Well, it runs, so long as you can find an xlive dll and ini pack (pcgamingwiki has one for example), no problems even on Win 11 Pro, supports widescreen resolutions at least up to 4K. So, if you absolutely have to play the game, it's easy to get it up and running despite the defunct GFWL, no further modding or patching required past the abovementioned file pack. However, the question is, should you really play it? And I really think the answer is no. The game is bad. It's a kids game, which is the first problem, because the series it is based off of is more of a teens show. The game mechanics are overly dumbed down, the writing is terrible - and sure, Filoni's (or what his name is) Clone Wars aren't exactly pinnacle of writing, but this is waaaay worse. Furthermore, the game controls are simply abysmal and imprecise, the camera is almost always in the wrong place and cannot be moved, and so on. As a last note, game looks passable, the sound is okay, though the voiceacting is of pretty questionable quality. Overall, it's a frustrating experience, and the only recommendation I can give, is that you stay clear of this one, even if you got it in the Steam Star Wars package or whatever.
Horizon 5 is both a disappointment and also exactly what I expected. From technical standpoint, it is certainly one of the best games currently available. It looks great and it runs great as well, no crashes, no craziness, nothing too buggy, throwing the Bethesda excuse of "our map big, bugs fine because map big" out of the window. However, it also realizes the biggest fears I had coming from Horizon 4. It focuses on a couple spectacle events, but regular racing is even more sidelined, the event types, length, etc. are stagnant and it feel like playing Horizon 3 all over again. The progress and building out your collection is even more randomized this time, as you do not earn money from races anymore (as far as I know), and about 90% (by my guesstimate) of anything you get is through random rewards, which is, to me, extremely unsatisfying and unfair, most of the time. I called Horizon 4 a gacha game without microtransactions. Horizon 5 is the same game, but after a patch doubling gacha mechanics after the halfway point in the life of the game, when the publisher knows the game is dying, so they make a last great push to milk the whales dry. Except FH does not have actual microtransactions, as far as I know, at least for now. It certainly feels like they are trying to ready the playerbase for them though, normalizing lootbox rewards and then eventually just switching selling them for IRL money. To be clear, this is just my opinion, I do not have any verifiable information. Either way, the progression feels even worse than in FH4 which was already a repetitive chore with abysmal rewards for the time spent. FH5 is even worse, by a lot. The other parts of the gameplay loop, much like the regular races, are also stagnant - the AI is just as bad, except it is now a bit more rubber-bandy, the driving physics were changed a bit and some cars do feel better, but others have moved closer to the ocean liner steering of Forza Motorsport 7, the story is utter cringe, the characters are still San Franciso bicycle riding urbanites pretending to be car enthusiasts, now with the added benefit of a voiced protagonist who is about as relatable as clothing store mannequins - it has a vaguely human shape, and that's about it. The car sound is just as generic and bland as in previous two games. And so on. This game isn't even one step forward, two backwards. It's more like standing in place and awkwardly shuffling to the side for a bit, like when rain is falling and you are under a short roof, so you try to squeeze more onto the wall to avoid the last few raindrops still hitting your shoulder, except the wall is covered in some pretty nasty stuff. As a gamepass game, where you ignore the story and characters, entertain yourself with the flashy special events in "brain turned off, things go brrm brrm boom, cool" way, play through the races once or perhaps a couple times, to complete the "main campaign" it's okay. However, it has no place being in the AAA price range, and as a live-service game with long-term shelf life, it's terrible progression system and bland main gameplay loop put it squarely among the titans of live-service genre, such as Tom Clancy's Breakpoint. As a NFS substitute, 6/10. As a live service game where you actually want to do ALL the things, 3/10. EDIT: Never mind what I said about no technical issues, now the game randomly started taking 10+ minutes to load from an nvme SSD... 1/10
Trek to Yomi is a very atmospheric experience, paying homage to classic Samurai movies. Enjoyment of the story and characters will hinge on your enjoyment of the kind of movies it pays homage to, because it is positively drowning in cliches. I honestly loved it. The art is awesome and so are the graphics, the soundtrack is awesome, the voiceacting and writing it just the right amount of cheesy and cliche. And the camera? The camera is simply the best, easily in the top 5 of the last decade. Trek to Yomi is honestly one of the best movies of 2022. Except it's a game. A bad game. The camera is godlike for a movie, but pretty bad for a game. The game employs the "learn through failure" model - or what I like to call "a--hole design approach" to gameplay. It will teach you how to time parries and attacks, how to stun enemies, how they react to being hit, and so on, and then throws enemies at you that completely ignore the rules the game has set and which still apply to you. Just not to your enemies anymore. Coupled with the rather clunky movement and the abovementioned cinematic camera, it turn combat - the main gameplay part - into a very frustrating ordeal. It's not even challenging. It's just annoying and a chore. Trek to Yomi is a great example of "good movie does not equal good game". Best way to enjoy it is to watch someone else suffer through it instead.
Easily the best game to come out this year, bar none. Great action platformer, tons of high octane fun, great soundtrack, great and very fitting graphics style, a wealth of content in the main "story" and a surprising amount of side-story content. The game is also very skill based, there's very little RNG here (mostly confined to accuracy spread of some weapons). It's a lot of fun, especially if you like to challenge yourself for the best times on levels - game is honestly closest to Trackmania in terms of its base philosophy, and it delivers on all fronts a fun experience, enjoyable for a casual player and even better for anyone looking to test their abilities.
The 2016 restart of DOOM is a perfect example of what an AAA game should be. Great gameplay, great story and surprisingly deep lore (for an old-school styled FPS), one of the best game soundtracks of all time and great graphics. While the game is not completely without issues (balance of the RPG lite elements is a bit off, the usual id Engine issues with texture streaming happen sometimes, etc.), none of it has large impact on the enjoyment of the game. A perfect game for pretty much anyone, from a "hardcore" FPS player to a casual player just looking for a fun game to play.
The Outer Worlds is a fun game, a good RPG with decent combat and some interesting plot points. Overall, I believe it's nothing less than a good game. On the other hand, it's also nothing more than just good, and where I have seen, especially in the professional critics space, the game often lauded as Obsidian's return to form, I would argue if you want to experience something close to KOTOR 2, or even the high moments of Neverwinter Nights 2 and Fallout: New Vegas, you will have to reach out for Tyranny or the Pillars of Eternity games instead. Another thing I have seen pop up several times is "Fallout: NV, but in space" - and you could not be further from truth. Perhaps the only things that tie the two games (aside from the studio itself) are the use of a simplistic and overtuned weapon durability system and a silent MC. TOW is not Obsidian's attempt to do a complete version of FO:NV in space, but rather, an attempt to make their own Mass Effect, more specifically a trilogy / series setup of Mass Effect 1, where you build a team of specialists and run around trying to save the galaxy (with two teammates at a time), or with the humbler TOW - one solar system. To be fair, it's pretty challenging to be completely original, if not impossible at this point, and the game does a lot to fix the issues of ME1. However, it also brings a couple new issues of its own, a lot of it due to Obsidian's attempt to make the game, especially in terms of the characters "quirky and original", and as a result, turning quite a few of them into some twitteresque morons. At the same time, the game often repeats some pretty stale tropes - and does it multiple times, sometimes within the span of couple minutes. For example, in the opening scene, which probably everyone already saw, as it is a part of the promotional materials for the game, the pre-teen cartoon trope of mad scientists gadgets not working so he has to push a button multiple times for it to miraculously work is used twice, in a span of some 4-5 minutes! I've lambasted Crackdown 3 for this recently, and I will say it again here: If you say or do something ****, stating "Actually I was only pretending to be ****!" afterwards doesn't fix or excuse your prior behavior, but makes you look even more ****. "We were only doing a satire of stereotypes!" - Yeah, but you still flooded your game with characters based off of them, and in addition, you further made it worse by making them more fitting for a Tom & Jerry episode than an M rated game. That being said, there are some genuinely interesting things about most of the characters, and there are moments where they have really well written and believable dialogue, but this makes things even worse, because it really clashes with their dumbass behavior outside of these moments. Honestly, it reminds me of Guardians of the Galaxy, except the writers weren't really able to balance out and connect the wacky and serious moments, and so the game feels disjointed and goes from bat crap insane to noir thriller to realistic interpersonal relations drama and then back again all in the span of a few moments. This is probably the largest complaint overall, actually. The game is disjointed, because it tries to be multiple things. It's trying to be ME1, a wacky parody of ME1, and an original Obsidian game, and is neither as a result. In some cases, you make a really big decision, and in one affected place you see a huge change, and in another, which should have a similar large effect applied to it, you get a one-liner mention of the whole thing and then nothing else. Some individual rare weapons are really interesting and original, but the weapon roster in general is just heaps of the same crap with the occassional "+3 fire damage". There's a bunch of factions that supposedly focus on different things, but they all use the same armor and weapons, just different colors, and so on. The game does fix some issues of ME1 though - specifically, the "worlds" you visit are more condensed, there's much less running around tons of large and near completely barren maps, the pacing, especially in case of side content, is much much better as a result. The simplistic karma system is replaced with a much better one with individual relations with each faction, and your individual decisions themselves play a larger role, the dialogues are much better and most often not constrained to paragon/renegade/neutral/ask-question, and feel more natural, and so on. The game also has a very distinct graphical style, a retro-futuristic mix between wild west and art deco and a few other elements, all locations and planets are pretty distinct and well crafter from design perspective. Anyways, in the end, the game is saved by a few great moments and a handful of well thought out and implemented mechanics and design choices that stand well above the rest of the game, and I mean a lot above the rest of the game. Without them, solid 3/10.
This game is a FlatOut 1+2 remaster. Not a remake though. What's the difference you ask? Well, it has both the good, but also the bad, and while the graphics are new and pretty good and the game has DLCs including (overpriced and with stats better than base-game) carpacks, essential things for any remaster, the game also fails to improve pretty much everything that plagued the old racing titles. This game is a love-letter to crash-racers of olden days, but love is blind to any imperfections. The racing is great. It's just fun, pure fun. The cars handle great and there is an okay variety of them in terms of body types, etc. and they are all pretty distinct, the tracks are awesome and pretty varied, the graphics are pretty good for a smaller studio, the damage model is well done - detailed and there's very little of surface stretching and objects sticking or melting into each other that happens a lot in BeamNG for example. On the other hand, the economy is, as in the old FlatOut games, not that good, and it requires you to re-run races repeatedly in the career mode already, and you only really need a couple cars to get through the career. Sure, completing the garage and unlocking all upgrades etc. should take some time, but in C class races with only 2 cars, you will already be counting every single dime, and I came here to race and crash cars, not count coppers. The base car roster, though varied, is also a bit limited in some categories, a couple more cars would be welcome - in the base game, not as "micro"transactions. The design of the menus is also atrocious and stuck in times even before FlatOut was a thing, and sometimes you spend as much time clicking through menus and trying to find something or switch cars, etc. as you spend racing. It's like the UI designer got put into cryostasis sometime in the first half of the 1990's and then got thawed out to make the menus in this game without being allowed even a glimpse of the progress that was made in this field. In addition, the game often freezes in the menus, mostly not leading to a crash, just freezing and then not allowing you to do anything, but to back out of the menu, so you have to retry that menu sometimes several times in a row until it starts working... So why 7/10, when I complain so much? Well, as I said, the game is just pure fun. When you are in a race, and don't have to fight stupid menu design or make complex financial plans for buying a digital exhaust for a digital car, when the engines roar, tires squeal and metal bends and cracks, the game just pulls you in, and you want more. In the end though, the game comes as a whole package and there's only one thing I can say about it in conclusion: It's a nostalgia trip. A fun and good looking nostalgia trip, but still a nostalgia trip. Eventually, the rose tinted glasses come off, and the issues of yesteryear which we have since dealt with will rear their ugly head again. Where you will stand on the scale between enjoyment and frustration will then depend on your ability and willingness to suffer their presence.
Fun casual platformer (and perhaps at times too easy) with a story that tries, but utterly fails, to tackle a very complex topic. The graphics style and design is pretty good, but technical aspects - especially low texture resolution, are worse, which goes contrary to the surprisingly high minimum required graphics card. The platforming works pretty well for the most part, and the game does have a couple mechanics to spice it up a bit, but it reveals its hand a bit too soon and becomes a bit repetitive, despite being relatively short. The "power cleaner simulator" part of it is also a bit unbalanced in some parts of the game and turns it into a bit of a chore. An okay experience on gamepass or heavily discounted, but nothing special, if you are looking for a really good platformer, you'll have to look elsewhere.
