Recenzii recente de Vortiene

A fun little game with beautiful and smooth pixel art and gameplay. The puzzles were challenging enough while also feeling like the game is constantly moving at a pretty quick pace. A lot of puzzles require good timing and can be done very quickly if you get the hang of it. So it's fun to run through levels once you master them. The hardest achievements seem very challenging but feel very fun to pull off, and don't ask an extreme amount of the player like not dying ever in the entire game. The difficulty feels 99% fair. Very rarely some jank comes through.

I especially liked the sound effects which are numerous and really fitting for every little thing that happens in the game! I like the art style and the blue ketchup??? covered chicken concept they have. It's weird but fun in a way. I like the little veggietale looking dudes walking around.

Now for the gripes:
-For whatever reason, my xbox one controller won't work with this game. I had to stick with keyboard. I guess I could just map it to my ancient snes controller that I can plug in with a USB adapter and map the buttons to keys I guess, since the game really only uses the d-pad and the "lay bombs" button.
-For whatever reason, the game refused to give me the "don't die in a playthrough of the first world" achievement, despite me deleting my save and doing it perfectly from a fresh save.
-Occasionally, you will die in a way that seems unfair, like an explosion far away somehow still killing you, or 1 pixel of a hazard touching the nothing beside you. It was rare though.
-The game still takes input while you are alt+tab'd out. Would be bad if you accidentally delete your save data from the title screen while typing some message to a friend or something.
-The game needs to reset the room when you die a little better, so it doesn't reset you in the manner that you have to wait for a "phase" of something. Like needing to wait a bit before you can start moving to avoid some projectile. It usually does it pretty well but sometimes you have to constantly wait for the level to allow you to do something after dying, which can slow down the game.

So I recommend it to everyone but you might experience a little indie game jank in the process of playing it.

1. The pixel art is beautiful if a bit muddy or weird in perspective at times for the backgrounds.

2. The puzzles aren't confusing and don't have strange solutions. Oftentimes they are a bit too simple I think.

3. The peasant shenanigans in the first act is cute and was probably what I liked the most about the game. I like all their accents and their voice acting. Everything sounds pretty authentic and fitting.

4. Thankfully there are no overly specific or stupid achievements.

5. There is too much pointless dialogue and "lore" dressing up an extremely simple and uninteresting storyline. You can hear backstory of random side characters that are completely pointless. I feel like the game's actual story could have been expanded instead of giving needless background info to these one-note characters.

6. The metal gear solid references were way too heavy handed in the final act of the game. Come up with some of your own ideas...it's way too similar. I especially wasn't fond of the guy with an english accent trying to sound like Snake but still having an english accent come through. I thought that sort of thing only happened with american VA's doing crappy english accents.

7. Sometimes the sound effects are needlessly loud. For example, at the very beginning of the game, there is a guy digging with a shovel in the foreground and the sound of the digging is way too loud, it drowns out normal dialogue.

8. The UI, although you don't have to use it much, has some very strange design choices. For example when you pause, there is a red X in the top right. Looks like it should close the pause overlay and unpause the game, because X at the top of a window in most operating systems closes the window. However it actually tries to exit the game entirely. Despite this being an option in the actual pause menu options already. You have to manually click "Resume" to unpause the game instead. Just a weird choice. Also, when you interact with your items in the first two acts of the game, the item images overlay over the entire background. This can be confusing if the colors clash with the background, since there isn't and opaque background behind the items. Another weird choice. At the end of the game, you have to make a medical solution by mixing colored fluids. You're supposed to mix 2 colors, but there is no indication you can do this, it just asks you to choose the colors to use on the patient. Turns out you just have to choose the two colors, and the system knows you want to mix them out of nowhere. Confusing as heck.

9. The last act has very awkward emotional part between characters that were just introduced like 20 minutes ago, which falls completely flat. The hero of the story is a side character introduced at the start of the last act. Holy moly is the end sudden and the final act awkard.

Overall despite the fact I really like the look of the game I can't really recommend it to point and click fans or people who just want to play something new. There are many better point and click games out there with a lot more effort put into their stories. I'd leave this one until you don't have much else to play for point and click fans only.

