Almost one year after completing Veilguard, I am still baffled that Bioware managed to ♥♥♥♥ up this badly. It is beyond tragic how such a fascinating and morally complex setting was reduced to colourful slop that doesn't want the player to think at all.

Worst of all, they ruined Dorian and I can never forgive that.

Every once in a while there's a new game that reminds you how absolutely mediocre most other games are. This is that sort of game.

If you like to cry a lot and also get your ass kicked (though not always at the same time), play Clair Obscur.

I should preface this review by pointing out that I have only watched two Indiana Jones movies: Raiders of the Lost Ark and Temple of Doom. I'm sure those movies are for someone, but that someone is not me.

And yet I had an amazing time with this game. I bought The Great Circle on a whim after seeing some gameplay footage and because this genre of theme-park action adventure with some light parkouring, stealth, and combat is absolutely my cup of tea. All those elements are competently done in The Great Circle, which speaks of a game that knows what it wants to be.

Story is the other essential component to a good action adventure and once again, the writers understood the assignment. In between the clichés and the macguffins, there's a Nazi villain who is not bland, compelling cutscenes, and generally solid dialogue. To my immense relief, Indy is no longer a loathsome misogynist but actually likeable. At one point, his female sidekick admits to a particular fear (I'll keep it vague to avoid spoilers) and the fact that Indy responds by reassuring her rather than ridiculing her instantly cured the trauma I suffered from watching Temple of Doom. Instead, Indy's fear of snakes is consistently made fun of, which is perhaps not entirely fair since it is just as valid.

My point being, this is probably a game for Indiana Jones fans (since it plays on the nostalgia a great deal) but it is also emphatically a game for people like me who really can't stand the movies. That's pretty impressive. Good job, MachineGames. =)

You may think this is a game about going to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry while enjoying some open world RPG extracurricular activities on the side.

You would be wrong.

This is a game about a fifteen-year-old sociopath. Though they have only just begun their first year at Hogwarts, they have, within their first week, mastered a sufficient number of spells to be undefeatable in combat.

When they are not wiping the floor with battle-hardened dark wizards, Protagonist is routinely breaking and entering into private homes, stealing everything that is not nailed down. Why does no one react to being robbed blind in broad daylight you may wonder?

I mean, what exactly do you expect people to do?

Would you speak up if a murderous lunatic showed up in your place, a lunatic who, I should remind you, spends their time off burning poachers alive and smashing goblins into hard objects? A lunatic who has access to an ancient magic with which they can literally disintegrate you with the flick of a wrist?

No, you stay quiet. You may laugh nervously. You comment on how Alohomora really is a neat little spell, and you pray that the insane person leaves your house as quickly as possible. You try to pretend that a shiver is not running down your spine as they beam at you happily after rifling through your underwear. You see, Protagonist is a high-functioning sociopath, perfectly capable of keeping up appearances in society. They really liked your grandmother’s old robes and they’re totally making off with them, but they’ll wish you a good day as they leave your house.

Rumours spread in the Valley of a terrifying new evil with a cheerful voice and an unhealthy obsession with wild animals …

///

What I’m trying to say here is that the ludonarrative dissonance is real.

The game also performs absolutely atrociously. Since early access the constant stutter has improved marginally, but it’s still extremely noticeable and disruptive. With my 3080 I had expected to be able to turn on RTX (while playing at 1440p), but that essentially makes the game unplayable. Further patches are necessary and I am wondering why no NVIDIA driver update for the game has dropped yet.

Wait, is the “recommended” rating a mistake?

It is not, actually. I adore this game! Like many others, I grew up with Harry Potter – reading the books, then watching the movies, and even though JKR has spectacularly ruined her own reputation, I still feel a great deal of nostalgia for this world.

And Hogwarts Legacy delivers. It is the colours that are just right, it is the broom-flying, the nods and references, the sheer detail in Hogwarts castle. The story is nothing ground-breaking, but pretty decent. The side quests are not hugely boring. I actually like that the “puzzles” can be done in two minutes, it gives the game a nice flow. Combat is definitely fun. Hogwarts Legacy is hella cozy and I’m loving it.

There are some gripes I still have with the game – the low amount of gear slots, the lack of interaction with the school, certain quests that are really dark in tone which none of the characters seem to acknowledge – but this is mostly nitpicking.

Overall, Hogwarts Legacy is really good, actually. Who would have thought?

After about 145h (most of them from before the game was released on Steam), I have, at long last, completed the main campaign, story DLC, and epilogue. And so only one question remains: Is Valhalla a good Assassin’s Creed game?

Well, no. It is fundamentally not an Assassin’s Creed game – Valhalla is about AC as much as, say, Skyrim is about racism. Yes, it has some of that, no, it isn’t what the game is about. Eivor, the protagonist, vehemently refuses to join the Assassins for the entirety of the game though they still hunt down the proto-Templars (aka the Order of the Ancients) because … Hytham asked nicely? Well, I guess, why not.

