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Do I get this right? You only get the proper ending in the game if you finish it twice with the same character?
 
Do I get this right? You only get the proper ending in the game if you finish it twice with the same character?

It works like this:

There are two characters, who have slightly different and contradictory stories. If you want a canon ending, you need to finish a Second Run with one of the characters. Meaning yes, you'll have to play the same character twice for a proper, canon story.

Essentially there is:

Leon 1
Claire 1
Leon 2
Claire 2

If you want a canon, complete story you'll have to choose a character to play first. I did Leon. The other character's Second Run will be the true, canon ending. Meaning I did Leon 1, then did Claire 1, and if I want to get the full coherent story I need to play Claire 2. Unfortunately, I don't think you can go from Leon 1 to Claire 2 straight away or vice versa. Personally I just youtubed the ending. Its about 10 minutes of extra content. Gameplay wise the intro is different, so I suppose it is worth playing the intro again. Puzzles and combinations are reset slightly but otherwise it is mostly the same game. Personally I didn't feel like going through it a 3rd time even if there were differences. I know the Second Run for both characters is much harder in terms of resource scarcity, which became apparent 20 minutes in when I stopped playing.

Leon 1 and Claire 1 offer a fair amount of cutscene and story differences including locations in the middle of the game to be worth playing each character at least once.
 
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Metro: Exodus (2019)

5c6609794829cmetro.jpg


You ask: What's it like?
Me: Good.
You: A little more detail please!
Me: Not Good.

This is a game that was almost something really good, but it stumbles in the threshold of greatness, clumsily breaking almost every bone in its own body, and comes out as a crippled dwarf on the other side.

So what is Metro Exodus? It's a story oriented linear shooter. And to be frank not being open world is kind of a relief. As I'm getting sick and tired of the filler content open world games are padded with. Being mostly a corridor shooter means there is barely any filler here.

There seems to be some confusion what being a "corridor shooter" really means among the people loving the game. Cause when I suggested that this is what this game was, some didn't took it very well. They thought it was a diss. And tried to argue that it's open world since you have optional goals that you can choose not to complete in certain areas. But being a corridor shooter has nothing to do with that. All that means is that the goals in the game can only be reached trough a single point of entry, by being funneled trough a narrow "corridor". Which doesn't have to be an actual corridor, it can be two lines of trees or buildings that you move between. And being linear means that you don't choose the locations you travel to, they come after one another in a specific order.

Now that we got that out of the way let's see what is good about the game. Obviously being story oriented is great, and the story if I view it in a vacuum is decent. They nailed the atmosphere of the game. And the graphics is pretty good even without real time ray tracing. The gunplay is good as well. You have plenty of weapons to choose from, and each can be upgraded. The pacing is excellent. Action is always preceded by exploration, and each chapter concludes with consulting your crew on the Train.

Well, I guess technically it's not your crew, since you're not in charge for a change. And with that let's see the story. You are living in the Moscow metro, have been for years, and you have been going on expeditions to the irradiated surface to find traces of other survivors. You've been told that everyone else is dead and there is nothing out there, but you still persist. Of course this doesn't come as a big surprise (or as a big spoiler) you have been lied to. Outside radio communications have been suppressed deliberately by broadcasting jamming signals to keep the people of the metro in the dark, both literally and figuratively.

Of course after you discover the secret, you're not allowed to go back into the metro, so you and a bunch of your mates snag a train and go your merry way to look for other survivors. That's the introduction chapter of the game basically. The story encompasses traveling for years and trough thousands of miles in the game, but this is only reflected by the narrative, you can't really feel that scale otherwise. Of course there will be monsters, bandits, nomads, and various fanatics on the way.

The characters are good enough, not going to love anyone like you did in Mass Effect, but they are passable. There was some criticism over the net about the voiceover quality of the game. I think it's neither here or there. It's certainly not award winning material, but I've seen many worse.

Overall I'd have enjoyed the story, if the game didn't slap me in the face at the end with the "bad" ending. As it turns out, whether you get the good or the bad ending is determined by a completely arbitrary metric: Namely did you kill enemies or used stealth in specific missions. I say that's complete bullshit, and the worst idea ever. The point of having the option to stealth trough levels, or to rambo trough them as well, is that players can choose which play style suits them. Rewarding one and punishing the other is a terrible idea. And it's not even enough to use mostly stealth, you cannot hurt a single soul or raise an alarm during those specific missions if you want the good ending.

Another thing related to the story that bothered me were the forced failures. There are a few of those in the game, guess A4 games didn't read Warren Spector's commandments on how to make a good game.

The game also suffers from some balance issues. The start of the game was quite hard for me, resources were extremely scarce, ammo almost non-existent. Then the middle was super easy. And the end a bit harder again but still easier than the beginning. Difficulty should scale up from the start of the game, and not be a sine wave. Normal enemies are OK, but they did put a few bullet sponges in there for good measure. Like the bearape monster in the Taiga chapter. Or the snow yetis at the end of the game. You can craft ammo in the game at workbenches or even on the go for the base weapon. But the problem is that you use the exact same resources for crafting ammo as you use for crafting medkits. Which is a game design mistake in my opinion. And since there is no auto-heal in the game, not even after minor injuries, you are forced to keep those medkits coming. And they cost quite a bit of resources too. This meant that I often reloaded games even if I got trough an encounter alive. Because I wanted to do them without injury, or at least using less medkits or ammo.

Another gameplay related issue for me was that melee is almost completely useless in the game. The hitboxes of enemies are often unreachable. You stand right in front of them, mash the melee key and your attempts keep missing. It is really frustrating when an enemy gets a hit on you because of this bug, and you have to use a medkit.

The game has numerous borrowed ideas from Half-Life. One or two I'd have let slide, but there are probably half a dozen things in the game that are lifted from Half Life almost directly.

The game also ended quite suddenly I expected it to have at least two or three additional chapters / levels. Especially since the last level felt so underwhelming. It was more a walking simulator than a shooter for most of the level.

And unfortunately that's still not the end of the negatives. Because we have the AI, which is the worst I saw since I can remember. They are completely idiotic, unable to adopt to anything unexpected. Often freeze in place doing nothing, or get stuck in infinite loops. Or even ignore your presence completely. The most hilarious part is when an enemy NPC runs at you and you scramble to kill it, but miss, and then you see it run past you. Or even better they start pushing you in front of themselves. I would laugh if I didn't remember that I paid over 50 Euros for this supposedly AAA game.

And unfortunately there are reports of game breaking bugs as well, which I thankfully didn't encounter. But I did encounter numerous crashes. Almost all of my sessions with the game ended with the software crashing or freezing.

And finally, the game is filled to the brim with scripted events, enemies spawning behind you when you hit a trigger point. These are things that I haven't seen used so blatantly in a game for at least a decade.

The character rigs seem to be very outdated as well, with polygons on people's joints stretching awkwardly when raising their arms and gesturing. It's deep in the uncanny valley. Plus clothes are not separate but simple textures on the models, so they look like they are body paint instead of actual clothes.

