I never played Alan Wake in 2010 when it was released. Not sure why, but I think there was this prick on a podcast talking warmly about it so I decided it was not for me. Then I played Control and I realized there were references I didn’t get because I hadn’t played Alan Wake. Alan Wake 2 came out and I didn’t feel I could play it because I hadn’t played its predecessor and now there’s a new Control in the making and I need to get up to speed. So I played Alan Wake Remastered. Alan Wake is a third person horror game where you play as Alan. You are a writer and have gone to Bright Falls on vacation with your wife. However, things transpire and you find yourself without wife, hunted in the forest, in the night, by crazy shades that want to kill you. The game is about rescuing your wife from the darkness. Most of the game takes place in the dark and the only thing that can protect you from the Taken is your flashlight. (and a huge load of bullets) This is absolutely a PlayStation 3 game in new clothes. It plays like a PlayStation 3 game. It looks like a PlayStation 3 game. It has one gameplay mechanic, running through the woods fighting shades, and it repeats that until the end. In the first three chapters there’s very little change of scenery at all. You move from light to light, getting ambushed in the darkness between, and the game is quite boring. Then the story picks up. First I wasn’t feeling it at all. Yeah, yeah, this writer is writing the story that he is experiencing. I had already been spoiled of that, but then it takes some seriously dark turns and even held some surprises for me at the end. It was the story that kept me playing and got me through this otherwise pretty dull shooter. Sometimes inanimate objects will be come very animated and throw themselves at you. The music and sound scape is also something that really stands out in this game. It does a lot to the atmosphere and I really enjoyed the musical outros to all the chapters. When I was at it, I decided that I was going to play the DLC as well. There are two extra chapters, Special 1 – The Signal and Special 2 – The Writer. Both of these are really good and I enjoyed them much more than the base game. Now I’m really looking forward to Alan Wake 2. I rate this game as GOOD. ⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 3 out of 5. ### _Related_

It’s been a while since a video game made me laugh out loud. Sure, Baldur’s Gate 3 had me snicker a few times, but a full out bellow must have been Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Dispatch is a game where you play as Robert, a dispatcher on a superhero-for-hire call center. Distressed citizens of Los Angeles calls in and you dispatch the most appropriate hero for the mission. You have your own team of super heroes to dispatch out on missions. Read the mission carefully and make sure you send the most appropriate hero. From the looks of it, I expected the game to be a visual novel, but there’s enough gameplay elements to take it out of that category. The dispatching, the hacking and the eventual quick time events make this more interactive than what you would call a visual novel, but I do believe there are accessibility settings to make it less interactive. You frequently get dialogue options that will change the story and how characters in the story perceive you. What I love about this game is the writing. The characters are really well written and the banter between them is hilarious. The overall story is good, not fantastic, but the animation is excellent, matching the characters and the setting perfectly. The dialogue system is fun and satisfying even if it’s a bit tricky to see where a particular answer will take the conversation. Also, you get far too short time to respond, but I guess I could change that in accessibility settings if I were so inclined. I don’t care much for the game play elements. I think the dispatching is okay, I don’t like that there’s luck involved if your heroes succeed or not in their missions, and I found the map quite tricky to navigate. It is the banter between characters that makes the dispatching fun. There is a hacking mini game and it is often done on a timer. If you fail it will have consequences in the world. The hacking mini game is neither my cup of tea. It’s not hard, I think I only failed two in the last episode, but they aren’t much fun and I miss the characters while doing it. It feels almost like they added that in late in the development cycle because they felt they had too few gameplay elements. Over all, the animation, the story, the writing makes me craving more. I hope they’ll make another season of it. I rate this game as GREAT. ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4 out of 5. ### _Related_

