Recent reviews by Rumbeef

If you like games where you can talk to squirrels and also become a bear and summon zombies, or maybe you like to talk to the dead and romance demons, you can do that here.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about if I could recommend Starfield, and I have to say I can't. It's fun and enjoyable to wander around a space themed building shooting pirates, but that's about the only fun found in the game.
The characters are interesting but not always good to be around as a companion in a game like this. Their quests for filling in the story surrounding them are good, but not great. Not enough to stand on the shoulders of Skyrim and Fallout.
The biggest problem is slow progression and elements to slow the player down. Progression experience is very slow, in hundreds of hours I've only gotten to about level 60, which is very few of the perks even getting the first point. I have no idea how long it would take to get all of them but I assume hundreds or thousands of hours.
They slow down the player by having many elements tied behind wait walls, such as waiting so that the five vendors on that planet can refill their money so you can sell the rest of your junk. The wait time is extraordinarily long, I assume only to punish players for waiting to sell their weapons to vendors.
Crafting is at first interesting but less robust than fallout 4, it felt nice to level up the crafting for my guns to make them a little more like what I'd want, but even then none of the mods really make too much of a difference between high-powered weapons, and it is frustrating to get the materials to craft, you must purchase most of them such as adhesive because you can't get it from the many rolls of duct tape laying around the universe.
Crafting high level stuff with rare materials is just as frustrating because that one rare material you need is only found at one or two vendors who only carry 1 of it.
Most of the complex systems such as space combat have been simplified to the point of being a bland chore, with very little reward for clearing a system except to fly between gray diamonds for a few random resources or ship repair parts.
There are still some fun and interesting side characters and random events as with most Bethesda games, but in this one they're put in places that you would often skip, flying into a system and spending a few seconds there can lead to interesting conversations but most of the time you'll skip it by fast traveling directly to the surface of a planet instead.
I like the looter shooter aspect of the game, but I don't think that the devs do. The cycle of go kill space pirates and loot everything and return to a base to sell off your junk is all completely pointless. New game + really takes the “this is my gun” feeling away.
I think this game might be trying to rid me of my OCD by making collection and persistence disappear. There's almost no reason to carry anything other than the guns you used to shoot pirates with, everything else is cheap, wasteful and unnecessary. It is a game that you need very little to complete.
Yes I have an ungodly amount of hours, and I'll probably continue playing to some extent, but there really feels like very little reason to. New builds are not a thing, getting new perks to try out other styles of play is hidden behind a time wall of a very long time between level ups. Some people say that grinding crafting resources to get to level 100 is the easy way to do it and I can't imagine a more terrible way to play a video game than to spend 100 hours churning out chunks of aluminum. Even skill magazines dont always give a bonus, I had 5 of the same mag with no benefit from collecting 4.
In my opinion to improve the game they need to remove the player restrictions, increase experience points for everything, lower the experience required to level up, and remove the time restrictions such as long sleep wait times low vendor inventory money, because they hinder a players experience. Though you can increase cargo, to store all the stuff you would keep for crafting and base building it pushes you to extreme hoarding, bad ship maneuverability or living with overencumbered penalties. They need to fix stat boosting magazines collectables, opening a crate with nothing in it, copy paste locations, bad storage and item management, and disappointingly slow progression, which is a terrible decision.
I assume Bethesda is going to add to current systems in DLC like they've done with past titles, but at this time it feels like the game presented was not finished with the players enjoyment being the focus. I enjoyed the game. The story is interesting, characters all right, combat is fun but it's a slog, repetitive, cookie cutter, and ultimately disappointing. Many cool ideas like new game + undercut the winning formula of other BGS games, which is the feeling of “this is my thing,” which this game does not have.

I played this on the lowest settings and it still looked good. It has many issues and is not a perfect game, but it was fun for me.

This is a good game to play with your kids or feel like a kid again. It is a colorful and fun collectathon and the locations and characters look great in the remaster.

I played a lot more of this than than I expected. I really enjoyed Cassandra as a character and the Greek tragedy story line for her, it felt different than other assassins creed games because you can make choices and the game has a lot of dialogue for you. Gameplay wise it feels a bit more action role playing than earlier stealth based games, but when you're silently killing Athenians one by one in a huge camp it still feels like being an assassin. Powers and abilities are much stronger now than in other games, but still felt very fun. What got me really into the game is the beautiful world, and there is a lot of it to explore. The Greek architecture and colorful statues made the game feel bright and colorful. The DLC levels have a more artistic and mythological take on the setting.