Here goes the Pros and Cons:

+
  • Story
  • Graphics
  • No throw away filler content
  • Believable characters
  • Train travel segments
  • The bits of gameplay where you don't have to constantly worry about resources
-
  • Terrible AI
  • Forced failures
  • The ending depends on whether you used full stealth in some missions
  • Crash and burn, I mean freeze
  • Melee mechanic is useless
  • Ammo and medkit shortages at times
  • Scripted events
  • Outdated character animations and rigging.
  • I'm sick of the mute hero trope (that's just one idea borrowed from HL)
  • A good chunk of the game's monsters and mechanics are plagiarized from Half Life
  • I didn't expect it to end when it did
That's it folks! Oh, I almost forgot the verdict:

graphics/realization: 7/10
story/atmosphere: 8/10
gameplay/controls: 7/10
overall impression: 6/10

It wasn't a bad game, because it wasn't a bad game, but this is not how a good game looks like either. I'd definitely wait until it's at least discounted before buying. If you're looking for a shooter Far Cry New Dawn seems to be the superior game. And I picked that up for only €25.
 
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Dang, there are a few folks here that need to look into a new vocation as a reviewer.
Metro: Exodus (2019)

View attachment 143576

You ask: What's it like?
Me: Good.
You: A little more detail please!
Me: Not Good.

This is a game that was almost something really good, but it stumbles in the threshold of greatness, clumsily breaking almost every bone in its own body, and comes out as a crippled dwarf on the other side.

So what is Metro Exodus? It's a story oriented linear shooter. And to be frank not being open world is kind of a relief. As I'm getting sick and tired of the filler content open world games are padded with. Being mostly a corridor shooter means there is barely any filler here.

There seems to be some confusion what being a "corridor shooter" really means among the people loving the game. Cause when I suggested that this is what this game was, some didn't took it very well. They thought it was a diss. And tried to argue that it's open world since you have optional goals that you can choose not to complete in certain areas. But being a corridor shooter has nothing to do with that. All that means is that the goals in the game can only be reached trough a single point of entry, by being funneled trough a narrow "corridor". Which doesn't have to be an actual corridor, it can be two lines of trees or buildings that you move between. And being linear means that you don't choose the locations you travel to, they come after one another in a specific order.

Now that we got that out of the way let's see what is good about the game. Obviously being story oriented is great, and the story if I view it in a vacuum is decent. They nailed the atmosphere of the game. And the graphics is pretty good even without real time ray tracing. The gunplay is good as well. You have plenty of weapons to choose from, and each can be upgraded. The pacing is excellent. Action is always preceded by exploration, and each chapter concludes with consulting your crew on the Train.

Well, I guess technically it's not your crew, since you're not in charge for a change. And with that let's see the story. You are living in the Moscow metro, have been for years, and you have been going on expeditions to the irradiated surface to find traces of other survivors. You've been told that everyone else is dead and there is nothing out there, but you still persist. Of course this doesn't come as a big surprise (or as a big spoiler) you have been lied to. Outside radio communications have been suppressed deliberately by broadcasting jamming signals to keep the people of the metro in the dark, both literally and figuratively.

Of course after you discover the secret, you're not allowed to go back into the metro, so you and a bunch of your mates snag a train and go your merry way to look for other survivors. That's the introduction chapter of the game basically. The story encompasses traveling for years and trough thousands of miles in the game, but this is only reflected by the narrative, you can't really feel that scale otherwise. Of course there will be monsters, bandits, nomads, and various fanatics on the way.

The characters are good enough, not going to love anyone like you did in Mass Effect, but they are passable. There was some criticism over the net about the voiceover quality of the game. I think it's neither here or there. It's certainly not award winning material, but I've seen many worse.

Overall I'd have enjoyed the story, if the game didn't slap me in the face at the end with the "bad" ending. As it turns out, whether you get the good or the bad ending is determined by a completely arbitrary metric: Namely did you kill enemies or used stealth in specific missions. I say that's complete bullshit, and the worst idea ever. The point of having the option to stealth trough levels, or to rambo trough them as well, is that players can choose which play style suits them. Rewarding one and punishing the other is a terrible idea. And it's not even enough to use mostly stealth, you cannot hurt a single soul or raise an alarm during those specific missions if you want the good ending.

Another thing related to the story that bothered me were the forced failures. There are a few of those in the game, guess A4 games didn't read Warren Spector's commandments on how to make a good game.

The game also suffers from some balance issues. The start of the game was quite hard for me, resources were extremely scarce, ammo almost non-existent. Then the middle was super easy. And the end a bit harder again but still easier than the beginning. Difficulty should scale up from the start of the game, and not be a sine wave. Normal enemies are OK, but they did put a few bullet sponges in there for good measure. Like the bearape monster in the Taiga chapter. Or the snow yetis at the end of the game. You can craft ammo in the game at workbenches or even on the go for the base weapon. But the problem is that you use the exact same resources for crafting ammo as you use for crafting medkits. Which is a game design mistake in my opinion. And since there is no auto-heal in the game, not even after minor injuries, you are forced to keep those medkits coming. And they cost quite a bit of resources too. This meant that I often reloaded games even if I got trough an encounter alive. Because I wanted to do them without injury, or at least using less medkits or ammo.

Another gameplay related issue for me was that melee is almost completely useless in the game. The hitboxes of enemies are often unreachable. You stand right in front of them, mash the melee key and your attempts keep missing. It is really frustrating when an enemy gets a hit on you because of this bug, and you have to use a medkit.

The game has numerous borrowed ideas from Half-Life. One or two I'd have let slide, but there are probably half a dozen things in the game that are lifted from Half Life almost directly.

The game also ended quite suddenly I expected it to have at least two or three additional chapters / levels. Especially since the last level felt so underwhelming. It was more a walking simulator than a shooter for most of the level.

And unfortunately that's still not the end of the negatives. Because we have the AI, which is the worst I saw since I can remember. They are completely idiotic, unable to adopt to anything unexpected. Often freeze in place doing nothing, or get stuck in infinite loops. Or even ignore your presence completely. The most hilarious part is when an enemy NPC runs at you and you scramble to kill it, but miss, and then you see it run past you. Or even better they start pushing you in front of themselves. I would laugh if I didn't remember that I paid over 50 Euros for this supposedly AAA game.

And unfortunately there are reports of game breaking bugs as well, which I thankfully didn't encounter. But I did encounter numerous crashes. Almost all of my sessions with the game ended with the software crashing or freezing.

And finally, the game is filled to the brim with scripted events, enemies spawning behind you when you hit a trigger point. These are things that I haven't seen used so blatantly in a game for at least a decade.

The character rigs seem to be very outdated as well, with polygons on people's joints stretching awkwardly when raising their arms and gesturing. It's deep in the uncanny valley. Plus clothes are not separate but simple textures on the models, so they look like they are body paint instead of actual clothes.

Here goes the Pros and Cons:

+
  • Story
  • Graphics
  • No throw away filler content
  • Believable characters
  • Train travel segments
  • The bits of gameplay where you don't have to constantly worry about resources
-
  • Terrible AI
  • Forced failures
  • The ending depends on whether you used full stealth in some missions
  • Crash and burn, I mean freeze
  • Melee mechanic is useless
  • Ammo and medkit shortages at times
  • Scripted events
  • Outdated character animations and rigging.
  • I'm sick of the mute hero trope (that's just one idea borrowed from HL)
  • A good chunk of the game's monsters and mechanics are plagiarized from Half Life
  • I didn't expect it to end when it did
That's it folks! Oh, I almost forgot the verdict:

graphics/realization: 7/10
story/atmosphere: 8/10
gameplay/controls: 7/10
overall impression: 6/10

It wasn't a bad game, because it wasn't a bad game, but this is not how a good game looks like either. I'd definitely wait until it's at least discounted before buying. If you're looking for a shooter Far Cry New Dawn seems to be the superior game. And I picked that up for only €25.