That is not to say Ubi didn’t *try* to make it an AC game. There are plenty of nods and references, scenery reminiscent of the Ezio trilogy and AC III (Tombs of the Fallen!), and they brought back familiar faces in the modern day segment – sort of. You see, there is a character called “Shaun” who looks deceptively like a character of the same name from earlier AC games and even has the same VA, but where Shaun used to be a hilarious snarky ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ (and my favourite character), this weird new clone is just kinda there to be friendly and helpful and utterly devoid of personality. Thanks, I hate it.

The only thing that astonished me about the game was how perfectly bland it is. I wouldn’t say the story is bad, necessarily – except for the various endings, those were pretty awful – but it also isn’t memorable by any stretch of the imagination. Many reviewers before me have lamented the pointless, bloated, meandering quest lines about conquering England so it suffices to say here that I agree wholeheartedly. It was a boring slog and the payoff was minimal. As the protagonist, Eivor had their moments - I certainly enjoyed them always being the voice of reason - but ultimately there was no growth whatsoever and the character remained as bland as the rest of the game.

The gameplay loop gets tired fast. Because stealth feels off – enemies are either complete morons or they can spot you from across the camp with no line of sight – I mostly murdered my way through the game in melee combat, mashing buttons. I figured since I am not playing an assassin anyway there was no point in bothering with frustrating stealth mechanics - not to mention that it would also be completely out of character for Eivor who very clearly said they consider stealth cowardly. Why are they the protagonist in an AC game again? Anyway, after a couple of hours, you have seen all the finisher animations in combat which then just become boring to watch over and over again. I was not a fan of AC Odyssey, but I have to say its stealth and combat were definitely better than Valhalla’s.

The game’s redeeming factor is its visual quality. It’s just straight-up gorgeous and a big part of why I finished it is because I wanted to see new, pretty environments. On my (fairly high-end) system, the game ran like a dream at solid 60FPS – at least until the next crash because, oh boy, this game is extremely unstable. It crashes all the time. This happens in addition to a colourful assortment of minor and major bugs which, two years after release, are still commonplace. In a full-price game with a ludicrously expensive ingame MTX shop. That takes balls, Ubi.

The DLC were more of the same for the most part. Wrath of the Druids resembled the main campaign in how completely forgettable it was while Siege of Paris at least made an effort to be a bit more cinematic. I absolutely loved Paris and exploring the sewers underground, it was the first time I felt like I was playing an AC game. The focus on assassination missions helped though again it seemed completely out of character for Eivor. Nevertheless, I wore Basim’s robes for the entire DLC and pretended I was there to solve a difficult situation as an assassin. Putting the “role-playing” into RPG and all that. SoP was definitely diminished by a completely pointless “rebel mission” system which was neither tied into the DLC main quest nor became otherwise relevant at any point in the DLC. They didn’t even try to conceal the fact that it was added as busywork to stretch the playtime.

In conclusion, AC Valhalla – just like AC Odyssey – cannot possibly be called an Assassin’s Creed game. As a Norse vikingr RPG, it was alright and if you like riding through pretty scenery while casually checking off forgettable missions, side quests, and various collectables without any challenging gameplay or complex stories, then you may well enjoy this game. I definitely enjoyed AC Valhalla sometimes, for an hour here or there. Overall, it was still a massive waste of my time and I hope the trend of bloated-games-unrelated-to-AC is over with this pointless entry into the series.

Steam, where's the "neutral rating" button?

A New Frontier is shorter than most Telltale games, certainly shorter than the previous TWD titles, but it somehow still manages to be all over the place. Somewhere between "we want a new protagonist" and "Clem is our mascot", the narrative team decided to have their cake and eat it which backfired.

Clem is present for most of the story and she's pretty awesome but that also means she constantly steals the new protagonist's spotlight. As the player, I also felt a strong dissonance between how I wanted to interact with Clem and how Javi should interact with her. She's a virtual stranger, why do you trust her so quickly? Very much of her part in the story feels shoehorned in.

Otherwise, the brevity is reflected in the overall story. Interactions with people outside the main group are missing to the point that I feel very detached from their struggles although the story in the final episodes largely revolves around their fate. I never met these folks. Why would I care? Why does Javi care, why do my companions?

Ultimately, A New Frontier is a typical 6/10. Not great, not terrible. It's sad to think about the wasted potential.

