Samvell

Great game. Aside from the tombs. Whoever throught tomb challenges should be timed needs to eat **** and choke on it. You can't see **** half the time and Ezio's parkour controls are about as precise as an explosive diarrhea after a sketchy shawarma. You're pretty sure it'll hit where it's supposed to go, but you can never be 100% sure. So, yeah, naturally they thought it would be a great idea to put a time limit on these events. Brilliant. By which, of course, I mean that it **** ass.

Crashed my PC twice within 30 minutes. Un-f*cking-believable. 12 years later and it still runs like @ss. F*ck this game and f*ck ubisoft.

Unplayable. The text is extremely tiny and there's no option to change its size. I'm sitting some three feet away from the screen and I can barely make out what's written. For a game that is 95% about reading text, this is just insane. The only other game where it was even worse is Vagrus. These games must be made by some turbonerds in +10 diopter glasses, because I don't know how can you read this for more than 15 minutes without putting severe strain on your eyes.

For a game that offers your control over multiple different characters, each possessing multiple different abilities, it felt oddly restrictive. While you have various skills to play around with, there's always only one correct solution to each puzzle-location. I didn't much enjoy it. For me personally, tactical games in particular and video games in general are about freedom. Like "here's what you can do. Have fun!". Stuff like Into The Breach or FFTA2 are some good examples of that. This game offers no fun though. If anything, it feels like boring homework. Bang your head against the wall until you find the right solution. Uh... Yay? If that's your idea of fun, well, I don't know what to tell you. Other aspects of this game felt rather derivative and... inoffensive, I guess? The writing is your standard redditspeak affair - shallow, superficial, occasionally funny. The worldbuilding is barely an afterthought, as the writers basically make things up as they go. It's clear they were more interested in rofling rather than creating an enthralling narrative or any kind of cohesive lore. So, yeah, I'm not really sure where are these rave reviews coming from. I guess the devs won themselves some goodwill by making the game literally unfailable.

Too many rules. The game bombards you with arbitrary limitations from the get-go. Obviously some rules are expected, but this game honestly feels more like doing homework rather than having fun. Games are supposed to be about freedom, not restriction.

That's it. I'm done with Japanese games. It was already bad enough that you literally can not progress in the main plot unless you invest hours into a business mini game that **** ass. It was already bad enough that the best arms dealer in the game is locked behind a convoluted side quest, which you will likely never find unless you read the guide (basically rendering a lot of the character classes pointless, since you won't be able to find decent weapons for them anywhere else). It was already bad enough that most of high-level character upgrades are locked behind a grindwall (technically, a double grindwall, since not only do you have to grind the business mini game to get the money, but then you also have to repeat the same dungeons in order to get rare components for the upgrades). But the Goro / Taiga bossfight is when the **** really hits the fan. First of all, you have no way of knowing beforehand which level is required to face them. So if you lose and you don't have millions of yen to restart the fight, you'll be forced to redo the **** preceding stealth section all over again. Second, even if you are roughly the same level as your opponents, this fight is still unfair af. Goro's got a crazy big health bar, insane speed, and 9/10 times there's basically no way of blocking his attacks. Oh, and if you think this is bad, just wait till Taiga joins the fight and one-shots your ass like it's nothing, even if you got several buffs. So, unless you've read the guide and know exactly what classes, attacks and debuffs are effective against them in advance, there's basically only one option for you - grind, grind and more grind. Because, yes, in a game that is already entirely built around grind, someone thought that adding a boss fight that is literally unbeatable unless you're 10+ levels above the bosses' levels was a good idea. I'll say this out loud - the Japanese are making games for masochists. Because I've no idea what kind of people would enjoy this. I really liked the writing, the characters and everything plot-related in this game, and even the combat itself is a ton of fun. But the game's overreliance on grind is just mind-boggling.

Mind-numbingly boring game. There's tons of text which is competently written, but just plain uninteresting to read. The visuals are bland, everything is drowned in sepia with no flavor or sense of style. The graphics are from 2005, yet the game struggles to maintain a stable framerate, even in small locations with just a handful of NPCs. There are numerous other technical issues as well. Anti-aliasing is basically non-existent unless you switch to the Ultra graphical settings. There is also no in-game option to turn Vsync on (it is switched off by default), so I had to force it through the Nvidia panel. The pacing of the story is way off. The opening chapter, in which you play as a minotaur, isn't a bad introduction. However, just as you begin to engage with the story, you are forced to play as a completely different character with a much weaker storyline and epic quests such as "Feed the Dog" and "Feed the Cat". The excitement is off the charts. The steampunk setting is fairly standard, but the addition of various animalistic races doesn't add anything to the story. Once again, it all comes down to racism allusions - a trope that's been done numerous times before, and much better too. Here, it just looks like a cheap way of saying "Oh, we're mixing centaurs, minotaurs, cyclops and all sorts of other mythical creatures with steampunk. Aren't we original?" No, no you're not. This has already been done in Arcanum, in Shadowrun, in China Mieville's books. I'm not even a fan of the genre, and even I know of multiple better examples. I'm not even sure why this is a 3D game. Honestly, it would've been better off as a visual novel. Then at least we would be spared the cumbersome navigation and having to walk slowly from one edge of the map to the other just to find some junk or read through another two minutes of boring dialogue. I'm a fan of text-heavy games. Planescape is one of my all time favorites, and the first Citizen Sleeper is one of the most enjoyable games I've played in recent years. However, the quality of writing in Sovereign Syndicate just isn't there. If your game has no mechanics other than the dialogue system, you gotta make sure that the dialogue is excellent. Which, once again, is very much not the case here.

I'm not sure how is anyone above the age of 12 supposed to enjoy this game. The combat system is actually kinda cool, but everything else is just mind-numbingly stupid and boring. The writing is kindergarten cartoon-level. The visuals are bland and uninteresting. Millions of respawning monsters everywhere, because all these decades later Japanese game developers still have no notion of strategically placed enemies. You can evade most of them, but still, it feels woefully anachronistic. Every single quest is the same. Go there, kill some monsters, fetch some stuff. They try to frame it a little differently on some occasions, but 99% of the time it just means you get to hear even more hollow and boring dialogues. The UI and the controls are actually great, and overall the game runs well, but that's a small comfort. One more thing that I wanted to point out is the English voice acting. For the most part it's tolerable, with the only notable exception being the game's protagonists, Joshua and Estelle. Some adult actors are very good at imitating kids' voices. Those actors were not hired for this game. Both Estelle and Joshua sound like 40+ year old adults, despite both of these characters being teenagers. Joshua at least has a nice voice, if way too gravelly for his age. Estelle's voice, on the other hand, is just nails on a chalkboard. Like, I'd honestly much rather listen to people getting tortured than to this annoying squeaky brat.

