Gohenko

This is a weird one. The concept here is great and some of the execution is pretty good, too, but unfortunately the game lacks polish in many areas and comes off as a bit too ambitious for its own good. Most of the game feels like a very bare-bones experience. The music isn't particularly memorable or even enjoyable (this is actually one of the few games where I prefer to turn off the in-game music and play something else in the background), NPCs keep repeating the same dialogue over and over again and there isn't any proper voice acting either. The quests are just copy/paste stuff and hardly anything surprising happens anymore after the first 20 hours. There isn't any expansive lore or interesting, well-rounded characters. It's just you and your army trying to become more and more powerful. That's literally the story of this game, so don't buy this if you're looking for a narratively driven experience. The land of Calradia looks and feels dull, you'll be spending a lot of time just traversing around the map without anything to keep you interested. None of the kingdoms have any real personality to them, making it hard to feel invested if you decide to fight for one of them. Would I still recommend the game, though? Surprisingly, yes. Like I said, the concept here is great and there aren't many games out there like this. I love the idea of starting from nothing and slowly becoming more and more powerful and influential. The combat system is one of the highlights of the game, even though the mostly bad AI sometimes tries its best to ruin the experience (lance fights in the arena, anyone?). It's also easier to forgive many of the flaws when taking into consideration that it's not an expensive game, currently just 20€ on Steam. Overall, I think this is a good game, something that will take up a lot of your time and keep you entertained for quite a while. The modding scene is also very vibrant, lot of good stuff there. This game just could be a whole lot better.

Short but worth it. This game will make you feel the feels and is also mechanically unique, a prime example of how to make a video game narrative work. Controller required.

"We had been long awaiting your arrival, had nearly lost hope. Then suddenly - that entrance! So spectacular!" If you enjoyed the main game, Blood and Wine is something you'll definitely want to play. In many ways this expansion feels like a love letter to both the fans of the franchise and to the world of the Witcher itself. The main plot can get somewhat dark (partly based on your choices), but the overall tone stays light-hearted and Geralt gets the send-off he deserves. Go and buy this, you won't regret it.

The writing is absolutely superb and there's easily enough content here to justify the price tag. A must-have for fans of the main game, no doubt about that.

The concept itself is very unique, I've never played a game quite like this. However, there isn't much else going on here. The presentation is very minimalistic and the story tries too hard to be clever. You really need to love the core gameplay or you'll get bored within ten minutes. It is one of the most innovative shooters I've played in recent years, I'll give it that. Just don't expect anything more. Definitely pick up on sale if you're at all interested.

Performance issues, bugs and glitches, simplified RPG elements, improved FPS mechanics that are still not quite on the same level as proper first-person shooters, absolutely abysmal dialogue wheel and everything is running on an engine that really needs to go away. But it's still Fallout. Fallout NV > Fallout 4 > Fallout 3

One of the most tactical shooters released in recent years, Rainbow Six Siege feels like a breath of fresh air compared to the increasingly stale mainstream fps franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield. However, you have to play it through Uplay and Ubisoft isn't exactly known for being great at supporting their games. Even now, months after launch, there are still some netcode issues and bugs tainting an otherwise great game. Also, if you're looking for great single player content, it's not here. Siege is a game that's best experienced online with friends, and playing it any other way will be a lesser experience. The full retail asking price might seem a bit high because of that, but the game's well worth picking up on sale if you're at all interested in a more thoughtful and complex online shooter.

The game itself is brilliant. The tactical turn-based combat works great most of the time and the base management elements are nicely robust without feeling too overwhelming. The controversial turn timers haven't really managed to frustrate me, more often than not they just help create more tense moments on the battlefield. Unfortunately, the performance problems are real. Forget about getting constant 60fps with any kind of rig. I've also experienced a variety of bugs and glitches, and so far I've had at least 5 hard crashes during my 56 hours of playtime. However, none of these problems are big enough to keep me from returning to the game time and time again. It's that good.

