Banger soundtrack, incredibly fun and unique combat mechanics unseen elsewhere, gameplay that is unmatched in terms of gamefeel and feedback, and bosses that actually will respond to your gameplay style. All of the above sets this game above everything else but the last point is what makes this the best game I have ever played. If you slowly walk to a boss dramatically, even on the hardest difficulties, they're not gonna immediately start bumrushing and let you savor the moment. But if you run straight towards them, they'll immediately open up. If you spam and button mash, a boss may do the same with extremely rapid and brutal attacks. If you're methodical about your combos and button presses the enemy also matches your pace organically without compromising difficulty. Seriously, the game will respect your ability to savor and take in the moment - I have not seen one other game where the AI isn't just a bunch of predictable single-behavior function. Sure, a couple bosses are traditionally pattern based and most basic enemies are still simple (but still well above average) but nothing else captures the organic feeling in a game like this. That just says how much care and effort went into this game. And it's all crammed into one of the most bombastic, ludicrous, yet somehow starkly prescient experiences ever created. It's rare I recommend a game universally, but this is a game that everyone should play. It just epitomizes what makes a game fun - and it's the ONLY games I go out of my way to replay every few years.
Long story short, the game absolutely thrashes SSDs and on HDDs are effectively unplayable for running settlements because of load times transitioning between your characters. This could be ignored if focusing on a single character didn't mean you'd spend hours simply running around. And THAT could be ignored if the game didn't require significant micromanaging of running multiple characters in seperate areas of the world map. What's there is very good, but I think that it would have been better focused as a small squad based RPG rather than potentially having dozens of characters as part of a settlement system combined with way too much downtime that effectively amounts to staring at character's running or waiting for them to wake up and get up. It's actually, very literally, like EVE Online but in a post apocalyptic setting and you get to manage your people. But it's also like Skyrim in that mods are kind of 'needed' for some things. This is not for the average person, and requires a LOT of time investment but if you're looking for something to dump hundreds of hours in, this is it.
Back on steam in early access, the game had a great deal of promise with a great premise and gameplay loop. Then an immediate paradigm shift kicked in one day, and the game decided to add unbelievable amounts of RnG that drags out playtime and screws you over in ways completely out of your control. Instead of committing to making something fun with progressively more interesting mechanics, it instead seeks to string you on by beating you down and dangling things in front of you to give you the idea that you're getting somewhere. From what the game was before, it is a frustrating, unfufilling game. For all its style and art, it's not brutal in any sense of the word, merely just cheaping you out of a good experience by dragging it on.
NMS has been making the rounds again across the internet for its continuing updates and incoming content from the ever diligent Hello Games studio. I bought it a few months ago for a friend and myself. And despite my friend's hardware being better, the game runs very poorly. They have better hardware than I do in every way - an SSD over an HDD, a desktop over a modest gaming laptop, etc. And for some inscrutable reason it refuses to run smoothly on their system, having choppiness and stutters every second. Their rig has **never** had issues with any other game. In 2020, 4 years after release, that's a huge flaw. NMS is not guaranteed to run on your system regardless of performance. A dealbreaker for most. The game's core gameplay loop - exploring, adventuring, and looking for things to do, is very one note. It doesn't take more than 20-30 hours to have "seen it all" because it's all procedurally generated. You know everything you're doing and getting, upgrades, ships you see, their color schemes, the plant flora, life, ALL of it is completely RNG. You have very little way to influence this exploration or even the way your gear and space ships looks, if any. Sure you can upgrade your ship infinitely now, but if you want to find something that looks the way you like, you're going to be wasting literally hours waiting for ships to land, and hoping they're high rank. If you want to base build however, and do stuff that makes 0 use of their world generation system, you can do all that. It seems most people who like the game enjoy this type of content which is why it has so much praise. If you're looking for intense space exploration, you'll want to look elsewhere. Also - the UI is designed for the controller but the game controls better with a mouse. Performance is garbage. Feels like an early access game that's adding more "things to do" but without fleshing out WHY to do them at all. 3/5 is generous given egregious performance problems.
Some games you can tell when you'll like them immediately or not. This was one of them, and I could tell from the start this game wasn't for me. Never played this game before, hopped in blind after a quick look on GoG. That is to say, this review is based on someone who holds no nostalgia for this game, nor any previous knowledge/biases. Old graphics are not the issue here - the graphics themselves just don't seem well done, period. Your characters are nebulous blobs that change shape and design over time. The gameplay, while passable, relies solely on the somewhat in depth gimmick of evolving your characters based on what you kill. There's some complexity to it but none of it is very intuitive. You run around and kill stuff and depending on what order and how many you kill, you eventually get enough evolution points to go up a notch, or end up avoiding enemies and being overtly picky about what you kill and pick up because of it. It basically boils down to interruptive micromanagement that intrudes on gameplay. The levels take place in an alien world, which is visually great at first but all blends together as the levels go on while the story never actually adds much more. At first it's fun, but there's really not much in the levels that make them remotely interesting to interact with. Short of its one gimmick, the gameplay feels bland (the gimmick itself isn't great), the story is non-existent, the graphics are...not even appealing, there really just isn't anything in this game that makes it worth it unless you have some other former investment in it. Put bluntly, I found it tedious and boring. But for those who know nothing about this game and are looking for some quality good old games to surprise them pleasantly? You're most likely not going to find that here. Buy it on a steep sale if you're interested. This is one of the few purchases that has actually disappointed me enough to write a such a review. Be wary of nostalgic-based reviews.
