I enjoy it. It’s a relaxing, peaceful game. I just wish there were more objectives. The idea of just exploring and finding things doesn’t appeal to me all that much. The game has a lot of potential for combat, both in the spaceship and as a FPS, but both of these areas feel like they could be expanded a bit. Overall, I just wish that there were more combat-focused missions after completing the main storyline.
But it’s still pretty good and I enjoy it when I want to relax.
I think this is why it never quite clicked with me. It’s a gorgeous game and it’s really come such a long way, but personally I could use a bit more direction.
I found the combat frustratingly bland, and Hello Games don’t seem interested in improving it. The first time I played was several years after release, and I was surprised to learn the only two enemy encounters that were at all fun or interesting (the sentinel mech and capital ships) were only recently added. That was years ago, and I don’t think they’ve added any new major enemies since. Last I checked there were less than twenty enemy types in the entire galaxy and most are braindead “approach and shoot at the player until you die” types.
The on-foot weapons also feel anemic and sluggish - even your heavy weapons feel like shooting someone with a Nerf gun while whispering pew pew under your breath until they explode, and your actions will often be delayed waiting for an animation to complete (unstowing your weapon every few seconds being the main offender). Ship weapons are better by virtue of not having animations and being the same as every space game ever.
I hope Light No Fire has more enemy variety and a better-designed combat loop.
Silksong - I had hyped myself up way too much, yet it still delivered. Absolute masterpiece.
Dispatch - I finally understand why people enjoyed Telltale games so much. The writing is great, the characters are interesting, just all around a great experience.
Lies of P - Overture - I finally finished Lies of P & played Overture a few weeks back, after dropping off the game twice in the last years. Wow, that was great! And honestly more emotional than I’d expected.
I’ve heard so many good things about Lies of P that I think I’ve been avoiding it in a similar way to how I was irrationally reluctant to play Hollow Knight. It’s a bit of a moot point at the moment, because I don’t currently have the brain space to get my teeth into a Soulslike, but when I do, I should resist that silly instinct of mine.
I’ve not heard much of Dispatch, I should check it out
There are too many games I want to play and not enough time to play them, and with a programming background, I decided to basically use Agile methodology to schedule which games I can reasonably finish in a given month. I’ve been tracking my completion times and comparing against How Long To Beat to get good ballpark estimates. This year, I’ve beaten 30 games, 15 of which came out in 2025, and I think I can beat 3 more before the year is done. When a new game comes out, I don’t like to play it unless I’ve played the earlier / mainline / canon entries in the series, so not only did I play Borderlands 4, I played through 1-3, the Tales games, and the Pre-Sequel. I played through the first three Mafia games and intend to play The Old Country once the Steam sale starts. I played not only Kingdom Come: Deliverance II but also its predecessor.
Speaking of KC:D2, that’s the best game I played this year, by quite a margin. Obsidian put out two great games this year in Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2, but despite obviously sharing a lot of the same bones, they deliver quite different experiences. Dispatch was a treat. Split Fiction was what I wanted as an iteration on It Takes Two. Borderlands 4 continues what Borderlands 3 set up in making its systems fun for math nerds. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was fun and novel in so many ways, and I love the story behind its development; I do wish that I loved the execution of its story more, and I wish the combat wasn’t so feast or famine, but those things didn’t seem to bother most people. The Alters might be the most slept on game in 2025 relative to its quality; seriously, it’s a great story, and it’s nice to see that level of presentation in a game of its scope and genre. (A lot of Unreal 5 games in that list…)
I’m curious what your take on Borderlands was after paying them all back to back. I’ve been a fan of that world since the beginning, and I’m curious how they stand up without the nostalgia. And of course, which was your favorite?
This series is pretty crazy to play through back to back, because they have to escalate so many times.
Borderlands 1 has the flattest progression curve of the series, and I say that in a good way. I very much prefer flatter progression curves in RPGs, or loot games in this case. It solves a lot of problems with scaling difficulty, eliminating grind, and so on. That said, this is the only game in the series that checks this box. This one sticks fairly close to its North star of Halo meets Mad Max; the premise is simple and it works. I played Roland, because the turret seemed to be helpful when playing solo.
Borderlands 2 is where it finds its identity that it’s known for; actually, they sort of found that identity in the DLC for the first game, but here the characters get much talkier. It comes with a major upgrade in game feel and pacing.
