ANNOYING CRASH ON STARTUP FIX: - For whatever reason, the game will just crash when launching it, making it impossible to play. There is a fix though (for me at least) that'll hopefully help you. - The game doesn't like to run on CPUs with tons of cores. Unfortunately I found no way to deal with this without a third party tool. Thankfully, Process Lasso is a very lightweight program that fixed the crash completely and let me play the rest of the game bug and crash free. - After installing Process Lasso, go to options/cpu/cpu affinities. - put dxhrdc.exe in process match - make cpu affinity 0-7 (so make it only use 8 cores (8 worked for me, use less if it still gives you problems)) - now just have Process Lasso running whenever you play this game STUPID SCREEN TEARING: - i fixed it by turning v-sync ON in game, v-sync ON in my GPU control panel (so for dxhrdc.exe), then i used RivaTuner to set the max framerate to 60 (you can probably do this in your GPU control panel too) - i also had g-sync too. But I don't think that really mattered. Alright sheesh now about the game: The original Deus Ex from 2000 is literally one of my favorite games ever, so what I said in the review title is a high bar's already set for Human Revolution. Ultimately though, you're getting more Deus Ex with this sequel. What does that mean, you ask?: - Great Stealth Gameplay - Really good level design, cleverly hidden items, massive open-ended areas - Fun side missions - Fun dialogue system (i liked Mankind Divided's improvements much more through) - Tons of Upgrades/Character Progression Stuff (only 4 augs you manually activate though... screw you consoles) - Sorry didn't explain character progression well. You get lots of augmentations/perks to unlock as you progress through the game, all of which improve your character in some way. Also can upgrade weapons too. - Great main story (dumb ending/"endings" though) Ran out of review room, so I highly recommend it!
Then just use this Revision mod. It's free and comes with the GOG version of Deus Ex and is installed separately from the main game (so you have the option to launch the original (that you can mod yourself) or the Revision mod with all the annoying configuration and tweaks already applied. + It spruces up the graphics, adds some quality of life improvements and balances some strange design choices (OP regen aug is nerfed, master tier of medicine skill has the biggest boost in med kit recovery, etc). + It adds some achievements, a new game plus option and includes some goofy and challenging extra difficulty options. + I mean, I've played the original a LOT and the actual level layout doesn't really change. And if it did, it was subtle enough that I didn't notice. I think only a handful or two of items throughout the entire game were added by this mod or moved around by this mod. All critical items weren't touched though. + And I should really highlight that the Revision mod *DOESN'T CHANGE THE STORY AT ALL* Here's what's not so good though: - Remade/New Soundtrack Kinda Sucks: Well, it's actually not bad and I didn't mind using it for my gazillionth playthrough. However, I thought the original soundtrack was much better. YOU CAN SWITCH TO THE ORIGINAL MUSIC in the Revision mod if you want though. So there's no harm done with the mod author's remaking the soundtrack, because you can swap back to the original at any time. - One Pretty Bad NPC: There was only one NPC added by this mod... i think. It was in Hong Kong near the club. The voice acting wasn't that great (especially when compared to the charming qualities of the rest of the game's voices), and didn't contain anything useful at all. I didn't really care though because I just skipped past this NPC. So yeah. Ultimately I recommend using this if you don't wanna tweak the original game or are looking for some extra graphics, gameplay balances and difficulty options to spice things up.
