Recent reviews by Joker

Stopped enjoying things around the three elder dragons quest, gating further main story progression. Game curved several times for difficulty throughout play time but the elder dragon difficulty curve was probably the most ridiculous and felt like it was propped up by tedious mechanics instead of anything really skill-based.

You've got Chip-damage Firelion who spends a majority of his existence pissed off and jumping around. He's not difficult if you avoid the supernova he does, but his moveset is pretty much just spammy attacks and high damage stun combos. I could probably cheese it with vitality mantle and trading out my charm, but that doesn't feel rewarding relying on a consumable item or piece of usable equipment to carry you through a fight. On top of that, this guy's armor looks pretty awful and makes for very bad incentive to grind it.

Then there's Moldspore Cancerdragon who isn't a difficult fight either, but his whole gimmick is he infects you with AIDS that halves your health if you're not immune to effluvia. This costs nullberries to fix, on top of potions to restore your health back up. You could however use the Girros "belt" but that's additional time spent grinding a single piece of gear for a single fight. You then still have to deal with his annoying health reduction, because suprise-surprise - It only actually helps with background buildup.

Finally, there's Blowhard McWindbag who is just a major pain. I fought that thing about three times before giving up, although the latter two were admittedly done under the influence to cope with the previous headache. He summons tornadoes which can be painful, especially when his AI bugs out and he decides to sit inside the tornado where you cannot reach. It's overall just a frustrating and drawn out fight like the other two before it.

I might be missing the idea of accomplishment this game serves. It isn't difficult so much as tedious and drawn out at times with a ton of weird mechanics to keep track of, most of which would be better off eliminated given they don't really offer any meaningful depth to fights. You've additionally got items that last until you "cart" like demon drug and armor-skin, but you can't reacquire meal bonuses within the mission once the meal category is used. This is extremely annoying because a good majority of the game makes it so you rely on these buffs, so punishing you that hard on top of reducing rewards is a kick to the balls.

I gave it an honest shot with 128 hours and enjoyed some of it, but these 3 monsters have made playing pretty miserable and sucked out my enjoyment of playing solo further. I know it only gets more of a slog from here when crazier variants show up.

This game still feels like its in development with how empty the game-play is; guns are un-intuitive and the crafting/upgrade system feels shoehorned in. Atmosphere is pretty though.

This game looks great from the promo material, but what they do not show you is how atrocious the UI system is. You're not even shown hotkeys for each UI item, and are instead left to either mouse over them for tool tips on what each is, which is a waste of precious time in combat, especially when each button in the right menu has a meaningless icon that ends up just opening a secondary menu.

The tutorial is additionally terrible, with repetitive "hints" that don't actually show you what you need to do in order to complete what they are asking. Spent far too long trying to figure out how to access a vehicle's inventory, and then completely forgot how to a few minutes later when asked to repair and rearm a tank. Unit management is also an issue, where you have to click directly on the floating icon over top of soldiers instead of being able to individually click-select one, with the only alternative being to box-select the individual unit(s) you want to micro. You're also expected to manually reload and rearm soldiers which makes no sense, and the AI path finding is atrocious. Literally had the squad run in two different directions from each other just to reach the selected cover, which forced me to micro the single squad even more to ensure they weren't running into a hail of machine gun fire.

Honestly, if they fixed the UI and made the tutorial "hints" better so that new players could actually learn the game without getting frustrated, that would make it a million times better. But as it stands, the bad UI makes this game way more difficult than it needs to be. I'd expect it to be more at home in a 90's game with how bad and uninformative it is. I fortunately only paid $12 for this, but I would definitely not recommend even considering this game unless it's heavily discounted.

♥♥♥♥ you, Sony. You can't touch democracy.

