Blenderhead

Ghost of Tsushima had the bones of a by-the-numbers, crowd pleasing open-world action adventure, interlaced with an ephemeral charm that made the game stick with me, even though I think a 7/10 was an honest rating for it. Whatever that special sauce was, Ghost of Yotei is missing it. The big problem with this game is the combat. The Soulslike combat style has always struggled when you're fighting multiple foes, and GoY prefers fields of 6 or 7 to single opponents. The target lock system is the worst I've ever seen. Even using the optional target lock mode, the camera swings wildly during fights. It became a constant annoyance that Atsu would be mid-combo on one enemy, but another would step just close enough that she'd change her target, mashing uselessly into an aware opponent while the staggered one I'd been trying to kill collected himself and counterattacked. Given the game's emphasis on setting up kill streaks without taking damage, this experience felt unnecessarily punishing, particularly for how common it is. Atsu has more weapons than Jin Sakai did, to her detriment. You'll have more than a dozen by the end of the game, 4 of which use multiple ammo types, each selected by holding a combination of buttons at once. Trying to switch anything but melee weapons mid-fight is needlessly difficult, since you don't have enough fingers to keep blocking and dodging during. This game uses the color-coded block/parry/dodge attacks, this time adding disarming attacks that knock away your equipped weapon. I have to find the game where this feels good, and GoY makes it feel worse than usual. The parry warning in particular is terrible, offset from the actual animation you need to interrupt just far enough to make parries more confusing than ever, while just as punishing as you'd expect. The shinobi, in particular, are a royal pain to fight. And you'll be doing a *lot* of fighting. The stealth mechanics are introduced much later than in GoT, including the ability to listen for enemies. The end result if that you're going to using your katana a lot and your tanto very little until about 2/3 of the way through the game. The story is good enough. There are moments that feel very predictable, but others that caught me by surprise. The key characters are likeable (and the intolerable side character is at least a much smaller presence than Kenji was). Atsu's story is one I've seen told before, but almost always worse than Ghost of Yotei tells it. The hard truth is that the moment-to-moment gameplay of Ghost of Yotei drags it down. I kept waiting for the moment that the combat would click. It never did. It's just cumbersome and frustrating the whole way through. It's hard to recommend a game like that.

The Northgard UI in a nutshell: Huge notification that takes up a quarter of the screen and lingers for 30 seconds: ERIC THE RED'S WIFE has GAINED WEIGHT! He no longer FINDS HER ATTRACTIVE and it's causing a STRAIN ON THEIR MARRIAGE! 6 pixel icon in the lower left corner that you need to mouse over to read: The **** Dragon will attack your town in 60 seconds.

This game shows you all kinds of cool stuff you can do and then fights you every step of the way when you try to do any of it.Everything worth doing takes multiple unlocks. Frequently more than a dozen. Any attempt to accrue advantage beyond spending a skill point on the first rank of a skill costs resources. But your carrying capacity is approximately one sandwich bag and vendors barely have an cash. The result is that everything wants you to grind up resources you don't have room to carry or store so you can spend them on things you can't afford because you don't have any **** feels like the balancing for this game was copied verbatim from Fallout 76, but they forgot that Starfield doesn't offer a paid subscription to make all the hassles go **** you install mods to increase your personal carrying capacity to 9999 and give merchants more money, the game is a 7/10. The writing has ups and downs (a lot of quests tease a potential, better outcome that isn't actually implemented, but by the same token, some of Bethesda's best atmospheric storytelling is on display). The performance is absolute garbage; my PC is around 90th percentile according to Steam's hardware survey and holding 60 FPS was impossible. There are definitely magic moments, like flying across the galaxy to find the perfect Legos to build your ship out of.Also, be aware that Starfield isn't really an RPG. It's more of an action adventure sandbox a la Horizon Zero Dawn or God of War Ragnarok. This isn't a bad thing as long as you have the appropriate **** problem is how much this game loves to make you manage containers and your workflows through them. It feels like every system is designed around not letting you escape the endless time sink. If you can't mod it away, it makes this game very hard to love.

