Bloodstained starts out pretty well - clearly a love letter to Castlevania Symphony of the Night, and one that hits most of the right notes. It starts out well, but then falls apart in the second half as difficulty increases exponentially and it turns into a tedious, grueling grind. The metroidvania gameplay is mostly good. Combat is fun, exploration is interesting and slowly expands with your abilities, and the game looks lovely. The story and writing, unfortunately, is pretty lackluster and seems to get worst towards the middle. The level design is mostly good, though I found the 3D sections a real pain to navigate. This game definitely has difficulty spikes - most of the bosses are hard, some of the bosses are really hard, and one blood-soaked boss took me dozens and dozens of attempts. But I had fun with it for the first half, and then the game changed. The second half features an exponential jump in difficulty - like someone flipped the switch from Normal to Hard. Regular enemy damage suddenly jumps to deadly. Each room becomes a trial to get through. I found myself having to grind souls to boost my elemental resistances just to try to survive. The game that I was really enjoying suddenly turned into a miserably experience. I'm okay with difficulty spikes, but this was like hitting a brick wall. I love Castlevania Symphony of the Night and its sequels - Aria of Sorrow, etc. I wanted to love Bloodstained, but in the second half it became so hard that it leeched all the fun out of the game and I eventually gave up.
The Prince of Persia games are great - from the classic The Sands of Time to the gorgeous, cell-shaded Prince of Persia 2008. This bundle lets you get all 4 classic Prince of Persia games (Ubisoft won't make The Forgotten Sands available) at a 10% discount versus buying them separately. I'm not sure why others seemed to get price issues, but for me the price was 10% less than buying them individually. The Sands of Time is an old game, however, and they didn't include native controller support for it - the main menu only works with a mouse and keyboard. You can play it with a controller, but I highly recommend going to PCGamingWiki and following the input fixes there.
Townscaper is a town and city game. You should play this game.
We're currently half-way through the game in local co-op and having a blast! If you enjoyed Trine 4 and wanted more, this is it. We've been playing the Trine games since the first one and feel like this is the best one yet - the levels are beautiful, the puzzles are interesting without being too obtuse or frustrating, the new abilities introduced are a lot of fun and create alternate ways to solve the puzzles, the combat is better than ever and we just finished an awesome boss fight (and that's not something I expected to ever say about Trine), and there's still occasional the feeling of breaking some puzzles (like you solved it in a way that probably wasn't intended) that's still delightful. New in Trine 5 are fun new abilities for Amadeus and Pontius, special sections in levels that feature just one of the characters where you get those fun new abilities, and player customization options (selectable outlines, outfits, hats, and backpacks) that help differentiate your characters to make it easier to tell who is who in multiplayer. Only negatives so far are that the main menu is still kind of confusing (I don't know what the difference is between "Local Singleplayer" and "Local Multiplayer" given that additional players can seemingly jump into the game at any point and puzzles scale accordingly), and the Amadeus idle animation on the level map screen looks off and weird to me. But this feels like nitpicking about a great game.
This unit pack adds a really nice end-game unit to each faction, patching some tech-tree holes in the process. For example, for Space Marines it unlocks the Devastator Centurion infantry unit which rounds out the end-game options of tanks and airplanes. The units it adds are really fun. In terms of value for money - one unit per faction for $7 - it's not great. In terms of enjoyment that it adds to the game, it's actually pretty great.
