Recent reviews by Varthorne

From an artistic standpoint, the game is great. The graphic artists really nailed the alien geometries of the void and the Lovecraftian creatures. There are visuals in this game that you'll simply never see anywhere else, and that's a shame.

The sound was decent. The music was pretty good, but was ultimately just the same track looping over and over throughout the game. Occasionally you'll hear these really bassy sounds when approaching certain objects which really improve the atmosphere and alienness of the world.

The problem is the gameplay, and story.

The game starts out as a walking sim. While not great, this is something I can live with, and the game was pretty up-front about this. The problem is that about 1/3 of the way in it stop just being a walking sim. First you unlock the ability to jump purely for the sake of hopping onto a ship to grab two items. After that, the mechanic is basically never used again in any meaningful way. The game is littered with invisible walls, so anything you can jump on (e.g. rocks) will likely have a wall preventing you from actually progressing further.

The second gameplay problem is that about halfway in, the game also decides to give you... let's call it "combat". You gain an alien artefact that can shoot out a beam that stuns and occasionally/arbitrarily kills certain creatures. You see, by this point the game frequently sprinkles in chase sequences. You either have to keep moving (as some monsters move at the same pace as your sprinting speed), or turn around and shoot them with the beam to stun them. Occasionally, some monsters will die, though some will then just respawn either right where they died, or in your path. You will die several times for no other reason than because you weren't standing far enough away from a monster when it popped out.

The other problem is story. The game basically teases you with a few tidbits about your character's past. It never really comes out and tells you a meaningful story, but you can piece together the fact that you were a fisherman, your wife died, and eventually your daughter died too. Your father often spoke about the island, and cryptic ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about making offerings to the sea/elder gods. There are some notes at the beginning of the game that hint at other people being stuck there, but it was disjointed, and most of the notes were "We've been stuck here for an indescribable amount of time | I'm starting to go mad | We may have found a way off the island".

I could go on, but ultimately this game just completely fumbles after the first 30 minutes or so. And even the intro sequence wasn't great to begin with.

Not a bad game by any means, but as others have mentioned, it's very confused. It has a ton of little details that make it realistic (e.g. you don't know how many bullets your clip still has until you hit H to detach the clip and check, having to manually pull the bolt on your rifle, or load the next rocket in your RPG, etc).

The problem is that gameplay is so frantic and TTK is so low that it's all for nothing. I spend more time either dead, running back into the fray, or getting dragged and revived by teammates, only to die almost instantly.

Most of the time, I have zero idea where my killer was, because odds are they are either across the map, or peeking through a miniscule gap between buildings from a window or rooftop.

The game is also lacking in a lot of fundamental features, such as the ability to set your loadout OUTSIDE of a match. If you want to swap out your weapon, or change any of the 5-8 attachment points on your gun(s), you need to do so in the middle of a match while dead. Chilling in the main menu? No loadout for you.

Lastly, I find visibility (outside of night maps) too good. IMO it's too easy to distinguish players from the environment, which only makes you die that much more.

I could go on, but after barely 3 hours I already feel the gameplay is getting stale for me, and not worth continuing. I'll probably hold onto the game to see where it goes, but otherwise I'm shelving this one.

The reason I'm giving a negative recommendation is because of how dull the game is 90% of the time. A big chunk of the game is referred to as "overland" content, which refers to PVE questing. The stories are actually pretty decent, very well voice-acted, and the environments are beautiful.

Unfortunately, the combat bores me to tears because of how easy it is. There's absolutely zero challenge. If you google ESO, you'll find tons of threads with people complaining about the difficulty, and fanboys defending it because making the combat challenging would "break their immersion". In short, the overland combat may as well be a podcast. It's so damn easy that you're almost never in any real danger.

I won't pretend that I've tried everything the game has to offer. I played a few dungeons, and while they were more engaging than the standard content, the low-level/low-difficulty dungeons were still fairly dull, but were also way more rewarding than doing story content. On top of that, most PUGs just rush through the dungeons, so you don't have time to even read the dialogue of the dungeon's quest before they all collectively decide to aggro the next group.

In short, I find myself at a loss. I want to enjoy the world, but the combat bores me to tears. I enjoy the dungeons, but they feel hollow compared to the overland content. If you're joining dungeons via the activity finder, then you're just being dropped into a random dungeon with zero context.

