Recent reviews by JRPUCK

You're a wizard, Harry.

I played the game at release but never got around to reviewing it (i don't know why). Hogwarts Legacy is amazing and earns top marks in everything it tried to do. Graphics are decent and the gameplay, though repetitive, excellently captures the spirit of the Wizarding World and wand-based combat. It has all the most important spells and creates appropriate scenarios for wielding them. You can fly on a broom, ride a hippogriff, and you can ride a thestral. You can catch magical beasts with your nabsack and keep them in your vivarium. The Room of Requirement is your own personal headquarters. Wandering the halls of Hogwarts, you find nearly all the Hogwarts ghosts you can think of, even Peeves. Each house has it's own chambers which can be accessed according to your placement by the sorting hat (which can be overriden by personal preference). Exploring the vast halls of Hogwarts and finding secret passages or hidden lore is a game in itself, but you can also go beyond the walls of the school and explore the country side while fighting beasts, bandits, goblins, and trolls - oh, my!

Complaints:

* Switching spell sets mid-combat can be cumbersome, especially if you only have to do it because somebody has a colored shield that requires a different type of spell. They should have had additional controls for PC to make use of the number keys to let you select any spell anytime.

* You're limited to only four character slots, and I can think of no technical limitation or appropriate design argument for this restriction. You're going to want one character for each house, obviously, but that leaves no room for additional characters. You might want a couple evil character playthroughs, especially with all the judgement and guilt-tripping you receive for using forbidden curses. Once you've beat the game and completed all the side quests you can find, you're going to want to start over with a new character (to make different choices or at least re-experience the quests and story), but you also don't want to lose any characters for which you invested hundreds of hours unlocking everything. It's a paradox. One that could easily been avoided by either doubling the character slots or not having a restriction on character slots (within reason).

* Despite the game's incredible success, it took them years to even announce additional content.

* Even years later, enabling Ray Tracing makes the game unplayable and doesn't really add much. In some ways it actually diminishes some graphical elements.

* There's only once or twice in the entire game that you actually see the Hogwarts Express running down the tracks. I understand there may be lore reasons for this (like maybe it only runs at the start and end of the term), but c'mon!

Great concept and reasonably well crafted, but incredibly frustrating. The base difficulty is incredibly too high, and there's some tedious micromanagement. If you're a perfectionist this is going to drive you nuts because there will inevitably be a point in each game/mission where there's too much going on and while you're managing all the other details, your aircraft collide on the deck. More unforgivable is the lousy pathing and tight space that will constantly result in aircraft blocking each other. You will lose entire days trying to 5-star a single late game mission because you are going to have to try over and over and over again while they are very time consuming and there is just way too much going on while requiring the player to micromanage every single thing.

This content made a huge difference considering I play on my 4K TV and the cinematics looked pretty bad before. There probably should have been a prompt in-game (seriously easy to do) to download this content though because I got 50% of the way through the campaign before I stumbled upon this in the DLC list.

The dumb retcons and reboot is reason enough to reject this game. I've never heard of anything so idiotic as naming at least the 12th game in a series "Mortal Kombat 1". It's stupid and confusing and I hate that they expect us to call it that. It's entirely pointless too because the story makes it abundantly clear that although the timeline has been reset, the other games still happened. The events of the past games still happened and are frequently referred to in this game. Furthermore, the previous timelines basically just end up reasserting themselves through the events of this game, so really nothing changed except for precise chain of events that led to the same rivalries and a good number of characters being deleted to make room for new ones. It's just a dumb marketing gimmick that I don't see as even being successful. The menus all run like crap but at least it doesn't crash constantly like the previous game. The predatory DLC practices continue and are even worse though. The game costs $50 and the price of the first DLC expansion is exactly the same, more actually if you want ALL the content. The individual character packs are ridiculous too. $5 to $10 per character that they planned to include from the beginning, seriously? Playing the towers to unlock everything is repetitive, boring, and stupid. Even worse is the new Invasions which are basically a combination of the Krypt and Towers and equally pointless, repetitive, and stupid. Kameos? ALSO STUPID. It's incredibly frustrating that they took an annoying mechanic from the Towers and forced it into the base game. Just let us fight one opponent at a time, one on one. the way the game was designed for, please. Fatalities have lost all purpose and have somehow become part of the grind. Most of them aren't very entertaining after the 2nd or 3rd time if they even were the first time. Instead of being a cool bonus mechanic for skillfully defeating your enemy, now they are a requirement for EVERY FIGHT, especially if you want to earn points and unlock things - which like past games is going to take you decades to do anyway. Most characters only have one or two unique or special moves, and most of the time they are counterproductive, making you vulnerable as you repeatedly fail to move backward and forward in a way that the controller recognizes.