Once again M76, it's like you have a window into my brain - great write-up. Concur on all points. I initially couldn't put my finger on why I wasn't really enjoying the game, but I think the aggregation of all of the negatives you mention bring the game down below the enjoy-ability bar. I really felt halfway through I was plodding along just to get to another scripted cutscene, and honestly couldn't wait to get to the end so I could go back to another game. Replayability is virtually nil for me, it would be a penitence going back to retread a level.

I think folks are confusing "corridor" shooter (which you aptly describe) with "rail" shooter in which your character is relegated to moving on a single spacial path (like you're on a train rail). Metro is solidly a corridor shooter, but not a rail shooter which I think what people were railing (...) on you for.
 
Replayability is virtually nil for me, it would be a penitence going back to retread a level..
Yes, I don't intend to replay it either. Guess the only incentive would be to try to get the other ending, but that would mean going back all the way to the volga level. Which is the very first after the introductory chapter. And even if stealth is quite easy in the game, constantly using it would not be that fun to me.
 
Dragon Quest XI : Echoes of an Elusive age

The story is a basic Good vs Evil story or in this case light vs shadow. The cast of characters is colorfull, albeit pretty stereotypical especially Sylvando his gay mannerisms are over the top. The characters both player controlled and npc's are nicely made, animated nicely, but definitely made for a younger audience.

Every major location is based on some real world regions and that also shows in the language use of the locals. The music is great imo. (for classical anyways) voice cast is pretty good, some of the writing is good, some less so :p

The gameplay is decent and can be customised, I played mostly on the default setting where I control my char and the rest uses the "fight smart" preset (which is not that smart btw but functional enough) but I had to turn that off near the end bosses which are a step up from anything the game throws at you b4.

You can buy or forge gear, where the forge can get you +1 to +3 improvements depending on how well you do the forging, You do have to look all over the place of the recipes and crafting materials (the random world items do respawn if you get to that zone again), different gear does not change your char's appearance most of the time, there are some exeptions to this though.

Now the main game to me is pretty good for a JRPG, I like the turn based combat a lot more then the let me press some random buttons and hope to be still standing at the end of the fight from FF XV. You can also avoid as much or little of the random encounters as you want as you see the mobs running around in the world, they are not that aggresive if you don't get too close to them whic is convenient when looking for some quest item.

The side quests are imo standard RPG fare of find this, kill that with some annoyances like having to kill specific mobs with certain pep powers, sort of supers which requires you char's to be pepped up which happens mostly random, and does not last very long and you need to get the right toons pepped up as they are combo attacks, I skipped most of those and also the ones where you have to equip certain items to complete a riddle/quest, I sold most of my old gear to get some money to buy better gear.

The game runs well most of the time, I did notice some lower FPS when casting certain (mostly fire based) spells.

I spend around 63 hours completing the game which I'm sure you can add some time if you want to do all side quests and find all recipes and crafting materials to make them.

Anyways, it's a well made game in the genre and I would recommend it fi you are into JRPG's but it's not and outstanding game or story, I would rate it around 75-80/100
 
Super Mega Baseball 2.
Great mixture of realism and arcade play.
Graphics are fantastic and no hiccups.
Little hard at first to bat but very little adjustment on learning curve.
Allows you to adjust difficulty (ego) from 0-99.
I had just about given up on baseball games for the PC but glad I checked this game out. I recommend it for anyone looking for a nice baseball game for the PC.
 
Super Mega Baseball 2.
Great mixture of realism and arcade play.
Graphics are fantastic and no hiccups.
Little hard at first to bat but very little adjustment on learning curve.
Allows you to adjust difficulty (ego) from 0-99.
I had just about given up on baseball games for the PC but glad I checked this game out. I recommend it for anyone looking for a nice baseball game for the PC.

I'm still playing MVP Baseball 2005 on PC... the last good baseball game.

Not a big fan of The Show...the hitting and pitching mechanics are not as fun as MVP Baseball where you actually use the stick to adjust your swing to match where the pitch is
 
Crackdown 3

Very underwhelming game but I knew that going into it. Think of Just Cause 2/3, with a less interesting world, even dumber story, technical problems, less vehicle types and without cool things to blow up. You have Crackdown 3.

I'll start with the technical problems because it is probably the first thing you'll notice about the game. Frame rate stays decently high (RTX 2070, Ryzen 2700, SSD, 16GB RAM) but there is a good bit of stuttering after you load into an area. In heavy combat it may come back but it isn't that problematic as it tends to be short.The map is laggy, it probably runs at around 10 frame rates depending on how much you zoom in. Same issue with some of the other in game menus. CTDs occur about every hour or so.

Graphically the game is underwhelming even if it uses UE4. Low resolution textures and ugly 3D models populate a neon cyberpunk style futuristic city. However the art direction is about as generic as you can get. Structure wise there isn't much interesting to see in the game or notable locations. Explosions look decent enough but nothing special. Other graphical effects such as water are very underwhelming. Visually it is a let down.

Voice acting of the main protagonist, Jaxon, is terrible. Both in volume and actual voice acting. Music in the background is okay but nothing special. Other sound effects are about average. Nothing to set any kind of mood or add to the experience.

Gameplay... is about as generic as it gets. 3rd person action shooter with nothing to set it apart. There are a number of different weapon types but around 4-5 are clearly better than the rest, to the point I practically only used 4, maybe 5, weapons for most of the game. Missiles, miniguns, beam weapons are all at your disposal. You can drive and fast travel to a location. You get a variety of cars to drive. You do get a special vehicle which can transform but to upgrade it you need to complete numerous races... which are very boring. Driving is fairly atrocious - weightless, poor sound affects, and not many interesting places to drive around or in.

Essentially you drive to an area, hold down the trigger and watch explosions. Boss fights occasionally change up the gameplay but not by any notable amount as I've already forgotten most of them. I believe that tells you how underwhelming most were. Sheer stupid gameplay but it works in the games favor. The game is short, about 10-13 hours. On one hand it is underdeveloped, on the other you stop caring and just enjoy it for utterly mindless fun.

5.5/10


Bottom line, the game is just bad and rough around the edges. It can still offer fun and overall isn't frustrating due to the bugs. Even the CTDs generally don't set you too far back and you don't really care much about the immersion breaking because you didn't have much in the first place.
 
