Recent reviews by Kess

This game has all the horror elements to make you question whether you have nyctophobia, but somehow also has the comedic timing of a Loony Tunes episode.

WE MAKIN' IT OUT OF THE GRAVEYARD WITH THIS ONE 💀💀💀🔥🔥🔥

Finally boys and girls, we've found it

Bigger Oil.

18 naked heisters in the showers at Ram Ranch

Game's good, but whoever created discount Anor Londo needs to be exorcised.

You get off to pornography.
I get off to Sigmarite teachings, righteousness and his holy light.
We are not the same.

Sigma(r) Grindset Rule #12

After hearing all the praise that this game had on the PlayStation version, I was genuinely interested in grabbing it when it went on sale, and soon enough I did so a few months back.

Horizon Zero Dawn has some of the most graphically beautiful and pleasing worlds I've ever played in; having machines/robots co-existing with natures' inhabitants, wandering and behaving similarly to those in the wild is an amazing concept and creates an unique story telling narrative by being the main driving plot-point that caused humanity's downfall, in which the protagonist, Aloy, wishes to uncover her past and reveal what happened that lead to the apocalypse. The wide varity of enemies, both machines and humans contributes a lot to the games world-building and it's immersion.

But that's about it really, it doesn't matter if you've got the narrative capabilities to tell a compelling story (such as The Witcher, Red Dead Redemption, Nier or Final Fantasy to name a few) or immersive open worlds with advanced AIs roaming around the lands, if you've got mediocre combat as your core gameplay elements, it's just going to be off-putting for a soundingly good game. Horizon Zero Dawn's combat system primarily revolves around attack-and-dodge using your melee and ranged weapons, incorporating a skill tree that players could invest in to suit your gameplay style. Yet it somehow fails in this department due to the jankiness of certain attacks; the weapons, be it the spear or the bow, neither of them don't feel any weight to their strikes. Moreover, Aloy's melee attacks feel way too assisted, attacking with her spear and she'll sometimes slide to the nearest enemy that's 3-4 meters away while still doing the bloody animation. Though the stealth system was 'OK' and the tools/equipment such as the shock traps and the override abilities were surprisingly somewhat fun to use, the general experience for me was not fun and felt like a chore to progress through sections of certain quests that requires combat.

Second of all, the facial expressions and gestures during dialogues are either very minimal or pretty much non-existent, I swear it felt like watching two wooden planks facing each other while having an audio book playing in the background. If it weren't for Aloy's decent vocal performance I would've only read the subtitles and skip through the dialogues instead of boring myself to sleep. Even the NPCs that have major story related quests suffer from the same issues of having dead-fish eyes with puppet like behavior, and I hope the sequel would address and improve upon this.

Another gripe I have is the world, though I did praise it for it's immersive and beautiful visual design, contributed by the dynamic foliage of the environment and robots roaming around the lands like they were integrated with the ecological creatures, there are still some issues prevalent. Despite being 'immersive', the exploration isn't rewarding enough for players who like to inspect every nook and cranny that the game has to offer. Moreover, the interactions available for human NPCs aren't enough as a lot of them only involve dialogues and vendoring, making it feel like the world's empty, in a sense.

Lastly the PC port itself is somewhat lackluster, I used to run a gtx 1060 and I had trouble trying to run this game on a smooth framerate even on low settings. Even after upgrading, issues like missing or blurry textures (Yes, the game is installed on a SSD), stutters and lag still persist. 'Optimizing shader caches' don't even save properly, requiring me to compile it every time I launch the game, taking ages for it to complete. Hell, I don't even know if it actually works or not. I've tried numerous solutions but no prevail, having to watch the numbers load up on the bottom right side of my screen after booting the game up and eventually ignored it after getting impatient.

By no means is Horizon Zero Dawn a bad game, but due to the issues stated above it's ruined the gameplay experience for me. I've tried my hardest to enjoy the content that the game has to offer, I really wanted to like it but it feels like a damned chore to chug through everytime I load up the game. If you really want to dwell into this post apocalyptic world, then go for it, it might just work for you. But the overall adventure for me was disappointing and I've expected more from this game, it feels like an average at best Triple-A title with an intriguing story but is off-set by its shortcomings and bang average mechanic systems.

Never thought I'd encounter a skeleton stationed in a cavern asking me to show them my badonkers as their initial dialogue with me.

Unlike the previous DLCs such as Winds of Magic or Shadows Over Bögenhafen, Forgotten Relics is an individual pack that came with the release of the Chaos Wastes expansion that only offers new weapons, keep paintings and a portrait frame rather than a "weapon+map" combo bundle, which is also cheaper than the other DLCs.
The weapons themselves are strong, one for each of the 5 heroes; though some are class restricted, they're still very much usable in high difficulties and aren't straight up upgrades, but rather, substitutes for the base weapons.
Though be cautious with the friendly fire that these weapons could deal, especially with the Moonfire-Bow, that thing hits like a truck with it's damage-over-time without barkskin.
For less than 5 dollars, the Forgotten Relics Pack is most definitely worth picking up if you're planning to play Vermintide 2 in the long run.

More friendly-fire to screw your teammates over yes-yes