Recent reviews by Undead Rufus

After starting and stopping this game several times across nearly a decade, I finally started a run and finished. I think I prefer the format of the old(er) Hitman games, but it'd be a lie to say Absolution doesn't stand tall on its own merits. It shows its age in some respects, but it's worth a go for fans of the series or stealth in general.

Great art direction and world-building, as expected from the creators of Dishonored. Interesting horror-esque retro-future story and setting, too.

Outside these elements, the gameplay is total crap. The devs apparently intended stealth to be a fixture, but it almost never works. Nearly every enemy in the game spots you instantly, which is a damn shame since every enemy in the game can also kill you in about two seconds. Things get a little easier once you find the shotgun and start bull-rushing everything, which I will categorize as "effective, but not particularly fun."

Ultimately, too much of the game is about backtracking, looking for access cards to open the next door. It's mind-numbing. Coupled with frustrating combat, my will to continue playing died after about 8 hours.

Wanted to love it, wound up hating it.

Starfield is NOT:

- A space sim.
- A seamless universe through which you can fly your spaceship wherever you want, like Elite Dangerous or No Man’s Sky.
- Perfect.

In all their years of marketing, Bethesda never claimed any of the above. However, if for some strange reason you go into Starfield expecting these things, you will be disappointed.

With that out of the way….

Starfield IS:

+ Galactic in scope.
+ A refinement and evolution of the basic mechanics from previous BGS games (i.e. The Elder Scrolls and Fallout).
+ Chock-full of interesting locations, characters, factions and quests.
+ Replete with multiple polished, well-designed systems.
+ Very fun to play.

SCOPE
After a number of hours with Starfield, I finally concluded that it’s comparable to the Mass Effect games, except every time you land you get a Skyrim-sized chunk of world to explore. You can’t wander outside these Skyrim-sized areas, but you can return to your ship and land somewhere else. Zones might not be entirely connected—e.g. if you wander to a zone border, and then fly just beyond it, you might not see the same thing you saw before when you look back. I haven’t tried this personally, because in all my hours I’ve yet to have any reason to walk all the way to the end of a zone.

Again, if you’re someone who was expecting No Man’s Sky reincarnated as a Bethesda RPG, you might rage at the heavens over this (and plenty of people have). It is a limitation, certainly. In practice, since there’s just so much content and so many places to go, it really isn’t an issue for me.

Due to this sheer scope, it’s disappointing that Starfield does not [yet] include player-controlled ground vehicles. Often you will land on a planet, only to find that your objective is hundreds of meters, if not kilometers, away. Moreover, once you’ve looted some distant location, you’re almost always encumbered, and must either slog back in slow motion or leave stuff behind. Some kind of rover or buggy with inventory space would be a massive QoL improvement.

EVOLUTION
When you’re moving around on foot in Starfield, it feels like a better Fallout 4. Animations have improved, including facial animations. Gunplay isn’t up to FPS standards, but it’s entertaining and better than it’s ever been in the Fallout franchise. Jet packs and zero-gravity environments add a new twist. Overall, interacting with NPCs and the world should feel familiar to anyone who’s played a BGS game.

AI is better too, albeit brain dead at times. Particularly at long engagement ranges, enemies often seem oblivious to the fact that they’re being shot. Medium and close ranges are more convincing, with foes ducking behind cover, tactically(?) retreating, and on occasion attempting to flank. It needs work, but like most everything else, the combat AI is an improvement over past efforts.

Additionally, Bethesda’s first crack at space combat is really good. Ships feel like they have mass as they accelerate and turn. Energy weapons, ballistic weapons and missiles all provide a satisfying sense of impact. With the right perks, you can eventually target specific systems on enemy ships, disable them, and then choose to board rather than destroy.

Speaking of perks…. The perk tree is split into several main categories (Physical, Social, Combat, Science, and Tech), and each category has multiple skills. Once you put a skill point into a skill, you have to complete a challenge (e.g. “Kill 50 enemies with ballistic weapons”) in order to invest another point in that skill. In other words it’s like Skyrim, except instead of meeting numerical skill level requirements, you just have to do something to qualify for the next skill rank. So far, no problems with it.

