Recent reviews by UnknownMerc

CRPGs are back, baby. You will *not* see everything in one playthrough no matter how thorough you are so just embrace the fact that you will end up playing this more than once.

Only buy this if you're a huge fan who needs an excuse to play the game again. The animations are better but the visuals are not a huge improvement over the original. Giving it a thumbs up anyway because the game is still great.

Did you ever want to play the gun levels of "Hotline Miami" but with a Hong Kong action movie scenario? Then this game is exactly what you want, though it's not very good. You will always die in 1 hit no matter what unless you abuse the slow motion combined with the dive dodge which makes you briefly immune to bullets, and a lot of fights can be won by shooting at off angles through doors and windows. For a twin stick shooter, it controls remarkably poorly with a controller.

TBH if you want this style of game just get "Hotline Miami" or "12 is Better Than 6" and if you want HK inspired games, there is always the "Max Payne" series or you can pick up "Stranglehold" on GOG. All of these options are much cheaper.

Not quite as good as Life is Strange 1, but that game was lightning in a bottle. After LIS2 tried some different stuff and didn't really stick the landing, True Colors goes back to the well (probably too much) by sticking to another singular small town setting with a central mystery.

While the production values increased dramatically, especially with facial animation and motion capture, there are a really small number of locations to explore and the game almost feels TOO focused on its main plot. The story DLC is good, but for some bizarre reason you need to finish the main game to play it, and you can't buy it separately.

The main draw of this DLC is 12 new missions. Lots of new art assets for the new enemies, no new music. You can earn more stars, but there are no new unlocks, which is a little disappointing. The missions themselves are quite challenging, so if you have already mastered the main game and want more then this is for you. Not bad for $4, though I feel like new unlocks would have made this easier to recommend.

I, like many other people, stopped really caring about Telltale games after they kept releasing so many same-y licensed ones over and over again. Waited for a sale to play TWD: A New Frontier and was disappointed with it. The new ANF cast mostly sucked, sidelining Clementine and AJ was a bad move, and while I know it was challenging to have to write all the different permutations of events for the season 2 endings, those were mostly trash.

When the Final Season was first announced I was apprehensive; "wait for another sale" was my line of thinking. The troubled development and Telltale shutting down meant my expectations were low, so I was totally blown away by how good this final season is. The focus is back on Clementine and AJ again, and they've written a very purposeful arc that mirrors Lee and Clementine from season 1. The new cast is interesting and likeable, and the writing is just miles ahead of ANF but that's an extremely low bar to clear. Mechanics-wise, it's still basically the same. The new camera is not noticeably better, and there are a few action sections where the way to make progress isn't entirely clear, but it's not a detriment. They've added collectibles, but there's no "collectible mode" like in Life is Strange so if you miss anything you have to replay the entire game.

As far as the whole series goes, I'd rank this a smidge behind season 1, but in front of season 2 and season 3 is dead last. They really stuck the landing with this one, and it's a fitting swansong for old Telltale.

Outriders is an extremely flawed game that has so much potential but squandered a ton of it with a bunch of really bad ideas and technical issues.

The basic premise of Outriders is that the Earth has been destroyed for unknown reasons, and as a last resort a spaceship has been sent to colonize the planet Enouch. You're part of a group called the Outriders who are basically the frontline explorers, and when you land on Enoch you find that it's inhospitable, filled with dangerous wildlife and electrical storms. Things go sour immediately and after a 30 year time jump humanity is stuck in a never-ending civil war while your player character has been granted special powers from the storms. It's enjoyable B movie schlock if you're into that sort of thing.

Outriders' gameplay is best described as a mix of Mass Effect and Borderlands/Diablo, a sci-fi third person shooter with interesting powers married to an ARPG style loot game. You have 4 classes that broadly fall into basic archtypes: long/medium range support class (Technomancer), close range thief/rogue (Trickster), tank/bruiser class (Devastator) and a medium range caster (Pyromancer). On paper, it all sounds good, but there are glaring issues at endgame. Most classes only have 1 or 2 viable builds, and the game severely limits skill points so you can only specialize. It is entirely possible to spend most of the campaign building your character in one direction only to hit a wall in the endgame and have to do a complete 180. I don't expect all character classes or trees to be equal but there's something to be said for managing expectations: the best endgame DPS is the supposed "support" class, while the most viable endgame tank build is being a rock summoning wizard.

Outriders is the first game I've ever played where levelling up feels like a punishment. This game measures your basic stats based on your average item level, so every time you level up, the enemies will gain in power, but you will fall behind unless your average ilevel matches your enemies.