My first impression was actually very positive. I was kinda burnt out by the games where you constantly have to kill someone, so finding an open world with a kinda unique cell-shaded look to it, where your main objective is to just explore the world sounded very promising. Ultimately, though, all that potential went to waste, as the developers couldn't think of anything better to do in this world then to solve lame puzzles, perform very repetitive and often quite frustrating platforming, and talk to NPCs who have little to nothing interesting to say. All the great discovery pretty much amounts to nothing. You either find the same-looking junk to sell or eggs that increase your stamina, so that you can reach more places where you - you guessed it - can find more of the same junk. You can find rare cosmetics here and there, but they don't affect anything. There's also the bike customization, but it's very primitive. Even the best parts only make your bike marginally faster / better controlled, and overall it just comes down to cosmetic changes again. Worse yet, you have to buy all parts blindly and it's not until you bring them to the machinist that you can see how will they affect your bike's stats, which is extremely dumb, irritating, and simply illogical. Maps are also pointless since they don't reveal any points of interest, and I'm not sure why buying them was even included in the game. And then there are, of course, the bugs. The game is very poorly optimized, across all platforms, judging by what I've read online. Some areas only have minor stutters and FPS drops, while others, like Eccria, are just borderline unplayable with framerate dipping to 10-15 region. Instead of just choosing one platform and properly polishing the game, the developers instead chose the big buck and ported the game to both Xbox and Playstation, with PS5 port being particularly messy. Four years after the release, none of the game's bugs were eliminated. On top of the aforementioned horrendous FPS drops, you also gets objects popping up out of nowhere, prompts that don't work (or work but don't show up), trade screen not working (even though many quests straight out require you to buy / sell things in order to be completed), etc. And it's not like the devs didn't have the money. They were backed by Raw Fury, one of the world's largest indie game publishers. They've been able to hire some big names like composer Michelle Zauner of the band Japanese Breakfast and writer Meg Jayanth, the writer of Horizon Zero Dawn. There was a physical issue art book, and the soundtrack was released physically as well on both the CD and vinyl. So apparently they've had funds for all of that additional stuff, but not for fixing the game. Clearly they have problems with setting their priorities straight.

Awful unresponsive controls that feel like you're struggling against air currents the entire time. A lot of the mechanics feel extremely unintuitive. The game does a terrible job at tutorializing. It be like "Yeah, take your time to familiarize yourself with the mechanics. But, also, you're gonna die in two minutes. Good luck, f*cker!". The visual style is questionable, but what I really didn't like were the cutscenes. Everyone acts so serious like it's friggin' Hamlet, while most of the lines are extremely corny, especially coming from these hilarious wooden figures' mouths. It's like Telltale without any charm or levity.

I liked the art style, the atmosphere, the exploration part of the game where you travel across the map, and even the camp management to a degree. The writing is rather basic as post-apocalyptic sci-fi goes, but it gets the job done. However, the card combat system itself which lies at the core of the game is rather rough. For starters, unlike most games of this type which have you assembling your deck from scratch or starting with a few simple cards, Nowhere Prophet handles you a full deck from the very start, which is a terrible idea in my opinion. Most cards are very weak, but at the same time fairly complex to play. Most cards can't act on their first turn, mostly die from one hit, two if you're lucky. Before you get any good grasp on how the combat flows, you'll have half of your crew wounded (or dead since you can't heal your allies at the beginning of your journey). Truly a puzzling choice, if you ask me. I've just defeated the enemy gang, there's no one around, I have the meds, and yet I still somehow can't heal? That doesn't make any sense and is a total arbitrary bs. And I get it - it's roguelite, you're not expected to win on your first run. But it doesn't mean there shouldn't be a normal learning curve and gradual, organic difficulty progression. Oh, and the gamepad controls are pretty terrible. Instead of simply using A to confirm/proceed, you have to manually drag the stick, even on screens where you have no options. Very clunky and weird.

Fun game overall, but some of the game design decisions here are just puzzling. For example, your armor only lasts one round. Why? It's fantasy, yada yada, I get it, but they didn't even bother with as much as writing an explanation. Same goes for almost complete lack of healing items. You get one tomato that heals 10 hp (which is just laughable, because you can lose 20 to 30 hp in one round) and that's it. You can potentially complete one, even two maps without finding a single healing item. So you got many stores that sell cards, but none that sell healing items? Once again, I get that it's fantasy and normal rules of logic do not apply here, but it's just such a forced, arbitrary mechanic. It's like they couldn't even come up with anything actually interesting to justify the repetitive nature of the game. I've had so many instances when I was just one healing item away from defeating the boss, only to then die and go back to square one because of these stupid rules that make no sense and are left completely unexplained. Oh well, I guess writing some lame meta jokes is far easier than coming up with a comprehensive set of rules.

It's a good tactics game at its core, but one little thing just completely ruins it - there's no way of telling how hard the next fight will be. Regular battles are fairly easy, but the purple skull boss battles are a total gamble. It could be a normal fight, albeit multi-phased, maybe a little more challenging. Or it could be a complete disaster, with a boss whose HP is in the tens of thousands (for comparison, your characters' HP is somewhere around 50-100 at the early stages of the game), plus two or three additional bosses (around 300-500 HP each), plus several regular minions. And there's no way of knowing what awaits you beforehand. It could be that the first two stages are easy, but the final stage boss just completely annihilates your party within two rounds. So, yeah, it's obviously meant to incentivize heavy grind, and that's about the worst thing any game can do. It's funny how much this game was influenced by FFTA2, and the developers were like "You know what that game lacked? F*cking dozens of hours of grinding!". It's a shame because otherwise Fae Tactics is a pretty decent game with a nice, if a little derivative art style, versatile combat and even some worthy improvements over classic TRPG formula, like passing your turn giving you buffs instead of, you know, nothing. But the grind and the unpredictability are two huge flies in the ointment that kill any possible enjoyment of the game.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

I liked the visual overhaul. The textures are much higher quality now, the lighting has been vastly improved and the color palette is more natural and pleasant to the eye. In terms of gameplay, the changes made in the Legendary Edition are a mixed bag. Maco's physics have become more realistic, but the driving experience has become less enjoyable overall (if that makes any sense). The nitro is a nice addition, although I don't understand why it can only be used in short bursts. Oh well, at least now you don't have to stand in one place like an idiot and be used for target practice while fixing the vehicle, which is a huge improvement. The sprint has also been altered. In the original game, you could run in short bursts during combat, but outside of combat, you could run as much as you wanted, which made sense. Now, you can only run in short bursts, whether in or out of combat. Because, yeah, apparently a decorated soldier in his/her prime has the stamina of someone who smokes two cartons of cigs a day. Other minor changes have been made, such as unlimited hacking attempts. This might seem like a casualisation, but the hacking minigame itself has been made slightly faster and a little more challenging, which balances things out. The controls are now more intuitive, though I imagine this depends on whether you thought the original control scheme was any good or not. Personally, I think it's an improvement. They even fixed that annoying issue where you could accidentally select the wrong dialogue option while skipping lines with the space bar. That's nice. However, all of these (mostly) positive changes are completely and utterly devalued by one huge downside - the lack of optimisation. I have no idea if they tested this before shipping at all, but it must be a joke. At first, everything was great: The Normandy, Eden Prime, the Citadel - all good so far. The problems began on Therum when stuttering and lagging started to occur occasionally. Although noticeable, this was still tolerable. However, as I started exploring more side quests on different planets, the situation deteriorated. This was particularly apparent on grassy planets, where the frame rate would often drop from a stable 60 to 15–20. The situation culminated on Feros, where I experienced severe lagging almost the entire time. Surprisingly, the lag continued even when I returned to the Normandy, despite it being a very small location where I had experienced no lag prior to that. Tweaking the graphics settings (of which there are very few) did almost nothing. I googled the issue and discovered that Bioware had never addressed it in any way (modern BiowEAre not giving a s#!t about players — shocker, I know). Online, people have recommended turning Vsync off, capping the frame rate at 60 fps, and - drumroll - buying a 120+ hz monitor to reduce screen tearing. I'm sorry, but I'm not buying a 120 hz monitor, which I otherwise don't even need, just to play a game that's nearly 20 years old. So, yeah, this so-called "Legendary" edition turned out to be just a legendary disappointment. No matter how many quality-of-life improvements you add, if I can't get a decent, stable framerate in a game with the graphical fidelity of 2012–13 games, your remaster is garbage.

