Recent reviews by Izzy

I was late to the party with Horizon 5, buying it in late 2025 and getting into it at the start of 2026. It was depressoing hearing that Horizon 6 was going to be released in less than half a year of me joining the fun in Mexico but I dealt with it and kept on with 5, enjoying what it was despite the community seeming to dislike it compared to 3 and 4. I noticed glaring issues with it right away but they weren't enough to make me want to stop playing it and I had high hopes that they'd do better with 6.

They did not.

6 is a direct downgrade to 5 in almost every way. The 2 things I'd say were improved were the graphics and optimization, everything else is worse.

The AI is my biggest complaint. In Horizon 5 the AI were notorious for being broken and how they became more broken the higher the difficulty where they'd throw physics out the window to play by their own game. There are tons of clips of Unbeatable AI doing funny things. In Horizon 6, they take what the Horizon 5 AI did and turn it up to 11. To give you an idea, I comfortably played against Pro AI in 5, in 6 the Highly Skilled AI has been equally hard if not harder to deal with. Expert and Pro are frustratingly difficult if not sometimes impossible (literally btw). I haven't touched the Unbeatable AI outside of the trials in the playlist. I liked the challenge in 5, I don't like it in 6 when the 10 AI not in 1st do nothing but try to slam your car by cutting you off in corners and full sending into the wall and hard brake checking you on straights (???) while having infinite grip and instant acceleration, as I saw someone else put it. I don't get how there are so many clips of the issues that the AI had in 5 and they made it worse, and not a little worse, it's to the point where some races I'm changing cars or lowering difficulty because tuning does nothing to close the gap, sometimes widening it.

Traffic would be my second biggest complaint. For a game with a massive open world map to drive around in, they've made it exceptionally not fun to drive around in. The traffic in this game is horrible. Where in Horizon 5 you'd see a car or 2 on every other road or so, Horizon 6 is packed to the brim with traffic, and not just in the city. You could be in the most remote bumf--- corner on a dirt trail or road and there will be half a dozen cars spawning right in. I get that some people felt like Horizon 5's roads felt empty and the map lacked some life, but they took this way too far. Instead of adding more social features to interact with other players on the road and make it more meaningful to see each other while driving around, they spammed the absolute F out of the map with traffic. It does not work for these types of games.

*Honorable mention to how bad the weather is in this game. Combined with the flood of traffic, it constantly raining makes it annoying to drive around, and in Winter when snow covers the entire map it's a terrible experience. You have to dodge traffic on wet roads and hoping to god that your wheels don't make any contact with snow otherwise get ready to get some air skills or for those skillchains to end. Stunt parties were a good way to notice how many people struggle with this. I'm considering skipping out on future Winter season weeks when they come along. Real bruh moment decision.

This one is more a personal preference complaint where too many of the rally and cross country races involve huge chunks of road. I wonder if this was an oversight or if this was intentionally done to help out the busted AI by allowing them to use their infinite grip. It was known in Horizon 5 that the AI was mediocre even on Unbeatable in dirt racing and cross country, giving them large pieces of track to work with to make them more challenging is something I can see them doing on purpose given how many of the races include them but I think it was done poorly and added to the frustration of dealing with broken AI.

Tuning is its own can of worms with how broken drag tires were on release and how useless it seems to be to tune your car when that also makes the AI more broken as it adapts to your tune. It obviously does make a difference in PvP but man I wish they had improved this more than anything else coming from Horizon 5. It costs more to tune cars in 6, the options are the same, and they still haven't streamlined the process, and the tuning menus are WORSE SOMEHOW IDK MAN.

The auction house has plenty of bugs, worse to use than Horizon 5's, and unfortunately as of writing this review the 1 thing I thought they had done right in limiting how high a car could be sold for turned out to be a bug that they just undid so now everything mildly rare is selling for 20 million credits. I was lucky to collect all the playlist cars and the wheelspin cars before the update, good luck to everyone else now in dealing with the no life snipers that just sit there and try to outbid you when there's 1 minute left.

