and giant optimized populations like sacred geometry, which tells you a lot about how nicely the building sandbox scratches that part of the brain. And the developers have not exactly abandoned it either, the Dragon Taming update landed in May 2025 and got hotfixes right after, so this is not a dead little relic rattling around in a storefront. On the other hand, the old criticism still stands: it can feel lightweight once you’ve seen the machinery under the hood, late-game motivation is shakier than it ought to be, and performance complaints on larger or busier maps are not imaginary. So yes, it’s charming. Also yes, after enough hours you may start seeing the scaffolding. Both things are true, which is rude but fair.


Graphics: 8/10
Bright, clean, and charming enough to make zoning decisions feel sexy.

Sound: 7.5/10
Quietly does its job, then turns the screws when the sky catches fire.

Gameplay: 7.5/10
Easy to love, easy to lose hours to, and just a little too easy to outgrow.

Story: 5.5/10
Barely written, mostly improvised, occasionally hilarious because your peasants live in a clown kingdom.

Overall: 7.1/10

Kingdoms and Castles is one of those games that understands a very important truth: a lot of people want strategy without feeling like they’ve enrolled in evening classes. It gives you enough danger, enough management, enough fiddly little optimization joy, and enough visual charm to make “just one more expansion” turn into a suspiciously missing afternoon. It is not the deepest city-builder in the realm, and it absolutely shows its limits once you’ve been around the walls a few times. But as a relaxed, inviting, surprisingly sticky medieval builder where you can make a pretty town and then defend it from screaming nonsense, it still does the job very well. Not the king of the genre, then. But a damn pleasant duke.

METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN kicks off with a hospital escape so deranged it feels like someone filmed a fever dream with military funding. Then it drops you into 1984 as Venom Snake, loose in Afghanistan and Central Africa, chasing revenge, rescuing Miller, rebuilding an army, and generally behaving like therapy has failed on an international scale. It’s officially sold as “tactical espionage operations,” which is accurate, but not quite accurate enough. This is tactical espionage operations if tactical espionage operations also included horse poop, child soldiers, cassette tapes, and a helicopter that arrives like it’s billing overtime.

This game still looks filthy in the best possible way. Not just “good for its age.” I mean properly, obnoxiously good. Sunlight bouncing off sand, floodlights cutting through dark outposts, rain slapping across metal, faces half-lit in the chopper, all of it still has that expensive, clinical shine that makes a lot of newer games look like they were assembled out of damp cereal. It’s not trying to be pretty in a fairytale sense. It wants to look like dust, steel, blood, and bad intentions. Mission accomplished, you magnificent bastard. Did I mention it's disgustingly well-optimized as well?

The audio in this thing is absurdly sharp. Every suppressed shot has that nasty little cough to it, every alarm feels like your luck just got audited, and the helicopter may as well be a supporting character by the end. Then there’s the music. The licensed tracks, the synthy unease, the mission intros that make you feel ten times cooler than your actual performance deserves, it all works. MGSV understands a crucial truth: if you’re going to sneak into a Soviet base at 3 a.m., you should at least have bangers. Otherwise it’s just unpaid trespassing.

This is where The Phantom Pain goes from “excellent video game” to “frankly a bit rude to the competition.” The stealth is incredible. Every mission gives you room to improvise, sabotage, scout, ghost through, tranquilize half the map, or turn the whole operation into a flaming HR incident. The open mission structure, all the tools, the buddy system, the supply drops, the weird little emergent disasters, everything clicks effortlessly. It's one of the few games where messing up is often more entertaining than succeeding cleanly. And the controls? Sharp as hell. The game trusts you to experiment, then quietly smirks while you invent some deeply unhinged tactic involving decoys, sleeping gas, and a cardboard box.

The story is fascinating right up until it starts feeling like it lost a fight with a chainsaw in the edit room. Early on, it’s strong stuff: revenge, identity, manipulation, trauma, all wrapped in that wonderfully self-important Metal Gear tone where everyone talks like they’re delivering classified poetry. I like that about it. I really do. But the back half stumbles. Hard. Important threads feel underfed, emotional beats get stranded, and the whole thing eventually gives off the unmistakable vibe of a masterpiece with a missing wall. Also, Quiet is a ridiculous character design. Not subtle, not clever, not “symbolic,” just Kojima looking you dead in the eye and saying, “No, seriously, she breathes through her skin,” as if we all just fell off the idiot truck yesterday.

That’s the maddening part. The Phantom Pain is simultaneously one of the best stealth games ever made and one of the most frustratingly incomplete-feeling blockbusters I’ve ever played. Its moment-to-moment design is so damn good that you can forgive almost anything for a while. Then the repetition creeps in, the narrative starts wobbling, and you realize this incredible machine is running with a few organs missing. Even so, the highs are ridiculous. Mother Base building is weirdly addictive, the freedom is intoxicating, and the game keeps producing those perfect little “♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, did I just pull that off?” moments that most open-world games would kill for. So yes, it’s flawed. Very flawed. It also absolutely wipes the floor with most games that are technically more “complete” but have the charisma of office carpeting.


Graphics: 9.5/10
Still makes military dirt look expensive.

Sound: 9/10
Rotor blades, tape hiss, and mission music doing criminally good work.

Gameplay: 10/10
An elite stealth sandbox that lets you play like a genius, an idiot, or both at once.