What confused me throughout the entire story was why David took away AJ after Clem tries to steal medicine for him. Regardless of whether she injected him or not, he basically tells her the kid's gonna die anyway, he's just another mouth to feed, and so they kick her out for wasting medicine on him. But then ... David decides they'll keep AJ? What? Shouldn't they be happy to get rid of the baby? Didn't they just say he'd die anyway? I didn't find an explanation anywhere and it took me completely out of the story for the rest of the game because I kept thinking "the only reason this happened was so Clem would stick around for the rest of the plot." Great.

19-05-2021

Finished my fourth Mass Effect 1 playthrough and it was better than ever. The improved UI, gunplay, and graphics make it difficult to believe that the game originally released all the way back in 2007 - until one is forced to traverse one of the autogenerated planet surfaces with the infamous Mako, that part of the game is still infuriating. However, the stellar writing, pacing, and voice acting as well as the main missions and the world in general more than make up for it.

I encountered a few minor bugs in the remaster some of which forced me to reload a save. Since I played right after release and Bioware already pushed the first post-launch patch, I am confident that these will be ironed out in time.

No.

Pros:

- Insanely beautiful. Seriously, as someone who values good visuals, there wasn't much to criticise. Fires had a weird red shine though. Coming from Origins, it also felt like a visual downgrade to me. I used Reshade to desaturate the game a bit, that helped.

- Kassandra really grew on me. A lot of the dialogue made me cringe or roll my eyes, but she was refreshing as a character.

- About 70% of the gameplay consists of mindlessly running around, clearing out enemy camps and it was so boring that my brain went off to other worlds. It was weirdly relaxing and productive to explore while brainstorming ideas for a story I was working on and murder various enemies in the background. Kind of a bad sign for a single player game though, if it's so boring that you need to occupy your brain with something else while playing.

- The Atlantis DLC was okay. Quite funny at times.

- It made me want to play Origins again. I love that game.

Cons:

- This is not an Assassin's Creed game. It's a meme-around-in-Ancient-Greece game with no interest in a grounded, historical setting whatsoever. Or in Assassin's Creed.

- The story is so boring, bland, and predictable that I missed Syndicate. Yes, Syndicate. After playing Origins, I had high expectations and Odyssey delivered on absolutely none of them.

- Everything was too long. The quest chains were too long, the DLC was too long, the levelling was too long. Oh hey, I completed one quest objective. Time for another bunch of extra requirements and two new fetch quests on the other side of the map.

- The bloat has gone beyond what I had thought possible. Prepare yourself for hundreds of fetch or kill-ten-of-this-type quests with generic, recycled dialogue. Wanna skip them? Better whip out your wallet and buy the XP booster, lol.

- The Legacy of the First Blade DLC was a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ joke. I did not consent to this.

- Microtransactions in a single player game. Screw you, Ubisoft.

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Origins made me cautiously optimistic about this new open world RPG spin on Assassin's Creed (although I still prefer the old games). Odyssey made sure to copy everything except for the good bits from Origins and implemented a grind fest instead.

After almost 80 hours and completing every side mission in the game, I finally finished Cyberpunk 2077. So far I’m not sure how I feel about the ending but I certainly have thoughts about the rest of the game. While I wasn’t as much into the hype as others, I still pre-ordered and got up in the middle of the night to play on launch day.

I have never felt so ambivalent about a game before. It’s not a 3/10 or 6/10 or 10/10 because I cannot possibly merge the things I loved and the things I hated into one score. Here’s my random thoughts on the aspects that I liked and those I really didn’t.

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THE GOOD

Night City, my god, what a beautiful, vast, varied place. At times the lighting and colours reached a level of perfection reminiscent of Control. Sundown in the desert was damn near photorealistic at times. And don’t get me started on the grimy, gloomy perfection that is Japantown and Little China.

Starting out, I went into most gigs as a stealthy hacker and got very frustrated with the unreliable detection system and how difficult it was to tell whether an enemy could be taken out safely with a quickhack or not. Then I tried going in guns blazing instead and suddenly I was playing DOOM. Seriously, the music, the pacing, jumping and sliding all over the place, it felt pretty much like DOOM and I loved it. Played the rest of the game as a complete badass with an assault rifle and the occasional quickhack.

The narrative is solid. Disregarding the disappointing tease that is Act 1, there is a lot to love here. As someone who primarily plays games for the story, I was hooked fairly soon and found myself caring for many of the characters. Some of the main missions were absolutely breathtaking (heh) and I enjoyed all the long conversations a great deal as they were very well written. The endings are a bit of a mixed bag though and I cannot possibly see how any DLC could pick up where they left off.

The music! The soundtrack is awesome (especially the DOOM-esque combat music) but what I absolutely fell in love with was the Samurai tracks by Refused. Will be listening to Never Fade Away, Chippin’ In, and Black Dog for many months to come.

Johnny, I’ll eat every last bullet in the city for you if that’s what it’s going to take. Sniff.