Repetitive, but fun and short enough that it does not overstay it's welcome, but definitely undercooked in some regards. Very much a "subscription service filler / discount bin" kind of game. It's not a game that can really be recommended, but if you play it with no expectations, you'll be entertained for a couple hours. From what I understand, Crackdown 3 is a part of loved series, especially the first game, and it had heaps of expectations also built up by some PR hype that it did not live up to. I'm not a Crackdown fan, this is the first one I played, and I only know of the expectations and hype from tidbits that I picked up here and there. That being said, this game definitely feels like Early Access game entering the beta stage. It has the world, it has the technical side of content down - all the weapons, all the vehicles, and so on, it can be finished all the way through. However, it has not been polished for full release yet, it has balance issues, it runs like azz, it crashes randomly, some of the more complex stuff like animations isn't quite there, etc. Except there was no polishing, the game was released in that state and not nearly patched enough afterwards. Money and time constraints? "F-ck it, we've been trying for years and we just can't get it done, just release it."? Who knows? I don't. The result is clear though, there's an interesting idea, and a core that actually works (mostly at least), but the game simply isn't finished. The graphics are "your generic UE4 early access game" level. By virtue of the engine itself, it has some decent effects, most models look okay, but the terrain isn't anything special and gets really bad in certain places. In regards to design, it's mostly doing things right - the city looks interesting, has a bunch of distinct locations, etc. The vehicles, weapons, etc. are all well designed - and as mentioned, the models are pretty good for the most part. Not what you would expect from a high end game, though - not even close. I'm not a graphics purist by any means, but fam, if your game tries to put a foot in the AAA space and your terrain is most reminiscent of Serious Sam: The First Encounter and half of the textures are blurrier than 144p video further massacred by YT compression, you are doing something wrong. Sounds are okay, the ambience is more or less nonexistent, soundtrack is good and the tracks are fitting the situation and location, although none of them really stuck with me. Voice acting is also good, for the most part. Story and characters - anti-corporate "covert commie" cringe support cast vs. cartoonishly evil villains with **** goals, and **** methods. I understand that this was meant to be over the top, but this is really really bad, not to mention so predictable that skipping cutscenes has no impact what so ever. I'd be okay with throwaway story as a simple justification of "go shoot crap" or with a parody or a satire. However, this story and these obnoxious and stupid characters, endlessly and incessantly b-tching at you in and outside of cutscenes, are a videogame story equivalent of that guy on a forum losing an argument due to his stupidity and then going "Joke's on you! I was only pretending to be ****!" No - that guy is ****, and so it the writing in this game. I'd give this game an extra point if it had no "story moments" and "banter between characters" (I am loathe to call them such), and was just a sandbox where you cause mayhem and tear down a crappy corporation. I've worked in a few, so that option alone would be a good enough motivation. Gameplay wise, the game is okay, this is definitely the strongest point in my opinion, but it's by no means perfect. I love the guns, they are great, albeit unbalanced and there's about 4-5 that are just flat out better than anything else. Combat overall is pretty fun, fast, a bit on the chaotic side, but manageable (aside from the last boss where it just turns into too much of a mess). There's a lot of verticality, especially in the second part of the game. The platforming is also pretty decent, but it's let down quite a bit by really janky camera and the "latch on" mechanics aren't exactly stellar. In regards to the vehicles - their physics and drive models are god awful, there's no good, fun to drive car in the whole game, and you're better off just running and jumping around. In regards to the structure of the game, it's basically just a bunch of side quests strung together with the "story" of this game with a couple boss - fights / main quests in the second half, albeit most of the main story quests are really just larger side quests, they use the same mechanics, etc. Performance - pretty bad. The game microstutters all the time even on a very strong PC, and it crashes randomly. In conclusion: If you haven't played Just Cause 2 and 3, or Red Faction: Guerilla, go play those instead. If you have and need mayhem fix, go replay them.
Cannot be played - downloaded it, tried to launch the game, forces me to go to some **** webpage, so it's not even launching via the goddamn EA Play app, and when I try to launch the campaign via the webpage where EA Play app forced me to go, it tells me I don't have the game installed. Yeah, you can f-ck right off, EA.
There's not much that needs to be said regarding this game - take any of the classic Zelda games, and any of the Dark/Demon Souls games, take only the worst mechanics and design choices out of them, turn the repetitiveness up to 11, and here you go: TUNIC. The artstyle is really nice, but there's not much asset variety and it all just melts into a blob of bland earthy greens and browns after some time. The interesting ideas, such as finding and building a manual to the game in the game by finding pages of it scattered around the map are all overshadowed by the really really bad game design of the main gameplay loop. From soulslike games, we have the combat relying on learning enemy behavior, timing and precise dodging, except the combat also consists of just one weapon with one three-strike combo and a handful of abilities of questionable balance and usefulness. In addition, you can literally just save at bonfires, and it respawns all enemies, which is an absolute pain, because: From early Zelda games, it takes linearity and backtracking, and goes absolutely overboard especially in the backtracking part - from the very first minute, I could see paths that I could not access, but it was clear I would get to them later after getting a sword and cutting the surrounding small vegetation down in a suitably Zelda-like fashion, and that would be fine, except these additional paths were largely just shortcuts or additional passages to the places I was already traversing, meaning that their use was to literally allow me to get back to the places where I already was, and this was proven true soon after. Of course, I had then to again participate in the same unsatisfactory combat against the, mostly simplistic and boring, enemies I already killed before, and after next puzzle, I had to go back and do it again to reach a next path, and so on and on. A lot of people seem to like the game, so most likely you, the one reading this word-vomit, will enjoy it too, but for me, I just can't see a reason why to play it over Zelda or Dark Souls games, because it wouldn't really stand on its own as either of those, much less a proper combination of them.
When initially this game was released, with very little fanfare, I expected it to be just another piece of licensed movie-to-game junk that the publisher wasn't talking about because they were pretty confident in it's failure and it being absolute trash. Oh boy, was I wrong. While not perfect, mostly on the account of technical issues that haven't been fully patched even half a year after release, and the humor that stoops down into reddit tier cringefest way too often, but it's definitely a full fledged game that is more than capable of standing on its own and it definitely does its franchise justice. Well, for those who want more details, here you go: Technical stuff: - game is incredibly well optimized, at least on my hardware (stock 5900X, RX 6900 XT factory overclocked, 32GB DDR4 Ram, running out of pcie 3 nvme drive) easily butter smooth at native 4k with ray tracing - well, most of the time - the game does, however, appear to have an issue with loading in assets, loading takes way too much for running out of near empty, half a year old nvme SSD, the game also hitches on transitions, such as in cutscenes and such where "background" loading takes place Graphics: - game looks great, though it's at times very clear the level of optimization that was achieved wasn't by magic, but by carefully balancing performance and fidelity. If you require nothing but the absolute best from your games in regards to graphics, you'll be disappointed - there's a few, common nowadays, graphical glitches, such as misaligned textures, scenery objects floating, objects sticking into each other or into the ground/walls, some weirdness with clothing animations, etc. - speaking of animations, they can be pretty stiff at times, nothing too bad though - the game is however, very much capable of delivering movie like-spectacle, repeatedly. character design, location design - from graphics perspective, is damn near flawless - unfortunately, some assets get reused a bit too often, especially enemies later into the game, and there ain't that many different alien species either and what is there is kinda limited and very similar to each other, perhaps to save time or cost (or both) Sound: - great soundtrack, nothing else can be said - sound design and direction is great overall - unfortunately, speech cuts out randomly a lot - for example if you go "too fast" through the world and don't allow your companions to finish, they just cut out mid-sentence and switch to a different conversation. Feels very unnatural and could have been handled better. - voiceacting is very good, for the most part, but there are some terribly written dialogues where you can feel the awkwardness the actors are feeling just seep through Writing/story/characters: - it is a marvel superhero fantasy "sci"-fi, but its one of the better ones - the humor is often a bit too cringey, as a banter during gameplay its okay, but its unbearably unfunny and annoying in cutscenes, a lot of which you cannot skip - and don't want to because of plot elements - the plot is surprisingly competent, it ain't winning pulitzer's by any means, it's not terribly original either, but for a superhero game which is by theme and design aimed at teenagers and redditors (which is mentally about the same level), it's very good, has some nice spins and twists along the way, and surprisingly some pretty thoughtful moments, I liked it - main characters are pretty likeable for the most part, the side characters are also, and the writing was competent enough, overall, to actually make me care about most of them, though I'd prefer they spoke less because most of the dialogue is really bad, really really really bad Gameplay: - is a bit of a mixed bag honestly - the game suffers from "cutscenis unnecessaris", especially towards the first half of the game, but it's not a terminal case fortunately, it still has a negative impact on pacing though - combat isn't terribly complex, but it is fun for the most part, especially when you unlock all of the abilities of your crew - there aren't all that many though, and honestly, the game would be better off without this rpg-lite crap - AI is dumb, really dumb, your friends will run into AoE attacks ang get knocked out repeatedly, enemies just dumbly rush you or stand in one place waiting to be killed, etc. - towards the end of the game, they get a bit too HP-bloated, especially the boss fights turn into test of patience rather than skill, and sometimes you get swarmed by way too many enemies turning the combat way too chaotic and a mess to manage - another pacing issue - overall though, it was still fun for me, really mostly for the spectacle and flashy stuff - the game is surprisingly substantial content wise, expected 5-6 hours, it's easily triple that - not really something I will be replaying anytime soon, though Last issue I encountered is disappearing or, doubled, or incorrect subtitles.
OMNO grabbed me a lot more than I initially thought it would. It’s not the most complex journey, but as a casual offering for just enjoying some light platforming and puzzles, it works very well, and the world design and music are just fantastic, so much so that despite some minor technical and gameplay design mishaps, I can’t help to love it It’s just perfect (well, almost) at what it aims to do, a captivating journey through another world, filled with wonder. As mentioned, the world design is beautiful. Wonderful landscapes with various biomes dotted with mysterious ruins, some of which you will explore directly, others you will only see from afar. Aside from you, the land is full of flora and fauna, some of which you can interact with. The designs range from near-real life through goofy and alien to majestic, but all of them interesting, and the variety is fairly large. The art style is rather simple, and it is not that distinct – there is a fair amount of games with these minimalist-styled 3D graphics nowadays, so the game relies more on being well designed than simply graphical fidelity. What is very good, though, is the lighting, really helping to build the atmosphere of the game. The sound is also wonderful, the music is simply amazing. There is a bit of a story, it is not super deep or anything, it’s just a simple justification for the journey you undertake, and some lore tidbits you find that refer to the history of the world you find yourself in, which are actually good enough to raise more interest. The ending was a bit surprising, and “open” – really, it raises more questions than it answers, in my opinion. Well, it answers almost nothing. It’s not really the closure the story needed and while it’s not entirely bad and has a bright side or two, it falls flat after the buildup of interest in the fate of the world you traverse during the game. Overall, the game gives off a mixed feeling, but not in a bad way. It’s a combination of wonder and joy of exploration, but also melancholy, as you wonder what the ruins were like in their days of glory, and about the people who lived in them. The controls are for the most part pretty tight and make for a good platforming experience, although the latching on edges during climbing is a bit inconsistent, and there’s some issues with jumping as well. It’s not too bad though. The gameplay design is casual, don’t expect any serious challenge, at least not overall – there’s a couple puzzles or platforming sections that are more challenging. For the most part, though, you are not really pressured by anything and the puzzles and platforming sections are easy to examine, the clues to solving them, when they are required, are always nearby, easy to find and decipher. Also, in order to progress, you only really ever have to finish some of the puzzles or platforming parts, so you can skip the few that are more challenging. That being said, while a platforming section with very short, but doable time limit, is one thing. Another matter are puzzles that force a trial and error approach and are long enough to where guessing correctly on your first time is very unlikely – that’s just bad lazy game design. Fortunately, there’s only very small amount of those. I also haven’t encountered any serious bugs, but there was some pop-in, flickering of shadows, and the game tends to stutter or freeze momentarily when entering new locations. Overall, the game is lovely and it pulled me in, and did not let go until I finished it. Despite the couple minor technical issues and the lackluster ending, I can’t say I regret playing through it at all. The journey was wonderful, and despite the linearity of the game, I’m looking forward to re-experiencing it sometime in the future.
Seeing as this is actually a mobile game, I could live with shorter stages and the dated graphics. What I cannot live with it is lazy level design from the get go, where you at times get stuck in a very small box with invisible walls, and defeat a couple waves of enemies, or have to do stupid escort missions for slow moving vehicles and so on. The roster of weapons has also been cut down a lot compared to the mainline games, as has the enemy roster, which is unforgivable - you have everything you need, all the designs, all of the behavior patterns, everything - just stick it in the game. But they were too lazy even for that. As for the PC version specific issues I encountered on the Windows Store / Gamepass version - the game is 4:3 window mode only and in some stupid resolution, can't even upscale it properly because of that. There's no graphics settings at all, at least I did not find them, you can't change controls either and the binds are f-cking dumb, the people working on this port probably never played a game on PC. The gameplay is okay, I guess. It's more or less well balanced. The hitboxes of the environment are crap though, and because of the limited enemy and weapon roster, the combat gets stale really quickly. Lazy game, crap PC port, waste of time and money.
