TheFrog

I was hungry for some old-style space combat. Unfortunately, this game plays worse than Wing Commander, you just need to point your reticle in the general direction of the enemy and let aim assist do the rest (you can also press a key in combat and the ship will automatically pursuit the enemy for you, but I REFUSE to do it - might as well let the PC play by itself). Not that you would go very far without aim assist, because of the insane aerobatics the AI pulls, and especially because of balance. Instead of forcing you to carefully make every shot count, they give you auto aim and make you fight at least five enemy ships at a time, all of them spamming missiles one after the other. I'm pretty sure a single mission had me take out at least thirty enemies, including the random encounters on the way between waypoints. Especially bad are those instances where you reach your third mission goal (scan something, pick up special cargo, etc.) only to have five or six enemy ships instantly MATERIALIZE right behind you, taking out all of your shields in less than one second. No tactics, just point towards an enemy and try to take it out as fast as possible. No planning a careful approach: enemies can instantly materialize anywhere. Ship upgrade? Yes, but pretty disappointing overall, especially since the enemies level up at least as fast as you. While their ships have outwardly remained the same, they take more shots before exploding now than they did at the start, and my firepower is 7-8 times as much. So there is absolutely no feeling of growing, improving, you actually become comparatively weaker the more you upgrade your ship. Compare this to the Starpoint Gemini approach, where you start with a very small ship and have to carefully avoid combat with most enemies, but as you improve, you capture bigger and better ships and eventually can duke it out with the strongest. Better play something else, like the X games or the old Descent Freespace.

Nice and interesting game, I liked playing it. The story is kinda meh and the cutscenes drag on forever, especially when the main opponent keeps babbling slowly for hours on end. The characters are nothing to write home about. But this is an action game, so how does it fare in terms of gameplay? Well, it's very old school, think Doom with some twists. You have to move quickly, shoot quickly and little else. You have three different magic attacks (roughly equivalent to pistol, shotgun and grenade) and a bow. In addition to these, you can use special talismans when in tight spots and block enemy hits; perfect blocks completely nullify damage and sometimes bounce back enemy attacks at them. Finally, you have a sort of rage meter, that gives you half a minute or so of super powers. Every now and then, the game will cage you in a round arena and make you confront waves of enemies or tough bosses. Everything happens at point blank or little more. It's not bad, but it also leaves very little room for strategy, and repetition is excessive. You move through the city on foot, but also have limited soaring capabilities that allow you to travel on rooftops, and can move from building to building almost freely you get the requisite ability. My main gripe is the fact that the difficulty spike between normal and hard difficulty is HUGE. I started the game on hard and kept on for more than 50%, then I realized it was killing my fun. Eventually switched to normal and completed the game. On normal, even bosses pose no threat, I don't think I've died once. The action is fun: you use block a lot, move quickly, dodge and hit savagely, and just eat or drink something if your health gets low. You can just avoid using talismans. On hard, it takes dozens of hits to down even the weakest enemies, they barely get staggered at all and, more importantly, even a minor hit will drain a huge amount of your health. I also think that the special ability which allows you to regain ammo by punching enemies, yields half its normal boon. This means that even common enemies are extremely dangerous, and when they attack in groups, they become deadly. Three shine dancers attacking together on the rooftops, for example, WILL kill you, unless you use your special rage attack. If you are fine dropping the more nuanced approach of modern shooters like Far Cry, and are down for some fast and furious close range combat, you can have fun with this game.

I'm kind of enjoying the combat in this title. It's more chaotic and less precise than in a souls-like game, but still gripping and more than enjoyable, it never devolves to plain button mashing. You have a lot of different techniques at your disposal, and different situations force you to adapt your strategy. I should mention I'm playing on normal difficulty instead of hard, because I wanted to relax a bit, and the game is usually very easy at this level. The story is not bad, for a videogame, but the huge problem is the way it's told. It's like the developers wanted to create an anime, not a videogame, so they might let you play for a while, and then force you to endure half an hour of terrible dialogs. And it's not really cutscenes either, since 99% of the "animation" boils down to drawing the face of the character currently speaking, and only moving his/her mouth and occasionally the eyelids. So, in the end, it's more like a radio drama than an animated feature, and oh my god, how long do the characters keep droning on and on and on! Do the optional bonding encounters, to improve your team's abilities, and it's more pointless dialogue. If it were more concise and poignant, it might work; there have been games able to hook me up with dialog in the past. In this case, it's just so diluted that I've stopped listening to the decent (*) voice acting and just click through each line, once I've read the subtitles. Also, I dislike the characters. There is an opponent repeatedly trying to kill the main character, and does he react in the rational way, i.e. snuffing the opponent once and for all, after defeating them? But of course not, so the situation repeats over and over, with the MC never even getting annoyed at the attempts on his life. That's stupid. (*) One unforgivable thing related to voice acting is using an adult voice talent to voice a child. It only happens during a few sections but it's creepy, it's obvious that's an adult constraining his throat, it ****.

So the Far Cry franchise has gone woke, too. Great, scrap another one. As much as women like to demand representation in armed forces throughout the world, the war in Ukraine has displayed the harsh reality: in case of danger, men (in that case, up to the age of sixty) are drafted, women are free to run with their tails between their legs. And the law in the whole Western world is the same. Feminists never demanded for women to be included in selective draft, they want the glory but not the risk. Please stop depicting all these courageous warrior women who do their best, along with drunk, ineffective, worthless men. MEN fight wars, all the more so when it's a defense war against an overpowering enemy and selective draft is enacted. Women make up a tiny portion of the combat force, and are way less effective in infantry (and several other) roles. If I ever see women clamoring to be included in selective service, and obtaining it, I'll change my mind.

The game is like all past Piranha Bytes offerings in the past fifteen years or so. You begin as a wimp who can barely wield a weapon, SLOWLY build up your character, in a world where every enemy is much stronger than you. At some point, you manage to join a faction, which finally allows you to develop some really powerful abilities, and eventually you are strong enough to confront even the strongest enemies. Unfortunately, the combat system is possibly the worst I’ve ever seen. In any game. Characters move as through molasses; enemy movement harks back from the last century. I’m positive I’ve seen games from the 90s with much better combat animations. Reading their stance to decide when to parry or dodge, is completely random: they twitch and turn, but apparently some of these erratic movements count as attacks; you only realize it because your health drops to zero and you die. Since all creatures can kill you in two hits, even combat against minor enemies becomes a deadly danger (I'm playing on hard). Hitboxes that are so glitched as to be almost funny: an axe may cut the air one full meter away from you, and you still get the damage. Also, you can lock onto enemies, which helps in attacking and avoiding damage - that is, until the game decides you lose your lock for some reason: bam! You dodge the wrong way and die. Earlier today, I was fascinated and incredulous, as I watched my cyborg companion utterly failing to land a single hit against a tough enemy. The AI was broken, like most other things in this game, and he kept freezing, looking at the enemy without doing anything, even though I tried to interpose him between me and the attacker. When he did decide to attack, he regularly missed, because his attacks were too slow to ever connect. Essentially, I was alone – but fear not, he’s not the only companion available. At the moment, I have two more. A fire mage, whose slow fireballs rarely hit anything, and a small robot, whose sniper shots deal relatively low damage, but thankfully usually hit the intended target. But does he fly out of enemy range? Of course not, he usually remains where they can hit him with melee weapons. Save often! There is an auto save feature, but it doesn't work 90% of the time. Everything in this game costs in-game money, even level ups. Money is hard to come by; the best renewable source of income is trophies from monsters, but you need to attain the highest level in this ability, and this can only happen late in the game. So, for now, I have to grind like crazy to afford anything, while the game designers thought it fine to include stupid missions where the quest giver gives you money to buy something, but the actual price turns out to be much higher. Pure genius. Dialogs are boring and badly written. Even when discussing something straightforward, NPCs tend to antagonize you and ramble on and on, with nonsensical lines that only induce sleepiness. The temptation to right-click through the voice acting is strong. NPC attitude is inconsistent as well. The first companion you encounter, wants you to butcher a party of invaders. Makes sense, no problem (apart from the fact that you are WAY too weak to do that, and she won’t join forces with you until you do). Later on, I encounter a hiding alchemist, whose bodyguards have been killed by an outlaw. He asks me to deal with said outlaw, but if I accept to kill the murderer, the warmongering mage doesn’t like it, she is suddenly averse to violence. Fast forward a bit, and she becomes bloodthirsty again, asking me to kill someone for a minor slip. Duh. On the positive side, the jetpack is fun, especially after you upgrade it with sprint jets, which allow you to zoom over the terrain like a missile. I really like the environment and the graphics, it’s a relaxing world, at least if you forget all the monsters that want to eat you. And character growth is satisfying. This keeps me playing, at least for now, but really: both the Gothic and the Risen series had better combat and equally satisfying character progression. I preordered this game after liking the first Elex in spite of its shortcomings, but I won’t certainly preorder a third one, if it ever comes out. They NEED to fix combat; as things are, it's simply atrocious.

