fray_bentos

Unplayable due to the awful camera and janky controls. Also difficult getting this playing smoothly at high framerates on an RTX 3080 at 1440p. A modern gloss over a broken game. This game is stuck in the past and should stay there. Make sure to turn off sharpening if using DLSS.

Most of the poor reviews are from people who tried to play the game before patches and on low-end hardware/laptops. I played in 2025 after patches and updates on a desktop RTX 3080 (midrange build for 2025). I am also using the DLSS to FSR mod to enable FSR framegen, which transforms the experience. Runs 100-120 fps at a crisp 3413x1920 resolution (DLDSR downscaled to 1440p) with optimised settings (i.e. not ultra everything!) even with RT enabled. This is the first game where I have found RT does actually improve the graphics (other than Indiana Jones where it is forced on). This is a chunky adventure in which exploration is rewarded. The combat is fun, even if there are difficulty spikes. I'm not a fan of such spikes as I have limited gaming time these days (repeating boss fights isn't fun to me), so dropped to easy. I have played 25 hours so far and seem to be about halfway through (I enjoy exploring every nook and cranny). The adventure opens up as you discover new abilities in a metroidvania way. More open level designs and fast travel to mediation points solves the backtracking issues of the previous game, Fallen Order. If it hadn't been for the technical issues and high spec demands of Survivor, I truly believe it would have been heralded as an action adventure masterpiece.

I first played this game in 2024, nearly 10 years after its release. I can safely say that this game is a masterpiece and is easily in my top 5-10 games (I have been playing games since 1984). I am not even a fan of horror games and tend to avoid them as they creep me out too much (e.g. Resident Evil VII). However, the story kept me drawn in. Some players criticise the water sections, but for me those are needed for pacing reasons to give breaks and contrast to the tense moments. My enjoyment of the game was improved by using the frame-generation feature of Lossless scaling so I could experience this at "almost" 120 fps.

I pushed buttons and stuff happened on the screen. The level design is very poor, just corridors that lock, kill enemies and then proceed. The same generic "alien mush" in most of the levels. Overwhelming numbers of weapons that you can swap between for no good reason. The story is incoherent. Naff dialogue. DmC 2013 was a far superior game in every aspect. Music is worse in DMC5 as well. The only good thing about DMC 5 is the graphics.

I was really excited to play this game after enjoying other open-world action-RPG games such as Zelda:BotW and OoT, AC:Origins/Odyssey, God of War (2018), Horizon: Zero Dawn, Batman Arkham games and GTA:V. I waited for the "next-gen version" to release. The game looks gorgeous, and some of the story and character development seems very good (though a bit long-winded for me). However, I play games to play them, not to watch them. My main bugbears are: The combat and character movement/interaction with the world is clunky, buggy, and frustrating. The inventory system is overly complicated. There is an overwhelming amount of stuff to do. Sections of the game are gated off by levels (as enemies become too tough to tackle). Ultimately, much to my surprise, I find the game dull and boring, and I am not finding it fun at all. After reading around it seems that many people have the same experience with the same issues flagged. Many of the game mechanics are very similar to in the AC games, but I often felt that they were done better in the AC games, especially the combat, inventory/loot system, and hunting for clues. Then, I hit a bug where I hit a black screen fast travelling between sign posts; a bug that apparently dates back to 2015... I uninstalled and moved on to other games in my backlog. In the future, I will look for action RPGs where the action and gameplay takes a more central role. I found Red Dead Redemption dull for similar reasons. Not for me.

Terrible AI. Driving along and AI cars drive straight into your rear and ram you off the track. I turned off all assists and still the cars have such good traction it is like you are on rails. Sorry, but I cannot suspend belief, this driving model might have been OK if it was some sort of futuristic racer. Graphics were good. Music during races was intrusive as were the silly points systems (both can be turned off).

I got bored within half an hour and never recovered. The controls and mechanics of having to activate items, zoom in on them etc made it feel like the original Resident Evil, but with much less action. Walking through the environments also revealed lots of collision detection issues; walking into invisible objects/walls, basic animation, and looking like the main character was floating just above the ground and placed in the environment, just like in the "good old days" of the original PlayStation. What I experienced as gameplay was walking around looking/backtracking looking for objects (with no run option to make it less tedious). Also suffers from serious performance issues. Loading stutter on a 10600K @4.9 GHz with an RTX 3080. RTX on ultra at 1440p brought the framerate down into the 30-40s, RTX on normal was 50-60s, and RTX off was 90 fps, even on scenes with a static, or almost static camera. It looks nice, but not that nice. Basically this a walking simulator with light puzzle elements in which you need to find things in the correct order, except less enjoyable than other games in that category I have played such as the Vanishing of Ethan Carter, What Remains of Edith Finch, Dear Esther, Stanley Parable, Abzu, Journey, The Unfinished Swan, and Rime.