Story: 7/10
Brilliant in stretches, then suddenly held together with duct tape and denial.

Overall: 8.9/10

METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN is the kind of game that annoys me by being phenomenal. If it were merely bad, fine, easy, throw it in the bin. But no, it has to be astonishing for forty hours, occasionally transcend the genre, and then leave a giant crater where a fully satisfying ending should be. Bastard. I still love it. Not because it’s tidy, and definitely not because it wraps up neatly, but because when you’re actually in the field, sneaking through a base while a sandstorm rolls in and your helicopter is blasting 80s nonsense on the horizon, it feels untouchable. Broken in places, yes. But untouchable. And honestly, that’s a very Metal Gear way to be.

Shadow of War is an open-world action game where Talion and Celebrimbor decide that the best way to fight Sauron is, naturally, to start their own evil startup and out-management the competition. The official pitch is all about forging a new Ring, building an army, dominating captains, and taking fortresses, and that is basically the game in a nutshell: stab people, brand people, betray people, repeat until Mordor becomes your very messy LinkedIn network. What makes it more than just “Arkham but with more ash” is the Nemesis system, which turns random orcs into petty little psychos with memory, ambition, and the emotional stability of a lit match in a fireworks factory.

This game still looks way better than it has any right to. The environments are big, nasty, and dramatic, the armor design is pure fantasy filth in the best way, and the fortresses actually feel like places you want to kick the door in and ruin. Reviews and sentiment is always positive since launch, and that makes sense: Shadow of War is bigger and flashier than Shadow of Mordor without collapsing into total visual soup. It’s not flawless (some faces are a bit stiff and the open world can occasionally feel like a very expensive murder playground rather than a living ecosystem) but aesthetically it absolutely sells the fantasy of stalking through a cursed land and causing HR violations at industrial scale.

The sound is one of those things you don’t always notice until you mute it and the whole game suddenly feels 30% less cool. The score was written by Garry Schyman and Nathan Grigg (the people behind the soundtracks of BioShock and F.E.A.R. respectively) and it does exactly what this kind of fantasy bloodbath needs: big atmosphere, grim weight, and enough menace to make every siege feel like somebody’s about to get demoted directly into a grave. You can't help but praise both the music and the voice work, and that still holds up even today. More importantly, the orcs sound fantastic. These idiots don’t just talk, they perform. Every threat, insult, and deranged monologue lands like the universe’s angriest pub argument, which is perfect because half the game is basically being bullied by your own side projects.

Gameplay is the reason people still talk about this thing years later. The combat is fast, crunchy, and shamelessly familiar in that very effective “yes, I’ve seen this before, but it still rocks” way. Sneaking works, climbing works, executions feel great, fortress assaults are big dumb fun, and the army-building layer gives the whole thing a compulsive loop that can absolutely eat an afternoon and then demand dessert. But the real star is still the Nemesis system. People are still praising it in current community discussions, and they're still coming back because there is simply nothing else that creates this specific flavor of emergent nonsense where an orc you humiliated twelve hours ago returns with new scars, a new title, and a personal mission to make your save file feel unsafe.

The story is fine. Not amazing, not embarrassing, just fine, provided you’re not the sort of person who twitches when lore gets bent into a pretzel. Shadow of War goes big, melodramatic, and very non-canon, leaning hard into spectacle and personal vendettas rather than subtlety. You will generally just like it more than you love it, which feels right: the plot exists mostly to keep the machine moving and to justify why Talion and Celebrimbor keep making decisions that would get them banned from every ethics committee in Middle-earth. There are some good character beats and a few strong late-game ideas, but the truth is simple: you are here for the orc web series, not because Talion is delivering the second coming of prestige fantasy writing.

Here’s the deal: Shadow of War is excellent at what it does, and what it does is let you create an endless parade of grudges, betrayals, rescues, humiliations, and accidental legends. The scale is bigger than the first game, the systems are richer, and the sheer amount of orc-related chaos is still absurdly entertaining. The downside is that the game’s reputation will forever drag a dead loot box around its ankle. Launch-era microtransactions were controversial enough that Monolith later removed them and rebalanced the endgame, explicitly admitting they undercut the core fantasy. That old stink faded, but it never fully disappeared. And now there’s a second layer of bitterness: after Monolith was shut down in 2025, Warner Bros. still retained the Nemesis system patent until 2036, which has left a lot of players looking back at Shadow of War like it’s both a great game and the tombstone of a brilliant idea. Fair, honestly. Brutal, but fair.


Graphics: 8.5/10
Mordor looks gorgeous, which is frankly rude considering how unpleasant it is to live there.

Sound: 8/10
The music is strong, but the real stars are the orcs yelling like failed theatre kids with axes.

Gameplay: 9/10
An absurdly fun murder sandbox powered by one of the best systems the genre ever got.

Story: 7/10
Perfectly serviceable, occasionally cool, and absolutely willing to beat canon with a chair.

Overall: 8.1/10

Shadow of War is messy, overstuffed, lore-bending, and at times about as subtle as getting headbutted by a troll, and it's still bloody awesome. Not because every part is perfect, but because the parts that work hit like a truck. The Nemesis system remains a freakishly good piece of design, the combat still feels great, and the whole game has that dangerous “just one more fortress” energy that turns evenings into historical records. It’s not sacred Tolkien. It’s not elegant. It is, however, a spectacularly entertaining machine for generating personal vendettas with the worst creatures alive, and that’s worth a lot. More than Warner Bros. apparently realized, but that’s a different rant.

