This is a soft reboot of the Yakuza series. It has the same setting but now has a new cast of characters and it changes the genre from 3D brawler to a turn-based JRPG. At first I was concerned about the gameplay change, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that those worries were unneccesary.

The combat is fun, there's a lot of variety in the attacks and some of them are just hilarious to watch, especially the Poundmates summons (like the Majima summon which is just NUTS). The turn-based mechanics have room of improvement though, like sometimes the camera doesn't move fast enough to show the enemy attacking one of your allies so it's harder to time perfect blocks. They also could've done more with the "press the right buttons to deal/block damage!" thing, like add more variety to the button combos. I still prefer the old brawler combat, but I won't mind if they keep and improve the turn-based gameplay in the next games.

The story is awesome, definitely one of the best in the series. Ichiban Kasuga, the new protagonist grew on me very fast and to be honest, I'd love to see more of him in the next Yakuza games instead of Kiryu. Too bad he didn't win in the BLAEO Game Awards though :/ My only nitpick is with the one particular "what are the odds?" twist near the end (the whole babies in the coin lockers thing). It feels a bit stupid but then again, there were dumber twists before. The story is newcomer-friendly but there are lots of references to past Yakuza games that series veterans will recognize easily. Substories are still a mix of crazy, hilarious and heartwarming moments, as always. It's difficult to pick the best substory as there's just so many good ones. ^{_{drink the milk, it's worth it}}
The English dub is surprisingly good. It still doesn't come as close as the Japanese dub, but it's great and the VAs did a solid job, especially Darryl Kurylo who returned as Kiryu's VA.

The new city is okay, it has some pretty good sights, however it's not as densely packed as Kamurocho since it's much larger. Still, it's nice to not be roaming around Kamurocho yet again for most of the game. Most of the minigames are the same as in Kiwami 2, but the new ones are definitely welcome, like the can-collecting minigame or the movie theater minigame. The music is really good too, so many great bangers! It's nearly on the same level as Yakuza 0's soundtrack.

The DLCs are a waste of money. They mostly consist of overpriced cosmetic stuff or P2W item packs. Only the Job Set (and maaaybe the Management Mode Set) are worth it, but you won't miss much if you don't have them. At least the NG+ DLC that is a thing for the Japanese PS4 version is now built into the main game.

The performance on PC is decent, I could run this game on a i5-10400F and a GTX 1660 Super at 1080p 60fps with almost all settings set at highest, but with disabled motion blur, depth of field and multisampling. The framerate would dip into the 50s sometimes when walking around the park in the north-east part of Ijincho or during certain attacks with lots of effects/particles, but other than that, it was stable.

Summing things up, I think that the developers did an amazing job with this game. It's easily one of the best games in the series, enjoyable by both newcomers and veterans alike and it's well-worth the full price. Now I just gotta wait for the remastered collection to release…

A sequel to Retro City Rampage and spiritual successor to GTA 1/2. I was excited for this game when it was announced as I loved RCR. It's a great open-world game, but not as good as RCR.

Gameplay is mostly the same, so if you played RCR, you'll feel right at home. There are some differences, like new different weapons, the ability to swim and use boats and there are now 3 protagonists, which honestly feel useless as you spend most of the game playing as the CEO anyway and none of the characters have any unique gameplay traits. Also there's now a business incremental-like minigame where you buy properties on the island to earn as much money as possible. It's as simple as "buy properties and watch the daily revenue go up", and it's fun to watch the map as the buildings on it turn gold over time.
I really liked the business world satire in this game. The game makes fun of pretty much every single modern trend or shady business practice: subscription models, fine prints, abusing legal loopholes, convenience fees or even lootboxes.
There's over 100 story missions to do but they're all short, like they were designed for handhelds. They were also fairly easy on normal difficulty (which is the highest difficulty at the moment of writing), until the last few missions where bulletproof enemies show up.
The ending and final boss are disappointing. I wasn't even aware when I was fighting the final boss, and when the credits rolled in, I was like "wait, THAT'S IT?". They could've gone with something bigger, like a huge overseas megacorporation suddenly trying to take over the whole island, instead you just get attacked by the cartel you stole the farms from.
There's not much worthwhile to do in the open-world, except for shakedowns. There are the gym and aerobics minigames, but there's no reason to do them at all. You can search for charging cables, but you only get an achievement for finding them all. I wish there was more to do. However the locations are very beautiful. The pixelart looks nearly perfect and the animations are fluid. It's also really cool that almost everything can be destroyed. You can drive through fences, burn down trees or mow tall grass with assault rifles (because who needs lawnmovers?). There is a time cycle (that is hardly noticeable, most likely to not obstruct vision), but no weather system, which would've been nice. The soundtrack, while not as large as RCR's, is really good; it straight up sounds like 80's music from a Genesis/SNES game.

Shakedown: Hawaii does improve on some things from RCR but it needs a better ending and extra side content (which will most likely receive sooner or later, judging by how much support RCR had). A weather system and a hard difficulty mode would be nice, too. It's a worthy purchase but if you didn't play RCR yet, I'd recommend playing that instead.

I was very excited for this game when I finally got a PC strong enough to run it so I started it as soon as I was done with Yakuza. It's much better than Invisible War which I played back in May but it still has some flaws.

The game doesn't try to reinvent itself so it just takes the gameplay of Human Revolution and refines it a bit. They added a few new augs and items, as well as gave the hacking minigame a slight upgrade. There's still multiple ways to tackle problems, plenty of places to explore and things to discover and it's still just as fun, like it should've been.

As for the story, many say that it's unfinished and I don't agree, at least not completely. It doesn't end suddenly, but I did expect it to be longer and it does reveal something at the end that gives a lot of room for a sequel. There are also some returning characters from HR and the original Deus Ex, however I didn't like how Mankind Divided is written all around the choices you make in HR. The background stories scattered around dozens of e-books, pocket secretaries and e-mails are still just as good, though, and make all the exploring well worth it.

Normally, there are cities between missions which you can visit and roam around freely. Mankind Divided, however, has only Prague, to which you return repeatedly. While Prague is bigger than any city from past Deus Ex games and with each visit it does change and provide new side quests, it's almost completely open to you right from the start, so if you do everything you can on your first visit, you won't have much to do on the subsequent visits. It doesn't help that some parts of the game got cut out to sell as DLC instead (they're quite good, though).

As for the graphics, the game looks marvelous on very high settings. The locations are full of little details and Prague has some pretty sights. My only nitpick is that there are a couple objects that have low-res textures for some reason.

Many complain about the microtransactions in this game, but the main game already seemed like it was made without those microtransactions in mind. There is absolutely no reason to buy them. If you have the DLC, you can claim some extra items but they're one-time use only. Once you claim them, you can't redeem them again ever, even on an another playthrough which is BS. Breach mode, on the other hand, is a whole another story. You can tell from a mile away that it's like one of those freemium mobile games that push you to spend money on card packs. I gave up on it as soon as I realized that.

I liked Mankind Divided. It's a bit too short, and the story isn't on par with the earlier Deus Ex games, but it's still a fun game to play. Let's just hope that they won't try to force microtransactions into the next Deus Ex game again…