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Beyond: Two Souls is quite possibly one of the worst games that I have ever played. I mean, David Cage's inability to write a coherent script and design gameplay without an overreliance on quick time events are so trite, it is almost a meme by now. The game is never more complicated than walking to a thing and pressing a button prompt. And the script is just an inexcusable, jumbled, derivative mess.

David Cage's fixation on Hollywood is no secret, and in Beyond he borrows heavily from various movies, but his writing ability isn't up to the task as he fails to grasp numerous fundamentals of good storytelling (i.e. Chekhov's gun, an overarching theme, good structure and pacing) and tone and atmosphere are all other the place: one moment you are playing as a bum, the next - exercising ancient native American demons. Back in the 90s and early 00s movies with a script like this were released as a straight-to-video and never saw a theatrical release. Willem Dafoe and that piece of identity crisis previously known as Ellen Page both trying to save it with some genuinely good performance but the whole game is just such a colossal, ridiculous mess that more often than not good acting is making the bad script unbelievably cringe.

The so-called gaming "journalists" and other pundits like to babble about a "toxic gaming culture", but looking at a Very Positive rating this game has I think it's actually the opposite - we are too forgiving.

Listen, I know it's been almost five years since Infra released into Early Access, but I only played it just now, and let me tell you, it is my personal Game of the Year, coming way ahead of all those fancy AAA titles.

Infra has been in my sights for a long while, so perhaps it was the premise of playing as a structural analyst surveying infrastructure condition that was putting me off. It sounded all too weird to really work. Oh boy, how wrong I was to hesitate that long.

The best way to describe Infra is, perhaps, to acknowledge how masterfully it walks the fine line between a full-on first-person puzzler and a more narrative-focused adventure of gradual exploration and discovery. Quite a few of the puzzles are optional and can be skipped. At the same time, players who prefer puzzle-solving to narrative experience are free to have it their way. But be aware that you will be missing on some interesting content if you chose to ignore one side of the game in favour of the other. And there is a lot to discover and experience in both exploration and in solving puzzles. Infra doesn't hold your hand and does not exactly explain its rules, so the hardest of puzzles can take a couple of hours for you to figure out and solve. Same for adventure part of the game, there's quite a lot of narrative content out there for you to discover both through various documents and audio logs, as well as through absolutely masterfully done environmental storytelling. And it's all serious stuff too, with the corruption of various official figures and damages that it caused to the environment, the city and its residents being the theme of the game.

And then, of course, the looks. I don't know if its the Source engine with its knack for realistically looking maps, or familiarity that anyone who lives in or ever visited the Baltic states gets to experience, but Infra is absolutely gorgeous.

Now let me finish with this. I don't exactly like long games. Anything longer than, maybe, a dozen of hours and I begin to lose interest. But I spent four times that with Infra and I didn't want it to end. It was beautiful, engrossing experience.

So dear developers, let me tell you this, take your time with that Whiprock DLC and be sure that it will be a day one purchase for me.

Unlikable protagonist with charisma of a potato and story straight from a preschool play are only parts of a problem. Star Wars aren't exactly known for its quality storytelling, with most of the feature films not being critical darlings, nor can the franchise boast about its many memorable characters, rehashing same old archetypes from one entry to the next. So Fallen Order having those problems come as expected.

What's worse is the game's constant hitching and stuttering that, if you look at user reports on the Internet, is affecting wide range of systems. As you move through the world, the game unloads old areas and loads new ones which leads to frequent and quite annoying microstuttering. Unfortunately, no matter your hardware configuration or game settings, Fallen Order is going to stutter.

To summarize, while not being a bad game per se, Fallen Order's both narrative and technical shortcomings are too apparent to be ignored. Refunded.

While the game starts promising, with puzzle design that compliments exploration and level progression, with solutions coming naturally and feeling logical, it gets worse the further you go. Puzzles quickly ramp-up in difficulty, blocking you from progressing, giving no clear objective on how you are supposed to solve them and requiring trial and error. The game is quite puzzle heavy, so such an unreasonably irrational puzzle design severely interferes with your enjoyment. Eventually, I just gave up. What got me, was a Pipe Dream type puzzle, which is rather unimaginative to begin with, but this one was covering several screens, and, to add insult to injury, you were supposed to solve it while simultaneously dodging enemy fire.

Shadow of Mordor plays like a boring crossbreed of an Assassin's Creed and Batman Arkham games. World map is bland with barely any standout or unique elements, which make you rely on the quest tracker rather learning the location, and looks more like an abandoned quarry rather than a Mordor environs. The story makes an impression of an aspired fanfic with one dimensional, lifeless archetypes of the characters. Much praised Nemesis System is just perk stats for the NPCs.

Feels unoptimised, unfinished, broken. Image is blurry regardless of the quality setting used, even with dynamic resolution and low-quality temporal AA disabled. Some serious pop-in issues with objects, clatter, grass coming into existence just a few meters away from you. Movement feels floaty and FOV is too narrow. Can't keep stable 60 fps on a system exceeding recommended requirements on anything above medium settings, and even then the game drop frames. Refunded.

I've played and finished every Assassin's Creed game up until Black Flag. Yet even though that game was praised for being rather innovative, Ubisoft's collect-a-fon of clearing every icon on the map started to feel rather boring by that point. Fast forward five years into the future - and the series transformed itself into the RPG. A shame that it plays even worse now. It does not even feel like an open world game anymore.