A visual novel, so, as is usual in this genre, the claims about how you can make these choices with huge consequences are mostly not true, as the story is more or less linear with crucial points that will be reached / happen regardless of what choices you make. The art style is okay, it's pixel art and it's decent, but there are pixel art games with way better quality. Considering this is a visual novel with a very restricted set of locations, I'd expect more effort to be put into them. Sound is okay, music is great, but the score is a bit limited, which is a shame. Controls are clunky, and there is a double-clicking bug that happens sometimes. The "kingdom manager" side of the game is as simplistic as it is unbalanced (for example, building a huge tavern costs less than what one single peasant requested as help with his one single field, and rejecting him has huge impact on the happiness of the whole kingdom - etc.). Honestly, is feels like playing your average maths textbook, where your average person on average trip to a shop buys 175 watermelons and 571 balloons - basically devoid of any logic and completely torn from reality. It feels like the devs made an actually working management system, but it was not quite reaching the point where it would force you to make some tough decisions, so they turned up the prices and punishments by about 5-10 times and then didn't playtest it. I'm all for making a management system where you just can't tick all the boxes, but there has to be some logic behind it, and the choices you make have to be informed and with realistic consequences. The system in this game is just arbitrary values stacked up to f-ck you over with no logical reason what so ever. Furthermore, there are bugs in it - or at least I hope these are bugs and not intentional, because that would make it even worse - you receive a complaint from peasants about a man doing some stupid stuff, you call him to court, you tell him to stop, he stops, and the peasants hate you for it. Because you did what they asked for. What the f-ck? The story is okay, it's not quite up there with the best in the genre, but it's also not outright bad. It has some interesting parts, some less so, some twists which you can see from a mile away, and it suffers from the common issue of visual novels - the badly hidden linearity, where you generally have 2-3 choices of how to proceed which lead to pretty much the same outcome. Sometimes, the characters seem supremely stupid because of this, because you see a completely different way to go about it, but you cannot, because despite the lofty claims of non-linear story and choices that matter, the path is - sometimes clearly, sometimes not - laid out. For example, out of your control, your character makes some promises. When time comes to go ahead with what was promised, the only way is to be a backstabbing a-hole, the only limited choices you have is what resources you will focus on in your quest to not have to be true to your word. There's no choice to just go through with it. There's no choice to try and negotiate and perhaps get into a better position that way. Nah, the writer decided you do X, so you do X. There's nothing wrong with a linear or semi-linear story. There is everything wrong with claiming it's non-linear with a plethora of impactful choices with far reaching consequences. It's simply not true in case of this game. Anyways, it's a damn shame, especially the borked kingdom management part, which makes the game damn near unplayable, unless you long for elementary school mathematics with some shady casino RNG thrown into the mix. The visual novel sphere is dominated by weeb stuff, this game could be distinct just by not being one of those, instead it's just a frustrating mess.
Forza Horizon 4 is a very fun game with a lots of cars to collect and with decent driving model and a map that offers it all, from tight city streets, through a long highway to muddy rural side roads. It is, however, also a grindy slog with limited amount of race tracks, very simplistic singleplayer AI and a lot of half-baked features. Personally, I love cars and they are my hobby, so I have forgiven a lot, and honestly, as a casual player, who just wants to win the main races, you'll have a fun couple hours. If you want to delve deeper and perhaps collect all cars, unlock all content, etc. you'll be facing some pretty frustrating roadblocks. Performance and technical bugs: - the game is very well optimized and runs great, I got about 105 FPS on average in 4k at max - it crashes randomly, no matter the location, whether in race or freeroam, full speed or standing still, the game will just freeze and then crash after a second or two Graphics: - the game looks great, the car models, the environment, the particle effects, all of it looks amazing - the game changes seasons, and all of them are done very well Sound: - music is fantastic, though there's not too many of them, and the songs cut off at weird points, the DJs are pretty good as well - engine sounds are kinda generic, but this is pretty much a Forza thing, there's too many cars to get proper sounds, I guess - voiceacting is alright Story/characters - what is not alright are the characters, most of them are not written very well, they feel like san francisco dwelling, bicycle riding urbanites who wanted to impress someone and so they have read a bunch of wikipedia articles about random cars so they could try and fake an interest in them. Needles to say, it does not quite work. - there's a bit of a shallow story about becoming a racing star, but it has no bearing on the gameplay, it's just a couple low cost "cut-scenes" that are mostly just showing the map while a character drops a line or two Gameplay: - as mentioned, the driving model is pretty good - on the arcadey side, though it can be tweaked a bit to make it more challenging by turning of ABS and such, though I don't think it can quite be said it becomes more "realistic" that way - there's a lot of cars to collect, some 750-800 pieces - the progression is really grindy in regards to money / credits - most of the progression is handled through randomized rewards which feel like someone wanted to sell lootboxes, but then got scared of backlash so removed the option to buy them with IRL cash, but this means that progression is very uneven and does not feel good, and building up a well rounded garage is also more of a problem since you will mostly get cars that you do not need, not to mention the game did not have an option to sell duplicate cars for a loooooong time - compared to the amount of cars and the grind required to get them, there's not enough tracks. What is in the game is pretty good, you get your short technical circuits, long tracks through the country side, etc. But all of them will eventually become boring as you drive hours upon hours on them - the game has a track editor, but it is kinda barebones and instead of "painting" the track, you drive your car and place checkpoints, which is dumb AF to be honest, as the way you drive determines the "best line" and also the line which the bots follow to the dot - so the editor is mostly used to build exploit tracks for easy credit grind - as mentioned, the AI is dumb, it just follows the "best line" in a train, very little awareness of anything, resulting in some stupid crashes at times - unless you are really into collecting cars, there's no real point in playing the game past completing the mainline races, all you'll get is a lot of grind for little reward - your car collection is only in Horizon 4, despite the fact that the next game(s) will contain them, you will have to regrind them again, making the grind even more pointless - drag racing is really undercooked in the game, drifting also feels a bit tacked-on - there are some vehicle categories which feel pretty empty and underutilized - some other minor attempts at different race types / events that went nowhere because the devs kinda always just decided to try something new, but were overly cautious and did not commit enough resources, so the result was underwhelming and did not take off, thus halting future development, the only exception being the battle royale mode - Eliminator - which I honestly did not like much - personally I also hated the inclusion of Lego and Hot wheels cars, which cannot be removed / turned off It's a fun racing game for a casual player, and a decent playground for someone trying to "catch them all", but the overly grindy, very randomized progression and some other issues - both technical and game design choices made - drag the game down. It doesn't really bring anything special to the genre.
An anime game that is more like a mildly interactive visual novel. Graphics: - anime styled, overall pretty good quality with some very nice environments - enemy design is very… distinct – but not in a very good way, and they feel very out of place and made so different just to be able to say they are original, but they are weird even by anime standards performance: - overall very good, game feels well enough optimised, no crashing, no stuttering gameplay: - cutscenes after cutscene after cutscenes, then a short period of running around, even shorter period of fighting, then more cutsceeeeneeees - most of the cutscenes are boring AF with very little substance, some of them are fully animated, but most are this weird mix of animated and comics style, not a big fan tbh - fighting feels pretty good, landing some combos feels very satisfying - the abilities are pretty interesting and useful for the most part - target lock on is inconsistent, often it locks at an enemy out of field of view, or not the one you look at - would prefer if the HP of the enemies was decreased a bit and instead there was more of them, but overall it’s okay - bosses and minibosses are very spongy and the fights with them pretty unimaginative, you lure them into “traps” that damage them / hit their weakspots for more damage, but you still have to do it multiple times, making it repetitive – these fights are more an exercise in patience than in skill - forced finisher and ability animations which mostly let remaining enemies closer to get off an attack that you cannot dodge after the animation finishes - enemies also have some pretty interesting abilities or attack patterns, but their AI is kinda dum dum - companion AI is also dum dum, they are kinda useless other than drawing some attention at times, you can change their “tactics”, but it has very little impact in my experience, they also sometimes bug out and just run into enemies instead of actually attacking them, their pathfinding could also use some work, in some areas they get stuck all the time, constantly teleporting to you as you get too far away from them, teleporting is fine as a fix if it only happens occasionally, but as mentioned, in some maps, it’s near constant, distracting, and makes the AI look as even more of a joke... – game has a bunch of rpg elements, miscellaneous item drops that can be traded, etc. and is kinda grindy, there’s no special twist on the formula, it’s run of the mill kind of thing for this genre, but at least it feels mostly well balanced - the game is semi open world, the amount of locations is okay, but their size is pretty small and they are all completely linear - encounters respawn on re-entering locations, but resources that you have to gather appear to respawn on some sort of timer that’s not entirely clear and I don’t even see the point - overall, it’s your average japanese modern day action adventure game / rpg hybrid, and there have been some much better examples of the genre lately, for example the Nier series. Sound: - very good japanese voiceacting - very little ambience in most maps - music kinda forgettable, also not mixed correctly – some songs are really quiet story: - your average sci-fantasy anime, a lot of cliches and tropes, cringy “jokes” and a barage of badly explained pseudo scientific gibberish as a replacement for actual lore, and a crapton of cliché side characters that feel like the writers had a checklist of anime character tropes and did their damned best to have not one, but at least 2-3 meaningless characters for every category - neither the “lore” that’s not directly tied to the main story nor the side characters are worth caring about, they come and go without any serious impact, there’s no real depth to any of it - main story, told from the perspective of two characters, is pretty interesting and has some intriguing parts of it, but it’s still quite far from a masterpiece, mainly the crap characters drag it down - the main characters are also cliché AF, a lot of cringy behavior, **** decisions, and so on Overall, what could be an interesting, if at times cliché filled anime (actually there is a SN anime now I think), got turned into a serviceable, but otherwise pretty indistinct game with some serious pacing issues and lack of actual gameplay time where you do stuff. I’d lie if I said there are no fun parts in this game, but unfortunately, they get pretty much evenly matched with the tedious or boring parts. With a 70 EUR price tag, I expected a lot more – a lot more game, especially. If I want to watch an anime, I go watch an anime.
Moonglow Bay could have been either a nice casual fishing and cooking game, or a challenging business simulator game. It tries to go both ways and as a result, gets nowhere. Yet, it is still charming in a few ways and a few of the gameplay elements are fun and engaging. So why the negative rating? Technical issues and lack of polish. First of, the graphics and the design - the game has a Minecraft+ style, blocky but some detail, and as mentioned, it is pretty charming. Unfortunately, the quality is kinda all over the place. You have locations that are well designed and with a lot of attention to detail, and then you just have other locations that are mostly empty, or they look hastily thrown together. Some of the parts of the game are also in a hand drawn (I guess?) 2D - and it has a very high quality and looks good. It just doesn't really fit for me, it's very out of place for the overall style. Sound is okay, the music is okay, a bit bland and generic "casual game" style. Same goes for the ambience. It's good enough, but it's nothing memorable. Story wise, it's a slice of life story with some play at emotions. I have seen it praised, but I honestly found it to be a bit bland. It tries to go for the feels way too soon, before I was even immersed into the world, it was already "feel-sad-baiting". The lore of the game, or rather the locations where it takes place, is pretty funny and interesting, though. Also, the narrative has a mild case of "the woke". The gameplay, as mentioned at the beginning, is kinda all over the place. The fishing is pretty interesting and fun at first, but there's a completely unnecessary mechanic that allows you to cheese through it. You can of course decide not to use it, but the fact that it even is in the game the way it is makes me question how much playtesting was done. I have a feeling it wasn't much. The cooking is also pretty fun, and it has no exploits as far as I know, but the QTEs that are part of it have pretty inaccurate button push/release registration and as the resulting food quality depends on how precisely you do the QTEs, you sometimes get screwed over. Finally, there's the business part and the economy. The business part is undercooked, literally. You cook a batch of food, and put it out to sell. But you don't really see how much of what you are selling, etc. Daily, one food gets a bonus, and one a negative status, increasing / decreasing price, but since you don't know how much stuff is left, and which types are sold out or not, you don't know what effect it has on you. You also can't take foods that are already being sold out of the stock and return them once their price increases. There is also no real simulation of demand besides these random statuses, so you can literally spam one type of food - the easiest to make that you can make out of all / most of the fish you catch, and just cheese it this way. For some recipes - most actually, you will also need different ingredients. You have unlimited amount of them in your kitchen, but you pay for them when you take them out of your fridge. And my question is, why even have this in? Like, just stop at the point where "you have unlimited other ingredients", remove the paying for them, and reduce the sell price of the foods. It's also not balanced well, and it's literally just more profitable to spam some cheaper foods instead - not to mention that you are supposed to have a fast food stall, and most of the stuff you cook is anything but fastfood, and a lot of fastfood recipes are not available. Also, the way fish works is stupid - you get fish, they have weight, etc. - but it does not matter - 1 fish = 1 meal. If the game was trying to stay casual, alright, fine, but it's trying to do this business thing, and it makes no sense. A 40kg fish, allows you to make one batch of fish cakes. So does a 4kg one... How is that even a thing? You can also donate fish to local aquarium, and it boosts your sale price - supposedly, I actually didn't see any change, and also, once when I donated fish, the aquarium only accepted some (all were new species), and not the rest - but they still got taken out of my inventory, so I had to donate another specimens of those species... Furthermore, there's a bunch of issues with random invisible walls, or places where the ground ends before the hitbox so you float above sea with your character in the parts where you are not on your boat, and so on. It just feels hastily thrown together - someone had a cool idea, but not enough patience - or skil, or both - to pull it off. And it's a damn shame, because the premise of the game is really fun, hell some of it is already here - fishing without the quickreeling, some aspects of the cooking, the long list of different and fairly distinct species of fish and other sea creatures... It just isn't done well.
This isn't really a game how most would think of one - me included, honestly, until I played around in Townscaper. So thanks for broadening my horizons, lol. Anyways, there's no goal, no "You won!" screen, nor a "You lost!" one. This game is about just plopping down a couple blocks and building an island town, painting it in a variety of vibrant colors and basking in the glory of your own creation. This game is like that time you sat down with your wooden blocks or your lego as a child, threw the manual to the corner, and decided to build a town of your own. If you remember it fondly, you'll most likely enjoy Townscaper. If you remember it as something boring you were forced to do because you couldn't go play outside or watch tv / play videogames, you'll probably want to steer clear. However, if you have a game pass, I'd recommend you give it a try while it's on there anyways. It's only some 150MB, so will be downloaded real quick, and perhaps it'll amuse you for a few minutes.
The game looks interesting, but for me, it simply does not work. When I try to start the campaign, and get to the plane selection before a mission, my cursor disappears, and the sensitivity skyrockets for some reason, and I just can't even get the mouse to where it needs to go. I tried with gamepad, and same issue with it as well...
