ShakesBeer

Writing this review on the occasion of my 3rd time trying to get into Code Vein and being disappointed again. Some interesting ideas, but unfortunately it all falls flat compared to any good souls like or action game. I wanted to like it, but no dice. Combat has no weight whatsoever. No noise, no feedback, no bounce off of weapons or visual cues. Enemies mostly don't react to your swings. There were many times I didn't even know I was getting hit because of the lack of weight. But once you're hit, you're screwed, as you're often stunlocked. No ability to animation cancel as far as I can tell. Weapon variety is terrible. Decent selection of abilities, but the visual flair for spells and such is surprisingly disappointing and subdued for an anime game. The whole "anime vampire" premise starts off interesting but goes nowhere. Environments and enemies are boring and repetitive. Story is blah. Typical anime tropes and poor dialogue, including of course female characters wearing almost nothing. Not a terrible game, but save yourself some time: go play Elden Ring or Lies of P or Nioh or Lords of the Fallen or anything else.

Picked this up because I was a fan of Digimon in my childhood and was hoping for a great nostalgia trip. But even my past affection for the series can't overcome just how boring and long-winded the non-battling parts of this game are. The story manages to be both totally nonsensical and utterly boring at the same time. I would have rated the game higher if there were actually anything engaging about the "detective" portions of the game or the quests. But it's basically just wander, talk, wander, get lost, talk, over and over again for 40 hours. The somewhat redeeming quality of the game is the actual battling, raising, and digi-volving of the Digimon themselves. Unfortunately, just when you start to enjoy that, you're forced back into fetching coffee, wandering around uninventive areas, and talking to an endless parade of NPCs. It's like 30mins of garbage for every 5mins of battling. The 10/10s here must be a joke. You need to be a BIG fan of the series to enjoy this, or totally desperate for a new monster taming game. But for everyone else, just play Pokemon!

A game with a lot of promise, but ultimately boring execution. Really only worth it for the most hardcore Conan or survival sandbox fans. I loved the first few hours - surviving in a harsh desert, learning to build, discovering weirdo creatures to fight. But combat quickly becomes stale, there isn't much of a story to speak of, and building materials vary in color and design but not really functionality. So after I had built a decent home and seen a quarter of the map, I didn't feel at all compelled to keep going. Oh and it's worth mentioning that the UI and crafting systems are pretty difficult to manage, and the learning curve is steep. In my opinion, if you're looking for something like this, Ark is a much better use of your money. Ark doesn't have much of a story either, but the dinosaur and crafting variety in that game gives you much more to look forward to, and much more reason to carry on.

What a bummer. As a fan of both MGS and sandbox survival, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard of this title. Just picked it up for $10, and it’s not even worth that much. The opener to the game is so brutally slow and nonsensical, it’s like they don’t even want you to play it. Then the robots who narrate everything speak at a snail’s pace, so I’m sure most of the game’s runtime is just listening to them talk. Once you can actually play, the game is interesting for 30 minutes but then reveals itself to be a totally uninspired, repetitive, boring experience. I wasn’t even motivated to get into the base building, and I love that stuff. Also... for some reason the MGS world involves portals? And the enemies are a cross between zombies and unicorns that wind up being much more weird than scary? If they wanted to do MGS survival, the recipe seems pretty simple: make it like snake eater, a soldier lost in the forest surrounded by tribal enemies or even zombies. But a totally wacko sci-fi hell portal full of dust storms? I just don’t get any of it.

I almost never give scores this bad, but when a developer decides to stop updating an unfinished game and still sell it for $30, they deserve a 3/10. If you have a PC and love sandbox survival with friends, the game looks like a lot of fun. But on console, expect bad graphics (even for voxel) and bugs, with no hope of fixes in sight. I'm only not giving it a 0 because there's a good building survival game in there somewhere, but it's impossible to find for any but the most patient gamers.

