AllNewSuperfake

If the star systems were fast traveling points on a map (they are) and the planets were dungeons with radiant quests (they are) you were left with a version of Fallout 4 that has only 3 settlements and nothing inbetween. Add the ability to scan the same three types of trees and wildlife over and over again, while "mining" metals that grow like mildew on rocks and build outposts to mine more metals so that you can build more outposts and minecraft suddenly looks good again. The story is a literally endless repeat of four, maybe five interesting missions + another 15 where you go into the same cave, not just a similar one - the. same. one. leading up to the same temples experiencing the same sequence over and over again, to return to a faction that is all about science but is solely talking about the fact that they have no idea what they are doing, and that they don't know why they are doing it. A faction with companions so one-note that the fact that your "romance" is talking about their exes, and nothing else, is just fitting. Four companions, by the way. Like half of what Fallout 4 had. FOUR. And let's not forget the vision of the future, where people work, sleep and have no cinemas, no theatres, no music, no disco, no working TV, no phones, no video games, no sports. The fashion is a sad joke. There are no pets, there are no bikes, no boats, no pools, no spas, not farming animals and certainly no riding. The amount of stuff that is not there that you even had in Oblivion is mindblowing. What you get is the ability to build a ship that also has nothing except beds, workstations and a deck of cards. These poor people don't even have drugs outside that one nightclub. With fully closed strippers. It will take you 10 hours to get to the halfway decent part of the main quest. 20 hours later you will have to force yourself to continue because even the last hope has gone that all of this has a point. It's busywork in small, uninspired locations with writing that is so uninspired, so going through the motions, that while I don't want my money back, but what about the time I've invested?

If you only have a mid-range computer and want to play this to the end, forget about it. Act 3 doesn't just have performance problems, it falls from a cliff and can't even die because of the stuttering, freezing and now, after the so called "Performance Patch", ridiculous loading times, where the level never actually STOPS loading. And even if Act 3 was playable, it's like crashing your car at the end of a wonderful road trip through interesting environments and mysteries, only to end up in the slums of glitchy fetch quests, robbing through the sewers of long solved mysteries, dragging out the inevitable and, let's face it, underwhelming finale. But if you are still interested in beta-testing this for the actual release on the PS5, you've been warned. BUT, you'll no longer play the game that is so cool and the best ever that it makes you cool, the cool best game ever people are moving on as we speak. It's a shame, because mechanically, as an actual game, this IS a masterpiece. Why it wanted to compete with Dribble-A cinematic storytelling with an engine that is just not up to it it beyond me. This way it got them the attention and money they were going for, but people who actually tried to finish this will look back at it a little different.

You don't expect great animations or graphics from this series, or deep puzzles, or a captivating plot or a cast that's more than canon fodder for failed QTEs. But someone bought a set of old Lara Croft animations for this one, so the character can climb and crawl and leap now, and as a result the whole level design is mercilessly stretched out, to the point where locations don't make any sense anymore to include that as much as possible. And don't you think you are allowed to fail in any way by falling down or jumping to your death. You won't get off this slow, linear ride that easily, oh no Sir. But there still is horror to be found here, like the movement controls that make you feel like you are drunk and ate a pound of glue. And in case you aren't pissed of yet there are other mechanics that occasionally bug out so that you will walk in circles around those really small spaces because a hint decided to not show up, or a cut scene decided no to trigger, or the button prompts lied, or one of your endlessly boring sidekicks stands in your way, so that you will slowly die on the inside because at this point you should have known better than buying the next installment of this series.

Now here is what I really love about Prey: It's probably the only bigger release in the past 8 years that wasn't an animated movie that got shown to me in cutscenes as a reward for doing whatever was the actual gameplay loop. Not once did it take control away from me and made me watch TV instead of playing a game; whatever there was to do by the player character was either done by me or not done at all. For once I wasn't just the stuntman who got to shoot a gazillion enemies and nothing else only to watch some other dude getting all the good scenes. It was always me, always from my perspective, and yet it still made some amazing moments happen that were all so much sweeter because it didn't just cut to a prerendered video. Prey dared to losen that death grip those wannabe Spielbergs that make games these days normally force on your experience, and yeah, sometimes I had to actually look for answers, and every once in a while I got stuck because it wasn't enough to enter a room and have a cutscene play that moved the plot forward, but it was so much more memorable that way. I really hope that in the current climate, where more and more big releases fail and people are just bored, someone will remember this one and give the formula another try.

Updated (-2) Instead of repairing the flaws of the game, overpriced DLC - including stuff that used to be free in the predecessor - has hit the market, and loading times as well as frequent crashes tell me that the architecture of the base game can't really hold them. Something like the autosave being highly unreliable in a game like this is simply unacceptable, and yet Paradox blames it on mods even if users point out that they don't use them. It has all the addictive qualities of it's predecessor, and has become more accessible. The 3D models of your characters are a huge improvement and emphasize that the focus of this game is more on the roleplaying aspects than, for example, Europa Universalis. Even though it has it's hick-ups and is cheating a lot, the AI manages to create a dynamic world that will redefine European history every time you start over, and I will never not find the results hilarious. Observing the competition while constantly (and most of the time unsuccessfully) trying to keep your own dynasty in check will never get boring; following the lives of even the most unimportant peasants can tell wonderful stories down the path. The expanded religion system is the second big improvement that makes Crusader Kings 3 worth buying. The only downside to religious as well as personal traits is that the AI doesn't really roleplay at all; too many entities on the map are cheating, lying, fornicating warlords that will turn into child-murdering cannibals if you give them the chance, no matter how peaceful, calm and honest they are in theory. Right now there are balancing issues, especially when it comes to the AI using female characters as anything but currency in negotiating alliances, that hopefully will get addressed in future patches. Alliances itself, especially if you need them in your wars, are another thing that needs to be fixed. Still, as of now this is a game worth playing over and over again, and where losing is just as much fun as succeeding. Even though it's missing the long, long, LOOONG line of DLCs that CK2 had, it already feels quite complete; as a matter of fact I feel like someone cut all the fat away. At the same time there's already a promising modding community out there, so this game's future looks like a 9+.

+10 because every game could be a 10 Personally I enjoyed Maneater for what it was, especially it's lack of cutscenes, meaning that you, the player, actually got to do all the cool stuff that sharks do... +1 which would be swimming around and eating things. Sometimes fish. Sometimes sharks. Sometimes humans. Sometimes boats. Swimming. Biting. Swimming. Biting. Nicely animated, pretty bloody, and you grow quite a bit, while... -1 Swimming. Biting. Still swimming. Still biting. +1 nice presentation, decent audio, and the controls are ok, while you are -1 swimming. And biting. And swimming. And biting. +/-0 sometimes you get to bite one of several collectables, and sometimes you get a little tourist-guide-style explanation, and sometimes those are funny -1 then you swim some more, and you bite some more +1 love the Attenborough-style commentator in the background, who, even though you really don't get to do a lot except for swimming and biting, finds something new to say even many hours into the game +/- 0 swimming of course also means exploring, and while most areas have their own theme and style, the caves that you will have to crawl through to get a lot of stuff don't. They look nice, but are copy-pasted just like your fast-travel homes -0.5 too often the camera will be your secondary enemy to fight, which at the start, when you are not yet quite invincible can be a problem with pretty much every primary enemy... -0.5 which later on really does not matter any more because with certain upgrades it gets nearly impossible to die even with the camera spaszing out +0.5 I still like the upgrade system and the different visual styles coming with it, but it's not a whole lot, and while you might choose another setup to challenge yourself, there is no real choice once you get the good ones -2 in the later game I found myself crashing to the desktop more and more. Since the game autosaves very regularly that's not the worst thing ever, but since all you do is swimming and biting... and occasionally slapping things with your tail just to remember that biting does five times the damage... there came a point when I decided that after yet another crash I had enough swimming and biting for a lifetime. It was worth it, and it was enjoyable, and it probably was all it could have been - sharks are pretty straightforward, even the mutated giant ones - it's not the best thing ever, but the best shark sim I've ever played.

+10 because every game could be a 10 +1 if you are a spiderman fanboy, you can end the review right here. Which, if you are a spiderman game, is certainly a good thing. it has all the peter-parkering you could wish for, including a wide variety of suits and gadgets I've never seen in anything, because I only watched the McGuire and Tom Holland movies, so I guess they are going all in on the comics and Garfield-movies as well. It is full of iconic villains and soundtracks and characters, and you get to play one of the most lovable heroes I know, and he is presented exactly like that. I liked him before, and I liked him even more after playing the game. -2 unfortunately the things that you actually do as Spiderman are very limited. You swing around between story missions - later you can fast travel, but since +1 the swinging around is great I don't know why you would - and there is a wide variety of icons that will have you swing around some more to catch things or throw things or fight things for reasons that are well explained, but don't change the fact that you are always doing the same thing. -1 you are doing all the interesting stuff in cutscenes, which means that you actually don't get to do them. If you like to watch TV instead of playing the game this is totally fine, it's just that I hate being pushed into the passenger seat. If I want to watch a movie, I watch a movie; if I want to play a game I want to do stuff. ALL the stuff. I don't want to be Andrew McHolland's stunt double who never gets to do the really cool scenes and instead gets beaten up at lot because -0.5 the controls with keyboard and mouse are great, except when they are not, and they suddenly decide to not respond. It really doesn't happen a lot, but in a game with the Batman-Arkham-Combat, where a single miss will turn you from a wonderfully animated kickboxing machine into a wonderfully animated tumbling mess of broken limbs, it is really aggravating when it happens because the controls have given up on you. -0.5 Too many quick time events boss fights and big action sequences. If you like QTE, disregard this, but to me they are the worst compromise between cutscenes and gameplay, resulting in underwhelming gameplay and a movie that you can't enjoy because there are button prompts in the way. +/- 0 New York looks great, but does not outshine other sandbox cities. It's mostly in your way while you swing from A to B, and a nightmare for those of us who like to complete things. You just cleaned up all the icons and collected all the things in a district? You are just one side mission or progress in the main quest away from it being covered in new icons that want to be collected or fought or both. If you like quantity in your game, this is clearly great. If you like variety... not so much. +/-0 Which always leaves me a little depressed. A whole, wonderfully modelled and presented metropolis with all those great landmarks and it turns into little more than a shooting range, even if you are shooting webs. Some more interactivity would have been greatly appreciated - some more Peter Parker out of costume maybe? This way there is a certain disconnect between one of the greatest places on earth and the stuff that you, the player, are doing. You get to photograph the landmarks on the flyby, but that's it. -0.5 which might be one of the reasons why the actual story didn't do a lot for me. It's not well paced, and it feels drawn out, and the fact that you will spend a lot of time fuffing around does not help with that, which is always the problem with main quests in sandboxes. And while there are lot of game mechanics and progress bars and unlocks, it feels more like a web than something complete, and it really doesn't feed into the story at all. +0.5 which is a lot of nitpicking in an otherwise very polished experience with great production values in one of the better, probably even one of the best PC ports I've seen in a long time.

