I recommend playing with Van Helsing Enhanced for some good tweaks, look for it on steam forums.
Behind all of the jank, bugs, crashes, 3rd party patches there's a wonderful game that I never get tired of playing one more time.
Pros: The shooting is actually satisfying Cool alt-fires and gadgets to use. Better enemy design than SS3, without hitscanning enemies(thank god) Cool mecha-driving sequence Cons: Horrendous performance and bugs all over the place Legion System is a lie Lots of lazy and reused assets(from Talos Principle!), from music to environmental. Bad level design overall, some have too much obstacles to stuck yourself, and some feel empty. Game looks like it was made in 2010, sometimes even worse than Serious Sam 3(executions, lightning, etc) Story and humor is totally off. Side characters are annoying as hell, and cutscenes are disturbing at best and painful at worst. I'd say don't play it. Or if you really want to, wait for them to at least fix the fixable stuff on the list and get it at a 75% discount tag. You won't be killing "thousands and thousands of enemies on screen" on this one.
Many expected a Fallout game in space. Not me to be honest, I was and still am fine about the game's hub structure. But the big thumbs down for me was how all mediocre the entire experience was. While the "corporation bad" theme wasn't groundbreaking and all, I still think the way they presented it was very unique and funny, most of the time, even if it was on your face and some consider it poor design. But the good part ends there: Character design, especially female, looks horrible(except miss Parvati, one of the only interesting characters in the game), straight up from a gender studies class or something. Weapons had some cool designs and animations but were very few and generic, with a barebones leveling and mod system applied to them. The amounts of useless loot you would store is literally absurd, even not stealing anything. Consumables were confusing as hell, and would overlap with one another, unlike the drugs in earlier Fallouts for example, which had very clear uses. The "skill tree" if you could call it that, was very...boring? Idk what to say about that. It was as generic and boring as it could be. Maybe the lack of Steam and GOG reviews hid how "not that good", Outer Worlds was. I'd say play it, but with gamepass at best. This launch price is not payable in my humble opinion, as replayabilty has little to no reason to be done as well.
if you are familiar with Mafia 2, or read some reviews, you know some people complain about the world being too empty, or being no sidequests at all, some mechanics are underused like tuning or robbing stores and cars, gaming taking your money and weapons maybe a bit too much... And of course, some bugs, one that almost made me never finish the game. And I'm glad I figured it out the problem and worked around it. Anyway. If those things were sorted out, the game would be better, for sure. But, what I played was fantastic. If you're into Mafia stories this one gonna hook you up, absolutely thrilling from start to end. Gameplay isn't spectacular but it's good enough to keep you entertained. You fight some pretty cool showdowns between missions, riding is always fun, the atmosphere of the city is amazing, the characters are memorable, well voiced, bautiful cutscenes for current days, the detail on things like fueling your car, eating a hot dog, washing your car, snow accumulating on top of your car in the winter and then slowly melting due to heat of the car... In my opinion this game is already a masterpiece for what it is. Don't believe people giving it 3 or 4 stars. The game could be better? Yeah, it could. But what's here for you is nothing short than full 5 fucking stars. Amazing experience.
Shadows of The Empire was an ambitious project. The first fully 3D Star ars game, where the developers wanted a ton of variety and to make you feel inside the movies. So you have a Hoth Battle, a huge train level, chasing sections, shooting sections, platforming sections and so on. If you played the N64 release you would probably say they achieved it and this game is one of your best memories. But to be honest it's hard to overlook all its faults. First, the controls are pretty clunky. Some of the cameras feel like a plane is falling out of the sky and spinning at the same time. The huge levels with only 3 checkpoints(and I'm talking about 30 minute levels here). The strange physics on platforming and walking(it feels like you're on ice). I'd say if you are a huge Star Wars fan, there's fun to be had, but expect some frustration now and then.
The game itself brings nothing that new. The levels are basically Quake III arenas with a more industrial look, with your standard pick-ups: health, armor, guns and ammo. Monsters spawn in, you kill them, you open up a new zone(levels are separated by zones) you get a bigger weapon, bigger monsters spawn in and there you go. The game has this "Artefact" mechanic, in which you have to pick this thing within a time period or else you lose the level on the spot. It kinda sucks but I can understand it was made to keep players in the high level zone(it always spawn in your higher level zone), since you can go all around them collecting stuff, and most of the time you will have enough room to pick the thing, it's not a big problem for me. You have some variety as well since there are quite a few characters with some different stat lines, active and passive skills(you slowly get these as you pass through the levels). The only cons I can think of are the standard mouse sensivity(which is fucking abismal, but changeable), the lack of resolution options and the weird camera stuff where the game sometimes pauses and shows your character or the new enemy or weapon spawn and then look around it, and suddenly comes back and you don't know where exactly you were. At least you can see the cyborg model, which is cool as fuck.
Try the Daikatana 1.3 community patch and stop complaining about things that happened more than 15 years ago. The patch makes the game overall much better and it's faults more bearable so you can actually appreciate what was good about it.
