Recent reviews by Arbiter<3John117

I want to ask Ubisoft: What happened???

I built my current Computer in February of 2017. That very year I got to play the Open Beta for this very game with no issues at 60+ FPS together with my friends, putting in around 6 hours at the time.

Then how come that now, years later, I purchase this game during a sale and find out that it cannot even maintain a solid 60FPS ON THE LOWEST SETTINGS AT 1080P???

I have an Intel i5-7600 CPU and an Nvidia GTX 1060 with 6GB of VRAM. Additionally I have 16GB of RAM. So can somebody explain to me how this game just doesn't run at a minimum of 60FPS for me?

it drops when driving around, it drops when in a gunfight, Hell. It even drops when I just AIM DOWN THE SIGHTS OF MY GUN.

I really wanted to give this game a try because I have fond memories of the Open Beta and I felt incredibly disappointed with the technical issues Breakpoint had (including their Always-Online DRM). But I guess Ghost Recon Wildlands got hit with the same "Let's f it up" stick that Ubisoft likes to swing at anything that might release in a good state.

This was the last straw for me. I am done for the time being with Modern day Ubisoft titles. Time and time again has my time been wasted with Ubislop, and half the time it doesn't even run well on my PC.

I miss the good old days when Ubisoft made good games, when seeing the Ubisoft logo on a game meant you were guaranteed a quality title that WORKS and IS FUN. But I guess making a good game is secondary to slamming your game full of microtransactions and Stores that give you Boosters for SINGLEPLAYER GAMES.

♥♥♥♥ you Ubisoft. In the future I'll make sure to buy all your games from Key Resellers, if I buy them at all. You will never again earn a single legitimate cent from me.

Intravenous 2 - A game formula perfected

Intravenous 2 was on my radar for a long while, partially because I had followed the developer Roman Glebenkov since I played Intravenous 1, and it was such a unique blend of different mechanics that I wanted to see what else he would pull from his magic hat next.

Safe to say. Intravenous 1 was a cult hit and making a sequel was a no-brainer.

Intravenous 2 takes the high-octane speedy gameplay and top-down perspective of Hotline Miami, slows it all down and changes the focus to be all about Stealth with an introduction of a Light and Noise Meter, the addition to crawl through vents and distract enemies with noises (Whistling, throwing glass bottles or empty magazines as lures, or shooting out lights). This game, just like its predecessor, takes large influence from Hotline Miami, Splinter Cell, Metal Gear Solid, and manages to make all of it work together to create one of my favorite Stealth Games of this Decade, when I already thought that Intravenous 1 was near-perfect.

Every aspect is improved, the game runs smoother, looks smoother with many graphical enhancements, and controls just as smooth as IV1. Even the story, that was once more of an afterthought to serve as a mere vehicle to get you to the gameplay, is elaborated on and expanded to fix flaws of the original and add more depth to the protagonist of the last game, Steve, to mellow him out more and make him more sympathetic to the Player and not just somebody who you reluctantly see transform into a Monster in the first game, regardless of whether you played non-lethal or lethal.

Even the addition of a new protagonist spices up the gameplay, leading you to swap between two characters, and what I really like doing is playing one character more stealthily and non-lethal while the other goes in guns blazing, giving me a taste of both styles of gameplay and how different the AI behaves

What I have to specifically point out: Police Precinct has to be my favorite level in the whole game. It manages to be a perfect vertical slice of the game and if I ever want to sell somebody on this game, that is the level I'll show to them. it is crawling with tons of enemies, lights, breaker boxes, vents. Everything to make your life both hell and heaven, and figuring out the level was like a big Puzzle Box, it was an absolute joy!

And even after completing the game, there's even more content! The entirety of IV1 was remade in IV2 with all the improvements backported into the old Levels to make for a better experience.
And there is a small side-story that recycles 2 levels to sink your teeth into which serves as a little bit of a prequel to the IV2 story, I believe it was at one point the Demo for the game, as there is a Steam page for it that has now been delisted.
But that's not all! You also get an entire Level Editor with Workshop Support, allowing you to create and download Levels, new Weapons, modifications, even entire Custom Campaigns. The possibilities are endless.

And once I finally made it to the end of IV2, I was both happy and sad. Happy, because the game has absolutely satisfied my need for a more visceral blend of tactical shooting and stealth gameplay, but also sad, because it now means that I cannot experience this game for the first time again.