If you liked 2013's Tomb Raider, you'll love this game. Rise of the Tomb Raider improves on its predecessor in almost every way, with better gameplay, better graphics, better sound design, better pacing and most importantly, more actual tombs to explore. Also, while it's not an open world game, you'll be able to explore the areas around you in a fairly free manner, unlike the previous game which had an awfully linear design throughout. Naturally, with a more open structure comes a whole lot of side stuff. Completionists will have a field day with this game, as there are numerous collectibles, secrets and ruins to discover. Most of them are more filler than killer, though, and I personally don't feel the need to go looking for every single hidden cache or ancient artifact. The story's alright, I suppose. Nothing mind-blowing, but it's not bad either. It takes a lot of cues from Indiana Jones movies, particularly The Last Crusade. The voice acting is pretty good and the cutscenes are well done. The whole game looks gorgeous both in gameplay and during cutscenes, but you'll need a lot of horsepower if you want to crank all the settings up and get a stable 60fps. The PC port seems to have been made pretty well. There is a satisfying amount of options available and the overall optimisation is great, I haven't noticed any stuttering or weird drops in framerate. It's a demanding title, yes, but it's also one of the best looking games I've ever seen. I cannot say anything about the keyboard and mouse controls, since I've been using an Xbox controller to play this. Overall, it's a damn fine action/adventure game and in my opinion the best Lara Croft game to date. And all you awkward teen boys can stop worrying, Lara is still plenty hot even without her tight shorts and enormous breasts.

Hi, fourth wall. Sorry, we're gonna have to break you. A lot. Nah, seriously, Pony Island's a pretty clever game and well worth the asking price of 5€. I don't really want to say anything else about it, because it's best experienced without knowing anything beforehand.

Short but sweet. Transistor is an isometric action RPG with beautiful art design, an addictive and unique combat system with loads of customisation and an intriguing storyline that requires some actual thinking on the player's part to fully understand. It also has one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard in a video game. The whole concept would be truly unique if not for Supergiant Games' previous title Bastion, and fans of that game will no doubt feel right at home with Transistor. It is a fairly short game, taking about 7-10 hours to complete, but it's a truly enjoyable experience throughout and definitely worth the asking price. The controls are very well optimised for both kb+m and a controller. Graphical options are pretty much non-existent, but the game looks absolutely gorgeous and should run just fine even on older PC's.

Rocket League is a very fun and enjoyable game, even if it is somewhat lacking in variety. Much more exciting than "normal" football, and a lot more tense. Controls are easy to learn but hard to master, allowing more skilled players to shine above others. Matches are short and can seem quite hectic, but a team with proper tactics will still be in a better position to win than a team that doesn't work together. Could easily see this becoming a proper eSports game somewhere along the line.

Papers, Please is a very unique game. I wouldn't really say it's fun to play, but it's definitely a gripping and tense experience. It's a game with a message and I respect it for that, but it won't be a game I'll be playing again and again.

In this game, you get to **** some **** up on Mars. You are Alec Mason, the hero (a.k.a. the only person who's really doing anything) of Red Faction, a resistance movement fighting against the tyrannical rule of Earth Defence Force. The open world of Mars gets fairly dull quickly, the graphics look really outdated, the story and characters are "meh" at best (Samanya's fake British accent is absolutely unbearable) and the third person shooting is quite bare-bones. However, the game does have an ace up its sleeve: completely destructible buildings. Pretty much every man-made thing can be utterly annihilated by explosives or vehicles or even your trusty sledgehammer. I cannot stress enough how fun it is to just go to an enemy stronghold and destroy everything in your sight. Every open world game needs to have its own gimmick to stand out from the crowd. Red Faction Guerrilla's gimmick is destruction. A damn fine gimmick, I'd say. Otherwise, it's just an alright open world third person action/adventure game.

