Recent reviews by Rubat

Unbelievably bad, to the point of me wondering why they even spent the 2 hours to make this "experience" a reality.

There are no controls. You just look around at some random points the game automatically teleports you around. No moving around, no inspecting details up close. There is no text to read about the history of the place or any of its parts, or anything at all.

The graphics are so bad here it is mind bogging. It was definitely much better in Assassin's Creed Unity than it is here, even ignoring the crusty render scale here that cannot be changed.

They had a perfectly good model already made for AC Unity years ago, and then they just compressed that into 2 pixels and put it out for free.

It's just a waste of time.

A great RPG with many, MANY flaws. Just like the case with Red Dead Redemption 2, the realism detracts a lot from this experience in my opinion.

The game has quite deep simulation of medieal times and life, both to the benefit and detriment of the overall experience.
I liked things like the reading skill. The alchemy skill, even though it does get old fast, due to how slow brewing potions are.

I really liked the atmosphere and the environment, especially at dawn/dusk or during rain (rain effects are kinda bad though).
The main quest like is pretty good, I felt like I actually cared about it, despite the overflowing amounts of information and characters in the game.

Lighting and global illumination are really nice in this game. Not the best I have ever seen, but really good. They can be buggy sometimes, mostly particles not having lighting at all.

The last few hours of the main story are very epic.

I didn't hate the save system. You can still save scum all you want, but it will cost you in-game resources to do so.
I felt that it adds to the experience, even if it did end up wasting a lot of play time because of crashes and progression bugs. Getting the "save potions" is quite easy.

First and foremost, I have to talk about the godawful combat system. It's just inexcusably bad, easily worst in any game I have ever played. Not even asset flips have combat this bad.
This is easily the biggest issue with the game.
Realism does come into the equation here, for sure. I get the "why would son of a blacksmith know how to wield a sword" argument, but this ia weak excuse for just how insanely unenjoyable combat encounters are.

You get ambushed (while just running around the map) by 3 or more people and you just have no chance of fleeing or defending yourself.

People may bring up the "master strike" argument - but it is also a very bad argument. A hidden 1-button combo ability that the game never tells you about, which makes you unbeatable in 1v1 combat, does not redeem this combat system. Not by a long shot.

The game has combo system for combat, but that is also simply unusable - enemies can perform master strikes on you (and do so extremely often) or they die in 1 hit later in the game, so you basically can never actually use any of the combos.

Worse still, in many cases your character will just refuse to perform attacks, such as in tight spaces.

Even worse still, is the camera lock during combat. It automatically locks onto enemies and forces you to look at them. So when you want to turn around and run away - that's right you can't! The game will try its best to make sure you see who kills you. Even if you do manage to break the lock, as soon as an enemy catches up to you and hits you, you are back looking at them!
EVEN WORSE STILL, when you get hit, often you can be "thrown around" by your enemies making your view spazz out, disorienting you greatly, and basically making the game simply unplayable.
It gets worse still, of course. The game has a directional attack system, which you select with your mouse. So when you try to select a direction to attack from, you may just accidentally lose enemy lock and be disoriented. Or the lock will simply just not happen for a few seconds after moves like "clinch".
Yeah, it gets worse again. When there are multiple enemies, you have to move your camera to try to switch targets, but the game will just refuse to let you do that most of the time, or switches to random enemy near the one you want to look at, or switches the lock to some other enemy that hits you right after you successfully switch lock. This makes story encounters with many enemies and friendlies just pure random chaos, no tact to any of it at all. You get very little control then.

The reason why the combat is bad is not because "peasant can't use swords". This combat system is just rotten from the very core of it. It was never going to work, and it can never work.

The best way I found to deal with the combat is to just do not engage in combat at all, or when you are forced - rely heavily on your compations to take aggro.

Bow aiming has no reticle, even if you level up your bow skill, not even as a perk on level 20 or something. Yet another combat feature gimped for the sake of realism. But you get a crosshair when riding on horseback. If you have no bow drawn.


Now to mention other issues.

First of all, the dog companion. It is also one of the worst implementations of this feature compared to any other game. Primarily the issue is that the dog gets in the way, WAY too much. Almost feels like the devs made it this way on purpose to frustrate the player.

Secondly, the horrible capsule-based movement that makes you unable to go up stairs sometimes, makes you slide off of everything. It is very frustrating sometimes, and it's crazy how this problem was solved in 1998, but yet here we are, sliding from slight inclanations on the floor in 2018.

