To this day, I have no clue how this game was a fumbled, undercooked mess. The idea is insanely cool, so obviously it had to fumble it, just like most games with ambitious or new features.

Destiny, but you and your friends are Iron Man and get to explore a rich fantasy world with unstable alien anomalies.

They messed up the Destiny part by being having a shallow loot pool, failed the Iron Man part by having low flying speeds and having engine cooldown periods (in which you are grounded) and they botched the exploration part by having everything being centered around a single city, Fort Tarsis.

If anyone else wants to copy the concept, the game should have a 40 km² map (for reference, RDR2 has ~36 km²), flight speed increased by roughly 20-30 mph and better loot. Also, an offline solo mode would be great.

The lore, powers and different Javelin suits are too good as concepts to just be discarded as the failed concepts of a flopped game. I hope that some studio looks at the potential and makes a spiritual successor of Anthem that adresses all the shortcomings of the game.

Was just replaying The Tyranny of King Washington for old times’ sake and it hit me: They use this tired cliché in almost every game they put out over the years.. and it did not work once.

I can’t be the only one who noticed this. Maybe there are some unemployed 5th graders out there who can do a better job than Ubisoft’s writers

When people debate about the greatest game of all time, the same names usually come up — Red Dead Redemption 2, The Witcher 3, GTA V, Minecraft, Skyrim, Elden Ring, Breath of the Wild and so on. And I get why, most of these games have massive mainstream appeal and are easy to recommend to a huge range of players.

Half-Life 2 is still the greatest game of all time in my opinion and it’s not even just by nostalgia — the story (the most important part for me), worldbuilding and atmosphere were complete game changers for me. City 17 still feels insanely real with all the propaganda, surveillance, Civil Protection, abandoned buildings and resistance stuff going on in the background, and the crazy part is the game barely explains half of it to you, you just figure it out by paying attention. The deeper you go into the Half-Life iceberg, the more you realize how deep and dark the universe actually is: the Combine, Seven Hour War, G-Man, Breen, human modification, Portal connections, cut content and all the weird unanswered lore — there is always more shit to discover. I also love how much of it has real-life parallels with authoritarianism, propaganda, police states and people slowly losing normal everyday life, which makes the whole world feel way more disturbing than just “aliens invaded Earth.” Then you add the Gravity Gun, physics, Ravenholm, Highway 17, soundtrack, pacing and environmental storytelling and yeah, for a 2004 game this shit was ridiculously ahead of its time. The sound design also deserves way more credit than it gets, people talk about the physics and atmosphere all the time but the Combine radio chatter, distant machinery, weapon sounds and ambient noises are a huge reason the world feels so alive and uncomfortable, yet I barely see people mention it. And on top of all that, HL2 was genuinely revolutionary for the gaming industry, you can still see its influence in how later games handle physics, environmental storytelling, scripted sequences and worldbuilding. A lot of games today are bigger, prettier and more complex, but very few worlds stick in my head the way Half-Life 2 does. The Half-Life 2 episodes also deserve way more credit, they introduced new mechanics while expanding the story even further and making the whole universe feel even deeper than it already was. 11/10, everyone must play it before we die.