Call of Duty Infinite Warfare (PS4)

8 stars (out of 10)

Pros:
$12!!!
spaceship combat (sort of)
wisecracking robots (Ethan)
almost a wing commander 3 feeling (almost) ability to select missions + objectives
some good voice acting

Cons:
a lot of really bad voice acting
worst use of Jon Snow ever
predictable
still a COD game at the core

I got this super cheap and thought I'd give it a shot. I'm not a fanatic COD fanboy, but I will play the single player campaign on most. This one got pretty bad reviews that I felt were off the mark. For someone wanting the usual run of the mill COD experience, yeah I can see why people hated it. However, I chose to view it as a Wing Commander type of game that had frequent FPS missions. In that view I think it is mostly successful. I enjoyed it for the most part, excepting the usual repetitiveness and stupid... sometimes really super stupid, dialog that is standard fare for FPS games.

The fighter (SCAR) missions were OK and I enjoyed them, but the controls just felt all weird and not like you were flying. I enjoyed being able to pick and choose missions. On purpose I chose the main missions for last, as I figured (correctly) I wouldn't get a chance to go back and do the side missions. The FPS combat is pretty much straightforward, but the guns felt OK enough. I frequently ran out of ammo and had to grab random enemy weapons which all sort of felt the same (the volk rifle was especially bland and I tried to avoid it).

I didn't like that the options on the Ret (Retribution) were limited to : watch a CNN space cam video about a mission I had just done (how would they know?), or proceed directly to the next mission. I would have liked more time to explore the ship, but options are limited.

There were too many "Well, DUH" moments in missions, and a lot of events you can't control. It wasn't always clear when there were time limits until you were dead. Your teammates will yell at you the whole time to hurry up or "hit this objective" type of comments, but sometimes you have all the time in the world, other times not.

All in all I enjoyed it more than I thought I would have, and it made me very sad we don't have Wing Commander types of games nowadays. It *ALMOST* scratched the itch, but not totally.

OTOH, I have also been playing COD:WW2 and this game is light years better in terms of gun control and enjoyment.

SOOOOO... if you haven't played it... DO IT if you want a space flavored shooter. It's super cheap now and totally worth playing the single player campaign. Now is there anyone still playing multi? Don't know yet but I doubt it and I don't really care.
 
Just finished Metro Exodus. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I really like the level design in that it's not a open world game like a Ubisoft title, but more of a guided open world game. The areas you explore are not too big to be frustrating, and also not full of nonsense extra things to do just for filler to make the game artificially longer. I really enjoyed the weapon modding although I felt that the guns got a little too dirty too fast. There are random workbenches scattered around the explorable areas to somewhat alleviate this, but honestly I just felt like keeping your weapons clean was more of a inconvenience than adding anything to the gameplay or enjoyment of the game. All-in-all I really like that they didn't stray too far from the Metro formula and what made those games fun. The graphics obviously are a new benchmark-setter and are phenomenal, the story is serviceable, and I like the characters you get to interact with. Not sure what score I would give it, but if I had to i'd lean towards a 8.5 out of 10. Mostly because I gauge a game and whether I have the motivation to even finish it. I have noticed getting older than I don't finish a lot of the games I start, and if I am playing a game I am actually excited to get back into let-alone actually play to it's conclusion then I know it was good.

Update: I noticed M76's very detailed review above which is quite well written, but I disagree on a lot of what he has mentioned. The big ones being bugs. Not sure if the game has gotten multiple patches since M76 played, but I encounter no bugs except at the very beginning there was a single one where I entered a tunnel and there were neon colored confetti-like things all over the place, and once you turn Advanced PhysX off that fixed that issue. Other than that the game never crashed and I didn't see any game-breaking bugs.

I never found the problem of using the same materials for ammo and MedKits. It's balanced and I never ran anywhere short of running out of MedKits. When I say balanced I mean there are two building materials... we'll call them fluid and hardware. This isn't accurate so this is just an example, but say bullets for the AK cost 10 hardware and 2 fluid, then the medkits will cost 20 fluid and 10 hardware. To me it never was a problem and neither was ammo, but that could be why I got the "Good" ending and played stealthily for the most past just because that's how I play games like this mostly anyway. I believe that if you loot everything, disassemble every gun you encounter, search all the areas for supplies you'll hardly ever run out of crafting materials. I know I didn't but once, but that was because I went a little crazy crafting ammo for guns I wasn't even using which was my mistake.

I don't agree that there is a "good" or "bad" ending... I am not sure why people see one as a punishment and the other not so. The ending is the ending... this is the last Metro game so either way the game is over so to me the ending just is the ending. I didn't even know there were multiple endings until today when I read about the ending since my ending which I guess is called the "good" ending was confusing to me. In either case the story was good but good in the context of the other Metro games... you're just trying to survive. To that end I had no complaints.

I also don't agree with M76's definition of a corridor shooter. By M76's metric of " the goals in the game can only be reached trough a single point of entry, by being funneled trough a narrow "corridor". Which doesn't have to be an actual corridor, it can be two lines of trees or buildings that you move between. And being linear means that you don't choose the locations you travel to, they come after one another in a specific order"EVERY game would literally be a corridor shooter no matter how open... even games like Skyrim could be defined as a corridor shooter because there is literally only one way to get past point B or point C... if your objective is to go to point B but you can choose to get there either by scaling this mountain off the beaten path or by using the stairs then it doesn't matter because both still funnel you to the same end-result. How you choose to get there does not make it a open-world game... I would argue that any game that has a singular objective which is to get to the end of the level such as say Doom 2016 is a corridor shooter because there is nothing else for you to do but blast people to get to your objective... if you had the option to go somewhere else and do something else in a entirely different part of the map for some sort of benefit or change in the story that isn't your "main objective" I would argue that's a open world game. Metro is as much a open world game as Crysis, FarCry, Metal Gear Solid 5, and all the others I associate with being open-world. I can choose how to approach and accomplish an objective. Yes, there are more "corridors" in Exodus than say the other games I mentioned but it's still what I would call open-world because the vast majority of my time is spent in a open landscape. If anything you could call Metro Exodus a corridor shooter with open-world elements... however I would reverse that and say Exodus is more of a open-world shooter with corridor-shooter-like elements.
 
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Yes, I don't intend to replay it either. Guess the only incentive would be to try to get the other ending, but that would mean going back all the way to the volga level. Which is the very first after the introductory chapter. And even if stealth is quite easy in the game, constantly using it would not be that fun to me.

I am almost finished with this game.
I find it to be exactly as advertised in the build-up to release.
The story is good, the action COULD be better,the AI is not too polished but the graphic is where it shines.

My reason for playing it over would be after I buy a second generation RTX GPU to gauge the new visuals I can't get with my 1080 Ti.

I do plan to install the new April driver and W10 to see if the GTX 1080 Ti can run the advertised RTX effects.

Overall score is to me 8.5/10

I think there is a good bit of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series built into this episode of Metro.
 
I think there is a good bit of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series built into this episode of Metro.

With yesterday's patch there is a new reason to play again... New Game + mode so you can start from the beginning with everything you left the previous game with. I will definitely be playing this again at some point but not quite yet. I finished it last night and I loved it, but I have to say that I don't agree with the STALKER comparison. As a huge STALKER fan the only similarity is the Russian accents... it's not open world enough to be a STALKER game, and inventory management was a huge part of the STALKER series imo. But yet, when I first saw the trailer I thought this will be the closest we get to a new STALKER game, but it is very much a Metro game throughout.
 
Just Cause 4

Too many crashes. Unplayable. Really enjoyed JC3 but this was a massive let down. After 20 or so crashes I had enough and refunded this pile of shit. All other pluses and minuses aren't worth listing.

