Mister Jack

Welk damn, the new weekly extraction mode in Zenless Zone Zero is pretty cool. If they ever were to put out a standalone spinoff version of it I could see myself buying it. Not that it's very likely. Still, it's nice to finally have a good alternative to Hollow Zero for weeklies.

Palworld Finished the story with the 1.0 release version. Man, this game is addictive. I never really get into the whole survival/crafting/base building thing but somehow adding a bunch of collectible creatures into the mix just makes it so much more appealing to me, especially when they help run your base. The Pal designs are great, probably the best I've seen outside of Pokemon itself, and since the early access several of them have had redesigns to make them look less like Pokemon counterparts. They've got so much personality in their animations, too. Leafan is always doing kung-fu poses, Dupin juggles and does magic tricks, Sekhmet dances while idle, and more. It really goes a long way to make these creatures feel more like living things and not just numbers to plug into an optimization formula. There's a few more palette swaps in the roster than I would like but there's more than enough original designs to make up for it. The story is basically an afterthought. Go fight a bunch of tower bosses and then go to the world tree and fight the final boss. There's lore journals you can find but honestly nobody is playing this game for the story. It's just for the love of catching these creatures and using them to make yourself a kickass base and that loop is honestly plenty addicting enough. There's definitely some 1.0 jank in there and stuff like Pals clipping through walls but I wouldn't say anything is truly broken. It only crashed on me once or twice during my over 100 hour playthrough. I would complain about stuff like item durability and crafting speed but the thing is that you can just adjust that stuff in your world settings so there's really no reason you can't get the experience you want out of it, especially if you're modding it on PC with steam workshop. I suppose the only thing I can complain about is that certain endgame crafting materials (AI cores) take a very long time to get and endgame weapons, armor, and buildings always require a bunch of them. I'm sure there's a mod that'll just give them to you but I'm only modding for quality of life, not to straight up cheat. Even with that gripe, there's a very good chance this will be my personal game of the year unless something else comes out to blow me away and no, that's not gonna be GTA VI for me.

Beyond Citadel This is one of the most unique FPS games I've played, although if you just look at gameplay footage you might not be able to tell. On the surface you're just playing as a hot anime girl in a biblical apocalypse shooting other hot anime girls with gratuitous amounts of gore (although you can turn off the gore and nudity if that's off-putting to you). What you can't see from watching someone else, however, is that this game might have the most immersive guns you can find outside of VR. In its intended gameplay mode, you're not just tapping R once to play a reload animation like every other shooter. You need to do almost all of it manually. While you have a backpack that automatically refills empty magazines for you, in order to reload your guns you need to pull out the magazine, refill it with the backpack, put the magazine back in, then cock the gun. All of these are separate button presses and chances are you'll screw it up a few times until you get the rhythm down, but once you do it feels really satisfying. While you technically can quick reload in a pinch by tossing aside the empty magazine and putting in a full one with a single button press, you have a finite amount of magazines on you and throwing one away risks breaking it so that you can't pick it up again. Revolvers and sniper rifles are reloaded one bullet at a time, but the upside is that it reloads as fast as you can tap the button for it. Guns also have durability and will jam when it gets low, requiring you to manually unjam them. Thankfully, guns don't degrade nearly as quickly as in Far Cry 2. You can also collect items to repair guns and, if all else fails, just buy a new one from a merchant. The complete control you have over the reloading process also allows you to do things like slam fire shotguns or fan the hammer on a revolver if you know how. All of this really keeps you on your toes and prevents the game from ever feeling totally mindless because you always have to be mindful of how you're handling your weapons. I honestly kind of wish more shooters had a system like this.

Remember Twisted Metal and how it's basically a dead franchise that hasn't had a game since 2012? Yeah, someone made a new one for free and it kicks ass.

Mina the Hollower Sweet Jesus, this game is hard. Shovel Knight could be decently challenging but this one is just straight up brutal if you play without modifiers. It's still great, though. The controls, level design, and combat all feel fantastic. Don't even get me started on that soundtrack full of absolute bangers courtesy of Jake Kaufman again. Hollowing is also one of those mechanics that make you go "man I wish I could do this in every game." I'd give it a strong 9/10, though I have to dock a point because the game is determined not to have tutorials but at the same time isn't always as intuitive as it thinks it is. Did you know the mirrors are the fast travel system and to activate one you have to walk into the mirror for about two seconds? Well now you do so congratulations, you won't have to backtrack to every region of the game to activate the mirrors like I had to do when I realized I'd overlooked this absolutely crucial step to accessing the endgame. There's also a section of the game where you have to burrow through deep water in order to cross large gaps. They drop a subtle hint by putting a tiny collectible in the water, but up until now jumping into water has also resulted in taking damage so the game has trained me by this point to NOT jump into water only to suddenly make an exception without really telling me. I actually had to look up a guide to be told that it's okay to jump in water now. Honestly, if you can make it through this entire game without having to consult a guide even once then my hat's off to you because some things it expects you to do are incredibly cryptic. Despite this flaw, I'd still recommend it to anyone. If the Souls-like difficulty is a turnoff to you then there are plenty of modifiers to adjust the experience. I refrained from using them myself because I wanted to beat it as the developers intended but there's so many options I'm sure you can fine-tune it to be as hard or as easy as you want it to be.

I literally just bought Xenoblade 3 so I guess I ain't playing it until the upgrade patch comes out.

Donkey Kong Bananza Okay, I get the hype. This game is hands down the best in the entire DK series. Not only that but it has one of the best finales out of any Nintendo game ever. Top 5 at least. Holy hell, the Odyssey team was cooking on this one. They said "It's time to return to monke" and locked the hell in. A-freaking-plus.