+10 because every game could be a 10 - 1 a lot of the glitches you might have heard about can be circumvented by using the DirectX 11-version, just like with this game's big brother, Cyberpunk. You will still have pop-ins, shader going wild, shadows drawn in a visible circle around you and nowhere else, and -2 a wide variety of gameplay bugs, starting with everything related to physics. The gravity in this game is on the level of Goat simulator, and while everything from trees to fences will crumble to pieces and cars explode like fireworks from any given vehicle crashing into it, there is always that one little rock that is barely visible and will still stop you in your tracks. Aiming, just like most of the controls, is bothersome, which in a game that pretty much has shooting as the central game mechanic is unforgivable. Stairs can become true obstacles, just like your -2 AI companions that tend to pile up right behind you and won't budge or move. The NPCs are true Zoomers, starting with the AI that has also been born in the late last century. Given the amount of babysitting that you have to do because they storm into danger and get themselves killed, watching them do so would be satisfying, but also ends the mission. It's the same with them riding cars or phasing out and not moving anymore. They have a lot to say, but unfortunately only three lines to chose from, and they say it with -1 the worst audio I've heard in a while. While the voiceovers aren't terrible, it always sounds like someone is speaking into a mic and directly next to you. Volition always had trouble with vehicle sound for some reason, but even the guns pop peas and popcorn. Which is fitting in my favorite section, which would be +2 the LARPing. I wouldn't be caught larping in real life if you paid me, but all the weaknesses of the game suddenly make sense; for example the finishers that never connect to whoever you are handling - in LARP they are not supposed to. And of course the guns sound like someone shooting you with thumbtacks. And of course the vehicles can't take any damage, because you can't drive cars into other cars in real life, DUH. The cringe humor and way too nice disposition of everyone suddenly makes sense; these people wouldn't commit genocide on a daily basis, but they would certainly *pretend* to do it while roleplaying. A part of me really wonders if Volition wasn't onto something when they created that part of the game, and it scratched an itch I've had since Rockstar's "Bully" - all the sandbox madness **** game, but ... nobody dies. I like that. Of course you will have a 4-digit-deathcount a few hours in, except for... -1 the forced stealth section, are you f*ing kidding me. It's like you made a list of things that people really hate and then decided on a dare to bring it all back. That's where I quit, by the way. -1 the open world is every bit as dead as you have heard, and looks more like a first draft overall. +1 unlike everyone else I did at least enjoy the "tourist" action where I have a good look at landmarks while a narrator explains the history of a place to me, because it's one of the few instances where the city gets some character. Also, it's one of the few moments where I don't leave a trail of corpses and trashed properties, which wouldn't be a problem if - 2 the writing wasn't that terrible. This new old new Saints Row takes itself way to serious and ends up mixing the comedy of "Friends" with mass murder, and if you are thinking right now that this would make sense because if you had to live with these people no one would survive... no. It completely lost that particular sense for irony that made the old games so great. +1 for the extended character creator that might be even better than the one in Saints Row 2. There are of course limitations, and shopping for clothes has become one of the thousand collectathons on the map without any real highlights, but it sticks out as something that feels finished. Which may be the overall problem. I hope they don't just throw this away and give up on it. Volition already knew how to make a great Saints Row game. With a little time they might remember and patch it back in. Potential buyers should wait until they do.

+10 because every game could be a 10. - 5 This is not a game. It's a more or less straightforward animated movie where you have to constantly fiddle around to keep it going, pull the stick here, click the mouse there, press a key, "Call of Duty"-players know the drill: Press F to pay respect. I kind of expected an adventure game, since that is what the studio is known for, and they weren't bad at it. But for some reason they decided to go down the David Caige route, which is daring because the only saving grace of those "games" is the technical side aka: Lots of money. Pendulo Studios does not have that kind of money, and it shows. And as if making a psychological horror movie wouldn't be hard enough, they decided to decorate themselves with one of the biggest names out there. I wonder: How can you be a fan of Hitchcock and think that padding your narrative with useless filler dialogue and inane activities would improve the experience? How can you have watched any decent movie and not understand that pacing is everything? How can you think that an obviously tight animation budget and mediocre voice acting can be a substitute for a great actor? How do you not understand that there is a reason why you normally don't spend 6 to 8 hours in a cinema? Even in this age of trilogies going home -aka saving the game- and doing something completely different before you continue watching the story isn't the norm for a reason. You don't get up in the middle of a movie and do the dishes and drive your kid to school for a reason. Movies are built to keep you in your seat and keep your attention. And if your movie doesn't do that, it failed, especially when you put *that* name on it. Having to press buttons and move the controller does not equal engagement, especially if there is no reason to do it in the first place. There is no failure here, there are no branching storylines, you won't miss out, and you won't "win" anything, you can't be good at it, and you can't get better at it. So what am I supposed to do with this?! It's a passable animated movie that I have to wind up or it won't play, and that is why it actually doesn't deserve a 5, because it's more of a chore that way. Let's just hope that this represents an evolutionary stage of a new medium that's neither a game nor a movie that we'll look back at like the 15 seconds of moving black and white pictures back in the late 18th century. A sideshow at best, and there really isn't a reason to pay for this except supporting the developers.

+10 because every game could be a 10 The general consensus about this game seemed to be that it is more of the same, up to the point where there is no real reason to put a 2 in the name. And I was just in the mood for more of the same, so -1 because it certainly wasn't. I had a great time with mouse and keyboard controls the first time around, while even with assistance I found myself stumbling and bumbling through the levels... -1 exactly the same levels, with exactly the same story, BUT: a new character. Me. And this is definitely not my story, I actually don't have a story except that I have a diary which only shows: Yes, I have absolutely no life to speak of, except for being a soldier and trying to impress people from the manga and anime. For example by going places and then -2 watching cutscenes in the middle of a battle. From the first game. That most of the time have nothing to do w0ith anything I was doing there. It's like having sex, and at some arbitrary point your partner shoves you off the bed and watches an old videotape with a badly aged porno. +1 Well, at the very least it shows that they've worked successfully on the overall presentation. But unfortunately -1 not on the in-game-menus. They are still multi-layered, obtuse things that you have to shake and mangle to spit out the information you are actually looking for, or achieve the thing you want to do, like selling or crafting, with half a dozen UI-designs, and each one is terrible. -0.5 while the levels look better, they still have all the detail and especially the destruction physics from two console generations ago. It has gone from retro-charme to feeling awfully dated by now. -2 missions are pure chaos, and unfortunately mostly because of design failures. Tutorial windows pop in hours into the game, hints lurk on the screen, fighting for your attention with subtitles that try to keep up with all the screaming around you, missions and icons are all over the place, and each enemy is showered in circles and targets and symbols and arrows. And over that you have other soldiers dialogue, smoke signals, building points and spawn points and recharge points and a small, overcrowded minimap with another heap of information, and just when you are getting into the rythm and are halfway oriented, you can bet that one of the aforementioned cutscenes kicks in. I have watched the first two seasons of the anime, and I played the first game. I should know what's going on, and I had to look up stuff because the narration is a disaster. If you haven't had any contact with this franchise, go and buy the first game, or you will have no idea what is happening half of the time. It slaughters the pacing and perspective while trying really hard to pretend that your charater matters, but how could she - or he? The whole storymode felt like an ongoing tutorial, and at the same time like joining a multiplayer game where you are just one of 60 people that have never met and will never see each other again. Overall pretty much everything about this was a terrible idea trying to **** as much money out of the fandom as possible, running after every trend and every hot thing in gaming back then and drowning in bad design choices because of it. It kills a great story while doing so, and slightly better visuals make it somehow worse since they feel wasted on this mess. -0.5 it also crashes regularly for no reason, sometimes repeatedly, and since this is not a new game, it will never be fixed, so again: If you want a game like this, buy the first one.

If you ever wanted to know what "5 Nights at Freddies" plus "Papers please" plus the Gym from GTA San Andreas plus several other minigames would be like while being a Guard at "Prison Architect", well, now you can. It's kind of amazing how it can combine all of that with a halfway decent presentation, and a wild story, and yet...I somehow never really got into it. Every day you, a faceless, nameless nobody, start out in the locker room with a list of tasks to fulfill, broken up with "free time" where you can raise your stats or make some money on the side. It's all explained rather well, controls fine and gives you all the beaurocracy, rubberstamps and monitor staring, occasional brawls, toilet searching and floor cleaning you could wish for. What it doesn't do is telling a story beyond the absolute minimum, making prisoners and guards feel like robots and everything else like a sideshow. It even throws in some customization and light management, but that is mostly a number game, heavily restricted by a level system and mostly there to give you an incentive to earn money, for yourself and the prison. It's one of those games that has everything it promises, but the mechanics have no depth and are only loosely connected while being seemingly unrelated to the story. No matter how fancy your prison gets and how highly respected you are, the story seems to play out just the same, and nobody is happier or less likely to misbehave. So in the end you are working through lists up to the point where it starts to feel like work. If you like games like that because you hate your free time and want to be told what to do for less than minimum wage at home this might be exactly what you are looking for. If you are looking for anything beyond that, you might be surprised by the quantity of content and the polish (relative to what you normally get with anything called a "simulator"). But what you won't find is an actual *game* or anything engaging except for running after achievements.