Another beautiful game from Amanita Design. I liked the puzzles in this one although I think they could have switched between "archetypes" a little bit quicker. The last one or two puzzles in each archetype got really tedious and overly specific, like the doppelganger enemies, the puzzles involving them often require you to stand on exactly one specific tile with mathematic precision to finish them. It can get a bit annoying after a while.

It's still a fun game to play, and I'd recommend it to fans of Amanita Design. If you aren't a huge puzzle game fan, and neither an Amanita Design fan, I'd say simply play their other games such as Botanicula. I think they're better overall.

Another great point n click from Wadget Eye games. Great characters, voice acting, and an interesting world they created in this game. I really liked playing through it. It's not too difficult, one or two more hard to figure out puzzles where you need to notice a couple of things without them being immediately pointed out. The "Good" ending seems kind of out of left field, but I think it's kind of cool regardless. I liked the characters and world in this game, and enjoyed the developer commentary. Love the art direction and the background art! Still haven't played a game that I disliked from these developers!

It's an excellent game. Good balance of Metro series indoor levels and more open larger levels without becoming an open world checklist game like the far cry series or other ubisoft open world crap. I like how you can change the attachments on your weapons on the fly. It means you can play a lot more tactically and use equipment for different situations with your weapons. As usual, the unique weapons such as the Tikhar are a really fun part of the game and a fun concept. I played through Hardcore, then Iron Mode on the easiest difficulty, then Ranger Hardcore. Playing through quickly is fun as is exploring everything slowly.

The story is fine, but I found it a lot more generic than the previous games. Also, the "revelation" at the very beginning of the game kind of cheapens the gravity of the previous two games' stories. But AT LEAST it allows for some interesting and fun differentiation between each level in this game since they're set in massively different places around Russia.

The Sam's Story DLC is really cool. I had a lot of fun playing through that one, and it was like a whole new excellent level to the game that tied into the rest of it pretty well.

So I recommend this game for the gameplay, which is fun and the challenges that affect the story such as playing through levels rather stealthily were quite fun to do rather than a chore. I also enjoyed that even when playing through as a "good guy" run, you can still use your weapons on bandits and other enemies often without consequence. What good is having such excellent weapons if you never get to use them while going around stealth knocking out everyone?

I also liked how if you max out your ammo, if you pick up more of that ammo, it'll be converted to scraps to make medkits, gas mask filters, or other ammo. You never feel like exploring is a waste of time if you do it really thoroughly because you will always pick up more scrap rather than be full up and have to leave things behind. No need to worry about the dreaded inventory management and carry weight, you can just explore all you want everywhere without hassle. Excellent design choice!

I have a couple of gripes about the game.
- Biggest one: It doesn't have borderless windowed mode, aka "actual full screen mode". Yes, I want full screen mode that doesn't crash my computer for 10 seconds when I decide to do something else by alt tabbing. Especially when the game takes forever to boot up. That's the entire point of "borderless windowed mode" and really should just be how you design your full screen mode to begin with. No, I don't want a full screen mode that messes with my screen resolution. I have literally never played a game on PC at a different resolution than I do everything else on my computer. On top of that, windowed mode insists on putting a bar at the bottom of my screen that tends to flicker like crazy.
- As I mentioned, the game takes ages to boot up, even on an NVME drive with a 4070 ti. It looks nice but honestly not THE BEST THING EVER...dunno why it is so massive and takes so long to boot up.
- THE GAME NEEDS A CUTSCENE SKIP BUTTON. On repeat playthroughs in-engine cutscenes take like 2-3 hours of the game. I had to use cheatengine to speed up the game with speedhack so I could get to the gameplay.

I can't overstate how empty and pointless exploring the later open world overworld in this DLC is. Some places have literally NOTHING other than the 1 place you're supposed to go and a bunch of enemies strewn about. For example: the finger ruins areas. Others have a couple bosses you've seen before a million times in the base game, and a million "cookbooks" that give you exactly 1 new crafting recipe or a bunch of glovewort (that nobody uses since they only need to upgrade the mimic or black knife tiche ever.) It's so tedious to find the useful items in these overly massive empty places. The main game was a bit more dense but still had this problem as well. This DLC the problem becomes even more obvious.

