Recent reviews by x-ray vision

Possibly the only game to make building a house with your friends a magical experience.

I take it back ...

This is one of the most front-loaded games I've experienced. The first 10 or so hours were totally magical in re-creating my nostalgia-filled love of her world.

After the game starts to really open up and you really start moving away from the castle ... it dissolves into a Ubisoft game where nothing has any real meaning or matters.

There is VERY little player agency regarding choice. Fable-level binary choices of good/evil would even be super welcomed! Alas, nothing matters really.

The map is so littered with busy-work filler that it's hard to really care. I MIGHT find some incentive to do some of it though if loot didn't absolutely SUCK. After your 30th legendary scarf, it's hard to really care.

Combat is fun, the world is gorgeous, the castle is a character itself that is a joy to run around in. Sadly, still a big disappointment.

They say all roads lead to Whiterun. I say they all lead to Blackreach!

If you kill Paarthurnax, we cannot be friends by the way.

Fallout: New Vegas is, to me, the pinnacle of Fallout games. I know, I know! Fallout 2 is also within that same realm and for many, that is the ultimate Fallout game. New Vegas, however, I feel is the perfect marriage of the isometric Fallout games and the modern first-person immersive Fallouts. It's not a game about tight plotting, but a game about rewarding player agency. 11 years later, I'm still finding things in the game that I did not know you could do and handle in specific ways. By giving the players so many off-the-beaten-path choices, it rewards you so many different outcomes and experiences. 11 whole years of it for me. Obsidian doesn't always see their ideas and games come to fruition (As many are abandoned or cancelled) but when they strike gold, they strike it very rich. Both Knights of the Old Republic II and Fallout: New Vegas are the pinnacle of Role-Playing Games in my eyes. I've often had an oddball love for janky games that are flawed that have an incredible amount of heart. My love of Cyberpunk 2077 proves just that. Obsidian's work is usually characterized by glitchy and janky products that have so much depth and heart to them that you keep finding your way back year after year.

What to expect with Fallout: New Vegas:
-A deep, complex world full of various factions with varied ideologies of the world and politics.
-A world full of interesting, twisted and often hilariously memorable characters. (Fantastic anyone?).
-Writing that straddles a very thin line of not taking sides, but allowing the player to formulate their own.
-A blank-slate player character which allows each player to fully craft/decide who they want to be and what they want to do.
-Various ways to approach any given situation. You have tons and tons of tools at your disposal and how you craft your character will give you opportunities to utilize your chosen abilities to reach your outcome.
-Tons of different builds that perfectly showcase why the difficult job of the blank-slate approach can work so well. Make up your own story!

Would I recommend this game? You're damn right I would. It ties for my favorite RPG of all-time and easily fits in my top10 games ever made. I feel like Yes Man (the only single thing in this game you cannot kill) perfectly sums up Fallout: New Vegas when he says "It's whatever you want to do!". Time for my next run!

Rocks when stoned.

This is a very imperfect game. What I'm about to say, try to hear me out:

I fully acknowledge the problems with this game. I understand everybodies immense frustrations. I sympathize with those who couldn't play it or still struggle to do so. I get it.

I love this freaking game. Why? Let me tell you about one of my oldest friends. We grew up playing Video Games in the days where games were VIDEO GAMES for the sake of being just that. AAA gaming today is so incredibly focused on these cinematic qualities of trying to mimic great cinema. In immersing the players in these vast, detailed worlds that feel truly alive. Many games made today, he struggles to really /care/ about and instead owns Nintendo as his primary way to game and a decent PC for gaming here and there. Gaming in todays age is heavily geared towards trying to create cinema in interactive form. For him, this is NOT the type of gaming he grew up loving. This is something I entirely understand. My all-time favorite game is Red Dead Redemption 2. I AM a massive cinephile. I love these kind of gaming experiences developers are putting out today, BUT ... I did grow up in that time where gaming was /VIDEO GAMES/ for the sake of PLAYING.

With that, we reach my point: Cyberpunk feels both incredibly detailed, incredibly cinematic and all-around technically impressive ... yet highly regressive. It feels like a jarring mix of these AAA cinematic immersive games, but yet feels very dated in many systems that you'd mistake some of it for being very late 90's / early 2000's. I love this. Your mileage will vary, but different strokes for different folks. The moments this game hits me with thematically rich narrative beats in a very stylish cinematic form, it grabs me. It takes hold. I eat up every kitschy minute of it. The narrative is compelling, the characters some of the best I have ever experienced in any game. The detailed world, loaded with incredible world-building has a hold on me. There is so much to love! The regressive, dated-ness is a joy factor for me too. For me, it's just super FUN to run around and PLAY! I grew up in a time where glitchy games made you often laugh at how stupid some of those glitches can be. Hell, I still play Oblivion to this day! It's a charm factor that is hard to explain to anybody who hasn't experienced the classic Bethesda model of game where events happen that can be so broken, you just end up shaking your head and laughing. Cyberpunk 2077 almost feels like great euro-jank, even though it cost 300+ million to develop.

Sure, there are things that I find could have definitely been better! The loot system I don't think is so bad that it prevents me from enjoying the game, but the randomized looting in Borderlands style isn't great. My biggest is the progression. The perks are NOT my favorite thing. Again, not terrible in a way that makes me quit playing the game, but just not great. In Fallout: New Vegas, when you take a perk, you almost always notice its stark effect on your build. It feels truly rewarding. In Cyberpunk 2077, you hardly notice. The only time you start to take note is long-term when your build starts to "fill out". Taking a perk in this game doesn't really feel exciting. The writing is mostly fantastic, but there are inconsistencies. Possibly a downfall of the open-world design. The moment you first meet Johnny in your apartment and he threatens to kill you, 5 minutes later you're getting your car crashed into by a rogue sentient AI cab driver and you just chat with Johnny like you've been friends for 30 years. It's jarring sometimes.

After having re-played both The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 back to back, I am actually shocked at how incredibly similar they are. The faults of The Witcher 3 are vastly more magnified in Cyberpunk 2077 because CD Projekt Red developed a game inside the Rockstar wheelhouse. Take off those rosy glasses and get objective about it, and you'll see The Witcher 3 has many of the same issues as this game, but you didn't /care/ as much. They were easily more disguised. Both of these games are among my all-time favorites, but I won't pretend they are perfect.

Do I recommend this game? It depends on who you are as a gamer. For my money, I loved it tremendously and still love playing it despite the issues. It's imperfect. It's flawed. It's janky, but it's also so much fun and incredibly compelling. The characters are wonderful, the gameplay loop is super enjoyable (in my eyes) and it's just a joy to explore. It feels like a split between the cinematic AAA gaming experiences being marketed today, and an archaic regressive VIDEO GAME for the sake of being a VIDEO GAME to PLAY! Much like Fallout: New Vegas, it has HEART where it counts. Now if you'll excuse me, I must once again go diving with Judy.

It's everything fans could have wanted from a AAA Star Wars game. Yes, the whole post-clone wars "Rebels" stories are getting tired, yet despite that, it manages to tell its story really really well. It's all very cinematic and with enough mystery to keep you invested. Also granted that the game isn't revolutionary or groundbreaking and it clearly wears its influences on its sleeves, isn't that part of what Star Wars is in general? The first film was entirely based around Lucas' love of Kurosawa and Joseph Campbell. It almost makes sense when translated into video games that the newest Star Wars is clearly based around the developers love of Tom Raider, Zelda and the FromSoftware games. It doesn't need to be groundbreaking, it just needed to finally have some passion. Fallen Order is a labor of love for fans of the franchise. I love it.