Which is tragic because this game is AMAZING. Hacking and camera researching is way better. Also has my favorite combat of the franchise. But now let me (hopefully) help you fix it. I recommend sticking with the original (comes with the remaster). Remastered version crashes way too much and was a lost cause. Your call though. So for fixing the original: warning: this is not a guaranteed fix and i still experienced 3 crashes in 16.5 hours. (less than ~20+ i had on the remaster) Run the game once to create this directory: C:\Users\*your user name*\AppData\Roaming\Bioshock2Steam in-game graphics settings: max everything except for directx10 detail surfaces (off) game resolution can be set to native resolution in-game without problems (i ran it at 2560x1600) In Bioshock2SP.ini (C:\Users\*your user name*\AppData\Roaming\Bioshock2Steam): optional: find AutoAim and set it to False *potential crash fix* Find "TextureStreamingMemoryLimit" and set it to 1024 or 2048 (MBs of VRAM for game to use)... but watch out, because too high can cause delayed texture rendering (textures are too blurry for a sec, then render properly... didn't bother me, so i just set it to 8192) *LIKELY CRASH FIX*: Play in DX9! gog galaxy: create a duplicate exe in Bioshock 2/manage installation/configure/features/ ... add -dx9 argument to new exe (label it Bioshock 2 DX9 or whatever) ... now launch game from additional executables -> whatever your new exe is called not using gog galaxy: Create a shortcut to Bioshock2Launcher.exe (BioShock 2\SP\Builds\Binaries)... Go to properties, add -dx9 at the end of the "target" field You'll know if it worked if directx10 in-game graphics setting is greyed out also a mouse sensitivity fix: Open User.ini, find these lines, then set them to 500 or something MouseX=IF_MOUSE_LOOK_ENABLED Count bXAxis | IF_MOUSE_LOOK_ENABLED Axis aMouseX Speed= MouseY=IF_MOUSE_LOOK_ENABLED Count bYAxis | IF_MOUSE_LOOK_ENABLED Axis aMouseY Speed= Hope this helps!
FYI: Remastered version is a lame port, but I still suggest playing it over the original for reasons below! So Bioshock 1 is an incredibly fun first person shooter with a big emphasis on RPG'ish elements and big open-ended levels. Let me tell you why it's SO good first! - Its story is my favorite of the franchise. The game's villain is Andrew Ryan, the founder of the big underwater city you're trapped in. There are also tons of other great characters that you can learn about directly via conversations over your radio or by audio logs similar to how System Shock 1 and 2 worked. - It also has an interesting setting of an early Cold War, extreme Anarcho-Capitalist society. The underwater city is like nothing else we've seen in video games before and has great fitting music. - Fun Economy System! So you loot money, ammo, and crafting materials from crazed enemies and buy medical kits or ammo from vending machines. You also use the crafting items to obviously manufacture unique ammo types or useful devices. - GREAT Combat! You get a selection of 8 different upgradeable weapons. Almost all of them can use different types of ammo. On top of that, you get Plasmids, the "magic" of the game. You can zap, freeze, and immolate enemies. This really spices up the combat! - Great Character Progression: You can obtain and swap different "genes", which essentially give the player useful perks! Unfortunately, there's some bad to be found here too: - Unbalanced Weapons: The pistol, shotgun, and machine gun becomes obsolete once you get the grenade launcher, chemical launcher, and crossbow. - Hacking is BORING: You gotta hack a LOT of machines, and it's a boring mini-game that takes too long. - Port Is Kinda Crappy: It mostly works out of the box, but the Remastered's only improvement is better resolutions, an FOV option... and that's it i think. Some people report that it crashes a lot, but it only crashed once for me. Still a great game, and I recommend it!
Dead Cells (and ALL its DLCs) are as close to perfect as action packed Roguelite games can get. There's a gazillion things this game does right, but here are my favorite aspects of this great game. - Absurd weapon/skill/build variety: Dead Cells has literally over one hundred different weapons with their own move sets and strengths. You also level up with "scroll" items, which affects your health and how strong certain weapons/skills/deploy-ables/mutations are. Playing around with different builds each run makes the game always feel fresh. - Super challenging: Dead Cells is really hard and can become almost too hard if you use too many "Boss Cells" (you get one each time you beat the final boss on the hardest available difficulty). Each Boss Cell/Difficulty setting can introduce new enemies, tweak monster stats and how many times you can recharge your health and healing items. In my opinion, Dead Cells has a difficulty cap/ceiling of basically impossible (for me at least). BUT this is good because if you're patient and play enough, you'll probably reach a level where you can beat the hardest difficulty (and if not, it's still fun to stick with the difficulty setting that's most fun for you). - Gameplay Loop is AMAZING: So you pick a starter weapon, clear each level/biome, level up whatever stat you want and pick whatever skills you want, get increasingly powerful with new weapons, and defeat increasingly difficult bosses. You have a "Souls-like" dodge to completely avoid damage and mastering each enemy's attacks and your favorite weapons is SUPER satisfying. - Unlock Stuff/Great Progression: You get "Cells" from enemies and use them to upgrade shops/healing items/available weapons or skills/costumes and more! The permanent progression makes each run rewarding. I really don't know what else to say about this. Dead Cells has super fast paced, addicting combat with cool optional lore. Buy the game AND THE DLCS because they ROCK!
