Recent reviews by Vivian

This game is great fun. At first I passed over it because the art style made me think it was one of those friendslop games or a soulless simulator. I was wrong.

This game is a lot of fun and has a lot of personality, and the devs by the looks of it intend to keep making it better.

I'm excited to see where it goes and while I beat the content currently present, I'm looking forward to doing it all again from the beginning on full release.

One of my all time favorite "sit back and relax" type games, the immense amount of depth you can get into here with creativity is actually insane, and it's getting more updates all the time.

I do hope eventually Frozen District adds some more jobs/houses, (there's already a lot but I have sunk an insane amount of time in this game) especially to those two districts that currently have nothing in them visible on the map.

This game has an insane amount of fun if you're someone who likes interior design and stuff. It's just a super relaxing, chill game.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the amount of content in the DLC for it, I thought the Scooby Doo tie-in thing would be some lazy cash grab but picked it up anyway to support the devs - I was pleasantly surprised that there's actually a nuts amount of content, interesting jobs and some cool ass new houses in it.

It's crazy seeing how far Frozen District has come from the jank almost asset-flip way House Flipper 1 felt at times, it is clear Frozen District has learned from their experiences and grown as a studio, and it's been really cool being on that journey with them all the way since House Flipper 1, a game I also put a crazy amount of time into.

My one current complaint is that whatever method they use to load custom pictures into the game for paintings is really inefficient as even on my SSD it lags loading in when there's more than a dozen or so. I hope they can fix that sometime. My only other issue is sometimes Shadows glitch out but it's no big deal, when they do I just disable and then re-enable them later.

Overall the game looks, plays and feels better than 1 and it's clear Frozen District really cares about this game, and has as much of a passion for design as the people in the community. Even if I'm not the best myself, I'm always so happy to see the things the community can create, and I'm always happy to try new things in my own builds!

Thanks for what you do, Frozen District!

I didn't think games had the capability to tell stories that genuinely get me to think and feel anymore. Yet STALKER 2 has that. It's the best story in a game I've seen in nearly a decade. It's a must play, and the gameplay is so refined and compliments the story GSC is telling so well. The voice acting is emotional and impactful (I played with Ukrainian voices because you should).

I was skeptical GSC would be able to recapture the magic that made me put so many hours into the original trilogy of games, even in the pre-Steam days. I was wrong - they outdid themselves.

The atmosphere, the gameplay, the story, the music, it's all here, and it's all incredible.

In an era of slop, STALKER 2 stands as a giant of what gaming should be. STALKER 2 had a rough launch but has come a long way since then.

Don't get me wrong, STALKER 2 does have its share of problems, but GSC has continuously provided updates well into the game's life to improve on its shortcomings.

Also no spoilers but one of the endings actually left me speechless.

Here's some spoiler free feedback on things I liked:

-Skif is a very likeable protagonist and his actions always feel logical no matter what path you're playing. The Ukrainian voice actor (I didn't play it in English so idk how he did) did an amazing job, and I truly think Skif is up there with Strelok and Degtyarev.

-The animations and weapon models are all incredible.

-A lot less jank and more accessible for people who aren't as deep in the STALKER fandom as I am. It's a worthy game to bear the title.

-Good music. Especially two specific enemies and an ending theme.

-The mutant designs are good with two notable exceptions - the Bloodsucker is a downgrade compared to oldschool and so is the boar.

-The environment is fun to explore and interesting and pieces together areas from previous games in a (mostly) logical way with the notable exception of Army Warehouses being moved WAY far from where it was in old school.

-The gun variety is good. There aren't too many nor too few weapons, and the ones that are there all felt good to shoot.

-The new Artifact designs are all incredible and translate very well into this HD rendition. I just kind of sat there staring for like ~30 seconds at a couple different artifacts because I thought they looked that neat.

-The pacing felt pretty good. I didn't find myself thinking the game was overstaying its welcome. It kind of lets you set your own pace since there's like 30-40ish hours of side content you can just ignore if you don't want to engage with it (though I found myself compelled to do all of it)

-The stash locations are really creative at times (though at others they are just as obvious as in previous games)

Men of War Assault Squad 2 if instead of being a complete game it was a DLC vending machine that pumps out piecemeal content on a regular basis. This game's DLC practices are scummy to the ninth degree and there is really no excuse, it's Paradox levels of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ - all for a game that functionally is not any better than MOWAS2, a complete package that shaped like a decade ago.

The graphics are nice and the spectacle is good but that's about it. Conquest is a neat concept but the AI just spams units of similar type all the time.

To give this game enough content to be worth playing you need mods like MACE or VALOR, and I am not reviewing the mods, I'm reviewing the game you shipped - and it's just not worth it.