* Extreme frame pacing issues - FPS counter shows 100+ FPS, but it appears/feels like 20 if you have very high shader detail or higher.
* Very inconsistent performance in general. Sometimes you get 30-40 FPS in the same area in the same PC and settings, sometimes 100+. No rime or reason to any of it.
* Experienced a few crashes after 30 hours of play, losing a lot of progress. Could be due to max settings.
* Game tells you to wear different outfits for different purposes, but there is no way to easily store different outfits, or mark stuff as favorite. So I ended up not bothering, and it never really affected me.
* Helping guards kill cumans (enemies) or bandits in random encounters randomly counts as a crime, for some reason.
* Multiple quest progression stopping bugs, sometimes loading screen doesnt go away for MINUTES at a time.
* Certain actions, such as pickpocketing and talking to NPCs are bound to the same key, so if you hold your talk button instead of pressing it, have fun being a criminal for no reason.
* The "move with the speed of the NPC" feature the game boasts to you about doesn't work correctly. You still always move either too slow and too fast. It doesn't work at all on horseback.

* The game kept unequppeing my weapons and random points.
* No way to put more than 1 custom map marker. So if you encountered a bandit camp with a very hard locked chest, you either have to write it out on a piece of paper, or just miss out on the loot.
* A lot quests expect you to check in on the NPC you did the quest for later for the actual reward, including achievements
* No skill XP gain notifications, doesnt tell you what reputation you gained or lost
* Game is fairly quiet by default, even after maxing out sound sliders.
* 30 fps lock in cutscenes
* I have experienced weird reputation losses without any logical explanation at random points.
* The map is annoying to use, the icons overlap each other, making it impossible to see some of them.
* The game is quite hand holdy in the beginning, and really discourages you from doing side quests as that will cause certain events in other unfinished quests to go "the bad ending" if you take too long to get around to finshing the quest.

It is alright, but very short. Maybe too short for the asking price, without a sale.

There is some replayability with collectibles and time trials, but I do not care about those.

I have mixed feelings about this game. Ultimately, I think it's a bit too rough for the asking price. The controls are bit weird, there's pretty much no story at all, you are just thrown into the world and told "Kill X boss". That's it. Crafting feels underdeveloped, and gear progression is borderline pointless.

There is some exploration, which is nice, but there's kinda no point in doing it due to the lackluster progression.
Music is a standout here, elevating the experience.
The boss fights themselves are quite repetitive. There are 8 in total (+ 3 mini bosses), and there are very few mechanics to those fights.

Playing on the normal/middle difficulty, the game felt very forgiving/easy. I am not sure I died once. The only frustration is slow movement/melee and minimal stamina for the first 2 boss encounters, before getting enough collectibles for the upgrades.

On a sale, this could be more appealing, perhaps if you also played the game this is obviously inspired by (Shadow of the Collosus) and have a craving for a "boss climbing" game.

Another map pack for Sniper Elite 3, but this time, it has good graphics. I really liked the 3rd and 2nd levels especially, but others also look good. They also feel a bit more open.

Coop is still a bit buggy, including the bugs saving to the save file (always being in combat type stuff), also
progress for Mission 8 does not save for non-host in coop.

Saving in coop is still very cool, really appreciate this detail.

Authentic difficulty for some reason limits your zoom levels to one, even on your binoculars, which is not very authentic.

Some new stealth mechanics appear to be directly lifted from Hitman WoA trilogy.

The X-Ray kill cam feels a bit off, where it focuses on the gore a bit too long compared to previous games.

The Sniper invasion is a neat gimmick, but we mostly played without it.

Not much else to say. It's more Sniper Elite. If you liked previous games, you'll most likely like this one.

Probably the best looking level in the entire Metro series so far. And the story is decent too, with an impactful ending.

This is more substantial than the Two Colonels DLC, and is easy to recommend. It's a pure story DLC, there's no new gameplay or mechanics here, just a good post-base game story.

It's a short story from the point of view of one of the side characters mentioned by the end of the base game.

Reminds me somewhat of "Spider Nest" DLC from Last Light. It doesn't really do anything special, just a story tie-in.

Best gameplay in the series. Less survival horror, more action-adventure. The atmosphere is still good and the story is kinda interesting, albeit you can see the twists from a mile away.

I played the Enhanced Edition, although given the blurry graphics, you may want to play the original.

I liked gear progression here better than previous games, although your stuff is taken away willy-nilly sometimes, which kinda sucks. The gun sounds were finally reworked and sound much better.

I still don't like the fact that the main character is mute. He has a voice actor in the loading screens! Why not use that? its so awkward when people ask you a question and then just continue talking at you as if you answered. In the DLC "Sam's Story" they DO voice the character, and it feels a lot more natural. (Although they might have overdone it, as he does speak a bit too frequently when picking up items or killing mutants)

I have heard rumors about the English voice over being bad, but it is on par with previous games to my ears. Accents all around.

