Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana is a marvelous game. The combat is fast-paced and offers lots of variety to keep me hooked from start to finish. The soundtrack is simply a masterpiece. The graphics are serviceable. The game worked great on my machine. I only had one crash in about 65 hours. Apart from that the game ran without any technical issuues. But by far my favorite aspects of the game are the story and the characters. The deserted Seiren Island is a great setting with lots of interesting places to explore. The story takes some time to really get going. In the first half of the game, you focus mainly on finding other castaways and exploring Seiren Island. The characters you recruit for your team are really likeable. Same goes for the castaways you meet along the way. When you meet the titular Dana (which in my opinion is one of the best characters Falcom has ever written) around halfway of the game, the story really starts to pick up. Especially the last 10 to 15 hours are absolutely outstanding. If you like Action-RPGs, I highly recommend this one.
Cyberpunk 2.0 is a truly fantastic game. Easily one of the best RPGs I ever played. Night City is hands down one of the best designed, most immersive locations I ever have experienced in a video game. Also, the writing is second to none. The main story is really engaging, the side missions are well written and rich in variety. A real highlight for me were the characters. The writing of all these likeable, memorable despicable and odd characters in Night Cit is just stellar. Not to forget the excellent graphics, which contribute a lot to the atmosphere of the game. Same can be said about the soundtrack, which does an excellent job setting the mood for the missions and Night City as a whole. The game still suffers from some bugs, but nothing major. It took almost 3 years, but I think Cyberpunk 2077 has now finally become the masterpiece it should already have been at its launch in 2020.
Phantom Liberty is a great DLC. The main story is really engaging and kept me intrigued until the end. The new characters are excellently written with many facets that come to light the longer you play. Dogtown is an interesting setting with lots of stuff to discover. It feels really like a bustling, vibrant city and is a great addition to the existing Night City. I had virtually no technical issues, apart from a handful of crashes when starting/terminating the game. Phantom Liberty is a great DLC, which makes Cyberpunk even better.
I bought this just to realize that commanding your own ship isn't as fun as it sounds in this game. What really bugged me the most, is that everything is painfully slow in this game. In the first it takes minutes to destroy some lousy asteroids. Navigating your ship is a pain in the ass as because the menu used to give orders is confusing. Same goes for basically any menu in the game. Commanding your ship just feels clunky, overly complicted and unresponsive. I gave up at the second mission, when my I simply couldn't manage to intercept a ship and tow with the tractor beam. Even though I gave the correct orders, I never managed to get in tractor beam range in time. Unfortunatley the game doesn't give you any feedback why you failed. That makes the game really frustrating. Which is magnified by the fact that there is no quicksave, so you have to play the whole mission again. I really wanted to like this game, but it turned out to be a huge disappointment.
Elite Force 2 is a mediocre shooter with an uninspired level design, rather boring combat and a story, which isn't really intriguing. Compared to its predecessor, EF2 is a step backwards in any direction. As there are only 2 known faces from Star Trek to be seen in the game (Picard and Tuvok), that game doesn't have such a great Star Trek atmosphere as Elite Force 1 did, where yxou met the entire crew of the Voyager. The story also isn't nearly as good as in EF1. The gameplay is more varied, but unforunately there were some elements added which I found to be rather tedious, like puzzles or party where you have to avoid traps and find switches. But what bothered me the most, was the gunplay. The weapons all felt too wek and had no real punch. The compression rifle from EF 1 feels now like a standard assault rifle. You also have some kind of shotgun, which feels ridiculously weak. The only thing that EF2 is really great at is its graphic. The game looks fantastic for an 18 year old game. To sum it up: I found EF2 to be a disappointing sequel, which just wasn't fun to play. It's not a bad game, but nothing special either. It's mediocre at best.
Rogue Squadron was one of my favorite games back on the N64. So I was really excited to be able to play it again. But as it turns out, I can't. The game doesn't properly support my XBOX360 controller. As a result I had to fight with the abysmal controls most of the time instead of the enemies on screen. It's just impossible to adjust the camera right. So you have a terrible camera angle most of the time, which doesn't allow to track your position correct. I crashed several times out of nowhere because my ship seemingly was close to the surface. Which I couldn't see. To sum it up: I strongly advise anyone against buying Rogue Squadron 3D. The controls are just so terrible, that it'll kill all the fun. I don't know if it works better with other modern controllers, but I highly doubt it.
The game itself is still fun to play. But unfortunately it doesn't support the XBox360-controller properly. You can map all the functions to the buttons, but some just don't work in game. For example I put Accelerate to the A-Button, which worked. But then I tried to map the booster to X-Button and I just did not work. I also couldn't switch the camera angels in the race, even though I mapped the corresponding function. So the game is practically unplayable for me - concerning the keyboard is no real option. That's a real dissappointment for me. I would have expected that upon re-releasing the game, it would support one of the most widespread pc-controllers.
Risen is a really good open world RPG with an interesting. It's really challenging, but makes lot of fun when you realize how you get stronger over time. The combat system is okay, but could be much better. The game world is nicely designed and invites you to explore aside the main path. Graphics are still okay, the game looks quite nice, considering its age. There are still some bugs in the game, so I'd recommend using the latest fan patch (version 1.3). Unfortunately the game has in may opinion one really big flaw. The first two chapters of the game, which take up about 2/3 of the whole game, are really great. But unfortunately the last two chapters are horrible. Most of the time you have to fight through temples, collecting stuff for the final fight. That eben would be okay, if the fights in this chapter wouldn't be so totally tedious. The main enemies in the 2 last chapters are such a pain in the ass to fight, I really had to force myself to keep playing. That's a real shame, because as I said before, the first 2/3 of the game are realla enjoyable.
I'm stuck in the first tutorial mission. I'm supposed to destroy some freighters, but I don't deal any damage no matter how often I hit them. I only hit randomly, without having any idea why it worked out. The game gives absolutely no feedback on what I've done wrong or how it is done right. Tried approaching from different angles, getting in closer range, using differnt weapons, overload mode - nothing worked. In my opinion that's just poor game design. Must be the first game in 20 years that managed to already annoy me in the tutorial so much, that I uninstalled it.
