Recent reviews by Aristiden

This is a neat idea for a game. I like the story telling. It's mostly lighthearted with some shades of interesting sci-fi concepts.

I don't recommend playing it. It's a golf game, and that isn't a bad thing. The levels are mostly reasonable. The problem comes down to 2 mechanics that make it feel like you're fighting the game to progress and see its story telling.
The first: In order to make precise hits on the ball, you have to click and release your mouse while it is close to the ball. The hit is drawn out from the center of the ball, not the surface of the ball so very light hits will not reach the outside of the ball. This leaves you in an awkward middle state where the ball doesn't release and you have to click again to hit. Basically, it's a problem with high precision hits not being registered and your inputs not doing what you want them to.
The second: Since you have to drag your mouse to set up power and direction, you'll sometimes have to drag the mouse off of the level to get the right power. When you do this, the whole level shrinks in scale including your shot setup, changing the power and angle which you were trying to get. This means you'll frequently have shots that are in between scales and you can't actually make them or you'll be unable to pull off a shot reliably in a timed situation (there are moving obstacles on the levels).

TL:DR
I wish I could continue to play this game and see the story, but so many times I feel like I'm just fighting the game on issues that seem so easy to avoid. In the end, the game feels too unfair to actually enjoy. I'm not forcing myself to get angry so I can finish a one-off, quirky indie game.

The story in the main game and the side quests are good by any literary standard. I would recommend this game just for that, even if it didn't have any visual qualities, or any gameplay at all.
I have one hundred-percented all locations, and I have all of the completionist achievements that matter. The open world of Cyberpunk is phenomenal. It feels like a real city. I get lost in it (both literally and immersively) and I have spent tens of hours after every objective was done just running through areas I thought I had never been to and uncovering unmarked quests or stories hidden throughout the world.
There are times while playing this game that I genuinely felt more a denizen of Night City than of the real world. Absolute immersion, real beauty. This is among the best games ever made and it will never receive that respect because of the cultural reception at launch which is an absolute pity.

As the game has ironed out visual optimization, my performance has actually worsened since launch. I'm playing on an R5 2600X with a GTX 1060 3GB, 32 GBs of RAM on Medium settings 1080p. I get something between 25-45 frames, but at launch I almost always had above 30. Normally, I don't play games below 60 fps on PC but for Cyberpunk I make an exception. The game looks phenomenal, and I use a blade/stealth build, which doesn't require high fps to execute well. Shooting guns is miserable when I have to.

Cyberpunk is the first game I've ever seen nail the facial animations ( I have since played Outriders and Fallen Order which do them well, but still not as good). In many games, even the most detailed models with high quality mocap can have faces that look totally flat (for example: even with all its charm, Hellblade's animations are flaky 30% of the time). I mention this because it drives a lot of what the game does well. The game was about 50% dialogue for the first 10 hours, and the story is what seems to have gotten the most development attention after the open world. I feel like I've been able to connect to these characters a lot more because I can actually empathize with what they feel. They fidget in their seats, cross their legs, adjust their stance. Along with some solid voice acting, it all leads to highly immersive conversations.

The world of Cyberpunk, beyond just being gorgeous, is also dense and filled with detail. Sure, almost all buildings you can't walk into, but there are a ton you can and all of them are overly detailed. The NPCs aren't great but their presence along with advertisements and culture helps make the city feel alive, rather than a bunch of plasticky polygons, even if some of the taller buildings and highways start to look like that. Advertisements and environmental stories cover most alleys.

Performance issues have kinda left me unable to enjoy gun combat so far, but I play with the blades and that is still a ton of fun. The blunt melee looks really bad but slicing somebody up with a katana or those arm blades from the original Cyberpunk teaser feels viscous and fast paced. I felt myself losing humanity by seeking out fights just to dice people up after I bought the arm blades. Stealth is also a big part of the story missions, and it's not innovative but that's fine.

Yeah there are bugs. I've been mostly able to ignore them, but I had to reload a save once because a character wouldn't talk to me and had to delete another because I would load the save and already be attacked when I had saved in stealth. Other than that, some UI elements or effects don't go away without a reload. Characters don't show up in cutscenes, rarely. Cars in cutscenes will sometimes start in the wrong place and destroy everything in their path to get to the right place quickly. Sometimes I can't stand up from crouching when a character starts speaking. Lots of minor things. Nothing really annoyed me though, you can overlook it. A lot of it has been ironed out over the years.

There are some delays between inputs and the actions they are supposed to perform, but most of it has been fixed since launch.

