Recent reviews by Soüp

This game arrived to fill the void that Zachtronics' closure left behind. Many have tried, but others aren't nearly as well designed and tend to end up rather mediocre and often frustrating. ABI-DOS is a proper challenging Zach-like with puzzles that can be quite tricky to complete, but feels rewarding and has lots of room for clever optimization. If it has one fault, it's that the game mechanics aren't the easiest to understand for some people, but the developers have been diligently working to improve the documentation and added a hint system to help new players along.

The only thing missing is a solitaire minigame.

Lost in Random is a hidden gem. It unfortunately didn't get nearly as much attention as it deserves, considering the quality of the game, but there's a lot on offer here. The game uses a very Tim Burton-esque aesthetic to effectively present the dystopian world of Random, where every citizen's fate is determined by a single roll of a six-sided die. The game world is full of weird and ridiculous characters, all with high quality voice acting and surprisingly good writing.

The gameplay is fairly typical of a light action adventure game, with exploration and simple puzzles, and plenty of NPC dialogue and cutscenes (perhaps a bit too much of the latter.) The combat system is rather unique though. You obtain energy from destroying crystals on enemies, which lets you roll a die that determines how much "mana" you have to play cards with, and you can customize your deck with more cards over the course of the game. These cards can summon weapons to attack with, buff or protect you, or bring damaging objects onto the battlefield. It's a well-designed system that works well, though some of the later enemies get a bit spongy and battles can be overly long. It is quite fun though.

The game does have a few annoying technical issues though. It features the console classic heavy-handed automatic camera, making kb/m play basically impossible since you have to constantly fight with the automatic camera for control. The game also features multiple layers of antialiasing when results in a rather blurry image, and this can only be addressed by editing game files. And last of all there's the EA App... It's annoying enough having to install and run this to play the game, but it can also randomly lock up and prevent achievements from registering, and there's no going back in this game.

But at the very least the game runs smoothly and seems to be fairly bug-free, though a bunch of the subtitles don't quite match the voice lines. That's much better than I can say about most modern games. In any case, Lost in Random is a great hidden gem, if you don't mind dealing with EA's half-functional software.

This is a game I waited a long time for. The Talos Principle is easily the best first person puzzle game that's released since Portal kicked off the genre way back in 2007. It combined straightforward mechanics with excellent and varied puzzle design, coupled with a heavy air of mystery and philosophical writing. This second game is a direct story sequel (which I won't get into to avoid spoilers) and that necessitates and fairly different structure but the core of the game is the same.

So to the core of the game: the puzzles. There's a ton of new puzzle objects and mechanics, which are all well thought out and quite interesting, but maybe a few too many. Each one is largely stands alone, contained within a single map. This unfortunately seems to result in the puzzle design largely being fairly simple, as the game is constantly teaching you new mechanics rather than offering more complex puzzles incorporating more mechanics. This may be a positive or a negative, depending on your puzzle solving skill and difficulty preferences. The secrets have been similarly simplified, though some are still fairly difficult due to the solutions being so obscure. The bonus puzzles at the end of the game are on the more complex side, though there aren't many of them. Now I don't mean to talk down on the game, I still greatly enjoyed it, though I'd really like to see the game expanded with DLC in the future featuring more complex puzzles, in a similar vein to Road to Gehenna for the first game (though I'd argue that DLC went a bit too far with the complexity.) One other change that's worth noting is that you can now pick up objects while retaining their connections to other objects, so if you need to move a connector you don't have to manually reconnect it to other objects each time. It's quite nice to have.

Sound design is largely the same as the original game, though many puzzle objects now emit a unique sound constantly while they're placed, which is a bit too late and can get annoying after a time. The composer returned from the first game as well, producing another excellent soundtrack, with a guest appearance from Risk of Rain's Chris Christodoulou, which is awesome to see (and hear!)