Unlike the first game, where you could complete it however you liked, here you literally cannot even finish the tutorial unless you play it the way the game wants you to. It's just awful.

Unlike the first game, where you could complete it however you liked, here you literally cannot even finish the tutorial unless you play it the way the game wants you to. Just awful.

The most boring game I've played in a long while. 100% linear, basically zero gameplay aside from walking and occasionally pressing A to make the protagonist utter some obvious and uninteresting comments. I haven't read The Invincible, but I have read numerous other Lem books and can assure you that none of them are this boring, not even remotely. The visuals are nice, but they sorely lack variety, and you grow tired of seeing the same sandy rocks after ten minutes. The only two good things I can say about the game are that it is very well optimized (stable 60 FPS on high settings even on my obsolete PC) and that it has a great, intuitive control scheme. That's about it for the positives. Overall, I'd much rather play The Solus Project again, which has far more atmosphere, actual gameplay, you can go wherever you want, and there's much more visual variety.

The controls are just as clunky and uncomfortable as they were in 1999. A lot of the issues could have been resolved with minimal effort, but they weren't. For example, you might have telekinesis, but for some reason, you still need to stand at the exact same trigger spot to grab a weapon. There's no autoaim either, which is just ridiculous. What's more, the tips range from useless to outright misleading. Press the left trigger to move stealthily? Absolutely useless. Unless your opponents have their backs turned, they will see you no matter what. Hold A to glide? Wrong! You have to press A to jump, THEN press it again and hold to glide. Once again, this could easily have been tweaked, but apparently they were too lazy to bother. It's a shame, because this game has a really cool plot, setting and atmosphere. It's a pity all of this is buried under tons of subpar, unenjoyable hack'n'slash combat.

Awful, grindy MMO combat, ugly recycled environments, area uploads every two minutes. And don't even start me on the whole "It's a PS2 game!". There are numerous PS2 games that still look good today thanks to strong artistic vision and style, and FFXII has neither. Almost every single mission is "Go there, kill X enemies / collect Y amount of something, go back". And of course you have to kill 25 million generic enemies in the process, because this is just SO. MUCH. FUN. I really wanted to revisit Ivalice because I'm a big fan of the FF Tactics games, but this barely even felt like the same setting. Everything is now 100% Middle East-inspired, even though there were almost no signs of this in the previous titles. People get killed left and right, even though there were no killings in the Tactics games. Skill progression is needlessly convoluted. I understand that they tried to call back to the Tactics titles, but the Zodiac system feels out of place here. It's bad enough I have to buy a license to wear or use every tiny thing, because apparently wearing a bracelet or a hat is some kind of an extraordinary skill you need to learn. The only two things I was totally satisfied with were music and voice over. I liked the rearranged older themes, as well as the new music, and the quality voice over really brings life to these otherwise pretty ugly character models. I know FF series is known for its variety and experimentation. Over the course of history, some experiments were successful, while others were not. FF XII is definitely among the latter. The plot is actually not that bad, but in order to follow it you'll have to endure through countless grind-heavy locations that are as visually appealing as a barf puddle.

My first impressions of the game were quite positive. It looks great, runs great, controls great. Ubisoft have really polished the movement and parkour to perfection with this title. However, the surface glitter of Odyssey quickly wears off and reveals just how shallow and hollow the experience really is. First of all, as much as I respect Ubisoft's ambition to recreate almost the entirety of ancient Greece, there's no point to this. What is the point of having dozens of cities if they all look the same? Assassin's Creed II had about four or five cities, but each one had its own visual style, mood and even color palette. You will not find that in Odyssey. The same goes for forests, mountains, rivers, etc. Wherever you go, it all looks pretty, but there's nothing to discover except the same-looking enemy strongholds and caves. The worst of all are the dungeons where you find stelas. They all look exactly the same, and even their layout is almost identical most of the time. The combat is okay, I guess, but it's all stats-based. Unlike in older games, everyone is a sponge now. If the enemy is more or less the same level as you, you WILL win. If they're at least 3 levels higher than you, there's no point in even trying - you WILL fail. There's no room for skill or luck or anything like that. It's just numbers now. The only time combat is even remotely fun is during these epic conquest battles, but that's only a small part of the game. The quest design is extremely primitive. 95% of quests are "go there, bring that" or "go here, kill that guy". Remember back in the old games, every mission would have you progressing, getting information, gradually getting you closer and closer to your goal. You really felt like what you were doing mattered, it made a difference. Here, though, with dozens of characters and hundreds of quests, it all seems kind of irrelevant. The conflict between the Spartans and the Athenians is also handled very strangely. Instead of making you choose one side and stick to it, you can fight for both sides at the same time. And for what? More grind in a game that is already full of grind? As a player, I want to see the results of my actions. I want to see the areas that once belonged to Athens now under Spartan rule, or vice versa. What they have done here instead is that you can conquer a region for the Spartans, then weaken it again and conquer it back for the Athenians, which is... I don't know who came up with that idea, but that person should be fired. Fired and banished from the game industry forever. Because this is one of the most **** game designs I've ever seen. It would be so much more interesting to make the player stick to one side, build conflicts around it, punish them for betraying their alliances, like in a true RPG. If anything, it seems like a huge missed opportunity. But by far the worst aspect of this game is the writing. This is easily some of the worst, most boring, most basic writing I've ever seen in any piece of media. Every character in this game speaks in this very lofty, posh manner, as if they were acting out some great Greek tragedy, yet the level of writing here is abysmal, bordering on **** at times. I can forgive subpar writing if at least all the quests, dialogue and characters are organically interconnected, but the writers here have failed to do even that. The worst example in my memory is when, during one quest, you have the option of telling your fellow resistance fighters that the villain you and they have been chasing is actually the resistance leader's father, even though the leader herself was unaware of this up until that moment and begs you not to tell anyone for fear of undermining her authority in the group. Naturally, when you tell everyone, she is outraged and in tears. Imagine my surprise when, on the very next quest, you hunt alongside her and she greets you with a smile and a hug and the two of you are joking and having fun. For a moment I thought maybe this was a bug or something and the quest designers had accidentally messed up the order in which these quests were supposed to be completed. But no, at the very end of the hunt, she acknowledges the fact that you have disgraced her in front of her people, thus blocking your potential romancing options. As I watched this unfold on screen, I actually felt my brain hurt. This is without a doubt the laziest, worst-written pair of quests I've ever seen. Speaking of romancing... 9/10 times the person hitting on you in this game is either an ugly-looking, fat, old, hairy guy (who, by the way, you met 10 minutes ago) or a strong, independent **** who looks like her testosterone levels would put Jason Statham to shame. I guess this is what passes for "progressive" these days. I didn't have high expectations for this game, and yet I was very disappointed. One more proof that this franchise should have ended after Black Flag.

This game hasn't aged well. The atmosphere, the environments, the music are all top-notch, and the city of Rome is incredibly alive and exciting to explore. But the gameplay itself is extremely restrictive. Up until Revelations, they basically followed the formula of the first game and just added stuff on top of it. AC III fell somewhere in between, and Black Flag was I think the first title that really nailed the "complete at your own pace" gameplay formula. With Brotherhood though it was still pretty rough. Even with the addition of things like hiring and deploying recruits, there are still far too many moments where the developers be like "no, you can't do that". For example, in some missions you cannot be detected. In some cases this simply prevents you from achieving full synchronisation, but in other missions it is downright mandatory without any explanation. God, I'm so glad they got rid of that "Ezio didn't do that" crap in later games. I used to play and love the **** out of this game, but at this point it's kind of dated in a lot of ways. I can ignore the stiff parkour, I can ignore the slow and a little unresponsive combat, but the quest designers' over-reliance on rules and conditions just doesn't cut it. Certainly not in 2025, and frankly it never did. It was never "oh cool, this is an interesting challenge to overcome". It was always very annoying and it always got in the way of the player having fun. It's sad because this game has a good story and a lot of artistic value to it, but when you see how Ubisoft have perfected the formula over the years, going back to older games is... hard.