Baldur's Gate 3 is very visually appealing with a handful of cool character companions that have decent writing, however I feel as though the dice really hold the game back from the full potential. Unlike with DND where you have a human GM that can make dice failures engaging, the computer and the dice in BG3 just feel stale and out of place for a CRPG. For example, You're unable to really spec into certain skills reliably because dice rolling eliminates a lot of the actual character speccing through RNG, with your bonuses being the only real thing that give you an actual consistency to a build. You can compensate for this RNG a little bit with certain spells that give bonuses, but ultimately failing checks with a computer doesn't give the same opportunity for fun or character growth as it does with a party of players. You ultimately just fail sometimes and then the game moves on, even though it gives you multiple attempts to catch yourself before either locking you out or setting you down another potential path. Consequences are good, but the game doesn't even reward you for passing checks all that often (given that they aren't always an option), other than you didn't get the bad outcome.

In addition to the RNG in dialog, combat is an absolute slog with the dice rolls and gimped level system. Not only do levels take incredibly long to accumulate, but you start the game at level 1 and can only climb up to level 12 before the game cuts you off, which locks you out of a bunch of fun spells that really are the bread and butter of Casters. As they stand, Casters are pretty much only for utilities unless you do specific builds for high DPS, but for most intents and purposes, a melee fighter will be much more consistent with their action economy.

Some character interactions admittedly are written like ♥♥♥♥ and are "damned if you do, damned if you don't." The Pale elf is one such example of this where your decision upon meeting him ultimately results in the same outcome of the dialog, allowing him to stay in your camp despite threatening your life. On top of that he's clearly a vampire just by appearance, however you are unable to discern this fact in-character without the dice's consent or waiting until an event triggers to finally broach the subject. It's glaringly obvious as a player and very frustrating that it's at the mercy of the dice to decide whether or not you can proceed with questioning him.

While yes, it is DND and everything I have written so far is ragging on the dice. But DND as a sit-down game offers you more flexibility for writing a story with friends than this game allows, which ultimately forces you into cookie-cutter builds/characters in order to have the best chances of succeeding. You want to win and only win that often leads to save-scumming, whereas sit-down DND gives you a chance to all create something that everyone is invested in, even if stuff goes completely awry and the party finds itself stuck. Even with multiple players, the game is far too linear to capture the true DND experience, and ultimately just makes you want to go play DND instead of slog through BG3. I am sure there's probably a gem in here I am missing, but ultimately you need to get past the core mechanics of the game to truly have any enjoyment while playing.

Overall, I think this game is a very poor CRPG in contrast to games like Fallout 1 & 2, which came out over two decades ago. Those games actually allowed you to incorporate random chance and character building to make you feel good at things you wanted to be good at, while also giving you a reasonable penalty to things you didn't spec into. They had a simplistic yet surprisingly detailed visual style for their time, yet Baldur's Gate 3 has too much a focus on graphics and not enough focus on what makes the core of making choices matter in an RPG.

Huge step down from Wasteland 2's skill system, which now forces you to miss out on loot if you don't have the exact skill level that the check requires. In the previous game, you could still attempt to do things even without the requisite with a higher chance of failure, or god forbid, a critical failure that prevents you from trying again until the item is repaired (which requires another mechanics check) or you find the key/code.

Wasteland 3's skills are set up in such a way that there are an incredible amount of skill checks in the prologue, most of which you wouldn't consider having a skill for that early on in the game with only two characters at your disposal. In addition, the second area of Colorado has several skill checks at level 4 and higher, which you don't have enough XP to acquire unless you know ahead of time and invest most of the available skill points into that one skill.

There is also no chat log like Wasteland 2, so if you miss a key piece of dialog you're completely in the dark unless you reload or look online. This issue is bad enough in single player, but it becomes extremely frustrating when you are trying to play with two people in coop and one person controls the dialog choice. Moreover, the lack of a chat log prevents you from being able to go back and look at observations you've made, such as when you examine a corpse for cause of death. You can't go back and see what the cause of death is after you've succeeded on the skill check, so the context disappears as soon as you complete the check.

