The choices that you can make in this game are often dense and crowded in mystery, meaning you never know what the actual decision of your decision will be unless they spell it out. Essentially, this is the narrative version of those 90's point and click puzzle games that gave you zero clues and expected you to stumble in the dark until you somehow figured out the random combination of things to click

If you've ever felt upset that you didn't get on Minecraft when it first came out, this is the PERFECT game for you. Not only does it have a similar level of building and exploration, but you can also basically run Valheim on a potato (compared to what you're getting).

Just to give you an idea of how fun and engrossing this game is, my two friends and I logged in for the first time and were told by the game that we need to kill a certain Bad Thing. As we all know of course, to kill the Bad Thing, we need to get some armor and weapons. Well, to get good armor and weapons, you need to get your crafting table and a good shelter going.

So, 4 hours later and my one friend and I are building our cabin, arguing the finer points of chimney and balcony placement. Apparently, my chimney for our fire was blocking the view of his balcony and he didn't accept that it was a very rustic aesthetic. The middle ground, and quite frankly what I've done ever since, is just build an external chimney: He get his nice clear views, and we don't get smoke clogging up our house.

In the meantime, my other friend has spent about an hour trying to tame a boar, completely ignoring our objective or the need for us to level up and get better gear. Of course, he wants to show us his progress by surprising us, and while leading us there told us to mysteriously 'not attack anything we see'.

What happened you may ask? Well, we pretty much immediately killed the boar because it was 7 am, none of us had slept, and we had no patience for the suspense.

And so that's how we spent the first 5 hours of the game: Building, exploring, and taming the wild, while managing to completely forget about any quests or missions we needed to do.

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Now, all that being said, there are a couple of minor downsides that aren't dealbreakers:

1) My main complaint is that the tutorials and information are doled out to you in a very obtuse manner, so a lot of times you basically just have to go by trial and error to figure things out. Better tooltips would help with this, and just generally better tutorials, but it is very similar to Minecraft in that you're better off finding somebody with experience, or going on a wiki and looking things up yourself.

2) My other complaint is that the penalties for death are a bit too harsh right now. Pretty much everything you do has an associated skill (even running and jumping) and when you die, you lose a percentage of that across the board. This can put you in a situation where you lose a lot of your progress because of silly mistakes or dying in an awful spot (you drop everything and need to go back). If death was a little bit less harsh on the skill loss I think the game progress would be a bit more enjoyable.

3) Similar to the point above I feel like the item cost for building stuff is a little bit high. Again, a tweak here to bring the item cost down would be super appreciated.

Either way, all of the three points above are things that will almost certainly be tweaked and dealt with going forward, and they don't require a foundational change in the game to rebalance, so I *do* expect it to happen as somebody who's had a lot of experience with Early Access titles.

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Overall, I would say this game scores a strong 4.5/5 and I would highly recommend. I think this game is gonna become really big and popular, and I do hope to see mods and things like that make their way into the same way that they did in Minecraft.

The core gameplay loop is ultimately quite a lot of fun, although the truth is that once you figure that out, the only thing left is to try it on different maps, and sadly there's only an option of about 4-5. The DLCs are interesting, but again, they suffer from an over lack of content variety (they introduce new systems, but don't really give you enough maps to try them out on, just the one that comes with the DLC really.)

Overall this is a fun and enjoyable game, and if you can the DLC on sale, they'll give you a few hours of fun game play each at least.

While I'm not particularly big on survival games, I have to say that The Long Dark manages to capture my interest really well.

For starters, the survival isn't focused so much on building, like you would find on other games, but instead focuses on getting yourself through each day while exploring a frozen wilderness. The difficulty scaling is excellent, unlike other games where they'll just let mobs cheat or just go out of their way to make your life miserable. Each day you survive really feels like an achievement, instead of just another box that's been ticket.

On of my favorite parts though is the amazing art style and atmosphere. I can't tell you how many times I've almost died because I just sat there looking at everything around me. I think there's an over-reliance on the mechanics in the survival genre and a lot of games don't put as much effort into their environments and atmosphere, an issue which The Long Dark doesn't have.

While I don't have as many hours as other people have had in this game, I'm already in love with it and I plan to come back to it for years to come, especially as the episodic story gets added.

Either way, this is totally worth the buy if you want to experience more realistic survival in a gorgeous environment . . . that wants to kill you.

There are several issues with CIV VI, mostly revolving around the mechanics, and the new style of gameplay that is a large departure from previous games. While generally that's ok, it's up to the developer how they want their game to evolve, one thing that is not ok is their business practices. Which is why I have to *not* recommend this game and here's the two main reasons:

Firstly, it would seem that several mechanics of the previous games were left out so that they could be sold piece-meal later on as DLC. This is not a practice that they had in CIV V and all the previous games. Up until CIV V, the mechanics of the previous game would be add to the new one, which is not the case with CIV VI.

* Secondly, and most damingly, it has come to light that CIV VI has RedShell (A spyware program) integrated right into it, meaning that the game won't run if you delete the RedShell files.

Now, I know a lot of developers have said that RedShell is not spyware. The truth is that gathering any information, without your explicit consent, and your ability to opt-out, is completely illegal and exactly what spyware is. It is nobody's right to data mine you, and you should *never* be ok with that.