The Falconeer looks good. You check the screenshots, looks cool. Check videos, looks even better. You start it up, and the story bits roll out and start pulling you into this post-apocalyptic / mythical combo world. Then you actually get to play the game, and oh boy... Things go to sh-t faster than the reactor at Chernobyl. The controls in this game are absolutely atrocious. The game suggests gamepad or joystick. Don't have joystick, so went with game pad. Flying around when nothing is going on is already a bit clunky, but the cumbersome controls and the janky as f-ck flightmodels turn combat into an infinitely frustrating ordeal as you struggle to force your bird to fly and turn where you want it to go and hitting enemies is a pain despite the very generous autoaim. It was actually a bit better after I switched to mouse+keyboard, but still borderline unplayable. The combat itself would be fun though, a bit chaotic and quite fast. It's a damn shame it's so frustrating to participate in it. The graphics are very stylized and the world is well designed and looks great for the most part, with some pretty distinct locations, but the color palette is very bland for the most part, seeped in shades of greys, blues and such. While it certainly helps build atmosphere, after some time, it's just too dull. Also, some particle and weather effects are just terrible. Looks like someone thought the overall style of the game would hide their lack of effort, but the PS2 era whirlwinds, for example, are very distinct - very distinctly bad. Sound is good, for the most part, great ambience, etc. Voiceacting is also great - but some of the npc-s are not voiceacted, and it's very jarring, when you swap between merchants and some of them talk, but others don't. This applies to non-story relevant characters, the story relevant ones are, as far as I know, all voiced. But still... Honestly, if you did not have the money or time to voice all of the low level NPCs, would have been better to not have any of them voiced. Consistency would be better choice than random NPCs of the same level speaking and others not speaking. The game is also not very good at communicating information. Your warbird has stats, but they are displayed graphically and it's hard to quantify them, especially at the beginning when you did not yet get the opportunity to try more than a few. You can also upgrade them, but some of the descriptions of upgrade items are pretty confusing and mention effects that don't really show anywhere in the gameplay, or they appear to have no effect at all - the yellow line representing your bird's agility gets longer, but there's no real change, etc. Then again, anything modifying the movement may simply get lost due to the atrocious controls. The game also does not explain its economy very well. You can buy trading permits, but they are not mentioned at least at first, so you just randomly stumble upon them, and so on. I guess the game tries to go with the "show, don't tell" approach, but it does a terrible job of it. You get a lot of stuff in merchant inventories and it just isn't explained what this stuff does. Or, on your map, straight from the first mission, you get "Found Seachantress 0/3" - but nowhere is it explained what that is. There's a lorekeeper in the harbor, which is supposedly providing the lore, but all he does is tell you two or three sentences about the current location and timeline. No interesting or useful information. And so you just stumble in the dark... The game doesn't even tell you dead enemies drop currency - I learned this again from a merchant's inventory where I found a related item, increasing radius at which it is picked up - because you see, the currency drops to the ground or water below you, or perhaps even spawns there, no idea. But you fight high in the sky. So I never noticed, until I found this item, and actively went looking for it... The world is great, the lore has some great parts, the fantasy tech is pretty interesting, but the game is uncontrollable, and has some mind numbingly stupid gameplay design decisions where I can't fathom why they were made. Was it some deliberate attempt to make the game harder because the game was too easy, and the devs just did not playtest them? Did they run out of time and is the game simply unfinished? Or did they know the gameplay is trash, but just could not be bothered to fix it, sure that at least some people would buy it for the way the game looks in screenshots? Are they just not good at gameplay design? Or is there some other reason? I don't know. What I do know is that the end result is an frustrating, unplayable mess.
It's SUPERHOT. That is all. It's just SUPERHOT. On one hand, the really original combat style remains and is expanded in some ways, each encounter is a bit of a puzzle, the graphics are more **** element with its "colorcoding", the feedback from killing enemies is great. On the other, the AI is still simplistic, the map quality is all over the place, the new modifiers are great in theory, but the implementation is often fairly lackluster and only few of them work well. First off - as mentioned, the graphics style remains - white location, black interactive objects and weapons, red enemies. Despite that, most of the maps are actually surprisingly detailed, though most of the effort inevitably gets wasted as the combat takes most of the focus. Still, I appreciate that the dev(s) put int the effort and did not just keep it completely simplistic. Sound is another matter though. While the weapon and impact sounds are okay, the ambience is lackluster - there is some of it, but it is mostly very indistinct - and there is no music, which is quite an oversight and missed opportunity, some blood pumping music, that would escalate or slow down as the encounters change tempo would work really well. Story wise, the devs tried some sort of mysterious thriller thing. Whatever. It was really bland and did not really catch my interest. The way it is presented through scraps of "code" is also more annoying than alluring. It's a pointless part of the game, and for all intents and purposes, it may as well not have existed at all. It has no bearing on the experience what so ever. Gameplay wise, the game tries to add some twist and turns, on one hand, adding so called "hacks" and "cores" which give you some new abilities, on the other hand, the enemies also gain a couple tricks up their sleeves. Unfortunately, most of the abilities you can gain are pretty much useless. And whereas for cores it does not matter, as you can pick them for each section of the campaign, hacks you get randomly - a couple each section. Unfortunately, as about half of them is literally useless gimmicks, and the remaining useful half is all over the place balance wise, you often get screwed over. I get what they were trying to do - change up the gameplay, force you to make a choice - do I do my usual thing despite not having the best upgrades for it, or do I change it up and try a different playstyle that I got buffs for? However, as mentioned, as at least half of the "hacks" have little to no use because they are gimmicky crap applicable to very unlikely situations and so you get gimped, or rather not buffed at all, but the enemies will always have their new "toys" for you to contend with. The enemies - most of them I liked. There is at least one, however, which is unkillable (as far as I know) and which has really fast attack, making them extremely annoying to deal with. If there is one thing I hate more than bulletspongy enemies, it's invincible enemies. Why do I even fight then, if I can't f-king kill this thing? Like, what's the point? Not like there are any cinematic QTEs in this game either, where they would magically become vulnerable and die after bashing a button for a couple seconds... Speaking of enemies, the AI remains pretty crap. They mostly just run at you and always know where you are. There's nothing else to say. Oh, wait - sometimes the enemies get stuck on some geometry and just stay in that place. The maps are... Well, there's 25 of them in the main part of the game, and then a couple one offs in special sections of the game. You could say that's quite a few. Perhaps it is, but the game is way too long for the amount of maps it has, and so they get reused. A lot. What is worse, is that only about 10 of them appear regularly, the rest only sometimes, meaning that by the end, you will have 10 maps you are really really tired of, and 15 you are starting to be tired of. The maps are generally pretty small too, and the design, from gameplay perspective, is not very good. In most maps, you have one small spot that's just really good for cheesing the encounters, which makes the maps feel even smaller, but trust me, if you ever play this game, you'll use these spots at least a couple times, because you will eventually get tired of the game's crap and will just want to progress ASAP. Then there's a couple pretty balanced, good maps, and a couple that are just outright crap. Anyways, overall, the new features mostly dilute, rather than improve, the original formula. Most of the issues of the original, mainly the simplistic AI, remain. The map design goes from fantastic to craptastic, and there's too few of them for the scope the game attempts, making the game repetitive. In the end, as there are no significant improvements and the main issues remain, and the new content brings a whole batch of its own problems, the only real quality this game has is quantity. The question is, is it enough? Not for me.
I really, so desperately, want to love this game unconditionally, but I can't. Where the journey through the game is captivating, it is too often interrupted by both technical and gameplay issues. In fact, even giving it a 7 is objectively way too good of a rating, because I am enamored with this world - perhaps I see in it things that the devs did not actually intend and those things are just my imagination running wild, but I don't care. So few games really get my imagination running like this one, and so where objectively I would probably not rate it higher than 5 or even 4, I simply have to bump it up a few notches. This is my subjective experience and view of the game. The world is amazing. I love every bit of it. Often, I will just climb up an look around and daydream about it - its past, its present and its future. There some tidbits of lore strewn about, but most of the world is just there, open to exploration and interpretation. Some could perhaps call it lazy, and say that the devs did not bother setting up an in depth base for the game, but I think it really goes well with the setting. I love just running around, exploring what the game has to offer, at my pace. There is no urgence, no combat, no imminent bodily threat, and call me a casual or whatever, but I love that there is nothing to worry about, in the now, and in the immediate future. The game is, story wise, about a rite of passage, of exploring what life has to offer before settling into the more structured and restricted adulthood, and while there are quests and such, the world, past the tutorial section, isn't gated. There's signs and there's a map, but nothing is stopping you from just picking a direction, and just going forward to see what you find. Sometimes you may find nothing, other times you will find an ancient building, or a nest of a rare animal, or just a huge rock formation which you can climb and look around the world with the pretty good draw distance. It's a great game to play after work, after hours of my fairly stressful job, I can just explore and perhaps be a bit nostalgic when I get across some situation and location that reminds me of something I experienced when I was younger. That being said, there is a lot of ugly under the pretty surface. The game crashes, freezes and stutters. A lot. There is no quicksave, and navigating to manual save takes "ages". Reloading a save resets some environmental puzzles, even if at the point of the save, you did part of it. It's either marked as done, or not done, I guess. Considering there is only one save slot per run, this could get you locked up in, or out of, certain locations. That's bad, very bad. There's checkpoints, but they are placed in some pretty weird places, and there is no timed autosave, meaning you will have to manually save every couple minutes to avoid losing progress. Another thing - while I could forgive some controls jank, it is to a point where it is hard to judge some longer jumps, because the controls, the snapping onto surfaces / ledges, etc. is so inconsistent I often find myself saving just before making a longer jump or a jump that may require some precision. Vehicle controls and physics are even worse, to a point where traversal in rougher terrain can be at times downright frustrating as your hoverbike glitches and jumps around and buries halfway into the terrain only to snap out of it. This also impacts your speed, and it reduces your progress from a sedate, but consistent pace down to a slow, painful, glitchy crawl. The graphics are cartoonish, but have a very distinct style and I love how the game looks. But, it's plagued by glitches - floating objects, misaligned textures, disappearing objects when looking from some angles, glitched light and shadows, sometimes the camera does weird crap and jumps around or shifts to a different angle rapidly, which can be a bit disorienting - and so on. The sound design is very good, for the most part, and the ambience and the gorgeous music often intertwine in a way that just blows my mind and makes me absolutely content at the same time. On the other hand, there are some ambient sounds that have a very annoying cadence of very sharp sounds that are so bad that I just want to turn off sound when in a location where they play, and there's also a couple of very loud ambient sounds that play kinda randomly, with no real reason I could find, and they are very distracting, especially when you are just enjoying some quiet spot or exploring somewhere, and this screechy loud roar plays out of nowhere, for no discernible reason. Furthermore, there are some spots on the map - quite a few of them being near some important locations, or in those locations, where the sound starts tearing really badly. I saw mentions of wokeness in the game here and there, and yeah, I caught a couple glimpses and one (pretty hilarious) stereotype in the game, unfortunately.
If I had to describe this game with one word, it would be "Inconsistent". In everything. Graphics, sound, handling, etc. The only consistent thing is the AI in singleplayer - it's consistently bad. In the end, all I got from this game is TOCA 3 nostalgia, but unfortunately, TOCA 3 does not really work anymore on modern HS/SW, so I am stuck with this instead. Graphically, the cars are mostly well modeled. Environment, however, is straight out of early 2000's, increasing that TOCA 3 nostalgia. Compared to F-Horizon 4, which is an open world game - the environments are much uglier, despite being more contained and thus theoretically allowing for much more detail. Theoretically only, in this case. Furthermore, the lightning and reflections are for the most part worse as well. Sound is okay, I guess. Some of the cars sound like lawn-movers on crack. However, this seems to be an area the Forza games are consistently serviceable, but nothing more. There's a lot of cars and I guess the devs don't have the resources to record sounds for all of them + various configurations / upgrades so they use generic soundscape and tweak it a little. The amount of tracks is again serviceable, but it's nothing special. It's all just the most common tracks. The meat of the game is the huge vehicle selection, which is great on one hand. On the other, a lot of them do not handle very well. Often, it feels more like steering huge ships rather than sports cars. My almost 2 ton Mercedes E Klasse Wagon feels more nimble than some racing cars in FM7. There's also some vehicle classes with only 1 or two cars - like the ATVs - and no tracks specifically for them, no autocross, etc. Feels like they just took random stuff lying around in their model library and put it in with no plans to actually expand on the roster of cars and tracks in any way. The game is also extremely grindy, it takes ages to get a decent garage, even with buying the ultimate edition and getting a bunch of different cars. Can't imagine how much of a pain it is to start out with just one car and try and build your way up from that. Setting up solo races or tournaments is a pain, it's complicated, there's very little to no tooltips and settings are often unclear, so until you learn to work with the convoluted system, you'll do a lot of trial and error attempts which is a serious pain in posterior. AI is nonexistent. It's just like a train, on railroad, carts going on rails behind each other, not flinching a bit from the pre-programmed path, not reacting to anything. Sometimes, this leads to funny af situations where the railroad goes too close to pitstop and AI cars get grabbed from the race to go pitstop in lap 1 of 2 lap race. Other times, it is annoying, as AI seems at least partially aware of the positions of other AI cars, but completely oblivious to yours, and they will just ram into you repeatedly. Most of the time, though, it is just boring. In single-player, your starting position is fixed, and based off of your difficulty - no qualifier, etc. You get points from the position you finish in, but not position gain, so starting from 24th and ending 4th gives you the same reward as starting 4th and ending 4th. If this was only the first race and then the position was based on your overall/tournament standing, I could probably live with it even though it would still be annoying. However, it is not. You start for example 14th, every race in the tournament, no matter your previous race position, no matter your tournament position, etc. In order to progress through the career, you have to, especially in the later groups, consistently podium. A lot of "fun" when you start 24th every race. Anyways, the game tries to lean more onto the sim part, rather than the cade, but it fails as it lacks, aside from proper driving model for a lot of cars, a lot of features which are a part of IRL racing, and the progression model that is there is a very simplistic and very crap replacement for it. Really, the game feels just thrown together because some suit at MGS saw a Gran Turismo ad somewhere and remembered they have some similar IP somewhere, so he took 10 guys and had them cobble together something out of legacy assets, just so they could tick a box on a list somewhere. Add to that the technical problems - the commonly reported crashing, the stuttering and freezing in tournament menus, the sometimes egregiously long loading times - seriously, the time it takes to load into a race is often 2-3 times longer than loading into Forza Horizon 4, which is again, an open world game with a huge map - certainly huge compared to one circuit at a time in FM7. As an uninspired, unimaginative game with no ambition, cobbled together mostly from older assets or stuff from its sister series (a bunch of the models are just lifted from Horizon), I could perhaps call it painfully average and give it a 5, but factor in the lack of technical polish and 4 it is.