So yeah. Deus Ex is an immersive sim/rpg/"not really a shooter" with a lengthy campaign, shockingly good level design, amazing music, massive levels, interesting story and characters, charming voice acting with gameplay that aged really well. You play as JC Denton, a badass special agent with various skills and augmentations to upgrade. You get 10 augmentations slots with 18 different augmentations available, all of which can be upgraded (except 2). They're all activated manually, so get ready to use a crap-ton of hotkeys. There are 11 skills to choose from with 4 different tiers for each skill that you upgrade with skill points, which are basically experience points. Some are kinda useless, but basically all of them are useful for specific situations. You use a grid based inventory, so you need to pick which weapons, grenades, suits, healing items, etc that you want to rely on. You can go guns blazing, but i wouldn't recommend it, this is mostly designed as a stealth game. You can actually complete the game entirely non-lethally with one exception. It definitely increases the difficulty though and only recommend it to those who already completed the game and are looking for some extra challenges. I had a lot of fun beating the game this way. This game has unbelievably good music, the Revision mod is a bit of a downgrade in my opinion. But it has such great music to work with that I still enjoyed the remade tracks too. Speaking of the Revision mod, I enjoyed it a lot and guarantee purists will hate it. It does make the game work out of the box and doesn't require any tinkering. I personally recommend using it if modding/tweaking the game to run really well sounds too daunting for you. Level design is some of the best ever in my opinion. Always look through shelves, on top of roofs, and basically every nook and cranny because there might be a handy lockpick or biocell sitting where you don't expect it. One of my favorite games! A must play!
Which really sucks because Mankind Divided retains all the things that made Deus Ex so great and improved upon Human Revolution in my opinion. Additionally, GOG eliminated the stupid micro-transactions from this version. Having said that, I actually managed to fix or workaround 100% of the problems I experienced with this game, so here's all the issues and how I fixed them. - Graphical Bugs: by saving and loading your game, strange graphical artifacts (like flickering black textures) are easily fixed and extremely rare to begin with - Inventory Bug: sometimes combining stuff doesn't work... after selecting "combine" select the item to combine it with then hit the "enter" button. Maybe it's just bad design or not properly explained to the player. Either way, doing what I said let's you combine stuff. - Golem City Bug: after using the big elevator that takes you to the ARC complex, previous areas will be unavailable due to a rendering/texture bug. There's an Easter Egg involving a penguin you need to carry through the entire level. You have to bring it with you as you progress through Golem City. It'll be unreachable once you reach the penguin's destination if you leave it in its original position. - Save Corruption Bug: You'll know this happens if the game suddenly and repeatedly crashes at the same spot. This happened once in 50+ hours and can be worked around if you just make multiple manual saves and rotate between them often. - Crash After Finishing Golem City: After the cutscene, the game might always crash. Fix it by limiting the number of CPU cores Mankind Divided can use. I used Process Lasso and limited the game to half of my 28 cores. - Softlock-ish/Unavoidable Prague Metro Crash: THIS ONE REALLY SUCKS because you have to use the train to travel. What could fix it is setting the game to windowed, low graphics preset, subtitles off, dx11. I fixed it by only having Process Lasso restrict the game to 8 CPU cores. Hope this helps someone.
If you loved Alan Wake 1 (like me), you might find brief pockets of fun here. However, there's just too much that I disliked about this game. It's not all bad though, here's what I liked: - You keep your items: In Alan Wake 1, it bothered the crap out of me that you lost your items and weapons so frequently. This doesn't happen in American Nightmare. - New Enemies: There's a few new enemies. However, the spider enemies were just annoying and melting them with the flashlight was pretty boring. - Some Progression: As you find collectables, you can unlock new weapons. Some were cool and some were kinda useless. But a bigger selection is always good to have. - Great Port: Graphics are about the same as Alan Wake 1 and didn't stutter or crash at all. Some of the environmental effects from Alan Wake 1 were absent here. But I didn't enjoy most of this game. Some examples: - BAD story, BAD characters, BAD writing: So you're stuck in a timeloop and trying to escape it. You work with a mechanic lady, a scientist lady, and a film journalist i think? They were all very bland and Alan is always reassuring them all that "everything's gonna be okay". The dialogue frankly sucked and they all had almost no personality. - Flashlight recharges almost instantly: In the first game, juggling batteries to charge your flashlight was fun. That's still in this game, but the flashlight automatically recharges so quick, the mechanic is essentially dead. - VERY repetitive: You're basically repeating the same objectives until the game ends. It's very uninteresting and doing the same task over and over again frankly bored the crap out of me. - NO new combat mechanics: Besides the new weapons and no longer needing to monitor your flashlight's charge, nothing new is introduced and the only horror element of managing your flashlight was stripped from the game. All in all, I don't recommend this. It doesn't add any new fun stories or gameplay to make it worth your while.
