Recent reviews by David Sid

Things I liked:
+ Pathfinder 2nd Edition is a magnificent system, and this is an exceptionally faithful adaptation of it; you could teach someone 80% of PF2e combat mechanics with Dawnsbury Days. To those who haven't played PF2e, it's hard to convey what an improvement it is on 1st Edition and D&D, thanks to the simple but flexible three-action economy, the carefully tuned encounter balancing, and the emphasis on teamwork.
+ There's a wide variety of encounters (e.g. basic kobold fight, wave defense, underwater combat). You rarely enter an encounter and feel like it's exactly the same as a previous one. And at higher difficulty levels, you have to tailor your tactics to the specific encounter, rather than using the same approach in every fight.
+ A wealth of classes and spells are available--far more than just those used by the default party.

Things I didn't care for:
- Loot is not tailored to custom parties. If you bring a monk, you'll need to buy your own +1 striking handwraps of mighty blows. EDIT: Patch 2.50 has improved this somewhat.
- There are no dialogue choices or side quests, and the story is fairly basic, though the setting is cool. There are some lightweight character arcs, but the only really memorable dialogue is anything to do with the Dark Poets.
- The music gets really repetitive after your first playthrough (but can be disabled).

My recommendations:
* Play the default characters for your first playthrough, since they're a balanced party that's well-served by the loot available. They're not particularly optimized, so start on Medium or Easy.
* If you're coming from Pathfinder 1st Edition or either of its Owlcat games, don't be fooled by the smaller size of temporary bonuses and penalties. A +1 circumstance bonus in 2e is roughly equivalent to a +2 circumstance bonus in 1e.

Things I liked:
+ Combat is tactical, visceral, and complex. Each of the nine vocations (i.e. classes/jobs) has its own way of fighting. You can climb large enemies in order to attack their weak points in regular gameplay (not just in cutscenes). There's a hilariously large variety of consumables you can use in combat. There are enough different techniques and tricks that you will still be discovering new ones after a hundred hours of gameplay.
+ Pawns (i.e. summoned allies created by other players) are an innovative way to add a cooperative multiplayer aspect to a singleplayer game.
+ Many of the boss fights are absolutely thrilling. One of those is among the best dragon fights in any action RPG.
+ There's a lot of excellent music in the game.

Things I didn't like:
- The math behind combat is poorly thought-out. For example, because of how defenses work, it's very difficult to make up for even slightly subpar equipment with player skill.
- Not all keyboard & mouse controls can be configured, and the game doesn't make this clear. For example, by default, F is used for grabbing things and for firing a bow. You can change the binding for grab, but firing a bow stays on F, no matter what. tl;dr Just play with a gamepad.
- Some parts feel unfinished. For example, two different characters, at the end of their last side quests, promise to seek aid for you in the final battle. And those two plot threads go absolutely nowhere.
- For the Dark Arisen rerelease, they didn't bother filling out the aforementioned unfinished parts of the game. Instead, they added Bitterblack Isle, a festival of power creep and fake difficulty.

My recommendations:
* Ignore Bitterblack Isle as much as you can. It will make you hate the game if you take it seriously. If you've played the DLC stages of Castlevania: Harmony of Despair on Hard Mode, you know the kind of grindy, repetitive, power-creepy ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ you get with BBI. If you really must get the achievements, just run through once as a level 200 magick archer.
* Don't restart repeatedly, trying to perfect your character's appearance. Once you've beaten the final battle, you can buy the Secret of Metamorphosis, which lets you customize your character's appearance whenever you want.

+ Complex but intuitive combat system, with numerous different weapons, spells, and items; exceptionally well-balanced for the number of options available.

+ Looks and sounds beautiful, yet has low system requirements.

+ Fully interconnected world with absolutely no loading screens (even when warping to distant areas).

+ Encounters are challenging, but fair and learnable...

- ...with a handful of really frustrating exceptions (i.e. the Tree of Men, Witch of the Lake, and Pitchwoods platforming hell).

- As of patch 1.0.0.6, crossbows still don't aim properly with mouse controls.

- No online multiplayer.

+ Puns the English language into submission
+ Challenging combat and platforming
+ Catchy, retro-styled soundtrack
+ Plague of Shadows (extra campaign where you play as one of the bosses)

- In the original campaign, hard to justify using anything but Dynamo Mail once you have a choice of armors

Steam Awards update:
+ Nominated for highest puntensity. I don't know of any game with a higher frequency of puns per hour played. Yacht Club Games really hit pay dirt with Shovel Knight.