While pretty much every mechanic in the game is enjoyable, and technical nitpicks are mostly hardwaree-related, SMT 5 fails to answer the question why I'm doing what I'm doing. There is no agency at all, just busywork with the occasional story blurb that most of the time only underlines the total absence of a narrative.

+10 because every game could be a 10 -1 obviously astroturfed reviews are obvious -0.5 the presentation relies heavily on post processing, leaving everything equally glossy and shiny, which really doesn't do the models any favors. Said models could have done with some facial animations. I feel oddly reminded of their last game, but this one is not supposed to have fish people, is it now? -1 obvious astrofturfed reviews are obvious -0.5 The background music does not do what background music does, aka staying in the background +1 it certainly offers a lot of mechanics to keep the whole thing fresh. You even go furniture shopping, to jog your memories, to inspire your mind palace, to find clues, that you might have to look up in archives, or show people , or that lead you to other clues, but... -2 those mechanics do not work well together. The whole world depends on what clue you have pinned in your journal. There are things you do not see, people you can not talk to, hints that will not show up only because there are several new entries in your journalS that you have to pin instead. You have your casebook, but every quest has several entries and chapters and clues and themes, and all the while your "companion" is collecting documents, items, clues and memories in his own journals. It is not impossible to follow all of that, but it kills the flow and leaves you confused too often to stay enjoyable. It makes things difficult for all the wrong reasons. At the same time you cannot access important hints while in certain modes even though you really need to, for example when trying to put witness statements together while staging a crime in your mind. -1 What I really did not enjoy was having to put together crime scenes that were obviously wrong, so that I have a reason to continue investigating things until I figure out they were wrong. At the same time I could never really go wrong on my own and figure *that* out. -2 It unfortunately never really feels like I am the one doing the thinking here. I just have to go to places and click, and find what to click next. This is quite well hidden under all the aforementioned mechanics, but thinking for yourself can actually get you into trouble since even if you are right, you may not have clicked on enough evidence to activate an item, or line of questioning. And you will stumble around looking for the right things, but at the wrong time. +1 It still kept my attention a lot longer than it should have. The characters, scenarios and and writing down to the side quests are borderline great, but you should like it strange and quirky. +1 for the whole disguise system, even though it is underused. +/- 0 I am not sure the open world is a good idea for the format, but it has been done a lot better than the last one. For every time it fits organically into gameplay and helps world- and character building there are long stretches where I just have to walk long distances to unlock fast travel points. +/- 0 The combat can be deactivated or skipped. It is goddamn awful, so that was a good idea. I really like the ambition of this studio, and they once again mostly failed because they wanted to do too much. And they failed a lot less than in the "Sinking City". And I was well entertained, as long as I was not looking for the right things with the wrong pinned journal entry.

While being able to breed elephants with ducks sounds like fun, unlocking that part of the game will require you to play many hours of a sub par tycoon game. And that means: Many hours of underwhelming visuals and sound, underwhelming animal and visitor behavior as well as staff AI, and a binary system of moral choices that are not thought through and cut you off from huge parts of the content. There is only one save slot, and you can't even save whenever you want. Meaning that you can't experiment with building a "good" or "evil" zoo. Instead you would have to start over to do that. Unlocking everything all over again, which is, as I already mentioned, not exactly a spectacular experience. Growing your zoo also means more and more useless busywork since important quality-of-life features are missing, leading to insane micromanagement while at the same time not really managing anything. Most of those mechanics only cut into the flow and fun without having any depth to them, and overall you never feel like you achieved more than putting another checkmark behind a long, long list of similar tasks that never challenge you, and only require patience, but not skill, thinking or creativity. While a lot of interesting ideas went into this, the mix doesn't work and is dragged down by bad balancing, UI, controls and a cute, but lazy presentation.

Everyone is pretending this is so casual and relaxing, BUT IS IT REALLY...?! Who is that woman that is too lazy to unpack her own stuff and enslaved you, some faceless minion, to do it for her, and at a very young age on top of that? Why does she force you to put all the furniture in one corner of the room, leaving two walls completely blank? What kind of woman only owns two pairs of shoes and no socks? And things get very dark later on, when she moves into places where the previous owner is nowhere to be seen and left most of their belongings in a hurry. And what do you get for your work? Stickers, until she puts you away again for another couple of years. I'm pretty sure the binding spell is in the Rubik's cube that she takes everywhere but obviously doesn't touch, so destroy it. Save yourself. .... yeah, not really. It's as casual as it gets, and has zero challenge or replayability, and you have literally one job. Don't get creative, it doesn't like it. It does however what it sets out to do, so I can't really blame it for that, and if you like the style you might even enjoy the underlying "story" it tells by showing, not telling. It's certainly as inoffensive and cute as possible, which also means that it passes up on any chance to be more than mildly interesting. oR DOeSN't iT?! Yeah, no, really not.

You are entering the vicinity of an area adjacent to a location. The kind of place where there might be a monster, some kind of weird mirror. These are just examples. It could also be something much better. Prepare to enter… the Dark Pictures Anthology. For the third time. +10 because every game could be a 10 -1 Unresponsive, unintuitive controls (mouse and keyboard). Movement feels sticky, the camera is on strike, and the UI is so overdesigned that button prompts, of all things, are confusing. Even if you’ve already done them before. Normally the challenge of QTEs is reacting quickly. Here it is deciphering what the f*ing prompts mean. -1 Facial animations, mushy lighting and badly scanned textures make humans the creepiest thing in this game. Again. If this series had any depth I would consider it a rather original analogy, but… -1 the game design is still trying to be as "accessible" as possible. Like „exploration“ aka looking for sparkling, floating things that scream „CLICK ME“. Those are never a good idea. But if your atmosphere depends on being creepy and dark and desolate, and someone puts christmas ornaments on everything interesting, it's just silly. Yet here it is again, for the third time. Together with -0.5 invisible walls, often in front of actual obstacles. This becomes most apparent in the extensive dungeon sections, where it would be so easily avoidable and where you get stuck in literally nothing. -0.5 Cutscenes, more precise: Cutscene direction. I already don’t like cutscenes, but they are getting worse everywhere thanks to game developers who think they are movie directors. Whoever sat at the helm of this one really didn't want to make a game, so it’s the kind of cutscenes that actually wouldn't be necessary half of the time, but me, the player, is only in the way of the creative vision, and I’m not standing in my spot. More often than not that spot is in another segment of the scenes, sometimes only 5 feet away, but you can’t go back to explore the room where you **** up by… yeah, not dying or making the wrong choice, but just moving. -1 If you want to make a movie, make a f*ing movie. I could have easily sat down and watch 90 minutes of having yet another unlikeable cast going through tired 90s action movie tropes and stolen ideas from better franchises enriched with melodrama. And I could have gotten drunk or eat popcorn and laugh my abs off. This way I had to hold the controls for more than 6 hours in case you wanted me to move 5 meters or look at a thing or QTE on mouse and keyboard. Really: Make an animated movie. Stop making games, you obviously hate them. Everything interactive is just lazy, the choices, the "relationships", the endings. It's obviously only in your way. And the movie even had moments where I was borderline interested. How do I know? Because the main antagonist of the series showed up and quickly killed any excitement. The end boss, as I like to think of him... -1 … the oh so mysterious, oh so victorian narrator guy, rambling for several unskippable minutes about nothing in particular to test your patience and break your spirit. The man that needs a compass to walk down a straight corridor, for over a minute, and there isn’t any way to speed it up. Remember your first day in game design school when they told you: Unskippable plus non-interactive equals bad, no matter how proud you are of your work? Obviously not. Here’s the deal, Supermassive Games: You make your 8 games, and I promise to play each and every one of them. But in the last one I get to kill the narrator. It would certainly be a better twist than the one you have in mind. -1 And one more piece of unsolicited advice: Take a scenario that does not require any kind of knowledge or research - not actual historical events. I can suspend my disbelieve when it comes to fiction. But whoever sat at the helm desperately wanted to make his version of „Apocalypse now“ on top of everything else, just without any understanding of the topics involved. Topics like Bush’s war on Iraq, just as a fun backdrop for a story that could have easily played out everywhere else. WTF?! I’m a little confused. This is obviously a professional studio. The result is quite terrible, don’t get me wrong. But there are so many things in this game that tell me that actual talent was present. +2 Music and audio are pretty ok. Most of the voicework is decent. Little moments in the script where they managed to show, not tell, give me hope. The dialogue options work better, meaning that you get the results you expect - whoever did that this time: You are getting there! It's just never scary, thanks to all the handholding. But I still think they have everything in place, and they are obviously working hard. This reeks of huge egos at the top that need to be replaced. Well. Try, try again (maybe with a new creative lead).

+10 because every game could be a 10 -1 You sound is bugging out? If you have an Nvdia card, you can adjust the individual setting for every game. What you have to do here is lower the FPS to 30 and put Vsynch to "Fast". And the fact that I looked that up for an 8 year old game and played it for 40 hours straight for the fourth time makes it kind of one of my top five games of the past 30 years. It's fun. Spoil yourself and give it a shot.

Now here's a game that makes a great case for how to ruin your narrative by including it in a videogame: By combining it with a pretty terrible golf simulation. While I really like the worldbuilding and the story that is unfolding, and I love the radio station that is playing in the background, it's like reading a nice book... that came with an arbitrary chore that you have to perform before you are allowed to turn the page. Even if that chore was fun and not riddled with terrible controls and cheap physics, why would you put that in your book? There is of course the slightly heavy handed metaphore about how evil and mindless rich people are, but I get it! I got it in the first level. I actually got it in the first 10 seconds of the trailer. And yes, it's a very nice metaphore, I wholeheartedly support the politics behind it, but the way it's used here all that's missing is Ben Garrison labeling everything. And while the cartoon apocalypse looks nice, it's not adding anything to the storytelling, since the golf course is taking up the visuals. So, what next? Shakespeare as a platformer? They could still turn this into a great comic, so how about that?

