Recent reviews by Roland

You could have the Recommended system requirements and still not be able to put all the graphics settings on High and reach 60fps consistently.

This game runs like hot garbage on hardware that came out several years after it did; do not buy unless you are comfortable with 30fps gaming.

I don't have enough space to explain how much this breaks my heart.
(I've owned it for 6 years and kept getting better hardware hoping it would finally be playable; and am a longtime fan of the franchise.)

It's Ark Survival Evolved but less buggy and if the Dinosaurs had powers and were actually useful.
(The similarities to a certain franchise end at the monster aesthetic; this is NOT that series with guns, the games are vastly different.)

I just wish it had first person view as an option.

Bustin' makes me feel good!

In all seriousness, this genuinely puts other Asymmetrical games like DBD to shame. The bots aren't perfect, but they only frustrated me when facing the final boss; for the rest of the game and well into my post game I have played with nothing but them and it's been a fun experience.

If you're facing them as a Ghost they are rarely a challenge. depending on the Ghost you play, but I can't say I didn't lose a couple matches to them.

If there was one thing I could change about the game: I'd like difficulty options for the Buster bots like we have for the Ghost bots

Otherwise, no notes really. The game is very wholesome, and while you might see some say it lacks content, I disagree. The store page SAYS there's 10 ghosts, but in reality it's like 30, just some aren't too varied.

This is because each ghost has 2 variants to unlock, and while all variants have the same Ultimate Ability, and usually the same stats, they each have their own Unique ability which can change how you might play them, and some do even vary slightly in stats.

And there's 100 levels of customization items to unlock for busters (50 for ghosts) on top of being able to level your gear and unlock new parts and customization. Also you can reset every 100 levels for bonus cosmetics and a fresh start, similar to the prestige system from CoD (called Tenure here). Cosmetics and story stuff stay unlocked, but all gear levels, and obviously the player levels, reset.

Oh yea, the story. I won't spoil it but it's plenty wholesome, albeit a bit short (roughly 9.5 hours, not counting lore from hidden collectibles). It is exactly what you'd expect from a GB movie with all the tropes and trappings. And the bestest part? Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson voice their characters; I damn near wept when Ernie Hudson said he was proud of me.

All in all, I adore this game. So much so that when I get paid next month I'm buying a bunch of friends copies while I can still get them for $15. You should try it.

It's Smash+Grab in a post-Apex and Fortnite world.

The entire time I was playing Dead Island I kept wishing I could climb things. The game had a lot of environment pieces and set dressing that looked like they should be climbable but weren't.

Then Dying Light came along and I was mostly happy. The story was weaksauce but the gameplay was special; kinda like MIrror's Edge but with danger. I loved it. (though I still need to play The Following)

Now DL2 comes along, and it's like Dying Light but like if you hadn't seen it for awhile and it comes back and you're like "daaaammnnn you've been working out!"

So yea it's more Dying Light. The grappling hook changed. At first it was difficult and I missed the Spider-Man one of the first one, but once you get good with it, you can literally climb sky scrapers; something that could not be said of the previous incarnation.

Apparently people are up in arms at the moment about some cosmetic store nonsense. "DL Points" or some such. I just spent 2 days revisiting the game and not once did the game mention or push these points. I'm pretty sure you have to actually click on the word "Store" in the Main Menu to even know these things exist if you didn't see all the tears in the Discussions.

If you never click on "Store" you never even know they are there.

That's another reason to recommend the game:
If you want microtransactions, you actually have to go looking for them. You could play for days, maybe even weeks and not know they exist.

But let me not get bogged down on that stuff, let's talk story (no spoilers of course).
The first one was like if a really attractive person was lame in the bedroom. You're just left laying there going "well... this was fun I guess... maybe I'll call you sometime or somethin?"

The second one gives you choices and ya know it's fine, everything's fine. It gets you comfortable and then in the end smacks you with an ultimatum because it got tired of your ♥♥♥♥. I could write a short story on why I didn't like the final choice, but my reasons are entirely personal and they would not prevent me from recommending the experience.

Oh and before I go I'd be remiss to not add that performance has always been amazing, even on my mid tier hardware. There's lots of options to increase framerates without giving up too much visually.

The robot from FLCL has an existential crisis and instead of going to therapy he pretends he's in Jet Set Radio.
10/10

As a fan, it pains me to write this but this must be said:
I can't recommend this game based entirely on how poorly optimized it is.

If you only glanced at the minimum system requirements like I did when I bought the game you might miss it. You might do like me and see a "10 series" and RX 580 and go "yea I can keep up with that, no prob" and overlook the huge slap in the face of EIGHT FRICKIN GIGS OF VRAM.

For teh wealthier of you, that don't do the budget gaming thing, you might not think anything of this, but to put it plainly: the RTX 2060 can not play this game and hope to get a stable 60fps at 1080p; even with ray tracing off.
A card from just 2 generations ago.

No game what so ever should need 8GB of VRAM for 1080p, and even more than 4GB is abnormal but can make sense in games with lots of models loaded in at once like a RDR2 or Watch_Dogs.

Now I did manage to play through the entire game once on my GTX 1660 but I did so with the framerate locked at 75% of my refresh rate, a trick I highly recommend for anyone if you can't keep a stable framerate at your refresh rate and need a smooth image.

And that was on Low-Medium settings, with no improvement on all Low. To put that to scale again: Watch_Dogs: Legion I can run on mostly medium with a dash of High settings and hold a higher framerate, which for those unfamiliar is a much MUCH more detailed game in terms of the numbers of models loaded that have their own individual textures and environmental details, and all while it does terribly with transparencies.
Like, WD:L isn't known for it's optimization either but looks like the smartest student in the class sitting next to this one.