It’s always hard to criticize a game made by one person. You’re essentially criticizing their life’s work. I’ve had small teams reach out to me after a bad review and – I’m sorry I didn’t love your game. It was an impressive feat nonetheless. Ball x Pit is like Space Invaders, but instead of shots you have balls that bounces and instead of five rows of aliens you have more and more enemies coming in. You get special balls with different abilities and you get to combine balls into new balls, evolving new balls with new abilities to take on the horde. You also have up to 16 heroes each having their own specialities and unique ways to shoot balls. All this combines, makes no round in Ball x Pit the same. Make those balls bounce to make really high damage numbers. In the game you’re unlocking blue prints for houses and when you’re not in the arena, you’re outside, building a city. Each house brings upgrades to the game in the arena and every house is also upgradable. You have resources like gold, wood, crop and stone to buy and upgrade these houses, but it’s never really any choice of what house to buy, because you’ll end up with all of them upgraded to the max anyway. The game is entertaining the way an arcade bullet hell game is. With all the upgrades and combinations of balls it doesn’t get as monotonous as it should be. It is very satisfying when you find a stellar combination of balls that makes the whole screen light up like a Christmas tree from enemies taking damage, and when you roll out damage numbers in the thousands. That’s really neat. Each level ends with a boss. The bosses are quite uninspiring and very easy. The hard part is getting to the boss. Once you get there you have basically won the level. Ball x Pit has 8 levels. You need to complete each level 2-5 times with different characters before you can proceed to the next level. The last level you need to finish 8 times before you’ve completed the game. This makes for a minimum of 30 rounds to finish the game, if you manage to win all the rounds. You won’t so expect about 60 rounds each 15 minutes long. This makes the game at least 15 hours long. I think this is the main problem. The game is way too long. Each level is the same. Two mini bosses and one end boss. The mini bosses are just bigger and stronger normal enemies and the end bosses are not that inspiring either. They shoot tons of projectiles and sometimes rushes towards you. The different levels aren’t that much different either. You get enemies in a slightly different hue with more health but the strategy doesn’t shift. You can do the same thing through the whole game. You upgrade your abilities in a city building mini-game. This might be my least favorite part of Ball x Pit. The city building is not very fun. I see why it’s there but it is not something I look forward to between my bouts in the arena. I also had some technical difficulties on Nintendo Switch 2 where the game crashed on me several times. Also playing on the handheld screen gave me headaches repeatedly, from the constant blinking lights when hitting the enemies with balls. It was fine on the big TV though. I rate this game as GOOD. ⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 3 out of 5. ### _Related_

This game is the continuation of the first two games. I really loved the first game, I thought it was brilliant. I thought the second game was good and now we’re up for a third. In this game you wake up in Nowhere as two characters. You play as a beak character or a green character. You start off in a dark place where a giant baby wants to kill you, squish you or play with you. It’s a bit unclear. You go from area to area with some kind of boss at the end of each and I think there are four in total. The game is not very long, not very hard, not very scary and there are no real puzzles to account for. I really dig the art direction, the environment and the ambiance of the game. What I love about this game is the graphics and the art direction. The game looks fantastic. The dark grueling world seems to have descended into complete evil and ruin. Everything seems hostile and just standing in a corridor even the walls leans in over you. I love it! The game is very spooky. It’s a kind of cozy spooky and not a scary spooky that the previous games had. Where the previous games could have my heart race, this one makes me just slightly on edge. As it has been before, the platforming and controlling your character is very bad. I got stuck several times, thinking that I must be doing the wrong thing as I keep failing, and then I look up on a tutorial and they do exactly the same thing. It’s just that the controls are so bad that it is partly luck based if you manage to pull off a jump and grab. This game seems much easier than previous games. There are no real puzzles or obstacles. You just go through the environments with an occasional fetching of a key. The game has several scenes where it’s just trial and error. There was no indication when you entered the room that you needed to be sneaking, so you get eaten at once. The only way to get past the chase scenes is by doing it again and again, because there are no clues of what you’re supposed to do. You just have to die and try again. My greatest disappointment is that you play as two characters, and it is possible to play with a friend over network, but not in couch coop. I would’ve loved to play this game with my son, but we do not own two PlayStation 5 and I don’t think we would’ve bought two copies of the game either. Too bad, it was a missed opportunity of a great couch coop game. My last criticism is that the story is a complete mystery to me. I have no idea really of how I ended up in this world, what the objective was and why it ended as it ended. I rate this game as GOOD. ⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 3 out of 5. ### _Related_

It feels a bit weird to review another Mario Kart game. A little bit like reviewing the latest version of FIFA. It’s a bit better. Some things are new. Whatever. Mario Kart is not a single player game. It’s a game you play with your family. That’s where it shines, and I can think of no better couch co-op game. This has been true for previous games and it’s true for this one. We’ve been having a blast playing it together. This game is at its best when you play it with friends. You can play up to 4 players in couch co-op. The new tracks are fine. It feels like it has a lot of discoverability. I enjoy the updated graphics and I like that they changed the formula a bit. Not all tracks go in a circle. Instead they go from point A to point B. I like the way that they can be stringed together as one long track. It makes the game less monotonous. Another change they’ve introduced is when you pick up a power-up, it immediately moves to defensive position, so if you get hit by a shell, the power-up absorbs that hit. It makes the game more tactical, when to use power-ups and when to keep them. Sometimes it is very hard to see where you’re supposed to go. This is just a problem for new players, as you quickly learn the layout of the few tracks that are included. As usual, what I don’t like about Mario Kart is the luck based aspects. You can be hit by seven shells just before finishing line and end up at 10th place and there is no way to protect against it. It’s just luck. And you could be almost last, get a super power-up and end up first and winning even if you played like an ass. This makes it a lousy single player game, but a super fun party game. I rate this game as GOOD. ⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 3 out of 5. ### _Related_

