You can yell slurs at people in prox chat and then hear it blast out of their TV if it's little Daquarias playing it on his PS5 and make them scramble to mute it. 10/10

My personal favorite of the Bioshock games. Better designed all around, writing is on par with the first, maps have better flow in general and the hacking mini game has been made much less cumbersome and time consuming. Port requires a few tweaks to get in perfect working order and the games weird 2K DRM they added force closed my application on first boot due to, and I quote "not being able to gather enough data to verify my age." Upon applying fixes and relaunching this was fixed and I never had any technical bugs or crashes again.

From an artistic standpoint, I love it. There's a certain eastern European "eurojank" quality to everything. Character models are uncanny, the music is great, the atmosphere is very offputting and at times oppressive. Some of the creative writing bits and stream of consciousness writing from some of the characters is entertaining to read. But everything else is very much a mixed bag. There's lots of rogue-lite elements here, a lot of RNG but also not a lot of replay value at the same time unless you like bashing your head against the wall waiting for very specific NPC's to spawn at the correct times to see all the conversations or get all the endings. From a gameplay standpoint it is very much not good and wears through its welcome quickly.

If you can appreciate the artistry of this game or just like weird sh#t, give it a shot. But if you're looking for an actual game, go somewhere else. Honestly very mixed on it, but giving it a begrudging thumbs up.

After slogging through the first half of the Cold Steel arc my perception of the Trails games did not come out of it unscathed. It had been quite a few years since I played through the Sky games and I even started doubting if they were as good as I remembered. I was planning on replaying these anyway to re-evaluate them and just to wash the taste of Cold Steel II out of my mouth and had somehow managed to dodge any and all news of the Sky remake until the day the demo dropped which was a great surprise.

Just from the demo my love for these games was rekindled and they did an exceptional job reworking the Sky games into the more contemporary/modern Trails style while still retaining everything that made them special.

The retranslation is hit or miss, some of the liberties I'm not too fond of that XSEED had taken were removed but they went a bit too far and removed terminology that has been and is still being used in the games as they get localized to this day, other than that the story beats are pretty much 1:1. English voices are absolutely horrid.

Gameplay further expands on what the later games try to do with introducing more active/action elements before actually getting into a battle. The game advertises itself as being able to be played entirely in real time but that's a straight up lie I think. Played through the game entirely on Nightmare and there were a few speedbumps mostly in boss fights, optional battles and big story fights. Other than that though the retrofitting of newer mechanics into this game and its fights have kind of smoothed the difficulty out, I remember even on normal in the original release there's some really tough moments but judging from posts I've been reading normal is now far too easy because of this. Regardless it still plays very nicely and looks great.

Didn't have any issues with the port personally, ran great, looks great. The music I'm 99% sure was re-recorded or at least up mixed so all that already great music sounds even better.

The biggest change here I think from an exploration perspective is that all side quest interactions and bonus POI's appear on your mini map as they become available. Honestly I like this because this series is notorious for hiding boat loads of quests and other things behind sometimes very strict time gates, on the other hand it's a bit too much for quests that require you to pay attention/look for things, all these things now appear on your mini map which definitely detracts from a few quests but overall I welcome it.

This thing appears to be pretty polarizing online with some people like myself loving it, while others decrying the re-localization and other aspects but I don't know man this just slapped so hard for me, especially coming off of the first half of the Cold Mid Arc and I'm excited to see SC and possibly Third Chapter redone in this style as well.

Highly recommended with the caveat being don't skip the original version if you've never played it before touching this.

For 3 dollars? I can't complain. Is it anything special? Not really? The aesthetic they're going for is at least semi-unique with the whole digitized actors thing. But with trying to make their game look like a Capstone game or some piece of shovel ware off of the 3DO they've made a game that is essentially that. The guns mostly feel alright, the level design is extremely basic but at least it's not confusing, half of the game is a sewer level. It's mostly easy until the very last room before the final boss where they dump like 20 of the most powerful enemy in the game in one room. A sequel game with actual maps and maybe a unique spin or twist on the gameplay would be nice I think.

I had to force myself to see this game to the end. By the end of Cold Steel 1 I had warmed up to the cast a little bit, the plot started to tie into the previous arc/arcs and the momentum was finally starting to pick up. Cold Steel 2, for almost the entirety of the run time stops all of this dead in its tracks. The civil war aspect falls pretty much flat, the walking tropes that are Class VII have even less to do this time outside of Rean. I don't like Rean, he is easily the worst Trails protagonist thus far, he's the biggest cardboard cutout of the whole cast yet they dedicate the most amount of time to him and his "arc."

This game has very similar pacing issues to Trails in the Sky 2, retreading the same towns as the previous game, most of the game is filler quests etc. But that game more than made up for it in its final third or so as well as the cast being miles more memorable and likable than anyone in this game. The intrigue just isn't there and none of the beats hit for me outside of some of the bits from the Final chapter onward.

Note: the games pacing is so bad, that while I took a little break while playing Sky 2 for about two weeks. I took a near TWO MONTH break from this game after reaching the halfway point

The gameplay is virtually identical to the first if not more exploitable due to how easy it is to AT delay every boss or enemy into the dirt with minimal build effort. Even the music this time fell pretty flat for me and that's a cardinal sin from a Falcom game.

I will see this series through to the end, there's still aspects of it here that I like and still characters in the world I'd like to see and play as again. But boy, I gotta say, the Cold Steel haters were right on the mark.

For fans of the series only or if you like the Cold Steel characters and plot I guess. So far with just Cold Steel 1 and 2 under my belt I am not a fan, at all.

Waited a long time for this to come out of early access before trying and was initially super disappointed. Episode 1, at least in my opinion is super rough, not unplayable but it doesn't play to the game/weapon/tool-set strengths very well, it also has an extremely amateurish feel in terms of map/level design. Lots of tight corridors, packed with enemies [that hit like trucks] monster closets will open in front of you, your retreat will be blocked and the game will spawn things behind you. Coupled with the lack of saving this gets annoying very quickly and I almost dropped it after finishing Ep 1 because I didn't want to play more two eps of that nonsense.

Luckily, I started Ep 2 anyway and the first 1/3 to half had me a bit worried but then around the halfway point of Ep 2 things improve immensely halfway into a level which is odd. The locale changes, the color palette switches from red to include more shades of blue and green, tons of new enemies are introduced and the level design opens up/improves a bunch. Ep 3 continues this trend and is incredibly strong, tons of good arena segments, the level design got even better, the final boss, while a bit too easy was at least not frustrating/boring which is something a lot of shooters struggle with.

Really this game is hard to rate, the first half suffers from a lot of issues that feel like things the developer was trying to feel his way out of. Enemy readability/visibility in the environments, encounter design, map layouts etc are vastly different and inferior to what you get after the halfway mark of the game, and the aesthetics in general which are a hindrance in the beginning of the game due to aforementioned issues become a point in the games favor and a boon in the latter half.

I recommend this game for that back half alone, it's some of the best stuff I've seen come out of the indie shooter scene in a while in terms of just overall fun and the aesthetics are killer. With the caveat being the first half being frustrating in a bad/confused way.