Specter of Torment update:
+ They've added yet another new campaign as of April 2017. And while the campaign itself is excellent...
+ ...its soundtrack deserves a special mention for including some of the catchiest chiptunes you will ever hear. (Here's a sample.[virt.bandcamp.com])

I wanted to like this game. The spellcasting system should make it a home run almost by default. You can combine up to 5 choices between up to 8 elements. It's not quite 32,768 permutations--order rarely matters, some pairs of elements can't be combined, and repeating an element doesn't usually change much--but it's still a system with a lot of room for creative tactics.

Despite that awesome foundation, the mechanics of the game are just too clunky to be enjoyable. The action feels very chaotic and random, and the controls feel unreliable. To give a few examples:

• If you get knocked off your feet, you can still cast a healing or shielding spell on yourself...sometimes.
  
• If you mistype a long combination, you can't cancel it; you have to cast the spell before you can start another.
  
• In certain fights, the camera will take a fixed angle that leaves critical parts of the battlefield offscreen or nearly offscreen.

I should note that I haven't played this game in multiplayer, and it may be more enjoyable there. Getting thrown off the level for the fifteenth time in a single fight might not be so bad if you have a buddy there to immediately cast Revive on you. As a single player game, though, I really can't recommend this.

This is the best action role-playing game since Dark Souls.

• Easy to learn, hard to master: Weapons can attack one-handed or two-handed, right-handed or left-handed, quickly or forcefully, and they have special attacks after running or rolling. Attack combos are never more than two button presses. Shields, bows, and catalysts work like weapons, but block, shoot, or cast instead of attacking. Regardless of what you wield, you can run, jump, roll, and use items. That's pretty much it; Dark Souls 2's actions are simple and intuitive. However, using them effectively requires much more attention than is needed in far more complicated games. For example, in Tekken 6, once a long combo is started, muscle memory can do all the work for a good five seconds. In Dark Souls 2, every single action must be carefully chosen, timed, and placed.
  
  
• Ernest Hemingway: "If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them." Dark Souls 2 applies this idea to its story and setting, and the result is quite compelling. Even the significance of the final boss is something you probably won't immediately understand—but there is at least one good explanation for that and for just about everything else in the narrative. You can find that explanation if you take the time to find all the clues and put them together. (And if you don't care to do so, there are plenty of good lore videos on YouTube to do it for you.)
  
  
• Massive replay value: There are countless possible variations for player characters, both aesthetic and mechanical. The eight classes are each tailored to a different combat style, yet even they don't represent every viable style (e.g. pyromancy and hexing don't have dedicated classes). It may be illustrative to note that of the 650 hours I've spent on this game so far, the most I've spent on one character has been 150 hours.
  
  
• Originality: Feel free to design your character as the typical JRPG protagonist (long-haired, pale-skinned, improbably young)... You will spend much of your first playthrough as the hideous green walking corpse of that character. Dark Souls 2 defies many tropes of both Western and Japanese RPGs (perhaps because it's a Japanese take on Western fantasy). It's not entirely a Darker and Edgier[tvtropes.org] Deconstructor Fleet[tvtropes.org], though; rather, it intermixes strongly contrasting elements—beauty and ugliness, light and dark, benevolence and malice—in a way that makes these extremes more striking when encountered.
  
  
• Well-balanced items: There are heated discussions in the Souls community about this or that overpowered weapon, armor, ring, or spell. What I've noticed, however, is that in my encounters with other players, there's plenty of variety in equipped items—which suggests that there are very few truly dominant items.

• Some assembly required for KB&M: Keyboard and mouse are quite usable (unlike the unmodded first game), but onscreen button prompts display Xbox 360 buttons instead of your key bindings. The default bindings are also not very good, so if you're a KB&M enthusiast, expect to spend your first hour setting up bindings, and expect to spend your first few hours getting used to them. Important: In order to detect double-clicking, the game waits a half-second after each mouse click before executing the associated action. You can use the "Disable double clicking" option to remove this delay, but as of Version 1.07, this only works until you quit. Each time you restart the program, you must turn "Disable double clicking" off and then on again for it to take effect.

• Consider playing the first game: You don't need to play Dark Souls to understand Dark Souls 2, but the former is an equally great game. Each has strengths and weaknesses, relative to the other, but the only real reason to right now play Dark Souls 2 instead of its predecessor is that the online community is somewhat more active in the newer game (as of November 2014). If you do play Dark Souls, and if you use the keyboard and mouse, DSfix[www.nexusmods.com] and DSMfix[pages.cs.wisc.edu]will help a lot.
  
  
• Don't read walkthroughs during your first playthrough: Many of the challenges in Dark Souls 2 are greatly diminished if you read online about the ideal tactics. It's much more satisfying to win a fight through your own wits than to apply someone else's methods for an easy win. You can get some hints from the in-game messages left on the ground by other players, but these are limited, so that they rarely give you the whole solution to a problem.

