JackTheGamer2002

This game is absolutely incredible. The enemies are well designed and fun to fight, the world is massive and fun to explore, and the sense of progression is perfect and doesn't feel too slow or too quick. The narrative is admittedly hard to follow at times, but is great once you piece it together. However, being the first Fromsoftware open-world video game, it comes with its own caveats. The lack of a quest log baffles me, and makes side quests extremely hard to follow if you have a lot of them at once. Eventually I would just forget the side quests that I didn't consider important enough to remember; there are so many quests, and if you end up prioritizing something else and not doing a quest until, say, a couple (real life) weeks later, it's easy to forget what they were about or what you were supposed to do. It doesn't help either that the game doesn't tell you when you start or finish these quests. There really is no way to keep track of your quests whatsoever. And although this may piss off the diehard Fromsoftware fans, the multiplayer in this game is abysmal. When playing with the mod 'seamless co-op', multiplayer is incredible. In vanilla though, your co-op partner is weaker and has less flasks, you're unable to use torrent, you are locked in specific areas, and the worst part; invasions. I hate invasions. I don't want to be attacked randomly by a player with a PVP build when me and my mate both have builds for fighting enemies and bosses. I just want to explore the open-world with a friend and kill every boss and/or enemy we come across in true Dark Souls fashion. With seamless co-op, me and my friend have killed every boss in the base game of Elden Ring, and it was a great achievement I remember to this day. Without the aforementioned multiplayer mod, this would have been immensely frustrating. I also found the open world extremely boring once you get to the snowy region of the game; I found the map started looking like much of the same wherever you look. If it weren't for these caveats, this game would be pretty much perfect, and easily a 5/5.

Red Dead Online is good fun with friends if you want to roam the map and mess around. But the issue is, it's an online free roam sandbox game and nothing else. There is little to no content worth playing, the game is even grindier than GTA Online with items as insignificant as clothing costing hundreds of dollars, which take hours of grinding to save up for. With the inclusion of multiple different currencies as well, the game just becomes a constant grind, and for what? A new hat? This game was abandoned by Rockstar despite so much potential, and now it's been abandoned by me too. Extremely disappointing.

It was late 2023 when I gave up on GTA Online, which is a shame, because this game used to be some of the most fun you can possibly have with friends in gaming. In a way, it still is, but that's if you can ignore the constant lag (especially for console), the modders, the griefers, overpowered futuristic vehicles that come straight from a sci-fi movie, the hours of grinding it takes to purchase a single vehicle, the massive amount of microtransactions as well as the inclusion of a subscription service, and the list goes on. The game is also stale now; we have been playing GTA 5 for the past 12 years afterall. If you can overlook all of that, then yes, GTA Online is great.

One of the best narrative games I have ever played. The story is well written, and although the gameplay is fairly basic and the game may rely a little too heavily on stealth, it is a joy from start to finish. AI is also abysmal and extremely easy to outsmart, but this didn't take away from the overall experience. I became extremely invested in Amicia and Hugo's story, and wanted to see them succeed. The bond between characters is something rarely written as well as it is in Plague Tale. The graphics also still hold up to this day, with scenes still giving me that 'wow' factor years after release. If gameplay were tweaked to not be so reliant on stealth, and if the AI were improved, I would consider this game a 4.5/5.0 stars.