2/10

Borderlands The Pre-Sequel


Boring, copy/pasted mechanics from BL2. No quick saves still. More time spent driving or running from places than playing. When you do play, it is slaughtering the same enemies dozens of times. I killed around 200-300 enemies before the tutorial was up. Bad pacing, boss that out levels you by 70% occurs during the tutorial and is practically impossible to beat. Lots of bugs and issues. Final nail in the coffin was forcing a dumbass mountain between objectives requiring you to drive around it for 15-20 minutes to turn in your objective. 2014 or 2015, whatever year this turd came out isn't acceptable. Don't waste our time. You play games for fun, not to play mail man.

2.5/10

Metal Gear Solid Revengeance

1920x1080 is the highest resolution this goes. Looks like a blurry mess. Okay, fine, shitty Japanese game port. But the FPS is locked at around 24. It is unplayable. There is an unofficial fix to make it render at 1440P natively which looks good but there is no fix for the FPS. Tried various shady 3rd party programs and .exes to make it run properly but none of those help. 24 frame rates is simply unplayable as your character responds almost half a second after an input. Unplayable.

Besides the unplayable input lag/frame rates the camera is utterly atrocious. As in, it automatically looks up to the sky while you and your enemy are on the ground. Even if there are no enemies in the sky. So you can't even see what is going on. Yes, it is that fucking bad. I'll assume these lazy bastards didn't finish the game.

2/10


Modern video games in a nutshell. I'll talk about Metro Exodus when I get time because that was actually worth playing and therefore is worth talking about.

It is about time we start looking toward video game regulation and laws. Padding game length to make it appear like you get more content should be illegal and developers/publishers need to have a stringent core to fluff content ratio (66% to 33% as an example). Developers who fail to abide by this would have the offending product removed from sale and face fines for false advertisement and predatory marketing tactics. Non-fuctional controls or camera angles should also be subjected to lemon laws with a 2-3 year window (for proper review by relevant agencies) allowing for full refunds for any customers on any platform.

If 80-90% of the developers/publishers go out of business that would be a good thing as far as I am concerned. I'd rather spend 12 hours playing a good game than 30 playing half a dozen that are unplayable or wasting my time with 3 hours of junk content that I'm not being paid to do.

I also don't agree with M76's definition of a corridor shooter.

It isn't a corridor shooter at all. It isn't a stupidly long game that forces you to run around doing dozens of busy work errands for no purpose (open world) either. It is a good mix and what games should strive for. Some parts are certainly very linear, other parts allow some freedom of location and approach.

Corridor shooter would be like the CoD games and HL2.
 
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Borderlands The Pre-Sequel


Boring, copy/pasted mechanics from BL2. No quick saves still. More time spent driving or running from places than playing. When you do play, it is slaughtering the same enemies dozens of times. I killed around 200-300 enemies before the tutorial was up. Bad pacing, boss that out levels you by 70% occurs during the tutorial and is practically impossible to beat. Lots of bugs and issues. Final nail in the coffin was forcing a dumbass mountain between objectives requiring you to drive around it for 15-20 minutes to turn in your objective. 2014 or 2015, whatever year this turd came out isn't acceptable. Don't waste our time. You play games for fun, not to play mail man.

2.5/10

This echos my feelings for TPS pretty well. Too tedious, repetitive, and like Flogger23m mentioned, waaayyyy to much time going from point A to B to C not doing much. I enjoyed playing as Claptrap for about 30 minutes then it faded. This one was done by a different team at Gearbox and it shows. It's not worth playing unless you're just a super dooper mega Borderlands fan. Honestly... I think I'd rather replay BL2 as a different character than play this.
 
Update: I noticed M76's very detailed review above which is quite well written, but I disagree on a lot of what he has mentioned. The big ones being bugs. Not sure if the game has gotten multiple patches since M76 played, but I encounter no bugs except at the very beginning there was a single one where I entered a tunnel and there were neon colored confetti-like things all over the place, and once you turn Advanced PhysX off that fixed that issue. Other than that the game never crashed and I didn't see any game-breaking bugs.
Maybe they released patches since then, but the AI was utter garbage when the game was released.
I never found the problem of using the same materials for ammo and MedKits. It's balanced and I never ran anywhere short of running out of MedKits. When I say balanced I mean there are two building materials... we'll call them fluid and hardware. This isn't accurate so this is just an example, but say bullets for the AK cost 10 hardware and 2 fluid, then the medkits will cost 20 fluid and 10 hardware. To me it never was a problem and neither was ammo, but that could be why I got the "Good" ending and played stealthily for the most past just because that's how I play games like this mostly anyway. I believe that if you loot everything, disassemble every gun you encounter, search all the areas for supplies you'll hardly ever run out of crafting materials. I know I didn't but once, but that was because I went a little crazy crafting ammo for guns I wasn't even using which was my mistake.
Well obviously if you use mostly stealth then you won't encounter a resource shortage because you are not using ammo. And if you go full stealth then you have less opportunity to notice how the combat difficulty changes from beginning to end.

I don't agree that there is a "good" or "bad" ending... I am not sure why people see one as a punishment and the other not so. The ending is the ending... this is the last Metro game so either way the game is over so to me the ending just is the ending. I didn't even know there were multiple endings until today when I read about the ending since my ending which I guess is called the "good" ending was confusing to me. In either case the story was good but good in the context of the other Metro games... you're just trying to survive. To that end I had no complaints.
For example I wouldn't call any of the endings in DeusEx "bad" they are all great. The ending I got from this game however felt like a punishment for finishing the game the "wrong" way. rather than a reward for finishing the game. Much like the refusal ending in Mass Effect 3. Which was a slap in the face. "You don't want to accept starbrat? - You loose" here it is: "You don't want to play stealthily? - You loose"


I also don't agree with M76's definition of a corridor shooter. By M76's metric of " the goals in the game can only be reached trough a single point of entry, by being funneled trough a narrow "corridor". Which doesn't have to be an actual corridor, it can be two lines of trees or buildings that you move between. And being linear means that you don't choose the locations you travel to, they come after one another in a specific order"EVERY game would literally be a corridor shooter no matter how open... even games like Skyrim could be defined as a corridor shooter because there is literally only one way to get past point B or point C... if your objective is to go to point B but you can choose to get there either by scaling this mountain off the beaten path or by using the stairs then it doesn't matter because both still funnel you to the same end-result.
It's not that you have to arrive at a certain point. Obviously you need to go to a specific goal in every game. Skyrim's dungeons /ruins on the other hand are the dictionary definition of a corridor shooter. But the game world itself is open since you can go to any location. A truly open world game is like Far Cry 3, or AC: Odyssey. Where you not just can go anywhere, but can get into every location from multiple directions, or by parachuting in from the sky if that is your fancy. Skyrim is mostly open world with some corridor elements. Metro is mostly corridor with some open areas.

If anything you could call Metro Exodus a corridor shooter with open-world elements... however I would reverse that and say Exodus is more of a open-world shooter with corridor-shooter-like elements.
So you know what it is after all, but for some arbitrary reason you feel the need to reverse it?
Being a corridor game is not a negative in of itself.
 