It's sad, because the legacy dungeon areas are as fun as ever in the souls series, although there are less of these to explore considering the price of this DLC. The bosses are quite cool and fun to fight as well. But this DLC is really soured by the need to add useless empty space to pad out the world. Souls games work a lot better with dense areas and curated placements for enemies in fun ways. The new weapons are very cool too.

The frame rate really suffers, even on a 4070 ti, and I think this is mostly because of the garbage anticheat they are using. I recall booting up the game offline without anticheat and it ran so much better. What is up with that performance...

And even after 2 years, there's still so many pointless restrictions on multiplayer. Re-summon hell, arbitrarily not being able to summon your friend because of killing a boss in an area, wondering what range you can get invaded by and having no idea, trying to figure out the requirements for a summon sign showing up, "inappropriate activity detected" when you have done nothing at all inappropriate, NOT BEING ABLE TO RIDE YOUR HORSE IN CO OP HOLY SH*T IS THIS EVER TEDIOUS WHY HASNT IT BEEN CHANGED YET. This game can be fun and is really ambitious but has so many pointless restrictions that are archaic and not needed anymore.

WHY AM I FIGHTING 30092378u09823 DRAGONS WE ALREADY FOUGHT THIS BOSS 329873298732 TIMES IN THE MAIN GAME AND ITS THE EXACT SAME ENEMY

THERE ARE TOO MANY FURNACE GOLEMS THAT TAKE AGES TO KILL AND ARE FOUGHT THE EXACT SAME MUNDANE WAY

WHY ARE THERE ENTIRE AREAS OF THE MAP CO-OP CANNOT BE DONE FOR ABSOLUTELY NO REASON

Somehow the game's story manages to make miquella's story a lot less interesting than the sparse but tragic story in the original game.

And hell no it's not a 10/10 at all. Damn if there isn't an insane amount of empty pointless areas in this DLC. I give it 7 or 8/10 at max. Not recommended at full price.

This game is really fun if you focus specifically on the main quest and side quests. The fun lies within the sometimes humorously authentic portrayal of medieval bohemia. Even the things we see as weird or barbaric these days are portrayed. For example at the Monastery in the game they poop on the second floor toilets, and you can look through the toilet to see some trees below. Wouldn't want to be the gardener there. (You can even see some nasty stains along the walls below it outside.)

Focus only on the actual quests and levelling up skills and stats. Other than that the game isn't that great. Avoid wandering around looking for cool stuff in the open world. You won't find much ever. If you must look up where the treasure chests are...there aren't many to be found. However their rewards are actually quite good. Although the combat is jank and not all that fun if you have a powerful setup you can usually just pummel your way through things. Then you can get to the quests which are amusing and fun to do.

It's fun to kit yourself out with armor and medieval gear, then go out and help some peasants with their issues. I remember one quest where part of the quest was a lady putting up a stone cross as a penance for something bad she did in the past. It showed two dudes setting up the small cross as if it was the most impressive thing ever with triumphant music. It was just a basic stone cross. But to them it WAS impressive. This is the kind of amusingly authentic stuff in the game.

I particularly like the potion system as the potions aren't too hard to buy or make but have rather useful effects. Such as seeing better at night, allowing you to pick harder locks or get past difficult speech checks early...pretty much any application if you get the right potion it can help.

One thing I found really amusing was that when trying to get the "don't kill anyone in an entire playthrough" achievement, you can still kill people by running over them with a horse. In some cases, not killing a person makes a quest really really annoying to finish, such as the monastery quest. Instead, I choked the person out, carried their body to a road while they were unconscious, and ran over them with a horse a couple of times at a full gallop. This was a really funny concept to me, that "my horse killed him" rather than I did, so no one accused me of murder, and the achievement still unlocked at the end of the game. If I ever got to some point in the game where I got fed up and wanted someone out of the picture to speed things up...they got hauled to the old horse trampling road.

Later on in the same "don't kill anyone" playthrough, soldiers witnessed the horror of I, a knight in shining armor jumping over the battlements of a castle and punching everyone up there to smithereens without a weapon. Soon everyone on the battlements was unconscious. Now that the knight's friends had arrived, they waited around 5 minutes standing there politely for the enemies to wake up from being unconscious only to immediately bonk them with a mace, killing them.