One other thing I’ll mention here is the substantial increase to population density Bethesda managed to work into their Creation Engine 2. Cities in Starfield actually feel like cities. There are only four main ones, but they’re huge and crowded and noisy, all with wildly unique aesthetics and impressive detail.

THE STARFIELD
Due to procedural generation outside of major cities and settlements, exploration in Starfield is different than in previous BGS games. Once you get into it, however, all the “stuff” you’d expect is there. Interesting characters with interesting problems; a compelling array of factions hanging out in beautiful locations, ranging from rundown moon outposts and space stations to vibrant sci-fi urban centers; random encounters galore; and the interplay of all this to create what feels like a living galaxy.

Yes, there are lots of loading screens, but there have always been lots of loading screens in Bethesda RPGs—from Morrowind to Fallout 4, and the one after that we don’t talk about. When you walk through a door—or fire up your grav drive to change star systems or planets—get ready to wait a couple seconds. It’s fine.

If I were to criticize one thing, it’s that grav drive (Starfield’s hand-wavy FTL solution) operations should be accessible from the cockpit, rather than requiring players to constantly fast-travel from the map screen.

DEPTH
Starfield has a lot of moving parts. Fortunately, it avoids the “Mile Wide, Inch Deep” syndrome that plagues so many games. It’s more “Mile Wide, Half-Mile Deep.” Nothing is complicated, but everything is satisfying. Whether it’s crafting, setting up an outpost, building a ship, lockpicking and hacking (merged into a single “digipick” tool in Starfield), stealing and smuggling, piracy and hijacking, bounty hunting, following the main story and the many epic side quests, or just wandering around one of the aforementioned Skyrim-sized procedural areas, there are tons of ways to play, activities to do, and things to see.

BUGS
In my first thirty hours Starfield crashed once. Gameplay wise, I had one quest NPC refuse to move, and one time I exited a planetside shipwreck and wound up under the airlock, unable to move. Other than those instances, I have had a smooth experience and good performance on a pretty mediocre system. Historically speaking, for a Bethesda RPG, this is amazing.

While not a bug, the Microsoft/Bethesda partnership with AMD resulted in Starfield not shipping with DLSS support. Gross anti-consumer behavior from the powers that be. Wow, who’d have thought?

CONCLUSION
Starfield delivers what I expected, if not slightly more. It’s a hybrid of Skyrim and Fallout 4 set in a sci-fi “NASA-punk” galaxy, with some fantasy elements. It isn’t perfect, and it isn’t a seamless galaxy-sized space sim, but it’s a Bethesda-style RPG taken to the next level. If previous BGS games are any indication, I hope to play it for years to come.

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+100 HOURS ADDENDUM
I still recommend Starfield, but after more time some things have become clear.

1) Starfield REALLY needs ground vehicles, more variety in its procedural systems, and a total rework of encumbrance. Being demotivated to explore in a Bethesda RPG is a foreign concept to me, but that's sadly the case in Starfield right now.

2) The Creation Engine is outdated.

3) Nearly every authority position is occupied by a woman. This isn't "equality," but rather an 80/20 or 90/10 split. Worse, prominent men in the game are usually some mix of evil, weak and stupid. Obvious agenda is obvious.

4) NPCs overall are belligerent. Guards are rude (the old Skyrim "sweet roll" thing on steroids). Every military, political or corporate leader is hellbent on letting you know how tough she is, usually by being insufferable. Most characters have no sense of humor, and get antagonistic when you choose humorous dialogue. Kindness and respect are all but extinct, even when you're a prominent faction member. I can't help but wonder if all this reflects the writers' feelings about most of their player base.

The game is still good, and might be great in a year or two w/ mods, but the above issues have reduced my initial enthusiasm. If I'd have given it a 9/10 before, I'm sitting at a 7.5 or 8 right now.

It's not so much a game as it is a DLC platform.

In 2023 the shooting mechanics just don't hold up, and the enemies are dumb as rocks. Difficulty comes down to nothing more than the number of enemies that spawn.

I definitely came back to this with some rose-tinted goggles. It's just not that good. I would say wait for Payday 3, but it's going to be chock full of DLC weapons, attachments and characters, and microtransactions, too.

Decent visuals and gunplay.

Nice concept, combining an R6-like operator system with SOCOM-like gameplay.

