Atrocious port even by the standards of ports of its time. You spend more time fighting crashes, replaying content you've already beaten a dozen times because it doesn't actually save progress, and fighting unresponsive controls than anything else. You may be used to "unresponsive controls" meaning something else, but here you can get locked in the inventory easily because every key stops working entirely. There's an interesting story, great soundtrack, and good stuff generally in there, but it's buried under garbage.

The last two chapters are 80% tedious padding to make the game's runtime longer than the 4-5 hours it otherwise would be, slowly and tediously traversing across the entire level to burn some roots so you can make a number go up. Chapter 8 decides to just not actually tell you you need an absurdly high 75+ power unlocked to make it possible to throw a molotov over a shield and proceed. Even that's not a guarantee, because you'll find walkthroughs online where you can pass that part at as little as 50 power, You're best off getting the ps3 version if you're going to bother with this game, since that supposedly fixes at least some of the issues.

It's the STALKER sequel I've been waiting for since the announcement and cancellation of the ca. 2011 version. It's got bugs, and needs a mod to make the flashlight cast shadows, but even Call of Pripyat needed a patch or two. It also works as a stark reminder that the 3080Ti is getting up there in years and might not cut it for much longer.

Once some of the big bugs like quest reward weapons being given to the player at 0% condition, a certain event at the starter town not working, and quick access items not actually being used, we're looking at gold.

Improved visuals, improved character animations, improved mechanics, improved combat that takes some pages from Dead Island: Riptide to offer more moves, improved throwables, the return of player shadows, pretty much everything I hoped for. A few patches to fix the bugs here and there, fix the reversion to Dead Island levels of key rebinding not actually working, and to hopefully restore your flashlight casting dynamic shadows, and the game would be golden.

It's slightly less buggy than the beta, and hitreg isn't complete garbage. It's still ♥♥♥♥. Specialists and varied equipment don't belong in battlefield, air vehicles still dominate everything else, and despite having massive maps, you're still spawned in some stupendously retarded positions, constantly with someone's gun or tank trained on your position as soon as you pop in.
>bruuuuuuuh what about portal
200+ ping servers or hardcore. What kind of choice is that? Nobody's playing.

This free weekend was a great way to confirm my decision to cancel my preorder after the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that was the beta was the right decision. Thanks for saving me money, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥!

They had a good thing going with the first game. It had some jank, bad facefx implementation, framerate issues, and lacked a PC version, but was otherwise a solid title with a killer soundtrack. I hated the sequel when I played the demo back in 2012, decided to give it another try. So far, I'm thoroughly unimpressed. They seemingly retconned everything from the first game but the returning character's designs (minus Jackie), because Jackie sure as hell isn't a slave of the Darkness all of a sudden, and now everyone in the family he suddenly runs knows about it. Guess switching developers made them forget that a sequel is supposed to actually follow the prior entry.

Everything is gimped. Full body first person view is now a scripted event-only thing. You're stuck with a 3 weapon system instead of the wide array you could experiment with. All the darkness powers are gone, replaced with generic slashers and throws. Maybe you unlock more with the tacked-on pseudo-RPG system later on. I'm not holding my breath for blackhole, creeping dark, or darkness guns coming back. Nah, instead I can unlock a slightly larger ammo pool and other useless trash. Can't even spawn darklings on demand.
Even the visuals are gimped. Sure, the characters have higher resolution textures, but everything else from the lighting to the model quality looks like absolute garbage. The music? So generic I don't remember a single bit of the OST from my playtime. To top off the ♥♥♥♥ sandwich, they decided an unfunny quipping british darkling that farts and pisses was a worthwhile addition to the game. Hardly worth the $3 I spent on it.

A free visual fidelity upgrade so your game isn't stuck with console textures. All you need is an actually good graphics card.

It's the same soundtrack you can buy from various online retailers, but for free.
Like most released soundtracks, some songs are curiously missing. The most obvious one in this case is the Volatile chase theme. Sadly, you're stuck with bad youtube rips or trying to record it yourself if you don't want to try and figure out how to crack open the .csb files.

Take Mercenaries and MGSV, mix them together, but remove the best elements of both. Mix in a lot of grinding, the amount you'd expect out of a free to play gacha or an MMO, primarily for leveling up your RPG-lite skills in what's claimed to be a tactical shooter. Make the enemy AI so smart they can see you through the tiniest of cracks in a wall and know exactly where you are at all times, while your Ghost and rebel AI companions are dumb as bricks and only good for reviving you.

Next, make the visuals look worse than games released on the same engine in the same year, and earlier, while it performs worse than even the latest Ubisoft games. Make sure the TAA implementation is bad enough the player never gets a clear image, it must always be blurry.

Finally, make sure the entire campaign, with easily 90+ hours of content for completionist runs, consists of the exact same dozen missions over and over, with the occasional change like "this time, there's a drone jammer and SAM launchers for your helicopter theft mission". What do you get in the end? This trash heap. Luckily, I'm only out a fraction of the cost because I picked it up on sale.

A Techland DLC being bad isn't unprecedented. Ryder White, Bozak Horde, the flop that was Bad Blood, and the dozen or so player texture DLCs they've released show a long-running trend. The only time they've bucked this trend was with The Following, and that was more of a full-fledged expansion pack.

Hellraid isn't absolutely horrible, it's just cheap. Even a cursory glance at wikipedia suggests the real Hellraid wasn't meant to be an hour-long dungeon crawler, but rather like Dead Island with demons and skeletons instead of Kuru zombies. What you get instead is a short dungeon and some reskins. Most skeletons are just reskins of Rais's guys. Slow zombies look like a new model, but all the zombies that move faster and have powers are just the bald woman zombies from Harran with the brightness turned down on their textures. Many items like coinpurses are just copied straight from Harran. I can get reusing assets, but they at least have to fit the setting.

