Avadon

This is not an RPG, it's an action game with conversations and snoozefest combat. I don't even care about the political stuff, but even without those there is not much to like here. Maybe get this on deep sale if you are exhausted and want something to play that requires zero investment out of you, while listening to a podcast? Or just play a work simulator like American Truck Sim, they are better for this purpose. Also why does an M rated game look like a cartoon?

Frostpunk 1 is one of the most influential games of the last decade. Together with Banished, they ushered in a creative explosion in the city building genre. Dozens of games were released, and almost all of them were influenced by it and copied elements from it. Nobody is going to copy anything from Frostpunk 2, because it does nothing exceptionally well. It is an extremely shallow "city builder", where the city building functions more like window dressing, while all the challenge stems from obscure resource management and balancing political tension. The level of interactivity between the player and the cities is kept at a minimum. The "story" is rather dreadful, and somehow it manages to be both difficult and tension-free at the same time, because, like the graphics, the player is too zoomed out from anything that's going on in the city streets. Finally, it runs terribly. Even on modern systems, it's basically unplayable when your cities get large, another addition to the pile of recent games that use UE5 poorly for genres that the engine isn't meant to handle. It's a very mediocre game, but as a sequel to Frostpunk 1 especially, it's absolutely abysmal.

I did not enjoy my time with this. The exploration was torture, since you can't just go from point A to B in the open world, you're usually stopped by a chasm that takes a 45 minute detour to go around, and that detour branches into 10 other paths layered on top of each other until you have no idea if you've fully explored an area or not and the map is useless. If you're not using a guide, you're gonna miss probably most of the things. The scadutree fragment system is so bad that it's hard to believe they implemented this willingly. It makes the already bad exploration even more of a slog and instantly kills any desire for replayability. I'd rather have them lower the level of my character to the recommended when first I zone in, rather than this terrible balancing system. Also most of the bosses, especially later, are so overtuned that any desire to play without summons or apply any other restrictions on yourself goes out the window, you will summon both the NPC's and the mimic and this will make bosses manageable, otherwise you will go insane. Overall, this is like a poorly designed Elden Ring romhack with pretty graphics. You miss nothing by skipping it.

A satisfying chunk of content with a great conclusion and some teasing of the arms race that will happen in the third game, which wouldn't surprise me if it took place in multiple zones instead of just one. Dialogue and characters are on par for Guerilla, so pretty meh. It could do with a couple more new machines. I think it's on par with Frozen Wilds, which was also a good DLC.

This could have been a good game, but unfortunately it feels like a game where different developers wanted to take it in different directions and they fought, but nobody won, so it ended up a mish mash of half baked features. The campaign is a snoozefest, soldiers have like 3000 ms built in lag before responding to any command, it's full of bugs, save game stops working, multiplayer is broken and desyncs, crashes, basically the multiplayer is unplayable. The only good part of the game is Hardcore Mode, where you can play skirmish maps with modifiers which rotate weekly, with allies in co-op. Unfortunately, the game doesn't auto matchmake you with an ally for these challenges. No big deal, you can ask around in the game's discord, right? Well, no. The game doesn't have a discord. You have to browse the forums and find some unofficial fan discords. Overall, nobody seems to care about this game. Ubisoft barely promoted it, the developers are pretty much absent, it's missing basic features, and is broken in many ways. It doesn't feel like Ubisoft expects you to buy this game, it feels like they expect you to pay a month of Ubi+ subscription, try it, realize it's bad and then uninstall it. Just casual mitigation of the financial losses that they had when it became clear that the development wasn't going anywhere. I hope they at least fix the multiplayer connectivity problems before they drop it like a hot potato, which is clearly what they want to do as soon as possible, so the few players that actually like it can at least play it sometimes.

Got this for free on PS plus and decided to give it a go. It's surprisingly enjoyable to explore the old world ruins, and at times quite atmospheric. Nice deep crafting and upgrade system. Tons of loot to find, and everything is rendered on your character, which is great. Runs great at 4k on PS5, even at max quality mode the game usually stays at 60 fps. The story is enough to push you forward, but nothing special. The combat is quite wonky, it's often hard to dodge things in melee and everything hits like a truck, so I found it safer to use ranged weapons and occasionally dash in and out to cast some AoE spells. There's a bit too much dialogue, and it often feels like babbling, it doesn't offer much. Overall though, it's quite decent. I've certainly played much worse open world games than this.

It's Overwatch 1, but instead of shooting at shields and being unable to dps them down, you're shooting at the tank with Mercy around the corner and unable to dps it down. The PvE is MIA, due in...2023...maybe? In small chunks? I don't even know anymore. Oh, I can also boot the game up on PS5 and share the same progress as on PC, which is nice. Also it's free, but you can't really earn any cosmetics outside of the battle pass. Boo.

Diablo Immortal is a disgusting scam, and a bad PC port on top of it. It doesn't feel good to play with keyboard and mouse, because it's too zoomed in and you end up clicking on some boss's massive hitbox which takes up half the screen, instead of the ground while trying to avoid attacks. There's very little here, and what is here comes at a ludicrous price if you actually want to experience it at any reasonable pace. If you told me 15 years ago that a new Blizzard game would come out and I would feel complete apathy and quite a bit of anger, I would not believe you. Yet here we are. Every Blizzard employee who cared is gone, and what's left is Bobby Kotick, a bunch of terrified coders who are just trying to keep their heads down and pay rent, and a lots of Asian external contractors. Let's hope that Microsoft cleans up this mess and puts in the time and effort to reboot this entire studio, although at this point I'm not sure it's even worth it.