Gripes:
-The "Open world" is largely pointless. There is very little to discover by going out into the wilderness. A couple of treasure chests with useful gear, but 99% of the stuff in the wilderness is an "interesting site" with nothing of interest there. Just a long unused campfire usually. Or a literal pile of rocks. Or a broken wagon with a pair of pants in it. Or something stupid like that. Why even mark these on the map? There's literally nothing there. Oh - it's because open world games thrive on checklists and the facade that they have a lot to do in the game, whereas they actually just have a normal amount of content spread out massively in a bunch of empty nothingness. You know how much better this game would seem if it just focused on quests rather than pretending wandering empty forests was worthwhile?
-Enemies can fight like Maximus Decimus Meridius in a pitch black night with no torch whereas the player literally cannot see a single thing making it impossible to fight until you yourself take a torch out (which leaves you without a shield). For a game trying its damndest to be realistic this is super unrealistic that enemies can fight just as well with no light whatsoever. If you use a Nighthawk potion, things are easier. I realized that later.
-Game takes like 2 minutes to start up. Majorly slow in that regard. Even modding away the intro videos, it still takes a long time to start.
-Rattay, Uzhitz, and Talmberg run at like 30-50 fps on ultra with my 4070 ti. Wtf, how is this that unoptimized, this game has graphics straight out of like the early 2010s. Dunno how it is that demanding.
-Enemies constantly perform master strikes, making normal combat take forever. Somehow, standing right in front of the enemy in full armor and drawing your bow while taking hits to shoot an arrow point blank at their head is the fastest way of finishing fights. I feel this isn't well designed.
-The item list constantly changes sorting while you sell items for items with the same name, leading to you accidentally selling the wrong one. Very annoying.
-Although the soundtrack while exploring and playing is great, the tracks are a bit too short and there aren't enough of them. Some more variance and expansion to each track would be perfect.
-The game forces you to do Sir Hans Capon's Amorous Adventures DLC right at the end of the game to finish the game if you haven't yet. This DLC has very little to do with the story, so it seems like the devs just wanted to annoy players trying to finish the game on hardcore mode by adding *just one more thing* to do. I already did it, and so did everyone trying to finish the game repeatedly...stop with this nonsense.
-The game crashes somewhat often. I had it crash around 10 times in 200 hours of playing. I would heavily recommend playing with "save whenever" mod because having save restrictions on a game that can crash is a major aggravation.

Excellent sequel to the amazing System Shock 1. Although this game removes some of the more obscure features of SS1 it still is very fun to play and explore. Although the game doesn't point out where to go other than by looking at your notes, I never felt much of a need to look at a walkthrough. Maybe only once or twice through the whole game.

Gripes:
-Some of the later levels are lacking in music compared to the earlier ones. Sometimes it's good for ambience sake, but felt like a couple more tracks could have been good.
-I don't think the skill system adds all that much to the game...your inventory being limited is limitation enough...can't use every weapon if they don't all fit in your inventory.
-No cyberspace which was a unique aspect of System Shock 1.
-It is a bit more industrial in feel to the first System Shock, which makes it feel colder in comparison and not as wacky. I kind of liked the aesthetic of the first one better.

That said, it has everything else going for it the same way as the first game, and SHODAN and The Many are interesting antagonists. The Body of the Many was a very interesting late game area as it looked very different from the rest of the levels. The areas were actually a bit less mazelike than the first game which made the game easier to play. The USS Rickenbacker was the only area that seemed kind of mazelike.

Things that are actually better than System Shock 1:
-Music (Not MIDI anymore)
-Can equip weapons by hotkey
-A bit less jank when moving about the levels

It runs very well and I never had any issues. I was able to run the game at 120fps at 1080p on a modern computer without having to do very much. That's very refreshing to see from a very old game and is a testament to either the upkeep of the game's code or the pure future-proofing of the game in the first place. Really cool how easy it is to get it going.

Terrible, absolutely TERRIBLE level design. Impossible to tell what is going on because of the insanely bright busy colors and backgrounds. Gameplay design clash everywhere. Go fast to even be able to go to the past/future, but also go slow to find the secret machine in the level to destroy! Also you CAN'T fully explore the level because we designed it to have multiple paths that you can't get back to the higher ones if you fall down to the lower one! Also we put past/future signs in places pretty much impossible to use them. And you still jump backwards on hills for some nonsensical reason!

Unfinished