rinks361

Idk what it is with Xbox and mid games, but they dump them out and fans act like they're the best games ever. Avowed has terrible animations that feel like they're incomplete and not even beta level. The amount of bugs combined with the janky, generic combat is enraging. The world is dull and lifeless and it's hard to believe this is even a game in the Pillars of Eternity realm. Sinking hundreds of hours between PoE 1 and 2, this game is an embarrassment on many levels. I feel like the game was made by AI and the only reason it took so long to release is that devs were trying to fix everything and then just gave up halfway through. It's like the game wants to be Skyrim, but it also wants to be Kingdoms of Amalur. It fails on both accounts, especially combat. I had a better time in base, launch day Skyrim than Avowed has offered. The poor animations, especially the stiff, lifeless combat animations, are probably the worst of it. Add in falling through the world,getting stuck in the swimming animation, and the day 1 Mass Effect Andromedacharacter models and facial ****'s just a massive mix of terrible design choices. The sound design is also off. Sometimes close sounds are far away while those that sound far away are super close. Sometimes sounds don't even play or are super delayed. One fight, the sound effects didn't trigger until I paused the game. I thought it was still playing in the background. **** sure who mapped these but they are terrible. Constantly hitting crouched when I don't mean to, I'm trying to dodge or block. Then there's the active pause screen that is disorganized so you have to fiddle through to find what you want. This is on top of the quick/hotbar mappings, so you have controls all over the screen. Veilguard did it better, Inquisition did it best. **** open world, thankfully, because even with a closed world there's nothing to do. I couldn't imagine having to trudged miles on end to reach destinations. The levels and graphics remind me of early Xbox Onedesigns and graphics. Textures seem lacking in both quality and clarity, like anisotropic filtering is on 2x or 4x. Then the framerate just makes it even worse. Bad graphics with bad animations and sub-30fps (even though nothing major is ever happening and fights are really weak and boring, nowhere near as flashy as something like Hogwarts Legacy, Veilguard, or Inquisition. Speaking of Hogwarts Legacy, the magic in Avowed is very pathetic. Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2 had great effects and spells felt meaningful. Here, Avowed tries to first person shooter magic with terrible AOE spells that are nearly impossible to aim properly. A lot of times, you can't even see the reticle for where you're aiming, especially if you're freezing water (VERY bad special effect with that, by the way.) Hogwarts Legacy had too many spells that required constant hotbar switching, but the spells actually did things and felt meaningful or impactfull. Combat is already non-reactive, but enemies barely flinch at magic attacks. Wands are also pathetically weak and useless in combat as most enemies are melee or have a fast range attack. You get easily stunlocked because even the slightest hit causes your character to flinch. Companions are useless. If they aren't completely disappearing but still somehow talking as if they're in fights, then they're usually defeated quickly, especially in the beginning. Micromanaging them and their skills, and a mob of enemies plus your own skills, health, and positioning is distracting from what would make the game actually fun. I don't even know how many times a companion disappeared mid combat, is talking like they are actively fighting, and then all of a sudden does a skill and magically reappears in the fight, only to disappear moments later. I won't write much about the story, but it feels like they got the C-Team to do this one. Pillars of Eternity 1, amazing story. Pillars of Eternity 2, even better story.Deadfire is by far my favorite RPG storyline, even though I don't care for the whole "Oh, you lost your powers and now start over from level 1 again" trope. With Avowed, they make it seem like yoir character is super important, but you're incredibly weak. If you're going to give an epic backstory, at least give the player a couple of free level ups to make it seem like they have the experience it is suggested they have. Overall, I honestly expected as much from an Xbox "exclusive." I use the term loosely because, well, all games are going to other consoles and PC. I would wait until Game Pass comes officially to Switch 2 and Playstation 5/6, because this is absolutely not worth paying full price for. I understand Xbox needs other consoles to help them stay in business, but maybe instead of spending billions on acquisitions, they should have spent that on games and developing their own studio instead of buying other brands and effectively ruining them. Another GOTY potential ruined.

Absolutely DISGUSTING performance even with the latest hardware (i9-13900K, RTX 4090, 64 GB DDR5-5600, 2 TB SSD). Playing in sub 30 fps in 4k regardless of any graphics setting high to low) and the upscaling options are tragic. No DLSS, and they have FRS 1 as the only alternative choice.... ****. Not sure who was in charge of greenlighting this but it definitely needs more work to fix the bugs and bring the engine into the modern age with better upscaling options. Their ridiculous excuse of "we were targeting 30 fps" is complete bs. There's no reason the top hardware available is unable to achieve 60 fps and I play several other simulation games including the first Skylines, the X4 series, flight simulator, etc. I can even run Cyberpunk, Warhammer, and Ashes of the Singularity at 4k max settings. City Skylines II can't even handle a completely new game on a blank map on the lowest settings. The entire dev team should be embarassed to say the least, especially if they designed it and knew it performed like complete garbage. Stick with the original Skylines until Colossal Order pulls their heads out of their rears and fixes this colossal failure.