I enjoyed the game for quite a while. I like combat against normal enemies, and the game gives you a lot of options to confront them. They hit hard but not SO hard, and elixirs are easy to find on fallen enemies. Unfortunately, weapons are VERY unbalanced. For example, with an agility/ninjutsu build, the most logical thing would be to go kusarigama, right? Wrong. Try out the tonfa, and you'll realize that most other weapons won't even come close to its effectiveness. Kusarigama is terrible at blocking and has zilch stopping power with fast attacks, so, while you CAN use it, you'll usually make your life a lot more difficult. Still, at times certain weapons prove handy against certain enemies, even if your build is not geared towards their use. The kusa is great at taking out oni, given that it's power attack takes off their horns. Also, in duels against humans, its huge range sometimes proves very beneficial. Trying every weapon out is good. You'll find lots of equipment items with different stats and perks. You can spend time and resources to tweak them, looking for the perfect combination... then you realize it's pointless, as they'll be obsolete in a few levels and the level of grind is insane. And mostly, you end up with negligible changes to your stats, hardly worth all the hassle. A 2% increase in damage when your health is low? Wow, this is *so* gonna change my view of the world! Then come the bosses. I usually hate bosses, but this game has some very strange difficulty spikes. Some bosses can be beaten with just a few attempts, you only need to memorize their attack patterns and devise a good strategy, while others are incredibly strong and have no weak points, so you just keep at it until you get lucky. For example, I even managed to beat one on my very first attempt - and then, the next one (Shibata Katsuie) had me ragequit after dozens of attempts. And then, the next day, I retried and somehow managed it - but still consider it a chance thing, even though my dodging DID improve. You can summon friendly NPCs to help you out, but that's not how I want to play the game. I feel you should have a fair chance to beat every level on your own. Other super annoying bosses are the bull spider and the two final encounters with the main opponent. Also, duels against human opponents are terrible. The opponent has a huge amount of HP and ten times your ki. Quite often, it's also not staggered by your hits so, even though you managed to get your attack in first, you still get hurt for 35% of your HP, versus 1% of his own. The dojo duels especially, are something I truly loathed, and ended up only completing the tonfa one; if you want to get new weapon skills, you have to do a lot of these, and they take away all your ninjutsu and magic techniques. As for the duel missions, I usually take them only after I'm 50% over their suggested level. After the opponent gets down to 50% health, they usually start using infinite special attacks that can reach you anywhere and reduce you to mincemeat. You have lots of special techniques you can learn, but they are rarely worth it. Parrying is unreliable, for example, and even when successful, it doesn't give you much of an advantage, whereas it can get you seriously hurt if you mistime it. I eventually completed the game, but was pretty fed up with it by then. I relied on grinding to increase my level and make things a bit easier, but saw many tombs of much lower level players, proving that the best out there can win even against overpowering enemies. Grinding is just one option. TL;DR - I enjoyed the game. I like the slow but sure progression through each level, and those thrilling moments like when I had to dispatch several strong enemies in the demon realm, are worth it. I can say that there are no really unfair fights mid-level, and you have a lot of strategies at your disposal. Bosses, on the other hand, vary from very easy to super frustrating, and they were, together with duels, the worst part of the game for me.

Another terrible RPG from Spiders. After playing "The Technomancer", my expectations were pretty low, and in fact only bought this one after its price dropped to about 15 euros. Still too much. It's an old school game, with discrete levels in place of a continuous open world; in itself, that's not bad and the levels are large enough, but the graphics are definitely meh, and the yellowish tint doesn't help its visuals. From the very start, the adjective summing up my impressions has been "clunky". Movement, quest structure, the dialogs... it all feels like a low budget C-movie. What really buries any chance of enjoyment is combat. I picked a mage and decided to play, as I almost always do, on hard difficulty. Combat consists of facing 4-5 enemies attacking nonstop, since the rest of your team usually gets KO'ed in about 5 seconds. But hey, cross an invisible line a small distance from where you started and the enemies instantly recover 100% energy, sheathe their weapons and return to their starting point, while your sidekicks also revive. There is a parrying mechanic which works well against humans, but fails miserably on beasts, who have no clear attack pattern. Also, when facing two or three enemies at a time, parrying suddenly loses relevance. A magical dodge/teleport skill transports you in the middle of an enemy group, rather than where you are pointing. In short, combat ****. Badly. Oh wait, the rest does too. Cliched characters, cringeworthy dialog, embarrassingly stupid quests, super ultra bland skill tree. While most RPGs are guilty of one or two of the above faults, Greedfall greedily embraces each and every one, maybe that's where the name comes from.

I really liked FCND as a mindless shooter with style, just like the other FCs. Playing with different guns, using stealth or all-out assault, teaming up with different companions. Growing, upgrading stuff, getting better and more powerful guns. Not worth the full price at launch, but definitely worth the 15 bucks I paid years later. Unfortunately, there is also a lot not to like, here. The scenery is too fuchsia, courtesy of the mutant flowers spawning everywhere. Driving cars is a chore, given that your eyes are positioned on a level with the cockpit, preventing you from seeing where you are going – just use 3rd person vehicles, it’s much better. Fire is annoying, as is fishing. Certain weapons are great, other are kind of pointless. Most of all, I hated most story missions. I know it’s a FC trademark, but I’m sick&tired of being stripped of all weapons and having to perform some highly unlikely escape sequence. The game forces certain idiotic decisions on you, putting you at the mercy of your enemies again and again. The final confrontation with the main antagonists gives new meaning to the term “bullet sponge”. Tank-resistant enemies with super-powered weapons (a flame thrower on steroids – of course the enemy is fireproof). You are forced to fight blind, while enemies can see perfectly well through the smoke. Many enemies help out the main opponents, but most of all, what I really hated the most, is a infinite sequence of guard dogs attacking you every few seconds, preventing you from landing the hundreds of hits you need to take the sponge down. I don’t like games that are too easy, and FCND is ok on the difficult setting. This battle, on the other hand, did not make me feel powerful but rather just a chump, like a fly fighting King Kong. Not impossibly difficult, mind me, nowhere near souls boss-difficult, but still very annoying. All in all, the game is ok. I had fun taking and retaking the various outposts and unlocking weapons and equipment. After all, it’s what every FC does; in this case, the map is smaller and the story less refined, but still worth a go, at a reduced price.

I played FF7 Remake thanks to its inclusion in the PS Plus program. I initially appreciated it more than I had expected, but after a while, I started realizing that something was very wrong. In short, you get high production values but a very poor JRPG, with severely limited scope and derivative narration. The graphics revamp is obviously welcome, with the 3D environments looking much better than the original 2D images, except when you see distant, pixellated panoramas. The semi-interactive battle system is more immersive than the original, turn-based active time battle. On the other hand, I quickly realized that turn-based strategy goes down the drain. Almost any enemy attack will stagger you, preventing you to complete any action, which means that casters like Aerith are heavily impaired when fighting multiple enemies. Say your team gets knocked out and your healer is the last man standing: chances are it's game over because she'll never manage to pull off a resurrection spell, with enemies concentrating on her. Also, if you can control one character at a time, team AI for the other two should be good. Here it’s abysmal, with your teammates doing practically nothing and getting hurt all the time. Using a fighter is some fun, but not as much as it could be. You have a dodge move that is essentially useless, your combos cannot be cancelled and block has a huge delay. All in all, it's totally unresponsive, preventing any fast action from working. Finally, stunlock is definitely a thing with certain enemies. As an action melee game, FF7R fails miserably. This is not its worst problem. The main issue is The Hobbit effect. What was once a very special game with a tightly knit story, relatable characters and a really special feel, has been artificially inflated to transform it into a 3-game epic, injecting filler content everywhere, and it suffers from the transformation. The original FF7 started exactly like this game: you are in Midgar City, battling the evil Shinra Corporation, and think you have it all figured out. After they pull a certain, horrible move, the perspective suddenly changes completely, the real game begins, the scope becomes huge and you realize you had only scratched the surface so far. In FF7R there is no such epiphany because the first game doesn’t get out of the small setup, which results in a very, very small game world and mundane side quests. The story also suffers. In FF7, you could talk to a lot of people, and while most chatter was just that, sometimes you could get glimpses of background stories going on, lots of hidden gems. It’s kind of difficult to explain, but a certain character takes a liking to Cloud from the very start. In FF7, you had very few chances to actually interact with her, and yet these interactions were poignant, because my imagination would reconstruct what was left unsaid. In FF7R, it’s all spelled out loud, and becomes a badly written, run of the mill semi-romance of no consequence. You get very, very few instances where you can decide what Cloud says. In FF7 you had a lot; many did not have real story consequences, but they were still part of what “my” Cloud was, they were role-playing in my view. Here, you just go through fixed dialogs 99% of the time. Other things I didn’t enjoy: - Bad, over the top acting. Stupid, evil laughter worked when it was text, irks when it’s voice. - Way too many special enemies. May be ok if you like bosses, but really, there are apparently more unique enemies than normal ones. - This is not Devil May Cry. Who figured that an idiotic, bombastic, superpowered, emo badass like Roche would fit in? - The ending. Bloody hell, talk about making it five times as long as it should have been! It’s a putrid slog through annoying, unsatisfying, inconclusive fights that drag on forever. All in all, I’m glad I didn’t pay for the game.

Excessive difficulty makes the experience frustrating, even with the many checkpoints. Having to jump between several, double-shielded enemies means that one stray bullet will often get you even if you keep moving and make no obvious mistakes. Vertical surfaces are often placed at near 180 degrees, so that it’s extremely difficult to jump the right way to stay in the air, especially since controls are not precise enough. Even very small areas may take one hour to traverse and cause you to die dozens of times. Getting bored. At times the game does shine and shows you what it could have been, but sadistic difficulty spikes are there to punish the player. Controlling jumps is almost impossible, so when you have a corridor with extremely distant side walls that you can only reach by perfect direction and timing as it is, and the designers also put in electrified surfaces that can only be deactivated by hitting them while you jump, controlling both aim and direction independently, since they’ll activate again in three seconds, it becomes an exercise in pure frustration. With a mouse, maybe it would be possible, but with a controller it’s simply too much, instant reload or not.

A fun shooter with a lot of variety in terms of weapon customization and special abilities. The action is frantic, forcing you to move quickly and never stop, rather than just take cover and shoot enemies with ease. Also, no stealth to speak of. Unfortunately it's also very shallow. No real story, no interesting characters and the world setup is bare bones. I must say I enjoyed the last two Far Cry games a lot more. I'm glad I could play it for free on Epic, I wouldn't have wanted to pay full price for a game like this.