It's a beautiful game telling a story of a life, or part of it at least, through items and locations. You notice, as with each moving, some items disappear, others are added, some of them stay but their condition changes, etc. The pixel art in this game is one of the best I have seen. Of course, one could argue that the game is limited in its scope, but in this case, it is definitely quality over quantity. Music is similarly very pleasant. It is a great title to just lose a couple hours in when you need to relax, listen to some great instrumentals, and click at couple things to take your mind off of more stressful stuff. Unfortunately, it is not completely without blemishes. For a self described "zen game", some of the item placement requirements are a bit stringent and there is not tips, or anything of the sort, and if you don't know all of the items present, you will sometimes struggle. Some of them are pretty non-descript, others are things that not everyone uses and the devs kinda expect that you do, which can lead to unnecessary annoyance or frustration. Fortunately, there aren't many such things. Furthermore, the devs decided to make a very specific statement about halfway into the game, and it also feels a bit shoehorned and out of nowhere, so if you are averse to topics regarding certain lifestyles, you should probably avoid this game. Whatever your opinion on the topic which I will not spoil or discuss, calling your product a "zen game" while intentionally creating content that will spark controversy, makes you a bit of a liar. Considering the limited to nonexistent re-playability and limited amount of content - even with how high quality it is, the game is overpriced and I'd not recommend buying it unless it's about 50% off at least.
I have to say that I like the premise of the game, but the execution is rather disappointing. Aragami 2 is a stealth game with some platforming and RPG elements. Unfortunately, the core gameplay, while fun – the stages are fairly well designed and interesting pieces of puzzle to solve, though not too challenging aside from a few very specific small parts of some stages – is marred by inconsistent spotting / stealth mechanics and clunky movement, which make the game frustrating to play. The story is – well, there is a story. I don’t understand most of it. What I understand of it is not exactly deep. The presentation is not helped by the weird choice to have the voiceover be this stunted mix of japanese, english, gibberish, sims language, and orcish, that’s honestly distracting, because some of it is understandable, and some of it is plain bullcrap. The story is mostly presented via too long cutscenes with little substance, and some dialogue with “quirky” NPCs – basically a very bad anime. The graphics are very stylized, but also very clear, and interactive elements, etc. are very distinct and it’s very intuitive. and perhaps the only thing I really liked about this game. The only downside is that, beyond the playable area, basically the back-drop, the skyboxes, etc. are fairly low quality, which is a shame, but I guess sacrifices had to be made somewhere. Sound is, well – the sound feedback is pretty good, although it makes you feel as if the enemies are deaf, but I guess for gameplay purposes, it is okay. Music though, is not very good. It’s a couple very short, generic samples, playing on a loop. Also, during cutscenes and dialogue, the sound has this weird glitch where every couple seconds it cuts out for a moment. Finally, I encountered a lot of issues with crashing, in and outside of missions, which have often cost me 20-30 minutes of progress. Since there are no checkpoints or a way to save in-mission, it means replaying some pretty long stages over and over, and f. that. Also, even without the technical issues which coupled with the choice to have no chekpoints/saving in missions, which are my main gripe in this game, the game is at best 6-7/10, it lacks enemy variety, weapon variety, and more complex stealth and combat mechanics. And it is most definitely not worth the price they are asking for it (40 EUR over here) - not even close.
A lot of high octane fun in a very beautiful package held back a bit by some bad design choices (map looks cool, but is useless, etc.), some technical issues, and could do with a balancing pass. Gameplay: - top down open world twin stick shooter – some rpg / rpg lite elements, some rogue-lite aspects - the mission design is pretty one sided, tbh – go here, shoot this – some minor variety, like you get a timer here, you get a couple main targets which summon minions there, etc. not a complaint, but an observation – despite the setting and some of the tacked on features, this is a game that is primarily focused on combat, and there is a lot of it. You want some quiet moments in between? Not really a game for you, in my opinion. - too grindy, after you get halfway through the game, leveling becomes a chore, even when killing equal or higher level enemies and doing all of the side content, it will feel slow – would not be as much issue if the combat wasn’t so damn stats based, but it is and leveling up sufficiently is a requirement, forcing you into a repetitive, slow going, boring grind. As you approach level 30, it starts feeling like a free to play gacha MMO where trying to progress anything by gameplay takes ages - combat itself feels great, fast paced, visceral, a lot of fun, even has some vertical elements which is unusual for this type of game - has a couple issues – often you get shot / attacked outside of your view because of camera placement, and even outside of your minimap/radar, feels a bit unfair. - the world is pretty complex in places and can be hard to navigate – the map is bad, the GPS is okay but far from perfect, but you can’t place your own markers on the map, so it can only lead you to active missions - as mentioned before, combat is heavily reliant on stats, higher level enemies take much less damage from you, and do much more damage to you, to a point where they can pretty much one-two shot you if they are 5+ levels above you, at least in the early game. It’s not really possible to discern them from equal or lower level enemies, making early game exploration hit and miss and unnecessarily frustrating, not to mention the GPS that leads you to missions will sometimes lead you through parts of the map occupied by these high level enemies, just for lulz, I guess? Story: – has some interesting elements, some pretty memorable characters as well, interesting lore as well. It’s not super high quality and deep, but it’s good enough to give you some background to all of the slaughter and mayhem. - side missions have a bunch of pretty funny and wacky stuff in them, but they still remain pretty well grounded in the world of the game, interesting quest givers as well, I recommend doing the side content as well, not just rushing through the main story – you kinda will have to for the XP rewards unless you want to endlessly grind the same respawning encounters Graphics: - great overall - technical side is okay, but there are some minor issues– some misaligned textures, some floating object, in loading screens and when entering new locations sometimes character T-pose for a moment before their animations load, etc. - the style is great, the design of the world, the peds, everything looks awesome - just stayed still sometimes just looking at the beautiful designs, the lively and moving backgrounds, etc. Sound – great sound design and direction, weapons sound great, a lot of intricate ambience, music is awesome, gets blood pumping in combat Notable bugs: - Enemies did not load in a main story mission, or spawned inside inaccessible building / in a wall where they were stuck, or killing them did not trigger mission completion – basically, every couple missions, something will break, forcing game restart and redoing the mission. - Sometimes after a cutscene, movement gets stuck for 10-20 minutes and no matter what you do, your character automatically moves in one direction – only appeared after a couple hours into the game. - Game randomly crashes during loading screens when moving between the world tiers, no progress loss as the game saves before changing the locations, but still annoying - When enemies get too far away from their “turf”, they get into a “flight” mode and try to return to their base location, while taking considerably less damage (something like 90% damage resistance) and can also regenerate health, but do not attack. However, they do so without rhyme or reason. The distance is random, their remaining HP is random, whether you are actively fighting them or running from them does not matter. Sometimes, it also glitches out, and they stay in flight mode when they reach their base location, you can literally stand in a place shooting a glitched out enemy for 2 minutes. - not really a bug, but the game is a bit underoptimized and has some framerate drop issues, even in non intensive situations
Really sad about this one, but I can't finish it because halfway through level 5 all textures disappear and the game cannot be finished. So far up to that point, this was a pretty solid 7 or even 8 / 10. Good graphics, pretty distinct style for new enemies - though I did not like the changes to some of the old enemies. The story is kinda "stuff happens out of nowhere" and it's not been very good at explaining wtf is really going on and the main villain and their motivation - feels like I am missing something and this stuff can be found in some other media, perhaps a comic or a book, but you shouldn't have to scour what is an expanded universe source to understand what's going in a mainline entry in a videogame series... Sound is pretty good, some of the weapons and kills feel very impactful, the music was a bit in the background and not very noticeable, which is a shame. Halo, for the most part, has great music, and it was mostly missing here. Gameplay was really good though, I really liked how it was balanced mostly, though for some weapons, the ammo count is a bit too low I think. Overall, though, it was fun fighting the different enemies - both new and old. The vehicle sections were pretty good, though the god awful camera-steering controls remain. Anyways, as part of the MCC and on game pass, can recommend, but if this is the only game you are missing for whatever reason, I can't recommend buying it / buying the MCC because of it - due to the technical issue I encountered.
Halo 3 ODST is boring. Oh so incredibly boring. Dull, absolutely dull. Compared to Halo 3 it, is very much a regression of quality. It has a chance of doing things differently, a different experience in the Halo universe. It fails to do so. The attempts at changing up the formula are too conservative and ultimately just make the game a worse version of Halo 3. Graphically, it's not worse or better on technical side, it's about equal. However, it is definitely duller - the color palette shifted more to grey and brown, making it also stand out less from the overabundance of dull shooters of its time. For the most part, you will move through a city at night, with reused buildings and location - the city is not that big, but you'll feel like it's even smaller because every goddamn district looks the exact same - same layout, same buildings, same colors, same props... Sound wise, it's technically again on par with the mainline games, but the music, for most of the game, is a sort of jazzy lounge / elevator music, that is both completely uninspired and completely out of place. Story wise, again, pretty uninspired affair. The characters are unlikable from first cutscene and remain throughout. Gameplay is, as mentioned, worse rendition of Halo 3. The enemies have inflated health pool, artificially creating a feeling of ammo scarcity. What it really is though, is that even common enemies take a huge amount of ammo to kill. Personally, I really hate bullet sponges, they are a very unimaginative way to handle enemies and difficulty. It's not overdone to a point where the game would become a complete slog, but it's still noticeable. Also, most of the game is moving through a, as mentioned, very boring and repetitive cityscape. The game eludes, at the beginning, that many of the buildings are empty and you can flank or avoid enemies or take shorter paths if you explore them - but this is actually very limited and there are only a few shortcuts and paths through buildings you can take. Most of the time, you will be slowly walking through mostly empty dark grey city with nothing happening, with occasional combat with small groups of enemies - mostly 1 brute + 3 grunts, or 1-2 snipers. After you move to a new location, you will be treated to a "flashback" which is a mission in line with mainline Halo, but as mentioned, worse balance and also shorter in length as well. The only other real difference is that your HP does not regenerate, so if your shields (called stamina for whatever reason, lmao) drop and you get hit a couple times, you have to go and get a medkit or find a healing post - so basically Halo CE. How very innovative... True non-Spartan combat... Anyways, what this should have been, was an expansion / DLC to Halo 3, and turn the huge, repetitive, boring city at night into a single level / stage perhaps with focus on stealth. As it stands, it's just a crappy boring shooter where the shooting does not feel good, and where the shooting parts are also separated by long walking simulator parts in an uninteresting setting where nothing really happens and everything looks the same.
This is, by a considerable margin, the best game in the series. As a sum of its parts, none of the Halo shooters come quite close enough. Individual parts though, do in some cases fall behind - Halo 2 has better story, characters and delivery, etc. However, Halo 3 is definitely, despite its shortcomings, deserving of the title of a classic, and you should definitely experience it if you have not already. Graphically, the game is not from technical standpoint, better than its contemporaries - in fact, it falls behind a bit in technical regard. However, it is very much distinct - not only for its unmistakable Halo style, but also, at the time this game came out, we were already entering the brown'n'grey era of shooters/games, and the fresh color palette of this game would definitely make it more distinct. Not so much nowadays when things are more colorful, but historically, credit has to be given. This should also be a remaster with improved graphics, sort of, but the upgrade is not even close to being as significant as it was for the first two games and it is very close to the original. Sound design and music are great. Truth be told, I don't think I've played a mainline Halo game with bad music. Halo 2 remaster breaks the mold a bit by having crap sound design / engineering, but the music is still good. Anyways, considering how many shooters often neglect their soundtrack and stick to some generic, low effort, low cost stuff, praise for good music is well deserved in Halo 3's case. Story wise, as mentioned, the game drops off from Halo 2 level of quality, some more cringy jokes and other stupid crap returns to ruin- I mean, lighten the mood. Eyerolls aside though, there is a twist with one of the characters by the end that I don't understand. It wasn't surprising, it was The Last Jedi levels of writing - subverting expectations by having characters act like lobotomized lemurs and making decisions so bad the word ret*rded does them no justice. The character wasn't exactly well written for what they are supposed to be in previous games, nor throughout this one to be honest, but this last moment of theirs was just terrible, really out of place, and went against pretty much everything the character did up to that point, as well as completely against their nature (or as far as could be gleaned throughout the games). Gameplay wise though, it's one of the most fun games in the series, if not the best in the gameplay department. It finally manages to get the flood mostly right - it still slips into a bit of a slog in some moments in later stages, but still manages to hold back quite far from Halo 2 and especially Halo CE. The combat feels great, the weapons work well based on their type, the enemies are, for the most part, fun to fight, and if all goes to crap, you can always pick up an energy blade and cut some crap up. I have to say though, vehicle controls and physics remained distinctly crap, as is usual for Halo. But just because you do something badly for years does not mean you should be exempt from criticism for it - quite the opposite to be honest. Anyways, the game was fun enough for me to just finish it in two sessions, and I'll probably give it another shake a couple months from now. Definitely recommend to - anyone really. Even if first person shooters aren't your main thing, you'll have fun with this one, I think.
