Recent reviews by Kurt Russell

Elden Ring but it's on crack and you'd better bring friends. Everything except the boss fights is massively sped up, and there's a BR-like ring of fire making you think twice about where you go for optional bosses and estus upgrades.

The most interesting part? it's surprisingly cohesive. It just "works" 99% of the time, with that other 1% being tiny annoyances like finnicky lock on when you want to revive allies, weird framedrops, etc.
But the game part just magically works fine. There's obviously things I'd like to see that aren't yet here (better solo balancing for scrubs like me, though that's debatable, a duos mode, and what's sadly a pipe dream, but a dream nonetheless: crossplay). Still, a great time for a budget price in an age where games are starting to go for eighty bucks and up.

Runs like a dream, looks gorgeous, and above all, it's still a blast to play, even if they went for a different approach here. Only thing I'm missing is some Mick Gordon goodness, but the new composers did an excellent job all things considered. Just haven't really heard any super memorable track, but also nothing out of place.

Somehow, this is the same old Oblivion with modern graphics and not much else (they did mix up the leveling system with Skyrim's, but the core of the Oblivion system is still the base, which is great). The same old jank (or charm, to people like me who played this way back) is still very much present in this graphically updated re-release.
Performance-wise, if you don't ♥♥♥♥ around with Lumen stuff it runs pretty well, but enabling ultra HW RT Lumen brought my framerate down to the high 50s on a 4080 at 1440p.

Still, this is exactly the game I remembered, with cosmetic changes and not much else. And that's exactly what I wanted. Todd wins again, I guess!

I liked the first game but never saw it as a "must play" (in my mind it's a very respectable 8/10). The sequel had a lot of baggage with its player reception, but I figured that I'd give it a shot anyway since even the people who hate it will tell you that gameplay-wise it's a better game.

What did I think? I honestly feel this is a better game than the first in most aspects. Story-wise, I think it has too many flashbacks, but outside of that I thought it was great. The gameplay is markedly better (though friendly AI is still mostly trash and can take you out of the experience very quickly). Graphically, it's a pretty good looking game with a well defined art style, and it runs very well on PC, especially considering that the first game's PC port was apparently terrible at launch (I played the game on PS3 and then PS4, so can't confirm that myself)

But yeah, overall I'd actually highly recommend this one, especially if you are someone who liked the first but don't have it in your top 10 games ever or something like that.

Nioh and Assassin's Creed had a baby, and somewhere along the way they got some Way of the Samurai DNA just because why not.
It has some performance issues when not using upscaling (which has sadly become the norm nowadays). Having a blast though, in the first hour they gave me a gun, a grappling hook and a glider. There's the now classic Nioh loot overload which isn't the best, but there are options to auto dismantle stuff, which is nice. The story so far is the usual where you meet a bunch of historical figures and go on unlikely adventures.

oh no

It's not a perfect game, but it's made by people who clearly enjoy making it and it shows. Full of heart and bold ideas, never afraid to get weird. It can be buggy, it can be hard to follow at some points, and some of the timers are clearly a relic of the past that refuses to let go... but for every one of these complaints you can find something good. The music is out of this world, the story dares to try something different in this tired world of live service games, and the gameplay is a mix of cool things the devs wanted to see in their game, and that alone makes it worth playing.

It doesn't run super well on my machine (3070, 32gb ram, 5600x) but it's far from unplayable as long as I use DLSS and can accept slowdowns in towns.
Performance aside, this is very much a follow-up to SoC and CoP and I couldn't be happier with that. The intro sequence is very guided so I was somewhat scared that they might have turned this series into a more linear experience, but once you get to the actual game things open up as they should and you are free to engage in the usual S.T.A.L.K.E.R. experience, only the graphics are all shiny and new.

Cheeki breeki iv damke stalker!!

Stupidly fun. It's like Crackdown and Titanfall had a baby, and along the way, it got a massive dose of Severed Steel goodness to crank things up to eleven.

You can grapple to clouds, you can get a quadruple jump and quad grappling hooks, there's tons of nice upgrades to discover, fun bosses to fight, crazy arenas to beat... Oh, and you can do that with 3 other friends at the same time in co-op, just in case you wanted some extra spice on your delicious meatball.

Quite possibly my favorite game of the year, and we've had some real good ones!

Edit: finished it and ooh boy, this is definitely my game of the year for now. Such a tight gameplay experience, letting you have fun without compromising challenge. Not a big fan of the boss fights, but literally everything else was so good I don't even care. And there's postgame once you beat it! So good.

A surprisingly fun yet very flawed game. It's clear that the developers weren't really sure what they wanted to make for a while, so it has remnants of an attempt at a survival game (but they've been mostly sanded off, thanfully). The naval combat reminds me of Black Flag, but it has slightly more depth to it (as most modern open world games do, it has a bunch of "RPG-lite" features, though in this case I don't think they detract from the experience)

There's PvP and it seems like at some point it was considered a major part of the game, but I don't really like to PvP nowadays cause I'm old and grumpy, so I haven't really engaged with it. Thankfully there's also a lot of PvE stuff to do, between just going around attacking AI controlled vessels to plundering settlements, or doing quests and some light empire building.

Overall, it's closer to Sid Meier's Pirates! than any other comparisons that would come to mind. It has a lot of modern junk like a battlepass, seasonal events that are timegated and stuff like that, but the core of the game is definitely inspired by Pirates! (and it reminds me of the sad fact that we haven't actually had a new Pirates! game in 20 years)

Performance-wise, it runs surprisingly well, though it doesn't really look super amazing (it doesn't look terrible either, just middle of the pack, really).

For full price I'd say it's not really the best purchase you could make, but at 60% off, it's a pretty fun timewaster if you are into Age of Sail ships and don't mind fantastical elements and weird anachronisms.