Recent reviews by Pywackett-Barchetta

I've become one of those "negative review, 70 hours played" kind of people, huh.

See, F1 25 is a step up over 24 in a few regards, largely (and impressively) performance. The game runs well on ultrawides and VR and the whole nine yards where its predecessor did not. Codemasters' strong work on the solid base here continues to shine through, but what's kind of nagged at me throughout is I felt consistently like I was waiting for the point where I'd settle in and it would Get Good, and at the 71 hour mark, that should have been earlier than now.

Laser-scanned tracks! That's cool. I could not tell you which of them they laser-scanned, just by like, playing. Reverse tracks! I would love to dunk on how pointless it is that there's only three of them, replacing the usual bonus track from the past few games, but I will say, Reverse Zandvoort kinda slaps.

Braking Point reaches its end with a conclusion that I know I played when this game came out but I could not tell you what happened in it. It is a Sports League Tie-In Story so things can't actually really happen. I will concede that despite myself, I was a lil' emotional over one decision involving a character I'd been playing as in three separate games, so they do deserve some credit on that.

My Team 2.0 is the thing I latched onto, the reason I bought this. Building your HQ, assembling your own car, all the RPG elements cranked up to 11, it really seems fascinating. But it's really incomplete and inconsistent.

In practice, there are *not* countless different builds you can end up with, or competition levels you can be at compared to other cars, like R&D in other games (and modes) in the series. Instead, there are three tiers of Breakthroughs for each department. Functionally, each competitor is thus at one of four levels of competition, and you will be bottlenecked by having to wait for the next Breakthrough *when* you have caught up on all of your R&D really quickly. Not if. It will be when, if you are any degree of competent at it (and I'm not! and I still had that problem!). Between HQ management, tire and engine management, driver and staff management, and car development management, it *should* be that perfect ebb and flow this series is sometimes the pinnacle of, where you do lots of prep, put the car out on the track, and hope it's what you need.

In practice, it is lots and lots of menus and completely pointless jabbering from 3D-modeled advisors that interrupt you constantly, repeating the same few voice lines and animations, getting in the way of running races that feel exactly the same as the rest of the game. As you are no longer an owner/driver, you do pick which driver you play as, but this leaves the mode feeling disconnected or pasted over the existing framework, as you aren't even the same guy when race weekend hits.

The sponsor decal system feels fantastic and visual customization is immensely better than it's ever been, and even online public lobbies are lovely to look at with incentives to easily whip up something good-looking. Filling the car out with new sponsors over the course of My Team is super satisfying.

As ever, radioing the crew by just pressing a button and then actually speaking feels real dang nice.

The lil' bit of voice clips and the way you're addressed changing when you're playing as one of the actual season drivers is real neat and adds a little something.

There is a wealth of voiceover commentary in this video game, all of which will trigger at the complete wrong times. Your crew will merrily radio in to keep up the good work managing your tires, while they are blowing and firing you into a wall. Davidson will, without fail, every Sprint weekend, first declare "well, they say that a change is as good as a rest..." and then, however you place in the Sprint, start the race day commentary by telling everyone you did amazing and you've got to be riding high after that success *and,* under a second later, that it couldn't have gone much worse, what a shame. It cannot get out of its own way, and I cannot stay immersed for over 20 minutes. All this presentation is supposed to be their one big showy leg up, yeah? It ought to at least be good.

Driver Career is identical to F1 24, except you can also race as or against the APXGP team from the F1 movie- what's that? Sorry? Oh, you didn't order it the month it came out? No, then. You can't do that. Nah, one of the entire playable teams in the game they just removed all way to access. Sorry about that.

You can use any *real* team from the F1 2025 season, though, and you can even select their special liveries from throughout the year- what's that? Oh. No, you can only do that outside of career mode- oh! And you have to have played certain specific online events when they were around. They're gone now, so no, you can't do that.

F1 World has an RPG-esque system, where you can unlock all sorts of upgrades for your multiplayer car. If you don't want those, you can trade them in to unlock pictures for a little F1 history scrapbook- what's that? Oh, that was F1 24. I see. In this one, you can trade them in to get... extremely small amounts of in-game currency usable only for buying more parts for the same mode. Okay.

This is a game starving for a coherent vision and content, and it is rapidly losing both the longer it's out. If you purchase it now, you will be getting an actively worse, lesser game than when it released, and it needed help when it released. I really, really want to love it. When it fires on all cylinders, you catch glimpses of a beautifully assembled game. However, it does not do that for over a couple minutes at a time.