Well, Unity is neither my favourite or my least favourite AC game, albeit it's certainly the buggiest. Many of my personal problems with the franchise have been addressed here and at least somewhat improved. You no longer feel like an undying god among men during combat (i.e. you can actually die pretty quickly now if you do a wrong move), which in turn makes you want to avoid combat and use a stealthy approach instead. The gameplay in general feels more similar to AC2 than the pirate adventure game AC4 that really should've been a new IP instead. Movement still feels a bit clunky at times, but the new free-run descend mechanic is a welcome addition, as it helps a lot when trying to get down from rooftops without accidentally committing suicide. I like the amount of character customisation that's on offer, but it's also irritating as Ubisoft is really pushing for microtransactions here and it shows. Story is kinda "meh". It's the same old revenge tale that we've already seen in plenty of AC games before, and Élise was the only character I cared about. The protagonist, Arno, is kind of a mix between Ezio and Altaïr, but there's just not really much depth to his character at all. It's a shame that the story did not take better advantage of the French Revolution setting. It's presented very well when you're just exploring around Paris, but the actual missions and side quests don't really have anything interest going on. GPU: GTX 970 CPU: i7-4790k Monitor resolution: 1920x1080 Performance on the PC version is a lot better than I was expecting. Granted, I got the game recently and have only played the 1.5 version, but still. I'm either really lucky or Ubisoft have done a good job fixing a lot of the problems with the game. I'm using highest settings except for shadows and AA and I get a consistent 60fps with vsync on, only dropping below that if there's a huge amount of NPCs on the screen. During cutscenes framerate can sometimes drop as low as 40, but it isn't too noticeable. The game does look gorgeous, especially during cutscenes. The biggest issue I have graphics-wise is that there's quite a lot of pop-in when moving fast. As for bugs and glitches, they're definitely worth mentioning. I've played the game for about 30 hours now and I've had the game crash to desktop twice, and once it forced me to restart the whole computer when it froze so badly I couldn't do anything. Opening cutscenes of co-op missions never work properly and sometimes I can't complete missions due to some important NPC just standing around when it should be moving. Other than that you have your usual minor open world game stuff, like NPCs trying to walk through walls, weird physics glitches et cetera. As a final note, the sound design in this game is absolutely awful. Some of the combat sounds are especially poor-sounding and the reverb on the sounds is often way off. Ambient sounds are lacking and the game doesn't have a particularly interesting soundtrack. Thankfully, the voice acting is pretty good, at least in French. Dunno about the English ones, since I couldn't stand French characters speaking in a very British accent and I immediately turned the spoken language to French. Based on what I've written about the game so far, you'd think I'd give it an even lower score than I did. I really wanted to, but I just couldn't. Even with all its problems, Unity is a good game and I've had lots of fun playing it. It just could've been so much more, and that's why the final word I use to describe Unity is "disappointment". Oh, and what the hell is up with Uplay games needing to be on the same partition as the OS to work? Every one of the games I play through Uplay have had the same problem. It's bloody annoying, since each game can take up to 50Gb of space and my main drive only has about 200Gb available overall.

When trying to describe Undertale, the word "lovely" comes to mind a lot. If you fancy retro RPGs and all things lovely, you'll love this game. If playing something that can be described as lovely sounds absolutely horrid to you (so in other words if you're a total killjoy in life), you'll probably not enjoy this game so much. ...Just play it already, will you?

After the latest patches, the game seems to be running just fine. With my gtx 970 and i7-4790k I get 50-90fps on max settings. Some minor hitches still occur randomly when driving the batmobile, though. The game itself is fine, it has everything you'd expect from an Arkham game. Everything from the previous games has been refined, but sadly the game doesn't really invent in any interesting ways. The only really new thing is the batmobile, and it is fun to drive in small doses, but it's definitely overused. There are lots of boring drone fights and there are even car race tracks made by Riddler that make no sense whatsoever. The story is alright, but quite predictable. The character Arkham Knight is more annoying than anything else and his identity becomes clear far before it's actually revealed. In the end, he doesn't really even contribute anything to the main story overall, he just kinda hangs around and wants to kill Batman (like every other Batman villain ever). It's nice that the game is finally in a good enough condition to play at least mostly properly. The game doesn't surprise and it definitely doesn't like feel like a grand finale to the Arkham series. It's good, even great sometimes, just not great enough.