You'd think how much Xbox talks about their console being the most powerful ever that Starfield would have more than 1080p and 30fps to offer on the Series X. Sure it's higher resolution at times...when nothing is going on and the bare minimum amount of NPCs are on screen, otherwise it's a blurry mess, especially in a game that relys on being a fps. It's hard to tell if console is better than PC because of the amount of work you need to do on PC just to have a stable frame rate, including modding in DLSS support. Being an "Xbox first party" title, you'd expect the Xbox to perform without issue. That's just not the case here and with many of the games Xbox offers. It's been one disappointment after the next with Xbox games and Bethesda's acquisition clearly didn't improve things for either company. After 10 hours on Xbox and close to 40 on PC, I've went back to other games, most recently Cyberpunk 2077 for theor 2.0 release and Phantom Liberty.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Absolutely epic. From the graphics, to the sound, to the animation, the story, the characters. Everything was peiced together well in this sequel. The first game was very basic in comparison and felt like a wanna-be Dark Souls. Jedi Survivor finally feels like the devs wanted to really create their own game. Improvements to combat are greatly appreciated and feel more fluid. If didn't feel like a "rock, paper, scissors" for of deal anymore. Could be better off course, but my favorite combat system is still from The Force Unleashed games. Regardless, you'll have fun in the various locations which feel much more epic in scope now. Sorry PC players have been having a terrible time with game releases for the past few years and decided to review bomb this game as well, but I guess all the snooty, uppity attitudes and spending thousands on parts every year isn't as "pc master race" as they thought it was.

I think the reason Crysis is so well talked about is because of the graphics. By todays standards, even the "remastered" version set to "Can It Run Crysis?" looks terrible compared to more modern AAA titles. Crysis may have looked great when it first dropped back in 2007 (if you had the rig to run it) but today it's not only a joke in terms of physics and realism (broken raytracing, blurry visuals, see other complaints submitted) but it's also a joke in terms of gameplay. Thirteen years ago this may have been a slightly decent game if they spent more time on gameplay mechanics instead of graphics, but unfortunately they decided on the latter. Gameplay is so bland, boring and generic that I would rather play Steam Early Access indie dev shooters. GAMEPLAY: Movement is slow, slogging and terribly implemented. The basic movement seems like a slow jog. Sprinting sends you forward so fast that your energy bar depletes in what seems like a second. Continuing to sprint makes a normal run but you will have zero suit energy. SO STUPID! Why not make suit sprint a toggled power? The game doesn't know whether to be a stealth shooter or a run-and-gun shooter as it constantly advises you to switch between stealth and armor modes as well as using binoculars that are pretty much useless and only highlight enemies on the minimap but not on a HUD. Stealth is nearly as pointless as the energy drains the faster you move and is instantly over the moment you fire a weapon or make any major action. Crouching and going prone causes it to drain slower, but because of the various large grasses, bushes and other foliage it makes finding your way nearly impossible. Going prone itself is so slow you'd wonder how your character even qualified to wear the suit let alone join a military branch to begin with. Once you're spotted by AI enemies (which is VERY easy even if you're crouched or prone) every enemy nearby INSTANTLY knows where you are and has pretty decent accuracy even on the easier modes that were tested. What's worse, is they're wearing basic fatigues while you're in an advanced alien war suit yet you will die VERY quickly, especially if you suddenly get caught while in stealth and your energy isn't high enough to absorb much damage in armor mode. Meanwhile, some enemies require half a clip of ammo to just take down 1 enemy, sometimes even if your shot is a dead on headshot on the first trigger pull. GRAPHICS: Again, some people need to take their nostalgia goggles off and actually see the game, both the original and Remaster, for what they are. It may have been the "ultimate" showcase of graphics 13 years ago but there are much better, more realistic options today than Crysis could have hoped for. I mean **** foliage doesn't even move in the game! Zero collision detection, one bullet can sometimes cause whole trees to split as if it was chopped by a massive axe, physics of objects are as generic as can be... It's just a mess of bad decisions and lack of innovation as if the dev's only concern was to make a game so graphically unoptimized that even if you had a PC that could run Crysis in 2007 it was sure to run it very poorly. Honestly, Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC is probably the new standard as I can play Crysis on max settings 4K and get between 60-70 fps in the Remastered version and in a modded original version (you'd think the devs would have implemented more modern graphics and coding techniques as an update to the original or even the Remastered version, but NOPE!). Meanwhile on RDR2, max settings and 4K brings the game to a painful 23-30fps (30 fps if absolutely nothing is happening and I stand still) but the game is crisp, clear, very clean looking and has natural looking scenery and interactive foliage and modern day physics. Crysis Remastered reminds me of Halo in terms of how people praise and remember those games as being the "holy grail" of PC gaming. When going back to them compared to modern day games, they are utter trash that has been overhyped for years without anyone returning to see how bad both games were in terms of graphics, story and gameplay mechanics.

Not sure what people (and I use the term loosely) are crying about. The game is phenomenal. Story, characters, settings, continuing the dark and gritty post-apocolyptic theme, everything here has returned from the first game. Are they mad they have to play as a girl? Are they mad Joel isn't center stage? It wouldn't surprise me if Xbox players were behind most of the reviews, mad because the game isn't available for them. Metacritic needs a new user reviewing process to weed out these review bombers because the game is great, especially the sound and atmosphere in which it takes place. It does start off fairly slow but eventually picks up. Beautiful graphics, frame rate that is stable 99% of the time, great acting and mocap.

Really fun game! It's a nice change of pace from all the run and gun type of games that have been coming out lately. Haven't had a self-paced game this interesting since I played **** Valley. There's always something new to explore, things to upgrade and decorate. It's sad that people are complaining that there's no "objective" to obtain or arrive at are obviously new to Animal Crossing and didn't understand what they were getting into. That's like a fan of action movies going to watch a romance movie and then rating it low because there was no action in it... AC:NH has charming graphics, the iconic dialog speech patterns, and plenty to see and do for the hardcore fans of the series. I never played the other games but this one immediately hooked me into playing every single day. I'm hoping for expansions to the island sizes as the starting areas are pretty small.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]