After playing through a bunch of games through the summer, I realised it would take far too long to review every single one, so I’ve decided to do some short reviews about a bunch of games all at once.
Stellaris
My friend gave me Stellaris about 3 years ago and I only started playing it recently after going on a long trip with nothing but my laptop and an awful internet connection. Over this trip I played 30ish hours and got thoroughly hooked. Stellaris is about controlling a spacefaring empire and doing your best to survive, and possibly thrive. The only gripe I have with it is that it is not very intuitive, and some mechanics might elude you for a good 20 hours. The main appeal of Stellaris is that you can roleplay as your own custom empire instead of most grand strategy games requiring you to play as an existing country from history.
In the end Stellaris is an incredibly fun game best enjoyed with friends and DO NOT OPEN THE L-GATE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!
Palworld
Palworld is the hot topic at the time of writing, and I’ve put in a good 20ish hours in so here’s what I think about it. Palworld primarily is not a Pokémon clone, it’s an ARK clone so it suffers from quite a few of the same issues such as the technology system. But on that same front it fixes some issues from ARK as well, such as the fact that in ARK there isn’t a motivation to protect your base from raiders if you play co-op but instead Palworld spawns random groups of Pals and raiders to fight you.
Overall Palworld is a fun take on a stagnating genre, but I don’t think it will hold its popularity for long.
Guilty Gear
I was always a bit scared of fighting games where you had to use complex combo’s but after a while, I’ve gotten used to them. It can have a bit of a rough learning curve, but it is very rewarding. The best part for me is the characters and the art style blending 3d and 2d animation. The game suffers from having barely populated Australian servers and unless you use Japan’s 200ms servers you will be waiting a while for a match that isn’t against the exact same guy who mops the floor with you.
Guilty Gear can be incredibly fun at the best parts and crushing at its worst but overall, it is very rewarding.
PS. If you play Potemkin, I will find you and steal your controllers.
Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy
The remaster of Apollo Justice came out recently and frankly it hasn’t made much of an impact online with the sole exception of my bank account and I think that’s a shame. The remaster has been anticipated for a long time, but $75 AUD is a little steep for 3 games that came out in 2007, 2013 and 2016 respectively with little added content, but a legal way to obtain the games was needed. Overall, the gameplay is the tried and true Ace Attorney experience with new additions to spice it up such as 3D investigation and dusting fingerprints. The only addition that didn’t work as well in my experience was the “Perceive” system, it often amounts to replaying the testimony 5 times looking for the “twitch” of the witness until you give up and look up a walkthrough.
Overall, it’s a very fun game and worth picking up on a sale at least after you play the first trilogy or you’ll be more confused than the judge.
Summary
While school holidays can be fun for gaming, it’s important to check the clock once in a while or suddenly it’s 4am and you really just need to finish this one thing before you go to bed. Overall if I had to give a rating for all the games it would be the follows,
| Gameplay | Graphics | Long term appeal | Overall | |
| Stellaris | 8/10 | 6/10 | 10/10 | 9/10 |
| Palworld | 6/10 | 8/10 | 5/10 | 6/10 |
| Guilty Gear | 6/10 | 10/10 | 7/10 | 7/10 |
| Ace Attorney | 9/10 | 7/10 | 6/10 | 8/10 |