Female vikings??? Just simply no. Assassin's creed used to teach us great lessons about history. Benjamin Franklin was a man. George Washington was a man. Leonardo Vinci was a man. Roman legionaries were all men. All soldiers during middle ages and ancient era were men. Why do we now have to see ahistorical garbage like female vikings?
Once upon a time, there was a game designer working for Ubisoft. This designer was not a good man - he bullied his staff and harassed his coworkers. He also had really short attention span, so he insisted on gutting and simplifying every aspect of the AC games. The man is now gone after a proper scandal, but the crippled, lame version of the AC series remain as his "legacy". Gone are well-written dialogues and historical facts cleverly woven into an intricate story, replaced by vague Netflix-grade "fanfiction". The core of the game is now pure grind - do the same things over and over and over again, collecting miniscule amounts of resources you need to spend by the ton to upgrade your gear. Or head to the shop and pay to be allowed to skip the grind. But I have found a better move yet - I headed to the shop and did not buy the game. Thus, I saved money and time to play games that actually do not ****. I recommend you do the same! BTW there were no female vikings, no female knights (knightesses), no female legionaries, you get it. That's all BS historical revisionism.
Quite a solid walking simulator, totally ruined with Kojima's pretensious, ham-fisted kitcsh. You, Kojima-san, could not write your way out of a shoebox, if you are ever in doubt, come, I will give you a certificate in writing. Please, do something, ken-do, kabuki or brew tea, but something else. The "stories" you create are ridiculous, pretensious, and unpalatable. This one comes with heaps of hard-to-chew side of "let's reconnect America" into some sort of non-profit, Facebook like driven, post-communist utopia (everyone works like mad just for facebook likes). And as the story advances, it goes worse and worse. The obligatory "bad people made boom with bad nuclear weapons", transdimensional boo-boo, Egyptians, stuff stolen from Daniken like pyramids, coming from the dead, immaterial soul, out of body travels, pseudo-science babble (a chemical called "chiralis" (handium) that makes little hand crystals grow everywhere, in large concentrations makes dead drag you with their hands into a pool of bad, bad crude oil, leaving handprints on your body - I am not kidding). Characters like Diehardman and Deadman, and Heartman, and it gets worse and worse. Towns named Central Knot, Fort Konox, Warehouse west of Central Capital Knot, you will never remember where is what. Clumsy, convoluted language - "deathless freaks", "Bridges - people connecting Americans, the president is called Bridget", and it goes on and on. Pretentious, nonsensical, trihard kitsch. Hideo Kojima is Ed Wood of game design.
A shady Chinese-controlled shell of a corporation scammed players by false advertising and shoddy delivery. Promised features like improved animations, UI or play modes were not delivered, the whole thing being just a lazy copy-paste work with slightly improved models, but degraded in many areas (fewer combat animations, lack of ranked play, unique online handles, etc.) Not only is the new game a disaster, but the old Warcraft 3 was forcibly merged with the new one, with some features like ingame shadows removed to provide incentives to upgrade. On top of that, people on forums are banned for advising others how to get a refund. Blizzard is dead, don't buy anything from this Chinese-controlled impostor!