Strategos is a real time tactics wargame set in classical antiquity, built around big battles, lots of factions, and a very opinionated command model. It's in Early Access and already packs a borderline irresponsible amount of content (think about 120 factions and 250+ units give or take). Just don't walk in expecting Total War custom battles. People compare the vibe, fo shur, but the systems are different enough that "I've got 2000 hours in Rome II" is not an immunity badge here.

Visually Strategos nails a distinctive look: colorful units, clean readability, and a style that genuinely feels like a miniature wargame come alive. Some people say it has that "tabletop look" and, while that’s subjective, it gives the game its identity instead of chasing photorealism. The weaker part: combat can feel a bit "samey" once units collide. Animations could use more variety and polish, especially when the game's underlying combat results are doing interesting things under the hood.

This is where the game swings for the head. The courier or order delay system is the star: orders aren't magic telepathy, positioning your general matters, couriers are limited, and you're forced to plan instead of spam-correcting every mistake in real time like a maniac. It's unique, it's tense, and it rewards actually thinking like a commander (ew, gross, I know). Also: factions and units galore. The dev commitment to sheer breadth is obvious, and if you like "pick your poison" roster browsing, you'll be eating well.

A few sharp edges that are noticeable right off the bat:

• The battle simulator setup isn't the same fantasy of fine tuning every regiment, even back in the demo days people wish they could customize armies more. Strategos Games, hear our plea!
  
• The unit modes feel like they need clearer tooltips or a proper encyclopedia entry, when a game is this systems-heavy, "figure it out mid-battle" is a little... spicy.
  
• Some factions can feel like they share a lot of roster DNA, you will encounter reskins or mixed unit pools. Personally I don't hate shared building blocks in a game with this much scope, but if you're hunting for maximal faction asymmetry, temper thy expectations.

The audio does its job, the music is decent and fits the era, but it's not the kind of soundtrack that hijacks your Spotify Wrapped and it's definitely not something to write home about. The game would benefit a lot from more informative and characterful battlefield audio like unit barks, clearer feedback for orders or routing, etc. And yeah, more genuinely epic battle tracks wouldn't hurt. When your cavalry hits the flank, the soundtrack should also commit to the crime.

The game isn't trying to be a cinematic narrative campaign first. The story is mostly the historical framing: scenarios, reenactments, and the joy of recreating ancient matchups with a crunchy ruleset. Its positioning is basically simulate historical battles with a hardcore tabletop feel. If you want character arcs and cutscenes, boy oh boy you walked in the wrong tavern. If you want "what if these two armies met on this terrain under these constraints": welcome home darling, now grab your xiphos, we got barbarians to kill.


Graphics: 8/10
Gorgeous tabletop vibe, combat animation variety still needs some love.

Sound: 6.5/10
Solid, but missing punchy battlefield feedback and truly epic peaks.

Gameplay: 8.5/10
The courier system is brilliant and forces real planning, some UX clarity and battle setup flexibility would help.

Story: 7/10
More historical sandbox than narrative, which is fine if that's what you came for.

Overall: 7.5/10

A serious tactics toybox with a standout command-and-control hook, wrapped in a beautiful miniatures aesthetic. Just don't buy it expecting "Total War battles but cheaper". It's doing its own thing, and that's exactly why it's worth a look.

If you love ancient warfare and you're willing to learn a system that deliberately prevents you from playing whack-a-mole with instant orders, Strategos is dangerously promising. Come for the factions, stay for the couriers, and accept that sometimes your perfect plan will arrive 12 seconds late, just like real life, except with more spears.

Mirthwood wants to be your new cozy-fantasy obsession, but not in the soft, harmless “plant turnips and pet a cow” way. It drops you into the Free Lands as a refugee starting over, then hands you a whole list of possible lives: farm, trade, explore, flirt, fight, marry, raise children, and generally try to build something decent in a world that keeps side-eyeing your plans. Since launch, Bad Ridge has kept stuffing more into it too, marriage, children, local co-op, festivals, pets, random encounters, jousting, vanity slots, the lot, so the pitch is not lacking for ambition. If anything, Mirthwood’s problem is that it wants to be three or four very appealing games at once, and sometimes you can hear the gears grinding while it tries.

The art style is lovely. Not “look at this expensive realism” lovely, actual lovely. Painterly, warm, autumnal, and just grim enough around the edges to stop it from becoming syrup. Mirthwood has that storybook-medieval thing down cold: rolling fields, cozy cottages, moody forests, candlelight, and enough earthy charm to make you forgive it for occasionally behaving like a cart with one square wheel. It sells the fantasy of moving to the countryside and becoming a self-sufficient woodland legend, right up until a wolf, bandit, or tax-shaped inconvenience reminds you that rural life was historically kind of ♥♥♥♥.

The sound does a lot to prop the whole thing up. The music leans into the pastoral-fantasy mood without getting too precious about it, and the ambient audio gives the world enough texture to feel inhabited rather than decorated. There is a nice rhythm to the quiet parts: tools hitting wood, animals nearby, footsteps through grass, that sort of thing. And when danger shows up, the tone shifts just enough to remind you this isn’t a pure cozy game in a flower crown. It’s cozy with a knife in its boot. I respect that.

