Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, one of the best games i had the pleasure to experience this year!

It's simply beautiful and full of different cool looking planets & landscapes to explore, i also appreciate the game being linear instead of forcing it to be yet another hollow open world borefest. It also ran great for me aside from a few minor bugs.

The characters are amazing, i loved each and every single one of the guardians, the voice actors did an amazing job with them! i also loved the constant banter between them, something that i've never experienced in other games before, not like this anyways, and i was genuinely surprised by the amount of unique dialogue they had, and how fun it was to listen to, it all felt true to the characters & helped immerse me even further & highly elevate the experience for me.
Kudos to the devs for not only managing to make it not annoying having to listen to your crew talk almost all the time, but also fun and enjoyable!

The game also has some very cool looking costumes for you to collect, and thankfully even though they're pretty hidden, i was still able to get all of them without having to rely on any external guides, the game also has some other collectibles that will triggers unique dialogues with your crew mates on the ship, which add some lore and backstory and help flesh out the characters even further, those seem to be even harder to find so you'll probably need a guide for them. (they're worth getting though, IMO anyways)

The gameplay is also very fun & intuitive, you basically play as Star Lord, but also get to issue special commands to the other guardians to make them perform certain actions & moves, every character has a skill tree to unlock (including 3 skills you can get by spending points & a 4th final one you auto unlock by the final few levels as you advance in the story)
all skills are fun to use, and i especially love Rocket's Five Barrel Barrage!
(the Huddle system was also a cool surprise, but you'll have to find out about it yourself :P)

I can't say i'm a comics guy, but i was exposed to a lot of marvel's characters & lore through other mediums including the movies and other games including Marvel Snap in particular, so i was able to recognize many of the Easter Eggs & hidden stuff & even some of the obscure characters included (the Rocket's move i spoke about earlier was one of the things i recognized, which made me super excited to finally acquire it & see how they would possibly animate it, it did not disappoint xD), the game is simply full of stuff like this, and you can tell the team behind this game had so much passion and love for it.

I also really enjoyed the story, and consider it to be one of the better ones i experienced this year, i also constantly found myself genuinely laughing out loud thanks to the excellent dialogue, and the choices you make throughout the game seem to actually pay off by the end, so that was cool.

oh, and you can also craft upgrades on different workbenches you'll stumble upon in each level, but there are only 15 upgrades in total which is a shame as i was hoping for more.

All in all, this game was amazing for me, i simply could not get enough of it, and would totally buy the sequel if they ever make one (they totally should!), highly recommended! 8.5/10

Fallout 4 is the first fallout game i ever finished, and what a rough journey it was to get to that finish line..

So let me start with the fact that i got the GOTY version since i had such high hope for the game, i also did not like the vanilla character creator and one thing led to another & i found myself with like 30 mods ranging from unofficial bug fixes to fan-made story expansions, but as you'll learn later, even mods could not make Fallout 4 the game i hoped it was..
and i also was getting frequent crashes at the very start (even before i modded the game), so that didn't bode well.

I first assumed it was because i maxed out graphics, since the game seemed like it was on the brink of breaking down (this was before installing any mods mind you), so i tried lowering them, but the crashes persisted still. So i cranked up the graphics again, modded the game, made my custom character and tried to push through and see if stability/crashes would get any better, and they did, i had less crashes in the later game than i did in he first 15-20h or so.

So i started doing quests, and i have to admit, the game was just too overwhelming for me at the start, i did not know what stuff to loot, if i was supposed to loot everything or not, and i was bombarded with side quests (that are not marked as such, i hate how quests in this game aren't separated to categories for you to know which is which, even if they may appear to be obvious for some people, even the repeatable "radiant" quests aren't marked as such..), i also missed the hint you get about V.A.T.S system at the start so i did not know what button i had to press until i passed the 20h mark, yup, that's probably on me for not looking it up sooner..

Oh, before i forget, it's also possible to get radiant quests at the very start of the game that require you to go to DLC locations you haven't even unlocked and even if you did, the distance is just not worth it in the slightest, what the duck Bethesda?