And in conclusion:

Compress. Your. Files.

This is unacceptable. There is no reason a game that looks like GoH: Ostfront should be 83 GIGABYTES. File space is not infinite and it's time devs started taking file compression seriously again.

I honestly cannot recommend this game in its current state despite it being fun due to the money hungry DLC practices, poor optimization and INSANE file size.

Wait for it to be on sale if you're gonna buy it at all. And even then, I wouldn't recommend it unless you have a drive that's a couple terabytes - which is not cheap in this day and age.

There is no reason that things like audio compression and texture compression should be some lost art. It's not like the technology doesn't exist.

Play modded MOW instead.

Really is a classic and my favorite idle game in the genre. When I was in high school I used to play this game all the time - it's very nostalgic.

Berzerk Studios were always some of my favorite creators on Newgrounds and watching them make the jump to doing stuff on Steam and on consoles was really cool.

Sometimes I still come back to Zombidle to relax.

I like the game but the creator is a coward for not letting you ♥♥♥♥ the Junji Ito-esque monstrosities.

Actually surprised at the nuance in this one compared to other Call of Duty games. Without spoiling anything major I will simply say that I expected this game, like most CoD games, to spend all of its time being somewhere between apologetic and neutral about US intervention, depicting all their enemies as baby eating monsters.

I was surprised to see this game not only address some of this but to even paint some US ally states from the Cold War in a negative light.

Actually kind of refreshing.

The gunplay is tight and the loadout system for campaign is neat.

The downside is definitely the squad defense missions, they are pretty mediocre. It's a shame because they had potential to be good but get bogged down by very samey gameplay with not much to mix it up.

There's great gunplay in this one and the music is baller.

I also found the story to be actually interesting.

Kinda surprised I held off on this one as long as I did because it's definitely one of the greats when it comes to CoD campaigns. I will say however that the past missions are better than the near-future ones by a pretty wide margin.

Unfortunately, Section and Harper are two of the most boring characters ever written for one of these games and their voice acting isn't great. Harper's VA barely sounds like he got any direction and Section is just nothing as a character.

As someone with over 2,000 hours on the OG Oblivion combined from the Xbox 360 release, the GOTY Edition on PC on Disc, and the Steam release, this remake is everything I wanted and more.

Here's my spoiler free review partway into my playthrough:

Having a real difficulty setting that actually feels natural and not just a slider combined with the balance changes makes combat feel a lot better, the combat is hefty and responsive, and even has integration for adaptive triggers if you play with controller, making it harder to press down when you have less stamina.

The masteries for certain combat skills are changed now, too. The game is much more clear about what, for example, reaching Journeyman in Blade skill does, as it no longer just "unlocks a new power attack" like in base game but explains that this power attack leaves opponents vulnerable to follow up regular attacks.

They've also changed the way leveling works so now major skills are no longer the only skills that contribute to you leveling up. Instead, they just level up quicker. This contributes to a much nicer balancing and a more natural level progression. I'm about level 8 at the time of writing this and the curve has felt a lot more natural than in OG Oblivion.

The graphics are absolutely stunning. People were complaining about this remake looking 'brown' from the screenshots we had but honestly I don't really see it. Some areas, especially the Gold Coast, do have that kind of look to them, but it's setting appropriate, and other areas you will see plenty of vibrant greens, purples, and oranges.

I'm about six hours into my first playthrough of the remake and so far I have encountered not a single technical error and no crashes. I'm also able to run this on my gaming laptop, which bodes well for people who have even mid-spec desktops.

All the OG voice acting you know and love is here, plus a levy of new voices to add variety to town guards and some of the NPCs around. Overall it adds great immersion. They also fixed the classic meme where beggar voices would just go back to Wes Johnson's regular voice when you asked about rumors, Beggars now speak consistently.


The character creator is better than ever and is as much a freak factory as it was in the original. If you want to create nightmare fuel abominations, you can. If you want to make your character look good, you can. Some specific nice features for me were the inclusion of skin tone selection and the fact eye types are not race locked, so you can have Mark Zuckerberg lizard eyes if you so choose.

The OG music you know and love is all here, and just as beautiful as ever.

Genuinely breathtaking. I had a feeling this was gonna be a good year for gaming, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ I did not expect my childhood to be resurrected this utter and completely.

Well worth the price and then some. Grab a root beer, kick your feet up and plunge back into killing some Daedra and making your mark, and close shut the jaws... of Oblivion.

Arthouse psychadelic Dark Souls with upgrade elements.

DEMOCRACY HAS ACHIEVED TOTAL VICTORY