Recent reviews by Gentlefish

It really is More Elden Ring, but with ideas from every aspect of play - exploration/navigation, mechanics, story - taken to new extremes. More verticality and even more carefully hidden secrets, new intensities of combat (and applications for jumping over rolling), elaborations on old lore and completely new narratives. The Scadutree Blessing system starts out as a powerful alternative to traditional leveling and rapidly eclipses it entirely; the percent increases from blessings and the enemies' stats seem perfectly tailored to allow your previous character-building choices to stay meaningful while also providing an experience akin to starting over from scratch. This does come at the cost of having a to-do list on new characters or NG cycles.
I can't give any hard numbers, but experientially, the content of the expansion feels roughly one-half to two-thirds the size of the base game, and I'd guess it took me between 50 and 70 hours to reach the finale (being relatively thorough in exploring). The final boss is currently threatening to double that time, and is also the one negative mark I'm giving Shadow of the Erdtree. Fair or unfair, hard or too hard- these are meaningless distinctions. The fight is so overwhelming it's like learning the game from scratch. Also there's an attack that cuts your FPS by 66% for its duration, because From showed no restraint with visual effects this time around.

THE fantasy adventure game. It's janky in places, but goes toe-to-toe with its own sequel and sometimes wins.

Of all the games on Steam saddled with mixed reviews, Dragon's Dogma 2 deserves it the least. It is a masterful execution of the archetypal Fantasy Adventure, with all its foot travel and unexpected detours and cooperation with your fellows, and a triumph of video games as an interactive medium. The simple ability to pick things up, pick people up, throw things at people and throw people at things gets more mileage in DD2 than I've seen in all the games I've ever played combined, both in and out of combat. I once was presented with a stubborn NPC who refused to meet with the NPC I was helping... and so I picked up NPC B and hauled her over to NPC A, and the quest was checked off my list. Speaking of quests and NPCs, the characters in this game are admittedly pretty flat, but they're all charming enough to make an impression. The pawns- while they can get grating- are almost always delightful in how they chat with you and each other, and how they interact with their surroundings.
I think the primary weakness of the game is that the combat just isn't challenging. There's around three enemy types that ever really tried to kill me, and I shrugged off what should have been infuriating levels of stunlocking (from wolves and bandits in particular) just because there wasn't any damage backing it up; it just made the fight longer and provided some slapstick to laugh at in the meantime. Thankfully the combat is still loads of fun, due to the aforementioned lifting and throwing, as well as a surprising attention to detail in things like elevation and whether or not somebody's wearing a helmet altering the flow of combat. The class system, too, is extremely satisfying. Freely switching between different playstyles while collecting augment skills with which to slap power bumps and quality-of-life improvements (e.g. greater lantern illumination, slower stamina drain while climbing/tackling opponents) on my favorite classes is just fantastic.
In summary, DD2 is a true adventure. Assemble a band of weirdos, journey out to meet a whole world of weirdos and do weird tasks for them, and beat up hordes of leathery, feathery and scaly weirdos in order to save that world. Despite how simple and played-out the premise sounds, there's really no other game like it.
Except for DD1, I guess, which I will buy as soon as it goes on sale again. Please, Capcom. Please.

Void Stranger is one of those games that is genuinely best experienced knowing as little as possible. It is exactly as beautiful as it looks and sounds, and the gameplay is equally fine-tuned and artistic. Every new mechanic is introduced as a simple puzzle for you to solve, and the game is simple enough that this works extremely well as a sort of ongoing show-don't-tell tutorial (aside from a point in the opening where it's unclear how to navigate from the canvas containing your cursor to the 'confirm' box below it- just press down until it's highlighted).
One quirk of this approach, which is a bit frustrating but endlessly funny in hindsight, is that- if you simply watch the trailer and then buy the game like I did, without any further research- you go into Void Stranger not knowing what the staff does. You are given the staff at the very beginning of the game, and you will use it to solve the majority of the floors you descend through, but the only hint you are given about what to do with it is the nature of the obstacle in front of you.
What you hopefully will go in knowing is the fact that this is indeed a puzzle game, not a game with puzzles here and there. The rules are simple but absolute and are used to create a wide variety of scenarios, and the more of them I somehow blunder through, the more I am reminded that I am very stupid.