I don't think I have to point out how pathetic it is that the DLC cars are all P2W. The WTAC cars are laughably broken but the WTAC cars you get without DLC are still competitive so I guess that's something. The FE cars are also absurdly broken, and I know they're supposed to be but I swear the Sesto FE in Horizon 5 which seemed to be the most busted car overall was nothing compared to the MX-5 FE and the funny trucks. If you want a fun drinking game, take a shot for every MX-5 FE you see in freeroam and in stunt parties. I have no idea how someone thought making a hybrid of the Sesto FE and the Pro Stock Camaro was a good idea. It killed so much of the variety of cars people were willing to use before everyone just went "haha lol car with funny headlights goes 300 mph in an instant".

I could go on about how social features are nonexistent, how convoy invites for Steam players STILL don't work, how useless the car meets are and how good they could've been, how annoying the class and car restrictions were for progression, how we're missing playground games, how Sadge it is that the air horizon arcade games and mini missions are gone but those are things that can be added down the line. I don't see how they got the AI, the traffic, and the car balance so wrong. Some people should be fired for that. This is the 6th game in the series, SIXTH GAME BROS, and they got next to nothing right coming from Horizon 5. HOW.

I tried to like this game, I played it for 30~ hours and have taken my sweet time exploring everything I possibly can as I thought Silksong would be full of secrets and fun lore and miscellaneous NPCs like the original HK was. I can't say it was. This game feels like it has no soul relative to its sibling (no pun intended). It's an empty wasteland where you find random non-cursed beings in places where it's more like you wouldn't want to and less of where you wouldn't expect. But onto the gameplay aspects that were disappointing.

Movement:
This is 1 of the 3 worst decisions when it came to overall level design. The starting down aerial [Dair] is horrendous to work with and you're forced to use more than you'd probably like during early game when it's the only option you have before unlocking better movement later on for platforming. To build onto that, for whatever reason so much of the platforming seems to have been designed to sit on the bleeding edge of Hornet's capabilities despite her appearing to be much more agile than the Knight in HK. You'll find yourself seeing Hornet's ledge grab animation far more than you'd like and often times being unsure of whether a specific jump is doable the first 1 or 2 times you attempt it. Even with later unlocks, platforming is awful compared to HK's, it's nowhere near as smooth and quick as one would think with Hornet's agility and movement options.

Money:
The 2nd of the 3 major changes in Silksong from HK. The majority of enemies you'll run into across Pharloom will drop shards which are useful for tools you'll find along the way. Those shards are also useless for actual purchases like maps, upgrades, and other misc. items that you need to progress. You need rosary beads for those, the official currency for traders / sellers in Silksong and the only enemies that drop those are cursed pilgrims or former workers of the city aside from random stashes you'll find. It is so much harder to get a decent amount of beads for the purchases you need to where it's annoying when you're constantly picking up useless shards because you're sitting at max capacity. Shards for tools are a whole other issue which I'll get to in the next section.

Enemies:
The biggest of all the issues in Silksong. Enemies in this game are a mess. You can go from silk farming fodder to enemies that will smack you for 2 HP in the same area and you won't even expect certain enemies to be able to hit you that hard. It gets worse when certain aerial enemies can be a nightmare to deal with because of the mediocre level design that leaves you unable to reach them after dodging their attacks or because they can parry you or because they're designed so that they get a movement boost that pulls them away from your range if you're not reacting near instantly in countering. It's like you're fighting the lance sentries in City of Tears from HK except it's an issue with several different enemies instead of the 1 in 1 area of the game. From what I've seen others say, tools and some abilities were meant to help close the gap with these types of enemies but it doesn't feel as linear as using spells in HK. Maybe it's a krill issue on my part as I'm still getting used to using everything in Hornet's arsenal but as it stands, I hate how I'm more often than not trying to chase an enemy to be able to get through a platforming section as it constantly runs or flies away. As for bosses, I love most of the fights I've encountered thus far but I'm disappointed that almost every single boss fight has felt so much easier than the badly designed platforming + tedious enemy fights you have to get through before you reach them. Tools are apparently supposed to make fights easier but they're so limited in uses before you have to repair them at benches (which is required) that it makes me not want to use them until I get to bosses but I've not found myself needing to use them on bosses at all yet which creates a cycle of uselessness of a pretty important part of Hornet's offensive options because you're not sure where you'll realistically get the best use out of them.

