Recent reviews by Command Line Vulpine

What else is there to say? It's litterally the OG.

Its the shortest of the Fallout games, so I find this to be one of the most replayable ones. Like 20 hours for 100% completion.

I didn't want to like it at first, because all the streamers I watched started no lifeing this and playing nothing else.

I finally bought it because there had to be something to it. Now I'm the one no-lifeing it and playing nothing else.

I've tried really hard to enjoy Darkest Dungeon 2, but it fights me every step of the way. I felt it was unfairly dogpiled on for being different than 1 when it first came out. As the phrase goes, "It's not like they're taking the old one from you, you can still go back."

What I've grown to accept though is we are allowed to want a newer, better version of our favorite thing. Halo 2 was Halo 1 with better graphics and a lot of new gameplay features. DD2 easily could have done the same.

It does do the first half of that. People didn't think the artstyle would translate to 3D, but they knocked it out of the park. The characters look incredible and the animations are next level. When you go back to the peusdo-chibi sprite and non-animation of the first game, you feel like you really took a step back. -- Hence why its not really fair to say "you should just be satisfied still having the original"

I can't really think of where to start with explaining the problems with DD2. In a nutshell, I'd describe it like, the complete overhaul of the core mechanics of the game make it impossible to balance properly. Darkest Dungeon 1 was already infamous as a hard game. However, because of the meta-progression of the campaign, you could just take things very slowly and carefully and overcome the difficulty. In 2, what meta progression there is is merely a thin veneer in comparison. You can't build up really strong characters through force of will.

This is exasperated by DD2 being even harder than the first. Characters can't be healed until their HP is less than 25% in most cases, instead of whenever you want in the first one. Same goes for stress. You can't flee from encounters when things go bad. If one character dies your game is probably over since there's always a hard fight at the end of every zone. Most abilities of good value have limited uses (more than in 1). You can't sell anything, which feels weird in a game where they're trying to make all the systems tighter because it leaves you with an inventory of junk that doesn't mean anything if you do make it to the end of a run.

Lastly, even though DD1 isn't a perfect game itself, it has a robust modding community to patch it up, allowing you to tailor the game how you want. DD2 has been around for a couple years now if you count it's Epic exclusivity window; it still lacks proper mod support.

Do you like Escape from Tarkov?

Are you sick of all the cheaters?

Can you handle an old-school art style?

Its the perfect game for you if the answer to all of these is yes.

A fantastic game that properly receives its title as scratching that itch only Obra Dinn has before with deduction based puzzle solving, and working your brain to understand a language's structure; allowing you to make accurate guesses without it having to be handed to you. This is my favorite genre of game, even though it only has 2 entries; so that makes it a 10/10

My one complaint is your character will only add a journal page after clicking on a specific thing. This can mean that you can entirely know what words are from your own reasoning, but not be able to lock them in until you find that thing. Those things can even be self explanatory from a distance so it doesn't seem like you should need to bother clicking them for a closer look. I was softlocked for an hour or two because of that, and had to ask Reddit what I had I missed.

Other mild complaint is the final language is almost completely handed to you with minimal effort. It even shows you a micro-tutorial for how to interface with it, when the rest of the game never holds your hand like that. Maybe they ran out of time, or maybe the implication of the player's origin is the reason. But it leads to solving the final language in like 20 minutes when the others took a couple hours each.

Collective Action.

Notice 2: Review used to just say "Tyranny." and was negative.

Notice: Review used to just say "Democracy." and was positive.

There's been a lot of imitators, but Blackwake was the first to ever do it, and it did it best.

Sea of Thieves ship combat has nothing on this. Skull and Bones wishes it was half as fun as this. Blazing Sails was a cartoony copy.

Of all games to lose an active player base, this one might hurt the most. I'm not sure what it needed. Do you all really need like battlepasses and loot crates to keep y'all engaged these days or what?

Either way, it just went free to play. I can definitely recommend it now. I hope it boosts the player count and gives it the boost it deserves.

ETA: I had no problem with the tutorial and it's running on my modern PC, don't know what the negative reviewers are on about.

I'm not sure what is is about Palworld that made a certain corner of the internet furiously hate it for any reason they can think of, and refuse to give it any kind of respect.

Nintendo fans savagely trying to cope? Maybe. People with AI derangement syndrome going rabid when someone even implies something might have to do with AI? Perhaps.

Whatever the claim, they keep moving the goalposts to continue hating it. First it was wild claims of AI that proved to be false. Then claims of copying which turned out to be made up. Then calling it low effort, which is easily disproven if you play it for 4 hours. Now they've gone on to call the player count dropping a sign that it's bad. The truth is they put their 60-80 hours in and have finished the game, so are moving on like any normal person does all the time. There will be some new reason they hate it next week.

That's all not to say it's a perfect game. Or that the game isn't clearly heavily, heavily inspired. Or that its using lots of popular game mechanics just to attract people. But there's nothing wrong with any of that. In fact, most AAA games do that too, they just maybe don't make it as obvious.

If you like survival crafters, and like pokemon, you'll have fun with this game. If you hate those game genres, you won't. And that's about all their is to it.

I'm not sure what I just played, but I liked it.

"Oh it's just a cute, cozy, light business sim." - Strawman I just made up in my head.

Okay, well, only 12% of you got to the gigantic plot twist towards the end which darkly recontextualizes the whole game. Then only 7% of you got to the epilogue where the game suddenly decides to have an immense amount of lore that makes you question the meaning of reality.

It had a bad launch, but stuck the landing.

I was well among those hating the game at the start. Specifically due to having to redo a 1 hour stretch at the start of the game when a pile of trash bags physics-exploded into existence and killed me.

I restarted the game when Edgerunners came out and had a much better time. There's probably millions of reviews of this game, so I'm not going to go into super detail like I normally do. But the best part of the game is the story telling and character development, while the weakest is probably the crafting system - which didn't make sense on launch nor post Phantom Liberty.

Despite the all the fixing, I was amused to see a weapon glitched bizarrely into the final scene of the game when it definitely wasn't supposed to be there. It was benign, unlike the exploding trash bags - but I appreciated that things came full circle either way.