gd01skorpius

TL;DR: This game IS worth getting but if you can, get it on PC. It's a shame the PS4 version is so much worse. I've left a glowing review for the PC version but I simply cannot recommend paying more than a very small amount of money on the PS4 version (it was free when I got it, and it showed enough promise to make me want to pay for the PC version). The issues: The game takes far to long to load and, worse, way way way too long to save. The saving issue is painful because world content will not stream in (i.e.: appear) until saving is complete. I have waiting between 1 to 2 minutes to save my progress, and you need to save because the game blue screens SO MUCH. This IS a GREAT game, which only makes it all the more frustrating because of these highly intrusive issues. Should you get this game on PS4? If you can get it for free or only a few bucks then definitely try it out, but if you have the choice, get it on PC where none of these issue exist.

Subnautica is, despite its flaws, one of the best games I've ever played, and I have played a LOT of games. While the PS4 version was extremely frustrating because of poor optimization, on PC the bugs are minor. This review is heavily tilted in spite of these bugs because of my emotional response to the game. I really have to say this is, **in my opinion**, as near a perfect video game experience there is. I actually feel blessed to have been given the opportunity to play it. This game is beautiful. While I'm less a fan of the slight cartoony style, it works for this game. It feels authentic to me. I've never gone scuba diving, let along been on an alien planet, but this really captures the fantasy for me. The graphics, art, sound, and music are all breathtaking. While it can be gorgeous, it can also be terrifying. The depths can make one feel very vulnerable, surrounded by monsters, running out of air, and barely enough time to reach the surface for a breath of air. The UI is mercifully light weight, so easy to get into game and navigate menus. My only issue is that it's overly easy to drop things when using a controller (the button is the same as moving things to lockers and the muscle reflex makes me want to use the same button for using things when not interacting with lockers) but this is minor. I also don't really see the value in having such a limited number of quick slots but I'm sure there must have been a good reason for game balance. The sound design is incredible but one little detail I want to call out is how all the PDA sounds and dialog sound like they are being transmitted through glass. Just something I appreciated as an audiophile. The gameplay controls with a controller are really well thought out and nicely tuned, never once had an issue with controls other than screenshots being triggered by pressing both thumb sticks, so the clench response of terror causes my screenshot section of my PDA to be filled of crashfish explosions and leviathan mouths (just kidding, that's actually pretty awesome). Story wise, I love a game that can weave a story with an absolute minimum of cut scenes and expensive cinematics. I loved the story. I felt it in my heart, the ending, (no spoilers) made me smile so big and misty eyed, something I haven't felt from a game in a long time. I'm just a little dismayed that they went more heavy handed with story elements in the otherwise excellent sequel. Now I do wish they would work on achieving the same level of polish on the PS4 version, which is so riddled with bugs and crashes and slow saving, loading, and streaming that I was glad that I got it when it was free. On the other hand, it was promising enough that it made me buy it on Steam. I cannot recommend the PC version enough. To the developers, thank you for the experience :)

Just no. The controls in this game are unacceptable straight from the menu and right into gameplay. X (ps4) is used to skip cinematics (good) then X again used to skip hints (usually it's a L1 and R1 in other games but whatever), then X again to start (okay but I had to press it several times after prompted) then the main menu has a strange layout, looking left to right there is your username highlighted as if you can select something else, then all the menu options are to the right... strange but whatever... then the game settings after pressing new game are on the left and your character is on the right.... why the switch? Now for some reason X is used to skip this whole scene and go directly into gameplay, and having been trained so far to press X to do things it's easy to skip right over the gameplay settings so you basically have to restart the game and when you get to the same screen press Square to change things. Finally when the game starts, your 1st person camera movement is incredibly sluggish and lags behind your inputs. When you make it to the progression trigger of the next sequence the change is so abrupt, followed by a loading screen, I though I had died and the game was reloading. From there I'm on a raft struggling with the camera and pop up hints, I finally got an paddle in my hand and rowed to shore, but incapable of exiting the raft. I pressed every button, there was no onscreen hint... but this time I gave up, having zero faith that things would improve from this point. It's like whoever approved the controls had never played a game with a controller before. Also the whole UI felt amateurish. Hate to be this harsh, it's a great concept and I wanted to give it a chance, but first impressions mean a lot.