Made it through the whole game, and I consider it a masterpiece. Especially the combat is demanding, fresh, dynamic, risky and rewarding, precisely everything what combat is not in modern RPG games, where you just press a single button and your stats fight for you. Sekiro's combat best capture the spirit of a swordfight, the necessity to feel the rhythm and the flow of the endless back-and-forth exchanges of the initiative, and after drilling a demanding encounter enough so that you are finally able to win, every victory in this game is rewarded by deep sense of accomplisment. Aesthetics of the game are top notch - level and character design, architecture, music, everything is dripping with atmosphere, easily immersing the player in the grim and moody world of this particular interpretation of the Sengoku Jidai period (dragons, ghosts and dark magic are in, by the way). When discussing "realism", one must realize that this is the mythological Japan we are talking about - Arthurian Britain would have to contain Merlin, magic swords and eniightment-bringing Grail, so similarly, Sekiro brings dragon blood, search for immortality, demons and tengus from the prop department to conjure up a one-of-a-kind story to tell. Not everything is perfect, however, especially on the technical side of things. The problems with locked framerate, typical for console ports, are present as well, and were solved only by a third party mod tool, which is less than ideal. The graphic engine shows its age, using a sort of dithering instead of true transparency, which creates really ugly dithering artifacts in some situations. The camera traditionally fails to track your opponents when the action speeds up, and sometimes shows a piece of your garment from 1 inch distance while the unseen enemy cuts of your head. Performance suffers from unused network calls that are mistakenly left in the code - once again, a problem solved only by a mod. However, the small glitches must be forgiven, since Sekiro is a unique, intense, one-of-a-kind experience that in my opinion belongs rightfully among the very best games that have ever been produced. Well done, FROM software, you certainly know your craft!
Yet another "quake with swords" without footwork that is bound to ultimately fail. You cannot run around and swing away independently and call it swordplay or melee combat. All cold steel weapon techniques drive their power from the fighter's contact with the ground, and for a cut or thrust to be powerful and effective, it must be accompanied with proper footwork - lunge or step forward, and in defence, backstep of lunge backwards. That creates a specific "back and forth" rhythm characteristic for sword encounters - when the attacker spends his energy, he is forced to defend, and vice versa. Since Mordhau does not implement footwork, it does not feel authentic - it's just Quake with swords instead of guns. As such, it could be hardly interesting for true fencing enthusiasts.
Fantastic, spectacular, amazing, difficult, crisp, fresh, electrifying, superb! The game is everything I hoped it will be, but above all, it bring a fresh, demanding combat system for anyone who wants to push their limits and be challenged! No longer you can fall back to always safe methods like spamming rolls, or cower behind the shield. In the spirit of samurai classics like Go Rin No Sho or Hagakure, Sekiro wants you to face the danger head on - unflinching, with straight body and alert mind, depending on your well honed defensive reflexes to push on attack until you break the enemy's posture and score a deathblow, brushing aside attacks and tricks of your foes as you go. The feeling of accomplishment after defeating a boss in this game is unrivaled. Compared to tired, formulaic "triple A" games-as-service like Anthem or Assassin's Creed that offer only ego pampering and boring routine sprinkled with a few trinkets from lootboxes, Sekiro does not want to scam you for extra money with lootbox lottery, does not want to hook you up for boredom shifts that resemble work, no, Sekiro is a honest, purely single player game cooked with raw difficulty, solid, well thought design and thick, immersive atmosphere we know from the Souls games. Congrats, From Software, you have conquered the gaming world again!
Greed machine designed to siphon money from people via a virtual market with artificially created scarcity of virtual items. The games design seems solid at the core, but is sprinkled with some really badly designed RNG cards. No way to get cards besides paying real money, good cards can cost over 20 dollars a piece. Stay away.
This is a sad tale about how greed killed my favorite game series. The pinnacle was AC2 and AC3, bold, rich games with ambition and well written stories. They allowed you to be an assassin, an explorer, a prizefighter, a sailor, a settler, a trader, a hunter and much more. Sadly, those happy days are gone. Obviously, greed now calls the shots at Ubisoft, so the entire gameplay premise of being an assassin that is able to instantly kill victims from close up with hidden dagger is gone, replaced by senseless quasi-RPG grind. You never do enough assassin damage, so you only scratch your victims, leading to messsy fights and escapes instead of professional hits. Everything except graphics and the level of detail feels mediocre - ship combat, melee combat, the senseless grind where you need 150 tree trunks to improve a single sword a little bit. This is the last Ubisoft game I have bought, I am boycotting the company now, until it mends its ways. The lootboxes are now being investigated by government regulators worldwide as unlawful gambling, I hope those greedy corporation and the people responsible gonna get burned. They certainly deserve it.