I was so worried of the negative reviews that I hesitated to play the game until some major patch, although I had preordered it an age ago. Well, my doubts were unfounded. I understand the pain of console-only gamers, but on an a good PC, the game runs great and looks better. There have been many city-based open world games by now, but none was able to create a city like this one, with its claustrophobic vertical development and omnipresent advertising. The gameplay is based on sandbox variety. You can choose a huge number of specializations for your characters, both in terms of abilities and toolset. You could be a street samurai using weapons to solve every situations, for example, but even so, which class of weapon will you specialize in? Pistols, rifles, shotguns, blades? And, in the case of firearms, will you pick power, tech or smart, each with its own defining characteristic? Will you give up your cyberdeck in favor of a bullet time augmentation? Or, will you use some stealth and cyber warfare to whittle down your enemies, before you jump in for the kill? What physical augmentations will you choose? As much as I like the gameplay, though, I really like cyberpunk as a genre, and I consider "Neuromancer" to be the best cyberpunk novel ever written - or at least the best one I've ever read. Its influence on the world, on the vibe and on the characters is undeniable. Keanu Reeves' Johnny shares his most evident characteristic with an important character of the book. The Afterlife night club would feel right at home in Chiba City. Most of all, the long sequence that introduces you to the main body of the game has you plan and prepare for the heist of the century and, while you get little choice in how the situation develops there, it made me felt like I was living that favorite novel of mine. If you are the kind of gamer that skips dialogues to jump to the action quickly, you'll probably find these sections boring. For me, they are what differentiate this game from the competition, together with the extreme care put in every detail. This might be my GOTY 2020, I laugh in the face of TLOU and its woke tirades. That said, a lot of complaints are well founded. The way police alerts are implemented is embarrassing. Driving AI is almost nonexistent. The racing and boxing side quests are shallow and really badly implemented. You'll probably be better off if you can wait until some significant patch to improve things.

I initially loved this game and thought I would not be able to get enough of it. The graphics are simply breathtaking and the setting possibly the most beautiful ever, snapshots of the screen are better than any photo I've taken in real life. Combat is fast-paced and challenging, at least in the beginning, and who doesn't love the samurai, their absolute courage and dedication? Unfortunately I've spent a bit too much going around in search of fox dens, pillars of honor and sashimono banners, and now every mission feels the same. Combat is still fun, especially since I give up most artificial advantages. No assassinations, no blowgun, no armor. Much more fun played the samurai way. On the other hand, I've grown more and more bored with Jin, the protagonist, and the dialogues in the game. He's not a samurai, or at least he doesn't behave like one. He's a western idealized white knight that doesn't belong in medieval Japan, treating every servant, merchant, peasant or thief like a friend and an equal. I guess this decision was meant to let the player identify with him, but it's anachronistic. Also, there's unfortunately no secondary mission that goes beyond banality. Mongols kill a family, you find injured wife. Wife beseeches you to save abducted husband, just before dying. You save husband, he mourns wife. You meet frightened peasants: "We are from XYZ Village, the Mongols have killed everyone". You kill Mongols, free village, people return. You find disheartened wench: "Oh Lord Sakai, father was abducted by kappa!". You search for the killer "demons", obviously find bandits instead. You kill bandits, tell daughter to go to safe house, "Thank you Lord Sakai", bye bye. Really mundane stuff; while it's true that most games give you this kind of situation, dialogues here are almost cringeworthy in their linearity. Moreover, there's an excessive female presence, as expected. The first character you encounter is Yuna, a female thief who walks around with a katana (wouldn't that be punishable by death?) and protects her weak brother. You soon meet Lady Adachi, a perfect female samurai who fears nothing and never falters, and is your companion in a side quest branch where you help her avenge her family. ALL RIGHT, I guess that female warriors are present in Japanese legends, so I can live with that, at least the game does not pretend they were fighting wars together with men. On the other hand, the male counterpart to Lady Adachi, a disgruntled master archer, is obviously an oaf and most definitely at fault for his (female) pupil's betrayal. Then you are following the tracks of a murderer and Jin goes: "THEY have gone this way". I honestly find it hard to believe that a 13th Century samurai would use the politically correct, non-gendered plural for ONE murderer. Finally, when a mission saw Lady Adachi and Jin track and kill a treacherous wife beater, it was really too much for me. TL;DR - Supremely beautiful game that is fun to play but disrespectful to its setting. Boring dialogues, unlikely protagonist. Injects political correctness and western values into the samurai society, but is still less obnoxiously feminist than most titles nowadays.

Strangely likable little game. A brief, RPGish story of heroism and courage with battles based on a team of up to four heroes against wave after wave of enemy grunts or, occasionally, boss enemies. The graphics are good, if very simple. At least, I like the overall design and most characters (apart from the female mage, whose visage is involuntarily more deformed than the evil, monstrous opponent's). The story is ok, if not breathtaking and the game is pretty short, but that's also fine because I never found the gameplay very satisfying, I would have probably abandoned it if it had been much longer. Different characters have different special moves and here we already have a negative note. A lot of abilities seem to do very little, not to mention that the charging time often means they miss on frantic, fast-moving battlefields. On the other hand, two-handed weapon wielding characters have an attack that sweeps enemy away and makes them fall, ripe for a one shot kill. Place one such character on a chokepoint, and the battle is won. Worse than this is the camera. You cannot pan over the battlefield, the camera is centered on the character you have currently selected. Unfortunately, if he's next to a wall, this means you can only see the floor around him/her, as the camera rises up and looks directly down. There are a lot of other situations where you are fighting it more than you are the enemy, and that's a shame. Then characters bump into each other when moving, so it's really a complete pain controlling them in narrow spaces, of which there's a lot. It would even make sense, but they still seem unable to move in large, open spaces without trying to move their companions instead of just avoiding them. Finally, some characters have wide attacks that also hit allies standing nearby. The lack of a "Hold position" command means that you spend half the time positioning the other heroes away from the wide-hitting ones, since they obey your order and then immediately move back to the place they were before. It's maddening. Add to this that inventory is ultra-super simplified and there is very little actual variety in battles. I was actually happy to see the end titles appear, after a dragged-on final sequence of battles, and that's not a good sign. You could have some fun on this cute game, but it's difficult to recommend spending more than a handful of euros or dollars, when there are games out there that are much better refined, easily offer 50 times the material and by now also cost very little. Oh, I really really liked the end song by Blind Guardian, "Children Of The Smith".

Gears Of Woke 5: yet another game with kickass women and manservants. What could possibly go wrong? And so another one of the few remaining non-feminized game series goes down the drain.

EDIT: Nearly three years later, I picked up Elex again after trying the somewhat similar (but much, much worse) Outward. To my surprise, after finally enduring one of the most cringe-inducing quests ever and managing to enter the cleric faction, the game started to pick up momentum and hasn't let me down yet. Well, I did change the difficulty level to normal along the way, which makes the game more playable and enjoyable. The world is huge (I hadn't fully realized the scope of it in my first run) and filled with many little secrets and places to explore. Combat becomes better once you reach a level that allows you to finally fight on par with most enemies. I got a cleric weapon that is a huge help in dealing with groups, bought a flamethrower, whose stagger effect is a huge help against tough enemies, and can now move almost everywhere in the map, although there are enemies I'd still rather avoid. I have started to like the graphics more, especially since the environment is pleasant and varied. Music is ok. Controls and animations are still ****, though. What I really hate the most is the fact that it often takes several seconds for your character to start sprinting, after you hit the corresponding key, which still results in me dying pretty often. Another issue is the hit box of the flamethrower. Quite often your bullet will fly right through an enemy, therefore failing to damage and stagger it. If it's a heavy, you're often toast. What about my companion, who bluntly ignores a charging horde until one hit lands on me? But then I mix my PSI abilities with the flamethrower and the good ole sword and shield to take down a group of enemies. Or control aggro so that between me and my companion, we take down a heavy enemy without using ranged weapons, by alternating melee strikes. Or manage to take down a behemoth by using the terrain as a cover. And I forgive the game its many flaws. In terms of story, characters and quest, it's rather poor. I think I'd like it better if there was a likable faction you can join, but all of them are designed to be hated. Where it works very well is in combat (after level 12 or so) and exploration. If you can find this game at a bargain price, you might end up enjoying it. Original, negative review: I really wanted to like this game, as I'm a long time fan of Piranha Byte, but I simply cannot. Even ignoring the ten year old graphics, the abysmal dialogues and the clunkiest combat animations this side of the galaxy, the game remains terrible. I tend to like difficult games, for example I really enjoyed Nioh. The character there responded instantly to controller input though, making hard challenges rewarding and fun. In Elex, on the other hand, you move a wooden character who moves veeery slowly and is instantly exhausted, every single encounter is a major PITA. Maybe my mistake was to choose the "difficult" level, but at level 8 my weapon DID NOT DAMAGE AT ALL enemies near my level (no skull next to their name). Level 9, better weapon, now I can deal some minor damage to basic critters that ravage me any time they hit. Considering that they are much faster, can hit several times in a row while I'm exhausted if I so much as perform one roll and one light attack, I still have to rely completely on my follower to deal any damage, and I'm really fed up with this. Did they playtest the game before release? Is "normal" the only level one is supposed to play? Did they not realize just how bad the combat system is, with second-long lags between one keypress and the corresponding move? Whatever the answers, I really cannot recommend Elex to anyone.

