Recent reviews by Eric Wake

Once upon a time, Ubisuck popped a squat ten times a year and called it Asscreed.

Every bit as bad as they say.

Only took me an hour to come to the conclusion that Sims 4 is an EA standard joke. That's an all time record for me.

Character creation was already making me cringe. By the time I got past the insultingly limited customization options and horrendous interface, I was gazing upon the neighborhood map.

I almost vomited.

Previous sims games prided themselves on their big detailed neighborhood maps with tons of lots you can place any building on. Everything constructed and placed from the ground up if you want to. You could even ad purely visual flairs to your neighborhood like additional streets, tree coverage, radio towers, hot air balloons, beachheads and lighthouses.

Sims 4 "neighborhood" is one screen with twelve lots illustrated with basic shapes.

Literally the only option is to choose a lot.

So once my Sims are on their vacant lot I find that there are no pre built houses apparently? The interface is so gobsmackingly terrible I couldn't figure out if there are. So apparently houses are assembled from a selection of prebuilt furnished rooms now. You just cobble them together to make your house. I don't @#$%ing believe it! This is what The Sims architectural simulation has been reduced to? Smashing prefab rooms together? Oh sure, you can add outlines for walls and stuff but, by God, is this interface terrible and aggressively limited in functionality. For some reason my dining room didn't care to put an entry to my kitchen. When I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out where the front flipping @#$% they hid the doors and windows I finally quit.

Knowing that the Sims 4 and all of its numerous insanely overpriced expansions are all stripped down from previous entries I honestly don't care enough to fuss with this absolute joke of a Sims game for any longer than an hour. That's all of the time I'm giving to the clowns at EA.

I picked up Sims 3 alongside 4 through EA's subscription thing so I could try Sims 4 on a lark just to see for myself what a pathetic joke it is. As soon as I started up Sims 3 I was immediately inundated with more options and greater functionality than the Sims 2 offered. To load Sims 4 and be met with less than a tenth of what any of its predecessors offer in terms of content and functionality is just ludacris.

Stay classy EA.

The Sims themselves also look stupid af. The Sims used to have an endearing visual style to them. Now they look like something out of a creature show.

People. The Sims, Sims 2, and Sims 3 all exist. Nobody has any business giving Sims 4 the time of day.

Lazy, Inept, and Stupid

Wasteland 3 is a shallow RPG, with only a scant few skills, weapon choices, and totally bereft of options in combat. The combat is cheap and lazy. Enemies are bullet sponges who take single digit damage to HP at a time while your characters take damage to their hit pool measured in fourths and thirds when they're not getting one shotted. The party is also always vastly outnumbered in combat. This would be fine if the combat system was designed to let you get creative with strategy and tactics. But it's not. You have a cover system... That's it. No really. That is the extent of the tactical options that are built into combat. Just take the nearest position that affords the optimal amount of cover for the best hit chance, clench up and hope for the best.

There are simply no options to build your character. Automatic weapons are useless. Handguns exist. Snipers are OP. Meleers hit things. Bombs explode if you throw them. You can heal if you want. And maybe, just maybe, you can use energy weapons for no reason other than that the hurt robots a little more. Everything else is just RNG and hope for the best.

The flat threshold system for skill use would be alright if they didn't set the skill checks obscenely high. 10 hours in and you're already having to make checks at difficulties of 6-8... out of max 10!! Seriously??? Our characters have to be making HIGH LEVEL skill checks 10-15 hours into the game? That's practically straight out of the freaking prologue! At least this time skills make freaking sense, unlike in the last game where they'd have two or three redundant skills for everything.

The story is as mind-numbingly dull as the combat. The premise is lame. The bad guys are completely forgettable. Not a single character is at all interesting. The factions are all cringingly bad. When it comes time to make the Choices That Matter (TM) they're always binary and so indifferent to each other that they make no difference whatsoever. What's worse is the script's embarrassingly bad attempts at humor. Stop me if you've played any game recently set in the post apocalypse with ZOMG!! WACKY Random and ZANY LULz and loaded with pop cultural references. Except here it's downright cringy. ♥♥♥♥. There's even literal clown raiders, if the standard Mad Max post apocalypse setting hasn't already been on the nose enough about it already.