This is where Mirthwood gets interesting and messy at the same time. There is a lot to like here: farming, trading, crafting, relationships, questing, combat, exploration, hiring NPCs, building a household, and now local co-op on top of it. The game clearly wants you to bounce between systems and make a life rather than follow one narrow lane, and I think that broad, sandboxy structure is its best quality. But it is also where the game starts showing its bruises. Official updates through 2025 and into early 2026 kept tackling onboarding, grind, combat tweaks, performance, NPC pathing, interaction issues, and assorted quest weirdness, which is another way of saying the developers have spent a lot of time fixing things that probably should not have needed this much fixing after launch. The result is a game that can be relaxing, absorbing, and weirdly addictive one minute, then a little janky goblin the next. You’re not playing polished clockwork here. You’re playing a very likable machine that still occasionally coughs up a screw.

Mirthwood does have a narrative frame (starting over in a new land, finding your footing, shaping your life) but it is not the sort of game you play for one giant, unforgettable plotline. The story mostly exists to give the world a bit of momentum and flavor while the real appeal comes from the day-to-day texture of living in it. That can work. In fact, I think it often does. But it also means the writing and quest structure need to carry a lot of subtle weight, and Mirthwood does not always have the confidence or sharpness to turn “pleasantly open-ended” into “consistently compelling.” Sometimes it feels inviting. Sometimes it feels a bit thin, like the game is hoping you’ll be too busy romancing, harvesting, or fighting a pig to notice. Clever, honestly. Not flawless, but clever.

What I like about Mirthwood is easy enough to say: it has genuine charm, a strong look, a broad fantasy-life-sim premise, and enough different systems to keep you poking at it long after a simpler game would have run out of road. It feels earnest. It feels handmade. It also feels like it launched a bit too eager to leave the house before checking whether its trousers were on properly. The steady post-release patching and content drops are a point in its favor, not against it, but they also tell the truth: this is a game with ambition bigger than its neatness. If you can tolerate some seams, some clunk, and a bit of “hang on, why is this doing that,” there is something lovely here. If you need your life sims to be smooth, finished, and impeccably behaved, Mirthwood may irritate the absolute piss out of you.


Graphics: 8.5/10
Beautiful little storybook liar of a world.

Sound: 7/10
Quietly does the job, which is exactly the job.

Gameplay: 7/10
Plenty to do, plenty to like, and just enough jank to keep your eyebrow raised.

Story: 7/10
A decent frame for a life sim, but not the part doing the heavy lifting.

Overall: 7.4/10

Mirthwood is the kind of game I want to like a little more than I actually do. That's not an insult. In some ways it is almost a compliment, because the potential is obvious from the minute it starts. The look is there. The fantasy is there. The “I’ll just do one more in-game day” pull is definitely there. But so is the roughness, and roughness in a game like this hits harder because the whole point is to settle in and stay a while. When it works, Mirthwood feels warm, flexible, and quietly absorbing. When it doesn’t, it feels like a very charming inn where one floorboard keeps trying to break your ankle. Worth a look, then (especially now that it’s had time to bulk up) but still not the finished fairytale it clearly wants to be.

Pillars of Eternity throws you into Eora as a Watcher, which means you can see souls, past lives, and other things that would absolutely get you committed in a less magical setting. You’re trying to figure out what the hell happened to you while the Dyrwood is being wrecked by the Hollowborn crisis, soul science is making everybody nervous, and the plot keeps dragging you toward bigger theological trouble whether you asked for that or not. The current Definitive Edition also folds in both White March expansions, which is great value and also a polite warning that this game contains a lot of game. Like, an aggressively middle-aged amount of game.

This game still looks lovely. Not in a flashy, “please admire the hair on my back” way, but in the much healthier “actual art direction exists here” way. The painted environments carry a lot of weight, and they do it well. Inns feel warm, ruins feel ancient, forests feel damp and vaguely cursed, and every location looks like it was designed by someone who knows that fantasy does not need to scream to leave an impression. The character models are less exciting, sure, and some of the animation has all the grace of a tired uncle getting off a sofa, but the overall visual mood is strong enough that I never cared much. It’s a handsome game. A gloomy one, obviously, because Obsidian was not about to let sunlight have too much fun.

The soundtrack is one of the easier things to praise here. Justin Bell’s score has that melancholy, old-world, slightly haunted tone the setting needs, and it gives the whole thing a quiet weight that helps the world feel older than your save file and smarter than half the people in it. The sound design in general is solid too, spell effects crack nicely, steel has some bite to it, taverns sound lived in. It all works. I would not say the audio carries the game on its back like some poor underpaid mule, but it absolutely keeps the atmosphere from ever going completely flat, which is useful in a game this fond of long conversations about metaphysics.

Mechanically, Pillars of Eternity is good. Properly good. The real-time-with-pause combat has depth, the class design is flexible, party building is satisfying, and once your group clicks, fights can feel wonderfully mean in that “I earned this win and also developed a minor stress condition” sort of way. The problem is that the game occasionally treats restraint like a personal insult. It has systems for days, text for weeks, and side content for actual geological eras. So while the combat and RPG framework are strong, the overall package can feel padded. Not empty, padded. There’s a difference. Empty is worse. Padded is when a game is good but still keeps talking after you’ve already nodded.