I've had a love/hate relationships for Souls-like games, starting with the first one, Demon's Souls. The mechanics keep me enthralled, I generally like the combat and the technical setup of your character, but the extreme - and often cheap - difficulty tends to drive me crazy, especially when it comes to boss fights. The Surge 2 is a Souls-LITE game: whereas most such games nowadays tend to veer towards excessive difficulty (hint: people lauding the fact it took them hours and hours to beat a boss in Sekiro), TS2 gives you a challenge that you can generally win, as long as you are careful. I'm not saying it's too easy: there are definitely areas where you are at serious risk, for example where multiple stagger rifle-wielding policemen are around, but the huge difference is that healing is abundant. By hitting enemies, you recharge health injections, the you can then use without needing to suspend combat, which means that there's a lot of room for small mistakes. You usually die when fighting multiple enemies, and you can often avoid just that with a bit of careful planning. I love drawing my own map, area by area, and seeing previously inaccessible areas unlock once I get a new power. I love the amount of customization you can put in your gear. You cut limbs from enemies and acquire new blueprints for those part you cut off, plus the materials to build them There are dozens of different armor sets in three flavors (predictably: light, medium and heavy) and lots of weapons, which varies wildly in stats and bonuses, some of them being especially suited for certain areas or certain enemies. There are also a lot of different implants, power ups you can install which give additional bonuses. They may make you more resistant to poison, or tell you the direction of an incoming attack, so that you can more easily use a directional parry, which is strong to begin with but can be further enhanced by using specific implants. You can customize your experience based on how you like to play; for example, I favor the light and fast attacks of double rigged weapons, but sometimes pick a more powerful single handed weapon with extra reach, depending on the situation. Different weapon classes have not only different stats but also very different combos, which allows you a lot of flexibility in taking down your enemies. When I'm grinding enemies for parts, I use an implant that reduces my energy buildup but doubles the limb yield; when exploring new areas, I use sturdy, protective armor and defensive implants. The UI helps you out, by allowing you to set up three different setups and switching among them in an instant. You can also mark several weapons as favorites and rapidly cycle among them. The same goes for drone weapons - yes, because you also gain a drone early in the game, acting as your somewhat limited ranged weapon. On the other hand, you can also acquire an add-on that attracts human-sized enemies, staggering them for a couple of seconds. There's really a lot to say about the technical aspects of this game and you aren't forced to pick the absolutely most efficient build, you are free to experiment and enjoy. This is much more Jedi Fallen Order than Dark Souls here, and if you like the combat but not the cheap shots or the excruciating difficulty of the latter, you can't go wrong. The only drawbacks are some technical imperfections: the game sometimes crashes to desktop and certain armor sets which sport flowing robes have glitchy animations. Everything else is mostly fine with me; levels load fast, graphics are good enough, music is ok. Just finished the game. I had buffed up for the final fight, abandoning my favorite light armor and double rigged weps in favor of a much sturdier MG Cerberus heavy armor and the deadly Soul Edge - pardon, sword - from Capt. Cervantes. Turns out that the final level 10 mobs you encounter shortly before that fight, are MUCH more dangerous than the boss himself, who posed very little threat to my uber warrior. That's how i like it, I prefer a constant challenge to excruciating and unfair boss fights.

Playing the game in Sep 2020, so in a very stable state. EDIT: Re-evaluated the game after a few days. Much better to play once I realized that raids are meant to be conducted using only a light and fast mech with jump jets. They are hit and miss, it's easy to die, but at least they provide some reputation and minimal pay for a very short mission duration. Demolitions are best avoided as infinite enemy respawn is stupid, and the excuse "You can't expect to level a city with no reaction" is lame: there are no reinforcements when YOU defend a city! Assassinations are possibly the missions I like best. Warzones are ok, just camp far from the beacon and you'll have some time to snipe enemies as they converge on you. Maximize armor and tinker with weapons. For example, an Archer is MUCH better if you ditch LRM20s in favor of lighter LRM15s, using the extra load for heat sinks (just don't expect the AI to be able to use them effectively). Try different mech configurations. For example, the Hero Thunderbolt is super powerful and can take down heavier mechs thanks to its barrage of medium lasers. Some 'mechs play well in your hands but fail miserably when the AI pilots them, and vice versa. Experiment. Getting more and more assault mechs, level 9 missions are currently paying well. Yes, the game has serious flaws, but it's also fun as hell. Original review: I played most Mechwarrior games, with MW2 being my favourite in terms of gameplay. MW5 goes back to the roots with randomized missions, very little room for 'mech customization and a merciless, dog eat dog economy. Graphics are good, destructible buildings are a pleasure to blow up and there are moments where it's pure joy. Aiming your lasers at the main weapon of an enemy 'mech and firing them all at once, declawing it, then turning to face another enemy, leaving the finishing blow for later, while your squad mates provide cover. Unfortunately, everything people complain about is true. Maps are small, the AI is abysmal, radar is a joke, enemies spawn right next to you and, after a certain notoriety level, the game becomes stupidly unplayable. Let me fast forward to notoriety level 8, where playing the game became really a chore for me. I signed up for a raid mission, for a pay of about 500K. Being a hero to the faction, I got some extra haggling points, which I invested mainly in salvage shares and secondly in damage insurance. Along this mission I and my three squadmates destroyed 13 medium and heavy enemy 'mechs, along with 82 miscellaneous enemy units. Yes, NINETY-FIVE enemies total, not to mention the ones I couldn't destroy because I was barely able to make it to the extraction point alive. Only much later I realized that I had lost one of my best pilots, who couldn't eject in time, ad at that point it was too late to reload without losing a lot of progress. Maximizing a pilot's abilities takes ages, and the ones you recruit start pretty low. So, I have damage for more than two million bucks, without counting the pilot, but insurance and pay, combined, go barely over one million. If I repair my mechs in a combat zone, I'll also pay 50% extra, otherwise I have to spend several hundred thousand buck to go to the nearest industrial hub and come back. My saving grace is the 'mech I can salvage using my shares. A nice Thunderbolt, worth a hefty price - except, if I sell it, I get just 50% of its value. So I did end up gaining something (except it doesn't even begin to compensate the loss of the pilot), but this was after several attempts and with continuous super ultra careful managing of my squadmates' positions, to prevent them from getting butchered due to their stupidity. Now, consider this: the faction that contracted me walks away with several salvaged mechs, worth millions each, for a total that is several times as much what they are paying me. They don't pay you, *you* are paying *them* for the privilege of fighting their war! If you were a privateer, with no payout but keeping all salvage for yourself, you'd earn several times as much. Having to face several times the strength of your team is stupid, when your squadmates have the same AI that animates the enemy. With four human players you could probably maximize specific role for 'mechs, using long range weapons to soften up targets from a distance, before moving in for the kill (or at least it would be if your radar worked a little more often), but with three AI morons that zero in on enemies when they have weapons perfectly suited for long range engagement, it becomes ultra frustrating. It appears that the designers have not listened to player feedback in the least, hence the Metacritic rating. It's such a pity because there would be so much to like in this game, if only they fixed at least the broken economy and reduced the enemy spawn a bit. They would get a bonus for avoiding to have enemies spawn right next to you and fixing the horrible radar.

What a fricking pity! I’ve bought this game thanks to a summer sale; being a fan, I would have bought it at full price hadn’t I known in advance of the super SJW attitude of Gearbox. First off, I disagree with most of what the negative reviews say about the gameplay. This is the best Borderlands in terms of shooting, thanks to improved weapon mechanics and wild design; I especially love the alternate function of many weapons. I like the fact that you cannot grow too attached to a weapon because it will become obsolete as you level up: change is good and equally good ones will come your way, keeping your experience varied. The main opponents are not as annoying as people would have you believe. On the other hand, it’s essentially the same as what came before. Get to an area, kill all the spawning mooks, then move on. No problem for me, as I love it, simple as it is. I’d give it a solid 9 if not for the rampant misandry. But then, at this point I’ve yet to see a female NPC that is a complete clown, like 90% of the male ones. Female NPC badasses I’ve met so far: Lilith, Ellie, Lorelei, Maya, Moxxi, Ava and also the female twin. Male badasses: Zer0. Notice something? And then comes a mission in which you have to kill one of Moxxi’s exes, Killavolt. His sin? Apparently, he disappointed her. It’s a stream of comments on how he's obnoxious and was no good in bed, minimally endowed, egotistical, overcompensating. You are also required to shoot him in his male parts, just to add offense to injury. Finally, after he is dead, you must hang a trophy of him to the toilet. Try to imagine what would happen if the genders were swapped and you were required to kill a woman who disappointed a man, with constants comments on how she was sexually inept and a total loser. The game would be trashed by all critics, there would be boycotts and worse. Well, if you don’t mind that and you like Borderlands humor and shooting, this game is great. Me, I can’t overlook Gearbox’s hatred of men, so it’s a middling score for me.

I find it stupid that people trash this game because of the Epic Game Store, as if Steam was a close friend of yours and you don't want any competition for Gabe Newell. The game is nice enough, has good graphics, detailed locations and some nice moments. Unfortunately, there are several elements that keep it from greatness. Graphics are good but not great, by far. The smallest mutant is a much greater threat than five or six human enemies armed to the teeth, and considering the excessive respawn, this means a whole lot of wasted ammo. Having characters speak with a bad English accent does not work for me. Dialogues are a pain, especially considering the frequent, long pauses between sentences, they prevent me from relating to the characters. A terribly annoying bear boss. Sections where you need a mask, with filters that burn up resources faster than a Gatling on full auto. TL;DR: Enjoyable but also flawed. Would be a 7, giving 8 to counterbalance Epic haters somewhat.