Well, almost perfect. But I'll get to that later. So I never played the Descent games, so I can only say as a big boomer shooter fan, Overload ticks all the boxes. Here's what I enjoyed most about the game: - Insane weapon variety. You actually get a total of 16 weapons to use. That's absolutely nuts and is almost too much since there's not enough key bindings to dedicate to each weapon. Two weapons are bound to one key (the keys 1 through 8 by default). You can scroll through them quickly with mouse scroll, but I just used the number keys. They're all well balanced and unique. - Good character progression. So you can also upgrade your weapons and ship features (like damage taken, energy usage and speed) with upgrade points you find throughout the campaign. Each weapon has different upgrade paths, so you can tailor each weapon to how you wanna play the game (weapons with better tracking abilities, fire speed, damage, etc). - Incredible music. Each of the 16 levels in the campaign have unique music tracks and I loved every one. They have a heavy synthwave feel, kind of similar to Ghostrunner, Hotline Miami and System Shock 2's music. - Tons of different enemies. There's around a dozen or so different enemies with completely different tactics. Some will beeline towards you with melee weapons or to self destruct. Some might fire homing missiles at you and even become camouflaged and teleport around. Some you will shred apart and some are heavily armored, huge flying tanks. All of them are really fun to fight. Unfortunately, I have a couple problems with Overload. - Game runs perfectly except on levels 13, 14 and definitely 15. No framerate dips or crashes, but can stutter a lot during chaotic fights. - No upgrade points on levels 13-16. The environment changes a lot during the end, and exploration isn't incentivized besides for powerups and big ammo supplies. Ultimately, I just had too much fun to remove any stars on my review! Recommended!
**Buy the Deluxe Edition, because Mooncrash is a really fun Roguelike take/spin-off of Prey's gameplay formula.** In Prey, you participate in an experiment aboard a space station and it goes very wrong. You explore these massive open-ended areas and complete objectives in numerous different ways. It's quite obvious that Prey 2017's developers also made the Dishonored games. There's a ton of different weapons and scientific gadgets to choose from. Some are effective or ineffective depending on the type of enemy alien you encounter. Enemies have unique fighting styles, so the combat never gets boring. You can also scan them with a scientific apparatus kinda like filming or taking pictures of enemies in BiioShock (except in Prey, you can access research notes of enemies kinda like how researching items work in System Shock 2). But obviously the most fun part is the numerous "perks" or "upgrades" your character can develop by installing "neuromods", the upgrade-item. Some will let you hack computers (which you can interact with like in Doom 3), and some will upgrade your inventory space so you can manage it better much like Resident Evil 4's "Inventory Tetris" system. Neuromods will also let you upgrade weapons and even develop alien powers like launching psionic fireballs or blocking enemy attacks. The voice acting is really good and it's cool that you can choose the body type/birth gender of your character. The ambient music is very fitting and some of the unique music tracks are exceptional. I can't really think of anything bad to say about this. This is an obvious buy for fans of Deus Ex, System Shock, BioShock, or Dishonored games.
Dishonored 2 picks up when Emily is an adult and ruling as Empress. Bad things happen during a social event and Emily (Or Corvo, your choice!) needs to regain her title. I thought the story and in particular, the villain, wasn't too interesting and lacks innovation compared to Dishonored 1's story. I won't spoil anything and leave it at that. However, that's literally my only complaint because I think Dishonored 2 improves in every other regard over its prequel. Here's just some important points why it's loads of fun. - Stealth system is better. You aren't invisible when leaning and only "almost" invisible on higher ground. When you get detected, you aren't forced to load an earlier save because you can take out guards during combat WITHOUT killing them. - You can track player kills and times detected in the middle of a mission. It was very annoying in the first game when rats ate an unconscious guy you knocked out. You needed to wait until the end of the level to learn that you're now a murderer. There's now a very handy "stats" menu you can access at any time to view how many you've killed, how many have detected you, among many more cool stats. This makes non-lethal, non-detection playthroughs much less frustrating to accomplish. - Levels are even bigger? Maybe it's my imagination, but the missions appeared to me to be even bigger and more open ended than in the first game. What's most shocking is that these new levels never overstayed their welcome. I never got bored and hoped a mission would just end already. - Dishonored 2 is finally stable and runs well. This game had a horrible release and performed like crap. But with newer hardware and multiple patches, the game never crashed and ran super well. - New game plus! You can replay the entire game again with powers, bonecharm traits (really cool feature btw) and upgrade schematics obtained in previous playthroughs! Dishonored 2 is a really long and fantastic stealth game! Buy it!
