78
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688
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Recent reviews by East of Sol

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Showing 1-10 of 78 entries
No one has rated this review as helpful yet
79.9 hrs on record (36.7 hrs at review time)
That Evangelion crossover is nice. They basically added a whole story mission with NGE content (won't spoiler it) as well as themed vanity items, weapons/simulacras, tasks etc.
Posted March 18.
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29.5 hrs on record (28.0 hrs at review time)
Well, I've a bit of critisism here.
- the game is quite outdated in terms of graphics and how it feels in general.
- I don't like that on higher difficulty bots become super accurate with lightning-quick reactions, so (esp in some scripted scenes or during vehicle segments of the game) the matter whether you survive or not depends basically on random - will a bot decide to focus fire you or not. If it does, you're almost certainly dead. Add to this occasional lack of save points during some particularly difficult segments, thus making you replay a large part of said segments each time you fail.

But still, it's a CoD game with all that wirlwind of action, directed scenes, varied gameplay and a lot of unique locations coupled with Cold War-era vibes. Pretty OK pastime for a couple of nights.
Posted June 17, 2023.
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0.0 hrs on record
Free XMas themed cosmetic pack.
Posted June 17, 2023.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
23.4 hrs on record
I know CoD: Ghosts was critisized by many players, but, personally, I find it a very entertaining game with a sturdy campaign filled with action, covert ops, guns/equipment aesthetics, epic scenes etc. Just as any other CoD, I guess. Alongside normal on-foot gameplay, you occasionally take on the roles of helicopter and armor crew, UAV-operator, remote sniper turret controller, combat astronaut, operator of a large orbital gun and even a dog. You perform direct assaults, covert infiltrations, diversions, captures of vital targets, defence of bases etc. Locations are equally diverse, with jungles, cities, deserts, underwater to name but a few.

So, if you need a fast-pacing, action-packed heroic shooter game in the modern setting with a diverse gameplay and sturdy if somewhat movie-like plot, than this game is good to go.

I nearly haven't tried multiplayer, just a couple of rounds (it's half-dead, but 1 mode had some players yet, or may be they were ai-controlled), so cannot comment on it. But should you want to run a couple of chilling matches with bots, just to relax, it's pretty ok to do so.
Posted June 11, 2023. Last edited June 11, 2023.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
126.9 hrs on record (108.9 hrs at review time)
The game: Consider the environment, preserve the planet, care for ecology, be responsible in your scientific and technical activity.
Also, the game: You need a bag upgrade? Simple as a pie! Just KILL ABOUT A MILLION RACOONS to drop that blue resource of theirs.

HZD is OK with the chief pros being beautiful graphics, setting, concept, design of robotic animals.
On the other hand, I was strongly disappointed by all side quests and a little by the main story. Sides are just fillers, while the story could really be more detailed with quests being more numerous and various. Quest dialogues quite often leave much to be desired in terms of quality, sense, NPC's (and the PC's) reactions. Sometimes they're just blatantly primitive and full of bad cliches.

Overall, contrary to my preliminary impression, the game's focus is not on its story, but on gameplay. Speaking of which, it - for the most part - is pleasant, but can be a bit annoying and tiresome due to survival elements, where you need to roam the world and grab all that is laid out there - wood sticks, berries, flowers etc. And you need to kill a ton of animals should you decide to upgrade your pouches. Fortunately, you can ignore the gathering aspect and just walk through the story, but it'll be more difficult. And I'm not sure you can do it as easily on higher difficulty.

Hunting robots is interesting with all those mechanics of critical points and elemental and damage-type vulnerabilities. The harder the game the more you need to prepare and plan your attacks, consider weapon options, traps, cover, moment to strike etc. The enemies themselves are diverse and unique, each type needs its own approach to be defeated.

A word on locations. Outdoors are magnificent, nuff said. Indoors are terrible, esp. bunkers with stalactites - they're just designed super dully with almost nothing to do there and very poor visuals. Except may be Cauldrons, but that’s arguable. And their technical optimization is worse, to my surprise.

One of the main drawbacks of HZD is Aloy the protagonist. Her best part is at the beginning - during her childhood, where her character and relationships with Rost are established and shown to players, and up until the Trials and the moment right after (when she sets off to her main adventure). After that she completely stops developing as a character. She has no core personality except being skeptical, nagging, arrogant even. She either scolds in every dialogue or scolds and then just does what is required by NPC. Well, sometimes she pities smbd in need, but that is rare and just don't look natural considering her other conversation lines. Typical conversations be like:
*NPC tells Aloy some info / asks her to do smth*
*Aloys grumbles at him for whatever reason*
After a while, it starts to annoy a bit. Aloy, why can’t you just not be passively-aggressive every time you speak with someone? T_T

Basically, those are all the aspects I wanted to mention. I’d give the game 6/10 in my personal (and occasionally changeable) chart. Oh, forgot smth.