This is a fine game that gives you a huge sandbox where you blow up all kind of stuff. The story is just an excuse, the fun comes from gorgeous, absurd non-stop action. You shoot a fuel tank and it starts burning. Soldiers open fire on you and you tether two of them to balloons, sending them to their airborne fate. You mow down the rest with your trusty machine gun, since they are not dangerous enough to warrant unleashing one of your precious drones. The tank you shot explodes, and the shockwave makes a nearby missile launcher go crazy and discharge all of its missiles randomly. Things start to blow up, with explosive barrels adding to the mayhem. You tether to a building's wall and launch into the air, while all around you the world seems to erupt in flames. Your trusty, self-folding parachute slows your descent, allowing you to tether an enemy helicopter that has opened fire on you. Two seconds later, bye bye pilot, you are in control of the chopper and rain lead on the enemy reinforcements. Yes, none of it is remotely believable, but it's spectacular and a lot of fun. People criticize textures and models, but forget that this game does not have small levels that limit geometry. A bird's eye view of the map is always one second away, without frame rate drops or loading delays. If you think you can have a huge game world that morphs into super hi-res graphics the moment you look at something near you, I have a Star Citizen to sell you. I mean, I just played Days Gone and apart from the looong loading times, I would often end up in a zone of the map which the game engine hadn't finished loading yet, sometimes falling through the ground to my doom! JC4 handles its world beautifully and with no such delays. That said, I feel Just Cause 3 was indeed better. They tried to change the formula by adding different missions, but it's just as repetitive and somehow makes the experience worse. The intro of JC3 was smooth and bombastic, it made you wanna play the game. The intro of JC4 is essentially nonexistent. The new balloons make most of your weapons redundant against basic enemies, since they are deadlier and consume no ammo. Your old reusable explosives required you to jump into danger to place them, and were a better game device overall. Enemies used to have perfect aim, which was bad, but now cannot hit a barn from ten feet, which is just as excessive. Many small changes did not turn out as good as the designers hope, but I still recommend this game. If you've never played a JC before, though, go grab the 3, which you can probably buy for a pittance nowadays. Ah, as of April 2020, I must say that I found no major bugs, the developers must have solved them all by now.

I was fooled by all the positive reviews here, this game is pretty bad. Note: playing at difficulty just one notch over normal. Difficulty level cannot be changed later in the game, so you need to guess in advance what works for you. You play as an obnoxious character who despises almost everyone else, and cannot help but scoff, curse or use sarcasm every time someone says anything. Oh, and he's a disgruntled vet who's seen too much death in his day, talk about cliché. Since the world is full of zombies, named freakers, survivors tend to group in relatively safe camps. You reluctantly work for these camps hunting bandits, reducing zombie infestation and the like. You move around on a bike whose tank grants about 1 km range (seriously!). Later on, you can upgrade it to make things a little better, but it's the first bad call. You can find fuel in gas stations, fed checkpoints and some other locations, so you need to plan your trips around the ludicrous fuel consumption. So, you are happily riding towards your destination when you see a laser zeroing in on you? Too bad, one second later your bike is shot out from under you and you'll need to use 7 scrap units, out of a maximum of 10 you can carry, to fix it. Since scrap can be found randomly in certain vehicles and is also used to craft crossbow bolts and fix your melee weapon, this is another idiotic idea. Essentially: "Too bad, we are randomly taking out almost all of your resources, **** to be you". Then come the weapons. While enemies obviously have infinite ammo, the first rifle I acquired could carry all of 15 shots in reserve. It takes 4 or 5 shots to kill a zombie, so you do the math. You are forced to use headshots; a bullet time ability helps out to an extent, but this is another case of pure genius that completely ruins combat for me. You can get a sniper rifle with 5+1 shots, and again, only a headshot will take out an enemy in one. You expect to find ammo on the bodies of fallen enemies? Think again, not gonna happen unless you are using the exact same weapon as them (at least, I think this is it because I can find pistol ammo but not rifle ammo). Auto rifles make things a lot better. Even though they have the same damage rating as semiautos, they can carry three times as much ammunition or more, which begs the question: why keep semiaoutos in the game at all, then? Then it must be difficult to take out a camp full of bloodthirsty, drugged enemies, right? No, it's a piece of cake due to their idiotic behaviour and the absurd stealth mechanics, where magic bushes hide you like the shroud of invisibility, I very rarely die in this situation. Random encounters, on the other hand, are deadly. I was about to kill the last man in an enemy camp when EIGHT wolves came out of nowhere, and this is a very tough situation to survive. Fast melee enemies are infinitely more dangerous than poor shooters in this game, and eight of them? Bad mojo. Same when three super hard, super fast zombie wolves zero in on you, which happens all the time. So, what genius decided that random encounters should be much more of a challenge than all-out assaults? Hey, at least you get good loot, right? Nope. Don't expect to get anything when you kill someone. A zombie is worth a bounty of 5 credits, while a mid level weapon will cost at least 2000-something. A human will never yield equipment you can sell, so combat will never repay you of what you spend for ammo. This means you'll never buy ammo, relying instead on rare police cars or ammo canisters to get it free. The "no loot" approach is really bad, it makes any extra fight on the road to a mission an annoyance, rather than any fun. Weapon silencers only last for a few shots and you cannot carry replacements (it figures). So, when you open a car and find a rare oil filter, which is what silencers are made of in this game, can you discard a half-used one and get the new one instead? Of course not! You'd need to use it up by firing, therefore wasting precious ammo. By the way, you cannot buy good weapons at the beginning. These only become available when a camp trusts you, which takes a lot of missions to accomplish. A zombie yields maybe 3 trust points; to go from lvl 2 to 3, you need 25000, and each camp has its own rating. There are stealth sequences in which you must shadow scientists from a fed organization, to listen in on them. Do you remember the universally panned shadowing sequences from the old Assassin's Creed games? Totally unfun, but at least they are generally easy to complete. Then there are motorcycle chases, where you need to chase a guy on a nearly indestructible bike, while his minions chase you. Another unremarkable minigame. So, the game has a little of Far Cry, a little of [generic stealth game here], some driving action, some poorly implemented crafting, but it does nothing well. It's inferior to other games in every possible aspect, and frustrating for all the wrong reasons.

The Best Jedi game I've ever played. Mi previous favourite was the very old Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, which featured very good characters and storytelling, but you became overpowered the moment you picked up the lightsaber. No worries, it was a complete blast nonetheless. Now we have much, much better combat. Enemies are strong and dangerous. Sure, a poor stormtrooper won't pose much danger, but when you confront several of them, supporting a kickass purge trooper, well, button mashing won't get you very far. You'll need to learn the attack patterns, strengths and weaknesses of every enemy in order to be effective. Just like Assassin's Creed, the move to a Souls-lite combat system is a huge asset, you get the fun but not the endless frustration. I just laugh at those reviewers playing in standard mode and complaining about low difficulty: if it's too easy for you, why not raise that level a bit? I play on Jedi Master level and the game is still mostly easy, but I also find it rewarding. If you want a real challenge, go grandmaster. Exploring the various levels, you'll find many collectibles that you cannot reach, so you are encouraged to return after acquiring new Force powers. Yes, it feels grindy and yes, it's a time sink, but I'm willing to forgive the designers, thanks to the blast I'm having. Production values are huge. Characters seem alive in the way they move and talk, and the environments are often spectacular, for an immersion that goes beyond that of the movies. The story is... well, I can't think of a Star Wars movie that had a really good story: it's your standard space opera, but very well narrated. And finally, we have one AAA game that does not pile s*** of white males. There's plenty of strong women in the game but we have equally strong men too! Wow, in a gaming scene where it's continuously implied that men are weak, stupid, cowardly, oafish and egotistic, being treated as equals is refreshing (especially considering the awful treatment we received in "The Last Jedi", brrr!).

Very nice at the start, becomes essentially impossible after a while. And I mean Manic Miner level-impossible here. Treasure caves start requiring perfect moves 100% of the time, 1/10 sec precision with instant reflexes or you need to restart them - and the grab jump mechanics are not precise enough for this requirement. I prefer Mario 64-level platformers, rewarding but not too punishing.

Bought this game to try out the capabilities of Stadia, so I'm essentially playing on a (remote) PC. Very nice graphics and environment, but the game is really bad. Ok, the exploration puzzles are where the game excels, if that's what you like. You pull levers, jump over traps, find contraptions that still work after several centuries, and explore a number of admittedly gorgeous locales. Combat is pretty bad, with unsatisfying weapons, a terrible over the shoulder aiming system that enemies take advantage of, and especially obnoxious stealth mechanics. There's a point mid game where you lose all your equipment (oh my god, why do almost all game have to have such a section???) and are forced in a really abysmal sequence. You don't have the freedom of Assassin's Creed: you need to pass through very small areas with forced choke points, and need to find out the exact, scripted sequence that will allow you to beat the level purely by trial and error. First you need to go left and dispose of the first guy with thermal goggles. Then don't kill the other two guys, or enemies will see you. You need to go left, wait for another guy to pass, etc. Zero gameplay freedom, and never mind the fact that all the enemies you kill drop firearms, and yet the game prevents you from picking up any. Boring and irritant as hell! Oh, and don't get me started on the genius side quests! For example, one requires you to free four rebels who have been "crucified" through the village as examples. How do you do it? Walk around the village following the map markers and click Y when you reach a prisoner. That's it. And the rest are not much better. I cringe at the dialogues going on in the background: I honestly don't think that South America is populated by **** people who reason like 11 years-old children, and yet they are so simplistically written that I cannot help but feel embarrassed. I've played Uncharted 4 not too long ago, and while both games really stretch suspension of disbelief to the limit, U4 has way, way better writing and characterization. Tomb Raider is a feminist dream. You visit a modern jungle village, whose unofficial leader is an exceedingly capable young woman. Then a village lost to time, whose leader is a super-badass-wise-courageous woman, Unuratu. Oh, you also encounter some savage deformed humans, led by - you guessed right - a woman. U4 has a male protagonist but does not misrepresent women, quite the opposite: Helena is a great character who can adventure hand in hand with Nathan, and one enemy is a mercenary gal who repeatedly beats the crap out of Nathan. In Tomb Raider, what do we have? Lara's meek friend-servant Jonah, who never tries to keep up with her at anything, plus a number of dummies, who repeatedly get humiliated, in multiple instances, by the super-ladies in the game. Just pay attention to NPC dialogues, for multiple examples that would never get approved if sexes were switched. Unuratu, the uber queen, repeatedly defeats in combat men who are obviously much, much stronger than her, and at one point stops a whole army of warriors, by herself. Men? They obviously ****, unless they are serving women, in which case they are tolerated. There's a supposed super soldier from the US Special Forces, who can only kill one target person by shooting them in the back, that's about what his super-soldier status amounts to. All in all, the gorgeous setting does not save the game, I'm really not enjoying it. I'll try to finish it but I'll probably give up once the inevitable confrontation with the evil stupid male opponents arrives.