Halo 2 is a decent game. It improves some things over the first entry in the series, though it's more of a partial improvement rather than actual fix of the issues with the base game design. It does significantly improve in the story department though. However, this remaster ruins some of that with some pretty noticeable technical issues. Graphically, the game is pretty good looking, as much as it can be without making any notable change to the base design of the levels, etc. to keep in line with the original. It's far from perfect though. There are some mishaps, though - some floating objects, misaligned textures, etc. - some of them so obvious I noticed them even in pretty hectic moments. Unfortunately, for this one, sound also disappoints - sound mixing specifically. Volume of music, ambience, effects, speech - especially speech - are inconsistent. Sometimes, music is too loud. So you turn it down. Then next track goes too low, so you turn it back up - but the next speech lines are too low volume and now hard to understand, so you turn the music back down to minimum, and so on. It's very intrusive, very annoying, very immersion breaking to have to pause the game every 20 minutes to fiddle with audio settings, to a point, where despite the very good soundtrack, it's just better to turn music off, if you are playing for the first time and want to catch all of the story details, dialogues, etc. Story wise, the game is much better than Halo CE, it's more fleshed out, there is less stupid and cringy moments, it's a tad more serious, but it still has that B-level action movie thing going on with a couple one liners and tons of "go shoot stuff, soldier". Honestly, I would say this is my favorite Halo story. It's not some super deep stuff, it's got the right amount of interesting tidbits to make you invested in the universe, and the rest is just basically explaining why this thing has to be blown up or that thing captured. Pretty much spot on for this kind of game. The only really downside is the really abrupt ending - this is not a cliffhanger, it's straight up "we ran out of money and time at this specific point and couldn't be bothered to smooth it out so the ending would at least feel as something akin to a closure behind the whole game, see you in the next one" kind of thing. Now, to the gameplay. Halo is famous for its super fun formula, and it's here for first 60-70% or so of the game. Then it goes to crap, much like Halo CE. There's less small hard to hit enemies, but others have been made into some pretty annoying bullet sponges, the level design is still very hit or miss though it has less re-used assets and layouts, and the last stages are swarming with infinite, or near infinite amounts of enemies, and it's just a slog, and I just skipped most of the combat by running because it turned from fun to a chore. Again, you get into hallway, five minutes fire down the hallway to kill all enemies, move around the corner, rinse and repeat - though to be fair, it's more open than in Halo CE so you can actually just skip it. And I could even understand a couple stages like that, where the odds are simply too stacked against you to fight them, and so you just focus on reaching the objective, but when more than a quarter of your power fantasy shooter is like that? You did something very wrong. Anyways, this is a bit of a mixed bag. I gave it the same rating as the Halo remaster, but Halo 2 is, in my opinion, a better game. It's just that the remaster is worse than the Halo CE remaster, so what improvements there are between the games are ruined by issues with the remaster itself.
In its time, the game could be summed up by this: Hated return to roots - the game. However, its actually a pretty decent game, but port plagued by constant crashing. 7/10 without taking technical issues into account, with them: 3/10. Unlike the broadly well received previous entry, Guerilla with its open map and non-linear (for the most part) progression, Armageddon is a linear shooter, mostly set in the caverns of Mars - much like the almost forgotten first two games in the series. As such, it received a lot of undue hate from the new fans, whose first game of the series was the above-mentioned open-world entry. I have been disappointed by that as well, but as I played the first two games and do actually like them a lot, not as much. The game itself, when not applying the expectations from Guerilla, is pretty good fit into the series. It has solid graphics, solid gunplay, and the semi-destructive environment with a couple new twists. The story - including interaction between characters, much like in most shooters of this type, is B/C-grade action movie cringe-fest, which also fits overall into the series I guess. However, the environments are pretty cool, and the enemies are also interesting with a decent variety of abilities, as is the selection of weapons. The sound design is also pretty good for the most part, though some weapons could use a bit beefier sound. The soundtrack is also pretty good, especially in some of the horror-lite sections of the game. Armageddon also plays pretty well, when it works - you can run it with decent framerates on the highest preset even on a fairly low end machine nowadays. However, the game falls flat in one regard: The game will crash every 2nd-3rd time you get to a checkpoint in a session when in DX10/11 mode (so generally every 20 minutes), and will crash every hour or so in DX9 mode. The graphical difference is pretty minor, so if you absolutely have to play the game, you can do so in DX9 and get through it with about 6-12 crashes (depending on whether you rush through or take your time exploring and getting all of the stuff the game offers (guns and upgrades)). However, this is pretty unacceptable, at least for me, so I cannot recommend buying the game on PC - unless you have a really high tolerance for crashes, and can get it for very cheap. I would recommend getting this game on console, if you own one that can run it. You will suffer a bit in regards to graphical fidelity and perhaps framerate, but you will not have to restart the game every 15-60 minutes.
This game is pretty damn bad. Considering this is a supposed ultimate edition with all of the patches and improved visuals, its shortcomings are even more glaring... I will start with plot, writing and characters first: Its bad - all of it. It has some twists, but you see them from the very beginning, considering A) the game takes place between episodes 3 and 4, meaning you know the past and the future and B) it is very apparent the main protagonist is dumb, really really dumb. The MC is absolutely oblivious to anything and more naive than a sheltered 3 year old... The plot also jumps around a lot and feels rushed, you go from playing for team A to team B so fast the EA SW Battlefront 2 change feels like an intricate storyline. This also makes the interactions and relationship development between characters feel unrealistic as well as a lot of it is "behind the scenes" and you are often just told/shown the result. There are a lot of plot conveniences, or plot armor, if you will, as well. The gameplay is frustrating. The combat, movement, and force powers feels pretty good, untill you actually have to use them in combat. The hints and prompts will tell you about these amazing combos which will help you destroy your enemies, but the game fails to recognise most of the combos when performing them, and those few that can be performed consistently are only good for a couple enemies and completely useless against bosses. I decided to just cheese it and spam lighting at everything / everyone. It was boring, but at least semi-consistent and had decent effectivity. That brings us to enemy variety - considering the vastness of SW universe, it's pretty poor. On paper, there is about 25-30 different enemies excluding bosses, but in reality, when you check their animations and damage they do, it is really about 10-12 as pretty much every basic enemy has a reskinned version for other faction, perhaps the only exception being the AT-ST walker - which brings me to the other issues with the combat, it's inconsistent. AT-ST will not take damage during some animations, but other times it will, some enemies are similar - you will interrupt their attacks sometimes, but othertimes, they will plow right trhough your lightsaber slashes. Same goes for you - sometimes you will be stunlocked to oblivion, other times you will shrug everything off. You can never really tell what will happen when you make a hit, or get hit, and considering the combat style in the game, that is really really frustrating. The AI does not exist. Enemies will rush into the room, and just stay pretty much glued to their positions in case of long range enemies, or fight you 1 on 1 in case of melee, with a few exceptions. The game tries to implement some simple environmental puzzles, but all they do, is just show how bad the AI is, as you watch it stumble around the traps set for the MC and fail hilariously. The game also does something I really hate - it spams mini-bosses after the initial encounter - and without much thought either. Its like the devs realised they did not have enough enemy variety at the end of the dev cycle, and so they just copy pasted the previous mini-bosses around later stages. Environmental design is also pretty bad, but I guess it has to be, given the poor AI. The game is very linear, the environment does look more open than it actually is - the use of invisible walls and ice surfaces that make you slide back is just tragically hilarious by the end - there are more invisible walls in one stage of this game than the last four games I played put together... Visually, they look good though - at least the first time you visit them. This game has 7-ish places you visit, but they use only 3 asset sets - imperial space station, jungle and ship graveyard. The DLCs have some additional new environments, but honestly, its just more of the same crap gameplay wise, so why even bother? Also, movement in some places is really weir because the ground hitboxes aren't as precise as the textures / visual parts, so you will randomly get stuck in some places. This, combined with the many invisible walls, makes the couple platforming sections in the game very inconsistent and random. Sound is okay - when it works, which is does for the first half of the game, but breaks after that - music stops playing randomly, weapon sounds won't work, etc. It reuses, incorrectly and inappropriately, music from the movies. There are also some weird design choices as well, though I would say they are probably the result of time constraints because no-one sane would do this... There is no map, only a very constrained minimap. To see objectives, you have to pause game and go to menu. Changing visuals cannot be done before mission, only during, and will reset you to previous checkpoint if you do it in the middle instead of right after loading in, and so on.
CK2 is a great game. It's not perfect, but it has a wealth of content and much like most Paradox grand strategy games, great replayability. It focuses more on building your own dynasty and fame for yourself, rather than simply bulding the biggest empire - although that is certainly a valid way to go about it. Unfortunately, it is a bit limited in the roleplaying aspect by a rather limited interactions system, and by over-reliance on randomized events. While it is a lot of fun, at times, you feel like playing a slot-machine - and you, of course, lose more often than win. Considering the rest of the game suffered from this focus on interaction and events and is therefore a bit more simplistic than the other Paradox GS type games, it can be a bit shallow and frustrating to deal with at times. Still, it is a great window into the life of a medieval ruler, and if you like this type of games, you will easily sink hundreds of hours into it, and it is still one of the best games to roleplay in Multiplayer, where the game really shines, as you can get an actual conversation with your adversaries and allies instead of the limited interactions menu. However, even in singleplayer, the game can still be a lot of fun. The graphics are passable, given the age of the game, and the genre. Music is pretty good, ambience is as well, but some of it will become annoying pretty quickly and the ability to manage sound types and volumes is a bit limited, the game could use expanded options for audio instead of the very simple ones it has. Also, I would recommend getting at least the DLCs that expand the roleplaying aspects, such as Conclave, but I cannot recommend the game and DLCs at full price - if you are interested, definitely wait for a discount campaign, they happen often enough.
A fun little game, just don't expect anything overly complex. This game is a very interesting take on the bullet hell / horde shooter genres, where you run around in a car instead of a regular character, with which come some specifics in regards to controls and movement. The game is, all things considered, built pretty solidly. The graphics are nothing special, but they are good enough for the time it was released and the type of game it is. The blood effects are pretty good, actually. The sound design is a bit bland though, and the soundtrack, while technically pretty solid with good sound quality, is a bit generic and uninspired. I got it with the game, but I doubt I will ever actually listen to it separately. The main singleplayer story of the game is a C-class zombie flick kinda thing, it does not take itself too seriously, and the big plot twists can be seen from a mile away, but it is really just a background noise to running around in a semi-sanbox city arena and slaughtering thousands of zombies - literally thousands, some of the side missions have you kill 2500 zombies and they are not exactly challenging, you can kill a lot more than that in one run. The city is also split into different locations, which are not only visually different, but require a bit different approach as well - some are denser and confine you to the roads, others are more open and you will be able to run in between building freely. There is also a lot of pick ups strewn around the city, so it is worth it to explore a bit whenever possible. The main "plot" is a bit short, but considering its quality, or lack thereof, its a good thing it does not overstay its welcome. There is a decent variety in vehicles, but they don't feel all that special - pretty much all of them feel the same, which is a shame, and the driving could use a bit of fleshing out, as it is a bit simplistic - considering cars are the main protagonist, really, this is a pretty large con. The game also has a racing mode, which I really did not get into, I feel like the faults of the driving models really rear their ugly head here, but it looks like there is a lot of people who actually did like and play the racing mode, so perhaps you will as well. Then there is a survival / horde mode, which seems more fitting, but as your car upgrades do not transfer between modes, I really could not be arsed to grind my cars and weapons again and did not play it, though I would have probably liked it much more than the racing mode. Anyways, I can recommend it, it is fun for what it is. So long as you curtail your expectations, you'll have fun as well. However, the game still falls into the "wait for discount" category for me.