Again we are at the end of a year and I’m going to reflect a bit on the gaming year that has passed. I had a lot of fun playing many different games this year. Apart from previous years I didn’t really have a hiatus this year, but felt like playing games the whole year. I don’t have that much time for it while working, so most of the games I play are during summer and winter vacations. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage was one of those games that I played during the summer. I played a lot of smaller titles that you can complete under 10 hours. I’m still unwilling to start a game that is longer, because I feel that it’s such an undertaking and if I don’t like it I’m stuck for tens of hours if I want to finish it. I played several platformers like Disney Illusion Island, Prince of Persia, Ori: Will of the Whisps, Blasphemous 2. In all I played 22 new games. No game was a **R EPLAY**. The total length of those games is 266 hours and my average rating is GOOD. ## Nintendo Switch 2 This was the year that Nintendo Switch 2 was released, and while I was very hyped before the release, it cooled off once the reviews came in. It seemed more like an incremental evolution of the Nintendo Switch, and the number of games that utilized the new performance of the Nintendo Switch 2 was very limited at launch. My wife got one for me, for Christmas present and my initial perception was correct. It is an upgrade, rather than a whole new console. However 6 months later the Nintendo eshop is full of games that have been upgraded for Nintendo Switch 2. Even if I don’t plan to replay games because of the higher definition graphics, it’s still nice that I can find new games tailored for my new console. I prefer Nintendo Switch 2 over Steam Deck because of the exclusive titles like Mario Kart World. For me the combination of having PlayStation 5 as my main console for the TV and a Nintendo Switch 2 as handheld is a good combination. I was contemplating getting a Steam Deck at the beginning of the year, but I still enjoy the occasional Mario game, so I think this combination is better for me. ## Looking forward to 2026 There is actually not a lot of games that I look forward to in 2026. Many games that I was looking forward to came out in 2025: Hades 2, Civilization 7, Little Nightmares 3. I hope it’s time for us to get another Mass Effect. It has been brooding for far too long. I’m just scared that the people working on the disastrous Dragon Age: The Veilguard is now working on the next Mass Effect. It could be the last nail in the coffin of our beloved series. Will 2026 be the year we’ll get another Mass Effect game? After being delayed (twice?) it is probably time for GTA 6 to come out, and I stand by what I said last year, that I might get a PlayStation 5 Pro just to play it. I also believe that no other game will dare to release at the same time as GTA 6 so we will have a pretty uneventful autumn. Maybe this will be the year that I will clean out my backlog completely? 🤣 _My next post will be game of the year 2024._ ### _Related_