Narrative is also quite a bit shakier than Wasteland 2 and it feels as though the Desert Rangers have become raiders or bandits for no good reason, especially given that the customization options give you some interesting (yet ridiculous) choices for headgear and armor - none of which actually looks as though it belongs on the Desert Rangers and would seem more at home in a Fallout 4 raider gang. While I do like some of these customization options, associating them with the Desert Rangers doesn't make sense and it would be much easier to avoid the problem by making the player character(s) initially unaffiliated with the Rangers, and have the potential to join up or remain independent wastelanders.

All in all, it's okay if you aren't expecting a Wasteland game that holds onto it's roots, however I would highly recommend picking up a key for Wasteland 2's Director's cut instead. You'll also get a copy of the OG Wasteland with it to further flesh out the story of the franchise, and then you may see the disconnect on story yourselves. Just go into this game with the expectation that all the systems have been heavily watered down in contrast to the original games, which restricts player agency and almost forces you to look up builds to prevent soft-locking your options.

War thunder tier map design

Gave the game a shot because it's developed by Arkane and not Bethesda. Unfortunately, like everything Bethesda touches, this game just reeks of their influence and you can see that Prey 2017 is only the same as Prey 2006 in name. To start off my dislikes, the game is incredibly slow to get started (about an actual hour just for the introductory stuff) and only really serves to introduce the rather uninteresting mimic enemy who eventually becomes quite tedious to deal with when there's a few. They're quite weak, but don't turn your back on them; especially if there are multiple.

This game also released with Denuvo despite it being a single-player game, which was definitely pushed through by Bethesda because of their lack of understanding on what is necessary for development. I feel sorry for Arkane in how much of their decision making was overshadowed by poor publisher mandates, which likely hurt their development freedom.

The graphics are great for terminals, but the controls surrounding them seem a bit clunky where you can use the mouse to navigate but need to press F to confirm the selection. Fortunately you can't break them, because I would have done it by accident a few times lol. Outside of the terminal graphics, this is a pretty decent looking 2017 game. I wouldn't say the people look particularly good, but they don't have the clay-person feeling either. The animations are relatively fluid, but there's weight lacking on weapons that make them feel good to use.

The story however is kind of ass, even from peeking into the wiki. It didn't really have any strong motivators to do anything, and I didn't feel attachment to any of the characters. I'd say save the cash and just watch someone play it on YouTube, it'll give you about the same experience.

Found the game felt really clunky with no interact hotkeys (forced click-to-interact) and a large lack of meaningful tips that also had a nasty habit of cluttering your vision every now and then with no clear trigger to why they'd appear. To make matters even worse, the inventory system feels terrible and I find myself wasting time by clicking and dragging items in and out of a toolbelt just to be able to use them in my hotbar (usually when there's a necessity for speed), and no clear indication if items can actually be placed in certain containers or if they are restricted to a specific category.

It has some really advanced systems that look pretty neat, such as the medical system that reminds me of ACE Medical from Arma 3, but with a clunkier feeling to the interaction. The Wiring system is also pretty neat and allows you to automate different things using modules and such, which puts Minecraft Redstone to shame with the interactivity it offers. I think that these two examples showcase a bit of potential, but overall I think there needs a heavy coat of polish to the UX and UI for it to really grab my attention.

Great concept and okay execution, unfortunately the developer cannot stick to a road map or communicate updates in a timely manner. Additionally, we are now going into an overhaul for tank internals that is slowing down the rest of development and essentially gating most of the features people are actually anticipating, such as Shell Designer, more missions, and a functioning campaign.

If we could make it through anywhere from half a road map to three quarters of one without completely deviating from it on a side project, I may consider reversing this review as I do enjoy the game.... But the updates aren't clearly communicated and there are far too many off-roadmap changes that end up derailing everything else.

Edit: 10/18/23 - Another delay announced.
Edit 2: 12/08/23 - Another delay to completely overhaul a core system
Edit 3: 02/26/24 - Still no update release, which also is preventing the hiring of more developers
Edit 4: 03/27/24 - Another delay announced.
Edit 5: 04/29/24 - Still no update or promised hires, development break