Deliver Us The Moon was a decent game. It had a great atmosphere of space isolation. The puzzles were rather simple and the stealth sections felt very clunky and tacked on, but overall it was nice. I was expecting a sequel, especially considering that Deliver Us The Moon / Mars represent a rare breed of space games that aren't shooters or horrors. Sadly, though, I have to say that they've botched the job. The atmosphere is gone. This game was written by completely different people and boy does it show. The script is now filled with cheap melodrama, lame C-tier sitcom-level jokes and a cast of walking stereotypes. Also, why does everyone look so ugly? It's not the graphics, they're fine. It's the character models. It's as if they've all been deliberately designed as ugly as possible. Our main protagonist rocks a disgusting huge manjaw, and yet she still somehow manages to look at least semi-normal, while everyone else is just ugly wax-faced dolls. I don't get it. The gameplay is very repetitive and boring. Go there, redirect the energy beams, climb here, wield this crap, press the button, rinse, repeat. I couldn't bear to play it for more than a couple of hours. I might have stuck around for the plot, but the plot here is of no interest, and the chatter between our heroes is simply unbearable and reeks of low-budget TV.

Easily the worst story in the series. Unlike the previous two entries, this game was written by Ian Thomas, whose greatest achievement up until that point was being a programmer on Soma. And his approach to writing is indeed very programmer-like (at least in this title - he's also written about a dozen indie games that no one has ever heard of). Everything is very neatly structured and logical, but it has no soul to it. What we are being sold here is basically a girly sob story with vaguely Lovecraftian horror elements haphazardly thrown on top. Mikael Hedberg and Thomas Grip, the writers of The Dark Descent, had such a great understanding of what Lovecraftian horror was about and how to make it work. And A Machine For Pigs, say what you will about that game, Dan Pinchbeck may not be the best horror writer, but he definitely knows how to write drama. Not the cheap, soap-opera kind, but a real drama in the best traditions of classical literature. What on earth made Frictional hire this Ian Thomas guy instead is beyond me. Every single loading menu narration had me literally rolling my eyes at how overly melodramatic, corny and cheap it looks and sounds. And the Otherworld stuff... While it's not as bad as Tasi's story straight out of the Lifetime network, and some of the efforts to explain the workings of the Otherworld are admirable, as a whole (and as a distant byproduct of the Lovecraftian mythos) the entire Amnesia lore works best when it explains the least. The first game understood this very well. But this game completely misses the point. There's something bitterly disappointing about discovering that this mysterious otherworld you've heard about is (well, was) not so different from ours. People went to work, had families, had mundane things to take care of. It kind of takes away the element of mystery and excitement, doesn't it? I hate seeing that in the media. It reminds me of the work of Wayne Barlowe, whose pictures of Hell were so, well, otherworldly and mesmerising, and then he turned to writing and it turns out that Hell is basically pretty much like Earth, except a little more grim. Nothing like tarnishing your own legacy. But I digress. On the gameplay front, things are just as bad. There are two types of puzzles - those that are simple and lame, and those that are simple but deliberately confusing to hide their simplicity, thus making them even lamer. Needless to say, neither are remotely fun to solve, with or without creepy demons breathing down your neck. The locations are... okay, I guess. They're not particularly interesting to explore, even more so when you can't see anything and only have a very vague idea of where you're supposed to go half the time. Overall, I think the idea of setting a game in a desert was unfortunate. Temperate regions have forests, rivers, mountains, so many interesting places to set your game in. Deserts have... sand. Occasional rocks. Do you like looking at monochromatic, boring sand and rocks for hours on end? Then you will probably enjoy this game. The Otherworld provides some relief, but it's nowhere near enough. And, to be honest, I was expecting more. These people had computers, teleports and other high-tech stuff, yet somehow still lived in bloody caves? Make it make sense. Even the visuals and atmosphere are somehow lacking here. The overbearing brownish-yellow colour scheme of the desert landscape is boring as hell, and the soundtrack is kind of mediocre too. Some vague, nondescript ambient drones - I mean, they're okay, but after the masterpiece that was the soundtrack to A Machine For Pigs, this certainly feels like a downgrade. In conclusion, Rebirth is a very weak title in the series, especially after such strong first two entries. Especially off the back of such a sci-fi horror masterpiece as Soma - arguably Frictional's best game.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Wow, it's been eight years, and the game is still broken and still runs like crap. I think there should be some kind of an anti-award for this kind of "achievement".

Having read countless reviews claiming that this was THE ultimate medieval life simulator, my expectations were quite high. And... It all goes to hell in literally the very first quest. I went to visit the drunkard who owes my father money. He refused to pay and we had a fight in which, unsurprisingly, I got my backside handed to me. I say "unsurprisingly" because the combat in this game is simply terrible. It's clunky, unintuitive, slow and just plain not fun. I'm pretty sure learning to fight in real life would be a lot easier. Anyway, after that I decide to go visit my girlfriend. Before that, the game made a big deal out of your clothes, telling you that what you wear, where you wear it and even how good your clothes look play a big part in the dialogue. On my way to meet my girlfriend, I decided to talk to a local merchant just for the sake of it. The merchant was genuinely shocked when he saw my cuts and bruises and my bloodied clothes. And then I talk to my girlfriend and her reaction is... absent. She doesn't say a word about the way I look, acting as if everything's fine. Wow, so realistic and immersive. Then I talked to a friend of mine who gave me some lockpicks so I could secretly retrieve the money the drunk owes my father. And my god, this game has the worst lockpicking system I've ever seen. I was doing exactly what I was told to, but kept failing without having the slightest idea what I was doing wrong. Having broken all my lockpicks, I decided to reload and try again. This time, however, I was caught by a local guard who must have telepathically sensed that I was trying to steal something, because I closed all the doors behind me, neither the guard nor the owner of the house saw me enter, and he couldn't have seen me in the window because I ducked when I picked the lock. One more thing about these guards. You cannot report the drunk who owes your father money (please note that this is not a "I gave you two cigarettes and you didn't pay me back!" kind of situation. My father gave the drunkard tools and the drunkard refuses to pay for them, which effectively makes it theft), nor can you report the drunkard for assaulting you (which is also linked to his theft, thus making it an aggravating factor), but if you try to get payment for the stolen tools - you will be immediately punished for your "crime". Mind you, all this happened in the first hour of the game, during the very first quest. I can only imagine how many more bs inconsistencies there are. If this is your "ultimate medieval life sim", then wow, it's just pathetic.