+10 because every game could be a 10 -2 after reading the reviews here, that all use the same aggressive Engrish, giving this a perfect score for no particular reason. Which on the other hand always helps lowering expectations +1 for remembering which game invented the style of animated GUI and text that comes on you from all sides with generic funky music looping, even though Persona 5 did this a lot better... -1 ... since I really don't like the artstyle. It's a little bit ugly on the 2D side while making me wonder if the MC has a neckbeard, or a mask, or a bandana strapped to his chin, and I'll never figure it out because it's so overstylized. On the 3D side I like how the faceless masses are literally faceless, but wonder who exactly thought that -0.5 a fixed camera would help here. It's obvious why the 3DS had it. But with it's -0.5 loading times while hopping between the microscopic city maps it makes them feel even more like little boxes and not like a giant metropolis. And you are trapped with -0.5 weird controls, especially in the menus where they change on every screen. At the very least you can rearrange them, and you'll have to so that you can access stuff like -1 the difficulty rating that you can't use until you have levelled up several times, which might be a problem because the -2 combat ****. Just to be entirely clear, the core mechanic, which is combat, and not "riddles" because you don't have to think for the riddles, you have to go to X and click to have your character solve it, which is not how riddles work. But I wish the combat would use that mechnic, because, once again, it -2 **** in every way that combat can ****. It is barely functional and repetitive, unresponsive and confusing. You are mashing buttons to attack, which makes you run towards the enemy, far, far away thanks to the **** camera, and shower him in hectical movement with flashy effects, making it impossible to see what he's doing which is bad when that's where the dodging mechanic comes in. And without timed dodging timing you will lose in the earliest tutorial stage, again and again, but you can barely see what's happening. It reminds me why I stopped instantly playing this when I was shown the predecessor on it's little console, thinking: Well, with a bigger monitor and controls that I'm used to this could work... But no, it really doesn't. -0.5 ... and even the story, the only reason why you would put up with something like this, can't help. It caught a massive case of "Fellow Kids"-Syndrome, which makes it the perfect game if you want to know what playing Pokemon Go while having ADHD is like. So, if you don't like the pricetag on this one, save the money. The great thing about it is that all the stuff it did right went right into every game that came out since, so you won't miss out on that. And because everyone was so enamoured with it, they thought that they could just serve the leftovers 8 years later without innovating one bit, which unfortunately is another thing that every game does these days, so once again: You won't miss out.

When you have dedicated your franchise to being family friendly, you will sooner or later run out of things that are interesting enough to be put in a life simulation. This is normally the part where the Sims hammer out your megastars and superstars expansions, but as with so many things the Sims 4 is way, way beyond that point. I would like to point at the description, which raves about two (out of four) things that are not in the game - well, there are forests, but they are part of the ever illusive open world this game doesn't have, and abundant new ways to connect to the countryside, that this game also doesn't have - not the ways, and not the countryside. The "woodland creatures" live in their own rabbit holes, numbering three: Rabbits (now that's fitting), birds (that don't go anywhere except if you enslave them to garden for you, how realistic is that) and foxes, that look suspiciously like someone just sabotaged the sliders in the pet creator and it shows in their profile pictures where it turns them into horribly deformed nightmare creatures, one of the the several new features that didn't make it into the description because they are of course bugs. Like every new feature their main purpuse seems to be overdoing the three things that they can actually do until you are pissed enough to turn them off, which leaves us with cozy architecture and cozy furniture that even your grandma would sneer at for not wanting to move into a retirement home made out of prejudices angainst old british people, but now you can. And you probably will, because you paid for this, and discover the two new plots of fertile soil that you can put "giant" crops in, after you grinded your gardening skill to the usual heights. You can eat that stuff, even though you know how much chicken **** went into it, or put it out in a sunny warm August day to have it prized in a competition that is mysteriously populated with standard crops of the beginner variety or the same kind of pie, and yet lose. I mean of course, get a participation trophy. And the odd jobs from the unspeakable island expansion make a comeback as "favors" that you get paid for, because Crumple-on-Forever has the worst post office in the world, and therefore a lot of packages that went missing or never got anywhere. And who hasn't dreamed since the day of the Sims 1 to finally do Mrs. Crumplebottom? Yeah, not me, but then again, I also never wanted the f*ing farm expansion that everyone wanted since those days, because I knew it would be boring, and now everyone knows. Can't fault the developers for once, I'd say they actually showed half an effort this time. But there is a reason why nobody wants to be a farmer anymore once he discovers the aforementioned more interesting things in life once puberty hits. So, EA, now that we have done all of that and you are certainly not going down that road with the medieval crap again, can we have that GTA expansion that *I* always wanted? No? Well, thank god for the modding community then.

While the new furniture is decent and can be used outside of the new career at the center of this pack, the laughable amount of bugs, horrible design choices and an utterly confused Ai make this a worthy part of the Sims 4-franchise. So if you were looking for more features that don't work, this fits neatly into the collection of unresponsive environments (so called worlds) full of bumbling morons (so called sims) that try to follow so many layers of contradicting scripts (so called AI) at this point that it's like a simulation **** open mental hospital that ran out of ADHD-meds a long time ago. Worst moment: Renovating my first room and thinking that this could be fun and seems to work as promised Best moment: Selling everything in a room and getting a perfect rating for my "renovation", and in conclusion going back to Sims 3 that did this, once again, a lot better.

Once upon a time, there was a horror game on the Playstation, and it wanted to have really impressive 3D graphics. And because the Playstation could not render those in real time without bursting into flames, the developers came up with an idea, which was to have a fixed, cinematic camera so that there was no extensive rendering necessary. They also understood what a camera does when it's cinematic, meaning that they understood camera movement and camera angles. The result was quite impressive graphics for the time and additional classic horror atmosphere. A thing of beauty: Necessity as the mother of an invention. The developers of this game did not have the necessity, and they also did not understand the invention, aka camera angles and movement. But they wanted their game to look and feel and play like that godforsaken classic and copied all the wrong things. Like the terrible tank controls, with the added unnecessary difficulty of the oh so popular "wait, now that the camera angle changed, pressing forward means that I'm going in the exact opposite direction, aka back to where I was coming from". Because that's what we are missing when we get all nostalgic, right? Right. Like the clomp-clomp-clomp of footsteps ruining all the other audio. The fiddly controls while examining stuff with some extra fiddly controls while rotating it. This is even worse than back in the good old days, everything is spinning out of control. Sometimes your cursor changes into a looking glass, which can mean everything from opening something to pressing a button to actually looking at something. Sometimes you need one click, sometimes you need to double click, it's as intuitive as your yearly tax return. You get thrown right into the action without any buildup whatsoever, meaning that you have no idea who you are. Which makes it a little difficult to care, especially when you are wearing the mother of all bad anime outfits and hair. And during the first cutscenes you already have classic goofs with missing props and props changing sides and places, only to run into one of the most mind-boggling puzzles in my long, long gaming history where I learn how to "modify" a wrench to use it as a doorknob. And what "lost in translation" means. The level design has all the chaos, but none of the interactivity of a hidden object game, and you have to rub your wooden animated body against walls, cabinets, shelves and other architecture to figure out if you can use any of the ten million objects lying around. Which, in case of the aforementioned doorknob, means that there are roughly twenty things in that room alone that would serve the same purpose like that wrench. You know, that thing that is always the first weapon you find in any game?... and that you leave there. Of course you leave it there, why would you need a weapon in a creepy house where people kidnapped you and cut your eye out?! So, if any of you undying "Resident Evil" and "Silent Hill" Fans out there could tell developers that even you have moved on and that you would not like to be reminded how badly huge chunks of the concept aged and how you also appreciate all the progress in game design we've made since? That would be great. How you appreciate those new, modern inventories where you don't have to search for the stuff you just picked up because because a watch is a "file" and a wrench is a "resource"? Because this drags down a great story. In other games, not this one, don't even get me started. This has all the appeal and insane twists of yesterday's leftovers put in a blender. But in case you had a great story, this would drag it down. Luckily for the developers, they hold on to that really good and original story for the next time. Right? Right.

This one is a liar. Every trailer, every promise, and of course the whole kickstarter. It's sad since they had the resources to make a good game, especially thanks to the artist. And it makes me angry how they they had all those resources and instead made yet another typical mobile game after lying to their kickstarter supporters. It is solely designed to put you through hour-long grinding to get a bunch of numbers through insane micromanagement so that you give up and get them in the online shop. Except that you, Masterrace consumer, don’t even get to buy your way out of playing this after you paid for it now. In the end, the presentation is the only thing that doesn’t deserve damnation here, and only if you exclude the not scalable, extremely small text and the UI that seems to have exploded and nobody cleaned it up. Imagine “Oxygen not included” or "Rimworld", but you have to do everything except building on your own (of course you place the buildings and tell them exactly where to dig so that there is no AI beyond pathfinding necessary). You have to put every colonist – excuse me, sinner! - to sleep, in the bathroom, and place them at the dinner table. You have to put them in a mine, then in a smelter, then in a forge and so on. By hand. If you don’t do that, they just stand around. And die. Not that it matters. Nothing matters. There are some goals that require you to get resources, which you gather to build stuff so that you can gather more resources. That’s not too unusual for a tycoon-style game, but you normally have an overarching goal. Like: Build a zoo so that animals can live there. Build a hospital so that your patients get healed. Here you build a hell to collect resources to build … hell. Sure, you are informed that Lucifer likes suffering, but what about the player? He can enjoy a 1 second animation of said suffering, but, you guessed it, he has to place people by hand, or hell doesn’t work. And in the end it’s all about the resource of “suffering”, not that you could do anything with that except build stuff that allows for more suffering. Demons can be bought like time-savers that will allow for for faster resource collection for five minutes or so, which gives you more resources to buy more demon time-savers. There isn’t any creativity or strategy, it’s working through a list of obligations so that you get the next list. I’ve had minimum wage jobs that made me feel less dead inside. There are some demons popping up with voiced text that try to explain why it is vital to collect resources this time and how the design flaws and lazy shortcuts of the developers are totally intentional and make sense. They are painfully unfunny, and I fear that’s unintentional. There just isn’t enough substance here to go meta, but if I had been able to collect my own suffering I’d had enough to buy out every ring of hell after the tutorial. So it’s not only a liar, it’s also a waste of everyone’s time and money. And you can’t even build that special place in hell that Woodland Games deserves for it.

