PeriUrban

Horribly optimized junk lazily coded and weighed down with copy protection and shader compilation. Inept and dreadful.

Such a crushing disappointment, since I have enjoyed all the previous games. I am a big fan of real time with pause games, and I thought that this being Dragon Age it would have that core feature. It doesn't. You don't get to fight battles tactically, beyond telling your companions which powers they should use and where they should use them. They cannot die, so the element of peril is much lessened. The writing was unbearably bad, especially the dialogue. Some parts just didn't seem to join up to what was going on, and other parts were repeated endlessly. The writing seems to have been written by a team where each writer wrote their lines in isolation, before trying to bodge it all together just before launch. To be fair, the game ran quite well and looked pretty, but the combat was button mashing with pause. Not what this fan of Dragon Age wanted or expected. A truly awful game.

No way to restart the game, and no way to have more than one character or profile. BUT several microtransactions to "help" with any mistakes you might make in the early game. Plus, the game runs like my grandmother in lead boots on my PC, which is a reasonably modern machine on which I can run every other game at high or ultra settings. I pre-ordered the game, only to find that my pre-order "bonus" was just one of the 21 microtransactions, and so was completely meaningless! I was soooooo looking forward to this game, especially after Baldur's Gate 3 gave the industry a path to greatness just a few months ago. I had no idea Capcom would be so stupid as to add both microtransactions and the performance killing Denuvo to a game that so many were excited to play. They ruined it.

In a futuristic world where the wheel and mobile phones were never invented, you will click to travel instantly halfway across the galaxy. You will climb into your cockpit once, maybe twice, before learning that you can simply click and go! Except if you are docked. Yes, you can travel from the middle of the wilderness of one planet to the landing zone on another planet with just a flick of the wrist and a twitch of the index finger, but if you are docked to some space station forget it! You are a nobody, a lowly newb miner with a possibly interesting background that has nothing to do with mining, but for “reasons” you will be sent to retrieve a mysterious artefact that displays “gravitational anomalies”, y’know, like in Star Trek. You will have a cinematic. A man turns up to gift you his ship and take your place in the mine. He too has had a cinematic, and so he knows all about the mysterious gravity things. You will ask yourself, “If this guy knew I was going to have a cinematic, wouldn’t it have been polite for him to say something about that before letting me have my pixels rearranged?” His chums in the secret society will give you a room in their hidden base, which is cleverly disguised as a base in plain sight. They will chat to you as if you’ve always been there, and send you on missions to find more of the weird artefacts. Funnily enough, although they are a society of explorers it appears they have done precisely no exploring, leaving that onerous task to you, the hero. So, you will discover strange alien sites featuring gravitational anomalies. You will discover them many times. You will explore the full extent of the procedurally generated tile that magically appears around you. Mysteriously, the caves and bases you find on all these many, many, many, many planets and moons will all be made of the same stuff, right down to the tea trays, pens and toilet paper. You will find innumerable weapons and suits and helmets and medpacks and resources and junk, and you will click and click and click on your many and varied storage places. There’s storage on you, in your companion, in another companion, in your locker on your ship, in the cargo hold on that ship, in the cargo hold on another ship - so many places to lose your loot! You will get powers you remember from Skyrim, and pretend they are new. The map will be a field of dots showing no detail. Even the cities will be mapless. You will remember that the mobile phone hasn’t been invented, so obviously no maps! And no taxis or bicycles, because the wheel isn't a thing. Just a train that never moves until propelled sideways by cut scene. You will enjoy loading screens. Many times. You will shoot the same bad guys. Many times. You will shoot or avoid the same weird creatures. Many times. You will scan bushes and trees. Many times. You will have epic space battles. A couple of times. You will hardly role play at all. Unless you start rolling dice IRL. NPCs will ignore any behaviour you care to engage in, but they will look at you sideways no matter what you do. There are cities. Or are they towns? At least one of them is just a town. OK, one of them is definitely a city. It has **** and everything. Markers will appear amongst those ****, leading you believe your quest lies above your head, but the only thing that lies is the quest marker. On planets you will see buildings in the distance that your scanner labels “unknown”, despite the fact that they are obviously buildings. But then you remember - no mobile phones = no maps. Other “unknown” features will turn out to be wrinkles in the topographies of otherwise largely flat terrains. The vast universe will be yours to explore, and you will never notice that assets and concepts have been repeated almost infinitely. You will never see the workings of the procedural algorithms, because they are so cleverly done. Except when you do, which will be always. You will conclude that the appearance of plenty is better than actual plenty, because you will be happy to be enjoyed so completely by Todd and his investors. You will think of Skyrim and swallow your overdraft, and you will be happy. Yes. Very happy.

I spent 250 hours playing through the main quest and 6 origin character quests using a wizard build. Not my first Larian game, and certainly not my first CRPG, turn based outing. I was BLOWN sideways by the inventiveness, the production quality, the attention to detail, the fun and the originality. I hadn't played anything from the D&D stable before, and so the dice rolls were a bit strange to begin with, but I ended up loving the wee extra thrill they gave. Just started my second playthrough, and even just a couple of hours in I'm seeing things I never saw before. Such depth, such care taken. It even has a fantastic controller implementation for those of us who like that. Absolutely game of the year for me (and yes, I have played Starfield).

Far Cry 6 isn't really like a Far Cry game at all. I mean, it's like a Ubisoft game (huge map, tons of things to collect, bases to liberate), but in many ways it owes a huge debt to the Just Cause series, and in particular Just Cause 3 (the best of the series). Once the initial launch day instabilities were dealt with the game settled down into the usual type of thing, but the changes were what stood out for me. The protagonist is vocal now (Just Cause style) and even pops into 3rd person when in home bases (Just Cause style) and landscape features can be destroyed to enhance reputation (Just Cause Style). What it lacks is the usual polish of the FC franchise, with some things feeling unfinished or undercooked, like the many things you can read scattered about the landscape, which remain active and readable after you have read them, and the many wild mission givers, again remaining active, calling your name after you've already taken the mission. There's a strong misogynistic streak running through the game, with equal numbers of fighters being female, and a trans man being played by, uh, a man! The basic plot is infuriatingly nonsensical. Add poison to tobacco to cure cancer, and enslave the population to farm it. The whole tone is brutal and dark, with little opportunity for fun. It looks pretty. I suppose.

I'm not sure why this wee gem **** has been scored at only 6.7 by users. My faith in humanity is destroyed once again. This is a fantastic game, and one of the few I've got 100% for. It's not perfect, but it is perfect at what it does. One of the best games I've played in recent years. Love it!

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]