Divinity OS2 is by far one of the best RPGs to have come out in recent years, rivaling with The Witcher 3 in terms of world design and effort put in. The combat is satisfying and there a number of options to approach combat, all of which can extremely effective. However there are many flaws to the game itself, and the most pertinent I have found is that while encounters (battles essentially) in Act 1 are very well balanced and polished, Act 2 relies far more on gimmicks to defeat players. Worse yet, many enemies begin to get arbitrarily inflated stats that you as a player cannot compete with. A key example of the stat inflation is one that ties to initiative. WITS is the attribute that defines your initiative. For players, it looks something like this: 20 Wits + 5 initiative (gear) = 25 initiative. On NPCs in act 2, it looks like 25 ("base") + 15 wits = 40 initiative. Or 50 at times. There is literally no way for one to compete against said initiative. It's not every enemy and typically those enemies that do have that initiative don't have Total Party Kill gimmicks, but it's still there. Stat issues wouldn't be a problem if much of your stat bonuses did not come from one's gear, which is almost entirely RNG generated (more later). There is *scaling gear* drops in this game. A scaled armor at level 9 has double the armor values of scaled armor at level 6. Every level, weapon loot scales an entire interval higher in terms of raw damage. There's too much playing equipment upkeep instead of playing the RPG. While it's not completely difficult to make it through with top of the line gear, it's certainly a pain to having all your gear become outdated every single time you level up, and then having all the gear you find be completely RNG generated. It essentially boils down to getting lucky in order to get the right gear for your characters, but by the time you do, you've outleveled half of it, even though most of the stat bonuses remain the same.
I was pretty young when Jedi Academy came out, and didn't play it for a few years until after its release at a friend's house. I remember having the time of our lives playing multiplayer, but I never stuck around to buying the game. Fast forward more than a decade and I've gotten a seasoned taste of video gaming, but mostly on modern games. So when I saw this thing for sale, I knew this would be my one purchase of the month. Jedi Academy is an absolute JOY to play. To those who played games of the earlier days, the controls and momentum of movement should make you feel at home. Born of the Quake 3 engine, the movement is slick, the shooting is excellent, and the devs did some straight witchcraft with their lightsaber system. No other game has as interesting or rapid a combat melee system. You're on GoG, so you're not here for the graphics (which still have better faces look better than Oblivion) but they're definitely passable; textures aren't too muddy and the lightsabers and guns look great. Textures are more visibly weak on open levels, but are made up with set piece meshes. Now, I haven't played most newer Star Wars games but when I say they don't make them like they used to, I meant gaming in general. Remember when you could get crushed by objects that compressed you? Remember when you could use your force grip and use it to slam enemies into the ground or other enemies and actually kill them? Thank the Quake Three engine. You don't see this kind of thing in newer games unless it's a scripted gimmick that advertisers and devs rave about. Meanwhile you can send enemies absolutely flying by doing any combination of abilities using the force without a tutorial telling you. The game's a touch easy once you learn the force powers and how they work and while the campaign is very fun, it's very easy to burn through it after the first playthrough. None the less, Jedi Academy is one of the most fun games I've had the pleasure of playing. Buy it!
What more do you cynical twats want based on these reviews I'm reading? You farm slimes in a ranch that make super cute faces and bounce everywhere in a relaxing pace. If you bought this for "mechanics" and "progression," you need to question why you even play games to begin with. The best 20 dollars I've spent on a game. It's a cute game, nothing more, nothing less. Absolutely no pretense.
A lot of reviews have already highlighted the weaknesses of Hotline Miami 2 so I'll go through my gripes with it. While the story is engaging and entertaining, the inability to select your own mask and abilities makes for a more confined and less repeatable experience. Second, the game is completely unlike the first. The first was a mixture of both tactical planning and on the fly random decisions. It did not punish you for going in guns blazing because sometimes, through luck or skill, you could react dynamically enough. However, I find I have to methodically plow through Hotline Miami 2 because there are many scenarios that will get you killed unless you used the "peek ahead" button that centers your view around your mouse so you can see further around your character. However, this is not conducive to the break-neck pace the music, aesthetic, and frankly the nature of the game want you to go. To me, this just isn't fun. Rarely, if ever, have I been able to spontaneously murder an entire level of enemies between sheer luck because of traps or arbitrary elements I would not have seen without scoping around in HM2. The music, art, and gore are all gloriously equivalent to HM1, but the gameplay is not sadly.
Most of the other reviews have covered all the upsides so I'll just get to the point. Now to the things that have plagued me; this could just be a result of my computer (far exceeds minimum requirements) but just something to keep an eye out. However, my friend says he never has these issues and I've watched other videos of the game working just fine. For the record, I am running a quad core I7 with 8gb of RAM on a 960M on Windows 10. I've a hunch it's windows 10, but compatibility mode doesn't help. First off, my game "freezes" for a split second when loading enemy dialogue or when they detect me or spawn. If my game freezes as I approach the corner to a door and I get a hitchup, I know there's usually an enemy or at least a civilian. Telling them to stand down does it as well against enemies. Shooting is no better. You know that red flash of damage on your screen when you get hit? Yeah, I never get that. When I'm exchanging fire with an enemy, the very moment I click to fire, I freeze up. If the enemy is looking at me and firing at the same time, I'll more often than not be dead after that half a second freeze. It is one of the most infuriating things I have ever experienced. One time, I was shooting an enemy from behind and I was quite literally lagging down to 15FPS as I was shooting him. It was god-awful. Second, there is no lag compensation when playing with friends in multiplayer. If your ping is over 50, you have an objective disadvantage as enemies tend to react faster. They prioritize enemy doing damage to you over their animations, so'll have whatever your ping value detracted from the time you have to react to their telegraphing. The game is still excellent. I have not yet found a solution, nor a cause to this. I noted that when starting up the expansion for the first time (compared to the base game), the game ran as smooth as butter. The more I played, the same issues started coming up until they were like the base.