One other aspect of the game deserves discussion: the engine. Croteam has abandoned their unfortunately outdated and rickety Serious Engine in favor of Unreal Engine 5. While I'm sure this greatly reduced development costs and allowed the studio to release a much more polished game, I can't say I'm particularly impressed with my first UE5 experience. Just like UE4 it's still very prone to traversal stutter, but exhibits a lot of frametime spikes and instability as well. The result is that it just never runs particularly smoothly, performance drops dramatically while running around the game's maps (which in classic Croteam fashion, are extremely large,) and sudden performance issues can happen at any time, even from just moving the camera. Even limiting the framerate to 60 fps (externally, since UE5's framerate limiter seems to be broken) can't smooth it all out, though it helps quite a bit. Frame generation is basically unusable since it amplifies all these problems, even working from the same base 60 fps framerate.

In addition to the performance issues, I can't say I'm impressed with UE5's Lumen lighting system either. Lumen GI is incredibly noisy with the most distracting pixel swimming I've ever seen and also prone to errors (such as light from light beams "sticking" to objects after the camera moves.) It also relies far too heavily on temporal accumulation, which results in tons of shimmering and disocclusion artifacts when moving. This in turn dramatically reduces the quality of upscaling since none of the general upscalers seem to be able to handle these artifacts. Even DLAA doesn't help, and you're basically forced to use Epic's own TSR to reduce the visibility of Lumen's artifacts to a reasonable level, though it's significantly less temporally stable than DLSS otherwise. The developers did have Lumen's quality level set higher at the Ultra setting for a while which did a lot to control the pixel swimming artifacts, but the performance cost was immense. Enabling hardware RT support would probably help but I can't say how much. Not many games offer this option with Lumen. Lumen also handles reflections, with extremely low quality (software) RT overlaid with SSR. It basically doesn't look any better than SSR with a cubemap fallback and is a complete waste of performance.

In summary: A great game and sequel with less complex puzzles than the original, but UE5 has many performance and image quality issues. I hope the situation can be improved in the future, either with tweaks from the developers or through engine updates.

Risk of Rain Returns is pretty much everything you'd want from a remake: improved graphics, expanded gameplay, features and mechanics brought in from the sequel, and just more content! It's everything you loved (and hated) about the original.

For my part I really appreciate all the additions. They really help flesh out the game and while there are some issues here and there, the package as a whole is thankfully quite polished. My only real gripe is that they didn't improve the game's balancing over the original - I still find the difficulty significantly over-tuned, making for a brutally punishing experience even on "normal" rainstorm difficulty. They did however add a workaround for this - sliders to adjust both player and enemy damage from 10-200%. It's a nice feature to have, but I'd prefer not to have to resort to that.

Also can't forget the incredible soundtrack by Chris Christodoulou. It's mostly the same as the original, just remastered and with a couple new tracks for the intro and credits.

If you have any interest in roguelikes, this is as good as they get. Forget those other games.

Starfield has been a surprisingly contentious game. A lot of people have bought the game apparently not understanding that Bethesda Game Studios only makes one type of game, and thinking it would be similar to No Man's Sky or Star Citizen, when Skyrim/Fallout in space is the only thing it was ever going to be. That's not to say the game doesn't far short in certain areas, because it certainly does.

Starfield is also an enormous game, featuring well over 1000 stellar bodies you can land on and explore (more on that later) and a script longer than Skyrim and Fallout 4 put together. The scope of the game can seem a bit overwhelming but it does a good job of balancing that with making the wide range of content easily accessible. Within this giant scope, BGS has built a very interesting and and carefully crafted universe about a future human civilization that had been forced to abandon Earth 200 years prior. It's a bit of a breath of fresh air having a new setting in a BGS game, and the writing quality continues to improve as well.

From a game design perspective, Starfield is a typical BGS affair with its detailed and highly interactive world design and an enormous amount of content. Anyone who's played a BGS game before will know if they enjoy that or not. For anyone who hasn't, it's a unique design that heavily prioritizes player freedom and world interactivity within a huge sandbox RPG world. No one game system is going to be the best compared to other games, but the way they're all combined is more than the sum of its parts. However while many things have remained the same, gunplay has improved significantly and has finally reached the point where I don't think anyone's going to miss VATS. Plus you can build space ships now!