My current favorite game for VR. This game had a rough launch, and the review history shows it. But they've put the work in. As of January 2020, No Man's Sky has become the logical evolution of survival crafting games like Minecraft and Terraria. The game fills a niche in VR that's largely missing. Most VR games are short or gimmicky. As a result of being a deep, immersive game first and having VR added later, No Man's Sky is the kind of VR game you can play until the weight of your headset gives you a headache. This game gives me a sense of wonder I haven't felt from a video game in years. Landing on a planet and discovering it has an environment unlike any you've landed on thus far is always a thrilling discovery. The VR controls are also really great. Rather than taking the Bethesda strategy of mapping buttons to the VR controller, No Man's Sky opts for Star Trek style gesture controls. You access your tools and inventory with contextual holograms on your exosuit's wrists. You fly your ship by grabbing its throttle with one hand and flight stick with the other. It all feels organic and *real* in a way that Skyrim and Fallout VR don't. The only reason I don't give this game a 10 is that the story is very utilitarian in nature. It's primary purpose is to walk you through the staggering number of game mechanics in a pace that isn't overwhelming. And it's enough. You won't be riding an emotional rollercoaster, but that okay because the game is focusing on what it does best. For my money, this is the best exploration game on the market, period, and far and away the best VR game.

There just isn't much here. I played this for a few hours during the free week from 6/10/19-6/17/19. I'm a big fan of the series, but this just seems empty. I hoped that maybe after 7 months of work, the initial mistakes had been fixed. Maybe they have? The game crashed once during my few hours with it, but that's something that Fallout 4 and Skyrim still do from time to time, long after official support has ended. I just don't know what's supposed to drive the player experience. There are no characters. The only story is one giant fetch quest. The game actively punished me for exploring how mechanics work before the story had drip fed me how to use them. There were meters that ticked down, and resting restores health *very* slowly, maybe 1% per second. The end result was that this was a game that seemed to be all about busywork. I don't need that. I have a day job. I'm not really interested in spending 2% of my gaming time for the day watching my character sleep.

Whether you like this game is directly proportional to how much of a MOBA purist you are. If you're looking for a gritty, heavily-optimized, highly twitchy experience that rewards perfect execution, this isn't a game for you. If you want a game that rewards broad strokes game knowledge over pinpoint accuracy, welcome aboard! PLUSES: Games are shorter, typically 20-30 minutes. All basic abilities are unlocked at level 1, with Ults (a choice of 2 for all but 2 heroes as of March 2018) at level 10 and powerful "Storm" Talents on 20. Heroes fit broadly into roles and sub-classes, and drafts are very rewarding since they're full of counterplay. The lack of an item shop keeps gameplay going smoothly, sometimes evolving in the middle of a big fight. There are no passive bonuses earned outside of each map, so no grinding for rune pages or spells. MINUSES: Quickmatch lacks a draft, meaning a lot of counterplay gets lost; sometimes you wind up with an unwinnable match. Many of the truly innovative heroes like Medivh, Cho'Gall, and Abathur wind up a liability if someone on your team doesn't know how to play with them. Hero pricing has gone down since the 2.0 update in early 2017, but is still a bit high (though you won't have much trouble picking up a hero a week on dailies alone). And lastly, this game *does* have loot boxes; they're mostly cosmetic (occasionally permanently unlocking a Hero for free), but if you're someone whose brain chemistry makes them bothersome, be aware that they're there. I can't give a game with loot boxes a 10/10 in good conscience. There's also been some complaints about matchmaking, but in my experience that seems to be confined to people with either very high or very low MMR. High end people are rare and difficult to pair effectively, while very bad people typically overestimate their own skill or grief to the point that the game thinks they're worse off than they are. I've been playing this game on a more-or-less daily for more than two years, so yeah, I'm a fan.