Horrible voice acting.

Also, it's a P2W grindfest.

I sent a new recruit, Goat, to do a job for another enclave. For experience, of course. Unfortunately, the job carried him to an active plague heart, and a simple bodyguard mission turned into a hellscape of freaks and plague zombies. The client died, and Goat ran out of medicine and bullets, blew up his car while trying to escape, and fled down the street on foot with only a sliver of health and stamina, a horde of zombies on his heels.

By sheer luck, he found another vehicle abandoned in a residential driveway. The zombies were so close that they swarmed the vehicle as soon as he got in. A screamer on the nearby road shattered all the glass as he pulled away, and the rest smashed the hood and ripped off all the doors. He barely managed to shake them off and GTFO before they wrecked his new ride.

Goat made it home, nearly dead, unable to walk upright, and less than five minutes remaining on his plague infection timer. The crew had exactly one cure in storage, so he survived.

I love this game.

CON:

- Sometimes janky as hell.

- I've had multiple missions break, one of which made the main story impossible to finish even after multiple restarts.

- The game always spawns zombies behind you in combat, even if you've meticulously cleared the surrounding area.

- On Dread difficulty and higher, the zombie spawns are excessive—e.g. dozens of zombies at a time continuously spawning, even after I've already killed dozens or hundreds. There's no break. There are times when I literally can't speak with relevant mission NPCs, because the zombie spawns won't stop and let combat end. I usually have to quit the game and redo the mission when this happens.

- Partial mission progress is not saved, a design flaw which truly rears its ugly head when jank breaks the game. Missions also seem to be kind of random, so any mission you have to quit might never come up again. This hasn't happened to me a lot, but it has happened more than once.

- Vehicle physics are awful, like constantly skidding on ice. I got used to it, but man....

- Hit detection in melee can be iffy. Certain swings at certain times will just ghost through zombies.

- Human enemies can be too resilient. I ran out of ammo putting a guy down seven or eight times. He kept getting up, even when I mag-dumped his skull while he was in the "help me" state.

- Low number of character models and voices, so you're bound to wind up with repeats and sometimes outright clones.

- Multiplayer can be fun, but the guest player is just a hired gun for the host. You can't have your community and your friend's community operating on the same map, nor can you actually join someone else's community.

- Higher difficulty settings work in part by making resources very rare, by making vehicles very fragile, and by making base management very expensive. With corresponding increases in zombie strength and combat difficulty, Dread mode and beyond started to feel less satisfying to me. You get less for doing more.

You can set difficulty for Combat, Community (base building) and Map separately. However, turning any slider down will reduce your achievement awards to that level, which is obnoxious. I don't mind massive hordes of infected freaks who all hit like Thanos, but I don't want my armored van to blow up because I backed into a wooden fence.

On the other hand....

PRO:

+ For reasons mentioned previously, the game is wildly addictive.

+ Combat is fun, with good weapon variety. Gunplay is simplistic (crosshair only, no ADS), but has nice oomph. Melee is brutal and well-animated. Flanked zombies can be grabbed/assassinated.

+ Stuff to kill—you've got regular zombies, plague zombies, several types of freaks (screamer, feral, bloater, juggernaut), plague versions of the freaks, and also living humans with clubs, blades and firearms.

+ Radio system for calling in vehicles, medical advice, artillery strikes and other services based on your outposts and relationships with other factions.

+ Nice clean interface.

+ Legacy pool that lets you move characters between communities.

+ Permadeath. Given that some deaths result from glitches and bugs, this isn't always a good thing, but I'd rather have it than not.

+ Several maps, each a few kilometers square and representing a rural town. There's high replay value.

+ With exception to explosive fender benders and oppressive resource scarcity, higher difficulty settings make the game pretty challenging.

+ I haven't completed the Heartland story mode yet, but the organic "stories" than arise in the main campaign are enough to get me invested in my characters. It reminds me of Kenshi, which is also janky, and one of my favorite games of all time.

State of Decay 2 is highly recommended, and a no-brainer on sale.

It's a shooter. It's Battlefield. It looks and plays nice, but it doesn't feel much like WW2, and cheaters abound in multiplayer.

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The game basically breaks up into three parts: War Stories (SP mini-campaigns), Combined Arms (cooperative), and of course Multiplayer.