Before you read this review, I would like to point out that I'm a newcomer to the franchise, having only played Ground Zeroes before this. I only judge the game itself as a whole and not how well it fits within the Metal Gear franchise. MGSV is, for the most part, an excellent game and very unique in many ways. Gameplay mechanics are top notch, probably the best in any stealth action game ever besides the sometimes clumsy cover system. I already fell in love with the gameplay in GZ, and TPP offers a more refined version of that. The game is stealth focused, but handles more than adequately in full-on combat as well. The story, while having a lot of silliness in it, tries to keep things mostly serious, while the gameplay often abandons the realism in favour of pure fun and over-the-top action. Hiding in cardboard boxes, launching sheep into air with a balloon, calling in a support helicopter to shoot down enemies while playing "Take On Me" on the loudspeakers...what's not to like? The controls are fine on kb+m, but it's clear they were designed with a controller in mind. Performance-wise, the game is well optimised for PC. My gtx 970 and i7-4790k can run it on max settings without even breaking a sweat. The graphics are quite good for the most part, but the lack of proper anti-aliasing and some low-res textures can get quite annoying. The options menu also lacks any proper audio sliders. The stealth and combat gameplay is mostly done in one of the two open worlds areas in the game, Afghanistan and Africa. Both are fairly big, but as they are warzones with no civilian life whatsoever, they don't really have much going on other than plants, wildlife and enemy outposts. There are 50 main missions and 157 side ops to do, and the objectives are usually quite simple and tend to repeat themselves after a while. However, even after 100 hours of gameplay I still haven't grown tired of doing them due to the unlimited freedom and the sheer amount of variables in play every time I do a mission or a side op. Other side activities include gathering resources, capturing outposts, finding secrets, collecting money and sending your mercenaries on assignments. I've found the online FOB mechanic quite unnecessary and often irritating as you can be dragged to defend your FOB just as you're trying to get an S rank in some mission. The FOB infiltration is also hilariously difficult when the player whose FOB you're invading decides to come and defend it. A big part of the game is managing your own private military force. It's very addicting and almost like a game in itself. Pretty much everything you can think of is customisable and there's a lot to construct and develop. You can recruit enemy soldiers to your mercenary group by extracting them from the field. Your field gear is highly customisable, letting you choose everything from your equipment to your buddy and/or vehicle going to the field with you. The story is interesting, but quite sparse. There were some interesting stuff explored in the game with themes like revenge, language and identity, and there were a few particular scenes in the game that will stay with me for years to come, but ultimately I was left wanting a bit more. Too much of the story is hidden away in cassette tapes, and to be honest, listening to them started to feel too much of a chore after some time. Chapter 2 is missing a real narrative drive to keep it going forward and it also ends really abruptly, leaving loose ends and a feeling that there was supposed to be more. Other than the story, the game does have its fair share of other problems. The open world doesn't really help the game as much as I think the developers wanted it to. Even with real-time weather and great freedom in gameplay, it does get annoying when you start to go through the same areas time and time again while never coming across totally unexpected things on the way. The online FOBs feel a bit unnecessary and tacked on, especially with their microtransactions. The enemy AI, while for the most part quite good, doesn't always act all that intelligently. When you're spotted and try to break the line of sight, enemies hardly ever actively chase you. Enemy soldiers' vision is also a bit weird, sometimes they have a hard time seeing you from 10 meters away when you're crouching and at other times they might see you and instantly alert the whole base even when you're hiding in tall grass over 50 meters away in pitch black darkness. It seems like the enemy's combat rating affects how well and far away they can see. It does allow for the game to have a really cool feeling of progressive difficulty where enemies get constantly better and harder to beat while you constantly get better equipment and also get better playing the game. Overall, the experience I've had with MGSV has been very memorable and unique and I have no problems recommending it to anyone who can imagine liking an action game with a stealth focus.

I think pretty much everyone knows what kind of game The Witcher 3 is by now, so I'll just list some of my own pros and cons about it. Pros: - Fantastic vast open world - Captivating story with loads of interesting characters - Top-notch dialogue and voice acting most of the time - Beautiful graphics despite the E3 downgrade controversy (the game is quite demanding as it is now) - Actually interesting and diverse side quests - Decisions often have real consequences, and they are almost never just black and white - Very adultlike, not shying away from themes like sex, war crimes and racism - All in all, the world feels really GoT-esque at times - Immensely rich content-wise, my first playthrough took 90 hours and I still had huge amounts of places to explore and quests to complete after that - Amazing soundtrack that fits perfectly into the game's world and its events - Bestiary and character list come in handy when trying to keep track of all the different creatures and people you meet in the game - Enemy variety is great and combat feels intuitive without being too simple... Cons: - ...But it doesn't feel as responsive as I think it should and can definitely take some getting used to - Battle preparations (potions, oils etc.) are quite useless unless playing on higher difficulties - Skill tree can feel a bit limiting and some of the skills are just pointless percentage stuff - Occasional bugs and glitches, although a lot of them have been patched already - Newcomers to the franchise can feel a bit confused by everything at first, albeit playing the previous Witcher games is not necessary to understand what's going on in this game - Can be a bit slow to get into, as is the case with most RPGs I've played Honestly, this is one of the best RPGs I've ever played, a must-buy for any fan of the genre. Just don't go into it expecting a game like Skyrim.