Recent reviews by OmniWashed

I bought it because of Dave The Diver. I like games with playing cards, and I like roguelikes. It's quite literally about playing the craziest poker hands imaginable. Get this game and give it a shot! 10/10 recommend.

Yet 20 years later, the GOAT FPS is still relevant and receiving quality updates from the developers.
11/10 a MUST HAVE for any Steam library.

Palworld does what NintenDIDN'T - Making real innovation on the pocket monster catching genre.
Imagine open world survival game elements of Ark or Rust while not requiring a high end PC combined with the monster collection elements of the beloved genre, as well as automating our base (using said Pals), giving a degree of management similar to games like Satisfactory. It's a unique marriage that I didn't know I needed, and I regret bashing this game when it first launched, and honestly should have bought it sooner.
Oh, and it feels less like Pokemon because the combat is not turn based, rather completely done in the open world, which, combined with the player character's involvement, makes fights feel very dynamic and gives more depth to the game, even if the list of monsters and typing is overall smaller.

There's a few features I'd like to see in the future combined with an expansion to the list of Pals we can catch, but I can excuse these because of the small development team and Early Access status.

And Nintendo, if you're reading this, you've lost what respect I still had for you as a company. Not because you refuse to innovate with your games, or your wrongful nuking of game preservation sites, or your continuous cease-and-desist letters against fan projects (and Gmod content), or even the abysmal launch of Pokemon Scarlet/Violet, but because you are actively suing the developers of this game on a completely fabricated claim of patent infringement, all because this game utterly embarrassed your series and you were petrified of the thought of any legitimate competition existing - You failed to make a copyright claim against Pocketpair stick, so you wrote a shady patent AFTER the game came out to resort to so-called "patent trolling". I can only hope that your frivolous and possibly downright illegal lawsuit will inevitably end in a complete and total failure.

Also, hats off to Pocketpair for assuring players they will never use the Live Service game model.

TLDR - Buy this game, even if you don't really enjoy the genre. You'll probably enjoy it, and the pro-consumer developers deserve my money. It's impossible to hate this game, and the very minor problems are so easily overlooked and even for me, rather nit-picky.

10/10, I stand with Pocketpair!

After completing Dave The Diver I can firmly say this is easily one of my new favorite indie games of all time. Absolutely perfect, a hidden gem which combines seemingly two genres in one, and certainly proves that great games don't need overly bloated multi-million dollar budgets, cutting-edge graphics, or backing from so-called "investors" and "publishers".

Oh, and it's like a quarter of the price of a "triple-A" game, and I still have post game content and plenty of side activities to do.

An absolute must-have in my book, a perfect 10/10!!!

So, this for me was an unexpected game to come to Steam. and the game was definitely hyped up amongst the Avatar community which I'm pretty involved in, but when the game was first released last year, it was not available here due to Ubisoft's opposition to launching on Steam due to Valve's supposed "Unrealistic Business Model". So, I guess they all come crawling back at some point - in that sense, welcome back, Ubisoft.
Was it worth all that hype? Let's see:

> The GOOD -
- Astounding world detailing - Pandora is NOT an empty place here - it is EXTREMELY detailed, almost excessively so, not just in the visual department and leveraging new technology to flesh out the graphics as much as possible, but also in the ecology. Avatar has always been one of those series where you could deep dive into the worldbuilding and not get bored, and this is another great example - most open world games these days feel rather empty, Avatar definitely does NOT feel empty at all, I spent a lot of time just wandering and not getting bored, couple that with a GIGANTIC map size. It also does an EXCELLENT job of leveraging new creature and environment designs into the franchise as well as catching up people unfamiliar with the first film (as the events are mentioned several times). Even just minor details, down to NPCs talking about your character's antics, is a BIG selling point of this game - hats off to the artists at Massive and at Lightstorm. It is one of the VERY rare games that is so well-done graphically that it feels truly special.
- Optimization - while isn't anything amazing, is still pretty great. Considering this game comfortably ran 1440p on my *nearly 7 year old computer* at a decently playable framerate and not at the absolute lowest settings (Which still look solid BTW). Heck, it's probably the best optimized game I've played in a LONG time, and it ran even better on the hardware it's designed for.
- The game feels like a weird hodge-podge between Far Cry Primal and Crysis to me, well, like Crysis but without the suit - while it's quite a power fantasy experience, enemies are equally as damaging to you, and I actually quite like it.
- The hunting and general resource gathering, absolutely nailed. A simple concept of getting better material for "clean" kills and "perfect" harvests that is executed beautifully.