I ran through the game after the 2.0 patch that lets you save your progress (something that should have been there from the beginning), and I also had no crashes, so overall a much smoother experience than most people. No bugs either, so if you were thinking about getting this, know that it now works properly. As for the experience itself, this is a highly atmospheric, mysterious, pretty game. The otherworldly, Alien-inspired ambience and creepy narrative kept me going till the end. Unfortunately, the gameplay itself is mediocre. There is not enough variety in the level layouts, just rooms that are rearranged in different order, which gets repetitive fast. Also, about half of the weapons and 90% of all "powerups" are completely useless. There's a couple good weapons, and all you need is health and damage resistance. There are no crazy synergy moments like in good roguelikes, almost everything exists to dilute the item pool with trash, and that's like the number 1 cardinal sin in such a game. With such bad design, replayability goes out the window. The initially compelling fragmeneted narrative also ends with a disappointing "non-story", that just leaves everyone speculating. I hate games that do that. Overall, it's a fun enough 20 hours, but it leaves a disappointing aftertaste. Worth checking out on sale.

This is a heavily simplified Factorio-style game, with more emphasis on base defense. Unfortunately, it's a pretty awkward game, as it doesn't do anything particularly well. The production/automation is heavily simplified (barely a step above Supreme Commander) so it's not that engaging, the enemy waves/base defense are not really something to worry about too much (none of the tension of something like They Are Billions), and the campaign is just tragic, just one long level with ear piercingly horrendous cringe banter between the mech and the pilot girl. Where is the meat of the game? What does it excel at? I played it on Game Pass and got bored after 5 hours.

This is the type of game that looks fantastic when you start playing it, but the longer you go on, the more repetitive and exhausting it becomes as its limitations become more apparent. The game does not do precision movement/platforming well. It's too floaty and sometimes ignores your inputs. That's fine at the start because that's not the focus, but later the game actually expects you to do precision platforming and precision air gliding and it just fails horribly. Also, the puzzles seem fun at first, but there's just so many of them and they are either too similar or completely obscure that they become exhausting. Like, put a cabbage on a pedestal and that will unlock a door somewhere. Not a rock, not a box, specifically a cabbage. In the open world, there's a locked door literally every 20 feet that has a chest behind it. You need to hit a switch somewhere to open it. That switch is usually behind a destructible piece of rock at a random surface in the area, and depending on the lighting is often indistinguishable from the background. 90% of your "exploration" time consists of running circles around an area, squinting your eyes trying to find a destructible piece of wall. Absolutely gruelling. Oh, there's also sliding block puzzles where you need to form an image. Lots of them. When you see sliding block puzzles in a game, you know the developers were desperate. Combat is very mediocre and not physics based at all. It's a glorified quick time event. Pressing dodge at the correct moment just makes you immune to the attack, and nothing else. You don't have to actually dodge the attack. Pressing dodge at the right time when a massive bull charges you for example means that you get no damage, even if the dodge leaves you in the bull's path and he directly runs over you. Ridiculous. Leveling and upgrading your gear also feels very underwhelming, because, like some previous Ubisoft games, it doesn't allow you to have an easier time against enemies. When you level up, the game just spawns recolored versions of existing enemies with higher stats, so your power level is always the same in practice. What's the point? They also copied elements from Breath of the Wild, because they were in Breath of the Wild. They don't seem to understand WHY they were there. So you have to climb high and mark preexisting locations manually, not discover them yourself. So, instead of encouraging exploration, this is the same as the usual Ubisoft towers, except even more tiresome. Overall, this game broke me by the 20 hour mark and I had no desire to continue playing it. It seems cool at first, but soon devolves into mind numbing boredom, frustration and repetition. Avoid.

An engaging and surprisingly polished 15 hours. The game does not particularly excel at any of its combined gameplay elements, but it's solid nonetheless. It's also frequently on sale, and definitely worth the asking price if you are a fan of the Terminator franchise. I think the developers did the best they could with what they had, and I appreciate their effort.

With 2 season passes of expansions already implemented, most of the bugs ironed out, and a THIRD season on the way, what started as a cute yet somewhat limited city builder is now a sprawling ubergame. The sheer scale of the interactions between the different zones and expansions can make your brain hurt at times, and a full playthrough of all the content can easily last you 150+ hours. What's even more impressive is that everything they've added so far feels essential, not just pointless filler. The only negative thing I can say is that I wish Blue Byte released more complete games at launch, instead of taking another 2 years and 200$ on the price tag to complete them. Still, I can't complain too much when all the DLC feels so high quality.

In light of the free release of Dungeons 3 on the Epic store, I got a chance to replay it, and I honestly think it is the best Dungeon Keeper inspired game on the market. The things that set it aside are the overworld map (which is awesome), the level of polish, and its newbie friendly presentation. The DLC are also worth the heavily discounted price. The only negative I can see is that some DLC maps are a bit too tightly tuned with their attack waves, which makes them a bit trial and error-y, but a couple of mission restarts never killed anyone. Other than that, there is very little to complain about.