Honestly. STAY AWAY!! Spare yourself the headache and any amount of money you'd waste on Wasteland the Turd.

This is the most unique multiplayer game I never knew I needed. I never would have even considered playing this if it weren't given to me as a gift by a friend. I nominated Phasmophobia for the Better With Friends Steam Award.

Phasmaphobia is mechanically sound for an Early Access game with only a handful of developers behind it. The graphics are exceptional, considering, but the seams are apparent in places (early 00's era looking skyboxes induce feelings of nostalgia). Where the graphics really shine is in the atmosphere of the various maps. Even modern suburban homes look creepy and rendered to an authentic tee. The environments absolutely bleed atmosphere and the lighting effects are top notch.

What isn't appealing are the character graphics, however. The character models *need* to be placeholders, else they need to find someone who can actually render and animate player characters. The player character models are Second Life levels of awful and scarier looking than any ghost you'll encounter.

The controls are simple yet utilitarian and easy to get used to. The voice recognition feature is an enjoyable if simple and somewhat under utilized mechanic. Don't even think about playing without a headset. Communication is key.

The only complaint I have about the controls is that movement speed is agonizingly slow and the difference between walking and "running" is practically imperceptible. This can make just getting around some of the larger maps a major pain.

As it stands, Phasmophobia is a solid and delightfully addicting multiplayer puzzler with plenty of scares, random hijinks, challenge and fun to be had. And it has plenty of room to grow so I'll be looking forward to watching how this one progresses. I can also attest to having witnessed but one confirmed bug in all my ten and a half hours of play. I can report a bit of jank, especially in regards to the character models, but shocking little jank compared to most indie early access titles.

Giving Two Point Hospital a thumbs down is a tough choice. The game has merit and is endearingly charming.

CONS
One of its major issues is the simplistic and incomprehensible manner of its simulation. I can't imagine TPH appealing to serious sim fans because not only is the simulation shallow it also doesn't make itself clear. 70+ hours in and I still don't know exactly how the diagnosis process works. Success and failure of treatments seems to be left up to RNG based on the skill of the physician and how well diagnosis went, making it somewhat of a crap shoot. Features like room prestige and hospital attractiveness, reputation and level don't appear to be any more nuanced than how they're vaguely defined.

While in the process of developing the hospital things will be going smoothly until suddenly there are double digit room ques for no apparent reason. Or you suddenly have a spike in death rates. (s'far as I can tell, that seems to happen if you suddenly hire a bunch of unskilled doctors and nurses). Or you were making six digit profits and now all of a sudden you have a five figure deficit. Then as suddenly as it happened, despite having seemingly done nothing at all, it's fine again. Even though the assistant complains about how prices affect reputation and there's even a meter to display how much patients approve of your prices, I never noticed any discernable effect on overall reputation. Sometimes patients will just outright refuse to pay higher prices, but afaict that's entirely random.

TPH has no tools that explain why these things happen. What rudimentary graphs and charts that track stats do exist are practically useless and I only remember referring to them once. This gives the feeling of an off the rails simulation you've got little control over. Besides, these simple graphs only tell you what is happening, not why it's happening.

You'll be laying out the same rooms with the same templates, hiring the same randomly generated staff, training them, upgrading machines, researching technology over and over and over and over again. Fortunately the simulation requires no micromanaging. Staff always seem to know how to delegate tasks to stay optimal, so as long as you hire enough of them they'll cover all the bases themselves. There are controls to delegate staff and room behavior, but I never felt like I had to resort to using them.

But this means that every mission is the same. Every game plays out the same way with no variation. TPH doesn't even offer up much in the way of visual customization for rooms, deco, or the appearance of staff, so every hospital is pretty much going to look exactly alike. You'll place the same rooms, with the same walls, and the same floors, and the same components, and the same decor over and over and over again.

Fortunately a recent update finally added room templates so at least you don't have to construct every room from the ground up anymore. Some fussing with door and item placement will still be required to make things fit sometimes.

