Recent reviews by elaxter

Great zombie simulator with a thriving modding community. Highly customizable experience. You can change how the zombies act, how much loot is present, how long it takes to grind skills, and more.

Great action, but even greater music!

Short game with a neat premise. Pilot a submarine blind by using x, y coordinates a map showing where you gotta go. A few neat ideas and worldbuilding too!

Despite technical issues that are present at the time of review, Elden Ring is well worth the trouble.

Good action, charming artstyle, and a perfect controls! A great throwback FPS! Highly recommend.

A fantastic fighting game, overshadowed by the fact that no one plays. I would avoid purchase unless you enjoy playing locally or against the CPU.

This game is secretly terrible. At first glance, the excellent presentation and expansive world give an air of competence. However, should you venture deep and actually expect something out of Bethesda's Skyrim, there are few things left to be desired.


I can give credit where credit is due. The world of Skyrim, unlike previous installments in the series, is extremely detailed. Taking a walk through the lush forests and vast plains is a breathtaking experience, especially if you overcharge the graphics with an ENB and a host of graphical mods. Where Fallout 3 failed in its world design, Skyrim makes up for. You can see where local village, towns, and cities get their food, among other things, that effectively make the world feel more alive - which Bethesda has failed a multitude of times. There is evidence of people doing things in the world, even if it is implied, which makes the province of Skyrim feel like a real place full of real people, instead of a bunch of amusement parks strung together loosely by a weak story. There are a number of quests that are actually quite enjoyable, and some of the more "hidden" quests are by far the most immersive. I believe one thing that should have been accomplished in Skyrim is introducing more mundane tasks, like being a postman, or a guard, or even a caravan driver. Something to break up this "you're always the hero" vibe that populates this game.


One thing that Bethesda can not, and probably never will, grasp is difficulty. That "D" word that plagues many discussions about many different games, but here it applies doubly so. Skyrim is dirt easy. A child could fire up Skyrim on their console - or PC should they be enlightened - and play through the main game, smash through side-quests, and build a ridiculously overpower character with minimum effort. Not saying that the game being easy to learn is a bad thing - Chess is a great example - but there is no reward for being good at Skyrim. There is no being good at Skyrim in fact. All strategies are equally viable, and all outcomes are the same: you end up with a stupid powerful character in no time at all, and you're still mashing the swing button a multitude of times (or holding it, in the case of magic) to beat down your foes. There's no enemy variety, no tactics, no combos, no learning, no a-lot-of-things. Look at Dark Souls for an example of an excellent way to implement difficulty in a way that isn't necessarily cheap, a system that rewards smart decisions and punishes mistakes in a way that makes sure to not drive away the player too much. With this in mind, Bethesda completely fails to make their game a challenge in combat, so they must have made some pretty interesting dialogues to make up for it, right?

Remember how I said that Skyrim succeeds in making a beautiful and alive world. Well, I lied to you. Only half so. What I said about it being the world that was alive is true, but there's another part of the world that I neglected to mention: NPCs. NPCs are extremely easy to screw up. They can feel stiff, lifeless, and boring, and it's especially hard to give them all voiced lines without accentuating the first two, and making the third unbearable. (Un)luckily for Skyrim, NPCs fulfill all three! Some NPCs, namely those that are actually important, are voice really well and are exempt from my criticisms. However, it's the common people who really shine in making the world feel as lifeless as possible. First and foremost, there are a lot of actors being reused, which produces comical results. Second lines are repeated infinitely. We remember the memes. Third, and possibly the most important, there are almost no new lines of dialogue to discover. There is no, absolutely NO meaningful dialogue gained from doing stuff in the world. Some things might change: like guards telling you that you smell like dog if you were made into a werewolf, but for the most part dialogue is static. No new stories are told, no new songs are sung, no new quest lines appear - everything is set in stone from the moment you load it up. It would be nice if walking into town with my Dragon armor and my Sword of Killing Big Things attracted a crowd - I know the NPCs do that when a dragon is killed nearby (which they don't comment on other than "good riddance"). Little things like that that can make the world not only look alive, but feel alive too. Nothing tickles me more than someone telling me, through my own actions, that they've "heard about me." Even if such a scene was scripted, and every character is "heard about" equally, it would still be more than "did you hear about the Dragonborn, Thane Dragonborn? I wonder if he can actually shout even though I saw him do it just a moment ago!?" You'd think that stories would get around about what the Dragonborn looks like, and people would react when you join a faction in the civil war.