When I first played through, the balancing was weird. I quickly became capable of totally destroying any combat encounter in the first area within a few hours, but sometimes adjacent areas were 4x stronger than me even 15 hours later. This is made worse by the fact that enemies can take a whole mag to kill but two sword strikes. I can't tell if that's because my build is sufficiently developed or guns are just really weak. This has been addressed since launch but I haven't experienced the new systems. Crafting is still poorly executed with materials, junk, and money having very strange pacing and poor interactions with other systems

I don't like fast travel in this game. I generally try to drive since Night City is so pretty. But the travel points are everywhere so I always feel like I can just walk somewhere until I find one, which never ends up being true so I just miss out on driving. But that's a personal thing. I'd be fine with removing fast travel altogether. The city doesn't take long enough to drive around to warrant it.

There are like 4 interesting cybernetic upgrades. There are missed opportunities to integrate the skill tree and cybernetics, for sure. They don't feel like distinct systems, one just requires money. The skill tree does not give you enough points with which to explore it. A complete build will be unable to fully master combat and actually use crafting, for example.

If I see one more lore book I've already read, I stg... They never show up as "read" or "collected" in the world, and they're everywhere so it's very cluttered.


Performance and bugs aren't really a problem for me with my playstyle (stealth/blades). The characters and the story are delivered very well, partially carried by the extremely detailed character animations. Story and dialogue are the main focus so the combat and balance are kinda wacky. The world is gorgeous and rich in culture, even if it's less interactable or intelligent then you'd hope. None of my gameplay concerns are major or couldn't be fixed with a patch.

*I didn't play this in VR, which I'm sure would add a lot*
Totally original game based on using and setting up ghost hunting equipment around a haunted location. With a group of 4 friends, this game is a ton of fun.

For an early access game, the graphics are fantastic. The sound design, especially on the proximity voice chat, adds a ton to the immersion. The environments are great and believable. I thought there wouldn't be enough to stay interested, but I don't think I've played nearly all of them and I haven't gotten tired of any yet.

There are some issues with equipment or voice chat not working for certain players, but in general everything works well enough. I hope some more minor mechanics can be added and tweaked with time (such as team members who have been attacked by the ghost using the spirit box or something like that to communicate to the other members).

I normally don't like horror games at all, and playing this game alone is very horrifying, but playing with other people gives a good balance between suspense and teamwork for a great experience.

Before I played this game, I thought I hated isometric action games.

After I played this game, I realized that god must die immediately and his blood will rain on the wicked and innocent alike, cleansing their wretched souls with an apocryphal ichor.

TL;DR:
Beautiful game/worldbuilding, great combat, intricate character ability customization, and pretty bad once you finish the story.

Summary:
This is a real gem in the shooter genre. There's no other game where you can feel as powerful and badass as this one. It's super well polished in every aspect, way more than we've come to expect from most AAA FPS games.

Singleplayer:
The campaign is fantastic. The story is good and more importantly it doesn't get in the way of the brilliant level design with incredible set pieces throughout. I don't think there's a human character in a game with as much humanity and charm as BT, the main character's Titan companion. If Titanfall 2 was just the singleplayer campaign (about 6 hours long), it would still be worth the price. I have played through it on normal and Master difficulty but I would recommend normal. There are plenty of challenging moments on normal but the checkpoints and enemy placement weren't designed for the damage dealt by higher difficulty enemies.

Multiplayer:
The multiplayer, though, is also incredibly strong. Pilot vs Pilot combat (when you're not in the huge metal robots) is hectic and highly skill based. Every weapon is viable in the right hands. Every upgrade and attachment and ability feels like you're using something overpowered, which is exactly how it should be. The game's design is wide open for your play style, and there are TONS of interesting options. From the traditional rifle R-201 to the slow grenade launcher EPG to the long range shotgun pistol Mozambique, everything has a place. Titan vs Titan combat (the big bad metal boys) is a whole different beast. There seem to be even more varieties of play there. Whether you're placing traps or redirecting missiles or slicing up enemies with a giant sword, all of them (yet again) are good and offer an interesting play style.

Sometimes spawns can be unforgiving and you die to the same enemy Titan as a pilot three times in a row or you mess up a wall jump and get stuck in a terrible position where the extremely fast TTK will guarantee death. That stuff can be annoying. But almost every time I die, I know it's because I made a mistake in positioning, or which enemy Titan to engage or something else that I could get better with, not something out of my control. And that's kind of Titanfall 2's biggest strength: it gives you total control to play how you want to in a masterfully crafted shooter sandbox.

Verdict:
Play this game.

This game is kinda bad. Like legit I hate the feel of the movement, the graphics are awkward even on max settings, a lot of the quest writing is mediocre, and there are some overly useful and completely useless combat skills.