A note on The Frozen Wilds.
Honestly, I like the plot in this DLC much more than in the main game. Sure, it’s less prolonged, but it feels more significant, saturated, packed more tightly and have no abrupt long pauses and blanks.
Add to this much improved indoor levels (and the same-class new outdoor region) and you get a pretty sturdy and well-balanced DLC. 8/10.

PS
And of course, one cannot not to notice some kind of underlying hate (or at least contempt) to male characters in HZD. As if the devs had such guidelines during the creation of NPCs:
- if it's a male, he is absolutely evil.
- if he is not absolutely evil, he's somewhat evil.
- if not somewhat evil, he's stupid.
- if not stupid, he's drunkard.
- if not drunkard, he has his own shady agenda, and is generally untrustworthy.
- if everything above fails, and he might be normal, then he's dead (or soon to be dead).
- in very rare circumstances he's not any of the above and not dead, then he's non-existent as an NPC except in a couple of text lines in some text-log amidst some far away ruins.
- otherwise, it's a female (alive, the smartest, bravest, paragon of every virtue known to humanity and totally unsusceptible to Humanity's vices).
I've got nothing against female protagonists (or NPCs for that matter) and, in truth, often play them if there is a choice of characters, but when somebody massively superimpose their unfair, subjective and arguable point of view, glorifying one party and vilifying another, although those parties are the same people and both have the same good AND bad sides, well, it's just a hypocrisy.
Posted May 31, 2023.
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13 people found this review helpful
1 person found this review funny
49.2 hrs on record (29.7 hrs at review time)
Well, Gears Tactics is a sturdy, well-built tactical game. It doesn't copy XCOM like so many other tactics nowadays, but has it's own feats and traits. Combat is the strongest aspect of the game, providing a plethora of opportunites to defeat enemies. Cover, flanking, elevation, overwatch, various skills and abilities allow for a flexible approach to combat tasks. Special acclaim goes to large badass bosses, each with its own mechanics and ways to be defeated. And that's about it.

On the other hand we have pretty simple story which is spread thin across few really important missions and great deal of template-like side missions (cannot be skipped) and filler-like story missions which are, in essence, don't differ from sides at all. Act 3 of the campaign is the worst filler so far, as you get, like, 2 story missions looking absolutely like sides, then 3 sides, then 2 stories (same as sides), then again 3 sides etc. There are several types of sides, but still too few for you to get bored pretty soon. So to get to the next interesting piece of plot, you will have to grind not so much as through interesting combat, but through uninteresting missions.

Squad management also should get its portion of criticism. After a while I realised, that I have to care about only a few of my fighters - those playing main roles in the plot. Others that you can recruit along the course are just there to fill gaps in your squad. It would be OK if not for the following nuance. It's completely pointless to develop them in the long term. Because, almost every next mission will add new fighers to the recruitment pool that will be of a higher lvl, have more unlocked skills and even several spare skill points to spend. Exp accumulation is very slow in the game starting from 2-3rd levels onwards, so it's much more profitable to recruit a new higher-level warrior than to play your beloved under-levelled specialist that you keep since the early missions. Recruitment costs you absolutely nothing and if you are capped, just fire a lower-level member of your roster and add a more skilled one. Ofc, default distribution of skills may be not to your liking (but often it's pretty decent), but you can always spend a reset token to redistribute, and there is no lack of those tokens. For the same reason customisation tool of your guys' look is almost useless. You don't wanna spend time to make someone look pretty just for them to be dismissed before the next mission in favor of another guy with more skills. To top it all, new warriors come with their own equipment that scales with their level and often is a bit superior than the majority of your hard-earned gear from mission chests.
Oh, yeah, the chests... new gear aquisition is completely random: you get an item at the end of each mission plus some for bonus objectives and collected chests on maps. There are tiers of rarity for the items but it's not uncommon to get a higher-rarity gear with worse abilities than your currently owned lower-rarity gear (eg you have +15 dmg blue item and then pull a violet item that gives you +0 dmg and some useless ability). Gold-tiered items are still pretty decent although there are also some very specific ones among them, not suitable for every build.


So, 6/10 with praises for flexible combat, a lot of builds and abilities, badass bosses, and criticism for simple and sides-gated plot, poor development of fighters and gear management.