Moronic SJW propaganda that spreads like wildfire from the insane continent overseas. Resist rewriting history with CGI garbage and trivializing the hardships our ancestors had to go through. Don't buy this rubbish.
It's amazing. I have never seen a turd polished so meticulously that it shines brightly enough to blind you. So many gfx assets wasted on a bland, soul-less corporate cash grab.
Narrative garbage full of plot holes and obviously cut material, combined with obsessive belief that mimicking mundane tasks like opening doors or drinking from glasses with your controller is a foundation of good gameplay. The game would be better presented as a non-interactive movie - if it had a sensible and enjoyable plot, which it does not.
Casual pew-pew for the 5 second attention span crowd. If 10 seconds of waiting, 20 seconds of sneaking and 15 seconds of aiming is a lethal dose of boredom for you, join the pew-pew Fortnite crowd, start the game in 3 seconds on a crowded mini-island, where half the players die in the first 30 seconds. Positioning and tactics do not matter, just spam jump and keep shooting until you kill or die. Pew-pew-pew! Super fun. If everything else fails, just spam buildings until you can pew-pew-pew from above. Oops, I have spoiled the whole game for you, there is really not much else to see. See you on the pew-pew grounds... bro!
Subnautica is an unique game resembling the old science fiction classical authors like Clarke, Asímov or Aldis. The emphasis is not on mindless action tropes, but rather on exploration and discovery. The game lets player to ponder in awe over vast, mysterious alien structures, feel dread from the unexplored depth of the sea, feel the insignificance of a single human being in the vast space of the ocean or the cosmos, and the joy of overcoming the environment of an unknown planet by improvisation and persistence. I loudly applaud the developers' decision not to give the player any destructive weapons. The power-trip of a doom-style killing machine is a boring, over-played trope, and by making the player feel small and helpless against the powers of the Nature, Subnautica achieves that much needed unique flavor. It's basically a fusion of Odyssey 2000 and Robinson Crusoe, progress feels satisfying, exploration is rewarding, and in the end, when the moment to look back at your journey, the base you have built to sustain yourself and to send the messago through time to other players, the game hits with a powerful wave of sentimental nostalgia. That said, there is a fair share of technical difficulties. The worst thing is player and player-controlled vehicles getting stuck in the level geometry or buildings, the game allows you to get free by jumping, but it's annoying, glitchy, and ever-present. Big creatures clip through your base, fish swarms swim through air, sharks glitch through forcefield to roam water-less corridors, and so on. The implementation of structural integrity of your buildings will also make you scratch your head. However, since the game is not a performance-focused competitive multiplayer game, but a meditative, exploration-centered single player game, all is forgiven, and I can say that Subnautica is a true unique masterpiece, and one of the best games I have played in my life (and I have played almost everything ;-)
I cannot praise this game enough. It is a prime example of a computer game as a piece of art (please show it to anyone claiming that computer games are just mindless shooters). Minimalistic, but cleverly designed puzzle-solving gameplay, beautiful hand-drawn art, artistic ambiguity, subtle symbolism, thought-provoking, emotional, memorable piece. I won't go into details, because the only way to experience is to simply play it. The game is quite short (we went through it with my daughter in a few hours), and I recommend it to everybody, especially to people who are normally not gamers. 10/10 - if there is perfection, this game is pretty close.
I suffered through it laddie, aye, that I did. Armed only with me wits, I battled through all them QTEs, all till the bitter end, with me wild, trusty psychiatric sidekick lassie, faced things beyond the human ken, and met fair share of them spooks along the way. Rough road it was, like a unpatched kilt, worn and coarse, aye, that it was, but I learnt me limits, and seen what misfortune can a Scotsman meet for the love of his wee dram. Aye.