I played the first Dragon’s Dogma on PlayStation 3. It is one of those cult classics, very much like Demon’s Souls. I think, mostly because of how weird it was. It also had some unique features like climbing monsters and the whole pawn system. I never finished it though. I ran into some wolves that killed me, and every time I reloaded they would kill me again, and again, so I quit. I was quite excited when Dragon’s Dogma 2 was announced. Even if I didn’t finish the first game, I still have some fond memories of playing it. Then the reviews said that it was a micro-transaction hellscape, so I lost interest. I think I bought it a couple of years ago on a sale, greatly discounted. Thought it might be worth a shot. As the Arisen you get your own Pawn (companion) to follow you on your journeys, and you get to hire two Pawns from other players. My first impression was “oh shit, this is still a PS3 game!”. Me and my son making fun of the weird looking characters, animations and the physics during the tutorial. Also the script seemed to be laughable, something taken out of a 13 year old game. It didn’t stop there. The game’s design is stuck in something reminiscent to 2013 rather than 2025. Inventory management is half the game, like it’s Diablo 2. Characters keep repeating the same dialogue like the Skyrim guard “taking an arrow to the knee”. Wolfs dropping out of the sky as they spawn right on top of you, and physics making both NPCs and enemies fly skyward. You keep running back and forth between objectives because there is (almost) no fast travel. Exploration is the strongest part of Dragon’s Dogma 2. You never know what you will find around the corner. I had a ridiculous situation where I was fighting some goblins, and suddenly a griffin comes out of the sky. Goblins are stock enemies in the game, but a griffin is a real challenge. If you take on a griffin it must be on your own terms, so I legged it and immediately ran straight into an ogre who mushed me like mashed potatoes. The problem is, this is not a bad game. I think it’s because every discovery takes you by surprise. Exploring in this game is a real treat. In modern games everything has a place, if there is a cave then there is a quest for that cave. This is not the case for Dragon’s Dogma 2. They have created a world, and then created the story in that world. When you walk off the beaten path, you are destined to find some really weird and exciting stuff. I was exploring a cave, no quest had brought me there, just that it looked interesting – and in it I found a giant lion, with a goat riding on its back. The goat was spewing magic everywhere and after I killed it, it dropped dragon’s blood. Weird! Some of the enemies you fight are terrifying. Don’t try to fight a griffin unless you’re really prepared. The game manages to make you scared of the dark, excited for a new journey, and make your heart skip a beat when you see a new monster. And this ties back to my Demon’s Souls analogy. That game is not particularly well designed, but it has a soul, something that makes it exciting without the need to be perfect. Dragon’s Dogma 2 has managed to embody that same feeling. I rate this game as GOOD. ⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 3 out of 5. ### _Related_

Blue Prince is a walking simulator combined puzzle game. You start each day entering a house. Each room has 4 possible entries and every time you open a door, you draft 3 possible rooms and get to pick one. This way you build a labyrinth of rooms throughout the house and your main goal is to find the 46th room. The story is that you’ve inherited this house, on the condition that you find the 46th room. During this expedition you will learn more and more about the history of the house and your family. In this regard the game is very much like What remains of Edith Finch, but here the floor plan changes and in that game it is static. You start each day in the Entrance Hall. You choose a door and draft a random room. You have 50 rooms to enter until the day runs out. I really like the vibe of this game, it’s very chill. Progress is slow, and every detail is important. Even if you have drafted the same room 10 times before there are slight differences. Every new day brings something new, but there is never any stress that you need to make progress. Either you do it or you don’t. Maybe you will get better luck next day. This is also what I dislike about the game. I am a very result focused individual. You can do everything right, and still get screwed because of bad luck. Some of the puzzles are alright. What I like about them is that they are slightly different for each day in game. Some of the puzzles stay solved after you solved them once, mainly the more difficult ones and I dare say that I wouldn’t have solved any of those without looking up the solution on internet. One of my favorite puzzles is in the parlor. One box has a true statement. One has a false statement. One box can be either true or false. You need to find the box containing the gems. I passed this room 40 times, and not once was the statements repeated. Playing this game it will sometimes feel like you’re stuck, even if you’re not. It is a combination of progress being so slow, but also that you need to wait for the correct combination of rooms to be drafted. Most often you don’t even know of the combination that you need, but you happen upon it by chance. All in all I enjoyed the calmness, the graphics, the story and some of the puzzles. It was a chill game and just what I needed. I rate this game as GOOD. ⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 3 out of 5. ### _Related_

It’s been a while since I played a proper walking simulator. This one is not a pure walking sim as you are required to hide from monsters, push some buttons and shoot matchsticks, but close enough. In the game you wake up as ”the burnt one” meet a friend named ”pot boy” and together you venture the Midnight Walk to the Moon Mountain. Along the way you meet characters, communities and you learn about the dark world that you travel through. The game is played in first person and pot boy is your companion. This was not entirely clear to me from the trailer. What makes this game unique is its graphics that is mostly made out of clay, and it gives it a very distinctive look. It is made as a VR game but I failed to play it in VR. I started out in VR but couldn’t solve the first puzzle because I couldn’t reach where I needed. My play area was too small. The story, the graphics, the music are all excellent. I’m not a fan of the hiding mechanics, but it is not over-utilized so I could stand it. When you die, you start over just that action you failed, so it’s not that annoying. The atmosphere is fantastic, and everything plays a part – the graphics, the clay, the music and the sound effects. It’s all masterfully done. If you’re looking for a cozy spooky game, this is prefect, VR or no VR. I rate this game as GREAT. ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4 out of 5. ### _Related_