Caution: addictive! I have played this game for maybe two years, then distanced myself, then came back because of a friend who wanted to play together (and then didn't even show up, the *****!) and now am off again. The good: it's an incredibly varied cooperative multiplayer with solid and fun mechanics. You can pick between a ridiculous number of different warframes, the titular power armors, each one with four different powers. While in Destiny you have three boring classes with very little to differentiate them from one another, in Warframe the designer's fantasy runs rampant and the powers are daringly different, creating extremely varied mechanics. Same goes for the hundreds of available weapons. So you grind and grind and don't get bored because you try something different every time, aided by the effort by Digital Extremes to constantly add new content, new material, new challenges. It's not pay to win: while investing at least a bit of money is advisable to purchase equipment slots, you just need to wait for a 75% discount, that is randomly distributed maybe once a month or so, and invest little more than 20$ to be set for the rest of the game. You can also sell equipment to other players if you really don't want to invest real money, but I have nothing against supporting the developers for their good work, and I also use platinum (the purchasable currency) to reduce grinding in some instances. You can also buy warframes and weapons for outrageous prices, but it's much better to do the related missions and earn them instead; not only they cost a premium, but you also miss the fun: what are you playing for? All in all, a totally fair earning model, IMO. The bad: most missions are mindless, old-school shootouts, where you confront thousands of enemies who keep spawning all around you. Forget about taking cover or tactically conquer an area piece by piece: you jump and zip left and right at light speed, shooting everything that moves - and everything that doesn't, just to be on the safe side. If you stay still for one second, you're probably dead, and tactics only lie in the way you use your powers and combine them with your allies'. There are inventive warframes, with tactical powers that would be great to use in a game like Deus Ex, but are essentially useless in this mindless frag fest. There are infiltration missions that aim to implement a different approach, but most people hate them - for a reason. There's so much material, so many different things to do, that you can be hooked for months or even years without getting bored, especially if you try to discover things on your own rather than just read the Wiki, but the gameplay always remains simplistic and repetitive.

Totally unexpected gem for me. I waited a long time before buying this game, expecting to cringe at the setting and the story, and instead I was taken in by great game design. Montana is beautiful to look at, and the people are also rendered perfectly. The story theme works, in spite of being absurd like in the other Far Cries (which I rank: FC2 - great, FC3 - bad, FC4 - good). The main opponent intrigued me. I mean, he was no cartoonish fiend, he was full of some kind of sick charisma, I could see why these crazy people would follow him and his actions even made perfect sense, especially in hindsight. What really made me say: "Wow!" is the subtheme of the warrior son, one of the three area bosses. No spoilers here, but the mechanics of his subplot are a stroke of pure genius, and 100% got me when the time came. Then I saw the endings, and loved both. Gunplay is very good as usual, stealth mechanics are also ok, and most companions are useful, if a bit too chatty. That crazy m*******er Clutch Nixon! I still hear his theme music in my head every now and then, lol! I know, I know, the majority of players doesn't like any of the above, but this is MY review and I did. So, maybe because I was expecting so little, the game gave me so much instead. YMMV but give it a try if in doubt, it's almost free by now.

Really terrible combat, poorly designed environments, abysmal crafting mechanics. As for the supposedly good dialogues, I mean, OMG, how is this stuff any good? I couldn't care less about any of the NPCs, they were simply super dull and uninteresting. The dark humor tries too much, too hard, and falls flat, becoming ultra repetitive early in the game. By the end of the game, I was doing quest just because I wanted to be done with it all. People compare it to Fallout New Vegas, but for me there is simply no comparison at all, on any level. FNW had hugely better combat, better characters, a better setting that was still ironic, without cranking it to 11, and a story I cared about. KOTOR 2 was an incredible RPG, with storytelling moments that sent shivers down my spine. This looks like a third grader effort, in comparison. Finally, male NPCs are a bunch of rock-stupid and corrupt morons, while most females are powerful, competent and compassionate. There are very few exceptions to this rule.

I can live with the poor graphics and the mostly empty world, I kinda like the simplistic combat, but I cannot force myself to ignore the many incredibly poor decisione the designers made. Every minute or so, some kind of penalty randomly spawns. Undead emerge all around you while you are in a heated fight with a giant. Meteors falling down or snow storms that quickly drain your health. None of these hazards is too dangerous, but they are too frequent and annoying as hell, especially considering how infinitely pestering Loki's manic laugh is. The worst is being forced to leave everything and being **** to some plane to fight Loki in a fight you cannot win (but temporarily defeating him will grant special materials you 'll need). Also, whoever decided to auto-switch weapons and armor? It's really an asinine idea, as some armor may have better protection than the one you are wearing, but much worse buffs. Or, you pick up precious elemental arrows and the game auto-selects them in place of the easily replaceable ones you are using. Most of all, I'm tired to wait forever for the age of fire, when I can finally find a few of the elusive fire giants I need, to ever so slowly collect their blood for the final sword. Gah, boring as Hel!

Graphics are horrible, honestly. Just played Uncharted 4 on my PS4; it's possibly the best looking game I've played on a console, and now I have to face THIS on an XBox One X, the most powerful console of the current generation??? The game is a Fallout knockoff, from the 50s-themed atmosphere to the combat mechanics, to perks and weapon/armor customization. Not necessarily a bad thing, but at best it looks like an uglier, simplified, Fallout 4. With several small, cramped mini-areas where exploration is pretty limited. I kinda like the tongue in cheek approach, the game doesn't take itself too seriously and often makes me laugh, or at least smile. Although "evil heartless corporation" jokes you unearth from locked terminals are already beginning to stretch thin. Ok, I get it, corporations don't give a damn about the lives of their employees, but after a while, the jokes begin to become stale. And finally, male bashing. In the first city you visit: the male leader is essentially a heartless slave driver who is not very gifted in the smarts department. A dissident encampment nearby is led by a compassionate and kind female leader, and guarded by a tough as nails female sheriff. My follower Parvati explained that her father was a grease monkey while her mother was a brilliant scientist, so it only made sense that the father would raise her, he was just a menial drone. We travel to a space station and the ruler is a super strong lesbian woman, selfless, honest to a fault and infinitely courageous, descending from a matrilinear lineage of equally powerful leaders. The security chief leading the mardets (marine detachment) is a super strong and competent woman who takes her job very seriously. If you try to talk to the guy next to her, he'll tell you he isn't allowed to respond to inquiries because he always makes mistakes when writing down people's name and surname. On the same station, we also find a white male ambassador, who, surprise surprise, is a slimy idiot. A secret lab on the Terra 2 planet: the chief is a white male scientist who is despised by all of his peers and only cares for himself and his life in the Capital, while also being utterly incapable of managing the station. A gangster city, on another planet: led by a super strong woman who may be a gangster but is exceedingly capable and is feared by all her minions - and her superior is in turn another super strong and efficient woman, residing on the space station. I meet one of her underlings, a male idiot, and there's a joke involving repeatedly punching him in the eye to put him in his place. See a trend so far? I find it funny how "diversity" has come to mean "bash white males like there's no tomorrow". I hope it gets better going forward. It's not bad so far, but it's certainly not original and doesn't measure up with recent games technically. Also, the **** approach certainly wins no points with me, although I reckon some may appreciate it.

I'm a long time fan of Remedy, and loved Max Payne 2 and Alan Wake + American Nightmare. Not so much for the gameplay, as for the incredible atmosphere, the indirect storytelling, in which music played no small part, the little details. I was a bit disappointed by Quantum Break, it's as if the big production money took away from Remedy's vision. Now we have Control, and in my opinion it's their best work in terms of gameplay by far, mixing weapons and PSI powers with quick movement. The story setup is great and perfectly coherent, as long as you accept the supernatural leitmotiv. The story that unfolds is unfortunately not quite as good as Alan Wake's, it's much more linear. Jesse Faden enters a mysterious building looking for someone, along the way grabs the sword in the stone (not literally but almost) and becomes Queen of England, or at least Director of the super secret FBC. From here, she'll have to solve an ongoing crisis, gradually gaining new powers, new weapon forms and access to more and more areas, but while the shifting reality of the building remains mesmerizing, the story itself does not provide too many surprises. There's a lot of material in the form of notes, correspondence and audio recordings, allowing the player to delve deeper into Control's world. After a while, though, it all started to become boring. I loved audio recordings in the old System Shock 2 because they told the tale of dozens of NPC who died on the starship it was based in. People who got swept away before the player appeared, good or bad, fighting or cowering in fear, they made the story come alive. In Control, after 100 notes about this or that mystical artefact, with dozens of words redacted to make it clear that the FBC takes secrecy seriously... ok, ok, I get it, but 10 would have been enough, how about providing something more varied? As I said, gunplay is lots of fun, but the powerup system leaves a lot to be desired. You have a very limited number of slots to customize your character and her weapons, so that I felt very constrained in my choices. Extra health + extra health regeneration are almost a must. That leaves you with ONE free slot and a lot of powerups that provide minimal effect. This is an area that would deserve a rework, in my opinion. On the other hand, I really can't see what people find wrong in the in-game map, I never had any problems, it's not like there are 20 levels on top of one another. Some bosses are downright infuriating, I can't imagine what it would be like to fight them using a controller. One forces the player to fight in a small room where the boss can mix explosive fungus, seeking spores and super strong direct hit combos, another one has you fight on a rather small square suspended in space, with the floor that gets eaten away by every enemy attack, so that you can aim at the enemy and fall through to your death, or look at the floor and not shoot. Finally, it's very sad for me to see Remedy go Sarkeesian. Tough female protagonist, check. Male NPCs = mostly jerks, check. Tough, competent, reliable female NPCs, check. It's not as black and white as in so many other games, but still you have a tough as nails ex CIA agent and a competent scientist facing a jerk custodian for a warehouse of altered items, a jerk head of Communications who disregards safety procedures to his own detriment and a suppposedly reliable chief of security who cannot even protect himself. TL;DR Good: - Gunplay with PSI is fun - GREAT supernatural environment - Very good music by Poets Of The Fall (love the maze sequence) - Very good graphics Bad: - Infuriating boss fights - Limited freedom in configuring your abilities - Monotonous collectible story material - Grrrl power, luckily not to an extreme extent