While this game offers an exciting open world to explore as you please, the steep difficulty and broken navigation ruin it all. I'm not entirely against challenge in video games, but the developers' insistence on staying "hardcore" and "oldschool" is to the detriment of this particular game of theirs. Now, there are SOME improvements over their previous Gothic entries. You no longer have to press three buttons at the same time just to pick something up (thank god for that), and you at least get some sort of rudimentary map early on in the game (as opposed to having to hunt it down for hours in Gothic). So obviously some steps have been taken to improve the UX. And yes, it did make the game playable. But it didn't make it enjoyable. Navigation is my biggest personal gripe here. When you start out, it's not too bad. Some of the paths are clearly not meant to be taken early on, as they are blocked by tough enemies. So far, so good. But things start to really unravel when you get to the first major settlement, Harbour Town. Although you are formally given a map, you might as well use it to wipe your backside. Apart from a few exceptions, all the buildings look absolutely the same. A house, a warehouse, a brothel, a temple - they all look the same. But ok, I suppose you can memorise what is what after a while, but the real problem comes when you have to find specific people. Yeah, that's where things really start to go south. You see, all the NPCs in the game have about three facial textures per gender. To make matters worse, they all have their own schedules, so when you go somewhere to find someone, there's a good chance they won't be there. This makes completing even the most basic quests a colossal clusterf*ck. Look, there is a way to do things without quest markers, but if that's your choice, then you have to make sure that the player has a very clear understanding of where certain NPCs and locations are. Look at the game that came out years before Risen - Star Wars KOTOR. That game had no quest markers, but I never once got lost in it. Why? Well, because the developers of that game actually cared about how navigation works and if the locations are actually facilitated for doing quests. Going back to Risen, the objectively weak quest design and writing doesn't help either. Some of the quests are okay and even offer some variety in the way you can complete them. For example, you have to retrieve an amulet from a mansion, and you can either talk the guard into letting you in or, if you're up for some acrobatics, simply enter the mansion through the rear window. But quests like this are very rare and very far in-between. Most quests in Risen come down to "kill this NPC" or "collect X amount of Y items". Yay, riveting stuff. And then there are some real head-scratchers, like the quest with the pirate held up in prison. The pirate is hailed by the NPCs as some sort of very important big baddie, and the prison he's in stands out in the landscape, so you're naturally curious to find out what all the fuss is about. You have to steal the key from a guard, you break in, and there's... almost no reward whatsoever. You're treated to a conversation that's not even remotely interesting or entertaining, and the pirate refuses to escape, instead giving you yet another fetch quest. Just... Why? You had the setup for a really interesting quest, but the whole thing turned out to be extremely anticlimactic. And then there's the difficulty. You know how in most games you start weak? Well, in Risen you don't start at zero. No, you start at what feels like minus 20. You can't do anything except gather herbs and mushrooms. Your combat skills are pathetic. Dealing with one enemy is difficult. Dealing with more than 1 enemy is almost impossible. Not only do your hits do jack **** of damage, but the range of your attacks has been strangely nerfed. You may be wielding a sword, but its active range makes it feel like you're using a toothpick. There is also a deliberate delay between your attack and defence stances. In the time it takes you to switch between the two, your enemy can score a hit, sometimes even two, and considering that even the weakest enemies can chop off 1/3 of your health in a single strike, this becomes a real problem. Conversely, most enemies have zero lag between stances, with some of them being literally impossible to penetrate. So there's challenge and there's unfair challenge. Read the last paragraph and guess which type Risen has. So, on the plus side, we have a solid RPG with lots of interesting mechanics and a big world to explore, but the horrible quest design, impossible navigation and completely broken difficulty make this game a real chore to get through.

Sadly, the inexperience of the sole developer is very evident in this title. I really wanted to like the game, but unfortunately for every thing it does well, there are at least two things it fails miserably at. In Other Waters has great vibes, great style and atmosphere, some very nice music and pretty decent writing. But gameplay-wise, wow, it's just bad. First of all, you have no list of objectives. Everything you are told to do you have to memorise. What do I do if I leave the game and come back like a month later? Was it really that hard to add a list of objectives? I don't know if it's supposed to be an immersion thing or something, but it just ****. My second major issue with the game is the navigation. It seems simple enough at first, but having your radar split into two parts, one showing where you can / can't go, and the other showing what awaits you at your destination (a creature, a waypoint, etc.) is just a terrible idea. This concept might have worked if we had some markers on the map, but we don't. The best you can hope for are some vague directions like "go southwest towards the reef" or something like that. So it's a bit like Morrowind, but with an eagle's eye view and Atari 2600 graphics. Sounds like a lovely combination, doesn't it? Oh, and did I mention that you can accidentally drop/use items that you have no idea you will need later? That's a nice touch as well. Because everyone loves a good game where you can screw yourself without even knowing it. There are several occasions where the game encourages you to try things out, but without any idea what will actually work, you have to blindly risk potentially valuable items. If you're lucky, you'll just have to go back to the item spawn point and collect samples again. If not, as mentioned earlier, you can fail a future objective without even knowing it. Again, this is a feature that could easily have been fixed by adding an objective list and a quicksave option. If something will be needed further down the line, just add a "collect X amount of Y items" objective to the list so that the player will know it's important. Adding quicksaves would give players an incentive to experiment with different things they find, and by being able to quickload at any time, they won't risk losing / missing out on anything. But no, apparently such basic features are just too much to ask for. All in all, In Other Waters had a good concept, but the realisation is just super shoddy. It is clear that the developer's heart and mind were in the right place, but they simply lacked the skill to make it work. Fortunately, they've achieved much greater success with their next title, Citizen Sleeper, which featured some similar mechanics and ideas, but also a gameplay that actually made sense and was fun and engaging. It's a bit like the situation with Subset Games, who first made FTL, an ambitious game for sure, but far too complex for its own sake, and then went on to make Into The Breach, which just rules and is killer through and through. As for In Other Waters though, perhaps one day it can be remade/remastered into something that is actually playable and enjoyable. Because this version is a stylish demo at best.

This could've been a fun little game, but unfortunately the developers decided to go full on Tarkovsky with the cameras. The game can be completed in six hours, five if you're hasty. But it would've been two, if not less, if it weren't for those slow as hell camera movements. Your objectives are usually not clearly communicated, so more often than not you'll find yourself stuck in a room with alarm sonically r*ping your ears, not knowing what the hell you're supposed to be doing, pixel-hunting with the slowest cameras ever invented. Yeah, sounds riveting. If you're a masochist, that is.

A mediocre shooter that tries to pass itself off as something more and fails. The stealth, which is heavily implied as the "primary" way to play many missions, is a joke. The first Splinter Cell game from 2002 has far more sophisticated stealth mechanics, and even if we take non-stealth games, something like Wolfenstein: New Order does a much better job of incorporating stealth into its gameplay formula. The shooting is... okay. Not terrible, not great, just passable. Which is nowhere near good enough for an action game. A lot of gameplay mechanics are added just for the sake of it. For example, they make a big deal out of this sound decoy grenade, which turns out to be literally THE LEAST effective way to kill silverfishes. It's much easier to just shoot them from a distance while they're dormant, or throw a regular grenade and kill a bunch of them at once. Same with turrets. I have no idea why I should hack them when they explode from just two shotgun blasts. They also somehow managed to make an even worse version of the hacking minigame from Mass Effect, which makes hacking not only useless, but annoying as well. The enemy AI is very stupid. First, there's the question of why they don't have augmented vision, you know, like you do. But even if we ignore that obvious question, they are just incompetent. I guess a natural reaction after seeing several of your fellow machines destroyed is to just... ignore it. "Must be the wind," as they say in Skyrim. I mean, at least Skyrim had the excuse that you were playing as a demigod with supernatural abilities like literally becoming invisible or turning into smoke, not a regular Joe whose presence would be easily detected using thermal scanners. The visuals are from 2011. Don't know what else to say. They're not repulsively ugly, but they're not exactly nice to look at either. The lighting is very strange and sometimes goes through solid objects. The facial animations are by far the worst. Everyone looks like a creepy doll haphazardly wrapped in human skin, with a bewildering lack of emotion on their faces. This is especially ironic considering that this is a game about fighting creepy machines wrapped in human skin. The music is rather forgettable. Needless to say, you won't find anything even remotely reminiscent of the timeless soundtracks of the first two movies here. All in all, a very mediocre game.