Here’s the honest take: I respect the story more than I love it. The themes are interesting, the worldbuilding is rich, and the central soul-and-faith business has real bite once it gets moving. But “once it gets moving” is doing a lot of labor there. Pillars has a habit of presenting lore with the confidence of a professor who has mistaken your facial expression for enthusiasm, and the main plot can drag in stretches where it feels more dutiful than gripping. I never thought it was bad. I did think it was occasionally a bit of a slog, which is almost worse because bad can at least be funny. Slow and worthy just sits there, adjusting its glasses, asking for another forty minutes of your evening.

This is where Pillars becomes easy to admire and a little harder to adore. The setting is excellent, the combat is satisfying, and the game clearly has brains. It is not some empty nostalgia-grab in an isometric Halloween costume. But the cast never fully lit up for me outside a couple of standouts, and that matters in a party RPG. If I’m spending fifty hours with these people, I would quite like more of them to feel like people and fewer of them to feel like carefully annotated arguments. The game is not lacking in writing. Christ, no. If anything, it could stand to misplace a few pages. What it lacks now and then is warmth, snap, and memorable character energy. It’s a very good RPG that sometimes feels just a bit too pleased with how serious it is.


Graphics: 8/10
Beautiful backgrounds and rich atmosphere doing the lord’s work.

Sound: 8/10
Thoughtful, moody, and clever enough not to shout for attention.

Gameplay: 8.5/10
Deep, rewarding, and occasionally a bit too in love with its own length.

Story: 7/10
Interesting on paper, slower in practice, and not always as gripping as it thinks it is.

Overall: 7.9/10

Pillars of Eternity is a good RPG. A really good one, in fact. But for me it stops just shy of greatness because it never quite turns all that lore, all that writing, and all that structural ambition into something truly electric. I enjoyed it. I admired the hell out of parts of it. I also felt it sag under its own weight now and then, like a very intelligent bookshelf beginning to lean. If you love classic CRPG structure, party tactics, and dense worldbuilding, there is absolutely a lot here to chew on. Just know that the game occasionally confuses “substantial” with “please read another ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ paragraph.” That’s not fatal. It just keeps Pillars, for me, in the “very solid” tier instead of the pantheon.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt drops you into a war-torn fantasy continent as Geralt of Rivia, a professional monster butcher with white hair, a bad attitude, and a very pressing need to find his adopted daughter before the Wild Hunt gets to her first. That’s the main plot, technically. In practice, it’s a game about trying to rescue Ciri while the world keeps waving better and better distractions in your face. A cursed village here, a political mess there, one morally disgusting contract over the hill, and suddenly your urgent family crisis has been postponed because somebody’s frying pan had lore attached to it. The modern package is the Complete Edition, which bundles the base game with Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, so the whole thing is less “one excellent RPG” and more “here, ruin the next few weeks of your life properly.”

This game still looks ridiculous. It has bloody amazing taste. Velen is bleak without being boring, Novigrad is packed without feeling like a theme park, and Skellige looks like someone took a tourism brochure and soaked it in grief. You can ride through a swamp at sunset and genuinely forget you were on your way to stab a noonwraith for money. The faces hold up, the animation work sells the conversations, and the landscapes are so obnoxiously pretty that the game practically dares you to stop every ten minutes and take in the view like some wandering medieval influencer. Frankly, Geralt should have charged for postcards.

The sound is pure filth in the best way. The soundtrack does not merely accompany scenes, it barges in, kicks the door off the hinges, and announces that your feelings now belong to Poland. The combat music has bite, the quieter pieces know when to simmer, and the regional flavor is strong enough that you can practically smell wet leather and bad decisions. Then there’s the ambient stuff: market chatter, rain on rooftops, distant wolves, tavern noise, steel coming out of a scabbard. It all makes the world feel lived in rather than staged. Also yes, the famous “LELELELELE” tracks still go hard. Anyone pretending otherwise is lying to themselves and probably has terrible taste in curtains.

Playing The Witcher 3 feels great right up until it very briefly doesn’t. Most of the time, the combat has a lovely rhythm to it: dodge, slash, cast a sign, drink something suspicious, try not to get clawed in the kidneys. Geralt moves with confidence, the signs give fights just enough extra spice, and monster prep adds some welcome texture without turning the whole thing into fantasy tax paperwork. But the combat is not flawless, and pretending otherwise would be fanboy nonsense. Range can feel a little off now and then, a few encounters get scrappier than they should, and every once in a while Geralt swings like he’s absolutely sure the enemy is two feet closer than reality suggests. It’s not enough to sink the system, not even close, but it is enough to remind you that even one of the greats can occasionally whiff like a drunk uncle shadowboxing at a wedding.

This is where The Witcher 3 stops being merely excellent and starts getting smug about it. The story is tremendous. Not just the big Ciri-and-Wild-Hunt spine, but the whole damned thing. The political maneuvering has weight, the personal stories hit hard, and the side quests are written with such irritating confidence that they make other RPGs look lazy. Even throwaway jobs have character, consequence, and enough moral grime to keep things interesting. The game does not hand you neat little good-guy choices wrapped in a bow. It hands you ugly situations and lets you live with the smell. That’s why it works. It trusts the writing. It trusts the player. It also has the audacity to make a card game so addictive that “saving the world” keeps losing to “one more round of Gwent,” which is honestly one of the funniest acts of self-sabotage ever built into a masterpiece.