"Jupiter Hell" turns the DOOM formula into a round-based roguelike, and that's it. That's exactly what it promises, and that's what it does, with several modes, a nice presentation (especially for a roguelike) and even some text-based storytelling that you can - but don't have to - read in the station's mail servers. It's easy to learn, but gives you quite a challenge and lots of ways to approach situations. It stays true to it's concept, which unfortunately also means that it doesn't add anything and therefore leaves the levels quite empty, naked and repetitive. It's 2D and tile-based, so the level design is restricted to empty squares and empty corridors, and there isn't a lot of furniture or decoration. It's walls, barrels, and doors. Just like in the original, so I can't really complain about that. As a little bonus you get different classes that you can level up with a wide range of abilities, becoming a tech wizard or a space barbarian swinging their wrench. It's not exactly a game that you can play for hours (and thanks to permadeath you probably won't last that long anyway), but I can see myself trying it's challenges and experimenting with it's systems for quite some time. It's everything it sets out to be, and as far as the genre goes, the only thing it's missing is a little more depth - but the original didn't really have that, either. If you like the formula and idea, you will get exactly that, with a crisp design and a polished experience, and that's becoming quite rare these days. I'm glad I tried this.

I don't want to rate this, it's more like an art project, and I'm afraid I'm way too old for this. There is that certain sweet spot in your 20s when you are still easily impressed by your own feelings and how they are so exquisite and deep and real that you feel like the star in your own movie. And all that stuff you think for the first time and experience for the first time is so magical. For everyone else: Don't play this while handling heavy machinery. I'm very tired now.

It looks and sounds like a great game while you start playing it. It plays like a good game until the bugs start appearing. It already seems like a not so great game when you have to reload a save for the first time because somethings not working as it should. That's when the next 15 minutes of the game begin.

I love the idea of this game, and the score is my way of saying: I don't want to rate this. I want more games like this, and this is obviously the work of people who had a great idea, and talented writers and programmers worked hard to make it, and given the size of the team the result is impressive. But under the thin veil of a decent presentation and some nice writing even the short time span that you spend in the "forgotten city" - again and again - is enough to break any immersion with technical issues and shortcuts in it's mechanics. While the story and underlying mystery are certainly interesting and the characters well fleshed out, the developers cut too many corners when it comes to the consequences of your actions. The lack of interactivity and interaction in the city makes it feel small, dead and less and less believable. Every time you enter the market place that has no customers filled with nothing but silence, where nobody reacts to you or whatever happens - even when it's a shrine coming down on a lunatic with a weapon - it becomes harder and harder to feel engaged or take it serious. You can't screw around because the developers didn't seem to see any potential in that, and every interaction and every object is directly tied to your quests. You can't really experiment because everything is quiet straightforward, which also takes out planning or getting creative and the satisfaction that comes with that. When you change history you never get something like a butterfly effect; you are lucky if you get additional dialogue. Everyone seems oblivious to what's happening right in front of them, and with very few exceptions most people just stand patiently in place until something sets of the repeating Armageddon that you are trying to stop. On top of that the game has small technical issues like long loading times that make you think the game crashed whenever you move around and hit one of it's invisible inner borders that put another dent into the illusion that you are in a living, breathing place that is alive even when you don't do anything. There are only very few things to explore or observe or watch, and everyone sounds like they are reading to you. So yes, I don't want to rate this, but I also can't recommend it only because I want it to be good.

Resident Evil ist a weird series for me. I've played every main entry, but I've never finished one of them. Most of the time I only played them for a few hours, and than they rotted away on my harddrive just to be deinstalled. It is weird because I never thought of them as bad. Or boring. I found each one scary. I was always satisfied with the presentation. I loved the enemy design. The scenarios were interesting. The underlying mystery was enduring. And yet, to my shame, it's RE 6 that I played the longest, for a simple reason: It was the best port, even though everything else about it was decent at best. And here is another game with all the aforementioned qualities, missing one thing: A decent port. An optimized experience. A mouse that works flawlessly and keyboard controls that make you feel in control. "Village" is a chore to play, with hickups, stuttering, lagging audio, slowdowns and a framerate that goes from 60 to slide show in an instant for no discernible reason. Resident Evil 8 also commits the general sin of bad direction, taking control away from you whenever something interesting happens and suddenly giving it back to you, with questionable results for the flow and atmosphere. I watch myself doing incredible badass stuff in cutscenes and go back to lying helplessly on my back seconds later. I have to watch long minutes of story to find myself teleported to some other place that has nothing to do with what I just experienced. And of course there is the main weakness of this series, the premise. The premise has always been so f*ing ridiculous that it begs for explanations that come way too slow and most of the time are huge letdowns. Here I feel once again like missed half the movie when I entered the theatre, and having played the other games and knowing the characters actually makes it *more* confusing. Yet for long hours there isn't even a hint what's going on, and I neither know where I am nor how I got there, what I'm looking for and why. Maybe the game will explain later why the player character seems so completely clueless and emotionally disconnected, but he certainly doesn't help. More than in other entries I grew bored of the actual gameplay loop where 2 hours in felt like I've fought the same enemies and searched the same furniture for much longer, and the combat is a tiresome affair with lot of automatisms and quick time events that, once again, take away control and immersion and feel like work. While the design and atmosphere are great, and the story as confusing as intruiging, the bad port, design flaws and the weird refusal of the game to let me play it because it wants it's oh so cinematic moments made me stop playing this even faster than the other entries. A fan of the series might be delighted, but should play it on the consoles it was made for, and with a controler.

+10 because every game could be a 10 -1 The presentation does the job, but by now the "new" engine feels dated. Too many clones, too many reused assets, and the facial animations make everyone look like they just burst through a door with an axe shouting "Here's Johnny!". Especially "dungeons" are dull, repetitive affairs, the architecture has no recognition value in most places. In the questionable tradition of older JRPGs items and treasure are never physically present in the world and only exist as boxes or sparkling points with added arrows so that you never feel like you found something, but it found you, and it won't leave you alone until you take it... -0.5 ... the loot. Into your inventory. Given your relatively short experience as a homeless person it makes sense that you collect trash, but you will already carry the equivalent of a hardware store in the pockets of your flashy suit when you finally get to use it in a convoluted and tacked-on crafting system. A lot of the stuff you find doesn't make sense. To find what you are looking for in excel-style menus with microscopic icons, navigating through the dungeon in your pockets and party is a burdensome and complicated affair. Obviously in the spirit of nostalgia, so... +0.5 for translating the yakuza series into something that resembles the old Dragon Quest series, because even though I've never played it I still recognize music and sound samples from those games, but.... -0.5 ... it really doesn't do anything for you if you haven't played them except making the more emotional moments in the story come across like memes. Which is a real problem when it comes to -2 the story. I won't say it's not interesting. Seriously, this game left me terrified that I might not understand what the word "writing" means that everyone was praising here. It's a little bit like reading something a 13 year old boy comes up with when he is writing his first epic novel. There is a lack of basic understanding of the themes and subjects the story is dealing with that left me speechless on a regular basis. This is, of course, not a franchise where you would expect Shakespeare or serious life lessons or deep philosophy. But it's unfortunately not presented like the filler text it should be instead. I have spent roughly 90 % of the first 6 hours watching TV - meaning cutscenes - and clicking dialogue box after dialogue box without any actual interactivity or choices. It's a superstorm of dramatic tropes with everything from corruption to child abuse, wild conspiracies and power struggles. Tragedies and misery pile up and collide with honor codes and ancient morales, poverty, prison, prostitution, death. And all of that from the perspective of a 13 year old, with all the insight and deep reflection you would expect. You can basically witness in real time how the writers try to explain to themselves how they got to the point where they needed to be after they got there on a regular basis, and during that process they stumble upon all the plot holes and contradictions they created on their way. So you click away text window after text window and listen to hours of professional voiceacting that, once again, seems like a meme most of the time because it is so f*ing ridiculous. And yet, at the same time, it's like you are watching the main characters standing around, no one knows what is going on and how they got there, so everybody has to improvise while the director is whispering "Just act natural!" from the sideline. All of this could actually be fun or even well-made satire. But I'm afraid they were serious about this. -0.5 ... when they are not fighting. Which they will do a lot. You won't be able to walk down any given street without having at least one random encounter, and while I enjoyed the round-based combat because I feel more in control than with the typical button mashing throughout the series, it's just too drawn out, and with the added RPG-nostalgia full of flashy effects and ridiculous power moves it is like constant comical relief. I actually love the idea to have the classic RPG formula translated to a modern day scenario, but given the actual story it's like watching a really sad movie with a constant laugh track playing over it. Even that could work, but it just doesn't. +0.5 still, even though I felt like I was part of an elaborate joke that I didn't really get - great writing? great scores? Deep characters? Are you f*ing kidding me - I never really got bored. The never-ending storytelling clears up after a few hours and releases you fully into an absurd sandbox that never makes sense, but always comes up with a new ridiculous idea. The actual gameplay has a satisfying flow and sense of progression. I love to hate this series, but I also hate to love it.