I'm an old school gamer, part of the old guard, which means I was around when most games were text-based. I tell you now that games should *not* be used to gather information that helps marketing, that is absolutely not what games are meant to be. If they want your information they can ask you for it, and do it the way everybody else does it, legitimately, by carrying out a survey that you opt-in to.

I have never been ok with, or ever will be ok with, my games which I bought and paid for, collecting my information for any purpose and neither should you. Furthermore, if I was you, I would send an e-mail to both Steam and 2k to make it clear that you do not support this practice.

*Edit: So it seems that Redshell has been removed from Civ VI which is great, but unfortunately this remains a no. After playing the game for a bit longer, I have to agree with a lot of people that the AI is not good. I understand that it's a complex game and something like this isn't easy, but when you play solo, you can only play against AI.

Also, the whole warring system needs to be revamped. If I get declared on, I shouldn't be getting such heavy warmonger penalties for taking cities. This makes no sense.

Let me start off, like most people, by saying that Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is almost an excellent game.

The gameplay mechanics are great, taking the fun parts of Human Revolution and make them so much more streamlined and fun to play. The graphics are equally an impressive improvement on the previous game, and even by today's standards, are scenic and full of life. Hell, even the side-missions are an absolute ton of fun, since they really do give some great insight into the Deus Ex world and what you're doing.

Unfortunately, what stopped it reaching excellence was the story.

You know, I can forgive bugs, especially with such a massive undertaking as a AAA game. I can forgive mistakes being made here and there with Breach. I can forgive low FPS even on low settings with a reasonably good card. I can even forgive having to retrace a whole hour of gameplay because of a bug that kept crashing my game. What I can't forgive is taking the story, and cutting it up into DLC sized chunks to sell after the fact.

Let me preface the next part with three disclaimers; (1) It may contain spoilers, although I'll do my best to avoid that (2) I pre-purchased the Digital Delux version for the DLC (3) I am a professional writer, both content and creative, so I understand the practical and theoretical aspects of story building.

So let's talk about the story. Basically, it follows on from the previous game, getting into the nitty gritty of segregation based on nothing else than fear and loathing. The storyline definitely harkens back to the early 1900s with the civil rights movement in the USA, with some parallels that give some great perspective on the whole ordeal. It adds a nice touch
to the game, making it relevant both as a historical lesson as well as to the modern day, especially when you consider terrorist like elements within the game story.

Ultimately though, the main focus is the Illuminati, or more precisely, a non-descript organization of people that are pulling strings across the world to carry out their own unknown agenda. Adam's job, while mostly serving as a member of an elite counter-terrorist unit, is to figure out who is in the Illuminati, and what their true objective is. I mean, I don't really need to tell you all that, it's always what Deus Ex was about.

Of course, these strings that are currently being pulled have some connection to the augmented rights group ARC. Being lead by an enigmatic doctor, this group isn't all that it seems, or at the very least, certain elements aren't necessarily in-line with the philosophy of their dear doctor. Ultimately, this all leads to a big boss fight in the end ( the final boss being a member of ARC ) and that's it.

Alright, well that all sounds great, so what? Why am I complaining? Well, the answer to that is simple: I feel cheated.

The story is always building up towards dealing with the Illuminati, with ARC acting as somewhat of a red herring or a stepping stone to the real confrontation: the top echelon of the Illuminati. That confrontation though, never comes. Instead, you fight the final boss at the end and that's it, no real mention or anything of the Illuminati. Even killing the boss doesn't give you any new information which could act as a lead-in to a sequel.

And that's where the problem lies. With the recent information on the upcoming DLC, it's clear as day that the story has been intentionally cut pre-maturely, so that the true conclusion can be provided in the DLC. That means that the base game is completely worthless as a story unless you purchase the season pass as well. That means you're paying well into the 80-90 dollar range just to get a story-complete game.

Now, some may argue that people don't necessarily play games for the sake of the story. Those people are hypocrites if they bought Deus Ex. Much like MGS, the story in Deus Ex is the driving force of the series, with the mechanics equally being a unique part of what makes the game so engaging and enjoyable. So when you take out what is essentially the third act of a story, and sell it as a game, you are really selling something that inherently has no value, not because it isn't engaging, but because it has no conclusion, not even a pseudo conclusion, like a cliffhanger.

So what does this all boil down to? Well, Deus Ex is a fun yet somewhat mindless game, with the story's philosophizing on segregation and what it is to be human being completely deadened by the fact that it's incomplete. It's a little bit insane, building up a whole argument and then coming to the crux where you deliver the killing blow, only to shut up and sit down.

What's the TL;DR then? Well, don't even bother buying the game unless you also purchase the DLC, because you really are only going to get the first two acts, which will leave you unsatisfied and feeling, like I did, that you were cheated out of a story you've been waiting to continue for several years. If you don't plan on buying the DLC, either because you don't want to spend that much money, or don't agree with the concept of DLCs, then I would say skip this game until it's on sale when you can pick everything up cheap.

As for myself, I might have played for 30 hours, but I feel that I deserve a refund, because I was sold a novel, and all I got was a short story.