Lame. Complete waste of a really great concept. The camera and controls are sluggish and overly limited. The game makes you do pointless quick time events (include 6 axis movements - NOBODY LIKES 6AXIS SONY!!!) to perform actions during sequences which should be fun but end up being frustrating with boring payoffs. Each chapter is very brief but because of the controls end up getting drawn out painfully long. At the end of each chapter is a summary of which path you chose vs everyone else, which feels pointless. In contrast to this there are moments in the game that require you to master quicktime sequences which off no other approach. I really liked the concept, but I really hated this game.

Dumb. When your shift ends you have to walk back home and get to your bed before you collapse from fatigue. But it takes so long to get back to your home and to your bed and back to your job again the next day that you only really get a few minutes of exploration time. Plus time is counting down when you're reading stuff or doing puzzles. It's very tedious and annoying, and sometimes you'll get back to your bed and it'll tell you that your shift isn't over yet or sometimes your manager will tell you your late. I actually hated it.

Nice looking game, controls feel good, need mechanic, but the first boss is too hard. You don't get any indication of progress for doing damage, so you're never really sure if what you are doing is correct or not. It's the first boss of the game!

Overall: 4.5/10 Personal Bias: +2 points Total: 6.5. Summary: Despite some serious flaws and pointless features, this game has just enough going right for it to be really fun. I hope to play a more polished Just Cause 4 in the future! Breakdown: Gameplay: 8/10. The grapple, parachute, wingsuit combination is INSANELY FUN, especially with upgrades. Add to that airplanes, fighter jets, helicopters, boats, cars, and motorbikes, you have many options and travelling around the world is very enjoyable. This game has some sandbox elements that lend themselves to some hilarious moments, and makes for a good pass-the-controller game with friends. That said, the motorbikes have terrible handling, like not even fun. Also, there aren't as many options as in JC2, notably jetboats with guns on them. It also seems strange that there is no underwater locomotion beyond basic swimming, since underwater is beautiful. A submersible vehicle or diver propulsion vehicle would have been fun. The camera gets a little janky here and it's mostly well executed. Missions/Activities: 3/10. While there are a few progression missions, they mostly just boil down to annoying escort/protection missions. The open world encounters are mostly pointless and are often broken, in fact they are such a mess they should have been cut from the game. There are also "Daredevil jumps" which are terribly half-assed in their execution, no clear indication of what you need to do and a complete lack of failure/success states (I'm guessing their inclusion was forced by world artists and game design ran out of time to polish the experience). That said, the challenges (races, wingsuit runs, etc.) are really really fun, well though out, rewarding, and polished. Presentation: 8/10. This world is gorgeous and colorful and compliments the locomotion mechanics really well. The explosions are very cool, not the best I've seen but still prove rewarding. The character models aren't the best, but they suit the overall style and tone well enough. The music is really good, though also very repetitive. The dialogue quality is mostly fine, but there are moments where important dialogue gets lost in the mix. The sound effects are good though not spectacular. The UI is simple, clean, and easy to navigate. Metagame: 4/10. I really liked unlocking upgraded by completing challenges, it gives them a reason to be completed, and it helps that the challenges are fun. Clearing settlements, provinces, and regions is fun but very repetitive (which wasn't really bad for me personally, but may bore other players). Unlocking priests/churches as cooldown areas feels like a really pointless mechanic. It was strange that there are less main missions than there are provinces and the method of unlocking missions felt inconsistent. I wish missions were more dependent on clearing provinces since at the end of the game I still had settlements left to liberate, which seemed out of context from the story. The reward progression is fine, but there are some really good vehicles and weapons which are unlocked before less good ones. The thing that really bothers me is that there is no "New Game +" option (pretty standard these days) when completing the game, allowing you to start at the beginning with all your previous unlocks and upgrades intact. To be fair, you can "re-oppress" settlements, but you can only do this one at a time and are forced to fast travel each time, which involves a 30 second load. It's weird that there is not method to re-oppress bases in bulk because the current method is very time consuming. Narrative: 5/10. Mostly harmless. The main character, Rico, is less interesting than in previous versions. He used to be a bad-ass anti-hero, but now he's a more suave and macho nice guy. I always assumed he was Mexican, but it this game he's more **** European gentleman. He used to be more like Batman, now he feels like Superman. The supporting characters are fine, but the most interesting character is Dimah, the scientist who crafts all of Rico's gadgets. She's really the only character with an arc. Aside from Dimah's part, the overall story felt rushed and shallow, with an ending that felt abrupt. To be fair, there is more to the story which you can discover by collecting audiotapes, but it's also where the real meat of the story is in terms of what motivates Rico and the sole antagonist DiRavello. Online: 0/10. A complete broken mess. The game will often stall trying to connect to a server, even after you select offline mode. The online leaderboards do not work at all beyond people on your friends list, which is a shame because the challenges are so fun. It would have been better to cut online completely since it does more harm than good in the game. Also, this game screams for coop, but to be fair it isn't really something other open world games have figured out how to do well either.