Space exploration, base building, alien creatures, what could go wrong? Procedural generation, that's what. The designers could have crafted 5-15 beautiful and interesting planets with varied biomes. But instead we've got an infinite number of randomly generated planets, most of which inevitably wind up boring and empty. So prepare to spend hours and hours and hours searching for a pleasant planet for your home base, only to find that once you've found one and started started building, you're in a constant struggle with your inventory size, the game's confusing mechanics, and refueling everything you own or use. Can't find a particular material on your planet? You'll have to fly off of yours, but oh wait no launch fuel. Oh wait no hyperdrive fuel. Oh wait can't find a planet with the material. Oh wait your mining beam is out of fuel. Oh wait you're out of storage space. It all feels much more tedious than in other survival games. And once you've built your base, a couple cool vehicles, you realize - there's nothing of interest to actually be explored and there isn't much story to speak of. There are barely any threats to your health and safety, and the variations among different kinds of flora and fauna basically amount to: wow, a vaguely cow-shaped thing with longer legs than the last cow thing. That's my 10-hr story with No Man's Sky. I tried. I really did. And I wanted to like it. Some people do find this infinite randomly generated space exploration thing interesting. But for everyone else, go play Subnautica, The Forest, Conan, Ark or The Outer Worlds, Mass Effect, Astroneer - really any other survival or space game instead.

I never thought I'd like swimming through an entire game, but somehow these developers have made it a joy. Subnautica is the survival genre at its approachable best. The game is easy to get into, but presents various degrees of challenge as you go along. Hours and hours of grinding is an option, but it is not required. There's some story to follow if you choose and lore to discover throughout, but it's never overbearing if you choose to do your own thing. There's a beautiful and varied ocean to explore, terror to encounter, and futuristic sea technology to build. I've got to knock it down to an 8 because I hit 10-15 bugs in my 20-hour playthrough. Getting stuck in walls, teleporting outside of submarines, etc. It felt like I just narrowly missed losing my whole save a few times. And the quick item select system is absurdly dysfunctional for a modern game. But otherwise, it's a great game that I can't recommend more strongly, both to longtime fans of the survival genre and total newbies. NOTE: Can't speak to the PS4 experience, as it runs great on my PS5 in 2021.

Very good survival horror game, held back slightly by a few flaws. It’s often genuinely scary and disturbing, and the horror is very creatively designed. Roaming and surviving in a Twin Peaks style town with various monsters on the loose is a real joy. The dialogue and voice acting are pretty bad, but the story overall is an interesting sci-fi / horror mashup. Gameplay is great, but bizarrely there’s no dodge or quick turn button, so you often feel clunky. And the game often requires you to unload all your ammo on a bullet sponge boss, then make you struggle through a gauntlet with no ammo. Seems unnecessarily punishing for the player. There’s also an odd character switch in the 11th hour, and the story drags at the end and sort of overstays its welcome when it should be racing to its conclusion. But despite the issues, I still recommend it! It’s up there with the best of the genre.

The 10s and 9s on here are totally bizarre, especially how many are at the top of the page. I think some superfans must be upvoting the positives and downvoting the negatives. I'm glad some people love the game, but it's basically The Last of Us with worse dialogue, voice acting, story, and gameplay. That doesn't make it a bad game, but it is highly derivative of many other, better games you've already played. You might enjoy the first few hours, but then you realize you've already seen most of what the game has to offer. The zombies quickly become insignificant pieces of scenery on your repetitive bike rides back and forth to kill some guy or fetch some whatever. Where's the fear, the tension, the surprises or scares? The hordes are interesting at first, but once you've seen one, you've seen them all. The game does deserve some points for the well-designed atmosphere, and really capturing what an open-road motorcycle ride would feel like in the zombie apocalypse. But that's about all the credit I can give it. Not a bad game, but not a particularly good one either. If you've already played TLOU, TLOU 2, RE 2 Remake, RE 7, Dying Light, The Evil Within, and you still need zombies... then I guess you can pick this up.

REVIEWING IN 2021 In the time since release, it seems like most bugs have been fixed. Plays very well on my PS5. But it's so brutal for solo play. A word of warning to anyone with kids, significant others, or jobs that require you to be on call all day: if you are inactive for 5 minutes, you will be booted out of your game. You will have to return to that mission and redo the ENTIRE MISSION. There's no real pause button, you will still get booted after 5 minutes. Same deal with putting your console in rest mode. Oh and Playstation Plus is necessary even if you never intend to play with other people. I did my research so I knew that going in, but it's counterintuitive so I want to let people know. I get these limitations for multiplayer, but applying them to solo as well is so absurd and seems like it'd be a simple, obvious fix. Gameplay is a blast - it's a great Iron Man simulator. If you can deal with the issues, it's a lot of fun, especially since you can now find it for $15-$30. But I find the solo limitations so frustrating that I keep leaving the game, and I may never finish it.