Another odd design choice. While you can place any size or room shape, you can only do so within the boundaries of each hospital building's pre-existing shape. And sometimes these templates just make getting every room to fit efficiently within them a deliberate fuss. The strange logic behind this method sees someone who isn't the player laying out the building's outer walls and then letting you fit rooms inside of them. Wonky. But you'll never make many rooms of varying size and shape anyway since each room only allows for so many mandatory components so you'll never need to construct a room any bigger than its minimum size. It would be nice to be able to have one huge pan lab with multiple machines, for instance, but the game only permits one per room. Heck, even being able to add multiple doors to rooms would be nice.

For how shallow a sim TPH is, the game's user interface is needlessly fussy. Sliders for adjusting staff salaries are a pita for getting their pay rate exactly where you'd like it to be. The only factor that seems to matter are the pay thresholds at which your staff's disposition to their pay improves, which affects their happiness. But there is no visual indication on the slider as to where that threshold is. You just gotta fiddle with it until the smiley face changes. Even then, if you want the salary set to just above what makes them happier, you gotta fuss around even more. Sure, there's a button to toggle any "unresolved" pay raises. But all that does is set all under paid staff to the middle of the road salary. Oh, and you can increase all staff salaries by 1%, but that results in overpaying everyone! Why can't there just be a button to set each individual salary to just past the next happiness threshold?

There are three menus you'll be cycling through the most. To open one you have to collapse the others, you can't just have them all expanded at once. But the icon to expand the menu then shifts a ways to the right. So to close it, you have to chase it! In fact, at no point can any window be open simultaneously with any other. There is no resizing or repositioning of menus. Little issues like this may seem trivial, but they quickly become a constant repeat annoyance.

PROS
Since the gameplay is awfully thin, most of the game's entertainment factor comes from the visuals. I absolutely adore TPH's Wallace and Gromit style graphics. The visual gags are fun but you see em once and they're already old. I got the most amusement out of the three disk jockies who cycle through doing voice overs through the game's soundtrack. They are genuinely funny and they always have something new to say so a lot of writing was done for them. They're about the only continuously fresh content this game provides because everything else is repeated incessantly. I also got the occasional chuckle out of some of the random staff descriptions too.

Speaking of the soundtrack, I haven't heard a video game soundtrack this catchy in a long time. It seriously took me back to the days of simple infectious jingles like I remember from - say, Ocarina of Time. And I found myself humming along to the familiar tunes again and again. There are only a scant few, but most of them are pretty enjoyable and at least for me I never got tired of hearing em.

Performance wise I had few hiccups. TPH isn't exactly pushing the limits of modern computing power so it'll basically run. I experienced a few oddities. After one long play session my hardware cursor started drifting. I had one nurse resign because she just froze up after exiting a room and I couldn't even pick her up. And the game can start to chug under large busy hospitals.

CONCLUSION
All in all, TPH is a very casual experience that'll be fun to mess with for a bit but will undoubtedly get boring pretty quick. The total lack of longevity is TPH's biggest flaw. There should be more and varied content to keep the game fresh and really allow players to play around and experiment. But as it stands, every play session is awfully shallow, repetitive, and by-the-books formulaic.

Quite the gimmick.

As a game, it's not very game-y. There are really only two aspects to gameplay. Stealth and "puzzle" solving. Both are paper thin, leaving the "game" to be more of a walking simulator at best.

As a psychological horror, it's not very scary. Unless you find MC Escher scary you're not likely to be creeped out by the imagery on display here. The surrealism might look unique at first glance but after a while it becomes mundane. It doesn't help that assets are reused out the wazoo so seeing the same objects copy pasted all over the apartment complex and dreamscapes gets boring after a short while.

Take the epileptic warning seriously this time. The head trip-y visuals like to do a lot of flashing and perspective shifting that frankly gets annoying after a short while.

The story is... eeeeeh. And after all the trouble the ending is... meeeh.

About the only thing Observer has going for it is that it features the image and vocal stylings of the late, great Rutger Hauer. This should honestly be a selling point on its own. It's just too bad he sounds half asleep the whole time. But you get to play as Rutger freaking Hauer so that's a plus.