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Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown (2019)

91-SptbzNKL.jpg

I so wanted a good arcade flying game for a long time. Spoiler: This won't do. At least not for me.

I'm a fucking fool. That's actually the harshest on the level of foolery. But they did only fool me once, so the shame is on them. So what is all this about? That I didn't look at the damn steam reviews before buying the game. Had I done so I'd have known that this pos doesn't support joysticks. Imagine that, a flying game on PC that doesn't support a flight controller!

That is something so far beyond reason that I'd never in my worst nightmares could've imagined it. What's next? An FPS on PC that is only playable with an XBOX controller?

I've tried playing with a controller, tried and failed. It's absolutely unplayable to me. I have an innate disability when it comes to playing any game with a boomerang shaped contraption they like to call a controller. I always thought that was only sarcasm because I sure as hell can't control a damn thing with it.

Playing with keyboard is out of the question as well, because you have to yaw and pitch with the mouse, that's not happening. The times of lifting the mouse at the end of the mat and resetting it at the other end a hundred million times a minute are over for me. I left them behind when I purchased my first joystick in 1994 for Tie Fighter.

Either way it is absolutely unacceptable by any standards that a game on PC would not support the re-assignment of controls to any custom input. There is no defending that, and I know some people have tried. It literally takes just a few hours of coding to implement a menu where you can re-bind controls. Hell I'm 100% sure that UE comes with one already in it. This reeks laziness, and amateur hour. Which is further compounded by the fact that the game also lacks ultrawide monitor support.

Too bad because the gameplay looks fun, were I able to control it I might even actually enjoy it. But as it stands I gave up after just finishing (barely) three missions. Then started waiting on a patch for the controls. But that never happened, and so my patience ran out. I'm reviewing the game as is.

The game also looks beautiful which is just rubbing sand in the wound as I cannot play it properly. Of course flying games were always an agreeable theme in terms of graphics. Meaning you can make them look almost photo realistic quite easily due to the fact that you're miles away from any object except your own plane. Even Flight Unlimited from 1995 looked brilliant by using actual aerial photographs as ground textures.

Even though I've not finished the game I want to say some words about the story. Well either I'm going crazy or this is the most incomprehensible random garbage I've ever seen. The cutscenes between missions seem to have absolutely no relation to the actual missions you're flying. Like they're from a different game altogether. And the briefings / chatter during missions is also completely incomprehensible to me. I'm sitting there not understanding the context at all.

+

  • Graphics
  • Gameplay
-

  • No support for USB game controllers except for gamepads.
  • No way to re-assing any of the inputs
  • Incomprehensible story
The verdict:

graphics/realization: 9/10
story/atmosphere: 2/10
gameplay/controls: 0/10
overall impression: 0/10

In its current state the game is unplayable to me, hence the zero score. And since they don't seem intent on adding support for additional controllers, that's where it'll stay. But one thing is sure as hell, they aren't getting a dime out of me ever again. The humiliation I suffered at their hands is unbearable. I purchased the game, installed it, dusted down my trusty Logitech Extreme 3D, set it up neatly on my desk expecting to have a fun time, only for the game to completely ignore it.
 
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That is laughable. I get not enjoying it but being unable to play at all with a controller? This kind of game is meant to be played with a controller and its a very easy game. FPS with an Xbox controller isn't even a valid comparison. A more valid one would be a PC FPS with only a mouse/keyboard option. I get not liking controllers but just how bad can you be with them? Not trying to sound rude here but obviously, this is an issue with you (being unable to play with a controller). Yeah the limited joystick support sucks but some parts of the game would be very had to complete with a joystick. More than likely you'd need a controller to finish at least a few sections of the game even if you could use the stick of your choice. Pretty much any tunnel section part. Flight model just isn't precise enough and physically moving the stick around would take too long compared a controller thumbstick.

I'm with you there on the story though. Seems to be stuck in the 2000s and actually regressed in quality from the PS2 era. Typical Japanese nonsense. Whenever I see a game made by a Japanese developer I know it will be either pretty silly or outright nonsense. Sadly they decided to double down on the nonsense bit. But no one (or not enough) will complain because that is "part of the charm" for Japanese games apparently. Japanese video games seem to have doubled down on the cringey, gibberish story telling as of late. Personally I wish they'd get better but I don't see that happening. One just has to look at all the childish sword fighting RPGs with massive floating swords that come out of Japan to see how bad Japanese can be with making a decent setting.

The first AC game I played was 4 and the story actually was decent, especially for 2001. Wish they went that route instead of the crappy overly personal and in your face style they did with 7.


And I'll add a mini DLC review for Last Light Redux.

Metro Last Light Redux - Anna

Not sure if I ever played the original version of this DLC. What I do know is that it is broken to the point it cannot be completed in Redux. There is a section in which you have to take on a few soldiers. The issue stems from the fact that as soon as en enemy detects you, they can instantly kill you. They don't even have to be aiming in your direction. Meanwhile they can take dozens of shots before going down, yet they can seemingly shoot through cars while you can't. Or maybe they drop a nuke on you because they can instantly kill you from any angle from any position.

Put a claymore down? Boom got one, but you're instantly dead the second it goes off.

Maybe you're supposed to wait for them to sneak around but I've tried it about a dozen times. They will always find you. Besides, you don't play an FPS game to to hide in shadows. That isn't "stealth". Its retarded.

I've got lucky to kill a few of them before they detected me but once it happens game over. To make matters worse there is no save system so the game decides to make you watch a long cutscene that lasts longer than the "action" each time you respawn.

Utterly terrible. If you played Last Light and were thinking of getting Redux for the DLC don't. It is unfinished and isn't worth your time.

0/10

Can't complete = 0. The main game itself was fun and perfectly fine in the Redux version.


Edit: The hits just keep on coming. The Metro Redux DLC is utterly broken dogshit.

Metro Last Light Redux - Sniper Something (can't be bothered to look up the name of this fucking turd)

Another one that cannot be completed. Because the Metro developers were too lazy to implement a quick save function you'll get stuck in an endless "check point save" loop that results in you loosing with no chance to correct it. In this DLC the enemy will ring a bell and you'll magically loose the mission. The problem is you have literally 3 seconds to react to this which means moving, finding, and killing numerous enemies before the bells ring. You'll only have enough time to start walking before you instantly fail and there are no NPCs in your line of sight.

Another reason why no quick saves in games should be illegal.

0/10


Can't be completed due to technical reasons yet again.

I think at this point you can write off Metro Redux if you plan on playing the DLC because the developers are lazy bastards and didn't bother testing or implementing a proper quick save system. The main game you can limp by without it although it is still immoral and wrong, you can still finish it. The DLC is simply unfinished. If you're obsessed with DLC or hours it takes to finish a game, keep this in mind. The main campaign will last 10-12 hours depending on your play style.

Edited to remove some language.
 