This is neither grand nor a tycoon game. You will find yourself working through a list that is at the same time what this game has instad of an actual AI: The one path every single member of a certain customer group will take through the casino. Yes, every "posh" gamer will visit a bar first, then a slot machine and so on. So your task is to build a bar, and a slot machine, and every customer group has exactly one of those that they like, and they don't like the other groups, so what you will build will resemble a zoo with habitats. There is no managment happening. There is no outside world. There is no free building. And, I can't stress that enough, there is no actual customer AI. Every single feature praised on the store site is a lie. The animations look wobbly and wooden at the same time. The voiceovers are horrifying. The tutorial is trying to sell the nonexistant features as challenges. I also had the first gamestopping bug during the very first mission where everyone just stopped walking around and nothing worked anymore. Except for uninstalling and refunding this mess. This has absolutely no redeeming qualities.

Give Kalypso a classic, and they will **** the soul out of it and leave a hollow skeleton of even the most original ideas, and fill it with bugs, terrible humor, bizarre control schemes, and better graphics, meaning that you get modern day performance issues for ps3 era quality. Their idea of adding content is adding micromanagement since additions to the AI or the simulated environment is hard, and their missions have all the charm, depth and excitement of a shopping list for a store that only sells one product. And of course there are the obvious holes in the game that can be filled with DLC in case it succeeds, but looking at the reception this one will be burried without support after three weeks. If you are nostalgic, play the original. If you are curious, play the original. If you are neither and have too much money, give it to an animal shelter, but not this publisher.

Dead Age 2 comes with three of the four riders of the apocalypse on it’s store-page, namely “survival”, “crafting”, “zombies”, missing only “open world” and instead offering “choices”. It’s the second attempt of the studio to make round-based combat with zombies a thing, meaning that instead of slashing and smashing your way through a horde, you will have to slowly chip away health bars after carefully lowering armor stats. If I had to point out something positive, it would probably be the visuals, as long as I ignore the UI. There are still some terrible design choices, like “decorating” the background with feeding zombies that never join the combat right next to them and ignore you while walking by. You have armored enemy types that don’t wear a helmet and expose more skin than your average anime princess warrior, but need to be handled with specific weapons and attacks before you can even think of using blades. 1 in 3 attacks by any given zombie is a critical hit, meaning that you are going to use one medikit per round just to stay alive as early as in the first tutorial battles. There are also some special attacks needing a buildup of “adrenaline” that are obviously mostly there to cause more action, flying numbers and unconvincing graphical effects to make this whole dull affair look more interesting, but poison the already nonexistent balancing even more. Featuring permadeath in a game without a random map, with slow base building, repeating quests and dialogue sequences where you can’t improve your own skill because there are no real strategies except for grinding and hoping that the gambling mechanics in the background are merciful is yet another bad idea. All of that could be saved or at least helped by the writing, by having a great atmosphere or interesting characters, and that is where the “choices” come in. The very first choice in the game, this is a mild spoiler, is already classic video game logic where you decide to not give into the threats of a rivaling group and not give them your resources only to lose those resources anyway thanks to plot magic. The writing, it pains me to say, is borderline juvenile; you don’t expect Shakespeare from your horror strategy game, but this is the kind of storytelling you get from an excited 10-year old smashing his action figures together. This is not a new indie studio; they’ve been at this for more than 10 years. There are areas where you can see the experience that one would expect after so much time; it certainly is ambitious and looks and sounds ok, the animations are halfway decent, and as long as no one is talking, there is even some of the atmosphere they were going for. But it is also under-designed, terribly written, repetitive, comes with an UI that seems to use Comic Sans on plain backgrounds and mixes the most overused scenario in video game history with a genre that just doesn’t fit. After 10 years you should be a lot better at this; it's not about money and resources. So maybe give *your* money to someone with more potential, or even a good game.

Having gone through a rather bumpy development cycle, "Lust from Beyond" is the second full game trying to mix up Lovecraftian Horror, Giger-esque artstyle and supposed erotica. It certainly has high ambitions, and 5 seconds into the game you are confronted with the sad reality that they were probably way too high. It really goes out of it's way to make a bad first impression: You start out playing a female character using an obviously male model. You can already see that the game is unoptimized and unpolished. Controls and camera are wonky, and while the aesthetics are on point and the audio fits the scenario, the sound is often out of sync, the effects suffer from stuttering and framerate drops, and Ive heard better voice acting in mods. Depending on the level turning the camera slows down performance no matter how low you adjust your settings, which is a shame. Given the size of the maps and the last-gen specs this was not only avoidable, but is a shame since the overall aesthetics are quite good. The same can't be said about pretty much all of the dialogue, which is wooden, generic and full of mythological babble, and having it read out by the voice actors like they recorded the first rehearsal doesn't help. There are some easy, but rather entertaining puzzles full of video game logic; while the solution is always quite obvious, the reasons why there was a puzzle in the first place aren't. You will spend a lot of time searching for keys or substitutes for keys, but the doors they open often have nothing behind them. You also won't have to go through more than the first chapter to have an idea what the main selling point looks like, the nudity. Unlike in "Lust for darkness" they were certainly a lot less shy about it, and there is an abundance of genitalia and some borderline hardcore scenes in the first 15 minutes. Since none of the models have actual facial animations and stare at you with blank eyes while reading out the script, this is unfortunately also the low point of an already subpar experience. Given the horror theme it's already not exactly stimulating, but the developers decided to throw in some actual sexual violence that, even though it's just as unconvincing as the rest of the robotic animations, deserves a trigger warning. Female sexuality is defined early on as something that is given out in exchange for presents, at least in the "real world", and similar tone-deaf writing sticks out like a sore thumb all over the game. The plot is, surprisingly enough, halfway decent, even though I might have just lowered my standards to the point where I could get through the whole thing. There is a lot of tropes and cringe, and there isn't a single thing in here that made me feel like I'm not just aggressively killing my time. It was remarkable for all the wrong reasons, and I wish I would have realized that before the time for a refund was up. So take a good look at the time you spent in this game. The first two hours are absolutely representative of the quality and mechanics. If you don't like what you see there, it won't get better.

Imagine you made a game with a dungeon full of collectibles, and a fun boulder-shaped yellow player character, and four ghosts that hunt down the player character. Could become an instant classic, right? Only here you get a quest "Go in the upper left corner and meet the cherry", and you do that, and than you have to listen to the cherry's life story only to get a new quest to go to the lower right corner and meet the blue ghost, who is going to tell you how his day went. Than stop and listen to a long monologue between the player character and his AI companion, before you can go to the center and have a chat with the peach about nothing in particular. There was a perfect little crazy taxi/truck simulator in a cyberpunk environment in here, but for some reason that aspect of the game doesn't even get a backseat. Way too often you don't even get to listen to the dialogue while you move from A to B so that the story and the "game" are completely disconnected from each other. You can buy stuff at every corner, but have no incentive to do it, you can even furnish you apartment, but you never use it for anything. Every once in a while you have a time limit to get where you are supposed to be, which I'd normally hate, but it's never challenging. So it perfectly fits the general design where everything that normally would be the game is pointless, and you are left with the story. It seems to be the centerpiece, but is only told whenever you finish one of your deliveries, meaning that it already has severe pacing issues, and often you get a passenger's life story or the player character's back-story instead, or the mentioned debates with her AI companion that are mainly comic relief in an overall narrative that otherwise doesn't even know how to establish a general tone. While the overall presentation is very decent, but also quite repetitive, I was bored out of mind after a few hours, and mildly confused. it's lacking challenge, and there is no progression where you build up your skills or develop your character or get money because you actually need it for anything, So you'd at least expect the story to go somewhere, but - no. It has no momentum, no message - if I had to say something nice it's that it perfectly encapsulates the kind of talk you have with you taxi driver where he rambles on and on about his life and you just want to get out. So if you were going for that, congratulations, ionLands. You made the perfect getting-your-ears-talked-off-while-sitting-in-cab-Simulator.

Reminscent of the old Sierra city builders, "nebuchadnezzar" leaves me with one question: How is it, that 20-25 years later, I get only half of the features of those games, while the game uses 100 times more resources? There are schools for game design now, so why are huge chunks of established, working concepts missing while the only additions are repetetive micromanagement tasks? Coding is hard, isn't it? Why does no one seem to ask themselves: Do I have the resources and know-how to pull of my grand ideas? Why are there a thousand times more people and studios making games, but despite the occasional diamond all you get is memes, cheap copies and half-baked crap (this being a half-baked, cheap copy)? At least it's not another early access title that takes six years to add "supporter"-DLC and hats.

This is a visual novel paired with a constant game of russian roulette, masking as choices and even touting a full blown skill system that does essentially nothing. In the end of the day you get to read a passable story with decent presentation- if you are lucky and don't die prematurely, but don't think too long about your path or how to manage your skills. More than once I was reminded of early 80's text adventures where gameplay went along the lines of "go west - you get eaten by a monster and die, GAME OVER", only with a lot more useless foreplay. The "game" will mercilessly railroad you because doing meaningful choices and having actual different outcomes in a story is hard. Lying about game mechanics in a trailer and having a blast with your 20 $ is a lot easier.