There is one significant deficiency in Starfield however, compared to BGS's prior games. In Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, you could always just start walking in any direction, and sooner than later you'd run across a new location, a random event, or some interesting unmarked content on the map. Because Starfield's content is spread across hundreds of planets with procedural generation filling in all the gaps rather than being contained in a single hand-crafted map, this key element is pretty much entirely missing and it really hurts the enjoyment of exploration.

Tying into the previous point about exploration is the worst news - the game doesn't actually have real planetary exploration. When you land, the game creates a sizable chunk of procedurally generated terrain around your ship matching the particular biome you landed in. If you hit the edge, you get a horribly immersion breaking popup message telling you you can't proceed any further. Now while it's unlikely that the vast majority of players will encounter this, it's one of those things that just knowing about negatively impacts your enjoyment of the game. This is also the first time where I've truly felt that BGS has lied about one of their games in saying you can fully explore planets. There also does not seem to be any consistency between the geography of the planet as seen from orbit to what you find on the ground, suggesting that picking the exact same landing location across different saves will provide completely different results. So the end result is that it doesn't feel like you're really exploring anything (and the procedurally generated content is so sparse and thin that there's not much point to it anyway.) It's become abundantly clear that this is the real reason why there are no ground vehicles in the game, and also why there are no seamless planetary landings since there isn't actually a planet to land on.

From a technical perspective it's an oddly mixed bag. The game's graphics are mostly good, with lots of detail crammed into the game's environments and characters. NPC's are weirdly inconsistent in quality though, even setting aside the noticeably lower quality non-named NPCs that just act to flesh out settlements. The game also features a brand new real-time global illumination system, something that's rather necessary to handle the lighting on 1000+ stellar bodies with fully simulated orbital mechanics and weather. It really is impressive seeing it all work, however the GI system appears to be extremely rudimentary and leans heavily on static color filters to provide a certain look to different areas, which often results in lighting not matching the scene. It really is too bad because a more robust GI implementation would do wonders for the game.

Now the bad technical news - quite frankly the game runs like crap. It's heavier on an nVidia GPU than Cyberpunk 2077 on RT Psycho settings, yet doesn't look nearly as good. It runs far better on AMD GPUs, seemingly due to their development partnership, yet still not as well as it seems like it should given the game's modest graphical quality.

To get the rest of the bad news out of the way: This is the buggiest game Bethesda Game Studios has released in a very long time, at least since Oblivion. I have no clue what game all the reviewers played, because it certainly wasn't this one (though it's possible they were just overlooking the bugs because this is the first time a Bethesda game has actually had a stable framerate on consoles.) Bugs and glitches (not the amusing ones that people actually enjoy) are a constant presence in the game and game-breaking issues can pop up seemingly at random. Given that the game was primarily delayed from its original release a year ago for polish and that it released as version 1.7, I can't even imagine how bad it was back then.

So I suppose that's about it. I realize this review may seem negative, but it really is one of those games that's more than the sum of its parts and I'm still greatly enjoying the experience despite all the problems I listed. Well, back to space.

It pains me to write this, considering how good The New Order and The Old Blood were, but The New Colossus is just a giant mess. It's a game where you can run fast enough to make Sonic the Hedgehog jealous, but you switch weapons at the speed of an arthritic old man. Enemies either do 1 damage to you, or shred through your maxed out armor and health in half a second (not even on the highest difficulty either.) Maybe you'll be able to play for a while, or maybe the game will just crash repeatedly and ruin your progress. It's a game that's often frustrating, written by people who took way too many drugs, and while the concept is great like the previous games it's just not worth my time or yours.

Have I mentioned that the game has a permadeath mode with zero saves or checkpoints of any sort, so when the game inevitably crashes you have to start over? Great job, Machine Games.

