Recent reviews by Starbucke

This game has become progressively less fun to play, and still handles like the janky Unity kitbash it originally started as.

Features such as bottling your own water in jars from rivers to then treat or purify into a higher-tier consumable or being able to specialize yourself with well-placed skill points into trees with genuine returns have been swapped out.

Nowadays, if you want to get your own water you now have to grind out trader quests, which limits your base locations pretty heavily as you now MUST live near a trader from the get-go if you want to obtain any sort of self-sufficiency. Those skill trees I mentioned? They're now almost entirely dictated by RNG, as your primary form of advancement will be reading books that ever-so-slowly chip at skill-related unlocks.

And the skill tree; I used to be able to readily specialize into a path and shape my survival experience around my specializations. I could become a tech-junkie who could build a network of automated turrets while my friend could specialize into resource-gathering to supply all the metal and gunpowder to fuel that torrent of mechanical death. Horde nights were tense, because it was always hard to tell if we had enough ammo to keep the guns up and running.

Nowadays, that skill tree is dictated by completely random books that I find in the now-too-copious amount of bookshelves and cabinets that contain them. I no longer think about what skills I invest in, because I know that I'll just have to comb the entire city for every book in hopes that I'll get to do anything I hoped to do going into the save. If I want to actually play the game and not scrape through the twelfth bookshelf in the log cabin I found, I can count on losing progression pace, and I won't have sufficient skills to make it through the 7th night without cheesing it. In their attempts to allow players to play more 'generally', they have locked players into a bit of a 'melting pot' style of play. No player in a group is special, now. There is still a rudimentary skill tree, but any real progression is now locked behind RNG-based book spawns. Yawn.

And oh boy, the engine is dogwater. Despite being in development for over a decade there has never been a fundamental re-write or re-visit to the original engine, which means this game—despite going for a full release soon—still runs like the original alphas from 2013-2014. Worse, actually, compared to builds such as the mid-10s of alpha builds (alpha 14 through alpha 17).

These developers were pretty bad at making games when they started, almost eleven years ago now. All of that horrible jank and bad code has trickled down. Don't get me wrong, The Fun Pimps have absolutely upped their game in terms of competency, but many of the systems still use foundations made in those "we suck at coding" phases.

If this is not the case, they have done a horrible job at rectifying it; The UI still operates like slop, and the game still seems hellbent on crashing my system with a 3070 and 64GB of RAM. My system far exceeds even their recommended specs, yet still chugs and horribly slows down with only two players on vanilla settings the moment more than ten zombies are active.

The game never even hit beta, and it is about to be released as a "full game." It is still advertised as a title that is still in alpha.

Let that tell you everything you need to know about the level of development that went into this title. Maybe pick it up when it goes on sale for $5.99, as it seems to do on average 6-7 times a year, typically through fall and winter, but do not pay full price for this.

The developers have had 10 years to work on their title, and they have done nothing but shoot the game in the foot time and time again.

SONY has rolled back their enforcement of PSN accounts. This is a major win for everyone (except SONY, who deserve whatever negative rep this whole situation nets them).

Helldivers 2 is an extremely well-crafted game, borrowing elements from other successful franchises to make one smorgasbord of action-packed fun.

Guns are satisfying, movement is weighty but not ridiculously clunky, and the starting equipment with a few very early unlocks sets most players up to be competent in a variety of situations rather than forcing beginners to slug behind their team for "progression" reasons.

People aren't joking when they tell you that this is the sort of love AAA developers could only wish their games felt from their communities. The game needs some serious polish, but it was made by a studio that didn't expect their title to blow up massively.

Seriously, you'll get your 40$ out of this game.

Runes of Magic recently had their 15th anniversary, which has brought a little bit of traction back to the game as journalists for gaming blogs have covered the recent dungeon overhauls. As somebody who put 400+ hours into the game back in its prime, prior to its Steam release, let me offset the recent reviews with something genuine.

The Good:
Runes of Magic, while based on the foundations of games such as World of Warcraft, managed to carve itself a unique niche for its time. It was truly a remarkable MMO for its time, and those same systems are still in place today. Multi-classing, which begins at level 10, allows you to deviate from a single-class archetype and mix it up. Is your Priest not battle-ready enough for solo quests? Sub-class into Mage, and you now have potent spell-casting capabilities alongside extreme healing.