Make no mistake this is a University level RPG game. If you haven't played an isometric RPG before, I wouldn't advise starting with Tyranny. First the bad stuff. The game has some rough spots, many of them technical. However, if you've played an Obsidian (or Troika. Or Interplay) RPG before, you know to expect this. The ending is very sudden--you prepare to go into battle and the credits roll instead. The voice acting is very sparse. Few characters have any voice acting, and I don't recall any character who is 100% voiced. This gets most jarring when speaking with a party member who weaves in and out of being voiced as you change subjects. This creates kind of a spoiler effect, as you'll quickly learn that any character who is voiced upon initial contact is either a recruitable party member or Archon (in one case, both). Also, this game in involves *a lot* of reading. I wasn't bothered by this, but I see other user reviews that were. Lastly, some of the boss fights feel kind of cheap, either through unjustified immunities ("He's immune to stuns because you fight him alone and could just stunlock him" is unsatisfying for a game with such deep lore) or unintuitive recovery mechanics (I had to wiki what makes the Havoc suddenly revert to full health). Now the good stuff. This game feels like a reconstruction of the isometric RPG games that fell out of favor in the early 2000s. Combat is satisfying and the writing is excellent. This game handles moral choices in a way that seems much more realistic than usual. For example, in BioShock, you can harvest the Little Sister for a big reward now, or you can spare her for a small reward now and a much bigger one later. In Tyranny, doing good is hard, much like in the real world. You can burn the village as you were ordered to and receive the promised payment from the Archon, or you can spare it and earn the Archon's wrath for disobeying his direct order. Choices are more meaningful because you have to weigh your conscience against your rewards, as well as whether you have the resources necessary to start a fight over what you're doing with a powerful potential enemy. All the major factions are nuanced and have things to like and dislike about them--the Disfavored are disciplined but closed-minded and wasteful, the Scarlet Chorus are accepting but brutish, and the Tiersmen are idealistic but untrustworthy. Combat is much improved over Pillars of Eternity. Drastically fewer abilities are "once per rest." I often felt like Pillars wanted me to use per-encounter abilities and basic attacks primarily, only falling back on my class's actual specialization when necessary. In contrast, most abilities in Tyranny can be used at will once their cooldown is over. This makes it feel like builds actually matter, since you're actually deploying your handful of abilities in every fight. The modular spell system is also really flexible and probably my single favorite mechanic. I have heard complaints about the game's length. This game has so many branches that it should be pretty clear it's meant to be played more than once. Also, don't be surprised if it takes you 45 minutes to create your first character, given the "Conquest" prologue. Overall, I was satisfied with this game. It plays with the concept of good and evil and your choices mattering in ways that a lot of AAA games aren't willing to. Some choices are admittedly less impactful than others, but a great many of them make meaningful changes to the world of Terratus. The game is cerebral, but if you weren't expecting that from an isometric RPG, that's kind of on you.