Hogwarts Legacy is a bog-standard open world game in a beautifully-realized world with plenty of content. The design and detail of the school is simply stunning and really feels like a love letter to fans. Gameplay is surprisingly solid, with engaging, impactful combat and fluid exploration. Writing is definitely a weak point however, with mediocre quests that fall completely flat any time they attempt to do anything which should have significant emotional impact.

So why am I giving this game a thumbs down? Because it runs like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, and every patch makes it worse. When the game launched, CPU performance wasn't particularly good and to make matters worse it stutters heavily any time you hit a CPU bottleneck (which you probably will.) That performance has dropped over time, culminating with a massive ~30% drop after the latest patch - one that was a result of months of intense optimization in preparation for the last-gen console release. This latest patch has also increased the incidence of texture/object popping, resulted in me having to wait for data to load at doors (which never happened previously,) and basically just makes the game hitch and stutter constantly even when nothing's going on, even with the framerate limited to avoid CPU bottlenecks. It can't even run cutscenes smoothly anymore. That's not even to mention the RT features which were half broken at launch and every patch seems to break them in different ways (though they're not even usable anymore with how poor CPU performance has gotten.) For reference I'm running a Ryzen 5800x3D and can barely stay above 60 fps now no matter the game settings with RT DISABLED and used to be able to comfortably stay above 60 with it enabled.

So basically I've grown increasingly dissatisfied with the piss poor technical state of the game, and all this culminating in a bug preventing 100% completion popping up right at the end of the story. A bug that was reported at launch and remains unfixed. Sorry Portkey but you need to do better.

System Shock is a glorious recreation of a classic game, one that spawned a genre that provided us with many beloved games. This remake is meticulously crafted to maintain the structure and mechanics of the original game as much as possible, while modernizing what parts most needed it. That surely makes it one of the best game remakes ever made.

So first the changes: Obviously the game uses modern graphics with the typical bells and whistles, though with an interesting retro aesthetic - low resolution pixellated textures. I find the effect really cool and it certainly evokes the original game's style well. And of course the game also plays like a standard first person game vs the clumsy interface of the original.

Now one thing that needs to be kept in mind about System Shock is that the design is very "oldschool." Map navigation and progression aren't exactly straightforward, and even figuring out what to do next can be tricky if you aren't paying close attention. Steam's new overlay notepad feature comes in quite handy for this. Now it's understandable that some people will be turned off by this, considering how rare this sort of design is in modern games, but I promise it's done extremely well. There is also a planned easy mode for progression (mission difficulty in game) that will provide waypoints like modern games do, but it hasn't been implemented yet.

There are still a few rough edges that I think could be addressed:
- Inventory management in the game is still rather tedious. A shortcut for vaporizing items and inventory sorting would go a long way towards improving matters. A way to unload the ammo from guns without needing to clear space to pick up the entire gun would be nice too.
- You can't write notes on the map like you could in the original game, only drop markers. The map's legend is also incomplete and can be a bit confusing until you learn all the symbols.
- Cyberspace, while it looks quite nice, is honestly not particularly interesting from a gameplay perspective and the cyberspace levels get repetitive quickly.

Despite those rough edges, the rest of the game really is fantastic. Any individual game system isn't going to wow you, but everything together really is more than the sum of its parts. Battling your way through the space station to defeat the out of control AI Shodan is an experience not like any other and certainly worth your time.

It feels like I've been waiting 20 years for this game, because I literally have - Freelancer was the last big space adventure I enjoyed way back in 2003. That's not to say that there haven't been other good space games (Everspace 1 was also excellent, for instance) but just not of this open world type. I'm not sure how much I realized just how much I missed this style of game until I got to sink my teeth into Everspace 2.

So what to say about this game? It honestly feels like a true successor to Freelancer. It's a tightly-focused open world arcade space game with a solid story that's packed full of content. Where it differs though, it really shines. Everspace 2 is also a looter shooter of sorts, with enemies dropping equipment and consumables for you to use. It adds an extra dimension to combat encounters, as is always the case with loot mechanics. Going along with this of course are a number of RPG and progression systems that are well thought-out and provide smooth progression through the game, as well as encouraging exploration without any need for grinding.