A great game, currently mostly played because of very dedicated modding community with some superb mods available, but also still pretty solid on its own. In its time, this was one of the - if not the - most innovative RTS games, and it definitely does its source material justice in terms of quality. My real play time of this game is probably upwards of 600 hours, as I had an original box copy of the game and the expansion, and I only bought the Steam version once my disc got damaged. I return to the game then and again for shorter or longer playthroughs - though the last couple times just with mods. The game features three different styles of RTS gameplay and blends them together very well, and these are then further expanded in the expansion Forces of Corruption. You have an overworld / galaxy map mode, where you direct your armies, improve your planets. Then, there are the two combat parts - first is the space combat part, where you battle with your fleet of ships against the enemy, targeting enemy ships - or their subsystems, allowing you to micromanage certain engagements to gain advantage. The ground / planetary combat is closer to other RTS games - where you command squads of soldiers and vehicles. You do not actually build buldings in the combat maps, aside from some minor defense turrets which you can build in specific spots, the combat is only done with the units you bring on the overworld / galaxy map. The game, for its time and being RTS, is pretty solid in terms of visuals, and especially the falling apart destroyed spaceships, burning and exploding, look well even by todays standards. The musical score is also pretty fitting, though it could use some more original tracks. The only issues I can really think of are some minor compatibility issues with newer Windows versions that can lead to occassional crashes, and the unit pathing, specifically in space combat, can be a bit weird sometimes and it will take some time and playing with clicking on specific spots to get your ships to do what you want them to do. Overall, it is a very good game, and if you are thinking about buying it, I can only recommend it even when not discounted. If you have never played it, and are thinking about buying it for the currently very popular mods, I would recommend to actually play the base game first. While a bit clunky due to age, it will teach you a lot about the game itself. The mods are often more complex and harder and without any tutorials, as they expect you to have decent knowledge and skill with the base game.
A decent game if you are a fan of the genre, but a bit too long winded and a bit disappointing, especially in terms of technical quality. I have heard about this game a looong time ago, back when it came out, but I did not actually get to play it until fairly recently, mostly because I forgot about it and then stumbled upon it by chance. I have to say, it was a bit disappointing. The game is not bad, it's just not all that good either. It gets repetitive really quickly and by the end (the last 2-3 hours), I had to force myself to actually finish it. On the first look, it has a lot of different locations and enemies to fight, but they all kinda feel the same, there isn't any real downside for going through a specific skill tree that would make you more suspectible to certain enemies, you just kill everything at more or less the same space, a lot of the enemies just feel like reskins of stuff you already fought before, and if you grind a bit by doing side missions, you won't really face anything overly challenging. Visually, the game is pretty decent for its time, the magic effects are pretty good, but some of the monster designs do not really fit into the game and look to be lower quality (a pink water dragon thing and some plant based enemies come to mind), as if the original art team did not have enough time, so they just outsourced some of the work to some cheap studio or got some college temp. hires to do them. Sound design is OK, I guess, but a bit bland. Nothing really stood out, save for some destructive spells which did sound pretty "punchy", but there were only few of them. Technically, the game is a bit problematic. Especially when entering dungeons, or changing locations, the FPS will tank hard. The game was solid 60 everywhere, even with a ton of enemies and spell flashing, etc., but once I got to those locations, the game would turn into single digits slideshow until I got sufficiently far from them. It also froze and crashed randomly a couple times. Overall, it is a bit above average game. It has a wealth of builds and content, but I never really explored it in depth because it is very bland in terms of combat and gameplay, and it is pretty long, which in combination, means the fun moments are few and far between. If you are a fan of the genre out of games to play, or if you want to try this type of games (as it is not overly complex or hard), I can recommend it when heavily discounted, but if you are looking for a well paced, great and fun from beginning till the end experience, this isn't a game for you.
The game has some very good ideas and is perhaps a decent foundation for interesting series of large scale fishing simulators, but this initial entry is very far from perfect, though it is playable. I am not a graphics maniac, but I will start with visuals first this time - the game is pretty poor in terms of visuals, with the exception of some very specific spots and a couple specific boat models. This would not be an issue by itself, at least for me, but what definitely is an issue is the very poor optimization - despite the poor visuals, you will suffer frame dips, microstutter, etc. Despite updating drivers, etc., it remained problematic, and turning up certain settings would not only cause FPS issues, but also cause graphical issues - texture artifacts, water turning pure black, etc. Sound design - well, the ambience of the sea is pretty decent, but most of the boats sound weird - especially the first one, which appears to have a lawn mower engine. The UI also leaves a lot to be desired, and you will have to search for related information by clicking through multiple menus or tabs, most of which are not really necessary other than containing the info you are looking for, which could be moved elsewhere - some streamlining would help a lot. Some crucial information is also missing completely, if you are lucky, it is on the game wiki, but a lot of it is for some reason no properly displayed in the game nor can be found on the wiki, so your options are to data mine or just go with it and see what happens - for example, the game supposedly simulates overfishing, but I never found any indicator of it in the game, and the availability of fish in certain areas changed pretty much randomly on game restarts... The variety of fish is okay, the crab DLC helps, the multiple fishing styles are also nice, though the minigames going along with some of them are really janky. The availability and variety of ships is pretty good, the game is a bit grindy and requires some commitment, but it's not too frustrating, and when the jank is toned down a bit, the minigames are actually fun enough. The main issue with the game is that there is no "speed up time / wait here" option when not moving, and when you move, it of course consumes fuel, which is annoying AF, and I actually decided to cheat and use a trainer to give myself infinite fuel. Wouldn't have done it if there was an option to just wait without wasting fuel. This isn't much of an issue with bigger ships where you will actually dropy your traps at different places with decent distance away from each other, but with smaller ships, it definitely is - also, fuel is much more of a concern due to A) smaller tank capacity and B) lower income, meaning it hurts a lot more to just swim around your traps waiting for them to fill. The game also has fog of war hiding pretty much all of the map and you have to go around all of it to uncover it. This by itself would not be too much of an issue if most of it was actually just an empty "wasteland" and so doing it is literal waste of time, but you kind have to do it, because on restart of the game, fishing ground can change and get hidden again by the FOW. I guess it could work as "hardcore" mode feature, but on first playthrough, it's just annoying AF. Anyways, the base idea is pretty good and I don't believe there is any real competition doing something similar, at least not right now - aside from the second game in the series, which appears to be more of the same in different location, rather than a sequel, but I have not played it, so I digress. Fishing: Barents Sea is an average game. It has some good ideas, some bad, some of it is done well, some of it is not. It can be recommended to fans of fishing or ship simulators, if they intend to buy it at a heavy discount, but everyone else should steer clear, because the few pros it has are definitely not enough to turn you into a huge simulator games fan, and the cons will probably be enough to make you never try anything similar ever again, which would be a shame, as there are a lot of good simulators out there.
Meme game with meme dog - a sidescroller platformer, or whatever you would call the genre, with 8-bit stylized graphics with some pretty interesting mechanics, pretty obviously geared towards achievement hunting, but aside from one, is not overly grindy, depending on your level of skill, you are looking at somewhere between 1.5-3.5 hours of gameplay. It's pretty cheap and goes on sale often, or at least used to. It is what it is and does not pretend to be anything more, it works without hitches, but has little value beyond that.
A classic for a reason, and still competing as one of the most content rich open worlds, 15+ years after release. What else really needs to be said? I sincerely doubt there even is anyone who has at least not heard about this game, considering how often it is referenced and the memes it spawns even almost two decades after release. I have replayed it multiple times, owning a disc copy, and later re-bought digitally, and will likely re-play it again a couple times in the future. Now, it is - objectively - by no means a perfect game - even during its time, the graphics were dated, and physics were rather simplistic, and unlike other GTA games, the plot had a bit **** guys vs. bad guys vibe, which did not really make sense considering the setting and the characters. On the other hand, the open world was not only considerably larger than previous GTA games, it was also more varied in terms of locations, and was filled with content - both missions, main and side, and a variety of minigames, collectables, challenges and easter eggs. The sound direction is great, especially in regards to soundtrack and radio track selection - I still sometimes listen to the OST / radio tracks on youtube as they are really good mixes. Also, it really shows that you can make a large game, and not have it an almost unplayable bugfest (though there still were some, and not all of them got patched) at launch - yes, I'm looking at you, Bethesda. SA is truly the definitive GTA game of the 3D era, it expanded greatly upon the content of previous games not only in regards to the mission/story content, but pretty much everything else - I would say one of the most important introductions was the (pretty extensive, all things considered) vehicle customization, which has since been considered a requirement to have in this type of open world games, and has led to criticism of games of this type that do not have it. Anyways, if you've never played SA, I recommend to do so ASAP. There will be a lot of jank, the graphics will make your eyes bleed at times - especially if you mostly play recent AAA titles, but you'll find a lot of enjoyment and fun in the game nevertheless.
It starts. It pretends to run. It crashes sometimes when you try to quit, but that hardly matters at that point. I bought this as I played the original Trainz waaaaaay back when it came out and trains / model trains are fun, and this is definitively a cheaper alternative to building a proper model railway, but unfortunately, it also turned out way less satisfying, mostly due to really really really bad optimization, and I cannot stress this enough - the game is optimized absolutely terribly, to a point where the framerate is 80% of the time barely passable, and the remaining 20% of the time single-digits slideshow. Ran the game on multiple different PCs to try and figure out the problem, only to conclude it's just the game being crap. The graphics were okay when Trainz first launched, which was Oct. 2001, but they are really bad for a 2011 game. A lot of scenery is 2D / sprites, not 3D, everything is low poly / low pixel count textured, lighting is very very basic, and there are barely any improvements over the first game in the series, though overall, at least the train vehicles look decent, albeit individually the quality is inconsistent - I will get into that a bit later, though. Sounds are pretty much the same. They are okay, overall, some of them are low bit-rate or not mixed properly, but there is a bunch of ambient sounds available, and for the most part, the world does actually feel lived in in most scenarios with solid ambience in stations and strewn about the maps/tracks. The physics - well, there is some, there wasn't almost any in the original game, so that is an improvement, as much as having a slice of apple while starving is an improvement over starving and not having that one slice. It's pretty poor, honestly, and pretty unrealistic even on realistic stability settings. I suppose, considering the minimum requirements, a lot of sacrifices were made to make it run even on, even at the time, terribly outdated hardware. Then again, from what I heard of the newer games, they are not much better despite having considerably higher listed HW requirements. The GUI is, pretty bad honestly, very imprecise - both the train controls and the game menus, and do not work well in widescreen. I had to mess around with setting for quite some time to get it to actually recognise where my mouse actually was. The quality of the scenarios and vehicles present varies greatly. The quality of exteriors mostly varies between good to great, but interiors are quite different, and quite literally varies from fantastic to craptastic, and this is not even consistent - you will have locomotives with great exterior model with interior being literally unfinished mess with missing textures, etc. Again, this applies to sounds as well, the scenery assets, the scenarios themselves (for example, some may have faulty scripting which does not switch signals properly, etc.). To me, it looks like the devs tried to push the engine way further than it could take, with few - if any - optimizations. The original Trainz ran much better on hardware which is comparable to today's cheap mobile phones. T2012 looks like someone just piled some additional features on it (extensive scenario scripting, much larger maps, physics - basic, but still expanded over original, etc.), but never bothered to test and optimize any of it. Honestly, it's very disappointing. I was very happy when I stumbled upon this series again after such a long time, happy to see what came of the little train game I used to play as a kid - and the game even has very positive rating on Steam for some reason, only to find a pile of trash. I honestly cannot say this enough: Steer clear of this. Even as a train /model train enthusiast, all you will find here is pain, suffering and depression. The other train sim series are a much better choice. Yes, they are much less of a sandbox where you can build your own traintracks, etc. and they are still buggy, and they have even worse pricing. But they at least work and are playable, for the most part. This thing is not.
A fun, but at times still annoying experience that ultimately does not offer anything memorable. Play and throw away sort of thing. Better than FU1 - better port, better balance, better level design, better controls, better pretty much everything, aside from annoying miniboss spam that remains, and the final bossfight is waaaay too long and repetitive. And though it is better than the first game in the series, overall, when compared to other games, it's nothing special. The story is also kinda bland and uninspired, and it has a serious case of "middle piece in a trilogy" as it ends with a cliffhanger and a lot of unanswered questions that will never be solved because stuff happened with SW.
This game does show a lot of promise in certain areas, but is an utter failure overall due to extremely deep issues with game design, underlined by very poor execution in regards to a lot of it. Honestly, this gives me serious Daikatana vibes. The balance is bad. Guns do tiny amounts of damage, the enemy HP is generally huge and everything is spongier than a sponge factory. Despite the levels being littered with resources, you will routinelly run out of ammo and grenades and have to rely on your pistol which recharges ammo. Accuraccy of the guns is also pretty crap, you can reliably hit stuff only at very close range, with the exception of the sniper rifle. This is not challenging skill-wise, it is artificial difficulty - you do not have to target specific parts or use specific weapons which do more damage (with the exception of one mini-boss type), the enemies are not smart or even all that dangerous - they just soak up a crap ton of damage before going down and more than half of your shots will miss just for lulz, that's the only difficulty the game has. The AI is utterly **** - your enemies are dumb, aside from places where they are very specifically spawned and sometimes restricted from moving, they all just dumbly move towards you. Once could perhaps forgive it for the basic battle droids as it is lore friendly, perhaps, but even non droid enemies do this. Special category of stupidity are the several types of enemies who can fly or jump around - who will fly away from attacking you or jump away to show that they can - even when it literally saves your life and allows you to recharge shields and then kill them. The AI cannot even use basic manouvers like encirclement, despite outnumbering you literally all the time. A lot of the time they even forget to shoot / attack. and just run up to you and stand in front of you. The same applies to your companions, who are presented to you as these specialist - a demolition specialist, a hacker and a sniper / CQC, leaving you as the leader and assault / heavy weapons specialist. But you and your bot friends can do everything without any contraints. Your hacker will snipe, your sniper will plant demolition charges and your demo guy will hack doors. Your hacker is down? No need to revive him to get a door open, just send the sniper to hack it while you revive him to save time, etc. - Oh, and sniping, for the bots, is also tied to very specific interactive pieces of cover. They look like any other piece of cover, but have special sign hovering above them, so you know you can send your guys to snipe from there. Most of them are not well placed for a sniper overwatch... Oh, also, some objects which are marked as "enemy", but cannot by destroyed by shooting, your guys will infinitely shoot at while ignoring actual enemies around them. Some of these can be blown up by planting charges at them - sned your guy to do it, and you will see him, more often than not, slowly crouch walk to it, shooting it all the time, doing no damage to it, before snapping into the "planting charge" animation. At least they have infinite ammo (and more HP/shields than you, because the devs knew their AI is crap). Also, in some levels, they just refuse to move. They reach some room, and just stay there. You give them a specific order, they will walk from the other side of the map to do it, and then walk back. Now, finally to the padding - the reason why you have locked doors that you need to unlock everywhere and spend half a minute each time, and why killing a droid that takes 3 shots in the movie and in the TV series takes one and a half magazine, is that the game, without all of that, would probably be 3 hours long, perhaps around 3.5-4 with all of the cutscenes. This way, it has around 7-8, I would say. I finished it in 5.5 because I could not take it anymore, and about 90% into the first location, I rebalanced the HP pools... It really feels like someone play tested the game like a month before release, found out it is way too short, so they ramped up the HP pools 3-5x (no joking, for you to have a good time, you will have to reduce the enemy HP that many times, and you will still have a few engagements where you will run out of ammo by the end of them), but it was not enough, so they put door breachign everywhere. Then, they found out you won't really be progress in some places where you do not have some / all of your bots, so they just said "screw it, let everyone do everything".
