Recenzii recente de Ben McLean

Let's break down the pros and cons of Portal Stories: VR.

Pros: It's free, it's fun and it doesn't take up very much of your time.

Cons: Portal Stories: VR does not have portals. It should probably have been called "Aperture Science VR."

Is it worth your time? Definitely. If you've got a VR headset then you've got to check this out. It says it only supports the Vive but my Windows Mixed Reality headset worked just fine.

There is alot of potential here but so much of it feels like a missed opportunity.

First of all, this game really should be scraping real pricing data from the Internet for real parts. Even if there isn't an appropriate 3D model available for all the parts on the market, using a generic model would be OK. But real compatibility issues between differemt real parts should be represented and it isn't. Playing this should be helping you get a good sense of where the PC hardware market is right now and it doesn't.

Let's say I wanted to work out whether different combinations of parts would be VR-ready or not. Can I do that? Can I simulate assembling a real PC that I can actually buy? Could I use this software to preview to real customers what their new custom built PC will really look like? No. Nothing like that is possible in this game. It is just a game, and tbat's the problem. It should be a simulator.

Also, there is no option for playing different historical eras of computing. Maybe that would be a good sequel. I'd like to see what it would cost to build the best 486 to play Doom back in the day. Can I do that? Not here.

This whole thing feels very unfinished. Like maybe it was designed to be a VR game but the developers realized the market for that would be too small and gave up on that feature partway through. Alot of features felt very half done like that when I tried it.

Hoard is a good game, but it is held back by a lack of a single-player story campaign or any sense of progression. It's very fun for the brief period while you're figuring out how to play it, but after you've won on a couple of maps, you realize that the whole thing is kind of shallow. There ought to be some way of unlocking more maps and gameplay modifiers by achieving in-game goals, and also some kind of story. Without these things, it feels incomplete.

Look at current Wolfenstein. Then look at the real Wolfenstein. (3-D and Spear of Destiny) Real Wolfenstein has much, much better aesthetics. It doesn't drown everything in an objectively awful palette of light brown to dark brown. What went so wrong with this series!?

We need a Wolfenstein Mania. Like Sonic Mania, but for Wolfenstein. Return the series to it's simple, fun, brightly colored roots without tons of cringe-inducing lore, stupid alternative gameplay concepts and badly written dialogue from terrible new characters. The retro easter egg in New Order only serves to indicate that I should be playing a much better game instead: the real Wolfenstein, preferably the modern source port ecWolf.

Shadow of War is one of those games which is so good that if you don't watch the clock, it will take over your whole life until you finish it. It is everything you loved about Shadow of Mordor, just more of it. Buying the base game with no DLC and no microtransactions gets you a solid 50 hours of really fun gameplay. Just remember to eat and sleep and not let your bladder explode.

The game is fun and it appears that the loot boxes are stupid but thankfully easy to ignore. They make no sense for this type of game. Do not buy them under any circumstances. Please ignore their presence and do not let them ruin your experience by thinking about them or (worse) buying them. This is a good game with one bad but thankfully unnecessary microtransaction tacked on.

The story is a weak point. It feels even less like anything to do with Tolkien than the original Shadow of Mordor. Like the original, this game is perfect for any gamer who enjoys the Batman Arkham series combat mechanics but any Tolkien fan who would start having suicidal thoughts from seeing their beloved Middle Earth lore being abused as an interchangeable generic fantasy setting for a fairly nihilistic storyline with Peter Jackson aesthetics and meaningless Gollum cameos should definitely skip this game. Shelob has no business being represented as a sexy lady of course, but she is anyway. In my opinion, this series would have benefitted from being set somewhere other than Middle Earth, such as in the Inheritance Cycle universe. (It literally has an unlockable skill called "Dragon Rider"!) There's a little bit of "Women can fight too" feminist claptrap in some parts of the story, but overall, this is not a SJW-driven plotline so don't panic.

Shadow of War has three acts, and most of the game happens in the second act. What the story calls "Act IV" is really just the New Game Plus mode like from the Arkham games. Completing it gets you a three minute cutscene which is just for 100% completionists, alot like the secret videos that are unlocked only for really hardcore players in the Kingdom Hearts series. If that's not you, just watch it on YouTube.

The actual game (Acts I-III) seems fairly easy with no loot boxes on Nornal difficulty but very good at tricking you into thinking you are somehow exceptionally skilled at it. You'll die a few times towards the end, but you'll be fine if you do these things:

1. Gather intel on every single orc in the entire region before doing anything else in any new region and make sure to actually use the intel when confronting them.
2. Actually use skill points, equipment upgrades and gems. Obviously.
3. Do every single open world collectathon and story quest and event open to you because none of it is optional. You'll need the skill points and XP and the game is balanced with the assumption that you will be doing all of that stuff as soon as possible.
4. Actually raise and manage your army. This means dominating all the captains in the region before attempting to take on any war chiefs or the overlord. Infiltrating War Chiefs as spies is the most valuable thing any Captain can be doing for you. Second most valuable is helping you attack other Captains. Always get your captains to help when the game lets you. Only kill when the game forces you. Never kill when you can dominate instead because that is always more to your advantage. Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War are both not about killing everything you see: they're about mind controlling everything you see.

Follow that pattern and the game's not too difficult. Arkham Knight was harder.

The gameplay in the actual game (Acts I-III) is so fun that I don't understand why anyone would want to pay additional money in order to play less of it by buying a loot box. Even with loot boxes in Act IV, you're just getting junk which you could get by playing more of the game, so there's no point. They seem like something upper management must have demanded be arbitrarily tacked on toward the end of development and definitely not part of the original plan or design of the game. Hopefully Warner or whoever will learn their lesson and not do crap like that in the future. Other than that, it's fun. It does nothing whatsoever to appeal to anyone who didn't like the first game, but if you liked the original then you'll like Shadow of War. Don't buy loot boxes.

Saints Rov IV represents what Superman 64 should have been and what DC Comics should create any future Superman video game to be in terms of mechanics. It's about having superpowers in an open world with total freedom for the player and the self-awareness to just laugh when stupid destructive things happen as a result.

The great thing about this game is how it encourages pure destruction as it's fundamental game mechanic. The fact that the cause of the destruction happens to be a cat was of little consequence to me. A great video game is one with the simple instruction to DESTROY EVERYTHING YOU SEE and then gives you fun and interesting things to destroy. That's what good game design looks like.

The developers constant cat-based puns got more than a little grating after a while though.

Arkham Origins gets alot of negative reviews which it doesn't deserve. It's a great game. However, an important thing to realize about it is that it was not developed by the same team as the other main Arkham games. You can't just slap a completely different team together and expect an end product which feels fully authentic to the most dishard fans. It comes off feeling more like an Arkham fangame sometimes, but it's still fun to play and that's the bottom line.

Also, some major bugs that were affecting the PC version on launch were later fixed. I still ran into some odd moments, like Killer Croc randomly turning invisible, but I got through it and had fun.

Troy Baker is not Mark Hamill, but he's probably one of the best substitute impersonators they could've gotten and does an excellent job. Still, there is only one Mark Hamill.

Meh. It's BeJewelled.

Sonic Mania is the sole legitimate successor to Sonic 3 & Knuckles and it was a success because SEGA finally noticed that rom hackers have been making better Sonic games than them for more than 15 years and decided to hire them instead of suing them. SEGA does what NIntendon't. Buy this game and demand that SEGA keep doing business with the Taxman and Stealth!! I want Sonic Mania 2!!

Their DRM is bad tho. Cmon, SEGA, you should know better than that by now. DRM is evil!