I liked the atmosphere and the visuals, but the puzzles are a huge downside to this game. What's with all these games feeling obliged to include crappy puzzles? Dear Esther didn't need stupid puzzles to be a great game. The same goes for Infra. It could've been a very decent walking sim, but instead chose to be a crappy adventure game. I don't get it. It's so obvious that Infra's strengths lie in its visuals, its environmental storytelling, and its desolate, moody vibes. Why ruin it with random puzzles? The devs have shot themselves in the foot.

Interesting concept and visuals for sure, but the lack of even the most basic tutorial and the constant randomness of events are two major downsides of this game. So you make these one-button devices and I still couldn't figure out how to use some of them. Sure, I could look it up, but if the game doesn't bother to explain the mechanics to me, why should I bother to look it up? The time limit is completely arbitrary and makes no sense. "Oh yeah, you know therapy - a procedure known to take months and years in real life? Yeah, let's make it two minutes tops!". Absolutely terrible choice. The only genre where arbitrary time limits make sense is racing games, and I will die on this hill. As for randomness, often a patient will sound perfectly normal, but then suddenly turn out to be a lunatic, and vice versa. You don't get any clues, nothing to tip you off. The mindscan itself is a joke. Half the time the right answer is painfully obvious, and half the time all three answers make absolutely no sense and you have to choose blindly. It just feels so random and unintuitive. Overall, this could have been an interesting title, but its player-hostile design and the utter randomness of the events ruin any kind of enjoyment I might have had.

Peak mediocrity. The "immersive sim" tag is laughably misplaced here. It's more of Doom-like game - run around, kill all you see. This game could've benefited from having some role-playing conversations or stealth mechanics, but it has too weak of a writing for the former and too weak of a level design for the latter. Obviously not enough thought was put behind Graven, resulting in a game that could have been great otherwise. You can barge into a random house and find some unique loot and it's like... just there. Why? Why not make it into an interesting quest? I'm not saying it has to be WItcher-level, multi-phased, 5+ hour questline, but an NPC here, a piece of dialogue there, maybe some interesting notes and voila - this would've been infinitely more interesting. Now, there are notes in this game, but they are so vague and nonessential you can pretty much just cut them out completely and it wouldn't change a damn thing. You burn down a pile of corpses and find a note underneath that says one of the dead people led a miserable life. Oh wow, that tells me... absolutely nothing. It's just put there because it's "meant" to be there, even though it adds nothing to the experience here. I liked some things about this game. I liked the visuals, as simple as they are. The difficulty is rather adequate, which is rare these days when almost everyone tries to either make a game that would rip your a*s or a completely handholding experience. It is clear that the developers had good intentions and a decent enough concept in mind, but lacked either the skill or the budget to really make the game shine. Or both.

I was intrigued by the game's fairly unique visuals and numerous Morrowind comparisons, but I must say I was sorely disappointed. The developers say the game prioritizes character interaction and exploration over combat and grind, but it doesn't work on any level you look at. They clearly do not understand that in order for exploration to be interesting, you need superb level design, one that keeps the player intrigued throughout his progression and then rewards them upon completion. But the level design in this game is about as simple and boring as it gets. A potion hidden behind the stairs is the pinnacle of level design in Dread Delusion. The odd color palette and wobbly textures make the locations look interesting on the surface, but when you peel back all the superficial gloss, what you find is lazy level design through and through. As for the character interaction and roleplaying itself, the writing in this game is mediocre at best. I've certainly seen worse, and if there's one good thing I can say about it, it's that at least it's mostly brief. If there was more of that mid-a*s, Robert Salvatore-like writing, I'd probably quit this game even sooner than I did. And I did quit it pretty damn soon. As far as difficulty goes, this game is surprisingly easy. Most enemies drop after three hits with the starting weapon, the throwing knives honestly feel like a cheat code, and you can find potions everywhere. Literally everywhere, I'm not exaggerating. I suppose it makes sense to find them at someone's house or in a fortress, but what sense does it make for them to fall out of a slain beast? What sense does it make for them to be just lying on the ground in the middle of nowhere? It all just reeks of artificiality and takes you right out of the experience. But I suppose the devs figured that having tough enemies and rare potions ON TOP of the mid writing and terrible world map would just be too much for the player to stomach. Ok, what's next... Navigation. If I've ever seen an artificially inflated challenge, it's the navigation in this game. Oh yeah, you can kill almost any enemy in three seconds without even dodging, and we put health potions around literally every corner, but giving the player a map? No, no, no, that would just completely casualize our game! Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing against not having a map in the game as a concept. But I at least need to know the directions. About the tenth time an NPC told me to go "somewhere southeast", I knew that was it for me and this game. The developers clearly don't understand that having to navigate the world on your own without any quest markers worked so well in Morrowind because a) YOU HAD A FRIGGIN' MAP FROM THE VERY START, b) you literally had every word of the directions written down in your journal, and c) the world had almost no verticality, so it's much easier to navigate when you have pretty much the entire terrain in front of you like the palm of your hand. Next, the music. Okay, this has got to be some kind of joke. For the first four or five hours I played this game, I only heard ONE track playing over and over again. Hell, it's hard to even call it a track - it's just the same four notes of some sort of angelic choir playing on repeat ad nauseam. And it doesn't even fit the mood of the game! Ok, so I'm in this brutal medieval-esque world where people are getting killed left and right like it's nothing, I'm surrounded by surreal vistas, weird violent creatures, zombies, ghosts and whatnot. So obviously the perfect soundtrack for that would be new age yoga ASMR ambient, which would hardly qualify as background music for reading. Jesus Christ, can I at least get a different track when the fighting starts? Morrowind had about 45 minutes of music, which is obviously criminal for a 100+ hour game, but it was remedied by the fact that it was undoubtedly some of the most epic and gorgeous medieval fantasy music ever written. Here though? Four notes of choir is all you get. To sum up this mess, Dread Delusion definitely had a lot of cool ideas in concept, and in the hands of a more skilled and experienced team, this could have been a very unique Morrowind-meets-Pathologic type of game. But sadly, as it is, this is just a lot of wasted potential wrapped up in pretentiousness that is meant to cover what is underneath - utter mediocrity and boredom.

One of those games that only create an illusion of freedom while actually granting none of it. "Oh yeah, you can totally create shadows anywhere you want!" Except no, you can only create them in very specific spots. "Oh yeah, you're totally invisible when you're in the shadows." Except no, on several occasions enemies can still see you even when you're covered in shadow, and conversely, sometimes you can stand in full light three feet away from an enemy and they still somehow can't see you. On the surface, it looks like an Assassin's Creed-type game where you're given a sandbox and you're free to choose your own path to achieve goals. But in reality, it is a heavily scripted game. If, god forbid, you dare to deviate from the one and only true path the developers want you to take, you die. I can handle a mid game. I can even handle a not-so-good game if it has some redeeming qualities. But what I can't stand is a game that flat out lies to you.