You get about an hour of content for $10, and it's up to you to decide if you want to replay the same exact dungeon over and over for extra rewards and challenges. The level is new, the new assets look and function well, even if some models and textures still look like they're from 2015. It's just not enough content for the price. Moreover, what's likely the case is that people are disappointed because this wasn't the Hellraid that was announced in 2014, nor is it even close. It's just a dungeon crawl with the name of a most likely canceled title slapped on top.

The final part in the reboot trilogy sets its expectations right away: Before you can watch the intro, you're greeted with a big splash page telling you how the game was made by a "diverse group of people". This isn't even a "ree social justice" complaint, it's a warning that the team and their management seemed to care more about virtue signaling and trying to put up a criticism shield than about making a good game.

Story-wise, it's fairly trash. The story isn't really engaging or interesting, and is full of really stupid writing. Lara gets ambushed by maybe 4 guys with bows while she has multiple guns? She needs a woman and two guys with bows to show up out of nowhere to help her because the script says she needs escorted to the hidden city. The rebel leader gets surrounded by a whole three guys with bows? Better run away Lara, you can't help her! Every story element feels like a random asspull meant to justify moving to the next stupid plot point. It's like watching some awful western cartoon where senseless and arbitrary decisions are made just so the next funny moment or emotional scene can appear. Characters have very little impact: Jonah is just kind of there, and even our protagonist feels more like she's just traveling from point A to point B to flip a switch so the rebel tribe leadership can do something.

A more minor complaint related to the story would have to be how the ancient journals were handled. Apparently they decided to milk Lara's VA and have her read all of them out, as emotionlessly and blandly as possible, instead of hiring actors to play the part of the journal writers.

The gameplay has been downgraded significantly to focus more on whatever's the least interesting option possible. Combat is a comparably puny percentage of the gameplay this time around, and even doing all of the challenge tombs doesn't account for a whole lot. This time, the vast majority, probably 70%+, of your play time will be spent in one of three peaceful hubs talking to uninteresting NPCs, doing small and simple sidequests (that once again mostly involve talking to NPCs), and collecting collectables. That's it.

Combat is a mess. It plays out about the same as before, but now it's dropped to a considerably smaller percentage of the game, despite the majority of the skill tree being dedicated to combat abilities. All the guns have cheap, pitiful sound effects. DOS shooters have better sounding guns. There's a distinct lack of blood splatter as well. You can blast one of those tomb creatures in the face point-blank with a shotgun, and you may as well have just pushed them away with a blast of air. Rise of the Tomb Raider's mistaken choice to remove the iconic Lara Croft pistol dual-wielding even TR2013 included continues here.
There's zero reason not to use the default rifle, until you get the LMG near the end.
There's zero reason to use any pistol but the Desert Eagle you get by doing a pathetically simple sidequest in the very first hub area. The only pistol with a benefit over the Deagle is the default one, and that benefit is literally "you have it before the Deagle is available".
There's zero reason not to use the default shotgun. The auto and semi-auto shotguns reload faster, but are even weaker than this beanbag shooter.

While you still have to upgrade your weapons through the crafting system, and the absolutely mandatory tool acquisition is still done through the story, all of your gear upgrades have to be purchased, instead. Ammo capacity upgrades? Gear like the rope ascender? Find a merchant and give them gold for it. Crafting has been simplified and downgraded to only apply to gun/bow upgrades, and "restoring" worthless pieces of clothing (that you have to pay gold to acquire in the first place) that provide little to no tangible benefit over what you already have.

The only gameplay element that escaped unscathed was the challenge tombs. They have the usual mix of fairly simplistic ones (e.g. open door C so you can move raft A to point B, attach it and raise water to open door D) and ones that provide something of a real challenge. The Temple of the Sun shines here, taking a pretty solid amount of brain power to figure out.

The final boss is underwhelming as everything else. After you break the back of three statues, you just munch a healing plant, shoot him and his friends until he glows, melee attack, and repeat another 2-3 times. That's it.

Visually it's pretty unimpressive. It looks about the same as Rise, if not worse in some areas. All the hub dialog scenes look generally awful, since they just set every character to use generic facefx animations and to use generic mocapped animation loops during these Fallout 4/Mass Effect-looking conversations. It wouldn't make sense to have the full attention to detail and animation present in the story cutscenes showing up in these smaller conversations, but there has to be a better option than having some random npc loop a "idle, looking left to right in fear" animation while in a conversation with someone right in front of him. Awkward, bad-looking things you'd expect out of a low budget game are all too common.

It probably looks better with raytracing, but even the lowest raytracing settings chug a high-powered GTX1080 every time you're close to an unimpressive looking "animated 2D texture with uniform orange point lighting" fire.

Overall, I'd give this game a pass, even at sale prices. It's worse in every way than the other two entries in the trilogy, and doesn't give a satisfying conclusion to itself, let alone the overall story arc. It's clear more focus was put in making sure enough checkboxes were marked off on their checklist than on making the elements of the game good.

It also crashed about 5-7 times during my playthrough, while I don't recall getting a single one in the prior two games. I had to ♥♥♥♥ around with audio settings and downgrade my soundcard output to 48kHz to get the audio to stop crackling, and even then there are times where the sound just freezes for no apparent reason. With no apparent cause, the game had to be fixed via "verify game data" to launch at all when I was nearly finished with it, even though literally nothing at all had happened to the game files between then and the previous successful launch.