Recent reviews by Fish

There's 2-3 hours worth of content here. Good story and great villain with a new area to explore.

It's a bit jarring if you've completed the game already because you'll have to revert back to an old save or start a new game (and progress far enough into the story) to play through the quest. The new armour looks great although sadly the legendary outfit can't be customised. The legendary weapons are underwhelming stat-wise, at least for somebody who has end-game gear already.

It's not great value but if you're left wanting an excuse to jump into GreedFall's universe and story for another couple of hours then this is an enjoyable bit of DLC.

GreedFall is a game I took a chance on and it's turned out to be an absolute gem. It's a very narrative focused RPG set in an incredibly unique fantasy colonial setting. In a sea of medieval fantasy universes (and the odd colonial one) it really stands out as such a great setting that I've never seen before.

The world looks incredible and has so much variety in aesthetics from the 17th century European (and Ottoman) inspired colonisers to the native villagers. The setting leads to a complex and unique narrative that perfectly explores all the themes you'd expect from politics to religion and, of course, the conflict between the different colonial powers and the native population. The political intrigue/conflict between the colonial factions as well as their unique themes (commerce, science, religion) and GreedFall's morally grey story telling make for some really great narratives. It's a brilliant story with many unexpected twists, turns, choices and consequences and one that doesn't shy away from the cruel realities of colonial expansion whilst never feeling like it has a political bone to pick. Of course, this is also a fantasy universe so Teer Fradee’s monsters and mystical creatures that the natives are so in-tune with are certainly not powerless!

Unlike other RPGs, you don’t play as a skilled monster hunter, warrior or "chosen one" - you play as a diplomat and emissary for your cousin who leads your faction's colony. You can feel that distinction almost immediately - although there is combat (and enough of it), much of the game is spent exploring the world and influencing the various factions on Teer Fradee through dialogue and diplomacy. If immersing yourself in the world that GreedFall builds doesn't appeal to you, you're probably going to find it pretty boring.

The combat doesn't do anything incredible mechanically but is definitely solid enough to be enjoyable. It's got a great mix of combat styles from swords and maces through to magic, guns and traps. You're not restricted to any one style so can build some pretty interesting hybrid builds. The skill trees give you a lot of choice over both combat and non-combat skills. There is armour customisation which is fun (if slightly limited in scope), as well as crafting and alchemy to help you throughout.

The companions are pretty varied and all have unique personalities that you get to explore with a series of quests for each. They're all worth using at various points as they all have different combat styles and you'll find dialogue options and even whole questlines will change based on who you bring and how much they like you.

A few negatives: The lip-syncing is frankly terrible and there’s some errors in the dialogue subtitles but nothing major. It also has forced negative mouse acceleration which I thought would make the game unplayable but it hasn’t, just a minor annoyance. There’s a lot of reused assets that you’ll notice mainly within the cities but again, not a huge deal.

If the world sounds and looks interesting to you then it's definitely worth picking up. If it doesn't or if you're the kind of person who just skips through all the dialogue to get to the "good stuff" it's probably worth giving GreedFall a miss.

If you do decide to give GreedFall a go, be aware that it’s definitely a game where you want to do all the side missions and do them as soon as you can. Your relationship with the factions and your companions have very real impacts on the main storyline and there are a few points in the main story where sidequests will fail automatically if you haven’t already done them! There’s probably about 35-40 hours of gameplay in GreedFall with every sidequest completed so it’s definitely manageable (and enjoyable!)

I dunno what I found more surprising - finding out that Master Bra'tac was also a Jedi or that I was playing the bastard child of Dark Souls and Tomb Raider.

The single player is fantastic and is definitely a must-play so I won't go into it.

Buuuuuut..

GTA:Online is more of a mixed bag. It is enjoyable if you have a group of friends to play it with but suffers from a pretty toxic playerbase, long loading times and the occasional modder.

More importantly, as time has gone on, in-game prices for new weapons, vehicles and properties (many of which you REQUIRE to start playing new content) have sky-rocketed while ways to earn money have remained relatively stagnant. This has been done to encourage microtransactions and as a result you're going to be spending a lot of real-world money to access content unless you want to be grinding for hundreds (or thousands) of hours.

£60+ for an in-game yacht anybody? £15-£30 for every new vehicle? I've stopped playing because of this.

To add a bit of perspective, at release:

• The most expensive item in the game was a $1.5M Tank
  
• The best car in the game was worth $1M
  
• Most ordinary cars (the ones you buy for fun because they look good despite being useless) were $50-400K
  
• The most expensive property was $400K

And now:

• The most expensive vehicle in the game (excluding a golden reskin & the yachts) is $6.5M
  
• There are 176 vehicles with a purchase price of $1M+ (before modification), 77 above $2M & 38 above $3M
  
• Only 5 vehicles have been released for under $300k since 2017
  
• The most expensive property starts at $8M before options & there are 84 properties worth more than $1M

And to put that all in context:

• As part of a skilled & coordinated 4-man crew can you can make around $400k/hr
  
• With significant starting capital, an experienced player can make $250-£300k/hr
  
• Most ordinary players will probably be closer to $150k-200k/hr
  
• ...Or you can pay £60 in real money for $8M in-game and cut out 20-50 hours of grinding.