Hour 1: Zombie parkour? Awesome! Hour 5: Wait there's really no fast travel? Hour 10: Oh I'm still fighting zombie hordes with a wrench? And combat with humans is pretty whack. Hour 15: Ok I have a gun now, but I'm starting to think first-person platforming isn't such a great idea. My guy can climb 200ft radio towers, but he somehow doesn't know how to climb down anything. Hour 20: Aaaand the story finale is just about 100 platforming deaths in a row. Such great ideas in this game, but it eventually wound up more frustrating than fun for me. Worth $15 but not much more.

Kudos to the developers for a decent 2D Dark Souls imitation. The art style is interesting, and combat feels solid and weighty. I enjoyed and appreciated weapon variety too. However, the Souls/Castlevania mashup has some fatal flaws. Imagine all of the difficulty and frustration of Souls. Now add in TONS of platforming. Can you make that jump? Not sure? Well go ahead and try it, and if you miss, look forward to having to kill 20 difficult enemies again as you restart from the last sanctuary. Souls can work without a map because levels are linear enough, and 3D landmarks help you find your way. But without a map in this game, I was frequently lost, and constantly wondering which of the many dark, dingy hallways I was in this time. And combat can feel very uneven, particularly when some bosses and enemies just knock you down and hit you over and over again before you can get back up.

Ignore all of the 0s, 1s and 2s. This is a beautiful game, and a great showpiece for the power of next-gen consoles. But while this game is very visually appealing, unfortunately it remains the worst of the Soulsborne-style games. This game features levels that are interesting and engaging your first few times through. The problem is that they are incredibly punishing marathons and feature few to no shortcuts. So you will die a million times, and getting through the levels becomes a tedious chore. And then, for some reason, most bosses are easier than the levels that preceded them. Thankfully, FromSoftware reversed this trend for the rest of the Soulsborne games. Levels can be challenging, but you unlock shortcuts that are much more respectful of your time. The bosses in those games are often very challenging, but each death means usually just a short walk back to the boss.

An awesome premise that is unfortunately ruined by unforgivable bugs and glitches. Despite losing much of my progress over and over and over again, I powered through for about 20-30 hours. I finally had to put it down after a major bug caused me to lose much of what I had built. And there are serious issues in the game design itself for solo players causing you to need to dedicate 100s of hours to assembling all the materials necessary to get to the top of the tech chain and assemble a collection of top dinos. Not very respectful of players' time. I hope they fix all of the above for the sequel.

So good. Can't believe it took me until 2020 to play this game. It nails just about every aspect of the Batman experience: gliding from rooftop to rooftop, racing around Gotham in the Batmobile, taking down thugs and supervillains, and working like the detective he's supposed to be. The entire experience feels very cinematic, and the developers clearly understand the value of freshness and continually surprising players. So many open world games are littered with pointless identical fetch quests, or even main missions that consist of "go here, fight, go here, fight" but Arkham Knight is so varied and really does justice to the entirety of the Batman world. I don't really understand the Batmobile complaints. Is it a little overused? Sure. But it's also fun as hell. You can launch yourself out of the thing 100ft into the air? Launch into an attack? Shoot the thing off a ramp and soar through the air? You summon the thing and it shows up pretty much immediately, and then it allows for super-fast travel? That's traversal done right. And there's plenty of Batmobile content that can be skipped if you're just not into it. What an awesome experience. I highly recommend it! I can be a stickler for modern mechanics and graphics, and this thing has aged very well.

This game is a tremendous bummer. I'm not a very critical gamer, and I love Soulslikes. Unfortunately, I could barely get through the first few hours of this game before having to put it down. The frame rate is all over the place, making the visual experience very jarring, and it's full of bugs. You would think it would have been properly patched in the 6 years since release. The aesthetics initially seem to be right on, but eventually you realize it's all sort of generic medieval fantasy and lacking in specificity. For some reason, your character moves like a sloth, even if you have the lightest armor, best agility, and quickest weapons. Many of your opponents don't have this limitation, so watch them dance around you as you roll in slow motion only to get whacked and knocked down for 10 minutes. The UI is an ugly mess, and once you realize how underwhelming the magic and gear offerings are, you're left without much reason to continue. Do yourself a big favor and play any of the Dark Souls games instead. Or if you've played all those, go for Nioh/Nioh 2.