Don't believe the corrupt reviewers who are in the publisher's pocket. While the game is beautiful to look at, everything about it screams low quality and rushed development. If you compare the beginning to the majestic and slow introduction of the AC 3, for example, this falls way short. Enemy AI is weak, and there is tons of bugs literally everywhere, characters stuck in animation loops, combat animations skipping erratically, and the eagle does not feel like a bird at all, but like some strange hovercraft/drone. I appreciate the attempt to innovate the combat, but this cake needed way more time in the oven.
Despite the fact that the game borrows many props from the Blade Runner movie - eerie volumetric lighting, desolate future mixing futuristic looking tech with decaying old buildings, even Rutger Hauer's voice (who sounds really old and tired, and does not deliver the lines with much energy, to be honest), despite all that, and all the flickering, motion blur and distorted sound, the game fails to cover the simple fact that it has nothing to say. It drags you from one cheap jumpscare to another (especially during the scenes where you rummage through other people's minds), hoping to somehow impress, but it fails miserably. There is no poetry combined with a brilliant soundtrack Blade Runner had, there is not deep theme to ponder about, it's an incredibly shallow show that in the end will give you only a headache from all the flashing lights. It's pretentious, it drags on without saying anything, it uses dark interiors and visual distortions to cover the fact that the levels and objects are lazily designed, and it has no meaningful gameplay. I understand why companies make walking simulators like this - it's cheaper, easier, there are no complex mechanics that must be debugged and balanced, but let's hope this style of games won't become the prevailing trend. It was so bad I did not even finish the game, which does not happen often.
Pitiful shade of the former glory of its two predecessors. What's worse, the developer is not above using their moderator henchmen to suppress valid criticism of this mediocre product in Steam forums. Well, obviously, I don't need your forums to discuss your games to survive, however you need my money to sustain your revenue stream to survive - money you will now never get. Refunded, moving on.
Seeing all the rave reviews the game got on release, I wonder how long is it before an average gamer starts questioning journalistic integrity of this "independent" reviewers. The game is fatally flawed, featuring brain-dead AI that does not function even when propped by the crutches in the form of heavy cheating bonuses. The diplomacy system is atrocious, the interface badly designed, and the graphics are pain to look at. Civ 5 had also a rough start, but was polished to a reasonable state in time. However, I think this mess of a release is beyond redemption, and after the mediocre Civ:Beyond Earth, it's a sad evidence of a decline of what used to be a stellar game developer company.
Prime example of the "Ameritrash" design approach. Focus is on theatrics, gaudy effects and grotesque lore, and solid gameplay is secondary, which is starting to show on the overall balance and quality of the game. Initially solid foundation was undermined by greed, slow response to problems (patches take 6 months to arrive), incompenent direction and lack of focus and dubious design decisions. It seems that the developers more and more satisfied with themselves, while the quality of the game plummets. Meanwhile, the cost of the game is being silently increases by non-obvious means (no more adventures that are replaced by more expensive pack expansions, power inflation in effort to force players to buy the new OP cards, card rotation, etc). Advice to new players - stay away! The golden age of Hearthstone is gone and will not return. The game is worse and worse with each expansion.
This product is as sophisticated as a barrel of methylated moonshine. Naturalistic, sadistic scenes, extreme violence, oceans of blood, heaps dismembered human bodies nor perpetual darkness you stumble around in can really cover the fact that the game lacks substance, unlike Silent Hill series, Evil Within, or similar games of the genre. There is no psychological aspect of the story, no clever symbolism, no eerie atmosphere, and no memorable characters. There is only pointless struggle with enemies that are invulnerable until the plot says otherwise, everything is scripted and linear, and all the "difficulty" comes from clumsy tank-like gamepad controls that are defacto standard for console FPS games. You cannot properly aim with the gamepad, but if you opt for the mouse, it only mimics gamepad analog sticks, so you get a molasses-slow aiming with tons of lag as a bonus. If you like heaps of innards, livers, lungs, blood, cheap sadism and jumpscare scenes, then by all means go for it and buy the game. It's one of the few titles that made me physically nauseated, which is an unique achievement. If you seek something like Evil Within or Silent Hill, stay away, this game is as brainless as its characters.