See you later, Jack!
Posted January 8, 2023. Last edited January 26, 2023.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
63.5 hrs on record
Control is a great atmospheric action game with "secret agencies/paranoraml activity/urban legends" etc. vibes with actual focus on the idea that all those superstitions are real and has an actual impact on that reality.

I really admire the locations in the game with the overall macro-location called the Oldest House being perfectly fit for the story. It's labyrinthine offices, labs, maintenance rooms look quite realistically but are often twisted and shifted unnaturally showing that those are not just ordinary facilities but areas touched by supernatural world with strange things and items happening there. Add to that other dimensions "spilling" inside, as well as otherworldly thresholds. Areas are gloomy, mysterious, full of suspense (and suddenly teleporting enemies surely contribute to that). The authors deftly use lighting, shadows and coloration to accentuate various scenes or events and covertly guide the player through.

The plot is a bit vague, but still not bad. Combat encourages proactive behaviour, dynamic position-switching, actively engaging targets with both weapons and psychic abilities. In fact, those abilities are even more useful and effective than weapons.

As for downsides, I'm not fond of the equipment system and how upgrades are obtained. It resembles a mechanic from some online service game where you just have to kill a lot of mobs that drop common/uncommon/rare etc. mod or resource. It's not especially grindy, but looks pretty primitive and oversimplified.

There are also just a few weapons in the game and they are in essense ONE weapon with differend modes of fire. Aesthetically they look almost the same, although being different gameplay-wise. Not all of them are equally useful: like, "rocket launcher" is so weak that it isn't worth it's charge time, really. Additionally, when I've obtained its unique mod for +100% blast radius I soon found out that my blast reaches back to me (with hp damage) despite me being decently away from a target, thus almost completely negating the mod's advantage. 80% of the time I used the very first Grip weapon variant with upgrades as it's nicely balanced.

Additionally, I'd love to see more elaborate interface elements regarding equipment instead of currently overminimalistic ones.
Posted December 23, 2022.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
3.7 hrs on record (1.4 hrs at review time)
Great meditative and emotion-invoking platformer with amazing music that is one of the core elements of the game.
Posted November 27, 2022.
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2.5 hrs on record (2.2 hrs at review time)
Relaxing, light, with satisfying gameplay of simplified (dis)assembling of various devices. Nice voiceover. A bit short. One thing i'd like to be improved here is the items rotation in 3d - would be nice to be able to do it via keyboard, like, 2 or 3 pairs of hotkeys, each one rotates an item clockwise and counter-clockwise along its axis.
Posted June 26, 2022. Last edited June 26, 2022.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
56.0 hrs on record (53.2 hrs at review time)
Top 10 anime betrayals are in there! Overall, I like this game, although, I enjoyed the narrative here a bit less than expected and the combat experience, on the contrary, much more.

Combat is pretty much challenging and satisfactory. It's dynamic and tactical in nature with a ton of options which you're strongly encouraged to use in order to effectively defeat enemies. Numerous weapon and psionic attacks, combos, several SAS powers, allies' various helping moves, brain drives and fields, statuses applications to combine them with SAS, interactive environment, multitude of types of enemies, each with its own protections, weaknesses and a tactics to be used against. Boss fights are even more interesting and tactics-dependable.
I played on Normal and can say that it's impossible to just button-mash the battles. Almost any blow taken is crippling with the character is knocked out and having to drag theirselves back into the fight, remaining vulnerable all the while. You need to attack thoughtfully, depending on the type of enemy before you, consider its moves, time your strikes and dashes properly, activate appropriate SAS, use environment objects, break defenses and hit critical spots. Well, basically you've to use every tool at your arsenal to prevail and in the end you'll be satisfied with the experience as a reward in itself.

Others aspects (briefly, since the text limitation):
Story: OK with some cringy events and accelerated character and overall plot evolution.

Visuals and art style: slightly below my expectations, but the style is there and it's not bad. Scenes are quite beautiful at times.

Locations: not many types, a few distinct levels, more or less straight-forward, basically a string of arena-like rooms along a corridor.

Voice acting: one of the best I've listened to in games (played Eng version). My respects to VAs of Kasane, Arashi, Kyoka and every other character.

Controls: compared to some other JRPGs, PC-controls in SN are made almost perfectly. Convenient and intuitive.

Also present: skills progression, characters visual customization, equipment system, party hideout, bonding episodes.
Posted May 30, 2022. Last edited May 30, 2022.
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Showing 1-10 of 78 entries