First, let me explain why I still recommend horror fans or those looking for a great narrative experience to give Alan Wake a try: - Story! In short, the story is very creative, interesting and frankly carries the game. But you play as an author going on a vacation with his wife in an unassuming village. He becomes forcibly set apart from her and gets sucked into a nightmarish, sort of alternate dimension full of darkness and ghostly creatures. What I loved is how the player is forced to question what is real and what is a hallucinogenic dream. I had a lot of fun piecing together what the heck actually happens in this game. - Great Graphics, Great Port: Alan Wake 1 is over 10 years old, but still looks pretty good. A lot of the environmental effects look nightmarish and freaky. The animations leaves a lot to be desired, but was acceptable back when this was made and won't disappoint you. ALSO, the game didn't stutter or crash once! - Serviceable Combat: You basically just shine light on enemies and shoot them. Much like the Uncharted games, Alan Wake's combat does the job, but doesn't break any ground as opposed to, let's say, Deus Ex or Resident Evil. Here are some disappointments i had with Alan Wake 1: - You LOSE your items very often: Unlike in Deus Ex 1 or Bioshock 1, you can't get them back and have to find new weapons again. It's not a big deal because you don't accumulate tons of items, but is still a frustrating mechanic. - No progression. People LOVED Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space so much because you can upgrade weapons and find items and money. In Alan Wake, you can only find new weapons or flashlights and can't upgrade or improve your character in any way. - Generic Combat: like I said above, the gameplay isn't good or bad and gets the job done. Just don't expect anything exceptional. I DO recommend you pick this game up, because I still had a lot of fun and bet you'll enjoy it too (plus it's pretty inexpensive).
So yeah, Bioshock Infinite is way different from Bioshock 1 and 2. Here's a few differences: - Very linear levels with one exception in the base game (Emporia level). Burial at Sea DLCs are kind of open-ended though. - The gameplay loop is much different from the prequels. You run from point A to point B with minimal exploring. Then you either fight (usually this), talk, watch a cutscene or take in the scenery. And this just repeats until you beat the game. Worded like that probably makes it sound dull, but it's still lots of fun. - No "Adam"/secondary currency. You still upgrade lots of stuff, but it's all with in-game "money" that's scavenged in hard to miss spots. BUT what Bioshock Infinite set out to do was provide entertaining combat and a well written story with an interesting cast of characters on a VERY creative setting. It totally succeeded in all these departments. So why is this not just some Call of Duty clone with a fancy setting? + Infinite has my favorite magic system in the franchise. In my opinion the vigors absolutely saved the entire gameplay loop. Some vigors let you stun enemies, block attacks, charm and throw/lasso enemies. But most importantly, many vigors actually interact with one another and provide for some devastating combos. For example, you can use a water rope to pull enemies towards you, then zap 'em with lightning. + Permanent progression. You can upgrade weapons, vigors and your health, magic pool, or shield. + Setting: A racist, religious cult on a floating city??? Yeah, pretty cool. + Story is AMAZING. The DLCs are unbelievably good too and wrap everything up nicely. + Also runs perfectly. No crashing or stutters. Great port. Couple bad things though: - TWO weapons. That's all you can carry at once. - "Halo" regenerating shield is dumb. All in all though, Bioshock Infinite is a one of a kind game that you should definitely try. Play the prequels first though (at least before this game's DLC).
