Yeah, Hello Games keeps adding content to repair their soiled reputation. Unfortunately, they've yet to add a compelling reason to engage with it. So many tedious gameplay systems to wrestle with just to even get your ship off the ground. Crafting items to craft an item to craft another item to maybe sell for money to buy parts to start the cycle over again. Once you tire of that, a handful of repeating fetch quests await you. Fun for some? Probably. But a universe this big shouldn't be this uninteresting.
Yep. This is the sawn song for the series. The follow ups TR(2013), ROTTR and SOTTR are good action adventure games starring Lara Croft, but they are absolutely not Tomb Raider games. I've played and completed every game in the series. None of them more than twice, except for Underworld, which I have beaten 7 times. Here you have the near-perfect balance of traversal, puzzle solving and action pulled from the original trilogy but with much smoother handling and a graphical facelift. The story, as usual, is not the star of the show here. It gets the job done and makes you hate all the right characters just enough to where you can't wait to ruin their day. But there is one aspect, brought forward from the originals, that really makes Underworld shine. You don't have a companion along for the ride, nor is there any annoying radio chatter blathering in your ear. Tomb Raider is at it's absolute best when it's just you (the player) and Lara embarking on the adventure together. It feels like you are working together as you enter an area and Lara talks about what she sees and pieces things together. It makes for a much more personal game experience and it's what initially made me fall in love with series with TR 1 on the OG Playstation. It's something that was more likely necessary due to time/budget/hardware limitations for the original trilogy (PSX) or perhaps because we hadn't yet reached the point where games felt the need to compete with Hollywood, but it's a feature a lot of today's games would benefit from. Modern games delight in constantly having a voice in the player's ear, leading them around like a child and in many cases, treating them like one as well with the aforementioned 'voice' frequently berating, talking down to or just flat out insulting the player. No thank you. Just let me and Lara go spelunking in peace. P.S. - And don't even get me started on the 'open world' crap. 5 Stars.
As a mod sitting inside of Skyrim, a game with a fairly immersive worldspace and very little compelling plot/story, which sits inside a clunky engine that holds together by the grace of community fixes, The Forgotten City was a compelling, if somewhat tedious experience that elevated what could be accomplished in fan made project. I enjoyed the experience, but the accolades that got poured on this thing for it's "excellent" writing were bewildering. Now, transfer that to a standalone game and what you get is an okayish experience that's not artificially enhanced just by being the least ugly kid in the room. Performance issues and a subpar presentation only serve to knock the score down even more. Wait for a sale. Pay no more than $5.
The first 5 hours are decent enough to keep you going despite the glitches/bugs. After that, there is nothing interesting enough to distract you from all the wildly glaring issues. The world doesn't really react to your actions and when it does, it's usually in the form of busted AI trying it's hardest to make you not want to play the game. And if this was a $20 game made by an indie studio in a year, I'd have no problem with that. But that's not the case at all. The fact that CDPR had the audacity to lie to and mislead the consumer, openly commit fraud to shareholders and publicly admit that they indeed did those things while STILL charging FULL PRICE for this "game", just goes to show that they deserve every bit of criticism and negative PR they get and the financial destruction that comes with it. If this is the last game they ever make, it won't be a shame.
Get the original version and don't bother with this. From the plethora of new bugs, new features that are more annoying than an improvement (visual fx) , less responsive controls and graphical fidelity that is in no way representative of the resources they consume, there is nothing here that's worthy of being labeled an improvement. Install the original version, download ReShade, apply some sharpening, AA, Ambient Occlusion and adjust the contrast a bit and you've got a superior version to Re-Reckoning already.
All the barebones, cringe-laden dialogue of Bayonetta, with a less precision oriented, more "button-mashey" combat system. The art direction has kept the game visually appealing even all these years later. Gameplay is fun enough to carry it through the roughly 8-10 hour playtime. Ayumi is easy on the eyes and while not very well voiced, she doesn't do anything to damage the experience.
Well, visually it's acceptable. Looks great at a distance, but textures are almost "8-bit" in their appearance up close. I enjoyed the animations when upgrades were installed and came online. Combat is currently lifeless and enemies have ridiculous reach. The orchestral score that plays in the "observation area' has got to go. I'm all for orchestral music, but the piece that plays here does not capture the mood of the visual setting at all. Nightdive has a lot of work ahead of them.
Everything great about this game has been said better by other reviewers. The reason I'm posting is to advise anyone playing this to get WesTech's FREE Windowed Borderless Gaming software. It will force the game to run in a fullscreen window which, for whatever reason, completely smoothes out the game/gameplay. I use the STALKER Complete MOD and had crazy FPS drops (from 150 FPS to 19 FPS). This fixed it.
Really enjoying the game. Fun gameplay, decent humor/dialogue and it looks beautiful maxed out under DX11. My confusion stems from the fact that there are Steam API files in the game directory. I have a few other games that are both available on GOG and Steam and there are no Steam files in those directories. Is this a normal practice? When I launch the game, it doesn't launch Steam, so I have to assume the files are either unneeded or they have been modified.
