Recent reviews by prabab

It's fun.

Sure, it's rough around the edges and some mechanics can snowball out of control, but, nevertheless, it's fundamentally a pretty great game.

I'm amazed they pulled this off. It's great. I wouldn't mind if they fixed the ancient pathfinding, though!

I really wanted to like this game and I admire what the creators wanted to achieve here, but it falls flat in almost every aspect.
VR doesn't add anything to the game and is actually rather janky, with camera clipping through walls all the time.
The combat is boring and predictable when you're facing one enemy, completely broken in group fights.
The graphics look beautiful, but the environments are extremely same-y and boring, so it gets old fast.
The puzzles are just tedious. And what's worse some of them depend on lighting and shadows which makes them impossible to solve unless you're running the game on the highest settings.
Optimization is another thing that I'd have to complain about. There's nothing in here that would justify the immense system requirements.
Important thing to note is that there are whole areas in the game which make your controller vibrate constantly. If you're using a wireless controller, better have some replacement batteries at hand.
Watch it on YouTube. It's a good story, but a bad game.

Wait, someone is actually praising this demo for graphics? The character models are absolutely atrocious and animations are painful to look at. The lighting is overbaked, the materials are flat, it's all unpleasant, ugly and inconsistent. I can't believe this demo is running on UE4, as you certainly need a special kind of talent to make UE look THIS bad.

It's great. Sometimes feels like it's too much, even. While combat needs some using to and tends to feel floaty and unresponsive at first, when you catch up with its rules it's as fun as it can be. The game is very challenging. Beautiful graphics, interesting story, amazing atmosphere.

While personally I've enjoyed the game, I can't recommend it with clear conscience.

It feels as if there are two games in one with this one. The main story is really great. The "open world" stuff, is mediocre, or even bad. Which is extremely unfortunate, because there's a lot of beautifully made content out there to explore, but what of it if it's barely any fun to actually play it.

If you love postapocalyptic atmosphere, get this game, but only play it for the main the story. The rest is just a weird half-baked curiosity that oftentimes turns into a chore.

I like this game and admire its success. I'd cautiously recommend everyone to check it out. But there's a HUGE "however". The puzzles are extremely uneven, and often punishing without being challenging. This isn't Portal 2. The game isn't half as accessible and smooth as Valve's title to which it's often compared.

Apart for a few standouds, most of the puzzles fall into one of these categories:

1. Good: Puzzles which are clean cut, make you go "a-ha" and don't stand in your way to achieve the solution. High points of the game, both stimulating and satisfying.

2. Meh: Puzzles which are a variation of previously tackled problems. In those, you're fighting with the level layout more often than looking for the solution. But it's still fun.

3. Bad: Puzzles which rely on you perfectly comprehending the game's internal logic. The game never explains its rules to the player, and in many cases these rules don't subscribe to common sense or rules of physics. Why do boxes perfectly stick to violently moving spheres?

4. Bad: Puzzles which are punishing for no reason at all, requiring of player to do the same thing 10 times in a row, sometimes with a perfect timing (the "recording device" will make you angry at some point, guaranteed).

If I were to judge it just by puzzles, I'd say that you're going to have fun 50% of your time with the game. But for the rest of your time you won't be solving puzzles - you will be solving developer's weird decisions.

To be frank, it shows that The Talos Principle was tested by tireless bots who were well-acquainted with the game's logic beforehand.

Seeing that this is a common criticism, yes, the philosophy in the game might be a bit blunt at times, but it serves its purpose, boldly exploring ideas which might not be common knowledge.

Overall: play this game, you're probably going to enjoy it when it's good. It will make you feel smart, it will make you feel dumb. But please keep in mind that it's an indie title with wonky-to-bad game design at every corner.

There's a great game in there. A REALLY great one. But honestly I can't recommend it, unless you're willing to face a lot of technical issues and bad design decisions.
Problems with crashing and freezing are constant, even months after the initial release, and seemingly they're independent of your hardware configuration. Posts on this subject are regurarly appearing on Bethesda's forum, but they're quickly silenced by generic responses about "fixes" in which half of the links allegedly leading to solutions... are simply not working. Great job.
Secondly, the game has a very uneven difficulty. One minute you're going through enemies like a knife goes through butter, next minute you're dying 30 times in a row for no good reason. And the worst part is, the hardest sections aren't even interesting, they're just hard for sake of being hard. They're not satisfying, there's no gimmick to them, just endless hordes of boring enemies. Obviously, this becomes old very fast. Also, there's absolutely no feedback telling you when you're receiving damage or what direction is it coming from.
On the plus side, the story is simply great. So are the controls. Gunplay makes you feel powerful (although dual wielding is exactly as half baked as in the previous game in the series). Graphics are otherworldy beautiful.
There's a really great game in there, but it's broken.

The gameplay is chaotic, repetitive, unnecesarily complicated, with seemingly no room for a player to improve. There's something very wrong right at the core of this game and no amount of polish will hide the fact that Gigantic simply isn't very fun to play.