Prey is BioShock's mechanics in Dead Space's setting, with some original spins on each. Gameplay is very similar to BioShock, but with Adam switched from a total to a small number of discrete mods. All changes to the player character are done via these mods; they are not split into separate types like BioShock's Plasmids and Tonics. Weapon handling is good and combat is tough--very tough. This is obviously a design choice. Most monsters are more powerful than you in a fair fight, so the game encourages you to fight dirty. Different enemies have different weaknesses, and learning how to exploit them is the axis combat revolves around. The various powers are interesting, and vary from straight up combat applications like psionic assault and shields to utility powers like slowing time or shrinking to the size of a small object (the better to squeeze through small openings with). Gameplay often revolves around balancing various resources, including the raw materials that the player's weapons and ammo are made from. My one complaint is that the game doesn't do a very good job of explaining all of this. I reloaded an early save about 6 hours in, and discovered that taking the Recycling Expert, Toughness, and Necropsy mods reduced the difficulty from what felt like Very Hard back to Normal, without changing the game's actual difficulty slider. The game's early instructions to "play your way," misled me on the viability of taking the mods I wanted from the getgo. The only reason I can see to not take Recycling Expert and Toughness are for the challenge inherent in not taking them; it's not really "play your way," if there are certain must-have abilities, but this is ultimately a small nitpick. I really enjoyed the story. Again, I'm reminded of BioShock. We start right off with a twist that's a good way to illustrate the side effects of neuromods. The story clarifies and then obfuscates against several times over a playthrough. And there is a stinger after the credits that would make Marvel comics jealous. The setting is also very original. I likened it to Dead Space, but it has a lot more flair than that, with the player slowly discovering the twists and turns of Prey's alternate history; a world where the Space Race never really ended. Also the game is surprisingly progressive, very reminiscent of Star Trek's vision of the future--I've never seen *any* media property that made a chapter revolve around a **** Asian couple, and Prey really makes you like them--they're nerds, and they're adorable. It's the little touches like that that make this game feel more vibrant than Dead Space. While Dead Space was a pessimistic vision of the future, Prey is more of a cautionary tale of optimistic arrogance. All of that does a great job of complimenting the game's central moral dilemma, which ultimately boils down to whether you're willing to risk humanity's present in exchange for a brighter future. My first few hours were a bit frustrating, and I see a lot of comments around the internet about how this game is too hard. It's not; it's too poorly explained. That's really the worst thing I can say about it. Comparisons to BioShock (and their common ancestor, System Shock 2) aside, this is a game I haven't seen anything like for some time. I enjoyed my time with Prey, and will likely play through it again to see the other options and tie up some unfinished side quests.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

I can't remember the last time I got so many hours out **** that cost so few dollars. Since the game is pretty much user-defined from the get-go, the only real limit is your imagination.

I didn't think I would like this game as much as I did. It is consistently wacky and inventive. In an age of games getting kicked out the door at maybe 80% complete, Saints Row: the Third is positively *polished.* Gameplay is straightforward and intuitive, yet challenging. The sense of humor is a bit sophomoric, but it stays genuinely funny enough that most players won't mind. The humor is over-the-top in the best way: the second mission has the player jumping out of an airplane, jumping back into the same airplane and shooting up the inside, grabbing a new parachute as he/she passes and firing then jump out of the same plane--and it pretty much keeps up the pace from there. My only complaint is that some missions are just Activities with some window dressing. And that's fine for the missions that introduce said activities, less so for the missions that simply feature them. The activities themselves are great--Volition has taken the things that most people did in GTA-style games (such as seeing how back of an accident they can cause or going on a rampage with a tank) and made them legitimate gameplay mechanics. In short, the developers knew what players were going to do, and built their game around it. Most importantly, the kept the game consistently *fun.* Is this a watershed game people will be talking about 10 years from now, in the same sentences as Grand Theft Auto, Bioshock, or Call of Duty 4? Probably not. Is it a damn good time? You bet.

