Recent reviews by Vex Werewolf

So this game comes with a piece of kernel-level anti-cheat software that I would classify as malware. Arrowhead promises it doesn't run when Helldivers 2 isn't running, but the only times my machine has ever had a full blue screen of death was while playing Helldivers 2, and while playing Pacific Drive while Helldivers 2 was installed. After removing the anti-cheat software using the provided uninstaller (note that simply uninstalling Helldivers 2 does NOT uninstall the anti-cheat software - a red flag in itself!), the crashes stopped immediately.

I don't know what this whole PSN stuff is about, but that also seems bad.

Game deployed a boss in the first area that has an attack that kills your party in one shot. Not really interested in a game that wastes my time like this.

Barotrauma is, for my money, the best horror game on the market. I have never encountered a game that is so fundamentally nerve-wracking to play.

You are a potentially suicidal lunatic whose job is to pilot badly-designed submarines in the freezing subsurface oceans of Europa. The subsurface oceans of Europa are full of two things: vast mineral resources, and monsters made entirely of teeth. You usually have to go into caves full of the latter to find any of the former.

The only way you can see the monsters is with your fragile human eyes or with sonar, which only tells you where they were a few seconds ago, not where they are now - a question to which the answer is always "closer and now they're even more angry."

If you want a premium horror experience with very deep gameplay, I cannot recommend this game enough.

As it turns out, this game does not actually respect your choices. It has a non-lethal option that still counts anyone you use it on as "dead."

The problem with Steam's binary "thumbs up, thumbs down" review system is there's no nuance, but I kind of have to say "thumbs down" or it gets lost in the scramble.

TL;DR: This game is pretty good, but there's a large number of issues that wouldn't be so bad on their own, but when taken together cause serious problems. You should probably buy it anyway, just to make sure the money men know that we want more of this kind of game.

System Shock 2023 is a remake of the 1994 cult classic System Shock. This might seem so obvious I don't even need to point it out, but it sits right at the heart of many of its problems. It strives to recreate the feeling of the original game while upgrading it to match the advancements we've made in graphics and gameplay in the intervening 29 years.

The problem is that the original game was intensely weird, fiddly and annoying to play. This has been reproduced successfully.

The maps aren't 1-to-1 reproductions of the original game's maps, but they do still feel distinctly 90s in their bizarre, unintuitive layout. Even with the map and minimap, it's very easy to get lost because nothing is laid out in a way that makes any sort of sense. The game even commits the cardinal sin of pointing it out with an audio log that says the station was intentionally designed this way to make its residents anxious and confused, but here's the thing: you could've just made the levels make sense.

The game is not terrific at indicating what you're supposed to be doing. It's not the worst, either, but many times I had to scrub through all the audio logs in my possession to work out what level I was supposed to be on to complete the current mission objective, which is described to you in the very vaguest terms. An innovation that many games have had in recent years is putting reminders for door access codes you know in front of you when you're at the relevant keypad, and this game could stand to learn from that - it just saves time.

The enemies endlessly respawn, which is good at creating a constant sense of danger. What doesn't endlessly respawn are healing items or ammo, which means that eventually you will run out. Fortunately, with the exception of the hardest difficulty, if you've re-enabled at least one restoration bay on the station, you'll always have a place to respawn. The problem is it doesn't respawn you at full health, so ultimately the game can turn into an exercise in throwing yourself at a brick wall over and over with steadily decreasing resources.

(There's also one particular place in the game that, if you die there, it's game over even if you have a regeneration bay active somewhere else on the station. The game gives absolutely no indication that this will happen.)

The combat feels kind of limp and unresponsive. Enemies don't stagger or flinch very much even when smacked with very meaty-looking melee attacks. Enemy death animations are kind of awkward and sometimes difficult to tell apart from their regular behaviour, meaning you often waste several shots of very limited ammo on enemies that are already dead.

None of these things would be much of a problem on their own, but a game that puts me in a weird maze with infinite enemies but very finite health and ammo and perform unresponsive combat while not making it very easy to remember what I'm supposed to be doing? This presents what I would politely describe as "a serious obstacle to my enjoyment."

You should still buy it though, because how else are the moneymen going to know that we want more immersive sims?

This is hands-down the easiest way to play Deus Ex on modern machines. It makes several changes to the base game but every single one of them can be switched off if you wish to experience the original game as it was all the way back in 2000.

This game claims to be a dystopia, and yet it depicts a world in which Florida no longer exists. 10/10

It gates its content behind challenges that are by design almost impossible to get 5 gear completion in.