> The Neutral -
- I definitely feel that the skill system is extremely one-dimensional. I have to compare it to Cyberpunk, which has replayability solely based on the fact that you're encouraged to try different builds, Avatar has absolutely none of that. It's not badly designed however, I like the way we actually have to explore to get them.
- Gunplay isn't super special even if everything feels very good, however I'm not one to complain about lack of guns in a game where we're playing as a race primarily known for using bows.
- We RARELY hear any spoken Na'vi through the whole game despite Paul Frommer's name making it into the credits. Just worth noting that, as it might be a big immersion breaker for some die-hard fans.
- Some of the outposts feel pretty samey, although I'm willing to ignore that on the basis of it not really being the main activity in the game (compared to Far Cry).

> The BAD -
- Questionable narrative decisions - I get that Avatar is always a bit on the nose about environmentalism, I mean, the reason why the original film's narrative was written in such a way was because of what's going on in the Amazon, but this game takes so much creativity away from expressing these more sensitive topics and makes them feel far more FORCED. This might be easier for me to ignore this as a problem just because I enjoy the film franchise so much, but it seriously might turn off other people from playing.
- Poorly designed antagonist - The antagonist is highly one-dimensional - TLDR - he's just very greedy, and just wants... oil? It just feels extremely shallow and is a departure from the antagonists that we know from Ubisoft titles of days past.
- Very badly written dialogue - Some of the main character dialogue in this game, a lot of it in fact, is quite poorly written, some of it to a downright CRINGE degree that I found myself skipping the cutscenes most of the time, and it's very clear at times that they followed trends for 'modern audiences'.

> The UGLY -
-- Requires the absolute trash-tier Ubisoft launcher, over 10 years later they STILL insist on using their proprietary garbage.
-- Denuvo Anti-Tamper.
-- MICRO TRANSACTIONS IN A SINGLE-PLAYER GAME! Are you @!#$ing kidding me!? Now I know they're just cosmetic but COME ON!

FINAL VERDICT:

While the game itself is more than serviceable and solid overall, it's clearly marred by LOTS of the disgusting "quadruple A" Ubisoft practices and for that reason my score is heavily skewed down, as a friendly reminder Ubisoft has also told us we should get comfortable with "not owning our games" so I felt reluctant to give them any money, however I picked this up for 40 percent discount, so it was absolutely worth it for purely gameplay. But at the full 70 dollar price? Unless you're itching for eyecandy and to have a game with the Avatar name on your catalogue, it's going to be a very tough sell, and - I actually might just recommend skipping or avoiding.

Final Score: 7 out of 10 - A decent, sometimes great overall experience, marred heavily by the publisher.

An absolute master piece, a true love-letter for those who loved the ship combat in the previous title. A relic from a time when Ubisoft had a heart and soul, and an unwavering pledge to make amazing games.

Buy this instead of Skull and Bones. Epic 9 out of 10.

Literally one of the best and easiest-to-use mod managers ever for one of the greatest games ever created. 11/10.

> The Good:
- This game has come a long way since launch. Optimization is shockingly good for me being on a graphics card which released all the way back in 2016. There's areas where I drop frames for sure, but it is MILES ahead of other open-world games in the past three years.
- Gameplay loop is nothing new for an RPG but there's a surprising amount that helps set it apart, like the recent reworks to things like the Cyberware- it REALLY helps set this apart from similar games. Gone are the days of wearing ugly stat-based clothes with V, now I can wear whatever I want while my Cyberware does all the stat lifting.
- Speaking of, I'll give a mention to Cyberpunk's choice of weapon categories which again helps it separate from similar games, some of the builds you can do are just bonkers and I will do multiple playthroughs just for that.
- If you ignore the massive overhype on launch, the world of Night City is breathtaking with a LOT to do. There's even a lot of minor details that show the effort that was put in to make it feel more alive, even on a mix of medium and low settings the visuals are still quite stunning.
- While there's a lot of 'forced' story direction for V, there's still a degree of freedom when it comes to the fact this game has like a half dozen different endings now. Game's kept me hooked for this long and I haven't seen all the endings yet.
- The overall story is FANTASTIC with plenty of good twists and turns to keep you gripped.
- Overall actor performance is unreal, and thank you, Keanu Reeves for your AMAZING performance as Johnny Silverhand.
- Bonus points for CDPR's use of their unique REDEngine. Doesn't have the same optimization flaws that UE has, a shame considering this may be their last game using their own engine.