The game doesn't drop items frequently enough to make sure every item slot is appropriately levelled, so you'll be spending a lot of time in the crafting menu. You can increase item level and rarity, as well as raise attributes and change mods. Item mods can fundamentally change how an item works, and the mod system works similarly to Division 2's stat library: once you deconstruct an item with a mod you want its yours to keep forever and put on any other item. At the same time however, you cannot change an item's base armor or damage roll, nor can you switch attributes on an item. Legendary items are the worst offenders since they have fixed attributes, so 99% of the time you end up breaking them down to collect their unique legendary mods.

To make matters worse/more complicated, Outriders has two different systems of difficulty progression: world tiers and challenge tiers. 90% of the game is relegated to world tiers, which will raise the enemy cap along with your ilevel cap and item drop rates. This auto scales by default, and I suggest anyone who plays this game immediately turn it off. You can find yourself in the unfortunate position of gaining a level or world tier (or both) during an encounter and immediately being much weaker in combat. Once you finish the campaign, you unlock Outriders' endgame expedition mode, and endgame progression called challenge tiers. It's the same thing, but you can only level it up by completing expeditions, which are basically time trial missions that funnel players into damage focused builds. Paradoxically, legendary mods can make or break builds, but they do not drop with any regularity until you reach the end of the challenge tier progression.

This brings me to probably the biggest problem with Outriders, which is its completely asinine scaling formula. For some reason, the developers have decided that you cannot ever outlevel too much. If the level difference is too high, then the game will instead nerf the players stats to be inline with their intended experience. At the same time, if you progress far enough in expeditions, you will reach the game's ilevel cap of 50 from challenge tiers, while the rest of the game's world tiers only go as high as ilevel 42. This results in the bizarre scenario where a developer has purposely cordoned off 90% of the repeatable content in a looter, and where players can do more damage to low level enemies by removing gear pieces to lower their ilevel. I am convinced that this scaling formula is what causes so many of the game's stats to break. I have found my character's stats to be completely inconsistent between level loads, or even between level upgrades. Sometimes stats don't seem to register properly until I die, or they will just completely change between encounters without level loads in between.

The broken stats and scaling exacerbates the game's somewhat incoherent gameplay identity. It features a cover system that is only ever useful in one boss fight and nowhere else. It also offers players long range weaponry like bolt action rifles but the encourages close range play. Enemies will often zerg rush the player or have a lot of melee attacks that can often lock players into stun animations. Many enemies have difficult if not impossible to avoid AOE attacks with no cooldown. Many of the most effective builds require on kill procs that are not suitable for co-op.

Gameplay issues aside, Outriders is also missing many quality of life features. It has an extremely unhelpful map and a waypoint system that requires reloading the game constantly to work. There's no item favourite function so you have to remember what items to keep. There is no buyback function in the vendors so I hope you never accidentally sell anything. There are no dedicated drops anywhere; everything seems to tossed into a giant loot pool, with the best items being locked to expeditions. For a supposedly co-op focused game, there is no in-game text or voice chat function.

This game is also the worst AAA release I've played recently with regards to technical issues, and I played Cyberpunk 2077 at launch. Outriders is plagued with constant framerate issues and microstutter, and audio constantly cuts in and out. I've had dozens of crashes to desktop and a few hard reboots. Outriders supports console to PC crossplay but I've had to turn that feature off entirely just to get cutscenes to work (and they still break occasionally). The netcode is by far the worst I've ever seen; regardless of where the other people live it always feels like I'm playing with someone in Australia on a dialup connection. Outriders isn't a live service but it always needs to be online even when playing solo, and uses Easy Anti-Cheat even though it's strictly PVE. It's a month after release and so far the developers have only nerfed players (either explicitly or via stealth back end fixes) and broken more of the game than they have fixed. The biggest offender is a bug where characters and inventories get completely erased. The issue has been around since the demo, and as of the time of writing still is not completely resolved. I'm convinced the only reason this doesn't appear to be a bigger story is because People Can Fly isn't as big of a mainstream developer as Bioware or CDProjekt, so the failure of Outriders isn't as high profile.

If you just stick to doing the main game and its sidequests, there's about 20 to 40 hours of content depending on your world tier settings. My recommendation is to keep the world tier low and only start to raise it if it feels too easy, and after you've built up some resources. I have a Devastator in endgame and I'm about halfway through levelling a Trickster alt, but the flawed endgame kills my desire to keep playing. I would say you could pick it up just for the campaign if it was at a huge discount, but otherwise stay away until People Can Fly potentially get their act together.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a deeply flawed game with not a whole lot of depth with tons of missing or unfinished systems and still somehow kind of interesting and fun to play. I didn't really play the Witcher games aside from idling for the Steam cards but I have played pretty much every Fallout game to completion besides Tactics, BOS and '76, as well as all the Deus Ex games and Alpha Protocol so I feel like I'm pretty well versed in the the type of game this was trying to be. I'll say right away, this ain't it. It tries to be it, in some spots, but it fails even by the standard that the original Deus Ex set 20 years ago.