Purchased this for six bucks on sale because a friend said "oh the Robocop game is real good". I'm not particularly attached to the film, I don't play shooters often, and I want to inform you they are 110% correct. A tight, focused, fun experience that allows for plenty of exploration and making your own builds while never feeling like it's breaking character. Full commitment to getting the setting exactly right without a single element from anytime post-1991. The aggressive bombast and cheesy dialogue of an 80's action flick, with characters that are entertaining and likable (or mustache-twirlingly evil) enough that you do, in fact, wanna protect this city and care about its wacky, offbeat denizens. Satisfying, meaty gunplay means when you gotta use lethal force, it feels *powerful*.

The part that threw me, though, was the credits. I expected, from the quality of game I got - while there are some obvious things that feel low-budget here and there - a much longer list of people that made it. This is a much smaller studio giving it their all, and you know what? I think they're punching well above their weight. This is up there with the big boys. This isn't gonna be a genre-changing replay-it-19-times blockbuster, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ is *fun*. It is the thing that matters, front to back, and it's well worth every penny even at full price, I'd say. They took a big swing at it and they hit.

It wasn't worth my time as a free pack-in with the pre-order, and it certainly isn't worth ten dollars. Six rather tepid mini-missions in the style of Braking Point that eventually give up on the pretense of even including movie clips and just sort of slap some shakycam on standard gameplay footage. What are we doing here? Who is this for? The different presentation style with the film-style filter is pretty neat, and there's an interesting concept here, but the result is very slapdash and you can tell it's a contractual obligation someone was forced to forced in.

Very simple and short, but I think for $0, if you've got a headset already, it's well worth giving a look. A brief tour of some awe-striking places that you probably won't quite get the chance to view in person; I'm all for these sorts of virtual museum exhibits being archived and freely available like this. It's worth seeing!

Y'know, I gotta put a recommendation for this largely because I'm actively a lil' irritated nobody recommended this to me before this point and I let it sit in my library so long. A pretty by-the-numbers turn-based RPG adventure in theory, this uses a lot of charm and creativity to make use of its budget and runtime, consistently fun and funny. Visually, it's striking, with color that pops and animations that are expressive and the right kind of over-the-top. The mechanics are new little twists on old classics, the odd lingo of Ooo forces you to think through sentences like "well I can't risk him getting flumped or he'll definitely be skronked".

The plot is paper-thin but good enough to justify continuing to explore, the pirate theming is admittedly a little light but is still a cute touch as somebody who's a sucker for that stuff, the sidequests are largely unobtrusive and sometimes open up entire new extra areas and cameos.

The only thing I'd say, upon 100%'ing it, is unless you're a completionist, you really don't have to. You don't get TOO much out of it, and some of the achievements are a lil' buggy in a way that's fixable but vexing. The cast is also definitely all original cartoon cast, an impressive feat, but the dialogue's often a little dry and sounds like early takes without many redos. Still, for a licensed tie-in game, this punches WELL above its weight class. I enjoyed it!

Saw this at an AGDQ recently and thought it looked wonderfully charming; happy to report that it is! As a "game for tired people", it does really fit the bill as something to hop into while decompressing from a work shift. It's not perfectly stress-free or anything, and there are *some* reflexes required, but it never really feels punishing. It's just about exploring and finding little surprises that get a laugh out of you.

I will note it does tend to struggle a little mechanically here and there - bumping into 3D boxes almost always breaks the physics and teleports you, I ended the game with one coin on one map simply electing not to register (you can still get 100% completion due to extra collectibles set just in case but that feels weird a fix) - but the movement tech is just on point. It's just fun to run, jump, frolic, and help out. Easy, easy recommendation.

This is a weird one. On the one hand, this is pathetically easy mechanically compared to its Versus peers, it's a new frontier in pushing the limits of asset reuse, it pastes CGs from a different game engine into a screen resolution where they don't fit, the AI simply forgets how the video game works and stands there and gets killed, and from a technical and content standpoint, it is a complete mess inferior to its entire neighboring series.

But is it fun? Yeah. Does it deliver exactly what it promises, the story of the first game done in a different style? Yeah.