And all of this isn't to mention any of the issues the owners of cards that should be able to handle it have.
I can't speak on those, as I'm just a poor boy, nobody loves me; he's just a poor boy from a poor family so spare him this life from this monstrosity.

Sorry, I can't help but think of sad songs like Bohemian Rhapsody when I think about how far Respawn has fallen from grace.

Respawn, if any of you guys see this, are you okay bud?
You guys gave us Titanfall, and Star Wars Jedi, and for better or worse, Apex Legends and we revered you for a time. Now; now though, not so much. You guys let Titanfall 2 just straight up crumble, Apex fans are moving away, and now this trainwreck of a game.... Kinda feels like we can't trust you anymore, for real for real.

Which is sad, because this isn't a bad game. It's not quite as engaging as the first one, but story and gameplay-wise it wasn't bad. It just runs like hot dog crap for no reason; and even if that changed I wouldn't recommend a game that requires 8GB of VRAM for 1080p without RT, ever.

As many other players have said: if you liked Assassin's Creed's Multiplayer, you'll love this.

If you know what I'm talking about, this is just AC MP in first person and with guns.

For those that don't:
Deceive Inc's whole thing is you are disguised as a civilian, guard, or staff worker and you are tasked with completing objectives while remaining unnoticed by other players; collecting intel and keycards along the way.

You start out by finding 3 terminals that can be in 5 possible locations in each map, and once players have hacked those 3, the gates to the vault containing the real prize open up. You are then tasked with either grabbing the package and getting to an extraction point, or killing the player that has the package, taking it and going to extraction.

This can be done Solo or via teams of 3. Solo has 10 players in a match, teams have 12.

The game is not without it's share of bugs, but the devs have been very on top of things and active in Steam Discussions so I won't bother listing any as they will likely be fixed soon.

My only real complaint is about the spatial audio. I play in 7.1 surround and sometimes it can be hard to tell if something is on the same floor you're on or above/below you. (namely keycards, since they make a jingle letting you know they are nearby). Lots of games have this issue though, so I can't dock it too hard for that. I only bring it up because I'd like to see better surround sound in all games.

I typically don't bother writing reviews for games I don't recommend, and especially so for ones I haven't put significant time into, but my opening experiences with this are pretty bad and Bossa needs to do better.

For starters, I play everything with a controller out of necessity. Now while this game doesn't list controller support it technically does support it, but it's that technically part where the cracks start to show already.
So first off, their Default Steam Input profile is not configured properly at all for controller to work out of box. It goes to literally the default template for Steam Input for FPS games, which is just standard fps keyboard and mouse controls mapped onto a controller. This is perfectly acceptable for games that aren't meant to have Xinput support and I'd even ignore it if this was their first game on Steam, or if the game just came out.
This isn't their first game though, and a studio with their experience should definitely know by now you have to, AT THE VERY LEAST, set the default controller profile to the Gamepad template so that your controller is properly sending Xinput to the game and not a keyboard and mouse translation. I know of at least 1 indie game made by only 1 guy who knew to get this right back in 2015, so how tf has Bossa not caught this stupid oversight a year and a half after release is beyond me.

Once you've done their job for them by switching the controller profile, you run into the next issue: AWFUL controller UI.
Hope your color accuracy and gamma are set right because the gamepad cursor for selecting things in the menus is just a slight gamma increase of the highlighted item. And mind you this is on off white menus; if the menus were dark backgrounds, this might be acceptable.
This incredibly stupid UI choice led to me skipping the tutorial which brings me to my next point:There's no way to reset the tutorial that I can find anywhere.
From what I can tell, your save file doesn't even exist. Options settings are stored in the registry like this is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ 2002.
There is some files in appdata/local, but I tried a combination of nuking them, deleting the registry entry, deleting the Steam JSON file, AND disabling Cloud Saves for the game.
This confirms a rant I saw about the game using it's on Cloud Save system. (from what I can tell poking around files, seems to be unity's cloud system. I am not knowledgable enough to elaborate any further)Which I 100% get why some devs do, especially for competitive games, but hey if a dev wants to make it so people can't save edit in a co-op game, fine, whatever. I genuinely wouldn't care if I could HAVE AN OPTION TO RESET MY ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ PROGRESS.

*sigh*
Okay, sorry, lost my cool for a sec there.
If you've been through this before with other games, and maybe like me you're just like "screw it, I'll read the controller layout in options and figure out how to implement controls later" and that brings me to my final, incredibly stupid, UI decision:
You can't view the controller controls. If you go into Options > Controls, all you get is keyboard and mouse controls. This is even while the game is showing gamepad prompts and allowing you to navigate menus as intended with a controller. There's a button at the top of the list that says "Keyboard & Mouse" as if it's supposed to be some kind of selector but it does nothing; and it's not a category divider because scrolling all the way down, there's no other categories.

Did I mention this game is on Xbox?

So in the end, I cannot recommend this game; especially if you play games with a controller.
I had hoped for better, especially when I saw this got the controller support that SS2013 never got from it's console counterpart, but the UI stops me from even checking it out properly.

Update: So I figured out how to replay the tutorial; you have to beat a stage first (possibly more than one; I didn't find out until after stage 7)In the end it didn't matter because even the tutorial doesn't show you the controller controls. I figured some of them out thanks to a random screenshot of the Xbox version found on some obscure site, but even it was missing at least 1 function.
Everything else I said about the game still stands.

Update 2: Creative mode is unplayable with a controller, which isn't entirely abnormal, but the thing is, the controller half works in it. It's literally like they got half way through the controller support for creative mode, and then just walked away and never returned to it. What the actual ♥♥♥♥ Bossa?