• Honor in PvP: By design, most PvP is asymmetric: In an invasion, the host can heal and summon help, but the invader can hide behind monsters. In Rat King Covenant PvP, the summoner can use the entire level against the victim, but the summoner is also the only one with anything to lose. Because PvP is so rarely fair, honor is rarely appropriate. If you really want an honor duel in Dark Souls 2, here's the best way to go about it:
  
  1. Go to Iron Keep and use a dragon sign (or place your own).
     
  2. When the opponent appears (or when you're summoned), move to just inside lock-on range and bow.
     
  3. If the opponent bows in return, start drinking your Estus and see if they do the same.
     
  4. Once you both have used up your Estus (as signified by the "no more Estus" animation), an honor duel can begin.
     
  5. It precludes an honor duel if someone uses a buff or moves to an advantageous position before the duel begins.
  
  
• Soul Memory: Nothing is more intensely criticized by the Souls community than Soul Memory—the quantity of souls your character has ever possessed, which is used for online matchmaking. There are two common criticisms.
  
  1. Souls can be permanently lost but still contribute to Soul Memory, so that two characters of vastly different power levels could be matched, because one has permanently lost far more souls than the other.
     
  2. One cannot maintain characters optimized for multiplayer against a specific boss or in a specific area, since one's Soul Memory will eventually surpass the range of most other characters fighting that boss or in that area.
  I tend to think both criticisms are blown out of proportion. Dark Souls 2's logarithmic power curve makes it so even someone who's permanently lost half their souls is only at a small disadvantage against someone who's permanently lost none. Also, if characters could stop their Soul Memory from increasing—even if it meant making their saved games essentially read-only—this would allow too much optimization for specific circumstances, making these "locked" characters far more effective than those moving normally through the game. Soul Memory is not a perfect system, but early-game invasions are much more manageable in Dark Souls 2 than in its predecessor, and I'm pretty sure that's because of Soul Memory.

As good as the gameplay is, I can't recommend this game. Paid-for games shouldn't contain in-game advertising, especially for other games or products. Tripwire Interactive seems to be of the opposite opinion.

The main menu has ads for the latest DLC. The character selection screen has more DLC characters than vanilla characters. The trader screen is bloated with all the DLC weapons you haven't bought. One weapon can only be unlocked by playing an entirely different game. Worst of all, the pre-game lobby includes obnoxious video ads not only for DLC, but for one of Tripwire's other games.

Of all the games I've bought on Steam, Killing Floor is the absolute worst offender when it comes to in-game advertising. I can't get my money back, but I can at least recommend you save yours.

What I liked:
- Presentation: The visuals and sounds evoke a potent feeling of gloom, dread, and otherworldliness, yet the game doesn't require a powerful computer to run smoothly.

What I didn't like:
- Completely linear: For every puzzle, there's invariably just one solution. You take exactly the steps the developers intended, exactly when they intended, and you succeed. Otherwise, you fail. I could barely finish the game once I realized it was little more than a bunch of Quick Time Events without the button prompts.
- Way too short: I can't imagine a single playthrough taking more than five hours, and replay value is minimal.

Recommendations:
- Play Trine instead: That game also has physics-based puzzles, but with multiple emergent solutions; you're not confined to the one "golden solution" approved by the developers. Trine is at least twice as long as Limbo on the first playthrough, and it has significant replay value thanks to collectibles, difficulty levels, and the hardcore mode added in the latest update. In short, Trine does all the things I had hoped Limbo might do, and then some.

What I liked:
- Exceptional story and presentation: Avoid spoilers for this game at all costs. You will have the best experience if you start the game completely uninformed. What I'll say is that the game has a message, and whether or not you agree with it, it's presented so effectively and so cohesively that Spec Ops: The Line feels like a breakthrough for video games as an art form.

What I didn't like:
- The highest difficulty setting: On FUBAR difficulty, the game sometimes feels like an escort mission; keeping your squadmates alive becomes the game's greatest challenge.

Recommendations:
- You can't get all the achievements in less than two playthroughs, so if you care about that sort of thing, work on it on your second playthrough. For the first one, just play naturally.

What I liked:
- Attention to detail: Wildfires spread, crappy guns jam, foliage conceals you. So many things are unexpectedly realistic.
- Novel setting: Very few games are set in an African landscape, and this one pretty much makes it a main character.
- Total immersion: There are no forced third-person cutscenes, and the HUD only appears when needed or when you press the "Reload" key.

What I didn't care for:
- Buddies are fragile: You can only successfully rescue a near-death buddy three times. This means you have to metagame if you want to keep a buddy alive.

Recommendations:
- Don't worry about having played the first Far Cry beforehand; there are no story ties between that game and this one.
- Play it like Fallout 3 or Red Faction Guerrilla, not like Call of Duty or Gears of War. Explore, take side missions, and approach fights tactically rather than recklessly.
- Turn off the music; it's not bad music, but it causes you to miss subtle audio cues.