What makes The Witcher 3 so easy to love is that nearly everything in it feels handmade instead of factory-stamped. The world has texture, the writing has teeth, the characters are memorable, and the game constantly rewards curiosity with something worthwhile rather than a chest full of useless crap and disappointment. At the same time, it is not beyond criticism. Roach still has moments where he behaves like a horse designed by committee, the combat can get a bit loose around the edges, and the weather, while beautiful, mostly functions as atmosphere rather than something with much mechanical bite. A storm rolling in looks incredible, but it rarely changes the situation in a meaningful way. That sounds like a petty complaint, and it is, but that’s also the point: when you’re down to grumbling that the rain isn’t interesting enough, the game is probably doing a lot right.


Graphics: 10/10
Still disgustingly beautiful.

Sound: 9.5/10
The music alone deserves its own tavern brawl.

Gameplay: 9/10
Smart, satisfying, and only occasionally a bit up its own arse.

Story: 10/10
An absurdly strong narrative carrying side quests that refuse to be filler.

Overall: 9.6/10

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is still one of those rare games that earns the hype without feeling like it was assembled in a lab to do so. It’s gorgeous, sharp, funny, bleak, mean, warm, and stuffed with more quality than most RPGs manage across three sequels and a desperate remaster. The combat has a little wobble, the weather could have done more than just show off, and yes, at some point the game will emotionally blackmail you with how good it is. Fine. Let it. This is not just a great RPG. It is one of those horrible, wonderful games that quietly raises your standards and then leaves other open worlds looking undercooked for years. The only real downside is that eventually it ends, which feels less like finishing a game and more like being evicted from a second life.

Foundation is a medieval city builder that ditches the neat little square-grid obsession and instead lets your town spread the way actual old towns did: awkwardly, beautifully, and with zero respect for geometry. You paint zoning areas, let villagers carve paths naturally, assign jobs, juggle production chains, and build modular monuments piece by piece like a lord with delusions of architectural grandeur. It officially left Early Access with version 1.0 on January 31, 2025, so this is not some “promising little prototype” anymore. It is the finished thing, standing there in public, hoping you won’t notice the mud on its boots.

I like how Foundation looks. It has that soft, painterly medieval charm that makes even a lumber camp feel a bit romantic, which is impressive because lumber camps are usually just wet men and administrative sorrow. The roads forming naturally, the houses clustering into uneven little neighborhoods, the monuments rising out of the town in lopsided majesty, it all gives the place a hand-made feel that a lot of city builders completely miss while they’re busy looking like spreadsheets with shadows. Foundation understands that pretty towns are half the point. If I am going to spend twelve hours optimizing bread, the game should at least have the decency to look nice while I do it. It does.

The sound design isn’t flashy, but you can say it still works. Foundation sounds like a place, not a stage show. You get the clink of work, the low hum of a settlement doing its thing, but the soundtrack kinda sits politely in the background instead of barging into the room in full orchestra cosplay, which makes sense for the genre. It fits the game’s whole personality: calm, warm, a little idealized, and just grounded enough that when something goes wrong, it feels like your town has developed a real problem rather than a UI icon. This is not dramatic audio, which is honestly rarer than it should be.

This is where Foundation earns its keep. The gridless building is not a gimmick, it genuinely changes the feel of the whole game. Instead of placing perfect little blocks like some medieval accountant with a ruler fetish, you guide growth and then react to what your town becomes. That makes Foundation feel more alive than a lot of its competitors. The monument builder is also excellent fun if you enjoy the idea of assembling abbeys, castles, and mansions from modular parts like a slightly unwell bishop with an unlimited stone budget. The catch is that this freedom sometimes comes with a side dish of “what exactly is this system trying to tell me?” Readability can be fuzzy, logistics can get wonky, and once your town gets bigger, the beautiful organic sprawl can start behaving like a drunk goat in charge of traffic. It’s good chaos, mostly, but still chaos. The November 2025 Quality of Life update helped by improving monument editing and control, which was badly needed and sensibly done.

There isn’t a grand scripted story here, which can be both good and bad. Foundation is much smarter when it lets your town become the story. You get progression, class systems, little narrative encounters, unlocks, and the general sense that your village is slowly becoming a proper medieval settlement instead of a muddy accident. But the real pull is the emergent nonsense. One district becomes wealthy and pretty, another turns into a peasant traffic jam, and before you know it you’re emotionally invested in whether your monastery is too far from the berry huts. That's absurd. It's also why the game works. It turns municipal fussiness into a personality trait.

What I admire most about Foundation is that it commits to its own lane. It's not trying to be a war game, a grand strategy sim, and a city builder all at once like some genre-hoarding goblin. It wants to be a calm, organic, medieval settlement builder, and in that lane it’s genuinely excellent. It also seems to be in a good place right now, Polymorph is still actively supporting it after 1.0 with the first post-release quality-of-life update landing in November 2025 and a February 2026 devlog confirming the team is expanding further. That said, I do think the game occasionally disappears up its own sleeves. Some systems are not explained as cleanly as they should be, the territory setup can be irritating when you have a specific visual plan, and the whole “organic city” dream can drift from charming into “why in the seven hells are my people routing through the back of a monastery to reach the market?” territory.