Update: -5 for the hilariously terrible astroturfing in forums, social media and of course on this very site. Together with the overall PR response and the whole story leading up to this point Cyberpunk might have at least succeded at pointing out that evil corporations can wear t-shirts while desperately trying to grow their remaining hair out. + 10 because every game could be a 10 TL;DR: While telling a way better story, Cyberpunk 2077 unfortunately put GTA 4's vehicles in the greatest city I've seen in a video game while having Fallout 76's AI and quality management - 0.5 disappointing character creation with terrible UI - 2 sadistic control scheme for mouse and keyboard with gamebreaking double-bindings that can't be changed. -0.5 the game uses far too much resources for what it actually does, it's not just bad optimization - 1 Civilian NPCs are terrible, with glitching audio, no facial animations, and cloned throughout the city, mostly smoking and eating invisible things while making rocks look smart. Whatever immersion you might experience, they will kill it. - 0.5 non-scaling fonts in front of very punky glitchy backgrounds make reading a hassle, which given the amount of interesting text put in the game is a shame +2 for an otherwise impressive, sometimes breathtaking city, especially while you are outside and don't do anything. - 0.5 Vehicles steer like bricks on ice. Traffic AI is borderline embarrassing. You can live without them, but that's no excuse. +/- 0 If you expected to do anything but the missions in this fantastic city, forget about it. Side activities are mostly shopping in copy-pasted stores and getting insulted by everyone (including sex workers and bar personal). It's wasted potential, not an actual flaw - 1 for glitches in vital gameplay mechanics, starting with the often confused GPS, non-responsive buttons, non-responsive controls, non-responsive enemy AI -0.5 Trying to hide the zombie-level incompetence of the AI with cheating and spamming -0.5 Inventory, journal and character management screens are multi-leveled, obtuse things that hide more information than they give you. +/- 0 too much loot, making crafting and shopping useless mechanics, but that's just more wasted potential +/-0 Can't say I was impressed by story, lore, characters and even the praised side missions, but unlike the rest they do the job. For everything I liked there were just too many campy, corny moments, and for everything that surprised me, there was a ton of edgy, pretentious stuff that wanted so desperately to be cool that it made me feel old.

This is not a video game. It's an interactive 9/10 cinematic with all the interactivity of a video recorder. It's quite linear. There are no real puzzles to solve except for figuring out where the next PLAY button is. It might be opening a door, or scanning a book that is inside a drawer, you might have to walk a few steps or just turn around, but I never really felt like I'm investigating or figuring something out. There is only ever one solution to every problem, and it therefore rewards patience and nothing else. However, as far as video-recorder-mechanics go, "Observer" has quite a few, just like it has some very pretty aesthetics and sound. Having played this after Cyberpunk I'd even go as far as saying that they understood way better what a dystopia looks like, and made it lot more inhospitable, messy and dark. Observer's cyberpunk is not stylish and cool, it's poverty is crushing and ugly, and it's technology has become a prison for it's citizens. It's claustrophic, hostile and outright depressing (and I recommend it for that) and has excellent voice-acting and sound design on top of that. It would however do much better as an actual film or animation that let's those qualities shine. The plot doesn't gain anything by being permanently on pause while you stumble through it's dark, glitching setpieces looking for the next scene to play. Dialogue choices, while seemingly plenty, don't really change anything, and there is no replayability. While the actual cinematic you are "playing" shames the likes of David Cage by being engaging, better paced and way better narrated, it's still that. So if you like this kind of "game" this is borderline a must-buy; even with some nitpicks about the controls it would be easily a 9. To me it still felt like watching a let's play where I had to do all the work, and I'd rather see the movie, so it's only a 6.

A number of studios have watched the exclusive success of Zelda's BOTW, and while there are already several early access titles around trying to clone it, this might be the first fully fleshed attempt to take the concept to other consoles and the PC. And that is why "Immortals Fenyx rising", starting with it's very title that seems to have been born in some buzzword-generator, is a product with only one actual design parameter: To fill that void on the market before someone else does. It is uninspired and unoriginal to the point where it almost becomes a satire of itself. Even the astroturfed fandom is so generic that it makes for hilarious reading, and I'm afraid I had more fun with the overblown praise (or the infinite rage against honest reviews) than with the game itself. It's certainly playable. It's not unpolished. The graphics are pretty ok. The music ... is there. It has a story which plucks elements from Greek mythology and reassembles them into something that gives you something to do, and recognizable faces that tell you what to do, and that it is important because the antagonist is evil. They are not nearly as funny as they think they are, and not nearly as godlike and Olympic as you would your greek god expect to be, but just like everything else in the game they are... ok. The game world is... big enough. Just like with the puzzles, the enemy design, the items, it's all... there. It's there, and it is in place, and it works, but it doesn't really feel organic, or, to chose a slightly more damning term: Everything about it feels unnecessary. It has combat that doesn't really require any skill or strategy, so the special moves and skills you gain are not really rewarding, but you can get them. It has customization, but no real character development. It starts to feel like work really quick, and a waste of money. It kills time, but not in a good way. Especially if you were watching BOTW-videos, wishing for something like that without having to buy that console- save the money. For the console, or at least for a game with a soul.

"Curious expedition"'s biggest strengths were a crisp rogue-lite concept and 8-bit-charm. Both have been "improved" in this sequel - the sharp, unforgiving sandbox now comes with unskippable, repeated campaign missions, and the pixelated artstyle and highly recognizable sound and music had to move for a rather generic hand-drawn style and pretty bland "modern" versions of the soundtrack. While there are some new elements, items and challenges, the original playstyle has more or less survived this renovation, but even here the new ideas are not always welcome additions, and some of the new rules - like not being able to build on your former success when you prepare a new exploration, since all your treasures and tools are just gone, and you basically have to start over - make for a worse experience. At the same time the amount of missions and mission goals is quite small, and while some tiles and events have been added to the maps, they come with balancing issues and difficulty spikes that turn what should be gaming into pure gambling. The antagonistic fog, that is the core element of the new campaign-based gameplay, seems to have seeped into the design stage of this sequel, and while it's not a bad game, it's a rather disappointing one given the momentum Maschinenmensch had with the predecessor.

While certainly blessed with an interesting story and some interesting underlying mechanics, "The Medium" tries to imitate certain classic titles of the survival horror genre without grasping what turned them into those classics. They also mistook some of the mostly age-related flaws of those games and not only replicated them, but made them worse. You don't get a masterpiece if you just imitate the terrible movement controls of those games and have the camera angle change three times whenever you walk through a room. And having to zoom in on any given item or document up to three times so that you can look at it, only to have to zoom out three times so that you can move again does not result in the kind of nostalgia the developers were obviously going for. It's also one of those games where someone really wanted to make a movie, and did neither have the budget nor the experience to pull it off. Overall the narrative is decent, and despite some pacing issues and wooden animations the team succeded at creating the atmosphere they were going for. You can see the inner battle of "The Medium" in almost every scene, but you can also see the inner battle of the game to stand on it's own feet and not just become a cheap copy - and I'm not sure that one has a happy ending.

Say what you want: They find new ways to disappoint you no matter how much you lower your expectations.

-8: Readjusted because while indeed being all it could have been, it's still quite terrible A very thoughtful, slow and immensely powerful testament to the question "Why does David Cage not make movies?". Because Hollywood learned from Uwe Böll. He will never get better. He will never not turn fantastic production values and great ideas into something that leaves you in the kind of angry coma that only David Cage can bring about. It controls like a video recorder, only that you have to press the buttons very long or very fast. If you do that enough, for many hours, you will have watched a student project short film stretched over 25 hours and filled with branching narratives with great twists like a character telling you that he told you so, instead of saying that you told him so. There is unfortunately no fast forward button, and thanks to digital distribution you will never have the satisfaction to take this bird, open the window and let it fly. Watch it falling, tumbling, have that impactful crunch when it hits the street. Listen to the sound of breaking plastic when a car drives over it. Watch the wind slowly spread the tape. Uninstalling and refunding it just doesn't give you the same pleasure.

Great style and music, well fleshed out mechanics and gameplay +10 Children's book level writing -1 90 % of the game is pressing X to continue the neverending blabbering -1 Morgana -8 (Morgana is just the most obvious example for a great sandboxy game getting repeatedly stabbed in it's best parts by being streamlined to let the story shine, and while the story isn't terrible, the way it's shoved in your face made me hate it and everything about it) readjusted the score because it's really not a 0, but I now understand the glorious vision that was the cat silencer in "postal 2" +5

Imagine "Deadly Premonition", with the same kind of small town archetypes and a very similar hero. And now take out all of the goofiness, the jokes, the comedy, the collectables and the wonky car. And replace it with the boring dystopia that it would be in reality, and what Francis York and Zack would look like if they grew up in that reality, starting with the medication they would have to take. Yeah, this won't be for everyone, and you will have to be in the mood. A lot of people will just be plain bored or disappointed because they expected a murder mystery you solve with superpowers, but that's really just the cover of this book. Don't expect a technical marvel, but it's polished, well-designed and with only few exceptions has exactly the right pacing and playtime. But I don't think that the motivations, symbolism and themes are as relateable and accessible to everyone like in Dontnod's other games. Which is one underlying theme of the game, right along with the conclusion that you shouldn't take it personal.

There is a lot of things that “Empire of Sin” wants to be. And if you are looking for good news under a bad score: It’s all there. But like most Paradox games that just came out, especially new franchises, they are not yet in place, badly balanced, bugged out or so disconnected that they hold up the flow a game of this scale needs to stay a game and not become busywork. There is the promised round-based combat, comparable to the X-Com-franchise, but right now it lacks tactical depth, and an AI that is able to think a round ahead, having it’s units work together. It offers a lot of inventory choices, specializations and classes, but only one kind of encounter in one type of 2-dimensional environment. There are the promised management and empire-building aspects, coming with a very pleasant presentation that makes this procedurally generated Chicago more than just a map. But only 5 different business types with 5 very generic “ambiance” upgrades don’t make it feel like your business. There is borderline no customization or actual management happening; you don’t set prices, you don’t actually hire staff except for guards that come with upgrades. There is no personal touch possible, and while you can get some moodlets in your joints they can be safely ignored outside their respective spreadsheet entries. There are very disjointed events that influence the demands of the neighborhood, but in the end all your rackets are little more than targets – for you and your enemies. There are some Sims-like elements, giving your characters and goons more backstory and traits, sometimes even supposed relationships. But in the end it’s little more than a game of cards where sometimes two cards match, and sometimes they don’t, and the results are numbers going up or down in a spreadsheet. No matter which family you play, the cards are always the same, and especially in the beginning there is almost no pool to really choose from. If you lose your cards, they are just out of the game – they won’t come back working for one of your opponents, and they don’t have any real agenda. Even if they leave you due to terrible morale you can just rehire them. Even with all their stats and inventory and traits they never become actual characters that you care for. And on top of that there is some diplomacy in the tradition of civilization, the so called “sit-ins”, where you could theoretically make deals from alcohol to non-aggression-pacts. But unfortunately the game has only one goal, and that’s eradicating everyone else. Leaving only one viable strategy that you are shown in the tutorial, and that from there on out will be the 15-minute-gameplay-loop you'll do over and over again. There are little quests and story-bits presented as missions, but all of that doesn’t feed into the actual game right now, it’s little more than flavor text that is unfortunately generic. The voice-acting sounds too mechanical and out of place most of the time to shine; the wooden animations don't help in that regard. Like everything else it feels like ingredients for a giant thanksgiving-meal they had been planning and shopping for, and they found the perfect center-piece and brilliant flowers and the single best receipts, but then they ran out of time, and you will have to dip your cold turkey leg into the ice cream while listening to Romero talking about all the great visions they had. So give this a few years, or even better: See if there’s going to be an “Empire of Sin 2” because they sold enough DLC with it. Right now the asking price is ridiculous given the fact that you get little more than a -very polished – alpha version of the game. Have a look into their forums from time to time if they listen to the feedback. Stop rewarding great ideas only because there’s a big name on the front and some nostalgia for a game you loved 20 years ago on the back. Give your money to finished games when they are worth it.