I am very confused by the praise this game seems to get. Frankly, after a few hours of play I found it incoherent, dull and unremarkable. I played to the end it peaked about 2/3rd of the way through (dimensional research), then it just ended. Even with an RTX 3080, I'm finding the graphics dull as well, it's mostly a concrete building with some flashes of red from time to time. Sometimes the red obscures the screen making it impossible to see. The enemies are repetitive, as is the gunplay. For the first few hours I had no chance to engage with the main character or plot. Since it is so weird and none of it has been explained, it means that most of it means nothing and gets ignored as nonsense, it didn't get much better. An utterly overrated game.

Utterly mediocre. Zero new ideas. Nonsensical "plot"/reasons for events happening. I experienced a bug when I started a new act, my weapons had all changed to other weapons. When I quit and reloaded my weapons were back just as I had in the previous act. The graphics are good and that is all I can say.

I nearly gave up on this game about a third of the way through (end of Zeffo), but I am glad that I gave it one more try and pushed on. The biggest flaw is that the navigation/map and level design is terrible in places. It can be difficult to see the route needed to get to particular objective (or even just back to your ship). On several occassions, I got near to where I thought I needed to be only to find a wall/unjumpable chasm in the way. I then attempted to backtrack to find that there are slides, jumps or ropes that force one-way travel. I also found the combat frustrating at times with some difficulty spikes when overcrowded by enemies (solved by turning difficulty down a notch). The stim is also a frustrating mechanic, especially early in the game when you do not have much health. The "stim" approach to health seems pointlessly copied from Souls games, which I hate. This game could have scored a 9 with just a few tweaks. Low points of the game = 5/10, good parts 9/10.

I really wanted to like this game, but, meh. Many missions can be most quickly and easily defeated by brute forcing through them with guns, by-passing all the tech/gadget stuff. What remains is simply pushing a button here or there to open doors. The game quickly becomes go here, pew, pew, open some doors, flip some switches, go there, pew, pew with an insufficient story, and a broken narrative due to playing with multiple protagonists. Some of the dialogue and characters are cringeworthy. It also took quite a lot of tweaking to get this running at my target framerate of 100 fps even using an RTX 3080. Many other players with slower CPU/RAM combinations than my own (10600K @ 4.9 GHz and RAM at 4000 MHz CL14) are CPU/RAM bottlenecked a lot of the time and can't get anywhere near that framerate.

Played just over 8 hours into this game, with no problems, then it just crashed. When I reopened the game the last game save it opened was from 1.5 hours ago! Presumably the game crashed during a save, which has now been overwritten with an autosave from 1.5 hours ago. I've lost 1.5 hours of progress including 2 x adam harvests, freeing a little sister, and killing one main character, weapon upgrades and some careful upgrades at a Gatherer's garden. Basically I had pretty much cleared a whole area and have go back back almost to the start. I am so annoyed that I can't face playing the game again.

Admittedly, I progressed further in the single-player game than the yawn-fest that was "Borderlands", but after playing for 5-6 hours again the grind feeling set in and I just gave up, despite the slightly better story. Too many loot boxes. mostly filled with junk. Box-opening simulator? No thanks. Other than that, the gun play was generally OK, and the graphics, style and presentation all top-notch. I genuinely fail to see why so many other like this game. For context, I've been playing games since the early 1980s.

The eyes of most players here are blurred by nostalgia, for many it seems, childhood nostalgia, while I skipped this generation (during my early 20s) and returned to this game later in life (having experienced 3 or 4 generations of gaming before the Gamecube even appeared). The parts of this game where there is a track that doesn't launch you into oblivion are great; superb high-speed racing. However, for many of the later tracks in the game then it is a matter of the game being so fast that you simply do not have time to avoid or see the ramps that launch you to an instant death. The only way to confront this unfair challenge is to play the challenges (or most annoyingly the whole cup) over and over again until you randomly succeed. This is not fun and massive design flaw. In many ways this makes the game impossible to complete without putting in a disproportionate amount of time (and anger) compared to the fun. I'd love a new F-zero game, but without this fundamental flaw. A game that is neigh-on impossible to complete, not due to size, but due to bad design = low score, simple as that.

Fun and beautiful, but not coming close to the adventure that was Journey. Some interesting ideas are explored, but I didn't feel compelled enough to go back and find every last balloon.

Fun and beautiful, but not coming close to the adventure that was Journey. Some interesting ideas are explored, but I didn't feel compelled enough to go back and find every last balloon.