Picture ugly-drawn graphics straight out of the PS2 era, and micro levels that still take longer to load than a sprawling open world with 100x the detail (my gods, loading takes AGES). The game consists **** where your soldiers face superior numbers of superior enemies with far superior combat capabilities. Your snipers will almost never hit anything and cannot see an enemy furthe than 6 meters. Your gunner deals minimal damage. Your scout is pointless, for stealth only applies to your very first attack. The specialist will heal you once per mission. Meanwhile enemies reanimate the dead, panic your troops (this may also occur if one of your soldiers gets hit!), take control of your soldiers, turning them into enemies that fire on your own troops. They pull your soldiers in a death grip that damages them, keep dealing damage and takes them in the middle of the enemies. The enemy spots you during their turn? You are in trouble. You spot the enemy? They get a free turn allowing them to disperse and get to cover before you can do anything. After a mission, your soldiers will be wounded, shaken and whatnot, introducing more handicaps for the next. Hitting is based on a RNG, so you often miss three times in a row even with an 80% chance to hit. It’s ridiculously easy to lose a soldier, and you only have four. Shouldn’t games be fun?

UPDATE: my initial review was enthusiastic, see below, but I had to lower the score after finishing the game. The game features a number of easy bosses that are perfect for someone, like me, who hates boss encounters with a passion. Then, at the end, you have a number of super frustrating, overpowered bosses that are as bad as those in Dark Souls, possibly worse. Attacks that cover the whole arena and cannot be avoided or parried, non-stop swipes that cover 340° around the boss with a radius of several meters, area effects that prevent you from attacking even in that miserable split second that you could (you spend the rest of the time avoiding those nearly infinite combos). You just try and try and try, until you get lucky and defeat them, thanks to your sidekick reviving you. I cannot make heads or tails of this design. This is certain to anger both boss lovers, who'll begrudge the easy ones, and boss haters, who'll suffer with the later ones. It looks like the game was too short and they decided to artificially extend the duration by cranking difficulty up to 11. A huge disappointment for me. Also, in hindsight I realized that while it's true that you can choose among dozens of gifts, most are useless or worse. If I see an opening, I can unleash a combo on an enemy, which will deal damage and recharge ichor ("mana") or a gift, which will probably deal less damage and *consume* ichor. There are powerful area-based gifts that in theory would be great when you are surrounded, but in practice will go through 10% of the time, due to the long animation that exposes you to the attacks of the enemies, who never stop attacking for more than half a second, no stamina meter for them. Finally, the red tint of everything has an explanation, but makes everything look drab and boring nonetheless. I am having a blast with this title, that has far exceeded my expectations. Think Dark Souls minus the frustration: the game is not nearly as punishing, while maintaining the satisfaction of a challenge. Especially bosses, which I hate, can often be beaten at the first attempt. A negative for some, I’m sure, but great for me, who prefer confronting the mob while exploring levels. Where this game really shines is customizability. Scores of different abilities to choose from and to activate with 8 hot keys. You are free not only to choose your preferred path, but also to switch it at a moment’s notice. In certain levels I breezed through using a spear, then I found that the short sword is much better in the next, punishing one. No problem, insta-switch. Certain enemies go from near invincible to easyish if you use the ability that augments your stagger value, others react better to poison, others still are powerful but slow, opening them wide to backstabs. I love the variety, I love the fun, I’m grinding just because I don’t want it to finish so soon. The story is ok, narration is very anime-oriented, which is not really my cup of tea, with lots of unconvincing drama. No problem, I can forgive the designers and anyway I’ve seen worse. Since many ppl are criticizing the Cathedral level, and I understand why, I can say that mapping such a 3D maze in the form ****, using a mind mapping tool on a tablet, is pretty satisfying. You know, creating your own maps instead of relying on the automap takes me back in time, and it’s not a bad sensation. By the way, I totally had to do the same for Bloodborne, so I honestly cannot see why it’s such a sore point here.

This game is a mixed bag. I like the setting and some of the storytelling, but there are so many bad design decisions that the overall experience is undeniably bad. I'm not very surprised that even the most basic achievements are rated "rare", meaning that a low percentage of users achieved them: it means that most players abandon the game after a while. Graphics are meh, and yet they manage to stutter rather often. On an XBox One X. Most characters are not very interesting and certain dialogues feel badly written, even though you'll spend so much time talking to people. At a certain point, romance appears out of the blue, with the blandest love declaration ever. Almost embarrassing. During dialogues, you often need to guess the "right" answer or miss an important hint on the character you are talking to, that would open up more dialogue options. This is not bad per se, it means that your choices matter and also go back to pen and paper RPGs, where you don't usually get 100% completion. Having fun does not mean getting every choice right, so I'm ok with this, but on the other hand, sometimes the choices presented to you are misleading, compared to what the character is actually going to say. All in all, getting the right answer is mostly guesswork, and this is irritating. Much more so when a wrong answer results in the irreversible destruction of a whole district. Oh, and sometimes you get character hints by chatting with other characters. Make sure you ask EVERYONE about where to find Mr. X, even after you learn the information, because one character on the map has one special hint about him. The map is not huge but is labyrinthine, so that to go from point A to point B you'll often need to take huge detours. Also, gates placed at key positions and locked or open according to the current quest, force you to take even more detours. Since there is a lot of backtracking, this becomes infuriating after a while. People get sick in the map, and progressively get worse if left unattended. Killed an NPC to evolve? Build up a huge reserve of medicine and go around the whole district to heal everyone again. Level 1 medicine requires a lowish amount of resources, but creating medicine for level 3 diseases implies slaying hundreds of ghouls or fanatics. Grind, grind, grind. At least NPCs don't get worse until you sleep in a bed. Combat? Your character is the weakest creature in the game, bar none. Even the weakest enemies can jump/slide huge distances with their attacks and are better armored and much less stagger-prone than you are. Killing a normal enemy takes up at least five times the damage it takes to kill you. Heavies, who are pretty common, unite a near-total resistance to staggers, a huge health poool, very long range devastating attacks and sometimes weapons of mass destruction, like flame throwers or chemical blowers, with infinite ammo. Enemy vampires have no limit on blood attacks, unlike you, and can spam their special moves with no need to recharge their blood pool. Your saving grace? A blinking, short-range evasion move, which is often not enough to avoid absurdly long range melee attacks. Also, you get often boxed in areas where the camera goes crazy. There is an obstacle that you cannot see and you die, because you can no longer escape the enemy. You do have some nice vampire attacks, which you need to mix and match. An enemy that is resistant to melee attacks may be vulnerable to blood damage (no weaknesses exist: at best you deal full damage, as opposed to reduced damage - guess what? You have no resistance to anything). So, can you take up your blood spear to the maximum level and use it as your main weapon? NO. The game does not allow you to level up an ability beyond a certain point, depending on your level, so you are stick with underwhelming attacks. Many games do so, but the overall impression is that, instead of being a super powerful vampire, you are King Wimp, wimpest of the wimps. At some point, a vampire you have created by mistake becomes a boss, with attacks that are incredibly powerful compared to yours and a nearly infinite hit point reserve. Shouldn't the progeny be weaker than the creator? The game is still better than ones that are too easy, but it is needlessly frustrating and boring, when even weak enemies require a huge number of hits to be taken down. TL;DR: grindy disease mechanics, unfair combat and super contrived city traversal make playing this game as much a chore as it is fun. Too bad because there is something nice, under all those errors.

Ok, so I was initially impressed by the admittedly very good forest-with-overgrown-ruins design of the play area. I picked up a mech and gradually learned how to use it at its best. Dropped better weapons that allowed me to take on more powerful enemies. After a while everything became routine, every mission is essentially the same. Oh, you drop a new weapon that is the same as the previous one but has better numbers and better random buffs. Same with mech enhancements. I spent months playing Warframe, which is just as grindy, but it offered so many different things to aim for that it kept me hooked. Here you'll probably have fun during the campaign, especially if you play with friends, but after that there is literally nothing. The missions are always the same, and more powerful enemies are simply the same enemies with higher stats. I didn't last one month.