Like a good carnival ride, Observer should be good enough for a once over. But the ride is shallow, gimmicky, repetitive, short, and ultimately unfulfilling.

The debut and swan song of the short lived 38 Studios.

KoA... has its issues. Though it is built on solid enough foundations, much of its execution is dodgy.

If you're familiar with any of the Elder Scrolls, Gothic, Risen, Two Worlds, etc. template of open world ar-pee-gee then KoA isn't going to surprise you. The only thing KoA really has going for it over its cousins is its over-the-top action combat. It's actually pretty sick the scale and special effects and animations of the combat moves you can pull off - and they only get more absurdly awesome as you level up.

The rest of the combat has problems, however. Enemy movement and attack tracks you 1:1. Because of this, the game treats dodging as little more than a vague suggestion. Dodging isn't about moving sufficient distance out of the way of an attack because the hit will track you regardless. It is more about the timing of the dodge, and even then the game is often like "LuLz naw that didn't happen."

Enemies get to doge with impunity, however, since they always move such that they're conveniently out of your range of attack. This makes the ranged weapon types and magic a dominant strategy, the cackrum especially. Even then they can spam attacks and every hit stun locks you. This can result in groups of enemies locking you into an endless attack combo gang rape that you have no hope of getting out of. For enemy attacks with follow up hits, you WILL take the subsequent hits. You, however, get to rely on the RNG gods to stun and interrupt enemies.

This all wouldn't be so bad if you could treat combat like a sort of chess match, where taking turns defending and picking the right attack for the appropriate target made combat into a tactical affair. Alas, the game uses "soft" auto targeting for attacks that is waaay too hard for the finesse that combat requires. It's sometimes so bad that spells that should place enemies well within their area of effect sail right past em.

The combat isn't utterly broken, though. It's just constantly aggravating. It can be satisfying but it can also get plenty of repetitive.

The rest of the game is pretty standard fare. Run around, complete quests, get rewards, sell junk. We've played this game before.

Enemy level is set to whatever region you're in. They don't level with the player at all. This might be considered a solid for people who criticize Elder Scroll's strict system of matching the player's level, but here it means that regions are gated by stronger enemies and areas you've been to are populated exclusively by enemies you can sneeze at and obliterate and receive no expee or relevant loot from.

The game does boast a ... "unique" presentation. Graphically its artistic style is somewhat refreshing from the norm. It's this colorful edgy fairy tale aesthetic that's a nice change from the usual gritty grimdark fantasy we're used to seeing. However, dungeon layouts are arranged like they were generated from building blocks by a logic processor with no end of reused assets. Even Skyrim's caves are more diverse than KoA's dungeons. And the overworld is this square grid of regions connected by narrow passages. It's not an organic looking world. To use my early analogy, it looks like something a logic processor assembled. Visually, however, the different areas all have their own unique aesthetic with some nifty visual touches here and there.

The story is pretty unique. It's an original enough concept penned by regarded fantasy authors including R. A. Salvatore and comes complete with its own extensive original world building. The concept and premise for Amalur is something I can get interested in. Your mileage may vary.

But there isn't much to do beyond combat and yucking it up with amalur's yokels. The dialog is awfully pedestrian and the characters largely forgetable.

Stealth is an absolute joke and it seems as though the designers only took stealth into account for select instances in certain quests. Even so you can just run all in sword point first anyway making stealth not so much a dominant strategy as a pointless waste of time. The problem is that enemies are programmed to either randomly wander or sit around waiting for you in such a way that they can always see you coming and there's never anything to hide behind.

By the end Amalur is left with some noteworthy if problematic combat and an original enough story and world to be compelling. It can't compare to the scale and sophistication of games like Skyrim, but it has enough of its own uniqueness and problems to offer.

You could either be intrigued and entertained - if slightly frustrated by combat woes - or painfully bored out of your skull playing Amalur.

For that, I wish I could give Amalur a simple middle of the road rating, but since Steam likes to keep things simple I'll give it a recommendation just for not being completely blinkered.

Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.

Elite Dangerous swings wildly between the two extremes of painfully dull, tedious, and monotonous and *bang* you're dead.