You'll pick up some bad habits that'll get punished in the Versus titles from this massive parry window and *extremely* choreographed attack patterns. Your bar will be lowered from redoing the same boss fight in the plot six times in a row. You may come away from this thinking it's middling to okay. But the original story still holds up plenty, starting in generically goofy slice-of-life before taking a hard veer as it goes, and the classic payoff of playing through a full campaign only to then see it way differently from the other perspective still holds up (I suggest committing to playing through the full Hanzo campaign first for full effect if you've never touched the series).

Two DLC campaigns add little bonuses but aren't really worth your time as much unless you already adore these characters; they're a compromise to make up for that many fan favorites weren't introduced yet.

I think as an entry-level thing to get people into the series, this is a wonderfully simply fun game with an enjoyably absurd number of hidden secret unlocks to spend a whole bunch of time trawling for. I enjoyed it being properly video-gamey with stuff I wanted to find, upgrades I wanted to get, Frantic Mode transforming the way I played by letting me decide to risk all my defense and become a one-hit kill to get way better attack power (and it being mandatory to choose at the *start* with no take-backs shakes things up), characters I liked, fun boss fights, and something I could really sink into for a while.

It is not the best put-together. If you like it, you will be better served by the Versus titles after. No multiplayer, busted AI, little incentive to return once you've cleaned through it. But I had a very good time getting there. If you're on the fence about starting at Shinovi Versus, and you're okay with something being *interesting* if unchallenging, why not start here on a sale?

Ooh, this one's rough. 10 *extremely* short missions that can be obliterated in under a minute each, bosses pasted directly in from other games, a flimsy narrative changing characterization and continuity with every single change facilitating that the sole playable character is the only cool and good and right one who learns that maybe being a hyperaggressive zealot isn't the way to live (immediately dovetailing into the Shinovi Versus plot where she is, in fact, a hyperaggressive zealot; not a knock against her! Interesting plot premise in THAT game, weirdly dodged in this one). Her basic attack has an extremely high chance of instantly freezing the opponents, who do not remember there are countermeasures to that attack in the other ones and thus simply stand there and die.

This is rough. I feel like this was a pack-in for the higher-tier version because it'd be nigh-impossible to get anybody but Yumi fans to buy it. Nothing against her, I wouldn't have tried this if I didn't think she could be interesting, but with a dev team apparently being given instructions to reheat existing assets and almost no budget, time, or plot leeway to do something new, there wasn't a winning scenario in this. They tried, but the end result is very hard to recommend.

This has gotten somewhat of a memetic reputation that precedes it. I just want to make clear: this was made with love and care, and you can really tell. I'm thoroughly, thoroughly impressed.

The tough part is, this question isn't "is this game a quality piece of software". Sure it is! I have no hesitation agreeing with that. The question is "would you recommend this game to other players", and personally, no, I wouldn't, especially at the $110 price point I bought in at. Yakuza: Like a Dragon before this deserved a worthy successor, and in all respects other than mechanical, this manages to undermine everything it laid down in short order, and make it take an even longer runtime to get nowhere with it.

The previous game - 7, for brevity's sake - was a fantastic entry point into the franchise, largely due to it boldly taking on a brand new genre for the series and also constructing a new identity around new characters, moving on from what was established before and letting the previous cast, for the most part, rest. It made something new and exciting and you can see this store page right now with your eyes, they immediately undid that with this one and put in the old protag (who I love!) and just brought back every party member regardless of if they have anything to do in the plot at all. An enormous amount of awkward backtracking is crammed into the story, packing itself with continuity from all the previous titles, making it extremely difficult to recommend to even people that just played and enjoyed 7 considering it's suddenly not about that anymore. Classic characters are teased to return in marketing, only to show up for under a minute and permanently vanish. New antagonists are introduced with extremely flimsy ties back to pre-existing characters rather than letting them be their own thing. The series has never done *great* with its conspiracy stories, but this one in particular comes off as incredibly tortured.

Most of my complaints are with the plot, admittedly, and maybe that's subjective. But I do also think the series is known and beloved for packing lots and lots of activities and excitement into tight, detailed spaces, and this one in particular goes out of its way to make increasingly gargantuan maps that encourage heavy use of fast travel or basically summoning a mount you have to repeatedly disembark from to interact with things, meaning a *lot* of time is wasted just... milling about towards objectives instead of it feeling like it helps realize the location as a real place.