This product is as sophisticated as a barrel of methylated moonshine. Naturalistic, sadistic scenes, extreme violence, oceans of blood, heaps dismembered human bodies nor perpetual darkness you stumble around in can really cover the fact that the game lacks substance, unlike Silent Hill series, Evil Dead, or similar games of the genre. There is no psychological aspect of the story, no clever symbolism, no eerie atmosphere, and no memorable characters. There is only pointless struggle with enemies that are invulnerable until the plot says otherwise, everything is scripted and linear, and all the "difficulty" comes from clumsy tank-like gamepad controls that are defacto standard for console FPS games. You cannot properly aim with the gamepad, but if you opt for the mouse, it only mimics gamepad analog sticks, so you get a molasses-slow aiming with tons of lag as a bonus. If you like heaps of innards, livers, lungs, blood, cheap sadism and jumpscare scenes, then by all means go for it and buy the game. It's one of the few titles that made me physically nauseated, which is an unique achievement. If you seek something like Evil Dead or Silent Hill, stay away, this game is as brainless as its characters.
Steaming pile of commercialized garbage, beta-tested by millennials with 5 secons attention span. The whole game is basically one big lie, telling stories of crude armored "knights" marching against machinegun posts, and of soldiers jumping from zeppelin to zeppelin Indiana Jones style. It tells its narrative like these are most authentic memories of our ancestors, yet it's a pile of grotesque manure. It basically craps on all the people who actually fought in those wars. The design philosophy is "if you spend 5 seconds not shooting at something, it's wrong". Soldiers run super fast, there are no battle lines, death is meaningless, because you constantly respawn, action is meaningless, because everyone dies constantly. There is no movement to positions, no tactics, no strategy, only mindless, constant, dumb action. 2 points for graphics and production values, the rest is utter garbage.
It was pleasant for me to find out that I have only good things to say about this game. Unlike many modern titles, that are either frustrating, derivative, or unfinished, Talos Principle is a pleasant, focused game, that resembles a quiet, lazy autumn afternoon when you go for a walk alone just to sort through your thoughts, passing people, observing, thinking, enjoying that precious little moment when there is no task at hand, no time pressure nor a danger that would force an immediate action. Everything in the game is "just right" - graphics, although very static, are pleasant to look at, the soundtrack is serene and enjoyable, the puzzles are not too difficult but not trivial either. Many of them feature clever twists, their structure indicating certain direction towards the solution that in facts leads nowhere while thinking out of the box is required. Solving such puzzles provides great satisfaction. I have not finished the game yet, but I would gladly play something similar again. Perhaps the best of the recent "puzzle games" I have tried, including Witness, Fish Fillets, etc. Fantastic little game, one of the few I will gladly give the perfect score!
Objectively, the game deserves praise for the actual gameplay. It's a fully realized military sandbox, you can embark from chopper, sneak around, steal soldiers, vehicles, collect plants, do side and main missions, it's well optimized and nice. However, the story part is nothing short of a scam. The second half of the story is missing altogether (replaced by recycled content from the first half), and even the first half is pitiful, with the actual story making no sense, with characters and narration so badly done it will make you cry. I consider selling half finished product to be deceptive practice, so buyers beware! Kojima apparently squandered huge budget while the result was below mediocre, and when Konami found out, they fired him (as would any sane employer). The only mystery remaining is why should you, the paying customer, finance their blunders.
Another promising game based on an interesting premise, spoiled by the Ameritrash design approach, in other words, every event in the game must involve tons of dice rolls - one dice does not suffice here, you have to roll dozens of them at once, apparently. The slick interface and nice art is marred by mandatory blur and bloom that gives the impression you are losing your eyesight to glaucoma. After a few hours of unfocused trodding on a map at the mercy of the RNG, you will shelve the game, never to return. Think Talisman, with better lore and graphics, blurred and bloomed to hell, with more directions to go. So much beautiful art, totally wasted.