CRASHES CONSTANTLY. Even all these years later.. This is particularly frustrating when you've beaten 5-10 characters in a tower and it suddenly crashes erasing your progress. These issues have taken days/weeks from me I'll never get back. Challenges are idiotic. Every tower has some kind of stupid combat effects. It's just bad. I absolutely hate all the minigames they keep putting in these too like the Krypt. I know they're trying to be innovative and relevant, but honestly all anyone expects out of Mortal Kombat is just a straight up deathmatch. Stick to what you're good at. Like all Mortal Kombat / NetherRealm Studios games that have come out in the last few decades, they expect you to dedicate your entire life to 100% everything. You will never play enough to unlock everything. What's the point of having unlockables if it takes you decades to earn it all???

Megaquarium can be frustrating and tedious at times, but overall it is a well put together aquarium tycoon game from an independent developer. The primary concerns: equipment takes up too much space, more efficient equipment takes way too long to unlock, you have to constantly spend hours completely reworking your entire aquarium every time you need to add equipment or change equipment or simply add a fish to a tank, it breaks the connection if you move a pump or the tank attached to it, staff and customers are incredibly stupid, and most of the time you need a huge tank with a lot of equipment to support it to have an adequate number of animals. The game is so simple, I wish I'd thought of it myself and I loved El Fish (Maxis) as a kid!

Like Breakpoint, this isn't really a Ghost Recon game, it's just Grand Theft Auto meets special ops.

I liked the first game so much that I wasted my money on this one without questioning it. They took an absolutely amazing game.. and ruined it.

This is a depressing game to review. The previous game was so fun that almost everything about this game feels like a massive disappointment even though by itself it's not terrible. There is a competent game here buried under the muck. It doesn't help that the full game experience is divided up across a lot of expensive DLC packs leaving you with what is basically just the previous game you already purchased and played, except you have to buy it again. The previous game was a nostalgia simulator where you got to relive the experience of seeing Jurassic Park in theaters for the first time in the early 90s. However, this game is just a micromanagement simulator. The campaigns are all extremely boring and stupid, made worse by super corny narrations by the movie cast that you are forced to sit through before you can build anything. They absolutely wrecked the economy in this game to the point that you spend most of your time waiting for your park to turn a profit. The scientists are super expensive and super ♥♥♥♥♥♥ to the point that they riot after doing one little research project. The majority of the missions, especially the challenge missions require you to reach five stars (a perfect score) with your park for some unfathomable reason when any Jurassic Park related property really should center around getting your park to an adequate level where your guests are no longer eaten rather than building a Disney resort where all the guests are happy because they don't have to walk more than five feet to grab a boba. The only challenge comes from the ridiculous map layouts that make you question why anyone would build a dinosaur park at this location - where you have tiny build areas barely sufficient for a single small dino pen connected by narrow corridors barely wide enough for a sidewalk all of which are separated by random mountains (unusable terrain considered out of park bounds) that some masochist level designer decided to sprinkle every five meters throughout the area allocated for a dinosaur park.

Like the movies, if you want to experience the thrill of Jurassic Park, go back to the first one.

JWE brings back the magic of seeing Jurassic Park in theaters for the first time when it released in the early 90s, especially on the maps that let you use the Jurassic Park skins. As many others have said, this game is way, way, way more fun than the second one despite having a lot less stuff. Lovingly crafted nostalgia simulator. Nothing beats racing across the park in a jeep during a typhoon to restore power and repair fences before the dinosaurs eat all your guests.. except maybe chasing down said dinos in a helicopter and sniping them with tranquilizers.