Recent reviews by Spec

"Excellent!"

Runs good, feels good, looks good, sounds good. Everything I hoped 7's successor would be.

Great game. If you go in expecting a souls-like, you will be disappointed. This is a pretty unique game mechanically speaking, but it does work well. Doesn't top Sekiro though in terms of sheer mechanical excellence.

The bosses were consistently the best bit for me, nice to see what From is capable of when working with combat systems allowing for more over the top combat. Seems like there's some nice replayability with ranks and NG+s too.

Runs pretty well on my 6800XT, have not measured performance but at 4K/Max I noticed no real frame rate issues except very briefly in some really intense scenes.

In terms of negatives, the ones that stick in mind are:
- The game sometimes feels a little clunky; I often went flying past targets when trying to do boost-kicks or melee attacks. Might be I'm just bad, but it felt imprecise to me.
- I haven't seen all endings yet but the story's a bit meh. Not bad, but not good either. That's fine since the game itself is fun.
- The music has its moments but is overall a bit disappointing, it's very subdued, would've benefited a lot from more energy in critical moments.
- HDR, at least in my system, just doesn't work after the first time I launch the game on that day. I have no idea why, and it's a bit annoying.

RDR2 has a great story, excellent characters and some impressive visuals, animations and sound design. A lot has been said about those so I won't repeat them.

I will list some of my gripes with the game. These are simply my opinions, and apart from the technical complaints these are pretty subjective.

• The Rockstar launcher is offensively bad; half the time it declares that I do not have the rights to play this game. I very much do. Steam is itself DRM, this added launcher is just insulting to us customers. You would, ironically, most likely have a better experience pirating it.
  
• The HDR implementation is (still!) completely broken. Turning it off and using Windows' Auto HDR looked best for me, but I was a little disappointed with that. On a similar note: for whatever reason, this game had weird issues with a really harsh transition from dark-grey to black on my display. No other game does this. It was immensely distracting at points.
  
• The game constantly feels like it's getting in its own way. It's trying very hard to tell a story and if you do the slightest thing it doesn't want you to do, it will simply 'fail' you and make you redo a section. I wasn't going out of my way to be 'clever', but still ran into this multiple times. At those points it almost feels like the developers resented the fact they were making a game rather than a movie.
  
• The gameplay is merely average. It's inoffensive and doesn't really do anything wrong - but doesn't feel particularly satisfying to play for the most part. If anything it feels rather clunky at times and a little dated. It feels like they haven't really changed much of their core gameplay design or mechanics since the days of GTA 4.
  
• The pacing is all over the place. The story really is a great one, but my god does it take a long time to unfold. I'm all for a slow burn but at points it felt more a deep freeze.
  
• The world felt largely empty and a bit boring. It's reasonably pretty but I felt absolutely no inclination to explore it, unlike in say the likes of Breath of the Wild or Elden Ring.

I've seen people say this game is immersive, but given the gameplay issues above I honestly rarely felt immersed. Heavily invested in the story, absolutely, but almost never immersed. An 'immersive sim', this is not.

I'm glad I played it, its story and cast are fantastic, but as a game it's far from a masterpiece in my opinion.

Simple arcade-y fun. Low skill floor, high skill ceiling. Fantastic 'pick up and play' game. Well worth the price.

Fusion has an even higher skill ceiling due to its different (less weighty/grippy) physics system, but most people won't reach a point where that matters. As a game, I think Rising is more varied, has more base content to offer, and a way better tutorial system.

That said, the XP system sucks (having the DLC helps reduce the grind a bit), and the cosmetic/lootbox system is pretty bad (but that can pretty much entirely be ignored).

Absolutely fantastic combat mechanics, with a lot of complexity to them. If you want a deep multiplayer game that requires a lot of time and effort to get good at, this is it.

Be aware if this is your first Tekken that there's no tutorial. I wouldn't let this put you off since there are some excellent guides online though.

Single player content is a bit barebones, so if you're looking for that, this might not be the best game for you.

Optimisation is fantastic, set everything to Ultra at 1440p and never dropped from 60fps on my 980ti/6600k.