Recent reviews by BlackLight78

Forza Horizon 4 (FH4) is an open-world arcade racing game. Initially you are given a few cars and must complete a number of events to progress to the next season. Completing the latter grants you credits to buy more cars and opens up new events, such as street races, off-road trails, online team events, speed traps, jump stunts and even a battle-royal mode with The Governator as a rare announcer. Players may unlock more than 700 cars and may also tune and paint each of them. So you may apply your favorite "Hello Kitty" or "SpongeBob" design on your Hypercar or Truck. FH4 offers so much content in fact that after spending nearly 150 hours, I still have not yet seen everything.

FH4 was ported by Sumo Digital to Steam and the launch was not without problems: After launch I ran sometimes into connectivity issues/long loading times in multi-player and experienced a few crashes. Today, the game runs very smooth for me as patches seem to have solved these issues. I highly recommend FH4 to everyone who enjoys racing games.

Orcs Must Die 3! (OMD3) is a third person tower defense-shooter hybrid game where you play as a real-life Google employee ... err ... fictional hero to prevent hordes of orcs from reaching your rift by using traps and weapons.

OMD3 starts a bit slowly, but you soon unlock the infamous orc-slowing tar trap and nasty orc-deviating barricades. Now, you may funnel the greenskins into neatly organised kill boxes. This will be the perfect time to lean back in your comfy chair and feast upon delicious snacks while watching how the orcs are shredded in your devious trap set-up. Yes, it's as satisfying as it sounds! OMD3 builds on OMD2 and adds new traps, brings more weapons and introduces bigger war scenarios. Once you complete the campaign you unlock the entertaining main protagonists of the franchise (Max, Gaby and Cygnus) as playable heroes.

I highly recommend OMD3 to everyone who enjoys tower defense games and similar genres. Go, get it now and make those orcs suffer! They are counting on you! There should be more content coming: The devs have been teasing that there will be expansions. Here's hoping that we'll get more of the awesome Orcs Must Die! Unchained heroes and complex maps, so that Blackpaw and Midnight get to play with their food again!

HLA was designed from the ground up for VR to deliver the first highly polished and fully immersive AAA-VR single player story-driven experience. It sets an extremely high standard for future VR games and for me it is the VR killer app I have been hoping for. HLA clearly plays and feels like a game from the (not so near) future!

Valve achieved this by crafting a very interesting and detailed world as well as encouraging exploring it: There are environmental puzzles to solve, ammo to find and weapons to upgrade. Exploring is super fun due to the grabbity gloves which allow to fling items into player’s hands. The pacing is outstanding with cool enemy encounters and funny chatter between the main protagonists Alyx and Russell. I can highly recommend HLA for everyone who wants to escape into the gorgeous and highly interactive Half-Life universe.

There is one major downside to having played HLA for me: Some non-VR games now lost a bit of their appeal since without VR, they cannot achieve the same level of immersion. As a result, I am now waiting for Valve to release their next Half-Life game. This probably means that I have to wait another decade which will feel this time even longer, due to the incredible post-credits cliffhanger ...

Beat Saber is a VR rhythm game where you have to cut boxes with light sabers to catchy music. The gameplay is super satisfying and at expert levels it becomes a decent workout if you flail your sabers about.

It is also the very first video game where I had to stop, because I became physically exhausted.