I also lost my SSD a while back sadly, so i had to play this on a HDD, and boy oh boy what a mistake that was..
You see, i'm not used to having a loading screen every 5 minutes, and this game is full of them, every building you enter you get a loading screen, sometimes you get a loading screen inside the building itself, when you need to fast travel to somewhere you get slapped with double loading screens, the fast travel one and another to enter the location, and you can't fast travel out of a location until you exit it, this coupled with the loading times majorly hindered my enjoyment of the game..

And since every building is filled with trash to loot, and stupid me wanting to fully experience everything and not wanting to miss any collectibles, terminals or stuff that would trigger side quests i felt the need to check everything, or else i would've probably missed something, and let me tell you this is no way to enjoy the game, it'll have the opposite effect, i believe now that the correct way to play this was to just follow markers and get things done as soon as i could without having to waste hours looking through all the pointless lockers & desks.. etc, don't loot, just do the objective.

Graphics aren't everything, but Fallout 4 doesn't look that great even on the highest settings, which is a shame.
I also faced countless bugs including some game breaking stuff like objectives not triggering, NPCs not doing what they were supposed to do, animations getting stuck, my Pitboy disappearing altogether, the ESC/TAB buttons would stop working randomly until i restart the game, NPCs glitching through geometry and many other bugs.. cmon Bethesda, you can do better than this!

The story itself isn't that great, and the endings, or shall i say the "ending", the ending never changes.. it's sad to say but i actually had more fun playing some of the user created stuff than a lot of the vanilla stuff.

I also found it annoying how companions kept nagging you unless you play the way they like, and had to get a mod to remove the messages you get every time you do something they don't like, it's not something too major but i thought it was worth a mention.

oh yeah, about the game being too overwhelming, so when i first played this i kept having the feeling that maybe it's just not for me & i should drop it and move on, but i kept telling myself it'd get better if i just force myself to push a bit further (and i had to justify getting the GOTY edition somehow), and many many hours later i got used to most systems and i was finally able to shake that feeling and enjoy the game, after that i did a lot of exploring, and tons of side quest, and it was all alright, not great, but not bad either, and that probably sums up how i feel about Fallout 4. It's an alright game, and it has the content to justify the price point, it's just that said content is just "okay" at best with a ton of filler on the side, nothing too exciting, nothing that will wow you, just a bunch of busywork for you to kill time.

I feel like Bethesda was focused more on the quantity rather than the quality and it clearly shows, and i personally have no use for filler and would rather play something 10 times shorter but actually memorable and full of quality content, something that respects my time & doesn't have the need to have me do pointless stuff because content!

About settlements, i got a mod for that, a mod that added an actual decent storyline (Sim Settlements 2), which was pretty good and i highly recommend! said mod also allowed me to make my settlers build their own ♥♥♥♥ instead of relying on me, so i don't have much to complain about that, but from what i read the vanilla systems are pretty tedious and bad.

So, after 100h or so, after finishing the super underwhelming main quest & feeling robbed of a satisfying conclusion, and after having to deal with all the slow loading screens & all the bugs (minor to game breaking), and having those bugs extend to even the user created quests i just reached my limit, i could not justify spending any more time on it even though i was looking forward to try the 2 major DLCs included in the GOTY game, i just could not keep going any further, i was just done with it all..

So, in conclusion, after all this you might think i hate this game, i don't, and i don't even consider it to be "bad", i certainly wouldn't call it good either, it's with games like this that i wish steam offered a 3rd in-between option for reviews..

If you have countless hours you want to waste on average to below average busywork, if you're looking for an infinitely moddable game, or if you just want a game where you can loot anything not nailed to the ground even if that loot is nothing to talk about, and if you're fine with the famous Bethesda jank and don't mind the frequent bugs than this game is perfect for you, seriously, the content is there if this is what you're looking for, it is worth the price.

BUT, if what you're looking for is a "good" & "engaging" story, a bug free game, something "memorable", than you should totally look elsewhere. 6/10