What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?

After finishing Breath of the Wild, I borrowed Tears of the Kingdom from a friend and already have probably 20-30 hours in it.

My first impression is that it doesn't feel like a Zelda game. BotW already broke from the formula, but it still felt like Zelda but with different tools. Unfortunately, they pushed Tears of the Kingdom a bit too far to me, and the beginning especially feels more like a physics simulator than the Zelda games I grew up with. That's not to say I don't enjoy it, it just isn't what I hope the mainline series looks like in the future.

Going straight from BotW to TotK means the combat and enemies are familiar, for the most part. The new weapon system took an adjustment, but I do like that weapon families are different due to specific traits rather than just raw damage numbers. Unfortunately, there's still definite tiers where some traits are nearly useless, others are situational, and a few are best in class overall. The durability/breaking system is still present and still a bit frustrating to work around, especially with the Master Sword - it doesn't even show the damage value, so I have no clue if it's better or worse to use it at any given time.

I haven't done much of the main story, just one out of four regions, as I'm holding off on those until I've geared up a bit. I'm also saving them for when a friend comes to hang out (he's mostly just getting away from home), as he's enjoyed talking through the puzzles with me. The one I did do was fun enough, although one mechanic wasn't quite as clearly explained as I had hoped so I burned time and resources figuring it out. Still, it's the least confusing water temple I've done in any Zelda game I can think of.

Overall, it's a fun game, but I'll give it an 8/10 at the moment. It's not a bad game, just not a good Zelda game in my opinion.

I've actually played a few recently.

Agent 64: Spies Never Die was a game I was greatly anticipating since it was meant to be a spiritual successor to Goldeneye 007. Unfortunately, I'm a bit disappointed with the end result and kinda wish I passed after playing the demo. The cipher system forces you to play on harder difficulties to progress through the game in a meaningful way. Guns feel very weak, enemies feel like bullet sponges, your character comparatively takes very few hits to die and the excessive amounts of autoaim and lack of permanent crosshair just make the experience feel really clunky and cumbersome to play. The story also sucks and the level designs are just so boring and unmemorable.

I mean that control scheme made sense on the Nintendo 64's limited hardware and was a solution coined for a very weird gamepad, coming out three years before Alien Resurrection on the PS1 (NOT Halo: Combat Evolved on the Xbox, contrary to popular belief) created the twin-stick control scheme that has become the standard in all console first person shooters. Designing a game around the N64's limitations in 2026 just feels bad.

Tyr held an open playtest recently and as someone who used to play a lot of World of Tanks, I just had to step in. Not a fan. Matchmaking is poorly balanced because you pick your tank after queueing up, meaning that the distribution of light, medium and heavy tanks is all over the place. There are also no artillery or tank destroyers (which are core roles in WoT.) The game straight-up highlights enemy tanks and tells you if your shot will penetrate or not (and is extremely fucking lenient with this), completely removing all sense of skill expression and any reward for learning the strengths/weaknesses of each tank. When I lost two straight-games to bullshit like a tank taking off and flying halfway across the map with its signature ability, I just knew this game had issues in its current state.

Marvel Rivals is an Overwatch clone that may or may not be better than the hero shooter it's copying. The complete lack of a tutorial, the clusterfuck that is matchmaking and my overall lack of knowledge surrounding the Marvel universe kinda holds back my ability to enjoy the game. It also seems to suffer from a similar issue to League of Legends where players will actively throw tantrums and outright sabotage the game if they either don't get to pick their character or you draft a character that isn't meta.

Duskfade is actually really good. My only issue is that the combat feels a bit unrefined. Zirian also feels really, really brittle, but then again I have been playing on the hardest difficulty. It feels a bit too inspired by Kingdom Hearts, to the point where your main weapon is also a key that works a bit more practically as a blade.

I actually caved and decided to return to World of Warcraft: Midnight recently. Part of the reason is that Fellowship simply didn't scratch that dungeon crawling itch because of its low player count and slow gear progression. The campaign was mostly alright. My main reason for wanting to go back was to try PvP, but progression is arguably worse than previous expansions, with the only way to grind Honor points now being co-op vs AI game modes.