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That is laughable. I get not enjoying it but being unable to play at all with a controller? This kind of game is meant to be played with a controller and its a very easy game. FPS with an Xbox controller isn't even a valid comparison. A more valid one would be a PC FPS with only a mouse/keyboard option. I get not liking controllers but just how bad can you be with them? Not trying to sound rude here but obviously, this is an issue with you (being unable to play with a controller). Yeah the limited joystick support sucks but some parts of the game would be very had to complete with a joystick. More than likely you'd need a controller to finish at least a few sections of the game even if you could use the stick of your choice. Pretty much any tunnel section part. Flight model just isn't precise enough and physically moving the stick around would take too long compared a controller thumbstick.
IMO No game is meant to be played with a controller. Racing games = Wheel, Shooters = Mouse, flying = Stick. The controller is a compromise for everything. Obviously it is not completely unplayable since I was able to do three missions, however I can't say I enjoyed it. And why would I play a game I don't enjoy? Hence it is unfit for my consumption. In short: Unplayable.

PS: Ok, fighting games are better with a controller, or I should say least bad with a controller.
 
I would say most third-person action games work perfectly fine with a controller, arguably better than KB/M in my experience. Having no analog movement is pretty balls with those games.
 
Red Dead Redemption 2:
7/10

Pluses:
Graphics are great. While it's only 30fps, it doesn't ever seem to run into performance issues. Typical great Rockstar animation. Lots of different environmental and lighting effects, too.
Storyline is also terrific. The game sets up a huge story arch that takes years and traverses 1/2 the country, a Caribbean island, dozens of characters, and even two leads. Acting and writing are top notch most of the time.
The world feels alive. Unlike similar games, there is someone or something to interact with around every corner. It seems like things are happening all around you even if the events are scripted.

Minuses:
Controls are horrendous. Aiming is either automatic or non-existent. Buttons contextually change at random (or with no forethought) with disastrous results often coming as a result.
UI is equally awful. Minor tasks are tedious and often pointless. Menus are clunky. There are too many things to keep track of and none of your various meters (of which there are too many) tell you anything important at a glance.
Pacing is too slow. You'll find yourself doing the same things over an over again in a slog. Loading time, travel time, menu time, etc. all = taking too long to accomplish anything. Your characters even slow down to a crawl in many areas simply to waste time. It's a game, not a documentary about the tedium of the late 1800's.

On the surface this game could have been an all-time great. The problem is that actually playing the game is a massive exercise in frustration. It's a story you want to experience that's hampered by a game that isn't very fun to play. In fact, it's probably a great title to watch an edited/recorded stream of.

I feel like the devs could have literally ported the exact same UI from GTA5 or even the first game and nothing would have been lost. Ditto with 2-way quick travel to areas you have already traversed.
 
I would say most third-person action games work perfectly fine with a controller, arguably better than KB/M in my experience. Having no analog movement is pretty balls with those games.
I gladly trade analogue movement for more precise aiming. Any 3rd person action game I was forced to play with a controller was an absolute nightmare.
 
Far Cry New Dawn

Essentially the fourth iteration of Far Cry 3, Ubisoft released New Dawn as a sequel to Far Cry 5. How well does it hold up?

Starting off with the gameplay, it is very similar to the 3/4/5. While Far Cry 3 at the time was fairly innovative and I thought great I feel as if the series hasn't kept up with the times. 5 felt like a regression, and New Dawn continues this trend. Shooting mechanics aren't that great for 2019. Weapons feel weak, sound fake and don't do a whole lot of damage. Animations are also a bit underwhelming. The whole shooting aspect of this game is a bit lame which is a big negative as this is a shooter. More on weak weapons further down.

The game follows the well established open world formula of capturing outposts and having many repeating side activities. Outposts themselves can be fun if effort was put into them, but in general the outposts in New Dawn feel stale. A few clumps of buildings, most are very flat, nothing fun to infiltrate. They're fairly uninteresting areas. After keeping the formula the same for four games you'd think Ubisoft could venture out a bit more here. Why must we fight in such boring places/setups?

General open world bits that at this point are a bit tired and done too many times return. "Hunting" is back, although not as necessary this time. Gathering plants for medkits is still a thing but thankfully was never a problem for me as I always seemed to have ample supply. The map size is smaller than FC5 but still feels big enough. The problem is there isn't much interesting to see in it.

The big changes to the game are the introduction of RPG mechanics. I hated the idea and still do, but the length of the game made these features practically pointless. You now have to gain resources to upgrade various facilities at your home/base, which allows you to upgrade things like your health or unlock better weapon types. It all feels out of place and slapped on though. Why would upgrading a building make a character physically stronger? In any case, there is a lot of juggling for resources such as fuel (a currency needed to buy stuff). At first this was overwhelming, you needed fuel, random parts for guns, and needed to level up.

But there are issues with the pacing and the RPG mechanics. Getting fuel naturally was an utter pain up front. You would have to re-capture outposts to get new fuel, which you needed to get better weapons or health. I love the idea of re-capturing outposts once the game is over but making us do them again before we finish the story was lame.

Weapon balancing due to the level requirements was terrible. Low tier weapons turn into airsoft guns against higher tier enemies. The enemies become bullet sponges until you get that fuel to get better weapons. But there are two downsides to this. For one, you loose access to some weapon types meaning your choice of weapons is artificially low. This limits the pool of weapons you can use unless you're okay with shooting someone 50-60 times. Tier 2 weapons as an example come and go so quickly that you never have a chance to even use them, and that tier had some of the more unique ones. Once you do get some high end weapons at tier 4 you can cut down pretty much every enemy though. And some weapons like the grenade launcher are just too good. You get around 30 shots and it makes pretty much everything else worthless. Essentially the RPG mechanics add nothing useful and only detract from the experience.

Due to the above, it makes using things like take downs early on in the game difficult. It becomes too suicidal to get close to enemies because your low tier weapons don't do enough damage and you need to stay at a distance. Other things like animal cages return from FC3 but like FC5, they're not that useful practically. So the game starts to feel stale as all you can do from a practical perspective is shoot people with underwhelming shooting gameplay.

The last bit of missions are small off map missions where you grab a package and escape via helicopter. Only one or two missions were challenging and the rest were a breeze. This is mainly designed to get hard to find resources to upgrade your guns. However I found these to be pretty fun. Some of the maps themselves are interesting such as an aircraft carrier or a crashed satellite. When you redo the missions are a higher level they can still be easy but offer enough enemies to keep you on your toes.

Stability was perfect though. I don't recall a single crash and there were not many bugs. A very polished game, and controls were fairly responsive. Graphics were decent. Nothing stellar but good enough to get the job done. Coming from Metro Exodus it looked outdated, but compared to most games it isn't that bad looking. Graphically the biggest issue was the childish art style. The neon, rainbow coloring on everything looks like something a 10 year old would come up with and doesn't fit the post apocalyptic theme of the game. But props to Ubisoft for not making an utter shitshow. They have a history of atrocious controls (Ghost Recon Wildlands, various Assassins Creed games) so good on them for doing this game right.

The story is probably the worst of all the recent Far Cry games. This is even a step down from 5. There are two bad sisters who kill people and set stuff on fire, and you need to kill them. That is about as advanced as it gets. There are no interesting characters, the major story mission plot points are utterly stupid and there are no real plot twists. The game throws some gibberish at the end similar to Far Cry 5.

That sounds like a list of mostly negative points. Is the game really that bad? Not necessarily. It is underwhelming but wholly playable. It does nothing well but everything is decent enough to be acceptable. There is still fun to be had. Using an MG42 with incendiary rounds can be pretty damn fun even if entirely OP. Allowing you to replay the resource run missions and the outposts give some extra replayability even if low in quality, I think it helps the game.