I have yet to see a single "movie" game that uses the medium in a way that made it a better experience. It's obvious that you would need a good movie to start with, and that's where almost all of these games fail. Also, for some reason, too many people seem to think that horror would be an easy genre and that you need neither experience nor resources nor talent even though we've seen decades of evidence to the opposite. It's not like brilliance can't be achieved, but it needs masterclass acting, direction and writing. There isn't a facial expression, a camera angle, a sound or an effect that isn't important, and that is why it is a daring choice for an interactive experience that changes the plot. Why? In short: You don't just have to make ONE good movie, you actually have to make SEVERAL good ones. +10 -1 "Little hope" does not even have that one good movie. The ghost-town setting has seen great games and movies alike, and none of them played out in what feels like a linear tunnel through a collection of random buildings, following a plot that tries to plaster an element of confusion over everything, a little amnesia here, a little silent hill over there, and the most lazy conclusion you can think of at the end. -1 It's technically unimpressive with subpar effects that are just plain bad when it comes to bringing it's actors to life. It's hard to say if the faces are badly scanned or the animations are botched, but there's something just that little bit off in every movement and every expression that delivers way more horror than the actual game. It doesn't do itself any favors by starting out in darkness, since the used engine muddles shadows and colors alike - I have no idea how this wasn't the first thing that got an overhaul since it already dragged down the predecessor. It's like playing one of those HD-remastered PS2 games at some points. -2 The control scheme got even worse than in the predecessor, and the "hints" break the atmosphere even more. That's borderline impressive because both were already terrible. it's takes away even the smallest hint of a challenge and destroys any immersion at the same time. The worst part is the implementation of scripted jump scares that are foreshadowed by a sudden change of the camera perspective where your characters won't move in any direction until you've seen that jump scare. It would make for a great satire of the genre, but I'm afraid they were serious about this. -2 points points for, once again, using the oh so mysterious, oh so victorian narrator to break the pacing the minute it gets interesting only to mumble for long unskippable minutes about nothing in particular so that the helpless viewer is reminded of the fact that whoever made this game not only has no idea how to make a good movie, but also has a terrible taste in TV. -2 That wouldn't be a problem if "Little Hope" would excel in anything, but the writing is sloppy, uninspired and so filled with logical fallacies, direction errors and goofs that the only emotion it made me feel was not fear, but anger. I am supposed to believe that character development is, once again, one of the things that I can actually influence, but since everyone is acting out unresolved issues from the past and impulses whenever they need to do something stupid to advance the plot, this isn't even funny anymore. It's a waste of time, and you can't even have some good popcorn while wasting it. There isn't a theme, motivation or twist that hasn't been overdone 20 years ago. It failed to get me invested, excited, pensive or at the very least offended. It didn't even try to be good and failed at being mediocre. It's a waste of all the talent and hard work involved, which pains me everytime. It wouldn't have to be. There are good horror movies out there; a good horror-movie game should not be impossible. Try, try again.

Well, I can't say I haven't been warned. But let me say upfront that I found a way to - kind of - enjoy "Death Stranding": SKIP. Skip the cutscenes, skip the dialogue, skip the calls, the mails, skip the animated sequences for every single mundane tasks, skip them all. Don't bother with the "science" or the "lore" or "story", you will come up with a better, more consistent and way more interesting explanation and message on your own. Just make up some new words you milked from Greek and Egyptian mythology, throw in some of the deep philosophy your found in your last fortune cookie, decide that you are going to make some nation of your choice great again, and boom: Now *you* are the genius, one-of-a-kind game designer. Even though you are not doing drugs with Norman Reedus, but hey, that's his loss. Maybe even skip the rest of this review. Really. It's just another rant about some of the worst writing and game design that I have seen in a long time, badly hidden under a very thin veil of beautiful graphics and well-done audio. That audio includes a score that I could have grown fond of, if it hadn't been forced on me repeatedly in the most "cinematic" way. Also understand that this is not a giant open world game, even though everyone says it is. It's not giant, it's not open, and it's not a world. It's a collection of hub worlds full of artificial borders and limitations - including rules and unlocks that don't care about logic or how silly they are, especially if you, against my sage advice, follow the story. Those hubs are littered with the same models and assets puzzled into "cities" that are devoid of life and any interesting features. There are no creatures, and only the tiniest amount of enemy types. Even though you supposedly travel across all of America, there is no distinctive level design, not the climate, not the textures, not the flora. There is no day- and-night cycle. There is no weather, except for the rain that tells you that enemies are near. Most of the map that you can actually explore looks completely random and has no regard for even the most basic rules of geography. And while I'm supposed to believe that everything has been destoyed, melted and thrown into chaos by some major event that I stopped caring about two hours into the game, I think laziness and having to pour all the money into celebrity appearances might be the actual reason. And down in that collection of hubworlds you are basically playing a walking simulator that made the simple act of walking as complicated as possible. You read the expression "tank-controls" in a lot in reviews, but a tank has a least some precision. It can change direction without keeling over, and doesn't get stuck in pebbles every five metres. It's instruments don't get stressed out and cry only to stop working for several reasons whenever the plot demands it. Later on I accepted that this is all there is, at least as far as gameplay is concerned, and that this is pretty much your only challenge as long as you are not literally throwing shyt at ghosts. You will still need a lot of free time and nothing better to do. But if you follow my advice and skip, and skip, and skip some more, this is where you can almost have fun. Lay bare the core gameplay loop of getting things from A to B while improving the infrastructure and technology to do it faster and with less problems. It isn't half bad if you do it like that, even though controls, camera and UI get in your way too often and break the flow whenever you let them. But the fact that I put dozens of hours into this even though I hated a lot about it tells me that, if you skip all the BS, there is a nice, not overly challenging, sometimes weirdly zen experience to be had, where you can set your own little goals and have your own little story. As long as you, I can't stress this out enough, don't listen to the actual one. Really. You will start asking questions, like, who came up with all that technology after the world ended and you couldn't leave the house and you had no resources and no clue what was going on? You don't want that. You have a map, you have your mission markers, you take stuff from point A, where it came from nothing, and you put it down at point B, where it disappears into the void again, and some hologram will say the same thing it always says and give you likes, and who does not like likes? Unfortunately you can't skip the crashes and glitches. I haven't had too much troubles, but be aware that the game will require some decent hardware. It's horribly ported and optimized and comes with loads of DRM and telemetry running in the background on top of that. But if you are not like me and morbidly curious about "that game that everyone talked about last year", don't waste your money. Don't waste your time. At least wait for a sale, like I did

It's a halfway finished product with very obvious design parameters. i could totally feel the deadpan expression of my decently cosplaying character model while dutifully jumping and shooting and kicking my way through it's environments, working myself through the objectives of collecting stuff or causing overblown particle effects with booming noises, just like everyone else around me. There was also storytelling in animated sequences, meaning that some stuff was happening I had no part in which lead me to the next mission where I collected the same stuff, shot the same enemies and destroyed similar things according to slightly altered mission descriptions. I was also supposed to unlock new styles of shooting, kicking and destroying while looking a bit fancier. And I bet, 8 year old me would have had a lot more fun because, hey, that guy looks almost like Thor from the movies! And of course back then Thor would have been four pixels, making beeping noises. Meaning that, if you've played a lot of video games, this one is very, very skippable. It's a little sad given the love that I have for the franchise, but not surprising.

Updated review after patches:+4 First off a warning: You should really switch off the character's voices, especially the constant laughter about their own jokes. I played two tutorial missions and was found naked and crying somewhere 120 miles away from home, that's how stupid they are. Compared with other zoo management games, especially from older generations, Planet Zoo completely fails to impress me. While it is very nice to look at when it comes to graphics and animations, in the end it was the lazyness of the whole thing that stood out to me. It reuses so many assets and mechanics - including the faulty ones - from Planet Coaster that it should have been a DLC for that game. Building pathways as well as buildings is as fiddly as ever, and half of the time you will fight the camera on top of that. The staff is barely functional by now, but you will still need six keepers per animal to not have dozens of warnings and alerts flashing on the side at all times. It's really keen on letting you know everything that goes wrong, important or not, including absurd alarms like "Low on cash". Not only is another distracting element in the already convoluted UI, since you can't really direct the priorities it makes the whole warning system useless. When clicking on one of those warnings it will change into one of it's several overview modes so that you can hardly make out details and have to switch back to building mode, having the screen go pitch black every single time. Overall it fails to make it's animals the stars. Watching them can be nice, but most of the time their pathfinding glitches out and let's them "swim" over the scenery. Except when they are swimming, then they are walking on the ground, even if it's way too deep. Birds don't lay eggs, pregnancies are not visible, and I really wonder why most of the work seems to have gone into the process of pooping. There are just too many weaknesses in the basic game design to make this more than a very average game.