> The Bad:
- Bugs still exist, so far nothing has been absolutely "delete my save, start a new run" level of game-breaking, anything that could be near that is fixed quickly by reloading your save, minus the severe light flickering bugs I had early on (which was fixable, and the only MAJOR bug I ran into.) I've also had less gamebreaking but still very annoying bugs relating to movement, sound, and sometimes the game's awesome soundtrack flat out refusing to play. (EDIT): 2.1's new sidequests are broken, avoid 'em for now.
- Sadly there was no New Game+. Not a dealbreaker but worth pointing out.

> The Ugly:
- Nothing! CDPR is a pro-consumer developer who will NEVER force ugly DRMs on our heads.

Final Verdicts:
Cyberpunk 2077 these days is a MASSIVE leap from what it was, and is a true testament to CDPR's dedication to turn this game around. Gone are the days where Cyberpunk 2077 was plagued by bugs.
If you've been waiting to buy the game, now that 2.0 is well out, this is the BEST time to buy it and give this game a spin, if you like RPGs with a degree of power fantasy, you're likely to enjoy it, and it may even be well worth the full price for the amount of time you can sink into it.

"Wake the f*** up, Samurai. We've got a city to burn."

Final Rating: 9.5 out of 10. A near perfect masterpiece.

Can I just ask a burning question? What kind of god computer did Studio Wildcard have to run this game on to get the footage for the trailers?

Either way... it's playable... if you're willing to endure low, or completely inconsistent FPS and or turn literally every setting down. That's how I played Ark to begin with, but this game truly brought my system to it's knees, the first yet and a big wake-up call for me on my aging computer. My (old rig) hardware was certainly dated but it shouldn't be so weak that it would struggle playing without Global Illumination and RT enabled. The decision to go for Unreal Engine 5 really irks me as it is notorious for being excessively demanding. Needs optimization fixes IMMEDIATELY, not to mention the crashes. Random crashes. Players with much better hardware than I report similar optimization problems and most are not playing the highest settings - reality is you NEED a 30 series card or better to even have a CHANCE of playing this game in 1080p, 40 series recommended as this game can at least make use of new GPU features. This is, assuming you're lucky enough to have one.

Crashes are abundant, it has been months since launch and people still report the same UE crash relating to the water physics and dynamic foliage, or, just the weird cursed purple rain. In personal experience, most of my crashes were seemingly related to the water physics. A GPU driver update seems to have lowered the amount, but I've still gotten them a couple times.

On the positive end, the QoL features are genuinely abundant and it's not just a pretty remake of the beloved ARK Survival Evolved. Building is INFINITELY better. UI is easier to read. Dino pathfinding finally doesn't suck. Hit registration FINALLY works if you have more than 15 ping on a server. The game even lets us hop right back into the previously-joined session immediately from the menu. So the fact this game didn't release with the expansions actually feels like a blessing in disguise (And the fact I didn't have to pay for them a second time was the ONLY REASON I bought this remake). Although... this game IS beautiful... even on low and medium (minus the lighting), and it becomes utterly gorgeous on high and above (Yet you need a very up-to-date system of course, and a REALLY good one at that). The game has the chance to be a fantastic remake of Ark, and, considering who ACTUALLY controls them, I do greatly appreciate Wildcard's passion for their community, their dev team is full of amazing people who are extremely dedicated to the lifespan of this game, it brings me back to ARK in 2015/2016. However their investors and publisher aka Snail Games are obviously NOT good, as well as Nitrado, who has single-handedly killed community-run servers that are not run on privately owned hardware like my own, oh boy, don't get me started... also... charging for so-called "premium" mods? Are the publishers really trying that hard to milk the ARK ip dry?

-- Will not recommend currently!

System specs for those who want to know:
NVidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super, AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, 32GB of RAM, installed on an m.2 SSD. Playing in 1440p high settings, medium shadows with DLSS on balanced and frame generation enabled. I'm using The Island as the benchmark here since it's the original map, even if it isn't the most commonly played anymore.
Runs at about 75 FPS at absolute maximum, but in reality I get more like 50 most of the time. Not as good as what I was expecting. Not unplayable but very disappointing for how my specs are currently amongst the best for gaming and along with the fact that this is with freaking frame generation enabled, so in reality, my ACTUAL frames are about half of what I'm getting. It is certainly miles ahead of what the original game ran like at launch, although that's not a very high bar to beat considering it struggled to run 30FPS even on the Titan cards. This isn't even on the highest settings, which, funnily enough, recommends an RTX 4070, and the 4080 Super is a significantly stronger card than that. Don't expect great performance on any new system unless you've got something absolutely mental like a 4090.