Palworld starts out with a bang- setting up your home base for the first time, and seeing your weird little creatures harvest resources and help each other plant and water crops, feels pretty great. Exploring further and further out from your base, bringing back new pals, materials and technology unlocks each time, feels even better. But then you hit your first or second plateau in progression and have some time to think about things- like how you're (temporarily) stuck in a region of the world that is far too large and bland to be holding nothing more than the low-level pals and enemies you've already seen.
It's no secret that the game world is composed entirely, or almost entirely, of Unreal Engine stock assets; while in a vacuum this is no big deal, I don't think Palworld works within this limitation nearly as artfully as it could. The ruined churches and their accompanying buildings, for example, were dropped in without floors or any suggestion that they ever had floors, and many forests are just terrain-brushed swaths of identical trees with no undergrowth or rock features. As an aside, certain world elements (eg. railings on bridges, various decorative objects in dungeons) pop in right next to you, but that's the kind of early access jank I'll laugh off until it's polished.
On the gameplay side, though, there's cracks which I suspect are of the 'good enough' variety and not the early access variety. The poacher syndicate goons you butt heads with do not feel smarter or more dangerous than the pals they hunt- which does provide some comedy and opportunities for surprise attacks, but feels really underwhelming in a direct fight. Their midgame counterparts, the Free Pal Alliance, are... exactly the same. Same tactics, same weapons, same propensity to throw hands with every pal in a mile radius (and to keep one in a cage in the center of their camp for you to free, same as the poachers). The collectible documents imply that they either don't practice what they preach or have a hidden agenda, but while that could make them more interesting in theory, in practice it's just a post-hoc justification for bland design. Boss fights, at least, are actually pretty good- they achieve a nice rythm of rotating your pals and trying to deal damage of your own without getting too much of the boss's attention on you.
Last but not least, the pals themselves are really hit-or-miss. The good ones, whether original or- shall we say- homages to specific Pokemon or Pokemon archetypes, are just fine. The bad ones, though, are real stinkers, such as Depresso (a grouchy-looking ambiguous mammal-thing which consumes energy drinks for its special ability) or Hangyu (a long-armed... floating head?). There's a hypothesis going around that Palworld's creature design was done through generative AI, and once you take into account the Pocketpair CEO's outspoken positivity towards AI and the studio's 2022 party game AI: Art Impostor, it doesn't sound too far-fetched. This is unproven, of course, but it's hard not to start seeing patterns in the pals. Pals that look like they take queues (or perhaps pull directly?) from a lot of different Pokemon, or seem like different executions of the same concepts, will incongruously include a whole and recognizable piece of a specific Pokemon, like Killamari having Espurr's eyes or Robinquil having Blaziken's legs. Personally, regardless of how cynical a game is in its concept or execution, I at least want some thought put into what the collectible monsters at its center are, instead of randomly generating the forms first and working out the substance later.
All in all, it was a decent 17 hours and 20 player levels (out of maybe 60? 80? I forget), but I'm going to have to take a second look at Ooblets or something. Palworld gave me a desire for a creature collector farming/management sim which it did not itself fulfill.

I played Ty on the GameCube as a kid, and even though it defined that small slice of my childhood, to my recollection I never beat the game- I got softlocked, or simply stuck, on the final stage. I made some attempts to pick the game up again in later years, but I didn't get far, and by that point I didn't like collectathons anyway (or so I though). I was intrigued when the remaster came out, but I never committed to trying it.
Now, six years later and twenty years after the original release, I gave it another try and I LOVED it. It's got its issues (namely obtuse gimmick bosses and a camera that recenters itself as soon as you stop moving the stick), and I wanted to die whenever there was one last opal in a stage that I couldn't find, but it's still a ripper of a game and not just held up by nostalgia. The run-and-rang gameplay loop is simple but fun, collectibles are interesting to find, and there's even a vehicle segment. The unlockable boomerangs are varied (if sometimes redundant or situational), the environments are surprisingly beautiful and full of life, the music is top-notch, and the character dialogue is stuffed full of Australianisms like you wouldn't believe. Perhaps more importantly, the port is phenomenal! I got all the way through (between 14-15 hours) with no crashes or bugs, AND the game can run at 144 FPS. I assumed before playing that it would be locked to 60 or even 30, but Krome went the extra mile to breathe new life into Ty and for that I am grateful.
TL;DR Ty the Tasmanian Tiger is a fair dinkum masterpiece of its era, and you should definitely give it a go.