This game has great vibes and great atmosphere, but its over-reliance on combat is puzzling. Because, well, the combat in this game ****. It's clunky and unresponsive. Almost as a mockery, you are given a slingshot as your first weapon, which will get you through the first area in the game, but once you enter the woods and you have to fight back against several powerful enemies at once, well, the combat quickly goes from mildly irritating to hugely irritating real fast. I would've really enjoyed this kind of game with focus purely on exploration and npc interactions because as an action game Northern Journey just doesn't work. And, I know it's a weird thing to bring up when talking about an indie game, but the optimization is far from great. This game has graphics straight out of 2002, and my PC far surpasses the system requirements, and yet even though I was getting a silky smooth framerate, my computer was heating up and humming like crazy. Not cool.

To call the writing in this game subpar would be flattering. The only person who could possibly find the writing in this game good is someone who has never held a real sci-fi book in their hands. This is some middle school level fanfic. It might seem passable at first, but pretty soon the author starts pulling things straight out of his as... I mean, straight out of his rich and colorful imagination, and you can "enjoy" awesome things like armored whales living inside a red giant (jfc, I feel stupid just mentioning that). Apart from that, Out There is rather primitive in terms of gameplay. It's a slightly more polished version of the space exploration from Mass Effect, but it's nowhere near as sophisticated as something like FTL. The graphics are even more primitive than in FTL. And don't even get me started on the soundtrack. Generic stock space ambient that you can find on any royalty free online music resource. Oh, the RND, right. It's ridiculous. You'll have to abandon many, many runs, not because you've died, but simply because the randomizer has thrown you into a star system from which you literally cannot escape. Wow, some really solid game design there, guys. This project looked promising, and it has some interesting ideas, like being able to cheat death or circumvent huge distances in certain ways, but it's so lacking in so many other, much more important areas that I have no idea how anyone could have set their priorities that way.

This game is certainly unique, I'll give it that. But there's little to it beyond that. Navigation is very unintuitive. At first it's fairly easy. Wherever you go you find a cube, and it just feels nice to roam these fun colorful environments. It would be way better if the game was built in a linear fashion, but with this amount of backtracking, different terrains and gateways, it doesn't take long for navigation to become a nightmare. So while I can appreciate the visual style and unique nature of Fez, I find it really hard to enjoy it.

Maybe it's a good game. I wouldn't know since the devs didn't bother adding saves, so if you die you have to start all over again. I don't care that it's only for a starting dungeon. Such blatant disregard for player's time and experience automatically gets a zero from me.

Is this a joke? Most of the text in the game is so tiny that it's physically painful to read. Almost as a mockery, the game actually has an option to adjust the font size, but it only affects SOME text boxes. What kind of moron designed this? Unplayable.

Frankly, just an embarrassing game. The graphics are straight out of 2003. The combat is primitive and ridiculous in the way it **** lack of a better word, directed. There is almost no strategy. All you have to do is get close to an enemy and click him to death. It's made even worse by the way each of these encounters is set up. When you attack, it triggers a short cutscene that only lasts about four to five seconds, during which the camera pans the exact same way EVERY SINGLE TIME, and the music also changes to a cutscene music that creates this janky, disjointed feeling. It ruins the immersion, it ruins the flow of the combat. Why, why couldn't they just keep the music uninterrupted? This is honestly such a puzzling choice. I think even to someone with zero experience in game design or, hell, even gaming in general, it would seem like an obviously terrible idea, yet here we are. And the second game surprisingly got a remaster as well, so I can only assume that there are enough mindless mech fanatics out there who will pay for literally anything as long as it has mechs in it, no matter how bad the quality is.

I'll probably never understand JRPGs. This whole thing feels like a nightmare to control. Each screen has like a dozen submenus, and navigating through it all is extremely cumbersome and unintuitive. At this point, I'm not even sure why the Japanese bother to port their games for us gaijins. The PC port of this game, as well as many other Japanese games, clearly shows that they don't give a damn about user comfort and playability outside of the Japanese platforms. But the worst thing isn't even the interface, but the fact that it drags like a motherfarmer. I have no idea why the maps have to be this huge, with like twenty combatants at a time. The first two actual fights you take part in require almost nothing of you, since 80% of the time you just watch NPCs making moves. The battle becomes even more of a slog when you factor in the nonstop banter between all the participants, both friend and foe, who can't seem to shut the hell up for more than two rounds. Every single battle takes forever to get through. In summary, I understand that this game probably just wasn't made for me. Obviously there are thousands of people who enjoy it very much, but it's just not my cup of tea.

This game had all the potential to be a pretty solid TRPG, but a series of baffling game design decisions just killed it. During the first hour of the game, I found three med kits. Just three. That may not sound bad, but consider that 1) you have three people in your party, 2) most enemies will one-shot you, and c) 90% of the time you will be facing enemies in vastly superior numbers. Literally the fourth encounter of the game had me fighting 8 enemies, one of which was a sniper on a high ground. And all of this happens before you've had any time to properly level up or even restock. You start the game with almost no money, so even though you are technically allowed to visit the shop, you can't buy nearly enough stuff to survive more than one fight, two if you're VERY lucky. The major factor here is the loot system, which is crap. You almost never find anything you can use right away. You mostly find junk that you can LATER trade for something useful, but in the case of this game, it's always too little, too late. And yes, I know what you're gonna say. "You can use the stealth approach". But that is such a non-option. Calling stealth in this game basic is like calling trump a not very nice person - a huge understatement. Stealth in this game is so undercooked that Gordon Ramsay would give it a three minute nonstop rant if it were a meal. Overall, this could've been a decent game if the developers hadn't been so determined to artificially inflate the challenge.

Quite possibly the worst in-game camera I've ever seen. It's constantly twitching, changing altitude for no reason and changing angles so that you can't see anything. This game is a sad victim of the 7th generation of consoles. I've tried installing the mod to fix the camera, but no matter what I tried, it kept giving me errors. Whether it's due to the game's age or just how badly it was made, I don't know, but whatever the reason, it doesn't work. Otherwise, it seems like a cool game, but the atrocious camera controls make it completely unplayable for me. Call me petty, but sacrificing the game's UI and UX just to appeal to console gamers is a mortal sin in my book, especially when there are hundreds of examples of console-oriented games that still play well on PC.

The whole thing is boring as sin. I couldn't play it for more than 30 minutes at a time without falling asleep. The SOMA comparisons are insane. There is no great music like in SOMA, no atmosphere, no intriguing plot, no nothing. Oh, but here you can pick up and spin useless junk in your hands. Wow, bravo! Someone forgot to tell the developers that this feature only works if the items are a) relevant or b) well modeled and nice to look at, and the items in Tacoma are neither. Why should I even care about these people or anything that happens? In Soma, you get a clear understanding that something is seriously wrong, and you are gradually led deeper and deeper into the plot. But in Tacoma? No introduction, no explanation except a few lines of text in your journal (which is boring as hell), and that's it. Now go listen to some boring conversations for three hours! Oh yeah, right. This game is three hours long. Two if you're not interested in seeing sights on this ship (not that there's much to see). Compare that to SOMA's 10 to 11 hours and you get a game that is superior in both quality AND quantity. The visuals are downright pathetic. The ship is so squeaky clean and empty, it looks like a sterile testing environment rather than a lived in place. It's probably the most boring and plain-looking Unity game I've ever seen. It's as if the developers took some stock assets and didn't even bother adding any textures or effects on top of them. Oh, and how could I forget the DEI. A lot of the astronauts aboard the station are frankly obese, which is like... Huh? And here I thought astronauts were supposed to be in tip-top shape, both mentally and physically. Okay, I'm supposed to cut them some slack because this is the future where everything is inclusiv... I mean, where the standards are a little lower than they are today, but damn, look at the engineer from the second crew recording that you come across. Are you telling me that this, this right here, is an engineer, as in someone who goes around the ship and fixes things? She looks like she has trouble staying on her feet for more than five minutes without a big mac and pepsi break, let alone doing hard physical labor. I suppose it could be worse, though. I'm surprised you don't see the characters' pronouns next to their names. Overall, it's a rare case where I don't have at least something good to say about the game. It's just pure garbage.