Went into FEAR 3 hoping for what had warmed my heart to the series in earlier installments--strong visuals, difficult firefights against foes using tactical advances and flanking, a unique combat system (3 weapon slots instead of the standard 2, health being a strategic resource instead of regenerating over time, and a developed melee system), and a mythology that made FEAR more than just another shooter. FEAR 3 really didn't bring any of that. Upon first loading the game, I discovered that my monitor's native resolution (1280X1024, hardly exotic) wasn't supported natively, meaning I had to play the game at a blurry 1024X768. The firefights had become much simpler, concentrating on throwing waves and waves off foes at the player who seem to spend more time swearing than actually fighting. The weapons system has been downgraded to the standard two slots, and health now regenerates...this was where I realized what was going on. The entire game has been changed to make it more reminiscent of Call of Duty/Battlefield, and has discarded its own unique properties to instead ape those of the giant franchises. There is still FEAR's signature Slo-Mo power, but since the enemies don't fight tactically anymore, it's rarely necessary. Bizarrely, an arcade-style points system was included, complete with a flashy rewards placard that pops up in the lower left of the screen. This is a real immersion breaker, which is awful--horror games rely on immersion like few other genres. Nothing makes a scary situation boring than having a dialogue box pop up, rewarding you for spending 100 seconds behind cover. All in all, it just feels like Monolith has scrapped their neat franchise in favor of making a generic shooter. Oddly, the game is pretty good in this regard. The cover system is simple and intuitive, and the best I've seen in a first-person game (I especially like that it always stays first-person, instead of jumping to the third like many do). While the aforementioned arcade popups break the horror element, they are conducive to adrenaline-fueled heavy firefights. While the enemies are dumber, they are also more numerous and so some "pop-and-stop" cover-based shooting is required. None of it is deep, but it is pretty fun. Overall, I would say don't go into this expecting a horror shooter, and you can still have a good time.

Hydrophobia Prophecy serves as a stunning example of how *not* to make a game. The controls are unresponsive and cumbersome; at one point, I solved a puzzle on accident because the action bindings are so ambiguous that my attempt to do something completely different caused me to perform the correct action. The camera control is equally cumbersome; an early jump puzzle forced me to reload because the camera swung 180 degrees without warning, causing me to leap to my death instead of to safety. The voice acting is awful; the main character can't seem to decide what sort of accent she has, being vaguely Irish most of the time but dancing through Scottist and various flavors of American and Australian, and sounding like a shrieking harpy the whole time to boot. Scoot is a bland stock character, no more and no less. The setting is actually pretty neat, and most of the time I spent playing was to dig up more details on the Queen of the World and the Population Flood. The villains detract from this severely, as they are too cartoonishly evil to be taken seriously;. To whit, the game's setting is struggling with feeding a severely overpopulated earth. The game takes place on the eve of the unveiling a new technology that could feed the masses, ending the crisis. The villains of the story want to use that technology to kill off the masses, as an extreme way to end the crisis--that just letting the technology work properly would also accomplish, minus about six billions deaths. In summation, I bought this game on sale for about two dollars, and feel that I didn't get my money's worth.

This game is insultingly incomplete. Scenarios are buggy and the AI gets downright abusive, doing things like ambushing your party from just offscreen (on the very first level, no less!). Even if the many bugs and generally sloppy coding were fixed (which they won't be, as support has been officially discontinued as of this writing), there's not much here to like. The storyline and levels are formulaic, as other reviewers have pointed out. Futhermore, two of the classic Disciples races (Undead Hordes and Mountain Clans) have been eliminated, only one of which was restored by later expansion. This barely-beta-ready mess comes as even worse, following the absolutely stellar Disciples 2.

Honest Hearts is an add-on of thoroughly middling quality, mostly due to length. I beat the entire DLC in one sitting, after getting home from work (I checked with the wiki, and I did in fact complete all non-mutually exclusive quests, not just the main storyline). While the change of setting is nice, most of the environment looks like it was made using old assets from Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and the required mountain climbing is frequently tedious. The three new companions introduced constitute fully half of of the DLC's characters of consequence, and their Companion Perks are forgettable. The only compelling character in the DLC is on screen for perhaps 30 minutes. Many of the quests simply start in sequence, making your character's motivation for completing them unclear. The so-called final battle of the DLC mostly consists of running across the length of the map with fast travel disabled, killing small pockets NPCs that never present much of a threat. Adding to this, only two of the characters in the entire DLC have any sort of personality, the rest being generic tribals. While there is good loot to be had (especially for character who wish to focus on Light Armor), loot alone makes for a grind, not a fun experience, as anyone who played Fallout 3's Operation Anchorage can attest. If you only want one or two New Vegas DLCs, I would recommend against Honest Hearts.