Overall, it's a thumbs up for the single-player which makes the purchase worth it on it's own.

But I really can't recommend the multiplayer at this point.
If you want to just hop on and do some heists or mess about with friends then definitely go for it. Just don't expect to take part in a majority of what else GTA:Online has to offer without significant investment... of one form or another.

It's actually an incredibly solid rpg. Very different style from the old Assassin's Creed games. It will feel familiar if you've played Origins but everything is bigger, better and more refined.

The world feels alive, the story is compelling and the gameplay is fun.

They have been piling on free (and paid) updates since launch and all of them have been really good. The story & quality of life updates feel like they're made by people who are genuinely interesting in improving their game and not just making some quick cash which is a nice turnaround for Ubisoft.

Everything you dreamed of doing in SimCity back in the day you can do in Cities Skylines.

So much content across the game and expansions + a big modding community.

How to win the game: Roundabouts

tldr: ACU gets a lot of ♥♥♥♥ for performance/bugs but in my experience it has run alright. The game itself is decent although too much content is locked behind co-op for my taste. Do your research into how the game might run on your setup. For the most part, I enjoyed it though.

Firstly, the game is a real mixed bag in terms of performance. You'll hear horror stories from some people and yet many others have very playable experiences. My recommendation would be to do your research and see if you can find people talking about how the game performs on the setup you have. Sure, the game is more buggy than most games for me but it was perfectly playable on my HD7850 and i5 3570K.

Just a few bugs that I've experienced:
- Not being able to change AA settings from the default to anything other than off without the screen becoming a mess of coloured boxes.
- Occasionally I get stuck being unable to attack because it won't lock onto NPCs and have to leave the area and come back.
- The game freezes for a few seconds every 30-40 mins. It feels as if it has crashed but then it starts working fine again.

One thing that I would say is that obviously the game has been expanded a lot from previous AC games in terms of scale of the environment and in particular the number of NPCs. Combine this with a definite lack in optimisation and you cannot expect to run this on ultra with anything but the most overkill rigs. I get the feeling that a lot of people are overestimating how powerful their PCs are and are complaining when trying to run the game on the highest settings results in a choppy experience.

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Onto the rest of the game, mixed bag probably sums this up here too. Graphically there are some absolutely horrible textures (the hair in particular on my settings looked terrible) but then that is combined with the best mocap and facial animation I've ever seen. I stopped noticing the bad textures after a while and certainly if you can run it on the highest settings it becomes a beautiful looking game.

I enjoyed the story and appreciated that it took more of a return to more of the traditional Assassins/Templars based story rather than feeling like a game just randomly set in the AC universe. Arno is a very enjoyable character to play as and is very Ezio-esque in his personality.

The combat and mechanics are typical AC but have had a majour overhaul. I'm not sure what I think of the movement changes as it seems to be a lot easier to ♥♥♥♥ up while navigating around the city (especially windows :@) but the animations are great at least... The combat changes and addition of skill trees is really refreshing too. As much as I enjoyed mowing through people in past games the combat being much harder means that you have to be much more tactical and there will be plenty of fights that you just have to run from. It just makes it a bit more challenging and very different from past games even if the combat itself feels very AC-like. The enemy AI is also a lot smarter and forces you to use your whole aresenal of abilities to succeed.

There's a lot of content and customisation but this is where my main problem with the game comes in - co-op. At least to me, AC has always been a more single-player game and, while I think that it is great that co-op exists, it is forced on you way too much. There are some missions that I'm fairly sure are co-op only and a large amount of the best gear is locked behind playing co-op missions in groups of 4 or more players. Combine this with the fact that there is no text chat in-game and unless you have a large group of friends who all want to play a lot of Unity (and are not plagued by or put-off by the technical difficulties so many people are reporting) it's a real pain in the arse. I have no doubt that some people will wind up playing a whole lot of Unity co-op and form groups and guilds like you might see in an MMO... but that isn't a goal that AC should be chasing IMO. Personally I'd like to see co-op as an option not a requirement to experience all the content in the next game. For some people, this large amount of co-op content will be a real bonus though and if that's you, more power to you.

All that having been said, I still enjoyed the game and will probably keep coming back to it occasionally as I have done with past AC games. Obviously, there's a lot of hate for this game ATM and I would recommend AC2, brotherhood, revelations or AC4 for somebody just starting with the series but if you do your research and when (or if) the game has been through another few patches it'll be a worthy installment in the series - not exceptional but decent.

A few extra things to note:
- There's no multiple save games.
- It does try to get you to use Initiates + their app which can be annoying but you don't lose out on much if you don't use them.