If you like Hotline Miami and/or the Splinter Cell series. You owe it to yourself to at least give this game a try once. It is absolutely worth it!

(Oh and also buy the Supporter Bundle. 100% of the proceeds for it go to the Soundtrack Composer who did an outstanding job on the music!)

One of the most overhyped games games of the early 2010s.

If you played a single Call of Duty game that released around the release of this title, you've already played this game. Just that except for Middle Eastern Terrorists or the oh-so-evil Russians, this game has North Koreans as enemies.

The game's intro immediately pushes everything it has at you in terms of shock value by showing civillians being shoved around and even seeing a child witness the killing of its parents and crying afterwards. And that is just about all this game is: As wide as an ocean and as shallow as a little puddle.

You are the good guy, the Koreans are bad because you just saw them hit a few people in the intro and occupy the USA. Here is a gun and now point it and shoot it at them for the next 4 hours.

I don't really know what went wrong here either? I remember seeing this game advertised to hell and back when it came out, everybody played it, everybody reviewed it, everyone had something to say about it. And all this game turned out to be in the end was a shallow Call of Duty clone? Damn...

Fortunately I didn't pay any money for this game and got it for free sometime in the past, but I'd be mad if I bought this game back in the day and it was just a reskinned CoD game lmao

I was waiting for a sale on the Ghost Recon games because it's been a series I wanted to get into for a while, being a fan of the older Rainbow Six titles myself.

I remember playing the Ghost Recon Wildlands Beta with my friends and having a blast, so decided that while this game went on a standalone sale to buy it, install it, quickly see how it runs and then play it sometime in the future when I am done playing the other games in the series.

I couldn't even get that far.

First the game kept refusing to launch, or crashing at startup. Because by default it tries to boot using the Vulkan API, which usually works fine on my PC using an Nvidia GPU.
So I changed to DirectX11 and launched the game, only to be shoved straight into the Intro Cutscene and game without allowing me to change any of my settings. And the game hovered at around 45 FPS...yikes.

So I lower the graphics, turned off their terrible Anti-Aliasing solution that just smears the image and the game ran at 60 FPS, great! I move forward for a minute, take out 2 guys and all of a sudden the game freezes, I press the Windows key, nothing happens, I ALT + TAB, nothing happens. Turns out this game froze my ENTIRE computer and I had to force reboot it.

So I do that, try to launch the game. And now it just won't launch at all anymore (The Splash Screen shows up, but doesn't progress past it even after 5 minutes of wait). So I verify the game files, now the game launches again, nice!

So I load back into the game and all of a sudden its daytime instead of the atmospheric night I had before... I was also spawned in an entirely different area than I was at before so I came at the same 2 guys from a different angle now. Sure... Do that, take care of them, and the game just crashes again.

I looked into all sorts of solutions on Reddit, some tell me to downgrade my Nvidia GPU drivers, some tell you to enable Windows 8 compatability mode to get the Vulkan API working because its apparently more stable than DirectX11, but I can't be bothered anymore really.

This is a game that released in 2019, Wildlands released in 2017 and ran perfectly fine on my PC. So just what the hell were Ubisoft doing over there to make this game the most convoluted experience to try and get running properly? I have better experiences trying to get old games from the 2000s to run on my PC than this game.

Oh. And then I also find out that this game is Always-Online and refuses to let you play it when Offline? Yeah no. I am refunding this game.

Wildlands ran fine, wasn't Always-Online, and didn't make me turn my fingers into pretztels trying to figure out solutions to get the game to run during its BETA STAGE!!! BEFORE IT WAS A POLISHED PRODUCT. And you are telling me that this game which has been out on the market, gotten patches, and reached its End-Of-Service 6 years after its release CANNOT RUN ON MY PC? LET ALONE RUN OFFLINE?

Yeah no. I'll gladly wait for the OG Ghost Recons and Wildlands to go on sale and play those. This? This does not deserve your money, attention, or benefit of the doubt. This is Ubisoft at its sloppiest and greediest in years.

♥♥♥♥ you Ubisoft

Sniper Elite Resistance - A quick cash-grab with reused assets.

This game was unnecessary. I understand that this is a whole new campaign following somebody who isn't Karl (my beloved <3). But this game could've gotten its own subsection in the Campaign Menu of Sniper Elite 5.