Let me explain. Every zone on the map is assigned with the level requirement, and if you are not meeting it then every enemy, and that includes even the local wildlife, will kill you in a couple of hits. You would assume that it's where the stealth comes in but no, even stealth assassination attack remove no more than a quarter of a health bar from the enemy. On the other hand if you are overleveled for a zone, then the experience gains are so vanishingly small that you can safely neglect them. What that means is that at any point you can only explore a single location on a map, effectively making this game a linear experience in an open world map.

What is even worse is that you can't just do the story missions only. Because they also have a level requirement and don't provide you with enough experience to continue. So after every story mission there's a grind of doing sidequests so you can do the next story mission.

And don't forget that for a long time now a moment to moment gameplay in every Ubisoft game is effectively you doing a checklist: collect X amount of stuff to upgrade Y, kill A amount of enemies to do B, do this insignificant nonsense just so you can perform that.

It is all plays so very mind-crushingly boring. Absolutely monotonous, lifeless game.

Mad Max is competent if uninspired open world game that borrows all of its ideas from somewhere else. Melee combat is from Batman Arkham games. The map is uncovered at vantage points, think Assassin's Creed and it's viewpoints. You conquer enemy camps just like you liberate outposts in Far Cry. Car combat and slingshot mechanics are from Just Cause and you do side-activities by going from one icon on the map to the other just like in any other open world game.

Neither of the above is a bad thing of course, and if anything Mad Max is a game with responsive and snappy controls. The desert is a nice looking, if understandably rather bland, place. The character of Max Rockatansky is voiced by an Australian actor, as he should be. And the story is as nonsensical and unnecessary as in the movies. And yet after playing this for a few hours, it all starts to blur together. You can conquer only so many camps, or do so many vantage outposts, clear so many minefields, or destroy so many convoys before the next activity starts to feel indistinguishable from the previous one. And it actually is the same activity repeated other and other again. You aren't exploring the world - you are mindlessly going from one icon on the map to next one. You are doing the same thing over and over, and over, and over, and over again. You are doing chores.

It may come as a surprise to some, but with the main version of the game being released back in 2011, and the Enhanced Edition following a year after that, Witcher 2 still holds up extremely well. Modern PCs have no trouble running it on Ultra, with Ubersampling enabled, with additional mods installed and get a silky smooth framerate. Throw a Reshade injector on top of it, and you got yourself a real looker.

But while the well-aged graphics is part of the appeal, the main attraction is the respect with which the game treats the player. You are capable of figuring things on your own, says the game and lets off your hand. Not every quest has a marker pointing to its destination and some tasks require preparations like finding and purchasing a specific book to learn about the weakness of a monster. Being second game in the series, Assassins of Kings isn't interested in retelling the events of the first game or in reintroducing of its characters. So if being bombarded by names of people and places, and the events that took place previously sounds like too much for you, you are better off starting with the first game.

Then there's this boldness to the game, that seems only Eastern European or Slavic games can have. The world of the Witcher is tough and you aren't The Hero on some Quest for Higher Meaning. Assassins Of Kings is the revenge story and the only thing noble about it are the heads of kings that are going to roll during the course of the game. While modern western titles are more interested in smoothing of sharp edges, or in sugarcoating, or just plainly in avoiding any controversy whatsoever Witcher 2 thrusts you into the situations where there is simply no right choice available and no sympathetic character to side with. Take for example the conclusion of the first act, you have to choose who to side with: government official or leader of the rebel group. Vernon Roche, the head of special unit forces stands for loyalty to the crown and for keeping the order, but he's also a torturer and as a person who enjoys hunting non-humans is directly responsible for the annihilation of many elves. Iorweth, commander of the last non-human guerilla unit, personifies freedom and fight against the discrimination of non-humans. Yet he is a mass murderer and terrorist and, an inadvertent nod at the current SJW politics of the western left, is just a condescending, violent person who uses the fight for civil rights as an excuse to validate his sense of unwarranted moral superiority and relieving his frustrations. And there's no third option, you can't sidestep either. It's either a torturer or a terrorist and the aftermath of your choice.

There's no such thing as happy ending in Witcher's 2 story, but because of its unapologetic approach, its attention to characters and story, its treatment of the player as a functioning adult capable of unwinding its web of intrigue and lies the impact the game makes is everlasting. If you're one of those kids who started their journey into this world with the third game you owe it to yourself to see how it all began. Buy the first game, then treat yourself to this masterpiece.

Being old enough and having played every game from the F.E.A.R. franchise back in the day of their original release makes rediscovering these titles after so many years quite an enjoyable experience. Despite being labelled as horror, any game in this series was first and foremost a competent FPS, a statement which is still true with this final instalment. With the premise heavily inspired by Japanese horror movies, particularly Ringu by Hideo Nakata, embodied through the character of omnipresent Alma, the living dead girl and the main antagonist of the series, and with blood and guts picturesquely scattered across the levels, the jump scares of this game are more reminiscent of the haunted house attraction and are more "cool" and "fun" rather than frightening.

Gameplay-wise F.E.A.R. 3 streamlines the cover system from the previous game and makes it actually worth using. However, the ability to lean, which was present in the first game, isn't included and is replaced by peeking that is used in conjunction with the aforementioned cover system. Health is no longer restored by consuming first-aid kits and is automatically regenerating instead. You can now also carry just two weapons instead of three like in previous games.

Being a corridor shooter, F.E.A.R. 3 makes up for it with imaginative levels. Each map, or rather "interval" - as they are called in this series, is uniquely themed, with pacing that alternates between shootouts and more quieter haunted house attractions.

Overall, with solid shooting mechanics and unique atmosphere, F.E.A.R. 3 still fills like a finely crafted experience up to this day. And it's a real shame we never got the fourth game.