7.5/10


 
not that I have tried it or anything but get an analog keyboard then :shy: https://wooting.io/wootingone

I always thought it would be cool to have an analog keyboard, or some analog keys. Not sure that the support is really there in games, though, and I suspect any sort of analog stick emulation would be funky.

Alternately, you can use this thing, though it's not really being produced anymore.
 
The CoolerMaster 850 Keyboard has some level of analog functionality. That's been one of those things the industry has needed for a while. I get that we use keyboards to type, but I still think a separate section with analog key functionality and better ergonomics could go a long way. Mice are obviously the bee's knees for gaming, but the keyboard isn't bringing anything to the table except a whole bunch of buttons arranged for anything but gaming.
 
Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown (2019)

View attachment 154635

Imagine that, a flying game on PC that doesn't support a flight controller!

Hey M76, try this

https://guides.gamepressure.com/ace-combat-7/guide.asp?ID=48549

The stupid game only supports a couple joysticks for PC which no one likely has (I don't, I have a logitech wingman something... $30 like 15 years ago)

That guide shows how to remap the controller in steam before you launch the game. Having seen this... I think I might give Strike Suit Zero another try, if I can change the horrible default controls.
 
Hey M76, try this

https://guides.gamepressure.com/ace-combat-7/guide.asp?ID=48549

The stupid game only supports a couple joysticks for PC which no one likely has (I don't, I have a logitech wingman something... $30 like 15 years ago)

That guide shows how to remap the controller in steam before you launch the game. Having seen this... I think I might give Strike Suit Zero another try, if I can change the horrible default controls.

And my 15 year old graphics card doesn't run the game either, it sucks. /S

But that may work. I know people use it for Switch & PS controllers on Steam.

I'll give it a try with my X52 and see if it works.
 
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And my 15 year old graphics card doesn't run the game either, it sucks. /S
You know that is not an honest comparison, since a joystick does not become obsolete. A Joystick from 2001 has the exact same functions as a joystick from 2016.

Case in point: the joystick I have can still be purchased brand new right now. It's not a model that has been discontinued for a decade.

But OK, let's say I buy one of the sticks the game supports, but the next game that comes along decides to include controllers from another MFG, then what, should I go and buy a new controller for every game? This is not right.
 
Hey M76, try this

https://guides.gamepressure.com/ace-combat-7/guide.asp?ID=48549

The stupid game only supports a couple joysticks for PC which no one likely has (I don't, I have a logitech wingman something... $30 like 15 years ago)

That guide shows how to remap the controller in steam before you launch the game. Having seen this... I think I might give Strike Suit Zero another try, if I can change the horrible default controls.
Thanks, I've seen that previously, tried it multiple times but didn't work for me at all. Whatever I do the game only accepts inputs from the keyboard / mouse even if I set everything up according to that guide.
 
You know that is not an honest comparison, since a joystick does not become obsolete. A Joystick from 2001 has the exact same functions as a joystick from 2016.

Case in point: the joystick I have can still be purchased brand new right now. It's not a model that has been discontinued for a decade.

But OK, let's say I buy one of the sticks the game supports, but the next game that comes along decides to include controllers from another MFG, then what, should I go and buy a new controller for every game? This is not right.

The /S stands for sarcasm. It was a joke. :p
 
Shadow of the Tomb Raider


A weak entry in the recent Tomb Raider reboot. Gameplay pacing is bad. There are few combat sequences and many of those force stealth upon the player. In many sections Lara decides to discard her firearms. Often times she comes upon enemies armed with guns and grenades but she is unable to pick them up. The adventure to combat ratio is certainly not ideal and the instances that are there aren't very good. They typically end up being very short as well. It is also important to mention the upgrade system. The weapons have many upgrades, but due to the infrequency of using them you may amass half a dozen or more upgrades before you get to use them again (or even at all). You may pick up a shotgun, shoot five shots, and then get 50% of the upgrades before you can use it again. And if you want to use it again, you may have 90% of the upgrades. Essentially the whole system felt pointless.

The puzzle sections were a huge step down. Often times there are jumps that look impossible to reach, but you actually can jump to them. Or vice versa. This is something many others seemed to have found as well. The puzzle design and navigation was simply done poorly and often had to rely on Lara magically getting a push mid air to physically reach something. There are other quirks to. An example is turning wheels. If I hold the A key to turn a wheel left, it will stop halfway because to continue turning it left you must now hit the D key. This made no sense and confused me a few times in puzzles as I had thought I had turned the wheels all the way. Other puzzles require you to view lights which are barely visible and just makes verification an utter pain.

Side quests were utterly boring. They had little relation to the overall plot, were often outright stupid and felt more like a pure time waster. Collecting items also got the shaft this time around as many items you pick up are literally the same. I picked up the same old pots/tools multiple times. And many times there are notes but they reuse the same old picture. For a Tomb Raider game this felt lazy and underwhelming.

Map navigation was horrid. Leaving the main hub area meant you had to travel around a lot. Refer to the 2nd paragraph to see why this was a pain. Objective markers were often inaccurate which meant slowly wondering around an otherwise pointless city manned by primitives.

Story wise the game was all over the place. I had little understanding of what was going on. Rise of the Tomb Raider brought in the organization Trinity to the forefront and Shadow jumped head first into it with little explanation. The antagonist apparently came out of nowhere. Lara has many awkward emotional breakdowns that feel out of place and out of character. The entire ending section felt rushed and I had little idea what actually occurred in the game.

Graphically the game was great. Lighting was excellent, objects looked stunning, the interiors of the tombs/caves looked wonderful. The artwork in general was fairly nice. It was very taxing though. My GTX 1070 SC, AMD 2700X and 16GB of RAM weren't enough for a stable 60 frame rates at 2560x1440. I averaged around 45 or so.

Overall this game felt rushed. It was a very unsatisfactory way to end the trilogy. From gameplay to story, the game simply wasn't what it should have been.

6/10
 
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I would say most third-person action games work perfectly fine with a controller, arguably better than KB/M in my experience. Having no analog movement is pretty balls with those games.

I love third person games, probably my all-time favorite camera angle. Much prefer it to first person, and I'll stick to that all day long. I think a controller is absolutely perfect for those, and having grown up with consoles, it works absolutely perfectly with a twin stick setup for movement and camera angle. If the same game happens to be on PC and I want to experience it with all the graphic goodies turned on (4K namely), I'm completely happy with a keyboard/mouse setup as well. Something about third person though, just feels fantastic and really lets you admire the animations.
 
I love third person games, probably my all-time favorite camera angle. Much prefer it to first person, and I'll stick to that all day long. I think a controller is absolutely perfect for those, and having grown up with consoles, it works absolutely perfectly with a twin stick setup for movement and camera angle. If the same game happens to be on PC and I want to experience it with all the graphic goodies turned on (4K namely), I'm completely happy with a keyboard/mouse setup as well. Something about third person though, just feels fantastic and really lets you admire the animations.

Sshhhh don't tell anyone... but I use a controller on my PC. My mouse/keyboard skills have deteriorated greatly as I get older.
 
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