This game charges you 50€ (+ one Season Pass of writing this review, who knows if they'll add a second one like in 5). And this asking price is extortionate in my opinion.
Why? Well because Sniper Elite 5's base game costs the exact same amount, but was developed with freshly new assets and huge changes to the Engine (for better and for worse), while Resistance is essentially just a reskin of 5 which was developed at merely a fraction of the cost that developing a game from scratch would cost.

The asking price is extortionate for what is, at best, Standalone DLC.

And even when you do buy the game, The game still has the same positives and issues that I outlined in my review of SE5, since, once again, it is the same game at its core, but with the caveat that the Level design has almost been downgraded across the board.
It is baffling to me how you can go from Level design that was consistently average-to-good to just average-to-subpar, it feels like the Levels, or this entire game, was outsourced and developed by another company and not Rebellion similarly to how Games in the late 90s and early 2000s would outsource Expansions to other devs (Examples being Half Life Opposing Force, Quake Mission Packs, etc.)

The game has 8 base game levels, 1 of which is a short 5-minute epilogue and 2 of which are the same (One being a short tutorial, the second one being the same tutorial level but with an expanded area added to it, and you start it from the other side this time...Wow!)

So you have essentially 5 levels in this game for the same price of SE5...

The only level in the game that I feel actually lives up to the Design of 5 is Mission 8 - End Of The Line. Because it starts you off in what I consider to be one of the most fun Sniper Nests in the entire series, which is then followed up by a good mixture of urban designs, trenches, and open fields.

There is also just a huge lack of polish across the board. I had instances where I couldn't walk up several of the stairs in this game and I'd just get stuck running in place at the bottom step, or the one time in Mission 3 where upon stepping onto the first step of a stairway, it teleported me several feet up into the air and caused me to go down from fall damage.
I also had several instances of guards during their alert phase just running in place or into a wall, allowing me to even just walk up right beside them and breathe in their face while they shouted at me.

This game released at the end of January 2025, right after christmas season where it would've made sense to rush it out the door. But you already missed that period, so why the rush to get it out the door?

Also, none of my criticisms of 5 have been fixed here either, the levels are still large but not populated with enough enemies, there still isn't a return of SE4's enemy types, no combat between Nazis and Resistance fighters going on, movement is still less precise than 4 and lacks the crouch-run, Surpressed Weapons are too easy to get & Subsonic Ammo is still too common and plentiful.

The only outright improvement that I welcome here is that Sniper Nests are finally worthy of being called SNIPER Nests. You can finally spend more than 2 minutes tagging people with your binoculars and actually take your time sniping several enemies from a good vantage point instead of only being able to shoot 1-2 enemies while the rest of yoursightline(s) are blocked by trees

It is clear that the Sniper Elite series has now entered its "stagnation era", which every gaming franchise tends to get after a while. Rebellion has been working on these games again since 2012 and it shows: The WWII era has been stretched to its limits and I do not believe SE6 being set in WWII would be a good thing, perhaps a shift in time, maybe Vietnam, could help shake things up because honestly? I am getting WWII fatigue from these games now.
Don't get me wrong, I love shooting Nazis in the face and if it was a full time job I would make a career of it in a heartbeat, but you can only do the same thing so many times before it becomes stale, a routine that you just go through, and I believe Sniper Elite has become routine to me, even if its still a fun routine.

But. This game isn't worth your money, unless you REALLY, DESPERATELY crave some more Sniper Elite gameplay after enjoying your time with 5 like me. If you do, then PLEASE do yourself a favor and wait for a sale, this is not a "MUST-BUY-NOW!" title that you should throw your money away for, this is just a quick buck for Rebellion to keep the lights on while they worked/are working on Atomfall and/or SE6...Maybe even a Zombie Army 5? Who knows.

After playing the previous games in the series on and off and then DOA6 again, this game is a travesty.

DOA6 is the perfect example of how you can piss off both gooners by making every single costume an arduous grind and overcharge them with tons of DLC, and also piss off competetive fighting game players by dumbing down the actual fighting aspects of the game so hard to appeal to casuals, that nobody wants to play this game competetively.

DOA6 will go down as the biggest failure in the DOA series which caused the developer to shift its focus from a Fighting Games that had some raunchy gooner fanservice, to games where fanservice is the main appeal of the game and everything is secondary...

Bring Itagaki back to direct the series, thanks.