I haven't had any performance issues or crashes personally, but the game doesn't really look that much better than the original. There are also plenty of sound issues, especially volume and mixing related since there are several units whose responses are almost inaudible. There are also tons of bugs from the old version that haven't been fixed, like pathfinding and units getting permanently stuck on terrain. Multiplayer is also really buggy, with disappearing lobbies, unable to observe games, unable to invite friends etc. In general, this is an overall weak effort from the developers. This is not some awesome transformative remaster of the game, plus it needs a lot of patches to become acceptable. It is currently not an essential purchase. Wait a year.

Wow, what a trainwreck. I just sat there with sub 40 fps and my metrics on and the game was maxing out two cpu cores, the rest were barely used, and my GPU was at 60%. I see only three possible explanations for this. 1, they didn't care about the PC version and their reassurences that all their efforts went there were lies. 2, they purposefully made the game run like crap for the memes. 3, they are incompetent. I don't know which explanation is correct, but none of them are good. Refunded, because I don't see the point in owning this.

Every aspect of this game is both good and bad. Graphics are great outdoors, but mediocre indoors, and the lip synching is terrible. The music is serviceable but ultimately forgettable. The combat system at first glance is loaded with enough depth and complexity to make it enjoyable, but it falls apart when you are surrounded by enemies (which happens 90% of the time). Because of the highly zoomed in camera and the atrocious FOV, enemies constantly move off camera and hit you blindly, and trying to keep them all on screen is very fiddly and frustrating. Stealth is the absolute bare minimum, there is no depth to it, and you are being chastised for using it even though it's a core part of mission design. The writing is serviceable, it moves things along, but it's never spectacular. Exploration rewards you with some collectables and nice vistas, but the world is empty. There are no environmental stories being told. You can't tell your friend "I was exploring the world in GoT yesterday, and I found those super cool things". There are no cool things, only supplies and iron and bamboo sticks. Overall, I certainly expected more from such a game in 2020. When its good elements are on display, Ghost of Tsushima is phenomenal, but it also seems to be somewhat stuck in the past.

I had the game on release for PC, and replaying it was certainly fun, but I think ultimately 15 Euros is too much for just an upscaled port with no other additions. Maybe for half that price, it would be easier to recommend.

An impressive technical display crudely bolted to a trainwreck of a story. The developers are obviously huge fans of the "cinéma du corps" scene, which focuses on assaulting cinematography, extreme violence, and despair. I appreciate the fact that they tried to make a videogame like that, but in order to do that successfully you need to make the audience relate to the character's motivations and their decisions every step of the way. Unfortunately, they failed completely. Character decisions are nonsensical and the ending is unwarranted to the point of being borderline offensive. It's still an enjoyable, pretty and highly atmospheric game though, so if you are into that it might be worth your time.

This remaster includes the old C&C and Red Alert, as well as all their expansions and some extra content from the console versions. It also adds multiplayer matchmaking through Steam, workshop support and specifically to the original game it adds a difficulty slider and skirmishes, which it lacked back in the day. It also includes a ton of bonus material, trivia and behind the scenes info. Petroglyph's intentions were to give the graphics and sound a facelift, clean up the cutscenes, but otherwise remain faithful to the original. I can say they 100% achieved what they promised. This is a beefy package, a love letter to the old games and an invitation to the fans to re-experience them, as well as new players to check out what all the fuss was about, as long as they can put up with a few mid 90's kinks and warts. I can't imagine why anyone would dislike this. Go ahead and get this, it's definitely worth the price, unless you are one of those people for which not having an attack-move command is a dealbreaker (and even if you are, someone's probably gonna mod that in soon anyway). Extra special kudos to Frank Klepacki, who remixed and re-recorder the music and somehow managed to make it even better than it was. What a champ.

Incredibly disappointing sequel. Combat pacing feels mangled as you have to constantly glory kill and chainsaw kill due to the low ammo capacity. It's no longer a fun way to replenish the ammo of your favourite weapon because you overused it a bit in the last arena, no, you have to constantly do it to stay alive. The aesthetic also feels way off. The UI is horrendous in many different ways, and the graphics frequently look washed out and cartoony. I also really hate the enemy weakness system they have in place. Certain enemies are weak to a specific weapon, or rather weapon upgrade, if used in a specific way. Unfortunately this doesn't give you a minor advantage, it turns them into bullet sponges if you don't kill them exactly the way the game wants you to. This is not how Doom should work. Enemies should be weak to the way you move, not the weapon upgrade that you use. In this case, instead of keeping your rhythm up, the game forces you to just fiddle with your weapon selection ALL the time. Add to the above an abundance of tedious platforming and the facepalm-worthy excuse for a "story" and you get a very mediocre, frequently annoying shooter that scores even lower due to the shoes it has to fill. Skip it.