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THE BAD

The original story line and premise were probably scrapped at some point in development to be replaced by what we have now. Bits of it can still be found in the life paths and the entire Act 1, leaving a decidedly bitter taste of what could have been. While I like the narrative that we did get, I felt that Act 1 promised a very different game and it should have been several hours longer at the very least. Developing that friendship with Jackie should never have been relegated to an action montage. The game tells you (briefly) why V cares about Jackie but it never tells you why you, the player, should, and so it all falls flat.

Customisation. There is none. Why do I sink hours upon hours into open world RPGs? Because I can customise my character to a T on my adventures. Appearance, equipment, weapons, mounts/vehicles, perks. I was so certain there would be barbers and tattoo parlors in this game, I didn’t even bother looking it up. In reality, there is nothing. No visual customisation at all, and the stat customisation is utterly boring. You can replace your eyeballs but you can’t cut your hair. There is no vehicle customisation whatsoever. No visible weapon customisation either, and I fail to see where +5% limb damage mods is compelling personalisation of your equipment. There are many perks but the vast majority of them is as boring and uninspired as the weapon/clothing mods. There was plenty of misleading marketing but this for me was the worst. Fashion is everything in Night City? ♥♥♥♥ off. There isn’t even a single decent hat in the entire ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ town.

There is no roleplaying. Dialogue options are very basic and decisions far and few between. V is not going to change based on your actions (or at all, really).

Romance options are limited to say the least. To avoid spoilers, I’ll simply say that after getting together, there’s nothing more going to happen until the very end. Oh, you can move in with your love interest - that is, an icon will appear on your map designating their place as one of your apartments / safe house but there is absolutely no point - unless CDPR seriously expects me to drive across town to make stupid faces in my boyfriend’s mirror.

The NPCs and AI. This has been discussed in many places so I won’t go into too much detail. Whenever danger breaks out, NPCs crouch down into a generic position that looks like a placeholder. Sometimes they panic because I sprint. The police system is a complete joke. They don’t give a ♥♥♥♥ when I go on a rampage trying to drive my bloody car but for some reason get real touchy when I look at them while passing by.

After many years of modding Skyrim, I thought I was resistant enough to not be annoyed by any bugs I might encounter. Boy, was I wrong. The glitches, visual and otherwise, just happen constantly, taking a crap on immersion at every turn. Quests get stuck and require you to reload an earlier save. During one long main mission, a 5 second audio loop from an earlier cutscene got stuck for about ten minutes, playing over relevant dialogue. Since the mission kept going, I couldn’t save/reload to fix it either so it ruined the whole thing. At least the game didn’t crash on me. Yay?

The performance ranges from decent to utterly atrocious. I realise that my processor is getting somewhat outdated (i5 7600k @4.2GHz) and was certainly bottle-necking my GPU (RTX 3080 bought specifically for Cyberpunk). Playing at 1440p with many of the settings turned down and crowd density set to medium, my frame rate would still drop below 20 in the Downtown area which is a bad joke. Outside the city it sat at a comfortable 70-80FPS but as soon as I got closer to the city centre, the game turned into a sluggish, unresponsive mess.

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THE CONCLUSION

I enjoyed the game a great deal. I am also severely disappointed. Cyberpunk 2077 is a rough, unpolished experience that clearly needed more time in the oven. What’s there is (for the most part) very good but constantly overshadowed by what could have been.

Overall, I just cannot recommend the game in its current state.

I expected decent gameplay, pretty graphics. and hopefully a better story than the sequel trilogy. I was not disappointed - quite the opposite in fact.

The game is tagged as Souls-like although true Soulsborne fans might disagree. As someone who isn't particularly interested in difficult combat, I was positively surprised. The swordplay is so much fun that even I could swallow my frustration over getting stuck on certain enemies / bosses at times. Especially fights against melee enemies were incredible.

But what really blew me away was the story, a return to grace to what Star Wars used to be before all the good bits were removed from canon. And you don't have to care about the fandom (although I do) to like the cast of characters. They grew on me so quickly that I pretty much finished the second half of the game in one go because I had to know the conclusion.

The only negative aspect is the performance. With a third-party tool to limit CPU usage to 96%, I eliminated the worst of the stuttering but JFO is the by far worst performing game I have played in recent memory. Especially in combat situations you do NOT want the game to freeze every other second. According to Google, this is an issue with the Unreal Engine and many people are struggling with it. However, I was so in love with the story, gameplay, and visuals that I managed to overlook the terrible optimisation.

EA - please let Respawn make a sequel. Nobody cares that it doesn't have multiplayer. Look how well a game without microtransactions can sell. Pretty please?

Note on the finale: While I knew that Vader would have a cameo at the very end, I was very surprised by how well it was done. This is a character everyone is familiar with and yet, the moment he entered the scene, I was terrified, heart pounding and all. It was brilliant.