Recent reviews by Veteran

I have 100%'d this game and I would never recommend it. I finished the grind now solely because, hopefully, the game will go down soon and I don't want to risk having more unobtainable achievements.

It doesn't work half the time, and when it does work it's aggressively mid. I'm very sure the developers understood that, because the entire post game had maybe 5 voice lines per character apiece.

I will remind you that in looter shooters, the post game is effectively the game.

Save yourself some time and watch a YouTube compilation of the storyline if you're interested where it goes (nowhere interesting) and be done with your curiousity.

Easily the best Warhammer game since Dawn of War.

Needs to be optimised a bit better. Ranged enemies are too susceptible to abuse, while melee enemies (especially those damn annoying imps) are sometimes unfun to play against, but overall this is the most fun I've had with a Warhammer game in a long time. Very 2nd generation campy satire, perfectly executed.

I think we're entering a new golden age for this IP, as the new powers-that-be consolidate the fanbase to create new products for this universe. Enjoy it while it lasts, because once it's become a clear success they'll reign in on the risk-taking and the creatives will be jailed again.

Pessimistic? Maybe, but my armour is contempt. For the Emperor!

The ending is extremely worth it. Don't be a fool.

If I dive for you, you give me a depth and a menu.

I give you a three-star cut, anything happens to that three-star cut and I’m yours no matter what.

I don’t sit in while you’re cooking.

I don’t carry a gun.

I dive.

(Editing in a short but serious recommendation: the core gameplay loop - where you dive for food then manager your restaurant into service, eventually including farms et all - is insanely addicting. The bulk of the game is a satirisation of japanese nerd culture targeting everything from tamagotchi to icarus to metal gear solid. Very worth the price. Final achievements are mega grindy in case you try it, some big RNG is there.)

Writing this review mostly to say that the people saying the ending is 'disappointing' or 'underwhelming' have to have been expecting some kind of eldritch horror M Night Shyamalan type twist, which the game absolutely does not lead you to believe is coming. It's a story driven game where the story is fundamentally about people realising that you can't care for everyone, no matter how much you love them, and you will and can mess up. There is a proper ending, and it is great, it ties everything together.

Don't let expectations ruin this one. It is a solid, story driven game.

Video games have a unique artistic potential. For music, for plays, for books, they have typically been seen as extensions of the other. "All art aspires to the condition of music" because music was seen as the most experiential of the forms, unperturbed by the various structures and limitations placed on theatre and literature. Film, arguably, held the position upon it's realisation to challenge music. Where music was pure audio - and open to experimentation with the lack of a defined structure outside of time - film could occupy the same unstructured space in both audio AND visual.

The 20th century saw many revolutions in film. We went from live orchestra accompaniment to the evolution of the talkie. From the musicals of the immediate talkie era to surrealism of Fellini, Tarkovsky, right through to present day Lynch. True experimentation with the audio visual medium that arguably continues. Animation could be seen as a route to unlocking it, the merging of it with live action giving further potential. Some might argue the opposite, but the argument exists both ways and that is the point.

We pay extra to see live orchestra accompaniments now. To relive those early revolutionary days of film. Maybe that is the sign of some kind of limit being approached.

Video games are the great new medium of the 21st century. We are, in the 2010s and 2020s, in a similar manner to film in the 1910s and 1920s. Great works that stand the test of time are barely now being created. They are incredible compared to Pong and Tetris yes, but they are still starting points for games as art. Something like Baldurs Gate could be seen as something like Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. But this is in the sense of narrative, scope, in becoming to film what film became to theatre. For gaming to become what film is to film, we have to go more foundationally.

Games are not experiential like film and music. Games are experience itself. They are fictional, yes, but so too is the daily experience of you and me. When you use your computer, you are using rocks with lightning passing through it. What makes it a computer is your experience of it. It only exists in your head, and the head of those who agree with you. The words on this screen become words only through your experience, otherwise it is light and plastic. Light and plastic, too, are simply arbitary groupings of real phenomena that help us further describe the world. What you go through in life is not reality itself but reality through a lense of fiction. With art, we create further fictions. With gaming, we can create the true experience of existing through them.