The new characters, for the most part, are so spectacular that I wish this was about them. The biggest frustration is the introduction of a compelling new setting and cast, and then constantly ripping the player away from that from awkwardly reheated pieces of previous dishes. It feels very... designed by committee, like it was said "people love this, we have to do it," and because I enjoy peanut butter and jelly and also hamburgers, this PB&J&Cheeseburger is just thumped on my plate like "it's all things you like!" without understanding those ingredients existed in a context.

But, I'm upset because there was potential I felt was unrealized. So let's talk about that potential, because some things, this does better than anyone else.

The soundtrack bangs.

The party conversations are excellent. Anything from ordering food to wandering about can prompt party conversations, and this makes them feel more fully lovably human and natural than an absolute ton of other titles I've played. You don't have to go to a separate part of the map for "this is character development time", your party just naturally exists in the same group. I want good things for all of them.

One of the strongest points in the writing is the typical "villains act, heroes react" order is completely turned on its head. Every one of Ichiban's party is entirely capable of being a mastermind themselves, outwitting their opponents, turning the tables, having plans in motion that feel believable and exciting to see the payoff of, like a solid heist flick.

The mix of languages from NPCs is brilliant; I played in the Japanese dub expressly because it made it *so* much more surreal in Hawaii to have English-speaking enemies. You really feel like you're *somewhere else* when you're in different territories throughout the game.

One simple tweak makes the combat in 7 hard to go back to; free movement. Positioning becomes everything, massively changing the game and making it largely about setting things up for just the right strings of attacks. When you can put it all together with teammates positioned perfectly for backup, it's tremendously satisfying and punchy. Very few RPGs really let you *feel* the impacts of each attack this hard.

You have a button you can press to say hello to people. They wave back. It's so cute. Ichiban's "hey!♪" and "aloha!♪" are now two of my favorite sounds to exist.

The highs of this game are insanely high. No less than five separate times did this get me to shout "that's videogames!" aloud, because they are absolutely completely willing to, as always, go the extra mile to make a scene the absolute best wild over-the-top thing it can be. Boss fights and setpieces in this one are some of the most imaginative they've ever done.

But, they are very small moments. Incredible moments, but all incredible moments firmly on one side of the game, with hours upon hours of Just Not That Much Of Note in the way. Plot thread after plot thread coming up without payoff, or when it does get payoff, arriving 60 hours after you last thought about it because it hasn't come up since.

The combat remains awkward and clunky even with free movement, and where it felt acceptable in 7 because it was the bold, risky move of plunking a genre into an engine it entirely wasn't made for, now it just... feels like it's staying like that. It still doesn't totally work, but where that felt okay on a one-off with the promise of future improvement, it now doesn't feel concretely improved enough to justify being "oh yeah we're doing this from now on". Kitting out a build is as fun as ever, but where Lost Judgment and Gaiden began to play around with the Dragon Engine's jank and let you have fun with it, turning bugs into features, if this game decides you're stuck on something, you can't make something good out of it. You just have to let it get stuck.

Minigames vary wildly in tone and setup; Sujimon are a fantastically strange way to have an entire second RPG in this enormous RPG, and this is maybe the only game series I can ever imagine including an entire Animal Crossing / RCT2 hybrid expressly as a joke.

What it comes down to is, this feels like it should be GOTY, easy. But it feels like the level of executive meddling that's happening to Sonic is happening to this: an awkward forcing of "we have to appeal to the classic fans", a cramming in of awkward DLC plans that spoil the presence of every character in the game if you made the mistake of purchasing the Tremendo-Billion-Yen edition, writing that can't afford to come to any definitive conclusion on any matter just in case. Even substories seem afraid to bring in new cast members, arbitrarily pasting in the same characters with the same jokes from 7 and seeming to expect they'll get an identically big laugh a second time, instead of understanding that it was fun before because it was a blindside. A game with an entire Crazy Taxi send-up (which is incredibly fun) seems somehow afraid to do something new half the time.

There is too much in the way of what makes this game great. It has an absolutely unreal amount of Content™️, and it leaves me just wishing it had been more focused. Maybe then this bountiful post-game would feel like a reward instead of the sole purpose. Like a watered-down drink, having one superb half of something new, bold, and confident means little when it's cut with so much stale.

If you're interested, I don't know that I'd stop you, because a "bad" RGG game still blows most of the industry out of the water. But I kinda wish I hadn't spent $110 USD and 87 hours on this, is all.