priya20's reviews

Completed · PC

The single player is the best thing Rockstar has written and I'd defend that against Red Dead. Three protagonists who actively dislike each other is a structural choice most studios would have focused-grouped out, and it's the reason the heists land — you're not switching characters for variety, you're switching because Michael doesn't trust Trevor to be in the room. What keeps it an S eleven years on is that the moment-to-moment shooting and driving still feel better than most things released since. The driving especially. Every open world game that came after made cars heavier and worse. I've done the Pacific Standard heist more times than I can count, mostly with the same four people, several of whom I no longer speak to outside of it. Make of that what you will.

100% Completed · PC

Cleared 32 heat. That's where I stopped, not because I couldn't go further but because past about 25 the game stops being about play and starts being about which boons you get offered in the first two rooms. That's my one real criticism and it's the standard roguelike one: at the top end the variance decides more than the execution does. Two runs with identical play can end four biomes apart. You can mitigate it — Chaos gambling, keepsake sequencing, learning which duo boons are worth building toward — but you can't remove it. Everything else is close to perfect. The weapons are genuinely distinct rather than reskins, the aspect system gives each one three real identities, and the moment-to-moment feel is the best in the genre. Ninety hours and the dash still feels good. An A because the ceiling is decided by luck more than I'd like, not because anything in it is bad.

Completed · PC

If you are going to build a game around stealth, the stealth has to be deep enough to reward mastery. This isn't. Guard AI has two states. There is no meaningful noise system. Detection is a cone and a timer, and once you understand that, every encounter in the game resolves the same way: break line of sight, wait four seconds, walk forward. I finished it without ever needing to think about an approach, which in a game explicitly returning to its stealth roots is a real failure. The assassination animations are lovely and the parkour is the best it's been since Unity, which I'd argue is still the high water mark for movement in this series. But movement is the delivery system, not the game. A B. It's competent and short and I don't regret it. It just doesn't have a system underneath it worth getting good at.

Playing · PC

Twenty-odd years across 1.6, Source and GO, and the thing underneath is still the best competitive shooter ever designed. The reason is economy. No other shooter makes losing a round a strategic decision — whether to save, whether to force, what a full buy costs you two rounds later. That single system means a 0-6 deficit is recoverable in a way it isn't in any game with respawns, and it's why matches have shape instead of just momentum. The sound is the other half and it's the thing people underrate hardest. You can play this game with your eyes closed and win rounds. Footsteps, reloads, a defuse starting two rooms away — the audio is a complete information channel and learning to read it is most of what improving means. Sub-tick has genuinely made some things feel worse and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. It's still an S because the foundation is untouchable.

Completed · PC

The co-op campaign is the part I'd defend hardest and the part that gets discussed least. It's a genuinely different design problem — every puzzle has to have a solution that requires two people who cannot occupy the same space, and it has to fail in a way that's legible so you can figure out whose half went wrong. The ping system doing all the communication work is quietly brilliant; you can play the whole thing with someone who doesn't share a language with you. What holds it at an A is that the solo campaign's back half sags. Once you leave the old Aperture sections, the gel puzzles start solving themselves, and the final act is mostly corridor with dialogue over it. Great dialogue. Still corridor. The co-op is the better campaign and most people never finished it, which is a shame.

Completed · PlayStation

Played this on Give Me God of War from the start, which I'd recommend to nobody and which taught me more about the combat than two normal playthroughs would have. The axe recall is the whole design. Everything is built around the two seconds where the weapon is not in your hands — enemy placement, the shield parry window, when Atreus's arrows are worth calling. On the highest difficulty that becomes a genuine resource management problem and the game gets much better for it. The Valkyries are the best boss encounters Sony Santa Monica has ever designed and Sigrun is a legitimately world-class fight. The camera is the one real weakness. One unbroken shot is an incredible achievement and it also means you get hit by things that are behind you, constantly, and there is no fixing that. Still an S. The combat is deep enough to carry a game twice this long.

Playing · PC

I run random seed glitchless and I'd argue it's one of the best speedgames in existence, for a reason most people wouldn't guess: the RNG is deep enough that execution alone can't save a bad run, but shallow enough that a good runner beats a lucky one over a set. You're managing a chain of probability — bastion type, trade rolls, blaze rates, stronghold triangulation — and every link has an optimal response you can drill. It's closer to a card game than a platformer. The routing knowledge that's been built up over the last five years is genuinely impressive as a body of work. The reason it's an A and not an S for me is version fragmentation. The community effectively plays 1.16.1 because later versions made the run worse, which means the competitive game and the actual game have drifted apart. That's a real problem and Mojang has no reason to care about it.

Completed · PC

Everyone agrees the writing is extraordinary and everyone quietly agrees the combat is bad, and I want to be specific about why, because 'floaty' isn't a diagnosis. The problem is that Geralt's attacks commit him to an animation with a fixed traversal component. You don't swing where you're standing, you swing toward where the game thinks the enemy is, which means positioning — the actual skill in any melee system — is repeatedly taken out of your hands. Add a dodge with generous i-frames and a roll that covers absurd distance, and the optimal play against almost everything is roll-roll-hit, forever. The signs are largely decorative outside of Quen, which is mandatory, and Igni, which is better than everything else. Death March doesn't fix it. It just makes the same shallow loop less forgiving. An A, carried entirely by the writing. If the combat were merely average this would be untouchable.

Completed · PC

Honour mode run, no reloads, finished it. That's the lens I'm reviewing through and it's a different game from that angle. The combat is better than people give it credit for because most people never have to engage with it properly. On a normal run you can brute force almost everything. Take away the reload and it becomes an action economy problem, and suddenly every scroll, every elevation advantage, every shove matters. There's a genuinely deep tactical game hiding under a difficulty curve most players never touch. What stops it being an S for me is that the encounter design doesn't always meet the systems halfway. A lot of fights are solved by the same three opening moves. The bosses that break that pattern are the best in the game and there aren't enough of them. Surfaces are still fiddly. Everything catches fire. You get used to it.

Completed · PlayStation

The swinging is the best traversal system ever put in a game and I don't think it's especially close. What makes it work is that it's a skill with a ceiling. You can get from A to B badly on your first day — hold the button, go forward. Or you can learn point launches, corner boosts, zip-to-point cancels, and start covering the same distance in half the time while never touching a rooftop. Almost nobody notices that curve exists, which is the mark of it being designed properly. Every other traversal system I can think of is either trivial or a chore. The combat on Ultimate is genuinely demanding too. It looks like Arkham and it isn't — you have no counter button, so crowd control is positional rather than reactive, and that changes everything about how you fight. The stealth sections as MJ are the one weak spot and everyone already knows it.

100% Completed · PC

Perfection save, about 220 hours, and I played it like a spreadsheet because that's what it rewards once you stop pretending otherwise. There's a real optimisation game in here. Ancient fruit in the greenhouse into kegs is the dominant strategy and everyone knows it, but the interesting part is the first two years, where cash flow is tight and the decision of what to plant on spring 1 of year 1 genuinely constrains what's possible by summer. Crop choice, fishing during rain, the Community Center order — it's a tight little economy and it holds up to being taken seriously. What stops it being an S for me is that the optimal play and the pleasant play diverge hard. The game is at its best when you're wandering into the mines at 10pm for no reason, and the spreadsheet version of me never does that. A great game that quietly punishes the way most people want to play it.