There's a very solid game here, and the core gameplay is fun. The story isn't great, but it's surprisingly good for a looter shooter. I would actually rate it much higher than Destiny 2 (but let's not get into that). While the ending was a bit disappointing, I still found myself compelled to finish it.

The reason I'm downvoting this game is because the devs have, thus far, severely mishandled the post-launch with patches that have (supposedly) nerfed the top builds, all while reducing the amount of time available to get the best loot. Yes, that's right: the endgame activities are time-gated, and now you have less time to complete it, with worse builds.

Even worse than all that is that the devs have no concrete plans (that we know) to release any sort of DLC or expansion. In other words, no matter how good this game is, the endgame is disappointing, and it sounds like this may well be as good as it'll ever get. Despite all this, this game is always-online, and has zero PVP. It's mostly playable solo (aside from the top-tier endgame, but that's also debatable), and features zero communication features (text/voice). It has all the trappings and downsides of a live service game... but without any of the benefits.

I simply can't recommend this game, despite having enjoyed my time with it, because you will invariably end up disappointed in this game. This game is like watching Firefly season 1, finding out that it was cancelled, and finding out that there won't be a movie to wrap things up.

Sadly, I'm one of those people who loved Doom 2016, but could not enjoy this game. As everyone says, this game isn't actually bad per se. The problem is that the core gameplay is fundamentally different from Doom 2016, in a way that simply isn't appealing to me.

2016 had a good, measured pace, and a great aesthetic. Eternal, on the other hand, has a more "cartoony" (for lack of a better word) aesthetic that bothers me every so slightly. It's not a huge gripe, because the game still looks good, but it's another strike against it.

The gameplay in Eternal is simply too frantic to be fun. Some people may enjoy the gameplay, but personally I found that it made me feel weak. All but the weakest of enemies could destroy me very quickly, while I unloaded every single piece of ammunition, grenades, and a mini flamethrower in order to try to stay afloat. The flamethrower is necessary to generate armor that gets peeled away after one hit. Ammo runs out almost immediately, forcing you to either switch to a different (and potentially less effective) weapon, or trying to find a weak enemy to eviscerate with your chainsaw, which is now your main source of ammo. If you've already killed all the weak enemies, then you're SOL when you start running low on ammo.

In short, I was already bored and annoyed with the game after the first level, and by the third one, I decided to go on Reddit to see if maybe this was one of those games that gets better once you clear a certain threshold. Unfortunately, I found that everyone thinks this game is the second coming of Christ, and I realized that I'm in that very small minority of people for whom this game doesn't click.

Odds are that you'll enjoy this game, but there's a small chance that, even (or especially) if you enjoyed Doom 2016, you may come to hate this game.

Much as everyone else will tell you, the story is pretty good. Admittedly, I found that it got worse as I progressed through the game, but more on that later. The atmosphere of the game is excellent, and somewhat reminds me of movies such as Shutter Island.

Unfortunately, the gameplay is aggressively bad.

Movement is janky, to the point that I died a few times because the game forced you into awkward platforming sequences where the controls wouldn't cooperate, and I couldn't get Alan to jump over a 2-foot gap. For some inexplicable reason, they bound the dodge mechanic to the sprint button, so Alan will usually starting sprinting when you're trying to dodge (so 80% of the time you'll fail to dodge), and try to dodge every time you try to sprint.

Alan also has as much endurance as a man several times his girth, which is to say that he gets tired after about 5 steps, and takes longer to catch his breath than he actually spent running.

The game features a few driving sequences (which really surprised me the first time) which feel completely out of place and unnecessary. The cars handle terribly, and in most of these sequences, you are forced to enter and exit the vehicle multiple times just to press a button to open a gate, or to pass through an obstruction to move on to the next vehicle and driving sequence (looking at you, Mr. Episode 6).

The combat is just plain boring, and in many/most cases also pointless. You can't outright kill or even injure an enemy right off the bat. Instead, you need to point a flashlight at them for at least 5 seconds before they become vulnerable, at which point it takes 1-4 shots (depending on where you hit, the type of enemy, and the planetary alignment). This makes fights feel slow and tedious, especially when considering that most if not all enemies are a joke, My favourite parts of the game were the ones where I didn't have to fight things.