If you're interested to learn the rise and fall of the DOA series, "How Dead or Alive Failed to Become Popular" by SwiftD on Youtube a watch

ODST just oozes atmosphere and vibes, carrying over the Halo 3 gameplay and letting you explore the effects that the War with the Covenant had on just one city on Planet Earth.

While the gameplay is mostly just copy-paste Halo 3 with some new weapons, this game tells a smaller-scale story that puts you into the shoes of a Shock Trooper that is just stuck in a City full of enemies and trying to make sense of where the hell your Squad has gone.

All of this is backed with a wonderful musical score made up of tons of Jazz.

The only nitpick I have with ODST is that even though it takes place at a time ||before the Covenant Civil War||, there sadly still are no Elites in this game and you are fighting Brutes instead of them ;_;

Halo 3 finishes the fight.

A bombastic finale to the original trilogy of Halo games, while not as grand in scope as Halo 2 or as fun as Halo CE (Due to Elites mostly being replaced with Brutes as enemies, which are nowhere near as fun to fight imo) it makes up for it in terms of generally...everything?

One of my friends hotly anticipated what I thought of Halo 3 and would hype me up for it as I made my way through each game, sending me marketing material for it here and there and I just have to say: I wish I was a Halo fan back in the day when this game came out.

The vibes that this game produced before and after its release were immaculate. You had live action trailers where the war against the Covenant was told as a documentary and "Veterans" of the war interviewed, and weapons of said war being shown off (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40jdpzrpIps). Or you had videos of people going to stores, buying a bunch of Doritos and Mountain Dew only to then line up at a GameStop to buy the game, then get home and set up a living room to play the game together (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVkGtVJVYps).

I really lament not being there back in the day cause I was neither from the US, nor an Xbox fan. Halo simply never had the biggest appeal here in Europe (Which is still true today seeing as when I queue for Multiplayer on MCC, the majority of my matches put me into US servers)

Oh yeah. Halo 3 Multiplayer.
It is perfect, perfect, down to the last minute detail. It is Halo in every way and I can see why so many people have spent AGES on this game back in the day.
You can just boot this game up, play a few rounds of Slayer (BR in my case) and turn the game off again, no harm done, no FOMO Battlepass, no shiny lootboxes and everything is unlocked ingame! What a novel concept in 2025 that playing a game that rewards you for your playtime rather than the amount of times you swiped your credit card is just...Nice.

Halo 4 is notable in the Master Chief Collection for not only being the start of the ruination of the Halo series, but also for being the ONLY game in this otherwise phenomenal set of games that has softlocked me not once, but TWICE on the same Mission (Reclaimer), forcing me to restart the Mission multiple times to replay it for several times...

Between the monotonous gameplay, the annoying Knight enemies and the boring dog-like enemies, these things compouned ontop of eachother almots mad me stop playing the game until I found out I was close to the end.

Couple that with the unnecessary introduction of Forerunners/Prometheans into the story and it just kinda feels like 343 tried to just try to do something new, but in the wrong way...

The Forerunners didn't need to come back to the now. It was perfectly fine for them to be a mystery, something long gone and forgotten whose constructions and actions echo into the present. But instead they now serve as a lackluster replacement for the Covenant as the main antagonist who shows up a total of TWO TIMES in the entire campaign. This antagonist isn't built up, hell, we never even learn his NAME for crying out loud.

On top of that the artstyle of the Halo series just got completely ruined with the addition of the new enemies and weapon types. It is just a mishmash of clashing aesthetics all throughout.

What ended up carrying this story is the relationship between Chief and Cortana and if it wasn't for that, I would've dropped the game.

The finale, even though it was a bunch of quick time events and not even a fight, was still worth experiencing, though it left a lot of questions open which I believe were answered in Halo 5? I dunno I sadly cannot play that game since its stuck on a last gen console that I don't plan on buying...

If you're wondering whether to play this or the Unbeatable Demo that just released, go with the Demo.

Unbeatable [white label] is an older Demo, looks a bit less refined than the current Demo, but still has the same banger music.

This is mostly just a small Tutorial and then turns into an Arcade Mode where you play multiple songs which have an intro and a outro that explain a bit about your protagonist, but other than that, you aren't missing out on anything here and this is not a must-play.

It is very interesting though how some of the UI and artstyle has changed going from this Demo to the new one.