The only significant difference is the character models. Apart from that, the game still looks over 10 years old. The frame rate heavily fluctuates even on a GTX1080 and there are many parts of it that feel unfinished and buggy, especially the UI. It's also having a horrible launch where hardly anything works. They are charging 30$ for this, almost the price of a full brand new game. Here's 1/10 for the character models, and here's my refund as well. What a joke.

"Competent" is the word I'd use to describe this game overall. Competent combat, competent story, competent mix of elements from other games that work well enough together. Polished and well optimized, super smooth on 1440p max settings on a GTX1080, looks great, sounds great. It is rather short and there's a lack of variety in its skills and collectables, but this is a 15-20 hour game, not some mega-RPG. Overall satisfying. It brings us back to an era when good Star Wars games were being made, when you could expect some standards when you bought a Star Wars game. Other than that, it's not gonna light the world on fire. It's definitely the best Star Wars game in many many years, but that bar was set pretty low. Definitely worth a month of Origin Prime to play through, but I'm hesitant to recommend it full price. Still, I hope it does well and that the developers get a chance to expand on their ideas some more.

Ok, here's the thing. One could write a book about the things that are wrong or just straight up baffling with this game. It is however easier to get into and enjoy if you know exactly what you're in for. At the end of the day, I'm glad that there's still a way to make high budget insane games in the industry without exhaustively focus testing them in order to remove every rough edge and make them appeal to absolutely everyone. I'm glad that this game exists, and I'll be on the lookout for more Kojima games, because at least they're worth talking about, which is more than I can say for most games these days.

The game's biggest flaw is how incredibly boring it is. The story is just incoherent babbling, there are no characters apart from the main villain, who is nothing special but at least you don't forget him within 30 seconds, and doing the objectives just feels tiresome. Not rewarding or exciting in the slightest. It might be more fun with friends, but if you have several friends all eagerly looking forward to paying 100 bucks for the next Ghost Recon game regardless of its quality just to play it with you, you're probably a streamer or a YouTuber. Who else does this? Technically it's also a mess, with bugs, crashes, servers going down, performance issues, you name it. It also looks and sounds about half a decade older than Division 2, which is inexplicable. It's like the teams who made these two games were on different planets. Its microtransactions also are well past the "cosmetic" line. You can buy almost everything in the game, but it doesn't really affect multiplayer, so you're basically expected to pay to cheat in a single player game. So if you do that, will the game become fun at least? No, it won't. It still ****. Honestly, it's not even worth playing for free if you have Uplay+. You will have a better time laying in bed and browsing on your phone than playing this, that's how uninteresting it is.

When Borderlands and Borderlands 2 came out, they were rather unique. Today, there are lots of similar games, like Destiny 2, Warframe, Division 2 and others. Unfortunately, all of them are better than Borderlands 3. Borderlands 3 is Borderlands 2 but less funny, with slightly refined shooting mechanics, slightly crisper graphics, lots of bugs and 10 times the system requirements. While Gearbox were timidly iterating, everyone else blew right past them with amazing technical displays like Division 2 or with endless content like Warframe. If you are one of those people who have 2000 hours in Borderlands 2, then you already own this and this review is pointless. If you are on the fence about it, I'd suggest you hold off for a few months until Gearbox polishes the game up, adds more content and lowers the price. Personally I see no reason to play this over all the other games, unless you've already played them to death.

A spectacular dumpster fire ****. You can outright forget it exists if you were thinking of playing it solo, the AI actively sabotages your play, has no concept of stealth, can not be ordered around and immediately suicides during tough fights. Half your playtime will be spent trying to resurrect her. Just forget it. The trainwreck is completed by repetitive mission design, constant backtracking through the same poorly designed areas full of infinitely respawning enemies and a shocking lack of checkpoints that can cause you to lose 30+ minutes of gameplay if you die. Add to that the terrible boss fights and butchered combat pacing caused by the game forcing you to fiddle around with your weapons CONSTANTLY to exploit ammo type vulnerabilities, and you have a game that manages to ruin absolutely everything. Apart from the graphics I guess, although even they are nothing to write home about. I refuse to believe that this is the best that Machine games and Arkane could come up with. These are great studios. Not all their games have been flawless, but even in the mediocre ones it was obvious that at least they tried. Nobody tried or cared here. Let's hope this was the game that they assigned to their diversity hires to get them off their backs, while the main teams have been working on actual videogames. I'm willing to give them one more chance.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

The only way to enjoy this game is with a team of friends in first person. You can play it in a team of randoms, but the average player is 9 years old so I wouldn't recommend it. With a team engagements are more tactical and someone from the team will always be able to spot an enemy team, so reflexes, aim and angle of engagement become important. It's also easier to find high power scopes and lvl 3 armor with 4 people looting, which are extremely important to survive, and the best strategy is being very aggressive. That's a good thing. Solo, it's a nightmare. Luck plays a bigger part while looting, and camping is the only viable option, due to the absolutely massive advantage of being able to hear anyone that sprints in like a 50 meter radious while being locked in a room 3 buildings away, which is complete nonsense. You just blow up anyone that gets too close, they have no chance, and the same will happen to you once you have to relocate. Every match ends with a faceoff between the people who randomly camped at the place closest to the last circle area and didn't have to relocate too much, where they just run into the last circle area, usually in a field somewhere, and the guy with the biggest scope on his Kar98 wins. It is a complete waste of time. So yeah, if you have a team of friends and can coordinate your play times, the game is worth picking up. Between servers lagging, different things breaking on different days due to how the servers are behaving that day, and people crashing randomly, you might eventually get a 20 minute match that is uninterrupted and smooth for everyone. That one match will be fun. In any other case, stay away from the game.