There are few games that have less respect for you and your time than Elite Dangerous.

Imagine a vast ocean, many times further across than the largest ocean on Earth, so large that to walk from one side to the other would take a thousand lifetimes. Now imagine that it's so shallow that even when you reach its deepest point, your ankles will still be dry.

Elite Dangerous offers you a colossal universe, so huge that nearly a decade after launch we've barely explored 0.05% of it. What is there to do in that universe? Well, as it turns out, not a whole hell of a lot.

The game is ludicrously disrespectful of your time. Even tasks as simple as flying from station to station are filled with busywork. Some functions are hidden in nested submenus. Some basic mechanics are not adequately explained by the tutorials. Some aspects of the game quite literally do not work the way they're meant to work. The user interface is sluggish and unresponsive, consisting mostly of menus that are sometimes slow to load, sometimes hitch, sometimes freeze. Making money and acquiring reputation is a tedious grind. The game is also exceptionally repetitive: expect to see similar station interiors, similar missions, similar planets, similar people and similar stretches of empty space over and over again.

Nearly a decade after launch, the game - despite having pretensions of being massively multiplayer - is missing some basic core functionality. Items, ships and money still cannot be traded between players (with the exception of just dumping things out the cargo hatch to give to a friend, which is usually even more time-inefficient than just grinding missions). In fact, having friends along for the ride can actually make the game more difficult than going it alone due to poor design choices. The game's weird and idiosyncratic justice system makes griefing very easy and revenge very difficult, but there's no real point to any of it anyway since the game can be played (and is in fact best enjoyed) in Solo mode where other players can't interact with you.

Features are added to the game unilaterally, without much thought to how they will impact existing elements of gameplay. In some cases, this results in game elements that compete or clash, while in other cases it results in isolated gameplay loops that don't have a noticeable impact on the rest of the game at all. New features are abandoned as quickly as they're added - faction warfare, planetary vehicles, on-foot combat were all delivered in a half-finished state and then neglected for years. The development team has acted with open contempt towards player feedback, often purposefully removing popular issue petitions.

Compare this with space games like No Man's Sky and X4: Foundations which had rocky, undercooked starts but were expanded upon again and again with years of hard, caring work by the developers and direct fan engagement. Compare it even to EVE Online - an equally bad game, but one which made every single one of Elite Dangerous' mistakes years in advance and from which Frontier Developments had so many opportunities to learn and do better.

There are better space games out there. There are better sci-fi vehicle games out there. There are better space FPSes out there. Elite Dangerous can't even do one of these well.

TL;DR: There is no TL;DR this time. Read the whole thing.

I absolutely love this game and have done since early 2010, but recommending it to others isn't something I can do without hesitation. It's not a game for everyone, and I'm not talking in a "git gud, sounds like a skill issue" sense - this is a game that a lot of people simply won't vibe with, and that's okay.

I'm going to give an example of something that just happened to me, and in fact inspired me to write this review.

My fortress has had constant issues with reptile men from the upper cave level raiding my fort and killing my citizens - over the course of a decade I've easily lost about 50 people to them. The main problem in dealing with them is that they keep retreating into deep pools of water. My first militia squad of ten Legendary skill dwarves can easily flatten hordes of 20-30 of them at once, sometimes with only two or three dwarves on the field. But if a dwarf falls into water - which they can easily do if they dodge a lot near to a pond - they'll instantly start drowning if they don't have any skill in Swimming, which no dwarf has by default.

Safely teaching dwarves to swim is monstrously difficult - there are ways you can build "swimming pools" but they're very complicated and take a lot of very tedious, precise setup. I couldn't be bothered to work out how to do that, so instead I built a gigantic pump stack and delivery pipe that siphoned magma from the very heart of the earth and dumped it straight on top of the pool most of the reptile men were hiding in. Their bodies, meticulously detailed with layers of skin, muscle and nervous tissue, were flash-boiled in an instant as they were encased in obsidian.

To sum up: in Dwarf Fortress, it is easier to build an apocalyptic magma superweapon than it is to teach your dwarves how to swim. The game is built in such a manner that doing very simple things that make sense - like teaching dwarves to swim - is really difficult, but it's actually pretty easy to just build massive corridors full of sawblades or drown entire caverns in magma. Dwarf Fortress seems almost intentionally designed to force you to do the most ridiculous possible thing at all times.

Does that appeal to you? Then you will probably have the motivation to overcome this game's absurd learning curve. If it doesn't, save your time and money.