Highly recommended to anyone who has never had their balls waxed and wants to experience the feeling, you'll often feel something similar when playing this game. The combat is satisfying, it takes some time to learn, but once you get a hang of it, you'll be styling on the enemies. Everything is pretty tight, and if you die, you know why - no bullcrap, you screw up, you die, you do well, you slaughter everything. There's lots of options - different classes with different modifiers, which you can also swap around to tailor the character exactly like you want it, loads of guns, all of them useful one way or another, you have the option to tailor the difficulty with a variety of options pretty much all of which have an impact on how you will be able to engage enemies (not just easy/normal/hard/very hard meaning more hp for the enemies or some such crap) etc. Graphics are great. It's not a technical marvel, but the style of the game is awesome, the various effects and the trails of carnage you leave along the locations as you slaughter your way through will make you feel satisfied, the simple and clear GUI is very fitting, easy to navigate and use. Sound design is great overall, weapons sound punchy, the distorted electronic voices of your enemies are fitting, there is a variety of sound and musical cues that you will pick up really quickly, but music is a bit too bland and subdued overall, which is a damn shame and possibly the only weak point of the game. Anyways, I'm not even close with being done with the game, looks to have some 100 hours of content, perhaps even more, so if you are into the €/hour thing, this is a great value proposition.
Bland representative of its genre, that is nevertheless somewhat enjoyable at least at first, mostly due to some interesting characters and an intriguing, if pretty predictable story. However, the game balance, that is at first passable, devolves into absolute crapfest by the second half of the game and turns most end-game encounters into patience-testing slogs which have nothing to do with skill or tactical thinking as the game showers you with infinite battles with respawning enemies, mini-boss spam, several repeated major bosses and a slew of other annoyances - minor to major. The game is lauded as complex by the developers and some players, but it really is not, aside from some aspect of skill management. No combos - magical or otherwise, no bonuses for positioning in combat, for flanking or surrounding and a couple abusable skills that allow you, for example: to stun enemies for double digit number of rounds, giving you ample time to regenerate mana and just permastun enemies - or for them to permastun you. There isn't much tactics at play, aside from basics, and its a damn shame especially because the enemy AI is actually surprisingly good, it mostly positions well and can easily surround and pick off single heroes if you give it an opening, it can abuse some of the broken spells as well. With proper balance and more tactical options, it could genuinely prove to be a fun challenge, but with the limited scope of the game's combat, it's held back a lot and only shows glimpses of brilliance here and there. In regards to spells, the game has a decent selection, though a bit unimaginative, but equipment selection is very poor, and even the "legendary" pieces you will find here and there are very bland and just stats+ with nothing special going for them. If you can get the game for very cheap on a sale and manage your expectations, the first 3 acts of the game will be mostly fun - I'd say somewhere around 6-7/10. From act 4 onwards, things will spiral out of control, and though there were some decent encounters still, there were many very bad ones to counter them - and they were very, very bad. I didn't actually finish the game, because the last "run" towards the last boss is just so bad, I just gave up. It would have probably taken me about 5 more hours to finish the game, if you want an estimate, and I played on the default difficulty (medium/normal I think). Also, as cherry on top, the game is pretty poorly optimized - while, due to the nature of the game, it has very little impact on the gameplay, it is still pretty noticeable and annoying when your frames randomly, but repeatedly, drop by 20, even when nothing special is happening.
Interesting spin on the "visual novel" genre that is lovingly crafted, but has its issues and is not quite as expansive as the store page makes it out to be. Still, considering the price, it is worth it, and given the casual nature and the topic, also suitable for people just interested in trying out this kind of games, or for those who would be turned off by weeb stuff. The game has some balance issues though, and it rewards min maxing waaaay too much for what should be a casual experience about (re)exploring life as a teenager.
A very solid SW experience with very good gameplay, and a few very minor issues. Easily can be recommended even to people not overly familiar lore or those who did not play previous games in the series - considering some of them don't even work properly on new OS/hardware, that's a very good thing. Although some knowledge of SW lore will help understand what is going on, the game by itself is good enough to not require it to be fun and to pull you in. The story is a bit disappointing and there are definitely better pieces of SW EU / Legends media in that regard out there.
Honsetly, if I had to describe this game in one word, "average" is the one that comes to the forefront. The graphics are okay, I guess, it's a quick remaster of an older game, I don't really care - it's clear enough, supports 4k native, I don't really need much more. It's nothing special though, and if you really care about graphics, you'll definitely be disappointed, there are definitely much better remasters out there. The sound design is not quite up to par to other Halos in my opinion, nor is the music. It's nothing too bad, but it's worse than you would expect given, especially the music, is mostly very good throughout the series. The gameplay is not too stellar either - while it avoids some of the shortfalls (infinite spawning enemies, too many constricted spaces, etc.) of the oldest entries, it also leaves a lot to be desired. The balance is not all that good, a lot of the weapons are pretty much useless - either their accuracy is crap, their damage is crap, or their amount of ammo availability and carry capacity is too low, which is again worse than the other games in the series which are generally much better in terms of balance. However, there are some space and flying sections that work surprisingly well and were perhaps the most fun parts of the game. The story is again forgettable B-grade scifi action flick, everyone is hardass badass hero, and so on. However, I don't want to spoil anything, but I actually liked a lot what they did with the ending. Also, there are no cringy teenager jokes unlike most other Halos, so that's a plus in my book. Overall though, it's just a painfully dull ordeal that you kind go through and forget, it's not gonna make you mad, but it's not exactly exciting either. Also, despite the setting, the color palette is much duller, because that's what was cool at the time - grey and brown and nothing else. Bleh.
Honestly, I am pretty disappointed and expected better. I heard Halo often mentioned as this great game that started a very good series of games, but what I found is, even for its time, a very frustrating experience with some questionable, and some downright bad design choices. Overall, the remaster is okay, it's not groundbreaking in terms of fidelity and quality, but it's good enough for a remaster / anniversary edition. No crashes, some short freezes in some places, no other issues, with perhaps one exception - in some places, the geometry appears changed from the original, but it actually is not and the hitboxes are from the original version - makes it a bit confusing in some places. In terms of sound, it's a bit of a mixed bag - sound design is overall decent, some sounds are better than original, some worse - especially the Warthog sounds much better in the original. Music is very good though, I loved it start to finish, although it did get silent at times and it was pretty noticeable. Now, onto the gameplay itself, which should be largely unchanged from the original - I liked it for the first 60-70% of the game. It felt well balanced, there is a variety of guns, etc. all of which with the exception of the needler thing feel good to use, albeit the human weapons are a bit too inaccurate for my liking. I had a lot of fun. Then you get a new opponent, largely composed off of swarms of small enemies, stuff starts infinitely respawning at times, and the game becomes a slog, where you stand in a hallway and shoot stuff for 5 minutes straight, then move around the corner, rinse, and repeat. Honestly, it feels like artificial padding, because the devs definitely knew how to balance properly, as evidenced by the previous parts of the game. It got so annoying I just gave up in the last section of the last level. It just felt like a chore, I powered through the previous two stages not having fun anymore, and this last level sealed the deal and I just stopped and I don't really feel like taking a break will help anything, because it's not fun. I'd rather re-experience the first couple levels again than actually finish the game... There are absolutely ways to do huge quantities of enemies well, first three Serious Sam games come to mind - but they have a lot of what Halo does not have, a lot of wide open spaces, quick and precise movement, lot of weapons good at taking on large quantities of enemies - with large area of effect damage, or high rate of fire, and most importantly - perfect, or near perfect accuracy, meaning you don't randomly waste huge quantities of ammo just because the game RNG decided to f-you. And lastly, these games also know that "a lot of enemies" != "infinitely respawning enemies" and that there still has to be a limit, otherwise the combat will eventually overstay its welcome, even if it is good. And for those who will argue "it's an old game" - it's still about a decade newer than first FPS games, and there were games before it that already made the same mistakes and were already criticized for them which I am sure the devs knew about, and again, I will point to the very well balanced first (more than) half of the game. The story is forgettable, it's nothing special - the lore of Halo, I love, but the story is a B-grade scifi action flick at best, marred by some badly placed cringe jokes for its teenage audience, but not too many, fortunately - the new Halo: Infinite is infinitely worse offender in regards to this. I love the grunts though, they are great.
A pretty decent game, albeit perhaps a bit overrated in the "professional critics" space and by some players due to being one of the few AAA non-Sony PS exclusives to not be entirely **** in the last 2-3 years. Also, I'm only talking about single player / campaign and not taking the multiplayer microtransaction shenanigans into account. This is the first Halo game I ever played, and I have to say, overall, I'm glad I did. I had fun pretty much throughout the whole game with a very few exceptions and the score is only 7/10 mostly due to some things that are very annoying, but do not directly affect gameplay. Yet, those things are still part of the game so can't really dismiss them outright. First, let's talk technical stuff - game is optimized fairly well and it pulls off some pretty serious draw distances with not too much additional strain on the HW. I had no crashes, no issues with corrupted saves or anything of the sort, no sound stutter, no freezing during loading, etc. Technical side of things is pretty much perfect - or very close to it at least. Graphically, the game looks very good - as mentioned, there are some serious draw distances the engine pulls off and this really feels like an actual huge open world, even though in reality, it is pretty compact actually. However, mostly, the game relies on design and style rather than raw photorealistic graphics, and some of the textures - even in the HD texture pack - are a bit blurry in places, and some of the models, even after some serious upgrades during the year-long delay, still have some space for improvement. A considerable amount of people complain about lack of variety in locations, and while it is true, it would actually not make much sense given the scope of the game and the story, and what is there is well crafted (for the most part, some remote places do have a few floating rocks and such) and looks good. Some of the places I found were downright gorgeous. Sound design is pretty decent for the most part, could have a bit beefier sound for some weapons and some vehicles, but it's not too bad. Music is very good, well paced, well placed, not much else to say. Now, the gameplay - this is one of the best games, core gameplay wise, that I have played in the last couple years. The combat is just so well balanced, it feels so good to get into any fight, the weapons, with two or three exceptions (two a bit UP, one a bit too good), are all useful in one way or another, the enemies have just the right amount of HP and their AI is pretty decent. The open world isn't really all that open, it's more a segmented / semi-open world, styled a bit as a Ubisoft-Lite kind of thing, most of the stuff is map marked, you reveal the map markers as you progress, and there is some stuff unmarked - some easter eggs, some additional encounters and ways to earn some bonus currency to unlock rewards during the campaign. The open world is okay, it never feels entirely empty, and like the combat, it is fairly well paced with down and up tempo moments. It's nothing special and awe inspiring though, it's "just" well balanced and feels good to play, and honestly, that was good enough for me, not all games need to reinvent the wheel. Traversing is made easy by the available vehicles and the grappling hook, though moving on foot is a bit too slow, and sprinting has a barely noticeable speed increase. Also, I know this is a thing that has been in Halo for some time, but the way vehicle controls work (turning with camera, so by mouse) is just atrocious... As for the story, it's forgettable, honestly. The lore is great, I loved delving into it from recordings, notes, etc., but the story itself is meh and I honestly remember F-all of it, and it's only been a week or so since I finished the game. I've seen some complaints it's worse than older games cause there was not enough focus on it, but honestly, I have played a couple more Halos in the meantime and it's about as meh as the rest of them, as far as I am concerned none of them really go beyond the B-grade action movie level. Two things, or rather characters, I remember all too well, though - for all the bad reasons. The two main support characters that you drag along throughout the whole game piss me off to no end, they are annoying, useless, ruin the mood - one with incessant whining, the second with crappy, badly timed cringe "jokes". The first one eventually reveals they kinda have a reason and got into this whole mess due to crap decisions and then calms down, but the second is an annoyance from beginning till the end. There was a moment where it looked like I would be rid of them, but no - they stay around and they get somehow even more annoying. F that crap. Another thing that annoyed me a bit is the friendly soldiers - much dumber than the enemy AI, with worse abilities and behavior in combat, and no way to tell them to f-off back to base... Conclusion: A fun game, but overall not groundbreaking.