And yet it's addictive and the combat is by far the best in a traditional MMO I've played. There are times when the pop-in isn't horrible and some of the great work put into world design can shine through. There's still a lot left that I haven't explored, but honestly if you like MMOs, this is quite an interesting one (if it's on sale and you guess the right class to pick).

I first got this game in May of 2020, and so far I've really enjoyed it, despite whatever history it's had.

The atmosphere and world:
Appalachia is a beautiful place with lots of really detailed locations and secrets. It doesn't always run well, but it hits that false nostalgia other games in the series have accomplished if not even better.
This is the first game since the first two in the Fallout series that actually hits the vibe the universe is supposed to have. The first two games are post-post apocalyptic and then Fallouts 3-4 revert to a more destitute wasteland, while Fallout 76 happens so close after the bombs dropped that the destruction makes sense. It's a really dense map with tons of unmarked locations and quaint stories scattered throughout. Lore wise I'm confused about a lot of points but I can look past it because the experience is nice.

Gameplay:
Combat feels a lot like other Fallout games, that is to say clunky and kind of bad but that's sort of the point I guess. Because it's in a persistent MMO world (where you'll probably be playing solo) you can't pause or slow down anything with VATS or your Pipboy, but these handicaps get made up for with some forgiving mechanics like a lot more health and lots of survivalist perks. You'll be doing most of your combat in small or medium sized arenas (there's a good deal of variation, but most of the time it boils down to smaller areas) where enemies close the gap really quickly. When you get hit, you stop moving for a second so basically the game becomes a cycle: enter stealth when exploring and get a headshot on an unsuspecting enemy with a long range gun, if that doesn't get the kill, shoot and miss repeatedly as they charge at you, struggle to run away while frantically switching to a shotgun or smg and then getting hit 3-20 times before you can manage to land a single hit.

Crafting and progression:
This looks like the most suspicious part of the game so far. Carry weight is an issue, like any RPG these days, and you constantly have to go back and forth between your base and worktables in locations to scrap loot you've found or store extra weapons and upgrades. Your stash has a limited capacity that I am quickly maximizing, even after storing only things I think are worth keeping (clothes, one extra copy of some weapons, power armor, and scrap materials). Weapons and armor degrade pretty quickly and eventually break. So far I haven't found a single repair kit, which can also be purchased as a microtransaction from the in-game shop. This means you'll be constantly switching out gear, but it's easy to find good weapons which makes repairing a luxury rather than a necessity.

TL;DR:
Really cool world that feels unique but authentically Fallout, combat that makes me want to vomit sometimes but keeps the game tense, and an inaccessible crafting system that encourages people to have no attachments to gear (or purchase microtransactions).

As someone familiar with Quixel and their work with UE4, it's clear to see where this game came from. Absolutely gorgeous at points, even if there are some oddities here and there. The soundtrack is masterfully picked. 20 minutes well spent.

I wish the score system worked because am very good and want to look at number go up.

--UPDATE--
I'm coming back to this because the game has changed significantly since I made my review. First of all, I no longer feel the desire to play the game despite the money I spent on season passes when I preordered Beyond Light. I no longer feel the desire to buy the next expansion. This is because the season content is horribly monotonous if you don't treat it like a plant you need to water once a week. And also the story has become increasingly absurd as more and more of the lore gets shoved into the game world just so that the next paid expansion can have more big set pieces instead of well written story.
The base game was strong (It was removed from the game). Forsaken was pretty good. But everything since then has been reused assets, strange design choices, and balance mistakes that take several months to be addressed by making it worse. I wouldn't recommend anyone start playing the game in the state it's in now, and I don't think I'll be spending that much more time on it in the years to come.

--ORIGINAL REVIEW--
The story you get with the base game is okay, but the gameplay (combat, movement) and mission design is a ton of fun. Multiplayer has its flaws, but is honestly really enjoyable at times. If you're willing to pay for expansions here's the rundown:
Warmind and Curse of Osiris offer interesting things to grind a lot for, but aren't super engaging.
Forsaken introduces environments that are absolutely gorgeous and expand the world in very cool ways. The things it offers to work towards are also very rewarding. The story is okay, again, but the overall experience is worth the money.
Shadowkeep is super fulfilling for Destiny as a grand narrative. It fulfills the questions that were introduced on day 1 in the original game which leads to moments that feel incredible for people who have played for that long. The additional content it adds is alright but makes the pricetag seem about $5 too high.

If you're a fan of games where you complete everything, Destiny is certainly intended for that audience while offering an extremely strong and adaptive gameplay loop to keep you busy for many hours. (I've put in about 200 hours on Battle.net Steam does not display).