Well this is...unexpected. I did not like the first game too much. The PC version was bad and my main issue with it is that it just wasn't effective at being scary or tense or interesting or anything other than gruesome and annoying. It felt like a AAA publisher carelessly stomping on a genre that they don't understand. This, on the other **** hard to review without spoiling it. I will say this though, this time it is VERY effective. When it wants you to feel panic and run, you do. When it wants you to breath in its decaying atmosphere and feel claustrophobia, you absolutely do. And it switches between those two modes constantly without ever feeling disjointed. It also wants you to wander around freely and explore, while also feeling like a carefully directed experience at the same time. Impossible, right? Turns out, no, it isn't. It also wants you to feel both powerful and frail at the same time, it wants the power fantasy of Resident Evil 5, but it wants you to be terrified that one misplayed confrontation will send it all crashing down. It succeeds. Oh, and it also wants to make you care about its characters and story. It does. Evil Within 2 constantly walks on a tightrope while trying to balance opposites. The slight mistake could lead to you uninstalling it on the spot. It doesn't make that mistake. I will give it a 10, not because it is a perfect game, but because in my opinion it is a perfect sequel. It improves on Evil Within 1 as significantly as Silent hill 2 or Half Life 2 did on their part 1's. If you like survival horror, don't ignore this.

An awesome value pack with 3 complete games and an online mode that combines them and you can choose between the 3 when creating a game. Fast, smooth, pretty, great soundtrack. If you are bad at really fast games, don't worry, the driving assist will do its best to keep you from ping-ponging around the edges of the track, a great addition which lowers the skill floor to get into the game. You can disable this when you make an online game, but there are plenty of people who play with it enabled, it shifts the game's focus from absolute precision to just hitting speed pads and destroying your opponents, which is a perfectly valid casual way to play. Multiplayer is at the moment extremely busy, with dozens of races that you can join at any given time.

Prey is a slow-burning survival-shooter in the vein of System Shock. It could have been amazing, but unfortunately the developers made a lot of mistakes: Lots of bugs, characters and quests glitching out, some hard crashes, several occasions where you go through a door and you lose items from your inventory which is devastating. Not good. It needs a lot of patching. Severe lack of enemy variety. There's only like 5 different enemies in the game. Some of them are the same enemy, but they shoot fire instead of energy or are slightly harder variations.. Some of them you only encounter once or twice. The weapons feel very underpowered (even when upgraded) up until you get the Q Beam which kills even the toughest enemies within 5 seconds and doesn't even use up a lot of ammo. It's jarring, there's a crazy lack of balancing that would at least make everything moderately useful. You can craft a lot of things in the game, but the only things worth crafting are neuromods and Q Beam ammo. Because almost all the weapons are bad, you are encouraged to use turrets to do your work for you, but they are also useless. You set up a turret and, even against the weaker enemies, it's a diceroll whether they do the instant-teleport-melee attack which knocks the turret over and destroys it, or they sit there and get shot to death. You just sit there and reload until it works out. You might as well not bother and use the Gloo gun + Wrench against everything, until the enemies can't be killed by anything other than the Q Beam. Really dumb. There's a story, but for the first 15+ hours of the game nothing really happens. You are only fed tiny bits of information. If you play games for the story, you will probably get bored here before the story starts going. The sound levels are seriously broken. Playing with headphones, sounds of things that are next to you randomly disappear, while you can clearly hear an enemy that's 2 floors above you like it's licking your ear. Audiolog/dialogue/ambient sound mixing is completely broken, with ambient sounds often drowning dialogue and other important things. There are glimpses of brilliance in Prey (the level design, soundtrack and atmosphere are great), but they get smothered in bad decisions and technical issues. Get it on sale after they patch it up.

3 hours was all I could stomach from RE7. After 3 hours of crawling around a Scary House, looking for keys like it's 1998, dealing with horrendous laggy shooting controls combined with such severe ammo shortage that if you miss a couple of shots you might as well reload and lose 20 minutes of progress... being chased by the same immortal hillbilly grandpa over and over again and "bossfighting" him over and over again until in the last fight he charges me with a powertool, glitches through a stone pillar and 3-shot-stunlocks me until I die 5 times in a row, I'm done. Why keep playing this? For the archaic gameplay? For the repetitive bossfights with glitchy "mechanics"? (Oh I'm sure I'd get to fight hillbilly grandma too later on, does she go "YEEHAWWW AMA GIT YOU SON" while she's chasing you as well? Terrific). For the horror? There is no horror. Have you seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Good, now watch it again. How scared do you feel the 5th time you watch it? This is how scary this game is, because everything feels like a copy of a copy of a reference to a western horror b-movie. Repetitive, boring and annoying as hell to play. Stay away.

