Great experience. Fast-paced action that feels great in hand and made especially gratifying through excellent visual effect work and lots of player agency. Good quantity of content for its price and an insanely rocking soundtrack.

Some cons: visual clarity is sometimes poor and the dodge roll feels a bit overpowered as it's highly spammable with next to no risk; it feels like the dash module you get later in the game would be better as the default, since it consumes boost and overall feels more fun to play with. I'll add that the story, while fine and not obstructive to the gameplay, didn't particularly catch my attention.

Writing this just after having beaten the main story, so I can't speak for the post-game content, but there seems to be a lot of it with New Game + that I'm looking forward to.

Yeah, this is poop, no surprise here.

I played this in multiplayer with a friend during the Olympic Games 2021 free weekend. This is, as should be expected, essentially a collection of minigames sold for 40€. This alone should turn off most potential buyers, but it would be nice if these minigames were at least fun. In reality, most of these are overly simplistic and/or are just too clunky to be enjoyable.

Most of the games that involve moving fast will ask you to mash A to go faster which has always sucked and lack anything substantial beyond that. Tennis and table tennis are shockingly clunky as there's a lot of animation-induced input delay on swings that varies depending on where the ball is. Football also feels bad to control and we commonly had issues with not being able to switch to the player we wanted or the game automatically switching us to another player without warning which led to at least one self-goal. Most of the basic actions in the game lack proper feedback which both feels bad and gets confusing in some of the more obtuse games like swimming where I had no idea if I was accelerating properly.
Some are nice. We particularly enjoyed judo which was decently profound and felt like it could be expanded into a larger game (in fact, there were probably some similar fighting games focused on throws in the 90s). Once we had a hang of the mechanics, there were mindgames to be done around mashing and spacing. But the rest are just not interesting enough to warrant more than a game or two.
Putting aside basic mechanics, for an arcade-style game, it's really difficult to get into a game. There are several screens that appear before and after each trial and it's very annoying to have to skip them all every time. It doesn't help that certain games such as the 100m last literally less than 20 seconds, yet you still have to go through the same idiotic cutscenes every time you play them.
While some games are way too short, others are way too long. Tennis in particular took so long to finish because neither of us could take three in a row that the game only ended when we had a sudden desync. Football also took forever for a similar reason. I understand these are the actual rulesets used in the Olympics but why use rulesets designed for professional athletes in an arcade game where most players will not be competent enough to win in a reasonable time within that ruleset? It goes against the arcade design philosophy by trying to simulate real sports at the cost of fun; I would call it half-assing.

Sadly, the gameplay was only one part of what makes this game a sad sight. Performance is an issue that I imagine will make online play severely difficult for the game's target audience. Remember the crappy little cutscenes that play before and after everything ? On my friend's machine, which does not usually have any issues running games of this age, the game ran fine during gameplay but struggled horribly during those cutscenes which led to uncaught desyncs and made it impossible for me to skip certain screens due to how the netcode seems to be built. We were eventually forced to abandon the game's online mode altogether and use Remote Play Together instead which, despite its inherent input delay, worked way better. On my end, despite being on max settings, I noticed distant structures still looked blurry and a few other graphical oddities which don't usually happen, even in SEGA games. And while we're talking graphics, I should mention that character models look absolutely horrible for a 2019 game ; the half-assed attempt at stylization did nothing but remind me of certain shovelware on the Wii. Background characters look even worse. At the very least, the game is at least a good monster creator.

Overall, there's very little value to this game and it is absolutely not worth its price. We had fun dissing it one night because it was free, but there's plenty of better things to buy with 40 bucks.

Outward is probably more than a few people's cup of tea but it wasn't ours. I made the hasty mistake of buying it around its release to play with a friend because its concept seemed dreamy but we quickly grew frustrated.

It prides itself as a verisimilar, challenging RPG and has some very interesting ideas but there was very little to reward us for going through the insane effort it asked us for. On paper, combat is designed so that every enemy is as much of a threat to you as you are to them, but in practice, it feels heavily biased against you with even the lowest level enemies feeling like damage sponges that can take thrice as many hits to go down as they would need to kill you. This takes place in very boring overworld areas where there's not much to do aside from getting attacked by random wild enemies and advancing towards the next zone. The mechanics also lack the interactivity required to make the verisimilar aspect of the game interesting.

Please be mindful of what you're getting into if you do decide to buy Outward.

/!\ DISCLAIMER: these are relatively early impressions of the game.

Lobotomy Corporation is a very strange game. It's an experience that has a lot of value but even early on, it's a straining and surprisingly difficult challenge.

I'm relatively early into the game, having reached day 12 (for the second time, as I've had to restart once for unrelated reasons). I initially did not expect it, but I think this game is better described as a strategy-management hybrid than just a management simulation, due to the amount of micro-management you have to do with your employees when it comes to dealing with breaches. The base management mechanics can be seen as simple to moderately complex depending on who you ask but associated with the Abnormalities' creative and very threatening effects, they'll quickly lead to deeply engaging head-scratching situtations. And from what I've read, it only gets more complicated and brutal as you go on.

This is apparently a game that is very difficult to complete in one playthrough and where you'll have to restart several times to get the true ending (you do get to keep certain elements of progress, such as knowledge of Abnormalities, research and Sephirot mission completion). You might want to know this in advance if you're a completionist or simply don't have the time or attention span to dedicate to it.

ULTRAKILL actually made one of my fingers bleed.
And I enjoyed it.

As of right now, only a third of the final game's content is currently out, but it's clear ULTRAKILL is and will be something special. Despite its aesthetics and its callbacks to 90s shooters, it's hard to put it in the same category as retro-styled shooters like Dusk or Ion Fury because it clearly has its own identity ; one that borrows heavily from what inspired it, but without neglecting originality or polish and that doesn't forego a clear vision instead of just going all-in onto the cool factor kitchen sink.

It can be ridiculously challenging both through extremely dense encounters and high execution requirements but the gameplay loop is so thrilling that only a couple of levels actually made me consider taking a break.
The shooting is amazing, but people don't talk about the movement enough ; you're granted very strong options at a base level yet the advanced techniques stemming from these options still feels challenging and rewarding to master, while being perfectly integrated into the level design.
Which, by the way, is also splendid, with a stupidly high amount of secrets for a game that's not complete at the moment. The structure is linear enough not to feel confusing but there's still incentive for exploration and revisiting old levels, even in ways that go completely off the normal path.

And for a game with a PSX aesthetic that might seem like a budgetary measure at first, there's some wonderful artistry to be found. You can find varied environments, interesting character design, and even some moments of very impactful direction, like with the title drop in the first level or the intro for Act 1's second layer boss. Then there's the bangin' soundtrack composed by the game's creator himself, because apparently Hakita has every talent known to man, that's already past an hour long and just doesn't miss, ever.

ULTRAKILL is absolutely worth it. Even in its unfinished state, it'll provide you with more playtime and entertainment than it should at its price, and it'll only keep on getting bigger.

I had been following this game's development for months before its Early Access launch, as I'd loved the first game and was interested by the daringness of a 3D sequel. I'm not disappointed in the least.

Risk of Rain 2 keeps the principles that made the original game so fun and doubles down on them while literally adding a new dimension and polishing the original ideas from Risk of Rain 1. The gameplay loop of RoR1 was unique even among roguelites and I am thrilled to see it make a return.