The Pre-Sequel is the blandest of the series by far. The characters are boring, and the elements they use to spice up the formula are not very spicy. The boss fights are well designed though, even in a way that gives it something it does better than 2. But something else interesting happens in this game. I played the class where you get a little drone that comes along and marks targets. Later up the skill tree, this gives you access to a little mini game of killing the guys that you marked to extend the timer of your active ability, plus one or two other gimmicks that create a positive feedback loop. This makes the moment to moment decision making far more interesting in a fight, but it’s a shame how boring a lot of the game can be otherwise.
Tales from the Borderlands is probably the only truly standout writing in the series.
Borderlands 3 is one I seemingly enjoy more than most people. The villains are terrible, I’m sure we all agree, but what’s important to me about the writing in this series is that it has personality more than anything else. I’m not really expecting to hear a ton of great jokes, though I’ll admit I consider the part with Ice T in the body of a teddy bear to be pretty damn funny. The mini game that I noticed in Pre-Sequel that creates a positive feedback loop? It’s kicked into overdrive here. Building out my skill tree is so much better and more interesting than in its predecessors, and there’s yet another major upgrade to game feel over 2 and Pre-Sequel. The decision making in each fight is all about that feedback loop rather than just mindlessly shooting until health bars deplete. I really enjoyed this game. I’m somewhat new to the loot game genre in general, but I have finished Titan Quest before this series, and this positive feedback loop seems to be a relatively recent innovation in the genre; maybe around Diablo 3? I took a brief walk through some other games and couldn’t find anything like it.
New Tales from the Borderlands should have been thrown right in the garbage. It is the worst writing in the series by far.
Borderlands 4, I have yet to finish, but I’m probably 3/4 of the way through, and this time I’ve got a co-op partner. It stands on the shoulders of all the improvements in 3 and adds some new movement stuff as well as some subtle changes to the general design of classes. I once again play a gadget class, but even though my class was functionally nerfed, the way they did it made it more interesting to play. Even with a performance patch, the game still runs pretty shit, but I’m having a good time. The open world may actually be a detriment compared to the old way the game did things, but not so much that it’s a huge drag.
If I’m picking favorites, at this point, it’s a tough call between 3 and 4.
2 is by far my favorite story with the BEST character development, but it definitely has it’s flaws. And the later games have acknowledged and overcome most of those flaws, but it seems like they haven’t had the substance to make me think “That was SOOO GOOD!” like 2 did.
I’ve been hooked on Dragon’s Dogma 2 for a bit now.
I haven’t even used a fast-travel item because world traversal and exploration is so much fun. It’s a game that actually uses it’s open world as something other than an overworld to move to the next quest.
I’m mostly an RPG/FPS person so that’s what I’ll mention.
We got a remaster of Oblivion that was excellent, The Outer Worlds 2 was a lot better than the last one, and we got Dragon Age: The Veilguard which Dragon Age fans didn’t like because it was more like Mass Effect and YouTube “personalities” didn’t like because there was an option to establish your player character is trans when establishing their backstory. As a Mass Effect fan I absolutely adored it though, so I’m playing through it again right now. STALKER 2 finally came out, and it didn’t have A-Life for some reason, but it does now… it’s also has mod support now too, even on console.
Oh! Speaking of games with mod support on console, we also got Arma Reforger on both PC and console, so that’s opened up mil-sims to a wider audience. and while we’re talking about military shooters, Black Ops 6 came out and it was terrible, and they just kept making it worse all year to the point where even the CoD fanboys didn’t even care when the beta for Black Ops 7 came around. Activision panicked and made a bunch of changes that the community had been begging for years for, but it was too late and when BO7 came out most people didn’t care. Especially since the campaign was Co-Op only and weird. Multiplayer is solid but nobody cares and ActiBlizz is in full panic mode. This whole situation wasn’t helped by the fact that Battlefield 6 had a beta that managed one of the top concurrent player counts on steam because it was so well received. The multiplayer of BF6 was well received on launch, but people complained that the maps are small (they are) but with the first season they released a BR called RedSec and it’s just okay, but it came with a couple new big maps and also every update to BF6 makes it worse in some way so now people are kinda souring on the game.
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