The Bad:
Crafting skills feel worthless with the adjustments to EXP rates. Your crafting skill will rarely/never outpace quest or dungeon loot in terms of viability until far too late into the game. Speaking of, you level so fast in this game in the early levels that even I, a seasoned veteran of the game, was struggling to keep up with the amount of items flooding my inventory due to level gifts. I'd like to think that this balances out for the later levels to make them more streamlined, but it's just far too fast in the early game.

The Ugly:
This game, despite everything, is a shell of itself, and has only become more aggressively micro-transaction reliant in the end-game. With a smaller, more condensed community, there is less acceptance for newcomers, as your average end-game player vastly outclasses you unless you sink a triple-digit amount of money into runes to get your gear into raiding shape. In addition, some classes like the Priest literally only ever receive about 3 attack spells for their class, with maybe about 9-10 different forms of healing and status cure that almost never comes into play because it's simply more efficient to just heal the damage than to try to cure it (most enemies who apply status will do so consistently). As such, your healer rotation will be maybe 2 or 3 spells long for most of the game, until you get to end-game content that requires more precision.


In conclusion, RoM isn't worth picking up long-term. If you're just looking for a nostalgia fix, knock yourself out, it's a small enough game and it's free. However, be wary that this game is hardly "Massively Multiplayer" anymore, and long-term solo play is not sustainable. If you have a group of friends who all want to get engaged with it, then you've struck gold, otherwise check out more modern MMOs.

tl;dr — Good game, stays true to the first while adding enough to mark itself as a sequel. Appeals strongly to the initial fanbase, this is still a souls-like with guns and it pulls its own weight very well. Minor performance issues if you have a gaming rig actually built for modern games. Very few bugs, the game is incredibly stable. Bosses focus more on the boss itself rather than spawning swarms of underlings to annoy you, an improvement from the first game.

Now, for the half-review half-rant:

The devs have more or less expanded upon everything that made the first game great; They're not trying anything wacky or quirky to appeal to a new audience; If you did not like Remnant 1, you will not like Remnant 2. If you DID like Remnant 1, you will like Remnant 2.

The gunplay feels very much the same, with your performance being more based on your skill versus the gun you've selected. Can't aim? Time to practice; you're going to run out of ammo if you don't make those shots count. Can't dodge in time? Time to practice; you'll die in just a few hits against most enemies. The game is VERY generous about giving you free healing opportunities, you just need to take them. If you're the kind of person to complain about "Uuugh, [X enemy] is so annoying!", you should consider just shooting them on sight. I'm serious, just snipe it, and the problem is over. People seem to forget that's an option in a game that's literally about blasting enemies away.

I've seen people complaining about performance, and this is a semi-valid concern. However, a quick glance at the recommended specs easily addresses that fact that you need a semi-competent gaming rig to comfortably run this game. It runs on a new, modern engine, and your older technology just isn't going to cut it. It simply wasn't built with new engines in mind, because they didn't exist. If you are under the "recommended" specs in any way, shape or form, you do not get to complain about bad optimization; The devs have already told you what you need to run their game well, and you ignored it. I'm sure they'll hotfix over time and GPU manufacturers will release some game-ready drivers, but it's 2023, time to upgrade your old 2015 rig.

Speaking of stability, this game hasn't had any apparent bugs that I've noticed in my time playing. I've played exclusively co-op, and that's normally where all the bugs would rear their head. Not Remnant 2. It's clear they spent their time doing beta testing, because the game plays great.

Rant time!

I've seen a few people complaining about the price, and I raise them one term; inflation. People are far too comfortable with indie developers who can afford to release their game for 15$ because they only have to pay a team of five people, setting an unreasonable standard that larger companies just can't compete with. Guess what? Gunfire Games has a team of OVER EIGHTY. Those people need to make a living wage for all the time they spent working and developing, and GG themselves need to be able to reimburse the initial development cost so they can continue patching, developing new content, and working on future titles. It's a simple concept. Besides, if you play the game for even ten hours, that's still only roughly 6$ per hour of entertainment. You've likely paid far more for far less. Games have been releasing at $60 since 2005. It's been 18 years, the fact it hasn't budged far from that is a marvel. Accounting for actual inflation, games should be roughly $85-90 these days, so genuinely shut up and appreciate that video games have been fairly immune to inflation.

This game is a reminder to the rest of the gaming industry; Good development pays off, humility earns trust, and listening to your general playerbase (not your top 10%) makes for a much happier audience.

This game is optimized, runs fantastically at max settings (I have a 3070, and I get ~130fps at 1080p), and only takes up ~34GB of hard drive space. The download itself is ~18GB at the time of this review. It's such a breath of fresh air that my friends who have slower internet can finally download a modern game in the span of a day instead of an entire weekend, and that I'm not choking out 10% of my monthly internet cap just to download a single game.