While the game is generally enjoyable, what completely destroyed it for me was the Sam Fisher mission, which is a horrible exercise in frustration. Part One: you have to sneak through a base filled with enemies like a metro on rush hour. One look in your direction and it’s mission over. Also, grenade lures are completely random. Sometimes the enemy walks towards them to investigate, other times they ignore them or walk directly towards you. You are not allowed to take out anyone, so, you’ll complete part one about 33% of attempts, based mostly on luck. You arrive at the destination and plant a few mines to prepare for part two, then you meet the legendary Sam Fisher. Part Two: since time is of the essence, Fisher goes blah blah blabber blabber blah blah blah for *minutes*, and you can’t skip the conversation, even if you have heard it twenty times already. Then all hell breaks loose. You weren’t allowed to kill anyone but now you have to kill everyone. Riiight. Usually at least two of your AI teammates are down before they even reach you, and then you have to survive wave after wave of enemies, while in a scarcely defensible rooms with multiple openings that allow the enemy great opportunities. Forget about reviving the fallen AIs, you’ll just die. Again, if you have a good assault weapon and some luck, you survive. This happens about 40% of the time. Part Three; time to exfiltrate, finally! Unfortunately, enemies are everywhere, and there are multiple helicopters overhead, armed with rockets. Taking down the copters is pointless, since they respawn immediately. You might manage to get out of the compound and into the wilderness, but copters will still keep flying directly overhead, and you’ll eventually be spotted. At that point, enemies from all directions will kill you. If they don’t, the rockets will finish the job. After several hours of frustration, I’ve decided to give up the mission. Yes, it’s optional – as is the game, tho. If the only way to enjoy the game is to avoid playing it, or parts of it, it speaks volumes about the quality of the design. Too bad.

This game is not perfect but it's still the best Assassin's Creed I have played. For me, combat has always been the weak point of the series, and Ubisoft finally delivered in that department. I suggest you play on hard, with enemy autolevel. Now you have to keep an eye on enemies because it's relatively easy to die, but it's also engaging and fun. This made me appreciate the whole experience and kept me playing for hours on end. Which is good, because the setting is incredible. Ancient Egypt is majestic, spectacular, and when you realize that in the Roman era the game is set in, the pyramids are already more than one thousand years old, you can't help but feel in awe for that great country. The XBox One X really brings its wonders to life, I kept shooting photos. I explored all locations in the map, eagerly improved my character's skills and weapon set and thoroughly enjoyed every play session. I didn't really love the side games, i.e. the arena and chariot racing, but they are optional. Further improvement? I would suggest differentiating weapons even more, a la Nioh. Right now, for example, a spear behaves like a longer, slower sword, instead of the completely different weapon it actually is. Also, tone down fire a bit, it looks like Bayek walks around covered in gasoline! Still, for me this is an epic game and definitely worth full price.

Didn't finish the first game. After reading this one has improved, decided to give it a try after its price went down. Quickly realized it hasn't really improved much. Stealth isn't feasible, with a density of five guards per square ft and being unable to hide bodies, they always go on alert very quickly. Combat isn't feasible: with INSTANT infinite reinforcements, you are always surrounded. What are you left with? Jumping from camera to camera, trying to do as much as possible without physically entering hot zones. May sound interesting, it's just boring. Exploring the city boils down to finding money and research points, and figuring out how to get to them, since they are almost always on high areas. This usually involves using the RC jumper and possibly external devices such as scissors lifts (investing early into device hacking skills is a good idea, because otherwise you are cut off from most of the goodies). Unfortunately, once again it's really boring. Driving is another important activity but it never "feels" right, and anyway there's a reason we use steering wheels and not joypads on real cars. For me, this part of the game is just an annoyance. Coming from the masterpiece that was Assassin's Creed Origins, with its refined combat and stealth mechanics, I can't help but feel that the Watch Dogs IP should be either completely reinvented or simply dropped.

Played late 2017, so the famous PC woes were probably fixed by now, I did not encounter stuttering or the like. I've loved Remedy's games for years. Max Payne II was memorable, and Alan Wake fantastic. Quantum Break too is very good: it has a good story based on time travel following the immutable closed loop approach where effect becomes cause (think Terminator 1). I liked the characters too, and yet I missed the desperate brilliance of Max Payne or the incredibly inventive atmosphere of Alan Wake (that concert scene, wow!). On the other hand, this game has sky-high production values and it shows, and combat is IMO much better than it is in Alan Wake. Unfortunately play time is *really* inflated by the search for collectibles, and there is too little combat compared to everything else. Chat. Go there. Pull that lever. Climb there. Pointless mini platformer level. More walking around. It's possibly more a movie than a videogame, especially if you consider the TV show part. Still, I loved it in many ways, and look forward to Remedy's next work of art. I feel bad for those playing it one year ago, with all the problems, and respect their low ratings.

Boring, uninspired combat, particularly iIrritating when it goes back 30 years in time, forcing you to play an old 2D shooter a la Xevious. Bland and dull when it tackles 3D melee combat, with many different weapons that play essentially the same. Incredibly annoying and boring side quests. Go there, talk to someone. Go to another place, talk to someone else. Go to yet another place, find body, quest over. Would be fun if combat were fun. Main quest? Storyline revealed after several playthroughs, and it still makes very little sense. Much more attention to classic JRPG dramatic scenes, that usually feel contrived and forced, than to a coherent and believable story. The environment is marred by abundant invisible barriers everywhere. Want to climb that cliff? Oof, you bounce into an invisible wall. Want to jump on that trellis structure? Ditto. This is terrible level design, especially considering how SMALL the game world is. Just a handful of small levels you'll need to traverse over and over (and over, and over). I see many people loved the soundtrack. Incredible, I wanted to poke a stick into my ears, after several minutes of bleating choruses in the forest area. The rest is at least sufferable, but forgettable. I guess this is another videogame you may love if you're into JRPG strangeness, and hate if you are not.

Well, what do you know. You start your first, sunny day of work at TranStar Labs in a big city and soon after find yourself up to your neck in trouble on a space station orbiting Earth, where things have gone very, very wrong. The transition from the first environment to the second is very well executed, it's probably the most memorable moment in the game. The rest is essentially System Shock 2 in 2017, which is a good thing for me. The game even openly acknowledges its roots (for example, a new holographic tech is named Looking Glass technology). It plays as an FPS with PSI powers and tech skills, and follows System Shock tropes, where you have a series of short term goals, and everything always goes wrong. "We need to restart the reactor. Oh no, it's stopped mid-sequence, we need to get the gizmo replaced and then retry. Damn, the replacement is in an area overrun by nasties". I love the gameplay, went full PSI powers on my playthrough and don't regret it. What's wrong with the game, then? It's yet another male-bashing fest. Maybe not so blatantly as in Horizon ZD, where "Men only bring destruction, I want no male children" clearly complements a long string of strong female warriors and meek, emasculated male nincompoops. Here it's subtler and potentially even worse, you notice it if you dig deep into the email system of the station: the picture that soon emerges is that males are unreliable, temperamental workers at best, while females are almost always dependable, often heroic. Real examples from the game include Loyd, who smokes near fuel manifolds, Frank, who harasses Emanuella, Dayo, who has no qualms getting live subjects killed in his experiments, a guy who keeps denouncing his co-worker's supposed sloppiness to their boss in order to ingratiate her, another one who uses the high tech equivalent of duct tape to seal leaks instead of using proper parts, yet another one who constantly accuses his colleague of having stolen his ideas, a paranoid one who wants to get a shotgun and seal himself in a bunker, a demented scientist who mistreats his female assistant, a military guy willing to commmit mass murder as easily as he makes coffee, a deranged serial killer, a guy who uses company material to build his own pet robot, a drunkard who dies in a refuse tank, and many more. Male employees disregard procedures, almost invariably freak out in the face of danger, and are often class A ****, especially when in a position of power. For the females, we have the tough-as-nails security chief, the heroic Mikhaila whose insists that you don't waste time getting her life-saving medicine, the courageous Annalise, who risks her very life to expose the illegal experiments, the strong and ingenuous Danielle, who remains alive against impossible odds and gives you vital help, and a string of people who do their daily job with conscience and care, and remain calm and rational even on the threshold of death. To balance things out, there is the female chief of a smuggler ring, but she is arguably much better than her male lackey, who goes grovelling back to the director and begs for mercy. I wish developers put a sticker on games such as this, reading "Feminism-compliant game" or something like that, so that I would know to avoid them. I would have never bought this game had I known of its "males are sad, inferior creatures" stance.

Way I see it, it's Dark Souls with all the fun, plus extra complexity and way less frustration. The game is difficult but, unlike DS, is never unfair to the player. Plus, it's not *that* difficult, so you can go wild and experiment with different builds, different equipment, different everything. I got more than a hundred hours solid fun, before starting to get bored by the limited variety in terms of levels.

This is the first ME that I don't complete. I had great expectations, and just before it was released, I replayed through ME3 to get in the right mood. Andromeda started off good, I was impressed by the improved graphics and awed by the number of unlockable skills. Then the very first mission crams really too much up together, and the story only gets worse from there. Where is that "Explore the unknown" feeling, if anywhere you travel, someone already lives there? The characters are so bland and shallow that I can't even say I really disliked them. I just did not care. Combat could have been a major improvement, fixing the flaws of the previous chapters, instead it was not realized to its full potential and ended up being worse. I loved the idea to have different power combinations to quickly adapt to different situations, but very quickly realized that everything is so uniform that you have exactly zero incentive to use the feature. Terrible, terrible ammo system. Meh weapons. Bad AI squadmates. And much more, but you get the vibe. Last preorder from Bioware from me.

A game that may not be ALL bad, but sure is marred by a large number of horrible design decisions. Repetitive areas with semi-instant respawn. Minimal enemy variety. Terrible stealth mechanics. Broken story with unexplained/skipped sections. Enemies that instantly forget about you in the middle of combat and merrily go back to their default location if you only move ten feet away. Brain dead AI companions that seem completely unable to help out in combat (at least they draw an enemy or two away from you). Most of all, your supposedly super powerful character is actually a wimp that goes down much quicker than even the low rank mooks that infest the streets. The game is not really difficult, but it never gives you the pleasure of feeling a super soldier. All in all, while the story is not bad and did keep me interested enough to complete the game, by the end I was bored out of my mind and yearned for something better.