The other big addition in Everspace 2 vs Freelancer are the puzzles. This seems to be a surprisingly contentious topic browsing through the game hub, but I absolutely loved them. Basically every location you can visit in the game has a number of secrets hidden in it, which contain high quality loot. It acts as a scavenger hunt of sorts, encouraging thorough exploration. Some secrets will just be a container you have to find, while others will have a puzzle of sorts attached to it. There are a limited number of puzzles types of course, but the actual execution of those is quite varied and manages to stay fresh while mostly staying consistent with the overall game world. It was certainly fun tracking them down, though I think some are a bit too difficult to find and I did resort to consulting guides on a few occasions.

On more general terms, the game is very fun to play, of course utilizing the same general gameplay mechanics as Everspace 1 - an easy to pick up arcade-like 6 DOF flight model, responsive controls, and plenty of control options. The graphics are gorgeous and there's plenty of performance scaling for both old and high end hardware. I was particularly impressed with the uniqueness and variety of all the game's locations - even the procedurally generated event and job locations never got stale. The visual design of the game (and audio for that matter) is truly incredible.

So kudos to Rockfish on another excellent game and congratulations on your second successful crowdfunding campaign. I look forward to whatever comes next (and the Everspace 2 DLC of course!)

This is a great game, and pretty much exactly what you'd expect from a Guardians of the Galaxy game. It's basically a Telltale-like narrative story with choices, but much more interactive gameplay. It oozes style and offers all the humor and banter that the crew should. I really enjoyed my time with it and it only got better the more I played. It does however have its share of problems.

I'll start out with the biggest problem here, which I realized halfway through: A bad first impression. The first time I tried playing, I only made it halfway through the first chapter. At first look, the whole cast just seems like movie actor imposters, since they purposefully designed the characters to look extremely similar but slightly different (even the voice actors sound similar.) When you start playing everything seems fine, but when you start playing you quickly realize that the main draw of the game - the dialogue - is extremely easy to accidentally interrupt by walking across trigger points for other dialogue or cutscenes. On top of that, you frequently get optional dialogue prompts, which you purposefully have to wait until the very last second to make a choice because they will also immediately interrupt dialogue. And then you run the risk of missing the prompt entirely. I haven't seen a game with this much trouble with dialogue interruption since the original Borderlands.

But then, the game introduces you to combat. Every enemy in the first chapter is quite annoying to fight, and your first introduction has you fighting them solo with nothing but your pathetic basic pea-shooter pistol attack (and the guns overheat very quickly.) The next fight, you actually get other characters to assist and unlock a single ability for them, but you're absolutely swarmed with enemies and the cooldowns are too long to reasonably deal with the flood. It's just not fun and the game throws similar combat experiences at you throughout the chapter.

Thankfully though, once you push through that initial chapter, things only get better and better. You (mostly) learn how to avoid the annoying dialogue interruptions, and you unlock more combat abilities for but you and the rest of the crew and aren't constantly fighting annoying enemies. Somehow battles actually end up being fun after a while. And that helps you appreciate the rest of the game even more.

Now for the good parts of the game: The writing is quite humorous, and there's lots of great dialogue between all the characters. The story offers significant impactful choices that often aren't just obvious black and white options. The game also dives into a bit more of the weirdness offered by Marvel than the movies do. The art direction is fantastic, offering a wide variety of beautiful and striking locations to explore as you play through. The game also features a surprisingly impressive implementation of ray-traced reflections, if your system can handle it, and excellent HDR support. Combat does eventually get quite enjoyable as well. And like I said at the beginning, it just gets better the more you play, and really doesn't stop getting better even as you reach the credits.

I certainly wasn't expecting much, particularly after my poor first impression, but this really is a great game and definitely worth your time.