The main reason I still play this game despite my negative review is because I run my own server for my small group, some of whom I've been doing this with since 2017 when I first ran a server for the original game.

Hopefully optimization patches will fix things. I'd rather have at least some optimism rather than be pessimistic. It's not a lot, but I may as well have something, considering this is still the only game of it's type, hence why I still find enjoyment for it's flaws. Otherwise, my review will continue to stay negative and I will say that people should steer clear.

Studio Wildcard, please help your players out and fix your game.

This is one of those games so far that makes me wish we had a "neutral" rating option...
I will also note most of the optimization problems have been fixed by now but this game still has a ton of downsides right now.

Coming back to Forza Motorsport after skipping FM7 because of how much of a disaster it was, and while this game fixes many of FM7's issues... but introduces a whole load of new ones.

The Good:
- The handling is a GREAT balance between arcade and realistic.
- Power-shifting is FINALLY gone.
- Track design is a huge step up from Forza Motorsport 7. A lot of improvements not just in realism but also flow. Suddenly 20 tracks on launch doesn't seem so bad.
- While not perfect, the penalty system and the new format to do qualifying races first DOES help people drive a little cleaner. I will say though, being penalized for being rear-ended is problematic though. Work on it.
- NO BS micro transactions like GT7.

The Bad:
- Sounds: while the sounds are a improvement over Forza Motorsport 7, there are SOME sounds that are just flat out inaccurate. Like the Sauber C9 sounds like a 4 cylinder, or the AMG One doesn't have that F1-esque electrical whine (long story short FH5 did that one better).
- MISSING CARS: There are some cars that we saw in the trailers (Eg. Audi R10) that are questionably missing from the day-one car list. For a Motorsport game, this game really lacks touring cars and prototypes, and some of the most recognizable GT cars are missing, too. Big shame! Suddenly 500 cars on launch seems like nothing.
- AI... The AI seems to sometimes not know when to try to pass or defend. This also leads to a group at the back and three to four AI drivers at front.
- Track list... 20 tracks on launch is whatever, but HOW can you launch a game without Monza! (Edit, Hockenheim got added)
Even Imola and Sebring are missing as well. All of these were featured in prior games.
I hope we get these soon rather than never, because it would be a big shame to see a big-budget racing game without these couple of iconic tracks.
- New mechanics nobody asked for: And my absolute biggest problem? Well I was really looking forwards to the car leveling system. Using credits ONLY to unlock new cars was like a breath of fresh air in a desert, because I am beyond tired of people shoving the highest power engine into a car, and slapping Forza aero onto it (By the way can we PLEASE hide those ugly wings??) and calling it a day. But the fact it can take over THREE HOURS to max-level ONE car is absolutely ridiculous. They advertised that it would take 2 hours at most, yeah no, that's just too much. The problem got partially fixed recently with most parts being unlockable by level 20, but now you're bottlenecked on Car Points when you're trying to do your build, that's a big problem.
- Excessively unfinished: minor details like car dashboards on some cars are messed up. Some cars have incorrect preview images (like having Forza aero). Huge problem. If this game was 'built from the ground up', what ground was it built up from?
- Big lack of Single-player content. Does Microsoft not understand that people play these types of games for single player career modes too?

The Ugly:
- Okay, so I was never told this nor does it actually say so, but this is a HUGE problem for me, WHY does this game require an always-online internet connection?! This is a terrible decision, I live in an area where internet is spotty at best and often goes out, so I can randomly lose progress on a series because of that.

While I will continue playing because, the game is FUN, and the handling, whether I'm on wheel or controller feels genuinely GOOD, and the menus while not great, is FAR better than FM7... and the visuals are definitely good even on low settings. Although I've yet to try multiplayer... which I hear lots of complaints about. And I did end up shelling out money for the ultimate edition... And I've played other games that have bad optimization. But for the time being, WAIT to buy this game. Probably just skip on it. Even if you have a good rig.

The game had a lot of potential to be good but... it's missing everything that made the 360 titles good... if this wasn't the only Forza Motorsport game on Steam, I'd be playing Forza Motorsport 4 instead...

Final Score: 5/10 (May change but that's what it's getting for now.)