When I first played Control, I expected a fancy tech demo with serviceable third person shooting mechanics. And boy was I wrong. Control has a ton to offer and took me over 40 hours to finish. I have a few problems, but first let me tell you how pleasantly surprised I was. - Fun Gameplay Loop: So you fight a big roster of different enemies, they drop weapon/personal mod items and currency. You use that currency to improve weapons. Completing objectives gives you ability points to improve your character. Firefights will get really chaotic and a clean office space can turn into a pile of rubble with your supernatural powers and environmental damage during combat. - Interesting Story: So you go inside this paranatural government facility and things get crazy. You save the world from this internal threat from spilling outside the building. Video logs you find are filmed with live actors too! - Patch: I recommend using the "Unofficial Comprehensive Patch" (available on pcgamingwiki). It disables achievements, but improves the visuals and lets you skip the intro videos. - Great Visuals: Control looks amazing and will bring the most high end hardware to its knees. Thankfully it's optimized well and is pretty easy on your CPU. So mid and even low end GPUs can run this game fine, but just stick to 1080p and maybe disable some of the more demanding graphics settings. - Stable: Control only crashed a couple times in 40+ hours, and it was always when selecting a menu in a fast travel point. Few things I didn't like: - Only ONE difficulty setting, which kinda stinks. - Two weapons at a time: there's actually many different cool weapons, but you have to go through a menu to select which two you want to be able to quickly switch between. - Weak character progression: The upgrades are like "+30% health" or "+75% launch damage". Nothing too innovative or interesting. All in all, Control was too much fun. So it gets a super duper recommendation from me!
Ziggurat 2 improves upon the first game in every way in my opinion. Here's why I had so much fun! - Campaign Mode: So now you can gradually unlock characters, amulets, perks, weapons, and permanent passive buffs by completing the 3 or 4 available missions. This is a Roguelite with procedural generation, so the available missions constantly change in mission type and layout. The campaign mode also has a "new game plus" option via its "ascension" system. Each level of ascension increases difficulty, but also keeps everything you've already earned as well as increasing the maximum cap of mastery points you can invest into the numerous "perks". - Permanent Progression: You can now earn "mastery" points that you can put into these perk trees. You can subtly improve healing or mana drop effectiveness, damage output and damage received among much more, There's about 40 different perks you can invest mastery points in and while it makes the game a little easier, it's not game changing. - 5 difficulty modes: Ziggurat 1 only had 3 difficulty settings, so this is a welcome change. I found the second hardest difficulty mode to be my sweet spot. It's a very hard game, but as I'm about to mention, there's a much bigger emphasis on skill now. - 12 unique characters: in Ziggurat 1, each character only had different stats i think. Now we get characters with different stats, skills, and gimmicks. You now have one unique ability per character. Some make you temporarily invulnerable, leeches life from enemies, collects all items in the arena, summons friendly monsters or can make your character invisible for a moment. These definitely change the way you tackle fights. Also with the introduction of the "dash" ability, you have much more control and simple strafing won't keep you alive. - Classic Mode: All of Ziggurat 1's game modes are available here too for fans of the prequel! Graphics are really good too and didn't crash once. Earns an easy recommendation!
Considering how great the first 2 Dishonored games were though, that's not saying much. I still had plenty of fun playing as Billie Lurk. I also already thought she was a great character, so it was cool getting to know more about her. I dunno about the main story regarding the Outsider though. It wasn't bad or anything, but it didn't captivate me like the first 2 games did. What kept me interested was frankly just more learning more details about Billie's past. The gameplay is kind of strange. Outside of the bonecharm crafting and the upgradeable weapons and equipment, there's no powers to learn or upgrade. So there's none of those "rune" upgrade items to collect. You also just have to wait for your supernatural energy/mana pool to regenerate (no mana potions). The 3 powers you automatically learn are pretty cool. The blink and dark vision powers have some interesting new gimmicks to them, but I never really used the third power. Oh and you also get these "contracts" to complete at the black market bulletin too. They're pretty fun and gives the player interesting optional objectives in already huge missions. It's also worth mentioning that there's no "chaos" rating and the world around you doesn't change depending on how many you kill. I actually kinda liked this, because even though I always use a non-lethal approach in these games, now there's no penalty for butchering these annoying NPCs (except for the wolfhounds. The animal lover in me always feels bad for them). The game definitely shines and saves the day with its massive, open-ended levels. The levels are gigantic and exploration is still incentivized and really fun because those useful upgrades are quite pricey. So thieving and combing through these big maps are always a thrill. The "original game plus" game mode stinks though. You just get different powers. I really wished they kept new game plus. Still had a lot of fun though, so I recommend it!