Well worth the ten dollar price of admission, Old World Blues is a proper sequel to Fallout 2. While the base game of New Vegas picks up a lot of Fallout 2's storyline, it mostly takes itself pretty seriously and while it runs the gamut from western to sci fi to gangster, plays things pretty straight. Old World Blues, on the other hand, picks up Fallout 2's mix of science fiction and black comedy that was largely missing in Fallout games since. It's a fun few hours with a limited, but memorable roster of new characters (including, among others, a genocidal robotic toaster and six mad scientists, one of whom can only communicate in radio waves). The actual plot of the DLC is of varying quality; the initial premise is paper-thin, but serves to set up a good third act revelation that maybe the heroes and villains of the Big MT are not who they initially seemed. The good dialogue, fun quests, and an actual Borderlands-style boss fight are complimented by some nice new loot that both looks and acts cool. If you can only buy one DLC for New Vegas, buy this one and you won't be disappointed.

I was introduced to Fallout in 2008. I've always been a huge fan of the post-apocalyptic genre, and Fallout 3 did it so well that I went back and played Fallout 1, 2, and Tactics. When word came out that New Vegas was to be a true sequel to Fallout 2, and to use most of the design assets from the original, canceled Fallout 3, I was overjoyed. The problem is that the traditions of Fallout 2 were *too* closely carried on. Quite simply, New Vegas would have been a great game if it had come out in January of 2011, after 3 more months of debugging. The immersive game world is constantly fractured by unprovoked crashes and frame rate drops. AI behavior flat out stops working for no apparent reason, with the exploitation of other glitches being the only fix (thus far, I've had to walk out to Vault 22 and use the elevator 4 separate times because my NPC squadmates stopped following me and I lost track of them--this is the only fix thus far). The return of the NCR and of Marcus (voiced by the Michael Dorn, just as in Fallout 2) is sullied by the constant need for reloading and restarting the console. Looking at the Fallout wiki, nearly every New Vegas quest has a list of known bugs. This wasn't a game, it was a beta. Dedicated fans have been working on fixing and completing cut content from Fallout 2 for almost twelve years, and New Vegas needs that kind of treatment. Which is a real shame. The Reputation system is vastly superior to Fallout 3's Karma only scheme, the disguises system felt like something that was truly missing from Fallout 3 (no one in the Brotherhood of Steel seemed to mind when I walked into their base wearing the armor of their sworn enemies in Fallout 3. Now they shoot me on sight). The reworking of the Repair skill is nothing short of genius, and the Companion Wheel is a beautiful simplification of Fallout 3's clunky dialogue system (itself a throwback to Fallout 1 and 2, games more than 10 years old upon Fallout 3's release). In addition, with the return of the NCR and other familiar settings, New Vegas' setting seems less like it's straining to fit into the existing world created back in the late '90s. The bugs just ruin everything. It is tough to find a review here or elsewhere where they don't come up, even when said review is one or two paragraphs long. This is highly unusual; you don't see complaints of bugs in reviews about Gears of War or Final Fantasy. They aren't just present in New Vegas, they are pervasive, ranging from quests (random doors gaining unpickable locks, trapping the player in a room), exploration (valuable power armor hidden in one of the most dangerous areas of the game doesn't always spawn), to basic mechanics (2 items, one of them common and the other a quest item that cannot be removed from the player's inventory after receiving it, use Fallout 3' s armor mechanic and make all other armor cease to function until the game is reloaded multiple times or an exploit is used to fix it). Oblivion glitches were annoying when quest items became bound to the player permanently. Fallout 3 bugs were annoying when talking to Bittercup inadvertently gave the player unlimited XP. New Vegas bugs are downright frustrating when walking into a room while aiming down the site causes the game to crash. In short, Fallout: New Vegas is a game that is defined by it's lofty goals coupled with a lack of fundamentals. It will likely be remembered as a game that fell short of being a classic just because of a failed development cycle.