Graphics: 7.5/10
Pretty enough to make bureaucracy feel romantic.

Sound: 7/10
Gentle, grounded, and smart enough not to overperform.

Gameplay: 8.5/10
Fresh, absorbing, and only occasionally sabotaged by its own lovely mess.

Story: 7/10
No epic plot, just the slow birth of your latest municipal obsession.

Overall: 7.5/10

Foundation is one of those games that sneaks up on you. At first it looks like a chill little medieval builder with nice roads and pleasant colors. Then suddenly you are fifteen hours deep, muttering about transport efficiency, cathedral placement, and whether your villagers deserve a better wheat route. Bastards got me. I think it’s one of the most distinctive city builders in its niche because it actually feels different, not just cosmetically different, and that matters. It’s not flawless. It can be vague, fussy, and mildly infuriating in exactly the way a good management game often is. But I’d take that over something more sterile any day. Foundation has taste, confidence, and just enough ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to keep you humble. That’s a solid medieval package.

Valheim drops you into a procedurally generated Norse purgatory and basically says, “Right then, prove you’re worth the trouble.” You chop trees, build shelters, cook better food, sail into increasingly awful neighborhoods, and work your way up through biome after biome until some towering bastard of a boss needs killing. Officially it’s an exploration-and-survival game for one to ten players, and that undersells it a bit. It’s really a game about starting with a pair of rags and a branch, then somehow ending up emotionally attached to a house you built because the roof angle finally stopped being a smug little ♥♥♥♥.

I love how Valheim looks. Not in the “wow, look at those hyper-real strands of hair” way, because it isn’t that sort of game and thank Christ for it. It goes for mood over vanity, and that was the correct call. The low-fi textures, thick lighting, fog, weather, and silhouette work give it this strange half-dreamy, half-hostile look that makes even a simple walk through the woods feel like you’re trespassing in a myth. Sunrises are gorgeous, storms are nasty, and the ocean at night has just enough “you may have made a terrible mistake” in it. Visually, it has taste. More games should try that instead of spending twelve teraflops rendering a wet pebble.

The sound design is one of the reasons the game gets under your skin. Wind through the trees, the distant groan of something ugly, the thump of your own axe, waves against a longship, all of it works together to make the world feel older and meaner than you are. The soundtrack knows when to show up and when to leave you alone with your bad survival choices. That matters. A lot of games panic and start screaming “feel something!” every thirty seconds with another music cue. Valheim mostly lets the world do the talking, which is much smarter and much creepier. The February 2026 patch also fixed audio stutters in Ashlands, which is nice, because nothing kills the mood quite like your apocalypse crackling like a cheap speaker.

This is where Valheim really earns its cult. The building is fantastic. Not “fine for a survival game,” actually fantastic. There’s structural integrity, ventilation, comfort, practical layout, proper hearth-and-home coziness, and a constant temptation to spend four straight hours perfecting a hall you absolutely did not need. Exploration is excellent too. Each biome feels like a genuine shift in the rules of the world rather than a palette swap with new wildlife and old ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Sailing can be peaceful or horrifying depending on whether the sea has decided to be poetic or vindictive that day. Combat is solid without being magical, and the food system is one of the smartest bits in the whole design because it rewards preparation instead of making you babysit a hunger meter like some medieval Tamagotchi. The catch is that Valheim can be grindy as hell. Corpse runs can be brutal, solo play can get punishing, and every now and then the game absolutely sits you down and says, “No, no, you don’t get to have fun yet. First go fetch twelve more chunks of misery.” It’s brilliant, but it’s not always polite.

Valheim does have lore, bosses, runestones, and a proper mythic setup, but let’s be honest: this is not a story-first game unless you count “I sailed too far, landed badly, got chased into a swamp, and barely escaped with my trousers and dignity” as narrative. Which, to be fair, I absolutely do. The written story is sparse on purpose. The real tale is the one you make while surviving, building, panicking, recovering your gear, and pretending the voyage was totally under control the entire time. Valheim understands something a lot of bigger games forget: if the world itself is vivid enough, players will happily write the legend in their own head. Also, that legend will usually involve at least one preventable death caused by overconfidence and a tree trunk.

What I admire most about Valheim is how cleanly it knows its own identity. It is not trying to be every survival game at once. It is trying to be a harsh, atmospheric Viking sandbox where progress feels earned and your base slowly turns from a panic shack into a proper hall. On that level, it absolutely cooks. The world generation works, the progression loop bites hard, and co-op makes the whole thing dangerously easy to lose a weekend to. On the other hand, it is still in Early Access five years after launch, Iron Gate is still working toward the Deep North biome that will take it to 1.0, and even recent official updates are still sanding down technical annoyances like Vulkan instability and general UX issues. I don’t mind that as much as some people do because the actual game is already excellent, but it’s fair to say Valheim remains one of those rare cases where “unfinished” and “worth playing anyway” are both true at the same time. Annoying, really. I prefer my opinions less complicated.


Graphics: 8.5/10
Stylized, moody, and a thousand times more memorable than another sterile realism demo.

Sound: 8/10
The woods, the sea, and the soundtrack all conspire to make your bad decisions feel majestic.

Gameplay: 8.5/10
Building is crack, exploration is dangerous therapy, and the grind only occasionally deserves a slap.

