Recente recensies door {SF} kenny

DISCLOSURE: I was given a copy of this game for free by a friend. I was originally planning to buy it myself however.

The Forever Winter is a game with amazing potential. The art style is jaw dropping, the music is fantastic, the core gameplay is amazing and tense when it works, and I dearly hope it comes together. But this review is about the state of the game right now, as of 9/27/2024.

I'll actually start off with some good news. This is not a typical 9th gen release where you have to wait forever for the shader cache to build. It only took a good 20-30 seconds to build the cache on my initial load of the game, and loading into new maps was only taking about 10 seconds on my configuration (RTX 3070, tweaking reflections and draw distance down to High from Ultra among some other preemptive fixes to ensure a 60fps framerate or as close to one as possible). So, much unlike Tarkov, you spend this game actually in the game and not in inventory management hell, or 10 minute raid time queues. You get in game quickly and you can play it and try things.

However, I'd like to relay to you some of the bugs that me and my buddy have encountered this far.

#1. PSA: If you want to join a session with your buddy, DO NOT load into the barrows. You have to be on the MAIN MENU to accept an invite. This is very silly. It took us 10 min of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about to figure this out.

#2. Do not fight under any circumstances if you can possibly avoid doing so. The game is set up to punish players for running and gunning, but sometimes this results in us killing 1 or 2 isolated soldiers only for the game to LITERALLY SPAWN A SQUAD ON TOP/ BEHIND US. This is some Cyberpunk 2077 launch cops levels of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. I mean, you CAN do that, just give us some time to relocate, have them airdrop in from a plane we can hear. Just give me FEEDBACK, man.

3. There is precious little feedback on when you can and can't be seen by the enemy, so you really just have to guess and play with things. For some people this is a selling point. For me it's a bit on the jank side because I need some more communicative barks from the enemy to understand their intentions. At present the radio chatter is exceedingly difficult to parse noise. Maybe have the ability to grab radios off dead enemies to monitor comms?

4. The control is not even passable at this time. You have to turn to a direction to sprint, you cannot break into a sprint sideways at all. When you are trying to move fast to get away from the enemy, you are GOING to hit some of the map's lovingly detailed rocks, gravestones, heads on pikes etc. which will bring your momentum to a COMPLETE stop and result in the enemy squad tearing you to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ribbons with a volley of fire. And when I tried climbing on a surface while crouched, the game bugged out my climbing to the point where I had to force quit because you cannot get around Elephant Mausoleum without using climbing.

So the long and the short of it is that if you like the vibes, buy it to support the team. If you have the stomach for what feels like pre-Alpha gameplay, help the team out by posting about issues you encounter respectfully. If you are expecting a complete or polished game, give this a couple years. I really love the idea of this game, and I want Fun Dog to do well. But man, these controls are nearly as janky as my current Unreal project controls where I switch between standing, crouching, and prone and start randomly clipping through the floor and my cover system pulls me inside of walls. Let the devs cook.

One of the best games you've never played. The story is fascinating, rich and complex, with a compelling protagonist lost in a sea of data unsure of who she was, or who she should be. The world is ruled by memories and their gatekeepers, positive feelings the memories can conjure contribute to memories becoming another form of drug to take the pain away. The world around you is sullen, rotten, filled with advertisements assaulting your senses from thin air, through your AR augmentations.

This game is a wonderful, awful experience that isn't to be missed. If you're reviewing the actual game part of the game, it will be average. The combat Arkham standard issue, with the extensive move customizer being little more than assigning new effects to the same animations.

But tell me you don't feel a sense of raw power, and of horror, at playing god with the minds around you. Grabbing the face of a guard who thinks you're a terrorist, and overloading his memories with junk data, sending him flying backwards at the shock of it all with a disgusting POP. It's the most satisfying, most terrifying sound.

The soundtrack is just as glitched out and confusing as the experience of the story, the aesthetic primarily brought about because the composer is just as lost as the player is in trying to understand the plot of this game, and it bleeds through into the music. Dear GOD, the music is worth the price of admission alone. Buy it on iTunes.

The art book is delicious cyberpunk imagry. Every frame of this game is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ gorgeous, a feast for the eyes, and at the same time, a warning. Warning what's around the corner of social media, when the soul is on the market for the public to dissect and reassemble. And you, as Nilin, get to play with that data and change the core of people you meet when it serves your ends. The game forces you to take a long, long look at the morality of that, and then snaps you back to be chased by a gunship spitting quotes from Little Red Riding Hood.

I bought this full price on PS3 when it came out and nobody cared to buy it. But everyone needs to play this game. It's a head trip. It's a nightmare. It's an experience worth having, and to explain it in too much detail does the game a disservice. Go buy this, play it, then absorb and think about what you just played. Then feel sad that all anyone will remember DontNod for is the tumblr video game.

(Product purchased at a discount during last sale)

An honestly well-written and designed game marred by difficulties with performance on PC. If you can find a configuration with performance you can live with, this is a game you can really lose yourself in. The Jedi series is one of the only Souls-likes I've ever been able to stand because you can get around the limits of the design by abusing the Force. However, there's plenty of mechanical depth to match the atmosphere.

The stance mechanics are most welcome, as you can have a wide variety of options with your lightsaber compared to the previous game. Sadly, you can only equip two at a time at meditation points instead of being able to shift between any form at will, which hurts the game's flow a bit. It's frustrating to die a bunch and have to go swapping stuff in menus instead of being able to adapt completely to new situations on the fly.