A fun, lighthearted game that brought a smile to my face many times even though I was in a bad mood while playing it. You don't need to use anything other than the stun gun and the gadgets to beat it, there are guns in it but actually not using them makes the game more fun and the story and characters make more sense that way. Performance-wise, you will need to tinker with the options a bit to get it to run smoothly, because some of them completely murder the framerate. On my 4790k/16g ram/gtx 1080 I had to turn down Extra Details to 30%, Nvidia specific shadows off and not go full ham on the AA to get it to stay above 60 on 1080p (everything else on Ultra, including the Ultra texture pack). The online interactions are fun but unfortunately a bit buggy, for example I was solving some kind of circuitry puzzle, another player joined my game and I was no longer able to interact with the puzzle. I had to boot him by exiting the game and reloading, and then the puzzle worked again. A few moments later I joined a co-op mission and the other player was afk, so we both just stood there, while the game would not let me abandon the mission, because you need the other player's permission (??) to do that, so once again I had to exit to the main menu and reload the game. A few frustrating moments aside, it's a fun game, which has already been discounted quite heavily, so it's definitely worth a buy.

This is my first Total War game, so I decided to play my very first campaign as Dwarves, which are supposed to be the easiest ones, and on easy difficulty. I've restarted 3 times now, since even with everything on easy I just get slaughtered by turn 40-50 by orcs waaaaagh. I have 7-8 cities at that point and as much army as I can upkeep, I play the battles manually and according to community guides (dwarves = have lots of ranged, never move, make formation with melee at front, ranged behind and cannons further behind, and keep some more melee on the sides and behind to intercept enemies that are trying to flank you, wait for them to come to you), and it doesn't matter, I still get slaughtered because orcs arrive with 4-5 lords with maxed armies, all moving together. They also move way faster on the campaign map than me, and the AI always moves them just out of your range when it's not ready to fight you, so it's impossible to catch them out of position. So there's nothing you can do apart from just wait to get slaughtered while the enemy heroes assassinate everyone you own with what appears to be a 90% success rate (while my own heroes have 25% and always fail and critical-fail). I have to admit that I don't understand this game and what I'm doing wrong. I've almost given up on it, and my score will reflect that. It's not the challenge that bugs me, but the fact that I feel helpless and I'm just not having fun. Sorry.

The game is in a disastrous state for me. Running on 4790k, 16g ram, gtx980. The framerate is high, but suffers from occasional weird spikes that really impact the gameplay. But that's nothing compared to the constant crashing. The game crashed 4 times for me in 90 minutes. I refunded because I don't trust FROM with fixing their games in a timely manner. When Dark Souls 1 was first released on PS3, the target locking was completely broken. It took them like 3 months to fix it, and it really ruined the experience. It took them so long to fix something that basic and important. Let's not even mention the weapon degradation nonsense in DS2 for PC, which they only bothered with when they had to deal with it for the PS4 version. I just don't trust them. The game itself looks great from my limited experience, but I recommend you wait and keep an eye on patch announcements and the Steam forums before you buy it. As for the score, I can't give a game that crashes every 20 minutes anything higher than 3. Will revisit it if/when they fix the game and update the review.

Performance is a trainwreck. Where both trains carry nuclear warheads. Choppy and horrible on my 4790k, gtx 980. Seems like Remedy developed this on workstations with the new Tesla P100, and then just uploaded it to the Windows Store. I think they skipped a step.

Horrible PC version, pop-in everywhere, frequent crashes, requires W10 store, nobody online. For several days I even had trouble running it at all. I'd like to say I'm surprised, but I'm not.

Before I started writing this, I saw a Reddit post about the fact that FC4 and Primal use the same world map. It's literally identical, they just modded it, and the games supposedly don't even take place in the same continent. I didn't notice this while playing, and that's not a damning factor on its own, but it speaks volumes about the mentality with which the devs made this game. Primal is a FC4 spinoff in an interesting setting, but with most of the features missing. If you remember the FC4 missions where you have a tiger and you tell it to attack things, that's basically the entirety of Primal. Ubisoft do like taking parts of games that players found interesting and expanding on them, which is great. The problem is that they didn't expand on anything here. The tiger missions in FC4 lasted as long as they should without overstaying their welcome, and in no way can they support an entire game on their own. Not without adding a LOT of other gameplay. And no, that DOESN'T mean just padding and busywork, Ubisoft. I can't recommend Primal to anyone at full price. I would only recommend this at 50% sale, and again only to people who have already played FC3 and 4, want more, AND have a high tolerance for busywork. At least Blood Dragon had its own map.

