Recent reviews by DatasHead

007 First Light is an amazing game offering beautiful and immersive set-pieces, enjoyable stealth and puzzle gameplay, and exciting action sequences. While there are familiar elements from IOI's Hitman series in the stealth sections (as well as some easter eggs throughout the game), First Light eschews Hitman's deeper stealth and emergent gameplay elements for a more linear, story-driven experience. In fact you'll, find much more in common here with the Uncharted series than Hitman.

In short, this is an amazing game that nails it's take on 007 in it's own unique way (although it's much more Daniel Craig than Sean Connery). What the game lacks in mechanical depth it more than makes up for by offering a rich and refined experience. I'd hesitate to say that this game is more than the sum of it's parts because that makes it sound accidental. This is an experience where it's clear that great care has been taken across the full spectrum of development to make each moment feel engaging and immersive. It's really something special, and if the idea of this game appeals to you, it's almost guaranteed that you'll enjoy it.

I'm writing this as a nearly 100% Breakthrough player outside of when I'm required to do horrible challenges for class and gun unlocks.

There is some fun to be had here. As much as I'd like to just blast this game as being a steaming pile of everything that I hate about corporate game development, there are those moments. What there isn't is any semblance of what Battlefield used to be about. Big, epic battles across land sea and air; battles where you were facing off against an enemy across something more than a hallway, sidewalk or one-lane road.

If you like tight infantry-focused maps, well that's basically all there is. Don't let the maps fool you, if you're off of the beaten path, you're almost always out in a field with no cover and no way to contribute to your team, while still being in range of some dude with an SMG.

The class system is back, but horribly broken. Assault really only has the respawn beacon, the ladder should be removed from the game. Engineer has an RPG, AA launcher, tank mines, bot and nothing else that has ever been used in history. Support has a ton of interesting gadgets, but will nearly always be using shock paddles, although they are broken just like the souls of all the people they don't bother to res. Recon as far as anyone can tell don't get gadgets other than C4, or it might be that they get the best one in the game and just refuse to use it because lolwhy.

Your teammates will not play on or for the objective about 75% of the time. They will not perform whatever their essential role is, but why would they. The only thing that is incentivized moment to moment is jump-sliding around corners in the same ghillie suit as every other spaz and shooting people with a shotgun, or pistol or whatever.

Is the game horrible? No, it's just not Battlefield. I'm not sure what it is. I have some fun with it, but honestly it makes me look back much more fondly on every previous Battlefield game.

First off, beware of reviews praising the game with only 10-12 hours played. The first quarter of the game is by far the strongest, and I'd have reviewed the game positively at that stage as well... Now on to the review.

It seems clear that the development team for this game had a vision for what they wanted to make, and I think they likely executed that vision very well. What isn't clear to me is why that vision was of a bad fan fiction version of the Pillars of Eternity world.

The game is technically competent and visually attractive. The combat is much better than expected and what you'd find in many similar games. The story and dialog though are just juvenile compared to what has been established in the previous games.

Avowed largely ignores the high stakes events at the ending of Deadfire. These are world changing events that should permeate Avowed but are barely mentioned. The main plot is just fan fiction quality, touching on some of the same tropes from the previous games but doing nothing new, and not approaching their quality.

Storybuilding with characters outside of your 4 companions is essentially absent. You'll only interact with any given NPC outside of one antagonist once or twice and then likely never see them again. In fact, it's noteworthy that only a single side quest has you return to an earlier zone repeatedly to talk to an NPC, but it's literally a one line interaction with no story.

Yes, there are plenty of "moral choices" and "no good option" scenarios presented, but it's all an inch deep in reality. There are no tough calls based upon relationships that you've developed or knowledge that you've built over time. You'll simply be told repeatedly to pick a side in a random conflict, do some deed and be done with it. Sure it may be referenced by some other NPC dialog, but the impact is minimal.

Many scenarios are contrived and make no actual sense. At one stage you encounter an unfriendly NPC in a fortified position who declares "as long as my banners stand I won't negotiate", and you're prompted to simply sneak in and steal their banners and you'll all of a sudden become friends. If this were presented comedically it might have worked.

At it's core, Avowed is to Pillars of Eternity what Veilguard is to Dragon Age. The major difference being that Obsidian is smart enough to be making smaller, AA quality games at this point so expectations will be a lot lower.

If you're a Pillars fan, you can find some fun here if you try but you should buy it on sale. If you're not a Pillars fan, I'm honestly not sure what you'd get out of this game.

The most impressive thing about this game is how it's sound and visual design have elevated it from a mid-tier open world ARPG into an award winning favorite. Mechanically there is simply nothing interesting here, all of the systems are painfully familiar and common to virtually every open world game with only minor aesthetic differences.

Sure, a yellow bird will lead you to a nearby undiscovered location, but it will spend half of that time flying brainlessly into a cliff wall as it inches higher and higher before reaching the top. It's a thin veneer over the most brain-dead mechanic, which is a common theme in this game.

Most importantly, the base campaign doesn't allow for skipping of any dialog or cutscene, and the game pauses if it loses focus. You will be forced to endure the slow, pointless dialog for every minor NPC encounter. Untie a hostage during a mission, stop and talk, get a map hint from a random villager, stop and talk. Combine this with unskippable ingame cutscenes after every minor activity, and the game can become an exercise in frustration rather quickly.

Ultimately, the game borrows the most cliche video-game tropes and wraps them in beautiful paper. If that is appealing to you, then you'll likely enjoy this game. Otherwise, you might as well dig out your Assassin's Creed collection and replay one of them. It will be basically the same game, but with less mandatory fart-smelling from the developers.

I'm glad that a lot of people seem to love this game. The developers clearly put a lot of love into it, and I really tried to enjoy it myself. Unfortunately though, the game is so far from being fully baked that I can't find any way to recommend it.

I think that in order to love this game you have to set aside any care for the deep and meaningful systems that are the defining trait of RPGs. While many RPG systems exist in this game in some form or fashion, none of them are even close to being fleshed out, and at best you're going through the motions to engage in a few very basic and shallow systems that add very little to the game as a whole.

There are hints of an interesting story in the game, and that story is well-supported by the core character mechanic of the game, which is at least somewhat novel. Unfortunately the writing is about 9th grade level which I suspect is further hindered by a poor English translation, so it's difficult to try and justify playing for the story elements.

All of that being said, I do believe that the game is pretty accurately portrayed on the Steam page, and that you can reasonably gauge the experience within Steam's 2 hour refund window. If you find that you're in the mood for an ARPG jankfest then you might really enjoy this game, but if you're looking for a quality RPG, there are way too many better titles out there to spend your time with.

If you want to play a game that makes a mockery of everything that previously made the Battlefield franchise great, this is the game for you. By the time I realized how bad the game was it was too late for a refund, so I tried desperately to find some fun in it, and that is possible, but the kind of fun to be had here can be had in much better forms in a dozen other games.

As a Battlefield game, everything from the specialists, vehicle design, map design and overall balance in the "2042" portion of the game is hot garbage and poorly designed in such an ingenious way as to equal far more than the sum of it's horrible parts. It is in every possible way a downgrade from every previous Battlefield, and plays like a game created by people who only ever knew of Battlefield from watching videos on YouTube.

The Portal experience is the one portion of the game worth salvaging, but you're still better off just playing the older games themselves at this point.