The Witness strips gaming down to this core fundamental. A simple circle and line, oft repeating, in various forms and puzzles. It is no mistake that it begins with simple puzzles on a screen - and make no mistake, this is not where the challenges end.

That is what The Witness is about. Not Tao Buddhism or anything like that, at it's core it is about the fundamental potential of video games as an art form - and it is it's own best example.

Yes, the art style is great. Yes, the atmosphere is brilliant. Yes, the challenges themselves - as they must - are fantastically inventive. But this is not what The Witness brings to the table that is new. Plenty of games challenge the greatest works of film, theatre, literature, music, and art itself in these aspects. The Witness attempts to warp your perception of reality itself in a simple manner, committed to with astonishing deliberateness, and in doing so unlock your view of gaming's potential to do just the same. If all experience is fiction, then the fictions you experience in gaming have the unique potential to carry through with you even after you stop playing.

In this, gaming can truly be life changing.

I do not know if video games will ever reach this potential. If they do, The Witness will be looked back on as the pioneer that started it all.

Have you ever seen a solar eclipse?

I will literally never get tired of Stellaris. The gameplay loop is as addictive as any other 4x game, and what you thought was a few hours turns out to have been most of the day by the time you check your clock. Why this one over others? Because I love sci-fi, and it pays homage to every single major sci-fi epic (and some minor ones) in so many little ways that I just keep discovering. It's a love letter to the genre. There are none like it, because none could compete. It does it all already.

Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk is a game where the artist describes why they were too mentally ill to draw anything legible. Milk is also involved.

Mass Effect was the result of Bioware taking their lessons from KotOR and channelling it into their own IP. It's one of the greatest gaming experiences I ever had, especially as someone who began with the third game and ended up playing through three times to try to save specific people and get different outcomes for major developments. Finally being able to do so was one of the best feelings I had in gaming.

Even outside of that, the story is ambitious, the points land, the final mission of the second game is one of the greatest missions of all time, and nobody is spared extensive characterisation that the DLC (all included in this release) expand on brilliantly. This is a game that genuinely has everything. You can see the influence games like Gears of War had on the third game - for the better, where the combat was nearly perfected short of some annoying instances of input.

It's also rare I'll say this but the Steam Achievements for this game are perfect too. I played from Mass Effect four times before this release, but the Achievements for this one forced me to learn and perfect aspects of the games that I had neglected before. By the end of the game I felt like an absolute God, and that I had genuinely mastered Mass Effect - so great decision by all involved there. Achievements that don't just reward you for completion but also act as an expert-level tutorial are the perfect kind, in my opinion.

A lot of criticism has been given to the ending of this one, with some citing previous drafts as possibly superior, other's lamenting that it didn't hold up to (sometimes explicitly stated) promises. Let me say without any spoilers that I think the ending is completely in keeping with the overall themes of this game, and is fully worth the journey. I only wish the Leviathan DLC was better integrated into it.

If you're a sci-fi fan, buy this game. If you're a role playing fan, buy this game. If you love a good story, buy this game. If you love a decent tactical shooter, buy this game. If you love a good time. Buy. This. Game. You will NOT regret it.

I should go.

Unironically, the KBM keybinds for MGS on Steam are:

- Switch Weapon: 0
- Switch Item: 9
- Shoot: U (??)
- Melee: H (??)
- Hide Weapon: M (??)
- Codec: ESC
- Pause: TAB
- First Person: F
- Crawl: Space
- Menu: LITERALLY NOBODY KNOWS YET LMAO

And no you cannot rebind them. And Mouse is unsupported. And resolution is fixed. FPS is fixed.

To call this rushed would be an insult to speed. A 25 year old game that has a previously servicable port on the same system should not be this way.

EDIT: Big thing to add, Konami changes 0 dialogue to incorporate the keybinds. You have to figure them out yourself. It's mental.