XCOM 2 is challenging, but for the wrong reasons. Most of it comes from the randomness that exists as its core mechanic, from the level design (procedural), to hit chances, to turn limit sizes, to world map events. Whether you'll like it or not depends on what you want out of it. Personally, I'd prefer a more tightly designed game that is harder than this (more enemies in maps +bigger maps +more "puzzle-y" encounters), but without the timers and stress and RNG everywhere. I'd rather have developer-designed maps and missions with tough encounters where you need to utilize the terrain and your equipment in the right way, rather than proceduraly generated missions with a turn limit that is barely enough for you to sprint to the objective and destroy it, and then pray as the 4 pods that you aggroed along the way rain down on you from the ceilings and wipe out your entire squad while your overwatches miss. Only to go back to the world map and see the Avatar gaining its 3rd ping in the same week due to RNG dark events. XCOM 2 is overwhelming in a way that makes you feel helpless. Because you are. Better read some Reddit threads and restart the whole thing, doing only the absolutely most optimal things. Why do the rest of the options exist again? You can mod out all the crazy 8 turn limits and massive random spikes in Avatar progress though. Great. What you are left with then is an extremely easy game. Guess why. Because that's what it is. An extremely easy game, made hard only through RNG rigged to screw you as a core design philosophy. The encounters themselves are easy and the maps are poorly designed, like everything procedural. There's no actual depth. There are no "damn, I'm a genious" moments as you lure an overwhelming force back to a well fortified position with half of your squad lying in the perfect ambush. The game gives you no time to think. No time to strategize. No time to have fun.

Good game, bad port. Performance on my (fully updated) system (4790k, 16g ram, 780 ti, w10) is subpar. With high textures, FXAA, and everything else maxed, the game hovers around the high 30's FPS. Unfortunately, lowering the settings doesn't do much. Slight tweaking might get you 2 or 3 FPS higher at a massive fidelity cost, but in order to get a smooth experience, I needed to drop everything to medium or below. At this point, the game looks a bit worse than the Xbox One version, which I have played. It's not acceptable for such a system to barely be able to keep up with the Xbox One. That's nonsense. Other than that, it's a great game, and an improvement on the previous one. Just be aware that if you don't have a 1500$+ system, you're probably going to have a bad time. NOTE: Since the game hasn't been cracked, if you're thinking about buying it to see how it runs and then refunding if you are not happy, DON'T be fooled by how well the game runs on the initial snowy zones (like many people who make "port reports" have done). It's in the later areas that the framerate tanks to oblivion.

**Note: I have not finished the campaign yet, it's quite lengthy, but really enjoyed the part that I played. This is more of a heads-up, rather than a full review. Cautiously take into consideration. With the exception of Starcraft 2, pretty much all RTS games that have been released in the past decade have had lousy single player campaigns AND underdeveloped/unbalanced/poor online components. Deserts of Kharak at least has a good single player campaign. It's not HW1-tier, but I'd say it's just as good as HW2's, in term of its effectiveness. Is it worth the asking price? The answer to that depends on who you are. If you are a big fan of the atmosphere and storytelling of the series and are mostly interested in the campaign and maybe a few online matches with a friend here and there, then DoK delivers. If you are a competitive player that doesn't really care about single player, and that's looking for a SC2 replacement (for some reason), this is not it. The depth and variety just isn't even in the same ballpark. I belong in the first category, so I will score this highly. It gave me a good campaign, and I've been growing increasingly sick and tired of ONLY Blizzard giving a crap about that extremely important aspect of RTS games, and then reading devs saying that people are not interested in the genre anymore. No. People are just not interested in bad RTS games. DoK is half-great, half-poor. If it receives post-launch support and even an expansion later down the line, it can become actually great. Let's hope for the latter.

I wasn't a big fan of the Wings of Liberty and HotS campaigns because they felt a bit too gimmicky to me. While I appreciate the creativity behind their design, having one gimmick for each mission made them feel a bit restricted. In Legacy of the Void, the gimmicks take a supporting role and allow the macro and the destruction of massive enemy armies to shine, like they should. The LotV campaign feels like Brood War, but even more all-out. I absolutely loved every moment of it. The production values are of course once again through the roof. The campaign stands toe to toe for me with Frozen Throne as the best one ever designed for an RTS. Multiplayer will take a while to evaluate, but between ladder, co-op missions and the Arcade, there is an absolute ton of content here. Legacy of the Void is RTS like noone apart from Blizzard can make. Fast, bombastic and extremely polished.

Performance is subpar on 4790k, 16g ram, 780 Ti on 1080p high settings (not even Extra). Spent most of my 2 hours messing with the settings, then refunded. Not gonna drop this to medium/low because the devs don't care to make a proper game. My PC can run all other games very well (even Arkham Knight), there is no excuse for dodgy performance in this game that looks very "meh". Mouse is also laggy, which is completely unacceptable. A message on Steam mentions some .ini tweaks to improve performance. I can't be bothered really, I have many other games to play, not gonna mess with .ini files when I paid 100 euros for this game and I have a common PC config, not some weird Xeon build or whatever. 100 euros = make it work on its own or I'm getting my money back.

In Hearthstone you used to be able to keep up for free if you were good at arena. Now arena awards packs from a random expansion, which means the only way to keep up with the latest is by paying hundreds of dollars. Just buying one or two packs a day with gold gets you nowhere. And even if you pay that obscene amount, you still lose to aggressive combo decks who stall until they have the correct cards to burn you down in a single turn, while you are unable to react. If you are a free player who wants to be competitive, Hearthstone has become a chore. If you pay, it has become an endless money pit while you try to build a deck that is fun to play and doesn't lose to combo rush decks. By the time you realize that this doesn't exist, a new expansion will be out. Rinse and repeat. Hearthstone continues its downwards spiral into straight up money milking waste of time territory. Get out while it's still early.