Keen observers - or anyone who followed the heavy marketing blitz - will note that the game's own copy no longer calls it an RPG. It *kind of* is one: it has skill trees and you can make builds, and there are definitely choices you can make and there are pitfalls/trap skills (this mostly has to do with skills that plain do not work rather than useless skills like Deus Ex's swimming though something similar is present). However these choices are pretty limited. A running joke is how these sorts of games will provide you with a door to break open, a computer to hack or a vent to crawl through as gameplay choices. Cyberpunk often reduces further to "door you open with Technical Ability" versus "door you force open because you are Strong enough". Hacking has combat applications but I rarely found it helpful as a progression tool; I mainly used it as a source of making money.

There are a variety of combat systems and while I found the melee to be too clunky and imprecise, the shooting is competent enough and you can make a variety of extremely broken shooty builds. I eventually settled on a shotgunner build that had a ton of speed bonuses stacked that also gave bonus damage for maximum hilarity. You can invest heavily in tech weapons that pierce walls or homing weapons that do less damage but fire seeking bullets, or just straight up become full hacker dude and kill everything from a computer interface outside of any given combat area.

Cyberpunk includes a very terrible attempt at a loot game style itemization. Items have rarity and stats based on rarity, but it doesn't do the sensible thing of gating item rarity by level so you can very well find a low level Legendary gun that becomes useless very early on along with level capped white or green items. The even more sensible thing would be to not have this sort of dumb itemization in the first place. You can bypass this sytem with crafting, which, mind bogglingly, has a whole tree tied to it. The game is never really hard enough that you need to invest in crafting, but going deep in it fundamentally upends the economy and further trivializes difficulty. It is also the only way you can make use of some of the game's rewards; often your reward for exploring somewhere is a legendary blueprint that you cannot do anything with without a nearly maxed out crafting tree.

So it's kind of not great as an RPG, but Cyberpunk also advertises itself as "the next generation of open world gaming" and that might be even more laughable. Night City is large, sure, and it's pretty well designed and vibrant but also completely dead. NPCs and vehicles are basically animated props with no real AI and spawn/despawn based on line of sight and the police/wanted system is so non-functional it makes you wonder why it's even there. Aside from the icons that litter your map there's very little to find/explore and even by that standard it's worse than your average Ubisoft factory slurry game.

I've basically spent hundreds of words saying why this game sucks, but I'm still sorta recommending it because I enjoyed a lot of the quests and the main quest, while deeply flawed like so much of this game, was intriguing enough. A lot of the game's main characters are pretty well fleshed out. As far as story choices go, this game fails to deliver even on the illusion of choice. I'm not expecting Alpha Protocol levels of reactivity here across a 100 hour game but it can't even achieve the level of a Mass Effect "you get a different email based on how this quest finished 20 hours ago". Hell even during most quests or quest chains you will rarely be presented with a story choice or a way to affect how things play out; most of what is actually possible to change was showed off in E3 demos years ago and is almost entirely frontloaded in the first act. I will at least give them credit for having the ending missions and cinematics that diverge quite drastically and do change based on what sidequests you did.

I didn't encounter too many bugs, and almost all of the ones I did were weird clipping issues/T posing etc that would get fixed by quickly reloading my last save. Saving is quick and easy and the game also autosaves often, thankfully. Had quite a few crashes but those mainly happened during loading screens or when the game decides it doesn't like when I Alt-Tab.

If you kind of remove it from the absurd marketing hype, Cyberpunk is kind of okay? It was interesting enough for me to finish at least. I would wait for a sale; if you own and haven't played any Fallout or Deus Ex games play those first especially if it's New Vegas or the original Deus Ex/Human Revolution. Supposedly CDPR might revamp this game further down the line but I think too many of its features and systems are broken as is to really expect much and they have said themselves their focus is fixing the console versions rather than addressing any systemic design issues.

"Polarizing" would be a quick way for me to describe Doom Eternal. The combat loop is amazing, although the game spends a lot of time (about a quarter of the game) throwing new mechanics at you until you have the full tool set. Doom Eternal is all about resource management and always moving; if you stay still for too long you're dead. The chainsaw, flamethrower and dash are your best friends. Unlike the last game, Ultra Violence *will* kick your ass the first time. Just grit your teeth through all the terrible platforming parts, which are sadly unavoidable. The purple slime also sucks but doesn't really show up after like level 2.

Not only did they completely screw up the art style, it also plays weirdly. They added Call of Duty style aiming and sprinting, which doesn't really add much to the gameplay, and they limited the gun inventory. The AI is braindead and there's tons of clipping errors just in the half hour that I played.

Stay far, far away.