Story: 7/10
Light on plot, rich in emergent Viking nonsense, which is exactly the right trade.

Overall: 8/10

Valheim is one of the few survival games that made me want to keep living in its world instead of merely tolerating it until the next upgrade. That’s the trick. Plenty of games can make survival stressful. Big whoop. Valheim makes it romantic, stupid, tense, funny, and weirdly domestic all at once. One minute you’re admiring the firelight in your hall like a proper Norse interior designer, the next you’re naked in a field sprinting back to your corpse because hubris has once again taken the wheel. It’s fantastic. A little cruel, a little grindy, still unfinished, occasionally up its own ass about how hard it wants to be, but fantastic. That’s a much better combo than polished and boring, and I’ll take it every time.

Sleeping Dogs drops you into Hong Kong as Wei Shen, an undercover cop trying to climb inside the Sun On Yee Triad without getting exposed, murdered, or emotionally scrambled in the process. That setup gives the whole game a nice built-in tension: every mission feels like work for two bosses, both of whom would absolutely ruin your week if they knew the full story. Definitive Edition also rolls in all 24 DLC packs, including Year of the Snake and Nightmare in North Point, so this version is basically the whole meal, including the weird side dish nobody asked for but is still sitting there on the plate.

This game still has style. Not “look at our ray-traced shoelaces” style, but actual style. The streets glow, the markets feel packed, the apartments look lived in, and the whole city has that humid, late-night, slightly grimy energy that makes you want to keep driving around even when you technically have a mission to do. The age shows in places, sure. Some faces look a little stiff, and every now and then an NPC carries themselves like they were animated by a man gently shaking an action figure. But the overall look still lands because the art direction has taste, which is more than can be said for plenty of shinier games. The Definitive Edition’s visual touch-ups help, but the real star is still the setting itself.

The sound design is one of the reasons Sleeping Dogs feels so easy to sink into. The radio stations are great, the city ambience has real texture, and the voice work gives the drama enough bite that the whole thing doesn’t collapse into B-movie cosplay. Wei’s conversations with cops, gangsters, and assorted idiots all sound like they belong in the same world, which should not be remarkable, and yet here we are. There’s also a nice tonal balance to it all: the game can be tense, funny, sleazy, or weirdly sincere without sounding like it stitched four different scripts together with fishing wire. That’s harder than it looks.

The best thing in Sleeping Dogs is the hand-to-hand combat, no denial about it. The melee system has weight, rhythm, and just enough brutality to make every fight feel rude in a satisfying way. Throwing some poor bastard into a phone booth, a fan, a dumpster, or any other object the game has generously marked “for head trauma” never really stops being funny. The gunplay is fine, the driving is arcadey and loose in a mostly enjoyable way, and the parkour-ish movement helps keep everything moving, but the fists are what you came for. That said, the camera does occasionally behave like it had two cocktails before work, and some driving sections can feel a bit more enthusiastic than precise. Still, when a game lets me solve problems by introducing a man’s spine to an air conditioner, I am prepared to be forgiving. The official pitch leans hard on the mix of martial arts, shootouts, and high-speed driving, and that line is not talking nonsense.

The story is better than it strictly needed to be. Wei Shen is not just a vehicle for chaos, he’s the whole point. The game actually cares about the mess he’s in, and that makes a difference. His position between the police and the Triad gives the plot some real tension, and the game is smart enough to let the relationships do a lot of the heavy lifting. When it leans into loyalty, grief, ambition, and the rotten glamour of gang life, it works. It’s melodramatic, absolutely, but in a good way. This is not one of those smirking crime games that thinks irony can replace writing. It wants you to feel something, and more often than not, it gets the job done.

What I like most about Sleeping Dogs is that it feels specific. It has its own rhythm, its own setting, its own flavor of violence, and its own priorities. It isn’t trying to be a giant sandbox where every building opens and every system interlocks like some sacred open-world commandment. It’s tighter than that, more guided, more interested in giving you a good time than in pretending to be a second life. That helps it a lot. The side content is mostly fun, the city is compact without feeling tiny, and the whole thing moves with a confidence a lot of bigger games never find. The weaknesses are there, though: exploration is more “look, don’t touch” than true freeform wandering, some systems are simpler than they first appear, and a few bits of DLC feel more like novelty leftovers than essential additions. Still, I’d take a focused, stylish action game with a few soft spots over a bloated one with nothing to say any day of the week.


Graphics: 8/10
Still slick as hell, even if a few faces look like they were stored in a cupboard.

Sound: 8.5/10
Great radio, strong voice work, and a city that actually sounds alive.

Gameplay: 8.5/10
The combat rules, the driving is fun, and the environmental takedowns are beautifully impolite.

Story: 8.5/10
A proper crime melodrama with enough heart to back up the punches.

Overall: 8.4/10

Sleeping Dogs is still one of those games that feels cooler than half the genre without acting smug about it. It has the good sense to keep things moving, the better sense to make punching people the main event, and the rarest sense of all: it remembers that an open-world game should have personality, not just acreage. No, it is not flawless. Some parts are rough, some systems are thinner than they first appear, and the city is more stage than sandbox if you poke at it too hard. But the minute Wei Shen starts throwing elbows and the neon kicks in, most of that stops mattering. This thing has swagger. Actual swagger. Not the fake kind where a game still plays with toddler toys and calls itself mature.