WAR STORIES: they're silly and qualify as quasi-historical at best. For example, there's one story exploring the German production of heavy water in Norway and allied attempts to stop it, which was a real thing, but here it's told through the perspective of a teenage Norwegian girl fighting off an entire German division with her mom. For that matter, nearly all the SP missions are entirely Rambo impersonations wrapped in ho-hum to decent cinematics. Further, there's anachronistic tech all over the place, like reflex sights on otherwise period-correct weapons. It's impossible to take any of this seriously.

However, if I stop thinking of BF5 as a World War II game, and just think of it as an arcade shooter set in some alt-history dieselpunk universe, it's not bad. It doesn't have to be serious to be fun, but it disappoints on the historical front.

COMBINED ARMS: it is basically a reskinned version of the Dragon Age Inquisition multiplayer, just bigger and with guns. Few people seem to play this anymore, and it's hampered by bullet sponge German flamethrower troops—which themselves seem to be reskinned Geth Flame Troopers from the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, armor and all. There's also a low selection of maps for this mode, but it's fun for a while if you've got a friend or two.

MULTIPLAYER: it's Battlefield. The atmosphere is gritty and explosive, and the gunplay thumps. As noted above, it just doesn't feel like World War II, and you will run into at least one cheater in almost every match. Sadly, one cheater is all it takes to ruin the game for everyone, or at least everyone on the opposing team. It's obnoxious, even more so since EA Dice has apparently done nothing about it in the years since the game released.

Whether the game is for you might depend on 1) how bad you want to play Battlefield after 2042's epic flop, and 2) how tolerant you are of cheaters in multiplayer. Regardless I would recommend waiting for a sale. Battlefield V is routinely $4.99 these days, and that's about what it's worth.

Banner Saga is a beautiful 2D game with a well-told story, immersive world-building in a Norse-inspired fantasy setting, believable characters, engaging turn-based combat, and an Oregon Trail-esque strategic layer.

I never quite figured this thing out. I keep seeing people talk about their Rank 10 wrecking crews by game's end, but my strongest characters (Rook and Iver) were only Rank 5 when the credits rolled. The low amount of Renown (currency) you earn got pretty frustrating after a while, such that most times I could afford neither supplies nor rank-ups. Clearly I was doing something wrong. Maybe the developers intended most investment to go into just two or three characters, but if so, this was never communicated in-game. I went for "balance" and wound up with a bunch of weaklings. By the time I realized I'd messed up, it was way too late.

All that aside, combat is great—a balance of armor, health, special abilities, and positioning on a square-tiled battlefield. Enemies get a little same-y after a while, but I never found battles boring, and the Renown woes didn't prevent me from finishing the campaign.

Speaking of finishing, I ultimately stayed not for the combat or visuals, but for the story. There are no remarkable twists or other stunning plot points, but the pacing, prose and dialogue are handled so well. Simple is usually best, and it's a credit to the writers. If Banner Saga was a novel, I'd have gladly read it.

Start to finish, the game runs around 10-12 hours.

Also, if I understand correctly, decisions carry over to Banner Saga 2 and 3. It's a great game, and after a short break I'm ready to jump right into the sequels.

The AI cheats. It's omniscient and instantly counters everything you deploy.

Unplayable unless you want it for multiplayer.

It's kind of boring.

If nothing else, the devs nailed the atmosphere of a war-torn urban center—at least insofar as I can imagine. Gameplay unfolds as a side-scroller, with nice animations and controls, numerous playable characters, and gritty visuals. Early on you are strapped for resources, sleep and safety, and it bears many hallmarks of something I should enjoy.

But it just isn't fun. It's dark and oppressive, and little else. The little girl in the main story cries all the time, which is plausible but not something I want to hear every waking in-game minute. There's little to get excited about in terms of the simple crafting system, and I find the characters and narrative more depressing and tedious than engaging. So many things happen as random overnight events that you have no opportunity to confront directly—you're just informed of them, and their consequences, as popup messages come morning.

I don't want to crap on the game too hard. I've only spent an hour or so with it, and nothing about it is overtly bad or broken. After eyeing this thing for years, it just isn't what I expected. I think there are better options for survival/management, including some of 11 Bit's other games.