Good vehicle combat and customization, a meaty melee combat system and a pretty and immersive setting are the main elements that hold Mad Max together. If you don't mind the occasional repetition that unfortunately comes with most sandbox games, there is a lot to do here, and the game is just challenging enough to justify doing most of it. The story is a bit anemic at times, but it makes up for it with some memorable moments and a great ending (a rarity in most games these days, which just sort ****). I enjoyed my time with Mad Max. I completed it with a smile on my face. Sometimes, that's enough.

The game looks ok graphically and the soundtrack is cool. It also has many types of units and upgrades. But the campaign is absolutely terrible. There's supposed to be a story somewhere in there, I think, but I don't get almost anything about it. Also, did you expect FMV cutscenes with cheesy acting like the old Westwood games? There's none of that here. It feels like a budget campaign, but they're not charging a budget price for the game... Also, there are a lot of gameplay problems and bugs. Unit pathfinding and responsiveness is a mess. You click 5 soldiers to go around a building, 2 of them will go one way, 2 more will go the other way, and 1 of them will get stuck and sort of twitch around for a bit. You have 2 tanks side by side and you order them to attack different targets, they start attacking, then if you select them again and order them to change and focus the same target they just...ignore you forever. I right click 50 times and they don't focus or reposition if they are out of range, they just ignore you and keep attacking separate targets. You select a group of long range snipers to kill garrisoned soldiers, some of them do it while others keep running until they reach melee range and get slaughtered. Completely inexcusable. You wanna micro your wounded units to the back of your army mid-fight? Yeah, good luck with that. And the devs have the nerve to add bonus objectives to not lose any troops on some missions, when units do whatever they feel like. Awesome. Also, there are typos EVERYWHERE. In tooltips, in menus, everywhere. The first thing you see when you log in the game is the message "Welcome in Act of Aggression!". Lovely. Then you start the campaign and the game tells you to press A and click to attack-move. It's a lie. A is camera scroll left. Q is attack move. Wrong button prompts on the tutorial. Seriously? I could go on. The game might have potential, but right now it's a hot mess, and its problems are very serious. Anyone who has played an RTS with bad pathfinding knows that patching never fixes it. If it's screwed on release, the game's doomed, period. The game is definitely, DEFINITELY not worth the premium price tag, but I'd even hesitate to recommend it for 50% off. Just because there are very few alternatives doesn't mean that we should be satisfied with rubbish.

"Hey, you know the X series? Let's make a game like that, but with vastly superior flight model and production values... and NONE of the depth!" Why... You know how in X you can build factory complexes and become a tycoon and eventually form your own fleet, including capital ships, and lay waste on the Xenon controlled space, with you leading the armada while piloting any ship you want? Well, in Elite you can't do anything like that. You can only grind aimlessly, buy a good ship, and then immediately quit the game. At least the devs are actively making content for the game (as free patches for now). It desperately needs a full fledged expansion though, even if they charge 30$ for it, I wouldn't mind buying it, because I want this game to improve so badly, and I want a reason to come back and revisit it. Is it worth 50$ right at this moment? Well, if you are a spaceporn guy who gets really really excited about flying to Altair and Alpha Centauri and Fomalhaut or something (and I mean REALLY excited), then there is not much to do other than grind for months. However, the foundations for a truly amazing game are here, and it will only get better with time no doubt. But for how long and how good will it eventually be? Noone knows. If you feel like taking a gamble, go ahead. I'd say you have a good chance of eventually not regretting your investment. NOTE: Best with a flight stick, playable with a pad, but personally I was unable to control it with k/b+mouse. At all. It's all a deadzone conflicting nightmare. So if you all you have is kb+m, be warned.

The game crashes about once every hour for me with a "failed to initialize" error. I bought the Steam version, verified installation, messed around with graphics settings, of course I have the new Nvidia drivers, and it still crashes. I'm on a 4790k, 16 g ram, 780 Ti, and the game is installed on Sandisk Extreme Pro SSD. I'm not running any "weird" hardware. What can I possibly score this other than zero if it crashes all the time? Extremely disappointed.

Note: The score reflects the "upgraded" version, and not the quality of the game itself. There are 2 improvements that require a lot of work and would upgrade the game significantly enough to warrant the price of this: 1) Implementing the full dynamic lighting system that they showed on previews some years ago. 2) Fixing the durability issue, which they say would require a significant engine rewrite (I believe them). Even one of those things would be enough for me to pay for the game again. Unfortunately, they did neither. It doesn't matter if From or N/B are responsible, what matters is that they are charging a premium price for virtually nothing. Why? The Shadow Warrior devs offered more of an upgrade on their game than From just a few days ago, for free. They added a brand new DX11 client, which looks significantly better and is ridiculously well optimized, to the point where I can max it out and play at downscaled 4k at 80+ FPS on a single GPU. I was floored. And it was a FREE patch. DS2 is a good game. Not a great one, but good. It suffers from some repetition occasionally, and the world design feels a bit out of whack, but it's definitely enjoyable. The DLC is also excellent. If you already own the base game and not the DLC, this is probably worth getting. If you own both, it's definitely not worth it. If you don't own it at all, again it's worth getting, but you might want to consider limiting it to 30 FPS, so your weapons don't blow up if you accidentally touch a wall. Absolutely ridiculous.