So Ziggurat 1 is a fun enough Roguelike RPG/mostly first person shooter. However, besides unlocking some characters, weapons and perks, there isn't much else to do. There's isn't a ton of permanent game progression. You don't unlock minor passive upgrades or slowly strengthen already obtained characters or items. There's also only 3 difficulty settings, the hardest one just seeming impossible to me. I felt like I "beat" the game after completing a full run on a few characters. Yes, there is more to do, but the game didn't compel or strongly incentivize doing anymore than that. Ziggurat 2 has NONE of these problems in my opinion. All the characters are vastly different, passive upgrades are available, but also subtle enough not to trivialize the game. There's even a little campaign in the sequel with 5 different difficulty modes. There's not much of a story or anything, so I'd personally suggest hopping right into Ziggurat 2. The first game was enjoyable enough, but the sequel is just way more fun in my opinion.
**Buy the Deluxe Edition, because Mooncrash is a really fun Roguelike take/spin-off of Prey's gameplay formula.** In Prey, you participate in an experiment aboard a space station and it goes very wrong. You explore these massive open-ended areas and complete objectives in numerous different ways. It's quite obvious that Prey 2017's developers also made the Dishonored games. There's a ton of different weapons and scientific gadgets to choose from. Some are effective or ineffective depending on the type of enemy alien you encounter. Enemies have unique fighting styles, so the combat never gets boring. You can also scan them with a scientific apparatus kinda like filming or taking pictures of enemies in BiioShock (except in Prey, you can access research notes of enemies kinda like how researching items work in System Shock 2). But obviously the most fun part is the numerous "perks" or "upgrades" your character can develop by installing "neuromods", the upgrade-item. Some will let you hack computers (which you can interact with like in Doom 3), and some will upgrade your inventory space so you can manage it better much like Resident Evil 4's "Inventory Tetris" system. Neuromods will also let you upgrade weapons and even develop alien powers like launching psionic fireballs or blocking enemy attacks. The voice acting is really good and it's cool that you can choose the body type/birth gender of your character. The ambient music is very fitting and some of the unique music tracks are exceptional. I can't really think of anything bad to say about this. This is an obvious buy for fans of Deus Ex, System Shock, BioShock, or Dishonored games.
In Penumbra, you're solving puzzles in an underground lab. In Dark Descent, you're learning about horrific torture methods while exploring a mysterious mansion. In both, unfortunately, you're running away from monsters and getting spooked from pretty good jump scares. Amnesia the Bunker is in a league of its own for numerous reasons: - In Amnesia the Bunker, you get to manage generator fuel so the monster isn't constantly lurking around. - You have a NOISY flashlight, which was a fantastic idea and makes even good visibility a risky endeavor. - You have to juggle inventory items and store them in a box like in oldschool Resident Evil games. - You get to explore the whole area in a very metroidvania fashion (get lighter to get wrench, get wrench to... etc). - You can spook off the monster for a short time with weapons and jury rigged devices like in Alien Isolation. These monster encounters are UNSCRIPTED except for a couple times, so if you make too much noise or leave the generator off, you're in for trouble. - There's a ton of different difficulty modes and numerous custom difficulty settings to tweak on your second playthrough. Couple that with randomized locker codes and item placement, and you have a short game with an fantastic amount of replayability. - The graphics isn't too demanding, but looks really good. Its scaling resolution option can make it playable on super old PCs or squeeze a ton of power from high-end GPUs. Also didn't crash once, so it's really stable too. This is horror at its absolute finest and my favorite game by Frictional yet. It's a must buy for fans of Horror games.
Arkane really hit a home run with this new IP. Dishonored 1 + its DLCs are a bunch of massive, open ended missions. You steal stuff, choke out or kill enemies, navigate through challenges with supernatural magic and eliminate special targets violently or with sabotage. You upgrade and buy handy gadgets with the money you stole. As the game's title suggests, your character becomes infamous for a horrible crime. Your main objective throughout the game is to reclaim your honor and fame by exposing those responsible for the big bad event in the beginning of the game. This is a really really fun stealth game. And unfortunately there aren't many amazing stealth games out there. So this is a must buy for anybody looking get sneaky.