Pokemon Legends Z-A Borrowed this one. I swear, Pokemon is such a frustrating franchise. They often introduce or refine one thing that's great and then surround it with a bunch of half-assed crap. This game is a prime example. The real time battles are great, probably the best the franchise has ever been. It completely cuts out all the tedious text boxes that I've been griping about for literally decades now. Battles are quick and snappy and don't waste your time with a bunch of popups you have to go through by mashing the A button. Not only that but the real-time aspect means you not only have to keep your positioning in mind but you will probably find yourself using moves you never used in older games based on their cast time or area of effect. This is probably the first Pokemon game since I was a kid to give me a decent challenge at more than one point in the story, though I did deliberately avoid doing a bunch of the side missions so I wouldn't be overleveled. Battles are just about what I always wanted them to be. There's room for improvement, but this is a tremendous step forward for battles in the same way Legends Arceus was for catching and if you put both of those together you could end up with the perfect Pokemon game. Too bad the rest of it is so lazy. Yes, the whole game takes place inside of Lumiose City and there is no going outside of it at any point, not even in the postgame. The city doesn't even feel alive. You can't enter most of the buildings except for Pokemon centers and a few story related locations. Hell, most of the citizens don't even walk around the streets. They just awkwardly stand in the middle of the road, radiating the kind of NPC energy I haven't seen since the Gen 1 days. Performance is pretty good, at least on Switch 2, but the environments are straight out of the Wii. Also, the lack of any voice acting whatsoever in a full priced game in 2025 is inexcusable. There is nothing that feels more awkward than watching a dramatic animated cutscene play out where everybody is just silently flapping their lips while you have to read subtitles at the bottom. This game costs 70 dollars. Enough is enough. The story isn't really anything to write home about either, though it does try to put a band-aid over some of the stuff in X/Y that people found to be stupid or shallow. Honestly if this was a 40, maybe even a 50 dollar game I could give it a soft recommendation just because the battling is so good and the battles are definitely where this game has its focus, but 70? No way. Just another case of Nintendo's eyes being bigger than their stomach.

I should be set for a while. Might get Splatoon Raiders if it turns out good and the Tears of the Kingdom upgrade since I already own it. Other than that I'm good on Nintendo games until they unveil something new. I got no interest in Metroid Prime 4.

Mouse PI for Hire I'm aware that IGN gave this a 6 and got torn apart for it while most people are giving it an 8. I'd probably give it a 7. It's a competent enough shooter but doesn't really set itself apart through anything but the visuals. The detective aspects are basically nonexistent in gameplay outside of pinning stuff to a board and automatically making connections by hitting a button. The guns are also pretty unbalanced. The paint thinner gun is so strong that the only real reason to use anything else is because you ran out of paint thinner for the paint thinner gun. You also can't replay levels so if you missed something after finishing one then too bad, you're locked out for the rest of the game. I can't help feeling like this team may not have made an FPS before because it's missing some QoL stuff I've come to expect. What they made here is decent but I wouldn't say it's amazing. Plus, outside of some death animations and a spinach powerup it doesn't lean into the cartoon wackiness nearly as much as I hoped. An FPS where you use a bunch of toon gags to kill enemies sounds like a hoot but that's not really what they did here.

I got one used. Originally I wasn't planning to get one at all but that was before the entire world economy lit on fire and every console started to go up in price instead of down. I'm not going to bother waiting for an OLED model because I'm mostly going to be playing this thing on my OLED TV anyway and an OLED model will be even more fucking unaffordable by the time it comes out. I only plan on playing first party exclusives on this thing, preferably used when I can get them. I still hate a lot of Nintendo's business practices but frankly 5 years from now I don't know if I will even be able to afford consoles anymore so I'm just going to get while the getting is good.

Every open world game where you have to walk and talk with NPCs needs a follow button. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 had one and I'm pretty sure RDR2 had it and every time it's not present I hate it. I hate having to slowly push the stick and stop and start so I don't accidentally overtake the NPC. Just let me push a button and forget about it. My input really isn't needed here.

Kingdom Come Deliverance II Holy shit, this game is a masterpiece. It feels criminal that this game isn't more popular in the mainstream. I don't know how it flew under my radar last year but if I had played it back when it came out it would have been my GOTY for 2025 easily. Yes, even over Clair Obscur. I was already a big fan of the first game even though it had a few rough edges since Warhorse had never made a game before. Even for a first time developer, the original Kingdom Come was a damn good debut. This time, however, they clearly learned from their experience making the last game because this one improved pretty much everything and feels so much better to play. Despite coming out just last year the performance is significantly smoother than the original 2018 game. The story is downright epic and I use that word in the classical sense. It took me 112 hours to finish, although part of that includes DLC since I bought the Royal Edition that came with it. Combat has been completely reworked to feel much smoother and more technical, giving you the tools to take on large groups of enemies if you're skilled enough while not making it too easy for you to do so. In addition to alchemy they've added a new blacksmithing mechanic where you can not only make weapons and armor for yourself but also start your own forge and run a business to fund your adventuring. Horse riding is better, archery is better, alchemy is better. Hell, even training your dog is better this time. It's chock full of memorable characters, lines, and moments that are going to stick with me for a good while. I honestly can't think of a lot to complain about here. Manual saves (minus exit saves) are still limited by a consumable potion, I guess, but just spend ten minutes at an alchemist's table every so often and you'll never have to worry about it. This is about as close to a 10/10 as it gets for me. This isn't merely Skyrim good. This is Witcher 3 good.

And now I have the platinum for Honkai Star Rail, which makes it my second gacha platinum. I started Neverness to Everness today after it launched so I'd better pump the brakes and make this my last one unless I end up dropping it.