Oh, and the bugs? What bugs? I've played for 14 hours, and haven't encountered a single bug that was noticeable. The polish is phenomenal. The only issue I even have with the game is that some of the auditory jumpscares (steam bursting from pipes, broken lights sparking) are a little too frequent, but considering that's the sole issue I have, that speaks volumes about the rest of the game.

As for the gameplay itself, I'm a big fan of the "figure it out from environmental cues" structure. Missions only tell you where you need to go if you're already closing on the location, otherwise you'll need to look for indicators such as signs/mannequins pointing you the right way, light cues, or even things like wires or pipes running along the ground that lead you to your objective. The game never tells you any of this directly, and lets the player figure it out for themselves. It's both incredibly immersive, and greatly refreshing compared to other modern titles that put a giant objective marker in your face and draw you a path directly to it. I feel rewarded for using my intuition to approach new tasks instead of punished for not doing a brain-dead sprint toward a giant marker.

Progression is solid, and lets you feel more empowered as you advance. Core mechanics such as effective door bashing, sliding, and saving yourself quickly from being pinned are quick to acquire, and are permanently unlocked upon acquisition. No need to pick between which quality-of-life perks you'd like to keep, you get to use them all. The only loadout options you have to choose between are ones that modify gameplay in ways that don't necessarily give you a huge advantage.

Rigs, for example, are the equippable gear slot, which allows you to have a healing fog, or a throwable stun grenade, or even tactical vision to see enemies through walls for a duration. These all serve the same purpose, which is to help you avoid or mend damage from the enemies. Because of this, no Rig is necessarily better than the others, and they all have upgrade paths to let you improve your favorite.

Speaking of other gameplay mechanics, Red Barrels has had their ear close to the forums and surveys, making adjustments to gameplay in response to feedback. Solo was too hard? They added infinite respawns for solo players (with a grade penalty for each respawn), and made enemies not linger around objectives so hard for solo-play. Running from some enemies was complicated due to limited stamina? They adjusted the base stamina value to make it a little more even. They even took some of the unlockable perks in the game, such as the ability to kick enemies off of your fellow players, and made them base-kit, while adjusting the perks to remove the stamina cost for doing so. If it sounds like they're just "making the game easier," they aren't. They still offer modifier-packed missions that'll amp up the difficulty immensely, these adjustments just help new players stand a better chance when matched up with fully-perked players who want to do harder missions while still giving progression a noticeable edge above base-kit, and a reason to invest into your progression trees.

I don't know what else to say about this game, it's beautiful, it runs great, and it's probably some of the funnest co-op gameplay I've had since Phasmophobia's original release.

TL;DR - Badly optimized game. Expect frame drops/crashes on lower-end systems. Social setting is heavily clique-based, meaning you'll likely only make friends if you join an existing community via Discord or something of the sort. Oh, and there's a lot of child predators.

This game needs a lot of love. Badly. It's horribly optimized as-is, with the minimum specs listed being an absolute joke even for the non-VR mode. I have an RTX 3070, and I struggle to pull even 60 frames in VR on 95% of worlds. On low settings, by the way.

With that being said, I've had a lot of fun with this, making avatars, it's given me a reason to expand into a part of 3D art that I had never really contemplated. The social aspects are alright if you've got a community to integrate into. If you're not already part of a clique, good luck, making friends is shockingly hard. Most folks are too glued to a mirror or a rack on a horribly optimized e-girl to even notice you for a conversation. And that's coming from a furry—we're usually TOO social.

The only thing keeping this game afloat currently is a lack of competition. Other competitors such as Neos and ChilloutVR focus too much on adding features and not enough on user accessibility, which makes them very unfriendly to entry-level users—This happens to alienate more than 90% of the VR playerbase. Even I'm well-versed in Unity and these titles are daunting to approach. If these games were to wake up and work to make their software more user-friendly, VRChat would be in a world of hot water.

I've got a lot of fond memories with VRChat, and I'll likely even continue to play it quite extensively through the rest of this year, but if the performance keeps worsening I may have to look into other options, because not all of my friends have high-end gaming computers, and even mine struggles to do well in any world that isn't literally just a blank box.

I would like to start this by making something clear: This game is starkly different from Dying Light 1 in just about every way. For some, this will be a deal-breaker, for others, a chance to experience an IP that they otherwise found uninteresting. I feel like this game isn't given the chance it deserves to be seen with fresh eyes.