I was initially quite excited by the game until I found out the game is basically broken. If you do not run it on 30 fps, many things will be broken because the developers tie gameplay mechanics to frames, not to real time. Therefore: - weapons degrade faster - enemies move faster - some controls (guardbreak) do not work The only solution is to cap the game to the unaccpetable 30fps. Hello, developers, I am not buying the game on PC only to cripple it afterwards. In its current state, the game cannot be recommended for purchase.
Unfortunately, this sequel of the awesome Hotline Miami 1 is quite bad. Almost in all aspects, I have to say. How is that possible? The developer has apparently decided to emphasize the weak points of the game while neglecting the strong points. First of all, the control scheme is mediocre. You can either play with mouse and keyboard, getting better precision, but the problem is that you aim via a near-invisible cursor that easy to lose sight off. Because mouse aiming is relative, you must know which direction you are aiming - and with twitch aiming, this just does not work. Gamepad has the "lock nearest enemy" function that almost feels like cheating, and the analog stick aiming is absolute, but the precision is far worse. Another problem is that the game is horribly pixelated and thus the artificially low resolution can cover only a small part of the battlefield. The solution is to SHIFT - peek out of your normal vision range in a given direction that is both clunky and unfit for a fast-paced, twitchy game. That all is less of a problem in small, close quarters map, where stealth, melee and careful planning is most important. That's why the developer has decided to go for large maps with tons of automatic guns, where you get shot from beyond your visual range most of the time, so you must carefully shift-creep through the levels. Frustrating, slow, bad. The prevailing theme of the sequel is the prevalent American "MORE" - more player characters, more guns, more enemies, bigger levels, more story threads. Unfortunately, it all results in a worse game - big levels are tedious to play, ranged gun play emphasizes poor controls, too many story-lines shatter the focus of the game narrative without really going anywhere. The gruesome acts of violence get exhausted fast as a shocker. 4/10 - Disappointing.
Here we have a game that most of all resembles an autistic child quietly mumbling to himself in an asylum corner. Does the quiet whisper contain observation of a brilliant, yet troubled mind, or is it just simply rambling of a madman? It's hard to tell, and sadly, without weeks of study and patience we may never know. So here comes Cults and Daggers with an interface that would be horrible even in the mid 80s last century. Throwing down the drain everything developers have learned about presenting information in a clear and readable manner, this game will present you with a huge, low-resolution, zoomed-in map, that you can sluggishly scroll around with something resembling a virtual finger on a touchscreen. After the initial confusion, you will find tiny icons and barely readable numbers informing you about cities, your status, your disciples, et cetera. And while other games try to present information in a way that the important things are immediately visible and understandable, this game presents you with a blur that's hard both on your eyes and on your mind. Is it a clever symbolic reference to a mind of a mad, raving cultist? Perhaps. What's clear is that this approach to visual presentation will make playing the game a painful chore. As to the game itself, it presents appealing enough concept - become a head of a cult, recruit disciples, persuade nobles, brainwash masses, assassinate opponents and prevent old gods from entering and destroying the world. But because the game fails to provide clear and understandable feedback about what's going on in the world, playing it actually feels like a chaotic mess. Sometimes, you travel somewhere, and your main disciple disappears. After painful minutes of searching through a convoluted mess of a message log, you find out why - a purge in enemy town killed him. Why? How? Could I prevent it? Perhaps, perhaps not. I really don't care anymore. If you take interest in the game, find someone who owns the game and try it first on his computer, as I did. If you find you don't like the game, you can invest your money in something playable - like I did by buying Hand of Fate, an excellent and well crafted indie game, who cost me half the price tag of this convoluted badly designed demo ****, yet provided ten times the fun. If you make the mistake of rushing and buying it for the insane price of 28 Euro, you will feel like you have become a victim of an evil cult plot - and perhaps that's the only authentic experience the game is designed to provide.