Probably a good game if you just wanna turn off your brain and vibe, but the game has nothing else to offer. There's close to no gameplay. You just **** around the environments the whole game. I'd say the game has a nice, relaxed atmosphere to it, but vibes can only carry the game so far. The graphics are definitely nice. Yes, it's 2015 level graphics, but the overall art direction is great. Except for the cats themselves, which often trigger that uncanny valley feeling in the cutscenes. The music is sparse and amorphous. For the most part it felt very unintrusive, and intentionally so. I'd say it fits the game well, although there's a slim chance I'll ever wanna hear it outside of the game. I have to note though that some musical cues felt off at times. For example, there was this one time when I was just walking down an alley and this really intense "action" music started playing for some reason, even though there was no action going on in the game at the moment whatsoever. The game design felt inconsistent. A lot of the objects are climbable, while others that look exactly the same aren't for some reason. I wasn't a fan of the scripted events either. There is one early on in the game where you have to run from zurks and I failed it like four times in a row. Why? Because the moment you have to jump off the ledge you can't press W+Space, you have to press just Space, unlike the rest of the game where W+Space works just fine. It's little inconsistencies like these that really ruin the enjoyment and leave a bitter taste in my mouth. Overall, this is a pretty great sci-fi cat simulator. If you like cats and don't like thinking, I'd say this game is definitely for you. Me though, I couldn't help but feel utterly bored.

Pretty mid Into The Breach clone. And no, 'clone' is not an exaggeration. This game steals pretty much every single element from Into The Breach, from the gameplay to the visuals to the soundtrack to the overall game structure. I have no idea how Subset Games haven't sued these guys. But plagiarism aside, this is just everything that game was, only much more lackluster. The units are less interesting to play around with, the entire campaign is much shorter, there are far fewer interesting tactical layouts and situations, and the overall variety is nowhere near the level it was in Into The Breach. The lack of satellites or some variation of them is a major drawback. Satellites were such an important part of the gameplay in Into The Breach. A lucky satellite drop could literally turn your team from a bunch of hapless losers into an unstoppable death squad. The only thing similar here are the gifts from the goddess, of which there are only two varieties - it's either money or upgrade points. The latter is obviously very useful, but I'm not sure why they bothered with the monetary reward. The money from the battles alone is more than enough to supply your party with relics, half of which are useless to begin with, and the whole merchant thing becomes redundant around 70% of the game in anyway, since you only have three relic slots for your party and you can't buy anything else (except for the aforementioned upgrade points, which are bought for a separate currency). The banter isn't particularly clever or funny, and I found myself skipping it pretty quickly. Then again, it wasn't exactly great in Into The Breach, but at least there was a lot less of it there. The pets are a nice idea, although some of them (like the dog) are almost useless, while others (like the guinea pig) are honestly OPd. Like, with a guinea pig you can turn your party of four into a party of seven. Seems like a no-brainer. I haven't used any other pets since I unlocked the guinea pig. But overall, the pets are just there to compensate for the abilities that were already part of the group skills in Into the Breach, so it's just another example of changes that don't really change anything. In summary, I feel like the developers had their hearts in the right place. The idea of making Into The Breach, but fantasy instead of sci-fi, sounds really cool, but there has to be something - a sense of personality, a certain uniqueness, something that would make this title stand out. Unfortunately, there's nothing here.

This game could have been amazing, but its numerous flaws weigh it down too much. On one hand, you have great and varied tactical combat, exciting exploration, and a multitude of interconnected skill-based gameplay systems that offer a lot of interesting things to do. On the other hand, there's mediocre writing, lazy quest design, recycled assets and level structures, unnecessarily drawn-out traveling sections, and a bunch of other mechanical issues. This game is definitely one of contrasts. Going through hundreds of office cabinets, trash cans, and suitcases is fun. Just like in Fallout, given enough components, you can assemble and improve pretty much anything, and that was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game for me. Another thing that I very much enjoyed was the tactical combat. But every time I felt great after an intense combat encounter or clearing a dungeon (laboratory, woods, etc.), I would return to one of the hub locations and end up spending long, long, loooong minutes basically doing nothing but running errands from one point on the map to another. The Staying Connected quest chain is the worst offender here. I can't remember the last time I was so utterly bored out of my mind. Who in their right mind would think a quest like this would be fun for anyone? This could have been fixed with strong dialogue, but there's almost none in this game. It basically reads like a subpar Roadside Picnic/STALKER/Fallout inspired fanfic. There are occasional good jokes (like when you get the opportunity to flash the exhibitionist), but that's about all the good I can say about the writing. The story is just... there. It's neither good nor bad, just functional. The game doesn't even have a proper ending—it's just several laughably easy fights and then boom—you've won! There's no final boss (the game has boss encounters, but somehow they didn't bother adding one at the end), no moral dilemma in choosing what to do with the Maelstrom, and no freeplay after the ending, even if you have a backlog of unfinished quests. Despite this, you can still recruit people back into your party on your way out of the final location and into the end credits. Like, what? Big cities are a joke. What's with this trend of making big cities in indie RPGs? You clearly don't have the budget, so why bother? Smaller locations in this game are fine because they are packed with people you can interact with, and there's a new quest around every corner. But the big cities in this game (Carmine Heights, Phalanx Base, and The City) are a total chore to navigate, have almost nothing interesting, and actually have LESS content than the mid-sized locations you find across the map. I saw the same thing in Colony Ship. I have no idea why developers keep doing that. The atmosphere in this game is kinda cool. It's derivative, sure, but it still feels nice to immerse yourself in that Gothic/Fallout/STALKER-type setting. Another big thing that contributes to the atmosphere is the music. It's not an outstanding soundtrack by any means, but it's still rather nice and fits the game perfectly. Being an indie title, the graphics are obviously nothing to write home about. The level design offers very little variation, but I guess they simply didn't have the budget for that. Overall, it's a pity Encased got riddled with questionable and at times outright bad game design decisions. This could have easily been an 8/10 solid post-apocalyptic RPG, but with this quality of writing, limited quest design, and a plot this lacking, I can't rate it any higher than 6/10.

Could have been a cool puzzle adventure, but the game's weak writing was a critical miscalculation on the part of the developers. Puzzles that require physical interaction are fine, but Mind'o'Matic puzzles require you to read every single data log and email. And, well, the quality of writing just isn't there. If you are going to build logic puzzles around text, you better make sure the player cares enough about the story to actually invest in it. And overall, these datapads are very oddly framed. You'd be lucky to get a datapad with 4-5 logs. Most of them contain 10+ logs, all of which are boring as hell. Not only is the writing dry and uninspired, relying 100% on genre cliches, it's also unrealistic. Like a character spelling out her boyfriend's full name in a log for no reason at all. It immediately breaks the immersion, because I get the impression that it's not really someone's note, but just a piece of information that the game has to feed to the player, and the writers were too lazy to bother to frame it organically. I liked the art. I don't know why they bothered with the faces, because they all look terrible, but the environments look pretty cool, if a little generic. The music is downright bad. With a budget as limited as theirs, they should have gone full synth-electronica. Instead, the composer (or developers) somehow felt the need to use 'live' instruments, and by that I mean cheap stock presets that only a deaf person could mistake for real instruments.