I can't recommend Silksong atm and I hate that I can't. TC undoubtedly went the route of making it harder than HK for difficulty's sake, especially in the health department where I'm 50-50 on whether most enemies doing 2 masks worth of damage is as big of an issue as some people are making it out to be. Getting that 6th mask does feel redundant though, I will give people that. lmao I don't know if any of the 3 big issues IMO will be remedied in future patches but it has only been out for a month and TC did wonders for HK so I'm optimistic.

Post-TLS update L4D2 is the worst version of L4D2 I've ever played since I started playing it in mid-2012. I'll take randomly falling through No Mercy's hospital elevator or tanks on 1st chapters over this current garbage any day.

Patience.

417.

This game in your library.

Need em all.

There are games that are left as projects abandoned.

There are games that should have never seen the light of day but were released anyway.

There are terrible games that are barely playable because of lack of effort.

There are bad games.

There are games that came close to being passable but failed to make the cut by the smallest margin.

There are games that fade in with the rest, not good nor bad, simply not outstanding.

There are games that go a step above average but no more.

There are good games.

There are great games that could've been even greater.

There are very few games that go so far in what they provide, in what limits they break that we call them masterpieces.

Then there's Hollow Knight.

Jet.
Engine.
Sounds.

tl;dr

Community is stupid as hell and worse than CSGO in toxicity. The developers are useless morons that are only trying to monetize the game so badly the quality of it is past being down the toilet (no working NA West servers is nice). Last time it was fully playable and a 'good' game was 2016.

l o l

Imagine having your balls cut off and while you're writhing in pain, the developers are taking your money and forcing you to go up against what would be a bull in Rebirth but is now a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ behemoth because they gave it steroids. That's Afterbirth in a nutshell (yes, that was an analogy pun for the testicles you just lost).

After putting a few hundred hours into Rebirth I wasn't sure whether to think of it as a good game or not because it seemed imbalanced from the get-go with every character and RNG threw it severely either way. You either became a god or became the game's ♥♥♥♥♥. That's what stopped me from buying Afterbirth. What a smart decision that was. For a game that revolves around RNG Rebirth is still 'okay' in terms of balancing. I get that I shouldn't expect balance from RNG but as long as you made smart decisions and got decent items you could pull through.

Afterbirth decided to say ♥♥♥♥ that and laughs in your face even when you have a set that would otherwise make you a god in Rebirth. You have to become a god among gods in Afterbirth to match the status of a good set in Rebirth, notice how I said 'good' and not 'godmode'. This doesn't add difficulty in a good way. Making wise choices with what you get from RNG and still getting the middle finger because you're still underpowered and because of damage scaling is stupid as ♥♥♥♥. That's what made Rebirth passable as a good game--you could become a god and annihilate everything. Mind you that was with Rebirth's item pool, add Afterbirth's and it doesn't become more difficult, IT JUST DOESN'T ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ MATTER LOL. Seriously, it doesn't.

I haven't put half the time into Afterbirth that I put into Rebirth, I don't think I will unless I want to get every achievement. I can definitely say it's not worth the full price, hell it's not worth the sale price ($8.24~). Really, what's the point of charging 2/3 of the base game's price if you butcher it with everything that's added in the process? If anything, buy Rebirth and keep it as Rebirth because Afterbirth is trash and not worth your money. :)

All you need to know is that this game is only $3, it's a good game to play if you need something to chill and be able to take your time with, will keep you occupied for hours plus it comes with a few new puzzles every day with varying difficulties even after you beat it, and best of all--its achievements. Use your imagination for that last one. :3

They let me into the Salty Spitoon after I told them I played this game without going offline. That and they saw the size of my right arm.

+cute catgirls
+R-18 patch
+makes you forget there's a story
+chest bounciness bar
+primary arm strength

11/10