Recent reviews by champagneZ

It's extremely good. Right at the very beginning I was worried the Grace sections would be too passive/hiding for me but it settles into something like RE7 very quickly, with one of the most engaging approaches to resource management the series has ever done. Meanwhile Leon's combat may just be the best the series has ever done, which is an extremely high bar. RE continues to knock it out of the park.

There's a number of things this does better than the original game, especially at first blush - the first impression is truly amazing - but ultimately it's just significantly worse. Builds seem more diverse when you start, but the way things are designed, especially in the second route, significantly limits what is actually viable. Several of the gods are built around trivializing the types of encounters that are already easiest and do little to nothing to help you with the actual challenges. There are twice as many bosses in this game as in the first, but only one, the Sirens, stands up to the fights from that game (although they are legitimately really great!). Story is similarly a step down, the aesthetics are slightly weaker, and the attempts to vary the level design largely produce tedium rather than novelty. There's a lot of on offer here, and it would be disingenuous to say that Supergiant's typical polish isn't present, but as a follow-up to what was very nearly a perfect game this ends up a tremendous disappointment.

This is definitely "more Elden Ring," and if your main issue with that game is that you wish it had been 120 hours long for $100 rather than 90 hours long for $60, this has you covered for sure. But with a half baked alternate leveling system, exploration that is comparatively empty and unrewarding compared to the main game, and overall uninspired boss fights and area design, the additions this DLC makes are at best adding another hub area of quality roughly equivalent to the little-loved Mountaintop of the Giants. To call this a letdown after ostensibly two years of development time is an understatement; From really dropped the ball here. Combine that with inexplicable performance drops and the same frame stutter bug that has persisted, unbelievably, for over two years in the PC version, and this is worth a 50% off sale at absolute most.

One of those premises that makes you wonder how you haven't seen it before. Pretty deep systems, too!

There's a really cool idea here, but it's just... clunky. Far too little of the challenge is about interesting hazards or obstacles and far too much stems from "the thing got stuck on the wall." Would love to see a more refined go at this - and one that doesn't ram unskippable audio 'cutscenes' down your throat, too!

The gunplay and movement feel as good as ever, and the Call of Duty multiplayer experience is here if you want it, albeit slightly slightly slower. There are a couple bewildering design decisions - the redesign of the perks feels like a change for the sake of change, the existence of several one hit kill sniper rifles means sniper hipfire is unfortunately common, and of course the minimap changes have been discussed to death - but this would be a perfectly serviceable Call of Duty multiplayer product...

If it worked, at all. Unfortunately, as of the writing two separate Nvidia driver updates haven't rooted out the graphical artifacting bug, crashes are common, interface elements overlap with one another in clearly broken ways, I played one match which balanced the teams into 11v1... some of these problems have been funny, others frustrating, but all of them together indicate a game that is clearly not ready for release. Swing back in a few months and see if things are better. As of now this product simply does not function.

Fantastic, addictive, and super super fun thematically. This is just not an experience that many games offer. The interface looks much more confusing than it really is at first, and most information is easily accessible if not necessarily intuitive (it took me a bit of time to realize where I could find a character's age, for example).

Those issues fade away quickly, and you end up with something really unique. For everyone who enjoys playing the bad guy in Total War Warhammer, but wishes your evil machinations could be a bit more subtle, this is a great game in an almost untouched niche.

A fun system that feels more like building an engine in a card game than traditional monster raising is unfortunately ruined by an atrocious interface, an opaque system of buffs, debuffs, and traits where vital information is nested many menus deep, and a dependence on RNG that can render a boss fight anything between trivial and impossible depending on which 4% chance skills fire and which of a random pool of enemies fill out their party.

Rich and creative, and surprisingly accessible for the genre!

The best RE since 4, and maybe the best RE period. If you have any love for survival horror, classic RE, or just good games of this style, this is it.