There's a lot of smaller problems, like dungeons feeling like dungeons more than real places, and a host of bugs and glitches that remain unfixed even in the re-released "Special Edition," and the inability to actually converse with NPCs in a meaningful way other than "I am done!" and "More money please!" and the classic "Tell me boring story!" Not to mention the terrible main story and conclusion. If you want more well structured critique of Skyrim's awfulness, watch MisterCaption's series on the topic.


Should you buy Skyrim? Despite my thumbs down, I will have to say this: If you haven't played Skyrim and you want to know what the hubub was all about those many years ago, buy this game when it eventually goes on sale. This review is more for those who have purchased Skyrim, and are looking for some closure after so many long years of praise.

The problem with Skyrim is that it's not a bad game. It's truly not. It's not poorly put together, the music's fine, the graphics are beautiful, there sound effects are decent enough, and there's a lot of stuff to do. The problems arise when thought is directed towards Skyrim in any way. Dumb design choices, a shoddy PC port, bugs and glitches, lifeless NPCs, the whole spiel. You're not supposed to think about Skyrim. You shouldn't question the world, the lore inconsistancies, the NPCs, the dragons, the Grey Beards, or anything. You're supposed to play. And that's it. Nothing more. And THAT'S why Skyrim is secretly a bad game.

What makes Mount&Blade: Warband so good is its many sandbox elemnts. You have control over how the game plays out, and that determines how hard the experience is. If you want to be a bandit, you can! If you want to be a master trader, you can! If you want to lead a certain faction to glory, you can!

Mount&Blade: Warband is definately the best medieval sandbox game that we have. It's rough around the edges, but when you get into the game those flaws are easily ignored.

Unturned is an underated free-to-play survival game that has been compared to games such as DayZ and Minecraft. While these comparisons are correct on a superficial level, the underlying mechanics of Unturned set itself apart from these two titles.

Unturned features elements that are similar to DayZ, such as.

• Food and water requirements
  
• Sickness and illness
  
• Many types of weaponry, featuring a number of different attachments
  
• Vehicles
  
• Scavanging
  
• Base Building (however Unturned has way more in terms of building a base)
  
• Simulated ballistics (bullet drop, travel, etc.)
  
• Emphasis on PvP

Where Unturned shines is its base building aspects. It's extremely easy to construct a base in Unturned, and there is a wide variety of different objects to place. From basic traps to industrial generators powering oil pumps and sentry guns, you can really build a fortress in this game.

The gunplay is solid, and on a strong server it works great. Unturned borrows a little bit from Counter-Strike with its use of spray patterns. They ussually follow in a straight line in a given direction, but the fact that they exist is interesting to say the least. Scopes in game feature a more realistic depiction, with the scope being pulled up with the rest of the 3D model, instead of the fullscreen style seen in most shooters.

The visuals are very simplistic. Textures only exist on plants and clothes, with most buildings being solid colored. However there is a good amount of detail, especially when a player is completely outfitted with a backpack, military gear, and a weapon. While the graphics aren't stellar, they get the job done and are charming in their own way.

The basic gameplay is rewarding as there is a lot of different type of loot to find. PvE can become boring, with zombies ending up as minor annoyances when you get access to good melee weapons, and the survival aspects not being an issue if you can build a base and generate your own food and water. PvP, on the other hand, has the potential to always be an adventure. Due to the size of the maps, and the placement of most of the popular loot spots, players can come from anywhere and kill you without you even knowing that they were there.

You will not like this game if you are not a fan of the niche PvP survival market, such as DayZ. While you can find PvE servers, and RP servers, the PvP servers dominate the server browser. The graphics may look simple, but the gunplay is loud, disorienting, and fast. I do not recommend this game if you are not already a fan of DayZ, or other similar games.


Unturned just had an update adding in the long awaited Russia map. It's 4 times bigger than the previous largest map, and features some pretty cool areas.

The most important feature that the map offers is the brand new deadzones. Zone on the map that will quickly drain your "sickness" meter unless you wear appropriate gear. The new gasmask is one of the pieces of gear that you need.

Two major Russian cities are shown: St. Petersburg and Moscow. St. Petersburg's main attraction is the subway system, while Moscow has pretty landmarks.

The guns that were featured in the previous two updates were officially added to the map's areas, meaning that you can get your hands on a minigun without having to hunt down airdrops.

It's very remenicent of the STALKER games in that you start in the southern portion of the map, and the good loot is far in the north, That's a very good thing, and is the best map Nelson has made. Hopefully the next map is 4 times larger than Russia!

Overall this map makes the game more enjoyable just because it is so expansive. Good job Nelson, and keep it up!

Simple. Good atmpsohere actually. Neat concept. I recommend trying it because it's so short.