Let me just start with the bad.
This game is charmingly clunky just like the first at times. NPCs may bug out, quests may softlock and require a restart or patience, or the game sometimes doesn't properly register that the poor bloke you just launched off of a skyscraper with a dropkick is dead.

[No direct spoilers, but I hint at things to make a point. Spoiler begin.]
The story is honestly wishy-washy. It starts out as a compelling tale of two factions who want the same objective, but they have different means of accomplishing this and different reasons for wanting this goal. You have to choose which side you want to put your chips with. These early decisions ultimately don't do much for your end-game story, but this first chapter of the game introduces you to the idea that your actions will inevitably have consequences. One or both of the factions in the area will be destroyed or driven away by your actions. This functions both as a way to get players comfortable with their butterfly effect, but also sets the mood for the later acts of the game.
[End spoiler.]

The early game, much like the first Dying Light, is a bit of a slog movement-wise. There is no dedicated sprinting mechanic until several skill unlocks in, though the default running speed isn't that awful. This is a bit of a neutral, though, as it does force players to learn some essential methods of movement before they unlock the fancier, often more effective methods. This gradual progression does allow for a player's overall grasp of the parkour mechanics to increase as their character's skill also increases.

Now, for some of the better stuff.
The combat, in my opinion, is solid. With much more of a focus on human encounters this time around blocking, parrying and dodging for an attack advantage were sorely-needed improvements from the first game. The parkour moves are criminally underrated for their effectiveness and all forms of combat can be improved with gear that the player can find by just looting or purchasing from shops. It never feels like one form of combat is invalid compared to the other, barring ranged combat due to the crafting requirements for arrows/bolts.

It should be noted that the game does feel much more "arcade-y" compared to the first game. Enemies will get flung back by blunt strikes, the parkour can feel floaty at times, and all enemies have health/stamina bars above their head during combat. I see this as Techland dipping back a bit into their Dead Island roots, and letting some of that slapstick beat-em-up violence come back to their gameplay. Is it realistic? No, but neither was the first game. Is it fun to launch a zombie across the street with a sledge hammer, knocking over another zombie in the process? Oh yeah.

The game does feel more RPG-y with the gear system influencing your potency in the forms of combat (Parkour, 1H, 2H, Ranged). I did my first playthrough on Hard and never found enemies to be too spongey as some of these reviews claim. Sure, in the first Dying Light if you were absolutely maxed in levels you could just 1-shot almost every zombie, and sure it was satisfying, but it eventually lost its challenge. That's all still possible in Dying Light 2, it just requires some effort. You need the right gear, you need the right weapons. And most importantly, you need to understand the crafting system.

Weapon modification in DL2 got a massive overhaul compared to the first game. Instead of being able to put a single modification on a weapon, players now get to pick between a combination of a Tip, Shaft and Grip mod for their weapons (lower rarity weapons lack some of these slots). This allows for more variety and more personalizing of combat. My roommate likes to double down on mods that blast enemies back as high-speed ragdolls, whereas I like to use mods that electrocute and ignite to maximize stunlocking and crowd control. Blueprints can be upgraded to be more potent, and the right weapon can let the player be a total killing machine. There's no conventional repair system, but there is an easter egg unlock that allows players to restore weapon durability at a pretty low cost (look up the Korek Charm).

Finally, the parkour itself picks up after the first few levels, and it feels great. You'll end up with various tools that allow you to further your ability without being completely immersion shattering like the previous game's grappling hook (literally pulls you in a straight line, ignoring all the laws of physics). More thought has to go into how you navigate a space rather than activating your portable zipline and going straight to the top, which I suppose is a negative to some. There's much more vertical space to play with in DL2, and there are ways to creatively, and without bugs, outsmart the preset paths for some of the parkour challenges the game has set up.

To sum things up, I very much think that Dying Light 1 provides that genuine, gritty zombie horror experience that enraptured many of its fans, whereas Dying Light 2 is set in the same universe, but is more focused towards the base gameplay rather than the atmosphere and story. There is some replayability (New Game+ really shakes things up for the infected types and lets you try a different story path) and the multiplayer experience has been relatively fun, with minor bugs and insignificant desyncs that can cause some funny sights.

I currently cannot recommend this game in its current state. There are gamebreaking bugs that while somewhat far and few between, can completely end your experience. Bugs include but are not limited to;

- Getting your camera stuck and no longer being able to move upon being incapacitated in prop form. You must leave the match and eat a matchmaking ban or wait an eternity for the match to end.

- Appearing to other players as a floating version of your most recent prop. This makes hiding impossible because you're constantly floating and standing out.