This isn't a hard game. It's a cheap game. It's easy enough to avoid situations that mean insta kills, but if you can avoid doing those activities then you can avoid some 60% of the things you can do in this game. Not that anything you can do in this game is especially fun, challenging, or interesting anyway. All the activities on offer are essentially the same thing, done over and over again, with slightly varying degrees of headache inducing tedium.

Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.

The insta kills wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the only motivation for suffering through this nerve-wrackingly tedious slog: GRIND, ALL GRIND and NOTHING BUT GRIND.. You do the same thing over and over again so you can afford bigger and better ships so you can do the same thing over and over again.

Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.

Then, when the game decides that you're ready to re-purchase your ship by snapping its fingers and insta-screwing you, you do so to the tune of at least half a dozen runs of the activities you've been doing over and over again. Millions of imaginary numbers you just spent hours pointlessly farming for no reason the same way over and over again, up in smoke. POOF. Gone.

Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.

Everything about this game is brain dead simple and nerve wrackingly repetitious. The vast majority of it is just going from point A to point B, slowly, through empty space, over and over again and again and then doing the same vacuosly simple thing you've done a million times again. The interface is repetitious. You'll be looking at the same screens with the same layouts and the same readings all in the same fonts and colors over and over and over again. You'll be looking at the same tiny cockpit interiors over and over, all the time, with no real variation between them. The entire gameplay loop is purely monotonous. The cockpit voice says the same things over and over again, the same way every single time and you can't shut it up. One of the first things this insipid pile of a "game" does it rub that in your face.

The music is repetitious. I hope you're not a fan of classical music, their schmaltzy little homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey, You'll be hearing Blue Danube until you're physically ill from it. I thought at first it would only play on entering the first star port. But no. That @#$%ing song plays over and over and over again, every time you dock.

Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.

A particular nuisance is frame shift drive evasion. It's an insipid game of watch the birdie that you'll be doing again and again; sometimes over and over several times in succession. It's not challenging, it's just a waste of time. The only way to lose an interdiction is on purpose.

Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.

Ultimately, hundreds if not thousands of hours later you've amassed hundreds of billions of credits for no reason and have run out of ships to buy and you're left with the top tier ships so you can continue doing the same thing over and over again. The rest of the galaxy you have yet to visit is all the same thing you've seen, again and again, the whole time.

Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.

Otherwise, there isn't much to see and certainly not much to do. Space is pretty big and empty. The game reuses assets over and over again so you're always looking at the same planets and the same star ports with slightly different coats of paint.

Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.

As a space sim it's awfully pedestrian. Piloting is easy and you've got auto-pilots to do the space simming for you if you think the game isn't already vapid enough.

So what else does Elite Dangerous have to offer? Nothing. It's a pointless, painfully repetitious time sink. A black hole that sucks hours of your life away that you're never getting back. The audio is well designed, but if you want to listen to spaceship sounds over and over again you can do it on iTunes if it please you. The start screen is pretty awesome the way the Elite logo appears from the blackness of space accompanied by the sweet Hans Zimmer music sting. That's probably the only thing I never got tired of.

That's' literally it. 112 hours of my life GONE to the dumbest video game I've ever seen in my life. I can uninstall this ridiculous excuse for an entertainment product, but I will never get those hours back.

Just do the same tedious mind numbing thing, over and over again, for nothing, if you're stupid.

Don't expect anything else.

Absolute garbage shooter

Yeah. I only just got around to playing HL2. Which some consider to be the mother of all video games.

WTH?

HL2 would have been dated back in its day. This thing has everything I hate about shooters.

CONS
Getting stuck on geometry, walls, corners, clutter.
Narrow corridors too small to maneuver in.
Hitscan enemies.
Unavoidable damage from enemies behind blind corners.
Wonky physics. Getting bounced around sporadically for no reason.
Terrible controls in vehicle sections.

Really uninvuitive level design.
It's never clear where you have to go next.
Every level is a maze with nonsensical layout and lots of dead ends for no reason.
Doors that don't open that look exactly like ones that can.
Crouch control that doesn't toggle.
Having to use a flashlight for no reason.

Every time you hit the interact button on anything that can't be interacted with the game plays a windows error sound.

