Review at the bottom of the post!

Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures is a series of short episodic games, from before Telltale really struck it big with their Walking Dead series. This one tries to recapture the success of their episodic Sam & Max games, but using the beloved claymation series Wallace & Gromit as its basis. For those not familiar with Wallace & Gromit, then shame on you! It's a charming series of claymation cartoons, following the cheese loving inventor Wallace, and his dog Gromit, which has seen infrequent releases since 1989.

Sadly Telltale's attempt at creating something based on this property is overall rather disappointing. While it captures some of the charm of the cartoon, it's also held back by Telltale's strict adherence to the classic P&C formula, with uninspired, and frankly slightly annoying, puzzles. If this game was larger, it would likely have been a real pain to play, as that would meant that you would have to rub more things against more other things, in order to find which combination works. But it's saved from complete disaster by its brevity.

In this episode, Wallace has managed to ruin Mr. Paneer's cheese shop (yes, Mr. Paneer is Indian, and yes, paneer is a kind of Indian cheese), and offers to repay him with a lot of honey, as Wallace has decided to create his own honey business. Of course, you can't instantly make large quantities of honey from a single hive, particularly not when you don't have any pollen for the bees. And so the adventure begins!

The term Metroidvania is a portmanteau of two words, Metroid and Castlevania. For anyone who's only played the older Castlevania games, the "vania" part might seem odd, but to anyone who's played any of the games that Igarashi worked on will know why Metroidvanias are called Metroidvanias. Koji Igarashi re-worked the Castlevania formula significantly with his Symphony of the Night, and the result was amazing. Symphony of the Night turned out to to be an absolutely stellar game, and over the following years Igarashi and co. was allowed to make more games in the vein of Symphony of the Night, almost all of them being great, and commercially successful.

But with Konami being Konami, they decided that the good times were not allowed to last, and so they simply decided that Igarashi would not be allowed to make more of his successful and popular games. So in 2014 he left Konami, and formed his own company, together with a Chinese Businessman. Seeing the success that some developers had had with Kickstarter, he then, in 2015, created his own campaign. He wanted to make what Konami had not allowed him to make, another game like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

And that's this game. It's a Castlevania game in all but name, borrowing almost all of its design from Symphony of the Night, and the games that followed it. And it's frankly outstanding. There's been a bunch of great Metroidvanias in recent years, and Bloodstained is one of the greatest, being just a bit behind Hollow Knight. The only area where I feel like Bloodstained falls a bit short is with the bosses, which are generally too easy, but the exploration feels satisfying, controls are tight and responsive, soundtrack is great, and the game looks decently good as well (although I do think it would have looked even better had they've gone with high quality pixel art instead of 3D models).

Wrote a review for this, link at the bottom!

Ever played Fallout: New Vegas, and felt like you wanted more?

Outer Worlds is Obsidian's latest game, and it follows closely in the footsteps of Fallout: New Vegas, with first person combat and exploration, and an emphasis on dialogue and skill checks.

Outer Worlds is set in a dark comedic future. You've just been brought out of cryogenic sleep, and find yourself in the company of a slightly unhinged scientist, who tells you about what happened to the colony ship you were on. Something went wrong, and it never reached its destination. Instead of trying to rescue you, they had just abandoned the ship, with its hundreds of thousands of frozen passengers.

What surprised me about Outer Worlds was how small it turned out to be. Compared to the likes of New Vegas, Fallout 4 and so on, Outer Worlds really is tiny, and that's reflected in the playtime. It took me less than 20h to beat it, doing almost all the side quests. It's still a fun game though, and 20h is a respectable length for a game.
One area where the game does fall a bit flat is with its economy. RPGs usually do have rather bad balance when it comes to their economies, but Outer Worlds is one of the worst I've encountered in this regard. The game just showers you with stuff, be it ammo, healing items, lockpicks, hacking tools or just money, making all of this lose its meaning. When you're ending the game with over 10000 bullets, something is off. Also, almost every locked door that you open will give you a few lockpicks in return, making lockpicks a pointless resource. The game also gives you too much experience, so you'll quickly out-level everything, if you do a bunch of sidequests.

A review at the bottom of the post for this one as well!

Ah Youngblood, mediocrity is thy name.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood is a cooperative focused FPS, set in the Wolfenstein universe. You're playing as one of two sisters, daughters of the main character from the previous games, as they try to find their father in a Nazi-occupied Paris in the 1980's.
Let's start with the good:
Much like the previous Wolfenstein games from Machine Games, the guns have a nice feel to them. Sound effects feel meaty and they also feel distinct. Also, in the linear areas, the level design is pretty good, with good enemy placement and map design that allows you to approach the larger fights in several different ways, depending on preferred playstyle. The game also runs surprisingly well, even if my graphics card sometimes decided that trying to force a game with a 4GB VRAM requirement to run on a 2GB card was a bit too much for it (a restart of the game solved this).

Sadly, a lot of the games design choices seem to have been informed by its "live service" nature. You've got some (surprisingly small) open-world regions, that you need to traverse repeatedly, and you get a lot of uninspired sidequests, that force you to go to the same area several times, with the difference between two missions sometimes being that you need to interact with different objects in different rooms.
The game also has hyper-aggressive level scaling, so every time you level up, the enemies level up, making levels pretty much useless.
You've got things you can buy with real money to help you along the way, and with how bullet spongey many of the enemies end up being, I can see why someone would be tempted to buy power. The game is overall not hard, but the combination of having to visit the same few areas repeatedly, and having them populated by increasingly bullet spongey enemies might well break the will of some people.

The game has some good points, but it also has some serious bad points, and overall, it's not a great game.