- Not sure if this one is a bug or just bad design, but you can still hear other players' voice-lines even if you mute them. Get ready to hear "EZ EZ EZ EZ EZ EZ EZ" for an entire match.

Don't get me wrong, the game is incredibly fun when things go right. But most matches will face you with toxicity that makes Dead by Daylight and League of Legends look friendly.

Being able to voice chat and spam voicelines is going to be one of the major pitfalls of this game. It's fun when it's well-executed proximity chat, but this is map-wide chat in a game where nobody needs to be communicating. It works for games like Friday the 13th where you genuinely sometimes need somebody's assistance to help accomplish a goal, but everything in this game can be done alone and thus requires no communication. Altruism goes hand-in-hand with the success of the survivors, so we do not need the ability for survivors (AKA Props) to open voice comms and start screaming or spamming their voiceline radial to ask for help. Look to the current king of asymmetric horror, Dead by Daylight, and notice how the only chat that's available is chat between survivors before the match begins to get acquainted, followed by post-game chat between all participants.

This brings me to my next point; toxicity. This game is TOXIC, there's no way to beat around the bush. People are flat out mean, and they'll make that clear with their dollar-store microphones that you can barely comprehend. This is further worsened by the lack of matchmaking, which the devs LITERALLY justify by claiming it provides the "Ultimate Fan Experience." What a joke! You have brand new players being faced up against people who have literally been playing since beta, it's not fair! As somebody who has a win-rate of about 90% as survivor and 100% as killer in the roughly 25-30 matches I've played, I'm not bringing this up because I'm salty, I'm bringing this up because it's too darn easy. Putting players who know what they're doing against others who don't not only breeds a poor learning environment for newbies, but provides little to no challenge for the experienced. Rather than enjoying a good match, you can expect the experienced players to be taunting newer players because there's nothing fun about the brainlessly easy match they're participating in.

I've mentioned the devs and their poor response, and I'll do it again. Look at the other reviews, they've got copy-pasted responses that are heartless, de-personalized, and empty. The game hasn't even been out for a month and they've already put most of their focus into cosmetics. The game completely lacks progression (AKA any reason to keep playing) and cosmetic unlocks are based on pure RNG where you must play at least 7-10 matches (and WIN, losing grants no currency) just to open a single box for a single cosmetic of a random rarity in a random category. Patches are frequent but pathetically lacking in any quality of life or content. Usually, they've just made tiny adjustments to movement speed or ability interactions. These updates are pointless considering the game has a hit detection system so forgiving that you can literally be hit through walls or from distances reaching up to 10+ feet away from the killer. Mind you, these are not ping-related, as all instances have occurred with players under 100ms ping.

I love this game's concept, I really do, but in this game's formative days the devs are more concerned about pushing out cosmetic content rather than actually fixing the game. I don't want a Christmas skin for a broken game. I want a working game for Christmas.

If you skip this game, you're not missing out on much, just another cash grab in the asymmetrical horror genre that already has a heaping selection of cosmetics before it has even implemented core features. The game feels like it's in alpha and the devs don't seem to care what the general community thinks now that they've already sold a ton of copies.

This game shows absolutely astounding promise. It's a very unique concept delivered in a clean, terrifying package. The first two hours of this game were the most immersed and scary two hours I've ever spent in a horror game. Sure, the initial horror gives way to some predictability once you've learned how the game functions, but there are still moments of genuine terror that rival many other horror titles.

This game doesn't get you with jump-scares aside from the rare cheeky thunderclap. No, it lets you know the monster is approaching via loud footsteps and the monster's hissing. It's the suspense that makes this game terrifying, and for an early access game only a month into its life on Steam, it's doing great.

Finally, this game is only TEN DOLLARS. For a lot of people, after playing for around two hours you'll have already gotten your money's worth. You pay ten bucks, and you'll get to be part of what could be a revolutionary game in the genre. Not only that, but when the game comes out, you'll get to have the full version. If even an hour of entertainment isn't worth ten dollars to you and you are a fully capable adult who can earn that money back within 1-3 hours of work, you may be entitled. For the kiddos out there who can't work yet, I do understand that you want bang for your buck, so it might be a good idea to wait and make sure that this game flourishes first.

I recommend getting this game about as much as I recommend drinking a glass of water. It won't kill you if you don't do it immediately, but you risk missing out on a pleasant experience.

I'm playing a game about being stuck in a quarantine while stuck in a quarantine.

10/10 would wait another 500 years for Dying Light 2