The game is also slow. Forward progress is glacial. This isn't an action packed run and gun shooter. it's a slow, plodding, methodical room by room shooter. Damage accumulates too rapidly and armor is a redundant feature, necessitating a careful approach to everything instead of aggressive play. But yet there is no way to lean around cover and levels rarely provide any adequate cover at all. A recurring tactic is to hide in a corner and let enemies group up and come to you. The game also likes to take frequent breaks from the shooting to make you solve inane physics puzzles.

The story is lame and so are the characters.

The gravity gun is a novel concept but not enough is done with it. Its novelty wears off fast.

Level variety is diverse. Each level has its own unique gimmick, but it isn't enough to save the game from its glacial stop-and-go pace.

It's easy. Even though enemies are brutal and damage is frequently cheap, ammo and health restoratives are plentiful. Death never comes over the long haul or through mismanagement of resources/improper play but rather through untimely instant super damage situations that are impossible to foresee.

PROS:
Atmosphere. Ambiance is the most common feature of almost all of my all time favorite video games and HL2 puts on rich atmosphere in all of its environs. I really dig the eastern european urban aesthetic.

As stated, level variety is diverse with some unique gameplay concepts for each level, often blending a nice synergy of action combat and logic puzzle.

Nice weapon selection overall. The low powered pistol is suitably rapid fire for excellent dps. The SMG isn't a pea shooter. High damage six shooter ftw. Crossbow. All well balanced and situationally appropriate. As far as video game shotguns go, HL2 could do worse.

CONCLUSION: Overall, I don't see much redeeming factor for HL2. After hearing all the hype for it all these years, I'm stunned that it's this mediocre.

Get it in a DEEP DEEP sale. Like 70%-80% off.

The Forest has the beginnings of a great open world survival/horror game. Unfortunately its finished state is far short of a full product.

The Forest is legit creepy, especially when spelunking through caves. The cannibals are really well designed with their erratic behavior and lots of personality, but there is only so much enemy variety you get used to them after a while.

As a survival game The Forest is lacking. You can immediately craft every upgrade from the start because there are so few materials to gather and animals are so plentiful. Crafting shelter and base camps is always a simple matter because materials are so plentiful. Anyone who's interested in building elaborate structures is going to be disappointed because the variety of structural components to build is extremely limited. Food, water, medicine, and everything is always on hand so you'll never have to worry about starving.

Whatever challenge the game has is in combat. Cannibal variety is limited but all the different enemy types behave pretty distinctly. However, against the more powerful cannibals or when attacked in large numbers death can come pretty quick in solo play and can feel pretty cheap at times. When exploring the surface of the island, cannibals are either so far away that they can be avoided easily or they're somehow spawning in right behind you in such a way that you never could have seen them coming.

Exploration is a thing that happens in The Forest and there is a lot of ground to cover on the island even though it really seems small in comparison to other open world titles. Movement is super fast and there's no real serious limit on running. There are a few goodies to discover in caves throughout the island, unique weapons and story mostly. Aesthetically there just isn't anything interesting to discover on the island. No ruins or derelict wrecks or anything fanciful like that. Just a few barren villages with the same copy pasted huts and the same loot scattered about and similar looking caves. The terrain features fields, woods, waterways, beaches, a snowy region and a big sinkhole and everything looks pretty much about how you're imagining it does right now.

Optimization seems pretty poor as well. Graphically The Forest is simply decent but it has some weird things going on with shadows and color. There's even a whole swath of color filters to select from in options for some reason. The graphics in The Forest seem to be there simply to exist. They don't really do much of anything with graphical effects, post processing, fog, or anything to really add ambiance or neat graphical tricks. You'll get your standard bloom effect or lens flair and that's about it. Water looks fugly as ur mum, especially the ocean. Foliage is simply fine I guess. The skybox is pretty ugly, especially the stars at night.

The game also lags horribly and I haven't been able to find a setting that gets rid of the stutter. It's really annoying especially when running around trying to cover ground quickly.

In short, what The Forest offers is basically decent but it doesn't offer much. It's not a broken or especially ugly game (although it could certainly look better). What is has works but it just doesn't provide much content or challenge.