Recent reviews by Migz - DH

Nostalgic.
Lots of Fun.
Good challenge.

The puzzles are good or bad depending on personal taste. Personally, I thought they were interesting, but I stopped after the fifth one.

The voice overs are fun.

Performance with my R9 5900X and RTX 3080 at recommended settings was very good @ 40+ FPS and smooth with G-Sync @ 3440x1440 resolution.

Mostly, I was curious about the tech. It seems to me that this is even better looking than Portal with RTX was, because the denoiser seems to be faster here than in the other mod.

(edit, added the resolution since the recommended settings are for 1080p, and I play at a much higher resolution.)

It was fun. Nostalgic even.
Expect your skin to crawl. lol

It's mostly a combat simulator. As long as you don't expect much of anything beyond that, you can reach your expectations and enjoy. :-)

Overall positive.
Price is steep for how little replayability there is to it though.
I wish the enemies could show up in other biomes during the campaign to make them more interesting.
I find the melee weapon from this expansion to be the best so far.

It's a beautiful game and well worth a campaign playthrough if you have an RTS itch to scratch and have a beefy PC to play it on. It has 3rd person shooter and tower defense elements too, but it feels like more of a hero RTS to me with all the resource gathering and base building.

I really enjoyed the campaign the first time through. But, unless you want to find out how difficult the campaign is on higher difficulties, there really isn't any reason to do it again. The only things that carry over to subsequent campaign playthroughs are skins (and if you beat the Metal Terror DLC a melee weapon). So, that's a downer to me.

Survival on normal in the first biome was a little nerve-wracking but doable. But, wow, the latter biomes whoop my butt, even on easy. Maybe I can do it after tweaking my build order and optimizing my actions, but so far, ouch.

The devs are still creating new content for this game and just recently rebalanced the survival mode (making it more difficult, lol), so there is more fun to come in 2023.

This is precisely what was advertised: the original portal with path*-traced lighting and shadows mixed with modern object materials and textures.

If you were expecting fixes to old Portal problems, nope.
If you wanted Portal in a modern engine, nope.
If you wanted to play Portal with path-tracing features at amazing framerates on large resolutions, nope.
If you thought that AMD's hardware would keep up with Nvidia's so that what works for a 4090 should work for a 6000-series AMD card, nope.

Now that your expectations are properly aligned, you can better enjoy what is actually here. :-)

Two additional notes:
Don't mess with the main menu graphics options. Use Alt-X instead.
Downclock your GPU from your normal overclock. Portal seems to be sensitive to GPU overclocks.

Have fun!

* After writing this, I learned that this uses path tracing, not ray tracing. The two are related but different. So, corrected.

The game itself is mostly fun, but it only has a fraction of what it needs to have when complete.

The development is moving at a very slow pace. I can't say it's the slowest early access game (EA) I've seen, because Black Mesa was by far the slowest Steam EA game I know of. Then, of the in-development games, Star Citizen is in a galaxy of its own. Maybe Valheim will have everything it needs... eventually. Come back in in Fall 2025 to check on progress.

The game crashes on me too often. Thankfully, the save backups are never longer back than 20 minutes ago, but having to redo the same 10-19 minutes dozens of times gets old. I don't know why the game crashes. Unfortunately, the devs don't seem to know why the game crashes either.

The quality control systems have missed several things in recent patches, and that's never good. A simple one is that the team forgot to do the Halloween seasonal this year. And, that's after weeks of players in the Steam forums asking for it and trying to remind the devs about it. Oops.

The volunteer forum moderators delete threads and posts. They don't merely lock threads that they want to close and archive, they actually delete posts and entire threads. And, I'm not even talking about vulgar, rude, fighting posts. I'm talking about on-topic posts in threads that someone else necroed or posts that are tangentially related if not exactly on topic. They even give out official warnings for things that posters haven't done. They might be nice people, but they need to learn a lot about moderating.

Combined, I feel that Valheim deserves a negative review.

I might come back in a couple of years to see if it's been improved. Maybe.

It was fun.
Combat was enjoyable.
Story was simple but satisfying.
No technical problems until after I'd played through a couple of times (two crashes during asset instanciation).
I wish that there was an FOV slider though.
I hope that Darksiders 4 comes out soon!

A step up from Vanilla's Ultra settings. Don't expect this to make everything 4K textures with much more detailed models though.
A good place to begin adding other graphics mods to make an exceptional-looking FO4.


If you have a fast internet connection, the storage for the download, and a high-end GPU (8GB+ VRAM), I think that it's worth trying out. Oh, download one of the mods that improves load times. They really help... do that even if you don't use this pack.