My main problem with rogue-likes is that they have a hard time keeping the game interesting. You may create the absolute best gameplay, but it always breaks down and becomes repetitive after a while. What Hades 1 did, which was a winning recipe, was to keep it interesting. There was something new happening every game loop. There was new dialogue, a boss changed slightly, new set of upgrades to try out. The game kept it interesting and you wanted to see ”what comes next”. Melinoë is a much better protagonist than Zagreus ever was. Hades 2 is Hades 1 but more. You have a new protagonist, new story, a whole new assemble of characters, new areas and new enemies. It takes some time getting used to it all, but once you do this game is an iteration upon Hades 1 where every aspect of the game has been improved. I’ve only just played until the credits rolling, but it feels like the game has so much more to give. The story continues, there’s more dialogue, I ran into a whole new boss last game loop, 44 loops into the game !! and I haven’t even dipped my toes into the challenge runs. The game is gorgeous, it plays extremely well and there is a vast amount of levels, weapons, upgrades to play around with. This is a game that keeps on giving, and I believe it is one of those games I will not uninstall when I’m finished, because I’d like to play another round now and then. I rate this as EXCELLENT. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 5 out of 5. ### _Related_

I quite enjoyed the first Mario + Rabbids game. A tactical shooter game like X-COM but cuter. When I started this game I just felt “oh no, what have I done?”. Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope is a tactical shooter, a spiritual continuation of the previous game Kingdom Battle. You follow a quest line, run into battles where you choose three of Mario’s friends and fight it out in an arena against evil enemies. There are five worlds to explore and a sixth ending which is more of a gauntlet. Move from world to world and kill the big baddie at the end. No fuss and no surprises. The story is really bad but thankfully it’s skippable. The writing of the game is the real weak point. It is awful. I’d rather prefer there be no writing at all to be honest. The dialoge between Beep-0 and the space ship AI Jeanie, will go to history as the worst in all video games. Thankfully the dialogue cut scenes are skippable. The tactical battle arenas are okay. They are moderately fun, but have some problems. It is both very hard to predict what the enemy will do in the next move, and at the same time very easy. It is hard, because if you’re clever enough you can pretty much move around the whole map. And yet it is easy, because if you bait the AI with a dummy that stands without cover, the AI will always go for the dummy. You go around these worlds looking for trouble, and once you find it the game switches into arena battle mode. The enemy progression is fine. You get tougher and tougher enemies through the game, but the new enemies are mostly rehashes of old ones with new abilities. Your heroes don’t gain new abilities though, but you can attach abilities to your heroes with sparks, and that way find new ways to kill enemies. It’s still quite boring. Just like the enemy progression is rehash of old enemies, the sparks are mostly the same attack with different elements, instead of fire attack it will be lighting. Not very inspiring. Once you enter arena battle mode, the game is totally okay, even if it becomes repetitive after a while. I think that sums up the whole game. It’s not very inspiring. The dialogue is awful, the story is boring, the enemies and the bosses are boring, and even the main villain is completely uninteresting. You find some fun in the arena matches, but they also becomes repetitive quite fast. I rate this game as OKAY. ⭐⭐ Rating: 2 out of 5. ### _Related_

Wait a minute, haven’t I already reviewed this game? Yes of course, I played it when it was first released as an exclusive to Apple Arcade. Now the exclusivity is gone and the game is out on PlayStation. Naturally I played it again, and this time I platinumed it. I still agree with all I said in my previous review. There aren’t any noticeable changes between the versions, but since I’ve taken the platinum trophy I have some more insights. The game is still great! I did buy it again and spend another 20 hours in it! But it has some flaws. The racing is a lot of fun in an arcade style racing kind of way. Do not come to expect realistic physics. This is all about having fun. The first flaw is the progression system. When you start you have 3 cars to choose from, and you earn experience for each car which will allow you to upgrade them. But soon you unlock more cars, and then you stop playing with the old cars so you never really upgrade one car fully. At the end you unlock fully upgraded cars, and then I wonder what the upgrade system really is for. Every car you unlock is also noticeable better than the previous, so there is never a reason to go back to old cars or stick with the car you have. Once you finish the main campaign you will unlock the best car, and so there is never any point of changing cars. There are two more unlocks but they are more of a novelty than anything else. The game is a lot of fun as couch coop and it’s easy enough that everyone can learn to play it in seconds. Another thing that bothers me is that when you play so much that I have for the platinum trophy you start to see the algorithm behind the AI for the other cars. It is the same every race and the rubber band effect is very noticeable. It’s still enjoyable but it kind of ruins the game a little. The difficulty is also very uneven in this game. I finished all the tournaments with Gold medal on my first try, except the last one where I was unlucky and had to do it twice. Then we have the time trials where I spend hours on the same track to pop all the time bubbles. I finished the last track of the campaign on my first try with gold medal, but I still had time trials from 3 continents past that I hadn’t even achieved bronze medal on. Customizing your car is fun, and you will unlock more options as you finish races. However once you’ve unlocked the best car there is no reason to play with any other. I did struggle for a long time, but then I found out that if I put my TV on gaming mode, the time trials got much easier. Who would have thought? 🤣 Still a really great game. I had lots of fun with it and I will play it again when I just need something quick and arcady. I rate this game as GREAT ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4 out of 5. ### _Related_