I really enjoyed this game. Not since Spider-Man 2 (SM2) has a Spider-Man game come along that really nails the swing mechanic. This is a game I can play to just swing around Manhattan. In this game the web lines do not literally connect with building like they did in SM2, which worried me before I played it, but this is barely noticeable since the exhilaration of swinging is really delivered in the camera. In SM2 you could hang on to a web line indefinitely, in this game you automatically release another web-line when you reach the apex of your swing, but you can let go early if you want more forward than upward momentum. There is also the web rush mechanic in this game. While I'm not a huge fan of seeing little silhouettes of spider man indicating where I can perform this action, it actually proves pretty useful and is a fun and welcome mechanic. One last noticeable difference is the absence of performing mid-air stunts, which now just happen contextually and automatically as you swing. This really didn't matter to me at all. Despite these differences the swing mechanic is just as fun, if not better than it was in SM2, because as I mentioned before they do a really good job of selling the exhilaration through camera, which to be fair takes a little getting used to at first. As for combat, it's pretty much straight out of Batman: Arkham. This is a good choice, Batman Arkham set the bar for fighting in an action game, and it would be foolish to not emulate their mechanic. The game generally has modes of play, Exterior (free roam around Manhattan) and Interior (linear confined levels). For the most part the game works the same on both areas except there is more emphasis on stealth gameplay in interior areas. There are a butt-load of collectables in both areas but most can be found in the exterior gameworld of Manhattan. For presentation, the game has excellent sound, music, and dialogue (which can get a tad repetitive). The front-end, HUD, and menus are all elegant, minimal, and well thought out with nice transitions. Just the right amount of options too. Graphically, I've seen better, but to be honest there was nothing jarringly bad. Beenox did a good job of prioritizing visual quality and I have to say the game actually looks better playing it than it does in many of the preview videos I've seen. I like that they created an large open world full of cars and pedestrians, the city feels alive. The things about this game that I did not like: For the most part the fighting between camera and control are minor, but this did cause me to fail on a couple of occasions. There is no way to exit an interior until you finish the level's progression. This is a problem for players like me who just want to plug in the game and swing around, but not really a big deal since the interior gameplay is pretty awesome. Somewhat Repetitive Dialogue (though to be fair the voice acting was excellent) There are different times of day and weather, but they are scripted and not dynamic (you can choose your time of day when you complete the game). The "Overcast" time of day actually makes the game look ugly, but thankfully this is brief (reminded me of I Am Alive). The open world gameplay is (or feels like it is if it isn't) very scripted, I wish there were more dynamic events to keep me busy. I was disappointed that I did not unlock more outfits after finishing the game. You get one and it's not great. There ARE more outfits to unlock, but more in an easter-egg fashion rather than as part of the progression, which would have made for better rewards IMO. Should you buy it? YES. This game is awesome. Lot's of fun to just swing around. A satisfying combat mechanic right out of Batman, and lots of cool comic collectables for Spider-Man fans.