Yakuza has finally come to PC! This is a great intro to the series, it has a lot of humor and melodrama and plenty of over the top scenarios that lead to fighting large groups of thugs. The game is set in a few fictional districts and has two playable characters each with their own movesets and side stories.

This game is kind of a bridge between the older Yakuza games and Yakuza 6, it still can be janky at times, with some scenes told with limited animation or voice acting, and it still has a lot of loading screens. That being said, it still is a lot of fun to play if you like brawling or the ample minigames. I will also say that this game has a lot of stuff you can grind on, it is easy to get really into your favorite minigame, and as you can see by my hours, addicted to, but if you just wanted to complete it for the stories it can be done without a lot of the grinding.

Divinity Original Sin 2 is the kind of game that had me constantly feeling as though I was getting to the point that I was powerful, and then they threw a curveball at me. It kept me exploring and eating at the edges of quests that I would have to return to later when I was more experienced. Throughout the game I came up to walls that I had to search for ways around or over, it seemed like the game was always ready for me. It felt rewarding to figure out something, to get past an enemy who had stopped me before, to try something different with my skills and abilities.

I hadn’t played any Divinity games before and they had a good way of bringing me into the world they’ve crafted, individual party members had interesting motives and I felt like our interactions were dependant on my input. The story had a good thread pulling me towards the conclusion of the game and kept me wondering where it was taking me.

I like turn based combat because it usually feels like I’m responsible for what happens throughout combat, and Divinity has a few ways to have unexpected actions unravel your plans. The elemental system worked well for this, combining a few different spells could make a whole area a minefield, or clear it by using alternatives.

I didn’t utilize all the systems, other than a few items I never had to touch crafting and rarely used potions. The items and loot were enough to have an impact on my builds and I was usually able to get gear I wanted from either quests or vendors. There are enough abilities and types of play that I could see a second or third run being very different than how I played through the first time.

I only played a little multiplayer, but I enjoyed how we were able to work together to rob and murder people, something I can never bring myself to do when I play solo. I think they found a good balance around doing turn based rpg combat with multiple people, if one person gets into a fight while their buddy is somewhere else, the buddy can regroup and join into already active combat. That also works in the single player game as well, I often would start a conversation with an enemy and before combat started I’d organize my squad and summon a demon for backup.

I got completely addicted to this game when I picked it up, I was impressed by it the whole way through.

Civilization VI is an interesting game, it released with more content than Civ V did, it has new mechanics that allow more customization to your empire, and it still keeps that same feeling of "one more turn." I was frustrated by Civ Beyond Earth, from technical bugs to issues with progression, maybe because it was foreign to me I just couldn't get into it in the way I expected. I still had some of that anxiety going into Civ 6, maybe it wouldn't be the game I wanted it to be, that it would be a step backwards from Civ V which is one of my favorite games of all time.


I think Civ 6 has the bones to be the best Civ yet, every aspect has some new level of depth or thought put into it, from great people having unique bonuses, to limiting the typical wonder spamming cities by requiring tile placement of wonders, to city state bonuses being more unique and having that race for Suzerain. I love when you find a great spot for a district with huge adjacency bonuses, setting up a great holy site or harbor really feels better than just adding a building to a production queue.


That said, there is still a lot of frustration for me as a classic Civ gamer, barbarian encampments that spawn high damage horsemen or ranged ships within the first 20 turns, movement penalties being changed from Civ V, some unit autocycling problems, and even AI bugs like not upgrading or spamming too much of one type of unit. I think most of those faults are overlooked by the core of the game being much deeper. Along this line, the first fall patch to Civ 6 addressed many issues, and has me excited for future updates to improve quality of life for the game.


Also, as a new father, Civ 6 is one of the few games I can play while holding my baby. I often play with the steam controller so that I can set up all the mouse actions to be controlled by one hand while I cradle the baby in my other arm.


If I had to recommend one Civ game to a newcomer, I’d say you can’t beat Civ 5 with all the DLC, it has everything I love about civ and isn’t working through any bugs or UI issues, but if you have played Civ before, Civ 6 is a great addition to the series and I can’t wait to see what more they bring to the table.

*** It has been 4 years since this review and I'd say that I love this game more now than I did when I wrote it. The expansion passes have made the game more rich and deep, I can't even imagine playing without governors and climate change anymore. My biggest gripe is still load times.