I played Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun back in 2018. I thought it was good but way too long. At the time the development studio Mimimi made a DLC for PC that was never released for console, until now 2025 after the studio have shut down. What a weird thing, or maybe not so weird. If you are a publisher and have this game with a DLC that only needs to be added to the already released console version of the game, you’re looking at a low investment with potentially high profit. The gameplay is about combining the different abilities of your assassins to solve situations. Use the right character for the right job, queue up actions and then execute. This is the same game as I played in 2018, except that it’s shorter as you only get the DLC levels. There are 3 major missions and 3 small ones. A major mission takes about 2 hours to finish, so that is more than enough content for me. The missions are quite hard, because they take place just before the end boss of the main game, so you need to use all your cunning to solve the puzzles. The game has some useful tips at the first mission to help you get back into the gameplay and I thought it was just the right amount of help I needed. I haven’t played Shadow Tactics for 7 years but found no big obstacle to get back into it. The game is fun and the maps and missions are great. They are just the right amount of complexity. You run into a scenario and wonder, “how the heck am I supposed to deal with this?” but you always figure it out. That’s what makes it feel awarding when you finish a mission. The characters are very well balanced. Maybe that is why you don’t get any new mechanics, because it would ruin a delicate balance. In the end you win if you use the strength of all your characters combined. As far as I know the DLC didn’t introduce any new mechanics, no new character or anything like that. It was just a couple of new missions. It would have been fun if they dared to go a little bit beyond the original formula. But I did have a ton of fun with the new content. It was never too hard, it wasn’t too easy and I find the console port to be perfect. I rate this game as GREAT. ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4 out of 5. ### _Related_

Do you remember playing Diablo 2 when it came out? Not the years of playing it after it came out or playing it now, but just when it came out. That game was hard as balls and you died a lot. These days I know exactly how to play that game so I rarely die and I play through it in just a few hours. But back then when you were new to ARPGs it was a hard game, but fun nonetheless. This is the experience I have with PoE2. It is hard, but fun. It is easy to get overwhelmed by enemies, they hit hard and you die. Bosses need some learning before you can beat them and there are a lot of things going on in the boss fights. The port to PS5 works very well. It is obvious that they have put some time and effort making the user interface usable with a controller and making screen text readable. I think my main problem with Diablo 4 was that the gameplay isn’t very interesting anymore. The game is too easy and the bosses are not doing anything that require any skill. I sailed through that game. It has become more of a cookie clicker for loot than an actual game. This is what makes PoE2 more intriguing because it will not hold your hand. It will beat the shit out of you, and if you fail to dodge when the boss hits, you’re kind of screwed. However, making a hard game that is so open as PoE2 is, makes it very hard to balance. How do you create a boss fight that is fair to every starting class, which takes the huge skill tree into account, but still make is challenging? I don’t really think it’s possible without dynamically scaling the boss to your specific character or build. Otherwise the boss will become too easy for some, and impossible for others. Sadly I chose a class and a build that cannot beat the boss of act 1. The game encapsulates the sprit of Diablo 2. Everything from the graphics, to the characters, music and atmosphere reeks of Diablo 2. Maybe I am the problem. I’m not good enough at the game. But I have upgraded all my spells to level 5, I am 3 levels over the boss, I have hunted down the resistances needed, and I have given it 20+ tries. This is the point where it stops being a fun game and just being frustrated. I would love to continue to act 2, but the game won’t let me. I will not re-roll to a different character and I think there are more fun games I could spend my precious gaming time on. So far my experience of act 1. The game play is fun and challenging. The graphics are cool and the atmosphere is really dense. They have failed to deliver a story by this time of playing and I find the skill tree and the upgrade system very confusing. I rate this game as OKAY ⭐⭐ Rating: 2 out of 5. ### _Related_