In fact, the game CONSTANTLY takes away all of your equipment and supplies. Alan finds himself falling off ledges or otherwise passing out consistently, and somehow this always makes him lose his gun, flashlight, and all the ammo/batteries that you've collected.

Adding to the above, you will be fighting the same 5-ish enemies, using the same 3-4 weapons for the entire length of the game. No variety, no progression, nothing. The only "improvement" that you will see is that you will start finding slightly bigger and more powerful flashlights as the game progresses. However, this is fairly arbitrary, and I found that the game would randomly downgrade to a smaller flashlight after cutscenes.

Do yourselves a favour: watch a Let's Play, or find a cutscene compilation. You'll probably get just as much out of the story without all the boredom, disappointment, and anger.

I am legitimately angry at how awful this game was. The only reason I forced myself to play it is because it canonically takes place in the same universe as Control, which is one of my favourite games, made by the same developers. Given that Alan Wake is directly referenced in Control, I figured that playing this game would improve my understanding of the events and themes in Control. Admittedly, Alan Wake's story did actually help, but otherwise I regret spending these 9 or so hours on it.

This isn't a bad game, but in my opinion, it doesn't do anything that you haven't already seen in a million other shooters. There are only 5 weapons, but two of them feel rather useless. From what I've seen so far, the pistol can one-shot one type of enemy, but takes 3-4 bullets (minimum) for most of the others. The sword tends to miss anything that isn't directly in front of you. Meanwhile, the shotgun can 1-2 shot just about everything, and has plentiful ammo.

The level design is pretty bland. I understand wanting to pay tribute to games like Doom, but bland design for the sake of it is just bad.

I only played two levels, but I already feel like I've seen everything the game has to offer, and I'm not impressed.

There is very little I can say about this game that hasn't already been said in all the other reviews. As you can see, I have put a lot of hours into this game, and at this point, I think I can safely say that I will be playing this game for years to come.

In my opinion, what gives this game its replayability, and what makes me come back to it is the sheer diversity of builds. The developers add new skill and support gems on a regular basis. As it is, there are already hundreds of them. I could go into more detail as to how the skill system works, but it would only make me stray off-topic. For now, suffice it to say that there are tons of different ways to play the game. I have to force myself to stay away from the class forums, because I always end up wanting to try out at least 2-3 new builds.

Hell, I am routinely amazed by some of the builds that people come up with.

Now, I could go on and on about how great this game is, but that would be a waste, because I would never be able to really convey how much I like this game. Thus, I strongly recommend you (the reader) to try this game out. It is completely free (unless you really want more stash tabs, which do come in handy), so you won't lose anything (besides bandwidth) for trying it out.

There are two major cons to this game, however. Luckily, they aren't that bad when compared to the kinds of cons that other games might have.

The first is the desynchronisation. Anyone who has ever played the game will tell you that desync can be a problem. You will often find yourself in situations where you can't hit an enemy, because it turns out that the enemy is actually standing somewhere else, and your client hasn't gotten that memo yet. Sometimes, you will find YOURSELF standing somewhere else, for similar reasons. However, as the devs have explained, the desync is there because, unlike some of their competitors (e.g. Diablo III), they refuse to compromise certain game mechanics for the sake of having a smoother gaming experience. Some may see this as a bad thing, but I think it shows that the devs would rather have a more complex game instead of dumbing it down. Luckily, there are ways of combating it. Ultimately, you get used to it, and then it isn't so bad.

The second con is the difficulty. Now, for some, this isn't really a con. But for those who are used to playing ARPG's (or games in general) that hold your hand in the beginning, this is not one of those games. The game isn't particularly difficult at first (especially since they rebalanced the early stages), but it does get fairly difficult in the mid-late game. This is compounded by the fact that new players WILL be overwhelmed by the sheer size of the passive tree, and will inevitably end up with a bad build. I always tell new players that their first (few) characters will be throwaways. Unless you follow a guide for a build that has been extensively tested in end-game, your first character(s) will be terrible.

This can be a hurdle for new players. Personally, I REALLY got hooked by this game once I started to get a firm grasp on the mechanics, and once I understood how best to build characters. A lot of people look down on those who blindly follow guides, but I found my experience was greatly enhanced by letting someone else iron out all the details. In short, the game may not be that fun (at first) for some, but once you get the hang of it (as well as some currency), a whole new world will open up in front of you.