That said, the addition of Blaster stance is probably one of the best things to happen to a Jedi combat game ever, as having that ranged option is a critical edge in some of the game's toughest scenarios. I also happened to enjoy Crossguard, as being able to use a Kylo Ren-like lightsaber in a game for the first time is a trip. I disliked how "heavy" the attacks feel and how slow they come out in Crossguard stance, but it's a good differentiation from the other styles and gives it a unique niche in the game's combat.

The traversal mechanics have also been thoughtfully expanded upon, and Cal has never felt so nimble to control. All of the previous game's traversal is here, but the wall-run length feels like it doubled, and more mobility tools make traversal a bit more forgiving and more fun as well. Puzzles can get surprisingly deep with how Cal's powers and abilities can be used- more than once I had to google around for a solution and feel gobsmacked when "Yes, this is a thing you can do with these mechanics and this really should have been something I thought to do" was the answer more often than not. I do wish the grappling hook could be used in combat as a pull tool when force meter is down, but perhaps that could be implemented in a future title.

All in all, if you liked Fallen Order, you'll probably really enjoy Survivor. Everything has been taken up a level, except for the stupid performance problems. You might have a better time if you have more onboard VRAM, since the new generation of console ports seem to have that as their chief edge on PC. I run an RTX 3070 with 32GB of RAM, and I was having difficulties keeping the framerate up, particularly on the open areas of Koboh. The framerate would tank hard enough that I needed to disable raytracing and cut most of my settings down to high to restore anything close to a playable framerate.

Granted, for a Soulslike, I personally consider 60fps to be the minimum end of playable, but I was regularly having to put up with 30-45 for a balance between image quality and performance, and Koboh could dip into the 20s in some areas. The final boss fight of the game also regularly dipped in frames to the point where I had to reduce my display resolution from 1920x1080 to 1280x720 to get a 60fps encounter, which made the fight significantly more playable than it had been up to that point.

This port, and many other difficult ports released this year, has me worried about PC scalability. Anyone that got "RTX capable" cards should be able to max out current gen releases, or at least think about getting the benefits of ray-tracing lighting that were promised. However, PS5/Series X have signifigantly more VRAM than many of the $500 range graphics cards, and not much effort seems to be put in regarding addressing the VRAM bottleneck on PC configurations vs console. I urge you to look into Digital Foundry's videos on the subject, as this is likely going to affect a lot of PC ports from the current generation going forward.

Do I recommend: Yes, but only if you have the horsepower and can stomach performance problems. Otherwise, continue to wait for some patches to see if the game's performance issues can be further addressed. However, some problems are likely unavoidable due to the aforementioned VRAM issue.

Assassin's Creed is a deeply flawed but interesting game, and was ultimately vindicated by history as it turned into a wildly successful franchise. Playing it now, however, can be brutally frustrating of an experience. Controller support is exceptionally wonky on PC and you'll have to go looking for third-party fixes. However, the art design holds up, the storyline is...alright, and the game is also refreshingly focused on your nine targets, with little in the way of side frills to distract like later entries.

I also advocate for playing this on a Steam Deck *above* playing on PC, because community layouts immediately fix the long-standing control problems, and performance runs quite nicely in Proton without any hangups during my brief testing. The Deck experience arguably improves the game in this respect.

Persona 4 is one of my all-time favorite RPGs. It has an excellent story with a mostly well-written cast, solid mechanical depth, and plenty of interplay between the time management simulation and the dungeon crawling. However, this particular version has changes from the PS2 original that I logged hundreds of hours in. There's an entirely new section of story gated off behind link progress on new characters, and your enjoyment of the game's final hours will largely hinge on how you like Marie and Adachi's links if you are a returning player, as well as the voice cast changes to Teddie and Chie. I personally greatly preferred the original Chie VA, so the new voice takes a lot of getting used to. Teddie's change is barely noticeable, however.

I haven't personally played the endgame content, but I'm currently working on a new play-through and will be getting to those bits of the game soon. I'll update this review with further thoughts on that as soon as possible. But overall, if you want to get sold on RPGs as a genre, Persona 4 makes a persuasive argument for the genre as a whole.

Added note: I've been primarily playing on Steam Deck, and my experience has been overall quite stable, save for my Deck's personal quirk of randomly shutting off sometimes. Some art gets a bit jaggy looking in the distance at the deck's native resolution, like social link notification "!" boxes. But overall the game looks nice and plays perfectly fine on the Deck.

One of the best mods I've played in ages. Feels like a good original flavor fanfic in the best way possible, with nods to basically every conceivable part of the collective Half-Life lore over the years. Just be sure to play Entropy Zero first or you'll have no idea what is happening. Hats off to the modders, one of the best original stories to come out of a mod in the history of ever, with polished gameplay to match.

Very slow beginning hours, a chunk of the story is gated off in a 2 hour movie you have to buy, and it doesn't help that the game continues to be plagued by CTDs after playing for an hour. I eventually just bought the PS4 Royal edition out of frustration just so I didn't have to deal with the bugs.

A bloody masterpiece. Pitch perfect atmosphere, smart writing, and flexible game mechanics. The Director's Cut also adds developer commentary that is ceaselessly interesting and entertaining, as well as reworked boss fights that fix the few remaining flaws in Human Revolution's crown jewel. A journey absolutely worth taking even if you have no prior experience with a Deus Ex game.

Don't try to rambo through this, you'll die. A lot.

RIP Payday 2. After a long history of endless DLC you add a half-baked microtransaction economy and ♥♥♥♥ over game balance once again. A fantastic case study of what NOT to do when supporting a game long-term.

Stunning looking, addictive as all getout, and comes with the full soundtrack to the Orange Box. Not bad for ten bucks!