There's now an FOV slider, yay!

The game has manual quick saves, which is a very welcome addition. But. Quick load does not load your specific quick save, it loads the latest auto save, and the auto save system will not hesitate to save at bad times. You can still load a few previous saves via the main menu though. I didn't realize this before about half-way through the game, which did cost me an achievement or two.

Just like the previous 2 games (Redux versions), there's no windowed mode at all (not even mentioning borderless). The game also force adds "English (US)" keyboard layout on game start up, at least on Windows 10. And you cannot use hardware media keys while the game is in focus.

Maxed graphics are blurry mess (max RT and no DLSS), even the in-game map has very noticeable blurring artifacts on roads. I don't know what the graphics are in the normal game, but I'd probably recommend that over this blurry mess.
You can somewhat mitigate this with render scaling of 1.5 and above, but obviously, that's gonna cost you performance and shouldn't be necessary in the first place.

This might be a nitpick, but NPCs like to get stuck in "I am looking around standing still" state after being spotted and getting away, never moving away.

Best gameplay in the series. Less survival horror, more action-adventure. The atmosphere is still good and the story is kinda interesting, albeit you can see the twists from a mile away.

I played the Enhanced Edition, although given the blurry graphics, you may want to play the original.

I liked gear progression here better than previous games, although your stuff is taken away willy-nilly sometimes, which kinda sucks. The gun sounds were finally reworked and sound much better.

I still don't like the fact that the main character is mute. He has a voice actor in the loading screens! Why not use that? its so awkward when people ask you a question and then just continue talking at you as if you answered. In the DLC "Sam's Story" they DO voice the character, and it feels a lot more natural. (Although they might have overdone it, as he does speak a bit too frequently when picking up items or killing mutants)

I have heard rumors about the English voice over being bad, but it is on par with previous games to my ears. Accents all around.

There's now an FOV slider, yay!

The game has manual quick saves, which is a very welcome addition. But. Quick load does not load your specific quick save, it loads the latest auto save, and the auto save system will not hesitate to save at bad times. You can still load a few previous saves via the main menu though. I didn't realize this before about half-way through the game, which did cost me an achievement or two.

Just like the previous 2 games (Redux versions), there's no windowed mode at all (not even mentioning borderless). The game also force adds "English (US)" keyboard layout on game start up, at least on Windows 10. And you cannot use hardware media keys while the game is in focus.

Maxed graphics are blurry mess (max RT and no DLSS), even the in-game map has very noticeable blurring artifacts on roads. I don't know what the graphics are in the normal game, but I'd probably recommend that over this blurry mess.
You can somewhat mitigate this with render scaling of 1.5 and above, but obviously, that's gonna cost you performance and shouldn't be necessary in the first place.

This might be a nitpick, but NPCs like to get stuck in "I am looking around standing still" state after being spotted and getting away, never moving away.

One of the better VR games out there. It compares well with Half-Life: Alyx in terms of gameplay.

I liked the music, the story is there but kinda forgettable.

I liked the gameplay variety in this game, there are multiple swimming sections where you need to use your arms to swim, that was cool, and they are well paced, never outstaying their welcome. Climbing sections as well. There's also crafting and scavenging systems for weapon upgrades. Nothing too deep, but its there.

Ledge grabbing controls are a bit inconsistent (might be a valve index issue), but better than any other VR game I have played.

Graphics are good (it runs on Unreal Engine), but the game enables upscalers/TAA/render scaling by default, which makes the game look quite blurry. Disabling all that stuff does make a noticeable difference in image clarity, but obviously runs much worse. My 4070 Ti was struggling to get 120 FPS on Index without all the upscaler BS on max settings. Wouldn't be half bad, but for some reason there are also insane lag spikes without upscalers, which in VR can make for poor experience.

There are a good number of options in the settings for graphics and accessibility.

30 euro for a 6 hour game is a tough ask IMO, especially given there's pretty much 0 replayability, but on a sale its quite good value.

Negatives & Nitpicks:
* Holding pistol with 2 hands for the laser sight is inconsistent. Sometimes it just doesn't want to activate.
* Backpack UI is still quite clunky (despite them apparently reworking it), with accidental clicks on menu elements a bit too frequent. A point and click system would've been better, even if less "immersive".
* Half eaten/used health items do NOT appear on the top slot in the inventory, so you will end up with a bunch of half eaten food
* I don't think the game ever tells you how to open the main menu, or that you can manually eject your weapon magazine
* Weapon wheel opens way too slowly (like 3 seconds of holding B)
* Manual reload system is a bit shallow. You basically smash the half-ejected magazine of your weapon against your body/arm IRL once your magazine runs out. Other than that, it's just infinite ammo.