Looking at it in a bare-bones way, Signalis appears to be a classic Resident Evil but in space. I have never played RE, but this game has all of the ammo management, puzzles, backtracking and frustrating inventory space I could ask for from a survival horror. On top of that, the menu navigation and character movement are neither too smooth to be tactile nor too clunky to be fun; in a word, the game feels weighty.
All this is finished with a cohesive artistic vision that's gorgeously crunchy and makes Signalis a truly unique experience. I would recommend it to practically anyone, even if you don't really go for horror games; all you need is an appreciation for suspense, mystery, and problem-solving.
Pro tip for saving ammunition: assume everything you shoot will eventually get back up.

You could say it's the Dark Souls of open-world RPGs.

If the Ace Combat series is Metal Gear Solid in the sky, Project Wingman is Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. A game unafraid to ask the questions "what if you had three special weapon slots," "what if arsenal birds were regular enemies," and "what if railguns were actually high-powered lasers?"

I've been thinking about how to change my review off and on for a while now, never quite going through with it because I didn't think it would be as eloquent or impartial as I'd like. But ♥♥♥♥ it, this game is a great concept gone to waste. Player feedback is taken into account, but good changes are always matched by stupid ones that make the game worse. We're also constantly being promised things (event reward distribution, roadmaps, updates) that take weeks longer than expected to materialize. And as for the F2P elements? The progression is comically grindy and unrewarding, the daily/weekly missions are comically unrewarding, and the weekly shop and general monetization are comically expensive, anti-consumer and just plain ball-busting. See that pack you want but have to buy with money instead of the gems you already bought? It's on sale! But it's only on sale because weekly reset is going to bring recolors/alts of those items in the shop. And the recolor of the legendary dragon is going to be in ANOTHER cash-only pack, which will run concurrently with the other one. I'm not making this up, it happened to me. Literally as soon as I gave this game another chance and spent some more money on it, it made a fool of me just like last time.
Oh, and more pertinent to a prospective player like yourself: this game is dead and you will be regularly fighting people way outside your reach. Even if you put in the effort to study up and learn the game, you're going to get ground into paste in the meantime.

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High-octane dogfighting action awaits if you're willing to brave the learning cliff. With three classes, three gamemodes (one of which I guarantee you will hate, but which it is depends on you; for me it's Gates of Fire) and a suite of finely tuned mechanics, this game is off to a great start. There's a lot to manage between your fireball and fire breath regens, your skill cooldowns, and your boosts (which must be manually regained by flying along glowing veins in the ground), but getting into the rythm of it feels very rewarding. My one complaint about the moment-to-moment gameplay would be that incoming fireballs track you too well and over too much distance, but since my outgoing fireballs feel completely fair I think that's just my inner scrub talking.
I can't speak a whole lot about the cosmetic unlocking experience because I got a founder's pack and am currently benefiting from an XP booster, but it seems bearable . Probably on the slow side, but you get some XP every match and the challenges aren't insulting (looking at you, Halo Infinite). Also, while the shop offerings are unfortunately on a rotation, there's not a single battle pass to be seen.
But speaking of cosmetics, Century made a clever side activity out of them! Acquiring dragon skins or encountering other players' dragons once or twice in the field will unlock bestiary entries, which are one- to two-paragraph rundowns on the habits and native range of the morph you've discovered. It's like Pokemon in miniature, and with virtually none of the effort.